This comparative and interdisciplinary study focuses on a
cluster of epoch-making themes that emerged in the late sixteenth
century. Michelangelo and Giordano Bruno are taken as the founding
fathers of the Baroque, and we see that beyond the Alps their
lessons were echoed in Montaigne, Cervantes, and the
Counter-Reformation culture of the Mediterranean basin. Maiorino
shows that the common denominator that links the origins of the
Baroque to its maturity is the concept of form as "process," which
is then articulated into chapters on the formative unity of the
arts, art forms at the threshold, and the development from humanist
perfection to Baroque perfectibility. Such an evolution in
literature and the arts is situated in relation to the age of
explorations (Columbus), scientific inventions (the telescope), and
the fundamental shift from the enclosed Ptolemic system to the open
universe of the Copernican revolution.
At the Baroque point of origin, the inner vitality of
Michelangelo's emphasis on creation as "process" rather than
completed act taught a crucial lesson to Baroque artists. Their
response to the infinite and open universe of the "New Science" was
one that took part to be as dynamic and metamorphic as life itself.
It is in the context of "open" forms within an "open" universe that
this study moves from Michelangelo to Bruno. His poetics of
immeasurable abundance set "process" at the very core of the
Baroque art, thought, and science.
Applied to the forms of art, growth and metamorphosis are linked
to what Maiorino calls (borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin) the Baroque
chronotope of formation, which refers to forms responding to the
dynamics of space-time interactions. Such interactions were
exhaustive and even tested the boundaries between reality and
fiction, creation and denial, conformity and criticism from
picaresque Spain to middle-class Holland. And it is the painting of
a Dutch artist--Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of
Homer-- that is taken as a symbol of the Baroque reconciliation of
humanist learning with human or humane understanding. Such a
humanizing attitude also marked the final transformation of
humanist ideals of perfection into the Baroque experience of human
perfectibility.
This book will be of importance to all scholars concerned with
the history of ideas, cultural history, and the Baroque in
literature and art.
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