Baroque painting is the painting associated with the Baroque cultural movement. The movement is often identified with Absolutism, the Counter Reformation and Catholic Revival, but the existence of important Baroque art and architecture in non-absolutist and Protestant states throughout Western Europe underscores its widespread popularity. Baroque art is characterized by shallow realism, rich and intense colors, and strong light and shadow.
Baroque painting encompasses a great range of styles, as most important and major painting during the period beginning around 1600 and continuing throughout the 17th century, and into the early 18th century is identified today as Baroque painting. In its most typical manifestations, Baroque art is characterized by great drama, rich, deep colour, and intense light and dark shadows, but the classicism of French Baroque painters like Poussin and Dutch genre painters such as Vermeer are also covered by the term, at least in English. As opposed to Renaissance art, which usually showed the moment before an event took place, Baroque artists chose the most dramatic point, the moment when the action was occurring: Michelangelo, working in the High Renaissance, shows his David composed and still before he battles Goliath; Bernini’s Baroque David is caught in the act of hurling the stone at the giant. Baroque art was meant to evoke emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality that had been prized during the Renaissance.
Among the greatest painters of the Baroque period are Velázquez, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, and Vermeer. Caravaggio is an heir of the humanist painting of the High Renaissance. His realistic approach to the human figure, painted directly from life and dramatically spotlit against a dark background, shocked his contemporaries and opened a new chapter in the history of painting. Baroque painting often dramatizes scenes using chiaroscuro light effects; this can be seen in works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Le Nain and La Tour. The Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck developed a graceful but imposing portrait style that was very influential, especially in England.
The prosperity of 17th century Holland led to an enormous production of art by large numbers of painters who were mostly highly specialized and painted only genre scenes, landscapes, still lifes, portraits or history paintings. Technical standards were very high, and Dutch Golden Age painting established a new repertoire of subjects that was very influential until the arrival of Modernism.
Overview
Thanks to their works, architects, sculptors and painters become the necessary means to effectively touch the soul of the faithful. Thus art becomes a means of the triumphant Catholic Church to persuade heretics, the doubters, and stem the Protestant pressure on the French and Italian borders. To achieve this ambitious goal, art must have the ability to seduce, move, conquer taste, no longer through the harmony of the Renaissance, but through the expression of strong emotions.
The visceral charm of the Baroque style derives from a direct involvement of the senses. In Baroque painting there was no solicitation of the intellect and refined subtlety as in Mannerism, the new language pointed directly to the bowels, to the feelings of the spectator. An iconography was used that was as direct, simple, obvious, but still theatrical and engaging as possible. Never before had the viewer, his point of view, and the effect that decoration could have on him been so important.
A sort of parallel is possible with the musical sphere, where the counterpoint takes hold replacing the polyphony, and the orchestral tone and amalgam makes its appearance more and more insistently.
The pontificate of Urban VIII Barberini was the fertile ground for the development of the Baroque style, aimed at celebrating the pope’s house and his grandchildren, in a sort of anticipation of absolutism.
The term “baroque” was used for the first time in the late eighteenth century, as a negative complement to those artists who had distanced themselves, with their oddities, from the sober classical norm. For neoclassical theorists, Baroque meant exuberance and excess ornamentation: the definition of Francesco Milizia remained famous, which in 1781 called the production of this era the “plague of taste”. The rediscovery of the Baroque is a very late thing, which took place fully only in the late 20th century, when so many important manifestations of this taste had been irreparably destroyed or compromised (think of the many neo-medieval and neo-Renaissance restorations in the buildings of worship, carried out by eliminating the subsequent stratifications and perpetrated until the second post-war period). It was precisely the “anti-classical” character and the undeniable originality that led to the rediscovery of the Baroque and its enhancement, first in specialist studies and then, through exhibitions and popular publications, also among the general public.
Features
In contrast to Renaissance painting which usually shows the moment before an important event, Baroque artists choose the most dramatic point, the moment when the action takes place. Baroque art is renowned for evoking emotion and passion and not the rationality and calm that emerges from Renaissance painting
At the level of the pictorial composition, the baroque painting is characterized first of all by the use of many warm and bright colors which go from pink to white through blue. On the other hand, contrasts are very present, with plays of light and shade which can in particular be used to highlight the muscular mass of the man. In contrast to the typical Renaissance approach, which has a uniform canvas lighting, the lighting of the Baroque canvas is done in spots. This technique draws attention to certain areas and leaves others in the dark (use of chiaroscuro).
Always in a spirit of contradiction with the Renaissance, the baroque canvas gives facial expressions to the characters present on the canvas to convey feelings. It also mainly represents an asymmetry (the main action is not necessarily in the center). The lines of force of the canvas are no longer only horizontal or vertical but also oblique or curved, which has the effect of giving an unstable position to the characters and an impression of movement. This movement effect is expressed by a profusion of clothes lifted or agitated by the wind; the choice of costumes often refers to antiquity. Fabrics are also arranged like curtains to dramatize the scene.
The baroque therefore opposes the Renaissance in various ways: it is a period of rupture which wants to represent change. Baroque works are differentiated by their interest in change, movement, the instability of things.
“The light, passing through the lens and impressing the emulsion on the film, only manages to reproduce one aspect of the movement. But the movement is an unbroken series of attitudes: slow motion cinema has revealed it. The spirit of the Baroque artist captures these successive aspects and condenses them into a single image ”
– P. Charprentrat, L’art baroque, Vendôme, Imprimerie des presses Universitaires de France, 1967.
Baroque painters generally approach artistic themes drawn from biblical or mythological legends and tales. However, although religious painting, the painting of history, the allegories and portraits are considered the most noble subjects, the landscape and genre scenes are also widespread.
History
The Council of Trent (1545–63), in which the Roman Catholic Church answered many questions of internal reform raised by both Protestants and by those who had remained inside the Catholic Church, addressed the representational arts in a short and somewhat oblique passage in its decrees. This was subsequently interpreted and expounded by a number of clerical authors like Molanus, who demanded that paintings and sculptures in church contexts should depict their subjects clearly and powerfully, and with decorum, without the stylistic airs of Mannerism. This return toward a populist conception of the function of ecclesiastical art is seen by many art historians as driving the innovations of Caravaggio and the Carracci brothers, all of whom were working (and competing for commissions) in Rome around 1600, although unlike the Carracci, Caravaggio persistently was criticised for lack of decorum in his work. However, although religious painting, history painting, allegories, and portraits were still considered the most noble subjects, landscape, still life, and genre scenes were also becoming more common in Catholic countries, and were the main genres in Protestant ones.
The term
The term “Baroque” was initially used with a derogatory meaning, to underline the excesses of its emphasis. Others derive it from the mnemonic term “Baroco” denoting, in logical Scholastica, a supposedly laboured form of syllogism. In particular, the term was used to describe its eccentric redundancy and noisy abundance of details, which sharply contrasted the clear and sober rationality of the Renaissance. It was first rehabilitated by the Swiss-born art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) in his Renaissance und Barock (1888); Wölfflin identified the Baroque as “movement imported into mass”, an art antithetic to Renaissance art. He did not make the distinctions between Mannerism and Baroque that modern writers do, and he ignored the later phase, the academic Baroque that lasted into the 18th century. Writers in French and English did not begin to treat Baroque as a respectable study until Wölfflin’s influence had made German scholarship pre-eminent.
Precursors
At the end of the 16th century, while mannerism was dying out in increasingly conventional and repetitive replicas, the counter- reformed taste, sober and simple, was spreading in many Italian centers, capable of being understood by all classes. If in Milan and Florence sobriety sometimes translated into a certain severe rigidity, with a geometric simplification of the compositions, other centers developed different, richer solutions. Venice in particular offered the example of Veronese and Tintoretto, with their bold compositions and the incomparable sense of color, while in Parmaafter decades of oblivion, the unscrupulous solutions of Correggio and Parmigianino were rediscovered.
This happened while the Church, strengthened by the Counter-Reformation, had large sums to reinvest in new artistic commissions, increasingly ambitious and gradually more tolerant of contamination with secular themes. The center of this process was Rome, where all the Italian and non-Italian artists now concentrate, looking for new stimuli and greater luck.
The first to develop something different were the Carracci brothers, who between 1598 and 1606-1607 triumphed in the decoration of the Farnese Gallery, which was followed by a series of Emilians such as Domenichino, Guido Reni and Guercino. After the early deaths of Annibale Carracci (1609) and Caravaggio (1610) the artistic world seemed to be divided into two: there were the Caravaggeschi with their extreme optical and social truth, and on the other side the “classicists”, who reworked the historical styles providing a new and eclectic reading.
The full mastery of the pictorial technique, necessary for the goals that will reach the Baroque, was anticipated by Rubens’ activity in Rome, which showed his skills in the decoration of the apse of the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella (1608), with the three large altarpieces of the Madonna della Vallicella and of the lateral saints, composed as a unitary scheme closely connected to the architectural space and the natural light present. In the central box an idea of the whole prevails with respect to the individual figures, with a sense of rotational choral movement, accentuated by the color of angels and cherubs. The color is warm and vital, as learned by the artist in Venice, and the sense of pathos is strongand energy. In Rubens there is the physical power of the figures of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the grace of Raffaello Sanzio, the Venetian, Titian color, and a new and preponderant energetic charge.
In 1621 Guercino arrived in Rome, following the newly elected Gregory XV, both of Emilian origin. In just one year of stay he left memorable works in Rome such as Aurora in the Casino Ludovisi, where the figures overlap the architectural space merging with it and optimizing themselves from the viewer’s point of view, unlike the almost coeval Aurora Pallavicini of the countryman Guido Reni, where the representation is instead equivalent to a canvas hanging from the ceiling, clearly delimited and without a vision “from below”. Already in Guercino, the eye of the beholder is invited to travel the whole scene relentlessly, attracted by the concatenation of the elements, in the name of a desired effect of movement and instability, with a soft light and the color spread in spots. These effects were replicated in the San Crisogono in gloria (today in London, Lancaster House) and especially in the large altarpiece of the Burial and glory of Saint Petronilla (1623), destined for the basilica of San Pietro and today at the Capitoline Museums. These ideas were essential for the birth of the new “baroque” style.
Style Evolution
Guercino and Rubens, therefore, were the forerunners of the new season which will have a definitive consecration in the third decade, in the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
But in painting, the first fully “baroque” work, in which all the characteristics of this “third style” are found (between caravaggism and classicism), is the decoration of the dome of Sant’Andrea della Valle by Giovanni Lanfranco (1625-27), not surprisingly a Parma, who took up and updated the lesson of Correggio’s domes in his city to the most innovative contributions. In this huge fresco the real space is enhanced by the creation of fluid and unstable concentric circles, in which the characters move freely and, thanks to the light, create a sense of ascending rotation that has its climax in the center and simulates a direct opening to heavenly paradise.
The maturity of Baroque painting took place with the gigantic decorative achievements of Pietro da Cortona, for example in the vault of the salon of Palazzo Barberini (1633-39) in Rome. His prodigious and reckless technique was soon followed by a good number of adepts, and cortonism thus became the language of monumental painting, a perfect means of propaganda for secular and religious commissions in which grandiose apotheosis are pushed towards each other by lighting effects and perspective also thanks to the use of quadrature (to create the architectures there were in fact specialists, called “quadraturists”).
The novelties of Pietro da Cortona’s work were evident from the contemporaries, in particular by contrasting this style of the many moving figures with the more sober and static one of Andrea Sacchi (also active in Palazzo Barberini with the Allegory of Divine Wisdom): theater the debate is the Accademia di San Luca, of which Pietro da Cortona was prince from 1634 to 1638. Comparing painting to literature, for Pietro da Cortona the figures compose an “epic poem”, full of episodes, while for Sacchi they they participate in a sort of “tragedy”, where unity and simplicity are fundamental requirements.
Spread
Among the centers where Pietro da Cortona worked, Florence stands out, where he worked for a long time for the Medici in the decoration of the Pitti palace and in other religious enterprises. The impact of his style on the local school, increased by the long presence of his most faithful pupil Ciro Ferri, was disruptive, although not immediately apparent. The first local artist who became fully involved was Volterrano.
Giovanni Lanfranco worked for a long time in Naples, creating the conditions for taking root in the Baroque taste in southern Italy, which had its most significant exponents in Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena. The first of the two traveled throughout Italy and was an extraordinary disseminator of the news. In Florence, right where Pietro da Cortona had most operated outside Rome, in the gallery of Palazzo Medici-Riccardi he created a huge fresco where, unlike Pietro da Cortona, any architectural layout is now absent, according to a compositional freedom that already heralds lightness eighteenth-century aerial.
However, the success of Pietro da Cortona pushed many artists to approach his style. Direct pupils of the first hour were Giovan Francesco Romanelli (removed from the teacher because he had placed himself in rivalry with him already in 1637 and taken to protection by Gianlorenzo Bernini), Giovanni Maria Bottalla and Ciro Ferri; the second hour (after 1655) Lazzaro Baldi, Guglielmo and Giacomo Cortese, Paul Schor, Filippo Lauri. Romanelli was called to Paris by Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and was a fundamental artist in the court of the Sun King.
Rubens’ passage to Genoa, followed by Van Dyck, had also sparked an early interest in the new style in Liguria. Gregorio de Ferrari made large scenographic and exuberant decorations in the Ligurian capital. Just a Genoese, the Baciccio, will create another key work of the Baroque journey in Rome, the vault of the church of the Gesù, called by Bernini himself. Still in Bernini’s circle was Ludovico Gemignani, an artist from Pistoia who made his fortune under the countryman Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi, and whose father Giacinto he had been another direct pupil of Pietro da Cortona.
The role of the Jesuits in the diffusion of the Baroque style is testified by the important commissions reserved to the confrere Andrea Pozzo, author of extraordinary optical illusions of vaults opened on the sky, first in Rome and then in other centers, including Vienna.
In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, requests for artistic commissions in churches and palaces multiplied and the Baroque style was now a riot of eclectic interpretations, spread by artists of the most varied artistic backgrounds. Among the names of this last phase stand out Antonio and Filippo Gherardi, Domenico Maria Canuti, Enrico Haffner, Giovanni Coli, Giacinto Brandi. At the end of the century, the aforementioned figure of the Neapolitan Luca Giordano stands out above all, which heralds more open and vast solutions, anticipating rococo painting.
National variations
Led by Italy, Mediterranean countries, slowly followed by most of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany and Central Europe, generally adopted a full-blooded Baroque approach.
A rather different art developed out of northern realist traditions in 17th century Dutch Golden Age painting, which had very little religious art, and little history painting, instead playing a crucial part in developing secular genres such as still life, genre paintings of everyday scenes, and landscape painting. While the Baroque nature of Rembrandt’s art is clear, the label is less used for Vermeer and many other Dutch artists. Most Dutch art lacks the idealization and love of splendour typical of much Baroque work, including the neighbouring Flemish Baroque painting which shared a part in Dutch trends, while also continuing to produce the traditional categories in a more clearly Baroque style.
In France a dignified and graceful classicism gave a distinctive flavour to Baroque painting, where the later 17th century is also regarded as a golden age for painting. Two of the most important artists, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, remained based in Rome, where their work, almost all in easel paintings, was much appreciated by Italian as well as French patrons.
Baroque painting in Italy
The Italian painting of the time tries to break with the forms of mannerism, already frowned upon. The managers were two well differentiated factions; on the one hand the painter Caravaggio, and on the other hand the Carracci brothers (Ludovico, Agostino and Annibale).
The naturalism of Caravaggio which is the best representative, deals with issues of everyday life, with grim images using light effects. The chiaroscuros try to give intensity and liveliness. They shy away from ideals of beauty, showing reality as it is, without artifice. A good part of the painters of the time cultivated Caravaggism
On the other hand, the Carracci form the so-called classicism. The themes to capture are inspired by the Greco-Latin culture, with mythological beings. The authors of the 16th century, like Rafael and Miguel Ángel, are strong influences. The color is soft, as is the light, and frescoes are painted on ceilings.
Both trends left a sequel and served to renew the pictorial settings. The presence of Rubens, another genius of the Baroque, in Genoa, is reflected in the works of the place.
Baroque painting in France
In France, mannerism is influenced by the Baroque. The painting is classicist and is used to decorate palaces, with a sober and balanced style. Portraits are painted and mythological subjects are treated.
Its most prominent author is Nicolas Poussin, who was clearly influenced by Italian trends, after his visit to Rome. He looked for inspiration in the Greco-Roman cultures. On the caravaggista side, the artists Georges de La Tour, Philippe de Champaigne, and the Le Nain Brothers stood out.
However, the Baroque in France was more than just an influence, later becoming Rococo.
Baroque painting in Flanders and the Netherlands
In Flanders, the figure of Rubens dominates the scene, developing an aristocratic and religious painting, while in the Netherlands, the painting will be bourgeois, dominating the themes of landscape, portraits and everyday life, with the figure of Rembrandt as its best exponent.
Baroque painting in Spain
In Spain, the baroque is the culminating moment of the pictorial activity, highlighting the genius and mastery of Diego Velázquez, Ribera, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo or Francisco de Zurbarán on a magnificent group of painters. The period was known as the Golden Age, as a sample of the large number of important figures who worked, despite the economic crisis that the country was suffering.
Spanish painters use Italian artists like Caravaggio and his tenebrism as inspiration. Flemish baroque painting has a notable influence in Spain, due to the mandate that is exercised in the area, and to the arrival of Rubens in the country as a court painter.
The main schools of baroque art will be those of Madrid, Seville and Valencia.
The theme in Spain, Catholic and monarchical, is clearly religious. Most of the works were commissioned directly by the church. On the other hand, many paintings deal with kings, nobles and their wars, as in the famous painting Las Lanzas, which Velázquez painted in 1635 for the Palacio del Buen Retiro in Madrid. Mythology and classic themes will also be a constant. But it is the Christian religion that repeats itself the most, serves as an example The Martyrdom of Saint Philip, great work of José de Ribera. The realism of the works will be used to transmit the religious idea to the faithful, so the baroque was a weapon for the church.
The colors are vivid, with effects of multiple light sources that create as many areas of shadows. Italian tenebrism will be felt in all Spanish painters. The figures do not usually pose, they are captured with an exaggerated movement to give strength to the scene. The oil paintings are large and usually complex, with various figures and expressive gestures.
Other experiences seicentiste
Naturalism
Among the fundamental components of seventeenth- century art there is that of naturalism, which has its fulcrum in the so-called ” Lombard seventeenth century “. Born from the observation of the nature of Caravaggio and grown with the indications of Carlo and Federico Borromeo, this painting, which has its driving force in Milan, used severe and dramatic language in strongly narrative scenes, in paintings that are always a mixture of concrete, daily reality, and a mystical and transcendental vision of humanity and faith. Samples of this trend are Giovan Battista Crespi, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Daniele Crespiand Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli known as Morazzone, who make up the group of so-called Milanese pounding painters.
Unlike counter-reformed painters, naturalists put every element of the sensitive world on the same level, without omitting secondary details compared to an ideal of beauty and decoration. These were principles also linked to particular philosophical and religious meanings, according to which each manifestation, as a reflection of the Divine, is worthy of being represented in all its many aspects.
This current spread across the followers of Caravaggio, taking root especially in the countries of Spanish domination: from Lombardy to the Kingdom of Naples, from Flanders (the caravaggists of Utrecht) to the Iberian peninsula (Velàzquez, Zurbaràn, Ribera).
Realism
Although it is a very recent term, with reference to Dutch painting of the Golden Age, one can speak of “realism” understood as some subspecies of naturalism.
The independence of the United Provinces brought to the fore the Calvinist Church, which rejected sacred images, initially producing a suspension of artistic production. However, the artists were soon able to devote themselves to new genres, dedicated to the decoration of the houses of the flourishing bourgeoisie: for the first time in Europe a “bourgeois” painting was born where, on medium-small supports, some genres hitherto niche, such as the landscape, still life, moral themes, portraits and self-portraits, acquired the dignity of the best pictorial production. The Dutch, following in the footsteps of their artistic tradition, had a particularly keen gaze towards the “real” aspects of environments, characters and customs, in which the objective data appears filtered by the artist’s sensitivity.
Classicism
Already from the end of the sixteenth century, the reaction to Mannerism and Naturalism spreads a theory of “beauty”, according to which the artists, although without denying the likelihood, invested in the ability to select the perfect, order and beauty with respect to imperfection, chaos and deformity. So the painter, following the experiences of Raphael in the Renaissance and the world of Greco-Roman art, could reach maximum perfection by filtering the real data.
The Emilian painters (especially Domenichino, Albani, Sassoferrato), who inspired the French as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, joined this trend.
Bamboccianti
The Dutchman Pieter van Laer was nicknamed the “Bamboccio” in Rome for his physical deformities. The term “bambocciante” ended up indicating his group of emulators and followers, not without intent to mockers, who reinterpreted Caravaggesque naturalism in the light of the typically Dutch popular genre. Compared to Caravaggio, as already highlighted by Bellori, however, they fished the subjects in the world of the most humble, and while enjoying the favor of some collectors, they were stigmatized by the theorists of the time.