Civilization of Baroque Italy 1550-1650 (original) (raw)
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Renaissance Quarterly 75.2, 2022
I have several impressions from the ambitious content and large scope of this book. One is that in one hundred years the Baroque has become an asset for European, Latin American, and Asian traditions beyond Iberian literature and art. The second is that this handbook of the Baroque à la française complements many impressive studies, touching on topics such as Baroque and German studies, Baroque and Romantic liter- ature, Baroque and neo-rhetoric, neo-Baroque, and poetry, theater, and prose from Iberia and Latin America. Third is that any aspect of inquiry can be associated with the epistemologically enlarged concept of the Baroque. Fourth, the bibliography accu- mulated in the volume is impressive and overwhelming. For all of these reasons, the handbook is a necessary reference in the library of any scholar in fields related to the seventeenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
A very brief account of the historiographical nature of 'the Baroque'. This was for an unrealised project. G David R. Marshall 2019.
This short account traces something of the relationship between baroque and art history from 19thC to present. Like illicit lovers, they found themselves in each other’s arms in nineteenth-century Germany. Baroque seduced the infant academic discipline; their coupling gave birth to ‘style’, and soon, as is often the case with lovers, they were shaped in each other’s image. Even when they later split up, they remained deeply marked by traces of that early encounter. Baroque might, then, be seen as the narcissistic imago of art history or even its Lacanian mirror stage. The discords in that relationship remain potentially productive for art history. Latin American baroque may open useful ways to think European baroque.
Journal of Art Historiography, 2023
In Baroquemania, Laura Moure Cecchini takes her readers on a fascinating, lesstravelled journey through Italian art from the fin de siècle to the end of the Second World War, the years when Italy was consolidating its position as a nation state. The book focuses on the Baroque, at a time when the main accepted aesthetic paradigms were first decadent and futurist aesthetics, and later rationalism. How did the Baroque feature within a landscape that intentionally seemed to exclude it? On which grounds-political, economic, social or aesthetic-was the Baroque marginalised from the official artistic history of the new nation state? And why could the Baroque not be an integral part of Italian national identity? These are just some of the questions that naturally arise from the book's main argument that 'by reinventing Baroque forms in their artistic and architectural practices, Italians confronted their fears about the past and imagined the future of their nation.' 1 The Baroque therefore becomes a tool for questioning certain fundamental aspects of the nation-forming process, including some that are not quantifiable historically, socially or economically. Moreover, investigating both the presence of Baroque art and its theorisation calls for a re-evaluation of key discussions about Italian artistic culture: the relationship between regionalism and nationalism, Italy's internationalism, and the development of modernism. In so doing, by re-inscribing the Baroque within Italy's intellectual and artistic landscapes, Baroquemania challenges the alleged hegemony of the classical tradition or of 1930s rationalism in unidirectionally shaping Italian culture. Unlike the consolidated classical tradition and the solid modernity of rationalism, the anti-classical Baroque, with its complex and ambivalent visual repertoire, enabled Italians to question rather than to affirm their newly found national identity, their sense of belonging to a modern nation, and even their faith in a bright future. Or, in the author's own words: 'The afterlives of the Baroque in modern Italy, and its temporal and conceptual destabilisation, allowed Italians to work through a crisis of modernity and develop a distinctively Italian modern approach to visual culture.' 2