by Piercarlo Crachi

Modernità e attualità di Ferdinando Fuga, Ferdinando Fuga, 1699-1999 Roma, Napoli, Palermo. Edited by Alfonso Gambardella, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Naples, 2002 (400 pages, 52,00 €)

This volume collects contributions to an international symposium held on the third centenary of Ferdinando Fuga’s birth. The proceedings, enhanced by valuable explanatory images, were divided into three main sessions. The first two, covering the Enlightenment and 18th-century patrons, extensively illustrate the period’s sociocultural context; they also deal with the multifaceted styles of secular and religious buildings tied to patrons’ differing exigencies and cultural policies. Part three, rightly more substantial, probes Fuga’s personality and works and his institutional roles, as well as his poetic, technical and formal innovations.

The volume examines his social, private and religious structures, demonstrating that his stylistic solutions tend to be difficult to pin down to ‘single critical categories’. His career spanned a period of synergies and stylistic tendencies that often only matured later. It was a delicate, strategic moment, when the great lesson of the baroque – one of his major influences – was in the process of being supplanted by the imaginative rococo. Moreover, the cognizance of classicism’s rigorous legacy was developing in an academic world involved in the neoclassical ‘renaissance.’ In the past, Fuga has been discussed as a proponent of the late baroque, a forerunner of neoclassicism or both (or neither, in the opinion of Roberto Pane).

Today we believe it is wrong to insert Fuga in the conventional historical categories of the diachronic sequence of styles. The architect’s production manifested two principal directions. The first was the creation of sober, rigorous, geometric buildings like the post-1730 works in Rome (the Quirinale Wing, the building of the Segretario delle Cifre and the San Michele a Ripa women’s prison) and the post-1750 projects in Naples (the poorhouse and the Granili). But the architect also created other buildings at the same time; eloquent and sumptuous, these projects – including the royal theatre, the Palazzo Caramanico and the facade of the Church dei Gerolomini in Naples as well as the outer arcade of Santa Maria Maggiore and the projected facade of San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome – were a far cry from the rigorous decoration of the first category. Alfonso Gambardella deserves credit for editing and organizing the accounts of the conference.

His work makes it possible to reappraise the rational, utilitarian features of Fuga’s social work based on large buildings. According to Nikolaus Pevsner, the Tuscan architect’s virtuosity died out in a stale classicism, and ‘the outstanding trait of his latest works was their size’. However, the buildings have been updated to meet modern requirements; they represent the social function they were supposed to perform, and the wise layout of the spaces is closely related to the structures’ utilitarian nature. The representation of the ‘architectural contents’ was carried out by their huge size. The lesson of Michelangelo, Longhi and Rainaldi exhibited by the celebrative aspect of Fuga’s creations seems gradually to diminish in the social architecture, whose language tends to be more simple and spare. Charles III of Bourbon invited Fuga and Luigi Vanvitelli to come to Naples in the latter half of the century.

He had just been crowned and wanted to redesign the city, thanks in part to the enlightened policy of his minister, Tanucci. A number of artists from Parma and Piacenza arrived in the kingdom’s capital. Since Fuga and Vanvitelli were proponents of a (Rome-engendered) international language, they brought linguistic innovations and fresh formal complexities to Naples, experimenting with new building methods to replace fading local styles and synergies. Fuga was already the Pope’s architect. Then he became the director of Ferdinand’s planning policy (addressed to a smaller scale, but covering the entire city), the engineer of the Delegation of the Kingdom of Sicily and the urban set designer for the ‘party machines’. Fuga and Vanvitelli were both members of the Roman Academy of San Luca and had the same cultural background, but they frequently appeared to have conflicting positions.

Over time the former developed rationalist ideas that rejected rococo, while the latter was linked to a more traditional school of thought, his style consisting in more malleable lines that did not scorn 17th-century sources. In Naples Fuga was a leader in the large-scale architectural (and set) designs that were destined to become ‘manifestos’ of the Bourbons’ modern policy, which influenced a rebirth of public, central clients alongside more common private and religious patrons. Some of the Tuscan architect’s Neapolitan buildings, like the poorhouse, the Granili and the 366-grave cemetery, were ‘functionally’ rigorous.

They represented the theme of architecture and social hygiene, one of the aspects of central authority manifested in the welfare and control of less prosperous people. The poorhouse was so large that the structure took on an urban scale marked by the regular rhythm of the windows; the style was gradually simplified, harking clearly back to the functionalist buildings of Carlo Fontana. The cultured language of private buildings, as determined by the 18th century, was here replaced by the consternation generated by the gigantic size of the structure; it leads us toward an ‘apparent infinity’ whose scenographic slant sought to evoke the ‘sublime’ feeling characteristic of 18th-century culture. And this is the modern reading of Fuga’s architecture: his rational rigour subjected formal decisions to the layout and functional needs. The absence of the symbolic or semantic was supplanted by an austere, reassuring image that evoked both the severity and the charity of government.

The plan of the monumental poorhouse, conceived as a hospital, place of worship and factory, was based on five square courtyards with the church in the centre. (When erected, the courtyards were diminished to three.) The first 1750 design echoed the contemporary square form with central cross of Vanvitelli’s projected Caserta royal palace.

The theme became noble and was treated in a celebratory way in two magnificent, grandiose works for opposite reasons. Rationalist rigour was acquired by the Florentine architect in the Roman intellectual milieu of Cardinal Neri Corsini, who favoured a precise architecture with no suggestions of sensuality. This made Fuga more popular in Naples, for at the end of the 18th century its intellectual climate was ready to accept Enlightenment precepts. However, one of his best-known works was the most unfortunate; initiated in 1751, it remained incomplete even after the architect’s death. Perhaps the effort to solve a serious social problem also went unfinished

Piercarlo Crachi is an architect