Sebastiano Serlio
b. Bologna, 1475;
d. Fontainebleau, 1554.

The first popularizer of architecture in print, author of the first architectural picture books. He went to Rome in 1514 and was a pupil probably of Raphael and certainly of Peruzzi when the latter succeeded the former as associate architect to St Peter’s in 1520. Peruzzi accumulated plans and sketches, presumably either for a treatise on the orders, antiquities and perspective or to illustrate Vitruvius, but he died and left the drawings to Serlio. (At this time Vitruvius was newly published in Italian and the early c16 information explosion was underway.) Serlio began a project that was essentially new: in the words of his last publisher, it was “to render the art of architecture easy for all”. He was the first to harness the new mass- medium potential of printing to architecture, and he published the first printed books where images rather than words were the chief conveyor of information and style in the arts. Some of Serlio’s images ? for example, the cut-away elevation/section of Bramante’s dome for St Peter’s (Book 3) or the three famous perspective scenes (end of Book 2) ? are memorable. His text is not. He was pedantic rather than intellectual, pragmatic rather than theoretical. His achievement is a pictorial handbook. For the men of architecture, fundamentally pragmatic, unintellectual but with the veneer of learning demanded of them, Serlio was the ideal author (and always more influential on the edges of Renaissance culture ? in the Low Countries, the English Midlands or Scotland). His work was a best-seller, and it was the first Italian treatise in English, a century before Palladio and then Alberti were translated, 160 years before a full Vitruvius in English. Yet no one really needed to translate Serlio; the value was in his images.

Bibliography:
Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte le Opere d’Architettura (in 7 volumes); Vols. 1 and 2, 1543; Vol. 3, 1540; Vol. 4, 1537; Vol. 5, 1547; Vol. 6 and 7, written and drawn c.1550: Vol. 7 pub. posthumously 1574, Vol. 6 not till an Mss. facsimile of 1967.
Libro Extraordmario (drawings of doorcases), 1551.
W B. Dinsmoor, The Literary Remains of Sebastiano Serlio, Art Bulletin, 24, June 1942. M. Rosci, II Trattato di Architettura di S. Serlio, Milan, 1967.
M. N. Rosenfeld, Domestic Architecture, MIT, 1979.
J. M. McKean, “An Introduction to S. Serlio”, AA Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1979.
Sabine Frommel, “Sebastiano Serlio : Architecte de la Renaissance“, Gallimard, October 9, 2002.