Baroque painting

During the Baroque painting era, Europe was plunged into continuous wars, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, which would not end until the independence of Holland, and the consolidation of monarchical absolutism, especially in the centre of the continent. Art will be the propaganda vehicle of both the Church of the Counter-Reformation and absolutist states or the Protestant bourgeoisie. It is a seductive art that appeals to the imagination, sensuality and dynamism, for which the uses of compositional theatricality are depicted.

?

In the Baroque, a human figure is a decisive object of art, not in its idealised form, but in any aspect, whether beautiful or ugly, sublime or everyday. In addition, there are other more banal subjects, which take objects from nature and place them in the foreground of the composition, such as animals, inanimate objects, hunting, still lives, works, etc.

In the Baroque there are three periods:

A) Early or primitive, from 1580 to 1630,

B) Plenary, from 1630 to 1680, and

C) Late or Rococo, from 1680 to 1750. In its last stage, the rococo takes the triumph of pure aesthetics and inconsequential beauty to art.

The artistic Baroque contrasts openly with the ideal of harmony, proportion and measure advocated by the Renaissance.

The main characteristics of Baroque paintings are:

·?Dynamism -?The baroque artist wants to create a constant sensation of movement. Faced with the predominance of straight lines in Renaissance art, the Baroque is mainly based on the curved line.

·?Theatricality -?The artist tries to emotionally shock the viewer, and he resorts to hyperrealistic procedures. For example, this intentionality can be seen in the representation of Christ lying and in all sacred imagery.

·?Decorativism and sumptuousness -?The Baroque artist attends equally to the essential and the accidental. Hence his thoroughness in the composition of small details and his taste for ornamentation.

·?Contrast?- The Baroque artist manifests himself contrary to the balance and uniformity of the Renaissance. Its ideal is to welcome different, and even antagonistic, visions of the same theme in the same composition. For example, the gods appear amongst ordinary people's characters in the mythological subject boxes.

The language of Baroque painting

The persuasive interest of the Church and the monarchy and the valuation of the Protestant bourgeoisie of the individual and the daily happenings determine the leading quality of Baroque painting: its relation to reality, which is also a consequence of stylistic evolution. Since the last years of the sixteenth century, when the purely aesthetic justification and the conscious antinaturalism of Mannerism exhausted their expressive channels, Baroque artists used formal novelty, embodying in their works what Mannerism rejected: reality and nature.

What characterises a Baroque painting

Realism?- They seek the models of nature without proceeding to its idealisation, even reaching naturalism, concern for the representation of the psychological state, feelings (pain, joy), etc. On many occasions, light is put at the service of realism. Predominance of the colour in the painting. In the great masters, the stains are the definitors of the forms (Velázquez or Rembrandt). Things are painted as seen in reality, with spots of colour and light, missing the details and with the outline not specified. Continuous?Depth?- In the baroque, the rigour of the linear perspective is abandoned; to obtain the sensation of depth, the procedures used can be convergent lines, a series of foreshortenings, a disproportionate first term, a first dark term, light plays, and atmospheric effects.

The hegemony of light?- Leonardo's sneer is abandoned; he moves to planes of light and shadows where the shapes are painted with great precision.

The baroque is the art of pictorially shaping the light, and in correlation, the shadow plays a previously unpublished role, especially in the first essays of the style that have come to be called Tenebrismo. In the baroque, the form is subordinated to the light, and in some cases, the forms can fade due to the weakness or intensity of the luminous twinkle.

Composition in Baroque paintings

Freedom in composition, i.e. asymmetric and tectonic composition. The instinctive tendency to place the central figure in the middle and to paint two halves of similar fabrics (symmetry) is lost, just as the horizontal and vertical mesh of classical art (tectonic composition) is discarded. Anything that shows imbalance or suggests that the scene continues beyond the boundaries of the frame is preferred. This atectónica composition is obtained by the diagonal lines that substitute the pyramidal compositions of the previous century. Sometimes, broken shapes indicate that everything does not fit on the canvas.

Shaping in Baroque paintings

Baroque painting is a painting of life and thus can not be represented in static forms. Turbulence precedes quietude; the figures are unstable, and the foreshortenings and undulations multiply. Sometimes, this movement does not exist, and the excess of quietude and austerity must be related to the desire to link the work with religious transcendence.

Techniques in Baroque paintings

The importance of colour and the desire to show it in all its brilliance make one abandon the temper and generalise the oil. The use of the canvas, sometimes of great proportions, and the painting on board are almost abandoned. The fresco technique is still used for decorative wall painting.

Themes in Baroque paintings

This is where the multiplicity of schools provokes an absolute variety in the subjects. As for the religious themes, there are many representations of the Virgin, such as the Immaculate Conception, Piety, the most relevant evangelical passages, charity, sacraments (especially penance and Eucharist), series on the lives of saints and their Religious experiences, and the vision of death.

The Schools of Baroque Painting:

A) The Italian school:

Concerned enormously by the problems of the light in the pictorial work, Caravaggio works the chiaroscuro, with marked contrasts between the zones of shadow and those of light within the painting (Tenebrismo) that perfectly mark the volumes of the figures and objects represented. On the other hand, he tries to give his figures the maximum possible realism without any hint of idealisation, which sometimes leads him to work directly from the natural. Over the years, this initial realism will eventually become a real drama, for which he resorts to increasingly complicated compositions.

B) The Flemish and Dutch schools:

The pictorial tradition of Flanders is well-known. It focuses on bourgeois taste for everyday details and the exaltation of their way of life. In these moments of religious convulsions in Europe, Flanders is an advocate of Catholicism, while Holland is one of Protestantism. However, painting is decorative, opulent and hedonistic.

In the seventeenth century, Holland was placed among the great schools of painting with a marked national character, thanks to the bourgeoisie's development, which demanded many paintings showing their way of life. Pay attention to the drawing. The colours are cold, and the result is more realistic than Efectista. In fact, the style is far from the baroque, except in the case of Rembrandt. The favourite subjects of the Dutch were portraits and, above all, the collective picture in which the members of the corporations of honest men appeared. It uses themes of natural and daily life, scenes of the interior, still lifes, landscapes and portraits, individual and collective. The most banal events deserve the attention of the painter.

Women who read letters, women who make music, who weigh gold, who pose for a painter, who converse gallantly with gentlemen; Women who write, play the lute, make-up, take care of children, spin, make lace bobbin ... They are common themes of Dutch painting of the seventeenth century and are protagonists of most of the works of Johannes Vermeer of Delft, A slow and meticulous work artist who spent his whole life in his hometown of Delft in the Netherlands.

His paintings (of which a little more than thirty are preserved) are usually of small size, presenting us with a palette of scarce colours but very bright and clear, with which he manages to reflect like no one the light on the objects. Moreover, the theme is also enormously interesting: it attracted him to represent mainly interiors, which frequently appear female characters. Many times, these women in Vermeer's paintings are alone or, rather, accompanied by the light that enters through a window (always to the left) and places them in the picture, capturing them in relation to the task in which they are occupied.

C) The Spanish school:

Baroque is, for Spain, the golden age of painting. The central theme is religion since Spain is the champion of Tridentine values. The Church is the great patron of artists and the Court, so religious subjects dominate overall. Spanish painters know European art more than travel because many great artists work at some point in Spain.?

THIS BLOG claims no credit for any images posted on this blog unless otherwise noted. Images on this blog are copyrighted to their respective owners. If a picture on this blog belongs to you and you do not wish it to appear on this site, please E-mail (rolandkeates at yahoo.com with a link to said image, and it will be promptly removed.