This latest entry in the catalogue raisonné of the dal Pozzo Paper Museum contains rather more than its title suggests: in addition to drawings of facades, plans, and architectural details, it includes the Paper Museum’s maps, topographical views, and military drawings, as well as a couple of drawings of antiquities as an addendum to Ian Campbell’s 2004 catalogue of ancient structures. The Paper Museum was the collection of drawings and prints that Cassiano and Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo assembled in their Roman palace from the 1620s until Carlo Antonio’s death in 1689. As well as illustrations of man-made objects, it included drawings of natural-historical specimens, all of which the Cassiano dal Pozzo project is now cataloging in two series. In the eighteenth century most of the Paper Museum reached the collection of King George III in England. The bulk is still spread between the Royal Collection in Windsor, the British Museum, and the British Library, but some volumes found their way into other museum collections, including Sir John Soane’s Museum, and some into private hands: two albums owned by the Stirling-Maxwell family, which were dismembered and sold in 1990, included much of the architectural ornament that is cataloged here. Here the authors have identified and elucidated a heterogeneous collection of drawings, and illustrated them with a series of well-chosen comparanda. Their catalogue is a beautifully produced tour de force, and not only provides essential documentation of the Paper Museum’s holdings, but also offers a compelling demonstration of the range of ways in which early modern draftsmen represented buildings.
The dal Pozzo brothers commissioned illustrations from artists, but also bought drawings made earlier in the Renaissance and received pieces as gifts. The material that remains today suggests that, at least for the man-made objects, they did not aim to document phenomena comprehensively, but to collect representative samples or interesting historical examples to complement their extensive print collection and library. Some general themes do emerge, most noticeably the brothers’ conservatism. They collected illustrations of antique and Renaissance structures, but nothing from the medieval period, and relatively little from their own day. Their collection celebrates the high classicism of the sixteenth-century masters Sebastiano Serlio, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, and Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola; Davies and Hemsoll note that their outlook seems closer to that of Gianlorenzo Bernini than that of Francesco Borromini, even though Cassiano knew Borromini, an early visitor to the museum. Most of the drawings are Italian, but there are some interesting Spanish examples that Cassiano probably acquired while with the Barberini legation to Spain in 1626, including a huge schematic drawing of the elevation of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid. Carlo Antonio seems to have been more interested in seventeenth-century projects than his brother, but less in Baroque churches than in bridges and spa buildings.
The architectural drawings’ subjects vary widely, and run from plans by Michelangelo and Carlo Maderno for St. Peter’s to sketches of acanthus scrollwork and candelabra. The drawings of topographical and military subjects, mostly cataloged by Simon Pepper, include a series of fortification plans of Venetian origin, datable to around 1590 and bound together in a volume in the British Library; some sixteenth-century town views and bastions; and some seventeenth-century illustrations of weaponry and siege views. It is easy to see why Davies and Hemsoll conclude rather exasperatedly of Carlo Antonio’s efforts, “the impression presented by much of this material is one of collecting for collecting’s sake” (55), and their observation could sometimes be turned to Cassiano as well.
As a group, though, the architectural drawings offer a valuable cross section of the ways in which architects represented structures at various phases of the building process. The dal Pozzos had several drawings representing early phases of designs, like a drawing of a central bay in a facade, probably for the Palazzo Mattei; a plan of Michelangelo’s project for new St. Peter’s, which the authors plausibly argue was made in the 1550s and then annotated in the 1570s; and a sheet with an early, abandoned scheme showing the half elevation and half section for the church of S. Andrea in Via Flaminia on the recto, and the final plan of the church on the verso. As an interesting parallel, they also owned preparatory drawings for illustrations in architectural treatises, and a series of facade designs by Sebastiano Serlio, probably produced in Venice before 1541, that never made it into print. Two drawings interleaved with drawings of ancient architectural details are project drawings for Cardinal Giovanni Ricci’s funerary chapel in S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome; they include measurements and a letter key, and so seem to be directions for the masons of the chapel. The dal Pozzos also had more formal proposals and models for patrons. For example, there is a project for a rectangular vaulted room that the authors attribute to Giovanni Francesco Testa, which can be folded to serve as a three-dimensional model; a plan of the Palazzo Farnese at Piacenza, by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola’s son and assistant Giacinto, includes a flap showing an alternative staircase; and the authors suggests that a huge, five-sheet representation of the campanile of Ferrara cathedral, showing it completed, could have been a drawing for an architectural competition. Finally, as well as Serlio’s drawings, they also owned other illustrations connected with the publication of buildings and details: four drawings of Carlo Maderno’s facade for St. Peter’s were almost certainly used by Matthaeus Grueter for his 1613 print of the church. Not surprisingly, the drawings also offer intriguing evidence for some different types of projects. One plan, elevation, and geometrical design is convincingly identified as a proposal to restore the Ponte Rotto, downstream from the Tiber Island in Rome, in preparation for the jubilee of 1575 (the catalogue includes many sensibly chosen comparative illustrations, but another might have been useful here). Carlo Antonio acquired a drawing of a short-lived monument erected by Pope Alexander VII in 1664, in humiliating recompense for a lethal scuffle between the papal Corsican guard and the troops of Charles, Duke of Créqui, ambassador of Louis XIV of France. The monument, topped by a pyramid, was placed in front of the Corsicans’ barracks and featured an inscription by decree of Alexander stating that the “Corsican race is unfit and incapable of serving the Apostolic See” (1.298). The monument was quickly demolished under the francophile pope Clement IX, shortly after Alexander’s death.
Some of these architectural drawings are relatively well known: Anthony Blunt cataloged many of those at Windsor while he was Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and the editors here sometimes correct and modify his conclusions. Many, however, were previously unstudied, particularly those in the Stirling-Maxwell volumes, and by presenting this material so well, this catalogue will prove a vital resource for the Paper Museum and will offer architectural historians evidence of a range of buildings, architectural features, and places, and of a range of ways of showing them. The catalogue raisonné of the Paper Museum as a whole is now more than half completed (the first volume appeared in 1996, although this is the first to be reviewed in Renaissance Quarterly: full details of other volumes can be found at http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/research/projects/cassiano/). Initially, the focus was solely on the drawings, but as work has progressed, it has become clear that they should not be seen in isolation from the dal Pozzos’ books and prints, and a six-volume catalogue of the latter is now planned. Collectively, these catalogues will document a seventeenth-century research center of fundamental interest and importance.
