Reflections on Baroque - Hardcover

Harbison, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 186189046X ISBN 13: 9781861890467

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2000

Synopsis

From its beginnings in the 17th century, the Baroque embraced the whole of Catholic Europe and infiltrated Protestant England, Orthodox Russia and even Muslim Turkey. Architecture, paintings, poetry, music, natural science, and new forms of piety all have their places on the Baroque map. In this work, Robert Harbison offers new readings that stress its eccentric and tumultuous forms, in which a destabilized sense of reality is often projected onto the viewer. This strange, subjectively inclined world is manifested in such bizarre phenomena as the small stuccoed universes of Giacomo Serpotta, the Sacred Mounts of Piedmont and the grimacing heads of F.X. Messerschmidt. Harbison explores the Baroque's 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 pastiches or imitations or resemblances in Czech cubism and Frank Gehry's architecture.

About this title

Review:

'the result of a private obsession with Baroque art going back more than a quarter of a century' -- ADRIAN FORTY, Times Literary Supplement

‘...worth reading for its acute insights and its nose for the bizarre and little known' -- Evening Standard

‘An intellectual adventure . . . exhilarating, brilliant, lateral-thinking and beautifully written' -- — Andrew Graham-Dixon, Daily Telegraph (Books of the Year)

‘Harbison ... uses his profound understanding of the arts to write with considerable flair and insight' -- ROBERT TAVERNOR, Architects’ Journal

About the Author:

Robert Harbison is former Professor of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He is the author of many books, including Eccentric Spaces (1977), The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable (1991) Travels in the History of Architecture (Reaktion, 2009) and Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery (Reaktion, 2015).

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 186189046X
• ISBN 13: 9781861890467
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280