From the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, the Baroque flourished in Europe and its colonies.  This chapter surveys the Baroque arts and the political backdrop against which they developed.

The literature of this period encompassed diverse themes and forms, some familiar yet many new and innovative.  In France, as the monarchy grew increasingly absolutist, the theater entered a golden age.   Cultivating the three classical unities, Corneille and Racine explored destructive human passions in tragedies on historical and mythological subjects; and Molière wrote comedies satirizing religious and bourgeois hypocrisy, often running afoul of clerical and civil authorities.  Set in Germany wracked by the Thirty Years War, Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus tells a picaresque story of spiritual development reminiscent of Cervantes' Don Quixote.  In England, Stuart absolutism clashed with parliamentary claims, and Anglican Protestantism with Puritanism.  During this period, Milton rose to prominence as a poet and humanist intellectual.  After the English Civil War, he served as a Puritan official, his literary career culminating with his blank-verse epics, including Paradise Lost.  During the Restoration, Bunyan continued the Protestant literary tradition with his spiritual allegory, Pilgrim's Progress. Dryden earned notoriety with his plays and satires on public figures, his fortunes rising and falling with the Stuart monarchy.  The Mayflower Compact articulated the principles of Puritan colonial society, which fostered two notable poets: Bradstreet, who wrote about family and faith, and Taylor, who articulated his spiritual struggles.

Baroque artists creatively employed Renaissance techniques, many sharing a fascination with the effects of light and shade on various surfaces.  Bernini's style exemplifies the distinctive exuberance of Italian Baroque, his works for St. Peter's basilica involving bold combinations of painterly, sculptural, and architectural elements.  In Spain, Velásquez produced richly colored royal portraits in which he experimented with Renaissance design principles.  Rejecting Italian exuberance, French artists cultivated classical restraint, employing rational principles codified by Poussin.  Baroque magnificence met French absolutism in Louis XIV's palaces at Versailles, decorated with classical design elements and monumental paintings by Le Brun.  In Catholic Flanders, Rubens developed a colorful, monumental style derived from Michelangelo and Titian and energized with a drama and sensuality all his own.  Rubens' student, Van Dyck, specialized in portraiture, producing images of aristocrats notable for their grace and austerity.  Artists of the Protestant Dutch Republic typically painted middle-class subjects, domestic scenes, landscapes, and still-lifes for bourgeois patrons.  Leyster, Rembrandt, and Vermeer all developed unique approaches to representing the effects of light and shadow, applying those techniques in works ranging from monumental group portraits to intimate interior scenes.  English Baroque found its highest expression in Wren's architectural designs, particularly those for St. Paul's Cathedral, which combined a variety of classical and High Renaissance elements.

The Baroque style persisted in music until the late eighteenth century.  During this period, composers expressed a variety of emotions through melody, pioneered new vocal genres, and decisively freed instrumental music from texts.  The last of these innovations enabled composers to experiment more widely with structure and movement and to create new instrumental forms, including the sonata and concerto.  Originating in the Italian spectaculi, ballet emerged in France as a distinct form, its choreographic principles established by Lully.  Aided by innovations in instrument design, Vivaldi composed works in several genres, most notably the concerto, pioneering programme music and techniques of instrumental coloring.  English Baroque music achieved its highpoint in the work of Purcell, who composed the first English opera, and Handel, who developed the oratorio form partly in response to middle-class taste.

The most important Baroque composer was J. S. Bach.  Combining the influences of Schütz, a notable composer of vocal music, and the famed organist, Buxtehude, Bach developed a style marked by complex harmony, rhythmic drive, and rich polyphonic texture.  He composed vast amounts of choral and instrumental music for a variety of employers; one of the most important of these was the city of Leipzig, which Bach served as Lutheran Cantor.  His works include sacred cantatas and oratorios, books of preludes and fugues for the instruction of students, orchestral pieces, and a summation of the counterpoint tradition, The Art of the Fugue.  Father of many children, four of his sons became influential composers in their own right later in the eighteenth century.

The Baroque Age saw a significant change in the artistic marketplace.  In addition to the traditional aristocratic and ecclesiastical patrons, members of the growing middle class demanded art to suit their taste.  At its least discerning, this taste pushed artists to vulgar extremes.  Even so, the possibility of such extremes was already contained within the Baroque style.  The best Baroque artists expanded the resources of their arts, pioneering new techniques of dramatic composition; the worst applied these techniques with vulgar ostentation, leading the style into a dead end by the mid eighteenth century.  By contrast, Baroque music, which involved some of the most important artistic changes of the age, remained a vital tradition until the late eighteenth century, when it gave way to lighter classical style.