Baroque Goes Global

Baroque spread across the world through colonial expansion and missionary activity. Spanish and Portuguese missionaries built exuberant churches across Latin America, the Philippines, and Goa, folding local traditions into European frameworks.

The most spectacular fusion came in Mexico, where indigenous craftsmen carved European Baroque forms with a pre-Columbian sensibility — stone facades packed with dense ornament that mixes Catholic saints with Aztec and Maya motifs. The result is neither fully European nor fully American, but something genuinely new.