Italian Baroque
To view our Italian School paintings
Part of our Art Movements & Schools series.
Italian Baroque was the dramatic, emotionally direct style of painting born in Rome around 1600, built on strong contrasts of light and shadow and vigorous movement. It split into two great branches, the naturalist darkness of Caravaggio and the idealizing grace of the Bolognese school, and its manner spread across Catholic Europe for a century.
Origins: Counter-Reformation Rome
The Italian Baroque was born in Rome around 1600, in the service of a Church determined to move the faithful through art. Where the Renaissance sought balance and calm, the Baroque sought drama: bold gestures, theatrical light, and figures that seem to break out of the frame toward the viewer.
Early Baroque (1600-1630) · High Baroque (1630-1680) · Late Baroque (1680-1750)
The Two Branches
Italian Baroque painting divided early into two temperaments. The first, led by Caravaggio (1571-1610), was naturalist and violent in its contrasts: ordinary faces, deep shadow, and a raking light that carved figures from darkness, a technique known as tenebrism. The second, centered on the Carracci and their Bolognese academy, sought a more classical grace, luminous color and idealized form in the tradition of Raphael. From these two poles, darkness and grace, flowed most of the religious and mythological painting of the seventeenth century.
The Long Afterlife
The Baroque manner spread from Rome across Italy and Catholic Europe, and its compositions were copied and adapted for two centuries. Devotional subjects, an Ecce Homo, a penitent Magdalene, a Madonna after a famous prototype, were painted and repainted for churches, convents and private chapels. These later Italian and Italianate works, often after a known Baroque model, are among the most evocative Old Master paintings a collector can acquire today.
Italian Baroque in Our Collection
Our collection includes Italian and Italianate Old Master paintings, chiefly religious subjects on canvas and panel, many after or in the manner of the great Baroque prototypes.
