Rome away from Rome.(Royal Academy's exhibit of Baroque artists)

Anyone fascinated by the Metropolitan Museum's recent exhibition of paintings by Evaristo Baschenis, the Northern Italian inventor of the still life of musical instruments, needs only the most minimal excuse to arrange a trip to London. The reason? Not an opportunity to see more works by Baschenis, pleasurable as that might be, but something far more ambitious and comprehensive: an exhibition at the Royal Academy promising a rapid refresher course in the context from which Baschenis emerged. "The Genius of Rome, 1592-1623,"(1) a survey of the formative years of Italian Baroque painting, is a thoughtful examination of the innovations and influence of the period's most powerful painters--Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and Peter Paul Rubens.

The three decades explored by the exhibition were a remarkable period in Rome's long history, a time when the papacy passed through the hands of three powerful and notably cultivated families. In 1592 Ippolito Aldobrandini was elected pope (choosing to become Clement VIII), while 1623 saw the end of the pontificate of Gregory XV, a Ludovisi; in between came Paul V, a Borghese. During this span, Rome was the center of patronage and of art and architecture on a dazzling scale. In this city of luxury and elegance, where political acuity, piety, and sumptuous living coexisted, papal nephews appointed to the rank of cardinal (as they routinely were) commissioned splendid decorations for their villas and palaces. They also commissioned equally splendid works for the churches they administered, since the Catholic church of the period, despite the rigid rules of decorum it imposed on the representation of religious subjects, had an enormous appetite for new images that would capture the imagination of the faithful and strengthen their resistance to dangerous Reformation doctrine. During this time, too, a definitive distinction began to be made between secular and religious art, and new genres of subject matter began to emerge as the specialties of particular artists. Both the secular and the ecclesiastical nobility avidly collected not only sacred art, but also antiquities and all manner of art from their own time. The discriminating, wide-ranging patronage of the Borghese family, especially of Cardinal Scipione, is reflected in the spectacular collection--from Roman mosaics to masterpieces of seventeenth-century painting and sculpture--still housed in the Villa Borghese. That of the Ludovisi, especially of Cardinal Ludovico, is commemorated in the splendid collection of antique sculptures that forms the heart of Rome's National Museum--including the marvelous relief of Aphrodite rising from the sea into the arms of helpful nymphs, known as the "Ludovisi Throne." In response to this climate of possibilities for both creative and financial advancement, artists, architects, and craftsmen came to Rome from all over to participate in what was later seen, nostalgically, as a "golden age" of art.

The thesis of "The Genius of Rome" is that the defining characteristics of the Baroque were formulated in the paintings of three immensely gifted individuals working in the Eternal City in the earliest years of this glorious era: Caravaggio (born 1571) who came to Rome in 1592 after an apprenticeship in Milan; Annibale Carracci (born 1560) who arrived from Bologna two years later; and Peter Paul Rubens (born 1577) who left Flanders for a long stay in Italy in 1600 and spent extended periods in Rome in 1603 and from 1606 to 1608 while serving as court painter to the Duke of Mantua. Each of these gifted painters explored, in his own way, new notions of realism and idealism, focusing on both the reality of the present and the art of the past.

Caravaggio's contribution was a pitiless realism and an unerring sense of the drama of light and dark. Obviously, there was a lot more to Caravaggio's idiosyncratic paintings than "merely" reproducing what he saw, but in his own day he was believed to have done just that. He was both admired and criticized for not having based his complex figure compositions, as "intellectual" artists did, on an abstract, invented notion of ideal beauty. Caravaggio's influence also extended, as the organizers of "The Genius of Rome" note, to a new kind of picture, defined by his early paintings of music-making boys and cardsharps, in which the everyday was treated with the same ambition and seriousness as subjects drawn from history, mythology, or the Bible.

Annibale Carracci's work was seen by his contemporaries as exemplifying everything that Caravaggio's did not. The truth, of course, is that it is a question of emphasis, since both painters' work is rooted in the common heritage of Northern Italian naturalism and both profited from their study of the art of antiquity and of the more recent past. But if Caravaggio was believed by his detractors to have simply copied the flaws and quirks of nature without editing, Annibale was perceived--just as mistakenly--as having created, exclusively through the exercise of his intellect, a convincing world free of the irregularities of actuality. Present-day viewers, while still keenly aware of the differences between these artists, seem to grasp more readily how much Caravaggio invented, in response to the demands of pictorial requirements, and to appreciate how acute an observer of actuality Annibale was. Yet to his contemporaries and to many subsequent generations, Annibale's disciplined compositions and heroic, elegant figures were seen as expounding an ideal order and an ideal beauty. The painter was thought to have arrived at this high-minded imagery through a process of correcting nature's imperfections by measuring them against his understanding of her perfections and his understanding of the art of the past.

Rubens, who came to Italy to learn from the antique and to absorb the latest pictorial modes, established himself well enough to execute several important commissions during his sojourn in Rome. In a sense, his works announced the possibility of uniting Caravaggio's and Annibale's approaches by fusing coherent spatial organization, utterly convincing naturalistic details, and sublimely idealized types (not to mention the Fleming's virtuoso touch and his ability to make painterly gestures evoke all manner of seductive substances). The organizers of the exhibition suggest that Rubens's most important Roman commission, an altarpiece for the Chiesa Nuova, was one of the first devotional pictures to use iconographic divisions to suggest rational, but nonetheless dramatic, spatial relationships in a sacred scene--an innovation with significant repercussions.

By 1610, Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci were dead, and Rubens had returned to Antwerp. Yet the cumulative effect of their distinctive answers to the demands of their patrons essentially posited alternative notions of what a painting could be and provided influential models not only for their contemporaries, but also for several subsequent generations of painters (including, in Bergamo, Evaristo Baschenis). For much of the rest of the seventeenth century, artists in Rome--some Italian, some from elsewhere in Europe--responded both directly and indirectly to the example of their inventive predecessors and made it the basis of their own art. This was not a simple story of cause and effect, as "The Genius of Rome" makes clear. For one thing, artists other than the exhibition's triumvirate contributed to the equation. For another, Caravaggio's highly personal approach soon fell out of favor, although it remained popular with some connoisseurs and with certain younger painters, who, on returning to their native cities, disseminated Caravaggism, with many permutations, throughout Northern Europe. At the same time, Annibale's type of classicism became the basis of a high-minded "philosophical" approach to painting endorsed by the academies and official patrons. The overall result, however, was the generous, accomplished, heroic painting style--with all its many variations --that we now call the Baroque.