L’utopia e i suoi volumi: profili simbolico-politici dell’architettura medioevale e rinascimentale

The following paper aims to analyse the symbolic-political structures of the utopic imaginary, particularly focusing on the Late Medieval and Renaissance literary and architectural sources. A theoretical distinction is preliminarily made between the concepts of “utopian genotype” and “utopian phenotype”, characterized by a different force of attraction to the real world, as well as by different actors and forms of exercise (i.e. the intellectual and the book; the architect and the volumes). A second paragraph deals with ideal architectures within some famous utopian books of the Renaissance. A third and final paragraph compares the utopian vision of the architect – on hold between an ideal model and its structural requirements – , and the contemporary will to power of the sovereign, in turn in search of new forms of domination and control.