« A norma del disegno stato rimesso» : Leonardo Marini, Giuseppe Battista Piacenza et Carlo Randoni, maîtres du décor intérieur néoclassique à la cour de Turin (1775-1821)

Architects always ruled interior decorations in the apartments of the court of Turin. Huge public collection of drawings in the XVIIth century show detailed carved wooden ceilings conceived by the ducal engineers. Few final drawings in private collections and as a huge amount of sketches show the genius of Filippo Juvarra as interior designer. From the follower, Benedetto Alfieri, we got great albums of architectural drawings, and it’s less clear how much freedom carvers and stucco-makers had. Anyway in the last 30 years of the XVIIIth century two collections witness how the whole conceiving of interior decoration was strongly ruled by only one mind. During the reign of Victor Amadeus III the court only promoted the apartments updating, a new goal for interior designers as Leonardo Marini and Giuseppe Battista Piacenza and Carlo Randoni. Great drawing collections by these designers show us how deep they hold control of each detail. When the Russian Grand Duchess Maria Fiodorowna and her husband Paolo Romanov visited in 1782 the new apartments in the country house of Moncalieri they asked to Marini copies of the project, focusing the central role of the artist, not an architect but a stage, coach, costumes and interior designer. Piacenza and his collaborator Randoni, on the contrary, were architects. Their album of drawings and sketches is a very complete system of interior elements: commodes, chairs, consoles, fireplaces, complete wall and ceiling decorations, painting frames, etc. The intervention of Marini was limited to few apartments, Piacenza and Randoni left their signature in more than six, in many court palaces, introducing the “good taste” from Lombardy more then Neoclassicism directly from France. Best reference were the two books published by Giocondo Albertolli in 1782 and 1787, but also, partially, the drawing collections published by Charles Delafosse (1768) and Juste-François Boucher (1775).