L’attualità della bottega di Carlo Fontana: precettistica, apprendistato e professione

Carlo Fontana has recently been regarded as a forerunner of the integral architect because of his many-sided and wide-ranging project activity and the entrepreneurial dimension of his atelier. Fontana, a pupil of Bernini and protagonist of Roman and continental architecture between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, is now considered one of the initiators of the architecture atelier in the modern sense: a laboratory where young people and collaborators learned architecture by working alongside the master; up to eight pupils could work at the same time, specializing in different fields of the profession (measurer, hydraulic expert, draughtsman, researcher on ancient texts, building yard expert, cartographer, etc.). The projects that came out of his atelier were distinguished by an attention to rationality and typological renewal in a period still characterized by Baroque language. Fontana taught and played a central role in the Accademia di San Luca, where his entourage directed the courses and results of the final tests for a long time. He was a great motivator and imagined a new training of students, which combined aptitude for architecture with literary, scientific, musical and antiquarian knowledge.