In 1458 Perugia called on Bartolomeo Mattioli to design the construction of a gate which, together with the one known as alle Due Porte, would form an enclosed courtyard; on his death in 1472, the task of continuing the work he had begun was entrusted to Agostino di Duccio, who would shape the gate into the first of the Italian Quattrocento to reproduce the forms of a triumphal arch all’antica.

The documents of 1464, 1468, 1473 and 1475 that speak of the new gate point to three orders of purpose: magnificence, the daily regulation of access, and defence. Yet while the transformation of the old medieval gate into a courtyard gate may still be understood as an attempt to improve its functioning, the contracts contain hardly a trace of defensive concerns. The prevailing interest appears to be the representative character of the gate, even though the medieval circuit of walls in which it opens had been assigned a precise role in the defence of the city.
In the years when Agostino di Duccio was called to refashion the gate, defensive systems were being updated throughout Italy in response to the contemporary development of firearms, the enormous growth in their effectiveness and their massive deployment. A few dozen kilometres away Francesco di Giorgio Martini was engaged in the most advanced attempt of those years to rethink military architecture in the light of firearms. In Perugia this process of transformation of the defensive works left no trace; one finds instead a strong inertia, a tendency to rely on well-tried but by then outdated solutions.
The gate stands as a unicum within the medieval circuit of walls: it is the only one in travertine, with all the prestige and symbolic value that material holds, and at the same time it was fitted with elements characteristic of the military repertoire as well as of the civic one; but it would be misplaced to expect from a gate of such markedly monumental character a defensive effectiveness that the wall circuit as a whole does not possess.
In the construction of Porta San Pietro, concerns of a military nature, until then inherent in civic architecture, receded into the background; the transformation of the old gate is the paradigmatic case of the process whereby traditional defensive systems, as they became obsolete and inadequate, took on a representative, apotropaic function. Not that reality failed to break in: although conceived as a monumental entrance to the city of Perugia, Porta San Pietro was continually subjected to tumults and assaults and forced to serve as the setting for skirmishes. It performed its defensive role by proclaiming it rather than by practising it.
The rebuilding of the gate falls between the passage through Perugia of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Pope Pius II, in 1459 and that of Julius II in 1506. The chronicles recounting the first make no mention of the crossing of the gate alle Due Porte, while those of the second and of later ones, Paul III in 1535 and others, place the ritual entry into the city precisely at Porta San Pietro. The route taken by the pontiffs is the same, but only from the beginning of the sixteenth century does the gate perform its triumphal role. Sporadic exceptions aside, the route of papal entries would remain unchanged until well into the nineteenth century.
When Pius II entered Perugia in 1459, Agostino di Duccio was in the city, and when fourteen years later, in 1473, he was given the task of bringing to completion the principal city gate of Perugia’s medieval wall circuit, he saw to it that it would serve for triumphal entries, applying the lesson learned in Rimini, at a court that entrusted its own representation in conspicuous measure to the triumph, as witnessed both by Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano and by Basinio’s Hesperis. The first great sculptural cycle carried out by Agostino di Duccio – the sculptural programme for the interior of the Rimini Temple – is studded with signs and images drawn from a triumphal repertoire, from the tondi with the portraits of Sigismondo crowned with laurel to the reliefs on the front of the Arca degli Antenati, and to the remarkable stiacciato relief with the Triumph of Scipio or of Sigismondo.
If in Rimini he had already had occasion to reflect on the most celebrated of that city’s antiquities, model too for the facade of the Tempio Malatestiano, namely the Arch of Augustus, which at the time already stood incorporated into the walls and served as a city gate, in Perugia Agostino witnessed a multiplication of models, both in the city’s two remarkable Etruscan-Roman gates and in the Porta Venere and Porta Consolare of nearby Spello. The peculiarity of Porta San Pietro is that it was built in a city without a prince to celebrate. It constitutes an armoury for possible triumphs, a machine intended to celebrate not a specific sovereign but a certain range of figures (pontiffs, but also authorities of various kinds).
In the documents the patrons make no mention of a triumphal connotation for the gate, and it is precisely the lack of a specific beneficiary of the apparatus that raises the suspicion that the active role in the gate’s configuration was played by its maker. The primacy of Porta San Pietro is thus to be explained not as the fruit of a political programme but as the emergence and crystallisation of a figurative convention found in contemporary Italian culture, and in that of its creator in particular. The new gate is an exemplary case of discrepancy, and at the same time of compromise, between the aspirations of a culture and the political conditions against which they break: a city gate in the guise of a triumphal arch which, unlike the imperial Roman gates, was never really allowed to set aside its defensive function, however much that function was then neglected. And if it is true that the gate would long be used as an arch, it is equally true that those entering it in triumph would be – beginning with Julius II and Paul III – the future masters of Perugia.
The most characteristic feature of the gate’s layout is the pair of towers that were to have flanked its archway and that, in the project as built, were transformed into distinguishing avant-corps. Faced in travertine, they offer an explicit reference to the Arco di Augusto, also known as the Arco Etrusco, yet their role is purely emblematic: where the gun openings for the defence of the city should have been placed, there is a rusticated surface.

If one draws a comparison between Porta San Pietro and the other great publicly commissioned building under construction in the city in the 1470s, the palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, it emerges that the two shared the patrons’ wish to make them the vehicles of a civic rhetoric already embodied by the palazzo dei Priori. If in the Perugian context Porta San Pietro is a unicum as a city gate, with the palazzo del Capitano del Popolo it shares the use of a whole series of motifs which stand as the emblems of the civic character of the undertaking. Porta San Pietro appears in every respect a form of institutional architecture understood in an already modern sense.
The principal civic motifs, all already attested in the palazzo dei Priori, are the griffin, the lion and the shield. At Porta San Pietro, as in the intrados of the paired windows of the palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, a syntax resurfaces that had been lost in the passage through the palazzo dei Priori. The shield appears in alternation with the rose. Both elements are ancient and occur with particular frequency among the local antiquities, but they also belong to a precise cultural climate, among whose leading protagonists we may count Agostino. From the alternation of shield and rose emerges the typically Renaissance theme of strength and defence joined to grace and beauty; the motif of war in conjunction with love, expression of a complex representation of the amorous union of Mars and Venus, the celebration of harmony, or of that beauty which according to Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino arises from the co-presence of opposites. Passion and civic virtue composed in harmony were an ideal for the man and the citizen of the Renaissance, an admirable point of contact between antiquity and tradition. The result, in Perugia, is an eloquent emblem of the warlike medieval city seeking to present itself with the new face of a courtly Renaissance city.
Another distinguishing element of the gate is the rustication of the avant-corps. Kindred elements are rather rare; one very close example appears in one of the reliefs prepared by Donatello for the Basilica del Santo in Padua, another in the Tarpeian Rock depicted in the Marcanova codex; and Agostino may have known both. Far more than a passing resemblance links the rustication of the Perugian gate to that of Frederick II’s Porta di Capua and to the scene of Saint Francis driving the demons out of Arezzo painted by Giotto in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. A further affinity between these examples and the Perugian one is that they all belong to city gates and military architecture. In the figurative arts one finds, with surprising frequency, the coursing of the ashlar blocks of walls and city gates emphasised as though they were rusticated, alongside rustication proper. The rustication is the revealing detail of a tendency to proclaim, rather than to practise, the military effectiveness of which the gate is an expression. In Agostino’s eyes it must have met an iconic, narrative need: the gate has to appear an effective defensive structure without the obligation of really being one. All the more must it appear so from the privileged viewpoint of the road from Rome, from which the gate is seen not frontally but at a pronounced oblique angle. From that viewpoint what stands out in the avant-corps is the inner front, marked by a rusticated facing that tends to characterise it as a tower. Once the effect was achieved, Agostino stopped; he did not trouble to give these elements a practical function.
Yet Porta San Pietro shows undeniable compositional shortcomings, for it belongs to that phase in the spread of the architectural language which also entailed its vulgarisation, the “moment when ideas are domesticated for the sake of their capacity for penetration, for acceptance” (Arnaldo Bruschi). This is the phase in which the Renaissance language penetrated settings that had until then remained foreign to it, renouncing its own rigour. The vehicle of this transition was Agostino, who between 1457 and the early 1480s was the point of reference for sculpture and architecture all’antica in Perugia. No colleague could compete with him, and at the same time his patrons neither prompted nor compelled him to update his language. And however blurred the distinction between architect and sculptor then was, Agostino was a sculptor. His architectural activity is confined to the execution of three facades, all in Perugia – the oratory of San Bernardino, the Maestà delle Volte and Porta San Pietro – and to the design of a fourth, that of San Petronio in Bologna; and since the latter is unknown, and the facades of the oratory and of the Maestà are to be understood as frames designed to support and organise the sculptural cycles displayed across them, Porta San Pietro is the only work by Agostino in which architecture plays the leading role and sculpture, instead, that of complement.
The effort made by Agostino with Porta San Pietro is therefore remarkable. The gate stands as the most antique-minded work of fifteenth-century Perugian architecture (“There is no architecture more beautiful than this in Perugia, and outside Perugia too there is nothing like it in this period, of a Renaissance so clean and solemn”, Cesare Brandi would declare). As a city gate in the guise of a triumphal arch, the Perugian gate, “of exquisite beauty”, is indeed – as Jacob Burckhardt observed – comparable only to the later Porta Capuana; for Walter Bombe, Porta San Pietro is nothing less than “the grandest gate the early Renaissance created, an imposing building and […] the most striking sign of Agostino’s architectural talent”.

The task of expressing the defensive effectiveness of the gate is carried out iconically by certain architectural elements, just as others symbolise its civic role and still others its triumphal character. What is privileged is not the syntax with which the individual motifs are deployed; a stringent logic capable of linking the choices together is wanting. The building tends rather towards a paratactic organisation, a faint internal concatenation that does no more than make the polysemy of the work intelligible. Porta San Pietro should be regarded as the fruit of intentions native to the ‘pictorial’ sensibility of Agostino di Duccio as attested by a masterpiece such as the facade of the oratory of San Bernardino, which allowed him to achieve a unified design, “elegant and noble” (Jacob Burckhardt), by a path that is not that of logic, coherence and rigour. He did not pursue the goal of an iron concatenation of the elements, and the ornaments he employs are chosen as capable in themselves of expressing in abbreviated form a condensed spectrum of values, achieving a solution extremely effective in terms of scenographic, emblematic and representative impact.

Works consulted

Tiziana Biganti, La città e la sua simbologia, in Carte che ridono, Perugia 1987.

Michele Bilancia, Il rapporto della città medioevale di Perugia con la cinta muraria etrusca, in “Bollettino della Deputazione di Storia Patria per l’Umbria”, LXXXV, 1988.

Ugolino Nicolini, Mura della città e mura dei borghi: la coscienza urbanistica di Perugia medievale, in Francesco Roncalli di Montorio, Ugolino Nicolini, Franco Ivan Nucciarelli, Mura e torri di Perugia, Roma 1989; then in Scritti di storia, Napoli 1993.

Daniele Pisani, Piuttosto un arco trionfale che una porta di citta’. Agostino di Duccio e la porta San Pietro a Perugia, Venezia 2009

Antonio Senatore is a writer and art critic. He has worked with journals and museum institutions both in Italy and abroad. He currently works within the circuit of Perugia’s civic museums and teaches History of Design at the NID – Nuovo Istituto di Design.