Venaria Reale, Turin
The subject of Hugh’s PhD. thesis was a seventeenth century hunting lodge outside Turin. Hugh has been preparing material for a website and a book on the subject. At first passing, this work may seem very remote from everyday practice in the UK. However, the thematic coherence of the hunting lodge and its use of multiple media explore principles which carry over to the current work of the studio. Below is the preface of the book.
La Venaria Reale is a hunting lodge built in the mid-seventeenth century for the Savoy Duke Carlo-Emanuel II. When I first saw it in the early 1980s it was all but derelict, a palace in decay at the head of a small run-down town on the outskirts of Turin. Since then it has been magnificently restored and has gained another layer of meaning as a tourist destination. The pleasant gardens are being replanted and now, although originally created as the preserve of the elite Savoy court, it is open to everyone. Admirable though this is, the pristine museum-like spaces and omnipresent visitors make it harder for me to imagine my way back into what it must have been like in the seventeenth century, even helped by Peter Greenaway’s mise-en-scènes. The sense of abandonment of the palace as I knew it then somehow evoked absence and that absence was of the Duke and courtiers. One almost felt that a lost glove or a fan might be discovered beneath the fallen stucco fragments littering the floors. The evident decay, with boarded-up windows and plants growing from the brickwork, made it easier to imagine the passage of the three hundred and fifty years since it was built.
Even by 17th-century standards the undertaking of Venaria Reale was extraordinary. None of the individual aspects of it are ground-breaking or of enormous artistic merit in themselves but the fact of its scale and completeness of conception most certainly is. It was built ex novo on a marsh outside Turin between 1655 and 1678. The project drew together urban design, architecture, festival, painting, sculpture, emblems, [1] garden design, theatre, dance and the hunt all under the aegis of rhetoric. [2] The word ‘microcosm’ is much overused but at Venaria it is no exaggeration. It seems as though the project strove to include and control every aspect of life as it was known at the Savoy court.
This is charmingly evident in the huge commemorative book, ‘La Venaria Reale’, produced (largely) by the architect of the project, Amadeo di Castellamonte He chose to describe the project by narrating a ‘day in the life’ of the court at Venaria. This enabled him to touch on all manner of things including, to name a few, the magnificence of the town and garden, the solemnity of the morning mass before the hunt, the practical details of the kennels and how the dogs are looked after, the splendid clothing of the courtiers, the running of the hunt, the table plans for the subsequent banquet and the music and theatre that follow it. These are described in great detail. The running of the hunt, for example, was strictly organised and orchestrated and Castellamonte spends several pages describing the movements of the groups of hunters and attendants and the types of equipment deployed. It seems to have been conceived almost like a ballet rather than as a contest between man and nature. It is evident that the court’s activities were highly controlled and, alongside the architecture and decoration of the palace, played an important role in reinforcing the overall rhetorical intent.
In his book, Castellamonte doffs his hat to Emanuale Tesauro, a court rhetorician and philosopher of international standing, ‘ … rare talent of this era, within whose ashen, aged and venerable head is an immortal and everlasting spirit … ’ [3] Tesauro was responsible for the choice of subjects and the mottoes accompanying the paintings which decorate the rooms of the palace and, I will argue, probably conceived the rhetorical programme of the entire ensemble. It is his involvement in the project which gives it the coherence and ambition which I shall describe in the following chapters.
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Footnotes
[1] Emblems were a popular form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Essentially they were images accompanied by a short motto and taken together they worked as metaphors illustrating moral lessons on themes derived from contemporary rhetoric (sermons, panegyrics etc.). They were much used in the interior decoration of important buildings.
[2] The discipline of rhetoric, which has its roots in public speaking, became tremendously important in all the arts by providing the structure for their practice (terms such as ‘composition’ and ‘invention’ derive from rhetoric) and the stockpile of themes for their content. The term ‘rhetorical programme’ can be used when the underlying structure, motives and themes governing the work of art, be it a play, architecture, festival or whatever are derived from rhetorical practice.
[3] As described in the introduction to Castellamonte’s descriptive book La Venaria Reale