Baroque

The Baroque was a movement in art, architecture, and music that flourished across Europe from the early seventeenth century into the early eighteenth, characterized by dramatic contrast, emotional intensity, and a sense of movement and grandeur, often in the service of the Catholic Church's Counter Reformation or the courts of absolutist monarchs. In painting and sculpture it favored strong light and shadow, dynamic composition, and theatrical subject matter. In architecture it produced curved facades, elaborate ornament, and dramatic interior spaces designed to overwhelm the viewer. In music the period is defined by the elaboration of tonal harmony, the rise of opera, and the contrapuntal mastery of composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, whose fugues and cantatas represent one of the style's technical high points. The term originated as a description of visual art and architecture and was extended to music only later by historians, so its boundaries in the different art forms do not align precisely, a source of ongoing scholarly discussion about how unified a single Baroque style really was across the arts.