For a Baroque Aesthetic, A study of the Films of David Lynch

Wölfflin and the Baroque

The baroque developed in Rome at the beginning of the 17^th century and corresponds to the time of the Counter-Reformation in the Catholic Church. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) had reaffirmed, in opposition to the reformist position, the importance of the visual arts for the communication of the Gospel to the people. Thus the Catholic Church supported a great artistic activity through its patronage. This explains the predominance of religious subject matter, and the importance of Rome.

The Baroque used the same system of representation as the Renaissance, but where its critics only saw distortions and decadence of the forms, Wölfflin developed the notion that the baroque had its own modus operandi:

The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfect proportion [...]. Every form developed to self-existent being, the whole freely co-coordinated: nothing but independently living parts. [...] The baroque uses the same system of forms, but in place of the perfect, the completed, gives the restless, the becoming, in place of the limited, the conceivable, gives the limitless, the colossal. The ideal of beautiful proportion vanishes; interest concentrates not on being, but on happening.^5(*)

Wölfflin develops his arguments further in the comparative description of a Renaissance and a baroque façade:

When Alberti speaks of a beautiful façade as musica, in which not a note can be changed, he means nothing else than the unalterable, or the organic determination of form. These terms are quite alien to the baroque, and it is inevitable that they should be; the aim of this is not to represent a perfected state, but to suggest an incomplete process and a movement toward its completion. This is why the formal relationship becomes looser, for the baroque is bold enough to turn harmony into a dissonance by using imperfect proportions. The significant thing is not the attempt to complicate our perception of harmonious relationships but the intention to create an intentional dissonance.^6(*)

Thus the baroque is not in opposition to the classical form developed by the Renaissance: it comes from and grows out of it. Its paintings use the same system of representation and the perspective, its architecture the same elements and order, but instead of seeking a harmony of forms it searches for the movement to animate them.

Rome was already layered by the accumulation of the architectural and cultural remnants of the civilisations that had gone past. Limited space did not stop the baroque artists to conceive the grandest projects fitted into the most confined spaces. This may partly explain the feeling of disproportion:

The baroque flaunts cramped niches, windows disproportionate to their allotted space, and paintings much too large for the surfaces they fill, they are transposed from a different key, tuned to a different scale of proportions.^7(*)

In his Principles of Art History, Wölfflin contrasted the art of the baroque with the art of the Renaissance around five principles of analysis. The first one, the linear and the painterly, compares the clear linear style of the Renaissance to the intermingled masses of the baroque. The second, plane and recession, develops the difference between a composition in parallel planes to one where all planes are absorbed by a movement in depth. The third principle, the closed and open forms, sees the transition from a contained composition where every element is balanced by another to a mode of composition where the parts aspires to move out of the frame. In the fourth principle, multiplicity and unity concerns the relationship between the various elements of composition. The multiplicity of the Renaissance is rather a multiple unity, that is a unity where the various parts are free elements which can still function independently, whereas in the unity of the baroque, all parts are absorbed into the movement of the composition and only make sense in relation to the whole. The fifth and last principle concerns the light and the shadows, clearness and unclearness. The light of the Renaissance is an overall luminosity where the shadows are only there to shade the form. In the baroque it is the light that brings out the form out of the darkness.

In the relationship established by Wölfflin between Renaissance and baroque, the baroque needs the classic form with which to be contrasted; it appears in the hollow of the classic form.

* ⁵ Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, The Problem of the development of style in Later Art, trans. Hottinger, M.D. New York: Dover Publications, 1950, p. 9-10.

* ⁶ Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, London: Cox and Wyman, 1964, p. 67

* ⁷ Ibid., p. 68.