Description
Baroque Without Boundaries, a digital mapping intervention and website, charts the increased contact among cultures during the late sixteenth-eighteenth centuries through the visual and material objects that originated from various sites of production. Pinned across Nicolaes Visscher’s iconic seventeenth-century map are essays about key themes and objects. Together, they articulate a new definition of “Baroque” art that moves beyond the conventional European parameters of this stylistic moniker. These essays point to the ways that trade, colonial occupation, missionary expansion, and cultural appropriation impacted artistic production across the globe. Contributors to this project push against the Eurocentric stylistic characteristics such as tenebrism, spatial dynamism, and illusionism that have often defined Baroque painters and sculptors like Caravaggio, Bernini, and Rubens. Instead, this project seeks to restore agency to the artists and peoples who have been underrepresented in the art historical literature and interrogates the place of “exchange” in these often-uneven power dynamics between peoples.
Founded in 2020 in conjunction with a course taught by Prof. Erin Benay at Case Western Reserve University, Baroque Without Boundaries seeks to engage broader publics in a meaningful discourse around conventional stylistic and period definitions of art through this online exhibition. The project bases its primary assertions around specific objects rather than texts, many of which are in the collection of our partner organization, the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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