Baroque Art Quotes

I'm a Baroque person. More than Baroque, I'm a Rococo person. I don't draw straight lines.

Embi: And you're supposed to be so good at mending primuses, pastor Jón! Pastor Jón: And correspondingly bad at Baroque art. Embi: How do you know there are 133 pieces? Who has had time to dismantle this work of art so carefully? Or to count the bits? Pastor Jón: No one is so busy that he hasn't the time to dismantle a work of art. Then scholars wake up and count the pieces.

In fact, if a museum were filled with all of the world's stolen artworks, it would be the most impressive collection ever created. It would have far more Baroque sculptures, much better Surrealist paintings, and the best Greek antiquities of any known institution. A gallery of stolen art would make the Louvre seem like a small-town gallery in comparison. Experts call it the Lost Museum.

In the 16th century,parks and gardens were models of the cosmos and also tools for altering one's consciousness, possibly for changing one's destiny.

It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumière. In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

When sonneteering Wordsworth re-creates the landing of Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent - Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed, The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore - he unveils nothing less than a canvas by Rubens, baroque master of baroque masters; this is the landing of a TRAGIC Marie de Medicis. Yet so receptive was the English ear to sheep-Wordsworth's perverse 'Enough of Art' that it is not any of these works of supreme art, these master-sonnets of English literature, that are sold as picture postcards, with the text in lieu of the view, in the Lake District! it is those eternally, infernally sprightly Daffodils.

In my previous murals, I had tried to achieve a harmony in my painting with the architecture of the building. But to attempt such a harmony in the garden of the Institute would have defeated my purposes. For the walls here were of an intricate Italian baroque style, with little windows, heads of satyrs, doorways, and sculpturesque mouldings. It was within such a frame that I was to represent the life of an age which had nothing to do with baroque refinements -- a new life which was characterized by masses, machines, and naked mechanical power. So I set to work consciously to over-power the ornamentation of the room.

Tensurrealism creates actual and non-compromised reality, jamboree, fervor, fascination, poetics of an active enthusiasm, interludium, lyrical practice, active happiness.

Your art has failed. You’ve turned literature into a religion and it’s as dead as all the rest, it’s an overripe corpse and you’re cutting fancy figures at the wake. It’s too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple-minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist!

Entering a garden like Bomarzo was like succumbing to a dream. Every detail was intended to produce a specific effect on the mind and body, to excite and soothe the senses like a drug. To awaken the unconscious self.

Such a society will want to invest the work of art with regularity and necessity. It will want art to prove that there are universally valid, unshakable, inviolable standards and principles, that the world is ruled by an absolute and immutable purpose, and that man - though not every individual man - is the custodian of this purpose, Art forms will have to be authoritative to agree with the ideas of this society, and must make a definitive and consummate impression comparable to that which the authoritarian order of the age desires to make. The ruling class will look to art, above all, as the symbol of the calm and stability which is aspires to attain in life.

For the artists the humanists were the guarantors of their intellectual status, and the humanists themselves recognized the value of art as a mean of propaganda for the ideas on which their own intellectual supremacy is based.

But it was not forgotten that an outside historical influence is never the ultimate reason for an intellectual revolution, for such an influence can become effective only if the preconditions fro its reception are already in existence.

Meanwhile the thinking person, by intellect usually left-wing but by temperament often right-wing, hovers at the gate of the Socialist fold. He is no doubt aware that he ought to be a Socialist. But he observes first the dullness of individual Socialists, then the apparent flabbiness of Socialist ideals, and veers away. Till quite recently it was natural to veer towards indinerentism. Ten years ago, even five years ago, the typical literary gent wrote books on baroque architecture and had a soul above politics. But that attitude is becoming difficult and even unfashionable. The times are growing harsher, the issues are clearer, the belief that nothing will ever change (i.e. that your dividends will always be safe) is less prevalent. The fence on which the literary gent sits, once as comfortable as the plush cushion of a cathedral-stall, is now pinching his bottom intolerably; more and more he shows a disposition to drop off on one side or the other. It is interesting to notice how many of our leading writers, who a dozen years ago were art for art's saking for all they were worth and would have considered it too vulgar for words to even vote at a general election, are now taking a definite political standpoint; while most of the younger writers, at least those of them who are not mere footlers, have been 'political' from the start. I believe that when the pinch comes there is a terrible danger that the main movement of the intelligentsia will be towards Fascism. . . . That will also be the moment when every person with any brains or decency will know in his bones that he ought to be on the Socialist side. But he will not necessarily come there of his own accord; there are too many ancient prejudices standing in the way. He will have to be persuaded, and by methods that imply an understanding of his viewpoint. Socialists cannot afford to waste any more time in preaching to the converted. Their job now is to make Socialists as rapidly as possible; instead of which, all too often, they are making Fascists.

there was something willfully idiotic in going to an unknown country, ignoring its people, their languages, art, its beasts and butterflies, flowers, herbs, trees, ruins, et cetera, and reducing it all to a few lumps of heavy matter un the center of a dish.

We sing lyrical excess, exacerbated expressionism, imponed objectivity, inventiveness, meta-baroque, extravaganza, super metaphor, sublimity, strident, exposure, super-pone, noise, super-objectivity, zillionism, fragmentation and aesthetics of facts, suractivism.

As an artistic style, mannerism conformed to a divided outlook on life which was, nevertheless, spread uniformly all over Western Europe; the baroque is the expression of an intrinsically more homogeneous world-view, but one which assumes a variety of shapes in the different European countries. Mannerism, like Gothic, was a universal European phenomenon, even if it was restricted to much narrower circles than the Christian art of the Middle Ages; the baroque, on the other hand, embraces so many ramifications of artistic endeavor, appears in so many different forms in the individual countries and spheres of culture, that it seems doubtful at first sight whether it is possible to reduce them all to a common denominator.

The expression of personality in art had been sought after and appreciated long before anyone had realized that art was based no longer on an objective What but on a subjective How. Long after it had become a self-confession, people still continued to talk about the objective truth in art, although it was precisely the self-expressionism in art which enabled it to win through to general recognition.

But the artistic program of the Counter Reformation, the propagation of Catholicism through the medium of art among the braod masses of the population, is frist accomplished by the baroque. It is obvious that what was in the mind of the Council of Trent was not an art which, like mannerism, appealed merely to a thin stratum of intellectuals, but a people's art, such as the baroque in fact became. At the time time of the Council, mannerism was the most widespread and the most live form of art, but it in no way represented the particular direction which was best calculated to solve the artistic problems of the Counter Reformation. The fact that it had to yield to the baroque is to be explained, above all, by its inability to master the ecclesiastical tasks committed to art by the Counter Reformation.

Although women participate in literary social life from the very beginning, they are not the centre of the courtly salons of the Renaissance; and later on, the age of the middle-class salon, they become the centre in quite a different sense than in the age of chivalry. Incidentally, the cultural importance of women is only another expression of the rationalism of the Renaissance. They are regarded as the intellectuals equals of men, but not as their superiors. "Everything that men can understand, can also be understood by women," to quote from the Cortegiano; but the gallantry which Castiglione demands of the courtier has no longer much in common with the woman-worship of the knights. The Renaissance is a masculine age; women like Lucrezia Borgia, who kept court in Nepi, or even Isabella dEste, who was the centre fo the court in Ferrara and Mantua and who not only had a stimulating influence on the poets of her entourage but also seems to have been a connoisseur of the plastic arts, are exceptions. Nearly everywhere the leading patrons and friends of art are men.

They were torn by force, on the one hand, and by freedom, on the other, and stood defenseless against the chaos that threatened to destroy the whole order of the intellectual world. In them we encounter for the first time the modern artist with his inward strife, his zest for life and his escapism, his traditionalism and his rebelliousness, his exhibitionistc subjectivism and the reserve with which he tries to hold back the ultimate secret of his personality. From now on the number of cranks, eccentrics, and psychopaths among the artists increases from day to day.

To periodize or not to periodize? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged academes by periodizing (and thus to blaspheme through generalization) or to address large-scale stylistic trends without prevarication; ’tis a fardel to bear, and bear it we shall. For such utile aids are not to be scorned, but embraced lest even greater misunderstanding be our lot. O Baroque! O Classical! O Romantic! Though the thorns of despised love be your reward, we will invoke you even as we curse you, for, like our knees, thou art poorly made, but we cannot walk without you.

In a conservative courtly culture an artist of his (Rembrandt's) kind would perhaps never made a name for himself at all, but, once recognized, he would probably have been able to hold his own better than in liberal middle-class Holland, where he was allowed to develop in freedom, but which broke him when he refused to submit any longer. The spiritual existence of the artist is always in danger; neither an authoritarian nor a liberal order of society is entirely free from peril for him; the one gives him less freedom, the other less security. There are artists who feel safe only when they are free, but there are also such as can breathe freely only when they are secure. The seventeenth century was, at any rate, one of the period furthest removed from the ideal of synthesis of freedom and security.

People fell into the error of imagining that an art which portrays the life of simple folks is also intended for simple folk, whereas the truth is, in reality, rather the opposite. It is usually only the conservatively thinking and feeling ranks of society that seek in art for an image of their own way of life, the portrayl of their own social environment. Oppressed and upward-striving classes wish to see the representation of conditions of life which they themselves envisage as an ideal to aim at, but not the kind of conditions they are trying to work themselves out of. Only people who are themselves superior to them feel sentimentally about simple conditions of life. That is so today, and it was no different in sixteenth century. Just as the working class and the petty bourgeoisie of today want to see the milieu of rich people and not the circumstances of their own constricted lives in the cinema, and just as the working-class drama of the last century achieved their outstanding successes not in the popular theatres but in the West End of the big cities, so Bruegel's art was not intended for the peasantry but for the higher or, at any rate, the urban levels of society.

The social function of court life is to enlist the support and adherence of the public for the ruling house. The Renaissance princes want to delude not only the people, they also want to make an impression o the nobility and bind it to the court. But they are not dependent on either its services or its company; they can use anyone, of whatever descent, provided he is useful. Consequently, the Italian courts of Renaissance differ from the medieval courts in their very constitution; they accept into their circle upstart adventurers and merchants who have made money, plebeian humanists and ill-bred artists - entirely as if they had all the traditional social qualifications. In contrast to the exclusive moral community of court chivalry, a comparatively free, fundamentally intellectual type of salon life develops at these courts which is, on the one hand the continuation of the aesthetic social culture of middle-class circles, such as described in the Decamerone and in the Paradiso degli Alberti, and represents, on the other, the preparatory stage in the development of those literary salons which play such an important part in the intellectual life of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Renaissance deepened the influence of medieval development with its striving towards capitalistic economic and social system only in so far as it confirms the rationalism which now dominates the whole intellectual and material life of the time. [...] They are arecreation of the same spirit which makes its way in the organization of labour, in trading methods, the credit system and double-entry book keeping, in methods of government, in diplomacy and warfare. The whole development of art becomes part of the total process of rationalization. The irrational ceases to make any deeper impression. The things that are now felt as 'beautiful' are the logical conformity of the individual parts of a whole, the arithmetically definable harmony of the relationships and the calculable rhythm of a composition, the exclusion of discords in the relation of the figures to the space they occupy and in the mutual relationship of the various parts of the space itself. And just a central perspective is space seen from a mathematical standpoint, and right proportions are only equivalent to the systematic organization of the individual forms in a picture, so in the course of time call criteria of artistic quality are subjected to rational scrutiny and all the laws of art are rationalized.

Compare with Greek art, modern classical art is lacking in warmth and immediacy; it has a derived, retrospective, and, even in the Renaissance, a more or less classicistic character. It It is the reflection of a society which, filled with reminiscences of Roman heroism and medieval chivalry, tries to appear to be something which it is not, by following an artificially produced social and moral code, and which stylizes the whole pattern of its life in accordance with this fictitious scheme. Classical art describes this society as it wants to see itself and as it wants to be seen. There is hardly a feature in this art which would not, on closer examination, prove to be anything more than the translation into artistic terms of the aristocratic, conservative ideals cherished by this society striving for permanence and continuity. The whole artistic fromalism of the Cinquecento merely corresponds to the formalized system of moral conceptions and decorum which the upper class of the period imposes on itself. Just as the aristocracy and the aristocratically minded circles of society subject life to the rule of a formal code, in order to preserve it from the anarchy of the emotions, so they also submit the expression of the emotions in art to the censorship of definite, abstract, and impersonal forms.

Cups and Rings and Drawings. I stopped by a famed park, Picked a blank sheet And drew a cup. For me, it represented me holding myself up in a storm, It represented the start of life, Something to pour out every lesson learnt Out of every misfortune we’ve ever been. The cup — the container to hold chocolate drink Water. Wine and strawberries. I drew a ring, A marriage between blessing and joy The bloom of flowers in spring The sprouting of leaves in midsummer And the smell of fresh grasses at night. I drew Monalisa I painted art I became Michaelangelo Da Vinci I became the Renaissance I healed through art “Don’t you know that you are gods?” So the first day, I cleared the storms out of my life. The second day, I dried all my tears The third day, I reinvented myself. The fourth day, I finally remembered what it felt like to be happy Like two children drawing arts on a canvass. Delilah & Annabelle Arts curled out of girls trying to reinvent the world Or the colours of the rainbow. The fifth day, I opened the windows wide To let the lights shine in. “When I’m down on my knees you’re how I pray.” The sixth day I created my favourite masterpiece — Baroque. The seventh day, I admired myself in the mirror. I missed me I missed the time I had so much optimism I miss you And I miss writing so innocently.

Like all disappearing forms, art seeks to duplicate itself by means of simulation, but it will nevertheless soon be gone, leaving behind an immense museum of artificial art and abandoning the field completely to advertising. A dizzying eclecticism of form, a dizzying eclecticism of pleasure - such, already, was the agenda of the baroque. For the baroque, however, the vortex of artifice has a fleshly aspect. Like the practitioners of the baroque, we too are irrepressible creators of images, but secretly we are iconoclasts - not in the sense that we destroy images, but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see. Most present-day images - be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized images - are literally images in which there is nothing to see. They leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences. The only feeling one gets from such images is that behind each one there is something that has disappeared. The fascination of a monochromatic picture is the marvellous absence of form - the erasure, though still in the form of art, of all aesthetic syntax. Similarly, the fascination of trans sexuality is the erasure - though in the form of spectacle - of sexual difference. These are images that conceal nothing, that reveal nothing - that have a kind of negative intensity. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence. Just as Byzantine icons made it possible to stop asking whether God existed - without, for all that, ceasing to believe in him.

[L'art sacré est le Ciel descendu sur terre, plutôt que la terre tendue vers le Ciel.] Dans le cadre de l'art chrétien, la seconde image peut néanmoins s'appliquer d'une manière relative, et sans abolir la première, à l'art gothique flamboyant. Faisons remarquer à cette occasion que le critère spirituel que constitue la beauté, ne saurait concerner l'art néopaïen qui empoisonna l'Europe au XVIè siècle et qui exprime le fatal mariage entre religion et civilisationnisme humaniste. Sans doute, ni le gigantisme froid et anthropolâtrique de la Renaissance ni la morbide boursouflure du baroque ne prouvent rien contre le Catholicisme lui-même, mais ce qu'ils prouvent certainement, c'est d'une part qu'une religion qui supporte ce langage et s'exprime par lui ne saurait avoir le monopole de la Vérité absolue et exclusive, et d'autre part que le Catholicisme, par cet amalgame, s'est exposé à en être finalement la victime ; non d'une façon totale, ce qui est exclu d'avance, mais néanmoins d'une façon gravissime. L'humanisation de l'art – a priori divin – a préfiguré celle de la religion, du moins de la religion officielle.

The statues carved here may be viewed as fragments of consciousness itself, or the residue of violent emotions

St Peter’s – as Michelangelo re-imagined it – was the prototypical baroque church. Elderly, grief-stricken, constipated, Michelangelo made himself a great master of architecture: an art that, of course, was not even his profession.

Sontag, Susan (1967). "What's Happening to America? (A Symposium)". Partisan Review. 34 (1): 57–58. The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone –its ideologies and inventions –which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the Mongol hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western “Faustian” man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.

or like a piece from the baroque period which is before things were fixed

Take the architectural legacy of Bucharest: Byzantine, Brâncoveanu, Ottoman, Renaissance, Venetian Classical, French Baroque, Austrian Secession, Art Deco, and Modernist, all writhing and struggling to break free of a dirty gray sea of pillbox Stalinism, like Michelangelo’s Unfinished Slaves struggling to break free of their marble blocks.

Objects are repositories of what we can learn about people. Pleasure is selfish. Luxury is something you share. The aim of perfumery, as of all the arts, is to create products that arouse sensual pleasure. The pleasure of the senses is also an intellectual choice. Memory works in such a way that the perfumes which are not experienced with excitement and passion, which are not linked with a personal story, are devoid of meaning and leave no trace in the memory. - The Baroques are defined by exaggeration and the space they occupy; the creation of tension through the accentuation of detail. - The Classics are perfumes that have become emblems, archetypes of perfumery. - The Abstracts are perfumes that do not imitate nature in any way. - The Figuratives seek to provide a faithful representation of a specific odor. - The Narratives tell a story and describe a place or a journey. - The Minimalists express odor for its own sake, stripped of all sentiment.

Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.

you thought it meant a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich? Yes, in queer circles they call that camping ... You can call [it] Low Camp ... High Camp is the whole emotional basis for ballet, for example, and of course of baroque art ... High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it, you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love.

Almost all the Renaissance and Baroque paintings we studied in class were of baby Jesus, which is not very interesting, so when I saw Artemisia Gentileschi's paintings of biblical women killing all those horrible men, my heart trembled. She was such a bad ass.

I began to recall my own experience when I was Mercutio’s age (late teens I decided, a year or two older than Romeo) as a pupil at a public school called Christ’s Hospital. This school is situated in the idyllic countryside of the Sussex Weald, just outside Horsham. I recalled the strange blend of raucousness and intellect amongst the cloisters, the fighting, the sport, and general sense of rebelliousness, of not wishing to seem conventional (this was the sixties); in the sixth form (we were called Grecians) the rarefied atmosphere, the assumption that of course we would go to Oxford or Cambridge; the adoption of an ascetic style, of Zen Buddhism, of baroque opera, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Mahler; of Pound, Eliot and e. e. cummings. We perceived the world completely through art and culture. We were very young, very wise, and possessed of a kind of innocent cynicism. We wore yellow stockings, knee breeches, and an ankle length dark blue coat, with silver buttons. We had read Proust, we had read Evelyn Waugh, we knew what was what. There was a sense, fostered by us and by many teachers, that we were already up there with Lamb, Coleridge, and all the other great men who had been educated there. We certainly thought that we soared ‘above a common bound’. I suppose it is a process of constant mythologizing that is attempted at any public school. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a good example. Girls were objects of both romantic and purely sexual, fantasy; beautiful, distant, mysterious, unobtainable, and, quite simply, not there. The real vessel for emotional exchange, whether sexually expressed or not, were our own intense friendships with each other. The process of my perceptions of Mercutio intermingling with my emotional memory continued intermittently, up to and including rehearsals. I am now aware that that possibly I re-constructed my memory somewhat, mythologised it even, excising what was irrelevant, emphasising what was useful, to accord with how I was beginning to see the part, and what I wanted to express with it. What I was seeing in Mercutio was his grief and pain at impending separation from Romeo, so I suppose I sensitised myself to that period of my life when male bonding was at its strongest for me.

Slightly further afield, you will find Baroque palaces such as Nymphenberg and Schlossheim, with wonderful parks and art galleries. On a slightly darker note, Dachau Concentration Camp is around 10 miles from town. Trains go there from Munich’s main train station every ten minutes and the journey takes less than 15 minutes. Transport in Munich is well organised with a network of trains – S‐Bahn is the suburban rail; U‐Bahn is underground and there are trams and buses. The S‐Bahn connects Munich Airport with the city at frequent intervals depending on the time of day or night. Munich is especially busy during Oktoberfest, a beer festival that began in the 19th century to celebrate a royal wedding, and also in the Christmas market season, which runs from late November to Christmas Eve. Expect wooden toys and ornaments, cakes and Gluwien. The hot mulled wine stands require a deposit for each mug. This means that locals stand chatting at the stalls while drinking. As a result, the solo traveller is never alone. The downside of Munich is that it is a commercial city, one that works hard and sometimes has little patience for tourists. Natives of Munich also have a reputation for being a little snobbish and very brand conscious. To read: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Narrated by death himself, this novel tells of a little girl sent to a foster family in 1939. She reads The Grave Diggers Handbook each evening with her foster father and, as her love of reading grows, she steals a book from a Nazi book burning. From this, her renegade life begins.

[Original text in French] Giovanni n'avait pas menti. Sagra était une merveille baroque, une collision improbable et inquiétante de la nature et de l'art. [My translation to English] Giovanni hadn't lied. Sagra was a Baroque wonder, an unlikely and disturbing collision between Nature and Arts. [My translation to Spanish] Giovanni no había mentido. Sagra era una maravilla barroca, una colisión improbable e inquitante de la naturaleza con el arte.

Le rapport d’analogie entre les intellections et les formes matérielles explique comment l’ésotérisme a pu se greffer sur l’exercice des métiers, et notamment sur l’art architectural ; les cathédrales que les initiés chrétiens ont laissées derrière eux apportent le témoignage le plus explicite et aussi le plus éclatant de l’élévation spirituelle du moyen âge (2). Nous touchons ici à un aspect fort important de la question qui nous préoccupe : l’action de l’ésotérisme sur l’exotérisme moyennant les formes sensibles dont la production est précisément l’apanage de l’initiation artisanale; par ces formes, véritables véhicules de la doctrine traditionnelle intégrale, et qui grâce à leur symbolisme transmettent cette doctrine en un langage immédiat et universel, l’ésotérisme infuse à la portion proprement religieuse de la tradition une qualité intellectuelle et par là un équilibre dont l’absence entraînerait finalement la dissolution de toute la civilisation, comme cela s’est produit dans le monde chrétien. L’abandon de l’art sacré enleva à l’ésotérisme son moyen d’action le plus direct ; la tradition extérieure insista de plus en plus sur ce qu’elle a de particulier, donc de limitatif ; enfin, l’absence du courant d’universalité qui, lui, avait vivifié et stabilisé la civilisation religieuse par le langage des formes, occasionna des réactions en sens inverse ; c’est-à-dire que les limitations formelles, au lieu d’être compensées, et par là stabilisées, par les interférences supra-formelles de l’ésotérisme, suscitèrent, par leur « opacité » ou « massivité » même, des négations pour ainsi dire infra-formelles, puisque venant de l’arbitraire individuel, et celui-ci, loin d’être une forme de la vérité, n’est qu’un chaos informe d’opinions et de fantaisies. (2) Devant une cathédrale, on se sent réellement situé au centre du monde; devant une église en style Renaissance, baroque ou rococo, on ne se sent qu’en Europe

There are two eyes in the human head--the eye of mystery, and the eye of harsh truth--the hidden and the open--the woods eye and the prairie eye. The prairie eye looks for distance, clarity, and light; the woods eye for closeness, complexity, and darkness. The prairie eye looks for usefulness and plainness in art and architecture, the woods eye for the baroque and ornamental. Dark old brownstones on Summit Avenue were created by a woods eye; the square white farmhouse and red barn are prairie eye's work.

But if Cravaggio really is the first master of modern age to be slighted by reason of his artistic worth, then the baroque signifies an important turning point in the relationship between art and the public - namely, the end of the "aesthetic culture" which begins with the Renaissance and the beginning of the more rigid distinction between content and form in which formal perfection no longer serves as excuses for any ideological lapse.

It is the court which gives the great, commanding style of art its guiding principles; here is formed that "grande manière" which invests reality with an idea, resplendent, festive, and solemn character, and which set the standard for the style of official art in the whole Europe. To be sure, the French court attains the international recognition of its manners, fashion and art at the expense of the national character of French culture. The French, like the ancient Romans, look upon themselves as the citizens of the world, and nothing more typical of their cosmopolitan outlook than the fact that in all the tragedies of Racine, as has been noted, not a single Frenchmen appears.

Like all the forms of life and culture of the age, first of all the mercantilism economic system, the aesthetic of classicism of guided by the principles of absolutism - the absolute primacy of the political conception over all the other expressions of cultural life. The special characteristic of the new social and economic forms is the anti-individualistic tendency derived from the idea of the absolute state. Mercantilism is also, in contrast to the older form of profit economy, based on state-centralism, not on individual units, and it attempts to eliminate the regional centres of trade and commerce, the municipalities and the corporations - that is to say, to put state-autonomy in the place of separate autarchies.

One ought, really, never to speak of a uniform "style of the time" dominating a whole period, since there are at any given moment as many different styles as there are artistically productive social groups. Even in epochs in which the most influential work is found on a single class, and from which only the art of this class has come down to us, it ought to be asked whether the artistic products of other groups may have been buried or lost.

painting, the world over, has struck a varied balance between the symbolic and realism. However, in the fifteenth century Western painting began to turn from its age-old concern with spiritual realities expressed in the form proper to it, towards an effort to combine this spiritual expression with as complete an imitation as possible of the outside world. The decisive moment undoubtedly came with the discovery of the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical system of reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist was now in a position to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them. Thenceforth painting was torn between two ambitions: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychological, namely the duplication of the world outside. The satisfaction of this appetite for illusion merely served to increase it till, bit by bit, it consumed the plastic arts. However, since perspective had only solved the problem of form and not of movement, realism was forced to continue the search for some way of giving dramatic expression to the moment, a kind of psychic fourth dimension that could suggest life in the tortured immobility of baroque art.a The

The doctrine of spontaneous naturalism of Renaissance comes from the same source as the theory that the fight against the spirit of authority and hierarchy, the ideal of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, the emancipation of the individual and the principle of democracy are achievements of fifteenth century. In all this light of the modern age is contrasted with the darkness of the Middle Ages.

The latent conflict between the intellectual and the economic upper class is nowhere openly engaged as yet, least of all by the artists, who, with their less developed social consciousness, react more slowly than their humanistic masters. But the problem, even if it is un-admitted and unexpressed is present all the time and in all places, and the whole intelligenstsia, both literary and artistic, is threatened by the danger of developing either into an uprooted, "unbourgeois", and envious class of bohemians or into a conservative, passive cringing class of academics. The humanists escape from from this alternative into their ivory tower, and finally succumb to both the dangers which they had intended to avoid.

He could do nothing else but follow this intrinsically conservative tendency, conservative because tending towards a timeless and abstract canon of form, but nevertheless progressive in the stylistic situation of the time.

The Renaissance was not a civilization of small shopkeepers and artisans, nor of a well-to-do, half-educated middle class, but rather the jealously gaurded possession of a highbrow and Latinized elite. This consisted mainly of those classes of society which were associated with the humanistic and Neeplatonic movement - a uniform and, on the whole, like-minded intelligentsia such as, for example, the clergy, taken as a totality, had never been. The important works of art were intended for this circle. The broader masses either had no knowledge at all of them or appreciated them inadequately and from a non-artistic point of view, finding their own aesthetic pleasure in inferior products. This was the origin of that unbridgeable gulf between an educated minority and an uneducated majority which had never been known before to this extent and which was to be such a decisive factor in the whole future development of art.

They have not the slightest awareness of how restricted their idea of "universality" is and of how few they are thinking when they talk about "everybody" and "anybody". Their universalism is a fellowship of the elite - of the elite as formed by absolutism. There is hardly a rule or a requirement of classicistic aesthetics which is not based on the ideas of this absolutism. The desire is that art should have a unifor character, like the state, should produce the effect of formal perfection, like the movement of a corps, that it should be clear and precise, like a decree, and be governed by absolute rules, like the life of every subject in the state. The artist should be no more left to his own devices than any other citizen; he should rather be guided by the law, by regulations, so as not to go astray in the wilderness of his own imagination.

But is is by no means those aspects of Dürer's style which it shares with Italian art that makes it so attractive especially for Pontormo and those who like him, but rather the spiritual depth and inwardness - in other words, the qualities which they miss most in classical Italian art. The antitheses of "Gothic" and "Renaissance", however, which are largely smoothed out in Dürer himself, are still irreconciled and irreconcilable in the outlook of mannerism.

The ruling class will look to art, above all, as the symbol of the calm and stability which it aspires to attain in life. For if the High Renaissance develops artistic composition in the form of the symmetry and correspondence of the separate parts, and forces reality into the pattern of a triangle or circle, then that does not imply merely the solution of a formal problem, but also the expression of a stable outlook on life and of the desire to perpetuate the state of affairs which corresponds to this outlook.

The art of the High Renaissance is absolutely secular in its outlook; even in the representations of religious subjects, it attains its ideal style not by contrasting natural with supernatural reality, but by creating a distance between the objects of natural reality itself - a distance which in the world of visual experience creates differences of value similar to those that exist between the elite and the masses in human society. Its harmony is the utopian ideal of a world from which all conflicts is excluded, and, moreover, not as a result of the rule of a democratic but of an autocratic principle. Its creations represent an enhanced, ennobled reality exempt from transitoriness and banality. Its most important stylistic principle is the restriction of the representation to the bare essentials.

But what are theses "essentials"? They are the lasting, unchanging, inconrruptible things whose value lies, above all, in their remoteness from mere actuality and chance. On the other hand, the concrete and the direct, the accidental and the individual - whose things which the art of the Quattrocento considered the most interesting and substantial elements in reality - are regarded by this art as inessentials. The elite of the High Renaissance creates the fiction of a timeless valid, "eternally human" art because it wants to think of its own influence and position as timeless, imperishable, and immutable. In reality, of course, its art is just a time conditioned, just as limited and transitory, with its own standards of value and criteria of beauty, as the art of any other period. For even the idea of timelessness is the product of a particular time, and the validity of absolutism just as relative as that of relativism.

The shortness of High Renaissance is typical of the fate of all the periods of classical style in modern times; since the end of feudalism the epochs of stability have been nothing but short episodes. The rigorous formalism of the High Renaissance has certainly remained a constant temptation for later generations, but, apart from short, mostly sophisticated, and educationally inspired movements, it has never prevailed again. On the other hand, it has proved to be the most important undercurrent in modern art; for even though the strictly formalistic style, based on the typical and the normative, was unable to hold its own against the fundamental naturalism of the modern age, nevertheless, after the Renaissance, a return to the incoherent, cumulative, co-ordinating formal methods of the Middle Ages was no longer possible. Since the Renaissance we think of a work of painting or sculpture as a concentrated picture of reality seen from a single and uniform point of view - a formal structure that arises from the tension between the wide world and the undivided subject opposed to the world. This polarity between art and the world was mitigated from time to time, but never again abolished. It represents the real inheritance of Renaissance.

Tradition is here nothing but a bulwark against the all too violently approaching storms of unfamiliar, an element which is felt to be a principle of life but also of destruction. It is impossible to understand mannerism if one does not grasp the fact that its imitation of classical models is an escape from the threatening chaos, and that the subjective over-straining of its forms is the expression of the fear that form might fail the struggle with life and art fade into soul-less beauty.

The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that's there. We shouldn't think "This is good," or "This is bad," or "This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, Z." Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn't think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.