An incomplete list of events which occurred in Italy in 1691:
| Years in Italy: | 1688 1689 1690 1691 1692 1693 1694 |
| Centuries: | 16th century · 17th century · 18th century |
| Decades: | 1660s 1670s 1680s 1690s 1700s 1710s 1720s |
| Years: | 1688 1689 1690 1691 1692 1693 1694 |
The Baroque is a Western style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished from the early 17th century until the 1750s. It followed Renaissance art and Mannerism and preceded the Rococo and Neoclassical styles. It was encouraged by the Catholic Church as a means to counter the simplicity and austerity of Protestant architecture, art, and music, though Lutheran Baroque art developed in parts of Europe as well.
Renaissance architecture is the European architecture of the period between the early 15th and early 16th centuries in different regions, demonstrating a conscious revival and development of certain elements of ancient Greek and Roman thought and material culture. Stylistically, Renaissance architecture followed Gothic architecture and was succeeded by Baroque architecture and neoclassical architecture. Developed first in Florence, with Filippo Brunelleschi as one of its innovators, the Renaissance style quickly spread to other Italian cities. The style was carried to other parts of Europe at different dates and with varying degrees of impact.
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian Renaissance painter, architect, art historian and biographer, who is best known for his work Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of all art-historical writing, and still much cited in modern biographies of the many Italian Renaissance artists he covers, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, although he is now regarded as including many factual errors, especially when covering artists from before he was born.
Baroque architecture is a highly decorative and theatrical style which appeared in Italy in the late 16th century and gradually spread across Europe. It was originally introduced by the Catholic Church, particularly by the Jesuits, as a means to combat the Reformation and the Protestant church with a new architecture that inspired surprise and awe. It reached its peak in the High Baroque (1625–1675), when it was used in churches and palaces in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Bavaria and Austria. In the Late Baroque period (1675–1750), it reached as far as Russia, the Ottoman Empire and the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America. In about 1730, an even more elaborately decorative variant called Rococo appeared and flourished in Central Europe.
Urbino is a comune (municipality) in the Italian region of Marche, southwest of Pesaro, a World Heritage Site notable for a remarkable historical legacy of independent Renaissance culture, especially under the patronage of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino from 1444 to 1482.
Richardsonian Romanesque is a style of Romanesque Revival architecture named after the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886). The revival style incorporates 11th- and 12th-century southern French, Spanish, and Italian Romanesque characteristics. Richardson first used elements of the style in his Richardson Olmsted Complex in Buffalo, New York, designed in 1870, and Trinity Church in Boston is his most well-known example of this medieval revival style. Multiple architects followed in this style in the late 19th century; Richardsonian Romanesque later influenced modern styles of architecture as well.
Pier Luigi Nervi was an Italian engineer and architect. He studied at the University of Bologna graduating in 1913. Nervi taught as a professor of engineering at Rome University from 1946 to 1961 and is known worldwide as a structural engineer and architect and for his innovative use of reinforced concrete, especially with numerous notable thin shell structures worldwide.
A meander or meandros is a decorative border constructed from a continuous line, shaped into a repeated motif. Among some Italians, these patterns are known as "Greek Lines". Such a design may also be called the Greek fret or Greek key design, although these terms are modern designations; this decorative motif appears thousands of years before that culture, thousands of miles away from Greece, and among cultures that are continents away from it. Usually the term is used for motifs with straight lines and right angles and the many versions with rounded shapes are called running scrolls or, following the etymological origin of the term, may be identified as water wave motifs.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli was an Italian architect who worked mainly in Russia. He developed an easily recognizable style of Late Baroque, both sumptuous and majestic. His major works, including the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg and the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, are famed for extravagant luxury and opulence of decoration.
The Polytechnic University of Milan is the largest technical university in Italy, with about 42,000 students. The university offers undergraduate, graduate, and higher education courses in engineering, architecture and design.
Colonial architecture is a hybrid architectural style that arose as colonists combined architectural styles from their country of origin with design characteristics of the settled country. Colonists frequently built houses and buildings in a style that was familiar to them but with local characteristics more suited to their new climate. Below are links to specific articles about colonial architecture, specifically the modern colonies:
Renaissance Revival architecture is a group of 19th-century architectural revival styles which were neither Greek Revival nor Gothic Revival but which instead drew inspiration from a wide range of classicizing Italian modes. Under the broad designation Renaissance architecture 19th-century architects and critics went beyond the architectural style which began in Florence and Central Italy in the early 15th century as an expression of Renaissance humanism; they also included styles that can be identified as Mannerist or Baroque. Self-applied style designations were rife in the mid- and later 19th century: "Neo-Renaissance" might be applied by contemporaries to structures that others called "Italianate", or when many French Baroque features are present.
Fascist architecture encompasses various stylistic trends in architecture developed by architects of fascist states, primarily in the early 20th century. Fascist architectural styles gained popularity in the late 1920s with the rise of modernism along with the ultranationalism associated with fascist governments in western Europe. Fascist styles often resemble that of ancient Rome, but can extend to modern aesthetics as well. Fascist-era buildings are frequently constructed with particular concern given to symmetry; simplicity; and monumental size, especially for public buildings.
French Renaissance architecture is a style which was prominent between the late 15th and early 17th centuries in the Kingdom of France. It succeeded French Gothic architecture. The style was originally imported from Italy after the Hundred Years' War by the French kings Charles VII, Louis XI, Charles VIII, Louis XII and François I. Several notable royal châteaux in this style were built in the Loire Valley, notably the Château de Montsoreau, the Château de Langeais, the Château d'Amboise, the Château de Blois, the Château de Gaillon and the Château de Chambord, as well as, closer to Paris, the Château de Fontainebleau.
Italy has a very broad and diverse architectural style, which cannot be simply classified by period or region, due to Italy's division into various small states until 1861. This has created a highly diverse and eclectic range in architectural designs. Italy is known for its considerable architectural achievements, such as the construction of aqueducts, temples and similar structures during ancient Rome, the founding of the Renaissance architectural movement in the late-14th to 16th century, and being the homeland of Palladianism, a style of construction which inspired movements such as that of Neoclassical architecture, and influenced the designs which noblemen built their country houses all over the world, notably in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States of America during the late-17th to early 20th centuries.
In architecture, Rationalism is an architectural current which mostly developed from Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. Vitruvius had claimed in his work De architectura that architecture is a science that can be comprehended rationally. The formulation was taken up and further developed in the architectural treatises of the Renaissance. Eighteenth-century progressive art theory opposed the Baroque use of illusionism with the classic beauty of truth and reason.
The Louis XIII style or Louis Treize was a fashion in French art and architecture, especially affecting the visual and decorative arts. Its distinctness as a period in the history of French art has much to do with the regency under which Louis XIII began his reign (1610–1643). His mother and regent, Marie de' Medici, imported Mannerism from her homeland of Italy and the influence of Italian art was to be strongly felt for several decades.
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings or other structures. The term comes from Latin architectura; from Ancient Greek ἀρχιτέκτων (arkhitéktōn) 'architect'; from ἀρχι- (arkhi-) 'chief' and τέκτων (téktōn) 'creator'. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural symbols and as works of art. Historical civilisations are often identified with their surviving architectural achievements.
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