In arts, the
Baroque is both a period and the style that dominated it. Baroque style used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur from sculpture, painting, literature, and music. The style started around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe.
(The name adapted a French adjective that is derived from the Portuguese noun "barroco"; both described a pearl of irregular shape. Some confusion can occur in using for the period and style the lower-cased version "baroque", which can instead mean merely "elaborate" (or especially "overly elaborate") without implying connection to the period.)
The popularity and success of the "Baroque" was encouraged by the Catholic Church when it decided that the drama of the Baroque artists' style could communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The secular aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and would-be competitors. Baroque palaces are built round an entrance sequence of courts, anterooms, grand staircases, and reception rooms of sequentially increasing magnificence. Many forms of art, music, architecture, and literature inspired each other in the "Baroque" cultural movement.
Evolution of the Baroque
The Baroque originated around 1600. The canon promulgated at the Council of Trent (1545???‚¬???63), by which the Roman Catholic Church addressed the representational arts by demanding that paintings and sculptures in church contexts should speak to the illiterate rather than to the well-informed, is customarily offered as an inspiration of the Baroque, which appeared, however, a generation later. This turn toward a populist conception of the function of ecclesiastical art is seen by many art historians as driving the innovations of
Caravaggio and the Carracci brothers, all of whom were working (and competing for commissions) in Rome around 1600.
The appeal of Baroque style 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 dramatic. 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 and Federico Barocci, nowadays sometimes termed 'proto-Baroque'.
Germinal ideas of the Baroque can also be found in the work of Michelangelo.
Some general parallels in music make the expression "Baroque music" useful: there are contrasting phrase lengths, harmony and counterpoint have ousted polyphony, and orchestral color makes a stronger appearance. See the entry Baroque music. Similar fascination with simple, strong, dramatic expression in poetry, where clear, broad syncopated rhythms replaced the enknotted elaborated metaphysical similes employed by
Mannerists such as John Donne and imagery that was strongly influenced by visual developments in painting, can be sensed in John Milton's Paradise Lost, a Baroque epic.
Though Baroque was superseded in many centers by the
Rococo style, beginning in France in the late 1720s, especially for interiors, paintings and the decorative arts, Baroque architecture remained a viable style until the advent of
Neoclassicism in the later 18th century. A Baroque palace (though in a chaste exterior) that was not even begun until 1752. Critics have given up talking about a "Baroque period".
In paintings, Baroque gestures are broader than
Mannerist gestures: less ambiguous, less arcane and mysterious, more like the stage gestures of opera, a major Baroque artform. Baroque poses depend on contrapposto ("counterpoise"), the tension within the figures that moves the planes of shoulders and hips in counterdirections.
The dryer, chastened, less dramatic and coloristic, later stages of 18th century Baroque architectural style are often seen as a separate Late Baroque manifestation. Academic characteristics in the neo-Palladian architectural style, epitomized by William Kent, are a parallel development in Britain and the British colonies: within doors, Kent's furniture designs are vividly influenced by the Baroque furniture of Rome and Genoa, hieratic tectonic sculptural elements meant never to be moved from their positions completing the wall elevation. Baroque is a style of unity imposed upon rich and massy detail.
The Baroque was defined by Heinrich W???¶lfflin as the age where the oval replaced the circle as the center of composition, that centralization replaced balance, and that coloristic and "painterly" effects began to become more prominent. Art historians, often Protestant ones, have traditionally emphasized that the Baroque style evolved 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 Catholic Reformation. Whether this is the case or not, it was successfully developed in Rome, where Baroque architecture widely renewed the central areas with perhaps the most important urbanistic revision.
Baroque visual art
A defining 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), in which a Catholic painter satisfied a Catholic patron: Baroque-era conceptions of monarchy, iconography, handling of paint, and compositions as well as the depiction of space and movement. There were highly diverse strands of Italian baroque painting, from
Caravagio to Cortona; both approaching emotive dynamism with different styles. Another frequently cited work of Baroque art is Bernini's "Saint Theresa in Ecstasy" for the Cornaro chapel in S. Maria della Vittoria, which brings together architecture, sculpture, and theater into one grand conceit.
The later baroque style gives way gradually to a more decorative
Rococo. A comparison with
Rococo, will help define Baroque by contrast.
