Italian Baroque

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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 idealising grace of the Bolognese school, and its manner spread across Catholic Europe for a century.

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.

Italian Baroque painting divided early into two temperaments. The first, led by Caravaggio, 1571 to 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, centred on the Carracci and their Bolognese academy, sought a more classical grace, luminous colour and idealised form in the tradition of Raphael. From these two poles flowed most of the religious and mythological painting of the seventeenth century.

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.

What each attribution term claims, from circle of down to after, is set out in our guide to reading attribution on an antique painting. And the practice of copying itself, which produced most of the Baroque paintings on the market today, is the subject of our guide to period copies after the Old Masters.