Castelfranci, Aurelio Musi presents "Baroque Melancholy"

Friday 23 February in Castelfranci the presentation of the book "Baroque Melancholy" by Aurelio Musi.

The book speaks of an era of decadence, of futile and vain theatricality, of ornament without substance: the Baroque appeared for a long time as a transition age from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, marked, like every transitional period, by a aesthetic and moral crisis. Returning to the studies that, over time, have highlighted its specificity, Aurelio Musi instead shows, in these pages, how the Baroque was an era of conflict that is located directly at the roots of the Modern. An age in which disorder seeks the path to order, in an unstable balance between deception and truth, the Baroque appears as an era of melancholy in which the feeling of life is inseparable from a profound death instinct, from the perception of a shipwreck in the things of the world and in the psychic life of its inhabitants. The melancholic soul of the century is revealed in the stories of melancholic men and women that are told here: those of Robert Burton, Cervantes, Descartes, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, of women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi and of nuns closed in the solitude of convents, as well as it is found intact in the alternation between harmony and counterpoint typical of the music of the period, made up of chromaticisms, polyphonies, canons and imitations. Crossing every field of European artistic and intellectual history, Aurelio Musi composes the fascinating portrait of an era full of contrasts and modernity, marked by the perennial tension between transience and dream.

Aurelio Musi, historian, journalist, official of merit of the Republic, member of various Academies, taught at the University of Salerno and in American universities.