1000 Paintings of Genius. Victoria Charles
who liked his bombastic flattery, and among Catholic patrons of religious art, who found in his extroverted sacred scenes another weapon in Counter-Reformation ideology. In Rome itself, the sculptor Bernini was Ruben’s counterpart, as the Catholic Church had in these two champions of Faith a means to show the power and majesty of the Church and the Papacy. The Italian Baroque painters let loose a torrent of holy figures on the ceilings of the churches of Rome and other cities, with the skies opening up to reveal Heaven itself and God’s personal acceptance of the martyrs and mystics of the world of Catholic sainthood. The Spanish painters Velásquez, Murillo, and Zurburán took up the style in their native land, perhaps calming the physical movements and open brushwork, but sharing with the Italians a mystical sense of light and the Catholic iconographic subject matter.
How different from all this were the paintings of seventeenth-century Holland! Having effectively freed themselves from Habsburg Spain by the 1580s, the Dutch practised a tolerant form of Calvinism, which eschewed religious iconography. A growing middle class and an increasingly wealthy upper class were present to buy the delightful variety of secular paintings produced by a host of skilled painters, with individual artists specialising in moonlit landscapes, skating scenes, ships at sea, tavern scenes, and a great variety of other subjects. From this large school of artists several individual painters stand out. Jacob van Ruisdael was the closest we have to a High Baroque landscape painter in Holland, his dark and sometimes stormy landscapes evoking the drama and movement so widespread in European art of the time. Frans Hals’ painting, with flashy, quick strokes of the brush and exaggerated colouration of skin and garments, also, like Ruisdael’s, approaches a more pan-European sensibility of the High Baroque. In contrast, Jan Steen typified the widespread realism and local quality of most Dutch art of the Golden Age, and he added a moral slant in his depiction of households in disarray and misbehaving peasants. Finally, the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn stand alone, even from the Dutch. Raised as a Calvinist, he shared some beliefs with the Mennonites, and he was happy to depart from the Calvinist stricture against representing biblical scenes. His later paintings, with their quiet introspection, make the perfect Protestant counterpart to the showy, dynamic, Roman Catholic paintings of Rubens. While working early on in a tighter technique influenced by the Dutch “fine painters,” Rembrandt developed a broad, shadowy manner derived from Caravaggio but expressed with much greater pictorial complexity. This style fell out of favour among the Dutch, but Rembrandt held his ground, going bankrupt though leaving a legacy that would be admired by Romantics and those modernists with a penchant for painterly abstraction. Rembrandt also stood out because of the universality of his art. He was steeped in knowledge of other styles and in literary sources. Although he never travelled to Italy, he was an artistic sponge, and he included in his works bits inspired by the late Gothic artist Antonio Pisanello and the Renaissance masters Mantegna, Raphael and Dürer. He constantly evolved, and he had the broadest artistic mind and deepest understanding of the human condition of any painter of his age.
Clearly, just as there were many ‘Renaissances’ in art, there were many forms of the Baroque, and the High Baroque was challenged by the Classical Baroque, which had its philosophical roots in ancient thought and its stylistic basis in the paintings of Raphael and other High Renaissance classicists. Annibale Carracci had embraced a classical approach, and painters like Andrea Sacchi challenged the supremacy in Rome of High Baroque painters like Pietro da Cortona. However, the most quintessential classicist of the seventeenth century was the Frenchman Nicolas Poussin, who developed a style perfectly suited to the growing ranks of philosophical Stoics in France, Italy, and elsewhere. His solid, idealised figures, endowed with broad physical movements and firm moral purpose, acted out a range of narratives, both sacred and secular. Another Frenchman developed a different form of classicism: the epicurean paintings of Claude Lorrain at first seem to differ sharply from those of Poussin, as Claude’s pictures melt edges away, his waters ripple subtly, and hazy views into infinity appear in the distance. Yet, both painters conveyed a sense of moderation and balance, and appealed to similar kinds of patrons. All these painters of the seventeenth century, whether classical in temperament or not, participated in the explosion of subject matter of the time; not since antiquity had artmaking seen such a diversity of iconography of both sacred and profane subjects. With the exploration of new continents, contact with new and different peoples across the globe, and novel views offered by telescopes and microscopes, the world seemed to be a changing, evolving and fractured place, and the diversity of artistic styles and pictorial subject matter reflected this dynamism.
Louis XIV (d. 1715), the self-designated Sun King who modelled himself after Apollo and Alexander the Great, favoured the classical mode of Poussin and of painters such as his court artist Charles Le Brun, who, in turn, favoured the king with a number of murky paintings glorifying his reign. There arose in the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century a debate over style in which painters allied themselves with one of two camps, the Poussinistes and the Rubénistes. The former favoured classicism, linearity, and moderation, while the latter group declared the innate primacy of free colouring, energetic movement, and compositional dynamism. When Louis XIV died, the field in France was open, and the Rubénistes took the lead, bringing forth a style we call Rococo, which – roughly translated – means “pebblework Baroque,” a decorative brand of the painterly Baroque. Rather than being a continuation of the style of Rubens, the manner of Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher conveyed a lighter mood, with more feathery strokes of the brush, a lighter palette, and even a smaller physical size of works. Erotic subject matter and light genre subjects came to dominate the style, which found favour especially among the pleasure-loving aristocrats of France, as well as their peers elsewhere in Continental Europe. The Rococo painters thus carried forward the debate between line and colour that had emerged in practice and in art theory in the sixteenth century: the argument between Michelangelo and Titian, and then between Rubens and Poussin, is a struggle that would not go away, and would return in the nineteenth century and later.
Not every artist succumbed to the Rococo. A focus in the eighteenth century on particular social virtues – patriotism, moderation, duty to family, the necessity to embrace Reason and study the laws of Nature – were themselves at odds with the subject matter and hedonistic style of the Rococo painters. In the realm of art theory and criticism, Diderot and Voltaire were unhappy with the Rococo style flourishing in France, and the days of the style were numbered. The humble naturalism of the Frenchman Chardin was based in Dutch still-life artistry of the previous century, and the Anglo-American and English painters, including John Singleton Copley of Boston, Joseph Wright of Derby and Thomas Hogarth painted in styles which, in different ways, embodied a kind of fundamental naturalism we recognise as fitting for the spirit of the age. A number of artists, such as Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Thomas Gainsborough, incorporated into their paintings some of the lightness of touch that characterized the Rococo, but they modified its excesses and avoided some of its artificial and superficial qualities, however delightful those are.
A leitmotif of Western painting has been the persistence of classicism, and here the Rococo found its fiercest opponent. The essentials of the classical style – a dynamic equilibrium, an idealised naturalism, a measured harmony, a restraint of colour and a dominance of line, all operating under the guiding influence of ancient Greek and Roman models – reasserted themselves in the late-eighteenth century in response to the Rococo. When Jacques-Louis David exhibited his Oath of the Horatii in 1785, it electrified the public, and was applauded by the French including the King, and an international viewership. Thomas Jefferson happened to be in Paris at the time of the painting’s exhibition and he was greatly impressed. The popularity of Neoclassicism preceded the French Revolution, but once the revolution occurred, it became the official style of the virtuous new French regime. The Rococo was associated with the decadent Ancien Régime, and its painters were forced to flee the country or change their styles. A later Neoclassicism remained in vogue in France through the Napoleonic age, and the elegant linearity and exotic attitude of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres took the place of the works of David, who had softened his style later in life to create a copious, more decorative form of classicism suitable for the less bourgeois character of the French Empire.
If the eighteenth century was the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, there was, developing at the same moment, an intellectual trend towards interest in the irrational and the emotional. A group of painters, sometimes