How is the Spanish Baroque similar to the Italian Baroque?

Answer 1

Baroque art from Italy and Spain is similar in that artworks from both regions emphasize realism. Genre scenes (scenes of everyday life) grew in popularity during this time; two well-known examples of this are The Beaneater (1580 - 1590) by Italian painter Annibale Carracci and Old Woman Frying Eggs by Spanish painter Diego Velazquez (1618). Before the Baroque period, these types of subjects were not considered by most to be worthy of being represented in paint. Paintings of a religious nature were also often brought down to earth; Christ and the saints were still divine, but they began to be represented as ordinary people that one might pass on the street. The compositions of religious paintings were kept simple in order to stress the meaning of the subject at hand. Examples of this move toward simplicity include Italian painter Caravaggio's Madonna di Loreto (c. 1604 - 1606) and Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran's Saint Serapion (1628).