Baroque and Rococo: The Fusion of Fashion and Interior Design

This is Professor Lynn Porter from Fairfield University, and this is my lecture on Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Décor. These are the various things that I'm going to talk about in this lecture. First, where we are and when we are, and then I'm going to break down Baroque and Rococo very similarly. We're going to look at the concepts and how those concepts are expressed in the designs themselves. And then for Baroque, we're going to look at several buildings, one in France, one in Italy, that are iconic Baroque pieces, as well as some Baroque furniture. And then the same thing for Rococo. Once we get concepts and characteristics out of the way, we're going to take a close look at an iconic building in France, and then some furniture. As to where we are in the world, for the Baroque portion of this lecture, we're going to look at the Italian Baroque, focused mostly in Rome, and then the French Baroque under Louis XIV. Then after that, we're going to look at the Rococo style, and that is an exclusively French style that comes after Baroque. So there you go, those are the formal dates of these various periods, design periods. So yes, Baroque comes before Rococo in the whole thing. It starts pretty much in Rome, moves into France, develops into a unique French look, and then that develops into the Rococo. So let's start by taking a look at Baroque. This style gets its name from irregularly shaped pearls. These pearls, by their very nature, are interestingly shaped, aren't they? These literally are called Baroque pearls, and that is the name that has subsequently been attached to the design style. What are the basic concepts that underpin the Baroque look? First of all, this is following the Renaissance, so we're continuing to awe and inspire. This is a style that's all about looking splendorous and magnificent, and that reflects this ever-expanding understanding of the universe. As more and more scientific discoveries are being made in the Renaissance and beyond, our understanding of the universe is shifting, and so the design style is shifting. Visually, however, this means we have a decline from the strict classicism of the Renaissance, and we lean more into the richness of the material and the colors and surface decoration. So this is a very rich, highly ornamented decorative style. And maybe for the first time, we now see the idea of unity coming through with a structure where the interior and the exterior are integrated together. So instead of looking like one thing on the outside of a building and another thing on the inside, now we're treating both the interior and the exterior as an entire unit. Now in Italy, all of these ideas are about the glory of the church. It's all about being awed and inspired by the church, whereas in France, all of these ideas are seeking to create a sense of awe, but it's all about Louis XIV and his absolute power. He, of course, was known as the Sun King. So starting with the Italian look, if we're looking at the characteristics of the style, we're going to see things that are monumental in scale. We're going to see some massive structures, but all of them are going to have an emphasis on the center of the visual composition. But we are going to see some really dynamic ground plans. We're no longer stuck within a rectangle, and the facades and the interior walls may even curve or undulate like a snake, move back and forth. And all of this creates a sense of movement and energy that's a really dynamic style. We're also going to see some sharp contrasts between light and dark, but we're also going to see our old friends from the classical style. So there's going to be classical details and exuberant carving. That's what all of the writings say. It's exuberant, which means it's really richly, richly ornamented and uses absolutely sumptuous materials, just gorgeous, yummy stuff. And all of it works together, the structure of the building, the sculpture on the building, and the painting within the building. All of those unite to create this really strong, dramatic, theatrical sense. Baroque is a very highly decorated and highly dramatic look. The two rock stars in Italy for this period are Bernini and Borromini, and they were contemporaries, but they both had a slightly different point of view. Bernini's look is very classical, but he was an amazing sculptor. So he was uniting the idea of the architecture and the painting and the sculpture, whereas Borromini was actually starting to bend the style and become more revolutionary. And it was his highly plastic, undulating walls with these complex plans that really kind of pushed the boundaries of what is Baroque. Let me show you what I'm talking about. So this is a Borromini building. This is San Carlo alla Quattro Fontana in Rome. And the Quattro Fontana is literally, it is a crossroads. And on the four building corners that face each other at this crossroad, there is an iconic fountain. It's the corner of four fountains, basically. And in fact, you can see one here, right there. That is one of the fountains. But I'm not here to talk about the fountain. I'm going to talk about the church behind the fountain. I want to talk about this structure. What is going on there? Here we are. This is the front entrance to this church. You see what I mean about undulating? We have something pretty darn amazing going on here, don't we? But we also have a lot of motifs that we have seen for a very long time. We have these large columns with their decorated tops. We have columns holding up lintels. But we have this kind of plastic movement to the front of the building. Here you see that lintel from another angle. You see how it really moves in and out. So it automatically just becomes more dramatic, more exciting than a straight lintel, doesn't it? I wonder how this plays out inside the building. Let's go in. Here we are facing the altar inside this church. And there's quite a few classical elements, aren't there? There are those columns with their beautiful capitals and their nice bases. We have these niches over the doors left and right. It feels kind of like it's using a lot of those Renaissance traits, doesn't it? But then when you tilt your head back and look up, you see this. Oh, wow. That undulating movement from the outside of the facade is throughout the entire structure. And remember I said one of the iconic design characteristics is complex ground plans. Here we are looking up into that dome, and that complex shape is actually the shape of the building itself. So it carries from the foundation all the way up to the very top of the dome. And I do want to point out, this is the first time we've seen an elliptical dome as opposed to a circular dome. What an amazing shape for this space. We've not seen a single church ever that has a shape like this. And when we move in closer and take a look at that dome, we see how that centerpiece that is called the lantern, that central bright area, it has the symbol of the Trinity, that triangular angel symbol there, and it's also the brightest area. So the lantern is that little top of the dome that lets light filter down, but it also symbolically connects the idea of light with the divine. And when we take a close look at the coffering inside the dome, you realize it's octagons and crosses and hexagons. So these are all mathematical shapes. These are shapes that are very rational, but now they're working together in this weird interlocking way to form this amazing whole. When we look at the building in plan view, you can see all of the details. Down here at the bottom is the front of the building, and we see that undulating front that we saw when we were standing in the street out in front, right? So you see that. And then, of course, this major shape here we were just looking up into the dome, but that is also the shape of the interior of the church. That's what I'm trying to get to here. So it's unusual. It is incredibly complex, but it is also highly rational, which means you can swing these arcs with a straight edge and a compass. So if you start with this shape here, number one, okay, that's relatively easy to swing. In fact, that is an equilateral triangle there. That's an incredibly rational shape. And then for number two, now we can put an ellipse inside of it. There is a central ellipse built within our lozenge shape, and then just squared off around that. Easy peasy. That's number four. And then based on that, you can swing an arc on each end, straighten out the sides, swing an arc here on the sides, and all of a sudden, you go from a very simple equilateral triangle to this bizarre and wonderful shape that's really complex, but it's all very, very rational geometry. So there we have it side by side. There's the drawing with all of the gray lines of how you would have to swing all the arcs to get to that shape, and then looking back up into the dome of this amazing structure, right? So it's a very complex, but nothing is based on a freehand curve. Everything is using the mechanical tools of the Renaissance. And when I say tool, mechanical tool, I mean a compass and a ruler and an inventive mind. So that's what was going on in Italy. Let's take a look at France. Remember, now it's all about glory to the sun king. So in some ways, what was going on in France was the same as what's going on in Italy. You have projects that are all about luxury and grandeur. You have this theatrical contrast between lights and darks, both in the materials and in the light and dark shadows that the building creates. There is this idea that the architecture and the sculpture and the painting is unified to create a dynamic drama sense to the whole thing. You also have your classical ideas and that exuberant carving and these glorious materials. But it's different from Italy in that this Italian exuberance and the sense of excess that we see in Italy is rejected, and it's going back to these principles of reason and restraint and order and formality. So in France, it was more formal than what's going on in Italy. And you definitely do not see any of that curving walls, undulating stuff. That is an Italian idea, not a French idea. The iconic building of the French Baroque is the Palace of Versailles. And this is where Louis XIV had relocated the royal court from Paris to Versailles in the late 1600s. And it was the seat of the royal power until the late 1700s, French Revolution, off with their heads, all of that stuff. This palace was phenomenally expensive, extravagantly expensive. But it also helped establish the idea that the French are the tastemakers, that if it comes from France, there's just a certain something-something style about it that makes it particularly glorious. And the Palace of Versailles as a building was a symbol of that system of absolute monarchy, as well as the excesses that led to the French Revolution. So let's take a look at what we're talking about here. Here you have a map from the middle of the 1700s with the plan of Versailles, as well as the parks and gardens and everything associated with it. And you can see how it is this massive plan of assorted things broken up pretty much on some form of a geometric basis. And if you're wondering, what am I looking at? The actual building is here, in the darkest lines in there, this kind of U-shaped structure here. That is the actual palace. The rest of all of these amazing things are gardens and roads and assorted structures. Taking a closer look at the palace itself, we have a central area that is basically for royalty. And then there is a north wing on this side and a south wing on this side that were added on to the structure. And if you look at it from the air, you see these major roads leading directly down into the front of this building. And looking at it the other way, looking behind the building, you see this series of very formal gardens and wild gardens and everything broken up in all those beautiful ways. So here we're actually seeing some of the gardens and pools and more formal gardens and formal pools. Everything has been paid attention to. It's not like, oh yeah, we have a big meadow behind the house. No, every square inch of this massive property has been formally arranged into a very pleasing composition. There are two large pools between the royal section of this house and all of those gardens. And so this is one of those pools. And I love this sculpture. You see how it feels very much like something out of ancient Rome, doesn't it? And here is a view from the other pool looking toward the royal part of the structure. Again, with a very Roman god feeling. This feels like Bacchus, doesn't it? So let's take a look at the building itself. Now this is the garden facade. This is the side that faces those two large pools I just showed you. But we have some superimposed orders going on here, with the ground floor having that rusticated stone wall with that Roman arcade in it. Above that, on the first floor, you have an arcade of windows, but they're separated by pilasters. There's a pilaster between each column. And then that central porch area that has the columns attached to it, you can actually walk out onto that area. And then on the top floor, you have square windows, but again, they're separated by classical pilasters. So there's a lot of very classical, almost Renaissance ideas going on in this structure. And on the very top, we have a flat roof, but the profile has a lot of protrusions, right? You have the balustrade. Your balustrade is just that railing. And then you have these assorted trophies in between. There's a trophy and there's a trophy. And then you have these wonderful sculptures jutting up over the top. So it's a little bit like what we were seeing with the Elizabethan prodigy houses, where we have a flat line, but we have projections above that line to make a more interesting total skyline to the building. This doesn't feel at all like that Italian church with the undulating walls, does it? Let's take a look at the other side of the building. Here we are in the marble courtyard. This is a U-shaped courtyard around this amazing black and white marble tiled floor. Yeah, black and white marble. Kind of subtle, isn't it? Highly polished, very, very slick, very rich. Again, that whole light and dark thing about the Baroque comes out really strongly in this building. Looking more closely at the front door, basically, of the structure, we see that the three doors at the center are separated by those red marble columns set up on their own pedestals. And those columns hold up this balcony level, so they have that strong lintel. And this balcony level has a wrought iron balcony rail, but it's gilded. That means it's been covered with gold. Of course, you have to have busts of Roman emperors. And again, we have some really interesting stuff going on with the overall skyline of the building. So we have this kind of triangle of statuary surrounding this large central clock. It feels very much to me like all of the sculptures within a Greek pediment without the pediment, without the triangle, to encase them, right? So this is hearkening back to more classical ideas. In fact, this entire building feels much more like an uber-Renaissance building as opposed to anything Italian Baroque. And looking at the top, you have this mansard roof, which is that really steep French roof. And again, these projections, you have the dormer windows with that gilded facade to it, and the really richly carved sculptures forming that interesting skyline shape. So again, all of the balustrade and the trophies and the sculptures that we saw on the back of the building, they're repeated here on the front of the building. Everything tends to be really heavily, heavily decorated, heavily ornamented. That is the Baroqueness here. It's the heavy ornamentation. Let's see what's going on inside. Here we are in the Mars Salon, which is part of the King's Apartments in the building. And you see how there's all of these opportunities taken to decorate. Everything is richly gilded, covered with gold, and even the wallpaper is sumptuous and rich and lush. This is a room that features on the ceiling a fresco of the Roman god Mars, the god of war, being escorted. So that's why it's called the Mars Salon. But you see what I mean about grandeur and luxury and exuberant carving? Everything that's carved is really, really rich and deep, and these materials are all the richest possible that you could find in the world. Here we are in the Hercules Salon that is dedicated to the Roman demigod Hercules. And again, you see you have these classical details. I mean, we have those big, chunky, beautiful square pilasters holding up a really rich lintel with those corbels, those brackets built into it. We have the semicircular arch. So there's all of these very, very Roman classical ideals. But you also have this light and darkness, and some of it is you used a dark marble next to a light marble, and some of it is the way the windows were arranged to literally have light streaming into these rooms and contrast that with some of the darker areas in the architecture. And you can see how there's windows either side that create this gash of light across the front of this photograph, but you also have this really rich darkness. So it's that contrast that creates the richness. Here we are in the Salon de la Guerre, or the War Salon, and you see how the architecture and the sculpture and the painting, all of this, create this highly theatrical, highly dramatic space that's all about sumptuousness and richness, and everything is just over-the-top decorated. Of course, the Queen is going to have an amazing bedroom, and here you go. You have these tremendous textiles on the walls. You have so much gold in this room, and when I say gold, I don't mean gold-colored paint. I mean gold woven into the fabric. I mean gold coated on the wood or the stone that forms that railing that is part of that furniture. So this is about as rich as you can get it. Again, looking up, you see those very detailed carvings up inside that ceiling. Everything is about decoration, and here we are in the King's Chamber. Such a quiet, simple place, right? Of course not, right? Look at those walls. Again, you have those amazing tapestries on the walls, but over on the left, over the fireplace, around that fireplace, again, classical pilasters with rightwards. So again, we keep seeing those same shapes over and over and over again, so it's about the surface richness and the real depth of the carving, and oh yeah, amazing materials, but I haven't even shown you the most famous room within this entire building. It's called the Hall of Mirrors. On the left-hand side, you see it's an arcade of 17 windows. Each one of those curved top windows separated by those really dark colored marble pilasters, and on the right side of the room, that rhythm of the windows and pilasters is repeated, but instead of windows, it's 17 separate mirrors, and throughout this long hall, there's numerous crystal chandeliers, and when those are lit, the individual light from each individual candle just gets refracted and bounced around the room and multiplied by the crystal itself, so it literally becomes a room of light, but again, look how dark the materials are. Look at those dark, wonderful maroon marbles against all of this lightness. That contrast is very Baroque. We haven't really looked up much in this building, but we've noticed that all of the ceilings have been highly decorated. Here in the Hall of Mirrors, the ceiling is 30 different scenes of the early reign of Louis XIV. Looking at it from the other end, just for another moment to go, wow, well, I can't top the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, so let's look at some furniture, and I want to point out that the furniture we're seeing has been designed for specific interiors, so now the connection between the piece of furniture and the room itself has been tightened up. We're talking about pieces that are massive in scale but highly dynamic, and it's not all about being comfortable. It's about projecting the sense of richness and opulence. In their basic forms, this furniture we're going to look at is rectilinear, but then the ornamentation gets all curvy on us, sometimes to the excessive curves, and excessive curves, I think you're starting to notice, is a thing about the Baroque, and just as with the architecture we've been looking at, the carvings are bold and rich and richly three-dimensional, and then the surface treatment can include marquetry or inlay with veneers of lots of different exotic woods that are gotten from different parts of the world, so even the wood itself has a certain level of richness, simply because it came from far away. Let's look at some armchairs. These are fantouille, and this is a style of upholstered armchair that has that characteristic opening between the seat and the arm and the seat and the back. It's got that open air space in there, and so while I would say these are basically rectangular forms, look at the left. I mean, good lord, talk about richly ornamented. That's covered with rich curves. That's that curvilinear look, even though the overall shape is pretty rectangular. Here we have two commodes. These are basically cabinets that have been raised up on legs, so they're a really chunky-looking table, but take a look at the top one. It's made out of tortoiseshell and brass over ebony wood, and then the entire thing is engraved and gilded, and then the top is a beautiful piece of marble. The bottom commode is made out of oak and fir in veneers, forming that really beautiful wood detail inlay, and then it's bronze that has been then gilded over top of it, so the whole thing looks like it's encrusted in gold, and then of course with a marble top, so incredibly rich detail, incredibly rich materials. This is not a subtle style. Here we have a writing desk, but I want to point out, if you look closely at it, you realize that the inlay or the marquetry isn't different kinds of wood. On this piece, it's brass and copper and tin and ebony and ivory and mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell and horn. I mean, it's this amazing mix of all of these beautifully rich materials, and I also want to point out on this desk how the legs are scroll-shaped, and then they terminate, they end actually in a scroll-shaped stretcher, so trying to really lean into the curves, we see more curves happening in the furniture than we see happening in the architecture, don't we? But this piece would feel very much at home in any one of those rooms that we were looking at in Versailles. Here is another desk. This is actually a desk that was made for Louis XIV, and this is called a broken desk because the top hinges open to reveal the inner workings of the desk. Let me show you. Here you see it where it's been broken open, and you realize, oh, the front folds down to create a larger writing area, and there you have a beautiful little writing desk. Down here in the right corner, this is just a shot of the lid of the piece itself, so you get a sense that this is a wooden lid, but then it's been covered with tortoiseshell, and then the brass has been worked into it to create, so it's these layers and layers of really sumptuous materials. And here is one more example of the beautiful French Baroque style, just this wonderful table that was made for Louis XIV to go into Versailles. So everything that I've been saying up to this point, I think you could see in this table also. So yeah, that's Baroque. So what's going on with Rococo? The Rococo came after the French Baroque, and this is a uniquely French style. The name itself comes from the word rocaille and the word coquille kind of combined together. We are still before the French Revolution, so this was a time when the royalty and the nobles got pretty hedonistic, got very much into enjoying the fact of pleasure and fantasy and being marvelous and throwing more and more and more fantastical parties. And for the first time, we see women overtly having more influence over a design style. So most of the Rococo fashion was dictated by the mistress of King Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour. So this style is really a reaction to that stiff French formality of the Baroque, and the whole point is to have something novel, have something fantastical for everything to be individual. This is a style that does not model itself on anything that comes from ancient Rome or ancient Greece, and this is the first time since the Renaissance we see a design style not based on the classical look. Its characteristics mostly come about in the interiors, where we find asymmetrical ornamentation, and that is unique. Everything we've seen up to this point has been symmetrical. And everything is very light in scale and in color, but a lot of these curves, so you have this curvilinear look and naturalistic ornament, so ideas drawn from And we still have the idea that the room itself is in unity with the furniture in it, so everything is of a piece. So for our example, we're going to look at the Hotel Soubise in Paris. Now looking at the outside of this building, doesn't it feel very much like the outside of Versailles, the side that faces those ponds on the garden side? So this feels more Baroque, doesn't it? We have the lower level being a little bit more rusticated than the upper level. We see the classical ionic columns up on their pedestals, so it feels like late Renaissance coming into French Baroque. We have that balustrade across the roof line, so decorating that roof line. We see some projections above that roof line, that very steep French roof. All of this feels very Baroque, doesn't it? Now we're still in that same courtyard, but now it's like we're on the top of the building looking toward the front of the courtyard, and you realize it's actually an enclosed courtyard, and you have a real small glimpse of the street through that center opening. So it's closed off from its neighborhood, but again we have these columns on their pedestals holding up this lintel covered with this balustrade on top, right? So this building feels very much like it belongs in the Baroque, but let's go inside. Here we are in the Oval Salon of the Princess, and it feels very different, doesn't it? This is about lightness. This is about asymmetry. This is about glory and color and all of these beautiful curves, and so it's about this highly decorated but light and curvy look. Looking up into the ceiling, you see so it's highly decorated but light and joyful and asymmetrical, and that carries through everything in the room. It's like everything about this room is about pleasure, about enjoying yourself. All of the images have to do with food and sex. Here we are in the same building. Now we're in the Oval Salon of the Prince, so this is a much more masculine room, isn't it? Well, yeah, still, but it's still highly decorated, highly curvilinear, and very, very light. Taking a closer look, I'm particularly intrigued by what's going on up in here. It's like the figures within the white sculpture are kind of splashing out over the edge. I mean, his foot is hanging out down over the edge of this, so it's like everything has to do with just a little bit more. Richly detailed. This detail is very thick, and the protrusions are intense, but still very light, very light. With the Baroque, we were seeing that contrast between light and dark, and with the Rococo, we're just seeing how everything lightened up. Let's see how this plays out with the furniture. We're going to see that we've lost any straight lines that we have, and basically the whole guiding principle seems to be if there can be a curve built into it, build a curve into it, but everything is slender and graceful and drawn out. Nothing is chunky and masculine. This is a very feminine-feeling style, and because this is about pleasure, everything is about comfort, so the pieces are smaller. They're very human-scaled, and you see more upholstery, so it's cushier, and then we also see matched sets becoming more common. So here we have two Louis XV fantouis, and while it's still that same fantoui shape with that airspace between the seat and the arm and the seat and the back, you see how we've lost that rectilinear chunkiness we saw in the Louis XIV look. With Louis XV, everything is curved. Every edge is curved. It curves front and back. It curves in multiple directions, so it's a more feminized, more refined form of the fantouis that we were seeing in the Baroque. Here are some commodes from Louis XV. Again, really rich detail, surface detail with that marquetry as well as the gilding, and a couple more commodes. You see, man, they just went to town with the decoration, and I wanted to show you this corner cupboard here on the left. It literally fits into a corner of a room, and the two doors swing open, so you can see how that the doors themselves have this floral pattern into the inlay, and so that's what marquetry is. You use different pieces of wood that have different colors, but they're inlaid to create these beautiful patterns, and you see how while structurally this corner cupboard is symmetrical, the decoration isn't symmetrical. You see that it's not the same flower pattern on each door, so there's carrying through that feeling of asymmetry even into the furniture. Here are a few desks of the period, the Louis XV desks. The black and white photo and the photo on the bottom, those are both roll-top desks, so that portion literally rolls up into the desk to reveal the writing surface and a bunch of pigeonholes that you can tuck things away into, but again, curved everything. Everything is curved. No more rectangular top to a table. Everything has those beautiful graceful curves, and the curves are natural curves. They're freehand curves. They're like curves that come out of the shape of a leaf or the shape of a vine, which is very different from the curves that we were seeing with the Italian Baroque, with that really funky shaped church. That was very rational because those were compass wings. These are hand-drawn shapes that come from nature, and here we have a couple console tables. The console tables are designed to literally sit up against a wall, so again, a beautiful surface, but man, the legs on these just go to town with the curves. Again, highly decorated, incredibly sumptuous, an obscene use of wealth and an obscene display of wealth. Of course, everything we're looking at here is the 1% of the 1%, and is it any wonder that the 99% pushed back in the French Revolution? I don't think so. So, that's what I wanted to share with you today about both the Baroque and the Rococo. Thank you for your time.