For religious buildings, the architecture of the Baroque period sought to become a guiding principle for a journey of faith through the very form of the construction and its ornaments. The façade features the characteristic elements of the sacred building and reveals its symbolic contents in its ...

Baroque creativity develops in the central part of the elevation. The long balconies of the piano nobile (main floor) are embellished by elegant wrought iron railings with a classic round-bottomed shape; the cornices of the large windows are enriched by sculptures and allegories that recall abunda...

The stylistic features of Baroque civic architecture are distinguished from religious architecture by the sobriety of the layout and the rigid compositional lines of the façades. In most recurring typologies, the sculptural form of the façade composition is abandoned, with the elevation framing ...

Every desire for renewal hides a period of transition. Continuity and innovation interacted in Sicily, only reaching the most eloquent and authentic expression of Baroque in the late 1670s. The widespread commitment of the religious orders to educate a modern generation of artists in the cultural a...

Baroque encouraged a new view of the world where reality and fiction animated the art of painting, sculpture and architecture before merging into unexpected scenic sights that roused wonder and amazement. The anthropocentric doctrines of the Renaissance, accompanied by a static view of society, we...

In a report about the earthquake of 11 January 1693 the Bishop of Syracuse described a dramatic sight: "The sun as obscured, the air, blackened and turbid, so for the dark and bleeding clouds, as well as the dense dust of the buildings that exhaled from the fall of the structures." According to th...

Baroque was born and developed in a historical period worn out by the conflicts between the Catholic Counter-Reformation and Protestantism that led to the Thirty Years' War, a scene of blood and death in Europe. With the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, freedom of worship was approved for the three ma...

Baroque is a particular cultural and artistic period that began in Rome in the early 17th century before spreading across Europe, in various forms, in the second half of the century. The negative connotation attributed to Baroque by 18th-century critics, who also coined the term, was aimed at artist...