 So look at this image for a while and then we'll get back to our topic which was looking at the different manifestations of a baroque impulse in the works of Bormini in specific and also Bernini and his contemporaries. The third great member of the Roman baroque is Pietro da Cortona. And da Cortona simply means from Cortona which is a town in Tuscany. And like so many of these Renaissance guys or Baroque guys, Pietro da Cortona is as comfortable doing painting as he is doing architecture. And this ceiling in the Barberini Palace is often considered to be the best thing ever when it comes to ceiling painting in the Baroque. And one thing that's so spectacular about it is just the very idea of how this thing engages the space below it. When we looked at the Sistine Chapel or even when we looked at the Farnese ceiling by Annibale Carracci which we looked at very briefly just for me to say not as good as I would like it to be. We noticed that there was this idea that a picture, a framed picture was transported to the ceiling. So ontologically and ontological means having to do with states of being, having to do with states of what existence we're talking about. So if you look at a picture you know that that thing is in a different state of being than you are. That's the thing on the wall. That's the image. And so Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel is very happy to keep that clear by framing pictures and having them be up on the ceiling. Pietro da Cortona does something quite different. Pietro da Cortona here is extending the space of the room illusionistically. Quite a theme really. You know you often get these paintings called things like the crucifixion or the creation of Adam or the separation of light and day. These are great biblical themes. The theme of Pietro da Cortona's painting is the triumph of the Barberini. The Barberini are his clients. That's kind of crazy right? It would be like the triumph of Bill Gates going up in chariots into the sky. Something like that. If you get enough money you can pay for that. I would definitely be commissioning that one if I were Bill Gates. But look what's going on. It's really quite amazing. It is as though the ceiling of the room has been blown away. There is an extension of the architectural features of the room into the painting and then a dismantling of those features as this great sense of rising up happens. The Trumploi perspective is being used but it's a Trumploi converging upward rather than converging forward. All of the techniques of the Baroque that we've admired in architecture are being trotted out here with great glory. And that is these complex compositional strategies of diagonal recession, of multiplicity versus unity, of loose handling of paint, strong plays of light and dark, and a moving of the pictorial image almost into the territory of theater. It becomes so dramatic and so active. I just wanted to show you that as a point of reference for where we've come since the days of Michelangelo, which we're not really so very long ago. Just a little diagram from Christian Norbert Schultz whom we mentioned before, talking about two basic diagrams for the Baroque church. One diagram is the longitudinal church that really becomes expansive around the dome, so much so that the domed part of the church becomes kind of like that great vault of heaven, that microcosm of the heavens that the centralized church tried to be. And the other diagram is the elongated central space where you give yourself an axis but just barely. Or you have some kind of displacement of center along a line that begins to give you an ovalized space rather than a centralized space. Let's get back to the theme we were discussing last time. The confrontation between Bernini and Boromini, or at least a comparison between Bernini and Boromini. Boromini and Bernini were both together working on projects with Carlo Maderno. And when Maderno died, they more or less went their separate ways. And their separate ways were quite different. Bernini was very courtly, Bernini was very charming. Bernini was the favorite architect, not simply of the Pope but also the king. Bernini went to France to do projects for Louis XIV, for example. Nobody was as charming as Bernini. And here you see a little handsome guy, Bernini, over here. Meanwhile, we have Boromini. And Boromini was very grumpy and very paranoid. Boromini eventually committed suicide by falling on his sword. And as he was dying, he was burning his drawings because he didn't want somebody else to get credit for designs that he did. Particularly, he didn't want Bernini to get credit for designs that he did. So he was in a difficult psychological state, let's say. Whereas Bernini was very gracious. The implications of that, if you happen to be an architect, is you don't get so many clients if you're the grumpy, paranoid, schizophrenic guy. And you get lots of clients if you're the courtly guy that popes and kings like to spend time with. There are more differences between them. And I would say one difference is that Boromini comes to architecture through architecture, through stone cutting, through masonry. When Boromini was a little boy, he actually cut stone on the Milan Cathedral. That was his first job. There are certain little winged angels that are signature Boromini elements. And you can find some of those in the Milan Cathedral. So he had this personal experience working on a Gothic site before he came to Rome. So the kinds of tasks that he would have the workers in the field do, he could explain to them. He knew exactly how everything got put up in the field. He knew it all. So he was really intellectual. He had in his own personal library over a thousand books. And in a day when books were precious, that is a huge library. Unlike, say, Michelangelo or Palladio who had great patrons who brought them into this sophisticated way of thinking about the world, thinking about philosophy. Boromini is a kind of autodidact, which means he taught himself things by reading. He became familiar with theory. He tried to load on as many meanings as possible. Meanwhile, Bernini was a sculptor. He was really interested in these close observations of nature, very interested in the virtuosity of handling stone, but not really skillful in architectural questions. So let's look at a couple of projects that they did that are similar in terms of program. Or not similar in terms of program, but let's say similar in terms of ambition. The first one we're going to look at is the Scala Regia by Bernini at the Vatican. As an aside, aren't these men dressed nicely? These are the Swiss guards at the Vatican. And if you think they're dressed nicely, that's because Michelangelo designed their outfits. And they still wear these little darling outfits designed by Michelangelo. I think they look great. The task that Bernini has is to make an entrance to the Vatican Palace. The Vatican Palace is up on an upper level, and the desire is to make an entrance more or less through here. So a big stair that gets you to the upper level of the Vatican Palace from the courtyard in front of the Vatican. What he does is he designs this dramatic stair called the Scala Regia, which basically means the royal stair. And he designs it in a theatrical way. What would we expect from Bernini? We would only expect that he would design it in a theatrical way. So this is where you enter the system and you move up. And as you move up, you have these landings that are bathed in light from hidden light sources. You can see the rhythm of light coming into it from this drawing down below. There is a bridge where you have an opportunity either to move into church or move into some private quarters and then you continue up. How's he designing this? You can look at the section, you can look at the plan and you should immediately notice that he's taking ideas about perspective or ideas about trompe l'oeil and building them into the plan. The walls taper. And not only do the walls taper, but the relationship of floor to ceiling tapers. So it's a taller space here than here. He's building a fake perspective. He's building a trompe l'oeil that you walk through. And he's being very careful to manipulate not simply the shape of the space, but even the dimension of the columns and the inter-columniation between the columns and the amount of light that comes in. So you get this thoroughgoing sense of being carried away by the illusion of the space. And that this long march up to the top seems easy because it's so well orchestrated. Meanwhile, poor little Boramini, all grumpy. He has like three people who ever want to give him work. One guy is a cardinal called Virgilio Spada. And this is the Palazzo Spada, a manorist building. Unfortunately, Spada already had a palace, but he got Boramini to do this little addition, the Galleria Spada. Here's a plan of it. And you see here where it's situated. This is a courtyard. This is the Galleria Spada. And this is the main courtyard of the Palazzo. This is a funny shape also. It's a little tapering cone similar to the tapering cone that we saw being used by Bernini. But now at a much smaller scale. You see there's a little statue at the end of the line. And you have some sense looking at this thing of how big the statue will be. Statue is more or less half a column height, slightly less than half a column height. A person is slightly less than half a column height. So all of the visual cues of the receding lines of the coffering of the columns make you think the little statue is going to be person height. But actually, ha, he tricked you. The little statue is like this big at the end of the line. And it is this trompe l'oeil. It's, I think, more effective than the Bernini trompe l'oeil. But the Bernini trompe l'oeil is really in prime real estate, which is to say the Vatican. And at a scale that's much, much greater. This is a little drawing showing you the details of how this illusion is created. By stepping down the ceiling, by stepping up the floor, and by shrinking the scale of the columns, the inter-columniation, and the bays that introduce light into the system. Fabulous. So now I want to talk about this moment in 6th to 5th plan, the four fountains, the quattro fontane. Because it's an interesting place where works by Boromini and Bernini come into direct confrontation with each other. Here we have the four fountains, right over here. One way that Domenico Fontana marked that special moment within the plan was to chamfer all the corners at 45 degrees and stick a fountain there. Hence the four fountains. So we have this funny intersection. And at this juncture, we have a little church stuck in the corner by Boromini, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. And along this road leading to the Quirinale Palace over here and Piazza del Quirinale, obelisk at the end, we have a Bernini church, San Andreao Quirinale. So both of these architects have a challenge. And this is really one of the big challenges of the Baroque. Renaissance didn't care so much about it, but the Baroque does. And that is, how can you conserve the continuity of fabric and edge? How can you knit together the city and still identify monuments within the city? How can you make the monuments stand out from the edge without rupturing the edge? And they both have different strategies for doing this. We'll look first at the Bernini. This is the long sleeve, it's called, of the Quirinale Palace, just a thin little bar of program with gardens behind it. But still, it's the Pope's Palace. So it has a certain hierarchical significance within the structure of the city. How will Mr. Bernini deal with that? And the answer is here. Mr. Bernini will deal with it by allowing the fake facade edge, the wall that defines the edge, to remain consistent, but to scoop a little concave circle out of it. It's kind of like what we saw Madeirno doing at the Barberini Palace, where he sets his building back a little bit to create a forecourt to carve out a space within the city that his building can become object-like in. But here there's a more complex game of inner penetration going on. He carves out a space, but no sooner does he carve out a space than he pulls out a facade, a temple facade, to occupy that space. And no sooner does the plane of the temple get established than he pulls out an etiquule, this little round porch. There is a kind of inner penetration of concave and convex spaces that really animates the whole system. Here you can see the wall sliding behind the facade, the ovalized volume of the church pulling back here and the little etiquule popping forward. And maybe this is a better view of it. Here's a plan. And this is an example of how the Baroque architects are sly about centralized churches. You must not have a centralized church, Bernini. Ew, don't worry about me. It won't be centralized because it's an oval. And so an oval gives you a pretty good idea about the circle, but it's not a circle. It's longitudinal. So Bernini succeeds in not having a centralized church and is allowed to build this. It's even slier than that, though, because you kind of want it to be centralized anyhow. So the long axis, strangely, is not the processional axis. So even though it has a long axis and isn't centralized, it's not like it's ideal for processions. There's an apse over here for the altar and the length from the entry through the apse and the length from pier to pier on the long axis is the same. So he's kind of insinuated centrality within the ovalized space of the church. He is clever. But just look at the interplay between these different volumes. It's really, really powerful. You know, in Manorist architecture, tensions are set into play and they become irreconcilable. Like, ah, how can you put these two things together and all you feel is tension? And I think what's amazing about Baroque architecture and maybe specifically Baroque architecture in the hands of somebody like Bernini is how oppositions are set into play. Here's a plane. Here's a volume. Here's an edge of the city. Here's an object building. What are you going to do? No problem. I'll just synthesize. It'll be fine. I'll rip them up all together. So these things are reconciled in a way that seems harmonious, that seems to dissipate the idea of tension and give you something more like a counterpoint than dissonance. Just fabulousness of the stair pulling out, pushing you away as you're trying to move forward and fabulousness of the etiquule, this little volume pulling out and for a moment at least giving you an idea about the idealized, centralized pavilion that is denied when you come onto the inside. On the inside, things are going on that we're familiar with because we looked at the Coronaro Chapel. So we're familiar with polychromy. We're familiar with all of the arts marshaling their forces together to create this really strong theatrical experience. So we have little angels crawling off the dome and crawling into the space of the church as though they have liberated themselves from heaven and they're coming down to meet you. You can see them, you know, coming out of here, this is no good, happening up here and the colors are these rich marbles, these gold leaves, these saturated tones, quite different than the kinds of things we've seen before. If we go down here to the corner of the Quattro Fontane, we find the solution put into play by Borromini, where he's trying to do the same thing. How can I put a building in a dense urban fabric and simultaneously hold the edge and define the urban space of the city and still individuate the objectness and therefore mark the hierarchy of my building? He does it in this subtle and sly way. What's going on is this strange attitude about the façade. Here, by the way, is one of those fountains, one of those four fountains put at the intersection of the two Sistine Roads. The façade seems to have a life of its own. The façade undulates. The façade wobbles away from the wall and disengages an autograph drawing. By autograph, I mean Borromini's drawing. You can see in this drawing something funny happening, and that is the axis of the façade and the axis of the church are misaligned. What that means is that the façade is in fact peeling away slightly from the line of the street and lining toward the line of this octagonal crossing that we have here, as though the façade wants to march away from street edge and occupy corner. And this autonomy of inside and outside is something that we already saw in the Jezu Church by Vignola, which more or less set the ground rules for subsequent Baroque churches. That is to say, the façade's doing one thing. The façade is a billboard. The façade is rhetorical and promoting messages to the church in Borromini. It becomes more animated and the façade begins to take on the freedom to move anywhere it wants. This is an early expression of this theme that we'll see developed in subsequent Borromini works. This is the undulating façade, really exaggerated here in this drawing. And in its undulation, it begins to inflect toward the square of the four fountains so that it can begin to, at least symbolically, occupy the space of the four fountains as its piazza, even though it's on the flat edge of a street. And here's the fountain, the fountain embedded into the corner. This is what the plan looks like, and the plan is not ideal. The plan is dealing with all of these contingencies, and it's a tiny little site. Remember, Borromini is grumpy. Nobody's going to give him a good project. This is a project for a order of monks called Spanish Trinitarians. They dressed in outfits that were these kind of black, rough cloths. And Borromini liked the way they dressed so much that he dressed like that for the rest of his life. It was like, I don't know, somebody dressing like a 19th century gentleman. It was like a hundred years out of style. But he thought this was correct. People were too pompous. People were too decorative. Let's reign it in. Here again, we see an idea about, can I make it centralized? I would like to make it centralized. And so it's an oval. And the oval takes the idea of center and meets the brief. But it's not simply an oval. Borromini is always more complex and will never give you simply one reading when he can give you multiple readings. If you look at this plan, it's almost a superposition of multiple plan geometries. It's an oval or circle. We could say it's a version of a circle. It's an octagon. It's a cross. So there are three plan types superimposed. And if you think that the client is an order of Trinitarians, Trinitarianism is important to them. A very important art historian called Leo Steinberg wrote his dissertation on this church in like 1960. And goes through quite meticulously showing you that everything in the church can be read three ways. This notion of tripleness doesn't simply happen to the plan, but it happens at every point. So look here at the cloister. If we look at the cloister, we also see the idea of cross. We get cross by the columnation and we get octagon. And we have circles coming out from the side. You look at this plan and if you're like everybody in the 18th century, you would say, oh my God, what is this guy up to? There was a famous 18th century critic called Militia. And he talks about Boremini and he says, he's just indulging his whim. There's no logic to this. He doesn't want to shape things because he can get away with it. He's talented, but he's completely undisciplined. He's the worst guy ever. People were really inclined to think that maybe this was the case. Maybe he in fact was completely undisciplined and making up shapes. Art historians didn't have access to his drawings really until after World War II. Very briefly, people saw drawings that Boremini did. They're held in a museum in Vienna called the Albertina. And nobody's looking at drawings in the Albertina. Instead you're having wars. And so finally after the war people began to examine the drawings and saw that in fact there are these geometrical structures going on. That these things are tightly constructed. In fact it was Leo Steinberg in his dissertation that began to say you have this trinary expression of geometry. Not one thing, but three things superimposed on each other. The cross, the octagon and the oval. And he even goes farther to explain why you need the cross, the octagon and the oval. You need the cross because the Latin cross, the Greek cross, it represents the body of Christ. It represents the shape of a church. It's the symbol of Christianity. You need the oval because the oval is basically a stretched circle. And in that it becomes a microcosmic reflection of divine order. And the octagon, represents the piers that support the dome at St. Peter's. The octagonal crossing of St. Peter's is reprised here in the church. This church is so little that if you read guide books at least let's say old guide books, guide books that were written 50 years ago it might say San Carlo is so small you could fit the entire church in one pier of St. Peter's. That's a little topos that gets connected to the church. And I think a lot of that might have to do with the idea that there is this referencing of the church in the geometry of the building. So it's tightly geometric, it's not willful, it's not whimsical but it is densely loaded up with a symbolism. And this dense engagement with multiple readings and not simply a singular reading creates the complexity of the edge. You get all kinds of complex readings going on here. Like you look at the wall that's such a bad plan. You look at the wall and you see a couple of things. Here's the octagon and every time you have the octagon you have a column there and those are structural column capitals. So Bormini wants you to know that they're structural column capitals. So what does he do? He takes the volume of these composite column capitals and holds and curls them upward as though they're supporting the roof. Over here inside these little curved niches the columns are not structural. They're not holding up the dome and Bormini marks them by curving the volumes downward. As if to say no structure here, pay no attention to the structure. So it's an amazing amazing wall on the interior. Not only because of its plasticity but also because of the way it codes information about architecture. We looked at the plasticity of the surface on the exterior early on and again our discussion of Baroque and I just want to show you again how this facade operates how it undulates and peels forward as if to suggest that within this street edge there is also object also volume pushing out and expressing itself. And here where it hits the corner it peels away and becomes just as thick as a column which suggests to you a sense of the facade toward a different condition. Look at the way the wall goes. It's kind of a running triumphal arch motif it's constantly destabilizing itself in one sense it wants to organize itself around the arch and then the little traviated piece on either side and then in another sense it wants to organize itself around the dome. So there's carving, there's pulling out there's renegotiation for center fabulous. In fact there's all kinds in the interest of full disclosure I'm a big fan of Boromini. If I had to say who the stars of this term are I would say Michelangelo and Boromini right now are winning the race in my mind. You could have other opinions it's absolutely fair you could like Bernini that's okay, Michelangelo and Boromini are the best. Because look at this it's so loaded with meaning even looking back here this is a tiny church this church would fit in this room very nicely you get fake perspective and so you get the sense that the thing is bigger than it is. Or look at the dome this is incredibly complicated no wonder the 18th century critics were screaming about it. But it's complicated in a really precise way we know that the closer you are to earth the more contaminated the world is. It's full of decaying matter time happens you can't have an ideal condition when you're trapped in earth so the building becomes incredibly complex when it touches the ground but the higher up it gets the more the building sorts out its geometry so by the time we have the springing of the dome all of this kind of craziness has contracted and resolved itself into an oval. By the time we come up to the lantern this area with light coming into it all that craziness has resolved itself into a circle with a triangle inside. The circle with the triangle inside is the symbol of the trinity. Even look at the coffering. You gotta love the coffering. We've admired the coffering in things like the pantheon because the coffering is great structurally and it marks out perspective in an interesting way. Here we not only have coffering giving us depth to the edge of the ceiling but we also have that same set of symbols that we saw superimposed in the plan individuating themselves here. We have a circle we have an octagon and we have a cross. We have all of these elements knitted together in this amazing manipulation of field. Even if you look at the courtyard over here you see some of the similar themes going on we saw the undulation of the facade and thought great look what happens in the courtyard he uses a flipping of the balusters so that one has the fat part at the bottom the other one has the fat part at the top and the space in between becomes S shaped he's designing the interstitial space between the balusters to mimic the undulating form of the facade. Very clever. In his dissertation Leo Steinberg also points out that if you were to take sections through the balusters and draw plans of them at different levels at one level you would have a circle at another level you would have a cross and at another level you would have an octagon so thorough going is this desire to make triple symbolism and to make form complex not through willful random acts of compositional frenzy but through layering on the symbolic value of each form if you liked that church stay tuned because you're really going to love this church this is another little church by Borimini a little bit later 1642 begun completed more or less in 1660 and this is Saint Ivo a la Sapienza La Sapienza is the university the Catholic University and this is a church for that university it has a very specific program a very specific site and the specific site is here the university buildings wrap it and form a courtyard and when Borimini got the project it had already been initiated he was given more or less a round foundation he didn't have a lot of freedom in terms of whether he would overlise the church whether he would make it longitudinal the foundation was there and he was stuck with the idea of a centralized church what did he do and we already have an idea that if you're Borimini you're going to be superimposing symbols together like crazy because why wouldn't you you're Borimini this church is the Sapienza and Sapienza in Italian means wisdom and somebody at least in biblical law and to be incredibly wise is Solomon the wisdom of Solomon on one level you have this star of David who is related to Solomon becoming the plan of the building kind of clever but not simply a star of David representing wisdom but the star of David that gets manipulated with his inner penetration concave and convex spaces that you come toward it scoop of space the area in which to act then the volumetrics begin to reveal themselves these bulging lobes come out at you and so forth you come inside some lobes are convex some lobes are concave and the whole envelope of the building twists and turns you could say that a diagram is kind of like this your basic star of David that then becomes interpenetrated with circles another way to think about the plan and Borimini would probably be thinking about it this way is that he's trying to make a heraldic symbol that will flatter the pope and at the time that he initiates the commission the pope is Urban who is a Barbarini and the heraldic symbol of the Barbarini is the bee these are early drawings of the building and right here in the middle of the whole thing there's a bee and if you look at the bee and you look at the plan of the church it's almost as if the plan of the church is the architectural representation of the Barbarini bee hilarious sadly there were like three popes that he had to go through before this thing got built so he constantly keeps shifting the iconic program the last pope that was here was Pamphili and his heraldic symbol was the dove but it's easy enough to get a dove in there too I could certainly draw that dove and persuade Mr. Pamphili that it was innocent that that was all about him however look at the section even the section kind of looks like a beehive if he's trying to flatter Mr. Barbarini Pope Urban beautiful church strange church in every sense of the word just let's look at it from the outside for a moment what does it even look like what's the facade doesn't seem to have a facade or it's playing this game so that edge of the university wrap wrap wrap wrap continuous and then suddenly the dome appears and unlike say the dome of St. Peter's which is so far back that you basically have to be across the river in order to see it this dome touches the edge of the building you have immediate confrontation between the space of the dome and the edge so they all constellate together but they don't constellate together as a thing it really becomes a kind of radical stacking here's a thing here's a thing here's a thing and you might be inclined to say what is he thinking about with all this stacking in the collection of the thousand books that Barbarini had he had one book called Ecologia by Rippa a Jesuit and this book was a book of symbols and so there are symbols that literally look like bits of this thing like this bottom part down here are a series of steps which represent in Rippa's Ecologia the steps of grammar the seven steps of grammar the little Dairy Queen element at the top of the building swirly swirly swirly looks like the Tower of Babel that this is the risky run when you try to know too much the biblical story tells you that way back way back when everyone spoke the same language and people had the ambition to build a tower that would reach reach to heaven and they were building this thing and it was like Dairy Queen it was swirly and they had so much pride in their own abilities to accomplish things that ultimately God smote them they went crashing to the ground the Tower of Babel fell and languages became multiple instead of unified so people couldn't communicate very well this is a risk the idea that if you become too prideful in your knowledge of the world you will have that fall so it's surmounted of course by a cross and I'm only giving you a few of the symbols there are maybe about 40 different symbols from Rippa that can get mapped on to this thing look at the interior this is another game that Boremini is playing that we haven't seen played in a long time and that is he's manipulating the dome in a way that's really frenetic we saw in San Carlos that the footprint of the building depending on where you cut the section changed from something quite complicated to something ovalized and something circular but everything kind of resolved itself in San Carlos at the springing of the dome here the springing of the dome directly reflects this weird little diagram of concave and convex incursions onto the geometry of the Star of David that's where the dome springs how do you resolve that and luckily Boremini was trained on the job side of the Milan Cathedral cutting stone with masons who were building a Gothic church so he had the same ability to conceptualize complex curvature and by complex curvature I mean something curving in multiple directions hard enough to build a dome but a dome is pretty rational you have that same arc all the way through if you're making a nice Roman dome but to make a dome where the curvature is changing constantly that is rather complicated but Boremini manages to negotiate this fabulous these little mountains that you see over here that look like pediments, heraldic symbols of the second pope, the Kiji pope in the middle there, the stars that we see all over here, heraldic symbols from the pope so he's really desperately trying to make popes like him but he has a hard time with that because he is a grump and he has a bad temper and he's smug so you guys, rain it in but isn't this great, look at that, wow you look at this thing from a distance and you get one sense of what it is you look at it close up and you get quite a different sense of what it is I want to show you another building by Boremini maybe not a spectacular St. Ivo in San Carlo but incredibly interesting and certainly a development of themes that we saw put into operation at San Carlo and that theme is the wandering façade this is the oratory of San Filippo Neri and San Filippo Neri is one of those Baroque saints that was canonized following the Council of Trent San Filippo Neri had the idea of musical performance as something that was very central and so the task that Boremini has here is not really to make a church but to make an oratory for musical performance but it's a funny project because here's the church in Nuova, new church and Boremini has to basically put a church right next to a church which is odd, right? how do you do that? and one answer is you begin to coat it materially to look different so the chiesa nuova is made of white travertine and this is the stone of Rome this is the stone of Roman antiquity and this is the stone out of which most significant buildings in Rome are constructed already there's a little gesture of decorum here saying I am secondary I'm using this lower material you are primary, you have this fancy material and there's also this idea of negotiating the urban fabric we have this wrapper of urban edge that translates through the building and then you get a series of layers piled up on top of it big layers peeling away peeling away the façade instead of becoming a thin on one surface you really think it's several lamina of façade that are together there's the five bay lamination there's the three bay lamination and then there's the one bay lamination of course out of which an edicule pops and even the pediment that we have here in a sense registers the multiple origins from which it comes by having this kind of compromised or let's say conflicted geometry but that's not the only way that façade wanders or behaves strangely here's Kies and Nuova fabulous here's the oratory little so already there's this kind of baroque exaggeration of scale or rhetorical gesture to make things seem grander than they are this little thing has a façade that's almost as big as the façade this big thing and how does he accomplish that and the answer is the façade in no way engages the volume of the church it's just there or let's say in some way it does these are the limits of the façade of the oratory by Boromini and you come inside and you enter a vestibule so that's kind of clever it's rhetorical it's act one of a drama of the senses the rest of which will unfold in different ways once you've entered the building at the same time the local lie not telling you the truth about the organization of the oratory does tell you the truth about the organization of the monastic compound so the façade centers on a series of courtyards but slips away from the lineament of the oratory itself fabulousness the language is crazy I just think not since Michelangelo have we seen someone so playful like look at this portal this is on the second story where you might come out and greet the people what is going on here you get this kind of wobbling as something seems to be transforming or transmogrifying before your very eyes the columns slip up and begin to well out into this like ear like lobe that suggests a column capital in the process of formation but not succeeding in forming because things are translating to the vertical things are moving up with this holy fire crazy and on the inside we see more of this legacy of Gothic masonry that Bormini had up his sleeve in that the entire vaulting of the oratory is ribbed that's strange Brunelleschi used rib vaulting but Brunelleschi sort of used rib vaulting by default he was trying to figure out how to put a dome up and that was what was available by now Bormini is going back and pulling up something that had been discarded and he's doing it to begin to get a continuity of reading between the pilasters that wrap the wall and the articulation of the ceiling and he's also doing it to come up with a crafty corner solution where instead of having one of those bad Brunelleschi corners or let's say difficult to resolve corners he simply puts one of these wrapping things along the corner and pulls it up so that it becomes a kind of seamless transition of the continuity of the wrapper great this technique of slippy slidey facade happens again and again in Bormini this is a little church not quite finished facade but we can see his intention of the facade Santa Maria delle Sette Dolores St Mary of the Seven Sorrows this is a nunnery across the river in Trastevere and here there's an idea about a facade there's an idea about a center but when you actually look at what's going on this is the church the facade has moved away to set up the first event in a series of events that you will experience and here's another building by Bormini called Propaganda Hide and you might say what does that mean and it means propagate the faith the word propaganda really comes from the Jesuits this idea that you go forth and you proselytize so this was the headquarters over the world to propagate the faith here too there is this kind of slippy slidey facade here is the church and here's the facade he's just pushing it away and beginning to play different themes and if you look at details of Propaganda Fide you can see some of this crazy language that's going on with Bormini where the peers seem to taper they're really skinny down below they get fatter and then they get skinny again, like stretching like gum and they rotate out of the alignment here and everything begins to crank as you read and register these pressures and these forces within the line of the building and here too Bormini is playing around with these basket weaves with this different idea about what it is to make a vault and taking the pilasters that you have down below and wrapping them up it's got a different idea about the corner here in the oratory there was a solid there was a plaster in the corner that peeled up here there's a void in the corner and so he never even has to solve the question of the corner the corner is voided the corner is not even there it's just the space between the ribs so clever this is Piazza Navono, the greatest square in Rome and this is one more point at which Bormini and Bernini are both operating in close adjacency Bernini has the charge of making three fountains in this long space and Bormini has the charge of completing this church the church is Sant'Agnese this also is a church that had been initiated by another architect and Bormini is given the commission to complete it the idea of Piazza Navono is kind of amazing it's the sort of thing we've seen in city plans before when we looked at Florence we saw the trace of an old arena in the city of Florence and this was once a horse racing stadium it was the hippodrome of the emperor of Domitian as in Florence where the old Roman walls were encrusted with buildings the same thing happened here too the actual structure of the racing theater was reused to make all these building edges but they kept the center void fabulous Noly map shows us it right over here so what are these interventions what is the strategy deployed by Bormini to make his fountains what is the strategy deployed by Bormini to make his church the name of the church that Bormini is designing is Sant'Agnese in Agone the name does not refer to Agony of her martyrdom which must have been excruciating but rather to the fact that in Greek the kind of athletic competitions that were taking place in this stadium were called Agone or Agonese the name in Agone like so many of his projects he was not able to conceptualize this from the ground up but came into a project that was already underway initiated by very good architects Girolmo and his son Carlo Avinaldi Bormini came into it after the foundations were in so the plan for the most part is not the work of Bormini and the part that seems most characteristic of Bormini is the façade and the urban strategy to wit how do you put a building in a square as important as Piazza Navona and simultaneously maintain the coherence of the fabric edge and yet emphasize the monumentality of the church and this was particularly important because the client was Pope Innocent Pamphili and the Pamphili palace was directly adjacent to the church and the church was to be the place for the tomb of Pope Innocent it kind of reminds you of something we've seen before for example San Andriel Quirinale not that you would want Bormini to hear you saying that but what's happening is there's a little scoop edge edge edge he's holding the edge of Piazza Navona he's wrapping the edge of all the buildings the domestic buildings translating it through here scooping out and then popping forward with a temple front so it's kind of consistent with the strategy that San Andriel Quirinale and here too he's putting a dome and the dome is right here right at the foreground so that there's no question about the fact that you read the dome as part of the church so we get a kind of interpenetration of concavity and convexity configuring the church it's also possible and I would say probable given the filial relationship between Bormini and Maderno Bormini's strong Michelangelesque sensibility that in building this church for the Pope for Pope Innocent albeit not at the Vatican he took it as a private task to rebuild Saint Peter Saint Peter's that had been spoiled by the addition of the nave to Michelangelo's church and by the failure of Bermini to complete the towers here to the left we see Saint Peter's funny looking Saint Peter's with its silly little dome and here's a drawing of what Saint Peter's would have looked like so many of the strategies deployed here by Bormini seem to do a double task on one hand they hold back the pressure of the edge and permit the insertion of an object into the fabric and at the same time make visible the immediate proximity of the drum and the dome on the temple-fronted portico bracketed by towers dreams for Saint Peter's that were never realized so now we have towers and that works really well almost like bookends stopping the march of edge that we have coming in along the edge of Piazza Navona bracketing it away and allowing the object of this church to be instituted here this church was done for the Confili family when Pope Innocent was reigning and that was really lucky because one of the craftsmen that was working on the church was sloppy and so Bormini killed him craft, come on, think about it people look really sharp the guy had bad craft so Bormini killed him luckily he beat him with a hammer it wasn't like he took a gun out or anything the hammer was right there craft is really important if you have any trouble with craft in studio I want you to get better fast this could still happen Pope Innocent got him out of trouble and so he was able to continue practicing but that was considered to be a black mark in Pope Innocent's record and just one of the indications that he's a little bit out of control right in front of the church of Sant'Agnese we have a Bernini fountain of the Four Rivers and this is kind of a great thing this is one of those obelisks that gets placed, Hitherinian in the Baroque city of Rome and we know from our discussion of the obelisk at St. Peter's that obelisks are heavy this is a small obelisk compared to that one Bernini situates it the theme of the fountain is the Four Rivers and so you have river gods of Asia, Europe America and Africa lounging about and this frothy whipping up of waves all around them and then real water down below and what Bernini actually does is he has a void underneath this heavy obelisk so that it's miracle enough that these obelisks are moved but if you situate one in this kind of precarious place kind of fad these are some of the different river gods down here and you might notice that on the church there's a statue of the virgin and guide books will tell you that this character river god who's going like this is afraid that the Bormini church will fall down this is a little joke being made by Bernini because he's full of life here you have the virgin blessing him saying don't worry Bormini built this church it'll be fine towers won't be falling here we're going to continue next time talking a little bit more about pietra.cortona and also urban space and the deliberate design of urban space in Baroque Rome