Baroque sculpture
In Baroque sculpture, groups of figures assumed new importance, and there was a dynamic movement and energy of human forms—they spiralled around an empty central vortex, or reached outwards into the surrounding space.
Flemish sculptors would play a prominent role in spreading the Baroque idiom abroad including in the Dutch Republic, Italy, England, Sweden and France.
The Council of Trent (1545–1563) gave the Pope greater powers to guide artistic creation, and expressed a strong disapproval of the doctrines of humanism, which had been central to the arts during the Renaissance.
[9] Other notable Italian Baroque sculptors included Alessandro Algardi (1598–1654), whose first major commission was the tomb of Pope Leo XI in the Vatican.
The fountain also contained allegorical works by other prominent Italian Baroque sculptors, including Filippo della Valle Pietro Bracci, and Giovanni Grossi.
[13] In the early part of the Baroque period, French sculptors, like Pierre de Francqueville, were largely influenced by artists from Flanders and the Netherlands, particularly the Mannerism of Giambologna.
But the sculptors Simon Guillain (1581-1658) and Jacques Sarrazin (1592–1660) spent part of their training in Italy when the baroque style was gaining popularity, before returning to France.
These included Pierre Puget, who was active in Italy before working for Louis XIV, Jacques Sarazin, François Girardon, who created the large Apollo served by nymphs marble group for Versailles gardens in 1666, Jean-Baptiste Tuby, Antoine Coysevox, who made several bust portraits and equestrian statues of Louis XIV and Nicolas Coustou.
[15] Some important French sculptors were mainly active in Italy, especially in Rome, like Nicolas Cordier in the early 1600s, and later in the century Pierre Le Gros the Younger and Pierre-Etienne Monnot, who adopted a more berninian style.
In the later years of the Baroque era, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714-1785) and Jean Baptiste Lemoyne (1704–1778), Director of the French Academy in Rome, were considered the finest rococo sculptors, along Robert Le Lorrain, Michel-Ange Slodtz, Lambert Sigisbert Adam, Étienne Maurice Falconet and Clodion.
[16] The Southern Netherlands, which remained under Spanish, Roman Catholic rule, played an important role in spreading Baroque sculpture in Northern Europe.
His more elaborate Baroque style closer to that of the Classicism of Bernini was spread in the Southern Netherlands through his brother Jerôme Duquesnoy (II) and other Flemish artists who studied in his workshop in Rome such as Rombaut Pauwels and possibly Artus Quellinus the Elder.
In particular, the workshops of Quellinus, Jan and Robrecht Colyn de Nole, Jan and Cornelis van Mildert, Hubrecht and Norbert van den Eynde, Peter I, Peter II and Hendrik Frans Verbrugghen, Willem and Willem Ignatius Kerricx, Pieter Scheemaeckers and Lodewijk Willemsens produced a wide range of sculpture including church furniture, funeral monuments and small-scale sculpture executed in ivory and durable woods such as boxwood.
The tomb was sculpted of marble, originally black but now white, with bronze statues representing William the Silent, Glory at his feet, and the four Cardinal Virtues at the corners.
[23] Pupils and assistants of the Flemish sculptor Artus Quellinus the Elder who from 1650 onwards worked for fifteen years on the new city hall in Amsterdam played an important role in the spread of Baroque sculpture in the Dutch Republic.
For instance the Dutch sculptor Johannes Ebbelaer (c. 1666-1706) likely received training from Rombout Verhulst, Pieter Xavery and Francis van Bossuit.
Like the Dutch sculptors, he also adapted the use of contrasting black and white marble in the funeral monuments, carefully detailed drapery, and made faces and a hands with a remarkable naturalism and realism.
[28] In the second half of the 18th century, the Anglo-Dutch sculptor and wood carver Grinling Gibbons (1648 – 1721), who had likely trained in the Dutch Republic created important Baroque sculptures in England, including Windsor Castle and Hampton Court Palace, St. Paul's Cathedral and other London churches.
[31] In the 18th century, the Baroque style would be continued by a new influx of continental artists, including the Flemish sculptors Peter Scheemakers, Laurent Delvaux and John Michael Rysbrack and the Frenchman Louis François Roubiliac (1707–1767).
Lady Elizabeth had died tragically of a false childbirth provoked by a stroke of lightning in 1731, and the funeral monument captured with great realism the pathos of her death.
They included Hubert Gerhard (1550–1622) from Amsterdam, a student of Giambologna, who was commissioned by the German banker Hans Fugger to make a monumental fountain for his castle at Kirchheim.
Gerhard was soon commissioned to make an Italian-Baroque style fountain for the town square in Augsburg, and a statue of St. Michael slaying a dragon for the prince's residence in Munich.
[36] One of the most unusual German sculptors in the late Baroque was Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, who was known both for religious sculpture and for a series of sculpted portraits portraying extreme expressions.
[citation needed] The emergence of the Baroque style in Spain, as in Italy, was largely driven by the Catholic Church, which used it during the Counter-Reformation as a powerful weapon against the Protestants.
[39] The crowning of the French Philip V the grandson of Louis XIV, as King of Spain, and the debut Bourbon Dynasty at the beginning of the 18th century brought a dramatic change in cultural policy, and to the style.
[40] His success enabled him to create a large workshop with many assistants, and to make very large-scale works, most notably the retable of the Cathedral of Plasencia made between 1625 and 1632, considered one of the high points of Spanish art in the first half of the 17th century.
The most important sculptor of the early Seville school was Juan Martínez Montañés (1568–1649), whose works portrayed balance and harmony, with a minimum of violence and blood.
[citation needed] The earliest Baroque sculptor and architect to work in Latin America was Pedro de Noguera (1580-), who was born in Barcelona and apprenticed in Seville.
In 1619 he moved to the Viceroyalty of Peru, where, with Martín Alonso de Mesa, he sculpted the Baroque choir stalls of the Cathedral Basilica of Lima (1619-).
The Baroque style of sculpture was transported to other parts of Latin America by Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in the 18th century, who commissioned local artists.
