Baroque Art and Architecture: Key Characteristics
Baroque Style
This style began in Italy in the 16th century and lasted until the late 18th century, spreading to all European countries, developing unique characteristics in each. In this art, there is a marked preference for naturalism, dynamism, and optical effects. Common subjects include still-life compositions, animals, lives of saints, and Christ, often framed within asymmetrical schemes.
Baroque Architecture
In Baroque architecture, planning is frequently emphasized. The most representative buildings are civilian, with ornate interior decoration, original floor plans, and complex coverings. The giant order is often used. The city becomes theatrical, a stage for life. Visual perspectives are created on a point of reference, as well as unique places, squares, and cozy corners, reflecting civil or religious power. The palace is a typical urban housing building for powerful families, characterized by dynamic facades with curves and counter-curves, and the play of light and shadow, highlighting the main parts. Gardens are also significant, with a taste for the beauty of nature enhanced and ordered, as seen in the typical French garden. The hotel is a type of detached family house surrounded by gardens, enclosed by a fence, popular among the bourgeoisie and privileged classes. The temple is the place of sermons and the Eucharist, designed as a site for theatrical performance with good visibility and acoustics.
There is a new conception of space, with whimsical and moving floor plans. Buildings are loaded with decor that pervades every corner, showcasing a penchant for luxury and wealth. Key features of Baroque architecture include:
- Rejection of simplicity and search for complexity.
- Emphasis on movement and light to create dynamic spaces.
- Creation of new typologies for specific buildings.
- Taste for the infinite and theatrical effects.
- Subordination of all arts to the architectural whole.
- Use of curved lines in buildings and decoration.
- Use of rich materials to enhance ostentation.
Baroque Painting
Baroque painting moved away from the elitism of Mannerism, seeking a more didactic and realistic expression. It provides suggestive content, dreamy forms, poetry, and evocation of the old, except in the interiors of the Netherlands. Baroque paintings are equipped with natural depth, portraying reality as we see it, with vague boundaries, forms that come and go, inconsequential foreground objects, twisting and violent positions, and diagonal compositions that give the work dynamism.
During this period, painting takes a prominent role in artistic expression, reflecting the weight of religion in Catholic countries and bourgeois taste in Protestant countries. The dynamics of space, the vision of scenes in depth, the structure of compositions by diagonals, and the distribution of light and color patches create a dynamic space where contours are diluted, and figures are less important against the unity of the scene. Color, light, and movement are the defining elements of the pictorial form.
Baroque painting in the Netherlands and Flanders is a direct descendant of Flemish Renaissance painting, with a more bourgeois language. It supports a wide range of subjects and techniques, spreading the values of the Counter-Reformation, absolutism, and the bourgeoisie. It delights in open spaces, the predominance of color and light over drawing, and the contrast effects produced by light and shadow, using a technique called tenebrism. The brushwork is usually long and flexible, and aerial perspective is often used to give depth to the picture.
Common subjects include religious scenes, saints, mythological figures, and portraits, both individual and group. Landscapes (marine, rural views, etc.) become important, and new themes like still life emerge. New genres such as still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and genre paintings are developed, enriching the iconography of religious matters. There is a trend that combines realism with theatrical and contrived elements.
Two Baroque Aesthetics
Baroque painting can be understood through two different aesthetics: dark (tenebrism) and eclectic or classic. Tenebrism is the violent clash of light against darkness, giving a naturalistic feel to the works. The background is in shadow or disappears, while the scene is in the foreground. Eclecticism aims to preserve the classic taste within the new aesthetic. While tenebrism advocates naturalism, eclecticism leans towards idealism. This aesthetic prevails within the Catholic Church as it is most apt to exalt it, being decorative, showy, and theatrical.