Baroque & Rococo Art & Culture

PREFACE Baroque and Rococo. For some years I have been struck by how literary and art historians have been beating a retreat from both these terms, as if they were redolent of an unseemly preoccupation with styles, and highly suspect styles at that. Many scholars feel more comfortable with phrases such as "Early Modern," whose meaning may be no clearer but whose overtones seem more neutral. So what is so pernicious about "Baroque" and "Rococo," and why has an entire generation passed since the last appearance of a general textbook on the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? First, because Baroque and Rococo were styles of courtly societies (whether religious or secular) the public of the new millennium, with its fairly consensual beliefs in a pluralist and meritocratic culture, may feel uncomfortable with the bombast and immodesty of these self-aggrandizing civilizations. Inevitably, we are reminded of the arrogant authoritarianism endemic in such centralized, statist governments. We recall all too quickly that the words "Baroque" and "Rococo" are highly implicated in displays of imperial power. Another problem is that we tend to reify the terms, to talk about the Baroque, for instance, as if it were a thing. When one writes of a "Baroque mind" or a "Baroque sensibility" one is using a permissible intellectual shorthand; but we need to remind ourselves that Baroque and Rococo were (and are) terms invented by historians and that they function as handy labels; they should not be seen as somehow living, breathing, historical entities that cross the centuries like phantoms. Perhaps it is feared that such vivid terms as Baroque and Rococo can summon to life a slumberingZeitgeistand set back historical criticism a century or more. On a basic level, I would argue that there is enough artistic cohesion and distinctiveness to the period to justify devoting a book to it. But more deeply, my intention inBaroque & Rococo: Art & Culturehas been to brave the currents of the potentially unfashionable and anachronistic while addressing legitimate concerns about the ways in which we art historians have gone about our business. I believe that we should not flinch from artistic manifestations of power (be they of courtly or capitalist societies), but should look upon, analyze, and--another dangerous verb!--appreciate them. Contextualization is one important facet of the so-called "new art history." For more than a century, major Western museums have been displaying works as artistic strays, images and objects pulled from their original locations and placed on pedestals or mounted on walls. To a certain extent, the same holds true of architecture: photography has allowed us to study buildings as if they were framed, isolatedobjets d'art.To "recontextualize" art means to attempt to see works as they were seen (and where they were seen) by representative viewers at the time of their production. It is foolish to imagine that we can somehow shed our modern identities and re-enter the seventeenth century as typical citizens, worshippers, businessmen, prelates, lords and ladies, intellectuals, workers, and so on; yet the attempt is interesting and worthwhile. We study the past to increase our awareness and consciousness of what it has meant and what it does mean to be human and to be alive. By contextualizing art we can have a rich understanding of the human interest in the use of images to express emotions and ideas, assert authority and presence, concretize beliefs and summon supernatural aid, increase awareness of self and other, reflect, refract, and project one's own identity through the present and into the future. To my mind, the best general text on the Baroque has been John Rupert Martin'sBaroque(Harper and Row, 1977). Martin did not erect a historical structure and then prevail upon it to produce his examples; rather, he allowed certain ciMinor, Vernon H. is the author of 'Baroque & Rococo Art & Culture', published 1999 under ISBN 9780130856494 and ISBN 0130856495.