Postfazione

The graphic analysis, as Giuseppe Pagnano stated with great clarity in 1975, allows us to fully explore aspects that verbal language can only touch; it does not make us re-discover the rules of architecture but, as every critical operation, makes us understand which rules the architect used and above all it makes us understand why he formulated certain solutions rather than others. Therefore, investigating architecture with drawing not only means using the language used to design it but also using a privileged access key for understanding the shape. Graphic analysis, therefore, is a useful ‘tool’ for architectural criticism and the history of architecture because it contributes to the knowledge of an architectural work; it is a sort of sinopia, no longer hidden, which allows the reading of a possible procedure for the construction of the completed shape with greater immediacy. This process was adopted by Vincenzo Cirillo with ab- solute methodological rigor starting from the meticulous analysis of the iconographic and textual sources of all the ‘ephemeral events’ of the Neapolitan Baroque that he re-proposes to the reader.