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Part 2: Streets, Neighbourhoods and Spatial Networks
Fabrizio Nevola
Description: Street Life in Renaissance Italy
Street Life in Renaissance Italy
~A little-known fresco from a now demolished palace in Perugia depicts a fairly...
Author
Fabrizio Nevola
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2020 Fabrizio Nevola
Related print edition pages: pp.130-133
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22184
Chapter subject tags:Architecture, Renaissance--ItalyCity planning--Italy--HistoryPublic spaces--ItalyCity and town life--ItalyUrban ecology (Sociology)
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Part 2: Streets, Neighbourhoods and Spatial Networks
A little-known fresco from a now demolished palace in Perugia depicts a fairly unremarkable street scene in the first half of the sixteenth century. Attributed to the local artist Giovanni Battista Caporali, the fresco forms part of a cycle that was produced in 1535 for a ground-floor room of the house of a celebrated lawyer, Guglielmo Pontano.1Santi, 1989, pp. 126–8, and illustrations 106a–q; see also Scarpellini, 1981 (there is some variation in the surname: Pontano and Pontani); cf. Jordan Gschwend and Lowe, 2015, p. 21. The Pontano family had long been active in the legal profession and the cycle depicts other members of the family who had been lawyers (Paolo, Ludovico and Giovanni), as well as a scene of Guglielmo teaching a group of students, perhaps in the city’s university (Studium Generale) or in the law school that he had established in the family palace itself.2Teza, 2014, proposes that the fresco cycle was commissioned by Guglielmo for the room that housed his law school, described in documents as the Iustitiae Sacellum. This building – the Palazzo Pontano – forms the main subject of what is undoubtedly the most interesting of the frescoes, a street scene, which proudly depicts the family home on the right side of the composition (fig. 64).3Another scene may depict the Pontano’s rural estates in Cerreto di Spoleto.
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Description: View of the Porta Romana by Caporali, Giovanni Battista
64. Giovanni Battista Caporali (?), View of the Porta Romana, early 16th century, fresco from the Palazzo Pontano (dem.), Perugia, now in Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia.
Everyday life on the street is the protagonist in this scene, with the city’s residents and visitors going about their daily activities, busily occupying much of the foreground. Eight horses and pack animals can be seen: horses are the means of transport for most of the individuals around the Palazzo Pontano, and one is held by a page boy or attendant. On the opposite side of the street three of the four animals carry bales of goods, and so are clearly identifiable as working animals. The social life that gravitates around Palazzo Pontano underscores the status of the building and its owners; two figures who appear to be lawyers, one of them holding a document, stand close to the front door of the palace, while the three men walking down the street towards the palace could be students making their way to Pontano’s law school. On the left side, by contrast, various people go about their business, carrying goods perhaps for sale at market; one woman, in the centre foreground, carries farm produce and may be identified as a treccola, a street seller.4Cohen, 2008; Welch, 2005. The time of day that the picture captures is uncertain, though the fact that most of the traffic is moving towards the city centre suggests the morning. Shops are open, and small groups of people are assembled around some of these, while others hang around by doorways, or sit on benches that face onto the street. While there are some women on the street, a greater number can be seen looking down on the scene from numerous windows and an elaborate balcony on the Pontano residence.
Palazzo Pontano stood on the via Romana or via Papale, one of the city’s grander streets, facing the church of Sant’Ercolano and overlooking the steep descent of borgo San Pietro towards San Domenico (where Gugliemo Pontano was eventually buried) and the ancient church of San Pietro, whose bell-towers are visible in the background, to the left. 5Siepi, 1822, vol. 2, p. 474; the palace was demolished in 1836 for the widening of viale Indipendenza. The street itself is paved with bricks laid in a herringbone pattern, with no distinction marked between the street and the houses that line it; only some buildings are subtly separated from the roadway by stone steps, or have benches and stalls that project outwards onto the street. This is a mixed-use neighbourhood, where elite houses such as that of the Pontano stand side by side with more middling residences, such as the two houses with white stone rectangular framed doorways to the extreme left and right of the composition. Excepting these three grander homes, much of the rest of street is made up of humbler buildings. Across the way from the Pontano palace a house with steps raising the entrance off the level of the street and two overhanging jettied balconies was probably occupied by more than one family. The borgo San Pietro, which forms the centre of the view, is lined with undistinguished houses, many of which contain ground-floor shops facing onto the busy street.
In his ground-breaking analysis of urban form, The Image of the City (1960), Kevin Lynch identified five key elements that defined how people understand and experience movement through the urban environment. The elements he pinpointed were: ‘paths’, or the streets and other routes that people use to move around the city; ‘edges’ as the boundaries that limit movement (for example, walls or watercourses); ‘districts’ a term he uses to describe larger urban areas with shared characteristics or identity; ‘nodes’, which are the significant intersections or meeting points that stand out in the street network; and finally ‘landmarks’ – the principal sites and objects in the cityscape (fig. 65).6For the five elements of ‘urban imageability’, see Lynch, 1960, pp. 46–90. These elements were derived from interviews that Lynch conducted with residents in American cities, and privileged the perspective of the everyday user on the street to describe and analyse what made a city ‘imageable’ – that is, memorable through lived experience, in contrast to the objective knowledge of cartographic representation. In this respect, we might say that Lynch’s method (which has influenced generations of urban-design theorists) offers complementary analytical tools for describing de Certeau’s ‘practiced space’, discussed in the Introduction to Part 1, by identifying distinct spatial conditions in relation to experiential practices.7On the influence of Kevin Lynch on urban-design theory, see Hospers, 2010. While Lynch’s analysis was based on an ethnographic approach to the contemporary city, his observations and conclusions can nevertheless be usefully applied to the study of urban environments in the past.8Lynch, 1990 (‘Notes on city satisfaction (1953)’, pp. 135–53). For Lynch’s approach in relation to historical cities, see Favro, 1999–2000; revisited in Clarke and Nevola, 2013b.
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Description: Five key elements that define people’s experience of the urban environment by...
65. Five key elements that define people’s experience of the urban environment, based on Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1960; redrawn by Alex Hibbert).
In the light of Lynch’s five elements, we can now usefully turn back to the Palazzo Pontano street scene and reassess it. Paths structure the composition: the main thoroughfare of the via Romana (or Papale) forms the foreground of the image, while the sloping borgo San Pietro creates a perspectival funnel leading out of the city towards the countryside, visible in the distance. The hard edges of the scene are formed by the architecture of houses and palaces that frame the street; while doorways suggest a degree of permeability between residential interiors and the public street, social conventions carefully define rights of access. The scene can be said to depict a district, a unit of the urban environment, here defined by the central placement of the residence of the Pontano, a leading family around whose house neighbourhood life revolves. The very focus of the scene is a node: the intersection of two streets, and particularly the street corner marked by the family palace, is revealed to be a site busy with social interactions, encouraged by the flow of traffic converging there. Again, landmarks are in evidence in the composition: a focus on the Palazzo Pontano is obviously justified through the family’s patronage; the scale, height and strong architectural accenting of the palace’s corner, with its stone quoining, the multiple residential and commercial ground-floor openings and the animation of figures in and around it all mark it as the focus of the composition. Beyond it, the local church steeples dominate the skyline, providing a visual marker for destinations outside the painted scene, yet significant to the family and neighbourhood.
In fact, secular subjects, including populated street views, are significantly less common in art of the Renaissance period than they were to become from the mid-seventeenth century, when topographic accuracy in the portrayal of neighbourhood scenes became a characteristic of the very popular veduta genre, which distributed the image of Italian street scenes throughout Europe by means of widely disseminated paintings and prints.9For the suggestion that the street scene was a new genre developed from the mid-17th century, see Blumin, 2008, pp. 19ff.; see also Dubbini, 2002. Painted records of ritual and devotional practices, set in topographically accurate settings, are not uncommon from the fifteenth century, though, as we shall see, purely secular subjects are quite rare.10Jordan Gschwend and Lowe, 2015, pp. 19–22. Discussed further in Chapter 5. This makes the Pontano fresco all the more remarkable, as it offers a very rare insight into everyday urban life, and shows the degree to which spatial and architectural meanings are clearly and inextricably associated with social practices and behaviours. As such, and as has been briefly discussed above, the scene’s meaning derives as much from the built environment as from the animated groups of figures that populate it. The fresco reveals how distinct urban elements serve to define discrete forms of human action in, and experience of, the built environment; in both pictorial and textual representations, a range of perceptions can be discerned, from the district-level understanding of defining landmarks to the far more localised conditions that shape movement along thoroughfares and encourage gatherings at nodal points.
It is this range of spatial and architectural conditions that is the subject of Part 2. In the three chapters that follow, the discussion is structured around Lynch’s categories of imageability, as we move from the wide-frame consideration of streetscapes (paths and edges), to a discussion of street corners (nodes), and end with a re-evaluation of the domestic residential palace (an example of what we might consider a local landmark). The discussion of the social fabric that populates the urban environment also adopts a narrowing frame of focus, from the large-scale patterns of urban zones and regions in the city towards the more personal interactions facilitated by specific sites and building types within it.
 
1     Santi, 1989, pp. 126–8, and illustrations 106a–q; see also Scarpellini, 1981 (there is some variation in the surname: Pontano and Pontani); cf. Jordan Gschwend and Lowe, 2015, p. 21. »
2     Teza, 2014, proposes that the fresco cycle was commissioned by Guglielmo for the room that housed his law school, described in documents as the Iustitiae Sacellum. »
3     Another scene may depict the Pontano’s rural estates in Cerreto di Spoleto. »
4     Cohen, 2008; Welch, 2005. »
5     Siepi, 1822, vol. 2, p. 474; the palace was demolished in 1836 for the widening of viale Indipendenza. »
6     For the five elements of ‘urban imageability’, see Lynch, 1960, pp. 46–90. »
7     On the influence of Kevin Lynch on urban-design theory, see Hospers, 2010. »
8     Lynch, 1990 (‘Notes on city satisfaction (1953)’, pp. 135–53). For Lynch’s approach in relation to historical cities, see Favro, 1999–2000; revisited in Clarke and Nevola, 2013b. »
9     For the suggestion that the street scene was a new genre developed from the mid-17th century, see Blumin, 2008, pp. 19ff.; see also Dubbini, 2002. »
10     Jordan Gschwend and Lowe, 2015, pp. 19–22. Discussed further in Chapter 5. »
Part 2: Streets, Neighbourhoods and Spatial Networks
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