Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (review)

What do Pietro da Cortona's fresco Divine Providence, on the ceiling of Rome's Barberini Palace (1633–9), Stephen Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), and the computer game Phantasmogoria (1995) have in common? As Angela Ndalianis argues in this engrossing book, a great deal. Here, she compellingly and convincingly shows that the structural and aesthetic principles underlying seventeenth-century baroque artworks permeate late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century popular culture, where the "neo-baroque" remediates the conventional forms of the earlier period in response to the ever-widening opportunities presented by developing technologies. Attending to both periods with expertise and elan, Ndalianis leads the reader through an exciting and burgeoning landscape peopled by seemingly disparate items, from Bernini's Ecstacy of St. Teresa to The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman theme park ride in Orlando's Universal Studios. In five substantial chapters, Ndalianis juxtaposes close readings of these contemporary and early modern forms in order both to demonstrate the continuities between baroque and neo-baroque aesthetics (and thus the indebtedness of contemporary entertainment to the spectacles of the earlier age), and to locate contemporary and seventeenth-century works within the specific historical, cultural, and technological frameworks from which they emerge. Always alert to the unique and far different circumstances informing baroque and neo-baroque works, Ndalianis manages to pull together a vast pool of materials from high and low culture that aptly and abundantly illustrate her point. The result is a cogent review of the basic tenets of baroque aesthetics, and a fascinating treatment of contemporary media that stresses their affiliations with earlier movements while insisting upon their radically different means to similar ends.

Ndalianis is equally at ease discussing contemporary computer games and the elaborate decorative programs of seventeenth-century baroque monuments. Following a slightly over-long introduction (in which the origins of this book in Ndalianis's dissertation seem particularly apparent as she surveys the relevant criticism on her subject), Nadalianis moves chapter by chapter through a number of characteristics ordinarily associated with the baroque artwork (most memorably, by Heinrich Wölfflin, upon whom Ndalianis relies) to explore the ways in which contemporary entertainment incorporates and enfolds those tenets, on the one hand, and adapts and revises them, on the other. Thus a discussion of Versailles's Apollonian fountains (each of which qualifies the previous as the spectator experiences them in turn, until collectively they reference the supreme power of Louis XIV) explains the baroque principles of polycentrism and seriality, which Ndalianis then traces in the "Alien" franchise (comprised of four films and numerous comic book adaptations). Ndalianis considers the principle of intertextuality and the baroque fascination with labyrinths in connection with Sam Raimi's self-conscious intertextuality in his films, Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, as manifested in Cortona's Barberini ceiling, with its allusions to earlier baroque frescoes, and finally in the computer games Doom and Doom II. A long discussion of Phantasmogoria explores the continuities between hypertexts and "colonizations" of cyberspace and seventeenth-century cartography, arguing that the "theatres of the world" embodied in baroque wunderkammers predict the virtual spaces and other worlds now accessible through computers. The baroque and neo-baroque delight in spectacle and valorization of virtuosity are explored in a chapter on seventeenth-century quadratura paintings (such as Andrea Pozzo's ceiling fresco The Glory of St. Ignazio, 1691–1694) and Spielberg's Jurassic Park, including a discussion of the Universal Studios theme park ride Terminator 2: 3D Battle across Time, where, as Ndalianis shows, the multimedia component of contemporary entertainment forms replicates and revises the baroque principle of the unity of the arts. Finally, the book concludes by examining the spiritual and magical aspects of baroque illusionism and neo-baroque special effects in a chapter on Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1645–52), baroque automatons, and the science fiction films Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Matrix. In the contemporary neo-baroque, as Ndalianis illustrates, the baroque incorporation of scientific principles and technological...