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Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect and Antiquarian
Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance artist, architect and antiquarian
David R. Coffin Pennsylvania State University Press, $55 ISBN 0 271 02293 0
An absorbing if visually undistinguished new biography of Pirro Ligorio prompts Giles Worsley to ask why this sixteenth-century polymath architect has never achieved the reputation he merits
An architect's reputation is a fragile thing. Why is it that some come to be feted, part of the common discourse of architectural history, while others end up as little more than footnotes?
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A few guidelines perhaps provide clues: publication (Palladio was a great architect but it was his Quattro Libri dell'Architettura that made his name resound across the centuries); an iconic building on the tourist trail (where would Sir Christopher Wren be without St Paul's Cathedral?); and above all fitting in with what subsequent commentators see as important, because history, even architectural history, is written according to the prejudices and assumptions of its authors. Those who fail to fit in with those prejudices get short shrift. On all three counts Pirro Ligorio failed.
Ligorio may have been the leading antiquary and archaeologist of the mid-sixteenth century, chief architect to two successive popes and designer of one of the most delicious buildings of the renaissance, but his critical reputation has never flourished. In Peter Murray's Renaissance Architecture in Electa's respected History of World Architecture series, for instance, he gets no more than a single, tangential, mention. Coffin's is the first proper biography of the man.
Ligorio was certainly diligent as an author, perhaps too diligent. He wrote not one but two encyclopaedias of antiquities, the ten volumes in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples alone comprising over 5,000 pages, with several drawings on each page. However, he was so prolific that his manuscripts were never published, and what is not published gets little credit.
A similar misfortune hangs over his career as a painter--hardly any of his works survive--and architect. As architect to the Vatican palace during the reign of first Paul Iv and then the high-spending Pius IV, who poured a million and a half gold scudi into architecture and fortifications during the first three years of his pontificate, Ligorio was at the heart of renaissance architecture during the late 1550s and early 1560s. His responsibilities included control of work on St Peter's, alterations to St John in the Lateran and, above all, work on the Vatican palace. But much of what he did was completing the work of others and has either been so altered as to be almost unrecognisable or is inaccessible, like the great and extraordinary Nicchione that closes the Belvedere Court of the Vatican, and above all his finest work, the Casino of Pius IV. Tucked away in the Pope's gardens, the Casino is about the most inaccessible building on the planet and so has never achieved the public recognition it deserves. As for his other great creation, the gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, few would immediately associate it with his name. Perhaps it would be different if his design for the Gesu in Rome had been preferred to Vignola's.
But Ligorio's greatest disadvantage lies in his relationship with authors, contemporary and subsequent. A good write-up in Giorgio Vasari's Vite would have radically improved our knowledge of his life and career, but Vasari ignored him. The reason is not hard to find. Ligorio and Vasari, who took Ligorio's post at the Vatican on the death of Pius IV, were bitter rivals and ideological enemies, with Vasari accusing Ligorio of belittling his hero Michelangelo.
Even more damaging was the fact that Ligorio's broad and imaginative vision of antiquity did not fit in with the narrow, blinkered post-Palladian views common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was a long time before it was accepted that the Casino of Pius IV should be understood as a scholarly reconstruction of an antique building rather than the outpourings of an over-imaginative mind, for to nineteenth--and many twentieth-century archaeologists Ligorio was little more than a fantasist and a forger.
This is somewhat unfair. It is true that he did at times complete partial inscriptions that he discovered, but this should not be read as forgery (as nineteenth-century critics would have it) but as his attempt to make sense of the inscriptions so that they could be of use to his contemporaries. For Ligorio, the ideal model for contemporary society was classical antiquity, which could be understood only through an exacting analysis of ancient remains. In much the same way, Palladio, whom Ligorio guided round the sites of Rome, reconstructed the baths of ancient Rome or sites such as Praeneste on far less evidence. What is more, with delicious irony, some of Ligorio's most outrageous 'frauds' have turned out to be authentic.
Bold, licentious (to other eyes), and at times somewhat crude, Ligorio's interpretations of antiquity just were not what later generations expected to see, but they are quite as valid as those of his critics, or perhaps rather more so. One of his criticisms of Michelangelo was that broken pediments should not be used simply for their architectonic effect but only on buildings associated with death, as in antiquity. The bold, somewhat startling, form of the Nicchione in the Belvedere Court was inspired by the great central niche of Domitian's so-called Stadium on the Palatine Hill. The asymmetry of the rear of the Casino of Pius pc, so unusual in renaissance architecture and anticipating the Picturesque, was probably Ligorio's attempt to suggest a Roman villa as depicted in an ancient painting. Similarly, the somewhat crude touch in Ligorio's figurative drawings was the result of his rejection of renaissance perspective in his attempt to recreate ancient Roman art as closely as possible.
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