Intro. * The Baroque is a period of artistic style that used exaggerated motion and clear, * 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. * The Baroque style was encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church,
What is Baroque Art? * Baroque art above all reflected the religious tensions of the age to reassert itself in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. * Was designed essentially to appeal to the growing aspirations of the merchant and middle classes * Baroque art tended to be large-scale works of public art, such as monumental wall-paintings and huge frescoes for the ceilings and vaults of palaces and churches.

Baroque Architecture * Was designed to create spectacle and illusion. * The straight lines of the Renaissance were replaced with flowing curves, while domes/roofs were enlarged, and interiors carefully constructed to produce spectacular effects of light and shade. * Characterized by an emphasis on unity among the arts. * It was an emotional style, which, wherever possible, exploited the theatrical potential of the urban landscape - as illustrated by St Peter's Square (1656-67) in Rome, designed by architect, Bernini,

Baroque Painting * Painters and sculptors built and expanded on the naturalistic tradition * The illusionistic effects of deep space interested many painters, including Il Guercino and Andrea Pozzo. * Color was manipulated for its emotional effects, ranging from the clear calm tones of Nicholas Poussin, to the warm and shimmering colors of Pietro da Cortona, to the more vivid hues of Peter Paul Rubens. * A heightened sense of drama was achieved through chiaroscuro, which means defining details of light and dark in painting * Baroque painting illustrated key elements of Catholic dogma * Painters typically portrayed a strong sense of movement, using swirling spirals and upward diagonals, and strong sumptuous colour schemes, in order to dazzle and surprise. * New techniques of tenebrism and chiaroscuro were developed to enhance atmosphere. However, the theatricality and melodrama of Baroque painting was not well received by later critics, like the influential John Ruskin (1819-1900), who considered it insincere.
Baroque Sculpture * Baroque sculptors felt free to combine different materials within a single work and often used one material to simulate another. * One of the great masterpieces of baroque sculpture, Giovanni Bernini's St. Theresa from the Cornaro Chapel, for example, succumbs to an ecstatic vision on a dull-finished marble cloud in an alabaster and marble niche in which bronze rays descend from a hidden source of light. * Baroque sculpture, typically larger-than-life size, is marked by a similar sense of dynamic movement, along with an active use of space.
Baroque, in music * A style that prevailed from the last decades of the 16th cent. to the first decades of the 18th * A revolt against polyphony, a form of music created by interweaving many melodic lines in harmony * Examples of baroque music is opera
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Baroque was a style in art that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur from sculpture, painting, literature, and music. The baroque 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.

The popularity and success of the "baroque" was encouraged by the Catholic Church when it decided that the drama of the baroque artists' style could communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The secular aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and would-be competitors. Baroque palaces are built round an entrance sequence of courts, anterooms, grand staircases, and reception rooms of sequentially increasing magnificence. Many forms of art, music, architecture, and literature inspired each other in the "baroque" cultural movement.

The Baroque originated around 1600. The canon promulgated at the Council of Trent, by which the Roman Catholic Church addressed the representational arts by demanding that paintings and sculptures in church contexts should speak to the illiterate rather than to the well-informed, is customarily offered as an inspiration of the Baroque, which appeared, however, a generation later. This turn toward a populist conception of the function of ecclesiastical art is seen by many art historians as driving the innovations of Caravaggio and the Carracci brothers, all of whom were working (and competing for commissions) in Rome around 1600.

The appeal of Baroque style turned consciously from the witty, intellectual qualities of 16th century Mannerist art to a visceral appeal aimed at the senses. It employed an iconography that was direct, simple, obvious, and dramatic (see the Prometheus sculpture below). Baroque art drew on certain broad and heroic tendencies in Annibale Caracci and his circle, and found inspiration in other artists like Correggio and Caravaggio and Federico Barocci, nowadays sometimes termed 'proto-Baroque'.

A defining statement of what Baroque signifies in painting is provided by the series of paintings executed by Peter Paul Rubens for Marie de Medici at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris (now at the Louvre), in which a Catholic painter satisfied a Catholic patron: Baroque-era conceptions of monarchy, iconography, handling of paint, and compositions as well as the depiction of space and movement. Another frequently cited work of Baroque art is Bernini's "Saint Theresa in ecstasy" for the Cornaro chapel in S. Maria della Vittoria, which brings together multiple arts, including opera.