Baroque
The Baroque era began in Rome, and then spread to the rest of Europe
It included the 17th and most of the 18th centuries.
In general, it took all the innovations of the Renaissance and combined them with the drama of Mannerism.
Having learned all the Renaissance techniques, Baroque artists could represent the human form convincingly from any angle, they could portray the most complex forms in perfect perspective, and could reproduce almost anything in the seen world realistically
The main differences between the Baroque and Renaissance art are that Renaissance art is rational and static, while Baroque art is emotional and dynamic
It’s useful to recall and compare Michelangelo’s David and Bernini’s David to draw the distinction.
Baroque took on a different character in each of its major geographic locations.
But in general, we could say that Baroque art is characterized by strong emotion and energy; dramatic lighting, scale and balance
In essence, it was a great deal more intense, and more theatrical than the art of the Renaissance.
The major artists of the Italian Baroque were the Painter Caravaggio, and the sculptor Bernini
The most renowned artist of the Flemish Baroque was Peter Paul Rubens.
The three great masters of the Dutch Baroque were Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer
Finally, Velasquez was the most gifted artist of the Spanish Baroque.
Premise (from webpages)
- Encompasses the period between 1600 and 1750
(17th and most of the 18th centuries) - Began in Rome, then spread to the rest of Europe.
- In general, it took all the innovations of the Renaissance and combined them with the drama of Mannerism.
- In its efforts to counter the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church encouraged visual forms that appealed to the senses and excited religious feeling. Artists portrayed miracles with drama and realism.
- The central theme of Baroque art and literature is the conflict between reason with passion.
- Idealism of the High Renaissance gave way to Baroque realism and an art that is often look ornate, dynamic, with greater color saturation and more contrast between light and shadow; by comparison Renaissance styles look relatively static.
- The Baroque diversity in subject matter and style is most apparent in Dutch art which includes a style of art that might be characterized as Realist art, focusing on the atmospheric effects of dramatic shadow and lighting.
Timeline:
1543 to 1565 - Council of Trent
16051621 Papacy of Paul V (Borghese)
1609 Galileo invents telescope
1620Francis Bacon writes Novum Organum
16231644 Papacy of Urban VIII (Barberini)
1637 Descartes writes- Discourse on Method
16441655 Papacy of Innocent X (Pamphili)
Newton (1642-1727)
Overview/History (from webpages)
Baroque encompasses the period between 1600 and 1750
(17th and most of the 18th centuries)
- began in Rome, then spread to the rest of Europe
- In general, it took all the innovations of the Renaissance and combined them with the drama of Mannerism.
- Having learned all the Renaissance techniques, Baroque artists could represent the human form convincingly from any angle, they could portray the most complex forms in perfect perspective, and could reproduce almost anything in the seen world realistically.
- The main differences between the Baroque and Renaissance art are that Renaissance art is rational and static, while Baroque art is emotional and dynamic characterized by strong emotion and energy; dramatic lighting, scale and balance. In essence, Baroque art was a great deal more intense, and more theatrical than the art of the Renaissance.
- Baroque took on a different character in each of its major geographic locations.
- The Baroque style is often subdivided into an aristocratic and a bourgeois (middleclass) style. Both styles emphasize portraiture. Other principal themes include episodes from classical mythology (aristocratic style) and stories from the Bible and genre scenes (bourgeois style). In the later Rococo style, subject matter is devoted almost exclusively to earthy parables on the vicissitudes of amatory love.
Major artists of the regions:
- Italian Baroque: Caravaggio and Bernini
- Flemish Baroque: Peter Paul Rubens.
- Dutch Baroque: Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer
- Spanish Baroque: Velasquez
Diversity in subject matter and style:
- era when subjects such as the everyday activities of people, the landscape, and still life became acceptable themes for artists to depict.
- The central theme THEME of Baroque art and literature is the conflict between reason with passion.
- Idealism of the High Renaissance gave way to Baroque realism and an art that is often look ornate, dynamic, with greater color saturation and more contrast between light and shadow; by comparison Renaissance styles look relatively static.
- The Baroque diversity in subject matter and style is most apparent in Dutch art which includes a style of art that might be characterized as Realist art, focusing on the atmospheric effects of dramatic shadow and lighting.
Variety of Baroque styles, including classicism(Common traits of 17th & 18th centuries)
- spacious and dynamic
- brilliant and colorful
- theatrical and passionate
- sensual and ecstatic
- opulent and extravagant
- versatile and virtuoso
- embrace viewer- Caravaggio and St. Peter’s
Baroque Artistic Characteristics / Devices
- Written program (like telling a story) everything has meaning
- Breathtaking Movement
- Naturalism breaks into viewers space
- heightened emotionalism - exaltation
- light, dancing, chiaroscuro (strong), symbol of God
- spotlight, just appears, window
- The real moment in action
- Immediacy-
- Psychological- self portrait
- inwardness- mystery of individual
- Visual game- Las Meninas
- Genre- everyday objects, subject matter, people, activities (domestic)
- Drama- Rembrandt’s group portraits, Light
Tensions between: ...
- light and dark
- real and unreal
- illusion and reality
- concave and convex
- certainty and uncertainty
- passion and intellectual
- earthly and heavenly
- naturalism and classicism
- classicism and romanticism
- religious and non religious
- sensual , passion and prof.
- math & fancy
- love and creation
- Christianity and empire (Charles)
Baroque Painting
Baroque art of the 17th century is characterized by its dynamic appearance, in contrast to the relatively static classical style of the Renaissance (see Baroque Art and Architecture). Typical of the baroque style are diagonal compositional lines, which give a sense of movement, and use of strong chiaroscuro (contrasts of light and shadow). Both these techniques created a grandiose, dramatic style appropriate to the vital spirit of the Counter Reformation. Many painters of the early 17th century also began to turn away from the artificiality of Mannerism in an attempt to emulate more closely the natural world.
Italian Baroque Painting
In Italy, many innovative artists worked during the baroque period. Splendid ceiling frescoes by Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Guercino, and Pietro da Cortona decorate various palaces in Rome, all to some extent inspired by Michelangelo's murals in the Sistine Chapel. Perhaps the most influential of the Italian baroque innovators was Caravaggio; his use of powerful chiaroscuro effects in religious and genre paintings had a profound influence on other Italian painters, such as Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, and, indeed, on European art in general. This style has been called Tenebrism, from the Latin word for “darkness.”
French Baroque Painting
Two French painters in particular assimilated the Caravaggesque style. Georges de La Tour, primarily a painter of religious subjects, was a master of light and shadow, demonstrating his virtuosity at so illuminating faces and hands, by the light of a single candle, that flesh seems almost translucent. Louis Le Nain also used light and shadow dramatically in his monumental paintings of peasant life. In general, however, French baroque artists practiced a classical restraint that brought clarity, balance, and harmony to their pictures. This is seen both in the classical subjects painted by Nicolas Poussin and in the dreamlike landscapes of Claude Lorrain; significantly, both artists spent most of their careers in Italy.
Spanish Baroque Painting
In Spain, Jusepe de Ribera and Francisco de Zurbarán absorbed Caravaggio's Tenebrism, but each brought different interests and tendencies to his work. Ribera could be brutally realistic, as in the Clubfooted Boy (1652, Louvre, Paris). Zurbarán imbued his religious paintings with Spanish mysticism; like Caravaggio, he also excelled in still life. Diego Velázquez, court painter to Philip IV, was the greatest Spanish painter of the age and a consummate master of tone and color. He approached his subjects with detachment, dispassionately but realistically portraying members of the royal family. The royal entourage can be seen in his masterpiece, Las meninas (The Maids of Honor, 1656, Prado); as symbol of its veracity, it even includes a portrait of Velázquez himself at his easel.
Flemish Baroque Painting
Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish baroque master, was also strongly influenced by Caravaggesque Tenebrism as well as by the work of the great Venetian colorists Titian and Veronese. Such was Rubens's popularity that he established a large workshop of assistants in Antwerp to help him carry out the great number of commissions he received from the city, the church, royalty, and private patrons. His enormous oeuvre includes portraits; a great outpouring of religious paintings; and treatments of mythological themes, classical legends, and history—all expressing the exuberance of the baroque style and attesting to the painter's own vitality of spirit. Large in scale, these paintings are charged with vibrant color and light, dramatic in composition and fluid of line. Rubens's way of contrasting light and shadow, as well as his wide range of themes, can be seen by considering just two of his paintings: The Descent from the Cross (1611-1614, Cathedral, Antwerp), with its great compositional sweep, and the tender portrait of a beautiful young woman in Le chapeau de paille (1620?, National Gallery, London).
Anthony van Dyck, one of Rubens's assistants, became famous for his portraits of members of the court of Charles I of England. These paintings are imbued with an elegance and attention to detail characteristic of Rubens; they had enormous influence on the style of 18th-century English portraiture.
Dutch Baroque Painting
An extraordinary number of fine painters emerged in the Netherlands during the 17th century; all, however, were surpassed by Rembrandt. His early works, such as the Money-Changer (1627, Staatliche Museen, Berlin), were influenced by Caravaggio; his later paintings, for example the 1659 Self-Portrait (Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London), display his incomparable chiaroscuro technique and psychological profundity. Other Dutch artists were Frans Hals, who, like Rembrandt, painted group portraits; and Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael, who did magnificent landscapes. Numerous “little Dutch masters” excelled in genre scenes, portrayals of everyday life that delighted the newly rising middle classes, who were becoming art patrons. Foremost among these painters was Jan Vermeer, whose paintings—such as View of Delft (1660?, Mauritshuis, The Hague)—although small in actual size, give a sense of ordered space and are, above all, masterpieces of the effect of light.
BAROQUE IN ITALY
Sculpture and Architecture
Bernini
- St. Peter's Colonnade, Rome, begun 1656
collonade was created for growing numbers who visit the St. Peter's Basilica - Baldacchino, St. Peter's, Rome, 1624-33, gilded bronze, 95' high
was created to create a more human scale in the interior of St. Peter's - The Ecstacy of St. Teresa, 1645-52
created inside St. Peter's - David, 1623, marble, lifesize
a more dynamic and literal version compared to Michelangelo and Donatello
Painting
Baroque painting had many of the same attributes that Baroque sculpture and architecture had: theatrics, sexual innuendo, and violent subjects.
Giovanni Pietro Bellori was an influential Baroque art critic who fervently believed that "ideal" and Classical forms were more desirable than naturalistic or "more realistic" images.
Annibale Carracci(1560-1609) ideal and Classical
- -a favorite of Bellori because of his use of "ideal" forms.
- The Virgin Appearing to St. Luke and St. Catherine, 1592, Oil on canvas
Carravaggio (1571-1610) naturalistic and "real"
- Italian painter who influenced most of the painters of his time through his use of great contrasts and theatrical lighting
- was a murderer (condottieri) and had a violent nature
- in works are characteristic dark backgrounds and bright highlights called tenebroso
- also uses many diagonals which makes a composition more active
- The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600, Oil on canvas
- Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598, Oil on canvas
- The Conversion of Saint Paul,1600-1601, Oil on canvas
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653)
- -a master female artist from the Baroque era
- -did Biblical and mythological subjects which portrayed violent themes
- Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1620, Oil on canvas
Italian Baroque
Caravaggio (-)
Bernini
Northern Europe Baroque
Flemish Baroque (Flanders)
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
- -wealthy trader, diplomat, and artist from Flanders
- -influential in art because he bucked trends and worked in a painterly fashion (the brush strokes were active and easily recognized in the painting.
The Garden of Love, c. 1630-32, Oil on canvas
Rape of the Daughters 0f Leucippus- c.1635, oil on canvas, 6.5'x 8'
- -active painting with sensual overtones
- -mythological subject at the time of the Reformation
- -soft, painterly look
Dutch Baroque
The Netherlands
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69)
- -conveyed character and drama through his use of dark and light
Self Portraits- conveyed these ideas of character in light and shadow
- -they are also a chronicle of a person's life, because he did them each year
- -Rembrandt was an excellent printmaker. He used a process called etching. This is a process that involves scratching into a metal plate, which has been covered with an acid-resistant coating, then dipping the plate in acid until it mars the surface of the plate. The plate is then washed, ink is pushed into the grooves left by the acid, and finally it is printed on paper.
The Little Children Being Brought to Jesus ("The 100 Guilder Print"), Completed 1647-49, Etching and drypoint, 1st state
The company of Frans Banning Cock preparing to march out, known as the Nightwatch, 1642, Oil on canvas
Abraham and Isaac, 1634, Oil on canvas
Jan Vermeer (1632-75)
- -master of light and perspective.
- -works were technically correct to the finest detail
- -Dutch banker and mapmaker
View of Delft, c. 1660-1661, Oil on canvas
The Art of Painting, c. 1666-1673, Oil on canvas
Woman Holding a Water Pitcher- c.1664-5, oil on canvas, 16"x 15"
- -exceptional perspective, convincing 3-D space
- -dramatic lighting
- -high detail
Hals
Dutch Baroque
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Spanish Baroque
Diego Velasquez (-)
- -court painter for Philip IV of Spain
Las Meninas, 1656, Oil on canvas
"Maids of Honor" (English translation) is a view into the artist's studio and the Royal family's lives.
Innocent X, c. 1650
France
Nicholas Poussin
- -used Classical subject matter
- -allegorical painter (he used a picture of mythological scenes to convey ideas about Christianity) allegories are intended to convey an idea through analogy and metaphor.
- -saw a connection between art and music
- -Most painters of the 17th and 18th Centuries allied themselves with either the Rubenists (bright vibrant color, painterliness, and exuberant brushwork) or the Poussinists (classical, idealist, and used a limited palette).
The Rape of the Sabine Women, 1636-37, Oil on canvas
Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion, 1648, Oil on canvas
Phocion was a Greek who was executed because he would not conceal the truth. It is a comment on the Stoic nature of Phocion and reflects this in its sharp detail and calm.
Part 5: Unit Exam Essay Questions (from previous Art 261 tests)
- Define the Baroque style of art. What were its visual characteristics? Name two artists whose works exemplify Baroque art.
- Discuss the artistic contributions of Rembrandt. Use examples of his paintings to illustrate your answer.
- Using examples in your text compare Baroque and Renaissance pictorial style.
- Compare Bernini's David to Michelangelo's David, showing how they illustrate the Baroque and Renaissance styles respectively.
- Define the Baroque style of art. What were its visual characteristics? Name two artists whose works exemplify Baroque art and use their work to help describe the Baroque stylistic period.
- Discuss the artistic contributions of Rembrandt.Use examples of his paintings to illustrate your answer.
(from AAT4)
- Discuss the political developments of the 17th century in western Europe. How did they affect the arts?
- Using examples in your text, compare Baroque and Renaissance pictorial style.
- Explain the iconography of Bernini's Pluto and Proserpina. What myth is it based on, and how is it reflected in the sculpture's style?
- Describe the Baroque, Renaissance, and Gothic elements of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
- Compare Bernini's David to Michelangelo's David, analyzing how they exemplify the Baroque and Renaissance styles respectively.
- Compare Caravaggiois tenebrism with Leonardo's chiaroscuro, using the examples in your textbook.
- Discuss the role of women in the arts from Antiquity through the seventeenth century. Cite examples from your textbook.
(from other)
- Discuss the political developments of the 17th century in Western Europe. How did they affect the arts?
- Using examples in your text, compare Baroque and Renaissance pictorial style.
- Explain the iconography of Bernini's Pluto and Proserpina. What is it based on, and how is it reflected in the style?
- Describe the Baroque, Renaissance and Gothic elements of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
- Compare Bernini's David to Michelangelo's David, showing how they illustrate the Baroque and Renaissance styles respectively.
- Compare Caravaggio's tenebrism with Leonardo's chiaroscuro, using the examples in your textbook.
- Discuss the role of women in the arts from Antiquity through the seventeenth century. Cite examples from your textbook
Chapter Outline (AAT4)