In questo volume:

Lorenzo Vigotti, The Emergence of the New Florentine Oligarchy: Palazzo Alessandri as a Pre-Renaissance prototype for the Palazzo Typology (1369-1376)

Abstract: The construction of Palazzo Alessandri in Florence on Borgo degli Albizi during the 1370s signified the beginning of an architectural process that led to the formation of the Renaissance palazzo typology. Continuously inhabited by the same family of merchants who built it, the palace is the first one specifically designed only for residential purposes, a statement by its patrons meant to declare their social and political position in the city among the Florentine élite. The absence of shops on the ground floor allowed for a first among domestic residences in Florence: a solid façade made of rusticated pietra forte. Other notable features included a plan based on a regular grid, a large porticoed area, and a garden in the back. The Alessandri, together with the following palaces built by the members of the Albizi oligarchy (1384-1432), paved the way for the design and the success of Palazzo Medici.

Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Il palazzo Farnese di Ischia di Castro

Abstract: The Famese Palace of Ischia di Castro has often been associated with Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, despite the absence of direct indications from the point of view of documentation. This study offers a more articulated picture of the events that the bu­ilding has witnessed, through an analysis of the wall structures and Plans (which has been possible thanks to an accurate survey connected to a recent restoration campaign) and through the consideration of a broader historiographical context. Thus, a mid-fif­teenth century layout is identified and can be associated with the name of Ranuccio Farnese. Structures of this layout can still be seen the ground floor and partly on the piano nobile. Sangallo’s intervention dates to the time of Cardinal Alessandro and his son Pierluigi, around the third decade of the sixteenth century. This intervention renewed the hall on the piano nobile bringing it back, together with the adjacent rooms, to clear proportional relationships. Sangallo must also have designed the loggia but perhaps the execution was entrusted to others. After another whi­le, around 1546-1547, Ottavio Farnese finally charged further work, for the loggia of the stairs and for the last storey, to an architect who can be identified with Jacopo Meleghino.

Domenico Giaccone, Il fons amphiteatrum nell’ex convento di Santa Maria in Gradi a Viterbo

Abstract: A fountain – fons surrounded by a pergola – amphiteatrum - stays inside the former Dominican Monastery of Santa Maria in Gradi in Viterbo. The paper aims to describe this little-known work of art, one of a kind, built in the second half of the fifteenth century, focusing on its design and on its stylistic features. The pergola is a stone peristyle consisting of eight columns which are arranged in a regular octagon, and which support a trabeation; its central plan is consistent with the design preferences which informed several works of that period, not only the actual architectures but also the settings of paintings and drawings. The composite order capitals, which give identity to the structure, refer to models widely used in several Italian cultural centers. They all differ from each other, and some of them show details which reveal also the attention, of the unknown designer, to less-common artistic solutions.

Sara Bova, La fabbrica del corridore nuovo in Belvedere: dal disegno bramantesco alle addizioni stratificate del secondo Settecento

Abstract: The study deals with the systematic examination of the con­structive history of the western corridor in the Belvedere com­plex in the Vatican from the pontificate of Pius IV (1359-1365) to that of Pius VI (1775-1799), analyzing. unpublished docu­mentary and iconographic sources. However, it also and above all aims to identify the elements of permanence of Bramante’s project in the building.

The survey is divided into three sections. The first one covers a period of about twenty years (1561-1585), a rather short, but decisive phase, not only as it is related to the construction of the west wing of the Belvedere Courtyard, but also because it is characterized by the earliest significant variations to its original design. The second part of the study starts with the construction of the Sistine Library, analyzing diachronically the multiple conse­quences on the unity of the corridor, which between the end of the l6th and early 18th centuries is divided into various rooms, suitable for hosting the ever-increasing Vatican book collections. The third paragraph, inherent to the eighteenth-century phase, focuses on the new additions and changes made to the build­ing to make it part of the Vatican Museums. In order to better document these transformations, this research comprehends, as well, some graphic reconstructions, made by the author and concerning the main construction phases of the corridor.

Antonio Russo, Atticurga. Variazioni di una base a Roma da Bramante a Borromini
 

Abstract: This essay brings attention to the numerous variants of the Attic base which can be found in Rome. These bases, built in a rather large time span that goes from the 16th to the 17th century by a considerable number of architects, witness a continuous process of critical elaboration breaking the limits of consolidated histori­cal-artistic partitions. The study examines more specifically the experimentations dating between Bramante’s and Borromini’s times, taking in consideration the examples in Rome, the prefer­red location of this process. It is well known that the Attic base was a good solution for all orders except for the Tuscanic, both in Antiquity and from the XV century on, when the philological at­tention to the orders became more conscious and meticulous. Although it can be considered a ‘generic’ base good for Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite, it often presents specific features in relation to the order to which it belongs, as we shall discuss. The aim is to understand the reasons that led the architects to variare (the term used by Palladio on this question), to vary, this kind of base. The variations result from additions or eliminations of single elements composing the canonical version, such as plinth, torus, scotia, and fillet. This study gives firmly reason to Henri Focillon, who affirms that the life of the forms is a continuous process and where it takes place, it is precisely chanks to that propulsive process standing at the base every evolution.

Emanuele Gambuti, Ricondurre all’ordine un’antica fabbrica: l’opera del cardinale Alessandro dei Medici in Sant’Agnese fuori le mura

Abstract: This article examines the events of the Basilica of St. Agnes outside the Walls and the important works commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro dei Medici between 1600 and 1605. By examining a sixteenth-century plan of the church, designed by Alberto Alberti, it is possible to reconstruct the state of the building before the seventeenth-century interventions. The analysis of the excavation work of the ancient basilica and the individual renovations involving the entire complex promoted by the Florentine cardinal, suggests the existence of a coherent and unitary plan for the revision of the accesses and the internal and external paths of the buildings. The consolidation of the structures, the new decoration, and the “normalization” of the semi-underground complex brought back to more ordinary forms of use, are part of the renewal program of the Roman churches promoted during the pontificate of Clement VIII. Rather than an operation of mere conservation, the requests for the protection of Christian antiquities are here combined with a will to recover the functions, including the liturgical ones.

Pavel Kalina, Santini, Kinsky, and Montesquieu: Architect and Patron between Palladianism and Romanism in the Early 18th Century

Abstract: The villa suburbana standing on a small hill near Chlumec on Cidlina (Chlumec nad Cidlinou) in Eastern Bohemia was de­signed by Jan Blasius Santini-Aichl, one of the most fascinat­ing architects of Central European “Baroque” architecture, for count Franz Ferdinand Kinsky, the Chancellor of the Bohetni­an Kingdom, in 1721-1723. The villa, which was visited by Ern­peror Charles VI in 1723 and bears a popular lume Chadesis Crown, distinguishes itself by its rotational symmetry, having a cylindrical core with three added wings. This unique shaped used to be explained as an example of architectural symbolism — either as a hint at the Holy Trinity or as a hint at the Habsburg power over three parts of the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia). The shape of the villa was, in fact, given rather by its inspiration by the work of Carlo Fontana, especially his non-realized plans for a villa in Veneto. These plans were in all likelihood supplied by the patron, not architect. The Palladian legacy which stood in the background of Fontana’s project probably was not valued as such in the circles of high Bohemi­an nobility in the first half of the le century.

Alper Metin, Percezione e restauro dell’architettura ottomana dei secoli XVIII-XIX a Istanbul: patrimonio artistico e identità dal tardo Impero alla Repubblica

Abstract: Starting from the publication of Usul-u Mimari-i Osmani in 1873, Ottomans began to display a certain sense of alienation towards the architecture built in the capital of the empire since the early 1740s. In this text, the post-classical Ottoman architecture was criticized for being unoriginal, excessively Westernized, and far from the ‘local’ artistic values. Therefore, the so-called Ottoman Baroque of the XVIII century and the Eclectic buildings of the following decades, which at their moment served as a tool for refreshing the capital with new sultanic images, started being overtly refused. After the earthquake which heavily damaged Istanbul in 1894, many buildings of the capital underwent important restorations, initiating a new relation with the artistic and architectural heritage of the post-classical period. Throughout the XIX century and till ca 1960s, the elements which were not seen as “fully Ottoman” were replaced by new, archaizing ones in different degrees and manners. This essay investigates how the Ottomans adopted and subsequently refused the Western-related forms in building and conservation practices and in which manner the Early Republic in Turkey has dealt with the question. The cultural identity, construction and conservation matters are interrogated together to give a panorama of the subject, trying to understand the social and political dynamics of Istanbul in the aforementioned period.

Federica Scibilia, La città antisismica: teorie, progetti e realizzazioni in Italia nel primo ventennio del Novecento

Abstract: The contribution aims to reconstruct chronologically the series of theories, projects and realizations developed in Italy over the first twenty years of the twentieth century, a period marked by three major seismic events: the earthquakes of Calabria in 1905, of Messina and Reggio Calabria of 1908 and of the Marsica of 1915. This essay pays attention on some urban-scale episodes, apparently secondary which nevertheless help to give an articulated and complex frame of the lively debate that animated technical culture around the themes of reconstruction and de- sign of new urban centers in post-seismic scenarios. Examined mainly on the basis of the rich literature of the sector coeval with these disasters, the case studies (some object of realizations, other only projects, or proposals) offer a possible interpretation of the models and design criteria which were developed for reconstructions in seismic areas.