Bernini and Borromini: The Rivalry That Shaped Roman Baroque

Seventeenth-century Rome did not get its Baroque from a single plan. It came from a running contest between two architects who worked almost side by side and who, within a few years, became declared rivals. The century follows the Renaissance and the Florentine Renaissance, the age of artists like Botticelli and his Birth of Venus. Roman Baroque went looking for something else: movement, staging, an effect on whoever walked into a church or crossed a piazza.

Two parallel lives, two opposite styles

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born in Naples in 1598, son of the sculptor Pietro Bernini, and died in Rome in 1680. He worked as architect, sculptor and painter at once, and his career spans nearly the whole century.

Francesco Borromini was born a year later, in 1599, in Bissone, near Como, under the name Francesco Castelli. He studied sculpture in Milan, where he likely came into contact with the stonecutters working on the late Gothic forms of the Duomo, and moved to Rome in 1619, according to TheArtStory. In Rome he became apprentice to his relative Carlo Maderno starting around 1620.

The two men worked closely together between 1629 and 1633, when Borromini assisted Bernini at the St. Peter’s building site. One academic source (Encyclopedia.com) describes Borromini, already in those years, as critical and jealous of Bernini: rather than bringing them closer, the collaboration seems to have widened the gap between them.

Practical example: set a photo of the Baldachin of St. Peter’s next to one of the interior of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and the split becomes visible at a glance. In the first, twisted columns seem to be in motion, dark bronze catching light from every angle. In the second, the walls bend into calculated, almost mathematical curves, with none of Bernini’s gold or theatrical flourish.

The works that defined Rome

Bernini built some of the most recognizable images of Baroque Rome. Between 1624 and 1633 he produced the Baldachin of St. Peter’s, the first major work to merge architecture and sculpture into a single bronze structure. In 1647 he was commissioned to decorate the basilica’s piers and naves, and in 1656 he began the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square. Outside St. Peter’s he signed the Fountain of the Four Rivers, completed in 1651 in Piazza Navona — Treccani cautiously ranks it among the high points of Baroque art — and, from 1658, the church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale.

Borromini worked on a smaller scale, but no less ambitiously. Between 1634 and 1643 he built the monastery of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Between 1642 and 1662 he designed the plan of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, one of the most unusual shapes in seventeenth-century Roman architecture.

Why they were rivals

No single reason explains the conflict. Treccani describes Borromini’s architecture as formally opposite to Bernini’s; the same source portrays Borromini as solitary and anxious, while Bernini moved comfortably among papal commissions and the public life of Rome. On top of that came direct competition for the same jobs, since both men worked for the building sites of the Roman Church.

The dispute went public in 1645. One of the bell towers of St. Peter’s, completed in 1641 to Bernini’s design, turned out to be structurally unsound, and a commission ordered its removal. Borromini used the episode to publicly criticize Bernini’s competence, according to TheArtStory.

Twenty years later, in 1665, Bernini accused Borromini of rejecting the anthropometric foundation of architecture — the idea that a building’s proportions should mirror the human body — and called him, in TheArtStory’s words, “an ignorant Goth who had corrupted architecture.” It is a harsh judgment, reported by the source as exactly that: not a verdict from art history, but the voice of a rival.

Around this rivalry a legend also grew, often told as though it were fact. According to this story, reported by TheArtStory, Bernini had the face of the Rio de la Plata statue, in the Fountain of the Four Rivers, turned away so it would not have to face the facade of Sant’Agnese in Agone, the church Borromini designed; Borromini, the story adds, answered by turning one of his own statues elsewhere. No seventeenth-century source confirms any of it happened. It stands as a later legend, useful for telling the story of how famous the rivalry became, not a documented episode from their own time.

Opposite characters, uneven fame

TheArtStory describes Borromini as a solitary, stubborn man who dressed in austere Spanish fashion. It also judges him probably celibate and chaste, and often quarrelsome in his working relationships. Treccani sums up his life as anxious, ending in suicide: in the summer of 1667, with his servant briefly looking away, Borromini turned his own sword on himself. He still had time to repent and leave a will before he died on August 3, 1667.

Borromini’s architecture was regarded with suspicion for a long time.

Treccani notes it was harshly criticized by neoclassical critics, and only reassessed later on. Bernini, by contrast, stayed the name most associated with Roman Baroque for centuries. Today the two careers read side by side, as two different answers to the same question of how to build Rome.