Waldir BARRETO; Thais CAREZZATO

Original title: Imaginari: a presença ausente no Barroco

Published in Games from Antiquity to Baroque

Keywords: Absence, Baroque, Imagination, Presence.

This essay presents an introductory and speculative approach to the paradigmatic change that occurred between the 16th and 17th centuries in the artistic treatment of the idea of “presence in absence”. Based on some comparative categories by Heinrich Wölfflin and semiotics by Charles Peirce, taken as merely functional tools and not directive concepts, it proposes the Baroque as the starting point of a historical process of relativization, opening and expansion of the space constituting a work of art.