The Palace of the Prince. Ideas and Architectural Projects from Florentine Experimental Academism to Borromini’s Drawings, with Notes on the Album of Giovanni Vincenzo Casale

Abstract

The unrealised architectural projects of Borromini for the princely Pamphili and Carpegna palaces in Rome have been relegated to a genre of ideal architecture on account of the grandeur of their conception and for their typological design complexity which anticipated the developments of seventeenth and eighteenth-century architecture. Rather, it can now be demonstrated that as far as questions regarding models for a “Palace of the Prince” in Renaissance practise and theory, Borromini was well aware of this long architectural tradition for high-ranking patrons – a tradition which culminated in the second half of the sixteenth century in the graphic experimentalism of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno. This article analyses two architectural projects for the Palazzo Barberini which can be related to this Florentine academic environment: the first, attributed by Wittkower to Pietro da Cortona, and the second, an allegorical drawing by Orazio Busini, still imbued with a late Renaissance schematic vision. To underline the specific importance of this academic type of architectural design in contrast to the inventiveness of Borromini’s architecture, his design projects for the Palazzo Carpegna are compared to the series of ideal palaces featured in the Album of drawings of Giovanni Vincenzo Casale, secretary to the Accademia del Disegno during the period when he closely followed the models of Montorsoli. From these comparisons it will be argued that the novelty of Borromini’s architectural projects for the Carpegna and the Pamphili palaces derives from the dynamic activation, interpreted in a “Brandian”-baroque meaning, of traditional academic schemes, that, once freed from the rigidly modular academic pattern, reach a harmonious fusion between interior and exterior design.