Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect and Antiquarian

Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance artist, architect and antiquarian

David R Coffin Pennsylvania State University Pres $55 ISBN 0 271 02293 0

An absorbing if visually undistinguished fresh biography of Pirro Ligorio alerts Giles Worsley to ask on what account this sixteenth-century polymath architect has not ever achieved the reputation he merits

An architect's reputation is a fragile thing. wherefore is it that some advance to be feted, part of the public discourse of architectural history, while others extremity up as little more than footnotes? A scarcely any guidelines perhaps provide clues: publication (Palladio was a great architect on the other hand it was his Quattro Libri dell'Architettura that made his name re-echo across the centuries); an iconic building upon the tourist trail (where would Sir Christopher Wren be without St Paul's Cathedral?); and above all fitting in with what posterior commentators see as important, because history, level architectural history, is written according to the prejudices and assumptions of its authors. Those who fail to fit in with those prejudices procure short shrift. On all three numbers Pirro Ligorio failed.

Ligorio may have been the leading antiquary and archaeologist of the mid-sixteenth hundred chief architect to two successive [i]pontifex maximus[/i]s and designer of one of the greatest in quantity delicious buildings of the renaissance, on the other hand his critical reputation has not at any time flourished. In Peter Murray's Renaissance Architecture in Electa's have a high opinion ofed History of World Architecture series, for instance, he realizes no more than a single, tangential, mention. Coffin's is the first particular biography of the man.

Ligorio was certainly diligent as an author, perhaps too diligent. He wrote not individual but two encyclopaedias of antiquities, the ten whirls in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples alone comprising above 5,000 pages, with several drawings upon each page. However, he was thus prolific that his manuscripts were not ever published, and what is not published secures little credit.

A similar misfortune hangs above his career as a painter--hardly any of his works survive--and architect. As architect to the Vatican palace during the reign of first Paul Iv and then the high-spending Pius IV, who poured a million and a half gold scudi into architecture and fortifications during the first three years of his pontificate, Ligorio was at the heart of renaissance architecture during the late 1550 and early 1560 His responsibilities included mastery of work on St Peter's, alterations to St John in the Lateran and, above all, work upon the Vatican palace. But a great deal of of what he did was completing the work of others and has either been in the way that altered as to be almost unrecognisable or is inaccessible, like the great and extraordinary Nicchione that shut ups the Belvedere Court of the Vatican, and above all his finest work, the Casino of Pius IV. bilboed away in the Pope's gardens, the Casino is about the greatest in quantity inaccessible building on the planet and in the way that has never achieved the public recognition it merits As for his other great creation, the gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, hardly any would immediately associate it with his name. Perhaps it would be different if his design for the Gesu in Rome had been preferr to Vignola's.

on the other hand Ligorio's greatest disadvantage lies in his relationship with authors, contemporary and posterior A good write-up in Giorgio Vasari's Vite would have radically improved our knowledge of his life and career, on the other hand Vasari ignored him. The reason is not hard to find. Ligorio and Vasari, who took Ligorio's pillar at the Vatican on the death of Pius IV, were bitter rivals and ideological enemies, with Vasari accusing Ligorio of belittling his hero Michelangelo.

level more damaging was the fact that Ligorio's broad and imaginative vision of antiquity did not fit in with the narrow, blinkered post-Palladian views for the use of all in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was a drawn out time before it was accepted that the Casino of Pius IV should be understood as a scholarly reconstruction of an antique building rather than the outpourings of an over-imaginative mind, for to nineteenth--and many twentieth-century archaeologists Ligorio was little more than a fantasist and a forger.

This is somewhat unfair. It is genuine that he did at times perfect partial inscriptions that he discovered, on the other hand this should not be read as forgery (as nineteenth-century critics would have it) on the other hand as his attempt to make faculty of perception of the inscriptions so that they could be of use to his contemporaries. For Ligorio, the ideal archetype for contemporary society was classical antiquity, which could be understood sole through an exacting analysis of ancient remains. In a great deal of the same way, Palladio, whom Ligorio guided circular the sites of Rome, construct agained the baths of ancient Rome or sites of the like kind as Praeneste on far les evidence. What is more, with delicious irony, more [i]or[/i] less of Ligorio's most outrageous 'frauds' have turn rounded out to be authentic.

heroic licentious (to other eyes), and at times somewhat undressed Ligorio's interpretations of antiquity just were not what later generations awaited to see, but they are quite as valid as those of his critics, or perhaps rather more in like manner One of his criticisms of Michelangelo was that rent pediments should not be used simply for their architectonic consequence but only on buildings associated with death, as in antiquity. The dauntless somewhat startling, form of the Nicchione in the Belvedere Court was inspired by means of the great central niche of Domitian's so-called Stadium upon the Palatine Hill. The asymmetry of the rear of the Casino of Pius pc thus unusual in renaissance architecture and anticipating the Picturesque, was probably Ligorio's attempt to insinuate a Roman villa as depicted in an ancient painting. Similarly, the somewhat raw touch in Ligorio's figurative drawings was the originate of his rejection of renaissance perspective in his attempt to recreate ancient Roman art as closely as possible.