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 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 Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, 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 Antony 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.
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 criticized for lack of decorum in his work. However, although religious painting, history
painting, allegories, and portraits were still considered the noblest 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.
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 use for Vermeer and many other Dutch artists. Flemish Baroque painting shared a part in this trend, while also continuing to
produce the traditional categories.
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