Exhibitions
Francesco di Giorgio: Architect (Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, till 31 July) Francesco di Giorgio and the Renaissance in Siena 1450-1500 (Sant'Agostino, Siena, till 31 July)
Master of all works
Roderick Conway Morris
The modern artist's role in war — if he has one at all — is to observe and record. That of his Italian Renaissance predecessor was, as often as not, to design and manu- facture military hardware, survey battle- grounds, build fortresses and invent new ways of discomfiting, and killing, the enemy.
Francesco di Giorgio, the Sienese artist, architect, author, military engineer and hydraulic, mechanical and ballistics expert, was born in 1439, a dozen years before Leonardo da Vinci. Two years ago, Profes- sor Paolo Galuzzi, the director of Flo- rence's History of Science Museum, staged in the brick-vaulted salt magazines of Siena's Palazzo Pubblico a splendid exhibi- tion, Before Leonardo, of which di Giorgio's manuscripts and machines formed a major component and which cogently demon- strated Leonardo's large, and underplayed, debt to his fellow Tuscan. The present two exhibitions focus on Francesco's architec- ture, drawings, sculpture and painting, offering yet further revelations.
Francesco's Sienese birth was crucial to his development. Siena's hydraulic engi- neers, who developed a complex, finely bal- anced system of underground passages called bottini — to supply this populous hilltop city with water, were the most inge- nious in Italy. The republic's rich mineral resources enabled the Sienese to become masters of metallurgy and the state's rugged terrain made them adroit builders on precipitous sites. Francesco's workshop, like others in the city, would have under- taken every kind of work from designing and constructing buildings to painting, carving, making jewellery and furniture, and casting statues, swords, firearms and cannons. By the age of 30 Francesco had become sufficiently prominent to be chosen to improve and expand Siena's bottini (whose layout was a state secret).
In 1477 Francesco went to Urbino to serve the archetypal soldier-humanist Fed- erico Montefeltro — who was realistically depicted by Justus of Ghent in full armour perusing a manuscript, and who, on captur- ing a town, was as likely to make a beeline for the library to secure the books and codices as to concern himself with baser booty. Francesco — the dream employer's dream right-hand man — became Federi- co's master of all works, the artist record- ing that at one time he was working simultaneously on 130 different projects.
Federico's dukedom was a poor one and he was obliged to hire himself and his army out as mercenaries to finance his cultured and artistic lifestyle. Accordingly, military matters figured large in Francesco's duties. He built fortresses all over central and later southern Italy — displaying (as Nicholas Adams illustrates in both exhibition and catalogue) a unique ability to blend archi- tecture and topography — and emerged as the supreme military architect of the age.
In this respect Francesco di Giorgio was much more successful in his lifetime than Leonardo, who in his famous letter to Lodovico II Moro, Duke of Milan offered his services as the designer of fireproof mobile bridges, armoured cars, battleships `and other engines of wonderful efficacy not in general use', mentioning almost as a footnote that he was also an architect, sculptor and painter, but who never had the same opportunities to put his military schemes into effect.
Surviving examples of Francesco di Gior- gio's civil and ecclesiastical buildings are scarce — Siena's charming and elegantly proportioned San Sebastiano in Vallepiatta being a happy exception. But, as Howard Burns shows in a fascinating section of the Palazzo Pubblico exhibition, it was Francesco's epoch-making Treatise on Architecture, rather than the buildings themselves, that had such a profound influ- ence on his successors: Palladio drew directly on this work to a degree previously unrecognised.
Francesco was a natural sculptor, whose innate gifts flourished under the influence of Donatello, who spent two years in Siena. The conundrum posed by the inferiority of most paintings attributed to Francesco is tackled in a bold manner by Luciano Bel- losi, organiser of the Sant'Agostino exhibi- tion. Accepting only a small number of early pictures as wholly or primarily the work of Francesco's own hand (only one known work, a Nativity, is actually signed by the artist), Bellosi argues that the rest were consigned to a banausic, not altogeth- er harmless drudge, whom he has dubbed it fiduciario (the delegate). Francesco's apparent habit, under pressure of work, of confining himself to the initial drawing is untypical of studios at the time, where the master would normally supervise and inter- vene at every stage of a picture's progress. But X-ray pictures revealing brilliantly Detail from the Nativity by Francesco di Giorgio, in the Church of San Domenico, Siena articulate and expressive drawing sub- merged by the plodding, pedestrian appli- cation of paint on top give strong credence to Bellosi's view.
If anyone is in doubt that there is any- thing left to discover about the Renais- sance, they should go to Siena and renew their acquaintance with Francesco di Gior- gio — the man capable both of inventing, or discovering, those captivating, angelic blondes that became the hallmark of Sienese painting and of detonating the first ever subterranean siege-mine (in Naples in 1495) to penetrate the Castel Nuovo's up- to-date defences which he himself only shortly before had designed and built.
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