Dome

Close view of the west altar wall; "A Guarini dome, such as the one in his Church of S. Lorenzo in Turin, becomes a luminous cage of slender intersecting ribs over which floats the light-filled space of the lantern visible through the complex rib network. The base of the dome is a circle. Eight semicircular lobes form the base of the buoyant lantern, each framed by a pair of splayed ribs. This extraordinary configuration of space, light, and mass has been described by a Guarini scholar as 'a great work of hallucinatory engineering'." p.349 Source: Trachtenberg, Marvin; Hyman, Isabelle; Architecture, from prehistory to post-modernism : the Western tradition, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1986 (0810910772) (accessed 12/31/2007)