Baroque art: Caravaggio and Bernini

Around 1600 a new style appeared in Rome that aimed to move viewers with drama, movement and strong emotion. The painter Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi, 1571 to 1610) set it going with works such as the Calling of Saint Matthew (1599 to 1600), which hangs in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Figures emerge from deep shadow into a shaft of light, and the saints look like ordinary Roman men and women. The sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 to 1680) took the same energy into three dimensions, as in his Apollo and Daphne (1622 to 1625) and the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647 to 1652), in which marble seems to float on clouds and gold rays.¹²³

The setting was the Catholic Church's response to the Reformation. The Council of Trent, which met from 1545 to 1563, asked that religious images be clear, accurate and able to move ordinary believers to devotion. Popes and religious orders, flush with new energy and Rome's growing wealth, paid for churches, chapels and altarpieces that did exactly that. Artists built on the realism and perspective of the Renaissance and added intense light, diagonal movement and emotion. Caravaggio's life matched the style: he was a brilliant painter and a violent man, who killed a man in a brawl in 1606 and fled Rome, dying at 38.¹²³

The Baroque spread across Catholic Europe and the Americas, and beyond: Rubens in Flanders, Velazquez in Spain, and the palaces of Louis XIV all drew on it, while Protestant Dutch painters took Caravaggio's lighting in their own direction. Bernini's colonnade framing St. Peter's Square (1656 to 1667) shows the style at city scale. By the mid 1700s the lighter, decorative Rococo and then Neoclassicism replaced it. The word itself, perhaps from a Portuguese term for an irregular pearl, was at first an insult.¹²