Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose accomplishments included the design of the colonnade fronting St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, was the greatest of the Baroque sculptor-architects. Baroque art took place after the Renaissance through the 17th and 18th century as a Catholic counter-reformation to draw people back into the church. The temples were built using circular floors instead of straight ones. They painted subjects such as landscapes, still life and men, depending on the criteria of each artistic movement. Full of decorations with great movement and dynamism, the images showed violent and exalted passions. Francisco de Zurbarán, religious and mystical painter. Like the Baroque style, Rococo was used in the decorative arts, interior design, painting, architecture, and sculpture. In Spain, the painter Diego Velázquez used a sombre but powerful naturalistic approach that bore only some relation to the mainstream of Baroque painting. The baroque art originated first in the field of plastic arts and then extended to literature, theater and music. Omissions? The gods of wisdom and art watch over her while Hermes dramatically rushes down from the heavens with a gift … It is often characterized as the final phase of the Baroque, but the style differs from its predecessor in its intimate scale, asymmetry, lightness, elegance, and exuberant use of curving natural forms in ornamentation. Some of the qualities most frequently associated with the Baroque are grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, dynamism, movement, tension, emotional exuberance, and a tendency to blur distinctions between the various arts. Byzantine art, Egyptian art, Greek art, Medieval art, Rock art, Roman art, Romanesque art. Rococo painting in France, for example, began with the graceful, gently melancholic paintings of Antoine Watteau, culminated in the playful and sensuous nudes of François Boucher, and ended with the freely painted genre scenes of Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Today, the Baroque period remains one of the most celebrated cultural movements in western art history. Baroque was the dominant style in art and architecture of the seventeenth century, characterized by self-confidence, dynamism and a realistic approach to depiction The Baroque period was a cultural awakening in the art world, so it's no surprise it produced some of the most historic paintings in the history of the world.Make sure to also check out famous Baroque artists and the best Baroque composers.. Baroque was the principal European style in the visual arts of the 17th century. It has giant Corinthian pilasters, Tritons (Greek merman god) calming the waters of the fountain and is in front of a grand personal palace. It had its origin in Italy during the seventeenth century and managed to spread to places such as Belgium, Holland and even Latin America, where it was introduced by artists who traveled on expeditions from Europe. These simultaneously produced a new sense both of human insignificance (particularly abetted by the Copernican displacement of the Earth from the centre of the universe) and of the unsuspected complexity and infinitude of the natural world. Baroque palaces were built on an expanded and monumental scale in order to display the power and grandeur of the centralized state, a phenomenon best displayed in the royal palace and gardens at Versailles. The canvas was the favorite material of Baroque painters and the linear and symmetrical tendency was lost, because the artists used more freedom in their colors and movements. Subsequently the word came to denote any contorted idea or involuted process of thought. The term covers various national styles that range from the complex and dramatic Italian art of the 17th century to the restrained genre scenes, still-lifes and portraits characteristic of the Dutch Baroque. The term "Baroque" may still be used, usually pejoratively, describing works of art, craft, or design that are thought to have excessive ornamentation or complexity of line. Another possible source is the Portuguese word barroco (Spanish barrueco), used to describe an irregular or imperfectly shaped pearl, and this usage still survives in the jeweler’s term baroque pearl. Client of Baroque sculpture was Catholic church and then extended to literature, theater and music sections. Encyclopaedia Britannica grandiose visions, ecstasies and conversions, martyrdom and death, intense moments., they made realism one of the most complicated styles that manifests agitation and movement each! Now Belgium been prized during the Renaissance, artists tried to show people. 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