Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Embracing Specificity, Embracing Place
- 1 Architecture on Paper: The Development and Function of Architectural Drawings in the Renaissance
- Part I Marking Place
- Part II Teaching Place
- Part III Excavating Place
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects and Places
7 - Nicola Zabaglia’s Scaffoldings for the Maintenance of Architectural Space in St. Peter’s Basilica and throughout Europe in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Embracing Specificity, Embracing Place
- 1 Architecture on Paper: The Development and Function of Architectural Drawings in the Renaissance
- Part I Marking Place
- Part II Teaching Place
- Part III Excavating Place
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects and Places
Summary
Abstract
The scenographic architectural space of St. Peter's represents an authoritative framework for the exhibition of the Vatican's intellectual and technological potential. The creation and maintenance of St. Peter's spurred inventions in construction practices and building technology, including the development of ad hoc scaffolding systems that could be assembled in prohibitive conditions. As demonstrated in this article, St. Peter's Fabbrica and the Church fostered a reassuring place of experience, where rigour and tradition encouraged the realization of striking accomplishments. Notable among others were the scaffoldings designed by the master carpenter Nicola Zabaglia, to whose work the 1743 Castelli e ponti was dedicated. The 1824 reprint of this volume enjoyed a critical fortune in Europe, disseminating the place-specific knowledge of the Vatican Fabbrica.
Keywords: restoration technologies, technical treatises, history of carpentry, Fabbrica of St. Peter’s
Introduction
The conservation of historical buildings has always depended on reliable and efficient procedures and technologies. Moreover, in the early modern period as still today, constraints on the space available for the assembly and operation of maintenance scaffolding typically entailed considerable construction challenges. A significant inventory of methods, techniques and spaces for architectural restoration was developed by the fruitful laboratory of St. Peter's Fabbrica in the Vatican, the papal institution in charge since 1506 for the construction and maintenance of the principal Basilica of Christianity. The Fabbrica was one of the most influential authorities on building practice in the modern era. Its extraordinary efficiency in the organization of manpower and its influence on the improvement of building techniques was not solely the product of its administrative structure or its employment of the period's best practitioners. The technical and organizational excellence of the Vatican Fabbrica were also connected to the development of construction and restoration scaffolding, and the working spaces to which they related.
Since its initial sixteenth-century reconstruction, the Vatican Basilica's architectural space imposed severe restrictions on the design and functionality of restoration scaffoldings. Not only did these structures have to rise great heights and accommodate large numbers of practitioners, but they also had to be assembled and used without interfering with liturgical ceremonies. The innovative mobile scaffoldings developed in the first half of the eighteenth century by the illiterate St. Peter's carpenter Nicola Zabaglia (1667-1750) met these demands.
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- Creating Place in Early Modern European Architecture , pp. 237 - 266Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021