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Early And High Baroque In Italy The International History Project Date 2003
By the last decades of the 16th century the Mannerist style had
ceased to be an effective means of expression. Indeed, in Florence a
conscious reassessment of High Renaissance painting had taken place
as early as mid-century. This tendency gathered momentum in the last
decades of the century, particularly with the Bolognese painters
Lodovico Carracci and his cousin Annibale. The Roman Catholic
Church's reaction to the Reformation, known as the
Counter-Reformation, reaffirmed the old medieval concept of art as
the servant of the church, adding specific demands for simplicity,
intelligibility, realism, and an emotional stimulus to piety. For
the zealots of the Counter-Reformation, works of art had value only
as propaganda material, the subject matter being all-important; and
in Rome there was as a result a sharp decline in artistic quality.
Under austere Counter-Reformation popes such as Paul IV and Pius V,
most official patronage favored the dry and prosaic; this late
16th-century style is best called Counter-Reformation Realist. A
similar process took place in Florence, where a strong movement away
from Mannerist conventions is seen in the paintings of Ludovico
Cigoli, and in Milan, where the dominant artistic personalities were
the painters Giovanni Crespi (known as Il Cerano) and Pier Francesco
Mazzucchelli, known as Il Morazzone.
In contrast, late 16th-century Venetian painting was as little
influenced by the Counter-Reformation as it had been by Mannerism;
and the workshops of Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, and Palma Giovane
remained active until the plague of 1629-30.Michelangelo Merisi,
better known by the name of his birthplace, Caravaggio, a small town
near Milan, was active in Rome by about 1595. His earliest paintings
are conspicuous for the almost enamel-like brilliance of the colors,
the strong chiaroscuro called Tenebrism, and the extraordinary
virtuosity with which all the details are rendered. But this harsh
realism was replaced by a much more powerful mature style in his
paintings for San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, begun in 1597, and Santa
Maria del Popolo, Rome, executed about 1601. His selection of
plebeian models for the most important characters in his religious
pictures caused great controversy, but the utter sincerity of the
figures and the intensity of dramatic feeling are characteristic of
the Baroque.
Although Caravaggio had no direct pupils, "Caravaggism" was the
dominant new force in Rome during the first decade of the 17th
century and subsequently had enormous influence outside Italy.
Parallel with Caravaggio's was the activity of Annibale Carracci in
Rome. During Annibale's years in Bologna, his brother and cousin had
joined with him in pioneering a synthesis of the traditionally
opposed Renaissance concepts of disegno ("drawing") and colore
("color"). In 1595 Annibale took to Rome his mature style, in which
the plasticity of the central Italian tradition is wedded to the
Venetian color tradition. The decoration of the vault of the gallery
in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome (1597-1604), marks not only the high
point in Annibale's career but also the beginning of the long series
of Baroque ceiling decorations. The third important painter active
in Rome during the first decade of the 17th century was the Low
Countries' painter Peter Paul Rubens, who became court painter to
the duke of Mantua in 1600. He came under the influence of Raphael
and Titian, as well as that of Caravaggio, during a journey to Spain
in 1603. The rich colours and strong dramatic chiaroscuro of his
altarpieces for Santa Maria in Vallicella (New Church), Rome
(1606-07), show how much he contributed to the evolution of Italian
Baroque painting.
Just as the first decade tended to be dominated by the "Caravaggist"
painters, the second decade in Rome was the heyday of the Bolognese
classicist painters headed by Guido Reni, Domenichino, and Francesco
Albani, all of whom had been pupils of the Carracci. The crucial
developments that brought the High Baroque into being took place in
the third decade.
The little church of Santa Bibiana in Rome harbors three of the key
works that ushered in the High Baroque, all executed in 1624-26:
Gian Lorenzo Bernini's facade and the marble figure of Santa Bibiana
herself, over the altar, and Pietro da Cortona's series of frescoes
of Bibiana's life, painted on the side wall of the nave. The rich
exuberance of the compositions is a prelude to the gigantic
"Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power," which Pietro
was to paint on the vault of the Great Hall of the Palazzo
Barberini, Rome (1633-39). Pietro continued with this style of
monumental painting for the remainder of his career, and it became
the model for the international grand decorative style, which by the
close of the 17th century was to be found in Madrid, Paris, Vienna,
and even London.
Despite the continued triumph of High Baroque illusionism and
theatricality in the hands of Bernini and Pietro da Cortona from the
1630s, the forces of classicism, now headed by the painter Andrea
Sacchi and the Flemish-born sculptor François Duquesnoy, gained the
upper hand in the 1640s after the death of Pope Urban VIII; and for
the remainder of the century the Baroque-versus-classicism
controversy raged in the Academy in Rome. Sacchi and the
classicists, including the Frenchman Nicolas Poussin, held that a
scene must be depicted with a bare minimum of figures, each with its
own clearly defined role, and compared the composition to that of a
tragedy in literature. But Pietro and the Baroque camp held that the
right parallel was the epic poem in which subsidiary episodes were
added to give richness and variety to the whole, and hence the
decorative richness and profusion of their great fresco cycles. The
lyrical landscapes of the French painter Claude Lorrain are among
the finest expressions of High Baroque classicism; and they exerted
a continual influence throughout the 18th century, particularly in
Britain. Even in Rome itself, however, a number of painters of
importance succeeded in remaining more or less independent of the
two main camps. Sassoferrato (1609-85), for example, painted in a
deliberately archaizing manner, carefully reproducing Raphaelesque
formulas. The cryptically romantic movement, centered on Pier
Francesco Mola, Pietro Testa, and Salvator Rosa, was more important
and, together with the landscapes of Gaspard Dughet, was to have
considerable repercussions in the 18th century. Claude Lorrain also
adopted an independent stand, despite the highly developed
classicism of his poetic landscapes and seascapes, both of which,
but especially the latter, featured much splendid architecture.
The Roman Baroque dominated the first two-thirds of the 17th century
in Italy, and few painters elsewhere provided serious competition.
Reni, who returned to Bologna from Rome in 1614 and remained there
until his death in 1642, remained the strongest artistic personality
in that northern city but steadily abandoned the strong plasticity
of the Carracci for a much looser style with a pale tonality. When
Guercino, in turn, left Rome in 1623, he returned to his native
Cento, just north of Bologna, and not until the death of Reni did he
decide to settle in Bologna. Guercino's early, fiery style slowly
gave way to a much more calm and classical outlook. Venetian
painting took a new direction with the rich colours and free
brushwork of Domenico Fetti, who had worked in Mantua before moving
to Venice. In the hands of Johann Liss (or Jan Lys) the groundwork
was laid for the flowering of the Venetian school of the 18th
century. Venetian painting was also enriched by the pale colours and
flickering brushwork of Francesco Maffei from Vicenza, whereas
Bernardo Strozzi in 1630 carried to Venice the saturated colours and
vigorous painterly qualities of the Genoese school. Giovanni
Benedetto Castiglione also began his career in Genoa and, after a
period in Rome, worked from 1648 as court painter in Mantua, where
his brilliant free etchings and brush drawings anticipated the
Rococo. Naples, under its Spanish viceroys, remained strongly
influenced by the "Caravaggesque" tradition, particularly in its
best-known painter, a Spaniard, José de Ribera, who settled there in
1616; the two most important native painters of the period, Massimo
Stanzione and Bernardo Cavallino, both died in the disastrous plague
of 1654.The most conspicuous aspect of the last phase of the High
Baroque in Italy is provided by the series of great fresco cycles,
which were executed in Rome during the last decades of the 17th
century. Pietro da Cortona's decoration of Santa Maria in Vallicella
(1647-55) is the link with the earlier phase of the Baroque, and his
decoration of the gallery of the Palazzo Pamphili in Rome (1651-54)
points the way to the decorations of Giovanni Coli and Filippo
Gherardi in the Palazzo Colonna (1675-78) and to those of the vault
of the gallery of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence by Luca
Giordano (1682). Bernini's dynamic and theatrical schemes of
decoration reached their climax in the nave vault of the Gesù, Rome,
painted in 1674-79 by Giovanni Battista Gaulli (Baciccia) under the
direct tutelage of Bernini. The fresco bursts out of its frame and
creates an overwhelming dramatic effect, with painted figures
flooding over the gilt stucco architectural decoration of the
ceiling into the space of the church. After this, the "Allegory of
the Missionary Work of the Jesuits," painted by Andrea Pozzo on the
nave vault of San Ignazio, Rome (1691-94) seems almost an
anticlimax, despite its gigantic size and hypertrophic illusionism.
Concurrently, the Baroque-versus-classicism controversy took on a
new lease on life, with Gaulli heading the Baroque party in
opposition to Sacchi's pupil Carlo Maratta. By the last decades of
the century the Baroque was triumphant, and Maratta's Baroque
classicism appears almost to be a compromise between Pietro da
Cortona and Sacchi. Maratta's style, however, was to provide one of
the most important sources for the grand manner of the 18th century.
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