The Stupendous Stupinigi: How the Baroque Invented Streaming Media

The Stupinigi Royal Hunting Lodge, built in the early 18th century, is located in Stupinigi, a suburb of Nichelino, near Turin, Italy. It is one of the residenices of the Royal House of Savoy in Turin, part of the UNESCO World Hertiage Stie list.

Surrounding ourselves with images that seduce, transport, amaze, delight, or distract us is nothing new. Case in point: the Stupinigi “hunting lodge” the Savoy royals built for themselves outside of Turin, Italy. A sprawl of Baroque spreading out in wings that, in plan or God’s Eye view, resemble the antlers of the deer that might have been hunted on the surrounding grounds, its interior is painted, gilded, sculpted and in general covered with a riot of paintings and illusions that are so intense as to be disorienting.

I made the trip to the Palazzinia di Caccia of Stupinigi mainly for the plan. Ever since I first encountered the 1729-1731 design by Filippo Juvarra, house architect to Victor Amadeus II of the Savoy House, as well as to popes and potentates across Southern Europe, in some dark room where they still showed real slides, I have long been fascinated by the freedom with which the designer strung the 153 rooms (or so; counting what counts as a room is a bit tricky there) together across the landscape. The building is bilaterally symmetrical, opening its wings to a forecourt that is flanked on its other side by service buildings, and to the rear to the hunting park, while the two side wings gesture towards what was originally more nature. The central reception room, basically an oval whose edges are so complicated by columns, pilasters, domes, half domes and other fragments of complex geometry as to make it almost dissolve, is by far the largest space, and is surmounted by a statue of a stag that makes the Stupigini’s purpose even clearer.

What I was not expecting was the degree to which the decorators Juvarra and his former employee and successor (the first of many who enlarged and enhanced the original), Giovanni Tommaso Prunotto, assembled ran riot across that already complex layout. The first generation of painters were apparently almost all Venetian, bringing with them the ability to dissolve surfaces into expanses of sky, landscapes, and classical architecture populated by people and animals gamboling through these fictional expanses.

You can tell some of the later decorations, all the way up through work done when one of Napoleon’s vassals was in charge there and later, more sober dynasts, apart because it tended to rely more on geometric effects, including trompe l’oeil grids swirling into corkscrew distortions of domes as well as more placid evocations of windows that are not really there. Other decorators were even more modest, whether in just faking the marble on the plaster columns or drawing precise versions of the flowers you could find in the surrounding forests and fields.

What matters most is the diversity and sheer quantity of this painting, which at times becomes three-dimensional as the moldings and coffers extend, drip down the walls, or open to clerestories. There is no place for the eye to rest, with the focal point of every wall or ceiling in every room shifting, pulling in and out of a fake vista, or pulsating with patterns before leading you in angles disappearing into this falsework to the next collection of imaginary spaces.

There was, of course, a method to this madness. The Savoys wanted to delight in their country retreat, bringing the joys of both the real and the imagined nature into their already light-filled and open home. But the Stupinigi was also part of a larger building project through which they sought to impose their reign through a series of architecture set pieces. An axis leads directly from the hunting lodge, which the Savoys also used for many of their dynastic weddings and other power-affirming celebrations, to their palace in the middle of Turin. It is crossed there by a second axis, which runs from the Rivoli Palace, where the kings were traditionally born, to the Basilica of Superga, high on a hill overlooking the town, where they were buried. Their power was inscribed on the landscape, and then the property they ruled was tamed, transformed into the geometries of their buildings, and both represented and extended through the decorative schemes inside the structures.

Zairon, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons]

Unlike the internet and social media, in other words, theirs was a unitary vision, however difficult it might be to discern it at first glance, underlying all this profusion. That is very different from the continually changing imagery that flits across our many screens, turning them into vistas not just of landscapes, but of whole alternative universes. Yet, as we are increasingly coming to realize, the situation today might not be that different.

The supposedly free algorithms that control the flow of those visuals, however much they are produced by countless creators, are entrained towards political and commercial purposes. They are also as much the embodiment and biases and worldviews as the monarchist universe of the Savoys. Perhaps if we can learn to parse and decode this 18^th century collection of social feeds, it might help us understand the seeming anarchy through which we go hunting for meaning or pleasure and find the lines of control on which they are based.

Unfortunately, although the palace was restored recently, so that you can experience the paintings and architectural elements close to how they appeared when each of the elements were added (keeping in mind that also means some earlier pieces were lost), you now enter the Stupinigi through what were once the stables, slogging through didactic exhibitions that seem to have learned nothing from the beauty of the subjects they are supposedly enlightening, before winding your way through anterooms and ancillary bedrooms until you arrive in the formal heart of the palace, then letting you meander through the facing wing in a confusing manner and then making you return, in a deflating coda, the same way you came. That lack of clarity extends out into the landscape, which is now hived out as a separate park, while the crossing axes are only partially visible throughout the Turin area.

In a way, though, this brings the experience you have at the Stupigini closer to our modern sensibilities. Instead of giving yourself over to the symmetries and hierarchies that building decreed before then marveling at the extension of artifice, you dive into that made-up world, experiencing the overall order only in glimpses --before you enter, in the central hall, or as you reconstruct the whole in your mind. The building becomes an assemblage, like your TikTok feed. You can either try to figure out what it means or, as we do in our daily lives, give yourself over to its seductions and wander, mouth slightly agape in a smile, a smirk, or just wonderment, before posting a selfie or two.

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.