human condition. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s essay on the Dignity of Man presaged Michelangelo’s belief in the perfectibility and essential beauty of the human body and soul. For their part, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Sebastian Brant’s satiric poem Ship of Fools were part of the same northern European cultural milieu that produced the fantastic follies of humankind shown in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights triptych and Pieter Brueghel’s raucous peasant scenes. There was hope for humankind in Paradise, but little consolation on earth for beings consumed by their passions and caught in a cycle of desire and fruitless yearning. Northern humanists, like their Italian counterparts, called for the classical virtues of moderation, restraint, and harmony and the pictures of Brueghel represented the very vices against which they warned. Unlike some of the contemporary Romanists, who had travelled from the Netherlands to Italy and been inspired by Michelangelo and other artists of the time, Brueghel travelled to Rome around 1550 but remained largely untouched by its art. He turned to local inspiration and staged his scenes amidst humble settings, earning him the undeserved nickname of “Peasant Brueghel”. He was a herald of the realism and bluntness of the northern European Baroque.
The great intellectual revolt set in motion by theologians Martin Luther and John Calvin in the sixteenth century led to an attempt by the Catholic Church to respond to the challenge of the Protestants. Various Church Councils called for a reform of the Roman Catholic Church. In the arts, the participants at the Council of Trent declared that art should be simple and accessible to the broad public. A number of Italian painters, however, whom we know as Mannerists, had instead been practising an artistry that was complex in subject matter and style. Painters eventually responded to ecclesiastical needs as well as to the ennui that necessitated a response to Mannerist stylistic formulae. We call this new era the age of the Baroque, which was ushered in initially by Caravaggio. He painted what he saw in front of him, in the most realistic if dramatically dark and theatrically concentrated manner possible, and he gained a following among the popular masses as well as with connoisseurs and even with Church officials, who were at first sceptical of his overly realistic treatment of sacred subject matter. Caravaggism swept across Italy and then the rest of Europe, and a host of painters came to adopt and adapt his chiaroscuro and his suppression of flashy colouring; his earthy and sincere actors struck a chord with viewers across the Continent who had tired of some of the artificialities of sixteenth-century art.
In addition to the Caravaggism of the early Baroque, another form of painting later called the High Baroque soon developed; the most dramatic, dynamic, and painterly of styles hitherto developed. Many of its painters built on the foundation laid by the Venetians of the sixteenth century. Peter Paul Rubens, an admirer of Titian, painted huge canvases with fleshy figures, rich landscapes, broken brushwork, and flickering light and dark. His pictorial experiments were the starting points for the art of his countrymen Jacob Jordaens and Anthony van Dyck, the latter of whom had a great following among the European elite for his noble portrait manner. Rubens brought back the world of antiquity, painting on his canvases ancient gods, goddesses and human sea creatures, but his style was anything but classical. He found a ready market for his works among the European aristocrats, who liked his bombastic flattery, and among Catholic patrons of religious art, who found in his extroverted sacred scenes another weapon in Counter-Reformation ideology. In Rome itself, the sculptor Bernini was Ruben’s counterpart, as the Catholic Church had in these two champions of Faith a means to show the power and majesty of the Church and the Papacy. The Italian Baroque painters let loose a torrent of holy figures on the ceilings of the churches of Rome and other cities, with the skies opening up to reveal Heaven itself and God’s personal acceptance of the martyrs and mystics of the world of Catholic sainthood. The Spanish painters Velásquez, Murillo, and Zurburán took up the style in their native land, perhaps calming the physical movements and open brushwork, but sharing with the Italians a mystical sense of light and the Catholic iconographic subject matter.
How different from all this were the paintings of seventeenth-century Holland! Having effectively freed themselves from Habsburg Spain by the 1580s, the Dutch practised a tolerant form of Calvinism, which eschewed religious iconography. A growing middle class and an increasingly wealthy upper class were present to buy the delightful variety of secular paintings produced by a host of skilled painters, with individual artists specialising in moonlit landscapes, skating scenes, ships at sea, tavern scenes, and a great variety of other subjects. From this large school of artists several individual painters stand out. Jacob van Ruisdael was the closest we have to a High Baroque landscape painter in Holland, his dark and sometimes stormy landscapes evoking the drama and movement so widespread in European art of the time. Frans Hals’ painting, with flashy, quick strokes of the brush and exaggerated colouration of skin and garments, also, like Ruisdael’s, approaches a more pan-European sensibility of the High Baroque. In contrast, Jan Steen typified the widespread realism and local quality of most Dutch art of the Golden Age, and he added a moral slant in his depiction of households in disarray and misbehaving peasants. Finally, the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn stand alone, even from the Dutch. Raised as a Calvinist, he shared some beliefs with the Mennonites, and he was happy to depart from the Calvinist stricture against representing biblical scenes. His later paintings, with their quiet introspection, make the perfect Protestant counterpart to the showy, dynamic, Roman Catholic paintings of Rubens. While working early on in a tighter technique influenced by the Dutch “fine painters,” Rembrandt developed a broad, shadowy manner derived from Caravaggio but expressed with much greater pictorial complexity. This style fell out of favour among the Dutch, but Rembrandt held his ground, going bankrupt though leaving a legacy that would be admired by Romantics and those modernists with a penchant for painterly abstraction. Rembrandt also stood out because of the universality of his art. He was steeped in knowledge of other styles and in literary sources. Although he never travelled to Italy, he was an artistic sponge, and he included in his works bits inspired by the late Gothic artist Antonio Pisanello and the Renaissance masters Mantegna, Raphael and Dürer. He constantly evolved, and he had the broadest artistic mind and deepest understanding of the human condition of any painter of his age.
Clearly, just as there were many ‘Renaissances’ in art, there were many forms of the Baroque, and the High Baroque was challenged by the Classical Baroque, which had its philosophical roots in ancient thought and its stylistic basis in the paintings of Raphael and other High Renaissance classicists. Annibale Carracci had embraced a classical approach, and painters like Andrea Sacchi challenged the supremacy in Rome of High Baroque painters like Pietro da Cortona. However, the most quintessential classicist of the seventeenth century was the Frenchman Nicolas Poussin, who developed a style perfectly suited to the growing ranks of philosophical Stoics in France, Italy, and elsewhere. His solid, idealised figures, endowed with broad physical movements and firm moral purpose, acted out a range of narratives, both sacred and secular. Another Frenchman developed a different form of classicism: the epicurean paintings of Claude Lorrain at first seem to differ sharply from those of Poussin, as Claude’s pictures melt edges away, his waters ripple subtly, and hazy views into infinity appear in the distance. Yet, both painters conveyed a sense of moderation and balance, and appealed to similar kinds of patrons. All these painters of the seventeenth century, whether classical in temperament or not, participated in the explosion of subject matter of the time; not since antiquity had artmaking seen such a diversity of iconography of both sacred and profane subjects. With the exploration of new continents, contact with new and different peoples across the globe, and novel views offered by telescopes and microscopes, the world seemed to be a changing, evolving and fractured place, and the diversity of artistic styles and pictorial subject matter reflected this dynamism.
Louis XIV (d. 1715), the self-designated Sun King who modelled himself after Apollo and Alexander the Great, favoured the classical mode of Poussin and of painters such as his court artist Charles Le Brun, who, in turn, favoured the king with a number of murky paintings glorifying his reign. There arose in the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century a debate over style in which painters allied themselves with one of two camps, the Poussinistes and the Rubénistes. The former favoured classicism, linearity, and moderation, while the latter group declared the innate primacy of free colouring, energetic movement, and compositional dynamism. When Louis XIV died, the field in France was open, and the
