Photograph: Courtesy of Yale University Press

Book Review

Fabrizio Nevola

Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, 320 pp., 190 b/w + 60 color illus., $ 65.00 / £ 40.00
ISBN: 9780300126785, ISBN-10: 0300126786

PDF version
The fifteenth century in Siena lives in the shadow of its illustrious predecessor. Builder of great monuments (the cathedral and the Palazzo Pubblico), patron of masterpieces of painting (Duccio’s Maesta) and sculpture (Nicola Pisano’s pulpit and Giovanni Pisano’s cathedral façade), and the authority that fashioned Italy’s most coherent urban environment, the late medieval commune dominates our picture of the city. Art historical scholarship, naturally, has followed the monuments. The physical city became a cornerstone of the history of urban design with Wolfgang Braunfels’s Mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst in der Toskana of 1953. Overshadowed, the fifteenth-century city has been imagined (more than studied) as a weak continuation of the earlier commune, its architecture characterized as decorative and without formal rigor, and dependent on the city’s Florentine rival for its limited essays in the new, classical idiom.

Fabrizio Nevola’s Siena provides the first English language treatment of that part of the city that we owe to the Renaissance. It is a complex book that makes full use of the rich documentary holdings of the Siena archives, of the recent body of scholarship on the fifteenth century, and of a broad range of contemporary political, cultural and ceremonial events to make interpretive sense of the work done on the city fabric by its fifteenth- century citizens. Its principal themes are the cooperative relationship between government and citizens which, the author shows, is responsible for much of the streetscape that we admire today as medieval, and a closer attention to architectural style that identifies the progressive, precocious, and original in the city’s building.

Like many other Italian cities, medieval Siena left an extensive record of its efforts to build new streets, rectify old ones, and limit the intrusion of private structures onto publicly owned ground. An office of government, the Viarii, oversaw this work and a collection of the legislation that it administered is preserved for the period around 1290. Nevola examines the fifteenth-century officers who dealt with related materials and illustrates the striking changes. The Viarii were concerned with functional issues. They widened streets and removed the projecting upper stories of houses to facilitate the passage of traffic. The government did not, however, pay for these improvements. That fell to the abutters, part of the cost of participating in the flourishing urban economy. In the fifteenth century, with the city in economic decline, the government assumed more of the financial burden of urban improvement. Derelict residential properties were confiscated and rebuilt with public money as part of a policy aimed at stimulating immigration into the city. Other projects were funded by the state by awarding salaried public offices to owners of residences in need of repair.  An office called the Ufficiali del Ornato facilitated this process and the projects they identified involved rebuilding street fronts. The petitions for this kind of subvention do not speak of functionality, but rather the “ornament of the city.” It is for the city, not themselves, the petitions assert, that the work is being done.

Nevola makes two important claims about these projects. The first is that they are concentrated on the main streets of the city, particularly the Strada Romana, the section of the pilgrimage road from the north of Europe to Rome within the city walls. It was these streets that were cleared of butchers, shoemakers and other activities that polluted or were simply too mundane and devoted to the shops of bankers, cloth merchants and other, “noble” trades. The target audience was now travelers, whose opinion is given a new value. With these changes to the physical city, the patrician regime of fifteenth-century Siena retreats from the vibrant chaos of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government (1338) and moves toward the ideal of decorum represented by monumental architecture as it will ultimately be imagined in the ideal cities of the Urbino and Baltimore panels (end of the fifteenth century).

Nevola’s second claim is that the visits of the emperors and popes who stayed in the city with their courts for months at a time in the course of the century had a profound impact on the physical city. They created alternate centers of public activity at the convents and palaces in which they were lodged, were the focus of elaborate public spectacle, and stimulated extensive urban improvement in the preparations for their arrival. Of these, the Sienese Pope, Pius II Piccolomini, made the most substantial impression. Nevola connects the formation of the Ufficio del Ornato in 1458 with Pius’s influence and the office’s greatest activity with his visits to the city. He cites the similarity of the Sienese projects with the urban improvements for the papal city of Viterbo that Pius describes in his Commentarii. He examines in detail the building projects of the pope’s family and of the noble faction in city politics of which Pius was the champion, including the immense, square, quasi-free standing palace on the Banchi di Sotto (a section of the city’s main road) planned during Pius’s papacy and built in modified form by his nephews from 1469.

It is this building that characterizes Sienese classicism for Nevola. Earlier projects had combined classicizing detail with traditional materials and gothic forms. The Bichi-Tegliacci Palace (now the Pinacoteca Nazionale), dated to around 1453, with its triple light, pointed arched windows to the street and Ionic courtyard is his example. The Piccolomini-related palaces, most often described as inspired by Florentine design (even carrying traditional attributions to the Florentine Bernardo Rosselino) are, for Nevola, more generally classical than specifically Florentine. They reflect an antiquarianism that finds expression in the increasing interest in the myth of the city’s Roman origin and in the placement of monuments to the she-wolf—the symbol of that identity—at strategic spots along the Strada Romana. The buildings themselves, he argues, are both traditionally Sienese (the shops around their base, etc.) and more closely related to contemporary palace architecture in Rome, Urbino, and Naples than to what was being done in Florence.

The text is adventurous and stimulating. It makes a substantial case for the connection of urban planning events to the city’s politics and its cultural ambitions as they change over the century. It assembles a beautiful collection of images and, most importantly, gives its reader a sympathetic picture of the role of the Renaissance in the creation of what is arguably Italy’s most beautiful and least spoiled city.

David Friedman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology