Review: The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome by Heather Hyde Minor

Abstract

Heather Hyde Minor. The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome . Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies series, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, 312 pp., 36 color and 112 b/w illus. $95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271035642 Despite its importance as the focus of the Grand Tour, eighteenth-century Italy—especially papal Rome—has traditionally been perceived as a cultural backwater, remaining relatively unaffected by the engagement with Enlightenment thought that catalyzed the transformation from early modern to modern culture in northern European countries. Since at least the 1960s, scholars in various disciplines have been working to dispel that antiquated notion, and in her recent book, Heather Hyde Minor ambitiously strives to follow suit by illuminating the influence of enlightened ideas on seven important building projects, initiated by popes or their cardinal-nephews, that spanned the years 1730 to 1758, when Clement XII Corsini and Benedict XIV Lambertini reigned as the supreme pontiffs. Minor's handsomely produced, well-illustrated study is divided into three parts, the first examining ecclesiastical commissions: the new facades of S. Giovanni in Laterano and S. Maria Maggiore as well as other renovations at the latter and the building of the Corsini Chapel at the former. The second section concerns the enlargement of two types of papal palaces: the family home of the Corsini, constructed for the pope's nephew, Cardinal Neri Corsini, and the “official” palace complex built for the pontiffs on the Quirinal Hill. The last part considers two important kinds of public institutions of learning, the newly founded Capitoline Museum and the Corsini Library at the family palace. Minor is mostly able to show how these projects were influenced by new and enlightened notions, but her claim that they constituted a distinctive “culture of architecture” is less effectively demonstrated; it stands in for a more comprehensive and serious consideration of the ways in which the …