General overview 1. General overview of 17th century European art.

The 17th century was marked by the spread of Italian Baroque throughout the continent, with its creative development in the Netherlands and France. Another powerful trend was realism, which developed most intensively in the Germanic countries. The greatest rise in this era occurred in painting.

Differently than at the end of the XVI century, the European art world looked at the end of the XVII century. The grandiose power and the revived massive baroque style everywhere told him a new imprint. Both the Arno and the Tiber, and the Seine and the Thames, were now dominated by huge, far-visible church domes, and those abundantly dismembered, luxuriously lively and yet integrally aged church facades, whose prototypes in the 16th century originated in Rome and Upper Italy; everywhere were powerful, widely spread palaces, like Versailles, surrounded by stylishly planned gardens. Sculpture, which was mainly designed to decorate palaces, altars, church portals and ponds, readily followed the large, animated, curving lines of architecture. Body movements, therefore, quite often returned to the bends of ancient Gothic figures, and the fluttering clothes received an independent, more picturesque and decorative than plastic life. Huge ceiling paintings of a new kind, dissected by hitherto unknown methods, spread the overflowing, almost unconnected with the architectonics, colorful life over the gigantic secular and church halls. Wall painting for the most part still replaced by woven paintings. But in all Catholic churches, gigantic altar paintings, full of baroque curves, breathing religious passion, which, in connection with the style of their luxurious frames, followed the dominant style of church buildings, took their place. No doubt, the Italian masters of the 17th century contributed much to the further development of this baroque altar painting; but just as undoubtedly, it found its final expression only in the best works of Rubens, on Flemish soil.

Along with this powerful in its wholeness, often quite pompous Baroque art, in which experiences of Gothic architecture almost disappeared, which did not completely disappear for a whole century, the realistic direction developed during the whole heyday, and although it is associated with the Baroque direction in its grandest manifestations, like Bernini’s sculptures, Ribera and Rubens’s paintings, yet it brought in all kinds of art a number of almost completely baroque-free creations, whose naturalism clearly represents pronounced contrast to the dominant style of the era.

In construction art, one can compare, on the one hand, the beginnings of a new device of the Protestant preaching church, on the other, the desire to arrange in residential buildings rows of truly residential, satisfying life needs, premises, as well as attempts to adapt the language of forms to the local building material. In sculpture, where side, false-classical movements have now created a different kind of counterbalance to the predominance of baroque taste, some attempts by the genre in sculpture from Holland, Belgium and France, and then everywhere a part of portrait sculpture belong to this, exclusively realistic, direction. In painting, this trend is particularly victorious next to the previous techniques, and despite the participation of Italian painting in realistic movement through Caravaggio, as well as Titian’s late style, in the development of a new widespread writing workshop, the further development of this fresh trend was not made in Italy and in other countries. The great masters, Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Velasquez, show how this realism, introduced by great artistic personalities, could, on the one hand, rise above itself, calling for help the most powerful fantasy of light and color, and on the other - to establish itself and develop further the most sophisticated observations of the forms and colors of great nature; This is also shown in different cases by those mostly Dutch masters who were able to reproduce their simple, snatched from nature and life landscapes of the daily life of the rich and poor, animals and the plant world up to the simplest dead nature, just as naturally as they were artistically. Already in the XVI century, all these genera of painting existed as artistic endeavors, but it was only the XVII century that brought them to their fullest and free bloom; and, of course, it is not by chance that this development took place mainly in the Protestant and Republican Holland.

Along with this great, essentially decorative, baroque movement and other equally great, essentially realistic, direction, quite often intertwined with ideal artistic ideas and baroque experiences, among which can be added in some respects also classicism, as the third current, directly or indirectly influenced by antiques, was revealed by the end of the 17th century in all areas of art, as a new stage of development, a tendency towards a light, pleasant, elegant, playful and playful, which became the main feature of the art of the coming century.

The painting itself was the main art of the 17th century. It is hardly necessary here to repeat that the “picturesque” with its colorful and promising life, with its light and shadow, with its connection of extreme opposites on the plane, prevailed in the construction art and in the sculpture of the XVII century. Almost all of the great masters of this century, whose works penetrate our hearts, were painters. The 17th century would belong to the most artistically powerful world epochs, if it had not presented us with other masters besides Velázquez and Ribera, Rubens and Van Dyck, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Brouwer, Reysdal and Gobbema. Despite the latest attempts to carry out and in art, as in various manifestations of life, “reassessment of all values”, we still cannot imagine the world of art without masters of this scope.