Leadership femminile e allegorie del potere nelle rappresentazioni urbane dello stato Sabaudo nel XVII secolo

In 1675 in the engraving by Antonio de Pienne based on a drawing by the Genoese painter Domenico Piola, the Savoy duchess Maria Giovanna Battista, regent of the state due to the minority of her son, is depicted in an allegorical guise against the background of an unusual urban representation of the capital. The fortification that surrounds Turin, built during the 17th century according to the modern military techniques of the court engineers, is replaced by imaginary continuous and uniform building facades. In the iconography of the Regency, with regard to urban representation, the image of the military city is therefore replaced by that of a civil city. This representation has a profound meaning: it is in fact the explanation of a political "manifesto". The paper will analyze this new form of urban representation by inserting it into the institutional and design context of the end of the 17th century, extending the study to all the actors involved and verifying the possible intertwining with similar iconographies.