Baroque Art

Flourishing throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Baroque style of art and architecture inspired wonderment through the use of ornate detail, tonal intensity, and an overarching sense of grandeur. The style arose in Italy, where it replaced the elegant contortions of Mannerism, and soon spread throughout the Continent. Its emergence had much to do with the Counter-Reformation – Pope Paul V was the first of a series of Catholic rulers to commission monumental works that parried Protestant austerity with dramatic appeals to emotion – although a distinctive Lutheran Baroque visual culture developed in the Germanophone world in the second half of the 17th century. By that time in France, the already lavish Baroque style evolved into the maximally flamboyant Rococo, with its gilded scrolls, trumpeting cherubs, and illusionistic ceilings, before giving way to the clean lines and rational symmetry of Neoclassicism. By the nineteenth century, Baroque art was broadly derided, with John Ruskin opining that it was “impossible for false taste and base feeling to sink lower”. Nevertheless, critics and collectors regained some of their lost appetite for the unabashedly sumptuous in the twentieth century, and interest in the Baroque era’s best work is stronger than ever.

Baroque painting most typically depicted Biblical and mythological allegories on a grand scale with strong contrast between light and shadow, richly saturated colours, a compelling evocation of activity, and sumptuous brushwork. Quintessential sculpture of the era is likewise larger-than-life and dynamically expressive, often suggesting both vertical and vortical movement, and is meant to be viewed “in the round” rather from a single, ideal vantage point.

At its best, Baroque art provokes passion, awe, and reverence, in sharp contradistinction to the more cerebral, classically-inflected work that defined the High Renaissance a century before and the Neoclassical period a century later.

While the Baroque style is commonly thought of as a Continental phenomenon, British painters, sculptors, and architects were among the epoch’s leading figures. Painters of note included William Dobson, Peter Lely, and John Michael Wright, the latter of whom enjoyed patronage from the royal court before anti-Catholic sentiment intensified in the wake of the “Popish Plot” hoax of 1678. Among the first British sculptors to adopt the Baroque style was Nicholas Stone the Elder, whose impressive statuary can be seen in London’s Guildhall and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Christopher Wren was the leading English Baroque architect, who rebuilt 52 churches and many secular buildings following the Great Fire of London in 1666.

While the Baroque style fell into disfavour for many generations, it has exerted a profound influence on many later artists and architects. The Baroque Revival, also known as the Edwardian Baroque, was an extravagantly embellished architectural style throughout the British Empire in the decades of prosperity and expansionism leading up to the Great War. Among the many and diverse contemporary works that have been described as “neo-Baroque” – defined by the Florentine art and semiotics scholar Omar Calabrese as “a valorisation of forms that display a loss of entirety, totality, and system in favor of instability, polydimensionality, and change” – are Frank Stella’s La vecchi dell’orto (1986); John Currin’s The Farm (1997); and Adriana Varejão’s Green Tilework in Live Flesh (2000).

The work of the original Baroque masters can be seen in museums throughout the world, notably the Louvre in Paris and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, whose palatial main buildings boast many magnificent Baroque elements.