Baroque and Rococo - Architecture and Decoration Edited by Anthony Blunt Photographs by Wim Swaan The spirit of the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Revival that followed it found expression in a new style of architecture that was dynamic, emotional and dramatic. It is only in recent years that this style has begun to be appreciated and understood by the layman as well as the scholar. By bringing together in one comprehensive volume the whole subject of Baroque in its historical context and illustrating it with the brilliant photographs of Wim Swaan. Anthony Blunt starts by tracing the origin of Baroque architecture in Rome during the first half of the 17th century through the genius of Bernini, Borromini and Pietro da Cortona. These artists invented designs in architecture and decoration – bold movement in space, dramatic illusionism in paint, stucco and marble – to express the rival of the Roman church. From Rome the Baroque spread to Northern Italy where it produced the fantasies of Guarini and the theatrical splendor of Juvarra, and the to the South to Naples and Sicily, where it developed special forms conditioned by the love of the southerner for rich colour. A major section is devoted to the architecture, and its decoration, of Central Europe, the centre of the second great flowering of the Baroque. In Vienna and lower Austria a fever of building, both secular and ecclesiastical, took place and the period saw the erection of great Viennese palaces by Fischer von Erlach and Hildebrandt, and the splendid masterpieces of Melk and Altenburg. In Bohemia and Franconia a different style employing complex structures was established by the Dietzenhofer family and Balthasar Neumann, and in Southern Germany Cuvilliés and Dominikus Zimmerman produces work in the true Rococo spirit. French Baroque architecture owes much to Rome. The grand-scale planning of Francois Mansart’s chateaux, the whole conception of Versailles, and the last public buildings of Louis XIV’s reign, the Invalides, the chapel of Versailles and the Place Vendome, are firmly Baroque in expression. In the Protestant countries of Northern Europe the style met with a more limited welcome. In ecclesiastical architecture there are individual Baroque features, such as Wren’s west towers of St Paul’s, but is was in secular architecture, in Castle Howard, Chatsworth and Blenheim in particular, that Baroque ideas were more suited to expressing the power of sovereigns of wealthy individuals. The volume concludes with a discussion of the architecture of the period in Spain and Spanish America, which has something in common with the true Baroque of Rome, and in Portugal and Brazil whose most significant buildings, particularly in their decoration, were a real development from Italian Baroque. Each part of the text is illustrated by magnificent photographs taken specially by Wim Swaan, whose work is well known from this many books, or by engravings, plans and photographs selected to complement his work. Sir Anthony Blunts was Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures from 1952 to 1972 and until 1974 was Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The author of numerous books on art and architecture, his main work was in the field of French and Italian art of the seventeenth century. He wrote the major portion of this study and was joined by Alastair Laing, an authority of German Boroque and Rococo, Kerry Downs, lecturer in art history at Reading University, on England, and Christopher Tadgell, lecturer at the School of Architecture, Canterbury, on France. 431 plates of which 34 are in colour. First published 1978 by Paul Elek Ltd. Reissued by Granada Publishing 1982. This edition published 1988 by Wordsworth Editions Ltd, Ware, Hertfordshire
