Guarino Guarini

Camillo Guarino Guarini was an Italian architect of the Piedmontese Baroque, active in Turin as well as Sicily, France and Portugal. He was a Theatine priest, mathematician, and writer. His work represents the ultimate achievement of Italian Baroque structural engineering, creating in stone what could be attempted today in reinforced concrete. Together with Francesco Borromini, Guarini is the most renowned exponent of the anti-classical, anti-Vitruvian trend that dominated Italian architecture after Michelangelo but increasingly lost ground from the late 17th century. His subtly designed buildings, crowned with daring and complex domes, were ignored in Italy outside Piedmont, but illustrations published in 1686 and again in Guarini’s treatise Architettura civile (1737) proved a fruitful source of inspiration in the development of south German and Austrian late Baroque and Rococo architecture.