Humanities and Social Sciences

Research in Visual Arts and Design

Lee-Anne Trewartha (PHD Candidate)

Born-Again Baroque: Contemporary Notions of the Historical Bel Composto.

The art of the Baroque has been integral to my research in recent years, with my research focused on exploring the Baroque mentality.  In particular, I have concentrated on Gianlorenzo Bernini’s concept of the Bel Composto (beautiful whole); the ability to construct highly sensory environments through the unity of painting, sculpture and architecture, interacting to create illusions of altered realities and spatial perspectives, aimed at the emotions and senses of its spectator.  In addition, these environments were charged with the depiction of the passions of the soul: fear, love, joy, hate, ecstasy and tragedy, which were also part of the Baroque aesthetic.  Using extravagant, sometimes violent gestures and facial expressions, artists created works containing agitated emotive states; writhing, quasi-sexual forms that captured the transient moment of an emotive climax in all of its theatrical pomp.  

In looking forward, as part of my new research, I wish to explore in greater depth the extreme physical manifestations of emotional states looking at gesture and expression.  The affetti, which describes the engulfing of the entire body as a vehicle of emotional expression, conveying passions of the spirit, is an area of particular interest. As if a sign language for the spirit, making the invisible visible, I wish to explore the affetti and its aesthetic power to both disclose and evoke emotion and to explore how these extreme altered states in art draw such an emotional response from the spectator.  Why do overpowering emotions evoke such pleasure?  Why do we enjoy a tragic film?   Is it the stimulation of primeval tendencies buried deep in our human make-up providing a catalyst to excite our senses, connecting with the deep-rooted undefinable spiritual cent that is so unfathomable?  Is the real beauty not in the images at which we gaze, but instead in the emotion it evokes within us?  With this in mind can we be so bold as to raise the concept of ‘Truth’ or truth in art in the present period of Post-modernism that tells reus there are no absolutes?  

 Looking at the disclosure of emotion through the affetti, deeper issues of affect and questions of ‘Truth’, I wish to address and bring these elements, in respect to Bernini’s concept of the Bel Composto,  to the altered platform of contemporary art practices today and investigate what that model might look like from both a theoretical and a visual expression.

View examples of the artists work (Flash slide show of 6 works)

'Concealment Disclosed'	'Veiled Exposure'	'The Essence of Things'	Imaged Confession Sequence: My Burdens are Light mixed media on canvas/panel 240cm x 160cm dick
Click image to enlarge.