The Bohemian late baroque was among the richest and most original artistic periods in the history of 18th-century Europe. The initial predominance of Italian taste, French stylistic elements, and the proximity of Vienna resulted in a harmonious and heterogeneous blend of forms that was unique in Europe. Prague again rose to rank among the most [...]

James Wyatt, Fonthill Abbey, 1795-1807
Designed and built for the eccentric William Beckford, Fonthill Abbey had an enormous cruciform plan with a panoramic gallery more than 100 metres long, some of it presented in the state of ruin, the rest put to domestic uses Wyatt created a visionary delirium that proved, however, to be structurally weak [...]

The reworkings of urban areas that took place during the 17th century were almost always related to overall systems of defensive fortifications, and these systems evolved steadily in terms of form and type. In response to the increased power of artillery, bastions became lower and wider, and ditches and moats were introduced on such a [...]

In England, in the second half of the 18th century, the term Gothic was freed of the negative connotations that had been attached to it by Renaissance art critics. This was a result of the early romantic infatuation with the Middle Ages, which saw medieval art as an expression of the national spirit; it was [...]

Around 1650, baroque forms began to appear in Latin America, where they were applied atop the stylistic stratifications deposited by Spanish domination dating back to the early 16th century. There were also contributions from local traditions and hybrid forms that resulted from crosses. Despite the reception of the treatises by Vignola and Serlio over the [...]

In 1530 Portugal began a radical rejection of the decorative wealth of the Manueline style, turning instead to a minimalist aesthetic with roots in military architecture, which for quite some time had become a status symbol in Portugal, one of Europe’s leading colonial powers.
So it was that by the time Philip II of Spain assumed [...]

As historicist styles spread, European architecture began showing the tendency to employ decorative and structural elements drawn from the art and architecture of the East. In the period between the English expansion in India during the first half of the 18th century and the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, what had initially been idle [...]

`Every age has left a sign of itself in an architectural style; why has ours not worked out its own style?’ With these words in 1826 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, returning from a trip to England, stated his aim to make himself the bearer of a new national style, of an architectural culture destined to express [...]

Structural engineering applied to the making of bridges is one of the fields in which the application of the new construction technologies and materials introduced over the course of the 19th century produced significant changes.
The Coalbrookdale Bridge over the Severn River in England - built in 1779 to a design by Abraham Darby and John [...]

What most distinguishes Italian neo-classicism is its lack of a unitary character, a result of Italy’s political fragmentation, the absence of a central state, and its domination by foreign powers. Even so, all of the European neo-classical movements drew their inspi - ration from Italy. Its many works of classical Greek and Roman art - [...]