Reflections on Baroque

Description

"In this reinterpretation of the Baroque, 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 universe of Giacomo Serpotta, the Sacred Mounts of Piedmont and the grimacing heads of F.X. Messerschmidt." "From its beginnings in the seventeenth 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. Harbison explores their metamorphoses into later styles, particularly the Rococo, and, in an unexpected twist, pursues the Baroque idea into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, proposing provocative analyses of pastiches or imitations (in Der Rosenkavalier and the work of Aubrey Beardsley) or resemblances (deliberate or not) in Czech Cubism and Frank Gehry's architecture. Typical of Harbison's approach is the depth and breadth of its points of reference. Reflections on Baroque demonstrates that the Baroque impulse lives on in the 21st-century imagination."--Jacket. Read more... Abstract: This text offers a reinterpretation of the 17th-century Baroque style and the cultural and political interests that gave rise to it. Robert Harbison looks at the architecture, art, scenography, music, poetry and literature of the period and he explores the metamorphoses of Baroque ideas and works. Read more...