It was encouraged by the Catholic Church as a means to counter the simplicity and austerity of Protestant architecture, art, and music, though Lutheran Baroque art developed in parts of Europe as well. The Baroque style used contrast, movement, exuberant detail, deep color, grandeur, and surprise to achieve a sense of awe. The style began at the start of the 17th century in Rome, then spread rapidly to the rest of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, then to Austria, southern Germany, and Poland.
By the s, it had evolved into an even more flamboyant style, called rocaille or Rococo , which appeared in France and Central Europe until the mid to late 18th century. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires including the Iberian Peninsula it continued, together with new styles, until the first decade of the 19th century.
In the decorative arts , the style employs plentiful and intricate ornamentation. The departure from Renaissance classicism has its own ways in each country. But a general feature is that everywhere the starting point is the ornamental elements introduced by the Renaissance.
The classical repertoire is crowded, dense, overlapping, loaded, in order to provoke shock effects. New motifs introduced by Baroque are: the cartouche , trophies and weapons, baskets of fruit or flowers, and others, made in marquetry , stucco , or carved. The English word baroque comes directly from the French. In the 16th century the Medieval Latin word baroco moved beyond scholastic logic and came into use to characterise anything that seemed absurdly complex.
The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne — helped to give the term baroco spelled Barroco by him the meaning 'bizarre, uselessly complicated'.
