Reflections on Baroque

From its beginnings in the 17th century, the Baroque embraced the whole of Catholic Europe and infiltrated Protestant England, Orthodox Russia and even Muslim Turkey. Architecture, paintings, poetry, music, natural science, and new forms of piety all have their places on the Baroque map. In this work, Robert Harbison offers new readings that stress its eccentric and tumultuous forms, in which a destabilized sense of reality is often projected onto the viewer. This strange, subjectively inclined world is manifested in such bizarre phenomena as the small stuccoed universes of Giacomo Serpotta, the Sacred Mounts of Piedmont and the grimacing heads of F.X. Messerschmidt. Harbison explores the Baroque's metamorphoses into later styles, particularly the Rococo, and, in an unexpected twist, pursues the Baroque idea into the 19th and 20th centuries, proposing provocative analyses of pastiches or imitations or resemblances in Czech cubism and Frank Gehry's architecture.