Caravaggio
The Space: Everything is So Close to Us
In so many of Caravaggio’s paintings, and Baroque art in general, everything is located very much in the foreground of the painting, very close to us in fact. Look at Christ’s body in the Entombment above — its so close we feel like we can touch it. And look at the ledge of the tomb, it is foreshortened and so it juts out into our space. The elbow of the figure carrying Christ’s legs is foreshortened too and so it pops into our space. The same is true of the cross in the the Crucifixion of St. Peter — it is foreshortened and protrudes into our space — as does the rear and feet of the figure raising the cross. Caravaggio organized the composition so that it looks like the body of Christ is being lowered right into our space, as though we were standing in the tomb! Remember: one of the most important goals of Baroque art is to involve the viewer, and one way to do that is by breaking down of the barrier between our space and the space of the painting. Baroque artists often used foreshortening to achieve this effect.
The Composition: Diagonals
Baroque artists were interested, as we’ve seen, in movement. In the Entombment, see the moment when Christ is being lowered into his tomb. Its a process happening before our eyes, so we have a caught moment in time. We see that the figures form a diagonal line — another very common feature of Baroque art. In the High Renaissance, we saw compositions in the shape of a pyramid — a very stable shape. Here in Baroque art, we see diagonals, or sometimes interlocking diagonals in the shape of an X (this is perhaps most obvious in the Crucifixion of St. Peter)
