The College Art Association (CAA) is accepting abstracts for its 112th Annual Conference that will be held February 14–17, 2024 at the Hilton Chicago, with a virtual component. Please consider submitting to the SAH session, "Guarino Guarini: 400 Years," co-chaired by Branko Mitrovic, NTNU and Elwin Robison, Kent State University. The deadline to submit an abstract is August 31, 2023. See the
Call for Participation for instructions on how to submit.
Guarino Guarini: 400 Years
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society of Architectural Historians
Branko Mitrovic, NTNU and Elwin Robison, Kent State University
The erudition of a polymath makes Guarino Guarini an exceptional figure among the prominent architects of the Italian Baroque. A Theatine monk, theologian, mathematician, and architect, Guarini created some of the most extraordinary buildings of his era. He was also the author of three treatises on astronomy, a commentary on Euclid and a massive philosophical treatise, the Placita philosophica. Well-travelled but solitary, a defender of scholastic Aristotelianism who also avidly followed the latest scientific breakthroughs, a baroque architect who was a keen observer of Islamic and Gothic architectural monuments, Guarini is an unusual figure that gathered and sought to resolve in his intellectual life an exceptionally wide range of contradictory intellectual trends of his era.
The 400th anniversary of Guarini’s birth provides an opportunity to review recent scholarship on his architecture, works and publications. Until recently, Guarini’s intellectual life has been difficult to explore, since the authors that he cites and the books that he read are often little known today and difficult to access. The digitalization of seventeenth century books, however, has made many of these sources widely accessible and has resulted in a number of breakthroughs in the understanding of his views and works in recent decades. We thus expect that the session will provide the opportunity to present interesting new research and discuss future possible directions of Guarini scholarship.
