Historians Define the Baroque: Notes on a Problem of Art and Social History

Abstract

Can the historian bring his presumably hard-headed and objective analytical devices to bear upon so impalpable a subject as man's art? At both ends of esthetic experience there is an elusive subjectivity: the artist (his “style” and “expressive content“) and the beholder (his “taste” and “feeling”) seem to take part in the experience on the basis of no rigidly determinable criteria. Yet here, as in the other gossamer realms of religion, philosophy, personal psychology or “national character”, the historian has never let mere impalpability daunt him. He may be aware of a caveat or two, but up into the rarefied heights he soars determined to transmit the historian's-eye view of the whole of human experience.

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