Introduction：Baroque Culture as a Concept of Epoch————

   The baroque, then, is a historical concept. It encompasses, approximately,
the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, having its center of greater
intensity and fuller significance between 1605 and 1650. If this zone of dates
refers specifically to Spanish history, it is also valid (with slight adjustments)
for other European countries. In Italy, however, with such names as Botero and
Tasso, its beginning could be set earlier, at least in some aspects of art, politics,
and literature.

   I do not, therefore, use the term baroque to designate morphological or stylistic
concepts, repeatable in culture, that are chronologically and geographically disparate.
One may certainly establish certain relations between external, purely
formal elements of the baroque in seventeenth-century Europe and elements
present in very different historical epochs in unrelated cultural areas. A culture
always has borrowings and legacies from previous and distant cultures. Let us
recall the considerable and curious harvest of iconographic terms that Southeast
Asia contributed to the European Middle Ages, as some of Baltrusaitis' ingenious
studies have revealed.2 But these antecedents and influences do not define a
culture. They tell us, at most, that a culture of a given period is open to exotic
currents that are geographically mobile. Examples include the introduction of
the cupola in pre-Roman Catalan art3 or the title basileus that was used for some
Asturian or British kings.4 Perhaps we are required, in characterizing a culture,
to point out the dependence on a distant tradition (as with Mozarabic art, which
has a Visigothic base with Islamic elements;5 or the Brahmanic metaphors that
until the eighteenth century were used to express the European estatist conception
of society).6 But tnese cases do not represent intracultural kinship so much as
isolated contributions that are integrated into different complexes. Neither the
mere coincidence in the utilization of separate elements nor the repetition of
formal elements whose connection occurs in very different systems can serve as
a basis for defining cultures spanning centuries and geographic regions of very
diverse characteristics. These morphological correlations, established in abstrac-