The greatest examples of the style exemplify the "total work of art" or gesamtkunstwerk, combining sculpture, architecture, painting (and sometimes music, too) and are thus immovable. But while the curators cannot transport the Palace of Versailles to South Kensington or Bernini's Cornaro Chapel, with his ecstatic St Teresa, or Borromini's church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, they can do so by proxy. Versailles, the ultimate Baroque palace, is present in numerous vistas and designs for its gardens, there is a Gobelins tapestry and a cabinet made for Louis XIV, the quintessential Baroque monarch, and a breathtaking state bed given by the Sun King to the Swedish ambassador. Rome, the birthplace of the Baroque, is present in architectural drawings by both Bernini and Borromini, and so on.

This, though, is the familiar side to the style. Some of the most interesting of the 200 exhibits lurk on its wider shores, literally so in the case of the items from South America and the Far East where the Baroque was spread by Portuguese and Spanish colonists. A bizarre, free-standing sculpture from Goa c.1675 showing the child Jesus as the Good Shepherd among a riot of foliage and a 17th-century Mexican "Bucchero" vase with serpentine Florentine mounts are proof that colonial artists were just as uninhibited as their European peers.

But there are objects of delight, too, proof that the Baroque was not solely concerned with pomp. Take, for instance, the bow and arrow made from gilded papier-mâché that were theatrical props as opera itself underwent an unprecedented flowering, or the extraordinary sleigh carved in the workshop of Gabriel Grupello in Germany around 1710. This confection is a chariot mounted on runners with six mythological figures draped about it from prow to stern. It is wildly impractical and may never have seen the snow but beneath the bombast it nevertheless displays a sense of joyousness in both its creator and his patron.

Although the Baroque is too big and too amorphous a subject to encompass in a single exhibition (the curators' chosen end date of 1800 is also 50 years or more later than many would put it) this is nevertheless a rich show in every sense. It also shoots down a particularly venerable canard: that one of the reasons the Baroque never gained much more than a foothold on these shores was that it was simply uncongenial to our phlegmatic northern tastes. We might be ready to like it at last.