50 Fun Facts About Baroque Art

What did the hot-tempered painter Caravaggio do in May 1606 that forced him to flee Rome as a fugitive?

Caravaggio killed a man, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a brawl and was sentenced to death. He spent the final four years of his life on the run, still turning out masterpieces.

The soaring dome that visitors see inside Rome's church of Sant'Ignazio is really what, made by Andrea Pozzo in 1685?

A flat painting on canvas fills the spot where the planned dome was never built. A marker in the floor shows visitors where to stand for the trick to work.

Dutch forger Han van Meegeren became a folk hero for selling a fake Vermeer to which Nazi leader?

Hermann Göring traded 137 looted paintings for the forgery. Van Meegeren's confession that he had faked it cleared him of selling a Dutch national treasure to the enemy.

The word baroque is often traced to the Portuguese barroco, a jeweller's term for an irregular what?

Pearl is the root: a lumpy, imperfectly round one was called baroque, and critics later borrowed the word for art they found bizarre and overdone.

In Bernini's marble Apollo and Daphne, the fleeing nymph is caught at the moment she turns into what?

A laurel tree is what Daphne becomes to escape the god, and Bernini shows twigs and leaves already springing from her hands, just as Ovid's Metamorphoses describes.

Rembrandt's huge 1642 canvas The Night Watch is a group portrait of what kind of Amsterdam organisation?

A civic militia company paid for the picture, and it is not a night scene at all. Dark varnish, removed only in the 1940s, gave it the famous nickname.

Which Flemish Baroque portrait painter gave his name to a style of goatee worn with a moustache?

Anthony van Dyck wore the style himself and painted it on many sitters, including England's King Charles I. The beard is sometimes called a Charlie for that reason.

In Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, where do Spain's king and queen appear as the painter works in the palace?

In a mirror on the back wall, the royal couple show up only as a small reflection, which seems to put them exactly where the viewer of the painting stands.

Outside Rome's Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a Bernini-designed statue of which animal carries an Egyptian obelisk?

An elephant bears the obelisk because, as the Latin inscription puts it, it takes a robust mind to carry solid wisdom. The monument was unveiled in 1667.

In 1914 Velázquez's Rokeby Venus was slashed with a meat cleaver in London by a campaigner for which cause?

Women's suffrage campaigner Mary Richardson cut the canvas seven times in protest at the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the day before. The painting was soon restored.

Bernini's marble group in Rome's Cornaro Chapel shows an angel with a golden spear standing over which swooning saint?

Teresa of Ávila described the vision in her autobiography, and Bernini staged it like theatre: carved members of the Cornaro family watch from boxes at the sides.

Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers, crowned by a tall obelisk, stands in the middle of which Roman square?

Piazza Navona's fountain has river gods for the Nile, Danube, Ganges and Río de la Plata. The Nile hides his head under a cloth because nobody then knew where the river began.

Which Italian art term names the bold contrast of light and shadow that Caravaggio made a hallmark of Baroque painting?

Chiaroscuro literally means light-dark. Caravaggio pushed it so far that violent contrast became the main device of the picture, a style known as tenebrism.

Which Baroque painter of Judith Slaying Holofernes was the first woman admitted to Florence's academy of art?

Artemisia Gentileschi built an international clientele at a time when few women could train as artists, and nearly all her known paintings give women the leading role.

Johannes Vermeer lived out his whole life in which Dutch city, the subject of his best-known cityscape?

Delft was home for Vermeer's whole career, and nearly all his pictures seem to be set in two small rooms of his house there.

Which Madrid museum is home to Las Meninas, the 1656 royal group portrait by Diego Velázquez?

Museo del Prado has held the painting since the museum was founded in 1819. Much of its collection was first assembled by Velázquez himself, as keeper of the royal pictures.

Which palace did Louis XIV grow from his father's hunting lodge into the grandest showpiece of French Baroque style?

Versailles took off after Louis XIV saw his finance minister's dazzling château at Vaux-le-Vicomte in 1661. He jailed the minister and recruited the same architect, gardener and painter.

Which lighter, more playful style emerged in 1730s France and is often regarded as the Baroque's final phase?

Rococo swapped the Baroque's heavy forms and strict symmetry for lighter, asymmetrical designs, and began as a reaction against the grand style of Louis XIV.

Which Roman landmark designed by Nicola Salvi, with Oceanus riding a shell chariot at its centre, was finished in 1762?

Trevi Fountain is the largest Baroque fountain in Rome. Salvi got the job only after Romans protested that a Florentine had beaten him in the design contest.

The painter born Michelangelo Merisi is known to history as Caravaggio, a name taken from what?

A town near Milan called Caravaggio was his family's home, where his father served the local marquess. The family moved back there in 1576 to escape a plague in the city.

Bronze for Bernini's altar canopy in St. Peter's was popularly said to be stripped from which ancient Roman building?

The Pantheon lost its portico bronze under the Barberini pope, inspiring the jibe that the Barberini did what the barbarians had not. Papal accounts say most of it actually became cannon.

Bernini said the curving colonnades he designed for St. Peter's Square were the motherly what of the Church?

Arms was Bernini's own image: the two colonnades, each four columns deep, reach out from the basilica to gather in the crowds arriving at the square.

Which great rival of Bernini designed the rippling façade of Rome's small church San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane?

Francesco Borromini offered to design it free of charge to launch his solo career. Melancholic and quick-tempered, he walked away from several other jobs.

After fleeing Rome, Caravaggio was briefly made a knight of the military order based on which Mediterranean island?

Malta made him official painter to the Knights of Saint John, but in 1608 he was jailed after a brawl that left another knight badly wounded, escaped, and was expelled.

Whose face did Caravaggio give the giant's severed head in his late painting David with the Head of Goliath?

His own face appears on Goliath's severed head, while David looks down at it pensive and resigned instead of jubilant.

Besides painting, Peter Paul Rubens earned knighthoods from the kings of Spain and England for his work as what?

A diplomat as well as a painter, Rubens shuttled between the courts of Spain and England on peace missions and gave England's king an allegory of peace as a gift.

The adjective Rubenesque, coined from the Flemish Baroque painter Rubens, describes women with what kind of figure?

Full and curvy women were the ones Rubens loved to paint. His young second wife, Helena Fourment, inspired the voluptuous figures in many of his 1630s pictures.

Which widowed queen of France commissioned Rubens to paint a cycle of twenty-four canvases for her Paris palace?

Marie de' Medici wanted her own life story on the walls of the Luxembourg Palace, so Rubens turned even her quarrel with her son Louis XIII into flattering allegory.

Rubens's huge triptych The Elevation of the Cross hangs in the cathedral of which Belgian city?

Antwerp lost the triptych in 1794, when French armies carried it off to Paris. It came home in 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Rembrandt made his name in Amsterdam in 1632 with a group portrait of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp teaching which subject?

Anatomy lessons were public events with an entrance fee, and Amsterdam's surgeons were allowed only one public dissection a year, on the body of an executed criminal.

For some 200 years the paintings of Judith Leyster were credited to which Dutch portraitist she had once sued?

Frans Hals had taken on an apprentice who left her workshop without the guild's permission, which is why she sued. Scholars began crediting Leyster's works to her only in 1893.

The Dutch proverb about a household of Jan Steen, drawn from the Baroque painter's scenes, describes what kind of home?

Messy and chaotic rooms full of drink and misbehaving children were Steen's speciality. He knew the scene well: his family were brewers, and he later opened a tavern himself.

Which genre of Dutch Baroque still life uses skulls and other symbols to stress the shortness of life?

Vanitas comes from the Latin for vanity. Painters filled these pictures with short-lived things to warn that ambition and worldly pleasure all end in the certainty of death.

Vermeer's costly ultramarine blue was made by grinding which semi-precious stone into a fine powder?

Lapis lazuli made a blue so expensive that painters often saved it for the Virgin Mary's robes. Vermeer used it lavishly, even as an underpaint.

In Vermeer's most famous painting, kept at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, what does the girl wear on her head?

A turban gave the picture its earlier title, Girl with a Turban. It is a tronie, a Dutch study of a head in exotic dress, and was never meant as a portrait.

Rembrandt's international fame rested largely on his work in which printmaking technique, taken up in 1626?

Etching spread his name abroad because the prints circulated so widely. He made just under 300 of them, about as many as his surviving paintings.

Rembrandt's only seascape and a Vermeer were among thirteen works stolen in 1990 from a museum in which US city?

Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum let in two thieves posing as policemen, who tied up the guards and looted the galleries for about an hour.

Diego Velázquez was the leading artist at the court of which seventeenth-century king of Spain?

Philip IV wanted to knight his favourite painter, but even a king had to wait while a commission investigated whether Velázquez's family was noble enough.

Which pope is said to have exclaimed that Velázquez's unflinching 1650 portrait of him was too true?

Innocent X reportedly asked for proof of the painter's skill before agreeing to sit. His family kept the portrait, and it hangs in their Roman gallery, the Doria Pamphilj.

Which twentieth-century artist painted a series of 58 variations on Velázquez's Las Meninas in 1957?

Pablo Picasso treated the series as a single work and gave all of it to the Barcelona museum that bears his name, where it has stayed together.

Which Seville painter is best known for religious works yet also painted street urchins, beggars and flower girls?

Bartolomé Murillo's lively pictures of poor children are an extensive record of everyday life in his time. The first, The Young Beggar, shows the influence of Velázquez.

Which French Baroque painter spent most of his working life in Rome, quitting a post as the king's First Painter?

Nicolas Poussin lasted little more than a year at the French court. Fed up with the workload and the intrigues, he went back to Rome for good.

French painter Georges de La Tour is best known for hushed religious night scenes lit by what?

A candle lights most of his night scenes. Forgotten soon after his death, La Tour was rediscovered only in 1915, and some of his pictures had been mistaken for Vermeers.

Which architect designed London's domed St Paul's Cathedral in the English Baroque style after the Great Fire of 1666?

Christopher Wren also rebuilt more than 50 City churches lost in the fire. He had proposed remodelling the old cathedral just months before it burned.

Which German city is home to the Zwinger, a Baroque palace complex built for Augustus the Strong of Saxony?

Dresden's Zwinger was designed by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann. The city's Baroque Frauenkirche, destroyed in the Second World War, was rebuilt between 1994 and 2005.

Which gathering of Catholic bishops, ended in 1563, declared that art should move worshippers directly and emotionally?

Council of Trent decrees answered the Protestant Reformation, and the Church then encouraged a lavish style aimed at ordinary churchgoers instead of intellectuals.

The Carracci, two brothers and their cousin, founded one of Italy's first art academies in 1582 in which city?

Bologna's academy took a name meaning those who are making progress. Its founders, Agostino, Annibale and Ludovico Carracci, taught pupils to blend the best of earlier masters.

The Italian Baroque painter Guercino, a farmer's son from Cento, got his nickname from which physical trait?

His squint earned him the name as a boy, but it never slowed him down: Guercino finished no fewer than 106 large altarpieces for churches.

Caravaggio's lost The Taking of Christ was recognised in 1990 hanging in a Jesuit dining room in which city?

Dublin's Jesuits were given the picture in the 1930s and took it for a copy by one of Caravaggio's Dutch followers, until a conservator from Ireland's national gallery looked closer.

Neapolitan Baroque painter Luca Giordano earned the nickname Luca fa presto for doing what?

Painting quickly was his trademark and also earned him the nickname The Thunderbolt, while his knack for imitating other painters made him The Proteus.