The major topics painted and sculpted during the 17th century are featured here. Baroque artists chose stories not only from the Bible but also from mythology; these are not included in art history texts. In this volume, one finds the primary sources: The Golden Legend, the Bible, Ovid, and Plutarch, to name a few. Each entry concludes with an example of a work depicting the topic under examination (Diana Hunting, Lot and His Daughters, for instance) along with a readily available source where the work is pictured. The only reference of its type for art students, this is a companion piece for the author's earlier (Greenwood, 1987). The turbulent 17th century resulted in two main artistic styles: an expressionistic, sensual kind of emotional outpouring and a silent, classical mode of the highest possible decorum. These styles focused on topics that were mostly mythological or religious: maenads, satyrs, and nymphs pouring wine, carrying baskets of flowers, and lounging at a mythological event; angels shown in the heavens or with the characters on earth. Art students until now have not had a single source that attempts to describe the topics of this intensely artistic age with artists as different in approach as Bernini and Rembrandt. Direct quotes from primary sources including the Bible and Ovid enrich the descriptive material. Extensive cross-referencing adds to the user-friendly aspect of the dictionary.

Baroque and Rococo Art and Architecture is the first in-depth history of one of the great periods of Western art, spanning the years 1585 to 1785.  The text treats the major media-painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, and architecture-as well as gardens, furniture, tapestries, costume, jewelry, and ceramics, all in terms of their original function and patronage and with emphasis on the social, political and cultural context.  Organized by country and medium, the book contains biographies of the leading creative figures of the time, from Caravaggio and Rembrandt to Watteau and Hogarth.  Significantly, Professor Neuman offers the fullest account to date of women artists and the representation of women and families in art.  Additionally, drawing from recent scholarship, the text explores such fields as Spanish polychrome sculpture and Viceregal American painting.   Baroque and Rococo Art and Architecture reviews traditional and recent strategies for interpreting artworks.  It also traces the dissemination of visual ideas through prints and drawings-the forerunners of today's art reproductions and digital media.  In special sections the text raises questions regarding the nature of perception and how artists transfer optical data to the canvas.  Artists' techniques, from painting and printmaking to sculpting in marble and casting in bronze, are explained.  Analysis of the institutions of art, such as the royal academies, apprenticeship systems, and artists' exhibition rooms, complements an examination of collecting at all levels of society.  The book is exceptional in considering issues related to authenticity and the relative value of artworks based on attribution.   The illustrations comprise a visual resource of unprecedented quality, with some 450 images reproduced in full color and in a large format that ensures high detail and emphasizes recent conservation efforts.  Finally, an extensive glossary introduces seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art terms.  

Rethinking the Baroqueexplores a tension. In recent years the idea of 'baroque' or 'the baroque' has been seized upon by scholars from a range of disciplines and the term 'baroque' has consequently been much in evidence in writings on contemporary culture, especially architecture and entertainment. Most of the scholars concerned have little knowledge of the art, literature, and history of the period usually associated with the baroque. A gulf has arisen. On the one hand, there are scholars who are deeply immersed in historical period, who shy away from abstraction, and who have remained often oblivious to the convulsions surrounding the term 'baroque'; on the other, there are theorists and scholars of contemporary theory who have largely ignored baroque art and architecture. This book explores what happens when these worlds mesh. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines retrieve the term 'baroque' from the margins of art history where it has been sidelined as 'anachronistic', to reconsider the usefulness of the term 'baroque', while avoiding simply rehearsing familiar policing of periodization, stylistic boundaries, categories or essence. 'Baroque' emerges as a vital and productive way to rethink problems in art history, visual culture and architectural theory. Rather than attempting to provide a survey of baroque as a chronological or geographical conception, the essays here attempt critical re-engagement with the term 'baroque' - its promise, its limits, and its overlooked potential - in relation to the visual arts. Thus the book is posited on the idea that tension is not only inevitable, but even desirable, since it not only encapsulates intellectual divergence (which is always as useful as much as it is feared), but helps to push scholars (and therefore readers) outside their usual runnels.

From Rome to St. Petersburg, Portugal to Brazil, the Baroque was the first art movement to span not only countries but distant continents. This stunningly illustrated book takes us on a breathtaking pilgrimage through its endless variations over some two hundred years, beginning in the early seventeenth century. Readers are treated to such wonders as Bernini's intensely powerful sculptures and his immense colonnade on St. Peter's Square, imposing palace facades, painted ceilings, crucifixes, angels, demons, piazzas, villas, gardens, and more. Though once viewed in Europe as decadent compared to Renaissance art, the Baroque is seen today as the ultimate manifestation of a style that expanded the bounds of reality and engendered a "culture of visualization," prefiguring the modern age. Combining Ferrante Ferranti's magnificent color photographs, many never before published, with Giovanni Careri's absorbing prose account of the Baroque in chapters arranged by theme, Baroques marks the first time the topic has been treated so comprehensively, going well beyond Italy as far as colonial Latin America. The materials used in Baroque churches, palaces, gardens, and cities were meant to dazzle-but they did much more. Whether marble, stucco, or gilded bronze, each in its own way captures the fleeting interplay between the overt splendor of fireworks and the secret, conceptual complexity of allegory. The Baroque is an art of passions and ecstasies, but it is also a political art: it conveys an image of power charged with new energy, an image that inspired awe, fear, and respect. Above all, it is a total art: painting, sculpture, and architecture come together in Baroques as a whole that invites the reader into its transforming universe.

This text explores the styles, institutions, cities and genres that shaped the Baroque and Rococo periods' great artistic outpourings. It aims to capture the cultural currents of the time from Counter Reformation to Lois XIV's Versailles to bourgeois Amsterdam.