Three broad tendencies had an impact on Baroque art, the first of which was the Counter-Reformation. Contending with the spread of the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church, after the Council of Trent (1545–63), adopted a propagandist program in which art was to serve as a means of stimulating the public’s faith in the church. The Baroque style that evolved was both sensuous and spiritual. Whereas a naturalistic treatment rendered the religious image more accessible to the average churchgoer, dramatic and illusory effects were used to stimulate devotion and convey the splendour of the divine. The second tendency was the consolidation of absolute monarchies—Baroque palaces were built on a monumental scale to display the power of the centralized state, a phenomenon best displayed at Versailles. The third tendency was a broadening of human intellectual horizons, spurred by developments in science and explorations of the globe. These produced a new sense of human insignificance (particularly abetted by the Copernican displacement of Earth from the centre of the universe) and of the infinitude of the natural world. Landscape paintings in which humans are portrayed as minute figures in a vast setting were indicative of this changing awareness of the human condition.
How did Baroque art and architecture come about?
Where does the term Baroque come from?
The term Baroque probably derived from the Italian word barocco, which philosophers used during the Middle Ages to describe an obstacle in schematic logic. Subsequently, the word came to denote any contorted idea or involute process of thought. Another possible source is the Portuguese word barroco (Spanish barrueco), used to describe an imperfectly shaped pearl. In art criticism the word Baroque has come to describe anything irregular, bizarre, or otherwise departing from rules and proportions established during the Renaissance. Until the late 19th century the term always carried the implication of odd, exaggerated, and overdecorated. It was only with Heinrich Wölfflin’s pioneering study, Renaissance und Barock (1888), that the term was used as a stylistic designation rather than as a term of thinly veiled abuse and that a systematic formulation of the characteristics of Baroque style was achieved.
