ABSTRACT
Leo Steinberg was nearing 40 and a late starter to graduate studies, but he hit the ground running with a dissertation submitted at the end of 1959 to New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism. 1 Steinberg showed little of the normal doctoral caution: methods were challenged and the image of Borromini’s architecture overturned. One attitude in particular that he rejected was an understanding of the church in terms of Borromini’s supposedly conflicted, even disturbed genius. Steinberg was wary of psycho-biography and insisted that if personality must be discussed, then it should be derived from San Carlo rather than imposed upon it. Instead, the church is in the foreground on almost every page and contexts as they arise are woven into the visual analysis. Steinberg argued, here implicitly but more overtly later in his career, that art historians should prioritize images, reversing their normal evidentiary value compared to written sources. This was more than formalism, because another feature of the dissertation is its conviction that in a work like San Carlo form is always symbolic, meaning and its expression being dissolved one into the other. 2 Open-ended as well, for Steinberg implied that San Carlo generated interpretation rather than was contained by it. Steinberg wrote as a student, in part discovering what he believed along the way, and once finished latent features would crystallize into a method that looked forward to aspects of the new art history and post-modernist architectural theory. Yet on another level, Borromini was the figure Steinberg had been looking for, having already developed an interpretive approach when he wrote as a critic throughout the 1950s.
