Fusione dei saperi sul crinale tra Cinque e Seicento: ingegneria, arte e cultura nell’attività di Giovanni Battista Clarici | The Convergence of Knowledge at the Turn of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Engineering, Art, and Culture in the Work of

Abstract

This essay reconstructs the career of Giovanni Battista Clarici, an exemplary figure of the integration of visual arts, technical expertise, and humanistic culture in Spanish Lombardy. After retracing his formative years in the Duchy of Urbino, the article examines his professional affirmation in Milan, achieved thanks to the patronage of Count Pietro Antonio Lonati and the trust placed in him by both the Governor and Archbishop Carlo Borromeo. Within this context, Clarici produced several landmark works of early modern cartography, including the Pianta di Milano (1584) and the monumental Codice di Madrid, a visual and textual synthesis of the State of Milan prepared for Philip II. The essay also investigates his antiquarian and collecting interests, documented by the Libro di disegni and by the presence in his library of Vasarian works and major historical texts of the period (Bugatti, Corio, Simeoni). A concluding section explores Clarici’s role as copyist and mediator of medieval historiographical traditions, through the first analysis of manuscript Triv. 1237 in the Biblioteca Trivulziana. Its rediscovery offers new insights into the origins of Venetian mythography and the scholarly circulation of pseudo-chronistic texts in the late sixteenth century.