Something for Everyone: The Brilliant Visual Dissonance of Baroque Art

A Fall 2024 Emeritus Society Course

Location:

Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, North Greene Street, Greensboro, NC, USA

Cost:

$ 120.00 per person

Duration:

1h 30min

About this experience

Tuesdays, 2:00 – 3:30 pm 
October 8 - November 12 

“Golden Age” is a designation that confers the highest status upon the art that was produced during a period. Encountering works by Bernini, Caravaggio, Poussin, Le Nôtre, Wren, Vanbrugh, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Velasquez, few would suggest that the designation is an exaggeration. However, the Baroque, as the period came to be tagged in the history of art, is anything but uniform. As the larger and smaller nation-states arose and consolidated their borders, national distinctiveness rather than continental uniformity became the rule, and artists and fine art mirrored their societies. For example, a major project in Paris by an internationally famous artist was rejected on the basis that the style was too Italian and not sufficiently French. Since apparent distinctions in style mattered greatly at the time, those criteria must assume the same importance when we study the history of the art.    

The art of the Baroque was nothing if not dynamic, emotive, and theatrical; except when it was otherwise—quietly deploying reasoned discourse. Radical propositions can be softly expressed even though the content lands in the mind like a hammer blow. Simply stated, the Enlightenment required many lights. Our course charts the “Baroques” of seventeenth-century European art—the obvious land masses, the supposed territories, and the sea monsters at the edges.

  1. Italy: New Old Influences and Directions
  2. France: All about US and Us Means Me
  3. England: Radical Restraint and Spectacular Dithering
  4. Flanders and Holland: Expressions of Divided Identities
  5. Spain: Rigidity and Invention
  6. Colonies and the Homes Away from Homes

 

Your Host

Host image

Richard Gantt (MA, UNC Chapel Hill; MFA, UNC Greensboro) retired from the UNC Greensboro School of Art where he taught art history for more than 30 years. His many research interests include architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design of 17th-century France, and 17th and 18th-century architecture, urban planning, and nationalist agendas in early modern London.