Baroque & Dutch Golden Age

A simple way to tell the two periods apart: Renaissance painters tended to show the calm before an event, Baroque painters the event itself. Michelangelo's David stands still before the fight; Bernini's is caught mid-throw. The word itself began as an insult for fussy excess, and only in 1888 did the historian Heinrich Wölfflin rescue it.

In Catholic Europe, the Church wanted pictures that told their stories clearly and powerfully, and around 1600 Caravaggio answered with ordinary-looking models, painted from life and spotlit against the dark. That extreme contrast, called tenebrism, spread through his followers across Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. In The Calling of Saint Matthew, a single beam of light crosses the faces of the men at the tax collector's table. Rubens, who had fallen under Caravaggio's spell in Rome, painted altarpieces and court commissions with sweeping movement and colour.

In the Protestant Dutch Republic, Calvinism kept religious pictures out of churches, while a large new market for secular subjects grew up; one estimate puts Dutch output at over 1.3 million pictures in the twenty years after 1640. Most painters specialised in one genre, such as portraits, landscapes or still lifes. Rembrandt turned the Baroque light inward, into portraits, etchings and biblical scenes, and even he found history paintings hard to sell. The only common kind of really large Dutch picture was the group portrait, the tradition The Night Watch belongs to.