Since the nineteenth century, historians and theoreticians of architecture have tended to examine the baroque in those moments when the relationship between the production of architecture and its historical analysis, between doing architecture and doing history, has been open to contention.¹ Generation after generation, scholars have been prompted to pay attention to the baroque to consider the limits of architectural history as a field and to advance new propositions concerning the relation of contemporary architectural practice and thought to its past.

Architects and historians who addressed the baroque as a subject of history helped to shape debates around modern expressionism and functionalism. The baroque shored up both phenomenological and critical sides of the theory wall. It explained nationalist values as it undermined them. It bolstered the modern inheritance of the classical and the romantic alike. It gave purpose to architecture in the age of post–World War II humanism. It negotiated the tensions among form, language, and ornament in the era of postmodernism. The resurgence in studies on the historiography and theorization of the baroque since the 1990s suggests that we are in another such moment of reflection.² The baroque was, in this sense, architecture’s constant twentieth-century companion—often against the grain of historical fidelity or philosophical rigor, but regularly to remarkable effect. All of which prompts questions about our contemporary relationship with historical knowledge and where the baroque might once again figure as a subject that invites contemplation of our field.

One of the earliest problems posed systematically by the first modern historians of art we can claim as architectural historians concerned the changes classical architecture sustained from its supposed fifteenth-century apogee to its seventeenth-century nadir and the question of how and why the rebirth of antiquity yielded to the deformations of Francesco and the Borrominists. The modernist historiography …