Baroque and Rococo
Baroque and Rococo are examined through function: who paid, who was meant to be persuaded, and by which visual means. The PAU often contrasts a Counter-Reformation image with a Protestant Dutch picture made in the same decade.
Rules of the Baroque
- Propaganda: after Trent, art must move and instruct. Theatrical light, diagonal composition, ecstatic figures.
- Light as subject: Caravaggio's tenebrism - hard raking light against near-black, isolating the sacred event among ordinary people.
- Bel composto: Bernini fuses architecture, sculpture and painting into a single perception (Cornaro Chapel, 1647–52).
- Illusion: quadratura, trompe-l'œil ceilings, mirrors, hidden light sources.
- National variants: Flemish (Rubens: colour and movement), Dutch (genre, still life, landscape; Rembrandt's late light, Vermeer's cool interiors), Spanish (naturalism and devotion: Ribera, Zurbarán, Murillo) and Velázquez's court painting.
Rococo
A largely secular, interior art (c. 1710–1770): asymmetry, rocaille ornament, pastel tones, gallant themes (Watteau's fêtes galantes), porcelain. It lacks the religious programme of the Baroque; Tiepolo bridges the two, using Baroque space with Rococo colour.
Worked example: the Obradoiro façade, Santiago de Compostela
- Identify - Fernando de Casas Novoa, 1738–1750, granite; west front of the cathedral, built over the Pórtico de la Gloria.
- Describe - a two-tier screen of columns like a giant altarpiece in stone, Saint James in pilgrim dress at the centre flanked by apostles, crowned by a soaring pediment; the shafts are hollowed to open windows ('vidrieiras') that light and dematerialise the mass.
- Reason - position determines form: the Romanesque narthex behind must be protected from Galicia's rain, while the new front had to be monumental for pilgrims arriving across the plaza and legible at a distance.
- Interpret - Churrigueresque ornament with granite carved to imitate marble and cloth: a Baroque stage set over a Romanesque core. Note the urban frame too - the Obradoiro square is itself a Baroque composition (Hospicio by Casas Novoa, Rajoy by Andrade).
Traps
- Using 'Baroque' as shorthand for 'irregular'.
- Confusing tenebrism with ordinary chiaroscuro: tenebrism's ground is night, not shadow.
- Calling Dutch Golden Age painting Counter-Reformation propaganda - it is largely Protestant and market-driven.
- Treating Rococo as a religious style, or merely as 'late Baroque'.
- Forgetting that Las Meninas is a complex group portrait with mirror and painter, not a portrait of the Infanta alone.