Baroque

In arts, the Baroque (or baroque) is both a period and the style that dominated it. Baroque style used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur from sculpture, painting, literature, and music. The style started around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe. In music, the Baroque applies to the final period of dominance of imitative counterpoint.

Baroque literature and philosophy

Baroque actually expressed new values, which often are summarised 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. If Mannerism was a first breach with Renaissance, Baroque was an opposed language. It represented the evidence of the crisis of Renaissance neoclassical schemes— the psychological pain of Man, disbanded after the Copernican and the Lutheran revolutions, in search of solid anchors, in search of a proof of an ultimate human power, was to be found in both the art and architecture of the Baroque period. A relevant part of works was made on religious themes, since the Roman Church was the main "customer."

Related Topics:
Metaphor - Allegory - Marinism - Copernican - Lutheran

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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.")

Related Topics:
Virtuoso - Realism

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Not without a certain correctness, it is said that the privilege given to external forms had to compensate and balance the lack of contents 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. But the increased attention to the individual, also created in these schemes some important genres like the Romanzo (novel) and let 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 was a possible cause for the classical opposition to Baroque) caused Latin to be definitely replaced by Italian.

Related Topics:
Marino - Maraviglia - Novel - Italy - Latin

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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.

Related Topics:
English literature - Metaphysical poets

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