Alois Riegl, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome Helen Hills Rethinking the Baroque

Abstract

The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, by Alois Riegl, edited and translated by Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte, with essays by Alina Payne, Arnold Witte, and Andrew Hopkins, Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute, 2010, x + 280 pp., £35.00/$50.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-60606-041-4Rethinking the Baroque, edited by Helen Hills, Farnham & Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2011, xvii + 243 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6685-1Alois Riegl's interpretation of the baroque, a version of his lecture-notes from the 1890s, was first published in 1908. The editors of this new English edition have provided a fluent and readable translation of a document which, they acknowledge, is not necessarily an easy text. Riegl's lectures, although interested in the baroque style, are more concerned with discussing actual baroque works, and this may have been why they were such a success when first delivered, although reading (rather than listening to) them inevitably loses some of the clarity offered by his concise (if occasionally dense) comments on artistic or architectural examples. When Riegl was teaching in Vienna the baroque was commonly derided by contemporary scholars, and his lectures defend it against detractors. For Riegl, it needed to be taken seriously on its own terms, and not regarded as the final decline of Renaissance classicism. The three prefatory essays effectively explore the broader contexts of Riegl's thinking, particularly the influence of Jacob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wolfflin, and responses to Riegl himself. As the editors indicate, The origins of the baroque in Rome is not the complete version of his original lectures, nor are they the definitive statement of Riegl's art-historical thinking. His most influential idea was the Kunstwollen, a term which unhelpfully changed meaning throughout Riegl's career, and might be understood as recognising a 'metahistorical and supra-individual force behind the development of style' or as defining 'an immanent quality of a work of art that connected it to the cultural context from which it had sprung forth' (p. 34). Though not so prominent here, its use nevertheless reflects the nineteenth-century interest in big conceptual ideas, intended to systemise and explain the evolution of western art. Nevertheless, Riegl's interest in individual paintings, sculptures and buildings allowed him to put forward a case for a historicising contextualism. He insisted that art historians should abandon abstract discussions of style and instead consider historical objects and the reasons for their creation. He believed that 'the signifi- cance of archival sources lies in the fact that they reveal the intentions of art' (p. 103).Given the complex debates now surrounding the very notion of the baroque, what did Riegl make of it? It was primarily an aesthetic of the seventeenth century, with its first phase occurring between 1550 and 1630, followed by the mature period of Bernini's pre- eminence. Its defining features were its depictions of 'momentary emotion' (p. 108) and 'the compositional unity of everything that comes into view' (p. 113). More vaguely it is 'peculiar, unfamiliar, extraordinary' (p. 94). For Riegl, the creators of the baroque were Correggio and the later Michelangelo; the latter emerges as an artist working on the 'threshold between styles' (p. 15). As for Wolfflin, Michelangelo was 'Vater des Barocks' and much of Riegl's lectures are pre-occupied with making this case. He locates key baroque emphases (notably, movement and transitory emotion), in sixteenth-century works and finds in them another baroque characteristic: the battle between will and sentiment. For Riegl, modern art is defined by the representation of sentiment defeating the will, and this psychological concept is represented within the nature of baroque composition, in a move towards subjective, rather than objective, depictions (pp. 130-1). As the editors indicate, Riegl's interest in psychology derived in part from his Hegelianism, but his thinking on the baroque was broader than this, for he located objects at the centre of culture, and the centre of that new culture was Rome, which superseded Florentine influence 'in correspondence with the overwhelming importance of the papacy' (p. …