entry Mar 2007
Ferdinando
Fuga (Florence, 11 Nov 1699; Naples, 7
Feb 1782)
18th-century painting of
the Albergo dei Poveri
I cheerfully note that
the great architect, Ferdinando Fuga, and I have the
same birthday! Onward. A note on Fuga in the
authoritative article in the Grove Encyclopedia of
Art says, "Fuga had no pupils who carried on his style;
even by the second half of the 18th century, his work
had ceased to arouse any interest." Maybe it is, then,
an understandable destiny that of Fuga's architectural
efforts in Naples, some no longer exist and two of them
face uncertain futures: i.e., the mammoth Albergo dei
Poveri (illustration, left) is being
restored (but to what end is anyone's guess); and the
great church of the
Girolamini (photo, at bottom) has been closed for
decades and I have heard of no plan to reopen it. It is,
I think, the largest closed church in Naples.
[Rejoice! Update
from 2009 here.]
Fuga
was from Florence and moved to Rome to train as
an architect. His career in Rome is illustrious and
includes ("but is not limited to," as lawyers like to say)
work on the famous Fontana di Trevi, the
Palazzo Quirinale, the Palazzo
della Consulta, Santa Maria
dell’Orazione e Morte, the Palazzo
Corsini, and the basilica of Santa
Maria Maggiore. In Rome he was a truly successful
architect, a member of a number of associations, and he
enjoyed the patronage of two popes, Clement XII and
Benedict XIV.
Fuga had
worked earlier in Naples on the construction of the chapel
within the Palazzo Cellammare. When the
two Neapolitan court architects, Domenico
Antonio Vaccaro and Ferdinando
Sanfelice died in the mid 1740s, Fuga moved to
Naples where he and Luigi Vanvitelli became the new royal
architects for Charles III.
The king was about to embark on a massive building
campaign for Naples. Vanvitelli was ideally suited for
that which was regal (his contributions are noted elsewhere), and Fuga was
to be the architect for the great public works projects
that the king had in mind.
Fuga had shown, earlier in his career great ability in
converting from the ornamental requirements of the
Italian Baroque and Rococo to the cleaner lines of
Classicism. He had often changed his designs to fit
the wishes of his patrons, showing none of the
artist's resentment at meddling from the moneyed. In
musical terms, if Fuga had been Mozart when the
emperor told Wolfgang that he "wrote too many notes,"
Fuga just would have taken out the offending notes.
(This, as opposed to Mozart, who apparently told His
Highness to take a royal hike.) The Grove says that
Fuga ran the risk of monotony since "…in
his later work he manipulated a virtual repertory of
prefabricated components, which were variously combined
for each project, an economical way of working…"; yet,
that is what no doubt gave Fuga his ability to handle
gigantic projects such as the Albergo dei Poveri in Naples (huge,
solid and functional), the naval shipyard and large municipal granary that he built
for the kingdom. Most interesting, perhaps, is the "Cemetery of the 366 Trenches,"
(one for each day of the year) the first
better-than-anonymous paupers' graveyard in Naples, where
the indigent and unknown could at least be decently buried
in a grave marked for the day of their death. The project
was finished and went into use in 1762, remaining a
functioning cemetery until 1890. (Note, however, that Fuga
was also quite capable of designing to meet the highly
ornamental needs of the palatial residences then in favor
in Naples. See the Villa Favorita.)
Yet, if
you stand in front of Fuga's last great work, his 1780
remake of the church of the Girolamini (photo, left, on
via dei Tribunali, one block from the Cathedral) you can
see that his heart really wasn't in prefabricated
monotony. The façade looks a century older than it is, a
direct throwback to the Counter-Reformation architecture
of the early Baroque: the central projection of the
façade, the ornate putti displaying the
Ten Commandments above the entrance, and the magnificent
Classical statuary of Giuseppe
Sanmartino high above at both belfries (photo,
left). That is all
intentional; Fuga is paying tribute here to the older
church of Santa Maria in Vallicella (from 1590) in Rome,
the first home of the Girolamini Order, and thus to the
connection between the two seats of the order, Rome and
Naples. The Naples church is more ornate, and perhaps that
is as it should be. Fuga was a child of the Baroque and,
yet, wound up building large, functional buildings in
Naples that some would later term "pre-industrial". Maybe
he got some satisfaction from going out with a splendid
and anachronistic memory of his youth.
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