Baroque
Contrasts of light and dark, compositions that spiral. After the Renaissance's balance came painting that felt like theater, built to move the emotions. Following the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church threw its weight behind this style, answering the plain, unadorned Protestant church with spaces built to seize the eye and the heart. Even the name 'Baroque' is not a compliment. It comes from the Portuguese barroco, a misshapen pearl, a word for something out of true that ended up naming the whole style. Caravaggio's way of dropping light into darkness spread outward, through his followers, the Caravaggisti, and on to La Tour. And then Caravaggio himself was forgotten, for a very long time. His name came back in 1951, when the art historian Roberto Longhi mounted Caravaggio and the Caravaggeschi at the Palazzo Reale in Milan and more than 400,000 people came. Judith Beheading Holofernes, now among his best-known paintings, had been tracked down by Longhi only the year before, in 1950, and was added to the show at the last moment. This map keeps running into things that arrived late — Altamira took 23 years, Art Nouveau half a century, Hilma af Klint a hundred. Caravaggio may be the one who waited longest of all. A place in the history of art, it turns out, is not fixed once and left alone.