Baroque Paintings
Caravaggio's drama of light and shadow, and Velázquez's Las Meninas — the seventeenth century at its most theatrical.
7 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
Light against dark
Caravaggio arrived in Rome in the 1590s and changed European painting within a decade: ordinary models, no idealisation, and a single raking light that picks figures out of darkness. The manner, called tenebrism, spread through Naples, Spain and the Netherlands, and Rembrandt learned from it at second hand. Velázquez, court painter to Philip IV of Spain, took the same realism toward something cooler and stranger in Las Meninas of 1656.
The works in this collection
Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew, Supper at Emmaus, Judith Beheading Holofernes, Bacchus, the Medusa shield and the Basket of Fruit, which is often called the first Italian still life. Velázquez's Las Meninas.
On a dark wall
Caravaggio was made for dark rooms. The near-black grounds disappear into a charcoal, oxblood or deep green wall and the figures seem lit from within the frame. These prints are best in a dining room or study, hung singly, 16×24 or larger.