Baroque Art Movement

The Baroque art movement is characteristic of exaggerated motion, clear detail, and pressing meaning all combined together in order to produce drama, tension, and a sense of overwhelming grandeur and style upon the viewer. The sheer magnitude of this art form can have the effect of intimidating the beholder.

Baroque Art

The movement began in Italy but quickly gained popularity in other European countries as well, such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. In addition, the artistic movement easily expanded towards affecting the reigns of literature, sculpture, music, dance, and architecture as well.

The art movement has its origins in the beginning of the 17th Century during the proclaimed "Age of Enlightenment", even though it was used to further the religious ideas of the Roman Catholic Church. Baroque murals and paintings were used as the major art form of furthering the Counter Reformation, rallied by the Catholic Church against the rise of Protestantism in England.

The launch of the Baroque art movement was in that sense launched and fully supported by the Catholic Church, through the employments of its art in churches and chapels all around Europe. This included the commission of worthy artists to complete them such as famous artist Michelangelo.

Heinrich Wolfflin, an art historian of the 19th Century, actually coined the term Baroque for the first time in his book entitled Renaissance and Barock in 1888. Wolfflin claimed that the nature of the art movement was quite opposing to the movement of the Renaissance, and described it as a "movement imported into mass", which gives a great way of explicating the powerful effect of Baroque art upon the viewer. This is done though the address of the arts combination of both the power of physical mass and the impending reality of movement.

Currently the term Baroque can be used to refer to objects or styles which are complex, ambiguous, and mysterious to the point of becoming divine in nature and obscure in meaning. The term baroque is also being interchangeably used with the term Byzantine, indicating similarity and parallelism in style, though Byzantine art originates from the Eastern Churches instead.

Baroque art and architecture was wholeheartedly adopted, and became highly regarded by the European aristocracy as well, as an elevated, noble, and impressive form of architecture and painting.

It was also quickly adopted by monarchs and monarchies as a means of adorning their walls and palaces, with exaggerated ornaments, gigantic sculptures and paintings, and prominent shapes and colors of both high intensity and contrast. It is thus no wonder that the Baroque style is also known as the 'style of absolutism'.

Some of the most famous Baroque artwork pieces are presently found in Italy, especially at the Catholic Churches of Rome. The paintings found in the churches favor the dramatic styles expressing the concepts of power, exuberance, and high emotional involvement, and intensity.

Finally, a general idea of Baroque art can be discovered while examining Michelangelo's and Caravaggio's paintings, both of which are dramatic, and possess overpowering scale and detail.