Studies on Studies: History and Historiography of Architectural Academic Didactics between Rome and Paris from the Late Seventeenth up Until the end of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the evolution and the principal aspects of the interconnectedness of architectural academic training models in Rome and in Paris from the end of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. A broad but heterogeneous historiographical picture of this evolution emerges by way of a detailed comparative analysis of the studies over the last two decades of the twenty-first century of the Accademia di San Luca and the Académie Royale d’Architecture and their mutual relationships. This study reveals a vision of academic training that can be interpreted according to three essential critical guidelines: the close relationship of both institutions to their respective professional contexts – little considered contemporaneously; the significance of competition drawings in the second half of the eighteenth century related to the rediscovery of antiquity; and the continuity in the organizational arrangements of both academies, the corporative Roman institution, the Accademia di San Luca and the state-run Parisian Académie Royale d’Architecture. Finally, the function played by the Académie de France à Rome as an intermediary between a French institutional approach and a Roman collective one will be scrutinised in the greater context of identifying a common thread that defines the academic didactics of architecture on the Rome-Paris axis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This research serves for an understanding of the transformation that occurred in the European schools of architecture over the two defining centuries under examination.