Baroque Art: Expression, Narration, and Composition
Baroque Art: Key Characteristics
- Expression: Figures are more expressive.
- Narration: Details incorporate important figures to better understand the interpretation of the world heritage Gothic.
- Theme: Changes in realism, identifying people who served as models for representations of apostles, etc.
- Hagiography: Lives of newly canonized saints in the seventeenth century, incorporating scenes from their lives.
- Movement: Figures full of life versus the statism of the Renaissance. Figures are dynamic and vibrant. Contrapposto, from Da Vinci, begins to be valued and exaggerated. Clothes also create movement and play dual roles: to create movement and to show rich fabrics and abundant deep folds, creating a luminous effect and fundamental chiaroscuro in sculpture and paintings, influencing architecture to emphasize pictorial effects. Contours are lost to a fade, giving a painterly effect.
- Composition: In sculpture, there is a great wealth of views, an inheritance of Mannerism, compared with the classical period where there was only one front view. The figure of Michelangelo, serpentinata, helical figure, requires turning around to view it from all sides, creating movement. Diagonal base compositions also dominate, compared to the Renaissance, drawing the gaze away from the work, a dynamic axis now seen in architecture.
- Materials: (Italy) Major works are in marble, bronze, or mixed media. Polychromy and the mixture of materials grow from this, with Bernini obsessed with this issue. When a patron cannot pay, plaster is used, covered with an imitation marble or bronze patina, etc. In Spain, painted wood is used.
Key Works
St. Cecilia by Stefano Maderno, Pauline Chapel
Stefano Maderno. This was his key work, in Carrara marble. He made two identical images, one in the catacombs where the body was found and the other in the Church of Santa Cecilia in Trestevere (1500). It is the same as the body was found – the first great example of realism in sculpture-glorification of martyrdom. She died with three blows of an ax to the neck and died three days later, having defended the Trinity, hence her finger pointing at number 1 (to serve as a model to the people). The treatment offers a subtle Italian idealization, with a perfect anatomy and very simple fabrics, simple folds of the Renaissance (fine fabrics are pasted to the body and are wavy, with no strong contrasts). It is placed in an urn on the altar (like Christ lying in Spain).
Francesco Mochi (1580-1654)
Between 1603 and 1630, he created his major works.
Annunciation, Cathedral of Orvieto (1603-1608)
From 1608, he worked in the Pauline Chapel until 1617, after which he started work in Pienza. The standing Virgin and the angel are falling on a base of clouds. (Above: fresco of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, the Virgin standing in an attitude of acceptance with the angel kneeling on the floor, motionless; Donatello, Santa Croce in Florence, the Virgin moves smoothly, introducing us to the realism of Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation: two static pictures with a single glitch with his left hand). The Virgin has been lifted and twisted slightly. The contrapposto is a variety of point of view. It is very unstable and creates the helical movement of Michelangelo. The fabrics create more movement, and the arm of the angel creates a diagonal which brings us into the scene.