The heterodoxy of Borromini’s geometrical model

‘Figurative heresy’ aimed at deceiving sight

Abstract

"And I estimate it is less bad to be a bad Catholic than a good heretic". With these words, Gian Lorenzo Bernini places his architectural production antithetical to that of Francesco Borromini. The latter, in the renewal of character and the achievement of original architectural solutions, stands in the collective imagination of the time as a heretic because he is not in line, divergent, with his established present, either through fallaciousness in discernment or pride or vanity. Borromini deviates from an established truth in the interpretative variations of the classical canon, thus proving himself a 'bad Catholic'. On the contrary, he uses reference models as a starting point for a quest to achieve innovative solutions to free his imagination in evoking forms with aesthetic and functional character in the interpretative variations of the classical canon. He pursued new constitutions, principles in respect of symbols and ecclesiastical geometric-proportional rules, so much so that his experiments, in the dichotomy between nature and art and licence and norm, unfortunately only imposed themselves later on as examples to be studied, to be noted, to be imitated. With this in mind, the contribution focuses on the theme starting with the Complesso di San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane of the Trinitarian Order, the first architecture "built with ingenious and bizarre design by Borromini". Borromini's Fabbrica appears, in its complexity, as an "evolutionary break" in the adoption of new stylistic and functional solutions, defining a prototypical model that only apparently expresses a negation of the rules, conventions, and methodologies adopted up to that time, but rather integrates religious symbolism and the Order's "measures", in a complex and concealed geometric design that is heretical, which led to its initial negative judgement but subsequently renewed the formal language of Italian and European architecture in the early 18th century.