Baroque vs Renaissance
バロック / ルネサンス
Both sit in Historical Styles, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Baroque
A total art that draws the viewer in with ovals, curved surfaces, dramatic light and an excess of ornament. Architecture, sculpture, painting and city planning were handled as one staging, turning power and faith into spectacle.
Renaissance
A movement that rediscovered ancient proportion and the human body and fixed three dimensions on a flat surface through linear perspective. Mathematics became the common language of painting and architecture, and the norms of the next five hundred years, symmetry, the classical orders and the golden ratio, were established here.
| Baroque | Renaissance | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1600–1750 | 14th–16th century |
| Family | Historical Styles | Historical Styles |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Ovals and curved surfaces / Dramatic light / Illusionistic ceilings / Architecture fused with sculpture | One point linear perspective / The classical orders and symmetry / Composition based on the proportions of the body / A clear triangular composition |
| Best used for | Theatres and festival spaces designed around the shock of entering · Making a room read taller than it is by pulling the eye upward | Showing authority and balance through proportion itself · Building an image whose depth is constructed geometrically |
| Type | Run lettering along curved surfaces and bands, never as level lines | Set Roman capitals in the proportions of inscriptions. |
| Composition | An oval as the main axis, funneling the eye before releasing it | Steady figures and elements on a central axis and a triangle. |
| Material | Gold against deep color, hidden side windows carving the relief | Move from tempera to oil and build up transparent layers. |
| Caution | Multiplying ornament without designing where the light travels, producing an even excess that is rich and has no climax. | Pasting on columns and symmetry gives you stage scenery. Decide one basis for the proportions and carry it through the whole. |