 This lecture is entitled Francesco Borromini and the Italian Baroque, and Francesco Borromini, who you see on the screen right now, is considered one of the most important and inventive architects of the Italian Baroque. So let's write that down. Inventive. He was a contemporary of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who we've already looked at, and he was actually one of his main rivals. They had a very competitive relationship. Rival of Bernini. And it's really interesting to consider Borromini alongside Bernini because both men are very representative of what Italian Baroque architecture really was, what the true style of Italian Baroque architecture was. But they're very different architects. They have a very different aesthetic and very different goals driving them in their architecture, yet they're both equally representative. And I think that's interesting to keep in mind because it shows how diverse the Baroque is, especially in its architecture. So let's keep that in mind. Diversity of Baroque style. And again, if you consider the architecture of Borromini versus the architecture of Bernini, who we've already considered, you really get a sense of that. So now let's take a look at some of Borromini's architecture. This is San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, which is in Rome, and it dates to the 1630s. And the name of this church translated into English simply means St. Charles at the Four Fountains. And it was given this name because it was built at a place where there happened to be four fountains. So this is one of his earlier buildings, and it's a very good example of his style and how he kind of took some of the trends of Baroque architecture and adapted them to suit his more innovative tastes. And it's also, as I said, it's very typical of the Baroque. What you see here is obviously on the right, the façade of the church and the plan of the church on the left here. So right here is sort of the plan of the church as you're looking down on it. And just to give you a sense of how this is set in the city of Rome, here's the plan over here. So there's a road here and a road here. And then these straight walls on the two other sides, a butt, other buildings. So Boromini was actually working with a very restricted space here. And he didn't have a lot of room to do whatever he wanted with. Nonetheless, most people agree he came up with a very successful and innovative building. So let's just take a look at the façade to start over on the right. Hopefully, when you look at it, you immediately see certain features that immediately say, oh, this is a very Baroque church façade. Now, what exactly about that façade looks Baroque to you? Take a second and look at it and ask yourself, you know, what is Baroque about it? Well, it might help if you think back to Carlo Maderno. And hopefully you remember Carlo Maderno was famous for his Baroque church façades. And his church façades typically had two stories divided by a wide cornice. They were divided up into three bays and had a central portal emphasis. And you can see all of that here, the wide cornice, the two stories, the three bays, right, by columns and the central emphasis on the portal. And importantly, Boromini had actually worked with Carlo Maderno, and Carlo Maderno was actually a distant relative of his. So it's not surprising that he would have absorbed some of what Carlo Maderno had done in the earlier Baroque. But there is something very different about this façade from what Carlo Maderno had done. And hopefully you'll notice right off the bat, this cornice here, right along here, is actually curved. It's not simply moving forward and backward the way some of Carlo Maderno's churches were that created depth within a straight planar space. This is actually curving. And you can see that both in the top and the bottom of this church. And that is something quite new. Curving façade. And this ultimately gives us concave and convex shapes throughout this façade here. Hopefully you can see this concave, concave, this here convex, and so on and so forth. And that is one of the real hallmarks of Boromini's architecture. So you should really remember that, the interplay of concave and convex, concave and convex. So it's really very new. This kind of wave-like shape, right? It's sort of like a wave across the façade. And you can even see that when you look at the plan here on the left. The same thing is continued on the inside. This really curved shape of the interior of this church. Very, very new and very interesting. And just, we don't have an interior view of the church, but you can see on this plan that he's able to create a continuity between the exterior of his church and the interior of this church. It's almost as though, and again this is the façade that we just looked at right here, upon entering that same wave-like energy and motion is continued on the interior of the building. So really interesting small church and modest church, but it makes a very bold statement in the way that Boromini has really given these very solid, rigid forms life and a real almost organic gracefulness. And moving on to look at one of Boromini's most famous and celebrated examples, this is Santivo alla Sapienza, which is also in Rome, and it dates 1642 to 1660. And I think if you look closely at this building, you can see that some of these ideas we just looked at at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane are really continued in this building and have reached sort of maturity. So once again Boromini is working within a constrained space. You can see here, this is his church right here, and it's at one end of a courtyard. So he was working with pre-existing spaces, or one pre-existing space, and nonetheless he managed to create something very, very remarkable. Right off the bat hopefully you'll see something that I said is a hallmark of Boromini and is unique and something kind of new, and that again is these concave and convex forms. And he often balances concave with convex to add to a liveliness in his buildings, but nonetheless once again we have concave and convex forms. And he also creates a liveliness in the facade of this building, not only with the contrast of concave and convex, but he contrasts straight elements like these columns with arches. He contrasts lighter shades of materials, the white of the drum of the dome up here, with this darker color of the stone here and even with the shadow created by these windows. So lots of contrasting elements playing against one another to create interest and liveliness and movement. But it's really in the plan of this church, which you see on the right, that we really get to what's so interesting about this building. Let me scroll down a little bit here. Now this is essentially a central plan church, right? You can see it's basically an embellished circle. But it's really a little bit more interesting than that. And you can see again we have our telltale concave and convex forms running all along the outer edge of this building. You can see it just continues. And as a result, there's just these very short, brief straight wall spaces, right? There's very little straight traditional wall in this building, which is really interesting. It almost does away with that really solid, stable feeling you're used to when you enter a square room. It's much more moving and almost unstable. In addition, if you take a look at these few straight lines, if you were to continue those straight lines out over where the concave space is, it would come to a point. And really that's part of a triangle as part of the geometry of this, right? You can see that there. And if you were to continue the convex parts of these buildings right here, these curves, the parts that are rounding out, if you were to make those into points, right? You have another triangle. And so this is really two triangles intersecting with one another. Creating a kind of a star shape. So it's a really interesting, geometric, yet very organic and really lively space, full of almost a frenetic energy. And just to show you the dome above, there you go. So on the right, this is the dome. If you're in the middle of the church looking up, that's what you see above you. This really soaring, impressive, awesome dome up above. And it's almost like this energy created by this playful movement along the walls of this Central Planned Church is really channeled upward into this dramatic, steep dome. And it's really just briefly interrupted by, right along here, you can see the cornice down here. But really that doesn't stop at this intense movement upward. And that's something that's really interesting about Boromini. And we saw it in San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane with the movement from outside to inside, that continuity of space. And I'm going to scroll up so we can write that down. That's an important thing to keep in mind. Continuity. And that's something really unique about Boromini, that he's able to achieve that continuity of space from one distinct space to another. And that's a real change from the Renaissance where we're used to having the traditional delineation of space from one space to another. Boromini has done away with that and he creates these organic spaces where one thing merges into another, right? As with this dome, the space of the church itself just merges into this space of the dome up above. And that's very organic quality to it and it's almost sculptural, this freedom of movement. And it's really quite unique. So hopefully you'll have learned today that Boromini kind of created new rules for himself and his architecture really very innovative in having done so. He takes classical elements, but adapts them even more than many of his peers did, creating even more theatrical, more lively, more ornamented buildings. And whether or not he had the goals of the counter-reformation church in his mind or not, Boromini certainly created buildings that were capable of moving people out of the ordinary human world and transporting them into the realm of the spiritual and the awe-inspiring. And in that way he's a true Baroque figure.