This document provides an overview of the 17th century Baroque period from 1600-1800. Some key points: - In the early 1600s, Rome was the leader of the Baroque style, though Baroque arrived later in France due to strict classicism. France later emerged as a major cultural center under Louis XIV. - The latter half of the period saw the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Rococo style rose as Baroque ended. Neoclassicism followed the Enlightenment with a focus on antiquity. - The 18th century saw the rise and fall of Rococo style and the emergence of Neoclassicism and later Romanticism, which emphasized emotion and individuality over reason.

1. 17 Century
th
the Age of Baroque

2. 1600- 1800
Overview
• In the early 1600’s Rome is the leader of the Baroque style
• Strict classicism prevails for much of the seventeenth century in France so the
Baroque style was slower to arrive there than elsewhere in Europe
• Eventually France emerges as a major world power and a cultural center to rival
Rome
• This is largely due to the aims of the French monarchs, particularly Louis XIV, who
called on architects, painters, and sculptors, to represent the court in ‘peerless
splendour’
• The French Revolution- the latter half of the period has France as the seat of the
Enlightenment, a major intellectual movement that asserts the power of reason and
mobilizes a widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary social and political ills that
results, later in the century, in revolution.
• Rococo style rises as the tale end of the Baroque
• With the Enlightenment comes a renewed veneration of antiquity and a Neoclassical
movement in the arts; this gives way, at the end of the period, to Romanticism

3. Chronology
• 1615 Cervantes begins Don Quixote
• 1618 The beginning of the 30 Year War
• 1619 Harvey’s discovered the circulation of the blood
• 1630 The building of the Taj Mahal begins
• 1635 The foundation of the Academie Francaise
• 1642 Rembrandt paints The Night Watch
• 1661 The building of Versailles palace begins
• 1666 Stradivarius makes his first violin
• 1675 The Greenwich Observatory is built
• 1682 The Accession of Peter the Great of Russia
• 1683 Newton expounds his theory of gravity
• 1714 Fahrenheit invents the mercury thermometer

4. 17th Century
1600 -1700
• The reformation had been succeeded by the
Counter-Reformation
• Artists and architects benefited from the
renewed strength of the Catholic Church
• Pope Sixtus V replanned Rome in magnificent
style with churches, fountains and palaces at
focal points in the city.
• Noble families rivalled each other as patrons
• Rome became the Artistic capital of the world

5. • Artists came from Spain, France, England and
Flounders for commissions
• Painters embraced the challenge to create
integrated environments (un bel composto)
meant to heighten religious experience
• A bohemian artists’ colony which still survives
today grew up around the Spanish Steps
• Members of this colony led the way in creating
new art styles and ideas which spread through
out Europe

6. Baroque
1600- 1770’s
• Early Baroque – 1540’s to 1600’s
• High Baroque 1620’s onwards
• Reaction against the artificiality of the 16th
century Mannerism
• Realism was again in fashion, although
interpreted in different ways
• Two most important groups of Early
Baroque were the Naturalists and
Classicists

7. Naturalism
• Based on extreme realism
• Details are naturalistic and painted in
bright clear colours
• As a rule painted directly on the canvas

8. Jan van Goyen
River Landscape with Lime Kilns 1640’s

9. Salomon van
Ruysdael
A Wooded
Landscapes with
Cattle and Droves
on a Ferry 1663

10. Other characteristics of
Naturalism
• Religious stories told in contemporary
idiom
– ie: the apostles no longer heroes but rough-
looking fishermen
• Extreme foreshortening

11. Peter Paul
Rubens
Two Saints

12. Carravagio
Table at Emmaus

13. Classicism
• Looked to realism of High Renaissance
• Painting and classical sculpture for inspiration
• Worked from preliminary drawings
• Monumental figures
• Glowing sensuous colours

14. Nicolas Poussin
The Triumph of David c.1631-3

15. Harmensz van
Rijn Rembrandt
Self Portrait 1658

16. Jan Vermeer
Girl with the Pearl
Earring c.1665-6

17. High Baroque
• From 1620’s second phase of Baroque
• Characterized by exuberant sensuality
and magnificence
• Feeling of movement

18. • Emphasis on clarity
of expression and
gesture
Bernini
Ecstasy of St Theresa

19. The Abduction of the Sabine Women, probably 1633–34
Nicolas Poussin

20. View of La Crescenza, 1648–50
Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée)

21. Dido
Carthage by, 1813

22. Turner
Carthage

23. Jean
Vincent
Millet
The
Cheese-
maker
• Introduction of a new form of painting (realism) began to
paint scenes from everyday life

24. Georges de la Tour
The Newborn Child late 1640’s

25. Van Dyck
Thomas Wentworth

26. Thomas
Gainsborough
Portrait of David
Garrick c1770

27. Venus and Adonis, mid- or late 1630s
Peter Paul Rubens

28. Francois Boucher
La Cible d’Amour ( The Target of Love)
1758

29. Jean-
Honore
Fragonard
Les Hazards
heureux de
l’escarpolette
(‘The Swing’)
1767

30. 18 Century
th
1700 - 1800
•The Rococo
•Neoclassical
• Romantic Era

31. • The Rococo style was fashionable in the
early 18th century
• Neoclassical succeeded around 1793
• Romantic style then succeeded in the
early 19th century (1812)

32. Chronology
• 1717 The first inoculation against smallpox
• 1720 Johann Sebastian Bach completes his first Brandenburg
concerto
• 1735 Linnaeus completes a new system for the classification of
plants
• 1745 The building of Sans Souci palace in Berlin begins
• 1752 Benjamin Franklin invents the lightning conductor
• 1755 A great earthquake in Lisbon
• 1756 The beginning of the Seven Years’ War
• 1765 James Watt invents the steam engine
• 1770 Goethe starts work on Faust
• 1776 The American Declaration of Independence
• 1781 Kant publishes Critique of Pure Reason
• 1787 Mozart appointed Chamber Musician to Emperor Joseph II
• 1789 The storming of the Bastille leads to the outbreak of
revolution in France
• 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte becomes French Emperor

33. David
The Coronation of Napoleon,1804

34. Rococo
1760’s
• France was one of the first countries
where Rococo became popular
• Rococo was a reaction against pomp and
grandeur of the court of Louis XIV

35. Rigeud
Louis XIV
1781

36. • Rococo was associated with his successor
Louis XV
• Colours are light with a lot of white and
silver, others colours favoured were:
dusty rose, pale lemon, misty blue, and
turquoise
• not much gold as it was too heavy
• S- curves and C- curves frequently
appear in composition

37. Ven
Suzanna and the Elders

38. • Favourite subject stories from the Old
Testament or ancient history
• With a much more light-hearted
approach

39. Poussin
The Nurture of Jupiter 1640

40. • Rococo was regarded as the last phase
of Baroque due to similarities such as
illusionist ceiling paintings of fabulous
fantasy worlds

41. Rococo Ceiling

42. Neoclassicism
• In total contrast to the Rococo was Neoclassicism
• Demand for “heroism and civic virtues’ (Goethe)
• The Paris Salon – art should be governed by rational
rules and not uncontrolled feelings
• Rococo was seen and hedonistic and self-indulgent
• Neoclassical art used spare but precise outline
preliminary drawings
• Figures are posed parallel instead of diagonal to the
picture plane

43. The Classical Ideal
• Increasing influence of classical antiquity in
the second half of the eighteenth century in
Europe
• The achievements of the Renaissance sparked
a renewed interest in harmony, simplicity, and
proportion
• In the midst of a grand gallery, students copy the
great works of antiquity.
• Neoclassical style arose from such first-hand
observation and reproduction of antique works
and came to dominate European architecture
painting, sculpture, and decorative arts.

44. Jean-
Auguste-
Dominique
Ingres
Jupiter and Thetis
1811

45. • In Baroque and Rococo contours are formed by
shading, in Neoclassical they are formed by
unbroken lines, not interrupted by light or
shadow
• Even light
• A sense of order prevails everywhere
• Portraits are half or full length

46. Princesse de
Broglie,
1851–53
Jean-Auguste-
Dominique
Ingres

47. Madame
Jacques-Louis
Étienne Reizet
1782–1850,

48. The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, 1789
Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825)

49. Monks in the
Cloister of the
Church of Gesù e
Maria, Rome
François-Marius
Granet
(French, 1775–
1849)

50. The Rape of the Sabines, ca. 1637–38
Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665)

51. Confirmation, ca. 1637–40
Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665)

52. The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar, 1789
John Trumbull (American, 1756–1843)

53. The American School, 1765
Matthew Pratt (1734–1805)
American

54. Romanticism
1800- 1850’s
• Romanticism, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France
and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and
flourished until mid-century.
• With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism
emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment
values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French
Revolution of 1789.
• Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism, early
Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in David’s studio,
including Ingres
• This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres'
Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix's Death of
Sardanapalus which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in
Paris.

55. Francisco Goya
The Clothed Maja c. 1800-05

56. • Landscapes had traditionally been used to
fill in the background of a painting
• As techniques improved they became
more important to artists
• The public still wanted a ‘subject’ and
artists had to comply

57. • In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential
for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of
Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by
Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated
by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French
philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, "all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a
feeling of terror, leads to the sublime." In French and British painting of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks (
2003.42.56) and other representations of man's struggle against the awesome power
of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with
Théodore Gericault's strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a
contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and
conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging
Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner's 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army
crossing the Alps (Tate Britain, London), in which the general and his troops are
dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling
vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault
also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different
times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct (1989.183), the dramatic sky,
blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

58. Casper
David
Friedrich
The
Wanderer
Above the
Sea of Clouds
1818

59. • If artists did paint landscapes it was for their own
pleasure and often in Italianate style
• Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature
emerges in the landscapes of John Constable, whose art
expresses his response to his native English
countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed
full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral (
50.145.8); he wrote that a sketch represents "nothing but
one state of mind—that which you were in at the time."
When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the
Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as
"nature itself." Constable's subjective, highly personal
view of nature accords with the individuality that is a
central tenet of Romanticism.

60. John Constable
Lock on the Stour

61. J.M.W. Turner
Farnley Hall from above Otley

62. • This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds
with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the
Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally,
records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles
for expressing a range of psychological and emotional
states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault
probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of
psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of
childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In
his portrait of Alfred Dedreux (41.17), a young boy of
about five or six, the child appears intensely serious,
more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the
background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

63. • Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom,
marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and
metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of
wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by
artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer.
Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in
his work. Lord Byron's 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated
Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the
violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who
exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée
Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end
of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome.
His oil sketch (87.15.47) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just
before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal
states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

64. • In its stylistic diversity and range of
subjects, Romanticism defies simple
categorization. As the poet and critic
Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846,
"Romanticism is precisely situated neither
in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but
in a way of feeling."

65. Eugene Delacroix
Le Puits de la Casbah Tanger

66. The end
For now…….