Baroque
Baroque is a European artistic style marked by theatrical movement, dramatic contrasts, and elaborate forms, prominent during the seventeenth century.
Chiaroscuro: The use of strong contrasts between light and dark to model forms and shape visual drama. Baroque painters used sharp light-dark contrasts to intensify scenes and direct attention.
The Calling of Saint Matthew: A painting by Caravaggio, made around 1599–1600, depicting Christ calling Matthew in a dim room. Its focused beam of light and ordinary setting helped define Baroque religious drama.
Counter-Reformation: The Catholic renewal and institutional response to Protestant movements during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Catholic patrons encouraged art that made religious teachings emotionally immediate and persuasive.
Renaissance: A European cultural movement that revived classical learning and art from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Baroque art transformed Renaissance ideals of proportion and balance into more dramatic effects.
Baroque music: A period of Western art music, roughly 1600–1750, marked by tonal organization, ornament, and expressive contrast. The shared label points to a parallel period whose musical forms developed alongside Baroque visual culture.
Tenebrism: A painting technique that sets brightly illuminated figures against deep, extensive darkness. It pushes Baroque chiaroscuro toward theatrical illumination and near-black backgrounds.
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa: A marble ensemble by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, made for the Cornaro Chapel in Rome in the 1640s. Bernini fuses sculpture, architecture, light, and spectatorship into a staged spiritual vision.
Council of Trent: An ecumenical council of the Catholic Church held between 1545 and 1563 to address reform and doctrine. Its guidance on religious images shaped the devotional purposes of much Baroque art.
Mannerism: A sixteenth-century style marked by artificial elegance, elongated figures, and complex compositions. Mannerism preceded Baroque and shares its artifice, but tends toward cultivated tension rather than direct theatricality.
Colonial Baroque: Baroque architecture and visual art produced in the Americas under European colonial rule. It shows how Baroque forms were adapted through local materials, artists, and religious traditions.