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Baroque Aesthetics

Gothic, baroque

is at once a qualitative term and a historical concept. In everydaydiscourse, the term

baroque

is used pejoratively to mean over-wrought, complex, and excessive.At the same time,

Baroque

describes a cultural movement of the seventeenth century, defined bycharacteristic styles in the visual arts, music, and literature. Its most common usage is as areference to the period spanning around 1580 to 1720–1750, depending on the art form. As anoverall aesthetic concept, a quality, a sensibility, or a style,

baroque

is notoriously difficult toanalyze, because its two applications are in many ways inextricable and interdependent. Themost fruitful understanding of

baroque

demands an overview of both the concept's developmentand the aesthetic ideals of the Baroque period itself.

History of the Term

Over the past two centuries the term

baroque

has undergone a number of transformations thatreflect not only changing fashions in aesthetics but shifts in critical theory as a whole. Even itsetymology has been disputed. The most popularly cited derivation, acknowledged during theeighteenth century when the term was first used, is from the Spanish

barrueco

, and Portuguese

barroco

, from the Latin

veruca

, or wart, referring to the irregularly shaped pearls favored insixteenth- and seventeenth-century jewelry design;

barroco

is still used among jewelers today.Another derivation, suggested by Benedetto Croce during the 1920s, is

baroco

, a mnemonic termdevised during the fourteenth century for a complex figure in formal logic. Sixteenth- andseventeenth-century Italian writers would use the phrase

argomento in baroco

to designate the pedantic, convoluted thinking of late-medieval logic. The tradition of two derivations isunderstandable because they are in fact similar in connotation.By the mid-eighteenth century,

baroque

barocco

had become a convenient, and alwaysderogatory, term for the grotesque, bizarre, excessive, or absurd, applied indiscriminately toartistic, architectural, and musical styles. This is largely because of the classicist bias of muchcontemporary aesthetics. In 1746, the French philosopher Noël-Antoine Pluche distinguished

musique baroque

(mutable, speedy, audacious, artificial, technically demanding of the performer) from

musique chantante

(unforced, melodic in a manner attuned to the human voice,natural and artless). He also described performances, as well as the music itself, as

baroque

(

Spectacle de la nature

, 1746, vol. 7). Jean-Jacques Rousseau's

Dictionnaire de la musique

(1778) defines baroque music as dissonant, confusingly intricate, and with impetuous changes intempo and harmony. Meanwhile, in Denis Diderot's

Encyclopédie

(1772),

baroque

referred to bizarre forms of architecture. Interestingly enough, what is now called Baroque art—that is, post-Renaissance art—was severely criticized during the eighteenth century. Millizia, in his

Dizionario delle Belle Arti e del Disegno

(1797), applies the term in its sense of “bizarre” to thework of architects such as Francesco Borromini and Guarino Guarini.

Baroque as a Period Style

The art historian Jakob Burkhardt (1855) was the first to designate Baroque as an artistic styleassociated with a particular historical period. Continuing the term's tradition of opprobrium, hedefined the baroque as “a corrupt dialect” of the Renaissance. Indeed, some art historians under the influence of Burkhardt and his fellow partisans of the Italian High Renaissance, Croce andBernard Berenson, used

baroque

as a generic aesthetic concept meaning the decadent, grotesquelate stage of a given style, without reference to a particular historical period. Thus

Roman Baroque

was occasionally used to refer to late antiquity, and

Gothic Baroque

, for the expressivedistortions of fifteenth-century German art.

Baroque

was finally rescued from opprobrium by Heinrich Wölfflin in

Renaissance und Barock

(1888), a study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural form. Wölfflin insisted oneliminating the term's pejorative associations in an effort to clarify seventeenth-century style.Baroque style, according to Wölfflin, was not decadent but “a great phenomenon”: an inevitableshift from the classical stability, harmony, and clarity of the High Renaissance to a heavy,unarticulated, massiveness, shot through with light, dissonance, and movement.By 1915, in

Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe

, Wölfflin had definitively isolated the distinction between Renaissance and baroque style, in painting and sculpture and architecture, according tohis famous formal dichotomies: linear/painterly, plane and recession, closed form/open form,multiplicity/unity, clearness and unclearness. This theory of stylistic evolution based onopposing forces is strikingly similar to Friedrich Nietzsche's proposal of Dionysian andApollonian principles in

Die Geburt der Tragödie

(1870). Wölfflin's pairs of opposites are meantas absolute, inevitable polarizations in all of art, and are not limited to a particular time period.Thus, his comparisons of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, prints, and sculptures isolate patterns of evolution in the essentials of representation: lines and shadows, composition, thetreatment of space, which operate independently of differences among native traditions, or modes appropriate to the work's subject matter or context. Instead, his deterministic notion of style is historicized in a more global, abstract manner, claiming that Baroque style arose fromlarger historical and social forces and visualizing a new zeitgeist. [SeeWölfflin.] Thereafter, studies in seventeenth-century art continued in the wake of Wölfflin's rehabilitationof the Baroque. The term lost its pejorative associations, as well as its original meaning, over thecenturies; it has become a loose definition of the period between Mannerism and Rococo,spanning the late sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. As a historical phenomenon,the Baroque began to be defined more fully in relation to both psychological and social concepts.Erwin Panofsky, in his lecture “What Is Baroque?” (1935), defined its stylistic tendencies as atransformation of the formal, emotional, and even religious conflicts of the High Renaissanceand Mannerism into “subjective emotional energy” (Panovsky, 1995). The limits of the Baroque,for Panofsky, extend to the industrial revolution. [SeePanofsky.] Some scholars have treated the Baroque as a purely Italian phenomenon, driven by the evangelical demands of Catholicinstitutions in a spirit of renewal and reform. Others have reintroduced the element of classicism,which Wölfflin omits, reclaiming for the Baroque academically inclined artists such as theCarracci brothers and Nicolas Poussin. More recently, with the increase of specialization withinthe discipline, art historians have taken

Baroque

as a given, focusing their scholarly view onspecific examples of Baroque art to trace local traditions rather than the character of the

baroque

in general.Two notable exceptions are Germain Bazin (1968) and John Rupert Martin (1977), who offer surveys of Baroque art as a whole by integrating art of several cultures in several media. Bazin's bold, all-embracing strategy, organizing his discussion around “principles,” “styles,” “modes”and “themes,” is exhilarating but ultimately confusing. “Principles,” for example, includes notonly philosophical and aesthetic issues but different social institutions and milieus; Baroque“style” encompasses Gothic, Mannerist, and Classical as well as baroque. Martin follows this brilliant example in a more lucid manner, taming the unruly concept by organizing his discussionaround larger themes such as “space,” “time,” and “light,” as well as naturalism, allegory, andantiquity.In the history of music, the definition of Baroque as a historical period has been fairlystraightforward, presumably because it demarcates the evolution of specific, easily identifiableforms and structures. The most important structural change is a shift toward chordal harmony,

the splitting of equal-voiced counterpoint into a treble line carrying the melody and anaccompanying continuo. This was accompanied by a free use of dissonance; greater variation inrhythm, now liberated from the precision and consistency of the Renaissance

tactus;

and the useof measures to regulate patterns of beats. New forms based on these structural changes includerecitative and opera, the concerto, the prelude, and the fugue. There is general consensus aboutthe beginnings of Baroque (about 1580), though more dispute about its end, or emergence intothe “classical” period in the mid-eighteenth century.The progress of Baroque as a period concept in literary studies has been far more troubled. In

Renaissance und Barock

, Wölfflin had encouraged the application of the term to literature,comparing the opening stanzas of Ludovico Ariosto's

Orlando Furioso

(1532) and TorquatoTasso's

Gerusalemme Liberata

(1575). He evokes the shift in these verses from the light andeasy grace of the Renaissance to seriousness and dignity—pompous, rustling splendor as ananalogy to changes in pictorial and architectural form. His association of style and zeitgeist waslikewise popular among scholars in other fields, and made them especially receptive to his ideas.Taking their cue from his formal dichotomies, literary scholars began applying the concept of Baroque to literature during the 1920s.In some cases, the term was adopted as easily as in art history. The success of Baroque as an art-historical concept in Germany prompted literary scholars to accept the term readily. Scholars of Spanish literature likewise adopted the term fairly quickly, encompassing specific tendencies of the native tradition such as

cultista

and

conceptismo

, in contrast to a more sober classical style.The term was slower to win approval in England, where period designations tend to correspondto political eras (e.g., Elizabethan, Jacobean), which in turn overlap stylistic modes such as“metaphysical.” This was also the case in France, where, as is clear from the critical writings of the eighteenth century, there has always been a strong classicist disapproval of the Baroqueaesthetic. Nonetheless, on an international scale, the entry of Baroque into the field of literature has createda tradition of thorny debate, revealing the enormous difficulty of adapting an art-historical termto literary studies. Several generations of scholars have proposed and refined various definitionsof Baroque poetry, prose, and drama, as well as arguing the merits and problems of the termitself. Many critics have attempted to consider a unified Baroque style throughout the arts,whereas others have remarked on the inadequacy of this endeavor, focusing instead on theorigins of Baroque style within literary tradition itself, or on themes and subject matter, rather than styles, common to Baroque literature and visual arts. The literary debate flourishing sincethe postwar period suggests that no specific style can be appropriately applied across the arts.What has proved far more useful in literary studies is the art-historical approach to the Baroqueas an agglomeration of styles and modes, whereby the various arts are subsumed under a moregeneral discussion of Baroque culture. Such is the case with surveys by Peter Skrine (1978) andGiancarlo Maiorino (1990), who associate works of literature with visual art according tosimilarities of theme, mode, and subject. In general, the term's enormous convenience as ahistorical designation, even a catchphrase, has outweighed and perhaps resolved its past problems of definition and scope. Carl Friedrich's (1952) survey of Baroque culture, arts, politics, and war anticipates the approach of most contemporary scholars, for whom Baroque isnot only a seventeenth-century cultural movement, but a sensibility. Indeed, since the early1970s, the unwieldy nature of the concept has proved an asset rather than a liability: Baroque has become an appealing subject for the interdisciplinary approach popular in late-twentieth-centurycritical methodology. The art-historical model of Baroque permits an analysis of various styles,