These days the crowds of people in a hurry under the porticoes, in search of their last Christmas gifts, prevent us from fully grasping how much rhythm and music one can find in the sequence of columns or pillars. We become aware of this this when reading the words of Andrea Emiliani (1931-2019), the well-known art historian and student of Longhi and Arcangeli, who was Superintendent of Bologna for a long time. About the capitals that decorate the porticoes, he wrote:
“This 'vie des formes' coincides with the secret, mysterious vitality of an antiquarianism swarming with spectacular figurative protagonism, mainly expressed or compressed in the architectural decoration, inflorescence or cornucopia, collected in the basket of the capital. Which, whether tangle or still life, is the metronome that marks the pace of those who walk through the city, the rhythmic foot of a dynamic vision that from the portico, a corridor of perspective instability shaped by light, learns to be illusory and scenographic"
In these dense and stimulating words of Emiliani, in addition to the music of the footsteps on the floor, embraced by the rhythm of the columns, porticoes and the space below suggest a theatrical metaphor. The modular volumes of the porticoes, constantly changing thanks to the rich and varied decorative apparatus, measure depths that open to the unexpected. Their nature as a porous diaphragm between the life of the street and that of the houses, between interiors and exteriors, shows itself as an indefinite space, impossible to delineate with clear boundaries.
Sources
Andrea Emiliani, Introduzione a E. Raimondi, Codro e l’Umanesimo a Bologna, Bologna, il Mulino, 1987, pp. XVII-XVIII.
Photo by Lorenzo Burlando for Bologna Welcome