Baroque Art: Contrasts, Themes, and Key Figures
Baroque Contrasts and Themes
The Baroque era juxtaposed luxury and poverty, religious fervor with sensuality and cynicism, and idealism with a stark view of reality. Key themes include disappointment and pessimism, often treated with irony and humor. Baroque art is characterized by its excess and lack of balance.
Baroque Theater
The Corral de Comedias, or neighborhood courtyards, served as open-air theaters. Stages were built against walls, with men standing and women seated in front. Love was a central theme, portrayed as a powerful force driving gallantry and linked to honor and social status. Characters included monarchs, nobles, gallants, ladies, funny characters, maids, and villains.
Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega’s theater catered to popular audiences, breaking the unities of place, time, and action. He reduced five acts to three (exposition and denouement), used type characters, and blended tragic and comic elements. His works often included lyrical instruments, songs, and dances, written in verse, with each verse building different scenes. Characters maintained their honor within their social status.
Calderón de la Barca
Calderón de la Barca’s theater, exemplified by Life is a Dream, featured fewer but more elaborate and profound characters. His language was cultivated and conceptista, with abundant rhetorical arguments and figures. He conveyed a pessimistic and conservative vision of the Baroque world, exploring philosophical themes of honor and monarchy.
Tirso de Molina
Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville showcases Baroque lyricism with culteranismo, using obscure Latin terms and altered syntax. The concept is based on conciseness and clarity. Key representatives include Gracián, Quevedo, and Góngora.
Baroque Poetry
Luis de Góngora
Góngora’s Polyphemus and Galatea exemplifies culteranismo, aiming for obscurity through complex language and syntax.
Francisco de Quevedo
Quevedo’s poetry, published posthumously, is divided into serious, love, and satirical burlesque categories. Common features include the concept, the union of disparate elements. His serious poetry explores philosophical ideas like the transience of life and death, as well as moral and religious themes. His love poetry reflects the poet’s unrequited love for an unattainable lady, using symbols like fire for love and water for pain. Quevedo’s satirical poetry mocks everything, including himself, addressing moral issues, old age, death, and people’s defects.
Neoclassical Transition
Neoclassical poetry, inheriting from Góngora and Quevedo, shifted towards new values. This included:
- Rococo poetry with references to the pleasures of life.
- Satirical poetry and social criticism of noble habits, as seen in Jovellanos’ Satires.
- Didactic poetry, evident in the fables of Samaniego and Iriarte.