SERLIO, SEBASTIANO. - Architect and architectural theorist, b. in Bologna on 5 Sept. 1475, d. in Lyon in 1554.
He is found between 1509 and 1514 in Pesaro as a painter of perspectives; then in Rome, where he studied scenography and determined what was to remain his spatial vision: perspectival and based on geometric relationships. From Rome S. moved to Venice, where he was in 1532 and where he published, in 1537, Regole generali di architettura... sopra le cinque maniere degli edifici (IV vol. of the his treatise, of which there subsequently appeared Book III in 1540, Books I and II in 1545, Book V in 1547; the book "on doors" in 1551 - these last four in France, where S. had gone as early as 1541 -; Book VII, posthumous, in 1575, at Frankfurt; Book VIII is lost, and a draft of it, together with Book VI, is to be found in the State Library of Munich.
The foundation of Serlio's culture is a free-and-easy dilettantism which, on a broad basis of uninhibited northern culture, welcomes the most diverse experiences, with the aim of constituting a repertory of forms ready to bend easily to the most varied purposes of building. In this attempt at synthesis Vitruvius is by no means untouchable, as indeed is none of the proposed components: but everything must be sifted with the help of reason.
S.'s work exercised a notable influence on the theory and practice of architecture in the second half of the 16th century, in Italy, especially in the Veneto, where his theory came to coincide with the aspirations of the cultured Vicentine milieu, linked to the Accademia Olimpica and versed with humanistic intentions in the problems of architecture. On French architecture of the second half of the 16th century S. had a very notable influence: because he disseminated in a land momentarily inclined toward the novelty of the Renaissance, but fundamentally anti-classical and "Gothic," the constructive forms, rendered decorative and external, of a classicism for show, a veritable harness superimposed on an irreducibly different structure.
As for the actual achievements of S. as an architect, more interesting than the works at Fontainebleau, at Ancy-le-Franc and at Lyon, certain through documentary evidence but so far unidentified, or than the Venetian Zen Palaces, remains, albeit indirectly, the Palazzo Testoni-Migliorini at Vicenza, where the faithful G. D. Scamozzi ingenuously repeated (c. 1550) the scheme conceived by S., without being able to carry it out, for a Venetian palace.
Bibliography7 works
Franco Barbieri