Baroque Art Essay

1446 Words3 Pages

The Baroque era was the age of magic. Flat surfaces became three-dimensional and paint on plaster became alive. It was the age of masterful illusion. Nothing exhibits this mastery better than Baroque ceiling paintings.
From its conception Baroque art, especially painting, has been designed to overwhelm and wow the viewer. Artistic devices of spatial illusion were developed during the Baroque in response to cultural anxieties occasioned by revolutionary scientific discoveries, revolutionary religious upheaval, and the new taste for virtuosic visual display. A spectacular painted phenomena, quadratura painting, make Baroque paintings seem to reach beyond their architectural limits into the viewer’s space. This trend of illusionistic painted surfaces begins early with Andrea Mantegna’s fresco Camera degli Sposi in 1465. With a di sotto in su, or “seen from below”, perspective the illusion of winged puttos, a peacock and some women lean out into what appears to be a third dimension. Viewers and painters alike grasped onto this illusionistic perspective in painting and ran with it. It was the Baroque era that really explored and perfected the techniques of illusionistic painting. From Mantegna to Pozzo and beyond, to this day illusionistic painting of the Baroque era still leaves viewers in awe.

Assumption of the Virgin
At the central dome in the cathedral of Parma the narrative of the Assumption unfolds in grandeur. The painter of this masterpiece, Correggio, was one of the most important Renaissance painters. Trained at the school of Parma, his later works, such as Assumption of the Virgin, greatly influenced the Baroque era. The dramatic style in which he painted Assumption of the Virgin foresees the dramaticall...

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..., and filled it with figures floating upward. On the floor beneath this scene is a marble disk to mark the ideal spot from which the viewer can fully experience the illusion .

These works are as effective today at inspiring the viewer as they were hundreds of years ago. The Baroque period saw an overflow of creative excess. Just as children become amazed when a magician takes a rabbit out of his magic hat, Baroque painters created the special effects of their time create the same awe inspiring magic. By balancing color, light and shadow, perspective, illusionism, linear perspective, naturalistic figures borrowed from antiquity, and other trompe l’oeil techniques this magic was made. Within room, palaces, churches and chapels, these artists worked a special kind of magic that created space where there was none, and beauty where little had existed before.

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