Vitruvian Man

Rome Under Construction
Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-069698-6
Verlag: Oxford University Press, USA

Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 564 g

Professionalism is political. This book offers a new assessment of the Roman architect Vitruvius and his treatise, On Architecture, dedicated to Augustus in the 20s BCE. Once reviled by scholars, Vitruvius emerges as an imperial expert par excellence when read alongside literary coevals through an intertextual lens. No building of Vitruvius' name survives from antiquity, but his treatise remains a formidable literary construction that partakes of Rome's vibrant textual culture. The book explores Vitruvius' portrait of the ideal architect as an imposing "Vitruvian man" at the dawn of Augustus' empire. In direct dialogue with his republican model, Cicero's ideal orator, the architect embodies a distinctly imperial civic ethos in which technically skilled partisans supersede old elites as guarantors of Augustan authority. Vitruvius promises to shape not only the emperor's legacy with architecture, but also the notion of a Roman citizen through his ideal architect.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Oksanish, John

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Geschichte der Architektur, Baugeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Preface and Acknowledgments

- Introduction

- Chapter 1: Vitruvius, man?

- Chapter 2: History from the ground up: Vitruvius's"textual" monuments

- Chapter 3: The body in brief: De architectura and the limits of somatic synopsis

- Chapter 4: Introducing the architectus

- Chapter 5: Bodies as Behavior: Corpus architectorum

- Epilogue: Alternate realities: a palimpsestic corpus

- APPENDIX: SUMMARY OF CONTENTS OF DE ARCHITECTURA

- Works cited

Über Autor(innen)

John Oksanish is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Languages at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem North Carolina. Professor Oksanish received his PhD in Classical Philology from Yale University in 2011 and has published scholarship on Vitruvius's work De architectura (On architecture) and Latin pastoral poetry.