Enciclopedia Cattolica

SERLIO, SEBASTIANO

Volume XI · p. 249 · 1953

English translation · Testo originale italiano

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

SERLIO, SEBASTIANO. - Architect and architectural theorist, born in Bologna on 5 Sept. 1475, died in Lyon in 1554.

Article illustration

Between 1509 and 1514 he is found in Pesaro as a painter of perspectives; then in Rome, where he studied scenography and determined the spatial vision that was to remain his own: perspectival and based on geometric relationships. From Rome, Serlio moved to Venice, where he was in 1532 and where, in 1537, he published Regole generali di architettura... sopra le cinque maniere degli edifici (IV bk.).

For Serlio’s practical architectural works, more than the documented but as yet unidentified projects at Fontainebleau, Ancy-le-France, and Lyon, or the Venetian Zen palaces, the Palazzo Testoni-Migliorini in Vicenza remains more interesting, albeit indirectly, since the faithful G. D. Scamozzi naively reproduced (c. 1550) the scheme conceived by Serlio for a Venetian palace without being able to execute II.

BIBL.: A complete monograph on the artist is lacking; special attention should be given to: G. C. Argan, s. V. ENOCH. Ital., XXXI (1936), p. 443; id., S. S., in L’arte, 3 (1932), pp. 183-99; for particular problems: A. Foratti, S. S. ed il barocco, in Atti e Mem. della R. Acc. di Lett., sez. di Scienze morali e storiche di Padova, 1929; J. Schlosser, Sull’antica storiografia ital. dell’arte, Palermo 1932, pp. 55-83; id., La letter. artist., Firenze 1935, pp. 352-56 and 364-365 (especially interesting for the chronology of Serlio’s editions); F. Barbieri, V. SCAMOZZI, VINCENZO, Vicenza 1932, pp. 28-33 and 41-50 (for relations with the Vicentine milieu).