Travelling in the company of Old Masters in shifting roles as observer, listener or sometime companion, this page is kept as a quiet pastime. It is part notebook, part informal journal, a collection of phone images and reflections drawn from encounters with old artworks and places where the past still lingers.
All pictures are taken by me, and all thoughts written during slow travels and unhurried visits, where time allows for second looks and quiet returns.The works and spaces gathered here were made in a world different from ours, yet they continue to ask things of us—not answers, but attention; not certainty, but time. These pages offer no final word, only a shared space in which looking, questioning, and returning might still matter.
Yvo Reinsalu

In the opening decades of the seventeenth century, Rome became the proving ground for a new artistic language—an experiment in how space, light, and illusion might merge into an architecture of faith. What emerged there was not merely a local idiom but a prototype for European Baroque vision, built upon the fusion of painterly illusionism and structural invention centred on the dome-crossing.

Among Rome’s more than 1,600 churches, the Basilica of Sant’Andrea della Valle stands at the point of transition between the disciplined ideals of the late sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation and the sensorial theatre of the Baroque.

The church was entrusted to the Theatines, or Clerics Regular of Divine Providence, a congregation founded in 1524 by Gian Pietro Carafa (1476–1559), later Pope Paul IV, whose reforming zeal left a powerful imprint on its aesthetic principles. In 1591 Cardinal Alfonso Gesualdo (1540–1603), protector of the order, initiated construction as an emblem of the Theatine ideal of disciplined spirituality. He called upon Giacomo della Porta (c.1532–1602) and Pier Paolo Olivieri (c.1551–1599), two architects of contrasting temperaments: della Porta, whose architectural vocabulary balanced Renaissance geometry with emerging Baroque dynamism, and Olivieri, a sculptor steeped in the ornamental sophistication of late Roman Mannerism. Under their joint direction, foundations and convent were laid in 1591; between 1594 and 1596 the main walls rose, and by 1599 the chapels and nave vault were largely complete. After Olivieri’s death that year, Francesco Grimaldi (1543–1613) continued the work, maintaining the measured symmetry characteristic of the late Renaissance. Yet Gesualdo’s death in 1603 brought a financial collapse that stalled progress for five years, revealing how dependent monumental architecture remained on the fortunes of individual patrons.

The project was revived with new ambition under Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto (1571–1623), grandnephew of Pope Sixtus V, whose extraordinary financial support and taste for architectural magnificence transformed Sant’Andrea into a statement of Catholic triumphalism. Under the direction of Carlo Maderno (1556–1629), the design expanded dramatically. The nave was extended, the spatial axis clarified, and the dome—second in size only to that of St Peter’s—became the focus of the entire interior. Completed in 1623, it was crowned by a lantern executed in refined stone by a young Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), then apprenticed in Maderno’s workshop. The vaults and roofs were finished by 1625, and though the interior was ready for the jubilee of 1650, the façade remained absent until 1655, when Carlo Rainaldi (1611–1691) refined Maderno’s conception into the dignified façade we see today. The final phase was financed by Cardinal Francesco Peretti di Montalto (1597–1655) and personally supported by Pope Alexander VII Chigi (1599–1667; reigned 1655–1667), whose patronage is still recorded in the dedicatory inscription.

After 1620, the Theatines turned their attention to the interior decoration, initiating one of the defining pictorial experiments of the Roman Baroque. Their programme brought together two painters of the Bolognese school whose temperaments perfectly embodied the opposing poles of early seventeenth-century painting: Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri, 1581–1641), the architect of classical order and moral clarity, and Giovanni Lanfranco (1582–1647), whose pictorial imagination sought ecstasy through movement and light. Both had studied under Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) and inherited his ideal of painting as a moral and intellectual enterprise. Yet in Sant’Andrea della Valle they would test how far that ideal could stretch between reason and revelation.

The project unfolded under the brief papacy of Gregory XV (Alessandro Ludovisi, 1554–1623; reigned 1621–1623), himself from Bologna. His nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi (1595–1632), supported Domenichino as the painter best suited to embody the measured dignity of the Carracci tradition. Cardinal Montalto, who still controlled the site, sought compromise between patronal factions. Domenichino was assigned the pendentives and apse vault, while Lanfranco received the dome—an arrangement that effectively institutionalised the stylistic polarity between rational structure and ecstatic illusion that defined the Baroque.

Between 1621 and 1625, Domenichino executed the frescoes of the apse, a cycle that distils the intellectual poise and moral discipline of the Bolognese school. The vault and conch recount key episodes from the life of Saint Andrew: The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, Saint Andrew Led to Martyrdom, and The Burial of Saint Andrew. Each composition is conceived with lucid order and deliberate gesture, transforming narrative into moral meditation. On the pendentives, the four Evangelists are enthroned in grave composure, their stillness counterbalancing the dome’s ascent. Domenichino’s classicism—heir to Raphael’s serenity and to the ethical clarity of the Carracci reform—translates faith into reasoned endurance rather than rapture. Through his synthesis of painting and architecture, the apse becomes an image of disciplined devotion: an art of conviction and restraint, where belief is expressed not in ecstasy but in composure.

Lanfranco’s Assumption of the Virgin (1625–1627) turned the dome above into a revelation of motion and light. It shows the Virgin ascending toward Christ amid a celestial tumult of angels and saints. At the summit, Christ descends from the lantern to receive his mother; beneath, the Virgin, robed in red and blue, rises from a vortex of clouds filled with patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and heroines of Scripture. Two putti crown her with a garland of roses, while angelic musicians circle above and seven cherubs support festoons of fruit and flowers near the lantern’s base. Among the lower figures, Saint Andrew holds the cross of his martyrdom as he welcomes the Theatine Saint Andrea Avellino (1521–1608; canonised 1624) into Paradise, while Saint Peter greets Saint Cajetan (1480–1547), founder of the order. Light radiates from Christ, dissolving the figures nearest the lantern into luminous air, then gaining substance in the lower clouds through tones of pink, yellow, grey, orange, green, and violet. The composition, recalling Correggio’s domes in Parma yet magnified to Roman scale, also reveals the influence of Rubens in its draperies and Bernini in the charged gestures of its ascending figures.

Lanfranco’s dome astonished contemporaries and inaugurated a new phase in Baroque decoration, where painting and architecture were bound together by light itself. The contrast between Domenichino’s calm order and Lanfranco’s exuberant vision embodies the Baroque paradox: the reconciliation of intellect and rapture, structure and ecstasy. Seen from the nave, the frescoes form a vertical continuum—from the martyrdom and endurance of Saint Andrew below to the radiant vision of the Assumption above—visualising the Counter-Reformation theology of salvation: faith tested on earth, transfigured in heaven.

The decoration of the high altar, executed around 1650 by Mattia Preti (1613–1699), introduced a final voice into this dialogue. His frescoes—The Raising of the Cross, The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, and The Burial of Saint Andrew—extend the theological sequence from sacrifice to glory.Conceived for the Theatine order, Preti’s work combines Caravaggesque gravity with a grandeur suited to the liturgical setting. His Crucifixion, with the cross seen at a diagonal against a luminous sky, dominates the visual axis of the nave and sets the emotional tone for the interior, extending the theological arc from sacrifice to glory.

Sant’Andrea della Valle thus becomes a monument to the creative tension that defined early Baroque Rome. Its unity is not harmonious but dialectical, built upon contrast—between Maderno’s structural order and Lanfranco’s illusion, Domenichino’s intellectual poise and Preti’s carnal immediacy. Within its vast nave, faith is staged as both conflict and resolution, devotion as both reasoning and spectacle.

The artistic ideals forged at Sant’Andrea della Valle would soon resonate beyond Rome. In 1631, Domenichino accepted the commission for the Chapel of the Treasury of San Gennaro in the Cathedral of Naples, where he worked for a decade on pendentives, lunettes, and scenes from the life of Saint Gennaro, translating his Roman classicism into frescoes of monumental gravity. Yet hostility and illness darkened his final years, and he died in 1641, leaving the dome—the intended culmination of his design—unfinished. Soon after, Lanfranco was summoned to complete what his rival had left undone. In 1643 he painted his Paradiso, a whirling vision of saints and angels ascending toward a radiant Christ, dissolving the architecture into light. Naples thus witnessed the final dialogue between the two painters: Domenichino’s disciplined theology yielding to Lanfranco’s luminous ecstasy, earth answering heaven, intellect contending with revelation.

Sant’Andrea della Valle, however, stands as the true matrix of this exchange—the point at which the Baroque synthesis of architecture, painting, and light first achieved structural and intellectual coherence. Its vast interior is not a simple unity of style but a theatre of competing visions, where architecture becomes the stage upon which divergent temperaments contend for authority. Maderno’s monumental design, disciplined in geometry yet expansive in spatial ambition, provided the architectural armature through which painting could aspire to the condition of vision. Upon this framework, Domenichino, Lanfranco, and later Preti enacted a dialogue that transformed the building into an arena of artistic and theological debate.

Yet it is Sant’Andrea della Valle that remains the matrix of this exchange. There, for the first time, the Baroque synthesis of architecture, painting, and light achieved full structural and intellectual coherence. The church is not a unity of style but a theatre of competing visions, where architecture becomes the stage upon which divergent temperaments enact the drama of belief. Maderno’s geometric armature provides the architectural grammar; Domenichino articulates moral clarity within it; Lanfranco transforms it into rapture; and Preti returns it to the human body. The result is equilibrium through opposition—a dynamic system where intellect and passion, structure and illusion, coexist in perpetual dialogue.

Viewed as a whole, Sant’Andrea della Valle encapsulates the complexity of the Roman Baroque: not a fixed style but a living negotiation between theology and spectacle, discipline and invention. Here, architecture no longer confines painting but partners with it in revelation. In the interplay of stone and light, of moral measure and visionary excess, the basilica captures the defining aspiration of seventeenth-century Rome—an art that sought truth through tension, and faith through the drama of transformation.