Le ‘Ruins’ di Robert Adams

The volume of the Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, published in London in 1764, constituted a calling card for architect Robert Adam (1728-1792) upon his return to England after his trip to Italy, during which his acquaintance with Giambattista Piranesi and Charles-Louis Clérisseau in Rome had strongly influenced him.

It was precisely with Clérisseau and a team of draughtsmen in their retinue that Adam organized the expedition to study the Palace of Split, indeed what remained of the original architecture, which had been contaminated over time by other styles and was presented to their eyes as a magnificent ruin generating other functions.

The precious engravings, in which reliefs from life are enlivened with picturesque scenes of life, soon became teaching aids for the Academies of the time, and it was in order to offer it to students of architecture that the painter Giuseppe Bossi (1777-1815) attempted an Italian translation. Secretary of the Brera Academy from 1801 to 1807, to him we owe the most important acquisitions of books, drawings, prints and plaster casts of the most famous classical sculptures and decorations, as well as the birth of the first nucleus of the Brera Picture Gallery. A commitment, that aimed at education, to which Bossi devoted himself with the same passion that animated his entire life as an artist in Napoleonic Milan.

Edited by.

Chiara Nenci – art historian, teaches Museology and Cultural Heritage at the Brera Academy. She contributes to exhibitions and volumes on the 19th century with writings devoted to landscape painting, fine arts exhibitions and the relationship between literary sources and artistic creation. A scholar of Giuseppe Bossi, she edited the critical edition of Le Memorie di Giuseppe Bossi (Milan 2003) and published several essays on the artist.