Baroque Art: Characteristics, Themes, and Literary Forms
Baroque Art: Key Features
- Sensationalism and Originality: Baroque art seeks to evoke surprise and strong emotional responses in the audience.
- Personal Wit and Originality: Artists emphasize individual creativity, drawing inspiration from classical sources to develop unique expressions.
- Excess and Exaggeration: Baroque art employs contrasts and dramatic effects, often leading to a sense of imbalance.
- Reflection of Disillusionment: Baroque art reflects a sense of disillusionment with the visible world.
- Artifice and Complexity: Baroque art favors ornamentation and complexity over the simplicity and naturalness of the Renaissance.
Baroque Trends
- Culteranismo: This trend exaggerates language and literary devices to create a world of absolute beauty, employing metaphors, Latinisms, neologisms, and hyperbaton.
- Conceptismo: This trend emphasizes inventive ideas, puns, and plays on words with multiple meanings or phonetic similarities.
- Exaggerated Realism: Reflected in picaresque and satirical literature, this trend focuses on the unpleasant aspects of reality.
Renaissance vs. Baroque
| Renaissance | Baroque |
|---|---|
| Optimistic vision of life. | Pessimistic vision of life. |
| Expression contained in feelings and emotions. | Surprise sought through sensationalism. |
| Imitation of classical models and canons. | Defense of the originality of the artist. |
| Balance and containment. | Excess and exaggeration. |
| Imitation of natural reality as a model of ideal beauty. | Satirical or idealized deformation of reality. |
| Nature as an expression of perfection and order. | Appearance is the main theme. |
| Natural, spontaneous style. | Artificially ornate style. |
| Valuation of life on earth. | Escape through death. |
Themes and Forms of Baroque Lyric Poetry
- Love: Sensuality, passion, despair, and the presence of death are added to the theme of love.
- Nature: The Platonic vision is lost, and nature becomes a decorative background.
- Mythology: Mythology is recreated as a thematic, aesthetic, and symbolic element.
- Disappointment: This becomes a significant theme, arising from various perspectives.
- Transience of Time and Reflections on Death: These themes are linked to the play between appearance and reality.
- Satire: A current of burlesque and biting satire with a strong critical sense emerges.
Poetic Forms
Cultivated forms like the sonnet, the silva, and the poetic fable are developed.
The Picaresque Novel (17th Century)
Resuming the realist picaresque character 50 years after the publication of Lazarillo, the 17th-century picaresque novel includes:
- Autobiographical perspective.
- Protagonist of low social status.
- The protagonist learns the harshness of the adult world as a child or teen.
- Service to several masters.
- Hunger as a motive for all actions.
Features that distinguish it from Lazarillo:
- The rogue loses tenderness and innocence, becoming a skilled con artist and thief full of resentment.
- Scathing and satirical caricatures.
- Marked pessimism, cruelty, pain, and distrust.
Important Picaresque Novels:
- The Life of the Rogue Guzmán de Alfarache
- The Swindler
Moral and Doctrinal Prose
Quevedo wrote numerous prose works to highlight his vision of reality and critique the vices and defects of humanity.
Satirical Prose:
Dreams: Reflections on the decline of Spain, often with humorous and burlesque intentions.
Doctrinal Prose:
In his moral and ascetic works, Quevedo blends Christian thought with Stoic doctrines, expressing pessimism about the world and viewing death as the only escape. The Cradle and the Grave is an example.