Baroque painting is the painting associated with the Baroque cultural movement. The movement is often identified with Absolutism, the Counter Reformation and Catholic Revival,[1][2] but the existence of important Baroque art and architecture in non-absolutist and Protestant states throughout Western Europe underscores its widespread popularity.[3]

Most important and major painting during the period beginning around 1600 and continuing throughout the 17th century, and into the early 18th century is identified today as Baroque painting. Baroque art is characterized by great drama, rich, deep color, and intense light and dark shadows. As opposed to Renaissance art, which usually showed the moment before an event took place, Baroque artists chose the most dramatic point, the moment when the action was occurring: Michelangelo, working in the High Renaissance, shows his David composed and still before he battles Goliath; Bernini’s baroque David is caught in the act of hurling the stone at the giant. Baroque art was meant to evoke emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality that had been prized during the Renaissance.

Rococo art is exemplified in works by famous painters like Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) especially his ‘fete galante’ outdoor courtship parties; Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) with his pictures of love and seduction; Francois Boucher (1703-70) with his lavish paintings of opulent self-indulgence; the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) known for his fantastically decorative wall and ceiling fresco paintings; and the sculpture of Claude Michel Clodion (1738-1814), sculptor of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, best known for his terracotta sculpture of nymphs and satyrs. In Britain, Rococo painting achieved its zenith in the female portraits of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88). Rococo was eventually replaced by Neoclassical art, which was the signature visual style of Napoleon in France and of the American revolution.

 

WORLDS TOP ARTISTS

For the greatest view paintings:

Best Landcape Artists.

For the finest still lifes, see:

Best Still Life Painters.

For the greatest portraits

see: Best Portrait Artists.

For the top historical painting,

see: Best History Painters.

 

AESTHETICS

For a discussion about beauty

in the visual arts, see:

Art Definition and Meaning.

 

EVOLUTION OF VISUAL ARTS

For chronological details see:

History of Art Timeline.

Rococo: Origins

Rococo is the frivolous, wayward child of noble, grand Baroque. The parent was born in Italy, the child in France. The Baroque (barocco, a rough pearl) developed in the early 17th-century and spread rapidly throughout Europe. At first predominantly a sculptural and architectural style, its greatest exponent and genius was Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) who, like Michelangelo before him, was first and foremost a sculptor, but turned naturally to painting, theatrical decorations and architecture while serving several Popes in the remodelling of Rome. His “Ecstasy of St. Teresa”

Cubism was a truly revolutionary style of modern art developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques. It was the first style of abstract art which evolved at the beginning of the 20th century in response to a world that was changing with unprecedented speed. Cubism was an attempt by artists to revitalise the tired traditions of Western art which they believed had run their course. The Cubists challenged conventional forms of representation, such as perspective, which had been the rule since the Renaissance. Their aim was to develop a new way of seeing which reflected the modern age.

In the four decades from 1870-1910, western society witnessed more technological progress than in the previous four centuries. During this period, inventions such as photography, cinematography, sound recording, the telephone, the motor car and the airplane heralded the dawn of a new age. The problem for artists at this time was how to reflect the modernity of the era using the tired and trusted traditions that had served art for the last four centuries. Photography had begun to replace painting as the tool for documenting the age and for artists to sit illustrating cars, planes and images of the new technologies was not exactly rising to the challenge. Artists needed a more radical approach – a ‘new way of seeing’ that expanded the possibilities of art in the same way that technology wa

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, 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 Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of the David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of the Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.