In matters of taste the period 1715-63 is only part of a longer period beginning in the late seventeenth century and ending with the triumph of the romantic spirit during the eighteenth century. During the whole age men prided themselves on their appreciation of the classical art of Augustan Rome, yet they had so much self-confidence in their own intellectual powers and had, specially in England and France, evolved such a characteristic form of society that while paying sincere lip service to the classic ideals they evolved examples of town architecture, of essay and of novel, which were entirely original and of great beauty.

In architecture the predominant influence throughout Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century was that of classical Rome as reinterpreted by the Italian architects of the Renaissance. But in France and England, and indeed in northern Europe generally, that influence was transmitted in a rather different form from the one it assumed in Italy and southern or Roman Catholic Europe. In Italy the style which persisted during the first half of the eighteenth century was the baroque which developed in Rome early in the seventeenth century. It had found expression in the work of such architects as Maderno (d. 1629), Bernini (d. 1680), Borromini (d. 1667) and Cortona (d. 1669), and the finest examples are perhaps the Palazzo Barberini designed by Carlo Maderno and built by Borromini and Bernini, the church of St Carlo alle Quattro Fontane designed by Borromini who built the front at the very end of his life, the Scala Regia in the Vatican designed by Bernini in 1665 and the chapel of St Teresa in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria designed by Bernini in 1646.