Europe had split itself in religious wars in the 16th-century, and for its first 50 years, 17th-century Europe did much the same.
In France, King Louis XIV concentrated power in his hands. He reduced the powerful nobles to minor attendants at his grand palace at Versailles.
Most of Europe was soon doing likewise. After a century of religious wars, an absolute monarch who promised stability and had the Catholic Church’s backing sounded good.
Many Europeans were enthusiastic about it.
In Rome, the grand façade of St Peter’s is decorated not with any biblical quote but with Camillo Borghese, Pope Paul V, who completed it in 1614. The Borghese was a self-made family, originated from Siena, who had worked their way up through the papal administration.
Camillo emerged as a compromise candidate from the conclave of 1605.
Paul spent richly, not only on St Peter’s but on the papal palace on the Quirinal. If Sixtus is remembered for his obelisks, Paul is remembered for his fountains. He rebuilt an aqueduct of Trajan so that freshwater now entered Rome on the Janiculum hill, bubbling into a fountain in the form of a triumphal arch (the Acqua Paola). From there, it flowed downhill into Trastevere and across the Ponte Sisto to feed the fountains in front of Palazzo Farnese. Another branch was diverted to the Vatican fountains.
The two themes which run through 17th-century Rome are the consolidation of the grand family palaces as the center of a glittering cultural and social life. Secondly, the contribution of a man who did more than any pope to create the city’s general ambiance: the architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The contrast with his rival, the less exuberant but equally creative Francesco Borromini, can be plotted through their Roman churches.
The Baroque Art
After 100 years of religious wars and disputes over who would rule whom and who would worship which way, Europe chose religious toleration, stability, strong absolute monarchs, and art that supported kings and popes, called Baroque. Emotionally-charged Baroque contrasts with the simplicity and balance of Renaissance art.
While northern Protestants painted simple scenes, Catholics and kings turned to this exuberant new over-the-top style. The Baroque style features large canvases, bright colors, lots of bodies, motion, and wild emotions. Remember about chubby flying babies? That’s the sure sign of Baroque.
Cultured aristocrats wanted colorful wallpaper for their palaces. Greek gods and myths were in. And they were naked.
Baroque art overwhelms. Decoration overflows. It plays on the emotions, excites the senses, and carries us away. It made an excellent Counter-Reformation propaganda for the Catholic Church.
While Renaissance art appeals to specialists with its logic, Baroque appeals to the masses with emotion. Renaissance art was meditation; Baroque art was theater.
The Baroque Architecture
The Baroque was perfect for the Catholic Church and powerful kings. Worshippers stepped into a world of glittering gold and precious stones. Corkscrew columns, Virgin Marys, bronze saints, and a ceiling painted as if it opened up to heaven itself.
The baroque architecture uses Renaissance symmetry as its skeleton. But then it’s full of angels, garlands, and rising clouds done in stone, wood, and poured plaster. The ambition was to impress the masses with beautiful palaces and glorious churches. Baroque art showed that God is great.
Caravaggio in Rome
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio shocked the art world with his ultra-realistic paintings. Baroque took reality and exaggerated it. While most artists amplified the prettiness, Caravaggio emphasized the grittiness.
Caravaggio (1573-1610) lived much of his life on the edge of society. Quick-tempered and outspoken, he killed a man over a dispute in a tennis match and spent years as a fugitive.
You’ll recognize Caravaggio’s works by the strong contrast between light and dark. Caravaggio paints a dark background, then shines a dramatic spotlight on the few things that tell the story.
The light is not glorious. It’s a severe, critical, “third-degree interrogation” light that cuts through everything, exposing the real person underneath.
Caravaggio’s psychological insight brings his contemporary, Shakespeare, who incorporated English lowlife into his plays. Even when Caravaggio painted religious art for churches, he pulled no punches. He hired the homeless to pose as angels and old alcoholics as his saints.
He set Bible scenes in the seedy Roman taverns he frequented. As Caravaggio shows, the Bible happened to real people. His Madonnas lack halos, and saints have dirty feet.
We’ve come a long way since the first medieval altarpieces that wrapped holy people in gold foil. Caravaggio paints very human miracles.
Caravaggio’s uncompromising details, emotional subjects, odd compositions, and dramatic lighting set the tone for other Baroque painters.
The Powerful Barberini Family
In the first half of the century, in Rome, wealthy families could achieve the papacy. These were the Barberini and Borghese. Paul V’s nephew Scipione Borghese acquired enough wealth to become one of the city’s great art collectors. Some of his acquisitions are still on view in the villa he built in the Borghese Gardens.
The Barberini popes’ relatives did even better, accumulating a fortune estimated to be twelve times the Papal States’ annual income. Much of the wealth of these families was plowed into their palaces. The Borghese acquired so much land for theirs, and they could create a piazza in front of it. The Barberini took advantage of the Quirinal hill’s emptiness to plan an H-shaped palazzo with separate wings for the family’s secular and clerical sides.
Bernini in Rome
Perhaps the finest architectural achievement of this century was St Peter’s conclusion under the Chigi Pope Alexander VII (1655-67). His architect was Gian Lorenzo Bernini. A perfect courtier and the favorite of many popes.
Bernini (1598-1680) practically invented Baroque. He went on to reconstruct the city of Rome in Baroque style.
In his statues, Bernini carved out some of the classic innovations of Baroque art: he makes spiritual events seem realistic. He stops the action at the most exciting, thrilling moment. The figures move and twist in unusual poses. He had created emotionally charged sculptures with technically refined elegance.
Rome bubbles with Bernini fountains, tombs, palaces (including parts of the Palazzo Barberini), chapels, and his most crucial Church, Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, begun in 1658.
He spent 40 years at the Vatican decorating St. Peter’s Basilica and creating St. Peter’s Square. Inside St Peter’s, he raised the majestic bronze Baldacchino over the central altar. He made the brilliantly composed Cathedra of St Peter in the apse. Yet it was his sweeping colonnade, its arms reaching into the piazza to embrace the world of Christendom, that completed the magnificence of St Peter’s.
This “Michelangelo of Baroque” was a sculptor, painter, and architect.
Rococo Art
The art of Louis XV was called Rococo. Like its Baroque predecessor, it’s highly decorated. But Rococo is like Baroque with boundless vitality and with pastel colors.
Buildings are decorated with slender columns, ivory, gold, and mirrors. Where Baroque used oval shapes, Rococo twists it even further into medallions and curvy cartouches. Everything glows in whitewash, pastel pinks, and greens.
Rococo captures the physical world of the decadent French court.
The Decline After the Baroque
This extraordinary outburst of patronage began to consume the resources of the papacy.
In 1692 Pope Innocent XII (1691-1700) called an end to extravagance when he forbade popes to transfer wealth to their families.
It had not been a happy century for Catholicism. In northern Europe, the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants had caused untold misery. The Ottoman Turks had made critical incursions into eastern Europe. In 1664, Alexander VII had to sign a mortifying peace with France to stave off an invasion of the Papal States.
Cultural supremacy shifted to France, now under the Sun-King Louis XIV (1643-1715). Even Bernini, who was particularly hard to detach from Rome, designed a grand façade for the Louvre (though it was never built).
In Rome itself, the 17th century had seen plagues and famines, which only increased the population’s resentment over papal excess. Even if the Inquisition was not as ruthless as it is sometimes portrayed, it controlled freedom of thought.
“Don’t you understand how so much reading of Scripture ruins the Catholic religion,”
Paul V told the Venetian ambassador
Italian translations of the Bible were forbidden.
In Protestant Europe, the scientific revolution challenged the Catholic doctrine and now was able to take root.
There was still construction in Rome in the 18th century. The Spanish Steps (1723-6) and the Trevi Fountain (1762) are two of Rome’s most popular attractions. But slowly, Rome lost its role as a center of cultural activity and emerged as a place for newcomers to view.
The first excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum were stimulating a new attraction for the Classical past. In response, the popes banned the export of statues and then began instituting the great museums.
The Vatican Museum was inaugurated by Clement XIV (1769-74). The Capitoline Museums also took their present form in the 18th century, with new acquisitions and their crowded galleries’ rearrangement. Several rooms still provide an example of what a museum of the period looked like.
The new visitors to Rome were often Protestants with a Classical education, enjoying the Grand Tour. They were as much interested in Classical Rome as in the papal performance.
It was in Rome that rigorous academic study of ancient art was beginning. Johann Winckelmann, a Prussian convert to Catholicism who became a librarian at the Vatican, published his A History of Art in Antiquity in 1764. Using examples from Rome, notably the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican collection, which he believed the most sublime work of art ever conceived, he set out a history of ancient creativity which placed Greece of the 5th century BCE at the summit of execution, with decadence after that.
Unfortunately, many of the “Greek’ statues with which he chose to make his point turned out to be much later Roman copies, but at least he had fostered debate.
A more committed champion for the art and architecture of Rome itself was the Venetian Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Piranesi traveled to Rome in 1740. His famous Vedute of Rome, his Capricci, made up of imagined Roman buildings, gave him international prestige. His prints helped inspire Classical facilities in the United States and beyond.
Dissolving the Society of Jesus
In 1773 Pope Clement XIV gave in to intense international pressure and dissolved the Jesuits. Enlightenment thinkers hated the Jesuits because they represented the intellectual wing of the Church, and European rulers wanted them out of the way to control the Church more efficiently.
The Jesuits’ fate was sealed far away, in South America. The society had set up some very successful missions working with the native peoples of the Brazilian rainforest and were operating virtually as an independent state, protecting the native peoples from the Spanish and Portuguese who wanted to carve the area up and enslave them.
The Spanish and Portuguese piled the pressure on Pope Clement until Clement gave in. The Pope dissolved the Jesuits, closed their schools and colleges, and the Spanish and Portuguese moved in on their South American missions.
