The city as precarious medium in granducal Tuscany

Abstract

This paper focuses on the concept of infrastructural precariousness in early seventeenth-century administrative drawings that document urban and natural environments by the architect-engineer Gherardo Mechini. Each drawing responds to a report produced for the granducal administration on broken property: walls, streets, and banks crumbling due to floods, fires, storms, vandalism, or, more often, cumulative destruction over time. In addition to illustrating the textual descriptions of ruined architecture in lucid coloured washes, Mechini often pasted sheets picturing his proposed restoration directly above each image. A user could make, unmake, and remake virtually the built environment by flipping the paper up and down. He further collaborated on a series of topographic maps to picture Tuscan roads and land holdings. In what follows, I examine the innovative graphic solutions adopted by Mechini to visualise the legislative management of Tuscany’s precarious infrastructure and policies informed by nascent theories connecting architectural preservation to ethical rule. Drawing emerged as an expressive administrative instrument to probe how to maintain and improve the built environment and promote the perceived stability and unity of the centralised governing state.