Francesco Borromini
Borromini started out as a stonemason at St Peter’s and became Bernini’s rival. His churches of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza are based on geometric figures that make the walls undulate and the domes twist.
Francesco Castelli, who later took the name Borromini, was born in 1599 in Bissone on Lake Lugano, in a region that supplied Italy with many stonemasons and master builders. His father worked for the Visconti family, and Francesco was sent to Milan at an early age to learn stone-carving on the cathedral works. Around 1619 he came to Rome, where he worked under his relative Carlo Maderno at St Peter’s. He became a skilled draughtsman and detail architect and continued under Bernini, working among other things on the baldacchino over the papal altar. The collaboration was fraught with conflict: Borromini felt that Bernini took the credit for his work, and the two became the great rivals of Baroque Rome.
His first independent work was the monastery and church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, begun in 1634. The church is small, but its plan is based on an oval and triangular geometric figures, and the walls move in concave and convex curves. The undulating façade was added only at the end of his life. At Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, the university church in Rome, the plan is derived from a six-pointed star, and the lantern ends in a spiral that twists towards the sky. He also remodelled the interior of the Lateran Basilica, designed the Oratorio dei Filippini and worked on Sant’Agnese in Agone on Piazza Navona. His architecture relies on geometry, light and white walls rather than costly materials.
Borromini was known for his difficult temperament and suffered from depression. He took his own life in 1667. In the 18th and 19th centuries he was often regarded as an eccentric who broke the classical rules, but his spatial inventions were of great importance for the Baroque in Piedmont through Guarino Guarini and in Central Europe, in Bohemia, Austria and southern Germany. In the 20th century he came to be appreciated as a forerunner of modern ideas about space and movement, and architects such as Paolo Portoghesi wrote about him. Tessin the Younger studied both Bernini and Borromini during his time in Rome, but for the Royal Palace in Stockholm he chose the calmer Roman palace type rather than Borromini’s undulating forms.