Baroque and Rococo Art
on Oct 25 by alinquist55BAROQUE ART AND ROCOCO ART
The great masters of the Renaissance were all Florentine artists, and with their passing, a newer style, called Mannerism, appeared. Highly influenced by the overly dramatic work that Michelangelo had accomplished within the Sistine Chapel, Mannerism swept Europe, leaving overly dramatic, highly stylized paintings of elongated people in very dramatic poses.
By the end of the 1500’s, as the art of Mannerism was finally drained of it’s visual ideas, art became focused on a more dramatic but more palatable style called Baroque. More than anyone, Caravaggio brought this new style of painting to the forefront of European art. His style is dramatized not by color but by light, as visual conflict of shadow and highlight created a drama focused upon the players within the artist’s drama. The style reflected his emotional instability, as the man would be involved in a series of knife fights that would eventually lead to an man’s death. The shadowy drama of Caravaggio’s work shocked many of his contemporaries but artists like Rembrandt and Velasquez would follow him, producing some of the world’s greatest art.
Rembrandt was one of Amsterdam’s hot young painters in the early years of the 1600’s. The Eighty Years’ War, fought by the Dutch for their independence from Spain, left a wealth of military garbage for Rembrandt to use in his own dramatically lit work. By his old age, he was painting shadowy self portraits and personal paintings that used the drama of Caravaggio to highlight a person’s own internal conflicts and spiritual place in the world. Diego Velasquez, although not as spiritually searching, also produced a brilliant body of work that highlighted Spanish life in the court of King Philip IV. His Las Meninas is a brilliant interplay of the various aspects of court life, with the painter, the Infanta, her royal parents and even the court dwarf and a dog standing in for the informal “formal” royal portrait.
A number of great artists from Frans Hals to Claude Poussin are included in what could be considered European paintings finest moment. By the end of the 1600’s, though, the dark drama of Baroque had run it’s course as it was being passed up by the lighter, less thoughtful Rococo style of painting.
Actually, Rococo art could be considered an extension of Baroque. What changed was the attitude. While Baroque was thoughtful and dramatic, Rococo came off as light and playful. The Rococo style had started as a design movement that added more and more flamboyance and ornate design to the already ornate Baroque design. This over-the-top playfulness was paralleled in art. French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau became the first artist to fully express the ephemeral nature of Rococo and the style is still seen as a predominantly French style. It was in those decades before the American Revolution that France was the true master of Europe and European art.
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