Analogie tra design e progetto: dalle rovine mediterranee all'architettura neoclassica mitteleuropea

When J.J. Winkelmann’s essay Notes on the Architecture of the AncientTemples of Girgenti in Sicily was published in the last years of the eighteenth century, it brought about great interest in the discovery of archaeological Sicily. Aside from rare tests within the reach of few scholars, this essay represented the first document on archaeological Sicily in modern history, due to the fact that its writer was the most important inspirer of German Neoclassicism and father of archaeology. The interest aroused meant that in a few decades, the study itineraries dedicated to Mediterranean architecture underwent a change: the Grand Tour of Southern Italy stretched towards Sicily, both for territorial contiguity and for a common scientific research plan. Thanks to accurate graphic documentation campaigns and exchanges between archaeologists, architects and intellectuals, both European and Sicilian, new strength was given to an in-depth debate for scientific studies and insights into classical language in Sicily. Thus, a sort of process of study, analysis and reinvention of architecture was formed. In this context we analyse the path followed by a large community of scholars through drawings, with emphasis on understanding the work method pursued. The great protagonists of Neoclassicism, especially the Germans, once arrived in Sicily, they no longer seemed willing to “dream” as the English landscape tradition dictated, but rather engaged themselves in observing, measuring, collecting and cataloguing. Their relationship with antiquity and ruins was not mere mimesis, nor a simple mythical immersion in a past idealized by poets, but rather a confrontation on the great themes of the contemporary project generated by archaeological research. The attention to everything ancient and the analogy based on the relationship of similarity between the constituent elements of the classical language were in fact the basis on which the great design utopias of neoclassicism rested. No longer was there an ecstatic vision of ancient vestiges, but an active interest in understanding their most intimate laws in order to identify the classic rules of architecture and use them for a contemporary project. It is with this spirit, at the beginning of the nineteen century, that very young architects arrived in Sicily: they intended to finish their apprenticeship among the classic ruins of Sicily. So it was for Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Leo von Klenze and Jacob Ignaz Hittorff, who trained in Paris at the time of Hausmann’s plans.