Definition for Baroque
From Biology Forums Dictionary
Baroque style (17th century) in architecture emphasizes the same contrasts between light and shade and the same action, emotion, opulence, and ornamentation as the other visual arts of the style. Because of its scale, however, architecture’s effect becomes one of great dramatic spectacles. Baroque style in painting appeals to the emotions and to a desire for magnificence through opulent ornamentation. At the same time, it employs a systematic and rational composition in which ornamentation is unified through variation on a single theme. Realism (lifelikeness using selected details) is the objective. Color, grandeur, and dramatic use of light and shade (chiaroscuro) are fairly typical, although the style itself is quite diverse in application. In much of baroque art, sophisticated organizational schemes carefully subordinate and merge one part into the next to create complex but unified wholes. Open composition symbolizes the notion of an expansive universe; the viewer’s eye travels off the canvas to a wider reality. The human figure may be monumental or miniscule. Feeling is emphasized rather than form; emotion rather than intellect. This is the style of Rubens and Rembrandt. Baroque style in sculpture emphasizes splendor. Forms and space are charged with energy that carries beyond the confines of the work. As in painting, baroque sculpture invites participation rather than neutral observation. Feeling is the focus. Baroque sculpture tends to treat space pictorially, almost like a painting, to describe action scenes rather than single sculptural forms. Baroque style in music extends from 1600-1750 (slightly longer than in the other arts, in deference to the life spans of J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel). The term “baroque” originally referred to a large, irregularly shaped pearl, and music of this style has many of the same opulent and emotionally appealing characteristics as its siblings of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Baroque composers brought to their music new kinds of action and tension—for example, quick, strong contrasts in tone color or volume, and strict rhythms juxtaposed against free rhythms. This is the music of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi.