Verisimilitude In Baroque Art

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.

Baroque painting contained dramatic details, large in scale and was full of energy. This style was intentionally non-symmetrical. The painters of this time were looking to capture the real feelings of their subjects along with the movement or action taking place.

After the idealism of the Renaissance (c.1400-1530), Baroque art above all reflected the religious tensions of the age - notably the desire of the Catholic Church in Rome (as annunciated at the Council of Trent, 1545-63) to reassert itself in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Thus it is almost synonymous with Catholic Counter-Reformation Art of the period. This period is often thought of as a period of artistic style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, theater, and music. The style began around 1600 in Rome, Italy, and spread to most of

Baroquer artists used the Baroque style to hallmark the rich impasto particularly used in the paint texture and also the light and shade strongly used in the painting.

The Baroque period of the 1600 and 1750s began in Europe and defined the art of the time (Stechow 111). Spain’s quest for the unity and assimilation to Spanish culture of its subjects in the Americas led to the systematic suppression and destruction of the indigenous cultures of the regions, such as the Aztecs and the Incans. Baroque art was only supposed to be another aspect of Spanish culture for the indigenous population to assimilate to (Gauvin 4, 33-34). However, the Baroque period created an atmosphere in the Americas that led to a blending of the Spanish and indigenous cultures. The subsequent art and architecture that was created was a hybrid formed from the cultures coinhabiting the area. This hybrid form has been characterized as “a hidden inscription of difference within the fictional sameness of official culture, as rebellious graffiti camouflaged in the forest of baroque symbols” (Salgado 317-318). It provided a place for the people of Latin America to subtly celebrate and preserve their heritage that Spain was threatening. To understand the significance of the cultural impact that the hybridization of Baroque art had on culture in the Spanish colonies of the New World, we must first define what hybridization of an art form means. Then we will investigate what constitutes baroque art and why it was so conducive to being hybridized. To further the understanding of the hybridization, we will examine the painting Our Lady of Guapulo and the architecture

It may at first glance appear that this painting is all cluttered, but you would be mistaken. Reuben placed each item precisely in this piece of art. This style of painting is called Baroque. The style of art Baroque means detailed and broad paintings. Reubens evades rigid lines and tedious geometric structure to establish life and

During the Baroque period, there were great, powerful monarchies that were said to be made “rulers by God.” This notion of divine commandment for these people to have power then made them nearly invincible was given supreme political power and was able to make national and economic laws, and end quarrels between factions. The Baroque era was a time when simplicity and embellishment were combined, and when science and faith were conflicted. Architecture became more elaborate and decorated, Buildings had painted ceilings, creating the illusion that the room continued into the heavens, with paintings of

“In art criticism, the word Baroque came to be used to describe anything irregular, bizarre, or otherwise departing from established rules and proportions,” (Britannica, 2016). Caravaggio, born Michelangelo Merisi (1571), an Italian painter, can be said almost single-handedly to have created the Baroque style during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. None other can be more appropriately defined as “Baroque” than Caravaggio; his character, like his art, was confrontational and uncompromising, and both loved and hated. “He introduced a powerfully frank realism and dramatic, theatrical lighting and gesture into Italian Baroque art. Caravaggio’s unvarnished realism and tenebrism influenced nearly every important European artist of the seventeenth century.”(Stokstad, Cothren).

The period of Baroque art was from 1600 to 1750, and relates to the style

The era known as the Baroque period includes the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries in Europe. The Baroque style was a style in which the art and artists of the time focused upon details and intricate designs. Their art often appeals to the mind by way of the heart. During this time the portraits began to portray modern life, and artists turned their backs on classical tradition. Much of the art shows great energy and feeling, and a dramatic use of light, scale, and balance (Preble 302). Buildings were more elaborate and ornately decorated. These works of art created history and altered the progress of Western Civilization. Architecture such as the palace of Versailles, and artists like

Associated with the Baroque cultural movement, which is commonly identified with the Counter Reformation, since the Catholic Church encouraged the style, is typically identified with Catholic Revival and absolutism . Baroque painting, a broad term that encompasses a range of different styles, which focus on drama, classicism, realism, and color . Overall, due to the historical context and Vermeer’s artistic elements of realism, idealism, symbolism and light found in his paintings, he is considered to be a part of the art historical movement the Dutch Baroque

•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

Europe in the 1600s was at the end of Counter Reformation, and as the political and cultural shifts took place, we begin to see art, particularly in France, influenced more and more, by the ruling monarchy. The transition from Mannerism into Baroque is not clear, but eventually the arts started to adopt a new look. And feel. Paintings started to become more exuberant, dynamic and ornamented. The scale of work produced during this time increased dramatically. Where Mannerism marked a departure from classical and realistic norms, Baroque becomes a return to these norms, but with an emotional undertow and visual tension. However, through the Baroque pursuit of eloquence, it abandoned the precious and contorted

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.