•  
  • Not used to describe art until 1970’s; originally meant bizarre, extreme
  • Occurs at different times in different places, for our class baroque= roughly 17^th century
  • There IS no single baroque style, we’re going to look at three
    • Baroque realism
    • Baroque classicism
    • Dynamic/Ecstatic Baroque
  • Sources of new art of Baroque
    1. Natural world
    2. High renaissance, the moderation
    3. Venitian art of the 16^th century

•  
  • God of Wine: wine leaves on head, wearing toga, classical couch
  • Startling immediacy
  • Plays to the spectator
  • This painting (and other facts) lead historians to believe Caravaggio was gay
  • Representational strategies:
    • Clear traces of mannerism: stylized face contrasted with the still life in the foreground, eroticism nod to mannerism?
    • Baroque traits:
      • Frankly physical
      • Repore or interplay with the viewer
      • Very direct, uncomplicated
      • Convincing reality effects (especially in the still life)

•  
  • Flirty, youthful
  • Meant as a warning of the dangers of a fast life at a young age: the young girl is stealing his ring
  • Typical gender construction for the time
  • What is it that breaks with mannerism?
    • Absolutely simplified: two figures in neutral background, sach directs eye to main even t of picture
    • Convincing reality effects, naturalism; attention to texture (gauze, metal), use of spotlight to light the scene
  • Elevated genre painting: full size painting (as large as a historical piece)

•  
  • Reassessing art and nature: stress the RETURN to nature
  • Advocated drawing from nature and live human model
  • Stressed the sutdy of classical antiquity
  • Stressed the study of central Italian high renaissance, interested in its moderation
  • **stressed the study of Venetian art of the 16^th century

•  
  • Scene from everyday life, mundane, common
  • Painterly, surface texture
  • Involves the viewer
  • Braod burshstrokes
  • References to Michelangelo cf. Sacrifice of Noah
    • Butcher in middle
      • Based on Noah with hand up
    • Butchered animal
      • Person with sacrificial lamb

•  
  • Enormous canvas, first public commission for a religious work
  • REVOLUTIONARY for religious art; forever changed and inspired religious art for succeeding centuries
  • Represents St. Matthew who is a tax collector, St. Peter and Jesus are calling Matthew to be a Christian
  • Very stark, however most complicated piece Caravaggio has done up to this point
    • Uses table to organize all the figures
    • One seat left open for the viewer
    • Tenebrism= spotlight effect
      • Creates stark contrasts of light and shade
      • Caravaggio is credited with creating this technique:
      • Six comprehensive functions of spotlight
        1. Gives the objects and figures immediacy
        2. Isolates key figures
        3. Creates a strong sense of relief; three dimensionality
        4. Reveals texture
        5. Adds drama and vitality
        6. Carries a symbolic message
  • Christ has bare feet (he is NOT idealized), meant to be read in contrast: Christ is humble
  • You see this picture at an angle- composition is designed so that Christ is beckoning YOU
  • Christ and Matthew seem to be communication across the picture
  • This painting recalls the dictates of the Counsel of Trent
  • TECHNIQUE
    • Superb colorist, colors are rich and glowing
    • Was not a draftsman, he painted directly on the canvas

•  
  • Caravaggio makes this a personal, private religious experience…not a historical event
  • Scene is reduced to two figures and a horse: no setting, no landscape
  • Saul is greatly foreshortened, dwarfed by the horse
  • No explicit representation of the divine in the effect
  • Light adds vitality and adds textures (wrinkles on grooms forehead, texture of hair and fabrics)
  • Figures are un-idealized, painted from live model

•  
  • Pessimistic depiction of saint: due to absence of light, oppressive composition (life-size figures actually seem powerless before death)
  • Bizarre shifts and handling of scale: huge grave diggers
  • Mood linked to events late in life 9Cf. Decaptiation of John the Baptist, 1608)

•  
  • Optimistic, tender moving
  • Mary seated on ground with Christ child in her arms
  • Light from upper right pickts out faces and Mary and Jesus’ interaction, comes to rest in bottom left corner on basket
    • Symbolic meaning of basket: loaf of bread=eucharist), white cloth (altar cloth), carpentry tools, (Joseph, crucifixion)

1.  
   1. New concept of relationship between observer and artwork: more direct and real
   2. Recognition of validity of religious emotions (influenced by Jesuits and Oratorians) viewer involved sensually in scene
   3. Believable art
   4. Privileged reality effects ot a previously unseen degree
   5. Merged central and north Italian manners

•  
  • Apollo, female figures represent the hours
  • Less physical, less sensuous, more lyrical
  • Meant to be an imitation of ancient depiction

• Escaping the shades of night
• Dynamic, ecstatic baroque
• Everything has been calculated for the viewer (has been painted from below looking up

Pietro Da Corona, Gloricication of the Barberini Family, 1629-31, Palazzo Barberini

•  
  • Patron = Pope Barberini
  • Painted to OVERWHELM everything merging together in dynamic, baroque way
  • Divine wreath associated with Barberini family
  • Allegorical feature representative of faith hope and charity

•  
  • Swiftness of Daphne’s flight
  • Very pictorial
  • Denies the reality of the medium
  • Carved from single block of marble

Pluto and Proserpina, 1621-22

•  
  • More realistic view of rape scene
  • Depiction of FLESH

Tomb of Urban VIII cf. Guglielmo della Porta, Tomb of Paul III

•  
  • Both cases feature a seated pope figure flanked by allegorical figures
  • Both cases utilize volutes
  • Colors richer in the Bernini, more dramatic
  • Greater drama has to do with the allegories being activated
  • Shown flanked by charity and justice
    • Charitys crying child is the viewerà sad about the pope’s death
    • Papal propaganda: FEEL SAD ABOUT HE POPE

Ecstacy of St. Teresa, Cornaro Chapel, 1647-52

Commemorates St. Teresa’s vision of the transverberation

•  
  • Designed the chapel like a theater: puts spectators in the “theater boxes” so that people can witness the vision of the St.
  • Marble sculpture seems to levitate
  • Sense of ascent from darkness to light, earthly to celestial
  • rendering of Teresa is EMOTIONAL
    • Drapery is heavy, emotional, heavily undercut
    • Contrasts Teresa with the angel simpler drapery, limp hand convulsed in ecstasy, his hand strong with arrow
    • Renders cloud in rough way

•  
  • Fantastic overhauling of classical principles
  • Restless, dynamic, oval shape of ground plan
  • Multiplied columns in the bays, interlocking framework
  • Looking toward the altar: walls are undulating
    • Coloumns are not evenly spaced
    • Half domes, pendentives are coffered to make them look taller
    • Strange tensions that involve you in the intereiorà all of that tension is resolved in the dome

•  
  • Normative oval, still fairly dynamic shape
  • Temple front fascade, only one bay, framed by giant pilasters (Bernini’s architectural vocabulary is more conservative)
  • Tightly organized, very reductionist
  • Interior
    • Facing the altar: Saint Andrew bursts through the pediment, ascends to the dome
    • Base pierced with windowsà dome appears to float

•  
  • Depicts common scene: angel 
  • Heavy picment
  • Paints from dark to light: starts with dark layer and layers light on top of it
  • Use of color is interesting: contrast Jerome’s red with angel’s blue
  • Powerful statement of Catholic doctrine
  • Composition: crossed diagonals: hold Jerome’s head in suspension
    • ULTIMATE KEY to its power: communicates on an abstract level, the way that Jerome’s thoughts are fixed
  • Spanish paintings have essential austerity: involves the senses without sensuality inherent in Italian work

-Spanish and Italian come together

-Mythology has a troubled status in Spain

•  
  • an image of unredeemable grossness, does not idealize
  • braying donkey: emblem of sloth
  • Ribera is NOT reveling in classical mythology, should be extolling the virtues of wine
  • C.f. Rubens, 1620
  • Tortoise= emblem of sloth
  • Satyr, crown of pine needlesà symbol of lust
  • Snake in bottom left: snake ripping paper, possible reference to the maenads?

•  
  • We know from inscription that this is a portrait:
    • Began to grow a beard at the age of 37
    • At age 52 gave birth to a baby
  • Demonstrates Spanish interest in the grotesque
  • Alludes to Greco’s Holy Family (1580s)
  • Typifies fascination with Spanish gender roles: how bizarre! Painted from life!

•  
  • Wearing  a knapsack, clubfooted, holding a cane, smiling, holding Latin inscription that says “give me alms for the love of god”
  • Ed Sullivan suggests that the painting gives pictorial representation of Catholic ideals vs. Protestant ideals good works necessary to get to heaven
  • Meant to contradict Protestant idea that one can get to heaven through faith alone
  • Child is smiling because he is emblem of potential salvation
  • Figure towers over the horizon

•  
  • Point is to make them as real looking as possible
  • Made of polychromed wood because wood is suited to realism
  • Sculdpture wearing actual clothing

•  
  • Simple composition, block like, hands turn in so as not to disturb the block
  • Counter-posing drapery that balances the slumped head
  • Extremely three dimensional- tenebris lighting

•  
  • Early example of still life
  • Simple composition: three objects
  • Handle of cup turned away: cup is not for us!
  • Objects have been abstracted from time/space
  • Objects may be signifiers of the virgin mary, rose is divine love, lemons, orange blossoms= purity

•  
  • Seated shuffling and playing cards, couldn’t walk by the time this was rendered
  • Cf. Ribera, Penitent Mary Magdalene: figure against rocky outcropping and distant landscape
  • Compositional type meant to ennoble the sinnerà in this particular painting it is meant to be FUNNY: meant to ridicule the sitter for the pleasure/entertainment of others

•  
  • Depicts Spanish military victory over Dutch in Holland
  • Lances held up proudly
  • Incredible range of light effects
  • Depicts aire and clouds and smoke
  • The brushwork is looser, thin washes in background thicker work in foreground

•  
  • Not a whole lot of female nudes in Spain
  • Cf. Hellenistic, so-called “Hermaphrodite”
  • Very painterly, venitian
  • Contrast of materials (silk, skin, mirror)
  • Exaggerates curves

•  
  • Church
  • Open chapel
  • Exterior of mission:
    • Looks like a military fortress
      • Has crenellations
      • Made to look like this to have an impact on native population
      • Friars thought of themselves as soldiers of Christ
      • Missions may have actually served as military fortresses
    • Fascade style called plateresque
      • Based on the kind of work that silver-workers did
      • Meant to be humorous, whimsical, quite ornate
      • Style associated with universities in Spain
      • Columns tied up with ribbons, carved with fruit
      • Pre-Columbian glyph
    • Atrium
      • Incorporated elements of native temple sights
      • Not allowed in the church
  • Cross
    • Just Christ’s face, no body
    • Instruments of the passion: rooster, nails
    • Scull of Adam at base à sets up typology, Christ as new Adam
    • Flowers carved on cross arm
    • Base: Mary sculpted in style of native relief
  • Larger Cloister:
    • Very European set up: arches , arcades
    • Crucifixion (painting)
      • Fresco, done by native artists: combines native and European mural painting techniques
      • Mostly black and white with touches of red: possibly natives were given prints and told to copy
      • Native elements:
        • Lid of Mary’s jar = shape of a jaguar, refers to indigenous jaguar deity
        • Border= grotesque designs: indigenous numbers, squash blossoms

• Fresco, done by native artists: combines native and European mural painting techniques
• Mostly black and white with touches of red: possibly natives were given prints and told to copy
• Native elements:
  • Lid of Mary’s jar = shape of a jaguar, refers to indigenous jaguar deity
  • Border= grotesque designs: indigenous numbers, squash blossoms

•  
  • Story= Guadalupe appears to recent native convert (Juan Diego) on the site of a former Aztec Goddess Templeà “tell archbishop of Mexico City to build a church in her honor”, fills Juan Diego’s cloak with roses, when JD shows archbishop, Guadalupe is printed on cloak
  • Mary’s ethnic signifiers

•  
  • Based on Caravaggio
  • Spotlight coming from left
  • Tenebrism
  • Light adds drama
  • Picks out important passages
  • Read the contrast between Christ’s hand and Thomas’ hand
  • Cf Cravaggio’s Doubting Thomasà idealized Christ’s body in Arteaga, low slung drapery…mannerist elements

3^rd generation Mexican

•  
  • based on the Caravaggio: Mexican work is more crowded, Caravaggio’s is more explicitly emotional

Afro-mexican artist, began to put people of color in his paintings

•  
  • Why Baroque realism?
    • Little angels of color!
    • More painterly, braoder brushwork
    • More idealism, less realism
    • More interest in color and light

•  
  • Less tenebrism
  • More color
  • Elongated, idealized bodies
  • Strange subject: Adam and Eve connected to the cross via veins out of their bodies that grow into the crossà blood of Christ gives life to Adam and Eve
  • Cross as tree of life

•  
  • Cross plan
  • Very tall creates illusion of height
  • Two towers with central vessel
  • Incredibly dense ornamentation, meant to overwhelm you

•  
  • Native influence, vernacular building
  • Exterior is unfinished and fairly modestà towers and middle section COVERED with tiles
  • Inside: SO ornamented, utlra baroqueà covered with painted stucco sculpture
    • Meant to involve you
    • Meant to stimulate your senses
    • Clearly an influence of native artists

•  
  • Demonstrates knowledge of Baroque developments in Europe
  • Undulating architecture
  • Cf. Borromini, San Carlo: first level second level, strange pediment, not a flat façadeà Borromini influence in Mexico
  • Tiles made by indigenous

•  
  • Seems to be portrait of peace harmony and order
    • Horizontals dominate, empty space in foreground
    • No altarà sacred word more important than the eucharist
    • Reductionist geometry
    • Saenredam’s father’s grave in forground

•  
  • Caravaggio’s influence:
    • Tenebrism, figures in contemporary dress organized around a table
    • Recousoir figure: corner figure that lets us know how to read the spaceà usually with back to us
    • They sing and make music
    • Monumental large figures
    • Argument for biblical overtones: prodigal son in yellow? Woman a prostitute? Female crone figure is madame?

•  
  • Figures in their entirety
  • Careful attentsion to environment
  • Detailed setting
  • Interest in color
  • Ligae and shade but no tenebris
  • Very different from Utrehct
  • Related to native Norther dradition (Netherlandsish)
    • Cf. Peter Brueghel the Elser, The Battle between Carnival and Lent, 1559
  • Genre Painting low life
    • Depicts peasants
    • Buyer= middleclass patron
    • Lots of diagonals
    • Coloristic
    • Brushwork is loose and painterly

•  
  • Alchemist working the bellows, trying to make gold
  • Verging on disorderlyà deliberately so; meanto to convey the confused mind/foolishness of the alchemist
  • “you waste oil and work” (written on piece of paper)
  • mother and naked babe in background allude to proverb “what is this body but waste and shit?”
  • relates to protestant ideas of wealth as shit

•  
  • Creator of Baroque landscape in Holland
  • No narrative; landscape is worthy in and of itself
  • Formula for landscape:
    • Low viewpoint (low horizon line)
    • Wide space à panoramic
    • Emphasis on horizon and sky
    • Human figures are small and inumporrant
      • Do seave to understand space and spatial recession

•  
  • Emphasis on atmosphere: the sky!
  • Notice artist employment of narrow range of colors
    • Gray, brown, yellow, no bright colors
  • Tonal landscape
  • Depicts winter

•  
  • Again, SKY IS SUBJECT
  • Windmill and sand dunes indicates that this is Holland
  • Tonal landscape, exploration of grays and yellows

•  
  • Focus on main windmill: its power and splendor
  • More sense of mass
  • Structural landscape from monumental phase of Dutch art (later…1650s-1670s)
  • C.f. Van Goyen’s Windmill:
    • In monumental work, windmill dominates, in tonal windmill is insignificant
    • In monumental, land is very separate from sky
    • Color contrast heightened in structural landscape

•  
  • Horizontals dominate but some diagonals
  • Drying fields for linen workers
  • Church gives it religious tone

•  
  • Tangible objects
  • Allegorical landscape: how are we intended to read it?
    • Enter at left with rainbowà lead your eye to ruins of medieval churchà move across to the treeà tree points to the TOMB (the white one)à move down to stream which pours you out of the picture
  • Actual Jewish cemetery, but ruins have been added
    • Ruins, tombs, broken tree = presence of death
    • Conveys transience of life, futility of human endeavor

•  
  • Early 17^th c.--> creation, revival of still life
    1. Interest in classical antiquity
    2. Linked to tradition of religious painting in Roman art
    3. Linked to scientirve developments in early modern Europe
       • New interest in natural world
       • Empirical observation

•  
  • Middle class dutch food
  • Atmospheric haze
  • Fairly monochromatic

•  
  • Phase 2= structural still life
  • Done for an elite/upper class clientel
  • Ostentatious, what is called a banquet piece
  • Not middle class food! Lavish food, lavish objects, against rich background
  • Very different setting for the still life
  • Overturned cup: shortness of life
  • Unifies through repetition of color
  • Lobster alludes to the sea, melons cut open to make them more visible

•  
  • Man woman and dog in foreground, innkeeper behind him
  • Diagonal sweep organizes the picture
  • Holding big glass of beerà moralizing picture: reference to prodigal sun story, gluttony
  • Has also been associated with Dutch proverb: “affection of dogs, love of whores, and hospitality of innkeepers, not one of these three can you enjoy without costs”
  • Meant by Has to suggest the deceptive nature of pleasure

•  
  • Genre picture or a portrait?
  • Malle Babbe is real person/ “figure” in town, bar-goer
  • Characterized  in a witch-like way: head and body turn in two different ways
  • Owl is emblem of drunkenness, stupidity, furthers interpretation of her as a witch

•  
  • Women in Europe had higher status
  • Woman and man in interior scene
  • He leans over an offers her a coin, she continues to sewà woman looks tense and uncomfortable, visually isolated against that background
  • Man is clearly characterized as foreign

•  
  • Albert Eckhout: 8 full sized portraits of racial castes
    • Tapuya Man and Woman, early 1640’s
      • Represents them as dangerous cannibals
      • Suggests that the woman in sexually voracious
      • They’re lazy
      • seen negatively because they will not cooperate
        • Man= emasculated, passive, holding clubs, snake at the bottom (open mouth), frightening spider (fatal bite)
        • Woman= holding severed body parts, wild dog lined up with vagina, maculated, 

•  
  • Purity of formal relationships= immutable quality
  • What is the effect of this formal purity for us as viewers?
    1. Effusive, poetic
    2. Unemotional
    3. Cerebral, intellectual picture
  • Did he use a camera obscura to create this image?
    • Box, lens, mirror machine that projects the scene before the artist to sharpen the eye to optical phenomenon
      • Things that make scholorars think Vermeer used one:
        • Wide field of vision
        • Precise treatment of reflections
        • Circles of “confusion”
        • Focus of picture usually on the furthest object in the background
        • Dimensional precision in the rendering of objectsà mathematical diminution of objects as they move back in the space
        • Horizontal lines slightly tipped
        • Shape of the canvases
    • Man and a woman, man overly transfixed
      • Picture about spell women cast on men
      • Mood a little melancholy
      • Framed picture on wall depiction of Roman charityà daughter breastfeeding father to save him from dying in prison

•  
  • A little more open, more accessible, livelier
  • Paintings on back wall:
    • Landscape
    • Well known painting of Procuress
  • Just below the painting is pregnant singing woman

•  
  • A little more open, more accessible, livelier
  • Paintings on back wall:
    • Landscape
    • Well known painting of Procuress
  • Just below the painting is pregnant singing woman

•  
  • Mood is reverent and melancholy
  • Holding perfect balanced scales
  • Painting on the back wallà a Last Judgement Scene (Christ above judging saved and the damned), woman’s head covers part of the picture depicted St. Michaeal with the soul scale
  • Pearls are worldly vanity

•  
  • Man sits painting woman in front of a wrinkled map
    • Woman is cleo muse of history holding trumpet of fame
  • Drapery in front reveals the scene
  • Theme= muse of history is the inspiration and fellow of painting

•  
  • Saskia seated on his knee, he pulls up her dress
  • Composition rather circular
  • Joyous composition
  • Cf. Fans Hals, so-called Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, 1623
    • Genre painting that looks like a portrait vs. portrait that looks like a genre painting

•  
  • Delilah cuts his hair, takes his strength: now he’s being blinded
  • Brutal scene in foreground
  • Light comes in diagonally- composition composed of clashing diagonals
  • Cf. Rubens, Blinding of Samson (brutal, theatrical etc)

Group portrait in the guise of a lesson on dissection and anatomyà portrait of elite/learned of Amsterdam

•  
  • He makes a portrait dramatic
    • Architectural setting
    • Light coming in diagonal
    • Main figure is Dr. Tulp:
      • Holding up with a clamp the tendons of the arm, gesturing with his other arm
      • Creates a narrative, indicates that he is in the middle of saying something
  • Book in right hand corner has been IDed as a book of anatomy from Vesalius: Would be more normal to dissect the abdomenà Vesalius said he valued the hand equal to the mind in medicine
  • Dramatic/melodramatic approach to portraiture

•  
  • group portrait of Muskateers from the militia guild of Amsterdam
  • leader in red sash gives orders ot his attendant in yellow
  • portrait has been enlivened/ agitated
    • uses grand dramatic architecture from Rafaelà meant to represent the city game to Amsterdam
  • rich color typical of Remberant
  • shifting light and shade
  • he has introduced a narrative:
    • the muskateers have bee called out to protect the city

•  
  • Christ in center healing the sick, healed are on the left: Christ as humble common approachable
  • Particularly protestant view of Christ
  • Christ pushes Peter (Socrates portrait) away from scene
  • C.f. Raphael, Disputaà Disputa elevates philosophers

•  
  • Close and tragic depiction of the scene
    • Christ gaunt
    • Mary consumed with grief

•  
  • Longinus the only one who recognizes Christ as the messiahà light shows brightest on him
  • Remberant keeps returning to the plate and scratching ità last stage of print is almost unreadable

• Council of Trent
• ItalianHigh Renaissance
• Understandable
• Reduced Setting
• Drama, immediacy
• Concern with viewers reaction
• Reality Effect
• Frankness, physicality
• Drawing from nature
• Genre painting

• Urban VIII (1623-44)
• Complex
• Emphasis on Light and Color
• Dynamic, Irregular
• Overwhelming
• Dramatic
• Idealization

•  
  • Dates from 1620’s to 1670’s
  • Following five traits
    1. Preference for reality effects
    2. Pictures designed to affect the viewer: pictures pushed up against picure plane, figures are cutt off (they are in our space)
    3. Emphasis on color and light: dramatic tenebrism, earth tone pallete
    4. Interest in drama and emotion
    5. See the persistence of mannerist traits (idealized, eroticized)

•  

  Calvinists and ?

•  
  •  
    • no church commissions for religious art in Calvinism
  • No monarchy in Holland
  • Much more private patronage, more art for the middle class
  • Art works commissioned for private homesà major shift in emphasis to portraits, still lifes, genre painting