Michelangelo in 1964: The Critical Model as Dialectical Image in Bruno Zevi’s Renaissance Architecture

Abstract

In 1964 Bruno Zevi and Paolo Portoghesi launched an ambitious retrospective of Michelangelo’s oeuvre to commemorate the fourth centenary of his death. Held at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the exhibition, titled Mostra Critica delle Opere Michelangiolesche, offered a comprehensive experience of Michelangelo’s work entirely through replicas and reproductions. A controversial aspect of Zevi’s didactics were the inclusion of student designed critical models that were intended to support a visual criticality alongside Oscar Savio’s photographs. The models operated as a touchstone for Zevi’s larger investigation into the representational possibilities for architectural history, and student photographs of the critical models appeared in a special editorial that was published in Zevi’s periodical, L’architettura: cronache e storia. Using installation photographs, unpublished preparatory photographs, and the final published images, this essay examines the unique indexicality constructed through a remediation of the critical model as it evolves from the exhibition to the pages of Zevi’s journal. By working through the photographic archive of the Fondazione Bruno Zevi and the personal archive of Paolo Portoghesi, this essay argues that the lens(es) used to frame Michelangelo’s architectural theory operated through a type of Benjaminian dialectics; one that reveals the “modern key” used by Zevi to approach Renaissance architecture at mid-century.