17th and 18th Century

17^th and 18^th centuries – notes

·      A lot of advances in science

·      Galileo was arrested by the Catholics because what he believed was against the churches beliefs. His books were burned, he was jailed for life and forced to dent all of his beliefs.

Baroque art

·      Over the top decretive art.

·      It was accepted by the church as it showed religious themes.

·      Women in the paintings were idealised and shown with a fuller figure as this showed wealth and prosperity.

·      The British Empire was dominant throughout the world.

·      Money and wealth were important in paintings.

·      Capitalism started so everything became tradable.

·       People bought oil paintings to show wealth and intelligence.

·      The church was incredibly wealthy and had galleries packed with paintings.

·      People included black servants as well as farmers and workers in their paintings to show wealth as if they were possessions.

·      The slave trade was a product of capitalism

·      some artists showed how bad it was for the poor people in their art work (Gin Lane) showed real life not wealth

·      Vermeer created a lot of similar paintings that always had the same light source coming from the same window. This was refered back to a lot in future art.

·      The camera obscurer was created so artists started to create art that looked like photographs.

Research task 

Compare the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt, particularly relating to their methods of lighting in their subjects.

Rembrandt was the first artist to use studio lighting in his paintings. his lighting technique worked so well that it is still used regularly within photography lighting today. The way that rembrandt used lighting was completely new and revolutionary when he first tried it out. It worked really well and added a new sense of realism to his paintings. Rembrandt cared a lot about the use of lighting so much so that he'd start to re think the colours that he used to get a better effect of light in the painting. The lack of colour in the centre of the face compared to the dark colours in the background is how he achieved the lighting effect best as seen in (figure1).[1]

Rembrandt reconsidered colour from 1627, he had tended to sacrifice colour in his effort to strengthen the 'spotlighting' effects in his paintings. In the 1640's he began searching for his possibilities of more frontal lighting in which larger areas of colour particularly reds, yellows and whites were allowed to retain their force

(figure 1) Rembrandt van Rijn, Self portrait, 1659, oil on canvas

Rembrandt's use of lighting was very different to how vermeer (one other great painter of the time) used lighting. Rembrandt used artificial lighting in his paintings and vermeer always used natural light from a window in his studio as seen in (figure 2) and almost all of his paintings. The fact that his studio had a window with lots of natural light also allowed him to create a camera obscurer in his studio. It is thought that he used the technology of camera obscurer to create his images. The reason people think he used this technology is because his paintings are so accurate even down to the reflections in windows and mirrors. To create the camera the window would have been blocked out and a tiny hole would be cut out to allow light in. This would then project an image onto  a flat surface inside of the studio then it just had to be traced over.

Fink mentions as possible evidence of Vermeer using the camera, the fact that he seems to depict the shapes and sizes of objects with considerable precision though he fails to justify this assertion with any actual measurements.[2] 

(figure 2) Jan Vermeer, Girl reading a letter at an open window, 1657

These two painters don’t just have differences with the way they light their paintings but they are also very different in the ways that they set up the compositions of their images.

[1] E van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at work, Amsterdam University press, p 289.
[2] P Steadman,Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the truth behind the masterpieces, Oxford university press, 2001. p39.