Giuseppe Venanzio Marvuglia

Who was Giuseppe Venanzio Marvuglia?

Giuseppe Venanzio Marvuglia was an Italian architect.

He received his first training in his native Palermo. This was followed by a period in Rome from 1747 to 1759. By the end of his stay a handful of progressive young architects and designers in the circuit of the French Academy in Rome were moving away from the ornate Baroque towards a simpler, more classical form of architecture under the influence of the architect Johann Joachim Winckelmann who was a protégé of Cardinal Alessandro Albani.

Marvuglia won the second prize in a contest organised by the Accademia San Luca, for a town square. His entry had at its centre a circular domed building reminiscent of the Pantheon in Rome, but with Baroque features in its columns and statuary.

Following his return to Sicily, he worked on the rebuilding of the monastery of San Martino delle Scale, in the mountains near Palermo; while he designed this in Baroque style, evidence that the tide of fashion was flowing towards Neoclassicism is evident through the straight clean lines as opposed to the curved facades and broken rooflines of typical Sicilian Baroque.

Though much of Marvuglia's work was in municipal architecture two churches are credited to him. One, at the very start of his independent career, is 'S. Filippo Neri': rather than in high Baroque it is built with a facade divided into three square divisions decorated with panels of bas-relief. The pilasters are flat and plain. The pediments are unbroken. The interior of the church has a gilded barrel vaulted ceiling, supported by great marble columns. What is unusual and a break in the Sicilian Baroque tradition here is that the columns do not support an arcade, but a flat entablature. This church, much preferred by English visitors in the 18th century to the ornate Sicilian Baroque, shows clearly the beginning of tastes moving from the Baroque towards a less decorated order.