Practical and Symbolic Geometry in Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

摘要

In 1634, the barely solvent Spanish Trinitarians commissioned the as yet untested Francesco Borromini to design a new convent in Rome, along with a church dedicated to San Carlo Borromeo and the Holy Trinity. The result had an immediate and seismic impact: no matter how the Baroque is defined, one of the starting points is always San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (also referred to here as San Carlino). The ingenuity of the church plan has been the subject of particularly intense debate. It is normally seen as a longitudinal oval, though in reality only the church dome is this shape. This supposed oval-centeredness has led Borromini to be thought as both neo-medieval, in that he bypassed the column-based proportionality of the Renaissance, and protomodern, in that his architecture gave form to the spirit of the new science of Kepler and Galileo.