this paper describes some aspects of Lacan’s interpretation on the Baroque and his conception of the links between word and image. to do this I distinguish three different readings of seventeenth-century culture. the first, which belongs to the first period of his teaching, is organized from what Massimo recalcati called an “aesthetics of emptiness”. the second of his lectures, given at the seminar The object of psychoanalysis , is structured from the conceptualization of the gaze. the third, established in the seminar Encore, is centered on the body and the reflections on the real.