Rome's Forgotten Master
How the last great architect of the Popes was an anchor of grace in a tempestuous Europe...
The annals of Italian history do not want for architects of wonder or worldwide fame. And yet they contain the name of a man who produced the former, only to be robbed of the latter.
Giuseppe Valadier was the last great architect of the pre-revolutionary world, and the champion of Neoclassical architecture in Italy. With his lifespan cut almost exactly in two by the French Revolution — and the course of his career changed forever by it — he lived and worked through one of the most tumultuous periods of European history.
But while it may seem contradictory to build for both the Popes and Napoleon, Valadier did so with little compromise on his aesthetic. His secret? To take inspiration from Ancient Rome, which ironically endeared him to both sides of Europe’s turmoil.
The Popes, after all, had long been shepherds of the Eternal City, and the glorification of Rome was the glorification of the heart of Christendom. Napoleon Bonaparte, on the other hand, sought secular continuity with the Caesars of old. Valadier, therefore, could build for both by drawing from the same source.
The material legacy he left across Italy — and in Rome above all, from one of her most famous squares to her grandest basilica — is so sweeping that it is largely taken for granted. Yet the child prodigy Valadier’s craft steadied the Roman ship through one of her most perilous storms, and ensured her political humiliation was at least somewhat compensated by lasting material glories.
Now, let us tell the story of Valadier’s life and work, and reveal how he used architecture as an anchor of grace in tempestuous times…
The Silversmith’s Precocious Son
The Spring of 1762 was a blessed age for the Eternal City. On the 22nd May, amid the thunder of its now iconic cascade, Romans celebrated the inauguration of the great Trevi Fountain, still today the most famous monument of its kind in the world.
Yet just weeks earlier, on the 14th April, silversmith Luigi Valadier and Caterina della Valle, daughter of a Florentine sculptor, had welcomed a son who would one day gift Rome another of her revered urban wonders — along with a dazzling array of architectural jewels that spanned the breadth of Italy.
Giuseppe Valadier would not take long to emerge from obscurity. Indeed he was not even an adult when he achieved his first public recognition. A childhood spent both in the heart of the Eternal City, and never far from his father’s workshop, after all, would prove ample inspiration for the young boy, who enjoyed sketching Rome’s Baroque marvels.
That inspiration nurtured extraordinarily precocious talent, for Giuseppe was just thirteen years of age when he won the Concorso Clementino, an immensely prestigious architectural competition organised every three years by the Accademia San Luca — Rome’s foremost academy of art. Awarded a gold medal for his entry, a proposed new façade for the Church of San Salvatore in Lauro, Valadier nevertheless continued his education in literature and the sciences, while also training under his father.
Two years later, he would also win the Accademia’s Concorso Balestra, once again for architecture, receiving his accolade atop the Capitoline Hill itself, in the presence of senior Church dignitaries and aristocrats alike. Yet even this was not the height of honour achieved by the boy in youth.
In 1779, after visiting the Valadier family workshop, an impressed Pope Pius VI himself nominated Giuseppe Valadier as Cavaliere (Knight). At seventeen years of age, he was already a decorated member of high society.
As a result, he was able to devote his entire adulthood to the crafting of beauty.
The Bells of Saint Peter’s
In 1781, Pius followed the honours of rank by appointing young Valadier as Architect of the Sacred Apostolic Palaces, commencing his broader career even as he continued to work with his father’s foundry.
The first of his great Papal commissions would however not be in Rome, but in the mountainous heart of the Papal State, when in 1785 Pius charged Valadier with the refurbishment of the Duomo of Spoleto, which had been left in a somewhat bedraggled state by half-finished redecorations in the previous century. The interior of that Cathedral today, from its surprisingly ‘clean elegance’ behind the medieval façade, to its meticulously arranged chapels and the setting of its high altar, are indeed entirely the fruit of the Roman wunderkind.
Valadier would leave many a legacy in the Spoleto hinterlands, though he would seldom have the luxury to focus on one project at a time. 1785 would prove to be a bittersweet year, for the awarding of the Spoletan commission was tempered by the death of his father Luigi.
The sympathetic Pope, who esteemed both Valadiers, took Giuseppe under his wing, and soon saw to it that father and son alike would be immortalised in the Eternal City.
In 1786, Giuseppe was promoted to Cameral Architect, or superintendent of public works in Rome, and his first charge was to complete the work first begun by his father eleven years earlier — the casting of the Campanone, or Great Bell, for Saint Peter’s Basilica. One of the largest bells ever made, the nine-tonne Campanone was received across Rome as if a conquering hero, borne on a vast wooden sledge for her triumphal procession, before receiving the blessing of the Supreme Pontiff himself.
The largest of the bells of Saint Peter’s, the Campanone, originally hung from the dome of Saint Gregory, is today housed near the summit of the Basilica’s towering façade, below the elegant clock Valadier would also design at its southeastern corner. Sounded only for the foremost occasions of liturgy and ceremony, from the election and passing of a Pope to Easter Sunday and Christmas Day, the Valadier Campanone has been the most sonorous herald of the Roman Church ever since.
Yet as Rome began to embrace her new symphonies, storm clouds were gathering over the Old World that would change both the Eternal City and the career of Giuseppe Valadier forever…
Occupied Italy
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