THE VITRUVIAN MIDDLE AGES AND BEYOND

The Vitruvian Middle Ages do exist. The history of Vitruvius does not start in 1416/1417. The manuscript Poggio and his colleagues discovered in the monastery of St. Gallen was not the sole survivor from the age of antiquity. And Vitruvius had not stayed buried for almost a thousand years in the obscurity of ignorance and monastic indifference. Already in 1967, Carol Krinsky had published an article in which she enumerated seventy-eight Vitruvius manuscripts dating from the eight or ninth to the fifteenth century. Here, Verbaal determines whether Vitruvius can be considered a formative force in this period and does he in any way add to the understanding of these thousand years of western European history.