What is Baroque art? Characteristics and the key artists

Baroque is the artistic style that dominated Europe from around 1600 to the 1720s. It is recognised by dramatic light and darkness, diagonal compositions, movement and strong emotion, and it was used by the Catholic Church, by princes and by middle-class buyers in the Netherlands alike.

Facts

An art that set out to persuade

The Baroque was born in Rome around 1600. After the Reformation the Catholic Church wanted to win back the faithful, and the Council of Trent had decreed that images should be comprehensible and arouse devout feelings. Art should not merely show a story but let the viewer experience it. At the same time kings and princes built their power with palaces, gardens and portraits in the same grand language.

The name is usually traced to the Portuguese barroco, an irregular pearl, and like Rococo it began as a disparaging word. Later art historians made it a neutral label for the art of the whole 17th century, from the churches of Rome to Dutch still lifes.

Light and darkness: Caravaggio

Caravaggio transformed painting with the pictures he made in Rome around 1600. In The Calling of Saint Matthew a sharp light falls diagonally into a dark room and strikes the tax collectors at the table at the moment Christ points out Matthew. The hard contrast between light and dark is called chiaroscuro, and in its most extreme form tenebrism. Caravaggio also used ordinary people as models, with dirty feet and worn clothes.

His way of painting spread rapidly across Europe. Artemisia Gentileschi became one of his most skilful followers, and his influence can be seen in painters from Utrecht to Naples and Madrid.

The Baroque masters of Europe

In Flanders Peter Paul Rubens painted large, swirling compositions such as The Descent from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral. In Spain Diego Velázquez turned the court portrait into a riddle in Las Meninas of 1656, where the painter himself stands at the canvas and the royal couple appear only in a mirror. In Rome Gian Lorenzo Bernini gave sculpture the same movement and drama as painting.

In the Protestant Dutch Republic, burghers bought art for their homes, and portraits, landscapes, still lifes and scenes of everyday life flourished. In 1642 Rembrandt painted The Night Watch, a group portrait of a civic guard company that he turned into a scene in motion, and Johannes Vermeer painted the quiet daylight of small rooms, as in Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Sculpture and ceilings

The Baroque liked to blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture. Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, made in 1647–1652 for a chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, is an entire room: the marble figure floats on a cloud, gilded rays fall from a hidden window, and the family that commissioned the chapel sits in boxes at the sides, like an audience at the theatre.

Church ceilings were painted with illusions that make the vaults open up. In the 1690s the Jesuit brother Andrea Pozzo painted the ceiling of Sant'Ignazio in Rome so that the walls of the building seem to continue up into a sky full of saints. From a marker in the floor the perspective looks entirely correct. This kind of ceiling painting is called quadratura and spread to palaces and churches throughout Europe.

The Baroque in Sweden

During Sweden's Age of Greatness, Baroque became the style of the Swedish court. David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl painted large allegories and portraits, and Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and the Younger built Drottningholm Palace and the Royal Palace in Stockholm after models in Rome and Paris.

The Baroque as an architectural style has its own guide to Baroque architecture. If you want to compare it with the period before, read the guide to the difference between Renaissance and Baroque.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What is the Baroque's strong contrast between light and dark called?