ABSTRACT
'No sign of Frederick Hohenstaufen in the railway station at least.' With this enigmatic opening sentence, Stokes embarks on the ambitious project of his first mature book: to define, as the book's subtitle states, 'a different conception of the Italian Renaissance'. (Figure 5.1) This chapter aims to isolate the salient architectonic aspects of that conception. This first sentence alludes to the birth of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in Jesi in 1194, and can also be read as a riposte to the challenge thrown down by Osbert Sitwell in Winters of Content, published in the same year (1932), where Sitwell praises Frederick II's Castel del Monte in Puglia:
Who dares to compare even so bold and successful a work of the actual Renaissance as the Malatesta Temple at Rimini, with this edifice, save that the building in Rimini still retains its superb embellishments while those of Castel del Monte have long been smashed or lost. 1
Stokes signals his independence from the Sitwell brothers, and stresses the singularity of his project, by siting its inception in the small Marche hill town Jesi, remote from the usual European cultural itineraries. Thus Douglas Sladen in his guide Hou> to See Italy by Rail (1912) writes of 'Jesi, a town [...] ringed by medieval walls, of which no Englishman ever hears till he passes it, though the great Emperor Frederic II was born there'. 2 Here Stokes focuses on the Palazzo del Comune by the then little-known Renaissance architect Francesco di Giorgio. (Di Giorgio's importance was identified in Chapter 3 when tracing the evolution of Stokes's aesthetics in relation to Pound.) In The Quattro Cento Stokes surmises that[Francesco di Giorgio's] name is unknown to the general public. [...] Yet it is safe to predict, so obvious is the greatness of his achievements, that within a decade or so Francesco's name will become synonymous in popular imagination, like Leonardo's, with the Renaissance itself. The process of correcting Vasari's Florentine boost will go on. 3
In fairness to Vasari, he estimates Di Giorgio's achievements highly, but later the latter's name became obscure and it is only more recently that his importance as a theorist and civil architect has been re-established — though hardly to the level of a household name like that of Leonardo da Vinci.