Sicilian Baroque

Sicilian Baroque is the distinctive form of Baroque architecture which evolved on the island of Sicily, off the southern coast of Italy, in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was part of the Spanish Empire. The style is recognizable not only by its typical Baroque curves and flourishes, but also by its grinning masks and putti and a particular flamboyance that has given Sicily a unique architectural identity.

The Sicilian Baroque style came to fruition during a major surge of rebuilding following the massive earthquake in 1693. Previously, the Baroque style had been used on the island in a naïve and parochial manner, having evolved from hybrid native architecture rather than being derived from the great Baroque architects of Rome. After the earthquake, local architects, many of them trained in Rome, were given plentiful opportunities to recreate the more sophisticated Baroque architecture that had become popular in mainland Italy; the work of these local architects — and the new genre of architectural engravings that they pioneered — inspired more local architects to follow their lead. Around 1730, Sicilian architects had developed a confidence in their use of the Baroque style. Their particular interpretation led to further evolution to a personalised and highly localised art form on the island. From the 1780s onwards, the style was gradually replaced by the newly fashionable neoclassicism.

The highly decorative Sicilian Baroque period lasted barely fifty years, and perfectly reflected the social order of the island at a time when, nominally ruled by Spain, it was in fact governed by a wealthy and often extravagant aristocracy into whose hands ownership of the primarily agricultural economy was highly concentrated. Its Baroque architecture gives the island an architectural character that has lasted into the 21st century.

Characteristics
Baroque architecture is a European phenomenon originating in 17th-century Italy; it is flamboyant and theatrical, and richly ornamented by sculpture and an effect known as chiaroscuro, the strategic use of light and shade on a building created by mass and shadow.

The Baroque style in Sicily was largely confined to buildings erected by the church, and palazzi built as private residences for the Sicilian aristocracy. The earliest examples of this style in Sicily lacked individuality and were typically heavy-handed pastiches of buildings seen by Sicilian visitors to Rome, Florence, and Naples. However, even at this early stage, provincial architects had begun to incorporate certain vernacular features of Sicily’s older architecture. By the middle of the 18th century, when Sicily’s Baroque architecture was noticeably different from that of the mainland, it typically included at least two or three of the following features, coupled with a unique freedom of design that is more difficult to characterise in words.

Grotesque masks and putti, often supporting balconies or decorating various bands of the entablature of a building; these grinning or glaring faces are a relic of Sicilian architecture from before the mid-17th century (Illustrations 2 and 9).
Balconies, often complemented by intricate wrought iron balustrades after 1633 (Illustrations 2 & 9), and by plainer balustrades before that date .
External staircases. Most villas and palazzi were designed for formal entrance by a carriage through an archway in the street façade, leading to a courtyard within. An intricate double staircase would lead from the courtyard to the piano nobile. This would be the palazzo’s principal entrance to the first-floor reception rooms; the symmetrical flights of steps would turn inwards and outwards as many as four times. Owing to the topography of their elevated sites it was often necessary to approach churches by many steps; these steps were often transformed into long straight marble staircases, in themselves decorative architectural features , in the manner of the Spanish Steps in Rome.
Canted, concave, or convex façades (Illustrations 1 and 6). Occasionally in a villa or palazzo, an external staircase would be fitted into the recess created by the curve.
The Sicilian belfry. Belfrys were not placed beside the church in a campanile tower as is common in Italy, but on the façade itself, often surmounting the central pediment, with one or more bells clearly displayed beneath its own arch, such as at Catania’s Collegiata . In a large church with many bells this usually resulted in an intricately sculpted and decorated arcade at the highest point of the principal façade . These belfries are among the most enduring and characteristic features of Sicilian Baroque architecture.
Inlaid coloured marble set into both floor and walls especially in church interiors. This particular form of Intarsia developed in Sicily from the 17th century (see the floor of illustration 14).
Columns that are often deployed singularly, supporting plain arches and thus displaying the influence of the earlier and much plainer Norman period . Columns are rarely encountered, as elsewhere in Europe, in clustered groups acting as piers, especially in examples of early Sicilian Baroque.
Decorated rustication. Sebastiano Serlio had decorated the blocks of ashlar in his rustication; by the end of the 16th century, Sicilian architects were ornamenting the blocks with carvings of leaves, fish-scales, and even sweets and shells; shells were later to become among the most prevalent ornamental symbols of Baroque design. Sometimes the rustication would be used for pillars rather than walls, a reversal of expectations and almost an architectural joke .
The local volcanic lava stone that was used in the construction of many Sicilian Baroque buildings, because this was the most readily available. Many sculptors and stone-cutters of the period lived at the foot of Mount Etna, making a diversity of objects, including balustrades, pillars, fountains and seats for buildings. Shades of black or grey were used to create contrasting decorative effects, accentuating the Baroque love of light and shade as demonstrated in .
The Spanish influence. The architectural influence of the ruling Spanish , although this was a milder influence than that of the Normans. The Spanish style, a more restrained version of French renaissance architecture, is particularly evident in eastern Sicily, where — owing to minor insurrections — the Spanish maintained a stronger military presence. Messina’s monumental Porta Grazia, erected in 1680 as the entrance to a Spanish citadel, would not be out of place in any of the towns and citadels built by the Spanish in their colonies elsewhere. The style of this arched city gate, with its ornate mouldings and scrolls, was widely copied all over Catania immediately following the quake.
While these characteristics never occur all together in the same building, and none are unique to Sicilian Baroque, it is the coupling together which gives the Sicilian Baroque its distinctive air. Other Baroque characteristics, such as broken pediments over windows, the extravagant use of statuary, and curved topped windows and doors are all emblematic of Baroque architecture, but can all be found on Baroque building all over Europe.

Early Sicilian Baroque

Volcanic Sicily in the central Mediterranean, off the Italian peninsula, has been colonised by the Greeks, then it was under the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ostrogoths, the Muslims, the Normans, the Hohenstaufen, the Angevins and the Aragonese, after whom it became a province of the Spanish Empire and then was part of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, before finally being absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1860. Thus Sicilians have been exposed to a rich sequence of disparate cultures; this is reflected in the extraordinary diversity of architecture on the island.

A form of decorated classical architecture peculiar to Sicily had begun to evolve from the 1530s. Inspired by the ruined Greek architecture and by the Norman cathedrals on the island, this often incorporated Greek architectural motifs such as the Greek key pattern into late Norman architecture with Gothic features such as pointed arches and window apertures. The Sicilian Norman architecture incorporated some Byzantine elements seldom found in Norman architecture elsewhere, and like other Romanesque architecture it went on to incorporate Gothic features. This early ornate architecture differs from that of mainland Europe in not having evolved from Renaissance architecture; instead, it was developed from Norman styles. Renaissance architecture hardly touched Sicily; in the capital city of Palermo, the only remnant of the High Renaissance is the Fontana Pretoria, a water fountain originally made for Don Pietro di Toleda by Florentine artists Franscesco Cammilliani and Michelangelo Naccerino and brought to Sicily when it was already 20 years old .

Whatever the reason that Renaissance style never became popular in Sicily, it was certainly not ignorance. Antonello Gagini was midway through constructing the church of Santa Maria di Porto Salvo in 1536 in the Renaissance style when he died; he was superseded by the architect Antonio Scaglione, who completed the building in a Norman style. This style seems to have influenced Sicilian architecture almost up to the time of the 1693 earthquake. Even Mannerism passed the island by. Only in the architecture of Messina could a Renaissance influence be discerned, partly for geographical reasons: within sight of mainland Italy and the most important port in Sicily, Messina was always more amenable to the prevailing tides of fashion outside the island. The town’s aristocratic patrons would often call on Florence or Rome to provide them with an architect; one example was the Florentine Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli, who established the Tuscan styles of architecture and sculpture there in the mid-16th century. However, these influences remained largely confined to Messina and the surrounding district. It seems likely that it was the patronage of the Roman Catholic Church, removed from the influences of Roman fashion, that remained conservative in architectural taste.

This is not to say that Sicily was completely isolated from trends elsewhere in Europe. Architecture in the island’s major cities was strongly influenced by the family of the sculptor Domenico Gagini, who arrived from Florence in 1463. This family of sculptors and painters decorated churches and buildings with ornate decorative and figurative sculpture. Less than a century after his family had begun to cautiously decorate the island’s churches (1531–37), Antonio Gagini completed the proscenium-like arch of the “Capella della Madonna” in the “Santuario dell’Annunziata” at Trapani. This pedimented arch to the sanctuary has pilasters — not fluted, but decorated heavily with relief busts of the saints; and, most importantly in terms of architecture, the pediment is adorned by reclining saints supporting swags linked to the central shield that crowns the pediment. This ornate pediment, although still unbroken, was one of the first signs that Sicily was forming its own style of decorative architecture. Similar in style is the Chiesa del Gesù , constructed between 1564 and 1633, which also shows early signs of the Sicilian Baroque.

Thus a particular brand of Baroque architecture had begun to evolve in Sicily long before the earthquake of 1693. While the majority of those buildings that can be clearly classified as Baroque in style date from around 1650, the scarcity of these isolated, surviving examples of Sicily’s 17th-century architectural history makes it hard to fully and accurately evaluate the architecture immediately before the natural disaster: the earthquake destroyed not only most of the buildings, but also most of their documentation. Yet more information has been lost in subsequent earthquakes and severe bombing during World War II.

The earliest example of Baroque on the island is Giulio Lasso’s Quattro Canti, an octagonal piazza, or circus, constructed around 1610 at the crossroads of the city’s two principal streets. Around this intersection are four open sides, being the streets, and four matching buildings with identical canted corners. The sides of the four buildings are curved, further heightening the Baroque design of the buildings lining the circus. These four great buildings dominating the circus are each enhanced by a fountain, reminiscent of those of Pope Sixtus V’s “Quattro Fontane” in Rome. However, here in Palermo the Baroque theme continues up three storeys of the buildings, which are adorned with statues in recessed niches depicting the four seasons, the four Spanish kings of Sicily, and the four patronesses of Palermo: Saints Cristina, Ninfa, Olivia, and Agata.

While each façade of Quattro Canti is pleasing to the eye, as a scheme it is both out of proportion with the limited size of the piazza and, like most other examples of early Sicilian Baroque, can be considered provincial, naive and heavy-handed, compared with later developments. Whatever its merit, it is evident that during the 17th century, the Baroque style in the hands of the local architects and sculptors was already deviating from that of mainland Italy. This localised variation on the mainstream Baroque was not peculiar to Sicily, but occurred as far afield as Bavaria, and Russia, where Naryshkin Baroque would be just as eccentric as its Sicilian cousin.

Sicilian Baroque from 1693

Earthquake and patrons
The great Sicilian earthquake of 1693 destroyed at least 45 towns and cities, affecting an area of 5600 square kilometres and causing the deaths of about 60,000 people. The epicentre of the disaster was offshore, although the exact position remains unknown. Towns which suffered severely were Ragusa, Modica, Scicli, and Ispica. Rebuilding began almost immediately.

The lavishness of the architecture that was to arise from this disaster is connected with the politics of Sicily at the time; Sicily was still officially under Spanish rule, but rule was effectively delegated to the native aristocracy. This was led by the Duke of Camastra, whom the Spanish had appointed viceroy to appease the aristocracy, who were numerous. The aristocracy was relatively concentrated compared to most of Europe, and a gentry class was missing. In the 18th century, one estimate held that there were 228 noble families, who provided Sicily with a ruling class consisting of 58 princes, 27 dukes, 37 marquesses, 26 Counts, one viscount and 79 barons; the Golden Book of the Sicilian nobility (last published in 1926) lists even more. In addition to these were the younger scions of the families, with their courtesy titles of nobile or baron.

Architecture was not the only legacy of the Normans. Rule over the peasants (there was no established middle class) was also enforced by a feudal system, unchanged since its introduction following the Norman conquest of 1071. Thus the Sicilian aristocracy had not only wealth but vast manpower at their command, something that had by this time declined in many other parts of Europe. As in Southern Spain, the huge rural estates remained almost as concentrated as when they had been Roman “latifundi”. The Sicilian economy, though very largely agriculturally based, was very strong, and became more so during the 18th century as shipping became more efficient and the threat of Muslim piracy died away. The export markets for lemons (for the great 18th century fashion for lemonade) and wines increased greatly, and Sicilian wheat remained, as it had been since Roman times, the backbone of the economy. The disaster that was to give Sicily its modern reputation of poverty, namely the opening-up of the American Middle West to wheat-farming, was a century away. When it came, this permanently more than halved the price of wheat, and destroyed the old economy forever.

The aristocracy shared their power only with the Roman Catholic Church. The Church ruled by fear of damnation in the next life and of the Inquisition in the present, and consequently both upper and lower classes gave as generously as they could on all major saints’ days. Many priests and bishops were members of the aristocracy. The wealth of the Church in Sicily was further enhanced by the tradition of pressing younger children of the aristocracy to enter monasteries and convents, in order to preserve the family estates from division; a large fee, or dowry, was usually paid to the Church to facilitate this, in the form of property, jewels, or money. Thus the wealth of certain religious orders grew out of all proportion to the economic growth of any other group at this time. This is one of the reasons that so many of the Sicilian Baroque churches and monasteries, such as San Martino delle Scale, were rebuilt after 1693 on such a lavish scale.

Once rebuilding began, the poor rebuilt their basic housing in the same primitive fashion as before. By contrast, the wealthiest residents, both secular and spiritual, became caught in an almost manic orgy of building. Most members of the nobility had several homes in Sicily. For one thing, the Spanish viceroy spent six months of the year in Palermo and six in Catania, holding court in each city, and hence members of the aristocracy needed a town palazzo in each city. Once the palazzi in devastated Catania were rebuilt in the new fashion, the palazzi in Palermo seemed antiquated by comparison, so they too were eventually rebuilt. Following this, from the middle of the 18th century, villas to retire to in the autumn, essentially status symbols, were built at the fashionable enclave at Bagheria. This pattern was repeated, on a smaller scale, throughout the lesser cities of Sicily, each city providing a more entertaining social life and a magnetic draw for the provincial aristocrat than their country estate. The country estate also did not escape the building mania. Often Baroque wings or new façades were added to ancient castles, or country villas were completely rebuilt. Thus the frenzy of building gained momentum until the increasingly fantastical Baroque architecture demanded by these hedonistic patrons reached its zenith in the mid-18th century.

New cities
Following the quake a program of rebuilding was rapidly put into action, but before it began in earnest some important decisions would permanently differentiate many Sicilian cities and towns from other European urban developments. The Viceroy, the Duke of Camastra, aware of new trends in town planning, decreed that rather than rebuilding in the medieval plan of cramped narrow streets, the new rebuilding would offer piazze and wider main streets, often on a rational grid system. The whole plan was often to take a geometric shape such as a perfect square or a hexagon, typical of Renaissance and Baroque town planning. The city of Grammichele represents an example of these new cities rebuilted with a hexagonal plan.

This concept was still very new in the 1690s, and few new cities had had reason to be built in Europe – Christopher Wren’s city plan after the Great Fire of London in 1666 having been turned down because of the complexities of land ownership there. There were some other examples such as Richelieu, and later Saint Petersburg. The prototype may well have been the new city of Terra del Sole, constructed in 1564. Another of the first towns to be planned using symmetry and order rather than an evolution of small alleys and streets was Alessandria in southern Piedmont. A little later, from 1711, this Baroque form of planning was favoured in the Hispanic colonies of South America, especially by the Portuguese in Brazil. In other parts of Europe, lack of finance, complex land ownership and divided public opinion made radical replanning after disaster too difficult: after 1666, London was rebuilt on its ancient plan, though new extensions to the west were partially on a grid system. In Sicily, public opinion (the public being anyone not a member of the ruling class) counted for nothing, and hence these seemingly revolutionary new concepts of town planning could be freely executed.

In Sicily, the decision was taken not just for fashion and appearance but also because it would minimise the damage to property and life likely to be caused in future quakes. In 1693, the cramped housing and streets had caused buildings to collapse together like dominoes. Although after the earthquake the avenues were broadened and the density of housing was lowered overall, cramped and narrow areas of housing still remained, posing a hazard for the poor. Architecturally and aesthetically, the big advantage of the new order of town planning was that unlike many Italian towns and cities, where one frequently encounters a monumental Renaissance church squeezed terrace fashion between incongruous neighbours, in urban Baroque design one can step back and actually see the architecture in a more conducive setting in relation to its proportions and perspective. This is most notable in the largely rebuilt towns of Caltagirone, Militello in Val di Catania, Catania, Modica, Noto, Palazzolo Acreide, Ragusa, and Scicli.

One of the finest examples of this new urban planning can be seen at Noto , the town rebuilt approximately 10 km from its original site on Mount Alveria. The old ruined town now known as “Noto Antica” can still be viewed in its ruinous state. The new site chosen was flatter than the old to better facilitate a linear grid-like plan. The principal streets run east to west so they would benefit from a better light and a sunnier disposition. This example of town planning is directly attributable to a learned local aristocrat, Giovanni Battista Landolina; helped by three local architects, he is credited with planning the new city himself.

In these new towns, the aristocracy was allocated the higher areas, where the air was cooler and fresher and the views finest. The church was allocated the town centre , for convenience to all, and to reflect the church’s global and central position; round the pairing of cathedral and episcopal Palazzo Vescovile were built the convents. The merchants and storekeepers chose their lots on the planned wider streets leading from the main piazzas. Finally, the poor were allowed to erect their simple brick huts and houses in the areas nobody else wanted. Lawyers, doctors, and members of the few professions including the more skilled artisans – those who fell between the strictly defined upper and lower class – and were able to afford building plots, often lived on the periphery of the commercial and upper class residential sectors, but equally often these people just lived in a larger or grander house than their neighbours in the poorer areas. However, many of the skilled artists working on the rebuilding lived as part of the extended households of their patrons. In this way Baroque town planning came to symbolize and reflect political authority, and later its style and philosophy spread as far as Annapolis and Savannah in English America, and most notably Haussmann’s 19th century re-designing of Paris. The stage was now set for the explosion of Baroque architecture, which was to predominate in Sicily until the early 19th century.

Later many other Sicilian towns and cities which had been either little damaged or completely untouched by the quake, such as Palermo, were also transformed by the Baroque style, as the fashion spread and aristocrats with a palazzo in Catania came to wish their palazzo in the capital to be as opulent as that in the second city. In Palermo the Church of Santa Caterina (it), began in 1566, was one of many in the city to be redecorated inside in the 18th century in the Baroque style, with coloured marbles.

New churches and palazzi
Of Sicily’s own form of Baroque, post 1693, it has been said, “The buildings conceived in the wake of this disaster expressed a light-hearted freedom of decoration whose incongruous gaiety was intended, perhaps, to assuage the horror”. While this is an accurate description of a style which is almost a celebration of joie de vivre in stone, it is unlikely to be the reason for the choice. As with all architectural styles, the selection of style would have directly linked to current fashion. Versailles had been completed in 1688 in a far sterner Baroque style; Louis XIV’s new palace was immediately emulated across Europe by any aristocrat or sovereign in Europe aspiring to wealth, taste, or power. Thus it was the obvious choice for the “homeless rich” of Sicily, of whom there were hundreds. The excesses of the Baroque-style palazzi and country villas to be constructed in Sicily, however, were soon to make Versailles seem a model of restraint.

As the 18th century dawned, Sicilian architects were employed to create the new palazzi and churches. These architects, often local, were able to design in a more sophisticated style than those of the late 17th century; many had been trained in mainland Italy and had returned with a more detailed understanding of the Baroque idiom. Their work inspired less-travelled Sicilian designers. Very importantly, these architects were also assisted by the books of engravings by Domenico de’ Rossi, who for the first time wrote down text with his engravings, giving the precise dimensions and measurements of many of the principal Renaissance and Baroque façades in Rome. In this way, the Renaissance finally came late to Sicily by proxy.

At this stage of its development, Sicilian Baroque still lacked the freedom of style that it was later to acquire. Giovanni Battista Vaccarini was the leading Sicilian architect during this period. He arrived on the island in 1730 bringing with him a fusion of the concepts of Bernini and Borromini, and introduced to the island’s architecture a unified movement and a play of curves, which would have been unacceptable in Rome itself. However, his works are considered of lesser quality than that which was to come. Notable works which date from this period are the 18th century wings of the Palazzo Biscari at Catania; and Vaccarini’s church of Santa Agata, also in Catania. On this building Vaccarini quite clearly copied the capitals from Guarino Guarini’s Architettura Civile. It is this frequent copying of established designs that causes the architecture from this period, while opulent, also to be disciplined and almost reined in. Vaccarini’s style was to dominate Catania for the next decades.

A second hindrance to Sicilian architects’ fully achieving their potential earlier was that frequently they were only rebuilding a damaged structure, and as a consequence having to match their designs to what had been before, or remained. The Cathedral of San Giorgio at Modica is an example. It was badly damaged in the earthquake of 1613, rebuilt in 1643 in a Baroque style while keeping the medieval layout, then damaged again in 1693. Rebuilding again began in 1702, by an unknown architect. Finally, Rosario Gagliardi oversaw the façade’s completion in 1760, but the compromises he had to make in deference to the existing structure are obvious. While Gagliardi used the same formulae he used so successfully at the church of San Giorgio in Ragusa, here in Modica the building is heavier, and lacks his usual lightness of touch and freedom of design.

There were also at this time other influences at work. Between 1718 and 1734 Sicily was ruled personally by Charles VI from Vienna, and as a result close ties with Austrian architecture can be perceived. Several buildings on the island are shameless imitations of the works of Fischer von Erlach. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach had begun to rebuild Schönbrunn Palace in 1686 in a simple form of Baroque; this form was later to be reproduced in Sicily in the final years of its Baroque era. The palace also had an external staircase (removed in 1746) similar to those that later evolved in Sicily. One Sicilian architect, Tommaso Napoli, a monk, visited Vienna twice early in the century, returning with a store of engraving and drawings. He was later the architect of two country villas of the early Sicilian Baroque period, remarkable for their concave and convex walls and the complex design of their external staircases. One villa, his Villa Palagonia begun in 1705, is the most complex and ingenious of all constructed in Sicily’s Baroque era; its double staircase of straight flights, frequently changing direction, was to be the prototype of a distinguishing feature of Sicilian Baroque.

Later, a new wave of architects, who would master the Baroque sentiments, aware of Rococo interior styles beginning elsewhere to gain an ascendancy over Baroque, would go on to develop the flamboyance, freedom, and movement that are synonymous with the term Sicilian Baroque today.

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