Baroque art is the dramatic art that came out of Rome around 1600 and spread across Europe until the middle of the eighteenth century. Its artists hid their light sources, froze figures in the middle of an action and staged whole scenes so that the viewer feels inside them.
The work to know is the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a marble group the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini made for a church in Rome.
Bernini finished the group in 1652 for the Cornaro Chapel, a side chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Above the altar, the stone table where Mass is said, the saint lies back on a marble cloud, eyes half closed and mouth open.
Over her stands a smiling angel. In his hand he holds a slender spear, aimed at her heart.
The chapel was paid for by Cardinal Federico Cornaro, a prince of the Church, who wanted it as his burial place, as wealthy Catholic families often did. On the side walls, Bernini carved the cardinal and members of his family in marble, leaning on the rails of boxes like those of a theater.
They talk and gesture as if watching a play, and the play is the vision of the saint. A visitor standing in the chapel ends up in the same audience, between the family and Teresa, and colored marble, sculpture and daylight all serve that one effect.
The name of the style began as an insult. It probably comes from the Italian barocco, the name medieval logic gave to a twisted, hard-to-follow kind of argument. A rival explanation points to the Portuguese barroco, a lumpy, imperfectly shaped pearl.
Either way, the word meant something misshapen. Until the late nineteenth century, critics used it for art they found odd, exaggerated and overdecorated, with twisting columns, gilded clouds and swirling drapery.
Then, in 1888, the Swiss art historian Heinrich WΓΆlfflin published a book called Renaissance und Barock, which treated the style as seriously as the Renaissance. After him, baroque stopped being a complaint and became the name of a style.
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The art itself is three centuries older than its name, and one of its first great works is a painted ceiling in Rome. In 1595 the painter Annibale Carracci came there from Bologna, a city in northern Italy, to work for the Farnese, one of the richest families in Rome.
In 1600 his decoration of the long gallery in their palace was unveiled. On its curved ceiling, scenes of ancient myth sit inside painted frames and fake statues that look carved, and the muscular nudes appear lit by the real windows of the gallery.
At the corners, the painted architecture breaks open, and patches of blue sky show through as if the roof had holes in it. The ceiling looks far deeper than it is.
In the same years another painter in Rome, Caravaggio, worked in the opposite direction. Instead of bright myths overhead, he painted saints in dim rooms lit by a single beam. The Baroque took something from each man, the grand illusion of the ceiling and the sharp contrast of the dark room.
What did the Council of Trent actually order?
Both men worked in a city ruled by the pope, at a time when the Catholic Church was fighting back. In the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther had broken away from it, and many of them attacked the images of saints in churches.
The Church answered with a long assembly of bishops at Trent, in northern Italy, known as the Council of Trent. The usual explanation is that this council ordered the dramatic new style. Yet the decree it issued on images is not the order people imagine.
What You'll Discover
Where Bernini hid the light.
How a painter faked a dome.
Why Caravaggio's saints sit in the dark.
How Rubens made a dead body heavy.
What moment the Night Watch captures.
When Las Meninas got its name.