Italian Baroque interior design
Italian Baroque interior design refers to high-style furnishing and interior decorating carried out in Italy during the Baroque period, which lasted from the early 17th to the mid-18th century. In provincial areas, Baroque forms such as the clothes-press or armadio continued to be made into the 19th century.
In the late 16th century, Rome was the seat of an extremely powerful and influential papacy which were struggling with the advent of Protestantism. As a response to the Protestant Reformation, the Curia started the Counter-Reformation, (after the Council of Trent), a period in which the church's policies and influence abroad would be strengthened. Due to this Catholic Reformation, popes in Rome hired several architects, painters and interior designers to re-decorate the city and improve its public decorum, creating several new palaces and churches, and re-designing the interiors of several papal buildings. Decorations were richer and more grandiose than those of the Renaissance, and this movement evolved into the Baroque, which later spread across the whole of Italy and later Europe.
To accord with these new architectural styles, new furnishing styles also emerged, for which architects even as pre-eminent as Bernini, were called upon to provide designs. In his Opus architectonicum Borromini fully described the furniture he designed for the Chiesa Nova, including the reused priests' bookcases, and Carlo Fontana was called upon shortly after 1692 to design the support for a porphyry tavola, or table-slab, for the bapistry of St Peter's; it was enriched with bronze ornaments and the Pignatelli arms of Pope Innocent XI. Architects had been called upon since the days of Buontalenti to design such marble or pietra dura tables on bases for the centers of grand spaces.
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