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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

LearnThatWord.com is a free vocabulary and spelling program where you only pay for results!

• Schools and Styles of Fine Art - baroque: emotional, dramatic style, anticlassical in form and spirit (late 16th-18th c.)
• Schools, Styles, and Forms - baroque: style emphasizing dramatic or distorted elements presented in classical ordered form (17th-18th c.)
• Types of Music and Composition - baroque: (adj) designating music of period 1600-1750
• Schools and Styles - baroque: architectural style using strong, dramatic design with imaginative use of theatrical, chiaroscuro effects (Europe, 17th-18th c.)

For other uses, see Baroque (disambiguation).

Adoration, by Peter Paul Rubens

The Church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini

The Baroque is a period of artistic style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music. The style started around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe.^[1]

The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church, which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent, in response to the Protestant Reformation, that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement.^[2] 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 of courts, grand staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence.

Contents 1 Etymology 2 Modern usage 3 Development 4 Painting 5 Sculpture 5.1 Bernini's Cornaro chapel: the complete work of art 6 Architecture 7 Theatre 8 Literature and philosophy 9 Music 9.1 Composers and examples 10 See also 11 References 12 Bibliography 13 Further reading 14 External links

Etymology

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word baroque is derived from the Portuguese word "barroco", Spanish "barroco", or French "baroque", all of which refer to a "rough or imperfect pearl", though whether it entered those languages via Latin, Arabic, or some other source is uncertain.^[3] A century ago, the Encyclopædia Britannica 11th edition, thought the term was derived from the Spanish barrueco, a large, irregularly-shaped pearl, and it was for a time confined to the craft of the jeweller.^[4] Others derive it from the mnemonic term "Baroco" denoting, in logical Scholastica, a supposedly laboured form of syllogism.^[5]

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.

The word "Baroque", like most periodic 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 transliteration of the Portuguese phrase "pérola barroca", which means "irregular pearl", and natural pearls that deviate from the usual, regular forms so they do not have an axis of rotation are known as "baroque pearls".^{[citation needed]}

The term "Baroque" was initially used with a derogatory meaning, to underline the excesses of its emphasis. In particular, the term was used to describe its eccentric redundancy and noisy abundance of details, which sharply contrasted the clear and sober rationality of the Renaissance. Although it was long thought that the word as a critical term was first applied to architecture, in fact it appears earlier in reference to music, in an anonymous, satirical review of the première in October 1733 of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734. The critic implied that the novelty in this opera was "du barocque", complaining that the music lacked coherent melody, was filled with unremitting dissonances, constantly changed key and meter, and speedily ran through every compositional device.^[6]

Modern usage

In modern usage, the term "Baroque" may still be used, usually pejoratively, describing 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 software, contracts, or laws that are thought to be excessively complex, indirect, or obscure in language, to the extent of concealing or confusing their meaning.

The word 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.^{[citation needed]}

Expressionism is often compared to Baroque.^[7] A difference between the two is that "Expressionism doesn't shun from the violently unpleasant effect, while baroque does. Expressionism throws some terrific 'fuck you's, baroque doesn't. Baroque is well-mannered."^[8]

Development

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

Aeneas flees burning Troy, Federico Barocci, 1598

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 Carracci and his circle, and found inspiration in other artists such as Caravaggio, and Federico Barocci nowadays sometimes termed 'proto-Baroque'.

Seminal ideas of the Baroque can also be found in the work of Michelangelo and Correggio.

Some general parallels in music make the expression "Baroque music" useful. Contrasting phrase lengths, harmony and counterpoint ousted polyphony, and orchestral color made a stronger appearance. (See Baroque music.)

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.

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 art form. 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.

The drier, 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 interiors, Kent's furniture designs are vividly influenced by the Baroque furniture of Rome and Genoa, hierarchical tectonic sculptural elements, meant never to be moved from their positions, completed the wall decoration. Baroque is a style of unity imposed upon rich, heavy detail.

Painting

Still-life, by Portuguese painter Josefa de Óbidos, c.1679, Santarém, Portugal, Municipal Library

Main article: Baroque painting

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),^[9] 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.

Baroque style featured "exaggerated lighting, intense emotions, release from restraint, and even a kind of artistic sensationalism". Baroque art did not really depict the life style of the people at that time; however, "closely tied to the Counter-Reformation, this style melodramatically reaffirmed the emotional depths of the Catholic faith and glorified both church and monarchy" of their power and influence.^[10]

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 Saint Maria della Vittoria, which brings together architecture, sculpture, and theatre into one grand conceit.^[11]

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

The intensity and immediacy of baroque art and its individualism and detail—observed in such things as the convincing rendering of cloth and skin textures—make it one of the most compelling periods of Western art.^{[weasel words]}

A rather different art developed out of northern realist traditions in 17th century Dutch Golden Age painting, which had very little religious art, and little history painting, instead playing a crucial part in developing secular genres such as still life, genre paintings of everyday scenes, and landscape painting. While the Baroque nature of Rembrandt's art is clear, the label is less often used for Vermeer and many other Dutch artists. Flemish Baroque painting shared a part in this trend, while also continuing to produce the traditional categories.

Sculpture

Main article: Baroque sculpture

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. 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. Aleijadinho in Brazil was also one of the great names of baroque sculpture, and his master work is the set of statues of the Santuário de Bom Jesus de Matosinhos in Congonhas. The soapstone sculptures of old testament prophets around the terrace are considered amongst his finest work.

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 Baroque work 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.

Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa

Saint Theresa, the focal point of the chapel, is a soft white marble statue surrounded by a polychromatic marble architectural framing. This structure works to conceal a window which lights 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 and in an imaginary setting. St. Theresa of Avila, a popular saint of the Catholic Reformation, wrote 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. In her writings, she described the love of God as piercing her heart like a burning arrow. Bernini literalizes this image by placing St. Theresa on a cloud while 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.

This is widely considered the genius of Baroque, although this mix of religious and erotic imagery was extremely offensive in the context of neoclassical restraint. However, Bernini was a devout Catholic and was not attempting to satirize the experience of a chaste nun. Rather, he aimed to portray religious experience as an intensely physical one. 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.

Architecture

Augustusburg Palace near Cologne

Trevi Fountain in Rome

Main article: Baroque architecture

In Baroque architecture, new emphasis was placed on bold massing, colonnades, domes, light-and-shade (chiaroscuro), 'painterly' color 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). 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, Ragusa and Acireale "Basilica di San Sebastiano".

Another example of Baroque architecture is the Cathedral of Morelia Michoacan in Mexico. Built in the 17th century by Vincenzo Barrochio, it is one of the many Baroque cathedrals in Mexico.

Francis Ching described Baroque architecture as "a style of architecture originating in Italy in the early 17th century and variously prevalent in Europe and the New World for a century and a half, characterized by free and sculptural use of the classical orders and ornament, dynamic opposition and interpenetration of spaces, and the dramatic combined effects of architecture, sculpture, painting, and the decorative arts."^[12]

Theatre

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

Theatre evolved in the Baroque era and became a multimedia experience, starting with the actual architectural space. In fact, much of the technology used in current Broadway or commercial plays was invented and developed during this era. The stage could change from a romantic garden to the interior of a palace in a matter of seconds. The entire space became 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 affected 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 selectively all the machinery that makes the actions happen.

The films Vatel, Farinelli, and the staging of Monteverdi's Orpheus at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, give a good idea of the style of productions of the Baroque period. The American musician William Christie and Les Arts Florissants have performed extensive research on all the French Baroque Opera, performing pieces from Charpentier and Lully, among others that are extremely faithful to the original 17th century creations.

Literature and philosophy

Further information: 17th century in literature, 17th century philosophy, and Early Modern literature

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. 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. 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").^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]} But the increased attention to the individual, also created in these schemes some important genres like the Romanzo (novel) and allowed 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 as a possible cause for the classical opposition to Baroque) caused Latin to be definitely replaced by Italian.^{[citation needed]}

In Spain, the baroque writers are framed in the Siglo de Oro. Naturalism and sharply critical points of view on Spanish society are common among such conceptista writers as Quevedo, while culterano authors emphasize the importance of form with complicated images and the use of hyperbaton. In Catalonia the baroque took hold as well in Catalan language, with representatives including poets and dramaturgs such as Francesc Fontanella and Francesc Vicenç Garcia as well as the unique emblem book Atheneo de Grandesa by Josep Romaguera. In Colonial Spanish America some of the best-known baroque writers were Sor Juana and Bernardo de Balbuena, in Mexico, and Juan de Espinosa Medrano and Juan del Valle y Caviedes, in Peru.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]}

For German Baroque literature, see German literature of the Baroque period.

Music

Main article: Baroque music

George Frideric Handel, 1733

Johann Sebastian Bach, 1748

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.

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,^[13] and it was not until 1940 that it was first used in English (in an article published by Manfred Bukofzer).^[14]

Many musical forms were born in that era, like the concerto and sinfonia. Forms such as the sonata, cantata and oratorio flourished. Also, opera was born out of the experimentation of the Florentine Camerata, the creators of monody, who attempted to recreate the theatrical arts of the Ancient Greeks. An important technique used in baroque music was the use of ground bass, a repeated bass line. Dido's Lament by Henry Purcell is a famous example of this technique.

Composers and examples

• Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), L'Orfeo, favola in musica (1610)
• Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672), Symphoniae Sacrae (1629, 1647, 1650)
• Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), Armide (1686)
• Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704), Mystery Sonatas (1681)
• John Blow (1649–1708), Venus and Adonis (1680–1687)
• Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), Canon in D (1680)
• Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), 12 concerti grossi
• Henry Purcell (1659–1695), Dido and Aeneas (1687)
• Tomaso Albinoni (1671–1751), Sonata a sei con tromba
• Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741), The Four Seasons
• Johann David Heinichen (1683–1729)
• Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), Dardanus (1739)
• George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), Water Music Suite (1717)
• Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), Sonatas for Cembalo or Harpsichord
• Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), Brandenburgische Konzerte (1721)
• Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767), Der Tag des Gerichts (1762)
• Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736), Stabat Mater (1736)

See also

• Gilded woodcarving
• Neo-baroque
• Dutch Baroque architecture
• English Baroque
• French Baroque
• Italian Baroque
• Naryshkin Baroque
• Petrine Baroque
• Polish Baroque
• Baroque in Portugal
• Sicilian Baroque
• Spanish Baroque architecture
• Ukrainian Baroque
• List of Baroque architecture

References

1. ^ Fargis, Paul (1998). The New York Public Library Desk Reference (third ed.). New York: Macmillan General Reference. pp. 262. ISBN 0-02-862169-7. 
2. ^ Helen Gardner, Fred S. Kleiner, and Christin J. Mamiya, Gardner's Art Through the Ages (Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005), p. 516.
3. ^ OED Online. Accessed 6 June 2008.
4. ^ "Baroque". Encyclopædia Britannica 1911. http://www.theodora.com/encyclopedia/b/baroque.html. Retrieved 20 April 2011. 
5. ^ Panofsky, Erwin (1995). "What is Baroque?". Three Essays on Style. The MIT Press. pp. 19 .
6. ^ Claude V. Palisca, "Baroque". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001).
7. ^ Michel Ragon (1968) Expressionism quotation:

   There is no doubt that Expressionism is Baroque in essence

8. ^ Gabriele Pedullà, Alberto Arbasino [2000] Sull'albero di ciliegie [On the cherry tree] - Conversando di letteratura e di cinema con Alberto Arbasino in CONTEMPORANEA Rivista di studi sulla letteratura e sulla comunicazione, Volume 1, 2003 quotation:

   L’espressionismo non rifugge dall’effetto violentemente sgradevole, mentre invece il barocco lo fa. L’espressionismo tira dei tremendi «vaffanculo», il barocco no. Il barocco è beneducato

   translation:

   Expressionism doesn't shun from the violently unpleasant effect, while baroque does. Expressionism throws some terrific "fuck you"s, baroque doesn't. Baroque is well-mannered.

9. ^ Peter Paul Rubens The Life of Marie de' Medici.
10. ^ Hunt, Martin, Rosenwein, and Smith (2010). The Making of the West (third ed.). Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin's. pp. 469
11. ^ "Cornaro Chapel" at Bogelwood.com.
12. ^ Francis DK Ching, A Visual Dictionary of Architecture, p. 133
13. ^ Sachs, Curt (1919) (in Deutsch). Barockmusik [Baroque Music]. Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters. 26. Leipzig: Edition Peters. pp. 7–15. 
14. ^ Palisca, Claude V. (1991) [1961]. Baroque Music. Prentice Hall History of Music (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0130584967. OCLC 318382784. 

Bibliography

• Andersen, Liselotte. 1969. "Baroque and Rococo Art", New York: H. N. Abrams.
• Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1994. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Sage.
• Gardner, Helen, Fred S. Kleiner, and Christin J. Mamiya. 2005. Gardner's Art through the Ages, 12th edition. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. ISBN 9780155050907 (hardcover) ISBN 9780534640958 (v. 1, pbk.) 0534640915 ISBN 9780534640910 (v. 2, pbk.) ISBN 9780534640811 (CD-ROM) ISBN 9780534641009 (Resource Guide) ISBN 9780534641085 (set) 0534641075 ISBN 9780534641078 (v. 1, international student ed., pbk.) ISBN 9780534633318 (cd-ROM)
• Wakefield, Steve. 2004. Carpentier's Baroque Fiction: Returning Medusa's Gaze. Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías 208. Rochester, NY: Tamesis. ISBN 1855661071.

Further reading

• Bazin, Germain, 1964. Baroque and Rococo. Praeger World of Art Series. New York: Praeger. (Originally published in French, as Classique, baroque et rococo. Paris: Larousse. English edition reprinted as Baroque and Rococo Art, New York: Praeger, 1974)
• Kitson, Michael. 1966. The Age of Baroque. Landmarks of the World's Art. London: Hamlyn; New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Lambert, Gregg, 2004. Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. Continuum. ISBN 9780826466488.
• Martin, John Rupert. 1977. Baroque. Icon Editions. New York: Harper and Rowe. ISBN 006435332X (cloth); ISBN 0064300773 (pbk.)
• Wölfflin, Heinrich. 1964. Renaissance and Baroque (Reprinted 1984; originally published in German, 1888) The classic study. ISBN 0-8014-9046-4

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Baroque art

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Baroque.

• The baroque and rococo culture
• "Dictionary of the History of Ideas": Baroque in literature
• The greatest works of Baroque literature
• Webmuseum Paris
• barocke in Val di Noto – Sizilien
• Baroque in the "History of Art"
• On Baroque Symbolism
• The Baroque style and Luis XIV influence
• "Baroque Style Guide". British Galleries. Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/british_galleries/bg_styles/Style03b/index.html. Retrieved 16 July 2007. 
• Melvyn Bragg's BBC4 radio program In Our Time: The Baroque

v d e Art movements 5th to 18th century Merovingian Carolingian Ottonian Romanesque International Gothic Renaissance (14th–15th) Mannerism (16th) Caravaggisti (16th) Baroque – Classicism (17th) Rococo – Neoclassicism – Romanticism (18th) 19th century Nazarene Realism Historicism Biedermeier Gründerzeit Barbizon school Pre-Raphaelites Academic Impressionism Post-Impressionism Neo-impressionism Divisionism Pointillism Cloisonnism Les Nabis Synthetism Symbolism Hudson River School 20th century Cubism Orphism Purism Synchromism Expressionism Scuola Romana Abstract expressionism Kinetic art Neue Künstlervereinigung München Der Blaue Reiter Die Brücke New Objectivity Dada Fauvism Neo-Fauvism Precisionism Art Nouveau Bauhaus De Stijl Art Deco Op art Vienna School of Fantastic Realism Pop art Photorealism Futurism Metaphysical art Rayonism Vorticism Suprematism Surrealism Color Field Minimalism Nouveau réalisme Social realism Lyrical Abstraction Tachisme COBRA Action painting International Typographic Style Fluxus Lettrism Letterist International Situationist International Conceptual art Installation art Land art Performance art Systems art Video art Neo-expressionism Neo-Dada Outsider art Lowbrow New media art Young British Artists 21st century Hyperrealism Intervention art Stuckism International Remodernism Pseudorealism Sound art Superstroke Superflat SoFlo Superflat Relational art Video game art Related articles List of art movements Modern art Modernism Late modernism Postmodern art Avant-garde

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Dansk (Danish)
adj. - barok-
n. - barok, barokstil

Nederlands (Dutch)
barok, barokkunst

Français (French)
adj. - (Archit, Art, Mus) baroque
n. - (Archit, Art, Mus) baroque

Deutsch (German)
adj. - barock
n. - Barock

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μπαρόκ, πληθωρική διακόσμηση
adj. - μπαρόκ, περίτεχνος, επιτηδευμένος

Italiano (Italian)
barocco

Português (Portuguese)
n. - barroco (m)
adj. - grotesco, fantástico

Русский (Russian)
период барокко, барочный

Español (Spanish)
adj. - barroco, extravagante
n. - barroco

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - barock
adj. - barock-, i barockstil, bisarr

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
巴洛克式的, 怪异的, 怪诞的, 巴洛克风格, 巴洛克式

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 巴洛克式的, 怪異的, 怪誕的
n. - 巴洛克風格, 巴洛克式

한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 바로크 양식의, 괴상한, 지나치게 장식적인
n. - 바로크 양식, 지나치게 장식된 것, 별 스런 취미

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - バロック様式, バロック様式の作品
adj. - バロック様式の, バロック時代の, あくどくて粗野な, 奇異な

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) أسلوب فني يعود للقرن السابع عشر (صفه) شبيه بفنون القرن السابع عشر‏

עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - ‮של סגנון הבארוק‬
n. - ‮סיגנון באמנות ובאדריכלות שהיה מקובל במאות 71-81‬

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