Claude Perrault's 1673 edition of Vitruvius was innovative on a number of levels. Aside from the quality of the translation, the commentary was distinguished by very modern editorial values, in particular its transparency. The text is supported by extensive footnotes, which serve not only to clarify the Latin original but also to explain the rationale for the choices made in rendering it into French. It is there that Perrault showcased his scholarship, measuring his translation against those of previous interpreters and corroborating his decisions with reference to other classical sources. Indeed, Perrault pushed this quality of editorial transparency to unprecedented lengths. Unusually for an editor and translator, he often took it upon himself to confront Vitruvius directly, sometimes objecting to the author's advice or even dismissing it altogether. In the latter cases, Perrault used the footnotes to propound his own opinions about architecture, in effect, offering himself as a competing and equally valid authority.

One of Perrault's most famous objections concerned Vitruvius's attitude toward proportion. In a footnote on the origin of the Doric order in the first chapter of Book Four, Perrault digressed from the original text to offer a broad critique of current architectural thinking. Most architects, he opined, favored Vitruvius's belief that certain fixed relationships between the different members of a building were somehow natural, like the distances between stars, or between parts of the human body. Perrault, however, was of a different view. The beauty supposedly derived from those proportions was neither verifiable nor—as was the case with musical harmony— upheld by common consent. For him, in lieu of any better explanation, proportional systems had simply become accepted over time. Whatever order architects bestowed on their buildings was not justified by any mathematical or natural basis but rather only by custom and precedent. Perrault fleshed out these arguments in a more closely argued form ten years later. The preface of his Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes (1683) unmasked what he saw as the self-indulgence and self-interest of socalled architectural experts. The notion of proportion, Perrault argued, was merely one way in which such self-proclaimed intelligens relied on the blinding—but ultimately baseless—force of convention to enforce their authority.

Historians have justly celebrated Perrault's independence of mind. His pronouncements contravened centuries of established thinking. Indeed, they directly assailed a tradition central to Western architectural theory from its very origins.