Borromini, Francesco Castelli (1599-1667), Arquiteto italiano:Palazzo Barberini (1625-1632);
Convento de San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1634) em Roma, na Itália.
The Italian architect Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) was the most daring and original architect of the Roman baroque, and his style is the embodiment of baroque extravagance. His works were influential throughout Europe and South America.
In the first half of the 17th century, Roman baroque architecture was dominated by two extraordinary figures: Francesco Borromini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Borromini represented the more imaginative and idiosyncratic side of baroque architecture; Bernini remained much closer to the aims and ideals of ancient Rome, both in sculpture and architecture, and his architectural works are sober and classical.
Borromini's style was essentially personal and thus was later denigrated by neoclassic critics. For the 18th and 19th centuries Borromini was the most licentious and extravagant architect in history, and his works aroused the most passionate disapproval, particularly in Protestant Europe and America, while being copied (and occasionally exceeded) in Latin America as well as in southern Germany, Austria, Spain, and Portugal.
Francesco Castelli, called Borromini, was born on Sept. 25, 1599, in Bissone on Lake Lugano. He was distantly related to the great architect Carlo Maderno.
As a boy, Borromini was sent to Milan to learn the mason's craft, and it was as a mason that he went to Rome, where his presence is recorded from 1621. He probably began as an ordinary mason at St. Peter's, but soon Maderno, the chief architect of St. Peter's, seems to have found him employment at S. Andrea della Valle (1621-1623). In any event, it is certain that Borromini's years in Rome were spent as a humble craftsman, at the very time when Bernini was making his reputation as a virtuoso sculptor.
This was probably the cause of the lifelong rivalry between the two men, which was exacerbated by difficulties at St. Peter's and the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, where Borromini worked under Bernini from 1629 to 1632. The rivalry was such that it may have been the cause of the profound melancholia which eventually led to Borromini's tragic death.
In the 1630s Borromini began to receive independent commissions, and his fame grew rapidly. In 1632 he commenced work at the Palazzo Spada. His famous gallery, designed with an illusionistic effect of perspective, has an unexpected wit that must have helped to make Borromini's name known.
