Art History the Transition From the Baroque

Art History The transition from the Baroque to the Rococo style in sculpture and painting was attended by a concurrent shift in European power relations, as the cultural and political hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church gave way to secular institutions of power.

Comparing a work produced during the height of either style demonstrates this shift implicitly, because the Rococo style contains a playfulness in both theme and visual content hinting that its intended audience and patron were far less concerned with grandeur and religious imagery than they might have been a century before, during the Baroque era.

Furthermore, comparing and contrasting Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa with Jean-Honore Fragonard's The Swing will make this implicit cultural shift stand out more dramatically, because although both works include some of the same stylistic features that link the Baroque and Rococo, the playful, almost deliberately blasphemous thematic and literal content of Fragonard's Swing stands in stark contrast to the explicitly religious milieu of Bernini's Teresa. To begin, one may note the similarities between both works that reveal the Rococo style's Baroque ancestry.

Although Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is a marble sculpture completed in 1652 and intended to adorn the tomb of a Cardinal, and Fragonard's Swing is a circa 1767 painting featuring a pair of adulterous lovers hiding their affair from a cuckolded husband, both works focus on the central image of a woman in a kind of ecstasy, and the ecstasy of the woman translates visually into the lines and curves of either work (Coonin 666, Schroder 150).

Both works exemplify their respective styles while presenting clear lines of continuity, and by tracing these lines of continuity one is able to appreciate the larger cultural impact of stylistic changes. Different ideological positions are rendered all the more stark when one realizes that they are traced in largely the same movements. Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa focuses on the image of Teresa as she writhes in pain and ecstasy, based on the story of her supposed experience with an angel (Berman 161).

Teresa's robes are simultaneously stiff and sensuous, because Bernini includes so many folds and ridges that it suggests an almost impossible movement. The heavy white marble nevertheless appears flexible due to Teresa's folds, and the movement implied carries the viewer's eye from the angel's straight golden arrow into the tumbling mass of Teresa's clothing and movement. Bernini's imagery is relatively simple, and he uses these simple symbols coupled with dramatic imagery to create the kind of epic spectacle that defined Baroque sculpture.

Fragonard's The Swing recreates some of this same texture and movement, but it does so in a characteristically lighter way. In The Swing the focus is still on a central female figure caught in a moment of ecstasy, or at least extreme pleasure, and once again the sense of movement and weight is conveyed by the folds and curves of her clothing. Her dress is extremely large, and yet it billows with the wind of her swing, so that the same sense of motion is conveyed.

Fragonard's painting continues the Baroque interest in curving lines and grand physical movements, but it eschews the serious focus on religion and epic characters in order to give life to more humorous, playful, and ultimately secular narratives. The visual elements of the painting reflect this movement to lighter subjects, because the woman's fluffy, flowing dress stands in stark contrast to Teresa's heavy robes, even though both are rendered in strikingly similar folds and ridges of fabric.

The shared stylistic focus on sweeping curves and folds reveals a visual sensuality that permeates both works, but this shared sensuality actually makes explicit the other cultural and ideological factors that the works differ on substantially. In both cases, the curves of the women's clothing is a not-very subtle use of line to imbue the movement of a woman with visual hints at her imagined anatomy, but the cultural context in which that appeal to sexuality is couched differs substantially.

In the case of Bernini's Saint Teresa, Teresa's ecstatic experience is couched in religious imagery, and so the sexualizing which occurs as a result of Bernini's style is nevertheless acceptable within a culture whose primary economic, political, and social order was based on the support and consent of the Roman Catholic Church (McCormick 1926). The church's influence changes the effect of a scene that would otherwise appear explicitly and obviously erotic. Fragonard's The Swing, however, celebrates the central figure's sexuality by taking an opposite tack.

Rather than couch the woman's sexuality in religious imagery, the painting explores in a positively secular fashion by portraying the adulterous couple in a positive light. The woman's lover is granted a view up her dress while her cuckolded husband stands in the shadows, demonstrating a complete ideological reversal in regards to sexuality, and particularly women's sexuality.

Where before Teresa's sexuality had to be couched in the language of a miraculous appearance, the sexuality of the figure in The Swing is shown to have a worldly, naturalistic character that values the blessing of Cupid over the baleful gaze of cherubs. In The Swing, not only is sexuality permitted, but sexuality that explicitly defies Biblical standards of morality appears to be the ideal.

In the years between the creation of Bernini's sculpture and Fragonard's painting, Europe had undergone a dramatic and unprecedented shift, as power moved away from the church and into the hands of royalty, nobles, and an emerging class of capitalists. As these power structures did not share the church's uncomfortable relationship with human nature, the art they patronized was free to reflect their more modern, secular morals.

Thus, where The Swing and the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa share a direct stylistic and aesthetic connection due to their mutual attention to the curves and folds of a woman in motion, the thematic connection they share is inverted.

That is to say, while both works deal with the theme of a woman in apparent ecstasy during a (relatively) secret meaning, the moral or ideological position taken in relation to that ecstasy is inverted, because the Rococo painting is comfortable celebrating sexual concepts that must be suppressed into the visual language of religion during the Baroque era. Comparing Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa with Fragonard's The Swing allows one to better understand how historical culture influences any given style,.