Jesuitic Architecture in Italy. Province Milan

The project is to understand as continuation of the - already started - second volume of a corpus about the architecture of the Jesuits in Italy, treating the Province of Milan. All buildings and projects of 37 settlements of the Jesuits in Liguria, Piemont, Lombardy and Corse are to document in the history of projecting and also of constructing - with the help of written source material, conservated at the Archivum Romanum and other archives at Milan, Torino and Genoa. On that base the art-historical interpretation of the buildings have to take place. In a next step the achieved results - and this is the decisive methodical extension of our research -, are to bind with the specific historical ambience of the Society of Jesus, because the specific structures and rules of the order exert important influence in forming the architectural themes. This kind of working out the different phenomena and solutions in constructing is a very innovative way, which has started the first volume of the corpus, published in 1985.

This project is based on two preceeding ones, whose aim was to produce monographies of all important buildings of the Society of Jesus in the province of Milan. This province, which included Lombardy, Piedmont, Ligury and Corsica, consisted of 36 settlements ("domus professae", colleges, novitiate-buildings and the so-called residences). The settlements, which were to be described and analyzed in the current phase of research, have been those: In Genoa the College in Via Balbi, the novitiate-building of S. Ignazio and also the small institutions Collegio Del Bene and Collegio Soleri, in Corsica the colleges in Ajaccio and Bastia; further the Collegio dei Nobili the in Turin, and the colleges in Saluzzo, Varese, Sarzana, Monza, Pavia and Alessandria; finally the Jesuit buildings in Milan, the center of the province and therefore of special importance: the college of Brera, the "domus professa" of S. Fedele and the novitiate-building of S. Gerolamo. The results achieved confirm the findings of the preceeding projects on a broader and firmer base. The research followed the same proceedings, which were developped by the project-supervisor in the first volume (dealing with the provinces of Rome and Naples) published in 1985. The 36 articles shall be published in the second volume of the Corpus of Italian Jesuit Architecture.