Unit 3 Study Notes: Baroque Europe, Colonial Spanish Americas, and the Rise of Rococo (200–1750 CE)

Baroque

A seventeenth-century (c. 1600–1700) European artistic style/strategy designed to persuade and emotionally move the viewer through drama, movement, and intensified experience.

Counter-Reformation (Catholic Reformation)

The Catholic Church’s response to Protestant criticism that promoted direct religious experience and used persuasive art/architecture to inspire devotion and reinforce belief.

Chiaroscuro

The use of strong light–dark contrasts to model form and create focus and mood (a common Baroque lighting device).

Tenebrism

An intensified form of chiaroscuro featuring deep darkness with harsh, spotlight-like illumination to isolate the main action and heighten drama (often associated with Caravaggio).

Theatrical composition

A Baroque compositional approach using diagonals, strong gestures, and figures that seem to break into the viewer’s space, creating a staged, dramatic encounter.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Italian Baroque sculptor/architect (active in Rome) known for designing total, theatrical environments where sculpture, architecture, light, and viewer position work together.

Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (Cornaro Chapel)

Bernini’s sculptural chapel installation (c. 1647–1652) depicting Teresa of Ávila’s mystical vision; staged like theater with hidden light, gilded rays, and varied marble textures to make spiritual experience feel immediate.

St. Peter’s Piazza Colonnade

Bernini’s oval colonnade at St. Peter’s (1656–1667) that choreographs movement and crowds; often read as the “arms” of the Church embracing and guiding the faithful.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Italian Baroque painter who combined gritty realism with dramatic, constructed lighting to make sacred narratives feel urgent and psychologically immediate.

The Calling of Saint Matthew

Caravaggio painting (1599–1600) in which a directed beam of light and a tense, contemporary interior dramatize Matthew’s sudden conversion and Christ’s call.

Peter Paul Rubens

Flemish Baroque painter known for energetic movement, muscular bodies, diagonal compositions, and lush color—often serving elite patronage and political spectacle.

The Elevation of the Cross

Rubens altarpiece (1610–1611) structured by a powerful diagonal as men strain to raise Christ’s cross, emphasizing physical labor, sacrifice, and dramatic spectacle.

Dutch Republic (art context)

A largely Protestant, commercially powerful region where fewer church commissions and a stronger open market encouraged portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and domestic genre scenes over monumental altarpieces.

Genre scene

A depiction of everyday life (often domestic interiors or ordinary labor), especially common in Dutch art shaped by middle-class patronage and the open market.

Johannes Vermeer

Dutch painter whose quiet domestic interiors use carefully constructed light, geometry, and objects to explore perception and moral/philosophical meaning rather than overt theatrical drama.

Woman Holding a Balance

Vermeer painting (c. 1664) of a woman weighing with an apparently empty scale and a Last Judgment image behind her, prompting reflection on moral balance, material goods, and judgment.

Spanish Colonial art

Art made in Spanish-controlled territories in the Americas, shaped by colonial power systems, conversion efforts, cultural negotiation, and global networks—not simply European art “copied” overseas.

Syncretism

The blending/merging of religious traditions and meanings (often Indigenous/local with Catholic) that produces hybrid imagery and practices in colonial contexts.

Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral

Major colonial cathedral begun in 1573 that anchors the Zócalo; its monumental scale and civic prominence express ecclesiastical and imperial authority over urban space.

Andean (Mestizo) Baroque

A regional colonial Baroque mode (often in the Andes) that blends European Baroque architecture/ornament with local motifs and craftsmanship (flora, fauna, pattern traditions), creating intentional hybrid visual language.

Virgin of Guadalupe (Miguel González)

Colonial Mexican devotional painting (c. 1698) presenting Guadalupe as a central icon surrounded by narrative scenes; supports Catholic devotion while also expressing local Mexican identity.

Screen with the Siege of Belgrade and hunting scene

A Mexican folding screen (c. 1697–1701) whose East Asian–associated format and mixed subject matter demonstrate global trade connections (Atlantic and Pacific) and elite collecting/display culture.

Angel with Arquebus (Asiel Timor Dei)

Andean colonial painting (Master of Calamarca, 17th c., Bolivia) showing an angel with a firearm and ornate costume, blending sacred authority with military/imperial imagery and local workshop aesthetics.

Rococo

An eighteenth-century style (originating in France) associated with aristocratic leisure and private interiors; characterized by lightness, pastel color, curving/asymmetrical ornament, and decorative integration.

Fête galante

A Rococo subject type (linked to Watteau) depicting aristocratic outdoor leisure and flirtation in idealized, pastoral settings—social performance presented as refined, elegant “theater.”