Baroque vs Rococo
This dramatic 17th-century style emphasized emotion, theatricality, and strong contrasts of light and dark.
What is the Baroque?
This Flemish artist produced sweeping, dynamic canvases for European courts, using allegory to glorify royal power.
Who is Peter Paul Rubens?
Louis XIV founded this major French institution to regulate artistic standards and reinforce state authority.
What is the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture?
This Diego Velázquez's 1656 masterpiece is one of the most analyzed paintings in Western art for its complex composition and mysterious use of space.
What is Las Meninas?
This Baroque master used intense chiaroscuro and realism to support Counter-Reformation goals of emotional persuasion.
Who is Caravaggio?
This Italian painter’s stark realism and spiritual intensity made his works powerful tools of Catholic reform.
Who is Caravaggio?
This public exhibition, run by the Academy, became the central venue where artists could gain reputation and state approval.
What is the Salon?
Painted around 1600 for a chapel in Rome, this dramatic scene utilizes a stark beam of light to spotlight a pointing Christ as he summons a tax collector named Levi to join him.
What is The Calling of Saint Matthew?
This later French style favored pastel colors, playful themes, and intimate aristocratic settings.
What is the Rococo?
The Catholic Church encouraged emotionally charged art during this movement responding to Protestant criticism.
What is the Counter-Reformation?
The Academy promoted this hierarchy, ranking history painting above portraiture, genre scenes, and landscapes.
What is the academic hierarchy of genres (styles)?
This Spanish Baroque work, one of many versions by Murillo, depicts the Virgin Mary ascending to the heavens, bathed in a celestial light and surrounded by numerous cherubs.
What is Immaculate Conception?
This Rococo painter of fêtes galantes depicted idyllic scenes of aristocratic flirtation and fantasy.
Who is Jean-Antoine Watteau?
This Spanish Baroque painter served King Philip IV and used dramatic realism to reinforce royal authority in works like Las Meninas.
Who is Diego Velázquez?
The Academy and Salon shaped public taste by reinforcing this polished, idealized style associated with artists like Poussin.
What is French Classicism?
The artist Van Dyck painted this work as a study for a bust by Bernini, depicting the King of England from three different viewpoints: full-face, profile, and three-quarter view.
What is Charles I King of England?
While Baroque art often aligned with Church and state authority, Rococo art reflected the tastes of this social class known for leisure and refinement.
Who are the French aristocracy (the nobility)?
One major goal of Baroque religious art was to inspire this emotional response in viewers, helping bring them closer to the Church.
What is devotion (or spiritual awe) and a return to the Church?
The Salon exhibitions allowed everyday people in Paris to do this for the first time—something that greatly expanded public engagement with art.
What is view art publicly?
This 1604 work by Annibale Carracci features a serene, classical landscape with a river, a boat, and a distant temple, serving as an early prototype for the idealized "heroic landscape" genre.
What is Flight into Egypt?