Baroque

• 1. Introduction

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  Baroque began in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, and within decades it had spread to every corner of the known world. Its architecture made churchgoers feel they were gazing up through the floor of heaven. Its paintings set saints in motion, their robes whipping in winds that only the artist could feel. Its music was so aggressively novel that a critic in 1733 could find no better word for it than "baroque" - meaning, at the time, something confused, excessive, and absurd. Yet that word, once an insult, became the name for one of the richest artistic periods in human history. How did a style born in Catholic Rome end up shaping palaces in Russia, mission churches in Mexico, and dance academies in France? And why did it flourish precisely during a century of religious war and political upheaval? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Word and Its Wounds

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  The English word baroque arrived through French, which may have borrowed it from the Portuguese barroco, meaning a flawed or imperfectly round pearl. An inventory entry from 1531 uses the term to describe pearls among the treasures of Charles V of France. A 1694 edition of Le Dictionnaire de l'Academie Francaise still defined baroque as applying only to pearls that were "imperfectly round," while a 1728 Portuguese dictionary described barroco as relating to a "coarse and uneven pearl."

  Beyond the jewelry trade, the word carried darker weight. In the sixteenth century, the Medieval Latin term baroco had migrated out of scholastic logic to mean anything absurdly complex. The philosopher Michel de Montaigne, born in 1533 and died in 1592, helped cement baroco's meaning as "bizarre, uselessly complicated." Other early sources linked the word to magic, confusion, and excess. One alternative theory traces it to the Italian painter Federico Barocci, born in 1528 and died in 1612.

  The first time the word was applied to music was in an anonymous satirical review of the premiere of Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera Hippolyte et Aricie in October 1733. That review appeared in print in the Mercure de France in May 1734. The critic complained that the opera's novelty was "du barocque" - the music lacked coherent melody, was filled with dissonances, and restlessly changed key and meter. The philosopher and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau echoed this sentiment in the famous Encyclopedie in 1768, writing that baroque music has harmony that is "confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances."

  In 1788 Quatremere de Quincy applied the term to architecture, defining it as "highly adorned and tormented." By the mid-nineteenth century, art critics had adopted baroque as an insult for post-Renaissance art generally. The art historian Jacob Burckhardt used it in 1855 to describe artists who he believed "despised and abused detail." It was not until 1888 that the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin published the first serious academic defense of the style, in his book Renaissance und Barock, treating baroque painting, sculpture, and architecture as worthy of systematic study. The word was not applied to music as a neutral descriptive category until 1919, when Curt Sachs introduced that usage, and it was first used in English in that sense in a 1940 article by Manfred Bukofzer.

• 3. Faith, Power, and the Council of Trent

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  The Council of Trent, which met from 1545 to 1563, set the doctrinal conditions that made baroque architecture possible. The Catholic Church's first response to the Protestant Reformation had imposed a severe, academic style on religious buildings, one that appealed to theologians but left ordinary worshippers cold. Trent changed that directive: the arts should now communicate religious themes through direct emotional involvement, not learned argument.

  The resulting architecture was built around the body and the gaze of the person standing inside. Baroque churches opened up a large central space so worshippers could stand near the altar. A dome or cupola rose overhead, funneling light down onto the congregation below. The inside of that cupola was painted with angels and saints, giving those who looked up the sensation of peering into heaven itself.

  Ceiling paintings called quadratura, set in stucco frames, were designed so that a viewer standing on the floor of the church would see the entire ceiling in correct perspective, as if the painted figures were physically present. This was a deliberate departure from Michelangelo's approach in the Sistine Chapel, where separate scenes each have their own perspective and are intended to be examined one at a time.

  The most celebrated decorative achievements of this period are both in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini created the St. Peter's Baldachin between 1623 and 1634, a giant canopy above the altar whose twisted bronze columns, gold, and marble contrast with flowing draperies of angels in a studied balance of opposites. He also designed the Chair of Saint Peter, completed between 1647 and 1653, and the great quadruple colonnade enclosing St. Peter's Square between 1656 and 1667 - three galleries arranged in a giant ellipse that balance the oversize dome above.

  Lutheran Baroque developed in parallel, shaped by opposition to Calvinist iconoclasm rather than the Counter-Reformation. The Dresden Frauenkirche, commissioned by the Lutheran city council of Dresden and completed in 1743, was compared by eighteenth-century observers to St. Peter's in Rome itself. A distinctive Baroque element inside churches across denominations was the twisted column: a shaft that spirals upward, giving both a sense of motion and a new way of catching and scattering light.

• 4. Architecture Across Nations

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  The first building in Rome to carry a Baroque facade was the Church of the Gesu in 1584, plain by later standards but a clear break from Renaissance precedent. In 1605, Pope Paul V became the first of a line of popes who commissioned basilicas designed to inspire awe through dramatic color, massed forms, and emotional light.

  Francesco Borromini pushed the style further than almost anyone. His Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, built from 1634 to 1646, achieves movement not through surface decoration but through the walls themselves, which undulate inward and outward. The entire interior space is oval, covered by an oval dome. For the Palazzo Spada in Rome, Borromini used columns of diminishing size, a narrowing floor, and a miniature statue at the end of a garden passage to create the illusion of a corridor thirty meters long; the actual length was seven meters. The statue that appears life-size at the end is only sixty centimeters tall. Borromini designed the illusion with the help of a mathematician.

  Spain's version was driven primarily by the Jesuits and the Catholic Church. The first major Spanish Baroque work was the San Isidro Chapel in Madrid, begun in 1643 by Pedro de la Torre, which placed extreme ornamental richness on its exterior while keeping the interior comparatively spare. The most ornamental branch of Spanish Baroque is called Churrigueresque, named after the brothers Churriguera, who worked chiefly in Salamanca and Madrid and whose buildings on Salamanca's Plaza Mayor date from 1729. That style traveled across the Atlantic and shaped churches and cathedrals throughout Spain's American colonies.

  French Baroque took a very different path. Louis XIV, whose reign ran from 1643 to 1715, invited the master Bernini himself to submit a design for the new east wing of the Louvre - then rejected it in favor of a more classical design by Claude Perrault and Louis Le Vau. The Palace of Versailles, begun in 1661 by Le Vau, with decoration by the painter Charles Le Brun, became the continent's most imitated building. The Galerie des Glaces, with its Le Brun paintings, was built between 1678 and 1686. Peter the Great of Russia visited Versailles during the reign of Louis XV and built his own version, Peterhof Palace, near Saint Petersburg, between 1705 and 1725.

  In Central Europe, the St. Nicholas Church in Prague's Mala Strana district, built from 1704 to 1755 by Christoph Dientzenhofer and his son Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer, transforms architecture into what the source describes as "a theatre of light, colour and movement." In Poland, Sigismund's Column in Warsaw, erected in 1644, was the world's first secular Baroque monument built in the form of a column.

  In Portugal, the city of Porto became the national center of Baroque, its historic center now part of the UNESCO World Heritage List. Much of that work was created by Nicolau Nasoni, an Italian architect working in Portugal, who designed the church and tower of Clerigos, the loggia of the Porto Cathedral, and several palaces.

• 5. Painting in Motion

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  Baroque painters set themselves apart from their predecessors through deliberate technical choices. They favored intense warm colors, frequently placing the primary colors red, blue, and yellow in close proximity. They avoided the even lighting of Renaissance painting, instead using strong contrasts of light and darkness to direct the viewer's eye toward the central action.

  In their compositions they chose the moment of greatest drama in any story - not the calm before or after, but the instant of peak movement. Figures' faces show emotion openly, unlike the serene expressions that populate Renaissance canvases. Action often occurs away from the center of the picture, on slanting axes that create instability. Garments billow as though caught in wind.

  Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was among the most disruptive figures of the early period. His method of painting the human figure directly from life, dramatically spotlit against a dark background, shocked his contemporaries and opened what the source describes as "a new chapter in the history of painting."

  In Bologna, Annibale Carracci, Agostino Carracci, and Ludovico Carracci sought to return painting to the orderly classicism of the Renaissance while also incorporating the intense emotion required by the Counter-Reformation. Their work blended intellectual order with devotional heat.

  Peter Paul Rubens became the dominant figure of Flemish Baroque. His compositions drew on classical and Christian history, with movement, color, and sensuality as their defining qualities. He specialized in altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and mythological or allegorical history paintings.

  Ceiling painting occupied a special place in the Baroque hierarchy. Pietro da Cortona's frescoes for the Palazzo Barberini, painted from 1633 to 1639 to glorify Pope Urban VIII, were the largest decorative frescoes executed in Rome since Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel work. In Rome's Sant'Ignazio Church, Andrea Pozzo painted The Entry of Saint Ignatius into Paradise between 1685 and 1695, one of the most technically ambitious trompe-l'oeil ceiling paintings in existence.

  In the Spanish colonies of the Americas, the Cusco School of painting arose after the Italian painter Bernardo Bitti arrived in 1583, introducing Mannerist influence. Among its notable figures was Marcos Zapata, who painted the fifty large canvases that cover the high arches of Cusco Cathedral.

• 6. Music and the Birth of Opera

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  Opera was born in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century. The earliest known opera is Jacopo Peri's Dafne, mostly now lost, produced in Florence in 1598. Louis XIV created the first Royal Academy of Music in France. In 1669 the poet Pierre Perrin opened an academy of opera in Paris, the first opera theatre in France open to the public, and premiered Pomone - the first grand opera in French - with music by Robert Cambert. It had five acts, elaborate stage machinery, and a ballet.

  Heinrich Schutz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England each helped build their nations' musical traditions in the seventeenth century. New forms were created during the Baroque period, including the concerto and the sinfonia. The piano also traces its origins to this era. Its invention is credited to Bartolomeo Cristofori, born in 1655 and died in 1731, a native of Padua employed by Ferdinando de' Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, as the Keeper of the Instruments. Cristofori named the new instrument un cimbalo di cipresso di piano e forte - "a keyboard of cypress with soft and loud" - a phrase that contracted over time into pianoforte, then fortepiano, and eventually just piano.

  The composers of the Baroque period span an extraordinary range. Johann Pachelbel, born in 1653 and died in 1706, wrote his Canon in D around 1680. Antonio Vivaldi, born in 1678 and died in 1741, published The Four Seasons in 1725. George Frideric Handel, born in 1685 and died in 1759, wrote his Water Music in 1717, his Messiah in 1741, and his Music for the Royal Fireworks in 1749. Johann Sebastian Bach, also born in 1685 and died in 1750, produced his Brandenburg Concertos in 1721 and his St Matthew Passion in 1727.

  Classical ballet also took shape in the Baroque era. Court dance style was brought to France by Marie de' Medici. Louis XIV himself performed in public ballets. In March 1662 he founded the Academie Royale de Danse, the first professional dance school in Europe, which set the standards and vocabulary for ballet across the continent.

• 7. Theatre, Gardens, and the Urban Stage

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  The Baroque period was a golden age for theatre in France and Spain. Corneille, Racine, and Moliere wrote for French stages; Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderon de la Barca dominated in Spain. Lope de Vega's 1609 treatise Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo introduced a new dramatic formula that broke with Aristotle's unities of action, time, and place, and mixed tragic and comic elements. Tirso de Molina, one of Lope's contemporaries, is best known for his play The Trickster of Seville, one of the earliest versions of the Don Juan myth.

  Cosimo Lotti, arriving at the Spanish court, brought advanced theatrical machinery from Italy and applied it to palace entertainments called "Fiestas" and elaborate displays called "Naumaquias." He was also placed in charge of designing the Gardens of Buen Retiro, Zarzuela, and Aranjuez, and oversaw construction of the theatrical building of Coliseo del Buen Retiro.

  In New Spain, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz stands as the second-ranked figure in Spanish-American Baroque theatre. Her works include the auto sacramental El divino Narciso and the comedy Los empenos de una casa.

  Outside the theatre, the Baroque garden - also called the jardin a la francaise or French formal garden - first appeared in Rome in the sixteenth century and reached its most celebrated form in France. The gardens of Vaux le Vicomte and the Palace of Versailles set the template. Andre Le Notre designed the Versailles gardens specifically to complement and amplify the architecture, with fountains visible from the interior of the palace. These gardens were geometric in plan, like the rooms of a house, and were best seen from above, from a chateau terrace.

  Baroque urban planning extended these same principles into city-scale design. Rome's replanning under Pope Sixtus V added grand piazzas as public spaces. The strategy was to link churches, government buildings, and piazzas through a network of axes, making the landmarks of the Catholic Church into the focal points of the city. This approach found a later expression in Barcelona's Eixample district, designed by Ildefons Cerda with wide avenues, a grid system, and distinctive octagonal intersections - a neighborhood whose Baroque-influenced architecture includes works by Antoni Gaudi.

• 8. A Global Style

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  The Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires carried Baroque to the Americas and Asia. In regions dominated by Spain and Portugal - both centralized Catholic monarchies - the style found especially fertile ground. European artists emigrated and trained local craftsmen; Catholic missionaries, many skilled in visual art, spread Baroque imagery into indigenous communities.

  In the Spanish Americas, what is called "Missionary Baroque" developed in settlements organized by Spanish Catholic missionaries across territory stretching from Mexico and the southwestern parts of what is now the United States to Argentina and Chile. Missionaries' accounts describe Western art, particularly music, having a powerful effect on indigenous people, and a hybrid form of Baroque emerged, shaped by Native craft traditions and devotional practices that combined Catholic worship with "passionate intensity, laden with mysticism, superstition, and theatricality."

  In Peru, architectural construction in Lima, Cusco, Arequipa, and Trujillo after 1650 showed characteristics that went beyond the European style, including cushioned walls and solomonic columns. Brazil produced Aleijadinho, whose group of churches in the Minas Gerais region are distinguished by curved plan layouts, concave-convex facade dynamics, and a plastic treatment of every architectural element. His Church of Sao Francisco de Assis in Ouro Preto was built from 1765 to 1788.

  In Portuguese Goa, an architectural style blending Baroque forms with Hindu elements produced buildings such as the Se Cathedral and the Basilica of Bom Jesus, which houses the tomb of St. Francis Xavier. The set of churches and convents in Goa was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. In the Philippines, a Spanish colony for over three centuries, four Baroque church complexes and the Baroque and Neoclassical city of Vigan are also UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

  In Eastern Europe, a distinct synthesis called the Brancovenesc style took shape in Wallachia and Moldavia, named after the ruler Constantin Brancoveanu, whose reign ran from 1654 to 1714. Baroque decorative elements arrived via Venice and the Dalmatian regions, and combined with Byzantine and Islamic traditions to produce elaborate column capitals, twisted shafts interpreted from the Solomonic column, and railings decorated with rinceaux and, at Mogosaoia Palace, with dolphins. Cartouches appeared on tombstones, including that of Constantin Brancoveanu himself. The style persisted through the eighteenth century and into part of the nineteenth.