"Baroque 1629-1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence" at the V & A

It is an exaggeration to say that "the Baroque" is a category in need of theorizing. The Renaissance? Well, we can say, that has something to do with a rediscovery of Classical antiquity not only in the most literal sense of unearthing ancient marbles in 15th-16th century Italy, but a recognition among men and women of the same period that their accomplishments might be worthy of comparison with those of the ancients. The Rococco? Well, we can locate that in time and place - - post-1715 France, after the death of Louis XIV when the locus of cultural power shifts back to Paris from Versailles.



But what of the Baroque? Are so-called "naturalists" like Caravaggio or maybe the Carracci (see above) of ca. 1600 its initiators?



Or was their brand of attention to observed human circumstance exactly the opposite of the kinds of rapturous fantasy sprayed out onto church ceilings by the likes of Pietro da Cortona in Italy or countless regional copyists around the world? Is, as Heinrich Wölfflin had argued a kind of advance of subjectivism, of privileging how the world seems to the individual over what it actually is? Is it an ideological construction of absolutist regimes intent upon concealing their tenuous hold on power with fantastical mythologies of their families and various mystifying shock-and-awe tactics? And was the Baroque a centrally European phenomenon or, as some like Gauvin Bailey have claimed, a world-wide enterprise?



Old Ken was "all ears" as it were; keen to learn indeed! Unfortunately, "Baroque 1629-1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence" at London's Victoria & Albert Museum was a funny business. The concept sounds great: learning about the Baroque in a design museum and not in a space constrained by Art constraints. Yet, how does this grab your fancy? "Baroque was the leading fashionable style in Europe for a hundred years from the mid 17th century ... It was opulent and impressive, dramatic and moving, but also very serious in its purpose." With these vague terms, we're hustled into a series of scattered rooms littered with various vacuous objects. Worse, the objects are mostly props for other things: instead of sculptures by Bernini, we're shown his bozzetti (or models). Instead of Pietro da Cortona's ceiling paintings (see above), we see studio copies of those works.

Part of this is inevitable and probably instructive: Baroque objects were created for carefully-crafted environments and to see them in the antiseptic context of the museum is to miss their integration with music, performance, architecture and so on. Fair enough. As installed at the V & A was the weakness of the objects on display. They just looked limp and lifeless.

Perhaps recognizing this, the curators had installed no less than 10 (!) different video projections inside the exhibition that were presumably supposed to supply meaningful contextualization. For me, at least, though, animated chronological visualizations of the global diffusion of the Baroque, re-enactments of seventeenth century theatrical performances, and projected shadows of window-panes only distracted from the lifeless objects with their own baffling questions.



Such as: was I supposed to be drawing a connection between these proliferating videos and Baroque projection techniques, such as those embraced by Athanasius Kircher (see above)? Was the ambition to reconstruct - - or at least to suggest - - the profoundly multimedia and multisensorial environment in which the Baroque was originally perceived? This would be an obvious link; sadly, the V & A folks included neither any reference to Kircher nor asked the viewer to situate the projections into period visualization technique.

So, my assessment is: weak objects plus unnecessarily gaudy, distracting visualization devices yields little light on what the Baroque is or how we can possibly understand some meaningful unity of style amidst its numerous media and strange forms.