Borromini begins San Carlo
Francesco Borromini is commissioned to build a small monastery church at a crossroads in Rome. He makes the facade undulate and the dome oval.
The Baroque turned the wall into something that moves, and architecture into theatre.
Francesco Borromini was born in 1599 in Bissone on Lake Lugano and started out as a stonemason. In Rome he worked under his relative Carlo Maderno at St Peter’s and later alongside his contemporary Gian Lorenzo Bernini on Palazzo Barberini and the baldacchino in St Peter’s. There began a rivalry that would follow them both. Bernini was the charming favourite of the court and the pope, Borromini a brooding and difficult man. In 1634 Borromini received his first major independent commission from the Spanish Trinitarians, a poor branch of the order that wanted to build a monastery and church on a cramped site at the crossroads of the Four Fountains. The monastery and cloister were built first, and the church from 1638.
The church is so small that it is often said to fit inside one of the piers of St Peter’s. Borromini started from geometry, with triangles and circles superimposed on one another, and arrived at a space in which the walls alternate between concave and convex sections. The columns stand close together and bind the space into a single whole. The oval dome is covered with coffers in the shape of crosses, octagons and hexagons that diminish towards the top, so that it looks higher than it is. The light comes from windows concealed at the base of the dome. Everything is white stucco and plaster; the friars could not afford marble. The facade was built only at the end of Borromini’s life.
The prior of the monastery related that visitors from all over Europe asked for drawings of the church, and it quickly became famous. But Borromini also had opponents. Many saw his free handling of the classical rules as capricious, and later critics called him a destroyer of good taste. He took his own life in 1667, before the facade was entirely finished. His influence was nonetheless great, especially in Piedmont through Guarino Guarini and in Central Europe, where churches in Bohemia, Austria and southern Germany took up his undulating walls. In Sweden developments went in a different direction. Nicodemus Tessin the Younger studied in Rome in the 1670s but was closer to Bernini and French Classicism.