Biography

Adrián Fernández Almoguera is a specialist in political and cultural History of Architecture in the age of revolutions. He earned his PhD in History of Architecture from Sorbonne University in 2020 with a dissertation on the construction of Madrid as a modern capital between 1770 and the fall of the Napoleonic Empire. At the Sorbonne, Adrián also held a teaching position in the department of Hispanic studies. Prior to his fellowship at Villa I Tatti, Adrián completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the École Française de Rome, where he worked on the relationship between political power and architectural thought in Rome and Naples between the Roman Republic of 1798 and the second restoration of Pius the VII in 1814.

Project Summary

While research on architectural culture in revolutionary Italy has experienced a renewal in recent years, the case of Tuscany remains unstudied. This project will approach the Florentine architectural debates during the French cultural and political domination of Tuscany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in order to explore the development of a national conscience conveyed through architecture and represented by the ideal of “toscanità.”. The research will explore how the political context of Florence around 1800 encouraged a phenomenon of inquiry and reinterpretation of Renaissance architectural models as a unifying artistic language to create a new national imaginary in this time of revolutions. Considering this phenomenon as an original cultural interpretation of a national past, this project will focus on the two spaces where it mainly took place: the Florentine academy, where modern architecture was being theorized, and within the Napoleonic urban projects being planned alongside those of the Florentine academy. This research ultimately seeks to understand how the revolutionary political system used the architectural transformation of major Renaissance buildings and urban spaces, identified as monumental images of “toscanità”, as a cultural mechanism for modern historical legitimation.