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 [...]

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 - [...]

The Sagrada Familia involved Gaudi throughout his entire life, and in it he expressed his intellectual ideas as well as his religious beliefs, which became more and more mystical as he aged. At the same time, the Sagrada Familia represents the extreme result of an art nouveau interpretation of the Gothic style. Work began on [...]

Early in the 18th century Tsar Peter the Great founded the city of St Petersburg. Russia was beginning to open itself to Europe, and St Petersburg was the ‘window’ looking in that direction. The city took on a Western style, brought there and applied by Italian architects and an international collection of artists. Among the [...]

Arriving late in Italy, modernist trends were first accepted only by the restricted group of decorative artists - designers, furniture manufacturers, ceramists - active within the orbit of the magazine Emporium or in the arts and crafts society Aemilia Ars. The great exposition of decorative and modern art held in Turin in 1902 marked [...]

Architecture provides shelter and facilitates many different human activities. It also expresses cultural values and it is as champions of traditional values that classical architects returned to the international arena in the late 1970s and 1980s, Although classicism had never entirely disappeared from the architectural scene, it had clearly receded in importance after World War [...]

The rigid classicism of the Escorial, the spirituality of the Counter-Reformation, and the centralization of the state provided the themes for Spanish architecture throughout the 17th century. So it was that classical harmony gradually gave way to a more accentuated hierarchy of individual elements thanks to the sculptural elaboration of walls, the use of a [...]

Throughout the middle decades of the 19th century architects lacked a clear view of their role in the history of architecture. Nevertheless, William Butterfield and G. E. Street in England built magnificent urban churches quite unlike anything previously known; Alexander Thomson in Scotland and Henri Labrouste in France both produced masterworks of genuinely urban architecture [...]

By the mid-1970s a wide dissatisfaction had grown up with “Modern” architecture, which began to be viewed as an arrogant imposition of inadequate environmental ideas upon society. Its basic ideals were seriously questioned and eventually its “death” was recorded. It was soon followed by the growth of a fashionable “Post-Modernism” invented by a number of [...]

As the Roman Empire distintegrated amid war and rebellion, living standards in western Europe declined precipitously, and so did the population ? to a third of what it had been. Poverty and lawlessness were universal. Marauding pirates converged on the West from Africa, Scandinavia and the Russian Steppes, pillaging deep into the European heartland. The [...]