VANVITELLI, LUIGI. — Architect, born in Naples on 26 May 1700, died in Caserta on 1 March 1773. Son of the Dutch vedute painter Gaspare Van Vittel, he was introduced by him to the study of drawing; he was Juvara (v.), and first a fellow student, then a colleague, of Nicola Salvi.
Among V.’s works, the following may usefully be recalled: Rome: extension of the façade of the Palazzo Olescalchi, Bernini’s work; Ancona: the Lazzaretto (1734), the Clementine Arch, the church of the Gesù (1746), the chapel of the relics in S. Ciriaco; Siena: a project for the rearrangement and transformation of the church of S. Domenico; Perugia: a project for the church and convent of the Olivetans; Macerata: a project for the church of the Misericordia; Loreto: completion of the bell tower of the Basilica, etc. But V. Caserta. In Rome, in fact, he intelligently transformed, with a remarkable sense of space, several great halls of the Baths of Diocletian into the imposing basilica of S. Maria degli Angeli. This work had already been begun by Michelangelo; he also supplied the designs for and directed the construction of the Augustinian convent (1746). In Caserta he built the Royal Palace. This is one of the greatest Italian architectural enterprises of the eighteenth century; it was commissioned from V. by Carlo III of Bourbon in 1751 and consists of a complex of buildings and gardens which, according to the monarch’s intentions, was to rival the most celebrated Versailles. Yet V.’s work clearly differed from that French model through a wholly different sense of architectural values and scenographic taste, a taste that was highly contested in V.’s case, so much so that people have even spoken, albeit improperly, of forms heralding Neoclassicism. Among V.’s other Neapolitan works are the church of the S. Annunziata, the arrangement of the Foro Carolino, the Palazzo d’Angiò, and the villa of the prince of Campolieto at Resina.
V., following the path indicated to him by Juvara but working with his own distinctive accents, is one of the most significant representatives of that architectural taste characteristic of the mid-eighteenth century which may be defined as neo-Sixteenth-century. This was a taste in which, reacting against the emphasis and the artists of the Baroque and Rococo, some of the most advanced and modern architects of the time showed a desire to return to the examples of Vignola and the more austere sixteenth-century masters, in harmony with the ideas that theorists and philosophers had long been expressing in the footsteps of the Belloni. — Vedi tav. XCIII.