What was typical of baroque art

Flemish Baroque painting is notable for the fact that it was separated into different thematic categories, and artists of the time tended to specialize in one of these areas. These genres included history, portraiture, genre, landscape, and still life paintings. History painting, considered the most noble genre during the 17th century, was comprised of depictions of historical, biblical, mythological, and allegorical scenes.

Peter Paul Rubens was the dominant painter in this category, though his student Anthony Van Dyck also became prominent. More than in any other category, Flemish history painters continued to draw influence from Italian painting.

Rubens spent nine years in Italy studying the work of the masters, and he introduced the monumental hunting scene to painting. This is exemplified in his work Wolf and Fox Hunt , which depicts a noble battle on a large scale and was inspired by his study of classical antiquity. Portrait paintings were, for the most part, monumental or life sized, though the group and family portrait came into prominence during the 17th century.

Although he was not a portrait painter, Rubens completed some early works in this category. He also exerted influence through his student, Anthony Van Dyck, who became the court painter for Charles I of England and an influence on subsequent portraiture in England. Genre paintings depict scenes from everyday life and were very common in 17th century Flanders.

The paintings of Adriaen Brouwer, which often show peasants fighting and drinking, serve as an example of Flemish genre painting. Brouwer is known for painting his subjects in interior, rather than exterior, scenes. Landscape painting was another major category in the 17th century.

The style developed from earlier 16th century Flemish landscape paintings, which were not particularly realistic and employed the semi-aerial view typical of Peter Brueghel the Elder. Architectural interior painting also became popular around this time, developing out of the works of Hans Vredman de Vries and depicting the realistic interiors of existing churches and cathedrals.

Floral still life painting was widespread in 17th century Flanders, popularized by Brueghel the Elder around His sons, Jan Brueghel the Younger and Ambrosius Brueghel, were also known flower specialists of the time. Other subjects or subcategories of still life painting included the banquet still life, the animal still life, and garland scenes.

Vanitas paintings were very popular in 17th century Flemish and Dutch work, and they often depict symbols such as skulls, flowers, rotting fruit, clocks, watches, smoke, and hourglasses, all of which are meant to convey the ephemeral nature of life on earth.

Vanitas Painting : An example of a vanitas from the 17th century by Franciscus Gysbrechts. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content.

The Baroque Period. Search for:. Painting of the Baroque Period. Italian Painting in the Baroque Period Baroque painting emerged in the 16th century and became extremely popular in the 17th century; the Roman High Baroque lasted from to Learning Objectives Name the most important Italian painters of the 17th century.

Key Takeaways Key Points Baroque painting is the painting associated with the Baroque cultural movement, which began in Italy in the 17th century. In its most typical manifestations, Baroque painting is characterized by great drama, rich, deep color, and intense light and dark shadows.

Caravaggio was an important figure in early Baroque painting during the 16th and 17th centuries and inspired many mimics, known as Caravaggisti. Pietro da Cortona was the most influential painter of the High Baroque Period. In the later 17th century, artists such as Giordano increasingly produced monumental ceiling frescoes. Key Terms tenebrism : A style of painting using very pronounced light contrast chiaroscuro , with darkness a dominating feature of the image fresco : In painting, the technique of applying water-based pigment to wet or fresh lime mortar or plaster.

Spanish Painting in the Baroque Period The Spanish Golden Age is a period of flourishing in arts, coinciding with the political rise and decline of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty. The Baroque Period. Search for:. Defining the Baroque Period Baroque is a period of artistic style that started around in Rome, Italy, and spread throughout the majority of Europe.

Learning Objectives Name the most prominent characteristics of Baroque art and its best known artists. Key Takeaways Key Points The most important factors during the Baroque era were the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation ; the development of the Baroque style was considered to be closely linked with the Catholic Church. The popularity of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Catholic Church, which had decided at the Council of Trent that the arts should communicate religious themes and direct emotional involvement in response to the Protestant Reformation.

The Baroque style is characterized by exaggerated motion and clear detail used to produce drama, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture , painting, architecture, literature, dance, and music.

The chiaroscuro technique refers to the interplay between light and dark that was often used in Baroque paintings of dimly lit scenes to produce a very high-contrast, dramatic atmosphere. Famous painters of the Baroque era include Rubens, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt. In music, the Baroque style makes up a large part of the classical canon, such as Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi.

The later Baroque style was termed Rococo , a style characterized by increasingly decorative and elaborate works. 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.

Such illusionist art - among them some of the best Baroque paintings ever created - 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 - co-founder along with his brother Agostino Carracci , and cousin Ludovico Carracci of the influential Bolognese School - who was noted for his Farnese Gallery frescoes in Rome, and his followers Guido Reni , Guercino , and in particular Domenichino whose elaborate classical compositions were to influence Nicolas Poussin.

Thereafter, we have Parma-born Giovanni Lanfranco , influenced by the frescoes of Correggio; Bernini , more famous as architect and sculptor; Pietro da Cortona - see his immortal Allegory of Divine Providence , Palazzo Barberini ; Andrea Sacchi , who exemplified High Baroque Classicism, and his pupil Carlo Maratta Luca Giordano and Andrea Pozzo - see his Apotheosis of St Ignatius , Sant'Ignazio, Rome - were also great exponents of the Baroque style of quadratura ceiling decoration.

See also the Neapolitan decorative painter Francesco Solimena , whose fresco works link the late Baroque with the Rococo. For more, see: Baroque Architecture Another important Italian artist was Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione , best 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 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 total control over French painting See also: French Baroque Artists.

For furnishings, see: French Furniture For artists and craftsmen, see: French Designers. 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 art 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.

Caravaggio 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.

His greatest paintings include the following:. 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 - and was also a centre of religious Quietism - was a key 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 For more detail of early 17th century art in Naples, see: Neapolitan School of Painting For later works, see: Neapolitan Baroque c.

The leading Caravaggisti in Naples included Battistello Caracciolo , the influential Jusepe Ribera and the great female painter Artemisia Gentileschi , noted for Judith Beheading Holofernes , Uffizi, Florence. 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 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 , 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.