Baroque Art. Victoria Charles

Peter’s Basilica, Vatican.

      At about the same time the Spanish Steps were built with 138 steps leading up from the Spanish square (Piazza di Spagna) to the 1590-completed Trinità dei Monte church and at whose lower end can be found the boat-shaped fountain created by Bernini in 1629.

      Turin and Venice

      In Turin in the years 1716–1731 Filippo Juvarra, on the wishes of Duke Vittorio Amedeo II, built a Church of the Holy Sepulchre for the princes of Savoy that the latter had designed, the Basilica of Superga that owes its name – actually it is called Basilica della Nativitá – to the fact that it is situated on a hill. In 1706 the Duke had sworn an oath that if Turin withstood a siege by the French troops he would build a church to the Holy Virgin. The result of this oath is the most beautiful example of the turning away from the excess of the Baroque and the return to stricter laws of construction. Today the Basilica della Nativitá is a much-visited pilgrimage site.

      17. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622–1625.

      Marble, h: 243 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.

      18. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Aeneas and Anchises, 1618–1619.

      Marble, h: 220 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.

      19. Baldassare Longhena, Santa Maria della Salute, started in 1630–1631. Venice.

      20. Filippo Juvarra, Basilica of Superga, 1715–1718. Turin.

      21. Annibale Carracci, Madonna in Glory with Child, St. Louis, St. John the Baptist, St. Alexius, St. Catherine, St. Francis and St. Clare, c. 1587–1588.

      Oil on canvas, 278 × 173 cm.

      Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Bologna.

      However, the Baroque influence in Turin was only secondary. It was more significant in Venice, where the most important representative of the High Baroque, Baldassare Longhena, was active. In the palaces he designed, such as the Palazzo Pesaro, he adhered strictly to the typical Venetian façades even if he strongly accentuated his works by using strong light and shadow effects. He showed himself to be much more relaxed and independent in the Santa Maria della Salute, the most beautiful domed church in Venice, which, due to its position at the entrance of the Grand Canal became one of the most monumental landmarks of that city.

      In 1630 the Signoria and the Doge of Venice pledged a church to the Madonna if she would end the plague that had been raging throughout the city since the start of the year. This plague had already cost the city a third of its population. The competition was won by the 26-year-old Longhena, who had the existing structures of the convent, church of San Trinità and residential buildings razed. This provided sufficient free space for the erection of the church, the customs station and the buildings for the Somaschi (Company of the Servants of the Poor, an order founded in 1534, whose adherents lived according to the rules of the Augustinian Monks) who cared for the church. Longhena spent almost his whole life building this church that was consecrated in 1687, five years after his death.

      No architect of this period was able to ignore the overarching influence of Bernini. He was commissioned to work by popes and kings and in France he was called “The Dictator of Taste”.

      Painting

      Italian painting of the seventeenth century has long been neglected in the history of art, although it has produced a great quantity of work that belongs to the fundamentals of art history. The painters of the period were divided into two schools, the Eclectics and the Naturalists. The Eclectics sought to achieve their ideal in that they selected the best from the Masters of the past and attempted to combine these works with the aid of their own study of nature to produce a new beauty. The Naturalists believed that nature was the basis for everything and that it would arrange itself. The paths of both groups often crossed and the points of view occasionally melded together so that the individual actors can only be determined by the location of their activities and not according to their original schools.

      The Carraccis and their Pupils

      This direction of Italian art, known as Eclecticism, originated in Bologna. The painter Ludovico Carracci, with his cousins Agostino, who became famous for his erotic etchings, and Annibale, known mostly for his frescos, had founded an influential school of painters at the end of the sixteenth century; an academy that promoted all fields of the painting and drawing trades. The pupils were taught all that was worth copying and were kept away from Mannerism. They were successful in teaching their most talented pupils, by striving for spiritual beauty, to bring extensive and deepened formal beauty into the foreground again.

      The greatest combined work of the Carraccis was the decoration of the Large Gallery of the Roman Palazzo Farnese, and they received help from the best pupils of the academy: Giovanni Lanfranco, Guido Reni and Domenico Zampieri, named Domenichino. The intention of the fresco decoration of the ceiling was to show the power of love over the grasping strength and pride of the universe and the soul of man. The artists were ambitious enough to take as examples the arrangement of the ceiling of the Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and the depiction of Raphael’s mythological Farnesi pictures.

      They were not quite successful but they did create a unified decoration with a great deal of painting mastery that can be compared with the masterworks of Raphael and Michelangelo. The presentation of the volutes, medallions with small mythological pictures between the nudes, moulding supports and winged putti (cherubim) clearly show the influence of Michelangelo, and the main pictures in the mirror of the ceiling show the influence of Raphael. The most beautiful pictures are certainly Agostino’s Abduction of Galatea by Polyphemus and Annibale Carracci’s Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne. The most beautiful of his altarpieces is that of Christ who appears to Peter with the Cross on his shoulder as Peter is fleeing from Rome in fear of a martyr’s death in the Campagna. Peter asks, “Lord, whither goest thou?” and Christ answers, “To Rome to be crucified again.” To his contemporaries, it seemed absolutely justified that Annibale Carracci shoud receive the honour of being buried next to Raphael in the Pantheon.

      22. Annibale Carracci, Hercules at the Crossroads, 1595–1598.

      Oil on canvas, 167 × 237 cm. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.

      23. Annibale Carracci, Galleria di Carracci, 1597–1604.

      Fresco. Palazzo Farnese, Rome.

      24. Domenico Zampieri also known as Domenichino, Diana with Nymphs at Play, 1616–1617.

      Oil on canvas, 225 × 320 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.

      Guido Reni and Domenichino have already been mentioned among the numerous pupils and followers of the brothers Carracci. However, Reni owes his fame less to his wonderful altarpieces or to the religious frescoes of the Crucifixion of Peter in the Vatican, but rather more to his mythological representations, the head and shoulders and half-figures of the suffering Christ with the crown of thorns, the so-called Ecce homo, the pictures of the Madonna, Mary Magdalene and many others. Among his mythological depictions should be mentioned, above all, those of the frescoes from the years 1612 to 1614. These were commissioned by the art lover Cardinal Scipione Borghese for the ceiling of the casino of the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi in Rome, and feature the Aurora that floats in front of the sun chariot pulled by the horae, which has become one of the emblems of Italian art of the seventeenth century.

      Domenichino, who was mainly active in Rome, was of a somewhat simpler nature, and died after a life that was made miserable mainly by the jealousy of the Neapolitans. Even though he painted very beautiful pictures