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10 November 2010

Where We Are: America the Baroque

The term Baroque was coined in the Iberian Peninsula—it is said to come from the Portuguese term for deformed pearl—to speak of the ornate cultural products generated in Spain and Portugal during the time when both nations (they were actually joined dynastically between 1580 and 1640) were simultaneously great powers and societies in the throes of self-evident decline and social dislocation. Give or take a few years, the esthetic had its heyday in those places in the period between 1580 and 1700.

During this era, the Iberians were engaged in two grand enterprises. One was running their vast seaborne empires. The other was waging an ideological and military struggle—the Counterreformation—against those who were challenging Catholicism’s long-standing role as the prime definer of Europe’s social matrix.

It has been said that the Baroque sprang from the need, which arises in all perpetually warring cultures, to restrict the normal flow of reasoned thought and cultural energy in the society.