Gems from the Museum

Continued from page 4

The Peruzzi Puzzle

The museums oldest drawing, an unsigned 16th-century architectural perspective rendering, has seen better days. In the candid words of the official museum description, the 86-by-53-centimeter piece has numerous folds, tears, losses, repairs, and graphite restitutions. Its edges are tattered, its stained, and it was missing a chunk at dead center that was later restored. There are numerous patches on the back side and inscriptions on both sides that may take years to attribute and understand. Theres also no clear understanding of the drawings purpose. It could be a sketch of some unknown building, a set design, a study for a religious panel, or a rendering used to teach architecture students the principles of perspective. But its faults and mysteries are also its fascination.

The elegant drawing was a 2003 gift from architect Hugh Shepley 59. If its attribution is correct, its also one of the few works by the Sienese architect Baldassare Perruzi in the United States. Historians, scientists, and architects are scrutinizing it to unravel its mysteries in time for an exhibition next fall. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the drawing is the six layers of patch repairs that have turned its back into a palimpsest, one that fascinates Gary Van Zante, curator of the museums architecture and design collection. What you have is a collage that shows [the drawings] history, he says. Various types of paper were used to make patches that either reinforce or restore parts of the original. The scraps of paper appear to have come from architecture or art studios. Two patches bear the faint outline of a ground plan; another includes part of a letter to an unnamed patron. Tests are under way to date the various scraps of paper, the ink, and the glue that holds the patches in place.

While Van Zante focuses on the forensic aspects of the work, Richard Tuttle, a professor at Tulane specializing in 16th-century Italian architecture, is providing the historical text for the exhibition and trying to nail down the drawings origins. Clues point to Peruzzi, a papal architect and contemporary of Michelangelo and Raphael. Two inscriptions mention him, columns are drawn with the finesse for which he is known, and the faade of a 16th-century Bolognese building he designed looks remarkably like the one in the drawing. Tuttle describes Peruzzi as a master of perspective drawing, perhaps the best in the last 500 years, and the museums piece, he says, is a tour de force in the genre.

For centuries, the drawing most likely was used to teach students about architectural perspective. This fall it is teaching once again. Architecture assistant professor Larry Sass, SM 94, PhD 00, and graduate student M. Svea Heinemann are creating a three-dimensional model of the faade as it would have looked if it had been built. When you reconstruct a drawing, you start asking lots of questions that deal with the relationship between design and construction, says Sass. Constructing the model should reveal whether the drawing was intended as the plan for a real building. Sass also plans to have four Peruzzi historians review the model and, based on their knowledge of the architects work, fill in the details not shown in the drawing. Then four models representing the historians interpretations will be created.

Next years exhibit in the Wolk Gallery of the School of Architecture and Planning will mark the drawings first public presentation and will introduce it to a wider world of scholarly debate.