Architecture Publications Architecture 2016 Excursus on Contessa Priuli, with postscript Colin Rowe Daniel Naegele Iowa State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/arch_pubs Part of the Architectural History and Criticism Commons The ompc lete bibliographic information for this item can be found at http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ arch_pubs/72. For information on how to cite this item, please visit http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ howtocite.html. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Architecture at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Architecture Publications by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Excursus on Contessa Priuli, with postscript Abstract I have dedicated this collection of essays to the memory of Contessa Lilian Priuli-Bon because I begin to understand that, unless I myself make notice of her, hers was a life and a sensibility – a remarkable historical intelligence – which likely will remain without record. Disciplines Architectural History and Criticism | Architecture Comments This article is from AA Files 72 (2016): 68–72. Posted with permission. This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/arch_pubs/72 72 Davide Spina 3 The Good, the Bad and the Malaparte Thomas Daniell 20 In Conversation with Itsuko Hasegawa Mario Tedeschini-Lalli 40 Descent from Paradise Laurent Stalder & Moritz Gleich 57 Stirling’s Arrows Colin Rowe 68 Excursus on Contessa Priuli, with a postscript by Daniel Naegele Irénée Scalbert 73 The Nature of Gothic Peter St John 96 Cathedral Silvia Micheli & Léa-Catherine Szacka 98 Paolo’s Triangolo Paulo Berdini 107 Introduction to La matematica della villa ideale, with a postscript by Daniel Sherer Hubert Damisch 115 Noah’s Ark Nicolas Kemper 127 The Hideous Duty of Isaiah Berlin Thomas Weaver 134 In Conversation with Alexander Brodsky Emma Letizia Jones 152 The Wanderer Henrik Schoenefeldt 161 The Lost (First) Chamber of the House of Commons Max Moya 174 Bawa’s Rolls 176 Contributors 72 aa Files The contents of aa Files are derived from the activities Architectural Association of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. 36 Bedford Square Founded in 1847, the aa is the uk’s only independent London wc1b 3es school of architecture, offering undergraduate, t +44 (0)20 7887 4000 postgraduate and research degrees in architecture and f +44 (0)20 7414 0782 related fields. 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(plus postage & packing) Back issues are available aaschool.ac.uk/aafiles I have dedicated this collection of essays to had been; and mostly down in Puglia. For the memory of Contessa Lilian Priuli-Bon Excursus on talk about Trani, Troia, Barletta, Bitonto, because I begin to understand that, unless Bitetto, Castel del Monte was abundant I myself make notice of her, hers was a life Contessa proof of all that. and a sensibility – a remarkable historical And then, as Contessa Priuli, Lilian intelligence – which likely will remain with- had acquired a genealogy. In the course of out record. Priuli-Bon the sixteenth and early seventeenth centu- The first thing to say about Contessa Pri- ries there were no less than three Doges of uli is that she wasn’t Italian and she wasn’t Colin Rowe Venice who carried the name Priuli: Lor- rich. In terms of theological speculation, in enzo (1556–1559), Girolamo (1559–1567) and Italy, she had moved in circles of intellec- Antonio (1618–1623). In Lilian’s terms, the tual brilliance. In terms of art history, she Doge Antonio eclipsed all others. It was he, had written a monograph on Sodoma (I have not read it). In terms accompanied by Galileo, who had climbed the campanile to take a of the history of ideas, she had acquired by marriage the celebrated look at Padua through Galileo’s newly invented optical instrument, Venetian name of Priuli and by historical empathy, by osmosis, had that famous telescope suitably lined in red velvet. absorbed the politics of the Venetian Republic; by means of visual Thus there was a big emotional investment, both in the history observation, reading and recollection, she had then, by the time of science and the history of Venice. Obviously, she felt almost a that I met her, placed herself centre-stage in a prominent theatre of proprietor of Galileo and identified with him in his condemnation sixteenth-century dispute. by the Vatican. And then she moved, by extensions, from science to Lilian Priuli-Bon was half-Swedish and half-Welsh – an unlikely Venetian politics of religion, from an extreme preoccupation with combination. Her father was Dean of Uppsala – I have always sup- Galileo to an extreme fixation with Fra Paolo Sarpi (something I’ve posed of the cathedral rather than of any university department. found quite easy to do myself since she told me all this stuff). It was And, when she was 18 or so, it became the ambition of her parents Sarpi who defended the Venetian state after it was put under an to marry her off to a Prussian landowner, Kurt von Beckerath – ‘but, Interdict by Pope Paul V (formerly Camillo Borghese) in 1606. And Colin, I could never have married von Beckerath, he was so cruel to still more. As part of his polemic against the Vatican, Sarpi wrote the his horses’. To me, this is like something out of Turgenev or Gogol. first history of the Council of Trent, dedicated to James i (James Vi I picture long extents of land, not much gradient, not quite steppes, of Scotland). A worshipper of the Venetian state, esto perpetua, Sarpi all interspersed with lakes and forests, farms and country houses, was more Venetian than Catholic, with the Venetian disdain for now totally vanished, but always – horses, horses, horses. Rome. After all, Venice could, and did, make a persistent claim for nyway, whatever the accuracy of this a superior legitimacy – it was Venice, affiliated both to Byzantium image, I think this is what the young and antiquity, which was the true heir of Roman virtu. And it was Lilian saw, and she acted accordingly – with this – the tradition of Venetian campanilismo – that Lilian she never did like horses. If not entirely remained associated. dazzling, the destiny which her parents And for these reasons she never was converted – she couldn’t had planned for her was – within the be Protestant and she wouldn’t be Catholic. She found another realms of imagination – clearly to be specimen of this via media predicament with another Priuli, who associated with a modest opulence; but that society, that Baltic light, in the 1540s was attached to the English Cardinal Reginald Pole, above all those horses – if not a fate worse than death, evidently, to then papal legate at Viterbo. And Reginald Pole? Educated at the her, this had presented itself as a near-equivalent. University of Padua, he was a cousin of Henry Viii and had, per- But fortunately help was at hand. She had an aunt; the aunt was haps, a rather better claim to the throne of England than his Tudor sympathetic; she understood – I think – the resolute type of St Bir- relative, who had Pole’s entire family exterminated, apart from gitta or Queen Christina, the type which used to abound as Swed- him.