Daniele Barbaro’s 1556 commentary on Vitruvius (second edition 1567) is generally regarded as the highest achievement of Renaissance Vitruvian exegesis. Because of Palladio’s participation in its writing, the commentary has been widely discussed by architectural historians. The paper analyses Barbaro’s theoretical views on architecture in the context of Paduan Aristotelianism in which he was educated. This study shows that Barbaro’s views on a number of important issues in architectural theory, such as perception, optical corrections, imitation, meaning, and the formulation of the canon of the classical orders, were fundamentally influenced by his Aristotelianism and Paduan philosophical education.
The original paper was published in The Sixteenth Century Journal in 1998 and in later years, as I worked more extensively on Paduan Aristotelianism, I became quite unsatisfied with the formulations and the terminology I used in that article and with the elaboration of the interpretations I proposed. Nevertheless, I still think that the article asked the right questions, and that ultimately Barbaro’s understanding of architectural judgment was based on the Aristotelian conception of the active intellect, though my original formulations sound quite naive from my current perspective. The version of the article that I upload here is therefore the revised version that I prepared for Monteleone’s and Williams’s volume on Barbaro and the University of Padua.