The Italian Baroque paintings, comprising an astounding 105 works, form the core of the M&G collection and provide a survey of styles and artists that is unsurpassed in the United States. Beginning about 1590, artists made a conscious effort to break away from the artifice of Mannerism. The mannerist emphasis on the design and decorative aspects of art resulted in paintings that failed to communicate. With the onset of the Protestant Reformation (1517) and the subsequent reaction of the Council of Trent (1545–63), the Catholic Church looked to artists to produce painted propaganda that would help regain their influence over the populace.

The first principality in Northern Europe to emerge culturally from the devastating ravages of medieval times was the Duchy of Burgundy. By 1425 the Burgundian provinces of Flanders (now Belgium) and Holland rose as the centers of artistic innovation. Flanders produced the most commercially viable towns–Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels. Of these cities, Bruges emerged as the artistic center of the century. For example, the van Eyck brothers established themselves in Bruges as the greatest artists of the period. Their pictorial achievements blended the artistic elements of space, color, and perspective with a realistic technique that brought nature into focus with unprecedented detail.

The heightened sense of realism resulted largely from the use of oil pigments instead of tempera and egg yolk. The attention to detail in early Flemish painting derives in part from the artists’ heritage as book illuminators, in contrast to Italian artists whose heritage consisted of monumental frescoes.

During the Middle Ages, France provided the artistic leadership in the Gothic art forms of stained glass, manuscript illumination, sculpture, and a number of the decorative arts. However, in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Italians captured the cultural seat of Europe, especially in painting. During these centuries of innovation and advancement, France was embroiled in many religious and political upheavals, stifling the development of strong schools of painting. While France certainly had painters of merit during the Italian Renaissance, it was not until the 16th century that France began to make a significant comeback with painters working in Fontainebleau under the influence of the Italians Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio. According to French art historian, Marc Fumaroli, by the beginning of the 17th century, artists made an obligatory trip to Rome for training so that all that was beautiful in Italy could be transferred to France.

While Italian Renaissance artists benefited from a mutual sharing of progressive artistic advancements, Spanish artists remained deeply provincial. In spite of the fact that the country dominated politics for most of the 16th and 17th centuries, it remained the artistic backwater of Europe until the Baroque age.

Over time, Spanish envoys returned home with works of art among their numerous European possessions from cultural centers including Naples, Sicily, the duchy of Milan, and the Netherlands; and artists began to travel from other countries to Spain influencing the arts and encouraging Spanish artists to travel to Italy for the superior artistic training lacking in their own country.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish Hapsburgs ruled present-day Belgium, then known as the Spanish Netherlands or Flanders (after its most prosperous province). Philip II reigned in an alliance with the Catholic Church that determined the religious tenor of his northern lands. The Catholic influence and doctrines oppressed many in the United Provinces (present day Netherlands) since they were predominantly Protestant. However, the Dutch Protestants soon gained their independence (beginning in 1609) from their southern counterpart in Flanders and became an independent Republic.

As a distinctly Catholic region, the Spanish Netherlands provided a wealth of opportunities for artists to find work through church commissions; therefore, the coastal city of Antwerp emerged as the leading cultural force in the first decades of the 17th century.

Although some of the greatest artists of the period made Antwerp their home, by mid-century the city had fallen into financial and political difficulty. Two major factors contributed to the economic decline of the Spanish Netherlands in the 17th century: the end of the 12-year truce with the Dutch Protestants in 1621 and the closing of Antwerp’s harbor in 1648 after the Peace of Westphalia. In spite of this decline, artistic patronage in the city continued to flourish, and Flemish painters received important commissions both at home and abroad.

The refinement and lofty “perfection” of High Renaissance art caused painters of the next generation to seek new and unusual avenues for artistic expression. Mannerism can be considered alternatively as a break with the Renaissance as well as a variation of it. Mannerists often drew inspiration from such aspects of High Renaissance art as the interest in human anatomy and the representation of nature and space. However, the Mannerists pushed these concerns to the extreme, replacing High Renaissance clarity, harmony and naturalistic idealism with complex compositions, exaggerated proportions, sophisticated design and discordant colors. Instead of drawing from nature, the Mannerists’ teacher was art itself. The result was a period in which artists sought individual styles of interpretation that broke away and went beyond the conventions of previous art. The inventive and intellectual qualities of Mannerist art appealed to the erudite nobles of the Italian courts, who commissioned much of the art of this century. Painters and sculptors began to lose their craftsman label and were welcomed into the cultural court circle alongside the scholars, poets, and humanist philosophers.

The Italian Renaissance represents the culmination of artistic achievement brought about by a revival of the arts and sciences of ancient Roman and Greek cultures. This profoundly influential source for learning changed the way people thought about the arts, religion, politics, nature, and especially themselves. The development of a wealthy middle class through expanding trade and banking led to private commissions of art for homes in addition to art commissioned by the church. A renewed study in the humanities led to important investigations and discoveries in diverse realms such as geography, physics, anatomy, biology, mechanical invention, optics, and mathematics. Such advancements inspired artists to paint with an increasingly realistic view of both nature and mankind. Furthermore, the humanistic belief of man as the measure of all things influenced society and developed a radically new disposition in the cultural and social climate of 15th century Italy. Artists began to paint the human figure in numerous inventive and expressive forms.

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With the waning of the Rococo era (18th century) in the dominant artistic countries of France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, the subsequent generations of artists increasingly sought new modes of expression. While preceding epochs could be categorized into general pan-European artistic movements–Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, and Rococo–with distinct manifestations by country and city, the 19th century brought about so many artistic facets that any label other than “19th-century painting” will not suffice.

Within this single century grew such movements as Neoclassicism, Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Nazarenes, Impressionism, Academic Realism, Fauvism, and Cubism to name a few. While M&G’s collection of 19th-century paintings is relatively small, the examples viewed here provide a quality sampling of the type of religious art created in a century when the tide of modern and abstract art would all but extinguish biblical themes from mainstream culture.

The history of the present day Netherlands is rooted in its conflict with Spain in the 17th century. Catholic Spain had controlled the Netherlands since 1555. Since the Dutch embraced the Protestant Reformation, their fight for freedom waged against Spain from 1568 to 1648 was religious as well as political. This defining era in their history also created an environment conducive to new modes of artistic production. Unlike their Catholic, Flemish counterparts, the Calvinistic Dutch shunned artistic ornamentation in their churches, thus forcing artists to look outside the church for commissions and patronage.

Fortunately, a surge in economic prosperity through the banking, commerce, and shipping industries accompanied the Netherlands ‘ political and religious independence. The resulting growth of a wealthy middle class produced patrons able and eager to buy art for their homes and public buildings. Artists began to specialize in particular subject matter, such as biblical and historical scenes, still life, interior architectural scenes, landscapes, portraits, and scenes of everyday life (genre painting), some of which had previously been undeveloped or rarely pursued. Interestingly, even though the Museum & Gallery collection of Dutch Baroque paintings is limited to religious themes, the collection still includes examples from each of these specialized genres.