imitatio & disegno geometrico. Idea of Invention and Planning Process of the Roman Architect Carlo Fontana (1638-1714) and his School

As has been known for a long time, the papal architect Carlo Fontana (1638-1714) – the most important pupil of the famous Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) – played a key role in the international dissemination of late Roman baroque architecture, as he trained numerous pupils from abroad, including such illustrious names as Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723), Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt (1668-1745) and Filippo Juvarra (1678-1736). It is also well known that he promoted the professionalization of architects, maintaining a huge studio organized by division of labor comparable to today’s architectural studios; and further, that when he visualized his projects by drawing he preferred the factual-objective orthogonal projection – which he called »disegno geometrico« – instead of the suggestive perspective; and, finally, that he practiced and propagated a synthesizing method of planning based on the rhetoric principle of »imitatio,« in this case meaning a combination of parts and motifs from canonized architectural models passed down from Antiquity with those from the early modern period. Despite these insights about four core aspects of Carlo Fontana’s importance for architectural history, research on this topic to date has produced unsatisfactory results, because the functioning of neither his planning process nor his practice of orthogonal projection, nor of the way these aspects are connected, has been investigated systematically. The research project on this topic pursued at the IKKM will help to fill this gap in the path to perception by revealing deeper insights concerning the practical role of orthogonally projected architectural drawing in the architect’s workshop, as well as its mediality and therefore its agency within the planning process, resulting in a design process that is normatively determined by a canon of models.