The word "baroque" conjures images of luxury, mystery, and a world filled with brilliant light and ominous shadows. Art historians have applied the term to an age of spectacular inventiveness in Western European art, when powerful forces were reshaping long-held notions about science, religion and politics.

During this tumultuous era, writers, artists and critics sought new modes of expression, and perhaps no field of artistic endeavor was so deeply affected as the theater. In France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theater became the center of culture. The stage offered dazzling spectacles as well as dramas that so closely mirrored society that playwrights were accused of spying on private conversations for their dialogue.

In this seminar--based on an exhibition at the University of Chicago's David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art--you will be introduced to some of the themes that dominated the dramatic and visual arts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will explore how an obsession with performance influenced not only the stage but the daily lives of aristocrats and the rising middle class, who looked to the theater for clues on how to present themselves to their peers and to the public. And we will look outside the theater at the ideas that defined the age--scientific discoveries, religious schisms, the rise of the absolute monarch--to see how these ideas shaped, and were shaped by, the art of the baroque period.

Copyright 2001 The University of Chicago. For a complete list of the works shown in this seminar, click here.