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'Baroque' started out as a pejorative term. Its meaning can be alternately conveyed by the adjectives 'whimsical,' 'absurd' and 'strange,' or it can describe an irregularly shaped pearl. Enlightened types of the 18th century, who valued order and common sense more than anything in the world, invented this word to castigate these qualities for failing to fit the classical canon. In the wise words of the great Austrian art historian Ernst Gombrich, the term baroque arose 'as a cutting jeer, an epee in the duel against 17th-century style. This label was employed by those who had no patience for random combinations of architectural forms.'
Today it is considered poor taste to define the Baroque with tired clichÊs of the formalist school, the kind mastered by first-year students at Moscow State University who have read the early 20th-century art history primer, 'Renaissance and Baroque' by Henrich Wolflin. In short, the Baroque is a style of painting. It assumes a synthesis of the arts, thinking in ensembles, vitality and sensitivity. On their own, these definitions can easily be applied to several periods of art history (from Hellinism to Post-Modernism). Taken together, these epithets are not entirely appropriate. They leave in their wake an endless trail of qualifying questions.
For me personally the baroque is defined by the systems of three 17th-century philosophers: Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Wilhelm Leibniz. In their endless belief in formal detail and the variety of the world, they erased the distinction between the terms 'material' and 'eternal.' The maximal display of emotion of each cell of the world's structure unites the creations of geniuses as different as Rubens and Rembrandt, Carracci and Caravaggio, Bernini and Borromini, Velazquez and Vermeer. And this intoxicating attention to the structure of elementary particles of being that form the grand and splendid symphony of the world, surprisingly enough, agrees with the systems of knowledge devised by Bacon, Descartes and Leibnitz.
In his 1620 essay 'The New Organon', Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor under King Jacob I, proposes discovering forms (essences) of nature based on experience. It is important to specify that form for Bacon is an essential category, one which explains the transcendental and metaphysical unity of nature, man and God. His study of natural forms that liberate reason from the captivity of prejudice is a gradual and methodical process. First, through a series of inductions, he creates tables of 'presence' and 'absence' of the desired natural phenomenon in life. Then, once nature is packaged in the cells of experience, he involves intellect, the method of deduction, based on hypothesis and experiment. Bacon creates a certain experimental catalogue of 'examples' of the Universe's structure, and he checks his studied phenomenon against it each time to make its formal (essential) qualities clear.
In order to understand what Baroque is and why it is of interest in our time, let us consult the eighth chapter of the catalogue,
'Deviating Instances,' which describes nature's digressions, freaks and curiosities, when nature digresses and deviates from its usual path. They must be understood, Bacon writes, because they restore reason in opposition to habits and reveal common forms. In other words, because they attest to the relativity of our knowledge and protect reason from self-satisfaction, pride and hubris. In practical terms, 'deviations' add diversity not to nature, but to art.
Another concept key for the culture of the Baroque is also linked to the theory of 'deviating instances' - wit. In the aesthetic thought of the 17th century 'wit' was the key idea. In 1642 Balthasar Gracian published the treatise 'Wit, or the Art of Inventiveness.' According to Gracian, the truth can be discovered through mixing the mutually exclusive. The essence of wit is an elegant combination, the harmonious juxtaposition of two or three distant concepts, connected by a single act of reason.' Wit as a path to autonomous truth of art was described in the 17th century in the treatises of Matteo Peregrini and Emmanuele Tesauro.
The systematization of the material world and the justification of its endless diversity and dynamics were the subjects of works in the early 17th century by Rene Descartes, author of the immortal aphorism 'cogito ergo sum.' He was firm in his distinction of the spiritual world (res cogitans) from the material world (res extensa). Substance is pure expanse, it has no emptiness. Thanks to the movement initiated by God, the collision of particles of matter, 'the world is full of vortices made of thin matter that transmit motion from one place to another.' What can illustrate this thesis? Why, the faÚade of a Baroque church or a composition of a painting by Rubens. 'The world is a giant mechanical clock, consisting of many toothed gears: the vortices catch them so that, pushing each other, they make the clock move.' There you have the iconography of luxurious 17th-century Spanish and Dutch still-lifes, flickering with various meanings (right down to 'vanity of vanities') and summarized by a philosopher.
Wilhelm Leibniz, Descartes' contemporary, would have best written about the painting born in Protestant Holland in the 17th century. Yes, that Crusader, the opponent of Newton and Descartes, the creator of the infamous Monadology. Let us look at the subtle coloring of the tiny Dutch paintings with shepherds and sailors, the holy family and dancing peasants, the almost fleshless silhouettes of cities and moist skies. Everything is woven from microscopic points ('monads') which provide for a single 'connection of the Universe.' Let us read from Leibnitz: 'God, when putting the whole in order, worries about each part, about each monad, and no one can limit the monad (presenting nature) such that it would present only one part of thins. It vaguely presents details of the entire universe.' The Greeks called it the 'universal conspiracy of all things among themselves.'
Sergei Khachaturov
Translated by Brian Droitcour
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