Carlo Lodoli

Carlo Lodoli (1690 to 1761) was a Venetian Franciscan friar, teacher, mathematician and architectural theorist. He came from a family tied to the Venetian Arsenal and its military engineering, studied at the monastery of San Francesco della Vigna, and became an Observant Friar Minor in 1706. After periods in Dalmatia, Rome and Forlì he lived in Verona from 1715 to 1720, where he taught astronomy, physics and mathematics to the sons of local noblemen and philosophy to novices. From 1720 he was in Venice, teaching theology and later instructing young Venetian nobles in a course that included architecture, for which he gathered architectural fragments in the monastery garden. His own writings were lost, so his thinking survives mainly through pupils and admirers, above all Andrea Memmo, whose Elementi d'architettura lodoliana of 1786 set out his theory, and through Francesco Algarotti and Francesco Milizia. Lodoli argued that architectural form should follow the function and the nature of the material, that stone should not imitate timber, and that nothing should be displayed which does no structural work. These ideas anticipated later functionalism, and he is sometimes called the Socrates of architecture. His only executed project was the 1739 to 1743 restoration of the pilgrim hospice attached to his monastery.