Baroque Theatricality

This paper focuses on “baroque theatricality” as a historical approach to the stage in the seventeenth century and its subsequent representation in theaters in the twenty-first century. What do actors do with the text? How do they give life to the words and implied gestures? The expression of human emotions (joy, fear, anger, despair, etc.) was codified by rhetorical gestures and tones of voice, while the makeup was a codified way of drawing the emotions on the skin. The relation among the actors, architectural space, and the audience gives a special meaning to the concept of dramatic illusion in this period, as this illusion was crafted by actors rather than theoreticians.

Saints and Baroque Piety

If Protestant reformers mocked the cult of the saints, Catholics in the century or so after the Council of Trent (1546–1563) not only reaffirmed the centrality of saints in their lives, but also recognized and celebrated holy women and men more than ever, including those formally recognized by the church (the beatified or canonized). Visual representations of the saints filled Catholic spaces and imaginations: saints were seen as valued intercessors or advocates with the divine, and as exemplars of how one ought to live one’s life. This article pays particular attention to case studies of Baroque models of sainthood, models honoring and privileging an exuberant piety of self-denial and self-giving. Baroque saints were women and men who, with the help of grace, chose light over darkness, good over evil, and persevered in those choices no matter the cost or consequences in this world. Baroques models of holiness developed both in Europe and also in what were “new” and strange lands for Europeans.

Water in The Baroque Garden

The article investigates the central role of water in European baroque gardens by using selected examples from Italy, France, Germany, and Spain. It focuses on the significance of water for the organization of space, the variety of its artful mise en scène in different fountain types, its multi-faceted symbolism, and on its performative possibilities concerning a physical as well as psychical involvement of the garden visitor. It is mainly the ambivalent materiality of water—its mutability, movement, transparency, and reflective quality—that define the Baroque’s affinity to this ephemeral and entirely atectonic element that activates different senses simultaneously and is particularly suited for a synesthetic experience of the garden. Yet, water displays also assumed an important role for sociability, as they could determine different moods in various parts of the garden, create amusement and intimacy between the visitors, and raise their awareness of hierarchies and power relationships by the demonstration of technical mastery.

Machine Plays

This article focuses on the practice of machine theater that originated from courtly spectacles in Italy during the Renaissance and developed throughout Western and Central Europe during the seventeenth century. Defined by rapid scene changes and special effects, machine plays reflect the Baroque fascination with both mechanical devices and the law of optics—or scenery perspective—to produce wonder while displaying royal power and prestige. The aim of this article is threefold: to provide an overview of the origins and development of machine theater, to examine the transmission and dissemination of stagecraft knowledge, and to look at the changing nature of machine plays performed by public theater companies, which took advantage of stage machinery innovations to broaden their repertoire, attract a larger audience, and remain competitive.

Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism

The Baroque in Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism, in parts of the Americas formerly comprising the Spanish and Portuguese empires, has been traditionally studied as a question of adherence to or deviation from a Counter-Reformation style promoted primarily by ecclesiastical institutions. This article expands upon what is meant by “Baroque” in the architecture and urbanism of the Iberian empires in the Americas. Through the analysis of urban plans, images of the city, architectural interiors and exteriors, physical urban spaces, and other forms of material culture, this article argues that Ibero-American architecture and urbanism in the age of the Baroque belonged to a phenomenon of ordering and thereby creating the “New World” as ideologically constituted colonial spaces that reified social and political norms. Furthermore, human subjects actively negotiated the spaces created by architecture and the city, making the American Baroque also part of a process of negotiating order and thereby producing American spaces.

Surface and Substance: Baroque Dress in Spain and France, 1600–1720

This article explores the surface and substance of elite dress in the baroque period by unpacking printed texts and images that reveal their political and economic significance in the courts of Europe. It does so by considering the nature and sources of garments and fabrics, continuity and change in their production and consumption in Spain and France, and the shaping of the modern fashion system—a system in which changes in textiles and trimmings were promoted seasonally by the state, textile manufacturers, and the nascent fashion press (Le Mercure galant) from the late seventeenth century onward. It thus underlines the local and global networks involved in the production and consumption of dress.

Introduction: The Crisis of the Baroque

Baroque is often considered as a category of style specific to the historical period extending roughly from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. The term “baroque” has also been applied to later periods, frequently with regard to works in the visual, musical, and performing arts as well as in literature, in which similar style markers appear. This entry, like several others in this volume, argues that the Baroque, as historical period, can also be fruitfully understood as a massive challenge of organization occasioned by geographic and scientific discoveries as well as by religious reformations. There are traits of the Baroque throughout the European society of this period and, as a consequence of European colonization of other continents, throughout the world.

Line and Trait of the Baroque River

In the Baroque era in France (1580–1660), poetry and cartography are of similar measure. Together, they attest to how the nation crafts an image of itself. Lyrical forms are drawn to sinuous description of the tenor and flow of rivers, while topographical maps proudly display the lines and swaths of a national hydrography. Map, river, and writing become synonymous. This essay compares the literary canon (Montaigne, Saint-Amant, d’Urfé, Scudéry) to maps by Jean de Gourmont, François de la Guillotière, Christophe Tassin, Nicolas Sanson and, as it should, ends with François Chauveau’s Carte de Tendre.

Ottoman Baroque

The Ottoman capital of Istanbul was transformed in the eighteenth century by the rise of a new building style that scholars have dubbed “Ottoman Baroque” in reference to its adaptation of European-inspired forms. Challenging the view that the style was derivative and inauthentic, this chapter explains the Ottoman Baroque as a conscious endeavor to refashion Istanbul into a modern city boasting a globally resonant mode of architecture. Such rebranding was part of a larger move to reaffirm the empire’s status in an age of intensified transregional interaction and dialogue. Its cosmopolitanism notwithstanding, the Ottoman Baroque was thoroughly and purposefully localized, even incorporating Byzantine motifs that invoked the Ottomans’ own claim to the Classical artistic heritage of Europe. Contemporary observers, whether native or foreign, wrote in overwhelmingly positive terms about the style, whose popularity proves the Ottomans’ success in crafting a compelling new visual identity for their empire.

Is There a Baroque Style of Preaching in Early Modern France?

Preaching in the baroque period, though often neglected by researchers, is a literary field that assumed renewed importance in the Catholic Church following the Council of Trent. Looking carefully at examples from the French repertory of sermons, this chapter describes several stylistic variants, ranging from austere simplicity to vivid appeals to the hearers’ imagination. The pulpit borrowed from the theater as well as from recently rediscovered Greek novels, but the florid style of the early seventeenth century was followed by a simpler one that is sometimes described as neoclassical.