Why Baroque artists were rebels?

Rebels of a new generation

Renaissance art including the Mannerist style that preceded Baroque movement was symmetric and restrained, traditions that were rebelled against by Baroque artists. Some described the Baroque movement as art of the heart, an answer to the Renaissance-era art of the mind. Baroque art was dramatic and emotional, appealed to the public, attempted to get closer to the contemporary viewers, and identified with ordinary people.

Taking a different path, unlike the Mannerist generation, Baroque painters portrayed realistic unidealized life in their paintings, stripped from heavenly imagery or mythology, just common people or even at times no people at all (landscapes and still lifes). A Renaissance or Mannerist painter would certainly find nothing spiritual about a fruit bowl. The stiff, controlled, idealized classical forms of the Renaissance era did not change but human emotions were introduced, and they were intense, in a way unseen before. Emotions and dramatic expressions were visible on the faces of subjects in paintings. Breaking with the past, also was the introduction of a heavy contrast between light and dark. Despite the deviation of the new artists from the older traditions, they still did not smash all conventions. There were boundaries to their art that they would not dare cross. For example, painting nude art in puritanical Spain meant you risk excommunication, fine and exile, enforced by the Spanish Inquisition, and any nude paintings were burnt. Italy was an exception as it had been influenced by pagan classical nude sculptures.