Baroque: the first global style

The first global style

Baroque was the first style to have a significant worldwide impact. It spread from Italy and France to the rest of Europe, then travelled via European colonies, missions and trading posts to Africa, Asia, and South and Central America. The style was spread through international trade in fashionable goods, through prints, and also by travelling craftsmen, artists and architects. Chinese carvers worked in Indonesia; French silversmiths in Sweden; Italian furniture makers in France; sculpture was sent from the Philippines to Mexico as well as Spain; London-made chairs went all over Europe and across the Atlantic; French royal workshops turned out luxury products in the official French style that were both desired and imitated by fashionable society across Europe. However Baroque also changed as it crossed the world, adapting to new needs and local tastes.

The painting of a shop dealing in export wares was originally intended to be the leaf of a fan. More fantasy than fact, it combines objects from all over Asia, including Japanese lacquer furniture, Chinese porcelain and red wares, small ivory devotional sculptures, Indian chintzes and Turkish or Persian paintings. Europeans were clearly fascinated by these exotic goods.

Chinese blue-and-white porcelain was highly prized in Europe. It was imported in large quantities and collected for massed displays. Some pieces were given elaborate mounts of silver or gilded silver. The mounts of this cup reflect German ornament but also the Chinese decoration of the cup. The dogs are probably part of a family crest.

Art & performance

Baroque art was dramatic: paintings, sculpture and decorative arts swirled with vigorous action and strong feelings. Figures have a sense of realistic immediacy, as if stopped in mid-action; their expressions, pose, gesture and drapery contribute to the drama. These human figures were key elements in all forms of Baroque art, from painting and architecture to sledges and tableware. Allegorical, Biblical, and mythological figures turned these works into scenes which strived to convey particular messages and engage the emotions of the viewer. The vase was a typically Baroque form of decoration. The ewer depicting the Triumph of Neptune is one of a pair of ornamental bronze ewers on a marine theme. It borrows elements from earlier printed designs, but combines form and ornament so that the figural decoration seems to form the structure of the ewer itself.

Both Church and State exploited figurative works for propaganda purposes, commissioning emotionally wrought religious paintings, or heroic portraits of rulers, heads held high above a mass of billowing drapery. The portrait bust of Charles II (reigned 1660–85) is a typical example of this. It represents the monarch in a heroic pose; the proud turn of the head and the vigorous drapery inspired by a famous bust of Louis XIV by Gianlorenzo Bernini. A symbol of magnificence and power, Bernini's bust was immediately imitated by other European rulers.

Architecture & performance

Baroque buildings were dynamic and dramatic, both using and breaking the rules of Classical architecture. Facades were full of movement, columns were twisted, and ground plans were composed of curves and ovals. Inside, painted ceilings seem to open to the sky, and hidden windows illumined domes and altars. All these designs conveyed meanings and emotions, such as the great curved colonnades outside St Peter's in Rome, representing the Church's embrace, or the repeated elements on the endless facades of Baroque palaces, signalling absolute power.

Baroque architecture was pioneered in papal Rome by Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and Francesco Borromini (1599–1667). The new style was vigorous and imaginative but always controlled. Borromini's oval ground plans were based on a dynamic geometry of triangles and circles: the same geometry that lay behind the city plans of Baroque Rome.

Marvellous materials

A fascination with physical materials was central to the Baroque style. Virtuoso art objects made of rare and precious substances had long been valued and kept in special rooms or cabinets, alongside natural history specimens, scientific instruments, books, documents and works of art. However during the Baroque period the birth of modern science and the opening up of the world beyond Europe brought an increasingly serious interest in the nature and meaning of these exotic materials.

Ivory-turning using a special lathe was a hobby among princes, allowing them to create objects for their display cabinets using a precious material. This cup, however, was made by the professional court ivory turner and teacher to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando de' Medici. The inscription boasts that the whole piece was turned on a machine, which was unusual.

Rarities such as East Asian porcelain and lacquer became fashionable and were imitated in Europe. Some of the rarest materials were believed to have the very useful capacity to detect poison, among them the newly invented ruby glass (containing real gold) and rhinoceros horn, which also had the sexual connotations it still carries in some cultures today.

This Meissen coffee pot was made from red stoneware but painted in lacquer colours over a black glaze to imitate Japanese lacquer. The decoration is probably based on Chinese woodcuts or European pattern books of 'japanning'. Primarily ornamental, these black-glazed wares were first sold to promote Saxony's industries and luxury goods. Later they were displayed in Augustus the Strong's 'Japanese Palace'.