I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened.

He appears to have been a self-taught scholar amassing a large library by the end of his life. A keen student of the architecture of Michelangelo and the ruins of Antiquity Borromini developed an inventive and distinctive if somewhat idiosyncratic architecture employing manipulations of Classical architectural forms geometrical rationales in his plans and symbolic meanings in his buildings. From the late nineteenth century onwards interest has revived in the works of Borromini and his architecture has become appreciated for its inventiveness.