Within the curving avenues of columns, there is a sense of shelter and intimacy under the coffering overhead. Perhaps Bernini intended to. make the colonnade both grand and intimate, With shifts in weather and time of day, and with crowds milling, or atending 2 ceremony, the piazza changes character, When emptied of people, it is free of motion and sound except the water spilling over in the two large fountains. ‘The scene Bernini planned is completed by the tall figures ringing the two arcs of the colonnade (p, 66), Dramatically posed, these single figures and pairs appear to converse with one another and perhaps with the viewer. Seen at a distance they look normal in size, but from up close, they loom to nearly twice lifesize, The statues form a lively, run~ ning gallery that softens the skyline of the colonnade. Like the angels he designed for the bridge across the Tiber, they are vital forms against the sky, but even they are subordinate to the twenty-foot-tall Christ and the Jes surmounting the church facade, Compared with the small- ef, less gesticulative figures surmounting Michelangelo's buildings on the Capitoline Hill, Bernini’s may look too prominent, but not when they are related to the immensity of the piazza and the new religious dramas of the city. The piazza was Bernini's architectural masterpiece, and it immedi- ately set a pattern which influenced European architecture from Naples through Bath to St. Petersburg. The rival in size of any Greek temple, it is on a scale with the great Egyptian sanctuaries on the Nile (which Bernini never saw). The moment it was finished it seemed to have been there for centuries ‘The oval piazza brings out the broad significance of the oval form the 17th century. It appears in every imaginable size, material and function, so plentifully that it could serve as a symbol of the era, Mathematicians now regard the circle as a variation of the oval, but anists and poets, as well as humanists and Neoplatonists, thought of the circle as a self-enclosed symbol of perfection, As new forms carry old ones in their memory, for Bernini the oval may have recalled the per- fect circle of the Renaissance, Specifically, he may have thought of Bramante’s Tempieto in Rome, when he was designing the oval church of §. Andrea al Quirinale. 8Michelangelo's practice gives an idex of how the oval took hold Treating classical ideas with considerable freedom, he made of them not a set of rules but points of departure. The oval served Michelangelo's needs, for example, in the Sforea Chapel in Milan, in the radial chapels of S, Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome (never built), and of course in the great oval piazza on the Capitoline Hill, 1fis ovals are one reason he has been called "grandfather of the Baroque.” The circular tondos painted in the previous century by painters like Botticelli and Correggio sustained the use of circles, but from as carly as 1520 they were augmented by ovals, which soon became the stan- dard shape of frames for portrait heads and full-length figures, They were the choice of such English miniavurists as Nicholas Hilliard and. Isaac Oliver, among others, Hilliard, who: painted on vellum with fine sible brushes, did! palm-sized portaits in oval frames, compact and portable, While Anglo-Dutch portrait painters and engravers used ovals for lesser purposes, Rubens used them for monumental purposes on the ceiling of the Whitehall Bangucting House (completed 1634) in England. The center panel is a huge oval surrounded by smaller, nar- rower ones in the four corners. More surprisingly, sculptors sometimes used the oval pattern for groups of figures, An eminent Spanish ex ple is Juan de Juni’s “Entombment” in Valladolid, a group of six life= size, polychrome figures cramatically arranged in an aval around the supine body of Christ ‘The all-imponant concept of perfection begins ta fade with a grow- ing awareness of knowledge a3 everexpanding. What in architecture had been essentially cubes of different kinds, were treated experimen- tally, Vertical and horizontal lines, the expectable norms of constuction, became active curves and oblique lines, ‘The four master architects of 17th-century Reme — Bortominé, Cortona and Rainaldi, as we Bernini — all made extensive use of ovals in their highly individualistic designs. Some Borromini designs employ it repeatedly, as in the ground plan and dome of San Carlino, the towers of the $ the 5; as. Agnese church, and | staircase in Palazzo Barberini, What made the oval aractive? Ttalmost parodies circular perfection by being similarly complete, con tained and continuous, yet it lacks an explicit center, Whether in motion ‘of al fest, both citcle and oval are forms without angles, but when cit- ocular forms are warped out of shape diverse ovals result, slender or obese, egg-shaped, irregular, of broken, Above all, the oval form is sym- pathetic to the key element of Baroque form, the curve. The 17th century could well be imagined to be the moment when the circle lost its form, The idealistic conception of culture, the perfeet- ly ordered cosmos were both Fading, The breaking of the circle was an event recurring in diverse ways. In England John Donne, then the most influential voice in the Anglican world, sees dazens of circular forms broken by the sins of man. Pascal sees the circle as a terrestrial form cracked open and human consciousness, a freedom not known before, ‘The medieval and Renaissance reliance on circles already seemed worlds away, Newton, living in an era mare attuned to science than before, and known to be wholly unresponsive to art, was asked a ques- tion by the astronomer Edmund Halley. How would you deseribe the path of a planet if the foree behind it were the inverse square ta its dis. tance from the sun? Unhesitatingly Newton replied “an ellipse,” and to. prove he had worked out the calculation, he therewith sent Halley one of three proofs he had found The prevalence of the oval lasted well into the 18h century Architecturally it appears in Apulia, Naples and Sicily, and near ‘Turin in nonhern Italy it is used in Juvarra’s facade for the Stupinigi Castle. Spain, also built oval churches at this time, and in England the oval made a few abrupt appearances, In France, thanks 10 official classicism, its absence is particularly nati And in the German states, which had a taste for the Baroque, the tecture and decorition reveal a passionate interest in oval forms, After the mid-I7th century, when the deep wounds of the Thirty Years War had begun healing, the surge of new building glorified the oval in masterpieces by the Asam brothers, the Zimmermann brothers ane Balthasar Neumann, Among scores of aval cellings, chapels and cupa- as, and smaller designs of tombs, fountains, tiles and mirrors, the most celebrated example is Vierzehnheiligen (1742-72), Neumann's pilgrim- age church in the Bavarian countryside. Its interior plan places three large ovals in a row, which gives the viewer a stunningsense of free and open space ble. are!S. Atle af Quirinale terior sf cupola, Rome. Bernini's own designs, built und unbuilt, show the same preference. The plans for chapels in the Louvre and Versailles, though never built were based on ovals. His ideas for the latter (as spacious as. the Pantheon) so excited him that he lay awake the whole night, At home in Rome his outstanding, church was 8, Andrea al Quirinale, which he loved best and frequented almost daily in later life. On the interior of its oval dome is a broken ring of winged prtti which releases other piatti into the lantern and beyond. His St. Teresi in ecstasy occupies an oval stage, and in St, Peter's the triumphant Catheddra Petri marks with an owal the pilgrim’s heavenly ascent. Yet the Piazza of $1. Peters, beside: being his architectural masterpiece, was the most significant oval design to be seen anywhere in ITth-century Rome