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Woo Shir LeyWho was the architect?Founder of the building?

Francessco Borromini

 

The facade of the church of San Carlo all Quattro Fontane, constructed by francisco Borromini thirty years after the church was built, is the architect’s last work in 1667.

It is an iconic masterpiece of Baroque architecture, was built as part of a complex of monastic building, A long-standing local nickname for the church is San Carlino, which literally means “Little Saint Charles”after the small size of the edifice.

Borromini had a difficult upbringing and struggled with mental illness, as he used to eventually committed suicide. But he is a brilliant analytical mind and his church of San Carlo is his demonstration ofBaroque as mathematics, he is a very detail person, interior of the building has tons of art sculpture.

 

Reasons of building this church

(1)   The church belongs to a convent founded by Spanish Discalced Trinitarians.

(2)   The Trinitarians order of friars was founded near Paris at the end of the 12th century by St John Matha and its purpose was the ransoming of Christians taken prisoner by Muslim pirates and slave-raiders

as well as during wartime.

In 1634 aged thirty-five, a relatively advanced age for a first commission, Borromini was commissioned to create a cloister, living quarters, and church for the order of Discalced Trinitarians, whose main

objective was the raising of funds to liberate Christians captured by the Moors.

- Spanish Discalced Trinitarians set about founding a house at Rome at the start of the 17th century.However, they facing finiancial problem.

- They eventually found a patron in Cardinal Francessco Barbarini. He promised to pay for the project and he was to be responsible for the design of the entire complex. Borromini was still an unknown despite

having twenty years’ experience working for other people in building and architectural profession.

 

 

What was the concept or philosophy of the architect that make the building historically significant/meaningful?

Baroque architecture

- Characteristic of Baroque architecture that to be foundthroughout Europe and Latin America, its is all designed by a single term, partly for convenience, in order to summarize the art of a whole period with a

single word, but mainly on account of their common aesthetic origin.

-Took the Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture and used it in a new rhetorical and theatrical fashion, often to express the triumph of the Catholic Church and the absolutist state.

-It was characterised by new explorations of form, light and shadow and dramatic intensity.

-Directly linked to the Counter-Reformation, a movement within the Catholic church to reform itself in respobnnse to the Protestant Reformation.

-Embellishments were on the one hand more accessible to the emotion

-Francesco Borromini, produced designs that deviated dramatically from the regular compositions of the ancient world and Renaissance.

-His building plans were based on complex geometric figures, his archietctural forms were unusual and inventive and he employed nuilti-layered symbolism in his architectual designs.

Distinguished by a complicated plan arrangement that is partly oval and partly a cross and so has complex convex-concave wall rhythms.

 

References :

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/S_Carlo_Alle_Quattro_Fonta.html

http://buffaloah.com/a/virtual/italy/rome/4f/

http://romanchurches.wikia.com/wiki/San_Carlo_alle_Quattro_Fontane