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The diminutive scale of Bernini's S. Andrea al Quirinal e and Borromini's S. Carlo illustrates the fallacy of the notion that massive size is the leading characteristic of seventeenth-century architecture. Vast complexes such as the sixteenth-century palace of the Escorial and the eighteenth-century palace at Caserta are a reminder that grandiose scale was not a monopoly of the Baroque.
Yet it is undeniable that the taste for the very large is everywhere in evidence at this period, and that Baroque architects, like Baroque painters, had the capacity to think in monumental terms. The monumental complexes that are generally thought of as typical expressions of the Baroque era have a good deal more in common than their imposing scale. For in these huge projects, as in individual works of painting and sculpture, the same habit of mind prevailed: the master architects and designers conceived of their works whether ecclesiastical or secular as embodying certain abstract ideas. The evolution of the Baroque still life follows a pattern very like that of landscape. The humanists of the sixteenth century had given their blessing to Mannerist paintings of still life, which were especially popular in Italy and the Netherlands, because they appeared to be consonant with their ideas about the revival of antiquity.
In Flanders, Holland, Italy, France and Spain, still-life masters were busy painting flower-pieces, baskets of fruit, musical instruments, household vessels of every sort, tables laden with food, heaps of dead game and fish. And these inanimate objects were represented not only with the utmost realism but with all the dedication and seriousness that had once been reserved for the human form. Perhaps this was what Caravaggio meant when he remarked to one of his early patrons that 'it took as much craftsmanship for him to paint a picture of flowers as one of figures. The origins of Baroque genre, like those of landscape and still life, go back to the Mannerist period. Yet there is nothing in the earlier history of the subject to prepare us for its dramatic flowering at the outset of the Baroque. At this moment, it seems, the genre piece presented itself as the naturalist theme par excellence, to be avidly taken up by artists everywhere.
In Italy, the genre subject early claimed the attention of Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci; in Spain, it made possible the solemn bodegones of the young Velazquez, painted before his employment at the court of Philip IV put an end to uncouth pieces of this sort: in Antwerp, Adrian Brouwer developed a type of rough low-life genre that was widely imitated in the Northern as well as in the Southern Netherlands; in France, rural subjects were treated by Louis Le Nain, not in a spirit of rowdiness but with dignity and restraint. But it was in the Protestant bourgeois society of Holland that the genre picture celebrated its greatest and most enduring triumph. Yet if Dutch genre is not (as it once appeared to be) simply a mirror of reality, it still stands as one of the most extraordinary achievements of Baroque naturalism. No other seventeenth-century school of painting can offer so comprehensive and so faithful a portrait of a whole society bourgeois citizens, peasants and soldiers; their dress, daily occupations, amusements, graces and foibles; their homes, gardens, taverns and guardrooms. In these scenes of everyday life, as in the paintings of landscape, the highest taste and craftsmanship in the art of picture-making are put at the service of the most penetrating powers of observation.
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