He was brought up in Edinburgh and went to university there (1743–1745). His family circle was that of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, and he was related to the Scottish historian William Robertson and a close friend of David Hume. Though a proud Scot as well as a Scottish member of Parliament for Kinross-shire, he was essentially a man of northern Britain and, as such, part of the mainstream of European thought. His departure for Italy in 1754 was an expression of this intellectual attitude.

Adam travelled to Rome via Paris, Aix, Genoa, and Florence. Apart from the antiquities of the South, France was neglected architecturally, and his visual and intellectual energies were concentrated on Rome. There, in the Casa Guanieri in the Piazza di Spragua, he studied drawing under the French expatriate Charles-Louis Clérisseau, landscape design with Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, and architectural composition with the Belgian architect Laurent-Baptiste Dewez. He was also, like any Grand Tourist, an inveterate collector of paintings (not very good ones), drawings, and antiquities, many of which were sold in London in 1776. The proof of his assiduity, if not of his genius, is shown in Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro, which he finished after his return to London in 1758. The historical introduction for this work was ghost-written by William Robertson. Adam was successful in this dramatic bid for fame and employment, and virtually overnight he established himself as a man of immense classical knowledge matched by ingenuity, architectural skill, and good taste. His London office in Lower Grosvenor Street, where his drawings and antiquities were thoughtfully displayed, became a stop in the fashionable circuit.

From Grosvenor Street, and after 1773 from Royal Terrace in the Adelphi development, Adam exercised immense influence on the British architectural scene throughout the 1760s and early 1770s. The Adam style is a personal mixture which combines, with an unsurpassed splendor of material, the whole gamut of styles he found in classical architecture. It was expressed as effectively in the decorative arts as in architecture. Adam could turn from designing a door handle to planning a ducal castle with ease and no flagging of inspiration.

Adam is perhaps most easily understood through his domestic work, in the town and country houses he built or remodeled, which he frequently decorated throughout. The most important of these for Adam’s early practice was Kedleston, Derbyshire (c. 1760–1770), whose owner had been struck “all of a heap with wonder and amaze” at the sight of Adam’s innovative designs. This commission was followed by the critical patronage of the duke and duchess of Northumberland, for whom Adam worked at Syon House (1762–1769), Alnwick Castle (c. 1770–1780), and Northumberland House in London (1770). Their wealth and position in society gave Adam an ideal and sustained opportunity to work on a grand scale. The Glass Drawing Room from Northumberland House, destroyed except for a fragment now in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and the contrasting styles of the Long Gallery and the Hall at Syon showed the range of Adam’s talents. The patronage of the Scottish prime minister, the earl of Bute, not only supported Adam officially to the position of Royal Architect to George III (1762, with Sir William Chambers) but also brought him the commissions of Lansdowne House in London (1762–1768) and Luton Hoo in Hertfordshire (c. 1768).

Admiration of Adam’s domestic talent must not obscure his important contribution to public building and town planning, of which the ill-fated Adelphi (1768–1772) was typical. This was a heroic attempt to lay out a whole quarter of London beside the Thames with a variety of houses and commercial properties, intended to provide London with a Parisian grandeur denied by official patronage. The project failed through its very scale—too great for the resources of any private speculator—and its trail of debt and opprobrium followed Adam to the grave. It was only in Edinburgh and Glasgow that he attracted the right sort of public patronage; his work at the Register House (1774), the University (1789), and the Bridewell prison (1792) showed his capacity to compose in the restrained monumentality of neoclassicism. His plan for the Bridges area of Edinburgh was similar in scope to the Adelphi venture and landed both Adam and his brother James in yet another financial crisis. Their work in Glasgow on the Royal Infirmary (1792) and for the University showed the same ability to incorporate public buildings into an expanding townscape.

Adam’s philosophy was set out in the various introductory essays of The Works in Architecture, published in parts between 1773 and 1778. These handsome folios looked both backward and forward and attempted to reassess and revive the Adam style by exploitating the literary and visual phenomenon of the Picturesque. It can be seen in his later watercolors and paintings and was a unique element in his Gothic work at Culzean Castle in Ayrshire (1773–1790) and in his other Scottish castles.

Brunelleschi, Filippo

Brunelleschi’s architectural commissions, all in Florence, began in 1418. His early projects, some of which cannot be dated precisely, include a domed chapel in San Jacopo Oltrarno (destroyed 1709), the Barbaradori Chapel in the Church of San Felicità (now known as the Capponi Chapel), the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa (now largely rebuilt), and the Church of San Lorenzo (1421–8). In San Lorenzo Brunelleschi first built what is now known as the Old Sacristy (the New Sacristy, 1523–9, was added by Michelangelo), a cube surmounted by a dome in which ribs radiate from the lantern at the centre; Brunelleschi described this construction, which mimics the effect of canvas pressed over the ribs, as having ‘crests and sails’ (a creste e vele). The church is designed as a basilica, but differs from the basilicas of late antiquity in its use of the proportions 1 : 2 and 1 : 4 throughout the building. In the interior Brunelleschi used ribbons of the grey Macigno stone mined in Fiesole and known as pietre serena to emphasize the architectural lines.

In 1419 Brunelleschi received the commission to design and build the Ospedale (or Spedale) degli Innocenti (constructed 1421–44), which is sometimes said to be the first Renaissance building. The façade of the Ospedale (then a foundling hospital, now a museum) is a loggia consisting on the ground floor of an arcade of thin Corinthian columns (the glazed terracotta roundels depicting babies were later added by Andrea della Robbia); above each semicircular arch is a pedimented window, and every detail honours the canons of mathematical proportion. The design proved to be seminal, and created the definitive form of the Renaissance loggia, which was to be imitated for centuries.

In 1420 Brunelleschi began his greatest work, the dome of Florence Cathedral, which was intended to be built in partnership with Ghiberti (with whom he had won the competition jointly) but in the event became Brunelleschi’s project; the design is in some respects Gothic, but the engineering that enabled Brunelleschi to raise the dome without supports is an imaginative revival of the ancient Roman technique of herringbone brickwork. Construction was completed in 1436, and a second competition was initiated for the construction of the lantern; this time Brunelleschi was the unequivocal winner, but construction of the lantern was delayed until 1446; in the interval Brunelleschi built the niched semicircular tribunes (1438) beneath the drum of the dome.

In 1429 Brunelleschi began to build the Pazzi Chapel in the cloister of the Church of Santa Croce. In the interior Brunelleschi again used pietre serena to emphasize the architectural lines. The façade, which has a blank upper storey with rectangular panels, is so different from Brunelleschi’s other work that it seems possible that his designs were replaced with those of another architect when it was constructed after his death.

In 1433 Brunelleschi started to build the Scolari Oratory in the Convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, but construction stopped before the building was roofed; a roof was added in 1503, and the building was ‘completed’ in 1934, but only the lower parts of Brunelleschi’s walls survived this restoration. These remnants clearly delineate the ground plan of the church, which was to have been the first centrally planned church of the Renaissance: the centre of the church was an octagon, and from each of the eight sides a chapel projected; externally the church was to have had sixteen sides.

Brunelleschi’s last church, started in 1436, was San Spirito. The church is in some respects a reversion to the geometrical basilican plan of San Lorenzo, but Brunelleschi aspired to create the sense of a central space by constructing an aisle around the whole church; his successors demurred, and the west aisle was never built.

Of attributions to Brunelleschi, the most important is the Palazzo Pitti. The rustication and geometry of the façade make it likely that Brunelleschi was the architect who drew up the initial plans for the central section; construction began in 1435, and the palace was eventually finished in 1570 by Ammanati.

While Vanvitelli developed the worldly Caserta, to Ferdinando Fuga
fell a more mundane but no less instrumental element of Bourbon
rule: the Albergo dei Poveri in Naples. Born a Florentine, Fuga came
to Rome to study at the Accademia di San Luca. He had proposed a
project for the Lateran facade as early as 1722 and participated in the
Trevi competition as well. His fortunes brightened when the
Florentine pope Clement XII made him architect of the papal
palaces.

Fuga enlarged the Corsini properties along Via della Lungara,
and for the papal summer palace at the Quirinal he extended the Via
Pia wing to an indeterminate length with what is called simply the
long sleeve,“La Manica Lunga.” He finished the stables at the
Quirinal, built a prison at San Michele a Ripa, extended the hospital
of Santo Spirito and designed its cemetery.The Palazzo della
Consulta, 1732–37, a multipurpose building opposite the Quirinal
Palace, is his most representative work, combining a carefully
coordinated plan behind a lively polychrome facade.
The pope’s big spending throughout the papal states was
understood as an opportunity to revive a slumped economy.
Monumental facades for unfinished churches, public fountains,
administrative offices, hospitals, even land reclamation and port
reconstruction were the signs of papal magnanimity, magnificienza,
well-balanced schemes for social well-being. A rich intellectual
climate, drawing in Clement’s case from Tuscan circles, sustained this
development. For example, Lione Pascoli, the pope’s economist,
developed a utilitarian understanding of architectural programs as
efficacious instruments of social policy.There was in Pascoli’s notion
little concern for style or form beyond clearly ordered space and
structure. Corsini’s enlightened circle advanced an erudite return to
the order of Renaissance and classical topoi and a rationalization in
all ways of thought.

Fuga, like Alessandro Galilei and Nicola Salvi,
propelled these values as architectural principles in his work.
Under Clement’s successor, Benedict XIV, Fuga’s career did not
falter. Indeed, the full range of his talents was exercised, from the
most spirited light baroque splendor of the new arcaded facade for
Santa Maria Maggiore to a sober Doric-style pavilion for serving coffee in the Quirinal gardens.They called it with self-conscious
cosmopolitan airs a caffèaus.This addition to the garden provided the
pope with a casual location for encounters, for example, with King
Carlos III of Naples in 1744, for which the palace throne room
would have been unwantedly officious. Fuga’s accomplishments were
even more obvious than Luigi Vanvitelli’s for they demonstrated
capabilities of adaptation to a wide variety of circumstances and
program, to site and to patrons’ tastes while solving difficult functional
and representational problems with brilliance and economy. Already
in 1748, Carlos had hand-picked Fuga, at the height of his fame, for
a mammoth job in his building scheme for Naples.
Regium totius regni pauperum hospitalium, the royal hospice for all
the realm’s paupers, better known as the Albergo dei Poveri, was
not a second prize to Vanvitelli’s Reggia but an integral component
of Carlos’s social, political, and architectural vision that in fact may
predate the maturation of the ideas for Caserta.
The population of Naples had grown dramatically in the
eighteenth century, necessitating a reorganization of its antiquated
charitable institutions. In the first years of Carlos’s reign, the idea of
a large, single, specifically designed hospice for the poor and
orphaned, like Rome’s San Michele a Ripa, was guided by a clear
program for the moral and economic health of the capital.The
Neapolitan hospice was to have been the largest in Europe, planned
to accommodate and sustain, equip and reintegrate eight-thousand
souls at a time.The Albergo dei Poveri addresses both the aesthetics
of magnificence in civil architecture and the functionality of a
framework for social sustenance.
Because the project relied upon the growing technical
proficiency of economic planners and even medical experts, Fuga’s
job as architectural designer was enriched if complicated by the
opinions of many special consultants. As in the case of Luigi
Vanvitelli’s evident qualifications, Carlos needed above all decisive
project managers. Fuga was given power of executive decision on the
means of production, which did not put him in an easy relationship
to the local workmen.They took every opportunity to make the
Florentine architect’s work more difficult. Fuga often fled to Rome,
leaving the Albergo to young assistants. Although Fuga forged no school or theory of architecture, he left behind in Naples a modus
operandi of a high level of professionalism. Already in 1748, Fuga’s
project was ready to go. An enormous square, 276 by 268 meters, was
to be divided four-square by cross branches within, much like
Caserta, but larger. A church space was placed so that its dome might
rise from the facade plane for greater visibility. Not one but three
nave spaces were to be fit within the body of the wings—left, right,
and down the center. Fuga could have drawn from a plethora of
sources for his plan, but we should not underestimate the influence
that Carlos had upon this project “with compass in hand.” As the
royal vision of things directed Vanvitelli’s work, so too Fuga
considered Carlos’s basic archetype for magnificence.The four-square
configuration with dome and towers of Fuga’s first design proposal
recalls the same rigorous geometry and elemental components that
Carlos gave to the architects of all his projects, confirming the related
nature of his architectural endeavors.The original site designated to
accommodate such a mammoth construction was, however, too low
and swampy and was rejected for hygienic reasons.That it was close
to the military installations of the port was also a problem for reasons
of security, though it is unclear whether it would be the poor or the
port in danger.With the designation in 1751 of a new site along the
Via Foria, Fuga had to rework the plans.
Complications such as this frustrated Fuga, but nothing could
have been more of an aggravation to him than to have seen
Vanvitelli at this time invited to the more seductive and flattering
Caserta project. It was clear that Carlos was more interested in
Caserta after Vanvitelli’s private audiences at Portici, and Fuga
reacted bitterly.

Vanvitelli criticized the Albergo plans and perhaps,
by his authority, triggered further changes shouldered by Fuga. In
turn, Fuga tried to wrench the Caserta commission from Vanvitelli
by criticizing the impractical nature and lack of economy of the
designs.The rivals bragged to one another about their buildings,
exaggerating their comparative sizes.
In May 1751, plans for both the Reggia and the Albergo dei
Poveri were presented to the monarch,Vanvitelli in his first
encounter, Fuga already having re-adapted the building to the new
site on the slope beneath the Capodimonte lodge.

The higher site afforded the desired light, air, and requisite salubrity encouraged by
medical consultants.Water slews and aqueducts from the hill behind,
perhaps to have been linked to the Acquedotto Carolino, would
supply the site.The cornerstone was laid on 7 December 1751,
coinciding again with one of Vanvitelli’s preliminary design deadlines
for the Reggia at Caserta.
The new site for the Albergo, however, required a horizontal
reconfiguration of the plan on the slope along five aligned
courtyards.The longitudinal development of Fuga’s second plan more
closely resembles the Roman hospice at San Michele a Ripa on
which Fuga had worked.The resemblance moreover to Soufflot’s
recently completed Hôtel Dieu in Lyons is a particularly compelling
connection, even more since the great French architect was actually
in Naples during the gestation of the Albergo project and may have
been consulted for his expertise. Fuga’s new building, however, was
to be three times the size: 634 meters long, eight stories high, and
containing over 750,000 cubic meters of interior space. A single
central entrance on the Via Foria facade brings all beneath the
Regium totius inscription into a vestibule where, according to more
Latin inscriptions, men and boys are directed to the left, women and
girls to the right.This immediate and irrevocable division by gender,
akin to the front and back apartments for the king and queen at
Caserta, is emphatically, graciously, and more obviously indicated to
the illiterate by the statuesque gestures of the images of King Carlos
and Queen Amalia to show the way. Routes through the building
maintain strict segregation of sexes and ages with special skip-floor
stair columns and interrupted corridors that carefully restrict
movement within. Fuga conceived the systematic circulation spaces
to eliminate all promiscuity in every sense. Paths of movement are
regulated in invariable schedules of eating and sleeping, working and
praying.There is within the Albergo dei Poveri a rigorous geometric
control of movement through space dissimilar only in quality to the
ritualized movement of the royal court through Vanvitelli’s equally
considered Caserta plan.
Segregation was only the first part of the Albergo’s program of
controlled movement. Once divided, the users were brought together
in the central symbolic space of a church. Experts on religious reform, such as the Neapolitan philosopher Ludovico Antonio
Muratori, expounded upon the efficacy of evangelical instruction in
combating indigence. Hence, at the heart of Fuga’s Albergo, the
central of the five courtyards was to be filled with a church with five
radiating naves, four on the diagonals with their separate entrances
on the corners of the courtyard for the four categories of inmate,
men, women, boys, and girls, the central nave for the public entering
from the front vestibule. Each space was focused upon the central
domed tribune area without affording views from the fenced-in
individual naves to the whole complex.The controlled visibility and
focus on the altar was a feature Fuga had also employed at his prison
in Rome. Here the fully radiating plan, a multiplication of his first
three-naved version, recalls models the architect could have brought
in, such as Michelangelo’s unexecuted although well-studied plan for
San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome, and others that Carlos III and
Soufflot could have suggested.The structures of the naves closely
resemble the heavily buttressed Gothic vessel of the Church of Santa
Chiara in Naples, which Carlos was then having Fuga restore as a
royal funerary chapel.
From the Albergo’s sparse nave spaces, the inmates would be
encouraged to participate by visiting one of the confessionals built
between the wall’s buttresses. Special passageways through the walls
allowed the priests to access these confessionals, themselves not
mingling among the inconstant of soul. Bathrooms were
conveniently located nearby for the inconstant of body. As by then a
century of French development in the building types of confinement
had taught, the centralizing gaze assured patients of the presence of
providence, but the conscious surveillance of their peripheral
positions from the center would, according to Enlightenment
philosophy of mind and body, invest the individuals therein with a
responsible consciousness.They would become through prayer and
work agents of their own reform and reintegration to society.The
architectural design would guarantee it.
If the building’s plan fulfills the functional necessities of its social
goals, the facade addresses, within the limits of economy, the
aesthetics of civic architecture and magnificence.The facade was
originally to have been 101 bays long, longer than the Manica  Lunga, each of its five segments larger than the Palazzo Farnese in
Rome, and so sparse in its ornamentation as to bring to mind the
unadorned mass of the Palazzo Farnese in Parma, once young
Carlos’s ducal seat. Fuga employed the lowest, most economical
pilaster strips and trabeation lines to delineate wall cells and rhythm
for suggestions of central and terminal pavilions.The wall is stripped
down to its barest essentials.The triangular pediment that only
meekly ornaments the mighty face was added by later architects
who shied from Fuga’s severity.
The Albergo dei Poveri, even in the small fraction of the
building eventually completed, exercises an immense visual power
at its scale—larger than the eye can take in.The Albergo impresses
itself upon the city and the region not by any alignments that were
sacrificed at this site but merely by the scale of its conception.
Fuga’s achievement of sober grandiosity and equilibrated
articulations has made the most monumental effect from the most
parsimonious means.The true monumentality of the Albergo dei
Poveri is expressed in a perfect match of his form and its program.
Although largely incomplete, it is the most ambitious utopian
attempt of the Enlightenment.
After thirty years of fitful construction, it was clear that the
economic support of Ferdinando’s regency would not see the
building completed. “At less expense and in shorter time, one could
have eliminated all poverty in the abundant Realm of Naples. It’s a
continual refrain,” Milizia complained, “that with these Hospices one
does not eliminate the poor. But this is not the business of the
Architect but of good Government.” In 1764, a famine pressed the
building into partial service, and the central church space was never
built, nor were the workshops for the education of the inmates.The
program never rehabilitated or reintegrated anyone, and the Albergo
became known crudely as a reclusorio, jokingly as a seraglio, and
effectively as a prison for the poor. Fuga’s Albergo passed
immediately from a utopian vision to a grandiose ruin, inhabited by a
variegated society of squatters.The palace for the proletariat did not
ameliorate the situation in Naples as Milizia predicted but defined
with greater clarity the distance between it and the palace of the
privileged at Caserta. Architecture in both Carlos’s great building projects was employed judiciously as an instrument to stabilize and regulate
society. If Caserta is the last in the line of symbols of absolute rule,
the Albergo dei Poveri is the progenitor of architectural instruments
of social control in the centuries to follow.

Alongside serious official architectural works on major ecclesiastical
sites, eighteenth-century Rome also sustained a flourishing activity in
more lighthearted but no less meaningful works.The Trevi Fountain
ranks perhaps as the most joyous site in Rome. Built from 1732 to
1762 under the patronage of popes Clement XII, Benedict XIV, and
Clement XIII, the great scenographic water display is often described
as the glorious capstone of the baroque era.This is indeed where
most architectural histories (and tourist itineraries) of Italian
architecture end. It is one of those places, like the Pantheon, where
the entire sweep of Rome’s culture can be read.

The history of the Trevi Fountain reaches back to antiquity.The
waters that feed the fountain today flow through the Aqua Virgo
aqueduct originally constructed by Agrippa in 19 B.C.The aqueduct
passes mostly underground and was obstructed in the Middle Ages to
prevent barbarian infiltration, so it was easily repaired in the
Renaissance.The water inspired a succession of baroque designers
with ideas for a fountain. As at San Giovanni, a similar architectural
competition was opened by Clement XII.With Clement’s own
favored Florentine architect, Galilei, already loaded up with projects, the pope took this opportunity to calm the waters over the Lateran
competition with a bit of artistic diplomacy. Nicola Salvi, born and
bred a Roman, was awarded the commission in 1732.
Salvi was endowed with a remarkably broad education in literary
and artistic culture that earned him positions in a range of Roman
intellectual societies, including the Virtuosi del Pantheon, a sort of
well-rounded genius club that met in the temple. His participation in
the Lateran competition featured his ability for flexibility and fusion,
both innovative and traditionalist, combining qualities of architectural
grandeur drawn from ancient and baroque examples.The same balance
and profundity is found in his singular masterpiece, the Trevi Fountain.
The Trevi Fountain is an architectural, sculptural, and aquatic
performance that spills off the flank of a pre-existing palace into a
low, irregular piazza.

A colossal Corinthian order on a rusticated base
sews the broad facade together around a central arch motif that
marks the terminus of the Aqua Virgo. Sculptural figures and panels
in relief adorn the central section.The figure of Ocean on an oystershell
chariot rides outward and gestures commandingly to Tritons
and their sea horses in the churning water below.

The water rushes in at eye level on the piazza across a cascade of rough-hewn travertine blocks tumbling down from the palace’s rustication into a deep-set
pool. Sweeping steps bring us down to the water while rich
sculptural flourishes draw our eye upward to the papal arms above.
Salvi has deftly combined formal references to imperial arches of
triumph and the colossal order of the Renaissance, elements featured
in both vignettes of Nolli’s map, with the scenographic unity
characteristic of the baroque.The architectonic structure is packed
with all the sculptural decoration it can hold, not more.The
sculptures were contracted to various artists who despite their legal
protests were forced to subordinate their work to Salvi’s commanding
architectural scansion.
One stumbles upon the site on this edge of the eighteenthcentury
city quite by surprise, as the engraved image by Piranesi of
the fountain and the piazza shows. Attracted perhaps by the splashing
sounds, we are drawn into a delightful episode in the urban fabric.
The jump in scale of Salvi’s construction provides a powerful impact  for this unexpectedly grand public event, like the grandiose
architectures of contemporary festivals or the fantasies of the lyric
opera stage.

Here water has taken center stage in an engaging
spectacle of cascading forms.Water is the source of salubrity and
fertility and nourishes all growing things, represented by all the
accompanying sculptures here and focused by Ocean’s magisterial
presence. Classical allegory is the basis here of a contemporary
philosophical program typical of Enlightenment interests in the
natural sciences.Thirty species of flora minutely described and
artfully disposed upon the rocks emphasize an encyclopedic spirit.
The natural and the artificial, the tectonic and the fluid, are
intermingled in continual transformation one into the other.The
themes of this poem in stone and water suggest an exaltation of
water’s vital energy in the cycle of self-renewal, time and decay, ruin
and regeneration.

At Levi, Christ turned water into wine; at the Trevi, Clement XII
turned wine into water: construction of the fountain was financed
with proceeds from the lottery and a tax on wine. Salvi hired a
learned and sensitive building contractor for the work, Nicola
Giobbe, and he also relied on close collaboration with Luigi Vanvitelli.
When Salvi’s health gave way following a stroke in 1744 (due to too
many subterranean visits to the aqueduct, it was thought), the
direction of the work was eventually shifted to Giuseppe Panini, son
of the famous painter, who oversaw its completion in 1762.
The response to the Trevi Fountain was overwhelmingly
positive. Salvi was catapulted to fame, receiving invitations to finish
up the cathedral of Milan with a new facade and build a palace for
the royal family in Naples. Even the stern critic Milizia who
preferred utilitarian works conceded that the Trevi was “superb,
grandiose, rich and altogether of a surprising beauty. . . nothing in
this century in Rome is more magnificent.”The Trevi Fountain
cannot be considered either a precursor of neoclassical rigor nor a
pure product of baroque exuberance. Salvi’s subtle shift toward a
knowledgeable, historicist ensemble is evidence of a significant
transformation in architectural ideas at this moment in the mideighteenth
century.The Trevi is a culmination of a grand cultural tradition in Roman architecture and yet subtly innovative in its
Enlightenment philosophical implications.The Trevi Fountain was
the most widely influential modern construction in its day, emulated
by architects across Europe. It enthuses still today an almost fanatical
fascination among all who encounter it.

Luigi Vanvitelli and the Reggia at Caserta

Clement XII’s consolation prize of the Trevi Fountain commission
to Salvi was coupled with another commission to the second
runner-up in the Lateran competition, Luigi Vanvitelli.Vanvitelli was
the son of a Dutch landscape painter working in Italy, Gaspar Van
Wittel, who Italianized his son’s last name. Luigi trained like many
in his day in scenography yet found employ in civil engineering. His
participation in the competition for the facade of the Lateran
assured his reputation although the bulk of his work continued to
be in rather utilitarian tasks. He built the bastions and quarantine
hospital in the pope’s Adriatic port of Ancona, his consolation prize,
and reorganized Michelangelo’s Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli
in Rome, itself a reintegration of the ancient Baths of Diocletian,
which stirred criticism comparable to the contemporaneous
Pantheon restorations. As head architect of the building commission
at Saint Peter’s, called the Fabbrica, his restoration project of
Michelangelo’s dome was contested yet successful. In Vanvitelli, the
indispensable professional qualifications of engineer and architect,
scenographer and coordinator were recognized by, among many,
King Carlos III of Naples.
Naples and the southern reaches of the Italian peninsula, ancient
Magna Graecia, had been ruled over by a succession of foreign
powers.The early eighteenth century brought the Bourbon
monarchy to Naples under Carlos III. Born the son of King Felipe V
of Spain and Elisabetta Farnese, Carlos inherited not only the
traditions arcing back through the French Bourbons to King Louis
XIV, his great-grandfather, but also through his maternal line to the
Farnese and Medici dynasties of Italy. Carlos III became, in 1734, the absolute monarch of the new and autonomous Kingdom of Two
Sicilies which bordered the papal states to the south. Naples, which
for over two centuries had languished, was now under Carlos’s rule
to be promoted to rank with Madrid, Paris, and Rome. Carlos
instigated ameliorative policies in architecture, urbanism, and regional
infrastructure that became a primary function of his reign. By
ordering landed aristocrats to be physically present at the capital’s
urban court, Carlos stimulated the local economy in construction
while simultaneously directing Naples toward a more cosmopolitan
image.The king set the example by supporting the arts, undertaking
archeological excavations at the buried ancient city of Herculaneum,
and building several royal palaces.
Carlos had lived in many of his parents’ residences, yet the
structures available to the new monarch in Naples were not up to
those standards either in the nature of their planning or in their lessthan-
imposing scale. At Portici, the Herculaneum excavation site on
the bay of Naples, he began a great royal palace more for the good
fishing than the promise of archeological finds the site promised. On a
hill above Naples at Capodimonte he had a hunting lodge built that
outstripped in its ambitious scope that modest program. Both palaces
were in large part the work of a Sicilian architect, Giovanni Antonio
Medrano, but both projects proved insufficient in Carlos’s eye on
aesthetic, representational, and functional grounds.
Finding local architects lacking, Carlos turned to Rome’s
prominent architectural culture for the professionals he required.
Nicola Salvi was first on his wish list, but with the architect in ill
health and concerned for the ongoing fountain project, he deferred,
recommending instead his collaborator Vanvitelli. Benedict XIV may
have been loath to see not only Vanvitelli but also another of his prized
architects, Ferdinando Fuga, summoned by the powerful new monarch
to the south, but the pope sent them along at the close of the Holy
Year of 1750 as a diplomatic payment of cultural tokens.
Carlos set his two new architects to the major buildings of his
two-fold economic and political scheme: two palaces for opposite
ends of the sociopolitical scale, the Reggia or royal court palace at
Caserta from Vanvitelli and the regium pauperum hospitalium, or royal
poor-man’s hospice at Naples from Fuga. Following schemes of his French Bourbon forefathers, Carlos consolidated the charitable
institutions for the poor in a grand architectural project, like Jacques-
Germain Soufflot’s Hotel Dieu in Lyons, and brought together the
governing institutions of the upper realm in an ambitious work
comparable to the palace at Versailles.
Like Versailles, the site of Carlos’s new Reggia lies several dozen
kilometers beyond the capital city limits at Caserta, amidst the king’s
favorite hunting grounds. More crucially, the site was safe from civil
unrest, coastal attack, and volcanic eruption. For the entirely
unimpeded site Vanvitelli drew up his first ideas for a great palace, but
so did the king: as a contemporary noted, “with compass and slate in
hand, Carlos drew out the first sketches of the great palace.” Carlos’s
specific design directives can be deduced by noting all the changes
Vanvitelli subsequently adopted and conscientiously adhered to in his
second project proposal: a square construction with four internal
courtyards and a great central dome.This design had many
inspirations: the project Carlos’s father had commissioned for Buen
Retiro outside Madrid, as well as El Escorial; elements from his
mother’s Palazzo Pitti in Florence; the Palazzo Farnese in Rome; the
Farnese ducal residence at Colorno; and most importantly, the
Louvre,Versailles, and their gardens.Vanvitelli procured all this
pertinent comparative material and dutifully shaped the project
according to the royal vision.

In 1751, he was summoned to the
Portici residence where in a private audience,Vanvitelli tells us, the
king and the queen delighted over his solutions, each asking
questions and voicing desires for the apartments, the gardens, the
fountains and, Queen Amalia extemporized, on a whole new, orderly
city to rise up around. Maestà, the courtier-architect obsequiously
responded,“this lesson that you deign to give me will be kept well in
mind and executed without alteration.”
On 20 January 1752, the foundation stone for the Reggia at
Caserta was laid with pompous ceremony.This and the entire palace
project were minutely described by Vanvitelli in a lavish publication
of 1756 distributed by the royals to visiting dignitaries. As the
architect puts it, the fourteen engraved plates and elucidating text
broadcast the sublimity of Carlos’s idea, which feared no comparison
with the great palaces of Europe or antiquity.Vanvitelli’s text is a  guide to the sculptural elements and their monumental architectural
vessel. Like the founding legends of western European civilization
expounded by the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, the
rhythms, repetitions, gestures, and metaphors of Caserta are Vanvitelli’s
architectural poems of the ideal of Bourbon absolutism.
Vanvitelli coordinated the ongoing spectacle of construction of
palace and gardens, along with the aqueduct that would serve them.
A 40-kilometer conduit, the Acquedotto Carolino, passes through
mountains, like the Aqua Virgo, and over valleys on arches modeled
on the Roman-era Pont du Gard in France. Aqueduct building, the
stuff of ancient emperors, provided aesthetic and functional benefits
to the palace as well as to the city of Naples—a grand watercourse
was to connect Carlos’s two great works in a single stream.
The Reggia’s ground plan measures over 250 by 200 meters, a
magnificent rectilinear block of stately proportions.Two ranges of
state rooms bisect within to define four rectangular courtyards. Its
1,200 rooms are arranged according to a rational geometric
disposition that conjoins the symmetry, distribution, and dimension
of the great palaces of Renaissance reason and Vico’s notion of
geometry as the visible manifestation of monarchic rule.The facade is
articulated with a colossal Composite order.

Its thirty-seven bays are
broken up in central and terminal pavilions originally to have been
accented with a cupola, corner towers, and acroterial sculpture,
references to Carlos’s Farnese inheritance and boyhood homes.
Unlike Louis’s Versailles, the walls of Caserta are not dissolved in
windows; instead,Vanvitelli, like Galilei before him, exalts the
rectilinear solidity of construction and achieves a sweeping
monumentality worthy of the Sun King’s descendant.Vanvitelli has
balanced Carlos’s French memories with the requisites of Italian
design tradition.
The facade of the palace announces its monarchic functions.
The deep central niche on the upper floor, which emphasizes the
wall’s solidity, is ideal for royal appearances. As Vanvitelli declared, the
central area of the palace “must show off those characteristics that
might give to those who enter some notion of the Personage who
resides there.”The various statues and inscriptions planned for the
entrance declare his virtues: Justice, the measure of our well-being, and Peace, which increases our prosperity, Clemency that sustains the
miserable, and Magnificence that sustains the arts “as was known,”
Vanvitelli wrote, “of Rome in the times of Augustus,Trajan, Hadrian,
in Paris in the celebrated reign of Louis XIV, and now in Naples.”
The towers, which were not executed due to later financial
constraints, would have lightened the facade’s horizontality with
bright vertical accents. For the central cupola the architect may have
been thinking of Saint Peter’s, but this suggestion would have been
overridden by the patron’s own more pertinent reference to El
Escorial. Here, this cupola does not mark a chapel within the palace.
Whereas Felipe erected a palace for the lord, Carlos, his son, erects a
palace for the realm, inverting ecclesiastical models and confirming a
theme of divinization of the monarch.The crowning construction
was to have been a pierced belvedere, an airy temple seen from the
vast piazza and axial road approaching the palace, rising high and
framing the equestrian statue on the pediment as if the royal
simulacrum were in triumphal procession.

Entering the palace, the visitor’s eye is drawn along a central axis
through the ground floor and clear out the back to the garden.This
is a grand covered street, a triumphant way that threads three
vestibules each of which radiates diagonal glimpses into the
courtyards. Many sources for Vanvitelli’s inspiration for these
surprising and dramatic vestibules have been suggested, but only
Vanvitelli’s first training in scenography can explain the effect of
infinite space achieved by the fleeting diagonal planes across the
rectangular courtyards. Every view to and through the Reggia
suggests the infinite power of its resident, even the interior vistas.
That power is also manifest in the materials used in the construction.
The dozens of monolithic columns that punctuate the great masses
of supporting wall, especially in the vestibules, were a particular
passion of Carlos, both for their representational value as
achievements of the classical past and for their local provenance from
archeological sites across his realm. Even the materials manifest the
monarch’s sovereignty across space and time, territory and its history.
These connections are made explicit in the few but significant
sculptural elements realized at Caserta. At the central ground floor
vestibule is a colossal figure of resting Hercules, loosely adapted from the ancient “Farnese Hercules.”According to Vico, Hercules plays a
major role in the origin of civilization and in many ways: wanderer to
foreign shores, tamer of beasts and land, huntsman and planter, builder
of gardens and cities.This reflects Carlos in all his endeavors.The stair
climbs its first ramp between lions and up to a tall scenic wall with a
statue symbolizing Royal Majesty. Here, approaching petitioners are
exhorted to truthfulness and meritoriousness by flanking allegories.
The stairs bifurcate and continue to climb within this large space
vaulted by two domical shells, the first pierced to reveal the second
painted empyrean of Apollo’s realm.A musicians’ gallery tucked away
above allows for ethereal accompaniment to the ascent. Here,
Vanvitelli maintains an extraordinary equilibrium of baroque
theatricality and classical measure.

The upper vestibule is similar to the one directly below, but
bathed in intense light. Approached at oblique angles, this vestibule
is invested with a centrifugal force that sends the visitor off to the
four corners of the palace. Carlos ordered Vanvitelli to model the
chapel after Jules-Hardouin Mansart’s at Versailles by emphasizing
the structural integrity of the free-standing polychrome marble
shafts.Vanvitelli also paired the columns as Claude Perrault had done
on the recent facade at the Louvre.Vanvitelli too strikes a balance
between the forces of tradition and the drive for innovation.
The royal apartments emanate from the central vestibule, the
king’s toward the principal facade, the queen’s toward the gardens,
in a strict subdivision of title and gender.The visitor proceeds
through sequences of antechambers to the royal presences, shaping,
as at Versailles, the rituals of absolute monarchy through the
controlled movement of its courtiers. Although the decoration of
these interiors fell to the successors of Carlos and Vanvitelli, the fuga
di stanze, or flight of aligned rooms along its 250-meter axes is
more impressive than any later gilding.The court theater on the
ground floor was completed entirely under Vanvitelli’s direction.
Within its tiny 10-meter breadth, completely subsumed like the
chapel within the overall geometry of the building,Vanvitelli’s
colossal columnar order unifies the space. Placed on the ground
floor, the stage may be opened at the back to a garden vista. The gardens at Caserta are an integral element in the
experience of Bourbon self-imagery.

Parterres and boxwood extend the geometry of the palace’s architecture outward. The central axis, noted upon our first approach, shoots thousands of meters up the hillside; the abundant waters of the aqueduct cascade toward us, bursting rambunctiously from a mountain cataract, stepping down enormous water chains and flowing into long, low pools.Vanvitelli’s
son, Carlo, strove to complete the key features of the sculptural
program of his father’s gardens.The Ovidian themes of fertility and
metamorphosis that Vanvitelli listed in his publication were carefully
determined as a Vichian mythopoeic historiography of the land.
The fountain sculptures reference both the king’s passion for
hunting here and the site’s historical association with the virginal
goddess of the hunt, Diana. At the top of the park, a dramatic
ensemble of statues play out the scene of Actaeon’s fateful
encounter with the goddess in her bath who in her ire flings drops
of water onto the hapless hunter who is transformed into a stag and
devoured by his dogs. In other ensembles along the water chain,
Adonis departs on his fatal hunt and Venus uses his blood to
seminate the earth with anemones.The statues describe the region’s
mythic foundations in the acts of gods.
All elements of this monarchic project are concatenated along
the water’s course, garden, palace, and on to the new city of
Caserta. In front of the palace, a vast elliptical piazza opens,
delineated by the severe forms of barracks and service buildings. Its
geometry begs a comparison to Bernini’s piazza at Saint Peter’s but
here the architectural gesture is stern and military beneath the
monarch at his loggia controlling with his gaze this place and the
model town that expands from it, the center of a wisely governed
realm. From here a radiating trevium and an orderly grid of streets
were planned with decorous, uniform blocks to guarantee light and
air to the residential units. Contemporary interests in urban
planning exhorted the monarch to the organization of cities, a duty
that brings with it not only considerable public utility but also
effective political propaganda.
Caserta was designed not to replace the capital city but, like
Versailles, to rise alongside as an ideal image of the monarch’s rule.  The axis of the palace and garden was to continue over the horizon
to Naples along a single road carrying with it the waters of the
aqueduct in flanking canals.The union of monumental aesthetic and
functional utility characterizes the particular strengths of Vanvitelli’s
vast plan and the absolute power of Carlos’s rule. Contemporaries
hailed Caserta as the greatest project of its kind. Milizia gushed with
praise calling it “a rare complex of grandeur, of regularity, of
rhythm, of variety, of contrasts, of richness, of facility, of elegance.”
Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, the French critic,
lauded its unity of conception and unity of execution, others its
sublime effect of symmetry and expansion, huge dimensions, and
controlled singular vision.While concepts of the sublime were being
developed across Europe,Vanvitelli himself described Caserta as “a
true mirror in which His Royal Highness can see himself . . . and the
sublime Ideas conceived by his magnificence,” and claimed that it
would “show to Italy, and to all Europe, what sublimity the thoughts
of his Majesty reach.”
Vanvitelli was the last architect of such absolutist ambition and
Caserta the swan song of the absolutist rule that sustained such
visionary building. Caserta is as much connected to the traditions of
the Renaissance and the baroque as it is a response to the innovating
classical shift of Vanvitelli’s generation. But Caserta stands, even in its
abbreviated form, as a confirmation of the highest aspirations of
late-eighteenth-century culture and a prototype for a whole line of
“megapalaces,” buildings of power, logic, largeness, magnificence, and
manipulation.
In celebration of his achievements, the festival decorations erected
in the streets and squares of his capital presented Carlos III as a
modern Hercules, the mythic builder of a new civilization. Far from
abandoning the city to its own squalor, the king began to set out
systems of urban improvement for the city of Naples, encouraging
private building. He commissioned a map of the city, like Nolli’s of
Rome, a clear testimony of an urban consciousness. He built the Teatro
San Carlo, repaired churches like Santa Chiara, established public
museums for the Herculaneum finds and the Farnese sculpture
collection, supplied warehouses, barracks, and hospices, and opened an
ancient-style forum, the Foro Carolino.

Vanvitelli brought to Naples what Carlos most needed, a grand
architectural imagery—clear, solid, geometric, with its severe grandeur
and rich magnificence “fusing,” as the visiting Frenchman Jérôme
Richard summarized in 1764,“the majestic beauty of ancient
architecture with the pleasantness of modern architecture.”Vanvitelli’s
impact in the hitherto provincial world of Neapolitan architects was, as
he immodestly said himself,“a lesson in proper modern architecture.”
As Michelangelo had done for Rome itself in the sixteenth century,
Vanvitelli defined an imperial idiom for his day that dismantled
regional inflections through the Herculean force of classicism.
Vanvitelli’s command of objective functional requirements may
certainly have predisposed him to classical solutions, reducing the
perceived excesses of baroque space with the rigor of columns, but his
classicism is neither self-consciously historicist nor artificially
aesthetisized but the result of a continuously evolving and solid Italian
tradition in architecture almost two millennia in the making.
Carlos’s ameliorative policies and architectural visions were
stopped short by his ascension to the Spanish throne and departure for
Madrid in 1759, leaving behind the regency of his eight-year-old son,
Ferdinando IV.Vanvitelli’s career, which depended upon Carlos, was in
jeopardy under Ferdinando’s lax interest and his regent’s stringent
spending. During his reign, only Caserta’s theater was inaugurated,
along with some small apartments on the main floor. Efforts to build
up parts of the new town, then to be called Ferdinandopoli, were
undertaken, although not to Vanvitelli’s original plans. Ferdinando,
however, established a worker’s colony specializing in silk production
nearby at San Leucio in 1769, and examples of its work line the walls
of the Caserta apartments.The collective community at San Leucio
figures as the Bourbon monarchy’s most effective socioeconomic
effort—it sustained local crafts, educated its inhabitants, and eliminated
the need to import silk.The notions of social ameliorative policies had
been at the core of Bourbon works, and Carlos had all along a second
grand project under way in town.

The Pantheon is one of the most celebrated and most carefully
studied buildings of Western architecture. In the modern age, as it
had been in the Renaissance, the Pantheon is a crucible of critical
thinking. Preservation of the Pantheon had been undertaken in the
seventeenth century and continued in the eighteenth during the
pontificate of Clement XI.

Floodwater stains had been removed and
some statues placed in the altars around the perimeter. Antoine
Derizet, professor at Rome’s official academy of arts, the Accademia
di San Luca, praised Clement’s operation as having returned the
Pantheon “to its original beauty.” A view of the interior painted by
Giovanni Paolo Panini recorded the recent restorations. From a
lateral niche, between two cleaned columns, Panini directs our vision
away from the Christianized altar out to the sweep of the ancient
space.The repeated circles of perimeter, marble paving stones, oculus,
and the spot of sunlight that shines through it emphasize the
geometrical logic of the rotunda. Panini’s painted view reflects the
eighteenth-century vision of the Pantheon as the locus of an ideal
geometrical architectural beauty.
Not everything in Panini’s view satisfied the contemporary
critical eye, however.The attic, that intermediate level above the
columns and below the coffers of the dome, seemed discordant—ill
proportioned, misaligned, not structurally relevant. A variety of
construction chronologies were invented to explain this “error.”The
incapacity of eighteenth-century critics to interpret the Pantheon’s
original complexities led them to postulate a theory of its original state and, continuing Clement XI’s work, formulate a program of
corrective reconstruction.
In 1756, during the papacy of Benedict XIV, the doors of the
Pantheon were shut, and behind them dust rose as marble fragments
from the attic were thrown down.What may have started as a
maintenance project resulted in the elimination of the troublesome
attic altogether.The work was carried out in secret; even the pope’s
claim of authority over the Pantheon, traditionally the city’s domain,
was not made public until after completion. Francesco Algarotti,
intellectual gadfly of the enlightened age, happened upon the work
in progress and wrote with surprise and irony that “they have dared
to spoil that magnificent, august construction of the Pantheon. . . .
They have even destroyed the old attic from which the cupola
springs and they’ve put up in its place some modern gentilities.”As
with the twin bell towers erected on the temple’s exterior in the
seventeenth century, Algarotti did not know who was behind the
present work.

The new attic was complete by 1757. Plaster panels and
pedimented windows replaced the old attic pilaster order,
accentuating lines of horizontality.The new panels were made
commensurate in measure to the dome’s coffers and the fourteen
“windows” were reshaped as statue niches with cutout figures of
statues set up to test the effect.The architect responsible for the attic’s
redesign, it was later revealed, was Paolo Posi who, as a functionary
only recently hired to Benedict XIV’s Vatican architectural team, was
probably brought in after the ancient attic was dismantled. Posi’s
training in the baroque heritage guaranteed a certain facility of formal
invention. Francesco Milizia, the eighteenth century’s most widely
respected architectural critic, described Posi as a decorative talent, not
an architectural mind.Whatever one might think of the design, public
rancor arose over the wholesale liquidation of the materials from the old attic.

Capitals, marble slabs, and ancient stamped bricks were dispersed on the international market for antiquities. Posi’s work at the Pantheon was sharply criticized, often with libelous aspersion that revealed a prevailing sour attitude toward contemporary architecture in Rome and obfuscated Posi’s memory.

They found the new attic suddenly an affront to the venerated place. Reconsidering Posi’s attic soon became an exercise in the
development of eighteenth-century architects in Rome. Giovanni
Battista Piranesi, the catalytic architectural mind who provided us
with the evocative engraving of the Pantheon’s exterior, drew up
alternative ideas of a rich, three-dimensional attic of clustered
pilasters and a meandering frieze that knit the openings and
elements together in a bold sculptural treatment. Piranesi, as we will
see in a review of this architect’s work, reveled in liberties promised
in the idiosyncrasies of the original attic and joyously contributed
some of his own. Piranesi had access to Posi’s work site and had
prepared engravings of the discovered brick stamps and the
uncovered wall construction, but these were held from public
release. In his intuitive and profound understanding of the
implications of the Pantheon’s supposed “errors,” Piranesi may have
been the only one to approach without prejudice the Pantheon in
all its complexity and contradiction.
The polemical progress of contemporary architectural design in
the context of the Pantheon exemplifies the growing difficulties at
this moment of reconciling creativity and innovation with the past
and tradition. History takes on a weight and gains a life of its own.
The polemic over adding to the Pantheon reveals a moment of
transition from an earlier period of an innate, more fluid sense of
continuity with the past to a period of shifting and uncertain
relationship in the present.The process of redefining the interaction
of the present to the past, of contemporary creativity in an historical
context, is the core of the problem of modern architecture in Italy
and the guiding theme of this study.

Rome of the nolli plan

The complex layering found at the Pantheon was merely an example
of the vast palimpsest that is Rome itself, and there is no better
demonstration of this than the vivid portrait of the city engraved in
1748.The celebrated cartographer Giovanni Battista Nolli and his
team measured the entire city in eleven months using exact
trigonometric methods. At a scale of 1 to 2,900, the two-squaremeter
map sacrifices no accuracy: interior spaces of major public
buildings, churches, and palazzi are shown in detail; piazza
furnishings, garden parterre layouts, and scattered ruins outside the
walls are described with fidelity. Buildings under construction in the
1740s were also included: Antoine Derizet’s Church of Santissimo
Nome di Maria at Trajan’s Column, the Trevi Fountain, Palazzo
Corsini on Via della Lungara. In the city’s first perfectly ichnographic
representation Nolli privileges no element over another in the urban
fabric. All aspects are equally observed and equally important.
Vignettes in the lower corners of the map, however, present selected
monuments of ancient and contemporary Rome: columns, arches,
and temples opposite churches, domes, and new piazzas. Roma antica
and Roma moderna face one another in a symbiotic union.
The Nolli plan captures Rome in all its richness, fixing in many
minds the date of its publication as the apex of the city’s architectural
splendor. It is an illusory vision, however, as Rome, like all healthy
cities, has never been in stasis. Nolli’s inclusion of contemporary
architecture emphasizes its constant evolution. His plan is neither a
culmination nor a conclusion but the starting point for
contemporary architecture.The architecture of modern Italy is
written upon this already dense palimpsest.

Alessandro Galilei and San Giovanni Laterano

One of the contemporary monuments featured in Nolli’s vignettes
was a new facade for the church of San Giovanni Laterano.The
basilica, along with its baptistery, was erected by the Emperor
Constantine in the year 315. It was, and still is, the pre-eminent
liturgical seat in the Christian capital, where the relics of Saints Peter
and Paul—specifically, their heads—are preserved.The popes resided
at the Lateran through the Middle Ages and it remains today the
cathedral of the city of Rome, though it does not enjoy a preeminent
urban position or architectural stature; indeed its peripheral
site along the city’s western walls and eccentric orientation facing
out across the open countryside make the maintenance of its rightful
stature, let alone its aging physical structure, extremely difficult.The
Church of Saint Peter’s, on the other hand, also Constantinian in
origin, had been entirely reconceived under Pope Julius II in the
Renaissance and became the preferred papal seat. Meanwhile, the
Lateran remained in constant need of repair, revision, and reform.
Pope Sixtus V reconfigured the site by adding an obelisk, a new
palace and benediction loggia on the side and later Pope Innocent X
set Francesco Borromini to reintegrate the body of the church, its
nave, and its double aisles, but his plans for the facade and eastern
piazza were left unexecuted. Dozens of projects to complete the
facade were proposed over the next seventy-five years until Pope
Clement XII announced in 1731 an architectural competition for it.
Clement XII’s idea of a competition was a novelty for Rome,
with a published program and projects presented anonymously before
an expert jury. It would indeed provide an opportunity for exposure
of new ideas and for stimulating discussion. In 1732, nearly two dozen
proposals were put on display in a gallery of the papal summer palace
on the Quirinal Hill. All the prominent architects of Rome
participated, as well as architects from Florence, Bologna, and Venice.
Participants drew up a variety of alternatives ranging, as tastes ran,
between a stern classicism to fulsome baroque images after Borromini.
Jury members from the Accademia di San Luca found the projects
that followed Borrominian inspiration excessively exuberant and
preferred the sobriety of the classical inheritance, and Alessandro Galilei emerged the winner.These expressed opinions delineated a
polemical moment dividing the baroque from a new classicism.
Galilei was a remote relation of the famous astronomer and
followed the papal court from Florence to Rome. Galilei had been
active in the rediscovery of classic achievements in the arts and letters
in the eighteenth century re-examining Giotto, Dante, and
Brunelleschi with renewed appreciation. For example, when asked in
1723 for his opinion on a new baroque-style altar for the Florentine
baptistry, Galilei favored preserving the original Romanesque
ambience of the interior despite the tastes of his day. A renewed
classical sense stigmatized the frivolities of the rococo as uncultivated,
arbitrary, and irrational. Clement XII’s competition for San Giovanni
may merely have been a means to secure the project less flagrantly
for Galilei and to introduce a rigorous cultural policy to Rome.
Roman architects petitioned the pope, livid that their talent
went unrewarded, and Clement responded with, in effect, consolation
prizes to some of them with commissions for other papal works.
Construction on the Lateran facade was begun in 1733.
Galilei’s facade of San Giovanni Laterano is a tall and broad
structure in white travertine limestone.The structure is entirely open
to the deep shadowed spaces of a loggia set within a colossal
Corinthian order. In a manuscript attributed to Galilei, the architect
articulates his guiding principles of clear composition and reasoned
ornament, functional analysis and economy. Professional architects,
Galilei insists, trained in mathematics and science and a study of
antiquity, namely the Pantheon and Vitruvius, can assure good
building. Galilei’s handling of the composition has the rectilinear
rigor and interlocking precision one might expect from a
mathematician.The ponderous form is monumental merely by the
means of its harmonious proportions of large canonical elements. It is
a strong-boned, broad-shouldered architecture, a match for Saint
Peter’s. It demonstrates in its skeletal sparseness and subordination of
ornamentation the rational architectural logic attributed to Vitruvius.
Galilei’s images are derived primarily from sources in Rome: the two
masterpieces of his Florentine forefather Michelangelo, Saint Peter’s
and the Palazzo dei Conservatori at the Capitoline. Galilei’s classicism
is a constant strain among architects in Rome who built their monumental church facades among the vestiges of the ancient
temples. Galilei refocused that tradition upon Vitruvius and in his
measured austerity contributed a renewed objectivity to Roman
architecture of the eighteenth century.
Galilei’s austere classicism is emblematic of a search for a
timeless and stately official idiom at a point in time where these
qualities were found lacking in contemporary architecture. Reason,
simplicity, order, clarity—the essential motifs of this modern
discussion—set into motion a reasoned disengagement from the
baroque.With Galilei’s monumental facade, guided in many ways by
the pressures of Saint Peter’s, the Cathedral of Rome takes its
rightful position, as Nolli’s vignette suggests, a triumphal arch over
enthroned Roma moderna.