Camillo Guarino Guarini (17 January 16246 March 1683) was an Italian architect of the Piedmontese Baroque, active in Turin as well as Sicily, France and Portugal. He was a Theatine priest, mathematician, and writer.Guarino Guarini. Encyclopædia Britannica on-line. His work represents the ultimate achievement of Italian Baroque structural engineering, creating in stone what could be attempted today in reinforced concrete. Together with Francesco Borromini, Guarini is the most renowned exponent of the anti-classical, anti-Vitruvian trend that dominated Italian architecture after Michelangelo but increasingly lost ground from the late 17th century. His subtly designed buildings, crowned with daring and complex domes, were ignored in Italy outside Piedmont, but illustrations published in 1686 and again in Guarini’s treatise Architettura civile (1737) proved a fruitful source of inspiration in the development of south German and Austrian late Baroque and Rococo architecture.
Early life and education Camillo Guarino Guarini was born in Modena on 17 January 1624. He came from a deeply religious family; he and his four brothers all joined the Theatine Order. At the age of 15 he became a novice and was sent at the monastery of San Silvestro al Quirinale in Rome (1639–48), where he was able to study High Baroque architecture, in particular the work of Borromini, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona. From Borromini, Guarini learned the use of complex geometry as a basis for floor plans. Borromini's second Roman church, Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, was a star hexagon plan created by superimposing two equilateral triangles. Guarini used such a format in the presbytery dome of San Lorenzo in Turin.
Besides architecture Guarini received a thorough training in theology, philosophy and mathematics.Lawrence Gowing, ed., Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists, v.2 (Facts on File, 2005): 291. The details of Guarini’s architectural training are not known, but in the excellently equipped libraries of his Order he presumably studied such well-known treatises as those of Serlio and Vignola.
In 1648 he returned to Modena as an ordained priest and two years later was appointed lecturer in philosophy at the Theatine College there. His career as an architect for the Order, which had a tradition of using its own members as architects, began in 1649 with the reconstruction of San Vincenzo, Modena, in collaboration with Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.
Guarini rose quickly in the Theatine hierarchy, becoming first auditor, then superintendent of works, treasurer, lecturer in philosophy, procuratore. In 1655 he was elected Provost (preposito) of the Theatine house in Modena against the wishes of Alfonso IV d'Este, who was acting as Viceroy for his father, Francesco I d'Este, Duke of Modena: he forbade the appointment and banished Guarini from the city. After short sojourns in Parma and Guastalla (1656), Guarini’s movements are unknown until his arrival in Messina in 1660. Claims are often made that he travelled in Spain and Portugal during this period in connection with a scheme to build a church in Lisbon, but this cannot be proved.
Early career, before 1666
In Messina, in addition to teaching activities, Guarini built the façade of Santa Maria Annunziata for his Order, placing it diagonally to the nave to conform with the building line of the street.. The adjoining Theatine College is also attributed to him. A scheme for a church for the Somaschi Fathers in Messina is illustrated in Architettura civile, but there is no indication of its date, nor if it was ever built. If contemporary with the Annunziata, it already announced a number of themes that characterize his style, such as centrality, telescoped space and the idiosyncratic treatment of vaulting. During his time in Messina Guarini published his first literary work during, an elaborate political and poetic drama entitled La Pietà Trionfante.
In June 1662, Guarini received word that his mother was gravely ill and swiftly departed from Sicily to Modena to stay with her at the end of her life. He remained there for several months while also drafting plans for the façade of the Theatine church of San Vincenzo in Modena, but the project was never executed.
In November 1662 Guarini travelled to Paris at the invitation of his Order to design the church of Ste Anne-la-Royale. Although he incorporated the existing foundations of an oval church by the engineer Antonio Maurizio Valperga (fl 1626–67), he developed a completely independent design, again illustrated in Architettura civile. This had a Greek-cross plan extended by a polygonal choir chapel on the far side of the east arm. The central square bay of the plan was defined by four piers set at a diagonal of 45°, which supported a high drum with an arcaded walk lit by small lanterns. Above the drum was a double dome, the soffit of the lower one decorated with an interlace of flat ribs springing in pairs from plinths in a way that recalled the vaulting in Borromini’s chapel of the Re Magi (1660–64) at the Collegio di Propaganda Fide, Rome. At Ste Anne, however, the wide central octagon produced by the interlaced ribs was left open, enabling a smaller, truncated dome capped by a lantern to be seen through the oculus thus created. The façade, with its three-part curvature, was reminiscent of Borromini’s for San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, although as this was not begun until 1665 (and with Borromini’s well-known fear of competitors it is unlikely that Guarini would have seen drawings) Guarini may well have devised the curved façade of Ste Anne-la-Royale independently. The church, his first ecclesiastical masterpiece, incorporated all the essential elements of his style: the geometric patterning of the dome, the autonomy of the volumetric components, openness to Gothic principles of construction, and receptivity to contemporary architecture in Rome.
During the construction of Sainte-Anne-la-Royale, Guarini was appointed as a lecturer of theology at the Theatine School in Paris. His travel in France gave him the opportunity to contact not only many Gothic cathedrals but also with the work of Desargue on projective geometry. "It was this new geometry that supplied the scientific basis for Guarini's daring structures, particularly of domes."
The construction of Sainte Anne began on the twenty-eighth of November, 1662 in a prominent site facing the Louvre on the quai of the Seine. Four years into the construction, both transepts of the church were nearing completion. Financial strains, as well as monetary and material resources, became increasingly irregular, putting the project in jeopardy. In a fit of resignation, Guarini sharply accused the superior of the Theatine Order of mishandling resources and abandoned the project, leaving swiftly for Turin in the autumn of 1666.
Mature and late work, 1666 and after
Ecclesiastical buildings When Guarini arrived in Turin towards the end of 1666 he submitted a completely new design for San Lorenzo, the first stone of which had been laid in 1634. It originally had a Latin-cross plan, variously attributed to Ascanio Vitozzi, Carlo di Castellamonte and Carlo Morello (fl c. 1630–60). Progress was slow, and there are records of payments for work on it as late as 1661.
Work was begun on Guarini’s scheme in 1668, when he was appointed the architect. Except for remnants of the outer walls, he had the body of the previous structure destroyed to make way for his own design, planned as a centralized nave set in a square frame, with a small presbytery to the east backed by a retrochoir. Into the central space intrude eight convex wall elements, pierced at ground level by large Serlianas framing altars. Four of these convex elements, on the cardinal points, are smoothly curved; the other four, located diagonally, have flat faces and sweep up, like huge chamfered piers, to form concave pendentives. They appear to support a cornice ring (itself pierced by eight oval openings) and drum, from the lower level of which springs a network of hyperbolic vaulting ribs, criss-crossing to create a diaphanous dome and rosette-like geometric mesh. The cupola of the lantern, also embellished with a network of ribs, is visible through an octagonal opening at the top. The surfaces between the ribs of the dome are broken up with windows of different shapes and sizes, creating a mysterious fusion of light and abstract linear grid. The small dome over the high altar has a similar, simplified structure. Guarini’s surface modelling gives the impression that the enormous thrusts of the superstructure are ultimately being channelled to earth via the slender columns of the diagonal Serlianas at ground-level. The real task of load-bearing, however, is sustained by an unseen deep structure of massive brick arches, buttressed by equally massive squinches, that spring at high level from points within the chamfered protrusions.
The inspiration for this extraordinary design seems to be twofold: Gothic and Islamic. In Architettura civile Guarini referred to the contrast between Gothic and Classical art, the aim of the former being ‘to erect buildings that were in fact very strong, but would seem weak and as though they needed a miracle to keep them standing’. The Islamic influence is seen in Guarini’s diaphanous dome, where the parabolic ribs create a pattern similar to that of the domes over the mihrab in the Great Mosque at Córdoba, albeit on a much larger scale; Guarini also cut out some of the infill web and placed a lantern on the ribwork of the open central octagon.
In May 1668, Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy named him Royal Engineer and Mathematician. The design skills evinced by Guarini at San Lorenzo prompted Charles-Emanuel, to appoint him, by a patent dated 19 May 1668, engineer for the chapel of the Holy Shroud, Turin. Work on the project had been under way intermittently since 1607 to a design by Carlo di Castellamonte, superseded in 1657 by one from Bernardino Quadri (fl c. 1647–60). The location chosen for this reliquary chapel, joined both to the west wing of the new Royal Palace and to the east end of the cathedral, was meant to symbolize the unity of Church and State, or the divine favour and recognition bestowed on the House of Savoy.