A priest-mathematician built stone domes that seem to float on light
Guarino Guarini was a Theatine priest who taught philosophy and theology, yet he designed domes in Turin so daring that they look like lace held up by nothing. He wanted buildings strong in fact but apparently fragile, as if kept standing by a miracle. Engineers say he achieved in stone what might now be tried in reinforced concrete.
Born in Modena in 1624 into a devout family, Guarini joined the Theatine order at 15, as did all four of his brothers. Sent to Rome from 1639 to 1648, he studied the High Baroque around him, especially Francesco Borromini, from whom he learned to generate floor plans out of complex geometry. Borromini's Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza rests on a star hexagon formed by two overlapping triangles, a device Guarini would reuse. He also trained thoroughly in theology, philosophy and mathematics.
His career was restless. Elected head of the Theatine house in Modena in 1655, he was overruled and banished by the ruling Este family. He resurfaced in Messina in 1660, then in 1662 went to Paris to design Sainte-Anne-la-Royale facing the Louvre. There he encountered Gothic cathedrals and Girard Desargues's projective geometry, which reportedly gave his domes their scientific basis. When money for Sainte-Anne ran short, he accused his superior of mismanagement and left for Turin in 1666.
Turin brought his masterpieces. At San Lorenzo, begun to his design in 1668, he demolished most of the earlier church and raised a dome from criss-crossing ribs, with windows of different shapes between them and a lantern visible through an open octagon at the top. The ribbed pattern echoes the domes over the mihrab of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, on a far larger scale, while the illusion of impossible lightness came from his admiration for Gothic builders. That same year Duke Charles Emmanuel II named him royal engineer and mathematician and put him in charge of the Chapel of the Holy Shroud, positioned between palace and cathedral to symbolise the union of Church and State.
Guarini died in 1683. Alongside Borromini he led the anti-classical current in Italian architecture, but outside Piedmont Italy largely ignored him. Engravings published in 1686 and his treatise Architettura civile of 1737 carried his ideas north, where they fed the late Baroque and Rococo of southern Germany and Austria.
Source: Guarino Guarini
