Around 1600, a handful of painters in Rome stopped preparing their pictures the way their teachers had. Within a generation, painters from Naples to Utrecht were lighting their models differently, and a French academy was teaching from canvases planned like arguments. Some of these painters were famous at once. Others lost their names for two centuries and had to be found again.
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How These Were Chosen
Baroque is the name later historians gave to European painting between about 1600 and 1700. Its painters worked for the Church, for kings and for a growing public of private collectors, and they wanted a saint or a god to look like someone met in the street.
That meant strong light, bodies caught in motion and models painted from life. Many of these painters passed through Rome, studied the same ceilings and ancient statues, and carried what they had seen back to Spain, France, Flanders or the Dutch Republic.
A painter earns a place here for one reason: after this painter, painting in some city or court was no longer done the same way. Each entry says what changed, then shows it in a single picture.
12. Nicolas Poussin (1594 to 1665)
In the self-portrait Nicolas Poussin finished in 1650, almost everything is thin and smooth: the dark cloak, the stacked frames, the blank canvases behind him. Only the diamond on his ring stands slightly raised. Nothing in the picture is left to chance, and that is what Poussin gave to painting: the idea that a picture could be planned like an argument, with every figure placed for a reason.
That was not how a painter made a name in the Rome of the 1620s. Fame came from churches and cardinals, from large altarpieces and ceilings. Poussin, born in Les Andelys in Normandy, tried that road once. In 1628 he won an altarpiece for St Peter's, The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, and no further papal commission followed.
So he worked for a small circle of private collectors, on easel pictures of Bible stories, ancient history and myth. One was Cassiano dal Pozzo, secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini.
Another, the French collector Paul Fréart de Chantelou, received from him the Seven Sacraments between 1644 and 1648, then this self-portrait. Even the French crown could not hold him. Called to Paris in 1640 as First Painter to the King, he found a pretext to leave in 1642 and never returned to France.
Rome gave him the quiet his method needed. Before touching a canvas, Poussin modeled small wax figures, draped them in wet cloth and set them inside a wooden box, with openings to move the light and a single eyehole to fix his point of view. Each scene was rehearsed in miniature until every gesture had a reason.
A picture built that way could be explained, and so it could be taught. On November 5, 1667, two years after his death, Charles Le Brun, first painter to Louis XIV, lectured the Royal Academy in Paris on Poussin's Israelites Gathering Manna, and a month later the painter Sébastien Bourdon lectured on his Blind Men of Jericho.
The academy that would train French painters for generations now taught from the canvases of a man who had walked out of Paris.
At a Glance
Artist: Nicolas Poussin (1594 to 1665)
Painting shown: Self-Portrait, 1650
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 98 × 74 cm (38.6 × 29.1 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris, Richelieu wing, room 825
11. Francisco de Zurbarán (1598 to 1664)
A young lamb lies on a gray ledge against a flat black background, its hooves tied with a thin cord. It is still alive. Francisco de Zurbarán painted it in Seville in the late 1630s, at a time when a religious picture was expected to explain itself with a halo, an inscription or a story. He left all of that out and kept only the animal, in a city whose painters had already protested his arrival.