The legacy of Dietterlin’s Architectura is evident in the enduring role of empiricism across seventeenth-century architecture and natural philosophy. The Architectura served as the culmination of a breed of architectural image-making informed by the humanistic philosophy of learned empiricism, which intertwined the iconography of the fantastical and the occult with empirical ideas and practices. The decline of learned empiricism’s influence over architectural images is already anticipated in Dürer’s Melencolia I, which inspired the final etching of Dietterlin’s Architectura as an elegy to that tradition. Dietterlin’s contributions to the consolidation of architectural images as platforms for empirical scientific inquiry, as well as the waning of learned empiricism, resonated in seventeenth-century England and France, where architectural images eschewed symbolic representations for a novel visuality that foregrounded purely empirical evidence. Dietterlin’s Architectura catalyzed the new relationship between architecture and science by exposing the limits of humanist symbolism and the vast potential of architectural images as agents of empirical thinking, philosophy, and practices.