The Council for Cultural Co-operation retained this theme in 1998 following an exploratory meeting held in Bavaria (Irsee bei Kaufbeuren) in June 1987.

The Baroque is presented indeed not only in the form of a structuring aesthetic of the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, but it moreover concerns the quasi-totality of the European territories, of cities and villages and remote mountain territories, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, from the Latin to the Slavic world.

goals and objectives

The principal objective of this route is to enable the discovery of the expressions of the Baroque in Europe and to offer a global and diversified reading of this key moment in the history of Europe. This aesthetic is indeed articulated by several modes of expression and in various disciplines by means of a phenomenon of local re-appropriation that gives rise to distinct trends, geographically identifiable. It is a question of understanding the modes of exchanges on a continent that is restructured simultaneously on religious, political, artistic and scientific levels. A number of men of the Baroque travelled following the Roman Church, slightly like the missionaries of architectural, craftsmanship or musical know-how, changing, as they did during the Renaissance, the proportions of cities, the modes of communication among inhabitants, such as the perception of space and time.

It is also a question of making it possible to rediscover the Baroque of the Central and Eastern European countries. It is indeed not by chance that after 1989 one of the first initiatives common to the countries of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire - but also to the Baltic States, those of the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Lithuania, Poland, Belarus) - was the launching of common museum initiatives and that the effort to restore the patrimony was initially often related to the religious patrimony and the civil baroque.

development

angel - caryatid Peisey-Nancroix, Savoy. Photo Savoy Administration

The interest in the topic of the Baroque brought about many regional and national initiatives, and even transborder ones (for example, the Year of the Baroque in Central Europe). The route was truly founded on a scientific plan during a conference in Queluz (Portugal) in November 1988. Meetings following the publications took place in Austria, France, Malta, Italy, Romania and the Czech Republic. Two illustrated guides on the Baroque were published in Slovenia and Lithuania. Seminars were organized on the topic of stucco work in Central Europe in Neuburg-an-der-Donau (1990) and Traustein (1991) in Bavaria, in Roveredo in Switzerland (1993), in Graz in Austria (1994) and Eichstätt in Germany (1997). Since 1997, the European Institute of the Cultural Routes contributed to put into an operational network all the actors concerned. A series of eight meetings proceeded during the Hungarian millennium (2000-2001) in a number of towns in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, as well as Serbia.

The theme of the Baroque included the related topic of the "Artists of the Lakes", adopted in 1994 by the Culture Committee. This axis relates to the migration - mainly during the baroque period - of artists and craftsmen from the area of the lakes between Como (Italy) and Lugano (Switzerland) towards other countries of Europe, particularly Russia. The actions undertaken relate to research (symposium), cultural tourism (guides, signposting ...), the conservation and valorisation of the architectural and artistic heritage.

A preparatory meeting with a network of the baroque was held in Malta at the end of 1994 and the meetings in Lithuania (1996) and Germany (1997) enabled the progress of the structuring of the network. A series of publications, as well as a newsletter, have since been proposed by the University of La Vallette.

Council of Trente. Eger Library, Hungary.
Photo MTP

european importance of the theme

The baroque movement is one of Europe's most significant cultural movements. "For two centuries a Europe without real borders or antagonistic blocks found itself unified in its diversity by artistic phenomena of a considerable breadth: born in Rome with the Counter-Reformation at the end of the 16th century, the Baroque will be diffused as a true powder trail throughout Europe". This movement extended from "Sicily to Bohemia, from Malta to Piedmont, from Spain to Poland and the Ukraine, from Slovenia to Bavaria; there is hardly any European region that has been able to lastingly escape the dynamics of the baroque! Even nations whose Protestant religious mentality seemed to withdraw from the ways of the Baroque knew in their own way a baroque effusion: it is the case of France ... of Anglican England, or of the United Calvinist Provinces ... " (Alain Roy). This theme made it possible to establish co-operation with other organisations: the Latin Union and UNESCO (Programme: Spaces of the Baroque, World Atlas of the Baroque).

current relevance of the topic

In addition to the influence of baroque aesthetic on certain tendencies in contemporary visual arts and design, baroque monuments were the subject of restoration and rediscovery in Central and Eastern European countries, where the Catholic faith regained its rights after the end of communist regimes. This route makes it possible to contribute more to inter-religious dialogue. Such a route indeed recalls the history of the ruptures and continuities that led Europe from the Reform to the Second Reform or Counter-Reformation.