Ottaviano Mascarino and Early Sixteenth Century’s Architecture. Notes on an Unpublished Drawing for Palazzo Ginnasi in Rome

Abstract

Palazzo Ginnasi in Via delle Botteghe Oscure was deeply transformed because of the enlargement and rectification of the street made in the 1930s. The palace had undergone, since the third-fourth decade of the seventeenth century, a series of radical interventions promoted by Cardinal Domenico Ginnasi, who made it the seat of a Carmelite nuns' monastery reconstructing also the ancient church. It became later the Collegio Ginnasi and then the seat of the Casa Generalizia and pontifical Istituto maestre Pie Filippini. Some drawings for the building, commissioned by Francesco Ginnasi (1515-1587), doctor and professor of the Roman Studio, and by his son Alessandro (1547-1591), who followed his father's footsteps, are kept at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca. A still unpublished drawing at the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, Rome, documents Ottaviano Mascarino’s project for the building facade facing the small square that opened in Via della Botteghe Oscure. The presence of the serliana and other formal characteristics refer to the Roman culture of the first half of the sixteenth century (Bramante, Raffaello, Peruzzi, Sangallo) rather than to that of the end of the century, deeply influenced by followers of Michelangelo such as Giacomo Della Porta. Mascarino’s design represents an important case-study useful for revising some widespread but inadequate categories, of sociological derivation, in the history of architecture of this period.