A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art, First Edition. Edited by Babette Bohn and James M. Saslow.

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Growing up in an Italian neighborhood, I was witness to how men of a certain

generation would gather outside on street corners, porches, stairs, or parking lots

and spend hours together in what seemed aimless conversation. To my utilitarian

principles, this activity seemed to possess no clear goals nor serve any particular

purpose except to pass the time. It was only much later that I was able to under-

stand the importance of what they were doing, and that discovery began when

I first encountered the Italian city square (Italian, piazza). No one can forget one’s

first experience of such spaces as Venice’s Piazza San Marco (fig. 27.1), Florence’s

Piazza della Signoria (fig. 27.2), or Rome’s Piazza San Pietro (fig. 27.4); they

represent some of the most spectacular experiments in European urban design.

And like so many before me, I was immediately overwhelmed by the monumental

arcades, the richly decorated church façade, the elegant bell tower, and the expanse

of the lagoon that formed the basis of San Marco’s complicated beauty. What was

less immediately apparent, however, was that while I was consuming this spectacle,

the square itself was subtly performing modifications to my bodily and social

behavior – leading me in certain directions and forcing me to confront the move-

ment and presence of others who filled the square with their own desires and reac-

tions. Ultimately, I learned that the piazza was the concrete manifestation of the

street-corner chatter that I had witnessed in my youth. What Italians were doing

by whiling away the day in “idle” conversation was reconstructing the social space

of the piazza, whose concrete presence they had been forced to leave behind.

Mass emigration from Italy has been replaced by mass tourism to Italy, and it

was only when I put these two streams of human movement together that I was

able to understand how the piazza lay at the heart of the production and

consumption of medieval and Renaissance Italian urban culture. It constituted

the theater for the most elaborate ensembles of civic, religious, and political

spectacles. It was also the site that fostered everyday social relations, where

The Italian PiazzaFrom Gothic Footnote to

Baroque Theater

Niall Atkinson

27

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T H E I TA L I A N P I A Z Z A � � � 563

individuals adopted and manipulated the multiple identities that urban living

required them to inhabit. Its design was a medium of communication, inflecting,

deflecting, and enhancing the negotiation of power and authority, the expression

of piety and politics, and the construction of the beautiful and the good. As a

result, the piazza bound the rhetoric of representation – images, sounds, and

narratives – directly to the consumption of spatial performances.

Bridging the distance between the theory and practice of the arts constitutes a

great deal of what art historians do, and the stakes for sustaining such a relationship

are very high indeed for Renaissance Italy. Much scholarship has been devoted to

linking a theoretical self-consciousness, in the form of treatises from the fifteenth

and sixteenth centuries, to the material evidence of artistic projects, whether

realized or not. In the realm of art and architecture, these treatises have been

central to the establishment of what constitutes Renaissance and Baroque style.

However, if we turn our attention to the piazza as part of a more integrated and

complex historical construct, then the gap between theory and practice becomes

strangely acute, entangled as we are, for better or worse, within the paradigms of

historical periodization: medieval, Renaissance, Baroque.

FIGURE 27.2 Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut in

Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.

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To illustrate this state of affairs, I would like to use the Italian piazza as the locus

for a discussion about the relationship between artistic design, theoretical texts,

and historiography, but also to show how our understanding of such spaces is

transformed by the way contemporaries encountered, experienced, and interpreted

the complex interactions of political propaganda, religious spectacle, and daily rela-

tions that brought such spaces to life. It is precisely these interactions, where per-

formers and spectators constantly exchanged roles, that expose the mechanisms of

representational meaning and interpretation particular to the built environment.

The Problem of Periodization

In discussing the scholarship on the Italian piazza, Marvin Trachtenberg points to

a footnote in Henri Focillon’s influential The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, in

which the editor states that despite the heroic but spectacular failure of Italians to

respond to the challenge posed by Gothic architecture, their real contribution to

medieval architecture was the civic piazza.1 As a design element and an idea,

however, the history of the medieval piazza long remained buried in that single

footnote. Scholars of Italian public spaces were more interested in the simple and

absolute geometry of the Renaissance piazza. They used the perceived formlessness

and disorder of the medieval square as a foil to highlight the advances of

Renaissance planners in rationally ordering and adorning urban space.2

Such a comparison is borne out between discussions of the two most prominent

Florentine squares: the Piazza della Signoria (fig. 27.2), begun in the late thirteenth

century, and the later Piazza Santissima Annunziata (fig.  27.3), whose defining

buildings and layout are classically inspired, not medieval. Trachtenberg pointed

out that historical analysis of the former either did not deal with it as an aesthetic

object or dismissed it as devoid of any conscious planning.3 The latter, however, was

considered the epitome of Renaissance formal lucidity and was consistently

represented in scholarship as a perfect rectangle. The question is why hardly anyone

had noticed that it was in fact “sharply distorted on all sides.”4 Trachtenberg’s point

was that the modern belief in the centrality of “rationality” to Renaissance design

distorts our understanding of the very thing it is supposed to explain; more broadly,

the opposition between formlessness and rationality has caused such gross distortions

in our historical understanding of medieval and Renaissance planning that much of

the scholarly literature may be flawed to the core.5 In this case, the geometric ideal

expounded in Renaissance theoretical texts was simply assumed to translate

seamlessly into actually existing spaces, even where it did not in actual fact.

Applying such terms as medieval, Renaissance, or Baroque to city squares is

deeply problematic, since they were almost always developed piecemeal over time.

Their shape and design, materials, colors, and use are the product of multiple and

complex artistic, social, and political negotiations, making them palimpsests of

style, meaning, and function. The delicate fifteenth-century arcades of Filippo

Brunelleschi’s Foundling Hospital (1419), which were the genesis of the Piazza

T H E I TA L I A N P I A Z Z A � � � 565

Santissima Annunziata’s status as a Renaissance square, stood in near isolation for

over a century and the final spatial articulation of the arcaded square occurred

nearly a century after that, long after most historians would agree that the

Renaissance was over and done with. As a result, ironically, the “Renaissance”

square we now know and love was denied to actual Renaissance Florentines and

the culture to which they purportedly belonged.

Trachtenberg points to the one scholar who took up the problem of formlessness

that such Renaissance squares were supposed to supersede. Wolfgang Braunfels

marshaled a mountain of documentary evidence to demonstrate that structural

order was a central concern of medieval urban planning.6 He demonstrated how

concepts of spatial order, beauty, and regularity were not only the preoccupation

of urban legislation and elite academic discourse, as they were in the construction

of Renaissance space, but were also deeply embedded in popular discourses about

the nature and value of urban communities.7

To make his case, Braunfels summoned the ideas of a popular Dominican

preacher, Fra Giordano da Pisa (1260–1311), who declared that the city as a civic

FIGURE 27.3 Piazza Santissima Annunziata, Florence. Photo: Forschungsgruppe

“Piazza e monumento”, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.

566 � � � N I A L L AT K I N S O N

society was defined by an order that produced its beauty, strength, and greatness.

Fundamental to this urban beauty was the spatial diversity and collective unity of

all the urban trades that filled its spaces with human activity.8 Beauty was never held

in isolation from utility; form and function were conceived as a dynamic integrated

whole. Even a nose was beautiful when attached to a face, just as “the foot is beau-

tiful in its proper place,” but, “if it were found attached to some other part, such

as one’s chest or head, it would be a loathsome thing. . . We are all, in a way, part

of one body: each of us belongs. . . and in this diversity lies [the city’s] beauty,

more than if everyone were just the same.”9

With these insights, Braunfels had unlocked the secret to medieval Italian urban-

ism, but his discovery was entirely eclipsed by conventional art historians, who still

saw in the Gothic piazza no real sense of space as a clearly articulated and discreet

entity. Instead of Fra Giordano’s celebration of exquisite social diversity, they saw only

geometric disorder and confusion.10 In the eyes of these Renaissance scholars, these

complex medieval urban configurations were only a jumbled mass of houses without

façades, streets with no coherent vistas, and squares with no stages for the spectacle

of urban ritual; with no overall plan, they were hopelessly drowning in details.11

The Renaissance piazza, on the other hand, is characterized by geometric sim-

plicity. As an image and an idea, its beauty and timeless presence can be easily

apprehended. Medieval concepts of urban beauty, which assumed a necessary

relationship between space and the social body, could not compete with such

elegant formalism. For example, the reconstruction by Pope Pius II of his home-

town of Pienza in southern Tuscany has long been considered a turning point in

the application of rational Renaissance principles to urban space. The central trap-

ezoidal piazza is defined by the surrounding cathedral, episcopal and papal palace,

and town hall with arcaded loggia. In his groundbreaking essay on Pienza, art

historian Ludwig Heydenreich argued that medieval monuments exhibited no

coordinated distribution of structures; either they were isolated in a formless void,

or they shut off the communal piazza within a fortified precinct. In contrast, at

Pienza, he saw the first conscious differentiation between the spatial ordering of

a single architectural structure and its role as part of a choreographed ensemble

with the other buildings. Fixed perspectives of the buildings were generated at

points of entry to the square, so that the buildings exhibited their organizational

logic within a carefully ordered space.12 The novelty of Renaissance design, he

felt, lay in the clear articulation of a coherent space that was also open and con-

nected to the city around it.13 Such a space mediated, therefore, between the two

extremes of medieval design: thoughtless openness and obsessive enclosure.

In contrast to the fixed perspectives of Pienza, medieval spaces were

successively encountered, choreographing multiple spatial performances to a

moving spectator. It took an architect with no formal historical training, the

Austrian theorist Camillo Sitte, to show how the most beautiful medieval spaces

were multiple and interlocking, built up over time by designers and users.14

Sitte noted that the organization of “form, size, secondary plazas, street open-

ings, placement of fountains and monuments” in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria

T H E I TA L I A N P I A Z Z A � � � 567

was “carried out so subtly that it has to be searched for, and one senses only its

effect, not noticing the cause.”15 His insight revealed how Renaissance architec-

tural historians tended to seek root causes manifest in the design rather than

effects built up through time.

From this starting point, however, Trachtenberg set himself the task of

uncovering those elusive design principles in the Florentine piazza, which had to

be manifest in the careful placement of and measurement between entrances and

monuments. And that is just what he found: a set of flexible but rational design

principles that took account of the material conditions of carving out space from

the dense fabric of medieval Florence. Unlike the Renaissance treatise writer, prac-

titioners could not design in a vacuum.16 The Piazza della Signoria took nearly a

century to arrive at its spatial limits, but there was a guiding conception of the

square as radiating out geometrically from the town hall and its tower, creating the

most striking views of the integration of piazza and monument. Seen from an

oblique angle, the tower dominates and organizes the space around it, transform-

ing the seat of the regime into an image of visual authority.17 By uncovering the

subtle underlying logic of the piazza in this way, Trachtenberg fulfilled the promise

of Braunfels’s scholarship through Sitte’s intuition of medieval spatial aesthetics.

This analysis countered the criticism directed at Braunfels’s concept of the

medieval art of city-building (Mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst) by another, more

traditional architectural historian, Wolfgang Lotz, who had claimed that the city

could not be a work of art because it was not a newly synthesized gestalt, a single

coherent whole distinctly bound by a proper name and a limited and closed chro-

nology. Art, for Lotz, was the product of an individual master, not society as a

whole, even though, as Trachtenberg points out, that conception of art would

remove most works of architecture from the canon of art history.18 Lotz, however,

was sensitive to Braunfels’s dilemma in trying to integrate a complex theory of

order derived from medieval sources into the domain of artistic aesthetics. He

acknowledged that, in order to be studied more productively, medieval cathedrals

required new modes of inquiry that took account of their temporally complicated

identity, because such buildings, like cities, represented “an accumulation of his-

torical facts insofar as the builders continuously had to come to terms with, and

to reshape, existing structures.”19

By 1977, Lotz had changed his mind about what constituted a work of art in

the field of architecture, and it appears that it was the Renaissance square itself

that taught him to see in this new way. Lotz demonstrated, in an article on

Italian squares, how Renaissance builders preserved a link with the past,

combining the old with the new, even though it “would be easier and less expen-

sive to erect a totally new structure.”20 What distinguished architecture from

sculpture and painting was the near impossibility of designing without regard for

older structures, the inevitability of design changes in the course of construction,

and the centrality of time as a factor in determining the aesthetic value of a build-

ing. Despite radical changes through adaptation and patterns of use, the build-

ings still maintained their artistic identity.21 This was a radical reversal on the part

568 � � � N I A L L AT K I N S O N

of Lotz, who now stated that the same stones that revealed the “creative genius

of the architect are also eloquent witnesses to the passage of time, what men [sic]

call history.”22 Now an expanded and more complex notion of historical time was

infused into the study of works of art, based on the fact that the squares he dis-

cusses were all ancient or medieval in origin, continually in use, always multi-

functional, and were given new, if not final form in the sixteenth century.

However, Lotz was still searching for that elusive Renaissance square, whose

defining feature was the covered colonnades surrounding an ideal ancient Roman

forum. It was this feature that bound together the period’s diverse formal con-

figurations. His concept of temporal development, moreover, allowed him to

claim the Piazza Santissima Annunziata for the Renaissance, since its cohesiveness

came from copying Brunelleschi’s original arcades in the design of subsequent

buildings, even though the facing building’s function as apartments did not

require it.23 In Florence, his new aesthetic category of temporal change allowed

him to separate form and function in the Renaissance square, where order is

divorced from the functional idea of beauty that Braunfels found in medieval

urban planning. This approach also allowed him to include Piazza San Marco in

Venice, where Jacopo Sansovino’s sixteenth-century classically inspired arcades

created their own formal dialogue with their medieval counterparts (fig. 27.1).24

Here, medieval design was re-imagined through a Renaissance lens, bringing him

closer to Sitte’s interpretation of the square as a series of spaces and monuments,

sculpture and polychromy, cut stone and open lagoon, whose irregular arrange-

ment produced its delicate and beguiling beauty.

Lotz ends his article by making the sixteenth-century square the link that binds

the two great ages of piazza construction in Italy, integrating the medieval into

the Renaissance and anticipating the monumental spaces of the Baroque. But

unlike each of those great ages, the Renaissance reconciled its principles with the

past, with a history that was updated to a more regularized set of human propor-

tions, preserving those structures that merited it. There was no rigid regime, and

this respect for the past explained why hardly any of them resembled each other

in form. “If a sense of history is one of the special attributes of man,” he writes,

“then here in these squares, more than anywhere else, the realization is granted to

him of how much the past conditions his present and future conditions.”25 Such

an interpretation, however, implicitly condemns the Middle Ages once again as

completely oblivious, not to space in this instance, but to time.

Despite his subtle intuition of Renaissance historical sensitivity, however, Lotz

was more interested in the one square in his survey that fully expressed the classiciz-

ing planning principles derived from the ancient architect Vitruvius and his

Renaissance interpreter, Leon Battista Alberti. The Piazza Ducale at Vigevano was

built from 1492–93 through the wholesale destruction of its medieval foundations,

and its architect, Bramante, might have received his sobriquet as the “wrecker” (il

ruinante) for his part in what Lotz admits was “ruthless planning.”26 But Vigevano’s

square offered Lotz everything an art historian could desire: a limited building time,

a princely patron – Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan – and a single architect.27 Are we

T H E I TA L I A N P I A Z Z A � � � 569

to assume, then, that the communal opposition to the destruction of the existing

“medieval spaces of confusion” could only have been the cries of philistines who

refused to assimilate the lessons of Alberti’s treatise? In compensation, the city’s

inhabitants were among the privileged few during the Renaissance who actually

ever experienced the “pure” expression of Renaissance urban design theory.

Lotz admits that this square belongs more to the domain of Renaissance theory

than practice, and this distinction effectively demonstrates how the identity of the

Renaissance square is fractured by the conflict between a seductive abstract theory

derived from texts and the unavoidable hybridity such squares almost always

exhibit when that theory is applied to the concrete conditions of the actual built

environment. To bridge that gap requires reuniting social performances to built

space. Piazza San Marco, for example, cannot be separated from the long tradi-

tion of civic rituals that took place there. The poet Petrarch doubted that there

was any equal to this square in the world when he described the celebrations of

military victory he witnessed there, where the

performance was so skillfully staged and completed that you would conclude that

you were not seeing men riding, but angels flying – a marvelous spectacle, so many

youths dressed in purple and gold, reining in and whipping on so many fleet-footed

horses, so aglitter with ornaments, that their feet barely seemed to touch the ground.

. . . It is not easy to say nor credible to hear what a crowd of people was there day

after day; neither sex, nor age, nor station, was missing.28

Not only was the square’s beauty a product of the spectacular performance, it was

also grounded in the diversity of the audience, which reveals a similar ethic of social

belonging that underlay Fra Giordano’s ordered city. Petrarch marveled at the innu-

merable crowds packed into the square, where “a grain of millet could not have

fallen to earth; the huge square, the church itself, the towers, roofs, porches, win-

dows were not only filled but packed.”29 He found the piazza most fascinating when

it dissolved into the unseen substructure of a reveling body politic that spilled across

its architectural surfaces. Petrarch, who stands as a link between medieval Italy and

the transformation of intellectual attitudes and interests that would come to define

the Renaissance, shows how the social aspects of beauty embodied in Fra Giordano’s

concept of order would never disappear under the formal order of Renaissance

design. The increasingly spectacular festivals staged in these public spaces of

Renaissance and Baroque Italy are a clear reminder of this fact (see chapter 22).

The Textual Construction of the Piazza

To fully comprehend this perpetual dialectic between social and aesthetic factors,

we must now take a closer look at the textual tradition upon which the under-

standing of Renaissance urban space was conceived. It began with the rediscovery

of Vitruvius’s first-century B.C.E. treatise on architecture.30 For Vitruvius, design

570 � � � N I A L L AT K I N S O N

was subordinate to the forum’s function as gladiatorial arena. The colonnades and

surrounding buildings were crucial in facilitating and restricting the vision of

those engaged in both private and public activities.31 Ritual spectacle, orches-

trated views, justice, commerce, and the monumental display of government:

these were the foundational attributes that defined the design and use of the

Roman city square.

The fifteenth-century theorist Leon Battista Alberti’s architectural handbook

De re aedificatoria (ca. 1450) responded to and went beyond Vitruvius’s text.

Alberti was concerned with the city as a series of integrated but separately articu-

lated functional spaces promoting the peaceful and secure life for its inhabitants.32

His squares are both aesthetic ornamentation and functional necessities,33 serving

as marketplaces, military training grounds, and communal storehouses.34 He also

understands the square to be part of the larger network of streets and not a dis-

creet articulation of space. For Alberti, like Fra Giordano, the presence of the

entire urban community in all its diversity is taken as a given and actually serves to

regulate behavior. The recklessness of youth would be restrained by the presence

of elders engaged in leisure or business.35 Correspondingly, such communal inclu-

sivity also generates self-repression and fear, since public squares belong most

fully to homeless beggars, who can shout about whatever they want without fear

of reprisal, while suspicious citizens fear the reproving ears of others and suppress

their own public speech. Elsewhere, Alberti shows how public space was a con-

stantly negotiated forum where liberty is both an ideal and a terrifying social

deformation, expressed through the crazed babble of the vagabond: “The theat-

ers belong to the beggars, the porticoes to beggars – in fact every public place

belongs to beggars!”36

For Alberti’s contemporary, the architect and treatise-writer Filarete, the square

was an organizing principle for the distribution of public activities and institutions:

government, royal court, markets, law courts, churches, mint, prison, vendors of all

kinds, artists, brothels, baths, inns, and taverns – the entire spectrum of public life.37

For another architect in the next generation, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, the

organization of the city followed the form of the human body, where each indi-

vidual unit was related in a harmonic proportion to the whole. The main square was

centered on the navel and surrounded by the principal public buildings.38 Radiating

streets lead out from it to the palms and feet. As an organic entity, the city was not

simply a rationally ordered environment, but one that lived and breathed, where

streets were veins transporting vital fluids to interlocking, mutually dependent sec-

tors. Like all those before him, he stipulated loggias or arcades surrounding the

city’s public squares, providing space for citizens to withdraw. The piazza was a

place for the inhabitant, understood as a microcosm of the social body.39

The influential sixteenth-century architect and theorist Andrea Palladio also

considered the city as an integrated whole based on beauty and efficient design.

In his treatise, The Four Books on Architecture, streets and squares are harmonized

to facilitate views, human and vehicular movement, conversations, business, and

urban cleanliness. Porticoes that flank streets separate pedestrians from carts

T H E I TA L I A N P I A Z Z A � � � 571

and animals loaded with goods and are paved with bricks to facilitate pedestrian

movement.40 The colonnaded main square follows Vitruvius’s requirement that

its size be calibrated to the number of bodies that would regularly fill it, so that it

would be neither too empty nor too full. 41

All these examples, which assume the primacy of the colonnaded square, exhibit

something far more complex than mere geometry in their definitions of what

constitutes good design. Central to their understanding of the piazza is the pres-

ence, movement, interaction, and services of the body public, of the body as a

concrete presence and an organizing metaphor. That understanding includes a

precise visual aesthetic, but it is also fully engaged with the entire sensorial appa-

ratus of the body and its immersion within a diverse social sphere. It is a remark-

ably coherent development of medieval spatial aesthetics, but one that is codified

more explicitly into formal design.

Theatrum Mundi

If the medieval piazza contained a dynamic social order that was recast by a more

historicizing design ethic in the Renaissance, then the seventeenth-century

Baroque square manifested an attempt to more radically control the symbolism

and use of the piazza. This goal was achieved through a design logic that made

the more transgressive and quotidian activities of the city square aesthetically

incompatible with a new theater of the urban spectacle. As Rome re-emerged

from the religious and military crises of the sixteenth century, papal plans to rede-

sign and control urban space led to the creation of a remarkable series of projects,

linked by a network of processional streets. Of these, the Piazza San Pietro

(fig. 27.4) and Piazza Navona (fig. 27.5) provide a richly instructive comparison

for the ways in which popes recast their relationship to the city and its history. The

latter represents a long historical trajectory of competitive civic performances,

culminating with its physical transformation into a showcase for papal family poli-

tics. The former, on the other hand, grew out of a dynamic design process that

created a new space with an invented history for the direct expression of papal

propaganda.

Piazza Navona was originally a stadium for athletic contests, built in the first

century C.E. by Emperor Domitian. Although it fell into disuse, the space

remained a secular oasis tied to civic activities, associated with the minor elites

that dominated the communal government and repeatedly clashed with the eccle-

siastical aristocracy that took increasing control of the Renaissance and Baroque

city.42 This alternative topography located in the center of the city was the site of

the commune’s most important Carnival rituals, including the Festa in Agone, a

procession of civic officials, guildsmen, and youths on horses ( giocatori) that

included sumptuously decorated floats, bull hunts, fireworks, as well as masked

festivities. Papal policy either attempted to suppress these transgressive rituals

or  co-opt them into a processional idiom that praised rather than criticized

572 � � � N I A L L AT K I N S O N

FIGURE 27.5 Piazza Navona with inset of Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain, Rome, 1648–51.

Photo by author.

FIGURE 27.4 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Piazza San Pietro, Rome, begun 1656–58. Scala/

Art Resource, NY.

T H E I TA L I A N P I A Z Z A � � � 573

the  church. For example, the papal possesso, which had been a medieval ritual

humiliation of the newly elected pope, became “an artfully choreographed trium-

phal entry that celebrated the power of the papacy as an institution.”43 The square,

which was nearly three times longer than it was wide, still maintains its curved

north end despite twentieth century alterations. It was a space that lent itself easily

to casual social relations – small commerce, beggars, itinerant sellers, acrobats,

storytellers, as well as the easy circulation of both people and information.44 The

transfer of both the weekly and daily markets to the square in the late fifteenth

century spurred significant economic growth in the area, while the ancient stadium’s

seating had been gradually replaced by palaces and medieval towers, whose

ground floors contained spaces for shops and taverns. Many prominent buildings

and churches on the square, however, had long turned their backs to it. This cus-

tom began to change in the sixteenth century, however, when important families,

most notably the Pamphilj, sought to ground their presence in the increasingly

prestigious square.45 When the Pamphilj Pope Innocent X was elected in 1644,

the piazza became a forecourt to the magnificent familial drama on display in the

architectural reconfiguration of his palace and the nearby church of Sant’Agnese.46

The design of the palace and the church involved the competing designs of

Girolamo Rainaldi and Francesco Borromini, who intervened upon each other’s

work as the pope tried to create an integrated complex of palace, holy shrine, and

open square. The design linked it to both the palace-shrine-square ensemble of

the Vatican and to the ancient imperial palaces on the Palatine Hill in Rome and

in Constantinople, which had also overlooked circuses.

Two sixteenth-century fountains occupied the ends of the square and Innocent

commissioned the sculptor and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini to design a central

fountain to display an Egyptian obelisk that he dragged from the Circus of

Maxentius, and to rework the sixteenth-century Moro fountain at the southern

end. The unveiling of the central Four Rivers fountain, the climax to Innocent X’s

interventions in the square, was accompanied by commemorative coins, prints,

poems, and theatrical performances.47 When Bernini turned the water on in

1651, it symbolically cleansed the square of all the unsightly elements that

remained in it, just as it replaced the water trough that had served the more quo-

tidian needs of daily commerce. The redesign of the square, with its papal allu-

sions and ancient references, had transformed it into a work of art, one whose

design had to be protected by laws from the contamination of daily commerce

and public life.48 As such, the square fits easily into the discourse of art history

because its formal organization, aligned façades, and central monument increase

its symbolic depth, even as they diminished its social diversity. The daily market

was immediately banned and offending sellers were sent to prison. Public reac-

tion was instantly hostile: numerous protests were staged and the Pamphilj had to

post sentinels at night to protect their property while by day they were harassed in

the streets.49 Throwing coins at the angry crowd in the square and trying to con-

trol the price of bread were futile amid the constant literary attacks posted anony-

mously on the ancient statue of Pasquino in a piazza nearby. The controversy was

574 � � � N I A L L AT K I N S O N

a dramatic clash between the aesthetic forces of papal authority and the persistent

public power of spatial subversion. Piazza Navona stood at the intersection of

these competing expressions of identity, which included processions, acts of vio-

lence, literary criticism, and the competitive revival of classical forms.

One of the most important of these revivals was the triumphal entry (trionfo),

a rite that had legitimized and communicated political changes and power shifts

in ancient Rome. The role of spectators was to respond acoustically with applause,

rejoicing, and ovations, spontaneous sounds that confirmed the desired consen-

sus demanded by the trionfo form. In 1539, the revival of this ancient military

parade served civic ends in a festival that highlighted the collective memory of the

Roman people for their ancient past.50 For the popes of seventeenth-century

Rome, the triumph, with its elaborate staging, fantastic animals, mythical figures,

and ephemeral architectural constructions, overlaid an ideal and marvelous urban-

ism that allowed propaganda to cohere seamlessly with the newly redesigned per-

manent theatrical backdrop created by Innocent X, and masked the profoundly

fractured spatial and social dimensions of the city.51 The history of Piazza Navona

from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries dramatizes how the creation of a

palatial papal complex, which displaced daily commercial life, created a spectacu-

lar urban theater (teatro) that expressed a more absolutist aesthetic, one that con-

demned its own economic foundations as an annoying eyesore.

“Quel gran teatro attorno la piazza”52

Compare these artistic and social dynamics to the form, meaning, and use of the

square that Bernini designed for Pope Alexander VII between 1656 and 1658

(fig. 27.4). The opposition to the new square of St. Peter’s came largely from cardi-

nals who protested against the demolition of needed buildings for an architectural

showpiece of papal spectacle.53 Although never fully completed, the square still

succeeds in combining several forms of ritual movement. It acted as the climactic

threshold for pilgrims on their way to venerate the remains of St. Peter: its colon-

nades reached out to envelope and isolate them from the city and reveal the heavenly

splendor of the church. The square also provided a series of sightlines between the

pope – on the benediction loggia of the church and in his private apartment – and

his flock, each of whom needed to see the other to visually confirm their mutually

dependent roles of legitimization.54 Its porticoes also made structurally permanent

the canopied routes of the feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated by a circular papal

procession through the square and the surrounding neighborhood, while providing

cover also for the carriages of canons and dignitaries visiting the papal palace.55

As Tod Marder has pointed out, Alexander VII, who legally enforced the sump-

tuousness of religious festivals, ascended to the papacy just as conditions relegated

it to a minor role in European politics. In compensation, he funneled the remains

of papal terrestrial power into the sanctification of the city, which became the

theater of his perpetual papal drama.56 As part of these new urban theatrics, Piazza

T H E I TA L I A N P I A Z Z A � � � 575

San Pietro shows how meaning was built into the piazza through a series of

contentious negotiations between patrons, institutional bodies, historians,

intellectuals, as well as architects themselves. Although the square is now firmly

attached to the “genius” of Bernini, contemporaries were very much aware of the

fiction of artistic genius, as much as they were sensitive to the truth of artistic

vanity. Based on compelling evidence, Marder takes seriously Bernini’s own

attribution of the oval design of the square to the pope himself, and it was Cardinal

Virgilio Spada, a prominent member of the works committee (congregazione della

fabbrica) overseeing the project, who suggested the design of the colonnade: a

triple portico with a central barrel vault and flat-ceilinged lower aisles. Spada

based his conceptual model on a historical reconstruction of the ancient Greek

Chalcidian portico – considered to be one of the most beautiful in antiquity – by

the Vatican librarian. Such academic erudition was not something for which

Bernini could claim credit. Spada, however, was sensitive enough to Bernini’s

exceedingly jealous self-regard to suggest a way for him to do just that: he told

the pope, “It will not be difficult to find the means to make Cavalier Bernini

appear to be its author, so that he will not be annoyed that others want to improve

his designs.”57

Marder also points to the set of anonymous, inventive, biting, and poetic coun-

ter-projects, presumably by other architects, that document how Bernini addressed

or ignored the mounting criticism of his designs.58 These images might have been

commissioned within the context of the intense scrutiny of Bernini’s designs and

the continued opposition to the project by the fabbrica, and may have been des-

tined to illustrate a treatise critical of Bernini.59 They are reminiscent of the liter-

ary attacks on the Pamphilj fountain, and represent an antagonistic form of

collaboration about the proper value and meaning of social and architectural

space in an age of glorified individuals. The most striking of these critiques depicts

two images of St. Peter. In the first, he has a pained expression, and his out-

stretched arms are horribly contorted by conforming to the shape of the trapezoid

and oval plan of Bernini’s design. In the other image, he presents a more serene

expression, while his extended arms intersect with the limits of the reconceived

oval piazza that envelops him. This figure recalls Vitruvius’s claim that the male

body represented the ideal of good architecture and draws attention to the cor-

rect relationship of architecture to that body, a relationship in which the body was

supposed to provide a set of ideal proportions rather than be subject to a literal

translation of forms. In a position paper (giustificazione) attributed to Bernini, he

countered his critics’ attacks by inserting this Christianized bodily metaphor

directly into his design logic, making the claim that his square represented the

arms of the church reaching out to both supporters and critics.60 He had taken

the criticism and turned it on its head, defusing its impact, while making it the

most memorable symbolic feature of the square.

Finally, the square’s relationship to the ancient trionfo was already expressed by

Gaspare Alveri’s contemporary guidebook to the city, by Pope Alexander’s biogra-

pher, and by the architect Carlo Fontana, all of whom bound the ancient rite to the

576 � � � N I A L L AT K I N S O N

procession of Corpus Christi, the proclamation of Christ’s triumph over the world.61

In the end, a pope’s keen sense of his own image of papal grandeur, the antagonistic

competitiveness of architectural culture in Rome, the specific ritual choreography, as

well as the criticism and intellectual work of scholars, all worked to bring the square

into being. Its meaning was nowhere fully inherent in the actual formal logic of the

design, but was built into it through the work of an informal and even hostile dia-

logue in which the architect’s voice was one among many. To adhere, such symbolic

content had to be continually staged, the way it was in the contest over Piazza

Navona. At St. Peter’s, the stakes were quite different, since they were deeply embed-

ded in the papal relationship to the presence of the saint who, as gatekeeper to para-

dise, could be construed as the final arbiter of successful urban design.

In Bernini’s giustificazione, he described his design as responding to utilitarian

and ornamental demands through design. It had to provide shelter from the ele-

ments, a processional route, sightlines, space for pilgrimage, and a correction of

the excessive width of the façade. However, through its use, the symbolism of the

piazza developed in complexity until it was understood as a theatrum mundi by

the eighteenth century.62 Consequently its meaning evolved from generic classical

references to abstract metaphors and complex systems of representation. Bernini’s

response to his critics had forced him to think about meaning and design, the

demands of the patron, and the content of the piazza. As a type of “spin,” “it

makes neat after the fact what was surely a more serendipitous design process,”

while the nature of the debates over the square produced some rather unusual

records concerning the content and meaning of the piazza.63

Conclusion: The Embodied Piazza

This essay has emphasized the ways in which the Italian piazza, whether in its

theoretical construction, aesthetic design, or subsequent use, was always a

collaborative venture that produced complex urban spaces. Nowhere in this

historical development did contemporaries divorce discursive space from actual

space. However, the multifunctional and social diversity praised by medieval

Italians and built into the rhetoric of Renaissance interventions was increasingly

focused into a carefully choreographed theatrical narrative by Baroque designers.

The success of this more rigid narrative depends on how the historical record is

interpreted and whether the final form of Baroque squares is read as the culmination

of a coherent and politically monologic design process or as the unfinished nego-

tiations of a decidedly uneven dialogue. The city’s inhabitants still had a part to

play in this newly scripted drama of urban design, but they were increasingly cast

as a more monolithic and passive entity, disconnected from the more chaotic and

aesthetically questionable roles they had played in such spaces in the past. The

Baroque festival attempted to transform the square into a purer form of represen-

tation through the medium of the theater – even if not everyone properly played

their parts – by attempting to alienate the public from an active role in the

T H E I TA L I A N P I A Z Z A � � � 577

constitution of social space. Such a move was similar to the way Renaissance

architectural theory is often alienated from Renaissance built form by art history’s

construction of a stylistic category based on a singular idea of geometry and order.

The expansive inclusiveness and frenetic energy that Petrarch marveled at in

Venice’s San Marco, or the charlatans, quacks, street entertainers, hawkers, and

peddlers who congregated there daily,64 had no part to play even at the margins of

or in between the ritual dramas that these later piazzas were created to serve. The

commerce and clutter of daily life had to be erased from official images.

In this light, consider Bernini’s most famous dramatic work, a play for the 1637

Carnival in which the curtain opened to reveal to the audience a mirror image of

itself: another audience onstage, watching them. The play sets off an unending

loop of reflections in which the real and the theatrical are never resolved. The two

characters, played by Bernini and his brother, each contend that their respective

audience and the play they is about to perform is the real one. The ambiguity

between audience and performers is profoundly different in this metaphor from

what it is in the piazza, where inhabitants were very much aware of playing both

roles and managing multiple urban identities. In Bernini’s drama, however, which

was intimately associated with the concept of the urban teatro, the ambiguity dis-

solves into delightful confusion. Bernini himself made reference to the final scene,

where each audience is getting up to leave, as taking place in front of St. Peter’s

before his remodeling of the site.65 The ideal of what we might call the Baroque

piazza in Rome was the complete aestheticization of the social relations that took

place there. But cleansing the piazza of its public function was a hopeless enter-

prise, captured brilliantly by Richard Krautheimer, who contrasts the carefully

orchestrated views of the newly renovated spaces of Rome with the impossibility

of eradicating the offending buildings and bodies from the square. In his attempts

to renovate the piazza around the Pantheon, for example, Alexander VII was

unable to permanently expel the vendors, who repeatedly returned to their tradi-

tional spaces of commercial exchange.66 In a similar manner, the meaning of the

“idle” conversation that I heard Italians engage in on the childhood street corner

was not located in its content so much as its form. The traces of movement and

patterns of use that people endlessly inscribed onto the surfaces of the most con-

tested Italian piazzas continued to draw them back there, in all of their messy and

unwanted diversity, to participate in the spectacle of urban life.

Notes

1 Trachtenberg, Dominion, 289, n. 65, citing Henri Focillon, The Art of the West in the

Middle Ages, edited and introduced by Jean Bony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1980), vol. 2, 55, n. 1.

2 Trachtenberg, Dominion, 9.

3 Ibid., 9, 289, n. 68.

4 Ibid., 11.

5 Ibid., 13.

578 � � � N I A L L AT K I N S O N

6 Ibid., 9.

7 Wolfgang Braunfels, Mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst in der Toskana (Berlin: Gebr.

Mann, 1953), 122–26.

8 Ibid., 123–24, n. 464.

9 Ibid., 124, n. 465, 466, quoting from Domenico Moreni, ed., Prediche del beato fra

Giordano da Rivalto dell’Ordine dei predicatori: recitate in Firenze dal 1303 al 1306

ed ora per la prima volta pubblicate (Florence: Magheri, 1831); my translation.

10 Trachtenberg, Dominion, 9, quotes several instances of this comparison between

medieval confusion and Renaissance clarity and order.

11 Braunfels, 124.

12 Heydenreich, “Pius II,” 140. Braunfels quotes the bulk of this passage, 125–26.

13 Heydenreich, “Pius II,” 140, n. 35.

14 Trachtenberg, Dominion, 10; Collins and Collins, Camillo Sitte, 192–97.

15 Collins and Collins, Camillo Sitte, 195.

16 When they did, however, the designs of medieval cities and squares have a remarkable

resemblance to Renaissance planning principles. See Friedman, Florentine New Towns.

17 For his detailed reconstruction of the geometric order of Florentine planning see

Trachtenberg, Dominion, 87–147.

18 Lotz, “Review of Braunfels,” 65–66; Trachtenberg, Dominion, 289–90, n. 74.

19 Lotz, “Review of Braunfels,” 66. Trachtenberg has developed this temporal theme

into a monumental study of his own: Building in Time: from Giotto to Alberti and

Modern Oblivion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

20 Lotz, “Sixteenth-Century Italian Squares,” 74.

21 Ibid., 75.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 82.

24 Ibid., 83–84.

25 Ibid., 90.

26 Ibid., 79.

27 Although Lotz does not have enough evidence to definitively establish Bramante as

the architect, he makes a convincing case.

28 Petrarca, Letters of Old Age, IV, 3 (134–35).

29 Ibid., 135.

30 A complete copy of Vitruvius’ treatise was rediscovered in 1414; see Vitruvius: Ten

Books on Architecture.

31 Vitruvius, Ten Books, V:1.

32 Alberti, On the Art of Building, I:9; IV:2; VIII:6.

33 Ibid., IV:3.

34 Ibid., IV:8.

35 Ibid., VIII:6.

36 Leon Battista Alberti, Momus, 133.

37 Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, II:26–27, VI:74–75, VIII:104–105, X:123 ff.

38 Quoted in Portoghesi, La piazza, 260–61, 263. See also Francesco di Giorgio

Martini, Trattati, vol. 1, 20–25.

39 Portoghesi, La piazza, 263–64.

40 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, III, 2:166. On Palladio and architectural

treatises, see Caroline Yerkes’ contribution to this volume.

41 Ibid., III, 16: 193–94.

T H E I TA L I A N P I A Z Z A � � � 579

42 Ingersoll, “The Ritual Use of Public Space,” 278 ff; Rak, “Piazza Navona,” 183.

43 See Warwick, “Pasquinade at Piazza Navona,” 362.

44 Rak, “Piazza Navona,” 183.

45 Ibid., 184; Low, On the Plaza, 79.

46 See Leone, The Palazzo Pamphilj. For another interpretation of the piazza, see the

forthcoming monograph on Borromini by Joseph Connors.

47 Warwick, “Pasquinade at Piazza Navona,” 355.

48 Ibid., 358. Until Innocent X’s death in 1655 the only festivals allowed in the square

were those organized by the Pamphilj family: ibid., 368.

49 Ibid., 357.

50 Rak, “Piazza Navona,” 185.

51 Ibid., 183, 187, 195.

52 “That grand theater surrounding the piazza.” Kitao, Circle and Oval, 20. The quote

comes from papal avvisi, official papal publications distributed to the city.

53 Krautheimer, Rome of Alexander, 70.

54 Kitao, Circle and Oval, 2.

55 Krautheimer, Rome of Alexander, 70, 72.

56 Marder, Bernini, 124–26.

57 Quoted in Ibid., 138.

58 Ibid., 138 ff.

59 Tod Marder, Bernini’s Scala Regia, 92.

60 Habel, The Urban Development of Rome, 284. Marder, Bernini, 141–42 (the draw-

ings are reproduced on page 141).

61 Marder, Bernini, 146.

62 Habel, The Urban Development of Rome, 284.

63 Ibid., 282, 284.

64 Fenlon, Piazza San Marco, 108.

65 A summary of this play is given in Kitao, Circle and Oval, 22–23.

66 Krautheimer, Rome of Alexander, 106.

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