 We're going to be moving on to a slightly different topic now. We're going to be talking about Baroque. And it's really only a slightly different topic in so far as the distinction between Renaissance and Baroque is a fairly recent historical development. It's a 19th century development. When we talked about the Renaissance, we said that that was really one of the first periods to give itself a name. People in the Renaissance were feeling quite pleased with their own engagement with history and their ability to supersede the efforts of the people who came before them. And they came up with this great name for themselves, those who have been reborn, the Renaissance. Rinashita means rebirth. The people during the Baroque period considered themselves to be practitioners of the same agenda that the Renaissance was engaged in. They were using classical architecture, they were using classical typology, they were using the orders, they were playing with symmetry and balance, doing it in a much more concatenated manner. So much so that by the 18th century, people looking back at the work of this period said, this is weird looking. And they gave the word baroque, baroque, which is a word that means misshapen pearl. Kind of pretty, kind of shiny, kind of attractive, but something's wrong with it. It's like a misshapen pearl. Baroque has this burden to recover from. Architectural historian Christian Norberg-Schultz suggests that one of the big issues and one of the things that sets the baroque out from previous periods is this interest in systemization and that just everything gets systematized. The world was really changing quite rapidly at that time and changing not simply from an aesthetic point of view, but all aspects of culture were changing. This is an image of René Descartes, a famous French guy. You're probably familiar with some of his work. He was a great mathematician. You know the Cartesian coordinates and we'll come back to Descartes in a minute. But let's look at Johannes Kepler's model of the universe as a ground against which to measure Descartes. This is the great astronomer Kepler making a model of the universe and in spite of the fact that Kepler was able to make really, really accurate, accurate empirical measurements of the orbits of the planets and so forth showing him that these were elliptical. He would plot them as elliptical based on his observations. When he had to make a model, the model was in fact based on these platonic solids because even then Kepler bought into the idea that things that you perceive with your senses aren't exactly true. Paying too much attention to nature is not exactly true and that there are certain things that are authorized, things like geometry, things like squares, things like circles. Not all points, not all things in the world are equal. Some are defined like the sphere, like the cube, and some are just out there. And we see this again being celebrated in the idea of the Vitruvian man. Here's Cesare Amos, a little Vitruvian man. But with the advent of perspective, already the dominance of these kind of singular visions of what it is to have a geometrical construct are becoming challenged. In this drawing of the artist and the model, we have an idea that the space between the two of them is activated also. It's not sufficient to simply think of the model as a character out of space, out of the world, but the space between the eye of the viewer and the thing being viewed is challenged in a provocative way. I think ideas like perspective become provocations for people like Descartes. Trying to think about what is the way that you can mathematically describe the space in between things. Descartes comes up with this theory of vision, which is pretty interesting, where he imagines that in fact there are images behind your eye that are projected outwards and then back to you again. All of this has to do with some kind of dynamic translation through space of seeing. It's not just the object that holds the properties of the object, but it's the eye of the viewer that makes those objects become knowable or even gives character to the objects. I have to say I find these images from Descartes' treatise on geometry to be hilarious because it's all about the eye, it's all about seeing, and much of this stuff about the little brain noggins in the back is funny, but you have to say, was it really necessary, Rene, to show this woman's breasts when you were talking about her eye? And Rene would answer, I'm French. Yes, totally necessary. Had to do it. This is how we would draw the Cartesian coordinates of the y-axis and the x-axis, and we might even have a z-axis going vertically through that. This is Descartes' drawing, and it's a little bit of a mess. He had not yet figured out this perfect geometrical diagram, but what he had done was find a system of naming any point in space. Based on Euclidean geometry, the only things you could really name, the only things you could really define were the platonic solids. And suddenly Descartes comes up with a system that authorizes any point in space, gives mathematical provenance to any point in space, and that's pretty powerful. It provides a system to organize everything, instead of a nomenclature for discrete objects. And therein you see a real shift between a Baroque way of thinking and a Renaissance way of thinking. There's also something pretty interesting going on in the Cartesian coordinates, and also in Descartes' diagram, not simply in our math homework diagram. And that is this arrow zipping off. Where's that arrow going? Does anybody remember where the arrow in the Cartesian coordinates is going? Did anyone ever take middle school math, elementary school math? I don't know when you guys get this. What does the arrow suggest? Andrew, it looks like you know. Infinity, which is a new concept, right? The idea that something could be whooshing off to infinity. The idea that not all things are bounded, but that an axis could extend infinitely, is another kind of amazing discovery that pertains to the Baroque period. So space is systematized. If you think about classical mathematics, if you think about Euclidean geometry, it's all about discrete things. Here's my cube, here's my sphere, here's my tetrahedron. How do I relate those together? Oh, maybe I can find a ratio. But that ratio only gets me a relationship between a couple of things. Maybe two, maybe three. And then I'm out of luck. Something like Cartesian mathematics begins to give you a way of relating everything, because every point can be equally verifiable in the space of x, y, and z. And likewise, you have people like Newton and Leibniz thinking about physics, thinking about calculus, inventing calculus, and beginning to give you a way not simply to talk about things in space, but space itself. The idea of infinity, the idea of these axes whooshing off to space, is a powerful provocation. And it really begins to reshape, I think, the way people in the Baroque period conceptualize space. You know, you think about a Renaissance axis, where an axis is a thing that's terminated. You want an axis, I'll give you an axis, and I'll put an obelisk at the end. As we move further into the Baroque, particularly into the French Baroque, the idea of the axis often becomes this extensible shaft of space, frame of which is delimited, but the boundary of which is not set. So the idea of building infinity becomes attractive. Even things like statecraft become systematized. You have great countries coming together. In France at this time, you have Louis XIV, pulling together all the minor nobles and really beginning to establish a centralized state in a way that you hadn't seen it before. And certainly in the realm of architecture, urban space comes to the fore. That is to say, the issue is not so much individual buildings, the design of an individual building, but the engagement of that building in an urban fabric. And in that sense, the design of the city as a whole, the design of public space, not simply the design of private edifices. And so infrastructure and not simply roads and not simply squares, but also the rebuilding of aqueducts, the draining of swamps, the clearing of river canals. All of these things happened during the Baroque period. Things that are really distinctly modern in terms of the ability to use power, not simply for local interventions, but really to reshape things on a global scale. It can also be said that Baroque is the last great universal style. Maybe we'll shift this title to Rococo when we go a little bit further. What I mean by that is during the Baroque period, people felt pretty sure that there was just one way to make architecture. You could make it extremely well using the kit of parts of the Baroque or you could make it badly using the kit of parts of the Baroque. But there was no opportunity to say, I'm going to make the Gothic church. Or that Islamic architecture that I saw pictures of. I'm going to do some of that. Or I think I'll make Chinese architecture. This idea of eclecticism, that there is a myriad of possibility out there in terms of style, simply didn't exist. Nor did the idea that somebody would simply reach into their own imagination and come up with something exist. Architecture during the Baroque period was embedded in a tradition and extended that tradition. I guess the last point I want to make is this idea of synthesis. It's a theme that we've been using periodically throughout this course to talk about the movement of style. And I think we can use it to talk about Baroque. We talked about Gothic, for example, earlier on. And we noticed that Gothic was all about a kind of virtuoso play of space and light. So much so that a person inside of a Gothic space would feel no ability to engage this space rationally. But rather you can kind of get swept away emotionally by the power of the space. You become persuaded that something astonishing is happening and you can't quite figure it out. It's very persuasive. It's very rhetorical. It's very strong emotionally. While Renaissance space is very rational, very clear. And so you might say there's a synthesis going on in the Baroque between that strong emotive power of architecture that we saw in Gothic between this multimedia effect of light and color and material and the use of the orders and the use of classical typology and the use of proportion. So you put those things together and you get a little something like Baroque. Earlier we spoke about the sack of Rome in 1527. And if any of you are wondering what the sack of Rome was, it is not the souvenir bag that you get when you go to Rome. But a sack is a violent raid of a city. It's when you just trash the city. You burn things. You tear things down. And when that happened by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor coming down from the North, the Vatican began to feel itself a bit less powerful than it did in around 1500. And there was also a strong desire to reclaim some of the ground that had been lost. And the ground had been specifically lost to Protestantism which was rising in the North. It is associated with a counter-reformation which is a movement within the Catholic Church to stave off advances of Protestantism. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses on the wall of a church establishing Protestantism saying these are the things that we stand for. These are the things that you fail to do. In 1520, Luther appealed to German princes to attack the church ideologically and they came down and attacked it with swords and fire. Luther was condemned as a heretic but Luther didn't care because Luther was a Lutheran by that time. And so, why does he care what the Pope thinks? But think about Renaissance humanism. A lot of the stuff that we said about Renaissance humanism valorized reason. You walk into a church and you have your faculties of reason validated by the perfect geometry of the church by the clear articulation of mathematically determined modules or proportional systems. And so, by walking into a church, you as a sentient reasonable being can enter into a direct relationship with God. It becomes a contemplative act to reasonably untangle and contemplate the lineaments of a church. That's not so good if you want to have a really strong hierarchy for your church which is what the Catholic Church wanted to have. They wanted to have a really strong separation between the priests and the cleat. They wanted to be able to find an architecture that allowed that to happen and they looked back and said, well, it was going pretty well during the Gothic period. They didn't call it the Gothic period but during this time, this pre-Renaissance time, the church was powerful. A council was convened called the Council of Trent and this is Pope Paul III talking about the Council of Trent. And the Council of Trent had as its specific ambition the reformulation of church policies to try to gather its strength together, to try to combat encroachments from the Reformation. The Council of Trent is 1545 to 1563. That's just a couple of decades after the Sack of Rome. They're moving fast to re-establish their power. And one of the things that they do is they call everybody a heretic who's a Protestant which is a serious thing to hear. And they began to define ideas about what church building could entail. And one of the things that was prohibited was centralized church planning because the centralized church plan was too much of a diagram for rational humanist engagement with the divine. Plus centralized church planning so desired by everybody in the Renaissance was a bad plan type to celebrate the liturgy of Christianity. Another thing that happened at roughly that period is the pantheon of saints began to expand and the pantheon of saints began to take contemporary figures, these dynamic contemporary figures. And you also got the Inquisition. The Inquisition was a very good way of getting rid of heretics. Over here we see a very nice painting showing all the very religious cardinals establishing policy at the Council of Trent to break heretics in half on the rack which is what's going on over here. Some of these new saints that you got were people like Ignatius of Loyola. Probably many of you have gone to schools called St. Ignatius. Did anybody go there? There's a big one in Cleveland with that name. Okay. St. Ignatius was a dynamic preacher. He was a spreader of the faith. He sent off people from his order all over the place. Places like China even, India. He had these Jesuits, that was his order, going hither and yon. St. Ignatius himself had a method of contemplating the suffering of Christ which was to reenact the suffering of Christ. He would go into this almost state of trance and perform on himself flagulations or beatings or piercings so that he could personally enact in a bodily sense the sufferings that Christ had on the cross and when he was being persecuted. And that is rather different than contemplating the proportions of a Brunelleschi church. This idea that reason alone is not enough to have a strong engagement with religious experience. You need to use your entire body. You need to surrender reason and become just kind of feeling creature. These are some more splendid views of heretics. You can put heretics on the wheel until they break in half. You can hang them. You can burn them. And I can't quite see what's going on here but very religious people thought of these so these must be very good. There were a couple of other saints that were canonized. One was Santa Teresa of Avila and she had this very powerful religious vision that involved all of her senses. Another was San Filippo Neri. San Filippo Neri introduced music into the church service so that instead of simply hearing some guy preach in Latin suddenly they were singing and musical performances and again these things stir your senses in the same way that St. Ignatius and his spiritual exercises stir your senses and force you to contemplate the religious experience in a bodily sense. You can burn them and I can't quite see what's going on here but very religious people thought of these so these must be very good. So let's go back to this parsing of terms between Renaissance and Baroque. People like Heinrich Wolfland help Baroque reclaim legitimacy by establishing ground rules that it plays by that are slightly different than the ground rules that were aimed for during the Renaissance. Heinrich Wolfland. Wolfland. One of these German art historians and it's interesting these German art historians are almost all genetically connected to Hegel and by genetically I don't mean they are the children of Hegel but they're the intellectual children of Hegel. You can find this lineage of famous art historians that studied with Hegel that pretty much spin off to most of the famous art historians that at least up through 1950 were dominating the discipline. Wolfland wrote a book in 1888 called Renaissance and Baroque and then he wrote another book in around I think 1911, 1912 called Principles of Art History and the latter is a kind of clearer reflection on impulses that were described in the first one and particularly in Principles of Art History Wolfland finds five oppositional pairs of qualities that will allow you to understand the difference between Renaissance and Baroque and this notion of oppositional pairs shows you that he descends from Hegel. He's thinking about Renaissance to Baroque not simply as new stuff proliferating but that one thing arises dialectically in opposition to the other. You can begin to understand its relationship but its relationship is not simply bad version of Renaissance but something aiming at quite different things. Wolfland says a Renaissance quality is linear and a Baroque quality is painterly. We'll look at images of these but I'll just parse them for you a little bit. What linear has to do with line, right? That the primary way that the image is communicated is through line, through delineation as opposed to painterly. Painterly means fields of color, the tactility of paint, the gesture of the paintbrush all work to communicate that image and you might say, okay that's true about painting but how does that pertain to architecture? And I would say it has to do with the surface of the wall. If you think about a Quattrocento wall it would be flat as a pancake maybe articulated in little polychromatic panels but quite flat. Already when you begin to think about a say Michelangelo wall like the Laurentian Library there are different layers to it. When you get to a Baroque wall there'll be incredible plasticity of the wall niches carved out, columns topping out so that you get ambiguity about exactly where the surface is and the surface presents itself as a play of light and shade rather than simply a plane that you can name. The next thing that Mr. Woflin tells us we need to pay attention to is how space is constructed and Woflin begins by talking about painting but then he expands into a discussion of architecture. He talks about planar recession versus diagonal recession. Planar recession is basically one point perspective where things march back in a series of planes. Diagonal recession might be two or even three point perspective where there are multiple vanishing points. One point perspective of this planar recession really insists upon a single central focus in the composition whereas diagonal recession multiple vanishing points begins to open up the door for multiple centers of activity and a kind of diffuse world of things happening over the surface of the picture. Another thing he talks about is closed form versus open form and he expands that to speak about tectonic and atectonic in architecture. Closed and open we can kind of understand closed, all closed, open you spread your arms out and so forth and in architecture tectonic form might mean the system is closed so that you can understand the entire constructional system. Think of a temple. You see the pediment you see the columns. You understand exactly what's going on. When you get a tectonic form or an open form there might be some ambiguity exactly about where does the figure even end? How does it engage the city? The implication of how the figure is part of the city is not so clear as it is with these ideal centralized churches. It becomes scenographically engaged and its constructional system becomes ambiguous. Two more points and then we'll look at some examples. Unity to multiplicity. A lot of this has to do with what the one point perspective gives you versus the multiple vanishing point perspective. Unity gives you a single subject, a single center multiplicity gives you lots of stuff happening all over the place and lots of stuff might not simply be the image but it also might be different materials that get put into play or different color palettes. For example when we look at architecture we'll see that there are not simply these super positions of different things on the wall like columns, niches engaged columns, palasters but there's also a engagement of sculpture and kind of theatrical space planning and strange light and polychromatic material and painting so that all of these different art forms collaborate to give you your experience. Then from absolute clarity to relative clarity or obscurity and he's talking here specifically about painting but it also has to do with architecture and this ambiguous figure-ground relationship you begin to get when architecture is not conceived of as an object but as a scenographic piece of a city where all of this stuff unfolds spatially to the viewer. So I think these are great images as a kind of comparison. Your obvious comparison, right? Renaissance guy, thank God we have Renaissance guy here because Baroque guy kind of looks like a naked and I know you've all been wondering what does John Goodman look like naked and now you can kind of fulfill that dream of yours by looking at the painting by Rubens of Bacchus. But it illustrates our argument quite well that in terms of linear, well it's a drawing of course it's linear but even if it were a painting it could have this kind of dominant representation of the form through line. Plainer recession, we see things organized on the orthogonality of the plane, closed form well it depends on where he's standing everything is contained within the circle it's one thing and it's clear as clear can be. When we look at the John Goodman painting already the composition of the painting is complicated it's not planeer recession it is diagonal or in fact the whole thing is a kind of spiral it's an intricate tangle of figures and you might say okay this is the guy in the center but all the other people are participating in this so you have multiple foci you don't have your absolute clarity if this were a better image you would see the way Rubens handles paint and Rubens handles paint the way pastry chefs handle frosting he just slops it on from a distance it looks like it's nicely drawn but if you get really close to it it is just this mush there's a word called impasto which means paste and that's the materiality of paint and I love Rubens this is because I'm sophisticated you guys hate Rubens because he makes it's gross looking people but forget about the gross looking people and look at the quality of paint look at the quality of light look at the quality of composition Rubens is really fabulous and there's also something interesting even about John Goodman in his corporeal plenitude and that is Rubens is looking at nature Rubens is not hyper idealizing things there is an interest not just in perfection but in how things are in the world and he's looking at that he's taking care in terms of relative obscurity you might say the light in the Leonardo of course it's a drawing clearly shows us everything we need to know about the figure and in the Rubens there is this chiaroscuro which is a art history term meaning clear dark and that simply means the strong play of light and dark chiaroscuro so figures begin to be swallowed up into the background instead of being clearly revealed and clearly illuminated let's see how that plays out in architectural terms and here on the left we have San Carlo Alecuatro Fontane by Mr. Francesco Boromini and on the right we have the Pazzi Chapel by Filippo Brunelleschi and it couldn't be more different right we'll talk more about the Boromini later on but just in terms of what is a wall look at the façade of San Carlo Alecuatro Fontane and look at the wall in the Pazzi Chapel Pazzi Chapel as a reasonable human being I look at the wall of the Pazzi Chapel and I am confirmed in my own sense that I'm a smart person and that the world is knowable I see these nice modules I see these palasters giving me these really clear figures ooh half a circle ooh square things are great I come over to the Boromini and it is really ambiguous the wall itself is unstable it is not even a flat surface and out of this undulating wall little edicules etiol means a little building and a little pavilion a little edicule is popping out you know what is the wall what is the wall all about I see these stacked orders but inside the stacked orders I see a minor order and then I see niches carved and so the wall of the Boromini church really presents itself you might compare it almost to the structure of Baroque music like a fugue where you have counterpoint going on you get various themes and variations on themes being simultaneously played over one another to create these kind of complex and very rich patterns even in terms of planar recession versus diagonal recession this thing really emphasizes the orthogonal and the orthogonal really allows itself to be understood in terms of a series of planes this thing hasn't got an orthogonal line on it it is this kind of weird jelly bean of an ovalized cross and how does it sit in the city there is this corner that it kind of smooshes around here's the undulating facade and then it seems to peel away from that corner and then wrap so it's very ambiguous you have to kind of look at the thing obliquely in order to understand how it sits in the city even though you wouldn't think it's something like how you manipulate in a composition can also apply to architecture it really seems to be fairly effective in these two examples closed form perfect little thing done open form where does it end how does this thing engage the city multiplicity lots of stuff going on unity relative obscurity the play of shadow the chiaroscuro of the building absorbing its own figureality into light and shade absolute clarity got it let's take a little march through sculpture and here we have a couple of examples this is Donatello representing the Quatrocento this is Michelangelo representing the Cinquecento and this is Gian Lorenzo Bernini representing the Seicento the 1600s the 1600s is the period that the Italian Baroque you can see a number of things here but first let's look at these two guys the contrast between the Donatello and the David by Michelangelo is fairly marked Donatello's David is a real classical nude he's got the Contrapasto going on he's also got the unity of action going on he has completed his act he has killed Goliath his foot is at the head of Goliath and he is at a moment of repose contemplating the completed act perfect Michelangelo's David has got his sling over his shoulder and his rock in his hand there's incredible focus going on here he's about to complete the act if Donatello's David represents Quatrocento repose and completion and balance Michelangelo's David begins to represent a kind of Cinquecento manorist tension even though this is early Michelangelo he's been a manorist all the time and you can see some of that complete balance of proportion in terms of the size of the head and the size of the hands in the Donatello versus the deliberate disproportion of the David in the Michelangelo with giant head, giant hands and veins popping out as the tension is about to make his heart pump more blood through his body and make him more and more agitated now compare the Bernini to get a sense of how the Baroque transforms the project of the Renaissance compared to the Bernini Michelangelo's David is a pretty quiet guy a pretty calm guy his focus is inward the tension that Michelangelo's David gives you is an internalized tension a psychological tension when you look at the Bernini David he's in the act of throwing the rock this is as tense and as dramatic as it can be it's almost narrative it's telling the story so dramatically and look at the expression on the face of this David again it's like twisting up his face forgetting about his beauty and being way more interested in the hurling of the rock to kill the giant and let me also say a word about virtuosity because Bernini is amazing this is the sling and it's made of stone and how is that possible we know that stone is bad in tension we know that we can barely make a beam out of stone and here is Bernini making a sling out of stone or making the hair whipped up by the wind or the cloth, likewise unfurling in the act of twisting and in terms of open versus closed form I think it's instructive to look at these two guys fairly fairly contained column of a man twisting in space with a little contrapasto this guy has his arms going in one direction his legs going in another direction he is like a little whirligig of a guy twisting in space it's impossible to look at him from one vantage point around him and the whole space becomes activated here's another Bernini also fabulous and this is the Apollo and Daphne Daphne was a wood nymph Apollo was one of the Olympian gods and Apollo thought Daphne was cute and the way Apollo would show his affection if he thought somebody was cute was to rape them and so here he goes trying to get Daphne but as a wood nymph Daphne is protected by Diana and the Virgin goddess so she implores Diana please save me from this brute and at the moment that Apollo is about to seize her Diana turns her into a tree so you see these amazing moments here of her fingers sprouting leaves or her feet her toes sprouting roots and look at how the hair just gets flown up into space very dramatic as possible figures turning in space open form multiple foci fabulous Bernini like many of these characters doesn't simply do sculpture he also does architecture and does it at a rather sophisticated level this complex I think shows off all of these skills and also exemplifies the sensibility that we're talking about it is a church in Rome called Santa Maria della Vittoria and there is a little chapel called the Cornaro Chapel the Cornaros were the donors the wealthy family that paid for the chapel hence their name and the subject is the ecstasy of Santa Teresa and Santa Teresa is one of these new Baroque saints canonized because the energy and drama of their particular religious experience seemed sympathetic with the aspirations of the Council of Trent here it is well first of all what is it and the answer is Bernini is not simply a statue here but he's designing the Edecul this little chamber that the statue sits in and he's also designing this chapel that the Edecul sits in and he's also designing the walls of the chapel and he's also organizing the light source he didn't do the painting on the ceiling but he could have all of these elements work together to represent this moment where Santa Teresa has her holy vision and Santa Teresa's holy vision and as she's dreaming an angel appears to her and the angel has a bright flaming sword and penetrates her with the flaming sword and she feels elevated into heaven so you have very racy expressions on Santa Teresa's face as she's having this vision and again virtuoso sculpture virtuoso use of stone here you can kind of see what's going on it's like Santa Teresa is floating and she organizes it in such a way that shade rakes beneath her and you get a sense that she's being elevated off the ground and he also puts these metal rods here so that golden light let's say light from a hidden light source comes down and bathes her in light so that you can kind of see the light from the flaming sword of the angel that makes possible her fabulous vision but you don't simply have Santa Teresa in the angel that would be way too easy even though it's a fabulous sculpture or orchestration of different colored stones different media of sculpture and architecture and lighting you also have the inclusion of the donors in the space for example over here we can begin to see things that look almost like little opera boxes and on both sides of the space he's put the donors like spectators in a theater watching Santa Teresa have her holy vision we've seen donors included in works of art before we've seen Federico da Montefeltro in front of the Brera Madonna and the donors in front of the Trinita and usually they're kind of passive they're there to have some connection to the image but not to cheer it on but here that's exactly what's going on and the fact that the donors are included in the picture begins to make you think well this whole space in front is the space of the theater this whole space is the space of the theater donors on both sides and when you are in that space you are also part of the composition the viewer becomes implicated in the space of the work and it is no longer a passive relationship of subject and object but the viewer becomes part of the work of art and that's what Baroque does Baroque makes things theatrical Baroque makes connections between things Baroque finds a system of relationships to tie things together here's Caravaggio and I'm showing you Caravaggio just to give you another sense of this naturalism that we already observe it is not the ideal type that gets represented again and again but it's a kind of close observation of phenomena in the world Caravaggio was too poor to hire a model and he liked to drink so this gives him two problems one he has jaundice and two which makes his skin yellow and two he's doing a self-portrait of Bacchus and so he's kind of giving you the jaundice and the farmer tan he's not giving you this kind of perfect body he's a little yellowish drunk great painting or here Caravaggio doing doubting Thomas where Thomas is sticking his finger into the wound of the resurrected Christ and it is gory it's not a symbol of sticking a finger into a wound of Christ but it has anatomically accurate about what it is to pierce the flesh of a person and Caravaggio uses light with this extreme chiaroscuro where you see the figures barely emerging from the background and the light therefore becomes another participant in the composition in the same way that the light source the hidden light source of Bernini's Santa Teresa became a contributor to the painting and there are occasionally these great battles between Baroque figures one battle we will see will be Boromini versus Bernini we'll go into that at length the next time but in the world of painting the big battle is Caravaggio versus the Caracci particularly Anniba de Caracci both Bernini and Caracci are these incredibly courtly polite charming individuals so they get the big commissions and both Caravaggio and Boromini are just so into their art that they can barely talk to people they both murdered someone just couldn't reign it in you know you gotta do that sometimes and so you see the difference in their composition this marriage of the gods in the Farnese Palace in that big Piano nobile room in the Farnese Palace is a spectacular work of art but it's fairly conventional in terms of the way it organizes its subject better and even in the way it organizes its space as opposed to this the crucifixion of Saint Peter by Caravaggio where again we get this strong chiaroscuro this amazing diagonal recession and this sense that you're watching something in the moment that it's happening the upside down cross on which Saint Peter was crucified is about to be planted in the ground Saint Peter is rising up incredibly dynamic fabulous and here is the Caracci hate him so they're very good what am I saying