3. Read and translate the text. Baroque art

Baroque art (1600–1750) succeeded in marrying the advanced techniques and grand scale of the Renaissance to the emotion, intensity, and drama of Mannerism, thus making the Baroque era the most ornate in the history of art. While the term «baroque» is often used negatively to mean overwrought and ostentatious, the seventeenth century not only produced such exceptional artistic geniuses as Rembrandt and Velazquez but expanded the role of art into everyday life. In Catholic countries like Flanders, religious art flourished, while in the Protestant lands of northern Europe, such as England and Holland, religious imagery was forbidden. As a result, paintings tended to be still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and scenes from daily life.

Italian Baroque

A rtists in Rome pioneered the Baroque style before it spread to the rest of Europe. By this time, art academies had been established to train artists in the techniques developed during the Renaissance. Artists could expertly represent the human body from any angle, portray the most complex perspective, and realistically reproduce almost any appearance.

Caravaggio. The most original painter of the seventeenth century, Caravaggio injected new life into Italian painting after the artificiality of Mannerism. He took realism to new lengths, painting bodies in a thoroughly «down and dirty» style, as opposed to pale, Mannerist phantoms. He advocated «direct painting» from nature. «The Conversion of St. Paul» demonstrates Caravaggio's ability to see afresh a traditional subject. Other painters depicted the Pharisee Saul converted by a voice from heaven with Christ on the heavenly throne surrounded by throngs of angels. Caravaggio showed St. Paul flat on his back, fallen from his horse, which is portrayed in an explicit rear–end view. Caravaggio's use of perspective brings the viewer into the action, and engages the emotions while intensifying the scene's impact through dramatic light and dark contrasts. This untraditional, theatrical staging focuses a harsh light from a single source on the subject in the foreground to concentrate the viewer's attention on the power of the event and the subject’s response.

B ernini. Gianlorenzo Bernini was more than the greatest sculptor of the Baroque period. Bernini's masterpiece – and the culmination of Baroque style was «The Ecstasy of St. Theresa». It represents the saint swooning on a cloud, an expression of mingled ecstasy and exhaustion on her face. The sculptor's virtuosity with textures made the white marble «flesh» seem to quiver with life, while the feathery wings and frothy clouds are equally convincing. The whole altarpiece throbs with emotion, drama, and passion.

Flemish Baroque

The story of Flemish Baroque painting is really the story of one man, Sir Peter Paul Rubens. Energy was the secret of Rubens's life and art.

His output of more than 2,000 paintings was comparable only to Picasso's. One painting that created a sensation, establishing Rubens's reputation as Europe's foremost religious painter, was «The Descent from the Cross». It has all the traits of mature Baroque style: theatrical lighting with an ominously dark sky and glaringly spot-lit Christ, curvilinear rhythms leading the eye to the central figure of Christ, and tragic theme eliciting a powerful emotional response.

Rubens was probably best known for his full–bodied, sensual nudes. His ideal of feminine beauty that he painted again and again was: buxom, plump, and smiling with golden hair and luminous skin woman. One characteristic Rubens shared with Hals and Velazquez was that his method of applying paint was in itself expressive. Rubens's surging brushstrokes made his vibrant colors come alive. Nowhere was this more evident than in his hunting pictures, a genre he invented.

V an Dyck. Van Dyck was a supreme portraitist, establishing a style, noble yet intimate and psychologically penetrating, that influenced three generations of portrait painters. He transformed the frosty, official images of royalty into real human beings. Yet van Dyck's ease of composition and sense of arrested movement, as though the subjects were pausing rather than posing, lent humanity to an otherwise stilted scene. He had an ability to flatter his subjects in paint, all becoming slim paragons of perfection, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary. One trick van Dyck used to great effect was to paint the ratio of head to body as one to seven, as opposed to the average of one to six. This served to elongate and slenderize his subject's figure.