Swiss International Holiday Exhibition

The Baroque style born in Rome at the beginning of sixteenth Century and spread all around Europe in many different expressions until the eighteenth Century. The main purchasers, the Popes, used the Baroque as a kind of self celebration but also to glorify God and to diffure the dogmas of Counter-Reformation.

In France, in the court Louis XIV (Sun King), the baroque art is the foundation of the centred power of the King and idealize through richness and opulence the governance defined “absoluted” and “divine”.

The Baroque is the historical and cultural period following the Counter-Reformation, described by an art full of virtuosities and contrasts, to be and to seem, pomp and semplicity, power and impotence. Today the word “Baroque” is often a synonymous of something “high-falutin” and “distasteful”.

The word's origin is still uncertain, someone thinks it proceed from the Portoguese word “barroco” which indicate a pitting pearl. We know that the termin has been coined in a following period and surely it has been firstly used in written form by Francesco Milizia around 1760, when the fires of the “baroque party” have been put off in all Europe.

The art works are anyway generally characterized by a theatrical exuberance and by the research for a more involvement of the observer. In the religious and baroque painting we see Madonna and Saints in disorder with floating clothes and gauzy clouds with cherubs.

As much popular were the mythological themes managed in an exasperate manner.