Baroque

Caravaggio arrived in Rome around 1592 and turned painting upside down with a simple but revolutionary idea: put real people — street models, not classical ideals — into biblical scenes, and flood them with a single raking spotlight against near-total darkness. The Baroque was born in that shock. Spreading from Rome across Catholic Europe throughout the seventeenth century, the movement was in part a weapon of the Counter-Reformation: images had to move viewers, stir devotion, overwhelm the senses. Rubens achieved this through swirling flesh and theatrical colour; Rembrandt through psychological depth and molten shadow; Velázquez through a painterly matter-of-factness that still astonishes; Artemisia Gentileschi through unflinching dramatic force. The Baroque was never a single style — it was a temperature, a commitment to intensity — and it produced some of the largest, most ambitious, most emotionally violent paintings ever made.

How to recognise it

Dramatic chiaroscuro — strong contrast between lit and unlit areas, with figures emerging from deep shadow — is the Baroque's most recognisable signature. Compositions are dynamic and diagonal rather than stable and horizontal; figures twist in motion, drapery billows, eyes roll upward in ecstasy or terror. Scale is monumental: altarpieces six metres high, ceiling frescoes that swallow entire church vaults. Colour in Flemish and Italian Baroque tends toward rich warm tones — deep reds, warm browns, golden ochres — against black backgrounds. In Dutch work, the drama is more restrained, interior and domestic, but the same spotlight logic applies. If a figure seems to be lit from nowhere in particular, caught mid-gesture in a theatrical freeze-frame, you are almost certainly in Baroque territory.