ARTISTIC BAROQUE & RICH ROCOCO

June 23th, 2011

Baroque and Rococo art and architecture have become popular once more, after a century and a half of neglect, misunderstanding and scorn. This radical shift in taste has led to a rapid growth in detailed knowledge about the artists who created these exhilarating styles. The famous masters have been reassessed and whole areas of achievement – Italian Baroque painting, German Rococo architecture - have been brought to a new, enthusiastic public. Germain Bazin's engrossing survey of this rich subject ranges over all Europe and traces the origins and effects of Baroque and Rococo - from the Counter-Reformation to Neoclassicism, Exoticism and even Art Nouveau.

Rococo, also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful. Rococo rooms were designed as total works of art with elegant and ornate furniture, small sculptures, ornamental mirrors, and tapestry complementing architecture, reliefs, and wall paintings (See Below at Figure 1“The Furniture and Decorations of Interior Design These Days in Rococo Style”). It was a style of high fashion and had few popular forms.

Figure 1 “The Furniture and Decorations of Interior Design These Days in Rococo Style”

The earliest rococo forms appeared around 1700. In 1701 rooms was redecorated in a new, lighter, and more graceful style by the royal designer Pierre Lepautre. In later schemes the forms were often mildly asymmetrical in arrangement, but asymmetry was more the province of three- dimensional objects, such as wall brackets, candlesticks and etc.

During the second quarter of the century the rococo style spread from France to other countries, and above all to Germany. Transplanted to Germany, the rococo took a more fanciful and wayward turn, with greater emphasis on forms derived from nature. The factor of two different cultures and present styles mix influence variation of the style. Germany, however- like Austria and Italy to some extent- also produced an indigenous form of rococo, a style evolved out of, rather than in reaction against, the baroque. Because the baroque style in Austria, Germany, and Italy was already much freer than in France, it needed only a fairly small adjustment in scale, pace, and mood to turn baroque decorative forms into rococo ones.

   Baroque art and architecture, broadly speaking, is the art and architecture of Europe and its Latin American colonies in the 17^th and the first half of the 18^th centuries. This art at its greatest and most intense is found in Roman Catholic countries, and a close association, if not an ideological link, existed between the style and the Roman Catholic Church in the larger stages of the Counter- Reformation.

A strong connection exists also between baroque and Renaissance methods of representing reality. What was new in all these cases was the way in which the forms were used or the methods applied.  To cite a slightly different example, some of the features correctly regarded as most typically baroque, such as inward- curving facades and oval ground plans, were anticipated by prototypes occurring as sidelines, often in underdeveloped form, in the art of the past. Finally, baroque artists and architects did create some, although not many, entirely new form, of which perhaps the most important was double curve- inward at the sides, outward in the middle- used for facades, doorways, and furniture (See Below at Figure 2 “Baroque Interior Architecture & Interior Design”).

Figure 2 “Baroque Interior Architecture & Interior Design”

Outside Italy and Flanders, the baroque was mainly a late 17^th- and 18^th- century phenomenon, although signs of it appeared earlier in most places. Each region interpreted the style in a different way. Probably its most radiant flowering was in Germany, in such churches. In Spain and Portugal and their American colonies, the interpretation was more pious and popular, as can be seen in paintings or in the façade of buildings, the plain surface of which is encrusted with carved forms partly of traditional Spanish origin. In France, full acceptance of the baroque was prevented by the cult of reason, which favored classical restraint, but the resulting “classical- baroque” style produced the greatest of all royal places.

In the early 18^th century the baroque gave way in France and Germany to the Rococo style, and it the second half of the century both styles were superseded by neoclassicism.

The social, economical and political circumstances of the Rome at that era influenced the development of the style by artists were far more active, than in all the rest Europe by creating a greatest number of important works of art were created. 

Lilija Deviatnikova
"Lily Design" 2011