Baroque to Neo-Baroque: Curves of an Art Historical Concept

In recent decades there has been a notable revival of scholarly discourse on the baroque. The term "baroque" emerged in the mid-eighteenth century as a pejorative designation for the dominant style of European art produced from c. 1600 to c. 1750. The critical valences the term possessed from the outset have endowed the "baroque" with an afterlife in art history quite distinct from that of the Renaissance and one that it is now particularly timely to interrogate. This conference will bring together eminent and emerging scholars of seventeenth-century European art, colonial Latin American art, and modern and contemporary art to discuss and reassess the "baroque" and the ways in which this concept is currently in play across these diverse subfields.