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.
Mannerism is a style in European art that emerged in the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520, spreading by about 1530 and lasting until about the end of the 16th century in Italy, when the Baroque style largely replaced it. Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century.
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.
Baroque painting is the painting associated with the Baroque cultural movement. The movement is often identified with Absolutism, the Counter Reformation and Catholic Revival, but the existence of important Baroque art and architecture in non-absolutist and Protestant states throughout Western Europe underscores its widespread popularity.
In the visual arts, style is a "... distinctive manner which permits the grouping of works into related categories" or "... any distinctive, and therefore recognizable, way in which an act is performed or an artifact made or ought to be performed and made". Style refers to the visual appearance of a work of art that relates to other works with similar aesthetic roots, by the same artist, or from the same period, training, location, "school", art movement or archaeological culture: "The notion of style has long been historian's principal mode of classifying works of art".
Pediments are a form of gable in classical architecture, usually of a triangular shape. Pediments are placed above the horizontal structure of the cornice, or entablature if supported by columns. In ancient architecture, a wide and low triangular pediment typically formed the top element of the portico of a Greek temple, a style continued in Roman temples. But large pediments were rare on other types of building before Renaissance architecture. For symmetric designs, it provides a center point and is often used to add grandness to entrances.
Form follows function is a principle of design associated with late 19th- and early 20th-century architecture and industrial design in general, which states that the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose.
Manfredo Tafuri was an Italian Marxist architect, historian, theoretician, critic and academic. He was described by one commentator as the world's most important architectural historian of the second half of the 20th century. He is noted for his pointed critiques of the partisan "operative criticism" of previous architectural historians and critics like Bruno Zevi and Siegfried Giedion and for challenging the idea that the Renaissance was a "golden age" as it had been characterised in the work of earlier authorities like Heinrich Wölfflin and Rudolf Wittkower.
Heinrich Wölfflin was a Swiss art historian, esthetician and educator, whose objective classifying principles were influential in the development of formal analysis in art history in the early 20th century. He taught at Basel, Berlin and Munich in the generation that saw German art history's rise to pre-eminence. His three most important books, still consulted, are Renaissance und Barock (1888), Die Klassische Kunst, and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe.
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.
In architecture and decorative art, ornament is decoration used to embellish parts of a building or object. Large figurative elements such as monumental sculpture and their equivalents in decorative art are excluded from the term; most ornaments do not include human figures, and if present they are small compared to the overall scale. Architectural ornament can be carved from stone, wood or precious metals, formed with plaster or clay, or painted or impressed onto a surface as applied ornament; in other applied arts the main material of the object, or a different one such as paint or vitreous enamel may be used.
Max Dvořák was a Czech-born Austrian art historian. He was a professor of art history at the University of Vienna and a famous member of the Vienna School of Art History, employing a Geistesgeschichte methodology.
The acanthus is one of the most common plant forms to make foliage ornament and decoration in the architectural tradition emanating from Greece and Rome.
Michael David Kighley Baxandall, FBA was a British art historian and a professor emeritus of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and worked as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy was profoundly influential in the social history of art, and is (2018) widely used as a textbook in college courses.
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.
Alois Riegl was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. He was one of the major figures in the establishment of art history as a self-sufficient academic discipline, and one of the most influential practitioners of formalism.
Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik is a book on the history of ornament by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. It was published in Berlin in 1893. The English translation renders the title as Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament, although this has been criticized by some. It has been called "the one great book ever written about the history of ornament."
Art history is, briefly, the history of art—or the study of a specific type of objects created in the past.
Open form is a term coined by Heinrich Wölfflin in 1915 to describe a characteristic of Baroque art opposed to the "closed form" of the Renaissance. Wölfflin tentatively offered several alternative pairs of terms, in particular "a-tectonic" and "tectonic", but settled on open/closed because, despite their undesirable ambiguity, they make a better distinction between the two styles precisely because of their generality. In an open form, which is characteristic of 17th-century painting, the style "everywhere points out beyond itself and purposely looks limitless", in contrast to the self-contained entity of a closed form, in which everything is "pointing everywhere back to itself". In general, the closed compositions of the 16th century are dominated by the vertical and horizontal, and by the opposition of these two dimensions. Seventeenth-century painters, by contrast, de-emphasize these oppositions so that, even when they are present, they lose their tectonic force. The diagonal, on the other hand, becomes the main device used to negate or obscure the rectangularity of the picture space.
In architecture, form refers to a combination of external appearance, internal structure, and the unity of the design as a whole, an order created by the architect using space and mass.
