Dictionary:

baroque

  (bə-rōk')

1. also Baroque Of, relating to, or characteristic of a style in art and architecture developed in Europe from the early 17th to mid-18th century, emphasizing dramatic, often strained effect and typified by bold, curving forms, elaborate ornamentation, and overall balance of disparate parts.
2. also Baroque Music. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a style of composition that flourished in Europe from about 1600 to 1750, marked by expressive dissonance and elaborate ornamentation.
3. Extravagant, complex, or bizarre, especially in ornamentation: “the baroque, encoded language of post-structural legal and literary theory” (Wendy Kaminer).
4. Irregular in shape: baroque pearls.

The baroque style or period in art, architecture, or music.

[French, from Italian barocco, imperfect pearl, and from Portuguese barroco.]

adjective

Elaborately and heavily ornamented: flamboyant, florid, ornate, rococo. See plain/fancy.

Definition: decorative, especially architecture
Antonyms: plain, unadorned, undecorated

[common] Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of elephantine or monstrosity but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. In the absence of other, more negative descriptions this term suggests that the software is trembling on the edge of bad taste but has not quite tipped over into it. “Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its letterform output. Now that is baroque!” See also rococo.

Term used to designate the period or style of European music covering roughly the years 1600-1750. First used in French, it derives from a Portuguese word meaning a pearl of irregular shape; initially it was used to imply strangeness, irregularity and extravagance and was applied more to art than music. Only in the present century has it been used to refer to a period in music history.

Music of the Baroque period, which some authorities see as beginning as early as 1570 in Italy and ending during the second half of the 18th century, in such countries as England and Spain, has a number of characteristics in style and spirit, including the use of the basso continuo and the belief in the doctrine of the affections. The emphasis on contrast (of texture, pace, volume etc) in the music of the earlier Baroque, as compared with that of the late Renaissance, is also a distinguishing characteristic. Important early Baroque composers include Monteverdi, Giovanni Gabrieli and Schütz; of the middle Baroque, Alessandro Scarlatti, Corelli, Lully and Purcell; and of the late Baroque, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Domenico Scarlatti, Couperin and Rameau.

The principal European style in the visual arts in the 17th century and the first half of the 18th; generally considered to be characteristic of the period of Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Giordano and Tiepolo in painting, Bernini in sculpture, and Borromini, Fischer von Erlach and Wren in architecture. Usage of the term is often extended to the whole period 1600-1750 without qualifying restrictions, or improperly to mean a florid and elaborate style in art, architecture, music or literature, of any date from late antiquity to the early 20th century.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

baroque [bă‐rok], eccentric or lavishly ornate in style. The term is used more precisely in music and in art history than it is in literary history, where it usually refers to the most artificial poetic styles of the early 17th century, especially those known as Gongorism and Marinism after the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora and the Italian poet Giovanni Battista Marini. In English, the ornate prose style of Sir Thomas Browne may be called baroque, as may the strange conceits of the metaphysical poets, especially Richard Crashaw. Some critics have tried to extend the term to Milton and the later works of Shakespeare as well. See also mannerism, rococo.

A European style of architecture and decoration which developed in the 17th cent. in Italy from late Renaissance and Mannerist forms, and culminated in the churches, monasteries, and palaces of southern Germany and Austria in the early 18th cent. It is characterized by interpenetration of oval spaces, curved surfaces, and conspicuous use of decoration, sculpture, and color. Its late phase is called Rococo. The style prevailing in the restrained architectural climate of England and France can be called Baroque classicism.

A term long used disparagingly, but given positive value by Wölfflin to define non-classical form in post-Renaissance painting. Extended later to the other arts, its application to literature, though controversial, has led to the revaluation of much that was previously dismissed as of little worth. Baroque art is seen as forceful, restless, unitary in its impact, breaking out beyond its formal limits—in contrast with the stability and ideal clarity of classical art. It invites emotional response rather than intellectual contemplation. Primarily the term refers to the period between Renaissance classicism, founded on immanent reason and proportion, and the neoclassical revival, the high point of the baroque thus understood being the Rome of Bernini and Borromini. But this scheme is too simple: it does not allow for the complex relationship between the baroque and 16th-c. mannerism, 18th-c. rococo, or indeed 17th-c. French classicism (many ‘classical’ authors display features usually associated with the baroque).

The term has acquired a thematic content rich enough to encompass the ethos and the pathos of an age. In the climate of near anarchy and religious war of late 16th-c. France, Pléiade humanism and courtly mannerism could no longer suffice. There is blood and thunder in the dramas of Hardy, unrestrained vituperation in satire, the love poetry of d'Aubigné is violently expressionistic, religious poets like Sponde and Chassignet are obsessed with sin and death. But in France, as elsewhere, the deeper cultural crisis is ontological. The sense of universal mutability, the loss of bearings amidst ‘ce tintamarre de tant de cervelles philosophiques’ (Montaigne), the social as well as the epistemological difficulty of discerning l'être from le paraître—such misgivings find appropriate means of expression involving enigma and illusion.

Theatrical values pervade the baroque. It sees the world as a stage, on which identities change, are called in question, confused, masked, and double-masked: a striking instance is Rotrou's Le Véritable saint Genest, where the hero-actor suffers the martyrdom of the character he represents—in a play within the play. But the theatre is also a decor, in which art, with increasingly sophisticated techniques, challenges the authority of nature, both in the playhouse and in festive forms of make-believe like the ballet de cour. Concurrently, the great outburst of visual imagery in Renaissance poetry is followed now by an extraordinarily free use of metaphor and conceit—stylistic means of metamorphosis. These may be played with for sheer pleasure or mannerist bravura, as by Marino and his French imitators; but for poets of the Catholic revival, like Du Bois Hus or Martial de Brives, they serve also to display the glory of the Creator, whose artistry has conjured up so dazzling and kaleidoscopic a world, and one so fruitful in similitude and symbol. (The theory of metaphoric wit and the pointe is fully elaborated by Jesuit rhetoricians—Sarbiewski in Poland, Gracián in Spain, Tesauro in Italy.)

In itself, however, this world is insubstantial, illusory: it is a theatre for the existential drama of man. For God is the Lord not only of nature, but also of history, and of the grim and glorious epic of the Redemption. So, in La Ceppède's intense spiritual exercises on the Passion, for instance, the symbolism is vividly realistic. Later, in a more self-assured Church, the tension eases. In Les Tragiques, the Protestant d'Aubigné had set a blood-drenched stretch of lived-through history in its context of eternity; the mid-century Catholic national epics (owing much to Tasso), such as the Saint Louis of Le Moyne, do the same for a history that is already legendary [see Epic Poetry]. Always, though, whether intense or expansive, militant or triumphalist, in literature as in the visual arts, the baroque seeks to impress, persuade, convert: it urges towards the transcendent.

This is a climate for heroes, saints, and martyrs. It appeals to the spirit of chivalry and gloire still alive in the aristocracy, and also to the Christianized Neostoicism, with its Roman resonance, spread in France by Du Vair. Much of all this is reflected in Pierre Corneille's theatre. And since the king himself is the Lord's anointed, the poetry of the Throne is as securely based as that of the Altar, drawing, with Malherbe and many others, both on the Bible and on heroic mythology.

After the Fronde, with the taming of the nobility and the elevation of the bourgeoisie, with the abating of religious fervour and the spread of Jansenist severity, with the growth of critical thought and of the natural sciences, the climate changes. In the work of the grands classiques, the baroque still provides much of the internal dynamics, but the transcendental urge gives way to a searching scrutiny of human behaviour and motivation [see Classicism].

[Alan Steele]

Bibliography

• J. Rousset, La Littérature de l'âge baroque en France (1953)
• P. Butler, Classicisme et baroque dans l'œuvre de Racine (1959)
• P. N. Skrine, The Baroque (1978)

Baroque (Barock)was once a term of denigration applied to supposedly extravagant and grotesque examples of 17th-c. and 18th-c. architecture and even to absurdity or whimsicality in the abstract (e.g. ‘a baroque idea’ or ‘conceit’). The word first acquired a respectable connotation through the art historian Jakob Burckhardt. It was given a more precise definition in the work of Heinrich Wölfflin, who at the turn of the century established baroque as a style in the arts of painting, architecture, and sculpture, in which dynamic energy, flux, swaying movement, and dramatic contrast, all declining to be fixed in space, replace the harmonious completeness and immobility of the classical, from which some of its elements are nevertheless derived. In the second decade of the 20th c. the concept ‘Barock’ was extended to German literature, notably by F. Strich, H. Cysarz, and E. Ermatinger. The exponents of this new conception of ‘Barockdichtung’ considered what had previously been regarded as bombast and a degenerate taste for excessive ornament to be a conscious and purposefully designed style, which created a new technique of accumulation, synonymity, antithesis, and parallelism to express the flickering chiaroscuro of a world in which grandeur and suffering, pomp and death coexisted in the closest proximity. The most conspicuous figure of baroque literature is Andreas Gryphius, both as tragic dramatist and as poet. The high-flown rhetoric of Gryphius appears in augmented form in Lohenstein and Hoffmann von Hofmannswaldau. The pregnant syntactical formalism of the style is evident in the mystical poetry of Angelus Silesius and Quirinus Kuhlmann. Among other exemplars, Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, Weckherlin, Fleming, Hock, Zesen, and J. U. König should be mentioned; in the later phases a satirical baroque prose is developed by C. Reuter and Abraham a Santa Clara. Among the more conspicuous forms are dramas of political or religious violence (Gryphius and Lohenstein), funerary odes, and sonnets for the New Year reviewing the personal misfortunes of the old and the probable disasters of that about to dawn. Titles such as Schlußgesang von der Flüchtigkeit und Nichtigkeit des menschlichen Lebens (Zesen) are not surprising in an age which knew the Thirty Years War, the repeated ravages of the plague, and the gruesome and protracted execution of capital sentences. But readers should guard against too personal and intimate an interpretation of this poetry, which is frequently ceremonial and highly formal. Moreover, though it has perhaps been less emphasized, there is much baroque erotic poetry, some of it of a pastoral character.

The truly baroque features are not conspicuous in all the writers of the 17th c. The hymn writers in particular, of whom P. Gerhardt is the outstanding figure, belong to a popular tradition which can trace its descent from Luther; and the great novelist of the century, Grimmelshausen, is perhaps the least baroque figure of all.

The temporal delimitation of the baroque age has been made difficult by the attempt to find some consonance between style in the various arts. It has often seemed convenient, but has in practice proved unfortunate, to treat ‘Barock’ as synonymous with the 17th c. The literary symptoms seem most clearly observable in the middle and later part of the century, though one school of critics opts for an earlier period (1580-1640). Baroque music is primarily associated with H. Schütz, with J. S. Bach, and with Handel (Händel), running therefore well into the 18th c. The architecture, too, belongs to the late 17th c. and to much of the following century up to 1750. The problem is complicated by the concept of ‘rococo’ (see Rokoko) and the difficulty of finding any point at which a frontier line can be drawn between baroque and rococo.

The baroque created confusion and dissension among its interpreters following its inception as an artistic term in the mid-eighteenth century. The origins of baroque (often capitalized) as a term are obscure, and once historians in the late nineteenth century began to question the derogatory meaning that had accrued to it, baroque became more contested than other period styles. During the mid-twentieth century, not long after it was used to characterize music, literature, and theater in addition to art history, a consensus developed that is still maintained in the popular press. By this account, baroque designates art and architecture from c. 1580 to c. 1750, and is a proselytizing Catholic art and grandiose power statement adopted by kings, emperors, popes, and other aspiring absolutists. Its multimedia forms were thought to be monumental, exuberant, unstable, theatrical, and metamorphic. Its psychology was self-aware, mystical, manipulative, melodramatic, and playful. Its subjects ranged from the abject to the sublime, from caricatures to idealized portraits, from sexualized ecstasies to bloody dismemberings. Its modes of expression were encomia, catafalques, and epithalamia; its key symbols the mask, the labyrinth, and the telescope and microscope.

This popular view holds much truth for many art forms, but in the second half of the twentieth century, scholars led by Ernst Curtius and Wolfgang Stechow began to question the legitimacy of the baroque as a period of style. They accepted baroque as a legitimate stylistic term that may be applied to some late Hellenistic, late Gothic, and other arts, but not baroque as a period style for the seventeenth century. The new consensus today asserts that the baroque, like any period style, relies on an essentialist Hegelianism that was discredited along with other totalizing prejudices such as sexism, racism, and nationalism. Furthermore, it was questioned whether an originally pejorative term signifying deformation and mawkish emotionalism could fairly represent a heterogenous phenomenon that included Carlo Dolci's pious quattrocentism, the limpid mist of Vermeer's rooms, and Cassiano Dal Pozzo's artists conscientiously recording, classifying, and reconstructing the ancient past. Like baroque ornaments that entwine buildings, the term baroque had spread too far, lately even to economics, and become so variously defined that its utility was lost. As a period style, this may be true, but baroque is currently enjoying a revival as an interpretive key to contemporary art.

Etymologies

It seems fitting that for a style known for instability and mutation no secure etymology has been determined. Baroque as a term is shrouded in greater ambiguity than the etymologies of other period styles. Wherever its origins truly lie, one can safely say that barocco (Italian and Spanish), Barock (German), and baroque (French and English) are linguistic mutations and semantic grotesques, much like the style they describe.

The four principal etymologies are presented here, from the most to least frequently accepted definitions:

1. Barroco, the Portuguese word for 'deformed pearl'(in Spanish barueca), is the etymology preferred by art historians, not for any particular philological reason, but because it signifies a visual form. Just as a spherical unblemished pearl may signify classical perfection, so a baroque pearl signifies its flawed perversion. "Flawed" was a nineteenth-century opinion; in the seventeenth century "baroque" pearls were fashionable.
2. In Italian, a baroco was a false scholastic syllogism, a caricature of logic and hence a form of sophistry. Because it originated in rhetoric and language, it became the preferred etymology for literary historians from Benedetto Croce (1929) onward; among art historians, only the textually oriented Erwin Panofsky (1934) accepted this as its primary meaning. During the seventeenth century, the French considered barocco to be an empty Italian form, identified with academies and devoid of original thought (Michel de Montaigne); Italians understood it more generally as sophistry (Francesco Fulvio Frugoni). Baroco was, like rococo, a form of baby talk or parrot chatter, where form is cut loose from its signifiers. Like the baroque pearl, baroque syllogism was not always viewed negatively in the seventeenth century but instead signified a form of wit, "an ingenious quibbling . . . playfully persuasive . . . based on metaphor" (Emanuele Tesauro). Whereas Croce and others regarded baroque syllogism as a "gnostic confusion" and an "empty game," the seventeenth century equated it with an equivocating wit and the associative ambiguities of metaphor that lie at the center of genius and creativity.
3. Baroccho from the fourteenth through seven–teenth centuries signified a type of usury, similar to pawnbroking, and hence by extension something illegitimate.
4. Erich Hubala proposed baroquer, used by French cabinet makers to signify turning and curving.
5. Generally unaccepted, but still enticing, proposed terms include barraqa (Arabic for 'to open one's eyes') and bis-roca (Latin for 'twisted stone').

Origins of a Period Style

Otto Kurz, Bruno Migliorini, and Rossana Bossaglia have traced the earliest applications of barocco/baroque/Barock as an art or architectural term to the 1740s. In 1751 Denis Diderot's encyclopedia entry defined baroché as "a painter's term used to explain that the paintbrush did not cleanly delineate a contour and that it smeared colors." At the same time, Charles Cochin and Charles de Brosses described baroque forms as twisted, winding, tortuous, and confused. Others likened it to the plague, dropsy, and other diseases, to decadence and lunacy. Francesco Milizia (1768) likened the suicidal and "raving mad" Borromini to the "contagious architectural madness" of his buildings: "He went baroque." De Brosses, picking up on a seventeenth-century epithet of Borromini as "a gothic ignoramous," identified baroque art as neo-Gothic where clear structure is hidden behind "fussy trimmings" and where precious miniature decorations are inappropriately gigantic. Baroque was thus an Asiatic style of sophistry and indiscriminate ornament, and like the Asiatic, it was conceived as foreign. The baroque as Gothic is one example; other critics compared it to Islamic and Chinese decoration (Pompei, 1735; Milizia, 1768).

In these early usages, baroque was not explicitly a period style, not yet Baroque with a capital B, but only a recurring degraded style frequently found in the seventeenth century. Concurrently with the use of baroque as a stylistic quality, early-eighteenth-century critics began to reify the seventeenth century as a cultural unit, a discrete decadent period where the visual and literary arts shared defects of excess, exaggeration, and novelty: "Just as Marino . . . introduced without proper judgment new forms of thought and speech in poetry. . . . so too might be said of Borromini, Bernini, Pozzi and their contemporaries, enriching buildings with new ornaments and deviated from good practice and deforming it" (Pompei, 1735). Others created a baroque canon of the terrible "B's" representing sculpture, architecture, and painting: Bernini, Borromini, and Berretini (that is, Pietro da Cortona). Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who wrote his seminal The History of Ancient Art (1764) partly as a critique of the baroque, saw it as a late "superfluous" style, the inevitable end of classicism, much like Late Hellenism and mannerism, all noisy, deformed, exaggerated, and corrupted.

Recoveries

The recovery of the baroque as a legitimate independent period style instead of a late bastardized form of the Renaissance began in late-nineteenth-century architectural studies (Wölfflin, 1888; Gurlitt; Riegl). For the architect Cornelius Gurlitt, this historical rehabilitation coincided with his architectural practice in a neo-baroque style. More than any other scholar, Heinrich Wölfflin came to be associated with the rehabilitation of the baroque, first in Renaissance and Baroque (1888; based on his dissertation) and finally in the classic Principles of Art History (1915). In the latter, he proposed five paired morphological categories, intended to distinguish Renaissance from baroque but that became for early-twentieth-century art historians universal categories: linear/painter; plain/recession; closed/pen form; multiplicity/unity; clearness/unclearness. Although now often dismissed as a "mere" formalist, Wölfflin, in his interest in the psychology of art and perception, influenced a younger generation of art historians (such as Wilhelm Worringer and Henri Focillon).

Many scholars starting in the 1930s resisted the formulation of the baroque as a period style, arguing instead that it should be seen as a perpetually renewing form (Focillon; Panofsky; D'Ors). Much like eighteenth-century critics of seventeenth-century art as a new Gothic (flamboyant Gothic and Spanish Plateresque) or as a new mannerism, they thought of the baroque as much as a recurring type as a chronologically limited period style. Curtius extended this view by showing how the perception of stylistic recurrences is partly a linguistic illusion, one that was created by the fixed rhetorical categories inherited by historians. This, in turn, helped lay the ground for a new historicism (White; Holly).

The German revisionists of the late nineteenth century assumed that the baroque originated in Italy and maintained its purest forms there. By the mid-twentieth century, however, a group of scholars (D'Ors; Francastel; Hatzfeld) proposed Spain and not Italy as its place of origin, partly because of the social control and mystical fervor of the Spanish church, partly because they thought of the baroque as an innately Spanish form of expression that can be traced back to Hispano-Latin writers like Lucan and Prudentius and to the Hispanic absorption of Islamic and North-African ornament. The Spanish origins of the baroque had actually been proposed much earlier, to little effect, by the literary historian Girolamo Tiraboschi (1782). A recent exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York interpreted contemporary Brazilian art as a continuation of baroque traditions (Sullivan).

During the 1950s, a series of seminal studies were published in Italy questioning Croce's syllogistic baroque (Retorica e Barocco; Argan). They accepted Croce's baroque as an art of rhetoric, or sophistry as Croce had insisted, but rediscovered its original virtues of persuasion and provocation. Having been sensitized to the linguistic dimension of the baroque, scholars then began a serious exploration of its etymology in the early 1960s (Bossaglia; Kurz; Migliorini). This turn to language was paralleled by contemporary developments in mannerism scholarship.

From the 1970s on, new (but not always convincing) theories of the baroque have been restricted to literature, music, or theater; more promising are those emanating from cultural studies and philosophy (Maravall; Deleuze). Art historians not disenchanted with the viability of period styles have tended to recycle previous ideas.

Baroque and Modernity

The rehabilitation of the baroque in the late nineteenth century coincided with the discovery of its modernity. Wölfflin stated this first: "One can hardly fail to recognise the affinity that our own age in particular bears to the Italian Baroque." Impressionism, art nouveau and liberty, symbolism, Richard Wagner's operas, and the philosophical treatises of Wagner's friend Friedrich Nietzsche offered new possibilities for appreciating the baroque. Nietzsche blamed pedants for mistaking the dionysian baroque for merely an irrational delirium. In Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio (1883) the metamorphosized bamboccio is sent off to an enchanted house of mirrors, the "Casa dei Barocchi," where men are transformed into asses, and it is in this unlikely place that Pinocchio finds his true path.

Not only have ideas on the baroque been reinterpreted in light of modern culture, but the baroque itself is seen as perennially modern. In 1934 Panofsky said the baroque was not the end of the Renaissance but "the beginning of a fourth era, which may be called 'Modern' with a capital 'M."' More recently Jacques Lacan professed that his riotously polyvalent thought, like a "Borromean knot," was baroque, claiming that modern existence can be best understood through its equivocations. In later-twentieth-century Italian literature, the neo-baroque movement posed linguistic convolutions to disorient readers. When asked why his literature must be so tortured, Carlo Gadda (one of the neo-barocchisti) responded: "I'm not baroque; the world is baroque." Omar Calabrese proposed the baroque as the best conceptual category for late-twentieth-century culture with its transgressions of pop culture into high art, its self-conscious referencing of the past, and its frenetic visual flux and its polymorphic media.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Brosses, Charles de. Lettres familières écrites d'Italie a quelques amis en 1739 et 1740. Paris, 1799. Letters from his travels in Italy; composed between 1745 and 1755.

Diderot, Denis, and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Vol. 2, p. 77. Geneva, 1777–1779.

Milizia, Francesco. Memorie degli architetti antichi e moderni. Rome, 1781.

Pompei, Alessandro. Li cinque ordini dell'architettura civile di Michel Sanmicheli. Verona, 1735.

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. The History of Ancient Art. Translated by A. Gode. New York, 1968. Translation of Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764).

Secondary Sources

Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Translated by Charles Lambert. Princeton, 1992.

Holly, Michael Ann. "Imagining the Baroque." In Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image, pp. 91–111. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.

Lacan, Jacques. "On the Baroque." In Lectures, edited by J.-A. Miller and translated by B. Fink. New York, 1998. Book XX; originally published in 1975.

Panofsky, Erwin. "What Is Baroque?" In Three Essays on Style, edited by Irving Lavin, pp. 19–88. Cambridge, Mass., 1995. Previously unpublished lecture from 1934.

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History. Translated by M. D. Hottinger. New York, 1950. Translation of Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915).

——. Renaissance and Baroque. Translated by Kathrin Simon. Ithaca, N.Y., 1966. Translation of Renaissance und Baroque (1888).

—PHILIP L. SOHM

A period in the arts, visual and musical, from about 1600 to about 1750, marked by elaborate ornamentation and efforts to create dramatic effects. Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, and Antonio Vivaldi were great composers of the baroque era.

An elaborate, extravagantly complex, sometimes grotesque, style of artistic expression prevalent in the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. The baroque influence on poetry was expressed by Euphuism in England, Marinism in Italy, and Gongorism in Spain.