The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450-1750) 9789048556021

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The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450–1750)

Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective This series is looking for interdisciplinary contributions that focus on the historical study of the imagined space, or of spaces and places as sensorial, experiential or intellectual images, from the interior to the landscape, in written, visual or material sources. From (closed) gardens and parks to cabinets, from the odd room to the train compartment, from the façade to the prison cell, from the reliquary to the desk, a variety of spaces in the shape of imageries and images unveils historical attitudes to history, to the object, to the other and the self and presents a subject that experiences, acts, imagines and knows. Spatial imageries and images in this sense constitute a prominent theme in various fields within the Humanities, from museum studies, intellectual history and literature to material culture studies, to name but a few. Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective therefore addresses a broad audience of scholars that engage in the historical study of space in this sense, from the Early Middle Ages to the Recent Past in literature, art, in material culture, in scholarly and other discourses, from either cultural and contextual or more theoretical angles. Series editor Dominique Bauer, University of Leuven, Belgium

The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450–1750)

Pamela Bianchi

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Filippo Vasconi, Cortile del Palazzo Altemps abitato dall’em:mo e rmo sig.r cardinal Melchior di Polignac ministro della Maestà cristianissima in Roma…, 1729 Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (P910002) Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 867 6 978 90 4855 602 1 e-isbn doi 10.5117/9789463728676 nur 657 © P. Bianchi / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

7

Acknowledgements 11 1. Introduction 1.1 Reasons for the Research 1.2 Topics, Frames and Methodology

13 13 16

2. Main Topics 2.1 The Topoi of the Exhibition Space 2.2 From the Act of Showing to the Idea of Exhibiting 2.3 Depicting (Exhibition) Spaces 2.4 Early Exhibition Design Precepts and Treatises

29 30 35 42 46

3. (Domestic) Interiors 3.1 Dressing Up Environments: From Representative Spaces to Exhibition Rooms 3.2 Aesthetic Promenades in Italian Noble Palaces 3.3 Dutch and Venetian Burghers’ Dwellings 3.4 A Proper Place for Artefacts 3.5 Setting Up the Collections 3.6 Directing the Viewers’ Gaze

57 58 66 75 90 102 115

*Spaces in Between *Ubi Papa, Ibi Roma: Furniture and Display Apparatus

121 122

4. (Public) Exteriors 131 4.1 Gardens, Outer Loggias and Inner Galleries 133 4.2 The City: A Stage to Display Ceremonies 142 4.3 Religious Spaces for Early Exhibitions 149 4.4 Transitional Spaces for Exhibition Fairs in Florence and Venice 159 4.5 Other Venues of Exhibiting: Italian Botteghe and Northern Panden 166 4.6 Alternative Exhibition Spaces: Eighteenth-Century Paris 172

5. Conclusion 5.1 The Psychology of the Display

179 179

Bibliography 185 Index 199



List of Illustrations

Figure 1

Filippo Vasconi (Italian, Rome 1687 – 1730 Rome), Cortile del Palazzo Altemps (1729), etching, 45.6 × 67.3 cm, J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Los Angeles.23 Figure 2 Anonymous, Dolls’ House of Petronella Oortman (c.1686 – c.1710), furniture, dollhouse, 255 × 190 cm, depth 78 × 28 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.81 Figure 3 Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, Delft 1632 – 1675, Delft), A Maid Asleep (1656–1657), oil on canvas, 87.6 × 76.5 cm, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913, The MET Collection, New York.82 Figure 4 Jacob Appel (Dutch, Amsterdam 1680 – 1751 Amsterdam), Dolls’ House of Petronella Oortman (1655/56–1716), painting, 87 × 69 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.84 Figure 5 Gerard de Lairesse (Dutch, Liège 1641 – 1711 Amsterdam), Johannes Glauber (Dutch, Utrecht 1646 – 1726 Schoonhoven), Italian Landscape with Three Women in the Foreground (1687), oil on canvas, 282 × 217 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.85 Figure 6 Samuel van Hoogstraten (Dutch, Dordrecht 1660 – 1678 Dordrecht), The Anemic Lady (1665), oil on canvas, 69.5 × 55 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.87 Figure 7 Jacob Ochtervelt (Dutch, Rotterdam 1634 – 1682 Amsterdam), A Musical Company (1668), oil on canvas, 58.5 × 48.9 cm, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.88 Figure 8 Pieter De Hooch (Dutch, Rotterdam 1629 – during or after 1684 Amsterdam), Interior with Women beside a Linen Cupboard (1663), oil on canvas, 70 cm × 75.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.89 Figure 9 Andries van Buysen (Dutch, active 1698 – 1747 Amsterdam), Visitors in the Natural History Cabinet of Levinus Vincent in Haarlem (1706), etching, 22 × 31.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.97

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Figure 10 Francesco Panini (Italian, Rome 1745 – 1812 Rome), View of the Farnese Gallery, Rome (c.1775), drawing, 42.5 × 27.6 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.100 Figure 11 Willem van Haecht (Flemish, Antwerp 1593 – 1637 Antwerp), Apelles Painting Campaspe (1630), oil on panel, 104.9 × 148.7 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague.119 Figure 12 Pierre Paul Sevin (French, Tournon-sur-Rhône 1650 – 1710 Tournon-sur-Rhône), Banquet Table with Trionfi and the Arms of Pope Clement IX in the Centre (1668), drawing, 33 × 24.5 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Photo: Cecilia Heisser).129 Figure 13 Hendrick van Cleve III (Flemish, Antwerp 1525 – 1589 Antwerp), View of the Vatican Gardens and St Peter’s Basilica (c.1580), oil on canvas, 71.5 × 101 cm, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris.137 Figure 14 Federico Zuccari (Italian, Sant’Angelo in Vado 1540/42 – 1609 Ancona), Taddeo in the Belvedere Court in the Vatican Drawing the Laocoon (1595), drawing, 17.5 × 42.5 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.138 Figure 15 Vincenzo Feoli (Italian, Rome 1760 – 1827 Rome), View of the Courtyard of the Museo Pio-Clementino from “Veduta generale in prospettiva del cortile nel Museo Pio-Clementino” (1790), etching and engraving, 57.9 × 89.9 cm, The MET Collection, New York.139 Figure 16 Vincenzo Feoli (Italian, Rome 1760 – 1827 Rome), Right Side of the Portico in the Courtyard of the Museo Pio-Clementino from “Veduta generale in prospettiva del cortile nel Museo Pio-Clementino” (1790), etching and engraving, 57.7 × 90.2 cm, The MET Collection, New York.139 Figure 17 Giovanni Battista Falda (Italian, Valduggia 1643 – 1678 Rome), View of the Villa Medici (after 1677), etching, 23.2 × 42.8 cm, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1961, MET, New York.140 Figure 18 Luca Carlevarijs (Italian, Udine 1663 – 1730 Venice), Regatta on the Grand Canal in Honor of Frederick IV, King of Denmark (1711), oil on canvas, 135.3 × 259.7 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.145

List of Illustr ations

9

Figure 19 Giacomo Guardi (Italian, Venice (?) 1764 – 1835 Venice (?)), Piazza San Marco Decorated for the Festa della Sensa, drawing, 29.5 × 45.6 cm, The MET Collection, New York.162 Figure 20 Luca Carlevarijs (Italian, Udine 1663 – 1730 Venice), Side View of the School of St Roch at Left and View of the Façade of the Church of St Roch, etching, 22 × 31 cm, The MET collection, New York.164

Acknowledgements As a researcher inspired by spatiality and architecture, I consider research as the collaborative creation of an infrastructure to explore a variety of scholarly and creative forms. Thus, this book stems from a series of meetings, discussions – sometimes ephemeral – exchanges and offerings of advice that have taken place over the past five years. Among these moments, collaboration with the international forum Collecting & Display, led by Susan Bracken, Andrea Gáldy and Adriana Turpin, and participation in 2022 in the Renaissance Society of America have allowed me not only to get to know inspiring colleagues but, above all, to enhance my reflection and my approach in the development of this book. I thank all the museums and institutions that have allowed me to publish impressive images and documents. Furthermore, this book would never have been possible without the initial interest of my colleague and editor, Dominique Bauer, and her involvement in all phases of the project.

“Car l’histoire ne s’apprend pas seulement dans les livres” (Pomian, 1987, 99) mais “Il faut recourir aux pièces qui la justifient” (Patin, 1695, 12)

1. Introduction Abstract: The introduction presents the topic and the historical and geographical contexts, and traces the two main interconnected themes (the representation of architecture and the history of exhibitions). From the very beginning, it defines the study perspective and the resulting scientific filter – that is, the intention to study those early places, practices, events and habits that have shaped the idea of exhibiting and the imagery of the exhibition space in the early modern period (1450–1750). It sets the methodology and outlines the primary aim of the study: to foster connections between art history, exhibition studies and architectural history, to explore micro-histories and long-term changes, to open new study perspectives and to enhance interdisciplinary historiography. Keywords: exhibition space, visual imagery, early modern period, methodology

1.1 Reasons for the Research Most essential places for museology are outside the museum. Thus, I would have tried to read the city as a space with a powerful museological connotation associating galleries and supermarkets, factories and churches, streets and underpasses, walls of industrial estates and freight cars, installations of street vendors and parks with statues. I would also have tried to develop the intuition that the principal cultural places are today, as yesterday, of the order of the interstitial, the alternative, the f ield displacement, the semantic shift rather than that of the institutional, the regulated, the squared and the normed.1 1 “La plupart des lieux importants pour la muséologie se situent hors du périmètre muséal. J’aurais ainsi tenté de lire la ville comme un espace à forte connotation muséologique associant galeries et supermarchés, usines et églises, rues et passages souterrains, murs de zones industrielles et wagons de marchandises, installations de vendeurs à la sauvette et parcs à statues. J’aurais tenté également de développer l’intuition que les lieux culturels majeurs sont

Bianchi, P., The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450–1750). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463728676_ch01

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The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450–1750)

The Origins of the Exhibition Space seeks to trace the birth of the idea of exhibition space by studying its visual and written imagery in the early modern period (from the Renaissance to the early eighteenth century). It aims to define a new epistemological characterisation of the exhibition space, free of any institutional and museum logic, but permeable to the social and cultural conditions of the time. This book is the culmination of a research project stemming from my earlier work on the concept of the exhibition space in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.2 This previous research has thoroughly explored this topic and the different connotations and forms it has taken over time. The study has highlighted the need for a new understanding and redefinition of the term “exhibition space”, especially in light of the emerging history of exhibitions and the current interdisciplinary methodology which intersects art history, exhibition studies and architecture theories. Therefore, the present book is an attempt to provide a sequel to this early research by fostering the heuristic potential of an interdisciplinary approach and then pursuing the ambitious desire to trace the history of the exhibition space before the opening of the first public museums. Following this intent, the research, while inscribed within the theoretical context of the early modern period, starts from a contemporary assumption. Indeed, the current museum field is now expanding within a complex constellation of exhibition contexts like “the social space, the street, the flea market, the natural or built landscape”,3 and this proliferation emphasises the difficulty that the museum institution is now experiencing in trying to distinguish itself from the increasing multitude of non-museum venues and exhibition opportunities. Also, while museology is now confronted with curatorship and exhibition-making approaches, in turn, museum contexts invade hybrid spaces “in terms of a real decentralisation of museology, with the result of a temporary conversion, sometimes also definitive, of new, disparate places, most often open.”4 aujourd’hui comme hier de l’ordre de l’interstitiel, de l’alternatif, du déplacement de champ, du glissement sémantique plutôt que de celui de l’institutionnel, du régulé, du cadré et du normé.” Marc-Olivier Gonseth, “Le dépôt, la vitrine et l’espace social”, in Pierre Alain Mariaux (ed.), Les lieux de la muséologie (Neuchâtel: Institut d’histoire de l’art et de muséologie, 2005), 5. 2 Pamela Bianchi, Espaces de l’œuvre, espaces de l’exposition. De nouvelles formes d’expérience dans l’art contemporain (Paris: Connaissances & Savoirs, 2016). 3 Pierre Alain Mariaux, Les lieux de la museologie, 1. 4 “D’autres lieux sont envahis, en termes d’une réelle décentralisation de la muséologie, avec pour résultat une conversion temporaire, parfois définitive, de nouveaux lieux disparates, le plus souvent ouverts.” Ibid., 3.

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Alongside the idea of gentrif ication and travelling museology,5 the contemporary museum system thus appears boundless. Yet, the diversity (alternativeness) of the current venues of art is not an innovation in the exegesis of the exhibition space. Over the years, especially before the museum institution became an academic dogma (when the concept of exhibition had not yet been fully established), those places that today are often defined as alternative (independent) exhibition spaces were rather temporarily used as ideal venues to stage ephemeral exhibiting events. Indeed, before the appearance of the first painting exhibitions and the spaces specially designed to present collections and fine arts (for which the case of the Parisian Salon is a decisive moment), the idea of showing art was mainly related to the habit of dressing up spaces for political commemorations, religious festivals, and marketing strategies. From the house to the street, passing through alleys, stairways, up to the entire city, these places were temporary and privileged platforms of showing, where the idea of exhibiting developed. Then, only when the museum was instituted, these places became outsiders, acquiring the connotation of alternative, non-institutional spaces for art. In short, the current proliferation of other exhibition venues would be a conceptual involution: a return to the origins of the idea of exhibition space. However, the study does not propose a difference between pre-museum and museum exhibitions. This distancing from museum history (and the consequent study approach) is due to various factors. First, because, throughout the period considered, the concept of the art exhibition had not yet been fully established. Then, because the analysed circumstances were for the most part of a social and religious nature, and had completely different objectives and locations from museum intents and contexts. And finally, because the ontological status of artefacts on display on these occasions was ambiguous. Indeed, depending on the nature of the event, they could be perceived as fine arts – that is, as autonomous cultural artefacts with their own inner meaning and logic – or, on the other hand, as goods intimately bound still to the religious, political or social event. Precisely for these reasons, the study of these displays did not require a comparative analysis but a contextualisation and a problematisation that took into account the origin of these same events. Furthermore, the purpose of the research was 5 In the past decades, neoliberal strategies, cultural entrepreneurship and market economies have especially reshaped the museum context. Increasingly, demands for marketability and f inancial competitiveness influence exhibition design and exhibition-making practices, by affecting public experience, comprehension and commitment. This condition has undeniably influenced the choice of exhibition spaces, which are often picked for their capability to attract an ever broader and more diversified audience.

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not to reinscribe the issues of the exhibition space and exhibiting within museum history, but rather to show precisely how the origins of exhibitions and their places can be disjointed from that. That said, what were those places and events? What aesthetic, cultural, social and political discourses intersected with the early idea of exhibition space? How did showing art shape a new vocabulary within these events and, conversely, how have these occasions conditioned exhibiting practices? Have these places to some extent shaped the gaze of the modern viewer? Did they model the aesthetic consciousness of modern spectatorship? Who were the producers, actors and spectators of these processes, devices and spaces? Which kinds of sources (treatises, depictions) are involved? With these questions in mind, the book studies those early places, practices, events, and habits that have shaped the idea of exhibiting and the imagery of the exhibition space in the early modern period (1450–1750). Thus, by fostering connections between art history, exhibition studies and architectural history, and by exploring micro-histories and long-term changes, the research finally seeks to open new study perspectives and foster interdisciplinary historiography.

1.2 Topics, Frames and Methodology How do spatial imageries, in painting and literature, allow us to think of the history of the exhibition space? How has such imagery shaped the idea of exhibiting? Is this history related to the history of societies? How can we relate early exhibition logic with art history and exhibition design theories? What does it mean to expand the early history of the exhibition and its space beyond (and before) museum history? Over the years, despite increased interest in the spatial issue, little attention has been paid to the “category” of the exhibition space. The latter (and the related imaginary) has too often been associated with interdisciplinary studies6 on pictorial practices, exhibition design, architecture, museum 6 Regarding contemporary debate, and just to mention a few, see Jean Davallon (ed.), Claquemurer pour ainsi dire tout l’univers; la mise en exposition (Paris: Éd. du Centre G. Pompidou, 1986); Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Erika Suderburg, Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Anne Cauquelin, Le site et le Paysage (2002) (Paris: PUF, 2007). Regarding the early modern period: Donatella Calabi and Elena Svalduz, Il rinascimento italiano e l’Europa. Luoghi, spazi, architetture, Vol. VI (Vicenza: Angelo Colla editore,

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history, which have consequently obscured its ontological meaning. In most cases, the analysis ends up considering it as mere background, more as a means to study other critical issues than as a pure research subject. Similarly, when the exhibition space is the main theme, studies are almost always dedicated to the political, social and cultural dimensions of space,7 spatial archetypes (the studiolo and the gallery)8 or specific institutional venues.9 For the present study, on the contrary, the exhibition space is the main research question. Not in an attempt to compare, but rather to reread and reinterpret, this research considers the place of art (in which to experience an event) and the exhibition space (which is designed by a creative set of items) as terms of a “conceptual structure […] that can be activated from many different angles”.10 Indeed, while the question of the exhibition space arises as soon as an exhibiting proposal is updated, the understanding of the place of art and its heuristic potential in the process of creation, develops instead in the rereading of its historical and contextual relations. Such an approach extends the study over an interdisciplinary field of research involving: the understanding of works of art, apparatus and artefacts within their historical and social context; cross-study with the history of exhibitions; and f inally the analysis of exhibiting layouts and architectural settings-up. That means mobilising the epistemological status of specific notions, such as space, place, work of art and exhibition. Besides, this research stems from the relationship between two fundamental topics studied through the light of contemporary vocabulary. The 2010). Consider also the seminar Architetture del sapere: edifici per il collezionismo nell’Europa moderna (XVI–XVIII secolo), organised by Gristiano Guarneri, at the IUAV University in Venice, November 22, 2012. The related publication brings together a series of essays dedicated to the architecture of the spaces of knowledge. Among these, there are some papers that, although lucid and relevant, explore traditional exhibition spaces: the cabinet, the studiolo and the gallery. 7 See the research programme “Collezionismo e spazi del collezionismo aristocratico nel XVII e nel XVIII secolo: fonti, scelte artistiche, contesti architettonico-decorativi nella Repubblica di Genova, nello stato di Milano e nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia”, directed by the Ministry of Education, University and Scientific Research, in Italy (2008). Cf. Andrea Spiriti (ed.), Lo spazio del collezionismo nello stato di Milano – secoli XVII–XVIII (Rome: Viella, 2013). 8 See Wolfram Prinz, Die Entstehung der Galerie in Frankreich und Italien (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1977); Wolfgang Liebenwein, Studiolo: Die Entstehung eines Raumtyps und seine Entwicklung bis um 1600 (Frankfort: Gebr. Mann, 1977). 9 Giuseppe Olmi, L’inventario del mondo: catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996). 10 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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first refers to the concept of architectura picta11 (painted architecture) and, basically, to the pictorial and literary representations of space, place and landscape.12 The second focuses on the exhibition system and its historical, formal and social evolution. The articulation of these two issues, combined with an iconographic and iconological study related to the narrative power of images, has provided the opportunity to reread the first practices of exhibiting through the filter of the most significant theoretical articulations in the history of art. That is, to probe the history of exhibitions,13 its system and underlying logic, examining different exhibiting dynamics (marginal, ephemeral, alternative, public or private), understanding its multiple appearances and crossing directly connected critical concepts, such as the exhibit, the collection, the artist and the public. Regarding the exhibition space as well as art exhibitions, contemporary literature and research programmes show an imbalance in relation to the methodology and scientific approach. In particular, although today the subject of exhibiting art is an increasingly privileged topic for modern and contemporary art studies, its long-term history has received relatively little scientific attention. However, Francis Haskell, Georg Friedrich Koch and Thomas Crow,14 among others, have recognised numerous historical moments, expanding the idea of exhibiting to various contexts of public life. These studies have suggested the genealogical link between an art 11 See Sabine Frommel and Gerhard Wolf, Architectura Picta (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2016). 12 See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Introduction”, in Landscape and Power, 1–4. 13 The history of exhibitions has only recently become an independent theme. The f irst studies date back to the 1950s and 1960s, with Kenneth Luckhurst’s book, The Story of Exhibitions (London, New York: Studio Publishing, 1951), and Francis Haskell’s research (“Art Exhibition in 18th Century Venice”, Venetian Art, Vol. 12 (1958): 179–185; “Art Exhibition in 17th Century Rome”, in C. Jannaco and U. Limentani (eds.), Seventeenth-Century Studies, Vol. 1 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1960), 107–121. In the 1960s, Georg Friedrich Koch’s study marks the beginning of the first exhibition practices in the Greco-Roman era, Die Kunstausstellung. Ihre Geschichte von den Anfangen bis zum Ausgang des 18 (Jahrhunderts, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1967). In the 1980s, the volume published by Francis Haskell focused on the Saloni, gallerie, musei e loro influenza sullo sviluppo dell’arte dei secoli XIX e XX, Atti del XXIV Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’Arte, CIHA, Vol. 7 (Bologna: Clueb, 1981). Following, also see Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2000); Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that Made Art History: 1863–1959 (London, New York: Phaidon, 2008); Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (eds.), Thinking about Exhibitions (London, New York: Routledge, 1996); Jérôme Glicenstein, L’art: une histoire d’expositions (Paris: PUF, 2009). 14 Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-century Paris (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1985).

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exhibition and the plurality of historical circumstances and venues in which one can identify an act of exhibiting: from palatial ceremonies to liturgical festivals, up to shop marketing strategies. But, most of all, these studies have underlined the need for a new methodology capable of offering other points of view from which to study the history of exhibitions. And this leads us to wonder: how do art exhibitions relate to these exhibiting circumstances? Did these events define a specific vocabulary? When and how did these circumstances start influencing and informing the idea of exhibition space? How does the act of exhibiting depend on its institutional framework? And on the other hand, is there a direct relationship between the early spaces for exhibiting and these exhibiting events? The intersection between these questions and related disciplines permitted the examination of multiple aspects of the immanence of the concept of exhibition space, emphasising above all its social, historical and cultural dimensions. Nevertheless, dealing with such an extensive issue may leave some aspects unexplored, especially concerning contextual and historical coverage. In this perspective, the choice of the historical period (from the beginning of the Renaissance to the opening of the first public museums) is iconic. “Limiting” the research to the period preceding the idea of a fully public museum15 (the mid-eighteenth century) concretely takes the research away from traditional museum history. Similarly, the initial period, the midfifteenth century, first of all, responded to the desire for non-encyclopaedic analysis. Also, it seemed pertinent to me to structure an in-depth study within a historical period supported by shared anthropological, geographical and sociological issues. Consequently, the study is mainly centred on the European context, where Italy stands out among the other fields analysed. There is nothing about Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia or colonial countries. Indeed, extending the study to these contexts would have required a different study approach concerning the specific anthropological and social issues of each context. Moreover, this precise and circumscribed geographical and historical context is critical, from iconographic, architectural and design points of view, as regards the diffusion and experimentation of display practices. Indeed, although the innovations studied in this book are not universally applicable, they nevertheless remain exemplary in their genre, having initiated, among other things, a mechanism of specificity (exhibiting 15 See, for instance, the establishment of the museum related to the Istituto delle Scienze. Paula Findlen, “The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy”, in Bettina Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 42.

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and representative) that would find wide use in the following centuries. Eventually, the current study emphasises the contexts that have marked the histories of exhibiting and exhibition spaces, precisely because not only the issue has not yet been studied in depth but also because a thorough examination of it would bring to light a new meaning. Studying the same contexts and themes from a different viewpoint seemed to me the best way to foster a new historiographical approach disconnected from traditional museum history and to insist instead on interdisciplinary historiography grounded on the political and social context of the time. This choice, however, does not deny, but on the contrary, wants to highlight, the need to expand the study to other geographies and other pre-modern and medieval periods. Indeed, not by chance, early modern collectors and events were self-consciously modelling themselves in ancient Rome. That said, the geographical and historical contexts chosen and the interdisciplinary approach taken have allowed me to expand the early history of the exhibition space beyond and before museum history and thus renew the methodology. The research thus integrates other stories (of exhibitions and displays) by pointing out a complex network of topics and structuring a historical gaze on specific categories of study. In this perspective, the book benefits from historical dynamism and considers both micro-histories and long-term changes; not rejecting synchronic conjunctions or diachronic fluxes, it proposes a cross-study on the history of art, architecture and exhibiting theories instead. For instance, because it records the radical change concerning the perception of space and place, the beginning of the Renaissance period offers here a firm basis for developing a reflection on the interaction between these two concepts in the broader scope of architecture. Besides, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the significant turn concerning the ideas of collection and artwork allows me to draw parallels with the ways of displaying and experiencing them at that time.16 Indeed, this change coincided with a statutory transformation for which the collection goes from being arbitrarily private to becoming public, which also echoes the passage from the studioli17 to the galleries. In the early eighteenth 16 William Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception in the Antiquity Collections of LateRenaissance Rome”, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer 2005): 397–434, [398]. 17 Yet, cabinets and studioli cannot be summed up as simple private spaces, indeed their relationship with the ideas of publicness, sociability and social engagement was more complex. See Leah R. Clark, “Collecting, Exchange, and Sociability in the Renaissance Studiolo”, Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2013): 171–184. For an in-depth study of the relationship between and the evolution of the studiolo and the gallery, see Arthur MacGregor, “The Cabinet and the Gallery: Introspection and Ostentation in Early Collection History”, Engramme, No. 126

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century, then, this growing accessibility to artworks leading to the eve of the opening of the first museums enabled me to analyse the resulting problems related to the display of the works and the satisfaction of the public. Such a study also required me to arrange my thoughts dynamically through a specific temporal and contextual logic. At the same time, it demanded an expanded glance at the main concepts. The notions of space, artwork, exhibition, collection, artist and display have been progressively contextualised regarding their etymological evolution and use over time. In particular, they have been defined according to their respective historical meanings. In other words, the research has tried to account for an evolutionary path, both practical and theoretical, by insisting on how modes of perception and presentation have crossed the visual culture and habits of a specific historical period. Thus, in this study, various displaying forms intersect with social, sacred or political functions of spaces, showing how this relationship has impacted the ontology of these same notions. Besides, it was also necessary to consider the evolution of the figurative language of the various contexts and historical periods, considering the links that these artistic modes had with the contemporary ideas of collection, production and with the various protagonists. It was a matter of outlining the constantly evolving idea of exhibition, by recognising the fundamental role that early collections and their several rearrangements had in defining the concept of exhibition space. It was then a matter of accepting the permeability of these terms and studying the issue of the exhibition space in the light of related historical circumstances. Therefore, I decided to organise the book so as to show the complex intertwining of and the influences between spaces, habits and societies. I defined, first, the spatial categories (domestic interiors, public exteriors) within which I then traced specific spaces (the palace, the atrium, the bottega, the church, the square, the façade, among others) and for which, finally, I structured an evolutionary history. In this sense, the study was structured above all based on each specific case study, without binding it to a progressive historical analysis. Thus, the book comprises three parts. The first one deals with the theoretical definition of the principal concepts mobilised in the research and provides the appropriate reading keys. It analyses dichotomies such as space/place, institutional/alternative, as well as the primary notions of exhibition and setup, and it provides a study dedicated to the original resources of the time (mainly treatises), in order (April 2015): 37–54. Just to mention some depictions of studioli, see: Imperato, Historia naturale, 1599; Besler, Continuatio, 1616; Ceruti, Chiocco, Musaeum, 1622; Worm, Museum wormianum, 1655; Legati, Museo Cospiano, 1677; Mercati, Lancisi, Metallotheca, 1717.

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to offer a first theoretical contextualisation of the topics developed in the book. The second part deals with the category of (domestic) interiors and the third with the category of (public) exteriors. However, although the distinction between inner and outer spaces has served to sort out precise themes, that between domestic and public has not always been easy to trace. And this is because, at the time, some internal spaces opened to the outside, bringing their decorative setup to the façades, at other times, the external spaces were dressed as internal rooms. This hybridisation is one of the characteristics of the study and has yielded inspiring results. In this sense, the book does not propose rigid categories but rather sheds light on the habits of the time, in which the concepts of public and domestic place were often unforeseeable and ephemeral or, nevertheless, dependent on specific social constructs. In this sense, in addition to the sections dedicated to indoor and outdoor spaces, I have devoted a central part to the idea of “intermedial spaces”. There, I analyse a series of cases (from the tent intended as an ephemeral pavilion to tapestries to dress fictional exhibition spaces) to explore the ontological meaning of furniture and its role in shaping exhibition spaces. Among the cases, I examined the transformation of the places of antiquities collections during the sixteenth century by analysing, for instance, the loggia – that is, the space between the gallery and the garden – and the Venetian portego. These spaces and events that took place there often led to exhibiting solutions that have changed the fate of the market and art criticism, as well as suggesting new forms of setting up. Besides, I focused on the ephemeral Italian apparatuses of the late seventeenth century, such as the setup for Pope Innocent XII’s visit in Carroceto, depicted in two prints by Alessandro Specchi’s Prospetto del Casale di Carroceto and Spaccato del Palazzo di Tavole. I then went on to study the role of tapestries in defining ephemeral architectures and in transforming internal places into external ones. Indeed, intended as mobile soft furniture, tapestries displayed micro-spaces, temporary environments linked to the celebration of rituals or recurring events. Among the cases, Filippo Lauri and Filippo Gagliardi’s oil painting Festival at the Palazzo Barberini in Honor of Christina of Sweden (1659), or Filippo Vasconi’s engraving, Cortile del Palazzo Altemps (1729) [Courtyard of Palazzo Altemps], led to an insistence on how “textiles temporarily transformed the courtyard of the palace into an interior for staging a festival, even roofing it with a scrim painted as an allegory-filled sky”.18 18 Gail Feigenbaum, “Preface and Acknowledgements”, in Gail Feigenbaum (ed.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace: 1550–1750 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 12.

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Figure 1 Filippo Vasconi (Italian, Rome 1687 – 1730 Rome), Cortile del Palazzo Altemps (1729), etching, 45.6 × 67.3 cm, J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Los Angeles.

However, besides analysing these transient spaces, I constructed the main distinction between interior and exterior spaces, following the social events connected. Thus, while I studied the idea of the house as a place to exhibit first the collector’s symbolic image and then artefacts and furniture, I explored public spaces by considering them as places in which artists, collectors and merchants could exhibit, sell, buy and contemplate arts. The second part explores the origins of the idea of exhibiting and considers the house as a metaphorical image of the owner’s need for self-representation – a sort of architectural self-portrait. The study progresses alongside an analysis of several related subjects highlighting various exhibiting practices and exhibition spaces inside Renaissance and Baroque palaces and burghers’ dwellings, and also humble people’s houses in main European cities. Intended as the palaces’ clothing,19 paintings and tapestries structured the display in such a way that, as Gail Feigenbaum 20 points out, it was not a static figure-and-ground problem but was conditioned by a multitude of factors. At the same time, the idea of a house emerges as an exhibition 19 See Alessandro Tassoni, “Pensieri”, in Pietro Puliatti (ed.), Pensieri e scritti preparatori (Modena: Edizioni Panini, 1986). 20 Gail Feigenbaum, “Preface and Acknowledgments”, in Display of Art in the Roman Palace, xiii.

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space apt to catalyse interactions between sculptures, paintings, furniture, decorative arts and architecture. In this sense, from the Italian sixteenth century, I studied the complex interplay that took place between the form, the function and the use of early modern dwellings, their interiors, their architecture and decoration, and the history of collections and collectors. I explored theoretical concepts by crossing them with the analysis of various and diversified cases, such as the Celeste Galleria at the Ducal Palace in Mantua. The third part, in turn, investigates exterior exhibition spaces. I focused on the squares, cloisters and streets in which recurring sacred or profane events staged exhibitions by hanging paintings from windows or displaying sculptures outside buildings. Among others, I studied the annual commemoration organised by the Parisian goldsmiths’ guild (the Confraternity of St Anne) from 1639 to 1707, the Festa della Sensa in Venice or the exhibition in Antwerp organised in 1540 by the local corporation of painters. Focusing on sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious ceremonies in Europe, the analysis sought to investigate the relationship between the display of artworks, the dynamism of the performative events and the features of the places. Finally, the third part also deals with other public spaces (shops, fairs and other circumstances of the art market) that connect the f irst exhibiting forms to the advertising needs of dealers and artists. In terms of substance, this tripartition allows me to draw parallels between the analysed spaces. Indeed, for instance, in the case of the seventeenth-century Roman botteghe and merchants and artists’ apartments, the display of works did not have a decorative intent but respected specific hierarchies. Pictures were often selected and stocked by size more than by subject. In shops, the display emphasised the repetition of the same genre instead. Moreover, while in shops merchants were used to putting on display the very act of painting, in private houses, the relationship with the positioning of the work was much more intimate and calculated based on the refinement of the work. As regards the methodological approach, the research made use of both original sources and secondary literature and examines various documents, written and visual, representing exhibition spaces that really existed or were simply imagined.21 In this sense, paintings, drawings, treatises or texts are here considered as means to rethink the history of the exhibition space from a new angle, and end up playing the role of historical sources

21 See Peter Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Interior, 1400–1600 (New York: Abrams, 1991).

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(indirect depicted evidence).22 However, depending on the nature of the documents (literary descriptions or pictorial representations), I adjusted the analysis approach as I went along. Thus, lists, archives and inventories of collections and guardaroba, notes of camerlenghi for the organisation of feasts and the preparation of religious exhibitions, and also letters between collectors and artists, have been essential historical sources.23 Not only do they record places (temporarily used as exhibition spaces) and their social dimension (as in the case of Ferdinando Gonzaga’s inventory for the study of the Ducal Palace layout, discussed in the second part of the book), they also detail the placement of items in those spaces and provide more contextual and punctual information concerning the taste and habits of the time.24 While for these documents, a critical and theoretical review has been enough to structure the study, for visual sources the approach required a closer look, related to the truthfulness of representations.25 Indeed, although many represented contexts are documentary snapshots of a precise historical period (a “straightforward reportage”),26 many other depicted spaces are mere landscapes that “stand for space in which history disappears”.27 Instead of being factual descriptions (“framing dimension”28) 22 Between 1719 and 1724, the Benedictine Bernard de Montfaucon published in Paris the fifteen volumes of L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures. The work incorporates more than 1300 images reproducing works of art, coins, objects and monuments of antiquity. The abbot’s objective was to record and illustrate the past as precisely as possible. This occasion was one of the first events where images were used as interpretative means. See Bernard de Montfaucon, Antiquity Explained and Represented in Sculptures (London: J. Tonson, J. Watts, 1725). 23 For further information, see Guido Rebecchini, “Evidence: Inventories”, in Gail Feigenbaum (ed.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 27–28. 24 See Silvia Danesi Squarzina, La collezione Giustiniani: Inventari, Vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 2003); Bertrand Jestaz (ed.), Le Palais Farnèse III. L’inventaire du palais et des propriétés Farnèse à Rome en 1644 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1994). 25 Over the years, various studies have debated the historical truth of representations, see Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1993); Luke Syson, “Representing Domestic Interiors”, in Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (eds.), At Home in Renaissance Italy (London: V&A, 2006), 86–101. 26 Francis Haskell, History and its Images, 81. 27 Painters often preferred the imaginative and symbolic power of the pictorial gesture to historical truthfulness; they often depicted pictures for a specific reason indeed. Often, they were in the habit of eliminating real details to make room for a higher aesthetic and symbolic refinement of the depiction. Charles Harrison, “The Effects of Landscape”, in W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 215. See also W. J. T. Mitchell, “Nature for Sale: Gombrich and the Rise of Landscape”, in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds.), The Consumption of Culture in the Early Modern Period (New York: Routledge, 1997). 28 David Herman, et al., Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012), 85–87.

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of a real environment, painted (and even literary) scenes appear as “loci of memory”,29 an ahistorical background to fill with characters and scenes. “Paintings […] fed the architectural imagination and visual culture of the period, often foreshadowing what was built by a decade or even a generation. Pictures were storehouses of architectural ideas.”30 In this sense, although they are visual quotations of specific and existing contexts (such as the paintings by Christian Reder, Prospetto e Spaccato del Palazzo [1697], which describe the prospectus and cross-section of the building in Carroceto), many other representations were the result of the creativity of the artists (such as Andrea Sacchi’s painting Festa al Gesù per l’apertura dell’anno secolare [1639], which I study in the third part of the book). In this respect, contrary to drawings, sketches or architectural projects that acted here as technical records of setups and spaces, paintings (for the most part, vedute, landscapes and religious scenes) acted rather as representations having the twofold nature of “fictional universes” and “topological dimensions”.31 Moreover, for these literary descriptions or pictorial depictions, the exhibition space is not always the main subject, but often only the background of the main scene. Therefore, in such cases as in the chapter dedicated to art setups in Dutch burghers’ dwellings and humble people’s houses, it was necessary to contextualise the scene, the event, the period, to understand the framework of realisation, and to define the truthfulness and the boundaries of the act of painting. In any case, because none of these sources are totally credible for our methodology of reading, I managed with care the interpretational approach. Indeed, according to Krzysztof Pomian, “the border is sometimes difficult to draw between the representation of a cabinet and an allegorical painting […]. But it is precisely this difficulty that seems important because it is due to the fact that, between the two cases, the realism—not to say illusionism—in the execution of details leads to an allegorical meaning of the whole, thanks to the choice and to the organisation of them.”32 Eventually, the reading of 29 Gail Feigenbaum, Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 311. 30 Amanda Lillie, “Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting” (London: The National Gallery, online 2014), http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/research/ exhibition-catalogues/building-the-picture/introduction (14/08/2022). 31 David Herman, et al., Narrative Theory. 32 “la frontière est parfois difficile à tracer entre la représentation d’un cabinet et un tableau allégorique […]. Mais c’est cette difficulté justement qui semble importante car elle tient au fait que, entre les deux cas, un réalisme – pour ne pas dire illusionnisme – dans l’exécution des détails débouche, grâce au choix et à l’organisation de ceux-ci, sur une signification allégorique de l’ensemble.” Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 68.

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the image as a historical testimony first considered three levels implying the understanding of art: visual analysis, iconography and context.33 Secondly, it recognised the two types of representations that permeate each narrative: “representations of actions and events, which constitute the narration properly speaking, and representations of objects or people, which make up the act of what we today call ‘description’”.34 Finally, in order to take advantage of the mnemonic value of these works, it was necessary, first, to understand the artistic language of the painting (its genres, its commissioners, and the historical and social reasons that influenced its execution), and then to accept the connection between the fictitious nature of the representation and its condition of historical quotation. Two processes have stemmed from this consideration: the one that supports the imaginative power of reality within a fictional universe, and the second that emphasises the idea of a mimetic aspect of the representation instead. Studying the representations of the exhibition space also implied considering space not just as a background housing the painted scene within an artificial, illusionary or allusive framework, but as a real narrative object. Therefore, no longer considered just as a “figurative object”35 – that is, an archetypal cultural universe that does not refer to the real world – space turns here into a “theoretical object”,36 making it possible to think about the dimension of historicity which is distinctive of art. Because it invests the field of iconography in the recognition of semiotic signs, this research also considers images as exemplary devices facilitating the epistemic processes of historical reading. Besides, because it treats images as models producing new forms of knowledge, this research appears as an instrument for understanding the logic implying the complex structure of images and their framework of interpretation. Within the articulation between a historiographical rereading and an iconographic and iconological analysis of documents, the early imagery of places of art appears as a narrative exploring the multiple status (public and private, internal and external, peripheral and alternative) of the exhibition space. Ultimately, from the understanding of the historical and geographical frame to the analysis of the specific spaces and places in which these 33 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). 34 Gérard Genette and Ann Levonas, “Boundaries of Narrative”, New Literary History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Fall, 1976): 1–13, [5]. 35 Pierre Francastel, La figure et le lieu. L’ordre visuel du Quattrocento (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). 36 Hubert Damisch, Théorie du nuage: pour une histoire de la peinture (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1972); Hubert Damisch, Giovanni Careri and Bernard Vouilloux, “Hors cadre: entretien avec Hubert Damisch”, Perspective, No. 1 (2013): 11–25.

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social, artistic or religious events occur, from the study of the architectural dimension of the exhibition to the comprehension of the sources, the book proposes a kind of “anthology of contexts”. Yet, this research is not a listing of exhibition sites, nor another reading on museum history. It rather tries to shape a sort of archaeology of display practices and a new geography of places of art that aims to understand what spaces did and still do to art.

2.

Main Topics Abstract: This chapter provides an in-depth study of the key concepts that will then be addressed during the research. It f irst analyses the state of the art and explores the etymological and ontological history of the exhibition space over the years. It continues then with the history of the exhibition, focusing on the distinction between the act of displaying and the action of decorating. It adds the analysis of some earlier case studies (such as the transport of the Majesty of Duccio di Buoninsegna, or Giovanni di Pedrino’s painting The Miracle of the Madonna). The chapter ends with a study dedicated to the ancient treatises and texts dedicated to the practices of organising items within a defined space. Keywords: ancient treatises, exhibition design, layout, architecture, exhibition

Il recupero del passato assegnato allo storico […] si colloca in un ordine del conoscere meno ‘scientifico’ – nel senso postcartesiano del termine – di quello cui pretende a buon diritto di accedere lo storico strettamente filologo: un ordine in cui il probabile, il verosimile, l’ipotetico, per quanto circoscritti e prudenti intendano essere, rivendicano i propri diritti nell’arte di recuperare non ‘fatti’ ma modalità dimenticate di percezione e comprensione.1

1 Marc Fumaroli, La scuola del silenzio. Il senso delle immagini nel XVII secolo (Milan: Adelphi, 1995), 61.

Bianchi, P., The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450–1750). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463728676_ch02

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2.1 The Topoi of the Exhibition Space Exhibition Space: The term generically refers to any place where one exhibits. It can be any museum space, covered or uncovered, which is given to see; it can be any public place, exterior or interior, in which an exhibition takes place, it can be a room specially dedicated to this function within the museum framework.2

Over time, the ontology of the exhibition space has been amply discussed.3 In the specific area of art and museum histories, two categories of research emerge with particular relevance: one that considers the notion of exhibition space as a means to deepen other reflections, and another for which it is the subject of study in its own right. Especially in the first case, the analysis of the space of art is a preamble that allows the development of the main subject. Several historical or sociocultural studies have used space mostly as a theoretical supplement, a practical parameter, or an architectural unity, sometimes confusing it with its alter ego: the place. Indeed, despite the twentieth-century “spatial turn”, 4 a sort of terminological generalisation5 seems somehow to justify the arbitrary and often erroneous use of terms such as space, place, site, environment and landscape within aesthetics and historical debates. On the one hand, this ontological confusion, or “linguistic closeness”,6 has permeated the epistemological boundaries of these concepts, making them unstable and often interchangeable terms. Yet, on the other hand, it made sure that the notion of “place […] disappeared 2 “Espace d’exposition: Le terme désigne, de manière générique, tout lieu (ou tous lieux) où l’on expose. Il peut s’agir de n’importe quel espace muséalisé, couvert ou non couvert, qui est donné à voir ; il peut s’agir d’un lieu public quelconque, extérieur ou intérieur, sur lequel se produit une exposition, il peut s’agir de salles destinées spécialement à cette fonction dans le cadre d’un musée.” See André Desvallées and François Mairesse, Dictionnaire encyclopédique de muséologie (Paris: Armand Colin Éditeur, 2011), 597. 3 The distinction and the relationship between the ideas of space and place offer a vast bibliography which I detailed in my doctoral thesis. See Pamela Bianchi, Espaces de l’œuvre, espaces de l’exposition. 4 “La grande hantise qui a obsédé le XIXe siècle a été, on le sait, l’histoire. […] L’époque actuelle serait peut-être plutôt l’époque de l’espace.” See Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres” (1967), in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, No. 5 (October 1984): 46–49, now in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, Vol. IV: 1980–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 752. 5 Richard Huyghe, Les noms généraux d’espace en français. Enquête sur la notion de lieu (Brussels: De Boeck Supérieur, 2009), 8. 6 Edward S. Casey, “Espaces lisses et lieux bruts. L’histoire cachée du lieu”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, No. 4 (2001): 49–55.

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in its concrete, traceable, bodily appearance”7 to be absorbed by space instead. Regarding the notion of exhibition space (frequently associated with the birth of the museum,8 the collecting practice and, only recently, the history of exhibitions), this term has become intertwined with that of place, without really being distinct from it. This situation mainly stems from a poor understanding of these terms and their epistemological value. Indeed, although the spatial issue arises alongside the exhibiting gesture, the understanding of place and its heuristic potential in processes of creation and display is still unclear. Yet, the various imageries of exhibition space (public and private, internal and external, peripheral and alternative) have shed light on the relationship between the two concepts, and thus highlighted their parallels and differences for which the place appears as a “context of life and human action”9 (since it “provides a topological determination to events and states in a story”),10 and the space arises in its poietic sense as a theoretical object related to the “articulation and disarticulation of a unicum that must be thought as an artwork”.11 From this consideration, at least two reflections emerge. The first one refers to the linked condition that permeates the relationship (of structural and ontological subordination) between space and place and that, in a certain sense, recalls Peter Brook’s idea of theatrical space. For the English theatre and film director, any space can be a stage: “A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”12 In this case, it is a matter of accepting the specific condition for which “[a]n empty place is filled with space, as if space were the negative void that rushes in when a place is vacated”.13 The other reflection takes into account the social feature of the place and, by referring to Henri Lefebvre,14 considers the exhibition space 7 “le lieu, comme partie d’une catégorie appelée ‘espace’, disparaît dans son aspect concret, repérable, charnel”. See Anne Cauquelin, “Lieux et non-lieu de l’art contemporain”, Quaderni, No. 40 (Winter 1999–2000): 159–167, [164]. 8 Among others, see Bettina Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. 9 Giulio Carlo Argan, “Il problema dell’arredamento”, La casa. Quaderni d’architettura e critica, No. 2 (1956). “una dimensione e un ambiente del vivere e dell’agire umano.” 10 Ruth Ronen, “Space in Fiction”, Poetics Today, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1986): 421–438, [423]. 11 Sylviane Agacinski, “L’espace de l’œuvre”, Cahier – Collège international de philosophie, No. 5 (April 1988): 93–107, [93]. “tourne autour des motifs de l’articulation et de la désarticulation du tout que nous pensons sous le terme d’œuvre.” 12 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Touchstone, 1968), 9. 13 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Preface”, in Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., IX. 14 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. by Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life (1947), trans. by John

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not as a neutral setting, but as a complex social product. Better still, from this point of view, the exhibition space could be grasped through the reading of W. J. T. Mitchell’s preface to the second edition of his anthology Landscape and Power.15 Indeed, according to Mitchell, space should be considered as a flexible and varied set of dimensions describing how we experience and value a location. From this perspective, the notions of space and place appear united by a dialectic for which the imaginative conception of a place directs the comprehension of the space inside it. Exhibition space would be thus a “potential place of action”16 whose configuration, together with the display of exhibits, defines a “space dramaturgy”17 capable of favouring the spectatorial enjoyment and the aesthetic experience. Beyond the dichotomy between space and place, another relationship emerges as soon as one proceeds with the study of the exhibition space – that is, the statutory question between institutional place and alternative space. Although the question has been extensively treated in modern and contemporary frames, this distinction is blurred when it comes to contextualising it within the historical context of the early modern period. Recent studies have tried to expand the issue, such as the volume directed by Andrew Graciano Exhibiting Outside the Academy, Salon and Biennial, 1775–1999.18 This collection of essays emphasises the idea of alternative space, by studying exhibitions organised outside what it seems to conceive as institutional and academic boundaries. It first highlights the growing interest in research conducted outside the traditional art history approach. However, the study seems to remain bound by the museum logic that considers the idea of exhibition space as a complement of the subject of study. Indeed, probing exhibition practices as the main topic, Exhibiting Outside the Academy still falls into the habit of distinguishing between institutional spaces (museums, salons and so on) and alternative ones. This type of research justifies in a way the conventional categories (“inside” and “outside” the institution) between alternative space and traditional museums or galleries, and relates the question again to museum history. Moore (London: Verso, 1991). 15 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Preface”, in Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. 16 Laurent Fleury, “Le pouvoir des institutions culturelles: les deux révolutions du TNP et du Centre Pompidou”, in Claude Fourteau (ed.), Les institutions culturelles au plus près du public (Paris: Musée du Louvre/La documentation Française, 2002), 36. 17 Isabella Vesco, “Teatro non a teatro: luoghi e spazi”, in Giovanna Donini (ed.), L’architettura degli allestimenti (Rome: Kappa, 2010), 148. 18 Andrew Graciano, Exhibiting Outside the Academy, Salon and Biennial, 1775–1999 (London, New York: Routledge, 2015).

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Indeed, the idea of alternative exhibition space began to appear when an institutional or an academic system started to take hold. [I]f the alternative is what is other, it can only be about a referent, a context, a set of objects to which it is not necessarily opposed, but which it especially tries to circumvent. The alternative is situational, it depends closely on a context to establish itself on the edge.19

The first manifestations of this condition, although they can be traced in sporadic Renaissance and Baroque circumstances, can be found above all in the eighteenth-century French context, following the development of the Salon and the consequent strategies of dissidence (even if, at the time, the term alternative was not yet in use). In the artistic and intellectual milieu of the time – which I analyse at the end of Chapter 4 – other cultural spaces (semi-public or semi-private) appeared in response to the “crystallisation of autonomous public spaces, capable of challenging ideological domination reigning in the public sphere”.20 Halfway between a domestic and public place where cultivated sociability21 was performed, houses, ateliers, patronage hotels or even urban contexts for fairs or religious festivals became places of social representation. Among the case studies explored in this book, the Bullion and the Jabach Hotel, the Dauphine Place or the Convent of the FillesSt-Thomas in Paris not only hosted market fairs or exhibitions to introduce private or public sales but gave life to associations and autonomous events that appeared precisely in response to the artistic supremacy of the Academy, such as the St-Luck Academy, the Salon de la Correspondance and the Youth Exhibition (the Exposition de la Jeunesse).22 Both places of sociability and witnesses of an academic counter-power, these versatile spaces shaped a new form of sociability through the relationship: artist–public–place. However, before this period and the contesting phenomena that laid the foundations for future artistic generations, the desire to provide society 19 Pauline Chevalier, Une histoire des espaces alternatifs à New York, de Soho au South Bronx 1969–1985 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2017), 11. “si l’alternative est ce qui est autre, elle ne peut l’être qu’en relation à un référent, un contexte, un ensemble d’objets auxquels elle ne s’oppose pas nécessairement, mais quelle tente surtout de contourner. L’alternative est situationnelle, elle depend étroitement d’un contexte pour s’y établir à la marge.” 20 Paul Rasse, Les musées à la lumière de l’espace public (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 41. 21 See Paul Rasse, “La médiation scientif ique et technique, entre vulgarisation et espace public”, La Science dans la cité, Quaderni, No. 46 (Winter 2001–2002): 73–93. 22 For further information, see Pamela Bianchi “Les espaces d’exposition alternatifs du XVIIIe siècle: entre sociabilité et contre-culture”, Dix-huitième siècle, No. 50 “Les lieux de l’art/Places of Arts” (Paris: La Découverte, 2018): 85–97.

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with an alternative to the institutional system was much less marked (even if this sense of displacement, from the institutional to the alternative, was especially linked to differences of caste and social class). Indeed, especially between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the use of spaces as showing platforms was mainly linked to specific needs of celebration that often went beyond exhibiting or transgressive purposes. Thus, cubicula, cabinets, villas, galleries, churches, chapels, convents, cloisters, façades, squares, tents, ephemeral pavilions, concert halls, auction houses, merchants’ fairs, shops were used as transient platforms in which pre-arranged social and religious practices implicitly linked to the very action of exhibiting and the ostentation of wealth. Suffice to mention the habit of decorating the façades of buildings with tapestries or paintings to celebrate the passage of politicians or prelates (as depicted by Canaletto in La visita del doge alla Chiesa di San Rocco, of 1735); the hanging of paintings on the vaults of churches to commemorate liturgical functions (as recorded by Andrea Sacchi’s painting, Festa al Gesù per l’apertura dell’anno secolare, in 1639); or the practice of arranging paintings, sculptures and other artefacts in domestic interiors according to the requirements of social representation (see, in this case, the watercolour by Andrea Francesco Nicoletti, Sezione di un palazzo con tavolo per banchetti e baldacchino, 1709). These three examples also introduce three archetypal sites which, over the years, have come to represent the privileged frames of the first exhibition forms: the house (matrix of the owner’s need for social self-representation); the church (a setting where artists could exhibit their works during religious ceremonies); the city (public theatres for public feasts and exhibitions). These sites were the only spaces for exhibiting that, among others, also participated in the definition of specific and transitory display practices. In these contexts, the concept of temporariness was indeed iconic since it presupposed spaces that were temporally used for an exhibiting purpose (commemorative or representative) but not intended to be exhibition places (at that time, terminologically speaking, the term exhibition was neither widespread nor defined). Yet, the use that was made of these spaces, as well as the understanding of the artefacts exhibited there, has undergone a parallel evolution, often linked by a reciprocal influence which led to the establishment of art criticism and the successive artistic practices and exhibiting modes. Finally, by defining a new epistemological characterisation of the exhibition space, free from the institutional museum logic but permeable to the social and cultural circumstances of the time, this research reconsiders a series of events and habits that, by sketching early exhibition modalities, contribute

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to outline a heterogeneous landscape, understood as the “theatre of an artistic investment”.23

2.2 From the Act of Showing to the Idea of Exhibiting I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.24

The origin of the exhibition space can be traced back to the intrinsic needs that underlie the act of public displaying, of embellishing a domestic interior, of organising a collection, that is, in short, of celebrating someone in the eyes of someone else. Before the appearance of the early painting exhibitions and the advent of the first spaces specially designed to collect and to display a collection of artworks and antiquities, the action of showing was mostly related to the habit of “dressing up”25 buildings and environments for political commemorations, religious processions or cultural festivals. Consequently, over the years, these actions have arbitrarily transformed various places into meta-exhibition spaces, defining their temporary and hybrid perimeters. Buildings’ façades and churches’ vaults26 were decorated with tapestries or paintings, while domestic interiors were arranged by hanging pictures on walls or placing objects in a specific position, according to the function of rooms within the building. These display practices were mostly tools to enact ceremonial rituals and stage social, intellectual and religious customs and power. However, these habits also shaped the idea of exhibition space and design. As Francis Haskell pointed out, “The earliest […] exhibitions bearing 23 Pierre Starobinski, “Opération à ciel ouvert, l’espace en-jeu(x)”, in Pierre Alain Mariaux (ed.), Les lieux de la muséologie, 115–130. 24 Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 9. 25 Alessandra Rodolfo and Caterina Volpi (eds.), Vestire i palazzi. Stoffe, tessuti e parati negli arredi e nell’arte del Barocco (Vatican City: Edizioni Musei Vaticani, 2014). 26 Many Roman churches remained unadorned until the second half of the seventeenth century because of economic problems that made the religious orders, especially the Jesuits, dependent on the power of Roman families of the time. These churches were lavishly decorated for specific religious ceremonies. See Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, Vol. 1 (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1977), 111–113. For further information, see Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1963), 63–65.

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any relationship to what is implied by that term today were organised in seventeenth-century Rome”27, and were mostly related to religious events. Since they implied the use of specific venues, these practices recognised in the action of displaying artefacts outside their original environments the moment when the idea of the exhibition began to take shape. Still, especially before the advent of museums, these practices also remained intrinsically linked to the idea of exhibition space. Indeed, as soon as an artefact (“a vector of memory”)28 was placed in a space, the latter acquired the essential characteristics of a presentation space (a museum). Within the broad context of this study, such consideration raises a terminological hybridization. It risks trivialising the action of the exhibition, and the notion of artwork, by confusing the act of decorating with that of exhibiting. Indeed, as Krzysztof Pomian points out: Having paintings and being a collector are two very different things. In the first case, the walls are covered so that they are not bare, and the paintings essentially play a decorative role. In the second, walls sometimes happen to be built to arrange the paintings whose number and choice show that their role is not so much to decorate as to draw the eye to the painting itself and to raise questions.29

Pomian’s distinction highlights the narrow line that separates the two activities of decorating and exhibiting. This corresponds both to the individual who owns paintings and the collector, as well as to the ideas of object and artwork. To put it differently, in the collector’s action, the idea of setting up would emerge as a consideration of the relationship between the place and artworks, in order to constitute a reflection capable of going beyond vision and suggesting thinking or messages. Yet, the difference between decorating and exhibiting, in a period in which the main concepts of exhibition and 27 Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum, Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2000), 8. 28 “Tout lieu n’est pas le musée certes, mais il en présente les caractéristiques essentielles (en tant que scène, podium, etc.) dès lors qu’on y pose un monument, c’est-à-dire un vecteur de la mémoire.” Pierre Alain Mariaux, “Epitaphe?”, in Pierre Alain Mariaux (ed.), Les lieux de la muséologie, 4. 29 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, 126. “Être propriétaire de tableaux et être collectionneur sont deux choses distinctes. Dans le premier cas, le premier, remplis un mur pour qu›il ne soit pas vide, le second construit un mur pour y mettre les tableaux dont le nombre et le choix montrent que leur rôle est non pas tant de décorer que d›attirer le regard vers la peinture elle-même et susciter des interrogations dont elle serait l›objet.”

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exhibit had not yet been defined, remains arbitrary, insofar as it depends on the complex network of relationships and statutory transformations undergone by these notions over time. Especially in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the act of showing off items was rather an almost symbolic vector capable of defining an exhibition space. However, not all the objects were works of art and not all the settings determined an exhibition space. In this regard, Stefano Marson30 raises the issue by rereading Francis Haskell’s lessons on the birth of the idea of exhibition. In particular, in his text dedicated to the first displays in Rome and Paris between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, he wonders if the installation of the Greek Pinakes (votive paintings painted on wooden planks) of the fifth century was not among the first examples of an exhibition. Furthermore, he wonders if the transport of the Majesty of Duccio di Buoninsegna, in 1311, from his workshop to the Duomo of Siena was not another case in point. If for Marson these examples remain open questions, in our context, these two cases fit into the matter of the statutory and ontological distinction between exhibiting setup and decoration furniture and also between exhibition and liturgical or social event. In fact, in the case of Pinakes (votive paintings and portraits),31 although they were expressly created to “decorate” specific structural units, such as sanctuary walls or sacred trees, these tablets were considered autonomous paintings. Pinakes, moreover, were very often represented in paintings as objects attached with the hanging rod prominently displayed, or as being suspended from a tree. In these representations, pinakes normally depicted scenes with animals or portraits, but also they could be represented empty. In this case, although pictured as an empty square with a red frame, they were enough on their own. In other words, the lack of representation did not prevent the understanding of the commemorative gesture, and the evocation of the simple pinax was enough to describe the idea of hanging and showing. Even more impressive is the fact that one of the oldest environments (mentions of them are already found in the Odyssey and the Iliad)32 designed to conserve Pinakes has been identified in the Propylaea of Mnesikles. Here, a specific room was used as a Pinacoteca (picture gallery), as confirmed 30 Stefano Marson, Allestire e mostrare dipinti in Italia e Francia tra XVI e XVIII secolo (Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2012). 31 See Vasiliki Zachari, “Images suffisantes – images efficaces : à propos de pinakes figurés dans la céramique attique ”, Images Re-vues, Hors-série 9 (2020), online: http://journals.openedition. org/imagesrevues/9290 (18/11/2022). 32 Ibid., notes 6 and 7.

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by Pausanias who describes the space while mentioning some painters of the time.33 In turn, the transport of the Majesty of Duccio di Buoninsegna suggests the ambiguity in the aesthetic and formal understanding of the ancient act of showing, in this case halfway between a spectacle and a form of exhibiting. At the time, indeed, this event, the moving of Duccio’s altarpiece from his atelier to the Siena cathedral, was acclaimed with a solemn procession documented by the chronicles of Agnolo di Tura del Grasso: He painted the altarpiece outside the Stalloreggi gate in the Laterino quarter in a house belonging to the Mucciatti. And the Sienese people accompanied this altarpiece to the cathedral on the eight of June at midday with great devotion and processions with the bishop of Siena, Ruggeri da Casole, and all the clergy of the cathedral and all the religious orders of the city and the lords and officials of the city and the podestà and Captain of the People and all the most worthy citizens, hand in hand with lit lamps. And after them, went to the women and children, with all the bells ringing in glory. All day, out of devotion, shops were closed, and many alms were given for the poor.34

Agnolo’s description seems to outline the idea of a transient and dynamic exhibition (public) space. Indeed, this event, halfway between religious procession and academic triumph, was staged in the streets of the city, thus 33 See Paolo Moreno, Enciclopedia dell’Arte Antica, Classica e Orientale, Vol. VI (Rome: Instituto dell’enciclopedia italiana Treccani, 1965), now online: https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ pinakes_%28Enciclopedia-dell%27-Arte-Antica%29/ (23/08/2022). 34 “la tavola dell’altar Maggiore del Duomo si finì, e portossi al Duomo a dí 8 di Giugno 1310 e ancon el detto tempo, e della signoria predetta si fornì di fare la tavola dell’altare maggiore, e funne levata quella, la quale stà oggi all’altare di S. Bonifacio, la quale si chiama la Madonna degli occhi grossi, e Madonna delle grazie, e questa Madonna du quella, la qualle esaudì el popullo di Siena quando furo rotti e Fiorentini a monte aperto, e in questo modo fu promutata la detta tavola, perché fu fatta quella nuova, la quale è molto più bella, e divota e magiore, […]. E in quello dì, chesi portò al Duomo si serrono le buttighe, e ordinò il Vescovo una magnia, e divotta compagnia di Preti, e Frati con una solenne precisione accompagnatto da Signori Nove, e tutti in mani tutti e più degni erano appresso a la detta tavolla co’ lumi accesi in mano, e poi erano dietro le donne, e i fanciulli con molta divozione, e accompagniorno la detta tavola per infino al duomo facendo la gloria per divozione di tanta nobille tavolla, quanto è questa. La qual tavolla fece Duccio di Nicolò dipentore, e fecedi in chasa de’ Mucatti di fuore della porta stalloreggi.” Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, “Cronaca Senese”, in Alessandro Lisini and Fabio Iacometti, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1939), 255–564, [313]. See also James H. Stubblebine, Duccio di Buoninsegna and his School (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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transforming the public space into an exhibiting site and the procession into a travelling and performative show. To better understand the importance of this event in our study, it should also be remembered that the displacement of Duccio’s work in the cathedral was considered an official parade, as evidenced by state documents relating to the payment of musicians called to accompany the event.35 This public procession not only testifies the already widespread interest in Duccio but also sheds light on the idea of the performativity of the exhibition that was, at that time, already mobilised. Another critical point is, then, the journey of the procession, which would have followed the usual route planned to commemorate the religious festival of 15 August, dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin. The path was aimed not at simply moving the artwork, but at its public commemoration, as Keith Christiansen clearly describes: [T]he procession would have made its way from Duccio’s workshop down the present-day Via di Stalloreggi […] and its broader extension, the Via di Città, lined with patrician dwellings, toward the fan-shaped Piazza del Campo […]. What was to become one of the most beautiful squares in Italy had not yet assumed its definitive form, but it already made an impressive backdrop. […] The procession must have skirted the piazza on the present-day Banchi di Sotto and entered at the east end, where the incline is least extreme. From there it would have passed before the palazzo, possibly with the governors waiting outside, before returning up the Via di Città and down the Via del Capitano to the cathedral, where the altarpiece would have been lifted off the cart and carried into the church for placement on the high altar.36

The interest in this reconstruction lies precisely in the path and in the decision to move an artefact (hard to handle given its size and weight) through the solemn streets of the city, without choosing the shortest route that would have brought the altarpiece from Duccio’s workshop to the cathedral in a few minutes (a choice that would have avoided, among other things, the difficulty of moving). This historical narrative finds visual correspondence in Frederic Lord Leighton’s painting of 1853–1855, Cimabue’s Celebrated 35 Archivio di Stato di Siena, Biccherna 125, fol. 261r. Also in Jane Satkowski and Hayden B. J. Maginnis, Duccio di Buoninsegna: The Documents and Early Sources. Issues in the History of Art (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2000). 36 Keith Christiansen, “Duccio and the Origins of Western Painting”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 66, No. 1 (2008): 1–61.

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Madonna. Although the source refers to Vasari’s erroneous attribution of the artwork,37 the picture describes the spectacular nature of Duccio’s Majesty’s displacement. In this painting, the altarpiece, despite being at the centre of the scene, is not frontal but represented from the side, so much so that the subject painted on is almost imperceptible. In this way, attention is drawn not so much to Duccio’s work but rather to the entire event taking place. Therefore, while the street turns into a temporary space of ostentation, the crowd of spectators/believers becomes a decorative element, a kind of theatrical piece of furniture within the moving exhibition. In the wake of these evocations, another example linked to the practice of staging can be found when Giorgio Vasari, in his life of Raphael, reported that in 1520, Raphael’s last painting was hung at the head of his own deathbed: Gli misero alla morte al capo nella sala, ove lavorava, la tavola della Trasfigurazione che aveva finita per il cardinale de’ Medici, la quale opera nel vedere il corpo morto e quella viva, faceva scoppiare l’anima di dolore a ogni uno che quivi guardava. La quale tavola per la perdita di Raffaello fu messa dal cardinale a San Pietro a Montorio allo altar maggiore; e fu poi sempre per la rarità d’ogni suo gesto in gran pregio tenuta.38

Raphael’s work was shown first in the intimacy of a domestic interior and subsequently in a public space. Again Marcon recalls that Vasari, in the lives 37 Giorgio Vasari confused the displacement of Duccio’s Madonna in Siena with that of Duccio’s Madonna Rucellai in Florence. Moreover, he almost voluntarily confused Duccio with Cimabue by attributing the painting to the Florentine painter. However, Vasari underlined the solemnity of the procession: “Since this work was so extraordinary, the people of the time, having never seen anything better, with great pomp and trumpets went from Cimabue’s house and brought the work in solemn procession to the church and, for this reason, he was very rewarded and honoured.” Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Barocchi Paola and Bettarini Rosanna, Vol. 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 1966–1969), 40–41. For further information, see Beth A. Mulvaney, Duccio’s Maestà Narrative Cycles: A Study of Meaning, Thesis (Ph.D.), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1998; Henk W. van Os, Sienese Altarpieces, 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function, Vol. I (Groningen: Bouma’s Boekhuis, 1984), 40. See also the English version of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, trans. by Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998), 11. 38 “[A]s [Raphael] lay dead in the hall where he had been working, there was placed at his head the picture of the Transfiguration, which he had executed for cardinal de Medici; and the sight of that living picture, in contrast with the dead body, caused the hearts of all who beheld it to burst with sorrow. That work, in memory of the loss of Raffaello, was placed by the Cardinal on the high-altar of S. Pietro a Montorio; and on account of the nobility of his every action, it was held ever afterwards in great estimation.” Giorgio Vasari, “Life of Raffaello Da Urbino, [Raffaello Sanzio]. Painter and Architect”, in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects.

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of Leonardo and Michelangelo, suggests how the cartoni (drawings) of the battles of Anghiari and Cascina, created by the two artists for the frescoes in the hall of the Maggior Consiglio in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, were exhibited publicly in the convent of Santa Maria Novella, in 1506. Specifically, Vasari adds a second location for Michelangelo’s drawing: in the sala grande in the Medici house, a position that suggests a well-defined exhibition goal. [P]er il che essendo questo cartone diventato uno studio d’artefici, fu condotto in casa Medici nella sala grande di sopra, e tal cosa fu cagione che egli troppo a securtà nelle mani degli artefici fu messo: per che nella infermità del duca Giuliano, mentre nessuno badava a tal cosa, fu come s’è detto altrove stracciato, et in molti pezzi diviso, tal che in molti luoghi se n’è sparto.39

Together with the previous examples, these cases highlight, first, the three spatial archetypes evoked above, respectively the house, the street and the church. Secondly, they record how, at the time, the act of showing was related to social practices, how certain types of places (public and private) served as specific exhibition venues capable of symbolising and mobilising precise underlying messages and, above all, how the act of showing still prevailed over the idea of exhibiting. However, despite these examples articulating the three criteria that determine the activation of the exhibiting principle (i.e. “at the same time, the act of presentation to the public things, the exhibits and the place in which this presentation takes place”), 40 they nevertheless remain anchored to an almost purely commemorative and symbolic goal. Ultimately, at the time, the circumstances of exhibition, the choice of spaces and display methods were still linked to the need to convey precise messages or to advertise reports and events. It was rather around the middle of the sixteenth century that a greater awareness of exhibition, understood as the staging and production of knowledge, would take hold. 39 “[A]nd since the cartoon had become a subject of study for artisans, it was taken to the large upper hall in the Medici’s home, and this was the reason why it was placed too freely in the hands of the artists. Thus, during the illness of Duke Giuliano and while no one was looking after such a thing, it was, as we said elsewhere, torn apart and divided into many pieces so that it was scattered around in a number of places, as is substantiated by some pieces that can still be seen in Mantua in the home of Uberto Strozzi, a Mantuan gentleman who conserves them with great reverence.” Giorgio Vasari, “Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti Florentine. Painter, Sculpture and Architect”, in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects. 40 “à la fois l’acte de présentation au public des choses, les objets exposés et le lieu dans lequel se passe cette présentation.” Jean Davallon (ed.), Claquemurer pour ainsi dire tout l’univers, 204–205.

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2.3 Depicting (Exhibition) Spaces In recent decades, the topic of painted architecture has received close attention. Various studies41 have highlighted the heterogeneity of the issue and, above all, the different roles played by the visual representation of a spatial context. Several exhibitions42 developed this issue too. For instance, in 2014, the National Gallery in London43 organised a show exploring the role played by architecture in Italian painting from the late Middle Ages until the High Renaissance. However, one of the most recent and complete studies on painted architecture is the volume edited in 2016 by Sabine Frommel and Gerhard Wolf, which stemmed from a conference in 2009, devoted to the theme of Architectura Picta.44 Enriched by an atlas of more than a hundred pictures, this book documents three centuries of art history to define not only a new classification of periods but also some criteria of analysis and stylistic genres. Driven by the desire to understand the history of architecture through its pictorial representation, the two art historians have emphasised the function of architecture in fictional portrayals. In particular, Frommel and Wolf’s research points out the formal and stylistic analysis of the paintings taken as examples. In addition to insisting on the architectural rendering of the represented structures within the specific historical period, they also delineated the phenomenological relationship between architecture and the body. Although the authors seek to offer an expanded overview of the argument, they have immediately clarified the limits of such research, whose extent, if not managed carefully, could have weakened its historical significance. Geographically circumscribed to the cities of Venice, Florence and Rome, their study has deliberately omitted several points. In particular, Wolf rightly suggests some categories of study that might be developed from their research, and thus treated in the light of their visual representations: architectural details, sketches or specific structural units (stairways or porches). 41 See studies of artists and their relationship to the architecture, such as Bramante: Filippo Camerota, “Bramante Prospettivo”, in Francesco P. di Teodoro, Donato Bramante: ricerche, proposte e riletture (Urbino: Accademia Raffaello, 2001), 19–46. 42 See the exhibitions Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art (Princeton University Art Museum, 2010); La città ideale. L’utopia del Rinascimento a Urbino tra Piero della Francesca e Raffaello (Urbino, Palazzo Ducale, 2012). 43 See Amanda Lillie (ed.), Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting. 44 The volume is the result of a conference organised in 2009 by Frommel and Wolf, on the theme of architectura picta, in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence and the École Pratique des Hautes études of Paris. See Sabine Frommel, Gerhard Wolf, Architectura Picta.

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In this sense, exhibition space can fit into one of these categories of study whereby the concept of architectura picta is intended as a category including several “species” of venues (interior spaces, urban places and landscapes) having a compositional logic that ‒ if not already explicit ‒ evokes an architectural organisation nonetheless. More precisely, within the historiographical context of this research, the exhibition space has been illustrated several times. Both as an illusionistic and symbolic space and as a real geographical and topological context, it was sometimes represented as background contextualising the pictorial tale, at other times, as a painted subject. Notably, the represented architecture indicates an organised space filled with characters structuring the narrated scene that maintain a more or less intense relationship with the architectural setting. However, generally, the background can play different roles depending on its relation with the pictorial representation. It can be a “unifying matrix” between the structural frame and the painted image, a “simple decorative element”, a “narrative and symbolic medium” or even the “real subject”45 of the painting. The functional versatility of the painted architecture changes with the period. In the late Middle Ages, for instance, the architectura picta structured, first of all, the space according to the narration (neglecting the integrity and architectural feasibility of the painted structures). Over time painted architecture moved from designing a temporal and spatial frame containing an autonomous window closed on itself, to integrating the narrative project of the picture. Owing to the laws of perspective, it thus became a fundamental element for the picture (together with the figures). Then, in the sixteenth century, medieval architectural frames increasingly began to connect to the real space, through fictitious solutions. In this case, in which the painted architecture appears as a sort of interface, works of art (mostly wall paintings) were structured to respond to specific contextual and structural obligations. For instance, they were in keeping with the spatial frame for which they were designed, thus defining site-specific painted architectures. This situation, widespread46 in the Italian Renaissance (in a moment when painted construction became a fundamental parameter of pictorial compositions), has meant that the depicted architecture turned into the pictorial extension 45 In the history of painted architecture, consider the three paintings depicting the Ideal City, by an anonymous Florentine author of the school of Giuliano da Sangallo. 46 That is even more evident if one considers the permeability of the arts in the Renaissance period – a cultural context where not only the artists shared competences, but where the ontological borders of the significant forms of representation (painting, sculpture and architecture) were easily crossed.

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of a real structure. 47 The use of painted architecture as a visual device integrating a two-dimensional image within a three-dimensional structure has subsequently revealed its essential aesthetic function. This last condition finds its momentum when the depicted architecture becomes the very subject of the painting, as in the case of sketches and projects for frescoes and other decorations such as those of Giandomenico Tiepolo (Project of Decoration for the Top of the Door of the Throne Room of the Royal Palace in Madrid, 1762–1764) or Gianantonio Pellegrini (the sketch The Triumph of Aurora was created for the ceiling decoration of the hall of the Mannheim Baroque Palace, 1730–1737). The aesthetic and stylistic contribution of the painted architecture appears widely even when it plays the role of a device for the harmonious organisation of the painting’s tale. As an instrument to direct the gaze of a prospective onlooker, architecture, as well as landscape compositions, has often played a part in subdividing the pictorial space and in building micro narratives within the painted frame. Precise architectural elements, such as façades, loggias, windows, porches, doorways, stairways and gates, focus the narrative climax of the painting, framing the main scene inside a structural unit (as shown by Masaccio, Giotto, or Piero Della Francesca). These structures also draw a specific diegetic temporality that directs and articulates the reading of the painting by dividing the space into successive or simultaneous stages. In this respect, the Venetian views of Carpaccio are a clear example of this. In the painting The Arrival of British Ambassadors from the King of Brittany (1495–1496), respectively a porch, followed by a loggia and an open interior organise the pictorial space in a specific temporal and narrative sequence. The depicted space reveals itself through the intricate relationship between the inner and the outer place. Within these connected environments, the stairway, in the right corner of the canvas, acts as a device directing the gaze. Through a fluid displacement, from a public location to a domestic one, an intimate scene then appears, staged in a furnished room where a small icon is hanging on the wall. As a painted tale (“récit peint”), here Carpaccio organised a kind of theatrical pièce, or better still, a “performed painting”48 with which he told a story. Of course, in this case, we cannot yet talk about exhibition space. The icon hanging on the wall of the private room indicates merely the fitting habits of the time instead. Carpaccio represents the icon 47 It should also be remembered that painted architecture was the way for many artists to imagine structures and buildings that were impossible to realise. 48 Ludovico Zorzi, Carpaccio e la Rappresentazione di Sant’Orsola (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 28.

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more for a decorative wish that falls within its almost theatrical practice of organising the pictorial space. Seen as a theatre prop, the image was thus chosen by Carpaccio “to characterise a young woman’s room in a simple, ordinary and obvious way for Venetian viewers [of the time]”. 49 Another example of the diegetic potential of architecture can be found in The Miracle of the Madonna, painted by Giovanni di Pedrino in 1450. The painting relates the circumstances that led to a miracle (a picture of the Virgin surviving a f ire in 1428 in the cathedral of Forlì) thanks to a spatial organisation suggesting the temporal succession of events. Within three neighbouring scenes, representing the “before”, “during” and “after” of the historical fact, the moment of the installation on the wall of the Madonna of the Fire woodcut is the focus of the painting. Inside a unique image, architectural structures play, here, the role of specif ic backgrounds for each scene, by marking spatial and temporal boundaries. The role played by architecture affects here the symbolic quality of the structural unit. “The architecture in a painting is itself an annunciation, announcing the subject of the picture in a very concrete way.”50 Thus, the demarcation of spatial portions through the use of precise architectural units is not merely a way to articulate the time and space of the narrative but is often a symbolic and diegetic means. Architecture turns so into a form of figurative language that symbolically stresses the spatial relationship between the different components while it intensif ies the painted scene. In short, the pictorial composition of an interior or exterior space appears not only as a mere background welcoming the represented scene. Since empty, filled or separated spaces emphasise distances, feelings and actions, architecture ends up acting as a functional and formal plurality that actively participates in the syntactic, semiotic and symbolic conception of the painting. From the domestic walls of interiors filled with paintings to the public squares connected to historical places and events, up to the glimpses of interiors of churches, the idea of the depicted exhibition space turned finally into a kind of sub-group of the epistemological category of the architectura picta. 49 Ibid., 62. Carpaccio’s example unveils not only Venetian Renaissance habits but also Florentine and Roman ones, where the middle bourgeoisie made different use of painting, sculpture and other items. Mostly used as devotional devices, these artefacts were exhibited in bedrooms (like tabernacles) and also in shops or taverns. See Donal Cooper, “Devotion”, in Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (eds.), At Home in Renaissance Italy, 190–203. 50 Amanda Lillie, “Entering the Picture”, in Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting.

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2.4 Early Exhibition Design Precepts and Treatises Paintings, sculptures, inscriptions, sometimes even natural rarities and curiosities, not to mention the relics: before the creation of the museums, all this was offered to view in churches and public buildings. On the other hand, […] the private buildings, placed under the eye, on their decorated façades, frescoes, busts, statues. […] Churches and public buildings are, therefore, places of collections: wholes of natural or artificial objects, kept temporarily or forever out of the economic activity circuit, subjected to special protection of a closed and equipped place for this purpose, and exposed to the eye. These collections are public: they do not belong to an individual, but to an institution, and most importantly, they are open to both everyone or only certain visitors, as appropriate. Thus contemporary authors distinguished them from private collections […] Because in the XVI–XVIII centuries […] private collections actually had a semi-public character. Often constituting the object of monographs or printed catalogues, they were also described or mentioned in the guides or in works that discussed the most remarkable things of the different cities.51

In Renaissance literature up to eighteenth-century artistic historiography, texts devoted entirely to practices of organising items within a defined space are not numerous. Among the most studied, and those preceding the publication of Kaspar Freiderich Neickel, Museographia (Lispia, 1727), we can mention: the Inscriptiones Vel Tituli Theatri Amplissimi … by Samuel Quiccheberg (Antwerp, 1565),52 De Pittura veterum by Franciscus Junius (Amsterdam, 1637), Graphice by William Sanderson (London, 1658), Unvorgreiffliches Bedenckenvon Kunst, und NaturalienKammern insgemein by Johann Daniel Major (Kiel, 1674),53 Museum Museorum … by Michael 51 Krzysztof Pomian, “Antiquari e Collezionisti nel Cinquecento”, in Girolamo Arnaldi and Manilio Pastore Stocchi (eds.), Storia della cultura veneta, Vol. 4: Dalla Controriforma alla fine della Repubblica. Il Seicento (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1983), 493–547. 52 The treatise provides readers with a catalogue of all things composing the universe, and instructions for organising such a collection. Thus, he divides the world into five classes which are themselves divided into f ifty-three inscriptions. The short book also contains a chapter discussing theatre-related spaces such as libraries, ateliers and reserves; another section which provides advice on the means of assembling objects and arranging them; and then another which quotes some princely collections as examples. 53 Twenty plates with illustrations explaining the individual’s need to collect, advising us on how to organise and maintain a collection. It lists about forty terms used in various languages (Greek, Latin, Italian, French, English, German) to describe the places of the collections. See Eva Schultz, “Notes on the History of Collecting and of Museums: In the Light of Selected Literature

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Bernhard Valentini (Frankfurt, 1704)54 and the Traicté de la decoration intérieure55 (1717) by Nicodemus Tessin. However, especially in the seventeenth century, precepts56 on the theme of the exhibition setup, providing rules for spatial organisation, appeared in architectural,57 historical and artistic literature. Many of them were not taken into consideration at the time, mainly because of the innovation they suggested. These were the reflections of scholars or private collectors who went against the seventeenth-century habit of placing intellectual and social power on exhibition. Instead of exalting or theorising principles of the practice of the encrustation58 setup, these precepts aimed to identify order, programming and symmetry in displays, and to pursue cataloguing and exhibiting logic according to painting genres and preset places. Moreover, these precepts often associated epistemological principles (the categorisation of the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century”, Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1990): 205–218. 54 Conceived, as the title suggests, as a Museum of Museums, this treaty is a kind of museumbook. In this encyclopaedic work, illustrated with numerous engravings, M. B. Valentini reproduces texts in full, such as that of Johann Daniel Major. He compiles things composing the universe (including 159 museums known at the time), explains their usefulness and describes natural history collections, including his own. See Wendell E. Wilson, “Fifty-Four Early Mineral Collection Catalogs”, Axis, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2006): 19–20. 55 A Swedish architect’s treatise, this is still today one of the most signif icant texts about the decoration of late seventeenth-century buildings. Based on the travels that the architect made to Rome between 1673 and 1688, the document offers an archive, among various topics, of the tapestries in Italian and European homes. Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, “Traicté de la decoration intérieure” (1717), in Patricia Waddy (ed.), Nicodemus Tessin the Younger: Sources, Works, Collections, Vol. II (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2002). 56 See Cristina de Benedictis, “Sui criteri di disposizione, decorazione e arredo degli spazi interni e sulle modalità di allestimento dei dipinti e dei disegni”, in Per la storia del collezionismo italiano. Fonti e documenti (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie editori, 1991), 97–108; Jannick Daniel Aquilina, “Muséologie et muséographie: la Tour de Babel ou les origines de la confusion”, Muséologies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2009): 42–61; François Mairesse and André Desvallée, “Brève histoire de la muséologie, des Inscriptions au Musée virtuel”, in Pierre Alain Mariaux (ed.), L’objet de la muséologie (Neuchâtel: Institut d’histoire de l’art et de muséologie, 2005), 1–53. 57 See in particular the Dutch Renaissance architect, painter and engineer Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527–c.1607) who extensively wrote on architecture (1562), ornaments (1565), garden design (1583), and perspective (1606). Jan Vredeman de Vries, Variæ architecturæ formæ (Antwerp), Hieronymus Cock (1562), now online: https://archive.org/details/variaearchitectu00vred/page/n9/ mode/2up (23/08/2022); Das ander Buech, gemacht auff die zway Colonnen, Corinthia und Composita … (Antwerp), Hieronymus Cock (1565); Hortorum viridariorvmque elegantes et multiplices formae … (Antwerp), Philippe Galle (1583); Architectura Die köstliche unnd Weitberumbte khunst welche besteht in fünfferley Art der Edifitien … (The Hague), Hendrik Hondius (1606). 58 The term defines the seventeenth-century habit of covering the whole wall with paintings. See Cristina de Benedictis, Per la storia del collezionismo italiano. Fonti e documenti, 101.

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of paintings by genre, historical context, school) with architectural ones (structure of spaces, functionality, roles), with an attempt to represent intellectual thought through the collection. This was the case, for example, with Giovanni Battista Armenini’s De’ veri precetti della pittura (Precepts of Painting), published in 1586, two years after the public opening of the Uffizi in Florence. The Italian art historian travelled extensively, gaining knowledge of artistic trends in sixteenth-century Italy. Therefore, his document offers today a key to understanding the habits and conventions around exhibiting paintings, depending on specific subjects and spaces, above all in the section dedicated to “the distinction and convenience of paintings according to the places and qualities of the people”.59 In the text, Armenini did not limit himself to dealing with the practical and technical aspects of drawing and painting, but sought to legitimise the very figure of the painter within the society of the time. In doing so, he offered various and precise indications on paintings of religious and civil buildings by analysing contemporary examples. Especially in the third volume, he associated typical Renaissance exhibiting places with specific paintings, organised by genre. For instance, in the loggia – the special architectural unit “commonly situated before the halls” – Armenini suggested installing decorations and subjects not bound by precise iconographic programmes, but “joyful things inspiring wealth and ornament”.60 If we consider the architectural nature of the loggia and the use made at the time, Armenini’s reasons are explicit. Since the loggia is a space to be experienced in movement (and not so much suited to contemplation), the works installed inside must suggest a dynamic rhythm capable of accompanying the individual. Basically, Armenini’s text is an atlas of carefully depicted exhibition spaces: tribunes, vaults (for which he analysed “their variety and forms, which way should be adopted in relation to the places where they are made and which types of figures are good for them”),61 chapels, libraries, religious cells, church façades, palace halls,62 loggias, walls of rooms and external 59 “Della distinzione e convenienza delle pitture secondo i luoghi e le qualità delle persone.” Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura (1586), ed. by Marina Gorreri (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 169. 60 “Non é dubbio che le logge, le quali sono fabricate o siano nel gran palagi o nelle case private e siano a qualsivoglia qualità di persone, che, così come servono a diversi usi et a varie comodità, così diverse sorti a materie di pitture sono da essere ricercate per quelle.” Ibid., 200. 61 “La varietà e forme loro; che modo si de’ tenere rispetto a i luoghi ove son fabricate e quali maniere di figure vi stiano bene”. Ibid., 181. 62 “Ma perché de’ palagi le prime parti sono le sale, si come luoghi più publichi, più capaci e più frequentati degli altri, e quello é per dove agiatamente si raccolgono i signori e vi si raduna la moltitudine, senza impedirsi l’un l’altro; e perciò le pitture che vi si fanno devono essere di

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façades, gardens and villas (of which he analysed above all living rooms and bedrooms). Finally, what emerges in this text is his approach to treating the specificity of each space and work, their relationship and their role as constitutive parameters of spatial organisation. About forty years after Armenini’s treatise, a text that shows with even greater clarity the progressive awareness of the time towards the act of exhibiting inside a specific place is the tenth chapter of Giulio Mancini’s essay, Considerazioni sulla pittura63 (Considerations on Painting), published in 1620. Meant for scholars, art experts and traders, the text establishes a series of rules and precepts regarding the history of the art system and, in particular, the use of painting. Not surprisingly, Mancini begins his treatise as follows: “[M]y intention […] is to propose and consider some warnings for which a man of similar studies can easily give judgment to paintings, know how to buy them, and place them in their places.”64 In the tenth chapter, Mancini sought to define criteria for innovative and experimental organisation of the space. In addition to classifying rooms according to the specific paintings’ genre, he also proposed a historiographical model based on schools and epochs, which would then be reactivated within the first museum forms of the early nineteenth century. He insisted on the idea that every work (and subject) belongs to a specific place and is thus defined by several criteria, among which, first of all, public accessibility stands out.65 cose magnifiche e per tal maniera, ch’elle rappresentino il calore e le virtù eroiche de gli uomini, che sono stati meritevoli et illustri.” Ibid., 200. 63 Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (1620), ed. by Adriana Marucchi and Luigi Salerno, Vol. 1 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1956). The essay has been studied and analysed several times for its ability to translate the passage from Mannerism to Classicism. For an extensive bibliography, see Cristina de Benedictis and Roberta Roani, Riflessioni sulle “regole per comprare, collocare e conservare le pitture” di Giulio Mancini (Florence: Edifir, 2005). 64 “l’intenzion mia… è di proporre e considerar alcuni avvertimenti per i quali un huomo di diletto di simili studij possa con facilità dar giuditio delle pitture propostegli, saperle comprar, acquistar et collocarle ai lor luoghi.” Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (1620), 5, note 3. 65 Starting from the Council of Trent, a genre of religious literary works developed providing indications on what was and was not permissible for artists to paint. These treatises, such as that of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura e architettura, and that of Domenico Ottonelli and Pietro da Cortona, Trattato della pittura e scultura, uso et abuso loro (1652), distinguished between public and private rooms and indicated the type of images allowed for display. Among these, the Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (1582), while remaining a treatise by an ecclesiastic who discusses the value of sacred and secular images, is one of the most studied today. In our context, the treatise offers multiple insights into the practices of the time regarding the relationship between pictures and dedicated rooms. For instance, Paleotti emphasises how inconvenient it was to decorate public spaces with classical and pagan frescoes and paintings. See Stefano Della Torre (ed.), Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582) (Rome: Città del Vaticano, 2002);

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Therefore, whereas for drawings he suggested cataloguing them in books or putting them in secluded places for the “enjoyment of the watchers”, for each painting Mancini recommended an appropriate place. For instance, landscapes and cosmographies: must be put in galleries and where anyone can go; lascivious Venus […] in garden galleries and secluded rooms […]. Civil paintings, or of peace or war, must be put in halls and antechambers where pass those who are waiting and staying to negotiate; so also the portraits of famous people […], of popes, cardinals, emperors, kings and other princes must be placed in these places where everyone can come. Those of Christ, of the Virgin, of the Saints, […] must be put in the antechamber and bedroom, while miniatures and small paintings of noble ornament at the head of the bed.66

In other words, Mancini placed each work in a specific space, based on the degree of visibility socially accorded to works. The need to make works more accessible thus implied a precise manner of exhibiting and an accurate choice of place to show them. In this sense, Mancini’s attention to the accessibility of collections reflects his ability to understand the changed condition of both the notion of collection and the idea of public and spectator. At the same time, attention to the identity of each image underlines the autonomy that the painting was progressively acquiring, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, abandoning its nature as decorative furnishing to become a historical source and means to study and interpret the history of art. Finally, Mancini’s reflections highlight an almost conceptual dialogue between work and place, which is completed with the technical analysis of the places, the study of works’ conservation needs and an understanding of the functional and social hierarchy of each venue. The result is an ordered Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura; Domenico Ottonelli and Pietro da Cortona, Trattato della pittura e scultura, uso et abuso loro (Florence: nella stamperia di Gio. Antonio Bonardi, 1652). 66 “si metteranno alle gallerie e dove puol andare ognuno; le lascive, come Veneri […] e donne ignude, nelle gallerie dei giardini e camere terrene ritirate […]. Quelle d’attion civili, o di pace o di guerra, se Devon mettere nelle sale e anticamere dove è il passeggio di quelli che s’aspettano e si trattengono per negotiare; così anco i ritratti di personaggi illustri […], così i ritratti di pontefici, Cardinali, imperatori, re et altri principi si devono mettere in questi luoghi dove é lecito venire ad ognuno, dove ancora si possono mettere le imprese, gli emblemi e simil altre pitture. Quelle di Christo, della Vergine, dei Santi, et insomma le sacre si metteranno per l’anticamera e camera dove si dorme, et a capo il letto le miniature e quadri piccoli di nobil ornamento.” Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (1620), 5.

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layout arranged for genres and chronology dialoguing with the decorative and iconographic apparatus of the place. This type of structuring67 is also found in Cassiano Dal Pozzo’s precepts,68 and above all, in the letter69 that he wrote in 1629 to Agnolo Galli. Here, the secretary of Cardinal Francesco Barberini insisted on the need to outdistance70 artworks, and to arrange them at eye-level in order to prevent them from vanishing into the confusing setup. However, he also proposed an installation for pictorial genres to interchange ancient perspectives with modern landscapes. In this case, the attention paid to the works of Dal Pozzo is an indication not only of the artistic value assigned to painting but also of a precise didactic intent that tried to move away from self-celebrating desire of the Renaissance. However, returning to Mancini, his didactic proposal was not taken into consideration at the time, but only in the second half of the eighteenth century, especially for the structuring of public art galleries. The causes71 of this lack of recognition are found, first, in the twofold role that Mancini allocates to the setup – both decorative and didactic – and, secondly, in the alternative proposal concerning the use of galleries. Indeed, with Mancini’s precepts, even though the various rooms of the building maintained the 67 Already in Leon Battista Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria, there was a subdivision distinguished by gender and places: “Ora, poiché la pittura, come la poesia, può trattare diversi argomenti: le gesta memorabili dei grandi monarchi, i costumi dei semplici cittadini, la vita dei contadini; il primo di questi tre generi, quello di maggior prestigio, si userà negli edifici pubblici e nelle case dei personaggi più ragguardevoli; il secondo si applicherà come ornamento alle pareti delle case private; l’ultimo meglio degli altri si applicherà ai giardini, per essere più piacevo li.” Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria (1443–1452), ed. by Giovanni Orlandi (Milan: Il Polif ilo, 1966), 804. 68 For more information on the role of Cassiano Dal Pozzo in the Roman collecting system, see Donatella L. Sparti, Le collezioni dal Pozzo. Storia di una famiglia e del suo museo nella Roma seicentesca (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1992); the four volumes: Cassiano Naturalista (Vol. 1), Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum (Vols. 2 and 3), The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo (Vol. 4). Series: Quaderni Puteani (Ivrea: Olivetti, 1993). The fourth volume is the catalogue of the exhibition organised in the Prints and Drawings Gallery of the British Museum in London (14 May to 30 August 1993). See also Francesco Solinas (ed.), I segreti di un collezionista. Le straordinarie raccolte di Cassiano dal Pozzo 1588–1657, exh. cat., Galleria Borghese, Rome, 29 September – 26 November 2000 (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2001). 69 Letter from Cassiano Dal Pozzo to Agnolo Galli, Rome, 1 September 1629, in Sheila Rinehart, “Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657): Some Unknown Letters”, Italian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1961): 35–59, [53]. 70 Dal Pozzo anticipates the same concerns as Ruskin and Eastlake, of the following centuries, on the set-up of artworks at the National Gallery in London. 71 Cristina de Benedictis and Roberta Roani, Riflessioni sulle “regole per comprare, collocare e conservare le pitture” di Giulio Mancini.

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layout habits of the Baroque palace, the gallery 72 lost its traditional role of fulcrum, instead becoming the place to store surplus works. But when these places are not enough due to the abundance of the paintings, then […] a gallery can be made in a comfortable lighted place, beaten by the north wind and protected from Scirocco and, there, left-over paintings will be placed according to genres, the period when they were painted and the school to which they can be affiliated.73

Mancini did not conceive the distinction between private venues and representative environments, as could be found in the Italian Baroque palaces, but organised spaces according to didactic intents. His attempt, as well as that of Armenini at the end of the sixteenth century, was indeed to offer an alternative to the habit of the time of dressing up buildings: Not only in Rome, Venice, and other parts of Italy, but also in Flanders and in France, nowadays it has become a habit of adorning buildings with paintings, varying the use of the sumptuous vestments used in the past, in Spain, and in summer; and this new custom still pays great favour to the sale of painters’ works.74 72 As early as 1509–1510, Jacopo Probo d’Atri described to Isabella d’Este the gallery of the French castle of Gaillon as a: “galaria live logia […] dove per maggior ornamento sono messe tre statue di marmore”. Letter of Jacopo d’Atri to Isabella d’Este, quoted by Roberto Weiss, “The Castle of Gaillon in 1503–10”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. XVI (1953): 1–12, [7]. However, the term gallery appears for the first time in the Italian Vocabulario della Crusca, in 1623: “Piniera: Edificio alla francese, forse quello, che eglino oggi chiamano Gallléria”. The French origin of the gallery has already been studied several times, see Wolfram Prinz, Die Entstehung der Galerie in Frankreich und Italien. In 1691, the term gallery definitively enters the third edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca as: “Stanza da passeggiare, e dove si tengono pitture, statue, e altre cose di pregio”. In the third edition, the term museum also appears for the first time, understood as a: “galleria: raccolta di cose insigni per eccellenza, o per rarità”. Vocabolario della Crusca, 3rd ed. (1691), http://www.lessicografia.it/ricerca_libera.jsp (23/08/2022). 73 “Ma quando questi luoghi non bastino per l’abbondanza delle pitture, allhora, perché con questa abbondanza di pitture vi é la ricchezza et commodità d’edificare, si potrà fare una galleria in luogo commodo et di lume et aria buona, e battuta da tramontana e parata da scirocco, et in quella si porran tutte le pitture che saranno avanzate alle sale e camere, collocarle secondo le materie, il modo del colorito, il tempo nel quale sono state fatte e della schuola secondo la quale sono state condotte.” Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (1620), 5. 74 “Non solo in Roma, in Venezia, en in altre parti d’Italia, ma anche in Fiandra ed in Francia modernamente si é messo in uso di parare i palazzi compitamente co’ quadri, per andare variando l’uso dei paramenti sontuosi usati per il passato, massime in Spagna, e nel tempo dell’estate; e questa nuova usanza porge anco gran favore allo spaccio dell’opere de’ pittori.” See Collection of Letters on Painting, Sculpture and Architecture Written by the Most Famous Characters of the

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Beyond historical literature, various paintings too offer clues to the approach of the time concerning the display of artworks. Michele Ragolia’s painting, Interior of the Neapolitan Palace, of the mid-seventeenth century, shows a setup focused on visual symmetry. Here, the walls are covered with paintings arranged according to their format and following a “varied symmetry”75 structured on the visual correspondence between works, walls and architecture in general. Similarly, two paintings by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, Musical Entertainment at the Spinet and Interior View of a Gallery with a Painter (circa 1668–1670), further highlight the search for visual balance in the installation of paintings on walls. However, in that case, the symmetry is highlighted through its related disturbance. Indeed, paintings are hung not in a linear row but without denying their specific formats. Thus, they seem to reflect the idea that it is “only when extreme emphasis is desired that the picture is likely to be isolated or placed […] between symmetrical converging features: pictures hung in a row tend to lose their individual identities”.76 In Ragolia’s painting, as in the first of the Schönfeld pair, exhibiting order prevails over pictorial genre (religious scenes, landscapes, portraits), and the balance of the wall thus becomes a structural and stylistic factor prevailing over the iconographic programme. Schönfeld’s second painting, which represents a painter’s atelier, highlights the same symmetrical play while, however, it records a more disused and disorderly setting-up, especially as regards the statues that flank the perimeter of the room. Another example, from the early eighteenth century – Marco Ricci’s paintings, Rehearsal of an Opera (1708) – in addition to staging two Italian operas, places the scene within a theatre-like room by showing three paintings symmetrically hanging from the wall. Besides, Gabriel Bella’s painting, Mascherata in un palazzo Veneziano, also from the eighteenth century, records, once again, the same symmetrical approach and the consequently visual balance of the entire environment. This approach towards a stylistic and symmetrical layout is also echoed in other sources of the time, especially letters and travel reports, in which faults in typical Baroque settings are highlighted. One case is the comment made by the French politician Charles de Brosses after visiting Palazzo Borghese in 1740: XV, XVI and XVII Centuries, published by Monsignor Giovanni Bottari, and continued to this day by Stefano Ticozzi (Milan: Appresso Niccolò e Marco Pagliarini, 1822), Vol. VI, Letter no. XXIV, “Letter from Vincenzo Giustiniani to Sir Teodoro Amideni”, 129–134. 75 Cristina de Benedictis and Roberta Roani, Riflessioni sulle “regole per comprare, collocare e conservare le pitture” di Giulio Mancini, 105. 76 Ernst H. Gombrich, The Uses of Images, 114.

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The sole decoration in the rooms consists of pictures with which the four walls are covered from top to bottom in such profusion and with so little space between them that, to tell the truth, they are often more tiring than attractive to the eye. On the top of this, they spend hardly anything on frames, the majority of them being old, black, and shabby, and, for all the tremendous numbers they crowd in, they have to mix a fair quantity of mediocre works with the beautiful ones.77

Even more explicit is the letter of an English gentlewoman of 1771, in which the description of a Venetian residence highlights defects in the Baroque almost theatrical ostentation: The Venetians cover their walls with paintings and think that houses are not completely furnished until they have filled all the available spaces from the ceiling to the floor, completely hiding the wallpaper. Given this habit, one sees more bad paintings than good ones, and on entering a room, the number of paintings is such that only after careful examination one can understand which ones are worthy of attention, confused as they are in the chaos of colours dazzling surrounding them. Often, then, the best things are badly arranged, so much so that one can see at the bottom a picture that should be on top, while another that must be seen closely touches the cornice. This stems from their sole purpose of covering the walls; without ever paying attention to the light and other conditions that are more suited to a given painting.78

Finally, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, a dual condition prefigures. Alongside Baroque galleries, where walls were entirely covered with paintings hung side by side, other ways of exhibiting and other spaces emerged (thanks also to the disclosure of the treatises of the time). Especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, these new experiments (structural, conceptual and ontological) consolidated a new system of spaces that would then find a symbolic image in the architectural typology of the public museum. Heir to the first humanistic and Renaissance spaces of private 77 “Tout l’ornement des pièces consiste en tableaux, dont les quatre murailles sont couvertes du haut en bas, avec tant de profusion et si peu d’intervalle, qu’en vérité l’œil en est aussi souvent fatigué qu’amusé. Ajoutez à cela qu’ils ne font presque aucune dépense en bordures, la plupart des cadres étant vieux, noirs et mesquins, et que, pour y en mettre une si furieuse quantité, il faut bien mêler grand nombre de choses médiocres parmi les belles.” Charles de Brosses, Le Président de Brosses en Italie, Vol. II (Paris: P. Didier, 1869), 48. 78 Cristina de Benedictis, Per la storia del collezionismo italiano, 105.

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collecting (studioli and cabinets) and the subsequent metaphorical explosion of the collection in the image of the Baroque palace, the idea of exhibition space and its ontological definition implicitly came into being. In particular, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been pivotal moments of social development in which a form of representation in architectural renewal was put in place. Indeed, from the second half of the century, in a period in which, within “museums and large private collections […] walls were built or arranged to display works”,79 the main themes of social and public architecture arose, ending up participating in the definition of an equally public social conscience devoted, among other things, to the appropriation of the public space and its embellishment.

79 Krzysztof Pomian, “Antiquari e Collezionisti nel Cinquecento”.

3.

(Domestic) Interiors Abstract: This chapter dwells on inner spaces and focuses on the house as the first space for the exhibition of social self-representation. It insists on the hybridisation of the public/private dyad and the ancient habit of “dressing up spaces” to commemorate political, social and religious events. It traces the dawn of the first exhibition practices in these events. It thus analyses Italian noble palaces and Dutch burghers’ dwellings. Also, it discusses the ideas of aesthetic promenade and the performativity of setting up, the definition of an early museography stemmed from the desire to educate the visitors’ gaze, on the role of collecting in the evolution of exhibition practices and the transformation of the architecture of collecting. Keywords: history of collecting, house, setup, display, aesthetic experience, architecture

Starting from the Italian sixteenth century, a complex interplay took place between the form, the function and the use of early modern dwellings, their interiors, their architecture and decoration, and the works of art displayed there. Sometimes, the works of art on display affected the spaces in which they were seen or for which they were made, altering their structures and forms. Often, paintings, sculptures and other objects reflected upon the social meanings of the specific space, helping define the social activities taking place there, and the social meaning and image the owner wanted to show off. Façade, sala nobile, portego, private apartments, central hall, were organised following a symbolic setting-up where artworks often played the metaphorical role of theatrical devices.

Bianchi, P., The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450–1750). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463728676_ch03

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3.1 Dressing Up Environments: From Representative Spaces to Exhibition Rooms Ancient and modern dress: in the matter of dressing rooms, the ancients win in some instances and we in others. They are victorious in the decoration of baths, gold and silver vases, columns, and marble panelling. If we are not equal to them in the working of floors, ceilings, pavements, and sumptuous chairs, then we are only a little behind. We win in silk and gold tapestries, carpets, doors, tables, pottery […], and paintings.1

One of the first manifestations of the relationship between dwelling and exhibiting can be found in Vitruvius’s De Architettura, which, among the various places composing the house, described the tablinum as the room decorated with paintings (tabulas). The tablinum was often associated with the atrium, with respect to both its role and its position within the home. Decorated with images, inscriptions and portraits, it was the room intended for the commemoration and exaltation of the family.2 Other “special” rooms dedicated to the display of the family’s image and its goods were widespread even in the Middle Ages. For instance, in the mid-fourteenth century, in Venice, it was recorded that: “The Falaier family had received as a gift from Marco Polo some objects that the traveller had, in turn, received as a gift in China: […] a member of the same house, Marin Falaier, continued to keep these gifts in one of his residences together with two tabulae […], precious objects and […] excavation objects.”3 The quotation refers to the rubea, a room in the Falaier Palazzo, which, at least until 1351, seems to have been used not as a warehouse but as a private place to study, contemplate and store precious objects. This habit of dedicating a room to objects of various kinds was of course already widespread in the late Middle Ages and often linked to the layout of cabinets and studioli. The latter, far from being simple spaces of private knowledge, were mostly considered spaces where sociability was exhibited. Both objects displayed (diplomatic gifts, devotional tools, collected works) and social activities organised within the studioli indicate how this private space also maintained a public dimension. Intended as an “artwork” space 1 Alessandro Tassoni, “Pensieri”, in Pietro Puliatti (ed.), Pensieri e scritti preparatori, 888. 2 See Annapaola Zaccaria Ruggiu, Spazio Privato e spazio pubblico nella città romana (Rome: École française de Rome, 1995), 387. 3 Claudio Franzoni, “Le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità”, in Salvatore Settis (ed.), Memorie dell’antico nell’arte Italiana, Vol. I (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 304–305.

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in which the contemplation of the single object gives room to the phenomenological experience of an overall vision, the studioli showed: “not only the picture in the frame but also the framed picture within a larger environment”. 4 However, the origins of the exhibition practices and structural paradigms that preside over the idea of the exhibition space should not be sought in the ancient procedure of turning some rooms into pure and simple display places. Rather, the origins should be considered through the lens of the interrelation of several factors (architectural, social, personal, symbolic) that concern, first, the idea of ​​housing 5 as a unified complex. From the microcosm of the studiolo to the macrocosm of the palace the aesthetic organisational approach to environments was often the same. The balance and symmetry in the arrangement of the assets had the primary purpose of visually translating a precise condition, whether it was mostly linked to knowledge (for the studiolo) or economic and social power (for the entire building). However, at least until the end of the fifteenth century, the arrangement of the whole building was above all dictated by a precise balance between different types of aesthetic and practical/technical requirements like, for instance, the problem of heating rooms. That is why, while paintings mostly embellished galleries and passageways (which did not need to be heated, being places of temporary passage), parati,6 textiles or tapestries wholly covered walls of socially more active rooms – like the throne room or the audience hall – and thus protected these environments from the cold. Similarly, early spaces where paintings and other artefacts began to be installed were linked to the need to accompany and delight the eye during long walks in internal galleries, gardens or external courtyards. This habit, already highlighted by Vitruvius’s ambulationes – long and narrow covered promenades, internal and external – which were propitious to walking and decorated with statues, rapidly spread in palatial Rome of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.7 In this case, the almost phenomenological relationship between space and body became the vector of a performative attitude: “the first galleries in private houses were created for walking, paintings were hung on the walls of these interiors to give people something to 4 Gail Feigenbaum (ed.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 13. 5 See the International Symposium Museums as Houses: Houses as Museums, organised by the Wallace Centre, London, 12–13 September 2014. 6 Parati: coordinate suites of textiles, in sets typically of twelve to forty panels plus columns, friezes and trimmings. 7 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. by Ingrid D. Rowland, Book VII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5, 2.

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watch while they were walking”.8 Besides, those venues were spaces where one could exercise9 to keep fit and thus respond, especially for prelates and other members of the clergy, to a sedentary life. Seventeenth-century Roman galleries were preferred spaces for exercising, especially to avoid some of the disadvantages of outdoor exercise such as bad weather and steep terrain. This habit also explains the practice of decorating galleries and rooms where people used to walk with landscape paintings, to emulate the outdoors and the natural environment. “By adorning galleries with landscape paintings, patrons and collectors transposed outdoor conditions to indoor settings that could be used year-round, creating an effective substitute […] for an open outdoor space in which to exercise body, mind and eyes.”10 Following these habits, two watercolours from 1709, attributed to the architect Andrea Francesco Nicoletti,11 show the structural, hierarchical and decorative layout of a typical Roman late Baroque palace, identified12 as Palazzo Massimi-Carafa, in Rome: Sezione di un palazzo con carrozza and Sezione di un palazzo con tavolo per banchetti e baldacchino [Section of a Palace with Carriage and Section of a Palace with Banquet Table and Canopy]. These drawings (which belong to a group of five) represent two architectural levels and an underground carriage house, depicted only in the first watercolour. On the first floor (the piano nobile),13 walls are entirely covered with tapestries, and two portraits (sovraporta) are displayed above the two diametrically opposite doors,14 on the left and the right of the room. 8 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 100–101. 9 For an in-depth study about the relation between space, mental and physical health and art, see Frances Gage, Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), above all the chapter “Walking in the Gallery”, 82–85. 10 Ibid., 84. 11 The most truthful attribution is that of Carlo Pietrangeli, Il museo di Roma. Documenti e iconografia (Rome: Cappelli Editore, 1971), 64. See also Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco, La festa a Roma: dal Rinascimento al 1870, Vol. 2 (Turin, Rome, Milan: Allemandi, 1997), 142; Barberini Maria Giulia et al., Life and the Arts in the Baroque Palaces of Rome: Ambiente Barocco, exh. cat., New York, 1999 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1999), 222–223. 12 See Carlo Pietrangeli, Il museo di Roma. 13 The noble floor (piano nobile) was the primary floor of the palace, dedicated to entertainment and public reception. It derives from the habit, begun during the Italian Renaissance, of raising the main living areas usually immediately above the basement or ground floor. The latter was reserved for more utilitarian, service-oriented purposes. The noble floor was more elegantly decorated and had higher ceilings than the rooms on the other floors of the building. 14 In the stately homes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the habit of putting paintings (sovraporta) over the door was a widespread practice.

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The second floor shows instead a less magniloquent but equally decorated space. There, the tapestries have disappeared, and in their place, there are two rows of paintings, probably landscapes, and a geometric wallpaper that completely covers the outside walls of the composition. Not yet considered as ekphrastic15 works, artefacts (paintings, sculptures, tapestries, fabrics, objects, furniture) continued to play an ornamental or symbolic role. This condition is even clearer if one considers that they were frequently designed to be inserted within an already well-defined ornamental and structural layout, according to the decorative and representative needs of each environment,16 and were often preserved and stocked in the guardaroba (wardrobe). The latter, traditionally located on the top floor of the building, in one of the last rooms, was used to “store furnishings, textiles, works of art, and more generally anything not currently displayed in the rooms of the palace”,17 and thus helps to clarify the functional nature of the works at that time. Indeed, before the first rooms (galleries) had been established inside palaces to accommodate collections, all the collecting artefacts were positioned inside the entire building according to a display logic much closer to the visual metaphor of underlying messages. In other words, they were mostly used as decorative elements for “dressing up”18 interior spaces and architectural exteriors. The metaphorical image of dressing up buildings echoes, here, the symbolic correspondence between the home and its owner. Indeed, being the architectural portrait of its owner, the house had to be dressed, adorned and staged to create an environment suitable for translating the solemn image of its proprietor during public or private events. This correspondence, between body and building and more specifically between house and owner, 15 Detailed description of a work of visual art used as a literary device. See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. by E. Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 [1990]). 16 See Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 111–138 and Luca Basso Peressut (ed.), I luoghi del museo. Tipo e forma fra tradizione e innovazione (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1985), 41–85, [41]. 17 The term guardaroba was also used to def ine the man in charge of the wardrobe, who, among other responsibilities, was in charge of compiling registers or drawing up the inventory of property. The study of these registers and their comparative analysis has allowed us to get an idea of the position of goods in connection with the places where they were displayed. See Barbara Furlotti, “Evidence: The Registers of the Guardaroba”, and Guido Rebecchini, “Evidence: Inventories”, in Gail Feigenbaum (ed.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 25–26, 27–28; Mark Rosen, The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy: Painted Cartographic Cycles in Social and Intellectual Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 18 See the research programme “Vestire i Palazzi” (Vatican Museums, Getty Research Institute, La Sapienza University, 2014).

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stemmed from classical writers such as Vitruvius, even if it was mainly elaborated in Italy 19 by Renaissance theorists such as Vincenzo Scamozzi: “As with a man’s face, one must be able to understand that it is the house of a gentleman from these external signs.”20 Similarly, in the Baroque age,21 there was no possibility of presenting a bare or unclothed dwelling: “no more the whitewashed plaster of a wall should be visible than the naked body of the proprietor”.22 This correspondence also echoes the etymological roots of the term “display”, which connects it to the art of fabrics. From the medieval Latin displicare,23 the act of displaying meant initially “to unfold” and has been connected to the practice, widespread throughout the Renaissance and 19 Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while in Italy creativity was reaching its pinnacle, Northern Europe (above all Germany and the Netherlands) remained anchored to the late Gothic and subjected to Lutheran Reform. Although the Italian influence was felt, the artists would take Italian cues without any aesthetic and scientific awareness. The result was a mix of disparate elements, as suggested by Frans Hogenberg’s engraving, Mutinous Troops of the Army of Flanders Ransack the Grote Markt during the Sack of Antwerp (1576). Here, the leaning roof meets Italian stucco and pilasters. Also, in the Northern countries, at least throughout the fifteenth century, no architectural theory on perspective was drafted. Even less, the artists of the time were not interested in a faithful representation of space and the surrounding reality. On the contrary, they were more allured by the expressive power of painting and colour. Being subjected to the political and social climate of the Reform, the Nordic innovation appeared rather in genre paintings, landscapes and portraits, to the detriment of religious subjects. 20 Vincenzo Scamozzi, Dell’idea della Architettura Universale (1615) (Sala Bolognese: A. Forni, 1982), 255. Quoted by Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (eds.), At Home in Renaissance Italy, 12. “Nelle fasciate, e nel di dentro [le case de’ gentilhuomini di terraferma] tenghino qualche cosa del bello e gratioso […] accio da questi segni esteriori: come dalla faccia dell’huomo si possi comprendere, che sia casa da gentil’huomo.” The literature on the coincidence between house and owner is vast. See Charles Burroughs, The Italian Renaissance Palace Façade: Structures of Authority, Surfaces of Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Georgia Clarke, Roman House-Renaissance Palaces: Inventing Antiquity in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jérémie Koering, “Un’arte della cosmesi: le facciate dipinte del Palazzo Ducale di Mantova al tempo di Federico II”, in Francesca Mattei (ed.), Federico II Gonzaga e le arti (Rome: Bulzoni, 2016), 189–203; Monika Schmitter, “Odoni’s Façade: The House as Portrait in Renaissance Venice”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 66, No. 3 (2007): 294–315. 21 See the case of Vincenzo Giustiniani, who refused to sell, after his death, “paramenti of silk or corami or others that will be installed, and attached to the walls of the rooms of the Palace, so that the palace did not remain naked and bare” (acciò che non resti spogliato è nudo affatto). Archivio Giustiniani, busta 10, Inventario dell’eredità del Sig.r Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani (3 February 1638). See also Serenella Rolfi, “Cortine e tavolini. L’inventario Giustiniani del 1638 e altre collezioni seicentesche”, Dialoghi di Storia dell’arte, No. 6 (June 1998): 38–53. 22 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History, 11. 23 Gail Feigenbaum, “Displicare: The Material of Display”, in Alessandra Rodolfo and Caterina Volpi (eds.), Vestire i palazzi, 11.

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beyond, of unfolding tapestries and fabrics (canopies) to announce and proclaim the presence of kings, aristocrats or high prelates. This habit lasted over time, adapting to contextual evolutions, especially in the seventeenth century when a structural and aesthetic change took place concerning the creation of the first rooms dedicated to showing collections. At that moment of transition, mostly in Italy, palaces normally had three typical chambers: one for social life and to receive friends, one “to appear” and one for family intimacy.24 The appearance of the “where to show themselves” room marks a turning point in understanding objects introduced in the domestic space, as of the same environment and its evocative function. Indeed, with this change, the primary function of the palace, as a place of residence, was replaced by the need to share publicly – in those specific rooms – the collections of paintings and antiquities which had now become of value to show. The artefacts first adorning the whole building ended up being moved to specific galleries likely to magnify their value and to symbolise the power of the collector. However, this does not mean that the rooms in the rest of the building were left bare. On the contrary, greater awareness about the aesthetic potential of environment displays introduced a specific logic to arrange and decorate spaces with artefacts, depending on their genre and value.25 The passage from a domestic space, not characterised by a precise role (if not the one linked to domestic functions), to a venue used for exhibiting purposes is also the vector describing the change in the aesthetic taste of the time, especially concerning the social value of the works. At the same time, this displacement of artefacts from an ordinary space to an exhibition one “consists in the loss by objects of the liturgical, ceremonial, decorative or utilitarian role which was originally theirs”26 and in the consequent acquisition of an aesthetic and artistic role. It is therefore an interrelation that mutually articulates the parameters of the relationship. Indeed, as soon as paintings and antiquities began to acquire the cultural value of works of art, as this same value could enrich the worth of the collection, the latter consequently became more and more public, and thus architecture design and aesthetic layouts of the palace began to be modified. Places of social representation (salons, antechambers, galleries), where collections were usually set up, began to be separated from domestic 24 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, Vol. I: Les structures du quotidien (Paris: A. Colin, 1979), 269. 25 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, 141. Many of the works involved in these spatial changes were both major and minor artworks. Pomian highlights how this change is registered above all in Venetian collecting. 26 Ibid., 298.

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and private environments, so access to these public spaces occurred in full autonomy, without requiring visitors to go through the house.27 This organisation then became a habit throughout seventeenth-century Italy, when rooms for paintings and antiquities were positioned so that visitors could not see any other spaces in the building than the exhibition ones. This idea of the house as a dynamic exhibition space, as well as the metaphorical image of the “dressed” home, objectified the building, which became, internally and externally, the first artefact to be shown. Thus the act of showing turned into a political, social and representative action motivated more by the desire to create a visual message and a symbolic image28 than to shape a conceptual and aesthetic narrative. Accordingly, within this sort of “display machine”, where and thanks to which owners presented themselves to society, the first image appearing to viewers and guests was that of a metaphorical topos: a place whose collection layout and architectural decoration were designed to show off, first and foremost, the social and intellectual power of the house owner. This condition was obviously linked to the idea that one had of the collection and the cultural artefact, and the use made of them at the time. It was precisely through: “the possession of objects, [that the individual] physically acquire[d] awareness, knowledge, and, through their display, symbolically achieve[d] the honour and reputation that all academics cultivate”.29 In this regard, the Renaissance concept of collection was still linked to the medieval one for which collecting objects and artefacts was a “projection towards the outside of the original primitive concept of possession as an ornament, with the consequent transition from movable and changeable to immovable and durable”.30 The idea of projecting one’s own power outward through the dramatisation of one’s possessions then became a habit, especially from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards. In that period, the custom of exhibiting, first antiquities and then paintings, shifted into a fundamental 27 The spaces were arranged hierarchically: the upper rooms of the building were often dedicated to private spaces so that they could be opened discretely, only to specific visitors. At the Palazzo Borghese in Rome, for example, the gallery of statues and paintings was separated from domestic spaces. Also, the first floor of Palazzo Barberini was dedicated to the collection, while the second floor was to private environments. See Patricia Waddy, Seventeeth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and Art of the Plan (New York, Cambridge, MA, London: The Architectural History Foundation/The MIT Press, 1990), 58–60. 28 Even if, throughout the history of exhibitions, inspiring and suggesting social and political messages were frequent practices, especially in the twenty century. 29 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature, 3. 30 Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1908), 7.

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means to demonstrate publicly “the magnificence […] and a way of asserting [the aristocracy’s] position”.31 In that context, it is above all the role of the exhibited artefact that changed, passing from an object representing an intrinsic value, memorial or cognitive, to an object with symbolic and metaphorical import. At that time, statues, jewels, stones, weapons or paintings often represented the symbol of diplomatic agreements or political negotiations, and they accordingly acquired prestige and value thanks to the one who offered and the one who received them. Given as a token of approval, these artefacts were therefore displayed in strategic rooms and positions – for instance at the forefront32 – to emphasise the political or social bond they represented. However, the possession of items came also to concern the aesthetic qualities and intellectual concepts that such objects transmitted. With a precise exhibition layout that took into account the symbolic value of the objects on display and the nature of each environment, the house ended up appearing as the ideal visual means to represent the status of the individual in the world and within society. It appeared to be the “architectural” portrait of its owner and, as such, a prominent place to show off. Not only the exemplary place to exhibit the magnificence of the owner, thanks to the staging of his/her material assets – that is, his/her collection – the house also rendered itself the matrix of private and public manifestations of the ideas of living and representing: The house is the place where everyone builds a sort of staging of daily action, a privileged space of memory and the accumulation of objects, a personal museum of the continuity of family genealogies and their legacies.33

That is to say, first, that the display logic was subordinated to the message the artefact had to symbolise, to the ways it performed the message and to 31 William Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception in the Antiquity Collections of LateRenaissance Rome”, 399. 32 See, for instance, the case of Diomede Carafa, Count of Maddaloni and counsellor to the King of Naples, who “proudly displayed in the courtyard of his palace in the neighbourhood of the Seggio di Nido in Naples the bronze horse’s head that he had received from Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1471”. Leah R. Clark, “Collecting, Exchange, and Sociability in the Renaissance studiolo”, 173. By the same author, see Collecting Art in the Italian Renaissance Court: Objects and Exchanges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 33 “la casa è il luogo dove ognuno costruisce una sorta di messa in scena dell’agire quotidiano, spazio privilegiato della memoria e dell’accumulo di oggetti, museo personale della continuità delle genealogie familiari e dei loro lasciti.” Luca Basso Peressut, “Spazi e forme dell’esporre tra cabinet e museo pubblico”, Engramma, No. 126 (April 2015), http://www.engramma.it/eOS/ index.php?id_articolo=2350 (23/08/2022).

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the manner in which it dialogued and engaged with viewers. Ultimately, the genesis and the history of objects can explain the multiple functions they performed over years, movements and societies, as in the specific case of the residences of the Roman Baroque aristocracy and the houses of the Flemish middle class.

3.2 Aesthetic Promenades in Italian Noble Palaces The house is the most perfect expression of the self34

The Renaissance Italian home was a central focus of social exchange, and its spatial arrangement was directed by a symbolic logic that allowed owners to shape their social image. At the same time, the quality and quantity of the interior and exterior decoration served to symbolise their intellectual power. Also, as a domestic context having a public function, the Renaissance house was neither public nor private, but a dynamic and hybrid space of sociability that linked these two spheres thanks to specific display practices. This condition became fundamental in the Baroque palaces, especially the Roman ones, which were rather considered devices, kinds of theatrical macchine35 whose architecture facilitated the setting up of artworks, goods and other artefacts. Moreover, in this context of dramatisation, owners often rethought their gestures and behaviours to achieve the primary intent – that is, impressing the guests. Visits to the palace frequently followed a precise and previously thought out schedule: the passage from one room to another involved a specific display logic of the collection which was sometimes correlated to the time that the visitors would spend in that room. Ultimately, to sublimate the guests’ experience, the display gesture was ritualised by performing the owners’ behaviours, dramatising the design of the rooms, and meticulously structuring the order of the visit.36 It is precisely in this 34 Marc Olivier, Psychology of the House [1972](London: Thames & Hudson, 1977). 35 Patricia Waddy, “Architecture for Display”, in Gail Feigenbaum (ed.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 31–40. 36 The literature on this topic is extensive and primarily concerns the idea of a performative gesture. To mention a few, see Barbara Furlotti, “The Performance of Displaying: Gesture, Behaviour and Art in Early Modern Italy”, Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2014): 1–13; Peter Gillgren and Marten Snickare (eds.), Performativity and Performance in Baroque Rome (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012); Michael J. Braddick (ed.), “The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives”, Past & Present, Vol. 203, suppl. 4 (2009); Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels (eds.), Theatricality in Early Modern Art and Architecture (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

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social context shaping the dwelling, and within the consequent display logic, aimed at conveying a precise image and message to the visitors, that we can recognise the appearance of early exhibition habits and spaces. Visitors experienced the art by moving along a path through differentiated spaces, along a course that might include stairs. And paintings, though unique works of art in themselves, were hung together to form a rich surface of colour and imagery comparable to the luxurious fabrics that otherwise would have decorated the walls.37

In this regard, Roman Baroque palaces38 are cases in point. The organisation of environments was mostly structured to welcome visitors, according to the idea of the spatial and aesthetic promenade.39 Visitors followed a succession of specially set environments, roaming around various spaces. Here, different aesthetic criteria and concepts, such as symmetry and varietas, were involved in the display apparatus. If the variety of the items was intended to delight the visitor with a varied iconographic programme, symmetry responded in turn to the visual need to balance the shapes of paintings or sculptures with the decorative rigour of the walls. The latter were mostly installed according to the balanced logic of a geometric grid, as recorded by Salvatore Colonnelli Sciarra’s watercolours, Prospetto della parete nord delle due sale superiori della Galleria Colonna and Prospetto della parete sud delle due sale superiori della Galleria Colonna [Design for the North and South Wall of the Colonna Gallery, Rome] (1730). 40 Although this is an eighteenth-century drawing, this perspective sketch records how a geometric display could set paintings according to their shape and genre, resulting in an orderly 37 Patricia Waddy, “Architecture for Display”, 40. 38 See Angela Marino, Abitare a Roma nel Seicento. I Chigi in città (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2017). 39 Since ancient Rome, the art of walking was considered a social and philosophical practice. In particular, wandering throughout the city was seen as an activity of delight, of spiritual value but, above all, an almost performative practice aimed at showing the social rank of the person who was walking. Indeed, although walking was significant, the “with whom walking” was more so. See Timothy M. O’Sullivan, Walking in Roman Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Over time, the idea of strolling began to be linked with architecture and the capability of certain spatial structures to suggest aesthetic experiences. 40 See Maria Cristina Paoluzzi, La collezione Colonna nell’allestimento settecentesco: la galleria degli acquerelli di Salvatore Colonnelli Sciarra (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2001). The Colonna Gallery was one of the subjects described and above all imagined also by Giovanni Paolo Panini. However, unlike the f ictitious spaces of Panini, such as Interior of a Picture Gallery with the Collection of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga (1749), Sciarra’s watercolours show a more likely geometric structure, useful for historiographical analysis.

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as well as heterogeneous arrangement. It shows a decorative programme in which different paintings (portraits of illustrious men, landscapes and historical pictures) establish a dialogue with the architectural decoration (colonnade) of the room. Nevertheless, mostly in the seventeenth century, the two principles of variety and symmetry were mutually connected to a much broader celebratory programme that took into account the wall decoration (frescoes, stucco or tapestries) and furniture. From the juxtaposition of the works that, according to occasions and periods, were set up by genre, form or chronologically, a symmetrical and regular arrangement was then drawn, creating a rhythm within an architectural and decorative apparatus serving as both frame and exhibition device. This stylistic and aesthetic fusion aimed at creating a totalising environment, visually balanced, having a critical, eulogistic and symbolic function in the transmission of the message that the owner wanted to convey to visitors. Therefore, the experience of the spatial apparatus was not limited to the single room (like humanist studioli) but developed thanks to the architectural walk suggested by the succession of rooms. This last consideration anticipates from afar the modernist reflections regarding the aesthetics of architectural spatiality that animated the entire twentieth century. Suffice it to think, in this sense, of the idea of an architectural promenade put to light by Le Corbusier – that is, a movement made possible “by the eyes that see, the head that turns, and the legs that walk”. 41 Likewise, inside a Baroque palace, visiting the building was rather a phenomenological experience of spatial embodiment based on the possibility of encountering a space in its totality, intended both as a container and as content. It was a kind of architectural stroll, the movement of an individual within a whole understood as a series of successive rooms. This reminds, once again, the movement of the individual described by Le Corbusier within an architecture understood as a series of spaces: “made up of pictures adding themselves one to the other, following each other in time and space, like music does”. 42 Yet, this concept of the architectural promenade, although it seems to go against the very precepts of Baroque architecture focused on the idea of a fixed point, becomes here the vector of a heuristic movement. The stroll, from room to room, shaped an aesthetic experience of space. In this regard, quoting Le Corbusier again, the dwelling of the time must be considered as a space that “[could] be appreciated only in walking, using one’s 41 Le Corbusier, Modulor (Boulogne-sur-Seine: Éditions de l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Collection ASCORAL, 1950), 74. 42 Ibid.

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feet; [indeed] it is in walking, in moving from place to place, that one can see the essential elements of architecture developing”.43 Said differently, while maintaining stylistic autonomy, each room became part of a whole – that is, a total work expanded on an architectural scale, in the image of the palace. Again, this condition relates to recent studies, and in particular to Davallon’s theory, on “viewpoint museology”, and Sergio Polano’s definition of exhibition design. 44 More precisely, for the French art historian, the act of displaying would be a presentation method centred not so much on the works on display, rather on spectators. “Objects and knowledge […] are used as material for the construction of a hypermedia environment that encourages visitors to evolve, offering them one or more points of view on the subject of the exhibition.”45 Regarding the Italian theorist, who tried to articulate the ontology of the discipline through the lenses of design production, the idea of exhibition design would represent “the art to design the interiors for the dwelling of objects temporarily collected in that totality (unicum) that should be the exhibition”.46 These ideas reflect precisely the environments and practices studied here, whereby, inside a dwelling arranged to shape an aesthetic whole experienced dynamically through the spatial promenade, 43 “L’architecture arabe nous donne un enseignement précieux. Elle s’apprécie à la marche, avec le pied; c’est en marchant, en se déplaçant que l’on voit se développer les ordonnances de l’architecture. C’est un principe contraire à l’architecture baroque qui est conçue sur le papier, autour d’un point fixe théorique.” Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Œuvre complète, 1929–1934, Vol. 2, ed. W. Boesiger (Zurich: Les Éditions d’Architecture, 1974), 24. 44 In 1937, Herbert Bayer defined exhibition design as a complex visual language structured both on the dialectic between different elements (Fundamentals of Exhibition Design, 1937) and, more generally, on the treatment of space and its narration. In 1982, with the text “Allestimenti/ Exhibit Design”, and later in 1988, with the volume “Mostrare. Allestimento in Italia dagli anni Venti agli anni Ottanta”, Sergio Polano suggested a clear definition of the practice of exhibition design. Over the years, the problem of exhibition design has been interpreted within theoretical articulations (often controversial) that have analysed the practice of setting up, both as a result (that is, as the product of a planning construction) and as a creative process in itself. The current state of research shows a change of focus concerning this traditional approach. No longer only probed in its essential definitions (as an exhibition paradigm), exhibition design is also defined in relation to the built environment, the urban space, installations and visual arts, and the living intended as an expression of the places of collective life. See Herbert Bayer, “Aspects of Design of Exhibitions and Museums”, Curator, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1961); Sergio Polano, Mostrare. Allestimento in Italia dagli anni Venti agli anni Ottanta (Milan: Edizioni Lybra, 1988); Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Victoria Newhouse, Art and the Power of Placement (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2005). 45 Jean Davallon, “Le musée est-il vraiment un media?”, Publics et Musées: Regards sur l’évolution des musées, No. 2 (1992). 46 Sergio Polano, Mostrare. Allestimento in Italia dagli anni Venti agli anni Ottanta.

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artworks and the related phenomenological experience implicitly aspire to seduce the viewer. An early example of this observation is given by the idea of the palace that the Gonzaga family was able to define. The Ducal Palace in Mantua, alongside the transformations it underwent over the years and the succession of dukes, visually renders a specific iconographic programme that was translated into what today is called the Celeste Galleria. Internally as well as externally, this palace played the role of an iconic object which, over time, portrayed the family in different ways. Following the rhetoric of appearance and the correspondence between house and owner, already around the first half of the sixteenth century, the façades of the Ducal Palace were not only decorated but were painted, thus suggesting the idea of architectural “make up”. 47 Concerning the interior, although today there are no visual representations that can provide an idea of the composition of the time, the inventory made in 162648 by Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga is a key source for understanding the importance of this family in the genealogy of the first exhibition spaces and practices. Despite the lapses, this inventory makes it possible to order the palace spaces and shape the display of the collection. Furthermore, cross-study with a second inventory (1614), corresponding to the beginning of Ferdinando’s reign and thus to the end of that of his father, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, makes it possible to trace specific transformations and consequential changes made by Ferdinando.49 His goal was indeed to give order, logic and a modern meaning to the family collections and, to do so, he undertook a transformation in terms of setup and space design. He started by determining a criterion for the exhibition of artefacts that was specific to their iconography and the various rooms of the palace. He then defined a precise path for visitors, and opened up other spaces previously closed by Vincenzo and Guglielmo (in particular, the studioli); ultimately he made the palace a real experience. Also, whereas in the inventory of 1614, rooms were named in relation to 47 Jérémie Koering, “Un’arte della cosmesi: le facciate dipinte del Palazzo Ducale di Mantova al tempo di Federico II”, 189–204. Stefano L’Occaso, “Le facciate dipinte nella Mantova di Andrea Mantegna (e nel Cinquecento)”, in Guido Bazzotti, Stefano L’Occaso and Francesca Vischi (eds.), Facciate dipinte nella Mantova di Andrea Mantegna (Milan: Skira, 2009). 48 This inventory is the last before the sale; the dismemberment of the collection started in 1628. 49 In particular, in the list of works, next to each painting, the letters V and F suggest the origin of acquisitions made by Vincenzo or Ferdinando. By comparing the two inventories, for instance, in the list of 1614, rooms are named following their pictorial decoration (room of Fish, Apollo’s room), while in the second one (1626) spaces are named concerning the typology of items contained, and the topology of the pieces (weapons room adjacent to the large room).

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their pictorial decoration (such as the room of Fish or Apollo’s room), in the second inventory (1626), spaces were named according to the typology of works and objects they contained, and also in relation to the topology of the rooms (such as “the weapons room adjacent to the large room”). This change allows us to understand not only how, for Ferdinando, the collection prevailed over the decoration but also that, with him, spaces started to be defined according to their relation with other spaces. Beyond the inventories, letters50 written in 1628 by Daniel Nys, consultant to King Charles I of England, record, in particular, the organisation of the palace spaces. At the time of Duke Ferdinando, the Palazzo Ducale counted various rooms in which more than 1356 artworks – including paintings, drawings, engravings – were exhibited. Duke Ferdinando, for whom the collection was a means to exhibit the power of the family, conceived an overall vision of the palace that had to be seen and appreciated through its spatial experience. The structure of the building followed a specific iconographic approach, in which each space was dedicated to a specific category of works: from the library for the collection of ancient books to the treasury rooms for the sumptuary arts, from the painting gallery of classical masterpieces to the marble gallery. Among these spaces in the Palazzo Ducale, the inventory of Duke Ferdinando also counted specific rooms dedicated to the showing of collections of antiquities and paintings: the Galerieta verso la Mostra (the gallery of marbles or months), the Galeria Grande (the main gallery of exhibitions, built around 1592 by Vincenzo Gonzaga to collect modern paintings),51 the Coridore longo che passa da Santa Barbara in Castello (long corridor connecting two sections of the building, opening in the centre towards the Palatine basilica, and used as storage for paintings and sculptures, waiting to be set), the Logion Serato (gallery of mirrors, the fulcrum of the exhibition structure, dedicated to the showing of ancient masters’ paintings), and other places of transition, such as the Passetto davanti al Camarino della Grotta or the Stanza contigua alla Libreria.52 50 See the letter of 4 December 1628 addressed to Lord Dorchester and entitled: “Marmi di S.A.S. che sono in piu luoghi della Casa et Favorita”, quoted in Alessandro Luzio, La Galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all’Inghilterra nel 1627–28 (Milan: L. F. Cogliati, 1913), 149. 51 See Michela Scolaro, “‘Il museo dei Gonzaga’: la collezione modello nell’Europa tra Cinque e Seicento”, in Raffaella Morselli (ed.), Gonzaga. La Celeste Galleria. L’esercizio del collezionismo, exh. cat., Mantova, 2 September – 8 December 2002 (Milan: Skira, 2002), 39–49. 52 For an in-depth analysis of these rooms, see: Pamela Bianchi, “Exhibition Design, Display Strategies, and Aesthetic Promenades to the Court of Gonzaga”, in Pamela Bianchi (ed.), Displaying Art in the Early Modern Period: Exhibiting Practices and Exhibition Spaces (London, New York: Routledge, 2022). See also Raffaella Morselli, “Il fior delle pitture … dei primi Pittori del Mondo”, in Raffaella Morselli (ed.), Gonzaga. La Celeste Galleria. Le raccolte, exh. cat., Mantova,

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The experience that a visitor could have within this succession of spaces is recorded by Joseph Fürttenbach. The German architect describes his experience at the Palazzo Ducale in 1627 (just after the death of Ferdinando Gonzaga) in his work Newes Itinerarium Italiae,53 dedicated to the buildings he visited during his trip to Italy, from 1610 to 1620. In the pages relating his visit, one can perceive the all-encompassing experience of the architect who walked in the garden, and then moved on to the rooms of the Estivale (the place to welcome foreigners), also passing through the studiolo: “a large room, extended and vaulted, supported by two rows of columns, very gracefully painted and gilded, containing such a collection of all the most wonderful things ever seen that to describe them adequately it would take a separate book”. After his visit, Fürttenbach54 also recorded wardrobes full of various artefacts, jewellery, silverware, weapons, and noted the quality of the furniture and the presence of antiquities and paintings. From his description, the Ducal Palace appears to be a building suitably dressed to welcome visitors and accompany them within the iconographic programme of the Gonzaga collection. Within this labyrinth of spaces, each room opened up to another; likewise, inside this internal circulatory system, the advancement of the body through succeeding spaces affected the creation of a meaningful and aesthetic relationship between bodies and architecture. With neither a real beginning nor an end, the spatial experience made the palace itself an object of contemplation in which the visitor, completely immersed, was able to experience the display imagery of the Gonzaga family. Here, the idea of the architectural stroll refers to the movement of the body within a whole composition staged in spatial sequences and with points of view that produce “aspects constantly unexpected and sometimes astonishing”.55 2 September – 8 December 2002 (Milan: Skira, 2002), 41–87; Federico Rausa, “‘Li disegni delle statue et busti sono rotolate drento le stampe’. L’arredo di sculture antiche delle residenze dei Gonzaga nei disegni seicenteschi della Royal Library a Windor Castle”, in Raffaella Morselli (ed.), Gonzaga. La Celeste Galleria. L’esercizio del collezionismo, 67–91. 53 Joseph Fürttenbach, Newes Itinerarium Italiae (1627) (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1971), quoted by Michela Scolaro, “‘Il museo dei Gonzaga’: la collezione modello nell’Europa tra Cinque e Seicento”. 54 Furttenbach also started producing detailed descriptions of public parades, performances and festivals that could be seen in Italy during his stay. In this regard, his treatise on architecture and engineering, the Architectura Recreationis (1640), records theatrical stages, light designs, and ephemeral machines built in Italy during those feasts. For further information, see Jan Lazardzig and Hole Rößler (ed.), Technologies of Theatre: Joseph Furttenbach and the Transfer of Mechanical Knowledge in Early Modern Theatre Cultures (Frankfurt: Zeitsprunge, 2016); Yannick Rocher, Théâtres en utopie (Arles: Actes sud, 2014). 55 Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Œuvre complète, 1910–1929, Vol. 1, ed. by W. Boesiger and O. Stonorow (Zurich: Les Éditions d’Architecture, 1974), 60.

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However, at that period, and more precisely in the second half of the seventeenth century, there were also alternative solutions to these total layouts that today emphasise the need of the time for greater spatial awareness regarding the domestic spaces, their compositional properties and the logic underpinning their design layout. An example of this is the one-room apartment of Cornelis Meijer (1629–1701). The Dutch hydraulics engineer, who came to Rome in 1680 to assist in the design of the banks of the River Tiber, published in 1689 a two-volume book titled Nuovi ritrovamenti (1689), a rich collection of engineering proposals related to his activity in Rome and other various drawings including four etchings of a “one-room apartment” with detailed captions. However, apart from descriptions of the parts that composed the room and a note on how the space fully satisfied the Vitruvian criteria of “stabilità, fermezza aspetto maestoso tanto di fuori che di dentro, e la distribuzione delle stanze commoda per l’habitatione”,56 no complimentary text is provided. Thanks to the “one-room apartment”, Meijer structured a harsh criticism of the architectural organisation of the Baroque palaces of the time and tried to create an alternative to the series of rooms in enfilade (which lead to the scattering of goods in different rooms) in order to “havere in pronto quello, ch’uno desira senza muoversi d’una stanza all’altra”.57 He organised the house in a single environment, designing the four walls as if they were vertical living spaces in which to arrange the idea of daily living. To do this, he conceived micro-architectures to be inserted into the walls, retractable wardrobes and other wall furnishings to take full advantage of all the volumes. Far from wanting to claim the ideology of the Renaissance studiolo, Meijer designed, on the contrary, his idea of an ideal home, offering an alternative to the almost urban logic and expanded temporality promoted by the major palaces of the Roman aristocracy, such as the Celeste Galleria. Indeed, going right back to the Gonzaga case, the idea of a palace shaped by the dukes clearly introduces the question of the temporality of experience. As a series of images succeeding one after another, each room of the palace contributed to relate different structural units, bodily movements and various external contingencies. It achieved this by giving life to an embodied experience thanks to which “peripatetic viewers, whose sense of spatial form 56 “stability, firmness, a majestic appearance both outside and inside, and the distribution of rooms comfortable for habitation”. Cornelis Meijer, Nuovi ritrovamenti, Part 6: “Del fabbricar comodo”, Rome (1689). For an in-depth analysis, see Joseph Connors, “The One-Room Apartment of Cornelis Meijer”, in Nebahat Avcioğlu and Allison Sherman (eds.), Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard (London, New York: Routledge, 2015), 45–64; Robin Middleton, “The One-Room Apartment”, AA Files, No. 4 (July 1983), 60–64. 57 “have ready what one desires without moving from room to room”. Ibid.

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occurs in duration”,58 ended up reading architecture through their movement. In particular, these concepts of serial vision and movement progression echo Auguste Choisy’s idea of picturesque and tableaux. Studying the way the Greeks tried to reach the “optical balance that reconciles symmetry of outlines with variety and unexpected details”, the French architecture historian described the Acropolis as a site to be viewed and appreciated in motion. Also, he considered the set of objects that a visitor can discover as a series of drawings (tableaux).59 By analysing the placement of each structure of the Acropolis, their mutual relations and the visual trajectory of an ideal visitor roaming the site, Choisy came to reveal the synergy between the path (leading to the centre of the Acropolis), the structural logic of the site, its architectural rhythm and the viewer’s experience. In this sense, within this structure, the picturesque and perspective tableaux play the role of sequential views (kinds of film shots) which evoke the image of the architectural and aesthetic promenade mentioned above. In fact, in both cases, we are faced with an expanded conception of the idea of architectural space that encompasses the question of aesthetic experience. The latter, entirely linked to the movement and positioning of the individual within the spatial structure, highlights the performative nature of the acts of seeing and showing. Indeed, it is not only a question of considering the composition as a complex installation implemented by the interplay between the various aesthetic components but, above all, of predicting in advance the possible movements of visitors. This predetermination makes the movement a heuristic vector of the entire exhibition machine that was the palace, in which the visitor’s point of view had become a parameter from which and for which a critical judgement arose. That is to say, “spectators [are] confronted not only with what [is] there to see, but also with the way in which they negotiate their own movements, themselves [caught] up in the train of the choreography”.60 In this sense, we can speak of an aesthetic of the ephemeral and the temporary, whereby within a fluid space, the spectator’s body moves, experiencing a new spatial and phenomenological dynamic. One could almost speak of an innovative spectatorial awareness that emphasises the polysemy of the building. Eventually, acquiring new identities and expanding 58 John Macarthur and Mathew Aitchison, “Pevsner’s Townscape”, in Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Planning and the Picturesque, ed. by Mathew Aitchison (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), 20. 59 Each picture had a perspective diagram showing the position of the viewpoint. Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’architecture, Vol. 1 (Ivry: Ed. Sera, 1976), 334. 60 Julie Pellegrin, “This Is not a Catalogue”, in Mathieu Copeland, Choreographing Exhibitions (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2013), 17.

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its boundaries, the palace became “a temporary attribute linked not so much to the quality of architecture as to the uses that arise from it”.61

3.3 Dutch and Venetian Burghers’ Dwellings The most precious burghers’ chattels consist, not only of gold and silverware, but also of tapestries, expensive pictures painted by the best and most famous painters in the land, and on which no money is spared […] fine carved woodwork such as tables and dressers, pewter, brass, earthenware, and porcelain etc.62

From at least the late sixteenth century, the habit among burghers and the general populace of decorating their dwellings with paintings was widespread, just as it had been in noble palaces. Beyond a few specific studies63 (many of which relate more to furnishings than setup), this subject has received little attention in the specialised literature. However, while in Italian art, depictions of domestic interiors are rare, the same cannot be said about Northern European painting. In particular, the Dutch Golden Age (1585–1672) recorded the explosion of social richness that came with the significant economic potential of the urban middle-class and the consequent transformation of their home decorations and furnishings. Houses started to be adorned with paintings and more precious artefacts, with a corresponding abandonment of the medieval style and furniture. While the society’s wealth grew alongside the progressive transformation of domestic interiors, Dutch homeowners began to gather items into specific rooms and to distribute them throughout the house, reflecting the imagery of the Italian palazzi of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this regard, Dutch houses especially recall sixteenth-century Venetian dwellings,64 above all the 61 Luca Basso Peressut et al. (eds.), Mettere in scena, mettere in mostra (Siracusa: LetteraVentidue, 2015), 11. 62 Jean Nicolas de Parival, Les délices de la Hollande (Leyden: Abraham Geervliet, 1655), https:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k310500c.image (23/08/2022). 63 Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompei to Art Nouveau (1964) (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981); Ernst H. Gombrich, The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication (London: Phaidon Press, 1999); John Loughman and John Michael Montias, Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses (Zwolle: Waanders Printers, 2000); Jeffrey M. Muller, “Private Collections in the Spanish Netherlands: Ownership and Display of Paintings in Domestic Interior”, in Peter C. Sutton (ed.), The Age of Rubens, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1994), 195–206. 64 See in this book the study dedicated to the Venetian portego, and especially Pietro Aretino’s letters and Marcantonio Michiel’s notes exploring the Venetian house of Milanese-born collector

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widespread practice of distributing paintings and artefacts according to the role of each room. This echo of Venetian layouts is not surprising if we also consider that in Venice, unlike in Rome, ideas of domestic collecting and art market developed outside the influence of the clergy, but within the habits and tastes of Venetian burghers. Most importantly, in Venice, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,65 the understanding of the spatial promenade intersected with the exhibiting nature of the dwelling by relating the function of each room with each item of the collection. Especially in the first decades of the seventeenth century, a greater sensitivity towards the specific collection of paintings developed, so much so that pictures in Venetian collections became imposing, passing from mere decorative elements to a consistent presence. In that period, while the “camaron dei quadri”66 (the large room of paintings) represented the room expressly dedicated to paintings, the portego (the semi-enclosed loggia) became the ideal place to display art. These spaces were known to Dutch collectors such that parallels can be drawn between, for instance, the Venetian “camaron dei quadri” and the Dutch beste kamer (both dedicated to paintings), or the “quadro da portego” (paintings created precisely to be displayed in the semi-enclosed loggia) and the schoortsteenstuk (pictures intended to be hung in the fireplace room – that is, the Dutch house’s main chamber). These correspondences exemplify the complexity of such interiors and their parallels while reflecting the critical role played by painting displays in the spatial experience of the house. As regards the Venetian portego, various documents allow us to reconstruct its importance in the progression of display practices. Undoubtedly one of the most well-known social spaces of representation, the portego67 was indeed the privileged place of public celebration, like the sala grande (the great hall) or the seventeenth-century representative galleries. Historically, it was intended as a room dividing the Venetian palace along its entire length, Andrea Odoni. 65 “The first views of Venetian interiors, from vignettes of daily life by Pietro Longhi to sciences of wider spatial breadth, date from the Settecento. They are the very precursors […] although it is important to clarify how reliable these sources are in reconstructing the various aspects of Venetian interiors.” Linda Borean and Anna Cera Sones, “Drawings of the Installation of a Nineteenth-Century Picture Gallery: A Study of the Display of Art in Venice”, Getty Research Journal, No. 2 (2010): 169–176, [169]. See also Irene Favaretto, Arte antica e cultura antiquaria nelle collezioni venete al tempo della Serenissima (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1990). 66 See Linda Borean and Stefania Mason (eds.), Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Seicento (Venice: Marsilio, 2007). 67 See Monika Schmitter, “The Quadro da Portego in Sixteenth-Century Venetian Art”, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Fall 2011): 693–751.

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connecting different chambers and translating a sense of monumentality. Since, in Venetian palaces, it was the central reception and entertainment hall, banquets and ceremonies were often held there, and furniture and objects were temporarily displayed, as recorded by Jacob Matham’s picture, A Venetian Ball Scene (1605). Depending on the occasion, the portego was set up with paintings and other objects with a specific theme, from banquets to women in society, to military scenes. Also according to the occasion, tapestries, various paintings and family portraits were set up. Being a place created not to exhibit, but to connect various rooms, the portego and adjacent rooms underwent a prolonged structural transformation in order to become more and more suitable for setting up and exhibiting.68 Yet, as both an interior and an exterior place of passage, and as a link between different environments, the portego’s architectural ambiguity emphasised its primary social function: providing Venetian owners with an open public space for self-representation. Not just a space to decorate, the portego was a place to be shown, a portrait of the owner. In this regard, the portego of Milanese-born collector Andrea Odoni (1488–1545) played a critical structuring role in the spatial experience of the building, while it epitomised the richness and diversity of his collection. The relationship between Odoni’s collection and his dwelling not only represents an early69 case of spatial and display embodiment but also suggests the idea of aesthetic promenade inside a total (artwork) space. Marcantonio Michiel’s notes, in 1532, give us significant information on the interplay between Odoni’s house and the artworks displayed there, especially concerning the specific placement of objects and their provenance. Called by Vasari “Albergo dei Virtuosi”70 (hotel of the virtuous), Odoni’s dwelling was organised through 68 The portego lost its seventeenth-century T or L shape by replacing it with a rectangular module. Furthermore, the walls started to be covered with precious fabrics (green or crimson velvets) to hang paintings. See the private gallery of Marco Boschini who suggested adding a perspective painting to the ceiling. Marco Boschini, La carta del navegar pitoresco, Francesco Baba, Venezia 1660, ed. by Anna Pallucchin (Venice, Rome: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1966). Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the house absorbed the idea of social ​​ representation in its ontology, we passed from the portego as a place of architectural conjunction to the portego as a place of commerce: a pièce d’apparat with a strong market identity. See Isabella Palumbo Fossati, “Gli interni della casa veneziana nel Settecento: continuità e trasformazioni”, in Giorgio Simoncini (ed.) L’uso dello spazio privato nell’età dell’Illuminismo (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1995), 165–179, [173]. 69 Odoni’s case anticipates by a few decades the publication of Giovanni Battista, De’ veri precetti della pittura (1586). See chapter 2.4 “Early Exhibition Design Precepts and Treatises”. 70 Marcantonio Michiel, Notizia d’opere di disegno nella prima metà del secolo XVI [1532], ed. by Theodor Frimmel (Vienna, 1896; Florence: Edifir, 2000); Andrew J. Martin, “‘Amica e albergo di virtuosi’. La casa e la collezione di Andrea Odoni”, Venezia Cinquecento, Vol. 10, No. 19 (2000): 153–170.

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a functional and stylistic logic in order to articulate the heterogeneity of his broad collection. Hence ancient and modern sculptures were placed on the ground floor (the open courtyard), and small objects, manuscripts and miniatures on the first floor. In the bedroom were sacred artefacts, in the adjoining rooms other figurative paintings, while in the portego a series of local and foreign works, mostly Flemish, could be found. The portego was also adorned with sculptures, an uncommon practice in Venice, but not for the collector who in his famous 1527 portrait by Lorenzo Lotto is surrounded by a series of ancient marble statues. However, it is mainly Pietro Aretino’s description of Odoni’s house that provides the most fundamental insights. By studying and fixing the placement of each artefact set up inside the “Albergo dei virtuosi”, Aretino not only described the furnishings and display criteria of Venetian homes of the sixteenth century but indicated how the typical Venetian house was mostly used as an exhibition space, a kind of work of art that portrayed its inhabitant. [W]hoever wishes to see how clean and candid his mind is should look at his face and his house, look at them, I say, and you will see as much serenity and beauty as one can desire in a house and in a face. I would compare the chambers [bedrooms], the salon, the loggia, and the garden of the apartment in which you live to a bride who awaits her relatives coming to attend her wedding. So I must [do], it is so well-kept, tapestried, and splendid. I myself never visit that I do not fear to tread there with my feet, its floors are so exquisite. I don’t know what prince has such richly adorned beds, such rare paintings, and such regal decor. Of the sculptures I will not speak: Greece would have the best of ancient form [art] had she not let herself be deprived of her [these] relics and sculptures. For your information, when I was at court I lived in Rome and not in Venice; but now that I am here, I am in Venice and in Rome.71 71 “Ma chi vol vedere in che modo il suo animo è netto e candido, miri di lui la fronte e l’abitazioni; e mirile dico, e vedrà quanto di sereno e di vago si può bramare in una abitazione e in una fronte. Se non che parrebbe un non so che, simigliarei le camere, la sala, la loggia, e il giardino de la stanza che abitate, a una sposa che aspetta il parentado che dee venire a veder darle la mano. E ben debbo io farlo, si è ella forbita, e atapezzita, e splendente. Io per me non ci vengo mai che non tema di calpestarla co i piedi; cotanta è la delicatura dei suoi pavimenti. Né so qual Principe abbi sì ricchi letti, sì rari quadri, e sì reali abigliamenti. De le scolture non parlo, conciosia che la Grecia terrebbe quasi il pregio de la forma antica, se ella non si avesse lasciato privare de le reliquie de le sue scolture.” See “Lettera di Pietro Aretino a Andrea Odoni, da Venezia, 30 agosto 1538”, in Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. by Fidenzio Pertile, Carlo Cordié and Ettore Camesasca, Vol. I (Milan: Il Milione, 1957), 124. Text translated by Monika Schmitter, “Odoni’s Façade: The House as Portrait in Renaissance Venice”, 308.

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Ultimately, Odoni’s house was not a simple dwelling. The Italian collector built his home and collection in his image and likeness, which is why Aretino described his entire dwelling and Michiel wrote a kind of topography of the place. From a contemporary perspective and in the light of current exhibition theories, the choice of dressing rooms with works of art, items and furniture explicitly designed for specific events seems to represent an early exhibiting awareness. There, the space – not yet a space in which to exhibit autonomous artworks or collective narratives – was rather an “artwork” space, charged with a specific symbolism thanks to the hierarchical organisation of all its parts, and a theatrical set where the individual (first owner and then collector) was put on stage. Contrary to Venetian houses, no Dutch interior from this period has survived. Only paintings, dolls’ houses, perspective boxes72 and inventories allow us to reconstruct the layout of these environments. One73 of the most detailed inventories concerning the layout of the paintings in a Dutch domestic interior describes a typical dwelling of the first half of the seventeenth century, where paintings of various subjects were usually displayed in two rows: “the landscapes on the top, mirrors and an occasional clock separating the paintings, and pictures hung in the narrow space between windows”.74 Visual examples in this sense include Jacob Appel’s painting of the Dolls’ House of Petronella Oortman, a three-storey dollhouse decorated and furnished in detail, Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Peepshow75 (1650), an empty wooden box that, on its inside walls, simulates a Dutch domestic interior of the seventeenth century, and Peter Janssens Elinga’s Triangle Perspective Box (c.1670), a triangular perspective box showing the interior of the furnished entrance-hall of a 72 John Loughman and John Michael Montias structured their research thanks to the analysis of the seventeenth-century dolls’ houses. For them, these objects are the critical source to draw up valuable information on the role of pictures in the Dutch interiors, due to their carefully detailed structure. See John Loughman and John Michael Montias, Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses. Further information on dolls’ houses and perspective boxes can be found in Kirsti Andersen, The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge (New York: Springer, 2007); Eva De la Fuente Pedersen, “Cornelius Gijsbrechts and the Perspective Chamber at the Royal Danish Kunstkammer”, SMK Art Journal (2003–2004): 152–160; Claus Jensen, “The Geometry of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Perspective Boxes”, in Bharath Sriraman, et al., Proceedings of Macas 2, Second International Symposium on Mathematics and its Connections to the Arts and Sciences (Odense: Denmark, 2008), 89–106. 73 The Strijker-Vuijsting inventory, 1639. Quoted in John Loughman and John Michael Montias, Public and Private Spaces, 138–142. 74 Ibid., 133. 75 For an in-depth analysis, see ibid., 10–11.

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Dutch house. Although these micro-architectures were mostly studied for innovations involving perspective and illusionistic effects, and despite the sometimes fictitious character of the peepshows, their internal design allows us to get an idea of the setup habits of the time. On either side of van Hoogstraten’s Peepshow,76 the structure opens up onto a succession of perspective glimpses showing a private place decorated with various paintings. First, we notice the sovraporta (the picture hung above the doorway), then the symmetrical arrangement based on the shape of the canvas and the structural design of the rooms, and finally the practice of hanging the paintings on the upper part of the walls. This last aspect, together with the symmetry and compositional coherence, is also visible in Peter Janssens Elinga’s Triangle Perspective Box, but also in paintings such as Johannes Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep (1656–1657) or Samuel van Hoogstraten, The Anemic Lady (1665), that reveal a succession of decorated rooms. Furthermore, in the latter, the perspective of the left side of the painting presents at least two environments decorated with paintings, thanks to a sequence of doors that, in turn, are embellished with a sovraporta. These representations record the Netherlands of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in which the house played the role of an archetypal place where paintings were displayed. Together with the market,77 the Dutch house traditionally welcomed canvases and prints mostly collected both to decorate and to embellish interiors, and to meet economic or social needs. Especially during the seventeenth century, when Dutch society experienced an increasing proliferation of paintings, the 76 For more information about this perspective box, see the site of the National Gallery where the artefact is preserved and: Christopher Brown and David Bomford et al., “Samuel van Hoogstraten: Perspective and Painting”, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, Vol. 11 (1987): 60–85. See also Thijs Weststeijn, The Visible World: Samuel Van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Celeste Brusati, “Paradoxical Passages: The Work of Framing in the Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten”, in Thijs Weststeijn (ed.), The Universal Art of Samuel Van Hoogstraten (1627–1678): Painter, Writer, and Courtier (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 53–75; Herman Colenbrander, “A Pledge of Marital Domestic Bliss: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Perspective Box in the National Gallery, London”, in The Universal Art of Samuel Van Hoogstraten, 138–59; Justina Spencer, “Illusion as Ingenuity: Dutch Perspective Boxes in the Royal Danish Kunstkammer’s ‘Perspective Chamber’”, Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2018): 187–201. 77 Unlike in Italy, where churches were a privileged place to show works of art and for which the clergy played a crucial role in the art market and the dissemination of painting and sculpture collections, in Holland, the situation was different. With the disappearance of the clergy from the sixteenth century, not only the demand for works to embellish churches disappeared, but the art market expanded to different social classes. The pictorial imagery of Dutch churches that came to us thanks to the various representations shows mostly bare spaces.

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Figure 2 Anonymous, Dolls’ House of Petronella Oortman (c.1686 – c.1710), furniture, dollhouse, 255 × 190 cm, depth 78 × 28 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

image of the collector was not yet completely developed. On the contrary, there were amateurs, curieux and liefhebber who acquired paintings to adorn spaces. There, at least until the first half of the seventeenth century, pictures played the role of decorating devices for interior dwellings. At any rate, the practice of displaying paintings in sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Dutch houses, and above all in the living room and the principal downstairs rooms, was also related to the family’s desire to convey its sense of self to the public. However, various treatises of the time show how the practice of displaying art was not only a decorative factor. William Sanderson’s essay Graphice (1658), mostly inspired by Henry Wotton’s architectural theories,78 reports practices relating to the setting up of paintings and 78 Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (London: John Bill, 1624). Although his treatise is mostly dedicated to architecture, Wotton also discussed painting and sculpture, and their employment in decorating houses and environments.

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Figure 3 Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, Delft 1632 – 1675, Delft), A Maid Asleep (1656–1657), oil on canvas, 87.6 × 76.5 cm, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913, The MET Collection, New York.

especially insists on the need for specific light, on the importance of not overcrowding rooms and of not forgetting the artist’s intention: “not to clutter the room with too many pieces, unless in galleries and repositories, as rarityes of several artizans intermingled; otherwise it becomes only a painters-shop, for choyce of sale”.79 Sanderson also suggested arranging 79 William Sanderson, Graphice. The Use of Pen and Pencil. Or, the Most Excellent Art of Painting: In Two Parts (London: Printed for Robert Crofts, at the sign of the Crown in Chancery-Lane, under Serjeant’s Inne, 1658), quoted by John Loughman and John Michael Montias, Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses, 30.

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works by following a specific logic related to the relationship between paintings’ themes and rooms’ functions: In the entrance to your house, or Porch; with some Rustique figures, or things rurall. The Hall with Paintings of Neat-heards, Peasants, Shepheards, […] in proper degrees, some other also, of Kitchenry; severall sorts of Foul or Fish, fitted for the Cooking. Pictures become the sides of your staircase; when the grace of a Painting invites your guest to breathe, and stop at the ease-pace; and to delight him, with some Ruine or Building which may at a views as he passes up, be observed […] The Great Chamber with Landskips, Huntings, Fishing, Fowling; or History of Notable actions.80

In the central part of the quotation, Sanderson brilliantly introduces the direct connection between the individual’s posture inside the house, the latter’s expected movement (stopping to breathe while climbing the stairs) and the display of works inside the house. In other words, following Sanderson, the layout of the artworks seems to reflect and, above all, anticipate the visitor’s gait, temporality and behaviour within the space. Besides, Sanderson’s description refers to a house in which every room, from the kitchen to the bedroom, was adorned with paintings, without a particular hierarchy aimed at social representation, but organised more in relation to the use of the room. This clearly recalls the organisation of Odoni’s house. However, although paintings were displayed in almost all the house’s rooms, there were also specific environments dedicated to social rituals, which were decorated accordingly. The living room was often the privileged place of sociability so it had to be embellished to represent oneself in accordance with the spatial design. Depending on the family and its habits, other rooms (kitchen, anterooms) could also act as representative places for receptions and entertainment. In any case, the domestic nature of Dutch dwellings prevailed over the idea of a public environment, so much so that one of the privileged places to hang paintings was above the fireplace. One room was particularly widespread in Dutch upper-middle-class residences of the second half of the seventeenth century: the “room in the room”.81 In this space, hangings (kinds of tapestries), large-scale oil paintings, generally depicting landscapes (but also meant as a set of curtains), were hung to cover the entire surface of the wall. The idea was to suggest an 80 Ibid., 40. 81 See Derk P. Snoep, “Het Trippenhuis, zijn decoraties en inrichting”, in Rudolf Meischke and Eduard Reeser, Het Trippenhuis te Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Noord-Holland, 1987), 187–211.

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Figure 4 Jacob Appel (Dutch, Amsterdam 1680 – 1751 Amsterdam), Dolls’ House of Petronella Oortman (1655/56–1716), painting, 87 × 69 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

“elsewhere” that was in continuity with the real space of the room. This is why very often the size of the subjects portrayed or the architectural parts depicted corresponded, as in a trompe-l’œil, to the size of the room. Beyond the technical problems related to the need to illuminate these interiors, hangings seemed widespread at the time even if today only few finds (some dolls’ houses and painted panels) testify to this practice. The Dolls’ House of Petronella Oortman (1686) and its depiction (1710) by Jacob Appel are a case in point. Being one of the most famous dolls’ houses conserved

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Figure 5 Gerard de Lairesse (Dutch, Liège 1641 – 1711 Amsterdam), Johannes Glauber (Dutch, Utrecht 1646 – 1726 Schoonhoven), Italian Landscape with Three Women in the Foreground (1687), oil on canvas, 282 × 217 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

today to have been made to scale and with the original materials, this micro-architecture has on the second floor a “room in the room”. The hanging represents a landscape in the foreground, while the upper part is dedicated to the sky. The veracity of the composition and the proportions define a sort of opening (fictitious window) that incorporates the salon within a bucolic atmosphere. Another even clearer example in this sense is the original

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hanging Italian Landscape with Three Women in the Foreground (1687) by Gerard de Lairesse and Johannes Glauber. Composed of four panels decorating a room in Jacob de Flines’ house on the Herengracht in Amsterdam, the painting contains the idea of fictional views and spatial continuity. Indeed, in the foreground, a group of three life-size women emphasises the role given to these paintings. Not simple autonomous representations, these hangings were indeed meant to be architectural paintings designed to suggest the unity between reality and fiction and thus create a total environment. Beyond these cases, other Dutch seventeenth-century genre painters, such as Gabriel Metsu, Vermeer, Pieter De Hooch, give us critical insights into the display practice and, above all, into the role of the living room as an exhibition space. However, it must be taken into account that for seventeenth-century Dutch painters, depicted subjects were more ideal figures than real portraits. Consequently, painted Dutch interiors often appear as artificial spaces designed by the artist’s imagination, where the setting, decor, furniture and other background items enrich and decorate the scenery of these symbolic and often moralistic images. Above all for Vermeer, the contextualisation of his characters followed a symbolic and metaphorical pattern. Nevertheless, in most of these paintings, many display habits of the time are recorded, often referable to the Italian Renaissance and Baroque influence. One of these is the symmetrical arrangement of paintings on the walls. Symmetry 82 (both thematic and formal) had often been used by painters to bring balance to the painted scene, as represented by Pieter Codde’s picture, Portrait of a Family (1634). In Northern interiors, there was even a custom of filling the gap between the wainscot covering the lower wall and the ceiling with pictures. Hanging paintings83 on the upper part of walls was a habit stemming from the sixteenth-century practice of covering the walls with panels or tapestries, which responded to various needs. Because of the desires to protect paintings from possible damage and to define a decorative symmetry, landscapes or other representations with an expanded background were often hung high up to suggest the depth of the image. In this regard, Samuel van Hoogstraten’s The Anemic Lady (1665) captures many of the habits listed above. Not only does it portray 82 The phenomenon of the production of pendants and paired paintings was widespread in seventeenth-century Dutch art. As they were usually hung side-by-side, they contributed to expanding the practice of symmetry in conjunction with a few specific architectural structures and furnishings of domestic interiors, such as the fireplace, the doorway, the mirror or the credenza. 83 Ernst H. Gombrich, The Uses of Images, 119.

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Figure 6 Samuel van Hoogstraten (Dutch, Dordrecht 1660 – 1678 Dordrecht), The Anemic Lady (1665), oil on canvas, 69.5 × 55 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

symmetrically hung paintings on the upper part of the wall (thanks to the use of internal windows), but also a picture above the fireplace in the third sketched room. However, as was often the case in Dutch painting of the time, the scene painted by Hoogstraten responds to a symbolic need, whereby each object portrayed seems to partake in the main action, where the doctor is diagnosing a woman’s pregnancy by studying her urine. Indeed, paintings depicted in the second room as well as the bottom left-hand corner of Raphael’s School of Athens above the fireplace

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Figure 7 Jacob Ochtervelt (Dutch, Rotterdam 1634 – 1682 Amsterdam), A Musical Company (1668), oil on canvas, 58.5 × 48.9 cm, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.

(partially hidden by the perspective), contribute to structuring the tale of the painting.84 Another interior scene, depicted by Jacob Ochtervelt, A Musical Company (1668) shows the same typical arrangement, with a row of paintings hanging on the top area of the wall, and a sovraporta as shown in Pieter De Hooch’s picture, Interior with Women beside a Linen Cupboard (1663). 84 See Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel Van Hoogstraten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 126.

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Figure 8 Pieter De Hooch (Dutch, Rotterdam 1629 – during or after 1684 Amsterdam), Interior with Women beside a Linen Cupboard (1663), oil on canvas, 70 cm × 75.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Covering paintings with a coloured curtain to protect them from light and smoke, and to limit their visualisation according to their themes and subjects, was another traditional arrangement in seventeenth-century Dutch houses. Even in this case, the symbolism of the picture led artists to depict the curtain not just to represent a real scene, but to define an ideal image, as in Gabriel Metsu’s painting, A Woman Reading a Letter (1662–1665). There, the maid depicted from behind, on the left side of the picture, moves the curtain, providing a glimpse of the image behind it, which depicts a storm at sea, thus revealing the internal turmoil of the lady on the right, intent on reading the letter just opened. Here, the curtain plays the role of a device participating in the depicted tale, helping the painter portray an ephemeral and abstract feeling. In turn, another painting by Metsu, A Man and a Woman Seated at the Virginal (1665), portrays an intimate and domestic scene where a woman, seated at the keyboard of a virginal, hands to a man a musical score, while he offers her a glass of wine. Here, the curtain, while bearing plausible witness to the display customs of the time, is used above

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all to suggest the possible link between the man’s action and the painting hidden behind the fabric. These examples suggest the practice of the time of filling one’s home with paintings following a logic that was structural and symmetrical on the one hand and, on the other, purely representative. The result is a symbolic and metaphorical use of art that corroborates the habit of portraying oneself through the environment in which one lives. In addition, a critical and historical awareness of art emerges as well as a mastery of the function of the painting in general, which suggests a kind of “domestication” of art and easel painting. More specifically, especially in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, this awareness corresponds to a social change that shows how the staging of the works, initially wholly understood as a phase of architectural make-up, has become over time a representation of a greater awareness of the intrinsic value of the work: “the descent into the living room and the increasing self-assertion of the painting itself”.85

3.4 A Proper Place for Artefacts There was in the house of Heius a private chapel of great sacredness, handed down to him from his ancestors, very ancient; in which he had four very beautiful statues, made with the greatest skill, and of very high character; […] one, a statue of Cupid, in marble, [was ]a work of Praxiteles. […] but their maker was … (who? who was he? […]) they called him Polycletus. Whenever any one of our citizens went to Messana, he used to go and see these statues. They were open every day for people to go to see them. The house was not more an ornament to its master, than it was to the city.86

Beyond the display habits witnessed in noble palaces and houses of the middle and lower classes, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the layout of the house underwent a gradual transformation87 that involved the aesthetic comprehension of artefacts, their positioning and function in the building, as 85 Ernst H. Gombrich, The Uses of Images, 121. 86 Ingo Gildenhard (ed.), Cicero: Against Verres, 2.1.53–86. Latin Text with Introduction, Study Questions, Commentary and English Translation (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2011). 87 Natalia Gozzano, “Bacchette, scopette, tenaglie e chiodi. Il guardaroba nella struttura organizzativa e finanziaria del palazzo e delle sue collezioni”, in Alessandra Rodolfo and Caterina Volpi (eds.), Vestire i palazzi, 65.

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well as the structure of the building itself.88 During that period a formal change concerned the choice of artefacts. While in the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, the habit was to decorate interior walls with textiles, fabrics and boiseries (panelling), in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rooms were mostly decorated with paintings and drawings often hung89 over tapestries. Several factors led to this change: primarily, the idea of the artefact that came closer to that of artwork. To put it differently, paintings, sculptures and other art objects began to acquire autonomy with respect to the political or social symbolism that had distinguished their status and position within the rooms. Thus, it was at that time that inventories of owners and collectors (such as the Roman Cardinal GiovanBattista Costaguti)90 began listing pictures providing detailed stylistic and technical descriptions, as well as the artists’ name. That is to say, instead of being seen as Virgins or Christs, paintings or sculptures became the productions of specific personalities.91 This habit quickly expanded during the sixteenth century, so much so that Vasari reported on how “not only princes’ rooms, but also those of many private individuals are being adorned with portraits of illustrious men”.92 The Italian prelate Paolo Giovio was one of these private collectors. Between 1537 and 1543,93 he built an edifice he called Museum, in Borgovico 88 At the same time, iconographic recommendations for artists begin to appear in the treatises of the time, such as suggestions for the convenient use of images in buildings and different environments, public or private. See, among others, the Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura e architettura by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1585). 89 The practice of superimposing paintings on fabrics that in turn covered walls was widespread in Baroque dwellings, especially in the Flemish area. The material was also changed during the year, according to tastes and seasonal periods. See the paintings by Franz Francken, David Teniers and Jan “Velvet” Brueghel. See Lauro Magnani (ed.), Collezionismo e spazi del collezionismo. Temi e sperimentazioni (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2013), 18, notes 22 and 23. 90 Costaguti’s testament, in 1703, records his requirement that the installation of his painting gallery not be dismembered or modified in any way, since he “had the opportunity to put together the paintings of [his] gallery with some particular diligence, application and expenses”. See Luigi Spezzaferro, “Pier Francesco Mola e il mercato artistico romano: atteggiamenti e valutazioni”, in Pier Francesco Mola. 1612–1666, exh. cat., Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano / Musei Capitolini, Rome, 1989–1990 (Milan: Manuela Kahn-Rossi, 1990), 40–59. For further information, see Giulia de Marchi, Mostre di quadri in S. Salvatore in Lauro (1682–1725). Stime di collezioni romane / note e appunti di Giuseppe Ghezzi (Rome: Biblioteca Vallicelliana, 1987). 91 This passage, from a decorative artefact without a name to someone’s work, happens in a moment in which the signature appears on paintings, which makes a craftsman the known artist. 92 “non solamente le stanze de’ principi, ma quelle di molti privati si vanno adornando de’ ritratti o d’uno o d’altro di detti uomini illustri, secondo le patrie, famiglie ed affezione di ciascuno”. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite, VII, 609. 93 The museum fell prematurely into ruin, it was sold in 1613 and then demolished, two years later, by the abbot Marco Gallio, to raise his villa. Among the extensive literature, see Pier Luigi

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near Como, to welcome his collection of portraits, which rapidly became an exemplum in terms of the spatial orchestration of artworks and related collecting processes. Giovio’s innovation at the time was manifold, so much so that interest in his collection (which counted more than four hundred portraits, as truthful as possible, of contemporary and historical illustrious men made by different masters of the time) was already widespread at the time. In fact, although the collection was completely dismembered at the death of the humanist, today it exists in the form of a copy. Called the Serie Gioviana (today in the Uffizi), it was commissioned by Cosimo I de’ Medici and copied by Cristofano dell’Altissimo – who spent almost his entire life copying all the portraits of the collection. Yet, Giovio’s case was foremost an innovation for the way he interpreted and used94 the concept of the museum: Giovio’s idea of founding a portrait museum on the lake was his most original contribution to European civilisation. While Wunderkammern and princely collections were not new, the idea of filling a villa with portraits of famous people on canvas or on bronze medallions, calling it a museum, and opening it ad publican hilaritatem (for public enjoyment) was a new departure.95

Giovo’s innovation lies above all in the fact that the idea of edifying a palace worthy of its iconographic collection preceded its real construction by at least three decades.96 Besides, although it is thought97 that Giovio initially constituted the building for private enjoyment, meant to contain a sort of De Vecchi, “Il Museo Gioviano e le ‘verae imagines’ degli uomini Illustri”, in Omaggio a Tiziano. la cultura artistica milanese nell’età di Carlo V, exh. cat., Palazzo Reale, Milan, 27 April – 20 July 1977 (Milan: Electa, 1977), 87–93 ; Franco Minonzio, “Il Museo di Giovio e la galleria degli uomini illustri”, in Eliana Carrara and Silvia Ginzburg, Testi, immagini e filologia nel XVI secolo (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007), 77–146. 94 Giovio was the first to use the term museum in a modern sense. Before him, the German humanist Johannes Cuspinian used the term in 1517 referring to a place of study, then followed by Erasmus of Rotterdam who used it to describe a studiolo within his treatise Convivium religiosum. 95 T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 159. 96 The first evidence of conceptual elaboration of the villa dates back to 1504, while the first evidence of the purchases of portraits of writers by Giovio dates back to 1520, to which he would later add those of princes and leaders. See Franco Minonzio, “Il Museo di Giovio e la galleria degli uomini illustri”, 77–146. 97 Cf. Pietro Marani and Rosanna Pavoni, Musei. Transformazioni di un’istituzione dall’età moderna al contemporaneo (Venice: Marsilio, 2020).

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atlas of portraits whose ideology and layout stemmed from the library at Alexandria, the fact remains that the Italian humanist established a building for the first time pedagogical and open to visits and contemplation. Concerning the architecture and display of this kind of “proto-museum”, descriptions of Giovio and his brother Benedetto together with those of the Florentine Anton Francesco Doni (who visited the palace in 1543), and a representation of the external architecture of the villa by an anonymous author help us reconstruct the layout of the various rooms. Giovio arranged the two-storey building around the “room of Muses” (which gave the palace the name museo), which Giovio kept separate from other domestic chambers in the building. From there, “you can see almost the whole city. You can also see the parts of the lake facing north, with their splendid inlets […] Wherever you turn, an unexpected and pleasant aspect of the region catches your eye that satisfies the gaze and is never tedious.”98 Although a large number of portraits was exhibited in the Muses room, the enormous volume of his collection99 led Giovio to distribute paintings and other items throughout all the spaces. For instance, while the atrium, connected directly with the Muses room, was f illed with pictures, frescoes and emblems, the connected arcaded inner courtyard was decorated with masks and was hence called personata.100 Around the room of Muses, which was also preceded by a portico, there were then other spaces (cubicula) with portraits of illustrious men set up on the walls: the Mercury room, dedicated to the library and where the two portraits of Giovio and his brother Benedetto were exhibited, and the Sirens room, dedicated to entertainment, which led directly to the armoury. The second floor included the sala grande and was dedicated to Giovio’s private apartments. Other spaces were built expressly 98 “si vede quasi tutta la città. Si vedono anche le parti del lago rivolte a nord, con le loro splendide insenature […] Ovunque ci si volge balza agli occhi un aspetto della regione inatteso e piacevole che appaga lo sguardo e non é mai stucchevole.” See Franco Minonzio (ed.), Paolo Giovio. Elogi degli uomini illustri (Turin: Einaudi, 2006). 99 The collection contained more than 400 paintings, mostly of men, ranging from classical antiquity to the mid-sixteenth century. See Bruno Fasola, “Per un nuovo catalogo della collezione gioviana”, in T. C. Price Zimmermann (ed.), Paolo Giovio. Il Rinascimento e la memoria. Atti del convegno, Como, 3–5 June 1983 (Como: Società a Villa Gallia, 1985), 169–180. 100 In ancient Latin the term persona meant “face”, but its second origin, the Etruscan, related the term to the theatrical “mask” habitually used by actors. The setting up of Giovio’s porch recalled the hortus pensilis of the Roman palace of the cardinal Andrea Della Valle, in which the frieze of the courtyard was adorned with masks and mottos. See Claudio Franzoni, “Rimembranze d’inf inite cose. Le collezioni rinascimentali d’antichità”, in Salvatore Settis (ed.), Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 301–360; Sonia Maffei, Paolo Giovio, Scritti d’arte. Lessico ed ecfrasi (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1999), 133.

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for specific functions: a conservation place for precious objects (rings, coins, jewels and cameos), a laboratory for artists and a place for meditation. The architectural decoration replied to specific functions too. Whereas, outside, the luxurious decoration showed off power and richness, inside, the museum lacked sculptures or antiquities so porches were decorated with various cycles of frescoes. Especially for northern Italy and the palaces of the Milanese aristocracy, Giovio’s museum became a model of inspiration for the implementation of the interplay between interior and exterior, between iconographic and historiographic logic and architectural structure, between the experience of the visit and cognitive experience. Furthermore, at that time, Giovio’s initiative laid the foundation for the ensuing ontological transformation on the use of artworks and spaces. Indeed, especially in the late sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century, the Renaissance concept of the home was abandoned to embrace the Baroque one. No longer focused on the desire to insert man into a structural unit, dwellings had to “manipulat[e] the trajectory of the moving body”.101 Then, while the palace became a dynamic space, in which the experience of architecture, decoration and dramaturgy of works structured an all-encompassing aesthetic experience, visiting the palace meant participating in a sort of theatrical event for which the stroll acted as a performative practice inside an exhibiting layout likely to glorify the owner of the building. This change is linked to a more evident metamorphosis that concerns the gradual architectural reformulation of Renaissance stately homes. Indeed, since palaces were simultaneously private and public places (designed as the seat of a court), their interiors assumed, over the years, a specific configuration to emphasise the magnificence of power and convey identity and importance. In addition to representing the capability of architecture to become the metaphorical portrait of an individual, this transformation also reflected the desire to find and invent new spaces capable of showing the material and intellectual wealth of the collection. Moreover, unlike cardinals and religious people who were more inclined to publicise their collections by exhibiting them in gardens and loggias, private owners were not in the habit of publicly presenting their collections. And precisely because the latter wanted to represent themselves through their possessions, they started to make their properties more accessible. Therefore, the need to define places dedicated to the display of the collections came into being. 101 Gail Feigenbaum, “Introduction: Art and Display in Principle and in Practice”, in Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 2.

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This situation finds a counterpart specifically in the ontological transformation of the idea of a collection102 which, starting from the sixteenth century onwards, became a “bridge between spectators and collectors”.103 More precisely, one can observe the transition from the general invisibility of collections (accessible to a selected few and located in specific spaces inside the house) to their visibility, made possible through various exhibiting solutions. It is, therefore, a progressive and complementary conversion, developing in connection with various factors – structural changes, representative needs, reform and definitions of art criticism – that translates the “transition from the silence to the sound, [from] a place for studying and meditation [to] a space for exhibition and conservation”.104 Already in the seventeenth century, Vincenzo Scamozzi recorded this ongoing change: Hoggidì si usano molto a Roma et a Genova, et in altre città di Italia quel genere di fabbriche che dicono Gallerie; forsi per essere state introdotte prima nella Gallia, o Francia per trattenersi a passeggio i personaggi nelle corti, le proporzioni di loro si ricavano dalle Loggie, ma sono alquanto meno aperte esse. Queste sorte di edificio fu parimento appresso agli antichi, come si legge nella vita di Lucio Lucullo, et altrove, et in vero sono di grandissima comodità, et accrescono meraviglioso ornamento alle fabbriche; ma però si convengono solo a signori e gran personaggi.105

However, the change was not so simple, since it was a real migration from the medieval and early Renaissance studiolo (which “reshaped, in the architectural structure, the figure of the individual who adhered […] to the idea of solitary life”106) to the gallery,107 passing through the loggia (semi-open 102 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIe siècle. 103 Claudio Franzoni, “Le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità”, 321. 104 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature, 109, 113. 105 Vincenzo Scamozzi (1615), quoted by Christina Strunck, “La sistemazione seicentesca delle sculture antiche. La Galleria Giustiniana e la galleria di palazzo Giustiniani a confronto”, in Giulia Fusconi (ed.), I Giustiniani e l’antico, exh. cat, Palazzo Fontana di Trevi, Rome, 26 October 2001 – 27 January 2002 (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 2001), 57. 106 Claudio Franzoni, “Le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità”, 307. 107 One of the first Italian mentions of the term gallery appears in the Farnese inventory of 1568 and seems to refer to the loggia in which antiquities were held. The gallery was understood first as “ambulationes vitruviane” (Vitruvius, De architectura, VII, 5, 2) and then as a space for paintings and sculptures. However, the gallery issue is much more complex and concerns the architectural dimension of the building, as well as the etymological, ontological and social evolution of the term. Its French origins are indisputable (see: Jean Guillame, “La galerie en

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space, colonnades) which acted as both a junction space and an exhibition site for sculptures and antiquities. Andries van Buysen’s etching, Visitors in the Natural History Cabinet of Levinus Vincent in Haarlem (1706), records, for instance, the public nature of both the collection and the gallery, and perfectly describes the transition from the humanist studiolo, spatially withdrawn into a small and secret room, to an enlarged space, open to the public, where the architectural structure and the repetitive and orderly display of the objects suggest the magnificence of the place. On the other hand, two paintings by Daniel Mytens, Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel and Surrey and Alathea, Countess of Arundel and Surrey (both 1618), highlight the nature of the two new spaces: the loggia and the gallery. Both venues, despite here being the background to the portraits of the Arundel spouses, first defined two spatial archetypes of the time: the gallery of paintings and the loggia with statues. Besides, the gesture of the two characters, intent on moving the curtain and indicating the environment, not only echoes the idea of ritualising the act of displaying, evoked at the beginning of the second part of this chapter, but also suggests the representative role played by these places in the constitution of the social image of the portrayed characters. From being junction spaces or walking spaces (the Vitruvian ambulationes), the gallery and the loggia became more and more places of social representation and, consequently, spaces for exhibiting collections and for impressing the beholder. This displacement from the studio to the gallery, from the silence of private knowledge to the sound of a public collection, thus reshaped domestic interior spaces, by giving them new functions and other forms. Alongside the traditional and hierarchical setup of existing private and France et en Angleterre du XVe au XVIIe siècle: emplacement et fonctions”, in Chistina Strunck and Elisabeth Kieven (eds.), Europäische Galeriebauten. Galleries in a Contemparative European Perspective (1400–1800), proceedings of the international conference at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, 23–26 February 2005 (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2010), 35–50. For further information, see Pamela Bianchi, Espaces de l’œuvre, espaces de l’exposition; Wolfram Prinz, Die Entstehung der Galerie in Frankreich und Italien; Valentina Fiore, “Lo spazio dell’antico nelle residenze genovesi tra XV e XVIII secolo: la diffusione e l’evoluzione della Galaria sive loggia”, in Lauro Magnani (ed.), Collezionismo e spazi del collezionismo, 75–88. See also the writings of Vincenzo Scamozzi who, among other things, commissioned the creation of the Galleria degli Antichi di Sabbioneta (1583–1590) to house the collection of statues and archaeological finds by Vespasiano Gonzaga. Its architectural layout was def ined as an architectural prototype for the museum display. Vincenzo Scamozzi, Dell’idea della Architettura Universale, Vol. 1, 18. “I luoghi da tenir Statue, e Rilievi, e Pitture, e quelli da stare à ricamare, e per ogn’altro essercitio, che ricerca lume fermo, & ordinato, e non molto alterabile, deono esser verso Tramontana: perché (come dicessimo) à tutte le altre parti il Sole, ò percuote, ò refflete à qualche hora del giorno; di modo, che i lumi divengono molto variabili, e fanno diverse apparenze, & effetti ne’ rilievi, e nel distinguer bene i colori.”

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Figure 9 Andries van Buysen (Dutch, active 1698 – 1747 Amsterdam), Visitors in the Natural History Cabinet of Levinus Vincent in Haarlem (1706), etching, 22 × 31.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

public environments, such as cabinets, studioli or courtyards,108 other venues were created or temporarily used as exhibition spaces. For instance, while, during the sixteenth century, a single antechamber might have sufficed to evince the rank of the noble family, the seventeenth century records a proliferation of antechambers that shaped “an impressive enfilade [that] constituted a display in itself”.109 At the same time, in the seventeenth century, the gallery took on the role of the sala grande (the part of the house generally decorated with a series of portraits of ancestors), thus becoming the room of the Baroque palace where the most important receptions and social exchanges were held. Freed from the staging of the dynasty, the gallery appeared, therefore, as an “alternative space for self-representation where the decorations did not necessarily have to focus on the family lineage”.110 108 Among others, Isabella d’Este’s studiolo, in Mantua, was interconnected with the grotta (a small room designed to accommodate the Marquise’s collection), and the courtyard, added later. This third place not only had to provide a naturalistic environment for the meditative and intellectual experience but also had the role of providing more space to display the works in the collection. See Claudio Franzoni, “Le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità”, 311–312, and Wolfram Prinz, Die Entstehung der Galerie in Frankreich und Italien. 109 Gail Feigenbaum, “Introduction: Art and Display in Principle and in Practice”, 8. 110 Christina Strunck, “A Statistical Approach to Changes in the Design and Function of Galleries”, in Christina Strunck and Elisabeth Kieven (eds.), Europäische Galeriebauten, 221, 260.

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Besides, this progressive transition from the sala grande to the gallery is easily understandable if one considers the relationship between the social role of each room, its decorative and architectural layout, and the choice of the works exhibited therein. The exhibition of the rooms full of antiquities and modern works, the very setting-up of a “worthy and real show”, ultimately serves to represent and to describe “the greatness of the generous and magnificent soul” of the owner.111

In particular, if in the sixteenth century, most of the galleries (especially Roman ones)112 were decorated in frescoes, and works on display were mostly sculptures, the seventeenth-century records a considerable reduction in wall frescoes and antiquities. This transformation might be first associated with the changed system of collecting at the time. Indeed, towards the end of the sixteenth century and then throughout the seventeenth century, interest in painting 113 increased (and eighteenth-century quadrerie are typical examples of that). However, if the architectural and social evolution of the gallery has been analysed several times,114 few studies have focused on the influence that this space had on the definition of modalities for setting up artworks 111 “L’esibizione delle stanze colme di antichità e di opere moderne, vero allestimento di ‘degno e reale spettacolo’, serve in definitiva a rappresentare e a descrivere ‘la grandezza del generoso e magnifico animo’ del proprietario.” Claudio Franzoni, “Le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità”, 338. 112 Christina Struck conducted an analytical and comparative study on the Roman palaces’ galleries between 1500 and 1800. She records the presence at that time of at least 173 galleries. See Christina Strunck, “A Statistical Approach to Changes in the Design and Function of Galleries”, 221, 260. 113 Especially in Rome, the sixteenth century remained the century of ancient art collections, where gardens and inner courtyards of private buildings (such as Palazzo Farnese or Palazzo della Valle) were the privileged places to exhibit sculptures. In the seventeenth century, painting collections also began to find space in private Roman apartments. Thus, in 1638, Pompilio Totti described the collection of pictures in the Palazzo Borghese: “There are twenty statues placed in different places in the courtyard, which beyond the great value, make this place wonderful. Inside there are rooms with imperial ornaments of statues, with a very famous gallery, fountains, the garden, and a thousand other delights.” Pompilio Totti, Ritratto di Roma moderna (Rome, 1638), 354. “Vi son da venti statue poste in diversi luoghi del cortile, che oltre il valore grande, rendono a fatto detto luogo meraviglioso. Dentro poi sono stanze con ornamenti Imperiali di statue, con una galleria famosissima, et banco fontane, e giardino, e mille altre delitie.” For an accurate study of some Roman palaces of the seventeenth century, see Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces. 114 Among other sources, see Cristina de Benedictis, Per la storia del collezionismo italiano.

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and furnishing seventeenth-century interior spaces. Treatises, notes on guardaroba, guidebooks, private recorded accounts and engraved prints of particular objects or spaces enable us to reconstruct today the enhancements in the design and organisation of collections, the exhibition layout of those spaces, and their evolution over time and according to contexts.115 Among the various mentionable cases, Cardinal Antonio Barberini’s move into the “Casa Grande ai Giubbonari” in 1658 records the need of the time for spatial and architectural renewal. As he aimed to divide private spaces from public ones,116 before his installation, the cardinal remodelled the ground floor of the building into an apartment of twelve rooms and a chapel where he displayed artworks (more than 300 paintings) from his collection. Beyond this case briefly described, one of the most clarifying examples, and of which there are visual testimonies, is the decorative arrangement of Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Eighteenth-century drawings by Giovanni Volpato and Pietro Bettelini, South Wall of the Farnese Gallery, Rome (1777), and by Francesco Panini, View of the Farnese Gallery117 (1775) record the decorative arrangement of Palazzo Farnese, designed entirely as an exhibition space. Yet, in addition to the geometrical organisation and the iconographic link with the vault frescoed 118 by Carracci, the Farnese gallery is above all a typical example of the structural transformation of the building. The Palace underwent a spatial reorganisation119 in the period when Cardinal Odoardo lived there, between the end of the sixteenth century and his death, in 1626. The cardinal, who also commissioned Carracci to decorate the Galleria and the Camerino, renewed the conceptual and functional status of the various spaces of the palace, so that, for instance, three rooms started being used as exhibition spaces, the so-called “painting rooms”. The general change 115 See Jean-Jacques Boissard, Romanae Urbis topographia et antiquitates, 6 Vols. (Frankfurt: Johann Feyrabend for Theodor de Bry, 1597–1602). A topographical narrative that Boissard put up during his four-day visit throughout Rome. Divided into six volumes with more than 800 plates, the work contains many engravings of palaces, gardens and prestigious collections. 116 Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces. 117 Volpato published the etching as part of a series of views of Annibale Carracci’s frescoes in the Roman Palazzo Farnese. The series was conceived according to the locations popular among foreign travellers of the time. 118 The vault is painted to suggest an optical illusion called the technique of the quadri riportati. Instead of the curved surface, one has the impression of seeing a series of framed paintings hanging in an overhead gallery. 119 Luigi Spezzaferro, “Il collezionismo a Roma nel XVII secolo”, in Olivier Bonfait et al, Geographia del collezionismo. Italia e Francia tra il XVI e il XVIII secolo (Rome: École française de Rome, 2001), 1–23. See also the inventory of 1644, of the contents of Palazzo Farnese, published in Bertrand Jestaz (ed.), Le Palais Farnese III.

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Figure 10 Francesco Panini (Italian, Rome 1745 – 1812 Rome), View of the Farnese Gallery, Rome (c.1775), drawing, 42.5 × 27.6 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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was substantial: it was no longer a question of placing objects, tapestries or paintings in the guardaroba waiting to be used to adorn rooms for special occasions, but on the contrary, it was a matter of defining specific places to exhibit autonomous paintings and allow visitors to contemplate them. This change testifies to the increasing awareness of the aesthetic and artistic value of the collection considered as “the result of a particular intellectual work, produced by a manufacturer that does not just do but rather makes, or creates what the subject freely expresses”.120 As for the Farnese example, which can be considered as “a complete work of display [where] nothing could be added or taken away”,121 the Roman palace of Vincenzo Giustiniani emphasises, in turn, the architectural and statutory transformation undergone by Baroque palaces. The inventory published in 1638, following Giustiniani’s death,122 not only provides a wealth of information on the heterogeneity of the works on display but also allows us to reconstruct their positioning within the various spaces. From analysis of the inventory, it is known that the noble apartment – as well as those of Giuseppe and Benedetto Giustiniani, already dead for years at the time – was thought of as an exhibition space. On the second floor, there was a “large room for ancient paintings” dedicated to the best works to contemplate. Besides, in Vincenzo Giustiniani’s studio, although it was conceived as a private space, inaccessible to visitors, there were works of lesser artistic value, especially city paintings and family portraits. But most of all, the inventory sheds light on the innovation in the setting up of works of art. Thus, according to the habit developed at that time, “to decorate palaces with paintings, to vary the use of the sumptuous ‘vestments’ [paramenti] used in the past”,123 Vincenzo’s main gallery welcomed a massive quantity 120 Luigi Spezzaferro, “Il collezionismo a Roma nel XVII secolo”, 9–10. 121 Gail Feigenbaum, “Introduction: Art and Display in Principle and in Practice”, 24. 122 Vincenzo Giustiniani’s post-mortem inventory, drawn up in 1638 by Andrea Giustiniani (State Archives of Rome, Giustiniani Fund, envelope 16) was found by Luigi Salerno. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, the Genoese Giustiniani family accumulated in the Roman Palace an expanded collection of about 600 paintings and over 1200 ancient statues. Merit for the collection is attributed, f irst, to the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. However, Silvia Danesi Squarzina reconstructed the genesis of the collection and assigned an iconic role also to Vincenzo’s elder brother, Cardinal Benedetto, papal treasurer and commissioner of the Carracci and Caravaggio. Luigi Salerno, “The Picture Gallery of Vincenzo Giustiniani. Part I, II, III”, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 102, No. 685 (April 1960): 21–27, 93–104, 135–148; Silvia Danesi Squarzina, La Collezione Giustiniani. Inventari I, Inventari II, Documenti (Rome: Einaudi, 2003). For an extensive bibliography, see Angela Gallottini, Le sculture della collezione Giustiniani, Vols. I–II (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1998). 123 “Modernamente si é messo in uso di parare i palazzi compitamente co’ quadri, per andare variando l’uso de’ paramenti sontuosi usati per il passato.” Vincenzo Giustiniani, Discorsi sulle

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of sculptures alongside the traditional frescoed walls and the religious and landscape paintings. As these antiquities and sculptures were positioned along the walls, on two adjacent rows, the effect was, therefore, a mixture of objects, images, sculptures and paintings that surrounded the visitors, marvelling at them with interplays of mimesis and overlapping between the various exhibition levels. Eventually, within such a setup space, the seventeenth-century visitors found themselves facing two rows of sculptures standing in front of the frescoed wall on which several paintings were hung. In brief, in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a progressive transformation occurred concerning the architecture of buildings and the ontological status of the particular works they contained. This change began at the end of the sixteenth century when the desire to view (and to show) artefacts more closely laid the groundwork for both the establishment of new modes of display and the creation (or the temporary use) of new spaces. The need to display the collection (and, implicitly, the social power of the collector) then echoed the ontological transformation of paintings and sculptures. This condition ultimately went on to define a new spatial hierarchy and a more apparent distinction between the ornamental structure of the various environments (objects, tapestries, paintings without a specific author) and works of art which, instead, were to be “placed in their own places [necessitate suae loci]”.124

3.5 Setting Up the Collections Un signe remarquable du mérite des citoyens, c’est qu’à Rome, le nombre des statues privées et publiques était si grand, que dit-on cette population fictive n’était pas moindre que la population réelle. Les notables exposaient en longs alignements les images des ancêtres dans les cortèges et dans les atria, comme la principale preuve de leur noblesse; doctes et savants ne s’employaient pas moins à avoir des cabinets garnis de statues et de sculptures que des livres; Cicero me semble en vérité moins dénoncer Verres qu’envier son éclatant butin d’ouvrages et de statues magnifiques.125

arti e sui mestieri (1610), ed. by Anna Banti (Florence: Sansoni, 1981), 45. 124 See the tenth chapter of Mancini’s text, dedicated to how and where to placing paintings in private homes. Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (1620), ed. by Adriana Marucchi and Luigi Salerno, Vol. 1 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1956), 144–145. 125 Pomponius Gauricus, De sculptura (1504), ed. by André Chastel and Robert Klein (Geneva, Paris: Droz, 1969), 52.

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The question of the house as an exhibition environment and a place of social representation has often been associated with studies126 on collecting. Considering the idea of a​​ collection in its broadest sense (from documents to books, from artefacts to relics, from weapons to jewels, from statues to paintings and furniture), a parallel is immediately outlined between the heterogeneity of the elements and the variety of exhibition spaces (convents, private rooms in bourgeois or aristocratic residences, libraries, shops and pharmacies, gardens). Within this relationship, not only did the variety and characteristics of each space impact the choice of the collection, but at the same time, the particularity of each item helped to define the exhibition needs in terms of layout and architecture. This means the adoption of an intentional approach towards architecture and design as devices capable of visually translating the ordering process inherent in the iconological programme of a collection, and its ontology.127 Following this relationship, the studiolo ends up of course signifying the correspondence between the symbolism of the collection and the typical architectural structure of this place: a space with a central plan of small dimensions, and often placed in a secret or not very accessible part of the house. On the contrary, for the humanistic cabinet and then for the Baroque environments, the central plan (that placed the visitor at the centre of the space) was exploited to stage the collection and give life to an experience of aesthetic embodiment. The same relationship is found in the other traditionally recognised space, the gallery, so that while the longitudinal shape led the visitor through a dynamic experience of the space, the architectural structure, often columned, conditioned a linear and rhythmic layout of the works. However, since spaces dedicated to art were not limited to these traditional spatial units but invested the whole house, other venues, such as exterior courtyards and gardens, were used and included in the display logic. Besides, although in the seventeenth century the first spaces used entirely as places of conservation and for exhibition of the collections began to be built ex novo, in the previous century, some places had already started being used just as exhibition spaces. “The common denominator and hinge between scholarly collecting and great aristocratic galleries is the choice 126 See the university project “Collezionismo e spazi del collezionismo” (University of Genova, 2008), the exhibitions Life and the Arts in the Baroque Palaces of Rome. Ambiente Barocco (New York, Kansas City, 1999), and A House of Art: Rubens as Collector (Antwerp, 2004) and also At Home in Renaissance Italy (London, 2006). See also the two study days organised in 2010 by the Getty Research Institute and focused on “The Display of Art and Roman Palaces 1550–1750”. 127 Luca Basso Peressut, “Spazi e forme dell’esporre tra cabinet e museo pubblico”.

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of the exhibition ‘container’: the multi-purpose complex […] expanded in several architectural spaces”128 which are concentrated in the image of the building: libraries (showcases), galleries (wardrobes), corridors (niches), gardens, ateliers, etc. Together with new spaces, new practices of displaying art and other cultural artefacts were developed on the Italian peninsula and beyond. This development was primarily accentuated by the fact that collection progressively moved away from the idea of a private set of objects and works of art to embrace that of an increasingly public collection, attentive to the needs of the visitors. Increased accessibility to collections then led to their growing institutionalisation, and to the opening and the construction of spaces in which to view artworks. Undoubtedly, this aspect had a specific geography and temporality. For instance, in Rome, the second half of the sixteenth century witnessed progressive public accessibility to cardinals’ private collections of antiquities.129 There, the public value of the cardinals’ collections was proportional to the symbolic worth that the accumulation of relics of antiquity was able to emphasise.130 Indeed, unlike those on the rest of the peninsula, Roman collections had a topographical dimension that concerned the city and its monumentality, rather than the object or painting in itself. However, especially in seventeenth-century Rome, precisely because of the supremacy of clergy’s collections, private collections offered an “alternative”131 to official quadrerie.132 In Florence, the growing opening up to the public of private collections, such as the de’ Medici’s, was more the result of a humanistic approach, interested both in the cultural aspect of ancient books and objects and in the allegorical interpretation of a specific iconographic programme. Moreover, Florentine forms of collecting 128 Donatella Livia Sparti, “Intorno a un progetto museale seicentesco: la collezione Dal Pozzo attraverso nuova documentazione”, 884. 129 William Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception in the Antiquity Collections of LateRenaissance Rome”, 398. 130 For an in-depth study of the role of cardinals in the evolution of Roman seventeenth-century collecting, see Patricia Falguières, “La cité fictive. Les collections de cardinaux, à Rome, au XVIe siècle”, in André Chastel (ed.), Les carrache et les décors profanes. Actes du Colloque organisé par l’École française de Rome, Rome, 2–4 October 1986 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1988), 215–333. 131 Donatella Livia Sparti, “Intorno a un progetto museale seicentesco: la collezione Dal Pozzo attraverso nuova documentazione”, Annali Della Scuola Normale Superiore Di Pisa. Classe Di Lettere E Filosofia, Ser. III, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1990): 879–926. 132 These collections, mostly of paintings, were characterised by a dynamic display, freedom and conceptual openness that influenced the museography of the following century (like Spada or Vincenzo Giustiniani’s collections).

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developed, above all, according to a precise cultural policy aimed at improving the economic development of the city, which resulted in the definition of new exhibiting models, which influenced the following centuries. In Venice,133 at least throughout the whole of the sixteenth century, private134 collections all shared the need to allocate their collections to collective memory instead. This condition led many private individuals to become “semi-public”135 and to donate their collections to the Serenissima, thus giving it broad intellectual power, at least until its progressive seventeencentury marginalisation. Furthermore, Venice, after Rome and Florence with the Villa Medici and the Uffizi, boasted the third exhibition space opened to the public136 of the sixteenth century: the Statuario Grimani.137 This public room dedicated to antique statuary (Statuario Pubblico) was held in the Antisala of the Biblioteca Marciana, and housed the huge collection of the Grimani family. Contrary to Roman and Venetian places, for which opening to the public was mostly dictated by the occupants’ need for social recognition, the Statuario specifically represented the Venetian social and political climate of the time. Indeed, it was precisely Giovanni Grimani who decided to donate the collection to the Venetian Republic in 1587, with the specific obligation of “selecting a place […] that was proportioned to this effect [housing his collection], and that allowed foreigners, after having seen the arsenal, and other marvellous things of that city, to see these antiquities in a public place”.138 The installation of his collection in the Marciana Library was entrusted to Vincenzo Scamozzi who installed the 133 Between 1520 and 1530, there were at least ten private collections in Venice and six in Padua. See Michel Hochmann, Peintres et commanditaires à Venise (1540–1628) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1992); Paola Barocchi (ed.), Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del Cinquecento, exh. cat., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, March – September 1980 (Florence: Electa, 1980). 134 Although even in Venice, public collections were managed by the clergy and institutional buildings, private initiatives were what made Venice one of the major centres of seventeenthcentury collecting. 135 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIe siècle, 84. 136 Marylin Perry, “The Statuario Pubblico of the Venetian Republic”, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, No. 8 (1972): 76–150. 137 For a general description of the palace and essential bibliography see ibid., 75; Marilyn Perry, “A Renaissance Showplace of Art: The Palazzo Grimani at Santa Maria Formosa, Venice”, Apollo, Vol. CXIII (1981): 215–221; Irene Favaretto, “‘Una tribuna ricca di marmi’: appunti per una storia delle collezioni dei Grimani di Santa Maria Formosa”, Aquileia nostra, No. 55 (1984): 205–240. 138 “deputar un luogo […] che fosse proportionato a tale effetto, e che permettesse che i forestieri dopo aver veduto l’arsenale, et altre cosa maravigliose di quella città, potessero anco per cosa notabile veder queste antichità ridotte in un luogo pubblico”. Verbale del 3 Febbraio 1587, quoted by Christina Riebesell, “Sulla genesi delle gallerie di antichità nell’Italia del Cinquecento”, in Christina Strunck and Elisabeth Kieven (eds.), Europäische Galeriebauten, 215.

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artworks according to a rigid geometric scheme, as documented 139 by the eighteenth-century drawings by Anton Maria Zanetti Disegni della parete d’ingresso e della parete verso la Libreria dell’Antiquario Grimani (Drawings of the entrance wall and the wall towards the Library of the Antiquarium Grimani, 1736). This overview highlights the complex situation, especially in Italy, characterised by different tastes and ideas cohabiting within an enlarged notion of (exhibition) space. The social and political climate of the time, in the middle of Catholic reform, is also reflected in the reorganisation of spaces, in the attempt to provide new schemes and to define precepts regarding arts and exhibitions. Moreover, throughout the whole seventeenth century, alongside the progressive abandonment of the German wunderkammer and the encyclopaedic connotation of medieval mirabilia, new exhibition sites were born together with the desire to establish educational and pedagogical viewing programmes. However, we cannot speak of a denial of cataloguing approaches and spaces. Indeed, while remaining an acquired humanistic method and precept,140 the concept of cataloguing was updated and increasingly associated with an exhibiting need. Indeed, the practice of displaying collections in various spaces, involving the totality of the building, was precisely a reflection of the scientific collecting approach, which occupied different spaces according to the descripta ratio of each collected genre. There is actually very little of the experimental method of the new science, or Galileo’s school of thought, or Malpighi’s biological research, under lining these museums […] I believe we now have sufficient evidence to state that museums such as Cospi’s, Moscardo’s and Settala’s represent in some senses a retrogression when compared with the collections of the 16th century naturalia lists.141 139 See Irene Favaretto and Marcella De Paoli, “La tribuna ritrovata. Uno schizzo inedito di Federico Zuccari con l’Antiquario dell’Ill. Patriarca Grimani”, Edicola. International Journal of Classical Art History, No. 7 (2000): 97–136. 140 The latter forged by Ferrante Imperato and Ulisse Aldovrandi finds a visual rendition in the Theatro della memoria by Giulio Camillo Delminio. See Ulisse Aldovrandi, Discorso naturale (1572–73), published in Sandra Tugnoli Pattaro (ed.), Metodo e sistema delle scienze nel pensiero di Ulisse Aldovrandi (Bologna: Clueb, 1981); Giulio Camillo, L’idea di Theatro (Florence: Torrentino, 1550). See also Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966). 141 Giuseppe Olmi, “Italian Cabinets of the 16th and 17th Centuries, in Oliver Impey”, in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 12–15.

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In this respect, it should also be remembered how ephemeral, transitory and mobile these setups were.142 Like a stage set, the arrangement of these spaces was subjected to constant change. As a result, works were interchanged according to recurring wishes and representative needs. This feature made the palace not only a multi-purpose whole but also a sort of performing building where individuals could experience space differently.143 This shared situation led to several theatrical forms of installation and setup based on the idea of a temporary event, which merge into a complex visual language structured on the dialectic between different elements, including the collector’s expectations and desires, architectural layout, and viewer experience. In this regard, the Medici’s collecting is a case in point, being in particular the symbol of a cultural reorganisation between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that led medieval collecting into that of the Renaissance, more attentive to contemporary figurative art and the recovery of the ancient. The archives and inventories144 of the Roman and Florentine Medici palaces testify to the complex logic behind the arrangement of paintings, sculptures and other objects. Indeed, the more their collection grew, the more the need to rethink the position of the works became a necessity. Throughout the sixteenth century, not only because of a need for spatial reorganisation but also for the need of social and symbolic representation, the Medici collections were continually moved and adapted to the spaces of various buildings, according to specific layout schemes (from the guardaroba to the gallery, to the corridor and the Tribune). The Roman Medici collections, concentrated in Villa Medici and directed by Cardinal Ferdinando, came under the influence of the approach of the time. Collecting was aimed at fostering the recovery and enhancement of the ancient, with a clear taste for antiquities. This appears more clear considering that in Rome, at least until the end of the sixteenth century, the idea of a painting collection was absent or essentially subordinated to a form of archaeological collection interested in mural decoration. In 1580, for example, Ferdinando I de’ Medici appointed Jacopo Zucchi to redefine the

142 For further information, see Barbara Furlotti, “Display in Motion”, in Gail Feigenbaum, Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 146–156. 143 In late medieval and early modern Europe, the room was also a place completely covered with tapestries, conceived as a “textile space”. 144 For an extensive bibliography, see Eugène Müntz, “Les collections d’antiques formées par les Médicis au XVIe siècle”, Mémoires de l’Institut national de France, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1896): 85–168; Paola Barocchi, “La storia della galleria degli Uffizi e la storiografia artistica”, Annali Della Scuola Normale Superiore Di Pisa. Classe Di Lettere e Filosofia, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1982): 1411–1523.

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spatial structure of his residence, mainly modifying the gallery adjacent to the villa, and integrating the rooms with impressive antiquities collections. Unlike the Roman collection of Villa Medici, which imposed rigid layout choices, often demonstrating an imbalance between ancient and modern, the Florentine one was instead a clear transcription of Cosimo I’s exhibiting intent focused on the balance between form and quantity and on the dialogue between ancient and modern. However, in the early Florentine sixteenth century, the place that marked the advent of a more conscious145 idea of the collection was the house of Ottaviano de’ Medici, known as Casino Mediceo, adjoining Lorenzo il Magnifico’s vegetable gardens of San Marco. There, the domestic space started being used as an exhibition space while the works of art setup was no longer considered as mere furnishing, but as a device apt to re-evaluate the artwork. This situation, in addition to echoing the Roman experience, paved the way for the complex exhibition layout of the first Medici palace, Palazzo Vecchio (the medieval public palace of the Signoria in Florence),146 which, in 1540, became the dwelling of Cosimo I.147 In order to legitimise Medici power, and glorify his installation in Palazzo Vecchio, Cosimo I immediately undertook a phase of restructuring of the palace, which involved expansion of the rooms, the definition of new decorative programmes and rearrangement of the collections. These various spatial reorganisations, carried out during the second half of the sixteenth-century, shed light today on the awareness of the time regarding the role of the setup and the exhibition space. Indeed, at least until the end of 1553, the collection remained hoarded for the most part in the wardrobe,148 and in Cosimo I’s 145 At the beginning of the century, with the expulsion of the Medici court and the advent of the republic, there were no real private collections in Florence. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, the paintings also still had a totally decorative character. Beyond the works of renowned quality artists, the pictorial cycles in Florentine homes were mostly considered the result of a decorative and iconographic programme, aimed at transmitting specific theoretical or celebratory messages. It was then towards the end of the sixteenth century in Italy that one began to talk about great masters. This situation became off icial only in 1602 with the promulgation of a decree that prevented the exit from Florence of the works of eighteen dead painters, considered the great masters of the past. See Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition, 20. 146 See Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo Mediceo e storia artistica. Da Cosimo I a Cosimo II 1540–1621, Vol. 1 (Florence: Studio per edizioni scelte, 2002). 147 The residence of Cosimo I in Palazzo Vecchio, in 1540, should be remembered as the beginning of the definition of a museum logic (close to that of the Gonzaga family in Mantua). 148 The inventory of 1553 testifies to the enormous proportions of the wardrobe, by then full of antiquities, tapestries, bronzes, weapons, bas-reliefs, crystals, leathers, paintings, drawings, medals, mosaics, exotic objects, porcelain, embroidery, etc. See Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo Mediceo e storia artistica, Vol. I, 7–9.

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bedroom, where various marble statues and a few paintings were staged within a spectacular structure made of leather vestments and gold friezes. In 1554–1555, the imposing dimensions of the collections necessitated a rearrangement of the spaces and items, which was entrusted to Giorgio Vasari.149 The latter “tried to achieve a decor in which all the craftsmen (dealing with glass, wood, stucco, terracotta and above all of the tapestry) could compete for the praise of the Prince [Cosimo I], confirming with their skill the positive results of his patronage”.150 In this regard, I Ragionamenti, a literary work completed by Vasari in 1567 and published posthumously in 1588, is a rich source of information regarding the conception of the exhibition space and the preparation of the works. The text collects Vasari’s conversations with Cosimo’s son, Francesco, while walking in the various rooms of Palazzo Vecchio. By structuring it in the form of a direct dialogue, the conversation ends up becoming a sort of literary guided tour, in which Vasari commented on and described the renovated spaces of the building. Moreover, throughout his description, Vasari suggested not only a predeterminate spatial promenade, but also a specific order and visual hierarchy 151. Ultimately, by emphasising the physical dimension of the visit, he implicitly shaped the portrait of an ideal beholder (riguardante).152 Among the spaces he described, the one that most seems to represent Vasari’s work on exhibition design is Cosimo’s studio (called the Scrittoio 149 If for the architectural part, Vasari had decision-making freedom, for the decorative part, he instead had to submit to the programme def ined by Cosimo Bartoli, in 1550. See Cosimo Bartoli, Ragionamenti accademici di Cosimo Bartoli gentil’huomo et Accademico Fiorentino, sopra alcuni luoghi difficili di Dante. Con alcune inventioni et significati, et la tavola di piu cose notabili (Venice: Francesco Franceschi Senese, 1567), quote by Paola Tinagli, Rileggendo i Ragionamenti, in Giorgio Vasari. Tra decorazione ambientale e storiografia artistica (Florence: Olschki, 1985), 83–93. For further information about the diegetic organisation of the tale, see Véronique Mérieux, “I Ragionamenti de Giorgio Vasari (1567)”, Italies, No. 9 (2005): 71–94. 150 “si sforzò di raggiungere un decoro nel quale tutte le maestranze (del vetro, del legno, degli stucchi, del cotto e soprattutto dell’arazzeria) potessero gareggiare nell’elogio del Principe [Cosimo I], confermando con la loro bravura i buoni effetti del suo patrocinio.” Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo Mediceo e storia artistica, Vol. I, 15. 151 Vasari developed the idea of the visit, better yet path (percorso), on various occasions (also architectural ones). And, almost always, he privileges the notion of an ideal, permanent and precise path, conceived on the features of the space, place and objects concerned. Cf. Andrea Mariorri, “Il tema della Città nell’attività architettonica del Vasari”, in AA.VV., Il Vasari, storiografico e artista: Atti del Congresso internazionale nel IV centenario della morte (Florence: Istituto Nazionale sul Rinascimento, 1974), 587–603; Ludovico Zorzi, Il Teatro e la Città: Saggi sulla scena italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1979). 152 Emilie Passignat, “The Order, the Itinerary, the Beholder: Considerations on Some Aspects of the Ragionamenti del Sig. Cavalier Giorgio Vasari”, in Maia Wellington Gahtan (ed.), Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2014).

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di Calliope),153 which not only is a perfect illustration of Vasari’s desire to magnify the dynasty but also offers a detailed representation of the place and the arrangement of the works within it: Let’s go in. Mr Prince, the Duke wants to use this studio […] to put on it small bronzes, which are in abundance and are all ancient and beautiful. Between these columns or pillars and in these cedar boxes he will keep all his medals that can be easily seen and without confusion because the Greeks will all be all in one place, the copper ones in another, […] and also the golden ones. What will be put in this middle frame between these columns? All the miniatures of […] excellent masters, and paintings […] will be put on it; and under these boxes […] there will be different goods, […]; and in these wardrobes [there will be] cameos; in these larger ones, he will put various jewels, because, as you know, he has got lots of them and they are all rare.154

In the setup of the Scrittoio di Calliope, Vasari seems to care about the relationship between the exhibits, the related furniture and exhibition devices. More important, it seems155 that Vasari refers to earlier exhibiting examples, especially ones of antiquarian collections. This association is mostly visible in the division of the wall space into various sections crowned by an architectural cornice in which small sculptures and objects were to be displayed. Instead of being hidden in the guardaroba (waiting to be shown), objects were set up in an ordered way, to increase the total effect of an exhibition space. Contrary to the well-known Renaissance studiolo in which objects were mostly conserved in closed cupboards according to the display methods of the fifteenth century, Cosimo’s scrittoio appears more 153 See Maia Wellington Gahtan (ed.), Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum. 154 “Entriamo. Questo scrittojo, Signor Principe, il Duca se ne vuol servire per […] per mettervi sopra statue piccole di bronzo, […] che ce n’è una gran parte, e tutte antiche e belle. Fra queste colonne o pilastri, e in queste cassette di legname di cedro terrà poi tutte le sue medaglie che facilmente si potranno senza confusione vedere perchè le Greche saranno tutte in un luogo, quelle di rame in un altro, […] e così quelle doro. Che si metterà in questo quadro di mezzo fra queste colonne? G. Si metteranno tutte le miniature di […] maestri eccellenti, e pitture […]; e sotto queste cassette […] staranno gioje diverse sorti […]; e in questi armarj di sotto grandi i cristalli orientali, […] cammei staranno; in questi più grandi metterà anticaglie, perchè come sa, n’ha pure assai e tutte rare.” Giorgio Vasari, “Ragionamento Quarto” (1557), in Gaetano Milanesi, I Ragionamenti e le lettere edite e inedite di Giorgio Vasari (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1882), 58–59. 155 Donatella Pegazzano, “Giorgio Vasari, Rome and Early Forms of Display of the Medici Collections in Florence: Models and Afterlife”, in Maia Wellington Gahtan (ed.), Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum, 131–149.

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as the rendition of a new way of conceiving collections, with a symbolic and aesthetic value. This setting-up, although it stemmed from the first necessity to better gather artworks of Palazzo Vecchio, suggested a kind of displacement, “from a conservative method of hiding the objects in question […] towards an exhibition system in which most of the objects were fully visible to those entering the room”.156 Such a solution describes the necessity of the time to renew the collection and its display based on technical (more order), aesthetic (more understanding) and social (better image) requirements. Palazzo Pitti was another Florentine place of Medici representation. Until 1588, when Ferdinand I moved his residence there, the palace served as a place of residence for illustrious guests. Inside, the room of the niches (sala delle Nicchie) was the most characteristic environment. Intended as an antiquarium, this gallery, designed by Ammanati in 1561, housed large classical statues set in ten niches, about two metres high, panelled with black marble and decorated with small-sized antiquities and portraits of the Medici family. The installation of the works visually translated the desire of Cosimo I, who not only wanted to emphasise a link with the approach adopted by Roman collectors, but also sought to suggest a stylistic continuity between past and present thanks to the dialogue between ancient and modern works. In the first half of the century, the Room of the Niches, even before Palazzo Vecchio, welcomed the first Florentine collection of works of art. A still extant description of the place by Vasari157 depicts the works on display and provides both a complete list of statues positioned on the ground, in the niches and above the door frames and a list of other antiques preserved in Cosimo’s working cabinet (the scrittoio). In the second half of the sixteenth century, in Florence, beyond the private studioli, Palazzo Vecchio, Palazzo Pitti and the Casino were thus the three ideal places for the Medici to exhibit their intellectual and political power. In 1581, the Medici architectural complex was modified again. To the new decoration of the ceilings of the Uffizi Corridor of Levante (the spatial unit that connected Palazzo Vecchio to Palazzo Pitti) a precise museological programme was added in order to insert the Corridor into the Medici antiquities. The Corridor was renovated so as to house the works of the various Florentine and Roman collections, and became the 156 Ibid., 137. 157 This description is added to the index of the second edition of The Lives (1568) but was omitted in most posthumous editions. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi, Vol. 4 (Florence: Sansoni, 1878–1885), 177.

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famous Gallery of Francesco I. “I started to arrange that first part of the Corridor over the Magistrates like a Gallery and I plan to put many large and small statues in it, which I kept scattered haphazardly.”158 This new gallery, a place for strolling and entertaining the court of the time, thus connected Palazzo Vecchio to the garden above the Loggia dei Lanzi (a garden which, in turn, was decorated with floral furniture). The layout of the gallery included frescoes in the spans of the ceiling and ancient and modern sculptures (from the Room of the Niches of Palazzo Pitti) alternating on the walls with portraits of illustrious men 159 of the present and past (previously set up in the Palazzo Vecchio’s room of geographical maps). This horizontal layout was a consequence of the architectural structure of the space. The grotesque vaults, regularly set, forced the horizontal set up of the portraits. This new logical museography then led, in 1583, to the creation of the Tribuna,160 which in the documents of the time was called the “Dome of the Gallery”,161 of “vermilion colour, beautiful in lacquer, encrusted with mother-of-pearl”.162 Intended as a place where all genres of collecting and historiography would be enhanced, the Tribune was organised according to a specific wall arrangement, called “step by step”: Paintings of various sizes and of various subjects (mostly religious), ancient and modern bronzes, waxes, marbles, alabasters, silver, hard stones, ivory, objects made from natural finds […], damask knives, miniatures, […] celestial globes, coral, […], vases and jars of the most varied stones. Sculptures, paintings, naturalia, scientific instruments, precious stones alternated at increasing height, in order to offer a surprising typological variety, which in specific domains could reach a different quality.163 158 Francesco I de’ Medici, quoted by Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo mediceo. Cosimo I, Francesco I e il cardinale Ferdinando (Modena: Panini, 1993), 190, note 205. 159 See Paolo Giovio, Elogia virorum illustrium (Basel: Petrus Perna, 1577). See also Franco Minonzio, Paolo Giovio. Elogi degli uomini illustri (Turin: Einaudi, 2006). 160 See Antonio Natali et al., La Tribuna del Príncipe. Storia, contesto, restauro (Florence: Giunti, 2014). 161 See Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo Mediceo e storia artistica, Vol. 1, 69, note 236. 162 See Francesco Bocchi, Le bellezze della città di Fiorenza, dove a pieno di pittura, di scultura, di sacri tempi, di palazzi, i più notabili artifizii et più preziosi si contegono (Florence: B. Sermatelli, 1591), quoted by Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo Mediceo e storia artistica, Vol. 1, 72. 163 Ibid., 71. “Quadri di varia grandezza e di vario soggetto (per lo più religioso), bronzi e bronzetti antichi e moderni, cere, marmi, alabastri, argenti, pietre dure, avori, oggetti ricavati da reperti naturali […], coltelli alla damaschina, miniature, […] globi celesti, coralli, miniere di monte, vasi e vasetti delle pietre più svariate. Scultura, pittura, naturali, strumenti scientifici, pietre preziose

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The Florentine setup, from the Casino di San Marco to the Corridor, up to the Tribuna, was thus conceived as a real aesthetic experience aimed at enhancing the cultural heritage of the Medici. In particular, although stemming from the Medici’s humanistic cultural impulse, the prestige of the Medici collection was mainly used as a means of consensus to convey specific ideological messages to the Renaissance society of the time, and therefore to gain their assent. With Francesco I, then, having abandoned the self-celebratory goal of his father Cosimo, a more domestic and private collecting took hold, as well as greater attention to the conservation and display of the dynastic heritage. In 1584, Francesco publicly opened the Uffizi,164 which thus became purely an exhibition venue. Once again, the complex of buildings between the Palazzo Vecchio, the Pitti and the Uffizi was reorganised from architectural, stylistic and iconographic points of view. The rooms of the Uffizi aligned with specific exhibition categories, such as the room of weapons and the room of scientific instruments. The two corridors (of Ponente and Levante), acquired a mirror-like aspect, rhythmically exhibiting statues and paintings. The Tribune, in turn, acquired in all respects the role of a rotunda – that is, the privileged place for exhibiting and where the masterpieces of the Medici collection were to be shown. In this regard, Cristina de Benedictis’s analysis clearly summarises the role of this new rearrangement within the history of the idea of ​​exhibition space: [O]bjects mainly belonging to the artistic sphere were distributed by genres and dimensions in rhythmic scansion on several floors with an exhibition approach that took into account a correct visualisation of both the single piece in its relations with the surrounding ones and the overall effect of the walls. By retrieving the suggestions of the set-up both of Cosimo’s studio and private studioli and by dissolving the systematic nature of the allegorical and cosmological structure that presided over the arrangement of Francesco’s studiolo, a new display system was created with a rare visual impact and extreme functionality. The harmonious relationship that was established between objects and the environment and the rigorous correspondence between dimensions and genres si alternavano a crescente altezza, in modo da offrire una sorprendente varietà tipologica, la quale nei singoli settori poteva raggiungere una diversa qualità.” 164 Paola Barocchi, “La storia della Galleria degli Uffizi e la storiografia artistica”; Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Ragionieri (eds.), Gli Uffizi: quattro secoli di una galleria, Atti del convegno, Florence, 20–24 September 1982 (Florence: L. S. Olschki 1983).

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exceeded the abstract classification of the universe and the ordering and setting criteria formulated for the first time by Quiccheberg, leading to an evocative and concrete museological practice that will be proposed as a parameter and fruitful stimulus for the future.165

This description is made even clearer by looking at Giuseppe Magni’s drawings, Walls of the Uffizi Tribune (1750), which reveal a setup attentive both to the dynamic balance of the surfaces and the sixteenth-century architectural decoration. Although these are eighteenth-century drawings, Magni’s depictions find confirmation in the sixteenth-century inventories, which suggest a wall arrangement capable of highlighting the stylistic and visual peculiarities of the individual paintings. To the detriment of a specific iconographic programme, this new way of setting up also highlights the role of the wall, intended as an architectural unit to be organised to take into account the mutual and visual relationship between the dimensions of the works. Both as regards the layout and the use of specific architectural units, such as the corridor and the rotunda, which later became favourite exhibiting archetypes, the Medici display logic helped shape the idea of exhibition space. It set off a phase of research and cultural expansion reflected in the creation of private collections organised spatially and iconographically on the basis of the Medici layout. Especially with Francesco I, the predisposition towards collecting gave rise to a precise stylistic and architectural physiognomy, which not only influenced the practices of private collecting but also resulted in the urban and building construction of villas, gardens, studios, galleries and private chapels.166 165 Cristina de Benedictis, Per la storia del collezionismo italiano. Fonti e documenti, 67. “gli oggetti prevalentemente appartenenti alla sfera artistica, erano distribuiti per generi e dimensioni in ritmica scansione su più piani con un criterio espositivo che teneva conto di una corretta visualizzazione sia del singolo pezzo nei suoi rapporti con quelli circostanti, sia dell’effetto complessivo delle pareti. Recuperando le suggestioni dell’allestimento dello scrittoio di Cosimo come quello degli studioli privati e dissolvendo la sistematicità della struttura allegorica e cosmologica che presiedeva all’ordinamento della studiolo di Francesco, si veniva a creare un nuovo sistema espositivo di raro impatto visivo e di estrema funzionalità. L’armonico rapporto che si instaurava fra oggetti e ambiente e la rigorosa rispondenza fra misure e generi superava l’astratta classificazione dell’universo e i criteri di ordinamento e di allestimento formulati per la prima volta dal Quiccheberg, approdando ad una suggestiva e concreta pratica museografica che si proporrà come parametro e stimolo fecondo per il futuro.” 166 For the inventories of the Medici environments, the list of works contained therein, and the main archive sources, see Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo Mediceo e storia artistica.

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3.6 Directing the Viewers’ Gaze Mediating between private and public space, between the monastic notion of study as a contemplative activity, the humanistic notion of collecting as a textual strategy and the social demands of prestige and display fulf illed by a collection, musaeum was an epistemological structure which encompassed a variety of ideas, images and institutions that were central to late Renaissance culture.167

During the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, the concept of adorning (parare)168 reappears, questioning the newly acquired autonomy of painting. Considered as “a single element in a whole, a cut-out of illusory space proposed by the artist, [the painting] took on new importance and appeared to be read in relation to other subjects, identifying a sequence or sequences of elements. […] The plot of those singularities, therefore, constitutes a structure that enters into relation with the architecture and the decorative layout of the environment.”169 By privileging the wonder that only an overall gaze could give, several galleries and cabinets were eventually filled with artworks, and their walls entirely covered by painting, like an “encrustation”.170 By simulating a sort of wallpaper, the dense installation of pictures contributed to creating a meta-exhibition space where the single element gave way to the whole. Thus, while paintings took on, once again, a kind of symbolic meaning, the visitor’s aesthetic experience appeared almost more important than the contemplation of individual works. The result was a space conceived as a potential space for action, where the overabundance of canvases was used symbolically to shape and stage a theatrical presentation and to metaphorically express the magnificence of the owner through architecture. In other words, it was a matter of “giving form to an organisation [of knowledge or objects] through architecture”.171 167 Paula Findlen, “The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy”, 23. 168 Lauro Magnani, “Lo spazio del collezionismo. Problemi”, in Lauro Magnani (ed.), Collezionismo e spazi del collezionismo, 18. 169 Lauro Magnani (ed.), Collezionismo e spazi del collezionismo, 15. “Il quadro é elemento singolo in un insieme, ritaglio di spazio illusivo proposto dall’artista, assume una nuova importanza e appare per essere letto in rapporto ad altri soggetti, individuando una sequenza o sequenze di elementi. […] la trama di quelle singolarità costituisce quindi una struttura che entra in rapporto con l’architettura e l’impianto decorativo dell’ambiente.” 170 Cristina de Benedictis, Per la storia del collezionismo italiano. Fonti e documenti, 101. The habit of exhibiting paintings to cover the entire wall began to spread in the seventeenth century, although, for at least the first half of the century, it remained limited to specific environments. 171 Luca Basso Peressut, “Spazi e forme dell’esporre tra cabinet e museo pubblico”.

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From a stylistic point of view, all these rooms were rigidly arranged according to geometric patterns that gave to the space an aspect of apparent regularity. If, for example, paintings were not inserted neatly inside architectural frames, hanging works circumscribed precise panels anyway, geometrically dividing the walls. The work of Hieronymus Francken II, Kunstkammer (1615–1623) clearly describes the layout of these “painting rooms”: Paintings cover the back wall where they hang side by side, one above the other, in a density so great that it overwhelms the eye’s ability to take everything in at a glance. Although this arrangement might appear random and chaotic, it actually employs a variety of visual conventions to establish a loosely ordered decorative and symbolic structure, quickly recognizable to seventeenth-century “lovers of painting” whose attention was elicited by the profusion of color and detail that invites a closer look. A hierarchy is implied on the back wall by the size and position of the picture centered over the wooden cabinet.172

The result is a profound relationship between object, decoration, painting and architectural space, which varies according to variations in tastes and displacement of single artefacts. The attention, therefore, was directed to the entire space, to the environment in general, ending up subordinating the autonomy of the single element, the contemplation of the onlooker and the private encounter between work and viewer. That is why, at the time, one often remembered not only the collections but also the “magnificent rooms”.173 In addition to the geometric and pictorial grid of the walls, the internal volume of the space was often filled with other objects, statues and artefacts. Especially concerning sculptures, if in the sixteenth century the habit was to place them niches, in the seventeenth century, these found a place within the space itself. This change can also be conceived as a new exhibition strategy for which the relationship between the visitor and the environment becomes a fundamental parameter. In this regard, another Hieronymus Francken II’s painting, Picture Gallery (1621), shows a beholder more involved, curious, and even represented in the act of discovering statues left on the central table of the room. This action particularly records the practice of 172 In this case, the truthful nature of the work is also justified by the presence of contemporary painters’ paintings of Francken’s time, especially Belgians. See Jeffrey M. Muller, “Rubens’s Collection in History”, in Kristin Lohse Belkin et al., A House of Art: Rubens as Collector, exh. cat., Antwerp, 6 March – 13 June 2004 (Antwerp: Rubenshuis & Rubenianum, 2004), 16. 173 Jean Galard, Promenades au Louvre: en compagnie d’écrivains, d’artistes et de critiques d’art (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2010), 86.

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the time of covering paintings and other artefacts. Unlike the Dutch cases mentioned in previous sections, this habit (of ecclesiastical origin)174 was often determined by the desire to emphasise the spectator’s involvement in the act of discovering, by dramatising the visit with a tactile experience.175 However, this practice was also used as a filter to select exhibits to show to visitors, as pro conservatione picture, and also as a device of censorship for “lascivious” works not admitted to public view by the rules of decorum of the time. Besides, Francken II’s painting also shows a mirror on the left side, and thus records the expedient often used at the time to dissolve boundaries of picture galleries and increase in visitors the overwhelming feeling produced by the “encrustation” setting of the paintings, finally suggesting the sought after feeling of astonishment (meraviglia). In the same way, in another painting by David Teniers the Younger, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Gallery at Brussels (1650), the composition of the display in the exhibition space appears carefully studied to create structural and narrative connections. This painting also suggests how a picture’s shape and size were still stylistic display parameters that could not be ignored. The series of small portraits framing the central door of the gallery is critical in this sense. [T]he artist positioned Paolo Veronese’s large painting Esther before Ahasverus in such a way that the man on the right seems to be furtively 174 This practice probably stemmed from the habit of covering the paintings and altarpieces with fabric (also called cortine, taffettani, coperta, bandinella or simply tenda [see Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura, 146]). In the seventeenth century, it was widespread in the lay and private environment. Numerous wardrobe inventories show the list of blankets covering the paintings. “The custom of covering the picture on the high altar with hangings […] is a familiar detail to anyone who has consulted church inventories or who looks attentively at Renaissance paintings.” Alessandro Nova, “Hangings Curtains, and Shutters of Sixteenth-Century Lombard Altarpieces”, in Eve Borsook and Fiorella Superbi (eds.), Italian Altarpieces 1250–1550: Function and Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 181, 188–189. See also Serenella Rolfi, “Cortine e tavolini. L’inventario Giustiniani del 1638 e altre collezioni seicentesche”. 175 See the expedient found by Joachim von Sandrart to exhibit Caravaggio’s L’Amore vincitore, in Vincenzo Giustiniani’s gallery. Sandrart was in charge of the publication of the engraving manual, called the Giustiniani Gallery, as well as the organisation of the entire collection. Working on this, he decided to hide the painting behind a green curtain, “not out of modesty, […] but to introduce a sort of dramaturgy in the visit to the painting gallery, culminating it in the vision of what, together with its master, he considered the supreme masterpiece”. See Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, “Sandrart a Roma 1629–1635, un cosmopolita tedesco nel Paese delle Meraviglie”, in Olivier Bonfait (ed.), Roma 1630. Il trionfo del pennello, exh. cat., Villa Medici, Rome, 25 October 1994 – 1 January 1995 (Milan: Electa, 1994), 104, note 47. “non per pudore, […] ma per introdurre una sorta di drammaturgia nella visita alla galleria di pittura, facendola culminare con l’apparizione di quello che, insieme al suo padrone, considerava il capolavoro supremo.”

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glancing over his left shoulder at Adam and Eve. On the right in Teniers’s painting, a depiction of Saint Sebastian is tilted forward in order to create the illusion that Sebastian’s column supports the bust displayed above. In the center, numerous small portraits frame an ambivalent image that could be either a trompe l’œil painting or a “real” man entering through a door. Above it is a representation of Christ in the Temple, in which one of the doctors looks down, as if to check who is coming in.176

These examples suggest how the visitor to seventeenth-century galleries was driven to seek and construct personal symbolic connections, starting from those indicated by the display. It was the visitor who immersed him/herself in a parallel space, in which reality and fiction put his/her imagination and capability of judgement and analysis into play. Besides, this type of display went hand in hand with the acceptance of the new idea of exhibition space which, therefore, seems to be implicit and immediate. Paintings representing this type of setup and exhibition space are numerous, of which the various Flemish “Cabinets d’amateur” are critical examples, such as the two paintings by Willem van Haecht, The Cabinet of Cornelis van des Geest (1628–1630) and Apelles Painting Campaspe (1628–1630), which describe the structure and exhibition layout of a part of Rubens’ atelier. However, in this context, Diacinto Marmi’s drawings177 (architect of the Medici residences) clarify the issue. Being architectural studies, the recording of a series of Italian interiors (many of which have since disappeared), these sketches move away from the fictional nature of the Flemish cabinets to reach the role of documentary sources. In particular, the sketches depicting the furniture and the organisational proposals of the rooms of Palazzo Pitti in Florence178 rightly describe the inner composition of the gallery, as well as the decorative role paintings played. Here, the canvases are “intimately connected to furnishings, a rigid hierarchy of objects, a vast range of surprising inventions, as well as deep integration of arts, manufactures and different materials that are composed in a symmetrical unitary vision substantiated by chromatic values and insistent dynastic allusions”.179 176 Christina Strunck, “Concettismo and the Aesthetics of Display”, in Gail Feigenbaum, Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 225. 177 Three projects of walls with paintings, busts and furniture, and a wall study of a room in the villa of Poggio Imperiale, Florence (Uffizi Drawings and Prints Department). 178 They complete and visually describe Marmi’s essay Norma per il guardaroba del Gran Palazzo per la città di Firenze (1661). 179 Cristina de Benedictis, Per la storia del collezionismo italiano. Fonti e documenti, 102.

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Figure 11 Willem van Haecht (Flemish, Antwerp 1593 – 1637 Antwerp), Apelles Painting Campaspe (1630), oil on panel, 104.9 × 148.7 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

This quotation leads us back to the idea of a place as a total artwork. Indeed, despite the greater aesthetic autonomy of painting, between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, while specific exhibition spaces were created inside the house to exhibit artefacts and antiques, these same exhibition spaces immediately lost their role as mere containers to turn into environments, experiences, pure images able to translate the portrait of a collector into an architectural scale. In other words, the container ended up merging with its content. Although, therefore, paintings were considered as works of art, these were always part of a more complex scenographic apparatus – composed of furniture, tapestries, architectural decoration – which helped to dramatise the theatrical set of the dwelling. This idea, spread throughout Europe, was used for almost all Baroque galleries, and at least throughout the eighteenth century, thus eclipsing the Renaissance habit of juxtaposing paintings and sculptures in a more spacious and open way. Indeed, we should not forget that during the sixteenth century, the desire to establish a dialogue between ancient and modern styles and to highlight the most significant pieces went hand in hand with “[exhibition] criteria still respectful of individual works”.180 On the contrary, 180 Ibid., 101.

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throughout the seventeenth century, the need to amaze the public went hand in hand with the need to show off the collector’s intellectual power, thus introducing new setup techniques (such as the practice of “encrusting” the paintings on walls, typical of the setup of the Parisian salons or the Flemish cabinets d’amateur).



*Spaces in Between Abstract: This chapter studies the ephemeral distinction between internal and external, and public and private spaces of the time, which is a critical question for the research. It insists above all on the role played by furniture within the exhibiting logic put on stage in these spaces. It thus reinterprets the ancient saying Ubi Papa, Ibi Roma (Rome is where the Pope is) and comes to highlight the relationship between “container and content”. It focuses on a series of case studies and artefacts, such as tents, tapestries, sideboards and other architectural structures. Keywords: furniture, display, private space, public space, exterior, interior

The distinction between internal and external spaces, public and private, was not a fundamental characteristic of the environments at the time. Interior rooms often opened outwards, displaying their decorative setup on the façades; exterior courtyards were dressed as internal chambers instead. Various devices were put in place to recreate these micro-architectures, from tapestries used as structural walls, to architectural apparatuses that simulated ephemeral scenes, to sideboards used as display furniture. This hybridisation characterises the habits of the time, in which the concepts of the public and the domestic place were often unpredictable and ephemeral or dependent on specific social constructs.

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*Ubi Papa, Ibi Roma: Furniture and Display Apparatus [O]ur host has read about that ancient custom of adorning houses, villas, gardens, porticos and gymnasia with signa [images] and painting and statues of ancestors to glorify their families, and since he has no images of his ancestors he has ennobled this place with these little broken bits of marble, so glory shall remain to his posterity through the nobility of these things.1

One of the first temporary and ephemeral exhibition spaces can be found in the tent (skené) erected by Ptolemy II Philadelphus and described2 by Athenaeus of Naucrati (2nd–3rd century CE) in I Deipnosofisti.3 Inside the tent, walls were decorated with fabrics and hides, while the architrave supporting the ceiling was covered with tapestries interspersed with painted panels. In this setup, the exhibiting role of the structure met the decorative function, thus defining a temporary and modular micro-architecture. Halfway between an internal and external space, this ephemeral space was commonly set to commemorate anniversaries, birthdays, births or to glorify religious and political exploits. Its main features (nomadic, removable, transportable architecture) were used to delimit a place and to emphasise its display. In this regard, Davide Ghirlandaio and Sebastiano Mainardi’s painting The Magnanimity of Alexander the Great (1493–1494) perfectly illustrates how the tent became a site for display. The panel4 represents an episode from the life of Alexander the Great, narrated in the Parallel Lives by the ancient Roman author Plutarch. Here, the painters recorded Alexander’s victory over Darius and his act of magnanimity towards Darius’ family (4th century BCE). They depicted the scene in a Renaissance style, with an open-air banquet with a goods-and-vessels credenza (recalling the garden furniture and setting-up 1 Poggius Bracciolini, Opera Omnia, Vol. 1: Scripta in edizione Basilensi anno 1538 collata (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1964), 65 as quoted by Caroline Elam, “Lorenzo de’ Medici Sculpture Garden”, in William E. Wallace (ed.), Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English, Vol. 1: Life and Early Works (New York: Garland, 1995). 2 See the work of the Visit Laboratory, which has graphically represented the tent on the basis of Athenaeus of Naucrati’s description. https://www.cineca.it/it/progetti/virtual-skené. 3 See Maia Wellington Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano, Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015); Elena Calandra, “L’occasione e l’eterno”, LANX, No. 1 (2008): 26–74, https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/lanx/issue/view/949 (14/08/2022). 4 The panel probably represented a set of spalliere (a headrest that decorated bedrooms during the fifteenth century in Italy) for the Palazzo Piccolomini in Siena. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, collectors were used to commission artists to create painted wooden furniture, to celebrate marriages, births or political exploits. Furnishings included, among others, headrests, painted friezes and ottomans.

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represented in an engraving by Teresa del Po discussed later in this chapter). In the middle of the composition, Darius’ tent appears “full of splendid furniture and a large quantity of gold and silver”5 – that is, Alexander’s booty – which magnifies the king of the Ancient Greek kingdom’s image. By using the tent both as a shelter and as the symbol of his exploits, the report describes Alexander removing “his tent from place to place, sailing up and down the Euphrates”.6 Ptolemy’s and Alexander’s tents visually represent the practice of describing a place through its furniture and content (and not just by its architectural structure).7 This use of the tent, alongside its symbolic and demonstrative function, seems to bound the physical and ontological perimeters of an exhibition space. Indeed, since furniture has evolved along with the spaces it has furnished, its comprehension is linked to the understanding of architecture. As we saw in the case of domestic interiors, also in this case, furniture and artefacts – through their abundance and position – were used as decorative elements to celebrate. Even in the case of the tents, objects were not exhibited for contemplation, but to convey a public message. In particular, according to the idea that architecture stages the ritual while the ritual exhibits architecture, the tent seems to take advantage of both the performative nature of the event and the symbolic meaning of the architecture, ultimately celebrating messages of legitimacy and defining a common symbolic language. The ephemeral architecture of the tent thus becomes a means to determine a new vocabulary for the issue of display. Ritual performances and monumental art are two facets of a complementary communication strategy. Ritual spectacles are powerful means by which to negotiate and reinforce power, but their pathos and effect tend to fade rapidly once the event is over: monumental art, surrounded by an aura of performance, counters the ephemeral nature of the ritual performances, anchoring them in space and time.8

Although in the case of the tent, the structure loses its nature of permanent architecture, the monumental and structural dimensions remain. 5 Plutarch, Lives, Vol. VII: Demosthenes and Cicero. Alexander and Caesar, trans. by Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 33:21. 6 Ibid. 7 Elena Calandra, “A proposito di arredi. Prima e dopo la tenda di Tolomeo Filadelfo”, LANX, No. 5 (2010): 1–38. 8 Alessandra Gilibert, Syro-Hittite Monumental Art and the Archeology of Performance (Berlin: Freie Universitat, 2011), 133.

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By exploiting the capability of architecture to simultaneously suggest the idea of monumentality and the temporariness of ritual, the tent becomes a symbolic sculpture that dramatises a portion of space. These sculptures represented, most often by means of images, the exploits of those heroes who had been born of the family, just as the storie represented their victories. We know that, in testimony to their valour, the people erected arches in the street where heroes were to pass triumphantly on their return to Rome from great enterprises. Some arches are yet standing in several places.9

The celebratory power of furniture finds a counterpart in the logic of the layout that presides over the idea of exhibition design. Indeed, this complex visual language structured both on the interaction between different elements and, more generally, on the treatment of space and its narration,10 defines a symbolic process of spatial writing while it structures space. In the specific case of the Roman tents, the exhibiting purpose just described was not, most likely, entirely conscious and intentional. However, we notice a sort of permeability between the ideas of furniture and structure, which end up almost coinciding.11 Furniture and objects act here as heuristic devices likely to shape the ephemeral borders of an equally temporary exhibition space. The tent disappears as a container to reappear as content –that is, an architectural object that displays something while it is being contemplated. Following this topic, but considering it within our timeframe, the spectacular ephemeral apparati of the end of the seventeenth century perfectly describe the relationship between the transitory nature of an event and the concrete dimension of the architecture designed for the specific occasion. One of them, depicted in two prints by Alessandro Specchi – Prospetto del Casale di Carroceto and Spaccato del Palazzo di Tavole (1697), – and also in two oil paintings by Christian Reder, called Monsù Leandro, La sosta di 9 “queste sculture doveano essere f igurate le più volte con l’eff igie per le azioni di quegli eroi usciti della loro progenie, siccome con istorie rappresentavano le loro vittorie; e di quelli si sa che poi il popolo faceva gli archi per le vie, dov’erano per passare trionfando, quando dale imprese grandi ritornavano a Roma, in testimonio del valor loro.” Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura (1586), ed. and trans. by Edward J. Olszewski, On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 270. 10 Herbert Bayer, “Aspects of Design of Exhibitions and Museums”. 11 Michael Roaf, “Architecture and Furniture”, in Georgina Herrmann (ed.), The Furniture of Western Asia: Ancient and Traditional, papers from the conference held at the Institute of Archaeology, University College of London, 22–30 June 1993 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996), 21–28.

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papa Innocenzo XII a Carroceto (1697) and Spaccato del Palazzo (1697), was set up for the visit of Pope Innocent XII in Carroceto. The architect Tommaso Mattei (Carlo Fontana’s apprentice) enlarged the preexisting building by constructing two lateral structures, a church surrounded by a courtyard in the shape of an amphitheatre and other ephemeral units structured in the square in front of the main building. In particular for the extension of the palace, the side structures, “wooded skeletons covered by fabric”,12 were so elaborated both inside and outside that they seemed load-bearing edifices. Furthermore, Reder’s paintings show, as in a model, the interior organisation of environments provided with a quadreria, various rooms used as exhibition spaces for earthenware, the sala grande and the piano nobile. In particular, Reder’s representation records the care applied to the setting-up and the meticulous decoration of the furnishings. Unlike in tents, here, the scenographic and theatrical setup is disguised. These transient structures metaphorically try to deny themselves, attempting to simulate monumental constructions. However, just like tents, both monumental architecture and the temporary ritual coexist within a specific theatrical set. The peculiarity of this apparatus, in addition to its spectacular arrangements, is the use of a skeleton made of wood and tapestries to simulate interior spaces. These structures, in fact, were widespread at the time and stemmed from a much older practice, dating back at least to the late medieval period. Tapestries have indeed, for a long time, played a significant role in displaying micro-spaces, being used as architectural and scenic structuring tools to build containers in which to set up artefacts. In this case, of course, the question of the theatricality of architecture is primordial as is the direct link with the display practice of theatrical staging. Indeed, tapestries have often been used as an architectural apparatus, as “mobile soft furniture”13 that creates temporary environments related to the celebration of rituals or recurring events. Intended as multi-faceted devices, at the intersection of artwork, fabric and architectural tool, tapestries have also been used to replace real walls and to create “textile spaces” or “architectural dress”.14 In fact, their function has a close relationship with the Renaissance and Baroque practice of dressing up buildings and 12 Daria Borghese, “La visita di Innocenzo XII a Carroceto”, Strenna dei Romanisti, No. 55 (1994): 49–60. Her analysis offers a vast historiographic bibliography both of the event and of the visual sources. 13 For an extensive bibliography, see Tristan Weddigen, “Textile Spaces, Interior and Exterior”, in Gail Feigenbaum (ed.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 162–177, [162]. 14 Ibid.

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the related desire to never have a social room appear “bare”. This original role of covering and decorating inner walls (on which paintings were often hung) made tapestries a symbolic means by which to shape fictional spaces. Frequently, they were used to create a visual continuity with the environment, so windows or doors were covered with tapestries following a specific iconographic pattern that symbolically simulated landscapes and provided architectural glimpses. Such a use made the tapestry a tool that, though it took advantage of the architectural logic, sometimes denied and hid the very arrangement of the palace. The act of denying a space by simulating another one simultaneously made the tapestry an aesthetic element to be contemplated. Here, a twofold function arises: while it created a transient space in which to exhibit specific artefacts and symbolic messages, it also became an exhibited image in its own right. That is, it configured a kind of fusion between container and content, material and form. Precisely for their capability to delimit micro-architectures, tapestries were often also used to suggest an inner space in an exterior. Filippo Vasconi’s engraving, Cortile del palazzo Altemps (1729), portrays this temporary transformation of a venue, from an exterior to an interior. The representation also describes the feast held by the French ambassador in Rome, Cardinal Melchiorre de Polignac, in honour of the birth of Giuseppe Maria II, the dauphin of France.15 The open-air courtyard was structured to appear as an extended theatre and was decorated with velvets, tapestries, damasks and other hangings which covered both walls and ceiling. The latter suggested the Renaissance idea of ceilings (windows on air), by representing a patch of blue. This fake ceiling created an inside space while simulating a symbolic breach. The engraving perfectly describes courtyard furniture and its temporary transformation into a room suitable to house a social event and to magnify the royal family. Finally, both functional and creative, the setting-up of tapestries turns them into theatrical devices. The staging of these structures was also used to shape buildings’ façades, which thus ended up translating the interior environment to the outside. Among the various representations of this practice, Filippo Lauri and Filippo Gagliardi’s oil painting Festival at the Palazzo Barberini in Honor of Christina of Sweden (1659), and Giovanni Battista Falda’s etching Prospetto et apparato del’ palco dove la maestà della regina di Svetia ne’ giorni del carnevale (1656), record this practice. In the first, tapestries play the role of a conjunction 15 See Pietro Ercole Visconti, Città e famiglie nobili e celebri dello stato pontificio: Dizionario storico, Vol. 1 (Rome: Tip. delle Scienze, 1847), 472.

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between inside and outside. Being hung on the windows facing the square where a feast was taking place, they create a kind of extension of the interior decoration and end up showing off the richness of the family. At the same time, but in a more architectural way, Falda’s etching portrays fabrics and tapestries on windows, but above all, it records the metamorphosis of the balcony into a canopy for which tapestries act as general decoration. That is to say: “[i]t is not necessarily the architectural place that defines authority but rather the power of displaying and the very act of deploying aesthetic space”.16 Following this topic, it also must be said that, at least during the sixteenth century, not only different places but also various devices were created and used as exhibit apparatuses. In this regard, credenze, massive sinks or large architectural fireplace systems, while furnishing the main hall (sala grande) of the dwelling, also acted as displayed objects which symbolically magnified the owner. As represented by The Cross Section of the House Belonging to the Gaddi Family of Florence (1560), these furnishings participated in the ekphrastic balance of the room they furnished and, more generally, they participated in the idea of bel composto in relation to the entire palace. In other words, they contribute to generating a total spatial artwork, ultimately becoming another item to exhibit. Various inventories too, especially Florentine ones, record the presence of these structures. For the acquai (a kind of basin that sometimes even came to have imposing architectural and decorative dimensions), their use in furnishing the house dates back to the Florentine Renaissance ceremony of hand-washing.17 Nevertheless, among the various pieces of furniture, the credenza is the device that above all went from being a domestic furnishing to becoming a display device. Initially used as a simple piece of furniture to store china and glassware, it became a showcase to show off precious objects and porcelain during special occasions. In this case, the pictorial depictions are numerous; the paintings by Jacopo and Francesco Bassano, Supper at Emmaus (1576–1577), or by Joseph Heintz the Younger, Kitchen Scene (1630), describe the traditional use of this piece of furniture, halfway between an exhibition tool and a work table. However, on many other occasions, the sideboard (on the architectural scale) even had a theatrical function, thus losing the domestic character suggested by the paintings of Bassano and Heintz. 16 Ibid., 162. 17 Brenda Preyer, “The Florentine Casa”, in Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (eds.), At Home in Renaissance Italy, 34–50.

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The etchings by Teresa del Po and Pietro Santi Bartoli, such as Setting for the Banquet Offered by Cardinal Flavio Chigi in Honor of Caterina Rospigliosi on 15 August 1668 (1668), correctly describe this type of circumstance. Drawn by Giovan Lorenzo Bernini and Carlo Fontana, the depicted event is the spectacular festival that the Chigi family carried out to pay tribute to the family of the reigning Pope Clemente IX. Here, the banquet was conceived as real stage action. The plan of the entire feast engraved by Teresa del Po records the layout of the banquet and the organisation of each structure, which the architect Carlo Fontana had thought out: “to the East, an elegant bottle credenza, towards the West, an almost enchanted sideboard, and between one and the other, facing the middle, the fountain”.18 In addition, while the side tables served as theatrical wings, the two credenza were composed in a manner similar to the Roman royal staircase or Borromini’s colonnade at the Palazzo Spada, with an arched perspective, which gradually decreased giving the impression of a very great distance. In this case, the credenza played the role of exhibition furniture, having been used to stage both, technically, gold and silver vessels, and symbolically, the prestige and wealth of the cardinal. A drawing by Pierre Paul Sevin, Banquet Table with Trionfi and the Arms of Pope Clement IX in the Center (1668), offers another point of view from which to analyse the sideboard and the entire apparatus. Here, a sort of permeability arises between the ideas of furniture, architectural structure and the need to exhibit. Apparatuses, tapestries and furniture end up becoming heuristic devices, hybrid objects capable of defining the perimeters of an exhibition space, and so highlighting the very act of exhibiting. More particularly, the subordination of the container, which disappears under the “weight” of its content, shows how, at the time, the very act of exhibiting was sometimes more critical than the place where the artefact was staged. To put it differently, by following the famous saying Ubi Papa, Ibi Roma (Rome is where the Pope is), we could finally suggest that there is an exhibition space where there is something to show. In other words, at that time, the content counted more than the container and this situation was even more evident in the shared practice of building ephemeral structures able to shape exhibiting spaces. Although the relationship cannot be simplified quite that much, in this case, it is not the place that determines the temporary boundaries of the act of exhibiting, but the reverse – it is the 18 “a Levante una superba bottiglieria, dall’altra verso Ponente una quasi incantata credenza, e tra l’una e l’altra situata verso il mezzo la fontana.” Lettera di risposta di Carlo Fontana al sig. Ottavio Castiglioni, ed. by Andrea Busiri Vici (Rome, 1906), quoted by Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, La festa barocca (Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 1997), 461.

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Figure 12 Pierre Paul Sevin (French, Tournon-sur-Rhône 1650 – 1710 Tournon-sur-Rhône), Banquet Table with Trionfi and the Arms of Pope Clement IX in the Centre (1668), drawing, 33 × 24.5 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Photo: Cecilia Heisser).

set of decorative apparatuses, furniture and devices to which the idea of exhibiting belongs implicitly, that defines a total work, and thus, a temporary exhibition space. In addition to the evident compositional dynamism of the time and the consequent imagery of hybrid spaces halfway between an interior and an exterior, these examples also testify to the society of the time and in particular to the progressive transformation of the places where collections of antiquities were displayed. The idea of p​​ ublic space, open to sharing, was in fact linked to a new awareness regarding the role of images in public spaces, increasingly used as symbolic and communicative tools to be positioned in strategic points. This attention to hybrid spaces and ephemeral microarchitectures also went hand in hand with a new idea of ​​the city, intended more as a sort of urban scenography to welcome political, religious and social celebrations. These circumstances indeed often led to innovative exhibitions and art solutions that changed the fate of the market and art criticism, as well as suggesting new forms of staging and delineating new exhibition spaces.

4. (Public) Exteriors Abstract: This chapter focuses on outer spaces and studies how and why collections were exhibited in gardens, open arcaded corridors, courtyards of palaces, and in religious spaces and inside the entire city. The study proposes the city as a field of experimentation for shaping the ideas of exhibition space and exhibiting. For churches, cloisters and adjacent squares, the analysis follows the study traced by Francis Haskell and considers them at the origin of the history of exhibitions. The chapter continues with the study of other venues of exhibiting (Italian botteghe, northern panden, Parisian alternative exhibitions), thus suggesting a reinterpretation of the spatial and cultural history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century society. Keywords: city, urban layout, exhibition design, religious exhibitions, façades, art market

Contrary to the idea of the house (as a place to exhibit first the collector’s symbolic image and then artworks), public space was rather considered the place in which artists, collectors, merchants and amateurs could exhibit, sell, buy and contemplate arts. Already in the fifteenth century, sacred or profane recurrent events staged rudimentary exhibitions in which paintings were hung from windows, façades or walls. In France, for instance, the Beaucaire fair in Occitanie, Troyes in Champagne, or the Lendit fair in St-Denis, near Paris, allowed artists to exhibit their creations. In Italy, among several fairs (such as those in Alessandria, Verona and Padua), the Festa della Sensa in Venice was so famous among the society and artists of the time that some sources1 recorded paintings by Lorenzo Lotto and the Bassano brothers. We also know of a 1540 exhibition staged in Antwerp by the local corporation of painters.

1 See Mario Labò, ad vocem “Esposizioni”, in Enciclopedia universale dell’arte, Vol. V (Venice, Rome: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1958), 42–54.

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Like that of Bruges, this fair welcomed lesser-known painters by giving them a stand (pand) to exhibit their productions. Beyond feasts, street displays and public venues, also pharmacies, libraries, ateliers and shops (botteghe) were spaces for exhibiting. Especially in Rome, where, in the sixteenth century, collectors already showed part of their collections, artists thus contrived temporary and ephemeral exhibition spaces.

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4.1 Gardens, Outer Loggias and Inner Galleries Before the appearance of the first places designed expressly to house collections of paintings and ancient statues (of which the Farnese Gallery is an emblematic example), other venues animated the exhibiting geography of the time. Gardens, open arcaded corridors, long loggias and courtyards of villas and palaces, especially Italian ones, rapidly ended up becoming the external extension of indoor galleries. In these spaces, several sculptures, often set into architectural niches or placed between columns, were displayed following the exhibiting logic of early sixteenth-century Italian palace galleries. In Rome, various cases can be recorded: in 1503, Cardinal Cesarini built a diaeta statuaria, a garden to welcome his antiquities; two decades later, in 1520, Cardinal Cesi arranged a garden as an outdoor room, as did Cardinals Carpi and Ippolito d’Este in 1540 and 1550. Also, Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawing, Jacopo Galli’s Garden in Rome2 (1533–1536) depicted the sculpture garden of the banker and humanist Jacopo Galli near the Roman palace of Cancelleria. However, the practice of setting up antiquities in gardens came to Rome from Florence and Mantua. Indeed, in 1483, when Lorenzo de’ Medici visited Andrea Mantegna in his house in Mantua, the Gonzaga court artist had already set his collection of antiquities in his outdoor gallery of marbles (at least since 1476, when Mantegna began the construction of his modern dwelling).3 The artist based the design for his house on the idea of a place for the cult of antiquity and as a locus of self-representation, thus creating a circular courtyard inscribed into the cubic volume of the house, in which he installed statues in niches carved into the curved walls. Nevertheless, since the fifteenth century, 4 outdoor spaces were often used as exterior guardaroba – that is, storehouses for antiquities, sculptural fragments and other architectural objects. They then appeared mostly 2 Here, Michelangelo’s Bacco (in Galli’s collection since 1506) appears with his right hand mutilated and is displayed together with other antiquities. 3 Although we don’t know a lot about his collection, his interest in collecting antiquities tells us a lot about the increasing intellectual climate between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. In that period, artists became collectors as a consequence of their need to copy and represent classic motifs. See Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 180–202. However, not only Mantegna but other painters (Sodoma, Pisanello, Ghiberti, Bellini) collected antiquities and other sculptures in marble or bronze by distinguishing them from simple gathering objects collected for study purposes. Their collections testify to the value of ancient relics they attributed to their collections of antiquities. 4 The use of gardens as storage places for sculptures and other goods is much older. Suffice to mention the atrium of the patrician houses in ancient Rome. See Bettina Bergmann, “The Roman

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in the sixteenth century5 when Roman antiquity collecting underwent increasing development. As well as galleries, courtyards, gardens and parks of neighbouring villas became open-air rooms – kind of “architectures of knowledge”, “theatres of memory”6 in which collections of antiquities were displayed alongside landscape furniture. Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawing, Garden of the Palazzo Cesi in the Borgo (1530) shows a specific rendering of a sixteenth-century antiquities garden in Rome.7 The work depicts a glimpse of the left side of Cardinal Cesi’s garden and above all pictured the disordered location of sculptures. Hendrick van Cleve III’s painting, Sculpture Garden of Cardinal Cesi, instead portrays the whole the garden’s setup. There, in a wide f ield structured by hallways and with defined areas and fluctuating paths, sculptures were displayed for the delight of viewers and to allow artists to draw inspiration. Like Van Heemskerck’s drawing, van Cleve’s painting also depicts the random display of antiquities and the lack of a specif ic iconographic programme. The disordered layout reflects indeed the historical and even pedagogical value conferred upon antiquities at the time – that is, as sources useful to artists and amateurs. This consideration of antiquities is documented by another well-known exterior space, the Hortus Pensilis of the Cardinal Andrea della Valle: a sculpture garden adjacent to the Palazzo Valle (later Palazzo Valle-Capranica) and near Piazza Navona, built around 1527 (after the Sack of Rome). Several depictions record the entire structure. Hieronymus Cock’s engraving, Statue Court of Palazzo Valle-Capranica in Rome (1550), together with Francisco de Holanda and Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawings, describes the setup, House as Memory Theater: The House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii”, The Art Bulletin Vol. 76, No. 2 (1994): 225–256. 5 For the extensive literature, see William Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception in the Antiquity Collections of Late-Renaissance Rome”; Ingo Herklotz, “Antiquities in the Palaces: Aristocratic, Antiquarian, and Religious”, and Tracy Ehrlich, “City and Country: A System of Properties”, in Gail Feigenbaum (ed.), Display of Art in the Roman Palace: 1550–1750, 234–249, 41–45. 6 See Bettina Bergmann, “The Roman House as Memory Theater: The House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii”. 7 The painting is analysed by Marjon van der Meulen, “Cardinal Cesi’s Antique Sculpture Garden: Notes on a Painting by Hendrick van Cleef III”, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 116, No. 850 (January 1974): 14–24. However, as specif ied by John Dixon Hunt, she confused the Cesi’s garden with the one under the Janiculum Hill. See John Dixon Hunt, “Curiosities to Adorn Cabinets and Gardens”, in Oliver Impey and Arthur Macgregor (eds.), The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 193–203; Domenico Gnoli, “Il giardino e l’antiquario del Cardinal Cesi”, Mitteilungen des Kaiserlich deutschen archaeologischen Instituts: Römische Abteilung, Vol. 20 (1905): 267–276.

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designed by Lorenzetto, the first sculptor appointed to restore Andrea della Valle’s statues.8 Here, the structure was rhythmically subdivided into blank walls and niches in which restored statues were placed according to the formal relationship between their forms and the architecture.9 Francisco de Holanda’s drawing, The Delightful Garden of the Palazzo Valle Capranica (1538–1541), then describes the eastern façade of the garden. Within a balanced and geometrical structure, niches with statues alternate with low reliefs in the upper level, while in the lower one, busts inside ovals stand above niches. The rhythm of the two levels creates a symmetrical play triggered by the heterogeneity of sculptures and themes, sacred and profane. In this site, once again, the two components of the exhibiting logic of sixteenth-century galleries – varietas and symmetry – are patent. Indeed, the iconographic pattern was subordinated to the wish to create an arrangement for “the delight of friends and the enjoyment of the citizenry and of foreigners”, as is recorded in the inscription on the top of the façade, depicted by Francisco de Holanda (Ad amicorum iucunditatem civium advenarumque delectationem).10 This explicit invitation to enter the garden was one of many that one could find in the first half of the sixteenth century in Rome where collections began to become more public.11 However, the Della Valle garden stands out for the care brought to the decorative setting and the orderly structure. Indeed, the cardinal’s garden was not a mere garden staging ruins arranged without order, but rather an example of an accurate display meant to delight the eye and enrich the experience of visitors. We shall pass to the facade of houses which the ancients built at a time when they conquered empires by means of virtue and arms. Besides the orders of the colonnades, the spaces into which the walls were divided, and the oriental stones in the facades, they placed in many of these spaces large storie in marble which were magnificent and of more than middle relief. And such were commonly the walls of their facades. But they placed 8 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite […], ed. by Milanesi, Vol. 4 [1879], 579. 9 Lorenzetto restored statues according to their position in the niches – that is, he restored sculptures only when intervention was necessary for an aesthetic performance. See Christina Riebesell, “Sulla genesi delle gallerie di antichità nell’Italia del Cinquecento”, in Christina Strunck and Elisabeth Kieven (ed.), Europäische Galeriebauten, 197–220. 10 Cf. Claudio Franzoni, “Le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità”, in Salvatore Settis (ed.), Memorie dell’antico nell’arte Italiana, 325–326. 11 Cf. Anna Cavallaro (ed.), Collezioni di antichità a Roma fra ‘400 e ‘500 (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2007), 18.

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within niches as very beautiful figures of bronze or marble, in round relief and detached from the niches.12

However, the gardens of Cesi and Della Valle, despite their various inspirations (from interest in the past, to the desire to show off riches and power, to the intellectual need for models and aesthetic sources of inspiration), underline a relationship between space and sculptures that was still far from being the result of the conscious display patterns of antiquity collections. In this regard, the courtyard designed from 1503 by Donato Bramante for the villa of Pope Julius II at the Vatican13 is a case in point, since it was one of the first spaces of the time built above all to allow viewers to see collections.14 Here, the artist showed a great awareness of the aesthetic and historical value of collections of antiquities. Having to incorporate former Pope Innocent VIII’s villa into the main structure of the Vatican, Bramante built two long, covered corridors linking the two buildings. He conceived the complex as a true architectural scenography which he divided into a series of courtyards on various levels and a sculpture garden. In particular, he designed the entire structure to place visitors in a position that would allow them to view sculptures. Hendrick van Cleve III’s painting, View of the Vatican Gardens and St Peter’s Basilica (c.1580) records the general arrangement. Sculptures were rhythmically displayed between fruit trees, within niches and along all the paths of the garden, thus acquiring both an aesthetic and a decorative value. To highlight its features, the courtyard, in turn, provided each sculpture with “elaborately painted and decorated niches (cappellette) at the four corners of the court and in the centre of each enclosing wall”.15 The importance of this garden and its public accessibility, although limited to a set of selected visitors and artists, is described by Federico 12 “Passeremo alle facciate delle case, che dagli antichi si fecero quando con le virtù e con le armi si procacciavano gl’imperj, i quali oltre agli ordini de’ colonnati e de’ vani, che scompartivano in quelle le pietre orientali, ponevano poi in molti di quei vani delle istorie di marmo, ch’erano grandi, e si mostravano essere più che di mezzo rilievo, e tali erano comunemente le spoglie delle loro facciate. Ma nelle nicchie vi ponevano dentro di bellissime figure di bronzo, ovvero di marmo, che erano di tondo rilievo e spiccate da quelle.” Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura (1586), ed. and trans. by Edward J. Olszewski, 270. 13 For further information, see Hans Henrik Brummer, The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1970). 14 Among the firsts, see the Antiquario of the Cardinal Federico Cesi built in 1550 to house his collection of antiquities. See Carole Paul, The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour (Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). 15 Francis Haskell, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1981), 7.

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Figure 13 Hendrick van Cleve III (Flemish, Antwerp 1525 – 1589 Antwerp), View of the Vatican Gardens and St Peter’s Basilica (c.1580), oil on canvas, 71.5 × 101 cm, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris.

Zuccari’s drawings in which the artist’s older brother is depicted in the act of copying statues (Taddeo in the Cortile del Belvedere in the Vatican, Drawing the Laocoon, 1590). Other visual sources describing Bramante’s structure include Francisco de Holanda’s drawing in which the Laocoon is represented inside a niche, Laocoonte and his Son (1541–1542), and Vincenzo Feoli’s engravings, View of the Courtyard of the Museo Pio-Clementino and Right Side of the Portico in the Courtyard of the Museo Pio-Clementino, both from “Veduta generale in prospettiva del cortile nel Museo Pio-Clementino” (1790). Especially in the latter, although being a late eighteenth-century representation, the setup for the Apollo del Belvedere, the Laocoon and the Venus Felix is the same as that depicted in the sixteenth century. The ordered integration of statues in the architectural and decorative setup of garden façades (starting with Bramante’s intervention in the Belvedere garden, with Raphael’s in Farnesina Villa and with Della Valle’s in his garden) then became common practice, above all in the second half of the century and throughout the entire seventeenth century. However, the exhibition of friezes and statues on walls concerned not only the façade overlooking the garden but also the other façades, as recorded by Ulisse Aldobrandi in 1550, who observed in Rome “nel muro molti epitaffi murati”.16 16 Ulisse Aldovrandi, “Delle statue antiche che per tutta Roma, in diversi luoghi, et case particolari si veggono” (1550), in Lucio Mauro, Le antichità de la città di Roma … Et insieme ancho

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Figure 14 Federico Zuccari (Italian, Sant’Angelo in Vado 1540/42 – 1609 Ancona), Taddeo in the Belvedere Court in the Vatican Drawing the Laocoon (1595), drawing, 17.5 × 42.5 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

In this regard, as I have tried to point out several times in this context, the more the awareness of the aesthetic, symbolic and economic value of antiquities increased, the more the need to exhibit artworks in proper spaces and through appropriate ways became almost a dogma. An example in this sense is the role played by inner galleries on the ground floor, considered as the physical and symbolical conjunction between the inside and the outside. Especially at the end of the sixteenth century, they were arranged to display antiquities. This practice, together with the setting-up of the piano nobile as the central exhibition space, led gardens to lose their function as an exhibition space and thus they often returned to their earlier purpose of warehousing 17 sculptures not inserted in the iconographic programme. Intended as the extension of an interior, they had to represent the expression of the logic guiding the architectural promenade of viewers inside the palace, and thus their aesthetic experience. This conjunction was technically and visually set up thanks to an interior gallery which often had a windowed side overlooking the garden. Villa Medici’s gallery was one of the first examples, even if the practice of setting up antiquities in indoor rooms came to Rome also from Venice, and in particular thanks to the Venetian Statuario Grimani. Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici erected it after 1576 for his collections of antiquities, by connecting it with the sculpture garden, through a single door. di tutte le statue antiche, che per tutta Roma in diversi luoghi e case particolari si veggono, raccolte e descritte (Venice 1556) (New York: Hildesheim, 1975), 284. 17 Consider the term warehouse in a broad sense. In fact, although they were used as storage places, their layout was never left to chance, but structured according to the aesthetic rigour of the time.

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Figure 15 Vincenzo Feoli (Italian, Rome 1760 – 1827 Rome), View of the Courtyard of the Museo Pio-Clementino from “Veduta generale in prospettiva del cortile nel Museo Pio-Clementino” (1790), etching and engraving, 57.9 × 89.9 cm, The MET Collection, New York.

Figure 16 Vincenzo Feoli (Italian, Rome 1760 – 1827 Rome), Right Side of the Portico in the Courtyard of the Museo Pio-Clementino from “Veduta generale in prospettiva del cortile nel Museo Pio-Clementino” (1790), etching and engraving, 57.7 × 90.2 cm, The MET Collection, New York.

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Figure 17 Giovanni Battista Falda (Italian, Valduggia 1643 – 1678 Rome), View of the Villa Medici (after 1677), etching, 23.2 × 42.8 cm, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1961, MET, New York.

Jacopo Zucchi was responsible for the decorative and architectural design, but his project was never completed. However, some of Zucchi’s drawings, such as Progetto per la Galleria Medici (1584–1587), record the arrangement of niches, ovals and statues, their relationship and symmetry. A century later, Giovanni Battista Falda perfectly described the garden surrounding the Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill with the etching View of the Villa Medici (1677), which portrays a glimpse of the phenomenal collection of statues from classical antiquity. In turn, the Oval Salon of the Barberini Palace, designed by Bernini, was thought of as an exhibition space, expressly dedicated to staging antiquities. The stucco decoration and the ordered wall were in fact designed according to the representative role of the room. At other times, this connection between the inside and the outside was played by the loggia (an open and columned gallery), which was also the refuge for high-value sculptures, as recorded by the drawing, Palazzo Madama: dalla famiglia Medici al Senato (1532–1536), by Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck’s who visited Rome between 1532 and 1535.18 Another example is the Marmi loggia, created by Giulio Romano around 1530 for the 18 Of all the Renaissance drawings of Rome’s collections of antiquities that have survived, Maarten van Heemskerck’s are important depictions recording the setting-up of gardens and loggias. For more information, see Kathleen Wren Christian, “For the Delight of Friends, Citizens, and Strangers: Maarten van Heemskerck Drawings of Antiquities Collections in Rome”, in Tatiana Bartsch and Peter Seiler (eds.), Röm Zeichnen. Maarten van Heemskerck 1532–1536/37 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2012), 129–156.

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Gonzaga family in Mantua.19 In 1572, Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga transformed the loggia of the Ducal Palace into a gallery (of Months)20 by closing the arches with glass walls. Ippolito Andreasi’s drawings (Rilievo della parete settentrionale della loggia dei Mesi, 1568) record the loggia before its closure and thus allow us to perceive its previous arrangement, closely influenced by the relationship between the sizes of sculptures and Romano’s structure. In turn, palaces’ façades served as interfaces between the inside and the outside. Unlike gardens (that, at least until the mid-sixteenth century and beyond some earlier cases, were considered as antiquities storehouses,21 or rather as theatres of memory and history, without, though, a clear iconographic plan), façades were instead set up with sculptures, friezes and architectural cornices, to follow a precise symbolic layout. In this sense, despite the fact they come from the following century (1671), the notes by Sir Thomas Brownes make perfectly clear the role of the façade and its specific spatial organisation: “the garden facciata [of the Medici Villa] is incrusted with antique & rare Basse-relievis & statues, [and] the entrante of the Garden, presents us with a […] dore-Case adorned with divers excellent marble statues”.22 From the same period, another comment echoes Brownes’ feeling: “the House is almost cover’d over on the out-side with Antique Basso rilievo’s, which are dispos’d in so natural an order, and with so much Symmetry, that you wou’d be tempted to think they had been purposely made to fill those places where they are now set.”23 These last two examples introduce the question of appearing and dressing. In fact, whether it was gardens, loggias or façades, the methods of setting up these spaces sought to create a kind of dramatisation of these same venues. Their theatrical dimension24 was linked, of course, to the need to convey to society a symbolic message representing the identity of the place and its 19 Among Gonzaga’s properties, see the Pavilion Garden (Giardino del Padiglione, o dei Semplici) called so because it was composed by a sculpture loggia (now disappeared). 20 Also known as the Loggia dei Mesi (months) for the f igures represented in the niches of the arches of the walls that allude to the months of the year. Jacqueline Burckhardt, “La loggia dei Marmi”, in AA.VV., Giulio Romano, exh. cat., Palazzo Te, Palazzo Ducale, Mantova, 1 September – 12 November 1989 (Milan: Electa, 1989). 21 Anna Cavallaro, Collezioni di antichità a Roma fra ‘400 e ‘500, 16. 22 Esmond Samuel de Beer (ed.), Diary of John Evelyn, Vol. II: Kalendarium, 1620–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 231, 251. 23 Maximilien Misson, A New Voyage to Italy … (London: Printed for T. Goodwin, M. Wotton S. Manship and B. Took, 1699), 46. 24 “the central theme of these Italian gardening dramas was the co-operation or rivalry of Art and Nature”. John Dixon Hunt, “Curiosities to Adorn Cabinets and Gardens”, in Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (ed.), The Origins of museums, 198.

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owner. On the other hand, these places acted not only as conjunction spaces reflecting the visual relationship between the interior and the exterior, but also as hybrid stages with a specific display logic25 applied to the memory of the classical past and the beauty of the landscape (thanks to antiquity collections). The semantic and epistemological variety of these spaces also was linked to the idea of p​​ ublic space and shared visibility (thus not reserved for a selection of visitors, as could happen in private environments). Intended as advertising platforms, these spaces also adapted to a new image of the city that was increasingly taking shape – that is, an image of a dynamic city, understood as an exhibition stage where the temporality of the experience and the act of exhibiting they directed the choices relating to the set-up.

4.2 The City: A Stage to Display Ceremonies L’arte non ci dà il volto reale del secolo ma il volto che il secolo riteneva di avere.26

The city has always been a field of experimentation for staging celebrations of various kinds and for carrying out principal activities of sales and sponsorship for the art world. In this sense, the phenomenon of the public Baroque feast, considered mostly for its monumental, experimental and temporary nature,27 perfectly describes a specific condition that helped shape the ideas of exhibition space and exhibiting. Intended as a reflection of the historical situation that both inaugurated a new visual language and favoured a greater permeability between arts, the seventeenth-century feast reached such structural completeness that it became a “redundancy of fiery invention that does not remain repressed by rules”.28 The habit of conceiving sacred and profane manifestations of 25 See the German architect and engineer Georg Andreas Böckler, who specialised in hydraulic architecture, and who wrote the treatises Theatrum Machinarum Novum (1661) and Architectura Curiosa Nova (1664). The latter, mostly dedicated to the application of hydrodynamic mechanisms on garden fountains, also includes detailed engravings depicting elaborated (and f ictional) gardens based on geometrical shapes, repetitive patterns and labyrinthine paths. 26 Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, Vol. 2 (Rome: Bulzoni Ed., 1977), 6. 27 For an extensive bibliography and visual references, see Marcello Fagiolo Dell’Arco, La festa barocca, and J. R. Mulryne, et al., Architectures of Festival in Early Modern Europe: Fashioning and Re-fashioning Urban and Courtly Space (London, New York: Routledge, 2018). 28 Francesco Milizia, quoted by Giovanni Carandente, I trionfi nel primo Rinascimento (Turin: Edizioni Radio Italiana, 1963), 7.

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thought as urban spectacles was already widespread throughout medieval Europe.29 Already in Quattrocento Florence,30 the coincidence between feast and arts transfigured the visual identity of the city through streets and squares especially decorated and set up to shape the ritual. On these occasions, paintings, tapestries, ephemeral architectures (such as triumphal arches) and even tableaux vivants were temporarily displayed in the public space, following the ceremonial route. Nevertheless, the practice of conceiving events as a kind of theatrical arrangement grew in seventeenth-century Europe.31 Especially in Italy, various feasts commemorated saints, patrons or religious anniversaries, honoured profane events (weddings, births or funerals at European courts), embodied carnivals or even celebrated32 political exploits, ambassadors’ visits or canonisation processes. Beyond the stylistic aspects and technical innovations they produced, these public events above all contributed to defining the first exhibiting practices, making streets and buildings (particularly churches) exhibition spaces. There, within a complex and dynamic structure, ephemeral architecture, various decorations, official paintings, ornamental friezes and fabrics were spatially and temporally set up. Intended as display devices, these artefacts created a symbolic environment apt to represent the magnificence of the event and to astonish the public, passing from the Baroque idea of continuity to one of progression. These happenings traversed the city and usually finished inside a church or a public building expressly “dressed” with decorative apparatus. The latter included statues, paintings and tapestries temporary installed on the buildings’ façades or directly in the 29 See Stephanie Porras, Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce and Devotion (London: Laurence King, 2018), 70–73. 30 Cf. Riccardo Pacciani, “Immaini, art e architecture belle fest d etc laurenziana”, in Paolo Ventrone (dir.), Le temps revient ‘l tempo is rinuova. Feste e spettacoli nella Firenze di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 1992), 119–137. 31 In France, for instance, this type of public ceremony often celebrated the entrance of the king into the city. The dramatisation of these events developed mostly at the beginning of the fourteenth century when public processions of the bourgeoisie and the French State council began to be decorated with costumes, musicians, artificial fountains (of wine or milk), theatrical representations and tableaux vivants (1350). Additionally, tapestries and paintings were hung on the buildings’ façades as huge decorations. In 1380, for the entry of Charles VI into the capital, a chronicler wrote: “the streets and intersections of the city were hung with tapestries as in temples”. Quoted by Robert W. Berger, Public Access to Art in Paris: A Documentary History from the Middle Ages to 1800 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 38. See also Martine Boiteux, “Fêtes et cérémonies romaines au temps des Carrache”, in André Chastel (ed.), Les carrache et les décors profanes, 183–214. 32 Since churches were places visited by everyone, painters exhibited there to gain more visibility.

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streets, so that they were ultimately called “painted cloths” (panni dipinti).33 Giacinto Gigli, known for his memories describing seventeenth-century Roman processions, ceremonies and miracles, recorded various occasions, such us the procession staged in honour of St Carlo: La strada era tutta coperta di tende, et nelli luoghi dove non erano case, come nella piazza del Popolo, et nelle bocche delle strade vi erano piantati grossi travi coperti di verdura nella cima de’ quali era inalzata la tenda donde pendevano abasso molti panni di arazzi, et di seta: il resto delle case era tutto similmente di paramenti adornato. Si fecero cinque archi trionfali per al strada adorni di festoni et di varie carte dipinte, nella sommità de’ quali si vedeva l’effige di S. Carlo in più modi in mezzo a due Angeli con belle iscrizioni di sotto. Avanti poi la Chiesa di S. Carlo vi era un altro bellissimo Archo a due faccie di legname, et tele dipinte a colori di diversi marmi con quattro colonne, et altrettante Statue dipinte, et altre di rilievo, et di stucco. La Processione fu a questo modo.34

This practice persisted until the eighteenth century, and in this case, such Venetian views as Canaletto’s A Regatta on the Grand Canal (1733–1734), Luca Carlevarijs’s The Regatta on the Grand Canal in Honor of King Frederick IV of Denmark (1709), or Michele Marieschi’s The Regatta in Honor of Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony (1740), show fabrics on windows and balconies overlooking the Venice Grand Canal, and the theatrical macchina (structure) built on these occasions. During these events, a procession of socially mixed individuals moved along the predetermined path. Along the route, buildings appeared as huge posters with articulated staging (impalcatura),35 acting as a “‘frontispiece’ for an interior celebration and a scenic ‘backdrop’ for an exterior spectacle”.36 This architectural complex apparatus decorated and embellished the city, 33 In the Medici inventory of 1492, of a total of 142 paintings, thirty-eight were noted as painted cloths. See Natalia Gozzano, “Bacchette, scopette, tenaglie e chiodi. Il guardaroba nella struttura organizzativa e finanziaria del palazzo e delle sue collezioni”, in Alessandra Rodolfo and Caterina Volpi (eds.), Vestire i palazzi, 79, note 13; Paula Nuttall, “‘Panni dipinti di Fiandra’: Netherlandish Painted Cloths in Fifteenth-Century Florence”, in Carolina Villers (ed.), The Fabric of Images: European Paintings on Textile Support in the 14th and 15th Centuries (London: Archetype, 2000), 109–117. 34 Giacinto Gigli, Diario di Roma, ed. by Manlio Barberito, Vol. I: 1608–1644 (Rome: Colombo Editore, 1994): 28. 35 Cf. Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, Vol. 2, 118. 36 “da ‘frontespizio’ per una celebrazione all’interno e da ‘fondale’ scenico per uno spettacolo all’aperto.” Ibid., 321–322.

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Figure 18 Luca Carlevarijs (Italian, Udine 1663 – 1730 Venice), Regatta on the Grand Canal in Honor of Frederick IV, King of Denmark (1711), oil on canvas, 135.3 × 259.7 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

making the urban space a “scenery where imperial ruins, ancient basilicas, new edifices, streets, squares of the city [became] the wings of an immense and prestigious ‘theatre’”.37 Whether they were travelling feasts (often processions ending up in a church) or events organised in specific places (for example, during the Venetian carnival), these occasions temporarily invaded the public space which was turned into a natural exhibiting stage from which to take inspiration to structure the scenography. In this regard, Rome’s public outdoor spaces provided the perfect scenery: “a commemoration, a destination, and a set of images and texts that moved through space and time”.38 For instance, on the occasion of Innocent X’s horseback ride, in his Relatione della Corte di Roma (1644) the chronicler Girolamo Lunadoro described the arrangement of the city: “streets were adorned following the good intention of everyone, [with] many tapestry cloths […] hanging from every window together with drapes, carpets in various formats and colours, and rich pillows”.39 37 “uno scenario dove i ruderi imperiali, le antiche basiliche, i nuovi edifici, le vie, le piazze della città [diventavano] le quinte di un immenso e prestigioso ‘teatro’.” Ibid., 317. 38 Josephine Shaya, “The Public Life of Monuments: The Summi Viri of the Forum of Augustus”, AJA, No. 117 (2013): 83–110, [106]. 39 “apparate secondo la buona intenzione di ciascuno, che sforzarsi di farsi honore, [e che] molti panni d’arazzo […] pendevano da tutte le finestre con drappi, e tappeti di varie foggie, di diversi colori, con ricchi cuscini.” Girolamo Lunadoro, Relatione della Corte di Roma, e de’ riti da osservarsi in essa, e de’ suoi magistrati, e offitij: con la loro distinta giurisdittione (Padova: Frambotto, 1635), 224–225.

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As early as the sixteenth century, collectors even lent pieces from their collections to decorate the city. A case in point is the decision of Cardinal Della Valle to lend a series of statues to adorn the arch erected expressly to celebrate the Possession of Leone X, in 1513, as described by the chronicles of the time. 40 Others took the initiative to decorate the façades of their own houses, by bringing outside pieces from their collections, as Gabriele de’ Rossi did during the same occasion of the Cardinal Della Valle. “For the occasion, the de’ Rossi had set up their antiquities, including a ‘Diana di alabastro che proprio parlar volessi’, on high platforms arranged on either side of the street in front of their house.”41 Beyond this early case, often, the layout also involved the demolition or the restoration of several edifices. Giovanni Paolo Panini’s painting, The Preparations to Celebrate the Birth of the Dauphin of France in Piazza Navona (1731), depicts these activities and remains today a clear testimony of the organisational creativity of the time. Panini represented the threedimensional stage, aligned along the Piazza Navona’s central axis, and composed of a pair of twin rectangular temples flanking Bernini’s fountain. The atmosphere portrayed symbolises the frenzy of preparations, as seen in the foreground of the painting, where the Cardinal de Polignac is represented giving orders42 in the centre of the work-in-progress floral scenography. Besides, it suggests a sense of community and the financial effort that had been achieved. This festive furniture, although thought to be ephemeral apparatus, sometimes became permanent structures of the city. Sculptures, fountains, arches, 43 aediculae and other architectural elements turned into lasting urban furnishings. Indeed, the city was not only a scenic backdrop for a specific feast but also a translation of both the social and political identity of the society and the typical ritual dimension of the Baroque spectacle. Public space was then turned into a pure performance that had to astonish 40 Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco, Maria Luisa Madonna, “Il possesso di Leone X: il trionfo delle prospettive”, in Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco (ed.), La festa a Roma dal Rinascimento al 1870 (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1997), 42–49. 41 See Giovanni Giacomo Penni, Cronicha delle magnifiche & honorate pompe fatte in Roma per la Creatione & Incoronatione di Papa Leone X Pont. Max. (Rome, 1513) quoted by Kathleen Wren Christian, “The De’ Rossi Collection of Ancient Sculptures, Leo X, and Raphael”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, No. 65 (2002): 132–200, [156]. 42 Peter Bjorn Kerber, Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2017), 107. 43 In France, since the sixteenth century, there was the widespread habit of converting temporary apparatuses into permanent urban structures, especially arches used to commemorate triumphal entrances to aristocratic homes.

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beholders who: “looking for new wonder, ended up becoming an active centre simultaneously temporary and variable”. 44 Regarding the beholder, in such contexts, viewers played a decorative and structural role, becoming part of the spectacle themselves. 45 Being simultaneously the seen and the seeing, the public looked at the feast while they took part in the event, finally becoming the object of other people’s gaze. From a structural point of view, the beholders were a mass, a crowd able to encompass ephemeral as well as dynamic stages. From the pictorial point of view, this function appears more explicit. In Francesco Guardi’s Venetian views, for instance, the individual disappears as a single identity46 while he/she integrates into the crowd. The latter turns into a pictorial spot, a kind of geometrical shape that occupies and organises the space of the representation. 47 Francesco Guardi’s painting, Giovedì Grasso Festival in the Piazzetta (1775), records the visual role conferred on beholders. Here, beyond the architectural device specially built to celebrate the Venetian carnival, in the centre of the crossing perspective, the public fills the pictorial space. Moreover, although the doge could be identified within the group of people depicted on the Doge’s Palace 44 “la meraviglia [e che] chiedeva la attiva partecipazione di uno spettatore che, in cerca di nuovi stupori, finiva per diventare lui stesso un centro momentaneo ma subito variabile.” Cf. Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, 57. 45 Peter Bjorn Kerber, Eyewitness Views, 61. 46 While the specific identity of the individual disappears, the social distinction remains. The position of the different social classes was indeed regulated according to the social behaviour of the time, the specificity of the event and the hierarchy within the same class. 47 This practice, among other things, recalls the medieval pictorial habit, especially Florentine and Sienese, for which the spatial definition of religious paintings was often organised through the circumscription of the worshipers within societies and gender perimeters. Represented as a uniform crowd, spectators were depicted through the reiteration of specific social forms and symbols. See, in this sense, two paintings by Sano di Pietro, “Preaching of St. Bernardino in Piazza del Campo” (1425–1444) and “Preaching of St. Bernardino in Piazza San Francesco” (1425–1444), the painting by Francesco di Giorgio, “Sermon of St. Bernardino” (1462–1465), and the work of Neroccio Bartolomeo de ’Landi, “Sermon of St. Bernardino” (1470). Here, the architectural lines that define the primitive perspective plans are articulated by the alignment of the symbolic bodies, representing a rigid class hierarchy. Furthermore, not only the distribution of the figures in the perspective plane is contextualised by their social role; it also builds a scenographic dynamism that could be defined as a “wide-angle” spatialisation. The architectural setting of these paintings has been the subject of an accurate iconographic and historical study, see Cesare Brandi, Quattrocentisti senesi (Milan: Hoepli, 1949); Jean-Marie Floch, “Quelques positions pour une sémiotique visuelle”, Actes Sémiotiques Bulletin, No. 4–5 (1978): 1–16; Émile Gaillard, Sano di Pietro: un peintre siennois au XVe siècle, 1406–1481 (Chambéry: Dardel, 1923); Algirdas Julien Greimas, “Sémiotique figurative et sémiotique plastique”, Actes Sémiotiques, Documents, No. 60 (1984): 5–24; Tarcisio Lancioni, Il senso e la forma. Il linguaggio delle immagini tra teoria dell’arte e semiotica (Bologna: Esculapio, 2001); John Pope-Hennessy, Sienese Quattrocento Painting (London: Phaidon, 1947).

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balcony, “the true protagonist of this and other depictions in the series is the Serene Republic, embodied by its rituals and traditions”. 48 During these celebrations, artists too played an emblematic role. While for worshipers and citizens, the event was an occasion to enjoy a religious or social spectacle which was above all theatrical, for artists, it was rather one of the few occasions on which they could show their work to a vast public. Not only could they design the decorative apparatus of various feasts (like Bernini), but they also had the opportunity to install their paintings or sculptures on the street, exhibiting themselves on the pretext of decorating the city. Often, they also exploited religious events to hang their pictures inside churches or to show them in the course of the exhibitions organised during the ceremony. In this regard, churches, as the locations of public49 collections, can be considered some of the first exhibition spaces of the early modern period. This situation, although well established in Baroque Italy, had a clear development in other countries as well. Among various religious ceremonies, the annual commemoration held by the Parisian guild of goldsmiths (the Confraternity of St Anne, St-Marcel), from 1639 to 1707 is a case in point. On this occasion, every first day of May, a large-dimension50 picture (called the “May”) was displayed in the Notre-Dame cathedral. The day after, the painting was then hung in the Lady Chapel, where it would remain a month before being permanently shown against a pillar of the nave. This type of installation is recorded by an anonymous Franco-Flemish artist’s painting, Interior of Notre Dame (mid-seventeenth century), in which one can recognise several Mays. In the foreground, on the left, the painter depicted Aubin Vouet’s painting, The Centurion Cornelius at the Feet of Saint Peter (1639), which is still in Notre-Dame. Although Mays were considered more as scenic devices than as artworks (the vast dimension of these paintings reflected the desire of the time to commemorate the solemnity of the 48 Peter Bjorn Kerber, Eyewitness Views, 15. 49 In this regard, K. Pomian quotes A. M. Zanetti who def ined the Venetian church Santa Maria Maggiore as a gallery of Venetian paintings (“compiuta galleria di pitture veneziane”). Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, 297. 50 This practice goes back to 1 May 1449 when the goldsmiths of Paris (at that time, not yet a confraternity) erected a decorated tree in front of the gate of Notre Dame, to celebrate the Virgin. Over the years, the tree was substituted for a tabernacle embellished with small paintings hung on the sides, depicting scenes of the Old Testament. From 1630 onwards, the tabernacle was replaced with a big painting made every year by an artist of the time. According to Robert W. Berger, despite not having clear sources, the passage from the tabernacle to the painting could be traced back to the high social impact the cycle of Rubens’ paintings had when it was installed at the Luxembourg Palace, in 1625. See Robert W. Berger, Public Access to Art in Paris, 53–55.

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ceremony), for artists, this recurring event was an excellent opportunity to exhibit their creations in a public space visited by all citizens. However, in France, this “conversion” of a religious feast into an exhibition remained sporadic, followed only by the eighteenth-century salon shows. In any case, in Paris as in Rome, public feasts set: “[the temporary and sometimes permanent] transformation of the places of the city but also the modification (through the ephemeral) of the habitual chronological notion: ritual thus also becomes a symbolic form of space-time suspension”.51 Returning to the general question of the city as an exhibition macrocosm and of the feast as an instrument emphasising this aspect, the idea of the Baroque feast appears today as an exhibiting occasion that, while it gave rise to the first historical painting exhibitions, also made the comprehension of artefacts shown in these events more ambiguous. Indeed, they appeared both as urban decoration and as works of art. This twofold condition requires an approach capable of reflecting the equally twofold nature of these events: social manifestations and simultaneously exhibiting occasions. Within our study framework, these manifestations acquire, therefore, a historiographical role, especially concerning the approaches adopted to organise exhibitions according to the spatial features and social needs of the time. This close connection ends up confirming how the ontological and structural evolution of the exhibition space is related to the aesthetic reconnaissance of the idea of the exhibition, of the act of publicly showing and above all of the social and political necessities behind exhibiting.

4.3 Religious Spaces for Early Exhibitions [F]or a long time before the seventeenth century artists had made use of a large number of casual and unofficial occasions for showing their work to the public. Such occasions were provided by the many saints’ days and processions which were such a feature of Roman life.52

According to Francis Haskell, Italian religious feasts, mostly Roman, Venetian and Florentine ones, are at the origin of early art exhibitions. There, churches, 51 See Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, Vol. 2., 5. “la trasformazione dei luoghi della città ma anche la modificazione (attraverso l’effimero) della nozione cronologica abituale: la ritualità diventa cosi anche una forma simbolica di sospensione spazio-temporale.” 52 Francis Haskell, “Art Exhibition in 17th Century Rome”, 107.

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cloisters, adjacent squares and other buildings were temporarily set up to welcome a selection of paintings, carefully chosen, to decorate the place and to commemorate the event. Although the first exhibitions held in these public frameworks appeared already at the end of the sixteenth century, Haskell traced four shows in particular, between the Holy years 1650 and 1764,53 that he considers at the origin of the history of exhibitions. These manifestations were managed most of the time by confraternities54 or churchly orders, and lasted a few days, following the duration of the religious feast. None of these events was conceived as a real exhibition offering painters the opportunity to show their works. In the mid-seventeenth century, those exhibiting occasions were fixed according to the nature of the fair: events conceived not to pay homage to artistes, but “to put on a spectacular decorative show, in honour of the saint and his devotees”.55 The feast of St Bartholomew della Natione Bergamasca in Rome, organised during the Holy year 1650, offered, for example, “an exhibition, an apparatus of infinite superb paintings [for which] all the places and the adjacent houses [were dressed] with tapestries”.56 Here, the exhibition served more as a means to decorate the site of the ceremony than as a creative and artistic initiative. Only later, when these proto-exhibitions began to be socially recognised for their artistic importance and high social interest, did collectors and artists start showing an interest in them. Soon, they even began to be institutionalised and organised annually. Especially for collectors, these recurrences were genuine opportunities to show off the prestige of the dynasty and family, by lending several pieces from their collections. The habit of lending paintings was a typical Roman custom. Indeed, contrary to what was happening in the other major European economic centres, in Rome shows related to the feasts were more a moment of commemoration 53 After 1764, the exhibition at the Pantheon in Rome was no longer organised. The list of paintings exhibited in the Pantheon dates back to 1750: “indice delli quadri antichi, e moderni Esposti nella mostra fatta nel portico di S. Maria ad Martyres dall’Insigne Congregazione della Terra Santa detta de’ Virtuosi, in occasione della Festa solennizzata nel corrente Anno 1750 ad onore del Glorioso Patriarca S. Giuseppe”, quoted in Halina Waga, “Vita nota ed ignota dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Notizie d’Archivio”, L’urbe. Rivista Romana, No. 5 (1967): 6–11. 54 See Matizia Maroni Lumbroso and Antonio Martini, Le confraternite romane nelle loro chiese (Rome: Fondazione Marco Lesso, 1963). For more information, see Renata Ago, “Collezioni di quadri e collezioni di libri a Roma tra XVI e XVIII secolo”, Quaderni storici, Vol. 37, No. 110/2 (August 2012): 379–403. 55 Francis Haskell, “Art Exhibition in 17th Century Rome”, 109. 56 “una bellissima festa con mostra, e apparato d’infiniti superbissimi quadri, e apparò tutta la piazza, e le case intorno di arazzi”. G. S. Ruggeri, Diario dell’anno del Giubileo 1650 (25 July 1650), 186, quoted by Francis Haskell, “Art Exhibition in 17th Century Rome”, 109.

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than a commercial practice. In Venice as well as in Northern Europe (most of all Bruges, Antwerp and Prague), the first seventeenth-century exhibitions were linked to the collecting and art markets, fairs and other methods of selling art and antiquities instead. Around the second half of the seventeenth century, two phenomena especially affected the art market: first, the painters’ need for self-promotion, and secondly, the appearance of other display practices. Indeed, the more these exhibitions became known, the more artists wanted to be present, with the consequent implication of needing more space in which to exhibit and different ways of hanging paintings. Furthermore, this period was particularly important for defining art practices not only because it witnessed the development of the artist’s social posture but also because it showed a “new tendency to set exhibitions with more modern criteria”57 likely to reflect, in passing, the interest of the artists towards foreign collectors and an extended art market. As a consequence, even cloisters, rows of pillars, plazas and various religious buildings became accepted exhibition spaces. In this context, our interest is not so much in describing exhibitions already reported by Francis Haskell but to return to the origin of their evolution to understand the causes, and the social and cultural intertwining, as well as the opportunities that resulted in the accrochages of paintings in cloisters and other places of worship that then became genuine exhibitions. Rome was the main centre in which these kinds of exhibitions appeared. The Holy years 1650, 1675 and 1700 were particularly important. In 1675, for example, the annual show conceived in the cloisters of St Giovanni Decollato on 29 August, in honour of the saint’s feast, was managed by the Medici family. On this occasion, while outside the church the façades, the cemetery, the plaza and even the adjacent streets were draped with tapestries, paintings and damasks giving the illusion of a real stage setting, the inner cloister (comprising a single room) was dedicated to the old masters, and more than a hundred paintings were hung.58 Acclaimed and acknowledged by the artistic system of the time, these events went from being occasional and ephemeral setups for paintings to annual scheduled shows. In addition to increasing the artists’ prestige and the viewers’ attendance, these circumstances also defined a new professional figure, that of the “artistic director” capable of managing the choice of works and their organisation. 57 “nuova tendenza ad impostare le esposizioni con criteri più moderni”. See Tiziana Pangrazi, Estetica e accademia: la retorica delle arti din Giuseppe Ghezzi (1634–1721) (Rome: Nuova Cultura, 2012), 46. 58 Francis Haskell, “Art Exhibition in 17th Century Rome”, 107–121 [115].

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One of the best known and most studied59 cases in this sense, is the Roman feast remembered as the “paintings’ festival”,60 held every 19 March by the Compagnia di San Giuseppe di Terra Santa (Congregation of the Virtuous). Here, paintings and tapestries were arranged under the colonnade of the portico, and above the balustrade of the Pantheon. In particular, the pronaos was set up with pictures of “men excellent as much as in architecture, sculpture and painting, as in any other practice worthy of great ingenuity”.61 The first evidence of paintings being exhibited in the Pantheon dates back to 1578, when the feast was not yet intended as an exhibition, but existed as a liturgical commemoration of the patron. In that year, a chronicler recorded the plaza setup, where: “the chapel and the oratory were adorned with cloths and festoons”. The chronicle also reported the feasts in 1581 and 1582 that incorporated the plaza around the Pantheon, which was: “decorated with ‘purebred’ cloths” and where the main apparatus was “very well disposed as much with paintings as damask fabrics and leathers”.62 In 1633, the feast then acquired the status of an exhibition of paintings; as a result, pictures also started being hung in the adjacent portico.63 This new space had already been used a few years earlier, in 1625, as recorded by the camerlengo’s notes in which he reported the expenses for “bringing in and bringing back”64 paintings to and from this space. Then, since 1633, the camerlengo’s notes became more specific, regarding both organisation expenses and especially the setting-up method for paintings. This change in particular suggests the idea of a transition from mere religious event to art exhibition requiring more precise coordination. At that time, the festarolo (the man in charge of organising the feast) was in the habit of entirely clothing porticos’ walls with fabrics and tapestries, on which to hang paintings thanks to a system of ropes and hooks tied to the framework of the structure. For instance, in 1675, to expand the hanging surface, the 59 Halina Waga, “Vita nota ed ignota dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Notizie d’Archivio”, 2, 9, No. 6, 2; Leandro Ozzola, “Antiche esposizioni d’arte a Roma”, Roma. Rivista di studi e di vita romana, Vol. I, No. 7–8 (July–August 1923): 273–275; Stefano Marson, Allestire e mostrare; Francis Haskell, “Art Exhibition in 17th Century Rome”, 107–121. 60 Stefano Marson, Allestire e mostrare dipinti in Italia e Francia tra XVI et XVIII secolo, 4. 61 “huominj excellentissimi tanto in architettura, scoltura, et pittura, quanto in ogni altro exercitio degno di alti ingegni”. Prima Statuto della Venerabile Confraternita di San Giuseppe di Terrasanta (20 December 1545), quoted by Halina Waga, Vita nota e ignota dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Contributi alla storia della Pontificia Accademia Artistica dei Virtuosi al Pantheon (Rome, 1992), 104. 62 See I libro del Camerlengo (f. 37, 48) quoted by Halina Waga, “Vita nota ed ignota dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Notizie d’Archivio”, 1–2. 63 See IV libro del Camerlengo (f. 158), quoted in ibid., 25. 64 Ibid. (f. 140).

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camerlengo commissioned planks of wood to be inserted between columns.65 At the same time, not only the porticos started being understood as exhibition spaces that, as such, had to be prepared carefully, but also the ways in which paintings were hung began to be more and more linked with the value of the artworks. That is to say, if the picture represented the portrait of a benefactor or belonged to aristocratic families of illustrious collectors, it had to be staged, placed and adorned so as to attract public attention. In short, the institutionalisation of the Pantheon exhibition (from a simple liturgical commemoration to an annual show) was confirmed by the genre of the paintings exhibited and the interest demonstrated by several artists of the time. Indeed, beyond religious pictures, one could find works by Velasquez, Jan Miel and Salvator Rosa, as well as old masters belonging to private collections and mythological, landscape or profane subjects. The ontological transition was also confirmed by the vocabulary used at the time to designate the exhibition. Especially in congregations’ notes, we find various forms: in 1680, the show was named “apparatus of paintings”, while that of the following year was called a “feast of paintings”; but it was the feast in 1684 that established the term “exhibition of paintings” [mostra di quadri]66 for the first time. Here, the different terminology perfectly translates the ontological evolution of this event. In addition to the feasts in the external Pantheon row of pillars and the cloisters of the church of St Salvatore in Lauro, also the oratory of St Lorenzo in Lucina (1675), the façade of St Bartolomeo Church, and the entire courtyard of the Compagnia of Santissimo Suffragio, in Rome, were arranged with paintings on the occasion of the Saint’s Day. Especially in this latter case, the chronicles of the time recorded: “an exhibition of paintings never seen before […], of excellent painters […], paintings were so numerous that they were organised in group of six or seven so that they came close to the tent [of yore], […] and the hanging took an entire day and night”.67 65 This practice evokes the historical evolution of the Renaissance gallery that in Italy, following the French example, took hold around 1570. At that time, loggias (initially composed of six or seven bays) began to be closed by filling the arches (such as the Gallery of Palazzo Farnese in Rome or the Gallery of the Months in the ducal residence of Mantua). The following decades, 1580s–1590s, instead marked the advent of galleries developed in length, such as the Uff izi Corridor in Florence, the Villa Medici Gallery in Rome, the Gallery degli Antichi in Sabbioneta or the Gallery della Mostra in Mantua. See: Cristiano Guarneri, “Architetture del sapere. Per una storia dell’architettura museale nell’Europa moderna”, Engramme, No. 126 (April 2015): 8–36. 66 See IV libro del Camerlengo (f. 158), quoted by Halina Waga, “Vita nota ed ignota dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Notizie d’Archivio”, 6. 67 “una mostra non più veduta di quadri, ce principiavano dalla Stufa à S. Biagio fino all’Hosteria della Scimmia dall’una e l’altra parte della strada, e tutti di mano d’eccellenti Pittori, e in tanta

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The feast celebrated on 9 and 10 December in the church of St Salvatore in Lauro (under the arcades of the cloister and in the upper loggia) is another event that contributed to the evolution of the history of exhibitions and their spaces. Already widespread as a liturgical feast in the early seventeenth century, painting shows began to be held around 1670–1675.68 This feast was the last of the year and was truly appreciated by Roman society above all because it was “conceived in a much less amateurish way than any other”.69 Also, since they were installed outside,70 paintings were made much more visible by allowing the public to enjoy the quality and quantity of works of art. From this occasion, the practical skills of the festarolo, Giuseppe Ghezzi, stood out, especially for his taste in choosing and exhibiting paintings. Ghezzi was a painter, restorer and collector who worked for various annual exhibitions held at the church of St Salvatore in Lauro. Thanks to his notes,71 especially those regarding display criteria, the structure of pathways for visitors, and expected expenses and problems, we know today that exhibitions were organised between 1682 and 1717. In particular, his annotations regarding the three shows, held in 1682, 1683 and 1684, record the care he devoted to the decoration of spaces (church, oratory and cloister) and the paintings’ setup, without forgetting the viewers’ experience. Indeed, the festarolo underlined how the cloister, thanks to its spatial structure close to that of a theatrical stage, directed the spectator’s eye. His notes also give information on the number of paintings displayed, which could vary each year (130 items in 1689, 221 in 1717). Besides this, the meticulousness of his notations allows us to deduce the setup of the collectors’ houses of the time. Indeed, Ghezzi indicated for each painting lent the original location from which it was taken (antechamber, first floor, the third room, bedroom, gallery, loggia, mezzanine under the stairs, corridor), and in doing so, provided copia che furono compartiti in sei, e sette ordini si che arrivavano vicino alla tenda e vi bisognò per appendergli spendervi una giornata, e una notte intera della Vigilia a forza di fiaccole, e torcia a vento.” G. S. Ruggeri, Diario dell’anno del Giubileo 1650, 8 Settembre, quoted by Francis Haskell, “Art Exhibition in 17th Century Rome”, 118. 68 See Tiziana Pangrazi, Estetica e accademia, 45. 69 Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters. 70 See Tomaso Montanari, “Cristina di Svezia, il cardinale Azzolino ere mostre di quadri a San Salvatore in Lauro”, in Vera Nigrisoli Wärnhjelm (ed.), Cristina di Svezia e Fermo. Atti del Convegno Internazionale “La regina Cristina di Svezia, il cardinale Decio Azzolino jr e Fermo nell’arte e la politica della seconda metà del Seicento” (Fermo: Fondazione cassa di Risparmio di Fermo, 2001), 71–93 [78]. 71 Giuseppe Ghezzi began writing these notes from 1682, these are preserved today in a single volume entitled: “Quadri delle Case de Principi in Rome” and published by Giulia de Marchi, Mostre di quadri a San Salvatore in Lauro (1682–1725).

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us with a narrative cartography of several seventeenth-century collections. His notes are also critical sources for understanding the temporality of the setup and how long the display lasted. Generally, he started organising arrangements at least a month before the opening of the exhibition. Then, a week before, he began to gather all the paintings together and to display them during the following days. Basically, pictures remained visible for two days (10–11 December), monitored day and night by guards.72 Ghezzi’s notes have also revealed that several social problems arose during the organisation of those exhibitions. In that respect, we know that shows were generally made up of paintings mostly from the collections of Roman families and, therefore, of paintings by mainly deceased artists. Sometimes, living artists were admitted, but on these occasions, Ghezzi personally chose the pictures and reported them in his notes under the name of “avventizi” (adventitious) or “moderni viventi”73 (modern living). Concerning paintings from collections, Ghezzi listed not only owners and artworks, but also the names of collectors who wanted to lend their collections and paintings. While the former details underline the geography of Roman collecting in the seventeenth century, the latter suggests instead how high the interest was in these manifestations intended as real opportunities to stage the intellectual and social power of the family. Indeed, on a few occasions, the exhibition was conceived with the artworks of only one collector. Also, during the show held in 1704, the Queen of Poland lent a series of paintings depicting the royal family precisely to commemorate the political exploits of the king. Beyond these specific cases, Ghezzi’s notes enable us to observe the inclusion of some unknown families of collectors, that let the evolution of the art market show through, as well as the increasing interest among Roman society for these exhibiting occurrences.74 At any rate, Ghezzi’s notes reveal a specific type of setup influenced more by collectors’ exigencies of social representation than by aesthetic requirements (as would happen during the displays of the eighteenth-century French Salons). Ghezzi not only curated exhibitions in San Lauro. His fame and ability in setting up were so widespread that Pope Clement XI commissioned him the project (never realised) to exhibit paintings in the Vatican galleries in anticipation of the arrival in Rome of Philip V, the King of Spain. Also, in this case, Ghezzi’s notes are full of information: he accurately related not 72 “Appunti autografi di G. Ghezzi”, in Giulia de Marchi, Mostre di quadri a San Salvatore in Lauro (1682–1725), 25. 73 Ibid., 63, 349. 74 Ibid., XX.

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only the setting up of the paintings, but also the list of pictures that could have been requested on loan, and the list of those deemed indispensable, given the proportions of the two galleries. The two white galleries have to be adorned with selected paintings to accompany the beauty of the first [gallery] which is already famous for its celebrated geographical representations in the Vatican Palace. […] If these two galleries, now white, are to become galleries of paintings, it is absolutely not necessary to dress them first with damasks […], and then adapt pictures over them, because if these are to be set up as in a gallery, then paintings must stay together and without spaces since we have (empty) spaces only when we have no paintings available. [The walls] must, therefore, remain covered only by paintings, […] with only three orders, the large, the middle-sized and the smaller ones.75

When reading this passage, the preoccupation of the time becomes evident, that is to say: a spaced setup (with paintings separated from each other) means a shortage of works and thus reveals the lack of intellectual and social power. Also, we understand how Ghezzi tries to remedy the structure of windowed rooms with a bare cornice, thinking of affixing fabric as a covering. However, in this case, Ghezzi explained that in doing so, “we could not call it a gallery, but a simple artificial exhibition of paintings, as is usually done in common feasts”.76 As a means revealing the taste of the time and the exhibition criteria used during religious events, Ghezzi’s notes and above all this last passage clearly distinguish between high-ranking exhibitions and those commonly 75 “Le due bianche galerie che si vogliono ornare di scelte pitture per accompagnare la bellezza della prima, che a maraviglia risplende per le sue celebratissime Geografie nel Palazzo Vaticano. […] Se queste due galerie hora bianche, si hanno da chiamar galerie de quadri, non é assolutamente necessario vestirle prima con damaschi o setini, e poi sopra adattarvi i quadri, perché se questi devono collocarsi ad uso di galeria, hanno da stare uniti e senza spatij, pratticandosi i spatij solo à cagione di penuria delle pitture. Devono dunque restar affatto coperte dai soli quadri le pareti, prendendo regola dall’altezza che ha di 22 palmi da terra sino al cornicione, col stabilirvi tre soli ordini, cioè li primi dei grandi, li secondi de mezzani, li terzi de piccoli. Si disse di voler dare le pendive, non solo per ovviare il lustro cagionato dall’opposte finestre, che per la troppa eccedenza del lume, può render perturbata la perfetta visura e godimento delle pitture, ma ancora per coprire la povertà del cornicione, tutto bianco e meschino. […] dandosi le pendrive e coprendosi il cornicione, non si potrebbe allora chiamar galeria, ma bensì semplice mostra posticcia de quadri, solita farsi nelle feste communi.” Ibid., 488. 76 Ibid.

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set up, ultimately dictating an aesthetic and statutory hierarchy that would later define the basis of future art criticism. Beyond Ghezzi and his notes, another feast established by the Jesuit congregation in 1639 to celebrate the power of the order and the achievements of the Catholic reform,77 turned rapidly into an exhibition of paintings. The event was built inside the Jesus’ Church in Rome and the painter appointed to decorate the space was Andrea Sacchi, who also depicted the feast in the painting Festa al Gesù per l’apertura dell’anno secolare (1639), together with Jan Miel and Filippo Gagliardi. In the picture, the high altar was “dressed with a wonderful apparatus, of silk and gold fabric, used like a tapestry, which represented the mystery of the Circumcision of the Christ […], it was so finely depicted that it could only have been made by the well-known Giovan Paolo Rubens”.78 This layout depicted by Sacchi suggests the ostentation of the entire ornament and records the habit of the time of hanging paintings on columns, or the main work on the central vault, as in the case of Rubens’ tapestry that was hung in the middle of the high altar. From a technical point of view, this setup seems to shape the display practice exploiting the rotunda (or the atrium) as the ideal structural unit to exhibit the masterpiece. Indeed, the conceptual significance of the rotunda, whose ontological definition is linked to the structure of pre-Hellenic tombs, experienced over the years a complex transformation, ultimately becoming an exhibition space. Of course, the practice of considering the rotunda the ideal exhibiting place finds its origins in the Roman Pantheon, whose rotunda was conceived as the symbolic centre of arts and knowledge.79 Nevertheless, in Sacchi’s painting, Rubens’ tapestry appears exhibited in a prominent position with regard to viewers and could finally be seen from any angle. The value of the tapestry is suggested by its position, which stands out from the rest of the paintings displayed. Sacchi painted another depiction of this kind of display habit, during the Vallicella feast, the Canonizzazione di S. Filippo Neri (1622), where he portrayed a flag depicting the saint in the middle of the high altar.80 77 For a detailed description of the event, see Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, Vol. 1, 111. 78 “l’Altare [fosse] vestito di un frontale meraviglioso, tessuto di seta, ed oro, ad uso di arazzo, rappresentando il misterio della Circoncisione del Signore, con quella vivezza di disegno, e f inezza di lavoro, che aspettare di può dalla mano del famosissimo Giovan Paolo Rubens.” Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, Vol. 1, 112. 79 For more information on the evolution of the rotunda as a museographic exhibition space, see Pamela Bianchi, Espaces de l’œuvre, Espaces de l’exposition. 80 The diarist Giacinto Gigli described and mentioned the ceremony: Giacinto Gigli, Diario di Roma, 96. Although the foreground of the painting is a f ictitious construction, a kind of “forestage” that recreates an open space suggesting the continuity of the internal space of the

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Beyond the specificity of all these examples, this display also suggests variation in the use of religious places, intended as exhibition spaces. [A]rt, entering the church, displaces the spaces of the temple, introducing a plurality of architectural perspectives. The centre of the space remains the altar where officiating takes place, but the side chapels, the aisles, the sacristies become places towards which the gaze is led, partially subtracting attention from the cross above the choir. Thus, in a double movement, the church removes art from simple worship and exhibits it to a gaze that escapes the canons of the religious.81

The church space was rethought to respond to an exhibiting logic that democratised all its parts. The various venues composing the sacred place, from the interior rooms to the external cloisters, with a specific function and cultural value, temporarily lose their identity to become hybrid spaces, whose connotation and status vary according to their ability to offer the visitor the best point of view to admire the exhibited work. It is, therefore, a statutory transformation generated by the architectural and spatial features specific to the place. As was the case with the feasts in the squares and throughout the city, also, in this instance, it is not just the transformation of a sacred space into a mere exhibition space that must be considered, but a question of taking into account the dramatic power of a (religious) place in relationship with an event that inhabits it together with the believer. In any case, all these exhibitions and their organisation have followed the same logic of the time. That is, not only did they have to promote the religious event, by amazing the public with the magnificence of art, but since they were intended as advertising stages, they had to allow collectors, artists and noble Roman families to show off their collections and artworks. church, definitely eliminating the façade, the painting still remains a sure historical source for the study of the displaying practice. Cf. Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, Vol. 2, img. 368; David Ryley Marshall, Viviano and Niccolò Codazzi, and the Baroque Architectural Fantasy (Milan: Jandi Sapi Editore, 1993), 51. 81 “l’arte, entrando nella chiesa, disloca gli spazi del tempio, introducendo una pluralità di prospettive architettoniche. Il centro dello spazio resta l’altare, da cui si officia, ma le cappelle laterali, le navate, le sagrestie diventano luoghi verso cui lo sguardo viene condotto, sottraendo in parte l’attenzione dalla croce che sovrasta il coro. La chiesa, così,, in un doppio movimento, sottrae l’arte al semplice culto e la espone a uno sguardo che si sottrae ai canoni del religioso.” Federico Ferrari, Lo spazio critico. Note per una decontrazione dell’istituzione museale (Rome: Luca Sossella editore, 2004), 21–22.

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4.4 Transitional Spaces for Exhibition Fairs in Florence and Venice The Roman religious events mentioned above participated in the evolution of exhibition practices. In particular, they turned cloisters, arcades, courtyards and other portions of religious buildings into temporary exhibition places, by def ining specif ic rules of spatial writing related to the typicality of those same spaces. In Italy, the phenomenon expanded in almost all major centres – Venice, Florence, Milan – and also peripheral ones, such as Bologna and Naples. In most cases, the ideal places affected were cloisters, spaces adjacent to the churches and other venues of worship. In the seventeenth century, the quadriportico in front of the Gothic church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Bologna hosted an exhibition of paintings every year. In turn, the chapel of Palazzo Reale in Naples welcomed a series of works of equal size commissioned to Luca Giordano, for an exhibition for the Corpus Christi feast in 1684.82 However, other occasions, not strictly religious, contributed to structuring these practices and the related exhibition spaces, such as the Academy of St Luke in Rome (1577) and the Academy of Drawing in Florence (1562). From the seventeenth century onwards, both institutions got into the habit of exhibiting the works of students as part of an annual exhibition, initially linked to the religious celebration on St Luke’s Day. In Rome, the Academy was located in the church of St Martina near the arch of Septimius Severus (replacing the demolished church of St Luke all’Esquilino) and, therefore, also celebrated the feast of St Martina. Although these were mainly artistic and social events, the religious custom of exhibiting only one day a year, on the occasion of the patron’s feast, influenced the practice of the two academies. Moreover, also on these occasions, the exhibition was housed within the buildings of the two institutions. For one of these events, the feast of the “Inhumation” organised by the Academy of St Luke, the scenographic apparatus was composed as follows: the nave of the church was set up with “two ranks of clothes”, while the ceiling was dressed with “taffettani”; the façade was decorated “with festoons of vegetables, rosettes, friezes, weapons and other embellishments”; the gate was decorated with tapestries and “on the streets, two paintings [were hung] representing the saints with festoons”. The vestments were set aside and recovered for the feast of St Martina on the following January, on the occasion of which: “the great gate was adorned more than usual […] and the 82 See also the feast of the Four Altars (1680–1684) where an exhibition of paintings is recorded.

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same festooned paintings were put back in the streets”.83 The square in front of the church was decorated with thirty tapestries from the Barberini house. In Florence, the Accademia del disegno (1562) organised two exhibitions a year (as described in its statute): one of paintings on the feast of St Luke, and the other one of sculptures on the feast of the four crowned saints. The Academy was connected to the Santissima Annunziata Church and, already during the fifteenth century, a chapel of the cloister was used as a place to temporarily display ex-voto paintings.84 From 1674 to 1706, other exhibitions were recorded, not annually, but sporadically. The year 1706, however, remains a critical year for the exhibiting history of the Academy, as it was Ferdinand I de’ Medici who took charge of the organisation and expenses of that year’s exhibition. On this occasion, not only did he modify the organisational terms of the show by keeping it open for several days (contrary to traditional one-day exhibitions), but he also tried to manage the iconographic pattern. Among the 273 works exhibited, nineteen (mostly Venetian and Bolognese works) came from the collection of the prince who sought to shape a stylistic change in the taste of the time and to direct attention to Northern European art.85 Furthermore, a printed catalogue (one of the first recorded) reported the main information about the works and their location in the exhibition space. After that exhibition, there was a pause at least until 1715, when academics began to fill the “painters’ cloister” with an ever-increasing number of works, with a prevailing didactic spirit and the desire to disseminate the styles and practices of the time. The last exhibition of the drawing academy was organised in 1767 (after thirty years of exhibition inactivity) and commissioned by the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Habsburg whose portrait was hung at the entrance to the chapel of St Luke. The exhibition showed more than 800 paintings, it was accessible to an increasingly large and diversified public (women and lower class), open at specific times, and more than four thousand catalogues were printed. 83 “adornato la porta grande più dell’ordinario […] rimessi di nuovo li medesimi quadri con festoni nelle strade”. Quoted by Alessandro Spila, “Allestire accademie: appunti sul mecenatismo culturale del cardinal Francesco Barberini, aggiunte su Bernini e Cortona alle Accademie di San Luca e degli Humoristi”, Annali delle Arti e degli Archivi. Pittura, Scultura, Architettura, No. 2 (2016): 67–74, [69], note 21. See also Karl Noehles, La chiesa dei SS. Luca e Martina nell’opera di Pietro da Cortona (Rome: The Rome University Press, 1970), 340–341, doc. 30, 35, 38, where the procession in the presence of Barberini and a noble canopy (“nobilissimo baldacchino”) are described. 84 Fabia Borroni Salvadori, Le esposizioni d’arte a Firenze dal 1674 al 1767 (Florence: Kunsthistorisches Institut, 1974), 2. 85 Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum, 28.

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Still, between the end of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, other small annual exhibitions were held in Florence, such as one organised by the Accademia dei Nobili (mostly military architecture drawings) at the Teatro degli Accademici Immobili, and another by the Nobil Collegio Tolomei of Siena, in the garden of Palazzo Guadagni, where portraits of dukes and nobles were exhibited.86 As for Venice, especially at the end of the seventeenth century, exhibitions (mostly related to religious commemorations) took place above all in the urban space. There, the façade of the churches (to which the feast was dedicated) mostly served as an exhibition space. Other shows were also linked to social events (such as fairs or markets), and on which occasions the city was adorned with a series of architectural decorations and street furniture. Every year, for example, on Ascension Day, an exhibition/market focused on the Venetian production of the year was set up in the two most famous Venetian places for trading and the market: St Mark’s Square and the adjoining Piazzetta. The exhibition was recognised by the art market field and known by many artists and connoisseurs. For example, Giorgio Vasari mentions the Ascension Day show (or Assensa)87 several times, and especially in Giorgione’s life where he recorded how he was able to admire his painting on this occasion. Also, thanks to Giulio Mancini, we know that Jacopo da Bassano sent his artworks to be displayed at the Assensa exhibition. This annual exhibition lasted throughout the eighteenth century and ended up taking an international character, as it recorded that Canova exhibited L’Euridice and l’Orfeo in 1776, and the Dedalo and Icaro group in 1779. Francesco Guardi’s painting, Piazza San Marco Decorated for the Festa della Sensa (1775), as well as his son Giacomo’s drawing of the same name, describes the situation as it must have been at the time, and above all the artificial and temporary architectural apparatus on the sides of the square, where all the goods were displayed. Regarding the exhibition of paintings, at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, it was set up on the façade of the church of St Geminiano (today disappeared), which stood 86 See Fabia Borroni Salvadori, Le esposizioni d’arte a Firenze dal 1674 al 1767, 5–6. 87 Cf. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite …, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi. See also the life of Giacomo Palma. According to Stefano Marson, the presence of paintings within this event could date back to the fourteenth century, when for example in 1322 one talked about “ancone e altre pitture”. Cf Stefano Marson, Allestire e mostrare dipinti in Italia e Francia tra XVI et XVIII secolo, 19, note 46; Lina Padoan Urban, “La festa della Sensa nelle arti e nell’iconografia”, Studi Veneziani, No. 10 (1968): 291–353.

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Figure 19 Giacomo Guardi (Italian, Venice (?) 1764 – 1835 Venice (?)), Piazza San Marco Decorated for the Festa della Sensa, drawing, 29.5 × 45.6 cm, The MET Collection, New York.

opposite the church of St Marck, and which played as a kind of bridge that related the two Procuratie.88 This festival also counted a large number of the temporary shops which, for centuries, were huddled together, creating numerous problems (above all fires) which eventually led to better planning and a structured reorganisation.89 However, other Venetian events marked the evolution of exhibition practices and the shaping of new exhibit spaces. Among these, we record the exhibition annually organised by St Roch’s school, on the saint’s day (16 August),90 when the doge used to visit the adjacent church, according to the vow made during the plague of 1575.91 88 See Giovanna Nepi Scirè (ed.), Le procuratie nuove in piazza San Marco (Rome: Editalia, 1994). 89 In the sixteenth century, Sansovino (1534) rethought the architectonic structure of these shops and designed wooden buildings covered and divided into specific and thematic sectors. Gabriel Bella’s painting, La Fiera della Sensa Nuova, highlights the change, especially if compared with another painting by Bella, La Fiera della Sensa Vecchia, in which shops still appear cluttered. 90 In Rome, at least from the end of the seventeenth century, on the day of the feast of St Roch, it was customary to organise a feast on the river and in the church in Ripetta. News of exhibitions linked to these festivities appears only in the mid-eighteenth century. See Stefano Marson, Allestire e mostrare dipinti in Italia e in Francia tra XVI e XVIII secolo, 12–14. 91 See also the ceremony of the triumphal entry of Charles III into Madrid in 1760. Although many written descriptions remain, the five paintings by Lorenzo de Quiros, now at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, offer a detailed description of the event and the ephemeral devices arranged

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The occasion, halfway between a religious and a lay event, included a ceremony marked spatially and temporally by specific stages. The doge arrived by boat. He was then welcomed with a procession that accompanied him to the church, then to the school of St Roch and finally to the Frari. For this cortege, a covered gallery, called the “the doge’s tent”, was set up: an ephemeral structure covered with fabrics, which traced the path of the procession and which protected the doge from the sun. As recorded, during this sort of promenade, people could admire “various modern paintings exhibited outside the School”.92 Indeed, from 1678 onwards,93 the school adopted the habit of displaying students’ paintings on the school’s façades and adjacent buildings. Also, unlike Roman shows that exhibited great masters of the past or private painting collections, this one was focused on young artists of the time. Indeed, this exhibition, while maintaining a decorative purpose (adorning the city for the ceremony), had above all a purely commercial interest among the contemporary artists for whom the show was: “an important opportunity to make themselves known, seek new commissions and freely sell their works”.94 To put it differently, contrary to what happened in Rome at the same time, where public exhibitions were run by collectors and princes to glorify and show off their wealth,95 in Venice painting shows were mostly organised to sell the works of artists. Furthermore, at least until the second half of the seventeenth century, the exhibition in Campo San Rocco represented “the court, in a certain way, of painting [in Venice], like the Salon in Paris”. While it reveals the importance of the exhibition due to its commercial nature, this parallel also highlights the differences between the haphazard nature of this show and the institutional logic of the Parisian salons. Indeed, the St Roch exhibitions along the circuit that led from the Buen Retiro Palace to the Plaza Mayor. In the paintings, one can note the triumphal arch set up for the occasion and, above all, the “painted cloths” hanging from the windows of the buildings. 92 “esposti al di fuori della Scuola vari Quadri di pennello moderno”. See Jonathan Glixon, Lorenzo Cesco and Lina Urban (eds.), La Scuola Grande di san Rocco nella musica e nelle feste veneziane (Venice: Grafiche veneziane, 1996), 64. 93 Before this date, many students and artists had spontaneously started hanging pictures inside the school, as a form of devotion and support to the arts. The number of works increased to such an extent that it was necessary to start hanging paintings outside, first on the façade of the school and then also on the adjacent buildings. See: Stefano Marson, Allestire e mostrare dipinti in Italia e in Francia tra XVI e XVIII secolo, 16; Francis Haskell, “Art Exhibition in 18th Century Venice”, 64. 94 Stefano Marson, Allestire e mostrare dipinti in Italia e in Francia tra XVI e XVIII secolo, 18. 95 It should be remembered that often in Roman exhibitions, paintings exhibited from private collections were not for sale.

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Figure 20 Luca Carlevarijs (Italian, Udine 1663 – 1730 Venice), Side View of the School of St Roch at Left and View of the Façade of the Church of St Roch, etching, 22 × 31 cm, The MET collection, New York.

had neither a “regular system of submission [nor] State interest. There were no catalogues and no written criticism”.96 In this regard, paintings by Canaletto (1735) and Gabriel Bella (1795), and engravings by Luca Carlevarijs (1703) and Michele Marieschi (1741) provide detailed information about the event and especially the setting up of paintings. Carlevarijs’ engraving, one of the first known visual portrayals of the Venetian event, represents the Side View of the School of St Roch at Left and View of the Façade of the Church of St Roch.97 Here, the only painting hanging on the façade of the school allows us to imagine the scene. Besides, in Bella’s and Marieschi’s depictions,98 the point of view leaves the school of St Roch on the right of the painting, focusing its attention on the façade of the church and the general atmosphere of the small Venetian square. 96 “il tribunale, in certo modo, della pittura [a Venezia], come é il Salone in Parigi”. Quoted by Stefano Marson, Allestire e mostrare dipinti in Italia e in Francia tra XVI e XVIII secolo, 18, and published in Giovanni Gaetano Bottari and Stefano Ticozzi, Collection of Letters on Painting, Sculpture and Architecture …, 373. 97 From the series The Buildings and Views of Venice (Le fabbriche e vedute di Venezia), 1703. 98 Marieschi made several engravings of the view, integrating his own personal proposal for the façade of the church of St Roch, which was being renovated at the time. In the engraving, we note a proposal with a highly theatrical and scenographic aim, typical of Marieschi.

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Here, the number of pictures displayed on the façade increases. Also, with Marieschi’s engraving, we note how buildings next to the school and the church began to be used as proper display devices. However, Canaletto’s painting, La visita del doge alla chiesa di San Rocco (1735), remains the most faithful testimony of the event. Here, one can immediately recognise the ephemeral awning prepared to accompany the doge on his way to the church. Also, one can decipher the technical methods used to display the paintings on the façades. Leaning on the lower capitals (the smaller ones) or tied to the columns (the larger ones), paintings hung in this way drew a single display line above the procession. To be more visible, paintings were even tilted downwards, but this aspect, while it is just perceptible in Canaletto’s painting, is instead perfectly evident in Marieschi’s engraving, thanks to the foreshortening point of view. The more linear display of this exhibition differs especially from Ghezzi’s setups, which were confused and congested. Indeed, as mentioned before, Roman painting exhibitions99 were subordinated to the representative need of collectors to show off their riches and power, so that the paintings were often placed side by side covering walls and even filling spaces between the columns. In brief, in the early modern period, Rome, Florence and Venice experienced a series of annual (religious and secular) events, which contributed not only to defining different exhibition methods but above all to structuring a richer and more heterogeneous idea of the exhibition space. Indeed, the essentially ephemeral nature of these exhibitions, dictated by social, political and cultural conditions and needs specific to each context, has shaped an idea of exhibition space free from institutional conventions that would quickly appear in the eighteenth century. Free from constructs and ontological definitions, the exhibition space of the time appears as neither an institutional nor an alternative place, but rather as a space without a specific place and name. From the street to the church’s façade, to the portico, to the cloister, and to the door’s threshold, the idea of exhibition space becomes spatially and temporally ephemeral as much as the related exhibition occasions. Again, Ubi Papa, Ibi Roma returns as a concept – that is, the exhibition space exists when an exhibiting intention manifests itself. 99 However, see Robert van Audenaerd’s engraving, Facade of the Church of Saint Agostino, recording the setting up of paintings on the façade of St Agostino church in Rome, on the occasion of the ceremony dedicated to St Giovanni di St Fecondo, one year after his canonisation, in 1691. See Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, Vol. 2, 139.

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4.5 Other Venues of Exhibiting: Italian Botteghe and Northern Panden Other spaces make it possible to draw the social geography,100 in particular of seventeenth and eighteenth-century art venues, by offering a transversal reinterpretation of the spatial and cultural history of the evolving society. Spaces not only harboured the society’s transformations but also laid the foundations for a new artistic, exhibiting and architectonic consciousness. In addition, these places emphasised the link established between new cultural phenomena and a new urban spatiality interested in major architectural and societal changes. In this sense, especially in the seventeenth century, as the spaces of social self-representation of the Renaissance and Baroque aristocracy changed the idea of painting, pictures turned into objects to rent for the lower and middle bourgeoisie. Temporarily rented from retailers or artists, paintings were used to decorate homes and give the impression of power and wealth. In this system, the relationship to the artwork arises from a need that goes beyond the purchasing power of the owner but becomes a semiotic sign within a social practice that deems distinct objects as symbolic vectors apt to convey a specific status and social prestige. Consequently, the shop of the paintings dealer quickly became one of the privileged places of the European101 seventeenth-century art market.102 As a hybrid space of production, exchange, sale and cultural and social entertainment, the Italian bottega was first considered as an exhibition space. Ideally, it was located on the ground floor of a well-known and busy 100 For an in-depth look at the spatial, urban and societal changes in Paris in the eighteenth century, and at the links between the establishment of the aristocracy and the geography of the Parisian Salons, see Antoine Lilti, “Espace urbain, espace mondain: Paris et la sociabilité mondaine au XVIIIe siècle”, in Katia Beguin and Olivier Dautresme (eds.), La ville et l’esprit de société (Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2004), 111–127. For a rich study focused on the history of London exhibition from the Middle Ages to the mid-nineteenth century, see Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (London: Harvard University Press, 1978). 101 For a generous and complete study on the painting market in Europe see Niel De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450–1750 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). On market and commercial spaces in Italy in the early modern period, see Anna Modigliani, Mercati, botteghe e spazi di commercio a Roma tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1998). 102 The issue of art markets during the European Renaissance has a consolidated bibliography. See, by way of example, Paolo Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo. La domanda, l’offerta e la circolazione delle opere in un grande centro artistico europeo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2010); Barbara Furlotti, Antiquities in Motion: From Excavation Sites to Renaissance Collections (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2019).

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street or square. Usually, the works exhibited on the ground floor covered the walls entirely, sometimes reaching the street, while frames were hung from the ceiling. On the second floor, where the merchant’s home was usually located, the most important works were kept and preserved for the sophisticated and wealthy clientele. Here, works were inserted into a decorative and domestic complex designed to enhance the worth of paintings. The merchant’s house thus became an extension of the commercial space, although the distinction between public and private remained a critical factor of division and hierarchy. The need to improve its spatial performance then led the dealer to change the architecture of the place; for example, throughout seventeenth-century Rome, many began adding a large window to the main façade of the shop. The dealer in paintings also chose to establish his shop according to the criterion dictated by the Academy of St Luke – that is, to maintain a verifiable distance from the other shops and to locate the shop where it would favour trade within the urban layout of the city.103 In seventeenth-century Rome, the idea of trading in and marketing paintings had already assumed immeasurable proportions. In this sense, the inventory of the bottega of Leonardo Santi (dealer in paintings from 1636)104 offers many starting points for studying the placement of works and display practices of the time. Most likely the largest painting shop in Rome at that time, its inventory listed more than 4201 paintings, catalogued by format and topography. Also in this case, there is no distinction between private and commercial spaces: the entire structure was used as a place for storing, selling and displaying paintings. In this house-shop, there was also a room used for the actual creation (“room where the painters work”) where artists created works on commission. Another example worth mentioning is the case of Pellegrino Peri,105 a Genoese “dealer of paintings” based in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century. In 1655, after various moves, Peri’s activity appeared at the Marquis Tassi’s Palace, in Pasquino piazza. The square was dedicated to commerce, as described by Sinibaldo Scorza’s 103 Rome, Archivio storico dell’Accademia di San Luca, Entrata e uscita, Vol. 5: 1714–1730. 104 Fausto Nicolai, Mecenati a confronto. Committenza, collezionismo e mercato dell’arte nella Roma del primo Seicento. Le famiglie Massimo, Altemps, Naro e Colonna (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2008), 196. The bottega and the merchant’s name appear in the first Nota de’ Revenditori drawn up by the Academy of St Luke between 1634 and 1639. 105 See Loredana Lorizzo, “Documenti inediti sul mercato dell’arte. I testamenti e l’inventario della bottega del genovese Pellegrino Peri ‘rivenditore di quadri’ a Roma nella seconda metà del Seicento”, in Francesca Cappelletti (ed.), Decorazione e collezionismo e Roma nel Seicento. Vicende di artisti, committenti e mercanti (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2003), 159–174.

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painting, View of Piazza Pasquino (1626) where, on the right of the view, we recognise a dealer of drawings and prints. After Peri died in 1699, Giuseppe Ghezzi drew up the inventory of his workshop, to estimate its value and to define his children’s inheritance. Ghezzi lists 2491 paintings of various types and sizes, unfortunately without specifying their location in the shop. Yet, in that period, the Roman art market expanded so much that it also involved activities not essentially dedicated to art. This is perceived above all thanks to the text issued by Urban VIII Barberini in 1633, as part of a series of measures taken by the Academy of St Luke to remedy the hybridisation of the increasingly heterogeneous art market: Stonecutters, shoemakers, sellers, gilders, barbers, tailors, and others called by any other name, who sell paintings in Rome or any other pictures made by others or that they are committed to sell and from which they profit, and who display them or buy them to sell; as well as all those who acquire sculptures to sell, have to pay ten coins [scudi] each year to the church of Saint Martina.106

Barbers, shoemakers, second-hand dealers, tailors were all interested in the resale of paintings so much so that in their shops, paintings could be found stacked alongside other items or hung on the upper part of the walls. In this regard, in the “note of 1634–36 of painting dealers” who had to pay a fee to the church of St Luke (Nota della rivenditori de’ quadri che devono pagare alla chiesa di San Luca),107 we find the barber Gaspare Lucattello who, in 1642, owned 108 paintings gathered between his house and shop. This expanded and varied form of art trade had an impact on the value of artworks. However, it also contributed to drawing the geography of the Italian art market of the time, by giving rise to a variety of venues where paintings could be exhibited. In the absence of official places to sell works, 106 “tutti e singoli li Scarpellini, Calzolari, Coronari, Venditori, Indoratori, Barbieri, Sartori, Rigattieri, et altri con qualsivoglia nome chiamati, li quali in Roma vendono immagini tavole dipinte ovvero qualsivoglia altra pittura da altri fatta o che essi fanno operare per vendere, e delle quali ne fanno mercato, e le mettono in vista o le acquistano per farne traffico; come pure tutti quelli che comprano sculture per quelle vendere, e sopra di se da far dipingere, debbano pagare la somma di scudi dieci moneta, ciascuno di loro ogn’anno alla chiesa di santa Martina.” Quoted by Fausto Nicolai, Mecenati a confronto. Committenza, collezionismo e mercato dell’arte nella Roma del primo Seicento, 193. 107 See Loredana Lorizzo, “Il mercato dell’arte a Roma nel XVII secolo: ‘pittori bottegai’ e ‘rivenditori di quadri’ nei documenti dell’Archivio Storico dell’Accademia di San Luca”, in Marcello Fantoni, Louisa C. Matthew and Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (eds.), The Art Market in Italy, 15th – 17th Centuries (Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2003), 325–336.

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merchants used even the street to sell them, as happened outside the door of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, where vendor Piero di Michele di Davino (known as Pietro il Carretta) sold handicrafts and religious images.108 However, in these contexts, no type of practice or well-planned method of exhibiting was outlined, precisely because of the secondary nature of the market. The resale of paintings was a subsidiary occupation concerning these activities, which very often also had to be disguised to avoid the tax imposed by the Academy of St Luke. The latter wanted to protect the cultural value of the paintings and tried to hinder “the greed of retailers who, not being painters but followers of other very vile and ignominious arts, dared to profane the honest art of painting with inferior dealing”.109 In this regard, the case of the cobbler Nicola Botta records that in 1627 he was seized for some paintings that he kept displayed (but hidden) in the shop without paying the tax due to the Academy. The Academy also def ined the commercial activities of the artists of the time, often dictating strict rules regarding the setup and arrangement of the space. By way of example, since the interdiction to have a shop to sell works, several artists were in the habit of using their houses as a place of promotion. This meant that the distinction between public and private spaces was completely lost, in favour of setting up a hybrid place where domestic rooms were used as a public market. However, in such locations, paintings were installed throughout the house following a very different logic to that of the collectors’ houses. The setting-up responded to various needs – pedagogical (allowing students and apprentices to copy pictures), advertising (many displayed works were copies of the artists’ artworks) and commercial (major works were exhibited in the main sala). Because of this practice, in 1691, the Academy decided to extend controls on those painters “who hang their paintings on windows to show that they have a market and that they set up their house as a shop”.110 Finally, as a temporary place for exhibition, sale and critical promotion, the house thus turned into the symbolic image of the “aff irmation of the painter’s activity”.111 108 Paolo Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo, XXIII. 109 “l’ingordigia dei rivenditori li quali non essendo pittori ma di altre vilissime e ignominiose arti seguaci osavano profanare con brutto traffico l’onesta arte della pittura”. Ibid., 194. 110 Quoted by Loredana Lorizzo, “Documenti inediti sul mercato dell’arte. I testamenti e l’inventario della bottega del genovese Pellegrino Peri ‘rivenditore di quadri’ a Roma nella seconda metà del Seicento”, 328. 111 Michèle-Caroline Heck, “Les transformations de la maison d’artiste au XVIIe siècle. L’atelier comme lieu d’expérience d’une nouvelle conception de la peinture”, symposium proceedings at

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In Flanders, the sale of paintings and places of art trade were controlled by the guilds even more rigidly than they were by the Academy of St Luke in Italy. As early as the fifteenth century, for example, in Bruges, painters could only sell and display their works in shops. However, urban space was not considered a place of sale or display, so that anyone who broke the rule was fined. In 1466, in Bruges, the city judiciary established: The members of the [painters] guild who work in a room or in the back of the street and do not have their own shop are allowed to have a balcony wherever they wish, that can be used individually or with other colleagues. And the painters on canvas [have the authorisation] to exhibit and sell on the bridge of Saint Giovanni or in the immediate vicinity, as was the custom.112

This situation evolved from about the sixteenth century onwards in the northern part of Europe. There, paintings were almost produced in excess. Various markets and shops were recorded in Bruges, Antwerp and Brussels where even farmers bought pictures. Antwerp113 was one of the main centres of the European art market, as it was an easy gateway to the East for artisans and artists.114 Although biannual fairs ( jaarmarkten) were already known in the first half of the fourteenth century 115 for their richness and heterogeneity in goods, it was in the mid-sixteenth century that the Poitiers University, 2005, La Maison de l’artiste (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 23. 112 “i membri della corporazione [dei pittori] che lavorano in una stanza oppure nel retro della via e non hanno una propria bottega sono autorizzati ad avere un balcone ovunque lo desiderino, cioè uno per ciascuno oppure con altri colleghi. E i pittori su panno [hanno l’autorizzazione] a mettere in mostra e vendere sul ponte di San Giovanni o nelle immediate vicinanze, così come era l’uso.” Maximilian P. J. Martens, “Some Aspects of the Origins of the Market in Fifteenth-Century Bruges”, in Michael North and David Omrod, Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800 (Aldershot, Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998), 19–27, [21]. 113 Even though no contemporary depictions of the inner city of Antwerp have survived that can illustrate the way in which works were displayed, the exhibition at the Bourse gallery, divided into individual stands, is inspired by a related presentation on a print of Aegidius Saleder, Interior View of Vladislav Hall at Prague Castle during the Annual Fair (1607), and on two copies made after, which shows the interior of the Emperor of Prague Rudolph II’s palace. The depictions record the habit of the Emperor of Prague Rudolph II to allow art dealers to carry on their trade in the Wenceslas Hall of his palace. 114 See Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market: Commercialisation of the Art in Antwerp’s Golden Age (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). 115 The first art fairs in the Netherlands date back to the thirteenth century. That of the city of Bruges is one of the most ancient (fifteenth century). See John Michael Montias, Le marché de l’art aux Pays-Bas. XVe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1996).

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the city underwent a profound transformation in the art market system. Semi-permanent market structures came to be the ideal places where new market practices were developed, so that they gradually ended up becoming permanent showrooms.116 The pand (a gallery surrounding the courtyard of a cloister or a church, where one sells merchandise or walks around)117 was a perfect vehicle to foster art production and sale. Until at least 1540, these markets were linked to religious feasts, such as the Our Lady’s pand or the Dominican pand, the oldest of Antwerp’s markets (1445), where the Guilds of St Luke and St Nicholas sold paintings, tapestries, silk, jewellery and other luxury goods. In the sixteenth century, the city acquired a reputation as an artistic centre, attracting European artists. Because of the new art commercialism and its new ways of managing art, the historical panden, scattered in the city centre, started becoming obsolete. A modern new place to sell art thus appeared, the schilderspand (painters’ gallery), more specific and more adapted to the display and sale of paintings and other oversize artefacts. The schilderspand was built by the print publisher Hieronymus Cock. Certainly influenced by his trip to Rome, he opened this gallery for selling paintings on the second floor of the Antwerp stock market. Thus, by responding to ongoing economic changes, represented by the opening of the new bourse building, this would rapidly lead to the rise of a new profession – that is, the art dealer. Despite the importance of this new place, no depictions of the schilderspand exist today. However, some paintings give us various information on how the dealer’s shop must have looked between the end of the sixteenth century and the early seventeen century. Paintings by Frans Francken the Younger, Jan Snellinck’s Shop (1621), David Vinckboons, Dutch Market (1620–1625), Frans II Francken, Art Dealer in his Shop (1640–1648) and above all by François Bunell II, A Dealer’s Shop (1590) provide us with technical information about the structure and the setting up. Beyond other depicted artefacts (statuettes, pottery, books, masks) and the dynamism of the scene, walls appear filled with paintings. From these examples a certain stylistic and ontological correspondence between the various Italian and Flemish exhibition venues emerges. Indeed, these European ways of showing and selling artworks not only shed light on new hybrid places halfway between domestic space and commercial 116 Peter Satbel, “Selling Paintings in Late Medieval Bruges: Marketing Customs and Guild Regulations Compared”, in Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, Mapping Markets for Painting in Europe, 1450–1750, 89–106. 117 Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market, 20.

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venue but also shaped the imagery of a new art system that now took into account other directly interested figures: the public (the buyer) and the art dealer. Therefore, while mapping out other exhibition spaces, they ended up testifying to the evolution of a new awareness of society within versatile venues of worldly, cultural, artistic and commercial sociability that would later lead to the nineteenth-century results.

4.6 Alternative Exhibition Spaces: Eighteenth-Century Paris In Paris too, the urban space was one of the first sites for public exhibitions: “among masters painters, many had stalls on the quays and bridges of the Seine, where they offered to passers-by objects from various origins”.118 However, beyond the humble and sporadic actions of independent painters, also in France, fairs and religious feasts were the real opportunities to experiment with temporary exhibition space and display modalities. Together with “the street of the Painters and the Iron-workers’ one”,119 or the annual feast on the Île de la Cité, the great fair of St-Germain-des-Près calls to mind the image of a chaotic and heterogeneous urban space, where paintings were displayed among other objects for a curious crowd of “drinkers, smokers, bons vivants, in all points similar to the characters typical of northern schools in the seventeenth century”.120 These occasions also responded to a new idea of artistic sociability. Indeed, the temporary exhibitions organised during the events, devoid of any institutional status, also had repercussions on the activities and specific norms of the Salon and the Academy, especially as regards the layout of the spaces, and the public nature of exhibitions.121 These events, which took place in the city regularly, were notably an opportunity to sell and present paintings to a varied audience. The paintings were sometimes hung on the walls of churches, sometimes on sidewalks and in mobile display structures. For artists “rejected” by the Academy and for young artists, these events also represented possible moments of sociability and artistic recognition. 118 Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, 57. 119 For an in-depth look at the history and organisation of the fair, and in particular on the “rue des tableaux”, see Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, 57–59 and Gérard-Georges Lemaire, Histoire du Salon de peinture (Paris: Klincksieck, 2004), 35. 120 Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, 60. 121 Although the Salon of the Royal Academy (1648) can be seen as one of the first public art exhibitions, it was not until 1737 that the Salon acquired a regular and biannual frequency, being held in the Salon Carré at the Louvre.

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In this context, a series of trivial and alternative spaces appeared and introduced a new idea of the public122 resulting from a long “process during which the public, made up of cultured individuals, appropriate the public sphere controlled by authority and transform it into a sphere where criticism is exercised against the power of the State”.123 Finally, beyond the typical artistic and intellectual places (salons or cafes) where the public sphere was dominant, other spaces came into being, intended as alternatives to these places and to the social and artistic supremacy of the Academy. As an “illegitimate public arena”,124 this kind of public spaces, very different from institutional cultural places, welcomed new forms of popular sociability which appropriated the intellectual resources of the time. In these places (informal and improvised venues lacking institutional and academic legitimacy; hybrid spaces temporarily indefinable and with multiple identities) dissenting reactions to the institutional artistic monopoly rose up. Throughout the eighteenth century,125 in a climate of emancipation from the academic regulations forbidding the organisation of exhibitions outside the Salon,126 these places thus became the theatres of alternative forms of exhibiting and artistic promotion. In this regard, the medieval feast on the Île de la Cité,127 organised by the parish of St-Barthélemy on Corpus Christi Day at the Place Dauphine,128 is a case in point. Traditionally, the Pont-Neuf and the buildings along the 122 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962), trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 381. 123 The process of constituting the idea of public space, developed in the work of Jürgen Habermas, gave life to a form of redefinition of the concept of private space and vice versa. Indeed, according to Dominique Wolton, it is precisely “the redefinition of the private that allows the public space to take shape and assert itself”. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Dominique Wolton, Penser la communication (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 61. 124 Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, 67. 125 At least until 21 August 1791 – that is, the date that marks the opening of the Salon to all French and foreign artists. 126 “Nous avons fait et faisons expresses inhibitions et défenses à toutes personnes, de quelque qualité et condition qu’elles soient, d’établir des exercices publics desdits arts de peinture et de sculpture, de poser le modèle, faire montre ou donner des leçons en public, touchant le fait desdits arts, qu’en ladite Académie Royale ou dans les lieux par elle choisis et accordés, et sous sa conduite ou avec sa permission”. Article published in 1777 which ratified the monopoly of the Royal Academy on the artistic system of the time. See Léon Aucoc, L’Institut de France. Lois, statut et règlement concernant les anciennes Académies et l’Institut de 1635 à 1889 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1889). 127 Ibid., 95–101 for examining in depth the feast at the Île de la Cité. 128 This square had already been the scene of other forms of exhibition, as evidenced by an etching by Stefano Della Bella made during a stay in Paris in 1638. In his engraving, we recognise the tapestries representing the Acts of the Apostles after Raphael’s drawings. See Caroline Joubert,

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northern corner of the square were decorated with paintings and tapestries suspended from windows and walls, to welcome the faithful procession. Simultaneously public square, exhibition space and religious venue, the Place Dauphine turned into a kind of stage for the Exposition de la Jeunesse,129 where, for a day, young artists exhibited their artworks alongside amateurs and artists from the Academy: “It is a very interesting picture to see that day, at nine o’clock in the morning, a crowd of young artists […] gather in this square. […] All hang up their paintings with precautions and thus abandon them to criticism and the judgment of the curious.”130 Display modalities for paintings were almost exclusively random and often depended on the weather: [the feast] lasted, when necessary, from six in the morning until noon; art objects were hung on draperies and tapestries demanded by the police for the passage of the procession of the Holy Sacrament; when it rained on Corpus Christi, the exhibition was deferred to the little Corpus Christi [the following week]; if it was still raining that day, the exhibit was postponed until the following year; the crowd in front of the exhibited works was compact; the classification was imperfect; the time allowed to judge was insufficient; the authors were mostly unknown.131

However, the uncertain and chaotic setup conditions and the problems stemming from the open-air nature of the exhibition did not prevent the Stefano Della Bella 1610–1664, exh. cat., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, 4 July – 5 October 1998 (Paris: RMN, 1998), 70–71. 129 Émile Bellier de la Chavignerie, “Notes pour servir à l’histoire de l’exposition de la Jeunesse, qui avait lieu, chaque année, à Paris, les jours de la grande et de la petite Fête-Dieu”, Revue universelle des arts, No. XIX (1864): 38–72 and Gérard-Georges Lemaire, Histoire du Salon de peinture, 35. 130 “C’est un tableau bien intéressant que de voir ce jour-là, sur les neuf heures du matin, une foule de jeunes artistes […] s’assembler dans cette place. […] tous accrochent leurs tableaux avec précaution et les abandonnent ainsi à la critique et au jugement des curieux.” Quoted by Jean Châtelus, Peindre à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 1991), 152. 131 “elle était subordonnée à l’état de l’atmosphère ; durait, quand il y avait lieu, depuis six heures du matin jusqu’à midi ; les objets d’art étaient appendus aux tentures et tapisseries exigées par la police sur le passage de la procession du saint Sacrement ; quand il pleuvait le jour de la Fête-Dieu, l’exposition était renvoyée à la petite Fête-Dieu [l’octave] ; s’il pleuvait encore ce jour-là, l’exposition était ajournée à l’année suivante ; la foule devant les œuvres exposées était compacte ; le classement était imparfait ; le temps pour juger était insuffisant ; les auteurs étaient le plus souvent inconnus.” Émile Bellier de la Chavignerie, “Notes pour servir à l’histoire de l’exposition de la Jeunesse, qui avait lieu, chaque année, à Paris, les jours de la grande et de la petite Fête-Dieu”, 4.

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public and the press of the time from recognising the artistic and cultural interest of the feast 132 (especially if one considers that such an exhibition was not bound by institutional restrictions in terms of genres or subjects). Indeed, the feast was also open to so-called minor genres (still lifes, domestic scenes).133 Despite its nature as a festive and ephemeral spectacle, this exhibition fostered a collective awareness of the need for a “unitary conception of artistic culture”, which has influenced the Academy. This aspect appears, for example, in 1725, when the Academy (surely inspired by the approach to exhibiting adopted by the Place Dauphine) decided to organise the annual exhibition no longer in the Great Gallery of the Louvre but in the Salon Carré, in order to have greater freedom in the setup and to exhibit more works. Or again, when between 1720 and 1730, several academics, such as Antoine Coypel or François Lemoyne, exhibited at the Exposition de la Jeunesse, despite the Academy’s official ban; and also, in 1728, when the success of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin’s painting La Raie134 exhibited at the Place Dauphine determined the painter’s access to the Academy. However, although it can be seen as a strategy of artistic propaganda for artists who sought emancipation from the Academy, this exhibition continued to be tolerated and accepted by the Academy as a religious and “festive market”135 (as it never violated the Academy’s regulations regarding exhibitions outside the Salon). In addition to this case, alternative forms of exhibiting appear as a consciously dissenting attempt to compete with the Academy and its members. This is reflected in the appearance of new forms of artistic and critical dialogue and the progressive development of a system of counterculture exhibitions in public or semi-public spaces. An example is the alternative literary and exhibiting 136 salon organised by Ms Doublet, nicknamed the “Parish” (La Paroisse) because it adjoined the chapel of the former FillesSaint-Thomas Convent. With the ambition of promoting classical art, this 132 An interest to which also the absence of the Salon in the first decades of the eighteenth century contributed. 133 On this subject, see the genre the “Fête Galante” by Watteau and his admission to the Academy in 1718. See Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, 68–90. 134 Udolpho van de Sandt, “Le Salon de l’académie de 1759 à 1781”, in AA.VV., Diderot et l’art de Boucher à David. Les Salons: 1759–1781, exh. cat., Hôtel de la Monnaie, Paris, 5 October – 6 January 1985 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1984), 79. 135 Gérard-Georges Lemaire, Histoire du Salon de peinture, 38. 136 Émile Colombey, Ruelles, Salons et cabarets: Histoire anecdotique de la littérature française, Vol. II (Paris: E. Dentu, 1892).

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salon remained active for about thirty-five years, from 1725 to 1760, by periodically organising exhibitions. Also, between 1751 and 1774 the Academy of St Luke (which brought together, since 1672, all the non-academic master painters and sculptors of Paris and which would be temporarily 137 abolished in 1776 following the edict of Turgot) realised seven exhibitions in various locations: the first in the Augustins Convent, the next three in the Arsenal and the Grand-Maître courtyard, the last three in the rooms of the Parisian Hotels Aligre and Jabach. Two years later, in 1776, two former members of the Academy of St Luke, Marcenay de Ghy and Peeters, then organised a clandestine exhibition of paintings in the Salon des Grâces, a room specifically fitted out in a structure, called the Colosseum, built on the Champs Elysées and used as a hall for parties and concerts. The exhibition was banned the following year by a decision of the Council of State.138 Alongside these dissenting exhibition events, the Parisian eighteenth century also recorded a burgeoning art market. The exhibition opportunities described above fuelled an increasingly acute art criticism and cultural fervour which, in turn, contributed to the development of the art market. This obviously translated into other art places (such as art shops to host auctions139 and public sales) and new professionals, merchants above all, such as Edmé-François Gersaint, whose activity Antoine Watteau represented with the painting L’enseigne de Gersaint (1720).140 In brief, in this context, the idea of alternative (as both noun and adjective) has crossed exhibiting practices, exhibition spaces and forms of sociability. Private and public venues became alternative exhibition spaces in which the relationship between artistic forms and dissident actions ended up transforming spaces in places of shared sociability. Furthermore, while, at 137 After the fall of Turgot, the corporations abolished by the edict would be restored, such as the Academy of St Luke. See Louis Hautecœur, “Pourquoi les académies furent-elles supprimées en 1793?”, Revue Des Deux Mondes 1829–1971 (1959): 593–604. 138 Dominique Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine. 1789–1815 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 97. 139 “The only places where the public had any chance of seeing pictures were the auction-rooms, where works of art were exposed to view for a day or two before the sales.” Kenneth W. Luckhurst, The Story of Exhibitions, 15. The first catalogue of objects sold at auction was published in the Netherlands (1616) where until the mid-eighteenth century, Amsterdam remained the great centre of public sales. It was then replaced by London and later Paris. In Italy, the trade in works of art was essentially done within the botteghe. See Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe – XVIIIe siècle, 54. 140 Edmé-François Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné des diverses curiosités du cabinet de feu M. Quentin de Lorangère, composé de tableaux orignaux des meilleurs maitres de Flandres, d’une très nombreuse collection de desseins […] (Paris: Jacques Barois, 1744), 183–184 [now in Pierre Champion, Notes critiques sur les vies anciennes d’Antoine Watteau (Paris: Édouard Champion, 1921), 62–63].

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least until the seventeenth century, the use of social and domestic places to exhibit was implicit in the condition of the time, during the eighteenth century, when the academic institution settled in the art system, the alternative appeared as a solution to the imposed restrictions. Yet, over the years, the alternative has appeared more as an epistemic category than as a simple condition.

5. Conclusion Abstract: The conclusion starts with the various setups of Botticelli’s Venus in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, thanks to the study of the Medici family’s inventories. More than simply a summary, this chapter rereads Ernst H. Gombrich’s reflections on the theory of visual accents, and comes to define the concept of psychology of display. It then returns to all the spaces studied to raise pivotal issue of the book, namely the idea of exhibition temporality, which goes hand in hand with the ontology inherent in the act of exhibiting and in the consequent definition of exhibition space. Keywords: psychology, display, performativity, temporality, exhibiting, exhibition space

5.1 The Psychology of the Display [B]oundaries, though being important, however, often had no exact or consistent location. Inside met outside, private met public, not at a precise drawn line, but at a variety of sites.1

One of the first mentions of Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera is found in an inventory2 of 1498 by Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici’s palace, in Florence. Here, the painting is reported hanging over (apicato) the bedstead (the lettuccio) in Lorenzo’s bedroom (the Camera terrena che è allato ala camera di Lorenzo), in the Casa Vecchia. The word apicato3 seems to imply permanent fixture rather than casual hanging. However, 1 Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen, “Open and Shut: The Social Meanings of the Cinquecento Roman House”, Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Fall–Winter 2001–2002): 61–84, [61]. 2 “sopra il lettuccio”. Inventory of 1498, quoted in Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work, Vol. II (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 51–53. “uno quadro di lignamo apicato sopra el letucio, nel quale é depinto nove figure de donne ch’omini.” 3 See John Shearman, “The Collections of the Younger Branch of the Medici”, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 117, No. 862 (1975): 12–27. www.jstor.org/stable/877927 (13/04/2022).

Bianchi, P., The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450–1750). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463728676_ch05

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over the years, the picture was listed in other inventories of the family, like that of 1598, where the Primavera, still untitled and unattributed, appears hanging in the salotto doue magnia il gran Duca4 (the living room where the Grand Duke eats) in the family villa of Castello, and the one of 1648, where it is reported that the painting was hung in the first chamber beside the windowed salotto. The position of the artwork above the bed, in the private room or the living room, may today appear strange and not suitable for the current value of Botticelli’s work. However, considering the historical context of the inventories and the execution of the painting, the habit of hanging pictures above the head of beds, doors or in conjunction with other domestic or public furnishings was a common practice which continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Gombrich reminds us, placing a painting above the sofa or the bed is not necessarily an action aimed at relegating the work to a mere object of decoration, but the habit must be seen in the context of the social and cultural history of the time and place. Yet, at the time, this habit was not only a practice that served to protect paintings from possible damage (the piece of furniture above which they were hung often served as physical distancing to viewers) but was also seen as the action of crowning the aforementioned piece of furniture. Moreover, placing images above the sofa or anywhere in an interior might be considered as a set of “visual accents”,5 which deals with the idea of ​​an interplay between regularity and disturbance, and between the social role of the room and the worth of the works displayed. The disturbance here symbolises the main work that was generally enhanced thanks to the choice of the specific exhibiting room and the way of displaying it, which formally broke with the prevailing balance (regularity) of the former layout. In this regard, as I have suggested several times throughout these pages, the need for social self-representation was one of the factors that not only made the house one of the firsts exhibition spaces but also used the displaying practices as ways of organising attention. This last consideration opens up towards the idea of a psychology of the display that outlined over time the series of methods, gestures and habits highlighted in this book. Considered from another point of view, since the cultural values of each period are subtly inscribed in the (exhibition) spaces that represent them,6 4 See the Inventory of 1498. 5 Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (New York: Cornell University Press, 1984), 95–116. 6 Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2009).

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these same venues can be read as the direct consequences of the social, political and cultural system of the period considered. Also, artistic modes and collecting practices have completed the framework, by often reshaping spaces according to various requirements and making them free to produce knowledge by staging multiple forms of representation. Yet, this complex interplay between spaces and display gestures frequently implied the opposite practice – that is, that of the modification of artworks to adapt them to various architectural structures. The works were not only cut, adapted and remodelled, but were also rather conceived and created according to the spaces they had to decorate or where they were to be exhibited from time to time and depending on transfers and sales. It was, therefore, a continual coming and going between the adjustment of the work according to a specific space, and the adaptation of the space to the characteristics of the work. Yet, although artworks continued to be transformed, the modification of the venue was privileged. This passage testifies today not only to an ever more vivid awareness of the symbolic potential of the setup but also to the higher flexibility of architecture and the greater recognition of the status of the work. Indeed, the ontological shift from an artefact to a work of art has led both the space (where artworks are to be shown) and the display practices to gradually modify themselves. Roman exhibitions at the Pantheon are cases in point. As we have seen, on these occasions, collectors insisted on displaying their collections to symbolically show their family’s worth, so that the more the number of paintings increased, the more the arrangements changed, finding solutions to get more space to hang them. In the same way, in order to display collections of sculpture and antiquities, we have seen how one passed from Roman gardens to glazed loggias. On the other hand, we have also studied how needs for social representation led to a sort of domestication of art.7 In this case, the shift from a functional object to an artistic one also conferred on artworks the historical, aesthetic and social value of witnesses of the invisible8 – that is, the symbolic image of intellectual, economic or political power. Indeed, as we have seen, the most significant work of art was rightly used as a device to draw attention to a specific message, thus becoming a sign (a semiosphere)9 within the syntax of a symbolic tale unfolding in space and time, and that visitors could 7 Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, 108. 8 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, 30–37. 9 Ibid.

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experience through an aesthetic as well as an architectural promenade. Here, works were intended as parts of a representative apparatus capable of transmitting to others not only an aesthetic image but above all, an invisible concept. Moreover, together with the idea of the house, we saw how indoor and outdoor large decorative cycles of buildings, practices of dressing churches, squares and edifices with apparatus and other works ended up “respond[ing] to the elite’s need to show itself to the city communities”.10 In brief, the present study has shown the heterogeneous and often contradictory practices, events and circumstances that have shaped over time the multiple ideas of the exhibition space. Shaping in the “form” of spaces of commemoration or spaces of representation, venues, internal as well as external, were used as exhibiting platforms and ultimately turned into total, composite, multi-layered works of art, in which every object, artefact, piece of furniture contributed to the global balance of the environment. Almost like an all-over space, this complex set of architecture, furniture and works of art, responded to principles which, by clearly inspiring museum precepts, were aimed at exhibiting, displaying and showing an aesthetic regulated by various devices. If this approach has appeared more effectual for the interiors logic, especially regarding the complex layout of palatial rooms – even if the setup was often changed according to feasts, commemorations and other social events – exteriors turned out to be ephemeral spaces instead, just as ephemeral was the circumstance at the origin of the corresponding exhibiting practice. In this case, the examples analysed have shed light on the performative aspect of the space itself, where the city often acted as a theatrical framework. Yet, whether it was an internal or external space, what emerges is the image of a hybrid space, inhabited by a polyphony of voices and social constructs that have temporarily suited the nature of the space to representative purposes. This last consideration introduces a concept underlying the entire book, that is the ontological temporality of these pioneering exhibition places. The notions of ephemeral, temporary and changeable have highlighted the hybridisation of spaces that appeared permeable to interdisciplinarity: domestic venues that implicitly became spaces of social representation or propaganda, as well as external public spaces that turned, for the duration of an event, into places of knowledge where culture and intellectual thought reached society. The second issue which pervades the book is that of the theatricality of gestures and behaviours. The act of exhibiting as 10 Fausto Nicolai, Mecenati a confronto. Committenza, collezionismo e mercato dell’arte nella Roma del primo Seicento, 160.

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well as the choice of spaces, the rhythm of the visits inside the buildings, and the dynamism of public events, were dictated by an aesthetic of the ritual, defined a priori. In this sense, the dramatisation of spaces and the theatricality of gestures should be considered as two of the main parameters at the origin of the ontological definition of the idea of exhibition space. Moreover, those venues were not only about collectors, patrons or clergy and the ritualisation of their gestures, but they were also about artists’ claims and competitions and viewers’ expectations. Such an interplay gave rise to a sort of culture of display where diplomatic manoeuvring, affirmations of power, assertions of aesthetic and iconographic programmes brought about the staging not only of various spaces, collections and all the activities taking place there but also of setup practices themselves. This culture of display also shed light on how these exhibition spaces directed viewers to new ways of deciphering visual images and objects in the early modern period. The result is an idea of space free from rigid statutory definitions or characterisations, but which can instead be shaped according to needs. Such dramatised spaces finally turn into stages or, even better, showcases (on an architectural scale) very often exhibiting an invisible and symbolic (not to say conceptual) intent, to which the exhibition practices are necessarily correlated. In short, squares, gardens, bedrooms, corridors, walls, façades, antechambers, open loggias, arcades, churches, chapels, markets, bridges, curtains, tents, cupboards, showcases, courtyards, cloisters (the list remains open) acted as real exhibition spaces which, today, we would name alternative. However, as I stated at the beginning of the book, the goal was not to list or even register the exhibition spaces of the early modern period, but rather to understand their evolution and their links with the social constructs of the time. Also, the aim was not to state or to dictate, but rather to focus attention on the interplay between art history, exhibition design and society in order to expand the history of the exhibition beyond its traditional geography, its terms, places and practices. Finally, beyond the iconic influence of social constructs that emerged in this book, what is clear is that the origins of the spaces of art and their design unfolded alongside the development of the idea of the work of art, while the awareness of the potential of the display in the exhibiting processes developed in parallel with the transformations undergone by the ontology of the exhibition.

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Bibliogr aphy

197

VISCONTI Pietro Ercole, Città e famiglie nobili e celebri dello stato pontificio: Dizionario storico, 3 Vols. (Rome: Tip. delle Scienze, 1847). VITRUVIUS, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. by Ingrid D. Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). WADDY Patricia (ed.), Nicodemus Tessin the Younger: Sources, Works, Collections, 2 Vols. (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2002). WADDY Patricia, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and Art of the Plan (New York, Cambridge, MA, London: The Architectural History Foundation/The MIT Press, 1990). WAGA Halina, “Vita nota ed ignota dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Notizie d’Archivio”, L’urbe. Rivista Romana, No. 5 (1967): 6–11. WAGA Halina, Vita nota e ignota dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Contributi alla storia della Pontificia Accademia Artistica dei Virtuosi al Pantheon (Rome: Arte della Stampa, 1992). WALLACE William E. (ed.), Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English, Vol. 1: Life and Early Works (New York: Garland, 1995). WEISS Roberto, “The Castle of Gaillon in 1503–10”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. XVI (1953): 1–12. WEISS Roberto, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). WELLINGTON GAHTAN Maia (ed.), Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2014). WELLINGTON GAHTAN Maia, PEGAZZANO Donatella, Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015). WESTSTEIJN Thijs (ed.), The Universal Art of Samuel Van Hoogstraten (1627–1678): Painter, Writer, and Courtier (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). WESTSTEIJN Thijs, The Visible World: Samuel Van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). WILSON Wendell E., “Fifty-Four Early Mineral Collection Catalogs”, Axis, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2006): 19–20. WOLTON Dominique, Penser la communication (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). WOTTON Henry, The Elements of Architecture (London: John Bill, 1624). YATES Francis A., The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966). ZACCARIA RUGGIU Annapaola, Spazio Privato e spazio pubblico nella città romana (Rome: École française de Rome, 1995). ZAUGG Remy, Le musée des Beaux-Arts auquel je rêve ou le lieu de l’œuvre et de l’homme (1986) (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1995). ZIMMERMANN T. C. Price, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). ZIMMERMANN T. C. Price (ed.), Paolo Giovio. Il Rinascimento e la memoria. Atti del convegno, Como, 3–5 June 1983 (Como: Società a Villa Gallia, 1985). ZORZI Ludovico, Carpaccio e la Rappresentazione di Sant’Orsola (Turin: Einaudi, 1988).

Index *Page numbers in italics denote footnotes. A Ajmar-Wollheim, Marta 25, 45, 62, 127 Alberti, Leon Battista 51, 79 Aldovrandi, Ulisse 106, 137 Altshuler, Bruce 18 Andreasi, Ippolito 141 Appel, Jacob 79, 84 Aretino, Pietro 75, 78, 79 Armenini, Giovanni Battista 48, 49, 52, 124, 136

Coen, Paolo 166, 169 Colonnelli, Sciarra Salvatore 76 Cosimo I (de’ Medici) 92, 108-110, 112, 113, 114 Credenza 86, 122, 127, 128 Crow, Thomas 18, 172, 173, 175

B Bayer, Herbert 69, 124 Barberini (family) 22, 51, 64, 99, 126, 140, 160, 168 Barocchi, Paola 40, 105, 107-109, 112-114 Bassano (family) 127, 131, 161 Basso Peressut, Luca 61, 65, 75, 103, 115 Bella, Gabriel 53, 162, 164 Belting, Hans 61 de Benedictis, Cristina 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 98, 113-115, 118 Bettelini, Pietro 99 Bianchi, Pamela 14, 30, 33, 71, 96, 121, 131, 157, 179 Bonfait, Olivier 99, 117 Borroni Salvadori, Fabia 160, 161 Botteghe 21, 24, 131, 132, 166-170, 176 Botticelli, Sandro 179, 180 Bramante, Donato 42, 136, 137 de Brosses, Charles 53, 54 van Buysen, Andries 96, 97 di Buoninsegna, Duccio 29, 37-40 Burrough,s Charles 62

E Elinga, Peter Janssens 79, 80

C Calandra, Elena 122, 123 Camillo, Giulio 106 Canaletto 34, 144, 164, 165 Carandini, Silvia 35, 142, 144, 147, 149, 157, 158, 165 Carlevarijs, Luca 144, 145, 164 Carpaccio 44, 45 Cauquelin, Anne 16, 31 Cavallaro, Anna 135, 141 Cesarini (cardinal) 133 Cesi Federico (cardinal) 133, 134, 136 Choisy, Auguste 74 Clark, Leah R. 20, 65 Clarke, Georgia 62 van Cleve, Hendrick 134, 136, 137 Cock, Hieronymus 47, 134, 171 Codde, Pieter 86

D Damisch, Hubert 27 Danesi Squarzina, Silvia 25, 101 Davallon, Jean 16, 41, 69

F Fagiolo dell’Arco, Marcello 35, 60, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 157, 158, 165 Falda, Giovanni Battista 126, 127, 140 Falguières, Patricia 104 Farnese (family) 25, 95, 99-101, 133, 153 Favaretto, Irene 76, 105, 106 Feigenbaum, Gail 22, 23, 25, 26, 59, 61, 62, 66, 94, 97, 101, 107, 118, 125, 134 Feoli, Vincenzo 137, 139 Findlen, Paula 17, 19, 64, 95, 115 Fontana, Carlo 125, 128 Francastel, Pierre 27 Francken the Younger, Frans 91, 171 Francken II, Hieronymus 116, 117, 171 Franzoni, Claudio 58, 93, 95, 97, 98, 135 Frommel, Sabine 18, 42 Fürttenbach, Joseph 72 G Gage, Frances 60 Gagliardi, Filippo 22, 126, 157 Genette, Gérard 27 Ghezzi, Giuseppe 91, 151, 154-157, 165, 168 Ghirlandaio, Davide 122 Gigli, Giacinto 144, 157 Giovio, Paolo 91-94, 112 Girouard, Mark 60, 62 Giustiniani, Vincenzo 25, 53, 62, 95, 101, 104, 117 Glauber, Johannes 85, 86 Greenberg, Reesa 18 Grimani, Giovanni (statuario) 105, 106, 138 Gombrich, Ernst H., 25, 53, 75, 86, 90, 179, 180, 181 Gonzaga (family) 25, 62, 67, 70-73, 96, 108, 133, 141 Guardaroba 25, 61, 90, 99, 101, 107, 110, 118, 133, 144 Guardi, Francesco 147, 161, 162

200 

The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450–1750)

H Habermas, Jürgen 173 van Haecht, Willem 118, 119 Haskell, Francis 18, 25, 35, 36, 37, 108, 131, 136, 149, 150-152, 154, 160, 163 van Heemskerck, Maarten 133, 134, 140 Heintz the Younger, Joseph 127 Herman, David 25, 26 de Holanda, Francisco 134, 135, 137 de Hooch, Pieter 86, 88, 89 van Hoogstraten, Samuel 79, 80, 86-88

van Miegroet, Hans J. 166, 171 Mitchell, William J. Thomas 17, 18, 25, 31, 32 Mytens, Daniel 96 Montias, John Michael 75, 79, 82, 170 Morselli, Raffaella 71, 72

J Jeanneret, Pierre 69, 72 Jestaz, Bertrand 25, 99

O Ochtervelt, Jacob 88 Odoni, Andrea 62, 76, 77-79, 83 Olmi, Giuseppe 17, 106 Oortman, Petronella (doll’s house) 79, 81, 84

K Kenneth, Luckhurst W. 18, 176 Kerber, Peter Bjorn 146-148 Klonk, Charlotte 180 Koch, Georg Friedrich 18 Koering, Jérémie 62, 70 L de Lairesse, Gerard 85, 86 Lauri, Filippo 22, 126 Le Corbusier 68, 69, 72 Lemaire, Gérard-Georges 172, 174, 175 Lillie, Amanda 26, 42, 45 Loggia 22, 44, 48, 76, 78, 94-96, 112, 133, 140, 141, 153, 154, 181, 183 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 49, 50, 91 Lorizzo, Loredana 167, 168, 169 Loughman, John 75, 79, 82 Lucattello, Gaspare 168 Lunadoro, Girolamo 145 M MacGregor, Arthur 20, 106, 134, 141 Magnani, Lauro 91, 96, 115 Magni, Giuseppe 114 Mainardi, Sebastiano 122 Major, Johann Daniel 46 Mancini, Giulio 49, 50-52, 53, 60, 102, 117, 161 Mantegna, Andrea 70, 133 de Marchi, Giulia 91, 154, 155 de Marchi, Neil 166, 171 Mariaux, Pierre Alain 14, 35, 36, 47 Marieschi, Michele 144, 164, 165 Marmi, Diacinto 118 Marson, Stefano 37, 152, 161-164 Matham, Jacob 77 Medici (family) 40, 41, 65, 92, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111-114, 118, 122, 133, 138, 140, 141, 144, 151, 153, 160, 179 Meijer, Cornelis 73 Metsu, Gabriel 86, 89 di Michele di Davino, Piero (Il Carretta) 169 Michiel, Marcantonio 75, 77, 79

N Neickel, Kaspar Freiderich 46 Newhouse, Victoria 69 Nicolai, Fausto 167, 168, 182 Nicoletti, Andrea Francesco 34, 60

P Panden 131, 132, 166, 171 Panini, Francesco 67, 99, 100, 146 Panofsky, Erwin 27 Paoluzzi, Maria Cristina 67 di Pedrino, Giovanni 29, 45 Pegazzano, Donatella 110, 122 Pevsner, Nikolaus 61, 74 Piano nobile ( first floor) 60, 125, 138 Pietrangeli, Carlo 60 del Po, Teresa 123, 128 Polano, Sergio 69 Pomian, Krzysztof 12, 26, 36, 46, 63, 95, 105, 148, 176, 181 Porras, Stephanie 143 Portego 22, 58, 75, 76-78 Poulot, Dominique 176 dal Pozzo, Cassiano 51, 104 Praz, Mario 75 Prinz, Wolfram 17, 52, 96, 97 Q Quiccheberg, Samuel 46, 114 de Quiros, Lorenzo 162 R Ragolia, Michele 53 Raphael 40, 87, 137, 146, 173 Reder, Christian 26, 124, 125 Rodolfo, Alessandra 35, 62, 90, 144 Romano, Giulio 140, 141 de’ Rossi, Gabriele 146 S Sala grande 41,76, 93, 97, 98, 125, 127 Sacchi, Andrea 26, 34, 157 Sanderson, William 46, 81-83 Scamozzi, Vincenzo 62, 95, 96, 105 von Schlosser, Julius 64 Schmitter, Monika 62, 76, 78

201

Index

Schönfeld, Johann Heinrich 53 Settis, Salvatore 58, 93, 135 Sevin, Pierre Paul 128, 129 St Luke (academy) 25, 159, 160, 167, 168, 171, 176 Staniszewski, Mary Anne 69 Stenhouse, William 20, 65, 104, 134 Strunck, Christina 95-98, 105, 118, 135 Studiolo 17, 20, 21, 55, 58, 59, 65, 72, 73, 92, 95, 97, 103, 110, 111, 113, 114 Suderburg, Erika 16 T Tassoni, Alessandro 23, 58 Teniers the Younger, David 91, 117, 118 Thornton, Peter 24 di Tura del Grasso, Agnolo 38 V della Valle, Andrea (cardinal) 93, 98, 134, 135, 136, 137, 146 Vasari, Giorgio 40, 41, 77, 91, 109-111, 135, 161

Vasconi, Filippo 22, 23, 126 Vermeer, Johannes 80, 82, 86 Vermeylen, Filip 170, 171 Vitruvius 58, 59, 62, 95 Volpato, Giovanni 99 Volpi, Caterina 35, 62, 90, 144 Vouet, Aubin 148 W Waddy, Patricia 47, 64, 66, 67, 98, 99 Waga, Halina 150, 152, 153 Weddigen, Tristan 125 Wellington, Gahtan Maia 109, 110, 122 Y Yates, Francis A. 106 Z Zanetti, Anton Maria 106, 148 Zuccari, Federico 106, 137, 138