Baroque architecture is the building style of the Baroque era, begun in late sixteenth century Italy, that took the Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture and used it in a new rhetorical and theatrical fashion, often to express the triumph of the Catholic Church and the absolutist state. It was characterized by new explorations of form, light and shadow and dramatic intensity.
Whereas the Renaissance drew on the wealth and power of the Italian courts and was a blend of secular and religious forces, the Baroque was, initially at least, directly linked to the Counter-Reformation, a movement within the Catholic Church to reform itself in response to the Protestant Reformation. Baroque architecture and its embellishments were on the one hand more accessible to the emotions and on the other hand, a visible statement of the wealth and power of the Church. The new style manifested itself in particular in the context of the new religious orders, like the Theatines and the Jesuits who aimed to improve popular piety.
The architecture of the High Roman Baroque can be assigned to the papal reigns of Urban VIII, Innocent X and Alexander VII, spanning from 1623 to 1667. The three principal architects of this period were the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini and the painter Pietro da Cortona and each evolved their own distinctively individual architectural expression.
Dissemination of Baroque architecture to the south of Italy resulted in regional variations such as Sicilian Baroque architecture or that of Naples and Lecce. To the north, the Theatine architect Camillo-Guarino Guarini, Bernardo Vittone and Sicilian born Filippo Juvarra contributed Baroque buildings to the city of Turin and the Piedmont region.
A synthesis of Bernini, Borromini and Cortona’s architecture can be seen in the late Baroque architecture of northern Europe which paved the way for the more decorative Rococo style.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Baroque style had found its secular expression in the form of grand palaces, first in France—with the Château de Maisons (1642) near Paris by François Mansart—and then throughout Europe.
During the seventeenth century, Baroque architecture spread through Europe and Latin America, where it was particularly promoted by the Jesuits.
Read more about Baroque Architecture: Precursors and Features of Baroque Architecture, Malta, Spain, Spanish America and The Philippines, Portugal and Portuguese Empire, France, England, Holy Roman Empire, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia, Ukraine, Scandinavia, Hungary and Romania, Turkey
Famous quotes containing the words baroque and/or architecture:
“It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)