Bernini in the context of "Scipione Borghese"

Baroque painting is the painting associated with the Baroque cultural movement. The movement is often identified with Absolutism, the Counter Reformation and Catholic Revival, but the existence of important Baroque art and architecture in non-absolutist and Protestant states throughout Western Europe underscores its widespread popularity.

Baroque painting encompasses a great range of styles, as most important and major painting during the period beginning around 1600 and continuing throughout the 17th century, and into the early 18th century is identified today as Baroque painting. In its most typical manifestations, Baroque art is characterized by great drama, rich, deep colour, and intense light and dark shadows, but the classicism of French Baroque painters like Poussin and Dutch genre painters such as Vermeer are also covered by the term, at least in English. As opposed to Renaissance art, which usually showed the moment before an event took place, Baroque artists chose the most dramatic point, the moment when the action was occurring: Michelangelo, working in the High Renaissance, shows his David composed and still before he battles Goliath; Bernini's Baroque David is caught in the act of hurling the stone at the giant. Baroque art was meant to evoke emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality that had been prized during the Renaissance.

The Solomonic column, also called barley-sugar column, is a helical column, characterized by a spiraling twisting shaft like a corkscrew. It is not associated with a specific classical order, although most examples have Corinthian or Composite capitals. But it may be crowned with any design, for example, making a Roman Doric solomonic or Ionic solomonic column.

Perhaps originating in the Near East, it is a feature of Late Roman architecture, which was revived in Baroque architecture, especially in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds. Two sets of columns, both in the very prestigious setting of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, were probably important in the wide diffusion of the style. The first were relatively small, and given by Constantine the Great in the 4th century. These were soon believed to have come from the Temple in Jerusalem, hence the style's naming after the biblical Solomon. The second set are those of Bernini's St. Peter's Baldacchino, finished in 1633.

The Caravaggisti (or the "Caravagesques"; singular: "Caravaggista") were stylistic followers of the late 16th-century Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. His influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from Mannerism was profound. Caravaggio never established a workshop as most other painters did, and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical approach to art, the psychological realism which can only be deduced from his surviving work. But it can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Bernini, and Rembrandt. Famous while he lived, Caravaggio himself was forgotten almost immediately after his death. Many of his paintings were re-ascribed to his followers, such as The Taking of Christ, which was attributed to the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst until 1990.

Only in the 20th century was Caravaggio's importance to the development of Western art rediscovered. In the 1920s Roberto Longhi once more placed him in the European tradition: "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different". The influential Bernard Berenson stated: "With the exception of Michelangelo, no other Italian painter exercised so great an influence."