The Baroque (US /bəˈroʊk/ or UK /bəˈrɒk/) is often thought of as a period of artistic style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, and music. The style began around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe.[1]

The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Catholic Church, which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent, in response to the Protestant Reformation, that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement.[2] The aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and expressing triumph, power and control. Baroque palaces are built around an entrance of courts, grand staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence. However, "baroque" has resonance and application that extend beyond a simple reduction to either style or period.[3]

The word baroque is derived from the Portuguese word "barroco", Spanish "barroco", or French "baroque", all of which refer to a "rough or imperfect pearl", though whether it entered those languages via Latin, Arabic, or some other source is uncertain.[4] The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica 11th edition thought the term was derived from the Spanish barrueco, a large, irregularly-shaped pearl, and that it had for a time been confined to the craft of the jeweller.[5] Others derive it from the mnemonic term "Baroco", a supposedly laboured form of syllogism in logical Scholastica.[6] The Latin root can be found in bis-roca.[7]

In informal usage, the word baroque can simply mean that something is "elaborate", with many details, without reference to the Baroque styles of the 17th and 18th centuries.

The word "Baroque", like most periodic or stylistic designations, was invented by later critics rather than practitioners of the arts in the 17th and early 18th centuries. It is a French transliteration of the Portuguese phrase "pérola barroca", which means "irregular pearl", and natural pearls that deviate from the usual, regular forms so they do not have an axis of rotation are known as "baroque pearls".[8]

The term "Baroque" was initially used in a derogatory sense, to underline the excesses of its emphasis. In particular, the term was used to describe its eccentric redundancy and noisy abundance of details, which sharply contrasted the clear and sober rationality of the Renaissance. Although it was long thought that the word as a critical term was first applied to architecture, in fact it appears earlier in reference to music, in an anonymous, satirical review of the première in October 1733 of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734. The critic implied that the novelty in this opera was "du barocque", complaining that the music lacked coherent melody, was unsparing with dissonances, constantly changed key and meter, and speedily ran through every compositional device.[9]

Modern taste and usage[edit]
The word was first rehabilitated by the Swiss-born art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) in his Renaissance und Barock (1888); Wölfflin identified the Baroque as "movement imported into mass," an art antithetic to Renaissance art. He did not make the distinctions between Mannerism and Baroque that modern writers do, and he ignored the later phase, the academic Baroque that lasted into the 18th century. Long despised, Baroque art and architecture became fashionable between the two World Wars, and has largely remained in critical favour. For example the often extreme Sicilian Baroque architecture is today recognised largely due to the work of Sir Sacheverall Sitwell, whose Southern Baroque Art of 1924 was the first book to appreciate the style, followed by the more academic work of Anthony Blunt. In painting the gradual rise in popular esteem of Caravaggio has been the best barometer of taste.

In art history it has become common to recognise "Baroque" stylistic phases, characterized by energetic movement and display, in earlier art, so that Sir John Boardman describes the ancient sculpture Laocoön and His Sons as "one of the finest examples of the Hellenistic baroque",[10] and a later phase of Imperial Roman sculpture is also often called Baroque. William Watson describes a late phase of Shang dynasty Chinese ritual bronzes of the 11th century BC as "baroque".[11]

The term "Baroque" may still be used, usually pejoratively, describing works of art, craft, or design that are thought to have excessive ornamentation or complexity of line.