The Baroque period showed dynamic and original qualities not seen before or since in Western culture. In experiencing this period, we are reminded of the need for mystery and mysticism, color and splendor, a life of the spirit that is closely united with a vivid life of the senses, and for all these reasons I see the Baroque as an emblematic expression of Western civilization.

Art and culture are human things, not scientific phenomena, and therefore resist being easily systematized and labeled. Nevertheless, scholars are wont to discern periods and stylistic trends in the history of Western culture and art, and the labels they develop become fixed in usage and consciousness over time. As we in the West have continued to reflect on our cultural legacy, a periodic timeline has gradually emerged. Sandwiched between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment comes that curious and curiously long period known as the Baroque, lasting in various artforms from between the end of the 16^th century to the middle of the 18^th—a sizeable segment of Western cultural history.

The Baroque embodies the paradoxes and richness so often manifest in history. It was an age of intense faith (like the Middle Ages) and also an age of intensive scientific research (like the Enlightenment). It was a time both of brooding and introspective philosophical inquiry and of enterprising exploration and study of the external world—the settlement of North America began during this time. The Baroque period is central in a literal, temporal sense: it lies midway between the Middle Ages and today and partakes in both ends of that timescale; it has qualities of the classical and medieval heritage blended with qualities of modernity familiar to us. I would suggest that the Baroque is central in a larger and more spiritual sense, too; its legacy lives on and embodies qualities that are essential, vital, and important to Western civilization.

Limiting ourselves to the artistic sphere, the Baroque is an aesthetic that informed painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and the decorative arts. It now seems very likely that the word “Baroque” derives, not from a Portuguese word for “misshapen pearl” as often stated, but rather from baroco, a medieval Latin and Italian term for a complicated syllogism in Scholastic logic. This term came to be used derisively by Enlightenment writers such as Rousseau to denote something tortuously complicated and elaborate. In fact, the first uses of “Baroque” to describe art or music come from the middle of the 18^th century, and they are not at all complimentary. Some critics went so far as to brand the period as a decadent one in the annals of art, making “Baroque” close kin to “Gothic” as a term of opprobrium for critics who preferred a whitewashed simplicity to mysticism and grandeur.

It wasn’t until the late 19^th century that “Baroque” became established as a neutral term of description instead of a putdown. Now it is a word anyone can gladly embrace to denote a range of estimable art, architecture, music, and indeed literature, where Shakespeare and the Metaphysical Poets can well be seen as typically Baroque artists.

To describe what the Baroque was all about is no easy task, but I can hardly improve upon such a collection of terms as found in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Baroque art: “grandeur, sensuousness richness, drama, vitality, movement, tension, emotional exuberance.” Perhaps all this can be summed up under the aspect of movement as opposed to the serenity and stability we commonly discern in the art of classical antiquity, so admired and imitated by the Renaissance and subsequent “neoclassical” movements.

Much writing about the Baroque stresses the role that the Catholic Reformation (Counter-Reformation) played in the development of the Baroque in all its forms; here is another one of those cases where all roads lead to Rome. The Catholic Church in the late 16^th and the 17^th centuries found itself trying to stem the tide of the Protestant Reformation and the stripped-down aesthetic of its more extreme forms. In order both to win people back to the fold and solidify the faithful, the church employed color, drama, and emotion to the maximum in depicting the things pertaining to the faith. To some degree this was nothing but a continuation of the accomplishments of Renaissance humanism, and the works of art that resulted seem to put into practice the Roman adage “Nothing human is alien to me.”

Consider the paintings of Caravaggio, with their unglamorized realism and homely human details and their stunning chiaroscuro (contrast of darkness and light). Or the plays of Shakespeare, which embrace all sides of humanity and all the expressive possibilities of language. Or the sacred music of the Venetian Baroque, in which voices and instruments combine in glorious antiphonal masses of sound. Opera—that combination of drama, poetry, and song put forth with outsized emotion—was an invention of early Baroque musicians such as Monteverdi. Baroque architecture with its decorative and theatrical exuberance (let’s be careful not to conflate it with the more flowery rococo, though) seems to invite the beholder to soar with the angels, marking out a church or palace as a “glimpse of glory,” as Fr. Dwight Longenecker has written.

On the other side of this Baroque flamboyance is a world of profound introspection as experienced in the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt or the philosophical writings of Pascal, where man faces himself in his inner truth. The Baroque was an era that turned both outward toward the splendor of the created world and inward to the most spiritual depths of the soul.

I myself have had a deep involvement with Baroque music as a violinist specializing on an historical instrument, often joining in a duo with a lute-playing colleague. The qualities that move me most in Baroque music, with Bach at the summit, are the intricate layers of its design and the forward propulsion of its rhythmic life-force, the quasi-improvised instrumental brilliance alternating with a songful expression that enshrines the dignity of the individual voice (again, the legacy of humanism at its best). To perform, as we often do in our duo, the wonderful suite of dances that Bach wrote in tandem with his lutenist friend Silvius Lepold Weiss is to experience the most profound musical satisfaction—one marked by a divine sense of order along with human conviviality and good-humored pleasure.

Sometimes I cannot help but feel as if Renaissance classicism was but a prelude to the riotous symphony of human accomplishment that marked the best of the Baroque. To have rediscovered the culture of ancient Greece is a marvelous thing, no doubt, but the Baroque period showed dynamic and original qualities not seen before or since in Western culture. In experiencing this period, we are reminded of the need for mystery and mysticism, color and splendor, a life of the spirit that is closely united with a vivid life of the senses, and for all these reasons I see the Baroque as an emblematic expression of Western civilization.

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The featured image is an oil portrait on canvas of Gottfried Reiche (1667–1734) by Elias Gottlob Haussmann (1695–1774), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.