Summary of Baroque: what it is, who are the protagonists, which works are most famous. Literary Baroque and Artistic Baroque.
We have often heard of Baroque . But what is it exactly? The century of Baroque , the seventeenth century , is a century of great political, economic and cultural changes and transformations.
The term Baroque was first used in a derogatory sense. In the 17th century, the humanistic-Renaissance culture began to give way to a sense of confusion and uncertainty in human things: the classical values of balance and harmony entered into crisis, man became aware of his fragility and began to fear death.
The baroque intellectual finds employment in the courts , but his role becomes more and more that of an intellectual who shows off his skills. The academies become instruments for the diffusion of this new knowledge.
Baroque is primarily novelty, change, and irregularity, socially, politically, and economically. Baroque theorists gain popularity by giving the public wonder and amazement. Consequently, poetry ceases to be a link between ideals and communication, but becomes a means of exalting real things in the eyes of readers, to derive cultural benefits from them.
Baroque, the lyric
In fact, the Baroque amazes and astonishes at all costs; referring to the theatrical effect, the wonder unites the poet and the reader in recognizing the novelty.
Baroque found a privileged field in lyric poetry, with its rejection of normal language. Lyric poetry is full of metaphors that establish analogies between different and distant semantic fields, usually considered irreconcilable.
The greatest exponent of lyric poetry is Giovan Battista Marino , so famous that he was called as a court poet in Italy and Paris. His most important work is Adone , a very long poem which tells the myth of Venus who falls in love with Adonis, arousing the jealousy of Mars.
Through his work Marino forcefully affirms his own personality, placing at the centre of the poetic operation not a process of imitation of past models, but a process of ingenious variation. The available literary material is modified to be filled according to new criteria in an operation of personal reconversion.
Marino exploits to the full the possible combinations offered by many rhetorics, which he applies on the collected materials. He then transforms each object into a word, to then create a work; in doing so he marks a new and modern poetic language.
