The Baroque
Church and king stage their power, from Rome and Versailles to Vienna and St Petersburg.
The Baroque set out to persuade. The Church staged faith against the Reformation, and kings staged their power. From Bernini’s Rome and Louis XIV’s Versailles it spread to Vienna, Würzburg, London, Madrid and St Petersburg – and on to Stockholm and Lisbon.
The Baroque is built on movement, contrast, staged light and a strong central axis.
Bernini and Borromini made 17th-century Rome the capital of the Baroque.
Versailles turned palace and garden into a single staging of power.
Garden and city were ordered along axes, like a stage.
After the fire of 1666 Christopher Wren rebuilt the churches of London and St Paul’s Cathedral.
In Austria and southern Germany the Baroque became bright and festive after the victory over the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683.
In Turin Guarini built domes of intersecting arches; in Spain the late Baroque became exuberant – Churrigueresque.
St Petersburg, founded in 1703, was built by Italian and French architects.
From St Petersburg to Stockholm, the courts of Europe imitated Versailles.
18th-century Rococo made the Baroque light, bright and asymmetrical – above all indoors.
Rome. After the Reformation the Catholic Church wanted to move and persuade. The Council of Trent, which ended in 1563, stressed that art and images should awaken faith, and the Jesuit order built churches in which the pulpit and the altar could be seen from the whole interior. Il Gesù in Rome, begun in 1568 to designs by Vignola and with a façade by Giacomo della Porta, was given a broad barrel-vaulted nave with side chapels and a dome over the crossing, and became the model for countless churches. In the 17th century Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini made walls undulate, light fall from hidden sources, and sculpture, painting and architecture merge into a single performance. Bernini's Cornaro Chapel with the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, from the 1640s, is like a theatre stage where light falls on the sculpture from a hidden window. His small oval church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale directs the whole space towards the altar. Borromini, his rival, built San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza on an intricate geometry of triangles, circles and ovals that makes the interiors seem to move. The Baroque is recognisable by oval plans, undulating façades, broken pediments, heavy cornices and light that is directed.
St Peter's. St Peter's in Rome took more than a hundred years to build and brings together Renaissance and Baroque. Pope Paul V had Carlo Maderno extend Michelangelo's centrally planned church into a longitudinal one, so that it could hold great processions and cover the entire area of the old basilica. Maderno also designed the façade, completed in 1614, which is wide and almost hides the dome from anyone standing close. Inside, Bernini built the baldacchino over the papal altar in 1624–1633, a bronze work almost thirty metres high with twisted columns imitating columns from the old basilica. In the apse he later created the Cathedra Petri, in which a throne is borne by Church Fathers beneath a golden window with the dove of the Holy Spirit. Between 1656 and 1667 he built the colonnades around St Peter's Square: four rows of Tuscan columns in an oval that embraces the pilgrims, and a straight section leading towards the church. Bernini himself described them as the arms of the Church. In the middle of the square stands an Egyptian obelisk that had been erected as early as 1586. The square is one of the largest urban spaces in the world and one of the most imitated ideas of the Baroque. Anyone standing between the fountains and the obelisk sees the four rows of columns merge into one.
The city as stage. The Baroque saw the city as a stage with vistas and focal points. In the 1580s Pope Sixtus V had straight streets driven through Rome between the pilgrimage churches and Egyptian obelisks raised as landmarks in the squares. At Piazza del Popolo three streets radiate from a square, a motif known as the trident that was copied in many cities. Piazza Navona, which follows the shape of an ancient stadium, received Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in 1651 and Borromini's church of Sant'Agnese. In Paris enclosed royal squares with uniform façades were built, such as the Place des Vosges at the beginning of the 17th century and later the Place Vendôme. In new towns from Mannheim to St Petersburg the grid and the straight axis became the rule. The grid was a sign of order, control and a modern state.
Guarini and Turin. In Turin, capital of the duchy of Savoy, the Baroque took a direction of its own, almost mathematical. The Theatine priest Guarino Guarini, who was also a mathematician and philosopher, built the church of San Lorenzo with a dome of intersecting arches that leave openings for the light, and the chapel of the Holy Shroud, the Cappella della Sindone, where the dome is built up of layer upon layer of small arches that seem to rise towards infinity. The chapel was badly damaged by fire in 1997 and reopened in 2018 after a long restoration. Filippo Juvarra, who came from Sicily, gave the city a lighter and more festive face in the 18th century, with the basilica of Superga on a hill above the city and the hunting lodge of Stupinigi, whose wings radiate from a central ballroom. Guarini’s vaults of intersecting arches found followers in central Europe, in Bohemia and Franconia.
Versailles and absolutism. In France the Baroque became more restrained and classical and was used for the glory of the king. In 1658–1661 the finance minister Nicolas Fouquet built Vaux-le-Vicomte with the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun and the garden designer André Le Nôtre. Louis XIV saw the château, had Fouquet arrested and hired the same team to enlarge his father's hunting lodge at Versailles. From the 1660s it grew into a seat of government, to which the court moved in 1682. The rooms were arranged around the king's bedchamber at the centre, and the whole of court life followed a ceremonial in which the nobility were to be close to the king and thus under his control. In 1678–1684 Jules Hardouin-Mansart built the Hall of Mirrors, with windows onto the park on one side and mirrors on the other, and ceiling paintings by Le Brun celebrating the king's wars. In Paris Bernini's design for the east front of the Louvre was rejected, and an austere French colonnade was built instead, which shows how France differed from Rome. Hardouin-Mansart's dome of the Invalides became another model. Versailles was imitated by princes from Madrid to St Petersburg.
The garden as architecture. In the Baroque the garden became a continuation of the palace. André Le Nôtre designed Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles with parterres – low patterns of clipped box, coloured gravel and flowers meant to be seen from the palace windows above – and, further off, bosquets, compartments of clipped hedges and trees with hidden rooms, fountains and theatres. Long axes, avenues and canals draw the eye towards the horizon; the Grand Canal at Versailles is more than one and a half kilometres long. Paths radiating from a single point are called a patte d'oie (goose foot). Nature was ordered geometrically as a sign of man's and the king's power over it, and moving water, fountains and cascades, was a costly technical achievement. Across Europe the nobility laid out similar gardens at their manor houses, often smaller but with the same symmetry and central axis. Many have since been remodelled as English parks, but lines of avenues and moats often reveal the Baroque plan.
The palace as a model. Versailles became the model for the princes of all Europe. In Vienna Schönbrunn was built as the summer palace of the Habsburgs, at Caserta outside Naples the Bourbon kings of Naples built one of the largest palaces in the world, and on the Gulf of Finland Peter the Great laid out Peterhof with fountains and cascades running down to the sea. Lesser princes in a divided Germany built their own small Versailles, with a main block, wings around a court of honour and a garden on the axis behind. The pattern recurs everywhere: a long symmetrical façade, a central axis running through the palace and out into the garden, a staircase as a stage for ceremony and a suite of rooms in which every door brought you closer to the ruler.
The Baroque spreads. The Baroque took different forms in different countries. In England Christopher Wren, a mathematician and astronomer, had the chance after the Great Fire of London in 1666 to rebuild some fifty City churches and St Paul's Cathedral, built in 1675–1710 with a dome that still dominates the City. In Austria and southern Germany the Baroque flourished after the victory over the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach built the Karlskirche in Vienna with two free-standing columns modelled on Trajan's Column, and Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt the Belvedere for Prince Eugene. Melk Abbey on the Danube rises like a palace above the river. Balthasar Neumann built the Würzburg Residence, where Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painted the ceiling over the staircase, and the pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen, where light flows between oval spaces. In Dresden the Zwinger was built, a festival ground surrounded by pavilions, and the Frauenkirche, which was destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt by 2005. In St Petersburg, founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, Italian architects introduced the Baroque to Russia. Central European Baroque is recognisable by bright, white and gilded interiors, ceiling paintings that open the vault to the sky, and churches with onion domes.
Spain and Latin America. In Spain and its colonies the Baroque became an art of surfaces. Façades and altarpieces, retablos, were covered with gilded sculpture, twisted columns and layer upon layer of ornament. The style is called Churrigueresque, after the Churriguera family of architects in Salamanca, although its most extreme forms were created by others. The sacristy of the Charterhouse in Granada and the Transparente in Toledo Cathedral, where light falls through an opening in the vault onto an altarpiece of marble and bronze, are among the most theatrical interiors in Europe. In 1738–1750 Santiago Cathedral received a new façade towards the square, the Obradoiro, which frames the Romanesque church in a shell of granite and glass. In Mexico, Peru and Brazil the Spanish and Portuguese Baroque merged with local craft traditions, and the cathedral of Mexico City and the churches of Ouro Preto are as rich as their European models.
St Petersburg. Peter the Great founded St Petersburg in 1703 at the mouth of the Neva and later moved the capital there from Moscow. The city was to be a window on Europe, and it was built by foreign architects to a plan of straight streets, canals and stone houses, on ground that first had to be drained. Domenico Trezzini from Ticino built the Peter and Paul Cathedral with a slender gilded spire. Under the Empress Elizabeth, Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli designed the Winter Palace, built in 1754–1762, and the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, with long façades in white, blue and gold. Rastrelli’s Baroque combines Italian and central European forms with Russian traditions, such as the onion-shaped domes of the cathedral of the Smolny Convent. Under Catherine the Great the city turned to Neoclassicism, and St Petersburg became one of the most uniformly classical cities in Europe.
Rococo. In the 1730s the Baroque grew lighter. Rococo was primarily a style of interior decoration, which emerged in Paris in the town houses of the nobility, the hôtels, where people wanted more intimate and comfortable rooms than the great halls of Versailles. Light colours, white and pastel, mirrors, gilded frames and asymmetrical shell ornaments, rocailles, from which the style takes its name, replaced the heavy pilasters and marble of the Baroque. Walls and ceilings flow together in curving lines, and motifs such as flowers, Chinese figures and rustic scenes became popular. In Germany Rococo reached its peak in the Amalienburg pavilion in Munich, Frederick the Great's Sanssouci in Potsdam and the Wieskirche in Bavaria, whose white and gold interior is one of the best known of the style. East India companies brought home porcelain, silk and wallpaper from China and awakened an interest in all things Chinese, and Chinese pavilions were built in palace parks all over Europe.