Part I

“When that sweet Huntsman from above

First wounded me and left me prone,

Into the very arms of love

My stricken soul forthwith was thrown

The dart wherewith He wounded me

Was all embarbed round with love,

And thus my spirit came to be

One with its Maker, God above.”

Dynamic. Dramatic. Splendid. Sensuous. Turbulent. Tempestuous. The 16^th century nurtured a period of great conflicts and confusions – religious, political, and intellectual. The ship of the church was storm-tossed on a sea of controversy.

Luther and the Protestant Reformation set Europe ablaze. Men set the torch to one another with religious passion. The Catholic Counter-Reformation brought with it the dread Inquisition and a great outburst of religious art. The French armies of Francis I swept into the Italy of the Renaissance. And Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, in his running feud with the Popes, sacked Rome in 1527. His troops set fire to the city – one of the greatest monuments of Christendom. The discoveries of unknown continents and their resources during the early 16^th century led to fierce competition for political power and economic riches – for Empire! – in the late 16^th and 17^th centuries. In France and Germany one civil war followed another, until those two countries were splintered into numerous hostile factions. As if these religious and political upheavals weren’t enough for Europe, Western man’s intellectual attitudes were also challenged and upset. Renaissance man had believed the earth to be the center of the universe. But Copernicus, in 1543, published a book setting man’s globe on a whirling path around the sun. In the 15^th century, Renaissance man had discovered an orderly world. His art reflects this. Renaissance painters used architectural backgrounds to create a feeling of geometric clarity and order. A Renaissance poet said, “God has formed the world in a goodly pattern.” In contrast, the men of the 16^th century saw their world in violent motion. Baroque art expresses this feeling for the dynamic and the dramatic.

The poet John Donne, commenting on the spirit of the Baroque era, wrote, “And new philosophy calls all in doubt… ‘Tis all in pieces, … all coherence gone…” Clarity gave way to mystery and vagueness. The deep shadows in Baroque paintings reflect a new awareness of the unknown, the mysterious. This use of dramatic contrasts of light and shadow is called chiaroscuro. We can see it in the following examples. In this study of a philosopher, the painter Rembrandt achieves a theatrical effect by placing his figure in the window-lighted corner of a dark room. Michelangelo Buonarroti dominated the arts of the 16^th century. He stood with one foot in the Renaissance and the other in the Baroque. His early works were filled with subjects from classical Greek and Roman mythology, or, like this early Pieta, were composed in an orderly, balanced form, like a triangle. But Michelangelo’s later works incorporate a new vision of the world: twisting, falling forms and rough, exciting surfaces. Michelangelo’s early Pieta is on the left. A later carving of the same subject is on the right. Here is a detail from the early work. This one is from the later, Baroque example. Let us make a more extreme comparison. On the left is Michelangelo’s David – typical of the High Renaissance. On the right is the same subject – David – by the Baroque sculptor Bernini. But look at the difference! Bernini’s David unleashes anger and violence.

Ben Johnson, a 17^th-century dramatist, said: “That which is tortured is counted the more exquisite; nothing is fashionable ‘til it is deformed.”

Michelangelo carefully arranged the Sistine ceiling into a geometry of frames: squares and triangles punctuated by prophets and classical figures. It is in the spirit of the Renaissance. However, when he completed the Last Judgment 30 years later, Michelangelo had filled the wall with a vast and terrible panorama. Everywhere, we see bewilderment, chaos, despair.

Rome, the city of Michelangelo’s triumphs, was the birthplace of the Baroque. Painters, sculptors, and architects from all over the world flocked there to study the monuments of the city and to make their own special contributions to the sacred beauty of Rome. There was Bernini, the sculptor, and Borromini, the disturbed and imaginative architect. Caravaggio came from northern Italy, and Peter Paul Rubens journeyed from Flanders. There was Nicolas Poussin, a Frenchman and El Greco, the Greek on his way to Spain. The works of these artists made Rome into an inspiring and magnificent center for the new Catholic church – embarked on its campaign of Counter-Reformation.