The Baroque is a period of artistic style that started around 1600 in Rome , Italy, and spread throughout the majority of Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.
In informal usage, the word baroque describes something that is elaborate and highly detailed.
The most important factors during the Baroque era were the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, with the development of the Baroque style considered to be linked closely with the Catholic Church.
The popularity of the style was in fact encouraged by the Catholic Church, which had decided at the Council of Trent that the arts should communicate religious themes and direct emotional involvement in response to the Protestant Reformation. Baroque art manifested itself differently in various European countries owing to their unique political and cultural climates.
Characteristics
The Baroque style is characterized by exaggerated motion and clear detail used to produce drama, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, and music. Baroque iconography was direct, obvious, and dramatic, intending to appeal above all to the senses and the emotions.
The use of the chiaroscuro technique is a well known trait of Baroque art. This technique refers to the interplay between light and dark and is often used in paintings of dimly lit scenes to produce a very high-contrast, dramatic atmosphere.
The chiaroscuro technique is visible in the painting The Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens. Other important Baroque painters include Caravaggio (who is thought to be a precursor to the movement and is known for work characterized by close-up action and strong diagonals) and Rembrandt.
Art as a psychoanalysis
the field of art and psychoanalysis expanded into various approaches, depending on the particular psychoanalytic or art-historical bias of the author. Although there has been considerable overlap in these approaches, they can be divided into three major categories: (1) psychobiography, in which the artist’s life is directly related to his or her work; (2) psycho-iconography, in which the iconography of a work is determined by convention and theme and can be analyzed psychologically; psycho-iconography can also provide insights into works of art when the artist’s life is well known and can be related to the meaning of the imagery; and (3) the origin and nature of creativity and symbolization.
These three methods of analyzing art and artists form the major sections of this article. Both psychobiography and psycho-iconography are of most value when they clarify the art, especially with regard to its meaning or technique. The origin and nature of creativity and symbolization are more relevant to the creative process and can be approached either from the point of view of a specific artist or via the conventions prevalent at a specific time and place. Brief bibliographical entries are also provided for tangential issues, as well as for general discussions of the methodology of psychoanalysis applied to art.
There are general overviews of the application of psychoanalytic thinking to works of art, as well as publications that expand the boundaries of psychoanalysis. These overviews include more recent approaches to art, and compilations of essays or talks giv m xcen at conferences that deal with different ways of reading art according to the school of psychoanalysis favored by the author.
Additional approaches to the application of psychoanalysis to art include feminist studies, semiotics and structuralism, gender studies, colonialism and non-Western art, and neurobiology. The issue of aesthetics is covered only when included in works primarily concerned with psychobiography, psycho-iconography, or creativity and symbolization. The application of psychoanalysis to aesthetics has become a major field in its own right and deserves a separate set of bibliographical entries.
In The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Bernini merged a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and architecture into a unified composition that perceptually appears to extend into the surrounding church (Figure 2). This would have been a new and revolutionary approach to art at this time. Ndalianis (2005:216) points out that the diverse media maintain their differences, allowing each to surpass its own limits as one merges into another. She (2005:216) goes on to say that the movement between the differentmedia is used to create a direct reaction within the viewer. The marble, architectural detail, gold, painting, and stucco fuse into one another, inviting the viewer into the space in which Bernini’s illustration of the event takes place, allowing one to embrace the polycentric nature of the composition. This can be seen where the painted skies with rays of light merge with the metal rods which descend into the space of the chapel. The polycentric nature of the work is distinctive of the Baroque era, where the focus of the work changes constantly, being dependant on the position of the viewer. This elaborate work, with its various references and the lavish context in which the sculpture is placed, becomes excessive, and the viewer is intended to feel overwhelmed.
The work changes into a dynamic process that varies as a result of the viewer interacting with the work, producing various perspectives, dynamic motion and the perceptual collapse of any restrictions usually created by the frame (Ndalianis [sa]). For Deleuze (1993:123) the Baroque artwork moves into the surrounding space and in some cases becomes an installation piece as it merges with the architectural space. This can be seen particularly in the sculptural works and the ceiling frescoes by artists such as Bernini, Giovanni Battista Gaulli (1639-1709) and Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), where the viewers walk around the sculptural form taking in its excessive details from various angles, shifting their perspective as they move around the artwork. From these opinions, it may be concluded that the viewing of Baroque art becomes a visual, sensual, and emotional occurrence in which the viewer participates. For Hauser (1962:162) such participation on the part of the viewer even becomes cinematic as he believes that the Baroque style has a tendency to make the
