Late 16th-Century Painting in the Context of Reform: Titian, Tintoretto, El Greco, Barocci, Caravaggio

FAIN: FA-52795-06

Marcia Brown Hall
Temple University (Philadelphia, PA 19122-6003)

The splendid inventions of these five painters should be understood in the context of new demands of the Council of Trent, not just for didactic images, but for images that move the emotions of the viewer. The didactic has been the object of most of the scholarship on Post-Tridentine art, but it is the call for affective images that spurred the painters to expand their repertories of color, light, perspective, brushwork into unexplored terrain. The atmosphere of the last third of the 16th century, rather than curtailing their freedom, challenged these bold painters to pioneer what will be the territory of not just sacred art, but of secular and especially politically motivated art in succeeding centuries.