A picture is worth a thousand words. In the 17th century, the Baroque period became one of the most prominent art styles in the Western world (Sayre 309). The Baroque is stylistically complex, and even contradictory, as an example would be using both light and darkness to add more drama to the artwork. The term itself is complex and contradictory as well, as Baroque derived from the Portuguese “Barocco”, which means misshapen pearl (Baroque Passions). The reason why the Baroque style developed was due to the Catholic Church trying to regain its followers and believers from the Protestant Reformation. This movement against the Protestant Reformation is called the Counter-Reformation (Sayre 310). One method that the Catholic Church used to tempt people into its religion was art. According to Sayre, art is a sensual appeal not just intellectually, but emotionally as well; the Church believed that using emotional appeal was the key to the Church’s success. One artwork in particular that relate to the Baroque and the Counter-Reformation was the Triumph of St. Ignatius of Loyola by Andrea Pozzo. Andrea Pozzo created the art piece around 1691-94 in the Church of St. Ignatius in Rome, Italy (Sayre 317). The painting in the ceiling is a magnificent artwork that was created in the Baroque period, but what exactly makes it a Baroque artwork? Claiming that it was painted in the time era is not sufficient evidence as to why it’s Baroque, so there are two points to evaluate in order to ascertain the painting’s relation to the Baroque era: The styles and characteristics used in the painting and how the content of the painting relates to the Counter-Reformation. Let’s start with the characteristics of the artwork.
The Baroque style commonly con...
... middle of paper ...
...ves the viewer a simulated experience as if he/she sees Heaven in the sky. While looking at the masterpiece, many thoughts can flow through one’s mind, allowing him to discover the variance of immense details. Due to his extravagant piece, Andrea Pozzo demonstrates that it is attainable for a picture/painting to be worth a thousand words.
Works Cited
Baroque Passions. Fullerton, California: Professor Angeles Sancho-Velasquez, 8 Apr. 2014. PPT.
"Pozzo's Glorification of Saint Ignatius." Smarthistory. Khanacademy, 26 Nov. 2012. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. .
Sayre, Henry M. Discovering the Humanities: Culture, Continuity & Change. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2010. Print.
Sviluppo, Fondazione N. "Andrea Pozzo, Glory of St. Ignatius (1685)." Haltadefinizione. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
The Baroque era was born out of the Roman Catholic Church’s Counter Reformation, during which the church made considerable efforts to strengthen the relationship between the secular world and the religious order. In an effort to engage the common people and create piety, the Catholic Church wanted art to appeal to human emotions. Gentileschi successfully accomplishes this in her painting, Judith Slaying Holofernes. By infusing the Apocryphal tale of Judith with dramatic techniques such as chiaroscuro and foreshortening, she created a deeply moving and realistic piece of art that engages the viewer physically and emotionally, which is quintessential to the Baroque style.
By most accounts, the year 1500 was in the midst of the height of the Italian Renaissance. In that year, Flemmish artist Jean Hey, known as the “Master of Moulins,” painted “The Annunciation” to adorn a section of an alter piece for his royal French patrons. The painting tells the story of the angel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary to deliver the news that she will give birth to the son of God. As the story goes, Mary, an unwed woman, was initially terrified about the prospects of pregnancy, but eventually accepts her fate as God’s servant. “The Annunciation” is an oil painting on a modest canvas, three feet tall and half as wide. The setting of the painting is a study, Mary sitting at a desk in the bottom right hand corner reading, and the angel Gabriel behind her holding a golden scepter, perhaps floating and slightly off the canvas’s center to the left. Both figures are making distinct hand gestures, and a single white dove, in a glowing sphere of gold, floats directly above Mary’s head. The rest of the study is artistic but uncluttered: a tiled floor, a bed with red sheets, and Italian-style architecture. “The Annunciation” was painted at a momentous time, at what is now considered the end of the Early Renaissance (the majority of the 15th Century) and the beginning of the High Renaissance (roughly, 1495 – 1520). Because of its appropriate placement in the Renaissance’s timeline and its distinctly High Renaissance characteristics, Jean Hey’s “Annunciation” represents the culmination of the transition from the trial-and-error process of the Early Renaissance, to the technical perfection that embodied the High Renaissance. Specifically, “Annunciation” demonstrates technical advancements in the portrayal of the huma...
Dutto, Rev. L. A. The Life of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the First Leaves of American Ecclesiastical History St. Louis, MO: B. Herder 1902
O'Malley, John W. “The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts”, 1540–1773, Volume 1. University of Toronto Press, 1999. Church History. (1999): 1-746. Online Database.
St. Francis was an Italian Catholic and a talented poet. As an Italian, his heart moved naturally to deep affection, love and enjoyment. As a poet, he could see right through the outcome of those answers. One night during a dream, he saw his house turned into a palace. The walls of this palace were hung with glorious armory, banners, shields, and swords – all instruments of war. Suddenly he heard a voice, it explained that this was to be his palace, the gathering place for all his knights. The arms were theirs, the banners, and tokens of their countless conquests. To complete this wonderful dream, a gorgeous bride awaited him. St. Francis awoke charmed. A few days after that, he left Assisi to go to Southern Italy to enlist. He reached Spoleto, wh...
Blessed Raymond of Capua. The Life of Saint Catherine of Siena . Trans. George Lamb. New York: P.J. Kennedy and Sons, 1960.
This article has allowed me to formulate an understanding of what the humanities are and how they are incorporated into everyone's life. The introduction of A New Deal for the Humanities gave me a clear idea of how different types of people can find different meanings for a subject matter. This passage speaks on how many professionals in higher education fear that the humanities are facing a crisis. The word “crisis” can be seen as a loaded word, just from the highly negative connotation and how it gains the reader’s attention from the beginning. However, if the eloquence about the word “crisis” is withdrawn, the humanities do face increasing pressure from outside parties. In A New Deal for the Humanities, Gordon Hunter and Feisal G. Mohamed
The tendencies of Baroque translated differently in parts of Europe. In Italy, it reflected the return of intense piety through dense church ornamentations, complex architecture, and dynamic painting. Calabrese’s work exhibits the combined artistic stimuli of the 17th century and culminates in the acquired Caravagesque style that alters how paintings were composed from then on. Executed at the height of Calabrese’s most creative phase, St. John the Baptist Preaching is indicates the monumentality of change in urbanization as well as the return of Catholic permanence in the 1600’s. Aside from the Baroque power of the artwork, Calabrese’s St. John is a piece worth gravitating to and stands as reminder of the grandiose excesses of Baroque art.
As the seventeenth century began the Catholic Church was having a hard time bringing back the people who were swept away by the protestant reformation. The conflict between the protestant had a big influence on art. (Baroque Art) The church decided to appeal to the human emotion and feeling. They did so by introducing a style called Baroque. Baroque was first developed in Rome and it was dedicated to furthering the aims of Counter Reformation. Baroque was first used in Italy than later spread to the north. In this paper I will argue that the Italian Baroque pieces were more detailed and captured the personality of the figure, in contrast and comparison to Northern Baroque pieces that aimed to produce a sense of excitement and to move viewers in an emotional sense leaving them in awe. I will prove this by talking about the different artwork and pieces of Italian Baroque art versus Northern Baroque Art.
In the two different depictions of the scene Betrayal of Christ, Duccio and Giotto show their different styles on how they compose their paintings. The first decision into the composure of the painting would be the comparison of the size of surface they chose to paint on. Duccio in comparison to Giotto chooses to work on a wooden panel no wider than a foot, and Giotto went with a plaster surface with a width of ten feet. This detail alone lets the viewer know that Giotto’s artwork is embedded in detail and visual consumption. The size difference is the factor between who see’s it and what they see; the fine details and symbolism of the narrative will be better understood if the viewer can see every detail.
The artists of the Baroque had a remarkably different style than artists of the Renaissance due to their different approach to form, space, and composition. This extreme differentiation in style resulted in a very different treatment of narrative. Perhaps this drastic stylistic difference between the Renaissance and Baroque in their treatment of form, space, and composition and how these characteristics effect the narrative of a painting cannot be seen more than in comparing Perugino’s Christ Delivering the Keys of the Kingdom to St. Peter from the Early Renaissance to Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul from the Baroque.Perugino was one of the greatest masters of the Early Renaissance whose style ischaracterized by the Renaissance ideals of purity, simplicity, and exceptional symmetry of composition. His approach to form in Christ Delivering the Keys of the Kingdom to St.Peter was very linear. He outlined all the figures with a black line giving them a sense of stability, permanence, and power in their environment, but restricting the figures’ sense of movement. In fact, the figures seem to not move at all, but rather are merely locked at a specific moment in time by their rigid outline. Perugino’s approach to the figures’themselves is extremely humanistic and classical. He shines light on the figures in a clear, even way, keeping with the rational and uncluttered meaning of the work. His figures are all locked in a contrapposto pose engaging in intellectual conversation with their neighbor, giving a strong sense of classical rationality. The figures are repeated over and over such as this to convey a rational response and to show the viewer clarity. Perugino’s approach to space was also very rational and simple. He organizes space along three simple planes: foreground, middle ground, and background. Christ and Saint Peter occupy the center foreground and solemn choruses of saints and citizens occupy the rest of the foreground. The middle distance is filled with miscellaneous figures, which complement the front group, emphasizing its density and order, by their scattered arrangement. Buildings from the Renaissance and triumphal arches from Roman antiquity occupy the background, reinforcing the overall classical message to the
Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Renaissance art underwent a deliberate and revolutionizing change. Catholic Rome, in this time had just surpassed approximately one hundred years of political and religious turmoil. During this time the Roman Catholic Church had survived the introduction and implementation of Protestantism in addition to the struggles Rome itself faced with invading forces attempting to seize control. Afterwards with the return of water, through the restored aqueducts, straight into the heart of the city of Rome was the perfect symbol for its rebirth (Realms). The art, architecture and music of this period in history became known as the Baroque. The term, which is derived from the Portuguese word barroco, describes the dramatic theatricality and elaborate ornamentation of this time. Barroco literally means, “Irregularly shaped pearl” (Kleiner). As defined by Heinrich Wölfflin, Baroque is the age in which the “oval replaced the circle as ...
Feduccia, Robert, and Nick Wagner. Primary Source Readings in Catholic Church History. Winona, MN: Saint Mary's, 2005. Print.
Pollen, John Hungerford. "St. Ignatius Loyola." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 7. New York: Robert Appleton Company,1910. 23 Mar. 2014 .
Sayre, Henry M., Discovering the Humanities: Culture, Continuity & Change. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2010. Print.