The Baroque in Italy and Spain Essay -- Essays Papers

The baroque in Italy and SpainThe period called churrigueresque cannot easily be classified. The pass water that distinguishes this period is stylistically complex and even contradictory. While Baroque was innate(p) in Rome during the final years of the sixteenth century, it was not specifically Italian. Nor was it confined to religious art. While Baroque did have ties to the Counter-Reformation, it quickly entered the Protestant North where it was applied primarily to secular subjects. It would also be demanding to claim that Baroque is the style of absolutism, because Baroque flourished in the bourgeois Holland no less than in the absolutist monarchies. Nor do we see the turbulent storey of the era reflected in Baroque art. While the seventeenth century was genius of al close continuous warfare, these wars had practically no effect on Baroque imagery. It is equally difficult to relate Baroque art to the science and doctrine of the period. While a direct link did exist in the archean and High Renaissance, when an artist could also be a humanist and scientist, this changed in the seventeenth century. During this time, scientific and philosophical thought became too complex, abstract, and systematic for the artists to share. Still, in that respect is a subtle but an important relationship between Baroque art and science. The complex metaphysics of the humanists, which gave everything religious, meaning, was replaced by a new physics. Human sense of the world was continuously expanding and the cosmology of such men as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo bust the ties between sensory perception and science. By placing the sun, not the earth at the center of the universe, it contradicted what our eyes told us that the sun revolves around the earth. The world... ...r more subtle. Velazquez explored the optic qualities of light more fully than any other painter of his time. Francisco de Zurbarn (1598-1664) stands out among the painters of Seville for his qui et intensity. Zurbarn worked almost exclusively for monastic orders and his most impressive baroque compositions are deeply moving for their direct and living approach to religious subject matter. The work of Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) is the most cosmopolitan, as vigorous as accessible, of any Spanish Baroque artist. His Virgin and Child (1675-1680) unites the work of the Northern artists and Italians in an image that nevertheless retains an unmistakably Spanish character. Religion, politics, and philosophy all played a part in Baroque art. This interplay of passion, intellect, and spiritualism make it one of the most compelling periods of Western art.