Hyatt Mayor

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The Bibiena Family

Author(s): A. Hyatt MayorSource: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Summer, 1945),pp. 29-37Published by: The Metropolitan Museum of ArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3257247

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T H E BIBIENA FAMILYBY A. HYATT MAYOR

Associate Curator of PrintsThe large collection of Italian baroque draw-ings given to the Museum by Cornelius Van-derbilt in 1880 includes an exact and detailedrendering of a stage set drawn in bister inkwith a fine quill and then brushed with agreenish wash. This turns out to be a sketchfor an etching in Varie opere di prospettivaby Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, a copy of whichis in the Museum's Print Department. Oneimportant fact, that the etching copies thedrawing and not the reverse, is made certainby the etcher's having boggled the entabla-tures to the right of the arch by giving thearch two moldings instead of the three in thedrawing. Several years later, in 1711, Ferdi-nando's drawings were again badly copied inhis Architettura civile (there is also a copy ofthis in the Print Department) because, sayshe, "My frequent travels and undertakingskept me from supervising the illustrations."Some families stamp all their members witha resemblance so marked that the world atlarge gives up trying to distinguish individ-uals and recognizes only a composite entity.The Hapsburgs with their overripe underlipand the Marx brothers with their beak andglaring eye are not more alike than the Bi-biena family, who, under eight names, createdtheatrical designs dating from the i68o's tothe 1780's in a style so constant that theirwhole work looks at first glance as though itmight have been done by one man at onetime. The story of the Bibienas is a story offamily genius working through eight menwhose Christian names matter less to us thantheir family name. When we cannot help con-fusing one Bibiena with another, it is a con-solation to read that their own fellow towns-men and acquaintances did the same.Three generations of supremacy in a spe-cialty of art is as exceptional in individual-istic Europe as it is common in the Eastamong, for instance, the dynasties of armorers

and lacquerers attached to the feudal housesof old Japan. The Bibienas were helped inmaintaining their century of brilliance by be-coming a 'sort of feudal appanage of thehouse of Austria and its connections. Whensome Bibiena prepared to retire from his postas theatrical engineer, he would introduce abrother or a son to take over where he leftoff, thus encouraging the younger membersof the family to train for an assured career.It is curious that when Maria Theresa diedin 1780, and her successor'seconomies put anend to the vast festivities of the Viennesecourt, the Bibienas had wandered far fromAustria and their great works had ended. Asthe resources of the old order declinedthroughout Europe, so did the imperial splen-dor of the Bibienas' imagination.Confusing as their family history is, someattempt must be made to trace it in order toshow where their wanderings contributed va-rious elements to their art. They sprang orig-inally from Florence, whence a certain Galliwas sent to govern the Tuscan hill citadelof Bibbiena. It may have been this podestafrom Macchiavelli's home town who endowedthe Bibienas with the political sagacity thatwas to steer them through the intrigues ofmost of the courts of Europe. When his son,Giovanni Maria Galli, wanted to become anartist, he was not sent to his father's birth-place of Florence, some forty miles to thewest, but sixty miles north across the Apen-nines to Bologna-so low had art sunk in thecity of Giotto and Michelangelo. Yet in spiteof the fact that none of the Bibienas everstudied in Florence, they showed their originby their passion for the two great Florentineinventions of perspective and the grand man-ner.

Bologna, where Giovanni Maria Galli andhis footloose descendants rightly made theirhome for a century at least, had become the29


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center of the then modern, or baroque, schoolof painting, which attempted to combine allthat Italian art had achieved since the HighRenaissance. When he entered the studio ofFrancesco Albani as apprentice, he was putthrough the Bolognese course of study to de-velop technical mastery and a knowledge ofthe accepted masterpieces of Italian andGraeco-Roman art and literature. He wasprobably unequal to so strenuous a curricu-lum, for he spent the rest of his life paintingrunning water and fountains in Albani's pic-tures, earning the nickname Il Fontaniere.As if to rub in his obscurity, Albani's largeworkshop included another helper by thesame name, so that our Giovanni Maria Galli,by a common Italian usage, added a placename to his family name. But it is noteworthythat, instead of calling himself I1 Fiorentinoto recall his family origin, he followed thecustom of a seigneur and took, as a familyname, not as a qualifying adjective, the nameof the place where his family had had power.It was Giovanni Maria Galli Bibiena's sonFerdinando who originated the family's styleand founded their fortunes. Ferdinando, whowas seven when his father died, was instructedand practically adopted by his father's fellowpupil, Carlo Cignani, the last great Bolognesepainter. Since painting was only part of histrue bent, he turned to the study of architec-ture under some of the heirs of that oncerevolutionary North Italian school which hadtrained so many of the builders of baroqueRome. He then completed his education bypainting scenery in Bologna for a CaptainErcole Rivani, who had worked as a theatri-cal engineer for Louis XIV when some of themost enormous stage machinery of the agewas being devised for Versailles.In his mid-twenties, with a sound trainingin draughtsmanship, architecture, and me-chanics, Ferdinando began to design theatersets, wall decorations, buildings, and formalgardens in and around Parma for the Farnesefamily, who held the most powerful courtnear the papal city of Bologna and had beenone of Italy's most lavish patrons of the the-ater for almost a century.

Ferdinando's introduction to the Haps-burgs occurred in Barcelona in 1708, whenhe supervised the celebrations for the mar-riage of the pretender Charles III of Spainand was made his first architect and painterof festivities, or, as he politely worded it toCharles, "You put my poor hand under con-tribution for Your ingenious pageantry . .and deigned to inscribe on my dust the Titlesof Your Beneficence." This first effort in thegreat world which he and his family were todazzle for three generations succeeded so wellthat as soon as Charles went to Vienna tobecome the Emperor Charles VI of Austriahe called Ferdinando to him. In 1712 Ferdi-nando took two of his sons, Alessandro, aged24, and Giuseppe, aged 15, with him to Vi-enna, where they joined Ferdinando's youngerbrother Francesco, who had come to the Aus-trian court about eight years before. This re-union established the Bibienas in Vienna,with the result that as a family they createdtemporary settings for celebrations of life anddeath in the court during a generation. Tothe world at large their drawings and theoperas that Mozart wrote later on are themost vivid witnesses we have of the first hey-day of Vienna's prodigality and verve.Though most of the family used Vienna fortheir headquarters and Bologna for theirhome, their work kept them all wandering.Yet for all their travels and foreign marriages,they liked each other so much that when a lotof them chanced to be home in Bologna inJanuary, 1744, they celebrated the reunion byfitting up a stage in the salon of their hand-some arcaded house and giving an opera per-formed by and for the theater-loving gentle-folk of the city. They constantly showed theirfamily loyalty by recommending each otherto influential people and by helping eachother on orders that had to be rushed forsome impatient patron. Working often shoul-der to shoulder, they not only drew verymuch alike, but must often have collaboratedon the same drawing, like members of anyarchitectural firm today. Such family collabo-ration was a tradition in Bologna, where thethree Carracci used to say that a given paint-

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Drawing for "Varie opere di prospettiva, about 703-r708," by Ferdinando Galli Bibiena. Giftof Cornelius Vanderbilt, i880

ing was by "noi tre." It is therefore no won-der that few of their drawings can be attrib-uted with any certainty.About two hundred of their finished draw-ings-nearly all lost now-were reproduced bycontemporary etchings and engravings, mostof which are marked with Ferdinando's orGiuseppe's name. On the basis of a few draw-ings that are thus identified by old prints,and a few more that bear genuine signatures,it is possible to guess at the style of some ofthe Bibienas. Ferdinando drew with a some-what labored exactitude, as might be ex-pected from the pioneer co-ordinator of scat-tered skills who also taught countless pupils.His son Giuseppe, the most inventive ex-plorer of the possibilities that he had openedup, drew with the happy inevitability of a

master who perfects an inherited formula.The completeness of Giuseppe's achievementwas for his son Carlo, the last Bibiena of thestage, both a prison and a patrimony tooprofitable to be discarded, even though hedid his best to meet the taste for classical bal-ance of the late eighteenth century. He drewwith the correct dullness of a good pupil.These deductions or guesses are mostlybased on drawings finished in every detail forthe engraver or the scene painter, which werebut one step in the process of creating a stageset, as described by Ferdinando. "When youare trying to conceive a project," he says,"your imagination will open more easily inthe dark, or in bed, lying awake and alone."Then came those first inimitable lightningsketches which can rarely be attributed be-

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cause almost none of them are signed, and thequill's instinctive swiftness bears no relationto the draughtsmanship by ruler and compasson the final renderings from which the actualsets were constructed. Sometimes the Bibienasalso helped their assistants to draw and paintin water color on the canvas wings and dropsas they lay flat on the floor. In most old thea-ters the only clear floor big enough for thiswork was the stage itself, though the TurinOpera House, opened in 1740, provided avast daylighted attic over the stage and audi-torium. Ferdinando says with pardonablecomplacency that many of his predecessorshelped their weak perspective by painting setsin place so as to be able to rule all horizontallines from a string nailed to the vanishingpoint.It is hard to estimate how well the Bibienaswere paid. Their fees must often have seemedhigh, for Francesco had to haggle for monthsto get his price of 8,ooo florins for designingan opera house in Vienna. In 1733 in Bolognahe designed a new set for the last act of anopera for 200 lire, or very slightly more thanthe prima donna received for each perform-ance in a run of twenty-six nights. Paintingthe set cost over twice, and the raw materialsalmost five times, as much. To make moneyfor their travels, their handsome home inBologna, and the rich clothes they needed tobe presentable at court in an age when a goodsuit cost as much as an automobile today, theBibienas turned their hand to a vast varietyof work for the Church as well as for the laity.In the English-speaking world, where theage of reason began as early as Bacon, itseems strange that churches should have em-ployed theater decorators in the full eight-eenth century. But in Italy, Austria, andSouth Germany both Church and State lookedbackward to the preceding age of the Coun-ter Reformation, when Loyola's soldiers ofJesus had battled to turn back the Turk andhad routed the heretic by striking at the emo-tions through the ear, the eye, and even thenose. This assault on all the senses had beenso vital a weapon in reconquest that it washeld over for the occupation. Eighteenth-

century Jesuit seminaries often had theaterswhere acting in sacred plays trained prospec-tive preachers in dramatic delivery. In St.Peter's, that most sumptuous of sacred the-aters, when a new saint was canonized hisportrait was made to appear during the bene-diction in the center of the hundred-ton gold-bronze glory that enshrines the chair abovethe high altar. Not far away, in San Fran-cesco a Ripa, a central mechanism like thatonce used in theatrical transformations forshifting all the wings and the backdrop inunison, still functions to open up panels andpilasters and display 18,000 relics.In Italy and Austria the Jesuit father An-drea Pozzo paved the way for the Bibienasby painting great perspectives in churches-canvas decorations of angels swarming up-ward toward the crown of the vaulting, wherethe latest Jesuit martyr swooned in ecstasy,or ceilings broken open through clouds to ablue so profound that only the saints of areinvigorated Church could dwell there with-out giddiness. But of all these baroque dec-orations, those that kept most of the spirit ofthe mediaeval mystery plays were the colossalpeep shows, or theatra sacra, that GiuseppeBibiena constructed yearly for the court atVienna. Each feast of Corpus Christi broughta fresh variation on the theme of wide rampsof stairs converging on a balustraded plat-form where the Man of Sorrows stood undera vast arch opening on lofty architectural dis-tances.

Since these theatra sacra were often viewedin narrow chapels and from one level, theirperspective could be much more rigorous andelaborate than that of theater sets which, inspite of being calculated to look their bestfrom the prince's central box, also had tolook at least passable from right and left,above and below.This age that venerated the family treenext only to the Cross staged some of its moststriking church spectacles for the funerals ofprinces. Nothing today-not even the Pompesfunebres premiere classe-can approach theblack and silver grandeur of baroque catafal-ques. For the court of Vienna Giuseppe Bi-

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biena alone constructed over thirty castradoloris, colonnaded towers burdened withurns from which heavy flames smolderedabout the uplifted, draped sarcophagus andthe skeleton flashing its scythe. The exaltationof worldliness by which the absolute princestormed heaven complete with sword andscutcheon was not viewed kindly by old-fash-ioned eyes. About 1614 Webster wrote in TheDuchess of Malfi, "Princes' images on theirtombs do not lie, as they were wont, seemingto pray up to heaven; but with their handsunder their cheeks, as if they died of thetoothache: they are not carved with their eyesfixed upon the stars; but as their minds werewholly bent upon the world, the selfsame waythey seem to turn their faces."But the Bibienas served the ambitions ofthe absolute monarch in life even more thanin death. Like modern dictators, the seven-teenth- and eighteenth-century rulers drama-tized themselves with the aid of stage tech-nicians who acted as a sort of bodyguard ofthe imagination. Pascal put his finger on themotive when he described Louis XIV in termsof a Bajazet: "Judgment must be clarified in-deed to see just another man in the great lordsurrounded, in his superb seraglio, by fortythousand janissaries." By dint of inhabitinga stage setting, the monarch became himselfa creature of the stage, like Louis XIV danc-ing in the center of his vast ballets, or MariaTheresa, called by her husband Europe'sgreatest actress, appealing to the Bohemiandiet by presenting herself before them withher newborn son in her arms. FerdinandoBibiena knew such rulers' need for theatertechnicians when he wrote to Charles VI,"Allow my lowliness to serve Your Palms bycontrast, as cropped grass serves the design ofa great Garden." As if to recognize the poli-tical value of a man like Giuseppe Bibiena,the margraves of Bayreuth allowed him tobracket his name with theirs in the ornatecartouche that crowns the ducal box in theBayreuth opera house that he decorated. TheBibienas' theatrical designs, even when viewedat their lowest level as mere accumulations ofluxurious intricacy, enhanced a prince's im-

portance by demonstrating what endless man-hours he commanded for his momentarypleasure.The great autocratic courts of the northwere the Bibienas' richest secular patrons, butthey did not provide the keenest or most in-terested audiences. Ferdinando, Francesco,and Antonio spent half their lives workingin the Italian community theaters, whichwere often built by public subscription. TheItalian spectator who appeared in the audi-torium not by princely command invitationbut because he had paid his share for theshow, came, according to the French ambas-sadress to Venice in 1795, "to listen, not totalk as we do." Italians cared so passionatelyfor the theater that in 1763, when AntonioBibiena's Teatro Comunale was opened, everyavailable bed in Bologna was bespoke forweeks beforehand, and the Bolognese werewaging a civil war of pamphlets and "lettersto The Times" for and against every detailof the building. Indeed, the voluminousnessof the old Italian literature on the construc-tion and acoustics of theaters is alone enoughto prove the passion for the arts that existedin these Italian cities, where our pattern ofurban life was first discovered and where thefirst modern men outside a court or churchachieved the intelligent use of leisure. In thesecommunities of free individuals the men ofletters, the cognoscenti of the arts, and thegentlemen musicians had first combined dec-lamation, scenery, and music to delight theheart, the eye, and the ear with opera. ThisItalian synthesis developed modern forms ofstage scenery, which were adopted by dramawhen strolling players stopped acting on tres-tles in the market place and settled down in-doors.

Wonders were performed on these operastages, often a hundred feet deep, but narrowand low-ceilinged. In Mazarin's Salle des Ma-chines at the Tuileries many of the trans-formations were effected by wooden machines,forty feet wide and sixty feet long, that rolledback and forth on a stage 132 feet deep. TheRenaissance changed scenes by reviving theantique system of revolving prisms. This lim-33


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ited and bulky machinery gradually gave way,after 1600, to the Italian scheme of loweringa backdrop from an overhead drum while thewings, being roped to a central capstan underthe stage, simultaneously slid back in groovesto reveal a different set of wings behind.When the stage machines were set in mo-tion, the actors should not distract from themarvel in progress by speaking, wrote Hedelind'Aubignac in 1657. It was in England thatstage spectacle met the only literature freeand bold enough to combat it with success,despite the fact that an Englishman, InigoJones, was the first northerner to practice Ital-ian stagecraft. "Painting and carpentry arethe soul of masque" was an outcry that BenJonson belied by writing the only drames amachines that still find readers-unless, in-deed, The Tempest may be considered

anorthern example of this Italian form. Thewar to extermination between the dramatistand the theater engineer must be one reasonwhy stage spectacle flourished most freelywhere writers were most strictly censored bythe Counter Reformation and absolute autoc-racy.Working in the reactionary German andAustrian courts and in the Italian states sur-viving on their past, the Bibienas introducedtheir novelties under a mask of tradition, justas the painters of their native Bologna cre-ated a new style out of old elements. Yet theBibienas' consistent use of architectural detailfifty to a hundred years old seems conservativeeven in the theater, which seldom welcomesideas while new. Ferdinando, the greatteacher of the family, proudly rejected inno-vations like the rococo, because, according tohis friend Zanotti, he admired and taught"true architecture without cartouches andsprays and modern frippery."But the Bibienas could not have astoundedtheir blase audience of princes without realinnovations. While the whole family, for in-stance, designed what were known as palais avolonte, or sets used for any action that calledfor a palace and as generalized as the wood-cuts repeated indiscriminately in old bookswherever "the author writes of a city," Giu-

seppe Bibiena sometimes created sets thatseem to fit some one action only. In his re-markable Gothic designs he started the studyof exotic local color that was to developshortly after 18oo at La Scala in Sanquirico'sromantic studies of Russian log houses, Ar-thurian castles, Muslim tombs, and Tahitianhuts. But Giuseppe's excursions into histori-cal accuracy were too much in advance of thetimes to make them the family's most admirednovelty. The Bibienas' contemporary famewas founded rather on several innovations bywhich they achieved the most complete knownmastery of the illusion of immensity.It was in the early seventeenth century thatthe Euclidian definition of parallel lines aslines that never meet was changed to lines thatmeet at infinity, because infinity was beingthought of as something different from thelargest conceivable number. Shortly afterFerdinando Bibiena took service with thehouse of Parma, Newton's Principia obsessedthe next half century with the nightmare ofinterstellar space. The age tried to fulfill itsdreams of loftiness and space in all sorts ofodd ways. In Sweden, for instance, QueenChristina's French gardener prolonged alleysto the horizon by canvas perspectives thatcould be removed in wet weather.

This desire for space was partly satisfied byan innovation through which the Bibienasachieved a new thoroughness and exactitudein drawing architectural perspective. Theywere probably helped to this new pitch ofskill by being brought up in Bologna, whereno observant man can escape having a senseof architectural distances forced on him bythe endless arcades that shelter the city fromits raw snows. One of these arcades alone runsfor nearly two miles in an unbroken flight of666 arches. A childhood of wandering downsuch vistas could not but contribute to theability to draw exactly a row of identical ob-jects repeating themselves indefinitely into thedistance-an ability that is practically a trade-mark of the entire Bibiena family. In theirbalustrades and their friezes of rich ornamentthe development of a shape disappearing to-ward the vanishing point is pursued with the

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Scena per Angolo, pen and wash drawing, possibly by Giuseppe Galli Bibiena. Gift of Cor-nelius Vanderbilt, i88orelentlessness of a Bach fugue. Indeed, theBibienas' perspective demonstrated how todevelop shapes in space as alblyas Bach's con-temporary counterpoint demonstrated how todevelop themes in time. These skills that dis-tinguish all members of the Bach and theBibiena families were doubtless the productof inherited aptitude developed by constantfamily collaboration. Ferdinando Bibienathought this exact diminution in scale soessential to creating the illusion of space thathe used to calculate the apparent depth of hisvistas in real.measurements so as to draw alldistant details in perfect proportion. Then,with the actor at the footlights to give the

scale, the completed stage set preserved theimmensity sensed in the first imaginativesketch of the idea.The Bibienas' most radical innovation, onwhich the family traded for a century, com-pletely broke the traditional stage picture.The renaissance stage suggested depth by aperspective of houses built on either side of an

upward-sloping street or avenue that pro-longed the central aisle of the orchestra. Thestrict axial symmetry of antique architecturemust have seemed mandatory for a form likeopera, which started as a baroque "revival"of Greek and Roman tragedy. Niccolo Sab-battini says that when this single central vista35


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was varied by opening up side avenues likethose in the wide Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza,the narrowness of the usual early stage madethe result like "a battle of flies." Ferdinandofounded the fame of the Bibienas by replac-ing this set axial formula with a simple andflexible scheme that gave a much more im-aginative illusion of distance. This is the onlything in his Architettura civile that he claimsas his own invention, though it is reallyPozzo's slanting perspective developed to itslogical conclusion. Ferdinando opened eventhe tiniest stage to hitherto undreamed ofspace and loftiness by painting architectureseen at about a 45? slant. A ground plan ofthese painted buildings would resemble theV of the angle of a building driving at theaudience like the prow of a ship, or the up-side down V of the corner of a room extend-ing its walls to embrace the auditorium, orboth plans combined in an X of intersectingarcades that spread outward toward the pros-cenium arch and also lead back through flee-ing colonnades. These restless flights of archi-tecture running diagonally offstage towardundetermined distances revolutionized anddominated scenic design for half the eight-eenth century.Actors and audience were drawn togetherby the equal illumination that the candlesspread over the stage and the auditorium. Ifwe today could leave the fixed electric bril-liance of our night life to go into one of theold candlelit theaters we should be charmedby the warm and gentle lights flickering overall the volutes, rippling over the swirls andgarlands, and dimpling the cupids. It takesthe uncertainties of candlelight fully to ani-mate the ornamental flow of baroque rooms.In the early theaters, where the lighting fix-tures were not readily accessible, the candleswere made to last out the performance by notbeing lighted until the scene was about to bedisclosed. "When everybody is seated," saysSabbattini, writing in 1638, "and the perform-ance is ready to start, then light the lights,first in the house and then on the stage, andbe as quick as you can, for the audience isrestless." He adds that the candles, their wicks

wetted with petroleum to speed ignition, werelighted from a taper on the end of a reed, or,for finer effect, by fuses running from wickto wick all over the house. In the better-equipped theaters of the eighteenth centurythe audience assembled under a blazing chan-delier that ascended through a hole in theceiling or the proscenium arch when the per-formance was about to start. When the audi-torium was at its brightest for gala, or agiorno, evenings, the heat from hundreds oflittle flames and from human beings oftensoftened the candles until they toppled overand splashed tallow on people below. Oillamps hardly improved matters by smellingwhen extinguished, even when the oil wasperfumed, and Sabbattini goes on to say,"Footlights of oil lamps, instead of lightingthe scenery better, darken it by smoke asdense as a fog, which shuts off the stage andblots out all details of the sets while suffocat-ing the audience with stink. Though the ac-tors' and dancers' costumes can be seen better,their faces look as pale and hollow-cheekedas though they had just risen from a fever."Under cover of the dimness what wondersbecame possible! Clouds forever lowered godsor snatched hard-pressed mortals up toheaven. Men turned to stone as painted clothswere pushed up around them from under thestage. Cardboard ghosts were shoved upthrough cracks in the floor and then swelledor shrank, since they were made, says Sabbat-tini, "with ribs like an umbrella." Live actorscatapulted through a trap from a seesawbelow when two men jumped on the otherend. Temples melted into stormy seas, andseas dissolved into imperial audience hallsthat burst into flames and ruin.

Such stage wonders reflected a new confi-dence in man's ability to bend nature to hiswill. So do the vistas at Versailles and the ave-nues that cross whole counties of England toconverge on some Palladian house, for theseare still the largest geometrical decorationsever imposed on the earth. The age that laidthe foundations for modern science, that har-nessed natural forces by exploring their for-mal laws, could no longer accept miracles

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with mediaeval matter-of-factness as a contin-uous function of the everyday world. Thebaroque painter, aware of two incompatibleworlds, clothed a miracle in every possiblerealistic detail so as to lead the reason as faras possible along natural laws before beingconfronted by their violation. In the same veinthe Bibienas made all their stage architecturestrictly constructible and never played, likePillement when the old order was under-mined, with a denial of gravity. Their stagesettings dazzle with the glamour of architec-tural renderings designed to allure the ba-roque ruler to build in marble. Here andthere some fantastic autocrat actually had themoney to put a stage dream in lasting form.Less than a century after Palladio and Sca-mozzi had built the permanent stage set inthe Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, Bernini andhis fellows adapted its three perspective streetsby cleaving the heart of Rome into three far-reaching avenues that converge on the Piazzadel Popolo and frame twin churches. Theairy, vast pageant ground of the Zwinger atDresden is, or more probably was, anotherseries of perspectives that could be walkedinto.

Lack of money may not have been the onlyreason for building so few of these grandiosestage settings. The baroque was the supremeage of illusion. Even its mathematicians, dis-covering infinity as the place where parallellines meet, must have visualized some opticalillusion like that of looking down railroadtracks. Seventeenth-century painting, by cre-ating new illusions of roundness and new sub-tleties of expression, became the master artthat impelled the sculptor to carve draperiesthat no blind man's hand could interpret andthe architect to merge his solid building intoperspective enlargements. The wise heads ofthe time must have seen that the visions ofthe great painter architects, however construc-tible they might seem, could not but becomevulgar in the exactitudes of stone. As themost optical of architects, the Bibienas fellheir to all the baroque, to all that Bernini andBorromini had dreamed but had had to leaveundone. Indeed, at their drawing boards, un-hampered by the expense of marble, the de-lays of masons, the whims or death of pa-trons, the Bibienas' achievement summed upthe great emotional architecture of the ba-roque.

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