In 1867 Jacob Burckhardt invited future historians to study the houses and collections of Renaissance architects. Though monographic studies have not been lacking, until now there has been nothing quite like this short, smart synthesis. Jaynie Anderson, an Australian specializing in Venetian painting, began thinking about the subject ever since her early work on Giorgione. This brought her to Asolo, where the pretentious (not necessarily in the bad sense) house of the architect Francesco Graziolo caught her attention. It is a rusticated fantasy of 1536 based on Serlio and Giulio Romano, who had just built a grand house for himself in Mantua. Being an avid student of historiography, especially in the Giorgione world, Anderson turned to the fascinating figure of Senator Giovanni Morelli, the pioneer of scientific connoisseurship, and to his circle in Milan. This got her to the house museum of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, the pioneering collector of Tuscan and Venetian Renaissance art. In the age of Verdi’s Nabucco the Poldi house museum offered defiance in the face of the occupying Austrians, who sent in troops to wreck the armor room. Poldi soon rebuilt, however, and turned the house into a public museum. His example was seminal for the great house museums of modern times, those of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Clay Frick.
The catalyst for this study was an invitation to lecture at the Lyon Housemuseum, a combination residence, gallery, and art center near Melbourne built by the Australian architect, musician, and collector Corbett Lyon. Thus, half of this short book is devoted to Australian architecture and architect collectors from the 1950s to the present. It is the first half on the Renaissance that will be of interest to readers of this journal. Anderson traces the architect’s house back to Alberti’s redefinition of the status of the architect and to Filarete’s proposal for an artist’s house in his mythic city of Sforzinda. On a little-known sheet in the Codex Ashburnham A, now in the Collège de France, Anderson finds Leonardo’s proposal for a one-room dwelling plus studio where perspective devices can be set up and the daylight adjusted. It is tiny, and radically simple: “Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it,” said the artist (12). She surveys the more lavish houses of Raphael, good enough to be bought by a cardinal after his death, and of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, later turned into Palazzo Sacchetti on Via Giulia. Vasari drew on Pliny’s anecdotes of the artists of antiquity for the frescoes in his famous house in Arezzo but recently his small and less famous house in Florence has come into focus as well. With his collection of five hundred drawings mounted in the famous multivolume Libro, Vasari transformed the nature of collecting by artists, who moved beyond the use of drawings as props for an active workshop into their appreciation as aesthetic objects.
Leone Leoni, that untouchable bully whose violent behavior was never censured by his grateful patron, Philip II, built himself a palazzetto in Milan with huge brutes (omenoni) decorating the lower story, and lions, his namesakes, devouring a satyr who falls from the cornice. One entered the house at one’s own risk, as Titian’s poor son Orazio pondered while recovering from wounds inflicted by Leone’s dagger. The book ends on happier notes: the house built in Bologna in 1714–39 by Francesco Bibiena for the members of his extensive clan who needed to stay in Bologna between travels, and Sir John Soane’s house in London, with its gallery devoted to cork models of the great buildings of antiquity. At the end of the historical part of this easy-to-read but still quite informative essay, before moving onto the Australian scene, Anderson reminds us that we will look in vain for the phenomenon of the architect’s house in Asian culture. Neither China nor Japan nor India elevated the profession of architecture high enough to merit houses and collections.
