27 Facts About Guarino Guarini

Camillo Guarino Guarini was an Italian architect of the Piedmontese Baroque, active in Turin as well as Sicily, France and Portugal.

Guarino Guarini's work represents the ultimate achievement of Italian Baroque structural engineering, creating in stone what could be attempted today in reinforced concrete.

Guarino Guarini spent his novitiate at the monastery of San Silvestro al Quirinale in Rome, where he studied architecture, theology, philosophy and mathematics.

From Borromini, Guarino Guarini learned the use of complex geometry as a basis for floor plans.

Guarino Guarini used such a format in the presbytery dome of San Lorenzo in Turin.

Guarino Guarini worked with Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione on the Church of San Vincenzo and the Theatine monastery.

Guarino Guarini rose quickly in the Theatine hierarchy, becoming first auditor, then superintendent of works, treasurer, lecturer in philosophy, procuratore, and finally provost in 1654.

Prince Alfonso supported another candidate and Guarino Guarini was replaced and had to leave Modena.

Guarino Guarini became a member of the Theatine House of Parma in 1656 and apparently visited Prague and Lisbon.

In 1660, Guarino Guarini was appointed to a professorial position at the archepiscopal seminary in Messina.

Guarino Guarini published his first literary work during his time in Messina, an elaborate political and poetic drama entitled La Pieta Trionfante.

Guarino Guarini developed La Pieta into a play that was performed by the students of the seminary.

Guarino Guarini remained there for several months while drafting plans for the facade of the Theatine church of San Vincenzo in Modena, but the project was never executed.

Guarino Guarini widened the four arms of the cross, creating an elegant symmetry of space in harmony with the large central dome.

Guarino Guarini's project appears to have been influenced by Bernini's proposals for the Louvre Palace in Paris and by Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane.

Guarino Guarini wrote ten treatises on a multitude of subjects, including architecture, mathematics and astronomy.

Guarino Guarini published this work while he was a professor of theology in Paris.

Guarino Guarini's Placita belongs to the school of thought usually referred to as Baroque Scholasticism.

The content of the Placita indicates that Guarino Guarini attentively followed scientific developments of the era.

Although, following the views of Aristotle, Guarino Guarini denies the existence of a vacuum, he describes and discusses Torricelli's barometer and barometric experiment with a glass tube closed at the top and filled with mercury.

Guarino Guarini defends the Ptolemaic system dismissing both the Copernican and Tycho Brahe's systems.

Guarino Guarini gives a lengthy description of the motion of planets and the Sun according to the geocentric model.

Guarino Guarini determines fairly accurately the distance between the Moon and the Earth and concludes that Galileo's observation of the change in lunar distance is due to a change in velocity; that when the Moon appears closer to the Earth, it moves faster.

Guarino Guarini's main work, entitled Euclides adauctus et methodicus, is a treatise on descriptive geometry in thirty-five books.

Guarino Guarini cites both the objections to this method used by Mario Bettinus in the Epilogus Planimetricus and that of Paul Guldin in De centro gravitatis solidorum, as well as the authors who appreciated the mathematical proofs, such as Ismael Bullialdus in De lineis spiralibus and Vincenzo Viviani in De maximis et minimis.

Guarino Guarini's conclusion is articulated in nine points and ends with the judgment that Cavalieri did not provide actual and evident proof because in his method he goes from one species to another: the indivisible segments form a surface and this kind of proportion between figures of different species is not permitted in geometry.

Guarino Guarini is the subject of a composition, Guarini, the Master, written in 2004 by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero.