Borromini, Francesco

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Francesco Borromini

1599–1667

Architect

A Tempestuous Spirit.

Born Francesco Castelli, this northern Italian eventually took his mother's name Borromini to distinguish himself from the many other members of his family who were active throughout Italy in the building trades. As a child he served an apprenticeship as a mason in Milan before moving to Rome in 1619 when he was twenty. Through family connections he succeeded in being hired onto the largest project in the city at the time, the construction of the mammoth façade of St. Peter's Basilica, which had been designed by his relative Carlo Maderno. Given to frequent bouts of melancholy, the mason Borromini spent much of his free time in mastering the art of drawing, and he appears to have copied many of the works of Michelangelo in his efforts to improve his ability as an artist. His work paid off when, within a few years of his arrival in Rome, his qualifications as a draftsman had resulted in his promotion from mason to an architect working in Maderno's office at the Vatican. During the 1620s one of the projects in which he participated was Bernini's construction of the massive Baldachino, or canopy, to cover the High Altar of the church. His participation in this and other major work underway at St. Peter's assured his rise to prominence, and he was asked to collaborate on a number of other projects being built around Rome at the time.

Independent Commissions.

Borromini's first independently produced design was for a monastery and church for the Trinitarian Order in Rome. This early masterpiece, the Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (or St. Charles of the Four Fountains), was notable for several reasons. The Trinitarian order was one of the poorer religious groups to take up residence in Rome during the renewed spiritual fervor of the Catholic Reformation, and they had few funds to build an impressive complex. Working within these constraints, Borromini nevertheless provided the order with a structure that made a noble impression on seventeenth-century Rome. It was also a highly unconventional structure. To this day, architectural scholars continue to debate the sources for Borromini's unusual design, which seems to make use of the superimpositions of the forms of a cross, an oval, and an octagon into the same small space. Into this tightly-defined area, Borromini poured decorative shapes of semi-circular apses, ovals, and columns, combined in such a way to present an impression of dramatic expansion and contraction. In the years that followed, he built upon the initial breakthroughs that he had at San Carlo to create a number of structures notable for their violations of classical architectural design principles. In this process he created a dramatically new and powerful kind of design that continued to stir controversy throughout the Baroque period. While his works were emulated in Rome, and his style eventually melded to the conventions of Roman Baroque, his architecture was alternately admired or rejected in other parts of Europe. In England, France, and the Netherlands, architects utilized little of Borromini's style, while in Central Europe and Spain, his influence was widespread.

St. Ivo and St. Agnese.

The highly geometric use of space that Borromini developed in his mature creations is brilliantly displayed at St. Ivo, a church built to serve as the chapel for a school that eventually became the University of Rome. An unusually shaped leftover space had been reserved for the structure, and Borromini turned what might have been an artistic deficit into a great asset. He filled the space with one of the most unusual domes ever seen in Rome at the time. Unlike the domes in fashion since the High Renaissance, the structure that the architect designed to crown this church did not rest on a drum, but rested instead on the unusually shaped structure of the building itself. The sources of inspiration for his design continue to be debated, but in effect the building's floor plan resembles a six pointed star, three points of which have been cut off and the remaining alternating angles transformed into concave semi-circles. In any direction the viewer faces inside the structure, he or she sees a shape that is exactly the opposite of that which is behind. In this way one must look up to the dome above, where the pattern is repeated, to understand the plan in all its complexity. Borromini followed the undeniably strange, but nevertheless beautiful construction of St. Ivo with a series of commissions undertaken for the popes, including the Church of Sant' Agnese in the Piazza Navona. Great difficulties plagued this last project, which was undertaken initially to serve as a family mausoleum for the reigning pope. By the time the architect arrived at the site, ten feet of the church's foundations had already been built. Borromini developed an ambitious and complex design, the most innovative parts of which were rejected by his papal patron. The church as it now stands, though, continues to present a series of imaginative solutions to the problems that arose from its small site. Here, too, Borromini managed to present Rome with a smaller version of what Michelangelo had intended with his designs for St. Peter's. Flanked on either side by two towers and a concave façade, his dome manages to soar above the church and to be seen. At St. Peter's, by contrast, the expansions that the papacy demanded in the structure's original size obscured Michelangelo's grand dome to those who approached its main entrance.

Later Difficulties.

Borromini's unusually complex ideas as well as his temperament eventually resulted in his dismissal from the project at Sant' Agnese. Other commissions followed, but the architect's designs were always controversial. Widely admired in his youth for his good looks and refined manners, Borromini grew more introverted and melancholic as he matured. In his final years he was said to have preferred his own solitude to the company of friends and associates. He grew suspicious and withdrawn, although he continued to have many advocates who passionately defended his art in his final years and even after his suicide. Largely self-taught, he managed to acquire more than a passing familiarity with philosophical and theological problems, and he appears to have been a disciple of the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca. His library included more than 1,000 books, a truly enormous collection for a man of his income and schooling. Yet, like Michelangelo and Caravaggio, his status as a commoner often left him ill at ease in the great social circles in which he traveled. In the generations following his death his imaginative architectural solutions to design problems allowed his reputation to soar in some quarters, even as his violation of the classical tenets of design continued to condemn his vision to attacks and criticism. Since the late nineteenth century scholarship has universally tended to revere the enormity of Borromini's imagination.