What Is Baroque?

¶ … Baroque? Thoenes, Christof. "St. Peter's as Ruins: On Some Vedute by Heemskerck. 25-39. This source explicates the concept of the paradox known as modern ruins. It does so by examining the church at St. Peter's, which was initially conceived of an created during the Italian Renaissance. In this respect the church and the proposed effort of architect Martin van Heemskerck to restore St. Peter's functions as a case study for the blending of traditionally ancient Roman ruins with modern structures.

The author takes great pains to emphasize that much of the architecture that is characteristic of ROmen is a synthesis of these two concepts of old buildings and modern ones incorporated atop and part of these older ones to result in modern ruins. The author explores this notion by illustrating the challenge that Heemskerck encountered when he attempted to restore St. Peter's after the Italian Renaissance.

Christof presents the notion that Heemskerck must have found such a task challenging due to the dilapidated state of the church and because of all of the previous building efforts on it. He states that Heemskerck eventually abandoned this challenge, after making a number of sardonic sketches in which he attempted to incorporate his proposed new architecture to fit with the older ruins. The vast majority of this work of literature (which is written in a maundering style) focuses on the various sketches that Heemskerck made.

These sketches are highly detailed and depict views of the church's interior and exterior from a number of different cardinal points-of-view. Some of the sketches are included in this document to clarify the author's points. The sketches are critical to the analysis of Heemskerck's work and to the author's overall point because they illustrate the complexity of blending older and newer buildings. Panofsky, Erwin. "What is Baroque?" 7-21.

This source attempts to disseminate through all of the confusion regarding the term baroque and to restore order and clarity to its many multi-faceted definitions. The author begins by providing a basic etymology of the term based on its syllables, vowel structures and syllogisms. From there, the term was explicitly used to denote a type of architecture and decoration for that architecture that was somewhat wild and devoid of practical value during the 1700's.

This source indicates the fact that as time continued to go by, the expansion of the definition of this term came to include not only architecture but also visual art, as well as non-visual art as well. The author devotes the majority of this article to explicating the term baroque as related to visual art and to architecture. He emphasizes the fact that when applied to these two realms, the baroque movement was actually a reactionary one to the Renaissance movement which preceded it.

Although virtually all periods of art incorporate some aspect of rebellion from the periods which.