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Il ruolo centrale del disegno d’archivio quale testimonianza primaria per la storia dell’architettura, del paesaggio, delle città e delle infrastrutture è da tempo un chiaro dato di fatto. Come afferma Manfredo Tafuri, «i disegni di architettura interpretati appunto come tracce archeologiche, a partire delle quali un testo si scompone, servono anche a “disseminare” l’opera […] al punto di dirci qualcosa di più su quell’opera, come se l’opera da sola non parlasse sufficientemente» [Tafuri 1983, p. 24]; sempre secondo Tafuri, inoltre, «un’opera disegnata o un ciclo di disegni di un’architettura può modificare addirittura la lettura di un’altra opera» [Tafuri 1983, p. 25]. [continua a leggere]

Through the examination of manuscript notebooks, sketches, drawings and tables of architecture, the essay reconstructs the main stages of the three travels in southern Italy of the French architect Pierre-Adrien Pâris, that were limited exclusively to sojourns in Naples and Campania; the paper also analyzes the perception and iconographic and descriptive restitution of the places and monuments visited, from that appears the remarkable interest of Pâris for architecture and archeology. The documents examined, such as Journaux de voyage, Carnet de croquis, Études d'architecture, are just a part of the vast collection, digitalized and available online for consultation, preserved in the Pâris Fund of the Municipal Library of Besançon.

Louis-Jean Desprez was the principle architect who handled the realization of the drawings of Messina, as part of a group appointed by the Abbé de Saint-Non, to represent all the places visited during the Voyage. He used several perspective views of the city, engraved between 1767 and 1770 by Francesco Sicuro, to select the most significant subjects of urban heritage. However, he used a radical reinterpretation, choosing completely different viewing points. Intentionally, his new criteria aimed at highlighting classicist architecture, resorting to dilation of the real measurements of buildings, always inserted in a large morphological context, therefore altering spatial proportions. The represented subjects were: the harbour and the Palazzata, the Cathedral, the Viceroy palace, the church of San Giovanni of Malta, the church of Santa Teresa, and urban landscapes from northern and eastern perspectives. Many important drawings by Desprez of Messina were excluded in the subsequent selection: from the drawings, Saint-Non commissioned those to be used for engravings. Those who today want to compare the representations of 1778 with the current city – identifying the same viewing points carefully evaluated by the French architect – will surely note the absence of any morphological relationship between the 18th century city and the one rebuilt after the 1908 earthquake. The rare buildings which survived the many earthquakes and reconstructions (the tribune of the church of San Giovanni di Malta, the Cathedral façade, the fountain of Orione) today define the rare cornerstones from which to evaluate the cultural principles of 20th century palingenesis.

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This paper analyses the drawing attributed to Jacopo Ligozzi and datable to the ninth decade of the sixteenth century, which portrays Sultam Selim 13 Imperator de Turchi – the ottoman sultan Selim II with a big dragon.In particular, aim of the paper will be the reconstruction of the historical, cultural and artistic context in which the drawing of the Sultan with the dragon should have been conceived. The analysis will start therefore from an introduction about the series of tempera drawings, of which the sheet, now in private collection, was originally part. Moving from the ‘ottoman series’ to the rest of Ligozzi’s artistic production, the sheet will be considered in the light of other works of art of the Veronese artist. These will help to better understand the practice of attributing allegorical meanings to animals, which was encouraged, at the end of the sixteenth century, by the emergence of emblem studies and books. The paper will then discuss the tradition of associating the image of the dragon to the representation of the ottoman Turks: this tradition was based upon the artistic and textual production using the image of the dragon as a metaphor of the infidel and related to the crusade ideology, which revived after the fall of Costantinopoli (1453) and continued to be an important paradigm of reaction to ottoman expansionism until the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and beyond. Finally, going back to the Sultan with the dragon, the paper will try to situate this sheet and all the others of the ‘ottoman series’ in the cultural and artistic Florentine context through the comparison with the forms and functions of the grotesque decoration of one of the Uffizi Armeria rooms, due to Ludovico Buti (1588).

It has been discussed in the last decades the split personality of Giuseppe Passeri in two homonyms contemporaries, one architect and the other painter. The end of the seventeenth century saw the triumph of figures of artists such the same Passeri and Alessandro Specchi, which at ease move dynamically in the design commonly understood among the arts.