Mannerism, like Gothic, was a universal European phenomenon, even if it was restricted to much narrower circles than the Christian art of the Middle Ages; the baroque, on the other hand, embraces so many ramifications of artistic endeavour, appears in so many different forms in the individual countries and spheres of culture, that it seems doubtful at first sight whether it is possible to reduce them all to a common denominator. The baroque of courtly and Catholic circles is not only wholly different from that of middle-class and Protestant communities, the art of a Bernini and a Rubens not only depicts a different inner and outer world from that of a Rembrandt and a van Goyen, but even within these two great tendencies of style further decisive differentiations make themselves felt. The most important of these secondary subdivisions is that of courtly-Catholic baeroque into a sensualistic, monumental- decorative tendency, in the traditional meaning of "baroque," and into a stricter formally more rigorous "classicistic" style. It is true that the classicistic current is present in the baroque from the very outset and ascertainable as an undercurrent in all the special national forms of baroque art, but it does not become predominant until about 1660, under the particular social and political conditions prevailing at this time in France. Beside these two basic forms of ecclesiastical and courtly baroque, there is in the Catholic countries a naturalistic tendency which comes forward independently at the beginning of the period, and which has its own particular supporters in Caravaggio, Louis Le Nain, and Ribera but is subsequently immanent in the art of all the important masters. Like classicism in France, it finally prevails in Holland, and in these two tendencies the social factors which determine the baroque make their separate impact.

Since the Gothic period, the structure of art styles had become more and more complicated; the tension between the particular spiritual contents became even greater and the different elements of art correspondingly more heterogeneous. Before the baroque it was, however, still possible to say whether the artistic approach of an age was fundamentally naturalistic or anti-naturalistic, making for unity or differentiation, classicistic or anti-classicistic -- but now art no longer has a uniform stylistic character in this strict sense; it is naturalistic and classicistic, analytical and synthetic at the same time. We are the witnesses of the simultaneous blossoming of absolutely opposite tendencies, and we see contemporaries, like Caravaggio and Poussin, Rubens and Hals, Rembrandt and van Dyck, standing in completely different camps.

It is only recently that the art of the seventeenth century, as a whole, has been classified under the name of baroque. When it first emerged in the eighteenth century, the concept was still applied exclusively to those phenomena of art which were felt, in accordance with the prevailing classicistic aesthetic, to be extravagant, confused, and bizarre. Classicism itself was excluded from this concept, which remained predominant almost until the end of the nineteenth century. Not only the attitude of Winckelmann, Lessing, and Goethe, but also that of Burckhardt is still guided fundamentally by the point of view of classicistic theory; they all reject the baroque on account of its "irregularity" and "capriciousness," and they do so in the name of an aesthetic which reckons the unmistakable baroque artist Poussin among its models of perfection. Burckhardt and the later purists, such as Croce, for example, who are incapable of liberating themselves from the often narrow-minded rationalism of the eighteenth century, perceive in the baroque merely the tokens of illogicality and lack of structure, see only the columns and pilasters with nothing to support, the architraves and walls bent and warped as if they were made of pasteboard, the figures illuminated artificially and conducting themselves unnaturally as on a stage, the sculptures with their search for the illusionistic surface effects which belong by rights to painting and which, as the critics have emphasized, should remain its preserve. One would think that the experience of the art of a Rodin, for example, would have been sufficient in itself to make these epigones of classicism realize the meaning and value of such sculpture. But their stipulations against the baroque are also stipulations against impressionism, and when Croce deplores the "bad taste" of baroque art, he represents, at the same time, academic conventions hostile to modern art. . .

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