Reflections on Baroque - Softcover

Harbison, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226316017 ISBN 13: 9780226316017

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2003

Synopsis

From its beginnings in the seventeenth century, the eccentric and tumultuous forms of the Baroque spread across not only Europe but colonial Latin America and Asia as well. With Reflections on Baroque, Robert Harbison brings together discussions of aesthetics, science, mysticism, politics, religion, and culture to offer a surprising reinterpretations of the baroque style and its influences and echoes into the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Harbison is a professor of architecture and interior design at the University of North London. He is the author of Eccentric Spaces and Thirteen Ways: Theoretical Investigations in Architecture.

From the Back Cover

From its beginnings in the seventeenth century, the eccentric and tumultuous forms of the Baroque spread throughout the whole of Catholic Europe, infiltrated Protestant England and Orthodox Russia, and even embraced colonial Latin America and Asia. Here, the author of Eccentric Spaces offers a surprising reinterpretation of this ubiquitous style and the cultural and political interests that gave rise to it.

Robert Harbison traces the complex and divergent origins of Baroque back to forces including seventeenth-century mysticism and science, personal features of Michelangelo's architecture, and a papal wish to reassert the primacy of Rome. Taking into account art, scenography, music, poetry, and literature, Harbison uncovers currents and connections that transcend the geographical and chronological boundaries commonly imposed on the style. He explores the metamorphoses of Baroque ideas and works of art into later styles, particularly the Rococo, and then, in an unexpected twist, pursues the Baroque idea into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, Reflections on Baroque reveals that the Baroque impulse still thrives in the twenty-first century imagination.

From the Inside Flap

From its beginnings in the seventeenth century, the eccentric and tumultuous forms of the Baroque spread throughout the whole of Catholic Europe, infiltrated Protestant England and Orthodox Russia, and even embraced colonial Latin America and Asia. Here, the author of Eccentric Spaces offers a surprising reinterpretation of this ubiquitous style and the cultural and political interests that gave rise to it.

Robert Harbison traces the complex and divergent origins of Baroque back to forces including seventeenth-century mysticism and science, personal features of Michelangelo's architecture, and a papal wish to reassert the primacy of Rome. Taking into account art, scenography, music, poetry, and literature, Harbison uncovers currents and connections that transcend the geographical and chronological boundaries commonly imposed on the style. He explores the metamorphoses of Baroque ideas and works of art into later styles, particularly the Rococo, and then, in an unexpected twist, pursues the Baroque idea into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Engagingly written and richly illustrated,Reflections on Baroque reveals that the Baroque impulse still thrives in the twenty-first century imagination.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226316017
• ISBN 13: 9780226316017
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256