Architecture

In combining architecture, painting, and sculpture to act on viewers' emotions, Pietro da Cortona was the quintessential practitioner of the High Baroque style. Painter, architect, and sculpture designer, the energetic Pietro always worked simultaneously on architectural and decorative projects. His dignified yet festive combination of paint and stucco became Europe's official decorative style for aristocratic dwellings. Pietro da Cortona once wrote that architecture was only a pastime for him, but he was second only to Gian Lorenzo Bernini among seventeenth-century Roman architects. His finest building, SS. Martina e Luca, typifies the High Baroque in its interplay of light and shadow through convex and concave forms.