The cover of The Genius in The Design compares its two anti-heroes with Mozart and Salieri, but this doesn’t do Jake Morrissey’s thrilling story justice ... Despite the clinical precision wit which it dissects its two subjects politicking and backstabbing, a story that ends with Borromini’s suicide, Jake Morrissey book is at best in its detailed reading of the individual buildings. The three pages he gives over to delineating Borromini’s San Carlo Cloister, for instance is a model of judicious analysis ... The book is studded with such apercus. Visitors wanting to get a handle on Rome’s architecture have hitherto had to pack both Hibbard’s Berninni and Anthony Blunt’s Borromini. Thanks to Morrissey, the need now weigh their suitcase their suitcase down with only one book ’ The Telegraph
‘With thorough scholarship and a novelist’s eye for vivid storytelling, Jake Morrissey expertly recreates a personal rivalry that sparked some of the world’s greatest architectural creations’ ’ Matthew Pearl, author of THE DANTE CLUB
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The Genius in the Design is the true story of the great rivalry between two extraordinary men, the seventeenthcentury architects Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, and how their antagonism changed the city of Rome and created the Baroque. Talented, driven and ambitious, each man spent his career trying to outdo the other to become the greatest architect of his time. Each, in his turn, succeeded, only to be brought down by the machinations of the other. In the end, one became the most lionized artist of his time and died a rich, happy family man. The other, consumed by internal demons, committed suicide. This book is the story of their hostility.
Part history, part biography, part adventure story, The Genius in the Design is narrative non-fiction that reads like a novel and brings to vivid life the struggle between two giants of architecture, so different in outlook, so similar in purpose.
