Baroque

Baroque architecture developed in Rome around 1600 and was built across Catholic Europe and its colonies until about 1750. It uses the classical columns and pediments of the Renaissance but arranges them differently: facades curve in and out, churches are planned on ovals, and giant columns or pilasters (flat columns set against a wall) rise through two or three stories. Architects placed windows out of view in domes and side chapels to light altars from hidden sources, and painted ceilings continue the architecture into scenes of the sky.

In Rome, Francesco Borromini fitted an oval dome and an undulating facade onto a site about 20 meters long at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (begun 1638), and Gian Lorenzo Bernini enclosed St. Peter's Square with colonnades four columns deep (begun 1656). Later examples include the Palace of Versailles near Paris, Christopher Wren's St Paul's Cathedral in London (1675-1711) and Jakob Prandtauer's Melk Abbey in Austria (1702-1736).

Baroque began in Rome in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, in churches built after the Council of Trent (1545-1563), where the Catholic Church set out its response to the Protestant Reformation. Carlo Maderno's facade for Santa Susanna (1603) and his front for St. Peter's Basilica, completed in 1612, established the early pattern. From the 1630s Bernini, Borromini and Pietro da Cortona designed the churches and squares of Roman High Baroque.

The style then spread to the courts of Europe. In France, Louis Le Vau and Jules Hardouin-Mansart enlarged Versailles for Louis XIV, who moved the court there in 1682; Hardouin-Mansart's Hall of Mirrors was begun in 1678. Late Baroque reached Austria, southern Germany, Russia and the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America. Around 1730 a lighter decorative variant, Rococo, appeared in France and Central Europe, and from the 1750s Neoclassical architects rejected both in favor of plainer forms taken directly from Greek and Roman ruins.