Rapport 99-00_final - Canadian Centre for Architecture

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Maarten Delbeke The Sacred History of Architecture: The Writings of Michelangelo Lualdi in Context The aim of my visiting scholarship was to contextualize the writings of the Roman priest and theologian Michelangelo Lualdi (d. 1673). Lualdi produced an extensive but only partly published church historical œuvre that offers elaborate descriptions of contemporary art and architecture within the larger production of Roman and Italian ecclesiastical and architectural historiography. His work drew my attention to the importance of church history writing as a problematic form of proto-architectural historiography. On the one hand, church historians such as Lualdi bring to bear a quite refined methodology on the built environment, which they consider simultaneously as an important piece of historical evidence and an eloquent witness of orthodox practices and rites. In their descriptions of art and architecture, however, these authors are obliged to mediate between celebrating the artifacts for their artistic merit or presenting them as places of worship and symbolical vehicles of celestial peace and harmony, exemplified in a patron’s virtue and piety. The interest of Lualdi’s work stems partly from his inability to perform this mediation. One of the questions I hoped to address during my residency was whether this internal conflict was unique to Lualdi’s work or found echoes in other historiographic practices as well. The Trissino collection proved essential to my research at the CCA. In itself a fascinating witness of the historiographic preoccupations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the collection contains a wealth of church historical, topographical, and guidebook literature. A systematic examination of its content allowed me to establish a corpus of works that offer a consistent background for the understanding of Lualdi’s endeavour. In addition, I was able to identify and study a number of remarkable works, such as Raffaele Borghini’s Italian translation of Jean de Marconville’s Traicté contenant l’origine des temples des Juifs, Giacomo Vivio’s Discorso sopra 24 la mirabil opera di basso rilievo, and Francesco De Simone’s Delle glorie de sagri tempj, a book that appears to be extremely rare. The collection also contains two editions of Lello’s Historia di Monreale, an important yet little studied detailed description of the Duomo. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the changes between the editions exemplify the shifting position of architectural and art history within the framework of ecclesiastical historiography. Finally, the collection holds a wealth of guidebook literature that allowed me to trace developments in the description and depiction of the city of Rome during the early modern period. While it is too early for final statements on the importance of church history for the historiography of architecture, or more specifically on the position of Lualdi within this more general development, a number of observations can be made. First, in ecclesiastical historiography there exists a remarkable convergence between the genres of biography and architectural history. This convergence opens up possibilities for the interpretation of architecture, since the genre of biography is very well conceptualized in its methods and aims. Second, the problems, themes, and methodologies of this historiography remain remarkably stable from the late sixteenth century up to at least the mid eighteenth century, as is evident from a work like Scudellini’s Dei vantaggi che può trarre un teologo dallo studio delle cristiane antichità, published as late as 1776. Third, there is an important exchange in information and methodology between forms of sacred historiography and literature that is more concerned with art and architecture per se. In fact, from the late seventeenth century onwards, the budding art historical literature becomes an important frame of reference for the dating and interpretation of architecture in ecclesiastical historiography. In other words, while Lualdi’s case seems unique in its visible struggle to wed an artistic
or architectural interest to a church historical agenda, the distinction between these agendas was clearly felt and to a certain extent exploited. My research at the CCA provided me with a wealth of material that forms and will form the basis for a number of contributions to conferences, journals, and books. My stay in Montréal also gave me the opportunity to establish or reinforce contacts with colleagues in North America. This has been especially useful for the final preparation of the manuscript for Bernini’s Biographies. Critical Essays (co-edited with Evonne Levy and Steven F. Ostrow, Penn State University Press, to appear in 2006). It was stimulating to be surrounded by other visiting scholars whose sometimes seemingly unrelated fields of interest provided impulses to rethink my own., Finally, the visiting scholarship allowed me to benefit from the expertise and helpfulness of the CCA and Study Centre staff and research assistants, and I am very grateful for their generous efforts to have made this such a productive stay. 29
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Rapport 99-00_final - Canadian Centre for Architecture

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