1. Baroque Art The Ornate Age

2.  Baroque art lasted from 1600-1750  Baroque was a marriage between the advanced techniques and grand scale of the Renaissance to the emotion, intensity and drama of Mannerism  Baroque art expanded the role of art into everyday life  Like explorers did, artists also built upon past discoveries  The most common element: a sensitivity to and absolute mastery of light to achieve maximum emotional impact  Flow of Baroque: Rome (1600: Cathedrals to display family triumphs to attract new worshipers to Catholicism)  France (divine-right monarchs spending like pharaohs on palaces—think my palace at Versailles)  Paintings tended to be still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and scenes from daily life  Religious art flourished in Catholic countries  Religious art was forbidden in Protestant lands like England and Holland What is Art? Are we Art? Is Art Art?

3.  Artists could  represent the human body from any angle  portray the most complex perspective  Realistically reproduce almost any appearance  The change from the Renaissance to Baroque was through the emphasis on emotion and dynamism rather than rationality and stasis  Three artists: Caravaggio, Bernini, and Borromini Italian Baroque

4.  He took realism to new lengths, painting bodies in a thoroughly “down and dirty” style as opposed to pale, Mannerist phantoms  He secularized religious art, making saints and miracles seem like ordinary people and everyday events  Advocated “direct painting” from nature – often from the steamy slums  Many said he was the first artist intentionally seeking to shock and offend…and if he tried to, he certainly succeeded  Contemporaries called him an “evil genius” and the “anti-Christ of painting”  Caravaggio was also a rebel, arrested multiple times and hung around the dregs of society…  And I apologize to the guys for saying this but…  …he once stabbed a man in the groin over a tennis wager  Ouch.  Anyway, let’s take a look at some of his paintings, which showed his opposition to tradition Caravaggio

5. Caravaggio: “The Calling of St. Michael”

6. Carvaggio: “Supper at Emmaus”

7. Caravaggio: “The Conversion of St. Paul”

8.  “The Calling of St. Michael” is a vision of Matthew, the apostle-to-be, sitting in a dark pub, surrounding by dandies (not the Yankee Doodle kind) counting money, when Christ orders him “Follow me.”  “Supper at Emmaus” showed the moment the apostles realized their table companion was the resurrected Christ as an encounter in a wine shop  “The Conversion of St. Paul” demonstrates Caravaggio’s ability to see a traditional subject in a unique, unusual way through hard focus and blinding spotlight and the use of St. Paul being flat on his back with a horse (rear-end first) over him  Usually St. Paul’s story of conversion is seen through Saul being converted by a voice from heaven with Christ on the heavenly throne surrounded by throngs of angels Caravaggio

9.  Caravaggio uses perspective to bring the viewer into the action and chiaroscuro engages the emotions while intensifying the scene’s impact through dramatic light and dark contrasts  Because he favored shadowy backgrounds, his style was called “il tenebroso” (which stands for in a “dark manner”)  To Poussin (known for his peaceful scenes), he was a betrayer of the art of painting  To the police, he was a fugitive wanted for murder  However, to major artists like Rubens, Velazquez, and Rembrandt, he was a daring innovator who taught them how to make religious paintings seem both hyper-real and overwhelmingly immediate Caravaggio

10.  Gianlorenzo Bernini was an architect, painter, playwright, composer, and theater designer…  …oh, and he may have been the sculptor of the era  Bernini created his version of “David” at age 25 Bernini (1598-1680)

11. “David” by Bernini

12.  Bernini captured the moment of maximum torque, as he wound up to hurl the stone  David bit his lips from the strain, conveying the power about to be unleashed, causing observers in front of the sculpture to almost want to duck  This is an example of Baroque art involving the viewer in its motion and emotion by threatening to burst its physical confines  Bernini’s best known work though was likely “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa” “David” by Bernini

13. “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa” by Bernini

14.  This was Bernini’s masterpiece and the culmination of the Baroque style and St. Peter’s Cathedral was an entire chapel designed as a stage set to show it off, including painted balconies on the walls filled with “spectators” sculpted in relief  St. Theresa reportedly saw visions and heard voices, believing herself to have been pierced by an angel’s dart infusing her with divine love  “The pain was so great that I screamed aloud; but at the same time I felt such infinite sweetness that I wished the pain to last forever.”  Afraid to say anything…  The marble itself is the saint swooning on a cloud, an expression of ecstasy and exhaustion on her face  Bernini’s goal was to relive Christ’s passion through the sculpture to give worshippers an intense religious experience  The saint and angel appear to be floating on swirling clouds, which golden rays of light pour down from a vault of heaven painted on the ceiling  Textures made the white marble “flesh” seem to quiver with life  The feathery wings and frothy clouds are equally convincing  “The whole altarpiece throbs with emotion, drama, and passion.”  (I couldn’t leave that quote out) “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa” by Bernini

15.  Van Dyck was the court painter of Charles I  He was handsome, vain, and fabulously gifted  Van Dyck dressed flamboyantly, carried a sword, and adopted the sunflower as his personal symbol  His portraits established an intimate and psychologically penetrating style that influenced 3 generations of portrait painters  He was able to turn royalty into real human beings  Van Dyck posed aristocrats and royals in settings of Classical columns and shimmering curtains to convey their refinement and status  Still, his ease of composition and sense of arrested movement (making it look as if the subjects were pausing rather than posing) lent humanity to an otherwise stilted scene  Subjects loved van Dyck because he was able to flatter his subjects, making them look like slim models of perfection rather than the plain look many of them had  By making the ratio of head to body 1 to 7 (instead of the common 1 to 6) he was able to elongate and slenderize his subject’s figure Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641)

16. “Charles I at the Hunt”

17.  This is a significant difference from earlier slides because this is Protestant country  Religious art was forbidden in the democratic country’s severe, whitewashed churches and the usual sources of patronage (the church, royal court, and nobility) were gone  The result was a democratizing of art in subject matter and ownership  Still Life  Extraordinary realism in portraying domestic objects  Considered inferior in other parts of the world  Landscape  Treated nature realistically, often set against towering clouds  “Big Sky” paintings  Done by Ruisdael, he emphasized great open stretches of sky, water, and fields and used dramatic contrasts of light and shadow and threatening clouds to infuse his work  A Fleeting Expression  Frans Hals was the “Master of the Moment”, etching a moment in time and bringing the subject to life through laughing or some other emotion Dutch Baroque

18. “Still Life” by Heda

19. “Windmill at Wijk-bij-Duurstede” by Ruisdael

20. “The Jolly Toper” by Hals