The Age of Wonder and Entertainment: An Introduction to Intermedial Networks in Baroque Culture

In its broadest sense, the notion of “baroque” is used today to define the period in the history of European culture going from the end of the Renaissance to the dawn of the Enlightenment. This chapter attempts to trace some paths through the baroque mediascape in order to give the reader an idea of how it can be investigated from the perspective of intermedial studies. More specifically, this chapter’s aim is twofold. On the one hand, it interrogates artistic phenomena, media products, performances, and intermedial relations that are specific to the baroque mediascape; on the other hand, it shows how these products contributed to a significant extent to shaping the mediascape in which we ourselves are immersed. Section “Framing Baroque Culture” investigates how baroque culture emerged in Europe and what its defining elements are. Section “Understanding Baroque Aesthetics across Media” explores the main tenets of baroque aesthetics (excess, wonder, ornamentation, self-reflexivity, artifice, and theatricality) and the emotional responses that baroque media products strived to elicit. Section “Painting and Architecture: Two Roman Ceilings” focuses on the relation between painting and architecture in two painted ceilings – Pietro da Cortona’s Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power and Giovan Battista Gaulli’s Triumph of the Name of Jesus. Section “The Courtly Feast and the Birth of Modern Entertainment” analyzes courtly feasts and festivals as the quintessential form of entertainment of the baroque age. Section “Theatre and the Rise of the Opera” is centered on intermediality in baroque theater, with a specific focus on opera, tragicomedy, and metadrama. The conclusion asks the question: how does one investigate the survival, reemergence, citations, and echoes of the Baroque from the half of the eighteenth century onwards?