Vapors and Clouds

The intention of the present essay is to juxtapose the thought of two authors who are chronologically distant from each other, yet who touch at a specific point: the common attempt to reason in an oblique direction and in an eccentric sense about Baroque form; they are Eugenio d’Ors (1881-1954) and Hubert Damisch (1928-2017). Both of them elaborate, at different times and in different ways, what will be called here ‘light morphological paradigms’, that is, statutes of formal legality derived entirely from ‘lightness’ as a loss of weight and consistency. The particular character of this quality compels a reconnaissance of the ‘dispute’ around early and late Baroque that not only articulates itself on the bipolarity between ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ – between levia and gravia – but also renegotiates it du côté aérien to transcend its boundaries; indeed, d’Ors and Damisch’s insistence on the marks of the intangibility of form is also justified in the name of overcoming disciplinary rigidities towards other, broad and all-encompassing fields of inquiry