Baroque and Rococo Architecture
Baroque and Rococo are terms, applied to European art of the period from the early 17th century to the mid-18th century.
The derivation of the word Rococo is uncertain, though its source is probably the French word “rocaille”, used to describe shell and pebble decorations in the 16th century.
Fundamentally a style of decoration, Rococo is much more a facet of late Baroque art than an autonomous style. During the Baroque period (c. 1600 – 1750), architecture, painting, and sculpture were integrated into decorative ensembles. Baroque art was essentially concerned with the dramatic and the illusory, with vivid colours, hidden light sources, luxurious materials, and elaborate, contrasting surface textures, used to heighten immediacy and sensual delight. Ceilings of Baroque churches presented vivid views of the infinite to the worshiper and directed him through his senses toward heavenly concerns. Seventeenth-century Baroque architects made architecture a means of propagating faith in the church and in the state. Baroque palaces expanded to display the power and order of the state.
Baroque space, with directionality, movement, and positive molding, contrasted markedly with the static, stable space of the High Renaissance. Baroque space invited participation and provided multiple changing views. Renaissance space was passive and invited contemplation of its precise symmetry. A Renaissance building was to be seen equally from all sides, while a Baroque building had a main axis or viewpoint as well as subsidiary viewpoints. Attention was focused on the entrance axis or on the central pavilion, and its symmetry was emphasized by the central culmination. A Baroque building expanded to include the square facing it, and often the ensemble included all the buildings on the square as well as the approaching streets and the surrounding landscape. Baroque buildings dominated their environment; Renaissance buildings separated themselves from it.
During the period of the Enlightenment (about 1700 to 1780), various currents of post-Baroque art and architecture evolved. A principal current, generally known as Rococo, refined the robust architecture of the 17th century to suit elegant 18th-century tastes. Vivid colours were replaced by pastel shades; diffuse light flooded the building volume; and violent surface relief was replaced by smooth flowing masses with emphasis only on isolated points.
Churches and palaces still exhibited an integration of the three arts (Renaissance, Mannerist art, Baroque), but the building structure was lightened to render interiors graceful and ethereal. Interior and exterior space entertained and captured the imagination by intricacy and subtlety.
|
|
In Rococo architecture, decorative sculpture and painting are inseparable from the structure. Rococo architects obtained unified spaces, emphasized structural elements, created continuous decorative schemes, and reduced column sizes to a minimum. In churches, the ceilings of side aisles were raised to the height of the nave ceiling to unify the space from wall to wall (Madonna Del Carmine Church[24], Turin, Italy, 1732, by Filippo Juvarra).
To obtain a vertical unification of structure and space, the vertical line of a supporting column might be carried up from the floor to the dome (e.g., church of San Luis[25], Seville, Spain, begun 1699, by Leonardo de Figueroa). The entire building was often lighted by numerous windows placed to give – dramatic effect or to flood the space with a cool diffuse light (Pilgrimage Church of Wies[26], Ger., Zimmermann, 1745).
