A European style of dramatic light, deep shadow, theatrical movement and intense emotion, born in Counter-Reformation Rome and quickly spreading across the continent. Baroque painters — Caravaggio, Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer — used tenebrist lighting, asymmetric composition and grand scale to pull the viewer bodily into the scene. The style served absolute monarchies and the Catholic Church but also flourished in Protestant Holland, where it produced a quieter strand of domestic interiors and intimate portraiture. Its rhetorical power still shapes how cinema and stage design think about light.
