The era known as High Baroque covered the period c. 1625-75 and is best represented by its leading artist, Gianlorenzo Bernini. In High Baroque all the visual arts - painting, sculpture and architecture - are forged together to make ensembles intended to exert an overwhelming emotional impact (e.g. the crossing of St. Peter's and the Cornaro Chapel, Sta. Maria della Vittoria, Rome). Reposeful balance is forsaken for dynamic movement and the integrity of individual materials is subsumed into the all-important illusionism calculated to impress upon the faithful the actuality of the spiritual experiences of the Catholic saints represented before, above and all around them. After Bernini, the greatest architect of the period was Borromini, and this was also an age when some of the greatest masterpieces of illusionistic ceiling painting were executed, the leading artists being Pietro da Cortona, Lanfranco, Baciccio and, slightly later, Andrea Pozzo. Contemporaneous with these exponents of the High Baroque, however, was a continuance of the Classical strand, characterized by the work of Algardi, Sacchi and Maratta.

Although Baroque art had its origins in the Catholic church the possibilities for propaganda afforded by the involving and illusionistic techniques of the Baroque style were not lost on secular patrons. The Barberini family employed Cortona to proclaim their divine right to the papacy in his ceiling painting for their palace in Rome, while Colbert, chief minister to Louis XIV of France, was instrumental in the adoption of Baroque in France for the sole purpose of exalting the reign of Louis XIV. Consequently, Versailles is one of the most grandiose of Baroque palaces. Indeed, French Baroque is, by virtue of its use chiefly as political propaganda, characterized by a certain pomposity. With its codification by Lebrun, the director of the French Academy, it also moved more towards a rather ossified Classicism based on teachable rules and precepts derived largely from the paintings of Poussin who had spent almost his entire active life in Rome.

Baroque art soon spread through the other Catholic countries of Europe. Rubens in Flanders produced religious and secular works with equal success, while in Spain religious art reached new heights of religious fervour and in South Germany and Austria the beginning of the 18th century saw some of the most remarkably elaborate and overwhelming church architecture ever erected (e.g. Neumann and Hildebrandt). Because of its base in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Baroque was resisted in Protestant countries such as Holland and Britain, although Rembrandt in Holland and the painter John Thornhill and architect Vanbrugh in Britain are exceptions. During the 18th century, Baroque gradually gave way to the lighter, more decorative Rococo style.

A secondary use of the term 'baroque', usually with a lower-case 'b', designates art of any era that demonstrates the salient characteristics of art of the Baroque period. Thus, Hellenistic art is sometimes described as the baroque phase of Greek art because of its tendency to dynamic movement, exaggerated naturalism and overt displays of artistic virtuosity.

In Britain, until the beginning of the 20th century, baroque was also used as a term of abuse to describe anything that was considered overdone.

Haskell, F., Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque, 1980; Martin, J.R., Baroque, London, 1977; Montagu, J., Roman Baroque Sculpture: The Industry of Art, New Haven and London, 1989; Wittkower, R., Studies in the Italian Baroque, London, 1975; Wittkower, R., Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, New Haven and London, 1982