ABSTRACT
The iconograhic complexity of San Carlino has not been adequately appreciated. The building is perhaps the most ambitious expression of ideas through visual form ever achieved in the history of architecture. San Carlino should still be seen as a model for the expression of ideas through syntax in modern architecture. San Carlino stands as an example of architecture that stimulates intellectual development and that functions as an edificium, an instrument of teaching and communicating philosophical tenets through a syncretic compositional approach. A key to the analysis of San Carlino is the understanding that there are more symbolic geometries at play than the triangle symbolizing the Trinity. The most important of these are the intersecting triangles in the plan drawings and other examples of the coincidentia oppositorum; the oval inscribed in the rectangle; and the three groups of three geometries in the elevation, symbolizing the Trinity, the celestial hierarchies, and the Neoplatonic hierarchies. Through Borromini’s use of geometries in a syntax, the building communicates the basic philosophical and theological tenets circulating in seventeenth-century Rome; primarily from Hermetic philosophy: all matter comes from light, and all multiplicity comes from singularity, principles that are still relevant in the modern world.
