Introduction

Baroque is a style born in Italy to Rome, Mantua, Venice and Florence at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is spreading rapidly in most countries of Europe. It affects all areas of art, sculpture, painting, literature, architecture, theater and music and is characterized by exaggeration of the movement, the decorative excess, dramatic effects, tension, exuberance, and sometimes pompous grandeur. It continues the artistic movement of Renaissance art; the Neoclassicism succeeded him from the second half of the eighteenth century. The term "baroque" comes from the Portuguese "barroco" which means "irregular pearl". (However the noun refers first barroco large boulder roundness irregular, or a ditch, ravine, in both cases, the term seems to contain an idea of irregularity).

Description and Analysis

The term "baroque" in its present meaning, like most period or stylistic designations, was invented later by the art critic and not by the practitioners of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They do not think baroque, but classic. They use the forms of the Middle Ages, the classical orders, pediments, moldings after classic Greek and Roman models. The Baroque was born in Rome in the late sixteenth century. In French the term is attested from 1531 about a pearl at the end of the seventeenth century figuratively (Martin, 78).

The art historian original Swiss Wölfflin Heinrich (1864-1945) Renaissance and Baroque defines the Baroque as "movement imported into mass," an art antithesis of Renaissance art. It makes no distinctions between Mannerism and Baroque that modern writers do, and it ignores its more recent phase, the rococo, which flourished in the first half of the eighteenth century. France and Britain, its study is taken seriously only from the dominant influence that Wölfflin acquires within the Germanic school.

The origin of the word "baroque" is uncertain. It may come from Portuguese barrocco, which means "pearl of irregular shape." From the late eighteenth century, the term "baroque" in the terminology between art critics to refer to broken forms opposing the proportionality Renaissance, as in ancient times by the standards trend called "classical" the late seventeenth century, namely proportion, harmony, balance and symmetry. Some art historians, as Jakob Burckahrdt, considered the decadent baroque as an expression of Renaissance art, until Heinrich Wölfflin, his disciple, who found the first in its Fundamental Principles of the history of the Art (1915), the differences between the art of the sixteenth century and the seventeenth century, but cannot categorize these changes ...