Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:
chapter:
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I: ON SYMMETRY: IN TEMPLES AND IN THE HUMAN BODY
CHAPTER II: CLASSIFICATION OF TEMPLES
CHAPTER 3: THE PROPORTIONS OF INTERCOLUMNIATIONS AND OF COLUMNS
CHAPTER IV: THE FOUNDATIONS AND SUBSTRUCTURES OF TEMPLES
CHAPTER V: PROPORTIONS OF THE BASE, CAPITALS, AND ENTABLATURE IN THE IONIC ORDER
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
BOOK I
BOOK II
BOOK III
BOOK IV
BOOK V
BOOK VI
BOOK VII
BOOK IX
3. Similarly, in the members of a temple there ought to be the greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to the general magnitude of the whole. Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended,, and a pair of compasses centred at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.
Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture. Vitruvius. Morris Hicky Morgan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. London: Humphrey Milford. Oxford University Press. 1914.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.
show
Browse Bar
hide
Places (automatically extracted)
View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.
Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.
hide
References (1 total)
- Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page
(1):
- Lewis & Short, dēsignātĭo
hide
Search
hideStable Identifiers
hide
Display Preferences