Pillon's gaffe: he thinks it's imbecilic to call Plautilla Bricci an architect, but it's a 17th century term

Figure of Senator Simone Pillon falling on the profession of artist Plautilla Bricci, the protagonist of a major exhibition at the Corsini Gallery in Rome. The Leghist senator’s gaffe concerns the title of the exhibition, “A Silent Revolution. Plautilla Bricci painter and architect.” Pillon, in fact, believed that “architect” was a recently coined term, perhaps the result of that political correctness against which the parliamentarian often rails, and therefore considered it imbecilic to juxtapose the term “architect” with the figure of the artist who lived in the 17th century.

“Dear friends have a good Sunday,” Pillon began in his post. “There are [...] some imaginative people who propose the use of asterisch*, others who want schwa, and finally others who produce themselves in funambulistic grammatical productions, such as the one that appeared on Roman buses according to which in order to be respectful and inclusive one should use the word ’architect’ instead of ’architect’ (ps. why not architect? was it too daring?) I wonder if at this point it is not necessary, for the same reasons, to use a more inclusive ’pharmacist’, ’truckist’, ’surveyor’ and so on for male workers. Or perhaps it would be better to ’pharmacist’, ’truck driver’ etc. etc.? But are we really convinced that equal dignity between males and females comes through these imbecilitations and imbecilitations? Bah. Have a good lunch to all and sundry and also to tuttori and tuttrici.”

Pillon, who posted an image of the exhibition’s advertisement posted on a bus (the senator probably does not frequent museums in the city where he works, otherwise he would not have noticed the exhibition a month after it opened), evidently ignores the fact that the term “architectress” is not a new invention, but is a seventeenth-century term, used as the feminine of “architect” precisely beginning with Plautilla Bricci. “Architect” was, at the time, the term by which architects were designated (for example, the full title of Giorgio Vasari ’s Lives is Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori). “There was another Plautilla Romana, of the house Bricci, an architect,” the scholar Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi wrote in 1704 in his Abecedario pittorico, but in general “architettrice” as an adjective is attested, albeit rarely, in other texts of the time, even in a mid-seventeenth-century sermon by the Piacenza Dominican Giovanni Battista Spada, who uses it to refer to divine Wisdom, “architect of all the heavens.”

As the feminine of the noun “architect,” however, it was born with Plautilla, who, the exhibition catalog reads, “naturally claims the feminine of the profession (architect) and coins a term that could enter common usage: if only she had heirs.” The exhibition curator, art historian Yuri Primarosa, also intervened in the discussion on social media, explaining to Pillon that “the word ’architect’ is a neologism coined in the seventeenth century by Plautilla Bricci herself to define her activity in the field of architecture. The term, certainly ambiguous and somewhat cacophonous, has been deliberately taken up in the title of the exhibition, also in order to celebrate the first female architect in European history. We should, rather, be proud that it happened precisely in Rome, to a Roman woman, and avoid sterile instrumentalization and polemics.”

In short: Pillon, before coming out with his ironic post, perhaps could have studied a little more. And surely now he could go visit the exhibition at the Corsini Gallery....

Pillon's gaffe: he thinks it's imbecilic to call Plautilla Bricci an architect, but it's a 17th century term

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