What Is Baroque Art? Drama, Light and Persuasion in the Seventeenth Century
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Walk into a Baroque church and the ceiling appears to open onto heaven, saints tumble through painted clouds, the altar is a storm of gilt and marble, and the light falls exactly where it is meant to. The style that dominated European art from about 1600 to 1750 was built to overwhelm, and it was built on purpose: it was the visual arm of a Church fighting for its congregations and of monarchs asserting their power. Baroque means, roughly, art that grabs you.
Where it came from
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.
Caravaggio and the light
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.
Bernini and the theatre of stone
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 Baroque of the north
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
What came after
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 takeaway
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.