baroque

baroque is a term widely applied by art historians to the whole spectrum of European art in the 17th and early 18th cents. Possibly used by Iberian jewellers to categorize imperfectly formed pearls, or originating in the Italian baroco, dismissal of a dubious theory with an extravagant conclusion, baroque meant a style in architecture, painting, music, and furniture which flouted classical standards.

In 17th-cent. Britain baroque was never whole-heartedly embraced or permitted to overwhelm classical models. Here a protestant ethos was decisive because, quintessentially, baroque was represented by the grandeur of Counter-Reformation Rome as projected by Bernini, Borromini, and their demanding Barberini patron Pope Urban VIII (reigned 1623–44); the fulsome interior decoration of the Pitti palace in Florence by Pietro da Cortona (1641–6) would never have been wanted for an English great house.

No painter who has been labelled ‘baroque’ has surpassed Rubens, the supreme colourist. While it should be remembered that he was ever a master of line, and had a practical knowledge of contemporary architecture, it is striking how, in England, Rubens's greatest surviving decorative scheme, the ceiling of the Whitehall Banqueting House (late 1630s), is ‘reined in’ by the building's austere character. This situation is reversed in Nicholas Stone's porch for St Mary's church, Oxford (1633), where barley-sugar (‘solomonic’) columns, redolent of Bernini, support a traditional fan-vaulted roof. In drawing, Lely's 31 depictions in black and white chalk of a Garter procession, made in the 1660s, are regarded as among the most accomplished of baroque drawings. Their swagger is exactly suited to their theme. In baroque woodwork, Grinling Gibbons's choir stalls in St Paul's cathedral are unsurpassed in England. While the English and Dutch shared in an ebullient use of brick, in stone (emanating from the fertile minds of Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, Talman, and Archer) there was a profoundly native adaptation of baroque. With these men there arrived a startlingly exaggerated interpretation of such classical features as entablatures, finials, pedestals, and pilasters, above all at Blenheim, Castle Howard, Seaton Delaval, and Chatsworth (all built between 1685 and 1725).

The Vanbrugh-esque had no counterpart in music because Britain shared sufficiently in the common currency of continental music. The ever-developing organ catered splendidly for the observational requirements of reformed churches, and it was symptomatic of the era that musicians such as Tomkins, Lawes, Locke, and Purcell benefited from royal rather than ecclesiastical patronage: the two latter furnished music for great occasions of state which would have sounded no less appropriate in catholic milieux.

David Denis Aldridge