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Fourteen sheets of drawings by Sebastiano Serlio

This article publishes fourteen previously unknown and unstudied sheets of drawings by the most influential of all sixteenth-century architectural treatise writers, Sebastiano Serlio. It shows that these drawings were made in connection with the publication of the Fourth Book of the treatise published in 1537, actually the first one of the set to appear in print. The drawings are all ones that have aesthetic problems associated with them and were all discarded by Serlio before going to press. What is especially interesting about these drawings is that they represent a type of drawing not previously known, a stage in the preparation process in which the more usual pen and wash style used by Serlio was replaced by a drawing in which every line to be engraved by the burin is represented on the sheet. The drawings tells us much about Sebastiano Serlio’s design process and aid our understanding of how Book Four, the book in which the orders of architecture were first formulated, was conceived.