Della architettura di Gio. Antonio Rusconi, con centosessanta figura dissegnate dal Medesimo, secondo i Precetti di Vitruvi,e con chiarezza, è breviatà dichiarate libri dieci.

Venice, Gioliti, 1590. Small folio. (ii), (viii), (x), 143 pp, (1 page errata). New vellum binding. (errata leaf with some staining). First edition, second issue with the 11-line errata on the last page. Woodcut illustrations throughout text,
ranging in size from vignette to full page. Although the first title page indicates there are 160 woodcutillustrations, the second title page gives the numberof illustrations as 160 and more ("Con centosessanta, e più figure ..."). The first eight unnumbered pages after the title, on our copy, contain an index from another, as yet unidentified, work/edition. Whoever decided to bind this here must have had a reason to do so. (is this the index of the second edition published in 1660?).

First edition, second issue of this beautiful architecture book by Giovanni Antonio Rusconi (1520-1587). Millard, Italian p. 408 given an extensive commentary: "The text is a mere summary of the contents of Vitruvius' ten books on architecture; these brief abstracts were unfinished at the time of Rusconi's death in 1587, but nonetheless his publisher went ahead with the book since the illustrations were complete. Rusconi began his work on the manuscript text and commentary, now lost, in the early i54os; considered nearly completed, the translation was praised by Claudio Tolomei in 1553, and the publisher was accorded a publication privilege by the duke of Tuscany in March 1553. The run of the 1590 edition was probably small; it is very rare... Rusconi's book is an unusual publication in the architectural literature of the sixteenth century in that a remarkably effective group of illustrations was married to an underelaborated text... Rusconi's search for a unique solution to the problem of representation of architectural construction results in several highly accomplished images and pictorial vocabulary... only the illustrations are securely Rusconi's, while the published text was probably put together by the publisher as an Italian paraphrase of Vitruvius... Like other Renaissance architects before him, Rusconi considered existing translations—in their textual renderings and illustrations—unsatisfactory... he decided to make his own Vitruvius... The commentaries to the illustrations published by Giolito's heir in 1590 were probably not by Rusconi, but the publisher may have desired not to waste the investment made in the already cut illustrations... These illustrations are faithful to existing traditions in the case of caryatids, wind towers, and religious building types... In others Rusconi creates new graphic solutions for the mechanical arts, engineering works, instruments, and trees... Rusconi had no experience of the ancient Roman ruins, he probably never went to Rome, and he based his own style on his contemporaries' drawings rather than archaeological research... The author refers constantly to Renaissance architectural theorists, such as Palladio, Bárbaro, Sebastiano Serlio, and Cesariano, turning the book into an extended discourse with a knowledgeable audience. Indeed, the author himself recognizes that the sketchlike quality of his publication disqualifies it as a fundamental teaching tool for architecture (p. 143: "poiche manco il fine e l'intention nostra è stata mai d'insegnarla con queste poche annotationi"). This author's main contribution is in the quality of the images... His illustrations display an unusual degree of independence from that of earlier commentaries on Vitruvius, revealing a marked anticlassical attitude... The illustrations of the Persian and caryatid porches are handsome; the octagonal wind tower of Athens occupies an entire page; and the Vitruvian man is shown not only in a circle, and separately in a square, but also stretched across an orthogonal grid. The illustrations are crisp, handsome, and well crafted. Rusconi's architecture is thoroughly appealing visually, as is the italic typeface used for the text of the treatise..." [c.f. Adams R-960; Mortimer, Harvard Italian 551; Fowler 280; Cicognara 640; Millard, Italian 119].