The baroque, as I theorize it, be it as a stylistic marker or period in art history, may be difficult to recognize for those who thought they knew it well. When used in the way I do here, has not the baroque burst out of its boundaries in such a way as to diminish its descriptive value and hence its usefulness as a concept of either criticism or periodization? Indeed, when the concept seems simultaneously to engage with periods after the traditionally recognized historical baroque and to encompass phenomena lacking the traits commonly associated with the term, what remains of it at all?I argue that the principal theoretical value of the term "baroque" derives from its relation as an aesthetic category to the historical period we call modernity. The historical baroque, I claim, owes its distinct fascination with certain aesthetic traits—in particular those of anamorphosis, mise en abîme, and trompe l'oeil, but also the juxtaposition of disparate terms (coincidentia oppositorum), the proliferation of décor, and a conscious embrace of artifice—to its privileged position at the dawn of the modern age. The organizing logic of that age is a theatrical one, in which the space of representation is severed into a screen of appearances and the truth presumed to reside behind it. It is this basic problem of thought that underlies the multiple strategies that baroque aesthetic production puts into play.A problem in recent criticism has been to distinguish the apparent ideological value of these various techniques, both during the historical baroque and in the more recent manifestations of baroque style that have come to be identified as neobaroque. One tendency has been to identify the historical baroque with a state-organized attempt to deploy spectacle for the purpose of constructing pliable citizens, while associating the more recent Neobaroque as an opposing tendency, born of the periphery, that works to undermine traditional colonial power structures.The trouble with this tendency is that it overlooks both subversive tenets in seventeenth-century European cultural production and aspects of contemporary baroque style that do not display any such critical value. Lois Parkinson Zamora's and Monika Kaup's designation of New World Baroque in place of neobaroque does much to correct the historical imbalance of the traditional terminology, but is not intended as a way of clarifying the ideological difficulties that nestle in both terms.In response to these issues, I came to propose the central terminological distinction in this book. As many have also argued, I see baroque and neobaroque aesthetics as historical bookends to the modern period. For negotiating between their old and new world manifestations, I happily accept Parkinson Zamora's and Kaup's distinction. What I add here is a new distinction between modalities or strategies of baroque aesthetic production.In that sense, and against José Antonio Maravall, for example, I do not believe one can generalize about the ideological value of the baroque period in its entirety, although one can certainly identify tendencies, as I do. Instead, we need to see baroque aesthetics on all fronts as engaging with the problem of thought endemic to modernity, and doing so through a deployment of at least one of two strategies: the major or the minor.This distinction frees us to examine both historical baroque and neobaroque phenomena in their full complexity, without, on the one hand, confounding historical periods and geographical tendencies or, on the other hand, confusing centralizing ideological discourses with others that work ironically to undermine those same discourses.The concept of major and minor strategies, then, is key to a non-reductive historical understanding of both baroque and neobaroque aesthetics. This historical understanding, in turn, should grasp the aesthetic production of the baroque, both new and old, in relation to modernity's core problem of thought: the theatrical dissociation between appearances and the truth they hide. For it is ultimately the theater of truth—both the truth that theatrical appearances claim to hide, and the theater that truth depends on for its appearance—that makes sense of the baroque, both old and new.