THE BAROQUE ERA c.1600–1700

HISTORY OF VISUAL ARTS

Definition: What is Baroque Art?

In fine art, the term Baroque (derived from the Portuguese 'barocco' meaning, 'irregular pearl or

stone') describes a fairly complex idiom, originating in Rome, which flowered during the period

c.1590-1720, and which embraced painting, and sculpture as well as architecture. After the

idealism of the Renaissance (c.1400-1530), and the slightly 'forced' nature of Mannerism

(c.1530-1600),Baroque art above all reflected the religious tensions of the age - notably the

desire of the Catholic Church in Rome (as annunciated at the Council of Trent, 1545-63) to

reassert itself in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Many Catholic Emperors and monarchs

across Europe had an important stake in the Catholic Church's success, hence a large number of

architectural designs, paintings and sculptures were commissioned by the Royal Courts of Spain,

France, and elsewhere, in order to glorify their own divine grandeur, and in the process

strengthen their political position. By comparison, Baroque art in Protestant areas like Holland

had far less religious content, and instead was designed essentially to appeal to the growing

aspirations and financial strength of the merchant and middle classes

Styles/Types of Baroque Art

In order to fulfill its propagandist role, Catholic-inspired Baroque art tended to be large-scale

works of public art, such as monumental wall-paintings and huge frescoes for the ceilings and

vaults of palaces and churches. Baroque painting illustrated key elements of Catholic dogma,

either directly in Biblical works or indirectly in mythological or allegorical compositions. Along

with this monumental, high-minded approach, painters typically portrayed a strong sense of

movement, using swirling spirals and upward diagonals, and strong sumptuous colour schemes,

in order to dazzle and surprise. New techniques of tenebrism and chiaroscuro (1) were

developed to enhance atmosphere. Brushwork is creamy and broad, often resulting in 1

thick impasto. Baroque sculpture, typically larger-than-life size, is marked by a similar sense of

dynamic movement, along with an active use of space.

Baroque architecture was designed to create spectacle and illusion. Thus the straight lines of the

Renaissance were replaced with flowing curves, while domes/roofs were enlarged, and interiors

carefully constructed to produce spectacular effects of light and shade. It was an emotional style,

which, wherever possible, exploited the theatrical potential of the urban landscape - as illustrated

by St Peter's Square (1656-67) in Rome, leading up to St Peter's Basilica. Its architect, Bernini,

ringed the square with colonnades, to convey the impression to visitors that they are being

embraced by the arms of the Catholic Church.

As is evident, although most of the architecture, painting and sculpture produced during the 17th

century is known as Baroque, it is by no means a monolithic style. There are at least three

different strands of Baroque, as follows:

(1) Religious Grandeur

A triumphant, extravagant, almost theatrical (and at times) melodramatic style of religious art,

commissioned by the Catholic Counter Reformation and the courts of the absolute monarchies of

Europe. This type of Baroque art is exemplified by the bold visionary sculpture and architecture

of Bernini (1598-1680), and by the large-scale grandiose set-piece paintings of the Flemish

master Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).

(2) Greater Realism

A new more life-like or naturalist style of figurative composition. This new approach was

championed by Michelangelo Merisi da Carravaggio (1571-1610), Diego Rodriguez de Silva

y Velazquez (1599-1660) and Annibale Carracci (1560-1609). The boldness and physical

presence of Caravaggio's figures, the life-like approach to religious painting adopted by

Velazquez, and a new form of movement and exuberance pioneered by Annibale Carracci - all

these elements were part of the new and dynamic style known as Baroque.

(3) Easel Art

Unlike the large-scale, public, religious works of Baroque artists in Catholic countries, Baroque

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art in Protestant Holland (often referred to as the Dutch Golden Age) was exemplified by a new

type of easel-art - a glossy form of genre-painting  (2)- aimed at the prosperous bourgeois

householder. This new Dutch Realist School of genre painting also led to enhanced realism in

portrait art and landscape painting, flower pictures, animal compositions and, in particular, to

new forms of still life painting(2), including vanitas religious works. Different towns and areas

had their own 'schools' or styles, such as Utrecht, Delft, Leiden, Amsterdam, Haarlem and

Dordrecht..

In addition, to complicate matters further, Rome - the very centre of the movement - was also

home to a "classical" style, as exemplified in the paintings of the history painter Nicolas

Poussin (1594-1665) and the Arcadian landscape artist Claude Lorrain (1600-82).

History of Baroque Art

Following the pronouncements made by the Council of Trent on how art might serve religion,

together with the upsurge in confidence in the Roman Catholic Church, it became clear that a

new style of art was necessary in order to support the Catholic Counter Reformation and fully

convey the miracles and sufferings of the Saints to the congregation of Europe. This style had to

be more forceful, more emotional and imbued with a greater realism. Strongly influenced by the

views of the Jesuits (the Baroque is sometimes referred to as 'the Jesuit Style'), architecture,

painting and sculpture were to work together to create a unified effect. The initial impetus came

from the arrival in Rome during the 1590s of Annibale Carracci and Carravaggio (1571-1610).

Their presence sparked a new interest in realism as well as antique forms, both of which were

taken up and developed (in sculpture) by Alessandro Algardi (in sculpture) and Bernini (in

sculpture and architecture). Peter Paul Rubens, who remained in Rome until 1608, was the only

great Catholic painter in the Baroque idiom, although Rembrandt and other Dutch artists were

influenced by both Caravaggism and Bernini. France had its own (more secular) relationship

with the Baroque, which was closest in architecture, notably the Palace of Versailles. Spain and

Portugal embraced it more enthusiastically, as did the Catholic areas of Germany, Austria,

Hungary and the Spanish Netherlands. The culmination of the movement was the High 3

Baroque (c.1625-75), while the apogee of the movement's grandiosity was marked by the

phenomenal quadratura known as Allegory of the Missionary Work of the Jesuits (1688-94, S.

Ignazio, Rome), by the illusionist ceiling painter Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709).

The developments of Baroque art outside Italy are Flemish Baroque (c.1600-80), Dutch

Baroque (c.1600-80) and Spanish Baroque (1600-1700).

Flemish Baroque Painting

The story of Baroque art in Flanders during the 17th century reflects the gradual decline of the

country itself. Occupying the southern part of the Low Countries or Netherlands, it was ruled -

along with the northern part of the Low Countries, known as Holland - by the unpopular Spanish

Hapsburgs, who had taken over from the French Dukes of Burgundy. Its once powerful

commercial and cultural centres, such as Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, were weakened by

religious and political disputes between the Catholic Hapsburg authorities and Protestant Dutch

merchants. Thus as Dutch Baroque art flourished as never before, Flemish Baroque depended on

a handful of artists, mostly active in Antwerp During the 15th century - the early days of the

Italian Renaissance - Flemish painters had exported the technique of oil painting to artists in

Florence, Rome and Venice. Now, at the beginning of the 17th century, with the spread of Italian

Caravaggism, Flemish painters combined their own tradition with the tenebrist tradition arriving

from Italy. This development was exemplified by the Antwerp artist Rubens (1577-1640). Since

the High Renaissance, Flemish painting had been in transition between Northern and Italian

influences; it was Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) who made the first real attempt to digest,

absorb and fuse the two schools, creating a new style, which was to have a powerful impact on

all painting north of the Alps.

Peter Paul Rubens

His style of Baroque painting was vigorous, confident, sensual, decorative, theatrical,

energetically magnificent. It is not without significance that when the young Rubens - the

promising painter from Antwerp - arrived to study in Italy (where he remained for eight years) he

devoted most attention to the Venetians, the most colourful and decorative Italian school. When

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he returned to his native city he opened a workshop where he was soon employing two hundred

assistants, many of whom were outstanding painters, each with his own speciality: the painting

of animals, of fabrics, of still life, and so on. He himself specialized in the human body - notably

female nudes - which he depicted with an abundance of rosy flesh, with broad, strong gestures a

continuous play of curves each one drawing the eye to another, the sum of which determined the

general scheme of the painting - as a lozenge, a circle, an S, and so on. These robust figures, who

move as expansively as though they were on a stage, are the immediately recognizable feature of

his art, an art which is joyous, robust, and almost unbelievably prolific.

After 1611, Rubens set foot on the first steps of the 'High Baroque', to become its chief

representative in northern Europe. His religious art and other forms of history painting had

already placed him at the head of the Catholic Baroque; he now achieved a consistency and

comprehensiveness which have made his pictures known to all the world. A period of

incomparable fertility followed: with his delight in portraiture, he immortalized his relatives, his

brother, his children, and four years after the death of his first wife, in 1626, he was painting the

young and lovely Helene Fourmont, whom he married when he was 53. Her grace and youth

endowed him with a new springtide, and he was never weary of recording her beauty. The time

came when he could not, unaided, carry out all the commissions he received. They were a

challenge to his powers of organization, for with all his overflowing vitality, he knew how to

husband his energies and to exploit them to the full, and he had soon established a large

workshop in which selected pupils and assistants carried out his ideas. At least two thousand

pictures were produced in this way. All Flemish painting was influenced by this prodigious

artistic patriarch. None of its practitioners, however, came near rivalling the master: some

devoted themselves to one aspect of his work, others to another.

Anthony Van Dyck

Of all Rubens' pupils, none became so famous or so independent as Anthony van Dyck (1599-

1641). In Antwerp, after Rubens had begun his diplomatic career, Van Dyck was the undisputed

master, but the many religious paintings of this early period are not among his best; they are

obviously influenced by Rubens, and also by Titian and the Bolognese school, boldly painted

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compositions in which the unbridled energy of Rubens is tempered by a fastidious elegance,

which never deserted Van Dyck, and is best of all displayed in his portrait art, even though these

works were produced with mechanical regularity.

Many of them are fluently painted, with a skilful and easy technique, in which white, black and

grey are predominant, as though the master were fastidiously avoiding the garishness of colour.

His sense of harmony led him toward a solution in which grey united all colours in itself. With

Flemish thoroughness he painted lace collars, ruffs, chains and jewels, without the pedantic

uniformity shown by so many of his contemporaries. The majority of his subjects were

aristocrats, who, in their sumptuous garments and their dignified, and indeed often arrogant

bearing, could only gain by the grace and refinement of Van Dyck's treatment. With fastidious

refinement he shrinks from all that is not ornamental, or elegant, or beautiful, and in his Biblical

scenes his shepherds and malefactors are dressed like gentlefolk and bear themselves

accordingly.

In 1630 Van Dyck was appointed court painter to the Princess of Orange, and also to the King of

England, by whom in 1632 he was knighted; he had now reached the zenith of fame and

prosperity. Everyone wanted to be painted by Van Dyck, who was one of the first fashionable

portrait-painters, able to give an appearance of refined elegance to subjects who lacked those

qualities: for example, the courtly and handsome figure of Charles I, as he exists today in our

imaginations, owes a great deal to Van Dyck. When portrayed by other painters, with more

honesty and less skill, Charles becomes a very different, and less appealing, figure.

Flemish Genre Painting and Still Lifes

Antwerp was the main centre of Baroque art in Catholic Flanders. Here, in addition to Rubens,

practised Adriaen Brouwer (1605-38), known for his genre-painting - especially his tavern

scenes. Other Flemish Old Masters included David Teniers the Younger (1610-90), best known

for his guardroom scenes; and Frans Snyders (1579-1657), the animalier and still life painter.

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Dutch Golden Age of Painting

During the era of Baroque art, the United Provinces, of which Holland was one, occupied the

northern part of the Low Countries. Less developed than Flanders, perhaps they had once been

the poor relations of the Flemings, but in the seventeenth century the nation was rich, proud, and

expanding in influence. In fact it became one of the wealthiest nations in 17th century Europe. It

was also addicted to painting: during the period 1600-80, more than 4 million paintings were

produced in Holland - far more than the number produced by artists of the Flemish Baroque -

and every sort of person indulged their own appreciation of fine art painting; artisans, merchants,

burghers, sailors, shop-keepers - all knew, or prided themselves on knowing, something about it.

The sort of Baroque painting they admired and which they commissioned from their artists were

however different from Italian paintings, different even from those of Rubens. The Dutch, being

Protestants, had banished religious painting, which was almost the only kind known in Catholic

countries. Once they had gained their independence, they expressed their contentment in the

enjoyment of the good things of life: fine, solid houses, convivial company, clothes of high

quality. They were, in short, bourgeois, and they wanted pictures that reflected the contentment

of bourgeois prosperity: portraits, interiors, genre-paintings (scenes of everyday life) and

affluent looking still lifes, painted on canvases of moderate size, to hang in ordinary houses.

This was the beginning of the Dutch Golden Age (c.1610-80), during which the Dutch School of

Realism established itself as one of the greatest ever movements of oil painting in the history of

art. Works by its leading members - such as Rembrandt and Vermeer - represent the summit of

human creative achievement and command multi-million dollar prices at auction. The school

also set standards in the categories of still life and genre painting, which have hardly been

equalled, far less exceeded.

Dutch Baroque Portraiture

Frans Hals (1580-1666) was the first great exponent of portrait art of the Dutch Baroque school:

the first to shake off the dominant Italian classical approach to portraiture, in favour of a more

realistic style. A style in which his sharp eye for observation and lively power of expression

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could conjure up a suitably unique composition. Hals painted what his customers wanted, and in

prosperous, bourgeois Holland, the new middle class patron wanted above all to see himself in

oils. Portraiture was after all the photography of the day, except better, because a painter can

flatter the sitter better than any camera. It was this genre that Hals mastered. In his brimming

vitality, for all his poverty and debt, he could always console himself by painting the portrait of a

jolly fool - capturing the sitter not in the brilliance of a finished portrait, such as Rubens had

taught people to expect, but by a new picturesque improvisation, owing its charm to its easy,

loose, brushwork - a style appreciated above all by the 19th century Impressionists.

Rembrandt

Where Hals specialised in capturing the unique exterior of a subject, Rembrandt (1606-69)

looked for the inner reality. To put it another way, while the Flemish Baroque painter Rubens

personified the exuberant, theatrical, courtly side of Baroque art, Rembrandt represented its

tormented, dramatic, introverted aspect. He was the heir to Caravaggio; and he made this

inheritance the nucleus of an incomparable achievement. It was Rembrandt who gave a new

spirituality to the realistic art of Holland. He kept the methods of realism, but gave them a

hitherto unknown, translucent luminosity. Above all, he went below the surface of his human

subjects and exposed some of their inner character and soul beneath.

One of his first great portrait masterpieces was actually a group portrait, a type which was

especially characteristic of the country and the time. During the wars with Spain, many

companies of volunteer soldiers had been formed - we should perhaps call them militia

companies. After the Dutch victory their members had not gone their separate ways but

continued to meet; and each of these companies wanted a group portrait to show their members

gathered together. Usually these canvases were of greater width than height, and showed the

officers of the company grouped around a table or some other object that would serve as a

pretext for a gathering of so many men. The lighting was depicted as natural, without any

dramatic contrast, giving the same emphasis to each of the subjects.

Rembrandt's portrait - highly controversial at the time - is actually entitled The Company of

Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch but is more commonly known as The Night

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Watch (1642), because of the dark background from which its figures emerge, partially or wholly

illuminated by patches of light. But it is not a night scene: the darkness is a technique of

caravaggism known as tenebrism, involving the contrast of dark shadow with areas of strong

light - a technique which had not been seen before in group portraiture. Contrary to convention,

the militia officers do not all have the same importance but are presented in strictly hierarchical

order. The captain of the company and his lieutenant are seen in strong light in the centre with

the others around them, only their heads emerging from the shadow. Such an approach signified

the beginning of an interest in the use of light to observe a single figure, or sometimes only a

face. To see how conventional Dutch painters approached this type of group portraiture, see

Company of Captain Reinier Reael (Meagre Company) (1637) by Frans Hals.

Caravaggesque methods are also evident in Rembrandt's single portraits, in which the shadows

can be even darker and invade almost the entire canvas. The light falls from one side of the

subject, illuminates the face, dramatizes every wrinkle. Sometimes it also strikes a secondary

subject - a book, a table, or other object. The rest is an area of darkness whose purpose is to

throw into relief those parts that are minutely scrutinized. One of the best examples is Bathsheba

(1654), along with many of Rembrandt's self portraits.

Dutch Baroque Genre Painting

To cater for the rising demand among the bourgeoisie for easel art, notably genre painting, a

number of artistic movements sprang up in towns like Haarlem, Delft, Leiden, Utrecht,

Dordrecht and Amsterdam. The Haarlem school was represented by Adriaen van Ostade

(1610-85) (lowlife peasant scenes), and the Catholic Jan Steen (1626-79) (moralising tavern

scenes); while Leonard Bramer (1596-1667), Pieter de Hooch (1629-83) and the incomparable

Jan Vermeer (1632-75), represented the Delft school. Utrecht had Hendrik Terbrugghen (1588-

1629), and Gerrit van Honthorst (1590-1656), both strongly influenced by Caravaggio, while the

Leiden school's most famous member was Rembrandt's first pupil Gerrit Dou (1613-75), known

for his small, colourful, polished works. The Dordrecht school was represented by the "interiors"

painter Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-78) and Nicolaes Maes (1634-93), noted for his kitch

genre-paintings and chiaroscuro effect; while the Amsterdam school consisted of Rembrandt, his

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pupils Govaert Flinck (1615-60), Ferdinand Bol (1616-80), and the talented Carel Fabritius

(1622-54) who perished in a gunpowder explosion, as well as Gerard Terborch (1617-81), and

Gabriel Metsu (1629-67), noted for his intimate small-scale genre works.

Special mention should be made of Jan Vermeer of Delft, who in his only self-portrait, if it is

really anything of the kind, symbolically turns his back on the observer, as if to remain

completely concealed within his world. Only from his portraits of elegant women do we realize

how little is known of him - the poverty-stricken father of eleven children - who hardly ever left

his native city, where he ate his heart out in longing for the aristocratic life; who languished in

obscurity for centuries before being acclaimed as one of the all time greats.

Dutch Baroque Still Life Painting

It was in the Baroque period too that a type of picture was developed that was to remain

successful up to our own time - the 'still life painting', a picture offering an arrangement of

flowers, of more or less inanimate objects of one kind or another, generally painted in the studio,

that is to say indoors. Of course paintings of this kind had certainly been made earlier, but now

they constituted a true genre, with practitioners in every country and in every school of painting.

Again the innovator who had founded this kind of painting was Caravaggio, who indeed began

his artistic career in this type of work. Not unnaturally, however, the genre reached its highest

development in the Netherlands, where there was already a precursor, if not a tradition, of

realistic, domestic, straightforward painting carefully attentive to the detail of everyday life,

which had been produced there from as early as the fifteenth century.

The tradition of still life art was developed by a number of exceptional painters who included:

Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606-84) a member of Utrecht school; Willem Kalf (1619-93) the

Amsterdam painter of pronkstilleven/vanitas paintings; and Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) the

Amsterdam flower painter, arguably the greatest still life artist of the Late Baroque.

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Dutch Baroque Landscape Painting

Coinciding with the classical Arcadian landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin,

working in Rome, the Dutch school began to produce great examples of Baroque landscape

painting, of which the finest works were created by Jacob van Ruisdael (c.1628-82) and his pupil

Meindert Hobbema (1638-1703); other top artists included Philips de Koninck (1619-88) who

specialized in large-size panoramic views; and Aelbert Cuyp (1620-91) noted for his soft light

and impastoed highlights. Other Baroque landscape painters included: Hendrik Avercamp (1585-

1634) who excelled at winter scenes; Cornelis van Poelenberg (1586-1667) who painted

Italianate scenes; the naturalist pioneer Esaias van de Velde (1591-1630) and his pupil Jan van

Goyen (1596-1656) who produced repetitive views of the Nijmegen River, Dordrecht, sand

dunes, and ships; and Salomon van Ruysdael (1600-70) famous for his typical Dutch views and

riverscapes.

Dutch Baroque realist painters who specialised in other genres included the Haarlem-based

architectural painter Pieter Jansz Saenredam (1597-1665), the peerless animal painter Paulus

Potter (1625-54), and marine artist Willem van de Velde (1633-1707) from Leiden.

The Golden Age of Spanish Painting

As in the Netherlands, the 17th century era of Baroque art was the Golden Age of Spanish

painting. Freed of most Italian elements, and sponsored by an uncompromising Catholic Church

- strongly supported by devout Hapsburg Emperors - Spanish Baroque artists adopted a severe

and noble style which combined line and colour as well as the graphic and the pictorial, and

involved such an acute sense of observation that no other age or style has been able to equal it in

truthfulness. It was the Spanish school, in concert with masters of the Dutch Baroque in Holland,

that effectively guided European painting along the path of naturalistic realism.

Like Flemish and Dutch artists Spanish Baroque painters - especially Ribera - were also strongly

influenced by Caravaggio's use of light, and employed copious tenebrism and chiaroscuro,

though not for the sake of a theatrical aestheticism, but rather to create a more urgent sense of

drama. Among their ranks they included several masters of genre painting, of portraiture, of

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religious scenes, for example Murillo, and they included such outstanding interpreters of the

asceticism and spirituality of Spanish culture as Zurbaran. And of course there was the

incomparable Velazquez.

In terms of subject, religious art continued to predominate, but Catholic Hapsburg patronage also

financed numerous royal portraits, as well as paintings of historical events and genre scenes. The

main schools of Baroque painting in Spain were those of Madrid and Seville, the former

enjoying the patronage of the court. Other schools operated in Valencia and Toledo.

Early Spanish Baroque

An early representative of the new Spanish realism was the Catalan Francisco Ribalta (1555-

1628), who trained in Toledo, and worked in Madrid and Valencia. Noted for his bold, loose

brushwork, he emphasized the sculptural modeling of his forms by contrasting light and shade.

Zurbaran was among the artists who was influenced by him.

Ribera

Based in far-flung Naples, Jusepe Ribera (1591-1652) was the first major Spanish painter to

adopt the new naturalist style. He became noted for highly realistic modeling, notably the flesh

tints of his saints, as well as a strong preference for dramatic themes, as illustrated in his St

Andrew (1630-32, Prado, Madrid), and his Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew (1630, Prado).

Ribera's style progressed from an early emphasis on caravaggism, through a period of

experiment with a silvery light, to a mature stage marked by warm, golden tones. One of his

most beautiful paintings is The Holy Family with St Catherine (1648, Metropolitan Museum of

Art, New York).

El Greco

In Seville, painting evolved rapidly from Renaissance classicism to the naturalism of the

Baroque, as exemplified in works by Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644), Juan de las Roelas

(1560-1625), and Francisco de Herrera the Elder (1595-1656). In Toledo, at the turn of the

century, the dominant influence was El Greco (1541-1614). His closest follower was the

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eminent painter Luis Tristan (1585-1624), who stressed the Tenebrist aspects of El Greco's

work. Other Toledan painters included Pedro Orrente (1570-1645), a follower of Ribalta, Fray

Juan Bautista Maino (1578-1649), who became the drawing master of Philip IV, and Fray

Juan Sanchez-Cotan (1560-1627).

Velazquez

The summit of Baroque painting in Spain was attained in the person of Diego Velazquez (1599-

1660). For Velazquez the manner of Caravaggio was only a starting-point. In his paintings light

is manipulated to reconstruct an 'optical realism' by means of the effects of different tonalities: in

other words, the reproduction of reality which is not faithful to the hairs of a beard or the texture

of a fabric in the manner sought by the painters of the Renaissance, but to what the eye actually

sees, the general impression we receive when looking at something. In Velazquez's paintings

light is used as painters of two centuries earlier had used perspective, to make space tangible.

Areas of light and shadow are alternated to create the illusion of a place in which the figures are

not painted but actually 'are'. These figures are painted with broad, supple strokes of the brush to

delineate them clearly without entering upon realistic detail. It was the same technique that was

to be used in the nineteenth century by the French Impressionists - a similarity that is not

fortuitous: Velazquez too seemed indifferent to the content of what he was painting, to the great

religious themes, for example, which had such importance for his contemporaries. Instead, his

whole attention was concentrated on painting, on his craft.

Noted for his drawing from life, even his earliest works are characterized by their dense impasto,

restrained colour, usually ochres and browns, and their simple natural composition. Old Woman

Frying Eggs (1618, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), Christ in the House of Mary and

Martha (1620, National Gallery, London), and The Supper at Emmaus (1620, Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York), all belong to his early period, as do a number of portraits, mostly

executed in a limited Tenebrist manner, without conceding exaggerated importance to contrasts

between dark and light.

In 1623, Velazquez became official portraitist to Philip IV and the higher nobility. Between 1623

and 1629 he completed a number of works with grey backgrounds, revealing his liberation from

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the Tenebrist formula. The Triumph of Bacchus (Los Borrachos, The Topers) (1629, Prado) dates

from this period. In 1632, he produced Christ on the Cross (1632, Prado) a work of particular

serenity and simplicity.

As his art improved even further, he revealed greater precision of outline, along with an even

more subtle blending of tones and colour. One of his great masterpieces at this time is The

Surrender of Breda (Las Lanzas) (1634-35, Prado) for the Hall of the Kings in the palace of

Buen Retiro, Madrid. During the next few years Velazquez focused largely on portrait art - see

his Philip IV on Horseback (1634-35, Prado) and Prince Baltasar Carlos on Horseback (1635-

36, Prado) - and subject paintings such as The Dwarf Francisco Lezcano ("El Nino de Vallecas")

(1643-45, Prado). He also executed several religious works including the magnificent

Coronation of the Virgin (1645, Prado). On a trip to Italy, in 1649, he painted his masterpiece

Portrait of Innocent X (1650, Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome), while during his final period

(1651-1660), he painted Venus at her Mirror (The Rokeby Venus) (1649-51, National Gallery,

London) and Las Meninas or The Family of Philip IV (1656-57, Prado).

If we briefly compare Velazquez' Rokeby Venus with similar paintings of the High Renaissance,

we see how much the artistic perception of reality had changed in the course of century. In the

"Rokeby Venus" Beauty nonchalantly turns her back upon the observer, while Cupid holds up a

mirror before her. The mirror was already a familiar trick, often used in Roman Baroque villas

and palaces to give an impression of spaciousness. Its ambiguous lighting and refraction increase

the picturesque effect of the device. Instead of the marble calm of (say) Giorgione's classic

Sleeping Venus (c.1510), or Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), the Rokeby Venus presents us with

a charming, but entirely human and un-divine, study of the nude. To this extent Velasquez was

the child of his period, the Baroque

Not surprisingly, Velazquez proved a difficult act to follow. Aside from followers like Juan de

Pareja (1610-70), Francisco de Palacios (1617-76), and Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo

(1615-67), the painters of the Madrid school opted for the easier Rubens-style Baroque.

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Zurbaran

Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664), an amalgam of Estremaduran asceticism and Andalusian

elegance, employed a naturalism and extreme chiaroscuro that made him the most restrained and

purest of the artists of the Spanish Baroque. During his 20s and 30s he painted a series of

compositions for several of the monastic orders such as the Mercedarians and the Jeronymites, as

exemplified by The House of Nazareth (1630, Museum of Art, Cleveland). In the process he

became a master-drawer of solitary figures, including saints with their eyes raised to heaven. No

doubt his art must have benefited enormously from his personal piety and religious devotion, as

perhaps illustrated by Saint Luke as a Painter before Christ on the Cross (1660, Prado) for which

perhaps he himself was the model.

Murillo

Within the Seville school, Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1618-1682) represents the height of

elegance and delicacy, and, it must be said, the greatest surrender to popular sentiment. Heavily

influenced initially by Old Masters such as Ribera and Zurbaran, he later borrowed from Van

Dyck, Rubens and Raphael. He developed his own light and filmy style - the estilo vaporiso -

featuring soft contours, delicately toned colours, and a golden-to-silver veil of light: a style

which inspired a host of imitators and followers. As well as religious works he specialized in

genre-painting of street urchins and beggars, as exemplified by The Young Beggar (1645, Louvre

Museum, Paris), and Boys Eating Grapes and Melon (1645-46, Alte Pinakothek, Munich).

Another important early work is Angels' Kitchen (1646, Louvre, Paris). From 1660, when he co-

founded the Seville Academy of Fine Art, he was active as a teacher. An example of his late

work is The Immaculate Conception (1678, Prado).

Juan de Valdes Leal

After the death of Murillo, the foremost painter in Seville was Juan de Valdes Leal (1622-

1690). Although, like Murillo, he was largely a religious painter, Valdes Leal was more

dramatic, more theatrical, more macabre, and more excitable: his works show a vivid sense of

movement and brilliant colouring. In many ways he was a forerunner of Romanticism. His most

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famous works are the two allegories of death in the Hospital de la Caridad, in Seville - In the

Twinkling of An Eye (1671), and The End of Worldly Glory (1672). Other major works include

Assumption of the Virgin (1659, National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Christ Bearing the

Cross (1660, Hispanic Society, New York). In his final years, Valdes Leal completed numerous

cycles of paintings for churches, monasteries, and philanthropic institutions - including a series

of scenes illustrating the life of St. Ignatius (1674-1676), for the Jesuits.

During the 17th century, the Spanish Baroque in Madrid was driven by Velazquez and by the

versatile sculptor, painter and architect Alonso Cano (1601-67) - nicknamed "the Spanish

Michelangelo". ( also the sculptor Juan Martines Montanes (1568-1649)) Other interesting

exponents of the Baroque idiom in Madrid include: the monumentalist Fray Juan Ricci (1600-

1681), son of a Bolognese painter who came to Spain to work on the decoration of the Escorial,

and Antonio Pereda (1608-1678), creator of several elegant religious paintings and allegorical

compositions. Of a higher quality is the work of the portraitist Juan Carreno de Miranda

(1614-1685), official painter to Charles II, who succeeded Philip IV. His pupil Mateo Cerezo

(1626-1666), was a particularly talented colourist, as was Jose Antolinez (1635-1675).

llusionist Architectural Murals and Ceiling Paintings

It is appropriate to begin an account of Baroque painting with its favourite genre and

characteristic function: the illusionist decoration of the walls of an interior. Obviously the idea of

using a wall to display a painted scene was as old as art; what was new, or almost new, was the

use made of this technique by Baroque artists. On the walls, and more especially on the ceilings,

of churches and palaces they painted vast, busy scenes, which tend to produce upon the spectator

the impression that the walls or ceiling no longer exist, or at least that they open out in an

exciting way. This, too was not essentially new: such experiments had been made during the

Renaissance, by Mantegna. In the Baroque period, however, it became almost an absolute rule,

combining as it did all the aesthetic features of the time: grandeur, theatricality, movement, the

representation of infinity, and in addition a technical skill that appears almost superhuman. It

showed that tendency to combine various forms of art for a unified effect which was the most

distinctive characteristic of the age

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Such illusionist paintings varied greatly in the stories they told - lives of saints, histories of

dynasties, myths, or tales of heroes - but they were consistent in the components they deployed:

architectural glories standing out against the sky; soaring angels and saints; figures in swift

motion, their garments billowing out in the wind; all depicted with bold foreshortening - the

perspective effect of looking upwards from below or conversely downwards from above, which

makes the figures appear shorter. Such was the vitality of the genre that it continued not only

throughout the seventeenth century but well into the eighteenth, invading the limits of time

generally considered to demarcate the succeeding Rococo movement.

Baroque painters who specialized in such murals and ceiling paintings included: the forerunner

Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), the Bolognese Baroque artist noted for his frescoes in the

Farnese Gallery in Rome, and his followers Guido Reni (1575-1642), Guercino (1591-1666),

and in particular Domenichino (1581-1641) whose elaborate classical compositions were to

influence Nicolas Poussin. Thereafter, we have Parma-born Giovanni Lanfranco (1582-1647),

influenced by the frescoes of Correggio; Bernini (1598-1680), more famous as architect and

sculptor; Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669) who decorated the Palazzo Barberini in Rome and the

Medici Pitti Palace in Florence, as well as numerous other churches and palces; Andrea Sacchi

(1599-1661), who exemplified High Baroque Classicism, and his pupil Carlo Maratta (1625-

1713). Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709) was another of the great exponents of the Baroque style of

illusionist ceiling decoration, noted for his huge ceiling fresco in S. Ignazio, Rome. The last of

the line was the Venetian Late Baroque painter Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), whose

fresco decoration of the state dining room (Kaiseraal) and the ceiling of the Grand Staircase

(Trepenhaus) in the Wurzburg Residenz of the Prince Bishop Karl Philipp von Greiffenklau, was

the greatest and most imaginative masterpiece of his career. The focal point was the soaring

fresco of Apollo Bringing the Bride (1750-1) in the centre of the Trepenhaus, a work which

brings to a majestic conclusion the Italian tradition of fresco painting initiated by Giotto (1270-

1337) four hundred years earlier.

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Light: The Key Feature of Baroque Painting

Naturally, painting was not confined to the walls of buildings. There was also, and indeed

especially, a tradition of painting on canvas, and as with architecture the characteristics of the

various national schools differed widely. They had one concern in common, however: the study

of light and its effects. In spite of the great divergences between the work of various artists in the

Baroque period - divergences so great that many critics are not prepared to designate their work

by a single common adjective - the thematic use of light and shade in constructing any

significant work was, to a greater or lesser degree, common to them all, to the extent of being the

key feature and unifying pictorial motif of the age.

Caravaggio (1573-1610)

The impulse towards adoption of this idiom came from Italy, indeed from a single Italian artist,

Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio from the name of the small town where he was

born. Although his work has been more attacked by some critics than appreciated, there is no

doubt that he marked the beginning of a new epoch. At the time of Caravaggio, fine art painting

had fully attained the objectives that it had been set two centuries before - namely, the perfect

representation of nature in all its manifestations. A new line of investigation was required, one

congenial to the age; and this Caravaggio supplied. His paintings showed sturdy peasants,

innkeepers, and gamblers; and though they might sometimes be dressed as saints, apostles, and

fathers of the Church they represented reality in its most crude and harsh aspect. This was in

itself a break with Renaissance art, with its aristocratic figures and idealized surroundings. The

most important aspect of Baroque painting was not however what was represented but how it

was represented. The painting was not lit uniformly but in patches; details struck by bright,

intense light alternated with areas of dark shadow. If in the final analysis a Renaissance painting

was coloured drawing with overall lighting, a canvas by Caravaggio was a leopard's skin of

strong light and deep, intense shadow, in which the highlights are symbolic; that is, they

indicated the important elements of the composition. It was a dramatic, violent, tormented style

of painting, eminently suited to an age of strong aesthetic contrasts, as the Baroque period was.

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Caravaggism

Caravaggio's temperament seems to have had closer affinities with the Spanish rather than the

Italian character, and Naples, which had close connections with Spain at this period, was the

centre of Caravaggism influence; the early paintings of Velasquez (1599-1660) show it, as do

those of other seventeenth-century Spanish masters such as Ribera (1591-1652) and Zurbaran

(1598-1664). But his influence extended much farther than Spain, though it is there that the

master's manner was most closely followed. In Holland, Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656)

seems to have transmitted something of Caravaggio's dramatic use of chiaroscuro to his great

countryman, Rembrandt; while in France the somewhat mysterious master, Georges de la Tour

(1593-1652), was a skilful, but apparently isolated, exponent of 'Tenebrism', as this use of deep

shadows cast from a single source of light, to give unity to a composition, is called. Adam

Elsheimer (1578-1610) was another influential representative of this tendency; while it is

perhaps just worth mentioning in this connection the name of the one English tenerbrist, Joseph

Wright of Derby (1734-97). Of Caravaggio's Italian followers, the most prominent were Mattia

Preti (1613-1669) and Domenico Fetti (1589-1624); while Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), also a

Neapolitan, has affinities with him in his taste for savagery and low-life scenes, of bandits

fighting and carousing among wild and rocky scenery. Salvator is particularly of interest for his

importance in the development of romantic landscape; the eighteenth-century Genoese,

Magnasco (1667-1749) has something in common with him.

Venetian Baroque Painting

Apart from Caravaggio, there were few if any 17th century painters in Italy to rank with the great

names of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, by the seventeenth century the golden age

of Italian painting was largely over, except for a brief mini-resurgence in Venice, where there

had been no painting of interest during the previous century. In the space of 25 years, Venice

produced Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), his son, Giandomenico (1727-1804),

Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768), Pietro Longhi (1701-85), Francesco Guardi (1712-93) and

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78). All of these, except the last, spent their working lives in

Venice, although Canaletto visited England in 1746. The elder Tiepolo we have already seen;

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Longhi, and to a lesser extent, the younger Tiepolo, portrayed the daily life of Venice, the former

in small canvases, the latter in drawings; while Canaletto and Guardi painted outdoor scenes on

the canals and piazza. Piranesi, though born in Venice, came to Rome in 1738. No paintings by

him are known, and his fame rests entirely on his etchings of architecture and ruins. Others,

notably Giovanni Pannini (1691-1765) and Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734), both of the previous

generation, had painted ruined buildings, and there is no doubt that they influenced Piranesi; but

their ruin-pieces, painted quite without feeling, are little better than superior furniture pictures.

Piranesi's vision, of gigantic, decaying Roman ruins, and fantastic prison interiors, has a

powerful, almost sinister, and sometimes almost mad, intensity.

Classicism

Before leaving Italy, we should note the existence of a separate trend in European painting,

usually called the "classical" tradition. A hangover, if you like, from the Renaissance, classicism

was the opposite of Romanticism, being a style of art in which adherence to accepted aesthetic

ideals takes precedence over individuality of expression. In simple terms, it was a restrained,

harmonious style that believed in primacy of design (disegno), rather than (say) colour or

expressionism. It was closely associated with "academic art", the style taught in most of the

European academies of fine arts. During the Baroque era of the 17th century, the classical

tradition was personified by the French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), who spent most of

his career in Rome, where his patrons included Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1669), and

the cardinal's secretary Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657). Poussin is probably best known for his

mythological history painting, although he was also an important pioneer of classical arcadian

landscape painting - a genre dominated by another French painter based in Rome, Claude

Lorrain (1600-82), who instigated the "Claudean" style.

Netherlandish Baroque Painting

In Flanders and Holland, painting had developed flourishing local schools that so far from being

backwaters were well in the van of artistic exploration. Flemish painters had created - or at least

greatly enhanced - two types of picture concerned with the faithful representation of domestic

life and everyday reality: genre painting and still life. Neither had any equivalent in Italy - where

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there was indeed no demand for such pictures. It was the Flemish painters who had exported the

technique of oil painting, formerly unknown to the artists of the early Italian Renaissance. Now

they were quick to fuse their own tradition with that arriving from Italy - a marriage which was

to produce works among the greatest achievements in the history of art. This development had

different results in Flanders and the Netherlands, and in each case was associated with the two

profoundly different people: namely Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Rembrandt (1606-

1669).

Spanish Baroque Painting

By the late 1570s, Rome was no longer the centre of the world. The Italians were wearing

Spanish costumes, and the heart of the Counter-Reformation was in Spain. The Escorial was

being built as the new citadel of the Faith, and the palaces of Toledo were being turned into

monasteries and convents. Beauty was giving way to holiness. In the spring of 1577, the resident

Mannerist El Greco (1541-1614) found in the Spanish city of Toledo the familiar shapes of his

Cretan home, the buildings of the Mohammedan East, all in the urgent and emphatic Spanish

form. He spent two years in painting his first great work, the altarpiece for San Domingo el

Antiguo. The passionate and often extravagant spirit of the Baroque had now possessed him. His

wooden panels and modest canvases were forgotten; he now painted pictures of enormous

dimensions.

Among El Greco's important paintings of the following period was the representation of the

miracle which was said to have occurred during the burial of Count Orgaz, when St Augustine

and St Stephen appeared and discharged the duties of the clergy, In grey and yellow, black and

white, the colours of the stormy sky, El Greco has painted the miracle in an unearthly light, not

as a supernatural, but rather as a supremely natural event, to which the whole Spanish people, its

priests, its nobles, and its faithful, bear witness by their presence on the solid floor of the church.

Some have called El Greco's pictures ascetic, ecstatic, cruel, nerveless and colourless.

Nevertheless, a portrait - like that of the Grand Inquisitor is painted with the strongest colouring;

it is only in El Greco's saints that we find deliberate distortion and an unearthly radiance. When

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he paints ordinary human beings, like his daughter, it is as though they were reflected in a mirror.

The final development of El Greco's art places him, in spite of his peculiarities, in the heart of the

Baroque period, as he abandons Renaissance laws of composition and colour and moves toward

the international art of the Baroque period.

Other important members of the Spanish Baroque school included: Jusepe (Jose) de Ribera

(1591-1652), the Naples-based Spanish caravaggesque artist, noted for his realist paintings on

religious and mythological subjects; the devout Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664), noted for

his intense religious pictures, still-lifes, and mastery of tenebrism; Diego Velazquez (1599-

1660), official painter to the Spanish court in Madrid who combined realism with the Baroque

emphasis on light and illusionism; and the sentimental Seville painter Bartolome Esteban

Murillo (1618-1682) whose religious works and genre paintings were influenced by both

Zurbaran and Caravaggio.

Baroque Architecture

It was characteristic of Baroque architecture that, though examples are to be found almost

throughout Europe and Latin America, they differ notably from one country to another. How

is it, then, that they are all designated by a single term? Partly for convenience, in order to

summarize the art of a whole period with a single word, but mainly on account of their

common aesthetic origin.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the Swiss critic Heinrich Wolfflin and his followers

gave the word a more objective meaning. Still referring to the religious art of the seventeenth and

early eighteenth centuries, they defined as Baroque those works in which certain specific

characteristics were to be seen: the use of movement, whether actual (a curving wall, a fountain

with jets of water forever changing shape) or implied (a figure portrayed as making a vigorous

action or effort); the attempt to represent or suggest infinity (an avenue which stretched to the

horizon, a fresco giving the illusion of a boundless sky, a trick of mirrors which altered

perspectives and made them unrecognizable); the importance given to light and its effects in the

conception of a work of art and in the final impact it created; the taste for theatrical, grandiose,

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scenographic effects; and the tendency to disregard the boundaries between the various forms of

art and to mix together architecture, painting, sculpture, and so on.

In architecture two types of building most occupied the attention of the age: the church and the

palace. In their different versions they respectively included cathedrals, parish churches, and

monastic buildings, and town and country mansions, and above all royal palaces, these last being

especially typical of the period. In addition to such individual buildings, Baroque architecture

was also characterized by what is now known as town planning: the arrangement of cities

according to predetermined schemes, and the creation of great parks and gardens around

residences of importance.

The Baroque Idea of a Building

A building can be conceived of in many different ways: as an assemblage of superimposed

storeys (the present attitude); as a box defined by walls of regular shape (as Renaissance

architects understood it); or as a skeletal structure, that is, one formed - according to the Gothic

conception - by the various structures needed to sustain it. Baroque architects understood it as a

single mass to be shaped according to a number of requirements. A verbal description of

Renaissance forms might be accompanied by the drawing of imaginary straight lines in the air

with an imaginary pencil; but a man describing the Baroque is more apt to mime the shaping out

of an imaginary mass of soft plastic or clay. In short, for Baroque architects a building was to

some extent a kind of large sculpture.

Ground-Plans

This conception had a vital effect on the ground-plan - the outlines of the building as seen from

above - that came to be adopted. It led to the rejection of the simple, elementary, analytical plans

which were deliberately preferred by Renaissance architects. Their place was taken by complex,

rich, dynamic designs, more appropriate to constructions which were no longer thought of as

'built', or created by the union of various parts each with its own autonomy, but rather as

hollowed out, shaped from a compact mass by a series of demarcations of contour. The ground-

plans common to the architecture of the Renaissance were the square, the circle, and the Greek

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cross - a cross, that is, with equal arms. Those typical of Baroque architecture were the ellipse or

the oval, or far more complex schemes derived from complicated geometrical figures. Francesco

Castelli (1599-1667), better known by the name he adopted for himself, Borromini, designed a

church with a ground-plan in the shape of a bee, in honour of the patron who commissioned it,

whose family coat-of-arms featured bees; and another with walls that were throughout alternately

convex and concave. One French architect went so far as to put forward ground-plans for a series

of churches forming the letters which composed the name of his king, LOUIS LE GRAND, as

the Sun-King Louis XIV liked to be called.

Baroque Architecture's Undulating Motif

Besides their complex ground-plans, the resultant curving walls were, therefore, the other

outstanding characteristic of Baroque buildings. Not only did they accord with the conception of

a building as a single entity, but they also introduced another constant of the Baroque, the idea of

movement, into architecture, by its very nature the most static of all the arts. And indeed, once

discovered, the undulating motif was not confined to walls. The idea of giving movement to an

architectural element in the form of more or less regular curves and counter-curves became a

dominant motif of all Baroque art. Interiors were made to curve, from the Church of S. Andrea

al Quirinale by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, one of the main creators and exponents of Roman

Baroque, to that of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane or S. Ivo alla Sapienza by Borromini, his

closest rival. So too were facades, as in almost all Borromini's work, in Bernini's plans for the

Palais du Louvre in Paris, and typically in the work of Italian, Austrian, and German architects.

Even columns were designed to undulate. Those of Bernini's great baldacchino in the centre of

St Peter's in Rome were only the first of a host of spiral columns to be placed in Baroque

churches. The Italian architect Guarino Guarini actually evolved, and put to use in some of his

buildings, an 'Undulating order', in the form of a complete system of bases, columns, and

entablatures distinguished by continuous curves.

Even excepting such extremes, during the Baroque period the taste for curves was nonetheless

marked, and found further expression in the frequent use of devices including volutes, scrolls,

and above all, 'ears' - architectural and ornamental elements in the form of a ribbon curling round

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at the ends, which were used to form a harmonious join between two points at different levels.

This device was adopted primarily as a feature of church facades, where they were used so

regularly as to be now perhaps the readiest way of identifying a Baroque exterior. In spite of

their bizarre shape their function was not purely decorative, but principally a strengthening,

functional one.

Vaults, Arches, Buttresses

The churches of the period were almost always built with vaulted ceilings. A vault is in effect,

however, a collection of arches; and since arches tend to exert an outward pressure on their

supporting walls, in any vaulted building a counterthrust to this pressure is needed. The element

supplying this counterthrust is the buttress, an especially typical feature in the architecture of the

Middle Ages, when the difficulty was first confronted. To introduce the buttress into a Baroque

construction it had to have a form compatible with that of the other members, and to avoid

reference to the barbaric, 'gothic' architecture of the past. This was a problem of some

importance in an age enamoured of formal consistency - and it was solved by the use of scrolls.

The greatest English architect of the age, Sir Christopher Wren, unable for other reasons to use

the convenient scrolls for St Paul's Cathedral, yet having somehow to provide buttresses, made

the bold decision to raise the walls of the outer aisles to the height of those of the nave so that

they might act as screens, with the sole purpose of concealing the incompatible buttresses.

The Baroque Concept of Building Design: Architectural Sculpture

Another, and decisive, consequence of the conception of a building as a single mass to be

articulated was that a construction was no longer seen as the sum of individual parts - facade,

ground-plan, internal walls, dome, apse, and so on - each one of which might be considered

separately. As a result the traditional rules which determined the planning of these parts became

less important or was completely disregarded. For example, for the architects of the Renaissance

the facade of a church or a palace had been a rectangle, or a series of rectangles each of which

had corresponded to a storey of the building. For Baroque architects the facade was merely that

part of the building that faced outwards, one element of a single entity. The division into storeys

was generally retained, but almost always the central part of the facade was organised with

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reference more to what was above and below it than to what stood on either side: in other words,

it was given a vertical emphasis and thrust which was in strong contrast to the practice of

horizontal division by storeys. Furthermore, in the facade the elements - columns, pilasters,

cornices, or pediments - projecting from the wall surface, related in various ways to the centre,

which thus came to dominate the sides. Although at first sight such a facade might seem to be

divided horizontally, more careful consideration reveals that it is organized vertically, in slices,

as it were. In the centre is the more massive, more important section, and the sides, as the eye

recedes froth it, appear less weighty. The final effect is that of a building which has been shaped

according to sculptural concepts, rather than put together according to the traditional view of

architecture.

A Baroque building is complex, surprising, dynamic: for its characteristic features to be fully

comprehended, however, or for them to stand out prominently, it needs to catch the light in a

particular way. It was this requirement that led Baroque sculptors to achieve a number of

innovations.

Architectural Manipulation of Light

It is not the light that falls on a particular point in a given building that varies, but the effect the

light produces in striking one surface by contrast with another. It is obvious that the texture of a

brick wall is not the same as that of a similar wall of smooth marble or of rough-hewn stone.

This fact was exploited by Baroque architects for both the exteriors and the interiors of their

buildings. Renaissance constructions, like many modern ones, were based on simple, elementary

proportions and relationships; and their significance rested in the observer's appreciation of the

harmony that united the various parts of the whole. These proportions were perceptible by

looking at the fabric alone: all that was required of the light was to make them clearly visible.

The ideal effect, sought in almost all the buildings of that period, was that produced by a

monochrome, uniform lighting. In place of the appreciation of logic that such an effect implied,

Baroque substituted the pursuit of the unexpected, of 'effect', as it would be called in the theatre.

And as in the theatre, this is achieved more easily by deployment of light if the light itself is

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concentrated in one area while others remain in darkness or in shadow - a lesson mastered above

all by Caravaggio in Baroque painting.

How can this effect be achieved in architecture? There are various possibilities: by the

juxtaposition of strong projections and overhangs with abrupt, deep recesses; or by breaking up

the surface, making it unsmooth in some way - to return, for example, to the example used

earlier, by altering a marble-clad or plaster-covered wall to one of large, rough stones. Such

requirements of lighting dictated a use in particular for architectonic decoration, the small-scale

elements, often carved, which give a effect of movement to the surfaces of a building. It was in

the Baroque period above all that such decoration ran riot. In buildings of the Renaissance it had

been confined to specific areas, carefully detached from the structural forms. Now, parading the

exuberance and fantasy which were its distinguishing characteristic, it invaded every angle,

swarmed over every feature, especially corners and points where two surfaces met, where it had

the function of concealing the join so that the surfaces of the building appeared to continue

uninterrupted.

Undulating Order of Architecture

To the five traditional orders of architecture - Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and

Composite, each of which had particular forms and proportions for its supporting members, the

columns and pilasters, and for the vertical linking members, or entablature - was added the

'Undulating' order. Another new and popular variant was the 'Colossal order', with columns

running up through two or three storeys. The details, too, of the traditional orders became

enriched, complicated, modified: entablatures had stronger overhangs and more pronounced re-

entrants, and details throughout sometimes attained an almost capricious appearance. Borromini,

for instance, in using the Corinthian order, took its most characteristic feature, the curls, or

volutes, which sprout from among the acanthus leaves at the tort of the capital, and inverted

them.

The arches connecting one column or one pilaster to the next became no longer restricted, as in

the Renaissance, to a semi-circle but were often elliptical or oval. Above all they took the form,

unique to the Baroque, of a double curve - describing a curve, that is, not only when seen from in

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front but also when seen from above. Sometimes arches were interrupted in form, with sections

of straight lines inserted into the curve. This characteristic feature was also used in pediments the

decorative element above a door, a window or a whole building. The canonical shape of a

pediment, which is to say that fixed by classical norms, had been either triangular or semi-

circular. In the Baroque period, however, they were sometimes open - as though they had been

split or interrupted at the top - or combining curved and straight lines; or fantastic, as for

example in Guarino Guarini's plan for Palazzo Carignano, where they appeared around doors

and windows like draperies rolled back.

Windows too were often far removed from classical forms: to the rectangular or square shapes

sometimes with rounded tops, which were typical of the Renaissance were added shapes

including ovals or squares topped by a segment of a circle, or rectangles beneath little oval

windows.

Other details, on entablatures, doors, and keystones of arches and at corners - everywhere -

included volutes; stucco figures; huge, complex, and majestic scrolls; and any number of

fantastic and grotesque shapes. One form of decoration not characteristic so much as striking was

the use of the tower. Sometimes a single one, sometimes pairs of them; but always complex and

highly decorated, were erected on the facade, and sometimes on the dome, of churches; and in

some countries, in particular Austria, Germany, and Spain, this arrangement was used often

enough to become in effect the norm.

These, briefly then, were the most obvious and frequently used motifs of Baroque architecture. It

must be remembered however that each individual work created its own balance between its

various features; and also that each country developed these components in different ways; and

an understanding of these regional and national differences is essential to a proper understanding

of the Baroque as a whole.

Italian Baroque Architecture

Italy, the cradle of Baroque, produced in addition to a proportionate number of good professional

architects a quartet who rate as excellent: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Borromini, Pietro da

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Cortona, and Guarino Guarini. The work of each was unmistakably Baroque, but each of them

had, as it were, a different accent. Bernini and to a lesser extent, Pietro da Cortona, represented

the courtly Baroque, majestic, and exuberant but never outrageously so, which was successful

principally in the Italian peninsula. This style possessed, at their most typical, all the features of

Baroque described above, and conveyed an air of grandeur and dignity that rendered it a classic

of its kind.

Bernini and St Peter's Basilica

The history of St Peter's is in itself a history of the transition from Renaissance to Baroque. Soon

after the death of Michelangelo, designer of St Peter's dome, Carlo Maderna (1556-1629) built

a nave which is not altogether a happy feature of the plan, considered as a whole, for every

attempt to expand one arm of the central space, as planned by Michelangelo, into a nave, was

bound to degrade the miraculous achievement to a mere intersection of nave and transepts.

Behind the facade, over 320 feet in width and 150 feet in height, the dome was concealed up to

half the height of the drum. It is true that the eight columns of the entrance, the giant order of

pilasters, the massive entablature, and the attic, are as Michelangelo intended. High Renaissance

forms are combined with the exuberance of the Baroque, in a premonition of the coming style. In

1667 Alexander VII set Bernini the great and difficult task of giving the Church of St Peter its

urban setting. He added a tower to Maderna's facade, but it collapsed and lay about in fragments.

No one dared again to subject the foundations to the weight of fresh building. The stumps of the

towers were left, rising to the level of the cornice of the attics, unduly widening the facade and

destroying the balance of the structure. But now, as before, the church was to be given a portico.

Bernini, in the most ingenious manner, took the opportunity of transforming the disadvantageous

widening of Maderna's facade into an improvement. To increase the actual height of the facade

was technically impossible, but Bernini, in the true spirit of the Baroque, produced an impression

of height by ingeniously misleading the eye. The open space before the church rose in a slight

gradient, and this was crossed by pathways which approached it obliquely, not meeting the

facade at right angles, but enclosing an acute angle. This obliquity escapes the casual glance,

which unconsciously transfers the smaller distance between the ends of the pathways to their

starting-point, so that the facade seems narrower and, owing to the upward slope, also higher

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than it is in reality. In front of this forecourt, by which the eye is doubly deceived, Bernini now

levelled an open space which he enclosed with open colonnades, thereby enhancing the effect of

Michelangelo's dome, which had been diminished by the addition of the nave. Bernini

completed his Baroque illusion by enclosing, with his arcades, an oval courtyard, which appears

larger than it is in reality. The eye, expecting to see a circle, transfers the obvious width of the

oval to the depth, which is not so great. The colonnades, in their simplicity, play their part by

directing the attention to the facade. - But even as this facade was begun under an unlucky star,

so Bernini's plan has not been fully realized. He wanted to place a third portico, as a terminal

structure between the two semicircles. Owing to its omission - probably on account of the death

of Alexander VII - the gap which now exists between the colonnades forms part of a typical

Italian rondo, still further enhancing the overwhelming majesty of the whole, and especially the

effect of the dome.

Borromini's designs were quite different, arguably more restless and extravagant. They include

extremely complex ground-plans and masonry, and the deliberate contradiction of traditional

detail - in the inversion of the volutes, for instance, or in entablatures that denied their traditional

function by no longer resting on capitals but on a continuation above them.

A characteristic example of Italian Baroque design by Borromini is the little church of S. Carlo

alle Quattro Fontane. Significantly, the plan of this tiny church is built up of oval forms. The

centrally planned church, either circular or Greek cross, was used by early and High Renaissance

architects to express their ideal of perfect lucidity and order. The oval, producing a precisely

opposite effect, that of confusion and uncertainty, and above all, of movement, was in the same

way a favourite motive with Baroque architects. The effect of the interior is one of complete

plastic unity; the building might have been carved out of one block of stone, for there is no sense

of its having been constructed out of separate elements. The same applies to the facade, built up

of an elaborate and subtle combination of convex and concave forms, which again have no

constructive purpose.

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Many of Borromini's ideas were adopted by Guarini, with the addition of a mathematical and

technical factor which was of great importance in itself - but even more because of its influence

on Baroque architects outside Italy, especially in Germany.

French Baroque Architecture

Personal variations apart, Italian Baroque could be said to correspond almost completely to the

norms described. The same cannot be said of France, which nevertheless produced during the

Baroque period a succession of excellent architects, even more numerous than in Italy: Salomon

de Brosse, Francois Mansart, Louis Le Vau, Jacques Lemercier, and, greatest of them all,

Jules Hardouin Mansart. But in France personality was less significant in its effects then the

'school' to which architects could be said to belong. The attempt of the French court to introduce

Italian Baroque into France, by summoning Bernini in 1665 to Paris and commissioning him to

design the reconstruction of the royal palace - the Louvre - was doomed from the outset. As a

critic rightly observed, there was in question a radical difference of temperament. To the French,

Italian exuberance verged on the indecorous, if not wilfulness and bad taste. Rather than as

artists, French architects considered themselves professional men, dedicated to the service and

the glorification of their king. At the court of the Roi Soleil a Baroque style was developed which

was more restrained than the Italian: ground-plans were less complex, and facades more severe,

with greater respect for the details and proportions of the traditional architectural orders, and

violent effects and flagrant caprices were eschewed. The textbook example and greatest

achievement of French Baroque was the Chateau of Versailles, the royal palace built for Louis

XIV outside Paris: a huge U-shaped mass with two long wings, disturbed hardly at all by the

small, low arcades on the main facade facing the gardens.

It was not in architecture, however, that the great glory of French Baroque was to be found, but

in the art of landscape gardening. Until the era of the Baroque, gardens had been of the 'Italian'

type, small parks with plants and flower-beds laid out in geometrical schemes. Andre Le Notre,

the brilliant landscape architect who created the new, perspective, form of garden, supplanted

these by the 'French' garden, of which the park at Versailles was to become both prototype and

masterpiece. In the centre stood the palace; on one side was the approach drive, the gates, the

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wide gravelled area for carriages; and on the other were lawns and parterres, or flower-beds in

geometrical shapes, fountains, canals and broad expanses of water, and, beyond all this, the dark

line of woods pierced by long, wide, straight avenues which were linked by circular clearings.

The imposing and austere architecture created in France, with its balance between Baroque

tendencies and classical traditions, was gradually to become the cultural model for progressive

Europe. When Sir Christopher Wren, in the second half of the seventeenth century, decided he

should bring his own ideas up to date, it was not to Italy that he went, as had been the custom

until then, but to Paris. The Baroque architecture of Belgium and the Netherlands likewise bears

the mark of French inspiration.

German Baroque Architecture

Closer to the Italian model was the Baroque of the northern side of the Alps, in Austria and

Germany. This was the case, however, only in a restricted sense. Baroque influence came

relatively late to the German states, which in the first half of the seventeenth century had been

devastated by the Thirty Years' War. Once acclimatized, however, it underwent a remarkable

growth both in quantity and quality. The great architects of the period practised at a relatively

late time, at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries; they were,

however, numerous, exceptionally accomplished, and blessed with enthusiastic patronage from

the several royal, ducal, and episcopal courts of Germany. All visited Rome, and were trained in

the Italian tradition: Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt

and his more gifted pupil Johann Balthasar Neumann; to these must be added Matthaus

Poppelmann, and Francis de Cuvillies - a Frenchman, but whose activity was almost entirely

confined to Germany.

One must remember that the Baroque style in architecture - as in Baroque sculpture - was one of

propaganda: in palaces, it impressed on the onlooker the importance of the absolute monarch; in

churches, it was at the service of 'the Counter-Reformation, notably in Catholic and absolutist

countries. It was therefore in the Catholic states of South Germany, such as Bavaria and

Austria, where the most magnificent Baroque architecture is to be found - as magnificent as

anything in Italy. The greatest of the South German Baroque architects was Johann Balthasar

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Neumann (1687-1753) who produced a miracle of palace architecture in the Wurzburg

Residenz; this went hand in hand with the building of monasteries and churches; for bishops and

abbots, no less than princes, pretended to wordly importance. Neumann found himself

confronted, in the case of the ingeniously-designed wing of the Banz monastery at Bruhl, by the

necessity of inserting a well-staircase loin in a building erected by Schlaun in 1725-28. Here we

see at its highest his unique ability for producing an effect of unlimited space by optical illusion,

the inclusion of picturesque vistas, and by tricks of lighting. In the well-staircase and the

banqueting halls of Schloss Bruchsal he produced what is, in consistency, design, magnificence,

and lighting, one of the greatest masterpieces of German architecture. In church architecture his

most impressive creation was the Vierzehnheiligen (the Fourteen Saints) near Bamberg. On

entering the building one is overwhelmed by a flood of light. Everything is moving; the interior

seems to be enclosed by circling, undulating forms: even in the ground plan it appears to be

completely disintegrated. Even when no special circumstances are operative, as in the church of

the Fourteen Saints, we see that the customary ground-plan of a Baroque church has almost

completely abolished the straight line, and even the facades are curved. Unlike the facades of

Italian Baroque churches, German churches have usually kept their towers. It was in the

decoration of these churches that this whirling combination of forms reached its height. In the

churches in which the brothers Asam co-operated, as, for example, the monastery church at

Einsiedeln, and the Carmelite church at Regensburg, and, above all, the church of St John

Nepomuk, in Munich, they reached the limits of the possible in the combination of reality and

illusion. Effects of hidden lighting, the inclusion of fresco painting in stucco decorations, and

every other possible illusionist trick, make these churches seem now like a pompous Baroque

opera-house, now like a Rococo stage improvised for a festival, entirely without the quiet

solemnity and the piety which are bound up with the conception of Romanesque or Gothic art.

The style of Baroque created by German architects spread to Poland, the Baltic states, and

eventually to Russia. It had considerable affinity with Italian Baroque, with the addition of an

even greater tendency to exuberant decoration, especially of the interior; it also differed from

Italian forms by its avoidance of sharp contrasts of light and darkness in favour of a more

diffused and serene luminosity. Two features also presaged the 'Rococo' style that was to succeed

it, a style that found its widest application in these countries and was sometimes the work of the

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same architects, for example Poppelmann, Neumann, and Cuvillies. In the two main forms of

construction, churches and palaces, the Baroque of the German-speaking countries adhered fairly

consistently to a few basic designs. On churches the device of two lateral towers with which

Borromini had experimented was universally adopted. Sometimes this was taken to the point of

upsetting the general layout, as Fischer von Erlach did in Vienna on his Karlskirche. On this, a

centrally planned building, in order to include the towers he added them as free-standing, empty

structures on either side of the main body of the church. The whole edifice exemplifies a

theatrical conception in the grand style, its form emphasized by two columns, reminiscent of

Trajan's Column in Rome, which stand beside the towers. In palace design, meanwhile, the

model was Versailles; but Germanic architects generally showed themselves able to surpass this

example in the articulation of large masses of masonry, accentuating the central section of the

building, and sometimes the lateral sections likewise.

Spanish & Portugese Baroque Architecture

At the same time that its influence spread north of the Alps, Italian Baroque also asserted itself in

Spain and Portugal. In these countries there was no obstacle to its success, but here too an

entirely individual style developed. Its salient, indeed its only particular, characteristic was a

profusion of decoration. Whatever the form of a building it appeared merely to be a pretext for

the ornamentation encrusting it. Many factors contributed to this result, chief among which were

the Moorish tradition, still alive in the Iberian peninsula, and the influences of the pre-Columbian

art of America, with its fantastic decorative vocabulary. This particular style, known as

'Churrigueresque' from the family name, Churriguera, of a dynasty of Spanish architects who

were particularly closely associated with it, dominated Spain and Portugal for two centuries and

passed into their South American colonies, where the decorative aspect was, if possible,

intensified to a frenzy of ornamentation. Its value is perhaps debatable, but as a style it is

certainly recognizable, in its subordination of everything to decoration.

Urban Planning

Going beyond the appearance of individual buildings, a number of more general themes were

also typical of the Baroque style of architecture. The first was the way in which Baroque

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architects were the first to confront the task of town-planning practically rather than in theory.

Principally they dealt with it in terms of the circus and the straight road. Into the fabric of the

city they cut circuses, each dominated by some structure, a church, a palace, a fountain, and then

linked these points with a network of long, straight avenues aimed, so to speak, at these

structures. It was not a perfect solution, but it was ingenious for the time. Indeed, for the first

time a system was devised for planning, or replanning, a city, making it more beautiful, more

theatrical, and above all more comprehensible because subordinate to a rule. Through the use of

such schemes for town-planning, which parallel those of the French type of garden, conceived on

the same principle, there evolved the great monumental fountains, in which architecture,

sculpture, and water combined to form an ideal centrepiece and to express the Baroque feeling

for scenography and movement. It was no chance that Rome, the city which more than any other

was planned according to the new norms of the seventeenth century, is par excellence a city of

fountains.

Domestic Interior Designs

Two other characteristic themes treated by Baroque architects concerned domestic interior

structures: the complex great staircases that began to appear in all aristocratic buildings from the

seventeenth century onwards, sometimes becoming the dominating feature; and the gallery, in

origin a wide, decorated corridor, and another showpiece, of which the Galerie des Glaces at

Versailles is an outstanding example. Often the gallery, like many other rooms in the Baroque

period, would be painted with illusionist scenes, conveying a realistic extension in every

direction of the gallery itself which would often actually intrude upon the architecture, reducing

it to a secondary role.

The Baroque is essentially an art of illusion, in which all the tricks of scene painting, false

perspective and trompe-l'oeil, are employed without scruple to achieve a total effect. It was also

the first step back towards a conception which the Middle Ages knew, but which the High

Renaissance abandoned, that of the subordination of painting and sculpture to the plastic unity of

the building they were to decorate, A Renaissance altarpiece or statue was conceived as an

isolated thing by itself, without very much relation to its surroundings; Baroque painting or

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carving is an integral part of its setting, and if removed from it, loses nearly all its effect.The

new world of baroque –Latin America

Baroque art in Latin America is not a mere transposition of Spanish or Portuguese art. It is a

hybrid art. And it embraces more than two cultures, for along with the Spanish tradition it

received the Arab heritage in the form of the mudejar (4) style. It is said that the Indian

contribution is shown in a preference for a range of pure colours and in the use of abstraction in

the portrayal of figures. But the Black influence can also be seen, both in the dark complexion of

angels and Virgins and in the syncretism of African gods with the traditional Christian saints. A

marvellously enriched style emerged from all these influences, the style of an art that was

fundamental to a new world. Such is the art we know as "Latin American Baroque'.

By the end of the 17th century the grand Baroque style was in decline, as was its principal

sponsor, Italy. The coming European power was France, where a new and contrasting style of

decorative art was beginning to emerge. This light-hearted style soon enveloped architecture, all

forms of interior decoration, furniture, painting, sculpture and porcelain design. It was known

as Rococo.

Rococo Art Style (18th Century)

Introduction

Centred in France and emerging as a reaction to the Baroque grandeur of the Versailles court of

the French King Louis XIV, the Rococo style was associated particularly with Madame de

Pompadour, the mistress of the new King Louis XV, and the Parisian homes of the French

aristocracy. It is a whimsical and elaborately decorative style of art, whose name derives from

the French word 'rocaille' meaning, rock-work after the forms of sea shells.

In the world of Rococo, all art forms, including fine art painting, architecture, sculpture, interior

design, furniture, fabrics, porcelain and other "objets d'art" are subsumed within an ideal of

elegant prettiness

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Rococo art is exemplified in works by famous painters like Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721)

especially his 'fete galante' outdoor courtship parties; Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) with

his pictures of love and seduction; Francois Boucher (1703-70) with his lavish paintings of

opulent self-indulgence; the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) known for his

fantastically decorative wall and ceiling fresco paintings; and the sculpture of Claude Michel

Clodion (1738-1814), sculptor of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, best known for his terracotta

statuettes of nymphs and satyrs. In Britain, Rococo painting achieved its zenith in the female

portraits of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88). Rococo was eventually replaced by Neoclassical

art, which was the signature visual style of Napoleon in France and of the American revolution.

Rococo: Origins

Rococo is the frivolous, wayward child of noble, grand Baroque. The parent was born in Italy,

the child in France. The Baroque (barocco, a rough pearl) developed in the early 17th-century

and spread rapidly throughout Europe. At first predominantly a sculptural and architectural style,

its greatest exponent and genius was Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) who, like Michelangelo

before him, was first and foremost a sculptor, but turned naturally to painting, theatrical

decorations and architecture while serving several Popes in the remodelling of Rome. His

"Ecstasy of S. Teresa" and the small church of S. Andrea al Quirinale in Rome both reveal the

tendencies which lead on to the rococo style: a brilliant use of light and shade on expensive and

elaborate materials, such as coloured marbles and bronze.

The seventeenth century was an age of grandeur, of strong religious sentiments expressed clearly

and forcibly in striking visual forms in the paintings of Caravaggio and Cortona, the sculptures

of Bernini and the architecture of Borromini. Its most important manifestations were Italian, and

it was really the swan song of Italy as a creative power, for already at the death of Pope Urban

VIII, Bernini's patron, the new star was making its appearance - France, which was to continue

her meteoric rise throughout the century and dominate fashionable and artistic Europe in the

succeeding century.

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The Rococo Style in France

In 1651 the young Louis XIV came of age and by the 1660s any dissensions in France had been

totally suppressed, so that Louis could devote his attentions to the building and decoration of his

palace at Versailles. Here, the Italian baroque style was adopted and modified by Louis' all-

powerful artist, designer and interior decorator, Charles Lebrun, to glorify not the saints of the

Catholic Church, but the King of France: "Le Roi Soleil". Louis' absolute rule involved not only

visual proof of his supremacy, but an elaborate court etiquette as stiff and unnatural as the

gardens laid out by Le Notre around the Palace. This extreme formality was felt in such

apartments as the famous Hall of Mirrors and the multicoloured Ambassadors' Staircase, and it is

against this background that the Rococo is set; France was demonstrating that already she was

arbiter of taste and eager for novelty.

French Rococo Architecture, Interior Design and Decoration

The Rococo is rightly associated with the 18th-century in France, but even within the last years

of the previous century, indications of the new style appear, as in the work of the court architect,

Jules-Hardouin Mansart (1646-1708), at the Trianon at Versailles, and at Marly, another royal

residence. In these two buildings Mansart broke away from the stultifying use of marble and

bronze, turning rather to wooden panelling and paler colours. The very scale of the Trianon

indicates a desire to escape from the grandiose palace, a feeling which occasioned a number of

highly significant works in the 18th-century.

Louis XIV appears to have much encouraged this reaction, as illustrated by his famous

injunction to Mansart concerning the decoration of the room of the very young Duchesse de

Bourgogne in the Chateau de la Menagerie: "You must spread everywhere the feeling of

youthfulness". This was in 1699, and the King still had another sixteen years to live, years which

were to determine the course of art and decoration for at least the next generation, not only in

France but as far afield as Sicily and Austria.

If the Rococo was specifically a French creation, many factors from further afield influenced and

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fostered the style, as, for example, the graphic works of such seventeenth-century Italian artists

as Stefano delia Bella, who spent a long time in Paris. In his designs delicate, feathery lines

enfold forms which are often purely decorative in intent, as much rococo art was to be.

Many engraved books from the last decades of the seventeenth century reveal the rococo style in

embryonic form. The tight scroll-work so characteristic of Flemish and German renaissance

decoration, and even of the School of Fontainebleau, was liberated, making it less severe and

symmetrical, and fantastic elements were introduced, unknown in the originals. This is seen in

France in the furniture of Andre-Charles Boulle and in Venice in the furniture of Andrea

Brustolon, where curving, intricate baroque forms began to be modified around the turn of the

century.

One of the first appearances of the new style in a highly important setting is in the bedroom of

Louis XIV at Versailles. This was redecorated about 1701 mainly in white and gold, relying

entirely for its effect on the crisp contrasts of finely sculptured pilasters against rich areas of

gilded carving, and, set above the chimney-pieces, large mirrors with rounded tops. Large areas

of Venetian mirror-glass were, of course, important decorative features as early as the creation of

the Galerie des Glaces, and also of the Mirror Room in the Grand Trianon: they have often been

mistakenly identified solely with the advent of the rococo style, in which, indeed, they were to

play an important part. The design of Louis' bedroom, however, still bears witness to a strong

preference for the Classical Orders, with pilaster decoration in the typically academic

seventeenth-century tradition.

One of the problems of any examination of rococo decoration is that we are uncertain as to how

much of it originated from the small army of draughtsmen, whose leading figures such as

Mansart kept behind the scenes, and how much from the great architects themselves. Thus, while

a building or an interior passes as the work of Mansart or De Cotte, the novel details in it may

just as well have sprung from a 'ghost' designer with a certain sense of fantasy and an originality

which the Royal Architect passed off as his own.

These draughtsmen were in all probability familiar with books of decorative patterns derived

39

from the Italian Renaissance and illustrating the famous grotesques of Raphael in the Villa

Madama and the Vatican Loggie. Grotesques, descended from the stucco reliefs and paintings in

Roman tombs (or grottoes, hence 'grotesques'), played an important part in French decoration as

early as the 1650s and later appeared in some of Lebrun's own decorations, such as those in the

Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre. They consisted of curving plant-and-scroll forms, often

originating in an urn or pot and winding upwards in a regular pattern, inhabited by playful

monkeys, insects and other creatures who provide a slight asymmetrical touch. The lightness of

this type of decoration was borne in mind by Pierre Lepautre when he decorated the King's

suite of rooms at Marly in 1699.

Lepautre's interiors at Marly are, tragically, known to us only from drawings. They show that he

dispensed with the heavy, rectangular frames around doors and mirrors, replacing them with

miniature curving decorations integrated into the corners of mouldings, which themselves were

finer and more elegant in effect than ever before. In place of the traditional painted and gilded

ceiling, Lepautre simply articulated the great white plaster expanse with a delicate gilded rosette

at the centre - this was to be imitated on both ceilings and panelling throughout the rococo

period.

The rococo style developed most strongly during the Regency of the Duc d'Orleans (1715-23),

whose town residence was the Palais Royale. Here, licence was the rule, and the tone of rococo

society was set: a society which demanded constant novelty, wit and elegance - precisely the

qualities of the rococo style. Society opened its doors to people whom Louis XIV would never

have accepted: the newly rich and increasingly important intellectuals. During the Regency much

of the aristocracy, which had found itself confined to Versailles during Louis XIV's reign,

returned to Paris and commissioned new town houses, as in the Place Vendome, where the

transitional style can still be clearly seen.

Their interiors did not call for the elaborate ceiling-paintings of the previous century, and in their

place a new school of painters emerged who specialized in the gently curving trumeaux (over-

doors) and small-scale painted panels which form a great part of the output of (eg) Francois

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Boucher (1703-70). Also in constant employment from this period until the Revolution were the

scupteurs, who executed the often minutely detailed carving on the boiseries, the decorated

panel-framings.

It was in about 1720 that the transitional style began to give way to a clear rococo style. The term

'rococo' probably derives from the French 'rocaille', which originally referred to a type of

sculptured decoration in garden design. Certainly the leading designers of the rococo style,

Gilles-Marie Oppenordt, Nicolas Pineau and Juste-Aurele Meissonnier, were very much

aware of it. The grotesques of the seventeenth century were now transformed into arabesques

under Claude Audran, Watteau's teacher, full of a new fantasy and delicacy.

The main steps forward were made in interior decoration and painting, while little of importance

happened to the appearance of the exterior, except that a certain light sophistication replaced the

heaviness of the Louis XIV style, and, instead of relying on the Classical Orders, architects such

as Jean Courtonne and Germain Boffrand produced buildings whose main effect lay in the

subtle treatment of stonework and the skilful disposition of delicate sculpture against

sophisticated rustication. In Paris, two of the best examples are the famous Hotel de Matignon of

1722-23 and the Hotel de Torcy of 1714.

In interior decoration a steady progression towards extreme elaboration is seen during the

Regency, as demonstrated by the Palais Royale and Hotel d'Assy, culminating in such

triumphantly sophisticated rooms as the Salon Ovale of the Hotel de Soubise in Paris (1738-39)

by Boffrand, whose influence on German rococo architecture was to be considerable.

A tendency to replace the huge series of very formal apartments favoured in the Louis XIV

period with smaller, more intimate rooms is also seen, as in the Petites Appartements in

Versailles, where form follows function more closely. Sadly these, together with many of the

greatest rococo rooms, have disappeared without trace. Apart from Paris, much fine architecture

and decoration in the full-blown rococo style was effected at Nancy, where the dethroned King

of Poland lived.

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French Rococo Painting

Paradoxically, the rococo style was heralded in painting, much earlier than in the other arts, by a

Flemish painter, Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). He moved to Paris in about 1702 and

began working as a theatrical scene-painter, before studying with the Keeper of the Luxembourg

Palace, Claude Audran, an artist who painted in a decorative, late baroque style. It was the

Rubens' Life of Marie de Medicis' series in the Luxembourg Palace which most impressed

Watteau and through him was to influence the course of French rococo painting. He studied

these together with the great Venetian painters and, in the words of Michael Levey, although he

had "no public career, no great commissions from Church or Crown; seldom executed large-

scale pictures: had no interest in painting historical subjects", he became the greatest French (by

adoption) artist of the first half of the century.

Watteau's pictures, with their combination of Rubens' colour and his own delicate eroticism,

were always more than a little melancholy. The lyrical quality of his painting, with its suggestion

of sophisticated amorality, was precisely that sought by French society in the Regency years:

Watteau was not only catering for a taste but also creating one. For more about nudity in Rococo

painting

The other two major painters of the French rococo period, Francois Boucher (1703-70) and

Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806), both purveyed an entirely different variety of the style

from that of Watteau and are often thought to have vulgarized where Watteau had refined.

Whereas Watteau achieved an all-enveloping aura of aristocratic distancing, Boucher and

Fragonard produced a more intimate and obvious effect.

Significantly, Boucher's career opened as an engraver of Watteau's pictures, and from then on

assumed the pattern of traditional success. Winning the Prix de Rome, he worked in Italy from

1727 to 1731. In 1734 he became an Academician, and with the help of his friend and Louis

XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour, he became the most sought-after painter in France for

every type of picture, but in particular for his vivid renderings of mythological and classical

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subjects. In these, often rendered in a somewhat unsubtly erotic vein, Boucher, like Watteau,

revealed a strong debt to Rubens and Venetian art, especially to Paolo Veronese, his finest

predecessor in painting brilliantly clothed and displayed mythologies. Boucher became Director

of the Academy in 1765, and altogether made a highly important contribution to the rococo

movement through his many paintings and his designs for tapestries and other decorations.

In the unreality of most of his later forms one recalls Sir Joshua Reynolds' sense of outrage at

discovering Boucher had forsaken models. By comparison with the unreal world of Watteau,

Boucher's settings are even less real, while the contrast with Thomas Gainsborough, who

composed his landscapes with pieces of mirror, twigs and moss, is still more extreme. Miniature

trees surround rustic buildings, which appear to have been made in icing-sugar, and water looks

as if it were made of glass. There is no real light and shade, perhaps so as not to contrast too

strongly with the surrounding pale and shallow rococo boiserie decoration into which it was set.

While there were a number of great individual artists, there were also families of painters who

followed an almost unchanging stylistic tradition. Among these are the Coypels, who executed

the chapel ceiling at Versailles, the Van Loos and the De Troys, all of whom painted

consistently amusing pictures for the upper classes and for the rising middle classes, who appear

for the first time in the rococo period as important patrons and to some extent account for the

increased demand for portraiture. Some of the most delicious evocations of the sophistication of

society are found in the portraits of Nattier, Drouais, Roslin and, of course, Boucher himself,

whose delicate likenesses of Madame de Pompadour are among the finest portraits of any

woman in that century.

Alongside portraiture, many other specialized branches of painting arose, such as the still life,

where Jean Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755) and Francois Desportes (1661-1743) were foremost.

In the field of still life one man is outstanding: Jean Chardin (1699-1779). His delightfully

simple and deeply sincere genre subjects and his still life paintings have a quality which seem at

first glance closer in feeling to Dutch Realism - with an added dash of French precision and

sensibility - than to the prevailing rococo style. A masterpiece could be born from a tiny picture

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of a Delft vase with a few flowers or from a simple two-figure study. It is their very delicacy and

refinement that links them to the rococo.

French Rococo Furniture and Decorative Arts

The same delicacy characterizes the furniture and other decorative arts of the period. Between

about 1715 and 1770 French craftsmen created furniture which remains unparalleled in its beauty

of line and detail, minute finish and costly materials expertly used. Also in this period most of

the furniture types with which we are familiar today came into being: such pieces as the writing-

table (bureau plat), the secretaire (of many different types, notably the drop-front and cylinder

type) and the sofa in many guises (canapes, lits de repos).

The heavy pieces of the later 17th-century inlaid with brass and tortoise-shell in the manner of

Boulle were replaced from the Regency onwards by smaller, lighter pieces, a development that

coincided with the decrease in the size of rooms and the lessening formality. The chest-of-

drawers (commode) was lifted off the floor on delicate curving legs, and bombe fronts were

covered with sinuous ormolu which often flowed over the entire piece and in which much of the

finest decoration of the Rococo is found. In this rococo craft, superb uses were made of inlaid

woods of all types, often imported from the Orient, contributing both to the high cost of the piece

and to the craze for the exotic which invaded French society and led to the use (often entirely

misplaced) of terms such as "a la polonaise", "a la grecque" and "a la chinoise". In furniture the

major manifestation of this interest in the Orient was in the use of imported or imitation lacquer,

many good pieces of Oriental lacquer suffering badly in the process of dissection and reshaping.

The display of luxury in rococo craftwork was not, of course, confined to furniture, and the stark

appearance of many rococo ensembles today is misleading. The frivolities and trimmings - frills,

ribbons, elaborate hangings on beds, doors and windows, festoons of fringes, gimps and baubles

- often only associated with the Victorians, added to the atmosphere of luxury and comfort, a

quality little known in seventeenth-century French interiors.

In spite of the extreme rigour of the Guild system, possibly even thanks to it, French furniture

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achieved, in the eighteenth century, such a state of perfection that it was sought after through-out

Europe. The Guild regulations encouraged specialization and incited the sons of master

craftsmen to continue in their fathers' trade by the prospect of economic advantages. The result

was exceptional professional skill, and the rise of veritable dynasties of joiners and cabinet-

makers, handing down the secrets of their craft from father to son.

Thus, the menuisier practised only the creation of the actual form of the furniture; the ebeniste

created the elaborate layers of inlay and surface decoration and yet another craftsman was

responsible for fitting the gilt-bronze decoration over the prepared framework; no guild was

permitted to intrude on the territory of another. As with the other arts, great names arose in each

field: Foliot, Lelarge, Sene, Cressent, and an increasing number of Germans: Oeben, Riesener,

Weisweiler. They rose to positions of great influence and a signed piece by one of these

craftsmen was as sought after as any painting by Boucher or Fragonard.

The Rococo was a style in which the feminine element predominated, demonstrated in furniture

in the supple and often sensuous curves, fragile appearance, and even terminology: duchesse

(duchess) and sultane (sultana). Flowers decorated much of the wall-panelling and furniture of

the period, and many rococo boiseries contain elaborate trompe d'oeils of garlands and sprays of

flowers inhabited by tiny birds and animals, the direct descendants of the grotesque. The small

scale of much of the furniture, particularly pieces designed for writing, almost precludes its use

by a man, although, paradoxically, one of the finest creations of the period, Louis XV's own desk

executed by Oeben and Riesener between 1760 and 1769 is large and surprisingly masculine.

Porcelain was sometimes incorporated into French furniture design, usually in the form of

painted plaques or discs set in bronze frames. Much of it is from the factory of Sevres. Louis XV

had himself provided funds to back a porcelain enterprize at Vincennes, near Paris, specifically

to imitate Meissen porcelain, which moved in 1756 to Sevres. Although not the first factory in

France to produce porcelain (Rouen and Saint-Cloud were both operating in the last years of the

seventeenth century), Vincennes-Sevres was certainly the most successful in its production of

hard-paste porcelain, counting important painters such as Boucher among its designers.

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The value attached to Sevres porcelain is attested to by the number of individual pieces or sets

such as that made for the Empress Maria Theresa in 1758 sent by Louis XV as diplomatic gifts.

Other famous sets include the services made for Catherine the Great and Madame du Barry. The

colours perfected at Sevres are not so different from those found in Boucher's paintings - greeny

blues and a wonderful pink known as rose Pompadour. The types of objects manufactured

ranged from wall-sconces to ink-wells and pot-pourri vases, of which some of the finest

examples are in the Wallace Art Collection, London.

For more about Rococo porcelain and Rococo sculpture, read about two important French

sculptors Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714-1785) and Etienne Maurice Falconet (1716-1791).

The rococo style in France represented her greatest artistic contribution before the rise of

Impressionism in the nineteenth century and embraced all the arts to an extent found nowhere

else in Europe apart from Germany. The amazing quality of French Rococo is due to the

maintenance of the highest standards throughout. It has the added appeal of patronage by such

figures as Madame de Pompadour, with whom the style is identified, and it stood at the end of a

long tradition of the finest French craftsmanship.

The Rococo Style in Italy

A large part of the story of the Rococo in Italy is that of painting in Venice - especially painting

by the great genius Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) - since the important products of the

style in its most original form are found there. With the exception of some buildings by Juvarra

and Bernardo Yittone, Italian architecture of the first half of the century passes fairly directly

from the late baroque style to early Neoclassicism, with little evidence of a definite rococo style.

Italian Rococo Architecture, Interior Design and Decoration

Architecture and decorative art was dominated by the work of two men at the turn of the century,

Bernini and Borromini, but in particular the latter. Soon, however, the leading architect in Rome

was Ferdinando Fuga (1699-1782), a Florentine whose greatest works were the Palazzo delia

Consulta (1732-37) and the facade of Santa Maria Maggiore (1741-43). In the former, a delicate

46

rhythm was created not by massive orders of columns but by subtly proportioned and slightly

recessed panels. Against these were set highly decorative windows, and the whole was crowned

by a large central sculpture of angels supporting a cartouche. It is much more sculptural in effect

than any French building of the same date, and links up rather more with German Rococo. The

same central emphasis is found in the facade of Santa Maria Maggiore, but there the whole

facade is conceived as an open loggia, relieved only by light sculpture. Elsewhere in Rome, other

architectural undertakings were coming closer to the spirit of the Rococo, as for example, in the

Spanish Steps (1723-25) by Francesco de Sanctis.

While French architects such as Boffrand were searching for an economical means of expressing

the sophistication of their interiors on the exterior, Italian architects were still very moch more

concerned with the exterior as the vehicle for an immediate impression. They often devoted their

energies to this at the expense of the interiors and as a result only succeeded internally where

huge spaces were involved, as in some of the works of Filippo Juvarra (1678-1736).

Juvarra was born in Messina into a family of silver-smiths and was trained in Rome under Carlo

Fontana, gaining his first successes as a designer of elaborate and decorative stage scenery, an

experience which was later to stand him in good stead. After being appointed First Architect to

the King at the Court of Savoy in 1714, he travelled to Portugal, London and, in 1719-20, Paris,

probably seeing French Rococo in its earliest stages. On his return he became Italy's closest

parallel to the French architect-designer, involved with not only architecture, but interiors,

furniture and the applied arts. His outstanding achievements are the hunting lodge he designed

between 1729 and 1733 for the Court at the Castle of Stupinigi, the Church of the Carmine

(1732-35) in Turin, and the sanctuary of the Superga near Turin (1717-31). Of these, Stupinigi is

his most exciting creation. Gigantic wings radiate from a domed central core Surmounted by a

bronze stag, the white exterior preparing one for the incredible spatial acrobatics and colour

inside the central Great Hall, which is close to many of Juvarra's architectural fantasies and

theatrical drawings. Much use is made of illusionistic painting, trompe l'oeil urns filling giant

niches painted above the many chimney-pieces in the hall, while a gently swaying gallery runs

round the walls and seems to pierce the great piers. It is a theatrical tour de force. By

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comparison, the Superga and the Carmine seem a little pedantic, but the former is sensationally

sited on a hilltop dominating the surrounding area with its elegant portico and high dome flanked

by onion-domed towers.

Comparable to Juvarra was Bernardo Yittone (1704-1770), who worked exclusively in

Piedmont, where he was born and to which he returned after studying in Rome and editing the

great baroque architect Guarini's 'Architettura Civile'. His most important works are in obscure

villages in Piedmont and unite Guarini's spatial complexity with Juvarra's lightness and brio. In

this vein, his masterpieces are the Sanctuary at Vallinotto (1738-39) and the church of Santa

Chiara at Bra of 1742.

While Vittone's domestic architecture is pedestrian, Juvarra's is not, and his rococo interiors are

among the finest in Italy. Unlike France, Italy was not ruled by one monarch, so patronage was

usually limited to a particular area of the country, as in Juvarra's case. His patron, Vittorio

Amadeo II of Savoy, was fortunate in having such an able court architect, and for him Juvarra

designed the facade of the Palazzo Madama in Turin (1718-21), and some of the few interiors

which approach the French in quality; such is the Chinese Room of the Royal Palace in Turin

with its lacquer and gilded boiseries, influenced, possibly, by JA Meissonnier's book of

ornaments published in 1734. A comparison of Juvarra's interiors with others in Italy shows that

he alone stood on an equal footing with other European designers.

Italian Rococo Furniture and Decorative Arts

Unfortunately the history of Italian rococo furniture does not follow such an easy pattern as the

French. The style of the seventeenth century overlapped into the eighteenth, and pieces which are

ostensibly datable before the turn of the century are often in fact much later. Much of Juvarra's

furniture remains fairly heavy, using natural forms in quite a different way from French

designers such as Nicolas Pineau or Meissonnier.

Splendour, left over from the baroque age, was still the dominant mood for all major interior

designs, and there was no feeling, as in France, or even Germany, for the small scale. Thus were

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produced more sophisticated but equally imposing furniture and settings. Whereas the French

taste was for constant novelty, Italian interiors changed little after the initial swing to the Rococo

had been accepted. As in France, and to a greater extent in England, the newly rich or moderately

well-off were now trying to keep abreast of contemporary developments.

What surprised most foreign travellers to Italy was the emptiness of the great suites which lay

behind the facades of most large palaces. Apart from the few splendid apartments on view, the

palaces contained many undistinguished rooms and their contents could not compare with French

furniture and the chic of Parisian styles, for which the Italians substituted tasteless extravagance.

The pictures by Pietro Longhi of Venetian interiors conjure up the sparsely furnished rooms of

many Italian rococo houses.

The figures of Andrea Brustolon and Antonio Corradini dominated Venetian design at the

beginning of the century, their heavy baroque forms continuing to be produced by succeeding

craftsmen well after their deaths, almost until the end of the century. The Venetians were

nonetheless the only Italians who took the rococo style seriously to heart and emulated the

French, producing exaggerated bombe commodes often teetering on tiny, fragile legs. Few great

names are known in the domain of Italian eighteenth-century furniture and one thinks mainly of

highly important individual pieces such as G. M. Bonzanigo's painted and gilt firescreen in the

Royal Palace at Turin. In Italy, even more than in France, an apparently insatiable demand for

curious or unusual pieces arose, elaborately painted in the Venetian style with rustic scenes or

flowers, inlaid, but never with the intimate skill of the French ebenistes. Lacquer, heavy gilding,

mirrors, painted glass and combinations of other materials led to a bewildering and not always

happy mixture of styles.

Outstanding in the art of inlay was Pietro Piffetti (1700-77), who worked for the House of

Savoy at Turin, creating highly individual furniture combining wood and ivory inlays with such

refinements in metal as masks at the corners and mounts for legs. The Royal Palace at Turin

contains some breathtaking pieces, literally covered with ivory inlay and occasionally seeming to

be supported solely by chance, so fragile are the legs beneath their elaborate upper parts. In the

Museo Civico in Turin is a card-table by Piffetti, stamped and dated 1758, with a wholly

49

convincing trompe l'oeil of playing-cards in ivory and rare woods.

In the minor arts nothing of great significance was produced in Italy compared with elsewhere in

Europe, and certainly no ceramics factory appeared to rival that of Sevres. But two factories

produced porcelain, much of which is certainly very beautiful - Vinovo in Piedmont and

Capodimonte outside Naples. Capodimonte porcelain is characterized by the brilliance of its

colouring, often in unexpected combinations as seen in the famous Porcelain Room from the

Palace at Portici (1754-59).

Italian Rococo Painting

Turning to Venice once more, we find painting dominated towards the mid-century by

Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), and, slightly later, by his son, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo

(1727-1804). In the elder Tiepolo, and in him alone, can one speak of a pure rococo style, related

to the late Baroque in many ways, but creating an entirely new type of visual experience. Not

surprisingly, many of the greatest Venetian qualities from the past are present in his work: the

colour and original imagination of Titian; the figure types and luxurious materials of Paolo

Veronese, together with his love of opulent classical architecture as a backdrop for rich pageants

of history and mythology.

The artificiality of the atmosphere in his early frescoes links Tiepolo at once with the mainstream

of rococo art, but at a time when he could not have known much about contemporary French

painting. From then on his career was a meteoric success until his eclipse in Madrid at the end of

his life at the hands of the neoclassicists under Mengs.

His greatest commission came in 1750, when he went to Wurzburg to paint frescoes for the

newly completed palace there and stayed until 1753 to decorate the staircase (the largest fresco

in the world), the Kaisersaal and the chapel. Shortly before leaving for Wurzburg, Tiepolo had

decorated the Palazzo Labia in Venice with the story of Anthony and Cleopatra, one of his most

evocative recreations of classical history.

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A comparison of Tiepolo's style with that of his exact contemporary, Boucher, reveals a different

and perhaps more intellectual temperament. His glacially elegant but still voluptuous nudes and

his subtle juxtaposition of types, as in the Wurzburg staircase where the 'Continents' are

brilliantly contrasted, is more original and complex than anything by Boucher. It was no accident

that Boucher admired Tiepolo above all others; "much more than Watteau's, his art is that of the

theatre, with a stage that is deliberately elevated above us, and actors who keep their distance",

says Michael Levey. Indeed his art is the last which is truly representative of aristocratic ideals,

soon to be replaced by the republican values of the French Revolution, an art which could only

have flourished in a city-state as decadent as Venice in the eighteenth century.

While Tiepolo, father and son, were the finest decorators in the city, there were the vedutisti, or

view-painters, such as Canaletto (1697-1768), whose great fame brought him to England

between 1746 and 1756, and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto (1720-80) .

The paintings of Francesco Guardi (1712-93) are triumphs of atmospheric study and

understanding of the singular effects of Venetian light on water and architecture. With a minimal

palette, reduced in some cases almost entirely to simple greens and greys, Guardi evokes

landscape and views of the canals in much the same way that Tiepolo executes figures, and with

magic dots of colour suggests people hurrying or engaged in conversation in the Piazza San

Marco or any of the many squares of Venice which he so clearly loved.

Pietro Longhi (1702-85), in contrast, specialized in somewhat gauche renderings of

contemporary life; in their gaucheness however lies their great charm, and in the often

delightfully unexpected choice of subject such as the 'Rhinoceros' (National Gallery, London) or

the 'Moorish Messenger' (Ca' Rezzonico, Venice).

But Italy was never as happy with the rococo style as it had been with the preceding style of the

Baroque or that of Neoclassicism, both of them heavier and more capable of expressing the

grandezza so beloved of Italian post-renaissance art. This, however, appears in Tiepolo in a

modified form, and it is his name which remains outstanding.

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The Rococo Style in England

Of all the European countries which had adopted or contributed to the baroque style, England

was the one which paid least attention to the Rococo.

English Rococo Architecture, Interior Design and Decoration

In architecture, at least, England moved directly from the baroque style of Wren and Vanbrugh

to Palladianism, a transition so swift that it allowed of no intermediate development. With

buildings such as Walpole's Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, built from 1748, and Arbury,

Warwickshire, of the same date and the other Gothick buildings erected during the eighteenth

century it is sentiment which places these works in the rococo category rather than any

relationship with the rocaille.

In fact English Gothick is divided into two distinct categories - 'associational' and 'rococo', the

latter being a light-hearted form of decoration loosely based on medieval precedents but

frivolous enough to become almost a counterpart of Continental Rococo in its sense of abandon

and superficiality. William Kent (1684-1748), architect and decorator, devized his own

vocabulary of Gothick decoration, which spread as quickly and as effectively over England as

the arabesques of Continental Rococo. But, apart from this, rocaille in England touched only a

handful of interiors, some high-quality furniture, certain paintings and some porcelain, in

particular the products of Chelsea and Bow.

The earliest example of rocaille in England was the commission given to the great French

designer Meissonnier by the Duke of Kingston in 1735 for a suite of table furniture in silver. But

this was a fairly rare instance and rococo design was generally confined to engraved decoration

on sobre forms almost entirely unaffected by the style. The new tendencies were disseminated

predominantly by pattern-books such as Matthias Lock's, or Jones's "The Gentleman's or

Builder's Companion" of 1739, which made rococo or quasi-rococo details available to every

craftsman who could afford the volume. The fact that these were only details, detached from

their surroundings, accounts for the frequently gauche quality of much English rococo furniture.

since the craftsman could not be expected to appreciate the organic nature of the style from mere

52

fragments.

As in Italy and France, the eighteenth-century patron's taste often extended to the Oriental in one

form or another. accounting for the few rococo rooms of note in England such as the bedroom at

Nostell Priory, Yorkshire, of 1745, or, the most important. Claydon House in Buckinghamshire

(c.1768), where a series of rooms were decorated by a certain Lightfoot, about whom little is

known. In these rooms, however, the style is by no means as pure as Continental Rococo.

Rococo decorative art appear in other English town and country house interiors and issometimes

of the highest quality - notably in the hall at Ragley, at nearby Hagley, and in the swirling

plasterwork of the Francini brothers. who executed much stucco work in Ireland, and are

particularly famed for their work at Russborough. But this attractive local craftsmanship is a far

cry from the consummate, all-embracing schemes of the Continent.

English Rococo Furniture and Decorative Arts

Unlike the French, English cabinet-makers did not usually sign their pieces, and so

comparatively little is known of men such as John Linnell, John Cobb, Benjamin Goodison

and William Vile, who all appear to have worked extensively in the new fashion. The name of

Chippendale is, however, outstanding, not only because of the quality of his pieces, but also

because of his publication "The Gentleman and Cabinet-maker's Director" (1754).

In his designs for mirrors and overmantels, often flavoured by chinoiserie, one sees exotic

examples of the rococo style, every bit as meticulous as French boiserie but designed to be used

as isolated features and rarely as part of a whole decorative scheme. Likewise, the elaborate and

fantastic carvings in the hall at Claydon are isolated in an otherwise classical setting.

English Rococo Painting

In painting, two English artists made certain concessions to the rococo - William Hogarth

(1697-1764) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88). Hogarth reacted strongly against the type

of baroque history painting which was so sought after by the 'amateurs' and introduced into his

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own work the so-called 'Line of Beauty', which he explained in his "The Analysis of Beauty"

(1753) and which was a serpentine line rather like an elongated 'S'. This was, of course, precisely

the form of much rococo decoration.

Gainsborough, on the other hand, began life as a painter of small, stilted portraits later

developing a more sophisticated style after his move to fashionable Bath. He painted some

portraits in a rococo style surprisingly close to Boucher, their floating brushwork and feathery

landscapes, bright pinks and silvery greys pronouncedly more rococo than any contemporary

English painting.

Neoclassicism swept England from the return of Robert Adam to the country in 1758, but even

his chaste and epicene style echoes the dainty, meticulous quality of most French rococo

decorations and his Gothick is as rococo as any decoration of that period in England.

The Rococo Style in Germany

In contrast to the superb restraint of the finest French rococo, Germany provides a breathtaking

range of some of the most outrageous and magnificent rococo architecture and interior

decoration in the history of European art.

German Rococo Architecture, Interior Design and Decoration

This high standard of excellence spread from architecture to applied art - furniture, furnishings

and porcelain - though these rarely surpassed those of France. Nothing in 18th-century France,

Italy or England rivals the sheer excess of such architectural masterpieces as Melk or the

Dresden Zwinger, and in the number of first-rate churches and palaces alone, Germany easily

outstrips the others. This may stem from the fact that what we now call Germany, was, in the

eighteenth century, divided into several different principalities, kingdoms anq bishoprics, so that

a certain rivalry must have determined the creation of buildings of major importance - unlike

France or England where the really important commissions were invariably confined to a small

number of patrons.

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German rococo can be seen to trace its origins to Roman churches of the baroque period such as

Bernini's Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, where colour, light and elaborate sculpture are all combined.

This is apparent for the first time in Germany in the Abbey Church of Weltenburg, built after

1714, with its oval dome cut away internally to reveal a frescoed vision of the heavens above.

Colour was the main string to the bow of German rococo - pink, lilac, lemon, blue - all were

combined or used individually to telling effect, as in the Amalienburg, near Munich. The heavier,

curving forms of the Baroque are turned into more staccato rhythms in German rococo, and one

finds the influence of a major baroque monument such as Bernini's baldacchino in St. Peter's

Rome, transformed by J. Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753), into a confection of the order of the

high altar at Vierzehnheiligen, perhaps the most complex and satisfying of German churches.

While room shapes in France during the eighteenth century did not change a great deal, and the

plan of ecclesiastical buildings hardly at all, German rococo architects explored every possibility.

Walls not only seem to sway despite their huge scale, but whole sections appear to have been cut

away, with the effect that the enormous frescoed ceilings, which entirely dominate most of these

churches, seem to float above the worshipper.

One of the most exciting features of German rococo architecture is the highly dramatic siting of

some of the most important examples, such as the Abbey of Melk by J. Prandtauer, begun in

1702. Deliberately placed in a commanding position high above the Danube, the two great

towers dominate a courtyard in front opened to the outside world by a great Palladian-type arch.

Such a feeling for drama, and for the total involvement of the faithful both externally and

internally, is also found at Ettal, in a reversed role, with the monastery dominated by surrounding

mountains.

Secular building also reached a high level of perfection. Perhaps the most sophisticated examples

are to be found in and around Munich where, as court dwarf and architect, Francois Cuvillies

(1695-1768) was involved in many buildings, perhaps the finest being the Amalienburg. This

small pavilion, built between 1734 and 1739 and named after the Elector's wife, has, in Hugh

Honour's words, 'an easy elegance and gossamer delicacy'. Its gently swaying front, shallow

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rustication and unusual pediments herald one of the loveliest rooms in Europe - the famous Hall

of Mirrors with its silver rocaille against powder-blue background and glittering glass. At the

opposite end of the scale, Cuvillies Residenz-theater in Munich (1751-53) uses richly gilded

figures and musical instruments to frame the entire auditorium, contrasting vividly with the red

damask and velvet of the walls and seats.

Potsdam and Dresden never produced a rococo style as refined as that of Munich, but buildings

such as the Zwinger (1709-19) by Poppelmann in Dresden overwhelm by their scale and

superabundance of decorative detail. The effect of this type of architecture is also felt in the little

Palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam (1745-51), which was built for Frederick the Great.For sheer

scale, opulence and overpowering grandeur of detail, the Rococo of Germany is foremost in

Europe.

Later Variants of Rococo

The rococo style never really died out in provincial France. With the arrival of Historicism in the

1820s, many craftsmen found it comparatively easy to produce whole interiors and buildings in

the 'Second Rococo' style so favoured by Louis Phillipe and his queen, examples of which are to

be found throughout Paris.

The rococo architectural and design revival came to England as early as 1828 with Wyatville's

Waterloo Chamber in Apsley House, the interiors of Lancaster House and the Elizabeth Saloon

at Belvoir Castle. It appealed naturally to the rich of the day, and the Rothschilds decorated

several houses in the style, even incorporating actual 18th-century interiors at Waddesdon Manor

in the 1880s.

Royal assent was given to the style by Ludwig of Bavaria in his Linderhof Palace and

Herrenchiemsee of the same period. It became the accepted taste in the decoration of the many

new hotels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and 'Le gout Ritz' was to be

synonymous with luxury and elegance.

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Mexican Muralism

Muralism or Muralismo is an important artistic movement generated in Latin America. It is

popularly represented by the Mexican muralism movement of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro

Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Rufino Tamayo. In Chile, José Venturelli was an

influential muralist, and Pedro Nel Gómez. Santiago Martinez Delgado championed muralism in

Colombia as did Gabriel Bracho in Venezuela. Some of the most impressive Muralista works

can be found in Mexico, Colombia, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and

Philadelphia. Mexican Muralism "enjoyed a type of prestige and influence in other countries that

no other American art movement had ever experienced."[2]

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo may be the best-known female Latin American artist in the United

States. She painted self-portraits and depictions of traditional Mexican culture in a style

combining Realism, Symbolism and Surrealism. Kahlo's work commands the highest selling

price of all Latin American paintings and the second-highest for any female artist

Neoclassical Art (Flourished 1770-1830)

The artistic style known as "Neoclassicism" was the predominant movement in European art and

architecture during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It reflected a desire to rekindle the

spirit and forms of classical art from ancient Greece and Rome, whose principles of order and

reason were entirely in keeping with the European Age of Enlightenment. Neoclassicism was

also, in part, a reaction against the ostentation of Baroque art and the decadent frivololity of the

decorative Rococo school, championed by the French court - and especially Louis XV's mistress,

Madame de Pompadour - and also partly stimulated by the discovery of Roman ruins at

Herculaneum and Pompeii (1738-50), along with publication in 1755 of the highly influential

book Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art, by the German art historian and scholar

Johann Winckelmann (1717-68). All this led to a revival of neoclassical painting, sculpture and

architectural design in Rome, from where it spread northwards to France, England, Sweden and

Russia. America became very enthusiastic about Neoclassical architecture, not least because it

lent public buildings an aura of tradition and permanence. Neoclassical painters included Anton

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Raphael Mengs (1728-79), Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807)

and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867); while sculptors included Jean-Antoine

Houdon (1741-1828), John Flaxman (1755-1826), Antonio Canova (1757-1822), and Bertel

Thorvaldsen (1770-1844). Among the best known exponents of neoclassical architecture were

Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), Jules-Hardouin Mansart (1646-1708), Jacques Germain

Soufflot (1713-80), Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), John Nash (1752-1835), Jean Chalgrin

(1739-1811), Carl Gotthard Langhans (1732-1908), Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), and

Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820).

Origins & Scope

The revival of artistic canons from Classical Antiquity was not an overnight event. It built on

Renaissance art itself, as well as the more sober styles of Baroque architecture, the mood of

Enlightenment, the dissatisfaction with the Rococo, and a new respect for the earlier classical

history painting of Nicolas Poussin (1593-1665), as well as the classical settings of Claude

Lorrain's (1600-82) landscapes. Furthermore, it matured in different countries at different times.

Neoclassical architecture actually originated around 1640, and continues to this day.

Paradoxically, the abundance of ancient classical buildings in Rome meant that the city at the

heart of the neoclassicism movement experienced little neoclassical architecture.

In addition, despite appearances, there is no clear dividing line between Neoclassicism and

Romanticism. This is because a revival of interest in Classical Antiquity can easily morph into a

nostalgic desire for the past.

Neoclassicism

Neoclassical works (paintings and sculptures) were serious, unemotional, and sternly heroic.

Neoclassical painters depicted subjects from Classical literature and history, as used in earlier

Greek art and Republican Roman art, using sombre colours with occasional brilliant highlights,

to convey moral narratives of self-denial and self-sacrifice fully in keeping with the supposed

ethical superiority of Antiquity. Neoclassical sculpture dealt with the same subjects, and was

more restrained than the more theatrical Baroque sculpture, less whimsical than the indulgent

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Rococo. Neoclassical architecture was more ordered and less grandiose than Baroque, although

the dividing line between the two can sometines be blurred. It bore a close external resemblance

to the Greek Orders of architecture, with one obvious exception - there were no domes in ancient

Greece. Most roofs were flat.

Neoclassical Painters

Founders and famous artists of Neoclassicism include the German portraitist and historical

painter Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-79), the Frenchman Joseph-Marie Vien (1716-1809) (who

taught J-L David), the Italian portrait painter Pompeo Batoni (1708-87),the Swiss painter

Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), the French political artist Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825),

and his pupils Jean-Germain Drouais (1763-88), Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (1767-

1824), J.A.D. Ingres (1780-1867) the French master of academic art, and the American

expatriate Benjamin West (1738-1820). In Britain, celebrated followers of Neoclassicism

included: Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Irish virtuoso James Barry.

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