Praising
and Burying Carlo Fontana at the Accademia di San Luca
For
three solid days this past week Rome’s vestige of the Accademia di San Luca in Borromini's Palazzo Carpegna hosted
mostly Italian speakers (with a handful of Germans, a couple of Americans, and
one Frenchman) for a conference on the “celebrated architect” (that’s how he
had described himself) Carlo Fontana, principe of the Academy at the turn of the seventeenth
century. I’m rather partial to Fontana myself, both as a teacher (Gibbs, von Erlach,
Hildebrandt, and Juvarra were among his celebrated students) and architect; as
an architect he was Bernini’s heir, and if he lacked the master’s fertile
iconographic mind, he managed a sophisticated compositional approach to the bel composto, and virtually defined the
terms of early eighteenth-century Roman architecture.
For
most of the conference the talks addressed particulars of Fontana’s atelier,
his collaborators and successors; his work for the theater; or the Colosseum
church project. Others focused on specifying his personal provenance,
cataloguing his lesser-known works, or looking at the mechanics of his
constructions. Most of these would qualify as praises, if faint; Paolo
Portoghesi, in his overlong talk, seemed more interested in burying Fontana as
an uninventive shadow of Bernini or Borromini—a rather outré opinion common
among an older generation of scholars. The majority of the Italians, many of
them architects, wanted to project onto Fontana’s operations the bureaucratic
realities of modern Italian building, a natural if regrettable predilection.
There
was little in the way of his relationship with the elephant in the room, the
French Academy; essentially nothing on his compositional methods, his conception
of space, or his urbanism; less than nothing, if that’s possible, on his
iconography, the concetti Bernini
privileged in the artistic act. Implicitly, no one really took Fontana
seriously as an intellectual, a thinking artist. Instead, he was projected
unquestioningly as a solid practitioner, an able administrator both in the
field and in the academy, a clever political operator; coincidentally, many of
the mid-career Italian presenters could have been mistaken for habitués of the
Palazzo Madama.
I
think there was a time, or I would like to think so, when the mission of
scholars was to try to understand the past on its own terms, not as a mirror of
ours. I also, fortunately, studied architecture at a time when history was
considered relevant to modern practice; postmodern relevance it may have been,
but it opened doors that seem to have closed again, perhaps even more
definitively this time. I feel bad for those young Italian scholars equipped
with a wealth of often esoteric information on specialist subjects, who aren’t
taught to integrate their knowledge into a larger frame and see it as
completely detached from modern practice (even as they, paradoxically, project
modern practice onto the past). I feel bad, but I can’t change it, and all I
can do is practice the alternative….
