Baroque Paintings

BAroque is an interesting time and style of of painting. It came about around 1600-1750 and it, once again changed art of all kinds. While the rennaissnace adopted a calm almost calculated and realistic veiws of the world, baroque paintings tried to evoke emotion. It tried to cause sadness, happiness, anger, and other emotions by using color, intense uses of light and shadow and a mesh of various other styles to appeal to the senses. Also, as opposed to rennaisance art, the baroque period made its art so that action was shown. For example: in the Rennaissance painters would often depict a scene right before a battle, fight or wedding. In the Baroque era, painters showed the battle or the wedding as it occured. It showed the emotion of wars, weddings, and other events as they occured so that the viewer could feel it too. Here is an example of a baroque painting:

The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba

By: Claude Lorrain

We see that this painting has wide aray of colors in use, even though they are quite dull. However, the uses of lighting and shadow are perfect to create a scene that incites awe and anticipation. You can see people getting ready to leave their home to go travel to a distant land. And this painting makes the veiwer feel the same. When I look at this I feel small and in anticipation of a great journey. there is a feeling of great expectaion that come from the setting or rising (probably rising) sun as the ships finalize their preperations and are about to leave. So with this we that that at the time the Catholic Church was hopeful and anticiapted a new begining of its future. The pinting its self was part of a set for the Catholic Church and this one probably reflected the veiw of many Catholics as they wondered what was to become of their faith since the Protestant reformation.