Building Art: the decorative terracotta of Palazzo Fodri in Cremona (IT)

Revalued during the 19th and 20th centuries, Palazzo Fodri is still today the best-known example of a Renaissance private palace in Cremona. Its critical acclaim derives from the use of decorative terracotta tiles, studied principally by art historians as a well-known construction practice which translates into artistic works mainly in the second half of the 15th century. However, despite a fervent season of studies over the last decades, previous researches do not return the useful and necessary information to design a conservation project and to delve into the ceramic history of construction: in fact, these studies concentrated on figurative analyses, on the identification of artists and workers involved in the construction sites and their relationships, on the mixture's characterization, without being able to propose hypotheses regarding the production process of decorative terracotta. The conservation project of the external facades of Palazzo Fodri and the possibility of dealing with its ceramic artefacts on the construction site constituted the stimulus and the opportunity to develop a knowledge project open to unedited research perspectives, thanks to a campaign of studies on terracotta from a technical-scientific point of view and through a multi-scale and multidisciplinary approach, especially paying attention to production and assembly techniques. Investigating a specific example such as Palazzo Fodri has allowed to partially fill a gap in the history of ceramic technology in the Modern Age and to analyse a specific case study with updated tools and methods, thanks to which it was possible to orient the intervention project.