Recently, a series of eight drawings, dating to the middle of the 16th century and illustrating the text of Vitruvius, came up for sale at a small auction house at Oxford. These were promptly purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and are now on view in the galleries. The curators of the Met are confident, on the basis of drawing style and handwriting, that these works derive from the Sangallo circle, a dynasty of Florentine architects who also built elsewhere in Italy in the first half of the 1500s.

To say “De Architectura of Vitruvius” was a book to conjure with is putting the matter lightly. From its rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1414, down to the French Revolution, this text, written by a Roman magistrate at the end of the first century before the common era, seemed to possess the force and authority of Scripture. Just as the architects of the Renaissance rooted through the sunken remains of antiquity that lay about them in order to find a column, an architrave, or a capital to integrate into one of their buildings, so it was that they seized on any trace of ancient practice that Vitruvius described in order to incorporate it into contemporary practice.

If the truth be told, these drawings at the Met are not really great examples of draftsmanship. There is an improvised unsteadiness to the lines, a wobbly use of two-point perspective, and a humility that attains more to the status of illustration than to the exactitude of architectural renderings, of which some fine examples now hang on a neighboring wall. But that softer, subjective quality has its own rewards. The draftsman of these eight works, who may be Bastiano di San Gallo or someone very close to him, is not recording the remains of classical architecture that he saw around him in 16th-century Italy. Rather, he is confabulating a sort of dream architecture that is a composite of things he has seen and things he can only imagine. Though Vitruvius was overwhelmingly interested in Greek architecture, only a handful of cultured Italians had ever been to Greece or to Athens in the 16th century, and so an attempt to re-create a Greek temple entirely a priori resembled contemporary efforts to imagine what an elephant or giraffe might look like.

This doubtless explains why, when the author of the Met drawings depicts the Egyptian city of Alexandria, or the Areopagus hill in Athens, the monuments in the background start to look suspiciously like those of modern and ancient Rome, with intimations of the Circus Maximus, the Pantheon, the Coliseum, and the like.

The art or profession of architecture was more broadly conceived in ancient times than now, and Vitruvius wrote almost as much about military formations and fortresses as about temples. These subjects are also broached in the Met’s drawings, with one scene of siege warfare. Another drawing, whose relation to Vitruvius’s text is admittedly somewhat inscrutable, appears to make reference to the ancient author’s discussion of the role of wind upon people and buildings.

Perhaps the most prepossessing works on view are those that are purely architectural, such as the several archaeological re-enactments of classical temples, whether pseudodipteral or in antis. With their simple lines and extensive cross-hatchings, these images show a mid-16th-century artist, saturated by the Mannerist architecture around him, trying to imagine the rough, almost rustic purity of the buildings at the dawn of classical architecture.

Accompanying this diminutive exhibition are four early editions of Vitruvius, of which the most influential was the Latin edition by Fra Giocondo, published in Venice in 1511. Today, Fra Giocondo is mainly known for his work on Vitruvius and his advisory role with Raphael when the painter was being groomed to design the new Saint Peter’s. But he was himself a great architect in an age of great architects, and his work in Verona continues to astonish even today.