The restless form, the alternating rhythm, the irregularity, the shipwreck of the senses, the exaltation of the feast, the theater of existence: this is the Baroque. A cultural phenomenon that crosses the seventeenth century and gives rise to our modernity. Here science is born and the primacy of consciousness is affirmed.

It is the magical moment of Art. A vivifying fever that leads princes and sovereigns to become promoters of a great pictorial and literary, urbanistic and architectural renewal. Things triumph. Collectors and patrons encourage the most diverse genres. To this extraordinary era, to all its artists and the influence they have exerted and still exert on artistic production, the great exhibition BAROQUE is dedicated. The Grand Theater of Ideas organized by the Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì at the Museo Civico San Domenico from February 21 to June 28, 2026.

The exhibition, born from a detailed and in-depth study, aims to provide a comprehensive view of Baroque culture: the role of Rome and European courts, the protagonists who shaped its forms, the role of the commissions that supported its

development, and the strategies of representation of power that determined it. To fully understand its origins, the journey will start with a comparison with the representation of drama in the Hellenistic age and the spatial experiments of late Mannerism, passing through Caravaggio's radical realism that leads the gaze to a more intimate dimension.