CHAPTER VI

The Baroque in the Roman Catholic

Countries

c. i6oo-£. 1760

MANNERISM, it has been pointed out, was originally, and in
this country still is, a noun connected with "mannered"
and nothing else. In Continental and American terminology
however, some twenty years ago, it changed its meaning and became
the term for a specific historic style in art, the post-Renaissance
style of the i6th century, particularly in Italy. The same process had
taken place about fifty years earlier with regard to Baroque. Baroque
had originally signified odd, especially of odd shape. It was therefore
adopted to descibe an architectural style which to the classicist
appeared to revel in odd, extravagant shapes, that is, the style of Italy
during the lyth century. Then, chiefly in the 'eighties of the kst
century and chiefly in Germany, it lost its derogatory flavour and
became a neutral term to designate the works of art of that century
in general. It is now fairly familiar as such in Britain too.1

We have seen the Baroque style first heralded in the massive
forms and the gigantic excelsior of the dome of Michelangelo's
St. Peter's. We have then seen that these efforts of Michelangelo
towards the Baroque remained exceptional and that he himself in
other works of architecture gave way to the pressure of Mannerism.
It was only after Mannerism had completed its course that a new
generation at the beginning of the iyth century, especially in Rome,
tired of the forced austerity of the late i6th, rediscovered Michel-
angelo as the father of the Baroque. The style thus introduced
culminated in Rome between 1630 and 1670, and then left Rome,
first for the north of Italy (Guarini and Juvara in Piedmont) and
then for Spain and Portugal and Germany and Austria. Rome,
since the late iyth century, turned back to its classical tradition,

1 But as late as 1927 it was printed in an accepted English textbook of the
history of architecture that Baroque signifies "a heavy ana clumsy treatment of
Renaissance architecture, "with" coarse and florid detail", and that it is "improperly
used to denote a supposed 'style* which has no existence as the style of any period".

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