Chapter III
Concerning the five Orders of Architecture, Rustic, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite, and also German Work.
§ 20 Rusticated Masonry and the Tuscan Order
The work called Rustic108 is more stunted, and more massive than that of any other Order, it being the beginning and foundation of all. The profiles of the mouldings are simpler and in consequence more beautiful, as are the capitals and bases as well as every other member. The Rustic socles or pedestals, as we call them, on which rest the columns, are square in proportion, with a solid moulding at the foot and another above which binds it like a cornice. The height of the column measures six heads,109 in imitation of people who are dwarfed and adapted to sustain weights. Of this Order there are to be seen in Tuscany many colonnades both plain and rusticated, with and also without bosses and niches between the columns: and many porticoes which the ancients were accustomed to construct in their villas; and in the country one still sees many tombs of the kind as at Tivoli and at Pozzuolo. This Order served the ancients for doors, windows, bridges, aqueducts, treasuries, castles, towers, and strongholds for storing ammunition and artillery; also for harbours, prisons and fortresses; in these the stones project in an effective manner in points like a diamond, or with many facets. The projections are treated in various ways, either in bosses, flattened, so as not to act as a ladder on the walls—for it would be easy to climb up if the bosses jutted out too much—or in other ways, as one sees in many places, and above all in Florence, in the principal façade of the chief citadel, built by Alexander, first duke of Florence.110 This façade, out of respect to the Medici emblems, is made with ornaments of diamond points and flattened pellets, but both in low relief. The wall composed of pellets and diamonds side by side is very rich and varied and most beautiful to look at. There is abundance of this work at the villas of the Florentines, the gates and entrances, and at the houses and palaces where they pass the summer, which not only beautify and adorn that neighbourhood, but are also of the greatest use and convenience to the citizens. But much more is the city itself enriched with magnificent buildings, decorated with rusticated masonry, as for example the Casa Medici, the façade of the Pitti Palace, the palace of the Strozzi family and innumerable others. When well designed, the more solid and simple the building, the more skill and beauty do we perceive in it, and this kind of work is necessarily more lasting and durable than all others, seeing that the pieces of stone are bigger and the assemblage much better, all the building being in bond, one stone with another. Moreover, because the members are smooth and massive, the chances of fortune and of weather cannot injure them so severely as the stones that are carved and undercut, or, as we say here, ‘suspended in the air’ by the cleverness of the sculptors.