What Is The Baroque Revival?

The Baroque revival is the nineteenth century return to the look of seventeenth century baroque architecture, sculpture, and ornament. It started in France in the 1850s, reached its loudest moment with Charles Garnier's Paris Opera (1861-1875), spread to the rest of Europe and the United States, and lasted until roughly 1914. In Britain the late phase of the Baroque revival is called Edwardian Baroque. In wallpaper and textile design it shows up as oversized scrolling acanthus, swags, cartouches, and the heavy ribbon-tied florals that fill the cover plates of high-Victorian pattern books.

This guide explains what the Baroque revival is, how it grew out of the original Baroque period, why it picked up around 1850 and faded after the First World War, the architects who led it, the buildings most often cited as the great examples, and how the same ornament tradition fed wallpaper, textile, and decorative pattern design.

The short answer: what is the Baroque revival?

The Baroque revival is the architectural and decorative movement of roughly 1850 to 1914 that revived the ornate sculptural look of the original Baroque period (about 1600 to 1750). Also called Neo-Baroque, the revival reached the public through major civic and theatrical commissions: opera houses, city halls, courts of law, public libraries, parliament buildings, and embassy buildings on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain its late phase is called Edwardian Baroque architecture and is associated with the architects John Belcher, Aston Webb, and Edwin Cooper. Famous examples include the Palais Garnier in Paris (1875), Belfast City Hall (1906), Cardiff City Hall (1906), the Royal Insurance Building in Liverpool (1903), and the Library of Congress in Washington (1897).

What was the original Baroque?

To understand the revival, the original is the starting point. The Baroque period in European architecture ran from about 1600 to 1750. It began in Rome with the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona and spread out from there. The look was high drama: deep curves, theatrical scale, twisted columns, broken pediments, gilded interiors, complex floor plans, dynamic sculpture, and a wholly different idea of grandeur from the calm symmetry of the Renaissance.

The most famous original Baroque buildings include St Peter's Square in Rome (Bernini, 1656-1667), the Palace of Versailles (Louis Le Vau, 1668-1684), Karlskirche in Vienna (Fischer von Erlach, 1716-1737), Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire (Vanbrugh, 1705-1722), and the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich in London (Christopher Wren, 1696-1712). These are the buildings the revival looked back to.

By the second half of the eighteenth century the Baroque had given way to Neoclassicism, which preferred the calm restraint of ancient Greece and Rome over the Baroque's emotion and grandeur. Neoclassical architecture dominated public building from about 1760 until the 1830s.

Why the Baroque revival started around 1850

By the middle of the nineteenth century, after eighty years of strict Neoclassical taste, two things created an opening for the Baroque to come back. First: civic and commercial wealth was outgrowing what plain Neoclassical façades could express. The new industrial cities of Britain, France, and Germany wanted city halls, opera houses, and railway stations that looked as rich as the new bourgeoisie. Second: the Gothic Revival of the 1830s and 1840s had broken the Neoclassical monopoly on serious architecture. If architects could revive medieval Gothic, they could revive Baroque too.

The first major Baroque revival commission was Charles Garnier's Paris Opera. Garnier won the competition for the new opera house in 1860. The building was opened in 1875. Its facade combines Baroque sculpture (paired columns, allegorical figures, a colored marble veneer) with the Second Empire taste of Napoleon III's Paris. The Palais Garnier became the building everyone looking for an opera house, a city hall, or a parliament built in the next thirty years tried to copy.

Baroque revival architecture and Second Empire architecture

The terms Baroque revival architecture and Second Empire architecture overlap. Second Empire is the French label, named after the reign of Napoleon III (1852-1870). Second Empire buildings share the heavy mansard roofs, double-storey colonnades, paired columns, and sculptural detailing of Baroque revival but emphasise the French roots: the new Louvre wing (Lefuel and Visconti, 1852-1857), the Hôtel de Ville at Tours, the Bibliothèque nationale extensions. Both terms describe the same general look from different national starting points.

In the United States, the Second Empire style spread quickly after the Civil War. Philadelphia City Hall (John McArthur Jr, 1872-1901) and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington DC (Alfred Mullett, 1871-1888) are the largest American Second Empire commissions. In Britain the term Second Empire is less used; British architects of the period preferred the label Baroque or Free Classical.

Edwardian Baroque architecture in Britain

The British branch of the Baroque revival has its own label: Edwardian Baroque. The style flourished from roughly 1895 to 1914, taking its name from the reign of King Edward VII (1901-1910). Edwardian Baroque is more restrained than the French Second Empire but uses the same vocabulary: rusticated lower walls, giant Corinthian columns, deep cornices, square towers with steep roofs, allegorical sculpture, copper domes.

The leading Edwardian Baroque architects were John Belcher (Institute of Chartered Accountants, London, 1888-1893), Aston Webb (Admiralty Arch in London, 1908-1912, and the Victoria and Albert Museum façade, 1899-1909), Ralph Knott (London County Hall, started 1908), Brumwell Thomas (Belfast City Hall, 1898-1906), and Edwin Alfred Rickards (Cardiff City Hall, 1898-1906, with Henry Vaughan Lanchester and James Stewart).

Notable examples of Baroque revival architecture in Britain include Belfast City Hall (1906); Cardiff City Hall and the Welsh National Museum (1906); the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster (1911); the Royal Insurance Building, Liverpool (1903); Liverpool's Cunard Building (1916); the Old Bailey in London (1907); Admiralty Arch (1912); and County Hall, London (built 1908-1922).

Baroque revival in the United States and Beaux-Arts architecture

The American branch of the late nineteenth century Baroque revival is mostly called Beaux-Arts architecture, after the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where many American architects trained. Beaux-Arts shares the Baroque revival's heavy sculpture, paired columns, allegorical figures, and grand staircases, but is less twisted and more academic in its rules.

The Library of Congress in Washington (Smithmeyer and Pelz, 1873-1897) is the largest American Beaux-Arts building and the best-known American example of the Baroque revival period. Other major American Beaux-Arts buildings include Grand Central Terminal in New York (1913), the New York Public Library (Carrère and Hastings, 1911), San Francisco City Hall (Bakewell and Brown, 1915), and the Detroit Public Library (Cass Gilbert, 1921).

Baroque revival in pattern: wallpaper, textile, and decorative ornament

The Baroque revival was not only an architectural movement. Its ornament tradition fed wallpaper, textile, and decorative pattern design throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Baroque revival look in pattern design is built on heavy scrolling acanthus leaves, oversized florals tied with ribbons or grouped in baskets, classical urns, cartouches (oval ornamental frames), swags of fruit and flowers, and gilded grounds. The pattern is symmetrical in repeat and theatrical at full scale. The color favours deep crimson and gold, ivory and chocolate, dark green and gold.

French wallpaper firms, especially Zuber and Cie of Rixheim in Alsace and Jules Desfossé in Paris, produced the most ambitious Baroque revival wallpapers of the mid-nineteenth century. The English firms Cowtan and Tout, Cole and Son, Sanderson, and Jeffrey and Co (the firm that printed William Morris's wallpapers) also produced extensive Baroque revival patterns. Many of the heavy gilded papers used in late Victorian country house dining rooms and London club rooms are Baroque revival in design.

William Morris's Acanthus wallpaper of 1875 sits on the edge of this tradition: drawn from the same acanthus motif the Baroque used, but flattened, hand-block printed, and stripped of the heavy gilding. The Morris pattern reads as a quieter Arts and Crafts version of the Baroque revival rhythm.

The Baroque revival period and its end

The Baroque revival period runs roughly from 1850 to 1914. The exact end is hard to fix. The First World War interrupted nearly every public building project under way and the spirit of the postwar 1920s was hostile to the heavy ornament the Baroque revival had favoured. By 1925 the more austere stripped classical and the new Art Deco had taken over the kind of civic commission the Baroque revival had previously won. A handful of Baroque revival buildings were finished in the 1920s (Liverpool's Cunard Building, the Royal Insurance Building extensions) but no new big Baroque revival commissions were given after the war.

The interior decorative tradition lasted longer. Heavy scrolling Baroque revival wallpapers were standard in middle-class formal rooms in Britain until the late 1930s and remained on the catalogues of major wallpaper firms until the 1960s. The Baroque revival look came back in fashion in the 1980s, in interior design and in the maximalist pattern revivals of the 2000s and the present day.

Notable examples of Baroque revival architecture worldwide

• Paris: the Palais Garnier (Opéra Garnier, Charles Garnier, 1875); the Sacré-Cœur basilica (Paul Abadie, 1873-1914, in a Romano-Byzantine-Baroque mix).
• Vienna: the Burgtheater (Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer, 1888); the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Semper and von Hasenauer, 1891); the Naturhistorisches Museum (Semper and von Hasenauer, 1889).
• Berlin: the Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom, Julius Raschdorff, 1905); the Reichstag (Paul Wallot, 1894); the Bode Museum (Ernst Eberhard von Ihne, 1904).
• Brussels: the Palais de Justice (Joseph Poelaert, 1883), the largest building of the nineteenth century in Europe by volume.
• Rome: the Vittoriano monument to Vittorio Emanuele II (Giuseppe Sacconi, 1885-1925).
• London: the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster (1911); Admiralty Arch (1912); the Old Bailey (1907); the County Hall (1908-1922); the Cunard Building, Liverpool (1916).
• Washington: the Library of Congress (1897); the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (1888).
• Belfast and Cardiff: Belfast City Hall (1906) and Cardiff City Hall (1906).

How does Baroque differ from Rococo and Neoclassicism?

Baroque (1600-1750) is dramatic, sculptural, heavy, theatrical, and Catholic in its first decades. Rococo (1730-1770) is later and lighter, with pastel colors, shell-and-scroll motifs, and asymmetry. Neoclassicism (1760-1830) is the reaction against both: calm, symmetrical, lean, and grounded in ancient Greek and Roman antiquity. Baroque revival, the nineteenth century movement, looks back to Baroque and partly to Rococo, but not to Neoclassicism, which it usually treats as the ancestor it wants to overthrow.

Frequently asked questions

What is Baroque revival?

The Baroque revival is the architectural and decorative movement of about 1850 to 1914 that returned to the look of seventeenth and early eighteenth century Baroque architecture. Its other names are Neo-Baroque, Second Empire (in France), and Edwardian Baroque (in Britain). Famous examples include the Palais Garnier in Paris (1875), Belfast City Hall (1906), the Royal Insurance Building in Liverpool (1903), and the Library of Congress in Washington (1897).

What does Baroque actually mean?

The word Baroque originally meant an irregular pearl in Portuguese (barroco). It was applied as a critical insult to seventeenth century architecture and decorative art in the eighteenth century, then accepted as a neutral period label in the nineteenth century. Today Baroque names the European artistic style of the period from roughly 1600 to 1750.

Which country is considered the birthplace of Baroque architecture?

Italy, specifically Rome. The original Baroque architecture grew out of the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona in Rome in the early seventeenth century, and spread from there to France, Austria, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and the colonial Americas.

Is Mozart Baroque or Rococo?

Neither. Mozart (1756-1791) is a Classical period composer. The Baroque period in music ends conventionally with the death of Bach in 1750, six years before Mozart was born. Rococo is a visual art and decorative term not commonly used for music. The musical equivalent of decorative Rococo is sometimes called the Galant style.

What is the difference between Baroque and Baroque revival?

Baroque is the original European period of about 1600 to 1750. Baroque revival is the later nineteenth and early twentieth century movement that revived the Baroque look in new architecture, sculpture, and pattern. The two are two centuries apart.

What are some examples of Baroque revival architecture in the United States?

The Library of Congress in Washington (1897), the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington (1888), Philadelphia City Hall (1901), San Francisco City Hall (1915), the New York Public Library (1911), and Grand Central Terminal in New York (1913) are the largest and best-known American examples, usually classified together as Beaux-Arts architecture.

Is Baroque revival the same as Edwardian Baroque?

Edwardian Baroque is the British branch of the Baroque revival, dating from roughly 1895 to 1914 and named after King Edward VII. Famous Edwardian Baroque buildings include Belfast City Hall (1906), Cardiff City Hall (1906), Admiralty Arch (1912), the Old Bailey (1907), and the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster (1911).

Sources

• Victoria and Albert Museum, Baroque style guide
• Historic England, listings for Edwardian Baroque buildings
• Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building (visitor information)
• Palais Garnier, visitor information
• Royal Institute of British Architects, history of British architecture