Plautilla Bricci was the first female architect of the modern era. But she was forgotten. Melania Mazzucco now gives her a literary voice.
Chance saved her design. Plautilla Bricci: Sketch of the Villa Vascello, 1663 Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Photographic Alliance
He took it from the woman on the steps. Capomastro Veragiola would not accept any instructions. The only thing that helped was going to a notary. Plautilla Bricci forced him to execute his design for a villa on the western outskirts of Rome accurately and faithfully, with a six-page specification of quantities. And she demanded a solution from the stubborn construction manager. architect, The Architect: Her Creations Made in Male Positions architect. revolution.
It was a radical design. The 47-year-old architect designed a country house in the shape of a sailing ship stranded on a rock for Abbot Benedetti. The steep bow of the ship, with its galleon rails, seemed to be heading bravely toward St. Peter’s Basilica. Villa Suburbana on Gianicolo Hill, nicknamed “Il Vascello” or “The Ship,” must have looked like a Disney castle to its contemporaries. It’s not a bad idea to draw attention to yourself. Benedetti was, after all, a diplomat to the powerful Sun King.
It was 1663. The cannon shots, which had been mentioned and described as a curiosity in every guidebook to Rome for almost two centuries, suddenly ended their fame during the revolution of 1849. Only the artificial rock with waves inspired by Bernini remained. The villa fell into oblivion, like its great architect Plautilla Bricci. Historiography was not yet interested in women artists.
It took a feminist with a passion for art history like Melania G. Mazzucco to liberate the first female architect of the Baroque from the darkness of the archives. Her fictional biography, “L’architettrice,” became a sensation in Italy in 2019. Folio Verlag is now trying to capture a German-speaking audience with a translation called “The Architect’s Villa.”
Melania G. Mazzucco: “The Architect’s Villa”. Translated from Italian by Karin Fleischanderl. Folio Verlag, Vienna/Bozen 2024, 480 pages, 28 euros.
How could one forget the first female architect of the modern era? This was the question that the successful Roman writer asked herself in 2002 when, while researching the history of a villa, she stumbled upon the name Plautilla Bricci. “I discovered that very little was known about her life.” She spent more than a decade searching for answers, delving into archives and museum archives, assessing legacies, intellectual records and sketchbooks to explore the most hidden corners of her existence.
No place for women
The result is a historical novel of epic power. Mazzucco lets her protagonist, a girl of the people, tell her own story. As if holding a camera, she scans 17th-century Rome, a city full of Baroque artistic delights and archaic violence, where many craftsmen and artists compete for orders and prestige in the Vatican, while women seem to be given a place only behind walls.
Nevertheless, Plautilla made her way from painting to the sublime art of architecture, an almost exclusively male domain until around 1900. She was the first woman to design and build villas and chapels, directed artists such as Pietro da Cortona, participated in public competitions, and became an honorary member of the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts of San Luca. She runs a workshop with an assistant and lives off the income.
Flautilla was born in Rome in 1616, the third child of a poor artistic family. Like other female artists of the time, her early training took place in her father’s workshop. Giovanni Brizio, a gouty, untalented man, gave his daughter a solid humanistic education from an early age, introducing her to the drawing and painting techniques he had learned from Federico Zuccari and Cavalier d’Arpino.
Because Plautilla was forbidden to study the nude, she threw herself into religious themes, finding them easier to sell and devotional images that fit the image she had constructed of herself as a “virtuoso virgin.” To be able to work more freely in the future, women are rarely allowed to leave the house without a chaperone and are made to take a vow of chastity.
The French were a bit more open.
A decisive turning point came when he met the influential abbot Elpidio Benedetti, a cleric who served as the art agent and deputy to Prime Minister Jules Mazarin and later to Louis XIV, traveling between the Vatican and Paris to arrange for artists such as Bernini to redesign the Louvre.
The promotion of women is not accidental, especially since the French are open-minded, thanks to the Sun King’s mother, who supports the “Femmes fortes” movement. Elpidio supplies Plautilla with orders and makes her his in-house architect.
She gained her first architectural experience during the complex renovation of his city palace on the Via del Monserrato, which remains to this day. Their main work is the Villa del Vascello with its frescoes by Pietro da Cortona and its pleasure garden. Now respected as an architect, she was able to plan and build the chapel of the national saints in the French national church of S. Luigi dei Francesi, a true Baroque manifesto in stucco and polychrome marble. She also replaced the church walls with glass windows to better illuminate the altar of St. Louis. The chapel becomes Elpidio’s final resting place.
It is unclear where she received her architectural training, as she worked in the workshops of great architects such as Bernini and Pietro da Cortona. Women sometimes worked as laborers in construction huts to support the family business. But it was unthinkable for a woman to be in a leadership position.
They were denied an understanding of mathematics and three-dimensional thinking, as well as the ability to lead a team of bricklayers. Their artistic activities had to be carried out in closed spaces, so they were mostly confined to decorative arts and miniatures.
be humiliated by one’s colleagues
Plautilla’s career is not without its humiliations. Elpidio uses his inferior position to show off to his employers. Thus he presents the design proposal for Cardinal Mazarin’s tomb as his own. It is a mystery why in the villa guide published in 1676 he mentions her common brother as the sole architect, rather than Plautilla. Basilio, on the other hand, worked under her protection. Was he afraid of appearing too progressive to posterity?
She had a plate with her name engraved on it in the foundation of the cottage, as if she suspected it. Chance saved a copy, specifications, and designs.
Later historians attributed their work to Basilio or ignored it. Her more productive colleagues, Artemisia Gentileschi and Lavinia Fontana, were also forgotten. None of these models of existence caught on. They remained solitary warriors. But Mazzucco offers another explanation: “Plautilla had neither heirs nor students. Moreover, the French were hated in Rome under Mazarin and the Sun King.”
The names, facts, and dates in the novel are historical, as Mazzucco assumes in the afterword. “Of course, facts can be interpreted differently,” the author admits. She develops a secret love affair with the abbot and Plautilla, “for the abbot had granted her a lifelong residence in his will, as high-ranking clergy usually did with prostitutes.”
The research has begun
Mazzucco weaves together the artist’s life and the life of the city with the precision of a historian. The biography won the Silvia Dell’Orso Prize for best popular science book of 2020 and inspired an exhibition of her works at the Palazzo Corsini, where they were first shown. Since then, research has also been in full swing. More images have been discovered and the year of her death has been revised from 1705 to November 1692.
Meanwhile, the road to Villa Pamphili bears her name. A guided tour through the old town shows a few works and the different stages of her life between the streets of Tridente, Borgo and Trastevere. The church seems in no hurry to rehabilitate the forgotten artist.
Her painting of the Madonna in Santa Maria in Montesanto didn’t even have an updated caption until recently. “In 2016, restorers discovered the true story of the much-revered altarpiece,” says Mazzucco.
The situation is no better in the chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, where hundreds of visitors pass by every day to see Caravaggio’s paintings. Here, “P. Brich” said, “It’s as if you can’t believe it’s a woman.” Traces of Plautilla are hard to find in the Eternal City. Until now, only novels have occupied a worthy place in the city’s history.
