From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), the film’s protagonists go on a night-time journey through Rome’s most famous attractions, among them the colonnade at the Palazzo Spada popularly known as the ‘Prospettiva Borromini’. Sorrentino’s camera follows as one of the characters, Ramona (played by Sabrina Ferilli), enters and walks along what appears to be a regular colonnade of evenly spaced paired Doric columns. The further Ramona moves into the colonnade, however, the smaller the columns get and the closer they stand together. As she goes from being dwarfed by the colonnade to almost outgrowing it, we realise that the colonnade and its apparent depth was nothing but an ingenious illusion.
Artifice and illusion are among the themes of Sorrentino’s film. As Susanna Berger charts in The Deformation, they also fascinated the creators of the false colonnade – Borromini, the Augustinian monk Giovanni Maria da Bitonto and their patron Cardinal Bernardino Spada. Indeed, as Berger shows, it was central to their world view. Spada’s illusionistic colonnade was built into the heart of his palazzo in central Rome and was the centrepiece of any visit to the house – the will of his brother records that certain doors were left open to create ideal views. If this seems strange to a modern mind, Berger shows that in Counter-Reformation Rome strangeness was a quality that was cultivated by artists, architects and thinkers to make deep points about the world around them.
There is of course a sense in which this kind of spectacle was designed simply to impress. It is no coincidence that, as Berger shows, the perspective effects used to create the colonnade originated in the world of Renaissance and baroque set design. But for Spada and for his visitors, this was no mere parlour game. As the Cardinal himself put it in an epigram written to James Alban Gibbes, a Scottish poet and physician based in Rome, the perspective colonnade was ‘the image of a deceptive world’. By revealing that which appears grand actually to be small, Spada wrote, it showed that ‘grand things under the heavens remain nothing except spectres’. Far from simply amusing them, Spada’s colonnade sought ultimately to prompt visitors to ask themselves how they stood in relation to God.
Berger’s book explores the intellectual culture that produced Spada’s colonnade. She argues that the cultural imagination of Counter-Reformation Rome was uniquely fascinated with the idea of ‘deformations’, images that, like the colonnade, deliberately subverted the viewer’s preconceived notions of how a visual system worked to cause them to have a heightened experience of that system. In contrast to reformations, which she argues are attempts to return a system to a known ideal, deformations are deliberate attempts to move the system away from this ideal, while not necessarily challenging it. If this all sounds a little difficult to grasp, this is because the lack of clarity was in many ways the point. As Berger puts it, ‘deformations are rhetorical in the sense they are persuasive, but they persuade via other means than strict clarity’. Deformations could serve different ends: to elicit feelings of pleasure on the part of their perceivers, to exhibit the wealth of the patron, or to display the enigmas of experience. At their most successful, deformations could establish philosophical or religious truths or even bring their perceivers to a more intense form of religious experience.
Berger does not therefore seek to give an overarching account of the 17th-century Catholic mind, but of a particular phenomenon in a particular context. The implications of her study, however, stand to provide new insights into the intentions behind many of the greatest buildings of the Roman baroque. Supplanting the characterisation of Heinrich Wölfflin of its architecture as formless, by instead using the term ‘deformation’ she explores its architects’ interests in form and the manipulation of form.
In doing all this, she attempts to complicate histories of art made in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. These have generally emphasised the extent to which Counter-Reformation art prioritised rhetorical clarity and immediacy of comprehension over ambiguity. But, as Berger observes, deformations could be rhetorical and persuasive in a different sense. By bringing the viewer through a pre-planned series of mental contortions, those who conceived deformations could use them to create heightened emotional and even spiritual states in their viewers.
Berger’s account is not just about the great buildings of the high baroque in Rome, however, but covers many other fascinating examples of deformations, some of which will be familiar to the reader, many others not. We encounter works of anamorphic art that, like the celebrated example of Holbein’s Ambassadors, can be understood only when viewed from a particular angle; mathematical, perspectival and religious treatises; and works of art in overlooked media such as turned ivories. Indeed, Berger casts this latter form of miniature sculpture as critical to understanding the mentality that lay behind deformations. Made out of a series of deformations, these small ivory objects, she contends, were so intricate as to be incomprehensible, something that could bring viewers almost to a transcendental state.
Deformations were far from being uncontroversial even in this period. Borromini’s church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane appalled and beguiled critics in equal measure. But by recovering how the sensation of incomprehensibility could be a positive aesthetic experience, Berger helps us better understand what an architect like Borromini was trying to achieve. And in doing this she loses nothing of the sense of wonder that was so clearly delighted in by the artists and patrons she studies. Pull-out images abound in this book, and a mirrored sheet of paper is included at the back of the book that, when placed in a certain way, makes sense of an anamorphic image of Saint Francis.
Today, perhaps as much as in the 17th century, deformations still have the power to beguile.
The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture by Susanna Berger is published by Princeton University Press.
From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.