The long pre-eminence of Italy in the arts came to an end even before the end of the old regime. Architects still flocked there, finding in each generation new sources of inspiration as first Renaissance palaces and then medieval churches succeeded Roman ruins as the preferred quarry of travellers of taste. But not after Piranesi was there an Italian architect with real international influence. At the opening of the new century doctrine flowed from Paris, not from Rome; increasingly, moreover, architects turned to England and Germany for still fresher ideas and ideals.
Only a few Italian cities were notably ornamented in this period; on the other hand, none were blighted, and much ordinary building hardly even bears clear indications of its date. The characteristic and prominent productions of the period are, however, quite up to the highest international standards. They have thus far been underestimated, not least by the Italians themselves, partly because they are so much overshadowed in interest by earlier work, partly because they carry in Italy for the first time since the Gothic the onus—not entirely justified—of following a foreign lead.
The Pope, like other legitimate sovereigns who returned to power after Napoleon’s fall, carried out existing projects, notably those for the Piazza del Popolo as planned by Valadier. He also initiated in 1817 the building of a new wing for the sculpture museum at the Vatican, the Braccio Nuovo by Raffaelle Stern (1774-1820). Completed in 1821, this is one of the finest of the many galleries in the line of descent from Simonetti’s Museo Pio-Clementino at the Vatican of which the first half of the nineteenth century saw so many (Plate [24]). Taller and less ornately embellished than Klenze’s galleries in the Munich Glyptothek, and with rather stronger spatial articulation, this is none the less well within the Romantic Classical tradition as it had been established by the previous generation of French architects.
The principal architectural activity of the post-Napoleonic years in Rome and, indeed, of the whole later period of papal rule was the reconstruction after a fire of the great fifth-century basilica of San Paolo fuori-le-mura. Begun by Pasquale Belli (1752-1833) in 1825, with whom were associated the younger Pietro Camporesi (1792-1873) and F. J. Bosio (1768-1845), the supervision was taken over after Belli’s death in 1833 by Luigi Poletti (1792-1869), who completed the job in 1856. Following closely the august original in its dimensions and proportions, San Paolo has a truly Roman Imperial scale; but the hardness of the materials, the polish of their surfaces, and the cold precision of their handling recalls rather the contemporary Paris churches of Lebas and Hittorff without matching their relatively rich colour. A more modest Roman monument of this period in a conspicuous location is the Teatro Argentina by Camporesi.
The Teatro Carlo Felice in the Piazza de Ferrari in Genoa, built by C. F. Barabino (1768-1835) in 1827, is a more advanced and distinguished Romantic Classical structure of considerable originality, now badly damaged by bombing. Barabino was also responsible for designing the Camposanto di Staglieno at Genoa with its Pantheon-like chapel and its endless colonnades. Begun in 1835, this project was carried to completion by G. B. Rezasco (1799-1872).
Naples[[68]] has more interesting monuments of this period to offer than Rome or Genoa. Yet San Francesco di Paola, which was built from designs by Pietro Bianchi (1787-1849) in 1816-24 in resolution of a vow of Ferdinand I, can hardly be considered much more original than San Paolo (Plate [26A]). The interior is another of the innumerable copies of the Pantheon that were erected all over Europe and America in this period; but the Berninian quadrant colonnades in front are better handled than at Voronikhin’s Kazan Cathedral at Petersburg. The great saucer dome, moreover, is rather happily echoed in the two smaller domes on either side; they serve also to tie together the side colonnades and the pedimented portico. Above all, this church is most effective urbanistically. The colonnades enclose the square north of the Royal Palace in a quite Baroque way; while the church as a whole, because of the giant scale of its parts and its cleanly sculptural composition, stands as a discrete object in the best Romantic Classical way against the higher portion of the city that rises behind. Less happy in the city picture is the front of the San Carlo opera house, carried out a little earlier in 1810-12 by Antonio Niccolini (1772-1850), who also redecorated the interior in 1816-17 and again in 1841-4. This has adequate open space only at the sides; and the curiously high-waisted façade, in any case rather underscaled in its parts, must be seen in a perspective sharper than is becoming to most post-Baroque monuments (Plate [23B]).
The throne room in the palace at nearby Caserta, decorated for Ferdinand II by Gaetano Genovese (1795-1860) in 1839-45, is a surprisingly worthy late pendant to de Simone’s contiguous interiors of more than a generation earlier, very rich indeed in its gold-and-white decoration, but superbly ordered. Genovese also carried out an extensive and tactful remodelling and enlargement of the Royal Palace in Naples in 1837-44, most notably the regularization of the long façade above the quay.
No other Italian city provides quite such prominent examples of individual Romantic Classical monuments as do Rome and Naples. The setting of San Carlo in Milan, built by Carlo Amati (1776-1852) in 1844-7, a rectangular recession from the line of the present-day Corso Matteotti, provides no such build-up for its Pantheon-like dome as does Bianchi’s San Francesco. The giant granite colonnades at the base of the contiguous blocks do, however, continue effectively the pedimented portico on either side of the little piazza. Only at Turin, almost more French than Italian always, were great squares and wide, arcaded streets carried out in this period, but without focal monuments of any particular distinction. These squares and streets vie with Percier and Fontaine’s in Paris, yet they also continue a local seventeenth-century tradition that was to remain alive down into the Fascist period.
The expiatory church in Turin, which paralleled in motivation Ferdinand I’s in Naples, the Gran Madre di Dio, was proposed in 1814 and built on the farther bank of the Po by Ferdinando Bonsignore (1767-1843) in 1818-31 to celebrate the departure of the French and the return of the House of Savoy to its capital (Plate [26B]). This is a far duller and less original example of a modern structure based directly on the Pantheon than is the Tempio Canoviano of 1819-20 at Possagno.[[69]] For this the great Romantic Classical sculptor of Italy, Thorvaldsen’s rival Antonio Canova, was the client and apparently also the designer.
It is not Bonsignore’s church that is notable in the Turin scene but the vast Piazza Vittorio Veneto opposite, laid out by Giuseppe Frizzi (1797-1831) in 1818 and later surrounded by fine ranges of arcaded buildings mostly carried out between 1825 and 1830 (Plate [26B]). At the upper end of this tremendous square two quadrants draw in to meet the arcaded Via Po. Characteristically, the arcades here are supported on compound piers based on those in the seventeenth-century Piazza San Carlo but simplified and sharpened now to conform to Romantic Classical standards. Also a typical Turin feature, but new in this period, was the syncopation of the handsome iron balconies of the upper storeys. This theme marks most of the houses in the quarter contiguous to this square, a quarter built up over the next generation in a remarkably elegant and consistent way more than rivalling the contemporary districts of Paris or Vienna.