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A B O U T

B O R R O M I N I

D E B O R A H R O S E N T H A L

Intaglio Prints and Linocuts

J E D P E R L

Texts

In the spring of 2003, we were staying at the American Academyin Rome. Over a period of months, we explored the buildings ofFrancesco Borromini, the seventeenth-century architect whoseworks – including S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, S. Ivo, and theCollegio di Propaganda Fide – are among the essential expressionsof the Baroque imagination. Virtually all of Borromini’s architec-ture is in Rome, and his personality is stamped as deeply on thecity as Gaudí’s is on Barcelona, with the di√erence that in RomeBorromini’s astonishing achievement must compete with themonuments of so many other epochal artists. Walking the streetsof Rome, looking at Borromini’s buildings inside and out, wefound ourselves wondering at the variety of his work. Who isBorromini? Is he the icy sensualist of S. Giovanni in Laterano, thevast basilica that he reconceived? Or is he the hot-blooded magi-cian who brought an Eastern aura to the towers and spires withwhich his buildings pierce the Roman sky? It can be confoundingto try to reconcile Borromini’s Silk Route luxuriance with thefanatical austerity of his imagination. Perhaps he saw no conflictbetween opulence and asceticism, those contradictory a≈rmationsof the unity of visual experience. During the time we spent inRome, we were bewitched by the complexity of his art, and out ofour experiences and conversations came this work-in-progress, aseries of images and texts dedicated to Borromini.

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In Rome, a city where the myths are heaped so high that theybecome another dimension of reality, Francesco Borromini, whocommitted suicide in 1667, will always be mythologically en-twined with that other commanding architectural genius of thetime, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The stories of their rivalries – and ofBorromini’s failures and of Bernini’s triumphs – have been told sooften that a sophisticated visitor may want to reject them as coarsefabrications. Nevertheless, we feel the undeniable power of thisancient, elemental juxtaposition, of Borromini and Bernini repre-senting architecture’s counterposed possibilities, as related and yetas distinct as the classical masks of tragedy and comedy. It mayseem simplistic, but it is also in some way absolutely true, to seeBorromini as the genius-pessimist, with his impassioned, single-minded devotion to architecture, and Bernini as the genius-opti-mist, with his easygoing, matter-of-fact mastery of architectureand sculpture and painting. If Bernini gives us the shamelesslytheatrical truth of Rome, persuading us that all realities are spec-tacular illusions, Borromini gives us the magnificent interior lifeof the city, the weight beneath its shimmer, a drama equallyvoluptuous, but more secretive, a matter not of skin but of bone, aquestion not of inspiration as a springboard but of inspiration as amystery to be penetrated, dissected, laid bare.

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F RO N T I S / FAÇ A D E

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In memory, Borromini’s buildings leave an impression almostintaglio-like, only somewhat faded – a sense of edges and shadows,of black-and-whiteness, or perhaps black-and-grayness is moreprecise. And these ghostly grisailles, imprinted on the mind’s eye,have a way of recapitulating the e√ects of Borromini’s preparatorydrawings, so that the monochromatic memories echo the architec-ture’s shadowy beginnings.

Both architecture and printmaking are arts of indirection, arts inwhich the final result is somewhat removed from the hand of theartist. The architect imagines a building and creates two-dimen-sional plans and elevations as a guide for the workmen who givethose plans a three-dimensional form. And the printmaker, cut-ting into the copper or the linoleum, creates a sculptural objectwhose true nature is only revealed when it has been inked andpressed into a sheet of paper to make a two-dimensional image.

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C O LU M N S I N F O R M AT I O N

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Stars, zig-zags, angles, angels, ovals, edges, curls, curves, flames,flowers, shells, breaks, bursts, echoes, accents, repetitions, rever-sals, reunions – these are the sights and sensations, each sharplyetched in the imagination, that remain from our Borromini walks,in the streets of Rome, one spring not too long ago.

Borromini is the master of a somber rococo, a luxuriant asceticism.He can be witty but marmoreal, and of what other artist can thatbe said? He brings an astonishing gravity to the playfulness of hisforms. He has the intentness of a child building sand castles, aseriousness about fantasy, a sobriety about outrageousness.

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G R A F F I T I

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Although the great windows on Borromini’s façades are quitefrankly functional, allowing light to penetrate the interior, theirheaped-high ornamentation makes a mockery of the reasonedclassicism of the Renaissance window frame. Borromini stirs upthe window frame, creating a decorative rumpus, an orgy of orna-ment that has nothing much to do with the promise of lightcoming into a room – or of a man looking out at the world. Thesewindow frames, loaded with pediments and volutes and shells andtassels, are vehement, self-reflexive, self-absorbed. They’re win-dow frames that turn away from – and even betray – the windowsthey’re meant to celebrate. They are drum rolls for oblivion, fan-fares for nothingness. The window frame has assassinated thewindow. And so illusionism dies, yet again.

Perhaps the modernity of Borromini’s work has most of all to dowith this former stonemason’s loyalty to architecture’s structuralimperatives, a loyalty that becomes a mask behind which his radi-cal aestheticism takes hold. Borromini is a prophet of the modernapproach to architecture, for he believes that the beauty of theform is a dimension of the function of the form. Having done whatis necessary, Borromini turns out to be an artist freed from neces-sity. Then again, the freedom from necessity becomes anotherform of necessity, an internal pressure equal to the pressure ofutilitarianism, so that in the end Borromini’s most flagrant flightsof fancy feel inevitable.

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W I N D O W F R A M E

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Bernini’s insulting description of his rival as ‘‘an ignorant Gothwho has corrupted architecture’’ provides a key to Borromini’sunruly modernity. Bernini wanted to remind people that Borro-mini had spent his early years in Milan, a northern city, and thathe had never escaped the shadow of the city’s vast Gothic cathe-dral, a monument to the fevers of the Gothic style, with its vehe-mently pointed forms, its accretion of details, its exaggerated di-mensions. But of course it is precisely those Gothic fevers that giveBorromini’s classicism its saving skepticism, its vigor, its inventive-ness, its independence. In Borromini’s teeming imagination theGothic impulse, such as it is, can almost be thought of as anincipiently Romantic impulse, a need to find an order of one’sown. Borromini speaks the language of classicism with a Gothicfervor – and thus he speaks to us.

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S E L F - P O RT R A I T ( D O M E )