Introduction to Italian Baroque Art

Particularly painting, sculpture, and architecture from about the year 1600 to roughly 1650, the height, really, of this period. And we're going to primarily focus on artistic production in the vicinity of the city of Rome. This is not a coincidence at all. By the time we reach the middle of the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church has been embroiled in a great deal of controversy, mostly stemming from reactions to the Protestant Reformation that's begun in Germany in the second decade of the 16th century. And there's been a great deal of response to that in terms of calls for reform, church councils, and other types of movements, for instance the founding of the Jesuit Order. All these constitute reactions to the challenges posed by the Protestant Reformers like Luther and his successors. These movements within the Roman Catholic Church are certainly, and probably the most significant influences upon Italian Baroque art that emerged right around the year 1600. It's best to keep that kind of context in mind when we pursue the story of Italian Baroque art in particular. One of the best places probably to begin is to really think about the whole issue of churches. Churches are at the front lines, really, of the effort to combat the inroads that Protestantism is making in Europe. Again, mostly in the North, but to a certain extent even in the South, you need to be aware of the need to revive the enthusiasm and devotion of the average worshipper, even in the Italian Peninsula, where Catholicism seems secure. As history shows, in this period from about 1600 to about 1650, a number of very, very important individuals bring their influence and money to bear in commissioning magnificent churches and works of art. Good examples are Urban VIII, Innocent X, and now Alexander VII, which take us really right around this period from about 1600 to about 1670, thereabouts. We can begin by thinking of the Church of Santa Susanna as it exemplifies some of the ideas of the Italian Baroque in terms of churches. One place to begin thinking about why the Italian Baroque is important, why the idea of it is important, and why it wants to be discussed, is the sense of movement and the sense of rhythm and the sense of emotion that's embedded in architecture. Typically, definitions of the Baroque include these types of words, theatrical, dynamic, focused on expressive aspects of the art and architecture. When you look at the façade of Santa Susanna, which is from the work of Carlo Moderno, and is actually being constructed right around the turn of the century, 1597-1603, you can see how the church begins to push forward in the space. There's a sense of abandoning the Renaissance mode of a flat, decorative surface in favor of a more active façade that moves forward into the viewer space, the visitor space. When you think about the emphasis on the vertical also in the Baroque church façade, that also is important, combined with the sense of sculptural relief that's present with the use of paired columns, niches, and sculpture. And Moderno carries that forward, in a sense, into his façade of St. Peter's, with these colossal columns giving the sense, again, of movement, light and shadow, really quite a dramatic front porch, so to speak, to that church. It turns out, of course, that Moderno's vision for the façade of St. Peter's had the unfortunate effect of diminishing the centrality of Michelangelo's dome. But it's worth noting that for the priorities of Catholic Counter-Reformation, sometimes just called Catholic Reformation, the desire to reinstate some sense of basilican longitudinal church ultimately took precedence. This was made the priority, in a sense, that alteration of religious reasons, the kind that they sought, in essence, to create the kind of church that Santa Susanna, Il Gesù, and a number of other Baroque churches had, in essence, a large, open longitudinal interior to focus attention on the mass. Right around the 1620s, we see the emergence of perhaps the most remarkable personality in the Italian Baroque, at least in terms of his diverse abilities, leaving his mark, really, on the city of Rome for succeeding centuries. And that's Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who lives from 1590 to 1680. His first primary commission in Rome was the Baldacchino, this extraordinary bronze canopy that was really his first major commission in Rome. It stands approximately 100 feet high and symbolically protects the altar over the grave of St. Peter's. This is, of course, the reason for the importance of the Basilica of St. Peter's. And it's an extraordinary melding together of architecture and sculpture. And this brings up another aspect of the Baroque besides the theatrical sense of dynamism and expression, and that is the idea of mingling boundaries, of blending together different media or different techniques of what happened to create an even more expressive and exciting effect. And that's certainly present in the Baldacchino. It's swiveling columns and swelling curves, for instance, in the sort of roof of the structure itself. The sense of size itself is another aspect of the Baroque, the idea that it overpowers the spectator. This, of course, is revisited in Bernini's colonnades that encompass the piazza in front of St. Peter's, an area that was deliberately designed to hold thousands of people, to accommodate people visiting the Basilica and perhaps listening, for instance, to papal addresses from the front of St. Peter's. And what's interesting in thinking of mixing and blending things is, of course, that the colonnade mixes and blends architecture and sculpture in much the same way that we saw in Baldacchino by shaping those two colonnades in the form of a pair of arms, embracing, as it were, the visitors who were gathered in front of the church. Another aspect of the Baroque that Bernini presents us besides this sense of mixing boundaries and mediums, a sense of theatricality, a sense of emotion and excitement, is sometimes the tendency to indulge in what one might describe as optical illusionism. And we see this, for instance, in Scala Regia. This is moving later into Bernini's career. He was asked to revise the so-called Scala Regia, the royal stairway that leads down from the papal quarters to the actual church itself in St. Peter's. And the effect that Bernini wanted to provide for his client, the Pope, and this is Pope Alexander VII, what he wanted to do was create this sense of the Pope almost literally descending from heaven, moving from one place, the heavenly realm, to the temporal, or secular, or more temporal, I suppose, so sort of more our zone. And he does this by tweaking effects of light and perspective. So he literally narrows the hallways that move up into space, accentuating that sense of diminishment, that perspectival narrowing that we see from this linear perspective. And this is significant, because we have to remember, in the era of the 15th and 16th century, the sense was to try to get this right is to make it natural, exact. And Bernini decides to play with it and alter it to enhance our perception of distance in that space. It's really quite remarkable to see, again, that sense of theatricality, presentation of the Pope. Bernini is an extraordinarily gifted sculptor, as well as an architect. And in the David of 1623, he surely made a huge reputation for himself. And the sculpture itself stands nicely as a sculptural equivalent to the examples of architecture that we've seen, a response, really, to the tendencies in Italian architecture that have emerged in the 15th and 16th centuries. This David is very different, for instance, from Michelangelo's David. It certainly focuses on a moment of action, a moment of intense concentration and emotional expression. And it's not nearly as self-contained as Michelangelo's David, as contemplative, as it were. Instead, it reaches out into the viewer space. It twists and turns, just like those columns that we see in the Balbacchino, that were produced in the decade following the Bernini's David. So that sense of intensity, that sense of movement, the sense of moving between the viewer space and the hard object space, again, points to this different set of priorities in Italian art. In his Ecstasy of St. Teresa, we see the blending of art media, almost to the theatrical sense of perfection, mingling light and sculpture and architecture to create a kind of theater of viewing of a saint's vision, St. Teresa being a Carmelite, none but that this vision of an angel approaching her and piercing her side with a golden arrow that she describes as having both properties of pain and pleasure simultaneously. So this mystical vision is rendered with exquisite sensitivity in marble, and these rays of light descend down on the vision, making this feel much like the members of the Cornaro family. This is close to the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, where sculpted members and portraits of the members of the Cornaro family are laid in the hall. These are just a very few examples of the many projects that Bernini had to take in the city of Rome. One of his primary competitors in field of architecture is a very interesting individual who in many ways pushed the boundaries of architecture much further, and that is Francesco Bernini. We can begin to see this perhaps most plainly illustrated in this small, really quite demeaning church, San Carlo alla Quattro Fontane in St. Charles of the Four Fountains. Again, a very small church on a very regular site points out another aspect of Baroque architecture, and that is the inclination to take the standard forms of classical architecture and alter them and twist them and mold them according to a particular purpose. When we look at the façade, for instance, the façade is no longer flat or rectilinear in any sense, but instead it's curved, almost as though it had been heated up and molded like plastic. The sense of a sculptural façade, of its deep recesses and projecting aspects, is very, very strong. It's a very strong sense of rhythm as well. And that continues on into the interior where pulsating, moving, undulating lines dominate the interior. The oval, of course, replaces the dome, the traditional circular dome, and the oval is compressed in an irregular form. It really is quite remarkable to see the central plan that was so beloved of Renaissance architecture transformed into something much more dynamic and much more plastic than really anything that Bernuschi could have come up with. Now I want to turn just very briefly to painting, and some very interesting and important developments in terms of painting. As I've mentioned already, there is this effect of the Counter-Reformation, and in particular the Council of Trent, which is very, very important for the future painting in the town of Windsor, the Council of Trent, which is running from basically the middle of the 16th century. And toward the end of the Council of Trent, I think it's 1545 to 1563, we see quite explicit decrees regarding the subject matter of art, the way in which art was supposed to be presented, this is religious art, of course. And this has a great deal of influence on the appearance of official church commissions. There's considerably less, one might say, innovation or inclination to stretch the boundaries. That doesn't mean that it necessarily doesn't happen, though. In fact, as we'll see in the course of Caravaggio, some very important innovations take place. One of the most important directions that painting takes in Italy around 1600 is an enhanced awareness and appreciation of classicism. This is abundantly illustrated in Nibale Caracci's Flight into Egypt, a painting of considerable importance for the study of landscape art, and indeed for the emergence of a revived sense of classicism in art, turning away, for instance, from the ideas of Mannerism, so popular in the middle decades of the 16th century. In the Flight into Egypt, we see the representation of a religious subject, that is, the whole family escaping into Egypt and away from King Herod. And the setting has been transformed into this spectacular but serene, orderly and harmonious landscape, dominated by regular architecture. There's certainly a strong sense of the Venetian pastoral that causes what might be recognized as a pastoral concert by Titian or other masters from that school. The landscape, as I said, is serene, balanced, ordered, harmonious, a reflection of a sense of stability and order, I think, that's at the heart of the subject matter itself. The so-called ideal or classical landscape proves to be very, very influential and the Karachi classical idea itself is very influential, not least, of course, because it reflects some of the ideas in the Karachi Academy, which is one of the earliest in the history of art, and really offers the opportunity for students to study art according to classical principles. Some of these classical principles are even more explicitly laid out in the ceiling from the Palazzo Parnese, The Loves of the Gods, or the spectacular fresco, clearly modeled, in some sense, on the precedent of Michelangelo in the cistern ceiling, but in this case the subject matter is wholly mythological and secular. And it's presented to us in a very interesting way. There's a strong feeling of illusionism in terms of the idea that the paintings, as we look up at the frescoes, are just canvases, as it were, transported up onto the wall, onto the ceiling. This is described as, using the Italian term, quadro riportata, the moving of, the fictitious moving of a frame up onto a ceiling or a wall. And it's a very interesting mingling, and we talked about the verb mingling, mixing and mingling, easel painting and fresco. The figures themselves are clearly based upon the likes of Michelangelo, but also borrows from the contributions of artists, Venetian artists, who in a way clearly admired such as Titian, and so on. It's a very, very important resource for artists, again, learning the classical mode. As we move forward through the century, the models to emulate will be the likes of Niccolò Carracci, Michelangelo, of course Raphael, and later, as we see, the French artist Nicolas Poussin. Perhaps the antithesis of Nicolas Poussin is the artist Michelangelo Marisi, known as Michelangelo Caravaggio. And Caravaggio's contribution to the history of the Italian Bureau of Painting is one of very, very direct realism, combined with an extreme form of manipulating light and dark known as tenebrism. And so he composed between the years roughly 1600 and his death in 1610, a series of very striking religious images. We'll look at the Conversion of St. Paul. It emphasizes a very, very gritty type of realism, focusing on character types rarely seen in previous religious depictions, in situations that are quite dramatic and emotionally compelling, surrounded by a developed dark, deep dark shadow. This style was hugely influential, not just in Italy, but elsewhere, especially in low countries to the north, in the region of North Holland, and so forth. In the Conversion of St. Paul, we see a remarkable illustration of the episode in which Paul, then Saul, arrives to persecute Christians, and has this extraordinary Conversion experience, where he's essentially struck by lightning, falls divinely for three days, emerges a devout Christian, and really one of the most powerful forces for the spread of Christianity in its history. Caravaggio shows us this figure recumbent upon the ground, illuminated in bright light, the horse being gently led away from that figure there of Paul, by a figure who himself is quite bold and not particularly distinguished-looking, his bare feet are dirty, the veins stand out in his legs, we can see the wrinkles on his brow, the sunburn nature of his face, it's very, very realistic, very specific, as if one was actually looking at the scene. If we look at this version of the Calling of St. Matthew, we see again this emphasis on a kind of urban street realism, where figures are gathered around a table, perhaps in a tavern or a restaurant or what have you, counting out money. Matthew was previously Levi the tax collector, and we see a number of dubious characters, weapons at the ready, confronting Jesus as he calls Levi to become Matthew. This sense, again, of danger, of suspense, is heightened, of course, by the dramatic lighting coming in from the right of the scene, and the dark shadow, of course, far to the left. We sense that something quite remarkable is about to happen. It's hardly coincidence that Caravaggio quotes, sort of in reverse, almost the hand of Adam as he's about to receive the spark from God that was the trademark of the Sistine Ceiling. The Calling of St. Matthew, again, is very similar to the Conversion of St. Paul, that sense of one being a direct eyewitness of a dramatic event that seems to have or could have happened in Rome, maybe in her own time. And this is much the same with the attunement, again, with the face of Mary as an old woman, one of the striking portrayals of a woman living in the history of art. Despite its indecorous nature, the realism, the really gritty realism that's so prominent in Caravaggio's art, it also has a great attention to pay to what one might describe as religious dogma, especially counter-reformation, in the sense of insisting upon the presence of Christ in the ceremony of communion. This is something that Luther and his followers are uncomfortable with. The idea that Mass is a commemorative act of actual witnessing of Christ in the act is an important point of distinction between Protestant and Catholic theologians. And it appears that Caravaggio, in the attunement, is giving this a very direct statement of the actual presence, if this was at all to be the actual presence of Christ in the Church. I'll just finish up our discussion with a quick note of Artemisia Genoveschi and her extraordinary adaptation of the visual style in works that show strong and heroic women striking a blow with their liberty, certainly the case in the Judith slang call of Mary's Judith, the Jewish heroine who's killing the Assyrian general Assan's head off with a sword. Really quite remarkable, her life story is so interesting in so many ways. She becomes one of the most successful painters in Europe in her later career, and stands out as an exception in a time of relative obscurity for female artists. They are very interesting, so we thank them. The last subject I just want to touch on briefly for a minute or two is ceiling paintings. It becomes an important outlet for fresco art, which is continuing its important tradition that exists in Italian art. We see a number of experiments in terms of playing with the space. We've noticed that, obviously, with Niccolò Carracci and Piazza Farnese. We see it also in Guido Reni and his classicism, clearly showing that he's learned quite a lot from the Carracci, from what we actually learned. Pietro da Cortona and his triumph at the Barberini shows the uses of these grandiose fresco allegories and propagandizing, essentially, the reputations of the great families of Rome. Giovanni Battista Galli's triumph of the name of Jesus, a spectacular production on the ceiling of the Gesù, shows us the possibilities and potential, really, of fresco art, in terms of decorating the ceiling interiors, the mixing of architecture, sculpture, and painting all in one. And then, of course, Fra Andrea Pozzo's glorifications of St. Ignatius and St. Ignatius in Rome, really closing out a period in the 17th century, shows us, really, the culmination of his experiments with perspective that we saw, perhaps, beginning most vividly with Asacio's Holy Trinity. Here, Pozzo blows the ceiling off altogether and extends a perspectival arrangement into deep space, high up into the heavens, populating this elaborate framework with all kinds of personifications of the common spiritual figures and what happened. That, I think, should give us a fairly good idea of the priorities of the Italian Baroque. The focus on drama, the focus on dramatic lighting, dynamic movement, compositions that oftentimes confront the view of a sort of specter, really, a specter based in the right order, a demonstration of infinity, of vast spaces and huge forms. We see this also in architecture, in sculpture. To sum up, I think, the Italian Baroque, I think we can think of it as, again, a response to religious ideas, a response to changing social patterns, and overall a sense of exploration of, in many ways, the spiritual and the infinite, always with an eye toward naturalism, but also with a view towards adapting it to artistic means.