From its beginnings in the seventeenth century, the Baroque embraced the whole of Catholic Europe, and infiltrated Protestant England, Orthodox Russia and even Muslim Turkey. Architecture, art, poetry, music, natural science and new forms of piety all have their places on the Baroque map. In this surprising reinterpretation of the Baroque, Robert Harbison offers new readings that stress its eccentric and tumultuous forms, in which a destabilized sense of reality is often projected onto the viewer.