Practice question · Multiple choice
Trent asked for images that would teach and move the unlettered. Why did that produce Caravaggio’s dirty-soled pilgrims rather than more decorous saints?
Hints
- Ask who the image was meant to reach.
- Some of these paintings were rejected by the clergy who ordered them.
Show the answer
A. Because immediacy pulled against the decorum patrons expected
Why
Two of Trent’s instructions pull opposite ways: instruct and move, but keep decorum. Caravaggio pressed the second at the expense of the third, which is why several altarpieces were refused.
Practise Baroque Art and the Counter-Reformation
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More questions on Baroque Art and the Counter-Reformation
- The daylight falling on Bernini’s Saint Teresa comes from a concealed window built into the chapel.
- Caravaggio lights a saint with a hard beam from outside the frame while the rest falls into darkness. What is…
- Match each term to its meaning.
- Order these events in the Baroque century.
- What does tenebrism accomplish in a dim seventeenth-century chapel?
- Why do Bernini’s sculpted Cornaro family lean from carved theatre boxes on the chapel’s side walls?
- Sort each choice: Caravaggio’s method or the decorum his patrons expected?