From Baroque light to Romantic night

Your goal in this lesson: to follow European art from the drama of the 1600s to the dark dreams of the Romantics, and to see why witches and moonlight came back into painting.

Baroque: art that wants to move you

Historical After the Protestant Reformation, some reformers smashed or whitewashed church images. The Catholic Church answered at the Council of Trent, which in December 1563 defended sacred images as ways to teach and to stir devotion. Baroque art, in the 1600s, took that task and made it theatrical: strong light out of darkness, bodies in motion, faces caught at the moment of crisis.

Caravaggio lit his figures as if by a single lamp. Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the most powerful painters of the age, became in 1616 one of the first women admitted to the academy of artists in Florence, and she painted strong women from the Bible again and again, such as Esther fainting before the king, now at the Met. In Spain, Diego Velázquez painted his assistant Juan de Pareja in 1650 with the dignity of a gentleman; that same year he signed a document freeing him. See Baroque.

The Dutch: daily life for sale

Historical In the Dutch Republic, mostly Calvinist churches did not buy religious pictures. Instead, merchants, artisans and professionals bought paintings for their homes, and painters specialized in landscapes, still lifes, portraits and scenes of daily life. Rembrandt painted himself throughout his life; Vermeer painted quiet rooms filled with window light; Judith Leyster painted herself at the easel, smiling. See Dutch Golden Age.

Rococo and the turn to reason

Historical In early eighteenth-century France, taste moved from the grandeur of Versailles to intimate townhouses. Rococo loved pastel colors, curving lines, shells and lovers in parks; Antoine Watteau’s Mezzetin, at the Met, sings his serenade in a garden. Then the Enlightenment called for art that taught virtue. Neoclassicism looked back to Greece and Rome for clear lines and moral lessons, as in Jacques-Louis David’s work. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, one of only four women then allowed in the French academy, painted herself with two of her pupils in 1785. See Rococo and Neoclassicism.

Romanticism: feeling, the sublime and the night

Historical Romanticism was less a style than an attitude. It valued feeling over rules, wild nature over gardens and the strange past over the present. In 1757 the philosopher Edmund Burke described the sublime: the vast, dark and terrifying, which gives a kind of delightful horror. Storms, ruins, mountains and moonlit coasts filled canvases. Caspar David Friedrich painted two men contemplating the moon; J. M. W. Turner turned whaling ships into storms of light.

Historical The supernatural came back too. Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) shows a demon crouched on a sleeping woman. Francisco de Goya published Los Caprichos in 1799, eighty etchings satirizing superstition and abuse of power. Plate 43 shows the artist asleep at his desk while owls and bats rise behind him, with the words “The sleep of reason produces monsters”. Many Caprichos show witches.

Modern For witches today, an important point: Goya’s witches are not friendly portraits of real practitioners. They are satire, aimed at ignorance and at the powerful. They can still be wonderful to look at, but read them as Goya meant them. See Romanticism, the close reading of The Nightmare and witches in art.

Try this

Today’s exercise: put Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher beside Turner’s Whalers. Write five mood words for each. Then list the visual choices that create each mood: light, color, edges, composition and space.

Quick recap

• Baroque art used light and drama to move viewers.
• Dutch painters sold everyday subjects to a broad public.
• Rococo charm gave way to Neoclassical virtue.
• Romanticism brought the sublime, dreams, witches and moonlight.

Keep going

Next: Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists and the occult revival. Need a refresher? Go back to Renaissance: magic, perspective and melancholy or see the whole course. For more, browse the moon and night gallery.

Sources

• E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1950).
• Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757).
• Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos (Madrid, 1799), plate 43.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, accession 1971.86; Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self-Portrait with Two Pupils, accession 53.225.5; Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, accession 2000.51.

Go deeper: the art movements timeline and art history pages on this site

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