By the second half of the seventeenth century, most thinkers readily acknowledged what Giordano Bruno had suggested in 1584: that the universe was infinite, containing a multitude of suns around which revolved countless planets. The concept of infinite space generated great excitement and equally great anxiety. In the mid-seventeenth century Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées:

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill . . . engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there (Martin, 155).

The University of Chicago. Library, Department of Special Collections

The frontispiece of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds shows the solar system with the sun at the center and other similar plantetary systems in the distance.

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, whose Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) became an overnight sensation in 1686, expressed quite a different attitude. "As for me," says Fontenelle's savant to the Marquise de G., his interlocutor:

I feel entirely at ease. When the sky was only a blue vault, with the stars nailed to it, the universe seemed small and narrow to me; I felt oppressed by it. Now that they've given infinitely greater breadth and depth to this vault . . . it seems to me that I breathe more freely, that I'm in a larger atmosphere, and certainly the universe has a greater magnificence (Hargreaves, 63).

Fontenelle's words, and Pascal's, remind us of what we appreciate in the great art of the baroque, that combination of exhilaration and foreboding, distinct yet inseparable from one another, which so characterizes the products of the age.

The sense of awe peculiar to baroque art resulted from a revolution in the style and manner of representing space. The artists of the seventeenth century inherited from the Renaissance the idea perhaps best expressed by Leonardo da Vinci that "the first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane"; or, in other words, to give the painted object a three-dimensional reality. Baroque artists extended the idea of giving life to the canvas still further. The object was meant not simply to exist in three dimensions but to move. Just as seventeenth-century science introduced motion into our understanding of the physical universe ("E pur si muove" ["But it does move!"] was Galileo's alleged defense before the Vatican council), artists introduced motion into their work, so that space extends into the fourth dimension of time.

Baroque art endows the objects it represents with a sense of often extraordinary weight and mass. It conveys a palpable illusion of physical presence. Viewers often notice, for example, the fleshiness of Peter Paul Rubens's nudes or the massiveness of Bernini's famous colonnade at St. Peter's basilica in Rome. The great art critic Heinrich Wölfflin captured another important quality of baroque art in his description of the staircase leading up to the Roman basilica which, he said, "looks like some viscous mass slowly oozing down the slope" (Wölfflin, 45).

Baroque art produces an illusion not only of presence but of motion in the sense that a physicist would understand it: the displacement of a body with mass through three-dimensional space over time. In this sense, baroque art is theatrical: the illusion of motion produces an effect that is both figuratively and literally dramatic. The theater, too, is a visual art. At the same time as painters were experimenting with novel effects that suggested movement on canvas, the use of perspectival scenery became common in Europe. Both art forms rely on trompe l'oeil devices, on illusion--tricks of light and the clever placement of drapery, for example--to heighten the viewer's sense of the reality of what is depicted.

The space of baroque art is projective. Within the picture, everything recedes toward a vanishing point, plunging into the depths of the pictorial space with exaggerated velocity. The represented objects simultaneously invade the space of the onlooker. Baroque art unites the painting and the viewer in a single space, creating the illusion that the image is as real as its beholder and that the pictorial space extends infinitely. Art historian John Rupert Martin suggests that this sense of pictorial space is analogous to the broader, cosmologic concept of infinity that was gaining hold during the seventeenth century (Martin, 155).

The University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art

DANIEL GRAN Austrian, 1694-1757 Design for a Ceiling, circa 1720-57 Pen and black and brown inks with brown and sepia washes and preliminary graphite underdrawing on laid paper The Austrian artist Daniel Gran produced a sense of infinite recession in his stunning Design for a Ceiling, a pen and ink study enhanced with sepia washes. Gran places us below the vault, looking upward past the edge of a fictive dome into a space that seems to have become transparent, open to the sky. A group of figures, one of whom dangles his leg into the space of the building, perches on the edge of the cornice; others, on insectlike wings, hover below. These fantastic figures are able to pass through the frame within the picture, an effect that endows the world depicted on the ceiling with a reality of its own, coextensive with the reality of the space below it.

Fontenelle's speculation about the possibility of communication between separate worlds is a common motif of baroque art--equally present in architecture and interior design, as Gran shows us. A wall is never simply a wall, nor a ceiling, a ceiling. Each architectural element is extended beyond its functional duty as a shield from the hostile elements. The aesthetic component of the object, its form, overtakes its function. A wall or a ceiling becomes a possible opening onto the reality which it occludes.

A world of light and shadow
--and in baroque art more generally--the effect of movement and action was more important than the effect of symmetry and balance that had dominated the art of the Renaissance. Baroque artists aimed to undo the classical unity of form and function, to unbalance the composition and achieve the impression of movement and space that the new age demanded. In his landmark study Renaissance and Baroque (1888), art critic Heinrich Wölfflin writes:

The church interior, [the baroque's] greatest achievement, revealed a completely new conception of space directed towards infinity: form is dissolved in favor of the magic spell of light--the highest manifestation of the painterly. No longer was the aim one of fixed spatial proportions and self-contained spaces with their satisfying relationships between height, breadth and depth. The painterly style thought first of the effects of light: the unfathomableness of a dark depth; the magic of light streaming down from the invisible height of the dome; the transition from dark to light and lighter still are the elements with which it worked.

The space of the interior, evenly lit in the Renaissance and conceived as a structurally closed entity, seemed in the baroque to go on indefinitely. The enclosing shell of the building hardly counted: in all directions one's gaze is drawn into infinity. The end of the choir disappears in the gold and glimmer of the towering high altar, in the gleam of the "splendori celesti," while the dark chapels of the nave are hardly recognizable; above, instead of the flat ceiling which had calmly closed off space, loomed a huge barrel-vault. It too seems open: clouds stream down with choirs of angels and all the glory of heaven; our eyes and minds are lost in immeasurable space (Wölfflin, 64-65).

Wölfflin discovered the greatest achievement of baroque art at the point where architectural design, with its functional imperatives, met religious art, with its propensity for symbolic statement. In great examples like Bernini's colonnade for St. Peter's basilica in Rome, the two aspects of the baroque--its purely concrete or stylistic qualities, and its idealized purpose--were joined in aesthetic unity, in a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art).

Contrast is the primary tool through which baroque art prompts a sensation of the infinite in the mind of the beholder. The infinite cannot of course be shown. It must be suggested or implied. What baroque art conveys is an impression, an illusion of infinite space, of movement into boundless depths, by suggesting the existence of what finally remains unseen. Contrast of light and dark, or chiaroscuro, gives space particular qualities. It accentuates the illusion of depth, giving the objects depicted a greater sense of mass and weight while simultaneously heightening their three-dimensionality, making them appear to jump out of the picture frame, or in the case of sculpture or decoration, out of the immediate space that "contains" them. It gives the image dramatic possibilities that steady, even illumination precludes. Like the lighting in films, chiaroscuro in painting works directly upon the spectators' emotions.

Curiously, perhaps because the technology was lacking, stage spectacles were slow to adopt the use of dramatic lighting. Other techniques for at once expanding and occluding the pictorial scene in order to create or heighten a mood, such as the use of drapery, found their way into both the visual arts and stage spectacles. It is possible to look at theater in the seventeenth century, particularly its embodiment on the stage, as a branch of the visual arts. The scene was framed and the actors were often described as "painting" their characters.

It is less important, however, to draw a direct analogy between the theater and the other visual arts than to suggest that the painter's use of chiaroscuro and the resulting sense of space were---in an important sense--theatrical. The effect of contrast, of drapery, of the deliberate bending and distortion of space was to create a dramatic illusion that suggests the existence of the unseen. Drapery foils the eye's natural curiosity, leading the viewer to imagine that it covers something. The gaze of a figure in a painting who looks off into an unseen space convinces us of the reality of that which we cannot see. Such figures deceive us as certainly and as pleasurably as the actors on a stage convince us of the existence of Hamlet's Denmark or Phèdre's Greece. This is not to say that what is represented has no real reference--Denmark and Greece are clearly real places (although Phèdre and Hamlet are not, at least in our conventional understanding of the matter, real people)--only that the object being represented is not present in the painter's or the actor's depiction of it; that Denmark, in other words, is not really on the stage, or that a figure in a painting is an image, rather than a living being.

And yet the success of the depiction depends in some sense on our believing in that being's presence. It hinges upon a painting's ability to get us to believe, not in the reality, but in the presence of what it depicts--the presence, for example, of a three-dimensional body within the surface of the painting, or of the infinite extensibility of the illusory pictorial space--if only in ghostly form. At this, the baroque excels.

This session is adapted from Robert S. Huddleston, "Baroque Space and the Art of the Infinite," in The Theatrical Baroque (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum/University of Chicago, 2001), 13-19. For a list of the critical works cited in this session, click here.