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- Baroque architecture is a style of building that emerged in Italy in the late 16th century and spread to other parts of Europe and the world in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is characterized by ornate details, curved shapes, large-scale decoration, and dramatic effects of light and shadow.
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What is Baroque architecture?
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What are the characteristics of Baroque art?
What are some examples of Italian Baroque architecture?
Apr 27, 2023 · Strictly speaking, Baroque architecture refers to an opulent architectural style born in Italy in the late 16th century. “It’s a very broad term used for European architecture of the 17th...
- Katherine Mclaughlin
Jan 29, 2024 · Baroque architecture is a style of building that emerged in Italy in the late 16th century and spread to other parts of Europe and the world in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is characterized by ornate details, curved shapes, large-scale decoration, and dramatic effects of light and shadow.
Mar 19, 2024 · Baroque architecture, architectural style originating in late 16th-century Italy and lasting in some regions, notably Germany and colonial South America, until the 18th century.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Overview
- The origin of the term
- Three main tendencies of the era
The term Baroque probably derived from the Italian word barocco, which philosophers used during the Middle Ages to describe an obstacle in schematic logic. Subsequently, the word came to denote any contorted idea or involute process of thought. Another possible source is the Portuguese word barroco (Spanish barrueco), used to describe an imperfectly shaped pearl. In art criticism the word Baroque has come to describe anything irregular, bizarre, or otherwise departing from rules and proportions established during the Renaissance. Until the late 19th century the term always carried the implication of odd, exaggerated, and overdecorated. It was only with Heinrich Wölfflin’s pioneering study, Renaissance und Barock (1888), that the term was used as a stylistic designation rather than as a term of thinly veiled abuse and that a systematic formulation of the characteristics of Baroque style was achieved.
Read more below: The origin of the term
Heinrich Wölfflin
Read about historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who refashioned the word Baroque from a thinly veiled term of abuse to the name of a distinctive style and period.
What are the characteristics of Baroque art and architecture?
The work that distinguishes the Baroque period is stylistically complex and even contradictory. Currents of naturalism and Classicism, for example, coexisted and intermingled with the typical Baroque style. In general, however, the desire to evoke emotional states by appealing to the senses, often in dramatic ways, underlies its manifestations. Some of the qualities most frequently associated with the Baroque are grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, dynamism, movement, tension, emotional exuberance, and a tendency to blur distinctions between the various arts.
The term Baroque probably ultimately derived from the Italian word barocco, which philosophers used during the Middle Ages to describe an obstacle in schematic logic. Subsequently the word came to denote any contorted idea or involuted process of thought. Another possible source is the Portuguese word barroco (Spanish barrueco), used to describe an irregular or imperfectly shaped pearl, and this usage still survives in the jeweler’s term baroque pearl.
In art criticism the word Baroque came to be used to describe anything irregular, bizarre, or otherwise departing from established rules and proportions. This biased view of 17th-century art styles was held with few modifications by critics from Johann Winckelmann to John Ruskin and Jacob Burckhardt, and until the late 19th century the term always carried the implication of odd, grotesque, exaggerated, and overdecorated. It was only with Heinrich Wölfflin’s pioneer study Renaissance und Barock (1888) that the term Baroque was used as a stylistic designation rather than as a term of thinly veiled abuse, and a systematic formulation of the characteristics of Baroque style was achieved.
Three broader cultural and intellectual tendencies had a profound impact on Baroque art as well as Baroque music. The first of these was the emergence of the Counter-Reformation and the expansion of its domain, both territorially and intellectually. By the last decades of the 16th century the refined, courtly style known as Mannerism had ceased to be an effective means of expression, and its inadequacy for religious art was being increasingly felt in artistic circles. To counter the inroads made by the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church after the Council of Trent (1545–63) adopted a propagandistic stance in which art was to serve as a means of extending and stimulating the public’s faith in the church. To this end the church adopted a conscious artistic program whose art products would make an overtly emotional and sensory appeal to the faithful. The Baroque style that evolved from this program was paradoxically both sensuous and spiritual; while a naturalistic treatment rendered the religious image more accessible to the average churchgoer, dramatic and illusory effects were used to stimulate piety and devotion and convey an impression of the splendour of the divine. Baroque church ceilings thus dissolved in painted scenes that presented vivid views of the infinite to the observer and directed the senses toward heavenly concerns.
The second tendency was the consolidation of absolute monarchies, accompanied by a simultaneous crystallization of a prominent and powerful middle class, which now came to play a role in art patronage. Baroque palaces were built on an expanded and monumental scale in order to display the power and grandeur of the centralized state, a phenomenon best displayed in the royal palace and gardens at Versailles. Yet at the same time the development of a picture market for the middle class and its taste for realism may be seen in the works of the brothers Le Nain and Georges de La Tour in France and in the varied schools of 17th-century Dutch painting. (For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon, see Rembrandt van Rijn.)
The third tendency was a new interest in nature and a general broadening of human intellectual horizons, spurred by developments in science and by explorations of the globe. These simultaneously produced a new sense both of human insignificance (particularly abetted by the Copernican displacement of the Earth from the centre of the universe) and of the unsuspected complexity and infinitude of the natural world. The development of 17th-century landscape painting, in which humans are frequently portrayed as minute figures in a vast natural setting, is indicative of this changing awareness of the human condition.
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- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Nov 1, 2021 · Baroque Architecture – The Elaborate 17th Century Building Style. Architecture from the 17th-century was defined by a dramatically theatrical and ornately decorative style which can be traced back to Rome in the early Baroque period. It peaked in the High Baroque period with Italian Baroque architecture spreading across Europe, segmenting ...
Jul 25, 2019 · The baldacchino designed by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) for the Renaissance-era St. Peter's Basilica is an icon of Baroque building. Rising eight stories high on Solomonic columns, the c. 1630 bronze piece is both sculpture and architecture at the same time. This is Baroque.
Jun 17, 2021 · Baroque Architecture Guide: Characteristics of Baroque Style. Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Jun 17, 2021 • 4 min read. Marked by ornamentation and exuberance, the baroque style of architecture reached its zenith in the seventeenth century and was meant to inspire reverential wonder.
