La lezione di Carlo Fontana in Danimarca: tecniche e modelli

In the second half of the seventeenth century an essential stop of the peregrinatio academica from Northeast Europe was Rome, where it was possible to complete studies at many academies and cultural circles or to access to some well-known art workshop. Prestigious destinations were the Accademia di San Luca and the atelier of Carlo Fontana, whose teachings were transforming the traditional learning of architecture. There is still a lot to investigate about the artistic link between Rome and Fontana’s lesson with Scandinavia, especially Denmark, which between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries lived an architectural season on the margins of the ferments irradiated from Italy to major European centres, because of the rooted Flemish and German matrix. Many drawings from Copenhagen’s archives are largely unpublished or little-known to the scientific community. Through the philological analysis and exegesis of significant examples – such as Christof Marselis’s sketchbook – the paper reconstructs the relationships derived from Fontana’s studio and teachings that contributed to accelerate the transformation of the Danish architectural language to the early Baroque classicism and to renew the teaching models at the Academy of Copenhagen.