SACCONI, GIUSEPPE. — Architect, b. at Montalto nelle Marche on 5 July 1854, d. at Collegigliato di Pistoia on 23 Sept. 1905.
A pupil in 1874 of the Accademia romana di Belle Arti, where he was a student of Luigi Rosso, Sacconi gained his most significant Roman experience under Virginio Vespignani, with whom he collaborated on the restorations of the basilica of Loreto, and whose principles of restrained Renaissance imitation he followed in his first completed work: the collegiate church of S. Francesco at Force, begun in 1880. In that same year the competition was announced for the monument to Victor Emmanuel II in Rome; after various vicissitudes Sacconi was declared the winner in 1884.
The work was administered in the original designs, though not a little modified during the course of execution; upon its completion, after Sacconi’s death, a commission composed of the architects G. Koch, M. Manfredi and P. Piacentini oversaw the work, which was then much maligned, though today a more balanced judgment may be expressed. Undoubtedly grand in conception and reflecting with extreme clarity the taste of its age, very careful and even elegant in certain details, in its great mass two fundamental errors may be recognized. The first and gravest was committed by Sacconi in the strictly architectural realm when he failed to differentiate structurally the enormous base, vast on its flanks, smooth, polished and flat, from the upper parts of the building characterized by the portico without depth and by the two Grecianizing little temples. The monument, which was meant to convey the sense of an acropolis—as it indeed was in the original design—because of that undifferentiated base now gives the impression of being the translation into marble and in gigantic forms of the top of a piece of furniture. The other error lies in the ill-advised choice of botticino marble for the cladding of the mass. To the first of these errors it may be objected that Sacconi found the ground of the Capitoline Hill unsuited to the erection of an acropolis; to the second, that the choice of marble was imposed by others for reasons extraneous to art.
Completely absorbed by the work on the Vittoriano, Sacconi had few opportunities to work elsewhere; nonetheless, mention should be made of the altar of the chapel of the Spaniards and the choir of that of the Germans, designed in Gothic style for the basilica of Loreto, of which Sacconi directed the works from 1886 until his death.