Baroque Meets Bold: How to Channel 17th Century Drama in Modern Art

Caravaggio | The Entombment of Christ | Vatican Museum, Rome

Do you know why the 17th-century Baroque art survived the test of time? 

Contemporary artists redefine form and material by exploring the word anew while many have borrowed a strong visual language from the 17th century art - the Baroque.

Known for its theatricality, intense richness, and deep emotional resonance, Baroque art has found a unique place within today's bold and experimental world. 

This blog examines what contemporary creators are doing with the splendor of Baroque painting in modern art styles and what it means for both artists and viewers alike.

The Timeless Appeal of Baroque Art

Beginning in the early 1600s, Baroque art techniques emerged as a reaction to the religious reformations and the great emotional catharsis resulting from cultural upheaval.

Artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Rubens set out to immerse the art-lovers in powerful storytelling and mastery of light and shadow, creating dramatic settings full of movement, tension, and deep emotions. 

Baroque paintings were rich with symbols and ornamentation, offering an experience to the visual senses, which is still true today.

Modern artists are captivated by Baroque emotions, drama, and theatricality. In these digital days of declining attention spans and an overwhelming trend toward minimalism, Baroque sets itself apart from other art practices:

It is breathtakingly dramatic and hard to ignore yet rewarding. Its opulence rebuffs simplicity in favor of contemporary trends, making this style all the more attractive for the audacious artist.

Baroque Contemporary Painting

Chiaroscuro: The Language of Light and Shadow

Chiaroscuro is one of the best-known characteristics of Baroque painting. This technique brings about volume, drama, and focus through large contrasts between light and dark. Caravaggio was especially adept in this technique because he could direct one's view very well and increase emotional impact. 

Chiaroscuro possesses vast reinterpretations in modern bold art. Many photographers, digital artists, and painters have adapted this dramatic enlivening of shadow and light to express intensity and depth. In all its shapes - whether black-and-white portraits, ethereal digital art, or layer upon layer of mixed media - chiaroscuro is still high-impact storytelling in contemporary art.

Baroque | Chiaroscuro and Tapestry of Drama

Bringing Movement and Emotion into Modern Art

Baroque compositions, generally, are not still. Figures are always caught in motion-gesturing, reaching out towards something, twisting to look at a third thing, accompanied by their clothes and hair blowing about by an unseen wind which suggests more immediacy and emotionality to the scene, thus inviting us into a moment of high drama.

The kind of motion that was used to infuse styles of expression in baroque art has been borrowed by today's artists.

Through broad sweeping brushstrokes, bold perspectives, robust compositions, and energy likened to the Baroque intensity, the works of contemporary creators are transformed by personal or political themes. This turns immobile images into active, emotionally violent encounters that resonate with the modern viewers.

Las Meninas | Diego Velazquez

Bold Colors, Symbolism, and Storytelling

Vivid color and symbolic storytelling are some other hallmarks of Baroque art. Artists such as Rubens, for example, used colors such as bloody reds, golds, and deep blues to not only create visual opulence but also layer the compositions with religious symbolism. Indeed, every object in a Baroque painting had meaning, and nothing was accidental.

Modern artists have, however, taken up this harnessing of symbolic richness differently. They may not be evoking myths but rather contemporary issues such as "mental health" or "identity politics."

The idea of embedding meaning within visual elements remains. Most of these artists would make "statements" or "evoke feelings" through such bold, expressive color palettes and symbolic motifs.

In doing so, they carry forward the Baroque tradition of layered narrative and emotional complexity, reinterpretations through a contemporary lens.

Celebration of Style and Color | 17th Century Baroque

Fusing Classic Techniques with Modern Styles

Works of art, paintings especially, are most exciting when easily settled into the old-new dichotomy in the art world today: hyper-realistic oil paintings with all the drama of light, to digital illustrations where themes or even actual figures are loud and proud modern but subtly inspired by or visually referenced classical composition.

The skills form the foundation of Baroque: an artist's experimentation with materials, forms, and media. Consider, for instance, a digital artwork showing chiaroscuro lighting and a classical pose of the subject dressed in streetwear or a futuristic environment. 

A sculptor would use marble most traditionally to create figures communicating an up-to-date notion of gender and technology. These courageous juxtapositions allow artists to honor the tradition while simultaneously breaking its barriers.

Contemporary Artists Inspired by Baroque Drama

Several contemporary artists have applied Baroque elements to their practice, resulting in works that, while historically embedded, remain undoubtedly modern. 

Kehinde Wiley is probably the most recognized in this regard, placing modern Black figures literally into settings ornamented in masterful, Baroque style, rich pattern, and regal pose. Indeed, his use of color, posture, and detail strikes toward Baroque grandeur and also proves powerfully cultural.

The romantic flow of Ruben comes again as large-scale portraits by Jenny Saville, as well as the busy, layered narratives, flowing compositions by James Jean, which reflect the cool, dexterous narrative of the 17th-century masters.

All these remind us that the visual vocabulary of Baroque-encompassed emotion, drama, movement, and symbolism-is ageless and easily adaptable.

High Drama and High Contrast | Finding the Baroque in Contemporary Art

Why Baroque Still Matters in the Contemporary Art World

Baroque art is the art of the impact: the glaring, the shocking, the proud, and rightly so. In a day when artists required ways to stand out in a crowd of hyper-visuality, the Baroque offered audacious techniques and clarity of emotion.  

More than this, today's viewers demand meaning - they want art with a narrative that relates to something larger than being just pretty. By using themes and techniques from the Baroque in their works, artists can create pieces that are aesthetically pleasing and spiritually powerful.

How to Incorporate Baroque Energy into Your Art

Now, learn all the digits and demigods of modern painting who breathe Baroque air into the work and study their studies closely. 

Who turned off the lights? Study the shadows, shapes, forms, emotions, and underlying meanings - they will probably be more than enough for your approach.

Then try for yourself, adding even an element of chiaroscuro to your digital art; implement it in expressive body language or narrative underlying your painting; marry sophisticated materials, or bright colors to modern themes like floating organisms. Heads and tails; not copying Baroque art, but getting inspired more so! 

Kehinde Wiley | Modern Take on Baroque Art

TERAVARNA’s Platform for Bold, Dramatic Art

At TERAVARNA art gallery, art is about breaking the bounds - be it a personal emotive portrait, an abstract symbolic-sprawl, or one of those dramatic pieces that combine different city fixtures into a mixed-media collage. 

If your work oozes history and reinterprets it in a bold modern manner, you should come and check out our international open competitions and exhibitions in art. It celebrates those who bring together history and modernity.

For us, magic happens on the canvas when bold meets Baroque.