Southern Baroque Art

1924. These essays on Baroque Art constitute more than merely a book of music and art criticism. They are an attempt at a recreation, through a consideration of its artistic expression, of the civilization of seventeenth and eighteenth century Spain and Italy. The more famous names are deliberately omitted, the artists considered being the many lesser masters about whom the critical exegesis has not yet raged, and whose names are for the most part unfamiliar even to those with some pretensions to a knowledge of the period. It is through his analysis of the common motive force which actuated the productions of these men that Mr. Sitwell has arrived at an interpretation of the art and the spiritual life of the time to which a book of purely formal criticism might perhaps never have brought him. The book is in this way complementary to all the existing literature on the subject, and it provides an extremely valuable and definitive study of Baroque Art both for the student and the general reader. The wonders that the author describes are confirmed by the plates with which the work is illustrated.