Baroque architecture

Baroque emerged in Rome in the late 16th century, when the Catholic Church answered the Reformation with an architecture meant to inspire astonishment, reverence, and awe. The style spread across Europe and the Americas and flourished into the 1750s; around 1730 a final, even more ornate phase appeared in Central Europe as Rococo.

You recognize it by Renaissance elements made higher, grander, and more dramatic: curved and undulating walls, twisted columns, lavish gilding, and grand stairways treated as set pieces. Ceilings open into painted illusionistic heavens, a device called quadratura, and light falls from cupolas. Ornament grows more restrained the further north you go.

Rome’s high baroque belongs to two rivals. Gian Lorenzo Bernini gave St. Peter’s its baldachin (1624-1633) and the colonnades that reach out to embrace the square (1656-1667), while Francesco Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638-1641) makes the walls themselves seem to weave in and out. In France the Palace of Versailles set the standard: the Hall of Mirrors was finished in 1681, the court moved in by 1682, and palaces across Europe, Stockholm’s among them, took it as their model.

The name began as an insult. Baroque likely derives from the Portuguese barroco, a flawed pearl, and for over a century it meant the bizarre and the needlessly complicated. Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance und Barock (1888) rehabilitated it as a period term, and the buildings have long outlived the slur.