Baroque art dressed the past in new clothes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/04/2007 (6851 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IF you had to make a list of the most important issues of our time, what would be on it? War? Terrorism?

How about health care, or the environment?

During the baroque era, a period from about 1600 to 1750, during which these dozen paintings were created, the Counter-Reformation would have been near the top of many people’s lists in Europe.

The Counter-Reformation was a time when newly rich Protestant nations like England and the Netherlands had broken away from the Catholic Church, with a subsequent move by the Church to re-establish its political and economic power.

A time that witnessed the genius of Shakespeare in its early stages, and the Industrial Revolution in its late stages, the baroque was a time of profound change in Europe and the world.

But all of this history, of course, stands only as a background for the paintings themselves, on loan from the National Gallery of Canada, masterworks by such artists as Rembrandt, Poussin, Rubens, and El Greco.

Despite the many changes of this period, baroque art still looked to the past for inspiration, borrowing the myths of Greek and Roman cultures, and the even more ancient biblical stories.

But even as these paintings told stories of ancient heroes, they did so amid clothing, architecture and daily life that reflected 17th-century Europe.

Witness The Penitent St. Jerome in His Study, for example, done around 1615 by an unknown Italian artist.

St. Jerome, who lived between 300-400 AD, is depicted in his typical monk-like fashion — praying in his study, surrounded by books. But in this version, he prays inside an Italian household during the baroque period, painted down to such details as the keys and scissors hanging on the wall behind him.

Or take a story like that of Job, for example, found in the biblical Old Testament, and probably written down some time around 1500 BC.

More than 3,000 years later, in northern Europe, Jan Lievens paints a moving composition of this same story, reflecting Job’s suffering and devotion to God, and reflecting many things about Dutch life in the 1630s.

In style, for example, it shows us the powerful influence of Caravaggio on all of baroque art.

A swaggering rock star of a 17th-century artist who, in a short lifetime, drank, gambled, and painted his way across Europe, Caravaggio’s stunningly original art left an impression on generations of painters after him.

Lieven’s version of Job shows Caravaggio’s influence both in its use of a harsh single source of light, and also in its portrayal of biblical saints as truly human figures, right down to bony hands and sagging flesh.

Meanwhile, a work like The Entombment, by Dutch artist Peter Paul Rubens, shows the dead Christ lowered into a grave, and was done in imitation of a work by Caravaggio — from memory, more than four years after Rubens would have seen it.

The work moves beyond mere tricks of memory and copying, though, with Ruebens arranging his human subjects, as well as the single source of light, so that the viewer’s attention focuses on one part of the painting, just below and to the left of centre.

The focus, of course, is the dead Christ’s illuminated body.

And similarly, El Greco’s sombre work St. Francis and Brother Leo Meditating on Death shows a popular theme from his day — the saint contemplating a human skull, and the short span of human life.

This work shows the two monks lit by a single ray from heaven, the entire painting designed to pull the viewer’s eye directly to the human skull in the centre of the work.

(For an interesting side-trip, it’s worth comparing El Greco’s deliberate distortion of scale and perspective to certain works in the Charles Comfort exhibit, just around the corner in another WAG gallery.)

And in keeping with the baroque theme, the WAG has chosen to fill out the show with art from its own collection, including baroque drawings and some more modern interpretations.

This provides some interesting tie-ins, but the main attraction is the dozen masterworks — large-scale and epic paintings from one of the true golden ages of European art.

lorne.roberts@freepress.mb.ca

Art Review

Baroque Masterworks from the National Gallery of Canada, by various artists

Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd.

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