Chapter One for Barroco and Other Writings

I

The Word “Barroco”

Any text about the Baroque gets underway by considering the word’s origins. In criticizing this mania, the present text confirms it: this vertigo of genesis that grants excessive knowledge to philology and underscores its logocentric limits. The nature of things—one supposes, in proceeding thus, that they have one—would be written, substantially, in the words that name them: as a signified that even if forgotten still subsists. Thus, of the Baroque there remains the knobbly image of the large irregular pearl—from the Portuguese barroco—, the rough rock conglomerate—from the Spanish berrueco and subsequently berrocal—, and later, as if disavowing the character of the brute object, of coarse, unworked matter, barroco appears among the jewelers: inverting its initial connotation, it will now no longer designate the immediate and natural, stone or pearl, but rather the elaborate and meticulous, the finely chiseled, the goldsmith’s fastidious effort. Subsequent, questionable attempts to establish its heredity have insisted on the sense of rigor, of patient assembly: barroco, figure of syllogism—precision of mental jewelry-making—; Baroccio, a mannered producer of madonnas.

Scholars have exhausted the history of barroco; only rarely has the persistent prejudice been denounced, one maintained above all by the obscurantism of the dictionaries, that identifies the baroque with the extravagant, the eccentric, and even the cheap, not to mention its most recent avatars, camp and kitsch. This rejection, innocently aesthetic in appearance, conceals a moral attitude:

Bizarrerie, feminine noun: term expressing, in architecture, a sense of taste contrary to received principles, an affected pursuit of fantastical forms, one whose sole merit is the very novelty that constitutes its vice. [ . . . ] One distinguishes, in moral philosophy, between caprice and bizarrerie. The first may be the fruit of the imagination; the second, the result of character. [. . .] This moral distinction may be applied to architecture and to the distinct effects of caprice and bizarrerie that occur in this art. Vignola and Michelangelo sometimes admitted capricious details in their architecture. Borromini and Guarini were the masters of the bizarre style.¹

To the history of the baroque we could add, as its punctual and inseparable reflection, that of its moral repression, the law, manifest or otherwise, that marks it as deviation or anomaly with regard to a previous form, balanced and pure, represented by the classical. Only beginning with d’Ors is this anathema tempered, or rather dissimulated: “If one speaks of illness with regard to the Baroque it is in the sense in which Michelet would say, ‘La femme est une éternelle malade.’”²

To motivate the sign barroco, to give it a foundation today, without the operation entailing a moral residue: impossible, if the aim is semantic concordance, an agreement of sense between word and thing. Where an ultimate sense is instituted—a full and central truth, the singularity of the signified—there guilt and the Fall will have been instituted as well. To the mania of definition, the vertigo of genesis, we would oppose a structural homology between the paradigmatic Baroque product—the jewel—and the form of the expression barroco:³ an analogy that links the referent up with the signifier, considering first the distribution of vocalic elements, and then its written form [grafismo].

“The word baroque has two clear vowels set nicely into it; they seem to evoke its breadth and brilliance”:⁴ the support, then, is opaque, narrow; on that consonantal surface, mounted nicely, like pearls in their setting, the clear elements sparkle.

In that abrupt distribution of light, in that clean break whose edges separate, without nuance, the authority of the motif and the neutrality, the indistinction of the ground, there comes a herald of the zenith point of the Baroque: Caravaggism. Immediate contrast between field of light and field of shadow. Suppressing all transitions between one term and another, bringing opposites into dramatic juxtaposition: in this way—Aristotle’s Rhetoric had already prescribed as much—one achieves greater didactic impact; to learn with ease is a pleasure consubstantial with man: one instructs by means of rapid syllogisms, without verbal ligature, putting subject and predicate in antithetical relation.

Encoded, then, in barroco, is the method, the mode, but also the first calling of that style, one that has been regarded, and not by happenstance, as related to the expansion of the Jesuit order: pedagogy, energetic expression that not only makes visible but “puts the matter right before one’s eyes.” Art of sophistry: its visual syntax is organized on the basis of unheard-of relations: hyperbole and distortion of one of the terms, abrupt night upon the other; nakedness, ornament independent of the rational body of the edifice, adjective, adverb that twists it, volute: any artifice imaginable in order to drive the point home, to demonstrate despotically. No vacillation, no nuance. Anything in order to convince.

—Barroco: amid the muted consonantal flow, the a and the o; the Baroque, like Ponge’s Abricot, runs from a to o. Barroco,

to the ear, opens and closes with a loop [boucle]: the letters a and o: the word folds back on itself in a circular figure, snake biting its tail. Beginning and end are interchangeable. The titled word, in its scription, is the sensible image of this reversal, this turn. The figure of the loop [. . .] designates as much the activity of the letter [. . .] as it does its semantic effects—cycle of the seasons, gyration of the stars, forms of fruit—and their backstop: “meanings locked up with two turns of the key [bouclées à double tour].” This loop [boucle], if we are to believe the proofs furnished by etymology, is a mouth [bouche]: boucle, from the Latin buccula, diminutive of bucca, bouche. The figure of the loop, tied to that of the turn or trick [tour] (turn of the key, trick of writing, tumbler’s turn) is overdetermined: it is to be found at a semantic crossing, a crossroads where writing, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric, music, and painting are all superposed, “closed up [bouclée(s)] in the form of the fruit” [. . .]. All these paths cross, inevitably, at this crossroads, they pass through the title’s doubled letter, as in the circus lions pass—one after another—through the hoop held up, with manes of flame.⁵

Abricot/barroco: “It is in the eye of the letters that the theme of gold appears and gets criss-crossed: in the letter O, gaping loop of a mouth.”⁶Barroco goes from the a to the o: direction of gold: from the loop to the circle, ellipse to circle; or in reverse: direction of excrement—gold’s symbolic verso—from the circle to the loop, circle to ellipse, from Galileo to Kepler.⁷Abricot: sun seen in eclipse, placé en abîme; barroco: sun in the zenith—in the circular o—and then, double center—the loop of an a, the ellipse’s double center—, one of which is the sun itself.

This transcription of the Baroque calls for its referent: one such, architectural, corresponds to it without remainder: the Chapel of the Holy Shroud by Guarino Guarini, in Turin, is the mounting for a jewel: the task was to find a setting for the stained shroud, for the face’s imprint on the linen.

The chapel is subtly assembled: its structure is not limited to the naïve relation support/motif, but rather, fulfilling the Baroque’s pedagogical vocation, it realizes this relation literally and at the same time, repeating it, offers its metaphor in marble. The support and motif, that is to say, the baldachin and the chest it covers, the case for the Shroud, are reduplicated and covered in turn by a meta-concretion of the project, by the definition, on a higher, metaphorical plane, of the notion barroco: the black cupola, visible mounting, learned superposition of star-shaped structures, where, precious, the light has found its setting.

From its construction to the present day, the darkness of the chapel, the opacity of its materials, the lack of windows, and the use—considered excessive—of black marble have been the object of intrigue, criticism, and even mockery. The explanations to which historians have seen themselves obliged to take recourse in order to justify this somber structure are convoluted or else of a great symbolic density. One has perceived, in the plan, “an intentional contamination, at least in their affective signifieds, between the crypt and the cupola [. . .] the shroud of Christ, left behind in the moment of his resurrection, is proof of his humanity and his divinity. The association is thus altogether pertinent. Death and eternity are conjoined in the sacred cloth like the light and shadow in the luminous black chapel.”⁸

This “key for interpreting the building” would anyway be implicit in the path that the faithful must follow in order to reach the Shroud: dark, steep stairs that accentuate the sense of effort, of fatigue, as though one would have to ascend on one’s knees, as though, beneath the curve of the vaulting, one were ascending to Calvary.

Other equally symbolic readings have seen in Guarini’s geometric diagrams and in his plans for the cupola evident analogies with horoscope “themes,” of which the architect was fond, inferring from this that the distribution of luminous effects is governed by zodiacal configurations. One can also expatiate, with Wittkower, on the chapel’s structure as an emblem for the dogma of the Trinity. Finally, in the very fact that the relic is displayed aloft in the apse one can read a political significance. The members of the House of Savoy, in whom its ownership continues to reside, do not keep the cloth in the privacy of the palace but instead generously extend its beneficial effects, its irradiations, to the people, demonstrating with this “sumptuous reconstruction of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem how false Luther’s assertion was, that God takes no more care for that than he does for oxen.”⁹

The approach that we are proposing here does not aim to confirm or refute the preceding ones. It is not a new interpretation, on the basis of a novel key, nor is it a fresh reading. Nothing prior or exterior to the building justifies it, no symbol; nothing is made to sustain the black architecture, nor is anything added onto it. Nothing seeks to clear away its opacity. What is postulated here is a conformity between this exemplary product of the Baroque and the word that designates it, barroco, a conformity that touches the word on two levels: its form of expression—the distribution of its consonantal and vocalic elements; the written form [grafismo] of the latter—and the symbolic site where it makes its appearance, the technical lexicon of jewelry.

If the Holy Shroud corroborates, in its signifying organization, the form of the expression barroco and the place of its appearance, there remains another mark, no less structural, of this emergence: the residue of a signified, a purely mechanical vestige, with no assignable link to its referent, emptied out: in Baroque poetry, the words designating the canonical materials of fine metalworking do not function as full signs but rather, in a formalized system of binary oppositions—antithesis is the central figure of the Baroque—, as “markers” bearing a plus or minus sign, that is to say, as pure valences: “The Baroque poet’s predilection for the terms of fine metalworking or the jeweler’s trade is not substantially expressive of a profound taste for the materials they designate. There is no need to go looking, here, for one of those reveries of which Bachelard speaks, in which the imagination explores the hidden strata of a substance. These elements, these metals, these gems are made use of, quite to the contrary, only for their most superficial, their most abstract function: a sort of valence defined by a system of discontinuous oppositions, which sooner evokes the combinations of our atomic chemistry than the transmutations of the old alchemy.”¹⁰

Notes

1. Quatremère de Quincy, Dictionnaire historique d’architecture (Paris: Librairie d’Adrien le Clere, 1832). [Translation mine—Trans.]

2. Eugenio D’Ors, Du Baroque (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 84.

3. According to the definition A. J. Greimas gives in the preface to Louis Hjelmslev, Le Langage (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1966).

4. Victor L. Tapié, Le Baroque (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 9. Italics mine. [Translation mine—Trans.]

5. Gérard Farasse, “La portée de l’Abricot,” in Roland Barthes et al., Le texte: de la théorie à la recherche (Communications, no. 19) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 186. [Translation mine—Trans.]

6. Farasse, “La portée de l’Abricot,” 186. [Translation mine—Trans.]

7. The passage from Galileo to Kepler is the passage from the circle to the ellipse, from what is traced around the One to what is traced around the plural, passage from the Classical to the Baroque: “The rupture that dismisses the collection of all sets—and prevents it from being included among them—institutes a limit, and it is around this limit, it is on the basis of its effect, that the fantastical symphony of the one and the infinite, the singular and the dispersed, shall play out, duality felt and traced in the body, and which shall be expressed subsequently as the duality of power-law and desire, between everything that revolves around the One (paternal function, “union” in a community, “unity” of action) and what evolves, instead, on the side of the plural—or of the plurien—(sexual relations where the bodies are at least two in number, whatever it is that goes unknown for them; schizophrenia, in which the body breaks into pieces, is multiplied).” Daniel Sibony, “L’infini et la castration,” Scilicet, no. 4 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), 82. [Translation mine—Trans.] I suppress the author’s italics and add my own in order to assimilate the circle and the ellipse to the two terms the author opposes.

8. Eugenio Battisti, Rinascimento e barocco (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 276. [Translation mine—Trans.]

9. Battisti, Rinascimento e barocco, 278. [Translation mine—Trans.]

10. Gérard Genette, “L’or tombe sous le fer,” in Figures (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 33. [Translation mine—Trans.]