ABSTRACT
As we saw in the introduction, the term baroque exhibits a camel-like complexity. Not only does it indiscriminately identify a period, a sensibility and a style that, though related, remain different things; it also embraces the wide variety of conflicting themes, forms and conventions with which period, sensibility and style are traditionally associated. In painting, for instance, the naturalist commitment to the human body's native colours, contours and attitudes is regularly hitched to idealizing fictions whose moral, political and devotional valence leaves unedified nature behind. Similarly, the taste for the breathtaking illusions of the art of trompe-l'oeil goes hand in hand with the aggressive iconoclasm of the vanitas motif, exposing the euphoric delights of aesthetic experience to the memento mori's melancholy reminder of sinfulness and death. Yet as contradictory as its concrete expressions may be, the baroque as a whole encodes a number of deep-seated constants; and chief among these is a tireless fascination with visual representation and the heightened acts of vision that representation mimics and promotes. The baroque marks indeed at once the apogee and crisis of early modern visual culture, simultaneously magnifying and deprecating human sight and the modes of depiction calculated to model and enhance it.1
