(PDF) In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, by Niall Atkinson

(PDF) In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, by Niall Atkinson
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In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, by Niall Atkinson
Areli Marina
Niall Atkinson
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This paper reviews Areli Marina's study of the Lombard city of Parma, emphasizing the importance of the public squares, Piazza del Duomo and Piazza del Comune, in shaping the city's social and spatial identity during the thirteenth century. By analyzing the architectural developments and the interplay between urban design and social institutions, Marina argues for a sociospatial perspective that challenges traditional scholarship. The analysis reveals how the geometric and visual relationships within the squares communicate broader political narratives, contributing to the understanding of medieval urbanism.
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Books

Areli Marina as a physical phenomenon, or urbs, and a convincingly locate these lost structures.
The Italian Piazza Transformed: social network, or civitas. In maintaining She demonstrates how the city’s political
Parma in the Communal Age this ­distinction, she claims, modern schol- institutions were spatially integrated by a
University Park: Pennsylvania State University arship has hindered an understanding monumental staircase and an ambulato-
Press, 2012, 192 pp., 102 color and 7 b/w of how social institutions and the built rium that joined the palaces together and
illus. $84.95, ISBN 9780271050706 environment mutually constituted each linked them to the square. With a system
other. of loggias and ­porticoes, the spaces of
The mid-thirteenth-century political In the first two chapters, Marina traces ­governance were raised up on a series of
­theorist Brunetto Latini (ca. 1220–94) the separate building histories and spatial platforms that ­provided a theater for the
defined as “public” those things that per- geometries of these piazzas, through which rituals of state that did not, symbolically at
tained to rulership, political offices (offici), Parma’s major political factions vied for least, encroach upon the flow of goods,
or that were owned by a city, which Bru- control of the city via a reconceptualization people and ideas.
netto defined as a community gathered of space in the tumultuous thirteenth cen- What Marina is able to make plainly
together to live according to reason and tury. Elaborated from previously published visible, through the effective harmoniza-
justice. The public square linked these material, the author shows how, beginning tion of textual arguments and rich visual
public things together, providing the space in 1196, each addition to the square—­ documentation, is the complex visual
through which their relations were expressed. baptistery, bell tower, bishop’s palace—­ geometry embedded in both squares. This
By analyzing this complex spatio­cultural created a unified cathedral complex whose is crucial because medieval communal
phenomenon, therefore, we can begin to ideal proportions were based on translating, legitimization of power demanded the
understand how the medieval city under- expanding, or rotating the proportional sys- exchange of a multitude of urban gazes,
stood itself as a spatially embedded com- tems of the cathedral’s façade.1 It is these which is why it is so surprising that the
munity with a concatenation of multiple spatial relations between individual build- author continually returns to panopticism
formal and social representations. The ings that expressed a rational system of to explain the visual and political logic of
medieval Italian piazza has only recently urban design. At the heart of such design Parmesan urban space.
elicited architectural investigations that logic was a network of sightlines and view- Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon was a
treat it as such an integrated urban system, ing angles that enticed viewers into the totalitarian Enlightenment fantasy, imag-
which is why Areli Marina’s new study on square and positioned them within the ining a one-way optical system whereby
the Lombard city of Parma is such a wel- ­rhetorical antagonism of simultaneously prisoners, arranged in cells around a cen-
come addition. panoramic and panoptic views of  the tral observation tower, had to assume the
Focusing on the city’s two main authority and magnificence of the state. presence of an all-penetrating gaze that
squares—the Piazza del Duomo and the The communal square reorganized they could never actually see. Reconfig-
Piazza del Comune (today’s Piazza­ the city’s ancient Roman forum and medi- ured by Michel Foucault as a metaphor for
Garibaldi)—Marina foregrounds the impor- eval market space. Rather than the prod- the methods of discursive surveillance
tance of approaching the city from a socio- uct of a complex spatiogeometric system, deployed by the modern state, panopticism
spatial perspective by citing the medieval this square emerges from an expanding entered the vocabulary of late twentieth-
writer Isidore of Seville (ca. ­560–636) cluster of medieval structures attached to century critical theory. Explaining the
to underscore the dual nature of the city the ­o ri­g inal communal palace, begun coercive power of designed space by
around 1221, to mark a legal victory over such  means allows Marina to come to
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 72, no. 1
the cathedral faction. However, since a terms with the influential and innovative
(March 2013), 105–118. ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN
2150-5926. © 2013 by the Society of Architectural Histori- seventeenth-century earthquake destroyed scholarship of her doctoral advisor, Marvin
ans. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for much of this medieval cluster, Marina Trachtenberg, whose analysis of Floren-
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content shows formidable skills in spatial recon- tine piazzas in the fourteenth century laid
through the University of California Press’s Rights and
Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ struction, meticulously assessing maps, the groundwork for the serious study of
reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2013.72.1.105. images, primary and secondary sources, to medieval urban planning. Her argument

105

suffers, however, from taking on Trachten- order, cleanliness, decorum, and efficiency space in the statement that the Parmese
berg’s critical apparatus because his research underlie attempts to regulate bodies and “had to replace the palace of the Pagani
is linked so intimately to Florentine politi- spaces within an ideal and beautiful geo­ family, which was very beautiful, with
cal conditions. In comparison to Tuscan metry. Such ideals took physical form, another palace and shops for public use,
piazzas, Parma’s civic squares emerge less according to Marina, in the classicizing as I saw with my own eyes” (154). What
as rigorous assemblages of fixed viewing columns, capitals, porticoes, and monu- does such an insightful viewer mean when
angles of a single monument and more as mental proportions that gave form to he says that the city “had” to replace some-
open orchestrations of architectural dis- the square, which, along with the rosso di thing beautiful with something defined as
play, which were, she notes, worked out a Verona stone, linked the city to its antique merely useful? This makes the reader won-
century earlier. But the panoptic interpre- heritage. This evocation of Romanitas is der about the fate of the Scipione family
tation only offers a one-way monologue of extended into a discussion of Ciceronian palace that Salimbene refers to immedi-
purely visual power that translates propa- civic duty, where collective large-scale ately after this statement, since that struc-
ganda directly into built space. As a result, building was justified by the honor it ture too had been bought by the city and
the complex political alliances outlined in bestowed on the city. Marina’s discussion was even more beautiful than the houses
her introduction disappear at times behind of the cultural motivations behind monu- of the Pagani.
an architectural ensemble that expresses mental projects forms the bulk of the As her discussion of what she terms
only a generic, vague, and monolithic idea fourth chapter, which is both compelling the “nightmare” of reconciling historical
of “authority” that has no real historical and problematic. Courtly liberality and units of measurements referred to in docu-
specificity. Renaissance magnificence are also har- ments with actual extant buildings shows,
More productive is Marina’s deploy- nessed to suggest how lavish architectural Marina subtly demonstrates that historical
ment of Trachtenberg’s insights into the patronage linked wealthy individuals to interpretation lies between words, ideals,
complexity of medieval Italian planning such urban prestige. All of these expla­ and buildings. Surviving documentary
principles. She argues convincingly that nations are possible, but none can be fragments, variations and adaptive strate-
the precise idealizing geometry that guided ­specifically linked to Parma’s historical gies in medieval building practices, along
the construction of Parma’s squares was experience, demanding, I think, a closer with the transformations of the material
not compromised by the concrete realities reading of the city’s chronicles and statutes remains wrought by the vicissitudes of time
that tempered and transformed it. Instead, in order to develop a more comprehensive may confound purely mathematical resolu-
such ideal principles were flexible enough interpretation rooted in the material and tion but are the raw material of medieval
to confront the political, economic, social, social complexity of these spaces. A subtle architectural history. And Marina’s highly
historical, and environmental contingen- reading of their political rhetoric could be developed method of processing, analyz-
cies that accompanied large-scale plan- as fruitful as Marina’s subtle reading of ing, and organizing disparate spatial, his-
ning. What to the post-Enlightenment eye their spatial rhetoric. It might also provide torical, and representational systems not
might seem to be tentative and ad-hoc a means to engage with the way Parma’s only makes an important contribution to
attempts of a weak state to impose its will chroniclers imagined their city through the contemporary debates about urban design,
over space were actually solutions negoti- act of writing and how their contempo- but would also have been immediately rec-
ated within a range of variation that was raries crowded into its spaces, continually ognized and greatly appreciated by her
fully commensurate with the spatial expe- redefined and shaped them, celebrated and medieval forebears.
rience of the body, if not to the tyrannous suffered in them. niall atkinson
demands of pure geometry. In an age often As Isidore of Seville remarked, only University of Chicago
disparaged for a lack of individual agency, Rome was referred to as urbs. It was the
medieval urban societies demonstrated a term civitas, therefore, that had to repre- Note
concerted dialogue that often limited any sent the medieval social body and the archi- 1. Areli Marina, “Order and Ideal Geometry in
pretenses to absolute power. In exchange tectural fabric, a dynamic that panopticism Parma’s Piazza del Duomo,” JSAH 65, no. 4
for their legal right to rule over Italian empties of the social and historical con- (Dec. 2006), 520–49.
imperial communes like Parma, for exam- tents Marina keeps filling it with, resisting
ple, Holy Roman Emperors had to accept, her attempts to specify a viewer that is
paradoxically, the de-facto independence everywhere addressed but nowhere defined
of those cities. as an active enabler of Parma’s spatial geom-
Within this culture of independence, etry. In Marina’s citation of Salimbene de
elites in cities like Parma expressed and Adam (1220–ca. 1290) in an appendix, it is
constituted their urban imaginary as a dia- the “Parmese” as a unified urban commu-
logue of space rather than monologue of nity, or civitas, who built these two fine
control. As Marina shows, their ideals were squares, or urbs. He gives no individual
encoded, if not fully realized, in the city’s patron credit but there is a subtle ambiva-
statutes, where familiar medieval themes of lence about the city’s reorganization of

106   j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 01 3
References (1)
Areli Marina, "Order and Ideal Geometry in Parma's Piazza del Duomo," JSAH 65, no. 4 (Dec. 2006), 520-49.
November 03, 2025
Areli Marina
University of Kansas, Faculty Member
Niall Atkinson
University of Chicago, Faculty Member
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Order and Ideal Geometry in the Piazza del Duomo, Parma (2006)
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The Italian Piazza Transformed: Parma in the Communal Age by Areli Marina
michela rossi
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The communal palaces of medieval Italian cities. In: Political functions of urban spaces and town types through the ages. Making use of the historic towns atlases in Europe, edited by R. Czaja, Z. Noga, F. Opll, M. Scheutz, Boehlau Verlag: Wien, 2019, pp. 55-110
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One of the most enduring legacy of Communal Italy is represented by the Town hall, palatium comunis as it was called to mark the achievement made by the local governments. Many Italian piazzas are dominated by these public palaces whose origins, in some cases, can be traced back to the late 12th century, after the peace of Constance. The palatium comunis, a multi-functional building, underwent several transformations to effectively embody values and needs of those urban societies, which this paper aims to illustrate. For this reason an overview of the different cases of Italian town hall, over a period spanning two centuries will be given. Topography and functions of these public buildings will be considered in relation to understand how they, giving a strong sense of city’s sovereignty, shaped a new landscape in medieval towns.
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Wim Boerefijn
Journal of Urban History 42 (5), 2015
In the historiography of town planning, one still finds the old idea that the straight street is typical for the Renaissance, whereas medieval streets would typically be curved or crooked and irregular. In this article, this idea will be contested with the evidence of the scarce written sources concerning the subject of the layout of the city street from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and of the urban form of the new towns that were built in that period. It will also be shown that traditional interpretations of the famous passage from Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, which describes the advantages of winding streets as compared to straight streets, are largely wrong. Moreover, it will be argued that the general idea of medieval town building as something completely different than Renaissance town building is not correct.
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