Architectural Diplomacy: Rome and Paris in the Late Baroque

This detailed analysis of a large, unified body of student drawings from the firstpublic competitions of the Accademia di San Luca, held between 1675 and 1700, brings to light acritical juncture in the Late Baroque. In Architectural Diplomacy, Gil Smith observes that at a timewhen building activity in Rome was greatly diminished, the Accademia became a successful laboratoryof ideas where design methods, such as the productive fusing of French and Italian Baroquetraditions, were tested for perhaps the first time before becoming common coin in eighteenth-centuryarchitecture.Smith uses these public competitions, held for the 25 years after the Accademia's unionwith the French academies, as evidence that the Accademia was of central importance to thearchitectural history of the Baroque. It was also a place where new typologies and design methodsarising from exchanges between French and Roman architectural traditions could flourish, and animportant source of inspiration for such prominent architects of the next century as J. B. Fischervon Erlach, Filippo Juvarra, and others who searched for a progressive, synthetic Baroquelanguage.The drawings also provide a means of studying the influence of such teachers andarchitect-academicians as Mattia de Rossi and Carlo Fontana (two heirs of Bernini) on a generationof young architects. Smith points out that it was Fontana in particular who consciously pursuedsynthesis as design methodology in order to revitalize traditions of Roman architecture.Gil R. Smithis Associate Professor of Architecture at Ball State University.