Baroque: Unit 2: General Characteristics of Baroque - ST Peter/s Piazza by Bernini and Rococo Styles
Baroque: Unit 2: General Characteristics of Baroque - ST Peter/s Piazza by Bernini and Rococo Styles
Baroque: Unit 2: General Characteristics of Baroque - ST Peter/s Piazza by Bernini and Rococo Styles
Baroque
◼ Baroque architecture evolved out of Renaissance architecture in Italy.
◼ In the 1600's, the renaissance architects began to get bored with the symmetry and
same old forms they had been using for the past 200 years.
◼ Meaning of the term Baroque :
-extravagantly ornate, florid, and convoluted in character or style: the baroque prose of
the novel's more lurid (loud, bright) passages.
-irregular in shape: baroque pearls
◼ They started to make bold, curving, with ornate (elaborate) decorations.
◼ They started to make curving facades, and used the double curve on many
different buildings.
◼ In Italian, the word barocco means bizarre and Baroque architecture certainly was
extravagant. Buildings in the Baroque style have many of these features:
• Complicated shapes
• Large curved forms
• Twisted columns
• Grand stairways
• High domes
• Trompe l'oeil paintings (visual deception, especially in paintings, in which
objects are rendered in extremely fine detail emphasizing the illusion of tactile
and spatial qualities)
Architectural characteristics and Architects
◼ The most distinct shape of the Baroque style is the oval.
◼ Creating buildings out of complex interlacing ovals allowed the architects to have
large open spaces that were different than just plain circles.
◼ The domes on many churches were oval shaped, but some were circular.
◼ Two main architects of the baroque era were Carlo Maderno, Bernini and
Borromini.
◼ Bernini's first medium was sculpture. He liked to incorporate lots of it into his
buildings.
◼ A sculptor and mason, Francesco Borromini went to Rome in 1614, and trained
under Bernini and Carlo Maderno. Lots of Borromini's buildings incorporated
many shapes and different forms