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Art Through Time · 1600 to 1750

Baroque art

Baroque art is the dramatic style that began in Rome around 1600 and led European painting until about 1750: strong light against deep shadow, bodies in motion, and scenes caught at their most intense moment. Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Diego Velázquez are its great names.

It was an art made to move people. The Catholic Church, after the Council of Trent, wanted pictures that would stir the faithful, and kings wanted pictures that would show their power.

When
1600 to 1750
Began
Caravaggio's Saint Matthew canvases and the Carracci in Rome, c. 1600
Grew out of
Mannerism

When was the Baroque?

Baroque painting begins around 1600 in Rome, with Caravaggio's canvases of the life of Saint Matthew for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, painted in 1599 and 1600, and Annibale Carracci's ceiling for the Palazzo Farnese. It lasts until about 1750, when the lighter Rococo had taken over in France.

The same years are the Dutch Golden Age, when Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer painted for the merchants of a Protestant republic: part of the Baroque in time, and a world of its own in subject.

How to recognize Baroque art

  • Light out of darkness. Figures lit by one strong beam against black, as in Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew, where the light follows Christ's pointing hand to the tax collector.
  • Movement on the diagonal. Compositions that twist and climb, as in Rubens's The Elevation of the Cross.
  • The decisive moment. The instant a sword falls or a head turns, as in Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes.
  • Real, unidealized people. Dirty feet, wrinkled hands and ordinary faces, even for saints.
  • Paint you can almost touch: flesh, silk, fur and polished metal.
  • Ceilings that open into heaven. Whole churches and palaces painted so the architecture seems to dissolve into sky.

The Baroque across Europe

In Rome, Caravaggio and his followers, the Caravaggisti, worked beside the Bolognese painters around Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni and Guercino. In Antwerp, Rubens ran a studio that sent altarpieces, hunts and mythologies to half the courts of Europe, and trained Anthony van Dyck. In Spain, Velázquez painted the court of Philip IV, and in Las Meninas put himself in the picture, brush in hand.

In the Dutch Republic, Rembrandt's The Night Watch of 1642 turned a group portrait of a militia company into a scene of action, and Vermeer painted The Milkmaid pouring milk in a still room. In France, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain chose a calmer, classical Baroque, painting ideal landscapes of the countryside around Rome.

Famous Baroque paintings

What came after the Baroque?

In France, after the death of Louis XIV in 1715, painters traded grandeur for charm and pastel color: the Rococo. By the 1780s Neoclassicism had brought back clear outlines and the stern stories of Greece and Rome.

Inside the Baroque

Baroque painters

More Baroque paintings

See Baroque on the timelineEvery art movement in order