Reviews of Helen Hills (ed.) Rethinking the Baroque (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011):
‘This book’s greatest contribution is that it prompts historians of Baroque art and architecture to look again at the term and its implications, and with the aid of Deleuze’s ‘fold’ reassess the period through the prism of its very construction and history as an archive worthy of study.’ Burlington Magazine Dec 2012.
The baroque – the concept, not the period – has had a paradoxical destiny in the last few decade. Prudently shunned by academic historians of seventeenth-century European art and culture, it reemerges regularly – if uncritically – in textbooks and art exhibitions, on the one hand, and as an adjective in discussion of contemporary, postmodern culture on the other. Rethinking the Baroque from a serious, scholarly point of view, is thus a well-needed enterprise, and this collection by some of the most important thinkers of our time marvelusly tackles the task. Renaissance Quarterly vol.65 n.1 (Spring 2012) 212-214.