At its core, the sweeping and dramatic changes which European architecture underwent during the Baroque was predicated on the stunning feats of virtuosismo and daring distortions of form which we saw emerge from the minds of Mannerist architects like Bernardo Buontalenti and Giulio Romano. After that cutting-of-the-cord from the Renaissance adherence to Classical antiquity’s harmonious proportions which Mannerism achieved, we will see those purely intellectual invenzioni assume spectacular new forms in the Baroque which would fundamentally alter the appearance of buildings not only in seventeenth century Europe, but also in the Americas and other lands which would be subject to various European powers’ colonization in the centuries to come.
From the late fifteenth century well through the seventeenth and beyond, European powers had been making significant territorial inroads and colonial acquisitions; in some cases, the Europeans’ metal weapons and later use of gun-powder brought victories over the indigenous people they encountered in these far corners of the world, and in other cases, the germs which they brought with them wiped out entire populations, as is thought to be the case with the great Mississippian civilization which had flourished in the southern United States. Still in other cases, the effects of this colonial legacy are being felt still acutely today. As we saw with the Roman Empire or its later incarnation in the Byzantine Era, wherever empires spread, so too did its architecture. These buildings were not only functional edifices, as their counterparts in Europe had been, this kind of colonial architecture functioned as visual articulations of the superior power and abilities of the European. Quite often, their size and their technical feats, an inheritance of the European court taste for virtuosismo, were intended to communicate to the colonized populations an unmistakeable message of total power over the conquered lands and peoples.
The Baroque style which had been unleashed by the Catholic Church in order to impress the Catholic populations on the European continent in the wake of the Council of Trent served double-duty in the lands which were colonized by Catholic powers, like Spain, France, or Portugal. Spanish architecture had by the Late Renaissance begun to assume its own idiosyncratic forms as the taste for the Mannered style got underway and acquired its own denomination: the Plateresque. Unlike the Italian Mannerist architects who sourced their distortions in the elements of Greco-Roman antiquity, the Spanish Mannerist and Baroque architect working in the Plateresque adopted and modified forms from the Gothic portal, embellishing its spaces with the delicate embellishment more commonly seen in the work of the silversmith, or platero. A Plateresque portal has essentially merged the form of a Gothic altarpiece, or retable, as a flattened form onto the building’s otherwise undecorated façade. By inserting and adapting what was otherwise an iconic, religious form into the outward feature of a building of Spain’s imperial and earthly power, we are seeing the marriage of Catholicism with the Spanish crown that otherwise defined their aggressive, expansionist rules both in Europe and the New World. Between the fifteenth-century Plateresque portal in Spain and its abbreviated sixteenth-century counterpart in Mexico, we can see how certain elements have been tinkered with, but overall how these elements still conform to the type, which would transcend the Mannerist and the Baroque in Spanish architectural history. When we encounter the massive Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary, built by the Spanish conquerors on the site of the Aztecs’ major temple in the former-capital city of Tenochtitlán, we can see how the Plateresque façade has been extended over the entrance of the smaller façade to the right on the building’s east façade. The Plateresque portal extends as a rectangular feature from the highest part of the nave to the ground; the blank wall into which these portals are typically set has been truncated dramatically, placing the ornately-embellished stonework front and center. To its left however stands the larger and more imposing construction of the same complex which has abandoned the Spanish Plateresque for more conventional and continental adaptations of originally Italian Baroque forms, to which we will now turn our attention.
As we have seen in our past lectures on the Baroque style in painting and sculpture, what we call the Baroque is the style which was selected for the lavish new constructions and art commissions which were part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the reaction against Protestantism and the opportunity it provided to re-clarify the core tenets of the Catholic faith. The Council of Trent was the event which hammered out the Church of Rome’s future goals and the agenda by which they could be realized; instructing and impressing the masses through religious art and architecture were the motives underlying the intensive building and embellishment campaigns which spread the Baroque style throughout Catholic Europe. In Rome, the formal recognition of the Jesuits, founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, as a new Catholic Order necessitated the building of a new home-church, Il Gesù. Giacomo della Porta, another Renaissance polymath who is also known for his published volumes of “natural magic” in addition his designs, conceived its façade very much in the Mannerist spirit which was the sought-after mode for elite patrons in the late sixteenth century; it was begun before the Council of Trent’s resolutions had shifted Church building and patronage decidedly to what we call the Baroque taste, which we might see as being a watered-down and sanitized version of all of the technical virtuosity of the Mannerists with none of the disquieting and erotic subtexts for mass consumption in Catholic Europe and its growing colonies abroad. At the time of the Gesù’s façade’s design, Della Porta is working with all of the flexibility of the age’s mix-and-match approach to previously sacrosanct principles, proportions, and forms of Classical architecture; as we have seen Palladio conflate two Greek temple facades into a single, combined church façade at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, in a similar vein, we can see the “nesting” effect Della Porta creates of a triangular pediment within a larger semicircular one above the central portal as an original invenzione which transgresses upon some of the very ideas of Greco-Roman construction and design. Leon Battista Alberti, we recall from our lecture on the essentials of Renaissance architecture, had been responsible for transmuting Vitruvius’s writings on architecture from Republican Rome to the Renaissance and had re-introduced the Greek temple form into the context of church facades in Italy and eventually beyond. While Alberti remained stringently faithful to the Classical striving for balanced, harmonious proportions- we remember that Alberti’s façade on a Mantua church stopped short of the full height of the nave rather than elongate and distort these ideal proportions- architects like Palladio and Della Porta who worked in the Mannerist style stretched and adapted Classical forms to ever-inventive solutions of space without the qualms of their predecessors. We recall that Alberti devised an S-shaped scroll on the façade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence in order for the eye to pass more smoothly from the difference in height between ceilings of the side aisles and nave; at the Gesù in Rome, we see Della Porta adopting these Albertian scrolls for the same effect. Another break with precedent of this church façade is the staggered depths of the columns and pediment from the façade wall behind it. The older era’s idea of the church façade as a flat surface to decorate crumbled in the late sixteenth century and was utterly dissolved by Baroque architects in the century to come. Carlo Maderno’s façade for Santa Susanna in Rome is still within this Mannerist paradigm of distorting, extending, and manipulating the classical formal elements into new compositions; what has changed from the Gesù is that the forms’ proportions to one another have been reimagined, with higher and more slender verticals defining its surface decoration. Compared to Della Porta’s façade, Maderno has created an even more dramatic variation of depth on the surface area of the Santa Susanna façade. Maderno’s work for Santa Susanna impressed Pope Paul V so much that the mantle passed after Michelangelo to Maderno to finish the grandiose work on the new St. Peter’s in Rome begun under Julius II in the High Renaissance. We can appreciate how the façade of St. Peter’s, which fundamentally distorted the central-plan Michelangelo and Bramante before him, appropriates Maderno’s design for the lower register of Santa Susanna’s façade; due to the constraints of his inherited dimensions of the building however, Maderno’s façade for St. Peter’s, the nucleus of Catholicism, exhibits a far more pronounced horizontality than the architect would have probably designed had he had the opportunity of a tabula rasa. Nevertheless, the difference between a Mannerist architect who breaks the rules of Classical architectural proportions and combines formal elements in unique ways and the Baroque architect who carries that tendency many steps, and sometimes leagues, further is the intentional cultivation of the grandiose, of the dramatic, and of the monumental communication of sheer power which preoccupied the mind of the latter.
We might see this difference illustrated in a single site to the north in Paris, France; at the Louvre, which today is a museum but which was formerly the residence of the French monarchs, we see one of the earliest imports of Classical elements derived from Italian Renaissance architecture in the west wing of its Cour Carrée, or square courtyard. Its architect Pierre Lescot has clearly studied the major architectural works of the High Renaissance; its arcaded colonnade, the alternating curved and angular pediments, and each story’s complete order are by the book, whether Alberti’s or Vitruvius’s. However, the adaptation of these Classical forms to Northern European architectural features- these include the decreasing height of the upper stories, the long floor-to-ceiling windows (“French windows” conventionally), and the varied depth created by staggered pavilions- locates this wing as the product of French Mannerism. In the late seventeenth century, the east side of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée established a Baroque counterpart. We see the same Classical elements adapted on a far larger and more grandiose scale whose consolidation of mass (and power) has been distilled to a single monumental register above a foundation punctuated by the long windows of the French taste. We can appreciate that we are beyond the academic application of Classical orders for their own sake; instead, the manipulation of formal elements’ size and scale has been put to the service of the glorification of the French crown with a monumental construction reminiscent of the most lavish Hellenistic temples. The horizontality of this new wing broke with all precedent of Gothic and Italianate architecture in France, and it became a massive symbol of the power and divine authority of the royal line.
This re-tooling of the formal elements of the Greco-Roman temple appeared in France and England during the seventeenth century in two similar adaptations of the Baroque church façade. The Église du Dôme, also known as the Church of the Invalides, by the architect to the Sun King, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, plays the horizontals of a Greek temple façade against the variation of depth achieved by the advancement of the central temple-unit away from the façade’s base. Across the English Channel, Sir Christopher Wren’s design for St. Paul’s Cathedral in London furnishes yet another combination of Classical formal elements; at its core, we are seeing the two-story Greek temple façade accompanying an increasingly-ornate treatment of the dome’s architectural embellishments, which at St. Paul’s owe an apparent debt to Bramante’s circular Tempietto in Rome. The presence of the twin towers is itself a hold-over from the Romanesque Westwerk present in Northern European church architecture from the Early Medieval Period onwards, but for our study of Baroque architecture, it is our first glimpse so far of another fundamental of Baroque architecture: the curve.
For a brief moment in history, French architecture very nearly inherited all of the curving facades which defined one of the apexes of Baroque construction in Rome. We recall that in our past lectures, Gianlorenzo Bernini was the premier sculptor of dramatic, technically virtuosic treatments of subjects in marble of the age, but- like many of his contemporaries- his creative genius was not restricted to one art form. Bernini also contributed seminal works of architecture which would contribute to the very definition of the Baroque style itself. Bernini’s novel solution to the space in front of St. Peter’s in Rome, which in its former fourth-century incarnation featured a courtyard, or narthex, and which required a grandiose rethink on par with what had been accomplished for the church itself. Yet, the space itself was awkward and presented two non-negotiable elements of different dimensions: the rectangular fountain installed by Maderno in front of the church (which is no longer there but its site remains marked in the present-day inlay of the pavement) and the obelisk erected by Pope Sixtus V to articulate the triumph of the Church. The solution which Bernini furnished saw the extension of two long “arms,” each terminating in a Classical temple façade, which opened from the straight boundaries of a conventional courtyard into two halves of an oval around the central obelisk. For a sculptor who succeeded in giving cold marble all of the tactile qualities of supple human flesh, delicate leaves, or even hazy clouds (see his sculptural works Pluto and Proserpina, Apollo and Daphne, and The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila for these examples), it was perhaps no small stretch to see the architectural elements as potential extensions of an organic entity. In the case of the Vatican in Rome, the curved “arms” of the colonnade were invested with the signification of the Church’s embrace of its flock. For a brief moment, Bernini pitched his proverbial curve ball to the French king Louis XIV for the Louvre commission, but it missed. Nevertheless, Bernini’s sketches for the Louvre show us a vision of what Northern Baroque architecture might have looked like; it is a vision of curved surfaces that had formerly been thought of only as flat. Even though the Classical temple façade has, in the French and English examples which we just looked at, been staggered at various distances from the façade’s base, the missed connection with Bernini’s treatment of the curved plane in architecture is one which would distinguish the Italian Baroque from its far-removed counterparts.
If Louis XIV missed the pitch, the architect Francesco Borromini hit curving undulations of stone. San Carlo alle Quattre Fontane gets its name from its adjacent the curve ball out of the proverbial park in Baroque Rome. Borromini’s façades transformed the linear surfaces into wavy, position to an intersection in Rome with a fountain on each corner; however, around the south side is a church that looks like all of the fixed principles which Renaissance and Medieval architects took for granted- that a façade is flat, that horizontal lines are straight- have melted in front of the viewer’s eyes. The interior of the church has similarly utterly reconceptualized the division of space with a previously unseen fluidity. The ceiling vault above the centrally-planned space soars into a coffered oval with a central oculus, a daring structural distortion from the rigorously circular form of the Classical and Renaissance domes. At Saint Ivo at La Sapienza in Rome, the seat of the University of Rome in the 17th c. and still an iconic aspect of its modern campus, Borromini inverted the façade to recede in space towards its center, the opposite of the gradual projections which we have seen from French Classical pavilions and their Baroque iterations of the seventeenth century. With Borromini, we are seeing an extreme interpretation of just how fluid the “fixed” elements of architecture really could be.
In this lecture, we looked at what makes Baroque architecture its own immediately recognizable style. On one hand, Baroque architecture continued down the course chartered by its Mannerist counterparts: ideas were explored and refined as individual elements were distorted and combined in novel ways. As we have observed shortly prior, the motivations of the application of these spectacular special effects of architecture were fundamentally different for church commissions after the Counter-Reformation than they had been for their elite patrons in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. What had shifted was the deployment of all of these architectural refinements within a clearly-articulated campaign to capture the hearts and minds of the faithful; in the Baroque, and in no place more than Rome, entering a seventeenth century church brought the individual into contact with the heights of the sublime conjured by the most brilliant architects of the day. Although Bernini and Borromini’s curved façades did not take root in northern soil the way that the earlier Classical elements did, and this may be also due in part to the high level of technical mastery which these seemingly fluid walls actually required of its engineers and builders; we catch a brief glimpse in the curved forms at the top of the twin towers at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Nevertheless, the grandiosity and the manipulation of even the most basic Classical formal elements in architecture for the most dramatic effect carried Baroque architecture far beyond Rome: to France, to England, to Russia in the East, to Portugal, to Spain, and then beyond on the European powers’ campaigns of colonization in the wider world.
Filson Art History 2019 