Art History: The Impressionists

Baroque

The word baroque has no clear origin. Some says that it came from a medieval philosophical word connoting the strange or the ridiculous, some consider it as derived from the Spanish barueco or Portuguese referring to an irregular shaped pearl. As 18th century was coming to an end baroque find its way to art criticism terminology in form of epithet leveled against art of the 17th century, though it later faced criticism that it was too strange or bizarre to merit serious study. Some of the baroque images can be viewed through this link, http://loki.stockton.edu/~fergusoc/lesson7/lect7.htm

Jakob Burckhardt among other 19th century Swiss cultural historian had a view that baroque was the decadent end of the Renaissance, and so was his student Heinrich who identified the essential differences between the art of 16th and 17th century describing baroque as a fully distinct art but not a...
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