Baroque - reflections by Robert Harbison

Condition: New

As New Unmarked First Edition 2000.260 well researched pages. Postage €3.50.
From its beginnings in the 17th century, the eccentric and tumultuous forms of the Baroque spread through the whole of Catholic Europe and infiltrated Protestant England, Orthodox Russia and even Muslim Turkey. Here the author of Eccentric Spaces offers an exciting reinterpretation of this ubiquitous style and the political and cultural interests that gave rise to it.

Robert Harbison traces the complex origins of Baroque back to influences as diverse as 17th century mysticism and science, the personal features of Michelangelo's architecture and a papal wish to reassert the primacy of Rome. Architecture, painting, poetry, music, natural science and new forms of piety all have their places on the Baroque map. Harbison explores their metamorphoses into later styles, particularly the Rococo and, in an unexpected twist, pursues the Baroque idea into the 19th and 20th centuries. Proposing provocative analyses of the pastiches, imitations and resemblances (both deliberate and unintentional) that followed, he demonstrates that the Baroque impulse lives on.

'An intellectual adventure... exhilarating, brilliant, lateral-thinking and beautifully written' -

'In Harbison's writing, there is the energy of someone seeing, and seeing passionately, everything for the first time... Reflections on Baroque is an intensely personal book, the result of a private obsession with Baroque art going back more than a quarter of a century'
'Harbison... uses his profound understanding of the arts to write with considerable flair and insight -
With 98 illustrations