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Lift Up Your Hearts:
Baroque Art, 1550-
1700
PARADOXES IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE:
Principles of the Course: Logistics and Ideas.

Baroqu-en: Pendant with Swann, 1590
and Borromini, San Carlo, 1644.

Wolfflin, The Baroque as Aesthetic.
Bronzino 1560 and Rubens 1624,
Resurrections.

Are Aesthetics enough: Continuity
vs. Change. Annibale Carracci,
1594.

What is Baroque Art and Architecture: 1550-1700
From Barocco: original meaning is debated: in
Portugese an irregularly shaped pearl. Also a
form of irregular argument in medieval
Scholastic Philosophy. This period of
architecture was called baroque in the 18th c.
because it was considered very odd, irregular
or monstrous.
Baroque

What is the Baroque? A
Critical Inquiry?• A period from the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation to the Ascendancy
of France and the “new” secular culture in the 18th c?
• An artistic period that follows the Renaissance and ends with the Enlightenment in
c.1750? The Age of Bernini? An aspect of that artistic period that contains other
strands: Classicism, Naturalism, etc.?
• A meta-historical aspect of art/ cultural styles. Baroque – a recurring period that
follows periods of High (classical? Or idealizing?) art. Hellenistic Greece after
Classical, Post-Modernism after Modernism, High Baroque after High Renaissance
in reaction to Mannerism?
• The period of European Colonization, the emergence of unprecedented numbers of
famed female artists, the export of Italian culture to Northern Europe, the
development of indigenous pictorial and mimetic national cultures, science in the
arts?
• A philosophical attitude that stresses dynamic, even mechanistic, explanations of the
mind/body, matter/spirit dichotomy?

This course is as much about the
problems of history in art as the history
of art.
• Take for example the Jesuits –A
RELIGIOUS REFORM ORDER
FOUNDED IN THE 16TH
CENTURY. :
• Active urban apostolate, social
services, education, etc.
• Very important in History of
Visual and Performing Arts: see
Walter Benjamin on Jesuit School
dramas, new churches.
• Influence of non-Western
cultures.
• But:
• Also deplorable elements to their
history: Colonial, repression of
native peoples; opposition to the
new sciences based on
observation.
• Deceptive political practices etc.
• Sexism – “inferior” female orders.
• HOW DO ALL THESE FIT
TOGETHER?

Some Questions to Consider:
• When deplorable histories
influence subjects, or fashions for
example, should we reject the
end product?
• Or does it force us to rethink or
redefine how arts function,
socially, politically, intellectually?
• If the forces around art function is
a complex way, must our
understanding be solely
determined by these motives?
• Does it allow us to consider
certain ideas retroactively:
sexism for example, or the male
and female gaze?
• Does category of or autonomy of
art in a formal sense arise from
the rationality of composition, a
sense of the independent mind or
intentional act of an artist or the
need for art history to save art
from a narrow concept of
history?
• Just Sayin….?!!

Ranciere, Regime of the Visible, 1998/2006: history,
politics, society, and art as separate overlapping spheres.
• From regime of the Moral (image) to the Visible
(forms.) to Aesthetics (object,)
• Moral: Plato/Medieval: (500-1300)
• Visible: Early Modern/Aristotle (1300-1750)
• Aesthetic: Art’s Own Sake: Modern (1750 to present)

Regime of Art
• For Ranciere these periods are
separate, meta-categories that
organize art in relationship to
perception, politics, society at any
given time; The three modes exist
as well exist in varying degrees in
the art and architectural objects of
the 17th c.

Art – Moral,
Representational,
Aesthetic.
Culture, - the
use of objects,
the notions of
Judgment, etc.
Politics –
meta-
concepts,
practical
actions.

The Regime of the Visible : Creating visual art 1300-1700 from QUESTION
OF the visible world REPRESENTED: The world of society and of fantasy;
Poesis (poetry, expression, the imagination) and Mimesis (after nature, its
appearances and principles.)
Caravaggio. The Calling of St. Matthew, detail, 1598-1600.

Poesis: Poetics and
Poetry
• See Ut picture poesis part of the Humanistic Theory of Art. As in painting, so in poetry. Whatever one
can do so can the other.
• The Paragone: whatever one art can do the other cannot.
• Revival of Interest in Aristotle’s Poetics, inspired by Humanism, the Counter Reform and applied to all
narratives.
• Lyrical Erotic Subjects, Pastoral landscapes, -- based on the Roman poet, Ovid.
• How to treat religious subjects? Follow tradition, reflect new realities?
• The role of allegory: elaborate metaphors realized often in Ceiling paintings – Rubens is the master.
• The Artist as Poet: Evocative of Emotional States, Expressive of their Manners and thus Selves,
Communicators in a Common yet Innovative Language

Mimesis:
• Copying the Conditions of Nature.
• From Human centered to Hierarchy of Subjects.
• Questions of what kind of Nature is to be preferred?
• How are we to arrive at it?
• What about the diversity of nature or its unity?
• Is light i.e. forces, space, i.e. extension, or forms, i.e.
figures definitive of Nature?

To Poesis and Mimesis, Forte would
add History (particularly of Art.)
• The History of Art 1350-1500 – Classical Art and Literature.
• The History of Art – 1550 throughout the 17th.c: Early Christian, Greek and Roman, The Art
and Architecture of Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian.
• The uses of the History of Art in the 17th c.: Patrons as Collectors and Connossieurs:
• Models of Perfection, Unified to Form a Perfect Art/Image, combines first antique then Greek
art as a model with 16th c. masters: The Idea. Carracci, Domenichino, Poussin.
• How to Steal from any and everyone: Sly, Clever, Ironic Borrowings masked by
transformation: Caravaggio, Bernini. Often uses powerful light effects and expressive
gestures etc. to
• How to Copy: Different Patterns of Transformations: Rubens and Rembrandt, Borromini.

Some Challenges:
• To Define exactly what Poesis (Poetry or Poetics) and
Mimesis (Copying nature or Mimicking) mean in the 17th
c.
• How did that definition change over time and through
different visual/cultural traditions and social/political
conditions? Regime of the Aesthetic
• How closely does it conform to common and specialized
ideas about art, based often on the Humanist Theory of
Art? (Poesis and Mimesis)
• What forms and traditions has authority? (History)

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2 principles of the course 2019 b

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