The Dutch Golden Age and the Baroque
Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Vermeer, and a market for pictures rather than patrons.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 80 years
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Caravaggio's violent chiaroscuro transforms religious painting from around 1600. In the Dutch Republic, an unusually broad middle class buys pictures on the open market rather than commissioning them, which produces landscape, still life, genre scenes and the psychological portraiture of Rembrandt and the domestic quiet of Vermeer. Estimates suggest millions of paintings were produced in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.