Precursors and Features of Baroque Architecture
Michelangelo's late Roman buildings, particularly St. Peter's Basilica, may be considered precursors to Baroque architecture. His pupil Giacomo della Porta continued this work in Rome, particularly in the façade of the Jesuit church Il Gesù, which leads directly to the most important church façade of the early Baroque, Santa Susanna (1603), by Carlo Maderno
Distinctive features of Baroque architecture can include:
- In churches, broader naves and sometimes given oval forms
- Fragmentary or deliberately incomplete architectural elements
- dramatic use of light; either strong light-and-shade contrasts (chiaroscuro effects) as at the church of Weltenburg Abbey, or uniform lighting by means of several windows (e.g. church of Weingarten Abbey)
- opulent use of colour and ornaments (putti or figures made of wood (often gilded), plaster or stucco, marble or faux finishing)
- large-scale ceiling frescoes
- an external façade often characterized by a dramatic central projection
- the interior is a shell for painting, sculpture and stucco (especially in the late Baroque)
- illusory effects like trompe l'oeil(is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions.) and the blending of painting and architecture
- pear-shaped domes in the Bavarian, Czech, Polish and Ukrainian Baroque
- Marian and Holy Trinity columns erected in Catholic countries, often in thanksgiving for ending a plague
-
Elector's Palace in Trier, Germany
-
Santa Susanna in Rome, Italy
-
Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, Russia
-
Saints Peter and Paul Church in Krakow, Poland
Read more about this topic: Baroque Architecture
Famous quotes containing the words features, baroque and/or architecture:
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)