Baroque brightness

 

The term baroque is a term from a word of Portuguese origin (barroco), and the feminine of it is called (pearl) that contains some distortions as in Spanish (barruecas). The word was originally a pejorative denoting a kind of grotesque, eloquent, and stuffy art.

Thus he first appeared in Trivo's Dictionary of 1771 "in painting, a frame or painting of a baroque character means not to follow laws and proportions and to depict everything according to the artist's whim." There is another theory derived from the name Baroque, a syllogism attributed to Aristotle and educational philosophy in the Middle Ages, which refers to an ambiguity, based on a logically weak content, that leads to confusion between right and wrong. Thus, this indicates the existence of a kind of pedantic and artificial logic, and in general with a satirical tone that is not free from controversy or innocent of it, and this trend was applied by Francisco Melithea in the Dictionary of Fine Arts of Design, where he sees that "Baroque is the superiority in strangeness and excess of absurdity".

The term Baroque was used in an era of the eighteenth century in a pejorative sense about an overemphasis and abundance of ornament, unlike the more obvious and realistic Enlightenment rationality. At this time, baroque became synonymous with adjectives such as "unreasonable" and "rude". Enlightenment thinkers see in the artworks of the previous century a manipulation of classical concepts that are close to rationality in reality, which prompted critics of the art of the Six hundred to make the term (baroque) a pejorative concept. In The Dictionary of Architecture (1792) Antoine Chrysostom-Catermier de Cancy defines Baroque as “a detail of the strange, it is, if we want to say, refined or, one might say, excessive. If rigor is wisdom in taste, then Baroque is wisdom in strangeness. The idea of ​​baroque involves carrying the absurd to excessive."

The historiography of this art tended then to re-evaluate the concept of Baroque and evaluate its intrinsic qualities, at a time when they began as a defining period in Western culture.

 Baroque is the culture of the image, where all the arts converge in order to create a complete literary work with a theatrical aesthetic and scenography (the art of decorating the stage) and directing that shows the control of the church or the state, with touches of typography, but in an overall work that expresses dynamism and vitality. This interaction of all arts justifies the use of visual language as a mass means of expression, shaped in the form of a dynamic perception of nature and the surrounding space.

One of the main characteristics of Baroque art is its illusory and artificial character: “Genius and determination are the enchanting art through which the illusion of the eye reaches even astonishment” (Gian Lorenzo Bernini). Primarily everything that is visible and mortal is valued, which is why theater flourished and artistic and performing genres such as: dance, the art of suggestive movements, musical drama (rhetoric and melodrama), puppet theatre, acrobatics, circus performances, etc. The feeling then was that the world was a theater (the world theatre), and the feeling that life was a theatrical act: “The whole world is a stage, and men and women are the actors” (As You Like It, William Shakespeare 1599). On the same level, it was necessary to give theatrical character to the remaining arts, especially architecture. It is an art that depends on investing reality, on “imitation”, on turning wrong into right, and in the direction of “punishing” right by wrong. Where things do not appear as they are, but rather as they are intended to be, especially in Catholicism, where the counter-reformation movement was not very successful because half of the population of Europe were Protestants, so the rhetorical trick appeared in literature absolutely as a means of propaganda expression that reflects the luxury of the real language in an improved way, And that is through the use of the innovative improvements such as: metaphor, paradox, exaggeration, counterpoint, inversion of speech, omission, etc. The heart of the truth appears distorted and magnified so that its proportions are modified with the imaginative work being subjected to a personal standard, and its effect has reached even to painting where the excessive use of deceptive arts.