Baroque

The Baroque, a cultural movement in European art history, originated around 1600 in Rome. Its appeal turned consciously from the witty, intellectual qualities of 16th century mannerist art to a visceral appeal aimed at the senses. It employed an iconography that was direct, simple, obvious, and theatrical, instead of the arcane programs, often worked up by bookish humanists and patrons rather than by the artists themselves, which were characteristically used by the urbane coterie of Mannerist artists. Baroque art drew on certain broad and heroic tendencies in Annibale Caracci and his circle, and found inspiration in other artists like Correggio and Caravaggio, nowadays sometimes termed 'proto-Baroque'. Germinal ideas of the Baroque can be found in Michelangelo.

Perhaps the definitive Baroque work of art is Bernini's "Saint Theresa in ecstacy" for the Cornaro chapel in S. Maria della Vittoria, which brings together multiple arts, including opera [1] .

Art historians, often Protestant ones, have traditionally emphasized that the Baroque period took place during a time in which the Roman Catholic Church had to react against the many revolutionary cultural movements that produced a new science and new forms of religion— Reformation. It has been said that the monumental Baroque is a style that could give the Papacy, like secular absolute monarchies, a formal, imposing way of expression that could restore its prestige, at the point of becoming somehow symbolic of the Counter-Reformation.

Effectively, it was successfully developed in Rome, where Baroque architecture widely renewed the central areas with perhaps the most important urbanistic revision.

A definitive statement of what Baroque signifies in painting is provided by the series of paintings executed by Peter Paul Rubens for Marie de Medici at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris (now at the Louvre) [2] , in which a Catholic painter satisfied a Catholic patron: Baroque-era conceptions of monarchy, Baroque iconography, Baroque handling of paint, and Baroque compositions and depiction of space.

Baroque architecture and sculpture

In Baroque architecture, emphasis was placed anew on bold massing, colonnades, domes, light-and-shade (chiaroscuro), 'painterly' color effects, and the bold play of volume and void.

Baroque architecture was taken up with enthusiasm in central Germany and Austria. In England the culmination of Baroque architecture comes with Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Many examples of Baroque architecture and town planning are found in other European towns, and in the Spanish Americas. Town planning of this period featured radiating avenues intersecting in squares, which took cues from Baroque garden plans.

In Baroque sculpture, groups of figures assumed new importance, and there was a dynamic movement and energy of human forms— they spiraled around an empty central vortex, or reached outwards into the surrounding space. Baroque sculpture often had multiple ideal viewing angles. The characteristic Baroque sculpture added extra-sculptural elements, for example, concealed lighting, or water fountains .

The architecture, sculpture and fountains of Bernini give highly-charged characteristics of Baroque style.

Examples of typical baroque architecture

Semper Oper (Dresden)

St Peter's Basilica (Rome_

Trevi Fountain (Rome)

San Lorenzo (Turin, 1666 - 1679)

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Rome, 1665 - 1676) - Francesco Borromini

Chateau de Versailles (Versailles, 1661 to 1774) - Jules Hardouin Mansart, André Le Notre (gardens) and many co-operators

Les Invalides (Paris) Royal Chapel finished 1708. (see illus. at entry)

St. Pauls Cathedral (London, 1675 to 1710) - Christopher Wren

Blenheim Palace Sir John Vanbrugh,England

The Queen's College (Oxford) - Nicholas Hawsksmore

Zwinger Palace (Dresden)

Karlskirche (Vienna, 1715-1737) - Johann Fischer von Erlach

Stift Melk (Austria, 1702-1736) - Jakob Prandtauer

Pommersfelden castle, Germany - Dientzenhofer.

Casa del Mexicano Braga, (Portugal)

Frauenkirche (Dresden)

Examples of typical Baroque Art

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Theresa

Baroque theater

In theater, the elaborate conceits, multiplicity of plot turns, and variety of situations characteristic of Mannerism (Shakespeare's tragedies, for instance) are superseded by opera, which drew together all the arts in a unified whole.

Dance was popular in the Baroque era.

'Baroque'

The word "Baroque", like most period or stylistic designations, was invented by later critics rather than practitioners of the arts in the 17th and early 18th centuries. It is a French translation of the Italian word "Barocco"; some authors believe it comes from the Portuguese "Barroco" (irregular pearl, or false jewel— notably, an ancient similar word, "Barlocco" or "Brillocco", is used in Roman dialect for the same meaning), or from a now obsolete Italian "Baroco" (that in logical Scholastica was used to indicate a syllogism with weak content). A common definition, before the term Barocco was used, called this genre simply the style of The Flying Forms.

The term "Baroque" was initially used with a derogatory meaning, to underline the excess of its emphasis, of its redundancy, its noisy abundance of details, as opposed to the clearer and sober rationality of the century of Enlightenment. It was finally rehabilitated in 1888 by the German art historian, Heinrich Woelfflin (1864-1945), who identified Baroque as antithetic to Renaissance and as a different kind of art (thus, not a "non-art").

Baroque literature and philosophy

Baroque actually expressed new values, which often are summarised in the use of metaphor and allegory, widely found in Baroque literature, and in the research for the "maraviglia" (wonder, astonishment - as in Marinism), the use of artifices. If Mannerism was a first breach with Renaissance, Baroque was an opposed language. It represented the evidence of the crisis of Renaissance neoclassical schemes— the psychological pain of Man, disbanded after the Copernican and the Lutheran revolutions, in search of solid anchors, in search of a proof of an ultimate human power, was to be found in both the art and architecture of the Baroque period. A relevant part of works was made on religious themes, since the Roman Church was the main "customer".

Virtuosity was researched by artists (and the Virtuoso became a common figure in any art), together with realism and care for details (some talk of a typical "intricacy").

Not without a certain correctness, it is said that the privilege given to external forms had to compensate and balance the lack of contents that has been observed in many Baroque works: the same Marino's "Maraviglia" is practically made of the pure, mere form. Fantasy and imagination should be evoked in the spectator, in the reader, in the listener. All was focused around the individual Man, as a straight relationship between the artist, or directly the art and its user, its client. Art is then less distant from user, more directly approaching him, solving the cultural gap that used to keep art and user reciprocally far, by Maraviglia. But the increased attention to the individual, also created in these schemes some important genres like the Romanzo (novel) and let popular or local forms of art, especially dialectal literature, to be put into evidence. In Italy this movement toward the single individual (that some define a "cultural descent", while others indicate it was a possible cause for the classical opposition to Baroque) caused Latin to be definitely replaced by Italian.

In English literature, the metaphysical poets represent a closely related movement; their poetry likewise sought unusual metaphors, which they then examined in often extensive detail. Their verse also manifests a taste for paradox, and deliberately inventive and unusual turns of phrase.

Examples of typical Baroque Poetry

Torquato Tasso, (Gerusalemme Liberata, 1584)

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Baroque music

The term Baroque also is used to designate the style of music composed during this period; see Baroque music for discussion. It is an interesting question to what extent Baroque music shares aesthetic principles with the visual and literary arts of the Baroque period. A fairly clear, shared element is a love of ornamentation, and it is perhaps significant that the role of ornament was greatly diminished in both music and architecture as the Baroque gave way to the Classical period.

Examples of typical Baroque Music

Johann Sebastian Bach, ( The Art of the Fugue, 1685 to 1750)

Antonio Vivaldi, ( L'Estro Armonico, 1678 to 1741)

Domenico Scarlatti, (Sonatas for Cembalo or Harpsichord 1685 to 1757)

George Frideric Handel (Water Music Suite for Orchestra 1685 to1759)

Baroque pearls are natural pearls that deviate from the usual, regular forms. In particular, they are pearls that do not have an axis of rotation. It was this use of the term for irregular pearls that eventually lent its name to the baroque movement.