Focusing on the Baroque period, this book gives readers the tools they need to grasp the architectural language and building forms of this style. Part of a new, accessibly written, and generously illustrated series on architecture through the ages, this book features Baroque's most important architects, buildings and cities, interior and exterior photographs, detailed images, drawings, and plans. The book offers a general introduction to Baroque, discusses the characteristics of the style, and the commonly used techniques and materials. Originating in the late sixteenth century and continuing to the early 1900s, Baroque swept the globe, from Europe to South America. The period is distinguished by complex architectural shapes designed to heighten emotion and dramatise experience. Buildings from this period are celebrated for their grandeur, intricate embellishments, and gilded statuary. Renowned Baroque architects include Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Guariono Guarini. AUTHOR: Claudia Zanlungo is a curator and writer on architecture. She lives in Berlin. 200 colour images REDUCED FROM $35.00

"This book offers a general introduction to the Romanesque period and discusses the primary characteristics of this style with its clearly defined forms and its overall appearance of simplicity, along with commonly used techniques and materials. Examples of Romanesque architecture can be found across Europe, some of the most recognizable being Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice, Durham Cathedral in England and Mont Saint-Michel in France." -- Book Jacket.

Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens. Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos—divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization. Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville’s hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.

Revised translation of 2006 Italian ed. with "substantial changes" (page vii). Author added an introduction and significantly expanded or reworked chapters 4 and 5 to incorporate research published in the intervening 6 years.

Delivered at the turn of the twentieth century, Riegl's groundbreaking lectures called for the Baroque period to be judged by its own rules and not merely as a period of decline.

In 1676-77 a single event revitalized the traditions of Roman design. That event, the union of the French Royal Academy and the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome, is given new significance in the present study. It has long been thought that the academies' fusion signaled the passing of artistic preeminence from Rome to France. Here, however, the author proposes a more complex interpretation. By demonstrating that Rome continued, in fact, to be the more innovative and influential of the two academies, Gil Smith is able to discern patterns of influence that cross geographical and temporal boundaries, and to portray late-Baroque architecture in international terms. For this Compelling portrait of a transitional period of European architectural trends, Professor Smith draws on the student competitions inaugurated at the Saint Luke Academy to commemorate its ties with the French academies. Far more important than mere "academic" work, these competition drawings reveal the nature of instruction in Rome, the influences of the academy's officers and patrons, and the nature of contemporary projects similar in program to the competitions. The design synthesis pursued in Rome until the end of the seventeenth century, particularly by Carlo Fontana, would become an important source of inspiration for prominent architects of the next century. Among others, the academy's design methodology influenced Fischer von Erlach, Filippo Juvarra, and Giles Oppenord in their search for a progressive Baroque language.

At first glance, Borromini's architecture is a flight of Baroque fantasy, the product of limitless imagination. A closer look reveals an almost ruthlessly logical geometry underlying his creation. Blunt shows how the combination of revolutionary inventiveness and intellectual control gives Borromini's work its great appeal.