Baroque

Question 1

16th Century Europe state of affairs

Answer 1

• ravaged by religious wars and strife accompanying the emergence of France, Germany, and other countries as national entities
• the prevailing mood was of distrust and doubt about the future

Question 2

17th Century Europe state of affairs

Answer 2

• centralized states ruled by kings with unlimited power
• Catholic Church reasserts its faith with confidence and intensity after the damages wrought by the Reformation

The Baroque style developed in Italy at the end of the 16th century partly due to the Catholic Church’s need to reassert its dominance and bolster its flagging membership

• Exuberant spirit of the age was mirrored in its art
• Baroque became a casting off of artificial conventions which controlled the Renaissance, and took up an expression full of imagination, vitality and emotion

Question 3

Italian Baroque

Answer 3

Gianlorenzo Bernini

-Interior decorations of the great basilica of St Peter

St Longinus, 1629-38

Question 4

French Baroque:

Louis XIV palace at Versailles

• set amid magnificent gardens and fountains
• interior is a dazzling display of opulence

multicolored marbles, glittering mirrors, tapestries, sculptures and paintings that allegorically portray Louis as a triumphant warrior, mighty statesman, or the incarnation of the sun god Apollo

Answer 4

Question 5

Flemish Baroque

Peter Paul Rubens

-lived in Italy 1600-1608

inspired by the early Baroque paintings of Caravaggio and Carracci

admired Caravaggio’s naturalism, lighting, dramatic sensuality

admired Carracci’s heroic, dynamic compositions

• came back to Flanders, painting religious and courtly subjects, events from mythology or ancient warfare, landscapes, portraits
• battle scenes pulsing with life, wildly struggling figures and frenzied horses seems to burst from their frame and involve the viewer in a characteristically Baroque manner

Answer 5

Question 6

Dutch Baroque

Answer 6

• after 100 years of occupation by the Spanish Empire, Netherlands was free
• during the period of Spanish domination, Dutch merchants had grown wealthy on trade with the New World and the East, and many of them wanted paintings in their homes

their new sense of freedom engendered such a love of the land that a native landscape school developed

• demand for paintings in 17th century Holland was so great that a visting Englishman noted in amazement that, “it is an ordinary to find a farmer lay out two or three thousand pounds in this commodity. Their houses are full of them”
• striking contrasts of light and shadow, a Baroque hallmark, can be seen in dramatic landscapes, but also in homely scenes as a mother rocking a cradle in a room where deep shadows lurk while sunlight pours through an open door
• artistic tastes of the merchants and the dutch public ran towards representations of the daily life—portraits of solid dutch citizens of all classes, scene of quiet domestic activity and lusty tavern lowlife, views of the native countryside or of the sea

Question 7

Dutch Baroque

Answer 7

Hercules Seghers

• pioneer of native landscape school
• Mountain Landscape, 1620-5

Question 8

Dutch Baroque

Answer 8

Rembrandt van Rijn

-The Woman Taken in Adultery, 1644

Light and dark contrasts evidence influence from Caravaggio