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.
Discover