The Loggia in Italian Communes

In this book, Kim Sexton offers a cultural history of loggias and their role in modernizing late medieval urban life in north and central Italy. In a narrative organized thematically around seismic ideological shifts in republican city-states from circa 1100 to 1400, she demonstrates that the loggia—a compact and refined form of portico—was much more than a convenient shelter on public squares and streets. Not only did loggias offer protection and adornment to both casual gatherings and ceremonial events, but they also functioned as societal tools that facilitated the collective validation of changing mores. Sexton argues that the increasingly monumental loggias commissioned by Italian communes for civic, commercial, and social settings reflects the influence of three secularizing trends: the process of political legitimation in self-governing, proto-capitalistic states, which required innovative, yet prestigious architectural forms to mediate unaccustomed rituals; the development of visual regimes that steered observers toward looking upon and remembering select public activities in a favorable light; and the rise of sophisticated temporal programs of ornament that rivaled ecclesiastical art in rhetorical force. Sexton further argues that both art and architectural historians can benefit from understanding the power of built form to exhibit human interaction, not only because loggias did so in a way that made architecture and spectacle seem indivisible and semi-pictorial, but also because a multi-disciplinary approach allows these highly elaborated spaces of encounter to emerge as key elements in theorizing the late medieval Italian city.     

List of illustrations 

Acknowledgements 

List of abbreviations 

Introduction: Seeing Loggias

Utilitarian Shelters and Instruments of Social Change
Framing the Loggia
Overview of the Chapters

Chapter 1: Justice

Laubiae in Carolingian and Ottonian Italy
The Social Landscape of Early Modern Loggias in Italy

Chapter 2: Law

Early Communes and the Challenges of Self-Governance
Northern Church Porticoes at the Dawn of the Communal Era
Podestas and Northern Communal Loggias
Milan’s Loggia degli Osii
Loggias and Mobile Urbanites in Milan
Loggias, Imaging, and Memory
Loggias and Communal Government in Rome
Early Seggi in the Kingdom of Naples

Chapter 3: Money

Medieval Cultures of the Coin
The Loggia of the Merchants in Venice
The Loggia of the Merchants as a Social Tool
Banking Porticoes: The Campo S. Giacomo at the Rialto
Affective Urbanism and Venice’s Money Loggias
Merchant Courts and Later Loggias

Chapter 4: Play

Opening Space for Public Leisure
Communal Leisure: Treviso’s Loggia dei Cavalieri
Class Segregation and Loggia Sociability
Urban Environments and Loggias for Play
Picture Perfect Leisure
Class, Gender, and the Social Space of Leisure
The Scourge of Gambling

Chapter 5: Politics

Republican Ideologies and Civic Loggias
The Framing of Republican Rituals in Florence
Civic Loggias as Symbols of Liberty
The Urban Calculus in Central Italy
Loggia Performances: A Citizen’s View
The Civic Loggia as Review Stand
Picturing Civic Loggias in Central Italy
The Loggia dei Lanzi’s Sculptural Program
Cross Currents

Conclusion 

Bibliography

Index