Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
No other Italian city provides quite such prominent examples of
individual Romantic Classical monuments as do Rome and Naples. The
setting of San Carlo in Milan, built by Carlo Amati (1776-1852) in
1844-7, a rectangular recession from the line of the present-day Corso
Matteotti, provides no such build-up for its Pantheon-like dome as does
Bianchi’s San Francesco. The giant granite colonnades at the base of the
contiguous blocks do, however, continue effectively the pedimented
portico on either side of the little _piazza_. Only at Turin, almost
more French than Italian always, were great squares and wide, arcaded
streets carried out in this period, but without focal monuments of any
particular distinction. These squares and streets vie with Percier and
Fontaine’s in Paris, yet they also continue a local seventeenth-century
tradition that was to remain alive down into the Fascist period.
The expiatory church in Turin, which paralleled in motivation Ferdinand
I’s in Naples, the Gran Madre di Dio, was proposed in 1814 and built on
the farther bank of the Po by Ferdinando Bonsignore (1767-1843) in
1818-31 to celebrate the departure of the French and the return of the
House of Savoy to its capital (Plate 26B). This is a far duller and less
original example of a modern structure based directly on the Pantheon
than is the Tempio Canoviano of 1819-20 at Possagno.[69] For this the
great Romantic Classical sculptor of Italy, Thorvaldsen’s rival Antonio
Canova, was the client and apparently also the designer.
It is not Bonsignore’s church that is notable in the Turin scene but the
vast Piazza Vittorio Veneto opposite, laid out by Giuseppe Frizzi
(1797-1831) in 1818 and later surrounded by fine ranges of arcaded
buildings mostly carried out between 1825 and 1830 (Plate 26B). At the
upper end of this tremendous square two quadrants draw in to meet the
arcaded Via Po. Characteristically, the arcades here are supported on
compound piers based on those in the seventeenth-century Piazza San
Carlo but simplified and sharpened now to conform to Romantic Classical
standards. Also a typical Turin feature, but new in this period, was the
syncopation of the handsome iron balconies of the upper storeys. This
theme marks most of the houses in the quarter contiguous to this square,
a quarter built up over the next generation in a remarkably elegant and
consistent way more than rivalling the contemporary districts of Paris
or Vienna.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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