The Baroque in Italy and Classicism in France

Architecture and Art

in the Service of Church and State in the 17th Century

The Church of Il Gesu, Mother Church of the Jesuit Order, signals a new era in Italian architecture and its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church.

Giacomo Vignola Giacomo della Porta(1568-1576)

As a symbol of the Counter-Reformation, the Gesu solution for façade and interior provides a flexible “corporate” image for the Church in small and large structures alike.

Sta. Susanna by Carlo Maderno, 1597-1603St. Peter’s Basilica, façade & nave by Carlo Maderno, 1606-12

St. Peter’s Basilica, nave

Dome and Altar of St. Peter

St. Longinus

The Baldacchino (or Ciborium)

Gianlorenzo BerniniAt St. Peter’s

The High Altar with the Doctors of the Church and the Cathedra Petri

Bernini’s symbolism of the Church Triumphant and the new Rome: the vivification of the main processional axis

The Piazza and Colonnade: the Church embraces the world

The power of the Church as an institution takes expression in the new churches of the 17th century. Along with it other kinds of forces also appear, including dynamism (energy and motion), spatial fluidity, and the destruction of limits and boundaries leading to the notion of “continuum.”

Ss. Luca e Martina, by Pietro daCortona, 1634-69

Energy can be perceived in the nervous perimeter established by the entablature over the wall columns. The interior becomes part of a continuum that is not clearly bounded in the layered wall system. The interior is no

longer a container delimited by wall planes but a locus of forces.

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (St. Charles at the Four Fountains) by Borromini, 1634ff

The dynamic energies of Italian Baroque architecture were explored by many designers and artists.

St. Ivo della Sapienza by Francesco Borromini, 1642ff

Chapel of the Holy Shroud, Turin by Guarino Guarnini, 1667ff

San Lorenzo, Turin, by Guarino Guarnini, 1668-80

Although the Renaissance was a 15th-century phenomenon in Italy, it reached the rest of Europe, including France, mainly in the 16th century. The Square Court of the Louvre, built in 1546, brought French architecture to the point Italian architecture had reached theoretically 100 years earlier in Alberti’s design for the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence (1446).On the other hand, much contact existed between Italian artists and French patrons, even at the level of royal commissions. Francis I invited Leonardo da Vinci to work for him at the Chateau of Fontainebleau where Leonardo died. Other Italian artists, especially practitioners of the Mannerist style also worked in France, even at Fontainebleau for the king.By the 17th century, French art and architecture had absorbed many of the lessons of the Renaissance revival but without losing a distinctive gallic quality based on tradition as well as the pragmatics of climate and taste.

Square Court of the Louvre by Pierre Lescot, 1546

By the 17th century, French architecture had reached a level of maturity that exceeded mere imitation of Italian models. An outstanding example of that stylistic level is the Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte, collaboration by three of the best French designers.

Court of Honor

Characteristically, the French Chateau retained steeply pitched roofs and tall windows for climatic reasons and the Court of Honor for cultural reasons.

Plan and Garden façade, 1657-1661

For Nicolas Fouquet, Superintendent of Finance under Louis XIV

Architect: Louis LeVauGarden architect: Andre LeNotreInterior designer: Charles Lebrun

Central pavilion of the garden façade and interior of the garden Salon

Bedroom for Louis XIV

Project for the East Façade of the Louvre by Louis LeVau, 1664

Project for the East Façade by Gianlorenzo Bernini, 1665

Bernini’s last solution for the East Façade, 1666

East Façade design and completed construction by Louis Le Vau, Charles Lebrun, and Claude Perrault, 1667-70

Portraits of Louis XIV by Bernini

The equestrian portrait is in bozzetto (or model) form