European architecture of the 17th century, referred to as Baroque, is characterized by magnificence, grandeur and richness in invention, design and, usually, in scale. The Papacy in Rome remained a principal motivating force and commanding Popes continued to support important architectural commissions. But political developments throughout Europe during the preceding century, particularly the urge toward nation-building and centralized authority, produced a new range of powerful royal patrons who harnessed architecture and urban planning as a means of demonstrating the supremacy of the state. Innovative architectural ideas began from the Classical principals that had dominated the Renaissance, further stimulated by the often clever and surprising buildings of the mid and late 16th century. The austerity and intellectual rigor of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, for example, yields to the richness and intellectual complexity of Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. In this period of expansionist goals, architecture came to embrace sculpture and painting as integral components of total design reflecting a conceptual cohesion often lacking in earlier buildings. Magnificent decoration, including both frescoes cycles and altarpieces, was unified through a more sophisticated use of light and color to enhance architectural space. This reflects, in part, the effort to construct large, complex buildings anew, motivated by the political and religious goals of the period and bolstered by full coffers, rather than adding on to existing buildings in a piecemeal manner as was often the case during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The buildings of the period are frequently described as dramatic but perhaps the term spectacular, in the sense of creating a spectacle of theatrical grandeur, capture the architecture of the period with greater accuracy.
Baroque architecture emerges first in Italy, a land favored by an enviable confluence of forces that fostered cultural renewal and reinvention for centuries. And if Florence is the ideal city of the Renaissance, then Rome is the ideal city of the Baroque, in this case privileged by the convergence of ambitious popes and an artist of international repute, Gianlorenzo Bernini, heir to Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael as well as a succeeding generation of architects working in the latter half of 16th-century Rome. Reinvigorated by the Council of Trent, the Popes sought to complete the protracted rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica, which was essentially a construction site since the early 16th century. From the monumental gilded-bronze baldacchino erected by an army of craftsmen in the 1620’s beneath Michelangelo’s dome to the embracing colonnaded piazza of the 1650’s, Bernini defined the character of 17th-century Rome. The consummate artist of his epoch, Bernini represents one seminal direction in architecture during this period. Francesco Borromini, a former member of Bernini’s studio, emerged in the 1630’s with a markedly different approach to architecture. Comparison of two small churches, Bernini’s San Andrea al Quirinale and Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, less than a mile apart in Rome, succinctly summarizes what these two masters shared and how they diverged. In no other buildings of the period is the simple geometrical shape of the oval developed with greater creativity, complexity and effect.
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Despite continuing preeminence in Italy, the declining authority of the Papacy and the prestigious Italian families in its orbit may be measured against the rise of other European powers especially the kings of France and the thriving French aristocracy. In Italy, ecclesiastical architecture was at the heart of stylistic evolution in the 17th century, but in France secular architecture and urban planning come to the fore. In 1657, Nicholas Fouquet, the Surintendent des Finances, commissioned Louis Le Vau to build a majestic chateau at Vaux-le-Vicomte which, along with the formal gardens laid out be Le Notre, represents the grandest example of French residential architecture with the exception of the Palace at Versailles. French ecclesiastical architecture reaches its apogee in J.H. Mansart’s Church of the Invalides begun in 1679 under the patronage of Louis XIV. From the classical rigor of the façade, culminating in a dome inspired by St. Peter’s in Rome, to the rich yet restrained interior, the Invalides epitomizes the French interpretation of the aesthetic principles of the age. The double-shelled dome filled with a frescoed rendering of celestial glory is complemented by a high altar designed as a careful adaptation of the baldacchino in St. Peter’s shaping an impression that Bernini himself would have recognized as Baroque splendor.
In an age of national progress and expansion, England was not to be outdone. Blenheim Palace, begun in 1705 by John Vanbrugh as the residence of the Duke of Marlborough, combines elements recognizable from Bernini’s Piazza San Pietro, the Palace at Versailles and even |
elements reminiscent of medieval fortresses all marked by the careful use of Classical ornamentation to create an English interpretation of imposing and massive Baroque architecture. In church architecture, Christopher Wren brought a thoroughly continental design to St. Paul’s Cathedral, rebuilt after the devastating fire of 1666 that destroyed much of Medieval and Renaissance London. But English ecclesiastical buildings in the 17th and 18th centuries invented new solutions based on local religious ceremony and a newly emerging aesthetic. In 1722, James Gibbs designed St. Martin-in-the-Fields in central London drawing on ancient Roman temples for the exterior coupled with a striking steeple evoking medieval references, leading into a light, elegant interior characterized by a flattened barrel vault in the nave and delicate domes in the side aisles supported by Corinthian columns.
As Baroque architecture, and the subsidiary style defined as Rococo, drew to a close by the late 18th century, the language of architecture had grown rich and varied based on the enduring Classical tradition creatively adapted for a range of new solutions by means of individual, cultural and national interpretations. With political revolutions in America and France, the modern world is ushered in at the dawn of the 19th century bringing with it unprecedented change, diversity and growth in all areas of architecture. |