In questo volume:

Aloisio Antinori (1957-2022)

Paul Davies, Richard Schfield, Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano: new observations

Abstract: This article advances a series of new observations about the history and design of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano. It suggests that Lorenzo de’ Medici began discussing the refurbishment of the old villa, then known as Ambra, with Bernardo Rucellai in 1474 and that these discussions involved features that were ultimately included many years later in the final design. It also shows that although some groundwork was undertaken in the mid-1480s, the building was not formally begun until 1490, when construction was initiated in a building race with Filippo Strozzi’s palace in the city. The article also deals with the drawings for villas in the Codex Barberini (fol. 9r) and the Taccuino Senese (fol. 17r), arguing that they are incompatible with Giuliano da Sangallo’s drawing style and consequently must be Sangallo’s copies after concept drawings by Lorenzo; and it goes on to suggest that the upper drawing on Codex Barberini (fol. 9r) is a scheme by Lorenzo for Poggio a Caiano. The article also sets out to reconstruct the original form of the building – much altered by Poccianti in the nineteenth century. It reconstructs the ramps at the front of the building showing that there was a third ramp as well as the two that are well known. It goes on to show that the original stonework of the loggias running around the building was completely different in form from its current state. Based on the evidence of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century record drawings of the building, the article reveals their original form and demonstrates that they were designed in a carefully considered hierarchy in relation to those of the «piano nobile», and more importantly that the external mouldings on each level are coordinated with those of the interior, introducing an idea that would become commonplace only in the following century. The article also has two appendices discussing Franciabigio’s Annunciation and Rucellai’s trip to Rome with Alberti.

Maria Beltramini, Padre Sebastiano Resta e l’architettura del Cinquecento: attorno ai disegni del ‘Libro d’Arabeschi’

Abstract: The essay reconstructs for the first time the architectural culture of the Oratorian priest Sebastiano Resta, among the greatest 17th-century European collectors of graphic materials concerning figurative arts. By 1689 Resta set up in Rome a ‘Libro d’Arabeschi’ – a volume entirely dedicated to architecture and ornament drawings – and sent it to a friend-collector in Palermo, where the Libro remained almost intact until its rediscovery and later publication in 2007. Focusing on the general structure of the book and on the creative display of the few pure architectural drawings it contains, the essay questions Resta’s attitude towards Cinquecento and early Seicento architectural principles and exemplary buildings, revealing his didactic intent and his architectural sensibility and competence, certainly grown thanks to his residency in the lively roman Oratorian milieu, materially reshaped in its structure by Francesco Borromini.

Marianna Mancini, La funzione del ‘tipo’ per lo studio delle forme architettoniche in Henrich Wölfflin ed Erwin Panofsky

Abstract: This article proposes a comparison between some of the writings of Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky dedicated to the history of architecture. The aim is to point out the presence of contact points in their theoretical and methodological processes, elements of connection that are due to their belonging to the same cultural context. Starting from the definition of type, as it can be inferred from the theory of Quatremère de Quincy, I have analyzed this notion as it appears in the proposals of Wölfflin and Panofsky. I have investigated its specific meaning and the function of typology in the two scholars. In Wölfflin and in Panofsky the concept of type acts as a linking tool between historiography and theory. Its application in the study of artistic phenomena reveals how much their work is connected to the nineteenthtwen-tieth-century debate on the possibility of conceiving the art history as ‘Kunstwissenschaft’.

Domenico Giaccone, L’isolamento di Porta Garibaldi a Catania fra interessi pratici e culturali: la consulenza di Gustavo Giovannoni e la disattenzione dei suoi principi

Abstract: The Garibaldi Gate represents one of the most distinguished monuments of Catania. Various bibliographical sources have described its history dwelling on its origin, the designer, and the links with the Baroque architecture and urban planning of the Etnaean city. Less space, however, has been given to the description of the isolation work of the monument carried out in the 1930s of the 20th century, the focus of the present study. From the analysis of the documents contained in the dossier kept in the Central State Archives emerges that it was a complex operation, where various stakeholders at local and national scale took part, spokesmen for conflicting interests. Prominent among them is the figure of Gustavo Giovannoni, consultant on behalf of the Ministry of National Education, Directorate of Antiquities and Fine Arts, who failed to assert his own idea of intervention. This was a failure vis-à-vis the principles of restoration that were emerging in those years, attentive to the authenticity of the monument and the preservation of the environment in which it is inserted.

Annalisa Viati Navone, “Tra misura architettonica e la latitudine ambientale”: un appartamento di Marco Zanuso

Abstract: Among Marco Zanuso’s works, the projects for houses and villas, both urban and holiday, as well as the furnishings in flats and attics, remain the least known and most neglected by critics. The spatial analysis of the Apartment for his brother, built between 1957 and 1959 in Milan, reveals a fluid spatiality, rooted in a profound historical knowledge of the domestic culture, which is regenerated and ‘revolutionised’, combining the orthogonal system with the diagonal one and taking up the traditional enfilade, here boldly shifted to the edge of the flat, namely to the balcony, so that the domestic environment would find, as its main interlocutor, the Giardino d’Arcadia on which it overlooks.