Baroque
Baroque architecture began in the early 17th century in Italy, reinventing the humanist Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture in a new rhetorical, theatrical, sculptural fashion, expressing the triumph of absolutist church and state. But whereas the Renaissance drew on the wealth and power of the Italian courts, and was a blend of secular and religious forces, the Baroque directly linked to the Counter-Reformation, a movement within the Catholic Church to reform itself in response to the Protestant Reformation.
The Baroque style arrived in Germany after the Thirty Years War. The Baroque architecture of the German government royal and princely houses was based on the model of France, especially the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Examples are the Zwinger Palace in Dresden built by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann from 1709 to 1728, initially for the holding of court festivals. The architecture of absolutism always put the ruler at the center, thus increasing the spatial composition, for example, the power of the ruler - perhaps in the form of the magnificent staircase leading to the person of the ruler.
The interaction of architecture, painting and sculpture is an essential feature of Baroque architecture. An important example is the Würzburg Residence with the Emperor's Hall and the staircase, whose construction began under the leadership of Johann Balthasar Neumann, in 1720. The frescoes in the staircase were made by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo from 1751 to 1753.
Other well-known Baroque palaces are the New Palace in Potsdam, Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin, Schloss Weißenstein in Pommersfelden and Augustusburg Castle in Brühl, whose interiors are partly in the Rococo style.
Rococo is the late phase of the Baroque, in which the decoration became even more abundant and showed most colors in even brighter tones. For example, Sanssouci Palace, built from 1745 to 1747, which was the former summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, in Potsdam, near Berlin. It is often counted among the German rivals of Versailles.
Among the best known examples include the Bavarian Baroque church in the Benedictine Ottobeuren, the Weltenburg monastery, Ettal Abbey and St. John Nepomuk Church, called Asam Church in Munich. Other examples of Baroque church architecture are the Basilica of the Vierzehnheiligen in Upper Franconia and the rebuilt Frauenkirche in Dresden, created by George Bähr between 1722 and 1743.
Read more about this topic: German Architecture
Famous quotes containing the word baroque:
“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)
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)