Baroque

Baroque. Style of C17 and C18 European architecture derived from late-Renaissance Mannerism and evolving into Rococo before Neo-Classicism eclipsed it. Theatrical and exuberant, it employed convex and concave flowing curves in plan, elevation, and section, optical illusions, interpenetrating ellipses in plans that were often extensions of the centralized type, complicated geometries and relationships between volumes of different shapes and sizes, emphatic overstatement, daring colour, exaggerated modelling, and much architectural and symbolic rhetoric. Associated with the Counter-Reformation, the style reached maturity with the C17 works of Bernini and Borromini: it achieved heights of inventiveness and beauty in Central Europe, especially Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia (e.g. the churches of the Asams and the Dientzenhofers); the epitome of exotic over-ornamentation in the Iberian peninsula and Latin America; and a chasteness where a strong Classicism was never far away in France. In England, however, where the Counter-Reformation had little direct architectural impact, the curved, swaying, swelling forms were generally eschewed in favour of emphasized modelling of wall-surfaces, as in the work of Hawksmoor. There was a European Baroque Revival that was evident in the years immediately before and after 1900. In landscape-design, the Baroque style was associated especially with the huge formal gardens of France, notably at Versailles.

Bibliography

Bletter (1973);
Norberg-Schulz (1986, 1986a);
Pevsner (ed.) (1960)