c. 1600–1750

Baroque

Around 1600, art no longer wanted merely to show harmony; it wanted to seize the viewer. Harsh light carves figures out of darkness, marble seems to move, church ceilings open into painted heavens. The Baroque is an art of overwhelming effect, in the service of the Church, of princes and, for the first time, of a middle-class art market.

Light in a Roman chapel

Rome, around 1600. In the Contarelli Chapel of the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, a young painter from Lombardy unveiled two large paintings from the life of the Apostle Matthew. In a gloomy room, men in contemporary dress sit counting money. A beam of light falls through an unseen window, and Christ points at one of them. The painter was Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio.

The pictures made him famous overnight. They showed saints as ordinary people with dirty feet, lit as if on a stage. Caravaggio’s harsh chiaroscuro was imitated across Europe, from Utrecht to Naples.

An insult that became a name

The word “Baroque” probably derives from the Portuguese “barroco”, an irregularly shaped pearl. In the 18th century it was meant disparagingly: critics in the classical tradition used it to describe an overladen, unruly art. Only at the end of the 19th century did the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin make the Baroque a serious stylistic term. In his Principles of Art History of 1915, he presented it as a way of seeing equal to the Renaissance: painterly rather than linear, open rather than closed, depth rather than plane.

Art in the service of faith

One major driving force was the Counter-Reformation. After Protestants had removed images from many churches, the Council of Trent reaffirmed the value of religious images in 1563. They were meant to instruct the faithful and, above all, to move them. The Catholic Church became the largest patron.

No one put this into practice as effectively as the sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, the marble seems to float, gilded rays fall from above, and on the side walls the donors sit like spectators in theatre boxes. For St Peter’s Square, Bernini designed the colonnades that receive visitors like two open arms. In the church of Sant’Ignazio, Andrea Pozzo painted a ceiling that seems to extend the space into the sky.

Artemisia Gentileschi

One of the most independent continuations of Caravaggio’s style came from Artemisia Gentileschi. Her depictions of biblical heroines such as Judith beheading the general Holofernes have a force that impressed contemporaries and posterity alike. In 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence. For a long time her work was read mainly through her biography, especially the trial over her rape by the painter Agostino Tassi. Recent exhibitions, such as at the National Gallery in London in 2020, have shifted attention more firmly to her artistic achievement.

Flanders: Rubens and his workshop

In Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens ran one of the most productive workshops in the history of art. His altarpieces and mythologies are full of movement, flesh and colour. Rubens was also a diplomat in the service of the Spanish Habsburgs and moved in the courts of Europe. Many of his pictures were executed from his designs by assistants, among them, for a time, Anthony van Dyck.

The Netherlands: a market for everyone

In the Protestant Dutch Republic, something new emerged. The Church largely ceased to be a patron; instead, burghers, merchants and craftsmen bought pictures for their homes. A free art market developed, with painters specialising in landscapes, still lifes, genre scenes and portraits. This is known as the Dutch Golden Age.

In 1642 Rembrandt van Rijn painted a group portrait full of movement and light for an Amsterdam civic militia company, later named The Night Watch. In fact the scene takes place by day; the dark impression is due mainly to darkened varnish. In Delft, Johannes Vermeer painted quiet interiors with women by a window, reading or working, bathed in cool daylight. Judith Leyster became one of the few women members of the Haarlem painters’ guild.

Spain and France

At the Spanish court, Diego Velázquez created Las Meninas in 1656, an enigmatic picture about seeing itself: the painter stands at his easel, the Infanta and her ladies-in-waiting look out of the picture, and a mirror in the background shows the king and queen, who apparently stand where we stand.

In France under Louis XIV, the Baroque took a stricter, more classical form. In 1648 the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was founded in Paris, and the Palace of Versailles became the model for princely residences across Europe. The painter Nicolas Poussin, who worked mostly in Rome, stood for an art of clear order and classical models.

Late Baroque in Germany

After the Thirty Years’ War, the courts and monasteries of southern Germany and Austria experienced a late flowering of the Baroque. Dresden gained the Zwinger, Würzburg its Residence, whose staircase the Venetian Giovanni Battista Tiepolo decorated with a vast ceiling fresco in 1752–1753. Churches such as Vierzehnheiligen by Balthasar Neumann fuse architecture, stucco, sculpture and painting into a total work of art made of light and movement. Around 1730 this style merged gradually into the lighter, more playful Rococo.

Why it still matters

The Baroque showed that art wants not only to be looked at but to be experienced. Its staging of light, its inclusion of the viewer and its fusion of the arts still resonate in film, theatre and installation art. And the Dutch art market, with its dealers, specialists and middle-class buyers, is an early model of how art is traded to this day.