SACCONI, GIUSEPPE. — Architect, born at Montalto in the Marches on 5 July 1854, died at Collegigliato di Pistoia on 23 September 1905.
A student in 1874 at the Roman Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a pupil of Luigi Rosso, S. gained his most interesting Roman experience under Carimini, with whom he collaborated on the restoration 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 same year the competition for the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome was announced; after various vicissitudes, S. was proclaimed the winner in 1884.
A work greatly admired in its original designs, considerably modified during its execution, which after S.’s death was completed by a commission composed of the architects G. Kock, M. Manfredi, and P. Piacentini, and subsequently disparaged beyond all measure, it can today be judged more serenely. Undoubtedly grandiose in conception and reflecting with extreme clarity the taste of its age, highly accomplished and even elegant in certain details, the great mass contains two fundamental errors. The first and more serious was committed by S. in the strictly architectural sphere, when he failed to structurally differentiate the enormous base—vast at the sides, smooth, polished, and flat—from the upper parts of the building, characterized by the portico without a background and the two Grecian-style temples. The monument, which was meant to convey the sense of an acropolis—as it indeed did in the design—because of that undifferentiated base now gives the impression of being the translation into marble and gigantic forms of the “upright” of a piece of furniture. The other error lies in the inappropriate choice of botticino marble for cladding the mass. To the first of these errors it may be objected that S. found the Capitoline terrain unsuitable for the erection of an acropolis; to the second, that the choice of marble was imposed by others for reasons unrelated to art. Completely absorbed by the work on the Vittoriano, S. had few opportunities to work elsewhere; nevertheless, mention should be made of the altar of the Chapel of the Spaniards and the choir of that of the Germans, designed in the Gothic style for the basilica of Loreto, whose works S. directed from 1886 until his death.