4 - Hans Sedlmayr’s Borromini

Summary

[O]ur essays in describing individual images do

not provide a guide for a penetration into them

but are the result of such a penetration – and

this is equally true of our later description of the

architectural ‘world’ of Borromini. A pedagogical

introduction to the study of this architecture

would be a completely different task.

The work that announced the methodology of the New Vienna School was Hans Sedlmayr’s Die Architektur Borrominis of 1930. A brilliant and difficult book, it has had scattered influence but, like all of Sedlmayr’s work, is tainted by its author’s name. Martin Raspe, who attempted a similar syncretic view of the architect to move beyond the standard catalogue was at pains to distance himself from Sedlmayr’s example, which loomed so large in his own German-language tradition. Indeed, language has been a barrier to fairly assessing Sedlmayr, as was his own notorious characterological interpretation of Borromini. But the book advances a remarkable analysis of Borromini’s work, which is worth the effort to understand.

The model of Sedlmayr’s self-reflexivity that I have sketched in the last two chapters can be confirmed in the book on Borromini. Indeed, if the author gets ahead of himself with his later speculations on Borromini’s personality, the overall aim of the book is reasonable – to give a phenomenological account of Borromini’s architecture. This is the propadeutic use of phenomenology as a basis for any critical discipline, in line with the appropriation of Kurt Lewin’s idea of a proper vergleichende Wissenschaftstheorie. If Sedlmayr’s approach is self-conscious about its own contribution, then we have to regard it not only according to its stated aim but the discipline of architectural history at the time. With his lens of Gestalt psychology, Sedlmayr achieves a remarkable deal of self-reflexivity in his discussion of Borromini.

After expanding the idea of Sedlmayr’s method, I will pass on to a full exposition of his analysis. Next, I undertake a full discussion of Sedlmayr’s notorious use of characterology – the use of the morphology of the body to infer into a person’s personality – as a means to make conclusions about Borromini’s own personality. While I fault Sedlmayr’s reliance on Ernst Kretschmer’s ideas, I also clarify how many things thought to be true about the theory are in fact inaccurate.