Taking the Sting out of the Baroque

Unlike the notable impact on modernist architects of Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949), there is very little recognition of the importance and influence on architects and other readers of Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750, his book on the Italian baroque commissioned by Nikolaus Pevsner for the hugely influential Pelican History of Art and published in 1958. ¹ Yet within its field of academic art history, Wittkower’s work quickly became the “Bible of the Baroque” and because, by the time of its publication, he had moved from London to New York, this extraordinary scholar was able to set as the subject of numerous doctoral dissertations all the unanswered questions about the plethora of secondary figures he had listed in his footnotes but was unable himself to research further. This alone ensured the work’s decisive influence over succeeding generations. ²