The general period we have labeled "Renaissance" continues without any sharp stylistic break (except for the interrupting episode of Mannerism) into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We call the art of this later period Baroque, although no one Baroque style or set of stylistic principles actually has been defined. The origin of the word is not clear. It may come from the Portuguese word barroco, meaning an irregularly shaped pearl. Certainly the term originally was used especially in connection with post in a disparaging sense, Renaissance architecture, which nineteenth-century critics perceived as decadent Classical: unstructural, overorna mented, theatrical, and grotesque. The term Baroque included in the art-historical vocabulary for many years a a blanket designation for the art of the period roughly covering 1600 to 1750 and encompassing the careers of some of the greatest painters, sculptors, and architect the Western world has ever produced.
Scholars gradually came to see that the Baroque styles were quite different from those of the Renaissance. The Baroque, for example, looks dynamic; Renaissance styles are relatively static. The historical reality lies in the flow of stylistic change, and Baroque art is a useful classification for isolating the tendencies and products of stylistic change. We shall designate here as Baroque those traits that the styles of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries seam to have in common. We have earlier applied adjective "baroque" retrospectively to examples of ancient sculpture and architecture that appear to modern art historians to have strong stylistic affinities with seventeenth and eighteenth-century monuments, for example.
Like the art it produced, the Baroque era was manifold -
It was an age of expansion following on an age of discovery, and its expansion led to still further discovery. The rising national powers colonized the globe Wars between Renaissance cities were supplanted by wars between continental empire and the history of Europe was influenced by battles fought in the North American wilderness and in India. The art of the Baroque period reflects this growing nationalism. In France, for example, it centers around the powerful monarchy; in Italy, it is the Catholic art of the popes, in opposition to the art of the Protestant North.
In preparation for the upcoming lecture at the Victoria and Albert museum on the 25th, 28th, 31st of March
Baroque expansiveness extended well beyond the earth in the conceptions of the new astronomy and physics proposed by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. The same laws of mechanics were found to govern a falling apple and a celestial body moving at great velocity. Humanity's optical range was expanding to embrace the macroscopic spaces of the celestial world and the microscopic spaces of the cellular. The Baroque is almost obsessively interested in the space of the unfolding universe. Descartes makes extension (space and what occupies it) the sole physical attribute of being only mind and extension exist, the former proving the reality of the latter in Descarters' famous phrase Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Pascal confesses in awe that "the silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”. Milton expresses the Baroque image of space in a phrase: "the vast and boundless deep”.
The Baroque scientist comes to see physical nature as matter in motion through space and time; the latter two are thought of as the conditions of the first. The measurement of motion is made possible by the new mathematics of analytical geometry and the infinitesimal calculus, and experiment comes to be accepted as the prime method for getting at the truth of physical nature. Time, like space and motion, is a preoccupation of the creative Baroque mind, art as well as in science. The age-old sense of time, rich with religious, philosophical, psychological, and poetic import persists alongside the new concept of it as a measurable property of nature.
Time, the subtle thief of youth that of steals away the lives of all of us; that, in the end, reveals the truth, vindicates goodness, and rescues innocence: that demolishes the memory of great empires; and that points to the ultimate judgment of humankind by God - this sense of time pervades the art and literature of the Baroque. Countless allegorical representations portray time as the fierce old man carrying his scythe or devouring his children. For the Baroque artist, then, time has acquired its new "scientific" connotations of the instantaneous and the infinite, yet without any loss of its significance for each human life.
Although the exclusive and exacting report of these elements is a most important enterprise in the age of the Baroque, the mechanical simulation of appearances for its own sake is by no means the naturalistic artist's intention. Although each artist obviously delights in the achievement of astonishing illusion, the images that are embody spiritual and metaphysical meanings of nature so persuasively real and present that their significance and truth are strongly reinforced. In this way, the artist brings before us the reality of the unseen world by means of the seen, the visible objects that are regarded as symbolic or emblematic of invisible and unchanging truth. Baroque naturalism remains largely religious in content. While naturalism thrived in Baroque art, Classicism was revised and further developed, and the two styles divided the taste of the age with a third: the dynamic, colorful, sensuous style characteristic of Rubens and Bernini. This concept was manifest in their insistence on the careful observation and depiction of the human figure from life. Nevertheless, the opposition of Classicism to the dramatic dynamism of painters like Rubens becomes conscious and fixed in the Baroque.
A central theme of Baroque art and literature is the conflict of reason with passion. The representation of that conflict is, of course, as ancient as Plato and survives as a great dualism in Western thinking about human nature. The exploration of the elementary structure of physical nature is accompanied, quite consistently, by the exploration of human nature, the realm of the senses and the emotions. The function of the representational arts is to open that realm to full view. The throwing open to human scrutiny of the two physical universes of macrocosm and microcosm did not distract Baroque humanity from the age-old curiosity about the nature of humankind. After all it was now perceived that if we are one with nature, the knowledge of ourselves must be part of the knowledge of nature.
Source: Garner’s Art Through The Ages, tenth edition