Baroque art is the dramatic art that came out of Rome around 1600 and spread across Europe, with hidden lighting, figures caught in action, and scenes staged to make the viewer feel inside them. The work to know is Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a marble group in a Roman church.
Bernini finished it in 1652 for the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria. Cardinal Federico Cornaro wanted the chapel as his burial place, and on its side walls he and his relatives watch from carved boxes, as if at a theater.
Standing in the chapel, the visitor joins that audience.
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The word began as a complaint. It probably comes from the Italian barocco, a word philosophers used for an obstacle in logic. A rival explanation points to the Portuguese barroco, the word for an imperfectly shaped pearl.
Until the late nineteenth century it meant what looked odd, exaggerated and overdecorated. Then, in 1888, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin published Renaissance und Barock, and the word became the name of a style.
That leaves a bigger question than the name: why does the style exist at all? The usual answer is that the Catholic Church ordered it, at a council of bishops in 1563, and that is the part of the story I trust least.
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