Pienza Culture

The idea

Pienza matters because of what it was for. Pius II — born here in 1405 as Enea Silvio Piccolomini, humanist scholar and diplomat before he was pope — had his birthplace rebuilt from about 1459 as a demonstration of how a town ought to be arranged. The result is described as the touchstone of Renaissance urbanism and the first application of humanist urban planning concepts anywhere.

What that means in practice is visible in one square. Piazza Pio II is composed rather than decorated: the Duomo, Palazzo Piccolomini, the Palazzo Vescovile and the Palazzo Comunale are placed in deliberate relation to one another and to the viewer, so that the whole can be understood from where you are standing. Medieval squares happened; this one was drawn.

The architect, and the one correction worth making

The design is Bernardo Rossellino's — Bernardo Gambarelli — possibly in collaboration with Leon Battista Alberti, who wrote the century's central treatise on architecture. Pius II was the patron, not the architect, and the distinction matters here more than usual: the whole significance of Pienza rests on the quality of the design decisions, and those were a professional's.

The cathedral

Consecrated 29 August 1462. A church built in one campaign to one brief, which is rare — most Italian cathedrals are arguments between centuries. The interior is a hall church, lit from above, and it is a 15th-century conception of religious space delivered whole.

The Borgia connection

The Palazzo Vescovile on the square was built by Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI — which means two popes are represented in a square in a village of two thousand people.

The landscape as culture

The Val d'Orcia's inscription in 2004 turns on the fact that the valley "has been depicted in works of art from Renaissance painting to modern photography". Those cultivated hills are the background of quattrocento painting, and Pienza was deliberately built facing them. The town and the view are a single cultural statement about the relation of civilisation to cultivated nature — which is as humanist a proposition as the square itself.