Francesco Borromini

The church behind your back is this man's first major independent commission and his final work at the same time. As it happened, San Carlino holds his entire life whole. Francesco Borromini was born in 1599 in northern Italy, lived in Rome from 1617, studied under Carlo Maderno and worked alongside Bernini. Everyone acknowledged his gift. At the same time, he had noticeably fewer commissions than his rival, and the reason is well known: Bernini was a brilliant courtier, while Borromini was a reclusive, difficult, and suspicious man whom it was hard to deal with. Look at what he was capable of. He turned a cramped, irregular plot at a crossroads into a device: the facade goes in a wave, the lower tier is concave, convex, concave, and the upper tier is concave three times. The wall does not stand, it moves. Inside, the plan is an oval, but cut into fragments of intersecting ovals, which makes the walls undulate and gives the eye nowhere to rest. The church is so small that it would fit inside one of the piers of St. Peter's dome - hence the nickname "San Carlino", little San Carlo. This is the essence of him. In Bernini's work, baroque is theater: figures, water, light calculated for the viewer. Borromini has not a single figure. Only geometry, walls, and light, and the sensation that the stone is breathing. Next came Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza with its spiral above the roof, the facade of Sant'Agnese in Piazza Navona, and work that is still analyzed in textbooks today. And then it all ended. On August 2, 1667, at the age of fifty-eight, Borromini threw himself onto his own sword. He died the next day, having managed to dictate his will. The facade of the church where you are standing was completed that same year - one of his last works. And now, the reason to go down to the crypt, if it is open. In the crypt of his first church, he had prepared a place for himself in advance - a small side chapel with a single window. After what happened, they did not bury him there: he chose to lie next to his teacher Carlo Maderno, in the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, and lies there without his own gravestone. And the niche in the crypt remained empty. It is still empty today.