VIGNOLA, Jacopo Barozzi da

(1507-1573)

Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, an Italian painter, architect, and theorist, took the name of his native town. His painting is not well known today, and it has been suggested that his lack of success in that medium was due to poor training. Architecture, however, was another matter entirely. He worked as an assistant to Baldassare Peruzzi* and was also influenced by Sebastiano Serlio. He moved to Rome in the 1530s, spent most of the 1540s working in Bologna (where his plans for the cathedral were undermined by political and intellectual intrigues), and settled again in Rome from 1550 on, executing numerous commissions for the powerful and papal Farnese family. His major architectural monuments are the Gesu (the mother church of the Jesuit order) in Rome and the Villa Farnese in Caprarola, not far from Rome.

The Villa Farnese at Caprarola combined a fortified pentagonal exterior with a circular courtyard inside. In addition to his innovative transformation of an already-fortified structure into a pleasant summer house, Vignola used his skills as an urban planner to facilitate the arrival of guests and to provide extraordinary organized views of the surrounding countryside.

The Gesù (1568-75) was also a Farnese commission. It has a single vaulted nave with side chapels, an idea perhaps adapted from the fifteenth-century Church of Sant' Andrea in Mantua by Leonbattista Alberti. Though Vignola's original version of the Gesù was altered by Giacomo Della Porta, the Counter-Reformation ideas and classical motifs used were most influential in Jesuit churches throughout the world.

Vignola also collaborated on stage sets, notably with Perino del Vega for a production of Niccolo Macchiavelli's* Clizia at the Farnese Palace (1541). His intellectual life was centered on the Accademia della Virtù, a private society dedicated to publishing a definitive edition of Vitruvius, the ancient Roman writer on architecture. It was probably this interest in ancient architectural theory that prompted Vignola to write his two theoretical treatises on architecture. The Regola delli cinque ordine d'architettura (Rule of the Five Orders of Architecture, c. 1562) gave a universal rule for the proportions of the five orders (Doric, Ionic, Corin­thian, Composite, and Tuscan). The illustrations were very clear, and the text was kept to a minimum. There were more than five hundred editions of this work, with translations into many languages. Vignola's second book, Le due regole della prospettiva pratica (The Two Rules of the Practice of Perspective, 1583), explains the Albertian (fifteenth-century) perspectival system as well as another method of achieving the illusion of perspective. At his death, Vignola was buried in the Pantheon in Rome, an honor previously accorded to Raphael.*

Bibliography

W. Lotz and L. H. Heydenreich, Architecture in Italy, 1400 to 1600, 1974.

Lynne E. Johnson