da Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi

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Giacomo Barozzi, known as Vignola, was influential in both his role as an author and as a practicing architect. His work, having a strong foundation in classicism, was innovative, and made important contributions to the design of churches and palaces. He was born at Vignola, near Modena, in 1507 and died in Rome in 1573. His early education included studying painting and architecture in Bologna. In 1530 he relocated to Rome and spent much time drawing examples of antiquity (Murray, 1963). Although a contemporary of Michelangelo, much of his classicism descends from Bramante (Murray, 1963). Early in his career, Vignola worked at Fontainebleau in France where he first met Sebastiano Serlio. His first major design was Villa Giulia for Pope Julius III, a starkly blank façade with deep-cut rusticated stone accenting the door and corners. One of his early churches, the Church of Sant’ Andrea, 1554, anticipates Baroque church design with its oval dome. The quintessential plan of the Gesú, begun in 1568, reveals a wide nave and barrel vault that consider the liturgical needs of the Counter Reformation. Vignola’s legacy includes a treatise entitled Regola delli Cinque Ordini d’Architettura, 1562, which deals mostly with the classical orders and was widely distributed for many years after his death.

This sketch by Vignola exhibits a mostly freehand page, crowded with various notes and sections. The sketch was used as a method to think through design, as it is strewn with dimensioning, details, and carefully drawn capitals and stairs, all in various stages of completion. It may represent work studied in one sitting but most likely represented a drawing returned to over time.

This working page has an uneven thickness of paper and scars from compass arcs that show through from the other side. One can see shadows of ink wash and a compass puncture from the recto that gives the page background and texture. As an example of a page used for thinking and discovering, one can see the various media of ink and wash, along with graphite used for guidelines. The smearing of the graphite suggests a drawing that acts as a ‘medium’ for design, considering both the meaning of medium as the physical media used to manipulate, and additionally suggesting the medium as substance or atmosphere in a magical sense. ‘Medium’ is both a means of conveying ideas or information and a substance through which something is carried or transmitted, allowing someone to convey messages between the spirits of the dead and the living (OED, 1985). With this in mind, the sketch becomes the medium of mediation, the place where ideas flow and intersect.

The largest image is a section, not completely rendered with poché. Molding profiles can also be viewed in section, rendered with wash to contemplate the three-dimensional illusion. A few of these images are drawn quite slowly in contemplation or carefully ruled. Although they are drawn slowly, they may display a thinking process as Vignola used the media to answer questions. As a medium or substance that encourages dialogue, it is possible to question which sketches were drawn first or last or even if they relate to the same building. This may be true especially since items as disparate as details of brick and spiral stairs question these relationships.

This sketch provides physical evidence of design thinking where Vignola was using various conventional and non-conventional modes of drawing. Here he was easily moving between different media and various techniques, almost as if he needed to conjure up the methods that best assisted him to visualize. This not-self-conscious free flow of ideas may provide insight into the ‘medium’ of  Vignola’s design process.

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