Architecture Around the World

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Four Fountains)
Rome, Italy

Erected:	1633-1641
Architect:	Francesco Borromini (1599-1667)
Style:	Baroque

TEXT Beneath Illustrations

Borromini was trained as a mason, and, since he was distantly related to Maderna, found work in a small way at St. Peter's when he went to Rome at the age of fifteen.

There he worked on, humble and unknown, while Bernini created his first masterpiece of Baroque decoration, the bronze canopy under Michelangelo's dome, in the center of St. Peter's, a huge monument nearly 100 feet high, and with its four gigantic twisted columns the very symbol of the changed age, of a grandeur without restraint, a wild extravagance, and a luxury of detail that would have been distasteful to Michelangelo.

The same vehemence of approach and the same revolutionary disregard of conventions characterize Borromini's first important work, the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, begun in 1633.

A new dynamism appears in the little church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, where Borromini goes well beyond any of his predecessors or contemporaries in the plastic handling of a building. Maderno's facades of Santa Susanna and St. Peter's are deeply sculptured, but they develop along straight, lateral planes.

Borromini, perhaps thinking of Michelangelo's apse wall in St. Peter's, sets his whole facade in serpentine motion forward and back making a counterpoint of concave and convex on two levels (note the sway of the cornices), and emphasizes the sculptured effect with deeply recessed niches.

This facade is no longer the traditional, flat frontispiece that defines a building's outer limits; it is a pulsating membrane inserted between interior and exterior space, designed not to separate but to provide a fluid transition between the two.

This functional interrelation of the building and its environment is underlined by the curious fact that it has not one but two facades. The second, a narrow bay crowned with its own small tower, turns away from the main facade and, following the curve of the street, faces an intersection (The upper facade was completed seven years after Borromini's death, and we cannot be sure to what degree the present supplemented and complex structure reflects his original intention.)

Interior oval motif in San Carlo

The interior is so small that it would fit into one of the piers which support the dome of St. Peter's. But in spite of its miniature size it is one of the most ingenious spatial compositions of the century.

It was only the predominance of the circle in central churches which the Baroque discarded in Rome. Instead of the circle the oval was introduced, and a form that endows the centralized plan with longitudinal elements.

By far the most brilliant paraphrase on the oval theme is Borromini's San Carlo. The church can serve better than any other to analyze what tremendous advantages the Baroque architect could derive from composing in ovals instead of rectangles or circles.

Whereas all through the Renaissance spatial clarity had been the governing idea, and the eye of the spectator had been able to run unimpeded from one part to another and read the meaning of the whole and the parts without effort, nobody, standing in San Carlo, can at once understand of what elements it is made, and how they are intertwined to produce such a rolling, rocking effect.

The interior is not only an ingenious response to an awkward site, but also a provocative variation on the theme of the centrally planned church. In plan it looks like a hybrid of a Greek cross and an oval, with a long axis between entrance and apse. The side walls move in an undulating flow that reverses the motion of the facade.

This molded interior space is capped by a deeply coffered, oval dome that seems to float on the light entering through windows hidden in its base.

Importance of decoration in Baroque architecture

We are too much used to looking at decoration as something that may or may not be added to architecture.

In fact all architecture is both structure and decoration, decoration for which the architect himself, or the sculptor, the painter, the glass-painter may be responsible. But the relation of decoration to structure varies in different ages and with different nations:

Baroque architects of the seventeenth century had to accept the claims of the sculptor and painter and, in fact, were sculptors and painters. Instead of the Gothic relation of superordinate and subordinate, there is now a cooperation of all the arts. In the works of Bernini and Borromini, what binds architectural, ornamental, sculptural, and pictorial effects into indivisible unity is the decorative principle common to all.

Now this decorative creed could leave no room in the minds of patrons and artists of the Baroque to be squeamish about honesty in the use of materials. As long as the effect was attained, what could it matter whether you attained it with marble or with stucco, with gold or with tin, with a real bridge or a sham bridge such as we find sometimes in English parks? Optical illusion is, in fact, among the most characteristic devices of Baroque architecture.

Sources:

• "An Outline of European Architecture," by Nikolaus Pevsner. Pelican Books, 1975.
• "Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Tenth Edition," by Richard G. Tansey and Fred S. Kleiner. Harcourt Brace College Pub. 1996

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Photos and their arrangement © 202 Chuck LaChiusa
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