Finding San Carlino

Collected Perspectives on the Geometry of the Baroque

Adil Mansure, Skender Luarasi, Adil Mansure, Skender Luarasi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429856037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, also called San Carlino, is an architectural artefact that continues to attract numerous hypotheses and geometric analyses attempting to explain its form and meaning. Numerous investigations have attempted to reveal its underlying geometrical principles, without, however, reaching a consensus. Finding San Carlino presents an edited collection of perspectives on Borromini's famous Baroque church from a range of established and emerging scholars in architectural history and theory, including Werner Oechslin, Karsten Harries, Michael Hill and Lauren Jacobi amongst others.

This book offers the reader different means of engaging with, enjoying and articulating San Carlino's complexity, non-consensus and ambiguity. It is precisely such a unique disposition that motivates this book to explore multiple modes of architectural enquiry and delve into a series of theoretical and historiographical questions such as: why was Borromini not able to post-rationalize his architecture with his drawings? What is San Carlino's exemplary value, and why does it continually engender exegetical and hermeneutic desire? What is the role of geometry in architecture, in history and today?

Written for researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in architectural history and theory, the book uses San Carlino as an enigmatic centering point for a set of significant contemporary voices to explore new modes of confrontation and comparison.

1
On Borromini’s drawings and “practical geometry”

Voleva dentro una cosa cavare un’altra, e nell’altra l’altra senza fi nire mai

Werner Oechslin

I. Ποίησις/inventio and its richness and differentiation embodied in (geometrical) drawing

“in architectura haec duo insunt: quod significatur et quod significat.”

Vitruvius, I. I, 3

“& però due cose sono, una è la significata, & proposta opera, l’altra è la significante, cioè dimostrativa ragione.”

Daniele Barbaro, I Dieci Libri di Vitruvio Commentati, 1556

“attacher des signes”

Condorcet, Progrès de l’esprit humain, 1795

Condorcet describes the larger framework of our actions – including (architectural) design – at the beginning of his outline of the whole of human progress, published posthumously in 1795:

L’Homme naît avec la faculté de recevoir des sensations, d’appercevoir et de distinguer, dans celles qu’il reçoit, les sensations simples dont elles sont composées, de les retenir, de les reconnoître, de les combiner, de conserver ou de rappeler dans sa mémoire, de comparer entr’elles ces combinaisons, de saisir ce qu’elles ont de commmun et ce qui les distingue, d’attacher des signes à tous ces objets, pour les reconnoître mieux, et s’en faciliter de nouvelles combinaisons.¹

From the connection of our perceptions with intellectual possibilities, the works of human culture arise – that which, according to Daniele Barbaro, in relation to architecture is created for utility in the external world.² Condorcet also immediately lists the ingredients absolutely necessary for such an operation such as the determination of difference and correspondence, recognition and memory, combination and its comparison. Condorcet calls the process that fulfills such criteria “Attacher des signes,” setting signs. The “comparer entr’elles ces combinaisons” approaches what Aristotle (981a) describes at the beginning of the Metaphysics with the concept of hypolepsis, namely, to come to an assumption and assessment based on similarities.³ A few lines later a sentence follows according to which experience is subsumed in the individual but art into the general. Before this, Aristotle quotes the saying of Polus of Acragas that experience brings forth art, which Daniele Barbaro literally adopts in the Proemium to his Vitruvius commentary in 1556. He specifies that with repeated experience, art develops more and more: “Il nascimento dell’Arti da principio è debole, ma col tempo acquista forza, & vigore.”⁴ The process of learning is emphasized.⁵ These are all considerations that can easily be transferred to the drawing and designing, creative activities of an architect.

Thus, it concerns both: the action related to the individual and its connection with the deeper insight of cause and reason, the understanding of art won out of repeated experience.⁶ Condorcet differentiates in as much at the end of his “Esquisse” that which stands as the achievement of an individual artist from that which as a whole signifies an advance for the arts.⁷

For his part, Barbaro examined the “attacher de signes” in more detail. After all, Vitruvius (I.I,3) himself had stated: “in architectura haec duo insunt: quod significatur et quod significat.” Barbaro comments:

Con tutte le predette Arti, anzi sopra tutte è l’Architettura, come giu-dice che ella è di ciascuna: là onde bisogna che in eßa specialmente si consideri alcuna cosa fatta, ò vero da esser fatta, & poi si consideri la ragione: & però due cose sono, una è la significata, & proposta opera, l’altra è la significante, cioè dimostrativa ragione.⁸

Barbaro therefore designates the architect’s creative act as “dimostrativa ragione,” which in turn corresponds to the “ratiocinatio,” which Vitruvius (I.I,1) connects with the “demonstrare atque explicare.” What on the one hand brings us very close to the (designing) activity of the architect, Barbaro connects, on the other hand – again in a very Aristotelian manner – with basic insights into scientific activity:

Tutti gli effetti adunque, & tutte l’opere, ò lavori delle Arti: tutte le conclusioni di tutte le scienze sono le cose significate, ma le ragioni, le prove, le cause di quelle sono le cose significanti, & questo è perche il segno si riferisce alla cosa significata, l’effetto alla causa, la conclusione alla prova.⁹

For the architectural processes, therefore, it also concerns cause and effect, the Aristotelian criteria of science. Barbaro defines the “significare” thus: “significare è per segni dimostrare, & segnare, e imprimere il segno.”¹⁰ The architect sets signs. And the “complete” architect is the one who has mastered both, concrete designing and making and – contained within this – the fundamental understanding and capacity of judgment of this concrete procedure.

Both are required, and they define the architect. Barbaro places this profile, rich in requirements, in the largest possible framework, there where one fundamentally considers the “agenti delle cose.” “Il Divino, il naturale, lo artificiale, cioè IDIO, La Natura, l’Huomo.”¹¹ One is near to “divine” insight and the idea of the demiurge and can barely resist Pythagorean concepts. It continues through the entire history of architecture up to Le Corbusier, who in Une maison – un palais of 1928 reproduces the “ordonnancer” of the architect copied after the “Dieu a tout ordonné dans l’Univers,” and invokes, “Éveiller le dieu qui est en nous, véritable et profonde joie de ce monde.”¹² For him, this forms the “unité architecturale.”

Divine omniscience, against which everything measures itself, is comprehensible. God is wisdom and science. The “universa Mundi fabrica” is determined by him so that then according to the image of the “Aurea Catena” the context is represented as follows: “qua, cuncta, ordinatis gradibus, quasi anulorum nexu, à Deo in Materiam descendant, and vice versa ab eadem materia in Deum redeant.”¹³

In this manner – valid for a long time – the universal and omnipresent framework of human activity is grasped. For Vitruvius, this setting a sign and this required melding of “ingenium” and “disciplina” for the architect is transferred into the catalogue of concrete requirements. After a general reference to education (“ut literatus sit”), the demand of the “peritus graphidos” (Vitruvius I.I,3) follows. The architect must be proficient in drawing, the “graphidis scientia” (Vitruvius I.I,4). Vitruvius adds the assistance of geometry to this. And Barbaro comments that the “peritia de i lineamenti” has the significance for architecture that mathematics represents for philosophy.¹⁴

The merging of the most general, deepest insights into the creative process with the totally concrete one-off single act to a “dimostrativa ragione” thus finds a locus of synthesis in drawing. Here Barbaro – long since in geometrical language – lists what the draftsman can achieve and record, in relation to size and delimitation of things (“la dimensione, & la terminatione delle cose, cioè la grandezza, & i contorni”) and the comparison of the parts with the whole, the “differenze, & le convenienze delle parti tra se stessi.”¹⁵

Here Barbaro is thinking above all of those drawings in which the architect employs geometrical instruments. It certainly fits with what Condorcet fundamentally comprehends in his listing of the possibilities in dealing with our experiences – so too the “comparer entr’elles ces combinaisons.”¹⁶ That here the individual and the fundamental come together is inherent in geometry itself. Right at the beginning of the prologue to his Euclid commentary, Proclus emphasized the “medietas,” the mediating position of mathematics. And there where he follows in the Platonic tradition the comprehensive connections, “coniunctiones,”¹⁷ all the way to dialectic at the apex of the mathematical sciences, it ultimately in turn concerns bringing together the concrete act of realization with the higher spheres: “Finis autem est tum sursum educendi facultatis, tum etiam cognitricis actionis longe optimus.”¹⁸

That much should be clear out of all these considerations for the closer contemplation of architectural drawings as well. One must not search far; the entire arc from concrete design to fundamental, more profound insight and significance is given in the drawing itself in the best Vitruvian tradition, which inasmuch assures itself of geometry. “Il n’y a ici ni mystique, ni mystère: il a simplement une rectification, une aparition des intentions que le plasticien a mis dans son oeuvre.”¹⁹ This is how Le Corbusier formulated it in the introduction to his “Tracés Régulateurs,” which he understands as “un moyen géométrique ou arithmétique.” Thus, he stands in a tradition in which mathematics in general is attributed with a purifying power in the context of aspiring to a “simplicitas Mathematica.”²⁰ This is of course also what the author of a project imagines over and over again as a goal in his mind’s eye, especially in particularly difficult situations.

II. The assistance of geometry: mediation and the “mixing” of abstract and sensory signs

Dise Lini will ich mit einem geraden strich hie entgegen mit der federn auffreyssen/ unnd den namen Lini darauff schreiben/ Auff das die unsichtig Lini/ durch den geraden ryß im gemüt verstanden werd/ Dann durch solche weyß muß der innerlich verstand im eussern werck angetzeigt werden. (I will draft this line with a straight stroke with the pen and write the name ‘line’ on it, so that the invisible line is understood in the mind by the straight stroke, since through such knowledge the inner reason must be shown in the external work.)

Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der messung/ mit dem zirckel und richtscheyt/ in Linien ebnen unnd gantzen corporen, Nuremberg, 1525

ma l’occhio sensibile guarda le figure sensibile, accio che le mentale possano esser viste dalla mente.

Niccolò Tartaglia, Euclide, 1543

One must not only consider the “medietas,” the mediating task and role of mathematics; it concerns – even more specifically – that “mixtio” in which (abstract) concepts and reality mix. Mathematics mingles itself with materiality, embodiment (“corporeitas”) of the sensible external world. It then allows Agostino Nifo to determine, in a text in defense of Averroes: “Per hoc sequitur formas in mixto esse.”²¹ In designing, such sensual moments combine with the abstract concept so that they can be perceived through the senses. It is – precisely in the experimental moment of first fixing an idea – the welcome and risky condition of drawing, simultaneously the place of speculation and the recording of the thought.

Against this background, the special role of geometry for architectural design should be examined more closely. The definition of geometry as the art of measurement is also valid in Borromini’s period. In a Jesuit primer on mathematics for youth written by Petrus Galtruchius (1661) thi...