Guarino Guarini: 400 Years

Guarino Guarini: 400 years

The erudition of a polymath makes Guarino Guarini an exceptional figure among the prominent architects of the Italian Baroque. A Theatine monk, theologian, mathematician, and architect, Guarini created some of the most extraordinary buildings of his era. He was also the author of three treatises on astronomy, a commentary on Euclid and a massive philosophical treatise, the Placita philosophica. Well-travelled but solitary, a defender of scholastic Aristotelianism who also avidly followed the latest scientific breakthroughs, a baroque architect who was a keen observer of Islamic and Gothic architectural monuments, Guarini is an unusual figure that gathered and sought to resolve in his intellectual life an exceptionally wide range of contradictory intellectual trends of his era.

The 400^th anniversary of Guarini’s birth provides an opportunity to review recent scholarship on his architecture, works and publications. Until recently, Guarini’s intellectual life has been difficult to explore, since the authors that he cites and the books that he read are often little known today and difficult to access. The digitalization of seventeenth century books, however, has made many of these sources widely accessible and has resulted in a number of breakthroughs in the understanding of his views and works in recent decades. We thus expect that the session will provide the opportunity to present interesting new research and discuss future possible directions of Guarini scholarship.