Early Modern

Early Modern is an art period of the 1400–1800 period. The gallery holds 18,423 works in this period, including works by Thomas Eakins, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro.

The Early Modern period in European art, conventionally bracketed from about 1500 to about 1800, is less a single style than a three-century arc spanning the High Renaissance, the Baroque, and the Rococo. It coincided with the consolidation of modernity itself: the spread of printing, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the rise of centralized courts, and the wealth flowing through Atlantic and Mediterranean trade. Patronage broadened from the Church and princely courts to merchant elites, while the perfection of oil paint and the codification of linear perspective gave artists unprecedented command over illusionistic space.

The period opened with the Italian High Renaissance, a roughly thirty-five-year flowering from the 1490s to the 1527 Sack of Rome dominated by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo, and Raphael. Their work fused classical ideals of proportion with new techniques — Leonardo's sfumato, the strong light-and-dark modeling of chiaroscuro, and the deep recession of Raphael's School of Athens (c. 1508–11). In the north, Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer pursued a different realism, prizing minute observation and the jewel-like surfaces that oil glazes made possible.

After about 1600 the Baroque emerged in Rome as an art of drama, movement, and direct emotional appeal, well suited to the Counter-Reformation Church. Caravaggio pioneered tenebrism — fierce contrasts of illumination against deep shadow — a device taken up across Europe. Peter Paul Rubens supplied muscular allegory and altarpieces, Diego Velázquez served the Spanish court, and the Dutch Golden Age produced Rembrandt van Rijn, whose Night Watch (1642) exemplifies Baroque chiaroscuro, alongside Johannes Vermeer's luminous domestic interiors.

In the early eighteenth century the gravity of the Baroque softened into the Rococo, centered in France during the reign of Louis XV. Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) is credited with its invention; François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and the Venetian decorator Giovanni Battista Tiepolo extended its repertoire of pastel palettes, asymmetrical "shellwork" ornament, and themes of pleasure and flirtation.

By around 1800 the Rococo's frivolity provoked a corrective in Neoclassicism, closing the era. The Early Modern centuries established the academic foundations of perspective, anatomy, and oil technique that the nineteenth-century modernists would in turn challenge.