Enfilade

From EAHN:

Filippo Juvarra (1678-1736): Architetto dei Savoia, architetto in Europa
La Venaria Reale, Turin, 14-16 November 2011

Filippo Juvarra, Great Stables at La Venaria Reale, Turin, 1722-27. In the eighteenth century, the stables (140 meters in length) could accommodate up to 160 horses.

The third conference of the series Architettura e potere: Lo Stato sabaudo e la costruzione dell’immagine in una corte europea is dedicated to Filippo Juvarra (1678-1736), the abbé from Messina who trained in Rome in the studio of Carlo Fontana and at the Accademia di San Luca, and went on (in 1714) to become first architect of the Savoy court, indissolubly linking his name with that of the capital of the kingdom, Turin. Despite numerous scholarly initiatives dedicated to his activity, knowledge of Juvarra’s work is still open to expansion. The greater part of both Italian and international scholarship has been consistently focused on the Turin-Madrid axis, in consideration prevalently of the executed architecture and its associated projects (whether of a permanent or an ephemeral nature), as well as of his role as a great artistic director. Beyond this core area, which is itself always open to further study, however, several fundamental themes for the activity and influence exercised by Juvarra in the European ambit remain to be investigated. Among these are his travels, which together with the albums of drawings now conserved in Italian and foreign collections were important vehicles for the dissemination of ideas, his heterogeneous architectural activity in other centers in Italy and in Europe (for example in Messina, Naples, Lucca, Como, Mantua, Brescia, Lisbon), and his projects for the decoration of royal and villa gardens and their links to contemporary treatise literature.

The scope of the conference is to approach themes that will generate new contributions, also from the point of view of methodology, aimed at a more comprehensive definition of the figure of Filippo Juvarra, both biographically and by approaching the dynamics and strategies – adopted more or less consciously – that allowed him to leave Sicily, passing through papal Rome (with all the positive and negative aspects of this experience) and arriving in Turin and then in Madrid, in an on-going endeavor to secure commissions in the international ambit.

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The conference program (as a PDF file) is available here»