Baroque Painting
History, Characteristics, Tenebrism, Caravaggism.
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Baroque Painting |
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Baroque Painting (1600-1750)Contents • Illusionist Architectural
Murals and Ceiling Paintings |
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EVOLUTION
OF VISUAL ART WORLD'S GREATEST
ART WHAT IS ART? |
Illusionist Architectural Murals and Ceiling Paintings It is appropriate to begin an account of Baroque painting with its favourite genre and characteristic function: the illusionist decoration of the walls of an interior. Obviously the idea of using a wall to display a painted scene was as old as art; what was new, or almost new, was the use made of this technique of mural painting by Baroque artists. On the walls, and more especially on the ceilings, of churches and palaces they painted vast, busy scenes, which tend to produce upon the spectator a trompe l'oeil impression that the walls or ceiling no longer exist, or at least that they open out in an exciting way. This, too was not essentially new: such experiments had been made during the Renaissance, by Mantegna. In the Baroque period, however, it became almost an absolute rule, combining as it did all the aesthetic features of the time: grandeur, theatricality, movement, the representation of infinity, and in addition a technical skill that appears almost superhuman. It showed that tendency to combine various forms of art for a unified effect which was the most distinctive characteristic of the age. |
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Such illusionist paintings varied greatly in the stories they told - lives of saints, histories of dynasties, myths, or tales of heroes - but they were consistent in the components they deployed: architectural glories standing out against the sky; soaring angels and saints; figures in swift motion, their garments billowing out in the wind; all depicted with bold foreshortening - the perspective effect of looking upwards from below or conversely downwards from above, which makes the figures appear shorter. Such was the vitality of the genre that it continued not only throughout the seventeenth century but well into the eighteenth, invading the limits of time generally considered to demarcate the succeeding Rococo movement. Baroque painters who specialized in such murals and ceiling paintings included: the forerunner Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), the Bolognese Baroque artist noted for his frescoes in the Farnese Gallery in Rome, and his followers Guido Reni (1575-1642), Guercino (1591-1666), and in particular Domenichino (1581-1641) whose elaborate classical compositions were to influence Nicolas Poussin. Thereafter, we have Parma-born Giovanni Lanfranco (1582-1647), influenced by the frescoes of Correggio; Bernini (1598-1680), more famous as architect and sculptor; Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669) who decorated the Palazzo Barberini in Rome and the Medici Pitti Palace in Florence, as well as numerous other churches and palces; Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661), who exemplified High Baroque Classicism, and his pupil Carlo Maratta (1625-1713). Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709) was another of the great exponents of the Baroque style of quadratura illusionistic ceiling decoration, noted for his huge ceiling fresco in S. Ignazio, Rome. See: Baroque Architecture (1600-1750). Another important Italian artist was Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-64), best known for his etching, Biblical genre painting (with animals) and his pioneering use of monotype.
Light: The Key Feature of Baroque Painting Naturally, painting was not confined to the walls of buildings. There was also, and indeed especially, a tradition of painting on canvas, and as with architecture the characteristics of the various national schools differed widely. They had one concern in common, however: the study of light and its effects. In spite of the great divergences between the work of various artists in the Baroque period - divergences so great that many critics are not prepared to designate their work by a single common adjective - the thematic use of light and shade in constructing any significant work was, to a greater or lesser degree, common to them all, to the extent of being the key feature and unifying pictorial motif of the age. The impulse towards adoption of this idiom came from Italy, indeed from a single Italian artist, Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio from the name of the small town where he was born. Although his work has been more attacked by some critics than appreciated, there is no doubt that he marked the beginning of a new epoch. At the time of Caravaggio, fine art painting had fully attained the objectives that it had been set two centuries before - namely, the perfect representation of nature in all its manifestations. A new line of investigation was required, one congenial to the age; and this Caravaggio supplied. His paintings showed sturdy peasants, innkeepers, and gamblers; and though they might sometimes be dressed as saints, apostles, and fathers of the Church they represented reality in its most crude and harsh aspect. This was in itself a break with Renaissance art, with its aristocratic figures and idealized surroundings. The most important aspect of Baroque painting was not however what was represented but how it was represented. The painting was not lit uniformly but in patches; details struck by bright, intense light alternated with areas of dark shadow. If in the final analysis a Renaissance painting was coloured drawing with overall lighting, a canvas by Caravaggio was a leopard's skin of strong light and deep, intense shadow, in which the highlights are symbolic; that is, they indicated the important elements of the composition. It was a dramatic, violent, tormented style of painting, eminently suited to an age of strong aesthetic contrasts, as the Baroque period was. Caravaggio's temperament seems to have had closer affinities with the Spanish rather than the Italian character, and Naples, which had close connections with Spain at this period, was the centre of Caravaggism influence; the mature works of Francisco Ribalta (1565–1628) and the early paintings of Velasquez (1599-1660) show it, as do those of other seventeenth-century Spanish masters such as Ribera (1591-1652) and Zurbaran (1598-1664). But his influence extended much farther than Spain, though it is there that the master's manner was most closely followed. In Holland, Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656) seems to have transmitted something of Caravaggio's dramatic use of chiaroscuro to his great countryman, Rembrandt; while in France the somewhat mysterious master, Georges de la Tour (1593-1652), was a skilful, but apparently isolated, exponent of 'Tenebrism', as this use of deep shadows cast from a single source of light, to give unity to a composition, is called. Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) was another influential representative of this tendency; while it is perhaps just worth mentioning in this connection the name of the one English tenebrist, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97). Of Caravaggio's Italian followers, the most prominent were Mattia Preti (1613-1669) and Domenico Fetti (1589-1624); while Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), also a Neapolitan, has affinities with him in his taste for savagery and low-life scenes, of bandits fighting and carousing among wild and rocky scenery. Salvator is particularly of interest for his importance in the development of romantic landscape; the eighteenth-century Genoese, Magnasco (1667-1749) has something in common with him. |
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Apart from Caravaggio, there were few if any 17th century painters in Italy to rank with the great names of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although both Titian and Tintoretto did much to pave the way for the Baroque, the leading representative of the Baroque style in Venetian painting was Tiepolo (1696-1770), in whose hands illusionistic fresco painting reached its apogee in the Wurzburg Rezidenz frescoes (1750-3) in Germany. With the death of Tiepolo, the golden age of Venetian art was over. Before leaving Italy, we should note the existence of a separate trend in European painting, usually called the "classical" tradition. A hangover, if you like, from the Renaissance, classicism was the opposite of Romanticism, being a style of art in which adherence to accepted aesthetic ideals takes precedence over individuality of expression. In simple terms, it was a restrained, harmonious style that believed in primacy of design, rather than (say) colour or expressionism. It was closely associated with "academic art", the style taught in most of the European academies of fine arts. During the Baroque era of the 17th century, the classical tradition was personified by the French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), who spent most of his career in Rome, where his patrons included Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1669), and the cardinal's secretary Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657). Poussin is probably best known for his mythological history painting, although he was also an important pioneer of classical arcadian landscape painting - a genre dominated by another French painter based in Rome, Claude Lorrain (1600-82), who instigated the "Claudean" style. (Note that Claude Lorrain was especially influenced by the German Baroque art of Adam Elsheimer.) Netherlandish Baroque Painting In Flanders and Holland, painting had developed flourishing local schools that so far from being backwaters were well in the van of artistic exploration. Flemish painters had created - or at least greatly enhanced - two types of picture concerned with the faithful representation of domestic life and everyday reality: genre painting and still life. Neither had any equivalent in Italy - where there was indeed no demand for such pictures. It was the Flemish painters who had exported the technique of oil painting, formerly unknown to the artists of the early Italian Renaissance. Now they were quick to fuse their own tradition with that arriving from Italy - a marriage which was to produce works among the greatest achievements in the history of art. This development had different results in Flemish painting compared to that of Holland, and in each case was associated with the two profoundly different people: namely Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Rembrandt (1606-1669). For more details, see: Flemish Baroque Art and Dutch Baroque Art. By the late 1570s, Rome was no longer the centre of the world. The Italians were wearing Spanish costumes, and the heart of the Counter-Reformation was in Spain. The Escorial was being built as the new citadel of the Faith, and the palaces of Toledo were being turned into monasteries and convents. Beauty was giving way to holiness. In the spring of 1577, the resident Mannerist El Greco (1541-1614) found in the Spanish city of Toledo the familiar shapes of his Cretan home, the buildings of the Mohammedan East, all in the urgent and emphatic Spanish form. He spent two years in painting his first great work, the altarpiece for San Domingo el Antiguo. The passionate and often extravagant spirit of the Baroque had now possessed him. His wooden panels and modest canvases were forgotten; he now painted pictures of enormous dimensions. Among El Greco's important paintings of the following period was the representation of the miracle which was said to have occurred during the burial of Count Orgaz, when St Augustine and St Stephen appeared and discharged the duties of the clergy, In grey and yellow, black and white, the colours of the stormy sky, El Greco has painted the miracle in an unearthly light, not as a supernatural, but rather as a supremely natural event, to which the whole Spanish people, its priests, its nobles, and its faithful, bear witness by their presence on the solid floor of the church. Some have called El Greco's pictures ascetic, ecstatic, cruel, nerveless and colourless. Nevertheless, a portrait - like that of the Grand Inquisitor is painted with the strongest colouring; it is only in El Greco's saints that we find deliberate distortion and an unearthly radiance. When he paints ordinary human beings, like his daughter, it is as though they were reflected in a mirror. The final development of El Greco's art places him, in spite of his peculiarities, in the heart of the Baroque period, as he abandons Renaissance laws of composition and colour and moves toward the international art of the Baroque period. Other important members of the Spanish Baroque school included: Jusepe (Jose) de Ribera (1591-1652), the Naples-based Spanish caravaggesque artist, noted for his realist paintings on religious and mythological subjects; the devout Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664), noted for his intense religious pictures, still-lifes, and mastery of tenebrism; Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), official painter to the Spanish court in Madrid who combined realism with the Baroque emphasis on light and illusionism; and the sentimental Seville painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1618-1682) whose religious works and genre paintings were influenced by both Zurbaran and Caravaggio. For details, see: Spanish Baroque Art. |
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Greatest Baroque Painters & Paintings Here is a list of the most important Old Masters working in the Baroque idiom, together with some of the greatest paintings of the Baroque era. Greatest Italian Baroque Painters & Paintings Caravaggio (1571–1610) Il Guercino (Giovanni Francesco
Barbieri) (1591–1666) Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669) Artemisia
Gentileschi (1597-1651) Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709) See: Italian Baroque Artists. Greatest Spanish Baroque Painters & Paintings El Greco (1541-1614) Jusepe (Jose) de Ribera (1591-1652) Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664) Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1618-1682) See: Spanish
Baroque Artists. Georges de La Tour (1593–1652) Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) Claude Lorrain (1600-82) Louis Le Nain (c.1593–1648) Antoine Le Nain (c.1599–1648) Mathieu Le Nain (1607–1677) Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743) See: French
Baroque Artists. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) Anthony
Van Dyck (1599-1641) Jacob
Jordaens (1593–1678) Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568–1625) Frans
Snyders (1579–1657) David
Teniers the Younger (1610–1691) Greatest Dutch Baroque Painters & Painting Frans
Hals (1582-1666) Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) For more about great Dutch Realist art, see: Famous Paintings Analyzed. Jan
Davidsz de Heem (1606-83) Emanuel de Witte (1616-92) Willem
Kalf (1619-93) Aelbert Cuyp (1620-91) Samuel
Van Hoogstraten (1627-78) Pieter de Hooch (1629-84) Jan
Vermeer (1632-1675) See also: Dutch Realist School and Dutch Realist Artists.
Paintings in the style of the Baroque can be seen in the best art museums around the world. |
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