Sebastiano Serlio was born in Bologna on this day in 1475. He worked in Venice, and later in France, where he was part of the Italian team at Fontainebleau. But the thing that carried furthest was not a wall he raised. It was a page.

Look at his woodcuts. A column stands in the middle of the block, and beside it, in the margin, the measurements: the height of the base in parts, the diameter at the foot, the projection of the cornice. No rhetoric. A drawing plain enough that a mason in Antwerp who had never crossed the Alps, never seen a Roman ruin standing in a field of thistles, could take the dimensions off the page and set out a Doric base correctly on his own bench. The book went along the trade routes where the buildings could not.

Serlio arranged the classical orders into a sequence you could hold in the hand and learn in an afternoon: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite. His treatise appeared in parts across his lifetime, and was translated and reprinted and pirated in Dutch, French, Flemish, English. He died in 1554, not rich. The columns on a Low Countries gable, on an English porch, on a doorway in a market town, often come from a man who sent measurements instead of himself.