During my term at the Center, I worked toward completing a book manuscript devoted to the Codex Mellon at the Morgan Library and Museum—a critical edition and interpretive study of one of the most significant architectural sketchbooks of the early 16th century. Long associated with the earliest phases of the reconstruction of Saint Peter’s Basilica, the codex has traditionally been mined for individual sheets related to Donato Bramante, Raphael, Baldassarre Peruzzi, and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. My project instead approaches the manuscript as an organic whole: a carefully constructed visual narrative offering an exceptional vantage point onto architectural culture in Rome from the pontificate of Leo X (1513–1521) to the years preceding the Sack of Rome (1527).

The Codex Mellon is a collection of copies and derivations, and for that reason it illuminates the mechanisms of emulation that shaped architectural invention in Renaissance Rome. Through drawing, its author—the Bolognese sculptor Domenico Aimo—absorbed, compared, and reconfigured formal solutions developed within the orbit of Saint Peter’s fabbrica. The sketchbook documents not only alternative projects for the basilica—centralized and longitudinal, monumental and experimental—but also contemporary palace facades such as Raphael’s Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila and Palazzo Alberini. In these pages, ancient prototypes and modern adaptations are deliberately juxtaposed, revealing the semantic density and ideological charge of antiquarian architecture in the “theater-state” of early modern Rome.

A central argument of my study is that the codex invites a reconsideration of citation and antiquarianism in early 16th-century architecture. Its copies are rarely mechanical transcriptions. Rather, they function as “critical copies,” in which monuments such as the Colosseum, Baths of Caracalla, or exedra of Trajan’s Market are compared with, and at times superimposed upon, contemporary designs. Through these visual associations, architecture becomes a device for constructing power ideologies. By assimilating and reinterpreting imperial Roman models, papal projects—most notably New Saint Peter’s—asserted continuity with antiquity, appropriating the mechanisms of material and formal persistence that define Rome’s built landscape. The codex makes this process visible: Fragments, profiles, orders, and spatial schemes are extracted from ruins and redeployed to legitimize new forms of monumental representation.

The exceptional state of preservation of the Codex Mellon—still bound as originally conceived—bears singular witness to how early modern architectural copybooks were created. Rather than treating it as a repository of isolated inventions, my research emphasizes its internal structure. The sequence of drawings devoted to Saint Peter’s presents projects traditionally attributed to different architects as part of a continuous design process. Plans associated with Raphael, Peruzzi, and Sangallo appear side by side, without hierarchical distinction, forming an uninterrupted flow of proposals that foreground scale, structural experimentation, and dialogue with ancient precedents.

This perspective yields significant novelties for understanding the early phases of Saint Peter’s. The codex challenges the historiographic model that frames the basilica’s reconstruction as a succession of rival geniuses. Instead, it reveals a shared design culture grounded in emulation, adaptation, and incremental transformation. Hybrid schemes—combining centralized cores with longitudinal extensions or incorporating earlier structural solutions into revised plans—demonstrate that the building site functioned as a laboratory of collective experimentation. The grammar of monumentality that would define European classicism emerges not as the product of a single vision, but from sustained dialogue among multiple designers working within a common linguistic horizon.

The progress achieved during my residency benefited enormously from systematic exploration of the Italian Architectural Drawing Project Archive, established at the National Gallery of Art Library by Hank Millon in the 1980s and 1990s, and especially from the extensive photo collection of early modern architectural drawings and sketchbooks from numerous public and private European collections, still largely unpublished. This sustained browsing enabled new identifications of drawings in the Codex Mellon and clarified its position within the network of anonymous antiquarian copybooks produced in the early 16th century. Seen against this broader corpus, the codex appears not as an isolated object but as a node in the circulation of images, models, and design strategies.

By recontextualizing the Codex Mellon within this network and foregrounding its logic of emulation, my project illuminates the intellectual ambitions embedded in its pages and reassesses the collaborative and hybrid character of Renaissance architectural production. In doing so, it contributes to a renewed understanding of drawing as an epistemic instrument—mediating between antiquity and innovation, citation and invention, representation and power—at one of the most consequential building sites in European architectural history.

Università di Verona
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, fall 2025

Dario Donetti will complete his book manuscript at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. He will then return to his position as associate professor of architectural history at the Università di Verona.