Born in Prague to a family of Italian stonemasons, Santini-Aichel was lame from birth and took up drawing rather than the chisel. A journey through Austria to Rome in the late 1690s put him in front of Borromini, and from 1703 he ran a Prague practice that worked almost exclusively for the Bohemian and Moravian Cistercian and Benedictine abbeys. What he built for them has no real parallel. He set out plans as stars, pentagons and interlocking circles, then roofed them with ribbed vaults and pointed arches quoted from the Gothic — a deliberate archaism his monastic clients read as loyalty to their medieval foundations, and which later scholarship named Baroque Gothic. He worked without pause for twenty years and died at forty-six.
