BAROQUE, ART. — The term “baroque,” which today criticism employs in a historical sense, i.e. without any intrinsic value judgment, to denote the art of the seventeenth century and a good part of the eighteenth, was originally coined with a pejorative meaning, and even if its etymology or derivation remains uncertain, it conveys the sense of the false, the extravagant, the reprehensible. This explains why the art of that period finds its chronological limit in the fierce polemic that Neoclassicism waged against it, branding it as delirious abnormality and convulsive, unbridled arbitrariness; and, at the same time, why baroque art stands out in sharp contrast to the art that preceded it (known as Mannerist).
Yet this very objective distinctiveness and inner coherence—not only with the taste of the entire epoch in which it developed, but also with the manifestations of contemporary poetry and literature—has persuaded twentieth-century criticism to overcome every polemical prejudice and to place baroque art in the light to which it is fully entitled.
The famous tercet by Marino is often taken as a quintessential symbol of the baroque sensibility: “È del poeta il fin la meraviglia: — Parlo dell'eccellente e non del goffo — Chi non sa far stupir vada alla striglia.”
In truth, the sense of the marvelous can well signify—in the context of a concise approximation—the inner formal content of the artistic expressions of the seventeenth century.
Having reached, in the intellectualist presumptions of the sixteenth century, the fullness of the ideals pursued by the fifteenth, artists believed they had to adhere to the imitation of the great masters, and they made this the basis of their theoretical approach to figurative art; so much so that art, intrinsically, resolved itself into composition rather than the invention of individual formal elements, thereby finding its new language (cf. MANNERISM).
But against this undeniable subjection there arose a free imagination that sought to transcend cultural conceptuality, to surpass every theoretical limit, and especially to break away, in every sense, from the forms that had become entrenched and consolidated in any accepted meaning.
Thus, for example, it was astonishing to see columns twist into fat spirals, pediments break apart, gables multiply and curve; walls bend and lose all geometric appearance, shadow and light replace the elemental nature of building materials, orders become mere expedients for pictorial effect; buildings transformed from strictly architectural structures into scenographic pretexts; the human figure valued not so much in itself as for the pictorial exuberance to which its always-exaggerated movement gave rise, both in its attitudes and—even more—in the drapery that fantastically transfigured it; landscape subordinating the figure, light prevailing over drawn form, the unexpected replacing the preordained. And since the men and artists of the seventeenth century took pleasure in marveling at such “irregularities” in artistic expression, even degenerating into bombast and virtuosity, it is on this fundamental and unyielding taste that baroque art cannot be considered inferior, nor even comparable to that of other periods; it must therefore be fully recognized in itself and for itself (cf. ART), and indeed admired for the uninhibited triumph of imagination, vitality, and exuberant freedom in which it is quintessentially embodied.
A distinctly Roman phenomenon, baroque architecture provided the ideal setting for the visual triumph of the Catholic Church emerging from the reforms of the Counter-Reformation (cf. COUNTER-REFORMATION, ART OF THE); and the style reaches its heights—divergent in their freedom of expression yet identical in historical value—in the towering personalities of Bernini and Borromini. Already Maderno, in the façade of S. Susanna (1606), proposes the theme of the dynamic façade, enriched—almost formed—by contrasts of light values; and the statues there assume not merely decorative but constitutive value through their intrinsic architectural quality. Taking up and amplifying the motif (which was not new) of Vignola in the church of the Gesù (begun in 1568), the side aisles are suppressed to allow the central nave to triumph, vast under its vaulted ceiling, populated by elaborate altars, intricate vaults, and scenographically perfected side chapels and, more significantly, in the deep apse: a final stage where, amid gilded “glories” and streaming light, the diffuse and magniloquent effect is brought to conclusion.
The interior of S. Peter’s will be the most extensive example. But Bernini’s churches (1598–1680) most fully exemplify the affirmation of pictorialism entrusted to the free interplay of mass values. S. Andrea al Quirinale, with its elliptical plan and entrance baldachin shaped in counter-curve, is among the most notable examples; and the stylistic coherence is complete with the work that marked Bernini’s architectural debut, the baldachin of S. Peter’s, where the spiral columns, the bronze gleaming with unexpected reflections, the simulation of drapery and vegetal elements, together with the scenographic value of the whole, find in baroque taste its most characteristic expression: beyond form in the sixteenth-century sense, matter in illusion, born from its figuration into values that transcend the work itself, spreading into environmental determinations.
In Bernini’s work are summed up the aims and achievements of his predecessors, and from it radiate his followers, from the last Mannerists to the true Baroque artists: from Giacomo della Porta (façade of S. Luigi dei Francesi, 1584), to Rughesi (S. Maria in Vallicella, 1605); from Martino Longhi the Elder (d. 1591, S. Girolamo degli Schiavoni), to Domenico Fontana (1543–1607, side façade of S. Giovanni in Laterano); and from Maderno (façade of S. Peter’s, 1607–14) through G. B. Soria (1581–1651, façade of S. Gregorio al Celio), and Algardi (1595–1654, façade of S. Ignazio), to Rainaldi (1611–91, façade of S. Maria in Campitelli), Carlo Fontana (1634–1714, façade of S. Marcello), Martino Longhi the Younger (1682–1753, façade of the Maddalena), and still further to the reactionary composure of the eighteenth century by Salvi (magnificent in the Trevi Fountain), Specchi (who, together with De Sanctis, designed
(1680–1753; façade of the Maddalena), and even down to the composite reactions of the eighteenth century by Salvi (magniloquent though he was in the Trevi Fountain), by Specchi (who, together with De Sanctis, wrote the magnificent testament of Roman Baroque in the staircase of Trinità dei Monti), and even by the classicising Galilei (façade of S. Giovanni in Laterano), a contemporary of the already neoclassical Vanvitelli.
A singular and towering figure (who may be included in the Berninian current) is Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), who especially with the exterior of S. Maria della Pace manifested the ardour of his style in moving masses and in multiplying the surrounding space illusorily, appropriating the surrounding void, elevating his work to scenographic—and one might say urbanistic—value.
Civil architecture clearly follows the same taste; in the Palazzo di Montecitorio by Bernini, even in its sobriety, the majestic character of the whole accords with the “bizarre” character of the lower windows, whose sills seem as if hewn from raw rock; thus the massive power of the ensemble is enhanced.
Thanks to the prodigious building activity of the popes and noble families (especially the Barberini and Chigi), Rome acquired its unmistakable face, where urban planning seems (and in this sense resolves itself) to be replaced by scenographic and panoramic values. Indeed, as a backdrop to the streets, animated by the resurrected obelisks, stand the new city gates (the finest example being Bernini’s Porta del Popolo); and the fountains that rendered water architectural in the most intimately Baroque sense, giving rise to the greatest exaggeration of the marvellous (one need only recall the so-called Fountain of the Rivers in Piazza Navona, also by Bernini, where the obelisk is set upon empty space). The ample portals framed in solemn architecture become the foreground of the courtyards, which are transfigured into the sudden pictorial quality of gardens and panoramic backdrops; and finally, the scenography of the whole is enriched by minute details—such as, for instance, the windows of the Palazzo Barberini “receding upwards” in perspectival simulation of depth—whereby even individual forms find full renewal.
Borromini (1599–1667), who is often presented, beyond unchecked anecdote, as Bernini’s antagonist, in truth completes his genius, integrating the meaning of the Baroque.
Not through a fantastic play of masses, but through the richest elaboration of linear elements in the gentle and extraordinarily complex undulation of façades, and in short through the complete overcoming of every traditional realism, Borromini expresses the truest meaning of the art of his time.
The plans of his churches, though derived from rigorous geometric compositions, suggest such indefiniteness in spatial values as to justify the most recent critical view that sees in Borromini the triumph of an intimate “Gothic” sensibility. Especially since, in elevation, he replaces the valorisation of structural or otherwise heavy elements with an intricate network of members, bands and meshes that exalt above all else the value of drawing. The interior of the dome of the celebrated S. Carlino alle Quattro Fontane, and more especially the spiral lantern of the dome of S. Ivo, exemplify this fully.
To Bernini and Borromini may be traced the rich expansion of Baroque architecture in Italy and beyond.
In Italy, with Guarini (1624–83, Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin) and Juvarra (1685–1737, Palazzina di Stupinigi), Piedmont becomes characteristic for palaces and churches where the complexity of original schemes is refined to the point of foreshadowing the later eighteenth-century “Rococo”; in the Veneto, despite the strong local tradition, Longhena (1598–1682; S. Maria della Salute in Venice) will constitute the last great art of the lagoon; scant traces in Florence and Tuscany, faithful to Renaissance nobility; sporadic but well-established forms in Romagna and Emilia; not very significant traces in Lombardy, where the expectation of Neoclassicism was more lively. In Naples, on the other hand, especially through the work of Fanzaga (1591–1678; church and cloister of S. Martino), the taste for the polychromy of inlaid marbles spreads, and Sicilian architecture, enriched in a Spanish manner, continues into the eighteenth century, especially in Catania. Meanwhile, Apulian Baroque (which in fact connects with Spanish “Plateresque”) is original, where the special quality of the stone—soft and compact—favours the abundance of ornamental sculpture entirely at the service of architecture, which flourishes and froths in the monuments of Lecce, popularly called the Florence of the Baroque.
Abroad, Baroque was enthusiastically received; and Bernini’s legacy, who designed a project for the Louvre, spread from well-known Parisian churches (Val de Grâce) to influence the sensibility of the Swede Tessin (1615–81). In Germany, especially in Dresden, examples abound. In Spain, where Italian artists had been active since the sixteenth century, the new style was limited—as indeed almost everywhere outside Italy—to enriching traditional forms with painterly effects. Yet it is certain that throughout Europe the schemes of Roman Baroque churches still today predominate over forms that came after the seventeenth century.
Likewise, the theme of the villa, as it matured in Rome with the grandest examples of the Tusculan and Tiburtine villas, was adopted everywhere as the complete expression of Baroque taste.
Sculpture, not content with the exaltation of its already celebrated architectural value, expressed in itself its triumphant Baroque essence.
The commemorative monument itself imposes—mutually—the need to compose statuary into architectural complexes. Even the “group” and the isolated statue lose every trace of sixteenth-century academicism and satisfy the desire for the marvellous that was proper to the age. Bernini, without doubt, proclaims the style of the time, from his early works (the celebrated Apollo and Daphne in the Borghese Gallery) to the great statues in churches. And everywhere the billowing drapery, the simulation of material, the eruptive and expansive postures of the figures transfigure plastic value, through an absolute pictorialism, into the exclusive sense of motion, in which form escapes its traditional definition. Thus in the monuments in St Peter’s (for example, that of Urban VIII and of Alexander VII), in the celebrated St Teresa in S. Maria della Vittoria, and in the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in S. Francesco a Ripa; and especially in the complex of the Cathedra Petri, a veritable triumphal “machine” set against the backdrop of the basilica and the baldacchino.
provisional pictorial quality of gardens and panoramic backdrops; and finally, the scenography of the whole is enriched by minute details—such as, for instance, the windows of the Palazzo Barberini “receding upwards” in perspectival simulation of depth—whereby even individual forms find full renewal.
The same taste—for the pictorial, the dynamic, the grand, the panoramic—also informs sculptural altarpieces, which become the backdrop and completion of altars. These, which replaced the large painted panels of painters, had their greatest exponent in Algardi (1595–1654), who, while embodying a reaction to Bernini’s exuberances, nonetheless constitutes a significant testimony to the tendencies followed by the numerous lesser artists who carried the art of the two masters into the full eighteenth century.
Painting, like the other manifestations of figurative art, likewise revealed the new attitudes of the spirit and the demands of taste.
Opposed polemically to the academic formalism of conventional types, the painters either asserted the freedom of personal and expressed judgment on the masters of the Renaissance—drawing from them elements (not models) for new works of art—or introduced absolute novelty, that is, a radical transposition of iconographic, compositional, and formal themes. Carracci (v.) Caravaggio (v.).
The Carracci worked extensively, with an audacity that then seemed bold when set against the restrained works of Barocci, still subtly rooted in the sixteenth century, producing scenes rich in fantasy while striving, through careful selection, to imitate what were then considered the finest parts of Raphael, Michelangelo, Correggio, and the Venetians. Yet this academically flavored eclecticism—erroneous in theory—was shaken by their creative freedom. While their “Accademia degli Incamminati” and “Scuola dei Desiderosi” sought to halt, in that theoretical and didactic stance, the progress of art, in fact the Carracci gave rise to a series of imaginative scenes (suffice it to recall the examples in the Palazzo Farnese).
Barocca, ARTE - S. Domitilla between ss. Nereo and Achilleo. Painting by P. P. Rubens - Rome, church of S. Maria in Vallicella.
Barocca, ARTE - Lectern (18th century) - Naples, museum of S. Martino.
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**BAROCCA, ARTE - S. Domitilla between ss. Nereo and Achilleo.**
**Painting by P. P. Rubens - Rome, church of S. Maria in Vallicella.**
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**BAROCCA, ARTE - Lectern (18th century).**
**Naples, museum of S. Martino.**
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These works paved the way for the grand decorative paintings of a later date, those that, like sculpture, integrated with architecture.
But the true revolutionary was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610). Drawing from Lombard painting and, in a broadly generic sense, invigorated by Venetian painting, he fiercely opposed the lingering intellectualism of the Carracci and rejected the cultural contributions of the great but exhausted predecessors, turning instead to direct observation of reality. The more stark, simple, essential, and corporeal reality was, the more abundantly it provided Caravaggio with artistic inspiration, renewing a kind of primordial expressiveness. The elemental spontaneity of a basket of fruit became a painting of the same nobility as a sacred subject; indeed, a still life of flowers was truer than a homage to Michelangelo. And so too in the most purely pictorial values: in Caravaggio’s most mature and characteristic works, light is the sole and supreme agent of form. No longer does drawing define and exhaust every aspect, determine spaces, or deceive with illusions of dimension. Instead, there is a plastic and chromatic world, as rich as reality itself, but validated only by the sudden incidence of light that reveals it to lived experience—and thus only in those parts that the light, as it breaks in, surprises. For the first time in the history of painting (with rare exceptions, mostly involving studies of nocturnal effects), light ceases to be a merely optical presupposition or a pictorial “environment” and becomes the despotic protagonist of the visible and hence of the expressible. Hence the dramatic effect, the violent and immediate contrasts of light and shadow; hence space no longer serves as scenography but is so closely bound to forms that it loses its individual value. The canvases in S. Luigi dei Francesi, S. Maria del Popolo, and the Death of the Virgin in the Louvre museum bear witness to the stylistic coherence and fertile substance of this innovator.
Opposed by contemporaries who accused him of brutal realism and irreverence toward tradition and the schematism of iconography, Caravaggio was nonetheless embraced by painters as a liberating revelation. Even many heirs of the Carracci, such as Reni (1575–1642) and Guercino (1591–1666), were invigorated by Caravaggio’s influence; and Rembrandt and Velázquez drew from him the decisive impetus for their expressive power.
Yet with Guercino, Lanfranco (1582–1647), and especially Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), his brother Pozzo (1642–1705), and most forcefully Baciccio (1639–1709), painting exalted the premises of the Baroque and became, in its highest sense, decorative: in the sense that it simulated open space and within it projected the richest and most lavish compositions with the utmost freedom of fantasy, for which architecture exalted itself, decisively transcending every spatial determination and formal limit. Linear perspective, raised to the highest virtuosity, enabled the “quadraturista” Andrea Pozzo to give the vault of S. Ignazio the ideal extension of complex architectures, amid which the glory of the titular saint—and even more the glory of the name of Jesus, spread by the Society—is exalted; and aerial perspective carries the imaginative resources of Gaulli, author of the vault of the church of the Gesù, to the highest peaks. Here colors, fading, are precisely accompanied by the inverse progression of luminous intensity, at its maximum at the apex of a radiant pyramid; and the astonishing “sott’in su,” suspended without any visibly drawn support in the open sky, the valorization of light, the necessity of going beyond the frame of the vault and expanding painting onto canvases that leap over the moldings and members of architecture—this supreme transcendence seems to encapsulate within itself the experiences and ideals of the century.
Subjects change: from Salvator Rosa’s “battles” to Albani’s mythological scenes, from Ruoppolo’s (1620–85) still lifes to Strozzi’s (1581–1644) war scenes; from the cloudy and radiant sacred scenes of the Carracci and Domenichino (1581–1641) to landscape, valid in itself—from the “classical” of the Lorenese (1600–82) to the more neoclassically inclined of Poussin (1594–1665), “philosopher-painter,” down to the delight in the rustic, the characteristic, the picturesque ruins. In short, it is all an exhaustion of the repertoire that was to close in the cultural rigor of the educational and evocative painting of the following century; and in the last heir of the Baroque and Gaulli, Tiepolo (1696–1770), light delights in the bleached clarity, however splendid, of vast swept skies. Thus too the historical, realistic, and cultural premises of the seventeenth century, no longer handmaids to fantasy, revive in the prelude to the true academism inherent in the painting of Carlo Maratti (1625–1713).
But now the Baroque is spent, and it would incur the bitter condemnation of the cold Neoclassicism that followed. — See Plates LIX–LXII.
BIML: For general information, consult: A. Schmarow, Barock und Rokoko, Leipzig 1897; W. Worringer, Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation, Berlin 1921; J. Wicrantner, Der Geist des Barocks, Hamburg 1925; M. Marangoni, A. b., Florence 1927; A. E. Brinckmann, Die Kunst des Barocks und Rokoko, Berlin n.d.; B. Croce, Storia dell’età barocca, Bari 1928; H. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, Florence 1928. – On architecture, consult (in addition to the general works cited) the following special studies: D. Frey, Architettura barocca, Rome-Milan n.d.; G. De Logu, L’architettura italiana del Seicento e del Settecento, Florence 1935. – For regional developments in Baroque architecture, cf. A. E. Brinckmann, Theatrum novum Pedemontii, Düsseldorf 1931; R. Pane, Architettura dell’età barocca in Napoli, Naples 1939. – On “Roman Baroque,” cf. A. Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, Vienna 1923. – On sculpture, consult: A. E. Brinckmann, Barockskulptur, Berlin 1917; R. Battaglia, La cattedra berniniana di S. Pietro, Rome 1943. – On painting: H. Voss, Die Malerei des Barocks in Rom, Berlin 1925. – On the spread of Baroque in Europe, cf. W. Weisbach, Die Kunst des Barocks in Italien, Frankreich, Deutschland und Spanien, Berlin 1924. – For the artists mentioned, see the individual entries containing further bibliography concerning Baroque art in general.