Baroque

Baroque art and architecture, the visual arts and building design and construction produced during the era in the history of Western art that roughly coincides with the 17th century. The earliest manifestations, which occurred in Italy, date from the latter decades of the 16th century, while in some regions, notably Germany and colonial South America, certain culminating achievements of Baroque did not occur until the 18th century.

The work that distinguishes the Baroque period is stylistically complex, even contradictory. In general, however, the desire to evoke emotional states by appealing to the senses, often in dramatic ways, underlies its manifestations. Some of the qualities most frequently associated with the Baroque are grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, vitality, movement, tension, emotional exuberance, and a tendency to blur distinctions between the various arts.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

1)Baroque brought images for religious worship back into the public eye after being banned for their glorification of the ethereal and ideal. The movement's leaders professed that art should be easily understood and strongly felt by common people with the effect of encouraging piety and an awe for the church.

2)Baroque churches became a pivotal example of the invigorated emphasis on the glory of Catholicism with their designs that incorporated a large central space with a dome or cupola high overhead, allowing light to illuminate the space below. The dome was one of the central symbolic features of baroque architecture illustrating the union between the heavens and the earth. Extremely intricate interiors, rife with ornamentation, allowed for a feeling of being fully immersed within an elevated and sacred space.

3)The defining characteristics of the Baroque style were: real or implied movement, an attempt to represent infinity, an emphasis on light and its effects, and a focus on the theatrical. A number of techniques were introduced, or further developed, by Baroque artists to accomplish these effects including quadro riportato (frescos that incorporated the illusion of being composed of a series of framed paintings), quadrature (ceiling painting), and trompe l'oeil techniques. This allowed for a blurring of the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture that was signature to the movement.

4) Baroque ushered in a new era for European sculpture, led largely by the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which emphasized sensual richness, dramatic realism, intense emotion, and movement. In Baroque sculpture figures assumed new importance, often spiraling outward from a central vortex, reaching into the surrounding space, meant to be seen in the round from multiple perspectives.

Greatest exponents include sculptor and architect Bernini in Rome; and in northern Europe, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, whose ceiling decorations commissioned by Charles I (Stuart) for the Banqueting Hall in London are still in place. Rubens’s great pupil Sir Anthony Van Dyck also worked in a Baroque style in Britain, and was Charles’s court painter from 1632 until his death in 1641. British followers include William Dobson, Sir Peter Lely, Jacob Huysmans, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and painters of wall and ceiling decorations such as Antonio Verrio and Sir James Thornhill.

Architecture, painting, and sculpture

The arts present an unusual diversity in the Baroque period, chiefly because currents of naturalism and classicism coexisted and intermingled with the typical Baroque style. Indeed, Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio, the two Italian painters who decisively broke with Mannerism in the 1590s and thus helped usher in the Baroque style, painted, respectively, in classicist and realist modes. Among his many innovations, Caravaggio is noted for popularizing tenebrism, the use of extreme contrast of light and dark. His most famous pupil, Artemisia Gentileschi, employed this technique to great effect in her history paintings, an unusual theme among contemporary women artists.

A specifically Baroque style of painting arose in Rome in the 1620s and culminated in the monumental painted ceilings and other church decorations of Pietro da Cortona, Guido Reni, Il Guercino, Domenichino, and countless lesser artists. The greatest of the Baroque sculptor-architects was Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who designed both the baldachin with spiral columns above the altar of St. Peter’s in Rome and the vast colonnade fronting that church. Baroque architecture as developed by Bernini, Carlo Maderno, Francesco Borromini, and Guarino Guarini emphasized massiveness and monumentality, movement, dramatic spatial and lighting sequences, and a rich interior decoration using contrasting surface textures, vivid colours, and luxurious materials to heighten the structure’s physical immediacy and evoke sensual delight.

Baroque and Rococo

The Baroque period, which started in Rome, eventually evolved into what was called the Rococo period, which started around 1702 until 1780 in France. The Rococo period was a time during which art portrayed a sense of lightness as opposed to the darker portrayals we see from the Baroque period. What both art movements shared was the dramatic flair in their artworks and use of ornate decorations, seen in paintings, sculpture, and architecture.

Baroque continues to live on in the future with many Baroque period artists influencing other artists from the Rococo period, as well as subsequent art movements like Romanticism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism. Contemporary artists and architects like I.M. Pei and Frank Gehry have also used inspiration from Bernini’s structures.