Giovan Francesco Buonamico - a flâneur in Baroque style

Abstract

The twentieth-century German critic Walter Benjamin, who studied the Baroque temperament in depth, provides us with his famous figure of the flâneur, the stroller who wanders about, along unending and intersecting city roads and arcades. In this wandering habit, the flâneur embodies the essential Baroque principle of roaming without a specific destination in mind, without a definitive point of entry or exit in his physically executed arabesque. Well before Benjamin's time, Giovan Francesco Buonamico bad betrayed the same Baroque tendency in both his writings and his extensive European travels, executing the art of wandering as an end in itself. [excerpt]