Outline 5

Ranvir Salaria
European History
Red 1
December 08, 2021
Baroque Art Reading provided by teacher

Baroque Art

I. Introduction/Definition
1. Art historians use the term baroque to denote the style associated
with seventeenth-century painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Baroque painters depicted their subjects in a thoroughly naturalistic,
rather than an idealized manner.
2. These painters, the most famous whom was Michelangelo
Caravaggio, also were devoted to picturing; sharp contrasts between
light and darkness, which created dramatic scenes in their painting.
3. Baroque works have been seen as theatrical and intending to draw
the observer into an emotional involvement with the subject that is
being portrayed.

II. Non-Religious Works

1. The work of Baroque artists served both religious and secular ends.
Baroque painters often portrayed scenes from the Bible and from
the lives of saints intended to instruct the observer in religious
truths. Artists used the same style of painting, however, to present
objects and scenes of everyday life in new realistic detail.
2. Such was the case with Dutch painters of still lifes who portrayed all
manner of elaborate foodstuffs as well as with artists such as Louis
Le Nain who painted scenes of French peasant life.
III. Religious Works
1. Baroque art became associated, rightly or wrongly, with both Roman
Catholicism and absolutist politics. Baroque art first emerged in
papal Rome. Gian Lorenzo Bernini's work in St. Peter's Basilica was
the most famous example of baroque decoration.
2. At the direction of Pope Urban, Bernini designed and oversaw the
construction of the great tabernacle that stands beneath the church's
towering dome and directly over the place where St. Peter is said to
be buried.
3. Behind the tabernacle, Bernini also designed monument to papal
authority with the chair of St. Peter resting on the shoulders of four
of the church fathers. In front of the cathedral, he designed the two
vast colonnades that he said symbolized the arms of the church
reaching out to the world.

IV. Political Works

1. The association of baroque art with Roman Catholicism had its
counterpart in the secular world. Charles I of England, during the
1630s when he ruled as an all-but-absolute monarch without calling
Parliament, employed Roman Catholic Flemish artist Peter Paul
Rubens to decorate the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall at his palace in
London with paintings commemorating his father James 1.
2. Rubens was the leading religious painter of the Catholic
Reformation. Charles's employment of him fed Puritan suspicions
that the king harboured Roman Catholic sympathies.
3. The most elaborate baroque monument to political absolutism was
Louis XIV's palace at Versailles. The exterior of the palace was
classical in its restrained design. Room after room in the interior,
however, was decorated with vast, dramatic paintings and murals
presenting Louis as the Sun King.
4. Monarchs across Europe, Protestant as well as Catholic, who hoped
to imitate Louis's absolutism in their own domains, erected similar,
if smaller, palaces filled with elaborate decoration. Baroque
architecture dominated the capitals of the rulers of the smaller
German states as well as the imperial court of the Habsburgs in
Vienna.