Opera was invented in Italy around the year 1600. Indeed, opera counts as Italy’s great contribution to the seventeenth century’s golden age of the theater. This century saw Shakespeare and his followers in England, Corneille and Racine in France, and Lope de Vega and Calderón in Spain.

The theater is first and foremost a place where strong emotion is on display, and it was this more than anything else that fueled the Baroque fascination with it. The emotionality that we generally sense in Baroque art has a theatrical quality; this is true even of much Baroque painting. Compare Raphael’s calm Renaissance Madonna on page 36 with the early Baroque Madonna by Guercino (right). Jesus seems to be falling out of the picture as he twists away from his mother, and she twists the other way; the background is not a serene landscape but a turbulent cloudscape, and the stagey lighting contrasts bright patches of flesh with dark shadows.