The "Frame Vaults" of North Italy between the Sixteenth and the Eighteenth Century

The compound and complicated vaults, built by a segmentary and policentrical arches, whose bear smaller flat vaults, are especially known as a masterpieces of the Piedmontese architecture in the seventeenth and in the eighteenth century. But there is almost unknown, that at the same time this pattern is largely diffused in the North Italy, chiefly between Cremona, Mantua and Brescia up to Verona, and here it is attested until the end of eighteenth century. In the second half of fifteenth century the pattern reproduce in brick the wooden floor: the arches are transformed in a pair of consoles that shorten the free span of a beam (Uggeri Palace, Brescia). By them, it's possible to cover any great spaces, with more as eight meters span and to realized flat surfaces for the frescoes, inside a frame decorated by stuccoes.

These vaults are a feature of the masonry construction analogous to the “trompes” or the “escaliers suspendus” of the French stereotomy. They are often connect by the written sources to the activity of the builders of Tessin, and they appear as the result of a empiric practice, out of the intellectual echelons of the treatises of architecture, with the partial exception Guarini's.