Santa Margherita in Montefiascone: A Centralized Building Plan of the Roman Quattrocento

* The author is grateful to the Max Planck-Gesellschaft for a fellowship at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome which made this study possible. My special thanks go to the director of the library, Professor W. Lotz. Dr. H. Giess and G. Bauknecht helped with the photographic documentation. The architects P. Debold and M. Ueblacker kindly gave their assistance with the architectural surveying and drawing. For supplying me with many references and for their inspiration I am grateful to Professor G. Bandmann, Dr. G. Urban, Dr. C. Thoenes, and Dr. H. Hager who gave me information about the late Baroque reconstruction of the Cathedral and placed at my disposal from his study of Carlo Fontana—soon to be published in extenso—the photograph used in Figure 16 of this work.

Abstract

Although the Cathedral of Santa Margherita in Montefiascone is one of the largest centralized buildings of the Renaissance, scholars have until now shown little interest in it. This is probably due to the fact that the Cathedral was finally completed only in the seventeenth century according to a new plan, and that it was not counted among the buildings founded during the Quattrocento because it was presumed to be of a later date.¹ Only in 1959, on the day of the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of Michele Sanmicheli, whose name was linked to the building by Vasari, was attention drawn to it. Interest was intensified when the recently completed reinforcement of the building disclosed an impressive lower room.” As usually happens in the excitement of an anniversary celebration, there was no hesitation in ascribing this newly accessible room to the hero of the day.³ Even the façade (Fig. 2)—which, as a long inscription tells us, was built together with the two towers about the middle of the nineteenth century—was erroneously interpreted as a typical work of Sanmicheli's.⁴