Abstract
Kerry Downes. Borromini’s Book: The “Full Relation of the Building” of the Roman Oratory by Francesco Borromini and Virgilio Spada of the Oratory . Wetherby: Oblong Creative, 2009, 536 pp., 455 b/w and color illus. $99, ISBN 9780955657641 The nucleus of this weighty and ambitious book is an English translation of the Italian text of the Opus Architectonicum , a precious folio volume on the design and construction of the Oratorio dei Filippini, the oratory and conventual house of the Congregation of St. Philip Neri. This precocious “architectural monograph” was published in Rome in 1725 by Sebastiano Giannini, working from a manuscript (1644–47) composed by the Oratorian father Virgilio Spada in collaboration with his friend Borromini, who had been the architect of the Congregation for thirteen years (1637–50). A concise overview of the building’s history and importance, and a critical appreciation of Downes’s edition have been given recently by Joseph Connors.1 In many respects I cannot but second Connors’s more than adequate observations. Instead of adding similar remarks here, I should like to draw the reader’s attention to some different aspects of Downes’s opus. To start with the obvious: Downes’s book is eccentric and willfully anachronistic. The jacket photograph shows Borromini’s well-known facade in the slightly withered colors of a touristic slide from the 1960s. The image is repeated as Plate A, this time along with the adjacent facade of Santa Maria in Vallicella (the Chiesa Nuova) to show “mother and daughter” side by side. It imparts the atmosphere of a now-lost Rome, not only because of the sapling that has now grown to block half of the Oratory from sight, but also the tiny Fiat Cinquecento cars that once used to inhabit the piazza. Appearances are deceptive, however, for closer inspection reveals that the original photograph has been reworked with the help of “modern technology” (as Downes calls it, with an apparent mixture of respect and reservation): the verticals that a wide-angled lens at close range inevitably distorts have been straightened, and the pale morning sky …
Published Version
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