Baroque painting: a strict moral code, asserted with buoyancy

A short essay, my own impressions or conclusions

 

The world depicted in baroque paintings intrigues by imposing quite simple paradigmata in an implosive and complex expression, so often artificial for the young generation. It is the world of those who learned in silence, following the drive nosce te ipsum, because, paradoxically, in these artworks one can find an initiation attempt with Socratic tools.

 

Baroque art is like a treasure map and the traveling compels to define an ontology, an anthropology of revelation and furthermore an axiology with cynical and bitter accents.

The World Upside Down by Jan Steen is one of the innumerable illustrations of this revealing irony. The pertinent satire is driven to ridicule and burlesque.

 

The religious paintings, by their intertwined lights and shadows, cast over the contrast between experience and naiveté the game between wisdom and sacred foolishness. A perfect example of this kind is The Death of the Virgin by Caravaggio.

 

Numerous objects, apparently intruders to the scenes, hold a highlighted symbolical value in different paintings, becoming clues in a charade which the spectator solves volens nolens.

 

Many times, social relationships abandon the stylization cloth. The extravagant Rubens, especially in The Arrival of Marie de Medici at Marseilles reveals true aphoristic meanings of history; the titanic pillars of the society explode with exaltation within the necessary roundish bodies of the nymphs, which can raise the pyramid of the society or any queen of it.

 

Baroque has no feelings, if this notion implies delicacy and decency. The truth is yelled at any door if you hold the appropriate key. Paintings like The Astronomer by Johannes Vermeer or by Gerrit Dou, The Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt take a glimpse towards the foundation of human reasoning in its instance of propulsive force, engine of celestial or alchemical revolutions.

 

I hid a smile while cataloguing unconsciously the bestiary or the botanical list throughout baroque paintings. From the gigantic vegetables in genre paintings up to the often seen aristocratic puppies with grotesque appearance. Such genetic mutations along the centuries can be a better illustration for the well known expression mutatis mutandins than vanitas paintings, like those of Harmen Steenvyck, Willem Claesz Heda and others.