Ferdinando Fuga was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 architect, whose main works were realized in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 and Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

 in the Baroque

Baroque

The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

 style.

Biography

Born in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, he began to work in that city as a pupil of Giovanni Battista Foggini

Giovanni Battista Foggini

thumb|Tomb of [[Galileo Galilei]] in [[Santa Croce, Florence]].Giovanni Battista Foggini was an Italian sculptor active in Florence, renowned mainly for small bronze statuary.-Biography:...

. In 1717 he moved to Rome, to continue his apprentice studies. His first important work was realized in Naples, in commissions for the richly decorated chapel in Palazzo Cellamare, in Via Chiaia, and its rusticated gate to the gardens with a scrolling pediment and a sculptured cartouche

Cartouche (design)

A cartouche is an oval or oblong design with a slightly convex surface, typically edged with ornamental scrollwork. It is used to hold a painted or low relief design....

 of arms, (1726—1727); Fuga's patron was Antonio Giudice, principe di Cellamare. He travelled to Palermo

Palermo

Palermo is a city in Southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Province of Palermo. The city is noted for its history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old...

 in 1729-1730 in connection with a projected bridge over the Milicia

Milicia

Milicia may refer to:* the Milicia is the Sicilian river that has its mouth at Palermo.* Milicia is a genus in the plant family Moraceae.* an incorrect spelling of militia...

.

After his return to Rome, he was nominated the architect of the pontifical palaces by his Florentine countryman Pope Clement XII

Pope Clement XII

Pope Clement XII , born Lorenzo Corsini, was Pope from 12 July 1730 to 6 February 1740.Born in Florence, the son of Bartolomeo Corsini, Marquis of Casigliano and his wife Isabella Strozzi, sister of the Duke of Bagnuolo, Corsini had been an aristocratic lawyer and financial manager under preceding...

 Corsini, a position which Benedict XIV

Pope Benedict XIV

Pope Benedict XIV , born Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini, was Pope from 17 August 1740 to 3 May 1758.-Life:...

 confirmed. Fuga's masterwork is the palazzo-like screening facade he erected in front of the basilica

Basilica

The Latin word basilica , was originally used to describe a Roman public building, usually located in the forum of a Roman town. Public basilicas began to appear in Hellenistic cities in the 2nd century BC.The term was also applied to buildings used for religious purposes...

 of Santa Maria Maggiore (1741–1743). A similar project, as if it were a dry run for the greater project, is the facade he provided for Santa Cecilia in Trastevere

Santa Cecilia in Trastevere

Santa Cecilia in Trastevere is a 5th century church in Rome, Italy, devoted to Saint Cecilia, in the Trastevere rione.-History:The first church on this site was founded probably in the 3rd century, by Pope Urban I; it was devoted to the Roman martyr Cecilia, martyred it is said under Marcus...

. In both cases, care was taken not to mar the mosaics of the medieval fronts that still lie behind Fuga's screens, which provided a narthex

Narthex

The narthex of a church is the entrance or lobby area, located at the end of the nave, at the far end from the church's main altar. Traditionally the narthex was a part of the church building, but was not considered part of the church proper...

 for each ancient basilica.

Among his other major commissions in Rome was the Palazzo della Consulta

Palazzo della Consulta

The Palazzo della Consulta is a late Baroque palace in central Rome, Italy, that now houses the Constitutional Court of the Italian Republic...

 (1732–1735), which, like the nearby Palazzo Quirinale, fronts the Piazza di Monte Cavallo and housed the tribunal termed the Consulta and the secretariat of the Brevi as well as two corps of papal guards. Fuga ordered the two-storey facade with a piano nobile

Piano nobile

The piano nobile is the principal floor of a large house, usually built in one of the styles of classical renaissance architecture...

whose windows have low arched heads set in fielded panels, over a ground floor with low mezzanine

Mezzanine (architecture)

In architecture, a mezzanine or entresol is an intermediate floor between main floors of a building, and therefore typically not counted among the overall floors of a building. Often, a mezzanine is low-ceilinged and projects in the form of a balcony. The term is also used for the lowest balcony in...

. On the lower storey, the panels have channeled rustication

Rustication (architecture)

thumb|upright|Two different styles of rustication in the [[Palazzo Medici-Riccardi]] in [[Florence]].In classical architecture rustication is an architectural feature that contrasts in texture with the smoothly finished, squared block masonry surfaces called ashlar...

 and rusticated quoins at the corners. Pilasters are applied only to the central three-bay block, which barely projects, and to the corners.

The little church of Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte

Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte

Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte is a small church in central Rome, on Via Giulia between the Tiber and the Palazzo Farnese....

 (1733–37) was a small project undertaken for the Compagna della buona morte whose role since 1538 had been to give decent burial to the unclaimed corpses of Rome. Fuga was himself a member of this confraternity which possessed its own coemeterium on the banks of the Tiber behind, lost to the nineteenth-century construction of the Lungotevere. The previous church of 1575 was demolished in 1733, and Fuga gave the new one an elliptical plan under an elliptical dome

Dome

A dome is a structural element of architecture that resembles the hollow upper half of a sphere. Dome structures made of various materials have a long architectural lineage extending into prehistory....

. On its crowded façade a triangular pediment encloses a segmental one, both cornices breaking forwards at the center and at the corners; pairs of columns fill the narrow recesses between the wide central bay and the corners, which are emphasized with stacked pilasters. Skulls wreathed with laurel serve as brackets for the pediment of the door.

Various transformations were effected for the relatives of the Corsini pope in the Palazzo Riario alla Lungara, which had been modified for Christina, queen of Sweden

Christina of Sweden

Christina , later adopted the name Christina Alexandra, was Queen regnant of Swedes, Goths and Vandals, Grand Princess of Finland, and Duchess of Ingria, Estonia, Livonia and Karelia, from 1633 to 1654. She was the only surviving legitimate child of King Gustav II Adolph and his wife Maria Eleonora...

 in the previous century but became now the Palazzo Corsini

Palazzo Corsini

The Palazzo Corsini is a prominent late-baroque palace in Rome, erected for the Corsini family between 1730-1740 as an elaboration of the prior building on the site, a 15th-century villa of the Riario family, based on designs of Ferdinando Fuga. It is located in the Trastevere section of the city,...

 alla Lungara, purchased on 27 July 1736 by Don Neri and Don Bartolomeo Corsini, for 70 thousand scudi from Duke Riario. After Christina's death in 1689, her sculpture gallery and her library were emptied. Fuga was called in to pull together the 15th and 16th-century amenagements for the Corsini brothers, works which took from 1736 to 1758 before all was finally completed. The Corsini retained Christina's bedroom just as she had left it, and the "urban" front in piazza Fiammetta had to be left untouched, but the weight of her library had produced cracks in the vaulting below it, and repairs to the existing structure were not finished until 1738 (Holste). Fuga worked on the garden front of the palazzo, beginning with work on the library wing for Neri Corsini. In 1751-53 he added an identical central block containing a theatrical divided staircase, lit with large windows that looked onto the garden parterre

Parterre

A parterre is a formal garden construction on a level surface consisting of planting beds, edged in stone or tightly clipped hedging, and gravel paths arranged to form a pleasing, usually symmetrical pattern. Parterres need not have any flowers at all...

s, which had been modified and brought up to date in 1741. Then the two were linked with a ground-floor portico. In the interiors, fuga managed in innovative ways to maintain a separation of the functional service circulation from the suites of parade rooms.

The church of San Apollinare (about 1748) was another commission. He completed the Palazzo del Quirinale and the adjoining building housing the Segretario delle Cifre and the extended new wing (the Manica Lunga).

In 1748, he was called to Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

 in the team under Luigi Vanvitelli

Luigi Vanvitelli

Luigi Vanvitelli was an Italian engineer and architect. The most prominent 18th-century architect of Italy, he practiced a sober classicizing academic Late Baroque style that made an easy transition to Neoclassicism.-Biography:Vanvitelli was born at Naples, the son of a Dutch painter of land and...

, for the new Bourbon King of Naples Charles III

Charles III of Spain

Charles III was the King of Spain and the Spanish Indies from 1759 to 1788. He was the eldest son of Philip V of Spain and his second wife, the Princess Elisabeth Farnese...

, King of the Two Sicilies. Here Fuga worked as one of the court architects in renovations to the city of Naples, where the king and his progressive minister Bernardo Tanucci

Bernardo Tanucci

Bernardo Tanucci was an Italian statesman, who brought enlightened government to the backward Kingdom of the Two Sicilies for Charles III and his son Ferdinand IV.-Biography:...

 were changing the face of the city, opening new neighborhoods, driving new arterial avenues and promoting some social and economic modernizations in the backward kingdom. The immediate part of the urbanistic planning

Urbanism

Broadly, urbanism is a focus on cities and urban areas, their geography, economies, politics, social characteristics, as well as the effects on, and caused by, the built environment.-Philosophy:...

 involved important construction of the colossal Albergo dei Poveri

Ospedale L'Albergo Reale dei Poveri, Naples

The Albergo Reale dei Poveri is a former public hospital/almshouse in Naples, southern Italy. It was designed by the architect Ferdinando Fuga, and construction was started in 1751. It is five storeys tall and about long. It was popularly known as "Palazzo Fuga"...

with a gray stucco front extending of 354 m. It was intended as a hospice to shelter 8,000 poor from all over the kingdom, (segregated by sex and age) but especially the "street people" of Naples, a project which was realized only in part. Fuga's final design, centered on a hexagonal church, devoted one courtyard to each of the intended social classes— men, women, boys and girls—each with their separate entrance. Construction was begun in July 1751. After the departure of Carlo for Spain, work slowed, and when it finally ceased in 1819, three of Fuga's five courts were completed, as they may be seen today, damaged by the earthquake of 1980 and closed (Serafino).

A second project with an enlightened social cast was the Cimitero delle 366 Fosse ("Cemetery of 366 trenches" one for each day of the year) not far from the Albergo, for which Fuga succeeded in obtaining assent from Ferdinand IV

Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies

Ferdinand I reigned variously over Naples, Sicily, and the Two Sicilies from 1759 until his death. He was the third son of King Charles III of Spain by his wife Maria Amalia of Saxony. On 10 August 1759, Charles succeeded his elder brother, Ferdinand VI, as King Charles III of Spain...

 in 1762 (Serafino). This project systematized the daily burden of corpses of the poorest Neapolitans that were delivered to the Ospedale and buried in various modes around the outskirts of the city. The cemetery functioned until 1890.

In a third vast public project, Fuga also designed the Granili (1779?), which were more than immense public granaries; they also contained a military arsenal and a ropewalk (since demolished). And a third Bourbon public venture was the ceramic manufactory adjoining the park of Caserta  (1771–1772).

In Palermo once more, he was in charge of refittings in the interior of the Cathedral and work on its dome.

In Naples Fuga was called upon in 1768 to transform the grand reception room of the royal palace, disused since the court had removed to Caserta, into a court theatre. For private clients he constructed numerous palazzi, notably Palazzo Aquino di Caramanico and Palazzo Giordano, as well as villas for aristocratic patrons. the Villa Favorita at Ercolano

Ercolano

Ercolano is a town and comune in the province of Naples, Campania . It lies at the western foot of Mount Vesuvius, on the Bay of Naples, just southeast of the city of Naples. The medieval town of Resina was built on the volcanic material left by the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed the ancient...

, in a manner traditional in Italy, has one façade directly on the street, the other giving on to extensive gardens . In his last work, the facade of the Chiesa dei Gerolamini (ca 1780), which belies its date, he remained essentially a fully Baroque architect.

The paving in colored marbles he designed in 1761 for the basilica of Santa Chiara no longer exists, but his Cappella dei Regi Depositi (1766) remains (Serafino)

External links

• Rosario Serafino, "Ferdinando Fuga ed il curioso cimitero delle "366 fosse" a Napoli"
• Final design for the Palazzo dellaConsultà, 1732
• "Chiesa di S. Maria dell'Orazione e Morte"
• Marc Cogan, Via Chiaia Palazzo Cellamare's pedimented doorway
• Riccardo Cigola, "Chiesa di S.Maria dell'Orazione e Morte"
• "Palazzo Corsini: la storia"
• Holste, Roma, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, F.N. 13835: Fuga design in connection with Palazzo Corsini alla Lungara. Details of the construction campaigns.
• Fuga's Villa La Favorita: Views in an album of photos of the Khedive and his family.
• Albergo dei Poveri in Around Naples Encyclopedia