Baroque

Baroque painting, from roughly 1600 to 1750, traded Renaissance balance for drama: diagonal compositions, movement caught mid-action, and above all chiaroscuro — a small area of intense light against a very large area of controlled darkness. Caravaggio invented the vocabulary; Rembrandt, working in Protestant Amsterdam a generation later, turned it inward and used it for psychology rather than spectacle. The difficulty in reproducing Baroque work lies entirely in the shadows, which must stay deep without going dead.

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