The Exhibition
The First Global Style
Baroque was the first style to have a significant worldwide impact. It spread from Italy and France to the rest of Europe. Then it travelled to Africa, Asia, and South and Central America via the colonies, missions and trading posts of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and other Europeans. The style was disseminated through the worldwide trade in fashionable goods, through prints, and also by travelling craftsmen, artists and architects.
Chinese carvers worked in Indonesia, French silversmiths in Sweden, Italian furniture makers in France. Sculpture was sent from the Philippines to Mexico as well as Spain. London-made chairs went all over Europe and across the Atlantic. The French royal workshops turned out luxury products in the official French style that were both desired and imitated by fashionable society across Europe. But Baroque also changed as it crossed the world, adapting to new needs and local tastes.
Art & Performance
Baroque art did not stand shyly by, hoping to be noticed. Paintings, sculpture and decorative arts swirled with vigorous action and strong feelings. Figures have a sense of realistic immediacy, as if they had been stopped in mid- action. Facial expression, pose, gesture and drapery all played a part in the drama.
Human figures played a leading role in all the various art forms, from painting and architecture through to sledges and tableware. Allegorical, sacred and mythological figures took over the whole work, turning it into a drama in which the actors strove to convey particular messages and to engage the emotions of the viewer.
These figures were put into the service of both faith and dynastic ambition - in emotionally wrought religious paintings, and in heroic portraits of rulers, their heads held high above a mass of billowing drapery.
Architecture & Performance
Baroque buildings were dynamic and dramatic. They used the language of ancient Greek and Roman architecture but broke its strict rules. Facades were full of movement, columns were twisted, and ground plans were composed of curves and ovals. Inside, painted ceilings seem to open to the sky, and hidden windows illumined domes and altars.
All these devices were meant to convey particular meanings and emotions. The great curved colonnades outside St Peter's in Rome made actual the church's embrace; the repeated elements on the endless facades of Baroque palaces signalled absolute power.
Baroque architecture was pioneered in papal Rome by Pietro da Cortona, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini. The new style was vigorous and imaginative but never out of control. Borromini's oval ground plans were based on a dynamic geometry of triangles and circles. The same geometry lay behind the city plans of Baroque Rome.
Marvellous Materials
A fascination with physical materials played a central role in the Baroque style.
Virtuoso art objects made of rare and precious substances had long been valued. They were often kept in special rooms or cabinets, alongside natural history specimens, scientific instruments, books, documents and works of art. But in the Baroque period - with the birth of modern science and the opening up of the world beyond Europe - there was an increasingly serious interest in the nature and meaning of these exotic materials.
Rarities such as East Asian porcelain and lacquer became fashionable in interior decoration and were imitated in Europe. Some of the rarest materials were believed to have the very useful capacity to detect poison. Among them were the newly invented ruby glass (which contained real gold) and rhinoceros horn, which also had the sexual connotations it still carries in some cultures today.
