From Bernini to Caravaggio: Icons of Italian Baroque Artistry

The text below is the excerpt of the book Baroque Art (ISBN: 9781783103843), written by Klaus H. Carl and Victoria Charles, published by Parkstone International.

Baroque art in Italy emerged during the 17th century, characterized by its dramatic and dynamic compositions, ornate embellishments, and emotional intensity. Influenced by the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation efforts to evoke religious fervor, Baroque artists sought to engage viewers on a visceral level. In architecture, this era gave rise to grandiose structures like the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome, designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Baroque painting flourished with artists such as Caravaggio, known for his dramatic use of chiaroscuro and naturalism. Meanwhile, sculptors like Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Alessandro Algardi created awe-inspiring masterpieces that showcased intricate detail and movement. Baroque art in Italy remains a testament to the power of emotion, spirituality, and artistic innovation that defined this vibrant period.

The Italian Baroque style developed consistently in the architectural and sculptural arts beginning in the high Renaissance period. It followed the spiritual streams of the period and enhanced all decorative and structural details. It was marked by an accumulation of building elements, an arbitrary change of classical building forms and a tendency towards the pictorial, which led to the rejection of all straight lines. Everything that was previously horizontal was curved, canted or chamfered; even the column, the original form of the support, was altered by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, the grand master of baroque architecture, to become sinuous and twisted, a style that had already appeared occasionally in late Roman architecture.

Rome was the epicentre of church and palace architecture in the Baroque style. It was also seen in Naples and Palermo, which can trace their architectural physiognomy only to the seventeenth century. The basis of all Baroque churches is the design of the Jesuit Church by the architect Giacomo Vignola, the successor to Michelangelo, and by Giacomo della Porta with the basic motifs applied there for the first time. It is marked by the linking of the nave and the choir with the greatest possible amount of space, ignoring the side naves; regarding the façade, further development occur with canted contours and the decoration of the cupola in its interior vaulting with frescoes. This church, with the altar of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, along with its striking architecture, sculpture and painting, embodies the height of the Italian Baroque style. This dwarfed everything that had been produced in almost two centuries in Italy and Germany. The creator of this altar, the Trento-born Jesuit lay brother, painter, architect and sculptor Andrea del Pozzo (who also painted the Jesuit church in Frascati) was one of the greatest artists of the Baroque style.

At the beginning of this development stood men for whom dimension and proportion were integral to artistic creation. Among these were Carlo Maderno who, beginning in 1603, was one of the master builders of St. Peter’s and the leading architect after Vignola, or the Papal Architect Domenico Fontana, the builder of the façade of the Lateran Palace and the hall of columns at the north side of the San Giovanni church. Finally, this group also included the already-mentioned painter and sculptor Lorenzo Bernini who decisively influenced sculpture and architecture in Italy, Spain and the countries north of the Alps.

Bernini was a master in the creation of magnificent spaces with a skilled eye for perspective effects. This is displayed primarily in the square in front of St Peter’s with its surrounding columned halls, or the Scala Regia of the Vatican. After Maderno’s death, Bernini completed the façade and front hall and created the famous bronze baldachin over the high altar for the inside.

The speed of the change of mind in which the admiration for the antique waned, is illustrated by the fact that the contemporaries of this tabernacle placed it as the high point of an independent artistic style. Bernini is also to be praised for the Palazzo Barberini with its masterful staircase, and for several smaller churches. The importance of the piazza design of this time period can be seen by the positioning of the two small cupola churches Santa Maria di Monte Santo and Santa Maria dei Miracoli at the north entrance of the Corso that were designed by Carlo Rainaldi and executed by Bernini and his student Carlo Fontana. It was they who helped bring the Piazza del Popolo to its completion.

St. Peter’s also contains Bernini’s most well-known works in the field of religious sculpture: the statue of the St. Longinus and the tombs of Popes Urban VIII and Alexander VII, both particular patrons of the arts and sciences. Bernini was most skilled in decorative sculpture and here, with his Triton fountain on the Piazza Barberini and the main fountain on the Piazza Navona, he created an imperishable memorial. With this fountain and the gods it features, Bernini reached back into the Antiquities, which were already the fundamentals in the three main works of his youth, Aeneas and Anchises, the stone-throwing David and Apollo and Daphne in the Galleria Borghese in Rome which he created as a 17-year-old. 

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