Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
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Research Article

The Sensory Turn in Baroque Architecture: An Experience Strategy in the Counter-Reformation Period and Its Contemporary Implications

Rongxunlun ZhaoThe Affiliated High School of South China Normal University*

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

In this article, Baroque architecture is reimagined not as an ornamental style but as an intentional instrument of the senses constructed in pursuit of the propaganda objectives of the Counter-Reformation and absolutist regime. It argues that Baroque was an instrumental amalgamation of spatial, dramaturgical, and intermedial forms exquisitely orchestrated to provoke felt devotion and signify time-power. Exemplars, from the Baroque spectacle of Bernini’s theatres in Rome to the Neo-palladian geometry of Borromini’s churches, highlight in architecture a rhetoric of experience designed to support theological dogma and the opulence of the ruling monarch, and their obsolescence following the onset of Enlightenment rationalism is situated neither as a singular endpoint but as a shifting of its foundational mechanisms. This final section shows how to situate this analytic sensory turn within a historically informed debate between the contemporary moment, where the post-digital Neo-Baroque draws upon the Baroque to destabilize form, and deconstructivism’s own crisis in form that acknowledges it has no longer found form as solid material elsewhere. Finally, it concludes that architecture, with its sensationalism (and through its connection with belief), remains capable of deeply-ethically charged moves as an always already politically salient way to make people believe.

Keywords: Baroque Architecture; Sensory Turn; Counter-Reformation; Spatial Narrative; Critical Legacy
Published: December 10, 2025
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2025.NS30464
Volume: CHR Vol.99
pp. 29-35
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