ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a drawing by Francesco Borromini, Albertina 173, for San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, in its symbolic, schematic, and geometrical content, to illustrate how palimpsest can operate on multiple levels in a sketch or drawing. The analysis discusses the incorporation of diagrams from Nicholas Cusanus and Athanasius Kircher, and the evocation of Humanist, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic philosophies in the drawing. It illustrates how the drawing anticipates elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, in the palimpsest of traces in human consciousness, the memory traces of perception, and the formation of dream images as traces of mechanisms in a palimpsest of forms. Representation in dreams, according to Freud, is often facilitated by replacement, as in a coincidentia oppositorum, or a condensation in a palimpsest of dream thoughts. Palimpsest can be a quality of a sketch, drawing, building, city, perception, memory. Applied to art and architecture, it can contribute to work of meaning and consequence, in the expression of human identity and experience.
