German painter, draughtsman and engraver. He was the son of a Protestant pastor and spent his childhood in Lissenheim before moving to Strasbourg with his widowed mother. he obtained Strasbourg citizenship in 1571. In 1575 he painted frescoes on the façade of the Brüderhof (destroyed. 1769).In 1589, he worked on the decoration of the Neu Bau (now Chambre de Commerce) in Strasbourg; the frescoes, known from engravings of the building and from descriptions, combined mythological and biblical scenes in an interesting iconographical relationship and emphasized the architectural structure of the façade. Dietterlin's only authenticated easel painting is the signed and dated Raising of Lazarus (?1582 or ?1587; Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle), which has the characteristics of northern Mannerism. As a Mannerist painter, Dietterlin was influenced by Stimmer, Christoph Murer and the Haarlem School, and he was one of the precursors of the German Baroque. He is, however, now best known for his book Architectura. The definitive version was published in Nuremberg in 1598; its 203 engravings are divided into 5 parts, corresponding to the 5 orders - Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite - modelled on Vitruvius' On Architecture. Like Vitruvius, Dietterlin attributed a particular quality to each order: the two 'masculine' orders, Tuscan and Doric, are represented by a peasant and a soldier, and the two 'feminine' orders, Ionic and Corinthian, by a young and a mature woman respectively. Dietterlin deals only briefly with the construction of columns on the first plate of each order (the only plates accompanied by text) before giving free rein to his imagination, suggesting various ways of using the five orders for doors, windows, chimney-pieces, tombstones and fountains. He was not particularly interested in pure architectural theory or in specifying measurements and proportions, though his treatise did influence later architects and cabinetmakers. In his role as painter rather than architectural theorist (he put his name to the book as a 'painter of Strasbourg') he was more concerned with the meaning of the principle of each order and the free transformation of architecture by ornament; in the plates he included figures and animals, juxtaposing Classical mythology and biblical scenes and combining masks, grotesques and volutes with Late Gothic motifs, giving a new dimension to the orders in a language that was both naturalistic and fantastic. //