Transformations: Baroque and Rococo in the age of absolutism and the Church Triumphant

Unprecedented in scope – like its companion volume on the High Renaissance, Mannerism – this sixth volume in the Architecture in Context series traces the development of architecture and decoration in the 17th and early 18th centuries – particularly the transformation of rationalist Classical ideals into the emotive, highly theatrical style known as Baroque and the further development away from architectonic principles to the free-ranging decorative style known as Rococo.

It begins with an outline of the politics of Absolutism and its opposite over the century from the Thirty Years’ War to the War of the Austrian Succession: this is illustrated with images largely chosen from the major artists of the day; a supplementary introduction outlines the cross-currents of painting in the early Baroque era. The first substantive section deals with the seminal masters active in Rome – Maderno, Cortona, Borromini and Bernini – and their contemporaries there, in Venice and in Piedmont. The second section deals with the seminal French masters – above all François Mansart, Louis Le Vau, Andre Le Nôtre, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and the latter’s followers who developed the Rococo style in the domestic field. The rest of the book is divided into three large sections: the Protestant North – the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Britain; the Divided Centre – the Catholic powers of central Europe and southern Germany, the Protestants of northern Germany and the Orthodox Russians; the Catholic South – the Iberian kingdoms and their dominions in southern Italy and the Americas.

Christopher Tadgell taught architectural history for almost thirty years before devoting himself full-time to writing and research, travelling the world to see and photograph buildings from every tradition and period.

Born in Sydney, he studied art history at the Courtauld Institute in London. In 1974 he was awarded his PhD for a thesis on the Neoclassical architectural theorist, Ange-Jacques Gabriel. He subsequently taught in London and at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in Canterbury, with interludes as F.L. Morgan Professor of Architectural Design at the University of Louisville and as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has lectured at academic institutions around the world, including the universities of Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and Cornell, the Graham Foundation in Chicago, and Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute in the UK. He is a Trustee of the World Monuments Fund, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of both the British and American Societies of Architectural Historians.

His The History of Architecture in India (1990, several reprints, Phaidon) is the definitive one-volume account of the architecture of the subcontinent, while many publications on French architecture include the standard account in Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration (ed. Blunt, 1978, Elek). He has contributed many articles on Indian and French architecture to The Grove Dictionary of Art and other major reference books.