Baroque: Artists A-Z

The Baroque was the leading style of European painting from about 1600 to the 1750s, born in Rome and carried across Europe and the Americas. Its pictures seize the most dramatic moment, with bodies in motion, strong contrasts of light and shadow, deep color and faces that show emotion openly. Before it named a style, the word baroque described irregularly shaped pearls, and later anything bizarre. For a long time critics used it with contempt, and Jacob Burckhardt applied it in 1855 to dismiss art after the Renaissance. Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque (1888) was the first serious study of the style.

The Catholic Church gave the new style its purpose. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) had asked religious art to address ordinary believers directly and move them. From 1605 Pope Paul V and his successors filled Rome with churches and decoration meant to inspire awe. Painters answered with warm, intense color, often placing red, blue and yellow side by side. Instead of the even light of the Renaissance, they used sharp contrasts to single out the main action. Compositions run on diagonals, figures are caught in mid-gesture and drapery billows as if in wind. Many pictures also hide allegories meant for learned viewers to unravel.

Around 1600 two answers to Mannerism met in Rome. The Carracci of Bologna, Annibale, Agostino and Ludovico, returned to Renaissance order but gave it feeling that spoke to the heart. Annibale’s frescoes of the Loves of the Gods in the Palazzo Farnese gallery, begun in 1597, set a model for decades. Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted his models directly from life and caught them in a hard beam of light against darkness. In The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600) in San Luigi dei Francesi, light follows Christ’s pointing hand into a dim tax office. After killing a man in a brawl in 1606, Caravaggio fled Rome and spent his last years in Naples, Malta and Sicily.

Caravaggio’s realism spread through followers across Europe. Artemisia Gentileschi brought the same lighting to biblical heroines, as in Judith Slaying Holofernes (about 1620, Uffizi). In 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence. Italy’s other specialty was the illusionistic ceiling. Pietro da Cortona covered the ceiling of the great hall of the Palazzo Barberini (1633-1639) with a glorification of Pope Urban VIII, its figures spilling over painted frames. In Sant’Ignazio in Rome, Andrea Pozzo painted the nave vault (1691-1694). Seen from a marked spot on the floor, its painted walls seem to rise into an open heaven.

In Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) joined what he had learned during eight years in Italy to the Flemish mastery of oil paint. His Elevation of the Cross (1610-1611), now in Antwerp Cathedral, strains a crowd of muscular bodies along a steep diagonal. A large workshop helped him produce altarpieces, portraits, landscapes and mythologies, among them twenty-four canvases on the life of Marie de’ Medici (1622-1625, Louvre). Rubens also served as a diplomat and was knighted by Charles I of England. His most gifted assistant, Anthony van Dyck, became court painter to Charles I and set the model for the elegant aristocratic portrait.

In the Protestant Dutch Republic, churches commissioned few images, so painters sold to burghers on an open market and specialized in portraits, landscapes, still lifes and scenes of daily life. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) shaped figures out of warm light and deep shadow, with thick, worked paint. The Night Watch (1642, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) turns a militia group portrait into a scene of sudden movement. In Delft, Johannes Vermeer painted quiet interiors lit by daylight from a side window. His Girl with a Pearl Earring (about 1665, Mauritshuis, The Hague) turns toward the viewer out of a dark ground.

In Spain the Church and the crown were the main patrons. Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) began with sharply lit tenebrist scenes in Seville and, as court painter to Philip IV, developed loose, luminous brushwork. In Las Meninas (1656, Prado, Madrid) he shows himself at his easel beside the young infanta and her maids of honor. A mirror on the back wall reflects the king and queen. Francisco de Zurbarán painted monks and saints in stark light against dark grounds. His workshop shipped canvases to Spanish America, where some remain in Mexico and Peru. In Seville, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo softened the style into gentle Virgins and ragged street children.

French painters preferred a measured, classical Baroque. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), who worked mostly in Rome, put clear drawing and composition before color. Claude Lorrain, also settled in Rome, bathed harbors and pastoral views in low sunlight, as in The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648, National Gallery, London). In Lorraine, Georges de La Tour painted still figures lit by a single candle. Under Louis XIV, Charles Le Brun directed the painted decoration of Versailles, including the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors. Members of the Paris Academy later argued whether Poussin’s drawing or Rubens’s color should guide painting. By the 1730s the Baroque had turned into the lighter Rococo, which later gave way to Neoclassicism.