Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (born c. 80–70 BC, died after c. 15 BC)
Vitruvius was an architect in the 1st Century BC and is sometimes loosely referred to as the first architect.
The word architect derives from Greek words meaning 'master' and 'builder', and in Roman times architecture was a broader subject than at present including the modern fields of architecture, construction management, construction engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, materials engineering, mechanical engineering, military engineering and urban planning.
He was not actually the first architect; it is more accurate to say that he was the first Roman architect to have surviving written records in his field. He was the author of De architectura, known today as The Ten Books on Architecture. In these writings he asserted that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas – it must be solid, useful, beautiful. These are sometimes termed the Vitruvian Virtues or the Vitruvian Triad.
The Greeks, when perfecting the art of building, invented the architectural orders: Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. It gave them a sense of proportion, culminating in understanding the proportions of the greatest work of art: the human body. This led Vitruvius in defining his Vitruvian Man, as drawn later by Leonardo da Vinci: the human body inscribed in the circle and the square (the fundamental geometric patterns of the cosmic order).
