Baroque Art, Illustrations fundamental concepts

Baroque Art, dominant style of Western art and architecture from approximately 1600 to 1750. Its features persisted throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, although this period is sometimes called the rococo style. Manifestations baroque art appear in virtually all European countries, as well as Spanish and Portuguese colonies in America. The term Baroque is also applied to literature and music of that period. See Baroque (music) Baroque (literature).

Definition of Baroque

The origins of the word baroque are not clear. Could derive from Portuguese or Castilian baroque baroque pearl, a term that refers to a type of irregularly shaped pearls. The word is an epithet coined later and with negative connotations, it does not define the style to which it refers. However, in the late eighteenth century the term became part baroque vocabulary of art criticism as a label to define the artistic style of the seventeenth century, which many critics later rejected as too bizarre and exotic to merit serious study . Writers such as Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, in the nineteenth century, considered the decadent end of the Renaissance; his student Heinrich Wölfflin in fundamental concepts of art history (1915), was the first to point out the fundamental differences between the art of sixteenth century and seventeenth centuries, stating that "baroque is neither the grandeur nor the decline of classicism, but a totally different art." Baroque art includes numerous regional particularities. It may seem confusing, for example, classified as baroque two such diverse artists as Rembrandt and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, however, despite the differences, his work has undoubted common elements typical of Baroque, as concern for the dramatic potential of the light.

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