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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
An interesting contrast may be drawn between the results obtained from the study of Vitruvius in the early years of the sixteenth century and the exposition of his meaning and text by the scholars of to-day. This contrast is almost always to the advantage of the latter-day scholars. Archaeology has done everything in recent times to clear up by consideration of existing monuments a host of difficulties not dreamed of in the days of the Renaissance, and archaeologists—so far as they are agreed as to the testimony of recent discoveries—have little or nothing to learn from remote predecessors. But a serious disagreement exists among them in regard to the stage of the Greek theatre. This want of agreement is reflected in the current interpretations of a difficult passage in Vitruvius. About this very passage the scholars of the early Renaissance were agreed, and since their explanation of it differs in some material respects from any now offered, it may be of some use to us to-day.
The Florentine Leo Battista Alberti reproduced the meaning of Vitruvius, without undertaking to construe his text, then very corrupt. In 1511 was printed the text of Vitruvius which, in spite of many subsequent labours, has bravely held its own up to the present day. This text we owe to Fra Giocondo, a Franciscan friar who was equally great as an inspiring teacher, a painstaking scholar, and a daring and original architect. The condition of the text in the three first editions was lamentable, as appears in the passage describing the Greek theatre which especially concerns the present inquiry.
1 See his De re aedificatoria, posthumously published, Florence 1485, passim.
2 M. Vitruvius per Iocundum solito castigatior factus cum figuris et tabula ut iam legi et intelligi possit…Impressum Venetiis ac magis 
unquam alio tempore emendatum: sumptu mira 
diligentia Ioannis de Tridino alias Tacuino. Auno Domini. M.D.XI. Die. xxii. Maii Regnante inclyto Duce Leonardo Lauredano. Dedicated to Pope Julius II.
3 On his teaching see note (17) below. His scholarship is known by his editio princeps of Pliny's Letters, by his remarkable elucidations of Caesar, 's Commentaries, published at Venice (1517)Google Scholar, reprinted by Giunta (1520) at Basle (1521) and finally in a sumptuous folio, Paris (1543.) See for his pains in collecting MSS. the dedication of this work to Giuliano de' Medici. Also he there speaks of a meeting of scholars at Venice where his text was discussed in detail. His architectural abilities caused him to be employed by the Emperor Maximilian, Louis XII. of France, Pope Leo X. and the Venetian Republic.
4 See his Annotationes in Pandectas, under the rubric “ex lege Athletas.”
5 M. Vitruvii de architecture libri decem, summa diligentia recogniti atq: excusi. This is a reprint of the 1513 octavo, both being dedicated in identical terms to Guiliano de' Medici. But the plan and diagram for the Greek theatre is taken in the 1523 edition, not from its exemplar of 1513, but from the 1511 edition.
6 Vitruvius iterum et Frontinus a Iucundo revisi repurgatique quantum ex collatione licuit. In this edition there is a revision of the marginal key to Fra Giocondo's diagram of 1511 which was abandoned in the latest edition (1523).
7 σκηνή or scena had various meanings. Used strictly, in a context where the other parts of the stage-building are explained, it has usually the most primitive of its meanings as here. The stricter and earlier meaning of προσκήνιον, or proscenium, corresponded to this meaning of scena, and designated a mask which screened the scena from view. There might or might not lie between avacant space (as in Fra Giocondo's diagram). See DrSommerbrodt, J., De Aeschyli re scenica, part II. (1851)Google Scholar and III. (1858). See also his Scaenica collecta, 1876.
8 Scaligeri, Julii Caesaris, ‘De Comoedia ac Tragoedia’ in vol. iii. of Gronovius' Thesaurus (1699).Google Scholar
9 Abrégé des dix livres d'Architecture de Vitruve, Paris, 1674, and 1681. An Italian translation appeared in 1747, and English ones in 1692, 1703 and 1729. Perrault makes nowhere any attempt to reconcile this definition with his very different account of the Greek proscenium in his two translations, Paris, 1673 and 1684.
10 If I rightly understand Dr. Dörpfeld's view, which he has kindly communicated to me, he regards the finitio proscenii as the forward line of the proscenium, then the proscenii pulpitum—on this phrase see note (16) below—is the λογεȋον built in front of this line. So far he agrees substantially with Fra Giocondo. But, according to Dr. Dörpfeld, the proscenium was at the same time the mask-front or facade of the scena, and also—because of the interval between it and the masked scena—a second λογεȋον, i.e. the θεολογεȋον This last, he supposes, was confused by Vitruvius with the λογεȋον pure and simple. Dr. Dorpfeld thinks that Vitruvius gives a correct plan with the right names attached to its component parts, but is led into the confusion above noted by misunderstanding the way in which plays had been represented. The Greek authors at his command took for granted the distinction between λογεȋον and θεολογεȋον, and therefore did not explain it, Dr. Dörpfeld thinks.
11 See Rode's, Kupfer zu Vitruv's zehn Bücher &c. Berlin 1801Google Scholar, Schoenborn's, is in the Zeitschrift für Alterthums Wissenschaft 1853 (Nos. 40 and 41)Google Scholar, Mueller's, Albert first is in the Philologus (1863) vol. xxiiiGoogle Scholar. The common feature of them all is their attempt to distinguish between the centrum orchestrae and the centre of the circle originally drawn. This, as A. Mueller has himself shown, contradicts the plain meaning of Vitruvius.
12 See Marini's note on the passage, folio edition, Rome, 1836. ‘At. …in sibimetipsis contradicentes pro dextero cornu intellexerunt prius dexteram manum spectatorum, deinde dexteram proscenii partem declaraverunt spectatorum sinistram. Non est credibile Vitruvium considerare voluisse eamdem rem in eodem loco sub duplici aspectu. Non secunda vox dexteram sed prima mutetur in sinistram.’ For some of the accounts, like those of Gallianus and Polenus to which Marini alludes, see Lemonius' dissertation, St. Petersburg, 1850. He there criticizes five diagrams and gives a sixth of his own. Fra Giocondo had no difficulty whatever in dealing with right and left.
13 For Wecklein's, diagram see the Philologus 1871, p. 435 ff. of vol. xxxiGoogle Scholar. Λ. Mueller's first appeared in 1873, and is reproduced in Hermann's Lchrbuch.
14 Perrault—the well-known architect of Colbert and Louis XIV.—says in a note to his translation: ‘Le mystère de ces trois cercles est une chose bien obscure ou bien inutile.’
15 Schneider's, G. K. W. plan is in his ‘Attisches Theaterwesen’ 1835Google Scholar. It must be admitted that his stage has a most ridiculous shape,—like that of a ship's prow,—but he uses the two circles last drawn to determine the position of the stage (λογεȋον), and so far agrees with Fra Giocondo: but Schneider is too much hampered by the words of Vitruvius and his details therefore are impracticable.
16 Quoted from a review of Wilkins' Vitruvius in a MS. note to a Bodleian Vitruvius, Douce V. subt. 2. Compare on the proscenii pulpitum Perrault's shrewd remark that the phrase applies rather to the Greek than to the Roman theatre.
17 Possibly these two ways of accounting for the error of Vitruvius' mistake should be combined. He makes no mention of the θεολογεȋον, and probably did not know its function. Finding his authorities giving its height at ten or twelve feet, he might refer for better understanding to existing theatres of the Cuieulum type. There the λογεȋον was of the height in question and so he was justified in a confusion between it and the θεολογεȋον.
18 In his commentary on the Pandects, fol. cii. verso in the 1532 edition, Budé gives a sketch of the teaching by Fra Giocondo, and refers especially to Vitruvius: ‘I had the good fortune to get, while reading that book, the help of a most rare preceptor, Jucundus the Friar, then king's architect, a man of consummate antiquarian lore. Not only by speech but with his pencil (graphidi) did he explain what we were seeking to understand. Those were the times when I emended my Vitruvius at my ease.'…For the testimony of Scaliger and others on this same point, see the Supplementum ad Scriptores trium ordinum S. Francisci. Rec. Lucas Waddingers, Rome, 1806.
19 Le fabbriche di Andrea Palladio, Ott. Bertozzi Scamozzi in Vicenza 1796.
20 It is discouraging to find in the last number of the Rheinisches Museum (Vol. xlvi. Heft 3) a new attempt to conjure with the word intervallum. Schönborn was certain that it meant Parodos. Albert Müller could not believe this, but agreed that something very uncommon was to be got out of the word. So he consulted a mathematical expert, who revealed to him that its meaning at the end of the account of the Greek stage must be determined by the context in which it last occurred,—at the beginning of Vitruvius' account of the Roman stage. So they two agreed that it must mean one of the twelve equal segments into which the circle was divided by its inscribed squares. Müller selected the two segments which he found convenient. Now comes Fabricius and selects two others which suit his view. Oemichen may well be left in the field against all these over-ingenuities. His objections have not been and cannot be answered.
21 Fra Giocondo's plans were reproduced,— unaccompanied however by the necessary marginal keys, and with no lettering whatever upon them—in the French translation of Jean Martin (1547). They were completely supplanted in 1556 by that prepared by Daniele Barbaro under advice from Palladio. Perrault followed Barbaro, and began the modern controversies where no account is ever taken of Giocondo's plans.
