CLICK TO VIEW ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS
|
|
19th C. Italian Baroque Walnut Side Table
Exceptional 19th Century Italian Baroque Walnut Side Table with a single drawer, a carved trestle form base terminated on paw feet, with minor restoration. H:25" W:30" D:18" A brief history of the Baroque style and tradition: earliest manifestations, which occurred in Italy, date from the latter decades of the 16th century, the work that distinguishes the Baroque period is stylistically unique. In general, however, the desire to evoke emotional states by appealing to the senses, often in dramatic ways, underlies its manifestations. Some of the qualities most frequently associated with the Baroque are grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, vitality, movement, tension, and emotional exuberance. Because the arts present such diversity within the Baroque period, their unifying characteristics must be sought in relation to the era's broader cultural and intellectual tendencies, of which three are most important for their effect on the arts. The first of these was the emergence of the Counter-Reformation and the expansion of its domain, both territorially and intellectually. By the last decades of the 16th century the refined, courtly style known as Mannerism had ceased to be an effective means of expression, and its inadequacy for religious art was being increasingly felt in artistic circles. To counter the inroads made by the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church after the Council of Trent (1545–63) adopted a propagandistic stance in which art was to serve as a means of extending and stimulating the public's faith in the church. To this end the church adopted a conscious artistic program whose art products would make an overtly emotional and sensory appeal to the faithful. The Baroque style that evolved from this program was paradoxically both sensuous and spiritual; while a naturalistic treatment rendered the religious image more accessible to the average churchgoer, dramatic and illusory effects were used to stimulate his piety and devotion and convey to him an impression of the splendour of the divine. Baroque church ceilings thus dissolved in painted scenes that presented vivid views of the infinite to the observer and directed him through his senses toward heavenly concerns. An extreme reaction to the austere classicalism of the Renaissance was the Churrigueresque style, Spain's response to Baroque, and the new language of the counterreformation. It is characterised by the play of light and shade, lush ornamentation and surface texture. This is an expample of an elegant highly carved early 18th C. Spanish Baroque Walnut Table with the carved trestle form base that is part of the historical reference of the Baroque Period.
|
