Baroque architecture

Baroque architecture, starting in the early 17th century in Italy, took the humanist Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture and used it in a new rhetorical, theatrical, sculptural fashion, expressing the triumph of absolutist church and state.

New architectural concerns for color, light and shade, sculptural values and intensity characterize the Baroque. But 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. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) is usually given as the beginning of the Counter-Reformation.

The Baroque played into the demand for an architecture that was 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 new religious orders, like the Theatines and the Jesuits, which aimed to improve popular piety.

By the middle of the 17th century, the Baroque style had found its secular expression in the form of grand palaces, first in France—as in the Château de Maisons (1642) near Paris by François Mansart—and then throughout Europe.

Important features of Baroque architecture include:

• Long, narrow naves are replaced by broader, occasionally circular forms
• Dramatic use of light, either strong light-and-shade contrasts, chiaroscuro effects (e.g. church of Weltenburg Abbey), or uniform lighting by means of several windows (e.g. church of Weingarten Abbey)
  opulent use of ornaments (puttos made of wood (often gilded), plaster or stucco, marble or faux finishing)
• Large-scale ceiling frescoes
• External façade is often characterized by a dramatic central projection
• Interior is often no more than a shell for painting and sculpture (especially in the late Baroque)
• Illusory effects like trompe l’oeil and the blending of painting and architecture
• In the Bavarian, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian Baroque, pear domes are ubiquitous
  Marian and Holy Trinity columns are erected in Catholic countries, often in thanksgiving for ending a plague

Links

• List of examples of typical Baroque architecture

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