Domes built in the 17th century by the Western world, broadly defined, used traditional geometric and proportional techniques for masonry domes and lanterns and relied on graphical or empirical solutions to the geometric problems created by oval domes. In the 17th century, analytical approaches were developed and the ideal shape for a dome was debated, but these approaches were often considered too theoretical to be used in construction. From the late 17th century, there was a shift away from proportional rules to a culture of testing.

Traditional Orthodox church domes were used in hundreds of Orthodox and Uniate wooden churches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Tatar wooden mosques in Poland were domed central plan structures with adjacent minarets. Bulbous domes became popular in Central Germany, Southern Germany, and Austria in the 17th century, and influenced those in Poland and Eastern Europe in the Baroque period. Onion spires are predominant in Bavarian country churches and onion domes over Bavarian pilgrimage churches may indicate influence from Prague.

In Spain, false vaults made of wood or reed and covered with plaster were in chapel domes to give the appearance of stone construction. An anti-seismic technique for building called quincha was adapted from local Peruvian practice for domes and became universally adopted along the Peruvian coast. A similar lightweight technique was used in eastern Sicily after earthquakes struck in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Naples, it was customary in the 17th and 18th centuries to cover domes with polychrome majolica tilework influenced by Arabic art.

Oval plan churches spread outside of Rome following Vignola's innovation with the church of Sant'Anna dei Palafrenieri. Guarino Guarini established the oval dome as a reconciliation of the longitudinal plan church favored by the liturgy of the Counter-Reformation and the centralized plan favored by idealists. He also originated the idea of a large oculus in a solid dome revealing a second dome.

Developments

The construction of domes in the seventeenth century relied primarily on empirical techniques and oral traditions rather than the architectural treatises of the times, which avoided practical details. This was adequate for domes up to medium size, with diameters in the range of 12 to 20 meters. Materials were considered homogeneous and rigid, with compression taken into account and elasticity ignored. The weight of materials and the size of the dome were the key references. Lateral tensions in a dome were counteracted with horizontal rings of iron, stone, or wood incorporated into the structure.

A treatise by Vincenzo Scamozzi from 1615 gives examples of a typology of vaults and domes, but not a general and thorough theory. A two volume treatise by Fray Lorenzo, published in 1639 and 1665, recommended against the use of heavy and expensive stone for domes in favor of a hybrid system of brick shells covered by timber shells, as structurally independent elements. He complimented the use of wooden domes over chapels in Spain, made to look like stone on the outside, as safe and strong.

In the seventeenth century, many Renaissance and Baroque elliptical and oval plan domes were built over rectangular naves, using brick in Italy and stone in Spain. Later German oval domes in the Rococo style used different combinations of geometry. Oval domes often incorporated both elliptical and oval or semicircular curves and this ambiguity is reflected in the architectural literature. Builders relied on graphical or empirical solutions to such geometric problems. In 1640, mathematician Paul Guldin established that the "elongated semicircle" of traditional practice is an ellipse.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, developments in mathematics and the study of statics led to a more precise formalization of the ideas of the traditional constructive practices of arches and vaults. Robert Hooke published a Latin anagram in 1675, deciphered only after his death, indicating that the perfect shape for an arch to resist a given load was the inversion of the shape a flexible cord assumes under such a load, but he was unable to define this catenary curve mathematically. He had proposed to the Royal Society in 1671 that the perfect dome shape was the cubico-parabolical conoid.

Although some recommendations for the profile of a dome can be found in treatises from earlier centuries, the traditional geometric and proportional techniques for masonry domes and lanterns were first detailed in 1694 by Carlo Fontana in his famous treatise Il Tempio Vaticano e sua Origine. Fontana explains the proportions of a dome based on the dome's internal diameter, the thickness and height of the drum, the internal diameter of the oculus, and the height of the piers. The thickness of the dome at its base is recommended to be three-fourths of the drum's thickness, with the dome's intrados and extrados following different circular curves to become thinner toward the top.

There was no single proportional rule for the sizing of the pillar supports beneath a dome in the second half of the seventeenth century and a wide variety of proportions were used, based on previously completed work. This contributed to a shift away from proportional rules to a culture of testing from the late seventeenth and into the eighteenth century. Mathematician and astronomer Philippe de La Hire created rules of pillar proportion with a mechanical hypothesis for the sizing of imposts in his 1695 Traité de mecanique. Dutch physicist Pieter van Musschenbroek performed experiments on the resistance of metal ropes, which were praised by Giovanni Poleni.

Dutch Republic

A domed octagon was built at Willenstad by Maurice, Prince of Orange, from 1597 to 1607. The brick octagonal church, twenty meters wide, was built at the center of the fortified town.

The city of Maastricht, jointly ruled by Liège and Brabant since the 13th century, was conquered by Frederik Hendrik in 1632, after which the States General assumed the responsibilities of Brabant. Hendrik's court architect, Pieter Post, built a new Maastricht City Hall in a classicist style between 1659 and 1664, accommodating the unique political requirements with separate rooms for the different governing bodies that were grouped around a central domed hall.

The prosperity of the Dutch Golden Age coincided with a period of large church building in the Netherlands by the Reformed Church, from the 1640s to the middle of the 1670s. The Calvinist government in Leiden built the Marekerk, a domed octagonal preaching church, in the 1640s. The octagonal plan was associated with the Dome of the Rock, thought to be Solomon's Temple. The Oostkerk in Middelburg was built from 1647 to 1667 with an octagonal dome and lantern. Begun in 1668, the Lutheran Ronde Lutherse Kerk was built in a classicist style but also was a continuation of the architectural style of the Marekerk and Oostkerk buildings. It was funded by wealthy members of the congregation as well as donations from Germany and Scandinavia, with the dome and lantern covered by copper donated by Charles XI of Sweden.

In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, domes were features of the gardens of distinguished Dutch country houses.

Spanish Habsburgs

Crown of Castile

Viceroyalty of New Spain

The 1609 dome over the presbytery of the church of El Carmen in San Cristóbal de las Casas is in the boveda esquifada style of mudéjar art.

Kingdom of Galicia

The College of Nosa Señora da Antiga (1593–1616) was built a few years after El Escorial and influenced by it. The recorded plans for the dome differ from what was actually built by master mason Simón de Monasterio. Although the plans describe the use of iron chains and iron cramps, no evidence of their actual use has been identified. Its extradosed, hemispherical, single-shell dome spans 10 meters and is made entirely of granite. There are eight windows in the drum and eight pairs of ribs in the dome. On the exterior, the lower part of the drum is octagonal and the upper part is cylindrical. The lantern and cupola are topped by a pyramidal finial. Kingdom of Castile

The inner brick shell of the dome of collapsed in 1999 after the collapse of the outer wooden roof.

The tower over the bridge of Pinos-Puenta was rebuilt in the 17th century with a shallow crossed-arch dome.

In Spain, oval churches of the seventeenth century include the , begun in 1617, and the Oratory of San Filippo Neri in Cádiz at the end of the century. Architect built oval domes over his churches of in 1616 and San Antonio de los Alemanes in 1624.

The dome of the Church of las Calatravas (1670–1678) in Madrid was built by Lorenzo de San Nicolás.

In Spain, false vaults made of wood or reed and covered with plaster were used in the seventeenth century. The technique, dating from the medieval period, was applied to chapel domes to give the appearance of stone construction. The dome of Seville's (begun 1659) used stucco to create high-relief scrolling foliage patterns like those of Islamic arabesque ornament.

Viceroyalty of Peru

In Lima, the "City of Kings", capital of Spain's Viceroyalty of Peru, frequent earthquakes prompted the use of quincha construction for the vaulting of the church of San Francisco (1657–74) by Constantino de Vasconcelos and Manuel de Escobar. Quincha was an adaptation of an indigenous wattle and daub technique and consisted of a wooden structural framework filled out with cane or bamboo and covered with plaster and stucco to resemble stone. The anti-seismic properties of this light and elastic system allowed the  double-shell dome of the church, a hemisphere and lantern resting directly on pendentives, to survive for more than three hundred years and it became universally adopted along the Peruvian coast. Another 17th century example is the dome of the church of Santo Domingo in Lima (1678–81).

The first dome built in Quito was the high dome over the crossing of the (1650–1684), a pilgrimage church made popular by a statue of the Virgin Mary that has miracles attributed to it. The statue, made to imitate that of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura, was destroyed in a fire in the 1830s.

Crown of Aragon

Kingdom of Naples

Earthquakes in Naples in 1627, 1688, and 1694 spurred the addition of domes to many churches as part of repairs and restorations in the 17th century. A 1999 survey identified 121 domes in the city, 42 of which were built in the Baroque era. Most are single shell extradosed domes on a circular plan. The domes were built of tuff ashlar voussoirs with mortared joints, Vesuvian stone fitted without mortar, or ribbed concrete domes. It was customary in the 17th and 18th centuries to cover the domes with polychrome majolica tilework influenced by Arabic art, such as on the dome of Santa Maria della Sanità, or with a copper and lead coating as on the dome of the Church of the Girolamini.

The two-shell dome of the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of St. Januarius (1608–1618) in Naples was built with a stone lantern that was replaced after an earthquake in 1688. Iron chains were incorporated into the structure, with the first placed during construction in 1612. Two more chains were added after earthquakes in 1626 and 1627. Further cracking spurred the removal in 1724 of the internal masonry lantern connecting the inner and outer domes, in order to lighten the structure, and the addition of a wooden and iron truss structure between the shells. The oculus in the inner dome was closed and a lighter wooden structure replaced the exterior lantern between 1724 and 1726.

The dome of Annunziata Church in Capua may have benefited from skills learned in the building of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica.