Mr
Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland,
so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together
after that in Italy. Right now we're
in Rome.
Not all Baroque
churches go for glitter. On the corner
of Strada Pia and Strada Felice there is a small, exquisite named San Carlo
alle Quattro Fontane -
San Carlino is a
small church – its entire footprint would fit into just one of the pillars that
support the dome of St Peters Basilica on the other side of the city in the
Vatican. Designed and built for a
monastic order known as the Discalced (Shoeless) Trinitarians by an architect
named Borromini, unimposing little San Carlino is dreamy.
Small, spare,
streamlined and strong-boned, this small church would go on have more of an
influence on European Architecture than all of the painted and gilded churches
ever had.
A short history
lesson:
The first big
builders in this part of Italy, the Old Romans, appreciated proportion and
measure – in society as well as stone, and built domes and arches and long
square halls according to precise geometries: mathematical ratios that they
considered to embody the order that they found so pleasing, pleasing both to
the eye and to mathematical philosophy. When the Roman Empire split, and fell,
balances and checks became wilder and less sure, and the architecture that grew
up out of it – what we call today the Gothic style – was tall and soaring and aimed for
the sky in a way that had absolutely no truck with reason or ratio. It was an architecture of mysticism to suit a
feudal world – a world of personal politics and charismatic religion, rather
than any wider, standardized sort of order.
Through the medieval
period, continental economies grew and continental politics stabilized, and by
the fourteenth century the Italian intelligentsia were giving up mysticism of
the gothic and beginning to explore – a thousand years after the fact – the architecture
and philosophy of ancient Rome.
These new
philosophers lived in the ruins of the Roman Empire, and the formal study of
their works was – well, the effect was much as if, today, we discovered the
writings of ancient Atlantis – and the writings weren’t obscure, abstruse, wisdoms
of ancient mystics and ambiguous provenance – they were real, and we could
check what the ancients had written by walking down the street to a broken ruin
and pulling out a measuring stick.
The enormity of the
impact cannot be overestimated. We call
the aftershock the Renaissance.
Ahem –
Renaissance
Architecture is premised on the emulation of the architectural styles of
Ancient Rome– and the presumption that the Romans did all of them
perfectly. Rome’s fourteenth century
disciples took the basilica, the dome, the column and the arch and built them
to a standard of mathematical rigor that went beyond style into a
way of measuring life itself. After the soaring
drip-castle muddle of the Gothic, the modern world was a rational world – no chaos,
no confusion, and mastery of the mysteries of the universe started at home, in
the mastery of one’s house. Each space
in a building must be separate and complete – outside and in. Volumes might be piled upon each other, or
balanced against each other in geometrically pleasing harmony, but they must be
discrete, unconnected, and pure in of themselves.
The results were
beautiful, majestic, exquisitely balanced and pleasing to the eye and it
was all exciting and terrific and for more than a hundred years, men
congratulated each other on their mastery of the chaos of the cosmos, but times
change, old men die, and young men grow up and grow bored and notice things
that had formerly gone unremarked–
When each
space and shape must be formally and separately contained, something is lost,
or is never there. A space might be
serene, but when serenity must never move or shift or change, the result is
static –
Stasis.
A man named Michelangelo Buonarroti started
the revolt; or he was, at least, the most visible face of the vanguard.
Michelangelo was wildly talented and terrifically intelligent, and he wanted to
do something that would make the whole world stand up and take notice. As an architect, he thought a great deal
about theory, and no matter how hard he thought, he couldn’t see the logic of
forcing related bits of building to be built separately – fourteenth Century
lives didn’t necessarily fit into forms designed by a civilization a thousand
years gone, and the effort of politely reconciling the two often had
Michelangelo spitting nails – and when Michelangelo spit nails, the world knew
it – the Pope tended to get huffy and the results tended to get built, and stand
five or six stories tall and look damned authoritative.
But even a
Michelangelo was constrained by popular expectation, and with one or two
exceptions, he took things cautiously and worked more or less within the bounds
of his patron’s cultural limitations. He
did what he could, and then another generation grew up, and took stock of what
Michelangelo had done, and the world changed.
We called that
change the Baroque. In its own time it was understood simply as
the overturning of the static and the foursquare. In Rome, the counter-reformation was
in full swing – art and architecture were growing bold and brassy, full of
splendid, optimistic vigor, and young men and women were eating sacred cows for
breakfast every morning – and nobody – or nobody who mattered- was
complaining. It was a fun time to be an
artist. Amid all the pyrotechnics, two
men were crystalizing two main approaches to the overturning of the sacred
Roman cows. These men were Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini.
Bernini was
everyone’s darling –charming, sophisticated, a natural diplomat (or unbridled sycophant,
depending who you asked) and courtier who could talk himself up without putting
people off, a talented artist and set designer, and possessed an undeniable genius for sculpture. Borromini was likewise a genius – his sophisticated
understanding of form and space matched Bernini’s understanding of stone, but
unlike Bernini, Borromini was a
depressive, petulant curmudgeon who didn’t get on with anybody and couldn’t not pick fights if he tried (and he never seemed to try).
Borromini worked
under Bernini for a period of time early in his career. Together they did exciting things (including
the baldacchino in
St Peters Basilica in the Vatican), Borromini lending the architectural punch
necessary to back up Bernini’s theatrical flair, and Bernini walked away with
all the credit for all of it. (In
fairness to the people of Rome, if given a choice between two men like that,
which would you lionize?) Borromini
growled, sank deeper into depression, and went away to work on his own.
Bernini lent
vibrancy and motion to static form with heavy lashings of theatrical
drama. He designed simple, highly
traditional spaces, and within them would set a stage - an altar, or a work of
sculpture, and use every trick of set design at his disposal – color, rich and
luxurious material, exciting theatrical lighting effects, altered scale and
forced perspective – to bring the viewer up to and into the action, and to spread the action
across the whole of the space of the church.
Go to Santa Maria Vittoria and examine his setting of Saint Teresa in her Ecstasy –
Borromini, on the
other hand, worked on a small, intimate scale, building with simple materials -
brick and stone and travertine – a humble, workaday marble. For
Borromini, the building itself was the sculpture –a sculpture in the
round. He never used color; the
interiors of all his churches are painted white, so that his manipulation of their
forms may be more visible and striking.
In building San Carlino, Borromini merged two
footprints much favored by ecclesiastical architecture, the circle and the Greek
cross, and in merging the two, he turned them into something different to their
canonical selves – something special. The
lozenge-shaped church is neither cruciform nor circular, but flows around its
inhabitants as a series of gently interlocking oval forms; there are no angles
within the church, only a soft, endless undulation that works its way around
and around the perimeter of the space.
Painted, very simply, in white, the
undulations create a self-sufficiency of spirit - though not serenity, not by
any means. It is a small space, and it
holds coils of contained energy - the walls of the church rising up to the lantern as a series of
suspended circles and spheres, each the beginning and the continuation of
another.
Borromini’s effects
were entirely architectural – spaces flow into each other and around, walls warp
and are cut apart, and the small scale of his works put the viewer into a
position intimacy with a space that appears to move and flow all around him or
her.
The effect is quieter
than the Bernini’s bombastic trumpeting, but it an effect intrinsic and
inherent to the space, not one that has been applied or shoehorned into it.
“One looks
at Bernini’s buildings with the eyes; one feels Borromini’s with the whole
body.”
-
Anthony
Blunt, Art historian, 1979
It was Borromini’s architectural
approach to that endured. It was a type
of design that did not depend on the presence of singular genius, but was a fundamental,
systematic, and critically, imitable approach to the manipulation of mass and
form. The gift that
Borromini gave to western architecture was a clear and unequivocal
demonstration of how forms could convey energy as well as strength. Taking up the embryonic union of form championed
by Michelangelo, Borromini forced the static strength and serenity of the
Renaissance into torsion and nervous equilibrium, and balanced ‘em perilously
together on a high tension electrical wire.
Posts
