Nietzsche’s Conception of the ‘Baroque Style'

In 1878, almost immediately after the publication of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche started taking notes on a variety of subjects related to art for a book, which he once tentatively titled “the New Overview” (der neue Umblick). While this project never saw the light of day, it marks an important step in the development of his mature views on art. Some of its ideas were integrated in the two follow-ups to Human, All Too Human, while others were expanded upon some ten years later in The Case of Wagner (Montinari, 1985). In these notes, Nietzsche attempts to sharpen his criticisms of Wagner and, in parallel, to formulate a new positive perspective on art and its historical possibilities. It is to do so that he borrows the notion of “baroque style” from his colleague in Basel, the art historian Jacob Burckhardt. Burckhardt introduced the notion in the realm of art history in his famous 1855 guide to Italian art, The Cicerone, to describe what he saw as the decadence of the classical style in the late Renaissance, under the impulse of the Counter-Reformation (Stenzel, 2012). Nietzsche applied the notion to Wagner and to the history of music, and injected it with a new ambivalence. The baroque style was, to him, indeed a decadent continuation of the classical style, but it was also its only possible continuation. As such, it retained some merit. It will be the object of my presentation to compare Burckhardt’s and Nietzsche’s use of the concept of a baroque style in art and to examine its use as a foil for the latter’s developing aesthetic perspective. In doing so, I hope to highlight the ever-present ambivalence of Nietzsche’s judgments on art, which is sometimes underplayed in later, more polemical texts.