Assess graduate students' understanding of visual rhetoric and theatricality in 17th‑century European Baroque painting, including formal devices (chiaroscuro, tenebrism, composition, foreshortening), rhetorical strategies and iconography, performative stagings and spectatorship, regional variations (Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch), and contextual drivers (patronage, religion, politics); require visual analysis and interpretation of sociohistorical meaning.