Juan de Caramuel y Lobkowitz, Count of Zen, royal counsellor, Cistercian monk and Bishop of Vigevano - theologian, philosopher, scientist, jurist, linguist, grammarian, authority on music and architecture, as well as politician, diplomat, soldier, engineer and architect - is undoubtedly one of the emblematic figures of the enlightment of the baroque age. He mastered more than twenty languages, was a great preacher, and a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects. In addition to his intellectual pursuits, he took an active part in the decisive political and military affairs of the time. As an intellectual, he intervened in the great controversies in both religious and aesthetic matters, and his cosmopolitan background and frequent travels meant that he was present at the great events that were to change the history of Europe. He really seemed to be ubiquitous. Although of foreign extraction, he was born in Spain and throughout his life he served the interest of the Hispanic Empire. His books were intended for Spanish readers although most of his life was spent in other countries to which he easily became adapted. Most of his work was written in Latin, but he wrote in Spanish those that were of the greatest interest and use to the Spanish reader: the "Declaración mística de las armas de España invictamente belicosas" (Brussels, 1636), "Steganografía o Arte de escribir en cifra" (Brussels, 1635), "Defensa de la Monarquía y respuesta al manifiesto de Portugal" (Antwerp, 1642), "Métrica o Arte nueva de varios e ingeniosos laberintos" (Roma,1663), "Arquitectura civil, recta y oblicua" (Vigevano, 1678).

The foundation of Caramuel's erudition was laid in Spain, but he showed a keen interest in all that was being published in Europe in Philosophy and Science. As a monk he was trained in scholasticism, but he was one of the first Spaniards to cross the ideological barriers that isolated Spain, and try to introduce there the new ideas he encountered in Europe. As Henry Kaman says, he was the only scientist in Spain to have international relations. [1] Among his many friends in the scientific and philosophical circles of Europe was the Capuchin astronomer, A.M. Schirlaeus de Rheita, whom he visited in Cologne; he kept up a correspondence with Gassendi, Mersenne, Marco Marci, Thomas Compton and Father Kircher who was very similar to him in character [2], and most significantly with Descartes who was, of course, responsible for the radical change in European thought. Descartes dealt a death blow to scholasticism and Aristotelism, and to the a priori authority of the printed word, ushering in a new era in which reason and experience are the foundations of scientific-natural knowledge. The awareness of the unitary system, the "mathesis universalis" of Descartes, was to be decisive in the thought process of Caramuel who took mathematics to be the basis of his encyclopedic concept of knowledge. This was why Caramuel was so much revered by his contemporaries, the Spanish "novatores" of the late seventeenth century, and then praised and respected by the well-informed of the eighteenth century. His subtle wit, extraordinary intelligence and memory, his power of reasoning in polemics, "en ciencias prodigioso" in the words of one of the sonnets in his "Mathesis biceps", placed him at the centre of controversy for his political and scientific writings as well as for his personal activities. He was contentious and contended. He wrote easily and extensively and while his brilliance was acknowledged, his work was considered as lacking in depth. The breadth of his interests led him to write so much that "inevitably it affected the rigour of his exposition". [3] In the words of his opponent, Humanus Erdeman, he had " the intelligence of eight, the eloquence of five, and the judgement of two", but even so, he was so much respected at the time that it was said "should God allow all sciences to disappear, and Caramuel were preserved, he would suffice for their restoration". [4]

He was more a fine dilettante than a professional, and his curiosity was inexhaustible. With an encyclopedic mind and a globalising view of the world, his intention was to classify all knowledge so that it could be passed on in a didactic way. Like his contemporary and part compatriot, the Bohemian Juan Amós Comenius (1592-1670), the author of the "Didactica Magna", he was one of the leaders of pedagogy, and this is at the root of his work, even when it is speculative. His eclecticism and paradoxes make him a typical intellectual of his time. His passion for mathematics having led him to an absurd obsession to geometrize everything in existence, Caramuel reawakens the interest of those who wish to investigate modern trends in the seventeenth century.

The period is often considered as one of decadence and intellectual immobility, but below the ornate surface there was a strong modernising current and an essential break with medieval tradition. The universality and courage of Caramuel's thinking reflect this wish for freedom and modernity that underlies a philosophical and scientific work destined to undermine the seemingly immovable structure regarded as the eternal philosophy. As a classic example of his time, his figure and his work are being revalued by present-day historians of science and of art.



An itinerant life.

Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz was born in Madrid on May 23, 1606, the year in which the Court returned from Valladolid to make Madrid the capital of Spain. His father, Lorenzo Caramuel, an engineer and gunneryman, was a native of Luxemburg; his mother, Catalina de Frisia, of a Bohemian noble family related to the Lobkowitz who were prominent in Central-European politics. [5]

From an early age, Caramuel showed his virtuosity in languages and in mathematics, drawing up astronomical tables, literary compositions, anagrams and acrostics while still a child. One of his school friends was Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, destined to become a famous Jesuit. At the university of Alcalá de Henares under the influence of the monks Atanasio Cuchis and Crisóstomo Cabero, he decided to enter the Cistercian order in the important monastery of La Espina in the diocese of Palencia. Both this old Gothic monastery and that of Montederramo in Orense where he went to study philosophy were being rebuilt in the classical style. Then his professor at the University of Salamanca, where he was sent to study theology, was the monk Angel Manrique (1577-1649), architect of the Cistercian monastery in Salamanca and Bishop of Badajoz from 1645 until his death. Caramuel always recognised Manrique as his first master in the art of building.

He was professor of theology in the Cistercian colleges of Palazuelos and Alcalá, but soon left Spain. In 1635 he left for Portugal and then for the university of Louvain where he received his doctorate of theology in 1638 and became a favourite of the Infante Don Fernando, governor of the Netherlands. As a monk in Dunes, Caramuel became known for his preaching and for his part in the Jansenist controversy. He was elected Abbot of Melrose in Scotland and Vicar-General of the Cistercians in Great Britain but it seems that he never left the continent. In Louvain he distinguished himself as an expert in military affairs when the city was besieged by French troops. The relativism he showed in the controversy with the Jansenists led St.Alfonso María de Liguri to call him "Princeps laxitarum", and the problems occasioned by these continuous debates and his failure to obtain the Chair of Theology in Louvain made him turn from political to scientific studies. In 1644 he left the Netherlands for Germany where King Philip IV named him Abbot of Disdondenberg and the Archbishop of Maguncia, Anselmo Casimiro, appointed him as his assistant and as Bishop of Misia. He was then to experience the horrors of the Thirty Years War whose devastation across Europe is so forcefully recorded in the engravings by Callot. The advance of the French army of Richelieu obliged him to change his residence, first to Spira, then Frankenthal, Frankfurt, and Münster, undertaking diplomatic missions on the way. The King of Spain sent him to Vienna as his agent at the court of the Emperor Fernando III who in turn claimed him in 1647 for service in Prague where members of his family held important posts. He was successively Abbot of the monastery of Montserrat in Vienna, then of that of Emaus in Prague, and finally Vicar-General of Bohemia. In Prague, besides an intense religious activity, he defended the city when it was besieged by the Swedish army in 1648, leading an armed band of priests and monks who fought bravely. As an engineer, he set up the fortifications of the city, and when the victory was won, he was awarded the highest military medal together with the commanding generals, Rudolfo Coloredo and Inocencio de Conti. He also took part in the peace settlement. His preaching obtained the conversion of more than 30,000 Bohemian heretics whose return to the Catholic church helped to set up the Austrian Empire. He advocated pardon, as did the Jesuits, in this mission of conversion, and was later accused of laxity.

This important period in the life of Caramuel terminated with his appointment to the new bishopric of Königsgratz which he did not come to occupy. The rest of his life was to be spent in Italy, in contact with all the intellectual and artistic splendour of the Baroque at the Papal Court and in other Italian cities. In 1654, the Italian Fabio Chigi became Pope as Alexander VII. Caramuel had met Chigi in Münster at the time of the Treaty of Westphalia and they had kept in touch by correspondence, so when the new Pope called him to Rome, Caramuel went immediately. But the two years he spent in Rome, from 1655 to 1657, were not the best of his brilliant career; as consultant to the Congregation of the Holy Office he had to deal with aesthetic problems. When Bernini's columnata was being built in the Piazza de San Pietro, Caramuel intervened, saying that the peristyle should be built according to his architectural theory of oblique perspective. His insistence gave rise to heated arguments opposing art and science. Caramuel admired Bernini as an artist but not as a builder, and said that Bernini was incapable of understanding the coherence that should exist between structure and form. To criticise Bernini was an error in the Rome of Alexander VII. In addition, Caramuel's religious views were not exactly in harmony with papal orthodoxy whose classicism in art and official conservatism were opposed to the theories of relativism, probability and laxity of Caramuel, under suspicion on account of his cartesianism. Even though he dedicated his Theologia fundamentalis (Rome 1656) to the Pope, it was not too well received; he was accused of being "uomo d'ingenio, ma poco prudente" [6] and instead of being made Cardinal as he had hoped, he was sent to be Bishop of Campania in the Kingdom of Naples. There in the south, and later in Otranto, he published some of his most important works, among others the Cursus Mathematicus in three large folio volumes.

The last and most productive stage of his intellectual activity came when he was appointed, at the petition of the Spanish King Charles II, to the bishopric of Vigevano in the kingdom of Milan. In this quiet town of Lombardy, after a restless, wandering life, he found time in his last nine years, to finish some of his most ambitious works such as his Arquitectura civil recta y oblicua, edited in 1678 in the printing shop the diocese had built for the purpose. It was here that he carried out his only practical work of architecture, the Baroque façade of the Cathedral of Vigevano, closing the west side of the beautiful piazza designed by the Renaissance architect and painter, Bramante.

Caramuel died on September 8, 1682, at the age of seventysix. His successor as Bishop was another Spaniard, Fernando de Rojas Curiel of Palencia. The tomb of the great thinker and writer has a simple stone: "Magnus Caramuel Episcopus Viglevani"; facing it is a stone tablet with a complimentary inscription.

Caramuel was a prolific author. His many books and writings, some in Latin and others in Spanish, were published during his life in Europe: in Brussels, Louvain, Antwerp, Cologne, Frankfurt, Vienna, Prague, Lyons, Venice, Rome, Campania, Otranto, Vigevano, but none of them in Spain. His extraordinary facility for jumping from one subject to another made him comparable to Lope de Vega, known as the "Phoenix of sapience" and much admired by Caramuel.

Caramuel was admired as much for the immense range of his knowledge and erudition as for the number of his writings. The Emperor, Fernando III, paid a visit to him in his monastery in Vienna, and after spending the evening examining the 260 manuscripts the monk kept in four chests, exclaimed "I do not want to form a judgement as to whether the manuscripts I have seen are good or bad; I leave that to the readers who buy them at great cost and to the printers who print them so often. All I say is that if I had not seen it, I would never have believed that one hand and one pen could have written so many things and so varied".

His bibliography, ranging from scientific works to amusements, moral treatises, sermons, and political writings, is difficult to confirm on account of the confusing chronology of his manuscripts and dates of publication. In his methodical way, he included his own bibliography at the end of his books, as these were published in the course of his travels. [7] All over Europe Caramuel was attacked by his opponents in the controversies in which he became involved, and was harshly criticized. In "Les Provinciales", Pascal attacks him for his "probabilistic" ideas as being very close to the casuistry of the Jesuits. [8] But more important than these polemical aspects are the quotations from his works made by Leibnitz, though not always favourable.

Muratori was less sharply critical; mentioning "errors due to brilliance and to memory" he says that while Caramuel "was gifted with uncommon understanding, wit and memory" he showed "great wit in small things and small wit in big ones". [9] Naturally his intricate and abundant prose, full of anecdotes, quotations, parables and puzzles, surprised the dry Neoclassical minds of the eighteenth century who hoped in vain to find scientific precision in Caramuel. The eloquence and ambiguity of the style of his age seemed meretricious.



Theologian and universal philosopher.

Caramuel was above all a theologian anxious to place human knowledge within a system in which scientific facts fitted into a natural philosophy. Trained in scholasticism, he was one of the first to break with the schools then dominant, particularly in Spain, of Aristotle and Aquinas. But it should be remembered that the modernity of his thinking was due to his religious preoccupation with what was operative. In common with the jesuits, Caramuel was a "probabilist", opposed to rigourous proof, who through science and teaching tried to form integral believers, real sons of faith. He considered science and culture, with all their spiritual facets, the most effective weapons with which to defend the catholc faith. His philosophic concept of the universe was a totalising one. In his concern for the knowledge of the person from its own values, he was one of the first to use the term "Ontosophy", later termed "Ontology".

The identity between thought and being, the homology of knowledge and objects, led him to the idea of a primary philosophy or "Panasophy".

With regard to the universal tenets of scholasticism, Caramuel maintained that the individualist principle originated in something intrinsec, in material and form and not in the actual created cause. He considered that the aim of knowing was to dominate all that exists, reducing reality by means of reason, and that this reality, enumerated and classified encyclopedically, made up a complete scientific system. The concept of unity, that all is one, governed all beings and objects, ideas and opinions. With an eclectic use of theories and doctrines he found connections between all the arts and sciences and wished to renew their principles. Preoccupied with the final result of quantifying, he searched for a sure method, by hypothesis and experiment, of getting to the root of truth that surpassed that of deceptive appearances. In his own words. "it is foolhardy to admit common opinions without previously examining them". Given as much to experiment as to speculation, he based truth on the testing of established hypotheses, considering this fundamental. The binomial "Experience/Truth" was to be submitted to reason and methodical doubting. Every hypothesis contains a truth, even if provisional, or a simulation of reality, and its validity can only be tested scientifically by experiment. Ahead of the Spanish philosophers of his time, he was one of the first to accept the Copernican System as well as that of Descartes, bringing the new mechanistic findings of science into philosophical reflection.

Caramuel did not make the scholastic distinction between liberal and mechanistic arts as he considered that all the sciences were linked. His work, whether philosophical, logical, grammatical, or scientific, culminated in his writings, in which he arranged knowledge as a catalogue so that it was seen as universal, with mathematics as the generalising element. At times his classification and judgement of all that exists was extraordinarily ingenious. [10] He considered grammar and languages as fundamental to learning.

Having learnt languages from his early childhood, and being familiar with oriental languages such as Chinese as well as some native languages of America, he insisted that a knowledge of language was an indispensable tool in any scientific research since it is man's instrument for stating his concepts and describing everything. Such was his interest that not only did he learn existing languages but, like Father Kircher, he tried to invent a new universal language, rather like a set of mathematical combinations, to be used by scientists. This was an obsession of the age, but in Caramuel it was a passion that fascinated him throughout his life but that was never formulated in a book.

Caramuel's thinking with regard to language has some very modern aspects. His analysis is carried out by the "dicision" of instrumental grammar or in other words Applied linguistics - Ars loquendi - the foundation of all science; speculative grammar which deals with meanings and senses; semiotics, in which the identity between thought and the being are essential to the understanding of the logical mechanisms of knowing.



The Spanish Monarchy

As a political writer, an agent of the Spanish Empire and a man of action in the church, Caramuel was firm in his defense of the unity and grandeur of the Habsburg monarchy. Together with his work as a moral theologist and preacher, this is important as the key to his patriotism and respect for tradition, in spite of his progressive scientific thought.

The first book he published was the Declaración mística de las armas de España invicatemente victorioso in 1636, coincident with the painting of battle scenes by Velázquez, Juan Rizzi, Carducho and Zurbrán for the decoration of the Buen Retiro Palace. The Declaración is a record of the Spanish Empire still conscious of its strength and military power. Caramuel expresses this in, for example, his comparison of the young King Philip IV with the sun, the fourth celestial body as Philip was the fourth of his name, the "Planet King" and therefore the centre of the universe; as the sun illuminates the whole universe, so does the King shine to the ends of the earth, and hence his device "Illuminat et favet". [11]

When in 1640, the unity of the Spanish Empire is threatened and war breaks out with Portugal, Caramuel defends the right of the Spanish monarchy over the territory of Portugal. But he begins to witness the decline of the Empire, the defeats and failings of a waning power, described in a political manifesto called Enfermedad de España - Sickness of Spain, a medical allegory, preserved in manuscript in the National Library in Madrid. He is not discouraged, however. Science will be his personal salvation, and the hope of a return to former grandeur of the nation. In 1678, unable to dedicate his Arquitectura Civil Recta y Oblicua to the revered King Philip II, he dedicates it to his successor, Don Juan of Austria, the illegitimate son of Philip IV, who was the generous patron the innovators in an attempt to inject new energy into Spanish life. Unfortunately for Spain, Don Juan died in 1979, when his action could have turned the course of history. Caramuel must have realised the consequences of this death for Spain.



The "Mathesis biceps"

Caramuel based his whole concept of the universe on mathematics, and with ruler and compass he solves all the problems of physics, astronomy, meteorology, architecture, gambling, freedom or grace.

He was familiar with the modern mathematics of Gérard Desargues although his fiery temperament he seems nearer to the magical values of the mystical compass of Fludd and to the fantasies of Father Kircher.

Caramuel made several contributions such as the formula of numbers to base n (illustrated by 2,3 . . . 10,12 and 60), showing that some of these could have advantages over the decimal. He also suggested a novel method of trisecting an angle and a system of logarithms which was not understood by his contemporaries but was a forerunner of cologarithms. His most important work in mathematics was the Cursus Mathematicus (1667-1668, 2nd edition 1670) in four parts; the first two, theoretical, were Mathesis Vetus operationum compendis demonstrationibus dilucidata and Mathesis nova veterum inventis confirmata. The third part dealt with arquitecture and the fourth with astronomy, the third, Mathesis arquitectonica, enlarged and translated into Spanish, became the Arquitectura Civil Recta y Oblicua.



Authority on Atchitecture

The Arquitectura civil y Oblicua was a new departure, both for its exposition and for the mode of presentation. As in the De re aedificatione (1485) of Leon Battista Alberti, his approach to architecture is purely speculative. [12] With his critical mind and his attempt to globalize all knowledge, to reduce the multiple to unity, as well as his desire to classify the different forms of art, ahead of the eighteenth century, he aimed to write a kind of encyclopedia of an eminently social human activity. Only Scamozzi with his Dell'Idea dell'Architettura Universale (1615) had attempted anything of the kind. The architectural doctrine of Caramuel is based on modern mathematics. Architecture which "is essentially obscure because it is founded on arithmetic calculation and geometrical demonstrations" is at the same time a noble art in the fullest sense of the term. Rejecting the scholastic distinction between mechanical and liberal art in favour of the modern interpretation of scientific activity, Caramuel affirmed that architecture belongs to architects and engineers, not to builders, masons, labourers and stonecutters. To conceive and design a building, one must have a solid knowledge of mathematics if errors and defects are to be avoided. Logarithms and geometry are necessary for the use of the right stonecutting and to make the required visual corrections. The correct proportions, to provide harmony among the various parts, are also dependent on mathematics. And good architecture should be promoted by awarding prizes in public contests.

The Arquitectura Civil Recta y Oblicua is in three volumes, with the illustrations collected into the third, which seemed to Caramuel the most practical distribution. It was compiled slowly, the fruit of much reading and reflection over the years. The first version appeared in Latin in the third part of his Cursus Mathematicus (1667-68), and is a kind of conclusion of the geometrizing of all material. Caramuel devoted a great deal of time and effort to its preparation as he himself recounts: "I began to write and draw these ideas in 1624 as a young man in Spain when a fine chapel was being built in our monastery, and now in my old age I am still engaged on it. The engraving of the plates began in 1635 and has continued in Brussels, Louvain and Antwerp, then in Vienna and a great number in Prague, to continue in Rome, Campaña and Otranto. And now, after forty years, the task of engraving and printing is being completed in Milan and in Vigeven where I have carried out this Oblique Architecture in the facade of my church". These lines from the autobiography of an intellectual, intensely active in matters of religion, administration and politics, reveal the constancy of Caramuel's interest in architecture.

For the Cartesian Caramuel, trained in non-Euclidean geometry, perspective was not the exact coherent Renaiisance system. Flat or artificial perspective should be abandoned in favour of a natural form. In opposition to the "legitimate construction" of Alberti and Leonardi, Caramuel adopted the geometry of Desargues (1593-1662) and Abraham Bosse, the perspective of Niceron (1638), and especially the works of Pietro Accolti, Lo inganno degli occhi (1625) and of Bernardino Baldi Ars magna lucis et unbrae (1646) for his advocacy of a less rigid perspective, with the accelerated vanishing points replacing the study of visual corrections to arrive at the system of Anamorphosis. [13] In this he can be compared with Samuel Marolois, Emmanuel Maignan and Kircher, although Jurgis Baltrusaitis makes no mention of Caramuel in his important study of the art of Anamorfosis. [14] Caramuel differs from the famous jesuit Fr.Andrea Pozzo who, as shown by Angela Guidoni Marino, this theorist of false perspectives, practised in the "quadratura" of the manierist style is totally different in conception from that of Caramuel and Guarino Guarini. [15]



Disputes with Bernini and with Guarino Guarini.

Caramuel's architectural theory was challenged from the beginning. The first dispute arose when he took part in the discussion over Art and Science in the construction of the "New Amphitheatre" of St.Peter's Square in Rome under Pope Alexander VII. Caramuel affirmed that this peristyle had "as many errors as stones", and that its eliptical form should be built with an eliptical section. [16] His "contra-project" would eliminate the deformation derived from the perspective converging towards a central point. This was a mathematical challenge more than a hypothesis and he considered it the only solution to the problems arising in a metamorphic area. The result, however, was not as disastrous as Caramuel had foreseen. The skill of the Roman masons working under the orders of Bernini achieved what was almost an application of Caramuel's oblique architectural project. Trials and minor corrections, canting and reducing the angles of the columns, forcing some of the elements, eliminated the triangular residual spaces - the "wedges" - the openings and widenings of the intervals, and other defects that so horrified Caramuel. Still critical of Bernini, he found defects also in the Scala Regia and in the equestrian statue of the Emperor Constantine. This he considered perfect as a work of art, but spoilt by the height at which it was placed. In fact he found it so ugly that he described the whole as a "goffo". The only unqualified compliment he paid to Bernini was for the perfect inclination he used in the church of San Andrea del Quirinal.

Caramuel's obstinate attitude towards the great Bernini, the Master of Pontifical Ceremonies, aroused the indignation of the authorities. Caramuel was more inclined towards Borromini, whom he did not mention, however in his treatise. In the Rome of Giovanni Pietro Bellori and the members of the St.Luke Academy, devotees of classicism, Bernini was above reproach. Criticism, particularly from a foreigner, was not well received.

The dispute with Guarino Guarini was more of a scientific nature than of aesthetics. [17] The two men had a great deal in common; both were churchmen, philosophers and mathematicians, this last to a degree that could be considered absurd. They were contemporaries and near neighbours, and must have known each other personally, but there was one essential difference: Guarini was first and foremost a builder, primarily an architect who was a master of the practical aspects of construction to which he devoted a great part of his life. He wrote a book on civil architecture that was published long after his death, but it is for his works that he has gone down in history. As far as is known, Caramuel was responsible for only one building, and only as director. Guarino Guarini held this against him and said he had no authority because he had never built anything; he even said that Caramuel's criticism was more a joke than a sensible instruction.



Defense of the Gothic

One point in which Caramuel and Guarini were in full agreement was their defense of the Gothic. According to Oeschlin, it may have been Caramuel who influenced Guarini in this appreciation. [18] After the decline of Gothic during the Renaissance, Caramuel still admired its qualities and included the pillars of the medieval buildings among the orders. He was the first to number the examples in the Cathedrals of Sevilla, Salamanca and Milan, and in the Carthusian monastery of Pavia, and this list, later to include other examples, was repeated by Guarini and Milizia. [19

Caramuel admired the Gothic for various reasons, first for its originality as compared with the Greek and Roman classical forms, just as the Temple of Jerusalem differed from what was considered academically as architectural perfection - "thus the Jews and Goths cut or drew many stones without having seen similar ideas in Greek or Roman palaces". They had other models. Then the vaulted structure that cannot be separated from its singular supports which contain "in their pillars a multitude of slim columns, some square, others round, and all half interlocking". [20] In addition to his analysis of the technicalities of this Gothic building, and his recognition of its complexity, Caramuel writes of its beauty. He considered many of the buildings very fine, but he preferred the smaller ones: "I have seen beautiful buildings of a small size, but they lose this quality when they are on a large scale". This did not prevent Caramuel from lamenting that in his lifetime the old Gothic buildings were being knocked down to make way for the then fashionable classical style.

This appreciation of the Gothic is not surprising coming from Caramuel, as it is normal also on the part of Guarini. A great part of Caramuel's life was spent in territories of the Spanish Empire where Gothic was common - in Castilla, Flanders, Germany and Bohemia. Some of Guarini's buildings contained structures and styles derived from an art that had been considered barbaric. In the case of Bohemia, a country full of noble examples of late Gothic, Oeschlin mentions the work there of an Italian Giovanni Santini, known in Bohemia as Johan Santin-Aichel (1667-1723) whose work was termed Baroque-Gothic. It was inevitable that the Spanish-Bohemian Caramuel, long resident in Prague, should have memories of that lovely city where Gothic and Baroque are so beautifully blended.

The human and intellectual personality of Caramuel, a "man for all seasons" at a decisive time for Europe, is of great interest.

His wide learning, his writings, and his multiple activities in such wide fields as the military, the po litical and diplomatic, the defense of the Austrian Empire and of the catholic church, meant that he was always at the centre of affairs. As a Cistercian monk who rose to the dignity of a Bishop, he was constantly on the move and in the midst of disputes - a typical European of the seventeenth century.

FOOTNOTES