SACCONI, GIUSEPPE. - Architect, b. at Montalto in the Marches on 5 July 1854, d. at Collegigliato di Pistoia on 23 Sept. 1905.
A pupil in 1874 at the Roman Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a disciple of Luigi Rosso, S. gained his most interesting Roman experience with Carimini, whose collaborator he was in the restorations of the basilica of Loreto, and whose imitative principles of a sober Renaissance S. himself followed in the first work he completed: the collegiate church of S. Francesco at Force, begun in 1880. In that year the competition was also announced for the monument to Victor Emmanuel II in Rome; after various vicissitudes S. was proclaimed its winner in 1884.
A work much admired in its original designs, not a little modified in the course of execution — which, after S.'s death, was carried to completion by a commission formed of the architects G. Kock, M. Manfredi and P. Piacentini — and therefore vilified beyond measure, today a more serene judgment may be expressed of it. Undoubtedly grandiose in conception and reflecting with extreme clarity the taste of its age, very careful and even elegant in some details, in its great mass two fundamental errors are to be recognized. The first and more serious was committed by S. in the strictly architectural field, when he failed to differentiate structurally the very great base — enormous on the sides, smooth, polished, flat — from the upper parts of the building, characterized by the portico without depth and by the two Grecizing tempietti. The monument that was to give the sense of an acropolis — as indeed it was in the design — because of that undifferentiated base now gives the sense of being the translation into marble and into gigantic forms of the "riser" of a piece of furniture. The other error is given by the inopportune choice of botticino for the facing of the mass. To the first of these errors it may be objected that S. found the ground of the Capitoline unsuited to the erection of an acropolis, and to the second that the choice of marble was imposed by others for extra-artistic reasons. Completely absorbed by the works of the Vittoriano, S. had few opportunities to work elsewhere; nevertheless one recalls 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, whose works S. directed from 1886 until his death.
Bibliography2 works
Emilio Lavagnino