Biagio Rossetti come pretesto

For Zevi, the study of Rossetti’s work was a decisive episode in his critical activity in terms of chronology and literary genre. It is precisely this last aspect that seems to interest Zevi most, who uses Rossetti to develop the tools of an expressly visual criticism, translating the similar research of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and using Rossetti as a general test for subsequent readings – this time by several authors – of other masters of architecture such as, for example, Michelangelo. The critical sketches, the genre of the architecture exhibition, and a monograph that had the ambition of becoming an indication of the method for contemporary events are just some of the critical methods that Zevi tested through Rossetti with the aim of “inserting” architecture and its history into the more general framework of culture and politics. For Zevi, Rossetti was a pretext for finding a remedy for what he considered to be one of the most significant problems that afflicted architecture and, consequently, caused its isolation: “most educated people do not know how to see architecture”.