Architektur und Ornament: Venezianischer Bauschmuck der Renaissance. (Reviews).

Wolfgang Wolters, Architektur und Ornament: Venezianischer Bauschmuck der Renaissance

Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2000. 320 pp. DM 128. ISBN: 3-406-45906-4.

In this masterful volume on Venetian building decoration of the Renaissance, Wolfgang Wolters succeeds in monumentalizing the role of decoration by insisting that it is not only inseparable from its physical context, but by situating it within the larger intellectual and technical parameters of Renaissance arts in Venice. The stigma of decoration as something extraneous to structure, the relegation of many media to the "minor arts," and the loss of ornamental elements over time are redressed by being inserted into the built environment as significant components of its function and meaning.

This organizational schema affords a fresh perspective on Renaissance Venice. Readers who specialize in the Serenissima will be exposed to an intimate view of unfamiliar aspects of a city they thought they knew well. The book's production values contribute to this perspective as the layout and quality of illustrations provide intelligent pictorial support for the text. Original photographs of monuments known previously only by their facades, or recently restored, furnish a powerful visual case for the author's intellectual arguments. Professor Wolters utilizes visual evidence to explain how the city reified itself through images and bound these to its physical fabric.

The book opens with the theme of the inherent conflict between the type of control that theorists such as Sebastiano Serlio (Fourth Book, Venice, 1537) and Daniele Barbaro (Commentary on Vitruvius, Venice, 1556) ascribed to the architect over all aspects of the building, including its decoration, and the far more heterogeneous reality ruefully acknowledged by Andrea Palladio (Four Books of Architecture, Venice, 1570). Throughout the text the author explores this tension: when the continuity of Venetian tradition outweighed Vitruvian authority, as, for example, in the treatment of details of capitals, pilasters, and friezes based on local models; when the new style prevailed in "modernization" programs where classical ornament, such as a fictive painted facade, was applied to Gothic buildings; or when the lack of classical precedent for the treatment of elements -- such as balusters or chancel screens -- led to a dependence on Renaissance theorists to create new forms.

The basis for later chapters is established in delineating building materials typically used in Venice -- brick walls, Istrian stone, marbles -- and workshop organization and practice. A new vocabulary transformed an aesthetics of materials already present in the polychromy and rich spolia of the city's fabric with inlay, carving, molding, painting, and gilding of precious marbles, stucco, and wood in all'antica motifs present in new books illustrated and printed in Venice, such as the Hypnerotomachia Polifili (1499). Lombard stone masons, instrumental in the Quattrocento for the exploitation of Istrian stone in this classicizing decoration, operated alternatively as stone carver or architect (a title not often applied until the second half of the Cinquecento). The role of the proti is given critical prominence for an understanding of Venetian practice. The title could mean master supervisor of an individual building project or the chief building official for various government agencies, which could exert maj or influence over civic architecture, often a force for tradition, with the important exception of Jacopo Sansovino (although as his renovatio romano was absorbed it became a new standard to be challenged).

The author makes it clear, however, that losses to the decorative fabric, such as the almost complete absence of painted facades, affects our ability to see the city as a contemporary Renaissance viewer would have. It is reconstructed in this volume from fragments, descriptions, drawings, and city views. Monuments are not treated monographically. Instead, their elements are selected to illustrate phases in style, purposes of decoration, and application of distinctive materials in chapters devoted to such topics as wall treatments, architectural ornament, church furniture, glass windows, flooring, and ceilings. The Grimani Palace at Santa Maria Formosa justly reappears throughout the book and may be said to provide a subtext for several of the author's concerns. The photographs of the palace interior reflect the author's program in revealing a "hidden" Venice to his readers, since it remains closed to the public. As Marilyn Perry's 1981 Apollo article helped to effect the recent restoration of its sixteenth-ce ntury alla romana decoration by Mario Piana and Anna Maria Bristot, so too may Wolters' book bring attention to the acute conservation needs of other monuments. The scholarly apparatus is a model for concisely crediting the extensive sources utilized by the author in his rehabilitation of an elemental aspect of Venice's allure.