Surveying, interpreting and designing: the multiple essence of a sixteenth-century drawing

The Uffizi drawing 7950 A is an unfinished representation of Pisa attributed to Giuliano da Sangallo. Although the problems of authorship and dating are the first to require a final solution, the analysis of the main features and contents of the drawing opens insights on a much more complex issue, the multiple nature of an artefact, for which the names of survey or ground plan reveal to be inappropriate. This unique sheet, far from being the visual record of a measured urban space, assumes the value of a personal record that mirrors the approach of the author to design as well as the meaning of the process of drawing at the beginning of the sixteenth century. While the definition of a method was still under construction, drawing was developing as a medium for architectural communication, in which the borders between surveying, interpreting and designing were blurred.