Italy

Architects in northern Italy, notablyGuarino Guarini,Filippo Juvarra, andBernardo Vittone, developed a Baroque style of great structuralaudacity. Guarini’s San Lorenzo (1668–80) and Palazzo Carignano (1679), both inTurin, have swelling curvilinear forms, terra-cotta construction, exposed structural members, and intricate spatialcompositions that show his relation to Borromini and also represent significant developments in the relationship between structure and light.Juvarra’sPalazzo Madama, Turin (1718–21), has one of the most spectacular of all Baroque staircases, but the true heir to Guarini wasVittone. To increase the vertical effect and the unification of space in churches such as Santa Chiara, Brà (1742), Vittone raised the main arches, eliminated thedrum, and designed a doubledome in which one could look through spherical openings puncturing the inner dome and see the outer shell painted with images of saints and angels: a glimpse of heaven.

Spain

SpanishBaroque was similar to Italian Baroque but with a greater emphasis on surface decorations.Alonso Cano, in his facade of theGranada Cathedral (1667), andEufrasio López de Rojas, with the facade of the cathedral ofJaén (1667), show Spain’s absorption of the concepts of the Baroque at the same time that it maintained a local tradition. The greatest of the Spanish masters wasJosé Benito Churriguera, whose work shows most fully the Spanish Baroque interest in surface texture and decorative detail. His lushornamentation attracted many followers, and Spanisharchitecture of the late 17th century and early 18th century has been labeled “Churrigueresque.” Narciso and Diego Tomé, in theUniversity of Valladolid (1715), and Pedro de Ribera, in thefacade of the San Fernando Hospital (now the Municipal Museum) in Madrid (1722), proved themselves to be the chief inheritors of Churriguera.

The outstanding figure of 18th-century Spanish architecture wasVentura Rodríguez, who, in his designs for the Chapel of Our Lady of Pilar in the cathedral ofSaragossa (1750), showed himself to be a master of the developed Rococo in its altered Spanish form; but it was a Fleming,Jaime Borty Miliá, who brought Rococo to Spain when he built the west front of the cathedral of Murcia in 1733.

Flanders

Roman Catholicism, political opposition to Spain, and the painterPeter Paul Rubens were all responsible for the astonishing full-bodied character of Flemish Baroque. Rubens’s friendsJacques Francart andPieter Huyssens created an influential northern centre forvigorous expansiveBaroque architecture to which France, England, and Germany turned. Francart’s Béguinage Church (1629) at Mechelen (Malines) and Huyssens’sSt. Charles Borromeo (1615) at Antwerp set the stage for the more fully developed Baroque at St. Michel (1650) at Louvain, by Willem Hesius, as well as at the Abbey of Averbode (1664), by Jan van den Eynde.

Holland

Seventeenth-century architecture in Holland, in contrast, is marked by sobriety and restraint.Pieter Post, noted for the Huis ten Bosch (1645) at The Hague and the Town Hall of Maastricht (c. 1658), andJacob van Campen, who built the Amsterdam Old Town Hall (1648; now the Royal Palace), were the principal Dutch architects of the 17th century. After the middle of the century, Dutcharchitecture exerted an influence on architecture in France and England. Dutch colonial architecture was especially evident in the 17th and 18th centuries in the Hudson River Valley ofNorth America and the DutchWest Indies (notably Willemstad on the island of Curaçao).

France

Salomon de Brosse’s Luxembourg Palace (1615), in Paris, and Château de Blérancourt (1614), northeast of Paris between Coucy and Noyon, were the bases from whichFrançois Mansart andLouis Le Vau developed their succession of superb country houses.

Mansart was the more accomplished of the two architects, and his Orléans wing of the Château de Blois (1635) in the Loire Valley and Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris (1642), are renowned for their high degree of refinement, subtlety, and elegance. Mansart’s church of Val-de-Grâce (1645) in Paris and his designs for the Bourbon mausoleum (1665) established the full Baroque in France; it was a rich, subtle Baroque that was quiet in its strength and restrained in its vigour.

Le Vau was Mansart’s only serious competitor, and in 1657, with his Château deVaux-le-Vicomte, near Paris, he fired the imagination ofLouis XIV and of his finance ministerJean-Baptiste Colbert. Vaux, though exhibiting certain Dutch influences, is noted for itsintegration of Le Vau’s architecture with the decorative ensembles of the painter and designerCharles Le Brun and the garden designs of landscape architectAndré Le Nôtre. By serving as a model for Louis XIV’sPalace of Versailles, the complex at Vaux was perhaps the most important mid-century European palace. Le Vau showed a sensitivity to Italian Baroque architecture that was unusual in a French architect, and his College of Four Nations (1662; now the Institute of France) in Paris owes much to the Roman churches of Santa Maria della Pace, byPietro da Cortona, and Sant’Agnese in Agone (1652–55), in the Piazza Navona, by Borromini andCarlo Rainaldi.

Le Vau, Le Nôtre, and Le Brun began working atVersailles within a few years of their success at Vaux, but the major expansion of the palace did not occur until after the end of the Queen’s War (1668). At Versailles, Le Vau showed his ability to deal with a building of imposing size. The simplicity of his forms and the rich, yet restrained, articulation of the garden facade mark Versailles as his most accomplished building. Le Nôtre’s inventivedisposition of ground, plant, and water forms created a wide range of vistas, terraces, gardens, and wooded areas thatintegrated palace and landscape into anenvironment emphasizing the delights ofcontinuity and separation, of theinfinite and theintimate. Upon Le Vau’s death,Jules Hardouin-Mansart, grandnephew of François, succeeded him and proved himself equal to Louis XIV’s desires by more than trebling the size of the palace (1678–1708). Versailles became the palatial ideal and model throughout Europe and the Americas until the end of the 18th century. A succession of grand palaces was built, including the following: Castle Howard andBlenheim Palace, in England, by Sir John Vanbrugh; the Residenz of Würzburg, Germany (1719), by Neumann; the Zwinger in Dresden, Germany (1711), by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann; the Belvedere, Vienna (1714), by Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt; the Royal Palace at Caserta, Italy (1752), by Luigi Vanvitelli; and the Royal Palace (National Palace) at Madrid (1736), by Giovanni Battista Sacchetti.

Hardouin-Mansart’sDôme des Invalides, Paris (begun in 1676), is generally agreed to be the finest church of the last half of the 17th century in France. The correctness and precision of its form, the harmony and balance of its spaces, and the soaring vigour of its dome make it a landmark not only of the Paris skyline but also of European Baroque architecture.

AfterNicolas Pineau returned to France from Russia, he, withGilles-Marie Oppenordt andJuste-Aurèle Meissonier, who were increasingly concerned with asymmetry, created the full Rococo. Meissonier and Oppenordt should be noted too for theirexquisite, imaginative architectural designs that were unfortunately never built (e.g., facade of Saint-Sulpice, Paris, 1726, by Meissonier).

The early years of the 18th century saw the artistic centre of Europe shift from Rome to Paris.Pierre Lepautre, working under Hardouin-Mansart on the interiors of the Château de Marly (1679), invented new decorative ideas that became the Rococo. Lepautre changed the typical late 17th-century flat arabesque, which filled a geometrically constructed panel, to a linear pattern in relief, which was enclosed by a frame that determined its own shape. White-and gold-painted 17th-centuryinteriors (e.g., the central salon of the palace at Versailles) were replaced by varnished natural-wood surfaces (e.g., Château de Meudon, Cabinet à la Capucine) or by painted pale greens, blues, and creams (e.g., Cabinet Vert, Versailles, 1735). The resulting delicate asymmetry in relief and elegant freedom revolutionizedinterior decoration and within a generation exerted a profound effect on architecture. Architects rejected the massive heavy relief of the Baroque in favour of a light and delicate, but still active, surface. Strong, active, androbust interior spaces gave way to intricate, elegant but restrained spatial sequences.