Volume 16, Number 11 · June 17, 1971
Go for Baroque
By Francis Haskell
Roma Barocca
by Paolo Portoghesi, by Barbara Luigia La Penta
MIT, 490, 475 gravure illustrations and 60 line drawings pp., $50.00
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press has published a translation of Paolo Portoghesi's Roma Barocca under the title Roma Barocca. This will be considered, according to taste, either pretentious or unenterprising: but, in fact, even the most persevering English or American reader may, however deficient his knowledge of Italian, come to the conclusion after reading this gigantic book that these are about the only two words in it that require no special effort to understand. This is not the fault of the translator. Over the last generation or so Paolo Portoghesi has emerged as one of the most brilliant of Italian architectural historians, who has made several decisive contributions to our knowledge of the baroque, but he has never been an easy writer and his style has grown progressively more recondite. Although I have not been able to check the Italian of some distinctly peculiar sentences, experience of earlier articles by him leads me to doubt whether they would make much more sense to anyone not in tune with his highly convoluted thought processes.
Review, 1987 words
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