ABSTRACT
Borromini’s architecture and architectural projects have been admired due to the particular intensity and enthusiasm that are so ‘evidently’ manifest in his drawings. To understand this better, one must go into the core of theories on ‘poiesis’ or invention, which is naturally, and precisely what Vitruvius does. Daniele Barbaro thus comments on ‘architectural doing’ as ‘rendering significance’ and defines: “significare è per segni dimostrare e segnare, e imprimere il segno.” Figure-making and form-giving are natural processes in an architectural project which ‘leave a clear trace’; the question is how these might have had - in Borromini’s time - special weight and meaning, and how they offer insights into the specialties of his doings. The special capacities in the form-giving process are documented by Borromini’s biographers. He is not only a “buon disegnatore", but praised for his “esatta finezza d’intendimento” (Passeri). It is unavoidable that one must enter necessarily the ‘psychological’ dimension of this doing. Dagobert Frey puts it as a “durchsichtige, reinliche Gedankenarbeit", a clearly intellectual capacity whose result must be a preciseness and clearness in form-giving through drawing. Borromini’s obsession in putting lines on lines in a nearly unending process might not give the first impression of precision, but it is aiming exactly at this. Frey furthermore would opt that every single line is put on the paper by considering its 3D-value and effect. Modern psychology did investigate that coincidence of doing and using, experience, and the particular (mathematical) qualities inherent in geometry. And in Borromini’s time this proximity of geometrical skills and the invention of form and figure is considered quite precisely by authors such as Gilles-François de Gottignies (1669) - who taught at the Collegio Romano from 1661 onwards - while sustaining the difference between science and art. It is clear that Borromini’s ‘intensive’ drawings are not simply a result of a modern tempestuous act, but they are solidly based on scientific grounds and developed to encounter difficult and sophisticated tasks. Discipline and freedom are combined - in a Pestalozzi-like experiment - to match the final precision and “esatezza” required for such special architectural situations.
