Baroque

About

Baroque art took shape in Rome around 1600, when a Catholic Church renewed by the Council of Trent wanted images that would move believers directly. Caravaggio answered with ordinary-looking saints in raking light, as in The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600). Gian Lorenzo Bernini made marble seem to breathe in The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52), set in a chapel staged like a theatre.

The style changed with its patrons. Peter Paul Rubens filled altarpieces and palace ceilings with surging bodies; Artemisia Gentileschi painted biblical heroines with unflinching force; Diego Velázquez turned court portraiture into a study of looking in Las Meninas (1656). In the Dutch Republic Rembrandt used the same light for portraits and biblical scenes, while Nicolas Poussin pursued a calmer classicism. Look for diagonals, twisting figures and theatrical gesture. The name, first used as an insult, may derive from a word for an irregular pearl.