Read and translate the text. Baroque art (1600–1750) succeeded in marrying the advanced techniques and grand scale of the Renaissance to the emotion

Baroque art

Baroque art (1600–1750) succeeded in marrying the advanced techniques and grand scale of the Renaissance to the emotion, intensity, and drama of Mannerism, thus making the Baroque era the most ornate in the history of art. While the term «baroque» is often used negatively to mean overwrought and ostentatious, the seventeenth century not only produced such exceptional artistic geniuses as Rembrandt and Velazquez but expanded the role of art into everyday life. In Catholic countries like Flanders, religious art flourished, while in the Protestant lands of northern Europe, such as England and Holland, religious imagery was forbidden. As a result, paintings tended to be still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and scenes from daily life.

Italian Baroque

Artists in Rome pioneered the Baroque style before it spread to the rest of Europe. By this time, art academies had been established to train artists in the techniques developed during the Renaissance. Artists could expertly represent the human body from any angle, portray the most complex perspective, and realistically reproduce almost any appearance.

Caravaggio. The most original painter of the seventeenth century, Caravaggio injected new life into Italian painting after the artificiality of Mannerism. He took realism to new lengths, painting bodies in a thoroughly «down and dirty» style, as opposed to pale, Mannerist phantoms. He advocated «direct painting» from nature. «The Conversion of St. Paul» demonstrates Caravaggio's ability to see afresh a traditional subject. Other painters depicted the Pharisee Saul converted by a voice from heaven with Christ on the heavenly throne surrounded by throngs of angels. Caravaggio showed St. Paul flat on his back, fallen from his horse, which is portrayed in an explicit rear–end view. Caravaggio's use of perspective brings the viewer into the action, and engages the emotions while intensifying the scene's impact through dramatic light and dark contrasts. This untraditional, theatrical staging focuses a harsh light from a single source on the subject in the foreground to concentrate the viewer's attention on the power of the event and the subject’s response.

Bernini. Gianlorenzo Bernini was more than the greatest sculptor of the Baroque period. Bernini's masterpiece – and the culmination of Baroque style was «The Ecstasy of St. Theresa». It represents the saint swooning on a cloud, an expression of mingled ecstasy and exhaustion on her face. The sculptor's virtuosity with textures made the white marble «flesh» seem to quiver with life, while the feathery wings and frothy clouds are equally convincing. The whole altarpiece throbs with emotion, drama, and passion.

Flemish Baroque

The story of Flemish Baroque painting is really the story of one man, Sir Peter Paul Rubens. Energy was the secret of Rubens's life and art.

His output of more than 2,000 paintings was comparable only to Picasso's. One painting that created a sensation, establishing Rubens's reputation as Europe's foremost religious painter, was «The Descent from the Cross». It has all the traits of mature Baroque style: theatrical lighting with an ominously dark sky and glaringly spot-lit Christ, curvilinear rhythms leading the eye to the central figure of Christ, and tragic theme eliciting a powerful emotional response.

Rubens was probably best known for his full–bodied, sensual nudes. His ideal of feminine beauty that he painted again and again was: buxom, plump, and smiling with golden hair and luminous skin woman. One characteristic Rubens shared with Hals and Velazquez was that his method of applying paint was in itself expressive. Rubens's surging brushstrokes made his vibrant colors come alive. Nowhere was this more evident than in his hunting pictures, a genre he invented.

Van Dyck. Van Dyck was a supreme portraitist, establishing a style, noble yet intimate and psychologically penetrating, that influenced three generations of portrait painters. He transformed the frosty, official images of royalty into real human beings. Yet van Dyck's ease of composition and sense of arrested movement, as though the subjects were pausing rather than posing, lent humanity to an otherwise stilted scene. He had an ability to flatter his subjects in paint, all becoming slim paragons of perfection, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary. One trick van Dyck used to great effect was to paint the ratio of head to body as one to seven, as opposed to the average of one to six. This served to elongate and slenderize his subject's figure.

Dutch Baroque

Dutch art flourished from 1610 to 1670. Its style was realistic, its subject matter commonplace. But what made its creators more than just skilled technicians was their ability to capture the play of light on different surfaces and to suggest texture by the way light was absorbed or reflected. Before the Baroque era, landscape views were little more than background for whatever was going on in the front of the picture. The Dutch established landscape as deserving of its own artistic treatment.

As a genre of painting, the still life began in the Netherlands. Artists tried to achievean extraordinary realism in portraying domestic objects. Often still lifes were emblematic, as in «vanitas» paintings, with symbols like a skull or smoking candle representing the transience of all life.

Hals. Frans Hals's contribution to art was his ability to capture a fleeting expression. Whether his portraits depicted musicians, gypsies, or solid citizens, he brought them to life, often laughing. His trademark was portraits of men and women caught in a moment of rollicking high spirits. Hals's most famous painting, «The Laughing Cavalier», portrays a sly figure with a smile on his lips, a twinkle in his eyes, and a mustache rakishly upturned. Hals achieved this swashbuckling effect chiefly through his brushstrokes. Before Hals, Dutch realists prided themselves on masking their strokes to disguise the process of painting, thereby heightening a painting's realism. In this «alia prima», technique, the artist applies paint directly to the canvas without an undercoat. The painting is completed with a single application of brushstrokes. Hals transformed the stiff convention of group portraiture.

Rembrandt. Probably the best-known painter in the Western world is Rembrandt van Rijn. For the first twenty years of his career, Rembrandt's portraits were the height of fashion. During this prosperous period, he also painted Biblical and historical scenes in a Baroque style. These intricately detailed works were lit dramatically, with the figures reacting melodramatically. The year 1642 marked a turning point in Rembrandt's career. His dearly loved wife died. In his mature phase, Rembrandt's art became less physical, more psychological. He turned to Biblical subjects but treated them with more restraint. A palette of reds and browns came to dominate his paintings, as did solitary figures and a pervasive theme of loneliness. He pushed out the limits of chiaroscuro, using gradations of light and dark to convey mood, character, and emotion.

He almost carved with pigment, laying on heavy impasto «half a finger» thick with a palette knife for light areas and scratching the thick, wet paint with the handle of the brush. This created an uneven surface that reflected and scattered the light, making it sparkle, while the dark areas were thinly glazed to enhance the absorption of light.

Vermeer. The painter Johannes Vermeer is now considered second only to Rembrandt among Dutch artists. While other artists used a gray/green/brown palette, Vermeer's colors were brighter, purer, and glowed with an intensity unknown before. Besides his handling of color and light, he balanced compositions of rectangular shapes lend serenity and stability to his paintings. A typical canvas portrays a neat, spare room lit from a window on the left and a figure engrossed in a simple domestic task. But what elevates his subjects above the banal is his keen representation of visual reality, colors perfectly true to the eye, and the soft light that fills the room with radiance. He used a «camera obscura» to aid his accuracy in drawing. This was a dark box with a pinhole opening that could project an image of an object or scene to be traced on a sheet of paper. His handling of paint was also revolutionary.

ornate – decorated with complicated patterns or shapes.

explicit – said or explained in an extremely clear way, so that you cannot doubt what is meant.

quiver – to shake with short quick movements.

throb – if a painful part of your body throbs, the pain comes and goes again and again in a regular pattern.

buxom – a buxom woman is rather fat in an attractive way, with large breasts.

flatter – to praise someone in order to get something that you want, especially in a way that is not sincere.

paragon – someone who is perfect or who is the best possible example of a particular quality.

swashbuckling – used about a character in a story, film etc who has a lot of fights and exciting experiences.

chiaroscuro – the way that light and dark areas create a pattern, especially in drawings and paintings.

serenity – a feeling of being calm or peaceful.

Поиск по сайту: