Why a Pearl Shell? On the Fundamental Features of Baroque Corporeality

Abstract

The article analyzes, in a historical sense, the principles of Baroque literary aesthetics, in particular the fundamental concept of Heinrich Wölflin’s “corporeality”, revealed by the researcher through the example of baroque architecture. The factor of ideological and aesthetic taboos imposed on the human body during the Middle Ages is noted. In the Renaissance, with its emancipated anarchic-individualistic ethics, the perception of the human body as a microcosm arises. The Baroque combines it with Christian notions of morality and conscience and deepens it in a new symbolic sense. In particular, John Milton (“Paradise Lost”) derives physicality as an ontogenetic criterion. Segismundo (“Life is a Dream” by Pedro Calderon) also perceives moral concepts through the mysterious experiences of his own body. The article explains why Wölfin claims the name of the “baroque” pearl as a term among others common in the sixteenth and seventeenth century style names (stile nuovo, stile bizzarro, stile capriccioso, stile stravagante). The mysterious understanding of the human body distinguishes the Baroque era from the Renaissance with its tragic perception of corporeality. In Renaissance and Baroque times, the aesthetic function of death is also represented differently. The figure of the Stoic goes back to antique Baroque literature. The principles of baroque comicality are considered in terms of contrast in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Baroque instilled in European art a taste for paired oppositions and dichotomous images. In particular, in the new era, the body was often perceived as a caricature and a humorous version of a serious, “sculptural” body. Classicism fully transferred it into its comedies and in the eighteenth century.conveyed Baroque techniques such as farce, caricature, travesty, wordplay and parody. Baroque corporeality opened up to succeeding generations of Europeans the experience of a world that is and always will be a conflicting, intrinsically antagonistic, largely hostile to the individual entity. The Baroque was the last era during which aesthetic creativity (literature, music, fine arts and architecture) and philosophical-theological thought were historically synchronous and typologically related. It was during this era that the fundamental principles and values of European culture – its so-called “Europeanness” – emerged. This refers the secular nature of art and philosophy; the complete emancipation of the materiality of the world and the corporeality of human nature; and the principle of the autonomy of morality.