It's Got to be Baroque

Week 10 Blog 9 for Art History 236

Baroque paintings have always appealed to me.  They have the attention to accurate anatomical detail in human and animal figures lots and of little details like recognizable plants: all the things I love to look at.  They also usually display considerable tenebrism and that dramatic contrast between light and dark along with the rich colors and the emotions and dramatic compositions make work done in this style particularly appealing.  The first people who saw the paintings done by Caravaggio must have been quite amazed and many critics rejected this style as too realistic.  Even today there is an argument that if something is depicted too realistically it somehow isn’t artistic or creative enough to be called art.  In the seventeenth century portraying a saint as a drunk with dirt on his face (even before conversion) was often seen as crude and undignified.

Nonetheless, Caravaggio’s style was greatly admired and copied (and sometimes still is) by other artists including two of my favorites, Artemisia Gentileschi and Diego Velazquez.  Artemisia’s Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting isn’t the most dramatic painting of this era but it does show how Artemisia seems totally unafraid of the truth of her appearance.  She depicts herself, in her middle thirties at this point, as a heavy, somewhat plain though richly dressed woman that might be passed in the street on any day without comment.  Her other works also show a realistic approach, possessing true Baroque drama and yet seeming non-idealized in the sense that the characters in the narrative of the painting seem to be displaying real, natural reactions to their story.  If I were to be tasked with depriving Holofernes of his head I might do it with about the same methods and emotions as Judith in the painting.  Her female perspective of life makes her work easy for me to identify with even from my vantage of several hundred years later.

I think that some of the most enjoyable works of Diego Velazquez were done early in his career.  He painted common people going about their daily lives in the Caravaggesque style such as the work Water Carrier of Seville.  Maybe these lives didn’t contain much drama in reality but it’s provided with his style of lighting and possible iconographic or allegorical meanings.  His fascination with surface textures render the glass and jugs of the water carrier as more real than the figures of the boy, man in the background or the water carrier himself.  He was probably Catholic but didn’t emphasize religious art which also appeals to me.  As a fairly long-lived and prolific artist Velazquez painted many types of subjects from patriotic (The Surrender at Breda [The Lances]) to portraiture to mass portraiture and including himself in Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor).  This painting is so multi-layered.  It seems at first to be a portrait of the princess- and indeed much of the light centers on her- but her maids, parents, pets and portraitist are all included.  Velazquez upholds the time-honored tradition of the artist showing him or herself as an equal member of the court circle by putting himself in a portrait with the noble class.  One other interesting element of the painting is the giant space of the rich, dark background.  The well-lit figures in the foreground dominate the work and don’t seem lost in it and yet the occasional details that emerge from the background space add mystery and drama to the piece in typical Baroque style.  As the Spanish court portraitist Velazquez was kept busy with projects involving the royal family but also found time to travel and illustrate mythological subjects like the Tapestry Weavers, or the Tale of Arachne (which I did a paper on for another class).  He seemed to like to return to his roots of painting common people whenever he could though they were likely to be placed in a much grander setting in his later works.