Who Was the Primary Patron of the Arts During the Baroque Era?

Detail from Supper at Emmaus (1602)
National Gallery, London. Caravaggio.
Another masterpiece of Christian art
from the Counter-Reformation.

Introduction

In general, "Bizarre painting" was a reflection of the profound political and cultural changes then emerging across Europe. Baroque painting coincided, broadly speaking with the 17th century, although in some areas - notably Deutschland - some of its achievements did not occur until the 18th century. Although the term embraced a bewildering variety of styles, it was typically characterized by 2 things: a sense of grandeur (or sensuous richness), plus an overt emotional content. It was through these ii elements that Baroque painters, sought to evoke emotional states in the viewer by appealing to the senses, frequently in dramatic means. Why were they appealing to viewers in this manner? Because life in 17th century Europe had suddenly become a competition between two powerful forces.

Historical Background: Status Quo versus Reform

On one side were those who supported the Catholic Church and the Divine Right of Kings - substantially, the status quo. The latter included the Kings of French republic, Spain, Austria and Great britain. On the other side were those who wanted reform: they included those who belonged to the new Protestant religious movement, as well equally those who believed in national or personal self-determination. The old actively used painting and other creative disciplines to impress their congregations and subjects with the truth of their message.

So Church authorities congenital magnificent churches, decorated with illusionistic fresco painting on the ceilings and walls, using the latest quadratura techniques and trompe fifty'oeil methods, in order to stimulate piety and convey an impression of the splendour of the divine. And they commissioned an endless stream of Biblical art, designed to illustrate of import parts of Catholic theological dogma. Meantime, Emperors and Kings proclaimed their own authority by hiring architects to build palaces, embellished with murals, oil painting and other forms of decorative art.

Reformers typically disapproved of this type of religious art, preferring instead to whitewash the interiors of churches. However, among the nations and provinces of northern Europe, a new breed of patron began to emerge - the eye form professional, merchant or office-holder - who began buying pocket-size-scale artworks in order to celebrate their growing affluence and promote their own cultural values. Thus in Holland, for case, a new realist fashion of easel fine art boomed as the newly empowered middle classes commissioned genre paintings, however lifes or private/group portrait paintings to evidence off their new status. In French republic, the aforementioned trend was evident in the demand for realist works by the Le Nain brothers and similar artists. Curiously, in Italy, where realist 'low brow' content had showtime emerged (in works past Caravaggio), the Church authorities had cleverly exploited it for their own ends, to make Saints look more human. Thus near all Caravaggio'southward paintings were religious.

Bizarre painting - in this case landscape painting - was also influenced past the general widening of man intellectual horizons, triggered by developments in science and by geographical explorations of the world. These two factors produced a new sense both of human insignificance and of the mysterious complexity of the natural world. Thus in the landscape painting of the period we encounter humans often portrayed as tiny figures in a vast natural setting.

Characteristics

In add-on to the 2 main characteristics of Bizarre painting outlined above: (one) grandeur or sensuality - come across, for instance, religious works by Peter Paul Rubens, or the elegant portraits of Anthony Van Dyck; and (2) strong emotional content - see in particular, works by Spanish Bizarre Artists such as Ribera, Zurbaran, fifty-fifty Velazquez; we should annotation 2 other important simply contradictory tendencies: (three) naturalism or realism, and (4) classicism or 'the platonic'. Naturalism is best exemplified past Caravaggio (realism by Jan Vermeer); while classicism is the master impulse in works by Onetime Masters like Annibale Carracci, Peter Paul Rubens, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine. Come across also: Classicism and Naturalism in Italian 17th Century Painting. In improver, (five) Baroque architects made full use of the mural painting skills of painters like Andrea Pozzo and Pietro da Cortona, whose trompe l'oeil fresco ceilings keep to inspire to this day.

Illusionist Architectural Murals and Ceiling Paintings

It is advisable to begin an account of Bizarre painting with its favourite genre and feature office: the illusionist ornamentation of the walls of an interior. Manifestly the idea of using a wall to brandish a painted scene was as erstwhile equally art; what was new, or well-nigh new, was the apply made of this technique of mural painting by Bizarre 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 to the lowest degree that they open up out in an exciting style. This, as well was not essentially new: such experiments had been made during the Renaissance, past Mantegna, and most spectacularly past Correggio in his extraordinary Assumption of the Virgin (Parma Cathedral) (1526-30). In the Bizarre period, even so, it became about an accented rule, combining as it did all the aesthetic features of the fourth dimension: grandeur, theatricality, movement, the representation of infinity, and in addition a technical skill that appears near superhuman. Information technology showed that tendency to combine various forms of art for a unified effect which was the most distinctive characteristic of the age.

Such illusionist art - among them some of the all-time Bizarre paintings ever created - varied profoundly in the stories they told - lives of saints, histories of dynasties, myths, or tales of heroes - but they were consequent 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 air current; all depicted with assuming foreshortening - the perspective event of looking upwards from beneath or conversely downwards from in a higher place, which makes the figures appear shorter. Such was the vitality of the genre that it connected not only throughout the seventeenth century but well into the eighteenth, invading the limits of time generally considered to demarcate the succeeding Rococo motility.

Baroque painters who specialized in such murals and ceiling paintings included: the precursor Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) - co-founder forth with his blood brother Agostino Carracci (1557-1602), and cousin Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619) of the influential Bolognese School - who was noted for his Farnese Gallery frescoes 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 accept Parma-built-in Giovanni Lanfranco (1582-1647), influenced by the frescoes of Correggio; Bernini (1598-1680), more famous as architect and sculptor; Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669) - encounter his immortal Allegory of Divine Providence (1633-39, Palazzo Barberini); Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661), who exemplified Loftier Baroque Classicism, and his pupil Carlo Maratta (1625-1713). Luca Giordano (1634-1705) and Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709) - see his Apotheosis of St Ignatius (1688-94, Sant'Ignazio, Rome) - were also cracking exponents of the Baroque mode of quadratura ceiling decoration. See also the Neapolitan decorative painter Francesco Solimena (1657-1747), whose fresco works link the tardily Baroque with the Rococo. For more than, see: Bizarre Architecture (1600-1750).

Another important Italian artist was Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-64), all-time known for his etching, Biblical genre painting (with animals) and his pioneering use of monotype. See also: Italian Baroque Artists.

In France, Charles Le Brun (1619-90) was the heir to Pietro da Cortona's decorative brilliance, which he applied to his murals at the Palace of Versailles, notably those in the Hall of Mirrors. Le Brun used his position as Director of the French Academy to exert full command over French painting (1663-83). Run across too: French Baroque Artists.

For the golden historic period of interior pattern in France during the Baroque, run into: French Decorative Art. For furnishings, see: French Piece of furniture (1640-1792). For artists and craftsmen, see: French Designers.

Light: The Cardinal Feature of Bizarre Painting

Naturally, painting was not bars to the walls of buildings. There was also, and indeed especially, a tradition of painting on sail, and as with architecture the characteristics of the various national schools differed widely. They had one concern in mutual, however: the study of light and its effects. In spite of the bully divergences between the piece of work of diverse artists in the Baroque period - divergences then nifty that many art critics are not prepared to designate their piece of work by a single mutual adjective - the thematic utilize of light and shade in amalgam any significant work was, to a greater or lesser caste, common to them all, to the extent of beingness the central feature and unifying pictorial motif of the age.

Caravaggio (1573-1610)

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-scale 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 earlier - namely, the perfect representation of nature in all its manifestations. A new line of investigation was required, one congenial to the historic period; and this Caravaggio supplied. His paintings showed sturdy peasants, innkeepers, and gamblers; and though they might sometimes be dressed every bit 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 aloof figures and idealized surroundings. The most important attribute 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 sheet by Caravaggio was a leopard's skin of potent light and deep, intense shadow, in which the highlights are symbolic; that is, they indicated the of import elements of the composition. It was a dramatic, vehement, tormented way of painting, eminently suited to an age of stiff aesthetic contrasts, as the Baroque menstruation was. His greatest paintings include the following:

• The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600) San Luigi dei Francesi.
• The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599-1600) San Luigi dei Francesi.
• Conversion on the way to Damascus (1601) Santa Maria del Popolo.
• Crucifixion of Saint Peter (1601) Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.
• Death of the Virgin (1601-6) Louvre, Paris.
• The Entombment of Christ (1601-three) Vatican Museums, Rome.

Caravaggism

Caravaggio'southward temperament seems to take had closer affinities with the Spanish rather than the Italian grapheme, and Naples, which had close connections with Espana at this menses - and was also a middle of religious Quietism - was a cardinal centre of Caravaggism influence. For the artist's late Neapolitan work, see: Caravaggio in Naples. For a guide to art in the city, see: Painting in Naples (1600-1700). For more item of early 17th century art in Naples, meet: Neapolitan School of Painting (1600-56). For afterward works, encounter: Neapolitan Bizarre (c.1650-1700). The leading Caravaggisti in Naples included Battistello Caracciolo (1578-1635), the influential Jusepe Ribera (1591-1652) and the great female person painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1597-1651), noted for Judith Beheading Holofernes (1620, Uffizi, Florence).

The mature works of Francisco Ribalta (1565–1628) show Caravaggesque influence; the early paintings of Velazquez (1599-1660) show information technology, as exercise those of other 17th-century Spanish masters such as Zurbaran (1598-1664). But his influence extended much farther than Espana, though it is there that the master'south manner was about closely followed. In The netherlands, Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656) seems to have transmitted something of Caravaggio's dramatic use of chiaroscuro to his great countryman, Rembrandt; while in French republic the somewhat mysterious master, Georges de la Tour (1593-1652), was a practiced, only plainly isolated, exponent of 'Tenebrism', as this utilise of deep shadows cast from a unmarried source of light, to requite 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 connexion the name of the 1 English tenebrist, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97). Of Caravaggio'south Italian followers, the virtually prominent were Mattia Preti (1613-1669) and Domenico Fetti (1589-1624); while Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), besides a Neapolitan, has affinities with him in his sense of taste for savagery and low-life scenes, of bandits fighting and carousing among wild and rocky scenery. Salvator is specially of interest for his importance in the development of romantic mural; the eighteenth-century Genoese, Magnasco (1667-1749) has something in common with him.

Venetian Bizarre Painting

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 manner for the Baroque, the leading representative of the Bizarre way in Venetian painting was Tiepolo (1696-1770), in whose easily illusionistic fresco painting reached its apogee in the Wurzburg Rezidenz frescoes (1750-three) in Germany. With the death of Tiepolo, the golden age of Venetian art was over.

For painters in Germany and Republic of austria during the 17th century, please see: German Baroque Artists.

Classicism

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 reverse of Romanticism, being a manner of art in which adherence to accepted artful ethics takes precedence over individuality of expression. In uncomplicated terms, it was a restrained, harmonious manner that believed in primacy of pattern, rather than (say) colour or expressionism. It was closely associated with "academic art", the style taught in nigh of the European academies of fine arts. During the Baroque era of the 17th century, the classical tradition was personified past the French creative person Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), who spent most of his career in Rome, where his patrons included Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1669), and the cardinal'due south secretary Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657). Poussin is probably best known for his mythological painting - see, for instance, his Abduction of the Sabine Women (1634-5) and Et in Arcadia Ego (1637) - although he was besides an of import pioneer of classical arcadian landscape painting - a genre dominated by some other French painter based in Rome, Claude Lorrain (1600-82), who instigated the "Claudean" style. (Note that Claude Lorrain was especially influenced past the High german Baroque art of Adam Elsheimer.) Like Poussin and Claude, Simon Vouet (1590-1649) as well spent a major part of his career in Rome, before returning to Paris as court painter to Rex Louis Thirteen. He was noted, in detail, for his muted style of Baroque painting, which avoided both the extreme naturalism and drama of Caravaggio, and the contrived painterly effects of the more intense Italian Baroque fine art.

Netherlandish Bizarre Painting

In Flemish region and Kingdom of the netherlands, painting had developed flourishing local schools that so far from existence 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. At present 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 fine art. This evolution had dissimilar results in Flemish painting compared to that of Holland, and in each instance was associated with the 2 profoundly different people: namely Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Rembrandt (1606-1669).

Masterpieces by Rubens include:

• Samson and Delilah (1610, National Gallery, London)
• Descent from the Cantankerous (Rubens) (1614, Cathedral of our Lady, Antwerp)
• Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)
• Judgement of Paris (1636, National Gallery, London).

Masterpieces by Rembrandt include:

• The Nighttime Spotter (1642, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
• Syndics of the Fabric-Makers Order (1662, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
• Return of the Dissipated Son (1669, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg).

For more details, see: Flemish Baroque Art and Dutch Baroque Art.
See also: Dutch Painting (17th century) and Dutch Realist Artists.

Castilian Baroque Painting

Past 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 beingness congenital 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 dwelling, the buildings of the Mohammedan East, all in the urgent and emphatic Spanish form. He spent two years in painting his start smashing work, the altarpiece for San Domingo el Antiguo. The passionate and frequently extravagant spirit of the Bizarre had now possessed him. His wooden panels and minor canvases were forgotten; he now painted pictures of enormous dimensions.

Among El Greco'south greatest religious paintings of the post-obit menses was the representation of the miracle which was said to have occurred during the funeral of Count Orgaz, when St Augustine and St Stephen appeared and discharged the duties of the clergy, In greyness and yellow, black and white, the colours of the stormy heaven, El Greco has painted the miracle in an unearthly lite, not as a supernatural, only rather as a supremely natural event, to which the whole Spanish people, its priests, its nobles, and its faithful, carry witness by their presence on the solid flooring of the church. See: Burial of Count Orgaz (1586-88). Some accept called El Greco's pictures ascetic, ecstatic, cruel, collected and colourless. Even so, his Portrait of a Primal (1600) of Don Fernando Nino de Guevera - like that of the Grand Inquisitor is painted with the strongest colouring; it is just in El Greco'due south saints that we find deliberate baloney and an unearthly radiance. When he paints ordinary human being beings, like his daughter, information technology is as though they were reflected in a mirror. The final evolution of El Greco's art places him, in spite of his peculiarities, in the centre of the Baroque period, equally 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 Castilian 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.

Masterpieces by Velazquez include:

• Waterseller of Seville (1618-22) Apsley Business firm, London.
• Christ Crucified (1632) Prado, Madrid.
• The Surrender of Breda (1634-5) Prado, Madrid.
• The Rokeby Venus (1647-51) National Gallery, London.
• Portrait of Pope Innocent 10 (1650) Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome.
• Las Meninas (1656) Prado, Madrid.

Other important painters of the Castilian School include the sentimental Seville painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1618-1682) whose religious works and genre paintings were influenced by Velazquez, Zurbaran and Caravaggio. For details, see: Spanish Bizarre Fine art.

Bizarre painting tin can be seen in the best art museums effectually the world.

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