Richness, Bernini vs. Borromini

During Baroque period, architectures were designed with full excessive elements showing richness of structure and power of the country. Most structures tried to emphasize hierarchy which it applied through both ornaments and forms. Enhance the richness, Bernini had successfully created many famous churches using all design factors and combined them as a whole: fresco, lighting design, architecture design, and planning design. Known as one of the famous architects at that time, Bernini received lots of commission, which his first was to design a left transept of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Within this small, insignificant space compared to the whole church, Bernini could still created an extravagant structure, which then turned it as one of the remarkable spots. In the left transept, St. Teresa' sculpture was placed underneath the half dome that pours light from the sky, symbolizing light from heaven. This little space consisted of excessive ornamented materials that Bernini brought up together whether paintings, theatre design, orarchitecture. The sculpture was emotionally expressed in a very excessive, yet, realistic way. To further articulated the fullness as Baroque architecture does, Bernini even designed huge columns with heavy pediments acting just for a frame around the sculpture. Three-dimensional and perspective were brought in place highlighting the area with illusion in bigger space. Bernini created a three-dimensional plane behind St. Teresa like Michelangelo did; however, enhancing it in sculptural form. Fresco was used within the dome tricking audiences in viewing a higher and larger dome.

Comparing to Borromini, his architectures, again, were emphasizing richness and country’s wealth however, through forms. Instead of being as popular as Bernini, Borromini did not gain much of attention leaving him to design lower budget architectures. However, that was not Borromini's concern, he brought out complex forms and structures instead. Due to his expert in mathematics and engineer, he was able to design complicated structures using not only perfect forms. Triangles, Borromini's favorite element, were widely used throughout his works as well as in Sant' Ivo della Sapienze. Borromini had created a magnificent roof plan for the structure composing many small triangles overlapping each other to form the first star plan. With his use of complex geometries and perspective elements, the church was designed to trick our illusion and viewing the space larger, due to the use of concave surface, as well as higher dome, consequences of star plan and smaller sculptures when moving higher.

Both Bernini and Borromini had successfully achieved their goals in creating expressive and richness architectures but in different approaches. While Bernini used lots of ornaments and decorations to enhance his works, Borromini was, instead, playing with complexity of forms and geometries, creating remarkable and stand-out structures