Baroque
The art of drama, darkness, and light: Caravaggio painted faces emerging from shadow, and a generation of painters across Europe followed him.
The Baroque: Drama, Darkness, and Light
The Baroque period in painting runs roughly from 1600 to 1750. It started in Rome, spread across Europe, and produced some of the most dramatic paintings in Western art. The word "Baroque" was originally a derogatory term meaning irregular, misshapen, or excessive. It was applied retroactively by eighteenth-century critics who preferred the order and restraint of Neoclassicism. The painters themselves did not call their work Baroque. They called it modern. Baroque painting is characterized by intense contrasts of light and dark, emotional directness, and a sense of movement and theatricality. Where Renaissance painters aimed for balance and harmony, Baroque painters aimed for impact. They wanted the viewer to feel something immediately, not to admire the composition from a distance.
Caravaggio (1571-1610)
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was the most influential painter of the early Baroque. He was born in a small town near Bergamo in northern Italy, trained in Milan, and moved to Rome in 1592. He was difficult, violent, and frequently in trouble with the law. He killed a man in a brawl in 1606 and spent the last four years of his life fleeing from justice, painting in Naples, Malta, and Sicily, before dying of fever on a beach at Porto Ercole at the age of thirty-eight. His paintings changed everything. He rejected the idealized figures of Renaissance painting. He used real people as models: street vendors, prostitutes, laborers. He painted them with a physical specificity that made them look like they were standing in the room with you. And he used a technique called tenebrism, in which the background is completely black and the figures are lit by a single, directional light source that seems to come from outside the canvas. "The Musicians," available in our store, shows four young men playing instruments and singing. The light falls on their faces and hands from the upper left. The background is dark. The figures are close to the picture plane, as if the viewer is standing in the room with them. This was revolutionary in 1595. Within ten years, painters across Europe were copying Caravaggio's technique. "Crucifixion of Saint Andrew," also in our store, shows the apostle Andrew hanging on an X-shaped cross. The painting is seven feet wide. The figure of Andrew is lit from the left, his body twisted, his face turned toward the viewer. The people watching the crucifixion are in shadow. The painting is not just a depiction of a martyrdom. It is a confrontation. Andrew is looking at you.
Georges de La Tour (1593-1652)
La Tour was a French painter who worked in the Duchy of Lorraine, far from Paris and the centers of artistic power. He was almost completely forgotten after his death and was not rediscovered until 1915, when a German scholar named Hermann Voss identified his work in provincial French museums. Today he is considered one of the masters of Baroque painting. His paintings of Mary Magdalene, including the work available in our store, show a woman sitting in a dark room with a candle as the only light source. The candle is sometimes hidden behind a skull, so that the light glows through the eye sockets. The technique is extraordinary. La Tour painted the way candlelight falls on a face, a mirror, and a piece of fabric with an accuracy that no one else achieved. The paintings are quiet, intimate, and completely unlike the theatrical drama of Caravaggio. But they use the same tool: a single light source in a dark room.
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)
Poussin is the exception in Baroque painting. He worked in Rome but rejected the drama and tenebrism of Caravaggio. He painted classical subjects with balanced compositions and clear, even light. His "Rape of the Sabine Women," available in our store, shows the founding of Rome through the abduction of Sabine women by Roman men. The painting is carefully composed, with figures arranged in a frieze-like pattern that recalls Roman relief sculpture. Poussin was the painter who pointed toward Neoclassicism, and his work was admired by the French Academy for two centuries after his death.
Why the Baroque Matters
The Baroque taught painting to be dramatic. Caravaggio's tenebrism, with its black backgrounds and single light sources, is the visual language of film noir, of Rembrandt's later portraits, and of every painting that uses darkness to make light more powerful. The Baroque also taught painting to be physical. Baroque figures are not idealized. They have weight, texture, and imperfection. They look like real bodies in real space. The Baroque was also the period when painting became a tool of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Catholic Church, responding to the Protestant Reformation, commissioned paintings that would communicate religious stories directly and emotionally to viewers who might not be able to read. The result was art designed to produce an immediate emotional response, not intellectual contemplation. This emphasis on emotional impact shaped Western art for centuries.
Where to See Baroque Paintings
Caravaggio's work is concentrated in Rome. The Galleria Borghese holds "Boy with a Basket of Fruit" and "Sick Bacchus." The Church of San Luigi dei Francesi holds the Contarelli Chapel cycle, three paintings of Saint Matthew that you can see in the setting they were painted for. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has "The Denial of Saint Peter" and "The Musicians." The National Gallery in London has "Supper at Emmaus." Georges de La Tour's work is at the Musee du Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Poussin's work is at the Louvre and the National Gallery in London.
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