‘Not enough Baroque’, Review of: Helen Hills (Hg.), Rethinking the Baroque, Farnham, Ashgate 2011. Originally published in Kunstchronik. Monatsschrift für Kunstwissenschaft, Museumswesen und Denkmalpflege: Mitteilungsblatt des Verbandes Deutscher Kunsthistoriker. ISSN: 2510-7534 (https://doi.org/10.11588/kc.2013.3.81104)

Abstract

Once, when questioned about the originality of Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980), Richard Krautheimer gave one of his rare and atypically acerbic replies: “you obviously haven’t read much Sherlock Holmes”. In many ways the volume discussed here provoked in the reviewer a similar response because, when reading through a number of the ten papers presented in these conference proceedings, he kept thinking: “but what about Argan?”. In this case Giulio Carlo Argan playing Canon Doyle, to Gilles Deleuze’s Eco, the latter’s Le Pli of 1988 to Argan’s brilliant but overlooked essay “La retorica e l’arte barocca” of 1955 which is not cited a single time in this book nor present in the bibliography. Acknowledging the importance of Argan (mentioned only in passing on p. 22) would not make Deleuze’s work appear any less innovative, but it certainly would have helped explain more persuasively the significant shifts in post-war perception and reception of the Baroque that were part of the historical preamble to the appearance of Leibniz et le baroque.