I'm Doc Baroque: an artist, art historian, and Caravaggio expert with dual MFAs and a PhD in Art History. My blog explores art history through request-driven, educational posts. Unapologetically Indigenous.
Doc Baroque
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They Wanted a Criminal. They Made an Icon.
Oscar Wilde is still most often approached as a writer, but his historical power cannot be understood through literature alone. Wilde was also one of the most visually constructed public figures of the late nineteenth century.
Doc Baroque
Do Not Open That Drawer
A cabinet is never just storage. That is the first lie.
People see doors, drawers, shelves, glass, hinges, handles, escutcheons, locks, feet, cornices, and think the matter is settled.
They Told You Islamic Art Had No Figures. They Were Wrong.
One of the most stubborn misconceptions about Islamic art is that it is an art without images. The claim is easy to repeat, but it cannot survive contact with the works themselves.
LGBTQ+ youth with one accepting adult are 40% less likely to attempt suicide. For Pride Month, I’m quadrupling all Cups of Coffee and donating proceeds to LGBTQ+ youth crisis support and policy work. Pride is care, action, and survival.
buymeacoffee.com/DocBaroque
Ornament Was Never Innocent
Islamic art has often been described through the language of geometry, arabesque, repetition, pattern, ornament, and surface.
The Bowl Was Never Just a Bowl
Islamic art from the seventh century to the present is often introduced through architecture, calligraphy, and manuscript painting, but some of its most revealing cultural meanings were carried by portable objects.
They Called It Melancholy Because Desire Was Too Dangerous
Romanticism gave modern visual culture one of its most enduring figures. This figure is beautiful, wounded, excessive, displaced, and difficult to contain.
The Most Powerful Image in Islamic Art Was a Word
The Qur’an is never only a text in Islamic art. It is revelation understood through recitation, memory, sound, script, material, touch, protection, devotion, and visual honor.
The Eighteenth Century Was Not as Straight as It Looked
Before modern LGBTQ+ identity could be named as a public, social, and political category, desire often had to move through indirection. Eighteenth century European art is filled with this kind of indirection.
Pretty Boys Made Victorian England Panic
In nineteenth century Britain, beauty was never merely beautiful. It could decorate a drawing room, flatter a patron, elevate a poem, or soften the brutality of industrial modernity
