Axial Rule in Renaissance Rome

Pier Vittorio Aureli

Visiting professor, Yale University, AA School of Architecture

The reinvention of Rome as the capital of Christianity between the 14th and 16th centuries can be considered as one of the most antagonistic processes of urban transformation in the Western world. This was mainly due to two specific conditions of the city: its complex topography and geography, and its idiosyncratic political regime. Unlike any other major medieval city in Europe, the major symbolic and power centers in Rome – the Capitol, the Cathedral of St John and the Vatican – were not located in the city center, but at the city margins. This geography contributed to make the city center an unresolved multipolar field of forces contested by the different powers represented by these centers. The political regime consisted of a non-dynastic monarchy where each pope was elected at a very old age in order to prevent too long a span of his reign, meaning he had only a very short time in which to implement reforms and to leave his legacy on the city form. The extreme political discontinuity between successive papacies meant popes’ efforts most often did not follow on from one another, and at best had contrasting aims. These extreme conditions resonated within a chaotic urban form made of an archipelago of clusters, each of them dominated by competing clans or dynasties.

On top of everything, the conflict between secular and religious power – represented within the city by the polar contraposition between the Campidoglio and the Vatican – gave to the different forms of conflict an acute political dimension that triggered the church to engage in the management of the city. It is for this reason that, parallel with the building of new monuments and the restoration of ancient ones, those popes who wanted to leave their mark on the city’s urban form engaged with the design of new city streets. This took the form not only of the opening of new or the completion of old streets but also in diffuse management of urban space. Facing a situation of extreme backwardness and political uncertainty due to the consequences of the Great Western Schism, and the exile of popes in Avignon (1378–1417), Pope Martino V (pope from 1417 to 1431) instituted the Magistri Vivarium, public administrators who were responsible for the management of the streets. Their task was not only the physical maintenance of space in terms of circulation and hygiene, but also to reclaim political control of this space from the opposing clans that contended it. It must be considered that in Rome at the time there were no proper streets and public space was more the interstice between the different clusters of buildings. Instituting the Magistri Vivarium created the possibility of an organic totalizing space of control that would surpass the local scale of the building. What is interesting here is that this was organized not in terms of military control, but through the institution of a civic body whose power was administrative and managerial rather than coercive, and thus more adaptable to being diffused within rather than simply imposed on the city.

The opening and management of new streets were also directed towards the possibility of making the city a Biblia Pauperum, an urban text whose message could be accessible to the pilgrims coming to the Eternal City. Yet the central issue of the street project was that, like in ancient Rome, representation and urban management were fused in the same architectural artifact. In Rome, urban circulation acquired this ambivalent meaning of both ceremonial display and urban control.

The awareness of circulation as a means of power soon resulted in a precise and archetypical form: the axial street, of which Donato Bramante’s design for Via Giulia (1508) can be considered the most radical example. The almost 1,000-metre (3,280-foot) long street that cut through the city fabric running parallel to the river Tiber (and to Via della Lungara, its twin street on the other ‘suburban’ side of the river), was, above all, a strategic link connecting two important elements of medieval Rome: the 15th-century Ponte Sisto, the only bridge built after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the commercial core of the city inhabited by the emerging class of bankers. The spatiality of Via Giulia is the direct product of the culture of perspective and its application in the representation of reality. The evolution of the science of perspective during the 15th century needs to be understood not only as a means to represent in a mathematically correct way the depth of space, but also because its mathematical implications were a framework within which to reimagine the reform of urban space according to the universal and abstract principles of spatial organization. The unprecedented axial form of Via Giulia represents the concrete application of this culture to the real body of the city. The perfect linear geometry of the street was intended to organize in one spatial gesture not only a proper circulation space but also a strongly defined interdependence between public and private space, by making the public space – the perfectly shaped void of the via recta – both the access to and control of the private properties along the street. Via Giulia, Rome, 1508– The geometrical regularity of the street offers the possibility of controlling private property by means of public space. Public space appears as regular, universal, efficient and magnificent, and in this way conceals its vested (and partial) interests.

（文章来源：CITY ASPOLITICAL FORM excerpted）