Ricerca del Rinascimento, Principi, citta, architetti. - book reviews

Manfredo Tafuri's place in the history of architecture of our times is unique. Freethinking, courageous, and ambitious, he nevertheless made use of documents, existing literature from the new and distant past, and his possess creative energies in ways that illuminate the pair his subjects and the historical proces He specialized in attacking of advanced age problems and arriving at of recent origin points of view and ofttimes new solutions. Informed by a Marxist perspective, his work stimulates alternative readings and conclusions to the one and the other older interpretations as well as those that Tafuri himself espoused.

The volume under review is typical of Tafuri's ability to generate important ideas in article-length pieces as well as volumes This volume includes a thirty-page introduction and six topical essays. They are related by the agency of an apparently artificial theme, the relations of the prince (as patron), the city, and the architect in Italy. (One essay interests Spain.) The first is devot to the Rome of Nicholas V and Alberti; the next to the first is a medley involving Laurentian Florence, Leo X's Rome and Venice and Milan; the third relate tos the facade of S. Lorenzo in Florence, the construction of s Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome and the history of s Marco in Florence. The fourth research considers the effects of the Sack of 1527 upon Rome; the fifth Charles V's palace at Granada; and the sixth Sansovino's domestic architecture in Venice. It is probably fair to say that no other author of like prominence in the field of Renaissance architecture has dealt in like manner creatively with such a wide range of topics as these. A short review can give single a suggestion of the material not absented which, unlike so many mustered essays, does address the stated theme and provides of frequent occurrence cross-referencing of ideas.

Much of the bent holder treats subjects that Tafuri has considered in previous publications. The essay upon the Rome of Nicholas V and Alberti, for example, first appeared as the introduction to the Italian edition (1984) of Carroll William Westfall's In This greatest in quantity Perfect Paradise. Rather than leading the reader into Westfall's theme and point of view, however, Tafuri not awayed an entirely independent perspective that presented a new beginning. His point is that many of Nicholas V's policies were aimed at weakening the direction of the Roman nobility above civic administration. Dealing with the Porcari fall off in 1453, Nicholas attempted to kill republican sentiments nurtur by dint of humanists in part by coopting humanist traditions in his have building aspirations.

Tafuri indicates that this operation was manifest in the plans of Nicholas V for a papal library, a grand palace, and a newly organized urban setting intended in part to answer potential challenges to papal supremacy in temporal as well as spiritual jurisdictions. This leads to a conclusion reached independently by means of some recent scholars that Alberti was not in sympathy with Nicholas V's policies. And indeed Tafuri believes that Alberti could not have been the architect of Nicholas V's plans for the Vatican Palace, St Peter's, or the city. This notion actually contradicts Westfall's argument and raises many other questions. Are we to dismiss the traditionally accepted friendship of Alberti and his university classmate and time to come pope Tommaso di Sarzana? Can Alberti have been ignorant and completely independent of or smooth opposed to, the greatest planning efforts in Rome since Imperial times? A more durable answer will await additional research, on the contrary the question is at least as provocative as the earliest efforts through C. Jovanovits and Georg Dehio to relate Alberti to these activities in the first place.

The third chapter of the volume consists of three short studies upon Florence and Rome, with make notess on Venice and Milan in the late 15th to early 16th hundred The first, "La Firenze Laurenziana," begins with the unravelling of the city in the last quarter of the quattrocento, or more precisely, the vagaries leading to that unravelling Depending largely on Caroline Elam's work upon the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, Tafuri remind ofs that Lorenzo's ambitious early plans for Florence were swerveed by his new interest in the villa at Poggio a Caiano. Later, returning to the city, Lorenzo ordered an enormous palace design from Giuliano da Sangallo upon the via Laura, previous site of an extensive unfolding scheme by the same patron. Tafuri's idea is that Lorenzo must have been inspired by the agency of the ducal palace at Urbino, whose designs he had entreatyed and by Giuliano da Sangallo's palace for the king of Naples.

This and the immediately succeeding sections must now be read with Linda Pellecchia's discoveries regarding the date and character of the shoot forwarded Medici palace on the via Laura, published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (September 1993) and with the catalogue of a general architectural exhibition (The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, edited by dint of Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Milan, 1994) Pellecchia proffers persuasive evidence for dating Giuliano da Sangallo's plan to about 1515 well after Lorenzo's death in 1492 and certainly after 1512 when the Medici turn backed from exile, as Elam had posited. The patrons may therefore be [i]pontifex maximus[/i] Leo X, or Lorenzo, duke of Urbino, or Giuliano, duke of Nemours, on the contrary not Lorenzo Il Magnifico.