it he gives a drawing of the façade of an edifice which he had heard was supported by a hundred columns. He had never seen it or its ruins, and seems to have had no idea where the building had stood, though he apparently gives us to understand that it was Grecian. The drawing shows a building with ten columns in front, adorned with Corinthian capitals, and supporting a second story of four columns and architrave. He had heard that only a few of the columns remained above ground, but he decided to present his readers with his conception of what it must have resembled. He ventures so far as to give the dimensions of the columns, although he anticipates that the whole thing will be flouted as a chimera or a dream. He thus gives us the first of a long series of conjectural ‘restorations,’ with which successive generations of architects have enlivened their books and obscured the subject in hand. He is certain that some such building with a hundred columns had existed somewhere, but it never seems to have entered his mind that he had to go so far afield as Persia to find it. Whether the idea was suggested by what he had heard from Barbaro we cannot say; but it is a complete error to suppose that he represented his drawing as ‘the plan and elevation of Persepolis.’[9] The first to suggest the identity was Don Garcia, who, however, does not appear to have read what Serlio had to say on the subject.[10] He thought Serlio had called his drawing the ‘Forty Alcorans’ and omitted its size and proportion. Serlio, on the contrary, says nothing about forty columns, and he gives the proportions of his imaginary edifice, which he leaves us to infer was one of the marvels of Greece.