One of the earliest literary representations of ruins in a landscape setting appears in Francesco Colonna's antiquarian romance, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) (figure 1). Encountering huge ruined columns and 'wishing to know their type', Poliphilo,the protagonist of the book, 'measured one that was lying on the ground and found that its shaft, from the socle to the thin end, was seven times the diameter of its bottom'.1 From the fifteenth century onwards, Roman ruins were carefully studied for what they revealed about ancient design principles and building practices, and compared with the information provided by Vitruvius's Ten Books on Architecture. The Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi, for example, must have adopted similar methods to Poliphilo so as to become, as Giorgio Vasari writes, 'completely capable of seeing Rome in his mind's eye, just as it was before it was ruined'.2
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