Darkness of The Baroque
Moments in art can be dated with reasonable accuracy—an artist's birth, death, completion of a painting, its date of sale—and placed in chronological sequence. Individual perception comes into play when more than one artist is perceived to have features of style in common with other artists of the same chronology. The painting of the High Renaissance was the first perceived “movement” in art, and the one which was first to be observed to transition into subsequent movements.
By this movement the art of The Baroque eventually emerged from the Renaissance as a distinct style, but gradually—not overnight—as if by torchlight, cautiously going by feeling its way in the dark. It was likewise the time of an emerging historical sense, of being-in-history, of making history. The entire era of the Baroque in art has been characterized as “the age of power,” both in art, as in the wider, world of events.
In that interval of uncertainty between the soaring achievements of Renaissance art, and the Baroque, was the period subsequently designated "mannerism." No artist ever boasted of mannerism. Mannerism cannot shed its pejorative connotations. That is not to say artists of the historical interval of mannerism didn't know that they were being artistically mannerist. It was intentional. They did not aim to fit into a narrow art-historical box.
At its best, mannerist excellence in painting emanated refinement, imagination, virtuosity of execution, intellect, culture, and individuality. More important than the artist's fidelity to nature was the artist’s conception of subject. If the Renaissance artist drew down heaven to earth, the mannerist artist conceived of his vision as taking place in the heavens, in (what we now call) outer space.
If asked to give the one defining characteristic of post-Renaissance mannerism in painting, it would be black. Add to that adjectives and synonyms for blackness, figures and objects seen against an empty void of nothingness. Often summarized as Chiaroscuro, its definition may be refined as tenebrism, as darkness for its own sake, from the Italian tenebroso, in succession derived from the Latin tenebrae, literally, "darkness."
Before citing notable artists, the tenebroso style should be defined, and then individual practitioners considered for inclusion within the trend's broad boundary. For, as not every dark painting is mannerist, neither is every mannerist painting dark. This obscure statement will make sense later, as it relates to my work. For now, let it be noted that tenebrism in art is both optical, as well as thematic.
One of the reservations art historians have about mannerism is its theatricality. Mannerism’s artificiality, its bizarre, acerbic color palette, its elongated—some would say distorted—proportions, exaggerated anatomy of figures, and (as said), its unnatural space, make it more a matter of self-expression than of objectivity. It calls into question the artist's own personal lifestyle, his habits, beliefs, in a word, his mannerisms.
When we enter the Baroque wing of the art museum it is as if entering upon a funeral. Funereal black mourning crepe drapes the walls. The aesthetic sense of Baroque tenebrism is not exclusively artistic. It has a touch of fashion. There we see, as if functioning as the altar piece of a church (as originally intended) is an oblique rendering of a religious subject by the greatest of the Baroque artists, Caravaggio.
Caravaggio (1571–1610), and other artists of the early 17th Century influenced by him, including the French painter Georges de La Tour, the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán and the Dutch Rembrandt van Rijn defined the tenebroso style of art. Caravaggio led the movement. See specific examples such as The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1602, and David with the Head of Goliath, 1610.
The viewer needs no program notes to respond to the alternation of sensibility with the Renaissance. It is as stark as black and white. Stark, high-contrast lighting effects dramatically accent the telling of uneasy, macabre, and truly terrifying stories. This is the complement of the dual significance of tenebrism. It is both dark, in a painterly sense, as well as figuratively dark. It has a dark story to tell.
Mannerism, in art, is style for style's sake alone. It is style for effect. It may be faulted for a distinctively self-conscious attitude. It may be the first play for publicity in the history of art. It is notorious. Granted, it emerged after the High Renaissance, which was admittedly a tough act for artists to follow. The soaring achievements of the High Renaissance were denied by subsequent artists to have been the death of art. Mannerism was seen as the Resurrection of art.