Interpreting Art Nouveau in drawings by Gino Coppedé

Gino Coppedé was an eclectic Florentine architect who actively contributed to Italian architecture during the first two decades of the twentieth century. During his professional career, his formal style—above all his drawings—was very similar to what in Italy was known as “stil-nuovo”, “stile foreale”, or Liberty, in other words the Italian version of Art Nouveau. This contribution reviewed the many works he executed in Rome during the last period of his career. Our critical analysis concentrated on the representation methods and communicative-graphic mediums used by the architect. The aim of the study was to try and understand to what extent a professional like Coppedé—who invented an architecture focusing on finance and business and therefore on the requirements of the world of luxury—was actually involved in the new cultural movement or whether his involvement was merely instrumental. We believe our results indicate a third option: if we consider his graphics, representation methods and style of drawing as signs of a specific cultural identity, Gino Coppedé’s works take on an independent denotation, difficult to define in a stylistically definable environment.