Baroque And The Baroque Era

This essay will analyze, The Calling of St Matthews, an oil on canvas painting made between the years of 1599-1600 by the artist, Caravaggio. Descriptive details of this painting will follow, which will allow an in-depth look into the elements and principles of design that are evident in this Caravaggio’s work. The Calling of St Matthew illustrates a religious scene where Jesus initially encounters Saint Matthew.

The history of art has been broken up into different time periods, each unique due to the influences of the time. The Baroque period began in the 1600s where artists such as Caravaggio and Bernini began experimenting with dramatic colors, light and darkness, and dramatics to tell stories. Michelangelo, while contributing to the art scene during the Renaissance period, was a large influence in the creation of the Baroque style. The ever-changing styles of art invent new periods with distinct artists that challenge each other to create stunning works that eventually influence a news style to be born. Michelangelo, a Renaissance artist, was born on March 6, 1475 in Caprese, Italy to a governor of a Florentine outpost and his wife.

The Baroque era began in the year 1600, at the end of the Renaissance period (Kamien 99). The word Baroque has had several different meanings. Back in its time, the word Baroque has meant: Bizarre, Flamboyant, and Elaborately ornamented. Historians, however, used this word to indicate the particular style in all different forms of art that fills space; which includes canvas, stone, or sound (Kamien 99). The Baroque Period is also known as “the age of absolutism” because so many different rulers of the time used and abused their royal power to control their subjects. For example, in Germany, the duke of Weimar imprisoned the famous Johann Sebastian Bach into prison for a month just because Bach asked to leave his job as the Duke’s musician (Kamien 99). This era in time was also home to scientific discoveries by Newton and Galileo. The Baroque era has shaped the world, as they knew it, to what the people of the twenty-first century all know and love.

Man has been creating art for over 30,000 years. There are cave drawings, sculptures, Egyptian art, Greek Art, Modern Art and plenty more but to many, the Renaissance Art period is considered to be most important. Never had so many geniuses in art lived at one time and never had so many pieces of cherished art been produced. Two examples of Renaissance paintings are Cigoli’s Adoration of the Shepherds and Moretto da Brescia’s Entombment. Both paintings posses the attributes that were popular during the Renaissance period which I will now contrast and compare.

During the Baroque Ages a man by the name of Caravaggio was a very prominante artist,

At first glance, Giovanni Paolo Pannini’s Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome (1757) reveals very little past the outsider-looking-in perspective we are given from Pannini’s perspective. In the center is the Duc de Choiseul surrounded by detailed views of Roman architecture including buildings, fountains, and monuments and several infamous sculptures from the 17th and 18th centuries. While looking at the painting, it is hard to pinpoint one focal point within the composition when the walls of the gallery are filled with paintings from the floor to the ceiling. The focus becomes about the space Pannini has created and it does not focus on one specific object or figure. Each view of Rome seen in the imagined gallery adds to the illusion of Rome as an ideal city and to the idea of its beauty. By showing a space that reflects this beauty through the numerous paintings, sculptures, and architecture Pannini’s painting transforms into an allegory. Even though this painting was commissioned to commemorate Rome, he is able to portray the city and its architecture through a well respected and scholarly environment uncharacteristic of any known space or time. These characteristics cause the which allows it by creating a fictitious These allegorical characteristics do not become known unless you take a closer look at Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome (1757).

Italy can be looked at as the home of the renaissance and consequently the immergence of great art. Artists such as Michelangelo, Botticelli, Da Vinci, and Raphael are some of the greats and are looked at for standards. But what about the artists whose lives are mysteries, and their works that were influenced by the greats? These artists hold just as much importance in the history of art as do the artist’s whose names can be recalled off the top of an average person’s head. During the sixteenth century things began to change in the art world, and that change was the Baroque. This new style of art brought a revolution to how subject matter was painted, it brought upon “… a radical reconsideration of art and its purposes…” (249) and how artists of all ranks could learn to paint the up and coming style of Baroque.

A tradition of journeying to Rome, Italy for training or to simply improve upon one’s artistic skills was carried out by many Dutch history and genre with landscape painters. As a result, the use of the Italians as a source of inspiration and emulation can be identified in their works and presents one of the underlying principles that connects the different thematic categories together. Hendrick ter Brugghen was a history painter who belonged to the Utrecht Caravaggists. Just as the name of the group implies, these artists were from Utrecht and heavily influenced by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Ter Brugghen’s Calling of Saint Matthew of 1621 provides an exemplary example of this. It is not only similar to Caravaggio’s own Calling of Saint Matthew of 1599 to 1600 with the subject

“There is no greater name in Italian art—therefore, no greater in art—than that of Titian,” (Claude Phillips “Earlier Works of Titian”1897 page 5). This artist was more than just a normal painter that played around in his work studio; he was the father of what was bound to become something greater than he even believed. We watched him work with imaginative textures and animated colors to generate the masterpieces of not only the Renaissance; but also of modern day work. All kinds of artists—painters, singers, writers, sculptures—are exploring their muse by studying how he worked with his paint brush; they idolize him and one day want their work to be as exceedingly renowned as Titian’s. His work has been carried on for many years after his

The following piece although very similar in theme, is created by Giotto di bondone whom was taught by Cimabue himself. Although comparable to Cimabue’s, it also displays many artistic differences with gothic influence. It uniquely displays a greater spatial consistency and sculptural solidity; this particular painting seemingly depicts the seeking of light theme so common in the gothic period. Praised for the lifelike figure with three-dimensional forms, it seemingly begins to rid of the Byzantine influences.

•The creation of the baroque style—an art style full of emotion, flamboyancy, symbolism, vigor, and subtlety—largely as a product of the Catholic Church patronage of the arts

Many of us today have things in our culture that we appreciate without thinking about where they have come from. The things we enjoy so much could be from another culture, and even another place in time. This document will explore the influence of Italian Renaissance art on today's civilization, which has greatly changed the art of today.

A number of modern artists have focused on reflecting personal perception of the world through a contemporary Baroque style in art. The increasing popularity of Baroque nowadays is due to the complex processes that took place in society and the solutions the modern culture has to offer to resolve them. Truly, through the history, the emergence of Baroque elements has always reflected the complexity of human life, followed by technological progress and cultural exchange. Eventually, Baroque, the style characterized by extravagance and drama, has been defined as anti-classical, innovative and experimental, intended to touch directly the beholder, individual of diverse and pluralistic society.

It is hard to believe that what began during the Renaissance would be followed by what we refer to as the Baroque period beginning in the 1600’s and later the Rococo. The term Baroque was first used in the eighteenth-century by critics in a negative way. “To the eyes of these critics, who favored the restraint and order of Neoclassicism, the works of Bernini, Borromini, and Pietro da Cortona appeared bizarre, absurd, even diseased—in other words, misshapen, like an imperfect pearl” (Camara, E., n.d. para. 12). Stylistic style differs in the Baroque period with the use of interrupted contours, dynamism, and instability. In addition, artists were moving toward a more realistic subject matter and not the idealized portrayals we saw in the Renaissance period.

Architectural drawings, despite its many crude forms, has existed long before the time of the Italian painter-architect Raphael Sanzio da Urbino. Nevertheless, with reference to Wolfgang Lotz, the prodigy painter’s letter to Pope Leo X has been regarded as the trailblazer of “the rendering of interior in architectural drawings”. Such fundamental foundations to architectural drawings are in fact the collaborative work of Raphael and several individuals, more specifically intimate friend humanist Baldassare Castiglione, translator of Vitruvius’ De Architectura Fabio Calvo and teams of scholars due to his inept expression through literal means. As a result, at least three versions of the letter are created (in chronological order of the date of publication or discovery) : a now-lost manuscript owned by Scipione Maffei in a collection of works of Baldassare Castiglione published by the Giovanni Antonio and Gaetano Volpi in Padua (1733); a Munich manuscript published in 1847; and a draft with the first parts of the letter that could decipher the complete text surfaced in the Castiglione family archives in Mantua and later published in 1910. The letter sets up the rudimentary foundations for architectural drawings to flourish and its significance is twofold: to depict Renaissance