Baroque Style

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In the arts, Baroque is both a period and the style that dominated it. The Baroque style used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, oil painting, literature, and music. The style started around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe. In music, the Baroque applies to the final period of dominance of imitative counterpoint, where different voices and instruments echo each other but at different pitches, sometimes inverting the echo, and even reversing thematic material. The popularity and success of the "Baroque" was encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and expressing triumphant power and control. Baroque palaces are built around an entrance sequence of courts, anterooms, grand staircases, and reception rooms of sequentially increasing magnificence. In similar profusions of detail, art, music, architecture, and literature inspired each other in the "Baroque" cultural movement as artists explored what they could create from repeated and varied patterns.