Baroque Art

Though the earliest manifestations of Baroque art appeared well before the year 1600, Mannerism was still a living force in many European centres during the first decades of the seventeenth century. The end of the Baroque is even less clear-cut than its beginning. There are works of art belonging to the eighteenth century that can be unequivocally called Baroque. Yet there is no doubt that in general the impetus of the Baroque had begun to slacken by the last quarter of the seventeenth century.

In attempting to define the essential characteristics of Baroque art we may conveniently begin with naturalism. Verisimilitude, though it takes varying forms, is a principle to which all Baroque artists adhere. Even in the last years of the century, when academic rules introduced theoretical complications into the creative process, the profoundly naturalistic outlook of the Baroque was never supplanted, as witness the portraitists of the age of Louis XIV who, for all their ornateness and rhetoric, were firmly committed to the illusion of reality. It is to this naturalism that we must turn to find the most direct link between Baroque art and thought: the new emphasis on visual realism is unmistakably related to the secularization of knowledge and the growth of science in the seventeenth century.

The principle of coextensive space is an important one in Baroque art. It may be seen in its most obvious form in the various trompe l'oeil devices employed by artists to dissolve the barrier imposed by the picture plane between the real space of the observer and the perspective space of the painting or, in the case of sculpture, in the statue that transcends the limits of the niche within which it stands. The desire to suggest an infinite prolongation of space also finds expression in the great illusionistic ceiling paintings of the period. As a result of such efforts to achieve an integration of real and fictive space, the observer becomes an active participant in the spatial-psychological field created by the work of art.

We must not overlook, in this connection, the effect on art and artists of the expanding world of the seventeenth century. The taste for the exotic, in particular, may be understood as a reflection of the geographical discoveries of the age of exploration, which served to awaken new interests in distant lands and peoples. Yet Baroque art, though undoubtedly receptive to picturesque motifs from non- European sources, was not profoundly affected by the spirit of exoticism. Painters might include in their works authentic details of costume and setting, but the Baroque world-view was essentially unaltered.

The suggestion of movement, which is characteristic of many works of painting and sculpture of the seventeenth century, may evoke the sense of time as well as of space. The fleeting glance, the momentary gesture, the changing aspects of nature tell of transience, mutability and time's swift flight. Time itself may be personified as Destroyer or Revealer: in the hands of such masters as Rubens, Poussin and Bernini the allegory of 'Truth revealed by Time' becomes one of the classic themes of Baroque art. The recurring cycle of day and night and the succession of the seasons offered to artists another way of dealing - whether in the guise of mythology or of landscape - with the infinity of time.

No account of Baroque art can fail to take notice of the pervasive influence of classical antiquity. The knowledge of the ancient world, which had been steadily accumulating since the early days of the Italian Renaissance, was now very extensive, and almost all artists of the seventeenth century were affected in one way or another by the images and ideas of the Antique.