17th Century
Art made between 1600 and 1699: the Baroque of Caravaggio, Rubens and Bernini, the Dutch Golden Age, and courts from Isfahan to Kyoto.
4,521 works · 10 related artists
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Painters of the 17th century made light itself a subject. Caravaggio's raking shadows, developed in Rome around 1600, were taken up across Europe, and a dramatic, emotionally direct art, later called Baroque, spread from churches to royal courts. Peter Paul Rubens filled altarpieces and palace ceilings with surging bodies, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini made marble seem to melt and swirl in The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52). In Madrid, Diego Velázquez turned the court portrait into a puzzle about looking in Las Meninas (1656).
In the Dutch Republic, paintings hung in burghers' houses as well as town halls. Rembrandt van Rijn's The Night Watch (1642) set a civic guard company in motion, and Johannes Vermeer painted quiet rooms filled with daylight. Elsewhere, Shah Abbas rebuilt Isfahan around a vast square, the Mughals raised the Taj Mahal, Tawaraya Sōtatsu painted the wind and thunder gods on gold, and Bada Shanren developed his strange, spare ink paintings.
