Baroque Art and Architecture

movement c. 1600-1750 Italy Europe

Baroque art and architecture arose in Rome around 1600 as the visual language of the Counter-Reformation: the Council of Trent had asked art to communicate religious themes with direct, emotional force, and Baroque forms delivered awe. The style uses contrast, movement, exuberant detail, deep color, grandeur, and surprise. From Rome it spread through Italy and to France, Spain, and Portugal, then to Austria, southern Germany, Poland, and Russia, and onward into the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the Americas and Asia, where it often mixed with local traditions. Architecture, painting, and sculpture work together as one theatrical whole - church interiors open onto illusionistic heavens, palace façades swell and undulate. By the 1730s the style had flowered into the lighter Rococo, though in the Iberian world and its colonies it endured into the early nineteenth century.

Example work related to "Baroque Art and Architecture".
Example work related to "Baroque Art and Architecture".Public domain (credit: Jahn Ekenæs) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Strong light-dark contrast and diagonal compositions caught mid-motion
  • Exuberant, dense ornamentation - cartouches, trophies, gilded stucco
  • Illusionistic quadratura ceilings that dissolve the boundary between painting and architecture
  • Undulating walls and twisted columns giving buildings a sense of movement
  • Deep, saturated color and grand scale designed to inspire awe
  • Mixed media fused into single theatrical wholes, as in Bernini's St. Peter's Baldachin

Key figures

  • Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) — Sculptor-architect of St. Peter's Square and the Baldachin, master of theatrical ensemble
  • Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) — Architect whose undulating walls and oval plans (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane) redefined space
  • Caravaggio (1571-1610) — Pioneer of tenebrism whose dramatic lighting defined early Baroque painting
  • Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) — Defined the exuberant Flemish Baroque with movement, color, and grand cycles

Example works

Sources

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