Baroque

The Baroque was a Western artistic movement spanning architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other creative fields. It thrived from the early 1600s through the 1750s, coming after Renaissance art and Mannerism, and before Rococo (once called "late Baroque") and Neoclassical styles. The Catholic Church promoted it to push back against the plainness of Protestant art, architecture, and music, though Lutheran Baroque art also emerged in some European regions. The style relied on contrast, motion, elaborate detail, deep colors, grandeur, and surprise to inspire awe.

It started in Rome at the beginning of the 17th century and quickly spread across Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, then to Austria, southern Germany, Poland, and Russia. By the 1730s, it had turned into an even more ornate form called rocaille or Rococo, found in France and Central Europe until the mid-to-late 1700s. In the Spanish and Portuguese Empires—including the Iberian Peninsula—it persisted alongside newer styles into the first decade of the 1800s.

In decorative arts, the Baroque featured abundant, intricate ornamentation. While each country broke from Renaissance classicism in its own way, a common thread was that the starting point remained Renaissance ornamental elements. The classical repertoire became crowded, dense, overlapping, and overloaded to create shocking effects. New motifs introduced by the Baroque included cartouches, trophies and weapons, baskets of fruit or flowers, and others, executed in marquetry, stucco, or carving.

Origin of the word

The English word "baroque" comes directly from French. The French term originated from the Portuguese "barroco," meaning "a flawed pearl," which points to the Latin "verruca" ("wart") or a Romance suffix "-ǒccu" common in pre-Roman Iberia. Other sources suggest a Medieval Latin term used in logic, "baroco," as the most likely origin. In the 16th century, the Medieval Latin "baroco" moved beyond scholastic logic and began to describe anything that seemed absurdly complex.

French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) helped give the term "baroco" (which he spelled "Barroco") the meaning "bizarre, uselessly complicated." Other early sources linked "baroco" with magic, complexity, confusion, and excess. Before the 18th century, "baroque" was also associated with irregular pearls. The French "baroque" and Portuguese "barroco" were often used in jewelry contexts.

An example from 1531 describes pearls in an inventory of Charles V of France's treasures. Later, a 1694 edition of Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française defined "baroque" as "only used for pearls that are imperfectly round." A 1728 Portuguese dictionary similarly described "barroco" as relating to a "coarse and uneven pearl." An alternative derivation points to the name of Italian painter Federico Barocci (1528–1612). In the 18th century, the term began to be used for music, and not favorably. An anonymous satirical review of the premiere of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie in October 1733, printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734, complained that the novelty in the opera was "du barocque," criticizing the music for lacking coherent melody, being unsparing with dissonances, constantly changing key and meter, and running through every compositional device quickly.

In 1762, Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française recorded that the term could figuratively describe something "irregular, bizarre or unequal." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a musician and composer as well as a philosopher, wrote in the Encyclopédie in 1768: "Baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited. It appears that term comes from the word 'baroco' used by logicians." In 1788, Quatremère de Quincy defined the term in the Encyclopédie Méthodique as "an architectural style that is highly adorned and tormented." The French terms "style baroque" and "musique baroque" appeared in Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française in 1835. By the mid-19th century, art critics and historians had adopted "baroque" to ridicule post-Renaissance art.

This was the sense used in 1855 by leading art historian Jacob Burckhardt, who wrote that Baroque artists "despised and abused detail" because they lacked "respect for tradition." In 1888, art historian Heinrich Wölfflin published the first serious academic work on the style, Renaissance und Barock, which described the differences between Renaissance and Baroque painting, sculpture, and architecture. Baroque architecture resulted from doctrines adopted by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent (1545–1563) in response to the Protestant Reformation. The first phase of the Counter-Reformation had imposed a severe, academic style on religious architecture that appealed to intellectuals but not the general churchgoing public.

Architecture: origins and characteristics

The Council of Trent decided instead to appeal to a broader audience, declaring that the arts should communicate religious themes with direct, emotional involvement. Similarly, Lutheran Baroque art developed as a confessional marker of identity in response to the Great Iconoclasm of Calvinists. Baroque churches were designed with a large central space so worshippers could be close to the altar, with a dome or cupola high overhead letting light illuminate the church below. The dome was one of the central symbolic features of Baroque architecture, illustrating the union between heaven and earth.