Is it Renaissance or Baroque?

This article is a collaboration with Cools Stories About Art, a publication that, like me, is dedicated to making art history understandable through clear, engaging storytelling. You can read more of their work on their page here (and don’t forget to subscribe).

People love calling things "Renaissance art". A candlelit scene in a prestige drama, a crowd-filled dynamic scene in a movie. Out comes the word, yet often incorrectly.

The Renaissance and the Baroque are two distinct movements, years apart, visually different, with different masters, and yet in most people's minds they’ve melted into one.

Today, we’ll review both movements comprehensively, so that the next time you hear someone utter the word, you at least, will know better.

Before we separate these movements, it’s worth acknowledging why people confuse them in the first place.

These two behemoths of Western art history cover a period of over four centuries, and one directly preceded the other. The Renaissance came about after the Middle Ages. It was a cultural movement that began in Italy around 1300 and lasted for about three centuries before Baroque art replaced it in the early 1600s.

Since one evolved into the other, it’s not surprising that they share some similarities:

• Both movements are spread across multiple fields of art, and shaped the nature of culture across much of Western Europe.

• Both drew heavily on Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman subject matter.

Understandably confusing.

But their differences are what make each of these movement a wonderful accomplishment in its own right, so let’s explore what those differences actually are.

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The word renaissance itself is French for the Italian ‘rinacimento’ or the English ‘rebirth’ and that goes a long way in telling us the movement’s purpose: to break away from medieval superstitions, and revive the rational ideas and achievements of classical antiquity that ended almost almost a millennium prior.

Now, we can seldom understand art without looking at the world that shaped it. At the time, Europe was undergoing fundamental changes in culture, economy, science and politics. The Reformation had split Western Christianity in two. The printing press was invented. The field of Natural sciences was advancing and the influence of the nobility and the Church, which had dominated politics and society for centuries, had waned. What began taking their place was the bourgeoisie, whose influence swelled by steadily growing trade at home and abroad.

They stepped into the role of the art patron that nobles and clergy had held all through the Middle Ages; and those who pay for art tells us a great deal about the art that came to be. It always has. Soon the subject matter in paintings widened, and portraits became more popular and even led to the very first self-portrait.

Another word we need to know is ‘Humanism’ which is a philosophical worldview that sees people as independent beings, whose needs, dignity, interests and values matter. Now keep in mind that this was a drastic change from medieval thought, where the Christian doctrine subordinated humanity to the divine. And so gradually, scholars, scientists, and artists emancipated themselves from this and made humanity the focal point of their works, slightly idealized yes, but still human.

This is not to say that spirituality and religion disappeared altogether. No. Scenes from the Bible and ancient mythological subject matter stayed on as frequent subjects in the arts.

It wasn’t that God left the canvas, it’s that people walked into it.

Now let’s turn the principle into practice.

The defining quality of Renaissance paintings is the realistic representation of humans and nature. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Titian, Michelangelo and Raphael were all inspired by classical art yet they pushed this even further with the level of precision they brought to their canvases. They captured minute facial features, created natural proportions, and built anatomically accurate subjects.

One of the greatest technical discoveries of the Renaissance was the ‘linear perspective’ which works like this: the artist builds imaginary horizontal and orthogonal lines throughout the canvas that all lead towards a ‘vanishing point.’ We can see that in the lines of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. This introduced depth and three-dimensionality to a canvas, similar to how our eyes perceive things in real life.

This was combined with related techniques like ‘foreshortening’ which helped Renaissance painters create the illusion of spatial depth. (You can read more about this technique in my Language of Space & Scale post).

They also gave us the technique of ‘sfumato’ in which the artist uses shading to create a soft, almost imperceptible effect as the different colors melt into one another so gradually that the edges of different elements become impossible to pinpoint. It also mimics the way our eyes see: when we focus on one thing, everything else blends softly into the background.

And below we can see one of the first self-portraits in the history of art. Every layer of the decadent red headpiece, every wrinkle of the man's face, all of it is faithfully kept by the artist. Before he is anything else, he is a human being.

Now the mood darkens, because history does.

Do you remember the Reformation that split up Christianity during the Renaissance? Well, that division was still not resolved, and in 1618, it erupted into a war that lasted thirty years (The Thirty Years’ War so aptly called).

The majority of the population endured disease, death, hunger and destruction while the aristocratic rulers, many of whom retained their positions after the war, had the most power and wealth they ever did. At the same time, the Catholic Church was conducting its own campaign to re-establish power and authority—the Counter-Reformation—and it worked. Where Catholicism’s influence had waned during the Renaissance, it was now becoming stronger.

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They set out to rebuild Rome’s reputation as a holy city, and one way of accomplishing this task came from commissioning decorative campaigns that embraced the Catholic Church’s divine powers. Religious artists had a job to do: be clear, be persuasive, be powerful. To Instruct, yes, but also to inspire, to make the faithful feel Christ’s sacrifice, the suffering of the martyrs, the visions of the saints.

Baroque art is about emotions.

It takes the naturalistic achievements of the Renaissance and brings it center stage, right under the spotlight.

Baroque paintings have stark lighting, deep shadows, realistic everyday subjects, and exaggerated, dynamic gestures. They have strong diagonal compositions that create sensations of tension, disruption and unease; an off-kilter effect that pulls the viewer into the theatricality of the moment.

Two techniques to know here are ‘chiaroscuro’—a strong contrast between light and dark—and ‘tenebrism’—an over-pronounced version of chiaroscuro. These methods help to make the scene more three-dimensional, more lived in. Some of the practitioners of these techniques, and in turn, Baroque art, are Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Artemisia Gentileschi, Diego Velázquez and Peter Paul Rubens.

Let’s look at Rubens’ The Elevation of the Cross. We can see multiple figures across the three panels of this triptych. The figures’ near naked muscular bodies painted meticulously are caught mid-motion in a terrifying moment of chaos.

The landscape scene behind the figures, which was a mere backdrop during the Renaissance, has now become an active element. The dark leaves of the forest, the roaring cloud-filled sky, the eclipsing sun, all help contribute to the heightening of emotions.

Another Baroque masterpiece is Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ.

Here we see the moment just after Christ's removal from the cross, his limp body lowered toward the anointing stone, and notice who is doing the lowering. Not divinely idealized figures, but ordinary, fallible humans, the kind Caravaggio met in his everyday life. Even Christ Himself isn’t beautified. He is simply dead, and the grief around his death sits in plain view; in Mary of Cleophas’ arms thrown toward the heavens, in the Virgin Mary’s bowed head, and in Mary Magdalene’s unwiped tears. Christ’s body is pushed so far forward from the scene that it seems to spill out into our space. We, too, feel the emotions and are invited in.

A new genre of art appeared during this time too—the vanitas still life.

Skulls, hourglasses, candles, insects, and wilting plants came out of the background, and demanded the focal point. In their simplicity, they hid reminders of the fleeting nature of earthly life as a way for the viewer to then examine their inner lives and moral standing.

So now when the credits roll and someone calls a scene “Renaissance,” you are equipped to ask the question that distinguishes the two movements: is it rational order, or is it a staged drama? Is it truly Renaissance, or is it Baroque?