While many studies have addressed in various ways the issue of proportions in Palladio's work, both in the orders and in the forms and dimensions of architecture, very little interest has been shown in Vincenzo Scamozzi's handling of this theme. After Francesco Milizia's broad but generic treatment during the 18th-century Enlightenment, we basically have to wait until the present day and Pier Nicola Pagliara's catalogue entries describing Scamozzi's drawings of the orders, accompanied by some important remarks, often technical in nature. Rudolf Wittkower in particular— who was determined, as Sir Kenneth Clark commented in the Architectural Review, ”…to dispose, once and for all, of the hedonist, or purely aesthetic, theory of Renaissance architecture”—made some detailed remarks on the subject in his Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. He reached the conclusion that, compared to his predecessors and even more so than Palladio himself, Scamozzi ultimately simplified measurements and ratios. We can generally agree with this conclusion since, for example, in the types of rooms that he deems to be perfect, the height turns out to be the arithmetical mean of the width and length.

We must bear in mind that Scamozzi argued for an architecture of an “anthropomorphic character” on one hand, and was a strenuous advocate of “mathematics” and “mechanics” on the other. Indeed, he explored those disciplines on his long Roman sojourn (1578–1579) by attending the lectures of Father Christopher Clavius, who disseminated “many ideas essential for the development of the sciences contained in the works of the Greek mathematicians,” primarily the Alexandrians Pappus and Heron. Scamozzi thus devoted the whole of Book VI in the second part of his treatise to the orders, a total of 174 pages, compared to the 37 pages given over to the subject by Palladio in the first of his Quattro Libri. Thus emerges a picture of Scamozzi as a convinced rationalist not indifferent to the echoes of Galilean scientism. After meticulously reviewing the evidence, he closely scrutinizes the various opinions on the subject, from Vitruvius to his contemporaries, and arrives at his interpretation of the “truth” through a coherent, imperturbable deductive method.