Baroque: It’s Never Too Much

Baroque. Even the word sounds like it’s wearing an embroidered waistcoat. This was an era when music curled like tendrils of incense, architecture puffed up like a proud pigeon, and paintings tried to out-drama each other with theatrical lighting and saints in ecstatic trances. The Baroque period, roughly from 1600 to 1750, was basically a three-century-long opera in four acts: grandeur, excess, ornamentation, and the deeply held belief that more is always better.

The Pope loved Baroque. So did monarchs, dukes, doges, and anyone with enough money to turn their houses into stage sets for divine authority. It was propaganda with pearls. You didn’t just build a church, you made it shine so bright the sun felt underdressed.

Let’s start in Rome, because naturally. The city became the Baroque epicentre thanks to the Catholic Church’s PR campaign, also known as the Counter-Reformation. Faced with Protestant reformers and their suspiciously plain tastes, the Church doubled down on splendour. They hired Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the Elon Musk of marble, to make sure every saint looked like they’d just met God, up close and personal. Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is technically religious art, but it’s also about two seconds away from requiring a parental advisory.

Speaking of Bernini, he also designed St. Peter’s Square to look like a pair of open arms welcoming you back to the Church. Very spiritual. Also very much a flex.

Meanwhile, Baroque music strutted in, powdered and preposterous. This is where we get Johann Sebastian Bach, who wrote music that sounds like mathematics doing ballet. Vivaldi gave us The Four Seasons, a concerto so catchy it’s basically the pop chart of classical music. Then there’s Handel, who moved from Germany to England and gifted the world Messiah, now a Christmas singalong for choirs that never skip leg day.

Baroque didn’t stop at churches and cantatas. It crept into bedrooms, kitchens, and even wigs. Yes, wigs. The bigger your hair, the closer to Baroque heaven. Aristocrats wore towering constructions that could conceal letters, fruit, and possibly small birds. Louis XIV of France basically was Baroque in human form: a walking sunbeam with legs. His palace at Versailles is a monument to golden mirrors, never-ending corridors, and how far a man will go to compensate for being five-foot-five.

Baroque’s flair for the dramatic made it a hit in theatre and opera too. Italian opera turned into full-blown reality TV, complete with improbable plots, tragic queens, and high notes that could shatter glass (or egos). Singers known as castrati, like the wildly famous Farinelli, performed heroic roles with superhuman vocal ranges, the result of, well, let’s just say permanent soprano status.

In painting, Caravaggio perfected the chiaroscuro effect: dark, moody shadows pierced by shafts of divine spotlight. Think holy soap opera with daggers. His subjects looked like real people – often because he used real people, including drunks, sex workers, and one guy who may have also been his bouncer. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a painter with a rap sheet and a habit of fleeing cities. He killed a man over a tennis match. Because, of course he did.

Elsewhere, Peter Paul Rubens made Baroque voluptuous. His paintings are an ode to curves, drama, and billowing drapery. In his world, nobody ever skipped dessert. Then there’s Rembrandt in the Netherlands, who combined theatrical flair with psychological depth. His self-portraits aged like vintage cheese: richer, stinkier, and more introspective with time.

Baroque architecture looked like stone had melted into ribbons. Curves ruled. Straight lines? Boring. Churches undulated like they were dancing. Domes got higher. Ceilings turned into kaleidoscopes of angels and cherubs and the occasional ceiling peeping Jesus. Francesco Borromini, Rome’s architectural wild child, designed facades that twisted logic and gravity.

But Baroque wasn’t just a Catholic monopoly. Protestants got their own flavour too. In Lutheran Germany, you’d find simpler exteriors but deeply ornate organs and music to make up for the lack of marble angels.

The colonising powers of Europe weren’t about to miss out either. They exported Baroque aesthetics along with guns and Bibles. Latin America got its own genre: Churrigueresque, a style so maximalist it makes Versailles look minimalist. Think churches where every inch is carved, gilded, and probably weeping.

Baroque also spawned scientific show-offs. This was the era when Isaac Newton did maths with apples and Galileo stared at Jupiter. Science and religion both borrowed Baroque’s love of spectacle. Telescopes and altarpieces were both tools for peering into the divine.

Fashion went fully flamboyant. Men wore lace, heels, and coats with more embroidery than a royal christening gown. Women were poured into corsets and panniers that could clear a doorway if you turned sideways. Accessories included fans, snuff boxes, and the occasional monkey on a leash.

Even furniture got theatrical. Cabinets had secret compartments. Tables twisted into animal shapes. Beds looked like small temples. Nothing was just functional. It had to perform.

The Baroque era also invented the cult of the virtuoso. Musicians like Archangelo Corelli turned the violin into a tool of ego and ecstasy. Composers became rockstars. One of them, Jean-Baptiste Lully, died from stabbing his own foot with a conducting stick. He refused amputation and perished from gangrene. Baroque until the end.

And then came Rococo, Baroque’s fluffier cousin, who swapped grandeur for pastels and coquettish grins. Baroque’s final decades saw its drama soften into flirtation, its cathedrals turn into parlours. It was still decadent, just less obsessed with judgement day.

But Baroque didn’t vanish. It just got archived. And then revived. Neo-Baroque pops up in film scores, modern architecture, and fashion collections that look like Marie Antoinette raided a goth boutique.

Even pop culture bows to its drama. Baz Luhrmann’s films, Beyoncé’s outfits, or a Lady Gaga music video – they all owe a little debt to Baroque’s unapologetic extravagance.

So what did Baroque really do? It took the plain world and dressed it up in gold leaf and emotion. It made sorrow gorgeous and salvation look like a fireworks show. And it was a style that never whispered… It shouted, with trumpets.

If the Renaissance was a polite conversation with antiquity, Baroque was that same antiquity after three glasses of wine, reciting poetry on a velvet chaise while clutching a candelabrum. It was a fever dream of faith, power, art, and a very particular idea of taste: namely, more ruffles.

You don’t have to love Baroque. But it certainly knows how to make an entrance. And once it’s in the room, good luck ignoring it.