Fashioning the Architectural Body: Gesture, Antiquity, and Aesthetics in Grand Tour Rome

In his 1688 etiquette book, L’art de plaire dans la conversation, Pierre d’Ortigue suggests a correlation between the civility of the body, conversation, fashion, table manners, domestic furnishings, and architecture: “It is this gallant or polite air, which renders everything pleasing. It’s seen on the face, or countenance, in discourse, clothing, at table, in household furnishings, carriages, even gardens and buildings.” Despite Ortigue’s artful analogy between civility and design, the language of civility was absent from architectural drawing until the work of Carlo Marchionni (1702-86), an architect prominent in Cardinal Albani’s circle. Marchionni’s drawings for Albani’s Roman villa are notable for unifying antiquities and architecture into a single design. They are exceptional for speaking the language of sociability and connoisseurship – even the language of aesthetics.

Marchionni belonged to an international culture of civility, a shared vocabulary of bodily comportment, gesture, and fashion. Corporeal eloquence informed the paintings of contemporaries. Figures in Panini’s vedute, though miniscule, display a rhetoric of gesture and costume in detail. Acknowledging the tradition of urban and landscape views, Marchionni explores gesture and bodily movement, but the figures he imports from these genres are writ large. Marchionni suggests an analogy between body and building the vedutisti do not. With a tilt of the head, the turn of a palm, the pointing of an index finger, eloquent figures engage in conversation – with one another, works of antiquity, and ornament. Marchionni’s gesturing figures articulate, even shape, practices of viewing and the apprehension of art in Grand-Tour Rome.