REFLECTIONS ON BAROQUE.

By Robert Harbison. London: Reaktion Books. 2000. [pound]19.95

This complex and stimulating book explains Baroque, 'the first style to be diffused across the world to a wide range of non-European cultures', as a total cultural entity. Covering architecture, painting, poetry, music, natural science, and new forms of piety, Harbison writes compellingly on topics as varied as Milton's Paradise Lost, St Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, Monteverdi, Handel, Pope's Dunciad, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and the Sacred Heart.

Harbison defines Baroque as 'striving after simulations of energetic movement' in nine chapters, beginning with 'The Case for Disruption', followed by 'The View from Above', where an account of Sicilian Baroque cities contains the bizarre claim that "The nearest thing to Noto in England is probably Blandford Forum in Dorset'. The chapter on 'The End of Heroism' draws thrilling analogies between Mozart and the Bavarian interiors of the Asam brothers, showing how all 'have unexpected depths below nonchalant surfaces'. 'The World as Scenery' contrives to include Congreve, Pope, Bibiena, Piranesi, Soane, Gothic novels, Venice as scenery, and Vanbrugh.

The twentieth-century chapter similarly includes Beardsley, Guimard, Constructivism, T. S. Eliot, Saarinen, a 1955 Cadillac, Coop Himmelblau, and Gehry. Perhaps this indigestion derives from Harbison's definition of Baroque as the 'distortion of classical models and norms'. Yet Bernini, studying antique architecture, did not know he was 'Baroque', seeing himself as simply working in the Classical tradition. William Chambers, called 'Neoclassical' today, would not have recommended his pupils to study Bernini in 1774 if he had considered him a Baroque distorter of classical models. It would have been helpful to have included a consideration of Baroque elements in classical antiquity, a topic to which a few lines are devoted towards the end of the book. But the only serious irritation is the illustrations, reproduced in dismal, inky sepia.