16: Baroque and Rococo Art - Part I

This slide presents the ideas from what are considered to be the most influential events of the 15th century in terms of the development of the Baroque style. In case you're viewing on a lower resolution, I'll read the texts aloud. The first refers to the foundation of the Jesuit order. In 1522, Ignatius of Loyola undergoes a mystical experience sitting by the river Carden in Spain. In 1540, the papal bull Regimini Militantes Ecclesiae founds the Jesuit order. The text of this bull reads, to strive for the defense and propagation of the faith, education of children and unlettered persons, whether the pontiff and his successors judged to send us to the Turks or to other infidels existing in the regions they call Indies, whether among the heretics, schismatics or the faithful, whatever they may be. The Jesuit order is particularly important in the Baroque for several reasons. Firstly, they were the intellectuals of the church and were responsible for disseminating new ideas like Copernicanism, as we will see below. Also, as missionaries, the Jesuits had churches in most major towns in Catholic Europe, and so their church architecture and decoration was particularly influential. The second extract is about Copernicus's discovery that the earth moves around the sun. In 1522, the Polish-Teutonic war ends and Copernicus is able to return to Frombork Castle to set up his astronomical observatory. In 1542, he publishes De Revolutionibus. This is an extract. This reasoning certainly makes it quite clear that the heavens are immense by comparison with the earth and present the aspect of an infinite magnitude, while on the testimony of the senses the earth is related to the heavens as a point to a body and a finite to an infinite magnitude. Although Copernicus is not saying it explicitly here, one of the implications of a moving earth is that the fact that the stars did not show parallax or movement relative to each other as the earth moved must mean that they are at optical infinity, meaning that the cosmos was vast. This is regarded by some as influential on ceiling painting of the period, showing as it did an interest in the vanishing point overhead, infinity above us. The Jesuits significantly were instrumental in allowing discussion of Copernicus's ideas in spite of Galileo's conflict with the church. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, Martin Luther's German Bible is written in 1522 and the Council of Trent is convened by Pope Paul III in 1545 to counter the threat of Protestantism. An extract from the 42nd session of the Council of Trent reads, by means of paintings or other representations, the people is instructed and confirmed in the articles of faith. In fine, let so great care and diligence be used herein by bishops as that there be nothing seen that is disorderly or that is unbecomingly or confusedly arranged. The Protestant Reformation is important due to its rejection of Catholic dependence on sumptuous images, Lutheran emphasis on the text of the Bible rather than the church, resulting in a simpler style in Protestant countries such as the Netherlands. Meanwhile in Catholic lands, the church's response to Protestantism was the Council of Trent, which reiterated art's function of communicating the tenets of the Catholic faith to the people. Caravaggio's paintings are a good illustration of what's known as post-tridentine art, that's art produced after the Council of Trent, and this is taken from the name for the city of Trent in Roman times Tridentinum. Caravaggio, as required by Trent, makes his religious paintings easy to follow as he uses the subject's hands to guide you as to where to look, and he simplifies the composition by increasing the contrast between light, the things that are highlighted as relevant, and the dark, not relevant background, and this is a process called chiaroscuro, light and dark. The entombment from 1604, on the left-hand side of this slide, is in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, and it was painted as an altarpiece for the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, and the cascade of hands, like a waterfall of grieving, guides you down to the last hand, Christ's, which touches the stone of the tomb. Given that this is an altarpiece, and that altarpieces at the time had to be made of an unbroken piece of stone in order to be sanctified, Christ's hand is referencing the altar above which the Eucharist would have been raised by the priest, and so Christ's body is the visual counterpart to the host, representing his body. This picture on the right-hand side of the slide, the hands explain the concept of intercession, and that's another function of a chapel, to pray to those in heaven for help. The hands of the supplicants, the people praying at the bottom, begin a rising axis of hands through the saints of religious orders, to finally meet the hands of the Virgin. Her bodily presence in heaven, her corporeality, represented with a red cloth above her, making her the highest mediatrix between mankind and her son, Christ, whom she holds. Hands and light are used by Caravaggio to express a fundamental religious idea in this work, the calling of Saint Matthew, still in situ for the chapel it was commissioned for. The painting is on the left wall of the chapel, so the light in the painting corresponds with light from a real window in the chapel to the right of the painting. Although most people executed in the Reformation died over the issue of the Eucharist, this is not the central theological difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. Rather, this is the issue of grace and how people are saved, which is a fairly complex theological issue. An omniscient God knows from the beginning of time who will be saved and who will not, and yet God makes us free to choose our own fate, so there's a dispute over the role of good deeds and the role of God's will in our grace. In Caravaggio's painting, the position is clear enough. The light from the right passes over Christ's hand to reach the hand of Matthew, the tax collector, whose hand points to himself, symbolising the role of both parties in his salvation. Other people in the painting seem oblivious to the light and to Christ, focusing solely on their work. The Spanish Netherlands, modern-day Netherlands and Belgium, were controlled by the Catholic Habsburgs from Spain. The provinces rebelled. The North successfully achieved independence and became Calvinist. The South remained Habsburg and Catholic. Peter Paul Rubens, despite being born into a Protestant family, was raised as a Catholic and became the painter par excellence for the Catholic Church and Catholic rulers in the north-west of Europe, going somewhat beyond the remit of Trent in creating sumptuous flesh tones of fabric to attract people to the religious messages of his paintings. This work, Delilah cutting Samson's hair, is in the National Gallery London, and standing in front of the painting, or zooming in on the digital version on the National Gallery website, you can see on Samson's back the deep chocolate and rouge-coloured shadows and greenish-grey moulding and cream highlights on the flesh. Similarly, Rubens is taking great trouble to frame the left side of the picture in a spectrum of silky material of red, yellow, olive, blue and purple. Although Copernicus published his findings in 1542, it wasn't really until Galileo's findings with the telescope in the first few years of the 1600s that the infinite universe became common knowledge among intelligentsia in Europe. Accordingly, ceiling paintings in Rome in the following years adopted an infinite vanishing point and placed the sun at the centre of their compositions. His early work by Guido Reni of Aurora, or The Sun at Dawn, is a quadro reportato, that is, a wall painting's perspective with horizon transposed on the ceiling. However, this work, only a decade later than Reni's, and after the Galileo scandal of 1615, represents the sun's chariot using the type of vertical perspective seen in Mantegna's Renaissance work. It becomes a convention in the Seicento that the architecture obeys the rules of vertical perspective, but figures are tilted towards the viewer for the sake of readability. Often teams of artists combined, one specialising in the quadratura architecture in this work, this was done by Agostino Tassi after his release from prison, and the figures painted by another artist, in this case Giovanni Barbieri, known as Cortino. This large scale work is called The Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power, and the election of a Barberini, Maffeo, as Pope Urban VIII, represented the high point in the family's success. Hence the top of the central space features the crossed keys of St Peter, the symbol of the papacy, crowned with a papal triple tiara, and laurels surrounding the three golden bees, the symbol of the Barberini family, below it. Divine Providence is represented in the luminescent centre of the work, with time devouring his offspring, and the spinning fates below that. Art historian Sciostrum has noted how ceiling painting progresses in the Seicento, from apertures, copied from Mantegna's work, to an opening up of the vault, and as we can see in this work, the framework has started to give way to open space. Again, there is a light-centredness about the work, and a use of sotensu perspective. Significantly, Urban VIII had been a supporter of Galileo's early in his papacy. This work by Gian Battista Gaulic shows similar qualities. Gian Lorenzo Bernini advised the artist on the work, which is on the vault of one of the most important Jesuit churches in Rome, the Gesù, where the founder, Ignatius of Loyola, is buried, and the church is connected to the rooms where the saint lived and died. The vault shows the Baroque preoccupation with a light-centred composition, and another Baroque interest of illusionism is represented here by the clouds, which use stucco plaster over the gold coffering of the vault, to allow them to spill outside the fresco. Also, the shadows of the clouds on the coffering are illusionistic painting. The vault painting is completely flat. However, in an interesting mix of the illusionistic and the real, the legs of the white statues of the angels surrounding the painting project downwards from the vault. In the sun at the centre of the fresco is the letters IHS, a symbol of the Jesuit order. This is another Jesuit work in an important Jesuit church, attached to the intellectual centre of the Jesuits, the Collegio Romano. The Collegio Romano was at the heart of the Galileo affair, with Cardinal Bellamine supporting Galileo as much as he was able to. The Jesuits then continued to teach Copernicanism as theory, eventually making it more acceptable. This ceiling work by Andrea Pozzo is entitled Allegory of the Missionary Work of the Jesuits, and features the Trinity at the centre of the work, surrounded by various Jesuit saints and allegorical figures representing the four corners of the earth where missionaries would go to. However, this work, perhaps more than any other Seicento ceiling painting, represents the vertical infinite vanishing point represented by the architecture and a light-centred composition. This 600 square metre ceiling painting continues the development of the form into the Rococo period. Beginning with Italian models such as Luca Giordano's ceiling in the Palazzo Medici in Florence, tones in painting lightened and included more sky than figures or framing architecture to create a vast sense of space. This work by the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo is another representation of the four corners of the earth, showing the interest in the new era of global exploration which the Jesuits have pioneered. Arguably the greatest sculptor of the Baroque period was Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Also an architect, he worked on the façade of St Peter's in the Vatican and designed St Peter's Square, which is oval. He also submitted designs for the Tuileries Palace, the Mont des Louvres, but these were rejected in favour of the French architect of Versailles, Louis Levant. This sculpture group, the Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila, shows the post-tridentine focus on the miraculous and mystical, in encouraging or recording spiritual states of mind. St Teresa's mystical vision is of a seraph, the highest rank of angel, who pierces her heart with an arrow, causing great pain and pleasure. This sculpture shows a similar interest in the subjective and the spiritual. Here the Old Testament David is used as an antitype or precursor of Christ, as both became in different ways kings of the Jews. Unlike the other sculptures of David we've considered in this course, such as Donatello's victorious David or Michelangelo's, with its serene contemplation, Bernini focuses on a psychological insight, the moment of resolve, where David has readied the sling for the shot and is visualising the moment of impact in his mind. This is typical Bernini, representation of the internal through the representation of external concentration, the agitation of the drapery he wears, like the St Teresa of Avila sculpture. The energy of the twisted spring of his body. And if we think back to the tools Bernini would have used, the chisel and the drill, if we remember that this frozen poetic moment is made of marble, five out of ten on the Mohs scale of hardness, where the notorious granite is seven, we can really start to appreciate Bernini's genius.