Baroque Rome

Baroque Rome names the century and a half, roughly 1585 to 1700, in which successive popes rebuilt the city as the capital of a reasserted Catholic Church. The campaign was funded by papal families whose fortunes rose with each election, and its architects worked in a city where the ancient past was not a memory but standing masonry. Ruins supplied models, materials, and sites.

The theoretical foundation was Roman. De architectura, written by Vitruvius in the first century BCE, was the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity, and Renaissance editions had codified its account of the orders into a rulebook every architect learned. Baroque architects mastered those rules and then stretched them, breaking pediments, doubling columns, and bending entablatures to produce effects of depth and motion that Vitruvius never described. Borromini went furthest, claiming he relied not on ancient authority but on his own invention; his undulating walls at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, commissioned in 1634 and built from 1638, develop alternating concave and convex geometries he had studied in Roman ruins, including those at Hadrian‘s Villa in Tivoli.

Ancient buildings were also occupied outright. In 1561 Pope Pius IV commissioned Michelangelo, then in his eighties, to convert the vast central hall of the Baths of Diocletian into the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri. Michelangelo left the Roman structure largely intact, and eight monolithic granite columns of the third-century baths, each about 17 meters high, still carry the vault. The Pantheon had been consecrated as a church in 609, and its survival made it the most complete ancient building in the city. That did not protect it: in 1625 Urban VIII had the bronze fittings stripped from its portico, an act that produced the epigram quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini (what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did).

Obelisks became instruments of urban planning. Between 1586 and 1589 the architect Domenico Fontana, working for Sixtus V, raised four Egyptian obelisks that emperors had shipped to Rome centuries earlier, placing them before the major pilgrimage basilicas. The Vatican obelisk, standing since Caligula‘s reign beside the circus where tradition placed Peter’s martyrdom, was moved in 1586 to the center of St Peter’s Square; others followed at San Giovanni in Laterano, Santa Maria Maggiore, and Piazza del Popolo. Fontana also cut new straight streets between them, so that a pilgrim crossing Rome navigated by ancient stone repurposed as Christian signposts.

The same logic shaped Piazza Navona. Innocent X redeveloped it in the 1640s and 1650s, building the Palazzo Pamphilj and giving Borromini the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, all of it laid directly over the Stadium of Domitian, whose first-century outline still fixes the shape of the square. At the center Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers, completed in 1651, carries an obelisk cut in Rome for Domitian in Egyptian style, set on a hollow limestone grotto. Nearby, Palazzo Barberini abandoned the closed Renaissance courtyard for an open H-shaped plan merging the city palace with the suburban villa. Rome had been rebuilt without being replaced.

FURTHER READING

1. Connors, Joseph. Borromini and the Roman oratory: Style and Society. The Architectural History Foundation, 1980.
2. Wittkower, Rudolf, Joseph Connors, and Jennifer Montagu. Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750: Volume 3: Late Baroque and Rococo, 1675–1750. Vol. 3. Yale University Press, 1999.
3. James-Chakraborty, Kathleen. “Baroque Rome.” Architecture since 1400, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, pp. 125–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt9qh39w.13. Accessed 2 Aug. 2026.
4. Heyl, Bernard C. “Meanings of Baroque.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 19, no. 3, 1961, pp. 275–87. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/428070. Accessed 2 Aug. 2026.
5. Karmon, David. The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome. Oxford University Press, 2011.