baroque art

In the twilight of Renaissance civilization, a significant idea began to gain ground: Beauty did not so much spring from balanced proportion. but from a sort of torsion, a restless reaching out for something lying beyond the mathematical rules that govern the physical world. Hence Renaissance equilibrium was followed by the restless agitation of Mannerism. But for this change to occur in the arts, the world had to be seen as less ordered and geometrically obvious. Ptolemy’s model of the universe: based on the perfection of the circle, seemed to embody the Classical ideals of proportion. Even Galileo’s model, in which the earth was shifted from the center of the universe and made to revolve around the sun, did not disturb this most ancient idea of the perfection of the spheres: But with Kepler’s planetary model, in which the earth revolves along an ellipse of which the sun is one of the foci, this image of spherical perfection was thrown into crisis. This was not because Kepler’s model of the cosmos did not obey mathematical laws, but because a visual sense no longer resembled the “Pythagorean” perfection of a system of concentric spheres.

- Umberto Eco