Baroque in architecture

The Baroque is a period of artistic style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, and music. The style began around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe.

The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church, which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent, in response to the Protestant Reformation, that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and expressing triumph, power and control. Baroque palaces are built around an entrance of courts, grand staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence.

In Baroque architecture, new emphasis was placed on bold massing, colonnades, domes, light-and-shade (chiaroscuro), 'painterly' color effects, and the bold play of volume and void. In interiors, Baroque movement around and through a void informed monumental staircases that had no parallel in previous architecture. The other Baroque innovation in worldly interiors was the state apartment, a sequence of increasingly rich interiors that culminated in a presence chamber or throne room or a state bedroom. The sequence of monumental stairs followed by a state apartment was copied in smaller scale everywhere in aristocratic dwellings of any pretensions.

Baroque architecture was taken up with enthusiasm in central Germany, Austria and Russia. In England the culmination of Baroque architecture was embodied in work by Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, from ca. 1660 to ca. 1725. Many examples of Baroque architecture and town planning are found in other European towns, and in Latin America. Town planning of this period featured radiating avenues intersecting in squares, which took cues from Baroque garden plans. In Sicily, Baroque developed new shapes and themes as in Noto, Ragusa and Acireale "Basilica di San Sebastiano".

Francis Ching described Baroque architecture as "a style of architecture originating in Italy in the early 17th century and variously prevalent in Europe and the New World for a century and a half, characterized by free and sculptural use of the classical orders and ornament, dynamic opposition and interpenetration of spaces, and the dramatic combined effects of architecture, sculpture, painting, and the decorative arts.

In Russia, Baroque architecture passed through three stages—the early Moscow Baroque, with elegant white decorations on red-brick walls of rather traditional churches, the mature Petrine Baroque, mostly imported from the Low Countries, and the late Rastrelliesque Baroque, which was, in the words of William Brumfield, "extravagant in design and execution, yet ordered by the rhythmic insistence of massed columns and Baroque statuary."

The first baroque churches were built in the estates of the Naryshkin family of Moscow boyars. It was the family of Natalia Naryshkina, Peter the Great's mother. Most notable in this category of small suburban churches were the Intercession in Fili (1693–96), the Holy Tritity church in Troitse-Lykovo (1690-1695) and the Saviour in Ubory (1694–97). They were built in red brick with profuse detailed decoration in white stone. The belfry was not any more placed beside the church as was common in the 17th century, but on the facade itself, usually surmounting the octagonal central church and producing daring vertical compositions. As the style gradually spread around Russia, many monasteries were remodeled after the latest fashion. The most delightful of these were the Novodevichy Convent and the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow, as well as Krutitsy metochion and Solotcha Cloister near Riazan. Civic architecture also sought to conform to the baroque aesthetics, e.g., the Sukharev Tower in Moscow and there is also a neo-form of this style — Neo-baroque — like the Principal Medicine Store on Red Square or Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace in St. Petersburg. The most important architects associated with the Naryshkin Baroque were Yakov Bukhvostov and Peter Potapov.

Petrine Baroque is a name applied by art historians to a style of Baroque architecture and decoration favoured by Peter the Great and employed to design buildings in the newly founded Russian capital, Saint Petersburg, under this monarch and his immediate successors. Unlike contemporaneous Naryshkin Baroque, favoured in Moscow, the Petrine Baroque represented a drastic rupture with Byzantine traditions that had dominated Russian architecture for almost a millennium. Its chief practitioners – Domenico Trezzini, Andreas Schlüter, and Mikhail Zemtsov – drew inspiration from a rather modest Dutch, Danish, and Swedish architecture of the time. Extant examples of the style in St Petersburg are the Peter and Paul Cathedral, the Twelve Colleges, the Kunstkamera, Kikin Hall and Menshikov Palace.The Petrine Baroque structures outside St Petersburg are scarce; they include the Menshikov Tower in Moscow and the Kadriorg Palace in Tallinn.