The architectural monograph, now a venerable genre, began in Italy in the late Renaissance. Sometimes lavishly illustrated, these books were meant to broadcast the splendor of patron and architect alike. A fully mature example, though with a delayed publication, is the “Full Relation” composed in 1646–47 to explain, room by room, the design and construction of the oratory and house of the Filippini, or followers of St. Philip Neri, next to Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome. The initiative for the book came from Rome's foremost expert in building management, Virgilio Spada, the Oratorian priest who worked hand-in-glove with the architect, Francesco Borromini. It was Spada who gave literary form to his partner's spirited voice. However, after thirteen years of service Borromini left the employ of the Filippini and never provided the promised drawings. Spada tried to salvage the enterprise by commissioning new drawings and using some older ones from his files, but he still did not succeed in having it published. The manuscript was found by an enterprising editor, Sebastiano Giannini, over fifty years after the architect's death and published in 1725 as the second volume of his projected Opera, or complete works of the architect. (The first volume, published in 1720, shows Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza.) It was lavishly illustrated with a mixture of plates, most commissioned by Giannini, but a few deriving from Borromini's own drawings. A Latin translation accompanied the Italian text, and it is from this deluxe eighteenth-century edition that Borromini's book gets a name he himself would never have hit upon: Opus Architectonicum. There have been five Italian editions or facsimiles and a German translation. In 1998, as a sequel to my 1980 monograph on the building, I published the original manuscript of the “Full Relation” with its drawings, collating all (pace Downes) variants and omissions in the printed edition. This is the first English translation.
Kerry Downes, distinguished scholar of English baroque architecture and author of superb studies of Wren, Vanbrugh, and especially Hawksmoor, has felt close all his life to the figure of St. Philip Neri, especially to his beautiful church in London, the Brompton Oratory. He heard what must have been magisterial lectures that Anthony Blunt delivered on Borromini in 1955 and attended a Courtauld summer school in Rome in 1976, where Borromini loomed large. Feeling sure that a wider public would find the story fascinating if they could read it, he gives not only a fine translation but an extensive commentary, to which he adds a “Companion” of 350 pages on the saint, the Oratorians, the church, Borromini's Swiss and Milanese origins, his architectural ideas, design, and construction, and finally the composition of the book. It is richly illustrated, though when it comes to architectural drawings he reproduces his own tracings and diagrams rather than the originals. Like Dorothy Sayers in her Dante, Downes occasionally comes up with archaic English terms, charming but also accurate, which fit the meaning of the Italian rather well.
Absorbing the material generated by a 1999 centenary exhibition in Lugano, Downes details Borromini's origins at some length and gives an extensive family tree. Though not all of Borromini's buildings are included, the major churches are given spirited treatment, especially San Carlino, Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, and the Lateran. The “two-lane” format on facing pages, text on the right and notes on the left, allows for commentary on commentary. Downes delights in Shandyesque digressions and often seems like the master teacher holding his willing audience captive long after the bell has sounded. There are observations on Michelangelo, the basilica façade from Leonardo and Serlio through the baroque, Carlo Maderno, Rubens (on whom he has also written a monograph), angels, mathematics in architecture, optical illusion, the frescoes in Palazzo Barberini, the Corinthian capital, faces hiding in moldings (though I confess to blindness on this point), Wagnerian opera, and much else. There are long sections on Bernini, his personality, architecture, and some of the sculptures. The material on St. Philip's special brand of spirituality and the Oratorian way are founded on early seventeenth-century accounts by the saint's followers, as well as on the wonderful early twentieth-century biography by Ponnelle and Bordet and the monumental 2,200-page life by Cistellini. Downes, however, has the special insights of an insider, and I found the material on the saint the high point of the book.
When I was researching the building in the 1970s and the Opus in the 1990s, aside from the exacting work of pinning down many dozens of drawings, there were larger issues that I found exciting. I was amazed to find that a complete project by another architect, Paolo Maruscelli, embodied in a set of presentation drawings where the function of every room is noted, could be dated a decade before Borromini's arrival. Borromini assures us that “as far as I know” no such project existed, but he had a copy of Maruscelli's plan and even drew his own first plan over it. Maruscelli's intelligent use of sources showed the Oratorians searching for an architectural imagery for a new kind of religious community, neither monks nor cardinals but something in between. I was intrigued to find the musicologist Howard Smither describing the gradual “aristocratization” of Oratorian music, while I was finding something similar in Borromini's architecture. I saw Borromini developing the famous curved façade of the Oratory gradually, changing the design after the building had been begun, and then using prints to shape the spectator's perception. He was a master psychologist who learned the device of the expanding façade under Maderno at St. Peters and used it with genius not only at the Oratory but also at Sant'Agnese in Navona and the Propaganda Fide. I was fascinated by Borromini's own shipwrecked publication projects, and by the enterprising publishing houses of eighteenth-century Rome, which made him posthumously the best-published architect of the baroque.
Little of this captures the imagination or garners the approval of Downes. In general, he prefers to see complex forms springing forth fully formed from Borromini's head, even though they might enter the documentary record only much later. He assumes that the architect kept his ideas in pectore for months or years before revealing them to his patrons. He prefers to see a famous Borromini elevation now in Windsor showing the Oratory façade (the only original drawing reproduced in the book) as Blunt saw it in the 1970s, that is, as both the first and final idea for the façade, not, as I tried to show, the end result of a long, bumpy process, which permitted major changes even after construction had begun. For the most important plans, Downes would return to the sequence mapped out by Hempel in the first Borromini monograph of 1923. In particular, he prefers to see Borromini returning to a key plan (Albertina 284) on separate occasions spaced over a year apart, rather than see the architect working through interrelated problems on the same drawing in a single intense session. I am afraid that I do not find these revisions convincing.
Borromini and Hawksmoor were kindred souls if there ever were any, and readers may be disappointed that Downes decided not to spend more time comparing these two great architects, an essay that he alone would be qualified to write. I am more flattered that he accepts many, perhaps hundreds, of points and readings from my earlier work than annoyed at the gruff dismissals of some. For the major differences, the reader will decide.
