Secrets of Baroque Art — The Inner Movement Curve

A beautiful, little-known quality hidden within works from this period.

For over ten years I’ve been a passionate student of baroque art, and a very perceptive teacher helped put me on to a beautiful, little-known quality hidden within works from this period.

Baroque paintings and sculptures are an amazing blend of realism and abstraction. They tend to be rendered with a dazzling realism, yet the poses of figures exhibit a high degree of artifice; they are composed and stylized, hardly mimicking the way we realistically move in day to day life.

The best Baroque paintings are like a grand ballet, with each figure moving in perfect relation to the next. When closely studied, the movements of figures in paintings such as the Mari de’ Medici Cycle by Peter Paul Rubens in the Louvre museum in Paris are both logical and yet highly surprising, almost eliciting a giddy joy about how unanticipated and daring they seem.

A bit of context…

Rubens and his prolific workshop painted this cycle of 24 monumental paintings in the early 1620’s on commission, to celebrate the life of France’s Queen Mari de’ Medici. His fertile imagination elaborated Mari’s rather prosaic aristocratic life into a world where Greek Gods came thundering down from the heavens to intervene with the affairs of humankind, with dramatic scenes exhibiting life-size angelic figures, heroically nude gods and goddesses extending themselves into the real world of historical people such as Mari and her late husband Henri IV, King of France.

The Meeting of Mari de’ Medici and Henry IV at Lyon, from the Medici Cycle

The oil paintings themselves are massive, ranging from thirteen feet by ten feet all the way to two which are twenty-three feet long. They are exhibited in a special room in the Louvre designed specifically for them, displayed side-by-side in a gallery that surrounds you like an amphitheater.

It is in an area of the museum well away from the Mona Lisa and other popular attractions, so considerably less traffic makes it an oasis away from the bustling crowds. I had the…