An Out Line Of European Architecture

BERNINI AND BORROMINI
It is important to remember that when Bernini with his South
Italian impetuosity won the first place in Roman sculpture and
architecture, this infiltration of North Italian elegance had already
done its work. His noble colonnades in front of St. Peter's (pL Lxm)
have something of the happy openness of Palladian villa architec-
ture, in spite of their Roman weight and their Berninesque sculp-
tural vigour. For Bernini was the son of a sculptor and himself
the greatest sculptor of the Baroque. He incidentally also painted, and
as for his reputation as an architect, it was so great that Louis XTV
invited him to Paris to design plans for an enlargement of the
Louvre Palace. Bernini was as universal as Michelangelo, and nearly
as famous. Borromini, on the other hand, was trained as a mason, and,
since he was distantly rekted 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 centre 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 characterise Borromini's first important
work, the church of S, Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (pi. LXIV),
begun in 1633. 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 has been said before that the normal plan for longi-
tudinal churches of the Baroque was that of the Gesu: nave with
side chapels, short transepts and dome over the crossing. It was
broadened and enriched by the following generations (S. Ignazio,
Rome, 1626 seqq.). But the centralised ground plan was not given up
either. 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, already in Vignola's S. Anna dei Palafirenieri (fig. 64),
a less finite form, and a form that endows the centralised plan with
longitudinal elements, i.e. elements suggestive of movement in space.
An infinite number of variations on the theme of the oval was de-
veloped first by the architects of Italy and then by those of other
countries. They constitute the most interesting development of
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