Baroque Architecture - Scandinavia

Scandinavia

During the golden age of the Swedish Empire, the architecture of Nordic countries was dominated by the Swedish court architect Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and his son Nicodemus Tessin the Younger. Their aesthetic was readily adopted across the Baltic, in Copenhagen and Saint Petersburg.

Born in Germany, Tessin the Elder endowed Sweden with a truly national style, a well-balanced mixture of contemporary French and medieval Hanseatic elements. His designs for the royal manor of Drottningholm seasoned French prototypes with Italian elements, while retaining some peculiarly Nordic features, such as the hipped roof (säteritak).

Tessin the Younger shared his father's enthusiasm for discrete palace façades. His design for the Stockholm Palace draws so heavily on Bernini's unexecuted plans for the Louvre that one could well imagine it standing in Naples, Vienna, or Saint Petersburg. Another example of the so-called International Baroque, based on Roman models with little concern for national specifics, is the Royal Palace of Madrid. The same approach is manifested is Tessin's polychrome domeless Kalmar Cathedral, a skillful pastiche of early Italian Baroque, clothed in a giant order of paired Ionic pilasters.

It was not until the mid-18th century that Danish and Russian architecture were emancipated from Swedish influence. A milestone of this late period is Nicolai Eigtved's design for a new district of Copenhagen centred on the Amalienborg Palace. The palace is composed of four rectangular mansions for the four greatest nobles of the kingdom, arranged across the angles of an octagonal square. The restrained façades of the mansions hark back to French antecedents, while their interiors contain some of the finest Rococo decoration in Northern Europe.