Baroque and Rococo
This domain covers c. 1600-1750. The exam tests naturalism and theatricality, the propaganda functions of art under absolutism and the Counter-Reformation, and your ability to separate Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch and French variants rather than treating Baroque as one style.
Italy and the theatrical mode
- Caravaggio: tenebrism, raking light, the Calling of St Matthew - light as grace, diagonal composition, tax collectors as protagonists.
- Bernini: David, Apollo and Daphne, the Ecstasy of St Teresa staged within the Cornaro chapel as theatre; baldachin and colonnade at St Peter's.
- Annibale Carracci: Farnese ceiling, quadratura, the ideal classical landscape that leads to Poussin and Lorrain.
Flanders, Spain and the Dutch Republic
- Rubens: allegory, the Marie de' Medici cycle, diplomat and workshop organiser; Van Dyck and the court portrait.
- Velázquez: Las Meninas - mirror, painter inside the picture, unstable viewpoint; bodegones and court portraits.
- Rembrandt: self-portraits as autobiography, the Night Watch and group-portrait conventions; Vermeer's domestic interiors and the camera obscura debate; Hals's loose brushwork.
France and Rococo
- Versailles: Le Brun's programme, the Hall of Mirrors, art as state apparatus under Louis XIV.
- Rococo: Watteau's fête galante, Boucher, Fragonard, Tiepolo; pastel palette, asymmetry, interior scale, aristocratic leisure.
Worked example. A dark room; a beam of light cuts diagonally from upper right; Christ gestures, echoing Adam's hand on the Sistine ceiling; a bearded man at a table points back at himself, a youth counts coins. Reasoning: the light source is outside the frame and reads as divine grace; the gesture chain moves from Christ to Matthew, whose pointing hand asks the question the painting answers; contemporary dress and tavern setting place the sacred event in the present. Identify as Caravaggio, Contarelli Chapel, 1599-1600.
Traps. Using tenebrism and chiaroscuro interchangeably; dismissing Baroque as merely exaggerated; confusing Rococo with Baroque in date and social function; missing the Counter-Reformation or absolutist programme; attributing Las Meninas to Dutch art; ignoring the difference between Catholic and Protestant image cultures.