Looking for Borromini
Part I: Narwhal Spires on the Road to Babel

It’s a bit ironic to travel four thousand miles in order to research the history of a building two minutes walk away from your school-desk, I thought as I headed to Strozier Library. Strozier faces a big, grassy quad in the heart of Florida State University in my very own home of Tallahassee. And I was spending the first weekday of my vacation here to uncover the arcane secrets of Sant’ Ivo della Sapienza, the meerschaum-white church whose narwhal-cum-Dairy Queen spire slips past me almost every day in Rome as I walk from my hotel to our studio in the Via Monterone.

It was, for all the redundancy of my visit, a beautiful morning. The sun was dappling on the grass, the air was alive with the sound of construction equivalent and there was even a pleasant homeliness to the uninteresting brick buildings that stood half-hiding behind nests of Floridian foliage. It’s strangely therapeutic to be around so much green after two months in Rome’s travertine jungle.

Rome’s a city of stone and stucco, and the slightest invasion of sap and branch seems strangely scraggly against the white-marble acanthus of so many Corinthian columns. They seem fig-leaves against Rome’s heroic antique nudity, masking some gap in the urban fabric, some Mussolinian disembowelment or Savoyard imitation Champs-Elysees. They seem faintly comic, like the weeds that must have grown in the Forum when it was known, as on the eighteenth-century Nolli plan, simply as the Campo Vaccino, the cow pasture.

FSU, on the other hand, runs riot with real foliage. Sometimes it’s covering up the fact that the buildings on this side of campus are ugly red-brick Miesian contrivances, lacking the crocketed and floriate Jacobethan nicety of the older dorms. Still, today I’m inclined to smile on this architectural dubium. I don’t know what it is, but I’m liking this place.

I find myself glad to be back on campus, even if it isn’t my own. For one thing, I’m finally old enough not to get weird stares from the students in the copy-room when I haul down my research to the sacrosanct Xerox sanctuary on the second floor of the ungainly and anti-classical brick box that FSU uses to imprison its sacred texts.

I hauled my parents over here once in eighth grade to dig up info, of all things, on Pope Pius VII for a novel that I planned to write and which never got beyond about chapter six—and on top of that, I’d never gotten to starting chapters two or three in between. I’d largely forgotten about the place until last year when I’d ferreted out info on Solomon’s Temple for an architectural rendering I’d been asked to deal with over the summer.

And now I’m back. Something about the monologue running in my head and the eager young minds flashing past me en route to class or clustered around the steel-tubing picnic tables makes me feel like I’m at the beginning of a movie or a WB sitcom. Maybe I’m the comic relief; I’m not normal enough to be the everyman hero. Come to think of it, though, the library’s not American Gothic enough to be in a movie. Even in Rudy they used the Law Library when good old Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library with its trippy sixties Diego Rivera-meets-Vasco de Gama mosaics didn’t prove photogenically hoary and academic enough.

The computer lab seems to be almost completely full. An Chaldean-looking young woman in a loud headscarf is reading a website detailing Islam’s doctrinal bloopers, while another coed has something up with the mysterious sub-heading of “Get Sexual.” I choose not to enquire and find an empty seat around back. After ransacking the electronic card-catalogue, the first sentence of the relevant tome I find in the NA 1100s shelf will ask me, “Why read a book on Borromini?”

It’s a reasonable question. Borromini. Francesco Borromini, 1599-1667: Italian Swiss by birth, Roman by death. Stonecutter by necessity, architect by vocation and pride. Cavaliere of the Order of Christ. Killed by his own hand, absolved of his sin before he bled to death. Buried in consecrated ground at San Giovanni dei Fiorentini near the end of the old Via Giulia. His body rests under a simple marble slab a few feet away from the altar and the grave of his mentor Carlo Maderno. Generally called a Gothic barbarian by his contemporaries, a madman by scholars, and the greatest architect of the Roman baroque by history.

Something about this man’s tortured life and effortless genius fascinates me, whether for morbid or wholesome reasons, I can’t say. Even back before I could tell him apart from the other nebulous panoply of goateed genius that surrounded settecento Rome I was clumsily copying the bizarre snail-shell spiral of the church of Sant’ Ivo, his greatest work, in grandiose sophomore projects.

In short, before I knew Borromini, I was Borrominian.

We have a strange sort of friendship, Francesco and I. His troubled brown eyes and aristocratic mustache stare down at me from a postcard taped up over my desk, the crusader’s knightly cross displayed on the silken folds of his mantle. No matter where I wander in Rome, Borromini’s mathematical and deviously exhibitionist curves eventually catch up with me. His Solomonic cherubim gaze down curiously at me from beneath a high undulating cornice as I walk to school. On my weekly stroll up the Via XX Settembre, the bizarrely contorted front of his church of San Carlino lurks over my shoulder at the Quattro Fontane. His memory haunts even the closest evening mass to my hotel, the vast dome of Sant’ Andrea delle Valle designed by his hand. Sometimes, despite the rushed penitence of his death, I wonder if perhaps his soul still dogs my steps.

On the other hand, the card-catalog entry on the computer in front of me is not helping much. Old Borromini is, for once, evading me. I was hoping to find art-historian (and, apparently, Soviet spy) Anthony Blunt’s great work on the man here, but it appeared to be on loan until March 8. Perhaps they have it at Patrice Lumumba U in Moscow.

Meanwhile, as I scan down the 15 titles on the menu, I’m faced with irrelevant extravagances with German jawcracker names like Fünf Architekten aus fünf Jarhunderten: Zeichnung von Hans Vreideman de Vries, Francesco Borromini, Balthazar Neumann, Hipoyte Destailleur, Erich Mendelson: Katalog zur— Oh never mind. He’s in there, but only if you can pry him out with a Teutonic crowbar. There’s also a book by Borromini himself, but it’s also equally unpromising, as it’s also only available in a German translation. On the other hand, he was born in Switzerland, after all.

Even more extraordinary is another title I find, a pamphlet dated 1669 (by one Elizabeth Atkinson, curiously enough) with the occult and conspiratorial title of Breif and plain discovery of the labourers in mistery, Babilon, generally called by the name of Quakers with a discription of how the subtile serpent deceived them and made them proud boasters, calling the tower of Babel, which they are building in their imagination, Mount Zion, and so on and so forth for what seemed like pages. It seems apparent to me that the FSU web catalog was not my friend in my endeavor.

Or was it?

Proud boasters. Babylon. Tower of Babel. Mount Zion. Occult and conspiratorial. Atkinson’s work might not have a direct connection to Borromini, but she, however unconsciously, had brought together the two great symbols of his life. Zion—Jerusalem—Temple. Temple Mount. The Temple of Solomon, the object of Borromini’s greatest obsession. And Babel, the mount of human futility and despair, the despair that killed the great artist. And thereby hangs a tale of theological mystery, esoteric experiment and even a murder, that, in the end, would enfold all the courts of Europe and direct the fate of the Catholic Church.

Read on in Part II as Matt discovers the Solomonic problem, meets two eccentric and long-dead Jesuits, pays a mental visit to the Escorial and finds out what Philip II of Spain, Errol Flynn and St. Lawrence have in common.