Looking for Borromini
Part II: Solomon’s Seal, or the Cube and the Sphere

Matt continues his meandering journey through the life of the tragic architect Borromini, his great obsession with Solomon’s Temple and other the artistic and theological issues of the Counter-Reformation.

The next day at the library, it rained, and I strolled around campus inhaling the sweet smell of damp grass, pleasant decay and ozone. Ferns clustered on the overhanging live-oak limbs, while off in the distance above the red-brick Gothic campus buildings, a gash of blue sky had opened. I found my mind wandering.

I’d spent the previous summer working on a vast watercolor rendering of the Temple of Solomon commissioned for a book on church architecture. I’d come to the FSU library as part of my search. The reconstructions I’d finally selected showed a remarkable Assyro-Babylonian fantasy of scarlet winged cherubim and lapis-lazuli tile, crowned by a vast tiered porch almost two hundred feet high. It looked more like a ziggurat out of Abraham’s Ur than the humble abode familiar to us from protestantized Bible illustrations.

There are about a million different versions of what Solomon’s Temple might have looked like. None of the modern archaeologists agree, naturally, and neither did the artistic greats and antiquarians who’ve tackled the problem over the centuries. Designs range from the prosaic to the bombastically ludicrous, some with steeples that look like St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields or others with vast above-ground sub-basements out of Bladerunner. Yet others, less imaginative and more archaeological, are unpromising pseudo-Egyptian affairs stuffed with random cherubs that seem too dryly accurate to be real.

The version I’d selected as the basis for my drawing had been drafted with beaux-arts precision for, of all things, a Biblical theme-park planned for 1920s Philadelphia. It seemed to square with the biblical descriptions, had some historic kudos behind it, and the elaborate iconographic program seemed suitably Catholic enough. Plus, the copyright had presumably run out by now.

But seriously. Solomon’s Temple, home of the old covenant, might seem an esoteric place to begin the study of church architecture, but for the architects of Borromini and Borromini’s generation, the complex fascination with this strange and wonderful structure was the be-all and the end-all. The Solomonic problem was the union of two great Renaissance obsessions, transformed but perhaps not wholly pietized by the mission of the Catholic Reformation.

The hierarchy, that sea of bobbing white mitres sitting enthroned in the stark duomo in Trent, was faced, in church after church, with the last two hundred years’ attempt to baptize antiquity. Had this conversion of the spoils of paganism allowed, in that infamous turn of phrase, the smoke of Satan to mingle with the incense gathering beneath della Porta’s great dome at St. Peter’s?

The Council fathers turned momentarily to austerity, recalling the simple icons of early Christianity. The vast, travertine churches that began to rise over the tiled rooftops of Rome were austere preaching-halls for the new orders of Theatines, Jesuits, Barnabites, the purity of the ancient church recalled in their simple stone Christograms and intertwined martyr’s palms. Offensive and exhibitionist plans with their centralized and a-liturgical dispositions were banished in favor of the simple Latin cross, with its prominent altar and grand processional nave.

Yet, the world of the classical, the world of the divine sphere rather than the divine trinity, lingered even in the forms of the Corinthian pilasters that decorated the dour facades of so many of these new basilicas, remained suspect even in its simplest form. The rising generation to which Borromini would belong would rediscover ancient classicism in a new and different light, cleansed by the flames of the Holy Ghost that would be depicted in stucco and gilt in so many frescoed lanterns of the next hundred years. Strangely enough, though, the ultimate roots of that new purgation would come from an unexpected and perhaps suspect corner of the Western mind.

While its roots were ostensibly Biblical, there was another influence, that of the world of the alchemist, the esotericist who revered the divine cube of the new Jerusalem of Revelation, the nine-square taxis of Solomon’s Temple.

The Christian intellect in history has sometimes had an uneasy relationship to its Judaic origins. St. Jerome befriended rabbis in his scrupulous search to discover the significance of every last yod as he transmuted Hebrew into the Vulgate at his hermitage in dusty Bethlehem, but not long after, St. Augustine had only felt it necessary to use Latin in his pursuit of the truth.

As the Renaissance approached, intellectuals threw off, for better or worse, medieval decorum and caution and turned once again to the calligraphic black flammules of the Hebrew alphabet. A small group of ecstatic rabbis, scattered across Spain, Provence and Germany, had long proclaimed that the very shapes of the letters were sacred and contained the secrets of the universe revealed to Adam, Seth and Abraham. Kabbala, they called it, meaning tradition, from the handing-down of this secret teaching through the centuries. Supreme power might be theirs, if only they could find the correct combination, the correct sequence of yods and taus and alephs that made up God’s secret name.

Gentiles started to listen to this group on the fringe of Judaism. There was always the deep-down feeling that perhaps the wandering, homeless Jews hadn’t quite told them just everything about their secret and sacred tongue, presumed by many to be the language Adam had spoken in paradise—or perhaps its simplified offspring from which the new and perfect tongue could be resurrected. Babel might have broken that linguistic ideal, but Zion could reanimate it by the kabbalistic power of the letters.

Christian scholars thus went back to the original Hebrew. Sometimes it was for sincere reasons of translation and truth, but just as often it was for disturbing and nearly magical purposes. The pseudo-scientists of Germany ransacked Hebrew lore for talismans and studded their weighty tomes with Solomonic seals and sinister pentagrams that had supposedly passed down through a chain of obscure and heterodox adepts from the hand of shadowy and suspect figures like the spurious Archangel Raziel. Surreal linguistic gymnasts set out to prove spurious etymologies, trying to claim that Kabbala actually meant the name of Jesus Christ in Hebrew. In sunny and seemingly sane Italy even Pico della Mirandola’s attempt to Christianize the Kabbala resulted instead in a Kabbalization of his Christianity.

The Judeomania of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bore more wholesome fruit as well. While brooding and dark Philip II of Spain had been touched by the alchemical gold-bug, the specter that had lingered behind Paracelsus’s ravings and Cornelius Agrippa’s tables of astrological signs, in his case it became something far more grand and sane and Catholic in the form of the Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de la Escorial. It was the monastery of St. Lawrence of the Gridiron, conceived in the image of the God-given plan of Solomon’s Temple.

The sordid Gentile occultists of Trier and Prague might have scrambled to find dark double-meanings in the simple sanity of language, but Philip had simply trusted and taken scripture at its word in the description of Solomon’s real temple and Ezekiel’s visionary sanctuary. Indeed, four hundred-odd years later, Errol Flynn would die at the Escorial while filming a grand black-and-white biblical epic entitled Solomon and Sheba. Philip’s great reproduction had become, in a weird pre-post-modernist twist of fate, the thing itself.

Here was a true new beginning, a true divine font for the architecture that Rome was struggling to re-Christianize. After all, it came neither from suspect occultists nor hedonistic demi-pagans. It was the mother taxis, confirmed by God’s own word.

In Part III, we return to the Escorial, chat with a bishop on the fringe of the Church who wrote rules on how to break the rules, and walk amid the seraphim of Borromini’s greatest achievement, the Solomon-inspired Lateran Basilica, an achievement tainted by a brutal beating and murder—at Borromini’s own hands.