Luigi Balugani from Bologna to Rome. The Training and Early Works of a Draftsman from the Accademia Clementina in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This essay treats the figure of the architect and draftsman Luigi Balugani: specifically his training and his first professional activity, documented in Bologna and in Rome. Balugani’s name is known on account of his association with the archaeological and naturalistic expedition to Africa and to the Middle East led in 1765 by the Scott James Bruce of Kinnaird, in which Balugani took part as a draftsman. As regards his professional training, Balugani gained experience in the Bolognese context of the Accademia Clementina in the 1750s, an academic experience representative of the background of many architects, not only in Bologna. Luigi Ferdinando Marsili was the founder of the Institute of Sciences and Arts, that incorporated the Accademia Clementina. Due to his interdisciplinary organization of the course of studies, and following the twenty years of teaching at the Academy by Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, the academic program of the Institute came to include the study of subjects such as measurement, architectonic composition and perspective, while leaving out the practical aspects of architecture. It is no coincidence that most of Balugani’s documented experiences, both in Bologna and in Rome, where he moved in 1761 to improve his studies, centre on drawing and engraving, which he learnt at the Accademia.