On the Art of the Baroque

In a previous article we commented on a remarkable contradiction that was unique to fifteenth-century art. On the one hand the medieval formulas were preserved, formulas which were charged with a dogmatic or at least a religious, meaning. On the other hand artists painted very naturalistically and with a great concern for details and for the visual givens, clearly much more interested in the natural than in the supernatural and religious. This contradiction was nothing more than an expression in the artistic realm of a more widespread cultural reality. And in this regard there was really no fundamental difference between the Italian artists and those north of the Alps. The only difference was that the Italians, more specifically the Florentines, let themselves be inspired, as far as form was concerned, quite nationalistically by their great Roman history; while those in the North based their work more directly on actual (visual) observations. We can see a clear continuation of the nature/grace motive of the Middle Ages, which led in the fifteenth century to great tension between the two. By the end of the century this tension became almost unbearable. Particularly in Florence, where this spirit had been taken to its extreme, one at times gets the feeling that the supernatural or religious aspect had become nothing more than a purely traditional affair. Somehow this tension needed to find a release. It finally did so at the end of the century in the person of Savonarola. He preached against the thorough secularization and protested, for example, about the fact that when artists painted a Madonna they in fact just painted a portrait of a charming Florentine woman. Some of the artists whose works were used as examples for that reproach took his charge very much to heart. Botticelli, for example, became a confirmed disciple of Savonarola; his art underwent a sharp change in direction and took on a much stricter, almost ascetic character.

But that did not bring to an end the inherent contradictions of fifteenth-century art. What was needed was a meaningful synthesis in which the two opposite poles of the Roman Catholic life and world view of nature and grace could be brought into relation with each other again, with nature in service to grace. In other words, renewal was needed within the Roman Catholic environment. We should mention in passing that this was also the time of the Reformation, which tried to bring renewal in a completely different way through a radical return to God’s word. Dürer already worked in this spirit even before Luther appeared on the scene. But we will leave that for now.

The master artist who formulated a solution and gave it magnificent artistic expression was Raphael. Thus he was the one who, for many centuries, became the shining example, who provided the inspiration and leadership, and whose influence reached far into the nineteenth century. He managed to make the new techniques developed in the fifteenth century for depicting natural realities subservient to the representation of that which is holy. In Raphael’s work the Madonna truly became a Madonna again, unmistakably the supernatural Mother of God. Her face was freed from that thorough individualism characteristic of fifteenth-century Madonnas (painted by Fillippo Lippi and Botticelli, for example). And the supernatural was clearly distinguished from the natural. In order to do so Raphael employed a method that had been used several times in earlier periods, specifically by Orcagna and Fra Angelico. These artists had tried, in their artistic rendering of the supernatural, to contrast it clearly with the natural by elevating it above daily reality and placing it on the ‘clouds’. The best example of this is the Madonna of the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s masterpiece. To the right and left of her are two saints, and Raphael managed with a stroke of genius to depict their garments in such a way that the folds of the cloth do not seem to be a part of the material world. Mary’s face is painted in a manner that from that time on would become the accepted style – realistic, but not a portrait.

After Raphael the style called Mannerism formed a short intermezzo. It is the art style of humanism in distress; artists were now forced to typify the sacred as sacred in a substantial way, in contrast with the artists of the fifteenth century who considered it sufficient to give no more than a sidelong nod to tradition.

After Mannerism there emerged a movement that built on Raphael’s solution, a style that we have come to know as Baroque. It is typically an art style of the Counter-Reformation, an outspokenly Roman Catholic art. We could typify it, in short, as a realism of a super-reality, the supernatural reality in which saints move about as if on an otherworldly stage. Carracci and the Bolognese school were the representatives of this movement in Italy; Rubens, in the Southern Netherlands. In this connection we also think of the sculptor Bernini, and of the ceilingmurals in Italy and southern Germany in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.

Guido Reni

Guido Reni’s Madonna, a huge painting housed in the museum in Bologna, depicts three ‘levels’, three layers of reality above one another. At the top the Madonna is enthroned on the rainbow, surrounded by angels, unmistakably a supernatural appearance. Below her, directly related to her and gazing up at her are a number of saints – the visual reality is here a clear expression of a religious and spiritual reality. We might mention in passing that the saint to the far left was undoubtedly inspired by the kneeling papal holy figure on the left of Raphael’s Madonna of the Sistine Chapel. The saints depicted here were not selected randomly; they are the patron saints of Bologna. Their supernatural reality (even apart from the way in which they are painted) is also made evident by the fact that they are kneeling or standing on a floor of clouds. Under these clouds we catch a glimpse of earthly reality, our own reality, in the view of the city of Bologna. The content of this work of art is clear, and the relationship between Mary and Bologna (via the saints) is visually portrayed in a Baroque style.

Besides the religious content there are other aspects to Baroque art as well. It often depicts universal human principles in a grandiose way through ancient mythology: Venus is used to symbolize love, Mars stands for war, Mercury for trade, and so on. We think for example of Rubens’s Abduction of the daughters of Leucippus, in which the essential content is the magnificence of woman as inspiration for male activity. The erotic has a clear but not exclusive role in this painting. There is also clearly no attempt at a realistic portrayal of the world here. Rubens does not suggest that it might have been possible to catch an actual glimpse of what he is portraying or that it was ever visible in this way. Rather, it is a kind of icon, the representation of an idea, a truth that is made visible in his art but which in our day-to-day reality never actually looks like this. In that sense the painting could be called ‘abstract’, since it depicts an idea.

Baroque art also saw itself as subservient to the absolute monarch. We could mention Rubens in this connection again, in his grand series created for the exaltation of Mary of Medici, now hanging in the Louvre. Another good example is the ceiling of the staircase in the Würzburg Palace, painted by Tiepolo.

For other articles belonging to this series, see the articles ‘About the content of works of art’, ‘About the Content of Medieval Works of Art’; ‘The Art of the Fifteenth Century’; ‘Theme, Style and Motif in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’; ‘Principles of Nineteenth-Century Art’ and ‘Form and Content of Modern Art’. These articles were originally published in Dutch from 1963-1965 in Ad Fontes.

Published in M. Hengelaar-Rookmaaker (ed.): H.R. Rookmaaker:

The Complete Works 4, Piquant – Carlisle, 2003.