Florence and Venice

      Only a few painters have managed to find a place in art history from the operations of the other Italian art schools during the seventeenth century. In Florence, only Christofano Allori stood out among the large number of followers and this only with one work, with Judith with the Head of Holofernes (c. 1613). Legend has it that he painted this picture while embittered by the betrayal of a disloyal lover, more or less with his heart’s blood.

      Italian painting achieved a late blooming in Venice where the locally-born Giovanni Battista Tiepolo attached himself to the offerings of the classical school and soon sought to compete with both Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto. In this he was successful in his wall, altar and ceiling pictures in whose creation and execution he developed an imagination and force that are unique even in this period of the most florid decorative painting. He decorated churches and palaces with frescoes of religious, allegorical and mythological content and thus created various masterworks of unique decoration. His main work in Venice is the frescoes in a hall of the Palazzo Labia, with pictures from the history of Anthony and Cleopatra. At least in scope, and maybe also in beauty, it is outdone by the wall and ceiling pictures in the Residence Palace in Würzburg where, in the decoration of the Imperial Hall and the stairwell, (1750–1753) with a pompous characterization of the four parts of the world, he produced the most brilliant decorative painting of the eighteenth century on German soil.

      One of his contemporaries was Giovanni Antonio Canal, whose nickname “Canaletto” is taken from his views of the Venetian canals with their churches and palaces and who thus founded a particular genre of architectural painting. Canaletto was apprenticed to his father and first worked as a stage designer. After his journey to Rome (1719–1720) he changed to topographical pictures and painted many views of Venice. He spread this fast-growing new art over a large part of Europe as he was also active in Dresden, Munich, Vienna and Warsaw and painted “Perspectives” of these cities and their surroundings. These works were later continued by his nephew Bernardo Bellotto, also named Canaletto.

      Two other noteworthy Venetian painters of this time are Francesco Guardi, who was a pupil of the older Canaletto and who exclusively painted views of Venice in fine colouration, and Pietro Longhi, who was a portrait painter and narrator of folk life. Longhi was one of the freshest artists of the times as an observer of his fellow countrymen, full of humour and perspicacity. His genre pictures such as The happy Couple (about 1740), The Charlatan (1757), Lady at her Toilette (about 1760) and various others are witness to an astounding independence.

      2. Baroque in France

      35. Hyacinthe Rigaud, Portrait of Louis XIV, 1701.

      Oil on canvas, 277 × 194 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

      After the Renaissance, the arts, in France, had led a relatively untroubled existence up to the death of Henry IV. They attempted to mirror the growing might of the Kingdom in a mostly festive increase in magnificence whose means consisted of following a similar path to the Italian art of the Baroque. This period of new development began under Louis XIII. The development then reached its apex in the long seventy-year reign of Louis XIV, whose autocratic manner also forced art and artists under its rule. Eventually even great spirits bowed to his will and set their whole force to work, in the execution of which the will of the ruler was mightier and more important than their own. Many great works were created in the Louis XIV style.

      Architecture

      In French Architecture of the seventeenth century, a movement with a strict classicism developed that would become the ruling style in the further development of the work on the Louvre by Claude Perrault, who was originally a doctor and who trained himself to be an architect by theoretical studies. His main works as architect are the famous eastern and southern outer sides of the Louvre known as the Louvre Colonnade. Besides his activities as a doctor, Perrault was also a philologist and art theoretician. He translated Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture and published a system of column arrangement that was the standard for many years.

      However, an original French style of building was created by the most important architect of the seventeenth century, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who, already at almost 30 years of age, was named as Court Architect by the King and who combined the most effective decorative forms of the Baroque style with the structural strength of classicism. His main field of work was the Palace of Versailles with the Chapel and the Royal Chambers as well as in the park of the Large Trianon and the Orangerie. His most important artistic work is without doubt the 1708-completed Dôme des Invalides, whose cupola is a masterly combination of monumental impact with French elegance.

      36. Louis Le Vau, Vaux-le-Vicomte Castle, Façade, 1656–1661. Vaux-le-Vicomte.

      37. Charles Le Brun, Ceiling of the Galerie des Glaces, 1678–1684.

      Château de Versailles, Versailles.

      The main exponent of this corresponding style to the Italian Baroque was the painter and architect Charles Le Brun. In contrast to his predecessor François Mansart, who moved to strict classical forms according to the example of Palladio – this is seen above all in his two main works the Maison-sur-Seine and the church Val de Grace in Paris. Le Brun sought to heighten the effects of this Baroque style by all the means permitted by a monarch with unlimited power. As an architect he was superb, above all in the 73-metre long Galerie des Glaces of the Palace of Versailles in which the monumental was as completely combined with the decorative as with no other work of the period.

      Painting

      Perhaps portraits are really the best that French painting of the seventeenth century has left behind. Simon Vouet, an important representative of the French Baroque, was, at the movement’s inception, the classic example of this. Vouet was also a teacher of painting, and his most noteworthy student was undoubtedly Eustache Le Sueur.

      With the reward of having achieved the best of the contemporary art, the French portraitists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also have the merit of having given to the future the most important impressions for evaluating historically important personalities. Other well-known painters from the period of Louis XIV include Pierre Mignard, who painted the portrait of the niece of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, Maria Mancini; Nicolas de Largillière, who made a name for himself as a historical painter; and Hyacinthe Rigaud, who painted Louis XIV (1701) in his full majestic glory.

      38. Liberal Bruant and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Les Invalides, 1677–1706. Paris.

      39. Nicolas Poussin, The Empire of Flora, 1631.

      Oil on canvas, 131 × 181 cm.

      Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

      40. Nicolas Poussin, The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, 1628–1629.

      Oil on canvas, 320 × 186 cm. Pinacoteca, Vatican.

      41. Claude Gellée also known as Claude, Seascape with crying Heliades,

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