Baroque Art

The Adoration of Peter Paul Rubens : a dynamic structure that forms a spiral wrap around an empty space with bright curtains, a breath of movements illuminated by a light arrow, painted with a brilliant mastery emancipated.

The Baroque is a style born in Italy to Rome , Mantua , Venice and Florence at the turn of the ^sixteenth and ^seventeenth centuries and is spreading rapidly in most countries of Europe. It affects all fields of art, sculpture , painting , literature , architecture and music and characterized by exaggeration of movement, excessive decorative effects drama, tension, exuberance, and sometimes pompous grandeur.

It continues the artistic movement of Renaissance art , the neoclassicism was succeeded from the second half of the ^eighteenth century.

The term "baroque" comes from the Portuguese "barroco" which means irregular shape about a pearl, a stone. (However the noun barroco first designates a large boulder roundness irregular, or a ditch, ravine .

In 1694 (in full Baroque period hence), the word for the French Academy "is only said that pearls are a very imperfect roundness. A necklace of baroque pearls " . Nearly a century later, in 1762, while the Baroque ends, besides its primary meaning, and always by the same academy, "he also said figuratively, to irregular, bizarre, uneven. " . In the ^nineteenth century to the sixth edition of his dictionary, the Academy reverses the order of definitions: the pearls are of secondary rank and figuratively at first. It was in 1855 that for the first time the word is used to describe the period succeeding the art and the Renaissance in the writings of the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt in The Cicerone . This is not a coincidence that in the German world was born this sense of the word, the French and the English have their kings to describe the evolution of styles (see Louis XIV , etc..) whereas At the time, Germany is divided into a myriad of micro-states, Kleinstaaterei.

It was not until 1878 for a generation and the "Baroque" do its entry in the Dictionary of French Academy and the definition loses some of its pejorative nature . It is true that the Empress Eugenie gave the taste of the sweets and the style of Louis XV and was born, what we call neo-baroque : the rehabilitation can start and write Wlfflin his work to enlighten us on what this baroque complex, troubled, irregular and, basically, more fascinating than funny ...

The art historian original Swiss Wlfflin Heinrich (1864-1945) Renaissance and Baroque defined the Baroque as "movement imported en masse, an art antithesis of Renaissance art. It makes no distinctions between Mannerism and Baroque that modern writers do, and it ignores its more recent phase, the rococo , which flourished in the first half of the eighteenth ^century. France and Britain, its study is taken seriously only from the dominant influence that Wlfflin acquires within the Germanic school.

Beginnings

Facade of the church of the Gesu in Rome, considered the first Baroque church (1580, Giacomo della Porta )

Germinal ideas of the Baroque can be found in the work of Michelangelo. The baroque style started around 1580.

The art historians, often Protestant , have traditionally emphasized that the Baroque style evolved at a time when the Catholic Church reacted against several cultural movements producing a new science and new forms of religion - the Reformation. It was said that the monumental baroque style that was the papacy could instrumentally, as did the absolute monarchies , by imposing a way of expression able to restore its prestige, symbolic point of commencement of the Counter-Reformation Catholic. Whether it was or was not the case, its development was a success in Rome where the Baroque architecture widely renewed the central city , perhaps the most significant urban renewal.

Distribution

The popularity and success of the Baroque are encouraged by the Catholic Church when she decides that the theatricality of the Baroque style artists could promote religious themes with a direct and emotional. It is an art of Catholicism as it was defined in 1545-1563 by the Council of Trent , whose decree the most significant is the "Decree on innovation and the relics of saints and holy images." So it's an aesthetic of Counter-Reformation , found particularly in the Jesuit art , it has also long equated the "art Jesuit" and "Baroque." This aesthetic encounter strong resistance in countries committed to the Reformation , which develops a Protestant art. England remains highly refractory, France as well.

The secular aristocracy also saw the dramatic impact of arts and Baroque architecture as a way to impress their visitors and their potential rivals. The baroque buildings consist of a series of courses at the entrance, lobbies , grand staircases and reception rooms, in order of increasing splendor. Many art forms - music, architecture and literature - learn from each other in this cultural movement.

The charm of the baroque style becomes conscious, from refinement, intellectual qualities of art Mannerism of the sixteenth ^century to the visceral charm to the senses. It employs an iconography direct, simple, obvious and dramatic. Baroque art is inspired to some extent trends heroic of Annibale Carracci and his circle, and finds inspiration through other artists like Correggio and Caravaggio and Federico Barocci , nowadays sometimes qualified to "proto-Baroque."

Often contrasted the art of the Carracci (brothers and cousin) to the art of Caravaggio by the terms of classical and baroque, there are two opposing influences in plastic (which was defined by Wlfflin) that will have a lot of influences on their successors.

Prometheus, Nicolas-Sbastien Adam , 1737 ( Louvre Museum ): a feat of feverish tension-filled contrast, multiple angles and perspectives, and intense emotion.

The late Baroque or Rococo Baroque classical succeeds, in the eighteenth ^century. It appears from the late ^seventeenth Germany, Austria and Bohemia. The taste of the sensual beauty brought freer composition to the systematic nature of the Baroque of the seventeenth ^century. The ornamentation is growing, becoming rich and fanciful. The frescoes in trompe-l'oeil, stairs, monumental fountains and sculptures are allegorical to the overloading of churches, palaces and fountains. Vienna, London, Dresden, Turin, southern Germany and Bohemia in adopting audacity. The pleasure of the eyes is imperative around the "Capriccio" exuberant late Baroque such as the Trevi Fountain in Rome (1732-1762) by Salvi and staircase at Caserta near Naples (1751-1758) by Vanvitelli.

Architectural spaces open in Paris (Place de la Concorde), Bordeaux (Place de la Bourse), Nancy (Place Stanislas). In Austria, Fischer von Erlach and Lucas von Hildebrandt compete with fantastic architecture. In Bavaria, rural abbeys were covered with cherubs. The Adam brothers were famous in Munich The Rococo of Bohemia, Moldavia and Southern Germany adorns the pilgrimage churches, as at Wies where the walls are crumbling under the effects of gilding on a white background.

The American colonies of Spain and Portugal influenced style Plateresque Iberian. In France, Mansart's disciples turn to the mansions and their interior, visible in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the Marais district or on the woodwork extraordinary Rambouillet.

Features

The Baroque was defined by Heinrich Wlfflin as when the oval replaced the circle at the center of the composition, balance replaced the centralization, where the effects of color and painting are becoming increasingly critical.

Some general analogies in music making useful the term "baroque music". Phrases with contrasting lengths, harmony and counterpoint dislodge polyphony, and orchestral colors appear more often. (See Baroque music ). A similar fascination with a simple expression, strong, dramatic, where the rhythms are clear, detailed, syncopated replace metaphysical comparisons, sophisticated and intertwined with mannerist like John Donne. One senses the imagination strongly influenced by visual developments in painting in the Paradise Lost of John Milton , a Baroque epic.

In painting, the term Baroque is broader than Mannerist expression: less ambiguous, less dark and mysterious, rather like the expression of the opera , a form of baroque art major. The installation is based on the Baroque contrapposto ("dislocation"), a voltage in the form that moves the planes of shoulders and hips in opposite directions. (XVI and XVII ^century). baroque art promotes the contrasts of light, movement, lines and curves and decorative excess.

Painting

Aeneas fleeing Troy Federico Barocci , 1598: a classically inspired scene, frozen in action drama, where the image plane explodes in a sweeping diagonal perspective.

A definition of the meaning of baroque painting is provided by the series of paintings by Peter Paul Rubens for Marie de Medicis in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris (now the Louvre ) , in which a Catholic painter meets the requirements a patron Catholic conceptions of monarchy in the Baroque era, iconography, mastery of painting and composition as the description of space and movement. From Caravaggio to Pietro da Cortona , there were different branches in the Italian Baroque school, both approaching the emotional dynamics in different styles. Another work frequently cited, Saint Teresa in ecstasy of Bernini for the Cornaro Chapel of Our Lady of Victory, brings together architecture, sculpture and theater in a grand conceit.

The late Baroque style gradually gave way to a decorative Rococo , which, however, contrasts with what was later called the Baroque. And there is opposition to Baroque classical art often directly related to France as an art in the service of the Monarchy.

Sculpture

The Angel of the Annunciation (1603-1608) of Francesco Mochi.

In Baroque sculpture, groups of figures assumed new importance, there was a dynamic movement and energy carried by the human form - they curl in spirals around a central vortex, or reached outwards spaces around. As The Annunciation (1603-1608) of Francesco Mochi for the cathedral of Orvieto , is one of the earliest examples of the genre . Innovative ways, Baroque sculpture had several angles ideals. A characteristic of baroque sculpture was carved to add additional elements, for example, concealed lighting or fountains.

The architecture, sculptures and fountains of Bernini (1598-1680) gave the highly charged characteristics of Baroque style. Bernini was undoubtedly the most important sculptor of the Baroque period. He approached Michelangelo 's point of view of his many skills: Bernini sculpted, worked as an architect, painted, wrote plays and staged performances. At the end of the twentieth ^century, Bernini was very well known for his sculpture, both for his virtuosity in carving marble and its ability to create forms combining physical and mind. It was also a very good sculptor of busts called powerful.

The Cornaro chapel: a masterpiece of art total

The Transverberation of St. Theresa (1645-1652), created for the Cornaro Chapel of the church of Sainte-Marie-de-la-Victoire in Rome , help us to understand the baroque. The chapel is designed for the Cornaro family as an auxiliary space on one side of the church is a masterpiece work of art.

Overview of the Cornaro Chapel and the Ecstasy of St. Teresa.

Bernini was a box shaped brick forming a stage on which swoons a St. Teresa of white marble surrounded by a polychromatic marble architectural framing revealing a window to illuminate the statue on top. In light relief, groups of faces carved in the Cornaro family occupy the boxes, along with two side walls of the chapel. The observer is placed as a spectator-witness of the mystical ecstasy of the saint. Teresa of Avila is highly idealized in an imaginary setting. The statue tells his mystical experience told the nuns of the Order of Carmelites. It describes God's love burning like an arrow piercing his heart. Bernini literally embodies the image representing a angel , a golden arrow in hand, like a Cupid in a posture inclination above her and smiled. The angelic sounds plunges the arrow in the heart or cut him off. The face of the holy reflects the anticipation of ecstasy, or its development.

The mixture of religion and eroticism, one aspect of Baroque genius, has long shocked or neoclassical restraint, modesty is Victorian. Bernini, a devout Catholic, does not attempt to satirize a nun but to embody in marble a complex truth drawn from religious experience. Theresa described her physical reaction to spiritual enlightenment in a language of ecstasy used by many mystics, and Bernini's representation is sincere.

The Cornaro family promotes itself discreetly in this chapel, it is represented laterally, she attended the event from balconies. As in opera, Cornaro have a privileged position relative to the viewer, in their private box, closest to the saint, the spectator still has a better view. This is a private chapel, in the sense that no one could say mass at the altar beneath the statue (in the seventeenth ^century and probably until the ^nineteenth) without the permission of the family, but the only thing that separates the observer of the picture is the gate of the altar. The show features show both the mysticism and the pride of the family.

Architecture

The palace Wilanw in Poland

Ludwigsburg Palace near Stuttgart in Germany, the largest baroque palace

Melk, Wachau

In Baroque architecture, the emphasis is on both the massive and charged, colonnades , domes , chiaroscuro effects, colorful paint, and the game loaded volumes opposed to vacuum. In interiors, Baroque movement occurs around and through a clever staircase unprecedented architecture. Another invention of the Baroque found in the interiors of the flat world is public, a processional sequence of increasingly rich interiors culminating with the location of the bedroom, the throne room, or a public room. The sequence of monumental stairs followed by the public room was copied in smaller scale everywhere in aristocratic homes of all claims.

Baroque architecture was taken up enthusiastically in the central part of Germany (see eg the Palace of Ludwigsburg Palace and Zwinger Palace in Dresden ), in Austria and Poland (see eg Wilanow Palace and Bialystok). In England the culmination of Baroque architecture was embodied by the work of Sir Christopher Wren , Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor , from ~ 1660 to ~ 1725. There are numerous examples of Baroque architecture and town plan in other cities in Europe and in Hispanic America. The maps from this period include radiating avenues, squares with their intersections, drawing plans of baroque gardens.

Literature and philosophy

In fact, the baroque praises of new values that are often limited to the use of metaphors and allegory , widely found in Baroque literature, and search for "maraviglia" (wonderful, surprise - as in the Mannerism ), and use of artifices. If Mannerism opened a first breach with Renaissance, Baroque was the opposite response. They found the psychological distress of Man - a theme abandoned after the revolutions of Copernicus and Luther in search of a solid supporting evidence of the ultimate human power - both in art and architecture of the Baroque period. One part was performed revealing works on religious themes, since the Roman Catholic Church was the main "customer."

Artists sought virtuosity (and the virtuoso became a common form of art) with the realism , detail-oriented (some speak of "complexity" typical).

The privilege given to external forms had to compose and balance the lack of content observed in many Baroque works: Maraviglia of Marino , for example, was practically carried from a primitive form. They should awaken the viewer, the reader, the listener, fantasy and imagination. All were focused on man as an individual, as a direct relationship with the artist, or directly between art and its users, its customers. Art is then less distant from the user, approaches him more directly, solving the cultural gap that stood apart art and the user from each other by Maraviglia. But the growing attention of the individual, also created with these important principles such as some kinds Romanzo ( novel ) and aside from other local or popular forms, especially dialectal literature, what to emphasize. In Italy this movement against the single individual (that some refer to as a "cultural descendants", while others suggest a possible cause of the classical opposition to Baroque) was the cause of irreversible replacement of Latin by Italian.

In English literature , the metaphysical poets represent a closely related move, their poetry used in the same manner of unusual metaphors, they often examined in detail. To express their taste for paradox, and for unusual and inventive turns of phrase deliberately.

Theatre

In the theater, the development of vanities, multiple changes of intrigue, and a variety of circumstances characteristic of mannerism (the tragedies of Shakespeare for instance) are superseded by opera, which combines all arts into a unified whole.

Several authors write plays during the Baroque period, such as Cornelius (Comedy, L'Illusion comique ) and Molire ( Don Juan or the Feast of stone ) in France, Shakespeare ( Romeo and Juliet ) in England, Tirso de Molina (Martha the devout comedy The abuser of Seville , historical drama) and Lope de Vega (the Star of Seville, not knowing who love, comedy) and Calderon ( Life is a Dream ) in Spain.

The baroque theater can be defined, initially, as the negative of classical theater. At the intellectual analysis, baroque prefers emotion, perception, and against the search for verisimilitude, the baroque promotes the illusion to the unity of tone, favors Baroque inconsistency and paradox in simplicity, the contrasts baroque complexity.

In general, Baroque literature is marked by a strong involvement of the death and the game of illusion. As in the vanities in painting, death is used as a metaphor of time passing, of the irremediable, and the ephemeral. Unlike the romance, death is not emotional suffering, but rather a metaphysical evidence.

The illusion is also characteristic of the Baroque comes, etymologically, like a multifaceted gem. Thus, many works are carriers of a variety of simulated abyss (can also be written as "abyss"): the Illusion Comique Corneille, the public attended the spectacle of a father watching his son grow in an environment that s' proves to be comedy. Thus, the author gives more force to his advocacy of the theater and even leads him to join the public's point of view. The characters, like the viewer, are at one time or another, victims of illusion. Pridamant believes his son to death in 977, Matamore believes his own lies. L'Illusion Comique does not just talk about the theater: his characters, this play also summons other genres popular in the seventeenth ^century. Clindor is a picaresque hero, that is to say audacious, opportunistic wanderer and adventurer, while qu'Alcandre seems to be an avatar of the Magi in this pastoral. Similarly, the character of Matamoros is the type of soldier swaggering presence in Latin comedies.

The illusion can also tell the truth, is evident in the play Hamlet , Shakespeare. The young Hamlet knows that the current king, his uncle has killed his own brother, ie the father of young heroes. He represented the eyes of the king a murder scene in all respects similar to that which we have not seen it, but we know from the speech of the ghost of King Hamlet murdered by his brother. The king, before the performance, leaving the scene. In this play, illusion and truth come together surprisingly well and cause vertigo in the viewer. Molire's Dom Juan has also staged a character Baroque fickleness. For Hero seducer, "the pleasure of love is change", this argument applies in all areas and joined the Baroque movement.

The Baroque style is based on movement, inconstancy, contradiction, antithesis. The characters move from a range of feelings to another. It is in excess, the climax. The speech given to see more than hear, is to show, to convene the images by the rhetoric of hypotyposis process. While the classical aesthetic research unit, Baroque revels in plurality, where his taste for accumulation. Baroque gives both sides of a coin: the truth is inseparable from the lies, like the dream is real, like life is death.

In theater, the Baroque is also reflected by a certain stage (lights, sets, costumes, scenery ...) that highlights the character of the movement.

In music the Baroque applies to the end of the period of the dominance of imitative counterpoint.

Born in Italy, where the ideas kept coming but they were moving at the rate of transport at the time, we see in the years 1600 parallel development of genres gradually building what was then called the Baroque. These musical adventures are related to cities or distinct regions:

The Orfeo of Monteverdi created in 1607 in Mantua traditionally marks the birth of opera. Note the birth of the genre oratorio in Rome with the rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo by Emilio Cavalieri in February 1600.

In Venice between 1550 and 1610 , specifically in the Basilica San Marco, is developing a style with polychoral Gabrieli and Merulo which gives Europe one of music's biggest and loudest that have been written up, involving several choral singers, brass and strings distributed in different locations of the Basilica.

The term Baroque is used to denote both the style of music composed during the period overlapping that of Baroque art, and also that of a slightly later period. Johann Sebastian Bach and Handel are considered their figures climactic. The extent of commonality of baroque music with the aesthetic principles of graphic arts and literature of the Baroque period is still a debated issue. The love of ornamentation is a common element quite clear, and it is perhaps significant that the role of ornament was greatly diminished in both music and architecture when the classical period replaced the Baroque. It may be noted that the application of the term "Baroque" to music is a relatively recent development: the first use of the word applied to music appeared only in 1919 , invented by Curt Sachs. It was not until 1940 that he was employed for the first time in English (in an article published by Manfred Bukofzer ), even in the late 1960s , there was still considerable disagreement in academic circles to determine whether a music as varied as that of Jacopo Peri , Franois Couperin and JS Bach could be combined, so sensible, in the same appellation.

The opera is born during the Baroque period away from the experience of Florentine Camerata , the creators of monody , who attempted to recreate the theater arts of ancient Greece. Indeed, this is exactly the event that is often presented as the beginning of the Baroque around 1600.

Neo-Baroque: the lobby of the Opera of Charles Garnier , Paris, dating from the plane Second Empire , 1861, finally opened in 1875

The neo-baroque

• Opera Garnier in Paris
• Semper Opera in Dresden
• Collino in Spain

Bibliography

• Germain Bazin , Baroque and Rococo, Thames & Hudson, et al. "Universe Of Art, Paris, 1964, repr. 2004 ( ISBN 2878110730 )
• Germain Bazin, Baroque Destinies, Hachette Book Group, Paris, 1968
• Anthony Blunt , Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, Macula 1983
• (In) Anthony Blunt , Sicilian Baroque, Weidenfeld & Nicolson , 1968
• Yves Bonnefoy , Rome, 1630 - The Horizon of the early Baroque, Flammarion, Paris 2000
• Yves Bottineau, Baroque Art (1986), Citadel & Mazenod, Paris, repr. 2006, ( ISBN 978-2850880216 )
• Charpentrat stone , Baroque Art, PUF, 1967
• Andr Chastel , The Art of Italy, Flammarion, 1999
• Gilles Deleuze , The Fold - Leibniz and the Baroque, Les Editions de Minuit (coll. "Criticism"), Paris, 1988, 191 p.
• Dominique Fernandez , photographs by Ferrante Ferranti. The Pearl Crescent / The Baroque Europe from Naples to St. Petersburg al. "Terre humaine", Paris, 1995
• (In) Michael Kitson, The Age of Baroque, ed. McGraw-Hill, London, 1966
• Philippe Minguet , Aesthetics of rococo, Vrin, 1979
• (In) John Rupert Martin, Baroque (Style and Civilization), ed. Viking, 1977, ( ISBN 978-0713909265 )
• Eugenio d'Ors , Du Baroque ' ', Gallimard, coll. "Folios tests", 1935, repr. 2000, ( ISBN 2070413411 )
• Benito Pelegrn , image of the infinite, the European Baroque, Seuil, Paris, 2000, 456 pages, ( ISBN 2020147017 )
• Benito Pelegrin, of a time of uncertainty, Sulliver Editions , Paris, 2008.
• Victor-Lucien Tapie , Baroque and Classicism, Hachette, coll. "Plural Reference ', 1957, reissued 1980 ( ISBN 2012792766 )
• Victor-Lucien Tapie, Baroque, PUF, coll. "What do I know," Paris, 2000, ( ISBN 213052849X )
• Rudolf Wittkower , Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750, Yale University Press , 1999
• Heinrich Wlfflin , Renaissance and Baroque, ed. G. Monfort, collection Imago Mundi, Brionne, 1997, ( ISBN 2852265370 )

Related articles

• baroque
• (In) This article is partially or entirely from the article in English entitled " Baroque "(see the list of authors )

External Links

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas in the Baroque literature
• Letters-and-arts.net test definition of baroque poetry anthology
• Webmuseum Paris
• Baroque Sicily
• Introduction to the issue of the Baroque by Frederic Dassas, Curator of the Museum of Music at the Cit de la Musique de la Villette.
• From the Renaissance to the Baroque
• Great Painters: movement and Baroque painters
• Relevance of the Baroque in France A reading of an anthology of poets Baroque

References

1. Olivio da Costa Carvalho, Dicionrio portugus-ingls of Porto Editora, in 1996 ( ISBN 0-05011-972-X )
2. Albert Dauzat & al. etymological dictionary Larousse, 1989 ( ISBN 2-03-710006-X )
3. Dictionary of the French ^Academy, 1st edition. Online
4. The French Academy ^Dictionary, 4th edition. online.
5. Source: Claude Lebedel, history and splendor of the baroque in France, dition Ouest France, Rennes, 2003.
6. The French Academy ^Dictionary, 7th edition. F. Didot, Paris, 1878 Online
7. We recall the words of Charles Garnier responding to the Empress, who asked him what style was the Garnier Opera presented it: "It's Napoleon III, your highness ..." as had become fashionable indefinable style mixing Renaissance , Neoclassicism and style of Louis XV.
8. Wlfflin Heinrich, Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung ber Wesen und Entstehung der Barockstils in Italien, 1888
9. The Life of Marie de 'Medici
10. (en) The Annunciation in Francesco Mochi - una carriera di scultore Marcella Favero, editions UNI Service, Trento , 2008, pp.29-33, ( ISBN 978-88-6178-240-2 )

• Gateway to the History of Art

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