Sentimental Education

Author(s): Fabrizio Ballabio and Alessandro Conti

Source: AA Files, No. 73 (2016), pp. 129-137
Published by: Architectural Association School of Architecture
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 Sentimental
In a 1940 issue of the Journal of the Warburg and Milani and Gustavo Giovannoni, in addition to
Courtauld Institutes Rudolf Wittkower explored Fasolo - who combined their academic careers

'one of the central problems' of Renaissance with practice as architects, engineers or

architecture - namely, the relationship of a
column to a wall. His particular focus was the
Education restorers, meaning they had a certain affinity
for the pragmatic aspects of the discipline. Their
ambivalent way the humanist scholar, architect own education, in fact, would have only been in
and priest Leon Battista Alberti dealt with this
Fabrizio Ballabio engineering, because it was not until 1919 that an
thorny issue. In the De re aedificatoria , Wittkower independent school of architecture was founded
notes, Alberti initially acknowledges the mun- & Alessandro Conti in Rome (curiously, this was the same year the
dane and structural origins of the column Bauhaus was founded, albeit under an entirely
as an element of support (quoting his apologia: different pedagogical premise). As a result, they
'I make no doubt, that at first the column was became 'historians with a trowel', as Manfredo
invented to support the covering'), before - one of the most unorthodox and capricious Tafuri would later, not unaffectionately, label
he then contradicts such an understanding interpretations of the Vitruvian code - Ackerman them: though they had a distinctly modern
by presenting the orders of Roman imperial writes that the moderns, 'preoccupied with appreciation of the logics of construction, their
architecture as a 'mere' means of ornamenta- structural and utilitarian problems, followed the aesthetic leanings were radically conservative.6
tion, which the wall - in all its 'excellence', lead of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc in criticising Moretti's own kinship with these dualities
structurally at least - can easily do without.1 Renaissance architecture as dishonest, uncon- - academic and practical - is evidenced by
What is radical about this association, Witt- cerned with the practical aspects of building'. the range of different ventures he embarked
He later argues that even when the same
kower argues, is that Alberti ('thinking in terms on early in his career. For instance, within just
historians and critics admitted that 'purely visualtwo years of graduating cum laude in 1929 he had
of the wall') saw 'the column first and foremost
as decoration'.2 delight is a proper function of architecture', completed his first projects, among them the
In many ways, the paradoxical nature of they still 'tacitly allowed that Renaissance Palazzina in Viale della Pineta, and also won the
this assertion represents Alberti's distinctive buildings could not be defended on technical prestigious Borsa Triennale per gli Studi
contribution to an architectural conundrum or practical grounds'.4 Romani, a three-year scholarship funding the
that emerged only in the Renaissance. Vitruvius, Ackerman wrote these lines in 1961; his study of Roman monuments. At the same time
in his De ariitectura , only ever saw these two polemic rooted as much in his own, contempo- he collaborated with the archaeologist Corrado
elements for what they were - support and rary context and its increasingly outspoken Ricci on the conservation of a number of the

enclosure, structure and infill.3 Even a cinque- questioning of modernist utilitarian dogma as it city's ancient ruins, notably Trajan's Market
was framed in terms of its Renaissance content.
cento building as radical as Filippo Brunelleschi's along what is now the Via dei Fori Imperiali.
Moretti's views on Michelangelo, and the
Foundling Hospital, completed in 1445, rein- Yet such a critique was clearly not restricted to
forced this view. But with the publication of hisAckerman's English-speaking world, and before
perceived shrewdness of his work, can in many
famous treatise just seven years later, Alberti long he was joined by a number of Italian ways be traced to these fertile years of fieldwork
challenged this previously irrevocable reading architects and theorists, all of whom similarly
- a period when he came into close contact
of column and wall, and suddenly made their questioned modernism's rigid infatuation (often for quite extended time spans) with the
tactile, material dimension of Rome's more
relationship open to interpretation. And it is with structure while celebrating, in particular,
in the context of this revisionism that we need the more complex architectural endeavours celebrated architectural history.7
to understand not just Alberti's almost comicalof Michelangelo as a model to follow. Among And yet, tangible evidence of this interest
definitions of the column (a 'certain strong them was the Roman architect and scholar Luigi
also dates back even further, notably to the
continued part of a wall') and colonnade Moretti, who set out a very similar enquiry in aoutline of an essay Moretti developed aged just
(a 'wall, open and discontinued in several 20, when he was still a student and assistant
paper titled 'Ideal Structures in the Architecture
parts'), but much of the work in the following of Michelangelo and the Baroque', presentedin Fasolo's 'History and Styles of Architecture'
century by architects such as Bramante, in 1964 at a conference commemorating the course. Accessible now in the architect's archive
Raphael and Sangallo. 400th anniversary of Michelangelo's death. (managed by Moretti's nephew, Tommaso
For better or worse, the equivocal relation 'An interesting and fundamental analysis forMagnifico) and accompanied by plates
understanding the history of architecture
of column to wall, and the suggestive or effective of drawings, this handwritten manuscript
load-bearing function of either of these two and its basic semantic values', he announced,essentially outlines Moretti's early conceptual
elements, thereby becomes fundamental to an 'would be to compare the relationships between thinking about ideal and real processes
appreciation of quattrocento and cinquecento representative structures, or ideal structures,of construction. In Italy, such a document
and real structures, or technology'.5
architecture, with its most celebrated practition- is typically referred to as a canovaccio - a term
ers vying with each other to render more and Whether or not Ackerman's book was a denoting a preparatory text for a literary
more of its subtle nuances. In contrast, histori-particular influence on Moretti is uncertain, composition, although it can also be under-
and perhaps unimportant (all we know for sure stood more literally as a blank canvas where,
ans and critics seem always to have been puzzled
rather than enthused by this ambivalence. Or atis that an Italian translation did not appear untilin broad brushstrokes, the author sketches
least, this is the thesis of James Ackerman in 1968). What is clear is that Moretti had been out the fundamentals of a story or argument.
The Architecture of Michelangelo , which lamentstrying to get to grips with these 'basic semantic Historically, however, the canovaccio is associ-
the sustained incapacity of 'the moderns' values' since at least the late 1920s, when he was ated with a specific medium, notably the
a student at the Scuola Superiore di Architetturacommedia dell'arte - a masked type of scenario-
(by which he is presumably referencing Nikolaus
Pevsner's 'pioneers of modern architecture') in Rome under the supervision of the architect based theatre in sixteenth-century Italy. Here,
to look at Renaissance architecture without and historian Vincenzo Fasolo and other the canovaccio was an improvisational tool,
members of the so-called scuola romana. This
submitting to the old structure-versus-ornament a rough script dictating only the acts and scenes
schism. For example, in the first lines of his collective featured the city's leading architec- of a play, while other elements, such as plot and
chapter on Michelangelo's Laurentian Library tural scholars - figures like Giovanni Battista dialogue, were left up to the actors to generate

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/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']

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 Luigi Moretti, perspective drawings of the vestibule
in Michelangelo's Laurentian Library, 1927
Photographs by Marco Provinciali
Archivio Moretti Magnifico, Rome

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themselves. Seen in this wider light, Moretti's processes and constructional intent of a given And it was in working through this solution
manuscript can be understood as an instrument work, which he did partly through his use that Moretti encountered particular difficulties
that enabled him to improvise, without of different inks to demonstrate overlapping in his graphic reconstruction of the vestibule in
inhibition, on a scenography of buildings and systems. In a number of studies, portions Michelangelo's Florentine library, the ambigui-
their constitutive elements, and in the process of buildings are even meticulously sliced off ties of which tended to evade the reading he was
generate a new form of architectural criticism.8 to reveal their status independent of conditions
trying to put into place (much more so here than
At the heart of this manuscript and Moretti's of adjacency, while in others, architectural andwith Michelangelo's palazzos on the Capitoline
particular canovaccio was the notion of senti- decorative elements are partially removed to Hill, where the clarity of the structural organism
mento costruttivo - a sensibility or feeling for show how the multiple expressive (or ornamen-
lends itself almost too convincingly to such
construction - which he believed was the basis tal) parts relate both to one another and to the contemporary analysis). Defined by the double
of all architectural thinking. What Moretti overarching (or structural) whole. order of paired columns and pilasters, along
was implying here was that in the conception Two buildings in particular, both by with transverse entablatures, this system was
of a building there exists an 'ideal' construction
Michelangelo, provide the focus for the most conceptualised by Moretti as a skeletal struc-
process which alludes to without necessarily interesting of Moretti's illustrations.11 In the ture in which wall portions act as infill. At the
incarnating the realities and processes later to
first - the Laurentian Library in Florence - same time, he acknowledged that the actual
be enacted on the construction site proper, but
the ricetto , or vestibule, and the reading room distribution of loads is not as neatly appor-
which is still of fundamental importance in are
the rendered in four separate perspectivai
tioned as the visual expression of Michelan-
determination and comprehension of any work
views (which preceded Wittkower's 1934 paper,gelo's true sentimento costruttivo . This was
of architecture. But as novel as Moretti made'Michelangelo's Biblioteca Laurenziana' by a point Ackerman himself could never grasp,
this sound, the conceptual distinction he wasalmost a decade, and so did not benefit from given his somewhat formulaic assertion that
suggesting had been articulated before, not the most substantial piece of scholarship 'in the final design ... the structural function
least by Giovanni Milani in 1920 in his three- on this structure).12 The second - the Palazzo of the column and wall are exactly the opposite
dei Conservatori within Rome's Capitoline Hill
volume L'ossatura murale - essential reading for of their visual effects' (even if Ackerman's
- was, in Moretti's view, the culmination of
every aspiring architect in early twentieth-cen- own structural diagram is almost identical to
tury Rome.9 Likewise, Moretti's fascination with
Michelangelo's built work, exemplifying how Moretti's).14 But where Moretti saw such opacity
the temporal nature of design processes, andarchitectural ambition (or, as he would say, as representative of an intermediate stage in
the artist's 'evolution', Damisch centred his
more generally with the multiple timelines 'il sentimento construttivo') finds itself reflected
of architecture (conceptual, constructional and
in actual construction processes. The drawings,
arguments on the tragic recalcitrance of
meta-temporal) is consistent with the work ofthis time taking shape as axonometric projec- Michelangelo's vestibule. 'The conflict between
his teacher, Fasolo, a former student of Milani's
tions of the building's underbelly, show the members and surfaces', he wrote, 'their
(even if Fasolo was more engaged with how main framework progressively stripped of interpntration, even their exchange of roles
the expressive intention of an architect couldornamental features in order to stress both and functions, and the whole play of inversions
and permutations, as well as of calculated
representational and actual systems governing
be seen in the imagining of a work, and not its
real form).10 But what is surprising about the the distribution of its structural load - ie, ambiguities that could be characterised as
youthful Moretti's canovaccio is not so much the
the giant composite order of the main frame baroque (or even mannerist), only brings out
novelty of his method as the daring with which
in contraposition to the tiling of a smaller more clearly the respective qualities of the
it was applied. Never before had someone ionic order carrying its own architraves and wall and the element of the order'.15
claimed that it was in the baroque, and more volticelle. Moretti gives further substance to Yet Damisch's measured arguments about
specifically Roman work of Michelangelo the underlying tension that results from all the inherent problems in the Renaissance
and Borromini, that one could plot the almostthese competing forces by emphasising recovery of Greek and Roman architecture
complete resolution of two otherwise split Michelangelo's stated engagement with ossatura
should not diminish Moretti's scholarly
realities in a single architectural organism - and riempimento (skeleton and infill); with achievements at this early point in his career
the incarnation of an ideal construction process
loadbearing systems and surface articulation(he was just 20 years old, after all). Indeed, the
within a real one. and, ultimately, with column and wall. apparent resolve with which Moretti articulated
Predating Ackerman's concerns by more In 'The Column, The Wall' (1981), Hubert his conclusions should be put down to this
than 30 years, Moretti's canovaccio is also Damisch's own contribution to this longstand-
youthful exuberance, rather than used against
noteworthy for the form it takes. Again, follow-ing, even classical debate, the French philoso- him as evidence of any intellectual shortcom-
ing his Roman mentors (who, in the French pher warns that the tendency to think of ing. Later, Moretti would be defined both as
tradition of Eugne Viollet-le-Duc and Augustearchitectural structure through the logic of the
a designer and a critic, by a subtle and highly
Choisy, saw the act of drawing as supporting frame, or in terms of the assembly of discrete informed interpretation of architecture's more
the practice of history), Moretti producedelements within discontinuous systems, is engrained codes, even if it was not until 1964,
symptomatic of a peculiarly modern conditionand his conference paper on Michelangelo
an extensive set of illustrations as a graphic
accompaniment to the arguments made in his- evidenced by the fact that in the architecture
('the divine one'), that he decided to revisit his
text. These drawings - in particular a number of antiquity, and more specifically the Romanaudacious student hypothesis and expose it
of simple but very elegant perspectives - reflectarchitecture incanted by Vitruvius, the word to public scrutiny.
Fasolo's conviction that in conceiving a building
'structure' was associated with the continuity Interestingly, in the intervening four
the architect thinks not through orthogonal of masonry, not the distinctiveness of the decades Moretti's visual language remained
projections but in an imagined three-dimen- largely unaltered (in his late 50s he was still
column. It is only with Alberti, he claimed, that
sional space. Unlike other more conventional a concern for a somewhat 'logical' declinationproducing the same elegant, expository
architectural renderings, they also make no perspective drawings he had first made as
between the two leads to precisely those puzzling
claims to either numerical precision or propor-formulas that Wittkower would lament and a student). But this long hiatus did offer time
tional exactitude. Rather, for Moretti their which, more importantly, the young Moretti to explore new concepts and material and
sole purpose was to disclose the layered thought
would desperately try to solve.13 further develop his narrative. For a start, there

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 Luigi Moretti, perspective drawings of the facade
at Michelangelo's Palazzo dei Conservatori, 1927
Photographs by Marco Provinciali
Archivio Moretti Magnifico, Rome

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 Luigi Moretti, plaster model,
Palazzo dei Conservatori, 1964
mbact, Rome /acs, no 1449/2016

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 Luigi Moretti, plaster model,
Laurentian Library, 1964
mbact, Rome /acs, no 1449/2016

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was the somewhat inscrutable notion of dei Conservatori. The former is now presented entirely directed to the temporal drama that
sentimento costruttivo , which Moretti continued
as a kind of palimpsest of various histories, Michelangelo had put on stage.
to unpick through his various articles on the with Moretti describing the double order In presenting these arguments at the
idea of structure, largely published in Spazio , of paired columns as a segment of a classical conference in Rome, Moretti did not simply rely
the magazine he founded in 1950. A work agora or stoa , the intercolumniation of which on the power of his own words, but - as with
of architecture, Moretti was by then arguing, has been filled over successive periods of time. the earlier canovaccio - also employed a visual
consisted of a 'general structure' to which As a result he distinguishes his own reading counterpart. Eight of these illustrations were
numerous heterogeneous and independent from that of Ackerman and others, who only his youthful perspective drawings, now
other structures could be subsumed. These ever referred to the library ricetto as a form of recycled. In addition to these drawings,
were structures of spaces, light, colour and mural architecture in which a series of columns however, there were two white plaster models,
had been encased. Moretti went on to detect
material effect, but more than anything, given photographed from multiple angles and set
the qualities that distinguish architecture this dual timeframe - at once ancient and against a pitch black background. As a model-
from any other art, they were structures of cinquecento - in almost all the other details maker, Moretti was mostly known for his series
a built nature, which governed the distribution of negative casts - bulbous and initially
of the space, not least in the doorway that leads
of forces as much as they expressed a sense into the main reading room, itself composed disorienting forms that reveal the volumes of
of two nested portals which are expressed
of mass perceived by the human eye.16 In this internal spaces as opposed to the exterior shell
sense Moretti remained fascinated by the almost independently of each other in terms of a building. Photographs of a number of these
ambivalences of real and ideal forces, but byof their formal articulation. accompanied his essay 'Strutture e Sequenze
now his arguments were not predicated on The same interpretative strategy defines di Spazi' (Structures and Sequences of Spaces),
finding a degree of correspondence betweenhis approach to the palazzo, where he identifies
published in Spazio in 1952.18 The text attests
the two, but relied more on the to his recent engagement with
poetic ability of the architect the 'void', an influence he
to place both in relation to one credited to Bruno Zevi's Saper
another under syntactic, vedere l'architettura (1948),
semantic and even semiological translated in English in 1957 as
terms (mirror to the wave of Architecture as Space: How to Look
structuralist texts then pub- at Architecture.

lished by Roland Barthes and The 1964 models, however,

Umberto Eco) - a skill, Moretti stem from a different line of

argued (in the spirit of a nascent research, as the direct offspring

postmodernism), at which of Moretti's earlier enquiries into
Michelangelo was unequalled. the possibility of making
Freed from the burden of criticism through architectural
having to be incarnated in 'true' means, to the point where they
building processes, Michelan- appear as nothing more than
gelo's ideal structures are three-dimensional, material
therefore now assessed by their improvisations on his analytical
capacity to produce meaning student drawings. And once
- an essence, Moretti main- again, like these earlier perspec-
tained, that is as much lyrical as it is technical. four separate 'strata' of elements: a main tive and axonometric views, Moretti's models
Similarly freed by his own poetic licence, structure formed by the giant order of piers depict the vestibule of the Laurentian Library
Moretti's 1964 presentation made explicit and terminal architrave; an independent, and an idealised fragment of the Palazzo
reference to what he saw as the fictional dei Conservatori.19 Yet whereas the canovaccio
secondary, structure inserted between the piers
character of Michelangelo's nested structures,and formed by a single volticella carried by fourdrawings seemed to fall short in conveying the
Ionic columns with adjoining monolithic
which, in recalling the mythical pasts associated volumetric characteristics of Michelangelo's
with their constitutive elements, seem to have lintels; an external wall enclosing the giant structures, the models were far more successful,
been erected in different eras and by different intercolumniation which sits above the exterior not least because they allowed a much greater
people. This sense of time appears to have lintel of the secondary structure; and a wall appreciation of their physicality - which had
offered a special kind of spark for the more been rendered almost weightless in pencil
enclosing the end of the portico, which leaves
mature Moretti, who recognised in Michelan- the inner columns of the secondary order and ink.

encased (encased columns being for Moretti

gelo a storyteller's ability to enact a kind of In both models, Michelangelo's ideal
meta-temporal narrative that synthesised past,yet another identifying element of this pan- structures are also reconstructed in the form
present and future in the very materiality of a gradation, beginning with the longstanding
historical architecture). Curiously, in describing
of stone and lime, bricks and mortar, in the these elements, Moretti makes no reference primary structure (the double order of paired
process intermingling idealism with the to the structural veracity of the entire system,columns in the library vestibule and the giant
pragmatic strictures of the building site (this unlike Ackerman, who concluded that all order in the palazzo) and terminating with
reading, it should be noted, appeared two yearselements 'really do the work that they appearthe composite (wherein the joints between the
before Aldo Rossi published his own temporal to do' (which in turn prompted his famous elements are deliberately highlighted). Moretti
architectural musings in The Architecture description of the pilasters lining the piers ashad used the same strategy in one of the
of the City). 'honestly ornamental').17 Instead the focus iscanovaccio drawings of the Palazzo dei Conserv-
Again, as with the earlier canovaccio , Moretti Maarten van Heemskerck, atori to describe the ideal construction process
illustrated this argument through references to Septizonium , 1536 of the portico-facade and its correlation to
Michelangelo's Laurentian Library and Palazzo Berlin State Museums the real construction. But in view of his later

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me ta- temporal leanings, this comparative
system gains further significance in the models.
For if - when read from left to right - the models
echo the mythical narrative of Michelangelo's
own evocation of successive construction, then
- from right to left - the impression is that of
progressive decay, of a building becoming a ruin
under the vicissitudes of time.
In appreciating these particularly ruinous
qualities, one is reminded of the Roman
drawings of Michelangelo's contemporary,
the Dutch painter Marten von Heemskerck,
which meticulously depict the crumbling state and a-historical sculptural games'.20 Moretti'sis the value of the architecture they depict
of the city's ancient buildings while revealing,
with astonishing accuracy, their constructional largely because they bore such a strong relation
makeup (and in the process helping later
historians to better understand Michelangelo's
own Roman structures, at St Peter's and on
the Capitoline Hill). As anthem to these ideas,
the top left of von Heemskerck's drawing of the
Septizonium is inscribed Roma quanta fuit ipsa
ruina docet - 'how great Rome was, its very ruins
tell' - anticipating, by almost two centuries, the
ruin lust so typical of seventeenth-century art.
Heemskerck's drawings among the graphic to the architectural language and tectonic
material that accompanied his paper, and in principles of the architecture they were analys-
many ways it seems to be these images, more ing. At the same time, the ideas these models
than any other single source, that were the spur appeared to convey, in terms of their overlapping
for his shared interest in an architecture at once historical associations, had powerful echoes
contemplative and empirical, drawn from the of a postwar cultural Zeitgeist, both in architecture
past and yet also clearly anchored to the present.
and in art (it is no coincidence that three years
Bruno Zevi's students also made so-called later Robert Smithson would develop the notion
'critical' models on the occasion of the same of the 'ruin in reverse', or that the 'unfinished'
anniversary (for the exhibition 'Michelangelo- the non finito - would become such a persistent
theme in Michelangelesque scholarship).
in Prosa'): they got short shrift from Manfredo
Tafuri, who dismissed them as 'abstract Ultimately, though, the value of these models
models, in contrast, were far more convincing,
- which is that in spite of their interpretative
meta-temporalisms they still 'climb back into
real architectural structures'.21 And so, in their
evocation of both a perfection of the highest
So here's the methodology: order and the mundane practicalities employed
if you begin with the orders then to achieve this, they hinted at what Moretti saw
you're teaching the image, as the greatest quality in Michelangelo's work
- namely its capacity to not only improvise but
but begin with the wall and you're
to enact the ever-conflicted relationship between
teaching reality. the ideal and the real, the timeless values
Julien Gaudet, lments et thorieof the orders and the aesthetic and structural

Tellingly, Moretti included a large number of von de l'architecture, 1910 22 necessities of the column and the wall.

1. Alberti expands on this idea: 'I will not
omit here what I have taken notice
of among the ancients, a contrivance
certainly very excellent and praisewor-
thy: their best architects placed these
apertures and the arches of the roofs
of their temples in such a manner, that
even though you took away every
column from under them, yet they
would still stand firm and not fall
down.' Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art
of Building in Ten Books, translated by
Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor and
Neil Leach (Cambridge, ma: mit Press,
1988), book i, chapter xii.
retaining other elements with the same Architetture della scuola romana nel
proportions and modularity, they have passaggio alla modernit, con particolare
evidently generated another type of riferimento all'opera di Giovanni Battista
plan with a new name, the pseudoper- Milani (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2015).
ipteral. However, these types are 11. In the canovaccio Moretti limited his
modified to suit the requirements enquiry to Borromini and Michelan-
of the sacrifices.' See Vitruvius, On gelo, but had originally intended
Architecture (London: Penguin Books, to extend this to encompass works
2009), book iv, chapter viii, p 6. by Carlo Maderno, Pietro da Cortona
4. James S Ackerman, The Architecture and Ferdinando Fuga.
of Michelangelo (Chicago, il: University 12. The first drawing highlights the
of Chicago Press, 1986), p 95. structural organism of the rectilinear
5. Luigi Moretti, 'Le strutture ideali della hall as seen through a worm's-eye-view
architettura di Michelangelo e dei of one of its shorter sides; the
barocchi', in Michelangelo Buonarotti remaining three describe the 'ideal 20.
period he spent working with the
archaeologist Corrado Ricci and
his Borsa Triennale per gli Studi
Romani. One could even argue
that it was Ricci who encouraged
him to highlight a particular
architectural fragment, and for
it to then metonymically be seen as
representative of a wider set of ideas.
Among these 1931 plaster models
was again one of the Palazzo dei
Conservatori, whose existence is only
preserved in a handful of photographs
in the Archivio Moretti Magnifico.
The exhibition was curated under the

2. By placing the column in his category
of ornament, Alberti touches on one
of the central problems of Renaissance
architecture. Thinking in terms of the
wall, the chief feature of all Renaissance
architecture, the column is for him
first and foremost decoration.' Rudolf
Wittkower, 'Alberti's Approach to
Antiquity in Architecture', Journal of the 7. For more on Moretti's early years, see
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , vol 4,
(ed), Aiti del Convegno di Studi
Michelangioleschi (Rome: Edizioni
dell'Ateneo Roma, 1966), pp 444-54.
6. Manfredo Tafuri, Architettura e storia ,
interview given to 'La rivista dei libri'
and then published in April 1994, p 10.
An extract of this can be found in
Casabella 633 (1996), p 73.
Annalisa Viati Navone, 'The Architect
compositional elements' of the
vestibule both in its current form -
as a hypothetical reconstruction of an
earlier study by Michelangelo (most
likely, the 'study for the west elevation
of the vestibule') - and following the
late baroque representational technique
of the so-called prospettiva ad angolo.
See Michelangelo Buonarotti, op cit ,
p 48. On Wittkower's later paper,
direction of Bruno Zevi, Guglielmo
De Angelis d'Ossat, Natalino Sapegno
and Giulio Carlo Argan, along with
Paolo Portoghesi, Mario Boudet,
Vittorio Gigliotti and Luciano Rubino.
It featured photographic material
and abstract interpretative models
of Michelangelo's architecture,
constructed by the students of the
Venice school of architecture. See

no 1/2 (October 1940 - January 1941),
pp 1-18. This text was later republished
in Wittkower's book, Architectural
Principles in the Age of Humanism
(London: Alec Tiranti, 1971).
3. In reference to the engaged column,
the solution typical of imperial Roman
(as distinct from Greek) architecture
- and which caused Alberti so much
trouble - was articulated best by
Vitruvius. He argued that this solution
(which he termed the pseudoperipteros )
was the result of modifications dictated
by the 'requirements of sacrifices'
and thus did not challenge the
architectural (and structural) primacy
of the column. He states: 'Other
architects actually move the temple
walls outwards and place them
in the intercolumnations, so greatly
increasing the size of the cella
by removing the space occupied
by the exterior colonnade; and while
Luigi Moretti: From Rationalism
to Informalism', The Architectural and
Town Planning Quarterly , vol lvii, no 2,
pp 3-41, and Cecilia Rostagni, 'Moretti,
Michelangelo e il barocco', Casabella
745 (2006), pp 81-85.
8. A reproduction of Moretti's canovaccio
can be found in Casabella 745 (2006),
pp 70-80.
9. Writing in part 11 of his text, Milani
argued that 'The solidity of a skeleton
should not only be real but also artistic ,
so to say, and thus apparent '. See
Giovanni Battista Milani, L'ossatura
murale: studio statico-costruttivo ed
estetico-proporzionale degli organismi
architettonici, con speciale riferimento
alle strutture elastiche nelle loro varie
e moderne applicazione pratiche
(Rome: C Crudo, 1920).
10. For more on Moretti's relation to the
scuola romana , see Marco Stefano
Orsini, Moderne Architetture Romane:
see Rudolf Wittkower, 'Michelangelo's
Biblioteca Laurenziana', The Art
Bulletin , vol 16, no 2 (June 1934),
pp 123-218. Wittkower himself only
ever offered minor considerations on
the relation of load-bearing structure
to representational structure in the
ricetto, and which would become a
more obvious subject of investigation
only with James S Ackerman in 1961.
13. See Hubert Damisch, 'The Column,
The Wall', Architectural Design,
no 49 (1979), PP 18-25.
14. James S Ackerman, op cit, p 111.
15. Hubert Damisch, op cit , p 51.
16. See Luigi Moretti, 'Struttura come
forma', Spazio 6 (1952) and 'Strutture
e sequenze di spazi', Spazio 7 (1952-53).
17. James S Ackerman, op cit, pp 156, 159.
18. Luigi Moretti, 'Strutture e sequenze
di spazi', op cit.
19. Moretti did, in fact, make models
earlier, notably in 1931-34, during the
'L'opera architettonica di Michelan-
giolo nel quarto centenario della
morte' and Bruno Zevi, 'Michelangiolo
in prosa' in L'Architettura cronache
e storia ix, no 99 (1964); and Paolo
Portoghesi, 'Mostra critica delle opere
michelangiolesche al Palazzo delle
Esposizioni in Roma', L'Architettura
cronache e storia, no 104 (1964), pp 80-91.
Tafuri's critique can be found in
Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and Histories
of Architecture (London: Granada, 1980),
pp 106-11.
21. Manfredo Tafuri, ibid, p 109.
22. The original quotation reads: 'Voil
la mthode logique: commencer
l'enseignement par les ordres,
c'est l'enseignement de l'image;
commencer par le mur, c'est
l'enseignement de la ralit', from
Julien Gaudet, lments et thorie
de l'architecture (Paris: Libraire
de la construction moderne, 1910).

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