From Late Renaissance and Mannerism To Early Baroque
The Baroque style penetrated Bohemia in the first half of the 17th century. Prague was one of the main centers of Mannerist art (a late Renaissance style, foreseeing early Baroque) under Rudolph II (1576–1611). At the end of his reign and during the reign of his brother Mathias (1611–1619) there were built some late Renaissance or Mannerist buildings with Early Baroque elements in Prague. But it is hard to distinguish between the Mannerist style and the Early Baroque style because there is no clear break, therefore some scholars consider these buildings to be Early Baroque while others consider them to be Mannerist.
Among these transitional buildings is the Italian chapel consecrated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, adjoining the former Jesuit college called Clementinum built in 1590-1600 for Italians residing in Prague, designed by the Italian O. Mascarino. Although it is a Late Renaissance or Mannerist chapel, it is very important for Czech Baroque architecture because of its elliptical ground plan which is much more typical for Baroque architecture than for the rational Renaissance style.
The Matthias Gate of the Prague Castle, built before 1614 probably by Giovanni Maria Filippi is traditionally designated the first Baroque structure in Prague.
Read more about this topic: Baroque Architecture In The Czech Republic
Famous quotes containing the words late, renaissance, early and/or baroque:
“We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn’t confess to the secret of our own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it’s often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they’re gone.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It’s a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it’s the togetherness of modern technology.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“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)