What makes baroque architecture

The combination of different spaces is a favorite way of emphasizing motion and sensuality. If the feeling of a building is grand, dramatic, full of contrasting surfaces, a multitude of curves, twists, and gilded statuary, it is likely a baroque building. The interior, in most cases, has a ceiling that is heavily painted, making the viewer believe there is no actual ceiling but rather that the roof is connected to the sky or a divine realm.

These characteristics will be discussed in detail in the following points. Some of the most notable baroque buildings are, as expected, in Italy. Paul in London. Besides these famous buildings, the names of Italian baroque artists Gian Lorenzo Bernini , Carlo Maderno, Francesco Borromini, and Guarino Guarini ought to be mentioned as they were the trendsetters of this style. With architectural plans that go beyond traditional geometric shapes and often use other inspirations such as letters or combinations of forms imitating a natural element, Baroque architecture is very diverse.

Because of the complexity of the plan, there are more opportunities for the architects to play with shapes and forms, all for the sake of visual movement. Because Baroque architects wished to do the impossible, namely to create movement in the most static form of art, they resorted to curves. Curves and counter-curves became thus the dominant motif of all Baroque architecture and art. Because of this, artists like Bernini quickly understood that they should make undulating columns in order to give off a dynamic appearance.

Peter in Rome is an excellent example of this dynamic effect. To go even further in the pursuit of movement, Guarino Guarini began using an undulating order which stood for a system of undulating elements that would create the final appearance of continuous curving.

Not all historic architecture comprises stone and dull elements, which is especially true for Baroque architecture.

Color and painting played an influential role in the complex realization of a building. If Renaissance artists began painting ceilings for patrons, the Baroque took it to another level. During the Renaissance , this was an optional feature; for the Baroque movement, it became a standard. Wooden ceilings were still in use from the Renaissance but now featured painted or gilded cavities, becoming lacunar ceilings as they would feature an interplay of empty and filled spaces. When the ceiling was not made out of wood, a rich variation of stuccoes would be used to offer depth.

Stucco was made out of plaster with finely powdered marble and which was then modeled and applied on the ceiling, creating a tri-dimensional aspect. Stuccoes were often highly decorated with wreaths of different leaves and plants, geometric forms, and occasionally some human figures such as cupids.

They were never aiming at peace, but rather pursuing artistic expression instead. The columns were pushed into space, giving off a theatrical vibe, and the bowing of the walls all charged the space with an emotional quality.

Inside, Baroque churches are as magnificent as it is on the exterior. While Protestant churches tend to be more straightforward with no ornament nor decoration, Baroque style Catholic churches were all about dramatic effects, implementing ornamental hierarchy on the altar—from God, to Jesus, to the Saints, to the Eucharists, to the priests.

Gold ornaments, dynamic marble sculptures , and cartouches occupied every available space. Part of the reason why Baroque architecture was highly successful was Carlo Fontana. The Italian architect took students from all over Europe, significantly aiding the spread of Baroque architecture across the continent. His notable work in Italy including San Marcello al Corso But when it comes to Italy, the most significant figure would be Carlo Maderno, whom a great number of new generation Baroque architects work for.

For this reason, many deemed him as one of the fathers of Baroque architecture. The greatest of the South German Baroque architects was Balthasar Neumann who produced a miracle of palace architecture in the Wurzburg Residenz ; this went hand in hand with the building of monasteries and churches; for bishops and abbots, no less than princes, pretended to wordly importance.

Neumann found himself confronted, in the case of the ingeniously-designed wing of the Banz monastery at Bruhl, by the necessity of inserting a well-staircase loin in a building erected by Schlaun in Here we see at its highest his unique ability for producing an effect of unlimited space by optical illusion, the inclusion of picturesque vistas, and by tricks of lighting.

In the well-staircase and the banqueting halls of Schloss Bruchsal he produced what is, in consistency, design, magnificence, and lighting, one of the greatest masterpieces of German architecture.

In church architecture his most impressive creation was the Vierzehnheiligen the Fourteen Saints near Bamberg. On entering the building one is overwhelmed by a flood of light. Everything is moving; the interior seems to be enclosed by circling, undulating forms: even in the ground plan it appears to be completely disintegrated. Even when no special circumstances are operative, as in the church of the Fourteen Saints, we see that the customary ground-plan of a Baroque church has almost completely abolished the straight line, and even the facades are curved.

Unlike the facades of Italian Baroque churches, German churches have usually kept their towers. It was in the decoration of these churches that this whirling combination of forms reached its height. In the churches in which the brothers Asam co-operated, as, for example, the monastery church at Einsiedeln, and the Carmelite church at Regensburg, and, above all, the church of St John Nepomuk , in Munich, they reached the limits of the possible in the combination of reality and illusion.

Effects of hidden lighting, the inclusion of fresco painting in stucco decorations, and every other possible illusionist trick, make these churches seem now like a pompous Baroque opera-house, now like a Rococo stage improvised for a festival, entirely without the quiet solemnity and the piety which are bound up with the conception of Romanesque or Gothic art. The style of Baroque created by German architects spread to Poland , the Baltic states , and eventually to Russia.

It had considerable affinity with Italian Baroque, with the addition of an even greater tendency to exuberant decoration, especially of the interior; it also differed from Italian forms by its avoidance of sharp contrasts of light and darkness in favour of a more diffused and serene luminosity.

Two features also presaged the ' Rococo ' style that was to succeed it, a style that found its widest application in these countries and was sometimes the work of the same architects, for example Poppelmann, Neumann, and Cuvillies. In the two main forms of construction, churches and palaces, the Baroque of the German-speaking countries adhered fairly consistently to a few basic designs.

On churches the device of two lateral towers with which Borromini had experimented was universally adopted. Sometimes this was taken to the point of upsetting the general layout, as Fischer von Erlach did in Vienna on his Karlskirche.

On this, a centrally planned building, in order to include the towers he added them as free-standing, empty structures on either side of the main body of the church. The whole edifice exemplifies a theatrical conception in the grand style, its form emphasized by two columns, reminiscent of Trajan's Column in Rome, which stand beside the towers.

In palace design, meanwhile, the model was Versailles; but Germanic architects generally showed themselves able to surpass this example in the articulation of large masses of masonry, accentuating the central section of the building, and sometimes the lateral sections likewise.

At the same time that its influence spread north of the Alps, Italian Baroque also asserted itself in Spain and Portugal. In these countries there was no obstacle to its success, but here too an entirely individual style developed. Its salient, indeed its only particular, characteristic was a profusion of decoration. Whatever the form of a building it appeared merely to be a pretext for the ornamentation encrusting it.

Many factors contributed to this result, chief among which were the Moorish tradition, still alive in the Iberian peninsula, and the influences of the pre-Columbian art of America , with its fantastic decorative vocabulary. This particular style, known as ' Churrigueresque ' from the family name, Churriguera , of a dynasty of Spanish architects who were particularly closely associated with it, dominated Spain and Portugal for two centuries and passed into their South American colonies, where the decorative aspect was, if possible, intensified to a frenzy of ornamentation.

Its value is perhaps debatable, but as a style it is certainly recognizable, in its subordination of everything to decoration. Going beyond the appearance of individual buildings, a number of more general themes were also typical of the Baroque style of architecture. The first was the way in which Baroque architects were the first to confront the task of town-planning practically rather than in theory. Principally they dealt with it in terms of the circus and the straight road.

Into the fabric of the city they cut circuses, each dominated by some structure, a church, a palace, a fountain, and then linked these points with a network of long, straight avenues aimed, so to speak, at these structures.

It was not a perfect solution, but it was ingenious for the time. Indeed, for the first time a system was devised for planning, or replanning, a city, making it more beautiful, more theatrical, and above all more comprehensible because subordinate to a rule. Through the use of such schemes for town-planning, which parallel those of the French type of garden, conceived on the same principle, there evolved the great monumental fountains, in which architecture, sculpture, and water combined to form an ideal centrepiece and to express the Baroque feeling for scenography and movement.

It was no chance that Rome, the city which more than any other was planned according to the new norms of the seventeenth century, is par excellence a city of fountains. Domestic Interior Designs. Two other characteristic themes treated by Baroque architects concerned domestic interior structures: the complex great staircases that began to appear in all aristocratic buildings from the seventeenth century onwards, sometimes becoming the dominating feature; and the gallery, in origin a wide, decorated corridor, and another showpiece, of which the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles is an outstanding example.

Often the gallery, like many other rooms in the Baroque period, would be painted with illusionist scenes, conveying a realistic extension in every direction of the gallery itself which would often actually intrude upon the architecture, reducing it to a secondary role.

The Baroque is essentially an art of illusion , in which all the tricks of scene painting, false perspective and trompe-l'oeil , are employed without scruple to achieve a total effect. It was also the first step back towards a conception which the Middle Ages knew, but which the High Renaissance abandoned, that of the subordination of painting and sculpture to the plastic unity of the building they were to decorate, A Renaissance altarpiece or statue was conceived as an isolated thing by itself, without very much relation to its surroundings; Baroque painting or carving is an integral part of its setting, and if removed from it, loses nearly all its effect.

A combination of neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque designs, Beaux-Arts architecture appeared during the 19th century, and was promoted by graduates of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts , in Paris. For more about the influence of 17th century designs on modern buildings, see: Architecture 19th Century. For details of the greatest architects of the Baroque style across Europe, see the following:.

Among Russian architects, only Michael Zemtsov played a leading role. All rights reserved. Baroque Architecture c. The Baroque Idea of a Building A building can be conceived of in many different ways: as an assemblage of superimposed storeys the present attitude ; or more like a piece of sculpture the theory of Greek architecture ; as a box defined by walls of regular shape as Renaissance architects understood it ; or as a skeletal structure, that is, one formed - according to the Gothic conception - by the various structures needed to sustain it.

Ground-Plans This conception had a vital effect on the ground-plan - the outlines of the building as seen from above - that came to be adopted. Baroque Architecture's Undulating Motif Besides their complex ground-plans, the resultant curving walls were, therefore, the other outstanding characteristic of Baroque buildings.

Vaults, Arches, Buttresses The churches of the period were always built with vaulted ceilings. The Baroque Concept of Building Design: Architectural Sculpture Another, and decisive, consequence of the conception of a building as a single mass to be articulated was that a construction was no longer seen as the sum of individual parts - facade, ground-plan, internal walls, dome, apse, and so on - each one of which might be considered separately.

Architectural Manipulation of Light It is not the light that falls on a particular point in a given building that varies, but the effect the light produces in striking one surface by contrast with another. Undulating Order of Architecture To the five traditional orders of architecture - Tuscan , Doric , Ionic , Corinthian , and Composite , each of which had particular forms and proportions for its supporting members, the columns and pilasters, and for the vertical linking members, or entablature - was added the 'Undulating' order.

Italian Baroque Architecture Italy, the cradle of Baroque and a key destination of those on the Grand Tour , produced in addition to a proportionate number of good professional architects a quartet who rate as excellent: Bernini , Borromini , Pietro da Cortona , and Guarino Guarini. Bernini and St Peter's Basilica The history of St Peter's - the most important architectural example of Christian art - is in itself a history of the transition from Renaissance to Baroque, and is also a textbook example of Catholic Counter-Reformation Art , in both its structure and surroundings.

Antwerp has several magnificent Baroque towers. The towers of St. Charles Borromeo have a square floor plan, tapering off into a rather spectacular crown with… a small cupola. Baroque artists and architects liked to use perspective to add depth.

Wait a minute. Why are we referencing the Renaissance in this Baroque story? Unfortunately, things are not that clear-cut. In the seventeenth century, prominent Antwerpers still liked to have a gallery in their courtyard, with arches and pillars.

So Renaissance. During the Baroque. Baroque, like so many things in life, is a mix. Of different forms and of different interpretations of the Baroque. In some cases, you can already discern hints of Classicism and Rococo, which came after the Baroque. Even in Antwerp. In addition to being a renowned painter, Rubens also worked as an architect, contributing designs for the famous Church of St.

Rubens was obviously inspired by the architecture he had seen during his eight years in Italy. The interior of a Baroque church is very different from that of a Gothic church.