   #copyright

Baroque

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Art

   Adoration, by Peter Paul Rubens. Dynamic figures spiral down around a
   void: draperies blow: a whirl of movement lit in a shaft of light,
   rendered in a free bravura handling of paint
   Enlarge
   Adoration, by Peter Paul Rubens. Dynamic figures spiral down around a
   void: draperies blow: a whirl of movement lit in a shaft of light,
   rendered in a free bravura handling of paint

   In the arts, Baroque is both a period and the style that dominated it.
   The Baroque style used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted
   detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in
   sculpture, painting, literature, and music. The style started around
   1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe. In music, the Baroque
   applies to the final period of dominance of imitative counterpoint,
   where different voices and instruments echo each other but at different
   pitches, sometimes inverting the echo, and even reversing thematic
   material.

   The popularity and success of the "Baroque" was encouraged by the Roman
   Catholic Church which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent
   that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and
   emotional involvement. The aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of
   Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and
   expressing triumphant power and control. Baroque palaces are built
   around an entrance sequence of courts, anterooms, grand staircases, and
   reception rooms of sequentially increasing magnificence. In similar
   profusions of detail, art, music, architecture, and literature inspired
   each other in the "Baroque" cultural movement as artists explored what
   they could create from repeated and varied patterns.

   The word baroque derives from the ancient Portuguese noun "barroco"
   which is a pearl that is not round but of unpredictable and elaborate
   shape. Hence, in informal usage, the word baroque can simply mean that
   something is "elaborate", with many details, without reference to the
   Baroque styles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A contrast with the classical

   Classical compositions, according to characterizations first elaborated
   by Heinrich Wölfflin, seek the unchanging truth behind appearances,
   expressed with simplicity and clarity: each constituent element is
   complete in itself.

Evolution of the Baroque

   In recent history, western European civilizations have faced three
   critical questions (in chronological order): Which religion to follow;
   which government to uphold; and how to bring equality to everyone. The
   matter of religion was resolved after Martin Luther, John Calvin, and
   others initiated a Protestant Reformation that gave many European
   monarchs an excuse to become more independent from The Holy Roman
   Empire. This led to a Counter Reformation by the Roman Catholic Church
   which included a push for new forms of art that exalted the Church's
   holy position.

   Beginning around the year 1600, the demands for new art resulted in
   what is now known as the Baroque. 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 at that time.

   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 (see the Prometheus sculpture below).
   Baroque art drew on certain broad and heroic tendencies in Annibale
   Carracci 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. Contrasting phrase lengths, harmony and counterpoint ousted
   polyphony, and orchestral colour made a stronger appearance. (See
   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. See the Neapolitan palace of Caserta, 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. It made
   the sculptures almost seem like they were about to move. See Bernini's
   David (below, left).

   The dryer, chastened, less dramatic and coloristic, later stages of
   18th century Baroque architectural style are often seen as a separate
   Late Baroque manifestation. (See Claude Perrault.) 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 Wölfflin as the age where the oval
   replaced the circle as the centre of composition, centralization
   replaced balance, and 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—the 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
   during this period of time.

Baroque visual art

   Aeneas flees burning Troy, Federico Barocci, 1598: a moment caught in a
   dramatic action from a classical source, bursting from the picture
   plane in a sweeping diagonal perspective.
   Enlarge
   Aeneas flees burning Troy, Federico Barocci, 1598: a moment caught in a
   dramatic action from a classical source, bursting from the picture
   plane in a sweeping diagonal perspective.

   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 Caravaggio 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 theatre into one grand conceit .

   The later Baroque style gradually gave way to a more decorative Rococo,
   which, through contrast, further defines Baroque.

Baroque sculpture

   In Baroque sculpture, groups of figures assumed new importance, and
   there was a dynamic movement and energy of human forms— they spiralled
   around an empty central vortex, or reached outwards into the
   surrounding space. For the first time, 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 (1598–1680) give
   highly charged characteristics of Baroque style. Bernini was
   undoubtedly the most important sculptor of the Baroque period. He
   approached Michelangelo in his omnicompetence: Bernini sculpted, worked
   as an architect, painted, wrote plays, and staged spectacles. In the
   late 20th century Bernini was most valued for his sculpture, both for
   his virtuosity in carving marble and his ability to create figures that
   combine the physical and the spiritual. He was also a fine sculptor of
   bust portraits in high demand among the powerful.

Bernini's Cornaro chapel: the complete work of art

   A good example of Bernini's work that helps us understand the Baroque
   is his St. Theresa in Ecstasy (1645–52), created for the Cornaro Chapel
   of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Bernini designed the
   entire chapel, a subsidiary space along the side of the church, for the
   Cornaro family.

   He had, in essence, a brick box shaped something like a proscenium
   stage space with which to work. Saint Theresa, the focal point of the
   chapel, is a monochromatic marble statue (a soft white) surrounded by a
   polychromatic marble architectural framing concealing a window to light
   the statue from above. In shallow relief, sculpted figure-groups of the
   Cornaro family inhabit in opera boxes along the two side walls of the
   chapel. The setting places the viewer as a spectator in front of the
   statue with the Cornaro family leaning out of their box seats and
   craning forward to see the mystical ecstasy of the saint. St. Theresa
   is highly idealized in detail and in an imaginary setting. St. Theresa
   of Avila, a popular saint of the Catholic Reformation, wrote narratives
   of her mystical experiences aimed at the nuns of her Carmelite Order;
   these writings had become popular reading among lay people interested
   in pursuing spirituality. She once described the love of God as
   piercing her heart like a burning arrow. Bernini literalizes this image
   by placing St. Theresa on a cloud in a reclining pose; what can only be
   described as a Cupid figure holds a golden arrow (the arrow is made of
   metal) and smiles down at her. The angelic figure is not preparing to
   plunge the arrow into her heart— rather, he has withdrawn it. St.
   Theresa's face reflects not the anticipation of ecstasy, but her
   current fulfillment, which has been described as orgasmic.

   The blending of religious and erotic was intensely offensive to both
   neoclassical restraint and, later, to Victorian prudishness; it is part
   of the genius of the Baroque. Bernini, who in life and writing was a
   devout Catholic, is not attempting to satirize the experience of a
   chaste nun, but to embody in marble a complex truth about religious
   experience— that it is an experience that takes place in the body.
   Theresa described her bodily reaction to spiritual enlightenment in a
   language of ecstasy used by many mystics, and Bernini's depiction is
   earnest.

   The Cornaro family promotes itself discreetly in this chapel; they are
   represented visually, but are placed on the sides of the chapel,
   witnessing the event from balconies. As in an opera house, the Cornaro
   have a privileged position in respect to the viewer, in their private
   reserve, closer to the saint; the viewer, however, has a better view
   from the front. They attach their name to the chapel, but St. Theresa
   is the focus. It is a private chapel in the sense that no one could say
   mass on the altar beneath the statue (in 17th century and probably
   through the 19th) without permission from the family, but the only
   thing that divides the viewer from the image is the altar rail. The
   spectacle functions both as a demonstration of mysticism and as a piece
   of family pride.

Baroque architecture

   Ludwigsburg Palace near Stuttgart, Germany's largest Baroque Palace
   Enlarge
   Ludwigsburg Palace near Stuttgart, Germany's largest Baroque Palace
   Melk, Wachau
   Enlarge
   Melk, Wachau

   In Baroque architecture, new emphasis was placed on bold massing,
   colonnades, domes, light-and-shade ( chiaroscuro), 'painterly' colour
   effects, and the bold play of volume and void. In interiors, Baroque
   movement around and through a void informed monumental staircases that
   had no parallel in previous architecture. The other Baroque innovation
   in worldly interiors was the state apartment, a processional sequence
   of increasingly rich interiors that culminated in a presence chamber or
   throne room or a state bedroom. The sequence of monumental stairs
   followed by a state apartment was copied in smaller scale everywhere in
   aristocratic dwellings of any pretensions.

   Baroque architecture was taken up with enthusiasm in central Germany
   (see e.g. Ludwigsburg Palace and Zwinger Dresden), Austria and Russia
   (see e.g. Peterhof and Catherine Palace). In England the culmination of
   Baroque architecture was embodied in work by Sir Christopher Wren, Sir
   John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, from ca. 1660 to ca. 1725. Many
   examples of Baroque architecture and town planning are found in other
   European towns, and in Latin America. Town planning of this period
   featured radiating avenues intersecting in squares, which took cues
   from Baroque garden plans.In Sicily, Baroque developed new shapes and
   themes as in Noto and Acireale "Basilica di San Sebastiano"

Baroque theatre and dance

   In theatre, 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.

   Theatre evolves in the Baroque era and becomes a multimedia experience,
   starting with the actual architectural space. It is during this era
   that most of the technologies that we currently see in current Broadway
   or commercial plays were invented and developed. The stage changes from
   a romantic garden to the interior of a palace in a matter of seconds.
   The entire space becomes a framed selected area that only allows the
   users to see a specific action, hiding all the machinery and technology
   - mostly ropes and pulleys.

   This technology affects the CONTENT of the narrated or performed
   pieces, practicing at its best the Deus ex Machina solution. Gods were
   finally able to come down - literally - from the heavens and rescue the
   hero in the most extreme and dangerous, even absurd situations.

   The term Theatrum Mundi - the world is a stage - was also created. The
   social and political realm in the real world is manipulated in exactly
   the same way the actor and the machines are presenting/limiting what is
   being presented on stage, hiding selectiveley all the machinery that
   makes the actions happen. There is a wonderful german documentary
   called Theatrum Mundi that clearly portrays the political extents of
   the Baroque and its main representative, Louis XIV.

   Watch movies like Vatel, Farinelli, and the wonderful staging of
   Monteverdi's Orpheus at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona to see
   some wonderful recreations of this time period. William Christie,
   American, and Les Arts Florissants have performed an extensive research
   on all the French Baroque Opera, performing pieces from Charpentier and
   Lully, among others that are extemelly faithful to the original 17th
   century creations.

   Dance was popular in the Baroque era.

Baroque literature and philosophy

   Baroque actually expressed new values, which often are summarized 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. The psychological pain of
   Man -- a theme disbanded after the Copernican and the Lutheran
   revolutions in search of solid anchors, 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").

   The privilege given to external forms had to compensate and balance the
   lack of content that has been observed in many Baroque works: Marino's
   " Maraviglia", for example, 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 Spain, the baroque writers are framed in the Siglo de Oro.
   Naturalism and sharp criticist points of view about Spanish society are
   common in the conceptista writers like Quevedo, while culterano authors
   emphasize the importance of form with complicated images and the use of
   hyperbaton. Theatre was extensively developed by authors like Lope de
   Vega and Calderón de la Barca. Overall, Cervantes is considered the
   most complete author of Spanish literature due to his main work, Don
   Quixote.

   In the Portuguese Empire the most famous baroque writer of the time was
   Father António Vieira ,a Jesuit who lived in Brazil during the 18th
   century. Secondary writers are Gregório de Matos and Francisco
   Rodrigues Lobo.

   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.

Baroque music

   The term Baroque is also used to designate the style of music composed
   during a period that overlaps with that of Baroque art, but usually
   encompasses a slightly later period. J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel are
   often considered its culminating figures.

   It is a still-debated question as 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.

   It should be noted that the application of the term "Baroque" to music
   is a relatively recent development. The first use of the word "Baroque"
   in music was only in 1919, by Curt Sachs, and it was not until 1940
   that it was first used in English (in an article published by Manfred
   Bukofzer). Even as late as 1960 there was still considerable dispute in
   academic circles over whether music as diverse as that by Jacopo Peri,
   François Couperin and J.S. Bach could be meaningfully bundled together
   under a single stylistic term.

   Opera was born during the Baroque era out of the experimentation of the
   Florentine Camerata, the creators of monody, who attempted to recreate
   the theatrical arts of the ancient Greeks. Indeed, it is exactly that
   development which is often used to denote the beginning of the musical
   Baroque, around 1600.

Typical Instruments

     * Baroque violin
     * Viola d'amore
     * Viola da gamba
     * Harpsichord
     * Baroque oboe
     * Baroque trumpet
     * Lute
     * Organ

Examples of Baroque music

   (In chronological order.)
     * Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) Vespers (1610)
     * Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672), Symphoniae Sacrae (1629, 1647, 1650)
     * Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), Canon in D (1680)
     * Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) Armide (1686)
     * Henry Purcell (1659–1689) Dido and Aeneas (1687)
     * Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741), L'Estro Armonico (1711)
     * George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), Water Music Suite (1717)
     * Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), Sonatas for Cembalo or Harpsichord
     * Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) Dardanus (1739)
     * Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), The Art of Fugue (1749)
     * Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767), Der Tag des Gerichts ("The Day
       of Judgement") (1762)

The term "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
   Portuguese word "Barroco". It means an irregular pearl, or false
   jewel—notably, an ancient similar word, "Barlocco" or "Brillocco", is
   used in Roman dialect for the same meaning—and natural pearls that
   deviate from the usual, regular forms so they do not have an axis of
   rotation are known as "baroque pearls". Alternatively, it may derive
   from the now obsolete Italian "Baroco" (meaning, in logical
   Scholastica, 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 excesses of its emphasis, of its eccentric redundancy,
   its noisy abundance of details, as opposed to the clearer and sober
   rationality of the Renaissance. It was first rehabilitated by the
   Swiss-born art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) in his
   Renaissance und Barock (1888); Wölfflin identified the Baroque as
   "movement imported into mass," an art antithetic to Renaissance art. He
   did not make the distinctions between Mannerism and Baroque that modern
   writers do, and he ignored the later phase, the academic Baroque that
   lasted into the 18th century. Writers in French and English did not
   begin to treat Baroque as a respectable study until Wölfflin's
   influence had made German scholarship pre-eminent.

   In modern usage, the term "Baroque" may still be used, usually
   pejoratively, to describe works of art, craft, or design that are
   thought to have excessive ornamentation or complexity of line, or, as a
   synonym for " Byzantine", to describe literature, computer programs,
   contracts, or laws that are thought to be excessively complex,
   indirect, or obscure in language, to the extent of concealing or
   confusing their meaning. A "Baroque fear" is deeply felt, but utterly
   beyond daily reality.

Modern usage

   In contemporary culture the term "baroque" is also commonly used to
   describe any artistic style that could be extremely elaborate,
   ornamented or adorned. In reality, the modern usage of baroque has
   nothing or very little to do with classic baroque, even though many
   people are unaware of the distinction.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
