(Want to explore the history of other movements, styles, and schools? Check out our series.)

The Italian Renaissance was a hard act to follow. In its most exceptional years, known as the High Renaissance (c. 1500–1525), masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian forever changed art history by adopting the realism and order of classical Greece and infusing it with unprecedented grace. Contemporary writers held these artists up as creative heroes, memorializing them in biographies. Centuries later, the earliest art historians framed the period as a yardstick by which other styles were to be measured.

Anything that came immediately after the Renaissance was doomed from the start, a challenge exacerbated by the fact that those years saw major religious and political upheaval. When Protestant leader Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church in Germany in 1517—founding a new Christian sect that refocused religious authority on the Bible, instead of the mighty Vatican—the Catholic church decided that it needed new ways to keep believers securely in their fold. A Catholic Counter-Reformation began, amending some of the church’s spiritual traditions and reinvigorating believers with art that directly appealed to their emotions.

This new church-sanctioned style was intended to seize congregants’ attention, through realism, dynamic movement, and ornamentation that bordered on the excessive. The evenly illuminated Biblical scenes of the Renaissance were replaced with dramatic contrasts of darkness and light, compositions lost their even symmetry, and buildings were no longer serenely white marble but gilded instead with bronze and gold.

Naysaying critics gave 17th- and 18th-century European art a mocking moniker, one that has clung to it to this day.

An irregularly shaped pearl

Baroque was originally a term reserved for jewelers and referred to irregularly shaped pearls that stood out from the smooth and uniformly round norm. Called barocco in Portuguese, perles baroques in French, and scaramazze in Italian, these unusual gemstones were coarse, uneven, and imperfect.

Slowly, the word evolved into an adjective used to describe things outside the jeweler’s workshop. An 18th-century French dictionary defined baroque as anything irregular, bizarre, unequal, strange, or ridiculous. As the years progressed, baroque was used to describe the arts as well.

The term was linked to the arts in 1757 when French writer Antoine-Joseph Pernety described it as “that which is not in accord with the rules of proportions, but follows caprice” in his Dictionnaire Portatif de Peinture, Sculpture, et Gravure. “It is said of taste and design [that] the figures of this picture are baroque; the composition is in a baroque taste, to mean that it is not in good taste.”

Art writer Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy expanded upon this newly coined art term in 1788 when he defined baroque in Encyclopédie Méthodique as “an architectural style that is highly adorned and tormented.”

Baroque was no longer a designation for rare pearls by this point. It was a stylistic classification for the garishly bizarre.

Jacob Burckhardt, a Swiss 19th-century scholar and one of the founders of art history, began propagating the idea that the highly ornate baroque style was the symptom of a decaying Renaissance. His student, art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, put these ideas in writing in his seminal book, Renaissance and Baroque (1888).

“Renaissance art is the art of calm and beauty,” Wölfflin wrote. “Baroque aims at a different effect. It wants to carry us away with the force of its impact, immediate and overwhelming.” Baroque architecture fell under special attack in the book. “The Baroque required broad, heavy, massive forms,” the scholar explained. “Elegant proportions disappeared and buildings tended to become weightier until sometimes the forms were almost crushed by the pressure. The grace and lightness of the Renaissance were gone.”

Wölfflin popularized using Baroque to describe the period of art between 1600 and 1750, and by the late 19th century, it was a widely accepted umbrella term, not an insult.

Who exactly is “Baroque”?

The Baroque label covers a century and a half of artistic production, across the European continent. It includes the monumental altarpieces of Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, the elongated religious figures of Spanish painter El Greco, the dramatically lit paintings of Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and the quiet domestic interiors of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

Since the term encompasses such a broad range of styles, modern scholars debate whether it is adequately descriptive. Certain sub-categories have emerged to make sense of the period. For example, Flemish artists of that time—such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Anthony van Dyck, and Judith Leyster—are considered part of the Dutch Golden Age. The late Baroque, characterized by extreme ornamentation and theatricality, is called Rococo. And other scholars have adopted the term Early Modern.

It’s telling that even one of the most exuberant, fancy, and florid movements should follow the same narrative as nearly every other major movement. First, it’s seen as too avant-garde—insult-worthy, even. Then, it becomes the guiding principle for its era’s most talented artists. Finally, it becomes staid, standard, the thing of textbooks. Today, what was once considered “highly adorned and ornamented,” is now old hat. As Cogsworth, the clock-shaped butler from the Disney film Beauty and the Beast, says: “If it’s not Baroque, don’t fix it.”