Renaissance and Baroque Art and Culture
What this domain tests
The exam expects you to separate the Renaissance (rule, measurement, the revived antique) from the Baroque (movement, persuasion, theatrical light), and to handle Spanish variants - Plateresque, Herrerian, Castilian polychrome sculpture - as local answers to European problems rather than as copies.
Core rules and concepts
- Quattrocento: Brunelleschi's dome for Florence cathedral (double shell, herringbone brick, 1420–36); Alberti's codification of linear perspective (De pictura, 1435); Masaccio's Trinity as its demonstration; Donatello's David.
- Cinquecento: Leonardo's sfumato; Michelangelo's terribilità (David, 1504; Sistine ceiling, 1508–12); Raphael's balance; Bramante's Tempietto and the central-plan ideal; Palladio's Villa Rotonda.
- Mannerism: elongated proportion, unstable colour, deliberate artifice (Parmigianino) - the channel through which El Greco arrives.
- Baroque: Caravaggio's tenebrism; Bernini's total theatrical works (Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, the Vatican colonnade); Borromini's undulating geometry (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane); Rubens' open compositions; Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656).
- Spain: the Plateresque façade of Salamanca University; Herrerian austerity (El Escorial, Juan de Herrera); Valladolid polychrome sculpture - Gregorio Fernández's incised flesh, glass eyes and blood, Juan de Juni's dramatic Entierro; Churrigueresque altarpieces.
Worked example
Prompt: "Why is Las Meninas a Baroque painting and not merely a court portrait?" Reasoning: build the answer on evidence. The vanishing point at the open door pulls the viewer into a plausible room; the mirror reflects the royal couple and doubles the space; the picture plane dissolves into several planes (painted canvas, sitters, reflection, spectator). That instability of viewpoint, plus loose manchas of paint, expresses a Baroque idea of reality as something staged. Style must argue, so give at least two formal proofs.
Traps that cost marks
Calling El Greco a Baroque painter (he is Mannerist, later absorbed by the Baroque); confusing Plateresque (ornamental, early 16th century) with Churrigueresque (late 17th–18th century); attributing San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane to Bernini; treating the Spanish Baroque as decoration only and ignoring the naturalist polychrome sculpture of Valladolid.