Bernini’s S. Andrea al Quirinale and Early Modern Architectural Representation
My research project focuses on Gianlorenzo Bernini's S. Andrea al Quirinale (1658-71), Rome, church of the Jesuit novitiate and largely underwritten by Prince Camillo Pamphili. This is not, however, a monographic study. S. Andrea is a vehicle for assessing fundamental and influential themes in early modern architectural representation as well as challenging several longstanding assumptions in current methodological approaches. The church is a milestone in any history of early modern architecture and a staple on most survey courses of western art. Over the last thirty years scholars have demonstrated that it was not built to an initial, unitary design but is instead the residue of protracted adaptation and revision (Connors, Frommel, Marder, Terhalle); elucidated the mechanisms of patronage; and explained its iconography (Cather, Careri, Levine). Yet, a full and coherent analysis of the intellectual priorities behind its formal choices, general and particular, is lacking. Indeed, as things stand, it is difficult to understand why Bernini himself considered S. Andrea his best work. The basic understanding probably remains that of a pioneering apologist of Baroque architecture, Rudolf Wittkower. Wittkower essentially characterized S. Andrea as a centrifuge, powered by an " overflowing vitality " that would burst the church apart were it not gripped and anchored by strategic architectural components. Wittkower's larger point was that, in Bernini's hands, the religious interior had ceased to be the formerly neutral vessel for mediation between man and God, and that a quiet and centripetal Renaissance had been substituted by an expressive and centrifugal Baroque. As this " dynamic " fallacy remains such a mental habit of virtually all analyses of early modern architecture, even at the level of simple metaphor, its conceptual genealogy deserves thorough historiographical investigation. For any such notion is completely absent from early modern thought and certainly any writings on architecture, whether treatise or anecdote. Dynamism, formal or spatial, is in fact a retrospective projection of modernist expectations onto early modern architecture. Ascribing motion to its undulating forms can be traced back to Jacob Burckhardt; equating this perceived motion with emotion, however, was the product of a late nineteenth-century aesthetic of empathy (influenced by the physiological theories of Johannes Volkeit and others) that matched the purported energy of the architecture with the supposed psychological state of the maker, as well as ascribing an animism to the buildings that haptically matched the (e)motions of the beholder. In architectural history this theory of design …