The baroque, which encompassed art and architecture, was an important period of art and style in Europe from about 1600 until the early 18th century. It was often highly theatrical and emotionally engaging, and was partly a response to the stylized and intellectual Mannerist movement of the later Renaissance. Baroque artists employed a freer, more realistic style, which in turn was replaced by the more elaborate, frivolous and sometimes overblown Rococo style.
One of the driving forces of the baroque movement was the Roman Catholic Church, which used baroque artists as part of its Counter-Reformation offensive. Long an important patron of the arts, the Papacy pumped money into commissioning striking works of art and spectacular buildings. Paintings and sculptures, often within grandiose church or palace settings, were typically large-scale, while in architecture the straight lines of the Renaissance were replaced by curves. Everything was bigger and more impressive than what had gone before, and figures in the field, including Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Alessandro Algardi, Peter Paul Rubens and Gianlorenzo Bernini, became stars of the European art scene for their work in Rome and elsewhere.
In France, the baroque was characterized by the work of Nicolas Poussin, who in turn influenced Charles Le Brun, whose work would adorn the baroque masterpiece that is the Palace of Versailles, and whom Louis XIV called the greatest French artist of all time. However, the baroque took a different turn in the Netherlands (a Protestant country beyond the reach of the Vatican), where it manifested as a trend for smaller-scale genre paintings (portraiture, landscapes, still-lifes) aimed at well-to-do middle-class patrons. It was a style epitomized by Rembrandt and Vermeer, but also reflected in the work of Diego Velázquez in Spain. In England, the style is detectable in some of the great architectural projects of the era, including Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London and John Vanbrugh’s Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace.
Rarely understated, the baroque was described by Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most important figures of 20th-century Argentinian literature, thus: ‘I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.’