THE RENAISSANCE 'STUFETTA' IN ROME: THE CIRCLE OF RAPHAEL AND THE RECREATION OF THE ANTIQUE (ITALY)

The dissertation examines the Renaissance stufetta, or bathing room, as one of the most complete expressions of the Renaissance aspiration to recreate the ambience of the antique. The dissertation focuses on those stufette with decorative cycles which were designed by the circle of Raphael (broadly considered as Giovanni da Udine, Giulio Romano, Baldassare Peruzzi, and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger) and which are extant in Rome: the stufetta of Cardinal Bibbiena and the so-called stufetta of Clement VII in the Vatican Palace, and the bathing rooms in the Cancelleria, the Palazzo Baldassini and the Castel Sant'Angelo.;The development of the stufetta as a recreation of the antique is surveyed with the aid of a catalog of bathing rooms spanning the 14th to the early 17th centuries. The entries provide information regarding the patron, architect and artists, documentation of the building history of the bathing room and its date of construction, and a description or a reconstruction of the room and its decoration.;Various patterns in the construction and decoration of bathing rooms during the Renaissance emerge. Although stufette are generally small, their architectural features and the provision of heating mechanisms evince a careful emulation of antique prototypes. The rooms are typically decorated all'antica, with grotesquerie and mythological scenes often featuring Venus and reflecting the function of the bathing rooms for purposes of health, cleanliness, and pleasure. A repudiation of these functions results in the gradual demise of bathing rooms toward the end of the Cinquecento, when there was no longer the intense desire to emulate antiquity which had stimulated the creation of the Renaissance stufetta.;Apart from the important summary in C. L. Frommel's study of the Renaissance palace in Rome (Der Romische Palastbau der Hochrenaissance Berlin, 1973, I, 75-78), the bath has not previously been studied as a significant type. Individual baths, with the exception of Cardinal Bibbiena's stufetta, have generally been published as brief notices without close examination of their decorative and iconographic programs. The present study considers problems of dating and attribution and the manner in which artists drew inspiration from antiquity through literary and archaeological sources.