Review: La magnificenza e l'utile: Progetto urbano e monarchia papale nella Roma del Seicento, by Aloisio Antinori

Abstract

Aloisio Antinori ; La magnificenza e l'utile: Progetto urbano e monarchia papale nella Roma del Seicento ; Roma, storia, cultura, imagine, 19. Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2008, 159 pp., 22 color and 133 b/w illus. €€30, ISBN 9788849215656 La magnificenza e l'utile, the magnificent and the useful, paired in the title of Aloisio Antinori's study of seventeenth-century urban projects in Rome, are terms that derive from the documents; Antinori explores them in the context of the relationship between papal sovereignty and public building. For scholars of Baroque architecture in Rome this is hardly news. What is intriguing is that, while examining this familiar patronage relationship, Antinori discovers moments of indecision that reveal tensions between building to celebrate the Church and her sovereign and building in the service of the Roman public. This slender volume opens with an introduction to the urban development of Rome in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, driven by projects focused on public building——especially on judicial building and grain storage——and papal residential architecture, specifically the Palazzo del Quirinale. It also treats the opening of new paths for circulation, all advanced by the usual suspects——popes Gregory XIII, Sixtus V, Clement VIII, and Paul V. This introduction orients us to the case studies that form the core of the book, made up of four chapters, each of which focuses on a papal project that involved, to varying degrees, the building of architecture and the reshaping of urban fabric. In terms of method each case is grounded in archival materials, some newly presented and all newly considered. Antinori does a commendable job of weaving together his archival discoveries with documentation published previously by others. Two of the case studies also incorporate reconsiderations of the iconography of these projects. …