Other Publications

"To show" was the fundamental and constituent act of the historiographic project as understood by Jean-Baptiste Séroux d'Agincourt (1730-1814). His Histoire de l'Art par les monuments depuis sa décadence au IVe jusqu'à son renouvellement au XVIe siècle was accompanied with a very rich set of engravings offering the scholarly community a first illustrated corpus of the medieval artistic heritage. This volume, the result of the International Conference for the Bicentenary of the death of Séroux d'Agincourt organised by the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute for Art History and by the French Academy in Rome-Villa Medici, analyses the contribution of Séroux d'Agincourt to the documentation and historicisation of the art of the centuries of the “Decadence” in its various aspects, from the "invention" and rediscovery of the primitives, to the design and graphic reproduction of the work of art as a research tool, to the art book and its market in the European context. The various contributions therefore deal with central problems of art historiography in the four decades astride the year 1800. In this period, against the backdrop of far-reaching political and social upheavals, art history was in a phase of transition from a mainly amateur and aristocratic practice to becoming professionalised and institutionalised as an academic discipline.

Merging built space with the cosmic realm, the dome emerges as a highly meaningful element in Late Antique and Early Medieval art. Sign of distinguished commission, the dome adorns important buildings (mausolea, martyria and memoria, baptisteries, imperial churches, and palatine chapels), providing a space where major architectural and decorative challenges were solved. The complexity of the problems they pose – structural, decorative, and ritual –, along with their use for spaces with various functions hindered the study of domed buildings as a group. In the past fifteen years, nevertheless, important studies enriched our knowledge of some of these buildings, and invite an attempt to propose a synoptic approach. The present anthology analyses the main Late Antique and Early Medieval domed buildings from a variety of perspectives, proposing new considerations regarding their structure, decoration, and functions.

Copies were a crucial issue in the definition of art history as a discipline and as a constant in the theoretical debate about the painter's education in Europe. Artists’ biographies, art histories and treatises, pictorial letters and art dictionaries enable us to retrace the multiple roles, meanings and functions entrusted to the pictorial copy. The theories, however, were echoed by the practices, especially those that developed against the backdrop of Rome, the cosmopolitan capital of artistic education between the mid-18th century and the end of the temporal power of the Church. Travel journals, memorials, artists’ notebooks and letters, applications for a license to make copies in museums, palaces and churches: the many stories that emerge from this substantial documentation reflect the continuity and fractures in the “school of Rome” between the Enlightenment and the second Restoration. But the pictorial copy also constituted a substantial part of Rome outside Rome, in London, St. Petersburg and Paris: from the project for the Northumberland Gallery in London to the eagerly awaited and finally unsuccessful plan for a Musée des copies in Paris promoted by Charles Blanc. From the mid-18th century until the 19th, there was a continuous succession of ideas and projects, most of which evolved in Rome, where intermediaries, academies and artists debated and competed and where, from the utopia of universal and shared knowledge, the ambition gradually emerged to establish the various national schools of art.

Published in cooperation with the USI, Academy of Architecture, Institute of History and Theory of Art and Architecture.

Microclimates, as natural or technical phenomena, are thermal zones with site-specific physical and thermodynamic characteristics; they are shaped by air temperature, moisture, rain, wind and other environmental factors. This publication emphasizes the man-made character of urban microclimates, and as such, expands existing approaches from applied climatology and building science. As artifacts, microclimates are part of local material cultures with various ecological, social and political implications. Following a theoretical approach which mediates between architecture and the social sciences, this publication explores how thermal diversity both outdoors and indoors is a product of human interaction with the built environment of cities. The case studies and interviews critically engage with urban microclimates in Burkina Faso, France, Italy, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan and the United States. Dealing with different climatic contexts and different seasons of the year, the case studies highlight the critical role of architects, landscape architects and urban planners in the design and construction of urban microclimates.

Vega Tescari brings together in a shared zone of silence and shadow a writer who doubled as a filmmaker, an artist-poet and an ecstatic photographer. Marguerite Duras, Claudio Parmiggiani and Luigi Ghirri find themselves engaged in a dialogue at a distance, in spaces that appear motionless yet are not and live in their shifting, in that tiny seism that unites their poetics. All three in their diversity belong to suspension, but also alteration. They are, as the title indicates, En suspens, and in each of them, beneath he skin, raise questions to the rhythm of our expectations, of our memories. (from the preface by Antonella Anedda).

Publication in cooperation with USI, Accademia di architettura, Istituto di storia e teoria dell’arte e dell’architettura.

Over the last sixty years, the architecture of Umberto Riva (b. 1928) has been distinguished for its stimulating complexity. This monograph analyses, for the first time in an organic and chronologically extended form, Riva’s work in the field of interiors and installations, fundamental fields of investigation for the Milanese architect. The restless and radical nature of Riva's work emerges from domestic spaces in contact with nature, apartments in the city or public places, in which the search for form brings with it a more intimate reflection on living. In the field of installations, the architect stages a complex relation between the works exhibited, the curatorial narrative and the museum space, proving himself one of the finest heirs to and continuers of the 20th-century Italian museographic revolution.

Only a few Italian Quattrocento buildings were completed within the lifetimes of those who commissioned them. The palazzo that Nicolò Sanuti and his wife Nicolosa Castellani erected on Strada S. Mamolo (now Via Massimo D'Azeglio) is one of these. Still visible are the façade, the courtyard and part of the interiors in almost the original forms. The text investigates the history of the Palazzo dei Diamanti, the most interesting 15th-century building in Bologna, never studied before, after first presenting a historical-political profile of its owner, Nicolò Sanuti, who also promoted other urban buildings. Built during the years of rule by the Bentivoglio family, Palazzo Sanuti was modernised by the Campeggi during the Counter-Reformation period, when it was chosen as the residence of Cardinal Del Monte during the transfer of the Council of Trent to Bologna, and subsequently passed to the Bevilacqua family, who are still its owners. The volume is completed by the transcription of a vast body of documentation, a survey of the property and an iconographic atlas conclude the volume.

Publication in cooperation with USI, Accademia di architettura, Istituto di storia e teoria dell’arte e dell’architettura.

Using light as fil rouge reuniting theology and ritual with the architecture, decoration, and iconography of cultic spaces, the present study argues that the mise-en-scène of fifth-century baptism and sixth-century episcopal liturgy was meant to reproduce the luminous atmosphere of heaven. Analysing the material culture of the two sacraments against common ritual expectations and Christian theology, we evince the manner
in which the luminous effect was reached through a combination of constructive techniques and perceptual manipulation. One nocturnal and one diurnal, the two ceremonials represented different scenarios, testifying to the capacity of church builders and willingness of Late Antique bishops to stage the ritual experience in order to offer God to the senses.

The basilica at Verano, built over the graves of holy martyrs, with Saint Lawrence notable among them, was conceived from its foundation as an important centre of pilgrimage. Over the centuries, its prestige has been constantly reaffirmed, increasing its patrimony of relics and readapting its structures to the expectations of pilgrims and the needs of representation of the Church Triumphant of the central Roman Middle Ages. The book traces the building history of the monumental complex from the early Christian period, focusing on the salient phases of its construction, which at the turn of the 1200s, led to the inversion of its liturgical orientation and to an exceptional extension through the insertion of a new basilica, so creating a building that is the best preserved testament to the splendour of building and Cosmatesque inlaid stonework in papal Rome at the height of its power.

Publication in cooperation with USI, Accademia di architettura, Istituto di storia e teoria dell’arte e dell’architettura.

Ever since the mid-19th century, satirical cartoonists have produced innumerable caricatures, vignettes, humorous illustrations and animated cartoons that show the profound impact of architecture on contemporary society. The great urban transformations (from the Paris of Baron Haussmann to the skyscrapers of Manhattan), the great public architecture (from the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao), the revolution in models of housing and the personalities of architects (from Le Corbusier to Renzo Piano) have inspired the drawings of numerous artists, capable of epitomising the most representative characters of these phenomena with a few lines. They include Honoré Daumier, George Cruikshank, Thomas Theodor Heine, William Heath Robinson, Louis Hellman, Alan Dunn, Mino Maccari, Leo Longanesi, Saul Steinberg, George Molnar and many others.