The same year, 1650, he published an anthology of ten ancient and modern writers on the classical orders, his "Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne", which marked the first complete translation of Vitruvius into French and upheld the superiority of the Ancients over the Moderns, a polemic that was to erupt in the following decades into a virtual culture war. In his preface, Fréart de Chambray argues that the Classical orders (the Doric, the Ionic, and Corinthian) which he assigns to Greek precedents, are perfect models for all architecture; he condemns the "Roman orders" (the Tuscan and the Composite) as corrupt. Citing the use of the Corinthian order in the Temple of Solomon, he declares it to be the ‘flower of Architecture and the Order of Orders'. To Fréart de Chambray, who illustrated his text with copious engravings, Vitruvius and his translators were beyond reproach.