Description: From its beginnings in the seventeenth century, the eccentric and tumultuous forms of the Baroque spread throughout the whole of Catholic Europe, infiltrated Protestant England and Orthodox Russia, and even embraced colonial Latin America and Asia. With Reflections on Baroque, the author of Eccentric Spaces offers a surprising reinterpretation of this ubiquitous style and the cultural and political interests that gave rise to it.

Robert Harbison traces the complex and divergent origins of Baroque back to forces including seventeenth-century mysticism and science, personal features of Michelangelo's architecture, and a papal wish to reassert the primacy of Rome. In addition to architecture, Harbison takes into account art, scenography, music, poetry, and literature. This unique approach enables him to uncover currents and connections that transcend the geographical and chronological boundaries commonly imposed on the style. He explores the metamorphoses of Baroque ideas and works of art into later styles, particularly the Rococo. Then, in an unexpected twist, he pursues the Baroque idea into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with provocative analyses of imitations or resemblances in works ranging from Czech Cubism to the architecture of Frank Gehry. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, Reflections on Baroque reveals that the Baroque impulse still thrives in the twenty-first-century imagination.

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