The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste

In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Rome, a rhetorical war raged among intellectuals in the attack and defense of language, literature, and the visual arts. Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste examines the cultural upheaval that accompanied attacks on the baroque predilection for ornament, extended visual metaphors, grandiloquence, and mystical rapture. Rome's Academy of the Arcadians emerged as a potent social and cultural force in the final decade of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century it provided a setting for arguments on artistic taste and reforms in literature and religion. This book describes the waning days of the baroque and ends with an analysis of the Parrhasian Grove, the Arcadian garden on the slopes of Rome's Janiculum Hill.

• Explains how and why the baroque style died
• Provides the first extensive description and explanation for the elusive concept of 'good taste' in the early eighteenth century
• Numerous works of art are scrutinized in terms of both baroque visual rhetoric and the newer rhetoric of good taste