| Summary: | This paper seeks to qualify D.Souiller’s unorthodox proposition that the baroque style in literature can and should be best defined outside any reference to the visual arts. Looking afresh at the method followed by J.Rousset in his pioneering book published in 1954, one realizes that he too had tried – thought unavowedly – to minimize the role of the fine arts in establishing the criteria of the baroque work in literature and drama; with the result that a fully satisfying definition of the baroque style was not reached until 1958, after Rousset had overcome his reluctance to learn first from Bernini’s fountain at the Piazza Navona before turning to literature. In the same line of though, this paper demonstrates that, at this stage, a definition of mannerism applicable to the arts of language can only proceed from a close scrutiny of the mannerist works of art produced first in Italy, then in the rest of western Europe in the course of the XVIth century. Though the category of literary baroque can now function autonomously, returning to the visual arts, whenever necessary, is still, willy-nilly, the surest key to a correct assessment of the crucial differences existing between the baroque and the mannerist styles in literature and the theatre.
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