ABSTRACT
The term baroque is notorious for the controversy that has attended its meaning and its appropriate use as a concept in literary history. Its application as a literary term was first suggested in passing in 1888 by the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who proposed that the difference between the poetic styles of Ariosto and Tasso might have a parallel in the difference between the styles of Renaissance and Baroque visual artists. Wölfflin characterizes Tasso’s style with the formula ‘weniger Anschauung, mehr Stimmung’ (‘less visualization, more mood’), and finds in the poet of the Gerusalemme liberata a kind of imagistic chiaroscuro and a degree of emotional saturation which contrast markedly with the clear and linear visual imagination and ironic aesthetic distance typical of Ariosto.
