Pursuing the Perspective. Conflicts and Accidents in the Gran Palazzo degli Eccellentissimi Borghesi a Ripetta

Abstract

Historical architecture can be a faithful image of the human and environmental forces that shape the society and territory. Palazzo Borghese a Ripetta is a fascinating example of how architecture can be distilled over centuries of projects and repentances, of additions and transformations driven by changing and contradictory political and economic interests. At the beginning of the 17th century, the building and the site around it became a sort of battlefield between renovation and conservation forces, eventually producing an irregular, strange cembalo-shape palace which is here described as a sort of evolution of the Palatium model where the reassuring axial transparency of perspective is replaced by a polycentric montage of events connected by an architectural promenade. This article aims to reconstruct a crucial phase of this conflict, when the idea of a regular Renaissance palace, depicted in two frescoes at the Vatican and still pursued in a design plan preserved in Vienna, was gradually abandoned to empirically respond to all the demands dictated by political and economic contingencies mainly through a policy of acquisition and transformation of urban neighbors.