A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
There is a drawing in the Albertina in Vienna by Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), made late in life for the Cappella dei Re Magi in Rome, which is so overdrawn and compressed with a graphite pencil that in some areas the paper is creased into a pulpy contusion. This is only the beginning. Passing deeper into the collection reveals sheet after sheet of smudged plans, smoked-out elevations, blackened sketches, beclouded details, and a confounding display of fuzzy, hazy and obfuscated graphite marks. The Ticinese stone-cutter-architect was already known during his lifetime as a compulsive drafter, but the sustained intensity of the way he wielded his graphite cannot be seen as merely accidental. Graphite was in Borromini’s time a new drawing material, which hardly anyone else in Rome was using. Hard, crystalline and able to be brought to a sharp point, it left a resolute and penetrating mark that could be smeared or erased, yet it adhered well to textured drawing surfaces. Scholars have generally understood Borromini’s smudgy graphite marks as by-products in the progression from rough to precise geometrical resolutions – the teasing out of form from formlessness, a theory of creation inherited from Giorgio Vasari. It has since become commonplace to analyse Borromini’s plan of San Carlino, for example, by extracting a rigid framework of lines, arcs and circles to discover the underlying geometric apparatus, hidden, as it were, by a cloud of dust. Indeed, if you play a word association game with an architect and say ‘Borromini’, the chances are that, after the knee-jerk ‘baroque’, the word ‘geometry’ will quickly emerge. Mentally peel away three to five centimetres of bone-white stucco finish from one of Borromini’s interiors, and an alternative reading of the drawings becomes possible, one that takes into account his remarkable use of building materials. To construct walls and vaults, Borromini utilised recovered bricks, a material known as tevolozze. Unlike new bricks, which are characterised by an intrinsic logic ...
There is a drawing in the Albertina in Vienna by Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), made late in life for the Cappella dei Re Magi in Rome, which is so overdrawn and compressed with a graphite pencil that in some areas the paper is creased into a pulpy contusion. This is only the beginning. Passing deeper into the collection reveals sheet after sheet of smudged plans, smoked-out elevations, blackened sketches, beclouded details, and a confounding display of fuzzy, hazy and obfuscated graphite marks. The Ticinese stone-cutter-architect was already known during his lifetime as a compulsive drafter, but the sustained intensity of the way he wielded his graphite cannot be seen as merely accidental. Graphite was in Borromini’s time a new drawing material, which hardly anyone else in Rome was using. Hard, crystalline and able to be brought to a sharp point, it left a resolute and penetrating mark that could be smeared or erased, yet it adhered well to textured drawing surfaces. Scholars have generally understood Borromini’s smudgy graphite marks as by-products in the progression from rough to precise geometrical resolutions – the teasing out of form from formlessness, a theory of creation inherited from Giorgio Vasari. It has since become commonplace to analyse Borromini’s plan of San Carlino, for example, by extracting a rigid framework of lines, arcs and circles to discover the underlying geometric apparatus, hidden, as it were, by a cloud of dust. Indeed, if you play a word association game with an architect and say ‘Borromini’, the chances are that, after the knee-jerk ‘baroque’, the word ‘geometry’ will quickly emerge. Mentally peel away three to five centimetres of bone-white stucco finish from one of Borromini’s interiors, and an alternative reading of the drawings becomes possible, one that takes into account his remarkable use of building materials. To construct walls and vaults, Borromini utilised recovered bricks, a material known as tevolozze. Unlike new bricks, which are characterised by an intrinsic logic ...
Borromini's Smudge
Foote, Jonathan (author)
2022-11-15
Foote , J 2022 , ' Borromini's Smudge ' , Drawing Matter Journal , no. 2 , pp. 1-28 .
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
DDC:
720
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