Baroque Art And Architecture example essay topic
444 words
Baroque art and architecture, is the art and architecture of Europe and its Latin American colonies in the 17th and the first half of the 18th centuries. This style is associated, above all, with Peter Paul Rubens and Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini. Baroque was first applied to the art of this period in the late 18th century, when the style itself had gone out of fashion. Eventually, however, as the classical rules lost their hold in the next hundred years and art historians began to look more objectively at the art of the past, baroque lost its critical significance. By the early 20th century, first specialists and later a wider art-loving public saw that baroque artists and architects had made a positive and original contribution to European art. For all its vigor, the baroque style was not absolutely new, in the sense that Gothic art or cubism were new. Formally, it owed much to Renaissance art and architecture and the intervening phase, Mannerism; it was also influenced by the antique Greek and Roman art and architecture. The classical orders of architecture and the idealized human figure are as much features of baroque art as they are of those earlier styles. The development of the baroque style began in Italy around 1600, when a group of painters, of whom the most important were Michelangelo da Caravaggio and Annibal e Carracci, brought about a revival of art in Rome following the breakdown of Mannerism. The main center of the baroque in the first three-quarters of the 17th century, however, was Rome, where a greater number of important works of art were created, and far more artists were active, than in all the rest of Europe. The dominant personalities were the sculptor and architect Bernini, the architect Francesco Borromini, and the architect and painter Pietro da Cortona.
Outside Italy and Flanders, the baroque was mainly a late 17th- and 18th-century phenomenon, although signs of it appeared earlier. Each region interpreted the style in a different way. In Spain and Portugal and their American colonies, the interpretation was more pious and popular, as can be seen in Bartolom Murillo's painting of the Immaculate Conception or in the facade of Santiago de Compostela Cathedral (finished 1750), the plain surface of which is encrusted with carved forms partly of traditional Spanish origin. The art of Rembrandt was affected by the style (The Night Watch, 1642).
In the early 18th century the baroque gave way in France and Germany to the rococo style, and in the second half of the century both styles were outdated by neoclassicism..
