Baroque once meant a flawed pearl or tangled logic
From the early 1600s to the 1750s, Western arts chased contrast, motion, deep color, and theatrical surprise. Rome launched the style; Catholic patrons used its grandeur against austere Protestant taste, though Lutheran lands developed Baroque of their own before Rococo softened the edges.
English took the word from French, which probably got it from Portuguese barroco, a misshapen pearl, although some etymologists prefer baroco, a term from medieval Latin logic. During the sixteenth century baroco escaped the schools to describe anything absurdly convoluted, and Montaigne nudged it toward meaning bizarre. Jewellers used the word too: a 1531 inventory of royal treasure applied it to pearls, and the Académie's 1694 dictionary reserved it for pearls that were not properly round. A minority view traces the name to the painter Federico Barocci.
Its first artistic uses were insults. A satirical review of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, printed in 1734, branded the opera du barocque for its dissonance and restless changes of key and metre. Rousseau in 1768 called baroque music confused in harmony and harsh in its singing, and in 1788 Quatremère de Quincy pinned the label on over-ornamented, tortured architecture. As late as 1855 Jacob Burckhardt sneered that such artists lacked respect for tradition. Rehabilitation began in 1888, when Heinrich Wölfflin's Renaissance und Barock treated the style as a serious subject of study.
The architecture had a clear brief. After the Council of Trent, which sat from 1545 to 1563, the Church wanted art that moved ordinary worshippers rather than only intellectuals. Churches opened a broad central space near the altar beneath a high dome, whose painted angels and saints gave visitors the sense of gazing up into heaven. Ceiling paintings known as quadratura were calculated so that someone standing on the floor saw the whole scene in correct perspective, unlike Michelangelo's Sistine panels, meant to be read one at a time.
Bernini's bronze baldachin over the altar of St Peter's in Rome, built between 1623 and 1634, shows the Baroque appetite for opposites: a colossal structure topped by a canopy that seems weightless, solid twisted columns set against fluttering angelic drapery. Protestants built in the style as well; Dresden's Lutheran Frauenkirche, finished in 1743, drew comparisons with St Peter's itself.
Source: Baroque
