What Is Baroque Art? Drama, Light and Persuasion in the Seventeenth Century

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century stripped images out of churches across northern Europe and accused the Catholic Church of idolatry. The Church's response, formulated at the Council of Trent in the 1560s, was the opposite: art should teach the faith, move the faithful and make the sacred vivid and immediate. Painters were told to be clear, emotional and true to the story, and to leave out the intellectual games of late Renaissance Mannerism.

The word itself was an insult. Baroque probably comes from a Portuguese term for an irregular pearl, and eighteenth-century critics used it to mean overwrought and absurd. It became a neutral label for the period only in the late nineteenth century, when the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin defined its character against the Renaissance: where the Renaissance was linear, calm, balanced and complete, the Baroque was painterly, dynamic, open and in motion.

The style's first shock was Caravaggio, working in Rome around 1600. He painted saints as street people, with dirty feet and creased faces, caught at the instant of their drama, and he lit them like a stage, with a single hard light from one side plunging everything else into darkness. The Calling of St Matthew shows a tax collector at a table of gamblers, looking up as a shaft of light and a pointing hand find him. Nothing in it is idealised and nothing is calm. The technique, called tenebrism, spread through Italy, Spain and the Netherlands within a generation.

Caravaggio's violence was in his life as well as his art; he killed a man in a brawl in 1606 and died on the run four years later. His followers, from Artemisia Gentileschi in Italy to Georges de La Tour in France, kept the light and the intensity and made them their own.

In sculpture the Baroque belongs to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who ran Rome's art for fifty years. His figures twist, reach and fly; his marble looks like flesh, cloth and cloud. The Ecstasy of St Teresa, in a Roman chapel, shows the saint swooning as an angel prepares to pierce her with a golden arrow, lit by a hidden window and watched by sculpted members of the family who paid for it, leaning out of boxes on either side as if at the opera. The chapel is not a setting for the sculpture; the whole chapel is the work.

That fusion is the Baroque's signature. Architecture, painting, sculpture and light are composed together into a single experience, and the viewer is placed inside it. Bernini's colonnade around the square in front of St Peter's, two curved arms of columns, was described by him as the arms of the Church embracing the faithful. The style's ceilings, by Pietro da Cortona in Rome and Andrea Pozzo, whose painted dome in the church of Sant'Ignazio is entirely flat, dissolve the building into an illusion of infinite space.

The Protestant Netherlands had no churches to decorate and no king, so its Baroque went into the homes of merchants and into scenes of ordinary life, and it produced the century's greatest painter of the interior. Rembrandt used Caravaggio's light on faces rather than on miracles, and his portraits and self-portraits, in thick, worked paint, are studies of a person thinking. Vermeer painted a woman pouring milk with the gravity other painters gave to saints. In Catholic Flanders, Rubens ran a workshop that supplied altarpieces and royal cycles across Europe, all muscle, motion and colour, and in Spain Velazquez painted the royal family with a detachment that still unsettles. The style's marks, wherever it appeared:

• •Dramatic light: a strong single source, deep shadow, the subject picked out
• •Movement: diagonals, twisting bodies, the moment of action rather than before or after
• •Emotion: faces and gestures at full intensity
• •Realism: real bodies, real fabrics, dirt and age included
• •Scale and unity: painting, sculpture and building composed as one

By the 1720s the Baroque had lightened into the Rococo, all pastel curves and flirtation, in the salons of Paris, and by the 1760s a reaction had set in: Neoclassicism, which looked back to the calm of Greece and Rome and regarded the Baroque as vulgar. The reputation stayed low for a century. It recovered when historians stopped judging it by Renaissance standards and started asking what it was for, and the answer, that it was made to move a crowd, is the reason it still fills the churches of Rome with people looking up.

The style travelled with the Spanish and Portuguese empires and changed on the way. In the churches of Mexico, Peru and Brazil, missionaries and colonial patrons wanted the same persuasive splendour as in Rome, but the work was often done by local and indigenous craftsmen, who brought their own motifs of fruit, flowers, faces and animals into the carving. In Mexico the result grew into an even more elaborate manner, sometimes called ultra-Baroque, in which altarpieces and facades disappear beneath dense gilded ornament from floor to vault.

In the gold-mining towns of Minas Gerais in Brazil, the eighteenth-century sculptor and architect known as Aleijadinho, the son of a Portuguese builder and an enslaved African woman, carved soapstone prophets and cedar figures of the Passion whose intensity rivals anything in Europe, and he kept working after a disease left him badly disabled. The style reached Asia too: the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa, India, which holds the remains of St Francis Xavier, is among the earliest Baroque churches outside Europe. The Baroque has a fair claim to be the first global style in art.

The same years, roughly 1600 to 1750, are called the Baroque in music too, a label music historians borrowed from art history, and the parallels are more than a coincidence of dates. Opera was born in Italy around 1600, and Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo of 1607 is the earliest still regularly performed. Its purpose matched the painters': to move an audience by making emotion vivid. Composers wrote for a single expressive voice over a simple bass, so the words could be heard clearly, which echoes the Council of Trent's demand for art that was clear and moving rather than clever.

The working machinery of Baroque music also mirrors the visual style. Almost every piece rests on the basso continuo, a bass line played by a cello or bassoon while a harpsichord or organ improvised chords above it from shorthand figures, giving a steady foundation for dramatic upper parts. Contrast was the favourite effect: a solo instrument set against the full ensemble in the concerto, loud and soft sections placed side by side like blocks of light and shadow. Listening to Vivaldi's The Four Seasons or a Bach cantata while picturing Caravaggio's lit faces against darkness shows how widely that taste for contrast ran.

Velazquez's Las Meninas, painted in 1656, shows how far Baroque painting could go in pulling the viewer into the work. At its centre stands the five-year-old Infanta Margarita, daughter of Philip IV of Spain, attended by her maids of honour, the meninas of the title, with two court dwarfs, a dog, a chaperone, a guard and a courtier pausing in a bright doorway at the back. On the left, Velazquez has painted himself at a huge canvas, brush raised, looking straight out of the picture. In a mirror on the far wall appear the faint reflections of the king and queen.

The arrangement puts you where the royal couple must be standing, so the people in the room seem to be reacting to your arrival, and art historians still argue about what exactly Velazquez is shown painting and whether the mirror reflects the couple themselves or their image on his canvas. The picture also records a promotion. The red cross of the Order of Santiago on the painter's chest refers to a knighthood he received only in 1659, so it was added after the painting was finished. In 1957 Picasso painted dozens of variations on it, proof that a single Baroque composition could keep provoking artists three centuries later.

Baroque art is the dramatic, emotional, theatrical style of about 1600 to 1750, commissioned by a Catholic Church and by monarchs who wanted art to persuade, and defined by strong light, movement, realism and the fusion of painting, sculpture and architecture into a single experience. Caravaggio gave it its light, Bernini its theatre, and Rembrandt turned it inward.