Three broad tendencies had an impact on Baroque art, the first of which was the Counter-Reformation. Contending with the spread of the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church, after the Council of Trent (1545–63), adopted a propagandist program in which art was to serve as a means of stimulating the public’s faith in the church. The Baroque style that evolved was both sensuous and spiritual. Whereas a naturalistic treatment rendered the religious image more accessible to the average churchgoer, dramatic and illusory effects were used to stimulate devotion and convey the splendour of the divine. The second tendency was the consolidation of absolute monarchies—Baroque palaces were built on a monumental scale to display the power of the centralized state, a phenomenon best displayed at Versailles. The third tendency was a broadening of human intellectual horizons, spurred by developments in science and explorations of the globe. These produced a new sense of human insignificance (particularly abetted by the Copernican displacement of Earth from the centre of the universe) and of the infinitude of the natural world. Landscape paintings in which humans are portrayed as minute figures in a vast setting were indicative of this changing awareness of the human condition.
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