Ferdinando Fuga - Work in Rome

Work in Rome

After his return to Rome, he was nominated the architect of the pontifical palaces by his Florentine countryman Pope Clement XII Corsini, a position which Benedict XIV confirmed. Fuga's masterwork is the palazzo-like screening facade he erected in front of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (1741–1743). A similar project, as if it were a dry run for the greater project, is the facade he provided for Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. In both cases, care was taken not to mar the mosaics of the medieval fronts that still lie behind Fuga's screens, which provided a narthex for each ancient basilica.

Among his other major commissions in Rome was the Palazzo della Consulta (1732–1735), which, like the nearby Palazzo Quirinale, fronts the Piazza di Monte Cavallo and housed the tribunal termed the Consulta and the secretariat of the Brevi as well as two corps of papal guards. Fuga ordered the two-storey facade with a piano nobile whose windows have low arched heads set in fielded panels, over a ground floor with low mezzanine. On the lower storey, the panels have channeled rustication and rusticated quoins at the corners. Pilasters are applied only to the central three-bay block, which barely projects, and to the corners.

The little church of Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte (1733–37) was a small project undertaken for the Compagna della buona morte whose role since 1538 had been to give decent burial to the unclaimed corpses of Rome. Fuga was himself a member of this confraternity which possessed its own coemeterium on the banks of the Tiber behind, lost to the nineteenth-century construction of the Lungotevere. The previous church of 1575 was demolished in 1733, and Fuga gave the new one an elliptical plan under an elliptical dome. On its crowded façade a triangular pediment encloses a segmental one, both cornices breaking forwards at the center and at the corners; pairs of columns fill the narrow recesses between the wide central bay and the corners, which are emphasized with stacked pilasters. Skulls wreathed with laurel serve as brackets for the pediment of the door.

Various transformations were effected for the relatives of the Corsini pope in the Palazzo Riario alla Lungara, which had been modified for Christina, queen of Sweden in the previous century but became now the Palazzo Corsini alla Lungara, purchased on 27 July 1736 by Don Neri and Don Bartolomeo Corsini, for 70 thousand scudi from Duke Riario. After Christina's death in 1689, her sculpture gallery and her library were emptied. Fuga was called in to pull together the 15th and 16th-century amenagements for the Corsini brothers, works which took from 1736 to 1758 before all was finally completed. The Corsini retained Christina's bedroom just as she had left it, and the "urban" front in piazza Fiammetta had to be left untouched, but the weight of her library had produced cracks in the vaulting below it, and repairs to the existing structure were not finished until 1738 (Holste). Fuga worked on the garden front of the palazzo, beginning with work on the library wing for Neri Corsini. In 1751-53 he added an identical central block containing a theatrical divided staircase, lit with large windows that looked onto the garden parterres, which had been modified and brought up to date in 1741. Then the two were linked with a ground-floor portico. In the interiors, fuga managed in innovative ways to maintain a separation of the functional service circulation from the suites of parade rooms.

The church of San Apollinare (about 1748) was another commission. He completed the Palazzo del Quirinale and the adjoining building housing the Segretario delle Cifre and the extended new wing (the Manica Lunga).