Where does the term Baroque come from?

The term Baroque probably derived from the Italian word barocco , which philosophers used during the Middle Ages to describe an obstacle in schematic logic. Subsequently, the word came to denote any contorted idea or involute process of thought. Another possible source is the Portuguese word barroco (Spanish barrueco ), used to describe an imperfectly shaped pearl. In art criticism the word Baroque has come to describe anything irregular, bizarre, or otherwise departing from rules and proportions established during the Renaissance . Until the late 19th century the term always carried the implication of odd, exaggerated, and overdecorated. It was only with Heinrich Wölfflin ’s pioneering study, Renaissance und Barock (1888), that the term was used as a stylistic designation rather than as a term of thinly veiled abuse and that a systematic formulation of the characteristics of Baroque style was achieved.

What are the characteristics of Baroque art and architecture?

The work that distinguishes the Baroque period is stylistically complex and even contradictory. Currents of naturalism and Classicism , for example, coexisted and intermingled with the typical Baroque style. In general, however, the desire to evoke emotional states by appealing to the senses, often in dramatic ways, underlies its manifestations. Some of the qualities most frequently associated with the Baroque are grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, dynamism, movement, tension, emotional exuberance, and a tendency to blur distinctions between the various arts.

How did Baroque art and architecture come about?

Three broad tendencies had an impact on Baroque art, the first of which was the Counter-Reformation . Contending with the spread of the Protestant Reformation , the Roman Catholic Church , after the Council of Trent (1545–63), adopted a propagandist program in which art was to serve as a means of stimulating the public’s faith in the church. The Baroque style that evolved was both sensuous and spiritual. Whereas a naturalistic treatment rendered the religious image more accessible to the average churchgoer, dramatic and illusory effects were used to stimulate devotion and convey the splendour of the divine. The second tendency was the consolidation of absolute monarchies—Baroque palaces were built on a monumental scale to display the power of the centralized state, a phenomenon best displayed at Versailles . The third tendency was a broadening of human intellectual horizons, spurred by developments in science and explorations of the globe. These produced a new sense of human insignificance (particularly abetted by the Copernican displacement of Earth from the centre of the universe) and of the infinitude of the natural world. Landscape paintings in which humans are portrayed as minute figures in a vast setting were indicative of this changing awareness of the human condition.

Which artists are associated with the Baroque style?

Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio were the two Italian painters who helped usher in the Baroque and whose styles represent, respectively, the classicist and realist modes. The painter Artemisia Gentileschi was recognized in the 20th century for her technical skill and ambitious history paintings. Gian Lorenzo Bernini , whose accomplishments included the design of the colonnade fronting St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, was the greatest of the Baroque sculptor-architects. The orderly paintings of Nicolas Poussin and the restrained architecture of Jules Hardouin-Mansart reveal that the Baroque impulse in France was more subdued and classicist. In Spain, the painter Diego Velázquez used a sombre but powerful naturalistic approach that bore only some relation to the mainstream of Baroque painting. The style, meanwhile, made limited inroads to northern Europe, notably in what is now Belgium. That Spanish-ruled largely Roman Catholic region’s greatest master was the painter Peter Paul Rubens , whose tempestuous diagonal compositions and full-blooded figures are the epitome of Baroque painting. Art in the Netherlands, however, is more complex. Conditioned by the realist tastes of its middle-class patrons, such towering masters as Rembrandt , Frans Hals , and Johannes Vermeer remained largely independent of the Baroque in important respects, but many art texts nonetheless equate them with the style. The Baroque did have a notable impact in England, however, particularly in the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren .

How did the Rococo style differ from the Baroque?

The Rococo style originated in Paris about 1700 and was soon adopted throughout France and later in other countries, principally Germany and Austria. Like the Baroque style, Rococo was used in the decorative arts , interior design , painting, architecture, and sculpture. It is often characterized as the final phase of the Baroque, but the style differs from its predecessor in its intimate scale, asymmetry, lightness, elegance, and exuberant use of curving natural forms in ornamentation. Rococo painting in France, for example, began with the graceful, gently melancholic paintings of Antoine Watteau , culminated in the playful and sensuous nudes of François Boucher , and ended with the freely painted genre scenes of Jean-Honoré Fragonard . French Rococo painting in general was characterized by easygoing, lighthearted treatments of mythological and courtship themes, the introduction of the family as subject, rich and delicate brushwork, a relatively light tonal key, and sensuous colouring.

Nicolas Poussin

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Nicolas Poussin: Adoration of the Golden Calf

Nicolas Poussin: Landscape with Saint John on Patmos

Nicholas Poussin: The Holy Family on the Steps

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Nicolas Poussin summary

Conversion to Classicism

in Nicolas Poussin

Written by Richard Verdi

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Quick Facts

Born:: June 1594, Les Andelys, Normandy [France]

Died:: November 19, 1665, Rome, Papal States [Italy] (aged 71)

Notable Works:: “Eliezer and Rebecca”; “The Adoration of the Magi”; “The Death of Germanicus”; “The Death of the Virgin”; “The Holy Family on the Steps”; “The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus”

Movement / Style:: Baroque art and architecture; Louis XIII style; Louis XIV style

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By 1632 Poussin had been elected a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Rome, a mark of official recognition that provides evidence of his growing reputation. In the early 1630s his art also underwent a fundamental change of direction. Rejecting the seductive attractions of Venetian painting—with its lustrous colour and vibrant brushwork—he adopted instead a more severe and cerebral style that emphasized clearly delineated and modelled forms and cold, pure colours. His compositions also became more rigorously ordered, with the figures often arranged in a friezelike manner parallel to the picture plane, in the style of an ancient relief. The order and complexity of this new style led Poussin increasingly to rely on making detailed preparatory drawings for his pictures. The Adoration of the Magi of 1633 serves as a manifesto of his artistic conversion and is unashamedly modeled after an earlier work on this theme by the greatest Classical master of the Renaissance, Raphael.

With his reputation with collectors significantly improving, in 1635–36 Poussin secured a major commission from Cardinal Richelieu, first minister to Louis XIII of France, for a series of bacchanals to adorn the cardinal’s château outside Paris. Other prestigious commissions soon followed. Beginning in the late 1630s, Poussin executed an important work for the king of Spain, Philip IV, and for Pozzo the Seven Sacraments, a set of paintings representing rites of the early Christian church. In 1638 he painted The Israelites Gathering the Manna for Paul Fréart de Chantelou, who subsequently became his closest friend and greatest patron. This work is the most ambitious history painting of Poussin’s entire career and, by the artist’s own admission, was designed to be “read” by the viewer, with every figure, episode, and action intended to contribute to the drama. This intensely intellectual approach to painting—which aimed to encapsulate a complex sequence of events into a single static image—would eventually earn Poussin the epithet of “painter-philosopher.”

“The Raphael of our century”

Early in 1639 Poussin was invited to Paris to work for King Louis XIII. Initially reluctant to be uprooted from Rome, he was repeatedly pressured by Richelieu to heed the king’s command and eventually arrived in the French capital in December 1640. The next 18 months or so were among the unhappiest of the artist’s career. Named First Painter to the King upon his arrival in Paris, Poussin was entrusted with the decoration of the royal residences, executing designs for the Long Gallery of the Louvre, painting altarpieces for the king and members of his court, and even designing book illustrations. Much of this work was carried out with a team of assistants—a method of working that Poussin found deeply inimical to his creative integrity and independence. Frustrated by the range and diversity of the king’s commands, Poussin eventually secured permission to return to Rome in 1642, ostensibly to fetch his wife. The death of Richelieu in December of that year and of the king himself four months later absolved Poussin of ever returning to the French court, leaving the artist to spend the rest of his years in Rome.

Commissions from French patrons dominated the second half of Poussin’s career. The most important of these was for a second Seven Sacraments set of paintings, for Chantelou between 1644 and 1648, which is the central achievement of Poussin’s art. Reflecting the general development of his style during this period, these works were nobler and more monumental in conception than his earlier set for Pozzo and were intended to be more archaeologically accurate. In all of them, the scene is set in early Christian times, and Poussin sought to re-create the architecture, furniture, and costumes as they would have looked in the period. This principle of historical accuracy was subsequently codified by the French Academy into a doctrine of “decorum,” which had a lasting impact upon later history painting, especially during the Neoclassical period.

In 1647 Poussin outlined another theoretical principle that was to be crucially important for future generations of artists, particularly in the 19th century: his so-called “theory of the modes.” Basing his ideas on the modes of ancient music, Poussin observed that all aspects of a painting should be chosen to arouse an emotion in the viewer that is appropriate to the subject. Thus, severe themes should look grave and joyous ones uplifting. The implication of that theory is that the basic elements of painting—line, form, and colour—can themselves be entrusted to appeal directly to the emotions. Poussin certainly applied that principle throughout much of his career, typically employing discordant colour harmonies for tragic themes and seductive ones for tender and lyrical subjects. The repercussions of that theory extended far beyond his oeuvre, however, for the notion that the rudiments of painting are themselves inherently capable of arousing emotion is fundamental to the evolution of abstract art.

The later years of the 1640s constitute the high point of Poussin’s career, when he created some of his noblest figure paintings, among them Eliezer and Rebecca, The Holy Family on the Steps, and The Judgment of Solomon. In all of those the artist integrated the figures with their setting in a strict and uncompromising manner that resulted in scenes that are not only conceived in depth but also highly unified across the two-dimensional surface of the picture. The visual tensions between space and surface design generated in those works make them among the most austere creations of the artist’s career, but they also possess a splendour and finality that rank them among the very greatest masterpieces of Classical art. “I have neglected nothing,” declared Poussin, when questioned later in life on how he had attained such perfection in painting.

In 1648 Poussin embarked upon a series of landscape paintings that was destined to become a cornerstone of the Classical landscape tradition. The majority of those incorporate themes from ancient history and mythology, though some are without an identifiable literary subject. In all of them an intensely idealized view of landscape is combined with architecture, contrasting the “irregular” forms of the natural world with the geometrically perfected shapes of human devising. Among the most heroic works of that period are the pendant compositions illustrating the story of Phocion. In the first of these, Poussin portrays the body of Phocion being carried out of Athens in a landscape of unparalleled grandeur and majesty, elevating that traditionally “inferior” genre of painting to the level of his most exalted history pictures.

In 1649–50 Poussin also painted two self-portraits that show him dressed in the manner of the ancients, whose art he so much admired. Having attained the most Classical phase of his art at that point, it is fitting that he should have been described by one critic in 1650 as “the Raphael of our century.”

The final years of Nicolas Poussin

Poussin continued to paint three or four pictures a year in the 1650s, despite being increasingly ill. Many of these works depict the Holy Family, a purely contemplative theme ideally suited to the serenity of his art during that phase. Yet he also executed more dramatic history paintings, certain of which are overtly inspired by the work of Raphael. By that stage of his career the artist’s work was so much in demand that he could choose his own subjects and set his own prices—unlike many of his greatest contemporaries. Despite that success, he employed no assistants or collaborators and reputedly never permitted anyone entry into his studio when he was working.

Poussin stopped painting landscapes in 1651, when he executed two pictures of violent storms that herald the mood of his very last works in that form. Resuming landscape painting in 1657, he no longer depicted the rationally ordered, Classical scenes of his earlier years but dwelt instead on the cycles and processes of the natural world and their omnipotence over humankind. These reflect the artist’s prevailingly stoical attitude toward life and his philosophical resignation in the face of death. The supreme achievement in this vein is Four Seasons, painted 1660–64, a set in which the cycles of human life are combined with those of the natural world in keeping with the pantheistic theme of his late landscapes.

Little is known of Poussin’s religious beliefs, though he certainly did not endorse the ecstatic Catholicism of Counter-Reformation Rome. From his voluminous correspondence it is evident that the dominant influences on his thought were instead the teachings of the ancient Stoic philosophers and their neo-Stoic followers of his own day, who maintained that only virtue and inner strength afforded any protection against the unpredictability of life. As early as 1643 Poussin had declared, “Whatever happens to me, I am resolved to accept the good and bear the evil.…We have nothing that is really our own; we hold everything as a loan.”

Legacy

Poussin’s work marks a major turning point in the history of art, for, although it is steeped in the art of the past, it looks forward to that of the future. Already at his death, Poussin was venerated among French painters and theorists for having revived the tradition of the ancients and of the great masters of the Renaissance. This aspect of his art would be crucially important for Neoclassical painters such as David at the end of the 18th century. But it was already revered by the French Academy, led by Charles Le Brun, in the late 17th century. This soon led Le Brun into a theoretical dispute with Roger de Piles; their respective sides were known as Poussinists and Rubenists, the former upholding the importance of line over colour and the latter the reverse. The Rubenists eventually triumphed, and the result was the art of Antoine Watteau and the Rococo.

Later generations of artists, however, found other aspects of his genius to admire. Romantics such as Eugène Delacroix were attracted to the poetic mythologies of Poussin’s early Roman period and the visionary landscapes of his final years. In the mid-19th century Camille Corot venerated Poussin as a master of Classical landscape, and later in the century Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne rightly saw him as one of the supreme masters of abstract formal design. With the rise of the Neoclassical style of the 1920s, Pablo Picasso especially sought to emulate the purity, serenity, and grandeur of Poussin’s art. The diversity of his admirers and the longevity of his reputation can perhaps be best explained by the paradoxical nature of Poussin’s creative genius: he was, in essence, a romantic who became a classic.