From survey to graphical analysis of the monumental entrance to the Verano Cemetery in Rome

This contribution describes the results of graphical analysis conducted on the monumental entrance to the Verano Cemetery in Rome, which was designed in the first half of the 1800s by Virginio Vespignani and finished around 1875 by the architect Agostino Mercandetti. The building, designed as an integral part of the architectural complex composed of the four-sided portico and the Church of Santa Maria della Misericordia, differs stylistically from a layout based on Renaissance Revival compositional canons, instead favouring a magniloquent symbolic allusive monumentality. The original centre of the Verano Cemetery was the object of studies conducted especially in the area of art history and architecture. Nevertheless, the substantial absence of specific design documentation and the objectively low reliability of the available documentary material, which almost exclusively regards the general layout, have not as yet enabled specific targeted investigations of the geometric-proportional aspects of the individual buildings. Following a series of survey campaigns, a body of drawings was organized, complete with all the representations useful for analysing the building system in question. With the geometric reasoning of classical and archaeological origin characterizing the work of Virginio Vespignani, the design/drawing of the monumental entrance to the Verano Cemetery is associated with a desire for an expressionist matrix illustrated through the clear evidence of the four “out-of-scale” statues and two towers. These are perfectly assembled in a geometry that, overcoming its own latency, becomes nearly tangible, contributing, like the physically explicit symbols, to the conformation of the perceived image.