Sant'Agnese in Agone
(Church of St. Agatha at the Circus Agonalis)
Piazza Novona, Rome, Italy
Completed: 1672
Style: Baroque
TEXT Beneath Illustrations
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Emperor Domitian in AD 86 built a race track and stadium on the Piazza Novona (this was known as Circus Agonalis, a name which by the Middle Ages had been modified to "in agone" and the dialect " 'n 'agone" before arriving at the present Navona.
Saint Agatha was a 13-year-old girl killed in 304 AD for her refusal to renounce her Christian beliefs and marry a pagan. She was thrown into one of the brothels close to the stadium. She was then paraded naked in the circus only for her nakedness to be covered by the miraculous growth of hair.
A simple chapel ("oratory") was built on the site of her death. Below the church there are Roman ruins, including the ruins of the brothel where St. Agatha was martyred. Pope Innocent X ordered the church enlarged in 1652. The first project was designed by Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi, but the pope was not happy with it, and gave the task to Borromini (see below) in 1653. Innocent X died in 1655, and work proceeded slowly under his nephew Camillo. Borromini wanted to move on, and Carlo Reynaldo took over. Camillo also died before the church was finished, and his wife decided to call in Bernini. He altered Borromini's design, leaving the the façade mainly as planned but adding a high pediment surmounted by an attic. The rebuilding was completed in 1672, and the church was consecrated on January 17th of that year.
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.
Although Baroque architecture was to spread all over Europe, it was born in Rome and its founding father was Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). This precocious sculptor was selling his work at age sixteen to the Borghese family. By twenty, Bernini was so famous, the pope commissioned him to sculpt a papal portrait. Not content to excel in the plastic arts, Bernini was the greatest scene designer of the age. When he created a stage set, the illusion was so convincing, people in the front row fled in terror, convinced they would be drenched by flood or scorched by fire.
Bursting with talent doesn't begin to describe Bernini's abilities, for he was also an esteemed painter, poet, and composer. An English visitor recalled attending an opera in 1644 where Bernini "painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, wrote the comedy and built the theater." If they had had popcorn, Bernini would have popped and buttered it.
In 1623, Bernini began his career as an architect. For the next fifty years, his fingerprints were all over Rome. His vision, skill, personality, and art shaped the grandeur, flamboyance, and emotionalism of Counter-Reformation Vatican City, and of the Baroque era in general.The Renaissance and the Baroque eras: It's the difference between a calm game of chess and juggling daggers and torches while riding a unicycle playing a kazoo. Renaissance architecture was intellectual, based on geometry, logic, symmetry, and simplicity. Baroque style was populist, appealing to a wide audience through hyped-up emotion and multimedia special effects.
Both styles commandeered the columns, entablature, arches, and domes of Roman antiquity. Renaissance architects used them to emphasize stability and stasis, while Baroque masters like Bering and Bromine twisted columns into corkscrews. They set classical elements in motion, breaking pediments to make lines swoop.While Renaissance facades tend to look flat, with shallow surface planes, Baroque exteriors seem fluid, weaving in and out like a broken-field runner. It's the difference between an ice cube and a waterfall.
Baroque extravagance came about when Renaissance restraint started looking boringly mechanical. Another factor was that, after the Reformation, Protestant churches were pared down to Calvinist purity. When the Catholic church made a comeback and launched an ambitious building program, it promoted the opposite of minimalism. Church officials enlisted all the drama of music, painting, sculpture, and over-the-top architecture to create a mystical atmosphere and enhance devotion. Deprivation was out; ostentation was in.
The word Baroque derives from the Portuguese "barocco," an irregular pearl. Rather than a perfect sphere, the premier Baroque form was an ovalñelliptical like the orbit of the planets that had just been sketched by astronomer Johann Kepler. Other scientific advances popping up at warp speed may have influenced the style. When Isaac Newton formulated his laws of motion, architects devised buildings with revved-up spaces that seemed to move. Curved walls undulate; contours recede and project. And just as Galileo scanned the heavens with his telescope from the bell tower at Saint Mark's Square, frescoed ceiling vaults dissolved all earthly boundaries, seeming to stretch to infinity.
The vast scale, rich materials, dramatic lighting, and heavy ornamentation of Baroque buildings had a propagandist goal. Seventeenth century architecture gave visual form to the power of church and monarch monarch, who ruled by divine right. "Un roi, une foi, une loi" (one king, one faith, one law) was the rule. In no uncertain terms, royal palaces and equally splendid churches proclaimed, "We're number one."
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