The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 9780190678449, 0190678445

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

T H E BA RO QU E

the oxford handbook of

THE BAROQUE Edited by

JOHN D. LYONS

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lyons, John D., 1946– editor. Title: The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque / edited by John D. Lyons. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018045242 | ISBN 9780190678449 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Baroque. Classification: LCC CB401 .O94 2019 | DDC 940.2/52—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045242 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Contributorsxi

1. Introduction: The Crisis of the Baroque

1

John D. Lyons

PA RT I   V I SUA L , SPAT IA L , A N D P E R F OR M I N G A RT S 2. Decentering the European Imaginary: A Baroque Taste for India

27

Faith E. Beasley

3. Line and Trait of the Baroque River

44

Tom Conley

4. Baroque Theatricality

65

Julia Gros de Gasquet

5. Water in the Baroque Garden

88

Stephanie Hanke

6. Fashioning the Baroque Male

119

Martha Hollander

7. Antinomies of the Twenty-First-Century Neobaroque: Cormac McCarthy and Demian Schopf

149

Monika Kaup

8. The Automaton

185

Jessica Keating

9. The Baroque City David Mayernik

211

vi   contents

10. Surface and Substance: Baroque Dress in Spain and France, 1600–1720

238

Lesley Ellis Miller

11. Baroque Dance

264

Jennifer Nevile

12. Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism

286

Paul Niell

13. Baroque Organ Music

312

David Ponsford

14. Ottoman Baroque

334

Ünver Rüstem

15. Baroque Opera

370

Downing A. Thomas

16. Machine Plays

386

Hélène Visentin

17. Ornamentation

409

Michael Yonan

PA RT I I   L I T E R A RY A N D P H I L O S OP H IC A L WRITING 18. The Organization of Knowledge from Ramus to Diderot

429

Emmanuel Bury

19. Experience and Knowledge in the Baroque

449

Anthony J. Cascardi

20. Conversation and Civility

471

Delphine Denis

21. The Philosopher’s Baroque: Benjamin, Lacan, Deleuze

487

William Egginton

22. The Spanish Baroque Novel Enrique GarcÍa Santo-Tomás

497

contents   vii

23. Baroque Tragedy

516

Blair Hoxby

24. The Baroque as a Literary Concept

540

Katherine Ibbett and Anna More

2 5. Baroque Discourse

560

Christopher D. Johnson

26. Classical Defense of the Baroque

582

Hélène Merlin-Kajman

27. The Baroque and Philosophy

602

Michael Moriarty

28. The Baroque as Anti-Classicism: The French Case

623

Larry F. Norman

29. Is There a Baroque Style of Preaching in Early Modern France?

642

Anne Régent-Susini and Laurent Susini

PA RT I I I   S O C I E T Y, I N S T I T U T ION S , A N D P R AC T IC E S 30. Prayer, Meditation, and Retreat

667

Mette Birkedal Bruun

31. Baroque Sexualities

688

Gary Ferguson

32. Paradoxes: Baroque Science

713

Ofer Gal

33. Baroque Diplomacy

734

Timothy Hampton

34. The End of Witch-Hunting

747

H. C. Erik Midelfort

35. Time and Chronometry Roland Racevskis

779

viii   contents

36. Court Spectacle and Entertainment

802

Guy Spielmann

37. The Baroque State

825

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

38. Saints and Baroque Piety

847

Thomas Worcester

Index

867

Acknowledgments

This Handbook spans so many arts, media, disciplines, and languages that it would have been impossible to put it together without the generous help of many people— most particularly that of the contributors themselves. By generously sharing their expertise with the volume editor they made this project a truly collaborative one. Special thanks go to the two editors at Oxford Handbooks: Julia Kostova, for her encouragement and advice from the inception of this work, and to Elda Granata, who brought it to its happy conclusion. Evonne Levy provided many ideas in the early phase of planning, and Cecily Berberat oversaw the almost infinite number of details that needed to come together for the whole enterprise to take shape.

Contributors

Faith E. Beasley is Professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. A specialist of early modern French culture, she is the author of numerous books and articles on French women writers and salon culture, including Revising Memory: Women’s Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (1990), and Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory (2006). Her book Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de La Sablière and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France (2018), supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, explores the effect that France’s encounter with India had on early Enlightenment thought, material culture, and literature. Mette Birkedal Bruun is Professor of Church History at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Parables: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Mapping of Spiritual Topography (2007), editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order (2012), and co-editor of several volumes, including Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages (2008) and Commonplace Culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period (2011). She was awarded the Carlsberg Foundation Research Prize in 2017. Emmanuel Bury is Professor of French Literature at Sorbonne University. His research is devoted to the study of the relations between literature and society in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to the study of the influence of the culture of  Antiquity (pagan and Christian) on the culture of the French classical age, from humanism to the beginning of the Enlightenment. His earlier work focused on classical rhetoric and poetics and the theory of translation (in particular creative mistranslation, the Belles Infidèles). His current work concerns learned discourse and the intellectual life of the Republic of Letters, with particular concentration on the relations between literature and philosophy (Lucianism, libertinage érudit, and philosophical dialogue). Anthony J. Cascardi is Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Professor of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish. He is former Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities and of the Arts Research Center. His many books include Literature and the Question of Philosophy (1987), The Subject of Modernity (1992), Consequences of Enlightenment (1999), and Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics (2012). Tom Conley is Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. Among his many books are

xii   contributors Film Hieroglyphs (1991, new edition 2006), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (1992), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996, new edition 2010), L’Inconscient graphique: Essai sur la lettre à la Renaissance (2000), Cartographic Cinema (2007), An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2011), and À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (2014). He has had numerous fellowships, such as those from the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Delphine Denis  is Professor of French Language and Literature of the seventeenth century at Sorbonne University. She is a specialist in the history of the forms and the styles of early modern France and has published, alone or in collaboration, around fifteen books, including La Muse Galante: Poétique de la conversation dans l’œuvre de Madeleine de Scudéry (1997) and Le Parnasse galant. Institution d’une catégorie littéraire au XVIIe siècle (2001) and four critical editions. She created the website Le Règne d’Astrée, dedicated to Honoré d’Urfé’s novel (1607–1628), and is directing the first critical edition of this major text of French literature. William Egginton is Decker Professor in the Humanities, Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, and a member of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. His numerous books include Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2016), The Man Who Invented Fiction (2016), The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics (2010), and How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (2002). Gary Ferguson  is Douglas Huntly Gordon Professor of French and Chair of the Department of French at the University of Virginia. His books include Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe (2016), Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (2008), and Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (1992). Ofer Gal is Professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he is also the Director of the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science. He is the author, with Raz Chen-Morris, of Baroque Science (2013) and also co-editor with R. Chen-Morris of Science in the Age of Baroque (2013) and co-editor with C. Wolf of The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (2010). Enrique García Santo-Tomás is the Frank P. Casa Collegiate Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. He is the author of La creación del ‘Fénix’: Recepción crítica y formación canónica del teatro de Lope de Vega (2000), recipient of the “Premio Moratín de Ensayo a la Investigación Teatral” (2001); Espacio urbano y creación literaria en el Madrid de Felipe IV (2004), winner of the “Premio de Investigación Municipal Antonio Maura” (2005); Modernidad bajo sospecha: Salas Barbadillo y la cultura material del siglo XVII (2008); and La musa refractada: literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco (2014, 2015), which has come out in English with the University of Chicago Press with the title The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain (2017).

contributors   xiii Julia Gros de Gasquet  is both an actor and university teacher. She is Associate Professor (maître de conférences) and Research Fellow (habilitée à diriger des recherches) at the Institut d’Études Théâtrales of the University Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3). She is the author of En disant l’alexandrin, l’acteur tragique et son art, 17e siècle-20e siècle (2006). She appears in Eugène Green’s feature film Le Fils de Joseph (2016). She is also the artistic director of the Festival de la Correspondance de Grignan. Timothy Hampton is the Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (1990), Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (2000), and Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (2009). Stephanie Hanke is an art historian and scientific collaborator of the library as well as of the research project Piazza e monumento at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence (Max-Planck-Institute). She received her PhD from the University of Bonn with a thesis on grottoes in Genoese gardens and palaces and has also published on private baths, sculpture, and urban space in Genoa during the Renaissance and Baroque period. Her research interests focus on the architecture and urban structure of Italian harbor cities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century as well as on the relationship between sculpture and urban public space. She co-edited with Alessandro Nova the volume Skulptur und Platz. Raumbesetzung – Raumüberwindung – Interaktion (2014). Martha Hollander is Professor of Art History at Hofstra University. She is the author of An Entrance For The Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (2002) as well as various articles on seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture, digital pedagogy, and film. Her current research projects include Fashioning Manhood in the Dutch Golden Age; experiments with digital art history pedagogy, and The Digital Van Mander, an online translation of Carel van Mander’s Foundation of the Noble Free Art of Painting. Blair Hoxby is Professor of English at Stanford University. He was formerly Associate Professor of History and Literature at Harvard and of English at Yale. He is the author of Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (2002) and What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon (2015), which was awarded Honorable Mention for the Renaissance Society of America’s Gordon Book Prize. He is the co-editor of Milton in the Long Restoration (2016), which received the Irene Samuel Award from the Milton Society of America. Katherine Ibbett is Professor of French at the University of Oxford and the Caroline de Jager Fellow in French of Trinity College, Oxford. She is the author of Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (2017) and The Style of the  State in French Theater (2009) and, with Hall Bjørnstad, the co-editor of Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French Trauerspiel (2013). Christopher  D.  Johnson  is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Arizona State University and the author of Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (2010) and translator of Selected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo (2009).

xiv   contributors His article “Configuring the Baroque: Warburg and Benjamin” (2016) reconsiders the Baroque from the perspective of two exemplary twentieth-century Kulturwissenschaftler. Monika Kaup is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature and Germanics at the University of Washington. Her most recent books are Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (2012) and Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (co-edited with Lois Parkinson Zamora, 2010). Jessica Keating  is Assistant Professor of Art History at Carleton College. She is the author of Animating Empire: Automata, The Holy Roman Empire, and the Early Modern World (2018). John D. Lyons is Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia and writes about early modern French literature and culture. He is the author of many books, including Tragedy and the Return of the Dead (2018), The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (2011), Before Imagination: Embodied Thought From Montaigne to Rousseau (2005), and French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2010). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to French Literature (2015). In 2007 he was named chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. David Mayernik  is a practicing architect and artist, and Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the RSA, and a winner of the Gabriel Prize. The author of Timeless Cities (2003) and The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture (2016), he has written extensively on urban history and theory. For several seasons he designed and painted stage sets for the Haymarket Opera company of Chicago’s historically informed performances of Baroque operas. Hélène Merlin-Kajman is Professor of French Literature (seventeenth century) at the University Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3). Her early work focused on the concept of the public in the seventeenth century, which she studied in its extensive ramifications, particularly through the literary debates (“quarrels”) of the century, such as the querelle du Cid in Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle (1994), L’Absolutisme dans les Lettres et la théorie des deux corps. Passions et politique (2000), and L’Excentricité académique. Institution, littérature, société (2001). She is also interested in literary and cultural theory, as well as contemporary problems of education and teaching. She founded the Transitions movement and its site (http://www.mouvement-transitions.fr). Her books include La Langue est-elle fasciste? Langue, pouvoir, enseignement? (2003), Lire dans la gueule du loup. Essai sur une zone à défendre, la littérature (2016), and L’Animal ensorcelé. Traumatismes, littérature, transitionnalité (2016). H. C. Erik Midelfort is C. Julian Bishko Professor Emeritus of History and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a specialist of the German Reformation and the history of Christianity in early modern Europe. Among his many books are Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684 (1972), Mad Princes of

contributors   xv Renaissance Germany (1994), A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (1999), and Witchcraft, Madness, Society, and Religion in Early Modern Germany: A Ship of Fools (2013). Lesley Ellis Miller  is Senior Curator of Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Professor of Dress and Textile History at the University of Glasgow. She was lead curator on the refurbishment of the Europe 1600–1815 Galleries (2010–2015) and is responsible for the care and interpretation of the museum’s collections of textiles dating to before 1800. She contributes to postgraduate studies in dress and textile histories at the University of Glasgow. Her personal research interests lie in French and Spanish textiles and dress (design, commerce, and manufacturing), and her main publications are Selling Silks. A Merchant’s Sample Book 1764 (2014) and Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion (2017). Anna More is Professor of Hispanic Literatures in the Department of Literary Theory and Literatures at the University of Brasília. She is the editor of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works, a Norton Critical Edition (2016) and author of Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (2013), which won honorable mention for best book in humanities from the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Michael Moriarty is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge and a  Fellow of Peterhouse. He works chiefly on the literature and thought of the early modern period. His publications include Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (2003), Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (2006), and Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (2011). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. Jennifer Nevile is Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth Century Italy (2004) and editor of Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–1750 (2008). She has contributed chapters to many collective volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to Ballet (2007) and Die Musik in der Kultur der Renaissance (2015) and has published widely in journals on dance history. Paul Niell  is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Florida State University. He specializes in the architecture and material culture of the Caribbean with an emphasis on the Spanish-speaking islands in the colonial period. His articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, and the Colonial Latin American Review, among others. He is author of Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754-1828 (2015) and co-editor, with Stacie G. Widdifield, of Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910 (2013). Larry  F.  Norman is the Frank  L.  Sulzberger Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the

xvi   contributors author of The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (2011, awarded the MLA Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies) and The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (1999). He has edited multiple volumes on the relation between theater, book history, and the visual arts in early modern Europe and has co-edited a collection of essays on classicisms. David Ponsford is a distinguished organist and harpsichordist who has been engaged in research in Baroque music throughout his career. He lectured at Cardiff University in Performance Practice and Notation and Editing for seventeen years. His edition of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas was published in 2007. Following the publication of his book French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV (2011), he is currently recording a series of CDs for Nimbus Records of French Baroque organ repertoire on historic organs. Roland Racevskis  is Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at  the  University of Iowa. He is the author of Time and Ways of Knowing: Molière, Sévigné, Lafayette (2003) and Tragic Passages: Jean Racine’s Art of the Threshold (2008). Racevskis’s research interests include early-modern literature and cultural history with a focus on seventeenth-century French theater and prose. Anne Régent-Susini is Maître de conférences at the University Sorbonne-Nouvelle and a former member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author of L’Éloquence de la chaire (2009) and Bossuet et la rhétorique de l’autorité (2011). She is currently directing the new critical and complete edition of Bossuet’s oratorical works. Ünver Rüstem is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has held fellowships at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge. His research centers on the Ottoman Empire in its later centuries and on questions of cross-cultural exchange and interaction. He is the author of Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (2019) and has published on subjects ranging from the reception of illustrated Islamic manuscripts to the legitimating role of ceremonial in the context of Ottoman architecture. Guy Spielmann  teaches French and Performing Arts at Georgetown University. His scholarly interests cover early modern European performing arts broadly conceived, with a particular focus on stagecraft and non-literary genres (such as fairground theater and commedia dell’arte), as well as various forms of contemporary popular culture, notably film and comics. His books include Le Jeu de l’Ordre et du chaos (2002), on the relationships between comedy and sociopolitical order in the later part of Louis XIV’s reign, and Parades (2006), on eighteenth-century farces performed on domestic stages. He is currently editing at Classiques Garnier (Paris) the dramatic works of Charles Dufresny. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Münster, Germany. Her work focuses on the politics and culture of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her books include Der Staat als Maschine. Zur

contributors   xvii politischen Metaphorik des absoluten Fürstenstaats (1986), Vormünder des Volkes? Konzepte landständischer Repräsentation in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (1999), Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation. Vom Ende des Mittelalters bis 1806 (2009), and Des Kaisers alte Kleider. Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (2013). She is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Laurent Susini is Maître de conférences at Sorbonne University. He is author of L’Ecriture de Pascal. La lumière et le feu (2008), which won the Prix Dumézil of the French Academy in 2009. Downing  A.  Thomas  is Professor of French and Associate Provost and Dean for International Programs at the University of Iowa. His books include Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (1995), Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime: 1647–1785 (2002) and, as editor with Robert Marvin, Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries in Musical Drama (2006). Hélène Visentin  is a Professor of French Studies at Smith College. Her research specializes in early modern literature and culture, with a focus on the history and the aesthetics of the performing arts. She has published three critical editions of machine plays: François de Chapoton, La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers (2004); Jean de Rotrou, Les Sosies, in Théâtre complet 8 (2005); and Pierre Corneille, Andromède, in Théâtre IV (forthcoming). She also is the co-editor of L’Invraisemblance du pouvoir. Mises en scène de la souveraineté au XVIIe siècle (2005) and French Ceremonial Entries in the Sixteenth Century: Event, Image, Text (2008). She is preparing a book on French machine theater. Thomas Worcester  is President of Regis College in the University of Toronto. His  primary area of research is church history in early modernity. He is the author of Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching of Bishop Camus (1997) and editor of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits (2017). He is the co-editor of many other volumes, including Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque (2007) and The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor (2010). Michael Yonan  is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri, where he is also Program Director in the School of Visual Studies. His work focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art. His books include Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History (2018), Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (2011), and The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, co-edited with Alden Cavanaugh (2010).

chapter 1

I N TRODUCTION: Th e Cr isis of th e  Ba roqu e John D. Lyons

The Crisis of the Baroque When Heinrich Wölfflin established the Baroque as a focus of scholarly attention within art history, he defined Baroque as a concept of style, specifically one characterized by painterliness, grandness, massiveness, and movement.1 It is unlikely that he foresaw how important the Baroque would become for other areas of cultural study, far beyond art history, and even far beyond style—so much so that some would write of “the age of the Baroque,” that this age would be described as having a specific worldview, and that the term Baroque would even be taken up by philosophers.2 Outside of the world of research, lovers of the visual arts flock every day to galleries and museums to see exhibits of baroque art, and listeners go to concerts and even festivals of baroque music. Scholars in almost every discipline write about the Baroque and writers sometimes give the term a proud place in the titles of their novels.3 A visit to a bookstore or a glance at a library catalogue makes it seem that the Baroque is a massive success. And, indeed, it certainly is: but a success that is also a perpetual crisis, a constant questioning about the meaning of this term and about what purpose it serves. To the extent that this “crisis” derives from the success of the scholarly use of the term and from its extension beyond art history, we could say that both the baroque period of early modernity and the scholarly world of today resemble each other. They face the same challenge of mastering and organizing an ever-expanding body of knowledge. The present volume explores both the cultural c­ risis that followed the Renaissance and the scholarly debates of the twenty-first century. Books about the Baroque seem fated to begin—as if some form of incantatory ­ritual— by referring to the Portuguese word for an irregular pearl. Indeed, here we will finally reach the baroque pearl and the constant early modern tension between two sets of everpresent polarities. On one hand, there was a commitment to rule, reason, classification, correct perception, and rigid structure. On the other hand, there was a fascination with disorder, with the irrational, with all that does not fit into existing classifications, with

2   the oxford handbook of the baroque illusion, and with rebellion against order. But before we get there, and before we explain why it is useful to call this historical culture baroque, we need to give a rapid overview of the culture to which the term “baroque” is applied.

From Crisis to Amazement The historical period to which the term applies—let us say roughly 1550 to 1750, with variations in region and art form—constituted a major turning point both in Europe and in other parts of the world touched by Europeans. It was José Antonio Maravall who most decisively linked the Baroque with the idea of a general cultural crisis: “The formation and development of baroque culture must be referred to that crisis, which offers a basis for explaining how it affects the whole of Europe.”4 Although Maravall mentions the unsettling effects of scientific discovery and religious discord, his concentration on financial, political, and demographic factors sometimes underestimates the challenges for perception and belief and the consequent aesthetic transformation that results. Beyond finances and demography, beyond the competition of nation-states remaking the political map, the very conception of the world was changing. Stephen Toulmin describes this period as one experiencing a “crisis of belief.”5 Walter Benjamin perceived the Lutheran Baroque as a period of profound melancholy, as the spiritual realm, the Kingdom of God, was perceived as definitively separated from the earthly, material one.6 Maravall himself considers the baroque mentality as “a state of disquiet—which, in many cases, could be characterized as anguished—and, therefore, a state of instability.”7 The central historical characteristic of this epoch is an experience of shock, as the foundations of European culture crumbled within two or three generations. The discovery of “new” lands, the collapse of the universal authority of the Roman Catholic Church, the emergence of new technologies—all of this meant that toward the end of the sixteenth century the European world experienced a rush of newness, both exciting and terrifying. And because European explorers and merchants were at this very time interacting with much of the rest of the globe—from Indonesia, India, and Japan to Africa and the Americas—the Baroque became the first global culture. It was a culture of amazement. Amazement, as a concept, is central to the aesthetics, the psychology, and the politics of the Baroque. It is known in various languages by closely related terms: astonishment, marvel, wonder, and admiration. Let us recall that baroque “admiration” differs from today’s in that it is not a term of praise; it does not require evaluation. Instead, it is the experience of shock. Descartes, in his Passions of the Soul, presents admiration as the foundation of emotional and intellectual experience: At our first encounter with some object that surprises us and that we consider new, or very different from what we knew previously, that causes us to marvel at it [nous l’admirons] and we are astonished. And because this can happen before we have any knowledge whether this object is suitable [convenable] to us or is not suitable,

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   3 it seems to me that admiration is the first of all the passions. And it has no contrary, because, if the object that appears has nothing surprising about it, we are in no way moved, and we consider it without passion.8

Descartes goes on to show that this first moment of astonishment can be followed by many other, subsequent passions (which can combine in various ways), so that we feel fear, esteem, contempt, desire, love, hatred, and so forth.9 We need to remember how centrally important, in this description of “admiration,” are the qualities of newness and unfamiliarity and strangeness. The Baroque is the encounter with the strange, with the unknown. If we think even briefly about all that was new and astonishing in the early modern world, we can see that there was much that astonished.

Space First of all, the world changed size and shape. This is the most visible break with the experience of the past, and it had global consequences: it affected the highest philosophical thought as well as in the most mundane details of daily life. Like most historical change, the change in the perception and use of the new global space was gradual until it reached a tipping point, when impending shifts accelerated. At the end of the fifteenth century Columbus discovered (from the European standpoint) what came to be known as the Indies or as America. This was just the beginning of an age of intense and unsettling exploration, familiar today from the voyages of Vasco da Gama (1497–1524), Caboto (1497), Magellan (1519), and many others. Accounting for all this space and its claimed ownership was a major difficulty. Even basic orientation in the enlarged world was a challenge. In 1504 Paulmier de Gonneville, blown off course, thought he had discovered a land east of the Cape of Good Hope (Australia), but in fact he had landed in Brazil. It is not ­surprising that baroque instrument makers and cartographers were very busy. These earlier discoveries led by the mid-sixteenth century to the major shift that, one could argue, marks the beginning of the Baroque: the age of massive colonization. After heroic navigation came the attempt at systematic settlement and organization. The Spanish Vice-Royalty of Peru was established in 1542. Seven years later the Portuguese organized the Governorate General of Brazil. The British East India Company was c­ hartered on the last day of 1600. Two years later the Dutch formed their own United East Indian Company, and in 1606 the two Virginia Companies were chartered: one to colonize the Plymouth area of what is now New England and the other to colonize the American coast farther south. In lands claimed by the Spanish, Portuguese, and French, Catholic religious orders established missions to impose European ways of life. Among the most famous of these were the Jesuit “reductions” (Spanish reducciones, Portuguese reduções). Besides the challenges posed by trans-oceanic transportation and communication and by the need to invent new administrative forms, this expansion in the terrestrial space now in the control of Europeans brought the knowledge of previously unknown

4   the oxford handbook of the baroque customs, languages, religions, flora and fauna. All of this information had to be ­somehow managed within the European framework of names. The resolution of this challenge posed by information overload appears in the great achievement of Carl Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae (1735). The Swedish botanist and zoologist rose to the massive challenge of naming the living creatures of the vastly expanded world and of trying to organize into some coherent relation the living beings long recognized in Europe and also those that were previously unknown. This is perhaps one of the best examples of how exploration and colonization in this period had bi-directional effects. While largely imposing a European perspective and terminology, newly discovered languages, beliefs, customs, flora, and fauna also had an impact on Europe itself. Words we now take for granted were novelties in the seventeenth century, as were the things they named: such as “chocolate” and “tomato” from the Nahuatl words chocolatl and tomatl, and “hurricane” from Taino, the language of the early inhabitants of the Antilles. Back in Europe, princes wished to display the explorations and conquests that they financed. After all, if amazement—astonishment—is the baroque passion par excellence, this is because colossal and extravagant display was both aesthetically powerful and politically intimidating. Two of the most striking objects that survive from the reign of Louis XIV are the huge spheres representing the terrestrial and the celestial globes, known as the “Marly Globes” or—after the name of their creator, the “Coronelli Globes”— that tower over the beholder. The globes, now displayed in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, are works of art; they also clearly indicate, through the bust of Louis displayed in trompe l’œil on the globe itself, that the king of France is boasting of his patronage of the mapmaker and perhaps also announcing ambitions to control the terrestrial surface that is thus depicted. To the eye of today’s beholder there is something desperate and pathetic about the disproportion between the human ambition of a king and the vastness of the earth, and this expression of vanity has highly timely, baroque implications. Here we cannot separate space, colonization, and the ideological and moral lessons that derive from the vast upheaval in European self-perception in early modernity. Vanity is one of the principal vices fustigated by the most famous preachers of the time, including Bossuet, tutor of the heir to the French throne, who repeatedly hammered home those words from Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”10 This is indeed a theme of Christian preachers of all confessions in the seventeenth century and of many painters.11 The sense of the overwhelming hugeness of the earth, now increasingly available to European navigators—and thus to armies, merchants, missionaries, scientists, and settlers—was powerfully stimulating and deeply unsettling. It was new and shocking. And new developments in optics soon gave people more sources of astonishment.12 In 1608 news of a device that allowed people to see faraway things as if they were nearby spread through Europe—news that stimulated Galileo to make his own telescope for use in astronomical observation.13 Shortly afterward, circa 1620, microscopes began to be used in Europe—Giovanni Faber gave this name to the device in 1625. The emergence of these two devices was associated with unsettling views of the cosmos and

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   5 of the human body. Both the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small undermined humanity’s ideas of scale and of the place of the earth and its inhabitants in the universe. These discoveries paralleled and added to the disarray in traditional knowledge of the earth, the sky, and mankind’s place in the whole scheme of things. Galileo had already argued for heliocentrism in 1610 in his Sidereus Nuncius, and the telescope spurred ­further challenges to the tradition of geocentrism.14 The human body now seemed full of mysterious and invisible living, material entities. Pascal, a scientist, mathematician, and religious polemicist, gave one of the most eloquent testimonies of the unsettling effect of such discoveries on human self-perception in a lengthy fragment of his Pensées in which he asks, “What is a human in infinity?”15 Even an ancient instrument such as the mirror could have a role in transforming humans perceptions of themselves, for mirror technology made a great leap in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and altered individuals’ self-perception.16

Perception, Thought, Belief, and Authority Global, cosmic, and microscopic space thus expanded and untethered from received notions spurred the people of the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries to massive innovation and consolidation in almost every domain of life. It is not surprising that the Baroque is described sometimes as a period of confusion and uncertainty and at other times as a period of dogmatic authoritarianism. It was necessarily both, and we find these tendencies intertwined in all domains and in all lands. Cartesian philosophy, for instance, is sometimes hastily summarized as a method of practicing radical doubt, but Descartes explains his aim as that of constructing philosophy and natural science on a foundation that will be henceforth entirely firm and certain.17 Pascal’s apology for the Christian religion in the Pensées seems both to instill in readers massive and anguished doubt about any rational and empirical source of certainly and to encourage unskeptical surrender to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Pascal imagines a man trying to sit all day long in a room doing nothing.18 Cervantes describes a man who thinks that his body is made of glass.19 Descartes tries to doubt all that he perceives, reaching such an extreme that he is not sure he has a body or than anyone else exists. These are, of course, extremes, and they are finally dismissed as impossible or aberrant, and yet they are among the best-known fictions or thought experiments of the early modern period. It seems as if these writers, among others, are insistently and intensely asking the question: what is it to be a human being? In doing this, they describe individual, isolated individuals, but individuals the reader could in some sense identify with. Much has been written about Renaissance “individualism” and early modern ­“self-fashioning,” but from the late sixteenth into the eighteenth centuries something rather different from individualism develops. On one hand, it is true that literary,

6   the oxford handbook of the baroque philosophical, and even religious writings concentrate on individuals, often accentuating their isolation from other people. On the other hand, there is also an increase in widely asserted standards of behavior and appearance, or “civility,” an assumption that all people share certain basic qualities or traits or that they can be molded so as to appear outwardly like other people. Just as the microscope uncovered depths and details inside the human body, so writers discovered the inside of the human mind. More than ever before, people were assumed to have and “inside” as well as an “outside,” and the two could be radically different. And indeed, this is how baroque writers insistently represent people in the world and how they depict people in interaction with others. As Baltasar Gracián wrote, in his Oracle, or the Art of Prudence (1647): There is neither pleasure nor profit in playing one’s game too openly. Not to declare immediately, is the way to hold minds in suspense, especially in matters of importance, which are the object of universal expectation. That makes every thing to be thought a mystery, and the secret of that raises veneration. In the manner of expression one ought to have a care not to be too plain: and to speak with open heart is not always suitable in conversation. Silence is the Sanctuary of Prudence. A resolution made manifest was never esteemed. He who declares himself, is exposed to censure; and if he succeeds not, he is doubly miserable. We ought then to imitate the method of God Almighty, who always holds men in suspense.20

Authors show characters in narratives, for instance, trying to figure out what other characters are thinking and concealing behind their words and gestures—in other words, what is happening in their mind. The term “duplicity” is apposite here, and it is not surprising that deception is a frequent theme in dramas and narratives of this time, including in historical narratives and memoirs, as well as in advice books. Descartes, whose personal motto was, “I go about masked” (larvatus prodeo) in his Discourse on Method, explicitly states that during his period of methodical doubt he will imitate outwardly the conduct of the people around him even while he does not subscribe to the values or beliefs that this conduct supposes, and he does so because he also takes for granted that the people around him are also pretending to believe things that they really do not.21 Religious movements made particular and varied use of this society-wide supposition of duplicity—of inwardness and outwardness—with manuals aiming to develop the internal resources of Christians as well as their outward conduct. In both the Protestant and Catholic reform movements, the faithful were encouraged to cultivate and deepen their internal, individual sense of attachment to God, effectively, in some cases, inventing an internal imaginative or imaginary world independent from their outward conduct and appearance. One of the major inspirations for inward cultivation came from the writings of Ignatius of Loyola, who was canonized in 1622, and whose Spiritual Exercises taught a kind of structured meditation. His influence spread throughout Europe thanks to Jesuit schools, and we can see modified forms of Ignatian meditation in the philosophical writings of Descartes as well as in the immensely popular devotional treatises of François de Sales, who was himself declared a saint in 1665.

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   7 His Introduction to the Devout Life was a best-seller in multiple languages. His teachings and other books of devotion included advice for what to do in solitary moments of meditation and prayer but also in other times when the individual believer was in a social situation. In other words, conscious, cultivated doubleness, in the form of a separation of the inward and outward person, was not a flaw, but a way to have an internal freedom while conforming to the requirements of one’s station in society.

Theatricality and Illusion The distinction between the inner world and the outer world meant that each could be cultivated separately, in different ways, for different purposes, and for different audiences. In both fictive and historical narratives as well as in painting, dress was a crucially important marker of identity. The carefully chosen details of dress and accessories in the increasingly important practice of painted portraits had real power. Baroque audiences were fascinated by such representation not because outward appearance was a clear sign of a person’s essential, permanent being but precisely because of the understanding that it was not. In novels, novellas, and theatrical performances themes of disguise and mistaken identity flourished. Female characters disguised themselves as male (and vice versa), commoners as nobles, nobles as commoners, laypersons as clerics, and so forth. Once the inner life and the outer life became separable spheres, both of which could be modulated, refined, and intensified, daily interaction became consciously theatrical.22 Manuals of behavior appeared to help people acquire the abilities to appear at court or in other contexts: to dress, speak, walk, and gesture in the proper manner for each context. Even novels, a literary genre that boomed at this time, were not merely entertainment but models of comportment and speech. Thus, while the individual and her or his qualities were the theme of painting, sculpture, and writing, it would be misleading to emphasize individualism as a characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead, there was widely diffused standardization of codes of outward representation that people were expected to master. In literary circles these codes appear in the many treatises of poetics and controversies around decorum or bienséance, which was understood not in terms of what we today consider etiquette or ethics but rather as an aid to creating believable dramatis personae. Theatricality generally aims to create an illusion—and the Baroque was fascinated by illusion. To begin with, all the new discoveries unsettled perceptions and beliefs that had seemed utterly secure. Now it seemed that many previous certainties were illusions, deceptions, or mistakes. This is part of the already-mentioned wave of skepticism and doubt that followed the collapse of unified dogmatic certainty in Christianity. It was not only religious belief that was affected by a weakened central authority but the whole range of learning and knowledge. If the Bible had—in the view of reformers—been misread, mistranslated, and misunderstood, what about such ancient authorities as Aristotle and the great medical authority, Galen of Pergamon? Should we trust the texts

8   the oxford handbook of the baroque that for centuries had taught the “truth” about the world, or should we trust the evidence of our senses? Both textual authority and empirical, experienced-based knowledge were questioned in deeply unsettling ways, as Montaigne’s influential essay on the natural theology of the Catalan writer Raymond Sebond shows.23 But doubt about what counted as certain knowledge was not a matter for philosophy and theology alone, and illusion was not always a purely negative thing. Instead the arts, including literary culture, became fascinated with the portrayal and creation of illusion. The distinction between the visible and the real, appearance and essence, was sometimes conveyed in rhyme, in sayings about the contrast between être et paraître and between Schein und Sein. The greatest novel of the Baroque may well be Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–1615), where a deluded hero loses touch with reality because of his excessive faith in his favorite books of chivalry.24 Intellectually based skepticism combined with religious teaching led to poems, plays, and paintings in which the world itself was presented as an illusion, as a mere dream.25 Calderón’s play Life is a Dream (1635) is the most memorable expression of a theme that runs throughout European literature in a multitude of languages at this time. Pierre Corneille’s Illusion comique plays with this idea (1636), and Jaques’s monologue (in Shakespeare’s As You Like It), beginning with the despairing claim that “All the world’s a stage,” encapsulates the idea nicely. The fact that the character who pronounces this monologue is melancholic roots his perception within serious medical views of the time, which saw melancholia as a physical condition that could alter perceptions of the material world. In the early eighteenth century the Irish philosopher George Berkeley took this idea of the life as a dream to the extreme of supposing that there is no material world at all, but only ideas and subjective impressions.26 Stage decoration and devices (in “machine plays”), use of light and dark effects and perspective in painting, exceptional refinement in sculpture—all these achievements in visual arts show that “illusion” can sometimes be synonymous with “accuracy” in representation. To produce an image that seems to be the thing itself, and then to let viewers realize that they have been duped is to astound them and make them admire the work of art. Trompe l’œil painting deceives the viewer by exploiting ever-increasing understanding of optics and subjective perception. When integrated into buildings, such painting can make small rooms seem large and can blur the distinction between solid surfaces and sky. In short, the fascination with illusion in the Baroque went hand in hand with discoveries of how both the material world, the senses, and the mind work.

Machines While human enterprise could create deceptive appearances, it could also allow ­mankind to penetrate appearances and to perceive things in depth as never before. If the microscope could be used to discover tiny entities within the blood, this feat was possible because the inside of the body was now open for viewing. Despite the tradition that medicine should be founded on theory and not on the lower practices of cutting and

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   9 observing (the work of disdained “empirics” or barbers), Andreas Vesalius, physician to the Emperor Charles V, published his On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543), offering dissection-based description of the human body as a system of functioning material parts. Already artists such as Leonardo had studied the detailed material structure of the human body. But as the sixteenth century advanced, the inspection of the human body as material system became more widespread, interesting a public beyond medical ­circles, as we can see in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). Nicolas Fontaine, in his memoir of life among the Jansenist followers of Descartes, reported the enthusiasm for dissections of animals, considered to be soulless machines.27 The Baroque was fascinated by the idea of machines, seeing in the cosmos itself a great machine, which could be described and modeled.28 If existing natural “machines” could be described and understood, new ones could be made. Yet what is particularly characteristic of baroque culture is, once again, the distinction between what appears and what is behind the appearance. Anyone who has visited a great baroque garden or city remembers the magical fountains with jets of water spraying high into the air or gushing in seemingly impossible waterfalls out of the side of a palace. Surely if anything has ever been universally acclaimed as “baroque” it is the Trevi Fountain (completed 1762) or the Neptune Fountain at Versailles (1682). The intent was to produce an effect of amazement and marvel in the beholder—as we know, the marvelous was a key theme of baroque poetics and aesthetics generally—and princes spared no expense to create such spectacles, often bringing the water from far away. These fountains are, in fact, elaborate and amazing machines. The early modern concern for the difference between what appears on the surface of human beings and what is hidden in their inner thoughts gives us a way to think about the machines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If we think for a moment about the marvel of the spectacular water displays, what is most impressive is the concealed engineering behind the surface. Versailles would not have its extraordinary fountains if it were not for the “Marly Machine” (la Machine de Marly), a system of pumps that brought water from the Seine to Versailles, a distance of seven kilometers and an uphill stretch of 150 meters. This machine was able to pump 3,200 cubic meters of water a day. The Trevi Fountain was supplied by the modern system that brought water eight miles into Rome. Mankind has had machines of some kind for a long time, but what fascinated the baroque period were machines that did things in concealed ways. This is different from a windmill or a water mill that supplies energy to grind grain, for instance; these productive and utilitarian machines are not meant to surprise and not usually built to impress. It is easy to see what they are doing. Baroque machines are designed so that they seem not to be machines at all but rather something baffling and magical. They produce “admiration” (in the sense of astonishment), and they are generally based on the illusion-producing foundation of a concealed mechanism. Besides fountains there are the ingenious theatrical devices that allowed actors to descend from the sky or to sail across a sea on stage. There are statues, automata, that move and gesture—statues that we would perhaps see as robots. There are fireworks (macchine del fuoco (machines of fire) that require great technical ingenuity—ingenuity that is, at the time of the spectacle, meant to disappear even

10   the oxford handbook of the baroque though the display itself amazes. We can recognize a baroque extension of the Renaissance social ideal of sprezzatura (from Castiglione’s 1528 Book of the Courtier), according to which elegance and wit appeared at their best when they appeared effortlessly and as if without preparation. And yet, of course, sprezzatura, like the fountains, depended on long development and hard work. In short, the baroque aesthetic of machines is paradoxical and duplicitous. The spectator knows that what he or she is seeing is an apparent impossibility—a god descends from a cloud at the end of a tragedy to bring a just resolution—and yet enjoys the illusion. These examples of machines that create visual magic are part of a much vaster baroque enthusiasm. The musical organ (from the Greek organon, meaning tool or instrument) enjoyed a golden age in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such organs also created quasi-magical illusions, seemingly giving a man-made device the ability to produce natural sounds, like the vox humana, the human voice. Blaise Pascal designed and had built another kind of machine, one that was not meant for aesthetic effect but that did something surprising that it shared with other baroque machines: it could allow a material, artificial object to do something thought to be the exclusive purview of human beings. Pascal’s sister wrote that as an adolescent he “invented that arithmetic machine with which not only can one do all kinds of calculations without a pen or counters, but one can do them even without knowing a single rule of arithmetic, and with perfect accuracy. This device has been considered as a new thing in nature, to have reduced into a machine a science that dwells entirely in the mind.”29 Pascal’s calculating machine did not look like a person, but it was perceived as doing something that previously could only be done by a human being, inside a mind.30 Many other baroque machines instead replicated the outward actions of a human being or of some other living creature. This was one of the great achievements of the water art of baroque gardens and of urban fountains, which often produced an aesthetic illusion so powerful that it created an immersive experience. In certain gardens, visitors had a multisensory experience enabled by three-dimensional hydraulic constructions which move, emit a range of sounds (ranging from the peaceful to the terrifying), and seem to gesture. Beyond the creation of striking new physical machines that the people of the time found amazing and entertaining, the machine as concept played a major role in thinking throughout the baroque period. Mechanical philosophy, or mechanism, came to prominence with Descartes and Hobbes between 1637 and 1651 and reached its best-known expression in La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine (1747). For Descartes, the material world in which we live is a machine or set of machines, including the bodies of living beings.31 Staving off conflict with religious authorities, Descartes conceded that humanity differs from (other) animals by having a soul, though the connection between the material body and the immaterial soul was a serious problem—Descartes proposed that the two are tied together by the pineal gland.32 If all that exists in the perceptible world could be described as a machine, this was because the world as humanity knew it was a “fallen” world. Descartes’s rather desperate attempt to hold together the human machine (the body) and a parcel of the divine (the soul) is symptomatic of the religious tendency that prevailed throughout Christianity

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   11 (both Catholic and Protestant) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The teachings of the Church father Augustine of Hippo insisted on the doctrine of original sin and of the resultant separation between the City of God and the City of Man—the imperfect world of human suffering, temptation, sin, and death. As Stephen Toulmin writes, “What essentially marked off seventeenth-century ways of thinking about Nature from their forerunners in the Aristotelian tradition was . . . the deanimation of Nature, and the associated separation of God the author of Creation from Nature, its object.”33

Organization and Display It was not only the vast expansion of newly accessible spaces—around the earth, within the body, and in the heavens—that required description and classification. Traditional knowledge, beliefs, rules, rituals, and territories were also shaken by the upheavals in religion, political power, and natural philosophy. One of the most consequential of these reorganizational efforts concerned religion, which had been (and continued to be) one of the most mortally violent sources of struggle from the sixteenth century onward. Now that Christianity no longer existed in a single centrally organized form the Catholic Church undertook reforms that clarified and codified doctrine and many practices. Between 1645 and 1663 the Council of Trent made a whole series of decrees—all of which illustrate the core baroque characteristic of centralizing and clarifying. From this time date the Tridentine Creed, the Roman Catechism (1566), the official recognition of the Latin Vulgate as the Catholic Bible, and the Tridentine Mass (published in the Roman Missal), which remained the authorized form of eucharistic celebration from 1570 until the late twentieth century, replacing local liturgical forms. Urban VIII (Barberini) imposed total papal control on beatification and canonization: that is, the naming of saints, which was a central feature of Roman Catholicism.34 Although the cult of the saints was a major target of Protestant criticism, the Catholic Church in this period engaged in exuberant saint making but did so with a greater level of documentation and institutional process.35 Not only were newly canonized persons subject to greater scrutiny, but the innumerable traditionally venerated saints became the object of scholarly attention, as, for example, in the case of the group of hagiographers called the Bollandists, who began publishing the Acta Sanctorum in 1643. It was not enough to decree and legislate belief and ritual: such decisions needed to be implemented and displayed. The ways in which churches, and in particular the Catholic Church, went about communicating the faith to the populations that were at least nominally affiliated with the denomination is one of the most visible aspects of the Baroque. This took place in architecture, painting, and sculpture, all of which aim to amaze the viewer and to imprint doctrines in a memorable and palpable way. These media are the epicenter of scholarship and publication about the Baroque—and deservedly so. But it is important not to forget that these are not only visual phenomena but rather part of a vast effort to reform, control, and modernize the relationship of each and every believer with

12   the oxford handbook of the baroque her or his religion. In the baroque period individuals began to have an “identity.” This latter term was not at the time in widespread use in its recent, early twenty-first-century meaning, but it did exist and seems apposite for describing the way each religious ­organization, as well as each person belonging thereto, was now distinguished by a set of uniform doctrinal, ritual, aesthetic characteristics—more than ever before. The OED attests two closely related understandings of the term in the baroque period: “The quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute or essential sameness; oneness.” In other words, religious denominations (and particularly the Catholic Church) aspired to a distinct and essential sameness distinguishable from other groups. And each individual member would acquire a corresponding identity, in the sense of “The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition of being a single individual; the fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality.” Clearly in the baroque Catholic Church efforts were made to assure this sameness of belief and practice throughout the world, and all Catholics would identify as Catholics: they would read the same Bible, attend the same liturgies, and receive the sacraments under the same conditions and at the same intervals. Of course, Christianity had always set boundaries between itself and other religions, particularly those closest to it, Judaism and Islam. But now the distinctions had to be made and enforced within Christianity itself, the majority religion of Europe. By virtue of their separation into ­distinct confessions, Protestants also “identified” (i.e., had the same beliefs as) others within their church—Lutherans as Lutherans, Calvinists as Calvinists, etc. In short, both Catholics and Protestants arrived at similar forms of identity through efforts of clearer definition of their precise doctrines, as well as through the elimination of indecision or ambiguity. The emergence of a religious identity increasingly assumed that the believer would have an active rather than a passive relation to the religion. Visual display within the places of worship were part of this process, whether it be through the exceptionally ornate and even illusionistic decoration of Catholic churches or through the intense sobriety of many Protestant ones—for even non-display can be a form of display, the absence of statues and paintings a reminder of the call to relate directly to God rather than through a set of intermediaries.36 In all religious institutions of the time it was important to engage the persons who were expected to cultivate their mental and emotional selves in keeping with the teachings of their church. We have already mentioned the practices of prayer and meditation that were intended to shape and develop the personal piety of the believer, outside of the physical space of church buildings. But the actions of churchgoers during ceremonies were also intended to form the inner beliefs of the Christian. Long before the concept of behavioral conditioning became famous in the work of Pavlov and Skinner, and before the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized the concept of habitus, Blaise Pascal argued that a non-believer could increase the likelihood of conversion to Catholic Christianity by going through the associated motions: by genuflecting, blessing himself with holy water, and so forth.37 It is perhaps no surprise that Pascal also, as we have mentioned, invented a calculating machine. In both cases he

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   13 was setting forth a kind of “programming.” It is indeed not surprising that Maravall ­perceives the Baroque as emphasizing a form of behaviorism: “What we might call a simple static guidance controlling by presence had to give way before a dynamic guidance controlling by activity.”38 Of course, religious edifices have always been meant to impress the visitor and to ­create the environment in which some special awe could be felt. But in place of a onedirectional communication (from the religious authorities to the individual) the Baroque, and particularly in the Catholic Church, implemented a two-directional communication. The statuary and painting of churches gave the congregants a vision of the interaction between the divine and the human, between the earthly life of the living and the blessed rewards of heaven. By an astonishing illusion, boundaries often disappear. Mary’s assumption into heaven, for example, seems immediately present. In illusionistic ceiling paintings, through complex techniques of representation di sotto in sù, the roof of the church vanishes, so that the beholder witnesses heaven itself. But it is not only the boundary between life and afterlife that vanishes; it is often difficult to locate the point where the load-bearing structure of the edifice stops and painted statuary— stucco—begins. And the painted ceiling often seems to be the sky itself, as if the church were open so that the visitor can behold choirs of angels assuring the communication between God and his people. There are two important features of such churches that are not as immediately striking as this illusionistic décor, and they nonetheless play vital complementary roles in the bi-directional flow of information in the strengthened institutional structures of religion: the pulpit and the confessional. These two ornate objects of ecclesiastical furniture facilitate two central functions of Christian institutional life, particularly in the Catholic church—conveying information from the leaders of the church to the believers and gathering information from each individual believer to confirm that the guidance has been accepted and internalized. While the pulpit has probably existed in some form since the earliest churches, after the Council of Trent the pulpit became larger, higher, and more ornate and moved forward into the mass of the congregation. Preaching was one of the earliest topics addressed at Trent. Clearly the Catholic church needed to get its message to the people to forestall Protestant interpretations of the faith. Sermons became obligatory on Sundays and important feast days, but strict control over the preachers was required: “Regulars, of whatsoever order they may be, may not preach even in the churches of their own orders, unless they have been examined and approved of as regards their life, manners, and knowledge, by their own superiors, and with his license; with which license they shall be bound to present themselves personally before the bishops, and beg a blessing from them, before they begin to preach.”39 Neglect of preaching, unauthorized preaching, and heterodox content were to be punished. Baroque pulpits, in Catholic and Lutheran churches, were frequently quite ornate but also functional. They usually had a canopy intended to direct the sound of the preacher’s words downward toward the audience. Celebrity preachers existed in all denominations, including the imperial court preacher in Vienna, Abraham a Sancta Clara, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in Paris, John Donne and Lancelot Andrews in England, and

14   the oxford handbook of the baroque Jean Frédéric Ostervald in Switzerland. Styles of preaching transcended national and denominational borders in a sign of the importance of this function.40 About the same time, in 1565, the object we know as the confessional was created, by Carlo Borromeo, bishop of Milan, to separate the priest from the penitent. Its use spread and in 1614 the Roman Ritual ordered “the use of the confessional in all churches and prescribe[d] its position in an open and conspicuous place.”41 In this way abuse of the penitent by the priest (and the seduction of the priest by the penitent) was to be prevented in a way that displayed publicly the integrity of the institution while also reminding all onlooks of the now obligatory annual confession of sins, by which information passed from the faithful to the clergy; in other words, in a reverse direction upwards through the hierarchy. De Boer writes that Borromeo “attempted to create a new, purified confessional order capable of countering the religious crisis of the time.”42 The Roman Catholic church, with its immense bureaucracy in Rome, was only one example among many in which an increasingly centralized and rationalized administration displayed its force. As Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger writes, “In the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century there was throughout Europe a similar political style that can be called ‘baroque.’ . . . This style is characterized by the idea of the state as an artefact, coupled with a love of geometry, theatricality and ceremonial order, a general climate of competition, and finally a fundamental tension between ideal order and factual disorder.” 43 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whether in France, Spain, Austria, or Britain, much energy was devoted to rationalizing and regularizing administration in all aspects, including tax collection, the military, and statesupported manufacture. But it was not enough that princes be efficient and powerful, they also had to display their might in an impressive manner both for subordinates and for rivals. Hence the enormous expenditures lavished on the creation of princely palaces such as El Escorial in Spain, Versailles and Marly in France, Schönbrunn and the Winter Palace in Austria, the Ducal Palace in Nancy (Lorraine), the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, etc.

The Return of the Baroque We have now looked at many aspects of European culture in the period from the ­mid-sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. Still, a reader may read this overview and yet ask, “Why should we call it ‘baroque’?” Certainly, in making use of this term, we draw on an intellectual tradition that dates from the last decades of the nineteenth century, notably from Wölfflin’s Renaissance und Barock (1888). In the following decades there were many art-historical studies concerning the Baroque and a few explorations that went beyond art and architecture toward a more general intellectual, social, and aesthetic concept, such as Wilhem Hausenstein’s Vom Geist des Barock (1920) and particularly Eugenio d’Ors Du Baroque (1935). The great explosion of Baroque studies occurred after World War II, and for several decades there were publications about

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   15 Baroque in all disciplines. Pierre Charpentrat’s Le Mirage baroque (1967) argues plausibly that the war and allied occupation of Germany increased awareness of the Baroque, and the German philologists exiled in the war years in the United Kingdom and United States also brought literary applications of the Baroque, as Jane O. Newman’s Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque argues.44 Henceforth there were many literary studies of the Baroque, such as Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style (1955), Roy Daniells, Milton, Mannerism and Baroque (1963), Wilfried Barner, Der Literarische Barockbegriff (1975), Jean Rousset, La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France (1965), and Daniel Klébener’s L’Adieu au baroque (1979). In the 1980s and 1990s, by contrast, the interest in the Baroque receded, except in art history and music history (where publications examining the Baroque have remained fairly constant for a century). There were some notable studies of the Baroque primarily in the literary domain, such as Murray Roston’s Milton and the Baroque (1980) and Timothy Hampton’s edited collection Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy (Yale French Studies, 1991), but the most resounding single book in these decades was by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (1988). As if by some pendular movement, in the first decade of the twenty-first century the Baroque once more burst upon the scene of the humanities. There is no single publication, event, or discovery we can point to explain this renewal. Instead, a series of coincidences appear as probable cause. Walter Benjamin’s work was rediscovered, and thus his proposed (but not defended) thesis Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928; translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1977), which deals in large part with allegory and its role in the Baroque. The influence of Deleuze’s 1988 book also strongly reenergized the Baroque. The trend in literary studies toward “material culture” and also the return of interest in text-image studies benefit the Baroque. In the last decade, colonial and postcolonial studies reached the major status in scholarship that they now hold. It is difficult to study colonialism, particularly with regard to the Hispanic or Lusophone world, without encountering the Baroque. European civilization reached the Americas, Africa, and south Asia during the Baroque era. A major contribution to this aspect of cultural studies is the indispensable Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque. Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation (2013), with its meticulous balance of studying both sides of the Atlantic equally and in their own right.45 While this deep historical trace is probably most conspicuous in the architecture and urbanism of Latin America, the contemporary Spanish literature of the Americas is now frequently studied for its Baroque or neo-Baroque aspects. And although the North American colonies were less visibly affected by the architectural manifestations of this style, the mind-set of religious groups such as the Puritans was arguably deeply Baroque in the application of allegory as a means of assimilating this new continent—a response to the baroque challenge of dealing with a vastly expanded globe. This new wave of Baroque studies differs significantly from the works published in the mid-twentieth century. In the post–World War II publications, the emphasis was on stylistic concerns radiating outward from art history and music history and came as a relative novelty to English-language and French literary critics. Today, in contrast,

16   the oxford handbook of the baroque much of the study of the Baroque springs from the timely realization that many of the issues that we identify as “post-modern” link the early twenty-first century to the Baroque. Among the things these periods have in common are questions about the truth claims of representation itself (is seeing believing?), the heightened perception of the world as spectacle, the nature of empire and universality, the problems of organizing an explosion of information, the effort of controlling intense sectarian strife and of finding (or of not finding) a framework that can both contain the nation-state and surpass it. In the time since the last great wave of studies of the Baroque, the intellectual landscape has changed, and new ways of seeing the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries allow a renewed understanding of the Baroque. Among those whose work helps us pose questions about the Baroque in new ways are Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Ian Hacking, and Lorraine Daston.

The Baroque Dialectic The Baroque is not a serene period in human history, and the always-controversial term “Baroque” permits us to focus on the dialectic, the tension, between order and disorder, Europe and the Other, the regular and the irregular. In the inventory of terms available to describe this moment between Renaissance and Enlightenment, it is this dialectical quality of “Baroque,” that makes the term useful. For purely chronological description, there are other terms to use. Consider, as an example, the study of France. Among scholars who write about French literature—and sometimes more broadly of culture—of the seventeenth century, for example, the term “classical” (classique) often appears to designate the very same objects that we are here calling baroque. Aware that both the terms, baroque and classical, imply judgments of various kinds, more recently Englishspeaking scholars prefer the term “early modernity.” This usage has spread to German (die frühe Neuzeit) and less often to French (la première modernité).46 Such terms have the advantage of allowing descriptions to elude a sharp and almost always arbitrary division at the turn of a century while also avoiding cumbersome, repeated expressions such as “sixteenth and seventeenth century.” In any discussion of these descriptors—and in particular the terms “baroque” and “classical”—the objection frequently arises that they are anachronistic. “Early modernity,” however, and the apparently most neutral terms “sixteenth century” and “seventeenth century” are equally anachronistic, since seventeenth-century authors did not describe themselves as such (if they did not simply say “now” or “today” they would have mentioned the ruling monarch to make clear what time they meant, as did Voltaire in writing The Century of Louis XIV). The term “baroque” is probably the most rooted in the historical period in question. Writers of the time such as Saint-Simon (b. 1675–d. 1755), Marivaux (b. 1688–d. 1763), Regnard (b. 1655–d. 1709), Dubos (b. 1670–d. 1742), and Diderot (b. 1713–d. 1784) all use the adjective “baroque” descriptively and evaluatively, though not with reference to a period of time. “Classic,” in contrast, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, usually refers to

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   17 Antiquity, though in the eighteenth century it began to have the evaluative (and not ­necessarily periodizing) sense that it still, to a large extent, conveys. Thus, we can see already toward the end of the period we are discussing, a cleavage between “baroque” and “classic,” a distinction that can be useful to us in this handbook. If, as Hall Bjørnstad writes, Baroque is “a Classical term for that which is not Classic,” we can see emerging in early modernity the tension that we have earlier noted between regularity and irregularity.47 Baroque is a useful descriptor precisely because it draws attention to what poses a problem or challenges order. Or it can refer to something excessive. Yet that problem can only be a problem for a period that is deeply concerned with order. There is a revealing bit of dialogue in one of Marivaux’s minor comedies, Les Sincères [The sincere ones]. Speaking of another character, Ergaste says that Araminte has a ­“certain regularity in her features.” To which the Marquess replies indignantly, “Regularity in Araminte’s features! Regularity! That’s a pitiful observation! And what if I told you that there are a thousand people who find that there is a baroque air to her?”48 Many adjectives can accurately describe the same thing, but the choice of adjective draws attention to specific features, links the thing to different elements of the context, and expresses a different attitude toward the object. And, of course, adjectives can do many other things. In the case of “baroque”—and this in distinct contrast to “classical”—the description in today’s usage is largely free of evaluative content. That is, if I write of baroque poetry, baroque religious practices, or baroque architecture, I am not saying that it is good or bad. But I am saying that it results from a dialectic between control and escape from control, between symmetry and dissymmetry. Here we touch on a truly crucial difference between “baroque” and other descriptors. What is baroque is irregular. It is problematic. According to one of the popular etymologies of the term, “baroque” derives from a Portuguese word for an irregular pearl.49 Etymologies are often of limited usefulness and sometimes of no use at all—for example, do we understand tragedy better when we learn that “tragedy” may have come from a Greek word for “goat-play”? In the case of Baroque, however, it may be worth pondering the concept of “irregularity” itself. How does one recognize a pearl, or anything else, as irregular? Presumably because there is a standard, a canon, that establishes the “regular” shape, or size, or color, or texture. And yet, is it always the case that the rule, the “regular,” precedes the irregularity? Or is the perception of “irregularity” quite often a retrospective one? René Descartes, one of the major thinkers of the period called baroque, in a famous metaphor for the establishment of regular thinking—a method for thinking, rules to guide the mind—pictures the liberating gesture of an engineer who escapes from the disordered cities that arose gradually in irregular ways, an engineer who can start fresh, rejecting the irregularity of the past.50 This tension between irregularity and regularity, between the weight of the past and the free and energetic newness of the present, between the limitless and the limiting, between madness and reason—this is fundamental to the Baroque. Timothy Hampton, in a luminous introduction to a volume of essays on the Baroque, noted, “The Baroque provides us with that rarest of phenomena these days—a body of texts with no theory.”51 Hampton significantly starts with the example of Montaigne’s

18   the oxford handbook of the baroque reflections on a “monster.” Perhaps the Baroque is, both historically and conceptually, that which always escapes, exceeds, or eludes theories and definitions, but—and this is crucial—the Baroque is also fixated on control, unification, codification, classification. On one hand, there are the “monsters” and “cannibals” of Montaigne’s essays, and then, in scholarly writing about the Baroque there is Wölfflin’s set of stylistic markers. What these have in common is perception, the noting and interpretation of appearances. Montaigne begins his chapter “Of a monstrous child” by describing what is different and deformed about a fourteen month old infant (who is being displayed for money) but concludes by evoking a beautiful, transcendent vision in which all monstrosity disappears: “What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it . . . From his infinite wisdom there proceeds nothing but that is good and ordinary and regular; but we do not see its arrangement and relationship.”52 This remark is one of the most important, historically, in its attempt to hold together in thought on one hand what appears odd and what does not seem to fit in, and, on the other hand, some form of perception that is capacious enough to contain and order everything. Baroque, unlike “classic” and other terms based on centuries, points to a conflict of some sort. And if our evocation of the culture of this period is correct, this period of ­crisis, reeling from the collapse of old limits and certainties, can usefully and accurately be labeled with a term that connotes something unsettled, something not normal— because the norms were themselves drastically contested. And indeed, not only norms but the very fabric of reality, the difference between accurate perception and illusion, between everyday reality and the “theatrical” representation of that reality—a transposition to the perception of reality to a second plane.53 As Maravall so cogently argues, the culture of the Baroque is a time of authoritarian control, of dirigismo.54 But it is also a ­period of civil, inter-regional, inter-confessional, and international wars throughout Europe. It is a time in which doubt becomes a philosophical tool for the defense of ­certainty, in which monsters become a source of fascination for those seeking the higher order in which their monstrosity would disappear. If irregular pearls did not exist, how could we recognize the regular pearl?

Notes 1. Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (1888), trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967). 2. Carl J Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque, 1610–1660 (New York: Harper, 1952); Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977); and Gilles Deleuze, Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 1st ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 3. To take only a few examples from books published the last six years in English, there are The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and religious reform in Bourbon Mexico City (2010); Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (2010); Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (2011); Baroque and Rococo Art

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   19 and Architecture (2012); Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (2012); Baroque. Architecture, Sculpture, Painting (2013); Baroque: Theatrum Mundi. The World as a Work of Art (2013); Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (2013); Science in the Age of Baroque (2013); Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (2015); Rethinking the Baroque(2016); Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe (2016); The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880–1980 (2017); Baroque Seville: Sacred Art in a Century of Crisis (2017); Baroque between the Wars: Alternative Style in the Arts, 1918–1939 (2018); The Server: A Media History from the Present to the Baroque (2018); American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (2018); The Universal Baroque (2018)—not to mention the popular use of the term in fiction, as witnessed by the bestselling Baroque Cycle (2014). In other languages, there are many recent publications about the Baroque, such as De Cervantes a Calderón: claves filosóficas del barroco español (2012); Carlos Fuentes y el pensamiento barroco (2015); Voyage dans la Rome Baroque (2016); Passion Baroque: Cent cinquante ans de musique en Europe; Olafur Eliasson: Baroque Baroque (2016); Danziger Barock (2016); Barock: Epoche-ästhetisches Konzept (2016), etc. 4. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Translation of La cultura del barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica (Esplugues de Llobregat: Ariel, 1975). 5. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See especially chapter 1, “The 17th-Century Counter-Renaissance.” 6. Jane  O.  Newman, “Melancholy Germans: War Theology, Allegory, and the Lutheran Baroque,” in Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 138–184. 7. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986), 38. 8. René Descartes, “Les Passions de l’âme,” in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Ch. Adam and Paul Tannery, vol. 11 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1966), article 53, 373. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations here are my own. 9. Thomas Hobbes, in The Elements of Law, Part 1, chapter 9, uses the term in a sense similar to Descartes: “Forasmuch as all knowledge beginneth from experience, therefore also new experience is the beginning of new knowledge, and the increase of experience the beginning of the increase of knowledge; whatsoever therefore happeneth new to a man, giveth him hope and matter of knowing somewhat that he knew not before. And this hope and expectation of future knowledge from anything that happeneth new and strange, is that passion which we commonly call ADMIRATION; and the same considered as appetite, is called curiosity, which is appetite of knowledge. As in the discerning faculties, man leaveth all community with beasts at the faculty of imposing names; so also doth he surmount their nature at this passion of curiosity.” Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1889), 45. By the mideighteenth century, admiration had lost this sense of value-free astonishment. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, use the term admiration as a synonym for esteem. 10. Jacques Bossuet, “Oraison funèbre d’Henriette-Anne d’Angleterre” in Oeuvres. Textes établis et annotés, ed. B. Velat, Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 83. Bossuet was quoting Ecclesiastes 1.1. 11. For example, Georges de la Tour, “Madeleine pénitente aux deux flammes” (ca. 1640) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

20   the oxford handbook of the baroque 12. There are many studies of wonder and amazement in the Baroque. See for instance Daniel Fusch, “The Spirited Mind: The Ethics and Epistemology of Early Modern Wonder,” Mediterranean Studies 17 (2008): 183–204; Françoise Graziani, “L’image merveille. figurer et dire selon le cavalier Marin’, ” Littérature, no. 87 (1992): 24–30; Peter Davidson, Universal Baroque. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 12–19. Many of the chapters of this Handbook discuss baroque amazement. 13. Albert Van Helden, “The Invention of the Telescope,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67, no. 4 (1977): 8. 14. Awareness of the existence of parts of the human body that were invisible to the naked eye—along with the increasing consciousness of vast and perhaps infinite interstellar space—is the basis for one of the most moving passages in Pascal’s Pensées (composed in the 1650s): the passage on the “two infinities,” fragment 230 in Les Provinciales, Pensées, et opuscules divers, ed. Philippe Sellier and Gérard Ferreyrolles (Paris: Livre de Poche/ Classiques Garnier, 2004), 940–950. 15. Pascal, Les Provinciales, Pensées, fragment 230, 943. 16. One often-forgotten effect of colonization on the inhabitants of America was to furnish Native Americans with mirrors. See Rebecca K. Shrum, In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). 17. This aim is particularly clear in the third part of the Discourse on Method, where Descartes distinguishes himself from the skeptics. He would doubt everything: “Not that in this I imitated the sceptics who doubt only that they may doubt, and seek nothing beyond uncertainty itself; for, on the contrary, my design was singly to found ground of assurance . . .” A Discourse on Method, Meditations, and Principles, trans. John Veitch (London: J.M. Dent; Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle: 1994), 22. 18. Blaise Pascal, Les Provinciales, Pensées, et opuscules divers, ed. Gérard Ferreyrolles and Philippe Sellier (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2004), fragment 168, 905. 19. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “El Licenciado vidriera,” in Novelas ejemplares, ed. Jorge García López (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2013), 265–301. Descartes seems to refer to this story in his Meditations on First Philosophy, first meditation, 75. 20. Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia in Obras completas, ed. Santos Alonso (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2011), 345. 21. Descartes, Discourse, Part III, 18–19. 22. There were many powerful stimuli to giving theatricality a central place in baroque society and thought. See the penetrating study by William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). 23. Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond” was a major factor in the rise of skepticism in the following century and stimulated attempts to refute and repress such skepticism. On the religious as well as ethnographic significance of the essay “Of Cannibals” see George Hoffmann, “Anatomy of the Mass: Montaigne’s ‘Cannibals,’ ” PMLA 117, no. 2 (2002): 207–221. 24. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Américo Castro, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (México City: Porrúa, 2005). 25. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La Vida es sueño (1635). See Life’s a Dream: A Play in Three Acts, trans. Kathleen Raine and Rafael Martínez Nadal (London: Hamilton, 1968). 26. George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, and, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, ed. R. S. Woolhouse (London: Penguin Books, 1988).

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   21 27. Nicolas Fontaine, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port-Royal (Utrecht, The Netherlands: Aux dépens de la compagnie, 1736), 2: 479. The friends of the French convent of PortRoyal, center of a lively movement inspired by the writings of Saint Augustine, were very interested in the work of Descartes, and learned from him that “animals . . . were only clocks, and when they shrieked, it was only the gear of the clock that made noise” (Fontaine, 2:470). 28. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue on the Great World Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1953], 1953). 29. Gilberte Périer, “La vie de Monsieur Pascal,” in Pascal, Les Provinciales, Pensées, 52. 30. Pascal’s calculating machine was only a tiny manifestation of the huge creativity of early modern mathematicians who gave the world algebra, calculus, and logarithms. In the case of logarithms, they have certain aspects of machines, in that they perform work that a person would otherwise have to do. The OED dates the earliest appearance of the word in English in 1616. 31. In the fifth part of the Discourse on Method, Descartes compares the human body to an automaton, but notes that the human body is a much more complex machine, “a machine made by the hands of God” (42). 32. Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme, articles 30–35, in Œuvres de Descartes, 11: 351–356. 33. Stephen Toulmin, “Nature and Nature’s God,” Journal of Religious Ethics 13, no. 1 (1985): 37–52, 41. 34. Alexander III (b. 1159–d. 1181) had already attempted to centralize control of sanctification, but there were still dioceses in which saints were named locally until the seventeenth century. See Auguste Marie Félix Boudinhon, Les Procès de béatification et de canonisation, (Paris: Bloud & Cie, 1908), 13. 35. Carol Piper Heming, Protestants and the Cult of the Saints in German-Speaking Europe, 1517–1531 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2003). 36. As Arnold Hauser wrote, about the Baroque of the Protestant bourgeoisie in northern Europe, “The new middle-class naturalism is a style which attempts not only to make spiritual things visible, but all visible things a spiritual experience.” From The Social History of Art (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 2: 213. See also Catharine Randall, Building Codes: The Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 37. Pascal, Les Provinciales, Pensées, fragment 680, 1215. 38. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 68. 39. Council of Trent Session V (June 1546), second decree, chapter 2, in James Waterworth, ed., The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, Celebrated Under the Sovereign Pontiffs Paul III, Julius III and Pius IV (London: Dolman, 1848), 28. 40. A.  Owen Aldridge, “An Early American Adaptation of French Pulpit Oratory,” The Eighteenth Century 28, no. 3 (1987): 235–247. 41. Charles Henry Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1896), 395–396. See also Carlo Borromeo, Instructionum fabricae et suppellectilis ecclesiasticae, ed. Stefano della Torre, Francesco Adorni, and Massimo Marinelli (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana), chapter 23. 42. Wietse de Boer, “At Heresy’s Door: Borromeo, Penance, and Confessional Boundaries in  Early Modern Europe,” in A New History of Penance, ed. Abigail Firey, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 344. Confession was also practiced—and confessionals sometimes used—in the Lutheran church. Augsburg

22   the oxford handbook of the baroque Confession, article XI, 23, in Christian Book of Concord, or Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Newmarket: Solomon D. Henkel, 1851). The surveillance of believers by the use of physical and optical devices (dispositifs) arises in parallel with contemporary social institutions such as those studied by Michel Foucault in several works, such as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), and The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 43. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “The Baroque State,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque. 44. Jane  O.  Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 45. Evonne Anita Levy and Kenneth Mills, eds., Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). 46. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Collège de France, “Histoire globale de la première modernité” (https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/sanjay-subrahmanyam/inaugural-lecture-2013-11-2818h00.htm). 47. Hall Bjørnstad, Créature sans créateur. Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les Pensées de Pascal (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2010), 9. 48. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Théâtre complet, ed. Marcel Arland, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1292. 49. See OED for a detailed etymology of “Portuguese barroco, Spanish barrueco, rough or imperfect pearl; of uncertain origin.” The OED suggests that it is related to verruca, from the Latin, “wart, excrescence on precious stones.” 50. Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, associates irregularity with the haphazard accumulation of structures from the past, and imagines the radical modern gesture of starting fresh: “those ancient cities which, from being at first only villages, have become, in the course of time, large towns, are usually but ill laid out compared with the regularly ­constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain.” A Discourse on Method, Meditations, and Principles), 10. 51. Timothy Hampton, “Introduction: Baroques,” Special Issue: Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy, Yale French Studies, 80 (1991), 1–9; here 1–2. 52. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976.), 539. 53. On this point, see Egginton, How the World Became a Stage. 54. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986), 58.

Further Reading Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: NLB, 1977. Bjørnstad, Hall. Créature sans créateur. Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les Pensées de Pascal. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1994. Davidson, Peter. Universal Baroque. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018.

introduction: the crisis of the baroque   23 Deleuze, Gilles. Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Egginton, William. How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Greenberg, Mitchell. Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Hampton, Timothy, ed. Special Issue: Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy. Yale French Studies, 80 (1991). Kaup, Monika. Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Levy, Evonne Anita, and Kenneth Mills, eds. Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986. Panofsky, Erwin. “What Is Baroque?” In Three Essays on Style. Edited by Irving Lavin and William S Heckscher, 17–88. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Rousset, Jean. La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France. Paris: José Corti, 1965. Vuillemin, Jean-Claude. Épistémè baroque: le mot et la chose. Paris: Hermann, 2013. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance and Baroque. Translated by Kathrin Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Monika Kaup. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2010.

pa rt i

V ISUA L , SPAT I A L , A N D PE R FOR M I NG A RT S

chapter 2

Decen ter i ng th e Eu ropea n I m agi na ry: A Ba roqu e Taste for I n di a Faith E. Beasley

In 1989, Jean Rousset gave his influential book La Littérature à l’âge baroque the intriguing subtitle “Circé et le paon.” The renowned scholar of French literature explained his choice of the peacock, calling the bird “the exemplary symbol of baroque ostentation.”1 Colorful, extravagant, pushing the boundaries of the known and expected, the peacock would indeed seem to embody the same spirit of the baroque Rousset saw emanating from literary texts that others had previously identified solely with visual artistic productions. His aligning of the peacock with Circé, the classical goddess of magic and enchantment, implies that the baroque aesthetic challenged artistic norms of the classical past, ushering in a new freedom, an exuberant creativity that could not be contained in existing models, just as a peacock, especially its ostentatious tail, goes beyond the examples its genus “bird” connotes. Rousset’s choice of the peacock to symbolize the baroque was appropriate in more ways than he envisioned at the time. In the peacock, Rousset saw the transgressive, surprising nature of a baroque aesthetic that broke with the ancient models transmitted throughout the Renaissance. For Rousset, the baroque is “a reversal of traditional relationships.”2 But the peacock is much more than an example of something that goes beyond the expected to reverse traditional expectations. The peacock itself exists outside such expectations, especially those belonging to the mindset of early modern Europeans. It is exotic, it is “Other,” and it is intricately enmeshed in a culture that seventeenth-century France was engaging with for the first time in a profound way. The spectacular bird is native to India where Western travelers encountered it in the wild as well as strolling in palaces and temples, domesticated by nobility and priests. For millennia, the peacock has been revered in the subcontinent, serving, for example, as the vehicle for Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge in the Hindu pantheon. The sacred peacock is now the national

28   the oxford handbook of the baroque bird of India. It evokes the sense of opulence and exoticism with s­ piritual undertones that are associated specifically with India.3 Rousset did not acknowledge or discuss the exoticism, the “indianness” of his choice of the peacock as the ultimate symbol of the baroque. But the seventeenth-century authors he examines would have made the connection. For many in seventeenth-century France, which saw the emergence of the baroque, this new approach to art and to life contained traces that emanated from “les Indes Orientales” (“the East Indies”). In the years since the publication of Rousset’s seminal work, the geography and perspectives of intellectual inquiry have changed. With the emergence of the field of global history, many concepts and movements usually associated only with Europe or the West have been enriched by a new contextualization that privileges conversation and global networks over the traditional compartmentalization according to national origins or periodization. Historians, philosophers, and specialists of literature have also widened their gaze and worked to create conversations across disciplines, constructing a global history that is as informative as it is illuminating. Felicia Gottmann summarizes the creative potential of this movement toward the global when she writes that “one of the most exciting historiographical developments of the last decade or so has been the emergence of global history as a discipline, a discipline that attempts not only to provincialize Europe but also to set European events in their wider context, showing that what have traditionally been considered solely Western or European achievements . . . were not only phenomena of worldwide importance and impact, but that their roots were global, too.”4 Historians of thought, specialists of histoire des mentalités, are increasingly drawn to this perspective for the new insights it offers for understanding past cultures and their practices. An examination of the concept of the baroque can benefit in myriad ways from these recent intellectual inquiries associating “global history” and interdisciplinarity. It is not a coincidence that the development of the baroque aesthetic occurred at the same time that France was experiencing its first sustained intellectual and artistic engagement with India.5 From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French missionaries joined their Portuguese and Italian counterparts in India, although their interactions would differ from those of their Iberian counterparts. The Jesuits, in particular, were interested in learning about the indigenous culture as much as they were seeking to convince inhabitants of the subcontinent of the “true” road to salvation. The hundreds of tomes containing the daily missives of these Jesuits attest to their varied interests. The missionaries informed their European public about all manner of cultural practices, describing life at court, as well as their efforts to ascertain how, for example, the coveted printed and painted cottons were produced. By the end of the seventeenth century, these volumes, published in abridged form as “Lettres édifiantes et curieuses,” were responding to the curiosity of the general public even more than to the church hierarchy that had originally required their composition. The popularity of these missives is a testament to the increasing inquisitiveness of a French public with respect to India. The Jesuit missionaries were not alone in their quest to understand India and to transmit their knowledge of this quasi-mythical land to their Western contemporaries. By the mid-seventeenth century, some intrepid Frenchmen decided to venture to India to

decentering the european imaginary: a baroque taste for india   29 experience this diverse culture for themselves. In contrast to those from other European nations, these early French travelers to India were not part of diplomatic delegations; nor were they primarily merchants drawn to India to take advantage of the lucrative trade in spices and textiles, among other things. It also bears emphasizing that in the seventeenth century, France’s encounters, like those of their European counterparts, were not colonial in nature. What is particularly striking about France’s engagement with India in the mid-century is its intellectual nature. The primary figure is François Bernier (1620–1688), who was the philosopher Pierre Gassendi’s disciple and then secretary. Upon the death of his mentor, Bernier embarked on a voyage to India where he remained for almost twelve years. Bernier went entirely out of curiosity and ingratiated himself at the Mughal court where his skills as a physician earned him a place in the entourage of Daneshmend Khan, (d. 1670) who held a variety of influential positions at court including the post of foreign affairs secretary and treasurer of the Mughal armies. Khan eventually became the governor of Delhi. This high-ranking political figure was intellectually curious and employed Bernier to teach him about European discoveries in astronomy, physics, anatomy, chemistry, and logic. In return, Khan remunerated him monetarily, but also intellectually by instructing him in Indian civilization. Through Khan, Bernier gained entry into the intellectual, political, and artistic circles of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1618–1707). He even accompanied the court to “Cachemire” (“Kashmir”), and was the first Westerner to experience and then describe Kashmir. Upon returning from India in 1669, Bernier rejoined his group of intellectuals in Paris, and expanded his entourage to include a wide range of worldly figures among whom were some of the best-known writers and philosophers of the period. Bernier accepted the patronage of Marguerite de La Sablière (1640–1693). He joined La Fontaine (1621–1695) who was already a resident of La Sablière’s hôtel particulier and was lodged in La Sablière’s home through the 1670s. Both men were at the center of La Sablière’s salon, which was the most eclectic and arguably the most intellectually stimulating of the period. Bernier, who was given the name “Le Mogol” by his contemporaries, in addition to “le joli philosophe,” disseminated the knowledge he had gleaned about India from his personal experiences through his texts which he composed, edited, and published while a member of this salon. Even today, Bernier’s accounts, which go far beyond travel writing in its traditional sense, are considered to be among the most accurate ­portraits of the Mughal Empire at the height of its power.6 Bernier’s texts fed the public’s curiosity about India. The philosopher’s perceptions and knowledge gleaned from his twelve years at the Mughal court were augmented by narratives of other travelers such as Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689), a jewel ­merchant, and the translations of numerous European travel narratives edited and published by Melchisédech Thévenot, whose nephew Jean Thévenot, also produced an account of a short trip to India as part of his Voyages.7 These texts and the personal experiences of travelers such as Bernier and Tavernier recounted in conversations with contemporaries worked to shape contemporary perceptions of the East, especially India, which had not been described previously in such detail. Bernier’s texts, in particular, proved to be especially influential; the originality of these diverse publications resided

30   the oxford handbook of the baroque in the fact that he experienced India as an independent intellectual/philosopher ­during a lengthy residence as opposed to a merchant or a diplomatic envoy such as Thomas Roe.8 Experienced and filtered through the mindset of an early modern philosopher, the India of Bernier’s texts could itself be described as exhibiting numerous characteristics many scholars today might ascribe to the baroque. For example, in France baroque France classique, René and Suzanne Pillorget define “baroque” as a “a style characterized in painting by a taste for movement, color, emportement . . . a kind of folie de la grandeur.”9 A sense of “grandeur” is also the most frequent characteristic associated with the Mughal court in all the texts of the period. Indeed, “grandeur” approaches epic proportions in these European texts devoted to India, inviting the global historian to interrogate the influence of this encounter with Mughal “grandeur” on the European imagination and artistic conceptions. What could appear to an early modern European traveler such as Bernier as “a kind of folie de la grandeur” is embodied by the throne created by Shah Jahan, the famous Peacock Throne. While almost every account, European and other, from the seventeenth century mentions this throne, the two best-known French accounts of India, Bernier’s and that of the jewel merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier both offer long, meticulously detailed portraits of this symbol of Mughal power. If the peacock embodies baroque ostentation, as Rousset argues, a throne in the shape of a peacock fashioned entirely out of gold and encrusted with every jewel coveted by mankind is the consummate concrete representation of the baroque taken to unparalleled levels of “grandeur” and even “folie.” Tavernier’s and Bernier’s descriptions of this throne both place the emphasis on the sense of “grandeur” concretely represented by the Peacock Throne, a grandeur that is easily sensed by the spectator who is awed by the sight of this object and humbled by the power emanating from this display. Tavernier’s description of the Peacock Throne is the most extensive and detailed. Contemporaries might also have found it the most authoritative and credible given Tavernier’s position as purveyor of diamonds and other gemstones to their own monarch Louis XIV.10 The merchant begins by evoking the incredible size of this throne and the dais and canopy surrounding it.11 He then describes meticulously how this immense structure is completely covered in gold, silver, and precious gems, in various configurations: The feet as well as the bars, which are over eighteen inches wide, are all covered in gold and enriched with lots of diamonds, rubies and emeralds. In the middle of each bar, one can see a large ruby with four emeralds around it that form a square cross. . . . The emeralds are table cut, and the spaces between the rubies and the emeralds are covered with diamonds among which the largest do not surpass ten or twelve carats. . . . There are also places where pearls are encrusted in gold. . . I calculated the number of large rubies that are around the throne, and there are about 108, all carbuncles, of which the smallest weighs 100 carats; but there are also some that weigh more than 200 carats. As for the emeralds . . . the biggest could be about 60 carats and the smallest 30. I counted about 160 . . . the background of the canopy is completely covered with diamonds and pearls, with a fringe of pearls all around;

decentering the european imaginary: a baroque taste for india   31 and on top there is a four-sided vaulted ceiling that has a peacock with its tail spread made of blue sapphires and other colored gems, the body is of gold with some gems, and it has a large ruby on its stomach, from which dangles a pear-shaped pearl of about 50 carats. . . . On the side of the throne that looks to the court, there is a visible joyau from which there is a diamond hanging that is 80 or 90 carats with rubies and emeralds around it. But what is the most rich, in this magnificent throne, is that the twelve columns that hold the canopy are covered in beautiful strings of pearls that are round and of beautiful clarity, and each one weighs between six and ten carats.12

In Tavernier’s description, the adjectives associated with the grandeur expressed by the throne are “grandiose,” “exceptional,” “spectacular,” and “large.” But he is also careful to underscore that the throne’s composition is ordered and carefully constructed to produce this sense of awe. Bernier’s account of his experience with the Peacock Throne transmits the same sense of wonder as Tavernier’s description. The philosopher then goes beyond a description of the physical properties of the throne and focuses on the symbolic meaning of this display.13 In contrast to Tavernier’s almost overwhelming precision and detail, Bernier’s description is designed more to contribute to the author’s overall evocation of the grandeur and opulence of the Mughal court. He portrays the Peacock Throne as the artistic expression of the manifestation of the Mughal emperor’s similarly outsized political power. Bernier begins by creating a visual portrait of Aurangzeb’s appearance on the throne, highlighting first the fabrics surrounding him: “The king appeared on his throne . . . magnificently dressed. His vest was of white satin with small flowers and decorated with fine silk and gold embroidery, his turban was of gold fabric and he had an eagle ornament on it whose foot was covered in diamonds of a size and a value that was extraordinary, with a large oriental topaz that was incomparable, that shown like a small sun; a necklace of large pearls hung from his neck to his stomach.”14 Fabrics and precious gems together create this “unparalleled” scene; diamonds, gold thread, and pearls all combine to transform Aurangzeb into “un petit soleil” (“a small sun”), a choice of metaphor that would have a particular, perhaps daringly provocative resonance in 1671 for Bernier’s initial public and their own monarch, Louis XIV, whose chosen image was Apollo and who was known as “Le Roi Soleil” (the Sun King). Bernier attempts to mitigate any misunderstanding by stating that it is the topaz, specifically an oriental one, that is unparalleled, but the implicit comparison to Louis XIV might still linger in the minds of his readers and interlocutors. Bernier then turns to the Mughal throne itself: His throne is supported by six big legs that are said to be of solid gold and decorated with rubies, emeralds and diamonds; I couldn’t tell you the exact number or the value of all these jewels . . . all I can tell you is that there are a lot of large diamonds strewn about, and the throne is estimated to be worth 4 kouroures of roupies, if memory serves me. I have already said that one roupie is worth about thirty sols, that a lecque is 100,000 roupies and that a kourour is 100 lecques; thus the throne is valued at 40 million roupies which is about 60 million livres.15

32   the oxford handbook of the baroque Unlike Tavernier, who carefully counted the number of diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, and even listed their probable weight in carats, Bernier is content to overwhelm his reader by evoking the overall value of the throne, as he offers a lesson on Indian ­currency.16 It is worth noting that Bernier’s description differs from Tavernier’s in another striking detail. For Bernier, the legs of the throne are solid gold, whereas Tavernier describes them as being covered in gold and jewels. It is interesting that of all the gems Bernier mentions, he chooses to highlight “the large diamonds,” the gems that could never be “strewn about” in a Western setting given the fact that the world’s diamonds emanated primarily from India during this period.17 Bernier thus exoticizes the scene, as he elevates it above what is even remotely possible in Europe.18 The “grandeur” evoked by the Peacock Throne surpasses Western manifestations of this trait later associated with the concept of the baroque.19 Depictions of other Indian creations also suggest an equivalency or at least a strong rapport between the India experienced by French travelers, their transmission of this India through language, and the concept of the baroque aesthetic as elaborated by critics in the following centuries and associated with this period in France. If we return to a standard definition of the baroque offered by the Pillorgets in France baroque France classique, for instance, we find other characteristics that also surface in the descriptions of India in texts of the period: “until the nineteenth century, this word was a synonym of ‘bizarre’ or ‘irregular.’ ”20 Bernier uses the same vocabulary to describe the whole complex of the Taj Mahal: To tell you the truth, you don’t see the columns, the arches and the cornices sculpted according to the proportions that conform to the five orders of architecture that we follow so religiously in our palaces. It’s a very different and particular kind of building, but that nonetheless has something pleasing about its bizarre [irregular] layout, and which, in my opinion, would certainly merit a place in our books on architecture. It is almost nothing but a series of arcades, . . . and yet everything appears magnificent, fairly well conceived and executed, nothing shocks the eye; on the contrary, everything in it shines and one cannot stop looking at it. The last time I saw it I was with one of our French merchants who, like me, couldn’t get tired of looking at it; I did not dare to tell him my opinion, because I was afraid that I had corrupted my taste and that it had become indianized, but since he was coming directly from France, I was relieved to hear him say that he had never seen anything so majestic, nor so bold in Europe. . . . I’m still not sure if my taste is a bit too Indian, but I think it merits inclusion among the world’s wonders more than those misshapen masses, the Egyptian pyramids.21

In this description, the Taj Mahal is an expression of the baroque as it has been ­conceived by modern day critics and scholars. It is “bizarre,” in the sense of irregular or unconventional. Antoine Furetière underscores this seventeenth-century understanding of “bizarre” in his 1690 Dictionnaire, writing that: “It is a jewelers term and is only used to describe pearls that are not completely round.”22 It does not conform to the Vitruvian “five orders of architecture” that Bernier says his European colleagues observe “so religiously” in their own constructions. The adjectives Bernier chooses—“different”

decentering the european imaginary: a baroque taste for india   33 “particular,” “majestic” (auguste), “bold”—all indicate that for this Western observer/ philosopher, the Taj Mahal is an edifice that is transgressive with respect to European norms. It does not conform to Western norms, it escapes categorization, it surprises as it compels spectators like himself, schooled to define architectural beauty differently, to enter a new realm, a new imaginary. At the same time, Bernier underscores that he considers the Taj Mahal “magnificent, fairly well conceived and executed, nothing shocks the eye.” It is a well-thought-out creation, but one that expresses an alternative form of beauty and majesty than what Bernier has been accustomed to in Europe. The Taj Mahal incarnates an alternative conception of beauty that is mesmerizing. Like the Peacock Throne, the Taj Mahal elicits wonder. Bernier and the French merchant, usually identified as Tavernier, cannot stop looking at it even though this beauty goes beyond their expectations and norms in its “bizarre disposition.” Bernier attributes his attraction to the Taj Mahal’s aesthetic to a change in his taste: “I was afraid that I had corrupted my taste and that it had become Indianized. . . . I’m still not sure if my taste is a bit too Indian.” He acknowledges his own adherence to what he identifies as an “Indian” taste when faced with the “bizarre” example of the Taj Mahal’s beauty. Bernier’s Indian contemporaries would not have viewed this spectacular monument as bizarre. The Taj Mahal reflects and conforms to Indian tastes. It is a spectacular example of Indian artistic creation, a compendium of artistic practices that were prevalent on the Indian subcontinent, practices derived from the cultural métissage of Hindu and Islamic practices. It is not unique nor is the Taj Mahal “bizarre” in its cultural context.23 Bernier’s reflections on taste invite a different interpretation than the author’s assertation that it has become “indianized.” Bernier, a product of mid-seventeenth-century France, finds the Taj Mahal attractive and mesmerizing, not because his French taste has become corrupted by a distinctive “Indian” taste during his sojourn in India. Bernier identifies elements of the Taj Mahal that are “bizarre,” that do not conform to “our architecture books,” but that nonetheless produce the sentiment of pleasure, of amazement, and can be considered “magnificent.” The Taj Mahal produces the same emotion as constructions in Europe that themselves conform to Western norms. Bernier’s reflections suggest that there is an overlap of taste, a fusion between West and East, rather than two separate conceptions of taste, one Western and one Indian. What we now term “baroque” in the West is a taste for the exotic, the nonconformist, the bizarre. This is an artistic expression, a taste, that in seventeenth-century France is shared by India during the same time period. Western art and literature that express this taste for randomness, for divergence, what is today labeled “baroque” finds a corollary in the Mughal India conveyed through the texts of travelers such as Bernier. This taste points to a shared mindset during the early modern period. Viewed from this perspective our modern concept of the baroque as the “reversal of traditional expectations,” to return to Rousset, reflects a conversation with the East, especially with India, and not an aesthetic rooted entirely and exclusively in the West. As Bernier’s and Tavernier’s texts illustrate, the seventeenth-century aesthetic in France bears the traces of this Indian encounter. Knowledge of India, of its cultural practices and its art, was infiltrating European sensibilities from the beginning of the

34   the oxford handbook of the baroque century. Louis XIV eagerly purchased as many diamonds from Tavernier as the jeweler could procure. Toward the end of the century, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, wrote: “I told Mme Royale that we love anything that comes from India, even the paper that the envelopes are made of.”24 The author of La Princesse de Clèves expressed the collective sentiment especially of a worldly public. Her friend, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, shared Lafayette’s attraction to Indian products. Like many of their contemporaries, Sévigné was especially drawn to the imports that were most identified with Indian culture, the cotton fabrics known as toiles peintes or indiennes. From the mid-seventeenth century, these colorful cottons with their seemingly chaotic designs were flooding the European market. They were coveted by European consumers, especially women, across the economic spectrum, and constituted the main import for all the European East India companies. More than any other import, these indiennes express the apparent randomness, the tensions, inherent in modern understanding of the baroque. The story of their implantation in France, and the effect of this democratization of a taste associated with a foreign world is a particularly convincing illustration that the concept of what we now refer to as baroque in seventeenth-century France bears the traces of a “decentering” of Europe. Understanding the role indiennes played in the development of taste enables us to establish a new genealogy for the concept of the baroque, and appreciate the role entities outside of the European imaginary played in its evolution. Indiennes or toiles peintes, as they were also called especially in seventeenth-century France, were remarkably different from any fabrics common to early modern Europe. This wonderous material produced by marvelous “vegetable lambs,” delighted the seventeenth-century French public with its flamboyant colors and wild floral designs.25 These cottons were especially coveted because their vibrant colors did not fade over time, even when washed. India had been the acknowledged master of the art of printed and painted cottons for millennia. It exported its expertise as well as its fabrics throughout Asia and the Middle East. When the Portuguese arrived in Goa in the late sixteenth century, they recognized the utility of these cottons and developed a lucrative trading system in which they used Indian cottons to pay for slaves in the New World and Africa, among other uses. The famous tiles we now associate with Lisbon resemble the designs imprinted on these indiennes. Although the Portuguese use for these designs did not extend beyond tiles, in much of the rest of Europe, these indiennes and their designs infiltrated other cultures on a much larger scale and for many different purposes. The French, Dutch, and British East India companies could barely keep up with the demand for these fabrics that were used for decoration as well as clothing by a wide range of consumers, from the nobility to the merchants selling the fabrics.26 In 1682, the Mercure Galant, France’s leading newspaper, reported that the vogue for indiennes was as strong as it had been for the past decade, and showed no sign of abating: “Indiennes still reign more than ever. The ladies still wear them the same way; but the bourgeois women have them made with round necklines.”27 These designs reflected, expressed, and arguably ultimately transformed the taste of the French public. They also opened French minds up to a world far beyond Europe.

decentering the european imaginary: a baroque taste for india   35 What exactly would this public have found so appealing in these indiennes? The painted fabrics, toiles peintes, had an exotic quality to them. Some fabrics often included scenes of life in India, thus adding to the knowledge of India for a curious French public and exerting a profound effect on the European imagination. Some toiles depicted female and male figures wearing clothing with the same elaborate designs. This mise en abyme of Indian design was then enhanced by the depiction of jewels woven into or painted onto the cottons, often with gold thread or paint. Indiennes and toiles peintes became precious commodities that were passed down from generation to generation, as attested to by the probate inventories of the period. They were a feast for the eyes with every space contesting for the spectator’s attention. Today, we might call these designs charged or busy, but they might just as aptly be called baroque. The various regions in India all had their own designs, and thus represented a great diversity that would have also been striking to a European public. One motif in particular, however, was often to be found in indiennes and is ubiquitous and an identifying trait of these designs even today: the motif referred to as paisley in English. The Scottish town of the same name appropriated the design in the late eighteenth century as it developed its own manufacturing of these cottons in an effort to supplant India’s hegemony over this lopsided trade. In French, the motif is called cachemire, thus retaining its Indian affiliation. The motif goes back thousands of years and expresses a variety of meanings. According to some, the form is of Persian origin, the buta, and is a Zoroastrian symbol of life and eternity. Most specialists would agree that India was the source of these cottons and thus that the motif, which has connections to Hinduism, would have been transmitted to Persia by early traders. In India, cachemire expresses fertility. The form is seen to represent the mango, a quintessentially Indian fruit. Whatever its origin, the colorful paisley design has come to embody exoticism, unruliness, flamboyance. The resurgence of paisley printed fabrics often occurs during rebellious, restless eras, such as the 1960s with the advent of the “hippie” movement or earlier in the twentieth century as part of the Art Nouveau aesthetic, which followed on the heels of another disruptive artistic movement especially in England, the Arts and Craft movement. Oscar Wilde was known for receiving guests dressed in his trademark paisley lounging robes. In seventeenth-century France, the attraction to indiennes and their diverse, vibrant designs, can be viewed as a taste for the uncontrolled or uncontrollable, the colorful, the extravagant, the “bizarre” in the seventeenth-century sense of “irregular.” Like the cotton it decorated, the paisley motif was foreign, other, even extravagant. The cachemire form is not only that of a mango, the fruit most associated with India. It can also be seen as related to the colorful eye of a peacock’s tail.28 The iridescent blues and greens that compose the eye exemplify the intense colors that characterize indiennes. This association with the peacock, that “symbol of baroque extravagance,” to return to Rousset, can be extended even further. When closed, the form of the tail bears the same shape as the paisley motif. Moreover, with its tail closed, the whole body of the peacock, with its long curving neck and the undulating lines of its body leading to the tail, also embodies the cachemire motif.29

36   the oxford handbook of the baroque By the 1680s, when Louis XIV was attempting to imprint all of Europe with his ­version of French taste, the passion for indiennes and the particular taste this passion expressed was increasingly seen by France’s absolute monarch as disruptive, controversial, and decidedly un-French.30 The fate of indiennes in France illustrates the disruptive nature of a taste we now label “baroque.” Louis’s reaction to indiennes reflects his efforts to ­supplant or even erase this aesthetic from the French imaginary. In 1686, Louis officially banned the importation of all printed and painted Indian textiles. In the view of many economists today, the bans, which other countries would also later institute, were designed to protect indigenous European fabric industries, whose linens and various other weaves were being cast aside in favor of the wildly popular indiennes. Louis’s bans were instituted earlier and went much farther than those eventually enacted by his European counterparts. Unlike the British, for example, Louis not only prohibited the importation of indiennes, he tellingly also forbade the imitation of indiennes by French companies. His initial edicts were followed almost immediately by even more draconian measures to control taste. Louis not only outlawed the buying, selling, and wearing of indiennes and toiles peintes, and their imitation, he also made it illegal to import even plain cotton cloth from India because, as the edicts clearly state, he felt that such fabrics would only be used for printing and creating the banned indiennes. Louis was reacting to the taste for these prints, and not just enacting protectionist measures to ensure the continued vitality of France’s manufacturing sector. The laws were actually nefarious to this sector itself since many French companies had already transformed themselves into producers of imitation indiennes in order to satisfy the tastes of the French public. The edicts also undermined the ability of the French East India Company to compete with its European rivals, given that textiles were the most important and lucrative import and the economic foundation of trade.31 The financial foundations of the company were further weakened by the contraband trade that flourished around indiennes. Unable to purchase these coveted fabrics within their own boarders, French men, but especially women, satisfied their demand by clandestinely purchasing the imports of rival companies such as the Dutch or British East India companies, which were only too happy to oblige them. These French consumers risked fines or even imprisonment for purchasing, selling, or wearing indiennes in public, but they continued to defy authority until the bans were finally lifted at the request of Mme de Pompadour in 1759, almost a century after they were first implemented by the Sun King. Women kept baroque taste as expressed in indiennes alive, and ultimately triumphed over the edicts prohibiting them. The controversy over indiennes that played out in seventeenth-century France illustrates the power of taste. Louis used all the weapons in his arsenal to combat this taste for the exotic, even prohibiting painters from depicting indiennes in their portraits.32 Indiennes are a manifestation of resistance to a centralized, standardized aesthetic. Moreover, because the West would be unable to replicate the production of these fabrics, both printed and painted, until the mid-eighteenth century, indiennes also function as a disruptive force with regard to European self-perceptions, especially in the case of France.33 The taste embodied by indiennes undermines the growing desire on the part of Europeans, especially Louis XIV, to view and to portray Europe as more civilized,

decentering the european imaginary: a baroque taste for india   37 innovative, advanced, and original than its Eastern counterparts. These fabrics were a constant reminder of the existence of the Indian Mughal court with its powerful emperor and of India’s advanced civilization.34 Banning indiennes is evidence of a desire for control. But it also illustrates an impetus to impose a French taste devoid of any Indian roots. Louis’s imposition of a certain order, his desire to rein in his subjects’ attraction to the exotic, is illustrated particularly well by the story of indiennes and his ban of indiennes and all they conjured up in the minds of his contemporaries. Modern scholars have had the tendency to define classicism in opposition to the baroque. The Pillogets are exemplary of this tendency, as evidenced by the very title of their work. In their formulation, classicism is “characterized by the taste for logic and reason; by the concern for ordered composition, centered on one idea, by the predominance of will over sentiment . . . by sobriety of expression, by the refusal of exaggeration . . . by the respect for the careful study of nature . . . by the interest in characters and universal traits as opposed to attraction to the particular, the bizarre, curious, strange, or the monstrous (that is, the baroque).”35 Viewed from this perspective, the aesthetic most associated traditionally today with Louis XIV is an effort to control extravagance, to c­ reate set parameters for taste as well as thought. But when we examine more closely this “Grand Siècle de Louis XIV,” supposedly the defender of “logique” and “raison,” and include the myriad voices, encounters, and texts that shaped the mindset of this complex period, a different portrait of the period emerges. When we’re not blinded by the light of one particularly absolute monarch, we can see that the categories of “classicism” and “baroque” are not as distinct as they have been made to appear in the following ­centuries. Indiennes, which do not at first glance share any of the characteristics ­associated with the Pillorets’s description of seventeenth-century French classicism, and belong more to their conception of the baroque, illustrate that the tension, the randomness, and divergence that many would describe as “baroque” continues to exist throughout the seventeenth century. Bernier’s admiration and taste for the Taj Mahal is evidence of the aesthetic debate and of the political undertones of this battle over taste and artistic expression. The story of indiennes and France’s encounter with a similar baroque expression in India also underscore the forces exploration and commerce were bringing to bear on the Eurocentric worldview. Seventeenth-century France and Europe, in general, experienced a world in India that was their equal. The common misperception is that colonization was immediately on the mind of these early explorers, merchants, and visitors and that these Europeans saw themselves as a civilizing force. This could not be further from reality in the case of seventeenth-century India and the Mughal Empire. Bernier and others experienced a world that was on a par with Europe and even surpassed it in many ways. The conversation that developed was at the very least bidirectional, with India offering as much to the conversation as its European counterparts. The infiltration of India into the concept of taste also illustrates something that is ­disruptive to conventional ways of considering the world: namely, that what we now identify as baroque, a taste for complexity, for randomness and diversity, is a purely European aesthetic. By encountering Mughal India and transmitting it through art and written accounts, early modern Europeans such as François Bernier promoted a fusion

38   the oxford handbook of the baroque of cultures, not the product of one Western culture over a less “civilized” Eastern world. The inclusion of India in the discussion of the baroque allows us to expand the concept itself, refine our understanding and redefine the concept. As in France, there was in India a mindset that contrasted apparent divergences with a sense of order, but one that also incorporated order into the outsized grandeur, color, disruption, and supposed chaos. We see this in indiennes, the Taj Mahal, and the Peacock Throne, and even the peacock’s tail itself. The cachemire motif or other designs are not, in fact, randomly ­distributed over the printed cotton. Similarly, the natural distribution of the eyes in a peacock’s tail obey a pattern that is repeated and ordered just as paisley is contained in the blocks used to transfer it to the cloth it decorates. The Peacock Throne was an overwhelming display of opulence, but the jewels were carefully set into the gold with an eye to transmitting power by showing man’s control over nature through carefully arranged artistic expression. And no edifice is more symmetrical than the complex of the Taj Mahal, where every column, every marble panel, every flowery design in pietra dura is minutely crafted to contribute to the overall expression of a baroque grandeur fused with a sense of symmetry. Including India in the conversation allows us to see that what we call the baroque today is not the random and disordered but rather is the dialectic between the apparent disorder and a real but much more complex order than we have been willing to entertain in the past. French classicism does not replace the baroque, as some have claimed, but coexists with it. Louis’s futile attempts to control and define grandeur, color, movement, and the exuberance of indiennes are proof of the continued tensions exerted by a baroque aesthetic that expresses this complex order. On the surface of the “splendid century,” order might seem to reign, but the baroque remains just under the gleaming surface, encountered in the admiration of Louis’s contemporaries for Indian taste or in their continued penchant for indiennes. In accounts of trade between India and Europe during this period before colonialism took hold in India, historians often underscore how India’s craftsmen, especially its weavers, developed particular prints for European markets during the early modern period. According to this scenario, Indian ingenuity simply caters to European tastes, and the popularity of indiennes and the attraction to these vibrant designs is due to India’s ability to conform to this Western taste. However, when we unearth the encounters that were occurring between East and West, between India and France for example, and view these interactions through the perspective of a global historian, the seventeenth-century aesthetic is a result of the West’s attraction to the East. The story of baroque taste is revealed to be a complex conversation among interlocutors from across cultures. Considered in this light, the vogue of indiennes, for example, reveals an attraction to Indian designs that embody an Indian sense of “baroque.” To advance that Indians worked to reformulate their work to cater to Western tastes particularly during the early, precolonial encounters with Europe during the seventeenth century is an illustration of a colonialist mentality that was not yet part of the European or Indian mindset, nor was it a characteristic of European’s early engagement with India.36

decentering the european imaginary: a baroque taste for india   39 When we claim the baroque as solely European and neglect its global context and expression, we are rehearsing these same colonialist paradigms with their inherent value judgments regarding the relative intrinsic merits of Eastern and Western cultures. Conversation among cultures influenced even what have been constructed as the most euro-identified concepts such as the baroque. Bernier’s attraction to India, his “Indian taste” that he perhaps provocatively qualifies as not “what is suitable” and that of his contemporaries for “all things Indian” illustrate that they share a taste that had already become “indianized,” a taste that was born out of conversations that were multidirectional, not unilateral. Rousset’s choice of Circé and the peacock symbolizes this conversation. Like the India embodied by the peacock, Circé, the goddess in Western mythology who has the ability to transform through her potions, can conflate different perceptions of reality, go beyond expectations.37 Circé and the peacock, and the taste they represent, upset conventions, derange, and are irregular, exuberant, and grand—both are memorable expressions of the baroque.

Notes 1. Jean Rousset, La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France (Paris: J. Corti, 1953), 219. Here and throughout, all English translations are my own and are intentionally literal. 2. Ibid., 169. 3. An article titled “Peacocks” that appeared in the Spectator on February 18, 1899, underscores the association between India and the peacock, describing it as “the incarnation of the spirit of India” (The Spectator Archive). The peacock has enjoyed sacred status in India for millennia. According to the author of the Spectator piece, this status explains how they were easily domesticated, thus enabling Western traders as early as the Greeks to introduce them to the West. 4. Felicia Gottmann, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France 1680–1760 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3. 5. Like its European neighbors Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands, France was impacted by the exploration and commerce with what was generally referred to as “les Indes orientales” in opposition to “les Indes occidentales” before the seventeenth century. But France’s sustained engagement with India, and with a Mughal Empire at the height of cultural influence and power, can be traced to the seventeenth century. The encounter with India exerted an influence on France that was specific to France and to be distinguished from the influence other countries from “les Indes orientales” exerted on the French mindset. The conversation between France and India during this period had its own characteristics and repercussions, as shall become apparent in what follows. 6. For an in-depth analysis of the influence of France’s encounter with India during this ­period, and an examination in particular of the influence of Bernier’s texts on early modern conceptions of India see my Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de La Sablière and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 7. Some of the other texts that appeared during this period are Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (Paris: Barbin, 1676), Melchisédech Thévenot,

40   the oxford handbook of the baroque Relations de divers voyages curieux, (Paris: 1660), and Jean Thévenot’s Voyages (Paris: 1665). These texts have drawn the attention of recent scholars including Michèle Longino, Nicholas Dew, and Dirk Van der Cruysse, among others. 8. Thomas Roe’s texts were well-known in seventeenth-century France. M. Thévenot translated parts of his work, which was the first text devoted to India to be disseminated so widely. Roe was sent to India in the early seventeenth century to negotiate trade deals with the Mughal Empire and the reigning emperor at the time, Jahangir. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier specialized in precious gems, especially diamonds. He made six trips to the Orient and India, where he met up with Bernier on a few occasions. He is known today as the procurer of Louis XIV’s diamonds. Inspired perhaps by Bernier’s compositions, Tavernier composed his own memoirs, which read like a handbook for potential merchants. 9. René and Suzanne Pillorget, France baroque, France classique, 1589–1715 (Paris: Laffont, 1995), vol. 2, 86. 10. Inspired by Tavernier’s detailed descriptions and drawings of the Indian diamonds he sold to Louis XIV, the Ecole des Joailliers in conjunction with Van Clef and Arpels mounted an exhibit of these diamonds, reconstructing them to show the impressive size and cuts. See the catalogue of this exhibit from January 2018, ed. Guillaume Glorieux, Le Fabuleux destin des diamants de Tavernier (Paris: L’Ecole Van Cleef & Arpels, 2018). 11. Tavernier writes:“On the four legs, which are very thick and twenty by twenty-five inches [pouces] high, are positioned four bars that hold the bottom of the throne, and on these bars are positioned twelve columns that hold up the canopy on three sides; [the fourth side] that looks out to the court doesn’t have any [columns].” Frédéric Tinguely provides Tavernier’s description of the Peacock Throne in his edition of Bernier’s text: Voyages, 1671–72; Un Libertin dans l’Inde moghole: les voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669), ed. Frédéric Tinguely (Paris: Chandeigne, 2008), 491–492. 12. Ibid. 13. Wonder, or “le merveilleux,” is an essential component of the European aesthetic during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, developed in large part as a reaction to the exploration of new worlds such as India and les Indes Occidentales and Orientales in general. The vogue of “cabinets de curiosités,” the precursors to today’s museums, both reflects and generates this wonder for the little known non-European cultures. This “wonder,” worked to explode the prevailing Eurocentric world view. 14. Bernier, Voyages, 1671–72, 264, my emphasis. All references to Bernier’s texts are to the edition by Frédéric Tinguely. All translations are my own. 15. Ibid., 264. 16. Tavernier was perhaps able to observe the throne more closely because he was granted access to the royal treasury by Aurangzeb himself. He describes examining the emperors’ treasure in his memoirs. 17. There are some references to diamonds from Borneo, but all Louis XIV’s diamonds, were from the famous Golconda mines near Hyderabad, India. Diamonds were not discovered on the African continent, for example, until the eighteenth century. 18. In addition to almost blinding his readers with this verbal display of gold, silver, and gems, Bernier situates the Peacock Throne in its historical and cultural contexts. He relates that “Aurangzeb’s father, Shah Jahan, is the one who had the throne made to display his jewels, which over time had accumulated in the treasury, deriving from the Pathans and rajas and the gifts that the nobles are required to give him every year at certain holidays” (Bernier,

decentering the european imaginary: a baroque taste for india   41 Voyages, 1671–72, 264). The throne thus evokes the emperor’s political power over “ces Anciens Pathans et rajas.” Bernier’s remarks point to the fact that the emperor is not the only person in the empire who possesses or has access to these precious gems. The throne consists in part of gifts that the nobles are required to offer to the emperor yearly, especially on the occasion of his birthday. This passage thus evokes the wealth and especially gemstones that are present throughout India, not just at the Mughal court. Nobles, the omerahs to whom Bernier refers, possess enough themselves to be able to offer them as gifts to the emperor. Thus, the sense of baroque “grandeur” is associated not just with the Mughal emperor, but with all of India. 19. It is interesting to note that Louis XIV attempted to rival his Indian counterparts by trading in pearls, the gem most associated with European royalty up until the reign of the Sun King, for diamonds, which at this point emanated only from India. Perhaps in an effort to  appropriate this expression of the baroque aesthetic and associate it with France as opposed to India, Louis purchased a large quantity of diamonds from India. The same Tavernier who provided the most detailed description of the Peacock Throne was Louis’s purveyor of diamonds. See my Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal, Chapter 4, for a detailed analysis of Louis’s use of diamonds. 20. Pillorget and Pillorget, France baroque, France classique, 1589–1715, vol. 2, 85. 21. Ibid., 297–300, my emphasis. 22. It is worth noting that Furetière and Bernier frequented La Sablière’s salon and knew each other. Furetière could also have crossed paths with the jeweler Tavernier in this salon or elsewhere which could explain his description of the term. 23. In fact, Shah Jahan’s tomb for his wife built upon, some would say perfected, the artistry used to construct other edifices such as Nur Jahan’s creation of a tomb for her father, I’timad ud daula, who served as minister to the emperors Akbar and his son Jahangir. Nur Jahan was Jahangir’s twelfth and most powerful wife. Her father’s tomb is also to be found in Agra along the Jumana River, a few kilometers from the Taj Mahal. Shah Jahan was very familiar with this tomb especially given the fact that it was erected for his wife’s, Mumtuaz Mahal’s, grandfather. Mumtaz Mahal, for whom the Taj Mahal was created, was Nur Jahan’s niece. 24. Madame de La Fayette, “Letter to Lescheraine, December 9, 1680,” in Correspondance, ed. André Beaunier (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), 99–100. 25. Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2015), 22. 26. Much has been written about the economic and artistic role played by indiennes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See John Guy’s study of the globalization of style though Indian textiles in his “ ‘One Thing Leads to Another:’ Indian Textiles and the Early Globalization of Style,” in Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800, ed. Amelia Peck (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), Felicia Gottmann’s Global Trade, and my study of indiennes in Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal, to name just a few of these explorations. 27. Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset, L’Esprit des modes au Grand Siècle (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2010), 34. In this volume, Thépaut-Cabasset has assembled all the entries pertaining to fashion. 28. Peacock feathers became coveted articles of adornment beginning primarily in the ­seventeenth century at precisely the time of European expansionism. Like other exotic feathers, they were used to illustrate the elevated status of the bearer because few people could have access to such exotic accoutrements. The historian Ulinka Rublack notes that

42   the oxford handbook of the baroque by the mid-seventeenth century, feathers were primarily used by the military, although the nobility continued to use them for hats. At the end of the 1800s, peacock feathers made a return in the decorative arts. The peacock was the preferred motif for the Art Deco movement. Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 29. For a detailed analysis of the paisley motif, especially from the late eighteenth century on, see Caroline Karpinski, “Kashmir to Paisley,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 22, no. 3 (1963), 116–123. 30. For an in-depth analysis of Louis’s attempts to regulate taste, particularly with respect to fashion, see Jennifer Jones, Sexing la mode: Gender, Fashion, and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004). I examine Louis’s control over indiennes in the larger context of France’s encounters with India in my Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal. 31. This trade with India was decidedly lopsided. Europe desired Indian products, especially textiles, but India desired very little from the West. This led to much complaining among Europeans that India was a sinkhole for the world’s gold and silver. Even Bernier refers to India as “an abyss for most of the world’s gold and silver, which find many ways to enter from all sides and almost not a single way to exit” (Bernier, Voyages, 1671–72, 201). 32. This prohibition explains why there is little visual evidence today of the prevalence of this taste for indiennes in the seventeenth-century France. The fabrics do appear in Dutch genre paintings of the period, as well as in Portuguese historical paintings such as those currently displayed in Lisbon’s church of São Roque. These large paintings by André Reinoso (1610–c. 1650) depict Francis Xavier’s missionary work in Goa. The Indians are depicted wearing indiennes, which give us a good sense of what these designs were in the early modern period. 33. For Felicia Gottmann, these fabrics, which she identifies as “Asian and Asian-style” as opposed to my emphasis here on the association with India that is clear from the texts of the period, were a constant visual reminder of the limits of the state’s power. She writes: “Their ubiquity was thus a constant reminder of the state’s failure to enforce its own laws . . . never was a failure quite so visually striking” (Gottmann, Global Trade, 83). I would argue that this “ubiquity” also functioned on a symbolic level and was a visual reminder of Louis’s inability to control taste and thus the mindset of his subjects. He was unable in this regard to impose French taste on Europe, which was his ultimate goal. 34. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s revenues at the time were four times those of Louis XIV’s. 35. Pillorget and Pillorget, France classique, France baroque, vol. 2, 252. 36. I am not arguing that certain designs, such as the “tree of life” were not used specifically to please the European market. But we should remember that most toiles peintes and indiennes were not created with the European market in mind during the period that corresponds to the rise of the baroque aesthetic. Moreover, in the early modern period, India did not need Europe as much as Europe desired India and its products. It is much more productive, and even accurate, to imagine that Indian designs affected the development of European tastes rather than the idea that Europe compelled Indian craftsmen to conform to its tastes in order to make its products popular among Europeans. I am suggesting that the history of taste is not as influenced by a colonialist mentality as we have been accustomed to believe.

decentering the european imaginary: a baroque taste for india   43 37. One of the few examples we possess of a seventeenth-century toile peinte from India is the perfect illustration of this imaginary but probable conversation between Circé and the peacock. Circé is particularly identified with her ability to transform humans into animals. The Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes in Mulhouse, France, possesses this toile peinte that depicts monkeys inside a horse-like figure, illustrating the conflation of species. This horse is cavorting across a background of lush vegetation, which is itself transformed. The leaves are decorated with intricate designs and the paisley motif is in evidence throughout.

Further Reading Beasley, Faith E. Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de La Sablière and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2015. Berg, Maxine, Felicia Gottmann, Hanna Hodacs, and Chris Nierstrasz. Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Bernier, François. Voyages, 1671–72; Un Libertin dans l’Inde moghole: les voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669). Edited by Frédéric Tinguely. Paris: Chandeigne, 2008. Crill, Rosemary, ed. The Fabric of India. London: V&A Publishing, 2015. Dew, Nicholas. Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Jones, Jennifer. Sexing la Mode: Gender, Fashion, and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Peck, Amelia, ed. Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014. Pillorget, René, and Pillorget, Suzanne. France baroque, France classique, 1589–1715. vol. 2 Paris: Laffont, 1995. Rublack, Ulinka. Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

chapter 3

Li n e a n d Tr a it of the Ba roqu e R i v er Tom Conley

Literature of what Jean Rousset had called the Baroque Age inspires fluvial fantasy. Figures of change and permanence, mutation and constancy, bending and twisting, whether in poetry or prose, sculpture or painting, rivers flow abundantly. Watery sites welcome aggrieved lovers to take stock of themselves, to find solace, or even to end their lives. Eddies, pools, and ponds become mental mirrors. In the eyes of the Baroque soul the very sight of the swirl and twist of moving waters can open sluices of pathos and melancholy. Crying over the death of his beloved Sylvie, Saint-Amant pines: Ruisseau qui cours après toi-mesme, Et qui te fuit toy-mesme aussi, Arreste un peu ton onde ici Pour escouter mon dueil extresme. [River running after yourself,/You who flee yourself no less,/Oh, please, stop your flow for a moment/To lend an ear to my extreme grief].1

Adepts of writers of several generations (extending between the later years of the Wars of Religion and the early years of the Bourbon monarchy) may wonder if the rivers they describe have living correlatives: are they inspired by what wandering bards or jilted lovers see when they amble about in sadness? Or in more likelihood, are they topoi belonging to topographies in which memories of a classical past, of Virgilian signature, that mark the provinces of the present? Are moving waters manifestations of the intransitive force and thrust of writing?2 Or, too, can they be symptoms of a spatial consciousness born of administrative cartography crucial to agendas promoting state reason? Surely, poems and novels are born less from experience of places they describe than the font of other poems and novels. Nonetheless, admirers of L’Astrée, the roman fleuve said to have captured the imagination of the court and public of the seventeenth century, a novel they claim to be the equal of À la recherche du temps perdu, would contend that

line and trait of the baroque river   45 Céladon’s unrequited love is for a utopian location ethnographers call a non-place. That on its opening page L’Astrée sets itself on a historical map of France suggests that the ensuing narrative what follows will have the trappings of a mythistoire, a mode of writing that forges fiction from real places and spaces, a process by which the effects of the former endow the latter with renewed aura and geographical accuracy. At the outset of his roman fleuve, drawing on the idiolect of topography, describing a fabled Forez (or “Forest”), the writing turns the matter of its narrative—the flow of writing—into a river: Au coeur du pays est le plus beau de la plaine, ceinte, comme d’une forte muraille, des monts assez voisins et arrosée du fleuve de Loyre, qui prenant sa source assez prés de là, passe presque par le milieu, non point encor trop enflé ny orgueilleux, mais doux et paisible. Plusieurs autres ruisseaux en divers lieux la vont baignant de leurs claires ondes, mais l’un des plus beaux est Lignon, qui vagabond en son cours, aussi bien que douteux en sa source, va serpentant par ceste plaine depuis les hautes montaignes de Cervieres et de Chalmasel, jusques à Feurs, où Loire le recevant, et luy faisant perdre son nom propre, l’emporte pour tribut à l’Océan. Or sur les bords de ces delectables rivieres on a veu de tout temps quantité de bergers, qui pour la bonté de l’air, la fertilité du rivage et leur douceur naturelle, vivent avec autant de bonne fortune, qu’ils recognoissent peu la fortune.3 [At the heart of the country is the most beauteous of the plain, surrounded, as if by a strong battlement, by nearby mountains and water by the River Loire, drawing its source from nearby, flows almost through the middle, not yet too amply or boastfully, but softly and peaceably. Several other rivers in diverse places go about bathing it with their clear waters, but one of the most wondrous is the Lignon which, no less errant in its course than uncertain in its source, twists and bends its way along this plain from the high mountains of Cervières and Chalmasel to Feurs, where the Loire, embracing it and causing it to lose its very name, carries it as a tribute to the Ocean. And along these rivers’ delectable borders everywhere we see shepherds who, for the goodness of the air, the fertility of the shores and their natural delight, live in such good fortune that they hardly take note of it.]

Much like Saint-Amant’s river, in D’Urfé’s prose the Lignon becomes a lieu de mémoire, a toponym in what would be a literary hydrography of France that includes the great fleuves (rivers running to the sea) and others, of lesser renown, that figure in an impressive canon.4 Anticipating the tenor of the many pages of the novel that follows, in the space of a sentence d’Urfé gently eroticizes the conjuncture of two bodies of water through descriptive conventions, where, at Feurs, Le Lignon flows blissfully into La Loire, losing its name before its letters and sounds are cast into the Bay of Biscaye. A nascent fiction of romance is born of narration borrowed from the idiolect of hydrography. The following paragraphs contend that with the mapping of major fluvial waterways, on maps where the Seine, Loire, Rhône, and Garonne define and demarcate the nation’s provinces, borders, and commercial avenues, rivers become an ever-extensive genius loci. A concurrent literary canon finds inspiration in real or virtual cartographies, in maps, like those describing rivers, where science assuring precision and exactitude is met with a force of imagination that draws attention to the twists and turns of creative

46   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque drive. Two points are key. First, among historians of cartography a sense of fracture is felt where, under the impact of a first wave of a scientific revolution, maps that had been creatures of post-medieval fancy are said to be at odds with others. These maps are based on the labors or topographers and engineers, carefully surveyed and measured, and faithfully represent the areas they delimit. Hence, in an overview of his own terroir in the Périgord, asserting that “il faudroit des topographes qui fissent narration particuliere des endroits où ils ont esté” [we need topographers to make detailed accounts of the places they have been], invoking a world turned topsy-turvy, Michel de Montaigne implicitly advocates the good work of the ingénieurs du roi or royal engineers assigned to draw surveys of the borders of France in order to implement defensive infrastructure and develop maritime and fluvial commerce.5 Writing against what he takes to be foibles of cosmographers steeped in dogma and received ideas, Montaigne makes an implicit case for scientific mapping. Paradoxically, when describing the heave and toss of his neighboring Dordogne, he mantles his words in the rhetoric of a cosmographer who envisages the world in turmoil: Quand je considere l’impression que ma riviere de Dordoigne faict de mon temps vers la rive droicte de sa descente, et qu’en vingt ans elle a tant gaigné, et desrobé le fondement à plusieurs bastimens, je vois bien que c’est une agitation extraordinaire: car, si elle fut tousjours allée ce train, ou deut aller à l’advenir, la figure du monde seroit renversée. 6 [When I consider the impression that my Dordogne River makes in my time on the eastern shore of its descent, and that in twenty years it has gained so much and taken away the foundation of several buildings, I note that it’s an extraordinary agitation because, had it always gone at this pace, or were to go thus in the future, the figure of the world would be turned topsy-turvy.]

The great backward thrust of the river is in fact what locals—topographers, pilots of commercial craft, riparian residents—had been calling the Mascaret, a sort of miniature tsunami that marked the Garonne and Dordogne: “a huge and sudden ravage, or inundation of waters (L’on appelle mascaret une grande montaigne d’eau qui fait en la riviere de Dordonne. Au temps d’esté, es saisons les plus paisibles, v tout en un moment elle se forme, et fait une course quelquesfois plus courte, renversant les bateaux.)” [(They call mascaret a great mountain of water arising in the River Dordogne. In summertime, in the more irenic seasons, all of a sudden it forms and makes its way, sometimes even more rapidly, capsizing boats)].7 The world in upheaval that Montaigne imagines in “extraordinary agitation” is grounded in phenomena belonging to local hydrography. Montaigne’s words attest to the fact that, second, rivers located in real time and space become focal points of projective fantasy often shown on maps themselves. The Baroque map of similar facture appears to be something of a “transitional” or intermediate object, both scientific and oneiric, that masks—but only masks—its causes and effects. In a thumbnail account of early modern cartography, historian of religion Michel de Certeau remarked that on portolan maps and decorative sea charts of the early and mid-sixteenthcentury artists exactingly depicted what made them as such. The maps displayed their raisons d’être and conditions of possibility.8 Attesting to expanding programs of

line and trait of the baroque river   47 commerce and colonization, they included representation of needed modes of transport, deployed conventional signs of the routes their navigators and surveyor had charted and reconnoitered to obtain what they sought, and often figured on their land- and seascapes their prey and quarry. Elegantly drawn and colored, charts composed and designed for the ends of luxury, intended for the pleasure of royal courts—such the “Miller Atlas” (1518) or the “Vallard Atlas” (1547)—included in their designs both the traces of their practical aspects (shorelines, harbors, mouths of rivers, representations of the Europeans’ encounter with or subjection of indigenous populations) and florid decoration. Later maps, presumably those of Dutch cartographers in the age of Louis XIV, tended to remove indications of their mode of production and limit or relocate ornate matter to allay doubt or an unsettling sense of things unknown (e.g., terrae incognitae). Repressing or marginalizing dialogue, based on new science of observation and survey they were drawn to be apodictic, seemingly beyond any shadow of doubt, and thus became instruments of power.9 The shift is consonant with Michel Foucault’s heuristic hypothesis that at about 1600 a medieval process of deciphering the world through similitude and analogy abruptly gives way to another, based on representation, in which, at the beginning of what he calls the “classical” (or classifying) age, signs of things put their referents at a new and greater remove from what describes them. The Baroque map attests to these points. Its figurations of borders, shorelines, and rivers draw lines of divide between analogy and representation while, at the same time, confirming their confluence. And already in 1570: in his Theatrum orbis terrarum Abraham Ortelius binds fifty-three folio maps on strips or onglets that are sewn to the binding and spine of the volume. It owes its novelty to a modular design that allows the map on the recto of the folio to have as a complement a text printed on the verso. At the outset, announcing an implicit cartographic narrative that will lead from a whole to its constituent parts, the world map is followed by projections of the four continents. A map of Europe gives way to the British Isles, then each of the Continent’s nations and regions, which are followed by Greece, Eastern Europe, Scandanavia, Russia, the Far East and, finally, Africa. By virtue of the inaugural world map that serves as a compass, the reader is invited to travel around the globe as he or she wishes. Reduced to a handsome (and expensive) volume, the terraqueous sphere becomes a foliated object. Of a Flemish style and signature, the topographical maps are defined by tight parallel hatching along shorelines. Marked here and there by patches of forest or left blank for steppes and deserts, some lands swell with molehills or taupinières representing mountains, but in every instance the maps are veined with rivers and waterways. As if celebrating the cutting edge of the engraver’s burin, lines of demarcation become the traces of the map’s very cause and process. And no better than along the undulating line defining the northern edge of Antarctica (Figure 1). As if it were the trace of an itinerary (recalling the line drawn across Battista Agnese’s world map of 1544, extending from the narrows between itself and “Magellanica” from the western edge eastward, up and down and at the sluice by the Terra del Fuego, past the Cape Bona Spes and all the way to the Moluccas, the edge moves nervously and jaggedly, while the neighboring orthogonal line defining the circulus antarcticus does not.10 Although offering a unique view of the entire world in a rectangular frame, the oval

48   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 1  Abraham Ortelius, World-Map, in Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1570). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

projection displays in its spandrels billowing masses of clouds, engraved in arced hatching as if to resemble inflated intestines.11 The huge portion in white, named Terra australis nondum cognita, stretching roughly from the Tropic of Capricorn to the lower edge, offsets the stippled oceans and continental masses marked by rivers, molehills, and place names. The unknown lands in the southern hemisphere seem to stare back at the viewer. Calling in question the limits of the known world, the line that separates Antarctica from terrae cognitae, curling upward at the eastern and western edges, bears the form of a faint smile: it is at once inviting and resistant to allegorical reading by which, if the flesh-colored continents of Asia and North America are imagined as eye-sockets, would add to the effect that the map is staring wryly at the viewer. The latent smile is not lost on printer Jean de Gourmont, member of an enterprising family of editors who published a famous “Fool’s Cap Map” in Paris in 1575.12 Jean de Gourmont displays for the first time in France proper a miniature of the Ortelian oval projection that had appeared in the Theatrum orbis terrarum (Figure 1).13 By setting the map in the place reserved for the fool’s physiognomy Gourmont both plays on and calls in question the analogy of world-and-face with which Ptolemy had inaugurated his Geography. A logic of denial is at work: as if telling the viewer that an imago mundi ought not be considered in terms of a similitude that Ptolemy, the father of humanistic cartography, and his commentators had proposed. The device tells us we are vain to consider the order of things by way of analogy—all the analogy—while disavowing that the device implies nonetheless that a time-held mode of inquiry informs cartography.14 By contrast with the rotundity of the face that it replaces (or with the bells on the ears that

line and trait of the baroque river   49 resemble globes bearing the signs of an older T-O diagram) the map’s “flatbed” character enhances its scientific allure.15 Given that it is a “mask,” the fool-as-map invites its viewer to see it as something like a mascaron, at once a figment of the imagination, a piece of truth, a carved face standing over an entry or below a window, and a visual joke. The wit of Gourmont’s print becomes a heuristic prod that invites closer inspection of the traits and hatchings that define its character, be they shorelines, rivers, lines of transit or commerce, or even the pocks and molehills of its orography. The Baroque character of Gourmont’s broadsheet is marked in the relation it establishes between abstract depiction and decoration bearing resemblance to bodily forms. Of a similar order, calligraphy and cartographic description define the fluvial bodies they designate while betraying the trace of the burin that has cut its way on the copperplate that has generated copperplate at the origin of the image. François de la Guillotière’s Charte de France, a great woodcut map of nine sheets begun in 1580 and first printed in 1613, may have been undertaken “to illustrate the great inquest on the state of the kingdom, the results of which Henry III awaited in 1593.”16 Despite the Wars or Religion that may have been cause for its delay in publication (along with the author’s reformed leanings) the map counts among one of the most detailed of its time. Displaying over thirty-thousand toponyms along a vast network of rivers cutting their way across the landscape, the map underwent six printings in the years 1613–1640. Its scientific purpose is manifest in the design even though usually a woodcut would be less exact than a copperplate (Figure 2).

Figure 2  Abraham Ortelius, World Map, in Jean de Gourmont’s “Fool’s Cap Map” (Paris, 1575). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

50   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque The single and double lines depict, respectively, smaller and larger rivers whose sources are shown where, from a cavalier perspective (or “high point view” as if from horseback, which represents an object of three dimensions on a flat surface), the artist uses shading to display chains of mountains; so also the dashes defining farmlands and meadows. Swirled hatchings describe agitated sea and ocean on which boats bob and sway. Amidst calmer waters in the Mediterranean float ships equipped with lateen sails. In Flemish cursive recalling Ortelius, the names of the bodies of water twist and turn, suggesting that they are of the same lines and contours as the waves themselves: such Le Grant mer oceane written above the elaborate cartouche on whose pediment (in the 1640 copy) the Parisian origins of map are noted. Bending like the sails of vessels or curling about itself like the tail of a horned sea-griffin, staring at the viewer, the script turns on itself and melds with the watery currents. Much like the bifurcating lines of a Ramist diagram schematizing Aristotelian logic, the bifurcating veins of rivers and their tributaries suggest that all of France is equally and evenly irrigated.17 The force of analogy is especially pronounced at the mouths of the Rivers Rhône and Gironde (Figure 3). As if placed both within and outside of the map proper, a cartouche sets the personification of the Rhône and Saone over an ornate lower border displaying scalloped forms, crossed rulers, and fleurs-de-lis. Reclining, the bearded Arar, god of the Rhône, props a caduceus-like paddle over his shoulder while holding a reed in his left hand. The long

Figure 3  François de la Guillotière, “Charte de France” (Paris, 1613), southwestern France (detail). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

line and trait of the baroque river   51 stem that arches and leans over the border aims its tip at a western estuary, adjacent to Aigues-mortes and the Camargues. The rounded end of his paddle is set over an island that spewn from the river’s mouth. Seen in trompe-l’œil, the island resembles a banner attached to the paddle that points directly to the river over which its bearer is said to reign. The reclining goddess of the Saone holds a shorter reed in her left hand that extends downward between her legs. Aimed northwest, at an angle complementing that of Arar’s paddle, that points in the other direction, her shaft indicates that the river she personifies is to the north. The deities pose their arms on overturned vases out of which flow the waters that buoy the emblem of Paris, fluctuat nec mergitur. In counterpoint to the festooned globe at the top of the map set in the midst of the title, Charte de France, the cartouche is set at a slight remove from the map while issuing from it, in direct recall of the lines of poet Maurice Scève’s Saulsaye (Lyon, 1547), in which a despondent and melancholic shepherd describes the two rivers meeting and marrying at Lyon, mixing their bodily fluids, living in flux and flow and dying at the edge of the sea where, like the Lignon in the Loire, they “lose their name”: Car le matin je vois là, ou la Saone Vient à se joindre à son espoux le Rhosne; Et le constraint à roidement courir Jusqu’à la mer ou tous deux vont mourir.18 [now in the morning there I see where the Saone/Comes to join its spouse the Rhône/And constrains him to flow straight and hard/To the sea where they both will die.]

Such especially is the rendering of the mouth of the Gironde (Figure 3), the river born where the Garonne and Dordogne meet and will also lose their names. In Guillotière’s woodcut the Gironde begins at the two rivers’ confluence near Bourg and northward by Blaye on the eastern shore. To the east of Lesparre the river takes an almost perpendicular turn to the west before emptying into the Bay of Biscaye, near which is shown the famous Tour de Cordouan, the beacon built to warn sailors of the shoals and dangerous waters. Seen from afar, the Gironde takes a strange bend before pouring its waters in front of an emblematic fish (perhaps a sign of the shad or alose of which Scève writes in Délie) and a vessel to the north.19 Further analogy would turn the course of the river into an esophagus or profile of a buccal cavity that is almost depicted as a mouth or correlative orifice. In its uncanny bend the widening estuary elicits bodily fantasy that would tie the scientific character of the map to the figure of the nation as a living, breathing, and flowing body. Because it opens onto the Grant Mer Oceane, the Gironde appears to be speaking to (or for) the elegant cartouche to the left. Like that which adorns the Rhône and Saone at the bottom, the cartouche appears to occupy a place at once inside and outside of the map, where the bare toes of the two deities touch the water, and where the hatching defining their calves, planted on the cornice of the cartouche (notably to the right) blends with the lines describing the folding flow of the adjacent sea. In the midst of the turbulent sea, holding instruments of measure in line with a great pair of dividers in the three laurel branches, the figures suggest that the mission of the map is to promote concord and

52   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 4  François de la Guillotière, “Charte de France” (Paris, 1613), border of southern France and the Mediterranean (detail). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

unity of the nation. If so, the map would address the political designs of Henry IV and the Bourbon monarchy that, if other rivers are recalled, might even allude to the signing of the Edict of Nantes in 1598, the city seen above and to the north (visible near the mouth of the Loire). The bend of the Gironde in Guillotière’s projection seems both near to and far from what surveyor and engineer Christophe Tassin makes of the area in his survey, published almost concurrently with the later printing of the Charte de France. In a section of his Plans et profils de toutes les principalles villes et lieux considerables de France (1634) for the chapter on the Guyenne, Tassin includes an ornate title page, a topographical map of the area to be covered, an alphabetical index, nine maps of the gouvernement (meaning numerous military and administrative divisions), and local plans, albeit less dramatically drawn than in Guillotière’s rendition, that include Bayonne, the Bergerac, Blaye, Bordeaux, Bourg, Cahors, Garonne, Fronsac, Leytoure, Libourne, Royan, and a close view of the Cordouan Tower at the edge of the Garonne. When followed from west to east, the elongated mouth of the Gironde (here named Garonne) moves along a straight trajectory before bifurcating at the entry of the Dordogne (Figure 6).20 Two arteries of water become veins that reach into the Périgord, Quercy, Armagnac and the greater area of the Languedoc. Emptying the topography of its toponyms, setting the size and extent of the region in accord with lesser or greater point-size roman type (names of smaller towns in minuscule italic), Tassin draws attention to hydrography and, by extension, to

line and trait of the baroque river   53 matters of navigation, commerce and defense. The trajectory has little of the bodily feel of Guillotière’s Garonne, which “turns” in anticipation of the wider breadth of the Gironde. Not given to areas inland, the engineer’s drawing of the “Entrée de la Rivière de Garonne” includes sandbars, shoals and shallow eddies. The map extending the view of the rivers, the Gouvernements de Blaye et Bourg, contrary to the first map, tends to read from east to west. Noting the bifurcation of the well named Bec d’Ambes (a point now occupied by an oil refinery) and the contiguous towns of Blaye and Bourg (pp. 9–10), the ichnographic views of the area lay stress on how the landscape can be managed and defended. A scenographic view of Bordeaux (p. 12) is shown against a broad horizon in whose bright sky the city’s name stands strong. The fluvial narrative continues: seven plates follow before the next ornately fashioned title page announces the maps of Poitou to the north. What would seem to be an engineer’s drab and dry rendering of the region is introduced by a heraldic cartouche fashioned with the jaws, talons, and gills of a chimerical beast.21 Recalling Montaigne’s comparison of his writing as crotesques (Montaigne’s spelling of grotesques) among others, the title page sets into counterpoint exactly what the maps are not aimed to describe. Areas over which the eye can wander, contrary to the engineer’s scientific description of the rivers, towns, and cities of France, the cartouches suggest that hydrography whets the viewer’s imagination. However exact, determined, and efficient, the engineer’s copperplates require areas and patches where fantasy and reflection on manner and matter can intercede. The inaugural map of Tassin’s Cartes generales et particulieres de toutes les costes de France (1636) drawn by Melchior Tavernier—grandson of Gabriel Tavernier, employed by Ortelius and later engraver of the maps in Maurice Bouguereau’s Théâtre françoys of 1594, the first specifically French atlas—juxtaposes science with fiction and fantasy. Composed of twenty-nine maps outlining the coastlines of France, formatted in French and Latin, the atlas is composed of textual descriptions set below Tassin’s dedicatory letter to Cardinal Richelieu. Tassin assures the prelate (and the readers who would be in his place) that his labors have been aimed to serve and protect the nation. A second title page features a fantastically splayed monster-griffin-fish of three faces, one of which extends its tongue toward the viewer (Figure 5) and downward toward the writing of the title. Deploying a style reminiscent of the jagged coastlines on portolan charts, but drawn in accord with careful observation, the maritime edges of the map are set under an order of rectangles indicating the arrangement and the areas depicted in the maps to follow.22 On the right a great cartouche is fashioned in the form of a scaled monster of many facets: coiffed by the crown of the Bourbon monarchy, a coat of arms of two units (the triple fleur-de-lis of France and Navarre’s chained grid) on the top becomes the eyes of a smiling monster from whose ornate lips a tongue seems to touch the forehead of another below it, a highly ornate creature, both fish and fowl, that extends palmate claw-wings that morph into spiraled consoles shaped like embryonic hands. At the bottom, a pendant cartouche containing the text of the advertissement, the collection’s mode d’employ (or directions for use) is held in its hands of five digits spiked

54   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 5 Christophe Tassin, Cartes generales et particulieres de toutes les costes de France (1636), introductory map. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

by claws.23 Grinning glibly, extending its tongue as if to lick the letters of the title, the horned monster stares directly at the viewer. The center (or greater mouth) of the cartouche would seem to “speak” the words of the title that the monster is about to wet with its tongue or langue. An emblem of power, the cartouche would suggest that the engineer’s maps are scientific enigmas of uncommon virtue. On the plane of symbolic magic, paradoxically, the strange monster might bear analogy to their agency or power. In the lower left corner of the map a cartouche containing a scale of leagues is placed over a scallop-edged festoon of fabric hanging between a console wrapped around a plume and then another from which extends an olive branch. Drawing attention to the chain of the Pyrenees and the name of Navarre above, the border on the right stresses swirls and folds where the map is of flatbed aspect. Three maps depicting the Guyenne, a site of interest for reason of its vulnerability, are more detailed than those in Tassin’s Plans et profils.24 The first in the series records measurements of depth at the mouth of the Gironde (on the map called Garonne) and takes note of the shallow waters and shoals near the river’s edges. The second (f. 23) that concentrates on the confluence of the Garonne and Dordogne, runs from west to east, stressing, contrary to Guillotière and other maps, the horizontal course of the rivers and estuary.25 The mix of science and

line and trait of the baroque river   55 fantasy on the initial map gives way to survey. Taking little heed of inland area, the map draws attention to shorelines and to signs indicating he depths of ambient waters. Traces of Tassin’s art are visible in what, perhaps in recall of his work for Tassin, engraver Melchior Tavernier executes for the geographer Nicolas Sanson. In 1641, in some correlation with Guillotière’s densely packed map of France, Tavernier publishes Sanson’s Carte des rivières de France curieusement recherchée (Figure 6). An elaborate hydrography divides the nation in areas defined by its five major river valleys—Seine, Loire, Garonne, Rhône, and Rhine. The map carries only the names of its fluvial pathways that when seen from a distance lend a sense of relief, suggesting also that of an orography. Given how broad swaths dramatically depict the course of the major rivers and filigree lines their tributaries, the map invites itself to be “read” but also to be seen in tandem with its complement: the well-named Louis Coulon’s highly detailed survey, Les Rivieres de France, which can be considered its gloss.26 The textual description encourages readers to imagine fluvial itineraries while seeing on the map how the rivers of France cover the nation and distribute their wealth equally and to all places—as if flowing water, like the directed or directional reason that Descartes heralds at the beginning of the Discours de la méthode [Discourse on method], le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée [good sense (direction, or reason) is the best shared thing in the world]. Both the text of Coulon’s guide and Sanson’s map underscore the generative and living force of the rivers they represent.

Figure 6  Christophe Tassin, map of the mouth of the Gironde in the Cartes generales et particulieres. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

56   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 7  Nicolas Sanson, Carte des rivières de France curieusement recherchée (Paris, 1641). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The cartouches indicate how and why: framing an invitation to the reader of the map, the cartouche in the upper right (Figure 7), set in what would be southwestern Germany, explains how the map was conceived and drawn. The contour of its left border and its pendant follow the bends of the Rhine. A piece of elegantly curled strapwork, a banderole fills a vacant space adjacent to the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine at what on other maps would bear the name of Coblenz. Set in relief, the design turns southward, following the bends of the Rhine, where the reverse curves of the base of its lower portion double that of the frame in which the invitation to the reader is placed.27 The lower (or second part) of the cartouche in which the origin and author of the copperplate are shown stands over Lake Constance; at its bottom, the form invites the eye to go to the very source or end of the Rhine’s line in the Alps. The right side of the cartouche suggests that the decoration exceeds the borders, or that the map cannot be entirely self-contained. Given its fleshy aspect, graceful contour, and bodily suggestiveness, the cartouche might be drawn to resemble a female pubis, and more so where the upper area of the cartouche seems to give birth to its lower portion in which the origin of the map is noted. Drawn in a similar style, the ornate cartouche in the lower left corner bears the title of the map. A visual fable or bourde, the frame in which the title of the map is enclosed calls attention to the “curious” or carefully wrought design spelled out in the title.

line and trait of the baroque river   57 Composed of two reverse curves having scalloped edges, the outlines of the plinth curl around a scale of common leagues and, above, the date and sign of the king’s privilege. Like the marriage of the Rhine and the edge of the cartouche on the upper right, the bend of the reverse curve that defines the right side of the cartouche almost melds with the map itself, its bend becoming the map’s border in visual conjunction with the involuted oval in which the title and name of the authored are incised. Capped by a pinnacle fashioned from three spheres of decreasing size, each perched on the top of the other, the design forms a point cutting between the words, drawn in Flemish cursive, “Mer” and “de Gascogne,” which are set in the Bay of Biscaye just above (Figure 8). The decorative apex that cuts into the line of letters (in lower-case majuscule) draws the viewer to the syntax or spacing of “Mer de Gascogne,” suggesting that the name of the sea can be glossed correctly and, no less, curiously, eliciting (fecal) fantasy related to what critic Mikhail Bakhtin had called “le bas corporel” or resuscitative region of “the lower body.”28 The alignment of the script with Garonne to the right of “Gascogne,” in smaller point-size, just beyond the river of its name, implies once again, as it had in Guillotière’s map that the mouth of the river is “speaking” or naming itself just beyond the indication of the Cordouan Tower to its left. The river and its name empty themselves into the area where they flush into the bay beyond.

Figure 8  Nicolas Sanson, Cartes des rivières de France, detail: Upper right cartouche and dedication to the reader. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

58   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 9  Nicolas Sanson, Carte des rivières de France, detail: Lower left cartouche and title of the map. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The affinity of potamography, a geographer’s term for the description of rivers, for bodily analogy suggests that the map is a veined, living, flowing and, like its gender, nurturing form whose flesh and fluid promise wealth, procreation, and good fortune.29 The area of the Guyenne where the Garonne finds its source is in proximity to the Mediterranean, suggesting in a pragmatic vein that the map might be a prod to implement construction of the Canal du Midi, a project realized later in the century.30 Two concomitant processes are at work. One, operational, implies that a network of real canals and navigable waterways can assure lively commerce in all areas of the nation; the other, “curious” or seductive, invests a gently erotic tenor in its design and execution.31 By way of conclusion it can be asked if the two processes apply to Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre (published in the tenth volume of her novel, 1661), possibly the most renowned of Baroque maps where analogy and science are in concert. A map whose folds are integral to its form, the Carte du pays de Tendre lends a sense of a bodily process when carefully and daintily opened. When fully displayed, adjacent to the following page where it is described (whose number, 399, is engraved in the upper right corner of the map), it invites an extensively haptic reading, a way by which the eye would “touch” what it discerns (Figure 10).

line and trait of the baroque river   59

Figure 10  Mademoiselle de Scudéry, “La Carte de Tendre” in Clélie (Paris, 1661). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The creases separating its twelve panels become lines of latitude and longitude; the pleat that forms meridian of the map runs from the Terres Inconnues at the top, going over the bridge connecting the two sides of the city of Tendre (left bank) and its companion sur In [sula] (right bank), and down and over the area where Inclination fleuve separates Nouvelle (left bank) from its sister-city, Amitié (right bank). The text to the right of the opened map invites the reader to follow the course of its three rivers: Vous vous souvenez sans doute bien Madame, qu’Herminus avoit prié Clélie de luy enseigner par où l’on pouvoit aller de Nouvelle Amitié à Tendre: de sorte qu’il faut commencer par cette premiere Ville qui est au bas de cette carte, pour aller aux autres: car afin que vous compreneiz mieux le dessein de Clélie, vous verrez qu’elle a imaginé qu’on peut avoir de la tendresse par trois causes differentes: ou par une grande estime, ou par reconnaissance, ou par inclination: & c’est ce qui l’a obligée d’establir ces trois Villes de Tendre, sur trois Rivieres qui portent ces trois noms, et de faire aussi trois routes differentes pour y aller. . . .  [Surely, Madame, you remember that Herminus had asked Clélie to teach him how to go from New Friendship to Tendre: in such fashion it is required to begin from this first City that is at the bottom of this map in order to go to the others, so that in order to understand Clélie’s plan [dessein], you will see that she has imagined how tenderness can be acquired by three different cause: either by a great estime, by gratitude, or by inclination: and that is why she had to establish these three Cities of Tender, on three Rivers which bear these three names, and also to make these three different routes in order to get there. . . . ]

60   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Two of waterways find their sources in tufts of lofty mountains, and the other, flowing upward across a long plain, begins from an unknown area beyond the lower edge of the map. Converging at a mouth opening onto the Dangerous Sea, Inclination Fleuve resembles a fallopian tube.32 Fuzzy hatching along the borders implies that the riverbeds cut deeply into the landscape, and their fairly straight course suggests the waters flow quickly and swiftly. An allegorical construction to be sure, the map concretizes and spatializes the aims of the novel and, where the toponyms are found, the vocabulary and tactical designs of the précieux. Yet, in the context of the engineers who drew pragmatic surveys for the sake of defense and commerce, the map can be read inversely, as a specifically utopian projection of the nation. In what appears to be a willed confusion of cavalier and ichnographic perspectives the map begins to resemble increasingly conventional representations of France itself. To the left of the western edge, as if opening onto the Atlantic, the turbulent Mer dangereuse resembles the Bay of Biscay as Guillotière had depicted its waters on his Charte de France. The bulbous Lac d’Indifference might be comparable to Lake Geneva at the border of Switzerland. The calmer strait of La Mer Dangereuse at the top of the map bears analogy with the English Channel, and the lower portion of the Terres Inconnues at the top could be the southern reaches of the British Isles. Reconnoissance Fleuve flows from an Armorican peninsula into an estuary that might be the mouth of the Seine, whose analogue would be the River Estime. Inclination Fleuve would be anybody’s guess, but it seems to follow a path reminiscent of the Rhône. The green promontory on which the staffage (two ladies, a man and a page) are gathered, a fitting background to the rectangular scale of Lieues d’amité, might be the edge of the Mediterranean. The disposition of the three rivers indicates that internalized or part of a greater stratigraphy, an engineer’s or ordinary geographer’s map of France inheres in its form. The science of “representation” associated with maps based on surveys of the nation is vital to the allegorical plan of Clélie. More broadly, the ostensibly scientific maps against which the Carte de Tendre is fashioned are hardly devoid of areas inviting creative reverie and fantasy. These regions are shown in the play of lines, of the letters and their flourishes, in the renderings of shorelines, borders, and rivers. They come forward where decorative forms, cartouches, and nominal material included, abut, or mix with the pragmatic matter; or, more broadly, in the latent or remote presence of bodily forms within accurately measured topographical depictions. Points of departure and itineraries on all the maps, the lines that depict rivers are the first to mesh oneiric fantasy with the science of survey. In these areas the maps become a form of Baroque literature.

Notes 1. Jean, Anthologie de la poésie baroque, v. 1 (Paris: Armand Colin, “Bibliothèque de Cluny,” 1961), 210. 2. In a close reading of Le Contemplateur, John D. Lyons notes how, reflecting on the waters of the world as if his eyes were fixed on a globe, Saint-Amant moves from the empyrean, “ ‘consultant les Eaux d’une roche nuë’ ” to the lower depths and, along the way, “. . . songeant au flus et reflus” of the oceans he loses his bearings both on the world and himself.

line and trait of the baroque river   61 He recovers his compass when realizing that lines of verse describing the turmoil are engraved or chiseled on a surface, in The Listening Voice: An Essay on the Rhetoric of Saint-Amant (Lexington: French Forum Monographs, 1982), 28–29. 3. Honoré d’Urfé, L’Astrée, ed. Gérard Genette (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1984), 25. 4. Noteworthy is the Seine in the second stanza of François Villon’s famous “Ballade des femmes du temps jadis”; the Loire and the Loir in the sonnets of Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, Angoumois and Tourangeau poets spearheading the Pléiade; for Maurice Scève and the bards of the Lyon School, the confluence of the Saone and Rhône; waterways that flow with blood throughout Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Tragiques. Often overlooked is the Allier, by whose shores Vercingetorix famously fought Julius Caesar. In his Dialogo pio e speculativo, con diverse sentenze Latine e volgari (Lyon: Guillaume Roville, 1560) [Harvard Houghton Library Typ. 515. 60.816], based on a topographical map of the Limagne and Auvergne he had drawn for the Bishop of Clermont, archivist, and antiquarian Gabriele Symeone stages a dialogue between a professor and a student, in situ, ambling along the edge of River Allier, who displace into contemporary space the history of the founding battle between Julius Cæsar and Vercingetorix. The account endows the area with an aura. The place and date of Toussaint Renucci’s critical edition of the work, Description de la Limagne d’Auvergne, traduction française par Antoine Chappuys du Dialogo pio speculativo de Gabriel Symeoni (Paris: Didier, 1943) indicate that map and text locating where proto-French citizens battled a colonizing enemy addresses the dilemmas of the Nazi Occupation. In his “César au fil des guides de voyage” [in Écrire le monde à la Renaissance (Caen: Éditions Paradigme, 1993), 71–86] Frank Lestringant calls the work a topomancie asking its reader to “discover in the map a history” (Lestringant 1993, 75), in other words, the Allier is the site of the origins of modern France. 5. See Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 15–35; here Chandra Mukerji offers an enlightening account of the complexity of projects that coordinated defense with the management of the waterways of France. 6. Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey and updated by Verdun-L. Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 1965), 205. In the initial reflections of “Des cannibales” the description is the sole instance where Montaigne refers to topography and topographers. 7. Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (London: Adam Inslip, 1611): “They call Mascaret a great mountain [montaigne] that is made in the Dordogne River. In summertime, in the most peaceful of seasons, all of a sudden it forms a thrust, quick and abrupt, that capsizes boats.” 8. Michel de Certeau, “Récits d’espace,” in L’Invention du quotidien, 1: Arts de faire, v. 1, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1990), 177. 9. Ibid., 175–176. 10. The John Carter Brown (Providence, Rhode Island, and Morgan Libraries, New York) hold copies of Agnese’s “Magellan Map.” See http://www.themorgan.org/collection/renaissancevenice/Battista-Agnese. See also map 23 in Agnese’s Portolan Atlas, Yale Beinecke Library MS 560: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3439925?image_id=1105589. 11. The legacy of Ortelian oval projection is taken up in John P. Synder, Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 38–39. 12. On the genealogy of the Gourmont firm that published the broadsheet see Catherine Hofmann, “Publishing and the Map Trade in France, 1470–1670,” in David Woodward, ed., The History of Cartography, v. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1569–1588,

62   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque figure 53.4 (1575); Marianne Grivel, in Maxine Priaud et al., Dictionnaire des éditeurs d’estampes à Paris sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Psalmodis, 1987), 142–145. 13. See Catherine Hofmann, “Publishing and the Map Trade in France, 1470–1670,” in David Woodward, ed., History of Cartography 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1569–1588, figure 53.4 (1575) [BNF Estampes, Facéties et Pièces de Bouffonnerie, v. 1, T.f. 1 Rés]. 14. See also “Cartography and Literature in Early Modern France,” in David Woodward, ed., The History of Cartography, v. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 430; Monique Pelletier, Cartographie en France et du monde de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris: BNF, 2001); and James Helgerson, “The Folly of Maps and Modernity,” in Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 241–262. 15. A creation of the Middle Ages that Isidore of Seville explicates in his Etymologiæ, the T-O map is a schema or memory-image of the known world and its three continents: an O-like circle, around whose circumference or extrados circulate the waters of an ocean sea or mare oceanum, encloses a majuscule T. The lintel or upper bar, a hypothetical juncture of Nile and Tanais (Danube) rivers, separates Asia from Europe. Separating Europe from Africa, the trumeau or vertical shaft signifies the Mediterranean. East is at the top and north to the left. The three continental masses are marked by the names of the sons of Noah: Asia belongs to Sem, Europe to Jaseth, and Africa to Cham. The diagram can be viewed in light of what Leo Steinberg remarks in “The Flatbed Picture Plane,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 61–98. Referring to this essay, Gilles Deleuze notes that in the Baroque world the ­coupling of a depthless city view and information-table (hence a map and its gazetteer) is opposed to a picture or window opening onto the world (the “window-countryside system”), in Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988), 38. 16. (BNF, Cartes et Plans, Ge DD 2987). See Monique Pelletier, Cartographie en France, 27 and also her “National and Regional Mapping in France, to about 1650,” in History of Cartography 3, 1493–1495. 17. On how Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée) deploys diagrams to visualize abstraction see Walter J. Ong, Ramism and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958/2004), Book 2, Part 9: “The Allegory as Diagram.” 18. Saulsaye (Lyon, France: Jean de Tournes, 1547) f. 8v°. In an exacting reading of Guillotière’s chart Monique Pelletier notes that the representations of the god and goddess directly recall the image of the fountain of the Saint-Pol in Guillaume Roville’s edition of Henri II’s royal entry to Lyon in 1548, for which Maurice Scève and artist-engraver Bernard Salomon had participated, in: De Ptolémée à La Guillotière (XVe–XVIe siècle: Des cartes pour la France pourquoi, comment? (Paris: CTHS, 2009), 120. See also: La magnifica et triomphale entrata del christianiss. re de Francia Henrico secondo (Lyon, 1549), 47: http://nrs.harvard. edu/urn-3:FHCL.Hough:8187683. 19. See Maurice Scève, Délie, object de plus hault vertu, ed. Maurice Parturier (Paris: Librairie Maurice Didier, 1939), dizain CCXXI: “Sur le Printemps, que les Aloses montent,/ Ma Dame, & moy saultons dans le batteau . . . ” (154). 20. The sequence of maps can be seen in the digital reproduction of the collection: v. 1:  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.Hough:10658348 v. 2:  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.Hough:10658349

line and trait of the baroque river   63 21. Page 1, sequence 192. 22. For the context of Tassin’s work see David Buisseret, “The Ingénieurs du roi, 1500–1650” in The History of Cartography 3, 1504–1534 (especially 1517). See Catherine Hofmann’s overview of Melchior Tavernier and Tassin’s labors in the commerce of maps in the same volume, in “Publishing and the Map Trade in France, 1470–1670,” 1569–1588 (especially 1580–1581). 23. “Ces quarrés tireés le long de ces costes denotent les separations de contenu en chaque carte particuliere” [these squares drawn along the coastlines denote the separations of content in each individual map]. 24. See David Buisseret, “Les Ingénieurs royaux du XVIe siècle,” in Ingénieurs et fortifications avant Vauban: L’organisation d’un service royal des XVIe–XVII e siècles (Paris: CHTS/ Géographie, 2000), 15. 25. Hofmann remarks that by “bringing together the work of military engineers—usually completely original—Tassin helped popularize the work of his engineering colleagues for a public whose cartographic curiosity increased gradually throughout the Thirty Years’ War,” and generally printed images of this kind became “an art relating to pleasure, and not to necessity, spurring the imagination and talent (1580). See also Mireille Pastoureau, Les Atlas français: XVI e–XVII e siècles (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1984), 437–480 (especially 447). 26. The title is fluvial: Les Rivieres de France, ou Description Geographique & Historique du cours & debordements des Fleuves, Rivieres, Fontaines, Lacs & Estangs qui arrousent les Provinces des Royaumes de France. Avec un Denombrement des Villes, Ponts, Passages, Batailles qui ont esté données sur leurs rivages, & autres curiositez remarquables dans chaque province, 2 v. (Paris: Chez François Clousier, 1644). Père François de Dainville notes that the volume is a “veritable commentary” on the map, in Le Langage des géographes (Paris: Picard, 1964/2002) 133. Sanson’s map figures, too, in the context of Georges Fournier’s Hydrographie: contenant la theorie et la praticque de toutes les parties de la navigation (Paris: Chez Michel Soly, 1643). 27. La France et arrousee de plusieurs belles et grandes Rivieres, et d’un nombre presque infiny de moyen et petits Ruisseaux [;] toutes leurs eaux se rendent dans l’Ocean en la Mer Myterrannee: J’ay trac[é] dans ceste Carte leurs Cours leurs Rencontres, & remarqué leurs Noms; au moins de ceux que l’espace d’une feuille a peu comprendre: et j’espere Amy lecteur que tu y en trouvera un grand nombre qui ne se sont veus ny dans les Cartes Generales, ny mesme dans les plus Particulieres. Encore en feray-je voir d’advantage quand je donneray au jour les Cartes de toute la France, a quoy le sieur Tavernier nespargne point la despence, pour recouvrir de bons et nouveaux desseins, ny moy ma peine pour les mettre en estat quelles puissant servir commodement au publicq: tu nous advertiras sy tu as quelque chose quy nous y puisse ayder et cependant tu auras le Contentement ce petit dessein des Rivieres de la France Adieu . . . A Paris, Chez Mel.or Tavernier, Graveur et Imprimeur du Roy pour les Tailles doulces demeurant en lisle du Pallais sur le Quay qui regarde la Megicerie.” Here and there, cutting into or intersecting with the text, the parallel hatching suggests that it is of the order of the “writing” of the rivers and the erotic or sensuous design of the cartouche. 28. In Rabelais and his World, translated by Helen Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1984. See also Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, on productive analogy and anality in “Coprographies,” Montaigne, l’écriture de l’essai (Paris: PUF, 1988), 198–220, which deal with the lower parts of the body politic, notably on the proximity of analogy and anality (200). 29. See Dainville (1964), note 26 on the art of potamography.

64   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 30. In her Impossible Engineering (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), Chandra Mukerji remarks how hydraulics in the technology of the canal were conveyed in “female imagery” (135–136). The decorative facture of Sanson’s map, which seems to anticipate the construction of the Canal du Midi, is of a similar order. 31. Further comparison might indicate why. In 1649 (and in a second edition, in 1652), accompanying a description of Gallia when it was under Roman rule, Sanson publishes a similar map in conjunction with an explanatory text. In its presentation the map becomes a stratigraphy. Covering the map in different point-size, Latin names provide a grammar and a spatial history that “speak” to the viewer, in text and image, in his Remarques sur la carte de l’ancienne Gaule, tirée des Commentaires de César (Paris: s.n., 1652) [Harvard Houghton Library GEN *53–1536]. 32. T. Jefferson Kline, on Louis Malle’s Les Amants (1958) in Screening the Text (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 40; Claude Filteau, “Le pays de Tendre: l’enjeu d’une carte,” Littérature, no. 36 (December 1979), 37–60. Jeffrey Peters notes that artist François Chauveau (1613–1676), “who engraved the published version” of the Carte de Tendre, had drawn a map for Sanson’s Atlas du monde (1665) and that the conflicting perspective visible on the map of Franche-Comté in Tassin’s Cartes générales de toutes les provinces de France shares much with what we find in Clélie, in Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2004), 105–106.

Further Reading Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, translated by Tom Conley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. David Woodward, ed., The History of Cartography, vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. François de Dainville, S. J. Le Langage des géographes. Paris: Picard, 1964. Jeffrey Peters, Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Monique Pelletier, De Ptolémée à La Guillotière (XV e–XVI e siècle), Des cartes pour la France pourquoi, comment? Paris: CTHS Géographie 6, 2009.

chapter 4

Ba roqu e Theatr ica lit y Julia Gros de Gasquet

Roland Barthes gives a famous definition of “theatricality”: What is theatricality? It is the theater minus the text; it is a layer of signs and sensations building itself on the stage on the basis of the written storyline; it’s the sort of ecumenical perception of sensual artifice, gestures, sounds, tones, distances, substances, lights, that floods the text in the fullness of its outward language.1

In this short extract Barthes stresses that which is beyond or below the theatrical text, calling out to the reader, listener and spectator’s senses and thoughts. Theatricality as “density of signs,” elaborated through a decentering vis-à-vis the text, serves also to express this essential dual nature of the theater, both dramatic and anti-dramatic. Under the concept of theatricality, the play can be conceived both in terms of the story, with the latter’s own elements and execution, and of the external elements of theatrical text, displayed in the structure of performance. In four essential points, Josette Féral has synthesized a definition of theatricality. Theatricality is:

1. an act of transforming the real, the person, the body, space, time, and thus a work at the level of performance; 2. an act of transgressing the everyday through the very act of creation; 3. an act that requires the exhibition of the body, semanticizing signs; 4. the presence of a subject who, through the body, actualizes the structures of the imaginary.2 When the term “theatricality” is associated with the adjective “Baroque,” “theatricality” presents us with an enigma worth exploring. What, in fact, do we understand by the term “Baroque theatricality?” The adjective “Baroque” concentrates, in complex, semantic layers, overlapping meanings that complete and enrich one another. The question of the word’s definition is vast, and Fabien Cavaillé’s mise au point allows us to ­consider the question along two lines of thought. The adjective “Baroque” takes us both

66   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque back to a repertoire, and more generally a European literary and artistic style of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, as well as a way of performing this repertoire nowadays, be it in dance, dramatic declamation, or opera: Among all the semantic extensions of the baroque, how can we locate the shifts of meaning that occurred in artistic and scholarly language beginning in the period 1970– 80? People began to speak about baroque music and baroque theatre to refer both to the repertory and the way of performing it, based on the rules and customs of the musical or vocal interpretation of the period called baroque. So, one could have, for the same baroque work, a contemporary modern interpretation as well as an interpretation based on the historically correct conventions. The whole point is to know whether on one hand “baroque,” in a baroque production [mise-en-scène] has the same meaning that is traditional to designate certain works or on the other hand whether the term is only used to denote a certain approach, an interpretation [parti pris], or artistic gesture: does one say “baroque” because the word is more ­elegant than “historically accurate” or “archeological”? [. . .] In this sense, baroque spectacles, like those of Antiquity, like all ancient and forgotten forms, can appear to artists as a new horizon, a path that, while returning to the past, leads to the questions and forms of our own time.3

Understood this second sense, “Baroque” is a setting-in-motion that, through performance, projects history into the present along with theoretical and practical questions shared by researchers, practitioners, and artists. To capture and appreciate its iridescence, Baroque theatricality is most suitably considered first through its relationship to rhetoric, specifically in the orator’s or actor’s speech and gestures. This starting point through rhetoric will then be filled out by considering how those on stage (both as speakers and listeners) and the theatrical public interact. This institutional context, with its relationship to space, influences the Baroque actor’s art, whether one thinks of it in terms of history or in terms of the contemporary stage. Finally, the notion of exhibition tied to the very definition of theatricality—showing off the body—will require us to envision the way in which Baroque actors put on their makeup and present themselves visually in a decorated skin, which is rendered with stage lighting. In this relationship to theatricality Baroque actors offer themselves as agents of the arts, at the heart of the complex relationship between what is natural and what is artificial.

Expressing Passion: Baroque Gestures and Speech The actor, when he orates, embodies one of several commonplaces of eloquence defined by Grimarest at the beginning of the eighteenth century: Declamation as it is understood today is the amplified recitation that one gives of an oratorical discourse, to content the mind and to touch the heart of the spectators. From that it follows that a sermon, an oration, a tragedy, a comedy may be the object of this part of rhetoric.4

baroque theatricality   67 The experience of declamation is connected to the existence of different places: the church, the Palace of Justice, and the theatrical space where plays, tragic or comic, are performed. As Grimarest uses the term, oration has its humanist meaning of public discourse; it appears that one “declaims” in church, at the Palace of Justice and in the theater. Though the locations are varied, neither Grimarest nor any seventeenth-century author distinguishes “types” of oration corresponding to these places; on the contrary, all the texts that speak of it underline the stylistic unity of this part of rhetoric.5 Declaiming is the transformative medium for the actor’s voice. He does not speak as he would in real life when he is declaiming: There is a simple pronunciation that aims to allow the words to be heard clearly, so that the listener can understand distinctly and without difficulty; but there is another pronunciation that is stronger [plus forte] and more energetic, which consists of giving weight to the words one recites, and which has an important relationship with the pronunciation that is is used on stage and on the occasion of speaking in public, and this is ordinarily called declamation.6

The words force, energy, and weight themselves convey the idea that the actor uses an augmented voice in order to assert the particular words he speaks. Vocal work draws on a technique of emphasis made necessary by rhetorical convention. The actor does not speak, he declaims. And, this declamation conforms to a particular convention according to the passions to be displayed: If [the orator] is fearful, he will make this known with a trembling and hesitant voice. If on the contrary he is confident, he will show it with a loud and firm voice; if he is angry, he will make it known with a sharp, impetuous, and violent voice and by taking frequent breaths.7

This encoding of the voice also extends to other parts of discourse (exordium, narration, confirmation, refutation, peroration) that one does not utter in the same way. So, too, it extends to figures of rhetoric occurring in the text (exclamation, swearing, prosopopoeia . . . ), which demand varied and differing tones of voice. This expression is regulated through a scale of vocal volume and a degree of intensity attributed to each emotion. This is what Father Mersenne states: The accent that we choose is an inflection or modification of the voice or of the utterance, through which one expresses passions or affects either naturally or by artifice. [. . .] Each passion and affect of the soul has its own accents, through which its different degrees are made clear.8

The allusion to the actor is recognizable in the phrase “by artifice” [par artifice]. Indeed, the actor is the person who performs feelings that he is not experiencing in the literal sense of the word, but which he is representing for the needs of the spectacle. He is therefore the person who experiences passions “by artifice.” Rhetorical principles regarding

68   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque the orator’s behavior and those that inform the performance of the actor build on the expression of passions: how to express vocally this or that passion the dramaturge will have given to his character? Passions are tied to seventeenth-century medical theory, which seems fanciful to us today but which then had the advantage of relating the body to the soul’s emotional states and of explaining, for example, why the body of a woman in love could “freeze and burn” [“et transir et brûler”] according to Racine’s words.9 Passions are the soul’s emotional states materialized in bodily symptoms: Hence one can conclude that the ancients established these four passions, namely joy, sorrow, fear, and hope, like the four elements, or the four humors of the appetite, which are common to us and to animals. [. . .] Now, one must examine what the movement of these passions consists of before deciding on the specific accent to give to each. First, the heart swells, widens, and opens in joy and hope, like the heliotrope, the rose, and the lily in the presence of the sun. Thus the complexion of the face is vermilion because of the vital spirits that the heart sends upward [. . .]. Joy brings a quantity of blood and spirit to the face and to the other parts of the body. But fear and sorrow are like the ebbtide that takes away what it had brought: for fear and terror make the face pale and the countenance dreary and hideous.10

The question before us is to know which are the qualities specific to each passion. Just as poetics produces a typology of norms, rhetoric produces a typology of passions and how they are accentuated: He [the orator] will show his love with a soft, gay, and pleasing voice, and hatred on the contrary with a bitter and severe voice. He will display his joy in a full, gay, and flowing voice, and quite differently his sadness in a muted, languishing, plaintive voice, often interrupted by sighs and groans. If he is fearful, he will show it with a trembling and hesitant voice. [. . .] From admiration, I go to its contrary and say that if the orator wishes to manifest scorn he feels toward someone and to incite the scorn of that person among the listeners, this must be with a tone of contempt and without any emotion nor effort of voice.11

Le Faucher picks up the discussion with the four principal emotions evoked above: joy, sadness, and their corollaries; love and hate; fear and assurance (or hope); and adds related passions such as admiration or disdain. For the actor, the expression of the passions will therefore be regulated by this typology. Expression does not depend on the free will of each actor. Such expression is codifed even before the actor has begun to plan his performance. Moreover, he is neither looking for it nor inventing it. He conforms to a code; and within this code, he creates the character. This vocal discipline is the basis of artistic practices that now aim at recovering the seventeenth-century actor’s presence. Yet what strikes contemporary actors who in the twenty-first century ­perform while adopting this code, as well as the spectators who watch them, is the ­relationship to

baroque theatricality   69 artifice, this cultivation of the voice that adds energy to the text. This energy is brought to bear not only through the vocal technique but also through ­precisely coded gestures.

Creating Gesture: Codified and Natural The treatises for the orator as they were written in the seventeenth century always follow the same two-part organization: the first part is devoted to the voice, the second to the orator’s body. It is the same codification that regulates both voice and body. The last chapters of Michel LeFaucheur’s treatise, cited earlier, are devoted to gestures: Let [the gesture] appear natural and as if arising from the things that you say and from the emotion that moves you to say it. [. . .] As for the body as a whole, it should not be always changing place and posture. But it must also not be immobile like a trunk. [. . .] One should make all the gestures with the right hand. If you raise the hand, it must not be higher than the eyes. Your eyes must always see your hands, and they must always be near your head; you should not extend your arms farther than a half-foot from your body; your gestures must always be ordinary and modest.12

We see how the speaker’s gestures are framed by precise rules regarding the carriage of arms, of hands: the accompaniment of the text by a certain number of gestures. Englishman John Bulwer’s plates in Chironomia/Chirologia are well known today by those interested in the question of the seventeenth-century actor’s performance. They show which hand gestures can be made by the speaker. What is striking in the collection of the quotations above is that they define a very insistent art of dramatic expression, even though this art must not fall into the trap of exaggeration: the gesture must seem natural even while following precise rules. Gestures remain “ordinary and modest” in Le Faucheur’s writing. Likewise, vocal emphasis has to do with added energy, not with added volume. Everything contributes to making this art of eloquence one extremely coded by rules and rhetorical canons. But this art must disguise itself: here is where dissimulation comes in. What greets the public at the ­theater is the art of dissimulation. That which is produced as natural is the result of this dissimulation, its quality determined by the very work of feigning. Charles Sorel defines this art of pretense well: The greatest art that there is, is to know well how to conceal art: this is the way one impresses the public, making them believe that one is speaking naturally and without any affectation. Artifice, when it is repeated, gives us the habit of speaking well.13

70   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Appropriateness intervenes here as well, in so far as certain gestures may not suit the orator: [. . .] The hand movements should suit the nature of the actions of which one is speaking [. . .] There are in particular some actions that you must never attempt to present with your hands, nor should you assume the posture of those who perform those actions, such as fencing, drawing a bow, firing a musket [. . .]; the gestures should be very ordinary and modest, not grand and vast, and also not too frequent, for this waving of the arms and hands would be inappropriate for an orator [. . .].14

In the same vein, René Bary’s treatise on rhetoric shows how gestures should vary according to the feelings at play or according to figures of speech expressed in the text: For triumph, one should look towards the sky, and to the side, should move the right arm towards the left, and should lower the head somewhat, because triumph implies that one does everything with greatness, and that this action should mark a momentary progress [. . .] The horrible requires that one open the eyes and the mouth extremely wide, that one should turn one’s body toward the left, and that both hands be stretched forward as if for defense, because those who are about to suffer the ultimate cruelties, seek with their eyes everywhere to escape death; it further requires that fright, smothering the heart after the bodily spirits have withdrawn, causes the mouth to open for air; and that the same fright that tightens the heart, dilates the mouth, turns the body, and stretches forth the hands. [. . .] Anger, or more exactly presumptuous anger, requires that one raise the eyelids horribly and that one push forward the lower lip [. . .] because in vengeance, the enflamed eye and the lower lip thrust forward signify animosity. 15

The presupposition underlying such expression comes from a causal link between the sensation that the emotion imprints on the soul, and the way in which the body reacts to this stirring of the soul. It is in these terms that Charles Le Brun will express himself later in the seventeenth century, in his lecture on the expression of passions: First of all, passion is a movement of the soul that dwells in the sensitive part, and that occurs to follow what the soul finds good for itself or to flee that which the soul finds bad for itself; and ordinarily whatever causes passion in the soul occasions some action in the body. Since it is thus true that most passions of the soul produce bodily actions, we need to know which actions of the body express the passions and also what an action is. Action is nothing more than the movement of some part and change comes about only by a shift in the muscles. [. . .] If it is true that there is a part where the soul has the most immediate effect, and if that part is the brain, we can also say that the face is the part of the body where the soul most particularly manifests what it feels.16

Expression therefore becomes the body’s reaction to the movement of a soul unsettled by a feeling eliciting pleasure or displeasure. The face is the graphic screen showing these

baroque theatricality   71 stirrings of the soul. Le Brun’s thinking is analyzed by J. J. Courtine and C. Haroche within the framework of a study on the human face and its expressions. Le Brun’s semiology, even if it only partially succeeds, tends to organize bodily clues into a network of signs, into systems of identities and differences. The body fades behind the code. Here we have a three-dimensional translation of a rhetoric of phrases and figures. Starting with the face at rest, from “tranquillity,” a sort of zero degree of the system, his semiology enumerates and articulates the variations of expression. [. . .] Its analogy with rhetoric reveals the normative content of Le Brun’s painting, as well as the ambiguous nature of the term “expression.” For expression is both the apparent movement of passions on the face and the prescription of rules that the painter must follow in order to represent them. Le Brun’s lectures contribute thus to the establishment of an aesthetic norm of facial behavior, one that counts for painting, close to dramatic art, but is also beyond that part of an aestheticization of social life.17

Vocally, and in terms of gestures, the actor arrives at a mastery demonstrating his know-how, and bearing witness to his virtuosity. Until recently, scholars and performers used only one way to get to know the seventeenth-century actor: rhetoric. And yet other avenues are available; without being in contradiction with the discipline of rhetoric, they enrich and renew it. This approach through rhetoric actually benefits from being enriched, filled in and made more nuanced by taking into account the actor and the setting he moves in. If one wishes to have the actor represent himself not only as master of the art of speech, gesture, and emotion but also as one facing spatial and acoustic constraints that condition his art form, then the space that surrounds the actor, and the relationship to the public within the spatial arrangement of the rectangular theaters, also contributes to Baroque theatricality.

Interactions Between Stage and Auditorium Seventeenth-century acting companies took as performance venues vast, elegant, and grand spaces. Far from the popular image of the actor in rags performing in dark, narrow rooms, the seventeenth-century actor practiced his art form in palatial multipurpose rooms that would have been just as likely to host political meetings as balls or live theater performances (ballets, operas, or plays). These rooms all featured the same architecture, namely a vast rectangle twenty-five to thirty-five meters long, and eleven to fifteen meters wide.18 If actors moved into a building set up for the sport of jeu de paume, for example, they built a stage at one end, an amphitheater at the other, arranged for viewing boxes on the sides, built access points for the spectators, and covered up the bay windows built into the frame of the building above the bearing walls. They put into place

72   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque a set of machinery composed of winches, pulleys, drums, and capstans. These works were built from fine wood by artisan carpenters.19 Following the Marais theater’s reconstruction in 1644, a second theater space in the form of a U was built four meters above the stage; it stood six meters high in relation to the floor. Thanks to the railing that enclosed it, this small raised theater made a link, visible to the naked eye, between the auditorium and the stage. Being the same height, it was a quasi-extension of the gallery railing into the auditorium.20 Yet around the same period, Italian-style theaters were being built in Europe. The public was arranged in a ring, “the prince’s eye” in the center for the best possible vantage point, this type of architecture highlighting a commonly held view on theatrical representation. The French playhouse vacillated between these two models. Through them, it is the reading of the scenic image which changes entirely: From the beginning of the 1640s until the end of the 1680s, the auditorium of the French-style public theater corresponds to the hybrid model which brings together, on one hand, unvarying features, inherited from a tradition going back at least to the construction of the Hôtel de Bourgogne by the Confraternity of the Passion in 1548 that derived from the conception of an dramatic tableau based on the analogy of the macrocosm and the microcosm, and on the other hand, new features ­borrowed from the Italian theatrical architecture of the Renaissance, which only perceives in the tableau an imitation of appearances that correspond only to the thing represented.21

Nevertheless, in France the rectangular playhouse remained a relatively stable architectural reference point throughout the seventeenth century. Whether, for example, one thinks of the hall of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the only structure purpose-built solely for theater by the Confraternity of the Passion in 1548, or the Comédie-Française playhouse inaugurated in 1689, we are still talking about a large rectangle finished with a pit where the public stands, an amphitheater with box galleries on the sides, the stage raised two meters high in relation to the floor. What can be inferred from this with regard to the actor and his work? One can first note that within the rectangular space, the separation between fiction and reality was not affirmed. For the actor, this meant that he was performing in a space that was not forward facing: there was porosity between the stage and the seating area. In fact the fourth wall did not exist, nor did an enclosed stage. Rather, the theatrical space was that of a “zone”: this was especially the case if one takes into account the fact that since 1636 and the success of Le Cid, it had become the custom to seat the public up on the stage itself. We therefore have the actor performing for the public, by means of the public and with the public, with no attempt to be unaware of this phenomenon. Never do the audience nor the actor forget that they are at the theater and that everyone is “making believe” it is real. With regard to what is happening on the stage, the performance is achieved with the audience. The play turns outward, self-consciously, yet never ceases to display itself as a play.

baroque theatricality   73 This model of rectangular space shaped another aspect of the actor’s art: the distance between the public and the performer. The audience seated on the stage had an unheard of physical closeness to the actors. It saw them working, breathing, and experienced them up close. But these same performers could be seen, simultaneously, both by the viewers less than several centimeters away and by those meters away: “A spectator seated in first level of the gallery, on the small side, was therefore 18 meters from the stage; in the amphitheater, a spectator was more than 20 meters from the stage if he was seated in the first row, or more than 25 meters for those seated in the last rows.”22 One can see that the rectangular space played on radically opposite effects of scale, with either great proximity or great distance between the audience and the actors. In order for his voice to reach the end of the rectangle, the actor must be able to fill the space of the room. If one adds to this that the pit was noisy and that the gathered spectators were standing, it becomes clear that the actor’s voice must match in strength and intensity the acoustic volume of the rectangular space. This disparity between distances in the rectangle accords with the rhetorical coding: the actor favored gradual gestures, the pose that could be seen from a great distance, and allowed himself to be admired up close as well. The rectangular room that plays on the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm is a compendium of the world. The actor placed at the center of it, who enters into this scenic picture, cannot perform by seeking a realistic imitation of the world. The analogic system proposes rather a mode of representation founded on a collection of signs that resonate with the living world; these signs are enlargements or displacements of the real. In essence, the actor’s gestures, coded by the rhetoric, set forth these displacements. There is concurrence and coherence in the “style” of representation and the space in which the representation takes place. In such an arrangement, the actor is a vehicle of emotions in every aspect of his address, sharing with the public not only in front of him, but behind and all around him, reaching the highest points of the room and beyond. The actor, surrounded by a “living zone” of theatrical space is subject to waves of emotion, to bursts of ardor, in which he surpasses himself and reverberates with the world, of which the stage is the reflection.

Compartmentalized Baroque Decor: The Actor as Larger than Life This reflection of the living world on the theatrical stage was expressed magnificently in the compartmentalized decor of the first half of the seventeenth century. Documented in the Mémoire de Mahelot, a stage manager’s guide and visual record of performances, the scenic designs drew their inspiration from medieval mansions. There was no question of representing the living world in a realistic way but rather of portraying it in its diversity by juxtaposing the locations in which the action takes place. It is the actor who brings alive this space which is signified rather than merely represented. Elliptical, the

74   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque spectacle favors the particular indicator that will ignite the public’s imagination. The actor makes these juxtaposed locations live; he gives birth to this illusion of the world by naming these locations and by entering onto the areas of performance, delineated by the framework and the painted canvas representing a particular location. He is the great organizer of illusion. In such a setup, as Anne Surgers shows, the actor appears “magnified” as a result of proportional adjustments in scenic design: The use of vanishing-point perspective had two consequences. First, it slowed down the perspective and allowed the actor to play, without being implausible, right up to  the back of the stage--the “beautiful palace” not appearing as a doll’s palace. Conversely, the actor did not appear like a giant, out of scale. The stage as a whole could thus be used by the actors, performing with volume. On the other hand, the “beautiful palace” at the back of the scene was nonetheless drawn in perspective: it was comprised of a framework that was smaller than it seemed. Next to this frame, the real body of the actor appeared larger than it was. The character was thus enhanced, because the body of the actor was magnified.23

What thinking gave rise to this feature of the “magnified” stage actor from the beginning of the seventeenth century? We begin with one fact in particular. The actor is the person who organizes the illusion and his art places him at the heart of the theatrical setup. Everything comes together to make the actor “shine,” to magnify him. We have seen above that the art of rhetoric also played this role. The notion of emphasis has, in fact, the aim of rendering the actor more powerful than he actually is: to push vocal potential to the maximum, even at the cost of his life.24 For the actor is the jewel of the show. Or more precisely, his work and the effect that he has on the audience is the raison d’être of the performance. The actor reveals his craft. His natural performance, his perfection of the artifice, holds the spectator at admiring distance, empathetic and conscious not only of the performance being given but also of the importance of the performance itself. It is not that the actor embodies the character he is playing but rather that he demonstrates how he actually plays it. We see a remarkable consistency here between what the material theater, or means of representation, builds and what the actor “builds” on the stage. What stands out in the end is that the actor’s performance is “artificial” in the sense that this presupposes the use of a particular technique. And we have seen that the actor’s work was based, in effect, on his vocal technique and on his precise gestures drawn from the rich rhetorical ground of his art form. This art is not perceived as “realistic” by the public of that time but as “natural.” It is the art of dissimulation: the public does not seek truth on the stage or in the work of the actor. In fact, this is also what Le Faucheur notes when he distinguishes the actor from the orator: The spectators do not demand [. . .] the same work from the orator as from the actor. Since they are listening to an actor in a theater, they do not focus on the things that he is representing, which they know to be false and fabulous, but only on the beautiful way he represents them, that is to say, on the elegance of elocution, or on the grace of the pronunciation and the gesture. If these are not perceived as sufficient,

baroque theatricality   75 the audience members are unsatisfied with him. Whereas when they hear an orator, they focus primarily on the serious and important things of which he is speaking. And as for the orator’s delivery, they are satisfied if it is reasonable and does not bother their ears or eyes.25

The distinction that Le Faucheur makes here between the actor and the orator is based on the expectations that the listeners (i.e., the seventeenth-century spectators) bring to each art. Though they base themselves on the same principles, the actor and the orator are diametrically opposed. In one case, it is the actual qualities of self-presentation that are praised, whereas in the other, the technique of voice and gesture is simply the medium through which one makes himself better or less well understood. The fact that the orator deals with “serious and important” things is not to be contrasted with lightweight and insignificant things in the actor’s realm. Rather the orator’s material is set in opposition to the “false and fabulous” things represented by the actor. The notion of true pretence, the basis of the tacit pact between actor and spectator, is clearly expressed here.

Lighting and Makeup: When the Actor Transforms Himself In the art of dissimulation, there is a real and physical element that adheres to the actor’s skin: makeup. Putting on one’s makeup, arranging one’s expression to step on stage: these are the major constraints for the Baroque actor, as for the twenty-first-century actor. We know the extent to which makeup is an essential prop of Bob Wilson’s work precisely because he conceives of the actor’s face as a mask that plays with the lighting that the director creates. This manipulation of the shadows and contours of the actor’s face defines the character’s facial features. This “mask” of makeup belongs to the realm of discernible visual signs that indicate a certain relationship with theatricality. What do we know about the Baroque actor’s makeup? How does it help the actor to define the contours of Baroque theatricality? Reapplied fresh for each performance, makeup work is part of the transformation of the actor, in preparation for his entry on stage. Remuneration is never mentioned with particular regard to actors’ makeup in the seventeenth century. In other words, each actor scrounged local artistic resources for his onstage makeup and took care of it on his own. It was the same for costumes: the care of these materials devolved upon the actors: to dress and make themselves up according to their own desires, wishes, potential. The made-up skin of the actor reflects the seventeenth-century image of beauty. It is a type of beauty related to the notion of artifice: Redesigned silhouettes, coiffures or wigs recomposing faces, a more systematic use of a corset that conferred a geometrical aspect to shoulders and torso, rigorous

76   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque s­ymmetry of stances and costumes. The absolute is imagined no longer as a revealed model, but as a crafted one: “the nature of nature” (Françoise de Motteville, Mémoires), it obeys the designs of the working sketch and modifications. The effect on beauty could thus be, more than ever before, artificialized. Not that some “natural” beauty had lost all prestige [. . .]. Artifice, however, had certainly changed its status.26

The whiteness of skin color, which is an ongoing societal feature at the Court of the Ancien Régime, poses in another way the question of what is natural and what is artificial even in this arguably trifling domain of makeup. In the Ancien Régime, aristocrats and upper classes exhibited their distinction by making their faces as white as possible. The tan was considered to be a sign of vulgarity and neglect. It also indicated belonging to the social class of country-folk: the sun tans and makes the skin weather beaten on those who work in the fields. Fitelieu writes in 1642 that in order to make up one who is elegant, one needs an entire setup: “cerussite, calcinated phosphate, Spanish red.”27 To whiten the skin, one needs to use different makeup and powders of varied natures and compositions. In the most obvious sense, this usage is problematic given the harmfulness of the minerals used. White lead, which is most often but not exclusively made of lead carbonate, is a fine white powder obtained through steeping. The hazards of lead powder were recognized only at the end of the eighteenth century. It promoted the loosening of teeth and caused bad breath. The reverse of made-up beauty ruined by the deathly use of lead is the dazzling beauty achieved in the glow of a flame. Indeed, and all the more so on stage, milky skin radiance is enhanced by indoor candlelight. Either way, Catherine Lanoë notes how rare and paradoxical is the use of the word “fard”: So many specific appearances of the word fard (makeup) along with formulas for making it are surprising, considering the requirement of whiteness that was imposed on individuals at this time. The history of the word gives a partial key to the mystery. Right from its appearance in 1190, the term fard is employed figuratively with a strong negative connotation, used to designate everything constituting a “deceptive appearance” in “words and attitudes.” Makeup is associated with the ideas of the mask, of artifice, of things done secretly at night . . . With the development of consumer society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the definitions of the word lose some of their moralizing vigor and emphasize increasingly the material circumstances of the manufacture and application of the products, but still whiteness and natural beauty are the sole reference. When they are mentioned, makeup is always condemned in modern France, because it lies and deceives in a world in which readability is always demanded. Thus, the mere implication of acting with such culpable intentions incites the fabricators of makeup to use other terms for them. This is the purpose of the term blanc (white), even though there are some other choices, to ­distance the product symbolically from its unavowable purposes.28

This paradox in the use of leads which go unnamed is comparable to the paradox of the actor who, while following the artificial dictates of his craft, must appear natural.

baroque theatricality   77 Makeup must not be confused with cosmetics which make the skin fresher, more beautiful, softer. The latter find a platform in comments of Gorgibus, father and despairing uncle in Molière’s Précieuses ridicules: These hussies with their salves have, I think, a mind to ruin me. Everywhere in the house I see nothing but whites of eggs, lait virginal, and a thousand other fooleries I am not acquainted with. Since we have been here they have employed the lard of a dozen hogs at least, and four servants might live every day on the sheep’s trotters they use.29

Pig fat and sheep hooves serve as natural excipients in the cream and ointment recipes, notably those given by the Doctor La Framboisière.30 Furetière makes clear that the virginal milk is for whitening the hands and the face. In L’Héritière ridicule ou la dame intéressée, Scarron identifies the same products: “Blanc,” “perle,” “coques d’œuf,” “lard et pied de moutons,” “Baume,” “lait virginal.”31 The art of makeup played on the effects of camouflage and on the highlighting of facial features through the use of pastes that cover and whiten. The skin of the face, décolleté and hands were made up on women, and on men the skin of the face and hands. Hair was powdered, and women liked to place small, circular, taffeta patches called “flies” on their faces to be pretty and to invite erotic fantasies. The three colors essentially used for makeup in the seventeenth century were white, red, and black. Black underlined the gaze in order to render it more intense and stronger. The work of  the raised eyebrow, with the use of black lead (most often oxidized manganese ­powder) allowed emphasis on the expression of emotions, making them more ­visible from afar, more intense up close. This makeup, to the extent that it borrowed from the customs of court society, did not limit itself to mere artistic adornment, in  the same way that theater costumes imitated from court life were reworked for the purposes of the theater. The aesthetic of makeup interacted with an important ­factor, namely candle lighting. This technical limitation added a creative element to the actor’s makeup work through the use of the shadows on his face. In a sort of face-sculpting, they were deepened or increased in size in order to make prominent traits stand out. If there is a place where the recent Baroque “revitalization” has an extremely concrete and practical application, it is certainly in the art of make-up for productions identified as “Baroque.” Mathilde Benmoussa, makeup artist for the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Pyrame et Thisbée, Cadmus et Hermione, Rinaldo, and Athalie no longer works with Spanish White or with cerussite.32 The cosmetic products that she uses no longer have anything in common with those used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, neither in their composition nor in the gestures they presuppose. The makeup brushes, puffs, and sponges require other techniques and knowledge on the part of the person applying the makeup to another or to himself. This being said, these products seek the same effect, whiteness of the face, and its sculpture, in the play with lighting. The return

78   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque of the Baroque in the art of makeup reveals even more than in the art of declamation how far it is from any sort of archeology. It would never occur to anyone to use cerussite, toxic as it is, to make up the face of an actor. Currently the art of Baroque makeup finds inspiration in historical paintings and takes into account the particular lighting conditions: in the creative process, makeup is first checked out by candlelight with the stage director before being approved by the entire team. In other words, the essence of the work takes place right on the actors’ faces, in the uniqueness of the shadows and lights that vacillate on their faces and on their bodies, accompanying their movements, their gestures, their changes of location. Being both an art of movement and of sculpture, makeup artistry is the medium through which the actor of today comes closest to the actor’s work from the past. The question of artifice is crucial here: rarely do men or women in twenty-first-century society use white makeup on their faces or hands. On the contrary, the social trend reflected in cosmetics is toward what is the most “natural” possible in a desire to “look healthy.” And whether mineral or vegetable based, the ingredients are always examined for their possible toxicity (e.g., the use of parabens in twenty-first-century makeup). It should be said that of all types of makeup artistry, this claim of “natural,” which the professional makeup artists call the “nude” effect, is the one that demands the greatest quantity of makeup in the quest to imitate skin complexion, and to camouflage its flaws and imperfections. For the professional actor in the seventeenth century, makeup was an artifice understood as it would be in the society of that day as a whole: using artifice without giving up the natural. It was a technique in its own right, which in the refined and flickering lighting, allowed the actor to rework his face in terms of its role. On stage, the makeup allowed more emphasis on emotions and on their expression. The makeup “heightened” the actor’s art by rendering him more visible and more sensual.

The Natural, Apex of Artifice: Baroque Actor or Agent of the Arts Opinion in the twenty-first century would have one think of natural as the opposite of artificial, in art as in many domains of our contemporary lives. Yet, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, if “natural” exists as an aesthetic category, it is akin to “artifice” and is not in opposition to it. The natural/artifice opposition does not therefore seem a good paradigm to understand the actor and theatrical performance. With regard to the paradigm, what is important is the status that one accords theatrical illusion: either the artifice of the performance is apparent—no one tries to hide it—or on the contrary, artifice is dissimulated as much as possible, so that the illusion of reality attains the highest possible degree hoped for or desired. From the starting point of this initial “decision,” a certain type of theater entertaining a certain relationship between artifice and natural sees the light of day. This is the case across historical periods. If one chooses to hide the

baroque theatricality   79 falsity of theater from the spectator, then one expects the performance to cast a spell on the spectator: the magic of the stage works as in an illusion box. The spectator knows rationally that it is theater, but the tableau absorbs, co-opts, and enraptures him. In this case we are looking at a phenomenon where the spectator is dispossessed and alienated from the character. The scene on stage functions like a frame, a fiction unfolding within this frame that one can almost reach out and touch. The theater therefore sets in motion a singular, particular performance, not a universal one. This is the theater where the actor is an illusionist; it is the theater of the fourth wall, one that posits a separation between the stage and the auditorium. And this is not the theater of the beginning of the seventeenth century. The other approach consists of showing the spectator that beyond the fiction, or rather just short of it, there is performance. And this performance manifests itself at the same time as the story is told. In the abbé d’Aubignac’s terms, “theatrical representation” and “theatrical action” should always be superimposed, side by side, bumping up against one another but not enveloping one another exactly. They should make spaces appear in between, giving birth to a theater style that calls for that which is true but reveals the false. There is no sleight of hand. The spectator likes the mechanisms of the show to be revealed, always sensing the actor behind the role. He therefore always appreciates simultaneously the two elements that d’Aubignac wishes to juxtapose: the performance and the theatrical effects. This induces a sense of analogy between the stage and the real world—of analogy and not of duplication. The actor of this type of theater is not an illusionist; the object of his art is not to imitate the real world perfectly in an identical reproduction but rather to select some elements, giving life to a stage reality that is the actor’s produced artwork. That which is natural is this path of artistic mastery and deception that culminates in an aesthetic reality, the objective of the art form. The goal is not to duplicate reality but to create a stage reality that offers clear signs of its connection to the real world. This is the Shakespearean actor, par excellence: “To sing the world is to sing its artifice, and to write of artifice in its own image; to renounce artifice is to abandon existence and to die, as Prospero’s testament suggests at the end of The Tempest.”33 In early seventeenth-century theater in France as well as in England, theatrical performance largely espoused the art of pretense, the stage not seeking to produce the illusion of truth but rather the “spectacular,” playing with the spectator as well as through him.34 The theater oscillates between two polar opposites: the illusion of the real on the one hand and on the other, the authentic “spectacular.” If one considers that the early seventeenth-century actor was not an agent of illusion in his relationship with the audience, he was therefore “an artistic actor,” an agent who performs with a master technique as valuable as the character he played, a mastery all the greater given that he knew how to conceal it. This was an actor for whom the strength of the performance consisted of manifesting on the stage a reality that went beyond the stage itself. But this sensitivity served a type of theatrical expression which was not “natural.” The actor, in the moment of expressing passion, channels the personal emotions that he feels through the lens of the performance code. At this point we are at the heart of the process that conjures up both artifice and natural. That which is natural is the foundation of the performance,

80   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque in a work of internal sensitivity that is the actor’s strength. The contrivance intervenes in the moment of expression as a vehicle of experienced and transmitted emotion. That a performance code plays this role as vehicle is essential to understanding this actor’s art, which definitely does not contrast the artificial with the natural. Rather, it makes them work side by side like the two sides of a same coin, belonging to a unified artistic practice.

The Baroque Today Why did the Baroque actor take on such power in the years 1990 to 2000, as part of a return to the sources? Undoubtedly we need to speak of a collective perception on the part of young actors graduating from acting schools of a drift in meaning, of a troubling multiplicity of viewpoints regarding the actor’s craft. Baroque performance was, at the beginning of the 2000s, a way to find a position, a seat on the stage, a relationship to rhythm, a way to learn where on stage the voice will ring out, to find a sense of making contact. At least this is the feeling of a generation of performers, initiated into Baroque performance by Eugène Green.35 Manuel Weber, Benjamin Lazar, Louise Moaty, AnneGuersande Ledoux, Sophie Delage, and others discovered that Baroque theatricality could emerge onto the contemporary stage. It was a joyous movement, inspired by pictorial sources, running against the prevailing psychological work of interpreting roles (method acting). Musicians were at the forefront of this movement and presented performances that were turning points in the Baroque renewal in theater and opera beginning in 2005, notably with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molière and Lully.36 In artistic terms, these performances—called “Baroque” because of their emphasis on a particular theatricality—are the opportunity to share with audiences a work that is not essentially archaeological but rather an artistic endeavor inspired by historical sources. By candlelight, with gesture and declamation, these shows allow people to see and hear plays from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasizing a sequence of poses, rhetorical accents, and attention to the expression of emotions.37 Such an approach compels spectators to listen differently from the way they are accustomed to doing: declamation with its varied accents within the rhetorical code verges on singing, the actor’s poses have a graphic aspect that is stressed by the shifting light of the candles on the edge of the stage. The highlights and shadows accentuate the make-up that in turn helps to convey emotions. Such a radical aesthetic approach has been greeted by objections, such as the ­reservations expressed by François Regnault, for example, when he says “Unlike music, for which there still exist instruments contemporary with the original written musical scores, there is no way to rediscover the voices of the actors and their diction.”38 This assertation has been countered, however, by musicians themselves who are specialists of ancient music, who show that things are not so simple, since the scores are often fragmentary and need to be “interpreted,” and since the structure of instruments has changed more since the seventeenth century than the human bodies of the actors performing the texts. In this way Baroque performance stirs up polemics, and even if it has

baroque theatricality   81 been well received critically it has still not found full acceptance in established theaters and operas.39 But in conclusion it is important to state the advantage that the actor gains from working in the style of this affirmation of Baroque theatricality. Baroque performance today allows the actor to be larger than life, in other words to become bigger than she or he really is, to grow in voice and body. Baroque performance allows the actor to attain the full power of theatricality, even according to the words of Barthes, quoted at the outset: The actor’s body is artificial, but its doubleness is much deeper than that of the painted backdrops or the fake theatre furniture; the makeup, the borrowed gestures and intonations, the potentiality of an exhibited body—all that is artificial, but not fake.40

“Artificial but not fake”—Barthes raises the essential question about the power and force of artifice in theater. In Baroque performance, the work of gesturing, like the work of voice amplification, is every bit about artificial parameters with which the actor plays. This permits him to not perform “psychologically”: he can invoke not only sensations and personal emotions but have fun making them larger, aggrandizing them, amplifying them through the work of musical intonation, by the power of gesture. He finds at the same time a sincerity that is not naturalistic. It is in this way that the twenty-firstcentury Baroque actor can attain a theatricality c­ onsisting both of artifice and of depth. Translated by Natasha Copeland.

Notes 1. “Qu’est-ce que la théâtralité ? C’est le théâtre moins le texte, c’est une épaisseur de signes et de sensations qui s’édifie sur la scène à partir de l’argument écrit, c’est cette sorte de perception œcuménique des artifices sensuels, gestes, sons, tons, distances, substances, lumières, qui submerge le texte sous la plénitude de son langage extérieur.” Roland Barthes, “Le théâtre de Baudelaire,” Ecrits sur le théâtre (Paris: Le Seuil, reprinted, 2002, 122–125). 2. Josette Féral, “La théâtralité: la spécificité du langage théâtral,” in Poétique (Paris: September 1988), 347–361. 3. Fabien Cavaillé, “Qu’avez-vous dit avec ‘baroque’? Extension d’une notion, usages d’une étiquette,” in Scènes baroques d’aujourd’hui. La mise en scène baroque dans le paysage ­culturel contemporain, ed. Céline Candiard and Julia Gros de Gasquet (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2019). 4. “La déclamation dans le sens qu’on la prend aujourd’hui est le récit ampoulé que l’on fait d’un discours oratoire, pour satisfaire l’esprit et pour toucher le cœur des spectateurs. D’où il s’ensuit qu’un Sermon, qu’une Oraison, une Tragédie, une Comédie peuvent être l’objet de cette partie de la rhétorique.” Jean-Léonor Le Gallois de Grimarest, Traité du Récitatif (Paris: Chez Jacques Lefèvre et Pierre Ribou, 1708), 120. 5. Eugène Green, “Le ‘lieu’ de la déclamation,” in “La voix au XVIIe siècle,” Littératures Classiques 12 (1990), 276. 6. “Il y a une prononciation simple qui est pour faire entendre nettement les Paroles, en sorte que l’auditeur les puisse comprendre distinctement et sans peine ; mais il y en a une autre plus forte et plus énergique, qui consiste à donner le poids aux paroles que l’on récite, et qui

82   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque a un grand rapport avec celle qui se fait sur le théâtre et lorsqu’il est question de parler en Public, que l’on nomme d’ordinaire Déclamation.” See Bertrand de Bacilly, Remarques curieuses sur l’Art de bien chanter (Paris: Guillaume de Luyne, 1668), 248–249. 7. “S’il [l’orateur] a de la crainte, il le fera voir par une voix tremblante et hésitante. Si au contraire, il a de l’assurance, il le montrera par une voix haute et ferme ; s’il a de la colère, il la donnera à connaître par une voix aiguë, impétueuse, violente et par de fréquentes reprises d’haleine.” See Michel Le Faucheur, Traité de l’action de l’orateur ou de la prononciation et du geste (Paris: A. Courbé, 1657), chap. 8, 113. 8. “L’accent sur lequel nous nous arrêtons est une inflexion ou modification de la voix ou de la parole, par laquelle l’on exprime les passions et les affections naturellement ou par artifice.[. . .] Chaque passion et affection de l’âme a ses accents propres, par lesquels ses différents degrés sont expliqués.” See Père Marin Mersenne, propositions XI, 19, and XII, 20, emphasis added. 9. See Jackie Pigeaud, La Maladie de l’âme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1989). 10. “D’où l’on peut conclure que les anciens ont établi ces quatre passions, à savoir la joie, la douleur, la crainte et l’espérance, comme les quatre éléments, ou les quatre humeurs de l’appétit qui nous est commun avec les animaux.[ . . . ] Or il faut voir en quoi consiste le mouvement de ces passions avant que de leur établir de certains accents. En premier lieu, le cœur s’élargit, s’épanouit et s’ouvre dans la joie et dans l’espérance, comme l’héliotrope, la rose et le lis à la présence du soleil. De là vient que le teint du visage est vermeil à cause des esprits vitaux que le cœur envoie en haut.[. . .] La joie amène quantité de sang et d’esprit au visage, et aux autres parties du corps. Mais la crainte et la douleur sont semblables au reflux qui retire ce qu’il avait amené : car la crainte et l’effroi rendent le visage pâle et la contenance morne et hideuse.” See Père Marin Mersenne, L’Harmonie universelle contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1636), proposition XII, 20 and following. 11. “Il [l’orateur] montrera son amour par une voix douce, gaie et attrayante, et la haine au contraire par une voix âpre et sévère. Il fera voir sa joie par une voix pleine, gaie et coulante et au contraire sa tristesse par une voix sourde, languissante, plaintive et même souvent interrompue par des soupirs et des gémissements. [. . .] De l’admiration, je passe à son contraire et dis que si l’orateur veut faire paraître le mépris qu’il fait de quelqu’un et l’exposer à celui de ses auditeurs, il faut que ce soit d’un ton dédaigneux, et sans aucune émotion, ni contention de voix.” Michel Le Faucheur, chap. 8, 113, and following (emphasis added). 12. “Qu’il [le geste] paraisse naturel et né des choses que vous dites et de l’affection qui vous meut à les dire. [. . .] Pour le corps entier, il ne doit changer ni de place, ni de posture à tout moment. Mais il ne faut pas aussi qu’il demeure immobile comme un tronc. [. . .] Il faut faire tous les gestes de la main droite. Si vous haussez la main, ce ne doit pas être plus haut que les yeux. Il faut que vos yeux voient toujours vos mains, qu’elles environnent toujours votre tête, vous ne devez guère étendre vos bras plus loin d’un demi-pied du tronc de votre corps, les gestes doivent être fort médiocres et fort modestes.” Le Faucheur, chaps 12 and 13, 225, and following. 13. “Le plus grand Art qu’il y ait, c’est de bien savoir cacher l’Art : c’est par là qu’on ravit les hommes en admiration, leur faisant croire que l’on parle bien naturellement et sans affectation aucune. L’artifice même étant réitéré, nous donne enfin une accoutumance à bien dire.” See Charles Sorel, De la manière de bien parler, chap. 1 in De la connaissance des bons livres (Paris: André Pralard, 1671; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1981), 270.

baroque theatricality   83 14. “Le mouvement des mains doit convenir à la nature des actions dont on parle [. . .]. Il y a particulièrement des actions que vous ne devez jamais essayer de représenter avec les mains, ni vous mettre en la posture de ceux qui les font, comme d’escrimer, de bander un arc, de tirer un coup de mousquet [. . .] les gestes doivent être fort médiocres et fort modestes, et non point grands et vastes, ni aussi trop fréquents, ce qui serait une agitation de bras et de mains messéante à l’orateur.” See Le Faucheur, 220, 224, 225, 226. 15. “Le triomphe veut qu’on regarde le Ciel, comme de côté, qu’on porte le bras droit vers le bras gauche, et que l’on baisse un peu la tête, parce que le triomphe suppose qu’on emporte tout de grand, et que cette action marque comme un progrès momentané [. . .] L’horrible veut qu’on ouvre extraordinairement les yeux et la bouche, qu’on détourne un peu le corps vers le côté gauche, et que les deux mains étendues servent comme de défense, parce que ceux qui sont sur le point de souffrir les dernières cruautés, cherchent partout de l’œil les moyens d’éviter la mort; que l’effroi étouffant le cœur après la retraite des esprits, porte la bouche à donner à l’air un grand passage; et que le même effroi qui serre le cœur, dilate la bouche, détourne le corps, et étend les mains. [. . .] La colère, ou pour mieux dire la colère présomptueuse, veut qu’on élève horriblement les paupières, et qu’on avance même la lèvre inférieure [. . .] parce que dans la vengeance l’œil enflammé et la lèvre inférieure avancée marquent l’animosité.” See René Bary, Méthode pour bien prononcer un discours et pour le bien animer (Paris: Denys Thierry, 1679), 82– 93, emphasis added. 16. “Premièrement la passion est un mouvement de l’âme, qui réside en la partie sensitive, lequel se fait pour suivre ce que l’âme pense lui être bon, ou pour fuir ce qu’elle pense lui être mauvais; et d’ordinaire tout ce qui cause à l’âme de la passion, fait faire au corps quelque action. Comme il est donc vrai que la plus grande partie des passions de l’âme produisent des actions corporelles, il est nécessaire que nous sachions quelles sont les actions du corps qui expriment les passions, et ce que c’est qu’action. L’action n’est autre chose que le mouvement de quelque partie, et le changement ne se fait que par le changement des muscles. [. . .] S’il est vrai qu’il y ait une partie où l’âme exerce plus immédiatement ses fonctions, et que cette partie soit celle du cerveau, nous pouvons dire de même que le visage est la partie du corps où elle fait voir plus particulièrement ce qu’elle ressent.” See Charles Le Brun, Conférence sur l’expression des passions (1668) (Paris: Dédale, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1994), 51 and following. 17. Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, Histoire du visage: Exprimer et taire ses émotions (XVIe-début XIXe siècle) (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 1988; citation to first paperback edition, 1994), 94 and 103. 18. On the matter of theatrical architecture in the seventeenth century see Pierre Pasquier’s critical edition of the Mémoire de Mahelot (Paris: Champion, 2005) as well as the proceedings of the Internation Colloquium of the CESR, June 2012, organized by Anne Surgers and Pierre Pasquier. The Mémoire de Mahelot is a working register started in 1629 to record the work of the set designers and the actors of the company of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and to provide a visual record of the scenery of a certain number of plays. 19. The notarized archives allow us access to the contracts made by various groups of artisans and actors for the arrangement of the theaters. See Le Théâtre professionnel à Paris, 1600– 1649, a study by Alan Howe, with documents analyzed by M. Jurgens and A. Howe and transcriptions by A. Chauleur and P.-Y. Louis (Paris: Archives nationales. Documents du Minutier central des notaires, 2000).

84   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 20. Consider the model of the Marais theater constructed by Anne Surgers and Fabien Cavaillé, as photographed for La Représentation théâtrale en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), 259. 21. Pierre Pasquier, 77. 22. Pierre Pasquier, La représentation théâtrale en France au XVIIe siècle, 62. 23. Anne Surgers, L’Automne de l’imagination, Splendeurs et misères de la représentation (XVIe–XXIe siècles) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 145. 24. Tallemant des Réaux mentions notably in his Historiettes the celebrated anecdote about Montdory’s apoplexy. See Antoine Adam’s edition of the Historiettes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, 1961), 775: “Ce personnage d’Hérode lui coûta bon; car, comme il avait l’imagination forte, dans le moment il croyait quasi être ce qu’il représentait, et il lui tomba, en jouant ce rôle une apoplexie sur la langue qui l’a empêché de jouer depuis.” Likewise Montfleury died after having acted the raving madness of Oreste in Andromaque in 1667. 25. “Les Auditeurs n’exigent pas [. . . ] les mêmes soins d’un orateur que d’un acteur. Parce quand ils écoutent un acteur au théâtre, ils n’attachent pas leur esprit aux choses qu’il y représente, lesquelles ils savent être fausses et fabuleuses, mais seulement à la belle manière de les représenter, c’est-à-dire ou à l’élégance de l’élocution, ou à la grâce de la Prononciation et du geste, en quoi s’il ne contente leur sens, ils sont mal-satisfaits de lui : au lieu que quand ils entendent un orateur, ils s’attachent principalement aux choses sérieuses et importantes dont il discourt ; et quant à l’action, il se contente qu’il l’ait raisonnable et qu’elle ne choque ni les oreilles, ni les yeux.” Michel Le Faucheur, chap. 14, 235. 26. Georges Vigarello, Histoire de la beauté (Paris: Le Seuil, Coll. Points, 2004), 74–75. 27. Dominique Paquet, Une histoire de la beauté (Paris: Gallimard, Collection “Découvertes,” 1997), 52. Fitelieu is the author of La Contre-Mode (1642). 28. Catherine Lanoë, La Poudre et le Fard, une histoire des cosmétiques de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2008), 33–34. 29. “Ces pendardes-là avec leur pommade, ont, je pense, envie de me ruiner. Je ne vois partout que blancs d’œufs, lait virginal, et mille autres brimborions que je ne connais point. Elles ont usé, depuis que nous sommes ici, le lard d’une douzaine de cochons, pour le moins et quatre valets vivraient tous les jours des pieds de moutons qu’elles emploient,” says Gorgibus in Les Précieuse ridicules. See Molière, Œuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1971), vol. 1, 267. Translation: Frederick Carroll Brewster, (Philadelphia: J. M. Goldy and Son, 1885). 30. La Framboisière, Œuvres (Lyon: Chez Pierre Bailly, 1669), Book 3, chap. 2, Remèdes propres pour embellir la face, 107: “Prenez une demi douzaine de citrons, hâchez-les en pièces et les infusez dans une pinte de lait de vache, avec une once de sucre blanc et autant d’alun de roche et distillez le tout au bain-marie. Mettez tous les jours au soir en vous couchant, linge imbus de cette liqueur pour tenir le teint frais et beau.” 31. In Scarron’s L’Héritier ridicule ou la Dame intéressée (Paris: Toussaint Quinet, 1650), Paquette says: Telle que je suis, on en voit d’aussi belles Que ces dames de prix, en qui, souvent dit-on, Blanc, perles, coques d’œufs, lard et pieds de mouton, Baume, lait virginal, et cent mille autres drogues,

baroque theatricality   85 De têtes sans cheveux aussi rares que gogues, Font des miroirs d’amour, de qui les faux appas Etalent des beautés qu’ils ne possèdent pas.  (V, 1, p. 112) See also La Précieuse (1656-1658) de l’abbé de Pure: “je dis ce que j’avais vu pratiquer à plusieurs dames soir et matin [. . . ] comme la pommade de la moëlle de pied de mouton détrempée dans la même eau était extrêmement détersive et nettoyait fort bien le teint.” See La Prétieuse, ou, Le mystère des ruelles, ed. Emile Magne (Paris: Droz, 1938), vol. 2, 126. 32. After studying artistic make-up, Mathilde Benmoussa began her career working in cinema, theater, advertising, and television. Her collaboration with Anne-Madeleine Goulet and Benjamin Lazar allowed her to learn about seventeenth-century historical stage makeup, which she adapted in order to use current products while respecting the essence of the original. 33. “Chanter le monde, c’est chanter son artifice, et écrire d’artifice à son image ; renoncer à l’artifice, c’est quitter l’existence et mourir, comme le suggèrent les paroles testamentaires de Prospero à la fin de La Tempête.” See Clément Rosset, L’Anti-nature (Paris: PUF, 1973), 117. 34. We are thinking here of the vogue of machine plays starting in the 1640s and their lavish effects. 35. Eugène Green is a writer, filmmaker, and stage director, born in New York in 1947. He lives and works in France. He founded the Théâtre de la Sapience in 1977 in an effort to rediscover the modern stage the ancient theatrical codes of the seventeenth century. In 2001 he stopped his work for the stage in order to write works such as the essays La Parole Baroque (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2001), Présences: essai sur la nature du cinéma (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2003), and the novel L’Enfant de Prague (Paris: Phébus, 2017), as well as to make films such as Toutes les nuits (2001), le Pont des Arts (2005), La Sapienza (2015), Le Fils de Joseph (2016), and Faire la parole, a documentary (2017). 36. Staging by Benjamin Lazar, with musical direction by Vincent Dumestre and choreography by Cécile Roussat. Among the important productions that have figured in the recent history of baroque theatricality we note Cadmus et Hermione of Lully, staged by Benjamin Lazar with musical direction by Vincent Dumestre at the Opéra comique (2010); Rinaldo staged by Louise Moaty (2009–2010), with musical direction by Vaclav Luks, at the Estates Theater in Prague; Athalie by Racine with music by Jean-Baptiste Moreau, staged by Alexandra Rübner with the group La Rêveuse, at the Grand Théâtre of Nantes, 2011; Pyrame et Thisbée by Théophile de Viau staged by Benjamin Lazar (2012). 37. For an introduction to these creative processes see the interviews with stage directors and musicians Vincent Dumestre, Béatrice Massin, and Benjamin Lazar in Scènes baroques d’aujourd’hui. La mise en scène baroque dans le paysage culturel contemporain, ed. Céline Candiard and Julia Gros de Gasquet (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2018). 38. François Regnault, quoted by Mathilde La Bardonnie in an article in Libération, Septembre 28, 1999, “Racine en vers et contre tous. Eugène Green propose une version baroque de Mithridate.” 39. See Céline Candiard and Julia Gros de Gasquet, eds., Scènes baroques d’aujourd’hui, 40. “Le corps de l’acteur est artificiel, mais sa duplicité est bien autrement profonde que celle des décors peints ou des meubles faux du théâtre ; le fard, l’emprunt des gestes ou des intonations, la disponibilité d’un corps exposé, tout cela est artificiel mais non factice [. . .].” See Roland Barthes, “Le théâtre de Baudelaire,” Écrits sur le théâtre (Paris: Le Seuil, reprinted 2002), 122–125.

86   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Further Reading Bacilly, Bertrand de. Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter. Paris: Guillaume de Luyne, 1668. Bary, René. Méthode pour bien prononcer un discours et pour le bien animer. Paris: Denys Thierry, 1679. Bulwer, John. Chirologia, or The Naturall Language of the Hand. London: Thomas Harper, 1644. Grimarest, Jean-Léonor Le Gallois de. Traité du Récitatif. Paris: Chez Jacques Lefèvre et Pierre Ribou, 1708. Howe, Alan. Le Théâtre professionnel à Paris, 1600–1649, with documents analyzed by M. Jurgens and A. Howe and transcriptions by A. Chauleur and P.-Y. Louis. Paris: Archives Nationales. Documents du Minutier central des notaires, 2000. La Framboisière, Nicholas Abraham. “Remèdes propres pour embellir la face,” in Œuvres. Lyon: Pierre Bailly, 1669. Le Brun, Charles. Conférence sur l’expression des passions (1668), Paris: Dédale, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1994. Le Faucheur, Michel. Traité de l’action de l’orateur ou de la prononciation et du geste. Paris: A. Courbé, 1657. Mahelot, Laurent. Mémoire de Mahelot, ed. Pierre Pasquier. Paris: Champion, 2005. Mersenne, Marin. L’Harmonie universelle contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique. Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1636. Molière, Œuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1971. Pure, Michel de. La Prétieuse, ou, Le mystère des ruelles, ed. Emile Magne. Paris: Droz, 1938. Scarron, Paul. L’Héritier ridicule ou la Dame intéressée. Paris: Toussaint Quinet, 1650. Sorel, Charles. “De la manière de bien parler,” in De la connaissance des bons livres. Paris: André Pralard, 1671. Tallemant des Réaux, Gédéon. Historiettes Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, 1961.

Studies Barthes, Roland. “Le théâtre de Baudelaire,”Ecrits sur le théâtre. Paris: Le Seuil, 2002. Cavaillé, Fabien. “Qu’avez-vous dit avec ‘baroque’? Extension d’une notion, usages d’une étiquette,” in Scènes Baroques d’aujourd’hui. La mise en scène Baroque dans le paysage culturel contemporain, ed. Céline Candiard and Julia Gros de Gasquet. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2019. Courtine, Jean-Jacques and Claudine Haroche. Histoire du visage: exprimer et taire ses émotions (XVIe-début XIXe siècle). Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 1988. Féral, Josette. “La théâtralité: la spécificité du langage théâtral.” In Poétique, 347–361. Paris: 1988. Green, Eugène. “Le ‘lieu’ de la declamation.” In La voix au XVIIe siècle, Littératures Classiques 12, 1990, pp. 270–278. Lanoë, Catherine. La Poudre et le Fard, une histoire des cosmétiques de la Renaissance aux Lumières. Paris: Champ Vallon, 2008. Paquet, Dominique. Une histoire de la beauté. Paris: Gallimard, Collection “Découvertes,” 1997.

baroque theatricality   87 Pigeaud, Jackie. La Maladie de l’âme. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1989. Rosset, Clément. L’Anti-nature. Paris: PUF, 1973. Surgers, Anne. L’Automne de l’imagination, Splendeurs et misères de la représentation (XVIe–XXIe) siècles. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Surgers, Anne and Pierre Pasquier, eds. La Représentation théâtrale en France au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Armand Colin, 2011. Vigarello, Georges. Histoire de la beauté. Paris: Le Seuil, “Points,” 2004.

chapter 5

Water i n Th e Ba roqu e Ga r den Stephanie Hanke

Water in the Baroque Garden “A baroque villa without water is almost unthinkable; it was the period’s favorite ­element.”1 In this passage of his book Renaissance and Baroque (1888), Heinrich Wölfflin, who is often considered the initiator of the scholarly concept of Baroque, postulated the fundamental role of water in the baroque garden. Indeed, in hardly any other period in history, apart from the times of the Roman Imperium, gardens were shaped by the use of water to such an extent. Water gave them spatial order and structure and manifested itself in an unprecedented variety of scenarios. With artful water curtains, cascades, and water jets, often in dialogue with architecture and sculpture, water became a leading dramatic element in gardens, reaching the apex of its splendor in the baroque water theater. With surfaces smooth as a mirror and high-spurting fountains, contrasts of the utmost repose and energetic movement appeared and subtly created different moods for various parts of the garden. The surprising activation of water jets playfully breaking up the physical boundaries between the beholder and the artworks, and thus displaying technical mastery, could also raise the visitor’s awareness of power relationships. In this brief description, the essential traits of baroque water art already become ­evident: contrast, surprise, and dissolution of form and boundaries. Despite all the ­controversies about the definition of the term “Baroque,” these are recognized as typical of the art of this period.2 It is in the first place the ambivalent materiality of water, its mutability, its movement, its transparency, and its reflective quality, which determine the Baroque’s affinity to this element uniting per se a welter of characteristics today conceived as “baroque.” Water can most easily be formed into any three-dimensional shape. Yet, without a solid framework, it immediately escapes and is thus an ephemeral and entirely atectonic artistic phenomenon. As an element to be perceived visually, haptically and acoustically, it activates different senses simultaneously and is particularly suited for

water in the baroque garden    89 a synesthetic involvement of the visitor, who is much more than a mere “beholder.” Wölfflin himself emphasized the acoustic component of the staged water masses in the baroque garden, since the baroque style, as he stressed, called for “rustling effects.”3 The fundamental significance of water for this period is also reflected by contemporary publications from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, variously oriented toward the interests of artists, technicians, or natural scientists. In the course of the seventeenth century, a multitude of series of engravings with views of famous fountains, beginning with Roman vedute, were published. These fountains achieved international fame through depictions by Giovanni Maggi and Domenico Parasacchi and finally through Giovanni Battista Falda’s and Giovanni Francesco Venturini’s four-part series of Rome, Tivoli, and Frascati.4 Henceforth, just like churches and palaces, fountains were among the sights of the Eternal City. With their fountain-series, the publishers clearly responded to a demand from travelers. At the same time, numerous artists, such as Salomon de Caus, Giovanni Francesco Guerniero, or Jean Le Pautre, seized the opportunity to attract the attention of the public and especially of potential clients by publishing images of their projected and realized fountains.5 The growing importance of water in the artistic and scenic composition of gardens becomes particularly evident by the emergence of the profession of the so-called fontaniere, a specialist for fountains and other water constructions, and by the ever-growing need for architects and gardeners possessing technical qualifications for water installations. Carlo Fontana was one of the most prominent figures in this field. He was not only one of the leading Roman architects of the late seventeenth century and one of the most important engineers for waterworks but also published his technical expertise in a treatise on hydraulics.6 From the significant increase in publications of technical garden treatises from the seventeenth century onward, it furthermore becomes clear that the recovery of appropriate water sources, the water supply to the garden, and its skillful distribution through a network connecting the fountains, cascades, and water jets were among the major challenges faced by artists entrusted with such constructions. Thus, also the most famous treatise on French baroque gardens, Antoine-Joseph Dézailler d’Argenville’s Théorie et pratique du jardinage (1709), dedicated extensive passages to water. In the second edition (1713), the author even added a whole essay on this topic in which he deals with technical questions such as water pressure, pumps, and automata, as well as with aesthetic aspects.7 Dézailler d’Argenville calls water the “soul of the gardens” (“l’âme des jardins”)—their most important adornment—by which he means above all, moving and flowing water, “les eaux vives.”8 Beyond water’s utility for plant growth, he herewith refers to its synesthetic effects, as “rafraîchissement,” “vivacité,” and “mouvement,” which Jacques Boyceau had also previously highlighted as particular qualities of this element in his 1638 garden treatise.9 However, already the garden designers and humanists of the sixteenth century, to whom nature and mankind seemed closely interrelated through the analogy of the macrocosm and microcosm, were aware of the notion of “animated” water, that is, water endowed with a soul (anima). According to Pirro Ligorio, water permeated the earth like the veins of the human body.10 In fact, the ancient conception of water as the fundamental element of the

90   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque cosmos and the source of all things, as formulated by Thales of Miletus and Vitruvius, was still received in the Baroque period.11 Although mastery of water in a technical sense had been achieved by increasing knowledge of hydraulics, the element remained linked with ancient concepts of natural philosophy and with mythical imagery. As the element of the nymphs and the muses, of Diana and Venus, water found its ancestral

Figure 1 Anonymous, Allegory of the Natural Cycle of Water, engraving. In Pierre Perrault, De l’origine des fontaines, Paris: Pierre le Petit, 1674. Courtesy of ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 1680 (http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-14519)

water in the baroque garden    91 place in the garden as locus amoenus and as the place of otium (leisure). It could therefore be associated with the concepts of purity and chastity as well as with eros and fertility.12 To demonstrate that the mythological imagination and imagery could often go hand in hand with a scientific approach, we only need to take a look at an illustration on the opening page of the treatise De l’origine des fontaines (1674) by Pierre Perrault, the father of modern hydrology (Figure 1).13 Three nymph-like female figures accompanied by a crowd of naked children, who appear to be playful cupids, are lying at the foot of a mountain brook streaming over rocks. With bowls and amphoras the nymphs scoop up the water. The children climbing over the brook take it back to the tip of the rock and pour it back into the spring. Play, eroticism, and fertility come together in this “moving” water, which is “animated” by the children. On the mountain slopes in the background of the picture, a descending rain-shower at the same time reminds us of the principle of the natural cycle of water through evaporation and condensation as explained in the treatise. Thus, at second glance, the figural scene of the picture is an allegorical visualization of a natural ­phenomenon empirically established by Perrault.

Baroque Water? The art-historical term “Baroque,” which commonly refers to the time span from the late sixteenth until the second half of the eighteenth century, frames the period covered by this essay. Furthermore though, the question of the Baroque as a stylistic category or as a formal-aesthetic term with regard to water arises.14 Stefan Schweizer has already pointed out that the period terms that were developed primarily with regard to the major genres of painting, sculpture, and architecture cannot simply be transferred to the domain of garden history.15 In the case of water, moreover, we are dealing with an element that is not comprehensible by itself but exclusively in context and in dialogue with the framework provided by architecture and sculpture. The stylistic language of this “framework” will not be emphasized in the following. Instead, we will examine the characteristics of baroque handling of water itself and the various ways of staging it. A clear-cut period boundary between the Renaissance and the Baroque is only of limited use, since baroque gardens are characterized by many features such as water chains, canals, artificial grottoes, and hydraulically powered automata, which had already evolved in the second half of the sixteenth century, mostly in Italy. It is not by chance that surveys of garden history often group the Renaissance and the Baroque together and that geographical categories take precedence over periodization in such publications.16 In formal-aesthetic terms, the Frascati gardens are often presented as the starting point of baroque garden design.17 The distinguishing feature of the famous Villa Aldobrandini is the garden’s organization around a central water axis, oriented toward the villa building—a characteristic that later appears as the most prominent ­feature of numerous gardens of the Baroque period and that marks the difference from

92   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque the additive principle of the Renaissance garden. Most of the staging forms of water, however, show a rather gradual transition from the earlier period, from which they ­differ mostly in terms of scale. In keeping with the considerably larger surface area of  baroque gardens, water features achieved a previously unknown monumentality, whether through the size of the fountains and cascades, the height of the water jets, or the availability of large quantities of stored water that permitted, as Wölfflin says, “a thoroughly massive” treatment of this element.18 Dézailler d’Argenville’s treatise leaves no doubt about the importance of sheer size, when writing for example of the layout of the bassins d’eau: “. . . on ne peut jamais pêcher en grandeur; plus ils sont grands, mieux ils sont” (“one can never overdo it; the bigger they are, the better”).19 This transformed scale was, however, only made possible by new technical accomplishments, by improved material conditions, and by the organizational and social structures of princely courts providing enormous sums of money and large human resources for their gardens. In Rome and its surroundings, the starting point of the great baroque waterworks, the popes in the sixteenth century had begun to restore the ancient aqueducts and to supplement them with new water conduits, which were the absolute prerequisites for the building of larger water features.20 The hillside location of many Italian gardens, such as in Tivoli, Frascati, and Genoa, also facilitated the construction of water staircases and cascades and enabled the relatively high water pressure, which elsewhere was possible only with complicated and expensive pumps. Versailles, located in a swampy area without springs, is the most striking example of the gigantic technical efforts required for the exploitation and supply of the water amounts needed for the ­garden, and for the maintenance of the entire hydraulic system. Not only did mills on site pump water into elevated reservoirs and water towers, but water was also brought from the Seine through pipes from the giant pump station of the Machine de Marly raising it higher than 150 meters, so it could run through many kilometers of conduits, across an aqueduct supported by arches, all the way to Versailles.21 Here as elsewhere, the construction of the enormous gardens, their water supply, and the expensive upkeep were only possible because the princes of the Baroque had armies of soldiers at their disposal and therefore a powerful, previously unknown workforce.

Space and Water The most important characteristic of water in the baroque garden is its increased use to organize space. Grottoes and fountains are employed as distant points de vue directing the gaze and the movement of the visitors, so that the spatial experience of the garden was determined by the well calculated positioning and the reciprocal reference of water features. The latter give different priorities to the different axes, mark their crossing points and give rhythm to extensive perspectives which are provided with a formal closure by huge water surfaces.22 In this respect the parterre d’eau, the canal, and the cascade are the defining features for spatial garden organization. They create the characteristic axes

water in the baroque garden    93

Figure 2  Pierre Patel, Chateau and Gardens of Versailles, 1668, oil on canvas, Versailles, Musée de l’Histoire de France. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

of the baroque garden and tie it together into a unity, while also visually extending it beyond the external boundaries. In Versailles, the visitor’s gaze from the piano nobile of the chateau is guided across the Latona fountain and the Allée royale, and then along the Grand Canal toward the horizon. The gaze wanders beyond the limits of the property at the surrounding territory, the spacious landscape within which the garden seems to be embedded (Figure 2). This type of spatial organization evokes the princely gaze extending from the chateau, and hence turned the baroque garden into a symbol of the Ancien Régime already in the eighteenth century.23 It is most of all the central water axis that with the expansion of the gaze creates a link between the chateau and the princely territory. Consequently, the baroque garden works as an expansive entity, in which water surfaces do not offer the eye a stopping point and thus distort the perception of distances.24 Vice versa the territory that literally feeds water into the garden was usually represented allegorically by sculptures of river gods since the Italian Renaissance. Yet monumental landscapearchitectural designs could also stage the water inflow from the territory, as for example on the main axis of the Reggia di Caserta. Here one can observe the increasing “domestication” of water as it makes its way from the great Cascata rustica down to the chateau, thus showing the step by step transition from wild nature to civilization (Figure 3).25

94   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 3  Garden of the Reggia di Caserta, view of the Great Cascade and the canal. Photo by Twice25 & Rinina25. Creative Commons License (CC-BY 2.5)

Parterres d’eau The parterre, a flat garden area shaped variously by means of paths, lawns, hedges, or garden beds, almost always gives water a marked role in the form of a central fountain or basin. However, this impact is particularly intensified in the special variant of the parterre d’eau. In this case, the surface ornament is shaped by the composition of varying basins arranged into an integrated form or through an extensive pool now merely framed by paths or broderie. Precursors to this parterre arrangement can be found in the Villa Lante in Bagnaia even before 1580. Here, however, the motif of the formalized island in the center referring to Varro’s Ornithon or the Teatro Marittimo of Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli dominates the aquatic arrangement of the garden surface.26 Only in André Le Nôtre’s gardens does water assume the principal role in the parterres, where plantings are reduced to fillers or pushed to the edge. This was for instance the case in Chantilly (1665–1667) or a little later in Saint-Cloud, where a small parterre de broderie located in front of what was then the principal façade of the chateau was replaced by a large unified trefoil pool in 1675 (Figure 4).27 Le Nôtre’s large basins with their surfaces either flat or slightly ruffled by the wind correspond best with Dézailler d’Argenville’s definition of a parterre as “aire plate et unie”

water in the baroque garden    95

Figure 4  Étienne Allegrain, Chateau of Saint-Cloud, 1675, oil on canvas, detail with the ­parterre d’eau, Versailles, Musée de l’histoire de France. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

(“flat and unified area”).28 They serve as wide mirror surfaces for the sky, the surrounding landscape, and the buildings, and illuminate the surrounding garden area as well as the rooms of the chateau with reflected light. Usually placed immediately next to the chateau, these open spaces emphasize the monumental effect of the architecture which is doubled by its reflection in the water. Vaux-Le-Vicomte is a particularly good example of the surprising mirror effects that were so precisely taken into account by Le Nôtre. Here the chateau seems to be ever-present by its numerous reflections not only in the basins of the parterres, but also in the far more distant transverse canal located at an even lower level at the end of the garden area.29

Canals The canals of baroque gardens originally derive from the moats of castles and were already characteristic of French and Netherlandish gardens in the late sixteenth century where they served as encompassing frames that combined the chateau and the garden into a unit. At the same time, they separated it like an island from the remaining territory invoking the metaphor of the garden as a hortus conclusus of a paradise regained. Particularly in the Netherlands, but also in Herrenhausen in Hanover, such canal arrangements appear well into the eighteenth century at the outside perimeter of gardens.30

96   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Simultaneously, however, canals were also increasingly used to trace the main axes of gardens where they function concretely (as a water supply) or visually (as sight axes) as a link to the surrounding territory. As transverse canals they divide individual sections of the garden and form a concrete obstacle for the visitor who must deviate from his path or, as for instance in Vaux-le-Vicomte, could be carried across in a gondola.31 The canal thus becomes a cesura in the spatial experience of the garden. If the canal, on the contrary, coincides with the garden’s main longitudinal axis, as the Grand Canal of Versailles (Figure 2), it either leads the strolling visitor along the banks further away from the chateau, or, as in Nymphenburg, accompanies the visitors arriving from the city all the way to the castle. After all, the waterway itself was navigable and served as a route of transportation for building materials or offered members of the court and their visitors an opportunity for comfortable gondola rides. For special festivities, torches could be placed on the banks creating spectacular light and mirror effects, that would reach their apogee with fireworks exploding over the canals.32 Under the influence of the Grand Canal of Versailles, a whole series of outstanding and systematically conceived canals arose particularly around Munich at the turn of the eighteenth century. Prince-elector Max Emanuel of Bavaria, whose political ambitions were reflected in the sumptuous expansion of his country residences surrounded by huge gardens, was interested in water constructions which had been sparked by his earlier service as governor in the Spanish Netherlands. He planned an extensive navigable canal system of more than forty kilometers that was meant to connect the chateaus of Dachau, Schleissheim, and Nymphenburg with one another and also with the Prince’s Munich residence.33 The concept of this canal network, which was fed from the rivers Würm and Isar and remained unfinished, as well as the gardens with their expansive water areas, stem from Enrico Zuccalli, an architect from the Grisons, and Dominique Girard, who had been apprenticed at Versailles. Both the Nymphenburg gardens (Figure 5) and those of Schleissheim were designed with canals of varying width combining the garden and the chateau into a single unit and also offering far-ranging and striking visual axes.34 A branch canal added by Max Emanuel’s successor in Nymphenburg was intended to offer even an urbanistic connection from the façade of the chateau towards the district of Schwabing. This had been planned by Josef Effner as the middle axis of a neverbuilt new town, the so-called Carlstadt, where territorial and urban planning would have taken their starting point from the canal.35

Cascades In striking contrast to the still water surfaces of the parterres d’eau and the canals, the moving water of the cascades provides a highly enlivening element in the garden. Their various forms include flat water steps, architectonic wall cascades, and seemingly natural waterfalls with a rocky base so that the visual and acoustic effects of the water could vary depending on the gradient of the slope, the width of the steps, or on the profile of

water in the baroque garden    97

Figure 5  Maximilian de Geer, Nymphenburg Palace and Gardens Seen From the Side of the City, c. 1730, miniature, gouache, Munich, Residence, Cabinet of Miniatures. © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung

the edge.36 The reflected light, the creation of foam, the spray of mist and the sound of the cascades, from a soft trickle to a powerful roar, contribute to the visitor’s sensual perception far beyond the merely visual. Characteristic of the early water chains, that is the catene d’aqua in Bagnaia and Caprarola, as well as of the monumental cascades of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe or in Caserta, is the function of designating the central axis of the gardens where they are

98   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque flanked by staircases giving access to the upper garden levels. In this way, the falling water with its rippling sound and its flickering light invites the visitor to climb the slope along the downward running water. Movement and counter-movement, climbing and falling thus condition the experience of space in the proximity of the cascades. This is especially enhanced by the contrast between the falling masses of water and up-spurting fountains. Examples to be mentioned are the chandeliers in the cascade at Saint-Cloud, created in 1664/65 by Le Pautre, or the spouting Enceladus in Guerniero’s cascade-series in Kassel, where the vertical jet also serves as the metaphor for the last cry of pain from the stoned giant (Figure 6).37 The range of cascades in the baroque garden corresponds to the different emotional values attributed to water—this ambivalent element which can be a life-giving source or a menacing deluge. Venturini’s engravings picture delighted garden visitors at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli dipping their hands into the softly splashing water of the small catene d’acqua at the parapet of the Fontana dei Dragoni, where the water flows in controlled movements from bowl to bowl.38 In contrast, at the Fontana del Diluvio (today called the Fontana dell’Organo) in the same garden, the very name of the fountain points to the

Figure 6  Jan van Nickelen, View of the Karlsberg in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe with the Fountain of Enceladus (Riesenkopfbecken), 1716–1721, oil on canvas, Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. © Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Photo: Ute Brunzel

water in the baroque garden    99

Figure 7  Giovanni Francesco Venturini, Vue of the Aniene Waterfalls in Tivoli. In Le fontane del giardino estense in Tivoli, Rome: Gio Giacomo De Rossi. © Bibliotheca Hertziana. Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rom

menacing aspect of falling water. This can also be experienced vividly at the nearby ­natural waterfalls of Tivoli, where the river Aniene displays the rushing waterpower of its current (Figure 7). In the fountains of the garden fed by water from this river, visitors could all the more clearly perceive the power of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este to assert his mastery over the ­elements.39 It is not by chance that Venturini chose to conclude his vedute of the Este gardens with two images of the Tiburtine waterfalls, whose wild nature is contrasted by the controlled waterflow of the Fontana dei Cigni with its peacefully sleeping nymph in the preceding engraving.40 Finally, in the case of Tivoli, we can also observe the dialectic between natural waterfalls and artificial cascades within the garden itself where the Tiburtine landscape is  recalled in different manners. It is allegorized by the sculptures of the river gods Erculaneo and Aniene as well as by the sculpture of the Tiburtine Sibyl at the Fontana dell’Ovato with its stylized waterfall spilling over the edge of a half-round bowl. In the fountain of the Rometta, though, Tivoli is evoked by a natural cascade en miniature as a reflection of the geographical landscape. Bernini finally took a further decisive step in this direction with his 1661 cascade below the water organ, which with its jagged mountain landscape and the rushing torrent reminds us again of the Aniene River and anticipates elements of the landscape garden.41

100   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Water Theaters The Italian teatri d’acqua reveal another spectacular staging of moving water comparable to the cascades: monumental, mostly exedra-shaped, architectonic fountain walls. Like the mostra of Antiquity, they represent water theaters in the truest sense of the word: water showplaces, in which this element is presented in its various visual and acoustic forms, often in a dialectical relation with an elaborate sculptural ensemble. The term teatro that was already used by contemporaries, though not necessarily referring to the function of ordinary theaters, is based on the formal analogy with the exedra in ancient Roman theaters. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the name was increasingly transferred to semicircular monumental architecture, particularly to façades.42 In the case of the teatri d’acqua—in accordance with the Greek meaning of theatron, namely “that which can be viewed or watched”—the idea of putting water on display is ever ­present.43 And its fleeting apparition is incidentally analogous to the ephemeral nature of dramatic performances. Particularly famous for its architectonic water theaters is Frascati, a Roman mountain site that used to be the summer residence, the villeggiatura, of popes and cardinals. Within a few years at the beginning of the seventeenth century, four water theaters were created at the villas of the Aldobrandini, Ludovisi, Mondragone and Lancellotti families.44 The starting-point was the celebrated teatro dell’acqua in the garden of the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, an exedra-shaped theater, embedded in the slope and facing the rear façade of the villa. Above it, a series of fountains and cascades pour the water down towards the center of the exedra (Figure 8). The most important source for the conception of this installation, constructed between 1602 and 1621 by Carlo Maderno and Giovanni Fontana, is the description by Giovanni Battista Agucchi, the Majordomo of Cardinal Aldobrandini, who was knowledgeable about the arts.45 Again and again he emphasizes the view from the villa’s rooms and loggias facing the slope toward the waters of the garden. He describes its varied appearances and movements in profuse terms and even compares them to the performance of a dancing nymph in whose honor the “bellissimo teatro” is said to have been constructed.46 Here, water springs out from five fountain niches, each decorated like a grotto with sculptures. The central scene of Atlas and Hercules with a celestial globe made of metal from which water sprays in all directions out of many small holes is the most spectacular.47 Whatever the political, heraldic, religious, and scientific interpretation of this scene might be, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the celestial globe, emanating water from all sides, best represents water as the primordial, original element of the cosmos.48 The water spectacle used to be accentuated with different background sound effects from hydraulic automata and a water organ, that were linked to the sculptures of each niche: a centaur with his trumpet could produce a deafeningly loud noise, whereas Polyphemus opposite him could play a “sweet-sounding woodland piece with a lovely . . . harmony”49 on his syrinx. A fountain jet rising at the feet of Atlas and Hercules

water in the baroque garden    101

Figure 8  Giovanni Battista Falda, The Teatro dell’acqua of Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati. In Le fontane delle ville di Frascati, Rome: Gio. Giacomo De Rossi. © Bibliotheca Hertziana. Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rom

created a quite different noise resembling fireworks or even thunder. Menacing primal sounds of unleashed natural forces were contrasted with the harmonious sounds of music so that the ambivalence of water was once again emphasized by the automata.50 This artistic display, which became possible only by the construction of an impressive water conduit commissioned by the Aldobrandini family, gave testimony to their financial riches and their powerful—demiurgical—control over the element. Unlike the architectonically structured stage-like show-walls at Frascati, other water theaters linked architectonic sections with more naturalistic features. This happens most strikingly in the Roman Fontana di Trevi, whose creator, Nicola Salvi, himself called the fountain a “teatro rustico” shaped by nature.51 Here, not the cosmic, but rather the subterranean water of the ocean, Oceanos, as the origin of all things is visualized and reveals itself to a broad urban public. This public can either become spectators and be seated on the theater-like stone seats around the massive powerful stage set or climb the accessible rock formations on the east edge of the fountain to become actors themselves within the framework of the natural theater.52 The Italian teatri d’acqua, alluding to the mostra of antiquity, contrast with French forms of water theaters that one encounters in Le Nôtre’s bosquets of Versailles, ­precisely in the now lost Théâtre d’eau or the still existing Salle de Bal.53 The latter presents a cascade show wall that emerges from the amphitheater steps of the oval space of the glade. Here, rocaille-covered naturalistic elements are combined with marble-covered parts and gilded candelabras. An important characteristic of this construction is the

102   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque absence of any figurative sculptures, so that the visitor can simply contemplate the rhythmic flow of the water coursing over the steps, creating an ample acoustic backdrop. A painting of the Salle de Bal by Jean Cotelle for a cycle of Versailles garden scenes (1688–1689) shows a dancing performance accompanied by musicians (Figure 9).54

Figure 9  Jean Cotelle, Vue of the bosquet de la Salle de Bal with Armida and Renaud in the Gardens of Versailles, 1688–1693, oil on canvas, Versailles, Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, MV 732. © Château de Versailles, Dist. RMN-Grand Palasi/Christophe Fouin

water in the baroque garden    103 This scene can be interpreted as a reference to an occasional real function of the bosquet, namely as a place to dance. However, the image is also an allegorical allusion to the musical component and the water movement of the cascade—here we can remember Agucchi’s metaphor of water as a dancing nymph.55 In contrast, the Théâtre d’eau does not seem to have hosted any real dramatic performances. Its space was shaped by trimmed hedges to resemble a free but intentional paraphrase of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza with a proscenium, perspectival openings toward the sets, an orchestra pit, and auditorium seating.56 The only performances taking place here were the complex waterworks installed by the hydraulic engineer François Francine. Up to eleven different figures could be created successively, which could even be illuminated with colored light at night. Simply the comparison of these French examples, with the installations in Frascati already discussed, makes clear that the concept of baroque water theater brings together very different types of garden construction. What they have in common is the idea of displaying the evanescent element of water in a performance. After all, the main impetus for theater-like stagings must have been rooted in the sound effects associated with music and dance and in the inherent potential of water to produce a great diversity of visual effects.

Ephemerality The baroque garden is characterized by contradictory concepts: geometrical forms on the one hand, and the tendency toward the dissolution of forms and transgression of boundaries on the other. This becomes most strikingly manifest in water features. Thus, the strict geometry of the basins, a prerequisite for setting up the parterres, yet an opposite to the liquid nature of water, was typically broken by sudden violent jets, which for a fleeting moment conferred vertical accents upon the flat garden areas and agitated the glassy water surfaces. Many baroque gardens, however, had only a slight gradient and needed to use pumping stations to momentarily ensure the water pressure necessary for the jets. Water jets and fountains rarely displayed their full splendor for very long and were rather set in motion for a few minutes on special occasions only and in accordance with the amount of water available.57 With regard to the gardens of Versailles, we know that the parterres were open to a broad public, whereas the so-called tour d’eau through the bosquets enlivened with the most varied water displays was reserved for the king, highest members of the court, and carefully chosen visitors.58 On these occasions, the individual bosquets were only successively supplied with the necessary amount of water, thanks to the concealed labors of the fontainiers, who would turn the valves on and off at the right moment. The Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles, a set of instructions written by Louis XIV describing the visitors’ circuit to specific locations and determining even the viewing direction, took into account the possibilities and limits of water supply.59 Here, we can recognize the obvious intention to maintain the illusion of an unlimited and perfectly controlled availability of water. This also explains the

104   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque deliberate production of prints and paintings of the Versailles fountains as a means of self-propaganda of the French court.60 The already mentioned painting cycle of the Jardins de Versailles, mostly by Jean Cotelle, for the gallery of the Grand Trianon, provided a simultaneous visibility of the splendid water displays of each individual fountain in 24 vedute.61 Thereby, the fountains as the most ephemeral art works of the chateau in their interplay with plantings and architecture were perpetuated through painting. However, not only in the case of Versailles, but also in many seventeenth-century prints, the ephemeral quality of water displays seems to be counteracted and even negated. Many images of fountains, such as the engravings in Georg Andreas Böckler’s Architectura curiosa nova (1664), show us rising and falling water jets as if frozen and merging in complex geometrical figures (Figure 10).62 With this highly sculptural conception of water, Böckler’s designs vividly convey the role of this element as an ornamental or indeed narrative component of fountains. In reality, in many fountains actually built these qualities can no longer be perceived today since the water supply has been turned off for better conservation of the historical monuments.

Figure 10  Georg Andreas Böckler, Fontain designs. In Architectura curiosa nova, Nürnberg: Paul Fürst, 1664. © Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, 83 B 2206 RES, vol. 2, plate 55. CC-BY-SA-3.0

water in the baroque garden    105

Figure 11  Jean-Baptiste Tuby (after the design of Charles Lebrun), Char d’Apollon, Versailles, 1668/72. © Jürgen Wiener, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Only recently Jürgen Wiener has shown how the narrative potential of the ephemeral element displayed itself in dialogue with the sculpture, by studying some works by Charles Lebrun in the Versailles gardens.63 This concerns most of all the change in the impact of figurative sculpture through its integration in an “atmospheric” context ­created by water jets, smaller sprays of water, or misting. In the so-called Fontaines de la couronne, for instance, the narrative content only becomes comprehensible for the beholder when the frothing and foaming water surface makes the twisted posture of the bodies of the naiads and tritons appear to be swimming. Likewise, in the case of the famous Bassin d’Apollon (Figure 11), the sculptural group of the forward-leaning Apollo riding his sun chariot drawn by hippocampi receives the appropriate dynamic only through the jets of water spraying from the front and the sides. They integrate the ensemble in an atmosphere of sea mist or clouds where sometimes even a rainbow can be discerned. Sculpture and water connect in a fleeting tableau, which would never be perceived as an “eventful” moment through the sculpture alone.64

Metamorphosis The idea of metamorphosis as a process of transformation, visible in nature and handed down in myth, has always been closely linked with water. It is not only the intrinsic

106   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque aspect of water in its capacity to appear as liquid, as ice, as snow, as steam, or as rain. Also, since Antiquity, water has been ascribed metamorphic powers, which is why it was given an active role in the staged transformations within the garden. In this context, metamorphosis does not only refer to the enlivening or ennobling effect of water—for instance in the sheen of wet marble surfaces—or, on the contrary, to its “renaturalizing” effect when tarnished lime accretes on fountain sculptures. It rather refers to the more extensive dimension of natura artifex—nature as artist.65 The caption of Etienne Dupérac’s famous engraving with the view of the Villa d’Este hints explicitly at the shaping power of water in the natural grottoes near Tivoli, where the Aniene river has created marvelous rock formations resembling humans and animals.66 Similarly, the Genoese poet Giovan Vincenzo Imperiale described not a river, but the sea as an artist, because it crafted precious pearls, shells, and corals in its depths with its “chisel” and “undulating brush.”67 It is no coincidence that he connected this ancient topos of the competition between art and nature to the description of an artificial garden grotto, as such grottoes were the place predestined to display the dialectic between natural and artificial forms, of natural artifizio and artificiosa natura.68 In line with the ancient tradition of grottoes, that in the course of the sixteenth century was first revived in Italy and in the following centuries spread all over Europe,69 one sought to imitate and even to outdo nature in its most artistic and bizarre forms. Therefore, the materials for the typical mosaico rustico became particularly relevant. Many of its elements, like crystals, corals, shells, or calcareous sinter, are generated by nature herself and have a close relationship to water and its creative power. Crystals, for example, were viewed as frozen and then permanently hardened snow; corals as plants fossilized in the process of the congelatio of a salty substance in the sea, and sinter was thought to be petrified water, a conception reflected in terms such as acqua pietrificata, acqua congelata or schiuma di mare.70 By conducting water to flow down from the top of the artificial grotto (through pipes in the vault) and thus to drip and form stalactite-like limestone concretions (Figure 12), artists not only imitated nature in its artful apparitions but also sought to reproduce her as natura naturans: that is, to copy the process of generating stone in the depths of the earth by turning water to stone.71 The dynamic relation of artificial and natural forms, so characteristic of mannerist and baroque garden grottoes, manifests itself in a wide range of design possibilities. On the one hand, there are strongly naturalistic constructions almost exclusively made of heaped rocks, like the grotto-like cascade wall of the Villa Borghese in Rome where a mascaron, a face in the rock, reveals the artificial character of the fountain only at second glance.72 On the other hand, there are thoroughly architectonic grottoes with purely geometrical and figurative wall decorations in which only the materials used in the mosaics still allude to the natura artifex. The apogee and endpoint of this second type is the no-longer-extant Thetis grotto in Versailles built between 1665 and 1676 on the north side of the chateau known from engravings and descriptions (Figure 13).73 This grotto, profusely decorated with shell and mosaic incrustations, once contained the famous sculpture group of Apollo resting at the end of the day and attended by nymphs. This statue by François Girardon and Thomas Regnaudin was a mythologized

water in the baroque garden    107

Figure 12  Genua, Grotta Pavese, detail of the interior walls. © Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Max-Planck-Institut

personification of Louis XIV. Already the façade of the grotto displays a clear architectonic structure in which natural rock formations, the so called glaçons, are organized in clearcut rectangular fields. At most, they can be read as a quotation from a natural grotto but certainly not as an imitation of one. Not without reason, also André Félibien observed at the outset of his detailed Description de la grotte de Versailles how the interplay of nature and art shaped this outstanding grotto, where nature contributes “matière” and “couleur,” while art provides “symétrie” and “proportion.”74 After describing the precious stones and shells of the mosaics as well as the superb sculptures of the grotto in the utmost detail, Félibien, however, concludes that water was the essential element of the place. According to him, no description could after all reproduce the effect of the innumerable artful or surprising jets of water in the inner room of the grotto giving the visitor the impression of actually standing in the sea-palace of the Nereid Thetis.75 As in Versailles, there are numerous other grottoes and fountains where one can observe the way water displays interact with the narrative content of the iconographic program. In 1584, Giampaolo Lomazzo already recommended for such buildings the water-related “favole degli amori e delle varie trasformazioni delle dee e delle ninfe” (“fables of loves and the various transformations of goddesses and nymphs”).76 Time and again we encounter myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in baroque gardens, such

108   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 13  Jean Le Pautre, Façade of the Thetis Grotto in Versailles, engraving, 1672. © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département estampes et photographie, FT 4-VA-423 (1)

as the story of Latona who changes the peasants into frogs, the nymph Arethusa who is transformed into a spring, or Diana and Acteon, who, sprayed with spring water, is turned into a stag. This latter myth of the goddess caught bathing emphasizes the metamorphic power of water, and thus offers the possibility of a performative involvement of the beholder in the narrative. A vivid example is the Diana-Fountain in the garden of La Granja de San Ildefonso near Segovia constructed by the Spanish king Philip V, a grandson of Louis XIV, and his wife Isabella Farnese at the end of the 1730s (Figure 14).77 The fountain, designed by René Frémin and Jacques Bousseau and built under the supervision of Pierre Puthois and Hubert Dumandré, has the shape of the French buffet d’eau. It depicts Diana bathing, surrounded by twenty nymphs. A figure is sitting on a rock above them, recently interpreted as Apollo. Yet there is no depiction of Acteon.78 When the water display was switched on, this “chaste courtly society of nymphs” ­vanished from the beholder’s gaze behind countless veils of water and jetting springs, as we learn not only from contemporary pictures but also from descriptions from the ­eighteenth century.79 In order to interpret the narration located in the midst of the water display, the visitor of the garden needs to move around the fountain to get a glimpse of the bathing nymphs by thus adopting the role of Acteon. In fact, one of Diana’s companions seems to raise her hand in a pointing gesture as if to admonish the uninvited observer.80 In the very moment of discovering the nymph, he becomes aware of having assumed the role of the voyeur and thus of the imminent threat of metamorphosis.

water in the baroque garden    109

Figure 14  René Frémin and Jacques Bousseau, Diana-Fountain, La Granja de San Ildefonso (near Segovia). © Maria Jesús Herrero Sanz

Water and Sociability As we have seen, water in the baroque garden could on the one hand serve as a separating, distancing element since water basins and cascades could prevent the observer from approaching certain parts of the garden or from seeing sculptures. On the other hand, it could serve, for example, in the form of a canal, as a link between individual areas of the garden or, in the case of the so called scherzi d’acqua, it could involve the observer directly in the fountain’s narrative by spraying him with water. The basic principle underlying such installations was the idea of playfully (and with a certain encroachment) breaking through the architectonic boundaries and physical barriers between the work of art and its beholder. The visitor would thus become physically as well as psychically involved in the experience of the garden to the highest degree. Water’s dual role as a separating and at the same time connecting element corresponds to the double function of the garden as a place of intimate retreat and locus amoenus for hours of relaxation and otium, and also as a prestigious place of sociability and convivial gathering. Baroque gardens offered a venue for theatrical performances,

110   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque concerts, and festive banquets, which often took place near water features. Such events are well documented in particular with regard to grottoes and artificial islands. In Genoa, for example, a banquet for the Duke of Mantua, Vincenzo Gonzaga, was held in the Grotta Pavese, with “interventi di belle ninfe,” poetry, and music in 1607.81 Also, from the Thetis grotto in Versailles we know of many receptions and concerts and of a celebrated performance of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire in 1674.82 This demonstrates the grotto’s great value for Louis XIV as a space of representation. During the festivities of the Divertissemens de Versailles, guests moreover could enjoy the splashing of the many water jets during a meal in the Théatre d’eau or while dining in the so-called Salle du Conseil on an artificial island encircled and screened by numerous water sprays like a protective grid.83 Such islands were preferred for hosting banquets partly due to the example of antique artificial islands used as triclinia, as for example Varro’s ornithon.84 These islands were places singled out within the garden—heterotopias, so to speak—that had throughout the Middle Ages been connected to the idea of unsullied nature, the secluded locus amoenus, as well as to the Garden of Eden. However, in the course of the sixteenth century, they also became increasingly associated with literary and mythological allusions, such as the islands of Circe or of the sorceresses Armida and Alcina.85 Consequently, they appeared with a new ambivalence as enticing but also as dangerous places. One of the most prominent examples of an island used primarily for festivities is the Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore, a rocky outcropping just forty meters above the surface of the lake, that the Borromeo family gradually turned into a garden of the highest artistic level throughout the seventeenth century (Figure 15). Contemporary accounts celebrated the garden, which rose above the water like a truncated pyramid, as a spectacular luogo di delizie, that with its boatlike appearance also conveyed the impression of a floating island.86 The trip from the shore to the Isola Bella and its perception from the water were part of the island’s staging during festivities. Guests approaching the island by boat could already see the larger-than-life statuary from the distance, listen to concert music coming from the island—or admire spectacular fireworks and their reflection on the surface of the lake.87 With boat rides like on the Lago Maggiore, on the Grand Canal in Versailles or on the Munich canal system, where court members and selected guests enjoyed themselves in sumptuous boats and Venetian gondolas, the princely host could make the garden visit a shared social experience.88 Crossing over to the island signified, so to speak, a shared escape to another world during which greater intimacy—real or imagined—arose between the participants in a relaxed atmosphere of villeggiatura.89 In these cases, water assumed an important function with regard to the creation of mood. This is also true—however through different means—for the so-called scherzi d’acqua or inganni (water tricks or traps) installed in grottoes and fountains and which enjoyed immense popularity, particularly in Italy. In such set-ups, water could transform animal figures into threatening waterspouts, or water jets would suddenly wet the visitor from out of the ground. Such jokes were often a central aspect of garden visits. On the one hand, they were considered scary surprises that women (a favored target) especially tried to avoid. On the other hand, they were generally accepted as a way of

water in the baroque garden    111

Figure 15  Johann Fischer von Erlach, Vue of the Isola Bella, Lago Maggiore, in: Entwurf einer Historischen Architektur, Leipzig 1725. © Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, C 5280 Gross RES, livre second, plate 15. CC-BY-SA-3.0

breaking normal social constraints in the realm of the garden, where strict ceremonial rules seemed, in the truest sense of the word, to have been “washed away.” Even during a visit of official state guests, the scherzi d’acqua could provide entertainment and pleasure and create a certain degree of intimacy that would have been impossible within the palace, where rigidly codified etiquette prevailed. Depending on the narrative context, they could have comic, burlesque, erotic, heroic, snide, or humiliating connotations, and therefore make hierarchies more perceptible. It thus seems also possible that in certain cases, water displays could deliberately aim at disconcerting the soaked and not always amused guests, who according to decorum were not allowed to complain about these social pleasantries.90 At the same time the water features placed the garden proprietor in a position of superiority expressing his power by demonstrating his control over the element. Water, more than any other element, was thus the decisive component not only for the baroque garden’s visual appearance but—in physical as well as in psychological terms—also for the social experience of the garden.

Notes 1. Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock. Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barock-Stils in Italien (Munich: Theodor Ackermann, 1888), 130: “Eine Barock-Villa ohne Wasser ist kaum denkbar. Das Wasser ist das Lieblingselement des Jahrhunderts.”

112   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Engl. Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 154. 2. See for instance Peter  J.  Burgard, “Vorwort: Äquivoke Anmerkungen zum vorläufigen Projekt einer Definition des Barock,” in Barock: Neue Sichtweisen einer Epoche, ed. Peter  J.  Burgard (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2001), 11–14; Dominik Brabant, Marita Liebermann, “Zur Einführung: Barock. Epoche—ästhetisches Konzept—Denkform,” in Barock. Epoche—ästhetisches Konzept—Denkform, ed. Dominik Brabant and Marita Liebermann (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017), 9–18; and Karin Leonhard, “Was ist Barock? Zur Entstehung des Barockbegriffs in der Bildenden Kunst und Kunstgeschichte,” in Barock. Epoche—ästhetisches Konzept—Denkform, 247–273. 3. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 130: “Der Stil verlangt nach dem Rauschenden.” 4. Giovanni Maggi, Fontane diverse che si vedano nel’Alma Città di Roma et altre parte d’Italia (Rome: Gio. Domenico Rossi, 1618, 1645); Domenico Parasacchi, Raccolta delle principali fontane dell’Inclitta Città di Roma (Rome: Gio. Battista de Rossi, 1637, 1647); Giovanni Battista Falda, Giovanni Francesco Venturini, Le fontane di Roma, 4 parts (Rome: Gio. Giacomo de Rossi, n. d.). On Falda’s and Venturini’s successively published series of engravings (between 1660 and 1690) see Iris Lauterbach, “Die Brunnenserie von Giovanni Battista Falda und Giovanni Francesco Venturini,” in Giovanni Battista Falda, Giovanni Francesco Venturini, Le fontane di Roma. Faksimile-Neudruck aller vier Bücher, ed. Iris Lauterbach (Nördlingen, Germany: Alfons Uhl, 1996), 5–10. 5. Salomon de Caus, Hortus Palatinus (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Bry, 1620); Giovanni Francesco Guerniero, Delineatio Montis (Kassel: Henricus Harmes, 1706), Reprint ed. Harri Günther (Stuttgart, Germany: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1988); Jean Le Pautre, Œuvres d’architecture, vol. 3: Contenant divers Desseins de Fontaines, Grottes, Vûes de Jardins, Jets d’Eau . . . (Paris: Jombert, 1751). On Le Pautre’s fountain designs see Jörg Garms, “Brunnen in der Graphik Le Pautres,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 24 (1971), 107–122. 6. Carlo Fontana, Utilissimo trattato dell’acque correnti (Rome: Gio. Francesco Buagni, 1696), Reprint ed. Hellmut Hager (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1998). 7. Antoine-Joseph Dézailler d’Argenville, La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (Paris: Jean Mariette, 1713), 263–293: “Traité succint des eaux et des fontaines.” 8. Dézailler d’Argenville, La théorie et la pratique, 277–378. 9. Jacques Boyceau de la Barauderie, Traité du Jardinage selon la raison de la nature et de l’art (Paris: N. Vanlochum, 1638), 75. 10. “. . . le acque correnti . . . arricchiscono la terra e la bagnano et l’alimentano a guisa de le vene del corpo humano,” “l’acque di fonti, . . . l’anima della sostanza di tutti le piante,” quoted from Marcello Fagiolo, “Il significato dell’acqua e la dialettica del giardino. Pirro Ligorio e la ̔filosofia’ della villa cinquecentesca,” in Natura e artificio. L’ordine rustico, le fontane, gli automi nella cultura del Manierismo europeo, ed. Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Officina, 1981), 176–189, these passages: 178. 11. Vitruvius, De architectura libri X, book VIII, praef. On Thales see Wolfgang Detel, “Das Prinzip des Wassers bei Thales,” in Kulturgeschichte des Wassers, ed. Hartmut Böhme (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1988), 43–64. 12. On the many myths and cultural references associated with water see Kulturgeschichte des Wassers. 13. Pierre Perrault, De l’origine des fontaines (Paris: Pierre le Petit, 1674). 14. On the art-historic understanding of “Baroque” as a period term and stylistic category see Ulrich Pfisterer, s. v., Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, ed. Friedrich Jaeger, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Metzler’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung und C.E. Poeschel, 2005), 976–986.

water in the baroque garden    113 15. Stefan Schweizer, Die Erfindung der Gartenkunst. Gattungsautonomie—Diskursgeschichte— Kunstwerkanspruch (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2013), 53. 16. See, for example, Marie Luise Gothein, Geschichte der Gartenkunst (Jena, Germany: Diederichs, 1926); Dieter Hennebo, Alfred Hoffmann, Geschichte der deutschen Gartenkunst, vol. 2: Der architektonische Garten: Renaissance und Barock (Hamburg: Broschek, 1965); Wilfried Hansmann, Gartenkunst der Renaissance und des Barock (Cologne: DuMont, 1983) as well as the introduction in Gabriele Uerscheln, Michaela Kalusok, Wörterbuch der europäischen Gartenkunst (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2001). 17. For example, in Hennebo and Hoffmann, Der architektonische Garten, 128–129; Herbert Keller, Kleine Geschichte der Gartenkunst (Berlin and Hamburg: Paul Parey, 1976), 50; Hansmann, Gartenkunst, 35–36. 18. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 129: “In gleicher Weise wie die Vegetation wird das Wasser durchaus massig behandelt; nicht kleine Äderchen und Brünnlein, sondern grosse rauschende Massen.” 19. Dézailler d’Argenville, La théorie et la pratique, 279. 20. David R. Coffin, Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 28–57; Katherine Wentworth Rinne, The Waters of Rome. Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 21. Ian H. Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden: Louis XIV, André Le Nôtre and the Creation of the Gardens of Versailles (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 247–260; Thomas Brandstetter, Kräfte messen. Die Maschine von Marly und die Kultur der Technik (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2008). 22. See Gerold Weber, Brunnen und Wasserkünste in Frankreich im Zeitalter von Louis XIV. Mit einem typengeschichtlichen Überblick über die französischen Brunnen ab 1500 (Worms, Germany: Werner’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985), 200. 23. See Horst Bredekamp, Leibniz und die Revolution der Gartenkunst. Herrenhausen, Versailles und die Philosophie der Blätter (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2012), 78. 24. Stefan Schweizer, André Le Nôtre und die Erfindung der französischen Gartenkunst (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2013), 47. On the baroque garden and its axial relation to the surrounding territorry see Cornelia Jöchner, “Die Ordnung der Dinge: Barockgarten und politischer Raum,” in Die Gartenkunst des Barock, ed. Florian Fiedler and Michael Petzet (Munich: Lipp, 1998), 177–181; Jöchner, “Die schöne Ordnung” und der Hof. Geometrische Gartenkunst in Dresden und anderen deutschen Residenzen (Weimar, Germany: VDG, 2001); and Jöchner, “Raumplanung in territorialen Diensten. Frühneuzeitliche Gartenund Stadtbaukunst,” in Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Deutschland, vol. 5: Barock und Rokoko, ed. Frank Büttner, Meinrad von Engelberg and Stephan Hoppe (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008), 397–401. 25. On the Reggia di Caserta see Giovanni Maria Bagordo, Le architetture per l’acqua nel Parco di Caserta (Rome: Aracne, 2009); Cesare Cundari, Giovanni Maria Bagordo, L’acquedotto carolino (Rome: Aracne, 2012). 26. See Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 248–252; Marcello Fagiolo, ”Nuove ipotesi sul giardino di Bagnaia,“ in Villa Lante a Bagnaia, ed. Sabine Frommel (Milan: Electa, 2005), 144–157. On the influence of Bagnaia on the French parterre d’eau, for example in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, see Weber, Brunnen und Wasserkünste, 45. 27. Weber, Brunnen und Wasserkünste, 137. On Le Nôtre’s garden designs, see Schweizer, André Le Nôtre. 28. Dézailler d’Argenville, La théorie et la pratique, 39.

114   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 29. On this point see Weber, Brunnen und Wasserkünste, 91; Schweizer, André Le Nôtre, 49. 3 0. On Netherlandish gardens, see The Dutch Garden in the Seventeenth Century, ed. John Dixon Hunt, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, 12 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1990); Erik De Jong, Nature and Art. Dutch Garden and Landscape Architecture, 1650–1740 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). On Hanover, see the recent book by Bredekamp, Leibnitz und die Revolution, 81. 31. Schweizer, André Le Nôtre, 49. 32. Especially impressive are the descriptions by André Félibien, Les divertissemens de Versailles sonnez par le Roy a toute sa Cour au retour de la conqueste de la Franche-Comté en l’année 1674 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1676), 25. 33. See Adolf Kleinschroth, Helmut Michel, “Schiffahrtskanäle aus dem 17. und 18. Jahrhundert im Raum München,” Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv 7 (1984), 7–24. 34. Hansmann, Gartenkunst, 236–247; also Hansmann, Barocke Gartenparadiese. Meisterleis­ tungen der Gartenarchitektur (Cologne: DuMont, 1996), 64–75. 35. See Jöchner’s contributions “Die Ordnung der Dinge” and “Raumplanung in territorialen Diensten.” 36. See for example Heike Juliane Zech, Kaskaden in der deutschen Gartenkunst des 18. Jahrhunderts: vom architektonischen Brunnen zum naturimitierenden Wasserfall (Münster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2010), in particular 219–223, 226–228; Weber, Brunnen und Wasserkünste, 46–50. 37. On Saint-Cloud: Robert  W.  Berger, Antoine Le Pautre. A French Architect of the Era of Louis XIV (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 51–64; Weber, Brunnen und Wasserkünste, 143–144, 250–254; on Kassel Wilhelmshöhe: Bernd Modrow, “Die italienischen Einflüsse auf den barocken Karlsberg bei Kassel,” in Fiedler, Petzet, Die Gartenkunst des Barock, 58–63; Jutta Korsmeier, Wasserkünste im Schlosspark Wilhelmshöhe. Die Gestaltung des Wassers im Wandel der Gartenkunst des 18. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, Germany: Schnell & Steiner, 2000); Antje Scherner, “Giovanni Francesco Guerniero—ein Architekt aus dem Umkreis Carlo Fontanas? Neue Quellen zu Leben und Werk des Baumeisters der Kasseler Wasserspiele,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 38 (2011): 171–196. 38. Giovanni Francesco Venturini, Le fontane del giardino estense in Tivoli con li loro prospetti, e vedute della cascata del fiume Aniene (Rome: Gio. Giacomo de Rossi), 11: “Fontana dei draghi detta la Girandola sotto il vialone delle Fontanelle.” 39. On the fountains and the water supply of the Villa d’Este: David R. Coffin, Villa d’Este at Tivoli (Princeton  N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960); Isabella Barisi, Marcello Fagiolo, Maria Luisa Madonna, Villa d’Este (Rome: De Luca, 2003); Isabella Barisi, Leonardo Lombardi, “La ‘mirabile natura delle acque correnti’ nel giardino del cardinale di Ferrara a Tivoli,” in Ippolito II d’Este, Cardinale, Principe, Mecenate, ed. Marina Cogotti and Francesco Paolo Fiore, proceedings of the conference held in Tivoli 2010 (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2013), 295–314. 40. Venturini, Le fontane del giardino estense, 26: “Fontana de Cigni, con statua di ninfa, che dorme nel piano del giardino.” 41. See Venturini, Le fontane del giardino estense, 21: “Veduta della cascata sotto l’organo nel piano del giardino.” See Marcello Fagiolo, Maria Luisa Madonna, “L’evoluzione delle Fontane dal Cinquecento al Novecento,” in Barisi, Fagiolo, Madonna, Villa d’Este, 111–131, specifically 121, 128.

water in the baroque garden    115 42. See Klaus Schwager, “Kardinal Pietro Aldobrandinis Villa di Belvedere in Frascati,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 9/10 (1961/62): 289–382, specifically 379–382. 43. Schwager, “Kardinal Pietro Aldobrandinis Villa,” 380–381. 44. Stefania Frezzotti, “I teatri delle acque nelle ville di Frascati,” Studi Romani 30 (1982): 467–477. 45. Transcribed by Cesare D’Onofrio, La villa Aldobrandini di Frascati (Rome: Staderini, 1963), 82–115, specifically 105–110. 46. “una Ninfa in forma humana in questo fonte . . ., che saltando, menando diverse carole con allegria se ne venisse a far pomposo spettacolo di se al Popolo in un bellissimo teatro,” quoted in D’Onofrio, La villa Aldobrandini, 105. The image of the nymph was a natural choice, since in mythographic literature nymphs were equated with water. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Della Genealogia de gli Dei libri quindeci, tradotti et adornati per m. Gioseppe Betussi da Bassano (Venice: Francesco Lorenzini, 1564), Book V, fol. 84r: “non essendo altra nimpha, che acqua, overo complessione humida.” 47. Today only the figure of Atlas is extant. The former sculpture group is shown in engravings. See Schwager, “Kardinal Pietro Aldobrandinis Villa,” 309–310 as well as Ronald Martin Steinberg, “The Iconography of the Teatro dell’Acqua at the Villa Aldobrandini,” The Art Bulletin 47 (1965), 4: 453–463, Figure 7 (with a detail from a print by Dominique Barrière, 1647). 4 8. See D’Onofrio, La villa Aldobrandini, 121–124; Steinberg, “The Iconography of the Teatro dell’Acqua”; Denis Ribouillault, “Atlas and Hercules in the Garden. Scientific Culture and Literary Imagination at the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati,” Nuncius 30 (2015): 124–160. 49. Hieronymus Welsch, Wahrhafftige Reiß-Beschreibung aus eigener Erfahrung von Teutschland, Croatien, Italien, denen Insul Sicilia, Maltha, Sardinien, Corsica (Stuttgart: Endters, 1658), 70–71: “ein wollautendes Waldstücklein mit einer . . . Harmoni.” 50. On acoustic automata, see the recent publication of Alexander Ditsche, Klingende Wasser (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017), 128–131 on Villa Aldobrandini. See also Jessica Keating’s chapter in the present volume. 51. See Frank Fehrenbach, Compendia Mundi. Gianlorenzo Berninis Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (1648–51) und Nicola Salvis Fontana di Trevi (1732–62) (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2008), 224–227, 283–293. See also John A. Pinto, The Trevi Fountain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). 52. Fehrenbach, Compendia Mundi, 227. 53. On these water features see Weber, Brunnen und Wasserkünste, 124–126, 174, 313, 316–318. 54. See Xavier Salmon, “Les jardins de Versailles selon Louis XIV illustrés per Jean Cotelle et Jean Joubert,” Barockberichte 46/47 (2007): 2–43; Jean II Cotelle 16461708. Des jardins et des dieux, ed. Béatrice Sarrazin (Paris: Lienart, 2018). 55. See remark above, 46. 56. Weber, Brunnen und Wasserkünste, 125. 57. On the technical aspects of water displays see Albert Baur, “Wasser in der Barockzeit. Ausdruck städtischer Repräsentation und höfischen Glanzes,” in Wasser im Barock (Mainz, Germany: von Zabern, 2004), 11–131. 58. See Schweizer, André le Nôtre, 86–87. 59. On this text, composed either by the king or at his initiative by a secretary, and of which a number of manuscript versions are extant, see Simone Hoog, Louis XIV. Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles (Paris: RMN, 1982).

116   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 60. Iris Lauterbach, “Die Seele der Gärten und ihre vornehmste Zierde: Wasser in der Gartenkunst des Barock,” in Hortus ex machina: der Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe im Dreiklang von Kunst, Natur und Technik, ed. Sandra Kress and Jennifer Verhoeven (Stuttgart: Theiss, 2010), 97–106, specifically 102. 61. See Salmon, “Les jardins de Versailles”; Sarrazin, Jean II Cotelle. 62. Georg Andreas Böckler, Architectura curiosa nova (Nümberg, Germany: Fürst, 1664), for example Figures 31–70. 63. Jürgen Wiener, “Die Tränen der Verliebten. Wasser und andere mimetische Materialien in der frühneuzeitlichen Gartenskulptur,” in Ephemere Materialien, ed. Andrea von Hülsen-Esch (Düsseldorf, Germany: Düsseldorf University Press, 2015), 79–144, specifically 91–100 as well as Figures 3a/b and 4a/b. 64. Wiener, “Die Tränen der Verliebten,” 88 describes it as “[das] Ereignishafte von Brunnen und Grotten.” 65. See Philippe Morel, Les grottes maniéristes en Italie au XVIe siècle. Théâtre et alchimie de la nature (Paris: Macula, 1998), 64–85. 66. Etienne Dupérac, Il sontuosissimo et amenisso palazzo et giardini di Tivoli (Rome: Antonio Lafreri, 1573), “il . . . fiume Aniene . . . ha fatto dentro le vene delle pietre concavità et grotte stupende, quale per successsion di tempo, et per sua natura hà generato tartari di diverse forme, tal che in molti luoghi si vedono congelati, che parono figure humane, . . . animali, frutti, et infinite altre cose stupende.” 67. Giovan Vincenzo Imperiale, Lo stato rustico (Genoa: Pavoni, 1611), 448: “T’offre in picciolo sen conche lucenti, / Di pretiose perle arche pregiate; / E chiocciole, e coralli, e quante ha il Mare / Co’l suo scarpel, co’l suo pennello ondoso / Dentro al suo vasto sen scolpite, e pinte / Di forma, e di color pietre distinte.” 68. See the often-quoted letter of the humanist Claudio Tolomei from 1543, published, among other places, as appendix in: Elisabeth B. MacDougall, “Introduction,” in Fons sapientiae. Renaissance Garden Fountains, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 5 (Washington DC: Dumbarton Research Library and Collection, 1978), 1–14. 69. An overview of the development of artificial garden grottoes gives Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves. Reflections on the Garden Grotto (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982). Specifically about Italy see also the catalogue-like collection in Atlante delle grotte e dei ninfei in  Italia, ed. Vincenzo Cazzato, Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Adriana Giusti, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori/Electa, 2000, 2002). 70. On the decoration materials of artificial grottoes and their aspects of material iconology see Stephanie Hanke, Zwischen Fels und Wasser. Grottenanlagen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts in Genua (Münster, Germany: Rhema, 2008), 97–119. 7 1. See Morel, Les grottes maniéristes, 15–64. 72. See Giovan Francesco Venturini, Le fontane ne’ palazzi e ne’ giardini di Roma (Rome: Gio. Giacomo de Rossi), 14: “Fontanone rustico nel giardino del Signor Prencipe Borghese.” 73. Lilian Châtelet-Lange, “La grotte de Thétis et le premier Versailles de Louis XIV,” Art de France 1 (1961): 133–148; Michael Petzet, “Die Thetisgrotte in Versailles,” in Fiedler, Petzet, Die Gartenkunst des Barock,. 27–49. 74. André Félibien, Description de la grotte der Versailles (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1679), see also Robert W. Berger, “André Félibien: Description de la grotte der Versailles (description of the grotto of Versailles). The original French text with facing English translation, introduction and notes,” Studies of the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 36 (2016), 2: 89–133.

water in the baroque garden    117 75. See Berger, “André Félibien: Description,” 119. 76. Giam Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, vol. 2, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi (Florence: Marchi & Bertolli, 1974), 300. 77. In general about the garden see María Jesús Herrero Sanz, “Los jardines de la Granja de San Ildefonso: Felipe V entre Marly y Versalles,” Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles (2012), http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/11940 (accessed 01 June2018); El Real Sitio de La Granja de San Ildefonso: retrato y escena del Rey, ed. Delfin Rodriguez Ruiz (Madrid, 2000). 7 8. See Eva-Bettina Krems, “Nymphs Bathing in the King’s Garden: La Granja de San Ildefonso and Caserta,” in The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture, ed. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Anita Traninger (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 337–370. Further on the fountain also Maria Jesus Callejo Delgado, Florinda Callejo Delgado, “Diana en los Jardines de La Granja de San Ildefonso,” Lecturas de historia del arte 2 (1990): 420–425. 79. For example in Jean François Bourgoing, Nouveau voyage en Espagne (Paris: Regnault, 1789), vol. 1, 70: “la déesse se dérobe aux regards sous ce vaste manteau de crystal liquide. Telle est celle de Diane aux bains, entourée de ses nymphes; en un clin d’œil, toute la chaste cour est cachée sous les eaux.” 80. See Krems, “Nymphs Bathing,” 353. 81. Hanke, Zwischen Fels und Wasser, 177, 230. 82. Petzet, “Die Thetisgrotte,” 43–44; Ditsche, Klingende Wasser, 147–148. 83. See the description of the feast by Félibien, Les divertissemens de Versailles, 8 (Salle du Conseil), 11–12 (Grotte), 13 (Théatre d’eau). 84. Varro, De Re Rustica III, 4–5. On the role of water in ancient garden triclinia, see Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti, “The Importance of Water in Roman Garden Triclinia,” in Ancient Roman Villa Gardens, ed. Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 10 (Washington DC: Dumbarton Research Library and Collection, 1987), 13–184. See also Hanke, Zwischen Fels und Wasser, 92, 235. 85. See Alessandro Tagliolini, “Realtà e mito dell’Isola nei Giardini del Rinascimento,” in Il giardino come labirinto della storia, ed. Centro Studi di Storia e Arte dei Giardini di Palermo (Palermo, n. d. ), 217–219; Vincenzo Cazzato, “Tematiche dell’isola in giardino dal Barocco al Novecento,” in Il giardino e il lago: specchi d’acqua fra illusione e realtà. Conoscenze e valorizzazione del paesaggio lacustre in Italia e Europa, ed. Renata Lodari (Rome: Gangemi, 2007), 87–99. 86. See Margherita Azzi Visentini, “Islands of Delight: Shifting Perceptions of the Borromean Island,” in Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion, ed. Michel Conan, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 25 (Washington DC: Dumbarton Research Library and Collection, 2005), 245–289. Floating islands also appear as a common motif in seventeenth-century theater performances. 87. Azzi Visentini, “Islands of Delight,” 265. 88. In Versailles, because of the popular gondola rides, there was even a village of Venetian gondoliers; see Amélie Halna du Fretay, “La flottille du Grand Canal de Versailles à l’époque de Louis XIV: diversité, technicité et prestige,” Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles (2010): http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/10312 (viewed 01.06.2018). About boat trips on the Munich canals see Kleinschroth, Michel, “Schifffahrtskanäle,” 20–22. 89. Stephanie Hanke, “The Splendour of Bankers and Merchants: Genoese Garden Grottoes of the Sixteenth Century,” Urban History 37 (2010), 3: 399–418, 416.

118   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 90. On the manipulative use of water tricks see Hanke, Zwischen Fels und Wasser, 232–237; see also Hanke, “The Splendour of Bankers,” 414–417. See also David R. Marschall, “Running from Water: Giochi d’acqua and the Sense of Touch,” in The Early Modern Villa. Senses and Perceptions versus Materiality, ed. Barbara Arciszewska (Warsaw: Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów, 2017), 131–142.

Further Reading Barbara Arciszewska, ed. The Baroque Villa. Suburban and Country Residences c. 1600–1800, Warsaw: Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów, 2009. Barbara Arciszewska, ed. The Early Modern Villa. Senses and Perceptions versus Materiality. Warsaw: Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów, 2017. Bending, Stephen. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Conan, Michel. “Il giardino della sovrana volontà del potere.” In I trionfi del Barocco: architettura in Europa 1600–1750. Edited by Henry A. Millon, 279–313. Turin, Italy: Bompiani, 1999. Harbison, Robert. Reflections on Baroque. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Mosser, Monique, and Georges Teyssot. L’architettura dei giardini d’Occidente dal Rinascimento al Novecento. Milan: Electa, 1990.

chapter 6

Fashion i ng th e Ba roqu e M a l e Martha Hollander

What did it mean to be a man in Baroque Europe? How should he dress, move, and behave? The answer was crucial for men aspiring to success, whether in everyday society or in the rarefied culture of the court. While the concept of manliness, “a repertoire of acts that change over time,” was articulated in conduct books, it is most clearly demonstrated in portraits.1 The history of dress and behavior in the seventeenth century is inextricably linked with the history of art.2 Depictions of individuals in formal portraits involved not just likenesses but the carefully arranged iconography of clothes and accessories, how they were worn, and their associations. Two portraits that bookend the Baroque period reveal the salient features of ideal manhood. The first, painted in 1595 by an unknown artist, depicts the poet John Donne (Figure 1). As a young law student with diplomatic ambitions, a reader and writer of poetry, and later a soldier, Donne epitomized the middle-class masculinity of the age. The twentythree-year-old poet stares out moodily from an oval frame. His solemn face is framed with a huge, loose hat. His exquisite starched collar is conspicuously undone, falling over the lace underneath, its loose strings meandering over his chest. His black cloak is wrapped around his left arm and then, just visible at the bottom of the frame, around his waist. The Latin inscription on the frame reads “Lady, lighten our darkness,” which suggests that the picture may have been a gift to a lover. Donne helped to design this image and referred to it in his will as “the picture of myne which is taken in the shaddowes.”3 His elegant dishevelment is tempered byhis folded arms, which signal withdrawal and contemplation. The second portrait, painted by Nicholas Largillière in 1716, shows the evolution of fashionable masculinity as well as changes in portrait style (Figure 2). The man stands in half-length, seemingly at a doorway or window with a glimpse of a landscape: just trees and sky. Instead of the large floppy hat worn by Donne, the effect of volume around the head is created by a pale gray periwig. Yet the man cultivates a similar

120   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 1  Unknown English artist John Donne, c. 1595. Oil on panel 77.1 × 62.5 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London

interplay to Donne’s between control and looseness, decorum and dishevelment. The narrow silhouette of the torso is topped with an undone collar like Donne’s but without the starched angular look. This man’s open shirt reveals his chest and a bit of lace, with a blue ribbon meant to tie together the shirt at the neck, now loose and meandering down his front. He also wears a cloak draped at the waist and gathered under his left elbow. He stands oriented sideways, with head turned. One elbow sticks out; the hand, hidden under his cloak, would be at hip or waist. His frank gaze and hint of a smile suggest the sprightlier, more vital quality of portraiture in vogue more than a century after Donne’s stylish severity. These portraits reveal some similarities over time. Both men appear in solid-color clothing in high-quality fabric with showy white linen at the neck, with elegance, highquality fabric, and gestures indicating grace and feeling. Both portrait artists have employed ancillary devices: the inscription, in Donne’s case, and in Largillière’s portrait, the snippet of nature. Nonetheless, there are also clear differences in the cut of the clothes, showing the evolution of fashion. During the Baroque period, men’s fashion was an interesting combination of rigor and looseness. The pervasive style of men’s clothing in the first half of the seventeenth century was a general looseness, known in French as à la negligence.4 This manner,

fashioning the baroque male   121

Figure 2 Nicolas de Largillière (1656–1746) Portrait of a Man. c. 1715. Oil on canvas, 92.2 × 75.4 cm. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, The Suida-Manning Collection

spread by the fashion of the French court beginning in the late sixteenth century, overtook the generally crisp, buttoned-up mode of earlier decades.5 An example of the earlier Renaissance style can be found in Giovanni Moroni’s 1576 portrait of a gentleman: long torso; small, tight ruff and cuffs; short breeches and cloak; exposed legs and flat shoes; and small flat hat (Figure 3). Donne’s portrait of twenty years later, with his untidy collar and huge hat, shows this new style beginning to dominate. Looseness in general was not yet a popular look: Michel de Montaigne, writing in 1573 about the excesses of the French court, expresses his concern that being “unbuttoned” is not only slovenly but also unnatural and inappropriate to his class.6 Advisers on behavior likewise stressed the importance of dressing appropriately to one’s class as well as profession. Images of men in both portraits and genre scenes feature a large-brimmed hat at a tilt; a doublet sometimes left partly unbuttoned at the bottom, sometimes with long horizontal cuts, or slashes, to allow the shirt to poke out; a soft collar; and long, sometimes flowing hair. Men wore their cloaks in various ways for which they weren’t designed: hanging on one side, draped or wrapped around one shoulder; folded up and tucked in their breeches to reveal sumptuous linings (often fur or silk); or, as these two portraits reveal, wrapped around their waists.

122   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 3  Giovanni Moroni (1520/1524–1578), Portrait of a Bearded Man in Black. s & d 1576. Oil on canvas, 174 × 104 cm. inv. P26W1. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Later in the century, hair remained long but became more elegantly styled, with the addition of periwigs. In the early 1660s, the three-piece suit—doublet, waistcoat, and trousers, often in matching fabric—emerged in England and ultimately spread everywhere in Europe. Civilian or military, noble or middle class, all men wore swords. The French printmaker Abraham Bosse created a series of prints, Le Jardin de la noblesse française [The garden of French nobility] specifically marketed as models for what to wear and how to look. They show the ultra-fashionable look for men in the late 1620s, according to the French court: huge hat and feather, long hair flowing in the wind, and a neatly trimmed moustache and beard; cloak worn over one shoulder and hanging free, points (i.e., the ends of ribbons) hanging from the doublet; full tapered breeches with material peeking through slits near the bottom; and soft, wide boots (Figure 4). Not only did clothes change their cut and style in the Baroque period; their depiction in art changed as well, as the portraits of Donne and Largillière’s man show. The Renaissance style of portraits often show clothes and accessories as a form of “prosthesis,” stiff and seemingly independent of the body underneath. Clothes were commodities, part of a sitter’s estate, and therefore just as important in a portrait as the sitter’s own likeness.7 Donne’s portrait was created at end of this period, when the taste for a vivid

fashioning the baroque male   123

Figure 4  After Abraham Bosse (1602/1604–1676). Gentleman Holding a Sword, from Le Jardin de la noblesse française. 1629. Etching, reverse copy, 14/3 × 9.3 cm. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

liveliness and arrested motion in visual art was beginning to develop, resulting in a more relaxed integration of clothing, accessories, face, and pose. The work of two portraitists stand out for their liberation of sitters from the formerly stiff images that had characterized earlier portraiture. (While one was Dutch and the other Flemish, their influence was international in scope.) Frans Hals’s attitudes and poses expressed the potential for speech and showed movement through stock gestures displaying grace and eloquence. Meanwhile his brushwork was dramatically loose, and his sitters were vividly alive.8 Hals’s portrait of a young man known as the “Laughing Cavalier,” resplendent in his embroidered doublet, jaunty hat and huge lace collar, is an example of this eloquent style, creating an appealing mix of extravagance and self-possession (Figure 5). To this lively ideal, Anthony Van Dyck added a level of elegance and refinement. Elongated, languid hands, tapering fingers, accompanied sometimes by ennobling classical columns and with drapes that echoed their clothing, which was with clothing dissolved into fluid folds subtly evoking classical drapery. Van Dyck’s great invention, the resulting blend of fantasy and close observation, arrogance, and graceful ease, made his work a sensation at the English court and

124   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 5  Frans Hals (1582/3–1666). The Laughing Cavalier. 1624. Oil on canvas, 112.5 × 98 × 9 cm. Wallace Collection, London

influenced future generations of portraitists.9 Van Dyck sometimes outfitted his sitters with accessories he kept in his studio, thus keeping total control of their look.10 Looseness was linked with the drapery of classical Antiquity, expressing the elegant insouciance of the upper class. In fact, looseness could be interpreted in two ways: carefree grace and superiority on the one hand, and untidy moral weakness on the other. This explains criticisms like Montaigne’s of the loose manner, despite its eager adoption by fashion-conscious men.11 Here is a typical portrait by Van Dyck, painted in 1635, of an unknown man (Figure 6). The man is all in black, a fashion of French and Spanish courts adopted throughout Europe and England by aspiring middle-class men for much of the seventeenth century.12 Like Donne, he sports a trimmed mustache and wears his cloak over his left arm while it bunches around his waist. The slashed fabric, fold in his lace collar, and freely curling hair, along with the slight turn of the head and sidelong glance, emphasize spontaneity despite his serious expression. He appears without a hat. The man’s gesture-hand forward, as if protruding out of the picture’s space into ours, is typical of the poses traditionally used by seventeenth-century portraitists to radiate both strong authority and graceful ease. The flexed wrist and gentle pointing finger suggest potential speech, a popular Baroque device for animating the mute medium of art. Hand on heart indicated sincerity.

Figure 6 Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641). Portrait of a Man. 1628–1632. Oil on canvas, 112 × 100 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York

Figure 7  Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669). Portrait of Jan Six. 1647. Etching, engraving and drypoint; fifth of five states. 24.4 × 19.3 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929

126   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Contemplation or intellectual or creative preoccupation would be expressed by folded arms, or by holding books or skulls. The man’s other hand on hip with elbow out was a hugely popular pose, signifying virile authority.13 This is further reinforced by his casually worn buckler and sword. Poses visible in full-length portraits include the contrapposto pose of Antiquity, the weight resting on one leg, evoking classical grace, or ankles together and toes turned out, reflecting the skill in dance and fencing that noble young men were supposed to learn. The latter is evident in Rembrandt’s etching of 1647 portraying his friend and patron Jan Six (Figure 7). The twenty-nine-year-old Six leans against a windowsill reading. Like Donne, Six wears his collar open, with the band strings conspicuously hanging down. He wears a riding costume (note the wide-bottomed breeches) while his cloak spreads out on the windowsill under his left elbow before falling over the table where his sword and buckler are resting. The discarded cloak suggests that Six had just come in from riding, flung it off, picked up a book, and started reading without even sitting down. Now he is rapt in his book, serene, and perfectly posed.

Behavior These carefully constructed combinations of dress, accessories, pose, and expression are embodiments of ideal masculinity. For over a century, portraits had functioned as examples of the self-discipline and thoughtfulness believed to be the best trait for a model citizen, based on ideas about knowledge and education.14 Ideal manhood was, in fact, a balancing act between power and resolve on the one hand, and sober melancholic restraint on the other: forceful virility tempered with moderation and soulfulness. The appearance of the Baroque man reveals an interesting tension between the conceptions of appropriate manhood (militaristic, fatherly) and the need for emphasizing worldliness and civility; between respectable formality and creative, elegant fantasy.15 During the early seventeenth century, the identities for Renaissance men—warrior, lover, and thinker—were reimagined as aspirational virtues of the upper-middle-class educated man, versed in several languages; aware of science; skilled in diplomacy and commerce; collector of art, books, and natural history; and trained in military practice. Sons of nobility came to be educated in academies–“finishing schools”–where they learned these refined arts of self-presentation, as well as skills in riding, shooting, dancing, fencing, ball-playing, and painting.16 Behavior, and its relation to emotions (known as “passions” or “affections”) was a new and important issue in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society.17 The concept of a gentleman, and the code of behavior known as civility, informed the thinking of the humanist elite. These codes were originally developed by two writers: Erasmus of Rotterdam in the Netherlands (De Civilitate Puerum [On the civility and customs of children], 1530) and Baldassare Castiglione in Italy (Il Cortegiano [The book of the

fashioning the baroque male   127 courtier], 1528). Both texts describe a wealth of practices collectively known as civility, or honneteté, which train the individual for social interactions appropriate to acceptance among the ruling elite. These texts were made available to a wide European readership in numerous editions, translations, and adaptations throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. A few books were aimed at young boys, such as Diego da Saavedra’s Empresas Políticas. Idea de un príncipe político Cristiano [Political maxims: Idea of a Christian political prince, 1640] written for the son of King Philip IV. Most were guides for men regarding behavior in any publicenvironment, from the court to the street. In the seventeenth century, ideal behavior was informed by the model of neo-stoicism, where passions and instincts are overcome in favor of a distanced calm.18 The essence of good behavior was modulation and adaptability. In 1530, Erasmus writes, “It is seemly for the whole man to be well ordered in mind, body, gesture and clothing.”19 Giovanni della Casa, writing in his Galateo of 1558, echoes this idea: “It is highly becoming a well-bred man, then, to have a constant regard to this elegance and harmony of manners . . . whether in walking, in standing, or in sitting; in his actions, in his dress, and the ornaments of his person; in his discourse, and in his silence; in his hours of leisure, and in his business.”20 Della Casa emphasizes that self-control derives from reason: “which increasing together with our years, and now arriving to maturity, transformed us as it were from brutes into men, so as to exercise her full force and power over our sensual appetites.” Men should aspire to “that sweetness of manners which, I apprehend, is properly called Elegance and Grace.”21 The virtue of moderation could be characterized by an appearance at once elegant and relaxed, as has already been observed. Castiglione writes in The Book of the Courtier that a gentleman should avoid too much precision and attention to one’s appearance. Here he introduces the famous concept of sprezzatura, the proper goal of which is “to cover [i.e., conceal] art: Therfore I judge it a no lesse vyce of curiositye to be in Reckelesness (which in it selfe is prayse worthye) in lettynge a mans clothes fal of his backe, then in Preciseness (whiche likewise of it self is praise worthy) to carie a mans head so like a malthorse for feare of ruffling his hear, or to keepe in the bottom of his cappe a looking glasse, and a comb in his sleeve, and to have alwayes at his heeles up and down the streetes a page with a spunge and a brushe: for this maner of Preciseness and Reckelesness are to much in the extremitie, which is alwaies a vice and contrarie to that pure and amiable simplicitie, which is so acceptable to mens mindes.”22

Along with successive editions of Erasmus, Castiglione, and della Casa, more conduct books for men, derived from these earlier sources, were published in the seventeenth century, likewise appearing in successive editions and translations: Jacques Faret, L’Honnete Homme ou l’art de plaire a la court (the civil man or the art of pleasing at court), 1630; Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, first published in 1622. While the Castiglionian ideal of moderation was observed in Spain, it was superseded early in the seventeenth century in favor of the desire for fame and the ambition to be extraordinary. Spanish books on conduct have a highly political emphasis, suggesting a strategic approach to behavior based on the ideas of statecraft.23 The focus is on achieving

128   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 8  Pieter Paul Rubens (1577–1641). Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma. 1603. Oil on canvas, 290 × 207 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, New York

perfection. Baltasar Gracián writes in El Heroe (The Hero, 1637): “I will try to make you the greatest person possible, a miracle of perfection, a king, if not by birth, by deeds.”24 The role of privado or advisor to the king was highly coveted, and the ascendance of privados inspired a culture of competitive performance at the Madrid court.25 Pieter Paul Rubens depicted one such privado, Duke of Lerma, as an embodiment of political and military triumph. He is not only in half armor but on horseback, carrying a ruler’s baton (Figure 8). Then there were fencing manuals and advice books about recreation. Richard Blome, The Gentleman’s Recreation, (in two parts), 1686, was a compendium of general training. The subtitle reads “the first being an encyclopedy of the arts and sciences . . . the second part treats of horsmanship, hawking, hunting, fowling, fishing, and agriculture: with a short treatise of cock-fighting” (London: S. Roycroft, 1686). Blome includes mathematics, sciences, and drawing, plus seamanship and navigation, as well as sport. Ideas of behavior were also influenced by analytical and taxonomic studies of gestures and physiognomy. These studies included Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), John Bulwer’s Chirologia, a taxonomy of gestures, and his lesser-known Pathomyotomia

fashioning the baroque male   129 (1649), which identified the muscles of the face activated when expressing particular feelings. Courtin’s Nouveau Traité de la civilité of 1671 contains a full discussion of gestures and their nuances. The texts emphasize control of one’s movements and speech; yet the goal was not so much to suppress emotions, as to guide and adapt them, like della Casa’s ideal of “grace” through conformity. The public self, expressed in deportment and articulated in art, was an important indicator of social class, but also of character.26 The perpetual maintenance of this public selfrequired creativity, wit, and resourcefulness.

Thinking about Clothes Combined with codes of behavior, fashion—along with its idealization through visual art—was crucial in the formation of personal and public identity. It was well understood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that being properly dressed required whatSue Vincent calls “sartorial agency”: a sophisticated knowledge of textiles, cuts, dyes, and so on (along with the associations they evoked), which enabled consumers to make informed choices about assembling their appearance. Because of their greater freedom and mobility, Baroque men had greater sartorial agency than women.27 They were responsible for their own clothes and grooming, did their own buying, and remained acutely conscious of the social and economic significance of how they looked. Letters and memoirs attest to this importance of clothes throughout the Baroque period. In his famous diary, Samuel Pepys describes an evening with a friend: Creed came and dined with me, and after dinner he and I upstairs, and I showed him my velvet cloake and other things of clothes, that I have lately bought, which he likes very well, and I took his opinion as to some things of clothes, which I purpose to wear, being resolved to go a little handsomer than I have hitherto . . . a velvet cloake, two new cloth suits, black, plain both; a new shagg gowne, trimmed with gold buttons and twist, with a new hat, and, silk tops for my legs, and many other things, being resolved henceforward to go like myself.28

Fashion plates were relatively rare in the early to mid-seventeenth century.29 Instead, one learned about what to wear not only by consulting friends but by looking at what others were wearing. Samuel Pepys observes, in his famous diary, “My wife and I walked to Grays Inn, to observe fashions of the ladies, because of my wife's making some clothes.”30 Pepys’s diary is full of references to clothes. He buys his wife clothes as well as himself. He gives her gifts of clothes to lift her spirits. His brother sends him clothes after they have had a fight. Clothes are not only essential to self-presentation, and material commodities, but currency of good feeling. In family correspondences there are frequent references to clothes and to concerns about looking good in public. Young men, supported by their families while at university or traveling, often wrote home to their families about clothes. In 1622, the Dutch

130   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque ­ iplomat and poet Constantijn Huygens, while staying in London as a young man, d writes to his parents, “Send me what Grotius [the tailor] has correctly issued, and shirts and linen with lace; you should see how preciously my companions are dressed!”31 Two generations later, in 1688, The young Englishman Edmund Verney writes to his father while at Oxford: “Most Honoured Father,—I want a hat, and a pair of fringed gloves very much, and I desire you to send me them if you can possibly before Sunday next, for as I come from church everybody gazeth upon me and asketh who I am. This I was told by a friend of Mine, who was asked by two or three who I was.”32

Fashion and Morality Despite the serious engagement and pleasure people took in their clothes, fashion (and interest in fashion) was the object of disapproval. Moralizing about fashion in various forms such as books, sermons, and broadsheets had existed as long as Western fashion itself: that is, since the fourteenth century. What lies behind the criticism of fashion is partly Christian morality in general about paying too much attention to the physical body, (i.e., vanity) but also the fear of gender confusion. This is another facet of the balancing act of masculinity: clothes were essential to manly appearance, yet showing too much preoccupation with them was seen by moralists to be unmanly. For most of the seventeenth century, effeminate behavior and excessive ornament in men was linked with foreignness and extravagance. The further association with homosexuality was often unspoken.33 In England, however, the court of the homosexual James I was explicitly regarded as a site of moral and financial corruption, incompatible with masculine, and hence, political rectitude.34 During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, styles of clothing spread rapidly throughout the courts of Europe, disseminated through travel, word of mouth, and printed portraits of courtiers. Meanwhile, the textile industry was the fastest growing industry in Europe. Because of so many fashion ideas, large and small, flooding European cities, there was a universal concern that people would refuse to wear native fashions and materials. In turn, concerns about fashion magnified considerably during this same period, becoming associated not only with gender but with national identity.35 In general, women more closely associated with clothing, and diatribes were primarily directed against them. Attacks on male extravagance expressed an even greater anxiety about the feminization of men, and hence, a threat to national as well as personal identity.36 Thus, the ideology of dress in the seventeenth century, expressed in moralizing texts, insisted on a strict distinction between the genders, between social classes, and between native and foreign identities. Sumptuary laws were enacted throughout Europe, generally forbidding the wearing of bright colors, certain fabrics, and ornaments such as lace, ribbons, and jewels, especially for middle-class men. These laws were enacted for various reasons, whether preventing gender confusion, promoting domestic cloth industries

fashioning the baroque male   131 rather than foreign imports, or reinforcing class distinctions. Bright colors, certain fabrics, ornament such as ribbons, lace, and jewels, were often forbidden to the middle and lower classes. In England, laws suppressing imported clothing or styles were not only driven by the supposed moral superiority of plain over fancy clothes but were intended to encourage the local cloth industry. In France, laws were enacted to reinforce class differences by preventing middle-class men from dressing like their aristocratic superiors. The Dutch mostly avoided sumptuary laws in order to encourage their vastly profitable domestic textile industries. In 1672, laws were finally enacted for patriotic (rather than moralistic) reasons: to keep down French influence.37 Later, laws were enacted by the Dutch regent class to prevent class mixing: for example, an Amsterdam city ordinance of 1682 forbade the wearing of lace, jewels, or expensive fabrics by servants because they were thought indistinguishable from their employers.38 Sumptuary laws had symbolic social and political value, though they were only loosely enforced and almost universally ignored. Meanwhile, the ambivalence about fashion and masculinity remained. This awareness of the balancing act (how should a man care about his clothes?) is neatly summed up in two Verney family letters. A gentleman of substance should not appear to think too much about clothes, since it suggested superficiality. Sir Ralph Verney describes a young gentleman he admires as “Not that thin sort of animal that flutters from tavern to playhouse and back again, all his life made of wig & cravat, without one dram of thought in his composition—but one who had solid worth.”39 Elsewhere, a cousin of the Verneys writes, with some concern, of her potential son-in-law that he has “an ill character in the tittle tattle of society [among] the sparks of the town & gentlemen that set their cravat strings & periwigs well.”40 Yet Sir Ralph’s grandson, the sixteen-year-old Edmund, whose letter to his father asking for gloves is quoted above, privately aspires to be one of those “sparks of town.” Preparing his wardrobe for going up to Oxford in 1685, he notes with pride his “new silver hilted sword, his new striped Morning gown,” and his “6 new laced Bands whereof one is of Point de Loraine.”41 A closer look at the articles about which young Edmund felt so strongly–the shirt, the gown, and the sword–reveals their associative power.

The Shirt One persistent feature of Baroque male fashion is the shirt: exposed white linen, from Donne’s open collar to the slashes in van Dyck’s man’s sleeves. It is important to understand that shirts were actually underclothes. Any display of linen—mostly kept hidden under one’s clothes—would suggest a state of undress, and thus, the closest thing to actual nudity. Male nudity was associated in visual culture with heroic figures of classical Antiquity. During the Renaissance, especially in Italy, nude and seminude portraits were occasionally commissioned as an alternative to contemporary dress. In  the seventeenth century, a mythologizing portrait style—with antique clothing,

132   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque rather than nudity—also became popular. Yet for a modern gentleman, the most effective and decorous means of communicating gravitas and classical heroism was not nudity or classical costume but through the show of linen. Thus, linen became a surrogate for bare arms, which were rarely seen in contemporary clothes and considered improper. Linen, or an open shirt revealing the throat, was the closest possible evocation of classical drapery. Men’s underclothes would not receive as much attention and exposure again until the ascendance of the T-shirt in the midtwentieth century, when film actors such as Marlon Brando and James Dean replaced monarchs and courtiers as disseminators of fashion. For Baroque men, shirts and collars were important vehicles for self-expression. Baroque portraits and self-portraits, as well as genre images of idealized gentlemen, reveal plenty of white linen: from the slashes and billowing sleeves of elegant and sober men to the open shirts of melancholic self-portraits. (This detail would have presented an opportunity for painters to display their skill at handling lead white pigment, added last in the painting process and tough to manipulate.) A man’s shirt became the most important indicator of class, sexuality, and character.42 Van Dyck’s man, for example, wears his collar decorously tied at his throat, but the white linen pokes out from the long slashes on his sleeves as if to compensate for this degree of finish. These vertical cuts on the arm and chest, called fenestrations, came into general use after 1625 in France, following the prohibition on embroidery.43 Yet cuts and slashes in men’s clothing first appeared in the fourteenth century. They originated from military culture, imitating and romanticizing the ripped clothing of knights in combat.44 Collars in particular, since they were always exposed, were the subject of great attention. Fashions in collars changed over the years, often dramatically. The historian and novelist Charles Sorel, writing in his Les Loix de la Galanterie in 1644, gives a neatly potted history of the collar, at least, in France. As to collars, our fathers wore small simple ones, while we began with circles of cardboard over which we laid a starched collar, after that we had a kind of unstarched cape which reached almost to the elbow, and then after that collars became smaller and of a reasonable size, though at the same time there were large tubular-pleated ruffs with enough linen in them to make sails of a windmill: now these are all discarded and our collars are so small that they are like sleeve cuffs.45

A quick tour of mid-seventeenth-century portraits reveals linen at the wrists and neck, sometimes heavily starched, plus softer linen poking through unbuttoned or slashed doublets. They could also be highly starched. In Spain, men vying for social recognition at the court wore the stiffened collar known as a golilla well into midcentury. Made of pasteboard covered with linen, it separated the head from the neck and torso, allowing a somewhat shorter fall of hair above.46 Velasquez’s portrait of a young courtier shows an example of this severe fashion, which separated the head from the neck; as a consequence, Spanish men tended to wear their hair somewhat shorter than elsewhere (Figure 9).

fashioning the baroque male   133

Figure 9  Diego Velasquez (1599–1660) Young Spanish Nobleman. c. 1630. Oil on canvas, 89.2 × 69.5 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Bpk Bildagentur Alte Pinakothek/Sybille Forster/Art Resource, New York

The standing band worn in England and northern Europe was a similar stiffened curve, of varying widths, standing out and away from the shoulders. As Sorel describes, collars later tended to be soft and flat—the so-called falling band—and depicted undone, with or without lace, often with artfully hanging band-strings, like those worn by Donne and Jan Six. Solid citizens often liked to be portrayed either in contemplation with books or skulls, turning or rising from a chair, or looking up from work. Such presentations reveal a new cultural preoccupation with professionalism, as well as reason and self-knowledge.47 At the same time, the exposure of the shirt—and its suggestions of barely controlled nudity—made a piquant contrast not only to dark or black clothes but to the sitter’s unruffled calm. White linen, which could be tamed and minimal as in a tight collar, or more freely draped or bunched, as in sleeves, evokes a sense of subtle disorder along with nudity itself. This is especially apparent in the use of open collars in portraits. This detail seems quite modern today, a natural informality; yet it would have carried associations beyond that during the Baroque period. Jan Six, for example, wears his collar open, with the

134   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque strings conspicuously hanging down. This signifies not only his retreat into his home but into his intellectual preoccupations. The loose or undone collar was also associated with melancholy. This complex condition, both medical and spiritual, took on a cult status during the sixteenth century.48 Images of melancholy men, in portraits, genre scenes and allegories, proliferated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The masculine types essentially fall into two broad categories: the pining lover and the man of learning. Both share a deep preoccupation of spirit and mind, in withdrawal from regular society. The melancholy look was developed at the Jacobean court by the portraitists and brothers-in-law Marcus Gheeraerts and Isaac Oliver.49 They depicted their aristocratic patrons depicted in open shirts, in miniature half-length, surrounded by flames, or lying down near their discarded swords in a soulful parody of dead soldiers. Later the fashionable melancholic was often accompanied with books, globes, and other instruments of science or music, along with skulls. John Evelyn would echo this in his mid-seventeenthcentury portrait by Robert Walker: he is open-shirted and draped, holding a skull, head in hand (Figure 10). Donne’s portrait shows him with folded arms, which, along with the inscription, feature the idea of darkness and brooding, along with lovesickness, characteristic of the melancholy persona. To advertise their work, artists portrayed themselves and their allegorical stand-ins in a variety of costumes and accouterments, evoking creativity, wealth, cosmopolitanism, learning, and leisure.50 The shirt in disarray evoked this mode of mental preoccupation. Sixteenth-centuryportraits depict young men in the throes of lovesickness not only with their band strings

Figure 10  Robert Walker (1599–1658) John Evelyn. Oil on canvas, 87.9 × 64.1 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London

fashioning the baroque male   135

Figure 11  John Hayls (1600–1679). Samuel Pepys. Oil on canvas, 1666, 75.6 × 62.9 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London

hanging, but tugging on the strings, or touching the openings of their shirts.51 In seventeenth-century portraiture the loose or open collar and hanging bandstrings came to signal intellectual credibility.52 Later in the seventeenth century, the collar was often replaced by a cravat. Like a collar, a cravat was a band of fabric, usually white linen, sometimes trimmed with lace. The difference is how it was cut and worn. Cravats, which appeared in England and France around 1660, were long, and loosely tied around the neck rather than cut into semicircular or triangular shape. They were depicted variously as very loose, undone, or even missing altogether, revealing the bare neck and throat. Samuel Pepys is depicted by John Hayls in 1660 wearing a cravat along with an Asian-style robe (Figure 11). Largillière’s man is shown entirely without a cravat; instead his shirt is trimmed with a strip of lace, while the blue ribbon normally tying its ends is hanging loose. A muchcopied portrait of 1690 by Godfrey Kneller of Grinling Gibbons similarly shows the great woodcarver without a cravat, or any lace in sight, instead with an open shirt (Figure 12). His right cuff is pulled back slightly to better reveal the soft folds of his shirtsleeve. His cloak, as in Largillière’s portrait, has become a generic piece of drapery, similarly draped across the body and around the waist. For Baroque men, looking good meant displaying their shirts to proper effect. Throughout the seventeenth century, this meant displaying it as much as possible. In 1644, the historian and novelist Charles Sorel observes, in his Les Loix de Galanterie [The laws of elegance], “the opening of the shirt . . . must always be trimmed with lace, for it is only an old fogey who buttons his doublet all the way down.”53 Edmund Verney, at

136   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 12  After Godfrey Kneller (1646–723). Grinling Gibbons. Based on a work of circa 1690. Oil on canvas, 123.2 × 99.1 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London

Oxford in 1688, writes to his mother, “I hope you will consider to buy me some good shirts or else some sort of waistcoat suitable for Summer, for it is not fashionable for any Gentleman to go buttoned up either summer or winter but especially summer.”54

The Lock: Hair and Its Significance Along with linen, long hair was the source of masculine pride. The fashion for long, loose hair was inspired by the ascension of two monarchs: the long-haired James I of England, in 1603, and the young and beardless Louis XIII of France in 1610.55 The longhaired look quickly became a sensation in France and spread throughout Europe and England. Hair was worn long, from covering the ears, to hanging over the shoulders. Mustaches and especially beards were signs of mature manliness and were carefully trimmed and oiled, since during the early modern period young men began growing facial hair relatively late—often not until their mid- to late twenties.56 While long hair on men was always fashionable, it was condemned as effeminate, untidy, or both. It was also associated with the trait of feminine vanity.57 As early as 1574,

fashioning the baroque male   137 Montaigne tartly observed “these long effeminate locks of hair” at the French court. He was probably thinking of hair like John Donne’s of twenty years later, hanging just below the ears in a modified bob.58 By 1630, Van Dyck’s sitter has far longer, more disordered hair. A thick lock, longer than the rest, falls over his left shoulder. This “love-lock” was a fashion first appearing in about 1620, worn by both men and women. Of varying length and thickness, the love-lock was sometimes braided, curled, or ornamented with a rosette or ribbon.59 It was also a special target for condemnation, seen as not only feminizing and extravagant, but dirty. This did nothing to diminish its huge popularity.60 Jan Six, in 1647, has no love-lock but his hair is long and full, falling over his large square collar to his shoulders. By 1666, Pepys’s hair falls half way down his back; as he turns his head, a stray curl falls over his snowy cravat. Later in the century, another English monarch spurred a new innovation. When Charles II returned to England in 1660 after his exile in France, he introduced, among other French fashions, the periwig—a thick wig with long curling hair. Periwigs, especially in formal contexts, replaced the wearing of natural hair. In France, the perruque had evolved from a hair supplement to a full replacement for the wearer’s own hair, first worn by the newly crowned Louis XIV when he decided to shave his own head.61 Like swords, Renaissance codpieces, and other trappings, wigs were a kind of fetish, standing in for male power and class, one of many “forms of self-enactment that served to define ­ niformity.”62 masculinity politically and culturally” establishing “monolithic and phallic u Generally made from human hair, periwigs were extremely heavy, elaborate, and carefully made. Clearly, they were expensive commodities. Pepys writes, “Home, and by and by comes Chapman, the periwig-maker, and upon my liking it, without more ado I went up, and there he cut off my hair, which went a little to my heart at present to part with it; but, it being over, and my periwig on, I paid him 3 pounds for it; and away went he, with my own hair, to make up another of it.”63 Largilliére’s man, for example, is clean shaven, since the beard had gone out of fashion, retaining only a sliver of moustache until the mid-eighteenth century. He wears a grayish-white wig with the characteristic high wings on either side of a severe part at the crown. It is loosely tied at the back with a red ribbon, which dimly echoes the untied blue ribbon at his chest. Since they were made from human hair, periwigs could also be of a natural color. An example of a naturally colored periwig can be found in the portrait of Grinling Gibbons; his brown wig falls well over his shoulders. The taste for exotic clothing was expressed everywhere. Well-heeled Western men could purchase Asian and central Asian clothing. Pepys records going “to an India shop, and there bought a gown and sash, which cost me 26s.”64 With the proper connections, one could have them custom made. Edmund Verney asks his brother John, stationed at Aleppo, to send him, along with “a well-tempered Turkish or Persian Scimitar or Battle Axe, or Persian Bow & Arrows or such like Toys,” “a Turkish habit from head to foot, but not of cloth [i.e., cotton] because that’s too common here. Let all be neat & handsome, the Turban chiefly. I am bigger & taller something than you, therefore bespeak it accordingly.”65 Turbans were not only worn for their exotic appeal but for more practical reasons. Bald men wore them informally, for warmth, when not wearing their heavy periwigs. John Verney writes that with his own hair “being already almost all come off,”

138   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque he asks his family in England to send him a wig and complains that he “must goe in the Turkish mode before it comes.”66

The Robe This taste was not only expressed in turbans, but even more in robes, or gowns. Pepys, sporting his smooth cravat and long flowing hair, pre-periwig, sat for Hayls’s portrait in what he called his “Indian Gowne.” This garment was an imported Asian garment of the sort worn as leisure wear by gentleman.67 Full length with long sleeves, open in the front, usually silk or cotton (both imported fabrics) and often worn with sashes, these included the Japanese kimono, the Indian banyan, and Turkish kaftan. Pepys’s term was typical: Words like “Persian,” “Indian,” and “Turkish” were often used interchangeably to describe any garment native to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. They were also called morning gowns in English, Schlafrocken in German, and robes de chambre in French, terms evoking a kind of undress, rather than clothing, for sleep or private leisure. Comfortable and elegant, these gowns were all the rage. Having first entered the English and European clothing market as rare objects, they became increasingly sought after, created in Asia for the Western textile trade and, later, produced domestically. Scholars wore them, appropriately, since their work was done at home, at their desks. Yet to be portrayed in one could also be a useful form of self-promotion. Artists, for example, often depict themselves wearing robes even while at work, an idealized rather than realistic depiction, suggesting both affluent leisure and intellectual prestige. The Dutch society portraitist Michel van Musscher presents himself in 1679 in a fictional version of his studio, surrounded with elaborate props evoking the study of art and music (Figure 13). He wears a wadded silk plum-colored gown edged in gray. Like many artists, he owned this garment and used it frequently in self-portraits or as a studio prop. Pepys’s gown is typical. Its thickness is clearly visible around the collar and the fall of the edge of the sleeve. While this one is a solid color, patterns were also common. While Pepys rented his gown for Hayls’s portrait, he owned several. We have already read of his “new shagg gowne, trimmed with gold buttons and twist.” (Shag refers to a thick-piled silk or wool, used in linings, gloves, and gowns.) He wears his gown with a cravat, a common practice by midcentury, and holds music he himself has composed. Portraitists could exploit the aesthetic qualities of these gowns for their draping effect, which lent a classicizing, timeless elegance to formal portraits. A beautiful Dutch example is Nicolas Maes’s portrait of Cornelis Munter (1679), showing his important sitter (secretary, and later mayor, of Amsterdam) draped in seemingly formless, shimmering fabric (Figure 14). Maes creates this effect by depicting Munter wrapping the robe around himself and holding the edges in place with his hand on his hip. From the layers of paint it is clear that Maes worked especially hard on the shiny, smooth surface of this sumptuous robe. Similarly, cloaks were reimagined as almost generic swaths of fabric, draping over the

fashioning the baroque male   139

Figure 13  Michiel van Musscher (1645–1705). Self-Portrait in the Studio. Oil on canvas, 57 × 46.5 cm. Museum Rotterdam

shoulder, across the body, and bunching around the waist. This is visible especially in Largillière’s portrait, in contrast to the more clearly articulated cloaks worn by Donne and van Dyck’s man, and cast off by Rembrandt’s Jan Six. The untailored look of gowns that gave them their exotic flavor also, predictably, made them the target of amusement and disapproval. This was especially true when they

140   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 14  Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693) Portrait of Cornelis Munter. 1679. Oil on canvas, 56 × 47.5 cm. Amsterdam Museum

were worn outdoors. At eighteenth-century universities, especially in the Netherlands, these silk and cotton gowns had replaced traditional academic robes. In 1762, a German traveler, Johann Beckman, described a professor who lectured “like all Dutch theologians, in a dressing-gown; many of his listeners also appeared in the same garment.”68 In 1735, the Baron de Pöllnitz remarked tartly of Leiden University students, “they do not bother themselves just as in Germany, with magnificence in their clothes; many of them hardly ever leave their dressing-gowns, and that is the favorite clothing of the bourgeoises. This made me believe, the first time that I passed through this city, that there was some epidemic disease, because all those undressed in the streets seemed thus convalescent.”69

The Sword While gowns were a way to show softness and leisure, swords had the opposite effect: virility and danger.70 By the late sixteenth century, it was essential to be seen with a sword. Montaigne writes, “Let them not permit that a gentleman shall appear in a

fashioning the baroque male   141 respectable place without his sword.”71 Van Dyck depicts his gentleman wearing a sword, held on by a decorated buckler swooping diagonally across his chest. This detail of gleaming metal, [combining with] the sheen of black satin, finishes off the man’s look by evoking the potential for vigorous physical action. Van Dyck has placed this sword, with its hint of violence and raw power, directly next to the man’s graceful, gesturing hand, further suggesting the closeness of two modes of manliness: charm and aggression. There was good reason for the ability to use a sword. Seventeenth-century Europe was a violent culture. Armed brawling was commonplace everywhere, and the rules of formal dueling were largely ignored, despite conventional disclaimers in the manuals.72 The only thing that mattered was self-preservation. Fencing manuals provided instruction in various “schools” (i.e., techniques) of swordplay. While fencing was considered a form of deportment and exercise for the elite, most schools demonstrated the swiftest and most efficient way to disable or kill one’s opponent. The English fencing master George Hale, in The Private Schoole of Defence, of 1614, remarks, “The Science of Defence is a remedie to an unavoyded Disease, in opposing sodaine assaults. Because of ‘Accidental Quarrels’ it is important to know how to defend oneself with wearing weapons, being for the most part, a single rapier or short sword.”73 The rapier could be used either alone, or in conjunction with the sidearms a gentleman would probably have with him at all times. One was the dagger, the universal cheap weapon of choice for men of all social classes. The other was the cloak, generally hip or knee length, not only an indispensable fashion item but appropriated for use in civilian defense. Fencing manuals included instruction in the use of both. A print from Rodolfo Capo Ferro’s definitive manual Gran Simulacro dell’arte e dell’uso della Scherma, 1610, shows the use of cloaks (Figure 15).

Figure 15  Rodolfo Capo Ferro da Cagli, Gran Simulacro dell’arte e dell’uso della Scherma, Siena, Apresso Saluestro Marchetti e Camillo Turi, 1610, Plate 36.

142   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Pepys recalls a rather embarrassing anecdote: on his way to perform an official mission, he forgot his cloak. Consequently, he had to leave his sword at the Tower Gate and wait inside an ale-house for a servant to fetch it from home.74 Clearly a cloak had to accompany the sword, for the sake of decorum as well as potential defense. Swords evoked military culture, and the appearance of soldiers, even in civilian life. Before the late seventeenth century, when the regimental system was introduced and commanders began clothing their soldiers in similar colors, military uniforms as we currently understand them did not yet exist. Soldiers might wear armor and carry weapons. Otherwise, for most of the seventeenth century, their clothes followed the cut and fashion of civilian wear: shirt, doublet, trousers, and boots with spurs for the cavalry. (Occasionally, if they could acquire them, soldiers might wear buff-colored leather doublets, which were far more durable than regular clothing.) Sashes were particularly important: they were used, along with feathers and cockades in their hats, as colored field signs for distinguishing different nationalities of the troops. Meanwhile, officers generally wore the most fashionable and elegant clothes they could afford. Thus, apart from wearing actual armor, it was fairly easy for any man to look like a soldier. Younger men especially imitated the military look, just as they imitated soldiers’ freewheeling behavior off the battlefield.75 Swords were associated not only with self-defense and soldierly vigor, but also with social status, reflecting the traditional connection between swords and knighthood. For middle-class men, sword-wearing was a way of assuming the trappings of the aristocracy.76 Occasionally officers appear in portraits with a gorget, or breastplate worn just below the neck, while royals and noblemen were sometimes depicted in full armor. Whether or not the armor was ceremonial or actually owned and used by the sitter, its message of power was unmistakable. Generally, the sitter would also wear a ruff or collar, sometimes trimmed with lace. For example, Rubens depicts the Duke of Lerma on horseback, in half armor. This use of horse and armor—and the cavalry battle in the background—endows the Duke with military authority. At the same time, he sports a sumptuous ruff edged in gold thread, along with a chain bearing the Order of Santiago. These flourishes of elegance, unsuited to actual battle, expands the idea of heroism signaled by the armor. Linen and lace, suggesting a life without manual labor or physical effort, are juxtaposed with the impenetrable body designed for bloody war. The rhetorical depiction of armor in portraits can be traced to the mid-sixteenth century. Armor was essential to Italian ideas about masculinity and important in Florence in particular, which was thought to be under threat by foreign “effeminate” influences.77 Duke Cosimo de’Medici went so far as to have himself represented in Antique-style armor, the first of many Italian rulers to do so. This association with classical nudity stood not only for heroic manliness but honesty and truth: showing the whole man, hiding nothing. Regardless of whether the sitter wore armor, he would have been carrying what is generally called a rapier: a long, heavy double-bladed weapon with a rounded hilt.78 This style was originally developed for piercing through chinks in armor and became an

fashioning the baroque male   143 object of standard use among citizens as well as in the military. In van Dyck’s portrait, the man’s sword emerges from the folds of his cloak, nestled against his hand. While swords were depicted as marks of both nobility and manly courage in the face of ever-imminent threat, they could also be depicted being conspicuously cast aside. Rembrandt portrays Jan Six at a moment when his intellectual life supersedes his riding, hunting, and military rank. Leaning on a windowsill, he abandons these active pursuits for an interlude of reading, his hat hung high on the wall behind him along with his hunting knife. His fur-lined cloak drapes elaborately around him, while his sword and bandolier repose on a table. This unusual portrait shows a rare moment of privacy, a new concept in Baroque life and thought.79 Discarded swords are, in a sense, attributes of the melancholy look, indicating a meditative state of retreat, a lack of aggression and resolve and aggression. The pose of head on hand or folded arms sometimes accompanied a discarded sword, a trope in literature as well as art. The poet and social critic Samuel Rowlands, in 1607, begins his discussion of “The Melancholie” with the following invocation: Rapier lie there, and there my hat and feather, Drawe my silke curtaine to obscure the light, Goose-quill and I must joine a while together: Lady forbeare I pray, keepe out of sight.80

Rowland’s verse focuses on the speaker’s physical withdrawal into a quiet space, as well as his isolation from his public self and from love and war. The frontispiece of his book features a figure with his hat shading his eyes and folded arms, like Donne in his somber portrait. With a dancer’s grace, Jan Six abandons his sword and retreats to his window and his book. The discarding of a sword is displayed with the same rhetorical flourish as the wearing of one, offering the thoughtful obverse of sociability and power. The turn from heroism to meditation, expressed through clothing, accessories, pose and gaze, offers an especially striking instance of the tensions inherent in fashioned manhood. Portraits enabled the Baroque man, equipped with his knowledge of clothes, the codes of behavior, and social context, to cultivate an appealingly diverse set of attributes. The terms of masculinity shifted constantly from looseness to restraint, from disorder to elegant finish, from affability to gloom. These aspirational images reveal how successfully the civil servants of Europe, aided by the shrewdness and talents of artists, achieved a complex, dignified version of the public masculine self.

Notes 1. Shifra Armon, Masculine Virtue in Early Modern Spain (New York: Routledge, 2015), 5. 2. Emilie S. Gordenker, “Is the History of Dress Marginal? Some Thoughts on Costume in Seventeenth-Century Painting,” Fashion Theory 3 (1999), 219–240. In particular, Gordenker observes that the history of clothing before the late seventeenth century is in a “vicious circle: because of the paucity of extant clothes of the period and because of the irregular

144   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque appearance of fashion prints, our knowledge of clothing often derives from portraiture; yet portraits are dated on the basis of dress style. This difficulty is aggravated in the seventeenth century by the introduction of fantastic elements to costumes, even in portraiture” (220–221). 3. He is referring to the dark background of the picture. T. Cooper with A. Fraser, A Guide to Tudor and Jacobean Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2012), 25. 4. See Marieke De Winkel, Fashion or Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 122–130. See also Bianca du Mortier, “Costume in Frans Hals,” in Seymour Slive, Frans Hals (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1989), 45–60. On criticisms leveled against the new loose look, see Aileen Ribeiro Dress and Morality (1986) (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 84–87. 5. On the adaptation of French style in the Netherlands, see du Mortier, “Costume in Frans Hals,” 49. 6. Excerpted from Michel de Montaigne The Essays of Montaigne, trans. E.  J.  Trechmann (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), in Kim  P.  Johnson, ed. Fashion Foundation: Early Writings on Fashion and Dress (New York: Berg, 2003), 16–17. 7. Peter Stallybrass and Ann  R.  Jones, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 40–49. 8. See David Smith, “Courtesy and its Discontents: Frans Hals’ Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen,” Oud Holland 100, no. 1 (1986): 20–21. 9. Emilie E. S. Gordenker, Van Dyck and the Representation of Dress (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols), 2001. 10. Stallybrass and Jones, Renaissance Clothing, 45–46. 11. Alison McNeil Kettering, “Gentlemen in Satin: Masculine ideals in Later SeventeenthCentury Dutch Portaiture,” Art Journal 56 (1997): 41–47. 12. Irene Groeneweg, “Regenten in het zwart: vroom en deftig?” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 46 (1995): 199–251. 13. Joneath Spicer, “The Renaissance Elbow,” in H.  Roodenburg, ed. A Cultural History of Gesture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 84–128. 14. Ann Jensen Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 110–111. 15. As Shifra Armon points out, “Viewed diachronically from 1500 to 1700 [conduct books] . . . exhibit the instability of gender identity over time”; Armon, Masculine Virtue, 5. 16. Herman Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body: Perspectives on Gesture in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle, The Netherlands: Waanders, 2005), 47–71. 17. On seventeenth-century discourses of shame and the body, see Gail Kern Paster’s wide-ranging study The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1993. 18. On the neostoic ideal, see Suzanne  J.  Walker, “Composing the Passions in Rubens’s Hunting Scenes,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek: The Passions in the Arts of the Early Modern Netherlands 60 (2011): 115–116. On neostoic ideals in portraiture, see Ann Jensen Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland. Portraiture and the Production of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 105–110. See also Lewis C. Siefert, Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 21–56. 19. Desiderius Erasmus, Literary and Educational Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978–c. 1989), vol. 3, 273.

fashioning the baroque male   145 20. Giovanni Della Casa, Galateo, or a Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners, trans. Richard Graves (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), 169. 21. Della Casa, Galateo, 156, 167. 22. Baldassare Castiglione, The Booke of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561) and edited in 1900 (London: D. Nutt, 1900), 36. Hoby’s influential translation was widely circulated and reprinted in England and came to form the idea of masculine identity well into the seventeenth century. 23. Jorge Checa, “Didactic Prose, History, Life Writing, Convent Writing, Crónicas de Indias,” in David T. Gies, ed. The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 289–290. 24. Baltasar Gracián, A Pocket Mirror for Heroes, trans. Christopher Maurer (New York: Crown, 2011), 1. 25. Armon, Masculine Virtue, 60. 26. Roodenburg for example, discusses Dutch painters’ use of particular gestures to depict different social classes. The Eloquence of the Body, 113–145. 27. Sue Vincent, “To Fashion a Self,” Dressing in Seventeenth-Century England,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 3, no. 2 (1999): 203–205. 28. October 31, 1663. Diary of Samuel Pepys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979–1983), vol. 3, 357. 29. The fashion plate collection, a series of prints depicting contemporary clothing styles, began to develop in France. See Carl Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 51–55. 30. May 4, 1662, Diary, 77. 31. J.  A.  Worp, ed. De briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens (1608–1687) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1911), Vol. 1, nr. 100. (June 8 1622) “Zend mij toe, wat Grotius juist heft iutgegeven, en hemden en linnen met kant; gij moest eens zien, hoe kostbaar mijne makkers gekleed zijn!” 32. February 2, 1685. Frances Verney, with Margaret Verney, ed. Memoirs of the Verney family During the Seventeenth Century (London: Longmans Green, 1907), vol. 4, 417. 33. Ian McCormick, Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Writings (Florence, KY: Routledge, 1997), 118–119. 34. David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850. Studies in the History of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 55. 35. Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion. A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 103. 36. On the historical association between women and fashion, see Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 146–151. On the promotion of native fashions, see Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, 65. 37. Linda Stone-Ferrier, Images of textiles: The Weave of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Society (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 219. 38. Derek Phillips, The Good Life: Well-Being in Amsterdam’s Golden Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 85–86. 39. July 18, 1680. Verney, Memoirs, vol. 4, 246. 40. April 26, 1687. Verney, Memoirs, 423. 41. January 20, 1685. Verney, Memoirs, 362. 42. Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988), 58–77.

146   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 43. Bianca du Mortier, “Costume in Frans Hals,” Seymour Slive, Frans Hals (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1989), 59–60, n. 90. 44. Andrea Denny-Brown, “Rips and Slits: the Torn Garment and the Medieval Self,” Catherine Richardson, ed., Clothing Culture 1350–1650 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 223–237. 45. “et que la description de cette bigarrerie ayant esté faicte par quelqu’un en ce qui est des collets, l’on a dit qu’au lieu que nos peres en portoient de petits tout simples ou de petites fraizes, semblables à celles d’un veau, nous avons au commencement porté des rotondes de carte fort, sur lesquelles un collet empesé se tenoit estendu en rond en maniere de theatre, qu’apres l’on a porté des especes de peignoirs sans empeser, qui s’estendoient jusqu’au coude; qu’en suite l’on les a rognez petit à petit pour en faire des collets assez rasonnables, et qu’au mesme temps l’on a porté de gros tuyaux godronnez que l’on appelloit encore des fraizes, ou il y a avoit assez de toille pour les aisles d’un Moulin à vent, et qu’enfin quittant tout cet attirail, l’on est venu à porter des collets si petits, qu’il semble que l’on se soit mis une manchette aoutour du col.” Sorel, Les Loix de la Galanterie, Charles Sorel, Les Loix de la Galanterie, (in Recueil des pièces les plus agréables de ce temps, Paris, Nicolas de Sercy, 1644), Chapter X, ed. Ludovic Lalanne, Paris, Aubry, 1855, 13–14. 46. Armon points out that the transformation of Spanish courtiers from men of arms to men  of letters required a “regulatory technology” of fashion elements to continuously reinforce their social aspirations. “The new services they performed–bureaucratic, diplomatic, juridical, cultural, ecclesiastical, ceremonial, financial and political–increasingly demanded their physical presence at the royal court in Madrid.” Armon, Masculine Virtue, 36–37. 47. Adams, Public Faces, 97–110 passim. 48. Laurinda S. Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500–1700 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). 49. Dixon, Dark Side of Genius, 55–80. 50. Dixon, Dark Side of Genius, 151–160. 51. Dixon, Dark Side of Genius, 66–68. 52. Martha Hollander, “Men of Saturn: Styling ‘Bohemian’ Melancholy in the Seventeenth Century,” Mostly Modern: Essays on Art and Architecture, Ed. Joseph Masheck (Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press Editions, 2015), 168–178. 53. “…l’on appelle un jabot l’ouverture de la chemise sur l’estomach, laquelle il faut tousjours voir avec ses ornemens de dentelles; car il n’appartient qu’à quelque vieil penard d’estre boutonné tout du long.” Charles Sorel, Les Loix de la Galanterie, (in Recueil des pièces les plus agréables de ce temps (Paris: Nicolas de Sercy, 1644), Chapter 10, ed. Ludovic Lalanne, Paris, Aubry, 1855, 16. 54. June 30, 1688. Verney, Memoirs, Vol. 4, 442. 55. Richard Corson, Fashions in Hair: The first 5000 Years, Supplement by Caroline Cox (London: Peter Owen, 2005), 205. 56. Will Fisher, “The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (Spring 2001), 155–187. On the late growth of facial hair during the early modern period, see 183. 57. Not only the wearing of long hair, but grooming it, was a popular theme of literary satire throughout Europe and England. Martha Hollander, “Adriaen van de Venne’s Cavalier at a Dressing Table: Masculinity and Parody in 17th-Century Holland,” New Perspectives in Early Modern Northern European Genre Imagery, ed. Arthur  J.  Di Furia (London: Routledge, 2016), 131–159.

fashioning the baroque male   147 58. “On Sumptuary Laws,” in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (London: Penguin 1987), 30. 59. On love-locks, see De Winkel, Fashion and Fancy, 139; 303 n. 16. 60. Many examples of attacks on the love-lock can be found in Corson, Fashions in Hair, 206–215, and M.  M.  Toth-Ubbens, “Kaalkop of ruighoofd, historisch verzet tegen het lange haar,” Antiek 6 (1972): 371–386. See also Benjamin Roberts, Sex and Drugs Before Rock and Roll: Youth Culture and Masculinity During the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 49–53. 61. Corson, Fashions in Hair, 215. 62. Marcia Pointon, “Dangerous Excrescences: Wigs, Hair and Masculinity,” in Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 128. 63. November 3, 1663. Pepys, Diary, 362. Pepys elsewhere observes, since periwigs were expensive commodities, “Mr. St. Amand is attacked in his coach between Knightsbridge and Hyde Park Gate, robbed of two guineas, some silver, and his periwig, and so much injured that prayers are desired for him in Covent Garden Church, where his assailants may well have formed part of the congregation.” May 4, 1674, 819. 64. October 5, 1667. Pepys, Diary, 126. 65. n.d. Verney, Memoirs, vol. 4, 263. 66. August 20, 1662. Verney, Memoirs, vol. 3, 386. 67. Martha Hollander, “Vermeer’s Robe: Costume, Commerce, and Fantasy in the Early Modern Netherlands,” Dutch Crossing 35 (2011), 177–95. 68. “Wie alle Holländische Theologen im Schlafrock, so wie auch viele von seinem Zuhörern in diesem Putze erschienen.” Johann Beckman, Dagboek van Zijne reis door Nederland in 1762. Cited in A.  M.  Lubberhuizen-Van Gelder “Japonsche Rocken,” Oud Holland 62 (1947): 150. 69. “Les Etudians ne s’y piquent point, comme en Allemagne, de magnificence en habits; plusieurs ne quittent presque jamais leur robe de chambre; & c’est l’habillement favori des Bourgeois. Cela me fit croire, la prémière fois que je passai par cette Ville, qu’il y regnoit quelque Maladie épidémique. En effet tous ces déshabilles dans les rues paroissent autant de convalescens.” Charles-Louis, Baron de Pöllnitz, Memoires. Contenant les observations qu’il a faites dans ses voyages, et le caractère des personnes qui composent les principales cours de l’Europe. (Amsterdam: Charles Hoguel, 2nd ed., 1735), vol. 4, 154–155. 70. This contrast was appealing enough to become a fad; by the eighteenth century, swords and gowns were sometimes worn together. In 1743, an English traveler noticed, to his dismay, that Dutch students in all the universities he visited wore “morning gowns” with their swords. W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsely, A History of Academical Dress in Europe until the End of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 176–178. 7 1. Michel de Montaigne, “On Sumptuary Laws,” in The Complete Essays (London: Penguin 1987), 30. At the same time, he is clearly concerned with the sense that being “unbuttoned” is not only slovenly but unnatural and inappropriate to his class. Elsewhere he writes, “Between my habit of clothing and that of a peasant of my country-side there is a much greater distance than between his and that of a man who is clothed only in his skin. . . . Just as I cannot go loose and unbuttoned, the labourers round about here would feel fettered if they had to button up.” Excerpted from Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne, trans. E. J. Trechmann (London: Oxford University Press, 1946); see Kim P. Johnson, ed., Fashion Foundation: Early Writings on Fashion and Dress (New York: Berg, 2003), 16–17.

148   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 72. Roberts, Sex and Drugs, 101–140. 73. George Hale, Private Schoole of Defence (London: John Helme, 1614), 2. 74. “So I went; and the guard at the Tower Gate, making me leave my sword at the gate, I was forced to stay so long in the ale-house hard by, till my boy run home for my cloak, that my Lord Mayor that now is, Sir John Robinson, Lieutenant of the Tower, with all his company, was gone with their coaches to his house in Minchen Lane. So my cloak being come, I walked thither…” (October 30 1662) Diary, 241. 75. Roberts, Sex and Drugs, 49. 76. As David Kuchta has pointed out, aristocratic masculinity relied on the trappings of war: armor, pikes, swords, and codpieces. Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit, 21. 77. Carolyn Springer, Armor and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), especially 132–159 on Cosimo de’Medici. 78. The nomenclature of renaissance and baroque weapons is very ambiguous. There is no single word in any language to describe a civilian sword used for both cutting and thrusting. Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 120. 79. David Smith observed that the portrait is highly unusual for its portrayal of privacy: Six is lost in his book, precluding any kind of rhetorical address to the painter/viewer. David Smith, “I Janus: Privacy and the Gentlemanly Ideal in Rembrandt’s portraits of Jan Six,” Art History 11, no. 1 (1988): 50. 80. “The Melancholie Knight” from Samuel Rowland, Doctor Merrie-man his Medicines Against Melancholy Humors (London: 1609), 30.

Further Reading Ashelford, Jane. The Art of Dress: Clothes and Society 1500–1914. London: National Trust, 2011. Breward, Christopher. The Culture of Fashion. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994. Hart, Avril, and Susan North. Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Fashion in Detail. Photographs by Richard Davis and drawings by Leonie Davis. London: V&A Publishing, 2009. Mansel,Philip. Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Ribeiro, Aileen. 2005. Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Smith, Woodruff  D. Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800. New York: Routledge, 2002. Turner, James. Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

chapter 7

A n ti nomie s of th e T w en t y-First- Cen t u ry N eoba roqu e: Cor m ac M c Ca rth y a n d Demi a n Schopf Monika Kaup

The afterlife of the baroque in twentieth and twenty-first-century works from around the world including Europe and the Americas has opened our eyes not just to the ­creativity of the baroque but also to its transhistorical, transcultural, and interdisciplinary appeal. The neobaroque reveals that baroque expression can no longer be limited to a historical period or to the identitarian framework of a national literature: the baroque is resolutely cosmopolitan, polyglot, and transcultural. The contemporary afterlife of the baroque shows that the baroque is radically heterogeneous and uncompromisingly pluralistic. This chapter has two objectives: first, to demonstrate the unbroken popularity of the neobaroque in the new millennium by considering two twenty-first-century (bodies of) works: American Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006) and Chilean visual artist Demian Schopf ’s installations and photographic exhibits Los coros menores o los tíos del diablo [The minor choirs or the uncles of the devil] (2013), La revolución silenciosa [Silent revolution] (2002), and La nave [The nave] (2015).1 Secondly, this chapter contends that what Walter Moser calls the instability of the concept of baroque—in particular the baroque’s inner contradictions we refer to as the baroque’s antinomies—shows no signs of disappearing.2 This essay therefore engages two neobaroque works that otherwise differ in almost every respect: language, expressive medium, as well as (for lack of a better word) emotional tone. McCarthy writes in English, while Schopf is based in Latin America. The Road is prose fiction, Schopf creates visual art. In particular, the focus here will be on the baroque’s dual affect. Like its transhistorical and transcultural hybridity, this is another aspect of the baroque’s notorious contradictory

150   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque nature: the baroque is at once joyful and sad. There is widespread agreement about the baroque’s connection with the emotions: few critical treatments neglect to make reference to the baroque’s emotional appeal. But what exactly does this mean? One wing of baroque expression, with historical roots in the Catholic religious baroque, is closely associated with the melancholic contemplation of ruin, death, and catastrophe. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the Deleuzian principle of becoming-minor, the program of the rebellious consumption of tradition, of second-hand creation by remaking existing forms.3 As we shall see further, the latter was the force at work in the historical emergence of the New World baroque from the European colonial baroque. This essay juxtaposes two twenty-first-century iterations of the neobaroque from the United States and Chile to demonstrate the ongoing presence of these dual currents of the baroque. In The Road, McCarthy memorializes post-apocalyptic ruin in a grand baroque style reminiscent of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. Conversely, Schopf ’s portraits of harquebus-brandishing angels and Andean dancers in colorful costumes embodying Christian and pagan figures recover the Andean mestizo baroque, one of the major expressions of the transculturating New World baroque. In McCarthy’s novel, the baroque gaze is engaged in mournful contemplation of mortality and the coming extinction of mankind. In Schopf ’s installations, a hopeful baroque celebrates the creativity of culture and its evolution toward greater diversity. Future, or no future? McCarty’s post-apocalyptic baroque meditates on death, extinction, and finitude; Schopf ’s joyful baroque celebrates cultural renewal and affirmation in the face of oppression.

Neobaroque What do we mean when we assign the rubric “neobaroque” to a contemporary work? To begin with, such classification registers a noteworthy phenomenon: the revival and return of a centuries-old mode of expression—the baroque—that until the beginning of the twentieth century, had been dismissed as hopelessly retrograde and antiquarian.4 Until around 1900, the baroque had widely been perceived as having disappeared from the modern cultural and artistic scene. Its revival since the beginning of the twentieth century—via successive cycles of cross-disciplinary and intermedial revivals extending into the new millennium and encompassing modernism and postmodernism, as well as literature, philosophy, the visual arts, and film—marks an “authentic paradigm shift.”5 In Brazilian theorist Irlemar Chiampi’s words, the “recovery of the Baroque is both an aesthetics and a politics of literature, an authentic paradigmatic shift in poetic forms that implies, among other consequences, the abandonment of the silent presence of the ­eighteenth century in our mentality.”6 What rehabilitated the baroque, releasing it from the “three centuries in purgatory” to  which most (if not all) of its major artists, writers, and thinkers—such as the Spanish poet Góngora—had been consigned?7 As Walter Moser reminds us, “baroque”

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   151 is a “historically exogenous concept” coined in the eighteenth century by Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment to stigmatize and debunk the disorderly sensibility of the seventeenth century.8 The first to register the loss of established worldviews in the wake of sixteenth-century scientific, religious, and social upheavals, the baroque was a culture of crisis, but its artists and intellectuals did not know that they were “baroque.” The baroque’s original pejorative meaning (baroque = a bizarre, illogical, even degenerate) was further consolidated by the instrumentalization of the baroque “grand style” by early modern authoritarian regimes.9 Arising as the cultural technology of power of the Counter-Reformation and Europe’s absolutist monarchies, the baroque was subsequently exported to Europe’s overseas colonies. As a result, the baroque came to be maligned as anti-modern, and worse, reviled as the propagandistic tool of political reaction. Broadly speaking, the revival of the historical baroque in the twentieth- and twentyfirst-century neobaroque is a consequence of the ongoing crisis of Enlightenment modernity in this era. As Chiampi contends: “The Baroque, crossroads of signs and temporalities, aesthetic logic of mourning and melancholy, luxuriousness and pleasure, erotic convulsion and allegorical pathos, reappears to bear witness to the crisis or end of modernity.”10 In part, the antithetical logic of the baroque’s pairing with its binary opposite—classicism—is at work here: the neobaroque is a negation of the negation (Enlightenment classicism) of the historical baroque. In the twentieth century, the culture of Europe’s first modernity (primarily Catholic, Southern, and mercantile) is rediscovered as newly relevant at a time when Europe’s second modernity (Protestant and Northern)—the modernity of the age of industrial and political revolutions—loses the hegemonic status it had enjoyed until then.11 Again, it is crucial to realize that the baroque’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century revival and recovery hinges on the discovery of the quintessential modernity of the baroque: rehabilitating the baroque from the stigma of dogmatism and obsolescence, twentieth-century writers, artists, and philosophers newly appreciate the baroque for its innovative response to the crises of modernity.12 Overall, the neobaroque tends to reconfigure baroque poetics, baroque thought, and baroque world view as innovative, even revolutionary, highlighting the baroque’s critical spirit and its disruptive force of cultural renewal. To give one prominent example: Cuban neobaroque writer and theorist Severo Sarduy celebrates the baroque as a revolutionary “art of dethronement.”13 Sarduy’s poststructuralist neobaroque draws on the baroque cosmology of Johannes Kepler.14 According to Sarduy, Kepler’s discovery of elliptical planetary orbits inaugurated the de-centering of the modern universe, a path-breaking event that foreshadowed the coming overthrow of the rule of absolute in Western culture, not only in the heavens (the sun) but also on earth (the absolute monarch). Sarduy champions “a Baroque that rejects all instauration, that metaphorizes the disputed order, the judged god, the transgressed law. A Baroque of the Revolution.”15 Similarly, Sarduy contends, the baroque rhetoric of circumlocution and digression in the Spanish poet Góngora’s works decenters language by eliding the master signifier. In Sarduy’s view, the baroque unseats absolutes across the domains of science, politics,

152   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque and art. The historical trajectory from the baroque to the neobaroque describes an intensification of heterogeneity and instability: The European Baroque and the early Latin American colonial Baroque present themselves as images of a mobile and decentered but still harmonious universe . . . . On the contrary, the contemporary Baroque, the Neobaroque, reflects structurally the disharmony, the rupture of homogeneity, of the logos as an absolute, the lack that constitutes our epistemic foundation. Neobaroque of disequilibrium, structural reflection of a desire that cannot attain its object.16

According to many scholars and writers from across Europe and the Americas including Chiampi, Sarduy, as well as Mexican-Ecuadorian philosopher Bolívar Echeverría, and Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot, neobaroque works recover the alternative modernity of the baroque.17 The baroque is characterized by a unique, non-dissociative response to modern religious and scientific upheavals. Baroque creativity arises from the rebellious consumption of tradition and the mongrelization of official culture. Rather than break with the past, the baroque recycles and re-creates the past. Rather than reject the alien culture, the baroque appropriates and transforms it. Indeed, the baroque was born deviant—a mongrel by birth: The original meaning of baroque—the nonclassicist use of classical forms—encapsulates the baroque’s quintessential deviance and its hybridizing mode of innovation. The baroque contests the norm, not by discarding it but by bending and deforming it. Chiampi emphasizes that the baroque and neobaroque became particularly relevant in Latin America, “to the very condition of a continent that could not be assimilated by the project of the Enlightenment.”18 As Brazilian writer Haroldo do Campos contends, the baroque’s unique paradigm for second-hand creation unfolded its transformative potential in Brazil, a peripheral zone where autochthonous traditions have been displaced by imported colonial ones.19 The so-called New World baroque, the baroque that grew up in Latin America, operates through what de Campos calls a cannibal rationality (or anthropophagous reason) that feeds on imported colonial culture. Anthropophagous reason “is a theory proposing the critical devouring of universal cultural heritage, formulated not from the submissive and reconciled perspective of the ‘noble savage,’ . . . but from the disabused point of view of the ‘bad savage,’ devourer of whites, the cannibal.”20 Brazilian writers devour and re-create metropolitan culture in order to make it their own. In the New World baroque, the characteristic baroque deformation of tradition is repurposed as a decolonizing methodology. We will examine this more closely in the last section of this chapter. What explains the baroque’s and neobaroque’s astonishing versatility? The baroque’s formal extravagance and its anticlassical and transgressive impulse to spill beyond set limits and to open enclosed forms, makes it an ideal medium to register difference. As Lois Zamora and Roberto González Echevarría have observed, baroque compositions are heterogeneous, decentered unities capable of “incorporat [ing] the Other”21 and the

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   153 strange. Otherness may be anything that disrupts harmony and proportion in the composition—including race, religion, or formal distortion. Technically, neobaroque works select and incorporate one (or more) elements from the baroque period into the contemporary text. Such elements may be baroque writers (for example, Góngora or the metaphysical poets), specific works (Calderón’s Life Is A Dream), baroque stylistic traits (horror vacui, the baroque conceit), or cultural phenomena (baroque illusionism, the baroque cult of melancholy). As Sarduy explains in his influential essay “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” such transhistorical incorporation operates through various procedures, including quotation or direct borrowings, indirect reminiscence, and parody.22 The result is a double-voiced text, stylized as an intertextual echo chamber where twentieth- or twenty-first-century voices bounce back as seventeenth-century echoes and vice versa. Roland Greene states that the neobaroque can be defined as “involv[ing] a present work and an absent context,” in which “the relation between the two brings the mode to life.”23 In Greene’s fortuitous phrase, baroque-neobaroque intertextuality forms an open valve between past and present: “The open valve that connects the baroque and the neobaroque allows us—encourages us—to enter a poem of the seventeenth or the twentieth century and step through into the other era.”24

Cormac McCarthy’s Post-Apocalyptic Neobaroque In The Road, an unspecified cataclysm has annihilated most of humankind as well as almost all animal and plant life. Nature is almost entirely dead, the planet is cooling, and some humans have resorted to banding together in marauding gangs of warlords hunting other humans for food. Two unnamed refugees, a father and his young son, struggle for survival as they make their way south toward the coast in search of a warmer climate. They traverse the post-apocalyptic wasteland on former state roads, pushing a shopping cart with their remaining possessions. A post-apocalyptic survivor narrative set in an unspecified location in the near-future United States, McCarthy’s plot begins about eight to ten years after the cataclysm, the age of the boy born in the immediate aftermath of the apocalypse. The mother has abandoned the family by committing suicide, leaving father and son behind. What has befallen the man is a terrible responsibility: to raise a child after the apocalyptic collapse of modern civilization as we know it, and the devolution of human society into the quintessential Hobbesian state of nature, where humans are thrown into neo-primitive conditions of scavenging for food, clothing, and shelter while fighting off predators. In McCarthy’s novel, the future of life as such is in question. The post-apocalyptic world in The Road is an entropic universe in rapid tailspin toward the complete extinction

154   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque of all life—human as well as non-human. In the wake of the catastrophe setting off massive conflagrations, the sun is permanently blotted out by thick clouds of ash that cut off access to solar energy. The scorched landscape is covered with ash from the ­conflagration and the charred remains of humans, animals, and things. Surviving humans are stranded on a dying planet without warmth or renewable food sources. As the father muses, “For all he knew the world grew darker daily.”25 The man’s memories of the years after the apocalypse chronicle the gradual dying of plants and animals: “Once in those early years he’d wakened in a barren wood and lay listening to flocks of migratory birds overhead in that bitter dark. Their half muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl. He wished them godspeed till they were gone. He never heard them again.”26 By the time of the narrative present, the only signs of non-human life are a patch of edible mushrooms found in the woods and the sound of a dog barking, which is never heard again.27 McCarthy’s speculative near-future scenario of impending extinction resembles the environmental catastrophe that led to the extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period about 65 million years ago. In The Road, the neobaroque is employed to depict post-apocalyptic ruin and extinction. Although The Road has received much critical attention, this connection has not been noted.28 Many of the narrative reflections on ruin, mortality, finitude, the coming extinction of humanity, and inexorable entropy in The Road are written in the ornate baroque style—often associated with Faulkner—of McCarthy’s previous fiction, most centrally Blood Meridian. As the man reflects, In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.29

This and similar passages memorializing extinct animals and plants, like other passages describing the post-apocalyptic wasteland of ruins, dead objects, and corpses, are focalized through the father’s memories—as is the entire narrative. The boy, born after the cataclysm, has no firsthand experience of the pre-apocalyptic period. The disappearance of trout in particular, mentioned three times, epitomizes the death of nature.30 The Road also ends in this baroque mode, with the closing paragraph looking back to mourn the living earth irretrievably lost: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.31

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   155 Baroque style is characterized by the principle of abundance and excess. It is the antithesis of minimalism: not “less is more” but “more is more” or “more is not less.” In literature, its hallmarks include digressive and lofty rhetoric, slow-paced narration laden with descriptive detail, labyrinthine hypotactical sentences, arresting images in the manner of metaphysical conceits presenting ingenious far-fetched analogies, and a learned vocabulary of rare and obscure words. Only the first of the two passages above is baroque at the sentence level, a situation that is evident throughout The Road, whose preference for short sentences, sentence fragments, and brief dialogue has been noted.32 But word choices such as “torsional” and “vermiculate” exemplify erudite baroque diction. The metaphors likening a falcon’s breastbone to a ship’s keel and a trout’s dorsal patterns to maps of the world are conceits. Phrasing such as “wimpled softly” and “all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage” evince the lofty tone and proliferation of descriptive naming that are characteristic of baroque style. From seventeenth-century baroque works such as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial (1658) to twentieth-century neobaroque works such as Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995; 1999), baroque style has been associated with melancholic reflection on transience and mortality of all stripes, religious and secular.33 It is no surprise that in The Road, McCarthy should employ it to memorialize destruction at the grandest scale: the apocalyptic annihilation of most humans and the coming extinction of life on earth. Melancholy, the mood of irretrievable loss and trauma, is closely associated with the baroque—the dynamic rhetoric of excess and theatrical display. This link can be traced in a wide variety of expressions across the visual and literary arts in the historical baroque and the neobaroque. One is the Catholic religious baroque’s cult of memento mori, represented by devotional images and their iconography of saints and martyrs contemplating skulls, tombs, expiring candles, and other symbols of the transience of earthly life. Another is Renaissance melancholia, embodied by the figure of the ­melancholic scholar, the “tortured but creative male genius.”34 As Juliana Schiesari explains, the latter’s suffering—unlike that of his twentieth-century feminized counterpart, the abject and unproductive Freudian melancholic—comes with the compensations of learning and knowledge. The early modern figure of the melancholic scholar-intellectual appearing in the works of Burton and Browne has been recuperated by twentieth-century writers such as Barnes and Sebald to forge the voices of their melancholic narrators contemplating ruin, death, and catastrophe. The Road is a new addition to Anglophone neobaroque fiction that revives baroque melancholia and transposes it into a modern setting. As such, it joins forces with Nightwood, Absalom, Absalom!, and McCarthy’s own Blood Meridian. Each of these works summons baroque melancholy to frame a traumatic experience in which a personal tragedy allegorizes a larger collective malaise: the grief of abandoned lovers facing the futility of asymmetrical desire (Barnes),  the racial trauma of the post–Civil War  U.S.  South (Faulkner),

156   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Indian ­genocide and apocalyptic violence on the nineteenth-century northern Mexican frontier (Blood  Meridian), and twenty-first-century near-future apocalyptic scenarios (The Road). In an observation on the baroque as the rhetoric of loss by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, Fuentes explains: The Baroque, language of abundance, is also the language of insufficiency. Only those who possess nothing can include everything. The horror vacui of the Baroque is not gratuitous—it is because the vacuum exists that nothing is certain. The verbal abundance of . . . Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! represents a desperate invocation of language to fill the absences left by the banishment of reason and faith.35

Fuentes’s observations on the compensatory relation between loss and the baroque rhetoric of abundance—words to fill the painful void—are helpful in illuminating related passages in The Road. The Road belongs to a burst of new post-apocalyptic narratives published since the late 1990s and the millennial turn.36 They are the latest product of an apocalyptic ­sensibility—a “doom boom”—that has been a defining trait of the twentieth century. Unlike Cold War–era post-apocalyptic fiction depicting the “instantaneous apocalypse” of atomic holocausts, contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction considers the “slow apocalypse” of environmental destruction, mass extinction, and public health disasters in the wake of climate change. Like The Road, many of these works are so-called clifi (climate fiction); The Road, to the best of my knowledge, is the only work that connects current scenarios of ecological holocausts to the baroque. Yet McCarthy’s choice is completely natural: apocalyptic narrative and its prediction of coming destruction has long been the domain of the baroque in the religious apocalypse of Christian eschatology. Apocalypse is a crisis narrative predicting the end of the world as we know it. The term’s Greek root (“to uncover, disclose”) identifies apocalyptic narrative’s singular blending of futurity and certainty.37 Apocalyptic narratives predict a future that is closed—a future that cannot be changed—a future that will bring total annihilation. McCarthy’s modern apocalypse is scientific, not religious. Both scientific and religious types display the definitive traits of apocalyptic narrative: the revelation of predetermined annihilation on a global scale. (Since 2001, McCarthy has been associated with the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico; the apocalyptic scenario in The Road’s is informed by McCarthy’s conversations with resident scientists.38) In McCarthy’s twenty-first-century environmental apocalypse, religious prophecy gives way to scientific prognosis, but the grim prospect of global destruction remains the same. McCarthy’s narrator contemplates the apocalyptic scenario of a dying biosphere caused by the blocking out of the sun by an enormous cloud cover of ash in language that alternates between scientific sobriety and baroque flourishes. A reflection that merges poetically with an alliterative sound effect (“the world grew darker daily” [my emphasis]) veers toward scientific fact in the next sentence: “He’d once found a lightmeter in a

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   157 camera store that he thought he might use to average out readings for a few months and he carried it around with him for a long time thinking he might find some batteries for it but he never did.”39 Earlier, the same subject of the loss of solar energy is again treated in alliterative and lofty baroque rhetoric: “the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk [my emphasis].”40 This blend of the scientific with the apocalyptic and poetic is reminiscent of the prose of English baroque writer and physician Sir Thomas Browne, in particular, his treatises Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus. Published together in 1648, these two works complement each other: whereas Urn Burial is about impermanence, dissolution, and death, The Garden of Cyrus is about renewal, resurrection, and the restoration of order via the cosmic pattern of the quincunx.41 Rather than direct quotation, McCarthy’s recovery of Browne works through indirect reminiscence. The Road mirrors Browne’s grand baroque style together with Browne’s themes— mortality and the hope for renewal. It is worth noting the millenarian dimension of The Garden of Cyrus. As Frank Huntley points out, Browne’s prophetic vision appears on the last page: “All things begin in order, and so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.”42 The “open valve” that connects McCarthy’s neobaroque with Browne’s baroque prose primarily leads primarily to Urn Burial. Written upon the occasion of the discovery of some sepulchral urns in Norfolk, Urn Burial, Browne’s most popular work, is a wide-ranging, learned meditation on funerary practices across times and cultures, mortality, time itself, and the possibilities and limits of human knowledge. Browne’s tone is melancholic; the fifth chapter contains a number of well-known passages reflecting on coming end of history that evoke similar musings from The Road, and vice versa. In many of these, the description of specific object (an urn, names on a grave stone) triggers abstract meditations on the death, transience, and decay. For example, Browne observes: There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; . . . Graves-stones tell truth scarce fourty years; Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far ­surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Equinox?43

As in Browne’s works, interspersed throughout The Road are baroque epiphanies on mortality, philosophical meditations that plumb the meaning of the post-apocalyptic world. The Road employs the (neo)baroque—the rhetoric of excess to take stock of a phenomenon in excess—the unbearable fate of being shipwrecked on a dying planet. In his classic analysis of Browne’s baroque style andhis treatise Religio Medici (1634–1635) in particular, Stanley Fish levels a charge against Browne that is reminiscent of those typically brought against baroque literature to justify its dismissal: the baroque abandons content and any genuine desire for knowledge or belief in favor of staging a “verbalized spectacle.”44 Linguistic and rhetorical virtuosity become ends in themselves.

158   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque According to Fish, in Browne’s work, “the machinery of reason . . . becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment.”45 As Fish teases, “Browne doesn’t feel anything, except the impulse to amplificatio.”46 This is a view that the present argument about parallels between Browne and The Road cannot accept. The Browne that McCarthy recuperates—if indirectly—employs baroque rhetoric to communicate genuine insight into what it means to live on after the world-end. One such epiphany comes after an episode when the father-and-son pair of survivors find a group of humans kept in captivity like livestock in the basement of a mansion occupied by a gang of cannibals. The passage reflects on the dehumanization of the human food slaves to the abject status of prey hunted by predators (other dehumanized humans): He saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless ­circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and ­borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.47

This passage depicts two isolated humans surrounded by an all-encompassing darkness. The man and the boy are like lights in the dark, two living beings shipwrecked in a wasteland of death. Similarly, the man’s revelation (“the absolute truth of the world”) flares up briefly only to be lost the next moment. This figure of a light in the darkness also appears as a leitmotif in Urn Burial. Laurence Breiner observes that knowledge, according to Browne, is like a “light in the dark.”48 Like the discovery of the Norfolk urns, buried and long forgotten, human knowledge is only a small spot in the “dark matrix that surrounds us in space and time.”49 As Browne states: “That great Antiquity America lay buried for a thousand years; and a large part of the earth is still in the Urne to us.”50 Browne associates the figure of light surrounded by darkness with the uncovering of subterranean treasures. In picturing the “earth” “circling” in the “black vacuum of the universe,” McCarthy places the same image in a cosmological frame. The two survivors traverse a post-apocalyptic landscape that is “cauterized terrain.”51 Large swaths of it are burned, barren land littered with the cadavers of animals and the corpses of humans: the “bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes,” which in turn are lined by “a jungle of dead kudzu” adjoining a “marsh where the dead reeds lay over the water.”52 In addition, the post-apocalyptic wasteland is littered with the broken objects of the shattered modern world. There are burned cities, ruined houses, a train wreck. The road itself is a junkyard of countless car wrecks and abandoned objects, consumer commodities now useless: Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats.53

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   159 The post-apocalyptic wasteland in The Road exemplifies the heap of rubble that, according to Walter Benjamin’s essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” is modern history.54 In Benjamin’s famous allegory of the angel of history, the angel sees something humans cannot: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”55 The destruction of modern civilization is presented to McCarthy’s survivor protagonist as the same panorama of ruin (“wreckage upon wreckage”) that is glimpsed by Benjamin’s angel of history. The following tableau of the remains—objects and corpses—of a conflagration that the father and son stumble upon may serve as an example: Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling.56

Looking backward to the residues of the cataclysm rather than forward to the future, McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic protagonist takes the same apocalyptic view of the history of modernity as Benjamin’s angel. The man is human, but unlike Benjamin’s moderns who are blind to the angel’s insights, McCarthy’s nameless post-apocalyptic refugee attains the angel’s inhuman perspective. In apocalyptic narrative, “a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient” that discloses a “transcendent ­reality” otherwise occluded to humans.57 Unlike John in Revelations, McCarthy’s postapocalyptic narrator gains access to revelations about the end of the world not due to the intervention of an otherworldly intermediary but to an accident—being among the few survivors of the catastrophic destruction of the world. His access to this superior epistemological vantage point is due to his surviving the cataclysm, a rare benefit of his otherwise desperate condition. The historical seventeenth-century baroque arose as the expression of cultural crisis. The dominant concept of history it encodes is tragic: transience, impermanence, decay, and destruction. In his study of German seventeenth-century tragedies, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Benjamin examines what he calls “the baroque cult of the ruin.”58 Benjamin’s scholarly study of baroque drama is itself a monument of the first wave of neobaroque recovery of the baroque in the 1910s and 1920s, in which Germany and German language scholarship (nineteenth-century pioneers of the baroque’s rehabilitation from Burckhardt through Nietzsche to Heinrich Wölfflin) played a leading role.59 The works Benjamin discusses are Protestant baroque plays from Silesia by Andreas Gryphius, Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, and others, whose subjects are ­historical figures, martyrs and tyrants from Antiquity to the baroque period. In key ­sections considering the ruin and to the spatial settings of baroque plays, Benjamin comments on the importance of spatial panoramas of decay (“The Ruin”; “Setting”).60

160   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque A shattered object world of dead things is the staple of baroque plays, which tend to take stock of the historical process of destruction by way of panoramic displays of the debris left in its wake. Benjamin identifies this strategy as the spatialization of time: “History merges into the setting”; “chronological movement is grasped and analysed in a spatial image.”61 By that he means that the material remains of destruction—rubble, shattered objects, dead bodies—are summoned to testify to the process of destruction. As Benjamin elaborates, “in the ruin history has physically merged into the setting [my emphasis].”62 As Benjamin would later explain in “Theses,” the historian’s task is to work against chronological progression “to brush history against the grain.”63 The ultimate goal is to demystify the notion of progress. This strategy of thinking from the ruins is at work in seventeenth-century baroque plays as well as Benjamin’s own neobaroque a­ llegory of the angel of history in “Theses.” Benjamin thought of baroque allegories as demystifying, critical works of art. They unmask false harmonies, forcing the reader to confront the truth of destruction ­otherwise concealed beneath a veneer of harmony. As he contends: Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather a death’s head.64

Benjamin’s observation on the baroque cult of ruin provides another excellent key to the neobaroque poetics of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel. The Road similarly presents a series of baroque panoramas and static tableaux of apocalyptic ruin in which (post-apocalyptic) history has physically merged into the setting. We have already seen several instances in the passages quoted earlier about the extinction of falcons and trout, the degradation of humans to prey, and about the incinerated remains of the holocaust in the passage above. In The Road, almost everything that is known about the apocalypse and the immediate aftermath is presented retrospectively and indirectly, via spatial tableaux that decipher the material remains of annihilation. In adopting this technique, The Road becomes a textual museum of sorts, albeit a museum of apocalyptic destruction. Its exhibits are Benjaminian allegorical ruins left behind by the cataclysm, augmented by the following carnage of gangs of degenerate assassins. This discussion of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel will conclude by considering one of most important neobaroque tableaux of apocalyptic destruction. It comes shortly before a second encounter with cannibalism. The man and the boy follow the tracks of a group of suspicious strangers (three men and a pregnant woman), only to discover the remains of a newborn infant in a still-smoking campfire. Beginning in the future tense, this passage sets out with an apocalyptic vision of the devolution of humans into cannibals. It displays the baroque descriptive regime of naming in uncommon diction and the solemn rhetoric of a requiem. As the man reflects on the world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   161 t­unneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.65

Demian Schopf’s Transculturating Creativity Now we turn to the second case study of the twenty-first-century neobaroque: the work of Chilean visual artist Demian Schopf. Schopf ’s installations are accompanied by brief commentaries by the artist; photographs of the installations and their commentaries can be accessed in an electronic portfolio, available in Spanish and in English versions on the artist’s website. Schopf ’s work centers on a regional variety of the colonial Latin American baroque, the so-called Andean mestizo baroque, and its survival in contemporary Bolivian visual art and culture.66 Schopf affirms the actuality of the neobaroque in our time: “I understand the Baroque, the mestizo and the syncretic as something that is still alive, and utterly contemporary.”67 Arising in the seventeenth century and continuing into the eighteenth, the Andean mestizo baroque exemplifies the process of transculturation that gave rise to the uniquely hybrid New World baroque by incorporating indigenous and local—in this case Andean—traditions and aesthetics. As an art-andculture historical phenomenon, the emergence of the transculturated New World baroque represents what—for present purposes—can be referred to as the “joyful face” of the baroque. In contrast to the melancholic baroque’s function as a memorial to ruin and death, the New World baroque reveals the baroque as a creative principle. McCarthy’s The Road updates the centuries-old use of the baroque as an expression of doom, by harnessing it to apocalyptic scenarios of extinction—the entropic principle of “no future.” In contrast, Schopf ’s artistic recovery of the New World baroque retrieves the opposite aspect of the baroque as a creative force of cultural renewal. The creative baroque modifies established structures to generate new, more diverse identities, cultures, and forms—the evolutionary principle of the unfolding of ever-more diverse forms of life. Schopf ’s installations feature two types of objects produced by the regional tradition of the Andean mestizo baroque. His artwork grew out of a research project on the Andean baroque that began in 2001 and also resulted in a master’s thesis.68 The first are iconic artworks of the Andean popular baroque of the colonial period: paintings of angels with harquebuses, one of the hallmarks of the famous Cuzco school of artists.

162   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque The second group of artifacts comprises contemporary costumes of Andean carnival dancers. The latter exemplify the survival of the transculturated New World baroque in the present time, as a sensibility thriving in Latin American popular culture and folk art in  the twenty-first century. As noted earlier, the New World baroque is a rebellious ­offspring of the colonial European baroque, which arrived in the Americas on the ships of the conquistadors—the instrument of colonialism and the Counter-Reformation. But because few European artists actually made it to the New World, colonial Latin American architecture and visual art massively relied on the skilled labor of indigenous, mestizo, and black artisans who built its buildings, painted its canvases, and carved its sculptures. Over time, these non-European artisans transformed the imported colonial forms into an expression of their own by adding something new to the European model they were tasked to copy. They incorporated local elements, styles, iconographies, and beliefs into European compositions, including indigenous flora, fauna, landscapes, and indigenous costumes but also indigenous religious symbols. In Mexico, the second major center of the New World baroque outside of the Andes, the term used for these hybrid forms blending indigenous and European elements is tequitqui art (tequitqui is a Nahuatl term for tributary or vassal). One splendid example is the Church of Santa María in Tonantzintla in the state of Puebla. In the interior of Tonantzintla, Catholic iconography (the Virgin Mary, the saints, etc.) drowns in a profusion of ornament that has local and indigenous referents: tropical fruit and vegetation carved in stucco and gilded climb up to the cupola. Indian faces peer out from among the carved forest to hold up columns. Distorting and ­subverting the European norm, tequitqui art is, in Cesar Salgado’s fortuitous phrase, “the survival of otherness piggybacking” on “the signs of empire.”69 The New World baroque is the expression of colonized subjects who steal the art of the colonizer to turn it into an expression of their own. As José Lezama Lima contends in his generative 1957 essay on the New World baroque, “Baroque Curiosity,” the American baroque was not an expression of the Counter-Reformation but “an art of counterconquest” (arte de contraconquista).70 Needless to say, the survival of indigenous forms in the mestizo New World baroque would not have been possible without the toleration of ecclesiastical and colonial authorities eager to increase the appeal of Christianity to local indigenous populations. Such syncretic or mestizo expressions are thus the result of the co-existence of two opposing social and political projects: the official program of Christianizing Amerindians that sought to instrumentalize convergences between Catholic and pagan beliefs on the one hand, and the unofficial popular syncretism of Amerindian and mestizo artists on the other, who in turn sought to Indianize Christianity. These two types of syncretism— the major strategy of co-optation and the minor strategy of rebellious appropriation— may look alike, but they belong to different ideological projects. The objects Schopf considers—the military angels of the Cuzco school and contemporary Andean carnival costumes—are shaped by popular Indian tastes; it is therefore important to probe further into indigenous authorship in the transformative process of mestizaje. New World baroque artifacts show a convergence of European, indigenous and African cultures, but who gets to define the character of the synthesis and its impact?

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   163

Figure 1  Cupola, Church of Santa María, Tonantzintla, 1690–1730, state of Puebla, Mexico.

Ecuadorian-Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverría sheds light on the New World baroque as a popular social project of indigenous survival. The baroque, he contends, “first appeared in the Americas as a survival strategy, as a way of life spontaneously devised by that tenth of the indigenous population that managed to survive the annihilation of the 16th century and had not been driven out to inhospitable regions.”71 For Echeverría, the baroque is a resilient historical strategy of everyday life. Analogous to Michel de Certeau’s concept of everyday practice as “making do,” the American baroque was improvised by “orphaned Indians in their destroyed world” in order to cope with living under the imposed colonial regime.72 Uprooted from their communities of origin, the urban Indians who had arrived to work building churches, convents, streets and mansions, and who had settled in cities as workers, artisans, servants, and unskilled workers, allowed what remained of their ancient code of civilization after the cataclysm of the Conquest to be ­consumed by the prevailing code of the Europeans.73

Echeverría emphasizes that “it was the Indians themselves who assumed the agency of this process.”74 He points out that “the indigenous acceptance of this alien civilizing form . . . followed the same peculiar baroque strategy adopted by certain societies at the time as they internalized capitalist modernity”: they settled for a compromise in which

164   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 2  Detail of Interior Wall, Church of Santa María Tonantzintla. Courtesy of Lois Parkinson Zamora

“the sacrifice of a natural way of life” is made in order to reclaim “everyday life and its assets” in the new world in which the conquered have been stranded.75 What Echeverría calls the baroque ethos (ethos barroco) is a resistant mode of survival, but it is not a revolutionary solution. As a tactic of making colonial culture habitable for the conquered, it was conditional on the acceptance of the imposed European culture. It is the criollos of the lower strata, mestizos of Indian and African heritage, those who, without knowing it, would end up doing what Bernini had done to the classical canons: they would re-make the most viable, the dominant civilization, the European. They would awaken and later reproduce its original vitality. In so doing, in nourishing the European codes with the ruins of pre-Hispanic codes (and with the residues of African codes of the slaves that had been violently imported), they would construct something different from what they had planned; they would create a Europe that never existed before them, a different, “Latin American” Europe.76

Echeverría here echoes the point made earlier about the baroque as a transhistorical and transcultural taste for disruption: The transgressive sensibility that gave rise to the European baroque is the same that animates the indigenous mongrelization of the

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   165 colonial Latin America baroque. What Bernini did to classical canons, Indians did to the imperial Spanish baroque. The foremost spokesperson of the baroque as a rebellious and creative spirit is Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who suggested that the baroque “arises where there is transformation, mutation, or innovation.”77 Carpentier, who together with Lezama Lima popularized the concept of the anticolonial Latin American baroque, declares in a much-cited passage that all symbiosis, all mestizaje, engenders the baroque. The American baroque develops along with criollo culture, with the meaning of criollo, with the self-awareness of the American man, be he the son of a white European, the son of a black African or an Indian born on the continent . . . the awareness of being Other, of being new, of being symbiotic, of being a criollo; and the criollo spirit is itself a baroque spirit.78

Carpentier is performing a delicate balancing act, for there is more than one kind of mestizaje: the indigenous survival strategy described by Echeverría is not identical with the “state mestizaje” that came to define the official nationalism of many Latin American countries in the twentieth century, such as post-revolutionary Mexico. Latin American national “cults of the mestizo” have rightfully come under fire as euphemisms for the ongoing Westernization of Amerindians: as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla contends, while professing to rehabilitate indigenous people and integrate them into the mestizo nation, state mestizaje actually promotes de-Indianization, the erasure of indigenous culture.79 Even as he enumerates the multiple threads of transculturation—white, black, Indian—Carpentier elides their difference by subsuming them all under one type: criollo culture, a term that, while originally referring to naturalized blacks as well as whites in Latin America, has come to refer to Latin Americans of European descent.80 This essay therefore takes care to point out indigenous contributions to and authorship in the heterogeneous phenomenon of the transculturated Latin American baroque. All this can be studied in the iconic artifacts of the colonial Andean baroque recovered by Demian Schopf, paintings of angels with harquebuses. Portraits of armed angels are one of the most celebrated products of the so-called Cuzco school of artists.81 The Cuzco school emerged in late seventeenth-century Peru as indigenous and mestizo artists broke away from guilds dominated by criollos and Europeans to form guilds and confraternities of their own, which eventually overwhelmed the European competition. After the rift, explains art historian Teresa Gisbert, Cuzco painting became more indigenous and popular in its style . . . . Painters who had separated from the guild lost contact with European developments, and sought inspiration both in the old styles and in their own taste and tradition. The result was a different kind of painting, one in which the images are treated almost like decorations rather than as representations of the natural world. It is an art characterized by conventional motifs, in which ornament reigns supreme, as through a rain of golden flowers were falling on the canvas. Figures are stereotyped and idealized. Angels and birds abound . . . [These works] belong to an archaic world, one very much to the

166   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 3  The Master of Calamarca (José López de los Ríos?), Lake Titicaca School, Archangel with Gun, Asiel Timor Dei, c. 1684, oil on canvas. Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz, Bolivia

taste of the Indians, who viewed the religious realm as something “different” from mundane reality. They portrayed sacred beings as remote, not with the familiarity of Spanish art which represents God-Man in flesh and suffering . . . . The aesthetic break with Europe seems to be total. The Cuzco painters created a school that differs not only from Spanish and European traditions, but also from the schools of Mexico, Lima, and even Potosí.82

The Cuzco school’s portraits of archangels with harquebuses, including apocryphal angels, are instances of transculturation. As art historian Julia Herzberg notes,

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   167

Figure 4  Anonymous, Cuzco school, Archangel with Gun, Fortitud, early eighteenth century, oil on canvas. Museo de Arte, Lima

“Spaniards conquered the Incas with both the cross and the harquebus.”83 The military aspect of the armed angels recalls the conquest and the forced evangelization of the Inca people. As Herzberg observes, colonial artists accurately represented “military positions for handling and firing a gun” based on the study of military manuals.84 The archangels’ garments, on the other hand, are neither those of military personnel nor celestial beings but those of secular aristocratic courtiers. The angels’ overcoat, “with its characteristic

168   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque ballooning sleeves, is an Andean invention”: it refers to “the high social status of both Spanish colonial gentlemen and Inca royalty.”85 There are further layers of mongrel signification through which armed archangels indirectly reference Inca mythology. As Latin American art historian Gauvin Bailey suggests, angels with harquebus were “associated with the stars and natural phenomena, which gave them great appeal to an indigenous Andean population accustomed to worshipping celestial bodies.”86 Inca venerated their rulers as descendants of the sun god, giving the Inca dynasty a quasi-divine status. Worship of celestial beings, headed by the creator deity Viracocha, focused on natural phenomena such as lightning and thunder and natural forms such as mountains and rocks.87 Citing scholarship on the Andean baroque by Gisbert and others, Schopf addresses the indigenous symbolism of Andean archangels. “The archangel—perhaps Saint Michael / Viracocha himself—holds his harquebus because Illapa [the thunder god] has the power to produce rain, not because he wants to shoot God or Inti [the sun god], but because it is only God, through him, who can provide rain.”88 As angels, or Catholic celestial beings, displaced Inca celestial beings in indigenous worship, the weapons in the angels’ hands became overdetermined by the indigenous iconography. According to Herzberg, “firearms, unknown to the Indians at the time of the conquest, seemed a frightening manifestation of the supernatural.”89 Schopf clarifies that “when the Spanish arrived at Cuzco with their harquebuses, the Quechua thought they had come out of Illapa himself . . . . The word Illapa was used to signify ‘harquebus,’ ‘thunder’ and ‘lightning’ at the same time.”90 The gun motif in Andean angels thus oscillates between realism and the marvelous, and between European and non-European codes. Schopf draws attention to firearms as a case of syncretism in his neobaroque angels: Demian Schopf ’s neobaroque adaptation of Andean armed angels takes place in an installation entitled “La Revolución Silenciosa” [Silent revolution]. “Silent Revolution,” Schopf explains in the commentary on the series, “proposes a critical review of the phenomenon of the painting of apocryphal angels and archangels in the Colonial era.”91 He highlights the transgressive deformation of Catholic angels that turns them into syncretic beings whose attributes recall indigenous mythology. I understand this painting, which is filled with harquebusier archangels and would have been unthinkable in Baroque Europe of the same age, as evidence of the iconographic concessions implied by the evangelization of the New World. The proliferation of these angels is anything but coincidental in a territory where the winged deity Viracocha possessed the ability to invoke the through thunder, which explains the general rule that many of these archangels grip their harquebuses as if aiming for the sky—but not God.92

The installations stage mannequins dressed as harquebus-brandishing archangels. They are photographed next to stuffed animals found in the warehouses of the Natural History Museum in Santiago, the capital of Chile. In Schopf ’s portfolio, the photographic portraits of neobaroque angels appear next to other images, both contemporary and from the Andean baroque. Some contemporary images revive the transcultural dynamics of Andean angels:

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   169

Figure 5  Demian Schopf, Gula (Gluttony), 2002, Archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 105 × 130 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

The neobaroque angel in Angelus Australis wears a poncho after the traditional f­ashion of the Mapuche, a Chilean indigenous people. Other contemporary images (such as of the Nicaraguan guerilla) connect the armed angels with the twentieth-­ century Latin American dictatorships and the armed struggle against them. Schopf was born in West Germany in 1975, where his parents—refugees from the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship—had been exiled. As Schopf explains, “Silent Revolution” is also the title of a book by a Catholic supporter of the Pinochet dictatorship. Instead of a gun, Schopf ’s neobaroque archangels hold “substitute objects” of various kinds, such as harpoons or pitchforks.93 One of these is “a four-pronged peasant’s rake, with a machete tied around it.”94 As Schopf explains, it “may [make us] think of specifically local phenomena such as the Nicaraguan Revolution and Liberation Theology.”95 Schopf ’s neobaroque installation quotes historical artifacts of the Cuzco school, inviting the viewer to step through the open valve into the historical Andean baroque. By replacing the historical mestizo object (the harquebus) with a substitute, Schopf introduces a playful element of parody that highlights the artificiality—the creativity—of the process of transculturation. At another level, the substitution updates the process of syncretic mutation: it performs another turn in the cycle of mongrelization that generates a new baroque incarnation.

170   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 6  Demian Schopf, Angelus Australis, 2002, Archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 105 × 130 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

Schopf ’s second group of installations featuring contemporary Andean carnival costumes moves from the historical Andean baroque to contemporary neobaroque ­offshoots. At the same time, it considers the contemporary revival of the mestizo Andean baroque in the broader context of popular visual culture. Here, the neobaroque appears as an instance of lowbrow countercultures of conspicuous display. Parallels from the United States for such lowbrow splendor and squandering of wealth are hip-hop or Chicano lowriders, customized cars that are flamboyantly and ornately stylized. Outside the United States, analogues include baroque festivals such as the Carnival of Rio. This popular neobaroque is rooted in the realm that de Certeau calls everyday practice, where ordinary people make do by appropriating and re-creating the material culture of global capitalism. In addition, the costumes and choreography of the Altiplano highlands draw on the mestizo iconography of the historical Andean baroque: the colonial baroque returns in a new guise, the cultural forms of the contemporary Antiplano carnival. The costumes of Andean carnival dancers staged in Schopf ’s installations are authentic objects used in festivals organized by and for indigenous Bolivians. Instances of the mestizo baroque, the costumes mix Catholic and pagan references. Schopf explains that the dancers wear these “costumes used for certain popular Bolivian folkloric dances,” such as the annual carnival in the city of Oruro and “the Jesús del Gran

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   171

Figure 7  Demian Schopf, Asiel Timor Dei, 2001, archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 105 × 130 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

Poder festival in La Paz.”96 One of the installations—“Los Coros Menores / Los Tíos del Diablo” [The minor choirs or the uncles of the devil]—takes its name from a local Aymara cult, the cult of tíos de la mina: meaning literally the “uncles of the mine.” As Schopf explains, each silver mine of the Bolivian Highlands used to have its own tío—its own patron.97 These figures are represented as clay idols, often painted red with a phallus and pair of horns and placed inside the mine in popular shrines to which miners make offerings. This syncretic folk deity has undergone a stunning series of mutations. The Spanish term tío [uncle] is a corruption of two other terms: one is the Spanish word dios (for God), which became tío because of the Aymara mispronunciation of Spanish. Secondly, tío is also a Hispanizing mistranslation of a pre-Columbian deity, “Tiw.” In pre-Hispanic culture “Tiw” was a male fertility deity of the underworld who fertilizes Mother Earth (pachamama) but who can also cause landslides and earthquakes. In the post-conquest setting, he came to be associated with the Catholic figure of the devil. Syncretized with the Christian devil and reframed within the Catholic setting, the creator-protector persona of the pre-Hispanic underworld deity nevertheless persisted, so that these underworld demon-gods continued to figure as protector deities for Bolivian miners, who still today make offerings to their local tíos during their labor in the mines.

Figure 8  Demian Schopf, The Minor Choirs or the Uncles of the Devil, Diablo, 2010, Archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 110 × 165 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

Figure 9  A Bolivian “Tío.” Courtesy of Demian Schopf

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   173

Figure 10  Demian Schopf, The Minor Choirs or the Uncles of the Devil, Rey Moreno, 2010, Archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 110 × 165 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

Figure 11  Demian Schopf, La Nave, Ch’uta Mariachi, 2015, archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 110 × 165 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

174   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 12  Demian Schopf, La Nave, Moreno, 2015, archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 110 × 165 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

The contemporary costumes of the Bolivian carnival in Schopf ’s installation are rooted in these folk demon-gods. But it is clear that they are also a long distance from them. As Schopf explains, In Bolivia the carnival is a sumptuous affair and the suit has become a status symbol that can cost up to twenty thousand dollars. This ostentatious practice is clearly linked to an emerging and prosperous merchant class known as the burguesía chola (the bourgeoisie of cholos, a word that refers to the Quechua and Aymara people). This burguesía chola is made up of cholo migrants who have settled on the outskirts of the cities and formed their own outskirt cities. The city of El Alto, in the heights of La Paz, is the most iconic outpost of this phenomenon.98

Flashy-colored, extravagantly ornate, and expensive, these suits are “bling”—to again use the American parallel of hip-hop. Schopf explains that its most emblematic character is the Chuta. In its most recent incarnations this is a kind of cowboy dressed in phosphorescent “chaps”—the common protective covering for a cowboy’s trousers and legs—and boots with pointed toes. This is an electrified, post-mestizo cowboy. His only context is psychedelia, the world of the masquerade and Andean pop, another high-plains stem of Babel and Las Vegas.99

Schopf ’s installations stage the carnival dancers out of context, against a monotonous background that is “away from the feast.”100 The dancers in “The Minor Choirs” are

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   175

Figure 13  Demian Schopf, La Nave, China Morena, 2015, archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 110 × 165 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

photographed on a landfill not far from the settlements built by the cholo migrants, the folk artists that created the carnival and the dresses. The purpose is to display the lively colors and extravagant ornamentation of the costumes with the greatest possible effect but also to expose the mountains of trash and garbage generated in the wake of urbanization. In the installation named “La Nave” [the ship/nave], Andean Carnival dancers pose in buildings that are examples of the New Andean architecture. Built by Aymara architect Freddy Mamani for this same social group (i.e., the new indigenous bourgeoisie in Bolivia who rose to prominence under the presidency of Evo Morales), these mansions as also known as cholets. Cholet “is a term that fuses cholo, a derogatory mestizo expression referring to indigenous Andeans, with the French world chalet.”101 Schopf ’s title—“La Nave,” a term that can refer to a ship or the nave of a church—is coined from another popular nickname for these palatial buildings: “Arquitectura de Cohetillo—Spaceship architecture.”102 The photos for “La Nave” were taken while the building was under construction and still had to be painted. In its ­finished state, it assumes the same delirious visual appearance as the costumes of the dancers. This is seen in the final photograph of the series. As Schopf quips, “Is this architecture or is it science fiction?”103 The site of this ostentatious architecture is also the city of El Alto de La Paz. In “La Nave”—and in another installation featuring Bolivian carnival dancers—the neobaroque blends into pop and kitsch, mixing with fragments of global consumer culture. Schopf notes that he is particularly interested in changes that the recent wave of globalization has wrought on the contemporary offshoots of the Andean mestizo

176   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 14  Demian Schopf, La Nave, Reception Hall of the Choque Multicentro building, 2015, Archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 110 × 165 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

baroque. The carnival costumes display traits that cannot exclusively be traced to the classic Andean mestizo baroque—such as “Made in Asia” elements. According to Schopf, there is a “delicate balance between the globalization of capital and the essential local color of almost all the places that globalization invades.”104 The latter are products of urban areas: such non-Andean grafts—Chinese Dragons or dinosaurs—as appear in these samples cannot be found in carnival suits from rural regions in Bolivia, which are more closely bound to the historical Andean mestizo tradition. The two installations in the carnival costume series (“The Minor Choirs” and “La Nave”) work differently from the series about Andean Angels (“Silent Revolution”). Because they stage contemporary neobaroque material, there is no need to bring the objects up to date. Schopf ’s staging of the dancers against monochrome backgrounds directs the viewer’s gaze to marvel at the splendor of the neobaroque composition, which Carpentier once aptly defined as an “impossible harmony.”105

Conclusion How does the post-apocalyptic neobaroque of McCarthy’s novel relate to the joyful neobaroque of Schopf ’s Andean carnival dancers? How can the same mode of expression encompass both the commemoration of catastrophe and finitude, and the celebration of cultural creativity under conditions of structural oppression? If anything, this is a testament to the extraordinary flexibility of the baroque throughout its wayward history in time and space. McCarthy’s melancholic baroque is cosmopolitan in the sense that it is not rooted in the history of a particular nation or ethnicity: it is about the annihilation of

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   177

Figure 15  Demian Schopf, The Minor Choirs or the Uncles of the Devil, Rey Moreno, 2011, archival pigment print on 310 grs. canson rag cotton paper, 110 × 165 cm. Reproduced with permission by Demian Schopf

humans and the extinction of life on earth. Schopf ’s creative baroque, in contrast, is inflected by identity, by belonging to a specific place and people: the Latin American decolonial appropriation of the European baroque and its rebellious transformation. Viewed from another angle, McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic melancholic baroque is epistemological, while Schopf ’s decolonizing creative baroque is ontological. The baroque is a microcosmic model of the non-linear histories and mechanisms of cultural transmission across all kinds of borders. It is an expression that has circulated ever farther from home and its source culture in seventeenth-century Europe. On its travels it has gained in translation, even as it has been thoroughly worked over by the needs of the foreign host cultures that have accepted and appropriated it. In this way, the baroque has evolved toward ever-greater diversity by differentiating into a plurality of subspecies of baroques around the world. As an expression that has been sharply refracted on its journeys across geographic and temporal borders, the baroque today fulfils David Damrosch’s criteria of what counts as world literature.106 As Rene Wellek’s 1962 essay “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship” demonstrates, the baroque used to be one of the principal topics of the old comparative literature focused on Europe. More than a half-century after Wellek’s landmark essay, the transhistorical, transcultural, and intermedial networks of the baroque and the neobaroque have come into better view. Today, the baroque is one of the poster children of the new comparative literature that has reinvented itself as world literature. Demian Schopf offers an insightful comment on the link between the baroque as a memorial to finitude and as a creative

178   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque principle for the diversification of culture, with which we will close: “The Spanish Empire is perhaps the most radical example of the foundation of a world upon the rubble of another world that has been destroyed and that nonetheless survives its own Apocalypse through this ‘Baroque.’ ”107

Notes All unacknowledged translations are mine. 1. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Random House, 2006); Demian Schopf, Portfolio. PDF. https://www.demianschopf.com/. Accessed 17 August 2017. Reproductions of images and quotations of text are taken from Schopf ’s portfolio. I am grateful to Schopf for giving me access to his portfolio and for granting me permission to reproduce images from it. 2. Walter Moser, “The Concept of Baroque,” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 33, no. 1 (2008): 11–37. 3. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 4. On the neobaroque see: Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles Lambert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Stephen Calloway, Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess (London: Phaidon, 1994); Irlemar Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000); Monika Kaup, Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004); Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media Art  and Cinematic Folds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor, eds., Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (La Jolla, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000); Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). An iconoclastic critique of some of the standard arguments about the neobaroque can be found in Allen Young, “How the Baroque Learned to Speak Spanish,” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 38, no. 2 (2014): 351–377. On transhistorical continuities between historical baroque and the neobaroque, see: Nike Bätzner, ed., Die Aktualität des Barock (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2014); Roberto González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). Foundational essays on the baroque, New World baroque, and neobaroque can be found in Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Monika Kaup, eds., Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, and Counterconquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 5. Irlemar Chiampi, “The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity,” trans. William Childers, in Zamora and Kaup, Baroque New Worlds, 508–528, 522. 6. Chiampi, “The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity,” 522. 7. Chiampi, “The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity,” 510.

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   179 8. Moser, “The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity,” 31. 9. The classic study of the historical baroque as a propagandistic instrument—a “guided ­culture”—of the state and the Church is José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). A comprehensive study of the historical Baroque as the artistic style and intellectual outlook that flourished between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment can be found in Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, vol. 2 (New York: Vintage, 1985). 10. Chiampi, “The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity,” 508. 11. See Enrique Dussel, “World System and ‘Trans’-Modernity,” Nepantla 3, no. 2 (2002): ­221–244, 228. 12. Generations of modernist and postmodernist writers and intellectuals across Europe and the Americas championed baroque-era writers as models for their own twentieth-­ century programs of stylistic and intellectual innovation. Such revivals generated transhistorical elective affinities, such as: T.S. Eliot and the English Metaphysicals; the Spanish Generation of 1927 and Góngora; the Mexican Contemporáneos and Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Austrian writer Hugo von Hoffmansthal and the Spanish playwright Calderón, and so on. On neobaroque works by Eliot and Djuna Barnes, see Kaup, Neobaroque in the Americas. Late twentieth-century studies from Europe (Foucault, Deleuze, Buci-Glucksmann) and Latin America (Chiampi, Echeverría) highlight the problem of baroque’s eccentric modernity: Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad; Bolívar Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1998); Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: SAGE, 1994) and The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics, trans. Dorothy  Z.  Baker (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 13. Severo Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” trans. Christopher Leland Winks, in Zamora and Kaup, Baroque New Worlds, 270–291, 290. Sarduy’s works on the baroque are collected in Severo Sarduy, Ensayos generales sobre el barroco (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987). 14. Severo Sarduy, “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” trans. Christopher Leland Winks, in Zamora and Kaup, Baroque New Worlds, 292–315. 15. Sarduy, “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” 290. 16. Sarduy, “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” 289. 17. T.  S.  Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933, ed. Ronald Schuchard (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994). 18. Chiampi, “The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity,” 508. 19. Haroldo de Campos, “Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture,” in Novas: Selected Writings, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 157–177. 20. de Campos, “Anthropophagous Reason,” 159. 21. González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 198.

180   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 2 2. Sarduy, “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” 279–283. 23. Roland Greene, “Baroque and Neobaroque: Making Thistory,” PMLA 124, no. 1 (2009): 150–155, 152. 24. Greene, “Baroque and Neobaroque, 155. 25. McCarthy, The Road, 213. 26. McCarthy, The Road, 53. 27. McCarthy, The Road, 40, 83. 28. On McCarthy’s The Road, see Steven Frye, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sara L. Spurgeon, ed., Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road (London: Continuum, 2011); Julian Murphet and Mark Steven, eds., Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (New York: Continuum, 2012); Kevin Kearney, “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Frontier of the Human,” Literature Interpretation Theory 23 (2012): 160–178. 29. McCarthy, The Road, 20. 30. McCarthy, The Road, 30, 41, 286; Donovan Gwinner, “‘Everything Uncoupled from Its Shoring’: Quandaries of Epistemology and Ethics in The Road,” in Spurgeon, Cormac McCarthy, 137–156, 154. 31. McCarthy, The Road, 286–287. 32. See Ashley Kunsa, “ ‘Maps of the World in Its Becoming’: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Journal of Modern Literature 33.1 (2009): 57–74, 68. Given the constraints of this piece, I note briefly that my reading of The Road departs from ­critical consensus that The Road’s stylistic tendency is minimalism, a sparse, austere style. For many, The Road marks a turning point in McCarthy’s fiction from the Faulknerian baroque maximalism that characterized his novel Blood Meridian (1985) and earlier work, to Hemingway-like minimalism. McCarthy’s refusal to name people, settings, and the ­precise cause of the catastrophe creates structural indeterminacies. Much of the novel is characterized by brief dialogue and fragmented sentences. I agree that these minimalist tendencies exist but that they represent only one of the The Road’s two narrative threads: the baroque is linked to the novel’s backward-looking commemoration of catastrophe and loss; in contrast, stylistic terseness functions to represent its forward-looking aspect of surviving, of “making-do” within the post-apocalyptic world. 33. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001); Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia in The Major Works. ed. C.  A.  Patrides (London: Penguin, 1977), 261–315; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1990); Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961); W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1999). 34. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 16. 35. Carlos Fuentes, “The Novel as Tragedy: William Faulkner,” in Zamora and Kaup, Baroque New Worlds, 531–553, 543. 36. Other instances of contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction include Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy: Oryx and Crake (New York: Random House, 2004), The Year of the Flood (New York: Random House, 2010), and Maddaddam (New York: Random House, 2014); Octavia Butler’s Parable Series: Parable of the Sower (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000) and Parable of the Talents (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000); Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (New York: Random House, 2015); James Howard Kunstler, World Made by Hand (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2008); Kevin Brockmeier,

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   181 The Brief History of the Dead (New York: Random House, 2006); Jim Crace, The Pesthouse (New York: Random House, 2007); Marcel Theroux, Far North (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009). 37. On apocalyptic narrative see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) and Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 38. In an interview McCarthy remarks that the only research he did for The Road was to “talk to people about what things might look like under various catastrophic situations” (John Jurgensen, “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy: Interview with Cormac McCarthy,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2009). 39. McCarthy, The Road, 213. 40. McCarthy, The Road, 14. 41. Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, in Patrides, Major Works, 317–388. 42. Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, 387; Frank Huntley, “The Garden of Cyrus as Prophecy,” in Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays, ed. C.A. Patrides (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), 132–142, 133. 43. Browne, Urn Burial, 309, 310–311. 44. Mariano Picón-Salas, “The Baroque of the Indies,” in A Cultural History of Spanish America: From Conquest to Independence, trans. Irving Leonard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 85–105, 90. 45. Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 353. 46. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 368. 47. McCarthy, The Road, 130. 48. Laurence A. Breiner, “The Generation of Metaphor in Thomas Browne,” MLQ 38.3 (1977): 261–275, 269. 49. Breiner, “The Generation of Metaphor in Thomas Browne,” 264. 50. Browne, Urn Burial, 267. 51. McCarthy, The Road, 14. 52. McCarthy, The Road, 177. 53. McCarthy, The Road, 273. 54. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253–264. 55. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. 56. McCarthy, The Road, 190. 57. David, J. Leigh, S.  J. Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 5. 58. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 178. 59. “The enormous vogue of baroque as a literary term arose in Germany . . . about 1921–1922” (René Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” 1945, updated 1962, in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963], 69–129, 75). 60. Benjamin, Origin, 177–182; 91–95. 61. Benjamin, Origin, 92. 62. Benjamin, Origin, 177–178. 63. Benjamin, “Theses,” 257. 64. Benjamin, Origin, 166.

182   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 65. McCarthy, The Road, 181. 66. On Andean mestizo baroque, see Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). On the New World baroque more generally, see Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America (London: Phaidon, 2005); Pál Kelemen, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1967); Stephanie Merrim, The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); and César Augusto Salgado, “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory,” Journal of American Folklore 112 (1999): 316–331. 67. Schopf, “On La Revolución Silenciosa,” in Portfolio, n.p. 68. Schopf, “La Nave,” in Portfolio, n.p. 69. Salgado, “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory,” 324. 70. José Lezama Lima, “Baroque Curiosity,” trans. María Pérez and Anke Birkenmaier, in Zamora and Kaup, Baroque New Worlds, 212–240, 213. The essay originally appeared as the second of five essays in Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, ed. Irlemar Chiampi (1957; Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993). 7 1. Bolívar Echeverría, “Meditations on the Baroque,” in Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster, ed. Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis, and Peter Krieger (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2017), 30–47, 34. This essay presents the main claims of Echeverría’s La modernidad de lo barroco in condensed form. 72. Echeverría, “Meditations,” 46; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 73. Echeverría, “Meditations,” 35. 74. Echeverría, “Meditations,” 35. 75. Echeverría, “Meditations,” 36. 76. Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco, 271. 77. Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” trans. Tanya Huntington and  Lois Parkinson Zamora, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 98. 78. Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” 100. 79. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, trans. Philip A. Dennis (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). 80. See Merrim, The Spectacular City, 4. 81. On the Cuzco school, see John Stringer, ed., Gloria in Excelsis: The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1986). 82. Teresa Gisbert, “Andean Painting,” in Stringer, Gloria in Excelsis, 22–31, 26–27. 83. Julia P. Herzberg, “Angels with Guns: Image and Interpretation,” 64–75, 64. 84. Herzberg, “Angels with Guns,” 66. 85. Herzberg, “Angels with Guns,” 70. 86. Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America, 203. 87. Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America, 35. 88. Schopf, “Talking About Angels: Interview with Elena Agudio,” in Portfolio, n.p. 89. Herzberg, “Angels with Guns,” 64. On the Andean vision of the Spanish harquebus as “divine thunder,” see also Ramón Mujica Pinilla, “Angels and Demons in the Conquest of Peru,” in Angels, Demons and the New World, ed. Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 171–210, and Ángeles apócrifos en la América virreinal, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996).

antinomies of the twenty-first-century neobaroque   183 90. Schopf, “Talking About Angels,” in Portfolio, n.p. 91. Schopf, “Talking About Angels.” 92. Schopf, “Talking About Angels.” 93. Schopf, “Talking About Angels.” 94. Schopf, “Talking About Angels.” 95. Schopf, “Talking About Angels.” 96. Schopf, “La Nave,” in Portfolio, n.p. 97. Schopf, “About Los Tíos del Diablo,” in Portfolio, n.p. 98. Schopf, “About Los Tíos del Diablo.” 99. Schopf, “About Los Tíos del Diablo.” 100. Schopf, “About Los Tíos del Diablo.” 101. Schopf, “La Nave,” in Portfolio, n.p. 102. Schopf, “La Nave.” 103. Schopf, “La Nave.” 104. Schopf, “La Nave.” 105. Alejo Carpentier, Baroque Concerto, trans. Asa Zatz (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991), 44. 106. David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 107. Schopf, “Talking About Angels.”

Further Reading Benjamin, Walter. “Excerpts from The Origin of German Tragic Drama.” In Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, and Counterconquest. Edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, 59–74. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Campos, Haroldo de. “Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture.” In Novas: Selected Writings. Edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros, 157–177. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Chiampi, Irlemar. “The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity.” In Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, and Counterconquest. Edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, 508–528. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Echeverría, Bolívar. “Meditations on the Baroque.” In Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster. Edited by Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis, and Peter Krieger, 30–47. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2017. González Echevarría, Roberto. Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Greene, Roland. “Baroque and Neobaroque: Making Thistory.” PMLA 124, no. 1 (2009): 150–155, 152. Harbison, Robert. Reflections on Baroque. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Kaup, Monika. Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Lambert, Gregg. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. New York: Continuum, 2004. Lezama Lima, José. “Baroque Curiosity.” In Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, and Counterconquest. Edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, 212–240. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

184   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Sarduy, Severo. “The Baroque and the Neobaroque.” In Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, and Counterconquest. Edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, 270–291. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

chapter 8

The Au tom aton Jessica Keating

By the year 1637, when the forty-one-year-old René Descartes (b. 1596–d. 1650) audaciously laid the foundation for the idea that man is a machine, figurative clockwork automata had already been fashionable at courts in the Holy Roman Empire for almost a century. Indeed, few mechanical objects had ever achieved such prominence in princely collections, or Kunstkammern, and none were so avidly gifted by German-speaking rulers to courts around Europe and beyond. From London to the Agra, from Copenhagen to Rome, rulers of every rank—emperors, sultans, electors, dukes, duchesses, princes, bishops, and popes—were receiving and displaying these German-made mimetic self-propelled mechanical objects, without much of a thought about their relationship to man or his soul. The popularity of German clockwork automata inside and outside the European continent in the seventeenth century rested on three essential conditions. First, there needed to be certain developments in technology allowing an automaton to be made en masse to reach a multiple, diverse, and far-flung audience. New clock-making practices, together with networks arising from diplomatic gift exchanges, enabled these objects to circulate around the globe. To ensure that these objects were received warmly at their destinations, automata retained a visual attachment to favored and at times famous works of art commissioned and collected at German-speaking courts. Signs of courtly tastes—the subject matter, the materiality, and the diminutive scale—constituted the second enabling condition of these objects’ popularity. Third, there was the ingredient of animation itself, the fact that these objects seemingly moved of their own accord made them admirable and desirable, then and now. This essay considers German automata produced, collected, and circulated in the seventeenth century through these enabling conditions: the technology, the imagery, and the fascination with the animation of the inanimate. Coming to terms with what these objects animate, and the themes they engage, in the end, will reveal an important distinction between these clockwork automata and the automata of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanistic philosophy. It is a distinction with a difference, and one that has heretofore gone unaddressed.

186   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

The Technology It is hard for us to appreciate the changes that clockwork technology brought about in early modern European culture. But the shift from clockmakers only crafting large-scale public clocks, to the manufacture of small-scale clockwork objects was world changing. Much has been written on the social, scientific, and philosophical revolutions wrought by the new pervasiveness of clockwork technology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Transforming the way the day was organized, scientific experimentation, and understanding of the cosmos, clockwork technology engendered new conditions of social organization as well as new structures of investigation and thought.1 Far less has been written about the art historical consequences of clockwork technology.2 Clockwork automata made man-made images of humans and animals move. And whereas paintings and sculptures had been special and singular, by the seventeenth century clockwork technology, like the printing press (with which it shares a kinship) allowed self-propelled objects that were dense with meaning and sophisticated in design to be made in numbers.3 Consider the case of an automaton of the Flagellation of Christ. Three automata of the flagellation survive, all roughly thirty-four centimeters in height, and all manufactured between 1620 and 1640 in what is now southern Germany. In an example, from a private collection in the United States (published in 1980), Christ and his tormentors are situated atop an ebony base.4 The figures of the automaton display contrasts of bodily activity and passivity as well as brutality and gentleness. Bound to the flagellation pillar Christ stands motionless, head hanging low. His relaxed stance embodies his calm acceptance of his sacrifice—a sacrifice made on behalf of the viewer, to whom Christ does not appeal. On either side of Christ stand his tormentors—vigorous young men with sturdy limbs, whose expansive poses not only suggest the force with which they strike but also the excitement the task provokes in them. With scourges raised, the figures would rotate on brass plates that turned their bodies toward and then away from Christ. The scourges that appear caught in mid-air when the figures are rotated away from the placid body of Christ, when turned toward him, would make contact with his broadly muscular torso. It is here in Christ’s torso, as well as the torsos of his tormentors, that we see the sculptor’s attempt to render flesh as it rests on and stretches over the musculature below. Such attention to anatomical specificity endows all the figures with life-likeness, and at the same time announces the sculptor’s technical skill. And the way the figures bend, turn, project, and recede showcases an unforced variety in the composition—an unforced variety that was sought after in small- and large-scale sculptures produced in marble, bronze, and terracotta in seventeenth-century Europe. As Klaus Maurice and Otto Mayr observed, these figures of the flagellation are modeled after a renowned and frequently imitated small bronze flagellation group attributed to the Bolognese sculptor Alessandro Algardi (b. 1598–d. 1654), who in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century was a darling of the Vatican and Roman aristocracy.5 Algardi restored antique sculptures, carved large works out of marble for

the automaton   187 ecclesiastical settings, and made small sculptures in ivory, bronze, terracotta, and plaster. Acclaimed for his naturalistic renderings of the body, energetic compositions, and insightful representations of human emotion, Algardi, along with Gian Lorenzo Bernini (b. 1598–d. 1680), typified the dominant style of ecclesiastical and courtly sculpture in baroque Rome.6 It therefore comes as little surprise that a nobleman, courtier, or well-to-do merchant north of the Alps commissioned an automaton derived from one of Algardi’s wellknown works.7 On the one hand, it makes sense that Algardi’s figures, which are full of life and energy, were ideal to give further animation to. On the other hand, upon activating the clockwork, the viewer would note a tension between the sculptor’s careful articulation of the figures’ stance, musculature, gestures, and expressions and the stilted mechanical movement of Christ’s tormentors who turn to beat Christ not with the fire of punishment but with the rhythm and predictability of a pendulum. To put it another way, whereas Algardi’s sculptural group was conceived so as to enhance the viewer’s imaginative expectation of the impact of the tormentor’s scourge against Christ’s exposed and bound body, the mechanical movement of the automaton creates an excess of movement, thus diminishing the group’s lifelikeness, and in so doing, arguably, lessens the spiritual and dramatic content of the work. Regardless of the mechanism’s efficacy, it’s safe to say that the automaton’s particular brand of animation fostered new spectator practices. Beholding the flagellation as a static sculpture in bronze was an altogether different activity from that of picking up the automaton, winding it up, setting it down, stepping back, and watching it go, sputter, and stop. Automata supplemented the artwork from which they were derived; they elaborated upon an action or a narrative that was only implied in their static models. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the popularity of clockwork automata was reaching its height, a collector of automata could readily acquire a golden lion rolling its eyes, a mother pelican striking her chest with her beak, Saint George on his steed vanquishing the dragon, a centaur carrying a woman on his back, or a spider scurrying across the floor and many others.8 Already by 1607, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (b. 1552–d. 1612) had amassed close to thirty automata in the imperial Kunstkammer in Prague, and comparable collections were assembled in the Holy Roman Empire by Archduke Ferdinand II (b. 1529–d. 1595), Saxon Elector Christian I (b. 1560–d. 1591), and Duke Albrecht IV of Bavaria (b. 1528–d. 1579).9 German-speaking rulers began collecting clockwork automata in the mid-sixteenth century. Prior to this moment, clockwork powered figures were primarily produced on a large-scale for monumental clocks in the public realm—on the face of ecclesiastical and civic structures. Constructed between 1352 and 1354, the clock on the exterior of the south transept of the cathedral in Strasbourg is exemplary of late medieval clockmaking. Standing roughly sixty-five feet in height and twenty-five feet wide, the clock contained a mechanical astrolabe, a carillon, a perpetual calendar, and moving tables indicating preferred times for phlebotomy. Every hour on the hour the three magi processed before the Virgin and Christ child, while a rooster crowed and flapped its wings to herald the Lord’s coming into the world (Figure 1).10

Figure 1  Isaac Brun, Eigentliche Fürbildung Vnd Beschreibung Deß Kunstreichen Astronomischen vnd Weitberümbten vhrwerks zu Straßburg im Münster . . ., 1621, The British Museum, London. @ The Trustees of the British Museum

the automaton   189 To be sure, seventeenth-century automata emerged from large-scale clocks with moving figures. Yet, there are important technological and aesthetic differences between the two forms of clockwork objects. The difference in scale between the early and later automata cannot be over-emphasized. Public clockwork automata were intended to be seen from a great distance and by a large heterogeneous audience. The automata made for early modern courts were manufactured to be viewed in intimate settings by an exclusive audience. Another key difference lies in the process of activation. The figures on the Strasbourg Cathedral clock were programmed to be activated every hour on the hour, whether or not an audience was present. Since the majority of clockwork automata required manual winding to be set in motion, their performances were far less frequent. The gears, pallets, escapements, and springs only turned and clicked when an agent external to the object desired to set them in motion. And it was the smallness of their mechanical innards that made automata collectible and transportable. It was not until the mid-sixteenth century that clockmakers were able to consistently design and craft portable clocks with small mechanisms. The multiplicity of functions a mechanism could accomplish in a confined space, like that of the automata under consideration, required not just a clockmaker’s clarity of mechanical design and spatial perception, but also the manufacture of paper-thin gear trains for stacking and precisely cut gear teeth. By the 1590s, clockmakers no longer had to manufacture their own parts but could buy readymade clock parts from goldsmiths.11 And because clockmakers could procure finely wrought gears, springs, and pallets they were able to focus their attention on clock design and construction. Consequently, clockmakers began producing more clocks and automata. With the capability of making clockwork objects en masse came more demand for these objects. And this demand helped create the need and therefore the supply of readymade figures for automata. An automaton of the Virgin and Child in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, dated 1635, comprised a readymade base and figures that were crafted in Augsburg, into which Isaak Habrecht III, a clockmaker in Strasbourg, built his mechanism (Figure 2).12 Rulers even kept wax models of automaton figures, presumably so that new automata could be swiftly crafted for large feasts or other events, such as a marriage or coronation. For instance, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had a wax model of an automaton of Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, riding a stag.13 The Metropolitan Museum of art has an example of the type Rudolf had produced (Figure 3). The fact that over twenty of these Diana Automata dating between 1610 and 1620 survive testifies to their popularity among European nobility and to the ease with which they could be constructed by the beginning of the seventeenth century.14 Rulers of the Holy Roman Empire were ideally situated to recognize the potential of clockwork technology. Beginning in the sixteenth century the southern German city of Augsburg was the global center of clockmaking. The clockmaker’s guild in Augsburg was highly organized and fostered the training of young apprentices and journeymen. A condition favorable to the construction of automata was the craft of goldsmithing, which was also thriving in Augsburg as well as Nuremberg.15 The fact that state-of-the-art technology was flourishing in their realm was not lost on rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. Automata featured prominently in courtly gift exchange among German rulers.

190   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 2  Isaak Habrecht III, Figure clock- Madonna, c. 1635, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich. @ Bayerisches Nationalmuseum

In 1582, Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria (b. 1548–d. 1626) presented to the Habsburg Archduke of Tyrol, Ferdinand II, an automaton on the occasion of his marriage to Anna Juliana Gonzaga (b. 1566–d. 1621).16 Now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, it features two groups of five trumpeters and a single drummer on a dark ebony base. The ebony base was carved to resemble ceremonial architecture like that constructed for a joyous entry of an early modern ruler into a city. When in motion, the ten trumpeters raised and lowered their instruments to from their mouths, while the drummer pounded his drum. This fanfare was accompanied by a processional melody, sounded by a rack of ten pipes hidden along with the clockwork in the base. Sophie of Brandenburg (b. 1568–d. 1622) gave her husband, the Elector of Saxony Christian I, an automaton of the Adoration of the Magi on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1589.17 Destroyed in the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, this complex work was composed of an elaborately embossed and modeled gilt-silver base, upon which the magi and shepherds of the Christmas story paraded in a circle around the Holy Family. And sometime before 1596, the Bishop of Salzburg, Otto Truchsess von Waldburg (b. 1514–d. 1573), also gave an automaton to Archduke Ferdinand II that animated the procession of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire around an unidentified enthroned emperor.18

the automaton   191

Figure 3  Joachim Friess (attrib.), Diana Automaton, 1610–1620, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 17.190.746. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17.190.746

Nobility in the Holy Roman Empire also gave automata to foreign rulers as diplomatic gifts. Consider the numerous automata that between 1547 and 1593 made up a portion of an annual tribute payment from the Holy Roman Emperor to the Ottoman Sultan to insure that Ottoman raids would not occur in Habsburg territories. Each year the Holy Roman Emperor gave the Ottoman Sultan 40,000 ducats and supplemented the payment with automata and other objects such as clocks and vessels crafted from gold and silver.19 The imagery of many of the automata given to the Ottomans over the forty-seven-year period was based on heavily circulated European prints of Ottoman ceremonial processions through the streets of Istanbul, such as Pieter Cocke van Aelst’s The Procession of Süyleman the Magnificent through the Hippodrome (1553) and Jan Swart von Gröningen’s Sutlan on Horseback (1526). Hardly any of these automata survive, but two that were not completed in time to make the arduous journey from Vienna to Istanbul remained in Habsburg collections and are now housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and Schloss Innsbruck in Tyrol.20 Both animate the Ottoman sultan as he presented himself to his subjects and diplomats: on a steed riding surrounded by an entourage of his subjects or standing on the prow of the ship accompanied by oarsmen. The German-made self-propelled clockwork objects sent to Istanbul paid homage to the

192   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Sultan and Ottoman political theater, while showcasing the Holy Roman Empire’s technological acumen. They were remarkably ambiguous gifts that, as has been argued elsewhere in this chapter allowed the Holy Roman Empire to ironize its mortifying embarrassment over having to pay the Ottomans to keep them at bay.21 The Habsburgs, though, were not the only German-speaking rulers to send automata to foreign courts. In 1616 members of the House of Wittelsbach in Bavaria sent two automata to the court of the Chinese emperor Wanli (b. 1563–d. 1620). These objects were transported to China by the Flemish Jesuit, Nicolas Trigault (b. 1577–d. 1628), who described the gifts in a published and widely circulated letter to Pope Paul V (b. 1550–d. 1621).22 According to Trigault, Ferdinand Wittelsbach (b. 1577–d. 1650), the Archbishop of Cologne, presented the China mission with an automaton of the Adoration of the Magi, which, like the automaton Sophie of Brandenburg gave Christian I, had many moving parts: the magi processed in a circle carrying their offering of gold, frankincense, and myrrh and bowed before the Christ child, who was rocked in his cradle by the virgin; an ass and an ox turned their heads to and fro; and angels ascended and descended from the star of the east that hung above the scene and opened to reveal the figure of God the Father in the gesture of benediction. Elisabeth Renata of Lorraine (b. 1574–d. 1635), wife of the Duke of Bavaria Maximilian I von Wittelsbach (b. 1573–d. 1651), contributed “a centaur that runs across a table by itself, shoots an arrow with such force that [the arrow] could even be driven into the wood close-by and be fixed; it strikes the hours with its hoof and fiercely tosses its head at each individual moment and displays some other actions that escaped my notice.”23 Trigault’s vivid description is underwritten by the fantasy (which was powerful in seventeenth-century Europe that clockwork objects would help bring foreign and “heathen” rulers into the fold of the Latin Church. For instance, we know that Jesuits who traveled to the Mughal courts in Agra and Fathepur-Sikri brought automata along during their futile quest to convert the Mughal Emperors Akbar (b. 1542–d. 1605) and Jahangir (b. 1569–d. 1627) at the turn of the century. In 1595 the Jesuit Priest Jerome Xavier (b. 1549–d. 1617) reported that the Jesuits visiting the Mughal rulers not only displayed a Christmas Crib during the Christmas feast but also supplemented it with an ape which squirted water from its eyes and mouth, and above it a bird which sang  mysteriously. . . and a globe of the world supported on the back of two elephants . . . and above this a large portrait of King [Jahangir] which he sent us when he was a prince . . . and next to this figure was placed a large mirror at the front of the crib. . . . [At the gates] were the Angel Gabriel with many angels, who were accompanied by placards proclaiming “Glory to God” or “Be not afraid” in Persian. Around the Holy Infant in the crib were some sayings of the Prophets who pretold the coming of God into the World.24

It would take another chapter to explain and interpret this bizarre, moving tableau. What is of immediate interest is that it contained automata, and it was not the last time a European automaton wound up at the Mughal court. A version of Holy Roman Emperor

the automaton   193 Rudolf II’s automaton of the Roman Goddess Diana riding a stag, mentioned above, also found its way to the court of Jahangir. We know this not from a European record or account but from the object’s appearance in a Mughal painting dated to 1620 and executed by one of Jahangir’s court painters, Abul Hasan (b. 1589–d. 1630).25 Now titled Jahangir Entertains Shah Abbas, the painting depicts a meeting between the Jahangir and the Persian Shah. In the image the two seated potentates are surrounded by an array of costly goods exogenous to the Mughal court, and they are accompanied by two attendants: one who stands before Jahangir holds a small cup and ewer, while the other who stands before Shah Abbas cradles the automaton of the Roman goddess of the hunt in his right hand while a falcon is perched on his left forearm. How the Diana Automaton made its way to the Mughal court is unclear. What is clear is that the automaton was valued enough to be featured in a work of art produced at the Mughal court. One of the most striking features of the history of these German clockwork automata is their centrifugal movement away from the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But more importantly, their distribution outside Europe suggests that the European rulers, diplomats, and missionaries who engineered this cross-cultural translation contended that automata embodied a cultural and aesthetic commensurability between certain powerful, independent political entities in Europe and foreign lands. But why did the initiators of these gifts have such confidence in their appeal? One answer lies in their material worth. Automata were almost always crafted from costly metals, such as silver and gold, and often they were adorned with precious and semiprecious stones. The fact that these objects were self-propelled and showcased the Holy Roman Empire’s technological acumen is also surely a factor. One might even say that automata were given because they rivaled nature—that they showed man’s ability to animate inanimate matter. But to make such a claim would require that we paper over exactly what is animated, because the automata in question do not draw their subjects from the world or ordinary existence. They draw their subjects from other forms of artifice—works of art.

The Automaton in the Age of the Work of Art Diana on her Triumphal Carriage, dated 1610, and currently in the Yale Art Gallery, is a paradigm of a seventeenth-century automaton (Figure 4).26 Crafted in Augsburg, and made up of gilt-silver, bronze, enamel and exotic wood, it would have appealed to the courtly taste for gleaming and precious objects that displayed artisanal finesse. Here Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt is bare-breasted and mounted on an ebony chariot. With quiver slung over her shoulder and with bow taut, she appears as if on the prowl, but the elaborate chariot drawn by two leaping leopards tells us that this display of marksmanship is just for show. What animal could she possibly hunt while riding

194   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 4  Triumphal Procession of Diana, c. 1610, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery

such a contraption? With one leg extended and braced, the woman who plays the divine huntress looks from one side to another as if in search of her kill. Surrounded by exotic animals—the leopards, a monkey, and a parrot—she would have traversed a table during a courtly feast. And just as she began to wind down, the goddess would, as if spontaneously, shoot her arrow at a feaster. Her chariot is a monarchical artifact, a customary symbol of the pageantry of a military triumph. Her victory is captured on the back of the goddess’s seat, which is adorned with fruit and flowers arranged in the shape of a wreath or crown. This abundance spills over into the paw of the monkey sitting cross-legged to her right. It holds a piece of fruit that it raises to its mouth, while nodding its head as if acknowledging the spectators seated at the table. Because the monkey was associated with foolishness and court performances, it parodies the solemnity of the triumphal procession.27 In other words, the monkey parades the parade-like character of the automaton. Indeed the entire object flaunts its extravagance. Leaping in the air and yanking on the chains that bind them to the chariot, the leopards play an important if supporting role in this endeavor. Far from being beasts of burden, their subservient position keys us into Diana’s command over the animal kingdom. And the parrot that rocks back and forth in the niche on the back of the chariot shores up this claim. A triumph in ancient Rome marked the entrance of a general into Rome following a  successful military campaign.28 During these processions the participants and the

the automaton   195 spectators shaped their movements to the symbolic geography of urban space. Temporary structures were erected, trumpets blown, painted banners held aloft, silver coin and bullion carted around, oxen and elephants led through the streets, vanquished and bound chiefs and foreign warriors forced to march in rows, booty hauled on the backs of Roman soldiers, and the victorious general, clad in purple, gems, and gold, moved through the city on his chariot. What battle does Diana’s triumphal chariot commemorate? Whom or what has she conquered? Which borders of what empire has she extended? In the automaton the display of might has been reduced, allegorized, and satirized. Virtually all of the trappings of the procession have vanished. Whereas the ancient triumph was seemingly endless, the automaton was concise. Rather than a male ruler, who commands armies and people, the female goddess holds sway over exotic and tamed animals, whose sole purpose seems to be to entertain. And instead of military might, the automaton shows the goddess of the hunt who hunts nothing. When they wanted to, early modern courtly patrons commissioned representations of triumphal processions, historical and allegorical, that were more serious in their purpose. Perhaps the most celebrated exploration (Vasari hailed it at as the best thing the artist ever painted) of a Roman imperial triumph was Andrea Mantegna’s nine paintings that comprised The Triumph of Julius Caesar, which he produced for the Gonzaga court in Mantua between 1486 and 1492. Monumental in scale and ambitious in its archaeological specificity, the series of paintings adorned the walls of the Ducal Palace.29 It is conceivable that Mantegna’s lauded portrayal of Caesar returning to Rome after his defeat of the Gauls and the recovery of Pontus in Asia Minor prompted Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (b. 1459–d. 1519) to enlist a small army of artists to produce an intricately allegorical triumphal procession to commemorate his own reign (Figures 5 and 6). The Triumphal Procession, roughly fifty-four meters in length, was printed using over one hundred and thirty woodblocks by a variety of artists, among them Hans Burgkmair (b. 1473–d. 1531), Hans Springenklee (b. c. 1490–d. 1540), and Albrecht Dürer (b. 1471–d. 1528). All of the sheets from the woodblocks were to be pasted together and displayed in or on civic structures and princely palaces throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Conceived of as a frieze, the long horizontal format was undoubtedly chosen to recall antique sculpture that adorned ancient temples and altars, as well as to convey that the fantastical procession took place in space and time. Albrecht Dürer devised and executed the centerpiece of the frieze—the triumphal chariot of Maximilian I (Figures 5 and 6).30 It is Dürer’s focal point that, in my view, captures the Northern courtly appropriation of ancient martial imagery—an imagery that goes under a further transformation in the automaton of Diana’s Triumphal Procession, manufactured almost a century later, and very likely collected by a German-speaking ruler. Pausing for a moment on Dürer’s woodcut for Maximilian’s procession reveals much about the automaton of Diana’s Triumphal Procession. Dürer based his woodcut on drawing he executed in 1512 in connection with Maximilian I’s visit to Nuremberg, the city where the artist lived and maintained his workshop.31 The print itself is an assemblage of classical learning, ornamental flourishes, and

196   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 5  Albrecht Dürer, The Triumphal Procession of Emperor Maximilian I, 1516–1518, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

the automaton   197

Figure 6  Albrecht Dürer, The Triumphal Procession of Emperor Maximilian I, 1516–1518, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

198   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque marvelous contraptions. Enveloped in regalia, and seated on a chariot brimming heraldic animals, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I is surrounded by female personifications of princely virtues, winged victories, and members of the Habsburg family. Though the chariot appears to move forward, pulled as it is by twelve horses, and even though all the personifications dance around and above him with wreathes of laurel, the emperor sits unmoved, as if embodying the princely virtues which appear in word and image throughout the woodcut. It is as if Maximilian’s moral restraint and princely prudence could only be communicated if contrasted with jubilant female bodies bearing significant accessories. Beyond this the printed word, hovering over the scene, articulates the specific, timeless, virtues of the ruler: liberality, intelligence, fortitude and so on. But these printed words, which call attention to the flat surface upon which they and the picture rest, also work to bridge from Maximilian’s reign of the Holy Roman Empire back to Roman Antiquity. The printed words do this, not only because they are printed in Latin but also because they are composed of Roman majuscule letters and not the German gothic script. How different is the Triumphal Procession of the Diana automaton! Whereas Dürer’s print, and the Triumphal Procession of Maximilian as a whole, were outward looking, intended as it was to be sent to different locations and put on public view, the automaton of the Triumphal Procession of Diana looks inward toward the court that displayed and activated it. Instead of a long, horizontal image that was designed and manufactured to conjure movement in space and time, the automaton actually moved through space in experienced time. Rather than an object whose materials had no intrinsic value, the Triumphal Procession of Diana is crafted from silver and ebony and is gilded to appear as if the figures—human and animal alike—were solid gold. In the place of a male ruler who walked the face of the earth, the automaton animates an immortal female, whose life and deeds can only be located in myth and poetry. Gone is the restraint of the sovereign cloaked in his array who sits still as a statue, now we have a bare-breasted goddess whose eyes dart back and forth, while she shoots an arrow, the launching of which seems haphazard. But what of the performance of actual processions of rulers that frequently took place in European cities, whenever the sovereign visited? Does the Triumphal Procession of Diana owe anything to these civic performances with their ephemeral architecture, pyrotechnics, tableaux vivants featuring Olympians with biblical overtones, and displays of monarchical dominance and the expected submission?32 Surely it does, but to spill more ink over such a comparison would be to overlook one of the most important characteristics of The Triumphal Procession of Diana and other automata like it. And that characteristic is this: the automaton does not require such an occasion; it creates its own. At first glance, the Triumphal Procession of Minerva, housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, is remarkably reminiscent of the Triumphal Procession of Diana (Figure 7).33 Riding on her ebony chariot behind a pair of leaping horses, and two flute-playing satyrs, a cuirassed, helmeted, and, wielding a lance, Minerva shifts her eyes side-to-side while behind her a monkey grasping a piece of fruit turns back and forth on his tail. Two melodies that were set up on cylinders inside the ebony chariot would sound one after the other while the object trundled down a table in straight line. Although it does not

the automaton   199

Figure 7  Achilles Langenbucher, Triumphal Procession of Minerva, c. 1620, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Courtesy of KHM-Museums-verband

appear in the 1621 inventory of the imperial collection, it was likely acquired by the Habsburg court sometime after 1620, the year we believe the automaton was crafted by the clockmaker and goldsmith Achilles Langenbucher.34 It is no wonder that an automaton which features the Triumph of Minerva was collected and displayed at the Habsburg court. The goddess of knowledge challenging foes was a prominent theme at the imperial court during the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Take the case of Bartholomeus Spranger’s Minerva Vanquishing Ignorance. Spranger’s painting, dated sometime between 1591 and 1601, is a chaotic, clamorous, and ostentatious scene (Figure 8).35 Overlapping and intertwined bodies of personifications of branches of learning and muses crowd Minerva, who has just bested the naked and donkey-eared Ignorance. The goddess of wisdom, still holding her lance in one hand and Ignorance’s leash in the other, looks to a winged putto who crowns her with a wreath of laurel, while another putto bestows on her the martyr’s palm. The identities of many of the personifications and muses are unknown or contested by scholars. There are, however, several figures that have been positively identified. Among them: Clio, the muse of history, Bellona, the goddess of war, Urania the muse of astronomy, a personification of architecture, and a personification of painting.36 Like Minerva Vanquishing Ignorance, the Triumphal Procession of Minerva is about the pursuits of the mind and the protector who enables their flourishing. But the automaton expressed this idea less iconographically than through the very fabric and materiality

200   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 8  Bartholomeus Spranger, Minerva Vanquishing Ignorance, 1596–1600, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Courtesy of KHM-Museums-verband

the automaton   201 of the object itself. Because in the automaton, the mechanical arts and the liberal arts, or to put it another way, techne and theoria, are literally fused together.37 Techne is manifest in the practical skills required in mastering the metallurgy and clockwork mechanics that animate the object, and theoria is embodied in the victorious figure of the goddess of knowledge herself. But seated atop the painstakingly arranged escapement, toothed gears, springs, and weights encased in her ebony chariot of victory—and crafted as she is from gilded-silver, Minerva (knowledge) is not just connected to, but d ­ ependent upon, the techne that brought her into being. One might even say that the automaton of the Triumphal Procession of Minerva does not try to imitate or emulate the spirit of Spranger’s painting but goes beyond it. Other automata of the period are also profoundly indebted to the art of the court. Automata featuring an African figure leading an elephant with a howdah can be found in numerous European collections, and its preeminence in the seventeenth century was undoubtedly due in part to a European courtly fascination with and repeated depictions of exotic persons, rulers in particular, from the far-flung lands. In a related vein, yet another automaton in the Kunsthistorisches Museum animates a peasant swinging his scythe in a garden. This object was produced and acquired by the court just a few years after Rudolf II made it his mission to acquire as many paintings of peasants by Pieter Brueghel the Elder that he could. And by the middle of the seventeenth century, miniature mechanized silver skulls were manufactured in numbers.38 One cannot help by wonder whether the popularity and ubiquity of Vanitas paintings and prints might have contributed something to these morbid objects’ sudden appearance in courtly collections. Though they differ in subject matter seventeenth-century automata have one crucial feature in common—their precious materials. Yet, the costly materials so valued by the early modern courts, gold and silver and enamel, which are used to represent all of the human figures and animals on the automata in question, look strangely archaic, more like the “body-part” reliquaries of earlier medieval art.39 Thus, far from being ersatz replacements of a product of nature, as they are usually construed, baroque automata advertised—by way of their scale, subject matter, but most importantly their materials— their costliness and their artificiality. Given the complexity of their imitative significance, it’s surprising that, very often, automata produced in the seventeenth century have been likened to, or even conflated with, the conceptual figure of the automaton that appears repeatedly in the writing of seventeenth-century mechanistic thinkers, like Descartes.40 It is to these abstractions that we now turn.

Admirable Automata God having an understanding infinitely superior to that of man in extent, clearness and other excellencies, he may rationally be supposed to have framed so great and admirable an automaton as the world, and the subordinate engines comprised in it, for several ends and purposes, some of them relating chiefly to his corporeal and

202   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque other to his rational creatures; of which ends he has vouch safed to make some discoverable to our dim reason, but others are probably not to be penetrated but lie concealed in the deep abyss of his unfathomable wisdom.41

This statement on the order and artifice of the divinely created revealed and esoteric world was written by the natural philosopher, chemist, and physicist Robert Boyle (b. 1627–d. 1691). Writing in 1686 for an intended audience of like-minded intellectuals, Boyle modeled God’s machine-like world on almost fifty years of thought in which analogies between machines and the cosmos, the state, and the human became central to debates in philosophy, medicine, and theology. This mechanistic philosophy, as it is now known, pictured the cosmos as a great complex machine or clock, which was constructed, wound up, and set in motion by an ingenious, rational, and largely unknowable God.42 Critical to this conceptual imagery was the figure of the automaton, which by way of its ubiquity in the writings of Boyle, Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Wilkins, Robert Hooke, Julien La Mettrie, and others came to embody the philosophical ideas and didactic tendencies of the mechanistic turn.43 This is the case, in particular, in texts that attempted to come to terms with the nature of the human and the animal body. Listen to Descartes, who in the fifth part of his Discourse on the Method, laid out his thoughts on how one should consider any living body to be nothing more than a machine. He writes that this idea will not seem at all strange to those who know how many kinds of automatons, or moving machines, the skill of man can construct with the use of very few parts, in comparison with the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins and all the other parts that are in the body of any animal.44

Here, then, mechanistic physiology allows for introduction of what the world knows as Cartesian dualism: man’s body is a divinely constructed automaton composed of earthly matter that, in order to be human—that is, possess consciousness, reason, and the ability to communicate—requires that an immaterial entity, the soul, take seat in the brain, or more specifically in the pineal gland. And in The Treatise on Man when Descartes describes a fictional race of men intended to reveal the nature of real men he tells his readers: I suppose the body be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much possible like us. Thus God not only give it externally the colour and the shapes of all the parts of our bodies, but also places inside it all the parts required to make it walk, eat, breath, and indeed to ­imitate all those of our functions which can be imagined to proceed from matter and to depend solely on the disposition of our organs. We see clocks, artificial fountains, mills and other such machines which, although only man made, have the power to move of their own accord in many different ways. But I am supposing this machine to be made by the hands of God, and so I think you may be reasonably think it capable of a greater variety of movements than I could possible ascribe to it.45

the automaton   203 In Principles of Philosophy he shifts gears, and instead of concerning himself with divinely made automata, he discusses mortal makers of automata in order to draw a distinction between actions made out of necessity and actions according to one’s own will. He writes: “We do not praise automatons for accurately producing all the movements they were designed to perform, because the production of these movements occurs necessarily. It is the designer who is praised for constructing such carefully-made devices; for in constructing them he acted not out of necessity but freely.”46 Although Descartes was familiar with automata like those we have discussed above, his work portrayed automata with little to no reference to actual objects.47 Instead he and other mechanistic philosophers emphasized the idea of the automaton as a key to understanding nature and the creator’s relationship to nature. The repeated evocation of the body-machine analogy by mechanistic thinkers contributed to the flourishing of the production and public display of automata that strove to thoroughly simulate human and animal physiology, movement, and behavior in the eighteenth century.48 Beginning in the 1730s, this “Automaton Craze” (as it is sometimes called) marks a unique moment, unprecedented and unrepeated, in the history of automaton making and reception in Europe. Jacques de Vaucanson (b. 1709–d. 1782), an engineer and mechanic from Grenoble was, arguably, the initiator of the trend. He arrived in Paris in 1733 with two purposes: to further his education and acquire funding for the building of life-sized mechanical statues. In 1738 Vaucanson exhibited three automata—a fife-and-drum player, a flute player, and a duck—in the Hotel de Longueville, and charged admission at three livres a head.49 On seeing the flute player’s fingers key fourteen airs before their eyes, some spectators speculated that if opened, one would find a hidden musical device (like the musical cylinder inside the Triumphal Procession of Minerva). But to the shock of the incredulous, “The machine was submitted to the most minute examination and to the strictest tests. The spectators were permitted to see even the innermost springs and follow their movements.”50 It is likely no one ever requested that the automaton of the Flagellation of Christ, which we began with, be pried open to reveal its secret innerworkings. Perhaps this is because the stiff, repeated, unchanging mechanical movement of Christ’s tormentors gave it all away. Or perhaps there was never any intention on the part of the maker to deceive or any spectator longing to be taken in. Vaucanson’s music-playing automata distinguish themselves from all earlier automata through their effort to seem human. They were, to use Descartes’s words yet again, “form[ed] with the explicit intention of making [them] as much possible like us.”51 Lifelikeness in Vaucanson’s automata is both a historical fact and a promotional ploy. On the one hand, this mimesis consists in the unprecedented character of his automata to simulate complex and subtle bodily movements—such as the fingering of a flute or the rolling of a drum. On the other hand, it rests on the mechanic’s novel claim—made by their method of display—that he could make statues come to life. The individual pedestals upon which each automaton was displayed bespeak this time-worn Pygmalion conceit, as the pedestals called attention to the sculptural qualities of the automaton, as if they were statues in a princely gallery that spontaneously became sentient beings. An engraving

204   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque from Vaucanson’s An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton or Image Playing on the German-Flute (Figure 9), certainly attempts to evoke such objects in such a setting. But once in motion, the automata—particularly the flute player and the fife-and-drum player—must have appeared strange and inhuman, at least to some. This was not so clearly the case with Vaucanson’s third automaton, the mechanical duck. In a letter to his mother dated 1741, Joseph Spence, a visitor to Paris from Oxford, described Vaucanson’s artificial animal: If it were only an artificial duck that could walk and swim, that would not be so extraordinary: but this duck eats, drinks, digests, and sh-ts. Its motions are extremely natural: you see it eager when they are going to give him his meat, he devours it with a good deal of appetite, drinks moderately after it, rejoices when he has done, then sets his plumes in order, is quiet for a little time, and then does what makes him quite easy.52

Beyond its ability to mimic the physiology of a duck, Vaucanson’s creation has been, from the description of Spence, anthropomorphized.53 In the duck Spence recognizes eagerness and joyfulness. It not only moves but also emotes. When was the last time you saw a duck smile? In Spence’s text there is a desire to see the mechanical duck as something more than a natural living duck. Instead of the exact imitation of nature, Vaucanson’s duck supplemented nature for a human audience who longed to see something of themselves in the natural world. But that natural world that they paid to see in the Hotel de Longueville was entirely fabricated. Eighteenth-century automata also did not advertise their artificiality to the same degree as those that preceded them. Perhaps the anthropomorphic qualities of Vaucanson’s duck were in part due to the broad audience it was intended for. Beginning in 1738 Vaucanson’s three automata were displayed for a large public. In 1742, for example, they all had a run at London’s Haymarket Theater. The people of Saint Petersburg were also given the opportunity to see the works when they went on tour in the mid-1740s as well as the friends of Gottfried Christoph Beireis in Helmstadt, Germany.54 Vaucanson’s creations were not the only automata in the eighteenth century to be placed on view for a large public. Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, a Swiss father-and-son team, proudly exhibited three automata of their own design in the center of their hometown, Chaux de Fonds. The group included a writer, and draughtsman, and a female harpsichord player.55 Works like these in the public realm spurred on a pervasive and protracted fascination with automata. By 1780 a Belgian who took on the name John Joseph Merlin established “Merlin’s Mechanical Museum” in London, where for a few pence anyone could saunter in and watch an inanimate object seemingly “come to life.”56 Thus the clear references to previous works of art fell away as the audience shifted to include a broader public. In the process automata shed their vestigial associations with courtly aesthetics to emerge as objects that attempted to replicate nature. As such they appeared to be objects continuous with daily reality, and they have mattered in a way that earlier automata have not.

Courtesy of Universiteit Gent

the automaton   205

Figure 9  Jacques Vaucanson, Le mécanisme du fluteur automate, presenté à messieurs de l’Académie royale des sciences, 1738.

206   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Eighteenth-century automata steeped in the aura of mechanistic philosophy have colored our understanding of seventeenth-century automata. In these objects, we long to see the human attempt to not just mimic life but the godlike ability to bring something that was not living to life—creation of the highest order. A consequence of this desire has been an overwhelming tendency to understand automata as things that existed at a penumbral point on the ontological continuum. In other words, automata, even seventeenth-century automata that flaunt their manufacture and artificiality, are construed to be liminal or transcategorical objects—neither artificial nor natural, but something betwixt and between.57 This conceptual leap, however, is based on the assumption that seventeenth-century automata were intended to replicate the function of natural bodies, and, moreover, that they successfully did so. But when we examine seventeenth-century clockwork automata, it becomes clear that their purpose was not to imitate the world of lived experience. Nothing about them—not their scale, their material makeup, subject matter, or programmed movement—is lifelike. Instead, they transcended biological processes as well as human and animal behavior, by way of their reliance on or engagement with works of art.

Notes 1. David  S.  Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture: 1300–1700 (New York: Norton, 2003). 2. There is an exception to this rule. See, Jessica Keating, Animating Empire: Automata, the Holy Roman Empire and the Early Modern World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). 3. Early modern clockwork and printing technology had a number of features in common. Among them: centers of production in the German-speaking world, a reliance on artisans adept at metalsmithing, multiple moving metal parts, and the ability to mass produce images. 4. Klaus Maurice, Die deutsche Räderuhr: Zur Kunst und Technik des mechanischen Zeitmessers im deutschen Sprachraum (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1976), II: Fig. 403; Klaus Maurice and Otto Mayr, eds. The Clockwork Universe: German Clocks and Automata 1550–1650 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1980), 238–239. 5. Maurice and Mayr, The Clockwork Universe, 238. 6. Jennifer Montagu, Alessandro Algardi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 7. On the famously imitated flagellation group see Jennifer Montagu, “A Flagellation Group: Algardi or du Quesnoy,” Bulletin des Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire 38/39 (1966/1967): 153. 8. Figuren-Automaten Uhr, c. 1630, Inventory Number: D V 5, Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, Dresden; Tobias Reich, Schlaguhr mit Pelikan, c. 1660, Inventory Number: IV 96, Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden; Goldsmith work by Jakob Miller the Elder, Saint George the Dragon Slayer, c. 1613–1615, (Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt); see Maurice and Mayr, The Clockwork Universe 206, no. 104; Hans Jakob Bachmann, Figurenautomat mit Diana auf einem Kentauren, 1606–1610, Inventory Number: IV 150; and Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden;Tobias Reichal, Automat in Form einer Spinne, 1604, Inventory Number: VI 7qq, Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden.

the automaton   207 9. For inventory entries on the automata in these princely collections see, Jessica Keating, “Machinations of German Court Culture: Early Modern Automata” (PhD diss., Northwestern University), 238–246. 10. For the most up-to-date assessment of the Cathedral clock at Strasbourg, see E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 149–153. 11. In July of 1592, Jost Bürgi, the clockmaker to Wilhelm IV of Hesse and Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, bought readymade clock parts in Nuremberg and Augsuburg on a journey between Prague and Kassel. See Klaus Maurice, “Jost Burgi, or On Innovation,” in The Clockwork Universe, ed. Klaus Maurice and Otto Mayr (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1980), 89. 12. Maurice, Die deutsche Räderuhr, II: fig. 393 and Maurice and Mayr, The Clockwork Universe, 236. 13. On Rudolf ’s wax model see Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen 23, no. 491 (1905): xxx. 14. On the extant Diana Automata see Lorenz Seelig and Joaneath Spicer, “Die Gruppe der Diana auf dem Hirsch in der Walters Art Gallery,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 49–50 (1991–1992): 107–118. 15. For an excellent account of the development of clockmaking and the clockmakers’ guild in Augsburg, see Eva Grois, “The Augsburg Clockmaker’s Craft,” in The Clockwork Universe, ed. Klaus Maurice and Otto Mayr (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1980), 57–86. 16. Kunsthistorisches Museum: Inv. Nr. Kunstkammer, 855. For more details on this particular automaton and the political significance of Ferdinand’s marriage see Hilda Lietzmann, “Die Geschichte zweir Automaten: Ein weiterer Beitrag zum Werk des Valentin Drausch,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 57, no. 3 (1994): 390–402. 17. The 1610 inventory of the Dresden Kunstkammer lists the following: “die Geburt Christi von Kupfer gemacht, versilbert und vergoldet und mit allerlei Bildwerk geziert . . . ist Churfürst Christian, hochlöblicher Gedächtnis von derselben geliebten Gemahlin zum Heiligen Christ verehret worden anno 1589,” Sächsisches Hauptstaatarchiv, HStA Inventar Nr. 3 Fol. 363v. See also Peter Plaßmeyer, “Renaissance Musical Automata in the Art Collection of the Saxon Electors in Dresden,” in Royal Music Machines, ed. J.J.L. Haspels (Utrecht: Nationaal Museum van Speelkok tot Pierement, 2006), 45–61. 18. “Ain hoches schönes alts gschirr, auf dem luckh siczt ain Kaiser in seinem tron under aim gwelb auf seiln, darunder ain uhrwerch, unden herumb die siben curfürsten, so da, wann uhrwerck gericht ist, im cürcle umbgeen und sich vor dem Kaiser naigen, kombt her von Cardinal Otto von Augsburg, wigt 39 marckh 6 lot.” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 7 (1888): xci–ccxxvi. 19. For the most up-to-date assessment of this tribute payment see, Carina Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 161–196. 20. Kunsthistorisches Museum: Inv. Nr. Kunstkammer, 6857 and Inv. Nr. Kunstkammer, 6873. 21. Keating, Animating Empire, 77–96. 22. On Trigault’s mission see Edmond Lamalle and Nicolas Trigault, “La propaganda du P.  Nicolas Trigault: En faveur des missions de Chine (1616),” Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu 9, no. 1 (Rome: Spirito, 1940). For a larger overview of clockwork sent with Jesuits to China see Catherine Pagani, Eastern Magnificent and European Ingenuity: Clocks of Late Imperial China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

208   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 23. “Tertium est in centauri forman expressum qui supra mensam seipso discurrens, ­sagittam emitit ita fortiter ut etiam lingo vicino infigi possit; horas autem ungula pulsat et ferociter caput circumvolvit ad singular momenta aliaque nonulla exhibit quae mihi exciderunt.” Lamalle, “La propaganda du P. Nicolas Trigault en faveur des missions de Chine (1616),” 104. 24. As quoted in, Gauvin  A.  Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 123. 25. The accession number of the painting in the Freer Gallery of Art is, F1942 16a. Much has been written on the miniature, see Sumathi Ramaswamy, “The Conceit of the Globe in Mughal Visual Practice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 4 (2007): 754–778; Jessica Keating, “Metamorphosis at the Mughal Court,” Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 732–747. 26. John David Farmer, The Virtuoso Craftsman: Northern European Design in the Sixteenth Century (Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 1969) 16262, no. 85, fig. 85, Maurice, Die deutsche Räderuhr, I: 47, fig. 280; and Clare Vincent, The Triumph of Humanism: A Visual Survey of the Decorative Arts of the Renaissance (San Francisco, 1977), 55, 558, 88 no. 147, figure 83. 27. H.W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952). 28. On Roman Triumphal entries see, Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 6–8; see also Ida Östenberg, Staging the World: Spoils, Captives, and Representations in the Roman Triumphal Procession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For the appropriation of the Roman triumphal imagery in the Middle Ages and early modern periods see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “The ‘King’s Advent’: And the Enigmatic Panels in the Doors of Santa Sabina,” The Art Bulletin 26, no. 4 (1944), 207–231; Robert  W.  Scheller, “Imperial Themes in Art and Literature of the Early French Renaissance: The Period of Charles VII,” Simiolus 12, no. 1 (1981–1982), 5–69. 29. On the entire painting cycle see Andrew Martindale, The Triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Hampton Court (London: Harvey Miller, 1979). 30. For the most recent work on Maximilian’s Triumphal Procession, see Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8–10 and 30–39. 31. See http://sammlungenonline.albertina.at/?query=Inventarnummer=[3140]&showtype= record. 32. The classic work on early modern joyous entries remains Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1984). 33. Hermann Fillitz, et al., Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Katalog der Sammlung für Plastik und Kunstgewerbe (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1964), no. 368; Maurice, Die deutsche Räderuhr, II: fig. 283; Maurice and Mayr, The Clockwork Universe, 282. 34. On Langenbucher see, Eva Groiss, “Automatic Music: The Bidermann-Langenbucher Lawsuit,” in The Clockwork Universe, ed. Klaus Maurice and Otto Mayr (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1980), 125–130. 35. For the most up-to-date information on Spranger’s painting, see Sally Metzler, Bartholomeus Spranger: Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 138–141. 36. Metzler, Bartholomeus Spranger, 141.

the automaton   209 37. On the mechanical arts and liberal arts in Renaissance see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 163–227. 38. For illustrations of a variety of automata featuring Africans leading elephants see Maurice and Mayr, The Clockwork Universe, 263–265; Hans Schwegler and Georg Schmidt, Automat mit Gartenlanschaft und Uhr, c. 1610/15, Inventory Number: Kunskammer, 870, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Habrecht Daniel, Totenkopfuhr, c. 1660, Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, Dresden. 39. On “Body-Part” reliquaries and questions of naturalism see Cynthia Hahn, “The Voices of Saints: Speaking Reliquaries,” Gesta 36, no. 1 (1997), 20–31. 40. An influential example of such a conflation occurs throughout Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), and more recently in Joan B. Landes, “The Anatomy of Artificial Life: An EighteenthCentury Perspective,” in Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, ed. Jessica Riskin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 96–116. See also Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004), 190–197; Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 3–5. 41. Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160. 42. On the “mechanization of the world picture” see E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 43. On the figure of the automaton in mechanistic thought see Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 103–145. 44. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 139. 45. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 99. 46. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 205. 47. It should be noted that in the Treatise on Man he addresses pneumatic automata that one could encounter in “grottoes and fountains in the royal gardens.” René Descartes, The World and Other Writings, trans. Stephen Gaukroger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99. It has been noted that he likely saw automata in the gardens at the royal chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. See Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines, 119. 48. Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata: A Historical and Technical Study, trans. Alec Reid (New York: Central Book, 1958), 274. 49. André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, Jacques Vaucanson: Mécanicien de génie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), 57–58. 50. As quoted in Chapuis and Droz, Automata, 274. 51. See note 43. 52. Joseph Spence, Letters from the Grand Tour (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 413–414. 53. On Vaucanson’s duck see, Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003), 599–633. 54. Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines, 104–106.

210   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 55. On the Drozs’ creations see Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Englightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 56. On Merlin see, Richard  D.  Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 69–76; Anne French, John Joseph Merlin: The Ingenious Mechanick (London: Greater London Council, 1985). 57. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 88–108.

Further Reading Bedini, Silvio A. “The Role of Automata in the History of Technology.” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 24–42. Bredekamp, Horst. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology. Translated by Allison Brown. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Chapuis, Alfred, and Edmond Droz. Automata: A Historical and Technological Study. Neuchâtel, France: Éditions du Griffon, 1958. Kang, Minsoo. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Keating, Jessica. Animating Empire: Automata, The Holy Roman Empire, and the Early Modern World. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Price, Derek J. de Solla. “Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy.” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 9–23. Riskin, Jessica. The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Voskuhl, Adelheid. Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

chapter 9

The Ba roqu e Cit y David Mayernik

The city was a primary theater of Baroque rhetorical projection. At once political, anagogical, and aesthetic, from its built form to the ephemeral structures and processions that animated it, the Baroque city was shaped into a theatrical space. The theater was a world, as Shakespeare signaled with The Globe, and the city too was a microcosm, a world in miniature, as Giovanni Botero wrote in On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities (1588): “Cities are like little worlds constructed by man within the greater world created by God.” 1 This chapter will focus on several cities that are representative of some critical aspects of Baroque urbanism: the coordination of buildings toward realizing coordinated urban space; the dramatization of a variety of urban events, from stairs to fountains; diverse approaches to the urban edge, from walls to their demolition; and the rational, classicizing design of a variety of civic functions, from hospitals to customs houses. This tendency toward coordination and order was paralleled by an accommodation to local conditions and irregularities, which gives the Baroque city its nuance. Beginning in Rome, where many of the techniques of Baroque urban design were generated, we will track their propagation to Paris and across France, to Germany, and finally to Amsterdam. The picture that emerges depicts those characteristics of the Baroque city that made it both unique and influential. While the Baroque was one of the great periods of urban growth,2 there was no independent discipline of urban design at the time. Instead, the shapers of the urban realm came from two disciplines, architecture and military engineering; these were complemented by the patrons who themselves were often amateurs in those fields. Of the two disciplines, the military engineers wrote theoretical arguments for their work, operating from a set of well-articulated principles which pretended toward the scientific. But in architecture there was little theoretical writing in the seventeenth century after the flurry of treatises in the sixteenth, and there was essentially nothing at all

212   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque written on the shaping of the city—partly because architects did not perceive boundaries between an architectural intervention in the city and the reshaping of its urban environment. As Joseph Connors argued in “Alliance and Enmity in Roman Baroque Urbanism,”3 architects used their large-scale, urban building projects as opportunities to project their work’s order out into its usually disordered urban context (although the context often pushed back). Because urban form was largely a projection of political will (as opposed to market forces, as it is today), the Baroque city has been interpreted as primarily a projection of political power; and, because the era has been characterized as the “Age of Absolutism,” Baroque urbanism is understood to be the manifest form of absolutist power. But rarely was the projection of power (and the concomitant, implicit suppression of individual liberty) a deliberate, obvious end of the urban realm. Rather, the political means—perhaps mostly absolutist in a Europe increasingly gravitating toward the nation-state ruled by a monarch, but also occasionally republican (in Venice and Amsterdam)—was directed toward the representation of civic harmony, the concordance of the civic and the celestial, and the mirror of the realm of the goddess Astrea (Justice). In 1709, the Earl of Shaftsbury claimed, “That whatever Things have Order, the same have Unity of Design, and concur in one, are Parts constituent of one Whole, or are, in themselves, intire Systems.”4 Order was equated with beauty; and beauty was not only an aesthetic experience, it was a sign of a harmonious society. Even so, the Baroque notion of harmony (in both music and architecture) depended on dissonance. As Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote in his Treatise on Harmony, “Far from dissonance being an embarrassment in composition, it facilitates its course.”5

Rome The idea of reshaping a whole city, one that was already ancient and encrusted with the residue of centuries, emerged slowly. It was not until the latter half of the sixteenth century that Rome became subject to a large, overarching urban strategy. Earlier in the century, Pope Julius II had laid out the via Giulia, the longest straight street since antiquity, tied to a network of interventions from the Ponte Sisto to the Vatican. But Julius seems never to have conceived of a Rome-wide network of streets and squares. Neither would his successor Leo X, although he too laid out new streets and saw them as part of a local network; not even the Farnese Pope Paul III, whose interventions ranged wider than any pope before him, had a coordinated project for the whole of Rome. It would be Sixtus V, near the end of the century, who wove the outlying pilgrimage churches into a radial network connected to the arteries of the inhabited core of the city, and to the sites of papal power at the Lateran and the Vatican. The urban interventions from Julius II to Sixtus V incrementally developed formal strategies to resolve Rome’s complex natural topography and inherited urban morphology,

the baroque city   213 which provided the essential repertoire of Baroque urbanism. The trident or trivium, a three-pronged street system, was arrived at by accepting the condition at the Piazza del Popolo of a central, ancient street, flanked by a splayed Renaissance road, and mirroring that via Leonina to create the via Clementina; similarly, the smaller trident at the foot of the Ponte S. Angelo responded to a surviving central, axial street from antiquity. The star-shaped pattern of the Sistine street network was developed in response to the scattered seven basilicas, and to Sixtus’s personal devotion to S. Maria Maggiore, the star’s core. Bernini, whose Scala Regia took account of the disparity of orientation of the Vatican Palace and the street with which his stair was aligned, said that an artist’s greatest challenge is in making a flaw such an essential part of the solution that if the flaw hadn’t existed it would have to be invented.6 The via Giulia and the Sistine pilgrimage roads were outliers, the former along the insalubrious Tiber flood plain, the latter largely in the disabitato, the uninhabited zone within the ancient Aurelianic walls. At the Palazzo Farnese, however, papal interventions initiated the kind of operations that would become the hallmark of Baroque Rome: a dominant building sponsors a piazza that sends out an axial street (the via dei Baullari) to tap into existing street networks. It is this kind of surgical urbanism—cutting and reshaping—that constitutes the majority of urban interventions in Baroque Rome. While the Piazza of St. Peter’s fits the modern impression of Baroque urban space— grand, vast, verging on the scale-less—two of the most representative spaces of Baroque Rome are rather intimate: Piazzas S. Maria della Pace and S. Ignazio. These two piazzas, one from the seventeenth century and the other the eighteenth, are representative for these reasons: they articulate complex, but symmetrical, shapes with coordinated façades (of sometimes disparate buildings); they treat the threshold moments at the piazza edge like stage or theater entrances; they both defer to a church as the focus of the piazza, and reserve for the urban fabric its own elegant, composed façade system; and, finally, they plug seamlessly into the surrounding fabric. In these ways, they define what distinguishes Baroque urbanism from its Renaissance sources: the desire to coordinate disparate elements into a clearly composed whole. Irving Lavin said that the common denominator in the widespread use of the word teatro in Baroque Rome was the sense of wholeness or totality:7 and, indeed, this predilection for wholeness—for linking, coordinating, and making inextricable the disparate stuff that makes up the urban fabric—is at the root of most interventions in the Baroque city. At the same time, both piazzas S. Maria della Pace and S. Ignazio engage in subtle negotiations with their context: the former by masking the two disparate streets that fork asymmetrically around the church, and adjusting to the angle of the approaching street, which is neither axial nor straight; the latter not only by negotiating the change in axis from the church façade to the opening into Piazza di Pietra to the north, but also by subtly inflecting the façades of the symmetrical buildings flanking the church to open up as they approach the piazza from the east and west. Alexander VII, patron of the Piazza of St. Peter’s and S. Maria della Pace, referred to them both as teatri; he is also the force behind the twin churches marking the trident

214   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque of streets at the Piazza del Popolo, which made explicit the trident’s similarity to Vincenzo Scamozzi’s scenography for Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. At the Spanish Steps, Francesco De Sanctis’s competition-winning design masks the shift in axis from the via Condotti to the church of the Trinità dei Monti, and provides a ­typically Baroque double theater: from the stairs one looks back on the grid of streets on either side of via Condotti, an ordered urban realm one might find on the stage; while the stairs themselves function as a kind of stage not unlike a fireworks set known as a macchina del fuoco; moreover, the church at the top is in the same position relative to the stairs as the Temple of Venus was to the cavea in Pompey’s great theater of ancient Rome. Perspective was one of the principal tools that created the illusions on stage and sponsored the ordering of long, straight streets and axial alignments of buildings. The capacity both to project illusionistic space and to make real space conform to illusion is what blurred the distinction between the real and fictive city.8 In the Baroque, the accomplishments of illusionistic perspective took on spectacular dimensions, and the mastery of perspective was displayed by those who, like the Bibiena family, designed stage sets and theaters. But in the real space of the piazza, this control of illusion, and illusion of control, was both facilitated by and sponsored actual theatrical events: ephemeral macchine del fuoco and their fireworks; catafalques and homages to a newborn dauphin; religious and political processions; and dramaturgical productions. Fitted out with elaborate temporary constructions, these short-term settings amplified reality. Because they posited not just a different reality, but a better one, temporary triumphal arches, sculpture groups, and obelisks functioned as models for what could or should be permanent, and indeed often became so. The teatrum mundi, the sense that the theater was a world in miniature, and the world a great theater, was a fertile confluence of microcosm and macrocosm that stretched the significance of local urban spaces to represent terrestrial and celestial geography, and projected onto the world the coordinated micro-environment of the theater. Pope Innocent X’s Fountain of the Four Rivers is a modest water display that represents, in its river gods standing for each of their continents, global geography and hydrography. Nicola Salvi’s Trevi Fountain, built to display the waters of the ancient Acqua Vergine, shows not a river god or even the sea god Neptune, but Oceanus, god of the oceans, commanding the waters with his baton and riding a massive seashell, heralded by tritons and seahorses, flanked by allegories of Health and Abundance: all this for a gravity-fed water system which, by the time it arrived in this part of the city, had lost much of its momentum, and was incapable of displays of great jets and cascades. Salvi’s conception, which filled most of its modest piazza, achieves with art what the element of water itself could not: a global drama of abundance and nourishment, of the power of Nature and her beneficent gifts. As both metaphor and actuality, the urban stage projected images of social and political harmony, divine order, and cultural sophistication through formal urban space—streets and squares—and urban elements like gates, walls, fountains, and stairs. While Rome

the baroque city   215 was the laboratory where these devices were often first tested, they propagated across Europe and to the Americas via prints, travelers accounts, and itinerant architects. As the seat of the Catholic Church, Rome was a consummately international city, with ambassadors from around Europe, and a destination for artists, architects, and patrons; both the Accademia di San Luca and the French Academy, sometimes rivals and sometimes allies, played large roles in disseminating Roman urbanism throughout Italy and beyond the Alps. Academy projects of the period, often designed for ideal contexts rather than real sites, were still often urban in scope and intent; and their unreality, divorced from the kind of responsive urbanism its young architects would be required to practice, inculcated a desire for the ideal, for abstract formal order, and the coordination of disparate parts. Filippo Juvarra’s projects for Turin manifest both his experience of the city of Rome around 1700 and his fantastical Concorso Clementino-winning project for an ideal palace for three princes. Near the very end of our period, in 1748, Giambattista Nolli published his extraordinary map of Rome, a city that would change very little again for more than a century. Nolli’s map documents the achievements of generations of patrons and architects in reshaping the medieval city into one of Europe’s great destinations. The Baroque was the seminal period of urban mapmaking, a flowering of documentation inspired by an outpouring of building energy on cities across Europe. Nolli’s map eschews the three-­dimensional projection of earlier maps of Rome for a rigorously ichnographic, figure-ground plan, meticulous in its detail and revealing of the rich texture of the city: he shows not only piazzas and streets as positive open spaces, but also the interior ground floor sequences of palazzi, the interiors of churches, theaters, and even hospitals. These private, public, and semi-public spaces were part of a continuum of accessible space that wove into the texture of the streets and squares. The urban realm, available to citizens and visitors, included a variety of spaces behind the grand façades of buildings: palaces were as much places of display as residence, churches (continually open for Eucharistic veneration) were places of devotion and refuge, theaters were designed to resemble piazzas, and hospitals served a variety of sufferers, from exhausted pilgrims to those with skin diseases at the advanced facility of S. Gallicano. It is this rich texture of exterior and interior, public and private spaces that Giambattista Nolli documented so clearly in his ichnographic map of the city, published in 1748 (Figure 1). The effects of Baroque Rome propagated unevenly across Italy, less in established capitals like Florence and Venice, more so in aspiring capitals like Turin or smaller towns rebuilt after the effects of earthquakes (such as Noto, Ragusa, and Grammichele in Sicily) or which experienced a late flowering (Modena). Bologna’s arcades and theatrical Arco del Meloncello leading to the spectacularly-sited Madonna di S. Luca on a hill southwest of town are manifestations of a particularly Baroque understanding of the relationship between city and surroundings (like Turin’s Superga), of a sense of both great distance and the capacity to transcend it, not unrelated to the precocious position of Paul V’s Acqua Paola on the Janiculum Hill high above Trastevere. There is no theater without drama.

216   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 1  Nolli, Giambattista. Nuova pianta di Roma data in luce da Giambattista Nolli. Roma, 1748. Key: 1. Piazza del Popolo; 2. S. Maria Maggiore; 3. Scala Regia; 4. Palazzo Farnese; 5. Piazza S. Pietro; 6. Piazza S. Maria della Pace; 7. Piazza S. Ignazio; 8. Spanish Steps; 9. Trevi Fountain. Courtesy of the the Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame

the baroque city   217

Paris The reasons why Paris would particularly feel the effects of Roman Baroque urbanism are several: the French Academy in Rome and its relationship there with the Accademia di San Luca; the presence of Gianlorenzo Bernini in the French capital in 1665; a growing sense of nationalism that would want the capital of France to supplant the capital of the Catholic Church as Europe’s most advanced city. But the presence of the king and the nature of royal influence and patronage differed from papal power. In many ways, all monumental Paris was a monument to the monarchy, which cannot be said of papal Rome (because the papacy was not hereditary, and rival powerful families, religious orders, and national churches and embassies each claimed its own urban territory). Cardinal Mazarin’s Italophilia and its impact on the French opera stage would contribute to the dissemination of Italian spatial depiction, but also to the development of real spaces organized perspectivally. The more the theater was able to credibly depict the world, the more the world began to be shaped like theatrical space. Where, indeed, is the boundary between the elaborate performances and fireworks displays in the gardens of Versailles and the stage-like nature of all of Versailles itself? While Henry IV is credited with bringing Renaissance planning to the city of Paris, his consorts and other female patrons had extensive roles in shaping the city in the first half of the seventeenth century. These interventions are mostly outside the center (the area focused on the Île de la Cité on either side of the Seine), and while this might suggest peripheral power, they were in fact impetuses to the expansion of the city to the south and west. Medicean Florence and papal Rome furnished models for developments in Paris under Marie de’ Medici: the eccentric location of Florence’s Pitti Palace informed not only the position and design of Marie’s Luxembourg Palace, but also the extension of its aqueduct to serve the surrounding neighborhood. Moreover, both functioned as catalysts and attractors for their outlying contexts, not only as sponsors of urban development but as sites of promenade in the public portions of their gardens. Like the private gardens of Rome, the Luxembourg was available for public enjoyment—assuming, of course, a decorous public. The queen’s Cours-la-Reine established a model for the extra-mural pedestrian promenade. A tree-lined route extending away from the city center along the Seine’s right bank, it also served the stylish carriages that Marie insisted be built in Paris.9 Opposite Marguerite de Valois’ earlier palace and gardens across the river (which were sold after her death and turned over to developers10), the Cours initiated the centrifugal trajectory of Baroque Paris, an expansion that Louis XIV would extend along the axis of the Champs Elysees, ultimately toward Versailles. The progressive dismantling of the sense of Paris’s limits, most explicitly with the demolition of its last mural circuit, is paralleled by the king’s relentless wars to extend his kingdom’s boundaries. The result was a new kind of open city, embracing and extending into the surrounding landscape. Since at least ancient Rome, the image of a city had been distilled into its walls. With the royal

218   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque urban projects of the seventeenth century, the limitlessness of space, the sense of infinite distance that Le Nôtre manifested in his gardens, began to profoundly impact the urban realm. The walls and their bulwarks, in their demolition, furnished the raw material for the development of the boulevard: the elevated circulation zone inside the walls intended for the lateral movement of troops was retained as a “grand boulevard,” now a place for promenade. The avenue emerged around the same time, but this was intended as a connection between city and country.11 Both new kinds of broad, treelined streets, one bounding the city and the other extending beyond it, would enjoy long and influential lives in cities around the world, especially in the nineteenth ­century. They clearly contrast with the warren of winding streets in the medieval core of the city as seen in Michel-Étienne Turgot’s aerial view “map” of the city, published in 1739 (Figure 2). Anne of Austria’s retirement complex of the Val-de-Grâce, while at the margins of the Parisian urban fabric like the Luxembourg and the Cours-la-Reine, represented a model of urban integration, of fabric and monument unified—the convent, royal residence, and church—in a way not unlike the Spanish Escorial, but still proximate enough to the

Figure 2  Louis Bretez, Plan de Turgot, 1739. Key: 1. Cours-la-Reine; 2. Luxembourg palace and gardens; 3. Val-de-Grâce; 4. Place Vendôme; 5. Place des Vosges; 6. Place des Victoires; 7. Palais Royal; 8. a. Louvre b. Tuilleries; 9. Collège des Quatre-Nations; 10. Île Saint-Louis; 11. Invalides. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

the baroque city   219 Left Bank population to be considered within the city. Unlike the Escorial, therefore, it offered not a remote, alternative ideal city in the form of a monastery, but an image of an ideal urban environment adjacent to its less-than-ideal faubourg context (and even to the royal core of the Right Bank itself). Baroque cities found it challenging to fundamentally remake their older urban centers, their most ambitious projects often emerging at the underdeveloped, less expensive edges of the city. Rome remained unique in the papal attention to surgical urbanism in the center, practiced over several centuries even as outlying streets struggled to attract building and population. While the Great Fire of London encouraged Christopher Wren to replan the city’s street networks, the intransigence of property owners of even smoldering ruins frustrated his ambitions. Baroque Paris, too, is not marked so much by the reshaping of its internal street network as by the local imposition of ordered spaces and monumental buildings—which did, though, have a ripple effect on their immediate contexts. The Place des Vosges (originally Place Royale), Henry IV’s project inaugurated for Louis XIII’s marriage to Anne of Austria in 1612 (just inside Louis’ later mural circuit near the Porte Saint-Antoine and the Bastille) provided a geometrically-shaped and consistently articulated public space that propagated its order out to the adjacent blocks through the north-south Rue Royale. Madrid would create the Plaza Mayor at roughly the same time, although the statue of its royal patron, Philip II, would arrive in the center much later. These royally-sponsored squares, or places royales, required a coordination of their framing buildings—largely upscale housing—that reflected an image of serene order: a mirror of the king’s own self-control that manifested itself in the decorous ritual of his daily life. That is why, perhaps strangely to us, the façades of these squares became priorities, most famously at the Place Vendôme (Place Louis Le Grand): the façade was the public realm, the projection of order in the shared space of the city. What went on behind the façade was of less consequence. Partly, no doubt, this was mere economic reality—the plots surrounding the Place Vendôme were to be built out by individuals, and leaving them latitude to build as they chose was just good business—but façades were as much the frame of the square as they were fronts of buildings. That communal harmony was reinforced in the tendency to, à la Steve Jobs, “round the corners.” Place Vendôme, unlike the simple square of the Place des Vosges, angled its corners, implying continuity around the space, almost centralizing it. Pediments were assigned to the angles and the centers of the long sides. An actual circular place royale was begun a decade earlier at the Place des Victoires; that form no doubt conditioned Vendôme’s chamfered corners, according to the longstanding classical preference for the circle as the most perfect form—shapes approximating circles were proximate in perfection. Paris was also shaped by private developers, albeit with royal support. The development of the Île Saint-Louis needed first extensive work on landfill, embankments, and bridges, all of which required the king’s endorsement, if not funds; but those funds were limited, and the Pont Marie was completed by selling lots along it for modest houses (the inhabited bridges of Baroque Paris were only eliminated in the later eighteenth century).

220   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Unlike the Place Vendôme’s prestige clientele, the market forces at work on the Île Saint-Louis sponsored an economically and socially diverse urban microcosm. While today, the Île is an extremely upscale neighborhood, when it was built, the “belt of fine mansions to be found particularly on the eastern part of the island, facing the river [and the Right Bank] and with their backs to the interior of the island, encircled a new Parisian residential area which consisted of some bourgeois houses of varying sizes, but mostly of modest housing.”12 The island’s simple grid of streets seems to lack Baroque dynamism, but the grid was an almost ubiquitous seventeenth and eighteenth-century ­planning device, deployed in founded towns like Neuf-Brisach in the Alsace and Naarden in Holland, the Sicilian towns rebuilt after the earthquake of 1693, in Mannheim and Ludwigsburg, St. Petersburg, and of course in the Spanish and English colonies. It had the principal merit of rational disposition of lots, and indeed radial planning remained an exception when not connected with a powerful formal sponsor like the Château de Versailles or the hunting lodge of Karlsruhe. Of course, the great palace of the Louvre and the nearby Palais Royal of the king’s brother (begun by Cardinal Richelieu) are inescapable actors on the Parisian urban stage. The latter was inextricably embedded in its urban fabric (its garden lined by ordinary houses until Victor Louis’ grand garden galleries of the late eighteenth century screened them); the Louvre, despite its scale, sat juxtaposed to, if isolated from, a jumble of modest buildings. When Bernini arrived from Rome at the invitation of the young king, via his minister Colbert, he envisioned a reshaping of the whole of the palace, not just its east front. For Bernini, the Louvre was as much symbol as residence, and his famous proclamation to Colbert upon arrival, “Speak to me of nothing small,” displayed both his artist’s concern for the building as the architectural equivalent of his royal portrait bust, and a naiveté about the court’s preoccupation with the minutia of the king’s daily rituals. Claude Perrault’s eventual rebuilding of the East Façade is not without its allegorical associations, but it also took account of the particulars of the royal apartment. Its paired columnar screen raised on an austere podium proclaimed the lofty, otherworldly nature of the royal presence which the palace’s humble context belied. By extending its lengthy Grande Gallerie along the Seine, Henry IV’s Louvre did more to sponsor the gardens of the Tuilleries to the west than its immediate urban neighborhood. But with Perrault’s East Façade “the Crown imposed the façade design [of the Rue de la Ferronnerie, near Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois] by royal order in 1669, producing the earliest street ordinance in Paris, half a century after the first piazzas.”13 In the French provinces and in cities across Europe, noble or royal palaces would give shape to their context by virtue of their scale and formal order. Whether influenced by or even designed in Paris, like the Thurn und Taxis palace in Frankfurt and the Palais Rohan in Strasbourg, or Italian influenced and/or designed like Prague’s Wallenstein Palace, Vienna’s extramural Schwarzenberg Palace and Upper and Lower Belvederes (Prague’s intramural Baroque palaces greatly outnumbered Vienna’s for most of the period), or Dresden’s Zwinger, these private residences with public scale and character functioned as catalysts to urban and suburban transformation. As Corneille said in Le Menteur (II. 5), the grandeur of Paris gave the impression that “all the inhabitants

the baroque city   221 are gods or kings,” which suggested Serlio’s illustration of Vitruvius’ Tragic Stage: Serlio distinguished tragedy as what befalls the nobility, and so his Tragic Stage was an exclusively classical city, a context befitting its subject. Comedy is what happens to the rest of us, and so its setting was heterogeneous, and humbler.14 The age of Louis XIV saw a notable increase in both projected and realized public buildings. Louis Le Vau designed the Collège des Quatre-Nations, commissioned by Cardinal Mazarin, with a central rotunda flanking concave wings (with echoes of Palladio, and Bernini’s Piazza of St. Peter’s). The college proper extended back into the Left Bank fabric, cleverly and almost imperceptibly integrating with it; along the Seine, the concave space fronting the quay seemingly embraced the Louvre across the river (the Pont des Arts would finally connect them a century-and-a-half later). The venerable Sorbonne itself received a new church under the patronage of Mazarin’s predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu. Colleges, especially Jesuit, would become significant set pieces on the Baroque scene, some of enormous size (like Prague’s Klementium), that would inevitably reshape their contexts. As Botero wrote, “Access to a seat of learning is of no little effect in attracting people, especially young men, to the city.”15 The grandest of Louis XIV’s public works projects was the military hospital of the Invalides. Liberal Bruant’s five courts, including the central cour royale, were focused on a domed church, in the end realized to the designs of Jules-Hardouin Mansart. The enormous complex was built on the undeveloped expanse of the plaine de Grenelle, and set perpendicularly to the Seine. While it remained isolated until the building of Gabriel’s Ecole Militaire and the subsequent nineteenth-century growth of Paris, it was at the same time urban in its scale, and sponsored street systems that only bore fruit more than a century later. The idea of a majestic military hospital would inspire England’s Charles II to commission Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital at Chelsea, to be followed by the great naval hospital in Greenwich, downriver at the other end of London. While all these projects, largely for reasons of cost, were peripheral, their scale and elegance, not to mention their practical needs, were spurs to urban development and economic growth around them. These architectural and urban developments of seventeenth-century Paris would disseminate similar ideal forms into the provinces during the eighteenth century, from Bordeaux to Rennes, Reims, Dijon, and Nancy. In each case, a public space and its ­attendant buildings reordered critical sites within the existing urban fabric, providing loci of coordinated elegance almost in acquiescence to the impossibility of realizing it comprehensively throughout the city.

Bordeaux A Roman founded town, with its cardo and decumanus, established the bones of Bordeaux’s street network that would survive through the Middle Ages. Later, the city thrived as an international port, with French colonies around the globe; under the

222   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 3  Place de la Bourse, Bordeaux. Photo by Nguyenhuuthanh. Creative Commons License (CC BY-SA 3.0)

administration of Louis-Urbain Aubert de Tourny, the urban fabric was reorganized and, most dramatically, its relationship to the water fundamentally changed at the Place Royale (today’s Place de la Bourse, inaugurated in 1749), shown in Figure 3. Realized under Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who inherited the project from his father Jacques V, the Place Royale is a subtle and complex urban ensemble projecting an image of harmony and control. Early prints show a city walled toward the water’s edge. The late-medieval Porte Cailhau (1493–1496), at once looming, defensive, and decoratively triumphal, speaks in part to the danger coming from the water—to a city both dependent upon, and vulnerable to, the river’s access. The Place Royale, on the other hand, represents a city opening up to, indeed thriving because of, the river and its access to markets overseas (including France’s enemy, England). The change from a porte embraced by walls, to a place embracing the waterfront, is representative of a transformation both military (France’s national borders are its defensive perimeter, not the edges of its cities; see Neuf-Brisach) and economic: trade, even with one’s enemies, is the lifeblood of a thriving state and city. The prestige value of Bordeaux wines was effected by the focus on quality at the ­Haut-Brion estate, the development of and shipping in the now standard wine bottle16 along with corking, and the rigorous quality control through the port of Bordeaux.17 The perfectionist proprietor of Château Haut-Brion, Arnaud III de Pontac, sent his son off to London in 1666 to open a restaurant, Pontack’s Head, which became the ­premier place in the British capital to not only eat but enjoy Bordeaux wines. It is this sophisticated internationalism, engaging foreign markets even in rival cities (London’s population was on its way to surpassing, just, Paris’s), that is behind the elegance of the Place Royale. Although the walls of capital cities of nation states (Vienna is a notable exception) became less critical, the gate or threshold was not eliminated: Paris’s gates erected under Louis XIV are an integral part of transitioning from defense to triumphal entry. Bordeaux’s eighteenth-century gates are analogous. But the use of open forms at the edge of the city is the culmination of a century of rethinking the city’s edge, its first impression on visitors. The gate that anchors the other end of Bordeaux’s waterfront, the Porte de Borgogne, sits framed by curved façades of residential buildings that themselves embrace the river and are, unlike defensive walls, detached from the portal itself.

the baroque city   223 Rue Saint-Rémi, the old Roman decumanus, arrives obliquely at the Place Royale, centered on the king’s statue; the place is aligned on the orientation of the river, not the street; its center pavilion functions as fulcrum to the Rue Saint-Rémi and the shorter (if wider) Rue Royale (now Fernand Phillippart), created to lead into a market square (today’s Place du Parlement, formerly the Marché Royal). Diverse orientations were used to advantage to integrate the existing primary street, the river which was the raison d’être of the scheme, the Bourse, and a new market for the goods arriving at the port. The angled corners of the place, while recalling other royal squares like Vendôme, to the south, address the splayed orientation of the medieval fabric, most prominently the church of Saint-Pierre: the rear of the Hôtel des Fermes’s wing terminates the street arriving from the Place Saint-Pierre. In Lattre’s map of Bordeaux from 1755,18 the Bourse or Customs House is rendered as a distinct building, reconfiguring our reading of this visually unified space. Being a form of economic guardhouse just upriver from the military stronghold of the fort, it filtered goods arriving from beyond France’s borders, while the Hotel des Fermes at the other end of the square managed the state’s tax income from those stable residents of the region. The latter, therefore, is nestled into the fabric, while the other marks its limit. In between, the square itself is filled out with residential units. The central block, set back the full width of the three-bay pavilion fronts of the adjacent buildings, both allows the two streets to arrive and join before entering the square, and invites entry into the city with a kind of avant-porte/vestibule. Because the Garonne bends concavely along the length of the city edge, and the place is set tangentially to the river, the twin pediments bracketing the space are also visible up and down river. This seems to be a deliberate effort to take advantage of the site conditions. Similarly, at Rome’s Porta di Ripetta on the Tiber, curved stairs anticipating the Spanish Steps responded to twin, albeit asymmetrical, churches, and a small customs house functioned as frame. As Rameau claimed, “All dissonant chords are composed solely of the union of consonances.”19 The mirrored pediments established the position of the now lost statue of Louis XV, the symbolic raison-d’être of a place royale. Placing him toward the edge of the square put Louis in a prominent position for visitors arriving from the water. His pedestal’s iconography was global in scope, with trophies representing the four continents locking down the corners; reliefs of two significant battles occupy the long sides. This was a place to project French military and economic conquest, as much as a place to receive goods and people. Bordeaux was a great entrepôt, but it was also about Bordelaise production, especially wine, promulgated worldwide. This representational function best explains the scale and refinement of the square’s architecture, surely more than was necessary to farm taxes and log in arriving goods. It was a manifestation of the Bordeaux and French brands, to put it in modern terms. At the same time, Bordeaux was a slave port, if a third the size of Nantes’s; but the nature of the triangular route of the French slave trade was such that the slaves themselves were destined for the Caribbean slave markets, not the port of Bordeaux. The allegorical devices of the Americas and Africa on the base of the royal equestrian statue manage to ignore this ugly reality of French power.

224   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Robert Williams’s term for Renaissance art, systematicity,20 underlies the trajectory of Baroque art—the idea that the rebirth of classical principles was informed by a predilection for systematic thinking, from painting to architecture. Ange-Jacques Gabriel in Bordeaux operates with a systematic approach to building and spatial composition, deploying a palette of elements in deliberate ways to articulate space and hierarchy, mirroring the measured approach of the customs and tax offices’ work, while resolving dissonant elements harmoniously.

Neuf-Brisach Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban was the premier engineer both of sieges and urban fortification during the reign of Louis XIV. Having effectively developed siege strategy into a “method” (his followers codified it into a system), he brought his knowledge to bear on a siege-resistant town on the French frontier. Vauban’s most complete work of new building, on a plane west of the Rhine, replaced an older town (Breisach) on the opposite bank surrendered after the War of the League of Augsburg. Neuf-Brisach, shown in Figure 4, doesn’t exactly rise out of the plain so much as the plain is excavated all around it, forming the outer defenses essential to protecting the ramparts from assault. Remarkably well preserved, unlike those of Lucca but reminiscent of Palmanova’s (the paradigmatic Venetian fortification, founded in 1593), these outworks today make for a picturesquely

Figure 4  Remparts de Neuf-Brisach, Neuf-Brisach, Haut-Rhin, Alsace, France. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

the baroque city   225 overgrown ring-park. But in their day, they made the town an “immobile machine” of war, as Vauban thought of it. Linked by tunnels and walled passages, these escarpments, demi-lunes (or ravelins), counterguards, and redoubts form a series of defenses that could be progressively surrendered after exacting substantial cost on the attacker’s resources. What made them a machine was their activation by defending troops; and their garrisoning was what made of Neuf-Brisach more than a war machine, but an actual town. Of the 48 small quartiers into which the octagonal town was divided, 34 (almost three-quarters) were allotted to civilians. A workforce of roughly three thousand, from masons to ironmongers, worked to erect the defenses in a mere 3 years; the troops served as apprentices to the masons, doing the cruder work like foundations. Eventually, the troops were to be housed in four long barracks immediately inside the walls, diagonally disposed between the four gates; their housing was organized according to their status, whether officers or common soldiers, single or married with families. Vauban realized that their quality of life was an important factor in sustaining the garrison over the long term. The fact that Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and forbade non-Catholics to live in the town—a policy Vauban vigorously opposed, largely on economic grounds— made even more essential the economic vitality of the place, which would otherwise have been enriched by Protestant and Jewish artisans and trades. “Vauban’s sympathy for the poor, the ‘bas peuple, le pauvres gens’, his desire to find them useful work, combines a utilitarian with a humane interest, an attitude unusual with his contemporaries. His fortified towns are telling examples of the attempted integration of all classes.”21 Buildings within the ramparts were limited to two stories, lower than the city walls. Streets were made unusually wide so that, should the buildings come under fire and collapse, their debris would not hinder the troops’ passage. The central square is also enormous, serving as a rallying point for the troops, the gridded streets facilitating access to the octagonal circuit of walls without the disorienting quality of Palmanova’s radial system (where the central piazza is hexagonal and the mural circuit a nonagon). The armory was located at a corner of the square, the primary public space surrounded by the residences of the town governor and the officers, and eventually the church. Four wells in the corner of the square provided all the town’s drinking water—a liability, however, when it became stagnant and many residents succumbed to disease. Knowing the place where one lives is completely organized around resisting an inevitable attack must have made life there uneasy, but to an extent all of Baroque Europe lived with the experience or specter of war (from the Thirty Years War to the War of the Spanish Succession). Neuf-Brisach proved relatively resilient until the superior gunnery of the late nineteenth century finally made it outdated. Prospective French citizens of Neuf-Brisach were given a free plot of land upon which they were obliged to build a home within 2 years. But foreigners also had rights similar to those of the French,22 and indeed the walls had been built by a heterogeneous crew of English, Dutch, and Italian, as well as French, workers. While the coordinated design of the barracks was an integral part of the defenses, the individual houses make for a diverse lot in character and color, imparting a quaint village-like quality to the town. Like

226   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Palmanova, Neuf-Brisach never really thrived economically, partly because of its isolation with respect to the major Alsatian traffic routes, and partly owing to its very defensive nature. Access was deliberately difficult, since gates would be weak points in the defenses: one passed through the outworks and entered diagonally through a counterguard before turning toward the gate; bridges over the outworks were of wood so they could be destroyed in case of attack. Not exactly welcoming, Neuf-Brisach was self-sufficient, especially militarily: it produced its own cannon, shot, and gunpowder. Providing food for a town under siege was a critical aspect of its survival, so gardens and courtyard animals (animaux de la basse-cour) were not only allowed but favored—even today, one can hear roosters crowing from the small garden plots with which the town is peppered. Not long before the construction of Neuf-Brisach, Paris’s walls were being demolished, with honorific gates replacing the defensive ones. While walled cities continued to be built, and even major cities like Vienna would have theirs tested—in the latter case by the Ottomans precisely in the year Neuf-Brisach was commissioned—capital cities were increasingly dependent on their national perimeters, not the walls of the cities themselves. Indeed, Vienna’s walls became an impediment to urban transformation. Paris could sacrifice its relatively recent mural circuit for urban growth because the walls of Neuf-Brisach were the walls of France. What Neuf-Brisach represents is an ideal, an image of perfection to which existing cities could only partially aspire. Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, says (as if it were self-evident): Those ancient cities which, from being at first only villages, have become, in course of time, large towns, are usually but ill laid out compared with the regular[ly] constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain; so that although the several buildings of the former may often equal or surpass in beauty those of the latter, yet when one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, there a large one and here a small, and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by reason must have led to such an arrangement.23

Rarely was that kind of coherence achieved, and perhaps the most ambitious new town of the Baroque, St. Petersburg, is notable more for its individual buildings than its plan. Vauban’s genius lay in not only geometrical abstractions of attack and defense, but his adaptability to circumstance. Neuf-Brisach is remarkable for its abstract clarity, but Vauban was also responsible for transforming existing towns and defenses around France’s perimeter. “From 1653 to 1703, Vauban took part in 48 sieges, restructured 130 strongholds, built about thirty strongholds from scratch and left behind him about thirty plans which were used after his death.”24 Like a Baroque composition’s latitude for the performer’s improvisation, Baroque planning was guided by a love of abstract order, but was at the same time dependent on response to a variety of prevailing conditions—precisely because, in the major cities, wholesale reconstruction was neither possible nor desired.

the baroque city   227

Ludwigsburg and Karlsruhe Northeast of Catholic Neuf-Brisach across the Rhine, two Protestant German-founded towns illustrate different but related approaches to ideal order, the representation of and relationship with power, and religious liberty. It has been said about Baroque music that “it would be a mistake to emphasize unduly the differences between Catholic and (at least some) Protestant environments: musicians of either faith could often—with discretion—live and work in either context . . . Yet often all it took was to give a ‘popish’ work a different text (i.e., to produce a contrafactum), or just to treat it as an abstract instrumental piece, to sanitize it for general consumption.”25 In architecture, formal strategies also transcended borders and confessions. Built by Eberhard Ludwig, Duke of Württemberg, who moved his capital there from nearby Stuttgart in 1709, Ludwigsburg’s palace and gardens sit en parallele with the town; the palace itself does not occupy the highest natural point, overlooking the town, but rather lies on a downward slope that steepens to the north behind the palace, into the park and beyond. The palace itself, although more of a complex than a single building, rests lightly on the ground in its typically eighteenth-century palette of white and pale ochre. Within the palace court, composed of heterogeneous functions that are both distinct and yet architecturally linked, the theater faces off against the banqueting hall; tucked in between them and the main residential wing are the entrances to the church and a chapel of the Order of the Golden Eagle, the one opposite the other like the way twin churches face off in the adjacent town: but there, the Protestant and Catholic churches are the primary elements on the marktplatz, where they no doubt represented their importance for the citizens. In this majority Protestant context, it is the Catholic church that is smaller and, in a way, less overtly “baroque.” At the palace, instead, the religious dimension within the court is discrete, to the point of being almost invisible— hardly able to measure up to, much less surpass, the prominence of the adjacent theater. One could see the coordinated palace as Serlio’s Tragic Stage, the heterogeneous marktplatz, the Comic. The contrast is clearly evident in two juxtaposed photographs: two very different worlds separated by a five minute walk (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5  Ludwigsburg, Palace court. Photo by David Mayernik

228   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 6  Ludwigsburg, Marktplatz looking toward the Protestant church. Photo by David Mayernik

While this is absolutism, it does not look like arrogance; missing is the commanding position of the Renaissance Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, which dominates its small town from above and on axis with it. Ludwig’s residence is like that of an extremely wealthy and powerful, but benign, neighbor. His palace is primarily a seat of territorial government rather than a civic one (the town hall is to the south of the marktplatz). The palace is oriented toward the erstwhile capital, Stuttgart. The duke’s power is not projected through the town, but alongside it. Both are organized orthogonally, but the town’s grid seems more a manifestation of practicalities than aesthetics. Not far to the southwest, Karlsruhe (founded 1715) represents a very different relationship of town and palace. And yet, while Karlsruhe is considered a paradigmatic case of absolutism, even there, the palace—really a hunting lodge, whose primary practical orientation is toward its hunting park—sits detached from the town. The lodge’s preexisting tower was formerly a prison, an image that was eradicated by being lightened in color and delicately ornamented, to the point of becoming a folly. Although it sponsors the whole of the radiating scheme of park and town (from it, twenty-three paths radiate out to the woods and nine into the town), the fact that the tower sits behind the V-shaped palace-lodge, and the whole is separated from the town by the considerable lustgarten, means that the image is not one of dominance but of sponsorship: the town does not radiate out from the palace-cum-tower, but is instead focused on it, like the cavea of a theater. The tower is not a panopticon, but rather an element of a stage set, a visual focus—like Sixtus V’s obelisks in Rome. One could say the same about Versailles, town and garden focused on the king in his bedroom; but at Versailles, the town, via the mediating Ècuries Royales (Royal Stables), begins to engage the royal residence (or, the palace the town). Here, town and palace, for all their geometric coordination, remain separate. It’s hard to judge the effect of Karlsruhe as the margrave intended it because it was built out rather slowly, subject to changing fashions, and was leveled by Allied bombing in World War II. The model of 1738, in the Landesmuseum within the palace, shows relentlessly regular housing defining the progressively larger urban blocks away from the palace, with correspondingly larger internal gardens. Karlsruhe’s abstract perfection

the baroque city   229 was probably always more of an idea than a reality. Without the will or means to build out the town as consistently as the project implied, the clarity of the geometric plan can’t be read like Bordeaux’s Place Royale or Rome’s Piazza S. Ignazio. At Ludwigsburg, the heterogeneous buildings of the urban fabric seem to be a part of the intention, but at Karlsruhe, they read as an imperfection. Indeed, the meaning of the formal contrast between Ludwig’s palace court and the town’s marktplatz is explicit, expressing the unique nature of the two realms.

Amsterdam Amsterdam offers a caution to the picture of the Baroque as the Age of Absolutism. In the magisterial eight-volume series Urban Development in Western Europe, E. A. Gutkind claimed “Seventeenth century Amsterdam was not the product of an arrogant and self-glorifying aristocracy like Versailles, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Pienza, and many other Renaissance Cities. It was the work of the merchant princes who dominated the City Council . . . [They applied] the same principles which had made them prosperous capitalists and entrepreneurs to the development of their city.”26 A merchant republic (although, like Venice, its ruling class was a closed oligarchy), the largest city of the Dutch States General was ruled not by royalty but a deliberative body of citizens, and these took special concern for the well-being of both the city and its population.27 While the Dutch may have been among the worst of slave traders (and among the last, only abolishing slavery in 1863), with regard to their fellow citizens, they took responsibility for the housing and care of orphans and the elderly under the benevolent agency of religious charitable institutions, analogous to Venice’s scuole. In many ways, one of the most advanced societies of the Baroque, the Netherlands and its cities employed many of the rational planning and design devices of absolutist Europe to serve a very different public and its government. Descartes wrote most of his major works while living in the Netherlands, and it is not hard to see how that rational environment may have shaped his thinking. The deliberate development of a series of three concentric canals conditioned much of new building in Amsterdam in the period of the city’s great prosperity after the Treaty of Westphalia; this major extension to the city also comprised new defensive walls, with no less than twenty-six bastions. The impetus for the urban growth was a burgeoning population, and the prudent anticipation of future growth. Over the course of Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century Golden Age, the city’s population tripled. The relatively modest medieval city was expanded in four phases, the first two in the 1580s and 1590s, the latter two on a grander scale in the early and mid-seventeenth century.28 Like Venice, the ground to build upon had to be created: fill from the excavated canals made the land for walks and buildings, but the structures still required pilings driven deep into the mud to find solid support; moreover, the wooden piles had to be kept constantly wet to avoid rot, so the maintenance of water levels was a critical part of ensuring long-term

230   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque stability. Therefore, while private building in these new canal ring zones was a matter of individual initiative, collective responsibility was required both for their preconditions and their maintenance.29 The new canals (comprising the last two phases of planned growth), Herengracht, Kaisergracht, and Prinsengracht, were realized in two halves, from west to east; each waterway measured roughly 24 meters wide, although the whole corridor varied in its overall width from building façade to building façade, with the middle canal the widest at about 49 meters, the inner and outer around 42.5 meters. As a point of comparison, although the Grand Canal in Venice varied in width, at its narrowest, it was in the range of the Kaisergracht (the covered portion of the Rialto Bridge is about 47 meters); but because in Venice there were often no walkways along the Grand Canal, and these never had trees, the perception of distance and space is wider there, and the scale of the architecture grander. Still, it is remarkable to think that Venice’s grandest canal, for which there was no near equivalent in the lagoon city, was approximate in spots to what Amsterdam realized as a whole system of canals, and these largely for prosperous middle-class housing. Moreover, a combination of generous canal widths and flanking walkways averaging 11 meters from canal to building front meant that circulation at street level was also generous; today, these corridors alongside the canal are wide enough to accommodate their original street trees, car parking, a vehicular lane, and a sidewalk. The walkways were paved in brick, harmonizing with the buildings that lined them. But because the canal water level is roughly 2 meters below the walkways, the houses along the canal do not have direct access from the water, as they generally do in Venice (where palaces often had both a water door, a porta d’acqua, and a land door). As the city map (Figure 7) of 1662 shows, Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century canal system, while focused on the old town, is not laid out in semicircles. Rather, the canals run in straight segments that together approximate arcs; they vary from the inner “ring” in its shortest stretch at 335 meters (at the center of the canal), the middle at 425 meters, and the outer at 550; Prinsengracht at its longest is over 900 meters. These long, straight stretches facilitated simple, rectangular lots, widths standardized at 26 Dutch feet (but often wealthy merchants would acquire adjacent full or half-lots). The long view down Prinsengracht from the bridge at Leidsegracht reveals the enormous tower of the Westerkerk, a view corridor double the distance from the waterside Molo in Venice to the façade of Palladio’s S. Giorgio Maggiore; the Westerkerk deliberately placed its entry tower on this orientation to capture the long view. At 85 meters, it is 10 meters taller than the campanile of S. Giorgio, its gilt crown easily visible over the trees. Venice built a new quarter, the Fondamente Nove, at the end of the sixteenth century; there, the length of the innermost of three parallel canals approximates the Prinsengracht in its longest stretch. But the widths, building façade to building façade, are narrower even than the width of Amsterdam’s waterways, less than half of the narrowest façade distances in the Dutch city. Amsterdam’s enormous increase in scale, the segregation of traffic, the use of street trees, and the accommodation of a variety of social services, all anticipate the design of modern cities by centuries.

the baroque city   231

Figure 7.  Map of Amsterdam in 1662, with a panorama of Amsterdam included. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The radiating streets connecting the grachten were given to commercial functions, as they remain today, preserving the canal frontages as residential; a mandated setback of the rear of the houses ensured no building within the middle of the blocks, and no subdivision of the open space by passages, meaning the block interiors were reserved exclusively for private gardens—often depicted in paintings of the period. These were both practical (kitchen gardens) and decorative. Integrated with the well-to-do residences on the Prinsengracht was the Aalmoezeniers’ orphanage (1663–1665), shown in Figure 8, symmetrically disposed with twin courtyards and rooms for 800 boys and girls, with corresponding twin pediments on the canal’s otherwise austere façade.30 While orphans were welcome in the bourgeois neighborhood, noxious trades like tanneries and breweries were relegated outside the new canal circuit; there too dwelled the workers in those trades. Occupying a prominent corner along the outer canal, the Aalmoezeniers’ orphanage integrated social services into the fabric of bourgeois society. But the zoning of streets according to function, and the zoning

232   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 8  P. Schenck, Aalmoezeniers’ Orphanage, Amsterdam, c. 1710. Photo by David Mayernik

of whole districts, is another aspect of seventeenth-century Amsterdam that anticipates modern urban design. The seventeenth century saw the construction of a variety of communal structures in tandem with the upscale housing in the new canal districts, and they share a common organization: symmetrical, often with double courtyards, their internal disposition was clearly represented in their façades. They are rational responses to needs, but also express an image of order, combined with a modest decorative program discretely proclaiming probity, that was a clear representative of the city’s Calvinism and its deliberate economic policies. Formal order of this kind is often seen as a projection of power and control; and indeed, control of a kind is also implicit in Amsterdam’s warehouses, rope works, orphanages and old age homes. But their rationalism is primarily of a utilitarian kind: simple, efficient, effective distributions of space combined with a decorous modesty that, in the latter two cases, insured a minimum of dignity for the inhabitants, and in the former, an image of restrained prosperity (albeit on an enormous scale). The commonality of many of these institutions’ plans is there as well in the new Town Hall, if at a much grander scale and enriched with a full panoply of the classical orders and sculpture.

the baroque city   233 The harmony of the housing stock that made the dominant fabric within which institutions and churches would be built was controlled by strict building codes (originally in response to two devastating fires of the fifteenth century), which forbade the flammable timber and thatch of which the medieval city had been built. Brick, and brick of certain kinds, was mandated by codes, and heights controlled; whether minimum heights were also established, or were ensured by the high land values, is not clear, but there is a consistency of scale and continuity of character that appears deliberate. London would adopt similar codes after the Great Fire of 1666. A primary site of magnificence on the canals was the so-called Golden Bend, on the innermost of the three canals. Closest to the center of power, the Herengracht became the site of some of the grandest homes of the Golden Age, depicted in twin paintings by G. A. Berckheyde in 1672 (when not all the lots had been built out). But unlike Venice, where the parade of palaces on the Grand Canal clearly distinguished nobility from middle class, in Amsterdam, the difference between a grand house on the Golden Bend and an ordinary middle-class house was a matter of degree, not of kind. In Venice, the Grand Canal was the primary, if not sole, public conduit for stranieri, who were forbidden to meet Venetians privately in their homes. Like many cities, Venice had sumptuary laws that governed public display in dress, but along the Grand Canal especially, the city actually encouraged building ostentatious palaces that proclaimed its wealth as much as the individual owner’s. Murano glass and large openings allowed passengers in gondolas, especially in the evenings, to witness frescoed ballrooms on the piano nobile lit by Murano chandeliers. The large and richly articulated openings on Palazzo Labia or the Ca’ Rezzonico revealed as much as they hid, functioning like so many proscenia to the scenes of noble entertainment within, while the masked “performers” were screened by the parapets and windowsills. In Amsterdam, wealth was more of a private matter, and while it was richly displayed inside (as so many paintings show), on the outside, the restrained façades spoke discretely of prosperity. The trees along the canals meant that, while one could see into the ground level rooms from the adjacent sidewalk, from a distance, the view to the more private rooms on the upper floors was obscured. The sash (or double-hung) window through which one glimpsed the ground floors was a Dutch invention;31 with many and large windows affording both light and air, they made the façades of Amsterdam’s prosperous houses extremely porous, an image of transparency that suggested there was nothing to hide.

Coda As a Baroque city, Amsterdam offers both anomalies and epitomes. Underlying Amsterdam’s peculiarities is a predilection for rationalism, which for all the period’s association with the exuberant and the irrational, pervades Baroque culture, especially in architecture. As architecture writ large, the city in its complexity reveals perhaps the

234   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque most salient characteristic of the Baroque: the essential, ethical role of Beauty. “The city authorities closely regulated the aesthetic appearance of [Amsterdam]. In this period, when aesthetics were closely connected with ethics, the beauty of the city was regarded as an expression of good government as well as a symbol of prosperity.”32 Although Baroque urban form is rooted in Renaissance Rome, what distinguishes the urbanism of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century from that of the sixteenth century is a tighter integration of fabric and monument, a more comprehensive approach to systems combined with a nuanced approach to local conditions, the relative aggrandizement of humble elements and functions like hospitals and orphanages, and of utilitarian services such as drinking water (displayed in ever more elaborate fountains), framing and terminating vistas, marking thresholds and taking advantage of opportunities to theatricalize ascent or descent, and enlarging scale without diminishing the human scale. What distinguishes it from the nineteenth century— when the Haussmannization of European cities deployed similar strategies but with far greater scope and demolitions—is precisely that refined calibration of scale, of adjustment, and of drama. The Baroque is the era of Handel and Vivaldi, not Wagner.33

Notes 1. “Since among the works that His Divine Majesty has created beneath the heavens, man is the noblest and worthiest, so then among the outward works of man there is none greater than the city; for man being by nature sociable and desirous to share his goods, it is in cities that conversation and the mutual exchange of all the things that concern life attain their highest form. . . In sum, cities are like little worlds constructed by man within the greater world created by God, and just as the contemplation of Nature leads to recognition of the greatness of God, in the same way the study of cities affords a special sign of man’s excellence, which in turn redounds to the glory of God, Whose creature he is.” Giovanni Botero, “Dedication To the Most Illustrious and Excellent Lady, Donna Cornelia Orsini di Altemps, Duchess of Gallese etc,” in On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities (1588), trans. and intro. Geoffrey Symcox (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 3–4. 2. Stephen Lee, “European Population Growth 1500–1800,” in Aspects of European History, 1494–1789 (New York: Routledge, 1984). 3. Joseph Connors, “Alliance and Enmity in Roman Baroque Urbanism,” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 25 (1989). 4. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (London: Printed for John Wyat, 1709), II. 285. 5. Jean-Philippe Rameau, Treatise on Harmony, trans. R. Gossett (New York: Dover, 1971), 217. 6. “In architecture, he gave the loveliest precepts: firstly, he said the greatest artistic merit doesn’t lie in the making of beautiful and commodious buildings, but in knowing how to invent ways for making the poor, bad, or ill-adapted so necessary to a beautiful work that, having made useful what was a defect, if it hadn’t existed the defect would have to be invented.” Filippo Baldinucci, Vita del Cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernino, Florence, 1682, ed. S.  S. Ludovici (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1948), 146; in Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 11, n.22, my translation. 7. Lavin, Unity, 155.

the baroque city   235 8. “The Peruzzian stage is precisely an instrument of experimentation, adapted to composing both reality and illusion: specifically, the real city and the theoretical city.” Manfredo Tafuri, Jacopo Sansovino e l’Architettura del’500 a Venezia (Padova: Marsilio Editori, 1969), 44, my translation. 9. Sara Galletti, “Female Agency and Early Modern Urbanism: The Paris of Maria de’ Medici,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 2 (June 2012): 186–203 (University of California Press, on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians), 192. 10. Cyril Bordier, Louis le Vau Architecte: Les Immeubles et Hôtels Particuliers Parisiens (Paris: Editions Léonce Laget, 1998), 31. 11. Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 28–29. 12. Bordier, Louis le Vau, 31. 13. Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History, 44. 14. “Now I am going to discuss the perspectival stage sceneries individually, because (as I said) stages are built in three styles—Comic for performing comedies, Tragic for tragedies and Satiric for satires. This first is the Comic type. The stage buildings for this should be private houses; that is, belonging to citizens, merchants, lawyers and parasites and other similar characters. Above all there should be a bawd’s house and an Inn. A temple is absolutely essential . . . .” Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Volume I, Books I–V, trans. Vaughn Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), Book II, 86. “Tragic stage scenery is for performing Tragedies. The stage buildings for it should be those of characters of high rank, because disastrous love affairs, unforeseen events and violent and gruesome deaths (as far as one reads in ancient tragedies, not to mention modern ones) always occur in the houses of noblemen, Dukes, great Princes or even Kings. Therefore (as I said) in scenery of this sort there should only be buildings that have a certain nobility . . . .” Ibid., 88. 15. “Because men will greatly exert themselves for honour or profit, and because some sciences bring a man certain wealth and others lead to high rank, it is of no small importance that our city have an academy or university, such that young men eager to acquire virtue and learning will chose to attend it, rather than some other one.” Botero, On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities, 39. 16. Invented by the British adventurer Kenelm Digby. 17. “Ensuring that the wine that arrived at its destination tasted like the wine available at its site of production, unlike Tuscan wines, shipped either in barrels or the breakable fiasco.” Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Terre, Uve, Vini: La Denominazione dei Vini di Qualità nella Toscana medicea e il contesto europeo (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2016), 21–28. 18. Plan geometral de la ville de Bordeaux: et de parties de ses Fraubourgs, leve par les ordes de M. de Torny, intendant de la generalite et de Mrs. les Maire, Sous-Maire et Jurats Gouverneurs de al dite Ville; par les Srs. Santin et Mirail geographes en 1754; Cochin filius, sc. delineavit. It was published by J. Lattre in 1755. Scale [c.1:333]. 19. Rameau, Treatise on Harmony, 110. 20. Robert Williams, “Italian Renaissance Art and Systematicity,” in Renaissance Theory, ed. James Elkins and Robert Williams (New York: Routledge, 2008), 169ff. 21. Helen Rosenau, The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 61. 22. “From whatever nation they come, those who desire to build in the city are to enjoy the same advantages as those of the kingdom, without being obliged to become naturalized; on condition, however, that the said foreigners who should come to establish themselves

236   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque in the city of Neuf-Brisach, should give assurances before the Intendant of Alsace to build houses in an agreed period, and conduct themselves as true and national subjects.” Edict of Louis XIV, 1698, my translation. 23. The context reads: “Of these one of the very first that occurred to me was, that there is seldom so much perfection in works composed of many separate parts, upon which different hands had been employed, as in those completed by a single master. Thus it is observable that the buildings which a single architect has planned and executed, are generally more elegant and commodious than those which several have attempted to improve, by making old walls serve for purposes for which they were not originally built. . . . And if we consider that nevertheless there have been at all times certain officers whose duty it was to see that private buildings contributed to public ornament, the difficulty of reaching high perfection with but the materials of others to operate on, will be readily acknowledged.” René Descartes, “Part II” of A Discourse on Method, July 1, 2008 [EBook #59], produced by Ilana and Greg Newby, online version by Al Haines. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59/59-h/59-h.htm#part2. 24. The Fortifications of Vauban, “Vauban,” http://www.sites-vauban.org/Vauban, 188. 25. “It is true that although the Baroque may not have been an exclusively Italian phenomenon, in its early stages it was essentially a Catholic one, and when Protestant cultures latched on to the stylistic tropes, they sometimes went in different directions.” Tim Carter, “The Concept of The Baroque,” in European Music, 1520–1640, ed. James Haar (Martlesham, UK: Boydell Press, Boydell & Brewer, 2006), 46. 26. E. A. Gutkind, International History of City Development, Vol. VI (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1971), 66. 27. “The power of the States-General, the central authority of the republic, was restricted to war and foreign diplomacy. In all other regards Amsterdam was an almost independent city-state . . .,” Konrad A. Ottenheym, “Amsterdam 1700: Urban Space and Public Buildings,” in 1700: Architecture in Europe and the Americas, ed. H. A. Millon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 119. 28. Ottenheym, “Amsterdam 1700,” 121. 29. Nearby Haarlem, connected to Amsterdam by a tow canal in 1632, initiated a similar extension to the city under the direction of Dutch Catholic painter and architect Salomon de Bray, based on his plan of 1644. Partially realized, it survives in the wide Nieuwe Gracht canal, Parklaan, and the canals outlining the mural circuit to the north of the modern train station. 30. It was later was replaced by law courts (which recently have been turned into a luxury hotel). 31. One sees it in Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, variously dated around 1658. 32. Ottenheym, “Amsterdam 1700,” 119; further: “To the authority of the citizens of Leiden, Constantin Huygens “argued that it was necessary to engage a highly qualified architect, and not a mere craftsman, as the head of the city’s building company ‘si decus et ornamentum Urbis amatis’ (if you love the grace and ornament of your city),” 120. 33. The Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame generously funded my summer research travel in preparation for this chapter.

the baroque city   237

Further Reading Ballon, Hilary. Louis Le Vau: Mazarin’s College, Colbert’s Revenge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Cieraad, Irene. “Dutch Windows: Female Virtue and Female Vice.” In At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, edited by Irene Cieraad. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. Cohen, Gary B., and Franz A. J. Szabo, eds. Embodiments of Power: Building Baroque Cities in Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Gutkind, E.  A. International History of Urban Development, Vol. I: Urban Development in Central Europe. London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1964. Habel, Dorothy M. The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Millon, Henry, ed. Circa 1700: Architecture in Europe and the Americas. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005. Millon, Henry, ed. The Triumph of the Baroque: Architecture in Europe 1600–1750. Milan: Bompiani, 1999. Morris, A. E. J. History of Urban Form: Prehistory to the Renaissance. London: George Godwin Ltd., 1972. Picon, Antoine. French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment. Translated by Martin Thom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. van Eck, Caroline. Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Wentworth Rinne, Katherine. The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

chapter 10

Su r face a n d Su bsta nce: Ba roqu e Dr e ss i n Spa i n a n d  Fr a nce , 1600 –1720 Lesley Ellis Miller

In the twenty-first century, fashion journalists, marketing gurus, and proprietors of fashion houses often describe certain trends or goods as “baroque,” waxing lyrical on ornamentation, luster, and texture: the surface characteristics of dress. Typical is the foregrounding of grandeur and performance, mostly in “special occasion wear.” Consider Katie Connor’s observations in 2012: Art history is always more fun when studied through the lens of fashion. This fall’s curriculum calls for an intro to Baroque, the art movement of the late 1500s to 1700s marked by ornate details and gilded, decorative motifs. Using textured fabrics —think velvet and silk tapestries—designers . . . manipulate light and shadows to dramatic effect (not unlike Rembrandt or Rubens) . . . the resulting masterpieces render each day a grand exhibition.1

This approach builds on a tradition of fashion reportage that dates back to the ­seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the steady dissemination of news through printed texts and images began to inform not only local but also distant audiences of what was being worn by the upper echelons of western European society.2 In an age before instant worldwide circulation of photographs of public events and catwalk shows, this news came through in black and white at an irregular and unpredictable pace, while access to color was largely the privilege of those experiencing the fashions firsthand, or through the paintings produced by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577–d. 1640). In this chapter printed texts and images are the starting point for exploring the surface of

surface and substance   239 dress, whose substance is then unpacked by considering the nature and sources of garments and fabrics. The purpose is threefold: first, to demonstrate how dress had a political significance in the courts of Europe; second, to introduce the shaping of the modern fashion system—a system in which changes in textiles and trimmings were promoted seasonally; and third, to underline the economic ramifications of elite and fashionable dress production and consumption. Dress is a sensitive barometer of taste because its materials are immeasurably easier to vary from event to event, place to place, and season to season—certainly much more so than the bricks and mortar, marble and stone of architecture and sculpture that dominate the great art historical narratives of the baroque style and period.3 Cloth embodied political and entrepreneurial strategies, transnational chains of supply and demand, and sensory experiences for rich and poor alike. It was a major feature in contemporary paintings and texts, all of which were subject to the artistic, ideological, and social conventions of their time. They were also subject to the personal and political preferences of artist, patron, and sitter, or the literary agendas of novelists, playwrights, or satirists.4 Indeed, the textiles, leather, precious metal and stones of which dress was made afford much food for thought on the economics of production and the dynamics of fashion, as well as on the experience of acquiring, wearing, gesturing, and moving in clothes. Nonetheless, dress and fashion histories often privilege image over object and theory over empirical investigation. Of course, few garments survive from the period in question, and most of those that do come from the upper echelons of society. Over the last few decades, however, analysis of an increasing corpus of “the real thing” from different social ranks and the reconstruction of examples of historical dress have added ­immeasurably to understanding of its component parts and their impact on the body.5 Historians have complemented such forensic dissection of objects with the creative exploitation of a variety of previously little-addressed textual sources. One outcome has been recognition of the pitfalls of interpreting apparently familiar (as well as obviously unfamiliar) words and has resulted in the development of lexicons of textiles and dress derived from mass documentation, such as inventories.6 The focus here spans the period from just before 1600 to just after 1720, during which print and news culture was expanding, diversifying, and periodizing, urban centers and their populations were multiplying, global trade was transforming the European world of dress and textiles, and France began imposing style leadership on neighbors and colonies alike.7 Catholic Spain and France are at the heart of the essay, as both had sartorial clout beyond their borders: the first an imperial power leaving its Golden Age (Siglo de Oro), the second a political and fashion empire entering its Great Century (Grand Siècle).8 Inextricably linked by kinship but often riven by war, both were models of gradual unification into highly centralized absolutist states. Both Habsburg and Bourbon monarchs valued and used the “culture of appearances” to their political and economic advantage.9 One striking indication was their promulgation of sumptuary legislation designed to control luxury consumption in dress; and a second was their licensing of the publication of tailoring manuals and an embryonic fashion press. In the first half of this period, each court had its own distinctive aesthetic in dress, but by the second half, French fancy had largely vanquished Spanish sobriety.10 In the historiography

240   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque of dress, Spain has been a poor relation, while France has assumed a privileged place, thanks in large part to the pioneering promotion of fashion by Louis XIV (b. 1638–d. 1715) from the 1660s onward and the continued high profile of the industry in France till the present.11

Fashioning the Image Descriptions in seventeenth-century news pamphlets delivered a rich diet of colorful, gilded spectacle. Spain was as prolific as France in producing this kind of reportage, though it did not develop its own periodical press till 1697, and it remained dependent on the French fashion press until the twentieth century.12 According to Andrés de Almansa y Mendoza, an author of such accounts, the inclusion of dress in these narratives was crucial as it glorified its wearers.13 Such events included rites of passage (baptisms, marriages, funerals, coronations, and oaths of fealty), royal visits to cities beyond the court, receptions for visiting dignitaries at court, and religious processions. The protagonists were kings, princes, ambassadors, clergymen, military men, and their households; a few were women. Dress emerges in these reports not only worn on the backs of nobles but also offered as appropriate and carefully calibrated gifts.14 For example, during the visit made by Philip IV (b. 1605–d. 1665) to Andalusia in 1624, his host the Duke of Medina left gifts in keeping with the status of his guests in their respective apartments. The king received a silver trunk mounted with the royal coat of arms. It contained, among other items, fifty pieces of Spanish ambergris-perfumed leather (a prized Spanish specialty), a hundred pairs of gloves, and fifty pockets or bags.15 His favorite, the Count Duke of Olivares (b. 1587–d. 1645), received luxurious items in more modest quantities as behove his station: an embroidered carnation-colored gown for wearing indoors, covered with a taffeta towel (presumably for protection), a shirt, a fine linen cloth, and two pairs of gloves.16 Monetary value was implicit rather than explicit in most reports, but on occasion the cost of the most extravagant gifts or outfits was broadcast. Jewelry was perhaps the ultimate symbol of esteem. After baptizing the Infanta María Teresa (b. 1638–d. 1683) in 1638, Cardinal Borja gave the baby a jewel worth twenty ducados, “with the Holy Spirit inside a fleur-de-lis, with a diamond, and in the middle one of Saint Theresa [of Avila]’s teeth. . . with two chains worked in the Portuguese Indies.”17 The value of this gift was, however, slight in comparison with the suit, embroidered and bejeweled with diamonds, and worn at the baptism by the Duke of Modena and the gown of the child’s godmother, the Princess of Savoy, estimated at three thousand and five thousand ducados respectively. Indeed, the writer noted that at this event what counted least were the expensive silk fabrics, those worn by the many liveried—and probably well-born—servants. While the dress at this event reinforced Hapsburg imperial power through excessive magnificence, it did not materially proclaim cultural differences in quite the same way

surface and substance   241 as it did at the Infanta’s dynastic marriage to Louis XIV twenty-two years later in 1660. This alliance sealed the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659), the Infanta renouncing her right to the Spanish throne. A French writer conveyed the rich ceremonial of the five days spent on the Franco-Spanish border (Figure 1), reporting impressionistically the attire of King, Infanta/Queen, and Queen Mother, as well as making observations on the experience of wearing ceremonial robes, the divergence between Spanish and French women’s fashions and between the garb of Queen and Queen Mother.18 Liveries and uniforms were important here as both the Infanta’s husband and father had brought impressive retinues of military and personal servants. Each contingent went out of its way to admire the accoutrements of the other. Philip IV gifted to Louis twelve horses’ caparisons in the finest scarlet wool with the arms of Spain embroidered in gold on the pillion and eight of the same to Louis’ brother, while Louis provided his new wife with several led horses attired in horse cloths of embroidered velvet, with plumes and aigrettes on their heads, and with accompanying pages and footmen in “very beautiful liveries.”19 The Infanta arrived in Spanish dress on June 5, and although the King wished to consummate the marriage immediately, his Hapsburg mother insisted his future wife would be more attractive dressed in French style. On June 7 the new Queen was still

Figure 1  Louis XIV and entourage greeting Philip IV, Infanta María Teresa and Spanish ­courtiers. After a tapestry design in a series representing the principal events in the reign of Louis XIV, 1728. Etching and engraving. British Museum: 1867,0413.572. © The Trustees of the British Museum

242   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque wearing Spanish dress, taking up the whole of the front of the carriage because of her distinctive Spanish hooped skirt. She was, however, half coiffed in French style, which made “her more beautiful and more amiable than she had been before.”20 On June 9 she greeted her husband for the marriage Mass. He was clad in a black suit and cloak lined in gold and silver brocade and covered in black lace; she was now dressed in French style in a white brocade gown, still coiffed a little à l’espagnole, her head encircled with a crown set with precious stones; a royal mantle in blue velvet, embroidered with gold fleurde-lis and lined in ermine, hung from her shoulders. The sheer weight of this outfit made her sweat profusely in the sun.21 Ladies-in-waiting for both Queen and Queen Mother dressed in Spanish or French style according to their origins. The attire of the Queen Mother was a salutary contrast as she was encased in crêpe from head to toe, carried a beautiful handkerchief (presumably trimmed with lace as in some of her portraits), and was decked out with much jewelry.22 The very name of this fabric—crêpe—alerted contemporary readers to the fact that she was wearing mourning silk.23 Death propelled the bereaved into different phases of mourning, starting with dense matte black. Indeed, a mere five years later the demise of the Queen’s father demanded that not only the Spanish but also the French courts express sorrow. The silk weavers of Lyon were quick to petition for a reduction in the prescribed length of mourning because of its impact on their livelihood at a time when the English were blockading their trade.24 Theirs was not an isolated outcry: Parisian merchants bewailed periods of official mourning, notably in 1672, the Chamber of Commerce in Lyon in 1703, and the silk weaving guild after Louis XIV’s demise in 1715.25 The widespread assumption of mourning for crowned heads as well as family members led to sumptuary strictures in Spain in 1691 and 1723, in which the wearing of clothes in fine black wool was limited to close family members to prevent those with no direct connection with the deceased donning black.26 The fortunes of merchants making and supplying luxurious silks and fripperies worn at court depended on consumers returning to buy new products regularly. Their interests were well served by Le Mercure galant, the publication that historians have long considered the first fashion journal.27 Printed in Paris from 1672 onward, at first it came out irregularly, just as the news pamphlets had. Between 1678 and 1724, however, it appeared monthly, its content overlapping with previous publications in its coverage of court activities. Its editor, the enterprising printer Jean Donneau de Visé (b. 1638–d. 1710), provided a mélange of cultural offerings, which included poems, songs, book reviews, as well as gossip from the court at Versailles and fashionable haunts in Paris. The tone was conversational. A major innovation lay in the fashion content, particularly noteworthy before 1700. It included supplements for spring and autumn for “people of quality,” who “often discuss new fashions, a topic that enters into their conversations as naturally as the cold and the heat, the rain and the fine weather.”28 The publisher’s belief that he provided a service to provincial ladies avid for news of the latest styles at Versailles and in Paris is borne out by reference to Le Mercure in postmortem inventories of fashionably furnished grand houses outside Paris.29 Donneau de Visé described with gusto the fickleness of the fashion system, emphasizing the “trickle-down” effect.30 In general, he was evenhanded in the attention he gave to

surface and substance   243 men and women throughout the 1670s and 1680s, addressing personal specificities (age, complexion, gender, physique) as well as social demands. His proposals suggest, however, that the most important drivers of fashion were royal authority, social station, and season—drivers that naturally enough also informed manufacturers of fashionable goods.31 In an early issue in 1673, for example, he wrote: “Fashions die before being born, and all people of quality have scarcely begun to follow fashion, than the monkeys at Court make them abort, because the grandees give them up immediately in order to take up others; and that is why the bourgeois who believe they are in fashion never are.”32 Allowance made for dramatic exaggeration, it is clear that the humor in many a comedy performed at court drew on perceived bourgeois ignorance of what was in fashion and how to wear it. Witness, for example, Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670).33 The extraordinary fashion supplement printed in January 1678 epitomises Donneau de Visé’s approach to the current season’s fashion: interleafed in the discursive commentary are annotated engravings of anonymous gentlemen and ladies “of quality” (Figure 2). They wear ensembles for winter, each component explained in words. The author stressed in the accompanying text that he was showing only new fabrics, lace and

Figure 2 Habit d’hiver. Extraordinary supplement of Le Mercure Galant, drawn by Jean Berain, engraved by Jean Lepautre, Winter 1678. Etching and engraving. V&A: E.267–2014. Given by Antony Griffiths and Judy Rudoe. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

244   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque trimmings for both sexes. He then provided a capsule wardrobe for men, one for women, and a list of twelve new silk fabrics, each described by name (type), pattern, and color and coded to match an accompanying engraving (Figure 3).34 He went on to observe that linen fabrics imitating these silks were also worn and commented on accessories such as ribbons, fans, caps, and palatines. In almost every article on fashion, Donneau de Visé built the reputation of Parisian merchants by providing one or two addresses: these were the suppliers or enhancers of the component parts of dress, drapers, embroiderers, mercers, and silk manufacturers.35 This emphasis on the importance of novelty differed from preceding newsletters and clarifies advice in contemporary business manuals, such as Jacques Savary’s Le parfait négociant (first edition 1674). All drapers and mercers had to be careful not to stock more fabric than they were likely to sell in a particular season, lest they find themselves selling the same goods at a lower price in successive seasons.36 The renewal of dress reinforced its wearers’ power and status and ensured commercial survival for suppliers. Within a decade, the anonymous “ladies of quality” had a life beyond Le Mercure in a new genre of “fashion portrait prints,” the name of an aristocratic lady in the public eye substituted for the more generic caption.37 These “proto-celebrity” trend-setters were

Figure 3  Garde-robes pour dames et pour hommes, Le Mercure galant, January 1678, drawn by Jean Berain (1640–1711), engraved by Jean Lepautre (1618–1682). Etching and engraving. Bibliothèque nationale de France: 8-H-26484. © Bibliothèque nationale de France

surface and substance   245

Figure 4  Antoine Trouvain, La Bénédiction du ciel sur la postérité de Louis Le Grand, almanach pour l'an de grace M.DCCV, Paris, 1705. Engraving. V&A: E.417–1905. © The Victoria and Albert Museum

depicted in stock indoor and outdoor settings—of suitable luxury or grandeur—engaged in informal fashionable activities—at their toilette, warming themselves by the fire, playing board games, dancing, promenading. This informality in setting, as in garb, was certainly a new departure from the more formal mode expected at court, as is revealed by comparison of some of these celebrities in engravings in the Almanach royal, prints that showed key official ceremonies in the king’s year (Figure 4).

246   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque In a sense, this range of engravings and commentaries, largely from court and city, combined to become the precursors of the twenty-first-century fashion press, which moves smoothly from commentary on the newest sources of design inspiration, praise, and promotion of newsworthy creative directors and designers to gossip about their celebrity clients.38 What might surprise twenty-first-century fashionistas, however, is the scant attention paid to the form of dress in both Le Mercure and the news pamphlets—to the cut and silhouette, which have been of primary importance since the nineteenth century. Instead, copious reference to type of material, color, and motifs (and sometimes to scent) appealed to the senses, the transformation of materials into clothing that adorned or molded the body taken for granted. Even when Le Mercure started to promote novelties, commentary on garments suggested minor rather than dramatic change: the growing popularity of mantuas, adjustments to the cut of petticoats, or to the length of men’s coats or waistcoats.39 Of course, the proliferation of engravings, from those in Le Mercure and the Almanachs to those sold as separate sheets, portraits, and even caricatures, offered some perspective on the general line for contemporary makers and wearers to interpret and can be mapped on to real wardrobes.

Clothing the Image In both Spain and France in the first sixty years of the seventeenth century, gentlemen’s basic garments comprised three pieces, sometimes combined as a suit: jerkin, doublet, and trunk hose/breeches.40 A cloak and hat were donned outdoors; a loose full-length gown replaced restrictive outer garments indoors. A shirt was worn beneath the doublet, while hose or stockings covered the lower leg, boots or shoes shod feet, gloves protected hands, and cuffs and collars adorned neck and wrists. The shape of the main garments and accessories differed in Spain and France. At both courts a form of breeches had replaced trunk hose by the 1620s (Figures 5 and 6). In France, variations during the century included slim beribboned breeches in the late 1640s and 1650s, and wider versions or petticoat breeches in the 1660s till as late as 1675 (Figure 7). Plainer breeches were adopted definitively in the late 1670s, virtually invisible below knee-length coat and waistcoat (Figure 2). This three-piece suit heralded the attire that was to dominate the next century, the skirts of the coat flaring out more fully, the cuffs growing large by the early 1700s (Figure 4). There is no evidence, however, that the short doublets and beribboned excesses that Louis XIV wore to meet his bride in 1660 ever caught the Spanish imagination. Instead Spaniards retained, into the eighteenth century, the distinctive and sober jerkin, doublet, and breeches favored by Philip IV and first worn consistently by all Spanish nobles in 1622.41 They gradually adopted French trends as informal alternatives, the military origin of the coat playing a key role in its swift adoption in Spain as elsewhere in Europe.42

surface and substance   247

Figure 5 June. The XII Mounthes of the Yeare in The Habits of Severall Nations (London, about 1620). Engraving. British Museum: 1931,114.625.6. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Early infiltration of French style was evident in the instructions for a French footman’s cape and a French cloak published in the Spanish tailoring manual authored by French-born Francisco de la Rocha Burguen in 1618. But it was only in 1640, in the treatise by his Madrid-born confrere Martín de Anduxar, that four diagrams for French suits made their first appearance.43 The royal stamp of approval for this attire came from the young Charles II (b. 1661–d. 1700), who started wearing it at the age of sixteen, and was

248   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 6  French School, Ladies and gentlemen in a ballroom, about 1630. Engraving. V&A: 29534A. © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

already employing a French tailor by 1678, a year before his marriage to Louis XIV’s niece.44 He did not relinquish Spanish suits entirely, using them consistently for formal occasions.45 By 1694, even the Spanish King’s doctor had fully embraced Frenchified fashions, cutting a different figure from his predecessor in 1674, while the king’s aging painter Claudio Coello (b. 1642–d. 1693) left to his heirs a wardrobe still heavily dominated by Spanish garb, yet incorporating one expensive French suit and waistcoat.46 In 1700 further reinforcement for French fashion in Spain arrived through Louis’s grandson, who ascended the throne as Philip V (b. 1683–d. 1746), not only bringing his own tailors from France but also continuing to order especially lavish items from Paris. On his grandfather’s instructions, he initially and diplomatically adopted Spanish suit and golilla though within several years it had fallen from favor.47 Nonetheless, serving a community beyond the court, Juan de Albayzeta’s tailoring manual published in Zaragoza in 1720 bears witness to the continued peaceful coexistence of Spanish tradition alongside French fashion.48 Fourteen years later, the Diccionario de Autoridades asserted that only formally dressed ministers, lawyers and constables retained the Spanish ensemble.49 French merchants must have rejoiced at the steady progress toward opening up the market for their wares, having noted on the King’s accession that: “If his Catholick Majesty could be prevail’d upon to lay aside intirely the Gonilla [sic], and the Spanish Garb, it would be a means to introduce our French Fashions, and to abolish the

surface and substance   249

Figure 7 Romeyn de Hooghe, Plate from Figures à la Mode, Netherlands, about 1670. Engraving. V&A E.14451897. © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

250   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 8 Philip V of Spain on horseback, about 1700, engraved by Jean Mariette, Paris. Etching. British Museum: 1870,0514.1455. © The Trustees of the British Museum

wear of Bays, a sort of Woollen Stuff very common in England, of which such Quantities are vended every Year in Spain (and in the Parts of Italy dependent on that Crown).”50 Here the Spanish suit was associated with a fabric of rather humbler sort than those described in the news pamphlets, while French suits were associated with embellished silks and rich trimmings.51 Interestingly Mariette’s engraving of the newly crowned Philip V shows a kind of hybrid Spanish suit, lavish in textile and adornment (Figure 8), while Rigaud’s official portrait promotes austere black and white.52

surface and substance   251 Loyalty to the Spanish suit over about a hundred years extended to loyalty to the idiosyncratic golilla, introduced by Philip IV in 1623 to discourage the wearing of extravagant ruffs.53 It retained its fascination for foreigners as late as 1700, when one French writer explained: Instead of falling bands [French collar] they [Spanish men] wear a kind of circle made of cardboard, over which is stretched starched cloth, shaped with many darts, which they call a golilla; it is a very uncomfortable invention which costs a great deal . . . It makes the movement of the neck and head stiff, and gives a serious air.54

The golilla worn by the Swedish ambassador to Madrid in 1655 confirms the rigidity of this type of collar.55 French fashions in neckwear slipped in through military and hunting wear, for which simpler flat lace-edged collars were worn without a support. Subsequently, the wearing of the French suit encouraged the adoption of the loose cravat, a length of linen or lace tied around the neck (Figure 2).56 Women also experienced a fair amount of continuity during the century, their main garments being gown, bodice, and petticoat, worn over a long linen shift and outdoors under a mantle. The cut of the neckline, the length of the bodice, and the construction of the sleeves varied over time and between countries, linen or lace accessories made to complement décolletage and sleeves. In Spain, the ruff remained in use until the 1640s when a wide lace collar began to cover the bosom and shoulders, by which time Frenchwomen had been baring their necks for twenty years (Figure 5). The most idiosyncratic Spanish item, however, was the hooped petticoat or guardainfante, which had elicited comment at the Franco-Spanish marriage in 1660 (Figure 1), more than twenty years after Spanish sumptuary legislation (1639) attempted to prohibit it.57 This garment had fallen out of fashion by the 1670s, by which time French modes were filtering into women’s dress. In 1720 Albayzeta included diagrams for a woman’s coat similar in cut to the man’s coat, presumably intended for riding, and loose gown or ropa chambra, alternatively called by its Spanish name, which echoed the cut of the robe de chambre that had entered the pages of the Le Mercure in Paris in 1693.58 Both of these French innovations reflected a more relaxed approach to dress than had been usual among secluded Spanish ladies. Trade petitions, advice manuals, and postmortem inventories help to clothe the static images more fully. After all, a single set of clothes did not make the elite man or woman; the contents of a more extended wardrobe did. Fabric apparently differentiated between items. Take the Dominican memorialist Juan de Corte’s estimate of what about one million well-to-do Spanish men and women bought annually in 1668: for underwear and accessories, linen to make four new shirts, four pairs of drawers (underpants), four handkerchiefs, eight collars, and the lace to trim them. For outerwear, annually men required silk for two suits and wool for one suit and one cloak, every five years a castor hat and two pairs of woolen stockings; women annually needed silk for two gowns, a rich petticoat and a mantle, every two years wool for one gown and two pairs of woolen stockings.59 De Corte was, of course, lamenting the fact they did not buy Spanish. Fifty years later the German jurist and tutor Joachim Christoph Nemeitz (b. 1679–d. 1753) recommended a similar size of wardrobe for a “man of condition” visiting Paris.

252   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Essential were three three-piece suits, an additional waistcoat and a surtout, the first suit to be richly ornamented, the second to be plain and self-colored, and the third black for the many periods of mourning observed at court. The additional waistcoat was to be of cloth of gold or silver, and the surtout of the finest scarlet cloth, which was good in the rain.60 Parisian postmortem inventories around this time suggest that Nemeitz was absolutely in tune with the city’s consumption. All men’s wardrobes comprised the same basic garments, the population dressing to the same rules but accumulating clothing according to means and status: nobles might own as many as five or six three-piece suits as well as a range of other garments for indoors and outdoors. Most of the suits were  made from costly broadcloths or heavy silks, and some had rich trimmings. Meanwhile craftsmen and shopkeepers owned two suits, usually in different woolen cloths.61 “Men of condition” no doubt sat between these two categories. Beyond the size of wardrobe, Nemeitz had three tips for innocents abroad: first, to dress in a way that fitted in rather than stood out; second, not to dress more magnificently than one’s station, to observe French preference for cleanliness over show; third, to wear good and fine linen, and always to make sure it was white each day. He recommended finding a French tailor of good reputation. Indeed, at court and in urban centers elite consumers experienced little change in how they acquired their clothing during this period. In both Spain and France the Royal Wardrobe had its own department for making and maintaining clothing for the King and his family, employing many dedicated craftsmen who received a basic annual wage.62 Well-to-do clients in the cities sought the services of guild craftsmen who had learned their trade through an apprenticeship system. Their methods and skills did not change: they had to know how to ­measure, cut, sew, and fit men and women, as well as how to make horses’ caparisons and military standards; all items were sewn by hand. Benoît Boullay, author of the first French treatise Le Tailleur sincère in 1671, after forty years of experience in his trade, foregrounded three issues: the taking of good measurements, checking there were no faults in the cloth before cutting out the garment, and careful assessment of the client: It is very necessary beforehand to ‘learn’ the man. You must observe [him] . . . recognise his ordinary posture, since he may naturally lean forward or backwards, or perhaps to one side or the other, and if you wait and measure him standing [straight] . . . the back will be too short, and the front long, or vice versa, . . . which is one of the worst appearances that the coat can have.63

The tailor’s skill lay in “correcting” the body before him so that it conformed to the current ideal.64 A good fit was crucial for elite wearers, evidence they could afford to employ a tailor. Less well-off urban dwellers were able to acquire ready-made clothing— new or secondhand—from other dealers, and there is some indication that the provision of this service increased in urban centers as they grew.65 Such clothing was unlikely to fit perfectly.

surface and substance   253 The making of linen garments had long been the province of seamstresses, male and female. The one major change in France—but not in Spain—lay in the granting of letters patent for the creation of an all-female seamstresses’ guild in 1675. This guild was allowed to make all manner of women’s and children’s garments, its creation possibly stimulated by the fashion for the informal gowns mentioned in Le Mercure. Formal court dress, which had a boned bodice, remained the province of male tailors, with whom the dressmakers came into conflict in the 1720s in a legal wrangle over who had the right to make of a new form of gown, worn over a hooped petticoat.66

Globalizing the Image Neither tailors nor seamstresses could make the garments without the fabrics their clients brought them (or chose from them), and it is through these textiles that the global substance of baroque fashion is fully revealed. Some were manufactured in the country in which the garments were made up, while others came from neighboring European states, the Middle East, and yet others from Asia. The state intervened in both production and consumption, granting guilds letters patents to regulate and protect their production, permitting the establishment of trading companies, issuing sumptuary edicts that sought to restrict the use of particularly rich textiles to certain social classes, and prohibiting the import of textiles that threatened local manufacturing.67 Increasing awareness of the benefits of luxury consumption to commerce contributed to a change in emphasis in legislation, although moralists still decried the adoption of luxury items, especially of foreign origins.68 France issued nineteen sumptuary edicts in the seventeenth century, and only one in the eighteenth in 1708; Spain issued four in the seventeenth and just one in the eighteenth, this last one in 1723 being part sumptuary, part prohibition of the consumption of foreign fabrics—in line with similar legislation in late seventeenth-century France.69 Throughout Europe silk and precious metal remained the signifiers of high status, generally appropriate, in the eyes of both Habsburg and Bourbon monarchs, for the royal family, church, military, and nobility alone. Spanish tailoring books underline the expense of textiles and their varied origins in their careful calculations on the minimum amount required for any garment and by including a growing list of equivalences for different local measurements: in Albayzeta, five local to Spain, two to France, six to the Italian states, two to the Low Countries, and one each for Vienna and the Rhine.70 The origins, rarity, and preparation of raw materials for manufacture into cloth all contributed to cost and prestige. Beaten and drawn precious metal, as well as thrown and spun fibers became yarns to be woven, knitted, or knotted into plain or patterned fabrics. They came from natural sources—from ore, insect, animal, or plant, as did the dyestuffs and mordants (fixing agents) that colored them. Gold, silver, copper; silk, wool and hairs, flax, hemp, and cotton had different properties and qualities and, separate or

254   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque combined, catered for different climates and purposes. In addition, animal skins and hides were tanned for gloves, footwear, hats and jerkins.71 Cork was cut for the soles of mules, whalebone and willow prepared for bodices and farthingales, and strong paper or metal wire bent for collar supports. Bleaching and dyeing resulted in pure white linen and richly colored wools and silks respectively; starch aplenty stiffened linen ruffs, collars, and cuffs; and perfumes scented leather. Supplies came from European and Middle Eastern sources, from mines in Peru, whaling expeditions to Newfoundland, and silkladen caravans and galleons from China.72 Some were visible in the end product, others invisible: linings, interlinings and supports were fundamental, as the satirist Quevedo quipped in 1612, “I tell you that our senses suffer an empty stomach with regard to what a woman is and indigestion with regard to what she looks like. If you kiss her, you mess up her lips; if you embrace her you squeeze splints and dent card; if you take her to bed, you leave half of her under the bed in her chopines [cork-soled platform mules].”73 Parisian postmortem inventories from around 1700 reveal that not all baroque textiles were glorious silks woven, embroidered, or trimmed with metal. The other face of baroque textiles was rather less glamorous and more prevalent. Most of the population was clad in woolen fabrics in dark colors; indeed, blacks, grays, and browns dominated the cityscape. Women’s clothes tended to be more brightly colored in every social category, but only noble women and some wealthy shopkeepers or bourgeois women enjoyed variety, the former dressing in silk, mixed fabrics or, more rarely woolen cloth, using linen for summer petticoats and high-quality woolens for winter; and brocade, cloth of gold and silver, damask, satin and taffeta for best clothes.74 Cottons also appeared in their wardrobes, hand-drawn and dyed, alongside fine muslins. This dominance of wool echoes their dominance in tailors’ treatises, which mention only silk and wool, though linen was used for linings: Rocha Burguen used eleven terms for woolens in 1618 and just five for silks, as did Albayzeta a century later.75 The roughest wools—sackcloth and kersey—were reserved for the habits of the religious orders, which proliferated during the Counter-Reformation, their vows of poverty restricting their consumption of more luxurious qualities.76 War and the provisioning of the military with uniforms played an important part in stimulating demand for certain types of woolen fabrics, especially from the final third of the seventeenth century.77 Color and pattern were the most noticeable signifiers of traditional values, court regulations, fashionable novelties, commercial and imperial endeavor. Black was versatile, its pedigree as an elite color inherited from the Burgundian tradition of Philip the Good (b. 1419–d. 1467), and the recommendations of Baltasar Castiglione whose famed treatise The Courtier (1520) still circulated widely.78 The Spanish court wore black silk and wool right through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, married early on with red and white.79 It denoted membership of knightly orders, official administration and clergy, as well as eschewal of worldly goods, mourning for the dead—the relative luster of each fiber determining its place in the scheme of things. In some respects, black was just as much a uniform as the colors worn as liveries by servants of royal or rich households, identifying its wearers’ membership of a particular circle. Blue, red and white, Louis XIV’s colors, assailed visitors entering Versailles, the king having bestowed

surface and substance   255 by special warrant the right to wear a particular coat on fifty members of his family, princes of the blood and favored courtiers from 1664. It was blue lined with scarlet, embroidered with gold and silver thread in a specific pattern, and must have harmonized in palette with his household’s livery, which distinguished different ranks by the width of the trimmings that edged coat, cuffs, and pockets and covered seams.80 Colors were also a commercial concern. Those favored in Spain probably reflected their imperial imports from the New World, logwood and cochineal, on which they had a virtual monopoly in the early modern period.81 Jean-Baptiste Colbert (b. 1619–d. 1683), Louis XIV’s Minister of Finances, revealed French mercantilist concern over this aspect of production in adjusting the regulations of France’s two guilds of dyers in 1669, and granting premiums and privileges to dyers who discovered new techniques. He explained to his royal master in 1671: If the manufacture of silk, wool, and thread is that which serves to sustain and make commerce pay, dyeing . . . is the soul without which the body would have but little life . . . Not only is it necessary that colours be beautiful to increase the commerce of cloth, but they must be of good quality so that they may last as long as the fabrics to which they are applied.82

Solid color was usual on woolen cloth, and for cheaper silks, both of which could be enhanced after weaving with embroidery. Alternatively, silks were woven up with polychrome patterns, the most expensive including metal threads. The Spanish and French experience was different in some respects and similar in others. Spain had a long tradition of both sericulture and silk weaving, established thanks to the long Arab presence in Iberia and access to both products and skilled labor from the premier weaving centers in the Italian states, such as Genoa.83 New imports from China via Mexico from the late sixteenth century added to their repertoire.84 As in France, mercantilist initiatives aimed to boost this luxury trade. The decline of long-established and newer weaving centers in Barcelona, Granada, Seville, and Toledo in the seventeenth century provided opportunities for Valencia, which sat in the heart of the area producing raw silk and was already a major velvet-weaving center. It experienced its heyday between 1720 and 1730, having benefited from the formation of the Junta General de Comercio in 1679, revised guild regulations in 1684, the prohibition of the export of local raw silk in 1699, and the reorganization of the galleon trade with Spain’s primary markets in the South American colonies in 1720.85 In contrast, in France, despite royal encouragement since the ­fifteenth century, sericulture did not flourish, and most raw silk continued to be imported from Italy, the Middle East, Asia, and a little from Spain. Silk weaving was more successful, especially after Colbert’s mercantilist reforms stimulated growth through new guild regulations issued in 1667 and introduced premiums rewarding technological, technical, or aesthetic invention. He and his royal master were, moreover, savvy in showcasing these products at Versailles, codifying court etiquette and spectacle to stimulate domestic and overseas demand. Le Mercure broadcast their efforts.86 Lyon became the largest silk manufacturing city in Europe, producing wide ranges of plain and patterned silks,

256   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque and its designers and manufacturers already had a reputation for changing their designs on a seasonal basis by 1700, and actively promoting sales, most successfully to Spain once the War of the Spanish Succession was over.87 Between the 1680s and 1720s, such designs often owed much to Asian sources of inspiration, the style now dubbed “bizarre” incorporating exuberant foliage and Oriental motifs.88 Silks of different qualities were also among the fabrics imported from China and India through the French East Indies Company, established by Colbert in 1664.89 The taste for such silks was mentioned as early as 1684 in Le Mercure. They were, however, less numerous than the different qualities of cotton with hand drawn and dyed patterns brought into France, their import, imitation, and wearing forbidden, first in 1686 and then repeatedly for over seventy years.90 Yet, their exotic designs and fast colors, r­ esistant to fading even when washed, kept them highly desirable, and they were stocked in shops and worn even by those in royal circles—an indication of the informal and illegal routes by which novelties might steal into fashion.91 Spain also fell victim to their allure, a boom in imports to Mallorca being noticeable from the 1680s and a ban on imports put in place in 1717.92 Cottons had arrived from the Middle and Near East, and from European printing workshops established early on in areas independent of French prohibition, such as Geneva, Marseilles, and the Low Countries.93 These were the novelties that exercised local manufacturers intent on protecting the wool and silk industries.94

Conclusion Textiles are key to understanding the surface and substance of elite dress between 1600 and 1720 in Spain and France, as elsewhere in Europe, for they reveal both continuity and change and thus what differentiated “baroque” wardrobes from their Renaissance progenitors and their Enlightenment heirs. At first glance, the lustrous silks and metal threads that attract the attention of twenty-first-century art historians belong to a long tradition of luxury textile production and courtly spectacle that continued with minor modifications until the French Revolution. This apparent continuity, however, belies fundamental changes in these fabrics from the late seventeenth century onward. In France mercantilist policies promoted domestic manufacturing in luxury textiles to serve both domestic and export markets. They contributed to the development of a “textile-fashion” system in which built-in obsolescence was visible on the surface of woven patterned silks, whose substance was achieved through the harnessing of complex and capital-intensive production methods, the development of skills and techniques in designing and selling, and assertive management of commercial networks. In contrast, cottons imported for decades, became a highly fashionable alternative to silks for informal attire, their patterns literally applied to the surface of the cloth, the substance of their production the subject of scrutiny and imitation, their import from Asia repeatedly prohibited to protect local silk and woolen industries.

surface and substance   257 The stuttering birth of a periodical press with a mission to spread news of fashion complemented and disseminated these changes in the surface and substance of textiles and the fashions they made in dress—again in late seventeenth-century France. Superficially, Le Mercure had its roots in a long-established tradition: that of relaying in letters or by word-of-mouth news about what was being worn by taste leaders at court to geographically distant correspondents—slow news. Its conversational style surely reflected this type of informal communication. The major change was the fact that for the first time improved communications networks allowed word to spread faster through an impersonal medium that was accessible not only to elite ladies and gentlemen in their country houses or on their travels, but to any reader who could afford the subscription or access a copy—and by this stage, in many cities, wealthy bourgeois, merchants and administrators were potential followers of fashion, thanks to state encouragement of commerce and changing attitudes to luxury. In brief, without ignoring continuity in methods of making dress and national specialisms, this chapter has suggested that what was new about dress in this period was the systematic exploitation of novelty, whether in textile patterns or their promotion in print. The speed at which these innovations were adopted, of course, varied according to local preferences, prejudices, and purses.

Acknowledgments I am extremely grateful to Clare Browne, Ana Cabrera, Hilary Davidson, Avalon Fotheringham, and Susan North for their helpful comments; Giorgio Riello, Ulinka Rublack, and Amanda Wunder for a preview of unpublished essays; and to John Lyons for his patient encouragement.

Notes Note: All translations are those of the author, who has used English terms contemporary to the period and avoided highly specialist technical vocabulary. 1. Katie Connor, “Going Baroque Style,” Marie Claire, September 18, 2012. http://www. marieclaire.com/fashion/advice/g1568/baroque-fashion-trend/. 2. Kate Nelson Best, The History of Fashion Journalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 15–25; Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset, L’Esprit des modes au Grand Siècle (Paris: Editions CTHS, 2010); Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style (New York: Free Press, 2005); and Jennifer Jones, Sexing La Mode (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 3. For a succinct overview on the use of the terms dress, costume and fashion, see Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, The Fashion History Reader. Global Perspectives (New  York: Routledge, 2010), 5–7. The most recent overview history has divided the chronology into Antiquity, medieval age, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and empire and modern age, providing chapters on textiles, production and distribution of fashion, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, and then considering visual and literary representations. The “baroque” period sits uneasily in this periodization. A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion, ed. Susan Vincent (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

258   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 4. In 2014 the organizers of “(Un)dressing Rubens: Fashion and Painting in SeventeenthCentury Antwerp” at the Rubenianum noted that “dress and textiles take up a large part of the picture plane, up to ninety percent in certain portraits”; https://www.codart.nl/guide/ exhibitions/un-dressing-rubens-fashion-and-painting-in-seventeenth-century-antwerp/ [accessed 3 March 2018]; often the dress depicted was a judicious combination of fashion and fantasy. Lou Taylor, The Study of Dress History (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 115–123. Aileen Ribeiro has published extensively on this subject and period. See, for example, Clothing Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017) and Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 5. Hilary Davidson and Anna Hodson, “Joining Forces: The Intersection of Two Replica Garments,” in Textiles and Text: Re-Establishing The Links Between Archival and ObjectBased Research, ed. Maria Hayward and Elizabeth Kramer (London: Archetype, 2007), 204–210. Key UK contributors on this period have been theater designers, museum curators and conservators, including Janet Arnold, Susan North, Jennifer Tiramani and the School of Historical Dress, Norah Waugh, and David Wilcox. There is no comparable scholarly tradition in Spain. 6. For example, Rosa María Dávila Corona et al., Diccionario histórico de telas y tejidos (Salamanca, Spain: Junta de Castilla y León, 2004); Margarita Tejeda Fernández, Glosário de tèrminos de la indumentaria regia y cortesana en España. Siglos XVII y XVIII (Malaga, Spain: Universidad de Malaga, 2007). 7. On communications and growth of periodical press, see T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture. Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 154–161; Henry Ettinghausen, “Pellicer y la prensa de su tiempo.” Janus 1 (2012): 55–88; Javier Noci, “Dissemination of News in the Spanish Baroque”; Alexander Cowan, Urban Europe 1500–1700 (London: Arnold, 1998); Joan Dejean, How Paris Became Paris. The Invention of the Modern City (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Giorgio Riello, Cotton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Introduction; DeJean, The Essence of Style; and Philip Mansell, Dressed to Rule. Royal and Court Costume form Louis XIV to Elizabeth II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), Chapter 1; Ribeiro, Clothing Art, chapter 4. 8. Terms coined to describe the cultural achievements of Spain from the sixteenth century and France from the second half of the seventeenth century by Luis José Velázquez, Marques de Valdeflores in Origenes de la poesía castellana (1754) and Voltaire in Le siècle de Louis XIV (1751) respectively. 9. La culture des apparences, the French title of Daniel Roche’s seminal work on dress in ancien régime France (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Françoise Tétart-Vittu, “À l’espagnole ou à la française. Résistances et emprunts dans la mode de cour,” in ¿Louis XIV espagnol? Madrid et Versailles. Images et modèles, edited by Gérard Sabatier and Margarita Torrione (Château de Versailles: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2009), 203–217. 10. Arianna Giorgio. España viste a la francesa. La historia de un traje de moda de la segunda mitad del siglo XVII (Murcia, Spain: Editum, 2016). 11. There is no work comparable to Aileen Ribeiro’s Fact and Fiction for either France or Spain. The main contributions: Diana de Marly, Louis XIV & Versailles (London: B.T.  Batsford, 1987); Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Clare Crowston, Fabricating Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Jones, Sexing La Mode; Carmen Bernis. El traje y los tipos sociales en El Quijote (Madrid: Ediciones El Viso, 2001); José Luis Colomer and Amalia Descalzo eds.,

surface and substance   259 Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe (Madrid: CEEH, 2014); La Moda Española en el Siglo de Oro, Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo (Castilla La Mancha, 2015); Giorgi, España viste a la francesa. 12. Sara Nuñez de Prado, “De la Gaceta de Madrid al Boletín del Estado,” Historia y Comunicación Social 7 (2002): 147–160; Ettinghausen, “Pellicer y la prensa de su tiempo.” 13. Henry Ettinghausen, “Periodismo de moda en la España de principios del siglo XVII. Andrés de Almansa y Mendoza y el viaje a Madrid del príncipe de Gales,” in Colomer and Descalzo, Spanish Fashion, 420. 14. On gift-giving, see Nathalie Zemon Davies, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). 15. Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume. Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 2011), chapter 5. 16. Jornada que su Magestad hizo a la Andalucia (Madrid: Jacinto de Herrera y Sotomayor, 1624). 17. Copiosa relación de las costosísimas galas, vistosas libreas, y preciosísimas joyas, que el día del bautismo de la señora Infanta, luzieron en la corte de España (Seville, 1638). 18. For a theorized approach, see Abby  E.  Zanger, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), chapter 2. 19. La pompe et magnificence faite au marriage du Roy et de l’Infante d’Espagne (Paris: Jean Promé, 1660), 4, 8. 20. La pompe et magnificence, 8. 21. La pompe et magnificence, 10–13. 22. La pompe et magnificence, 11. 23. Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, Être veuve sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Belin, 2001), ­132–135, 217–240. Antoine Furetière. Dictionnaire universel (Paris: 1690): “. . . Le crespe frisé se met sur les habits pour porter le grand deuil. Le crespe lisse ou uni se porte pour . . . un moindre deuil . . .” 24. Justin Godart, L’ouvrier en soie (1899) (Geneva: Slatkine, 1976), 229–232. 25. Jones, Sexing La Mode, 29; Archives de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Lyon (hereafter ACCIL), Déliberation, 10 March 1703, f.73v.; Godart, L’ouvrier en soie, 214–215. 26. Pragmática Real sobre trajes y coches (San Ildefonso, 15 noviembre 1723). 27. Le Mercure galant (1672–1674), then Le Nouveau Mercure galant (1677–1724), subsequently Le Mercure de France. From John Nevinson, “The Mercury Gallant or European Fashions in the 1670s,” Connoisseur, 136 (1955) to Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset, L’esprit des modes au Grand Siècle (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 2010). For an analytical overview, see Jones, Sexing la Mode, 25–41. 28. Cited in Jones, Sexing La Mode, 26. 29. Donna Bohanan, Fashion beyond Versailles: Consumption and Design in SeventeenthCentury France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 19, 53. 30. Famously theorized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). 31. Jones, Sexing La Mode, 28, 31, 33–37; Archives départementales du Rhône, Série 8B1281 Fonds De Vitry et Gayet, Liasse I, 15 juillet 1723 Laurent to De Vitry et Gayet. 32. Extract from Le Mercure of 1673 reproduced in Thépaut-Cabasset, L’Esprit des modes, 45; cited in Jones, Sexing la Mode, 38. 33. Lesley E. Miller, “Male Adornment,” in The Arts of Living. Europe 1600–1815, ed. E. Miller and H. Young (London: V&A Publishing, 2016), 182–183. 34. See Thépaut-Cabasset, L’Esprit des modes, 84–98.

260   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 35. Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset, “A Glittering Reputation. Gaultier’s Retailing Innovations in Seventeenth-Century Paris,” in Fashioning the Early Modern, edited by Evelyn Welch (Oxford: Pasold Research Fund/Oxford University Press, 2017), 169–185. 36. Jacques Savary, Œuvre de Mr Jacques Savary, contenant le Parfait Négociant (Paris: Veuve Estienne & Fils, 1749), I, 26, 42, 45. 37. Kathleen Nicholson, “Fashioning Fashionability,” in Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, ed. Kathryn Norberg and Sandra Rosenbaum (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014), 15–54. 38. See The Business of Fashion online. 39. Jones, Sexing la Mode, 27. 40. On the suit, see David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity. England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley: University of California, 2002). 41. Noticias de Madrid, ed. Ángel González Palencia (Madrid: Ayuntamiento, 1942), 35. 42. Giorgi, España se viste a la francesa, 69–80. 43. Francisco de la Rocha Burguen, Geometría y traça perteneciente al oficio de Sastres (Valencia: Pedro Patricio Mey, 1618), 144, 105; Martín de Anduxar, Geometría y trazas pertenecientes al oficio de Sastre (Madrid: Imprenta del Reyno, 1640), 13–14. 44. Amalia Descalzo Lorenzo, “El traje francés en la Corte de Felipe V,” Anales del Museo Nacional de Antropología, IV (1997): 189–210. 45. Descalzo Lorenzo, “El traje francés en la Corte de Felipe V” and Amalia Descalzo Lorenzo and Carlos Gómez-Centurión Jiménez, “El real guardarropa y la introducción de la moda francesa en la corte de Felipe V,” in La herencia de Borgoña. La hacienda de las Reales Casas durante el reinado de Felipe V, ed. Carlos Gómez-Centurión Jiménez and Juan A. Sánchez Belén (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Politícos y Constitucionales, 1998), 161, 167, 185–186. 46. Giorgi, España viste a la francesa, 164–165, 196–197. 47. Descalzo Lorenzo and Gómez-Centurión Jiménez, “El real guardarropa,” 159–187. 48. Juan de Albayzeta, Geometría, y trazas pertenecientes al oficio de sastres (Zaragoza, Spain: Francisco Revilla, 1720). 49. Cited in Descalzo Lorenzo and Gómez-Centurión Jiménez, “El real guardarropa,” 165. 50. British Library, 1029.C.12. Mémoire sur le commerce d’Espagne avec la France; des Marchandises qu’elle y envoye, et des Retours qu’elle en reçoit; ses grands défauts, avec les moyens d’y remédier, pétition présentée par Messieurs les députés de commerce au Conseil Royal Paris, 1701, 28. 51. Descalzo Lorenzo, “El traje francés en la Corte de Felipe V.” 52. Hyacinthe Rigaud, Philip V, about 1701. Museo del Prado, Madrid. P002337. 53. Ruth Mathilda Anderson, The Golilla: A Spanish Collar of the 17th Century (New York, 1969); Amanda Wunder, “Innovation and Tradition at the Court of Philip IV of Spain (1621–1665): The Invention of the Golilla and the Guardainfante,” in Fashioning the Early Modern, 111–134. On wider European context, see Janet Arnold et al., Patterns of Fashion 4: The Cut and Construction of Linen Shirts, Smocks, Neckwear, Headwear and Accessories for Men and Women, c. 1540–1660 (London: Macmillan, 2008). 54. M***, “Máximas, usos y costumbres de los españoles,” published in Amsterdam by Jorge Gallet in 1700, translated and reproduced in Viajes por España, edited by José García Mercadal (Madrid: Alianza, 1972), 227–229. 55. Full suit described in Lena Rangström, Lions of Fashion: Male Fashion of the 16th, 17th, 18th Centuries (Sweden: Atlantis, 2003), 363–365.

surface and substance   261 56. Giorgi, España viste a la francesa, 69–80, 168–175. 57. Amanda Wunder, “Women’s Fashions and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Spain: The Rise and the Fall of the Guardainfante,” Renaissance Quarterly 68 (2015): 133–186. 5 8. Albayzeta, Geometría y trazas, 74–75; Thépaut-Cabasset, L’Esprit des modes, 170. 59. Juan de Corte, Memorial para remedio de los daños de la monarquía de España (Madrid, 1668), 5. 60. Joachim Christoph Nemeitz, Séjour de Paris. Instructions pour les Voiageurs de Condition (Leiden: Jean Van Abcoude, 1727), chapter 10. 61. Roche, The Culture of Clothing, 130–132. 62. Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset, “Le service de la Garde-robe: une création de Louis XIV,” in Fastes de Cour et cérémonies royales. Le Costume de Cour en Europe 1650–1800, ed. Pierre Arizzoli-Clémentel and Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2009), 28–33; Descalzo Lorenzo and Gómez-Centurión, “El real guardarropa,” 171–175; María José García Sierra, “Who Dressed Kings and Queens? Royal Wardrobe and Court Tailors,” in Colomer & Descalzo, Spanish Fashion, I, 113–135. 63. Benoît Boullay, Le Tailleur sincère contenant ce qu’il faut observer pour bien tracer, couper et assembler toutes les principales pièces qui se font dans la profession de Tailleur (Paris: Antoine de Raffle, 1671), preface. 64. For deconstruction of surviving English garments, see the V&A’s Seventeenth-Century Dress Patterns series. 65. Roche, The Culture of Clothing, 293–309; José A. Nieto Sánchez, Artesanos y mercaderes: una historia social y económica de Madrid, 1450–1850 (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2006); C. Suárez Figueroa, Plaza Universal de todas las ciencias (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1615), 361, cited in Arianna Giorgi, “Sastres y roperos en Madrid: la imagen cotidiana de la moda del siglo XVIII,” Estudios Humanísticos. Historia 15 (2016): 61. 66. Crowston, Fabricating Women, 25–26, 36–43, 51–59. 67. Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996); Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack eds, The Right to Dress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Antonio Álvarez-Ossorio Alvariño, “Rango y apariencia: El decoro y la quiebra de la distinción en Castilla (siglos XVI-XVIII),” Revista de Historia Moderna: Anales de la Universidad de Alicante 17 (1998–1999): 263–278; Saúl Martínez Bermejo, “Beyond Luxury: Sumptuary Legislation in 17th-Century Castile,” in Making, Using and Resisting the Law in European History, ed. Günther Lottes et al. (Pisa: Plus-Pisa University Press, 2008), 93–108. 68. Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 101–125; Mónica Bolufer Peruga, “Cambio dinástico: ¿Revolución de las costumbres? La percepción de moralistas, ilustrados y viajeros,” in Felipe V y su tiempo, edited by Eliseo Serrano (Zaragoza, Spain: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2004), 598–617. 69. Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, 28–29, 36. 70. Albayzeta, Geometría y trazas, 36. 7 1. Félix de la Fuente Andrés, “La piel en la indumentaria y la moda del Siglo de Oro,” in La Moda Española en el siglo de Oro, 65–77; Purificación Marinetto Sánchez and Isabel Cambil Campaña, “El calzado en el Siglo de Oro,” in La Moda Española en el siglo de Oro, 91–100. 72. For a useful overview of the production and consumption of the fabrics made from the main fibers between about 1500 and 1800, see The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. David Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Part III: The Early

262   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Modern Period, 395–716; Maria Hayward, “Textiles,” in A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 3, 19–36; Giorgio Riello, “The World of Textiles in Three Spheres: European woollens, Indian cottons and Chinese Silks,” in Global Textile Encounters, ed. Marie-Louise Nosch, Zhao Feng and Lotika Varadarajan (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), 93–106. 73. Francisco de Quevedo, El mundo por de dentro (Barcelona: Red Ediciones, 2012), 22; Elizabeth Semmelhack, “Above the Rest: Chopines as Trans-Mediterranean Fashion,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 14:2 (2014): 120–142. 74. Roche, The Culture of Clothing, 126–128. 75. Rocha Burguen, Geometría y traça, 1618; Albayzeta, Geometría y trazas, 1720. 7 6. Helen Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 127–130. 77. Roche, The Culture of Clothing, 221–256; Giorgi, España viste a la francesa, 69–89; Mario Rubio Calleja, “Madrid en pie contra la Guardia Chamberga. El motín popular del verano de 1670,” Tiempos Modernos 36:1 (2018), 1–38. 78. Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 79. José Colomer, “Black and the Royal Image,” in Colomer and Descalzo, Spanish Fashion, I, 77–112. 80. Mathieu da Vinha, “Les gens des livrées dans la maison civile du roi de France,” in ArizzoliClémentel and Gorguet Ballesteros, Fastes de Cour, 160–165; “Au couleurs des livrées royales,” in Visiteurs de Versailles. Voyageurs, Princes, Ambassadeurs 1682–1789, ed. Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide and Bertrand Rondot (Paris: Gallimard/Château de Versailles, 2018), 66; de Marly, Louis XIV & Versailles, 61–63. 81. John Harvey, Men in Black (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), chapter 3; Michel Pastoureau, Black. The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), chapter 4; Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red. Empire, Espionage and the Quest for the Colour of Desire (London: Black Swan, 2011). 82. Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert publié d’après les ordres de l’Empereur, cited in John  J.  Beer, “Eighteenth-Century Theories on the Process of Dyeing,” ISIS 51 (1960): 21–23. 83. Germán Navarro, El despegue de la industria sedera en la Valencia del siglo XV (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 1992). 84. José Luis Gasch Tomás, “Textiles asiáticos de importación en el mundo hispánico, c. 1600. Notas para la historia del consumo a la luz de la nueva historia trans-‘nacional’,” in Comprar, vender y consumir: Nuevas aportaciones a la historia del consumo en la España moderna, ed. Daniel Muñoz Navarro (Valencia: PUV, 2011), 55–76. 85. Ricardo Franch Benavent, La sedería valenciana y el reformismo borbónico (Valencia: Diputació de Valencia/Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 2000), chapters 1–2. 86. John Styles, “Fashion and Innovation in Early Modern Europe,” in Fashioning the Early Modern, 33–56. 87. Godart, L’Ouvrier en soie, 110–150; Lesley E. Miller, “From Design Studio to Marketplace: Products, Agents and Methods of Distribution in the Lyons Silk Manufactures, 1660–1789,” in Threads of Global Desire, ed. Luca Mola, Giorgio Riello and Dagmar Shafer (London: Boydell Press/Pasold, 2018), 225–250. 88. Anna Jolly ed., A Taste for the Exotic. Foreign Influences of Early Eighteenth-Century Silk Design (Riggisberg, Switzerland: Abegg-Stiftung, 2007).

surface and substance   263 89. Felicia Gottman, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Part I and Appendix I. 90. Riello, Cotton, chapter 6. 91. Gottman, Global Trade, Part I; Giorgio Riello, “Governing Innovation: The Political Economy of Textiles in the Eighteenth Century,” in Fashioning the Early Modern, 57–82; Manuel Herrero Sánchez, “La política de embargos y el contrabando de productos de lujo en Madrid (1635–1673). Sociedad cortesana y dependencia de los mercados internacionales,” Hispania 59:1, no. 201 (1999): 171–191. 92. James Thomson, “Explaining the ‘Take-Off ’ of the Catalan Cotton Industry,” Economic History Review 58, no. 4 (2005); 705. 93. Andrés Bibiloni Amengual, “Cambios en el consumo textil en la España del siglo XVII: El auge del lino y el algodón,” in Comprar, vender y consumir, 77–98. 94. ACCIL, Déliberation, 26 August 1702.

Further Reading Colomer, José Luis, and Amalia Descalzo, eds. Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe. Madrid: CEEH, 2014. Crowston, Clare Haru. Fabricating Women. The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Jones, Jennifer. Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Mola, Luca, Giorgio Riello, and Dagmar Schaefer, eds. Threads of Global Desire. Silk in the Pre-Modern World. London: Boydell Press/Pasold, 2018. Norberg, Kathryn, and Sandra Rosenbaum, eds. Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV. Interpreting the Art of Elegance. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014. Ribeiro, Aileen. Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Riello, Giorgio. Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Roche, Daniel. The Culture of Clothing. Dress in Ancien Regime France. Cambridge: Berg, 1996. Welch, Evelyn, ed. Fashioning the Early Modern. Dress, Textiles and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

chapter 11

Ba roqu e Da nce Jennifer Nevile

While the term “baroque dance” is widely used in the writings of historians of early dance and by musicologists, there is no agreement among scholars as to exactly which decades are covered by this term.1 Some scholars have even questioned the appropriateness of the term itself to the dance practice.2 In this chapter, however, the term “baroque dance” refers to the dance practices of the 1630s–1750s. This is not to say that what spectators saw and admired in the ballets de cour of the 1630s was identical to what audiences at public theaters were watching in the 1730s and 1740s. The dance practice we now call “baroque dance” did change in the course of 120 years, and elements of late eighteenthcentury theatrical dance practices, for example, are present in pre-1750 dances. Marie Sallé (b. 1707–d. 1756) performed in London and Paris during the 1730s, where she had a “profound impact on members of the audience because of her grace and expressivity.”3 Two of her choreographies were without any text either sung or spoken. The storyline, development of the characters, and their emotional states were all portrayed through dance alone. Thus in the 1730s London theater-goers saw two ballets en action, a dramatic danced form that rose to prominence in the second half of the eighteenth century.4 Yet even while some aspects of baroque dance practice were changing, there was also continuity throughout this period: dances were still being taught thirty to forty years after they had been first composed, and students were happy to pay to learn such choreographies. John Weaver, for example, was still teaching his students at his dance school in Shrewsbury in the 1740s dances he had created when he was working in London in the early years of the eighteenth century.5 If the period referred to as “baroque dance” is open to debate, what is not contentious is that the dance practices across western Europe during this time were all based on the French practice as performed at the French court and at the Paris Opéra. French dance masters dominated the available employment positions across Europe, and the dancers and choreographers at the Opéra in the second half of the seventeenth century “set the standard for all of Europe.”6 This did not mean that the dance practiced in England or at the German courts, for example, was identical to that taught in France, as each country had its own national dance traditions.7 But what is clear from documentary evidence,

baroque dance   265 such as English and German translation of French dance treatises and iconographical evidence, is that the fundamental characteristics of the style was French. Baroque dance practice not only reflected the immediate social, political, and intellectual contexts in which it was performed, but it also continued many of the characteristics of the dance practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Baroque dance was still part of daily life for the elite and middle classes. Dancing was seen as essential to the education of a nobleman or woman and figured highly in the evaluation of a person’s worth. Dance taught self-control, which was itself a sign of noble virtue and graceful bearing. The dance lessons that started at an early age, and the opportunities to perform at court in front of the critical eyes of one’s peers, instilled “good co-ordination of movement, agility, balance, concentration, memory, sense of orientation, as well as civility, ethics and ease of manner.”8 Those who were not able to master this art laid themselves open to laughter and ridicule by their peers, as the account of a courtier who danced in two balls in 1692 reveals. A son of Montbron . . . was among the company. He had been asked if he danced well; and he had replied with a confidence which made every one hope that the contrary was the case. Everyone was satisfied. From the very first bow, he became confused, and he lost step at once. He tried to divert attention from his mistake by affected attitudes, and carrying his arms high; but this made him only more ridiculous, and excited bursts of laughter, which . . . degenerated at length into regular hooting. On the morrow, instead of flying the Court or holding his tongue, he excused himself by saying that the presence of the King had disconcerted him, and promised marvels for the ball which was to follow. . . . As soon as he began to dance at the second ball, those who were near stood up, those who were far off climbed wherever they could to get a sight; . . . Every one, even the King himself, laughed heartily, and most of us quite loud. . . Montbron disappeared immediately afterwards, and did not show himself again for a long time.9

Dancing at court occurred as part of social events, like the formal court balls and the more informal masked balls that were an essential part of the carnival season, as well as balls held in the apartments of individual courtiers, and as part of the entertainment provided by the jours d’appartement, which were usually held on three evenings a week in the apartments of the French king. Dance also played an important role in the dramatic spectacles: operas, plays, and ballets de cour. The frequency of dance events at the French court in the late seventeenth century illustrated by the 175-day period from September 10, 1684, to March 3, 1685, during which there were about seventy opportunities to dance, or to watch others dancing.10 In French baroque opera dance was far more than an added extra as it occurred within each act, not just between acts as usually happened in Italy, and was enmeshed with the vocal music that surrounded it.11 Dancing occurred in the part of each act we now call the “divertissement.”12 In these divertissements dance was used to present ideas and themes that were further expanded in the arias; it was a vehicle to allow audiences to see the obstacles confronting the protagonists, or to emphasize the power relationships between the latter, as well as permitting

266   the oxford handbook of the baroque the expression of a character’s feelings.13 By 1700 dance had become such an integral part of the commercial theater scene in London that “there were only a few days in the year . . . when one could not attend a theatrical performance with dancing somewhere in its programme.”14 Baroque dance practice was the last dance practice that allowed for the participation of average dancers, skilled amateurs, and professional dancers. The latter two groups often performed together in the ballets de cour, and noble ladies were partnered by professional dance masters at court balls. In the ballets performed at the French court individual entrées could be danced by either courtiers alone, by professional dancers, or by a mixture of both groups. There were a few professional female dancers who danced in seventeenth-century ballets de cour, so most of the female roles in these ballets were danced by noble ladies, or by men both noble and professional. From the 1650s the daughters of professional dancers and other professionals involved in court entertainments started to appear in the ballet de cour, in roles that highlighted their youth and agility. In the Ballet de la Nuit (1653) the four young girls, the oldest of whom was nine, danced two sarabandes alongside the father of one of the four, the dance master Ribera.15 Dance masters also performed with children of the elite and thewell-to-do in the ballets produced in the Jesuit colleges. The lines between social and theatrical dancing, and between skilled amateurs and professionals were blurred, with all genres of dance at  this  time utilizing the same step vocabulary16 and the same structural principles. Furthermore, the same choreographers created new dances for both the ballroom and the stage, and the same professional dancers who performed on stage in the public theaters also performed at court. In May 1698, for example, the celebrated French dancer Anthony L’Abbe, who had traveled to London to dance at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theater, was commanded to perform at court in front of William III. The following year both he and Claude Balon danced a loure at court before the English king.17 As Jennifer Thorp has pointed out: It is rather a myth that all early eighteenth-century theatrical dances were ipso facto more complex or technically demanding than ballroom dances; and study of the extant repertory reveals that both genres contained examples ranging from the dull and simple to the sophisticated and technically brilliant.18

Choreographies that were regularly danced in a ballroom setting were also performed as part of theatrical productions, while dances that were composed for a specific theatrical event could and did migrate to the ballroom. In spite of the characteristics that baroque dance shared with the dance practices of the previous two centuries, there were changes in styles and dance genres, major innovations in the methods of notating the dances, as well as visible and substantial changes in the bodily deportment of a dancer during the period 1630–1750. The relationship between music and dance also altered during these 120 years, and, as the seventeenth century progressed, dance music was increasingly used by composers for all genres of music, including sacred music.

baroque dance   267

Notation Perhaps one of the most visually arresting elements of baroque dance, and the reason more is known about dance at this time than in earlier periods, is the system of dance notation now known as the Beauchamps-Feuillet system that was developed in France in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.19 Around 1674 Louis XIV requested the dance master Pierre Beauchamps to develop a system of notation for the dances performed at court and at the Opéra.20 Beauchamps, however, did not publish his work, nor did he take out a privilege that would allow him to prevent others from publishing it. His system was published in 1700 by the younger dance master Raoul-Auger Feuillet in a treatise entitled Chorégraphie ou l’art de décrire la dance in which the movements and steps were explained by written descriptions, tables, and diagrams. Just six years after Feuillet’s work first appeared, two translations of it were published in England by the dance masters P. Siris and John Weaver.21 In 1725 Pierre Rameau published Le maître à danser, in which he extended the scope of Feuillet’s Chorégraphie by discussing in detail the positions of the arms and how and where they should move, a topic the latter discussed only briefly. Rameau’s work was just as popular in England, with an English translation by John Essex appearing in 1728.22 Seven years later Kellom Tomlinson published his work, The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures.23 It is a beautiful work of art in its own right, as Tomlinson employed the leading engravers to work on it under his instruction24 to produce plates that showed the dancers superimposed over their notated steps and floor plan at specific moments of a dance as part of the notation. This was a technique that combined horizontal and vertical elements and perspective, with the fluidity of the human figures creating a real sense of movement for the reader.25 (See Figure 2 for an example of one of the plates from Tomlinson’s Art of Dancing.) Not surprisingly, Beauchamps-Feuillet notation became popular and was used to notate dances in both published and manuscript form, with more than 350 choreographies surviving from France, England, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, almost all of which are social dances for a man and a woman, and theatrical solos or duets.26 (An example of Beauchamps-Feuillet notation is shown in Figure 1.) For the first time there was a system of dance notation that was far more comprehensive and concise than those of the past, and which showed the steps, the floor track of each dancer, and the music all together on the same page. In this system the individual steps are notated alongside the line of each floor track, along with additional symbols representing the different movements of the body and feet that could be added to modify a step. Thus, the components of each step are shown far more clearly than in previous notation systems. In BeauchampsFeuillet notation symbols indicate bending the knees, rising on the half-toe, jumps, springs, and other more elaborate gestures of the feet and legs, as well as movements of  the hands and arms, although in practice hand and arm movements were rarely notated. Beauchamps-Feuillet notation also indicates the relationship of the dancers to each other and when there is a change in direction of a dancer relative to the floor track.

268   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 1  First four bars of Pécour’s la Bourrée d’Achille in Beauchamps-Feuillet notation. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC

At the top of each page of notation was the melody for the notated steps shown on that page, and the bar lines in the music corresponded to perpendicular lines that divided each floor track, so it is very clear which steps are to be performed to which bar of music.27 The notation system developed by Beauchamps clearly reveals what were crucial elements of the dance style and how the dance practice was viewed by the dance masters of the period. Of fundamental importance was the emphasis placed on the feet and the precision of the dancers’ footwork. While there were a number of elements of baroque dance practice that contributed to the expressiveness of the style, the centrality of the steps in the notation system, and the detail in which they could be notated, reflect the fact that baroque dance was constructed around a small number of fundamental units that could be combined to form step units (pas composés).28 These units were then assembled into longer sequences to form each new choreography, with each different step contributing to the unique “rhythmic pattern, spatial design and degree of perceived activity or repose” of each dance phrase.29 Each step unit could also be ornamented and varied; for example, a demi-coupé could be performed in fifty-five different ways.30 Furthermore, each step unit could be performed in either duple or triple time. Thus the variety in the steps was enormous, repetition of steps was not common, and there were no rules for the formation of step sequences, since any step could be followed by any

baroque dance   269 other step.31 As Ken Pierce explains, “A dancing master’s choice of step at any given moment seems to have been influenced chiefly by the immediate choreographic context, musical rhythm, and affect; each dancer’s facing, direction of travel, and free foot; and how the current step should maintain or alter these positions.”32 The inclusion of the relevant music in each page of notation also emphasizes the importance of the relationship between the dance steps and the music in baroque dance. Earlier systems of dance notation, such as that employed by Thoinot Arbeau in his late sixteenth-century dance treatise where he wrote the names of the steps alongside the appropriate note or notes of the music,33 did link the music and dance steps, but none to  the degree of precision as found in Beauchamps-Feuillet notation. In fact the Beauchamps-Feuillet system of notation, and the precision of the music-dance relationships, was further developed by Pierre Rameau in his Abbrégé de la nouvelle méthode (1725), where he presented twelve dances by Guillaume-Louis Pécour re-notated in his “new method” of notation.34 Dance masters believed that the relationship between the music and the dance was so precise it needed to be clearly laid out, and for them a dance without music or one with only a vague relationship to the music would have seemed very strange.35 One of the reasons for the precision between the music of a baroque dance and its steps is that almost every dance had its own unique piece of music to which it was performed. In baroque dance there is a precise relationship between the musical rhythm and the timing or rhythm of the dance steps. This level of precision has both an intellectual and emotional aspect to it. The emotional aspect is that the phrasing of the dance steps, the dramatic high points of the tension created by the dancers as they move through the course of a particular choreography, can be emphasized and heightened by the rhythms and phrasing of the accompanying music. The intellectual aspect is found in the contrapuntal nature of baroque music. The rhythms of baroque choreographies add another contrapuntal line to those already present in the music, often acting as a duet with the music. One example of this duet can be seen in the formal minuet, a couple dance for the ballroom that had a small number of basic forms of the pas de menuet, all of which had slightly different rhythms.36 These forms of the pas de menuet all involved a dancer moving forward or sideways with four steps alternating right and left feet to the time of six beats of the music; that is, two triple-time bars. The mouvements (bends and rises) within these four steps also added more variety to the rhythmic stresses of a pas de menuet, a variety that allowed the rhythm of the pas de menuet to either work against or in harmony with hemiolas in the music. The rhythmic variety of baroque dance steps, and the contrapuntal line created by the choreographic rhythms, also occurs in dances for the stage. For example, an entrée for a harlequin (a chaconne) has a zany passage of a sequence of triple-time steps with toes turned in and out, knees bent and then straightened, followed by a series of three composite steps in duple time followed by jumping with the feet together, all to five triple-time bars of music.37 Beauchamps-Feuillet notation also emphasizes the continuous movement of the dancer’s body through space, by showing clearly where a dance is going. Even before reading the sequence of steps, the patterns or figures created by the dancer(s) moving

270   the oxford handbook of the baroque around the dance space can be seen at a glance, just as someone could see and appreciate the patterns in other artistic creations such as paintings, decorations, or garden designs.38 The ease with which the steps and the floor plans could be read in BeauchampsFeuillet notation also contributed to the movement of individual dances between the theater, the court and the general public. Feuillet understood that the market for notated dances was mostly “upper-class amateurs interested in learning the latest dance from the court or the Opéra,” so he concentrated on publishing dances for a couple or solos, as well as “designing each page so that it looked beautiful and would appeal to the eye.”39 In fact, dance literacy—the ability to read the notation—soon became an expected part of the skill set of those learning to dance.40 As part of his Chorégraphie Feuillet included a number of theatrical dances composed by himself, and a collection of social dances for the ballroom created by Pécour. His criteria for the inclusion of the notated dances in his publication was their popularity or their newness.41 Chorégraphie was an immediate commercial success, and from 1702 Feuillet started an annual publication schedule of dances for the ballroom that continued for another 23 years.42 The annual collections appeared in November so that dancers had time to learn and to practice before the start of the new season of balls in January and February. The theater dances that Feuillet notated and published were also taken from the productions seen at the Paris Opéra in the few years preceding their publication.43 The publication of dances in BeauchampsFeuillet notation also enabled a faster transmission of individual dances and the spread of the French dance style in general across Europe, as Feuillet pointed out in the foreword to his 1702 Recueil. As the greater number of persons far away [from the centre of all good dancing, Paris] find it troublesome to obtain knowledge of the new dances for the ball, one has found it appropriate to fix a time, and to this effect one would inform the public once and for all that one will continue to offer a small selection of them every year towards the beginning of November.44

In spite of the popularity of the new system of notation, and the clarity and precision with which baroque dances could be notated in it, dancers still wanted to learn in person from the leading choreographers of the day. For example, some two years after the French dancer Philippe Du Ruel and his wife and partner Eleanor Mayers arrived in London for an engagement at Drury Lane, they returned to France for six months in order to continue lessons with Philippe’s former teacher Pécour, and to learn the dances from the current productions at the Paris Opéra.45

The Aesthetic of a Dancer’s Body The French noble style of dancing was based on the expected deportment and carriage of the elite in society. Through a reading of the contemporary dance treatises, we see that the deportment of a noble dancer was the same on or off the dance floor, which means

baroque dance   271 that by looking at the dance practice we gain an understanding of how elite society conducted itself.46 The desired aesthetic was achieved through an harmonious, and therefore beautiful, body and spirit, an air of majesty, as well as a sense of order, balance, discipline, and precision, all of which combined to embody the noble virtues of douceur (sweetness, also courtesy), bonté (goodness, also valor) and honnêteté (integrity, virtue, civility). Thus, another major change in baroque dance from Renaissance dance practices is found in the deportment or carriage of a dancer’s body. From the material in the dance treatises, and from the figures of dancers, it is clear that the basic shape of those who danced in this period was an “S” curve. The “S” was created by the opposition of arms and feet (that is, when the right foot moves forward, so too does the left arm),47 the angle of a dancer’s head, a subtle, forward shading of the shoulder when the same arm was raised, and the curve in the wrists, hands, and fingers of a dancer as she or he moved through the steps of a dance. This “S” curve can be seen in the posture of the two men dancing a chaconne from Tomlinson’s Art of Dancing (Figure 2).48 The movement of the arms, wrists, and fingers had to agree and be in proportion to the movements of the feet and legs, as Tomlinson explains in his treatise at the end of the section on arm movements. Tomlinson advises that the movement of the arms “cannot be sufficiently described by Words but must be compleated by the very best Masters” since these movements must “agree with all the Steps made Use of in genteel Dancing.”49 Tomlinson continues: I shall refer the rest to the personal Instructions of a Master properly qualified, who must compleat what is here wanting, not only in Relation to the Movements of the Arms but also those of the Feet between which there is, . . . a perfect Connexion and Harmony. The Fingers and Toes, Wrists and Ancles, Elbows and Knees, Shoulders and Hips, in Dancing must move all of a Piece.50

The harmony between the movements of the various parts of the body was a part of an overall bodily movement that was essential for a graceful performance. This motion throughout the whole body was referred to as le mouvement by contemporary writers, who also underlined its necessity for an admirable, graceful, and aesthetically pleasing performance. This definition of mouvement in dancing is included in Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel from 1690, where he also mentions a girl who dances badly because, no matter how she performs the dance steps, she never has the appropriate mouvement of her body.51 Further to Furetière’s definition of mouvement, the term had a second and more specific definition with regard to dancing. Le mouvement was the term used to refer to the action of bending the knees on the upbeat, then rising onto the ball of the foot that begins the step on the first beat of the next bar, an action that initiates most baroque dance steps, and that gives the dancer’s body a sense of controlled buoyancy and grace. Tomlinson describes this “sink-rise” action in detail in his description of the coupé.52 He then adds that this movement is how all steps are to begin, except for “Springs, Bounds, Hops, or Chassees.”53

272   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 2  Part of the chaconne from Tomlinson’s Art of Dancing. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC

baroque dance   273 Before discussing the execution of the various steps, dance masters felt the need to describe how to stand, how to walk, and how to make a reverence, all of which was part of everyday social situations. Tomlinson, for example, begins his treatise with a chapter on standing. Before I proceed to treat on Motion, I apprehend it to be necessary to consider that Grace and Air so highly requisite in our Position, when we stand in Company; for, having formed a true Notion of this, there remains nothing farther to be observed, when we enter upon the Stage of Life, either in Walking or Dancing, than to preserve the same. . . . Position, then, is the different Placing or Setting our Feet on the Floor, whether in Conversation or Dancing.54

When discussing walking Tomlinson notes that “in Walking with a good Grace, Time and Harmony must be observed, as well as in Dancing,”55 further emphasizing the continuum between dancing and other social situations. Similarly, the reverence was just as much a part of social interactions as it was of dancing. Bows or Courtesies are the outward Marks of Respect we pay to others, . . . and, if made in a regular Manner, they are, indeed, very grand, noble, and highly ornamental. They accompany our Conversation, as well in Standing as Walking; in the former, on breaking off a Conversation, as in taking Leave, or by way of Acknowledgment for some Favour or obliging thing spoken in our Praise; and in the latter, when we enter a Room, or meet a Person passing either on the Right or Left.56

Expressive Dancing on the Stage: Ménestrier, Weaver, and Other Theorists The second half of the seventeenth century saw a marked increase in the number of ­treatises published on dance whose purpose was not to record choreographies, or to describe the method of executing the various different steps (as was common in the ­previous two centuries) but rather to present a theory of theatrical dance as it was ­performed, and should be performed, in contemporary danced spectacles. Theorists such as Claude François Ménestrier and Michel de Pure distinguished between social dancing enjoyed at balls, and the dancing seen in theatrical productions to which they gave the generic title of “ballet.” Needless to say they were both prejudiced in favor of the latter formof dance. The theorists viewed “ordinary” or “simple” dance as incapable of representing interior feelings and emotions because they saw this type of dancing as movements of the body that did not express anything and consisted only in the appropriate steps performed in agreement with the harmony and rhythm of the music.57

274   the oxford handbook of the baroque What Ménestrier and de Pure were reluctant to admit is that “ordinary” dance could express emotions and had indeed done so for the past two hundred years at least. The expression of interior feelings, however, was only part of the aesthetic purpose of “ordinary” dance. La belle danse also expressed, or embodied, the agreement between the harmony and rhythms of the accompanying music, which has its own beauty and grace. For Ménestrier and de Pure ballet was an imitative art that was capable of expressing through the movements and gestures of the dancers the passions and inner feelings of men and women, as well as intellectual concepts and everyday actions.58 De Pure wrote in 1668 that ballet was “a silent representation where the gestures and the movements declare what could be expressed by words.”59 Guillaume Colletet shared this view of dance, stating that “dance is a living image of our actions and an expression of our secret thoughts” (la danse est une image vivante de nos actions, et une expression de nos secrettes pensées).60 The English theatrical dancer, teacher, choreographer, and theorist John Weaver expressed the same view of theatrical dance in his Essay towards an History of Dancing. Stage-Dancing was at first design’d for Imitation; to explain things conceiv’d in the Mind, by the Gestures and Motions of the Body, and plainly and intelligibly representing Actions, Manners, and Passions; so that the Spectator might perfectly understand the Performer by these his Motions, tho’ he say not a Word. . . . And without the help of an Interpreter, a Spectator shall at Distance by the lively Representation of a just Character, be capable of understanding the Subject of the Story represented, and able to distinguish the several Passions, Manners or Actions; as of Love, Anger, and the like.61

Dance did not suddenly become a means of representing the passions and feelings of human beings in the second half of the seventeenth century. Dancing, whether in the ballroom or on a stage, had always been a communal activity, and as such was ideally suited as a vehicle for displays of emotion. In the dance practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were opportunities to express a range of emotions depending upon the performance context. The seventeenth-century theorists, therefore, were not proposing an entirely novel view of dance. The fifteenth-century Italian dance master Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, for example, expounded the long-held view that dancing proceeds from music and, like music, has the power to move and to change men’s and women’s emotions. In sixteenth-century France part of the motivation behind the establishment of the Académie de Poésie et de Musique was the belief that by combining poetry, music and dance in contemporary theatrical spectacles the ancient Greek ideal of the powerful moral effects on the emotions of the spectators and the performers that were generated by the spectacle in its entirety would be revived.62 Yet the contribution of Ménestrier, de Pure, Weaver, and other writers on the theoretical aspect of baroque dance practice was considerable, even if not totally original. Part of the impact of their writings (and the importance that their work has assumed in the corpus of modern scholarly research) was due to the degree to which these writers developed their thoughts on the subject, and the extent of their erudition. By 1681, for example, Ménestrier had assembled

baroque dance   275 a collection of more than two hundred ballet livrets from which he was able to formulate his rules.63 He had also read ancient authorities on dance: Aristotle, Plutarch, Plato, and Lucian of Samosata, as well as contemporary writings by such authors as Marin Mersenne and Emanuele Tesauro.64 Their central place in the history of pre-nineteenthcentury dance is also due to the developments in theatrical dancing in the second half of the eighteenth century, where dance masters, choreographers, and writers such as JeanGeorge Noverre extended and amplified Weaver’s experiments with dance as an autonomous art form that attempted to render the story intelligible to the spectators through the actions, gestures, postures, facial expressions and steps of the dance performers.65 In their treatises Ménestrier and de Pure discuss in what manner certain emotions should be represented on stage.66 For example, de Pure says that dance must consist of more than an exceptional dexterity of the dancer’s footwork, and that there must be a close connection or agreement between the steps, the subject of the ballet, and the character being represented. He gives the example of a fury that should move in an abrupt, jerky, and expansive manner, that at times can be seen as unnatural or affected. The portrayal of a fury should also include a disordered costume and a distracted air.67 Ménestrier discusses what is involved in the portrayal of Love, Anger or Rage, as well as Fear.68 Anger, for example, must be fiery and spirited, with violent movements and sudden steps with jolts and unequal rhythms. A dancer representing Anger should proceed by violent leaps, he should use his head, eyes, and hands to create a threatening impression, as well as throwing out wild and furious stares.69 Fear, on the other hand, is represented with slow steps when approaching and precipitate retreats. The dancer should have a trembling gait, a distraught outlook, with a lowered head and crossed arms as if he were truly enshrouded by his misery.70 As one can see from these examples, Ménestrier and de Pure describe the portrayal of emotions in a general sense. Despite their affinity for setting out the rules of theatrical dance with regard to the composition of the entrées, the choice of the subject, the costumes, the stage sets, and machines, when discussing the representation of the passions they are concerned with the overall effect. They are not proscriptive: they do not list individual steps that represent fear or anger, et cetera. They merely say that the steps must be slow or violent. What steps were to be used for each portrayal of a specific emotion or character was the responsibility of the dance master who created the ballet, with a great deal left up to the interpretation of the individual performers. Weaver published descriptions of three of his pantomimic, theatrical productions: The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717), Orpheus and Eurydice (1718), and Judgement of Paris (1733). In The Loves of Mars and Venus Weaver gave a description of fourteen of the most important gestures that he (as Vulcan) and Hester Santlow (as Venus) used to represent the characters, feelings, and passions of the story, although Weaver also believed that “character was discovered in the dance by nuances and less specific expressions, as well as formal gestures.”71 Nine of the gestures recorded by Weaver are for Vulcan, and they represent admiration, astonishment, jealousy, upbraiding, anger, threats, power, impatience, and indignation, while five are for Venus and represent coquetry, neglect, contempt, distaste, and detestation.72 Some of the gestures are stylized, such as for astonishment,

276   the oxford handbook of the baroque where “both hands are thrown up towards the Skies, the Eyes also lifted up, and the Body cast Backwards,” while others are more general, as for coquetry, which Weaver describes as being “seen in [the] affected Airs, given herself [Venus] throughout the whole Dance.”73 Once again Weaver does not detail any particular steps that Venus should perform when engaged in her dance of coquetry.

Dance and the Wider Society As we have seen, Ménestrier’s conception of ballet as an all-encompassing art form was shared by contemporaries such as Michel de Pure, who saw ballet as a mirror that reflected the world; Marin Mersenne, who saw ballet as an art that could teach one about the sciences; and Guillaume Colletet, who viewed ballet as a living picture of human actions.74 Baroque dance practice in general, and theatrical dancing in particular, was intimately connected with the society in which it existed. Sixteenth-century painters, poets, musicians, architects, and dance masters all shared a common vocabulary with which to express concepts of beauty in their particular art and the philosophical principles on which it was built.75 The same situation existed in the baroque period. Dance masters, choreographers, and theoreticians of dance were part of a common discourse among artists of all persuasions: aesthetic principles that applied in one art also underpinned another. Following on from previous centuries, seventeenth-century writers on dance such as Ménestrier declared that choreographers had to be knowledgeable in much more that the art of dance: they also had to be learned in music, poetry, geometry, natural philosophy, and rhetoric in order to create successful and beautiful dances in which the qualities of “things, actions and passions” were truly expressed, the mouvements were properly observed, and the dance steps were in harmony with the rhythms of the music.76 In the plays performed at the Jesuit colleges the students’ training included the proper use of gesture, as well as the appropriate ways one could move around the stage, and one’s stance when standing still while performing. Even though these physical aspects of rhetoric were an important part of dance training, they were not confined to dancers only. The physical aspect of rhetoric was a “precise gestural vocabulary shared by seventeenthand eighteenth-century actors, dancers, preachers, lawyers, and singers.”77 One artistic endeavor that shared the same principles as the art of dance was the design and planting of formal gardens. This is not surprising given that both garden design and choreography are concerned with manipulating, controlling, and ordering space. Dance can be seen as the creation of patterns in space: patterns that form and reform and trace out shapes in the air and on the ground. Formal gardens can also be viewed as the creation of patterns on the ground: their shapes are static, but they still present changing images as viewers stroll from section to section, and new shapes open up before them. As Sir Hugh Plat remarked in his work The Garden of Eden from 1654, “I shall not trouble the Reader with any curious rules for shaping and fashioning of a Garden or Orchard . . . Every Drawer or Embroider, nay, (almost) each Dancing-Master

baroque dance   277 (my emphasis) may pretend to such niceties.”78 Figure 3 depicts the flowing curvilinear patterns and the “S”-shaped curves found in the floor patterns of the regular minuet, as well as in many other baroque choreographies. Very similar patterns are found in the parterres of seventeenth-century grand gardens such as the one created by André Le Nôtre between 1656 and 1661 at Vaux-le-Vicomte, or in the designs for parterres de broderie such as those by Jacques Boyceau in his Traité du Jardinage published in 1638. Garden design was not the only art form to share design principles with baroque dance. Ornamental designs known as grotesques or arabesques, which were used to decorate the interior walls of the houses of the elite during the latter half of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, also closely resembled the floor patterns of notated dances.79 The way the world was perceived by society in general also found expression in the choreographies and danced spectacles of the era. While each danced spectacle had its own particular political and social context, with specific messages that the patrons and artists wished to convey to the spectators and to those not present but who read accounts of the event, many of the ballets de cour were “structured around a struggle between the forces of good (usually represented by the king) and those of evil.”80 Evil was represented by demons, monsters, magicians, devils, or an enchantress such as Circe, and in the first half of the seventeenth century the livrets and accounts of the personifications of evil all emphasized their terrifying nature. In the ballet de cour performed on February 12, 1619, the magician Ismen first summoned eight monsters who, although they all had two feet, appeared as various types of “strange and frightful animals with talons and teeth” and grotesquely shaped heads. Their entrée was danced with devilish steps and many extravagant gestures.81 Next Ismen calls forth the “powers of hell”; that is, three furies who appear with flaming torches from beneath the stage. Their costumes and their coiffures all contributed to the presentation of horrible infernal spirits. Their hair was a mass of entwined snakes and their long robes of a dusky-russet color were decorated with gold lacing and the fabric itself was woven with gold thread. The gold would reflect the flames of their torches and magnify the effect of the flames to make it appear as if their whole body was engulfed by fire.82 The existence of these monstrous beings in the physical world was a commonly held belief at the time by both the general populace and by scholars.83 This view of the natural world as one populated by demons and spirits also found expression in the ballet de cour in the number of roles that were cross-breeds; that is, half-human and half-animal, or half-demon. Costume designs for a man-rooster, a man-fox, a man-frog or a man-wolf, are just a few examples of what appeared on stage.84 But by the mid-seventeenth century this mindset began to change, and the widespread belief in demons diminished, especially in Paris. While phantoms, furies, witches, and werewolves continued to appear in danced spectacles of the 1650s and 1660s, the interest in them had shifted from a representation of horrible and fear-inducing supernatural beings, to providing an excuse for a novel choreography and new costumes.85 The spirits appear far more as benign beings than as agents and ministers of evil ceremonies. The reflection of a changing worldview was not the only way in which baroque dance was linked to society in general, as the methods by which the dance profession regulated

278   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 3  The regular minuet. Plate U from Tomlinson’s Art of Dancing. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC

baroque dance   279 itself also reflected similar developments in other professions. The establishment in 1661 of a formal academy, the Académie Royal de Danse, to regulate dance teaching and choreography, improve standards in dance performance, and to wrest control of the dance profession from the existing musicians’ guild, was a momentous event in the history of dance as a profession in its own right. Yet it was also part of developments in other artistic, literary and scientific fields. The Letters Patent that established the Académie Royal de Danse were modeled on those of the Académie Royal de Peinture et Sculpture from 1648,86 and the decade that followed the former’s founding saw the establishment of four other academies; that is, for Inscriptions et Belle Lettres in 1663, the sciences in 1666, music in 1669, and architecture in 1671. Changes in the dance practice were also paralleled by changes in science. For example, the second half of the seventeenth century saw the development of notation in the fields of mathematics as well as in dance. Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were both developing their own system of notation for calculus, while René Descartes developed a notation system for analytic geometry and Cartesian coordinates.

Conclusion As the dance historian, performer and choreographer Mark Franko has commented: “Baroque dance technique is not easily mastered. Being highly cerebral, musically complex and often counter-intuitive, it demands special study.”87 One can also add to Franko’s description of baroque dance that it was—and is—a rich, exciting, exacting, expressive, wonder-inducing art form. Baroque dance was inseparable from music, theater, and stagecraft. Even in ballroom dancing the participants were “performing” in front of their peers. Its part in multimedia dramatic spectacles gave it a dramatic power and an expressive passion—in all senses of that term. It was part of politics and diplomacy; it was influenced by contemporary artistic attitudes with regard to the concept of beauty and artistic design principles, as well as trends in philosophic and scientific thought; and it reflected the organization of society and the social interactions of the upper levels of society. It was also part of the daily experience of many in society for a large part of their lives.88

Notes 1. For example, in his studies of the choreographic structure of baroque dance, Ken Pierce concentrates on the fifty years from 1680 to 1730. See Pierce, “Choreographic Structure in Baroque Dance,” in Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick,1250–1750, ed. Jennifer Nevile (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 182. 2. See, for example, Rebecca Harris-Warrick’s statement: “The term ‘baroque dance’ is problematical, both because the style itself has significant classical elements and because it

280   the oxford handbook of the baroque is questionable whether the term ‘baroque’ is at all appropriate for arts arising in France during the reign of Louis XIV.” See Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 83–84. 3. Sarah McCleave, “Marie Sallé and the Development of the Ballet en action,” Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland 3 (2007–2008): 1. 4. For a discussion of Marie Sallé’s two ballets and her contribution to later dance practices, see McCleave, “Marie Sallé,” 1–23. 5. Richard Ralph, The Life and Works of John Weaver: An Account of His Life, Writings and Theatrical Productions with Annotated Reprints of his Complete Publications (London: Dance Books, 1985), 36. 6. Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, 83. 7. Jennifer Thorp has argued that the dancing seen in opera performances in London in the decade 1673 to 1685 “mixed English traditions with the growing influence of the French style . . . known as la belle danse” (“Dance in Opera in London, 1673–1685,” Dance Research 33, no. 2 (2015): 94. For a discussion of the continuation of traditional German dance forms at the Württemberg court in the seventeenth century, see Samantha Owens, “ ‘Not Always the Same Minuets’: Dance at the Württemberg Court, 1662–1711,” The Court Historian 15, no. 2 (2010): 133–144 and especially 138–139. For an examination of the spread of the French dance style in Spain, see Clara Rico Osés, “French Dance in EighteenthCentury Spain,” Dance Chronicle 35, no. 2 (2012): 133–172. 8. Régine Astier, “Louis XIV, ‘Premier Danseur’,” in The Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture During the Reign of Louis XIV, ed. David Lee Rubin (Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), 76. 9. M. le duc de Saint-Simon, Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency, trans. Bayle St. John, 3 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1857), I: 25–26. 10. Rebecca Harris-Warrick, “Ballroom Dancing at the Court of Louis XIV,” Early Music 14, no. 1 (1986): 42. 11. Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, 2. 12. Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, 8. 13. See Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, 17 and 19, and throughout the monograph for examples of the dramatic purpose of dance in French baroque opera. 14. Jennifer Thorp, “Dance in the London Theaters, c. 1700–1750,” in Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–1750, ed. Jennifer Nevile (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 136. 15. Jennifer Thorp, “Dances and Dancers in the Ballet de la Nuit,” in Ballet de la Nuit: Rothschild B1/16/6, ed. Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorp (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2009), 20–21. 16. John Weaver makes this point when he says “altho’ the Steps of both [that is, ballroom dancing and theatrical dancing] are generally the same, yet they differ in the Performance: Notwithstanding there are some Steps peculiarly adapted to this Sort of [theatrical] Dancing, viz. Capers, and Cross-Capers of all kinds; Pirouttes, Batteries, and indeed almost all Steps from the Ground.” John Weaver, An Essay towards an History of Dancing (London: Jacob Tonson, 1712), 162–163. Weaver’s work is reproduced in facsimile with annotations in Richard Ralph, The Life and Works of John Weaver, 391–672. The quotation is from pages 655–656 of Ralph’s work. 17. Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, “Theatre Dancers at the Court of Queen Anne,” The Court Historian 15, no. 2 (2010): 171–172.

baroque dance   281 18. Jennifer Thorp, “Pecour’s L’Allemande, 1702–1765: How German Was It?” Eighteenth-Century Music 1, no. 2 (2004): 184n7. 19. In France in the 1680s there were three other dance notation systems also being developed; that is, by André Lorin, Jean Favier the elder, and Sieur de la Haise. These three never achieved the widespread popularity that Beauchamps’s system did. For more information see, Ken Pierce, “Dance Notation Systems in Late 17th-Century France,” Early Music 26, no. 2 (1998): 286–299. For a detailed discussion of Favier’s system and a facsimile of the masquerade that was notated using this system, see Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Carol G. Marsh, Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See Julia Sutton and Rachelle Tsachor, eds., Dances for the Sun King: André Lorin’s “Livre de contredance” (Annapolis, MD: Colonial Music Institute, 2008) for an extended discussion of Lorin’s system of notation. 20. Beauchamps taught dancing to members of the royal family and was also employed as the director of dance at the Opéra. 21. P. Siris, The Art of Dancing (London: Siris, 1706) and John Weaver, Orchesography, or the Art of Dancing (London: H.  Meere, 1706). Siris’s translation was not the success that Weaver’s was, which went through several later editions. Ralph, Life and Works of John Weaver, 13. 22. John Essex, The Dancing Master: Or, the Whole Art and Mystery of Dancing Explained (London: J. Essex and J. Brotherton, 1728) and later editions. 23. Kellom Tomlinson, The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures (London: Tomlinson, 1735) and later editions. 24. Gabriella Karl-Johnson, “From the Page to the Floor: Baroque Dance Notation and Kellom Tomlinson’s The Art of Dancing Explained,” Signs and Society 5, no. 2 (2017): 284. 25. Karl-Johnson, “From the Page to the Floor,” 281–284. 26. Almost all of these dances appeared in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The work of only four choreographers represents the vast majority of these notated choreographies: sixty-three by Feuillet, forty-one by Gaudrau, eight by Dezais, and about onethird by Pécour. 27. For a summary of the weaknesses of this notation system see Harris-Warrick and Marsh, Musical Theatre, 97. 28. To give just one example, the step unit contretemps de gavotte is a combination of “a hop on one foot followed by two pas marchés (walking steps).” Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, 85. 29. Pierce, “Choreographic Structure,” 187. 30. Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, 85. 31. Pierce, “Choreographic Structure,” 187. 32. Pierce, “Choreographic Structure,” 187. 33. Thoinot Arbeau, Orchésographie (Langres, 1589). Translation by Mary Stewart Evans 1948. Reprinted with introduction and notes by Julia Sutton (New York: Dover, 1967). 34. See Part II of Pierre Rameau’s, Abbrégé de la nouvelle méthode dans l’art d’écrire ou de traçer toutes sortes de danses de ville (Paris: Pierre Rameau, 1725). 35. Harris-Warrick and Marsh, Musical Theatre, 121. 36. For a detailed description of the basic forms of the pas de menuet see Tomlinson, Art of Dancing, 103–106, and Pierre Rameau, Le maître à danser (Paris: Jean Villette, 1725), 76–83. 37. The choreography is set to Lully’s music for the Entrée des Trivelins from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. I would like to thank Jennifer Thorp for bringing this choreographic

282   the oxford handbook of the baroque sequence to my attention. For a choreographic and musical analysis of the whole dance in a rhetorical framework, see Ricardo Barros, Dance as a Discourse: The Rhetorical Expression of the Passions in French Baroque Dance (Saarbrüken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010), 158–165. 38. The relationship between the floor patterns of baroque dance and patterns in other artistic practices will be discussed below in the section entitled “Dance and the Wider Society.” 39. Harris-Warrick and Marsh, Musical Theatre, 122. 40. Karl-Johnson, “From the Page to the Floor,” 274–276. 41. Rebecca Harris-Warrick, “La Mariée: the History of a French Court Dance,” in JeanBaptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony, ed. John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 240. 4 2. Harris-Warrick, “La Mariée,” 240. For more information on the annual collections in France and England, see Ingrid Brainard, “New Dances for the Ball: The Annual Collections of France and England in the 18th Century,” Early Music 14, no. 2 (1986): 164–173. 4 3. Harris-Warrick, “La Mariée,” 239n2. 44. “Comme la plus grande partie des personnes qui sont éloigneés se trouvent embarasseés de sçavoir quand il y a des danses nouvelles pour le bal, on a jugé apropos de fixer un temps, et pour cet éffet on avertit le public vne fois pour tousjour, que lón continura toultes les Anneés vers le commencement du mois de Novembre.” Feuillet, Receüil [sic] de danses de bal pour l’année 1703 . . . (Paris: Feuillet, 1702). The translation is by Brainard, from “New Dances for the Ball,” 165. 45. Baldwin and Wilson, “Theatre Dancers,” 174 and 179. 46. As Judith Rock explains, “Baroque dance technique’s celebration of limits, precision, and small intricate complexity, of the luxurious weight of costume as part of movement, tell us much about the manners, ways of speaking and moving, and even thinking, in upper bourgeois and noble society” in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. See “The Jesuit College Ballets: What We Know and What’s Next,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 4, no. 3 (2017): 434. 47. See, for example, Tomlinson, Art of Dancing, 6–7. 48. The “S” curve found in the dancer’s body and in the floor patterns of baroque dance also played an important part in William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753), where he “defines the serpentine line as the line of grace.” For a discussion of the place dance and deportment instruction played in Hogarth’s thought, see Annie Richardson, “An Aesthetics of Performance: Dance in Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty,” Dance Research 20, no. 2 (2002): 38–87. The quotation is from page 66. 49. Art of Dancing, 156. 50. Art of Dancing, 156. 51. “On le dit aussi dans la danse des diverses agitations du corps qu’il faut faire pour se mouvoir agreablement en cadence. Cette fille danse mal, car quoy qu’elle marque les pas, elle n’a point le mouvement du corps convenable.” Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel, contenant généralement tous les mots françois . . . (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: A.  & R. Leers, 1690). 52. Art of Dancing, 16–28. 53. Art of Dancing, 29. 5 4. Art of Dancing, 3–4. 55. Art of Dancing, 6.

baroque dance   283 56. Art of Dancing, 7. 57. “La premiere [simple dance] n’est qu’un mouvemens de corps qui consiste seulement en la justesse des pas, & n’est qu’un divertissement que l’on prend sans autre regle que celle de l’accord & de la cadence.” Claude François Ménestrier, Remarques, Pour la conduite des Ballets published on pages 50 to 56 of his L’Autel de Lyon (Lyon, France: Jean Moulin, 1658). Reprinted in Marie-Françoise Christout, Le ballet de cour de Louis XIV, 1643–1672, new edition (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 2005), 231–235, the quotation is from page 233. In his later work Des Ballets anciens et modernes selon les regles du theatre (Paris: René Guignard, 1682), Ménestrier repeats this important distinction on p. 154. “Et cela nous apprend la difference qu’il y a entre les Ballets, & la simple danse; que la simple danse est un mouvement qui n’exprime rien, & observe seulement une juste cadence avec le son des instrumens par des pas & des passages simples ou figurez.” 58. “Cette imitation se fait par les mouvements du corps, qui sont les interpretes des passions, & des sentiments interieurs, & comme le corps a des parties differentes qui composent un tout, & font une belle harmonie, on se sert du son des instrumens & de leurs accords pour regler ces mouvemens, qui expriment les effets des passions de l’ame.” Ménestrier, Remarques, 232. 59. “C’est une representation muette, où les gestes & les mouvemens signifient ce qu’on pourroit exprimer par des paroles.” See Michel de Pure, Idée des spectacles anciens et nouveaux (Paris: Michel Brunet, 1668), 210. 60. The quotation is from Margaret M. McGowan, “Le Ballet en France et en Savoie: ses effects et son public, 1650–1660,” in Le noces de Pélée et de Thétis, Venise, 1639-Paris, 1654. Edited by Marie-Thérèse Bouquet-Boyer (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2001), 14. 61. Weaver, An Essay towards an History of Dancing, 160–161. 62. For a detailed discussion of the ways in which emotion was portrayed in Renaissance choreographies, see Denis Collins and Jennifer Nevile, “Music and Dance,” in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Late-Medieval, Reformation and Renaissance Age, vol. 3, ed. Susan Broomhall and Andrew Lynch (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2019). For a discussion on emotion in baroque dance, see Tim Carter, “Music and Dance,” in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age, vol. 4, ed. C.  Walker, K. Barclay, and D. Lemmings (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2019). 63. Margaret M. McGowan, “Ménestrier, maître des spectacles au théâtre de forme irrégulière,” in Claude-François Ménestrier: Les Jésuites et le monde des images, ed. Gérard Sabatier (Grenoble, France: Presses Universitaires, 2009), 132. 64. McGowan, “Ménestrier, maître des spectacles,” 132. McGowan suggests that Ménestrier might have rediscovered Aristotle through his reading of Tesauro’s Il Cannochiale Aristotelico (1654). See McGowan, “Le Ballet en France et en Savoie,” 16–17. 65. For two discussions of the change in dance aesthetics at this time, see Claudia Jeschke, “From Ballet de Cour to Ballet en Action: The Transformation of Dance Aesthetics and Performance at the End of the Seventeenth and Beginning of the Eighteenth Centuries,” Theatre History Studies 11 (1991): 107–122; and McCleave, “Marie Sallé,” 1–23. 66. For a further discussion on the gestures used to express emotions in imitative or expressive dances, see Pierce, “Choreographic Structure,” 198–201. 67. “D’observer dans un furieux un pas brusque, emporté, & dont par des temps affectez, ou par des coupez rompus, on puisse s’apercevoir de desordre du personnage & de son égarement.” De Pure, Idée des spectacles, 250. 68. Ménestrier, Des Ballets, 161–162.

284   the oxford handbook of the baroque 69. “La Colere est fougueuse, elle s’emporte, elle n’a rien de reglé, tous ses mouvemens sont violens, & pour exprimer cette passion les pas doivent estre precipitez avec des chutes & des cadences inégales. Il faut battre du pied, aller par élancemens, menacer de la teste & des yeux, & de la main, & jetter des regards farouches & furieux.” Ménestrier, Des Ballets, 161. 70. “La Crainte a des pas lents dans les approches, & precipitez dans les retraites, une démarche tremblante & suspendüe, une vûe égarée & les bras embarrassez. Ceux qui sont affligez baissent la teste, croisent les bras, & sont comme ensevelis dans la tristesse.” Ménestrier, Des Ballets, 162. 7 1. Ralph, Life and Works of John Weaver, 61. 72. Weaver, The Loves of Mars and Venus (London: W. Mears/J. Brown, 1717), 21–23. 73. Weaver, The Loves of Mars and Venus, 21 and 22. 74. Margaret M. McGowan, “Ménestrier, maître des spectacles,” 136. 75. Margaret M. McGowan, La Danse à la Renaissance: Sources livresque et albums d’images (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2012), 19. 76. “C’est pour ce sujet qu’il veut que ceux qui les composent soient sçavans en la Musique, en la Poësie,Geometrie, Philosophie naturelle & Rhetorique, pour bien garder les cadances, observer les mouvemens, exprimer les qualitez des choses, les actions & les passions.” Ménestrier, Remarques, 231–232. 77. Rock, “Jesuit College Ballet,” 436. 78. Hugh Plat, The Garden of Eden (London, 1654), 31–32. 79. For a detailed discussion of these similarities between grotesques and court dance, see Sarah  R.  Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89–133. 80. Margaret M. McGowan, “Court Ballet: The Nature of its Fantasies,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 6 (1984): 41. 81. “ces monstres estoient tous plantez sur deux pieds, mais representans en tout le reste du corps, diuerses sortes d’animaux estranges & affreux auec griffes & dents, & les testes de formes confuses en grotesques, . . . faisans des pas endiablez & des grimaces du tout extrauagantes.” Relation du grand ballet du roy, dancé en la salle du Louvre le 12 Feurier 1619, sur l’adventure de Tancrede en la Forest enchantee (Paris: Jean Sara, 1619), 16. 82. “entrerent tout à coup par les trois portes de dessous le theatre, trois Furies auec leurs flambeaux allumez. Elles auoient vne simarre de tabis battu d’or, couleur enfumee enrichie de passement d’or, auec vne ceinture d’vn grand serpent. Leurs crins comme on a accoustumé de les peindre estoient des coleuures entortillées à l’entour de leur teste en vn bracelet de petits vipereaux de bouquetterie.” Relation du grand ballet du roy, 17. 83. McGowan, “Court Ballet,” 44. See pp. 43–46 for examples of this worldview. 84. For the first three examples, see McGowan, La Danse à la Renaissance, Plates 59, 60, and 61 on pp. 63–65. 85. McGowan, “Court Ballet,” 46. 86. Rose A. Pruiksma, “Generational Conflict and the Foundation of the Académie Royal de Danse: A Re-examination,” Dance Chronicle 26, no. 2 (2003): 171–172. 87. Mark Franko, “The Baroque Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 43. 88. I would like to thank Jennifer Thorp for her helpful and insightful comments, which greatly improved this essay.

baroque dance   285

Further Reading Brooks, Lynn Matluck. The Art of Dancing in Seventeenth-Century Spain. Juan de Esquivel Navarro and His World. Including a translation of the Discursos sobre el arte del danzado by  Juan de Esquivel Navarro (Seville 1642), and Commentary on the Text. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003. Franko, Mark. Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Goff, Moira. The Incomparable Hester Santlow: A Dancer-Actress on the Georgian Stage. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Powell, John S. “Pierre Beauchamps, Choreographer to Molière’s Troupe du Roy.” Music & Letters 76, no. 2 (1995): 168–186. Le Roussau, F. A Collection of New Ball- and Stage Dances, 1720. Facsimile with introductory notes by Jennifer Thorp (Lulu.com, 2008). Russell, Tilden. The Compleat Dancing Master: A Translation of Gottfried Taubert’s Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister (1717), 2 vols. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Schroedter, Stephanie, Marie-Thérèse Mourey, and Giles Bennett, eds., Barocktanz: La Danse Baroque: Baroque Dance and the Transfer of Culture between France and Germany around 1700. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms, 2008. Semmens, Richard. The bals publics at the Paris Opéra in the Eighteenth Century. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2004. Thorp, Jennifer. “Servile Bodies? The Status of the Professional Dancer in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries.” In The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance. Edited by Fiona Macintosh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010: 169–187. Tomko, Linda J. “Harlequin Choreographies: Repetition, Difference, and Representation.” In The Stage’s Glory: John Rich (1692–1761). Edited by Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011: 99–137.

chapter 12

Ibero -A m er ica n A rchitect u r e a n d U r ba n ism Paul Niell

Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism The myriad attempts by European nations, beginning with Spain and Portugal, to identify, name, map, categorize, and enter into knowledge the things they encountered abroad coexisted, as Walter D. Mignolo has argued, with darker, domineering impulses to produce knowledge of the “other,” and thereby gain control of land, impose territorialities, and subjugate foreign peoples in unfair labor arrangements through strategies and tactics of coercion, discipline, racism, and punishment.1 The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed June 7, 1494, created an official division between the newly discovered lands claimed by the Crown of Castile upon Columbus’s early voyages and those of the Portuguese. Castile received the lands west of this cartographic division that ran halfway between the Cape Verde islands and those recently encountered by Columbus, and Portugal received the lands to the east. The Ibero-American colonial city and its architecture in the age of the Baroque served as ideological instruments in these processes of colonialism and as part of a broader strategy of domination and exploitation, enlivened and ordered by public performances of church, monarchy, and elite.2 This chapter examines architecture and urbanism in Ibero-American territories through the lens of the Baroque as a process of aesthetic, semantic, and temporal (re)ordering in the larger history of European colonialism. Such an approach to Baroque architecture and urbanism writes against the grain of previous scholarship that has couched the phenomenon as merely an artistic style situated directly or implicitly between Renaissance and Neoclassical developments in the

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   287 Americas. Manuel Toussaint’s 1948 survey of Mexican colonial art projects the succession of European stylistic taxonomies of the last five hundred years onto the colonial Americas.3 Toussaint (b. 1890–d. 1955) thereby endeavored to locate the Baroque within Mexican colonial painting, sculpture, and architecture through an art-historical periodization devised to explain developments in Europe. Toussaint’s Eurocentrism presents several problems. First, it frames the Spanish colonial Americas as dependent entirely upon Europe for its cultural maturation and does not fully appreciate these territories as rich centers of cultural production. Toussaint looked to Europe to make sense of Mexican colonial art history, but his efforts appear to have also been deeply tied to Mexican nationalism. The 1930s–1950s in Mexico witnessed a revival of interest in colonial heritage in art, architecture, literature, and foodways perhaps based in part on a sense of the loss of heritage with the booming modernism of mid-century Mexico.4 Hence, in Toussaint’s work, it becomes difficult to fully know, recognize, or appreciate the American Baroque on its own terms. Secondly, by framing cultural developments in the visual arts and architecture as matters of style alone, Toussaint reduced the broader process of colonial power and its implementation through culture to a fetishized form, the Baroque aesthetic in multiple media that served as the mask of that power. In the present study, placing colonialism, Europe’s global expansion, and the negotiation of such power by subaltern communities at the center of the description, we can explore style and its significance with new insight. A more recent work by Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque, includes a chapter on “Colonial Baroque,” which focuses entirely on Mexican examples.5 While Harbison takes a more sociopolitical approach than Toussaint—situating the colonial Baroque, as it were, as part of a phase of European expansion beginning in the sixteenth century— his work reveals its own Eurocentrism and commitment to the notion of a coherent and exclusive style called Baroque. Through his myriad descriptions, we gain a sense of his own pursuit of the fully crystalized Baroque as a metropolitan-bound Western achievement emanating from Europe, rather than as a dynamic geopolitical global phenomenon in which European culture was adapted and transformed within colonial systems of domination and exploitation in dialogue with the peoples of the Americas and other parts of the globe. Harbison’s approach resembles somewhat the work of US art historian George Kubler (b. 1912–d. 1996), who focused so much on Spanish precedents that Mexican Baroque inevitably appeared as “a bad copy of something of which the colonial craftsmen possessed only misleading reports or partial understanding,” in Harbison’s words.6 While denouncing such value judgments as irrelevant and elevating Mexico as a place where the “strengths and weaknesses of this European style are more richly present in the New World than anywhere in Europe,” Harbison nevertheless re-inscribes such Euro-centric ideas in his insistence that even if Mexican Baroque should not be seen as a “watered down, rustic or eccentric” cousin of Europe, it is nevertheless provincial, even if it achieves an escape from European models.7 Its “folkish” quality ought to be appreciated, such as the “particularly folkish feel [to] the tile-covered façade” in places like Puebla, Mexico.8 Here, Harbison confers the high/low, fine art/folkish hierarchies of empire, not accounting sufficiently for the colonial processes and societies that

288   the oxford handbook of the baroque established and orchestrated such forms. He paints in this way the picture of art to be appreciated, more than a cultural phenomenon of colonialism to be critically engaged and understood. A new generation of art historians has begun to ask such questions of empire, from the perspective of Spain and the Americas. Architectural historian Jesús Escobar in his examination of the transformation of the Plaza Mayor of Madrid in the seventeenth century opens up the possibility that Spanish urbanism abroad in places like Mexico City impacted decisions in the imperial metropolis.9 Art historian Michael Schreffler’s work on the role of visual culture in Baroque New Spain as fostering “allegiance” to the monarchy across a range of media attests to a move toward concerns with the constitution of colonial power in the Americas through various cultural forms working in tandem, including architecture and urbanism.10 This turn in the art and architectural history of the Spanish Americas, using empire and the colonial as a point of departure, deepens our understanding of the Baroque—a global phenomenon that did not necessarily originate in Europe. There is much to explore beyond Madrid and Mexico City, as we will see in the work of a number of scholars mentioned in the present essay, as well as much to learn from the Portuguese colonial world.

City Planning, Order, and Colonial Ideology Christopher Columbus’s arrival in today’s Caribbean islands, a place that he mistook for Asia and labeled “the Indies,” set into motion an encounter with a difference in land, climate, flora and fauna, resources, and human beings that began to be incorporated into an evolving European knowledge in the early modern period. Columbus at once remarked on the inferior nature of the indigenous people he witnessed, noting that they seemed to have no religious faith, but with evident quick intelligence, they would make good servants.11 The ensuing series of conquests of the islands that the Spanish would name Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries decimated the indigenous populations of these areas. Soon after Columbus’s arrival it was clear that the European impulse to order in the so-called New World (only “new” for Europeans) would be accompanied by tremendous violence and exploitation. As native polities shrank dramatically and resistance was quelled, cities such as Santo Domingo (founded in 1496) in Hispaniola rose that had features in common with siege towns in Iberia, such as that of Santa Fé (c. 1490), a town built for military assault in a grid formation in order to threaten Granada, the last Islamic polity on the Iberian Peninsula, dismantled in 1492. The Americas offered Europeans a space to realize urban dreams of order and geometry that had been stirred up by the rise of humanism and nascent capitalism in late medieval Europe or the so-called Renaissance. The grid-iron city plan became the

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   289 favored urban template for the Spanish, developed through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a series of promulgated laws, codified in 1680 under Charles II as the Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de Indias [Compilation of the laws of the kingdoms of the Indies].12 In terms of the mandates for urban planning, these laws drew heavily on recommendations for urban settlement set forth in The Ten Books on Architecture by the first-century Roman architect Vitruvius.13 In terms of Spanish American urban planning, the laws specified that the main plaza is to be the starting point for the town; if the town is situated on the sea coast, it should be placed at the landing place of the port, but inland it should be at the center of the town. The plaza shall be rectangular, and should have at least one and a half its width for length inasmuch as this shape is best for fiestas in which horses are used and for any other fiestas that should be held.14

By contrast, the Portuguese allowed their American colonial cities to take a more topographically conditioned layout with streets and buildings conforming to the undulating conditions of the landscape, as seen at Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.15 The Spanish conceived the grid plan as ideally focused on the central plaza, an urban nucleus from which civic and spatial order arose. A plan of 1596 of the plaza mayor (main plaza) of Mexico City, conveys the importance of this medial plaza space (Figure 1). Through a well-ordered plaza, in tandem with laws, urban regulations, and the establishment of social norms, the Spanish attempted to advance and sustain the notion of policía in the Americas. As historian Richard L. Kagan has shown, royal officials conceptualized policía broadly, as an urban ideal encompassing physical order (orderly streets, well defined public spaces, and buildings) and social order (a law-abiding and Christian population). Kagan also stresses that urban order was conceived by the Spanish as part of an interconnected matrix of urbs (physical components—buildings, plazas, fountains, aqueducts) and civitas (the human element of cities), both managed by laws written in the dominant colonial language of Castilian and by the practices of everyday colonial life.16 The 1596 plan exhibits the physical attributes of the noble and loyal city of Mexico as geometrically conceived through its central plaza, stately in its buildings’ use of regular columnar elements bordering this public space, and functional in the uninterrupted and bridged acequia (water canal or aqueduct) that makes its way through the plaza on one of its long sides. Conspicuously absent from this plan are references to the human element of the city, including human figures standing, working, riding in carriages, selling their wares at a market, or cavorting on horseback, however implied that population might be, as urbs and civitas represented interpolated domains. In fact, this colonial plan, itself and many others like it, could be viewed as a spatial artifact operating in conjunction with architecture and urbanism in a larger ideological effort to establish and maintain urban order.17 Art historian Tom Cummins and anthropologist Joanne Rappaport have examined the Spanish colonial city as composed of various coordinated “spatial genres” including written language, verbal enunciation, images, architecture, and urban spatial configurations that functioned in the constitution of

290   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 1  Plan of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City and of buildings and adjacent streets. 1596. Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   291 colonial social reality. 18 We should only expect that this kind of colonial spatiality might have been deployed differently yet complementarily in religious, commercial, governmental, and domestic spaces. In contemporary scholarship, a picture of Spanish architecture and urbanism has begun to emerge in which the city and its built environment played active roles in the establishment and maintenance of normative power structures, a process that involved both time and space. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, we can perceive the creation of a colonial habitus, whereby colonial subjects of disparate social ranks absorbed power structures through training and membership in colonial society and exhibited different behaviors and norms in public spaces as they interpreted those settings and performed their identities in divergent ways. People of different social standings and racial categorizations, including Spanish peninsulares (individuals born in Spain), Creole elites (people of Hispanic descent born in the Americas), mestizos/as (persons of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry), Indians, and black Africans, negotiated the structures of the city and exerted their own kind of agency upon urban spaces.19 The internalization of the ideals of urban order in the Spanish colonial city and their exteriorization through individual actions during the age of the Baroque can be understood through the analysis of an image by Guamán Poma de Ayala (b. 1535–d. 1616), an indigenous nobleman in the viceroyalty of Peru. Guamán Poma completed his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno around 1615, a manuscript handwritten, illustrated, and aimed at the audience of King Phillip III of Spain as an account of the abuses that his fellow Andeans had received at the hands of the Spanish.20 While denunciatory of Spanish treatment of the indigenous people, including forced labor, rape, and other atrocities, Guamán Poma dedicates imagery and text in his manuscript to extolling the virtues of the Spanish colonial city. In one image, “La Ciudad de los Reis de Lima” (City of the Kings of Lima), a reference to the capital of the viceroyalty, the author takes pains to exhibit the virtues of the city in visual terms (Figure 2). In this representation of the city, clear delineations of architecture and plaza furnish the frameworks for urban life, as human figures occupy these physical spaces, making them into social ones and thereby upholding urban order through bodily performances. Whether elites or commoners, a nobleman on horseback or a laborer with his cart, the colonial subject would typically have perceived the sobering expectations of plaza space and often complied in some way, unless negotiating those norms more antagonistically in the case of some form of resistance.21 In violent counterpoint, the central plaza also became a space where trials would be held and the penalty for breaking the king’s laws might likewise be enacted, such as the autos de fé (tests of faith), held by the church to prosecute heresy, which sometimes resulted in public tortures and/or executions. This scene by Guamán Poma, which contains an image of a figure swinging from the gallows, does not document the abuses of the Spaniards, but instead boasts with pride the urban order embodied by Lima. The image and its accompanying text demonstrate that its author as a colonial subject of indigenous descent, could criticize the Spanish vice regal system in the Americas and treatment of indigenous Andeans while upholding and even celebrating the order and rule of law to be found in the city. After all, the colonial city provided a place that often served as an exemplar of indigenous rights and privileges.

292   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 2  Guaman Poma de Ayala, “City of the Kings of Lima,” Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, 1613–1615. Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen

In the Caribbean, Spanish dreams of urban order in the age of the Baroque often took the form of fortified, if not walled, cities that guarded Atlantic ports and their vital function within the empire given the imperial support they lent to the Spanish fleets. A 1603 rendering of Havana, a major port that developed in the sixteenth century on the north coast of the island of Cuba, represents the city with streets that lack the Platonic angles of the grid-iron plan.22 This somewhat irregular configuration owed itself to the first wave

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   293 of Spanish colonial urbanism, to the conquistadors’ trial and error approach in the laying out of Caribbean cities, as found on the islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Havana’s main plaza occupies the bottom of this urban view, nearest the harbor. Projected, if not yet completed, fortified walls encompass over half of the city and mostly on its western front facing the land. The existence of walls and forts in Caribbean cities like Havana, Santo Domingo, San Juan, Veracruz, and Cartagena de Indias was largely unknown in most Spanish colonial cities of the mainland. These fortified elements performed defensive functions along coastlines and in vulnerable ports, while also mediating access to the city and ultimately dividing urban districts according to identity criteria, such as class and race.23 The Portuguese colonial settlements in Brazil that arbitrated the flow of trade in agriculture and enslaved Africans between the plantations of the hinterland and the coast, included such cities as Recife (est. 1537), Salvador de Bahia (1549), São Paulo (1554), and Rio de Janeiro (1567). Prior to the nineteenth century, these colonial cities took on a non-gridded configuration, with Salvador de Bahia bearing the closest resemblance to the Portuguese capital of Lisbon and its series of hills with narrow streets in an irregular layout. A gridded plan would not be imposed in Lisbon until the work of prime minister Marquis of Pombal after the 1755 earthquake and the construction of two large terreiros, or squares. Salvador would serve as the Portuguese colonial capital of Brazil from 1549 to 1763, and as with almost all early Portuguese settlements here, it was founded along the coast with a non-gridded configuration of streets and urban areas created at two or more levels. An upper level, at Salvador, functioned administratively with principal churches, government buildings, and palaces partaking of abundant sea breezes. A lower city consisted of tenement buildings, narrower streets, areas servicing commerce and the functions of the port, and the associated laborers. The levels would be joined by ramps at high inclines with public spaces only to be found in various oblong, narrow, and non-geometrical terreiros. From the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil around 1500 to independence in 1822, no set of codes for urbanism would be established, in contrast to the Spanish Laws of the Indies.24 Prior to 1492, it should be noted, the Portuguese opened up the transatlantic African slave trade along the east coast of Africa in the early decades of the fifteenth century, such that coastal settlements facilitating such commerce could have served as precursors to Portuguese port cities in Brazil.

Urban Landscapes, Perception, and Power Colonial architecture and urbanism encompassed a colonial urban landscape, in the more expansive notion of landscape in which cities and their architecture become more than objects and/or containers for urban life. Rather, the colonial landscape was a

294   the oxford handbook of the baroque medium that orchestrated human life and that involved not only the physical components of a locale, such as architecture, but also the human imagination, time, and social spaces.25 In everyday settings, Spanish and Portuguese colonial architecture mediated human passage through the continuum of space, establishing and articulating the perception of power on the ground, including the authority of church and state, the rule of law, and the preeminence of the upper classes. The principle institutions of Ibero-American colonial cities, the church and monarchy, and to a lesser extent, the elite, required architectural representation in urban spaces to actualize authority day-to-day during ordinary moments and upon more structured occasions, such as public ceremonies, weddings, funerals, or rites of investiture. Official and ecclesiastical buildings often occupied key sites within Spanish and Portuguese American cities, particularly such structures as governor’s residences and cabildo (town council) buildings, cathedrals, parish churches, and convents. In the São Francisco Church and Convent of Salvador in the Portuguese colonial city of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, constructed between 1686 and 1737, two towers flank a central façade built and ornamented with stone curves and volutes that rise to a central cross, the whole structure being off center from the quasi-rectangular urban space before it (Figure 3). The two-tower, central façade that echoes the high altarpiece within became a common formula for church fronts throughout the Ibero-American world in its evocation of the modernity of salvation to which colonial powers wanted all subjects to aspire.

Figure 3 Manoel Quaresima, Vicente das Chagas, Jerónimo de Graça and others, São Francisco Church and Convent of Salvador, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, 1686–1737. Photo by Robert English

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   295

Figure 4  Luis de Jesus and others, high altar and vaulting, São Francisco Church, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, 1686–1737. Photo by Jeff Nyveen

Within the church, the providential narrative could reach great heights as it does in São Francisco (Figure 4). The surfaces of vaults, pillars, and walls are covered in paintings with sculpted and gilded woodwork. Gilders lavished a ton of gold leaf on the interior surfaces of a church paid for, in part, by the profits of sugar plantations with their enslaved workforce. The celestial order represented by the painted and sculptural programs within the sanctuary reinforced the unequal social order of mercantile capitalism that drove the colony and orchestrated the labor regime that built the church. Of the metropolitan cathedrals of Spanish America, that of Mexico City, begun in 1573 and completed in 1813, epitomizes a broader effort to constitute grand public spaces with a symbolic representation and phenomenal presence of the church (Figure 5). The cathedral’s two great towers and façade front a massive central vessel built atop former Aztec temples in a gesture of symbolic erasure. Along the east side of the plaza, the vice-regal palace begun before 1562, counterbalanced the cathedral with the highest architectural representation of the Spanish Crown (Figure 6). Its sweeping façade framed the plaza, as the building itself served as a multifaceted stage for the representation of vice-regal power. The building, in fact, continues to serve as the seat of governmental power for the Mexican nation. Its central balcony became a site for the performances of royal magnanimity in the colonial period, such as the occasion after the installation of a new viceroy, when his wife, the vicereine, would toss silver coins to the gathered crowds in the plaza. Inside the vice-regal palace,

296   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 5  Claudio de Arciniega and others, Cathedral, Mexico City, 1573–1817. Photo by David Miller

Figure 6  Claudio de Arciniega and others, Viceregal Palace, today the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City, begun before 1562, enlarged 1563–4, reconstructed after 1692, third floor added in 1926. Photo by Leon Reed

great chambers furnished space for official functions and housed representations that alluded to dynastic succession, such as the Hall of Royal Accord in which portraits of viceroys in sequence generated a sense of the solidity of Spanish rule.26 As the viceregal palace symbolized and facilitated the enactment of the king’s laws, the cathedral

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   297

Figure 7  Vaulting of the Cathedral of Puebla, Mexico, begun 1575 and completed by 1690. Photo by Lesley Wolff

and other ecclesiastical establishments represented the authority of the church in matters of salvation, marriage, baptism, and other social dimensions. At the cathedral of Puebla, the great saucer domes and soaring vaults create an image of the arc of heaven and the promise of salvation for colonial audiences of both European and American origin (Figure 7). In Havana, Cuba, the most important Spanish colonial city in the Caribbean islands for the empire’s mercantile dominance over the Indies, the cathedral church occupies not the main, sixteenth-century plaza of the city, but a separate space that only became a plaza in the eighteenth century (Figure 8). Originally a Jesuit church, begun in 1748 and completed by 1777, the building was converted from a Jesuit church to the Havana cathedral only after that order had been expelled from the Americas by the Bourbon monarchy in 1767. Prior to that time, Havana possessed a main parish church on its Plaza de Armas several blocks away that eventually fell into disrepair and was demolished in the 1770s to make way for a plaza re-design and new government buildings. Intended to evoke the forms of the Jesuits’ mother church in Rome, the Gesù, constructed during the period 1568–1584, the new structure in Havana possessed two towers of unequal size flanking a triangular façade articulated by volutes, spirals, and concave/convex surface effects. The

298   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 8  Pedro de Medina and others. Façade of the Cathedral of Havana, Cuba, 1748–1777. Photo by Paul Niell

Jesuit-cum-cathedral church sat on one of Havana’s five plazas within the walled city, public spaces accumulated from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. On the Plaza of the Cathedral, the church joined elite residences in an area formerly known as la cienaga (the swamp) for its low-lying, marshy consistency. Some of the homeowners added impressive facades with portales (arcades) once the site evolved into a plaza. Across from the cathedral stands the townhome of the prominent Bayona family of Havana (Figure 9). With great wealth from sugar cultivation and even the construction of an eighteenthcentury family-run town at Santa María del Rosario near the sugar fields, the Bayona, as with other elite plantation owners, maintained a stone townhouse for residency and as a form of sociopolitical representation on the city stage. In fact, maintaining a house with an elaborate façade on the central plaza must have been considered one of the highest forms of elite conspicuous consumption in the city. The Bayona house façade that fronts the cathedral plaza consists of a central door surrounded by a curvilinear framework characteristic of Havana and southern Spain. The retention of such elements resulted from various waves of immigration and the constant connection between Havana and Seville because of the fleet system. Regular openings flank the door on each side, including a carriage way to the far left. The principal living floor, what might be considered the second floor in the United States and used in colonial Havana by the family for dwelling,

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   299

Figure 9  Façade of the Casa de Bayona, Havana, Cuba, seventeenth century. Photo by Paul Niell

is punctuated by small balconies, windows with shutters, fanlights, and pediments that boasted of the wealth and ostentation of the owners. As the Crown and church required their architectural representatives of power and presence in the principal city, the elite employed their townhomes as physical reminders of their social prominence and as set pieces in the performance of those elevated social identities in daily life, at weddings, funerals, and during festivals. Throughout the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, elite townhouses operated actively pieced together the aristocratic social reality that we associate with the IberoAmerican colonies through various means, including the use of exquisite materials. The eighteenth-century Casa de los Azulejos (House of Tiles) in Mexico City displays a stunning surface of talavera tiles from the city of Puebla along with ornamental stonework adorning windows, doors, floor divisions, and cornices (Figure 10). Elite families could join forces in sculpting the urban topography and marking the sides of entire streets and plazas with a sense of stateliness and aristocratic presence, such as that seen along the western boundary of Havana’s Plaza Nueva (now Vieja), the second oldest plaza in the city (Figure 11). A line of five elite townhomes bound this side of the plaza and provide shade under a continuous portal, or arcaded loggia, that connects the buildings in a manner not unlike

300   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 10  Detail of the Casa de los Azulejos, “House of Tiles,” Mexico City, Mexico, begun 1793. Photo by Lesley Wolff

the arcades that surround the Place des Vosges in Paris. The Plaza Nueva served as a public market for centuries, thereby evoking through these forms an important ­mandate of the Laws of the Indies: Around the plaza as well as along the four principal streets which begin there, there shall be portals, for these are of considerable convenience to the merchants who generally gather there; the eight streets running from the plaza at the four corners shall open on the plaza without encountering these porticoes, which shall be kept back in order that there may be sidewalks even with the streets and plaza.27

The Plaza Nueva exhibits not only this regulatory pattern, but also the 2:3 (width:length) ratio dictated by the laws. In Portuguese America, an empire that lacked such codes for urban planning in the early modern period, we nevertheless see a similar pattern of townhouses defining urban spaces in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, only with a row of such houses with contiguous walls that taper down the descending street (Figure 12). Such urban collections of private residences reinforced the presence of homeowners for spectators on the streets and metonymically, elite power in urban politics, serving as architectural indices of family wealth, titles, distinguished reputation, participation in city councils, and genealogies free of racial impurities.

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   301

Figure 11  View of the Plaza Vieja (formerly Nueva), Havana, Cuba. Photo by Paul Niell

Figure 12  View of the Street of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Photo by Thomas Delsol

302   the oxford handbook of the baroque These architectural representations of church, state, and elite served myriad types of functions to maintain colonial ideology in perceptual spaces, often through calculated material choices. In the city of Panamá, which marked and facilitated a key passage of mineral wealth from the west coast of South America through the Panamanian isthmus, to the port of Havana and then to Spain, the city’s cathedral exhibits the typical two-tower, Baroque configuration.28 In addition, one finds mother-of-pearl embedded into plaster covering the uppermost portions of the towers that glistens in the tropical sun. Even prior to silver and gold, the extraction of pearl, which was exported back to Europe, became an important colonial industry that forced indigenous laborers and then enslaved Africans into dangerous pearl diving in the Caribbean and Pacific.29 The towers, therefore, served as a reminder of the city’s wealth, which was tied to one of its key industries, as it simultaneously connoted the sanctity of commerce and God’s protection over the economic vitality of the city. Baroque architecture could, therefore, operate at multiple symbolic levels to construct and maintain colonial ideologies as tied to place and commercial identity.

Cultural Convergence and the Colonial Scene The reality of dramatic cultural collision marks the history of certain forms of IberoAmerican architecture and urbanism. Architectural surfaces, structural techniques, materials, spaces, and styles exhibit a convergence of cultures, frequently that detected between European and Amerindian forms, across the hemisphere. These patterns of cultural mixing have been dealt with in various ways by scholars. One of the salient debates has been that of hybridity, a concept applied in cultural studies to examine the condition by which two or more cultures combine to produce a hybrid product. In art and architectural history, scholars have traditionally looked only for a visual affirmation of such hybrid forms, that is, what can be viewed on the surface of things. However, art historians Dana Leibsohn and Carolyn Dean draw attention to a range of important caveats in the use of hybridity in the interpretation of visual culture.30 For the purposes of this essay, we can say that a reality of cross-cultural architectural and urban production existed throughout the Ibero-American worlds, and the following case studies call attention to various aspects of this phenomenon. Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s treatment of the “Andean Hybrid Baroque” focuses, among other things, on the textile patterns of stone churches in the viceroyalty of Peru.31 In this use of the term hybridity, the author means to denote such motifs as the relatively flat relief carving on the surface of various colonial churches in the Andes that generally take a square form. At the late seventeenth-century church of Santiago (La Compañía) in Arequipa, Peru, built in 1698, the façade consists of a central door flanked on each side by two sets of double columns, a motif continued on the second level surrounding the window that lights the choir loft (Figure 13).

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   303

Figure 13  Façade of the church of Santiago (La Compañía), Arequipa, Peru, 1698. Photo by Judith Epstein

The projecting and receding forms written across the surface, particularly the middle entablature, contrast with the relative flatness of relief-sculpted panels that dominate the façade and become a linear counterpoint to smooth upper portions of each column. Bailey has called these “textile patterns” in the flat style of their stone carving, a comparable patterning inscribed in the Inca textile garment known as the uncu.32 Similar surface treatments can be found surrounding doors elsewhere in the complex, on piers, and in the spandrels of arcades in the larger interior courtyard. While European priests surely directed the church’s design, Andean laborers must have carried out the sculpture of this façade, incorporating motifs that might have communicated various Christian and/or imperial messages (such as the Habsburg eagle) but that also partake of something of an Andean abstraction that survived the conquest albeit in a reconfigured state. Such a phenomenon is known across the Spanish American world, particularly in ­mission settings, in which the religious orders of Franciscans, Augustinians, and Dominicans co-opted local labor and allowed indigenous people to inflect aspects of their pre-Conquest symbolic systems into artistic programs. In this way, the missionaries hoped to facilitate conversion through the slippages and conflations generated between European and Amerindian semantics. These forms of architectural sculpture at Arequipa are thus physical documents of a process of representational reordering on the colonial scene and in association with the Baroque world.

304   the oxford handbook of the baroque In what is now the US state of New Mexico, once the northern reaches of the viceroyalty of New Spain, a comparable yet disparate material process to that in Arequipa produced the Franciscan mission church of San Esteban Rey, built between 1629 and 1644 to serve conversion efforts at the indigenous Ácoma Pueblo (likely founded in the eleventh century).33 The church incorporates the common Baroque formula of two towers flanking a central façade with door and choir window, yet the absence of surface decoration in this case is striking. Rather, we see an overlay of adobe plaster with courses of stone masonry showing through in the upper portions of the towers. Constructed with the same technology used to make the terraced houses of the Pueblo people at Ácoma and other sites, the process that accounts for this church reveals the Spanish friars co-opting indigenous labor, materials, and techniques to make a building intended to deliver religious modernity and lead the indigenous people out of heresy and toward salvation. As the production of the work served to make Christianity locally legible and relevant, blending it in with the human-made landscape of that area, it also drew indigenous technologies into the production of a European religious space. Christianity, as practiced, did not ultimately take root at Ácoma. The church is no longer in use today, left only as a reminder of the Pueblo’s complex history. However, like so many other Christian structures in New Mexico, San Esteban stands as evidence of an aggressive ­re-ordering of space enacted by the seventeenth-century Spanish on indigenous people in the early modern age of the Baroque, when efforts to introduce new ideas, forms, and knowledges accompanied the process of colonization. Hundreds of miles south of Ácoma, down the camino real (royal road) to Mexico City, the political and cultural heart of the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain, the architect Francisco Guerrero y Torres designed El Pocito (The Chapel of the Well), 1777–1791, for the site over the sacred spring on the Tepeyac hill where the Indian Juan Diego allegedly encountered the Virgin of Guadalupe (Figure 14). The oval plan of the building reveals the Baroque preference for oblong shapes, known in the work of the Roman architecture of Francesco Borromini, while other design features and the surface treatment incorporate materials and design motifs closely tied to Mexico. The late Mexican art historian, Juana Gutiérrez-Haces, attributes the chapel’s accumulation of forms associated with over two and a half centuries of Novohispanic art  history at that moment as belonging to the encyclopedic tendencies of the late eighteenth century.34 With the escalation of the so-called Bourbon Reforms in the American colonies during this period, Spanish Enlightenment thought was increasingly brought to bear on myriad dimensions of social life, with an increased emphasis on ­record keeping, classification of social types, and regulatory policies. In Spain, the Royal Academy of History promoted the production of revised histories of the New World incorporating archival documents, while history painting became the paradigm of the Royal Academies of Fine Arts, such as that of San Fernando in Madrid.35 This reordering of historical time inflected art and visual culture in the Americas through the vehicle of the Royal Academy of San Carlos, which opened in Mexico City in 1783. While Gutiérrez-Haces invokes the impact of the Spanish Enlightenment on Novohispanic art production by this claim and hence the re-imposition of imperial power, we can also regard the tendency to order the time and place of historic events and

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   305

Figure 14  Francisco Guerrero y Torres, El Pocito (The Chapel of the Well), 1777–1791, Mexico City. Photo by Ken McCown

the gathering of things local in the visual arts as attributable to the rise of a local or Creole consciousness that took expressive form in this highly important chapel for Mexico City. Star motifs from the sixteenth century co-exist with talavera tile ornamentation, Baroque finials, and a combination of dark red volcanic tezontle (a stone used by the Aztec) and white chiluca limestone around the entries to create contrast and accentuate the concave/convex qualities of the structure’s surface. El Pocito in Mexico City commemorates, glorifies, and thereby enshrines a site of miraculous occurrences, bringing the miracle up to date, while simultaneously alluding to its local antiquity. Such an appropriation of things Novohispanic gave the work a local significance tied to a sacred history with familiar forms and materials in Mexico City.

Performance and Spectacle Literary scholar Stephanie Merrim has argued that the Baroque city in the Spanish world possessed a “spectacular” quality, emphasizing the use of Novohispanic literary culture to address the Baroque city and its festival life. Merrim employs a range of

306   the oxford handbook of the baroque t­extual forms, including poetry and historiography, in such a way that contributes to our knowledge of the performative history and material culture of the Spanish American city from a literary perspective.36 As with its Portuguese counterpart in Brazil, the city in the Spanish Americas hosted celebrations, such as rites of investiture, theatrical events, and religious processions set against sometimes grand and flamboyant architecture that generated a panoply of sensory experiences in actual spaces which surely complemented more imagined spaces in the minds of elite readers. Urban spaces became theaters of consumption, in particular those of major colonial capitals such as Mexico City and Lima, in which social orders and the efficiency of the market went on view. The sheer sensory richness of the city, its Baroque piety, political and social performances, and theatricality glossed and even naturalized the rigidity of the underlying hierarchy of church, monarchy, and elite. In a painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando, New Spain’s most celebrated Baroque ­master of the late seventeenth century, the artist depicts the central plaza of Mexico City, also known as the zócalo with its rectangular configuration framed by the partially ­damaged vice-regal palace at the far end and the towering masses of the cathedral to the viewer’s left (Figure 15). Completed in 1691, the painting represents the rich, complex, and vibrant marketplace of Mexico City with an image of the red-tile-roofed wooden structure known as the parían in the foreground. Villalpando portrays an orderly city, communicating a pride of place comparable to that conveyed by Guamán Poma de Ayala’s image of the plaza of Lima. Market activities proceed in an orderly fashion, amidst the mingling of social classes, as the elite process across the picture plane closest to the viewer in front of the parían, distinguished by the refinement of their clothing and gestures. The artist represents an acequia or canal/aqueduct on the viewer’s right with spectators on its various bridges, that same urban element evocative of the functional city portrayed in the 1596 image for this plaza. The artist’s painting visualizes the performative city of spectacle and thereby demonstrates Baroque principles of visibility, including the creation of a discernable hierarchy through clear markers of religious, monarchical, and social power as represented through the urban grandeur of architecture. The painting, furthermore, exhibits a panoptic effort in its establishment of an expansive space that renders human subjects highly visible, and as such, displays pictorially a spatiality also found in recording keeping, gridded urban layouts, and other forms of surveillance. While the era of the Enlightenment in Spain and the Americas would introduce new and intensified methods of social monitoring, the quantitative measures taken in the guilds, town halls, and church books of marriage and baptism had already begun in the age of the Baroque, if not beforehand, and operated to fix the identities of colonial subjects. In the South American viceroyalty of Peru, a similar type of scene as that composed by Villalpando exists in an urban view of the vice-regal capital of Lima, a painting of 1680.37 The central plaza of Lima, as with Mexico City, embodied the political center of the viceroyalty and the site where performances of church and monarchy actualized those institutions before colonial subjects and thereby made and remade colonial subjectivity. As with the Villalpando image, the anonymous author of the scene of the plaza

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   307

Figure 15  Cristobal de Villalpando, “The Plaza Mayor of Mexico City,” 1691, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Bridgeman Images

in Lima depicts the cathedral and vice-regal palace framing a space alive with social activity and commerce. Detailed renderings of social types dominate the scene and reveal a tendency within colonial visual culture to depict colonial subjects standing in  front of the architectural representatives of the dual arms of Spanish power in the Americas. The impulse to visualize cities, towns, architecture, and their interconnected relationship to social actors can be seen in a lucid image from New Spain, a biombo (or colonial folding screen informed by the Japanese byobu but considered a product of the Americas) from c. 1680 and painted with a continuous scene representing an Indian wedding.38 Differentiation by social types comes in the appearance of a man of perhaps Spanish descent at the far left of the composition who, by his outfit, would seem to be a member of the elite. Across the picture plane, one finds a range of people with disparate skin tone, physiognomy, and dress that articulate indigenousness, becoming more Indian at center and right with the flying pole and elliptical dance before the appearance of the bride and groom emerging from the church at right. The architectural appearance of the church conveys meaning and authorizes the scene as firmly situated within colonial norms.

308   the oxford handbook of the baroque Architecture and urbanism in the Spanish Americas supplied for vital performances for the Spanish Crown in the colonies before a vast majority of subjects, most of whom had never seen their monarch. The investiture of an incoming European viceroy served as one such occasion. Almost all viceroys in Novohispanic history were European born, and their arrival in New Spain at Veracruz inaugurated a journey by land to the capital at Mexico City during which the viceroy, the vicereine, and members of the vice-regal court performed their sovereignty through the ritual known as the entrada (entrance). In one Novohispanic painting, the entrada is rendered as a grand procession with its multiple participants embodying something of the hierarchy of the vice-regal court, church officials, and civic elites, ushering in the new viceroy in and perhaps seeking to curry favor.39 The Novohispanic intellectuals, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (b. 1645– d. 1700) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (b. 1648–d. 1695), produced celebratory and historicized treatises to extoll the virtues of the incoming viceroy. Each of these intellectuals were invited to contribute a design for a triumphal arch to welcome the viceroy in 1680 as well as textual descriptions of the works.40 A series of painted panels of the Corpus Christi celebrations of Cuzco, the former political capital and most sacred city of the Inka empire prior to the Spanish arrival, renders a procession for the religious holiday in various sequences.41 Through a format that includes direct participants in the festival moving across the center of the picture plane, the scene also incorporates spectators in the foreground and background situated on balconies draped in tapestries for the occasion. These paintings bear witness to the importance of spectacle and performance to the Baroque city in Spanish America, with an understudied equivalent in Portuguese America as well. The works themselves entered into the production of the performative city in their existence as a form of visual discursive production that would have fostered verbal conversations. Such discourses co-constituted the order of the city in tandem with its architecture and urbanism, while obscuring the city’s inequalities and the inequities of the colonial system that produced the Baroque in the Americas.42

Notes 1. See Walter  D.  Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 2. Here, we refer to the emergent nations of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) in the late fifteenth century and ultimately the colonial settings and cultures that they ­generated abroad in what would come to be known as the American Hemisphere as “Ibero-American.” 3. Manuel Toussaint’s Arte colonial en México (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1948) received an English translation by Elizabeth Wilder Weisman and was republished as Colonial Art in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967). 4. For these modernist transformations in architecture, see Kathryn O’Rourke, Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital (2017). 5. See Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   309 6. For George Kubler’s work on the topic, see his co-authored volume (with Martin Soria), Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American Dominions, 1500–1800 (London: Penguin Books, 1959). 7. Harbison, Reflections on Baroque, 167. 8. Ibid., 172. 9. Jesús Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 10. Michael Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). 11. Christopher Columbus and Cecil Jane, trans. The Journal of Christopher Columbus (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960), 24. 12. Recopilacion de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, mandadas imprimir y publicar por la Magestad católica del rey don Carlos II. nuestro señor….4 impression. Hecha de órden del Real y supremo consejo de las Indias. Madrid, La viuda de d. J. Ibarra, impresora, 1791 (Madrid: Gráficas Ultra, 1943). For an English translation of the particular portion of the laws pertaining to town planning and from the sixteenth century, see “Transcription of the Ordinances for the Discovery, the Population, and the Pacification of the Indies, enacted by King Phillip II, the 13th of July 1573, in the forest of Segovia, according to the original manuscript conserved in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville,” in Cruelty & Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), 18–23. 13. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Morris Hickey Morgan (New York: Dover, 1960). 14. “Transcription of the Ordinances,” in Cruelty and Utopia, 21. 15. For a discussion of the contrasts between Spanish and Portuguese colonial urban p ­ lanning in the Americas, see Robert  C.  Smith, “Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 14, no. 4, Town Planning Issue (December 1955): 3–12. 16. Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 17. Valerie Fraser has emphasized the ideological role played by architecture in the conquest and early colonization of the Americas. See The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1535–1635 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 18. Thomas  B.  F.  Cummins and Joanne Rappaport, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 19. In Pierre Bourdieu’s dialectical notion of habitus (i.e., the interiorization of structures that structure an individual’s worldview and cause them to then exteriorize that structure through habits and actions according to social class), Bourdieu does not assume human subjects to be blind and uncritical replicators of authorized structure. Rather, he sees habitus as encompassing a broad range of likely adherence to dominant ideologies that can likewise be negotiated by all and even resisted by some. See Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 20. Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (Guadalajara, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2006). 21. For a more contemporary study of how the plaza elicits civic behavior, see the work of anthropologist Setha Lowe, particularly her book On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).

310   the oxford handbook of the baroque 22. For an image of this plan, see the website, Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520–1820. https://vistas.ace.fordham.edu. 23. See Guadalupe García, Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 24. See Smith, “Colonial Towns.” 25. For landscapes studies, see Barbara Bender, Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993); Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1997); and J.  B.  Jackson, Landscapes: Selected Writings of J.B. Jackson (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970). 26. See Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance. 27. “Transcription of the Ordinances,” Cruelty & Utopia, 21. 28. For an image of the metropolitan cathedral of Panama City Panamá, see: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Basilica_of_St._Mary_(Panama_City). 29. For the importance of pearl in early Atlantic world trade, see Mónica Domínguez Torres, “Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean: Early Images of Slavery and Forced Migration in the Americas,” in African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States, ed. by Persephone Braham, 73–82 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015). 30. Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5–35. 31. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). 32. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America (New York: Phaidon Press, 2005), 80. 33. For an image of San Esteban Rey at Ácoma Pueblo in today’s US state of New Mexico, see the website Vistas, https://vistas.ace.fordham.edu. 34. See Juan Gutiérrez-Haces, “The Eighteenth Century: A Changing Kingdom and Artistic Style,” in The Grandeur of Viceregal Mexico: Treasures from the Museo Franz Mayer, ed. Héctor Rivero Borrell Miranda (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 45–66. 35. Historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has emphasized that while Spanish historians re-wrote histories of the New World from the authorized locus of the European metropolis, Creole intellectuals in such urban centers as Mexico City and Lima responded with their own histories of the region. See How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 36. See Stephanie Merrim, The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 37. For an image of this painting, see https://www.biodiversidadvirtual.org/etno/PlazaMayor-de-Lima-(1680)-img52615.html. 38. For a photograph of this biombo, see the online collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, https://collections.lacma.org/node/209529. 39. For an example of such a painting, see the “Entry of the Viceroy Archbishop Morcilo into Potosí,” by the artist Melchor Pérez Holguín, an oil on canvas from 1718 and in the collection of the Museo de América in Madrid, Spain. The work can be viewed on Google Arts and Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/entry-of-viceroy-archbishop-morcillointo-potosi/6AHbZS-Q0K-Ygg.

ibero-american architecture and urbanism   311 40. For these descriptions, see Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Neptuno alegórico, océano de c­ olores, simulacro político, que erigió la muy esclarecida, sacra y augusta Iglesia Metropolitana . . . (México, 1680) and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Teatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen a un príncipe: Advertidas en los monarcas antiguos del Mexicano Imperio, con cuyas efigias se hermoseó el Arco triunfal que la . . . Ciudad de México erigió para . . . recibimiento del . . . Virrey Conde de Paredes, Marqués de La Laguna . . . . ideolo entonces y ahora lo describe D.  Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (Mexico City: Por la Viuda de Bernardo Calderón, 1680). 41. For an image of this painting, “Corpus Christi Procession, Parish of San Cristobál,” oil on canvas, 1680, today in the Museo de Arte Religioso in Cuzco, Peru, see Vistas, https:// vistas.ace.fordham.edu. 42. The author wishes to thank Lesley Wolff for offering a critical reading of a draft of this chapter.

Further Reading Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Cummins, Thomas B. F. and Joanne Rappaport. Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Dean, Carolyn, and Dana Leibsohn. “Hybridity and its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America.” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1, 2003, 5–35. Escobar, Jesús. The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Fraser, Valerie. The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1535–1635. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. García, Guadalupe. Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno. Guadalajara, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2006. Gutiérrez-Haces, Juana. “The Eighteenth Century: A Changing Kingdom and Artistic Style.” In The Grandeur of Viceregal Mexico: Treasures from the Museo Franz Mayer. Edited by Héctor Rivero Borrell Miranda, 45–66. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Harbison, Robert. Reflections on Baroque. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Kagan, Richard  L. Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Lejeune, Jean-Francois, ed. Cruelty & Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003. Lowe, Setha. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Merrim, Stephanie. The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Schreffler, Michael. The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Smith, Robert C. “Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 14, no. 4, Town Planning Issue (December 1955), 3–12. Toussaint, Manuel. Arte colonial en México. México: Imprenta Universitaria, 1948.

chapter 13

Ba roqu e Orga n M usic David Ponsford

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it was impossible not to believe in God. Moreover, the Divine Right of Kings ensured that both the king and his subjects had absolute belief that Louis XIV was God’s representative on earth, and for the ordinary worshipper in a world with no recordings or broadcasts, the experience of walking into, say, Chartres Cathedral, slowly becoming aware of the rich colors of the stained glass with organ music coming from high up in the nave, made magical by the enormous resonance of the building, incense, and candlelight, must have been an overwhelming aesthetic and spiritual experience—the nearest thing to heaven itself. The European organ played a crucial role in both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the visually-stunning organs in the reformed Netherlandish churches (such as that in St Bavo, Haarlem) often occupied the east wall of the building, replacing what would have been, in Roman Catholic churches, an elaborate altarpiece. In the Catholic Church in France, the traditional siting of the organ on a gallery at the west end (and sometimes in the transept in large cathedrals) gave the instrument an unparalleled speaking quality throughout the entire building. The period in France between 1660 and 1740, coinciding with and extending beyond the reign of Louis XIV, witnessed an extraordinary flowering of organ compositions, all of which were intimately associated with liturgical practices in cathedrals, parish churches, religious communities, and royal chapels within the Roman Catholic Church. In relation to organ music, authors have traditionally termed this period as “Classical,” but in music, the word is so easily confused with the immediately succeeding period of Haydn and Mozart that the word “Baroque” better describes the period. The year 1660 was an opportune time to reestablish nationalist pride in French Baroque music. The wave of enthusiasm in the first half of the seventeenth century for Italian music, musicians, and artists had been continued by Cardinal Mazarin, but his death in 1661 marked an uprising of anti-Italian sentiments, partly as a result of Mazarin’s political policies. 1661 also marked the beginning of Louis XIV’s personal reign, and French music and art was positively encouraged by the monarch with the support of a burgeoning economy.

baroque organ music   313 Cathedrals and churches were able to afford magnificent new instruments, often with four keyboards and pedals, and organists were financially well rewarded. The most ­talented organist-composers occupied notable positions in cathedrals, fashionable ­parish churches, religious communities, and at the royal court, sometimes in plurality. The posts of organiste du roi were held in rotation by four organists (each for a period of three months) with responsibilities at the royal chapel. These included GuillaumeGabriel Nivers (1632–1714), Nicolas Lebègue (1631–1702), François Couperin (1668–1733), and Louis Marchand (1669–1732). In the Parisian parish churches, Nivers was also organist at St Sulpice, Couperin at St Gervais, and Lebègue at St Merry (St Médéric). André Raison (d.1719) was organist at the community of Ste Geneviève, and Marchand for the Cordeliers. In the cathedrals and abbeys, Nicolas de Grigny (1672–1703) was at first organist at St Denis (the traditional burial place of French kings), followed by Reims Cathedral (where coronations traditionally took place). Gilles Jullien (1653–1703) was organist at Chartres, and Jacques Boyvin (1653–1706) was organist at Rouen. All these composers contributed to the plethora of valuable organ publications printed between 1665 and 1740, each book consisting either of sets of versets united by ton de l’église (the system of church modes that predated the major/minor key system) or by collections of pieces appropriate for Masses, Magnificats, Te Deums, and hymns. Some idea of the practical demands made of organists during this period can be gleaned from contracts relating to Louis Couperin at St Gervais, Paris, in 1653, and to Lebègue at St Merry in 1676. Both were responsible for about four hundred services per year, with some feast days (such as Easter Day) requiring the organ at five or even six services. On such days, it has been calculated that organists would be required to play up to one hundred versets during the services of Mass and Vespers. Therefore, improvisation (or instant composition) must have been the norm, and the extant publications and manuscript collections must only represent a tiny fraction of all the organ music played. It is important to realize that churches functioned in a way similar to medium-sized business organizations today. An inventory of 1695 from St Gervais details no fewer than fifty-one priests with an additional forty-seven clerics, and another forty-three priests living on parish property. Organists’ appointments to churches were sometimes made on a hereditary basis. François Couperin inherited the post at St Gervais on the death of his father in 1679 (when François was 10 years old), although the appointment was only confirmed on his 18th birthday in 1686. During the interim, the services of MichelRichard de Lalande, who already held two other church appointments and in 1683 was appointed as sous-maître of the royal chapel, were secured.

Organ During the Baroque period, each country united by similar languages had their own national styles of organ building, so a history of the Baroque organ and its music in Europe is too vast a subject for the confines of one chapter, but an account of the organ,

314   the oxford handbook of the baroque its liturgical function, and the music written for it in one country—France—presents a powerful example of how liturgical parameters and a consistent tradition of organ building resulted in such a valuable corpus of music both in quantity and quality. Today, after a history of vicissitudes of organ rebuilding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historic organs from the Baroque period have been sympathetically restored and many are now in good working order, enabling us to hear the very sounds that would have been heard in the period. What is remarkable is that, from about 1670 to over a ­century later, the design of the French organ achieved a large degree of consistency, unmatched in other countries. No words can adequately describe the character, color, and sound of these organs, with their low pitch and historical tuning systems. They need to be experienced live to appreciate fully their impact within these buildings. One fine example is the organ built in 1752 by Jean-Francois Lépine in Saint-Sarcedos Cathedral, Sarlat-la-Canéda, shown in Figures 1 and 2, which was restored to its original state in 2005, by Bertrand Cattiaux. Originally hand-blown by a set of bellows, it is situated high up on the west wall of the Cathedral, which has no less than eight seconds of acoustic reverberation.1 The organ has five departments: four keyboards arranged from bottom to top named Positif (in a small case, nearest the congregation), Grand Orgue (in the larger main case), the Récit (literally the “Solo”), and the Echo (both housed within the main case, not visible from outside). The fifth division is the Pédale organ, playable by the organist’s feet operating small keys underneath the keyboards. The Pédale had two functions: first to play the bass part in a harmonic or contrapuntal piece, and secondly to act as a solo keyboard for its powerful Trompette and Clairon reed pipes.

Figure 1  General view, organ of Saint-Sacerdos Cathedral, Sarlat-la-Canéda. Photo by Pierre Dubois

baroque organ music   315

Figure 2  Keyboard, organ of Saint-Sacerdos Cathedral, Sarlat-la-Canéda. Photo by Pierre Dubois

There were broadly three kinds of pipes that were arranged in ranks from the lowest to the highest pitches: 1) Principals, called Montres (the pipes “on show” in the case), Prestants, Doublettes, and the mixtures composed of several ranks of the highest-sounding pipes called Fourniture and Cymballe. 2) Square wooden Flutes, named Bourdons or Flûtes at various pitches. 3) Reeds, consisting of Trompettes, Clairons, Cromorne, Voix Humaine, that is, imitations of orchestral instruments and the human voice.

All of these ranks of pipes could be used either on their own, or in combination in the manner prescribed in the prefaces to published organ books. The appellation 16’, 8’, 4’, and so on refers to the fundamental pitch of the pipe. An eight-foot long (8’) open Montre sounds bottom C on the lowest note of the keyboard (therefore defining the fundamental pitch of the organ), a four-foot long pipe (4’) playing the same note will sound an octave higher, and a sixteen-foot long pipe (16’) will sound an octave lower than the 8’. One of the most characteristic sounds was that of the “Cornet,” which consists of five separate ranks “voiced” to sound as one focused tone, consisting of ranks of 8’, 4’, 2 2/3’ (an octave and a fifth above the fundamental), 2’, and 1 3/5’ (two octaves and a third above the fundamental). Therefore, each note of the Cornet, heard as a single sound with a remarkably rich tone color, is actually five different ranks of five different pitches sounding together. It was mounted in the center of the main case and was designed to

316   the oxford handbook of the baroque reinforce the first five harmonics of the natural harmonic series (simple multiples of the fundamental frequency). The organ, therefore, was an instrument capable of imitating orchestral instruments and human voices, as well as having a vast array of different sounds achieved through utilizing different combinations of pipe-ranks. The complete specification follows:

Saint-Sacerdos Cathedral, Sarlat-la-Canéda Organ by Jean-François Lépine (1752) restored by Bertrand Cattiaux (2005)

I. Positif 1. Montre 8 2. Bourdon 8 3. Prestant 4 4. Nazard 2 2/3 5. Doublette 2 6. Tierce 1 3/5 7. Larigot 1 1/3 8. Plein jeu VI ranks 9. Trompette 8 10. Cromorne 8

Coupler: Pos/GO II. Grand Orgue 1. Bourdon 16 2. Bourdon 8 3. Montre 8 4. Grand Nazard 5 1/3 5. Prestant 4 6. Grosse tierce 3 1/5 7. Nazard 2 2/3 8. Doublette 2 9. Quarte 2 10. Tierce 1 3/5 11. Fourniture V ranks 12. Cymbale IV ranks 13. Grand Cornet V ranks 14. Trompette 8 15. Clairon 4 16. Voix humaine 8 III Récit 1. Cornet V ranks 2. Trompette 8

baroque organ music   317 IV. Echo 1. Cornet V ranks Pédale 1. Bourdon 16 (from GO) 2. Flûte 8 3. Flûte 4 4. Nazard 2 2/3 5. Quarte 2 6. Tierce 1 3/5 7. Trompette 8 8. Clairon 4 Accessories Tremblant doux Tremblant fort Each rank of pipes is controlled by a wooden drawstop (abbreviated to “stop”) which is pulled out to activate the whole rank, and pushed in when not needed. Instructions for combining “stops” (called “registration”) developed from the inherent design of the organ. Such was the consistency of both the organs and the manner of registering them, that, throughout the period, pieces were titled by the registrations themselves, such as “Plein jeu” and “Grand jeu.” Registration could also be defined in titles such as Récit de cromorne and Duo sur les tierces. Other titles, such as Fugue, Duo, Récit, and Dialogue, referred to compositional procedures, but registration instructions for these were prescribed (with options) in the prefaces, so organ registration and musical genre in France during this period were inseparable.2 Nevertheless, within these ordered parameters, composers did develop the genres in a variety of creative ways. Analysis of the repertoire during the period reveals the successive influences of French and Italian dance styles in organ music, as well as opera, revealing a high level of creative composition based on the established genres, which will be discussed below.

Repertoire During the second half of the seventeenth century, when both German and English publications were relatively scarce, French livres d’orgue were published to a standard hardly approached elsewhere, often complete with extensive prefaces on performance practice and registration. Such publications had various objectives: as pedagogic models for improvisation and composition, to increase the personal stature of the organistcomposer, and to add another element in the aim of Louis XIV to establish hegemony (in this case, cultural) in Europe. From a total of 30 publications from 1660 to 1740, we may cite the publications of music by six composers who had the most influence and which have, arguably, the greatest aesthetic value:

318   the oxford handbook of the baroque

G.-G. Nivers

Livre d’orgue contenant cent pieces de tous les tons (1665); 2. Livre d’orgue contenant la messe et les hymnes (1667); 3. livre d’orgue des huits tons de l’eglise (1675).

N. Lebègue

Les pièces d’orgue (1676); Second livre d’orgue (c.1678); Troisieme livre d’orgue (1685).

A. Raison

Livre d’orgue contenant cinq messes (1688).

F. Couperin

Pièces d’orgue consistantes en deux messes (1690).

N. de Grigny

Premier livre d’orgue contenant une messe et les Hymnes (1699).

L.-N. Clérambault Premier livre d’orgue contenant deux suites (c.1710).

Before Nivers’s 1665 livre, there was a relative dearth of extant organ music. Jehan Titelouze’s Hymnes de l’église pour toucher l’orgue (1623) and Magnificat, ou cantique de la vierge (1626), although falling within the conventional time span of the Baroque, can be regarded as fine examples of late Renaissance counterpoint, but should not be regarded as part of the Baroque tradition. In addition to the music, registration instructions and advice on performance practice topics such as ornamentation, fingering, and rhythmic inequality (notes inégales) were published in the prefaces. In Nivers’s first livre d’orgue, the array of genres was established that became standard for the next century. His first book contained one hundred pieces arranged in “suites” in all the eight church modes. His 1667 book contained an organ mass plus hymn-suites appropriate to the seasons of the church year. Thus, in two books, he established the format of organ composition for the next century. Lebègue’s three books extended the scope of genres, incorporating symphonies, offertoires, and noels. Raison’s 1688 book contained five masses, each mass containing twenty-one organ pieces. These pieces could (he stated) also be used for fifteen Magnificats, which consisted of seven organ solos each. Raison’s range of musical styles was consciously encyclopedic, even to the extent of incorporating French dance styles into liturgical organ music. François Couperin was only aged 21 when his two organ masses were “published,” accompanied by a certificate vouching for their beauty and competence signed by Lalande. Only the title page was engraved; the music was copied by hand, and so circulation was probably small compared with fully published organ books. These are remarkable pieces though, in which a young composer’s musical ideas and his mission to reconcile Italian and French music styles is evident. De Grigny’s 1699 “Premier livre d’orgue” (although there never was a second book) is the finest book from the period, incorporating the latest instrumental and vocal styles within the established seventeenthcentury genres, combining expressive detail with a command of long-range structure. Although shorter in scope, Clérambault’s two suites are perhaps the most immediately attractive for their broad phrase structure and schemes of key modulation, signifying a change to a more eighteenth-century musical style. As a supplement to these publications, important manuscript collections need to be noted, of which the most important are the seventy organ pieces by Louis Couperin

baroque organ music   319 (1626–1661) and the Louis Marchand manuscripts. The largest manuscript collection, the Livre d’orgue de Montréal, was taken to New France (Canada) in 1724 and rediscovered in Montreal in 1979.3 The 398 pieces therein reveal the influence of Lebègue, and may well contain hitherto unknown works by him.

Liturgy Each individual piece in this large musical repertoire was designed to be played in alternation with sung voices, a practice known as “alternatim,” which was in operation by the fourteenth century and lasted until the early twentieth century. The practice was another aspect of the embellishment of the liturgy, and may have developed from the ancient practice of singing psalms antiphonally. In the seventeenth century, every liturgical item, including the Mass, Magnificat, Te Deum, and hymns, were performed in this manner. The detailed divisions of liturgical items between organ and choir varied according to century and to region, but during the period in question in France, a ­standard format was in operation. In the Mass, organ music was used for all sections of the Ordinary with the exception of the Credo, which was sung throughout. Organ masses might be based entirely on plainchant, the Missa Cunctipotens genitor Deus in particular (Nivers, Lebègue, Gigault, F. Couperin’s Messe pour les paroisses, de Grigny), or composed more freely for religious houses with more local liturgical customs, being less bound by ecclesiastical prescription (Raison, F. Couperin’s Messe pour les couvents, G. Corrette). As an example, the nine phrases of the Kyrie would be divided between five organ solos (the organ beginning and ending the Kyrie) and four sung plainchant verses. The entire text of the Mass was then divided up between organ and choir according to the following pattern (the organ versets being underlined): Kyrie - Kyrie - Kyrie - Christe - Christe - Christe - Kyrie - Kyrie - Kyrie. Gloria - et in terra pax - laudamus te - benedicimus te - adoramus te - glorificamus te - gratias agimus - Dominus Deus, rex coelestis - Domine fili - Domine Deus, Agnus Dei - qui tollis . . . miserere nobis - qui tollis . . . suscipe deprecationem nostram - qui sedes Quoniam - tu solus Dominus - tu solus altissimus - cum Sancto Spiritu - Amen. [or: in gloria Dei patris. Amen.] Sanctus - sanctus - sanctus, Dominus Deus sabaoth - Pleni sunt coeli. Benedictus. Agnus Dei - Agnus Dei - Agnus Dei.

This made a total of nineteen organ versets, five for the Kyrie, nine for the Gloria, two for the Sanctus, one for the Benedictus, and two for the Agnus Dei. The organ began the sequence in each section with the exception of the Gloria in excelsis, for which the priest or choir intoned “Gloria in excelsis Deo.” Concluding Mass, the response Deo gratias was

320   the oxford handbook of the baroque also normally played by the organ. This arrangement of organ pieces implied that the pieces themselves needed to be short, and therefore it was localized musical effects such as melodic and rhythmic inflections as well as the expressive performance of ornaments that took priority over long-range structural concerns. In addition, the opportunity to play a solo piece occurred in the Offertoire to cover the liturgical ceremonies that could last for up to 10 minutes. This required and gave opportunity for a large-scale piece, and the published offertoires sur les grands jeux are the most extensive in the repertoire. Shorter organ pieces were also required to cover ceremonies such as the Elévation and Communion. There remains debate over the issue of whether solo organ pieces reflected the character of the omitted liturgical text, or not. Certainly, François Couperin’s quiet and meditative Tierce en taille and Cromorne en taille are suitably sensitive pieces appropriate for the Elévation, but (following the same principle of liturgical sensitivity) a loud Dialogue sur les grands jeux, played on the reeds stops, would seem less appropriate for the final Agnus Dei. This debate has led to some speculative reordering of movements in, for example, the Gloria of de Grigny’s mass, in which the Récit de tierce en taille (set for Domine Deus, Rex caelestis) and the Basse de trompette ou de cromorne (set for Domine Deus, Agnus Dei) have been reordered to match them to what is perceived by some scholars as more appropriate texts.4 It is possible, though, that whilst the general operating principle was for the alternatim organ solos in each section of the Mass to contain a variety of pieces of differing registrations, with each liturgical section beginning with a plein jeu and ending with a grand jeu, certain individual sentences were capable of inspiring text-sensitive music.

Genres The consistency of the compositional genres, their registrations and their associated musical textures and character, has led to the assumption that the music itself was fairly consistent in style. However, analysis of a wide range of music from publications and important manuscripts reveals successive musical developments that were influenced by secular styles such as Italian string music, French dances, and airs de cour, with a significant input from opera. Some of these developments can be summarized by considering each genre in turn.5

Plein jeu Plein jeu refers to the combination of principal ranks from the lowest pipes (16’) to the highest mixtures (the “chorus”) in both Grand Orgue and Positif departments, which produced a brilliant, powerful, and shining sound. These pieces were used mostly as opening organ versets in major sections of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) and as opening pieces in organ “suites.” For those organ masses based on the

baroque organ music   321 Cunctipotens genitor Deus plainchant, the chant itself was played on powerful Pedal reed stops (Trompette 8 and Clairon 4) either in the tenor register (en taille) or (less often) in the bass (en basse). A common tempo indication for plein jeux was gravement, and these pieces are characterized by slow-moving, mostly four-part homophonic textures. The finest examples are the Grands pleins jeux by Nicolas de Grigny, with their five-part textures and an individual harmonic language deriving from a colorful mix of “ancient” modal and “modern” diatonic harmony,6 with the surprising modulations to related keys being controlled by the (modal) plainchant. De Grigny’s verset for “Et in terra pax” is notable for its alternation of 3/2 (three beats per measure) and 6/4 (two beats per ­measure) meters, which is also characteristic of the courante dance. Hence, this particular Plein jeu can be regarded as a large-scale, magisterial plainchant-based courante with the dance tempo slowed right down—a new development for pleins jeux. However, it was Louis Marchand (1669–1732), the most famous French virtuoso in the early ­eighteenth century, who composed the most demanding grand plein jeu, with six ­independent parts including a double pedal. From Lebègues first book (1676) onward, and in the Livre d’orgue de Montréal, the plein jeu du Positif became an established subgenre, described by Raison in 1688 as “legerement et le bien couler” (“fast and flowing”). Consisting of quick improvisatory passages on the light-actioned Positif organ, they reflect the influence of the toccatas by Johann Jacob Froberger (1616–1667). Several sources testify to Froberger’s visit to Paris in 1652, and it is clear from certain compositions by Louis Couperin, as well as Froberger’s own pieces in the Bauyn manuscript, that the presence of the Viennese court organist was a catalytic musical influence.7 This implies that the plein jeu du Positif was fast and improvisatory in character, inviting a dialogue with the stately Grand Orgue plein jeu. In pleins jeux by Raison and Clérambault, the Grand Orgue and Positif were often contrasted within single pieces, and particular pleins jeux were subject to experiment. With Raison we can trace the influence of a more varied range of French dances in organ music (more fully explored under “Duo”). In his Agnus Dei (Messe du sixiesme ton), the Grand plein jeu (“Lentement”) has stylistic resonances with the allemande, and the Petit plein jeu (“Viste”) with the bourrée. In François Couperin’s two organ masses, Petit pleins jeux were used for the (final) Deo gratias movements; that in his Messe pour les paroisses is based entirely on fugal imitation in the style of an Italian grave movement, whilst in the Messe pour les couvents the Deo gratias reflects a style similar to the solo and accompaniment texture of a récit. A further development was Boyvin’s use of a Plein jeu d’écho to be played on the fourth manual (the Echo), which enabled the three plein jeu registrations to be contrasted within one piece. This comes from the Grand plein jeu a 3 choeurs (1690), no doubt composed for the large new organ at Rouen Cathedral, built by Robert Clicquot in 1689, which Boyvin (as organist) oversaw.

Fugue Fugues were normally played on reed stops such as the Trompette or Cromorne. However, the French fugue (one of most rigorous exercises in contrapuntal development)

322   the oxford handbook of the baroque has often been regarded as a Cinderella genre.8 Many writers have ignored the French genre altogether, primarily, I suspect, because writers on fugue have been grounded in contrapuntal techniques deriving from J.  S.  Bach, in particular, the Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue. From the generation of Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707), German developments in terms of countersubjects (themes designed to accompany the main subject) and permutational counterpoint (when several subjects or countersubjects appear in any vertical order, often varied systematically) led to fugues of extended length, whereas French fugues needed to be relatively short for liturgical considerations. In his Traité de la composition de musique (1667), Nivers defined fugue as “une imitation de chant” and the subject should be made “by the sequence of a beautiful melody worthy to be imitated and repeated several times.” From Nivers’s first Livre d’orgue (1665) onward, fugue subjects were sometimes based on the plainchant announced in the immediately previous Plein jeu, a practice which both F. Couperin and de Grigny adopted. The normal texture for fugues was for four parts, but de Grigny extended the texture to five, typically registering the fugue for Cornet for the two upper parts, Cromorne for the two lowest manual parts, and Pedal Flute, resulting in one of the most beautiful combinations of tone colors in all organ music. Moreover, the various contrapuntal skills that de Grigny exhibits in each of his fugues is remarkable and repays analysis. German protestant organ music was not restricted by the same liturgical considerations, enabling composers to develop fugues of extended length through a variety of contrapuntal procedures. These included one or more countersubjects, permutational counterpoint, inversion (subjects upside down), augmentation (subjects with note-values doubled), diminution (subjects with note-values halved), stretto (the subject being imitated before it has finished), and fugues based on more than one subject with each being fully worked out successively. French fugues normally occurred immediately after the initial Plein jeu in any liturgical section, and as one of twenty-one or so organ Mass movements, fugues (like all other movements except the Offertoire) had to be concise in length. Composers therefore concentrated on varied treatments of the subject and contrapuntal density rather than gross length. This can be seen in the Fugue (headed “Lentement”), the second movement of Clérambault’s Suite du premier ton (c.1710). In only twenty-nine measures there are no less than twenty complete entries of the subject, with each of the first five entries ornamented with subtle differences. Fugue subjects differed too. There was no place for fast subjects in sixteenth-notes derived from violinistic idioms as found in Buxtehude and J. S. Bach. French fugues were mostly based on plainchant melodies, sung immediately beforehand, and often treated to inversion and stretto to increase the density. These considerations suggest that French fugues need to be assessed and listened to in quite a different manner from German fugues, and their value as a discrete genre is equally important. A genre related to fugue is the quatuor, essentially a fugue in four parts with each of the contrapuntal parts played on a different keyboard with a different registration. JeanHenri d’Anglebert suggests this as an option for his Quatuor sur le Kyrie à trois sujets tirés du plein chant (Pièces de clavecin, 1689), a four-part fugue in which three plainchantderived subjects from the Kyrie of Cunctipotens genitor Deus are combined within a total

baroque organ music   323 length of only twenty-three measures. Much later, in L’art du facteur d’orgues (1766– 1778), Dom Bédos suggests some registrations, of which one example is: Récit trompette (top part) Grand Orgue jeu de tierce (2nd part) Positif cromorne and prestant (3rd part) Pédale flute (bass part) In practice, this requires digital gymnastics. Performing a quatuor necessitates the upper two contrapuntal parts being played with one hand on two keyboards simultaneously. Given the relatively small dimensions of French keyboards in the Baroque period, this is not impossible, although the examples composed by Marchand and d’Anglebert pose considerable technical and mental challenges.

Duo Unlike other genres, duos and trios (two-part and three-part pieces) were defined by their textures rather than by their prescribed registrations. This encouraged greater opportunities for composers to incorporate secular musical styles, particularly dance. Reference to an allemande and courante has already been made in connection with pleins jeux, but it is in duos and trios that dances make the largest impact on organ music. Dances were a fundamental component of social life at the court of Versailles. From the diary of the Marquis de Dangeau, it has been calculated that between September 10, 1685, and March 3, 1685, there were seventy opportunities for dances, and they often made the centerpiece to mark formal occasions such as marriages, births, military victories, and visits by dignitaries.9 Moreover, Pierre Rameau’s Maître à danser (1725) makes it clear that gestures from dance pervaded normal social life and contributed to maintaining the differences between classes in this hierarchical society. However, French books on liturgy reveal that secular influences such as dance were discouraged in church music. Nevertheless, the influence of dance can be traced in organ music from the 1660s to the end of the eighteenth century, and an explicit acknowledgement of this influence can be seen in the preface to Raison’s Livre d’orgue (1688), in which he stated, “It is necessary to observe the time signature of the piece that you are playing and to consider if it has some similarity to a sarabande, gigue, gavotte, bourrée, canaris, passacaille and chaconne, mouvement de forgeron etc.,10 so that you give the same Air that you would on the harpsichord – except that you must set a slightly slower tempo because of the sanctity of the place.”11 In Nivers’s first Livre d’orgue (1665) the twelve duos can be divided between seven contrapuntal pieces and five (all marked légèrement) in which dotted rhythms in compound time signatures (such as 6/8 time: 6 eighth-notes divided into two groups of three) reveal the influence of the canarie-gigue. Nivers suggested the following registration for duos: “Duos are played on the petite tierce in the treble and on the grosse tierce in the bass; or on the cornet and the trompette.”12

324   the oxford handbook of the baroque Such canarie-duos seem ideally suited to the advice given in the (rather illiterate) late seventeenth-century manuscript entitled Maniere de toucher lorgue dans toute la proprete et la delicastesse qui est en usage aujourdhy a Paris: “The duo is played gaily, boldly and very fast, and in a lively manner full of fire. To succeed in this one must detach the fingers well. . . . The duo is to be extremely dotted, because therein lies its beauty.”13 Successive composers, most of whom composed suites of dances in their books of harpsichord music, expanded the range of dance styles in organ music. Lebègue composed contrapuntal pieces in triple time with the characteristic features of the minuet. His Duo du 7. Ton (1676) in alla breve time, on the other hand, has stylistic similarities to the gavotte, as a comparison with titled gavottes in suites of dances for harpsichord will demonstrate. In Raison’s organ music, an encyclopedic range of styles of duos is found, incorporating gigues, minuets, and gavottes, as well as including a Duo that I consider to be the “mouvement de forgeron” (mentioned in his preface, above), based on the Entrée des forgerons from Lully’s opera Isis (1677). Clérambault expanded the range of styles still further with a Duo (Suite du deuxième ton, c.1710) based on a bourrée, a dance popular in both folk and court contexts. François Couperin’s two Duos for the “Glorificamus te” (Pièces d’orgue, 1690) add an extra dimension in line with his mission (stated later in the preface to Les nations, 1726) to unite the Italian and French styles, by attempting to unite the French and Italian gigue in the Messe pour les paroisses, and a French and Italian gavotte in the Messe pour les couvents. In the latter, the virtuoso performance style of the Italian gavotte is effectively juxtaposed against a simpler and measured French gavotte. However, the formal notational features of keyboard dances such as binary form (with double bars and repeat signs at the ends of the two sections) were hardly ever printed in organ music. All the dance-related duos mentioned above begin contrapuntally in the manner of a two-part fugue, which was considered to be on a higher intellectual level of composition compared to real dances. Therefore, the influence of dance was subtle, never explicitly stated, but incorporating time signatures (meters), rhythms, gestures, and tempi that would have been immediately recognizable by congregations. Perhaps the most successful duos to combine sacred and secular elements were Nivers’s Duo (4th couplet, Kyrie, 1667) and de Grigny’s duo (3rd couplet, Veni creator, 1699), both of which are written in the style of canarie-gigues, but whose melodies are paraphrased from the relevant plainchant, appropriate for the Kyrie verset (Nivers) and the verse of Veni creator (de Grigny), respectively. De Grigny’s Duo is the most extensive example of  this type, combining expressive detail with a command of long-range structure unmatched elsewhere during this period.

Récit de dessus As seen in the organ specification above, the plethora of individual solo “colors” encouraged the development of the récit; that is, a solo for the Cromorne, Cornet, or Voix humaine, and accompanied on another keyboard by Jeux doux (“gentle stops,” such as Montre 8 and Bourdon 8). In the preface to his 1665 book, Nivers emphasized the

baroque organ music   325 fundamental importance of the human voice in matters pertaining to organ playing, and this must be particularly true of organ récits both in content and in performance. Nivers’s 1667 book contains récits de cornet based on the appropriate plainchant for which the organ was substituting, but in both his books the vocal styles of the air de cour can be noted. One particular piece, the Récit de cromhorne du 6. Ton (1665) appears to be a transformed version of Bacilly’s Puisque Philis est infidelle (Nouveau livre d’airs, 1661), demonstrating a substantive link between organ genre and vocal style. On the other hand, Nivers’s récits de cornet has similarities to early seventeenth-century Italian cornett and violin sonatas, such as are found in Dario Castello’s Sonate concertate in stile moderno (Venice, 1621), reminding us that musicians were well aware of Italian music, however politically incorrect. The standard tempo marking for these pieces was “fort viste” (“very fast”), and in later publications of Raison, récits de cornet were written with échos, which together with the accompaniment (jeux doux) utilized three keyboards (Récit and Echo, accompanied on the Grand Orgue or Positif) of the standard four-manual organ. In the music of François Couperin and de Grigny, there are no superficial echo effects, but they developed the genre by including dialogues between two solo récits (Cromorne and Cornet), which, when combined, produced trios, with the Pedal playing the bass line. Dialogues between récits proved to be an effective way of demonstrating the many colors of the French organ. Boyvin was no doubt exploiting the tone colors of the new organ at Rouen Cathedral by composing his Dialogue de récits de cromhorne et de cornet, ou bien de petite trompette, et de petite tierce (Suite on the 2nd tone, 1690), giving wide scope for coloristic use of the organ. From analysis of all the pieces, Raison’s 1688 book was intended as an encyclopedia of styles, consciously exploring the different ways that were currently fashionable in which each genre could be composed or improvised. For instance, all five of his récits de voix humaine were composed in five different styles: fugue, folk song (or noël), minuet, French gigue, and chaconne. A further development appeared in Clérambault’s Récit de nazard (Suite du deuxieme ton, c.1710), which was written in the style (similar time signature and tempo) of an Italian Sicilienne, with long phrase lengths and clear well-structured modulations characteristic of eighteenth-century composition.

Récit en taille Récits en taille were composed with much greater consistency. They appear first in Lebègue’s 1676 book in which expressive solos for the Cromorne or jeu de tierce (8, 4, 2 2/3, 2, 1 3/5, 1 1/3) played by the left hand in the tenor range are accompanied by the right hand on jeu doux (gentle flutes) and an independent pedal part. In his preface, Lebègue described the tierce en taille as “la plus belle & la plus considerable de l’orgue” (“the most beautiful and the most notable of the organ”).14 Examples by Lebègue, Raison, François Couperin, and de Grigny reveal a range that extended over the whole keyboard for the solo line, with slow expressive ornamented phrases alternating with fast running scales. De Grigny’s Récit du chant de l’hymne precedent is a wonderful example of a tierce en

326   the oxford handbook of the baroque taille based on the plainchant Pange lingua, but his Récit de tierce en taille (4th couplet, Gloria, 1699) is the finest example of all due to its long-range structure, careful use of sequential phrases, expressive range, and harmonic tension that is almost operatic. Due to the flawed engraving of the 1699 print, the climax of this piece (measure 35) is the ­subject of bitter debate as to which notes de Grigny intended (which in itself is a tribute to the quality of the music). Both these examples may well have served as a catalyst for certain chorale preludes by J. S. Bach, for example An wasserflüssen Babylon (“By the waters of Babylon,” BWV 653), which may well have been intended to be registered as a tierce en taille, but based on a Lutheran chorale. Generally, the cromorne en taille contained less rapid movement than the tierce en taille, by virtue of the Cromorne’s characteristic “speaking” qualities. De Grigny both extended and crowned this genre by composing a piece using a duet of Cromornes (played by the left hand) in his highly expressive Cromorne en taille à deux parties (3rd couplet, Kyrie).

Récit de basse The derivation of organ récits from vocal music also extended to the récit de basse. Often titled “Diminution de la basse,” and registered for a solo jeu de tierce in the bass, these pieces could be based on plainchant, as in Nivers’s Diminution de la basse for the “Tu solus altissimus” (8th couplet, Gloria, 1667). However, the basse de trompette (or de cromorne) was cultivated to a far greater extent throughout the period. The first extant examples of this style are found in Louis Couperin’s six (basse) fantaisies (dated 1651–1656) in which the lowest contrapuntal entry develops into a long bass solo for the most powerful rank of pipes on the organ (the Trompette), characterized by broken chord figures, dactyl, and dotted rhythms as well as fast left-hand scale passages. Gaspard Corrette in 1703 described the basse de cromhorne as imitating features of the basse de viole, and the basse de trompette as being played boldly in imitation of a fanfare. These musical characteristics were undoubtedly military in origin and can be seen in Marin Mersenne’s fanfares in Harmonie universelle (1636–1637).15 Pieces titled Basse de trompette suited the French Trompette stop admirably, with its powerful, explosive transient (initial attack), a highly-colored formant (rich in higher harmonics), and a natural crescendo down toward the lowest notes of the keyboard. Examples are found in all the important organ books of the period, by Nivers, Lebègue, Raison, Boyvin, Gaspard Corrette, in addition to François Couperin and de Grigny. One of the most characteristic examples is that by Louis Marchand, which incorporates military rhythms, broken chord figures and extensive use of the entire keyboard compass, including a solo treble Cornet (played on the Récit keyboard) to contrast with the bass Trompette (played on the Grand Orgue). Such was French influence in England in the late seventeenth century that these characteristics also appear in English organ voluntaries such as Voluntary no. 11 by William Croft (1678–1727), which contains similar textures, ornaments, and figurations

baroque organ music   327 of the French genre. There is also an operatic connection: In Act 1 of Lully’s Isis (1677), Jupiter appears singing “Jupiter is coming to earth, to shower it with benefits; he is armed with thunder, but it is in order to bring peace.” He does this by singing the bass line with military rhythms, repeated notes, and melodic figurations entirely characteristic of the basse de trompette, although which came first is an issue which can only be speculated upon. Occasionally, dance styles were incorporated, particularly the time signature and the rhythmic figures characteristic of the French gigue, as may be heard in Boyvin’s Basse de trompette du premier ton (1690) and in Clérambault’s Basse et dessus de trompette ou de cornet separé, en dialogue (Suite du premier ton, c.1710).

Trio From Louis Couperin’s Pièces d’orgue, it is evident that trios were already an important genre for organists in the 1650s. Unlike his duos, which are free compositions, all fourteen of Couperin’s trios are based on plainchant, with the chant sounding in the middle of the texture, in a tradition that extended from Titelouze’s Hymnes de l’église (1623). Whereas Titelouze was preoccupied with strict counterpoint, Couperin decorates the chant with short musical figures, which are anticipated and reflected in the accompanying counterpoint. Another kind of trio retains the pure chant in the middle part, but Couperin surrounds it with a plethora of fast intricate melodic lines similar to Samuel Scheidt’s Latin and German hymns in Tablatura nova (1624). Couperin also writes in a third style with the plainchant paraphrased in two upper parts accompanied by a bass line reminiscent of a basso continuo, as if in imitation of early seventeenth-century Italian cornett or violin duets such as in the Deposuit from the thirteen-part Magnificat from Monteverdi’s Vespers (1610). Thus, Couperin in his trios invoked three of the most important musical publications from the early seventeenth century, emphasizing the importance of tradition on which to base more modern modes of composition. Later, trios hardly developed with regard to plainchant, but found new directions in Lebègue’s trios à trois claviers (trios for three keyboards including Pedal) and trios à deux dessus (two-part trios for the right hand, one part for the left). In the Montreal manuscript we find, for the first time, trios constructed from a dialogue of two solo récits. In Raison’s book (1688) the range of styles is much expanded, and the influence of dance is clearly evident. In addition to bourrées and French canarie-gigues, Raison’s trios à deux dessus in triple time reveal the influence of the chaconne and passacaille as well as the minuet. Raison’s Trio en passacaille (“Christe,” Messe du deuziesme ton) and Trio en chaconne (“Christe,” Messe du sixiesme ton) were probably used by J. S. Bach to construct the theme for his organ Passacaglia in C minor (BWV 582), a hypothesis made more certain by the discovery of an advertisement for a copy of Raison’s Livre d’orgue in Bach’s handwriting.16 Whilst François Couperin’s trios (Pièces d’orgue, 1690) follow the formats established by Lebègue, the sheer quality of invention supersedes previous examples.

328   the oxford handbook of the baroque Structurally, Couperin’s use of well-planned counterpoint, spacious modulations to related keys, melodic phrases used sequentially, and clear phrase direction enabled him to write trios approximately twice the length of Raison’s pieces. One remarkable example of the mixing of genres occurs in De Grigny’s Dialogues à 2 tailles de cromorne et 2 dessus de cornet pour la Communion, which can be regarded as a dialogue of récits, with each récit being doubled to produce its own trio à deux dessus in both tenor and treble registers, underpinned by the Pedal. Conversely, the piece can be regarded as a trio à trois claviers with each manual part doubled. This is a fine example of a composer of real genius transforming a conventional genre, established by his teacher Lebègue, to produce a piece of unprecedented expression, full of registrational color and representing the apotheosis of the trio in all its forms.

Fond d’orgue Registration instructions for the fond d’orgue specified the warm and sonorous combination of Flutes and Montres, which could be used either for solo pieces titled “Fond d’orgue” or “Concert des flûtes,” or for the accompaniment of solo récits where the registration was designated “jeu doux.” The fond d’orgue was characterized by slow harmonious progressions of dissonant harmonies and their resolutions appropriate for those parts of organ masses requiring a special devotional character. In Nivers’s Jeu doux for the “Benedicimus te” (2nd couplet, Gloria, 1667), the basic musical rhythm of the “subject” appears to be based on a rhetorical pronunciation of the words “Benedicimus te,” emphasizing the relevance and the “speaking” character of particular organ pieces to substitute for the omitted text of relevant Mass versets. Marchand’s fond d’orgue in E minor (actually untitled) in the Versailles Manuscript is particularly interesting because of its shifting chromatic chords that fail to settle in any strongly defined key until the very end. At a time when harmony in the modal system was being gradually superseded by the modern major/minor key system, this piece would have sounded extremely adventurous, even other-worldly.

Grand jeu The sound of the French Baroque grand jeu is perhaps the most unmistakable and characteristic registration of all organs. The prescribed combination of Grand Orgue Trompette, Clairon, and Cornet, coupled to the Positf Cromorne and jeu de tierce, was an imitation of Lully’s orchestra of oboes, bassoons, flutes, trumpets, and strings. The Cornet increased in strength toward the highest notes, whereas the Trompette increased in volume toward the lower end of the keyboard. Therefore, the combination produced a balanced dynamic and a rich tone color throughout the keyboard compass, with the added 8’ and 4’ foundation stops providing stability to the reeds and helping bind together the different ranks of pipes. Whereas the plein jeu often began the main s­ ections

baroque organ music   329 of organ masses and suites, the grand jeu was used mostly for the final pieces, and was used for the most substantial piece in the organ mass, the Offertoire. The first published grands jeux were the nine pieces titled A 2 coeurs in Nivers’s 1665 livre, which are short harmonically-based pieces based on the dialogue between Positif and Grand Orgue. In his 1667 book, some grands jeux were loosely based on the relevant plainchant, and his Offerte en fugue et dialogue is the longest and most significant grand jeu to date. Its expansive structure uses both fugue and dialogue between keyboards in a well-controlled three-part structure: a) contrapuntal, b) homophonic, and c) contrapuntal. The alternation between 3/2 and 6/4 meters in the middle section has some ­stylistic resonance with the middle section of Louis Couperin’s harpsichord Prélude à l’imitation de Mr. Froberger. A particularly successful use of plainchant in grands jeux occurs in Lebègue’s offertoires on the hymns Stabat Mater (for Lent) and O filii et filiae (for Easter) from his Troisième livre d’orgue (c.1685), which were the first offertoires in form of thematic variations. Otherwise, Lebègue widened the range of styles of grands jeux to include dances such as minuets and canarie-gigues, and in the same book, his four simphonies were the first examples of French overtures published for organ. This classic form, first established by Lully and which became ubiquitous as opening movements of operas and oratorios throughout Europe (including Handel’s Messiah), was characterized by sharply dotted rhythms for the opening and closing sections, framing an Italian fugal Allegro in triple time. French overtures became the most frequent form for grands jeux and significant examples can be found in the organ books by de Grigny and Clérambault. However, as part of both his encyclopedic agenda and his capacity for creating new styles, Raison’s 1688 livre contains grands jeux in the styles of minuets, gavottes, bourrées, with one piece, the Imitation en trio sur les petits et grands jeux (Messe du huictiesme ton, 1688), being derived from bell-ringing, in which each successive point of imitation (a contrapuntal device in which the melodic line imitates a previous theme) is a different permutation of notes derived from the initial descending melodic phrase. Pieces based on bells were characteristic of the period, another example for organ being Lebègue’s Les Cloches (c.1685). The Offertoires sur les grands jeux by François Couperin, Marchand, and de Grigny are the most substantial and the most significant pieces in this repertoire. Characteristic of a young composer, Couperin (who was only aged 22 when his two organ masses were published), created new forms whilst retaining certain standard features. In his Offertoire sur les grands jeux in Messe pour les paroisses we can hear influences from French Overture, Italian ricercare, and French gigue. Couperin’s Offertoire in Messe pour les couvents, is based on the duet “Gardez pour quelqu’autre” from Lully’s opera Isis, first performed in 1677 and receiving (perhaps) as many as one hundred performances thereafter. Couperin used the same key and the same melody but transformed these e­ lements into a completely new piece.17 This demonstrates a tangible link with opera, supported by Le Cerf de la Viéville in 1704, who described Isis as “l’opéra des musiciens.”18 In some of Boyvin’s Grands dialogues [sur les grands jeux] the influence of the Italian stylus fantasticus toccata can be heard.19 This style, deriving from Frescobaldi’s and

330   the oxford handbook of the baroque Froberger’s keyboard toccatas, was one of the essential elements in harpsichord preludes non mesuré, first established by Louis Couperin. This form of notation omits all metrical and rhythmic indications, but every note (even individual notes of ornaments) is written in white “whole notes.” This experimental notation encouraged an improvisational character in performance, free of the tyranny of metrical and rhythmic constrictions implied by conventional musical notation. Whilst there is no similar notational equivalent in organ music, nevertheless, the character of the improvisational toccata infuses both Boyvin’s grands jeux, as well as such pieces as the Dialogue which concludes de Grigny’s Ave maris stella. One of the most extraordinary pieces is De Grigny’s Point d’orgue sur les grands jeux, the final couplet of the A solis ortus suite. The Pedal part has just two notes, bottom A and bottom E (which intentionally restricts the harmony) in a piece consisting of eighty-three measures. However, this is countered by all kinds of contrapuntal devices: canon (the subject pursued or “answered” by itself), inversion (the subject upside-down), retrograde (the subject back-to-front), and retrograde inversion (a combination of both upsidedown and back-to-front), all treated with a lightness of touch unmatched in this repertoire. The piece ends with a quotation from Georg Muffat’s Toccata tertia (Apparatus musico-organisticus, 1690), which highlights the flawed engraving of de Grigny’s 1699 print. Misplaced and omitted accidentals, slurs and ties, ornaments, as well as notational errors and wrong titles all undermine faith in the original source, but de Grigny’s importance is signified by the manuscript copies made by J. S. Bach and his relative J. G. Walther. Bach’s copy keeps (mostly) to de Grigny’s text, but Walther attempts corrections (or updates for the benefit of German organists). It is paradoxical that the greatest livre d’orgue of the period should have such a source of questionable accuracy, and a definitive authentic edition of de Grigny’s Premier livre d’orgue is therefore an impossible project, unless (by some miracle) the composer’s autograph were to be discovered.

Noëls Perhaps the most overtly popular genre of organ music from this period was noëls, defined in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (1768) as: “Tunes intended for certain canticles which people sing at Christmas: these types should have a rustic and pastoral character consistent with the simplicity of the words and of the shepherds who were supposed to have sung them while paying homage to Christ in the crib.” Traditional melodies of regional and secular origin were often adapted for new religious texts, and organists excelled in improvising sets of variations upon such popular melodies. Orchestral settings were composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) and Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657–1726), and keyboard arrangements (for organ or harpsichord) were published by Lebègue (1676), Nicolas Gigault (1682), Raison (1714), Dandrieu (c.1720), Louis-Claude Daquin (c.1745), and Balbastre and BeauvarletCharpentier (c.1783). The genre fell from favor at the time of the French Revolution, but its popularity can be glimpsed from the actions of the Archbishop of Paris, who had to

baroque organ music   331 ban performances of noëls en variation played by Balbastre in St Roch, because of the public disorder that resulted.20

French Influence Abroad Some reference to English and German composers has been made above, and there is no doubt that French music, organs, and performers on all instruments suffused Europe during the period. The influence of French organ specifications can be seen and heard in the organs such as by Gottfried Silbermann, from his first important organ in Freiberg Cathedral (1710–1714) to his last instrument in Dresden Hofkirche (1750–1754), and one  of the finest grands jeux can be heard in Freiberg’s Petrikirche (G.  Silbermann, 1733–1735). We know from Bach’s obituary that he “took many good French organists as models,” copying out not only de Grigny’s organ book but also Raison’s Livre d’orgue (now lost) as well as some significant harpsichord music. Extant evidence from library catalogues confirm the many copies made of French organ and harpsichord music by musicians in the Bach circle. In England, Robert Dallam’s proposal in 1662 to build a large new organ for New College, Oxford, with “extraordinary stops,” was significantly influenced by French organs. Elsewhere in England, Dallam was at the forefront of new styles in organ-building that incorporated French influence into traditional styles, bringing his knowledge and skills derived from his residency and activities as an organ builder in Brittany ­during the English Civil War and Commonwealth from 1642 to 1660.21 This French influence became firmly established in the eighteenth century, as is evident in the newly-restored organ by Richard Bridge in Christ Church, Spitalfields, London (1735), which follows closely (although not exactly) the design of the standard French Baroque organ, especially in the provision of reed and cornet stops.

Toward the Revolution From the discussion above, it is clear that whilst the organ and the particular genres composed for it remained relatively consistent throughout the period, the range of styles with which composers refreshed each particular genre expanded constantly, encouraged with the influence of Italian and French secular music. This is particularly true for the period of Louis XIV’s reign (1661–1715). Thereafter, some entrenchment is evident, with attractive music but little to advance on the musical imagination and intellectual command of de Grigny. It is paradoxical that some of the most famous French “Classical” organs extant today, Souvigny (F.-H.  Clicquot, 1782), Poitiers (F.-H.  Clicquot, 1791), and St Maximin-en-Var (J.-E. Isnard, 1772–1773), all date from a time when the musical traditions were changing. Michel Corrette’s Premier livre d’orgue (1737) contains the

332   the oxford handbook of the baroque established genres but with the addition of Musettes, and his Pièces de clavecin pour l’orgue (1734) make it clear that harpsichord character pieces were also played on the organ, with organ registration instructions included in each piece. In Corrette’s Pièces pour l’orgue dans un genre nouveau (1787), the standard genres were given more pianistic figurations, but a new feature was the Grand jeu avec le tonnerre, which required a plank of wood placed over the lowest octave of the pedalboard, which when played on the Trompettes and Bombarde imitates a clap of thunder. Thus, popular sound-effects were impinging on real music. Guillaume Lasceux’s pieces published in the Nouveau journal de pieces d’orgue (1783 onward) reveal musical styles and genres more orientated toward pianistic and orchestral styles of the late eighteenth century, including a Simphonie concertante for an Offertoire as well as logically structured variations on noëls. Similar musical styles are characteristic of Jean-Jacques Beauvarlet-Charpentier (1734–1793), whose pianistic figurations dominate his fugues, récits, noels, grand choeurs, and Offertoires en symphonie concertante. By this time, evidently, organ, harpsichord, and pianoforte idioms were merging. During the same period, the most comprehensive details of the classical French Baroque organ were described in Dom Bédos de Celles’s treatise L’art du facteur d’orgues (Paris, 1766–1778), the foundation of all studies into French organbuilding of the period. However, the tradition that had been so stable throughout the period was to change with the organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899), who, whilst building on classical traditions, developed the Romantic orchestral organ in the early nineteenth century.

Notes 1. This organ can be heard on a recording from Sarlat Cathedral: Nicolas de Grigny: Premier livre d’orgue, played by David Ponsford (Nimbus NI 6342, 6343, 2016). 2. English translations of registration instructions are contained in Fenner Douglass, The Language of the Classical French Organ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 3. Livre d’orgue de Montréal, ed. Elisabeth Gallat-Morin and Kenneth Gilbert, 3 vols. (St-Hyacinthe, Quebec: Jacques Ostiguy, 1985–1988); both the original MS and the modern edition can be viewed at http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/livreorgue/. 4. Marina Tchebourkina, “Rappel à l’Ordre ou Couleurs Baroques,” L’Orgue 293 (2011): 27–38. 5. For more detailed analysis of the development of each genre, see my French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; paperback edition, 2016). 6. “Diatonic” denotes music written in an unambiguous major or minor key. “Modal” harmony refers to an earlier system of scales based on the “white” notes of the keyboard; for example Mode 1 begins on D with no accidentals, therefore enabling access to a discrete range of harmonies. 7. See Rudolph Rasch, “Johann Jacob Froberger’s travels 1649–1653,” in The Keyboard in Baroque Europe, ed. C. Hogwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19–35. 8. “Fugue” can be defined as a contrapuntal piece beginning with a theme or “subject,” which is immediately followed by another entry of the same theme, and continuing with a series of entries of that subject in different keys after intervening “episodes.”

baroque organ music   333 9. Rebecca Harris-Warwick, “Ballroom Dancing at the Court of Louis XIV,” Early Music 14 (1986): 41–49. 10. Mouvement de forgeron can be translated as “in the style of a blacksmith.” 11. André Raison, preface to Livre d’orgue (1688). 12. Guillaume Gabriel Nivers, preface to Livre d’orgue (1665), 6. 13. Cited in William Pruitt, “A 17th-Century French Manuscript on Organ Performance,” Early Music 14 (1986): 247–248. 14. Nicolas-Antoine Lebègue, preface to Les pièces d’orgue (1676). 15. Marin Mersenne, Livre cinquiesme des instruments à vent, Harmonie universelle (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1636–1637), 264–265. 16. John Scott Whitely, “New Light on the Toccata in C BWV 564 and Bach’s ‘Mordant,’” Journal of the British Institute of Organ Studies 41 (2017): 139–140. 17. This is one example of “transformative imitation,” a method of composition by which a composer bases their musical invention on thematic material by another composer as an act of homage. This is described in my “Some Examples of Transformative Imitation in Late Seventeenth-Century French Organ Music” in Perspectives on Early Keyboard Music and Revival in the Twentieth Century, ed. Rachelle Taylor and Hank Knox (New  York: Routledge, 2018), 123–134. 18. Jean Laurent Le Cerf de la Viéville, Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Chez F. Foppens, 1704–1706), 102. 19. Stylus fantasticus: literally the “fantastic” style, which was associated with improvised Italian keyboard toccatas from the early seventeenth century, the object of which was to astonish and constantly defeat the listener’s expectations. 20. Christopher Hogwood, “Introduction,” in Louis-Claude Daquin’s Noëls (London: Faber Music, 1984), viii–x. 21. Stephen Bicknell, The History of the English Organ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91–121.

Further Reading Apel, Willi. The History of Keyboard Music to 1700. Translated and revised by H.  Tischler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Butler, H. Joseph. “The Premier Livre d’orgue of Nicolas de Grigny and the Revisions by J. S. Bach and J. G. Walther: An Overview and Appraisal.” The Organ Yearbook 33 (2004): 73–90. Gustafson, Bruce. “France.” In Keyboard Music before 1700, 2nd ed. Edited by A.  Silbiger. New York: Routledge, 2004. Higginbottom, Edward. “French Classical Organ Music and the Liturgy.” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 103 (1977): 19–40. Higginbottom, Edward. “Ecclesiastical Prescription and Musical Style in French Classical Organ Music.” The Organ Yearbook 12 (1981), 31–54. Ponsford, David. French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ponsford, David. Nicolas de Grigny: Premier livre d’orgue; Organ of Sarlat Cathedral with L’école de Nivers, 2 CDs. Nimbus Alliance NI 6342, 6343, 2016. Saint-Arroman, Jean. L’interpretation de la musique française 1661–1789, 2 vols. Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1988. Williams, Peter. The European Organ 1450–1850. London: Batsford, 1966.

chapter 14

Ot tom a n Ba roqu e Ünver Rüstem

The eighteenth century marked a turning point for the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, which experienced a momentous building boom that introduced a new style of architecture into its fabric. Distinguished above all by their idiosyncratic yet unmissable adaptation of Western European models, the monuments resulting from this development have proved taxonomically contentious among modern scholars. Art historians writing in the early twentieth century attributed the new manner to Baroque influences from France, and by the 1950s, a full-fledged notion of a “Turkish Baroque” had established itself in academic usage.1 Like the concept of the Baroque itself, this categorization— later reformulated as “Ottoman Baroque”—has faced considerable and often well-founded criticism, not only because it was unknown in the context that it purports to explain but also because those who coined and popularized the label frequently used it pejoratively. Recent art-historical interventions have therefore tended to eschew the designation as an unhelpful Eurocentric burden that obscures how the buildings were intended and viewed in their own time.2 While sharing many of the concerns of the revisionist scholarship, I believe that the Ottoman Baroque is a valid concept that stands to be recuperated as part of the ongoing effort to rethink the Baroque at large.3 Among the most significant consequences of this effort has been a new attentiveness to the Baroque’s global manifestations, which are now being explored not merely as the outcome of Europe’s colonialist endeavors but as vital traditions in their own right that creatively adapted their Western source material.4 The Baroque viewed in these terms can no longer be narrowly defined as, for example, a Counter-Reformation aesthetic or a tendency toward formal irregularity. Rather, we are dealing with a broad artistic continuum whose numerous versions—linked by their shared use of certain recurrent models and motifs—spoke of power and magnificence, and whose worldwide spread and cachet reflected the heightened conditions of transregional commerce, diplomacy, and interaction that characterized the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Notwithstanding its contested nature—and in part because it has survived so much scholarly scrutiny—the word “Baroque” thus continues to offer us a useful category by which to consider the diverse but related phenomena that fall under its purview.

ottoman baroque   335 Such is the sense in which the term might fittingly be applied to the Ottoman material, whose relationship to other Baroque traditions goes well beyond what those who first observed it meant. The scholars who proposed the existence of a Turkish Baroque were for the most part speaking disparagingly of what they regarded as a derivative and decadent style that superficially mimicked European fashions at the expense of local artistic principles.5 Recent attempts to correct this negative picture have produced their own problems, for in trying to rehabilitate eighteenth-century Ottoman architecture, scholars have misleadingly downplayed the extent of its engagement with European models. A more effective rebuttal of the earlier viewpoint would be to address its assumptions directly.6 Far from being a clumsy imitation of an alien mode, the Ottomans’ embrace of  Western forms yielded a new aesthetic synthesis that was in its own time widely ­celebrated by locals and foreigners alike. The style succeeded precisely because of—not despite—its patently cross-cultural quality, which allowed it to resonate on the world stage as a sign of the Ottoman Empire’s international standing. What qualifies such architecture as Baroque is not, then, a shallow resemblance to other traditions thus called but rather its intended and acknowledged connectedness to a larger network of prestigious aesthetic approaches. Pronounced as it was, this rapport took nothing away from the buildings’ inherent Ottomanness. Their many foreign-inspired elements were always creatively assimilated in accordance with local needs and practices, which renders it all the more appropriate to consider the style in terms that underscore its simultaneously Ottoman and Baroque character. The remainder of this chapter will offer such a consideration, examining the Ottoman Baroque with reference to four key themes: its eighteenth-century timing; its political and artistic significance; its place in Ottoman aesthetic history; and its impact on the cityscape.

A Time for Change The Ottoman Baroque was a product of—and helped to shape—one of the most transformative periods in Ottoman history, more or less corresponding to the eighteenth century.7 Bookended by two revolutions (the first in 1703 and the second in 1807), this period has traditionally been viewed as part of a well-established decline narrative in which the Ottoman Empire steadily loses military, political, and cultural steam after its sixteenth-century peak, ceding ever more territory to its enemies until its demise in 1922. The eighteenth century serves as the story’s critical juncture, for it was at this time, we are told, that Russian ascendency laid bare the true weakness of the empire, which now turned to Western models in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to reform its institutions and ensure its survival.8 Such an assessment renders the Ottoman Baroque merely the visual manifestation of a larger process of ill-executed “Westernization” in the face of European hegemony.9 Much work has been done since the mid-twentieth century to counter this negative assessment. Without denying the reality of the empire’s weakened position, the more

336   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque recent historiography has brought greater attention to the resourceful and productive nature of Ottoman reformism. The initiation during the eighteenth century of certain modernizing measures should be seen as an active rather than defeatist response, one bespeaking a self-assertive readiness to confront changing circumstances.10 While Western expertise played a large role in this modernizing drive, the Ottomans were pragmatic and selective in what they borrowed, adapting imported models to suit their own distinctive needs.11 That the empire remained a sizable transcontinental polity well into the twentieth century shows that these efforts were not without payoff. Visual culture provides especially clear evidence of the Ottomans’ continuing vigor in the later period, which witnessed an uninterrupted campaign to revivify Istanbul and render it a showcase for the empire’s achievements. This campaign followed—and was meant to remedy—the perceived neglect of the capital during the latter half of the seventeenth century, when the court had preferred to reside in the more tranquil setting of the empire’s second city, Edirne. Indeed, the downgrading of Istanbul was a major factor in the 1703 revolution, whose instigators placed a new sultan, Ahmed III (r. 1703–1730, d. 1736), on the throne and demanded that he restore the capital to its rightful status. Ahmed and his grandees did so in spades, enlivening Istanbul with a series of public ­festivities and new buildings that heralded the court’s return.12 Generally smaller in scale than the “classical” landmarks of the sixteenth century, the buildings that survive from Ahmed’s reign are distinguished by a new emphasis on surface decoration, as exemplified by the famous drinking fountain that the sultan erected between 1728 and 1729 just outside the Topkapı Palace, his principal residence.13 The fountain, which stands in a public square directly in front of the palace’s main gate, is a substantial pavilion-like structure with self-service spigots and grilled corner kiosks from which attendants would serve cups of water or sherbet. Its carved marble-clad walls combine such well-worn Ottoman motifs as the arabesque scroll and muqarnas (geometric stalactite work) with less familiar forms, including naturalistically rendered floral bouquets and bowls of fruit.14 Responding to Iranian, European, and perhaps even Mughal models, these more novel elements rejuvenate what is a largely ­traditional ornamental repertoire, and while the resultant mix has sometimes been conflated with the later Ottoman Baroque, it should be recognized as its own particular mode.15 Such architecture has come to be associated with the term “Tulip Era,” an early twentieth-century label for the tenure of Ahmed’s son-in-law and grand vizier Nevşehirli İbrahim Pasha (d. 1730), who held power between 1718 and 1730 and oversaw multiple building projects. Although coined in reference to the period’s tulipomania, the term has tended to function as a byword for incipient Westernization: in 1718, the Ottomans concluded a damaging war with Habsburg Austria that cost them the province of Serbia, after which they supposedly took up a more peaceful, Western-looking attitude that engendered the kind of aesthetic eclecticism displayed on Ahmed’s fountain.16 More recent scholarship has rightly cast doubt on the “Tulip Era” explanation, not least because the visual trends attributed to these years had already begun with (and indeed before) the court’s return in 1703. The chief impetus behind Istanbul’s architectural

ottoman baroque   337 refurbishment came, in other words, from within the empire itself. And rather than betokening a turn to the West, the buildings’ eye-catchingly variegated ornament capitalized on a locally burgeoning culture of leisure and consumerism among the city’s denizens, a growing number of whom had the means and opportunity to visit, gather around, and contemplate the new structures being put up among them. Certain “middle-class” Istanbulites might even become patrons in their own right.17 As important as Ahmed’s reign was to launching the capital’s visual and material renewal, it was under his nephew and successor, Mahmud I (r. 1730–54), that a truly novel approach would emerge. Ahmed fell as he had risen when he was deposed in 1730 in a janissary-led uprising, sparked, it seems, by an unpopular and expensive war with Iran.18 Though installed as a puppet, Mahmud quickly punished the rebels and proved his own mettle as a capable and well-respected ruler. His sultanate has tended to be overshadowed in the historiography by the more tumultuous reigns that preceded and followed it, but it was precisely his ability to maintain a relatively tranquil realm that earned Mahmud the applause of eighteenth-century commentators.19 A Russian attack in 1736 had once again embroiled the empire in war, with Austria entering the fray a year later. Against the odds (and refuting any notion of unremitting Ottoman decline), the conflict played out surprisingly well for the empire, which held its own against the RussoAustrian alliance and even managed to retake Serbia. The ensuing Treaties of Belgrade and Niš, both signed in 1739, initiated almost three decades of peace between the Ottomans and Christian Europe, the longest such period in the empire’s history. Besides these international successes, Mahmud handily quashed an attempted revolt within the capital in 1740, proving that he had the backing of the majority of the populace.20 It is against this largely stable background that Mahmud poured his energies into commissioning works of art and architecture, his enthusiasm earning him the reputation of a great patron and connoisseur.21 The French merchant and manufacturer JeanClaude Flachat (d. 1775)—who lived in Istanbul between 1740 and 1755 and served as the sultan’s bezirgan başı (chief merchant)—wrote in his travel account that “Mahamout had hardly finished one building when he went about starting another.”22 Like Ahmed before him, Mahmud was joined in this activity by his courtiers and a wider network of patrons, including high-ranking women.23 The architecture produced in the first decade of his sultanate essentially continued the “Tulip Era” manner of the previous reign, but a switch occurred thereafter with the appearance of the Ottoman Baroque. This new style, whose European references would also encompass the Rococo, burst onto the scene at the start of the 1740s, marking a decisive shift in Istanbul’s architectural aesthetic.24 Its earliest dated extant examples are four projects all related to water, all completed in the Hijri (Islamic) year 1154 (March 1741–March 1742), and all of elite patronage.25 Mahmud’s own contribution to this group was a new public bathhouse in the busy central neighborhood of Cağaloğlu. Built according to a traditional plan, the bath presents an unremarkable brick-and-stone exterior. But the marble fixtures within are beautifully carved in the new style, particularly the Corinthianizing column capitals, which combine beaded foliate volutes in their corners with shell-topped oval cartouches on their main faces.26 Of the other works in this pioneering group, the most splendid is the

338   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 1  Sebīl of Mehmed Emin Agha, Dolmabahçe, Istanbul, 1741–42. Photo by Ünver Rüstem

sebīl (kiosk for the dispensing of water) built by the cavalry captain (sipāhī aġası) Mehmed Emin Agha (d. 1743–1744) (Figure 1). The building’s exterior walls and columns are made of white and gray marble that is sumptuously carved with forms drawn from the European Baroque, including garlanded roundels, acanthus-like vegetal scrolls, and, as at Cağaloğlu, Corninthianizing column capitals crowned by scallop shells. That the scheme also features traditionally calligraphed inscriptions only emphasizes the remarkable ­novelty of its remaining elements.27 Indeed, the originality of these inaugural Ottoman Baroque works is difficult to ­overstate. While the earlier “Tulip Era” style had already introduced a new ornamental lushness and plasticity to replace the more restrained decorative carving of previous centuries, its ingredients were for the most part rooted in Ottoman tradition. The Baroque mode, by contrast, ushered in an entirely new formal vocabulary: round and mixtilinear arches in place of pointed ones, C- and S-scrolls instead of muqarnas, and fleshy vegetal scrolls rather than geometricized arabesques. This receptiveness to foreign forms has been likened to the taste for turquerie that was sweeping Europe in the very same period, but although important for showing that the flow of ideas between East and West was not unidirectional, the comparison can be taken only so far.28 Where turquerie was always circumscribed in its application and excluded from such settings

ottoman baroque   339

Figure 2  ʿİmāret of the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, 1742–43, main gate. Photo by Ünver Rüstem

as churches, the Ottoman Baroque made its first dated appearances in charitable good works, revolutionizing the most respectable categories of public architecture.29 Just how striking the change was can be gauged from perhaps the most outstanding early example of the style, the ʿimāret (public soup kitchen) that Mahmud built in 1742–1743 as part of the complex of the empire’s principal mosque, the converted cathedral of Hagia Sophia. Located in the northeast corner of the precinct, the ʿimāret was the last in a series of additions that Mahmud made to the complex starting in 1739–1740.30 The earlier works in this series, which included a library and a domed ablution fountain, were largely in keeping with the style of preceding decades, displaying such forms as muqarnas column capitals and geometric interlace. But the ʿimāret takes an altogether fresher approach, as announced in particular by its marble-clad gate (Figure  2). Containing a round-arched door, the gate is a lavish assemblage of Corinthian-inspired columns, dentil-studded architraves, large scrolls in high relief, and niches set with scallop shells. The gate’s tripartite organization and constituent motifs recall the facades of Roman Baroque churches, and yet the whole is distinctly localized: forms derived from all’antica models are reconfigured and combined in ways unthinkable in Western architectural practice, and the scheme makes prominent use of calligraphy.31

340   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque What comes out of this fusion is a style that partakes of both Western and Ottoman qualities even as it looks unprecedented by the standards of either tradition. In a later account of the event, the court chronicler Subhi (d. 1769) relates the ʿimāret’s opening in terms that capture the effect such novelty had on contemporary viewers. The sultan, he tells us, was so impressed with the building’s “various subtle arts” that “he looked attentively from top to bottom, scrutinizing one by one each of the exalted doors and walls and matchless vaults and arches present in its various parts.”32 The detail with which Subhi describes Mahmud’s inspection finds no parallel in the same author’s account of the opening of the Hagia Sophia library only a few years earlier.33 Here, then, was a style with the power to captivate even the most discerning of viewers, its inventiveness bringing startling new luster to the already resurgent capital.

Baroque Meanings Once the Ottoman Baroque appeared in Istanbul, it rapidly eclipsed more established modes to become the aesthetic of choice for the city’s elite and nonelite architecture, finding favor in all building types. Both the speed of this shift and the high status of the actors behind it bespeak a programmatic process rather than a spontaneous change in tastes, and although previous scholarship has not made the connection, it can hardly be coincidental that the style’s advent came so soon after the peace treaties of 1739. The Ottoman Baroque was, I would argue, an officially sanctioned triumphal mode designed to celebrate the sultan’s recent achievements and, by extension, the revitalization of the Ottoman realm. The choice of style was quite deliberate, for the Baroque was already flourishing as an international prestige language.34 It is no accident that Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) brought in European architects to help design his new capital of St. Petersburg after he established it in 1703.35 Created by an Eastern polity responding to Western models, this so-called Petrine Baroque was intended as a robust statement of Romanov ambition, and scholars have continued to treat it as such. Can a similar reading not pertain to the Ottomans, whose diplomatic, commercial, and cultural ties with the West were older and arguably closer than those of Russia, and whose capital was on European soil? By developing its own take on a style that had reached transregional proportions, the Ottoman Empire was able to reaffirm its world standing in terms that were both current and cross-culturally legible. Although conventional wisdom holds that the  Ottomans were late to the game, adopting the style just as it was giving way to Neoclassism, this is a simplistic view that overlooks the Baroque’s continued significance in the architecture of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe throughout the ­second half of the eighteenth century.36 The Baroque refashioning of Istanbul was thus a timely and astute move that boldly situated the Ottomans in a wider and still thriving architectural climate. Such participation in the Baroque network could connote multiple messages. On the one hand, it signaled the more diplomatic approach that the Ottomans were

ottoman baroque   341 pursuing vis-à-vis their traditional Christian enemies.37 No longer presenting itself as a hostile force, the empire now wished to be counted as an equal player in the European balance of power, such that in 1745, the British ambassador Sir Everard Fawkener (d. 1758) approvingly noted the existence of “a greater connexion than ever between the [Sublime] Porte & the several Powers of Christendom.”38 But as well as reflecting these closer ties, the Ottoman Baroque was a competitive proclamation of the empire’s continued global relevance, all the more so given that it brought the empire into more direct aesthetic confrontation with its rivals. It is notable in this regard that the reconquered city of Belgrade included several Baroque monuments from its time under Habsburg rule.39 In view of its imperial associations, the Ottoman Baroque likely flourished in palatial architecture shortly before it came to predominate in the city’s urban fabric. No surviving examples of such architecture can be securely dated to the early 1740s, but written sources record a stream of palatial construction in these years, especially between 1740 and 1742.40 In entries from the middle of the decade, an official journal (rūznāme) refers to these structures as being in “the pleasing new style” (nev-ṭarz-ı maṭbūʿ).41 The description is vividly borne out by the slightly later Sofa Kiosk, an originally ­seventeenth-century garden pavilion in the Topkapı Palace that Mahmud renovated in 1752–1753. Brightly lit by expansive wood-framed windows, the building’s interior features beautifully carved Baroque-Rococo woodwork along its walls and ceilings (Figure 3).42 The Sofa Kiosk today houses a brass brazier that is one of a pair presented by Louis XV (r. 1715–74) to Mehmed Saʿid Pasha (d. 1761), who headed an Ottoman embassy to Paris in 1741. Created by the French designer Jean-Claude Duplessis (d. 1774), the brazier combines a basically Ottoman shape with swirling Rococo scrollwork, aptly complementing the space it decorates (Figure 3).43 European luxury wares had long been popular among the Ottoman elite, and this appreciation reached new levels in the eighteenth century, with merchants such as Flachat keeping the court richly stocked with imports. The collecting of such objects must have been instrumental in familiarizing Ottoman audiences with the Baroque before the style took hold in Istanbul’s architecture.44 The same is true of European architectural books and prints, which, as we know from examples that survive in the Topkapı Palace Library, were acquired in large numbers and often annotated in Turkish.45 As Flachat’s account makes clear, many in the court had a share in this cosmopolitan visual culture,46 so that the rise of the Ottoman Baroque must be understood as a collective elite enterprise. At the same time, the style could not have come into being without the participation of a very different sector of Ottoman society: the non-Muslim architects and craftsmen who sources reveal were the main creative force behind the buildings. Although Ottoman Greeks and Armenians had always played a major role in Istanbul’s construction industry, they rose to unprecedented prominence in the eighteenth century, forming semiautonomous teams that secured the lion’s share of commissions and displaced in all but name the imperial corps of architects.47 Referred to as ḳalfas (master builders), Christian architects were in an especially strong position to answer the emergent tastes of the Muslim elite, for the Greek and Armenian communities had long enjoyed a

342   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 3 Sofa Kiosk, Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, seventeenth century, remodeled 1752–53, ­interior view showing a French brazier made ca. 1742 by Jean-Claude Duplessis. Photo by Ünver Rüstem

s­ ignificant mercantile presence in Italy and other parts of Europe.48 This network would have afforded the ḳalfas unrivaled access to foreign artistic models, and some of them may even have been able to travel West for themselves. Besides such practical advantages, Ottoman Greeks and Armenians had their own independent interest in European art, fueled by a growing sense of cultural affinity with Western Christendom.49 A carved marble tombstone from one of Istanbul’s Armenian cemeteries shows that Baroque motifs were already current in non-Muslim Ottoman circles by 1737, almost half a ­decade before the style entered public architecture (Figure 4).50 When, a few years later, their Muslim patrons decided to coopt the Baroque as an ­official aesthetic, it was inevitable that the ḳalfas would be assigned a leading part in its deployment. In its officialized form, however, the style was emptied of the connotations it had carried for Ottoman Christians and given an altogether different meaning in relation to the West. What had been a marker of communal identity was thereby turned into a powerful and politically expressive language for the state itself—a “pleasing new style” emblematic of pleasing new times.

ottoman baroque   343

Figure 4  Marble tombstone dated 1737, Armenian cemetery, Balıklı, Istanbul. Photo by Ünver Rüstem

Placing the New Style One of the reasons that modern observers have had trouble accounting for the Ottoman Baroque is that eighteenth-century Ottoman sources offer little explanation for the style. While commentaries from the period frequently use such phrases as “new style” (nev-ṭarz) when speaking of the buildings, they neither describe what constitutes this newness nor elucidate the motivation behind it.51 This quietness has all too often been taken to mean that the Ottoman Baroque lacked an intellectual basis.52 The architecture itself, however, tells a different story, a close reading of which should leave us in no doubt of the style’s purposeful and knowing utilization. Our most revealing documents in this regard are, not coincidentally, also the Ottoman Baroque’s most conspicuous products: a series of sultanic (imperial) mosques built throughout Istanbul during the second half of the eighteenth century. Occupying the highest place in native taxonomies of architecture, the sultanic mosque experienced a notable resurgence at this time, a development that cannot be divorced from the contemporaneous efflorescence of the

344   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Baroque. Indeed, it was with these mosques that the style—hitherto applied on a smaller scale—achieved true monumentality, proving itself as a mode fit for the most serious and charged of contexts.53 The starting point for this new breed of religious architecture was the Nuruosmaniye Mosque, constructed between 1748 and 1755 on a prominent hilltop location in the commercial heart of Istanbul’s walled city (Figures 5 and 6). The centerpiece of a larger complex that also includes such ancillaries as a college and library, the mosque was begun by Mahmud I, who died a year before its inauguration, and completed by his brother and successor, Osman III (r. 1754–1757), after whom it is named.54 It had been well over a century since any sultan had built a mosque in the capital, for tradition dictated that only those rulers who had triumphed in war should commemorate themselves in this way.55 Mahmud’s reconquest of Belgrade allowed him to revive the practice, as noted by the French diplomat and long-time resident of the Ottoman Empire Claude-Charles de Peyssonnel (d. 1790), who wrote that the sultan “had legally acquired this right” and so “erected a very beautiful [mosque] within the capital.”56 The return of this long-dormant architectural category was noteworthy enough to inspire a lengthy monographic account entitled Tārīḫ-i cāmiʿ-i şerīf-i Nūr-ı ʿOs̱mānī (History of the Noble Mosque of Nuruosmaniye). Authored by a certain Ahmed Efendi, who had served as the mosque’s financial secretary during its construction, the Tārīḫ belongs to a rare group of Ottoman texts concerning esteemed works of architecture.57 Ahmed

Figure 5  Nuruosmaniye Mosque, Istanbul, 1748–55, aerial view from the northwest, with the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (1609–17) visible in the right background. Albumen print by Ali Rıza Bey, ca. 1880s. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Prints and Photographs Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection (LC-USZ62-78322)

ottoman baroque   345

Figure 6  Nuruosmaniye Mosque, interior view looking toward the qibla (principal) wall. Photo by Ünver Rüstem

Efendi strives throughout his narrative to situate the Nuruosmaniye in a long line of sultanic landmarks going back to the empire’s heyday, but he also emphasizes the originality of this latest iteration, which he dubs the “noble mosque of graceful new style” (cāmiʿ-i şerīf-i nev-ṭarz-ı laṭīf).58 The building’s architecture more than justifies Ahmed Efendi’s evaluation. Designed by a Greek ḳalfa called Simeon (the first non-Muslim architect to be credited with a sultanic mosque),59 the Nuruosmaniye stands in obvious contrast to earlier monuments, and in particular its immediate forerunner, the mosque built by Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–1617) between 1609 and 1617 (Figure 5). Where this and other “classical” imperial mosques had been characterized by their pyramidal massing of domes and semidomes, the Nuruosmaniye’s square prayer hall is crowned by a single large dome that rests on four enormous high arches.60 More unexpected still is the adjoining courtyard, which uniquely for Ottoman mosque architecture, is semielliptical in plan rather than quadrangular. The novelty of the mosque’s overall form is matched by that of its decorative stonework, particularly the triangular semivaults above its doors, which are carved with a bewildering array of Baroque moldings that take the place of traditional muqarnas (Figure 7). With their undulating stone pinnacles, the lofty twin minarets

346   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 7  Comparison of the semivault and dome above the main entrance of the mid-sixteenthcentury Süleymaniye Mosque (left) with their counterparts at the Nuruosmaniye Mosque (right). Left: Photo by Rabe! Creative Commons License (CC BY-SA 3.0). Right: Photo by Ünver Rüstem

add to the impression of newness, though in this case the effect is the result of a late nineteenth-century repair—older images show the towers with their original coneshaped lead caps (Figure 5).61 Whether Ottoman or Western, those who saw the Nuruosmaniye in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries wrote of it in overwhelmingly glowing terms, often deeming it the city’s finest mosque. Ahmed Efendi asserts that it “has no like or counterpart not only in the capital, but indeed in [all] the lands of Islam,” while Flachat calls it “the most beautiful [mosque] that one can see in the Empire, after one has seen St. Sophia.”62 Both men commend the mosque’s uncluttered single-domed prayer hall and preponderance of white stonework, and they are echoed by several other Ottoman and  Western commentators, whose overlapping sentiments attest to a widely shared aesthetic sensibility.63 Among the Nuruosmaniye’s most enthusiastic admirers was Peyssonnel, who wrote that the mosque had been designed by Sultan Mahmud himself on the basis of “the most elegant designs and models to be found in Europe.” Mahmud’s design was supposedly found to be too church-like and had to be toned down into “a monstrous mixture of the European and Turkish Style, though still magnificent and ­elegant”—monstrous here meaning hybrid rather than ugly.64

ottoman baroque   347 Fanciful as it is, Peyssonnel’s story fittingly evokes the thoroughness with which the mosque’s constituent elements have been combined. That Simeon and his team consulted European models is obvious enough, but there is a new maturity to the resultant synthesis: the recognizably Corinthianizing column capitals of the 1740s, for example, have here given way to various new designs with vaselike bells and prominent corner scrolls.65 A hallmark of the Ottoman Baroque from the Nuruosmaniye onward, this diverse family of “scroll capitals” typifies the extent of the style’s localization in the years following its advent.66 The move away from a more imitative kind of Baroque was evidently the outcome of a deliberate process rather than the product of Ottoman ineptitude or incomprehension. By now over a decade old, the style had become an established part of the cityscape, with the Nuruosmaniye definitively stamping it as an Ottoman concern. The sultanic foundations that followed the Nuruosmaniye further visualized the Ottoman Baroque’s canonicity, none more so than the Laleli Mosque, built between 1760 and 1764 by Mustafa III (r. 1757–1774) (Figure 8).67 Located, like the Nuruosmaniye, in the walled city, the Laleli at first appears less daringly inventive: its stonework is more restrained, and its courtyard returns to the familiar quadrangular plan. But the

Figure 8  Laleli Mosque, Istanbul, 1760–64, rear facade of the prayer hall, with the royal pavilion on the right. Photo by Ünver Rüstem

348   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque mosque’s svelte single-domed prayer hall and beautifully carved furnishings render it unmistakably Baroque, while its differences from the larger Nuruosmaniye prevent it from falling under that monument’s shadow. There is, moreover, something quite distinctive about the Laleli’s makeup: constructed of alternating courses of brick and limestone, the exterior walls are boldly striped, while the interior is gorgeously veneered in red and green stone (Figure 9). These techniques are extremely unusual by the standards of sultanic mosque architecture and hark back instead to Istanbul’s Byzantine churches, most of which had been converted into mosques.68 The Laleli’s prominent citation of the Constantinopolitan past compels us to consider another reason why the Ottomans could take on the Baroque with such self-assurance. As the former Byzantine capital, Istanbul boasted a rich corpus of late antique architecture that ultimately shared the same Greco-Roman lineage as the Baroque, so that Ottoman viewers and artists would already have been primed to appreciate the new style. The more astute among them cannot have failed to notice the real relationship between the Baroque’s all’antica vocabulary and the antique remains on their doorstep, and this awareness—by invoking the empire’s demonstrable stake in Europe’s Classical patrimony—situated the Ottomans as cultural insiders with every right to make the Baroque their own. Accordingly, some early Ottoman Baroque columns invite comparison with their likewise Corinthian-derived Byzantine counterparts, from which they borrow such features as beaded bronze collars. And in the Nuruosmaniye Mosque is a special kind of double dentil molding—its squares alternating in direction—that can only have been lifted from the Hagia Sophia.69 These Constantinopolitan references serve, for the most part, as a subtle though significant localizing device, woven into buildings that otherwise read as modern. At the Laleli, however, the rapport between the Byzantine and Baroque is fully instantiated, flaunting the Ottomans’ joint claim to both traditions. While there is no textual discourse commensurate with this sophisticated architectural statement, the buildings are not alone in asserting the Ottoman Empire’s Classical credentials. In a political report he composed for Sultan Mahmud in 1741, the Comte de Bonneval (d. 1747)—a French aristocratic renegade who, under the name Ahmed Pasha, served the Ottomans as a military adviser—states that the empire was the legitimate successor to Eastern Rome, just as France, through its kings’ descent from Charlemagne, was heir to Western Rome.70 Bonneval’s argument picks up on a much earlier Ottoman belief originating in the time of Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1444–1446, 1451–81), who styled himself “Caesar of Rome” (Ḳayṣer-i Rūm) after taking Constantinople, and it is likely that the report reflects ideas that were already circulating in Mahmud’s court.71 Another relevant document, in this instance pictorial, is an early nineteenth-century painting by an Ottoman Greek artist that shows a Christian stonemason of Istanbul standing alongside four column capitals (Figure 10). Cleverly responding to Western taxonomies of the Classical orders, the image contrasts the first capital—an old-­ fashioned muqarnas example—with the three Baroque designs that come after it. Here, as in the buildings themselves, is striking evidence of the conceptually conversant

ottoman baroque   349

Figure 9  Laleli Mosque, interior view looking toward the minbar (pulpit). Gabriel Rodriguez / © The Istanbul Documentation Project, The Trustees of Columbia University, Media Center for Art History, Department of Art History & Archaeology

Figure 10  Anonymous Ottoman-Greek artist, views of column capitals and other architectural details, painted in Istanbul, ca. 1809. Water- and bodycolor on paper. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London [D.148–1895]

350   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque environment to which the Ottoman Baroque belonged.72 The well-informed practitioners (themselves often Greek) and tastemakers populating this milieu not only understood the style’s transregional implications, but also recognized its intrinsic suitability to their own cultural context. Without forsaking its cosmopolitanism or topicality, the Ottoman Baroque could thus comfortably take its place in Istanbul’s age-old tradition of imperial architecture, rooting itself in the city that the Ottomans still officially called Constantinople (Ḳ ostạ ntị̄ niyye).73

Surface, Ceremonial, and Space In its first decade, the Ottoman Baroque had largely been limited to the architectural realm and to Istanbul. With its maturation, however, came its spread, and from the 1750s onward, the style grew increasingly prevalent in other artforms as well as in localized varieties across the empire.74 Even so, the phenomenon remained at its most influential in Istanbul’s built environment, permeating and expanding the city to produce a modern world capital emblematic of the state’s aspirations. This was no small accomplishment given that the walled peninsula—which constituted the capital proper—had long since acquired its essential contours, defined by a wealth of earlier monuments that occupied the majority of its choice locations. As the Nuruosmaniye and Laleli demonstrate, major interventions in this cityscape were certainly possible, but for the most part, the Ottoman Baroque had to work within and around the limitations imposed by an already crowded urban environment.75 It was well placed to do so by virtue of one of its most characteristic attributes: its richness of surface decoration. Scholars have often noted that the Ottoman Baroque, unlike some other versions of the style, was largely a matter of surface application that brought negligible changes to the buildings’ structures or typologies, notwithstanding such exceptions as the Nuruosmaniye’s curved courtyard.76 True though it may be, this characterization has fed into the view that the Ottoman Baroque was a lighthearted, skin-deep mode unable to compete with the grandeur of earlier monuments. In a setting like Istanbul, however, such an approach had the potential to transform the city’s texture from within, interspersing it with a luxuriant new ornamental aesthetic whose concentrated exuberance could impress even on a small scale. Take, for example, the marble fountain-cum-gate (originally one of a pair) that the grand vizier Nişancı Ahmed Pasha (d. 1753) added in 1741–1742 to the mosque complex of Mehmed the Conqueror, which had been constructed between 1463 and 1470. A relatively tiny alteration to one of Istanbul’s largest and most venerable religious sites, the fountain nevertheless stands out for the graceful carving of its niche, whose shell-topped scrolling pediment and foliate oval cartouches provide a lively counterpoint to the stately but sober arches of the flanking fifteenth-century walls.77 Downhill from the mosque in the densely packed quarter of Vefa is another eye-catching Baroque work, the primary school established in 1775 by Recai Mehmed Efendi (d. 1780), chief of the

ottoman baroque   351 Ottoman chancery. While the building is an architecturally unadventurous cube ­constructed of brick and limestone, the lower half of its main street-facing side presents a splendid wall of carved marble decoration centered on a bowfront sebīl.78 For those who passed the structure and made use of its facilities, this gorgeous facade redoubled the munificence of the patron, who had contributed not only a good work but a beautiful one. No architectonic innovations are needed to change the look of the neighborhood, and none may have been possible given the constraints of the site. In a manner that exemplifies the workings of the Ottoman Baroque more generally, the ornamented surface here becomes the very vehicle by which the building makes its impact. Baroque backdrops of this kind lent themselves especially well to the capital’s ceremonial routes, along which the sultans and other notables would process on horseback with their retinues. A superb example of such a streetscape is the Hamidiye Complex, which was erected by Sultan Abdülhamid I between 1775 and 1780 on either side of a major commercial and ceremonial thoroughfare in the intramural district of Bahçekapı (Figure 11). Originally comprising an ʿimāret, primary school, and sebīl on one side of the road and a madrasa, library, and tomb on the other, the complex has only partially survived, though old photographs show how effectively the intended ensemble embraced the street and involved passersby.79 Marking one end of the complex was the founder’s

Figure 11  Hamidiye Complex, Istanbul, 1775–80, with the sebīl in the right center. Albumen print by Basil Kargopoulo, 1875. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Pierre de Gigord Collection [96.R.14 (A11.V2.F12b)]

352   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque domed tomb, which still stands, and the now relocated sebīl, whose dazzlingly carved high-relief stonework is among the most impressive in the entire Ottoman Baroque. The placement of the sebīl—probably the most utilized of the complex’s charitable facilities—opposite the tomb insistently reminded the populace of the benefactor to whom they owed so much goodness and magnificence. The message would have become still clearer on the numerous occasions when the sultan rode in cavalcade between the buildings, their decorative splendor heightening the majesty of his own richly attired person. The power of such a scene is evocatively captured in Thomas Allom’s (d. 1872) well-known nineteenth-century depiction of a mounted sultan who, surrounded by an admiring crowd, processes through another street-lining Baroque complex, that built by the queen mother Mihrişah Sultan (d. 1805) between 1792 and 1796 near the muchfrequented shrine of Eyüp (Figure 12).80 This concern for decoratively augmenting the sultan’s route reflected a more general attentiveness to royal showmanship during the Baroque period. Although it had long been customary for the sultans to ride in stately procession each Friday to one of the city’s mosques to attend the midday prayer, the eighteenth century witnessed a number of elaborations to the practice, particularly through the use of architecture.81 Besides reinvigorating Istanbul’s ceremonial arteries with richly embellished facades, this

Figure 12  View of a newly girded sultan processing through the Mihrişah Sultan Complex, Eyüp, built 1792–96. G. Presbury after Thomas Allom, from Thomas Allom and Robert Walsh, Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor Illustrated [. . .] (London and Paris: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1838), vol. 1, plate between pp. 48–49. Engraving on paper. George Peabody Library, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore [GPL 949.61 W226 Quarto]

ottoman baroque   353 development also resulted in the creation of new venues to host and highlight the ruler’s movements. Each of the Baroque sultanic mosques was thus provided with a royal pavilion, in most cases an L-shaped structure adjoining the corner of the prayer hall where the royal tribune stands. Typically consisting of a ramped entrance, facilities for the sultan’s comfort, and a corridor leading to the adjacent tribune, pavilions of this type had been introduced early in the previous century, their purpose being to enhance both the sovereign’s experience of visiting the mosque and his subjects’ experience of watching him do so.82 But whereas seventeenth-century examples are externally ponderous structures of brick and stone that pale in comparison to the mosques they accompany, those of the Nuruosmaniye and its successors take the form of elegant stone-built passageways largely composed of arcades.83 This Baroque reformulation has turned the pavilion into an attractive, semitransparent showcase for the sultan’s ceremonial ingress and egress, so that the structure now works in tandem with the mosque as a visually meaningful extension of it. The symbiosis of parts is especially striking at the Laleli, where the pavilion’s carved marble doorway and graduated arches appear in conjunction with the prayer hall’s banded rear wall, defining one’s view of the mosque as one enters its precinct from the street (Figure 8). As well as drawing attention to royal visits as they were taking place, such pavilions also stood as embodiments of the sultan’s presence even in his absence. The same symbolism could operate in smaller kinds of structures, too, as demonstrated by the projecting royal loge that Sultan Mahmud added to the Mosque of Hacı Kemalettin in 1746. Located on the Bosphorus in the suburb of Rumelihisarı, this was an older non-sultanic mosque that Mahmud restored after a fire. The renovated building is a simple boxlike structure, in keeping with its origins as an ordinary neighborhood mosque, but on its shorefront facade is a marble bay window carried on three princely Baroque columns, their capitals carved with inverted volutes in Borrominesque fashion (Figure  13). Internally, the projection is a small room that hosted the sultan when he came to reopen the mosque; externally, it reads as a sort of abbreviated royal pavilion that forever commemorates his visit and anticipates his return. Whether Mahmud ever went back is unclear, but by bestowing his beautifully crafted loge on the mosque, he gave enduring expression to both his patronage and his presence.84 That Mahmud’s interest extended to a rather remote suburban mosque points to another key aspect of Istanbul’s architectural modernization, one again intimately tied to the visibility of the sultan. Before the eighteenth century, the majority of elite patronage had been focused on the ancient walled peninsula on the European side, but the court’s return in 1703 prompted a surge in architectural activity that spilled over into the wider city. A string of elite residences sprang up along both shores of the Bosphorus, which thus became a new processional axis continually crisscrossed by the caiques of the ruling class.85 Already conspicuous in the earlier part of the century, these edifices gained in prominence with the Ottoman Baroque, whose buoyant decorativeness magnified their effect. It is in this capacity as a marker of the city’s growth that the style acquired a spatial dimension, even if the buildings themselves rarely exhibit the degree of spatial dynamism associated with other regional Baroques. A telling case in point is

354   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 13  Royal loge of the Hacı Kemalettin Mosque (İskele Masjid), Rumelihisarı, Istanbul, added 1746. Photo by Ünver Rüstem

the now lost palace of the princess Hadice Sultan (d. 1822), partially renovated in the 1790s by the German-born artist Antoine Ignace Melling (d. 1831). One of a very small contingent of European architects working in Istanbul by the end of the century, Melling added a Western-style Neoclassical pavilion to the palace. The greater part of the building, however, had been designed in a local Baroque manner, with hipped-roofed halls, projecting bays, and a lively ornamental facade.86 Overlooking the traffic of the Bosphorus, such architecture offered the populace a vibrant demonstration of the elite’s role in building up the city. Hadice Sultan was one of many dignitaries to make their mark in this way, but it was the sovereign himself who stood to gain most from the rise in extramural patronage. No longer leading their armies on campaign as their predecessors had done, the sultans of the eighteenth century maintained an aura of command by intensifying and expanding their visibility within the capital. This became especially important after war resumed with Russia in 1768 and the empire once again began to suffer territorial losses.87 In the face of so much conflict, the continued growth of Istanbul was a vital reaffirmation of sultanic stamina and influence. It served, moreover, to underscore the ruler’s magnanimity, for beyond the proliferation of palaces, the drive to develop the suburbs also

ottoman baroque   355 produced numerous charitable institutions—baths, fountains, schools, and so on—that brought tangible benefits to ordinary inhabitants. Where religious architecture was ­concerned, this model of patronage elegantly sidestepped the old rule that discouraged militarily unsuccessful sultans from commissioning imperial mosques in the capital proper. Indeed, the Laleli was the last foundation of this kind to be established in the walled city.88 Such were the circumstances in which Abdülhamid (r. 1774–1789), while constructing his mosque-less intramural complex at Bahçekapı, decided to erect a mosque at some distance in Beylerbeyi, a quiet village on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus (Figure 14). Completed in 1778, the Beylerbeyi Mosque is a relatively modest affair that has little external decoration and at first had only a single minaret, which was replaced by a pair in the 1820s.89 The lack of ostentation was appropriate to the building’s semirural setting, but the site also inspired the unknown architect to devise an alternative means of ennobling the mosque: he designed its main entrance side (which faces the water) to resemble a suburban shoreline palace in miniature, complete with projecting lateral wings and hipped roofs. Lower and wider than the domed prayer hall to which it gives access, this pseudo-residential structure combines an entrance portico for public use with upstairs rooms reserved for the sultan, who had his own private entrance to the side. What we are seeing here is none other than a radically altered version of the earlier mosque pavilion type, which now functions not as an appendage to the mosque, but as its very facade, taking the place of the traditional courtyard in an extroverted display of

Figure 14  Beylerbeyi Mosque, Beylerbeyi, Istanbul, 1777–78, renovated 1820–21. Courtesy of Andy Teach

356   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque sultanic presence. The result is a mosque-palace hybrid that brought ruler and ruled into unprecedented conceptual proximity, recasting the prayer hall as a sort of royal chapel into which the sultan deigned to invite his subjects. As an early nineteenth-century view of Beylerbeyi by the artist Ludwig Fuhrmann (d. 1829) shows, the conceit was spectacularly dramatized whenever the sultan visited the mosque by water, his caique surrounded by the humbler boats of eager spectators.90 The Beylerbeyi’s innovative design was probably conceived as a one-off experiment in response to its location, but it met with such favor that all subsequent sultanic mosques would follow its basic pattern. It was Abdülhamid’s nephew and successor, Selim III (r.  1789–1807, d. 1808), who confirmed the model’s potential when he built his own mosque in Üsküdar, Istanbul’s largest Asian suburb (Figure 15). A committed reformer, Selim is perhaps best known for the ill-fated modern infantry that he established in 1794 with the aid of Western military advisers. This so-called New Order (Niẓām-ı Cedīd) drew considerable opposition from the janissaries and other t­raditional factions, and the sultan also had to contend with numerous outside threats, including Napoleon’s invasion of the Ottoman province of Egypt in 1798.91 In spite of these difficulties—and in part to show himself undiminished by them—Selim defiantly followed his predecessors’ example by continuing to renovate and enlarge the capital, as his mosque at Üsküdar attests. Built between 1801 and 1805 and named Selimiye in his honor, the mosque formed the crowning component of a brand-new urban district intended to advertise the sultan’s modernizing program, with gridded streets, numerous shops and factories, a printing press, and barracks. The mosque’s architect—a Greek named Foti Kalfa— referred to the best of earlier monuments in crafting his design, which combines an aggrandized reworking of the Beylerbeyi’s pavilion frontage with a lofty prayer hall that harks back to the silhouette and lavish stonework of the Nuruosmaniye.92 Making full use of the Ottoman Baroque’s arsenal of effects, the Selimiye is a rhetorical tour de force that loudly declares its founder’s regenerative ­purpose. Viewers were duly impressed, with one early-nineteenth-century British observer calling the monument “conspicuous, imperial, and well deserving attention.”93 Events did not play out as Selim had hoped, however. The mosque’s inauguration had to be postponed and downscaled after the janissaries—suspecting they would be excluded from the ceremony—threatened violence against the court. Tensions came to head in 1807, when the janissaries and their backers staged a revolt that compelled Selim to scrap the New Order, though even this was not enough to prevent his dethronement and subsequent execution.94 The Ottoman eighteenth century thus ended as it had begun with a rebellion. But Selim’s cause would soon be taken up by his cousin, Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839), who in 1826 massacred the janissaries and replaced them with a modern army.95 A few months before the massacre, Mahmud had opened a new shoreline mosque, the Nusretiye, which was patently modeled on the Selimiye and accordingly understood as a monument to military reform. The Nusretiye’s clear resemblance to its forebear does not, however, mask important differences between them. In particular, the decorative stonework of the later mosque has moved away from the Baroque toward an opulent rendition of Neoclassism, signaling a new chapter in Ottoman art history.96

ottoman baroque   357

Figure 15  Selimiye Mosque, Üsküdar, Istanbul, 1801–5, view from the southwest toward the mosque’s right side, with the royal pavilion projecting toward the foreground (the original ­minaret caps were conical). Albumen print by Abdullah frères, 1880–1893. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Prints and Photographs Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection [LOT 9541, no. 21]

Conclusion If the Ottoman Baroque ceased to be Istanbul’s dominant architectural mode after the start of the nineteenth century, it had nonetheless set the terms on which the city would continue to develop. The Nusretiye Mosque has just shown us the extent of this continuity, which manifested itself in a multitude of new shoreline mosques and palaces as well as the ongoing expansion of the suburbs. But it was, above all, by establishing a purposeful aesthetic dialogue with the wider world that the Ottoman Baroque achieved its greatest impact. Ottoman architecture therefore maintained an active and distinctive share in international visual culture until the end of the empire, producing its own versions of Neoclassicism, Eclecticism, and Art Nouveau.97 Against this artistic backdrop, the Ottoman state built on the reformist initiatives of the eighteenth century and enacted extensive overhauls of its political, social, and military institutions, often with the help of European experts. The Baroque refashioning of Istanbul thus constitutes

358   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque one of the first major instances of what is usually dubbed Ottoman “Westernization” and more correctly described as the empire’s conscious participation in wider patterns of modernity. That the Baroque was chosen for this far-reaching project should not surprise us. Already a widely esteemed visual language consanguineous with Istanbul’s antique ­heritage, the style readily offered itself to the Ottomans as a means by which to breathe new life into their capital. Not only did they take up the mode, but they also made it their own, forging a new kind of architecture to serve the empire’s image—a truly Ottoman Baroque.

Notes 1. For historiographical overviews, see Shirine Hamadeh, “Westernization, Decadence, and the Turkish Baroque: Modern Constructions of the Eighteenth Century,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 185–197; and Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 4–9, 15. For the first major study of the “Turkish Baroque,” see Doğan Kuban, Türk Barok Mimarisi Hakkında bir Deneme (Istanbul: Pulhan Matbaası, 1954), whose arguments are updated and recapitulated in Doğan Kuban, Ottoman Architecture, trans. Adair Mill (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2010), 499–550. For other traditional accounts of this ­period, see Ayda Arel, Onsekizinci Yüzyıl İstanbul Mimarisinde Batılılaşma Süreci (Istanbul: İ.T.Ü. Mimarlık Fakültesi Baskı Atölyesi, 1975); Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu, “Western Influences on Ottoman Architecture in the 18th Century,” in Das Osmanische Reich und Europa 1683 bis 1789: Konflikt, Entspannung und Austausch, ed. Gernot Heiss and Grete Klingenstein (Munich: Oldenbourg,  1983), 153–178; Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “The Synthesis of East and West in the Ottoman Architecture of the Tulip Period,” Oriental Art 48, no. 4 (2002): 2–13; Ali Uzay Peker, “Western Influence on the Ottoman Empire and Occidentalism in the Architecture of Istanbul,” Eighteenth Century Life 26, no. 3 (2002): 139–164; and Turgut Saner, “Exotic Yet Local. A Brief Essay on the Reception of European Styles in the Ottoman Architecture of the 18th Century,” in The Phenomenon of “Foreign” in Oriental Art, ed. Annette Hagedorn (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2006), 157–163. 2. See, for example, Hamadeh, “Westernization, Decadence, and the Turkish Baroque,” 193–194; and Nasser Rabbat, “Islamic Architecture as a Field of Historical Enquiry,” Architectural Design 74, no. 6 (2004): 20. 3. My phrasing is borrowed from the title of a work paradigmatic of this effort: Hellen Hills, ed., Rethinking the Baroque (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). This volume includes an essay that is ostensibly about the Ottoman Baroque but, inexplicably, focuses instead on the sixteenth century: see Howard Caygill, “The Ottoman Baroque: The Limits of Style,” in Hills, Rethinking the Baroque, 65–79. 4. See, for example, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Bailey, Baroque & Rococo (London: Phaidon, 2012), 349–395; Peter Davidson, The Universal Baroque (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Michael Snodin and Nigel Llewellyn, eds., Baroque, 1620–1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence (London: V&A, 2009).

ottoman baroque   359 5. See, for example, Aptullah Kuran, “Eighteenth Century Ottoman Architecture,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, ed. Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press; London: Feffer & Simons, Inc., 1977), 327. For an overview of such judgments, see Hamadeh, “Westernization, Decadence, and the Turkish Baroque.” 6. For a much fuller version of the argument presented here, see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque. 7. For an overview of the period, see Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923 (London: John Murray, 2005), 329–417. 8. For a historiographical overview, see Jane Hathaway, “Rewriting Eighteenth-Century Ottoman History,” Mediterranean Historical Review 19, no. 1 (2004): 29–53. 9. Exemplifying this view is Bernard Lewis’s evaluation of the mid-eighteenth-century Nuruosmaniye Mosque (discussed below), about which he states, “When a foreign influence appears in something as central to a culture as an imperial foundation and a cathedralmosque, there is clearly some faltering of cultural self-confidence.” See Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 137, discussed in Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood, “Introduction,” in “Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century,” ed. Avcıoğlu and Flood, special issue, Ars Orientalis 39 (2010): 27. 10. See Cemal Kadar, “The Question of Ottoman Decline,” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Review 4, nos. 1–2 (1997–98): 30–75, espcecially 62–67, 70–71; and Ali Yaycioglu, Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 11. See Edhem Eldem, “18. Yüzyıl ve Değişim,” Cogito 19 (1999): 189–199; and Rhoads Murphey, “Westernisation in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire: How Far, How Fast?” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23 (1999): 116–139. 12. See Tülay Artan, “Architecture as a Theatre of Life: Profile of the Eighteenth Century Bosphorus” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989); Artan, “Istanbul in the 18th Century: Days of Reconciliation and Consolidation,” in From Byzantion to Istanbul: 8000 Years of a Capital, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Sakıp Sabancı Museum,  2010), 300–312, esp. 305–308; and Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth ­ istorical backCentury (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 17–75. For the h ground, see Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 253–333. 13. For these earlier monuments, which are heavily associated with the career of the famous architect Sinan (d. 1588), see Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), 142–333; and Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion, 2011). 14. For the fountain, see Hatice Aynur and Hakan  T.  Karateke, III. Ahmed Devri İstanbul Çeşmeleri, 1703–1730 (Istanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür İşleri Daire Başkanlığı, 1995), 175–180, no. 88; Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 374; Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 89–99; and Kuban, Ottoman Architecture, 510–511. 15. On this eclectic style, see Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 85–86, 199–200, 236. For examples of its conflation with the later Baroque style, see Bailey, “Synthesis of East and West,” 2–13  (though the author does acknowledge 1740 as a turning point); Sheila  S.  Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 230; Barbara Brend, Islamic Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 180; Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986),

360   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 29; John Freely, A History of Ottoman Architecture (Southampton, UK: WIT, 2010), 355; and Michael Levey, The World of Ottoman Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 112–127. 16. Coined in the early twentieth century, the term “Tulip Era” (Lāle Devri) was popularized by the Turkish historian Ahmed Refik, whose 1915 book of the same name established the classic characterization of the period. For a transliterated edition of this work, see Ahmet Refik [Altınay], Lâle Devri (1718–1730), ed. Yücel Demirel and Ziver Öktem (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2010). For the historiography of the “Tulip Era” and revisionist perspectives on it, see Can Erimtan, Ottomans Looking West? The Origins of the Tulip Age and Its Development in Modern Turkey (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008); Dana Sajdi, “Decline, Its Discontents, and Ottoman Cultural History: By Way of Introduction,” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 1–40; and Ariel Salzmann, “The Age of Tulips: Confluence and Conflict in Early Modern Consumer Culture (1550–1730),” in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 83–106. 17. For these newer art-historical perspectives, see Artan, “Istanbul in the 18th Century”; Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, especially 3–16, 76–138; and Shirine Hamadeh, “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002): 123–148. See also the corrective works cited in the preceding note. 18. See Salzmann, “Age of Tulips,” 94–97. 19. See Bora Keskiner, Ünver Rüstem, and Tim Stanley, “Armed and Splendorous: The Jeweled Gun of Sultan Mahmud I,” in Pearls on a String: Artists, Patrons, and Poets at the Great Islamic Courts, ed. Amy Landau (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2015), 206–209. For an overview of Mahmud’s reign, see Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 355–371. 20. For these events, see Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 355–371; Virginia H. Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (Harlow, UK: Pearson/Longman, 2007), 102–128; and Robert  W.  Olson, “Jews, Janissaries, Esnaf and the Revolt of 1740 in Istanbul: Social Upheaval and Political Realignment in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 20, no. 2 (May 1977): 185–207. 21. For this reputation, see Keskiner, Rüstem, and Stanley, “Armed and Splendorous,” especially 206–219. 22. “Mahamout avoit à peine fini un édifice, qu’il en faisoit recommencer un autre.” JeanClaude Flachat, Observations sur le commerce et sur les arts d’une partie de l’Europe, de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, et même des Indes Orientales, 2 vols. (Lyon, France: Chez Jacquenod pere & Rusand, 1766), 2:26. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. For a brief overview of Flachat’s stay in the Ottoman Empire, see Jane Hathaway, “Jean-Claude Flachat and the Chief Black Eunuch: Observations of a French Merchant at the Sultan’s Court,” in Fantasy or Ethnography? Irony and Collusion in Subaltern Representation, ed. Sabra J. Webber and Margaret R. Lynd, Papers in Comparative Studies 8 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1996), 45–50. 23. See Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 96–109. 24. Following other historians of both Western and Ottoman art, I use “Baroque” as an umbrella term that, in its eighteenth-century application, includes the Rococo (which, indeed, is sometimes referred to as “Late Baroque”). Hans Theunissen, who has developed a convincing chronology for the Ottoman Baroque, prefers to use the variant

ottoman baroque   361 designation “Ottoman baroque-rococo”: see Hans Theunissen, “Dutch Tiles in 18th-Century Ottoman Baroque-Rococo Interiors: Hünkâr Sofası and Hünkâr Hamamı,” Sanat Tarihi Dergisi 18, no. 2 (October 2009): 71–135, especially 131–133. 25. For overviews of these works, see Arel, Batılılaşma Süreci, 51–52; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 64–69. 26. For the bathhouse, see Semavi Eyice, “Cağaloğlu Hamamı,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 7 (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1993), 12–13; Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 378; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 68–69. 27. For this building, see Arel, Batılılaşma Süreci, 51–52; Affan Egemen, İstanbul’un Çeşme ve Sebilleri (Resimleri ve Kitabeleri ile 1165 Çeşme ve Sebil) (Istanbul: Arıtan Yayınevi, 1993), 556–562; Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 379; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 64–68. 28. For instances of this comparison, see Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 11; and Levey, World of Ottoman Art, 112–120. For turquerie itself, see Alexander Bevilacqua and Helen Pfeifer, “Turquerie: Culture in Motion, 1650–1750,” Past and Present 221, no. 1 (2013): 75–118; Nebahat Avcıoğlu, “A Palace of One’s Own: Stanislas I’s Kiosks and the Idea of SelfRepresentation,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003); Avcıoğlu, Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1728–1876 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate 2010); Perrin Stein, “Exoticism as Metaphor: Turquerie in Eighteenth-Century French Art” (PhD diss., New York University, 1997); and Haydn Williams, Turquerie: An Eighteenth-Century European Fantasy (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014). 29. To be sure, turquerie was not, as is sometimes supposed, a frivolous style incapable of connoting important meanings (see the works cited in the preceding note), but its absence from certain architectural categories is nonetheless notable. I know of only one example of eighteenth-century Western church architecture that has anything “Turkish” about it: Vienna’s famous Karlskirche (1716–1742), whose twin towers are reminiscent of minarets. In style, however, the church is free of any Ottoman influence, and the likeliest explanation for the towers—each of which is fashioned after Trajan’s Column—is that, in referring simultaneously to Rome and Constantinople, they posit Vienna as a Third Rome. See Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 74; and Nicholas Temple, Disclosing Horizons: Architecture, Perspective and Redemptive Space (New York: Routledge, 2007), 180–183. 30. For the ʿimāret, see Semavi Eyice, “Ayasofya İmareti,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4 (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1991), 212; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 70–76. For the other works that Mahmud added to the complex, see İsmail E. Erünsal and Semavi Eyice, “Ayasofya Kütüphanesi,” Eyice, “Ayasofya Sıbyan Mektebi,” and Eyice, “Ayasofya Şadırvanı,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4 (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1991), 212–214, 216–217, 217; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 70, 75, 83; and Yavuz Sezer, “The Architecture of Bibliophilia: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Libraries” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016), 63–68. For the Ottoman afterlife of the Hagia Sophia more generally, see Gülru Necipoğlu, “The Life of an Imperial Monument: Hagia Sophia after Byzantium,” in Hagia Sophia: From the Age of Justinian to the Present, ed. Robert Mark and Ahmet Çakmak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 195–225. 31. See Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 89–90. 32. “Envāʿ-ı ṣanāyiʿ-i daḳīḳayı seyr ü temāşā içün . . . zīr ü bālā ve zevāyā-yı şettāsında vāḳiʿ der ü dīvār-ı muʿallā ve tạ̄ ḳ u kemer-i bī-hemtāsından her birine yegān yegān diḳḳat ü imʿān buyurduḳlarında [. . .].” Subhi Mehmed Efendi, with Mustafa Sami Efendi and Hüseyin

362   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Şakir Efendi, Subhî Tarihi, Sâmî ve Şâkir Tarihleri ile Birlikte (İnceleme ve Karşılaştırmalı Metin), ed. Mesut Aydıner (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2007), 763, more fully quoted in Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 74–75. 33. Subhi, Subhî Tarihi, 619–623. 34. For the Baroque as an international aesthetic of power, see Gary  B.  Cohen and Franz  A.  J.  Szabo, eds., Embodiments of Power: Building Baroque Cities in Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); and Snodin and Llewellyn, Baroque. 35. See James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 159–162. 36. For the view that the Ottomans were chronologically out of keeping with the rest of Europe, see Kuban, Ottoman Architecture, 505–506, 508. For other regions in which the  Baroque continued to flourish during the second half of the eighteenth century, see Anthony Blunt, Neapolitan Baroque & Rococo Architecture (London: A. Zwemmer, 1975); Eberhard Hempel, Baroque Art and Architecture in Central Europe, trans. Elisabeth Hempel and Marguerite Kay (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965); and Christian NorbergSchulz, Late Baroque and Rococo Architecture, English trans. (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1974). 37. For the strengthening of diplomatic ties between the Ottoman Empire and its Western neighbors during the eighteenth century, see Virginia H. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700–1783 (Leiden: E.  J.  Brill, 1995), especially 42–46; G. R. Berridge, “Diplomatic Integration with Europe before Selim III,” in Ottoman Diplomacy: Conventional or Unconventional?, ed.  A.  Nuri Yurdusev (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 114–130; Thomas Naff, “Ottoman Diplomatic Relations with Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Patterns and Trends,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, ed. Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 88–107; and Ariel Salzmann, Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 40–41. 38. Report dated February 6, 1745/45, The National Archives (UK), SP 97/56, Fol. 62a. 39. See Maximilian Hartmuth, “The Balkans in an Age of Baroque? Transformations in Architecture, Decoration, and Patterns of Patronage and Cultural Production in Ottoman Europe, 1718–1856” (master’s thesis, Koç University, 2006), 30–33; and Nikola Samardžić, “The Emergence of the Baroque in Belgrade,” in The Peace of Passarowitz, 1718, ed. Charles Ingrao, Nikola Samardžić, and Jovan Pešalj (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011), 255–266. 4 0. See Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 97–98; Theunissen, “Dutch Tiles,” 111–115. 41. See Kadı Ömer Efendi, “Kadı Ömer Efendi: Mahmud  I.  Hakkında 1157/1744–1160/1747 Arası Ruznâme,” ed. Özcan Özcan (thesis, Istanbul University, 1965), 56, 58. 42. For the Sofa Kiosk, see Sedad Hakkı Eldem, Köşkler ve Kasırlar, 2 vols. ([Istanbul]: Devlet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi, 1969–73), 2:259–267; Eldem and Feridun Akozan, Topkapı Sarayı: Bir Mimari Araştırma ([Istanbul], 1981), 30, 79; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 99–100. 43. The brazier (Topkapı Palace Museum, inv. 4/2) is made mostly of similor, a brass alloy developed in 1721 and valued for its resemblance to gold. See Béatrix Saule et al., Topkapi à Versailles: Trésors de la cour ottomane, exh. cat. (Paris: Association française d’action artistique: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999), 330. For the broader context in which the brazier and its missing pair were gifted to Mehmed Saʿid Pasha, see John Whitehead, “Royal Riches and Parisian Trinkets: The Embassy of Saïd Mehmet Pacha to

ottoman baroque   363 France in 1741–1742 and Its Exchange of Gifts,” The Court Historian 14, no. 2 (December 2009): 161–175. 44. For examples of such imported goods, see Artan, “Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Princesses as Collectors: Chinese and European Porcelains in the Topkapı Palace Museum,” in “Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century,” ed. Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood, special issue, Ars Orientalis 39 (2010): 113–147; and Fanny Davis, “The Clocks and Watches of the Topkapı Palace Museum,” Journal of Turkish Studies 8 (1984): 41–54. 45. For these books and prints, see Gül İrepoğlu, “Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Hazinesi Kütüphanesindeki Batılı Kaynakar Üzerine Düşünceler,” Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Yıllığı 1 (1986): 56–72; Feryal İrez, “Topkapı Sarayı Harem Bölümü’ndeki Rokoko Süsleminin Batılı Kaynakları,” Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Yıllığı 4 (1990): 21–54; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 30, 34, 85–88, 206–207. Flachat discusses the use made of these books by their Ottoman owners: see Flachat, Observations, 2:225; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 82–83, 104. 46. See, for example, Flachat, Observations, 2:204–206, 225, 255–256. 47. See Dimitrie Cantemir, The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire, trans. N. Tindal, 2 parts (London: James, John, and Paul Knapton, 1734–1735), part 2, 294–295, n.  32; Maurice M. Cerasi “Town and Architecture in the 18th Century,” in “Istanbul, Constantinople, Byzantium,” special issue, Rassegna 72 (1997): 49–51; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 46–54, 82–96. 48. For the transnational connections of non-Muslim Ottomans, whose reasons for traveling abroad also included education, see Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 201–223; Mathieu Grenet, “A Business alla Turca? Levant Trade and the Representation of Ottoman Merchants in Eighteenth-Century European Commercial Literature,” in Global Economies, Cultural Currencies of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz, with Tara Czechowski (Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, 2012), 47–50; Christine Philliou, “Phanariot Hanedans from the Ottoman Empire to the World around It (1669–1856),” in Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages, ed. Christopher  H.  Johnson, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Francesca Trivellato (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 177–199; and Traian Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” Journal of Economic History 20, no. 2 (June 1960): 234–313. 49. The Catholic Church, for example, succeeded in gaining a large number of Ottoman Armenian converts during this period: see Charles A. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1923 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 153–220. For the architectural dimension of this development, see Paolo Girardelli, “Architecture, Identity, and Liminality: On the Use and Meaning of Catholic Spaces in Late Ottoman Istanbul,” Muqarnas 22 (2005): 233–264, especially 241–248. It should be noted, however, that Ottoman Christians remained by and large rooted in the empire’s own cultural practices and attitudes: see Murphey, “Westernisation,” 131–139. 50. See Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 94–96. 51. On this discourse of novelty, see Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 216–219. 52. See, for example, Kuran, “Eighteenth Century Ottoman Architecture,” 327. 53. The contemporaneity of these developments is one of the central concerns of my book: see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque. For the sultanic mosques as a category, see Howard Crane,

364   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque “The Ottoman Sultan’s Mosques: Icons of Imperial Legitimacy,” in The Ottoman City and Its Parts: Urban Structure and Social Order, ed. Irene A. Bierman, Rifa’at A. Abou-El-Haj, and Donald Preziosi (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1991), 173–243. 54. For the mosque and its complex, see Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 382–387; Pia Hochhut, Die Moschee Nûruosmâniye in Istanbul: Beiträge zur Baugeschichte nach osmanischen Quellen (Berlin: K. Schwarz, 1986); Kuban, Ottoman Architecture, 526–536; Ali Uzay Peker, “Return of the Sultan: Nuruosmânîye Mosque and the Istanbul Bedestan,” in Constructing Cultural Identity, Representing Social Power, ed. Cânâ Bilsel et al. (Pisa: Plus-Pisa University Press, 2010), 139–157; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 111–169; Murat Sav, ed., Nuruosmaniye Camii: Külliyenin Algısı ve 2010–2014 Restorasyon Çalışmaları (Istanbul: Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü/Kadıoğlu İnşaat Taahhüt Kollektif Şirketi, 2016); and Selva Suman, “Questioning an ‘Icon of Change’: The Nuruosmaniye Complex and the Writing of Ottoman Architectural History,” METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 28, no. 2 (2011): 145–166. 55. See Necipoğlu, Age of Sinan, 55–66, 514–517; and Ünver Rüstem, “The Spectacle of Legitimacy: The Dome-Closing Ceremony of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque,” Muqarnas 33 (2016): 253–344. 56. Claude-Charles de Peyssonnel, “Strictures and Remarks on the Preceding Memoirs,” in Memoirs of Baron de Tott. Containing the State of the Turkish Empire and the Crimea [. . .], by François, baron de Tott, English trans., 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1786), vol. 2, part 4, 194–195. Peyssonnel’s letter (“to the Marquis de N.”) appears as a lengthy corrective appendix to the second edition of the memoirs of François de Tott (d. 1793), a French aristocrat of Hungarian origin who served as a military adviser to the Ottomans. 57. For a full transliteration and translation of the manuscript, which is housed in the Istanbul University Rare Books Library (T.  386), see Ahmed Efendi, “Ahmed Efendi’s Tārīḫ-i cāmiʿ-i şerīf-i Nūr-ı ʿOs̱mānī (History of the Noble Mosque of Nuruosmaniye), 1756–57,” trans. and ed. Ünver Rüstem, in “Architecture for a New Age: Imperial Ottoman Mosques in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013),” 381–512. For an alternative transliteration, see Ahmed Efendi, “Tarih-i Câmi-i Nuruosmânî,” ed. Ali Öngül, Vakıflar Dergisi 24 (1994): 127–146. For analysis of the text, see Hochhut, Die Moschee Nûruosmâniye (which includes a reprint of a 1919 print edition on pp. 158–208); Doğan Kuban, “Tarih-i Cami-i Şerif-i Nur-u Osmanî ve Onsekizinci Yüzyıl Osmanlı Yapı Tekniği Üzerine Gözlemler,” in Türk ve İslâm Sanatı Üzerine Denemeler (Istanbul: Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, 1982), 123–140, imperfectly translated into English as “Notes on Building Technology of the 18th. Century. The Building of the Mosque of Nuruosmaniye at Istanbul, According to ‘Tarih-î Camii Şerif-î Nur-u Osmanî,’ ” in I. Uluslararası Türkİslâm Bilim ve Teknoloji Tarihi Kongresi, 14–18 Eylül 1981: Bildiriler = I.  International Congress on the History of Turkish-Islamic Science and Technology, 14–18 September 1981: Proceedings, 5 vols. (Istanbul: İ.T.Ü. Mimarlık Fakültesi Baskı Atölyesi, 1981), 5:271–293; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 119–123, 132–133, 137–138, 147–148, 150–154. 58. Ahmed Efendi, Tārīḫ, 398, 460. 59. For Simeon’s life and career, see Kevork Pamukciyan, “Nuruosmaniye Camii’nin Mimarı Simeon Kalfa Hakkında,” in Ermeni Kaynaklarından Tarihe Katkılar, ed. Osman Köker, vol. 3, Zamanlar, Mekânlar, İnsanlar (Istanbul: Aras, 2003), 152–154; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 120, 147–148, 152, 194, 255.

ottoman baroque   365 60. See Necipoğlu, Age of Sinan, 102–103; and Rüstem, “Spectacle of Legitimacy,” 257–262. 61. For the mosque’s restoration history, see Fatih Köse, “Arşiv Belgelerine Göre Nuruosmaniye Camii İnşâsı-Tamirleri ve Onarımları,” Vakıf Restorasyon Yıllığı 5 (2012): 25–41, especially 34 for the minarets. 6 2. “Böyle maṭbūʿ bināʾ-i zībā ve maʿbed-ḫāne-i dilküşā Āsitāne’de değil belki memālik-i İslāmiyyede daḫi naẓīri ṣūret-nümā olmayup ems̱āli nāyāb olduġu ehl-i taḥḳīḳa ḫ afī vü pūşīde değildir.” Ahmed Efendi, Tārīḫ , 430, 494. “La mosquée que Sultan Mahamout a fait bâtir est sans contredit la plus belle qu’on puisse voir dans l’Empire, quand on a vu Ste. Sophie.” Flachat, Observations, 1:402. 63. See Şemʿdanizade Süleyman Efendi, Şem’dânî-zâde Fındıklılı Süleyman Efendi Târihi: Mür’i’t-Tevârih, ed. M.  Münir Aktepe, 3 vols. (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Matbaası, 1976–80), 2A:6; Cosimo Comidas de Carbognano [Kozmas Gomidas Kömürciyan], Descrizione topografica dello stato presente di Costantinopoli arricchita di figure, introduced by Vincenzo Ruggieri (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1992), 42; Ghukas Inchichean [Ğ. İncicyan], XVIII. Asırda İstanbul, trans. and ed. Hrand  D.  Andreasyan, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Baha Matbaası, 1976), 50; Antoine-François Andréossy, comte, Constantinople et le Bosphore de Thrace, pendant les années 1812, 1813, et 1814, et pendant l’année 1826 [. . .] (Paris: Théophile Barrois, Benj. Duprat, J. S. Merlin, 1828), 127; John Cam Hobhouse, Baron Broughton, A Journey through Albania, and Other Provinces of Turkey in  Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the Years 1809 and 1810, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: James Cawthorn, 1813), 2:973–974; and Walter Colton, Visit to Constantinople and Athens (New York: Leavitt, Lord and Co., 1836), 55–56. For analysis of these commentaries, see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 154–157, 169, 209. 64. Peyssonnel, “Strictures and Remarks,” 195–196. The wording of the original French is somewhat different: “Il en résulta un monstre, mais un monstre qui réunit la majesté & l’agrément.” Claude-Charles de Peyssonnel, Lettre de M. de Peyssonnel [. . .]. Amsterdam, 1785, 37. 65. The plan of the complex’s library, for instance, has been convincingly tied to that of Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: see Turgut Saner, “18. Yüzyıl İstanbul Kütüphanelerinde Kullanım, Mekan ve Tipolojik Esinlenmeler,” Sanat Tarihi Defterleri 13–14 (2010): 187–196; and Sezer, “Architecture of Bibliophilia,” 174–177. 66. The term “scroll capital” is my own: see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 286n95. 67. For the mosque and its complex, see Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 388–391; Zeynep Karaali, “Laleli Külliyesi İnşaatının Arşiv Kaynakları (1173–1178/1760–1764)” (master’s thesis, Istanbul University, 1999); Kuban, Ottoman Architecture, 540–543; Aras Neftçi, “Lâleli Külliyesi’nin İnşaat Süreci” (PhD diss., Istanbul Technical University, 2002); and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 182–198, 210–211. 68. See Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 195–196. For an overview of Istanbul’s converted churches, see Süleyman Kırımtayıf, Converted Byzantine Churches in Istanbul: Their Transformation into Mosques and Masjids (Istanbul: Ege Yayınları, 2001). 69. See Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 198–199, 201. For discussion of the little-noted Byzantinizing aspects of eighteenth-century Ottoman architecture, see Maurice Cerasi, “Historicism and Inventive Innovation in Ottoman Architecture, 1720–1820,” in 7 Centuries of Ottoman Architecture: “A Supra-National Heritage,” ed. Nur Akın, Afife Batur, and Selçuk Batur (Istanbul: YEM Yayın, 2001), 34–42; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 198–207; Ünver Rüstem, “Spolia and the Invocation of History in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,”

366   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque in Spolia Reincarnated: Afterlives of Objects, Materials, and Spaces in Anatolia from Antiquity to the Ottoman Era, ed. Ivana Jevtić and Suzan Yalman (Istanbul: ANAMED, 2018), 289–307; and Sezer, “Architecture of Bibliophilia,” 153–161. 70. See “Mémoire du Comte de Bonneval donné a la Sublime Porte par ordre du Grand Seigneur Le 4. fevrier 1741,” Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de la Courneuve, 133CP (Turquie)/108, fols. 67a–89a, discussed in Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 204–205. For Bonneval’s life and career, see Albert Vandal, Le pacha Bonneval (Paris: Cercle Saint-Simon, 1885). 7 1. For Mehmed the Conqueror’s use of the style and its relationship to his artistic patronage, see Gülru Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 124–141, 249; Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative Translation: Artistic Conversations with Renaissance Italy in Mehmed II’s Constantinople,” Muqarnas 29 (2012): 1–81; and Julian Raby, “El Gran Turco: Mehmet the Conqueror as a Patron of the Arts of Christendom” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1980). 72. For further discussion of this painting, see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 210. The painting was commissioned by the British diplomat Stratford Canning (d. 1880) in about 1809 as part of a larger series of images showing Istanbul and its inhabitants: see Charles Newton, Images of the Ottoman Empire (London: V&A, 2007), 19, 21–29. 73. On the city’s official and popular names, see Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 57–58. For the continuities and changes between the city in its Byzantine and Ottoman incarnations, see Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). 74. For examples of the style outside architecture, see Şule Aksoy, “Kitap Süslemelerinde Türk-Barok-Rokoko Üslûbu,” Sanat 3, no. 6 (June 1977): 126–136; and Günsel Renda, Batılılaşma Döneminde Türk Resim Sanatı, 1700–1850 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1977). For regional instances of Ottoman Baroque architecture, see Ayda Arel, “Gothic Towers and Baroque Mihrabs: The Post-Classical Architecture of Aegean Anatolia in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 212–218; Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 387–388; Maximilian Hartmuth, “Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Architecture and the Problem of Scope: A Critical View from the Balkan ‘Periphery,’ ” in Thirteenth International Congress of Turkish Art: Proceedings, ed. Géza Dávid and Ibolya Gerelyes (Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 2009), 295–307; Hartmuth, “Die Kunst des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts im unteren Donauraum (Rumänien, Bulgarien, Ukraine) in Zusammenhang mit dem Phänomen Barock,” in Barocke Kunst und Kultur im Donauraum: Beiträge zum Internationalen Wissenschaftskongress, 9.–13. April 2013 in Passau und Linz, ed. Karl Möseneder, Michael Thimann, and Adolf Hofstetter (Petersburg: Michael Imhof, 2014), 177–185; Agnieszka Dobrowolska and Jarosław Dobrowolski, The Sultan’s Fountain: An Imperial Story of Cairo, Istanbul, and Amsterdam (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2011; and Hans Theunissen, “Dutch Tiles in 18th-Century Ottoman Baroque-Rococo Interiors: The Sabil-Kuttab of Sultan Mustafa III in Cairo,” Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies 9, no. 3 (2006): 1–283. 75. See Cerasi, “Town and Architecture,” 42, 45–48. 76. See, for example, Kuban, Türk Barok Mimarisi, 133–136; and Kuran, “Eighteenth Century Ottoman Architecture,” 315–319. 77. For this fountain, see Kuban, Türk Barok Mimarisi, 106; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 64, 65–68, 215, 282n26.

ottoman baroque   367 78. For this building, see Cerasi, “Town and Architecture,” 39 and figs. 10–11; Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 397; and Doğan Kuban, “Recai Mehmed Efendi Sıbyan Mektebi ve Sebili,” in Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 6 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı, 1994), 311. 79. For the complex and its elements, see İ. Birol Alpay, “I. Sultan Abdülhamid Külliyesi ve Hamidiye Medresesi,” Sanat Tarihi Yıllığı 8 (1978): 1–22; Ahmet Hamdi Bülbül, “IV. Vakıf Han’ın Yerindeki Önemli Eser: Hamidiye İmareti,” Vakıf Restorasyon Yıllığı 4 (2012): 6–16; Müjgân Cunbur, “I. Abdülhamid Vakfiyesi ve Hamidiye Kütüphanesi,” Dil ve TarihCoğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi 22 (1964): 17–69; Semavi Eyice, “Hamidiye Külliyesi,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 15 (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1997), 465–468; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 222–234. 80. For this complex and Allom’s view of it, see Thomas Allom and Robert Walsh, Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor Illustrated [. . .], 2 vols. (London and Paris: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1838), 1:48–49; and Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 410–411. 81. On these processions both before and during the eighteenth century, see Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 31, 37–39; Crane, “Ottoman Sultan’s Mosques,” 206, 221–225; Mehmet İpşirli, “Osmanlılarda Cuma Selâmlığı (Halk-Hükümdar Münâsebetleri Açısından Önemi),” in Prof. Dr. Bekir Kütükoğlu’na Armağan (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1991), 459–471; Necipoğlu, Age of Sinan, 33–34; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 23, 127–128, 134–136, 232–233. 82. See Aptullah Kuran, “The Evolution of the Sultan’s Pavilion in Ottoman Imperial Mosques,” Islamic Art 4 (1990–91): 281–301; Lucienne Thys-Şenocak, “The Yeni Valide Mosque Complex of Eminönü, Istanbul (1597–1665): Gender and Vision in Ottoman Architecture,” in Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, ed. D. Fairchild Ruggles (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 69–89, especially 74–77; and Rüstem, “The Spectacle of Legitimacy,” 262–270. 83. See Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 124–133, 174, 187–189. 84. For this mosque and Mahmud’s patronage of it, see Ayvansarayi Hüseyin Efendi (enlarged by ʿAli Satı), The Garden of the Mosques: Hafız Hüseyin al-Ayvansarayî’s Guide to the Muslim Monuments of Ottoman Istanbul, trans. and ed. Howard Crane (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 438–441; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 79–82, 91–92, 134. 85. See Artan, “Architecture as a Theatre of Life”; Artan, “Istanbul in the 18th Century: Days of Reconciliation and Consolidation,” 305–308; and Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 17–75. 86. For the palace, see Artan, 1994. “Hatice Sultan Sahilsarayı,” in Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı, 1994), 19–20; Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 216–217, 220–221; and Jacques Perot, Frèdèric Hitzel, and Robert Anhegger, Hatice Sultan ile Melling Kalfa: Mektuplar, trans. Ela Güntekin (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2001), 12–14. On the presence of Western architects in eighteenth-century Istanbul more generally, see Paolo Girardelli, “From Andrea Memmo to Alberto Blanc: Metamorphoses of Classicism in the Italian Buildings for Diplomacy (1778–1889),” in Italian Architects and Builders in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Design across Borders, ed. Paolo Girardelli and Ezio Godoli (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 12; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 52–53, 92–94. 87. For this war and its wider political context, see Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 129–179; and Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 372–412.

368   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 88. On the growth and significance of suburban patronage in the realm of royal mosque architecture, see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 248–250. 89. For the mosque, see Mehmed Rebii Hâtemi Baraz, Teşrifat Meraklısı Beyzâde Takımının Oturduğu bir Kibar Semt Beylerbeyi, 2 vols. (Istanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür İşleri Daire Başkanlığı, 1994), 1:110–118; Selçuk Batur, “Beylerbeyi Camii,” in Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı, 1994), 203–205; Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 397–399; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 234–250. 90. See Edward Raczyński, Dziennik podróży do Turcyi odbytey w roku MDCCCXIV (Wrocław, Poland: Drukiem Grassa, Bartha i Kompanii, 1821), plates 43–44; Raczyński, Malerische Reise in einigen Provinzen des Osmanischen Reichs, trans. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (Breslau [Wrocław]: Grass, Barth, 1825), 122–126; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 245–247. 91. For Selim’s reign and reforms, see Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 180–258; Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 389–422; Stanford J. Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789–1807 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Yaycioglu, Partners of the Empire, 38–63. 92. For the mosque and its accompanying district, see Selçuk Batur, “Selimiye Camii,” Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 6 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı, 1994), 512–515; Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 413; Kuban, Ottoman Architecture, 545; and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 256–265. 93. Charles MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828. A Residence of Sixteen Months in the Turkish Capital and Provinces: With an Account of the Present State of the Naval and Military Power, and of the Resources of the Ottoman Empire (London: Saunders and Otley, 1829), 465n. 94. For these events, see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 262–263; Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 243–252; Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 414–422; Shaw, Ottoman Empire, 271–274; and Yaycioglu, Partners of the Empire, 157–202. 95. For Mahmud’s reign and reforms, see Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 259–398; and Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 422–446. 96. For the Nusretiye Mosque, see Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 417–418; Kuban, Ottoman Architecture, 631–633; Ünver Rüstem, “Victory in the Making: The Symbolism of Istanbul’s Nusretiye Mosque,” in Art, Trade and Culture in the Islamic World and Beyond: From the Fatimids to the Mughals. Studies Presented to Doris Behrens-Abouseif, ed. Alison Ohta, Michael Rogers, and Rosalind Wade Haddon (London: Gingko Library, 2016), 92–115; Pars Tuğlacı, The Role of the Balian Family in Ottoman Architecture, English translation (Istanbul: Yeni Çığır Bookstore, 1990), 47–52; and Alyson Wharton[-Durgaryan], The Architects of Ottoman Constantinople: The Balyan Family and the History of Ottoman Architecture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 103–104. 97. See Çelik, Remaking of Istanbul, esp. 126–154; Goodwin, Ottoman Architecture, 421–427; Kuban, Ottoman Architecture, 605–678; Wharton, Architects of Ottoman Constantinople; Ahmet  A.  Ersoy, Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the  Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015); Ersoy, “Architecture and the Search for Ottoman Origins in the Tanzimat Period,” in “History and Ideology: Architectural Heritage of the ‘Lands of Rum,’ ” ed. Sibel Bozdoğan and Gürlu Necipoğlu, special issue, Muqarnas 24 (2007): 117–139; and Turgut Saner, 19. Yüzyıl İstanbul Mimarlığında “Oryantalizm” (Istanbul: Pera Turizm ve Ticaret, 1998).

ottoman baroque   369

Further Reading Arel, Ayda. “Gothic Towers and Baroque Mihrabs: The Post-Classical Architecture of Aegean Anatolia in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 212–218. Artan, Tülay. “Arts and Architecture.” In The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839. Edited by Suraiya Faroqhi, 408–80. Vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Turkey. Edited by Metin Kunt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Artan, Tülay. “Istanbul in the 18th Century: Days of Reconciliation and Consolidation.” In From Byzantion to Istanbul: 8000 Years of a Capital, exh. cat., 300–312. Istanbul: Sakıp Sabancı Museum, 2010. Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. “The Synthesis of East and West in the Ottoman Architecture of the Tulip Period.” Oriental Art 48, no. 4 (2002): 2–13. Cerasi, Maurice M. “Town and Architecture in the 18th Century.” Rassegna 72 (1997): 36–51. Girardelli, Paolo. “Architecture, Identity, and Liminality: On the Use and Meaning of Catholic Spaces in Late Ottoman Istanbul.” Muqarnas 22 (2005): 233–264. Godfrey Goodwin. A History of Ottoman Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971. Hamadeh, Shirine. “Westernization, Decadence, and the Turkish Baroque: Modern Constructions of the Eighteenth Century.” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 185–198. Hamadeh, Shirine. The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Kuban, Doğan. Ottoman Architecture. Translated by Adair Mill. Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2010. Kuran, Aptullah. “Eighteenth Century Ottoman Architecture.” In Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History. Edited by Thomas Naff and Roger Owen. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977: 303–327. Peker, Ali Uzay. “Western Influence on the Ottoman Empire and Occidentalism in the Architecture of Istanbul.” Eighteenth Century Life 26, no. 3 (2002): 139–164. Rüstem, Ünver. Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Saner, Turgut. “Exotic Yet Local. A Brief Essay on the Reception of European Styles in the Ottoman Architecture of the 18th Century.” In The Phenomenon of “Foreign” in Oriental Art. Edited by Annette Hagedorn, 157–163. Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert Verlag, 2006. Suman, Selva. “Questioning an ‘Icon of Change’: The Nuruosmaniye Complex and the Writing of Ottoman Architectural History.” METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 28, no. 2 (2011): 145–166. Yenişehirlioğlu, Filiz. “Western Influences on Ottoman Architecture in the 18th Century.” In Das Osmanische Reich und Europa 1683 bis 1789: Konflikt, Entspannung und Austausch. Edited by Gernot Heiss and Grete Klingenstein. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983: 153–178.

chapter 15

Ba roqu e Oper a Downing A. Thomas

If one had to identify what distinguishes the “Baroque” from the “Enlightenment” or the “Renaissance” or “Romanticism,” it would be that the “Baroque” conveys an ­in-betweenness that is absent in the other terms. “Enlightenment” designates an arrival, the advent or exposure of truths previously unrecognized or unrealized. “Renaissance” very clearly signifies rebirth, a new coming into being. The Baroque points to an era between two periods whose identity is shaped by acts of birth or disclosure. Victor-L. Tapié characterized the Baroque as “a child of the Renaissance,” clearly designating its status as coming after and dependent on the Renaissance.1 As a term used by scholars to designate an aesthetic and historical period, the Baroque is somehow modern—coming after the great Renaissance—yet not really part of modernity. At the same time, as scholarly and philosophical writings from the 1980s attest, the Baroque connects to questions and themes that have postmodern resonance.2 There is an unsettled quality to the aesthetic objects identified as belonging to the Baroque: in Tapié’s typography, the Baroque appeals “to imagination and sensibility” and seeks “to arouse emotion rather than satisfy logic or reason.”3 Its objects lie in between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; and they are also mobile, making concerns and tastes of the past alive in the present time. Clearly, these terms do not designate any external reality, nor are they even coherent designations for agreed-upon historical periods or stylistic trends across disciplines. However, their usage and the connotations they vehicle are here to stay, and have been part of literary, musical, and historical criticism since the eighteenth century. In the field of music history, where opera resides today as an object of study, the use of the term “baroque” echoes the in-betweenness mentioned above. For early modern commentators, the term “baroque” referred to music that was perceived to be bizarre, irregular, or extravagant, in other words deviant from a supposedly standard or normal practice. In considering the emergence of the Baroque as a period, music historians point to Claudio Monteverdi’s codification of “seconda pratica,” where composition was shaped by and aligned with text, as distinguished from the “prima pratica” of composers such as Josquin des Prez, whose music strictly followed the dictates of counterpoint. According to the late Claude Palisca, the earliest appearance of the term “baroque” in

baroque opera   371 the arts occurred in a satirical letter published following the premiere of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1733 opera, Hippolyte et Aricie.4 The letter in question nicely encapsulates many of the core identity markers of baroque opera in the French context. The anonymous Lettre de M. *** à Mlle. *** sur l’origine de la musique is framed as a gallant offering from an older and presumably wiser man to an ingenue, a woman who has had many suitors but has not yet been touched by love. The narrator describes the encounter between Eros and Psyché to characterize the language of true love: “it speaks little, simply, avoids affected turns of phrase; its language is vivid, full of innocence and expression.”5 One day, the daughter of Eros and Psyché used a reed to imitate the language of love: “she found a way to paint in sounds the various agitations of a heart in love: melancholy, tears, delights, tender and innocent joy.”6 What follows in the letter is a narrative description of a scene that functions as a miniature baroque opera, populated by gods who fly through clouds to a distant and verdant land, identified as Cythera, and by amorous shepherds who imitate with flutes and bagpipes a language invented by the gods. In this “most pleasant spectacle ever,” the music is perfectly complemented by the expression of the dance: “the shepherds and shepherdesses danced several of these ballet movements . . . with eyes closed, one could guess the dancers’ roles and imagine the various ballet characters, so perfectly was the expression of the music matched to the dance.”7 As described in the letter, the participants also doubled as spectators, in a seamless whole, as if part of a single aesthetic organism, singing, dancing, and simultaneously feeling the effects of the spectacle: “it seemed as if Nature alone had produced the music and the dance; and without noticing it, one felt the most delicate nuances of the gentle emotions expressed by the sounds.”8 In contrast, when Venus—characterized here as false love—attempts to create a theatrical scene to “imitate this beautiful landscape,” she fails.9 In the place of the harmonious spectacle described earlier, the music was “constrained”; all the elements of the spectacle “fled from nature and sentiment”; “it was gratuitously dissonant . . . the singular was baroque, and fury [merely] a racket.”10 Since these mythological times, the author concludes, these two forms of music have spread throughout the world. One must use one’s heart and taste to determine which form is true and which one is false. This short text that introduced the term “barocque” [sic] into the critical vocabulary of musical and theatrical appreciation, indirectly applied in this instance to Rameau’s first opera, underscores a foundational characteristic of French baroque opera. Of all the qualities that have been identified with baroque music and opera, it is music’s ­function as a language and that language’s affective elements that remain the most ­persistent and useful in describing the identity and purpose of opera from this period. As the anonymous author of the Lettre made abundantly clear, the currency of opera was sentiment; and sentiment was conveyed through music which was, along with dance, the language identified as best adapted to this task. The claim that the letter’s recipient should be able to distinguish between those suitors who speak a false language and those who speak the truth goes hand in hand with his claim that she must be able to tell the difference between a music that speaks to the soul, and one that merely teases (or tortures) the senses.

372   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque The fundamental assumption is that tasteful music functions simultaneously to express sentiment and to move the listener-spectator. Indeed, the three core elements of the baroque operatic spectacle—poetry, music, and dance—are defined by their ability to express and convey passion. This general function of theater, enhanced even further in opera, is succinctly described by Blaise Pascal, albeit to condemn the entire theatrical enterprise: “it is such a natural and delicate representation of the passions that it moves them and arouses them in our hearts, above all love.”11 When music strays from this model, it loses its tie to meaning and therefore its ability to affect the listener, becoming incomprehensible (“tintamare”). Jean-Jacques Rousseau later codified this meaning of “baroque” in his Dictionnaire de musique: “baroque music is one whose harmony is vague [confuse], laden with modulations and dissonances, whose singing is harsh and unnatural, whose intonation is difficult, and whose movement is constrained.”12 Baroque music in this sense is music whose communicative function is prevented because its means of communication (harmony, melody, rhythm) are overwrought. What we refer to as French baroque opera occurs, as it were, between the two poles of the Lettre’s polemical antithesis, opposing the ideal and (according to the Lettre) unrivaled aesthetic model of Jean-Baptiste Lully, on the one hand, and the initially contested operatic works of his most celebrated successor, Jean-Philippe Rameau, on the other.

France and Italy Together, French and Italian opera comprise the two great operatic models of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. In the larger scheme of things, French baroque opera followed Italian models. After all, it was Jules Raymond Mazarin, né Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, who first brought operatic works to Paris in the 1640s during the regency of Anne of Austria. Delighting the inner circle at court and raising hostility among a broader public because of its enormous expense and because of the Italian influence associated with them, productions of Francesco Sacrati’s La Finta pazza (1645 at the Palais Bourbon) and Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo (1647 at the Palais Royal) paved the way for the first French creations of the 1670s. In 1669, Louis XIV accorded Pierre Perrin the privilege that created the Académie Royale de Musique, otherwise known as the Opéra; and on March 3, 1671, the first French opera premiered, Pomone by Perrin and the composer Robert Cambert. A series of tragédies en musique by JeanBaptiste Lully (another naturalized Italian) and Philippe Quinault followed from 1673 to 1687, a repertory that became the unavoidable touchstone for French baroque opera through most of the following century. Prior to the emergence of a fully-formed French opera, a number of other theatrical genres explored aesthetic options and served as operatic precursors and mostly shortlived features of the theatrical landscape. The through-sung pastorale, such as the Le Triomphe de l’amour by Charles de Bey and Michel de La Guerre from 1655, featured “shepherds, hunters, fishermen, and similar kinds of folk” and took “the stuff of the

baroque opera   373 ancients’ idylls and eclogues,” but applying to it “the economy of satiric tragedy.”13 The ballet de cour, a genre that had existed since the end of the sixteenth century, gave the young Louis XIV an opportunity to display himself and to show off his legs, for the first time in the Ballet de Cassandre by Isaac de Benserade in 1651. More importantly for baroque opera, the ballet de cour allowed Lully to develop his skills as a composer of theatrical music. The comédie-ballet, a genre which Molière developed from Les Fâcheux of 1661 to Le Malade imaginaire of 1673, placed intermèdes incorporating dance and music between the acts of the spoken comedy: “a mixture that is new to our stage.”14 There was also the relatively short-lived machine tragedy (Pierre Corneille’s Andromède of 1650, for example), which joined music with what we would call today “special effects” over a broad-brush mythological plot. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the fair theaters generated an ever-evolving repertory of works which sometimes included acrobatics, dialogue or written text, marionettes, and music, often functioning as parodies of the serious works at the Opéra.15 The fair theaters and the Opéra-Comique that was founded there in 1714 constituted a theatrical alternative to the Académie Royale de Musique, which was the official, state-sponsored theatrical institution of the period (together with the Comédie-Française). Together with the spoken genres, these forms constituted the theatrical ecosystem in which opera, starting in the 1670s, reigned supreme. Aesthetic influence, rivalry, and patronage networks mark the circulation of people and works in Europe during this period. French architectural and literary works were models to be emulated and copied; and they spread across Europe. French tragedies also became the basis for Italian operatic works. French painters and sculptors went to Rome to master their craft. Dramma per musica spread from Venice and other operatic centers in Italy across the continent, as did the most sought-after singers, poets, composers, designers, and impresarios: Agostino Steffani was appointed Kappelmeister in Hanover and later held important positions in Düsseldorf; Giuseppe Sarti worked in Vienna, Copenhagen, and St. Petersburg; Nicola Porpora spent time in London and Vienna; and Niccolò Jomelli composed works for Vienna, Mannheim, and Stuttgart.16 Dramma per musica was highly exportable, or “mercenary,” to borrow Giovan Domenico Ottonelli’s apt characterization.17 French baroque opera, by contrast, was something of an exception française, and was not generally accepted abroad. The libretti for successful Italian and French operas alike were recycled by later composers. In the case of Apostolo Zeno’s Scipione nelle Spagne (1710), for example, the libretto traveled from Barcelona to Naples, Vienna, Venice, Wofenbüttel, Genoa, Munich, Florence, and Milan, taking musical shape through multiple settings by Antonio Caldara, Alessandro Scarlatti, Tomaso Albinoni, and others.18 In France, Quinault’s and Lully’s operas were revised and revived multiple times through the mid-eighteenth century. The libretti were also adapted to new music. Quinault’s libretto for Armide, for example, was ­tailored to a new score by Carl Heinrich Graun for the court of Frederick the Great (1751). It was also translated into Italian and set by Tommaso Traetta in Parma (1761) and later in Venice by Gennaro Astarita (1773). Most famously, Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck’s Armide brought Quinault’s libretto back to Paris nearly 90 years after Lully’s setting was first staged.

374   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Opera and the Ancien Régime As Martha Feldman has explained with respect to dramma per musica, later known more colloquially as opera seria, “whatever forms of rule prevailed, opera seria thrived in the glow of old-regime sovereignty.”19 Scipione nelle Spagne (1710), for example, served the imperialist Habsburg court in Barcelona as an expression of Charles VI’s ambitions in Spain.20 Similar claims could be made with respect to the relationship between the ancien régime and French tragédie en musique. Both Italian and French opera evolved from purely courtly entertainment, with the French tragédie en musique opening, notably, with an encomium to the king that was virtually obligatory until the mid-eighteenth century. Take for example the prologue to Isis, first performed for the  court in 1677 at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. A prefatory miniature play  within the larger tragedy, the prologue to Isis opens in the palace of Fame (“La Renommée”), with Rumors (“Rumeurs”) and Noises (“Bruits”) in attendance.21 The first words sung by the chorus, set off by the martial sounds of trumpets seconded by violins, create a moment of performativity that one might call baroque par excellence: “Let us proclaim far and wide / The triumphant valor of the greatest of Heroes.”22 The prologue enacts exactly what it announces, and indeed did just that at the premiere in August, 1677, in the presence of the king and his court. The trumpets announce the grandeur of Louis XIV; and the score makes it clear that these instruments are to come in immediately following this strophe, enacting the “sound” to which the poem refers: “May the Earth and the Skies / Echo with the sound of his brilliant glory.”23 Fame insists on the self-reflexive moment of glory that is being proclaimed: “Let us speak of his virtues, let us tell of his exploits; / We can barely suffice / With all our voices.”24 Neptune arrives with an entourage of tritons, noting that his empire was the “theater” for our Hero’s war, referring to the French naval victory over the Dutch and Spain during the 1676 Franco-Dutch War.25 Quinault’s and Lully’s tragédies en musique functioned as reminders that Louis XIV’s wars allowed peace to flourish in the kingdom, creating the space for thematically pastoral diversions such as opera. The prologue to Thésée very explicitly performs this trade-off: “Let the oboes and musettes / Win out over the trumpets / And drums.”26 In Isis, Apollo and a retinue of muses enter to silence the sounds of war and to remind the audience that it is present to enjoy the pleasures of the arts. Addressing themselves to the clash of arms, Calliope and the other muses insist: “Do not disturb the charms / Of our divine concerts.”27 As David Charlton reminds us, the Opéra, the Comédie-Française, and the ComédieItalienne “amounted to the monarch’s personal property”: l’Opéra, c’est moi, as it were.28 It was for this reason that Casanova claimed that the thrill of transgression—specifically, of lèse-majesté—was the primary motivation for noblemen to seduce les filles de l’Opéra, the dancers who were featured in ballet scenes, which, themselves, were prominently featured in French baroque opera: “I remarked during that time several supernumeraries and ugly, talentless singers all of whom nevertheless lived comfortably. . . . That which

baroque opera   375 above all makes French noblemen aspire to have a fille de l’Opéra under their wing is that all these girls belong to the king in their role as members of his Académie royale de musique.”29 Very early in its history, opera moved from court to opera house, becoming a form of theater that was very much made for public consumption, however caught up in princely or royal trappings it remained. As Feldman has pointed out, opera seria was paradoxical: dominated by aristocratic patronage, it was nonetheless “attended by a mixed populace, including paying customers—some of them social climbing—and managed through various combinations of state, court, and private persons and funds.”30 In France, well into the eighteenth century, operas would premiere at court, moving to Paris relatively soon thereafter. However, some operas were only performed at court because they were commissioned for specific occasions, such as La Princesse de Navarre by Rameau and Voltaire which celebrated the 1745 wedding of the dauphin, the son of Louis XV, with the infanta Maria Teresa Rafaela of Spain.31 At the Palais-Royal, the Opéra played three times per week during the summer, and four times per week during the winter.32 There was a regular circulation of the official troupes between court and public venues. While the Comédie-Italienne usually played Versailles on Saturdays following the late autumn return of the court from Fontainebleau, starting in 1737, they performed at Versailles on Wednesday, normally assigned to music, so that the troupe could take advantage of doing shows on Saturdays in Paris, a day the Opéra was closed.33 Charlton estimates ticket prices at today’s equivalent of £60, over twice what it cost at the time to attend the Comédie-Française.34

The Nested Worlds of Baroque Opera As can be seen from the French operatic prologue examples above, the ways in which the prologue sets up the drama proper creates an effect of interlocking or nested worlds that can be considered a feature particular to baroque opera, in both Italian and French models. Indeed, the anonymous Lettre de M. *** à Mlle. *** sur l’origine de la musique with which I began my discussion of baroque opera does much the same thing, rehearsing a virtual opera within the narrative to make its point. Consider the prologue to Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronatione di Poppea (1643). The acts of the opera tell the story of how the calculating Poppaea Sabina rid herself of all the obstacles (the moralizing Seneca, her lover Otho, Nero’s wife Octavia) that were preventing her from being crowned empress alongside her lover, the emperor Nero. The prologue frames this story as that which will resolve a dispute among the gods regarding who has the greater power over humans: is it the goddess of Fortune, the goddess of Virtue, or is it the god of Love? Sacrati’s La finta pazza is structured around multiple interleaved dramas, most notably another opera that is staged during Deidamia’s feigned madness. Sometimes the operatic characters observe the action of these nested dramas, sometimes they participate in them, as Ellen Rosand has noted: “as observers, they abandon one illusion to create another, for they then appear to share the point of view of the audience rather

376   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque than that of their fellow characters. Implicitly they cross the frontier of the proscenium, temporarily renouncing ancient Greek citizenship to become modern Venetians.”35 These creations are baroque insofar as their nested dramas allow the operas to model spectatorship and citizenship, centered in emotion and feeling, in worlds that come together in the opera house. From opera’s origins to the late seventeenth century, the plots of dramma per musica “shifted from an emphasis on mythology to romance and increasingly fictionalized ­history . . . [featuring] two pairs of lovers, surrounded by a variety of comic characters, whose adventures involved separation and eventual reunion.”36 The dramatic structure of Italian opera was tightened by Zeno in the early eighteenth century, particularly after he moved from Venice to the Habsburg court: his “tightening of dramatic structure and elimination of overtly comic elements produced an eminently exportable product that served the social interests of the ancien régime and provided a suitable vehicle for the singers and musicians.”37 Pietro Metastasio, who took Zeno’s place in Vienna, continued and enhanced these reforms. The baroque technique of creating worlds within worlds, or plays within plays, fades with these developments. Musically, dramma per musica featured primarily soloists, delivering recitatives and arias in turn, with very few ensembles in the repertory. The bipartite aria was common in the mid-seventeenth century, in which a first section contrasted with a second ­section, the latter often underscoring a moral lesson or illustrative truth. In later Italian opera, ABA forms, with the aria returning to the original material, “increased in frequency and size, eventually supplanting bipartite structure as well as strophicism itself to become the dominant form for opera for the next hundred years: the da capo aria.”38 Goldoni’s Mémoires poke fun with hindsight at “these rules, which are immutable,” of the fully-evolved form of opera seria: the three principals must sing five arias each: two in the first act, two in the second, and one in the third. The second female role and the second [male] soprano can have only three, and the other singers must be happy with one or two at the most. The author of the words must provide the composer the various nuances that create the chiaroscuro of the music, and be careful that two sad arias do not come one after the other. One must divide, by the same rule, the bravura arias, the action arias, the arias di mezzo carattere, menuets, and rondos. Above all, one must be very careful not to give passionate arias, nor bravura arias, nor rondos to the secondary roles. These poor souls must be content with what they are given, and honor is forbidden to them.39

French tragédie en musique, in contrast to the dramma per musica, centered its plots in mythological and supernatural material well into the eighteenth century, involved elaborate dance sequences and choruses, and attempted a more seamless musical continuum between declamation and song. While the tragédies en musique of Quinault and Lully eschewed the stark aria-recitative contrast of opera seria, they nonetheless adapted the Italian practice of seeding airs with illustrative truths. In Atys, for example, Idas interleaves a dictum about the inevitability of love into a conversation: “Sooner or later

baroque opera   377 Love is victorious, / The most haughty defy him in vain. / One cannot refuse one’s heart / To fair eyes that solicit it.”40 When Cassiope and her sister, Merope, lament together the latter’s secret love for the hero in Persée, Cassiope marks an important truth with a similar dictum: “Only time can heal the wounds caused by love.”41 Marketing practices for audio recordings and performances have likely encouraged audiences to consider baroque opera as extending from the genre’s beginnings in late Renaissance experimentation through the end of the ancien régime, with the romantic period beginning after a short span of revolutionary upheaval and transition. However, from the perspective of most scholars, a turn away from baroque forms begins in the first half of the eighteenth century. In Italy, this shift takes shape in the above-mentioned tightening of the opera seria plots which tended toward increasing simplification, and away from embedded plots and self-reflexive scenes, such as those of La Finta pazza discussed above. There is also an aesthetic shift toward unified mood, and away from the alternating serious and comic scenes that one finds in many seventeenth-century operas. In La Finta pazza, the Eunuch, whose job it is to guard and entertain Licomede’s daughters (including Achilles who is in hiding, disguised as a girl), sings a licentious song about the fate of “beautiful women who are born to endure thirsty men,” embedding a comic moment in an otherwise serious frame.42 The comic and recursive elements disappear by the mid-eighteenth century, giving way to a “more or less ‘classic’ form codified during the 1720s, telling tales of heroes, young and old, who make their way through a labyrinth of passions . . . played by six to seven characters ordered both horizontally and vertically,” as parodied by Goldoni above.43 In France, there is a noticeable shift away from the tragédie en musique as the center of operatic gravity to new, rival forms, notably the opéra comique. Following a series of agreements with the Opéra in 1714, the Paris fair theaters were allowed to develop entertainments featuring music and dance and to be called the Opéra-Comique. Le Mercure galant remarked on the stiff competition that opening day at the Foire St Laurent (July 25) presented for the official theaters: “starting this very day, the Comédie-Française and the Opéra were deserted, as is understandable. . . . Thousands and thousands of people of all ages, sexes, qualities and conditions went there [to the Foire] . . . and left charmed by the novelties they had just seen.”44 By 1762, when the Opéra-Comique merged with the Comédie-Italienne—the troupe of Italian actors recalled from exile by the Duc d’Orléans following the death of Louis XIV—this new, fashionable form of opera was pulling spectators away in droves from the traditional venues, including the Opéra. Nicolas Bricaire de La Dixmérie wrote that “the Blaise le savetiers, the Sancho-Panças, the la Brides, the Mère Bobis, and so many other similar characters [from opéras comiques] have caused the Orosmanes, the Rhadamistes, the Alcestes, the Phèdres and the Armides, etc. [tragic characters] to be entirely forgotten.”45 Looking back in hindsight, Marmontel remarked that the foundation of tragédie en musique was the supernatural realm and that the basis of the works staged at the Opéra-Comique was “simple nature.”46 While these new operas were as far from simple and as far from anything natural as one can imagine, it is clear that they were no longer part of the earlier baroque repertory and that a new aesthetic regime was coming into play. Although the works of

378   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Lully and Rameau continued to serve as models and were staged in various guises almost to the Revolution, a novelistic aesthetic on the model of Samuel Richardson had begun to permeate the theater, which ushered in a new repertory, new modes of spectatorship, and new ways of appreciating opera.47

Languages of Sentiment At the beginning of this chapter I claimed that the means of expression that make up baroque opera—that is, poetry, music, and dance—functioned together as interwoven languages of sentiment. This is particularly the case for French baroque opera because, as tragédie en musique, its identity was largely shaped by a poetic understanding of the genre. Louis de Cahusac, writing in the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, remarks on these interconnected modes of expression, embedded in voice and movement: As it developed, song, which was so natural to man, inspired in others who were struck by it gestures that corresponded to the various sounds that made up the song. The body twisted and turned, the arms opened or closed, the feet took slow or rapid steps, the facial features participated in these various movements: the entire body reacted through positions, movements, and postures to the sounds that affected the ear. Thus, song, which was the expression of an emotion (See SONG), caused a second expression which was in man to be developed, which was called dance.48

Indeed, far from being an incidental add-on, dance was understood as part and parcel of the expressive language of opera, and in this capacity was included in every act of every French opera up until the Revolution.49 As we consider Quinault’s and Lully’s tragédies and the works of their near-contemporaries, dance “is embedded within a vocal framework, regardless of whether the dance piece is instrumental or sung.”50 There are other dimensions of the baroque, such as the aristocratic and monarchical hierarchies that permeated the plots and the spaces of performance themselves. Yet, the bedrock of baroque opera is its ability to articulate and provoke sentiment, as the abbé Dubos argued: “the natural signs of the passions that music gathers together and uses with art . . . have a marvelous ability to move us.”51 Dubos goes on to claim this connection between musical sounds and passions as the basis for the idea of weaving songs and actions together into a dramatic whole: “voilà nos opéras,” he writes.52 The truth of opera’s songs, Dubos continues, “consists in the imitation of the tones, the accents, the sighs, and the sounds which naturally belong to the feelings contained in the words.”53 The abbé de Mably’s Lettres à Madame la Marquise de P . . . sur l’opéra (1741) reinforces the case for opera as a coordinated effort to articulate sentiment. “What is charming in Alceste,” writes Mably, referring to Quinault’s and Lully’s second opera, “are the touching scenes where Lully represented nature with simple silence.”54 Mably argues that opera’s

baroque opera   379 function is to represent sentiment (which he refers to as “nature,” that is, human nature as well as the human experience of natural scenes) and at the same time generate feeling in the spectator. Lully is able to accomplish this, according to Mably, by a skillful articulation of silence and sound. Mably cites Boileau’s claim that music cannot narrate, arguing that this inability allows it to focus on what music does best, that is to present passion: “the lyric poets can take advantage of music’s powerlessness to narrate and to reason by spreading more warmth in their works. They should only represent characters moved by some passion and they should only give them short, lively, and animated passages.”55 Mably further argues for the superiority in nuance of opera over spoken theater where the representation of passion is concerned. At the very least, Mably insists, the operatic libretto alone cannot possibly reveal the complexities that the coordination of poetry and music produce during operatic performance: Music is a kind of very powerful magic. . . . Corneille complains somewhere of the frequent necessity of making a character speak who should only utter sighs or stammer a few incoherent words. . . . I would very much like to see what response would arise in the spoken theater to an Admete who, upon learning of the death of his wife, would be satisfied with saying, as in the opera, “Alceste is dead.” These words, so natural and moving, and to which nothing can be added, would nonetheless miss their mark without the sounds of Lully.56

Referring to act 3, scene 4, of Alceste, Mably remarks on the discrepancy between the apparent inadequacy of the poet’s words alone and the full effect when Quinault’s poetry is wed to Lully’s music. He points here to the particular ability of musical language to represent that which is out of reach of spoken language, or below the threshold of linguistic representation: music “imitates those sounds that are anterior to all language.”57 Similarly, Remond de Saint Mard’s Reflexions sur l’opera remarks on the poetic words of opera, which “depict the confusion, the agitations, the movements of the soul,” but only insofar as they are supported by musical inflections—the tones and intonation that transform the poetry into song.58 Remond de Saint Mard calls this combination of inflected words that is song “the simplest image of our moods and the most faithful language of passion.”59 Mably insists on the superiority of French tragédie en musique over Italian opera, because the French genre represents gods, heroes, and magicians in a musical language appropriate to them, whereas Italian opera presents emperors and kings, for whom music is not the most appropriate language.60 Furthermore, making a case that became commonplace in the criticism of Italian opera later leveled by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, Mably suggests that Italian opera, as beautiful as it may be, nonetheless remains attached to vocal pyrotechnics through its excessive use of melismas and other vocal sound effects, whereas French opera focuses on the substantive poetry and expression of passion.61 Mably then turns his attention to what would appear to be the least “natural” elements in opera, those for which the argument for music as a language is most tenuous.

380   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Instrumental passages are poeticized, he argues, by virtue of the fact that they are ­integrated into the tragédie through episodes where music would naturally occur, such as at festivals, sacrifices, and other ritual occasions.62 An operatic usage about which critics had raised particular objections are duets. Despite the fact that no one sings duets outside of the world of operatic and musical performances, duets are appropriate and justified, Mably explains, on two counts. First, he makes an argument of poetic equivalence with respect to spoken tragedy, suggesting that sung duets are no more unnatural than spoken monologues or asides, which occur in virtually every spoken tragedy or comedy. Second, he wagers that audiences will forgive composers and librettists for an artificial usage that nonetheless draws real emotional interest from the spectator, referring to the “pleasure that they give in certain situations where they fill us with so much warmth and are so apt to generate interest.”63 Here, he gives a specific example, again taken from Alceste: “such is, in my opinion, the beautiful duet between Admète and Alceste, when the two lovers say their eternal farewell, after Alcide had brought Alceste back from the Underworld.”64 He even goes so far as to claim that it is plausible that two lovers, whose hearts are connected by virtue of sharing the same intense emotional ­predicament, would utter the exact same words, in this case the duet, “We must not see each other ever again.”65 Where early modern commentators perceive a rift in the representational fabric of opera is in passages that jump out of the diegetic continuum and draw attention to themselves as separable from the operatic narrative, such as the dicta cited above from Atys and Persée. Mably finds fault, for instance, in one passage where Admète and Alceste sing together: “For a noble heart, the most tender Love / Must fall victim to Duty.” He notes that this poetic phrase sounds like a maxim, an utterance which would not fit with the emotional intensity of the moment; and he suggests it would have been better if it had been set as a question or perhaps sung alone by Admète.66 One might understand the use of maxims as another way to create intercalated worlds, where the spectator’s truth and that of the actor coincide harmoniously, similar to the scenes within scenes discussed earlier as exemplary of the baroque. Mably argues, however, that maxims are unwelcome in opera because they jolt the spectators out of the identification and emotional interest generated by the duet, and force them into an epigrammatic mode by reflecting on general truths. Maxims, in other words, create a distance that is incompatible, Mably argues, with emotional interest.67 We find a similar rejection of the maxim in an earlier text also focused on Quinault’s and Lully’s Alceste: Charles Perrault’s Critique de l’opéra. Perrault’s Critique takes the form of a dialogue between Cléon and Aristippe on the merits of Alceste, where Quinault in particular is lauded and compared to Euripides. Following a passage where the interlocutors are discussing whether or not Quinault should be blamed for adding to Euripides’s version of the story an episode featuring the inconstancy of a secondary character, Cephise, Aristippe objects to Quinault’s use of poetic maxims. Aristippe says he detests “the little songs that are sung there,” referring to the maxims.68 In response, naming two songs in particular (“Si l’Amour a des tourmens” and “l’Amour tranquille

baroque opera   381 s’endort aisément”) Cléon points simply to their considerable popularity among the opera-going public: “think what you like; but I hold that there is nothing more impossible than making all of Paris sing a song that is worthless.”69 Cléon argues that, separated from the play, they “have a meaning that is complete and appropriate for many ­people. . . . I see them as precious stones which taken alone are valuable and yet taken together compose a crown.”70 Some critics perceived a discordant note in these moments where a “pierrerie” is pulled from the fabric of the opera, a poetic practice which one might consider endemic to the baroque. Others found it perfectly fitting that a reflection on moral and emotional states within the opera could be broken off into a poetic morsel circulating outside the work, in the carriages and salons of late seventeenth-century Paris. This aesthetic rub might be considered to be, in some measure, a window onto the shift from the baroque to the more novelistic aesthetic that opéra comique represents and which would continue through the Revolution and even into the nineteenth ­century. The baroque reveled in these embedded worlds, in the mixing and matching of serious and comic elements, in the poetic pierreries that are part of the operatic narrative and yet exportable into daily life. The aesthetic frame promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the works of Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck among others in the second half of the eighteenth century, sought something quite different.

Notes 1. Victor-L. Tapié, The Age of Grandeur: Baroque and Classicism in Europe, trans. A. Ross Williamson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960), 255. I want to thank Charles Dill for his advice on a variety of matters, and for his friendship. 2. Among the most prominent of these writings is Gilles Deleuze, Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988). 3. Tapié, The Age of Grandeur, 255. 4. Claude V. Palisca, “Baroque,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2017. 5. Anon, Lettre de M.  *** à Mlle. *** sur l’origine de la musique, Mercure de France (May, 1734): 863: “il parle peu, simplement, évite les frases et les tours affectez, son langage est vif; plein de naiveté et d’expressions.” 6. Ibid., 864: “elle trouva le moyen de peindre par des sons les differentes agitations d’un coeur amoureux: langueurs, larmes, délices, joye douce et naïve.” 7. Ibid., 866: “plus agréable spectacle qui fut jamais”; “les Bergers et les Bergeres danserent quelques Entrées de ce Ballet . . . les yeux fermez, on pouvoit deviner quels étoient les Danseurs et se représenter à peu près les différentes figures du Ballet, tant la même expression regnoit et dans le Chant et dans la Danse.” 8. Ibid., 866: “il sembloit que la nature seule eut produit l’une et l’autre; et sans que l’on s’en apperçut, on ressentoit les plus délicates nüances des douces passions exprimées par les Sons.” 9. Ibid., 867: “imiter ce beau Paysage.” 10. Ibid., 868–869: “contrainte”; “fuioient la nature et le sentiment”; “c’étoit des dissonnances faites exprès . . . le singulier étoit du barocque, la fureur du tintamare.”

382   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 11. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Œuvres complètes, ed. Michel le Guern, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2000), 2:801, no. 640: “c’est une représentation si naturelle et si délicate des passions, qu’elle les émeut et les fait naître dans notre coeur, et surtout celle de l’amour.” For a s­ ummary of the condemnation of opera in this period, see Downing A. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32–36. 12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. B.  Gagnebin and M.  Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995), 5:651: “une Musique Baroque est celle dont l’Harmonie est confuse, chargée de Modulations et de Dissonances, le Chant dur et peu naturel, l’Intonation difficile, et le Mouvement contraint.” 13. François Hedelin, abbé d’Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre (Amsterdam: Jean Frederic Bernard, 1715), 132: “Bergers, Chasseurs, Pêcheurs, & pareille sorte de gens”; “toute la matiere des Idilles & des Eglogues des Anciens, & nous y avons appliqué l’oeconomie de la Tragédie Satyrique.” 14. Molière: Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Forestier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 1:150: “c’est un mélange qui est nouveau pour nos Théâtres.” 15. See Isabelle Martin, Le Théâtre de la foire: des tréteaux aux boulevards (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002). 16. Richard Strohm, Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 7. 17. Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 11. 18. Robert  C.  Ketterer, Ancient Rome in Early Opera (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 87. 19. Martha Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 6. 20. Ketterer, Ancient Rome in Early Opera, 103. 21. On the function of the prologue, see Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 75–90. 22. Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully, Isis (Paris: J-B-Christophe Ballard, 1719), 6–7: “Publions en tous lieux / Du plus grand des Héros la valeur triomphante.” 23. Quinault and Lully, Isis, 9–10: “Que la Terre, & les Cieux / Retentissent du bruit de sa gloire éclatante.” 24. Quinault and Lully, Isis, 16: “Parlons de ses vertus, racontons ses exploits; / A peine y pourons nous suffire, / Avec toutes nos voix.” 25. Quinault and Lully, Isis, 28. 26. Philippe Quinault, Livrets d’opéra, ed. Buford Norman, 2 vols. (Toulouse: Société de ­littératures classiques, 1999), 1:111: “Que les hautbois, que les musettes / L’emportent sur les trompettes / Et sur les tambours.” 27. Quinault and Lully, Isis, 42: “Ne troublez pas les charmes / De nos divins Concerts.” 28. David Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3. 29. Giacomo Casanova, Histoire de ma vie, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 2013–2015), 3:1080–1081: “j’ai remarqué dans ce temps-là plusieurs figurantes, et chanteuses laides, et sans talent, et malgré cela toutes vivant à leur aise. . . . Ce qui rend surtout les seigneurs français ambitieux d’avoir sur leur compte une fille de l’Opéra c’est que toutes ces filles appartiennent au roi en qualité de suppôts de son Académie royale de musique.” See also the satirical songs included in the Chansonnier Maurepas (1686): “The Opéra supplies us with mistresses, / No sadness is to be found there; / Everyone comes away happy / From such a delightful harem. / One

baroque opera   383 can do whatever one wishes without disturbance, / One can be unfaithful in pursuit of one’s desires, / And love only sheds tears there / Over those who get in a muddle counting all the money” (French Baroque Opera: a Reader, ed. Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000], 140); “L’Opera nous fournit des Maîtresses, / On n’en trouve point là de tigresses, / Chacun revient content / D’un sejour si charmant. / On y fait ce qu’on veut sans allarmes / Au gré de ses desirs, on peut être inconstant, / Et l’amour ne fait verser des larmes / Qu’a ceux qui sont brouillés avec l’argent comptant.” Chansonnier Maurepas, “Volume 6 (1686–1690),” Seventeenth-Century Parisian Soundscapes, https:// www.parisiansoundscapes.org/jobs/vol6. 30. Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 7. 31. Henri Lagrave, Le Théâtre et le public à Paris de 1715 à 1750 (Paris: Klincksiek, 1972), 162. 32. Ibid., 195. 33. Ibid., 169. 34. Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 5. 35. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 113. 36. Ibid., 322. 37. Ketterer, Ancient Rome in Early Opera, 157. 38. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 296. 39. Goldoni, Mémoires, 3 vols. (Paris: Duchesne, 1787), 1:221–222. See Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 9. 40. Philippe Quinault, Atys, ed. Stéphane Bassinet (Geneva: Droz, 1992), act 1, scene 2, 64: “Tost ou tard l’Amour est vainqueur, / En vain les plus fiers s’en deffendent, / On ne peut refuser son coeur / A de beaux yeux qui le demandent.” 41. Philippe Quinault, “Persée,” trans. and ed. Lois Rosow, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 10, no. 1 (2004): act 1, scene 2: https://sscm-jscm.org/v10/no1/rosow_libretto.html: “Le Temps seul peut guerir / Les maux que l’Amour fait souffrir.” 42. Giulio Strozzi, La Finta pazza (Venice, 1644), digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc44/, act 1, sc. 6, p. 30: “Belle Donne voi, che nate / Per bear gli huomini sete.” See Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 110–124. 43. Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 8. 44. Le Mercure galant (July, 1715), 282: “dés ce même jour, la Comedie [Française] et l’Opera furent desertez, comme de raison. . . . Mille & mille personnes de toute âge, sexe, qualitez & condition y furent en effet . . . & en sortirent charmées des nouveautez qu’elles venoient d’y voir.” 45. Nicolas Bricaire de La Dixmérie, Lettres sur l’état présent de nos spectacles (Amsterdam et se trouve à Paris: Duchesne, 1765), 5: “les Blaise le Savetier, les Sancho-Pança, les la Bride, les Mère Bobi, & tant d’autres personnages du même order, ont entièrement fait oublier les Orosmane, les Rhadamiste, les Alceste, les Phèdre & les Armide, &c.” 46. Jean-François Marmontel, “Opera,” Elements de littérature, Oeuvres complètes, 8 vols. (Paris: A. Belin, 1819), 4:781: “la simple nature.” 47. See Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 214–229. 48. Louis de Cahusac, “Danse,” in Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/encyclopedie1117/navigate/4/3155/. 49. Rebecca Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1. 50. Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, 8.

384   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 51. Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1993), 151: “les signes naturels des passions que la musique rassemble et qu’elle emploie avec art . . . ont une force merveilleuse pour nous émouvoir.” 52. Dubos, Réflexions critiques, 151. 53. Dubos, Réflexions critiques, 151: “consiste dans l’imitation des tons, des accents, des soupirs, et des sons qui sont propres naturellement aux sentiments contenus dans les paroles.” 54. Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de Mably, Lettres à Madame la Marquise de P . . . sur l’opéra (Paris: Didot, 1741), 27: “ce qui charme dans Alceste ce sont des Scene touchantes, où Lulli par de simples soupirs a rendu la nature.” 55. Mably, Lettres, 47: “les Poëtes Lyriques peuvent tirer parti de l’impuissance où la Musique est de narrer & de s’associer à des raisonnemens, pour répandre plus de chaleur dans leurs Ouvrages. On ne nous présentera que des personnages agités par quelque passion, & on ne leur mettra dans la bouche que des récits courts, vifs & animés.” 56. Mably, Lettres, 78–79. 57. Mably, Lettres, 74: “imite ces sons antérieurs à tout langage.” 58. Remond de Saint Mard starts his Reflexions sur l’opera (La Haye: chez Jean Neaulme, 1741), 10–11: “peignent les troubles, les agitations, les mouvemens de l’ame”; “elles les ne les peignent avec vérité & avec force, qu’autant qu’elles sont aidées des inflections.” 59. Remond de Saint Mard, Reflexions sur l’opera, 11: “l’image la plus naïve de nos mouvemens, & le langage le plus fidéle de la passion.” 60. Mably, Lettres, 50–51. 61. Ibid., 135. 62. Ibid., 155–156. 63. Ibid., 158–159: “plaisir qu’ils donnent dans de certaines occasions où ils répandent tant de chaleur, & sont si propres à intéresser.” 64. Ibid., 159: “tel est, à mon gré, le beau Duo d’Admete & d’Alceste, lorsque ces deux Amans se disent un éternel adieu, après qu’Alcide a ramené Alceste des Enfers.” 65. Ibid., 159: “Il ne faut plus nous voir.” 66. Ibid., 160–161: “Il faut dans un grand Coeur que l’Amour le plus tendre / Soit la victime du devoir.” 67. The abbé Dubos has a similar objection to a scene in Armide: “Renaud in love despite ­himself because he is subjugated by the enchantments of Armide deeply interests me in his situation. I am even touched by his passion when he opens the scene, saying to his mistress who is leaving him for a moment: ‘Armide, you are leaving me?’ And also when he replies, after she explains the reason why she must go, with the same words that he had already uttered: ‘Armide, you are leaving me?’ Here, Renaud seems to me to be a man entirely given over to love. Love could not be better expressed than by this repetition. Not hearing the reasons that are offered to him is the mark of intoxicated passion. But a moment later, Renaud becomes a precious and affected lover when he replies to his mistress who says to him, ‘Do you see where I am leaving you,’ with this bland compliment, ‘Can I see anything but your charms?’ ” (Dubos, Réflexions critiques, 50). 68. Charles Perrault, Critique de l’opéra, ou examen de la tragedie intitulée Alceste, ou le Triomphe d’Alcide (Paris: chez Loüis Billaine, 1674), 50: “les petites chansons qui s’y disent.” 69. Perrault, Critique de l’opera, 50–51: “vous en croirez ce qu’il vous plaira; mais je ne tiens rien de plus impossible que de faire chanter à tout Paris une chanson qui ne vaut rien.” 70. Perrault, Critique de l’opera, 51: “ont un sens parfait & à l’usage de beaucoup de personnes . . . je les regarde comme des pierreries qui toutes separément sont preciuses, & qui ne laissent pas d’entrer en la composition d’une Couronne.”

baroque opera   385

Further Reading Charlton, David. Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Cowart, Georgia. The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Dill, Charles. Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Feldman, Martha. Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Harris-Warrick, Rebecca. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Kintzler, Catherine. Poétique de l’opéra français, de Corneille à Rousseau. Paris: Minèrve, 1991. Rosand, Ellen. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Strohm, Richard. Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Thomas, Downing  A. Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Waeber, Jacqueline, ed. Musique et geste en France de Lully à la Révolution: études sur la musique, le théâtre et la danse. Bern and New York: Lang, 2009.

chapter 16

M achi n e Pl ays Hélène Visentin

The forty-nine engraved plates on “Machines de Théâtre” included in the tenth volume of plates1 of the Encyclopédie by Diderot and d’Alembert testify to the importance of machine plays in Western and Central Europe during the Baroque period.2 Revealing what is behind the scenes, this series of plates offers complete views of state-of-the-art machines in a full-page image, along with a label below each of the plates and a few side vignettes in the upper part of some of the images detailing snapshots of common theatrical scenes (as an example, see Pl. XV, http://artflsrv02.uchicago.edu/images/ encyclopedie/V27/plate_27_5_42.jpeg, from the ARTFL Encyclopédie Project). This visual inventory of the fly loft over and above the stage—filled with pulley systems, ropes, cables, winches, wooden beams, drums, counterweights, and so on—also contains text explaining their general features and functions. As such, these images, which follow in the footsteps of Filippo Brunelleschi (b. 1377–d. 1446), Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452–d. 1519), Joseph Furttenbach the Elder (b. 1591–d. 1667), and Jean Berain (b. 1640–d. 1711), among others, offer a demystification of the illusion box in an effort both to showcase the mechanics of theatrical devices and divulge the secrets of the fabrication of wonder.3 In that respect, the plates contrast with the engravings that have largely contributed to the history of Baroque theater in well-known snapshots of La pellegrina (Uffizi Theatre in Florence, 1589), Le nozze degli dei (Pitti Palace in Florence, 1637), La finta pazza (Teatro Novissimo in Venice, 1641), Andromède (Grande Salle du Petit-Bourbon in Paris, 1650), and Il pomo d’oro (Opernhaus auf der Cortina in Vienna, 1668), to name a few of the most remarkable examples. While they constitute a visual testimony of the staging experience at the time, they primarily offer an idealized image of the spectacle. Their main goal was to promote political propaganda among courtly audiences throughout Europe by soliciting international acknowledgment as part of their diplomatic functions.4 Paradoxically, the series of plates on “Machines de Théâtre” from the Encyclopédie seem fixed in time; they are motionless even though the machines were moving objects and always acclaimed in various accounts and booklets for their rapid movements on stage. Numerous stagehands were necessary to activate these machines—sometimes up

machine plays   387 to 250–300 stagehands for a court performance—making it awkward to observe any signs of human presence on these specific plates (contrary to many other Encyclopédie’s plates). These plates also give an impression of lightness even though theater machines are usually weighty pieces of engineering made from wood and designed according to  hydraulic, naval, and military engineering. After all, machine designer Giovanni Battista Aleotti (b. 1546–d. 1636) was one of the most influential hydraulic engineers of his time, and Giacomo Torelli (b. 1608–d. 1678) worked at the military shipyards in Venice before embarking on a successful career in stage design.5 As such, the machines would produce a grinding noise once activated for appearances, disappearances, and other special effects. For this reason, music usually accompanied the execution of machines, creating a multimedia performance on a moveable stage in marked contrast to the fixed stage displayed in the Encyclopédie’s plates.6 Fortunately, several theater buildings, with their authentic scene sets and stage machinery from the Baroque era, survived in Western and Central Europe and are used today for their original purposes. One of the most documented is the Drottningholm Court Theatre, located on an island near Stockholm, Sweden, and built in 1766 at the request of Queen Lovisa Ulrika, the wife of King Adolf Fredrick and the sister of Frederick the Great. Among the remnants of the structure were the moveable stage, the machinery, and the scenery, of which thirty sets remained completely preserved.7 Another striking example is the Castle Theater in Český Krumlov in Southern Bohemia of the Czech Republic, erected in the second half of the seventeenth century and remodeled with a Baroque stage in its current shape from the 1760s; it is known to be the most perfectly and completely preserved Baroque theater in the world.8 Ten years later, the Opéra Royal in Versailles, France, located in the north wing of the château, was inaugurated for the marriage of the Dauphin—the future Louis XVI—to Marie-Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria on May 16, 1770. Used as the congressional chamber for the Senate at the end of the nineteenth century, the Opéra Royal was restored a few years after World War II, inaugurated during the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in the spring of 1957, and returned to its original state from 2007–2009. Every year, the public can enjoy the rich programming of a series of spectacles entitled Splendeurs Baroques. A last prime example is the Ekhof Theater in Gotha, Central Germany, first built in 1681 and redesigned in 1775. The special effects that the well-preserved stage machinery produce still amazed audiences every summer during the Ekhof-Festival und Barockfest.9 In summary, these theater buildings, ones that still house visitors, feature the so-called Italian stage, which became the essence of theater machinery in the Baroque era. They also demonstrate that artistic and cultural activities at this time were le fait du Prince; stage and theater technologies were used to serve the grandeur of the ruler through the power of representation. This chapter argues that machine plays reflect the Baroque fascination with both mechanical devices and the law of optics—scenery perspective—to produce wonder while displaying royal prestige (the wealth of the courts) before becoming a popular genre performed in public theaters in the second half of the seventeenth century. The aim of this chapter is threefold: to provide an overview of the origins and development of machine theater, to examine the transmission and dissemination of

388   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque stagecraft knowledge, and to look at the changing nature of machine plays performed by public theater companies: these theaters took advantage of stage machinery innovations to broaden their repertoire, attract a larger audience, and remain competitive.

Origins and Development of Machine Theater: A Brief Overview Machine theater refers to transnational multimedia performances that primarily feature scene changes and special effects—such as flights, metamorphoses, magic and supernatural appearances/disappearances from above and below the stage, and lighting and sound effects—all achieved through technology. In his Traité des tournois, joustes, ­carrousels, et autres spectacles publics (1669), Claude-François Ménestrier provides a detailed definition of theatrical machines that reflects the understanding and practice of the time: The name of “machines” is given to all that has motion only by the contrivance of men. The scenes, & the mobile theaters, the chariots, the clouds, the vessels, by whatever way they are moved, are truly machines, because they are dead & immobile by nature, whether movable or mobile by springs, by weights, by wind, by water, by fire, or by animals, it is from the industry of men that they receive these motions, & thus pass for machines.10

In Ménestrier’s formulation, machines are categorized both as scene sets, which were moveable, and other mechanical devices needed to produce special effects.11 Thus, machine theater is a broad designation for an array of dramatic works and genres divided by acts that rely on the use of elaborate machinery to execute the action of the play. Mainly based on mythological tales, these dramatic works include pastoral drama, tragicomedy, comedy, comedy ballet, comedia nueva plays, mythological plays, as well as opera (also referred to in Italian as dramma per musica or festa teatrale and in French as tragédie lyrique).12 Even though these performances often involved poetry, dance, music, and lavish costumes, the machines were considered the most striking elements as they captivated audiences through their technological advances and the secret of how they operated (ingenium).13 Able to produce wonder (le merveilleux, la mirabilia, das Rätselhafte, lo maravilloso) via impressive, visual effects, machines efficiently dazzled the eyes of the spectators while displaying monarchal or princely power and prestige. The more the audience was amazed, the more the ruler could affirm his authority since wonder and power promote each other.14 In fact, the dramatic form of machine theater developed in the context of courtly entertainments in collaboration with erudite academies—such as L’Accademia della

machine plays   389 Crusca in Florence, L’Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza, and the Académie de Musique et de Poésie in France—during the sixteenth century and spread across Europe throughout the seventeenth century. The specific interest in theatrical machines emerged alongside the revival of a rich culture of mechanistic design and practice in the Renaissance, a period that also saw unprecedented and prominent scientific advancements and inventions relating to the rediscovery of ancient texts that prompted translations and commentaries. Regarding the field of stage design, two critical elements in conjunction with technical and scientific knowledge emerged: on the one hand, the vogue of and fascination with automatons and other engineering designs (real or imaginary) found representation in the literature of theatrum machinarum—or machine books—that started to flourish at the end of the sixteenth century upon the translation first in Latin, then in Italian, of Heron of Alexandria’s Automata.15 On the other, the rediscovery of Vitrivius’s De architectura inspired the development of optics and more precisely the formulation of the laws of linear perspective through the circulation of architectural treatises.16 Artists first applied the theory of perspective to quattrocento painting to create the visible appearance of the world according to the idea of illusionism (“a finestra aperta sul mondo”), as Alberti theorized in De pictura (1435) and then entered theater stage thanks to influential architectural books, such as Serlio’s Il secondo libro di prospettiva (Paris: Jean Barbé, 1545) and Vignola’s Le due regole della prospettiva pratica (Rome: F. Zanetti, 1583).17 The art of perspective revolutionized stage design by bringing coherence to the organization of the scenic space in its relationship to the auditorium: the vanishing point on the stage now matched the central viewpoint of the audience—the best seat, l’œil du Prince, being the one facing the one-point perspective on the stage, therefore instituting a hierarchy in the seating. From that moment on, the viewer’s perspective dictated the scenic space around a single point of view.18 In brief, experimentation with mechanical devices and the use of the perspective scenery significantly changed stage practices to create surprising special effects the same way digital technology is now transforming theater on and off stage. There is a shared understanding in scholarly research that dramatic interludes (intermezzi, intermèdes), inserted between five-act spoken plays, contributed a vital role to the development of stage machinery. Moreover, critics agree that the performance of the six intermezzi of Girolamo Bargagli’s La pellegrina, staged by Bernardo Buontalenti (b. 1531?–d. 1608) at the Uffizi Theater for the Medici wedding of May 1589, set a standard for stage design and machinery against which other operatic productions were ­measured.19 Based on classical mythology, each intermezzo of La pellegrina accompanied successive scene changes at the full view of the audience (by rotating prisms), major light and dramatic effects, impressive ascending and descending flights according to eyewitness accounts, as well as music composed by the Florentine Camarata.20 Thanks to detailed engravings that were circulated across Europe and now preserved in several national libraries and private collections around the world, scholars have a clear sense of the set and machinery needed to perform La pellegrina.21 For the comedy itself, the set depicted a cityscape, and for the intermezzi it staged: first, the heavens composed of seven cloud machines for a scene titled “The Harmony of the Spheres”; second, a garden

390   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque with the rise and the disappearance of Mount Parnassus from the under-stage area (locus amoenus); third, a forest and a grotto that opened to show a dragon for the battle of Apollo and Python (locus horribilis); fourth, the underworld (the cloud machinery used to represent hell needed no less than eighty-two men) with the apparition of a witch on a moving chariot; fifth, a seascape with a huge galley floating in the sea for a scene depicting the rescue of Arion; and sixth, a final glory with the seven cloud machines representing the assembly of the gods. Undeniably, this lavish performance defined a typology of stage design for the years to come. In that regard, it is important to underline the impact of the wide dissemination of these intermezzi. As Arthur Blumenthal states, “Because the designs for the settings of 1589 were etched and widely dispersed throughout Italy and Europe, they played a major role in the development of Italian Baroque scenography as well as in the evolution of the English masque.”22 Thus, the Baroque stage that the intermezzi of La pellegrina generated, can be understood as a microcosm, a representation of the universe through the harmony of the four elements (fire, air, earth, and water) illustrating the idea of the theatrum mundi, Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage,” or Il grand teatro del mundo (Calderón de la Barca).23 Even though performance accounts and diary entries repeatedly emphasize the ­surprising novelty of theatrical devices, technologies of performance were not new. In fact, they date back to Greco-Roman theater. Regarding change scenery, periaktoi, ­constructed as a revolving triangular prism painted with different decors on each face (a forest landscape for satirical dramas, a cityscape for comedies, and a temple or a ­palace for tragedies), were used on both sides of the stage (scena versatilis). Baldassare Lanci used the same system, for instance, to stage two comedies with intermezzi—I Fabii by Lotto del Mazza and La vedova by Giovanni Battista—that were part of the Florentine festivals in 1568 and 1569, respectively.24 Nicola Sabbattini (b. 1574–d. 1654) explains this system in detail in the first book of the Pratica di fabricar scene e machine ne’teatri (Ravenna, Italy: de’ Paoli & Giovanelli, 1638 [1637]) as well as Joseph Furttenbach in his civil architecture treatise Architectura recreationis (Augsburg, Germany: Schultes, 1640), which includes an etching of a sciena della commedia (pl. 22) equipped with periaktoi, also called telari. Regarding the machines, three main scenic devices appeared in ancient theater as well: the ekkyklêma—a platform that rolled out of the main door of the skènè carrying corpses or showing the inside of a palace—the mèchanè—a crane to lower or pull up an actor, representing a god or another supernatural creature going to and from the stage, and the theologeion, designated as an upper structure above the skènè to allow for the apparition of gods. Sacre rappresentazioni and other mysteries also featured specialized machinery, the so-called feintes, or secrets, to represent the paradise, the hell mouth, as well as various miraculous apparitions (the ascension of the Christ, angel flights, etc.).25 Similarly, Elizabethan theater commonly featured flying machines and other special effects. For instance, the Globe Theater contained trapdoors to bring supernatural beings on and off stage, such as ghosts and witches in Shakespeare’s Richard II, Hamlet, and Macbeth.26 In brief, stage machinery was not at all a new enterprise in the Baroque

machine plays   391 era but involved the continuity of improved and more sophisticated (mainly in scale) technical practices over the centuries. Furthermore, as occurred in ancient theater, ­theatrical devices revealed the invisible: the gods, other supernatural creatures, and the inside of unknown or hidden spaces.27 In that regard, machine plays expressed the visual experience of the boundless, fascinating, and yet somewhat fearful Baroque world by relying on increasingly complicated machinery. Even so, the climax of machine theater coincided with the development of what is broadly called the “Italian stage” (teatro all’Italiana), which gradually eclipsed the practice of staging multiple spaces at once (the mansions of the so-called décor simultané). Fully implemented in 1618–1619 (but first used for a theatrical performance in 1628) by Giovanni Battista Aleotti at the newly erected Teatro Farnese in Parma and setting the bar for the European purposed and built theaters to come, the Italian stage includes a proscenium arch, which separates the stage from the auditorium, and a scena ductilis: sliding/moveable flat side wings that allow for rapid scene changes during the performances and that the invention of backstage areas made possible.28 Parallel to the front of the stage, the flat-wing set was constructed to present theatrical scenery in a central onepoint perspective in order to create a unified stage apparatus according to the concept of verisimilitude. For the inauguration of the Teatro Novissimo in Venice in 1641, the famous stage designer Giacomo Torelli developed complex machinery, allowing the flat wings to be quickly changed in the full view of the spectators.29 This system relied on a pole and chariot system connected by ropes to a central drum, located below the stage and cranked by a single stagehand who had to change the eight pairs of wings simultaneously. Before the implementation of this method, stagehands executed scene changes at each side of the rows of flat wings. When prompted by a given signal, they had to slide a new wing and pull back the previous one in the runners; if the stage was equipped with five pairs of wings, ten men were needed (one at each wing). In that regard, Torelli’s chariot-and-pole system brought both efficiency and speed to the scene changes with far less labor and was quickly adopted on major European stages and retained until the end of the nineteenth century.30 It is not surprising that Torelli was called “Il grand stregone” (the great wizard) at the peak of his career.31 Per Bjurström rightly states: Torelli’s invention was of more than technical importance. He had made possible just that instant of change, of uncertainty and transition, that was to become one of the most attractive attributes of the Baroque stage—a moment’s suspense while the clarity of the set dissolves, and then the sudden appearance of a new conception. The audience could share the actual moment of change, and experienced the transformation as an imaginative stimulus just because it could not be grasped clearly by the intellect.32

The Italian stage with its perspective scenery allowed for endless possibilities of large-scale special effects, enhancing the machines within the theatrical space, which was limited on both sides by the sets of flat wings. The performance was concentrated into a box meant to reproduce an optical illusion. Machines mainly moved according to

392   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque a vertical axis: descending and ascending flights, transporting gods and goddesses to clouds, and making the connection between heaven, earth, and the underworld.33 Mount Olympus replaced the heavenly paradise of the mystery plays and the decors of Hades took the place of the mouth of hell. As Viktoria Tkaczyk comments: “The machines gradually lost their religious meaning in this process of artistic and technical development.”34 By the end of the seventeenth century, the Italian stage, defined by its mobility and versatility thanks to the capabilities of elaborate machinery, had flourished in courtly theaters across Europe, reflecting a concerted effort to create a new model of performance meant to advertise state political power.35 In that sense, the box of illusion was a perfect speculum principum (mirror of princes), displaying the marvels achieved by technological skills of the artists-engineers serving the ruler.

Transmission, Dissemination, and Transfer of Technological Knowledge Nowadays, thinking of the stage as a total spectacle involving science, technology, and art is the work of a scenographer or set designer who claims greater autonomy in the conception of a performance. This role is best embodied by Robert Lepage, one of today’s foremost stage directors, well known for staging multimedia shows produced by his company Ex-Machina. However, if the word “scenography” has existed since Greek Antiquity to define the drawing of the stage and evolved in the Renaissance to refer to the use of perspective on stage, the specific word “scenographer” does not appear in early-modern documents. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, stagehands were polyvalent and multi-skilled men; thus, it was not unusual for most of them to be engineers, hydraulic technicians, pyrotechnicians, painters, and architects simultaneously. In many ways, a machinist at this time was a jack-of-all-trades working with a team of technicians, such as set painters, carpenters, rope-makers, etc. Archival materials reveal the extent to which these stagehands were fulfilling a variety of occupations. Regarding Italian machinists, scholars have coined various expressions such as architetti della commedia, machinista, inventore, ingegneri del teatro—Brunelleschi was defined as an ingeniere, literally meaning “the one who finds.”36 The Florentine Tommaso Francini (b. 1571–d. 1651), who moved in 1598 to France where he founded a dynasty of hydraulicians, was appointed the “Intendant général des eaux et fontaines de France” in 1623 under the French King Louis XIII; besides creating automatic hydraulic machines for garden palaces, he was one of the main organizers of court ballets and other theatrical performances based on the mechanical devices.37 Recently rediscovered, Georges Buffequin (b. ca. 1585–d. 1641) was a master painter: he was appointed “peintre ordinaire du Roy” around 1616; some notarized documents related to the Hôtel

machine plays   393 de Bourgogne—the main Parisian public theater at that time—also refer to him as “finteur artificiel à Paris,” “faiseur d’artifices,” “peinctre, feincteur et artificier ordinaire du Roy,” or simply “maître Georges.”38 His collaborator Laurent Mahelot, who built the decors and machines at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, was called a feinteur, which ­literally means a maker of feints, or devices. Finally, Inigo Jones (b. 1573–d. 1652) held the office of Surveyor-General of the King’s Works, and Alessandro Galli-Bibiena (b.  1686–d. 1748) was appointed the Ingenere e Sovrintendente alle Fabbriche e agli Spettacoli. These assorted titles and names of occupation reflect the fact that the work of stage design was not a well-defined profession but rather a position that relied on many different areas of technical expertise, which could render the transmission of a broad technological knowledge challenging. It is known that the greatest Italian engineers, hydraulic technicians, and architects were responsible for disseminating the most innovative stage technologies and skills across the Alps, which explains the dominance of the Italian stage and similar machineproduced stage effects in Western and Central European theaters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, several Italian machinists, after apprenticing with one or several experienced masters, traveled to Northern and Central Europe at the formal request of prominent political figures.39 Requesting the most promising artistsengineers often depended on political machinations through the mediation of foreign ambassadors and delegates, as was the case in the late 1630s of the exchanges between Jules Mazarin—the principal adviser and collaborator of the French Chief Minister Cardinal-Duke de Richelieu—and his diplomatic agent and secretary, Elpidio Benedetti. They were to bring the most talented Roman artists to France, among them Gian Lorenzo Bernini (b. 1598–d. 1680). Unfortunately, Bernini declined the invitation; but after several diplomatic negotiations, his pupil Giovanni Maria Mariani came to work on the stage of the Grande Salle de la Comédie, located in the newly constructed PalaisCardinal; this was the first building in Paris to be erected initially with a permanent stage able to accommodate the use of innovative mechanical devices.40 Mariani stayed in France for a short period of time, but most Italian architectengineers who emigrated pursued their career abroad. This was the case with Cosimo Lotti (b. 1571–d. 1643), nicknamed “el hechicero” (the wizard), who worked with Bernardo Buontalenti in Florence before travelling to Spain in 1626 at the request of the Count Duke of Olivares at the court of Philip IV. Regarding the complexity and scale of the illusionist stage scenery and mechanical devices that Lotti created, Margaret Rich Greer states, “A new era started in court theatre in Spain.”41 Similarly, Ludovico Ottavio Burnacini (b. 1636–d. 1707) arrived at the imperial court in Vienna at age fifteen and worked as a highly praised architect and stage designer until his death in 1707.42 Foreign apprentices also came to Italy to work with the best engineers and architects. One of the most striking examples is Joseph Furttenbach the Elder (b. 1591–d. 1667) who spent approximately one year in Giulio Parigi (b. 1571–d. 1635)’s private academy on Via Maggio in Florence around 1617, at the same time as the French artist Jacques Callot (b. 1592–d. 1635).43 Upon his return to Germany, Furttenbach compiled a sketchbook with detailed drawings and explanations of theater machines, known as the Codex

394   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque iconographicus 401 with the goal of sharing this practical knowledge with his contemporary fellows.44 Another example is Inigo Jones (b. 1573–d. 1652), considered the first architect in England, who staged numerous masques at the court of King James I in collaboration with Ben Jonson. Jones performed several grand tours in Italy where he discovered the work of Andrea Palladio (b. 1508–d. 1580), through the study of I quattro libri dell’ architettura (Venice: Domenico de’ Franceschi, 1570). At some point, he trained with Giulio Parigi in his private academy, which, according to Viktoria Tkaczyk, was like a “school of theater design.”45 Regarding the influence of Giulio Parigi, Tkaczyk rightly states: “It is fair to regard Parigi’s knowledge of theater engineering as a nodal point in a  first regional, then supra-personal network of theater engineering.”46 Thus, both Furttenbach and Jones can be considered mediators as they played a key role in transferring the technological knowledge they acquired in Italy to their own country.47 In brief, the transfer of practical theater engineering knowledge spread from Italy across Europe mainly through the migration of architects and engineers, who created their own network allowing for the circulation of shared knowledge and practices, and to a lesser degree, through the circulation of printed books and treatises. In that regard, a strong culture of secrecy as both a “protection of invention and ­control of reception” surrounded stagecraft knowledge and practices.48 In his treatise Architectura recreationis, Joseph Furttenbach contends that, in general, engineers were unwilling to share their knowledge, “particularly those in Italia, . . . are reluctant to ­communicate the proper modus and keep many things confidential. . . . Indeed, it is often buried in the earth together with the people.”49 The fact that mechanical knowledge was tacit partly explains the reason printed manuals and treatises on stage machinery are sparse. As Jan Lazardzig and Hole Rößler argue: The striking lack of contemporary print sources on Early Modern theatre technology indicates a conspicuous lack of desire to make this technology public. While visual depictions of spectacular stage effects were widely distributed in the 17th and  18th centuries, in numerous and occasionally quite opulent festival publications, the circulation of stagecraft knowledge in print form remained something of an exception.50

Keeping this knowledge secret was a way not only to protect great mechanical inventions and preserve the surprise effect for the audience—to experience the miracle and to produce the wonder—but also to reinforce the authority of the prince who, by commissioning these spectacles, was also controlling the circulation of technological knowledge in a climate of political rivalry. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that technological skills and knowledge were mostly based on oral transmission, often from father to son. In fact, the prominence of family dynasties who monopolized the practice of stage design in and outside Italy is striking. In addition to the previously mentioned Parigi and Francini families, there were Georges Buffequin and his son Denis Buffequin (b. 1616–d. 1666) who, as an “ingénieur décorateur ordinaire du Roy,” worked with Giacomo Torelli on the stage of

machine plays   395 the Petit-Bourbon in Paris. He was also the décorateur-machiniste of Théâtre du Marais, which specialized in machine plays starting in the mid-1640s. Following his father, Denis shared his stagecraft knowledge acquired alongside experienced Italian stage designers and artists for the benefit of a public theater. Another example of dynasty is the Vigarinis: the architect Gaspare Vigarini (b. 1588–d. 1663) was called to France from Modena in the late 1650s to build the Grande Salle des Machines at the Palais des Tuileries for the marriage of Louis XIV.51 His sons Carlo (b. 1637–d. 1713) and Ludovico worked with him in Paris, but only Carlo stayed in France after 1662 to work on staging Molière’s comedy ballets and Jean-Baptiste Lully’s tragédies en musique, among other courtly entertainments. Finally, in 1651, Giovanni Burnacini (b. 1610–d. 1655) came to the imperial court in Vienna from Venice, where he worked at the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo as the main competitor of Torelli. As the Viennese court architect, Burnacini designed the Cesarea Corte theater. His son, Ludovico Ottavio Burnacini (b. 1636–d. 1707), who was his apprentice, inherited the office of chief engineer and architect at his death and worked for Emperor Leopold I for whom he staged, among other plays, the lavish performance of Il pomo d’oro (1667). Through these various examples, it is striking to observe that stagecraft knowledge not only contained trade secrets but was kept between families. As very few of the previously mentioned stage designers wrote treatises or left notes and sketches, their work is mostly known through iconography and much has been lost, which makes it difficult to reconstitute the technological and cultural knowledge developed by these machine designers. This is especially the case for the stage technologies used to perform machine plays in public theaters.

From Court to City: Machine Plays at the Public Theaters If machine theater is rightly associated with court entertainments and operas, it is important to clarify that as the audience developed a keen interest in spectacular effects, machine plays became increasingly successful in public theaters as well. In fact, major European cities saw an increase in the number of playhouses in the second half of the seventeenth century, especially in Italy, France, and England. Undoubtedly, the wellpublicized performance of Andromeda, an opera by Benedetto Ferrari (librettist) and Francesco Manelli (composer) to inaugurate the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice in 1637, served as a model of a new kind of “commercially oriented theater.”52 The Teatro San Cassiano was the first public opera house conceived as a for-profit enterprise. From then on, operatic spectacles were no more the privilege of the aristocracy and foreign dignitaries in private courtly theaters but open to the public, who could afford to pay an admission ticket to see a performance. As the audience had developed a taste for the spectacular on stage, some theater managers and authors were ready to meet the public demand. It is precisely during this

396   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque period that machine theater began to develop as a popular genre. This was the case of the Théâtre du Marais, a Parisian public playhouse where the first plays by Pierre Corneille— among them the controversial performance of Le Cid (1637) that led to the famous “Querelle du Cid” arbitrated by the Académie Française—were staged. After a destructive fire in 1644, the newly renovated theater stage was equipped with the most innovative stage machinery according to the Italian order—on a more limited scale, though, as the means were not the same compared with the court milieu.53 The company made good use of the new staging opportunities by programming and setting machine plays to the point of specializing and being quickly nicknamed the “Théâtre des Machines.”54 Notably, in response to the lavish courtly performance of Orfeo (1647) by Francesco Buti (librettist) and Luigi Rossi (composer), staged by Giacomo Torelli at the PalaisRoyal, the theater company revived a tragedy in 1647–1648 from the previous decade: La descente d’Orphée aux enfers (Paris: Toussaint Quinet, 1640) by François de Chapoton. This play was first performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1639 with a few special effects; but for its remake on the stage of the Théâtre du Marais, the drama was transformed into a true machine play. For the occasion, the editor Toussaint Quinet reprinted the text of the play in 1648 without any changes but with a catchy new title page: La grande journée des machines ou Le mariage d’Orphée et d’Eurydice.55 In addition, a dessein—a small ­brochure, which provides an account of the spectacle by summarizing the plot and extensively describing the decors and the machines—was published to advertise the play prior to the performance, as emphasized by the use of the future tense in the title: Dessein du poème et des superbes machines du mariage d’Orphée et d’Eurydice, qui se représentera sur le Théâtre du Marais, par les comédiens entretenus par leurs Majestés (Paris: René Baudry, 1647).56 A comparison of the dramatic text of the play and the dessein reveals the extent to which the company, now with access to an enhanced stage and improved machinery, exploited the potential of Chapoton’s play’s spectacular effects to create a tragédie à machines. The beginning of the dessein promises numerous special effects: And the fatal marriage of Orpheus and Eurydice, represented by the comedians of the Marais, will show in their theatre on the stage, simultaneously, Gods of Heaven descending on the earth, divinities flying in the air; the sun passing through his Zodiac, the Furies wandering in their caverns; Dryads in the woods and maenads metamorphosed into trees; rampant snakes; animals walking; the earth opening, the heavens and the pleasant diversity of the forests, of the plains, deserts, rocks, mountains and rivers arguing with nature to deceive pleasantly the sight of the spectators, and delight them with the charms of an inimitable artifice.57

This dessein was republished in 1648 and again in 1662 to coincide with the performance of the italian opera Ercole amante by Francesco Buti (librettist) and Francesco Cavalli (composer) for the inauguration of Vigarini’s Grande Salle des Machines at the Palais des Tuileries.58 Not only do these reprints of the dessein attest to the popularity of this machine play at the Théâtre du Marais but they also shed light on the changes made

machine plays   397 to the staging by the company in collaboration with its well-established machinist Denis Buffequin. If the reprint of 1648 is an exact copy of the dessein’s first edition (1647), the issue of 1662 is slightly different: the description of the stage apparatus of the first act reveals minor revisions. The addition of a new paragraph discusses a significant increase in the number of special effects at the beginning of the performance: two scene changes at the full view of the audience instead of one and the appearances of the chariots of Aurora and the Sun. The narrator notes: Admire the excellence of the engineer who has so well represented on this theatre, and whose fertile spirit of invention, found ways to give two different stars the Dawn and the Sun different kind of light, which all in turn have had the same effect of illuminating these beautiful decorations.59

Thanks to this reprint of the dessein of La grande journée des machines ou Le mariage d’Orphée et d’Eurydice, scholars have clear evidence of changes made to the stage design over time. As such, this type of small program or booklet constitutes “the typographic memory” of the performance, as it reveals the component of the performance that does not always appear explicitly in the dramatic text of the play itself.60 Moreover, the machines of Aurora and the Sun added for the staging of 1662 were already used for a performance in 1649–1650 of a remake of Les sosies (1638), a comedy by Jean Rotrou, at the Théâtre du Marais, renamed La naissance d’Hercule, ou l’Amphitryon.61 A comparison with the Dessein du poème de la grande pièce des machines de la naissance d’Hercule (Paris: René Baudry, 1649) establishes obvious similarities in the staging of both La naissance d’Hercule and Le mariage d’Orphée et d’Eurydice by Denis Buffequin. This last point raises the question of the re-use of machines and decors from one play to another. As theater technology was costly, it was important to amortize the equipment stored in a magasin des décors. This also explains the fact that actors along with the stage designer would stage a play according to the decors and machines that were available to them. More importantly, performances of machine plays were also based on a principle of escalation of special effects not only to please the audience but also to compete with other playhouses. A case in point is the performance of Pierre Corneille’s machine play, Andromède, first staged in 1650 in the Grande Salle du Petit-Bourbon with Torelli’s decors and machines of Orfeo. This play was also staged several times by the company of  the Théâtre du Marais in 1655, 1660, and 1664–1665 with the machines of Denis Buffequin.62 When the Comédie-Française, newly founded by a royal decree, performed Corneille’s Andromède in 1682 to compete with Persée, a tragédie en musique by Philippe Quinault (librettist) and Jean-Baptiste Lully (composer) performed at the Académie royale de musique and based on the exact same mythological story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Books 4 and 5), a real horse appeared on stage for the climax of the tragedy—the rescue of Andromeda by Perseus riding Pegasus. According to the review published in the Mercure galant, “As we always add on to what has already been done, the Pegasus horse was a real one, which had never been done or seen in France.

398   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque He played admirably his role and made in the air all the movements he could make on earth.”63 Even though this case is extreme, it speaks to the spirit and intensity of rivalry among theaters to attract a broad audience.64 It also speaks to the fact that the plots of machine plays were consistently based on a few mythological subjects that had a considerable potential for stage design possibilities: the rescue of Andromeda and Perseus, the descent of Orpheus into hell, the fall of Phaeton, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the love of Jupiter and Semele, Jason’s conquest of the Golden Fleece, etc. Thanks to the stage machinery, these stories were condensed into performable images that would astonish the audience and be part of the visual culture of the time.65 Both Chapoton’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfers and Corneille’s Andromède were performed abroad: in Brussels at the Gracht Theater and the Montagne Sainte-Elisabeth, and in London at the Cockpit (a theater located in Drury Lane), among other places.66 More specifically, during the Restoration period (1660–1688), Londoners found a new interest in machine plays called Restorations spectaculars, which were initially performed at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields.67 Managed by William Davenant, the Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the first theater in England to contain a scena ductilis, which could stage plays with elaborate mechanical devices. In brief, this is the context in which Chapoton and Corneille’s machine plays were performed in French across the English Channel. To allow the audience to follow the plot and also to advertise the performance, a brochure was usually published in English, such as The Description of the Great Machines of the Descent of Orpheus into Hell (London: Robert Crofts, 1661), a copy of which can be found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.68 Following Davenant’s death, the Duke’s company moved in 1671 to the newly built Dorset Garden Theater where the most innovative stage machinery was installed. The writer and memorialist John Evelyn commented in his diary on June 26, 1671, “I went home, steping (sic) in at the Theater, to see the new Machines for the intended scenes, which were indeed very costly, & magnificent.”69 The Davenant’s revival of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1673 was described as “being a new Fancy after the old, and most surprising way of MACBETH, Perform’d with new and costly MACHINES.”70 Based on French machine plays and operas, Restorations spectaculars developed as a genre to attract spectators in search of surprising theatrical effects based on the visual. As such, they were appealing to an increasingly popular audience, while neoclassical theater, which became the canonical drama, were primarily intended for privileged members of the society.71 In fact, machine plays performed in public playhouses pleased a broader general audience. They were developing alongside the model of the Aristotelian tragedy, in which spectacle is marginalized. Therefore, machine theater, which assigns importance to visual effects—the French playwright Pierre Corneille ends the Argument of Andromède (1650) by stating that “this play is only for the eyes”—was quickly assimilated with a form of commercial theater that competed with the neoclassical sort that learned scholars and elites regarded at the time as the aesthetically “legitimate” theater, a form of drama based exclusively on the quality of the text.72 Interestingly, when the ­erudite literary man François-Hédelin D’Aubignac discusses machines and scene sets

machine plays   399 in the fourth book of La Pratique du théâtre (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1957), he starts by admitting that: Certainly the decorations of the scene are the most perceptible charms of that ­ingenious magic, which brings us back to the world of the heroes of past centuries and which shows us a new heaven, a new earth, and an infinite number of wonders that we believe to be present, even at the same time that we are certain that we are being deceived.73

And D’Aubignac adds that recent courtly performances based on the use of theatrical machines (i.e., La finta pazza, Orfeo, etc.) constitute “a sample of the new miracles that the peace has in store for us” (“un échantillon des nouveaux miracles que la Paix nous prépare”).74 Nevertheless, when he refers to machine plays performed on the stage of public playhouses, he formulates the strongest critics, justifying that actors simply cannot do anything right when it comes to machine technology and are too greedy to spend money on proper mechanical devices, with the aim of discouraging playwrights to write machine plays.75 Similarly, he seems to excuse the courtly audience who appreciate machine plays—“although the court rather appreciates them” (“bien que la Cour ne les ait pas désagréables”)—and judge the popular public who favor this type of entertainment— “and that the people come in crowds every time there is a chance to see something like this” (“et que le peuple fasse foule à toutes les occasions de voir quelque chose de semblable”). As shown in D’Aubignac’s remarks, from the moment where mechanical devices were no more exclusively used to serve the glory and prestige of royal power, they were discredited and severely criticized as compared with the dramatic text. Actually, in today’s world, digital technologies such as 3D projection, computer animation, and virtual reality have transformed the art of theater by creating new experiences for audiences in which they are actively engaged and entertained. But as for Baroque machine plays, which were subordinated to the visual, in the digital age, “is the play still the thing?”76 To conclude, the general enthusiasm for modern technology that comes from the Renaissance and blossoms in the Baroque age reveals a fascination for the amazement and wonder of efforts to understand and even reproduce aspects of nature and the cosmos. The intellectual application of mechanistic concepts clearly at work in the writings of Descartes (in Traité de l’homme, 1648) and of Fontenelle (in Les Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 1686) finds in the theater—as in fountains, clocks, and miniature automata— an aesthetic version of the period’s new enthusiasm for the power of mechanism.

Notes 1. I thank Marie Roche for her editorial assistance and her translation of the quotes from French into English. 2. “Machines de théâtre, contenant quarante-neuf planches à cause de quatorze doubles & de quatre triples. Dessinées & expliquées par M. Radel, pensionnaire du roi, & architecte-expert,

400   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque sous la direction de M. Giraud, architecte des menus plaisirs, & machiniste de l’opéra de Paris,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, vol. 10 (Paris: Briasson, David l’Aîné, Le Breton and Durand, 1772), reprinted in L’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert. Théâtres, machines de théâtre (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Image, 2002), 35–63. Robert Bénard engraved the drawings and the architect Radel designed them. The plates show the machines du théâtre de l’opéra de Paris, but the same machines have been used in other theaters across Europe since the mid-seventeenth century. This series of plates can be seen on the website of the ARTFL Encyclopédie Project by browsing the tenth plate volume: http://encyclopedie. uchicago.edu/content/browse (in Table of Contents of Volume 10, scroll to the end of the page to find “Machines de Théâtre”). 3. We refer to machine sketches by these engineers-artists. In most cases, drawings of machine designs in the early modern period were never published during the artist or author’s life, as they mainly circulated among members of corporations and professional circles. For instance, Filippo Brunelleschi’s machine designs are known through the drawings of Bonaccorso Ghiberti (b. 1451–d. 1516) and gathered in a collection called Zibaldone (around 1420–1421). Jean Berain’s projects for machines are collected in Recueil de décorations de théâtre recueillies par M. Levesque, Garde général des magasins des Menus Plaisirs de la Chambre du Roy (Paris: Archives Nationales, [1752]). 4. Ellen R. Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 5. In the dictionary of the Accademia della Crusca, the first definition of the word ­“macchina” is linked to “macchinazione,” defined as “Per macchina, ordigno e strumento da guerra.” The term derives from the word mèchanè in ancient Greek, which means a military siege engine. 6. See Bénédicte Louvat, Théâtre et musique: Dramaturgie de l’insertion musicale dans le théâtre français, 1550–1680 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), 365–400; for an analysis of the plates included in the Encyclopédie, see Roland Barthes, “Image, raison, déraison,” in L’univers de l’Encyclopédie. Images d’une civilisation. Les 135 plus belles planches de l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert (Paris: Les Libraires Associés, 1964), 11–16. On these specific “Machines de Théâtre” plates, see Guy Spielmann, “Machines à rêves? L’imaginaire du théâtre classique d’après les planches de L’Encyclopédie,” Lumen 25 (2006): 103–120. 7. Ove Hidemark, Per Edström, Birgitta Schyberg, et al., Drottningholm Court Theatre. Its Advent, Fate and Preservation (Stockholm: Byggförlaget, 1993); see in particular the chapter by Per Edström, “The Stage Machinery at Drottningholm Theatre,” 74–114. 8. Frank Mohler, “Survival of the Mechanized Flat Wing Scene Change: Court Theatres of Gripsholm, Český Krumlov and Drottningholm,” Theatre Design and Technology 35 (1999): 46–56. 9. See the European Theatre Architecture (EUTA) database: https://www.theatre-architecture.eu/en/. This database provides detailed information on European theater buildings and stage designs. The entries are accompanied by photographic documentation. The stage machinery of the theaters mentioned above can be viewed in this database. For images and models of theater machines, see also the website “Development of Scenic Spectacle” created by the scholar Frank Mohler: https://spectacle.appstate.edu/. 10. “On donne le nom de Machines à tout ce qui n’a de mouvement que par l’artifice des hommes. Les Scenes, & les Theatres mobiles, les Chars, les Nues [nuées], les Vaisseaux, par quelque voye qu’ils soient mûs, sont véritablement machines, parce qu’estant de leur

machine plays   401 nature des estres morts, & immobiles, soit qu’ils soient mûs par des ressorts, par des poids, par le vent, par l’eau, par le feu, ou par des animaux, c’est de l’industrie des hommes qu’ils reçoivent ces mouvemens, & passent ainsi pour Machines.” Claude-François Ménestrier, Traité des tournois, joustes, carrousels, et autres spectacles publics (Lyons: Jacques Muguet, 1669), 142. Interestingly, Antoine Furetière’s definition of the word “machine” in his Dictionnaire universel (1690) describes it in almost exactly the same terms as Ménestrier. 11. Wings were hung in sliding frames, which would move along grooves for a scene change coinciding with a change of action and/or place in the play. 12. Machines were also used in court ballets, masques, sacre rappresentazioni, autos sacramentales, fireworks, ceremonial entries, and other courtly entertainments throughout early modern Europe. See Guy Spielmann’s chapter in this volume on “Court Spectacle and Entertainment.” 13. See Laura Naudeix, Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique, 1673–1764 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 121: “Opera is essentially a show of machinery rather than a dramatic or musical genre” (“L’opéra est presque davantage un spectacle de machineries qu’un genre dramatique ou musical”). As the French actor and theater director Louis Jouvet (b. 1887–d. 1951) puts it: “The dramatic place, machinery, sets, and representation connect. Arranged inside the edifice and forming part of it, the machinery appears as the organs and lungs of the theater whose respiratory function is expressed by the exercise of representation” (“Le lieu dramatique, machinerie, décors et représentation tiennent ensemble. Aménagée à l’intérieur de l’édifice et faisant corps avec lui, la machinerie apparaît comme les organes et les poumons du théâtre dont la fonction respiratoire s’exprime par l’exercice de la représentation”). In “Découverte de Sabbattini,” in La pratique pour fabriquer scènes et machines de théâtre par Nicola Sabbattini, trad. Maria Canavaggia, Renée Canavaggia, and Louis Jouvet (Neuchâtel, France: Ides & Calendes, 1994 [1942]), xviii. 14. Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984 [1973]), 39–41. 15. On machine books, see Wolfgang Lefèvre, ed., Picturing Machines, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Luisa Dolza and Hélène Vérin, “Figurer la mécanique: l’énigme des théâtres de machines de la Renaissance,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 51, no. 2 (2004): 7–37; Jan Lazardzig, “The Machine as Spectacle,” in Instruments in Art and Science. On the Architectonics of Cultural Boundaries in the 17th Century, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 152–175. Contrary to the scholarly tradition, Lazardzig establishes a relationship between machine books and theatrical machines due to the “spectacular character” of the machines. 16. Günter Schöne, “Les traités de perspective, sources historiques du théâtre,” Theatre Research 3 (1961): 176–190. 17. Published in a bilingual edition with a French translation by Jean Martin, this treatise is mainly known for the famous engravings of the three types of scenes (satirical, comic, and tragic). A drawing of a Florentine cityscape stage setting by Baldassare Lanci for Giovanni Battista Cini’s comedy La Vedova (1569), performed with six intermezzi for the  official visit of Archiduke Karl of Austria exemplifies Serlio’s comic scene. See Alois M. Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 1539–1637, trans. George Hickenlooper (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), plate 26. Regarding the relationships between painting and theater in the early modern period, see Emmanuelle Hénin, “Ut pictura theatrum.” Théâtre et peinture de la Renaissance italienne au classicisme français (Geneva: Droz, 2003).

402   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 18. Anne Surgers, Scénographies du théâtre occidental (Paris: Armand Colin, 2017), 89–123; Françoise Siguret, L’Œil surpris. Perception et représentation dans la première moitié du XVII e siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993). 19. The famous Medici festival in 1589 celebrated the marriage of the Grand Duke Ferdinando I and Christine of Lorraine (one of the granddaughters of Catherine de’Medici). Numerous scholarly articles and books have concerned these intermezzi. Among others, see Alois M. Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 58–92; Elena Povoledo, “Origini a aspetti della scenographia in Italia dalla fine del Quattrocento agli intermezzi fiorentini del 1589,” in Li due Orfei: Da Poliziano a Monteverdi, ed. Nino Pirotta and Elena Povoledo (Turin: ERI, 1969), 371–505; Sara Mamone, Il teatro nella Firenze medicea (Milano: Ugo Mursia, 1991 [1981]); Anna Maria Testaverde, L’officina delle nuvole: Il Teatro Mediceo nel 1589 e gli “intermedi” del Buontalenti nel “Memoriale” di Girolamo Seriacopi (Milano: Associazione Amici della Scala, 1991); Philippe Morel, “Gli intermezzi di La pelligrina (1589): Fonti filosofiche e precedenti iconografici nell’arte medicea,” Biblioteca Teatrale 19/20 (1990): 75–98; and James Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 20. In his official account of the performance, Rossi noted: “We have seen many machines coming out from the earth, then ascending to the sky, returning back to Earth and crossing on both sides the scene, always full of persons inside.” Quoted in Sara Mamone, “The Uffizi Theatre. The Florentine Scene from Bernardo Buontalenti to Giulio and Alphonso Parigi,” in Technologies of Theatre. Joseph Furttenbach and the Transfer of Mechanical Knowledge in Early Modern Theatre Cultures, ed. Jan Lazardzig and Hole Rößler (Frankfurt, Germany: Klostermann, 2016), 398. 21. Agostino Carraci made the series of engravings based on a drawing by Andrea Boscoli after an original sketch by Bernardo Buontalenti. 2 2. Arthur  R.  Blumenthal, Theater Art of the Medici (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Museum & Galleries, 1980), 9–11. 23. In that regard, it is significant to note that eyewitness accounts of La pellegrina’s interludes repeatedly underline the artifice as a perfect imitation of nature, raising the question of the paragon between art and nature. For example, one foreign eyewitness wrote: “Also remarkable was the skill with which it was arranged that the clouds which were up in the vaults moved like real clouds. It also looked as though the real moon and many stars hung in the clouds, which rotated and moved. . . . Again, the scene turns [for the fifth interlude], to become an entirely realistic sea.” Italics mine. Quoted in M. A. Katritzky, “Aby Warburg and the Florentine Intermedi of 1589: Extending the Boundaries of Art History,” in Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects, ed. R. Woodfield (Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 2001), 209–258; here 240. 24. Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 44–46. 25. See the famous illumination by Hubert Cailleau showing the different mansions staged for the renowned Valenciennes mystery play performed in 1547 (BNF, Ms. Français, 12536). 2 6. See Lily B. Campbell, Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Renaissance: A Classical Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1923]); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 27. Regarding the use of machinery in Greek theater, Roland Barthes writes: “This machinery has an overarching meaning: ‘To show the interior,’ that of the underworld, the palaces or the Olympus; It forces a secret, thickens the analogy, removes a distance between the

machine plays   403 spectacle and the spectator” (“Cette machinerie a un sens général: ‘faire voir l’intérieur,’ celui des enfers, des palais ou de l’Olympe; elle force un secret, épaissit l’analogie, supprime une distance entre le spectacle et le spectateur”). “Le théâtre grec,” in Histoire des spectacles, dir. Guy Dumur (Paris: Gallimard, coll. La Pléiade, 1965), 533. 28. Giulio Troili’s Paradossi per pratticare la prospettiva senza saperla (Bologna, Italy: H.H. del Peri, 1672) is the first book on perspective that talks about the flat-wing system. See Dunbar H. Ogden, The Italian Baroque Stage. Documents by Giulio Troili, Andrea Pozzo, Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, Baldassare Orsini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Margaret Berthold states that “Flat, sliding wings were the great novelty of the Baroque theater.” See The History of World Theater. From the Beginnings to the Baroque (New York: Continuum, 1991); (Weltgeschichte des Theaters, 1972), 420. It is important to mention that the flat-wing system did not replace the periaktoi, but rather co-existed for a while with the scena versatilis. 29. This complex machinery system first appeared in the Venitian performance of La finta pazza, a festa teatrale by Giulio Strozzi (librettist) and Francesco Sacrati (composer) on 14 January 1641. At the request of the Cardinal Mazarin, who had the ambition to enhance the prestige of France abroad and transform Paris into a leading cultural center rivaling Italy, Torelli came to Paris in 1645. He was first asked to redesign the stage of the Grande Salle du Petit-Bourbon (a palace adjacent to the Louvre) to accommodate his most significant machinery innovations for performances of Italian operas on the French stage. See Per Bjurström, Giacomo Torelli and Baroque Stage Design (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1962) and Francesco Milesi, ed., Giacomo Torelli. L’invenzione scenica nell’Europa barocca, (Fano, Italy: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Fano, 2000). 30. It is worth noting, though, that the central perspective scenery was no longer in favor during the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century, Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena (b. 1657–d. 1743) introduced the so-called angular perspective through a diagonal axis—“la scena per angolo,” coined as “the consummate expression of high Baroque scenography” by Carroll Durand in “The Apogee of Perspective in the Theatre: Ferdinando Bibiena’s Scena per angolo,” Theatre Research International 13.1 (Spring 1988): 21–29. See also Pannill Camp, The First Frame. Theatre Space in Enlightenment France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–25. 31. This expression underlines the close relationships between science and magic in the early modern period. Interestingly, Luigi Riccoboni states: “Machines are the effects of the magic and the wonder” (“Les machines sont les effets de la magie et du merveilleux”). Réflexions historiques et critiques sur les différents théâtres de l’Europe (Paris: Jacques Guerrin, 1738), 45. 32. Per Bjurström, Giacomo Torelli, 110; quoted in Hoxby Blair, “Technologies of Performance. From Mystery Plays to the Italian Order,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age, ed. Robert Henke, vol. 3 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 172. 33. See Agne Beijer, “Visions célestes et infernales dans le théâtre du moyen âge et de la Renaissance,” in Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, ed. Jean Jacquot, vol. I (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1956), 405–417; Sara Mamone, “Les nuées de l’Olympe à la scène: les dieux au service de l’église et du prince dans le spectacle florentin de la Renaissance,” in Images of the Pagan Gods, ed. Rembrandt Duits and François Quiviger (London and Turin: The Warburg Institute/Nino Aragno, 2009), 329–366; Alessandra Buccheri, The Spectacle of Clouds, 1438–1650: Italian Art and Theatre (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). The cloud machine (la nuvola, la gloire)

404   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque became the key element of the Baroque stage. Interesting parallels can be drawn between the use of cloud machines on the Baroque stage and paintings. 34. Viktoria Tkaczyk, “ ‘Which Cannot Be Sufficiently Described by My Pen.’ The Codification of Knowledge in Theater Engineering, 1480–1680,” in The Structures of Practical Knowledge, ed. Matteo Valleriani (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2017), 91. 35. Per Bjurström talks about a “dynamic set” (in Giacomo Torelli, 108) and Jean Jacquot uses a similar expression: “une scène dynamique” in “Les Types de lieu théâtral et leurs transformations de la fin du Moyen Age au milieu du XVIIe siècle,” in Le Lieu théâtral à la Renaissance, ed. Jean Jacquot (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1964), 479. 3 6. Anne Surgers, Scénographies du théâtre occidental, 16. 37. See Hervé Brunon, “Tommaso Francini (1571–1651),” in Créateurs de jardins et de paysages en France de la Renaissance au XXIe siècle, dir. Michel Racine, vol. I (Arles and Versailles: Actes sud/École nationale supérieure du paysage, 2001), 38–42. 38. See Hélène Visentin, “Décorateur à la cour et à la ville: Un artisan de la scène nommé Georges Buffequin (1585?–1641),” XVIIe Siècle 195 (1997): 325–339 and Marc Bayard, “Les faiseurs d’artifice: Georges Buffequin et les artistes de l’éphémère à l’époque de Richelieu,” XVIIe Siècle 230 (2006): 151–164. The word “maître” precisely refers to the mastery of a craft—here painting—acquired in a professional workshop. 39. Elena Tamburini, “Guitti, Buonamici, Mariani, les Vigarini. Scénographes Italiens en voyage à travers l’Europe,” in Les Lieux du spectacle dans l’Europe du XVIIe siècle, ed. Charles Mazouer (Tübingen, Germany: Narr, 2006), 189–206. 40. Anne Le Pas de Sécheval, “Le Cardinal de Richelieu, le théâtre et les décorateurs italiens: Nouveaux documents sur Mirame et le ballet de La Prospérité des Armes de France (1641),” XVIIe Siècle 186 (1995): 135–145; Marc Bayard, “Le roi au cœur du théâtre: Richelieu met en scène l’Autorité,” in L’Image du roi de François Ier à Louis XIV, ed. Thomas W. Gaehgtens and Nicole Hochner (Paris: Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art and Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2006), 191–208. 41. Margaret Rich Greer, The Play of Power. The Mythological Court Drames of Calderón de la Barca (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 13. 42. Flora Biach-Schiffmann, Giovanni und Ludovico Burnacini, Theater and Feste am Wiener Hofe (Vienna and Berlin: Krystall-Verlag, 1931); Robert Arthur Griffin, High Baroque Culture and Theatre in Vienna (New York: Humanities Press, 1972). 43. Jan Lazardzig and Hole Rössler, “Joseph Furttenbach and the Transfer of Mechanical Knowledge. New Perspectives on Early Modern Theatre Cultures,” in Technologies of Theatre, 289–309. 44. This original manuscript is located at the Bavarian State Library and can be consulted online at https://codicon.digitale-sammlungen.de/Blatt_bsb00002107,00001.html?prozent=1 https://codicon.digitale-sammlungen.de/Blatt_bsb00002107,00001.html?prozent=1. An English translation of the Codex iconographicus 401 by Hole Rössler is forthcoming. 45. Viktoria Tkaczyk, “ ‘Which Cannot Be Sufficiently Described by My Pen,’ ” 97. 46. Tkaczyk, “ ‘Which Cannot Be Sufficiently Described by My Pen,’ ” 97. 47. It is worth mentioning that transfer knowledge implies the idea of translation. As Hole Rössler puts it: “Knowledge is ‘translated’ in the transfer from one socially-, politicallyand economically-determined knowledge culture to another, in the movement through diverse storage media, through the change in language and not least through selection and reduction as means of adapting what is abstractly possible to the concrete and acute needs,

machine plays   405 expectations and demands of the ‘target’ culture.” (“ ‘For lack of a site, and also to save expense.’ Knowledge of Stagecraft: Joseph Furttenbach and the Limits of Cultural Translation,” in Technologies of Theatre, 375–376). On the question of knowledge translation, see also Harold J. Cook and Sven Dupré, “Introduction,” in Translating Knowledge in the Early Low Modern Countries, ed. Harold J. Cook and Sven Dupré (Zürich and Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2013), 9–10; Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke, and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 48. Jan Lazardzig and Hole Rössler, “Joseph Furttenbach and the Transfer of Mechanical Knowledge,” 277. 49. Lazardzig and Rössler, 277–278. As another example: an eyewitness of La pellegrina (1589), Barthold von Gadenstedt, ends his diary account by stating, “We would have appreciated the opportunity [to see] how this could have been produced, but it was strictly forbidden to grant anyone permission to see this.” (Quoted in M. A. Katritzky, “Aby Warburg and the Florentine Intermedi of 1589: Extending the Boundaries of Art History,” 209–258.) 50. Lazardzig and Rössler, 279. Besides a myriad of drawings and engineers’ notebook manuscripts, the main manuals/treatises that deal with pre-modern stagecraft are: an anonymous manuscript, written between the late 1620s and 1630s, titled Il Corago, o vero alcune osservazioni per mettere bene in scena le composizioni drammatiche, ed. Paolo Fabbri and Angelo Pompilio (Florence: Olschki, 1983); Nicola Sabbattini’s Pratica di fabricar scene e machine ne’ teatri (1637–1638), which was the first printed manual on theater technology; Giacomo Torelli’s Apparati scenici per lo teatro Novissimo di Venitia, (s.l.n.d. [1644]); Joseph Furttenbach’s Codex iconographicus 401 (ed. Hole Rößler, forthcoming), along with passages from his architectural treatises—mainly Architectura recreationis (1640) and the Mannhaffter Kunstspiegel (1663); and Fabrizio Carini Motta’s Trattato sopra la structura de’ theatri e scene (1676) and Costruzione de teatri e machine teatrali (1688). On the later, see Orville K. Larson, The Theatrical Writings of Fabrizio Carini Motta: Translations of Trattato sopra la structtura de’ theatri e sceni, 1676 and Costruzione de teatri e machine teatrali, 1688 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). 51. Gaspare Vigarini is known for having burnt all the decorations and machines created by Giacomo Torelli for both stages at the Palais Royal and the Petit-Bourbon as a way to secure his authority and sovereignty over the Parisian stage. In any case, he did not stay long in France after the complete failure of the Grande Salle des Machines due to bad acoustics because of the size of the theater building. See Jerôme de La Gorce, “Torelli et les Vigarani, initiateurs de la scénographie italienne en France,” in Seicento. La peinture italienne du XVIIe siècle et la France (Paris: Rencontres de l’École du Louvre, La Documentation Française, 1990), 13–25; Alice Jarrard, “Gaspare Vigarini: Le macchine, la prospettiva e l’architettura,” in Modena 1598. L’invenzione di una capitale, ed. Massimo Bulgarelli, Claudia Conforti, and Giovanna Curcio (Milano: Electra, 1999), 193–217. 52. Evan Baker, From the Score to the Stage. An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 13. See also Hélène Leclerc, Venise baroque et l’opéra (Paris: Armand Colin, 1987) and Ellen Rosand, Opera in SeventeenthCentury Venice. The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 53. John Golder argues that Théâtre du Marais, in 1644, was equipped with a stage conforming to the Italian scenography and modelled on the stage of the Palais-Royal. “ ‘À l’instart et conformément . . . au jeu de paume du Marestz’: Ce que l’Hôtel de Bourgogne devait au Théâtre du Marais en 1647,” in Les Lieux du spectacle dans l’Europe du XVIIe siècle, ed. Charles Mazouer (Tübingen, Germany: Biblio 17, 2006), 87–102.

406   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 54. As highlighted in the title of a play by Claude Boyer performed at the Théâtre du Marais in 1648–1649: Ulysse dans l’Ile de Circé, ou Euriloche foudroyé, tragicomédie, Représentée sur le Théâtre des Machines du Marais, (Paris: Toussaint Quinet, 1650). 55. See the “Postface” of the critical edition of François de Chapoton, La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers, tragédie 1640, ed. Hélène Visentin (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004), 141–170. 56. Publishing a dessein of the performance of machine plays started to be a standard practice when Italian feste teatrali were imported by Mazarin in France in the 1640s. See Hélène Visentin, “Le ‘dessein’ de la pièce à machines: Un cas particulier d’inscription du texte spectaculaire,” Texte 33/34 (2003): 139–165. 57. “Et le funeste Mariage d’Orphee et d’Euridice, estant representé par les Comediens du Marests, fera voir sur leur Theatre presque en un même instant, des Dieux du Ciel descendre sur la Terre. Des Divinitez voler dans le vague des Airs. Le Soleil rouler sur son Zodiaque. Les furies errer dans leurs cavernes. Des Driades dans les bois. Des Bacchantes métamorphosées en Arbres. Des Serpens remper. Des Animaux marcher. La Terre s’ouvrir. L’Enfer parroistre. Et l’agreable diversité des Forests. Des plaines, des Deserts, des Rochers, des Montagnes & des Fleuves disputer avec la Nature pour tromper agreablement la veuë des Spectateurs, & les ravir par les charmes d’un artifice inimitable.” See Hélène Visentin ed., La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, 135. 58. It is known that this performance was hugely disappointing, mainly because of the bad acoustics and visibility to the stage due to the enormous size of the theater. 59. “Admirez l'excellence de l’Ingénieur qui les a si bien representez sur ce Theatre, & dont l’esprit fertile en invention, a trouvé moyen de donner à deux differends Astres l’Aurore & le Soleil differente sorte de lumiere, qui toutes chacune à son tour ont eu le mesme effet d’éclairer ses belles Decorations.” Hélène Visentin ed., La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, 136. It is worth mentioning that this passage highlights the use of lights with candles to brighten the machines, which was part of their appeal. 60. “La mémoire typographique.” Roger Chartier, “Georges Dandin, ou le social en représentation,” Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales 49, no 2 (1994): 289. 61. Les sosies by Rotrou was first performed in 1637 on the stage of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, before being staged at the Théâtre du Marais in 1649–1650 under a new title La naissance d’Hercule, ou l’Amphitryon (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1650). See Jean de Rotrou, Les Sosies, in Théâtre complet 8, ed. Hélène Visentin (Paris: S.T.F.M., 2005). 62. S.  W.  Deierkauf-Holsboer, Le Théâtre du Marais, vol. 2 (Paris: Nizet, 1958), 68–72 and 221–224. 63. “Comme on renchérit toujours sur ce qui a été fait, on a représenté le cheval Pégase par un véritable cheval, ce qui n’avait jamais été vu en France. Il joue admirablement son rôle, et fait en l’air tous les mouvements qu’il pourrait faire sur terre.” Le Mercure Galant, 23 Juillet 1682. Quoted from Christian Delmas’s critical edition of Corneille’s Andromède (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1974), 191. 64. See Hélène Visentin, “Le théâtre à machines: Succès majeur pour un genre mineur,” Littératures Classiques 51 (2004): 205–222. 65. For instance, Benoît Bolduc identified about thirty French and Italian plays and operas based on the mythological story of Andromeda and Perseus performed between 1587 and 1712. See Benoît Bolduc, Andromède au rocher. Fortune théâtrale d’une image en France et en Italie (1587–1712) (Florence: Leo Olschki, 2002). 66. See Henri Liebrecht, Histoire du théâtre Français à Bruxelles au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Édouard Champion, 1923), 59–69; Colin Visser, “The Descent of

machine plays   407 Orpheus at the Cockpit, Drury Lane,” Theater Survey 24, no. 1–2 (1983): 5–53; John Orrell, “Scenes and Machines at the Cockpit, Drury Lane,” Theater Survey 26, no. 2 (1985): 103–119. 67. The scholar Judith Milhous described these plays as “multimedia spectaculars” and “Dorset Garden spectaculars.” See Judith Milhous, “The Multimedia Spectacular on Restauration Stage,” in British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984), 41–66. 68. Colin Visser, “The Descent of Orpheus at the Cockpit, Drury Lane,” 35. See also the appendix of John Orrell, “Scenes and Machines at the Cockpit, Drury Lane,” 113–118 for a transcript of The designe or the Great peece of Machines of the Loves of Diana and Endimion (another French machine play by Gabriel Gilbert) from a copy located at the Bodleian Library as well. 69. Robert  D.  Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 280. 70. Quoted in Sandra Clark, “Shakespeare and Other Adaptations,” in A Companion to the Restauration Drama, ed. Susan J. Owen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 279. 7 1. It is worth mentioning that the scholarly work of Christian Delmas rehabilitated the genre of machine plays as a legitimate theater. See Mythologie et Mythe dans le théâtre français (1650–1676) (Geneva: Droz, 1985) and “L’unité du genre tragique au XVIIe siècle,” Littératures Classiques, no. 16 (1992): 103–123. 72. “My principal aim here has been to satisfy the eyes by the brilliance and variety of spectacle, and not to touch the mind through the power of thought.” (“mon principal but ici a été de satisfaire la vue par l’éclat et la diversité du spectacle, et non pas de toucher l’esprit par la force du raisonnement.”). Pierre Corneille, Andromède, tragédie, ed. Christian Delmas (Paris: S.T.F.M., 1974), 13. 73. “Il est certain que les ornements de la Scène sont les plus sensibles charmes de cette ingénieuse Magie, qui rapelle au monde les Héros des siècles passés, et qui nous met en vue un nouveau Ciel, une nouvelle Terre, et une infinité de merveilles que nous croyons avoir présentes, dans le même temps que nous sommes bien assurés qu’on nous trompe.” Abbé D’Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre, ed. Hélène Baby (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), 485. 74. D’Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre. In a recent article, Jean-Vincent Blanchard establishes an interesting relationship between the idea of France’s historical becoming (“le devenir historique de la France”) and courtly performances of machine theater. See “Les Promenades de Richelieu de Jean Desmarets et la modernité du théâtre à machines,” XVIIe Siècle 280 (2018): 461–474. 75. D’Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre, 485. To render justice to D’Aubignac, often machines failed to work properly on the stage of public playhouses according to eyewitness accounts. 76. Craig Lambert, “The Future of Theater. In a Digital Era, Is the Play Still the Thing?” Harvard Magazine, January–February 2012, http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/01/thefuture-of-theater.

Further Reading Baur-Heinhold, Margarete. The Baroque Theater. A Cultural History of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Translated by Mary Whittal. New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1967. Blumenthal, Arthur  R. Giulio Parigi’s Designs: Florence and the Early Baroque Spectacle. New York: Garland, 1986.

408   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Buccheri, Alessandra. The Spectacle of Clouds, 1438–1650: Italian Art and Theatre. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Lazardzig, Jan. Theatermaschine und Festungsbau: Paradoxien der Wissensproduktion im 17. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Lefèvre, Wolfgang ed. Picturing Machines, 1400–1700. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Milesi, Francesco ed. Giacomo Torelli. L’Invenzione Scenica nell’Europa Barocca. Fano, Italy: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Fano, 2000. Ogden, Dunbar H. ed. The Italian Baroque Stage. Documents by Giulio Troili, Andrea Pozzo, Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, Baldassare Orsini. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. Roßbach, Nikola. Poiesis der Maschine: Barocke Konfigurationen von Technik, Literatur und Theater. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013. Rossi, Paolo. Les Philosophes et les Machines. 1400–1700. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Visentin, Hélène. “La tragédie à machines ou l’art d’un théâtre bien ajusté.” In Mythe et histoire dans le théâtre classique. Hommage à Christian Delmas. Edited by Fanny Népote-Desmarres and Jean-Philippe Grosperrin, 417–429. Toulouse, France: Société de Littératures Classiques, 2002.

chapter 17

Or na m en tation Michael Yonan

The Baroque era was nothing if not ornamental. Its cultural products confirm it at every turn, displaying a decorative effusiveness that few other moments in European history can match.1 The sumptuously decorated churches of Bernini and Borromini bedazzle the eye with complex manipulations of space, gilded surfaces, inlaid marble, and art works of every kind. The gorgeously verbose writings of Cervantes and Milton take their readers on journeys of vivid lexical abundance, while the soundscapes of Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel thrill the ear with sounds of beautiful intricacy. These and other well-known examples of baroque decorative generosity have made the term ­virtually synonymous with the ornamental. Indeed, to call something baroque today is to describe it as elaborate. The sheer abundance of ornament in European cultural products made between 1550 and 1750 is also one of the greatest obstacles to comprehending the era. When we look at baroque art or listen to baroque music, we are confronted immediately with an unfamiliar mindset about what makes something beautiful. In that time period, beauty required decoration, and the period’s ideas about how decoration worked—how much there should be and what it should look like—are remote indeed from our own. We approach baroque aesthetics from the opposite side of modernism, which influenced commonplace aesthetic criteria in decisive ways.2 Twentieth-century artists strove for a crystallization of forms into concentrated aesthetic statements, stripping art of anything deemed unnecessary in order to produce what they believed to be an authentically pure aesthetic experience. Modern artists therefore placed greater value on the streamlined, the efficient, the pithy, and the direct. Those criteria have become normalized into aesthetic ideals that celebrate clarity and conciseness over more elaborate forms of communication. Nothing could be further from a baroque attitude toward decoration. We therefore are badly equipped to understand why so much art from that era rejoices in exactly the characteristics considered so aesthetically wrong today. This chapter seeks to aid readers in approaching baroque art and music by offering frameworks for understanding how ornament worked in that period. What follows is less a catalog of baroque decorative forms or a historical analysis of ornament’s meanings

410   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque than an inroad into the mindset that made ornamentation necessary. It is not easy to summarize decorative complexity concisely; being asked to do so is likewise a symptom of the historical difference between our moment and the Baroque. But attempt it I shall, with the hope of enabling readers to see something meaningful in this period’s ornament, indeed to understand ornamentation itself as a vital structural component of the period’s culture. To achieve this, I will concentrate on two areas: ornamented interiors, particularly ecclesiastical ones, and the ornamented musical lines of vocal compositions. In both, the role of ornament is not simply to be a whimsical add-on to works of art complete without it. That understanding would fit a modernist view of art. Instead, baroque ornament is a site of communication and psychic expansion, one in which the work of art is allowed embrace possibilities that are beyond what the artist or composer can convey directly. Ornament permits art to be open to the new.

The Classical Inheritance Let us begin with architecture, since it is in architectural constructions from this period that ornamentation plays a such a vivid role. European architecture of the early modern era was grounded in architectural forms inherited from antiquity. The primary formal lexicon for evoking that classical inheritance were the Orders of Architecture, the wellknown shapes of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns, as well as myriad variations of these created to suit specific architectural situations. Early modern architects derived knowledge about the Orders primarily from two sources. There were the remnants of classical architecture itself, which could be viewed in the regions of Europe that were once part of the Roman Empire and of course in modern Rome. The other extremely influential source was Vitruvius’s De Architectura, the sole architectural treatise to ­survive from classical antiquity. Vitruvius discussed at length the arrangement of each order’s different parts, but vagueness in his prose led to much confusion in the Renaissance about precisely how the Orders should look. Scholars and architects turned their attention to clarifying his text across the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, with numerous architectural treatises written to delineate the Orders’ appearance. These books have become hallmarks of the literature on architectural ­history: Leon Battista Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria (1485), Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Regola degli Cinque Ordini dell’Architettura (1562), Andrea Palladio’s I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (1570), and Sebastiano Serlio’s I Sette Libri dell’Architettura (1584) are only the most recognizable names in a literature that grew by the eighteenth century to dominate the discourse on architectural design in Europe.3 There are several important things to recognize about this literature. The first is that despite the shared desire to clarify the forms of the Orders, little actual consensus about them and their usage emerged. Early modern architects frequently found variations in how the Orders appeared when they observed works of ancient architecture, and there were additional inconsistencies between what surviving ancient buildings showed and

ornamentation   411 what Vitruvius recommended. Another issue is that few treatises dealt with ornamentation in terms similar to the emergent idea of decoration. The ornamental elements of each architectural Order are essential, fundamental components of its visual language, not decorative flourishes. The Doric Order, for example, ideally should not be used without the triglyphs and metopes that comprise its entablature, nor the fluting on its columns. Likewise, the Ionic Order is not Ionic without its representative scrolls or the Corinthian Order without the stylized acanthus leaves of its capital. Yet, although these elements of the Orders are semantically important, they are structurally unimportant. Removing the sculpted acanthus leaves from a Corinthian column will not cause a building to collapse; removing the column itself might. This means that there is a discrepancy inherent to the Orders between their structural and nonstructural components. Over time, those nonstructural aspects increasingly came to be associated with what we would nowadays call ornament.4 Contributing to this was Vitruvius’s use of the word ornamentis to describe those parts of the order that are nonstructural.5 He used the word to indicate the visual equipment of the Orders, aspects of their appearance that enabled them to convey meaning, and these were necessary requirements of a building in order for it to be considered architecture. It is a sense of ornamentation that is largely lost today but which was essential to the Orders as Vitruvius understood them. Perhaps because Vitruvius has rather little to say about ornament beyond this, the concept of ornament plays a surprisingly minor role in early modern architectural writings, and in them a cleft between structure and nonstructure opens up, which laid the groundwork for modern theories of ornament.6 Renaissance and baroque architects read into Vitruvius’s distinction between structura and ornamentis a division between architecture and decoration.7 And given that the widespread dissemination of Vitruvius’s ideas occurred in tandem with historical events that lent decoration an increasingly charged social value, we can begin to trace how ornament became a prominent part of baroque design even as it became the focus of derision.

Baroque Ornament and Social Change To see how history and theory combined to create a discourse of ornament, let us turn to one of the most famous buildings of early modern architecture, the church of Il Gesù in Rome, shown in Figure 1. This is the titular church of the Society of Jesus and a building of singular importance to the history of European architecture.8 It was begun in 1568 to initial designs by Giacomo da Vignola and with financial support from the powerfully placed Farnese family, whose members held prominent positions in the Catholic ecclesiastical ­bureaucracy. A major influence on the church’s appearance was the Council of Trent, a  series of meetings between Protestant and Catholic authorities that took place in

412   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 1  Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta, Church of Il Gesù, Rome. Façade. 1568–1584. Scala/Art Resource, ART190803

northern Italy between 1545 and 1563. The Catholic Church emerged from the Council with new ideas about how to engage the populace in an era in which Protestant adherence had increased exponentially. Central among these was the idea of connecting worshippers more directly with the clergy during the mass by making the celebrants, and above all the Eucharist, clearly visible during ceremonies. Doing so, it was hoped, would enhance the worshippers’ religious experience, reignite their faith, and bring the doubtful back into the church’s embrace. The Gesù was the first major Roman church to be built after the Council of Trent and the first to put into practice this new conception of visual clarity in an ecclesiastical interior. After lengthy discussions about its appearance and several false starts, the church was consecrated in 1584. The original designs of Il Gesù were a direct response to the Council of Trent’s edicts. The church was built with an unusually wide transept, the brainchild of the architect Giacomo della Porta, who succeeded Vignola on the project. The building also possessed shallow side chapels and other design elements intended to make the ceremony

ornamentation   413 of the mass apprehensible during worship. Contributing to that was the church’s interior decoration, and here we come to the role of ornament. Surviving drawings, prints, and letters indicate that the Gesù’s original architects and patrons intended it to be minimally decorated, with comparatively few decorative elements on its walls. Much of the interior surface was to have been whitewashed and unpainted. The justifications for this sparseness were several. The first was that a modestly decorated interior matched the ideal of poverty that the Jesuits adopted, and as a relatively new order, such an ideal perhaps suited their image at a significant moment in their development. But more than this, a spare decoration kept the worshipper’s focus on the mass and particularly on the Eucharist. Minimizing decoration meant that there was little to distract. One of the church’s primary patrons, Cardinal Alexander Farnese, remarked further in a letter that a minimally decorated interior would make the church more acoustically reverberant, which would then enable the words of the celebrants to be heard clearly during the mass.9 We should remember that this demand for architectural clarity in sixteenth-­ century Italy coincided with the widespread scholarly investigation of the architectural Orders, paralleling the ever sharper distinction between structure and ornament that architectural theorists derived from Vitruvius. Ornament became a negative quality, a distraction from truth, understood here as a Catholic religious truth associated with the power structures of the Church. The well-traveled reader will likely recall, however, that the interior one sees when visiting Il Gesù today is not in fact sparsely decorated. On the contrary, it is one of the most richly and abundantly decorated interiors in Roman baroque architecture, as Figure 2 clearly shows. The church looks as it does because later officials came to the conclusion that decorative restraint did not adequately convey the Catholic Church’s majesty. Less than a ­century after its consecration, the Superior General of the Jesuits, Giovanni Paolo Oliva, ordered that the Gesù’s interior be redecorated, and not with restraint.10 After consultation with Bernini, Oliva commissioned artists to cover the church’s interior with ornately carved marble, gilded woods, metalwork, and numerous paintings. He also supervised the addition of a complex illusionistic fresco to the church’s ceiling. Made by Giovanni Battista Gaulli, it represents the Triumph of the Name of Jesus in a trompe l’oeil that seems to break through the building’s architecture to reveal the heavens above. Oliva justified this redecoration by evoking the need for una chiesa ricca e bella, a church both rich and beautiful.11 In so doing, he perpetuated a division between poverty in the way the Jesuits lived and richness in the spaces where they worshipped. And the Gesù is  hardly a unique building in its ornamental abundance; comparatively elaborate, intensely decorated buildings both ecclesiastical and secular became increasingly ­standard across Europe by the mid-seventeenth century and especially so in Catholic territories. How does one explain the profound change in attitude toward ornamentation we find at the Gesù? The problem can be approached from several angles. One is to think in terms of conspicuous consumption, an idea first propounded over a century ago by Thorstein Veblen and much evoked among social historians of art to describe artistic

414   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 2  Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta, Church of Il Gesù, Rome. Interior looking toward apse. 1568–1584. Scala/Art Resource, ART341793

practices. By displaying wealth and power through abundantly ornamented works of art, the patron communicates their social authority. A more cynical view would be to say that the church’s interior stakes a claim through decoration on authority that the patron may only shakily possess. An abundance of ornamented decoration therefore implies a certain insecurity. Another avenue would be to think in terms of changing styles, with style understood either as the manifestation of profound cultural predilections in art or simply as changing attitudes toward beauty. In this framework, the restrained elements of Renaissance ornament lost their appeal, and as more elaborate ones came to replace them, artists strove for ever greater complexity to suit changes in taste. Baroque ­ornamentation would be understood as an attempt to please through ever increasing

ornamentation   415 novelty; Padre Oliva’s chiesa ricca e bella could only appeal if worshippers grew tired of church interiors with subtler forms of decoration. I would propose a somewhat different way of approaching the problem. Changing historical conditions require changes in attitudes toward art, and ornament is particularly sensitive in that regard, perhaps uniquely so in comparison to other kinds of artistic activity. Here, we might look for historical conditions that justify the magnification of ornamental abundance that occurred in European architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The architectural historian Richard Krautheimer attempted to think along these lines. In attempting to explain why Pope Alexander VII Chigi commissioned so many impressive architectural and urbanistic projects for the papal capital during his 12-year reign, and to explain their elaborate artistic ingenuity, Krautheimer suggested that the cause was the changing place of the Catholic church in the world.12 The perception that the institution of the church had lost significant authority after the Reformation, as well as territory and revenue associated with that authority, accelerated the desire for grandiose artistic achievements to reassert the church’s importance. This may have pushed artists to view art as a site for ever-increasing levels of ingenuity and elaboration, as well as for patrons to demand art that displayed ever greater visual complexity. That, in a nutshell, might explain the efflorescence of baroque ornament. It is possible to broaden Krautheimer’s argument to speculate that the processes of social change that characterized early modern Europe—the splintering of religious identities, the decentralization of power among European courtly seats, the increasing awareness of cultures across the globe and the minimization of Europe that this awareness implied, and increased literacy among the emergent merchant classes—would result in a world in which revered institutions would feel pressure to assert their relevance.13 Ornament might have been a way to do that. The more there is to look at, the more important something must be. If that is the case, then the same baroque ornamental richness that conveyed that importance would, in later centuries, become the evidence of an earlier era’s aesthetic errancy.

Ornamental Transformations The language of baroque ornament was often classically inspired, as we have seen, but as the seventeenth century progressed, the classical language of architecture began to coexist and combine with architectural motifs deriving from diverse sources. One sees this illustrated clearly in architectural and ornamental prints. An anti-classical, anti-rational ornamental impulse came to prominence in the sixteenth century and thrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth. It combined decorative elements from outside of the Orders with elements of classical architectural design. This anti-classical impulse assumed many names. In the seventeenth century, it was likely called the grotesque, a term deriving from the garden grottos where such free ornamental experimentation was allowed. It was in gardens that the rules of social and architectural

416   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque decorum were loosened. In the eighteenth century, the grotesque came to be associated with non-Classical and non-European decorative shapes. It elided with chinoiserie, motifs alla turca, the Gothic, and other decorative languages that deviated from strict Classical precedence. By the late seventeenth century, the actual language of ornament had grown to a dizzying repertoire of visual forms: leaves, flowers, animals, curls, lines, scrolls, and squiggles, which could be manipulated to produce highly inventive decorative schemes.14 A strict divide between the classical and the extra-classical in decoration became increasingly difficult to demarcate. As an example, we can look at Guarino Guarini’s Chapel of the Holy Shroud, a church interior completed in the 1690s and appended onto the much older Cathedral of Turin. Among the many architectural innovations one finds there, the so-called Passion Capitals, shown in Figure 3, are particularly noteworthy.15 Strictly speaking, they follow the general format of the Corinthian Order, but add to it pictorial elements derived from the iconography of Jesus’s crucifixion: stylized branches of thorns, nails from the cross, a  banner with the initials of the phrase Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, and other innovations. The result of this intermixing is a continuation of the classical language of architecture, a crediting of that tradition’s continued validity, combined with creative modifications of it that suit the room’s specific liturgical function and that display both the architect’s faith and his ingenuity. Guarini’s chapel was often derided later as an example of grotesque architecture, its dark interior and distended vertical proportions far indeed from qualities recommended by Vitruvius. Those deviations highlight the room’s ­spiritual content and embellish it to enrich it. Yet, as ornament grew in decorative abundance, the criticism that it was unnecessary was increasingly leveled against it. The role of the artist or architect in designing ornament, and the creative freedom that their designs came to signify, became the subject of intense critical scrutiny. Nowhere was this more true than in the eighteenth century, when rococo ornament became dominant in continental European decoration. The rococo holds various places in the stylistic progression of European art. It has sometimes been called the late baroque, a term that conveys the belief that it is a straightforward continuation of the decorative elements propounded in the “early baroque” of the sixteenth century and the “high baroque” of the seventeenth. It is better to understand the rococo as a new moment in the history of ornament, one in which artistic creativity and invention is precisely accorded the freedom that traditionally had been categorized as grotesque. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, French designers in particular began to experiment with composite ornamental designs that drew from grotesque ­elements in European architecture, pushing the limits of decoration beyond its traditional role. One sees this in drawings by Claude Audran III, Gilles Oppenord, and most famously in the early designs of Antoine Watteau. Their designs use the language of the grotesque, but do so to suggest that ornament can become autonomous, that it contains within itself the raw materials of all art. It achieved this by manipulating two ornamental elements in order to complicate ornament’s traditional pictorial limits. These were the shell and the cartouche.

ornamentation   417

Figure 3  Guarino Guarini, Chapel of the Holy Shroud, Turin. Detail of interior showing Passion Capital. 1668–1694. Archivio Seat/Archivi Alinari/Art Resource, SEA-S-T11980-007

Shells and shell-like forms appear in European ornament over many centuries. In the seventeenth century, one finds shell-like shapes in ornamental frames and borders. Shells were particularly appropriate for villas and garden architecture, where their natural beauty could be modified to create pleasing hybrids of human and natural invention. But shells were hardly limited to such spaces, and with the increasing awareness of global biological diversity in the natural world, the shell emerged as a primary form in rococo art. Shells achieved this because they were natural wonders; they seemed to be designed, even decorated, but were also natural and seemingly untouched by human artistic intervention.16 Rococo ornament is based in the shape of the shell, and in several European languages it was described specifically as such. In German, for example, the period term for rococo stuccowork was Muschelwerk. Through the shell, rococo ornament became a starting point for a broader visual exploration of the connection between art and nature, with the shell as the meeting point between the two. Then there was the cartouche. In the decorative interiors of early eighteenth-century Europe, the cartouche served a primary ornamental role: it embellished pictures and

418   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque enhanced visually the pleasure of looking at things. Cartouches appear in art as far back as ancient Egypt, but in the early eighteenth century, they appeared less to decorate ­pictures and more to play with perception of space. One sees this, again, particularly in Germany, where cartouches overflow their ostensible function as frames and become complex players in the visual experience of the rooms they adorn. German rococo cartouches are often empty, which means, strictly speaking, they frame nothing. They can also exceed or expand outward from the surface of the wall, which lets them become free players in a decorative program. Such freedom often directly flaunted the rules of classical aesthetics. One way in which cartouches did so was by becoming increasingly asymmetrical, which marked a distinct and unquestionable break with Vitruvian ideals. We see these varied design choices in the cartouche shown in Figure 4, from the interior of the Franciscan Church in Überlingen, Germany, a medieval building that was renovated in the rococo manner around 1750. The uneven and irregular forms one sees in it are at once natural (shells, leaves) and artificial (angles, edges). They are also beautiful and monstrous, asymmetrical and balanced all at once. To achieve this, stuccoworkers needed to possess both great manual skill and a fine sense of design. But as a functional frame, the cartouche at Überlingen fails totally, and if one applies a criterion of utility to the building’s decoration, as Vitruvius would have done, then the cartouche might indeed be an unnecessary add-on to the church’s function.

Figure 4  Rococo cartouche, Franziskanerkirche, Überlingen, 1750s. Photo by F. Bucher. Creative Commons License (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ornamentation   419 By the end of the eighteenth century, such ornamental effusion was associated firmly with the perceived excesses of the Ancien Régime. Exploitation and wastefulness, the decline of virtues exemplified by classical heroes, and the excesses of irrational religious fervor all seemed to be traceable to baroque and rococo ornament. While it is important to recognize the basis of that critique, as it recurs in modern assessments of baroque art and architecture, I would caution readers from assuming that the terms of antiornament criticism somehow correctly explain ornament’s value. A cartouche like that at Überlingen may break self-consciously with the rules of classical aesthetics, but it does so to invite the worshipper to imagine aspects of the divine beyond even what Guarini’s pictorially inventive Passion Capital allowed. One might call Guarini’s ornament meditative, a form designed to stimulate the mind to ponder the suffering of Jesus, while the Überlingen cartouche might be described as generative. It places the observer in a position coextensive with the artist’s, and in doing that it activates the imaginative and creative powers of the observer when they look at it. It is a symbol of divine beauty, a sign of human appreciation of divine beauty, and a space where the worshipper can insert their imagination of the divine into the church’s design all at once. Rococo ornament like this is less a stylistic choice than a mode of viewing commensurate with new expectations of the worshipping public. This rococo self-consciousness reached its apex in late rococo prints. The plate shown in Figure 5, from Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier’s Livre de Legumes of 1745, is not a picture of ornamental forms intended to be copied onto works of art, although this is how such prints are often explained.17 Instead, the plate is better understood as a springboard to creativity. No explanatory text on the print guides the viewer in understanding what the depicted objects are.18 Instead, we are confronted with two bunches of celery upon which rest a dead rabbit and two pigeons. Nice as they are, Meissonnier is equally if not more interested in the manner in which they are conveyed. The celery bunches have arranged themselves into an artfully balanced X, which, when looked at askance, may for some observers assume humanoid characteristics. The animals likewise let themselves be identified easily, but the more one looks, the less sure one is of their boundaries. Edges blend into each other as the birds’ feathers transform into the rabbit’s fur and from there into feathery celery leaves, blurring distinctions that in normal human experience remain apparently discrete. Look carefully and you might just see the outline of a pig, but doing so requires you to un-see the rabbit and birds. They are all, to our modern minds, completely different things, but Meissonnier asks us to imagine them as linked materially in a mysterious way. Those transformations exist not only as perceptual shifts, but also material ones, and indeed drawing the line between the object represented and the way we see it is difficult to do. The sensitive viewer aware of the language of art will find more to see, and more to imagine they see, as they look at the image over time. This is the apparently involuntary creation of artful design in the forms of nature, a tension between art and nature that was never resolved in Meissonnier’s Livre nor in early modern aesthetics broadly. Meissonnier’s rococo print is the end point of a history in which ornament was allowed increasingly to evoke the unseen, the perceptually unclear, and the realm beyond.

420   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Figure 5  Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, Livre de legumes, Plate 5. 1745. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Musical Ornamentation So far, it has been ornament in the visual arts that has been this chapter’s focus. But ornamentation plays a role in many other forms of cultural expression. In music, a comparable discourse of ornamental usage developed across the early modern era in terms roughly comparable to the situation in art. The forms of musical ornamentation were a subject of great interest to early modern performers. The divide between structure and ornament found in discussions of architecture has a parallel in melody and ornament in music.19 As with architecture, ornament was not optional in baroque music; some kind of ornament was required in order for music to communicate. But despite that essential role, the place of musical ornamentation in melody was never securely fixed despite plentiful discussion in print about how ornament should be applied. Performers took liberties with printed scores, modifying them to “improve” the musical line and display their performance skills. Here, we should remember that there exists a fundamental distinction between a baroque understanding of printed music and the modern idea of a published score. Baroque musical notation was a malleable template for performance, something that could be (and indeed was expected

ornamentation   421 to be) changed according to individual performance conditions. This is indeed far removed from a nineteenth- and twentieth-century understanding of a score as conveying a composer’s precise intentions for performance. As seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury composers produced increasingly complex compositions, the leeway of the performer to alter them was reduced, which led the way to a modern idea of musical notation. The great example of this among early modern composers is Johann Sebastian Bach, whose highly intricate contrapuntal compositions do not lend themselves to modifications or ornamental additions.20 Bach is something of an exception for his time, however. Most early modern writers on music made allowances for ornamentation in performance. One finds this as early as 1617, when the Italian organist Enrico Radesca di Foggia described ornamental practices in the preface to his Quinto Libro delle Canzonette, Madrigali et Arie, a tre, a una, et a due voci.21 He states that his book of songs will omit ornamental passages in order to allow performers of different skill levels to insert them according to their abilities. Radesca indicates that the published score is a skeleton for judicious additions by skilled singers. The keyword here is skilled, since composers recognized that the ability to ornament music tastefully was not universally shared and could not, therefore, be prescribed in absolute terms. Notating ornament too precisely would limit who could perform a given piece of music, and the ability to add ornaments judiciously was likewise understood as the product of good taste. Nowhere was taste more of a concern than in France. Michel de Saint-Lambert’s Les Principes du Clavecin gives us insight into the French perspective.22 Saint-Lambert’s text discusses keyboard rather than vocal music, but the point applies equally to both. “Good taste is the only rule that must be followed,” he writes. Performers may invent new ornaments, but in doing so, they are well advised to mimic the ornaments of others until they become knowledgeable about how to create pleasing effects. After they master this, they then can apply ornamentation more freely in performance as they deem necessary. At work in this idea is a notion of emulation particularly common in French discourses about the arts. Saint-Lambert remarks further that musical notation was an imperfect mode for conveying ornamentation. Ornaments needed to be heard in order to be understood; they could not simply be read in a musical score and then properly reproduced in performance.23 Despite these warnings, there were no hard and fast rules about what made ornamentation in a musical line beautiful. Different listeners found different things appealing, and although some of these differences were rooted in individual tastes, many fell along broad national tendencies. Italy emerged as the society with the highest tolerance for ornamental abundance, and when music theorists recognized this, their observations developed into a discussion about the place of ornament in emergent national musical traditions. French musicians like Saint-Lambert believed that the Italian love of ornament was often excessive. This was particularly true in vocal music, where abundant ornamentation could interfere with the clear articulation of sung texts. French writers focused on this point and used it as a criticism of Italian music. Jean-Laurent Le Cerf de la Viéville wrote a comparison of Italian and French music, Comparaison de la Musique

422   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Italienne et de la Musique Françoise, published in 1704, which takes on this idea directly.24 He credits Italian composers with being able to express different emotions in quick succession in a single aria. “The Italians have a useful device that we do not have when incorporating two feelings into the same air. They repeat words much more often than we do, and thus they can attach different characteristics to different repetitions. But we ought not to envy them an advantage so dangerous. In order to achieve one beautiful air of this sort, they spoil 500.”25 The “different characteristics” that Le Cerf mentions are ornaments to the vocal line. In general, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Italian vocal music provided the performer with more opportunities for vocal ornamentation than did French vocal music of the same period, since in France, taste ran toward relatively simple melodies that conveyed the text clearly and directly. One notices this immediately when comparing an air from an opera by Lully or Rameau with an aria by Cavalli or Vivaldi. The biggest difference between the two national traditions was the amount and complexity of ornament in each. Le Cerf ’s comment contains the seed of a judgment that has been applied to Italian baroque opera ever since, namely that it is simply a framework for vocal pyrotechnics. But that judgment, while of respectable pedigree, does not do justice to the expressive potential of ornamentation in early modern music. This is easiest to see in a direct example from a musical form in which ornament played a fundamental role: the operatic da capo aria. The da capo is the most common musical structure for operatic music in early modern Italy. It consists of three parts. The first is an exposition in the tonic key, called the A section, which is in itself a complete musical statement. This is followed by a contrasting B section, which involves changes in key, tempo, mood, or text, and often a combination of these. The B section is typically shorter than the A and offers an expansion and commentary on the situation conveyed in A. The aria then repeats the A section, but not verbatim. Singers were expected to ornament the repeat in ways that amplified and complicated the musical line. By doing this, they also expanded on the emotions conveyed in the music. Such ornaments were not usually written in the score; singers added them according to their abilities, their tastes, the tastes of the audience, and their personalized responses to the music, the dramatic situation, and the character. A ­single singer could even ornament the same vocal lines differently in different ­performances of the same opera. Let us look at an example of how this would be achieved by looking at Example 1, a da capo aria, “Sì, son quella,” from George Frideric Handel’s Alcina, an opera seria that premiered in London in 1735. Despite being the creation of a German composer for an English audience, the opera uses Italian musical forms to set an Italian text that derives (with major modifications) from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. At the moment when Alcina sings this aria to her lover Ruggiero, the erotic bond between the two has begun to crack, and Alcina calms her confused lover by reminding him of their shared affection for each other. The aria begins with the following phrases as written: Si son quella, non più bella Non più cara agl’occhi tuoi

ornamentation   423

Example 1 Opening solo line of “Sì, son quella,” aria from Alcina by George Frideric Handel, 1735.

In the eighteenth century, the singer would perform this more or less as written in the initial A section, possibly embellished slightly in certain places, but generally not. It is a simple musical line, one that sits in the middle voice for a soprano and is likely singable even by someone with modest musical abilities. In its initial statement, the musical line conveys a base understanding of Alcina’s emotional state at this moment in the drama. The aria repeats the musical motifs of these phrases multiple times, but in the initial A section, the repeats are done cleanly. The point is to delineate the aria’s melodic structure and associate that structure with Alcina’s feelings. It also conveys those f­ eelings to the audience so that they can experience them with her. In the aria’s B section, Alcina’s thoughts turn more pessimistic, a mood that is conveyed in tenser, more agitated music, after which the soprano repeats the A section. When singing these same phrases in the da capo repetition, however, the singer would be expected to ornament them. Example 2 shows how one modern soprano sang the da capo in a revival of Alcina in which embellishments were performed according to baroque principles: Sì son quella, da capo

The singer begins the melody a beat early, she prolongs notes with fermatas, as in the second phrase, and generally pulls and stretches the musical line to the limits allowed by its rhythmic structure. She has added mordants, trills, and turns to selected notes, which has the effect in several spots of freely rewriting the melody. As the da capo unfolds, the singer takes greater and greater liberties, sometimes lifting the phrase a fourth or even a fifth off of the melody as originally written. The challenge to the singer was to do this in a way that retained the musical line’s basic structure, rendering it recognizable to the ­listener, while also elaborating it in compelling and surprising ways. The ability to do this not only required greater musical skill than that needed to sing the original melody,

Example 2  Da capo repeat of “Sì, son quella,” aria from Alcina by George Frideric Handel, with ornamentation as performed by Renée Fleming, Lyric Opera of Chicago, November 1999.

424   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque it  also necessitated that the singer comprehend the character’s situation and choose ornamentation that enhanced the dramatic possibilities of the moment. For that reason, singers who excelled in expression were also those who had mastered vocal technique. It should be noted that although the ornamented da capo passage requires skill to perform, the primary element determining the placement of ornaments in it is not in fact the display of vocal agility. Rather, the ornaments are expressive. They nuance the musical line to extract the full psychological potential of this moment. They function a little bit like an idea that sticks in one’s mind, revisited and pondered in different ways as one thinks about it. When performed well, stock operatic characters like Handel’s Alcina become richly textured portraits of human emotion, with ornament central to that ­portrayal in music. Just as later centuries struggled to understand the abundance of baroque architectural ornament, so did later centuries mistake baroque musical ornament for the performer’s disrespect for a composer’s written intentions. In the hands of an unskilled singer, ornamentation might indeed become little more than an opportunity to show off a beautiful voice. It not helped matters that in the intermittent centuries, deviations from musical scores have been viewed with ever greater skepticism in certain performance circles that demanded music be performed come scritto. That is a mindset far indeed from that of Handel and his contemporaries. They would have understood ornamentation as an essential part of music, indeed what music required in order to bring it to life.26 They would also have recognized ornament as the part that they, the composers, could never fully control. In this way, baroque music has parallels to jazz, another art form in which a musician’s individual responses are allowed to shape musical performance. Musical and architectural ornament share a common basis. Ornament is the element of each that is communicative, that enables the imagination to be triggered, but that also by nature of its unpredictability is also a site of the new. Perhaps instead of understanding baroque ornamentation as rooted in a taste for the complex, we should see in it an acknowledgment that art changes. An architectural interior will be experienced differently by different individuals at different times. Musical performances are never the same from night to night, even when performed by identical groups of musicians. Ornament enlivens the work of art by enabling it to change. The recognition that art needs this built-in flexibility might just come from the Baroque era’s recognition that the world had already changed, and was continuing to change, in ways that could not be predicted.

Notes 1. A grandiosity implied in the titles of exhibitions devoted to this period’s art and culture, including Michael Snodin and Nigel Llewellyn, ed. Baroque: Style in the Age of Magnificence, 1620–1800, (London: V&A Publishing, 2009). 2. Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); and James Trilling, Ornament: A Modern Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), ch. 7. Trilling sees the modern rejection of ornament as a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution.

ornamentation   425 3. Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor, Elsie Callander, and Antony Wood (London: Zwemmer/Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), ch. 6. 4. Alina Payne, “Von Ornatus zu Figura: Das figürliche Ornament in der italienischen Architektur des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Rhetorik des Ornaments, ed. Isabelle Frank and Freia Hartung (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001), 220. 5. Ibid., 219. Vitruvius linked the idea of ornamenta to that of imagines, copies of actual things, which contrasted with the nonrepresentational components of architecture. 6. Ibid., 209 and 221. An exception is Gerardo Spini, Trattato intorno all’ornamento (1569), which offers a programmatic theory of ornament based on literary categories. 7. Ibid., 219. 8. On the church’s history and interior, see Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), chs. 6 and 7. 9. Torgil Magnusson, “Jesuiternas kyrka Il Gesù i Rom,” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 75, no. 3 (2006): 150. 10. Ibid., 149 and 162. 11. Ibid., 149. 12. Richard Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655–1667 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 138–142. 13. This interpretation harkens back to the explanation for the Baroque offered by Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 76–79. Wölfflin argued for a broad change in corporeal understanding that generated changes in architectural decoration. 14. Bell Gallery/List Art Center, Ornament and Architecture: Renaissance Drawings, Prints, and Books (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1980), v–viii. 15. John Beldon Scott, Architecture for the Shroud: Relic and Ritual in Turin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 163–172. 16. A mindset analyzed in Lorraine J. Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 17. On this print series, see Peter Fuhring, Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier: Un genie du rococo 1695–1750 (Turin: Allemandi, 1999), II:321–323. 18. This is not quite the same thing as saying that the prints are text free. See Valérie Kobi, “De la gravure d’ornement à la théorie de l’ornement. La gravure au trait et sa function théorique à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Ornamento, tra arte e design. Interpretazioni, percorsi e mutazioni nell’ottocento, ed. Ariane Varela Braga (Basel: Schwabe, 2013), 21. 19. Frederick Neumann, Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 27. 20. Ibid., 529. 21. Fifth Book of the Canzonette, Madrigals and Arias, three, one, and two voices [English] (Venice, 1617). Translated in Dennis Schrock, Performance Practices in the Baroque Era (Chicago: GIA Publications, 2013), 353. 22. The Harpsichord Principles [English] (Paris, 1702); Schrock, Performance, 367. 23. Schrock, Performance, 368. 24. Comparison of Italian Music and French Music [English] (Brussels, 1704). Schrock, Performance, 369. 25. Ibid. 26. Neumann, Ornamentation, 576.

426   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Further Reading Grabar, Oleg. The Mediation of Ornament. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Kruft, Hanno-Walter. A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present. London: Zwemmer/Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. Neumann, Frederick. Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Neumann, Frederick. Performance Practices of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York: Schirmer, 1993. Payne, Alina. From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Schmitz, Hans-Peter. Die Kunst der Verzierung im 18. Jahrhundert: instrumentale und vokale Musizierpraxis in Beispielen. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1955. Snodin, Michael. Ornament: A Social History since 1450. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Trilling, James. The Language of Ornament. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Trilling, James. Ornament: A Modern Perspective. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

pa rt I I

L I T E R A RY AND PH I L O S OPH IC A L W R I T I NG

chapter 18

The Orga n iz ation of K now l edge from R a m us to Diderot Emmanuel Bury

The question of the organization of knowledge in the early modern period can be approached from a variety of angles: first, as a matter of the institutional organization of knowledge, involving a study of the frameworks—such as universities, academies, learned circles, and erudite courts—in which different forms of knowledge were taught and developed. Within such a context, the study of learned men (hommes de lettres, letterati, eruditos, Gelehrten, etc.) is also indispensable, be it from the perspective of their professions and statuses or from that of their respective ways of life, their intellectual exchanges, and their approaches to sociability. Finally, insofar as knowledge exists, this question bears directly upon the epistemology of time conceived, in the broadest sense, as the time of intellectual organization that connects different domains of knowledge and arranges them hierarchically according to an underlying conception of truth and to the methods deemed most appropriate to gain access to that truth at any given point in time. Yet our task is complicated by the fact that a vast reconfiguration of all these elements was underway during the early modern period. With the emergence of the new science, a new model of the “learned man” was established—humanists, according to the expression of R. Mandrou, gave way to men of science—and new practices, such as instrumentation, collaboration, and publication were imposed. This emergence was accompanied by a crisis of the medieval model of the university and a noticeable decentering of sites of knowledge production (academies, courts, salons) which eventually led to a greater specialization of learned men and to the gradual separation of science and literature.1 A shift took place: from the humanist who studied books and especially ancient texts by hunting down manuscripts and subsequently comparing and editing them, to the man of science who explored the book of nature by observing it through the microscope and the telescope. Thenceforth, the scalpel would accompany the reading of Galen and

430   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque mathematical language would take precedence over the ancient trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic). Simply put, one could say that a republic of letters centered on the order of discourse and theory (that of “logo-theoretical” knowledge) gave way during this period to a republic of sciences centered on the order of observation and on the experimental approach (“techno-scientific” knowledge).2 Philology itself, which was at the heart of the new knowledge that humanism had produced, fundamentally changed between the middle of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century. From Erasmus (b. 1469–d. 1536) to Friedrich-August Wolf (b. 1759–d. 1824), the science of texts was endowed with new tools and methods (paleography, diplomatics) and evolved into “modern” textual criticism—an approach rendered illustrious and prolific by Karl Lachmann (b. 1793–d. 1851) and the German universities of the nineteenth century.3 The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (b. 1680–d. 1715), which took place at the heart of the Baroque period, is one of the most obvious symptoms of this transformation. Indeed, the first volume of the Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688) by Charles Perrault (b. 1628–d. 1703) deals specifically with the arts and sciences, aiming to demonstrate the superiority of the Moderns over the Ancients in these fields, before addressing the issue in the domains of poetry and eloquence.

The European Dimension of Knowledge in the Baroque Age Any inquiry into the Baroque as an early modern Western cultural phenomenon implies several initial choices. On the one hand, one must decide how to periodize the time span that extends from the twilight of the Renaissance to the height of the Enlightenment. On the other hand, however, one must also define its geographical expanse. This raises the issue of the cultural unity of early modern Europe and requires us to consider the influence of Europe at its margins (in the East and on the Asian fringes of the Continent, as well as on the shores of the Mediterranean, from the Middle East to North Africa) and how it projected its culture overseas (in the wake of the “Atlantic vertigo” prompted by the voyages of Christopher Columbus). Any attempt to grasp this moment in a unified way must contend, from the outset, with a number of chronological inflections and geographical disparities. Where are we to locate the break between the Renaissance and the Baroque, depending on whether we situate ourselves in southern Europe (Italy, Spain), or further north (France, England, Holland)? How important were the effects of the Reformation, which broke out early in Germany, tragically divided France, and subsequently the Empire to the point of durably upsetting the European balance of powers? The cultural space of the Counter-Reformation has often been associated with the Baroque; art historians, especially, use this term to identify a specific style that can be

the organization of knowledge from ramus to diderot   431 understood as the expression and vehicle of the spirit promoted by the Council of Trent.4 Approached from this angle, the history of a religious order such as that of the Jesuits, created in 1540 and dissolved in 1773, corresponds fairly precisely to the same chronological span. The company’s rapid growth, the development of its colleges, and its constant interaction with theological, aesthetic, and philosophical debates of the time made it an integrating force of an extensive Baroque culture, the impact of which would far exceed the limits of the old European Continent. The extent to which this order spread was due precisely to the pedagogical function it fulfilled and to the model of knowledge it disseminated, even if beyond this diffusion its ultimate goal was to win back the hearts and minds of Christendom. The organization of knowledge was in fact a major preoccupation for the educators of the Baroque age, in their role as direct heirs of the Renaissance. The history of the Jesuit order is thus deeply intertwined with the history of pedagogy. Indeed, in the wake of Erasmus (Ratio studiorum, 1512) and his friend John Colet (founder of St. Paul’s School in London in 1508)—and in order to oppose the pedagogues of the Reformation, such as Philip Melanchthon (b. 1497–d. 1560, the “preceptor of Germany”) and Jean Sturm (b. 1507–d. 1589, founder of the Strasbourg Gymnasium in 1538)—the Jesuits endeavored to structure the studies of younger generations by way of their own Ratio studiorum (started in 1548 and published in its final version in 1599), a work inspired both by the lessons of humanism (Cicero, Virgil, and Quintilian remained the lively sources of this pedagogy) and by the concern to maintain the Christian faith within a Catholic perspective, as redefined by the decrees of the Council of Trent.5 The Jesuit approach to learning would remain that of Catholic Europe throughout this entire period, and explains to a large extent the cultural homogeneity of Continental European Catholic elites, from Madrid to Louvain and from Paris to Vienna. Faced with this network of colleges (in Europe, there were 180 in 1579, 265 in 1608, 517 in 1710),6 Melanchthon inflected the Reformed model of education, originally inspired by the method of the “Brethren of the Common Life” that had prevailed in pre-Lutheran Germany, towards humanism. Drawing on Erasmus, Melanchthon gave priority to the idea of training Christians for civic life; he appealed to the great oratorical models of Antiquity and was anxious to combine the study of Latin with that of Greek.7 Beyond confessional divides, early modern European elites shared, therefore, a common core of “basic” learned knowledge derived from the fertile ground of humanism. This had clear repercussions on the general structure of learned exchanges. It also explains to a large extent the success of the res publica literaria both as an ideal notion and as the actual mode of operation of this shared space of learning. The “citizens” of this learned state were those who had access to knowledge by way of the book, which in accordance with the canonical organization of the “liberal arts” inherited from Antiquity through the lens of medieval learning, encompassed the entire enkyklopaideia: from the philosophy of nature (physics) to the arts of speech (grammar, rhetoric), through metaphysics, ethics, logic, mathematics, ­astronomy, and music.

432   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

The Idea of Republic of Letters The expression Respublica literaria appears for the first time in 1417 in humanist correspondence. It accompanied the enthusiasm of humanists for the rediscovery of “good letters” (bonae literae, i.e., the texts of Greco-Latin Antiquity) and was used to refer to the community of learned men participating in this endeavor. In common usage, this expression remains vague: it functions merely as a convenient way of referring to the world of scholarship or of learned men (Gelehrtenrepublik). This has obliged authors of recent works on the subject to carefully define what this community was in concrete historical terms. F. Waquet’s close examination of the notion retraces the major stages of its history, through a lexical study of the concept and its evolution from its origins to the end of the eighteenth century.8 She emphasizes the collective right away since, for the “citizens” of this invisible republic, it was as much a matter of exchanging information and circulating manuscripts as it was a matter of personally traveling throughout Europe. The Republic of Letters was more than just an institution. It was, above all, the locus of an ethics of shared knowledge, where probity, modesty, and friendship characterized the true scholar—piety and charity were a matter of course for these genuinely Christian humanists. This ideal was subject to many inflections between the age of triumphant humanism and the age of the Enlightenment: while informal in its infancy, it seemed to become more real when it crystallized around the figure of Erasmus, whose European dimension (corresponding to the extent of his many travels) and deep-seated irenicism appeared to illustrate perfectly the existence of a learned community of the mind beyond political and confessional divides. After this Erasmian moment, which reverberated throughout humanist Europe, the golden age of this paradigm of learned life would unfold between the second half of the sixteenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century.9 It is, therefore, a perfectly appropriate framework for our present study. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a figure like that of Justus Lipsius (b. 1547–d. 1606) could still be interpreted within the framework of this Erasmian ideal in which philology and erudition reigned supreme over the realm of knowledge, and the influence of a man and his work could still correspond to that of a single learned institution—in this case the University of Louvain. Indeed, the influence of Lipsius was matched by the analogous prestige of his successor at the University of Leiden, the Protestant Joseph Scaliger (b. 1540–d. 1609).10 It should be noted that a number of pioneering works devoted to the Res publica Literaria have been published under the auspices of the international research center on the Baroque at Wolfenbüttel, and that the period of most interest to German specialists— specifically referred to as “late humanism” (Späthumanismus)—spans from the 1580s to the 1640s.11 This is a welcome reminder that slightly different chronologies coexist on a European scale: the highlights of the life of the Republic of Letters are not the same everywhere, for the political and religious reasons alluded to above. Nevertheless, in the last years of the seventeenth century, the expression evolved into an explicit concept,

the organization of knowledge from ramus to diderot   433 which became both a source of questioning for the learned and a model to which they resorted to define their intellectual world. Indeed, in 1684, Pierre Bayle (b. 1647–d. 1706) saw fit to call his newspaper Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. Some even came to understand this republic as a specific “body,” as it was defined by Richelet in his Dictionnaire (1680) and again in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise (1694): “We use the expression Republic of Letters figuratively to refer to literary people in general, as if they were a single body.”12 Bayle even calls it an “extremely free state,” existing ­independently of the sovereignty of particular states and recognizing only “the empire of truth and reason.”13 The fact that this idea can be found in various writings of the period proves that the sense of belonging to a learned community, with a universal and egalitarian mission, was shared by many at the time—a time which Paul Hazard has called the “crisis of European conscience.”14 This is an important juncture, which often features prominently in studies of the Republic of Letters centered on eminent figures such as Bayle, Gottfried W. Leibniz (b. 1646–d. 1716), or Jean Le Clerc (b. 1657–d. 1736). The latter, to whom the concept of Republic of Letters is almost naturally associated—at least since the thesis of Annie Barnes15—was a central figure in the diffusion of John Locke’s thought (b. 1632–d. 1704) on the Continent, thereby initiating the conversion of a part of European philosophy to empiricism, an approach that would come to be a constitutive feature of Enlightenment thought. That Le Clerc was also the master craftsman of the great edition of Erasmus’s Opera omnia is no small detail, given that the latter was the first prince of this ideal state.16 From the standpoint of the humanist tradition of erudition and polymathy, Leibniz could rightly be considered one of the last figures of the golden age of the Respublica literaria: he wrote in Latin and French, and reached a wide network of correspondents across Europe.17 The phenomenon of the Huguenot Refuge, born out of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), was another decisive event of the period: it reshaped the geography of learned networks and explains the activity of learned men such as Bayle or Le Clerc. Moreover, the growth of French as a shared language at the expense of Latin, which had prevailed until then, was undoubtedly a consequence of this diaspora of French Protestants throughout northern Europe and beyond.18 It can rightly be considered the soil in which, some years later, the movement of the Enlightenment would take root. The episode of the Revocation reminds us that this aspiration to the unity of learning and the active collaboration of men (and, to a lesser extent, women19) with a view to the broadening of knowledge, emerged during a period of crisis in which all forms of “catholicity” (in the etymological sense of “universality”) were being called into question. In fact, Erasmus, driven by the enthusiasm of a type of humanism closely tied to Christianity, still dreamed of a Respublica literaria that could be the worthy successor of the medieval Respublica Christiana,20 and this in spite of having witnessed the irreversible rupture caused by Luther’s enterprise (Wittenberg’s Theses, 1517). The golden age of the Republic of Letters begins in the decade between Pope Paul III’s decision to convoke the Council of Trent (1545) and the Peace of Augsburg (1555). The former asserted a form of Catholicism that was resolutely opposed to the Reformation; the latter

434   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque confirmed the split by ratifying the confessional division of the Empire. A long period of religious war ensued. France was destabilized by a conflict that extended from 1562 to 1598, but that would in fact last beyond the peaceful reign of Henry IV (b. 1598–d. 1610) until the siege and fall of the Protestant citadel of La Rochelle, in 1628. In those same years, Holland, a country that had been won over to the Reformation, wanted to break free from its Spanish tutelage and thus tore itself apart (between 1568 and 1609); England, in support of Holland, confronted Spain on land and at sea (between 1585 and 1604) and soon the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) would once again throw Continental Europe into deep turmoil. The war led to a struggle for power between the Habsburg Empire and the France of Richelieu and Mazarin (1635–1648). And what of the Fronde in France (1648–1653) and the English Civil War (1642–1651)? All of these painful episodes, tied to the emergence of a modern Europe, should have heralded a profound crisis of knowledge, since political disturbances usually imply the disruption of learned exchanges and a prudent withdrawal of learned men. Yet these crises do not seem to have had any impact on the scholarly activity of learned networks. The assertion of confessional diversity was no doubt an obstacle, but it also favored the homogeneity of the Republic of Letters as such. Indeed, though it erected barriers between states and communities, this diversity also compelled some scholars to conceive of a learned space detached from confessional constraints, as shown in the example of the cabinet of the Dupuy brothers in Paris, which hosted learned men from all walks of life and from all faiths.21 Rather paradoxically, these divisions could also prompt the development of large networks in the wake of community exile, as can be seen in the case of the dispersion of the French Huguenots following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV, in 1685.22 The ideal of the Republic of Letters, insofar as it was an intellectual response to the political and religious tensions of an entire period, should be understood as an ideal of universality and harmony that defied precisely the vicissitudes of its time. The neo-Stoicism that prevailed at the time of late humanism, with figures such as Justus Lipsius or William Du Vair (b.1556–d. 1621), provides an example of the philosophical thinking or positioning that accompanied this ideal: the inherent cosmopolitanism of this doctrine no doubt explains the resonance it achieved among the learned.23

The Republic of Letters and the Transformation of Knowledge The instability of the period, however, was not solely political or religious. Indeed, from Michel de Montaigne (b. 1533 –d. 1592) to René Descartes (b. 1596–d. 1650), we are also in the time of the so-called scientific revolution. The works of Francis Bacon (b. 1561–d. 1626) and of Galileo Galilei (b. 1564–d. 1642) are often regarded as the most emblematic achievements of this revolution.24 It was also the golden age of philology, the “queen science” of the early Respublica literaria, thanks to the European influence of Joseph

the organization of knowledge from ramus to diderot   435 Scaliger, Justus Lipsius, and Isaac Casaubon (b. 1559–d. 1614), and of what Jean Jehasse has called the “Renaissance of criticism.”25 Indeed, reflections on the Ars critica appear to have been a permanent feature of this period. In 1597, Gaspar Scioppius (Kaspar Schoppe, b. 1576–d. 1649) published his De Arte critica, a treatise in which he establishes a method for the emendatio of manuscripts by way of a typology of mistakes grounded in grammatical reasoning. A century later, Jean Le Clerc published his own Ars critica (1697), a work theoretically inspired both by Descartes’s method and Locke’s empiricism.26 This evolution attests to the emergence of a new requirement: the requirement of “method,” which concerned the new “science” and old philology in equal measure. Sure enough, from Ramus (Pierre de la Ramee, b. 1515–d. 1572) to Descartes, several generations of scholars pondered the surest ways of accessing knowledge. In doing so, they cast doubt on the validity of Aristotle’s logical treatises (the Organon) and sought to ­reorganize dialectics (following the De inventione dialectica of R. Agricola, † 1485). The Reformation entertained a close relationship with such radical efforts to re-found knowledge. Indeed, it was Melanchthon who paved the way for this transformation (De Dialectica Libri III, 1531), before Sturm (Partitiones dialecticae, 1531) and before Ramus himself (Dialectic, 1555). This proximity is all the more understandable when one replaces these methodological explorations within the broader context of pedagogical thought, given the importance that the Protestant tradition attributed to the latter.27 Having said that, the Catholic world was no stranger to such considerations: in Padua, a convinced Aristotelian such as Giacomo Zabarella (b. 1533–d. 1589) took advantage of the philological rediscovery of Aristotle’s Greek commentators to rethink the structure of traditional logic (De methodis Libri IV, 1578). Not only was this first generation of the Baroque age confronted with a crisis of dogma in the religious sense of the term (as a result of the Reformation), therefore, it also had to deal with an overall crisis of instituted knowledge. Both the revival of Platonism and the affirmation of a skepticism directly derived from Antiquity (Henri Estienne’s edition of Sextus Empiricus’s Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes is published in 1562; Quod nihil scitur, a skeptical manifesto by the Portuguese philosopher and physician Francisco Sánchez, appears in Lyon in 1581) contributed to undermining the foundations of scholastic Aristotelianism.28 The links between Platonism and skepticism, via the reception of Cicero’s Academics, played a key role, moreover, in this redistribution of epistemological models during the Renaissance.29 The gradual rediscovery of Hellenistic philosophies such as Stoicism and Epicureanism also participated in this movement. The contributions of these two doctrines to the fields of moral philosophy (suffice it to mention here the neo-Stoicism of Justus Lipsius) and natural philosophy were, in fact, decisive: Stoicism played a significant role in early modern reflections on matter (in particular in the domain of chemistry), and Gassendi made use of epicurean atomism in his physics.30 Prior to drawing on Archimedes to establish his method, Galileo himself had studied and taught Aristotle both in Pisa and in Padua. Historians of Galileo have, moreover, highlighted what he owed initially to the Collegio Romano.31 These discoveries suggest that we should proceed with caution when attempting to assign a fixed philosophical identity to this or that section of early modern epistemology: each and every

436   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque scholar had to deal simultaneously with a crisis of method and with the abundance of alternative models that humanist philology had gradually put back into circulation. One might add to this the effect produced by the expansion of new or renewed knowledge, especially through the encounter with the New World and through travel literature. In botany and zoology, in particular, philological readings of sources (Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder) gradually gave way to practices of collection and observation of new specimens. Agents of Baroque knowledge all had to build their own models, on the basis of their initial training or of their professional practice, which often led to forms of eclecticism that can be disturbing to historians of ideas seeking to formulate clear and unambiguous accounts of processes of change. Eclecticism, grounded as it was in an extensive knowledge of ancient texts—and all the science that these works contained, be it that of Varro, Pliny the Elder, Aristotle or Galen—initially favored polymathy and polygraphy rather than strict specialization. Universal curiosity was indeed characteristic of the great scholars, or “heroes,” of the early Republic of Letters, as exemplified by the case of Nicolas Peiresc (b. 1580–d. 1637), one of the indefatigable animators of the European Republic of Letters.32 He was an antique dealer, an archaeologist, a collector of manuscripts and medals but also an astronomer, a botanist, and a zoologist; he corresponded as much with Galileo (who gave him one of his telescopes) as he did with Hugo Grotius, Tommaso Campanella, or Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Endowed with a personal fortune, he was the patron of learned pursuits and encouraged Pierre Gassendi (b. 1592–d. 1655) in his endeavors.33 He also connected Italy and Paris, corresponding with many Roman friends and relaying the information he received and sent to the Dupuy brothers between the two countries.34 A truly “modern” learned man, as proven by his astronomical work,35 Peiresc was also an assiduous participant in European learned networks. This was all the more remarkable given the political and military unrest of the period (his correspondence discusses the years 1617–1637, at the moment when the Thirty Years’ War set fire to Continental Europe).36 As a correspondent of the Dupuy brothers and of Father Marin Mersenne in Paris, Peiresc appears to anticipate the activity of future scientific societies that would flourish in the second half of the century. He also appears as a precursor in the interest he shows for the eastern Mediterranean, establishing a genuine network of communication with North Africa and the Levant.37 In fact, many recent works have emphasized the relations with the East that were then favored by learned activity,38 the motivations of which could be political, economic and often religious. These aspects of the Republic of Letters still remain unexplored, as a complement to the global approach that has been proposed by the likes of H. Bots, F. Waquet, or M. Fumaroli.39 The Republic of Letters, both as a phenomenon and as a concept, hardly fits within a vision that considers the history of knowledge as a succession of mutually exclusive paradigms and a series of epistemological breaks. Rather, it allows us to understand better the complexity and nuances of the metamorphosis of knowledge that characterized this period of early modernity. As Anthony Grafton40 has shown, philology and the new science progressed at a similar pace at the time. Models and methods competed, moreover, in ways that often enriched rather than prevented the elaboration of new

the organization of knowledge from ramus to diderot   437 hypotheses, as in the exemplary case of Gassendi, whose work, which clearly relied on the framework of the Republic of Letters—as evidenced by his extensive correspondence— drew on both philological practice and on modern scientific inquiry.41 The Parisian circle of the Dupuy brothers itself acted as a vehicle for the dissemination of Francis Bacon’s works on the Continent. Indeed, Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette (b. 1585–d. 1668), one of the regulars of this circle, played a decisive role in the introduction of the English chancellor’s work to the intellectual circles of Paris.42 Intellectual historians, one might add, have often studied the Dupuy circle in light of the critical philosophical activities of its “erudite libertines,” because of their reliance on book exchanges and their quest for ancient manuscripts. Such a configuration of knowledge allowed for the transformation of early humanist encyclopedism. Its borders and centers of gravity changed between the years 1550 and 1650, culminating in the form of modern encyclopedism so central to the Enlightenment and its Encyclopédie (1751–1772). This unprecedented venture, which brought a philosopher, Denis Diderot (b. 1713–d. 1784), and a mathematician, Jean d’Alembert (b. 1717–d. 1783) together, to head a vast collective of scientists from all horizons, can rightly be considered one of the first fruits of the “Republic of Sciences,” which rose to prominence over the course of the eighteenth century.43 In fact, the project of the Encyclopédie was directly derived from the reform of knowledge undertaken by Bacon (Novum Organum, 1620). It illustrates fully the ideal of scientific progress that the latter had theorized and called for both in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and in his New Atlantis (posthumous).44 Moreover, even if he criticizes the “traditive sciences” that structured the Republic of Letters in the age of humanism, Bacon cannot do without one major accomplishment of this structure. It is indeed striking that, from a Baconian perspective, scientific progress can be achieved only through collective effort in collaboration with others and with public utility as ultimate goal. All these elements are consistent with the ideal of the humanist Republic of Letters, whose essential foundation was precisely communication.45 In contrast, the direct consequence of a new science based on technical and instrumental know-how was the gradual fragmentation and specialization of domains. The history of the Republic of Letters, between 1650 and 1750, strongly attests to this specialization, indeed this “professionalization,” of the learned man.

The Vehicles of Learned Sociability Originally, philology and rhetoric were the two major sciences promoted within the learned community. The promotion of the former was linked to the rediscovery— initiated by the first humanists, from Petrarch to Lorenzo Valla—of manuscripts containing the great texts of classical Antiquity.46 This rediscovery subsequently led to the promotion of the latter, because these texts were read and analyzed in light of the  rhetorical arts that had governed their conception and composition and that were being rediscovered through the works of Cicero and Quintilian in particular.47

438   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Valla’s Elegantiae Linguae Latinae illustrate the fundamental harmony that existed between philology and rhetoric in Italian humanist thought.48 Philology’s contribution to rhetoric, itself inherited from the medieval scholastic tradition (the trivium) but revived by the rediscovery of its original sources, resulted in what has been called an “age of eloquence,” in which the rhetorical model of the Ancients emerged triumphant. This model was restored through the filter of Italian humanism, over the course of numerous fruitful debates that would come to structure both the concrete stylistic practices and the ideals of language (“classical” vs. “baroque”) of European culture, well beyond national borders.49 Rhetoric was at the heart of the pedagogical fabric of modern Europe, whether Catholic or Protestant, and it had a profound structuring effect on the culture of the Baroque age.50 In particular, it had a major impact on the theories of civility (modeled on Baldassare Castiglione’s Corteggiano, published in 1528) that would shape social relations from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.51 Many recent studies that examine the history of science in light of paradigms of sociability have in fact called for a reevaluation of the place of rhetoric and civility in the organization of early modern knowledge.52 Indeed, knowledge was developed in a public space that insisted on specific procedures for publication and debate. The canonical university disputes that had prevailed until then had privileged, overall, a restricted and specialized space that was hierarchically ordered around the authority of a single master entitled to the last word in a disputatio.53 In contrast, early modern approaches to knowledge aspired to an ideal of egalitarian exchange, in which arguments and demonstrations were to be discussed freely and in which experimentation, when it came to natural philosophy, was authoritative. When approached from the Ciceronian angle of dialogue—from the Renaissance onward, Cicero’s Tusculanae and Academica were models of learned conversation that influenced ideals of learned sociability—rhetoric was thus able to contribute to the dissemination of new knowledge. During the Baroque period, from Giordano Bruno to Fontenelle via Galileo, dialogue, along with the epistolary genre, was one of the major forms of learned communication. It was a genre that embodied perfectly the civility that was appropriate to learned exchanges as they were conceived in the Republic of Letters. Indeed, dialogue, like the epistolary genre, relies on bonds of trust and friendship, which attests to the genuine importance of human ties within the ideal of the Republic of Letters. According to Bacon, friendship has a real heuristic value and, conversely, knowledge has direct philanthropic consequences. On the one hand, in essay XXVIII, “Of Friendship,” Bacon explains how friendship is beneficial for intelligence because conversation helps to clarify ideas and man becomes wiser “by an hour’s discourse, than by a day’s meditation.”54 On the other hand, in The Advancement of Learning, he presents knowledge as a way of bringing people together: compared to Orpheus and to the magic power of his lyre, knowledge becomes the condition of a peaceful and harmonious society. Bacon’s insistence on the reciprocal and mutually favorable bonds between science and friendship establishes a theme that would continue to resonate at the heart of the learned ideology of the Enlightenment.55 This ideal would continue to flourish over the course of the eighteenth century, especially with the development of the

the organization of knowledge from ramus to diderot   439 Masonic lodges, transcending institutional frameworks in the name of shared knowledge and of an enlightened universal human reason that carried the mark of friendship.56

The Spaces of Learned Life These new forms of learned sociability have often led critics to talk of the sidelining of the university. This is true to the extent that, as scholars have shown, the early modern period was characterized by a crisis of the university, which contrasted with its medieval golden age.57 Sure enough, at the time, the university was less a place for the elaboration of new knowledge—as we now consider it to be—than a place for the transmission of traditional knowledge, where most students hoped to acquire skills in preparation for a specific professional project (to become a lawyer, a doctor, or a theologian). This picture deserves to be nuanced, however. The influence of the great philologists of northern Europe (Lipsius, Scaliger, Saumaise) was, as we have seen, directly related to that of their respective institutions (the University of Leiden for Scaliger and Saumaise, the University of Louvain for Lipsius). In these institutions, private lessons (privatissima) provided the opportunity for authentic intellectual exchanges between a master and his chosen disciples, and friendship and trust reigned supreme. In fact, as H. Bots reminds us, this tradition lasted at least until the early eighteenth century.58 Elsewhere, such as in Italy, the prestige of Padua was linked to the name of Galileo, even though he did not conduct his research within the structures of the university itself. The university of Padua, which was under the jurisdiction of Venice, greatly contributed to the latter city’s scholarly influence in Europe. It was in Padua, for example, that Peiresc made friends with Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (b. 1535–d. 1601), whose collection of books and wide-ranging curiosity made him an exemplary figure of learning during the Baroque period. Bologna, the oldest university in Europe, was no less important. Indeed, after training or welcoming humanists such as Alberti or Erasmus, it was, from Ulisse Aldrovandi (b. 1522–d. 1605) through Marcello Malpighi (b. 1628–d. 1694) up to Luigi Galvani (b. 1737–d. 1798), a place of teaching and training that played an important role in the history of the natural and life sciences. This demonstrates that while rooted in a common medieval tradition, early modern university traditions nonetheless varied from country to country, notably in function of the place they granted to the Faculty of Arts within their curricula.59 In France, alongside the university, the chairs of an institution like the Collège Royal (founded in 1531) were often occupied by prominent citizens of the Republic of Letters, such as Ramus (from 1551 to 1572), Casaubon (b. 1600–d. 1610), the mathematicians Roberval (b. 1634–d. 1675) and Gassendi (b. 1645–d. 1655), the physician Gui Patin (b. 1654–d. 1672), the canonist Etienne Baluze (b. 1689–d. 1710), or the Arabist Antoine Galland (b. 1709–d. 1715). In the French context, the pedagogical and intellectual influence of the Protestant Academies must also be taken into account: their activities having been authorized in reformed cities (Die, Montauban, Nîmes, Saumur, Sedan)

440   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque by the Edict of Nantes, these academies would welcome numerous Protestant students, who arrived from all over Europe before having to disperse once more following the Revocation in 1685.60 On the other side of the Channel, if Isaac Newton (b. 1643–b. 1727) exemplified the scientific influence of Cambridge at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during the eighteenth century it was in Edinburgh and Glasgow that the Scottish Enlightenment blossomed. These universities were, moreover, as dynamic as the clubs that favored exchanges between philosophers, scholars, and actors of economic life at the time. The fact remains that the golden age of the Republic of Letters coincides with the blossoming of “learned societies” that kept away from university institutions. As a result, the role of early modern academies has often been emphasized.61 The academic dream, inherited from Antiquity through the Italian Renaissance, played a major role in the dissemination of knowledge on a European scale from the sixteenth century on. Indeed, Henry III surrounded himself with the famous Académie du Palais, in which eloquence, poetry, and music were debated. On the threshold of the seventeenth century, in Rome, Federico Cesi founded the Accademia dei Lincei (1603), which promoted the new science until it was forced to suspend its activities in the wake of Galileo’s trial in 1633 and after the death of its founder and patron (in 1630). Still, the reputation of this academy lasted well beyond its flourishing years. In 1657, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, founded the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, where experimental science was practiced in keeping with the work of Galileo. The fruits of these experiments were shared throughout learned Europe thanks to a very active network of correspondents. The Accademia del Cimento had a definite influence on the founding of the Royal Society of London (1660) and, in turn, on the new Académie des sciences in Paris (1666). The correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (b. 1618–d. 1677) alone covers the entire history of the Royal Society in its early years, demonstrating the decisive role personal networks of correspondents could play in the development of institutional activities.62 Similarly, the Parisian Académie des sciences was formed out of the learned activities of Father Marin Mersenne (b. 1588–d. 1648) at the Couvent des Minimes in Paris. Mersenne initially taught for five years at the Couvent des Minimes in Nevers (b. 1614–d. 1619) and following his return to Paris to the convent of the Place Royale, in 1619, he began to participate actively in Parisian learned life. His activities in Paris did not prevent him, however, from traveling to the Netherlands (b. 1629–d. 1630) and Italy (b. 1644–d. 1645). He was an exemplary intermediary between all the learned men of his time, Descartes, Roberval, Naudé, Huyghens, Le Vayer, Pascal, Fermat, Peiresc, and Gassendi. He corresponded with Galileo, Torricelli (b. 1608–d. 1647), and Michelangelo Ricci (b. 1619– d. 1682) in Italy; Isaac Beeckman (b. 1588–d. 1637), Gijsbert Voet (b. 1589–d. 1676), and André Rivet (b. 1572–d. 1651) in Holland; Herbert de Cherbury (b. 1583–d. 1648) in England. Finally, it was Mersenne who introduced Thomas Hobbes (b. 1588–d. 1679) into the learned circles of Paris.63 In this “company” freedom was of the essence and the library was open to researchers; the absence of a fixed time and place for meetings, along with the refusal to archive learned activities, were practices that contrasted greatly with the rules implemented a few years later in the brand new Académie des sciences.

the organization of knowledge from ramus to diderot   441 The convent’s own practices of sociability, along with Mersenne’s active network of correspondents and the conferences organized by his group of friends, favored the exchange of new ideas in the fields of mathematics and music. It was undoubtedly the astronomer Adrien Auzout (b. 1622–d. 1691), however, who outlined more officially the project of a Compagnie des sciences et des arts around the time when he was preparing the establishment of the Paris observatory in 1665.64 The goal of this project was clearly the promotion of the experimental sciences—from a techno-scientific and utilitarian perspective inspired by Bacon. Both in England and in France, and in keeping with the tradition of the Republic of Letters, international collaboration and the sharing of knowledge were essential to this kind of organization. To this was soon added the organization of missions and travels, foreshadowing the great expeditions of the eighteenth century, such as that of Maupertuis (b. 1698–d. 1759) in Lapland (b. 1736–d. 1737). In eighteenth-century France, the multiplication of provincial Academies focusing explicitly on the promotion of the sciences was manifestly also a direct legacy of the Res publica literarum as learned ideal. Like the Parisian companies, they were officially recognized by the state (by letters patent) and by 1789 there would be more than thirty such academies. The enlightened nobility played an important role in their creation. This is a significant point, which demonstrates that Enlightenment thought extended beyond the “professional” circles of knowledge.65 In Italy, the academic phenomenon also extended well beyond the sole academies of Rome or Florence, as S. Testa has shown in his works on the entire Italian academic network during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.66 The names of Peiresc and Pinelli, mentioned above, must also draw our attention to the fact that the learned culture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was closely linked to the phenomenon of collectionism and to the history of libraries. Confronted as we are today with the transformation of modes of knowledge conservation and of networks of information and communication, we are well placed to understand the analogous processes that were underway during the early modern period. The origins of humanism itself were closely tied to the wondrous rediscovery of manuscripts that had been preserved in the vast archives of medieval monastic libraries and whose survival had been ensured by layers of transliteration and copying over the centuries. The transition to print was a crucial turning point that further amplified the impact of this rediscovery from the fifteenth century on. Such dynamics continue into the Baroque period. The libraries of the likes of Pinelli—whose manuscripts constitute the core of the ancient collection stored at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan—or of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (the largest private library in Paris at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) acted as centers of gravity for the learned life of their time. Peiresc took over from Pinelli, if we are to believe the Vie that Gassendi dedicated to him.67 And the Dupuy brothers cultivated the heritage of J.-A. de Thou, first as guardians of his library, from 1617, and then as curators of the Bibliothèaue du Roi, from 1635. These two brothers, both active participants in Parisian learned life, drew much of their prestige and attractiveness from the exceptional collections they had been entrusted with. The circulation of books, printed or manuscript, and correspondence with Europe’s leading librarians

442   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque were essential parts of their learned activities.68 In fact, the history of the book and of libraries now features prominently in any investigation of the learned life and intellectual networks of early modern Europe. Thanks to this field of study, spaces sometimes neglected by the French and English historiographical traditions can be reintegrated into the circuit of early modern intellectual exchanges. This is particularly true of Spain and its empire, the influence of which extended well beyond the Spanish Golden Age, involving both continental Spain and the parts of Europe under Spanish rule over the long term.69 The systematic study of the circulation of ideas between England, Spain, Italy, and France at the time of Louis XIII and Philip IV (that is to say at the time also of Richelieu and Olivares) is a continent that remains to be explored. Princely patronage is particularly significant in such a context, most obviously motivated as it was by rival attempts to constitute large heritage libraries. This framework also allows for a better understanding of how places of knowledge shifted gradually from the “private” domain of learned circles to the “political” institutionalization of science. The case of the Paris Académie des sciences, promoted by Colbert as part of the cultural policy under Louis XIV and stabilized through the re-founding of ­ rocess is observthe Académies royales in 1699, has already been mentioned.70 A similar p able in the case of the establishment of the Royal Society, whose history is also more complex than official accounts in the history of science (drawn from Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, 1667) would lead us to believe. Indeed, as early as the 1640s, a group of London scholars promoted Baconian science (at Gresham College). After a pause prompted by political turmoil that forced them to pursue their activities at Oxford for a time, they returned to London where the project of a learned society devoted to Baconian pursuits was born—a project, that is, which openly departed from the neo-Aristotelian sciences of the (notably Oxonian) university.71 The support of the monarchy was decisive in the consolidation of this project. Both in France and in England, this type of political influence greatly contributed to the detachment of scientific research from the framework of the university that had previously guaranteed its authority. The extent to which the absolutist context of political power had an impact on the speculative and experimental freedom of research is paradoxical to say the least.72 It is true, however, that the promotion of philosophical and scientific pursuits had long been of great interest to princes as a way of acquiring the prestige of knowledge, as has been shown in the case of Galileo.73 The Republic of Letters would thenceforth also be the locus of political rivalries between states, since the quest for scientific knowledge correlated with access to forms of technical knowledge that aimed to provide man with the power to intervene upon nature. The history of modern and contemporary science, from the nineteenth century on, has only confirmed and illustrated the importance of such competition.

Conclusion This outline would deserve to be extended in many directions, through monographic studies of early modern agents of knowledge—the most humble having often been

the organization of knowledge from ramus to diderot   443 neglected in favor of the “heroes” of the history of ideas—as well as through broader investigations into the intellectual, political and social phenomena that accompanied transformations of knowledge during the Baroque period. Hopefully a few avenues of inquiry and some useful references for further research have been provided here. From the legacy of Erasmus, for whom “general philology” was the key to accessing knowledge, to the ambition of the Institut de France founded by the French Revolution in 1795, whose mission was to encyclopedically encompass all forms of knowledge at a time when domains of expertise were subject to increasing specialization, it would seem that knowledge really did shift from one model to another.74 The Institut, heir to the academies of the Ancien Régime, was indeed organized around different “classes,” from the nascent human sciences to the natural sciences. This system was proposed and stabilized by P.-S. Laplace (b. 1749–d. 1827, Exposition du système du monde, 1796) and would soon be confirmed by the epistemology of Immanuel Kant (b. 1724–d. 1804). The story does not end there, however. New transformations in the cartography of knowledge and changes in its modes of elaboration and diffusion were already afoot around learned men such as Wilhelm (b. 1767–d. 1835) and Alexander (b. 1769–d. 1859) von Humboldt. The von Humboldt brothers were both conscious of tradition and hopeful that the foundations of knowledge could once more be renewed.75 The modern German university, whose history is attached to these two names and of which the University of Berlin, established in 1809, is a prime example, would become a model to be emulated throughout the nineteenth century, in Europe and well beyond. Strikingly, these two men, who both aspired to universal knowledge in the tradition of Leibniz, were also representative of the two magnetic poles of science that we have seen at work in the earlier periods discussed above: philology, represented by Wilhelm, and the natural sciences, pioneered by Alexander. This seems to illustrate perfectly the extent to which the history of knowledge is a constant dialogue between the exploration of the words of men and the decipherment of the book of nature. The Baroque period was manifestly one of the most brilliant and productive episodes of this dialogue. Translated by Raphaëlle J. Burns.

Notes 1. R. Mandrou, Des humanistes aux hommes de science, XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1973). Mandrou approached this question from the standpoint of the intellectual and cultural history of agents of knowledge, see pp. 10–12. 2. This clear-cut distinction is useful insofar as it highlights the contrast between these two approaches. It deserves of course to be nuanced, since medieval scholars already appreciated the value of observation, and the order of discourse continued to govern modes of thinking about knowledge well beyond the early modern period. On this topic, see P. Rossi, Les Philosophes et les machines 1400–1700 (Paris : PUF, 1996), chapter 1, and P.  Dear, “The Meanings of Experience,” in The Cambridge History of Science, III, Early Modern Science, ed. K. Park and L. Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 106–131. 3. On this issue, J. E. Sandys’s early work remains a useful reference: A History of Classical Scholarship. II, From the Revival of Learning to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:

444   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1908]. See also L. D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 4. See E. Mâle, L’Art religieux après le Concile de Trente, étude sur l’iconographie de la fin du XVIe, du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècles en Italie, en France, en Espagne et en Flandre (Paris, 1932). See also M. Fumaroli’s preface to V.-L. Tapié, Baroque et classicisme [1957] (Paris, 1980), pp. 9–43. 5. See A. Demoustier and D. Julia’s preface to the Ratio studiorum. Plan raisonné et institution des études dans la Compagnie de Jésus, (Latin text and French translation) (Paris: Belin, 1997), 12–69. 6. A. Demoustier, 12. In 1710, there are also ninety-five colleges overseas. 7. On the pedagogy of the Reformation in general, and that of Melanchthon in particular, see E. Garin, The Education of the Modern Man. 1400–1600, (1957) (Paris, 1968), 175–180. 8. F.  Waquet, “Qu’est-ce que la République des Lettres? Essai de sémantique historique,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes (1989), 473–502. See also M. Fumaroli, “The Republic of Letters,” Diogenes 143 (1988): 129–154. 9. This is the story retraced by H. Bots and F. Waquet, La République des Lettres (Paris: Belin, 1997), see chap. 2, “The Time of the Republic of Letters,” 29–61. 10. See  J.  Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique: l’essor de l’humanisme érudit de 1560–1614 (Paris: Champion, 2002 [1976]). On Scaliger, see A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–1993). 11. See, for example, Res Publica Litteraria. Die Institutionen der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. S. Neumeister and C. Wiedemann, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Vlg, 1987 and Die Europäische Gelhrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus/The European Republic of Letters in the Age of Confessionalism, ed. H. Jaumann (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Vlg, 2001 (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 96). 12. F. Waquet, 1989, 484. She also cites the Dictionnaire de Furetière (1690) and that of Trévoux (1704), emphasizing the value of the notion of “body” as a mode of organization under the Ancien Régime. 13. Bayle, article “Catius” in the Dictionnaire historique et critique (3rd ed., 1720), cited by Bots and Waquet, 19. 14. P. Hazard, The European Mind 1680–1715 (Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1968). 15. A. Barnes, Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736) et la République des Lettres (Paris: Droz, 1938). The definition of the Republic of Letters Barnes provides in her introduction (13–14), remained the standard until its more recent reformulation in the studies of H. Bots and F. Waquet. 16. Desideri Erasmi Roterodami, Opera omnia emendatiora et auctiora, cum notis (Leyde, 1703–1706). 17. See Kultur der Kommunikation. Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter von Leibniz und Lessing, ed. U.  J.  Schneider (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Vlg, 2005, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 109), in particular U. J. Schneider, “Leibniz und Lessing als Bürger der Gelehrtenrepublik,” 345–356. 18. On the relationship between the Republic of Letters and the Refuge, see A.  Goldgar, Impolite Learning. Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 19. Anna Van Schurman (b. 1607–d. 1678), Margaret Cavendish (b. 1623–d. 1673), and Anne Dacier (b. 1647–d. 1720) are some of the leading learned women of the time. Studies have also shown that Voltaire owes his understanding of Newton to the work of his friend

the organization of knowledge from ramus to diderot   445 Émilie du Châtelet (b. 1706–d. 1749); see P.  H.  Labalme, ed. Beyond their Sex. Learned Women of the European Past (New York: New York University Press, 1980) and C. Nativel, ed. Femmes savantes, Savoirs des femmes. Du crépuscule de la Renaissance à l’aube des Lumières (Geneva: Droz, 1999). 20. On this point, see Bots and Waquet, 31–34. 21. On Pierre Dupuy (b. 1582–d. 1651) and Jacques Dupuy (b. 1591–d. 1656), see R. Pintard’s seminal work, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1983 [1943], 77–122). In addition, see the works of J. Delatour, notably “Le cabinet des frères Dupuy,” Revue d’histoire des facultés de droit et de la science juridique, 25–26 (2005–2006), 157–200. 22. On the question of confessionalism in relation to the ideal of the Republic of Letters, see Jaumann, Die europäische Gelhertenrepublik, 2001, including Ann Goldgar’s contribution, “Singing in a Strange Land: The Republic of Letters and the Mentalité of Exile,” 105–126, on the effects of exile on the constitution of an ethos of the “republican of letters.” 23. On Lipsius, see the study of Jehasse and Juste Lipse (1547–1606) en son temps. Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 1994, ed. C. Mouchel (Paris: Champion, 1996). 24. While accounts of this key moment in the history of ideas are many, S. Shapin’s classic work, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), remains a reference in the domain. 25. See Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique, chap. 2, which traces the parallel beginnings of Henri Estienne (b. 1531–d. 1598), Isaac Casaubon, Joseph Scaliger, and Justus Lipsius. 26. On Le Clerc, see M.-C. Pitassi, Entre croire et savoir. Le problème de la méthode critique chez Jean Le Clerc (Leiden: E .J. Brill, 1987). On the continuity of the ars critica, see E. Bury, “La Philologie dans le concert des savoirs: mutations et permanence de l’ars critica au XVIIe siècle,” in Le Savoir au XVIIe siècle, ed. J. D. Lyons and C. Welch (Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003), 17–33 (« Biblio 17 », 147). 27. On Ramus’s pedagogical framework, see M. Magnien, “D’une mort l’autre (1536–1572): la rhétorique reconsidérée,” in Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne 1450–1950, ed. M. Fumaroli (Paris: PUF, 1999), 341–409. On the influence of Ramus, see 369–390. Ramus taught rhetoric at the Collège de Presles before teaching eloquence and philosophy at the Collège Royal (1551). 28. See the introduction by F. Sanchez in E. Limbrick, That Nothing is Known, Latin text established, annotated and translated by Douglas  F.  S.  Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On early modern skepticism, see R.  H.  Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Popkin highlights the influence of the Reformation on the renaissance of skepticism (chap. 1). See Le Scepticisme au XVIe et au XVIIe siècle, ed. P.-F.  Moreau (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001). 29. See Ch. B. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1972). Schmitt also highlights the complexity of the Renaissance Aristotelian tradition in Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 30. On these influences, see Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 31. William  A.  Wallace, Galileo and his Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo’s Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

446   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 32. See  P.  N.  Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). See also M. Fumaroli, La République des Lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), chap. 2, “Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, prince de la République des Lettres,” 56–90. 33. See L. T. Sarasohn, “Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and the Patronage of the New Science in the Seventeenth Century,” Isis 84, no. 1 (March 1993): 70–90. 34. See Peiresc et l’Italie, ed. M. Fumaroli (Paris: A. Baudry et Cie, 2009). 35. See Seymour L. Chapin, “The Astronomical Activities of Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc,” Isis 48, no. 1 (March 1957): 13–29. Peiresc observed the Orion Nebula and drew one of the first maps of the moon (with the help of Gassendi); thanks to his calculation of longitudes, he also measured the true width of the Mediterranean space. 36. See Mandrou, Des humanistes aux hommes de science, 248–249, for a mapping of Peiresc’s network of correspondents. 37. See  P.  N.  Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) and A.-M. Cheny, Une Bibliothèque Byzantine. Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc et la fabrique du savoir (Champ Vallon, 2015). 38. See, for example, “All My Books in Foreign Tongues”: Scaliger’s Oriental Legacy in Leiden, 1609–2009, ed. Arnoud Vrolijk and Kasper van Ommen, with an introductory essay by Alastair Hamilton (Leiden: Leiden University Library, 2009), the catalogue of an exhibition dedicated to J. Scaliger’s collection of oriental manuscripts. 39. See E. Bury and F. Montcher, “Savoirs et pouvoirs: l’âge de l’humanisme tardif ” (introduction aux actes du colloque tenu à la Bibliothèque Mazarine), Paris, 8–9 mars 2013, in XVIIe siècle, 266, no. 1 (2015): 5–16. 40. A.  Grafton, Defenders of the Text. The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 41. See E. Bury, “Gassendi: Philologie et République des lettres,” XVIIe siècle, 233 (2006, 4), 655–663 and “La preuve philologique comme argument: Gassendi et Épicure face à la révolution scientifique (1624–1658),” in Philologie als Wissensmodell/La Philologie comme modèle de savoir, ed. D. Thouard, Fr. Vollhardt, F. Mariani Zini (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 207–230. 42. He returned to Paris with Baconian manuscripts acquired during a stay in London in 1623: see Fortin de La Hoguette, Lettres aux frères Dupuy et à leur entourage (1623–1662), ed. G. Ferretti (Florence, Olschki, 1997). 43. R. Mandrou, Des humanistes aux hommes de science, traces this evolution. See also the collaborative issue “La République des sciences,” Dix-huitième siècle 40 (2008), ed. I. Passeron. 44. On Bacon’s works and their impact on early modern philosophy, see S. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Rossi, Les Philosophes et les Machines, chap. 2, “L’idée de progrès scientifique.” 45. P. Dibon, a pioneer in this domain, has emphasized this term to define the essence of the Republic of Letters: “Communication in the Respublica Literature of the 17th Century” (1978), reprinted in Regards sur la Hollande du Siècle d’Or (Naples, Vivarium, 1990), 153–170. See Bots and Waquet, La République des Lettres, 117–125 and Commercium Litterarium. Forms of Communication in the Republic of Letters. 1600–1750, ed. H. Bots and F. Waquet (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1994), vii–ix. 46. Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, chap. 4.

the organization of knowledge from ramus to diderot   447 47. Indeed, we owe the rediscovery of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria to Italian humanism, since it was Poggio Bracciolini who discovered a complete manuscript of this work at the monastery of Saint-Gall in 1416. See Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, chap. 4, § 5. On the cultural impact of this rediscovery see Quintilien Ancien et Moderne, ed. P.  Galand, F.  Hallyn (†), C.  Lévy and W.  Verbaal (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010 (see section on “Quintilien du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance”). 48. C. Vasoli, “L’humanisme rhétorique en Italie au XV e siècle” in Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne, 45–129, in particular 61–74 on Valla. 49. M. Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et « res literaria » de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980). 50. See  T.  M.  Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 51. On the model developed by Castiglione see A. Quondam, La Conversazione. Un modello italiano (Rome: Donzelli, 2007). 52. S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth. Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), has shown the potential of such a perspective to shed light on the history of sciences. 53. See O. Weijers, La disputatio dans les Facultés des arts au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2002; Studia Artistarum 10). 54. F. Bacon, “Of Friendship,” The Essays, in Francis Bacon, A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 391. 55. See L’Amitié et les sciences de Descartes à Lévi-Strauss, ed. J.-C. Darmon and F. Waquet (Paris: Hermann, 2010). See also E. Bury, “L’amitié savante, ferment de la république des Lettres,” XVIIe siècle, 205, no. 4 (1999): 729–747. 56. See P.-Y. Beaurepaire, L’espace des francs-maçons: une sociabilité européenne au XVIIIe siècle (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003). 57. This is evident in the case of Paris, whose university appeared to turn its back on all forms of modernity. See J. Mesnard, “Le xviie siècle, époque de crise universitaire,” in Le XVIIe siècle et l’éducation, proceedings of the first conference of the CMR 17 published in Marseille, no. 88, 175–182. 58. H. Bots, “De la transmission du savoir à la communication entre les hommes de lettres: Universités et académies en Europe du xvie au xviiie siècle,” in Commercium litterarium, 1994, 101–117. 59. The medieval tradition has been studied by H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), 3 vols.; on the traditional curriculum of the Faculty of Arts in Paris, see Volume 1, 433–461. For the early modern period, see J. Verger, “Les universités à l’époque moderne,” in Histoire mondiale de l’éducation, ed. G. Mialaret and J. Vial (Paris: PUF), 247–271. 60. See P.-D. Bourchenin, Études sur les Académies protestantes au XVIe et au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Grassart, 1882). 61. See Bots, 113–115. See also F. Waquet, “Cercles savants,” in La Science classique. XVIe–XVIIIe siècle. Dictionnaire critique (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 17–25. 62. See J.-P. Vittu, “Henry Oldenburg ‘Grand intermédiaire,’” in Les Grands intermédiaires culturels de la République des Lettres. Études de réseaux de correspondances du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, H. Bots, and J. Häseler (Paris: Champion, 2005), 183–209. 63. See  R.  Lenoble, Mersenne et la naissance du mécanisme (Paris: Vrin, 1943). See also H. Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth Century France (1620–1680) (Baltimore:

448   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Williams and Wilkins, 1934), 41; and J.-R. Armogathe, “Le groupe de Mersenne et la vie académique parisienne,” XVII e siècle, 175, no. 2 (1992): 131–139. 64. See R. Taton, Les Origines de l’Académie des Sciences (Paris: Palais de la Découverte, 1965). 65. See D. Roche, Le Siècle des Lumières en province: académies et académiciens provinciaux 1680–1789, 2 vols. (Paris: La Haye Mouton, 1978). 66. S. Testa, Italian Academies and their Networks, 1500–1700: From Local to Global (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 67. Gassendi, Vie de l’illustre Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1641), trans. R. Lassalle (Paris: Belin, 1992), 55–56. See also M. Fumaroli, La République des Lettres, 76–80. 68. See E. Bury, “Les lieux de l’érudition dans la République des Lettres et la diffusion du savoir: espaces et fonctions du débat d’idées au XVIIe siècle,” in Origines, Actes du 39e congrès annuel de la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature, ed. R. Ganim and T. M. Carr Jr. (Tübingen, Germany: G. Narr, 2009), 153–163. 69. The collaborative work Poder y Saber. Bibliotecas y bibliofilia en la época del conde-duque de Olivares, ed. O.  Noble-Wood, J.  Roe, and J.  Lawrance (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Európa Hispánica, 2011), is exemplary in this regard. 70. See H. Brown, Scientific Organizations, 150–160. In addition, see R. Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 7 1. See M. Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). 72. Incidentally, is rather striking that a theoretician of absolutism like Hobbes should have condemned the plan to establish an official society for the pursuit of scientific research, as R. Tuck recalls, “Institutional Setting,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, 26. 73. See  M.  Biaggioli, Galileo Courtier. The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). See also B. T. Moran, “Courts and Academies,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, 251–271. 74. See G. Gusdorf, Les Idéologues, (Les Sciences humaines et la pensée occidentale, VIII) (Paris: Payot, 1978), 307–309. 75. See La Sociabilité européenne des frères Humboldt, ed. M. Espagne (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2016).

Further Reading Gaukroger, Stephen. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210–1685. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Mandrou, Robert. From Humanism to Science: 1480–1700. Translated by Brian Pearce. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985. McKenna, Antony, and Gianni Paganini. Pierre Bayle dans la République des Lettres: philosophie, religion, critique. Paris: Champion, 2004.

chapter 19

Ex per ience a n d K now l edge i n the Ba roqu e Anthony J. Cascardi

Style and Experience Across almost all the accounts of the baroque, the question of style remains nearly constant. Whatever the root causes or larger social and historical contexts may be, explanations of the baroque cannot avoid the fact that the things we point to, and the reasons for pointing to them as baroque, are often prompted by one or another stylistic feature. Whether in painting or in sculpture, in music or in literature (prose, poetry, and drama all included), in philosophy or in matters of individual comportment and social psychology, the question, “What is baroque?” would be pointless were it not for the fact that each of these demonstrates a particular set of stylistic markers, even if these vary across the various domains just mentioned. That the baroque involves matters of style has been prominent since at least since Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (he describes the works of his contemporary, Jean Paul Richter, as a “baroque mustering of things objectively furthest removed from one another,” and as involving “the most confused disorderly jumbling of topics related only in his own subjective imagination”1). In the twentieth century, the stylistic conception of the baroque took solid root in art-historical thinking with the writings of Wölfflin (1929) and Friedrich (1952).2 It is only more recently, with the sociohistorical work of José Antonio Maravall (The Culture of the Baroque, 1980) and the writings of Gilles Deleuze (The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, 1988), that the baroque has been thought of beyond the conception of style. And yet, even in these instances, style in the larger sense remains a factor to contend with. What Deleuze calls “the fold” involves the transposition of an aesthetic category relating to a certain kind of embellishment—a “turn” is a fold in music or drapery—to the conceptual domain. Likewise,

450   the oxford handbook of the baroque the urban contexts that Maravall associates with the rise of the baroque in Europe provided the impetus for a set of social behaviors that are marked by the particular ways in which individuals learned to comport themselves. If there is a reason why the baroque has been so prominently and consistently associated with questions of style, this is because of the fact that the baroque emphasizes style in such a way that it has the potential to pass from ornamentation to essence, from manner to matter. The intense contrasts in Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul, for example, are not “embellishments” of the conversion scene, but go to the essence of the dramatic reversal that is the conversion itself. Likewise, the intricate syntax of Góngora’s Soledades (Solitudes), which are composed in the strophic form of the silva (a term related to selva, “forest”), is not a decoration added to a poem about a wanderer, but shapes the essence of what it means to be lost and searching for direction. In baroque music, the contrapuntal organization of the fugue (as in Bach’s Ricercar a 6) is not just a mechanism for the extensive ornamentation of a theme, but constitutes the very essence of the composition. The essential nature of style in the baroque speaks directly to matters of ontology—to the importance of mode and manner, figuration and configuration, in determining what any given thing is. There is perhaps no more vivid example of this than the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.3 Often thought of as an example of a virtuoso talent creating strangely “curious,” even bizarre, images—works which appear to consist of heads fruit or images associated with the elements—his works are in fact an instance in which the lines between “ornament” and “essence” converge. His pictures are not instances of portraits decorated by fruits or adorned by vegetables or images of the elements, but are in fact images made of those things. These are not “stylized” works in any conventional sense; they establish new ontologies, however fantastical they might be (for example, a “flower-head,” in the case of “Spring,” a “bird-head” in the case of “Air”). In a very different vein, the writings of Baltasar Gracián demonstrate the way in which personal identity in the baroque is linked to matters of style.4 Gracián’s conception of selfhood grows out of an Italian Renaissance tradition that raised the practice of nonchalant urbanity, wit, and stylist athleticism to the level of an art. Insofar as personal identity came to be regarded as something to be fashioned and crafted, style was integral to personal being, not something artificial layered, as it were, on top of an essential self. On the contrary, Gracián’s work demonstrates how the self is defined by the ways in which it responds in particular circumstances, and how those responses are stylistically calculated so as to afford the self the greatest possible advantage—to maximize its opportunity for success. Yet, in spite of these powerful examples, prevailing considerations of style that go to matters of ontology remain object-centered, and so are of limited use when helping us to understand the nature of experience in the baroque, much less the relationship between experience and knowledge. This is the case even with most analyses of baroque oratorical practices, which were clearly intended to produce psychological effects through experience—for example, to convert the sinner by making forceful impressions upon as many of the senses as possible. Indeed, the physical sites of many baroque sermons have been described as “theatres of preaching” for the role that sculpture and illusionistic painting play in them.5 In these instances, the larger, situational ontology is essential in

experience and knowledge in the baroque   451 contributing to the experiential effects and desired outcome of the sermon in question. Monteverdi’s pioneering Vespers of the Holy Virgin (1610) intended to create an experience that was musical, spatial, and nearly theatrical. Similarly, the term “oratory” was long used to refer both to speechmaking and to the space within a church or cathedral dedicated to prayer, but Borromini’s Oratorio dei Filippini, shown in Figure 1, was something different—a space designed specifically for the Congregation of the Filippini to practice intensely imaginative and contemplative spiritual exercises; a place for praying rather than preaching. These examples will suggest that style and “experience” in the baroque are connected with ontology, not riding, as it were, alongside or on top of ontology. But before turning to the question of experience and its relationship to knowledge, it is important to say a few things about the genealogy of experience in the baroque, about why the category of experience came to prominence, and about some of the problems that were created as part of this process. It has long been said that human “experience” was a discovery of the Renaissance, when a theocentric orientation to the cosmos gave way to anthropocentric perspectives. This shift validated and, in some sense, helped to create what we have come

Figure 1  Domenico Barrière, drawing of Bernini’s façade of the Oratorio dei Filippini, Rome, 1658. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

452   the oxford handbook of the baroque to think of as “experience.” The outline this view sketches is overly simple, to be sure, but as with many such views, there are kernels of truth to be found within it. The broad swath of history that we know as the Renaissance did see a number of important shifts in belief that contributed to the validation of human experience. This is especially true in the field of cultural production, where inward life came to play an increasingly prominent role. From Petrarch’s Rime to Rojas’ La Celestina, from the Essays of Montaigne to Shakespeare’s sonnets, and from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, the nature of experience in the human domain is the presiding interest of Renaissance art and literature. Needless to say, perhaps, experience and subjectivity go hand-in-hand. Experience is predicated on the existence of a “subject,” which is simply to say that there cannot be unattached, free-floating experience. This leaves the question of knowledge aside, but not for long. The matter of what we can know on the basis of experience becomes an issue, because experience is by its very nature variable and ever-changing. And insofar as the senses are the conduits of experience, the reliability of even changeable experience can be problematic, given the fact that the senses have a reputation for being untrustworthy, if not deceptive. Thus, while the Renaissance helped establish and validate “experience,” it also created a set of problems needing to be resolved. How could we say anything truthful about experience if it arrives to us through potentially deceptive channels? Indeed, how could we say anything true about the world at all if our engagement with it is accessed through the senses and configured as “experience”? In the way that the history of ideas and cultures is often sketched, the individual most often identified with finding a solution to these problems was Descartes. Cartesian rationalism was, in a sense, a response to the disorienting effects of the Renaissance encounter with experience. While it is true that Descartes presented his work as overcoming the Scholasticism of his philosophical predecessors, whose ideas remained securely lodged in the Sorbonne, his work was at the same time a response to the questions of experience presented by two other figures, Montaigne and Cervantes. For Montaigne, the senses are “the base and the principles of the whole edifice of our knowledge.6 Life, he says, is “nothing but movement.”7 But where is there any certainty, and where is there knowledge if these things are true? Descartes writes: “All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.”8 Don Quixote radically skews the relationship between potentially deceptive sense experience and the things we claim to know from it, insofar as he adapts the meaning of what his senses tell him according to a skewed interpretive framework (that is, the framework derived from reading the books of chivalry). Montaigne’s Essays were known to Descartes, as was Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He was interested in finding grounds for certainty that would be subject neither to the unreliability of the senses nor to the distortions of inappropriate cognitive frameworks. Descartes’s first procedural step was to recognize his own susceptibility to deception. Following that,

experience and knowledge in the baroque   453 he went on first, to absent all sense experience from his thinking and, second, to create a foundation for his thinking based only the things he cannot exclude as unreliable. This is thinking itself; thinking is thus the irreducible constitutive element of the ­subject, the “I.” Descartes’s work became paradigmatic both because his method could be generalized and, more importantly, because the things he claims about the “I” are so bereft of specific experience and thought content that they could apply to any “I,” anywhere and at any time. While there are reasons to view some of what Descartes does as baroque, there are nonetheless great differences. Insofar as the culture of the baroque revolves around the constitutive role of style, and whereas style is about objects and experience alike, Cartesian thinking would seem to stand in categorical opposition to it. And yet, there are aspects of the quality of Descartes’s own thinking and writing that can be seen as baroque. I am thinking especially of the intensity of the “thought experiment” in which he evacuates himself of all sensory experience, and likewise of the sometimes fantastical doublings that he imagines, for example, between the waking and dreaming self, or between human beings and automata—“I will now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will turn away my senses from their objects, I will even efface from my consciousness all the images of corporeal things.”9 These efforts are the discursive equivalent of the depictions of intense concentration and meditation of painters like Georges de la Tour, transposed to the secular domain. These features of Descartes’s writing are further remarkable since his thinking about truth and knowledge would seem to leave no place for qualitative factors at all. Indeed, there is an important difference between what Descartes’s claims philosophically, and the discursive means—both in thought and in writing—by which he arrives at philosophical truth. Whereas the philosophical tradition has for the most part looked at the “truth content” of Descartes’s thinking, his writing is no less important, since it was the means by which Descartes arrived at and was able to represent the things he treats as “foundational” truths. What more can be said about the qualities of experience that attach to baroque as reflected in baroque style? There is a standard repertoire of features that are customarily invoked in this regard: exaggeration, exuberance, a complexity that begins in doubling and proceeds through its multiples; contrast, opposition, and tension are among the ­features that typically sit beside ornamentation, and sometimes characterize it as well (since not just any kind of ornamentation would be described as baroque). For heuristic purposes, these can be separated into two categories. On the one hand, there are “figures of force” (intensity, exaggerated tensions, exuberance) while on the other hand, there are “figures of form” (doubling, opposition, repetition). In what follows here, I turn to each of these categories successively, as a way of framing the ways in which the qualities of style and experience in the baroque are integral to the baroque understanding of the way things are, and in turn to matters of knowledge and truth. In a final section, I turn to two places where both these figures intersect. These are the “figures of life” exemplified in baroque styles of behavior and the incorporation of the powers of mind (ingenio) associated with verbal wit.

454   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figures of Force Descriptions of the baroque that hinge on traditional views about style are apt to miss something crucial about force in the baroque: the fact that the dynamism that drives its exaggeration, exuberance, intense contrasts, and dramatic oppositions, provides one of the principles unifying experience and essence. While it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that “force” began to enter the philosophical vocabulary in a systematic way, that was, in many ways, a crystallization of the baroque encounter with the various figures of force mentioned above. It was a response to the challenges that the encounter with force posed to the project of knowledge in part because forces were not easily explained within existing philosophical frameworks—neither by Cartesian rationalism nor by Humean empiricism. Leibnitz was one of the first to understand that force is fundamental. But Kant subsequently thought that Leibnitz did not go far enough, and so went on to posit that the primordial units of nature are active forces. The result was a dynamic ontology that captured remarkably well one of the things that underlies many of the different baroque figures of force Leibniz rejected the Cartesian formulation. When examining the motion of rising and falling bodies, for example, he recognized that their behavior reveals a particular quantity, derived from Galileo’s law of fall, that he called “living force” (vis viva). With this, Leibnitz transformed physics into dynamics where it had previously simply been kinetics. But Kant superseded Descartes and Leibnitz both by arguing that “living force” and “dead pressure” were two sides of the same coin. Yet, there is more than one critical difference between Kant and the baroque when it comes to the question of force. The most important of these lies in the fact that Kant conceptualizes the things that baroque style actualizes and transmits to experience. Save a few passages on the dynamic sublime in the Critique of Judgment, Kant was scarcely interested in rendering the dynamics of force that he says are fundamental to nature. He was instead interested in establishing force as a building block for his ontology.10 One of the perennial challenges for any understanding of force has to do with the fact that it is visible only principally in its effects. We accept the fact that there is no representation of “energy” as such, and likewise no representation of the forces that create baroque hyperboles, or that drive the proliferation of its exuberant forms. And yet, it might seem that much of baroque art was committed to undertaking this very task of representation. But here, the term “representation” can also mislead. The forces that are manifested in the baroque are not in fact representations of anything at all. They are rather manifestations of a dynamic essence and, as such, provide a very different understanding of the baroque from that which regards ornamentation and other figures as “added on,” as layered “on top,” as it were, of some primary essence. The point about baroque figures of force is that they capture something that had escaped the Renaissance understanding of nature. Likewise, the baroque captured something that had escaped the Renaissance notion of experience. In both cases, baroque figures of force express aspects of the fundamentally qualitative nature of things, understanding that qualities are lodged equally in the “things themselves” and in our experience of them.

experience and knowledge in the baroque   455 Some examples will lend clarity to these intertwined points. Baroque art and a­ rchitecture demonstrate both an aversion to the straight line and an affinity for curved lines and surfaces. This has consequences for the way we understand baroque “figures of form,” but it also matters for questions of force. It is, first, one example of an interest in blurring the lines between the static object-world and dynamic nature, between the animate and the inanimate. It has been said that there are no straight lines in nature (although of course there are such lines in theories about nature, that is, in our conception of nature and of the principles at work in the natural world). Introducing curved lines in the façade of a building—as in Bernini’s Roman Oratory, for example—introduces an element of dynamism into what would otherwise have been a static form. It proposes an energetics of form, as shown in the spiral shape atop the lantern of Borromini’s Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, shown in Figure 2, and the columns of Bernini’s baldachin in Saint Peter’s Basilica, shown in Figure 3, which twist and turn as if driven by an internal energy not ordinarily associated with static ­vertical structures. The example of Bernini’s columns is particularly salient. They are removed from their purely structural purpose, which is to support the canopy, and are endowed with an

Figure 2  Francesco Borromini, Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, Rome. Photo by MM. Creative Commons License (CC0 1.0)

456   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 3  Gian Lorenzo Bernini, baldachin, Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome. Photo by NicvK. Creative Commons License (CC0 1.0)

inner force that shifts the balance of their purpose from one of function to one of expressive being, where “being” is inseparable from force. They transform a decorative “turn” into something integral, into a seemingly natural tropism. As a paradoxical example of motion in stasis, they also show that “force” is not something limited either to the natural world or to the relationship among bodies. It is contained within any given body and can be manifested as such. Insofar as one regards “mannerism” as a run-up to the baroque, one can certainly identify antecedents of this dynamic ontology in it. These antecedents are instances in which the activation of forces produces what appears from customary perspectives to be a “distortion” of bodies and forms. Consider the staircase in Jacopo da Pontormo’s Joseph in Egypt, which circles and rises alongside a massive circular column, leading the eye upward toward a pair of statues which seem visually out of proportion to the rest of the scene. This visual drama is set alongside and, in some regards, is independent of the image announced in the title of the painting. Similarly, Tintoretto’s Last Supper is a work in which the force of a miracle is translated into the dynamism of light and movement, sustained by a tension between the visual concentration centered on the figure of Christ and the gesturing apostles and swirling angels that surround the scene. But perhaps the most impressive examples of the mannerist incorporation of forces are the paintings of El Greco. His elongated figures epitomize the effects of force on figural forms. In creating

experience and knowledge in the baroque   457 the The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, in fact, he required that the proposed altar site be lengthened in order to accommodate the hyper-extension of the vertical axis of the painting. His image of the city of Toledo (now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) is a study of the natural forces at work in landscape and sky, in which an exaggerated perspective and the use of acid-toned colors transmit the dynamism of nature in ways that are nearly palpable. But El Greco was equally concerned with finding ways to render supernatural forces, just as Tintoretto was in his Last Supper. What is no doubt El Greco’s most famous image—The Burial of the Count of Orgaz—is a case in point. As we will have occasion to remark further below, the image is divided into two planes: the terrestrial (material) and the heavenly (spiritual). They are rendered in very different styles, with a concentration of detail and the depiction of known figures in the lower half, and a far more flowing and sinuous portrayal of heavenly forms in the upper part of the work. The image poses questions about the relationship between the two planes, which seem to be so different: When, how, and why does one pass from one to the other? And how can the passage between them be represented not as the movement from life to death, but from one form of life to another, equally vital one? Indeed, thinking about the relationship between these two forms of life as divided schematically by the horizontal axis at the center of the image distracts from what is no less powerfully at work in the image—the representation of nonmaterial, spiritual forces at work in the terrestrial world. The elongated hands and fingers, as well as the faces of the clergy gathered around the body of the deceased Count, rhyme with the tongue-like flames in the upper part of the background of the image, which in turn double as visual representations of the power and passion of the spirit, rendered in what may be the least tangible of material forms, and the one closest to pure energy—fire. Much of what has been said thus far might seem to support the argument that the baroque is a form of expressivism in the arts. But there are important differences between expressivism and the baroque. “Expression” and its related forms (“expressivism,” “expressionism”) generally refer to the view that art is a vehicle for the “ex-pression” (literally, the “pressing out”) of “inward” feelings and emotions. Implicit in this view is the notion that, along with thoughts, feelings and emotions are the principal constituents of the inward life. The baroque differs from this conventional thinking in two ways. The first lies in the fact that it embraces a much larger, and fundamentally different, conception of what can be expressed. The second lies in the fact that it blurs the lines between “inward” and “outward.” In the baroque, the elements that we have come to regard since roughly the Romantic age as specific to the affective life are subsumed within the much larger category of “force,” from which it follows that the difference between human and natural forces, and likewise between internal and external forces, are not categorical. Rather, it would be better to say that baroque art is interested in r­ endering visible a range of forces that are not typically available to sight. As the examples above suggest, these may be secular or sacred, but where they are sacred, the challenge is to move away from an iconography to a focus on the forces of the human and natural worlds. The baroque version of “expressivism” thus has consequences for the category of “experience.” It has long been said that the very objective of certain forms of baroque art—especially religious art—was to create passionate responses in its audience.

458   the oxford handbook of the baroque Baroque art was, in this regard, a form of rhetoric whose persuasive aims sought to move the spirit by moving the passions. Especially in Southern Europe, baroque preachers in the Catholic Church drew on the powers of rhetoric and on the contextual resources of church architecture as a way to resist the efforts of the Reformation to purge religious experience of its reliance on ritual and embellishment. In response to the relative austerity of Reformation religious practices, the religious baroque of Southern Europe made direct appeals both to the emotions and to the senses—that is, to the broad spectrum of experience. This was true even in instances where preaching was carried out by images alone, in with the muta predicatio or “silent preaching” developed by Gabrielle Paleotti, Archbishop of Bologna.11 But forceful, rhetorical appeals were no less prominent in secular art, and formed the basis of a “theatrical” style that was transmitted to neoclassical art. The emphatic gestures in Rembrandt’s Night Watch are not incongruous with David’s Oath of the Horatii.12 However, the rhetorically emphatic style of baroque art has a purpose that neoclassicism seems not to share—to bind the force of the work to the experience of the audience in ways that disrespect what we customarily regard as the categorical distinction between the two. Indeed, one could say that the category of “experience” is integral to baroque art, that the work not only aims to create certain experiences in the subject but incorporates experience within the work itself. With specific regard to the category of force, this means that along with the principle of dynamic ontology, the distinction between (natural) forces operating “in the world” and forces operating “in the subject” is of relatively little consequence. Experience is itself part of the wider spectrum of forces that baroque art brings forth. The contrast with Cartesian ontology and its attendant epistemology follow from what has been said thus far. In the Cartesian scheme of things, the category of “body” (whether animate or inanimate does not matter) depends upon the fact that bodies take up space. They are “extended substance.” There is no dynamism in the Cartesian conception of “body,” and likewise no obvious connection to those elements of personal being that are not extended in space, whether they be thoughts or feelings. Indeed, one of Descartes’s great challenges, taken up largely in The Passions of the Soul, was to reconnect the body and the mind after having established a categorical distinction between them in his epistemology. The categorical distinctions that Descartes established was predicated on two beliefs: first, that the senses are deceptive and may lead us to accept things that are true which are not; and second, that sense experience can be eliminated from our conception of subjectivity whereas thinking cannot. The result was the epistemology that has undergirded much of modern philosophy, but which is inconsistent with the epistemology of the baroque. What follows from the dynamic ontology of the baroque is, rather, an epistemology that emphasizes experience as one of the best ways to ensure that the forces at work across the animate and inanimate worlds are not discounted as inessential, and likewise to ensure that we avoid schematizing our relationship to the world as one between a “knowing” subject (a subject of consciousness) and an object-world to be known. The examples of the baroque suggest that these two are far more intertwined than Cartesian epistemology would suggest, and that distinctions we

experience and knowledge in the baroque   459 may be tempted to draw between them are liable to be false. (Consider Rembrandt’s image of the philosopher in meditation, where the circular room and snail-like staircase are in essence extensions of thoughts that themselves have no “extension” in space, and which we cannot otherwise see). Where Descartes posits that we can only know what we can think—and think clearly and distinctly—the writers and artists of the baroque suggest that knowing is tied to experience in its most dynamic forms, and that we can truly know only what we can feel. Moreover, the Baroque linkage of experience and knowledge is something quite different from empiricist conceptions of knowledge based on the things we can observe, since baroque “experience” is the dynamic form of being, rather than something to be inspected by the rational faculties, to be verified as true or as false.

Figures of Form As mentioned earlier on in this chapter, the distinction between “figures of force” and “figures of form” is heuristic. It allows us to discover things about the baroque without itself reflecting a categorical division between the two. Indeed, the previous discussion of “figures of force” has already referred to certain figures of form (Góngora’s silvas, the spiral of Bernini’s columns in Saint Peter’s, or the corkscrew steeple of Borromini’s Sant’Ivo). Turning to focus in a more concentrated way on “figures of form” nonetheless allows us to foreground the role of form in the baroque in ways that a concentration on force does not afford. Furthermore, it allows us to consider the relationship among a variety of different forms within the baroque and to ask about what they imply for questions of experience and knowledge. Of the forms that mark the baroque, several are worth special attention. The first is the figure of the double, along with the cognate structures by which doubling is produced, both in its positive forms (for example, mirroring, folding) and in its negative forms (for example, the oxymoron, the paradox, and the antithesis). Borges clearly learned from the baroque on this account, as the passage from the story “Tlon, Uqbar” suggests—“Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of beings.”13 The second are figures of “wit” (inegnio), which involve various procedures for linking disparate elements of thought, perception, or speech, for the purpose of making surprising associations, some of which stretch the bounds of what would be considered “natural.”14 Indeed, baroque forms often upset familiar distinctions between what is natural and not, sometimes using combinations of nature to create new, unnatural, and even monstrous forms (the example of Arcimboldo applies here again), and sometimes by bringing the natural and the unnatural orders into closer proximity than one might typically imagine. Figures of doubling and figures of wit both contribute to one of the most important baroque forms: the essential hybrid. Given the fact that canonical forms of reason assume that the things in the world can be reduced to “simples,” what does knowledge of essential hybrids imply?

460   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Doubling In most ontologies, and in the epistemologies that go with them, things have an “essence,” which it is the task of reason to discern, typically by winnowing away all “accidental” attributes and secondary qualities. From Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and their Scholastic followers, the essence of a thing—be it a substance or an idea—is conceived as singular. Scholastic thinkers agree, for instance, that every secondary substance has a composite nature, whether comprised of metaphysical parts or of physical constituents. Descartes’s “foundationalism” likewise envisions the construction of an edifice of knowledge based on irreducible principles, which allow us to identify the things—necessarily fundamental things—that can withstand the power of radical doubt. What is striking about the baroque, and striking even in Descartes, is the affinity for forms that are fundamentally double. They are manifested through a series of tropes, although if we understand “tropes” as a figurative way of expressing something else, we miss the fact that these tropes are the keys to a series of insights into the essentially double nature of things. They are what Blumenberg described in Paradigms for a Metaphorology as “absolute metaphors.”15 The baroque is full of instances in which the things we identify as real are duplicated, for which the following figures are a good index.

The Dream One of the main premises of Calderón de la Barca’s most important play, La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) is that the things that one learns while dreaming are essential for the conduct of life. When the prince, Segismundo, awakens from his sleep in the tower, he is unable to discern whether the things he has dreamt there are true or not. The point of the play is not, however, to establish how we can know the difference between dream and reality, nor is it to establish which one is true and which one false. On the contrary, the point is to grasp the bearing that insights learned in one realm (Segismundo’s dream) have on the other (the human and political worlds that he faces as a prince). The dream is an essential double of reality, as summed up in what may be the most famous lines of the play, which assert the equivalence of life and its dream-double: Segismundo:  What is this life? A frenzy, an illusion, A shadow, a delirium, a fiction. The greatest good’s but little, and this life Is but a dream, and dreams are only dreams.16 The trope has a parallel in the “world as theatre,” as in another Calderón play, this one an allegorical work entitled El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theatre of the World). It taps into a longstanding figure, the theatrum mundi, which Shakespeare famously

experience and knowledge in the baroque   461 invoked in As You Like It—“All the world’s a stage.”17 The connections to the mousetrap play in Hamlet are direct. But more significantly, perhaps, is the fact that Shakespeare’s plays—especially as they were originally cast—involve the practice of doubling of roles by a single actor, which generated a multiplicity of interconnected allusions and parallel meanings within the works. Particularly in the comedies, as Stephen Booth suggested, the doubling of parts served as a kind of visual commentary on the events enacted in the plays, reinforcing thematic resemblances. He notes how a single actor playing Caesar, who is murdered, returns as his nephew Octavius, and that the dead Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale returns as Camillo, soon to marry the dead man’s widow. In Henry IV, Part 2, the actor who plays Northumberland, characterized as “old, ineffectual, confused, and isolated,” was likely cast in the roles of Shallow and the King, each one “old, ineffectual,” and so on.18 As one reviewer wrote, the practice is like sleight of hand or Shakespeare’s “natural perspectives,” where the spectator can’t quite believe his or her own eyes.19 The doubling of dream and wakeful life has an ancient pedigree, and was revived with particular vigor as Renaissance writers re-encountered the texts of the ancients, including the portion of Cicero’s Republic known as the “Somnium Scipionis” (“Scipio’s Dream”). Montaigne echoes Cicero in the Essays (XIII, “Of Custom”) and then later goes on to expound more generally on the homologies between our dreams and our wakeful lives: They who have compared our life to a dream were perhaps more right than they thought. When we dream, our soul lives, acts, exercises all her faculties, neither more nor less than when she is awake; but if more loosely and obscurely, still surely not so much that the difference is as between night and bright daylight; rather as between night and shade. There she sleeps, here she slumbers: more and less. It is always darkness, and Cimmerian darkness. Sleeping we are awake, ad waking asleep. . . . Since our reason and our soul accept the fancies and opinions which arise in it while sleeping, and authorize the actions of our dreams with the same approbation as they do those of the day, why do we not consider the possibility that our thinking, our acting, may be another sort of dreaming, and our waking another kind of sleep?20

But the homology between our experience in dreams and our wakeful experiences was just the sort of thing that Descartes took to be symptomatic of our susceptibility to deception. The aim of the Meditations was to establish the grounds for certainty as the mark of truth, so that we can know which experiences to trust and which not—“I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.”21 But the difference between dreams and wakefulness is not itself a component of the foundations Descartes establishes. Surprisingly, perhaps, he is concerned to identify those things that remain true even if the dream-state were a perfect double of wakeful existence. Consider this passage from Meditation II: But what, then, am I? A thinking thing, it has been said. But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, that imagines also, and perceives. Assuredly it is not little, if all these properties belong

462   the oxford handbook of the baroque to my nature. But why should they not belong to it? Am I not that very being who now doubts of almost everything, understands and conceives certain things, who affirms this one alone is true, and denies the others; who desires to know more of them, and does not wish to be deceived; who imagines many things, sometimes even despite his will; and is likewise percipient of many, as if through the medium of the senses. Is there nothing of all this as true as that I am, even though I should be always dreaming, and although he who gave me being employed all his ingenuity to deceive me? Is there any one of these attributes that can be properly distinguished from my thought, or that can be said to be separate from myself? For it is of itself so evident that it is I who doubt, I who understand, and I who desire, that it is here unnecessary to add anything by way of rendering it more clear.22

The Fold Among the most intriguing theories to have been put forward about the baroque, Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold relies centrally on one of the principal “figures of form” that range from aesthetics to philosophy. Three things are important about The Fold and the figure it names in its title for an understanding of the relationship between knowledge and experience in the baroque. First, by invoking Leibnitz’s monads, Deleuze makes it clear that the fold is a kind of form that can be generated out of simple, irreducible elements without introducing further metaphysical hierarchies. Since folds are forms that do not conform to an ontology of “surface” and “depth” (or to a division between “deep structure” and “superstructure”), experience in and of them is continuous. Second, and directly related to the first, is the fact that folds are essential forms. They are reversible without “prejudice” to either side and correspond to an ontology that is materialist rather than metaphysical. (They reflect Deleuze’s interest in identifying alternatives to the metaphysics of representation.) Third, they present a challenge to the assumption that there ought to be a sharp dividing line between any one plane of reality and any other, not least because folds can be refolded and so obviate the notion that such distinctions are fundamental. Deleuze invokes some familiar examples to support his arguments. One is El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, in which there appears to be a horizontal division between two planes of reality, separating the terrestrial, lower half of the image, which concentrates on the burial of the deceased Count, and the upper, heavenly half, which concentrates on the spiritual afterlife. But the point of the image, as Deleuze sees it, is to signal the homology between the two planes, and to show that the relationship between them does not allow us to predicate either one upon the other. Similarly, Deleuze invokes Saint Teresa’s Las moradas or Castillo interior (the Mansions or Interior Castle) as a case in which an interior spiritual space can be subdivided into a series of seemingly limitless spaces and yet does not predicate a hierarchy of spaces that would grant any one ontological priority over any other. They are all folded within a single, undivided spiritual

experience and knowledge in the baroque   463 consciousness. And while both examples are illustrative of Deleuze’s interest in finding alternatives to the metaphysics of representation, there are still better examples of the way in which “folded” forms in the baroque raise questions about the assumptions behind the metaphysics of representation, even as they may draw upon them. Two examples, both from Velázquez, may suffice to illustrate the point. The first is the painting that Foucault took as an icon of the paradigm of representation and as emblematic of an epistemological shift away from the paradigm of “resemblances”— Las Meninas (The Ladies in Waiting). The second is Las Hilanderas (The Spinners). In the first, the interior volumes of space—as seen by the viewer, as reflected in the mirror, as seen by the painter within the painting, and as implicitly reflected on the canvas of which we can see only the back—all seem to suggest that the perspectives they require in order to be grasped might converge around the position of a subject who stands outside of all these volumes. Following the visual logic of the painting, this perspective would seem to coincide with the position of the royal couple, whose images are reflected in the mirror, and who presumably stand facing the painter, in the spot where a viewer would be positioned to look at the work as a whole. This “subject” location can be regarded as a metaphysical position subtending the work of representation that the painting so deftly carries out. And yet Las Meninas is also involved in getting beyond the paradigm of representation by showing in a very graphic way that the subject position is in fact constructed. That position is not ultimately, as is often suggested, one that makes possible all the other forms of representation in the picture. It is itself constructed out of the interplay of surfaces—mirror, canvas stretcher, mirror, doorframe, window, and so on. This means that Las Meninas is not just an example of the paradigm of representation in the metaphysical sense. It is directly and experientially a paradigm of representation in the visual sense, which is to say that the viewer’s experience of the forms it embeds is integral to it. So too Las Hilanderas would seem to exemplify the representation of a mythological scene (the myth of Arachne) on the tapestry depicted in the background of the image, which resembles the backdrop curtain of a theatrical scene. Indeed, the painting could be taken as an example of how both narrative and decorative arts are subsumed under the paradigm of representation. But the work of the spinners in the foreground—who are actively involved in tapestry weaving—suggest that the representation has a genealogy, that it is fashioned, and in this case, produced by a process of human and mechanical labor. And those things, it turns out, cannot be subordinated to the work of representation. They are integral to it, indeed coequal with it, but not reducible to it.

Forms and Figures of Life As is true with the relationship between figures and force and figures of form more generally, so too is the way in which the baroque construes and cultivates particular forms of lived experience. The way forms and figures of life are imagined in the baroque provides an intersectional lens that can shed special light on some unique aspects of

464   the oxford handbook of the baroque experience in the baroque while also refracting matters of force and form. The ways in which lived experience is cultivated and shaped—which I refer to as “forms and figures of life”—are particularly important for foregrounding the fact that experience in the baroque is not punctual or objective, but is grounded in the powers and the needs of subjects to shape who they are in light of social circumstances. They open onto questions about knowledge, but contravene expectations that the individual has privileged “interior” access to the truth that is meant to satisfy “objective” standards of verification. The figures of life that we see in the baroque may acknowledge these expectations but they pursue a set of responses that do not conform to those of modern philosophers such as Descartes, Hume, Locke, and Kant. Baroque figures of life present things from a very different perspective because of what they understand about the nature of the locus—the subject—of experience. The baroque subject is not crafted out of pure thought but rather is fashioned out of strategies of self-representation and elements of style. These shape a particular, social form of life that coincides with much of what has been said in this chapter regarding baroque figures of force and figures of form—for example, that style is integral to essence, that the distinctions between surface and depth are not absolute, and that the power of self-creation is a manifestation of energy or force. Here, it can also be useful to understand the baroque in relation to the Renaissance revalorization of human-centered experience. At the center of that revalorization was the discovery of the possibilities of self-creation; epitomizing those possibilities, in turn, was the emphasis on the role of style in self-fashioning associated with Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura. Sprezzatura is a word without a genealogy. It was made up by Castiglione to describe the art of making difficult things appear effortless; he characterized it as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”23 There is energy in sprezzatura, not inconsistent with the baroque figures of force that it anticipates. It is in fact something other than what the individual does, or what he (since the subject is the inevitably male courtier) is capable of doing. Rather, it describes the particular qualities of action, and reflects a convergence of questions of identity with questions of personal style. Additionally, it reflects the fact that the self is a social self, and that the way it appears to others (in this case as able to carry off all manner of difficult things with apparent ease) is crucial to the matter of personal identity. Its baroque connections are numerous, but perhaps none as striking as the ones taken up by Baltasar Gracián in the Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (The Art of Worldly Wisdom). This is a book that marries the techniques of self-creation derived from Castiglione’s courtly advice with a pragmatic sense of the behaviors more broadly necessary for success in the social world. The context for Gracián’s work is not so much the courtly environment as it is the urban and administrative world in which individuals increasingly found themselves struggling for advantage. It is highly conscious of the fact that the opinions of others play a critical role in determining whether one will succeed or fail, and it provides strategic advice on how best to present the self in order to achieve one’s goals. Two things are notable about the forms of life cultivated by Gracián. The first is that “success” is not defined in relation to any preestablished set of principles. The long-held

experience and knowledge in the baroque   465 Aristotelian belief, which had successfully been Christianized—according to which every individual had a proper end to achieve, coinciding with an idea of perfection—is scarcely visible in Gracián. On the contrary, his work marks a notable shift toward a strikingly modern form of pragmatism, a form that is neutral with regard to the question of ends. The second is that as it places its emphasis on strategies, on the style and appearance of one’s actions, and on the opinions of others, which requires intelligence, it sidelines the question of self-knowledge. This is a decisive step away from philosophical views that had held sway from Plato all the way through the work of Renaissance humanists, including skeptics like Montaigne. There, the goal of self-knowledge, commencing in an acknowledgment of one’s ignorance and proceeding through strenuous self-questioning, was crucial to the conduct of life. Phrased in slightly different terms, self-knowledge was the basis on which experience could be shaped and directed toward meaningful ends. With Gracián, this changes considerably. To be sure, Aristotle’s ethical ideals of prudence and practical wisdom (phronēsis) were powerful enough to have persisted even in the face of Gracián’s pragmatism; indeed, one might describe his thought as “pragmatic prudentialism,” or as “prudential pragmatism” (as in Oráculo manual y “arte de prudencia”). But the idea of a “core self,” that can be known and can orient itself toward action at the intersection of principles and circumstances, is not something we see in his work. Rather, he marks a new and surprisingly modern form of life, a form that is consistent with the baroque “figures of force” and “figures of form” discussed in this chapter.

Wit While it is natural to turn to a discussion of wit in the context of “figures of form,” rather than in relation to figures of force—since wit is after all something that shows up most vividly in forms (figures) of speech—wit does require a particular kind of mental energy (for example, ingenio, as in the description of Don Quixote as the ingenioso hidalgo). This goes to the fact that all these categories are intersectional lenses, and that concentrating on one rather than another has rather the effect of seeing a complex of relations through a particular lens, which can of course be changed for another. To see wit as a means for producing forms that draws on figures of force nonetheless allows us to understand how wit is in fact more than a capacity for generating interesting discourse or persuasive arguments, but is instead one of the ways in which the individual was able to fashion perspectives on the world by means of the intuitive and creative powers of language and mind. The novel perspectives introduced by wit were understood to be productive and not merely reflective in nature, and wit was in fact one of the ways in which the process of self-fashioning also had the potential to shape the world. Baroque conceptions of wit (ingenio) as generative originate in early modern attempts to understand the psyche (spirit, mind). Juan Huarte de San Juan explains at the very opening of his Examen de ingenios (Examination of Mens’ Wits) that ingenio derives

466   the oxford handbook of the baroque from in genere, which means “to engender within oneself, . . . to produce by means of the understanding.”24 It indicates talent or capacity. “The understanding is a generative power . . . it has the natural ability and power to engender an offspring within itself, which philosophers call the concept, or mental word.”25 All of the arts and sciences, he argues, are images or “figures” produced by their originators. Medicine, jurisprudence, and other such fields are the products of the wit or ingenio, and not just random products. They engender a complete and accurate picture of that field.26 Huarte’s ultimate purpose, however, was not so much psychological as social and political. His aim was to produce a systematic understanding of the different types of ingenio so that the most apt ones might be recognized in different individuals and cultivated in the public realm. His overarching focus was not so much the life of the individual, and certainly not providing a framework for the project of self-invention, but rather optimizing the cultivation of the diverse talents of individuals for the purpose of shaping a healthy state. Gracián’s purposes are quite different, and reflect the fact that wit is an essential component in the project of self-invention in the culture of the baroque. There is perhaps no better example of “ingenious” self-invention than the case of Cervantes’s errant knight, whose self-conception and whose actions are attributed directly to the power of the ingenio, working in concert with his will to imitate the examples of past heroes. Although misguided and anachronistic, the force of his wit is significant enough to generate a form of life—albeit one that is incongruous with the world around him. Indeed, among the more remarkable things about Don Quixote are his reactions when he encounters a clash between the way his wit says the world is and what reality itself tells him—for example, as he is trampled by a flock of sheep he believes to be an enemy army, or as he is hurled to the ground by the arms of a windmill, which he believes to be a giant. His responses consistently reflect the power and persistence of his wit, which he helps sustain by endorsing various theories about how and why an army was transformed into sheep or a giant into a windmill. These are typically theories about the work of “evil enchanters” which involve no correction to the conception advanced by his wit, but rather that accommodate experience in ways that allow the creations of his wit to survive unscathed. But as hinted above, there is a feature of wit that centers on language and, like Don Quixote’s ingenio, has the power to bring quite disparate realities together. This is the activity of the mind—which Gracián calls agudeza (sharpness of mind)—in which figures of speech reflect the powers of thought to generate changes in the way we understand the world. The Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Wit and the Art of Inventiveness, 1648) is as much a book about the mind and human nature as it is treatise of rhetoric. The deployment of wit is necessary not just in order to speak well or to argue persuasively; it is essential in order to understand the world, to express one’s knowledge of it, and to act properly in it. To be sure, Gracián accords an important place to the faculty of judgment (juicio), but judgment alone is not itself enough. For whereas judgment aims at the truth, wit contributes the capacity of the mind to establish correspondences between different things. It was in fact the inspiration for the way in which poets of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes theorized metaphor, which valorized the creative

experience and knowledge in the baroque   467 energy in bringing distant realities together. What they learned from Gracián, and writers like him, was that figures of speech were in fact creative figures of mind, and as such played an important role in the work of individuals who saw themselves and their language as fashioning the world, not simply reflecting nature. Along with Gracián, it was Tesauro who contributed most to the baroque discourse on wit as a manifestation, in language, of the vital powers of mind. In Il cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope, published in 1654 but written in the 1620s) he identifies metaphor as the paragon of human inventiveness. Metaphor and wit (argutezza) matter because they are reflective of a capacity of the human spirit that is, in its turn, reflective of the transposition of divine powers of invention to the human world. The powers brought forth by metaphor are of two kinds, perspicacity (perspicacia) and versatility (versabilità). Perspicacity matters because it penetrates “the farthest and most minute circumstances of every subject.”27 And versatility matters because it enables the comparison of things, both with each other and with the subject matter of discourse. It “connects and separates them; the one with the other or with marvelous dexterity puts one in place of the other as the juggler does his stones.”28 As with Gracián’s Agudeza y arte de ingenio, Tesauro’s work seems to be an attempt at establishing a taxonomy of ­ figures of speech. Also, like the Agudeza, it appears to serve pragmatic purposes, acting as a compendium of figures of speech. And for both these reasons, their work reflects an effort to bridge the powers of the mind and the inventiveness of language with the means for living successfully in the world. They envision life as fashioned in and through language. Tesauro and Gracián look at ingenuity as manifested in language not—or not only—because they hold the deft use of words in high regard for aesthetic reasons, but because they regard language as coincident with the distinctively human form of life in which the power of mind called “wit” shapes our engagement with the world.

Conclusion I began with style, and I shall end with style. Style gets us to the heart of things in assessing the baroque, but it is more. It is one of the keys to an understanding of why the baroque matters—matters to us in the contemporary world and matters to the way we understand the values and the interests of the humanities now. Attention to style and to the force of artworks is increasingly resonant with “the way we read now.” That phrase, the title of a special issue of the journal Representations was meant to capture the fact that deep-structure theories and ideological analyses of literature did not produce the social change toward which they pointed, and distracted attention from some of the things that matter most about art.29 Style is paramount among them. And emergent from a consideration of style in the baroque is an indication of how we might frame a system and structure of values that is differentiated from those that prevail in the natural sciences without necessarily standing in opposition to them. The first of these derives from the attention to the qualities of experience—rather than to things that must be

468   the oxford handbook of the baroque gauged in quantitative terms. Here, the gradations of intensity are paramount. The ­second, which builds on the first, is anchored in the notion that aesthetics and essence have one and the same root. The third revolves around the insight that the capacity to know things is bound up with the capacity to say things, and that the ability to invent things is one with the ability to establish new connections, connections across things that can seem quite “unlike” one another. All of these factors together differentiate the aesthetic commitments we see epitomized in the baroque from the natural sciences. Force is a key component of both, but carries very different implications. Michel Chaouli made the point this way in relation to works of art and the way we study them: “One way of seeing our disciplines is as a measure of the lengths to which we go to keep at bay the force of artworks, the same artworks whose ability to snap us out of our torpor drew us to them in the first place. How curious it is that we dig wide moats—of history, ideology, formal analysis—and erect thick conceptual walls lest we be touched by what, in truth, lures us.”30 There is no doubt that the natural sciences also have their force, their lure. But what does it mean to understand the forces by which we are lured? Here, the question of style—and paradigmatically of style in the baroque—has important answers to provide.

Notes 1. G.  W.  F.  Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. T.  M.  Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1975), 1: 601. 2. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M.  D.  Hottinger, reprinted (Dover Publications: New York 1932); Carl Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque. 1610–1660 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952). 3. I note that Arcimboldo’s work is often described as mannerist, rather than baroque. 4. On this subject, see Carlos Soldevilla Pérez, Ser barroco: Una hermeneutica de la cultura (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2013), esp. 53–106 (“El autodominio prudente: La génesis ­barroca de la identidad como estilo de vida en Baltasar Gracián”). 5. The phrase refers to Belgian churches and cathedrals. See John Weretka, “The Baroque Pulpit in Southern Netherlands,” ASA Cultural Tours, July 22, 2015. 6. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), II.12, 444. 7. Ibid., III.2. 8. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Vietch (New York: Dutton, 1919), I. 80. 9. Ibid., III. 10. See Martin Schönfeld and Michael Thompson, “Kant’s Philosophical Development,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward  N.  Zalta (Winter, 2014), “Kant's stance would mark out the future course of science. We do not regard nature as a collection of particles and forces in empty space anymore, but instead as a system of energypulses interacting in fields. Dynamics has turned out to be fundamental.” The conceptions of force that had been advanced during the prior century were the source of considerable philosophical controversy that involved a host of related terms (for example, motion). For Descartes, force was a quantity of motion, observable in matter. As Schönfeld and Thompson explained, for Descartes “nature is matter in motion, and motion is the explanatory principle.

experience and knowledge in the baroque   469 ‘Force’ is the product of mass and velocity (mv), a quantity called ‘quantity of motion’ or ‘dead pressure’ . . . Beyond this, for Descartes, ‘force’ has no further meaning. Cartesian essence can be isolated to physical and mental substances and force is neither of these. Force is not a dynamic essence, nor an essence at all. It is merely a quantity of motion calculable in another substance. By his rendering, Descartes reduced physics to kinematics.” (Martin Schönfeld and Michael Thompson, “Kant's Philosophical Development.” See also Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]). 11. See Gabrielle Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre et profane [1582] (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1990). 12. This said, the opposition between what Michael Fried described as “theatrical” and “absorptive” images does not hold in the baroque. Artists were capable of producing, and did produce, both kinds of work. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 13. Jorge Luis Borges, “Töln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Labyrinths [1961], trans. James Irby (New York: New Directions, 2007), 3. 14. Borges’s affinity for the writings of Francisco de Quevedo demonstrate yet another ­connection between his work and the earlier Spanish baroque. 15. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 16. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño, trans. Roy Campbell, in Eric Bently, ed., Life is a Dream and Other Classics [1959] (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishing, 1999), 268. Segismundo: ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí/¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,/una sombra, una ficción,/y el mayor bien es pequeño;/que toda la vida es sueño,/y los sueños, sueños son. (Act I, l. vv. 956–958). 17. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, (First Folio: 1623), Act II, Scene VII. 18. Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, lndefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 141–142. 19. Russell Fraser, “Review of Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, lndefinition, and Tragedy,” Modern Philology 83, no. 4 (1986), 423. 20. Montaigne, Essays II, 12 (“Apology for Raymond Sebond,” 451). 21. Descartes, Meditation I, 81. 22. Ibid., 89. 23. Baldasarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York: Norton, 2002), 32. 24. “Engendrar dentro de si . . . producir con el entendimiento.” Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenious para todas las ciencias, ed. Federico Climent Terrer (Barcelona: Parera, 1917), 42; translation mine. 25. “El entendimiento es potencia generative . . . tiene virtud y fuerzas naturales de engendrar dentro de sí un hijo, a que llaman los filósofos concepto o palabra de la mente” (ibid); translation mine. 26. “Vemos, pues, que el nombre ingenio, deriva más bien del verbo ingenero, que quiere decir engendrar dentro de sí una figura entera y verdadera que represente vivamente la naturaleza del asunto cuya es la ciencia que se aprende” (ibid., 44). 27. Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, ed. August Buck (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1968), 51, cited in Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 27. 28. Ibid.

470   the oxford handbook of the baroque 29. Sharon Marcus and Stephen  M.  Best, eds., “Reading ‘The Way We Read Now,’ ” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009), 1–21. 30. Michel Chaouli, “Criticism and Style,” New Literary History 44 (2013), 323–344, here 328.

Further Reading Braider, Christopher. Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Cascardi, Anthony J. “Philosophy of Culture and Theory of the Baroque.” Filozofski Vestnik, 22:2 (2001): 87–110. Connors, Joseph. Borromini and the Roman Oratory: Style and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. Damisch, Hubert, et al. Puissance du baroque: Les forces, les formes, les rationalités. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Harries, Karsten. The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Johnson, Christopher D. Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 2010. Maravall, José Antonio. The Culture of the Baroque. Trans. Terry Cochran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Panofsky, Erwin. “What is Baroque?” In Three Essays on Style. Ed. Irving Lavin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Riegel, Alois. The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome. Ed. and trans. Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010. Santo-Tomás, Enrique García. La musa refractada: Literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2014. Soldevilla Pérez, Carlos. Ser barroco: una hermenéutica de la cultura. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2013. Toman, Rolf, ed. Baroque: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting. Potsdam, Germany, 2010.

chapter 20

Con v ersation a n d  Ci v ilit y Delphine Denis

In the first dictionary of the Académie française (1694), the entry for the term converser reads as follows: “to be with someone in an ordinary fashion, and to speak casually with them.” Indeed, the interactions that take place in such casual company are first and foremost exchanges of opinions and remarks, conducted within the framework of “civil conversation.” These types of exchange were modeled on the three great Italian Renaissance treatises on the subject, namely the Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (1528), the Galateo by Giovanni della Casa (1558), and the Civil Conversation by Stefano Guazzo (1574),1 all of which were rapidly translated into French. France took up this project almost a century later; foreign courts promptly followed suit, perceiving in this culture of civility the nature, indeed the very identity, of the “génie français.” This gradual refinement of conduct, or rather its theorization, extended from the 1530s into the middle of the eighteenth century and was at very least a European phenomenon—if one considers the court of Catherine II of Russia. Art historians have named precisely this period, and geographic expanse, the “Baroque.” France, however, holds a special place within this longue durée, since it was the locus of a determining episode in the elaboration of worldly politeness (politesse mondaine). Indeed, the founding figure of the honnête homme emerged over the course of three decades, from 1630 to 1660. During these formative years, the mastery of savoir-vivre, taught by innumerable treatises, implied a complete awareness of the role one was to play in society. It is a “rare talent,” observes the Chevalier de Méré, at the end of the seventeenth century, and “it takes a great deal of wit and precision to achieve perfection.” He continues, “I am convinced that on many occasions it wouldn’t be without its uses to regard what one does as a play, and to imagine that one acts a part in the theater.”2 It would be tempting to read this analogy as an avatar of the theatrum mundi metaphor, but such an analysis has its limits: Méré, like his contemporaries, is not denouncing vain illusions in the face of divine transcendence. To play one’s role well is not a matter for strategic prudence, such as that promoted by Balthazar Gracián in Spain,3 nor is the “worldly science” analyzed

472   the oxford handbook of the baroque by Girolamo Cardano about duplicity and dissimulation4—be it of the “honest” kind that is discussed by Torquato Accetto.5 Similarly, it would be premature to relate this endeavor to a baroque sensibility fascinated by spectacle and by the ostentatious staging of social and political values. Sociolinguists, building upon the research of ethnologists, have shed light on the universal and necessary aspects of such efforts to represent the self within verbal interactions:6 this work of self-representation is at the heart of politeness, of which only the forms and requirements vary from one culture to another. For all these reasons, it would seem appropriate to avoid the notion of baroque in accounts of practices and theories of worldly sociability (sociabilité mondaine) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. The no less controversial notion of classicism is, moreover, irrelevant within the context of our chronology.7 The way in which men and women of this period accompanied, and sometimes even incited, the promotion of worldly values to the point of converting them into a new aesthetic must, therefore, be apprehended on its own terms. Maurice Magendie’s pioneering study La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté en France8 opens with the year 1630—the year of publication of Nicolas Faret’s L’honnête homme, a work which introduces Castiglione’s Courtier to French audiences. Faret’s work constitutes a milestone in the long elaboration of a model of honnêteté, finalized only at the turn of the century. The work’s subtitle, L’Art de plaire à la Cour, expresses—at least superficially—fidelity to the spirit of Castiglione’s Courtier, a figure attached to developing the means of acquiring the favors of the Prince. But the difference in political context radically changed the stakes. France was a unified kingdom, whereas Italy was not yet a nation, its territory remaining fragmented in a multiplicity of sovereign duchies. The Court was now the court of the French monarch. The Louvre— where a crowd of courtiers sought to approach the entourage of the king in order to advance their own personal fortunes—was a far cry from the amiable Hall of Vigils at the ducal palace of Urbino. These French courtiers thus required a methodical guide of their own. Indeed, the supple dialogical form prized by Castiglione becomes more rigid under Faret’s pen. Faret’s is an organized treatise: the continuous thread of Castiglione’s dialogues, in which each participant would contribute to creating the portrait of the perfect courtier, is now split into isolated rubrics. In the same decade, the 1630s, but in the city, the context changes again. A new type of civility flourished there, in the feminine ruelles—that did not yet go by the name of salons—where hostesses of high rank received their regular visitors, chosen on the grounds of personal merit alone.9 To please them, all erudition had to fade away, the last traces of knowledge acquired in the colleges were to disappear, to be replaced by the school of life (l’école du monde). The science of affability (science des agréments) was not to be taught, but rather acquired in the company of these exceptional women.10 The physiognomy of the French language was also progressively changing, en route toward the modern French, thanks to which we can still read these classical texts today without recourse to an unwieldy apparatus of linguistic annotations. Such an evolution can only be understood in light of the forms of politesse discussed above. The “Malherbian reform,” as it has sometimes been called, which began at the beginning

conversation and civility   473 of the seventeenth century, affected the entirety of linguistic practices and all literary genres. The oral and the written, each fashioning the other, came together in an asymptotic movement, the curves of which were formed by the conversation of honnêtes gens and the reading of the best books. One was to write as one spoke, and speak as one wrote. At the end of the century, this was a matter of consensus: Marguerite Buffet, in one of the many volumes dedicated to the elegance of style, is able to assert that “the way in which we write at present is very easy; it is a natural and pleasant style [. . .]; one must do the same in conversation, and discuss all matters pleasantly, that is with the ease and graceful art of good speech and good writing, that is the ultimate requirement of the written word and of conversation.”11 In 1653, Madeleine de Scudéry reminds her readers: “the great secret [of conversation] is to speak always nobly about lowly things and rather simply about lofty things.”12 Indeed, in the 1630s, the middle style is irresistibly ­promoted—a style diametrically opposed to the ostentatious figures of speech through which authors of the beginning of the century had sought to elevate French prose.13 Latin rhetoric had assigned to this mediocris style the task of pleasing (delectare). Its charms were fully consonant with the injunctions of a sociability grounded in the art of pleasing (art d’agréer). Attempts to purify the French language were not limited to a series of proscriptions, however. If low, technical, or antiquated terms were to be abandoned, and neologisms permitted only once they had entered into common usage, it is because the goal was to form a common language, “such as it is in the ordinary commerce of honnêtes gens.”14 The first dictionary of the Académie française could thus do without the authorial citations that filled the pages of Richelet (1680) and Furetière’s (1690) dictionaries: its examples do not simply attest to bookish usage. Rather, these examples offer—or return—the best ways of speaking and writing to the public, by proposing phraseological contexts in which given terms may be put to good use. Vaugelas had already placed at the heart of his Remarques sur la langue française (1647) the experience of speakers originating from the “soundest part of the Court.”15 In particular, he gave pride of place to the experience of women, to whom he attributed the natural intuition of good usage. As early as the 1630s, Corneille’s comedies were supposed to emulate the conversation of honnêtes gens,16 endowing them in return with a certain literary prestige. On stage, their language is contrasted by Molière to the jargon of physicians or of the précieuses he ridicules. The novel, from L’Astrée onward, provides an ideal representation of this type of honest conversation and gradually opts for a style which breaks away from the flashiness of the previous generation’s “phoebus speech” (parler phoebus).17 “I have endeavored to speak like the honnêtes gens,” writes Georges de Scudéry in his 1641 preface to Ibrahim. This politeness of language was a victory: in order to be successful, that is in order to literally polish language, all asperities had to be removed, and one had to renounce cutting a personal path through language. In vain, voices were raised to demand linguistic freedom,18 or to recover a poetic vigor which many felt had been exhausted by the increasing blandness of modern ways of writing.19 These anti-purists were going, in all conscience, against the grain of a powerful movement: that of a society engaged in the process of refining civility. If language must be a common good, it is because it relies on a

474   the oxford handbook of the baroque community of speakers; if, in the name of clarity, one must hunt down all lexical ambiguities, all syntactical equivocality, stylistic gibberish, and obscurity, it is to ensure that no misunderstandings, no hidden thoughts remain. “When we speak and when we write, we must try as much as possible,” Vaugelas reminds us, “not only to be understood, but also to ensure that we cannot not be understood.”20 Such standards of clarity, drawn from classical rhetoric,21 also transmitted an ethical injunction, that of a respect for others. A sociable language was instituted, in a way that mirrored the civility of manners. It was a language within which individuals could converse freely, constrained by nothing but the necessary regard that each must have toward all. Conversation was thus the touchstone against which the qualities of the honnête homme were tested in society. One exposed oneself, in both senses of the term, since one appeared in public, thus taking the risk of making a faux pas. All aspects of savoir-vivre converged toward, and were diffracted out of, conversation: respect for the rules of propriety implied that each must find their place in function of each situation and each interlocutor—it was a question of aptum, of decorum. A great deal of skill was necessary to be pleasant without falling into fawning and sycophancy; wit—that is, a sense of what is appropriate to the occasion and a source of good cheer—had to prevail; pleasant mockery (la belle raillerie) contributed to it, as long as other participants were spared its bite—a bite characteristic of the persiflage of the following century.22 If there was such a thing as a rhetoric of conversation,23 at a time when the know-how associated with techniques of persuasion was no longer reserved only to the courts of law and to preaching but extended to all areas of public speech,24 conversation had nonetheless dismissed eloquence, incompatible as it was with the freedom and affability of casual exchanges among honnêtes gens. Yet all these elements were only gleaned after the fact. As is often the case, theory lagged behind practice: one would search in vain for a systematic analysis of how to conduct conversation within the first treatises on civility prior to the 1650s. It is to Madeleine de Scudéry that we owe one of its first definitions. In the “History of Sapho,” of the last volume of Artamenes or the Grand Cyrus (1649–1653), the novelist depicts select company mocking the appalling conversations held at the house of Damophile. Each conversant in turn provides an example of the inappropriate topics discussed there, thereby ­contributing to the portrayal of this gallery of unfortunate characters. In doing so, they can underline, in contrast, the qualities of their hostess. They beg Sapho, moreover, to explain to them “what conversation must be” since, as one interlocutor laments, it still has no “certain rules.” Sapho gracefully complies by way of a long development. All subjects may in fact be raised in conversation, she explains carefully, since: there is nothing that cannot be said in conversation, provided that one is endowed with wit and judgment, and that one considers well where one is, to whom one is speaking and who one is oneself. However, while judgment is absolutely necessary so as never to say a single thing out of place, the conversation must nonetheless appear so free, that it would seem as if none of our thoughts are rejected and that everything that strikes one’s fancy is said [. . .] One should never know what it is one is to say, and yet one should always know well what it is that one is saying.25

conversation and civility   475 Above all, Sapho insists, “I wish, also, for a certain joyful spirit to reign,” inspiring “in  the hearts of all the company a disposition to be amused by everything and bored by nothing.”26 The recurrence of modal expressions in this passage conveys the drive toward regulation expected by Sapho’s friends. These considerations have nothing to do, however, with the rigidity of precepts. The recommendations that Sapho provides at her friends’ request simply elucidate the intrinsic modalities of conversation such as it was practiced in la belle société. The novelist’s recommendations are clearly indebted to early theories of honnêteté, developed at length in treatises destined to readers who were not yet fully versed in these matters.27 Yet, these manners are to be so well internalized that they become invisible: it behooves one to appear in society with the ease of naturel, the master concept of a fully assimilated culture of the self. To speak about everything “without transport and without affectation,” as Sapho specifies, is to display the type of sprezzatura that was so dear to Castiglione, the meaning of which the term désinvolture, awkwardly proposed by his first translators, fails to capture. In addition, the propositions put forward by Madeleine de Scudéry are expressed in the very form of the practice they purport to describe: this fictional conversation is the model for such a practice. Sapho can then modestly conclude by bestowing all the compliments awarded to conversation upon the present company itself. It is, in fact, under this pseudonym that Scudéry’s contemporaries recognize her: in 1653, the date of publication of this text, Scudéry’s lodgings in the Marais accommodate every Saturday her small circle of regular visitors, some members of which, like herself, had frequented the Hôtel de Rambouillet so admired throughout the century. To indirectly sing the praises of these Saturdays in such terms amounted to no less than the claim to retain their spirit. Although the bourgeois company frequenting her abode, rue de Beauce, had little to do with the guests chosen by the marquise d’Angennes and her daughter Julie at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the latter two would not have refuted her analyses. In contrast to masculine erudite circles, of which there were still many at the time, Sapho’s friends find themselves united by a shared “spirit of joy.” In the author’s conversation, the vocabulary of galanterie is recurrent: in fact, the term galant along with its lexical derivatives replaces the adjective honnête, nowhere to be found in this text. This was a new phenomenon, which did not escape the attention of speakers of the period, and in fact baffled many of them. Witness to these hesitations which he seeks to remedy, Vaugelas exposes them in a lengthy remark which is so decisive that it is worth citing in full: Gallant, gallantly (galant, galamment). Gallant has several meanings, both as a noun and as an adjective. I will leave them all aside to speak only of one, which is the focus of this Remark. At the Court, they say that a man is gallant, that he says and does all things gallantly, that he dresses gallantly, and a thousand other similar things. One asks what is a gallant man, or a gallant woman of this sort, who does and says things with a gallant air, and in a gallant manner. I have seen this question debated among courtiers, indeed by the

476   the oxford handbook of the baroque most gallant of either sex, who were hard-pressed to define it. Some maintained that it is ce je ne sçay quoi, that differs little from la bonne grâce, others argued that neither ce je ne sçay quoi nor la bonne grâce sufficed. Both, they said, are purely natural things, which must nonetheless be augmented by a certain air, that one assumes at the Court, and which can only be acquired by keeping company with the Greats and with the ladies. Others still said that these external elements were not sufficient, and that the scope of this word gallant was far greater, that it embraced several qualities at once. In short, that it was a composite notion which involved a measure of je ne sçay quoi, or of bonne grâce, of courtly air, of wit, of judgment, of civility, of courtesy and gaiety, and all without constraint, affectation or vice. With that there is enough to make an honnête homme in the fashion of the Court. This sentiment was followed as the closest to the truth, but everyone agreed that the definition remained imperfect and that there was something more in the meaning of this word that could not be expressed. Indeed, in the case, for example, of dressing gallantly, dancing gallantly, and all those other activities involving bodily gifts rather than intellectual ones, it is a notion that is easy to define, but when we move from the body to the mind, and when in conversation with the Greats and the ladies, and in the manner of dealing and living at the Court, one acquires the title of gallant, providing a definition becomes much harder, for this trait presupposes many excellent qualities which one would be hard put all to name, yet of which were only one to be missing, this would suffice to no longer be considered gallant. The same may be said of the lettres galantes. In these matters, France can boast of having someone to whom all others must yield. Neither Athens nor Rome, notwithstanding Cicero, have what it takes to compete with him, and I can say this boldly, since it hardly seems that a kind of writing so delicate was even known to them. And all the most exquisite tastes delight in his letters, as well as in his verse and conversation, in which one finds no less charm. I would hold the Public well-founded to bring action against him to have his works printed.28

If the meaning of the adjective is “questioned” in all the contexts in which it appears, it is because its use has gradually invaded linguistic practices. It extends to all worldly conduct, and this seemingly centrifugal force creates a deficit in meaning. But it is not given to all to know how to lead this interrogation: it is at the Court that the term is in fashion; it is there too that this quality is practiced. By way of a noticeable loop effect, Vaugelas further specifies that the “question” is debated by “the most gallant” of courtiers. To make room for it in his Remarques is not merely to propose a regulation of good usage, as Vaugelas does elsewhere: the inquiry here is of a semantic order. Good usage (le bel usage), which the continuators of Vaugelas will endeavor to clarify, is not even at stake, since the use of the adjective already pertains to good usage in the social space within which it circulates, and whose practices it describes. Ways of living and ways of talking come together in this respect: l’air galant and le bel usage have in a sense been confiscated by this elite circle. The certain je ne sais quoi, attached to la bonne grâce, yet distinct from it, does not need to be elucidated either: it operates again as a powerful agent of distinction.29 Indeed, the central notion of taste (goût) continues to function in much the same way: definitions are proposed one after another up until the very end of the century.30

conversation and civility   477 Wrested from the religious sphere, to which it had been subordinated by Gracián in a chapter of The Hero (1630), taste falls well within the province of the type of gallantry that is the focus of so much attention.31 With this text, Vaugelas opens the mysteries of the air galant to an audience that is not yet initiated into its secrets, but is only too pleased to learn. This is not an easy matter to carry out. The series of proposed periphrases is scrupulously recorded, and each in turn is then unpacked in this remark. No expression, however, supplants the one that comes before it. Quite to the contrary: the formula placed in italics by Vaugelas is elaborated through successive layers which allow us to grasp the very spirit of la belle conversation. As in Madeleine de Scudéry 10 years later, multiple voices make themselves heard, and each plays its part. Guided by “judgment,” simultaneously a faculty of reason and a capacity for adaptation, the gallant man is thus presented as “an honnête homme in the fashion of the Court.” But central as this definition may be, even in the typographic space of the page, it remains aporetic for want of exhausting the list of “excellent qualities” necessary to reach a fulness of meaning: in linguistic terms, the impossible enumeration of its inherent semes prevents one from reaching a stable definition, while constantly improving connotations (the related semes) inform us of the notion’s social value.32 No doubt, the same goes for the notion of honnête homme. Indeed, these two syntagms have in common not only that they designate behaviors, but further still that they determine the forms that these behaviors must take. Their respective meanings thus have implications for the whole of worldly sociability (la culture mondaine). To understand this type of sociability, therefore, one must leave the realm of language (langue) and return words to the practice of effective speech (langage effectif). This is why the lexicologist must give way to the historian. These terms, unlike other words that only refer to their referent (a chair, for example, remains a seat), are what some linguists have proposed to call “praxemes,”33 insofar as they refer to social practices. Regarding the two expressions that concern us here, we must go further: they organize these practices, they regulate them, and that is precisely why they are so difficult to define. In the absence of a definition, models and foils can nonetheless be proposed. Some exemplary personalities can lay claim to this idealization: the Marquise de Rambouillet was a model of it for her contemporaries, Mademoiselle de Scudéry was its theoretician in another conversation on the air galant,34 the Duc de Nemours is its accomplished representative in The Princesse de Clèves, while the pedant or the uncouth provincial are its antitheses. Vaugelas’s’ remark concludes with literature: according to him, there is an author of his time who conforms to this nature—an author whose work has never been printed, and who thereby denies himself any such status. If his name is missing in the rubric it is, on the one hand, because its publication would have the effect of tearing the author away from the first circle of his admirers: to preserve the author’s anonymity is to respect his own choice. But, on the other hand, and here Vaugelas closes the second loop of his remark: “the most gallant” of his readers will have immediately recognized Vincent Voiture, the official poet of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Since the remaining readers are neither complicit with, nor do they share the “most exquisite tastes” of their better colleagues, it would be pointless to unveil to them the author’s identity. The social signs

478   the oxford handbook of the baroque of galanterie thus open onto its literary manifestations. Voiture is the paradigmatic example of this new way of writing, which is etched into this space of sociability. In fact, for Vaugelas, Voiture is still the only one of his kind. Vaugelas had wholeheartedly called for the publication of Voiture’s works—an action which the latter’s self-professed ­dilettantism had prevented during his lifetime. Just 2 years after Voiture’s death in 1648, his nephew Martin de Pinchêne fulfilled this wish by publishing the long-awaited volume of his petites pièces galantes. To avoid utterly betraying his uncle’s position, however, he prefaces the collection with a short text in which he portrays the poet as a perfect galant homme, even in his way of erasing all traces of an albeit very real kind of knowledge. Voiture’s singular genius is barely discussed by Pinchêne: his works testify to it. As a result, a general poetics that could reveal the characteristics of this new writing was lacking. But it was not long until it appeared. In 1655, the equally posthumous edition of the late poet Jean-François Sarasin’s works was published. The poet’s friends, Gilles Ménage and Paul Pellisson, worked to bring together his scattered productions, some of which had remained in manuscript form. The great diversity of these writings, however, should not distract us from their profound unity: that of a genuine aesthetic, as presented by Pellisson in the long Discours with which he opens the edition of Sarasin’s works.35 The pleasures of amiable conversation had diffused their graces onto the poet’s literary work, and for good reason since it was from this worldly sociability (sociabilité mondaine) that it had drawn its first resources—this “free, familiar and natural conversation, strewn everywhere with games, with the gaiety and civility of honnêtes gens,”36 of which Sarasin was able to recover the tone. By reproducing Pinchêne’s editorial gesture (a posthumous publication accompanied by a preface), Pellisson duly notes the founding place of Voiture, the poet of Rambouillet. But, to Pellisson, Sarasin is by no means an epigone: each in his own way and with his own talent had illustrated the same literary vein. By promoting the work of his friend, Pellisson did nothing but relay the ambition he had himself exhibited in his Pompe funèbre de Voiture, published the very year of the latter’s death. The stylistic virtuosity of this piece, woven with quotes and pastiches of the ancient authors that Voiture had revived by bringing lost poetic genres back into fashion, makes it unquestionably a tribute. But, in his “masterpiece of wit, gallantry, delicacy and invention,”37 Sarasin competes with wit, playfulness, and ingenuity, and proves his own poetic mastery as well as the right to occupy the place left vacant by the recent disappearance of Voiture. That this appropriation of another’s heritage makes little sense in terms of literary history hardly matters, since it is not a question of evaluating their respective value: it is Pellisson’s preface that should be remembered as a manifesto. Madeleine de Scudéry probably did not participate directly in this collective edition, but it is well and truly in her entourage that it was prepared. Pellisson met her in 1653, Gilles Ménage knew her, and Sarasin himself had frequented the circle of the Saturdays in the 1650s. One grasps the coherence of their project: the reflection on forms of sociability is inseparable from a literary poetics. The air galant which they share, is precisely what needed to be defined in these two interrelated spaces. But this literature still lacked legitimacy. In particular, it lacked the authority of filiation. Once again, it is Madeleine de Scudéry who provides it in 1658 in a passage of the “History of Hesiod” inserted in Volume VIII

conversation and civility   479 of her Clélie (1654–1660). Asleep at the edge of the Hippocrene, the poet listens to a long prophecy pronounced by the muse Calliope, who shows him in dream-form “the progress of poetry” since its origins. The slow procession of ancient poets continues into the present and ends in apotheosis with the praise of “gallant and playful poetry,” which will be noble, natural, easy, pleasant, it will mock without malice, it will praise without great exaggeration, it will sometimes blame but without bitterness, it will be ingeniously humorous and entertaining. It will at times be tender, and at times playful [. . .] it will be full of pleasant inventions and ingenious simulations [that is to say, fictions], it will combine wit and love, it will have a certain worldly air that will distinguish it from other poems, and finally it will be the flower of wit of those who will excel in it.38

The institution of this literary category was fully accomplished in the 1660s, when gallant works proliferated with titles that rallied under its banner.39 Unknown authors tried their hand at it, often without claiming to aspire to the prestige of this literary status. “All the writers in the kingdom”40 thought themselves authorized to speak of such matters. But concerns were raised in the face of such a massive irruption of writers on Mount Parnassus where one legislated in pleasant allegorical fictions, calling to the bar witnesses and complainants of this invasion. In this context, Apollo and the Muses had a hard time sorting the winners from the losers. In 1672, around the same time as collections gathering small, light, and playful pieces by a variety of authors, both in prose and in verse, were being assembled, Donneau de Visé launched a periodical with the eloquent title of Mercure galant. The novel was sometimes explicitly “galant.”41 Comedies and ballets were sometimes produced in the same vein. Courtly poetry relied heavily on this notion.42 One could expand the list of contemporaneous genres in which the esprit galant prevailed. Indeed, the latter knew no bounds in these years of conquest. La Fontaine is clear on this point in the preface to his Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (1669): the taste of the century “tends toward gallantry,” and this elegant jest makes the “just temperament” which is required by the “new character” of his prosimetrum.43 With The Princesse de Clèves, Madame de Lafayette inaugurated an unprecedented narrative formula which modern critics have since made the masterpiece of the classical novel, but which was then described as an “histoire galante.”44 The pleasure of reading, which gallant literature self-consciously places at its very heart, is the same as the one defended by Dorante in scene 6 of La Critique de l’École des Femmes (1663), and established by him as “the rule of all rules.” Racine confirms it again in the preface to Berenice (1671). What is known today as classicism flourished on this cultural breeding ground, but that was not all there was to it. On the contrary, according to the partisans of the Ancients in the famous late seventeenth-century querelle, it was even necessary to detach oneself radically from this aesthetic; whereas the Moderns claimed it explicitly as their own.45 If Boileau establishes gallant aesthetics as the enemy to be fought if one does not wish to see the belles-lettres debased into trifles, it is precisely because he has measured its importance. This literature, one might say, had entered into conversation: epistles in

480   the oxford handbook of the baroque verse respond to one another, literary portraits—so fashionable at the time—depict such worldly circles,46 light poems echo each other, authors propose their texts through public readings in the presence of select company, and in the entourage of the Marquise de Sablé, each maxim of La Rouchefoucauld is discussed. Previously confined to the judgment of the learned or of literary authorities, criticism itself now belonged to the man of taste: at times, it also drew on dialogical modes of exposition. In the case of the quarrel provoked by the publication of The Princesse de Clèves, the Conversations of the Abbé de Charnes are written in direct response to the Lettres of Valincour. Bouhours also makes use of dialogue, whether in the Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène or in his various reflections on the French language. It is through dialogue that Roger de Piles sides with color against drawing in the querelle over painting that shakes the last third of the ­century,47 and the same goes for many late seventeenth-century treatises dedicated to ways of living, conversing, and writing. What name can we give to the type of sociability in which this modern literature flourished, and which Charles Perrault defends in his Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1692–1693)? Just as Vaugelas struggled to define the air galant, and Madeleine de Scudéry had to devise a long conversation to attempt the same, so too is there here a je ne sais quoi that escapes all definition. The Roman model of casual conversation had prompted Guez de Balzac to risk the Latin calque of urbanité, “this amiable virtue of commerce.” He does so in a text of 1644 that presented itself as the “Suite d’un entretien de vive voix” held in 1637 with the Marquise de Rambouillet.48 Here, as elsewhere, it is in conversation that one ponders the nature of civilité. “The bitterness of its novelty,” in the words of a self-conscious Balzac himself, prevented the notion of urbanité from entering into language, and this in spite of being championed by a few authors whose efforts are vindicated by our modern usage of the term. Quite naturally, however, the word is used repeatedly by Pellisson, who seeks lexical equivalents accepted into common usage— although he ultimately fails to find a “sufficiently proper name” to express in French “this urbanité that the words civilité, galanterie and politesse explain only imperfectly.”49 At the end of the century, when Perrault summarizes the achievements of modern gallantry, he uses the same nominal associations: “it comprises all the fine and delicate ways in which one speaks of all things with a free and pleasant playfulness; [it is] what Greek elegance and Roman urbanity had begun, and that the politeness of recent times has brought to a higher degree of perfection.”50 Captured synchronically, all these terms are indeed quasi-synonyms, delimiting the same semantic field. But words have a history: in the space of half a century, they marked undeniable scansions. These changes took place against the backdrop of theories of honnêteté. These, in turn, had been developed through the very learning of civilité, the first precepts of which had been laid down by Erasmus.51 These precepts having been assimilated, it was in the ruelles féminines that one expected to find the urbanité of the Romans. But the casual conversations exemplified in Cicero’s letters and in the dialogues of his Brutus and his Orator, have little to do with the sociability of the 1640s. It was the era of galanterie, and it was the novelty of this term that gave rise to the type of reflections

conversation and civility   481 that flourished in the social circles which practiced these forms. But what of politesse in the context of these lexical variations? Most certainly, it functioned as a generic term, but its meaning gradually—albeit significantly—changed during this period, reviving in its wake the notion of honnêteté itself. Many factors contributed to this transformation: Augustinian moralists had undermined civil virtues by uncovering the mechanisms of self-esteem lurking beneath the flattering mask of good manners; philosophy, after Descartes, placed individual experience at the origin of a new anthropology; the Encyclopedists of the following century devoted themselves to the rehabilitation of politesse as “a practice of natural law, all the more laudable that it is free and well founded,” failing which it could be no more than a proud “desire to distinguish oneself.”52 The last third of the century durably entered into the era of suspicion.53 A  more solid foundation for the talents of the worldly man was deemed necessary. “Politesse does not always inspire goodness, equity, amiability, gratitude,” complains La Bruyère; “it gives the appearance of these, however, and makes the man seem on the outside as he should be within.”54 Since they are “they are easily confused,” a “difference between the honnête homme and the galant homme” must, therefore, be introduced, argues the interlocutor of the Chevalier de Méré in 1668.55 If the galant homme undoubtedly possesses “certain charms, that an honnête homme does not always have, [. . .] those of the honnête homme are more profound.” So as not to abandon the model of galanterie, which still resonated with so many, it was necessary to assert a second difference: between false galanterie, a transient effect of fashion, and “the least common” type of galanterie which “is strictly a matter of esprit and honnêteté.”56 This second form no longer depended on civil manners, it transcended them. By returning throughout his work to all aspects of worldly sociability (commerce du monde), Méré seems only to repeat lessons by then already well known. But in doing so, he renews the stakes, and the title of his treatise “De la vraie honnêteté,” written around 1684,57 is expressive of the transformation that honnêteté has undergone. The cards have been redealt. Madeleine de Scudéry was aware of this when, in the same years, she started preparing her Conversations morales, partly taken from her novels, partly new, for publication. Her former reflections thus presented in a new light, and selected from among the extensive material offered to her by her fictions, are indicative of this change in orientation. A Dutch counterfeit rather perceptively—for this indeed was the ambition—entitled two of its volumes La Morale du monde. Far from being abandoned, questions of savoir-vivre were reexamined in this light. The first of the ten volumes (1680) opens with ­­“La conversation,” taken from the Grand Cyrus. Positioned thus, as an opening statement, it confirms the central role that is still attributed to conversation. In contrast, “De l’air galant,” which immediately followed the former in the original novel, is relegated to the first volume of the Conversations nouvelles sur divers sujets, published 4 years later. Moreover, it is preceded by twenty other conversations of the sort. Above all, it comes long after a previously unpublished conversation entitled “De la politesse.” Having frequented the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where the Marquise had been “the worldly

482   the oxford handbook of the baroque woman most perfectly versed in politesse,” Théanor is most fit to carry out the task. The Chevalier de Méré’s differentiating gesture is thus continued: “what we call the worldly air and the gallant air, are they not practically the same thing as politesse?” asks one of Théanor’s interlocutors. The latter’s response is unambiguous: “These airs usually arrive in its wake; politesse is something more solid, more essential, and more necessary [. . .] In a word, true politesse is literally a savoir-vivre.” But the apparent equivalence with the modern expression savoir-vivre is misleading. This skill goes well beyond the mastery of social signs: it involves an ethics of one’s relationship to others. To this extent, “one must know morality to know politesse well.” This savoir-vivre (know-how) is in fact a devoir-être (must-be). The collection of terms assembled by Pellisson is not to be dismantled. At the time when he is writing his Discours on the works of Sarasin, they formed an operational constellation. But, as we have seen, a closer look reveals that these terms can be reorganized over the brief span of three decades. The years in which the category of the honnête homme was instituted provided the means for the kind of refinement of manners to which galanterie refers. Indeed, the middle of the century acts as a “turning point.” These are the “Foucquet years.” They are the years of festivities at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the glamor of which was celebrated by La Fontaine. They are above all the festive years of the monarch’s young Court. Indeed, Foucquet, the Superintendent of Louis XIV, pays the high price of this unequal rivalry when he is brutally disgraced in 1661. When the Court moved to Versailles in 1682 and Madame de Maintenon began to infuse it with an air of piety, politesse could be said to have been “moralized.” Is all of that to say that the moment galant was over? Absolutely not: in a new economy of relations between men and women, brilliant conversation durably remained a matter of galanterie, and the latter continued to be identified with modernity.58 The benefits were no less great on the aesthetic level. The conversion of civil manners into artistic value could not be founded on the basis of theories of honnêteté: only a culture of signs, in all its manifestations, could make such a conversion possible. The work of Marivaux—to name but one literary example—is largely indebted to this culture; Watteau’s Fêtes galantes portrays its graceful forms;59 Rameau devotes an opera to it;60 Verlaine pays homage to these bygone times in an evocatively titled collection.61 Galanterie—that fine flower of a long process of civilization—is a savoir-vivre only if one is capable of taking the expression seriously, as Madeleine de Scudéry did in her time. Conversation was the crucible of this savoir-vivre: to converse was not simply a matter of exchanging remarks, it was a demanding way of living together. Of course, it remained an ideal and not a faithful representation of what social relations were. There was certainly no shortage of political intrigues: literary cabals were set up, dangerous liaisons were formed, and conquests were paraded. Rousseau will have no difficulty in unmasking the insincerity of seductive Parisian conversations in La Nouvelle Héloïse, attributing to Saint-Preux the corrosive analyses of his letters to Julie, written during his stay in the capital. But to see in Molière’s Alceste of the Misanthrope a model of the honnête homme, as Rousseau does in Émile ou de l’éducation, is a reading to which the previous century would certainly not have subscribed—in the name of an enlightened sociability. Translated by Raphaëlle J. Burns.

conversation and civility   483

Notes 1. See A. Quondam, La Conversazione. Un modello italiano (Rome: Donzelli, 2007). 2. “Suite du commerce du monde,” Œuvres complètes, ed. Ch.-H.  Boudhors (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930), III, 157–158. This text, posthumously published in 1700, was written in the 1680s. 3. In particular in his Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1647), translated with great success by Amelot de la Houssaye as L’Homme de Cour (1684). 4. Cardano’s Proxeneta, seu de Prudentia civili liber (1627) is translated into French in 1652, bearing the title La science du monde ou la Sagesse civile. 5. His treatise Della dissimulazione onesta was published in 1641. See L.  Van Delft et F. Lotterie, “La dissimulation honnête dans la culture classique,” in L’Honnête homme et le dandy, ed. A. Montandon (Tübingen: Günter Narr, 1993), 35–57. 6. They have done so particularly in the aftermath of E. Goffman’s La Mise en scène de la vie quotidienne, 1973 (vol. 1 La Présentation de soi, vol. 2 Les Relations en public); Les Rites d’interaction (1974). We owe to Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson a major investigation of this question: “Universals in language use: Politeness phenomena,” in Questions and Politeness. Strategies in Social Interaction, ed. E.N.  Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 56–289. A branch of linguistics has progressively specialized itself in the domain of ordinary conversation: see C. Kerbrat-Orecchionni, Les Interactions verbales (Paris: A. Colin, 1990–1994), 3 vol. 7. A reappraisal of this question can be found in the issue of Œuvres et critiques (XLI/1, 2016) entitled “Revaloriser le classicisme,” edited by R. Zaiser. 8. M. Magendie, La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté en France au XVIIème siècle de 1600 à 1660 (Paris: PUF, 1925). 9. Aristocratic women received visitors reclining in a receiving room: the most famous of these is the celebrated “chambre bleue” (blue room) of the Marquise de Rambouillet, which was an important venue for select society in the years 1630–1640. The ruelle is the space between the daybed and the wall where some of their visitors were located. 10. On the role women played in the fashioning of the honnête homme, see M.  Fumaroli, “L’empire des femmes, ou l’esprit de joie,” La Diplomatie de l’esprit, de Montaigne à La Fontaine (Paris: Hermann, 1994b), 321–339. 11. Nouvelles observations sur la langue française, où il est traité des termes anciens et inusités, et du bel usage des mots nouveaux (Paris: J. Cusson, 1688), 173. 12. Madeleine de Scudéry “De la conversation,” in De l’air galant et autres conversations (1653–1684), ed. D. Denis (Paris: H. Champion, 1998), 59–75, here 72. See La Bruyère: “The greatest things need only be said simply [. . .] small things have to be said with nobility.” Jean de La Bruyère, “De la société et de la conversation,” in Les Caractères (Paris: Estienne Michallet, 1688), V, 77. 13. See B. Beugnot, “La précellence du style moyen (1625–1650),” in Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne (1450–1950), ed. M. Fumaroli (Paris: PUF, 1999), 539–599. 14. Preface of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1694). 15. Preface to Claude Favre de Vaugelas’s Remarques sur la langue française, utiles à tous ceux qui veulent bien parler et bien écrire (Paris: Vve J. Camusat et P. Le Petit, 1647). 16. In his Examen rétrospectif de Mélite (1660; the play had been staged in 1629), the author highlighted the novelty of his “naive style, which provided a depiction of the conversation of honnêtes gens.”

484   the oxford handbook of the baroque 17. Contemporaries called it the “style Nervèze,” after one of the most prolific and undeniably successful novelists of the 1610s. See R. Zuber, “Grandeur et misère du style Nervèze,” Les Émerveillements de la raison. Classicismes littéraires du XVIIe siècle français (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), 83–95. 18. Scipion Dupleix’s plea for linguistic freedom is rather eloquently titled La Liberté de la langue française dans sa pureté (1651). 19. Marie de Gournay was the most virulent opponent to courtly poetry, which she accuses of being excessively gentle and refined, at the expense of the type of poetic energy exemplified by Ronsard. For these reasons, she defends the use of metaphors in poetry, at a time when they are increasingly condemned in French literary usage. In 1641, she collected the entirety of her treatises, mainly composed in the 1620s, in Les Avis, ou Les présents de la Demoiselle de Gournay. See H. Lausberg, “Marie de Gournay et la crise du langage poétique,” in Critique et création littéraires en France au XVIIème siècle (Paris: Éd. du C.N.R.S., 1977), 117–128, G. Devincenzo, “De la réflexion linguistique chez Marie de Gournay,” Studi di letteratura francese, XXVII (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 27–45, and D. Denis, “La douceur, une catégorie critique au XVIIe siècle,” in Le Doux aux XVI e et XVII e siècle. Écriture, esthétique, politique, spiritualité (Cahiers du GADGES, Université Jean Moulin-Lyon, March, 2003), 239–260. 20. Remarques sur la langue française, 591. 21. Particularly from Quintilian’s long exposition dedicated to perspicuitas (Institution ­oratoire, VIII, 2). 22. See É. Bourguignat, Le Siècle du persiflage (1734–1789) (Paris: PUF, 1998). 23. See Chr. Strosetzki, Rhétorique de la conversation. Sa dimension littéraire et linguistique dans la société française du XVIIème siècle (Paris-Seattle-Tübingen: PFSCL, 1984) From the now overabundant bibliography on conversation, the following titles are worth mentioning: M. Fumaroli, “La conversation,” in Trois Institutions littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1994a), 111–210, and B. Craveri, L’Âge de la conversation (Paris: Gallimard, 2005) [La Civiltà della conversazione, (Milan: Adelphi, 2001)]. 24. “There is nothing so important as to know how to persuade. That is, after all, what is at the heart of worldly matters. Also, there is nothing more useful than rhetoric; and confine it to the bar or to the pulpit, it is to give it limits too narrow.” B. Lamy, La Rhétorique ou l’Art de parler, ed. C. Noille-Clauzade (Paris: H. Champion, 1998), 103; the text is reworked several times between 1675 and 1715. 25. Scudéry, “De la conversation,” 72–73. 26. Ibid. 27. This becomes clear, on a European scale, in the two volumes of the Bibliographie des traités de savoir-vivre en Europe du Moyen Age à nos jours, edited by A. Montandon (ClermontFerrand: Presses Universitaires de Clermont, 1995). On the French context of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see J. Hellegouarc’h’s anthology, L’Art de la conversation (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1997). 28. Vaugelas, Remarques, 476–478. The italics are in the original. 29. See A. Faudemay, La Distinction à l’âge classique. Emules et enjeux (Paris: Champion, 1992) and R. Scholar, Le Je ne sais quoi (Paris: PUF, 2010). 30. “It would be most appropriate to state clearly the nature of this good taste; but one senses it better than one can express it” (Méré, Œuvres complètes, II, 128). “Everyone talks about taste, and I have as yet found no one who can properly define it” Madame Dacier also laments, in the preface to her translation of the Nuées d’Aristophane (1684), before describing it as an “interior harmony” by way of an extended musical metaphor. This analogy remains

conversation and civility   485 unsatisfactory to the Jesuit Dominique Bouhours, who in turn proposes his own definition of taste in La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687). 31. The fifth conversation of the Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671) by Bouhours revolves entirely around the notion of je ne sais quoi, but extends well beyond the realm of sociolinguistics to embrace all the domains infused with this elusive notion. As early as 1635, the academician Gombault had dedicated an entire speech to this notion—a speech presented to his colleagues, but of which no trace remains. In Bouhours, sensitive intuition is given pride of place, in a way that does justice to the element of irrational expressed in the phrase je ne sais quoi. 32. See F. Rastier, Sémantique interprétative (Paris: PUF, 1987). 33. The notion of praxème, which stands in opposition to the “componential” approach of the structuralist tradition, was proposed by R. Lafont in Le Travail et la langue (1978). Claude Hagège proposes a clear definition of the stakes of this expanded semantics: “In every language, semic organization reflects the praxis of the society that culturalizes referents in a specific manner for each case and in such a way that it becomes possible to consider words as praxemes or linguistic expressions of this praxis.” L’Homme de paroles. Contribution linguistique aux sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 288. 34. It appears a few pages after the passage dedicated to conversation: Scudéry, “De l’air galant,” 43–57. “I can see clearly, Antoine Godeau writes to her in 1654, that you are going to become the oracle of gallantry for the entire universe; and that just as one speaks of Platonism, Peripateticism, not to speak of Jansenism and Molinism, that are most serious matters, we will speak of Saphonism to express the most delicate sort of gallantry.” 35. See L’Esthétique galante. Paul Pellisson, Discours sur les Œuvres de Monsieur Sarasin et autres textes, ed. A. Viala, E. Mortgat, and Cl. Nedelec, with the collaboration of M. Jean (Toulouse: Société de littératures classiques, 1989). 36. Ibid., 55. 37. Ibid., 57. 38. Extract published in Scudéry, “De l’air galant” et autres conversations, 195–244, here 197 and 243. 39. See D. Denis, Le Parnasse galant. Institution d’une catégorie littéraire au XVIIe siècle (Paris: H. Champion, 2001). 40. Gabriel Guéret, Le Parnasse Réformé (1668). 41. Cléonice ou le roman galant (1669) by Madame de Villedieu. 42. See A. Génetiot, Poétique du loisir mondain, de Voiture à La Fontaine (Paris: H. Champion, 1997). 43. P. Clarac, ed., Œuvres diverses (Paris: Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, 1958), 123. 44. Abbé de Charnes, Conversations sur la critique de la Princesse de Clèves (Paris: Cl. Barbin, 1679), 130. 45. See L. F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 46. Such as in the Divers portraits composed in 1659 in the circle of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, in exile at Saint-Fargeau at the time. 47. Dialogue sur le coloris (1671). 48. R. Zuber, ed., Œuvres diverses (Paris: H. Champion, 1995), 73–96. 49. P. Pellisson, L’Esthétique galante, 55–56. 50. C. Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (Paris: Vve et Fils, J.-B. Coignard, 1692), III, 286. 51. De civilitate morum puerilium (1530). 52. Article civilité, written by L. Jaucourt.

486   the oxford handbook of the baroque 53. See E. Bury, “De la vertu des payens,” in Littérature et politesse. L’invention de l’honnête homme, 1580–1750 (Paris: PUF, 1996), 129–168. 54. La Bruyère, Les Caractères, “De la société et de la conversation,” V. 32. 55. Première conversation, I, 18–20. 56. Des agréments, II, 43. 57. This text was published only posthumously, in 1700. Méré was born in 1607: he was an exact contemporary of Mlle de Scudéry. 58. Hume recognizes this in 1742 in his essay On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences: “If the superiority in politeness should be allowed to modern times, the modern notions of gallantry, the natural produce of courts and monarchy, will probably be assigned as the causes of this refinement” (in Standard of Taste and Other Essays [New York: BobbsMerrill, 1965], 89. Cited by L. F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient, 120). 59. This title refers to a series of paintings created around 1715, which can be said to culminate in the creation of Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, presented at the Académie de peinture in 1717. Watteau thus inaugurated a pictorial genre that was especially prized by collectors throughout Europe. Frederick II, emperor of Prussia, requested that his castles of Charlottensburg and Sans-Soucis be decorated with works by Watteau and other painters that had gained renown after him for representing this genre of scenes. 60. The opera-ballet entitled Indes galantes was created in August 1735. 61. The collection of Fêtes galantes is published in 1869. For a more comprehensive study of these cultural manifestations, see A. Viala, La France galante (Paris: PUF, 2008).

Further Reading Bury, Emmanuel. Littérature et politesse. L’invention de l’honnête homme, 1580–1750. Paris: PUF, 1996. Craveri, Benedetta. The Age of Conversation. Translated by Teresa Waugh. New York: NYRB, 2005. Fumaroli, Marc. “L’empire des femmes, ou l’esprit de joie.” In La Diplomatie de l’esprit, de Montaigne à La Fontaine, p. 321–339. Paris: Hermann, 1994. Fumaroli, Marc. When the World Spoke French. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: NYRB, 2001. Génetiot, Alain. Poétique du loisir mondain, de Voiture à La Fontaine. Paris: H. Champion, 1997. Goldsmith, Elizabeth C. Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Hellegouarc’h, Jacqueline, ed. L’Art de la conversation. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1997. Magendie, Maurice. La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté en France au XVIIème siècle de 1600 à 1660. Paris: PUF, 1925. Quondam, Amedeo. La Conversazione. Un modello italiano. Rome: Donzelli, 2007. Richards, Jennifer. Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Scholar, Richard. The je-ne-sais-quoi in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Viala, Alain. La France galante. Paris: PUF, 2008.

chapter 21

The Phil osoph er’s Ba roqu e: Ben ja mi n, L aca n, Del euze William Egginton

The aesthetic and historical concept of the Baroque intersects with philosophy in two partially distinct ways. On the one hand, there is the corpus of properly philosophical writing that was produced in the Baroque period, which is the subject of another contribution in this volume (see Moriarty). On the other hand, are the twentieth-century intellectuals who, inspired by historical baroque thought or cultural production, developed a body of thought around the concept “baroque” that has in turn pollinated a new field of inquiry that continues to thrive today. This second group is the subject of the present essay, and will be designated “the philosopher’s Baroque,” in contrast to the ­former “baroque philosophy.” These groupings are only partially distinct because, as we will see, the philosophical Baroque draws in some ways from baroque philosophy, although it is more often and obviously motivated by reflections on aesthetics and form. There is a large and growing number of thinkers who could justifiably be categorized as belonging to the philosophical Baroque. In addition to the three who will be the main subject of this essay—Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze—we must also count a few European and North American cultural critiques who have developed the conceptual framework of the Baroque in highly influential ways. In a somewhat parallel development, a line of thought emerged in Latin America devoted to countering the traditionally unidirectional and positive reading of the colonial influence of Europeans on the Americas. This movement would eventually be coined “neobaroque” due to the prevalence of baroque points of reference in the historical colonial period under consideration by these thinkers and the choice of styles and cultural products they consumed, parodied, or otherwise turned against the presumed original value, meaning, or intent. While its first theorist and practitioner, the Brazilian poet and intellectual Oswald de Andrade, didn’t explicitly focus on the concept of the Baroque, those who followed in his footsteps did, specifically three Cuban writers: Alejo Carpentier,

488   the oxford handbook of the baroque Severo Sarduy, and José Lezama Lima. While these other thinkers, and perhaps most evidently the three Cubans, constitute an equally compelling subject for consideration, their specific focus on the counter-colonial aspects of baroque aesthetic production in the Latin American justify their placement in their own section in this volume. Each of the three thinkers I focus on in this essay was concerned predominantly with a distinct aspect or figure of baroque culture or thought in one of his writings. In Walter Benjamin’s case, he drew out significant aspects of the Baroque in his neverto-be-accepted Habilitationsschrift on German tragic drama. In Jacques Lacan’s case— although there are other mentions of baroque authors in his long history of encyclopedic name-dropping, including his turning the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora into an adjective to describe his own bizarre way of speaking—he devoted several weeks of his 1972–1973 seminar on feminine sexuality to the Baroque, starting with a long riff on Bernini’s sculpture depicting the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. Finally, Gilles Deleuze’s contribution came in the form of a book-length study of the German baroque philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. In what follows, I will devote a few pages to summarizing what each of these thinkers extracted from his engagement with that specific aspect of baroque culture or thought that fascinated him at the time, before concluding with some thoughts about how these three, in many ways wildly different thinkers, overlap in their consideration of the Baroque.

Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin’s hopes in the period between 1923 and 1925, when he completed the manuscript that would be called Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of the German Play of Mourning) were firmly set on an academic career. In the German academy, the production and defense of a second major study after the doctoral dissertation, the Habilitationsschrift, was the indispensable requirement for fulfilling this ambition. Benjamin’s study, the only book he completed and published in his lifetime, was unambiguously dismissed by the academic hierarchy. The Ordinarius or chair of German studies at Frankfurt declared the work unfitting for Germanistik and suggested in no uncertain terms that he withdraw his application.1 The Ursprung is an intensely complicated book, and one impossible to adequately summarize in only a few pages. That said, a distinct current of thought emerges from Benjamin’s engagement with the notion of the Baroque as he finds it expressed in the examples of Trauerspiel, literally plays of mourning, that form the corpus of his study. This current can both be identified as a recurrent concern in later Benjaminian works, and as a theme in common among those thinkers we are gathering under the umbrella of the philosopher’s Baroque. The current in question is that of time. An uneasy, eccentric relation to historical time and the subject of historical knowledge lies at the heart of much of Benjamin’s critical work, and his conception of the Baroque is no exception. This relation is manifest in the very choice of words used in his title to characterize his

the philosopher’s baroque   489 methodology; in his description of the rhetorical figure of allegory that he identifies as the era’s primary mode of signification; and in the melancholy that he designates as the age’s dominant philosophical and aesthetic mood. Benjamin had a choice for the term he would use to discuss the beginnings of the dramatic form he had selected as the object of his study. German distinguishes between Ursprung—formed of the prefix ur- meaning earliest instance, and the root Sprung meaning leap—and Entstehung, literally a standing-up out from something. In English, the standard translations of the terms are respectively “origin” and “genesis.” His choice of Ursprung thus establishes already on the title page an understanding of historical time that will turn out to be significant, as Benjamin makes clear in the introduction: Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to de- scribe that which emerges from a process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the ­process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and re-establishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete.2

If time is a current, origin is an eddy. This means it is localized and partial. It does not purport to tell the whole story, as it were. The historical gaze that identifies it strives to restore it to its place so as to re-establish a missing order, but the moment, the eddy, can only remain “imperfect and incomplete.” Where “genesis” implies the priority of the totality the historical gaze seeks to reconstruct, a beginning that already contains its telos, “origin” consumes the very presumption of that process in its momentary swirl. It resists the ordering that history imposes on time. For readers of Benjamin’s better-known fragments, this description will be familiar. In it are prior echoes of his poetic reading of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus: His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.3

Likewise, it recalls his definition of history in the fourteenth of the same set of theses, “the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before,” a term which in German, Tigersprung, inevitably resonates with his choice of the term Ursprung.

490   the oxford handbook of the baroque The opposition between two approaches to historical time returns in the book’s central thematic focus, when Benjamin adopts the distinction between symbolic and allegorical modes of representation articulated by Friedrich Creuzer in the early nineteenth century, quoting with considerable approval the “acute observation” of the writer and theologian Joseph von Görres that, “We can be perfectly satisfied with the explanation that the one [the symbol] as a sign for ideas, which is self-contained, concentrated, and which steadfastly remains itself, while recognizing the other [allegory] as a successively progressing, dramatically mobile, dynamic representation of ideas which has acquired the very fluidity of time. They stand in relation to each other as does the silent, great and mighty natural world of mountains and plants to the living progression of human history.”4 Benjamin extends this observation by emphasizing, however, that the temporalization of nature in allegory, unlike that of symbolism, either fails or refuses to idealize or redeem its “transfigured face.” Instead the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head. And although such a thing lacks all “symbolic” freedom of expression, all ­classical proportion, all humanity—nevertheless, that is the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the ­biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of ­seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline.5

At stake is a conflict between two historical attitudes: one naturalizing and quietist, the other agonizing and grotesque in its refusal to smooth over the rough facticity of human existence. These attitudes become analogues for the art historical descriptions passed down from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century denigrations and then recuperations of the baroque as opposed to the classical style by scholars such as Winckleman and Wölfflin. Benjamin further pushes the latter’s baroque apologetics, raising the Baroque over the Classical for the former’s greater truth value, since, “By its very essence classicism was not permitted to behold the lack of freedom, the imperfection, the ­collapse of the physical, beautiful, nature. But beneath its extravagant pomp, this is ­precisely what baroque allegory proclaims, with unprecedented emphasis.”6 This focus on the collapse of the beautiful, the decay of the physical, Benjamin in turn finds objectified in the stage settings of the Trauerspiel in the figure of the ruin: “The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay.”7 Bearing witness to this decay and being compelled to realize and reflect upon its irresistibility is what leads to the predominant mood he identifies in the Baroque, the melancholy of the baroque observer. Benjamin sees this figure personified in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving

the philosopher’s baroque   491 from 1514 entitled Melancolia I, personifying the mood as a winged goddess, her cheek resting dejectedly on her left hand as she writes with her right, surrounded by instruments of geometry and observation. In Benjamin’s words, “The images and figures presented in the German Trauerspiel are dedicated to Dürer’s genius of winged ­melancholy.”8 Here, Benjamin draws heavily on Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl’s ­analysis of the engraving as “both the problem and a symbol of geometrically defined optics—more particularly, of perspective.”9 For Benjamin, the spectacle of the theater functions for the baroque spectator much as does the newfound science of that period. Out of the fragments of a perspectival world, the observer strives mightily to reconstitute the cosmos as it once was, whole and meaningful, but is destined to Sisyphean failure. Like the spectator in the theater, with its perspectival illusion depending on a strict positioning in the center of the audience, the prince is in a similarly precarious position. As Michael Osman succinctly observes, like this allegorical figure herself, “the princely spectator of the Trauerspiel, sitting in the center of the viewing audience, is likewise silent and motionless. His melancholic gaze is absorbed in a spectacle embellished by theatrical designs built only to distract him from his own misery.”10

Jacques Lacan The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan spoke at times of his own baroque propensities. In his seminar of 1962–1963, he joked about his obscure way of speaking by making a neologism out of the name of the Spanish baroque poet par excellence, Luis de Góngora, and stating that his style, as his audience well knows, is gongorique. Three years earlier, in a seminar devoted to the topic of Ethics, Lacan had this to say about the Baroque: Isn’t it true that the living being who has no possibility of escape suggests in its very form the presence of what one might call petrified pain? Doesn’t what we do in the realm of stone suggest this? To the extent that we don’t let it roll, but erect it, and make of it something fixed, isn’t there in architecture itself a kind of actualization of pain? What happened in the period of the Baroque, under the influence of a historical movement that we will come back to later, will support this idea. Something was attempted then to make architecture itself aim at pleasure, to give it a form of liberation, which, in effect, made it blaze up so as to constitute a paradox in the history of masonry and of building. And that goal of pleasure gave us forms which, in a metaphorical language that in itself takes us a long way, we call “tortured.”11

The something that “was attempted then to make architecture itself aim at pleasure” is, for Lacan, the aesthetic and libidinal signature of the Baroque. Baroque architecture is tortured because the culture that creates it has decided to “give it a form of liberation,”

492   the oxford handbook of the baroque but this liberation produces a paradox: the masonry, the stone, writhes, and yet is fixed. And caught, stretched between the points of this absolute opposition, the aim to liberate and embody pleasure becomes an actualization of pain. As they are wont to do in Lacan’s thought, ideas he articulates at one point find their way back in his speech in slightly altered, more developed forms, sometimes years later. In the seminar he conducted during 1972–1973, he embraces the Baroque in a more ­full-fledged way, devoting a week to exposing his ideas. In the published form of that seminar, the French cover of which depicts Bernini’s famed statue The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, Lacan refers to Bernini and his statue almost in passing at first, asserting that the mystic’s religious ecstasy the artist is seeking to portray is an orgasm: “you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she’s coming.” He then adds, “it is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it.”12 Experience in the gaps of knowledge is the key to understanding Lacan’s fascination with the Baroque. For Lacan, conveying lived experience through language always misses its mark; something always exceeds our ability to say it, but that something ­continues to mean something, in a form of significance he calls joui-sense, or meaningin-enjoyment. The “metaphorical language that takes us a long way” he referred to in his seminar on ethics was the description of baroque architecture and sculpture as “tortured”; the metaphor the Baroque best embodies is the “petrified pain” of the “living being who has no possibility of escape.” Embodied life attempts to speak itself in signifiers, the function of which is to remain the same, to connect disparate moments in space and time, to fix the living being. The language of the mystics, or of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “because it’s of the same order,”13 as he puts it, is baroque precisely insofar as it attempts to inhabit that embodied substance extruded by the fixations of meaning. Just as he identifies himself, the analyst, with the mystics, Lacan situates himself, as he puts it, “on the side of the Baroque.”14 The side of the Baroque, like the language of the mystics, is the side fixed, encased, and extruded by classicism, science, order, reason, “in other words, of the individual considered as specified.”15 He captures this divide in these terms: “Thought is on the winning side, and that which is thought of is on the other side.”16 That which is thought of is the body, and the body is thus, in some ways, always on the other side of thought, always exceeding what can be expressed in words. That surplus of embodiment, always exceeding and yet in a relation to thought, thus expresses itself as joui-sense, meaning-in-enjoyment, pleasure-in-pain, in the tortured “paradox in the history of masonry and building” that is the Baroque. For the Baroque is nothing other than, in Lacan’s famous words, la régulation de l’âme par la scopie corporelle, in Bruce Fink’s translation, “the regulating of the soul by a corporal radioscopy.”17 Baroque art depicts the body and sees through it. It sees through it in an attempt to capture, to regulate, that which animates it: the soul, “the supposed identity of this body to everything people think in order to explain it. In short, the soul is what one thinks regarding the body, on the winning side.”18 What Lacan’s obscure, tortured, baroque understanding of the Baroque reveals is its essentially dialectical nature. Baroque knowledge attempts to regulate, to control, to classify and specify, and

the philosopher’s baroque   493 in the visual and visceral material of that very attempt, it displays its own shortcomings and failures.

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Deleuze built his international reputation by collaborating with the iconoclastic psychoanalyst and director of the famed Clinique de la Borde in Northwest France, Félix Guattari—most famously in their manifesto-like evisceration of Freudian psychoanalysis, Anti-Oedipus. On that basis, it is to be supposed that Deleuze’s approach to the Baroque would differ substantially from that of Lacan, who framed all of his teachings as a “return to Freud” and who, despite being exempted from Deleuze and Guattari’s most savage critiques, would still be counted among those they denigrated as “priests of lack.” Indeed, at first blush, Deleuze’s 1988 treatment of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, would seem to fit that narrative. Although it contains no outright criticisms of psychoanalysis, being ostensibly about an eighteenth-century thinker, it constitutes nonetheless a coherent piece in Deleuze’s life-long attack on the foundations and reigning presuppositions of Western philosophy. One of the recurrent bones Deleuze has to pick is with that philosophy’s insistence, clearly present in Plato but institutionalized since Descartes’ Meditations, that the subject is constituted by its lack of knowledge, and that its desire is born of that lack. The Fold thus turns to Leibniz as one in a series of thinkers that Deleuze believes created a counter-narrative to philosophy as a story of lack, and Leibniz’s main foil in this episode is René Descartes. Descartes appears on the very first page of the study, as Deleuze starts media in res describing without at first naming the monad Leibniz posits as an alternate understanding of the soul. This Leibnizian soul is not opposed to the matter around it; they are both made of folds. Far from a gap challenging their communication, “this communication stretches out indefinitely.”19 Descartes, for his part, was unable to navigate the “continuous labyrinth in matter and its parts, the labyrinth of freedom in the soul and its predicates,” because “he sought its secret of continuity in rectilinear tracks, and the secret of liberty in a rectitude of the soul. He knew the inclension of the soul as little as he did the curvature of matter.”20 The Fold takes its name from Deleuze’s physical correlate for the dominant aesthetic marker of the Baroque. In baroque art, painting, and architecture, folds abound; the rectilinear is almost nowhere to be seen. Straight lines are curved, but also clear demarcations between light and dark are blurred, giving us the famed chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and his followers, which Heinrich Wölfflin described as “the painterly style.” It is the relativity of clarity (as much as of movement), the inseparability of clarity from obscurity, the effacement of contour—in short, the opposition to Descartes, who remained a man of the Renaissance, from the double point of view of a physics of light and a logic of the idea.

494   the oxford handbook of the baroque Clarity endlessly plunges into obscurity. Chiaroscuro fills the monad following a series that can move in either of two directions: at one end is a dark background and at the other is light, sealed.21

Baroque aesthetic techniques like folds of marble and chiaroscuro on canvas inspire Deleuze’s thought inasmuch as they communicate fluidly with Leibniz’s refusal of the fundamental Cartesian distinction between two kinds of substance or thing, one looking out upon the other through a kind of hole in the body, a seat in extended substance for a thinking thing not of this world. In place of the negativity of such holes, Deleuze finds solace or hope in the immanence of folds, connecting each soul to all others and to the universe as inflections in a singular yet infinitely folded substance. Deleuze thus turns to Leibniz as a baroque antidote to the classical Cartesianism that inhabits modern assumptions of substance. Descartes follows the Aristotelian tradition in abstracting substance from its attributes as the “thing in which” those attributes inhere. At the same time, however, “for Descartes the essential attribute is confused with substance, to the point that individuals now tend only to be modes of the attribute as it generally is.”22 It is by, in this way, essentializing a given attribute as substance that, for Descartes, the thinking thing and the extended thing are in themselves, or really distinct, and thus separables. But there still, Leibniz shows that Descartes does not push the concept far enough: two things can be thought of as being really distinct without being separable, no matter how little they may have requisites in common. Descartes does not see that even simple beings and even individual substances have requisites, even if it were in the common world that they express, or in the inner characters toward which they converge…. Essentialism makes a classic of Descartes, while Leibniz’s thought appears to be a profound Mannerism. Classicism needs a solid and constant attribute for substance, but Mannerism is fluid, and the spontaneity of manners replaces the essentiality of the attribute.23

Deleuze turns to the Baroque, to baroque aesthetics, but also to its thought, because in the Baroque, he finds a response, a counter-narrative, an undercurrent to the “classical” story about being that philosophy has been telling itself since the Greeks, and that has become firmly ensconced in modern thought. In that story, the human soul is pure, cleanly demarcated from the world it looks out on. This demarcation and separation leaves its stamp in the form of an existential lack, a hole it seeks to fill. For Deleuze, this story is false, and the Baroque is a period of time in Western cultural history and mode of expression that reveals this falsehood. For Lacan, this story is only partially false. For him, the soul is an effect of the body’s mortification by language, “the supposed identity of this body to everything people think in order to explain it.” In other words, for Lacan, philosophy’s false story is more

the philosopher’s baroque   495 than a merely philosophical mistake; it is the true reflection of a common but erroneous way of thinking with real consequences. As for Deleuze, for Lacan, the Baroque reveals something, but it does so by way of participating in the culture-wide endeavor to see and regulate the soul. That the Baroque reveals something hidden, an ugly truth, that it is at least in part the response or return of something unacknowledged or shunned by a pure, rational classicism, is what conjoins all three of thinkers under examination here, and what attracts them all to its aesthetic and intellectual products. For Benjamin, for Lacan, for Deleuze, each in their very specific way, the Baroque speaks the truth—but it is a truth that history, that science, and that philosophy want very much for us to forget.

Notes 1. George Steiner, “Introduction,” in Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborn (London: Verso, 1998), 11. 2. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborn (London: Verso, 1998), 45. 3. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 249. 4. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 165. NB, the note is to Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, from 1819. 5. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 166. 6. Ibid., 176. 7. Ibid., 178. 8. Ibid., 158. 9. Michael Osman, “Benjamin’s Baroque,” Thresholds 28 (2005): 127. 10. Osman, “Benjamin’s Baroque,” 127. 11. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 60. 12. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, 1972–1973: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 76. 13. Lacan, Book XX, 76. 14. Ibid., 106. 15. Ibid., 106. 16. Ibid., 106. 17. Ibid., 116. 18. Ibid., 110. 19. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 3. 20. Deleuze, The Fold, 3. 21. Ibid., 32. 22. Ibid., 54. 23. Ibid., 55–56.

496   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Further Reading Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, 249. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborn. London: Verso, 1998. Beverley, John. “Going Baroque?” Boundary 2 15, no. 3 (1988): 27–39. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. La raison baroque: de Baudelaire à Benjamin. Paris: Galilée, 1984. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. “Von den Allegorien des Barock zu den Allegorien der Indifferenz.” In Eine barocke Party. Augenblicke des Welttheaters in der zeitgenössischen Kunst. Edited by Dinos and Jake Chapman et al., 148–153. Vienna: Kunsthalle, 2001. Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque: a Sign of the Times. Translated by Charles Lambert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Calloway, Stephen. Baroque: The Culture of Excess. London: Phaidon, 1994. Chiampi, Irlemar. Barroco y modernidad. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Harbison, Robert. Reflections on Baroque. London: Reakton, 2000. Kaup, Monika. “Becoming-Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New World Baroque with Alejo Carpentier.” CR: The New Centennial Review 5, no. 2 (2005): 107–149. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, 1972–1973: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998. Lambert, Gregg. The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. New York/London: Continuum, 2002. Lambert, Gregg. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. New York/London: Continuum, 2005. Moraña, Mabel. “Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque: Disruptive Readings of Modernity.” In  Hispanic Issues Volume 31: Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context. Edited by Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo, 241–282. Nashville: Vanderbuilt University Press, 2005. Ndalianis, Angela. (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Osman, Michael. “Benjamin’s Baroque.” Thresholds 28 (2005): 119–129. Sarduy, Severo. “Barroco y neobarroco.” In América Latina en su literature. Edited by César Fernández Moreno, 167–184. Paris: UNESCO, 1972. Steiner, George. “Introduction.” In Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborn. London: Verso, 1998. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

chapter 22

The Spa n ish Ba roqu e  Nov el Enrique García Santo-Tomás

When, in the fall of 1604, Miguel de Cervantes handed his El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha to the publisher-bookseller Francisco de Robles, the most awaited novel of the time was the sequel to Guzmán de Alfarache (1599),1 which would come out in Lisbon at the end of that year.2 The first part had afforded its author Mateo Alemán an extraordinary amount of fame, and the hopes were that the continuation would be equally successful. This was, after all, the most important picaresque novel since the groundbreaking Lazarillo de Tormes—published anonymously fifty years earlier—and neither its unusual length nor its moralizing tone had stopped it from becoming an editorial phenomenon.3 Printed over twenty-six times within seven years, and with sales exceeding fifty thousand copies, Guzmán de Alfarache would inspire sequels, reprints, and imitations throughout the first half of the century—including an apocryphal version of the first part from 1602 signed by Mateo Luján de Sayavedra (pseudonym of Juan Martí). Its European success was also formidable: it was translated into Italian in the Venetian presses of Barezzo Barezzi in 1606 and 1615, and into German by Aegidius Albertinus (Munich, 1615); following an early translation of the first part by Gabriel Chappuys (1600), the poet and literary critic Jean Chapelain translated the two parts of the novel into French, and published them in Paris (1619, 1620); two years later, the English version by James Mabbe was printed in London with the title The Rogue: or, The Life of Guzmán de Alfarache; Gaspar Ens translated the novel into Latin (Cologne, 1623); and in 1655, it came out in Dutch (Rotterdam: A. Pietersz).4 Initially surpassing Don Quixote (1605, 1615)5 in sales and popularity, Alemán’s novel signaled new ways of portraying the poor and the marginalized by commenting on a reality that by 1600 was fully tainted with disillusion and despair.6 Guzmán’s life was tragic, violent, and hopeless, and his story contained all the elements—social satire, unfiltered jokes, intercalated stories, and so on—that connected with the tastes and concerns of the moment.7 Meanwhile, up until 1600, Cervantes had remained a second-tier writer, known for a handful of poetic compositions, a number of plays of relative success,

498   the oxford handbook of the baroque and for the pastoral novel La Galatea (1585). But Robles’s commercial instinct saw in Alemán’s novel a world of countless possibilities—a world, however, that had to be kept alive with a steady stream of new titles.8 Cervantes’s Don Quixote, as a result, was printed somewhat hastily, prompting numerous errors that were the result of the various hands involved in the process of its production, including Cervantes’s own, as Francisco Rico has argued.9 By early December the book was finished and ready to usher in, when it became available on 16 January 1605, a new epoch in Spain’s literary history: if the windmills of La Mancha contributed greatly to the universal appeal of its protagonist, a new set of wheels was then activated, thus crowning two centuries of unparalleled artistic excellence. Erasing the inherited boundaries between fiction and didacticism, the Baroque novel captured the existing disillusionment with the surrounding political and social crisis, a deep preoccupation about the passage of time, and the distrust of all things earthly, while at the same time celebrated new forms of female agency, the appeal of the growing cities, the many outcomes of travel and war, and the breakthroughs brought about by science and technology. As Howard Mancing wrote, “Spain produced more original and influential fiction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than any other European nation.”10 Don Quixote’s success was immediate. In the spring of 1605, a new, corrected edition came out, in which it is believed that Cervantes himself intervened to remedy some major inconsistencies.11 By March, two derivative (pirated) editions were being sold in Lisbon by the printers Jorge Rodríguez and Pedro Crasbeeck. Soon, new versions appeared almost simultaneously based on the second Madrid edition: one in Valencia by Patricio Mey, and another one—the best one, it is believed12—in Brussels in 1607 from the press of Roger Velpuis, followed by a new (third) edition subsidized once again by Francisco de Robles in 1608. Before Don Quixote II came out in 1615, there already were translations into English (Thomas Shelton, 1612) and French (César Oudin, 1614), along with an apocryphal version (1614) that infuriated Cervantes. Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s Quixote was, in fact, the last of a number of disappointments for Cervantes and his contemporaries. During the previous century—Cervantes and Alemán were both born in 1547—Spain had reached its greatest unity and territorial extension.13 Through inheritances, diplomatic agreements, and royal marriages, Flanders, Germany, Hungary, Naples, Portugal, and Sicily, as well as new territories in the Americas, had come under the scepter of Charles V (1516–1556). As a young adventurer, Cervantes enjoyed the splendor of cities like Rome and Naples, and proudly fought as an imperial soldier in the battle of Lepanto (1571).14 His eventual captivity in North Africa for five years (1575–1580) forced him to reinvent himself upon his return to Spain. By the time he set out to write Don Quixote, the Spanish Empire had begun its rapid decline, and the situation became particularly worrisome. Beginning with Philip II (1556–1598), the three “Philips” would lose, one by one, all the European territories, resulting in serious religious and political unrest at home and abroad. To make matters worse, the monarchs began to delegate their power to unpopular court favorites. Philip III (1598–1621), the most important king in Cervantes’s life, was a weak ruler who inherited a great empire in bankruptcy, along with the hostility of England and the Netherlands. His favorite, the

the spanish baroque novel   499 Duke of Lerma, signed a truce with England in 1604, and later with the Netherlands (1609–1621). He expelled the moriscos (converted Moors) from the Peninsula, a decision that impoverished agriculture and commerce in the country, and one which Cervantes addressed in the episode of Ricote.15 Under Lerma’s successor, the Duke of Uceda, Spain entered the Thirty Years’ War, the nobility increased its power, the economy stagnated, and the currency was debased when copper coinage replaced gold and silver. It has been said, perhaps too simplistically, that the first Don Quixote embodies a Renaissance ethos that is absent in its sequel, much more somber in nature. What can be said with certainty is that Cervantes’s life ran parallel to Spain’s fall from its glorious zenith, a collapse that led to a new worldview that we have generally associated with the Baroque.16 The turn of the century can thus be considered a useful starting point for the study of the Baroque novel, and not only because of Alemán and Cervantes’s monumental achievements. By 1600, a number of literary genres had already begun to lose their preeminence.17 It has been frequently said that Don Quixote “killed” chivalric romance, but historical evidence indicates that the genre died out years before with the swansong of the mediocre—and now forgotten—Policisne de Boecia in 1602. Other novelistic forms like the pastoral romance—which had in Lope de Vega’s La Arcadia (1598) the last of its major examples—suffered similar outcomes, as their idealized portrayals of rural life had become irrelevant in a society in deep despair. Even the entertaining adventures of the Byzantine romance held less and less appeal, despite the efforts by giants like Lope de Vega with El peregrino en su patria (The Pilgrim in His Own Country, 1604) and Cervantes, who deemed the posthumous Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda, 1617)18 his crowning achievement. Inspired by Byzantine and Greek novelists such as Heliodorus and The Ethiopian Story of Theagenes and Chariclea, Cervantes narrated, in four books, how the youthful Periandro and Auristela traveled from northern territories of Norway or Finland to Rome to receive Christian marriage. As was typical of this genre, the protagonists endured throughout the journey a variety of trials, mishaps, and delays, such as captivity by Barbarians and the jealousy and machinations of numerous enemies. The novel was published, almost simultaneously, in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Pamplona, as well as in Lisbon and Paris. It was the last of the great Byzantine novels in Spain, and one whose afterlife has been uneven, still sparking heated scholarly debates four hundred years after its publication. The picaresque novel, on the other hand, displayed enormous vitality for several decades as both denunciation and escapism, beginning with one of the earliest examples of the century, the sensational—yet scarcely known—Primera parte del guitón Honofre (First Part of Honofre the Swindler, 1604) by Gregorio González. In addition, it soon became apparent that the genre could welcome all types of formal and thematic innovations.19 This was soon demonstrated with the groundbreaking novel Libro de entretenimiento de la Pícara Justina (Book of Entertainment of the Rogue Justina, 1605).20 Believed by critics like Marcel Bataillon to be a response to Guzmán de Alfarache, the book was, however, frivolous from start to finish, as it built a first-person narrative of life episodes devoid of sexual exploits. Affected by syphilis, Justina was

500   the oxford handbook of the baroque nevertheless a master trickster, lacking any morality despite the insistence on her treasured virginity. Divided into a long introduction and four books, titled “La pícara montañesa” (from the mountains) “La pícara romera” (festive), “La pícara pleitista” (litigant), and “La pícara novia” (bride), the author opened each chapter with a few lines that announced the theme, closing with an aprovechamiento, or moral statement taken from the narration. Justina’s storytelling, however, offered no narrative structure worth mentioning, and its discourse did not fit into any of the categories that other picaresque works had adopted, according to Peter Dunn.21 It rather signaled a return to Carnival and the world upside-down, and has been interpreted as a parody of Classical rhetoric, as a compendium of oral folklore and fabiella, as a mockery of hagiographical literature, even as a study of emblems. The novel enjoyed great success beyond the Pyrenees: it was translated into German (1620), Italian (1624–1625), French (1635), and English (in a volume called The Spanish Libertines, 1707). Although rarely read today outside scholarly circles, La pícara Justina constitutes one of the best and most accomplished paradigms of Baroque literature in Spain. It is also a work of great historical relevance because it created, as we will soon see, a long line of urban pícaras known for their ingenuity and resourcefulness.22 If 1605 was a pivotal year in the careers of Alemán, Cervantes, and the creator of Justina, it also signaled the arrival of El Buscón (The Swindler),23 one of the greatest narrative experiments not only of the genre, but of the century as well. It is believed that Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), who denied its authorship for fear of the Inquisition, had a draft, around 1604, that circulated in multiple manuscripts before being published in 1626. As the most gifted prose writer of his generation, Quevedo not only displayed in this piece a dazzling verbal ingenuity, but also sharp criticism through the lens of the protagonist Pablos and his failed attempts at climbing the social ladder. Enormously funny and unapologetically shocking—the portrait of Pablos’s master, Dómine Cabra, is perhaps the most cited and admired in Spanish literature24—the novel can also be read in multiple ways: as a bitter satire of Spanish life, as a game of masks, as a study of moral and spiritual decay, as a commentary on the absurdity of life without a proper moral compass, even as a sustained attack on conversos (converted Jews). Quevedo was an aristocrat and cristiano viejo (Old Christian), and for him and many others, conversos and upstart commoners were a threat to traditional social hierarchy. Through Pablos’s journeys, he not only offered a glimpse of the underworld—the scenes of his time in prison are truly remarkable—but also an examination of the most abject human conduct. In the twenty-plus years between the writing and the publication of El Buscón, and particularly during the second decade of the century, the genre of the picaresque evolved into a more versatile expression of life-writing, with a number of innovations—use of the third-person narrative, incorporation of female protagonists, presentation of new and exotic scenarios—that kept it relevant and entertaining.25 In his early novel La hija de Celestina (Celestina’s Daughter, 1612),26 the satirist Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo (1581–1635) narrated the life and deeds of a charming prostitute called Elena, whose story was inserted in a larger, Italianate text told in the third person. The piece

the spanish baroque novel   501 was well received, which allowed for a second version with new materials in 1614, a trend that its author maintained throughout his career as a novelist. Author of over seventy-five works of multiple shapes and registers, Salas was the ultimate experimentalist, as well as master at borrowing and repackaging materials, so much so that a few of his major novels were wrongly attributed to fellow writers—such was the case of his popular novel Don Diego de noche (Don Diego at Night, 1623),27 which some French publishers, perhaps in order to sell more copies, attributed to Quevedo. As I have written elsewhere, his satires, which inherited many of the misogynist tones of his literary antecedents, uncovered Madrid’s follies through portraits of frivolous courtesans, prostitutes, and swindlers.28 La hija de Celestina not only is his best-known novel, but also a narrative experiment that paved the way for a number of fascinating iterations: Vicente Espinel’s Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón (Relations of the Life of the Squire Marcos de Obregón, 1618), which narrated the misadventures of an elderly squire looking back over his life, was quickly translated into French by Vital d’Audiguier, and inspired Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane (1715, 1724, 1735)—later translations appeared by Algernon Langton in London (1821) and Ludwig von Tieck in Breslau, (1827). Jerónimo Alcalá Yáñez y Ribera’s El donado hablador (The Talkative Lay Brother, 1624; with a second part in 1626) presented an old man in his religious retreat who revisited some of the most important chapters of his life, such as his captivity in Algiers, his adventures as a student, and his sojourn in the Indies. This novel shared many traits with another major work of the time, Vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen humor, compuesta por él mismo (Life and Deeds of Estebanillo González, Man of Good Humor, Written by Himself, 1646), which introduced the reader to a dwarf and buffoon who traveled around Europe as a court jester during the Thirty Years’ War. Estebanillo recounted his life (1608–1646) as servant of many masters and as soldier in several campaigns, and displayed many familiar themes of the picaresque genre, like swindles, fights, deceits, drunkenness, robberies, and prostitution. By the time it was published, the biographical format had morphed into different versions of itself, with soldiers’ lives as one of the most revealing portraits of imperial rivalries.29 Such was the case, for instance, of the nail-biting adventures of the mercenary Diego Duque de Estrada in his Comentarios de un desengañado de sí mismo (Commentaries of a Disillusioned with Himself, finished in 1645), which, among other things, reflected on the enormous appeal of all things Spanish—music, dance, clothing, weaponry, and so on—in early modern Europe. None of this illustrious genealogy, however, can be properly understood without pausing for a moment on the real game-changer of the time, the collection of twelve Italianate short stories published in 1613 by Miguel de Cervantes with the title Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels).30 As Mary Gaylord reminds us, Cervantes used his newly-acquired stature “to carry a career-long journey of generic exploration into another promising literary territory, the novella,”31 which had traveled from Italy to Spain a few decades earlier.32 Influenced by Giovanni Boccaccio and Matteo Bandello, and with a notion of exemplarity that was both formal and ethical, Cervantes devised plots hardly imagined before in narrative format, in portrayals that were sometimes far

502   the oxford handbook of the baroque from decorous, and with characters placed in liminal and extreme situations, exploring some of the darkest corners of society. Within a decade, the collection had gone through a dozen editions in Spanish, with nearly a dozen more by the end of the century, and with translations into English, French, and German. Without a clear distinction between romanzo and novella—or between roman and recit, as was the French case— Cervantes saw himself, according to his words in the pivotal Prologue to the collection, as the first to write novellas in Spanish. Thus, the sense of experimentation permeated each and every one of them, from the more “realistic”—Rinconete y Cortadillo, El casamiento engañoso (The Deceitful Marriage)—to the more idealistic ones, like La Española inglesa (The English Spanish Lady) and La señora Cornelia (Lady Cornelia). The stories mapped great territory, taking the reader to Bologna, London, and Nicosia, among other places. They featured colorful characters like traveling gypsies, treacherous Turks, a dancing eunuch, old witches, and historical figures such as Queen Elizabeth I, in narrative experiments that bore “traces of the intense theoretical discussions on epic and romance, history and poetry, verisimilitude and the marvelous.”33 Feats of heroism and ingenuity abounded, surprising coincidences drove the plot to unexpected situations, but the stories also revealed very real concerns with contemporary issues related to honor, as, for instance, in La fuerza de la sangre (The Power of Blood); corruption, as depicted in Rinconete y Cortadillo; and hypocrisy, as expressed by Berganza in El coloquio de los perros (The Colloquy of the Dogs). Far from the dogmatism of Mateo Alemán, Cervantes offered in all his novels, long and short, countless ideas and conflicts to reflect on, always leaving the reader with more than one option to interpret reality and, ultimately, with multiple ways to approach fiction and the act of reading itself. The Novelas ejemplares opened the door to a whole new world of fiction. Salas Barbadillo, who—as a close friend of Cervantes’s—signed on July 31, 1613, the “Aprobación” of the Novelas, published his own collection of eight short stories titled Corrección de vicios (Correction of Vices, 1615),34 and from then on, as Juan Ignacio Ferreras has written, “there isn’t a year without a new collection of short stories.”35 Cervantes died in 1616, three days after the completion of his Persiles, and by the time Philip IV took power in 1621, a new generation of giants of the Spanish Golden Age had risen to new heights of excellence. Under the young monarch, the arts flourished in Spain, and an emerging worldview—partly inspired by what was happening abroad in the scientific arena—began to set in with elements like fantasy and the supernatural as trademarks of these new forms of novelization. The Spanish satire featured celestial journeys, landings on the Moon, and visits to the underworld, with new narrative devices—the political lens (occhial politico), the aerial voyage, the watchtower—that were used to reveal the true nature of things. In the tour de force presented in Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El Diablo Cojuelo (The Limping Devil, 1641),36 a student freed a devil from a flask in the office of an astrologer, only to be rewarded with an aerial voyage that allowed him to open the roofs (levantando a los techos) of Madrid and other cities in order to reveal Spaniards in all their misery. The coalescence of talent in different cultural domains had no rival in Europe, and Madrid—which had been the seat of the Crown since 1561—became the destination for

the spanish baroque novel   503 anyone with artistic ambitions. However, its rise as a metropolis was not free from setbacks and controversy: in 1599, Philip III moved the Court to Valladolid, where it remained until 1606, but it soon became evident that Madrid was a much better option because of its abundant water, its many flour mills, its proximity to El Escorial, and also for being a place with much cleaner air than the plague-infested Valladolid. Since the end of the sixteenth century, the arteries of Madrid, its various districts, and commercial nuclei had already been structuring a professional partition in response to the rapid growth of the population. Allusions to popular places in the city were frequent in the novels of these years, with innovative metonyms to portray urban realities: doors of exit and entry to the city, the river Manzanares, the Puente de Segovia, the churches of Carmen Calzado and the fashionable Victoria, and the Puerta de Guadalajara were common scenarios of romantic encounters, but also of duels, robberies, and even murder. The speed of the carriages (coches and carrozas) navigating Madrid’s geography mirrored the quick transformations taking place demographically and architecturally— changes brought about through processes of urbanization and demolition, renovation and reorganization, and through readjustments in social hierarchies. Paintings like Juan Gómez de Mora’s El Alcázar, Louis Meunier’s Puerta del Sol, Félix Castelló’s Vista del Alcázar, and Juan de la Corte’s Fiesta en la Plaza Mayor (Madrid, Museo Municipal), and Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo’s Un estanque del Buen Retiro (Madrid, Museo del Prado), captured with images what the novel did with words: the violence, chaos, and improvisation of a fascinating metropolis that never ceased to amaze its visitors, as proven by the many urban chronicles of the era. Take, for example, Antonio Liñán y Verdugo’s Guía y avisos de forasteros (Guide and Warnings to Foreigners, 1620), devoted to identifying the many perils of the Court. Therefore, the “rise” of the novel in the seventeenth century cannot be uncoupled from the rise—both physical and symbolic—of the city.37 In a matter of years, Madrid gathered poets like Luis de Góngora (1561–1627); playwrights like Lope de Vega (1562–1635) and Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681); painters like Diego Velázquez (1599–1666), Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), and Bartolomé Murillo (1617–1682); polymaths like Juan de Espina (1563–1545); and stage designers like Cosimo Lotti (1571–1643) and Luigi Baccio del Bianco (1604–1657), just to name a few. Its appeal was so powerful that even a figure like Galileo Galilei attempted several times to move there in order to work more freely, and—given the vitality of Spanish comedia—to experiment with new notions of stage design and acoustics.38 What made Madrid so vibrant was also the fact that most writers and artists lived a stone’s throw away from one another—many of them in what is today called Barrio de las Musas. Tirso de Molina had lived since 1621 in the Mercedarian monastery near the Rastro and the Palace of the Duke of Alba, one of the wealthiest patrons of the time. He was not far from some of the leading writers of his generation: Lope de Vega, Vélez de Guevara, Ruiz de Alarcón, Suárez de Figueroa, and Salas Barbadillo were some of the first to establish themselves there, followed later by Mira de Amescua (1616), Góngora and Villamediana (1617), Quevedo (1618), Guillén de Castro (1619), and Esquilache (1621). Tirso enjoyed many distinguished neighbors, including Lope de Vega, who immortalized the garden of his house in the Calle Francos

504   the oxford handbook of the baroque (today Calle Cervantes); Calderón, who grew up on the Calle de las Fuentes, close to the Plaza de Guadalajara, and later moved to the Calle de Platerías; an elderly Cervantes who lived on Cantarranas (today Calle Lope de Vega); Salas Barbadillo on Calle Toledo; Juan Ruiz de Alarcón on Calle de las Urosas, Fray Hortensio Paravicino in the Trinitarian Monastery; and Luis de Góngora, who had lived on Calle del Niño until 1619, before Quevedo arrived (and where today this street preserves his name). Most of these streets were located near the core of the artistic and bohemian quarters surrounding the two major playhouses (Príncipe and Cruz), where these writers spent the afternoon drinking, chatting, and watching comedias. But not everything was friendship and collaboration: such a density of talent, power, and fame also sparked intense rivalries, as Lope de Vega captured in his correspondence with his friend and protector the Duke of Sessa. The result of these clashes has left us literary testimonies of all kinds, even by well-established novelists like Quevedo, who spent some time in jail; Lope de Vega, who suffered banishment in his early years; Salas Barbadillo, who was prosecuted for some of his works and unruly behavior; and Tirso de Molina, who was expelled from Madrid in 1625 because of political hostilities. As Jaime Moll wrote, 1625 was also the year in which the Junta de Reformación, organized by the Count-Duke of Olivares to ingratiate himself with the Church and the Jesuits and to improve morals, published an edict banning novels for ten years.39 The prohibition proved to have a noticeable impact on most of these writers, who started using other terms—fábulas, historias, maravillas—to have their work published and get their message across.40 Numerous novels from the 1620s and 1630s subscribed to this new perception of the urban. Madrid was frequently portrayed as a symbol of the cosmos and the labyrinth, as a site of clandestine experiences through the presentation of flirtatious lads and damsels— the famous tapadas, or veiled ladies.41 The format that was best able to capture the realities of urban life in the following decades was, without a doubt, the short story, which frequently took the form of the so-called novela cortesana, defined by Isabel Colón Calderón as a short piece of amorous nature in which the city played an important role.42 Practiced by every major writer of the century, these novels were semi-realistic pieces usually set in a courtly scenario, with the city—Madrid, Lisbon, Naples, Seville, and Zaragoza were favorites—as one of its main characters. The literary formula included copious amounts of desire, violence, and deceit, and soon attracted a female readership, which forever changed both its contents and its financial outlook. These stories were not only enormously popular, but provocative as well, oftentimes bordering on the scandalous: Juan Pérez de Montalbán, perhaps the most daring novelist of his time, published Sucesos y prodigios de amor en ocho novelas ejemplares (Prodigious Events of Love in Eight Exemplary Novellas, 1624), which had over twelve editions in the following decades, and was translated into Italian, English, French, and Dutch. Lope de Vega, never shy when it came to experimenting with the autobiographical, excelled with his Novelas a Marcia Leonarda (Novels to Marcia Leonarda, 1624),43 a collection of miscellaneous novels of amorous thematic and intricate technique, in which verse and prose were mixed. Charged with erudition, and subject to frequent digressions, they were set in exotic atmospheres, and peopled with zesty characters. In some cases, as happened

the spanish baroque novel   505 with writers like María de Zayas (1590–1661), these collections had a Boccaccian-type frame, with a tertulia or sarao (party) taking place among idle aristocrats in order to entertain a woman during illness or to accompany her after giving birth. Zayas, a true maverick for her time, published two collections of ten novels: Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (Amorous and Exemplary Novellas, 1637) and Parte segunda del Sarao, y entretenimiento honesto (Second Part of the Evening Party and Honest Entertainment, 1647), which enjoyed several editions. Her trademark was the amount of graphic ­violence, the placing of upper-class women in extreme situations and hostile locations, and the presence of the supernatural, which she peppered with constant warnings against the naïveté of women and “the cruelty of men.”44 Little is known about Zayas, but the mystery surrounding her life hasn’t prevented her from being one of the most studied Baroque novelists of the last fifty years—and, one could also argue, one of the most relevant today. The relation between the novel and certain dramatic forms like the comedy and the interlude (entremés) was a staple of the Baroque, as some of these writers—Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Vélez de Guevara, just to name a few—practiced both. It wasn’t uncommon, furthermore, that a novel featured a short dramatic piece in it, either to change the pace or tone of the narration, or simply to display the author’s versatility. In 1625, the Palace of Buen Retiro was built in Madrid, where lavish court events were held, and where some of these ingenios premiered their plays, while some others—Salas Barbadillo among them—explored the possibilities of hybridity in comedias noveladas. But the political and economic horizons remained bleak, to say the least. Philip IV granted power to the Count-Duke of Olivares, who tried to maintain Spanish supremacy over France in a war begun in 1635, and control over the Netherlands. Fiscal pressure and general political disquiet caused revolts in Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, and Andalusia. In addition, Portugal, which had been annexed to Spain during the reign of Philip II in 1580, obtained its independence as a separate kingdom under the Duke of Braganza (1640). The Count-Duke was replaced in 1643 by his nephew Luis Méndez de Haro y Guzmán, and, at his resignation, an influential nun named María de Jesús de Ágreda became the king’s advisor.45 In 1648, Spain signed the Treaty of Westphalia, by which some territories were lost, and the Dutch Republic obtained its independence. In 1659, the war with France ended with the Peace of the Pyrenees. Poverty, epidemics, and high taxes caused an alarming drop in population and encouraged rapid migration from the country to the city. Many areas were left depopulated, which harmed the national economy. Whether philosophical, moralizing, satirical, or costumbrista, most of these novels shared a profound sense of pessimism, locally expressed as desengaño (understood as both religious and philosophical disenchantment). Howard Mancing elaborates on this theme: Many Spaniards of the period struggled with the perpetual difference between ser (what is) and parecer (what seems to be; what is perceived, seen, understood); between engaño (deceit, misperception) and desengaño. These themes are seen much earlier—in Celestina, Lazarillo, and others, especially in Guzmán—as well as

506   the oxford handbook of the baroque throughout the picaresque novel, the novela, and the comedia of the time. But the intensity and profundity of the preoccupation with the idea is almost obsessive in many writers of the century. There is a pervasive pessimism about the nature of the world, but always an underlying optimism that perceiving reality within the context of Christianity can lead to eternal salvation.46

An intellectual pessimism became more and more pronounced as Renaissance ideals failed and Spanish power continued to ebb. At times, despair was manifest in pieces defined by a strong sense of nostalgia, as Cervantes wrote in the “discourse of arms and letters.”47 Writers reacted in several ways to the surrounding decay: some turned their backs on it by celebrating past feats and glories, or by presenting an ideal world in which problems were resolved and order prevailed. Others, meanwhile, took refuge in the world of art and mythology, as was the case of Luis de Góngora and some of his followers— Mount Parnassus, for instance, became both a setting and a narrative subgenre to reflect on the literary field in novels like Salas Barbadillo’s Coronas del Parnaso y Platos de las Musas (Crowns of Parnassus and Dishes of the Muses, 1635). Stoicism, in the form of complaints on the vanity of the world, or in the fleetingness of beauty and fame made for a strong philosophical tradition, which also drew from other sources. For instance, in the Prologue of his Teatro popular (Popular Theater, 1623), Francisco Lugo y Dávila revealed his inclination for Tacitus. Seneca was a referent in some of Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s novels, and a neo-Stoic spirit united the friends who met in the “house of honest pleasure” (Casa del placer honesto, 1624) by Salas Barbadillo. Shaping new forms of homosocial behavior, its characters rejected love and marriage, and pledged to devote themselves to higher pursuits, just like the protagonists of Manuel Lorenzo de Lizarazu’s novel El más cuerdo desengaño (The Sanest Disillusion, 1654). In other works, however, the political message was expressed more openly and programmatically. Alonso de Castillo Solórzano reflected on the virtues of the perfect prince in Engañar con la verdad (Deceive with Truth, 1625) while Pedro de Castro y Anaya did so with the “perfect princess” in Auroras de Diana (Diana’s Dawns, 1637). Other writers were even more specific: in Mal presagio casar lejos (Marriage Abroad: Portent of Doom, 1647), María de Zayas critiqued the corrupt privado, as did La dicha merecida (The Deserved Joy, 1649) by Castillo Solórzano. At times, the novels included historical events disguised as critique: Castillo Solórzano integrated in El amor en la venganza (Love in Revenge, 1625) some episodes related to the 1623 arrival of the Prince of Wales in Madrid, and Francisco Santos chronicled the famous 1672 fire that destroyed part of Madrid’s Plaza Mayor in his novel Madrid llorando e incendio de la Panadería de su gran Plaza (Madrid Crying, and the Fire of the Panadería in the Great Square, 1690). One of the most politically-engaged writers of this era was, without a doubt, Francisco de Quevedo, both in his life and writings. In his period of maturity, he published satirical, political, and moral prose works in which a Stoic spirit predominated, as Henry Ettinghausen argued in a classic study.48 In 1619, he published Política de Dios y Gobierno de Cristo (God’s Politics, Government of Christ), a political treatise which expounded a doctrine of good government, the so-called mirror of princes (espejo de príncipes) for a

the spanish baroque novel   507 righteous king. With Jesus Christ as a model of conduct, Política de Dios was a treatise in conformity with Spanish anti-Machiavellism, proposing a politics free of intrigue and divorced from toxic influences. But Quevedo’s lens also reached the lower ranks of society, elevating the Spanish satire to unprecedented heights. The critique of specific trades like jurists and doctors, the presence of death, the need for accountability, and the search for a Christian fervor on which the politics had to conduct itself, defined his thought in pieces like Sueños (Dreams, 1627).49 And toward 1636, he concluded his last great satirical prose, La hora de todos y la fortuna con seso (The Hour of Everybody and the Fortune with Prudence), which would remain unpublished until 1650. In La hora, Jupiter requested Fortune to give for one hour what each individual truly deserved, denouncing the falsity of appearances and the hidden truth under the veil of hypocrisy. Operating by antithesis, Quevedo showed doctors as executioners, the rich as thieving poor, and a whole gallery of social types, offices, and states implacably satirized. However, it wasn’t all pessimism during these years, and the novel continued to delight its public with humor and ingenuity, following a comic tradition that harkened back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.50 The first half of the century witnessed the success of female characters with great powers of manipulation, such as Castillo Solórzano’s Las harpías en Madrid (The Harpies in Madrid, 1631)51 and Salas Barbadillo’s La sabia Flora, malsabidilla (The Wise Flora, Know-it-All, 1621).52 The profile of the pícara intersected with features belonging to other creations like the courtesan (cortesana), the widow (viuda/viudita), the witch (bruja, hechicera), and even the so-called maya, a girl-prostitute that would be portrayed on more than one occasion by Francisco Santos in his allegorical novels La Tarasca de parto en el Mesón del Infierno (The Tarasque Gives Birth in the Inn of Hell, 1672) and Las Tarascas de Madrid y Tribunal espantoso (The Tarasques of Madrid and the Frightful Tribunal, 1694). As I have written, a number of these pieces presented some of the features that have traditionally been considered essential to the genre: a circularity that was both plot-related and existential; episodic structure; physical, linguistic, and symbolic violence; absence of gender as a discursive category; ingenuity driven by a desire for wealth; mockery of male vanity and falseness; and the portrayal of harsh, dangerous environments.53 However, several of these “lives” deviated from the norm by choosing the third person, and by locating some of their plots in a more refined setting, in what has been considered a literary borrowing from the novela cortesana. Except in Castillo Solórzano’s La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares (The Trickster-Girl, Teresa of Manzanares, 1632),54 “where the mode of autobiography is unmotivated and nonfunctional,”55 most female narratives were told in the third person, sewn together by an overlapping cast of characters, and with the confidence trick as a constant device. If these pieces had something in common, it was the fact that they all shared a frontal rejection of the traditional roles of the female protagonist—seen as the submissive wife and the mistress—and offered no sexual agenda. They also complicated the category of the pícara, as they explored a number of issues such as the effects on female decorum of all the new trends that were emerging in cities like Madrid and Seville, like eating clay (comer barro) and drinking chocolate. It was in these commercial centers where new practices shaped new social mores, and

508   the oxford handbook of the baroque where women, as scholars like Scott Taylor have demonstrated,56 enjoyed a very productive and stimulating public life. The end result was the construction of lives whose perils and limitations were somewhat different from those of their male counterparts; unlike Lázaro and Guzmán’s quests for survival, one rarely found in these pícaras hunger and poverty. Humor, however, was not always tied to content, as it also found, in a very Baroque way, to blossom through form as well. Early in the century, Cervantes had already introduced a character from Avellaneda’s version into his novel to certify whose was the one and only Quixote, and Justina had announced her marriage to Guzmán de Alfarache at the end of her narration. As the century progressed, others followed suit: Andrés Sanz del Castillo (b. 1590), author of Pagar con la misma prenda (Pay Back with the Same Token, 1641), featured himself in Hitchcock-like fashion as a secondary character named Ginés Carrillo Cerón. Other times, the games entered the linguistic realm, as was the case of the lipogrammatic collection Varios efectos de amor en cinco novelas ejemplares, sin una de las cinco vocales (Various Effects of Love in Five Exemplary Novels, without one of the Five Vowels, 1641) by Alonso de Alcalá y Herrera, in which one of the vowels was banished from each of the novels,57 and of Francisco de Navarrete y Ribera’s Novela de los tres hermanos (Novel of the Three Siblings, 1640), written without the letter A. The 1630s and 1640s witnessed the deaths of some of the most important writers of the century, such as Lope de Vega, Vélez de Guevara, Salas Barbadillo, and Quevedo. By the time of Tirso de Molina’s death in 1645, Madrid had acquired a basic structural anatomy that would be preserved for decades; this cartography was seen as symbolically relevant, and the city was sometimes defined as a “mother figure” (based on a mistaken etymology of the word) in novels like Marcos de Obregón by Vicente Espinel, and plays like Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil de las calzas verdes (Don Gil of the Green Breeches, 1635), among others. At the same time, new stars rose in the literary Parnassus. Alonso de Castillo Solórzano (1584–1648) was perhaps the most popular mid-century novelist,58 thanks to pieces like the aforementioned La niña de los embustes Teresa de Manzanares (The Girl of the Swindle Teresa de Manzanares, 1632), Las aventuras del bachiller Trapaza (Adventures of the Trapaza Bachelor, 1637), and La garduña de Sevilla y anzuelo de las bolsas (The Marten of Seville and Hook of the Purses, 1642).59 These were picaresque works in which novels, poems, and some entremeses were mixed. Castillo was a chronicler of the moral decadence that was taking place in the Spain of the 1630s, a state of affairs from which women knew how to take advantage—even his most accomplished pícaro, the wicked Trapaza, ended his days in failure in La garduña de Sevilla. This state of affairs was intensified exponentially in his novel Las harpías de Madrid, which told the story of four beautiful courtesans (Feliciana, Luisa, Constanza, and Dorotea) who performed four different tricks, or estafas, with the help of a coche alcahuete—a sort of brothel on wheels. In this case, the “suckers” were a prosperous merchant from Milan, a wealthy man from Genoa, a priest, and a rich young lad. Their stories have been read as four roguish—but not picaresque—novels, which ended with a cosmetic “aprovechamiento formal,” or teaching, following the model of La pícara Justina. The novel also succeeded

the spanish baroque novel   509 as an excellent guide to contemporary Madrid through some of its best-known ­destinations—Puerta de Toledo, Calle de Toledo, Plaza Mayor, Puerta de Guadalajara, Platería, Tabernillas de San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Iglesia de San Sebastián—as well as through some of its most pleasurable activities: supper (merienda) in the Soto, attendance to the literary academies, and walks at sunset. These decades also revealed the enormous attraction for the scandalous and even the taboo, as the limits of the permissible were pushed time and again: take, for example, La voluntad dividida (The Divided Will, 1624) by José Camerino, which featured erotic episodes of men kissing women’s breasts; the sinister tones of María de Zayas’s La ­inocencia castigada (Innocence Punished, 1647), in which the female protagonist was walled up alive; or Francisco Santos’s Día y noche de Madrid (Day and Night in Madrid, 1663), where a courtesan admitted having placed her dog between her legs in order to be pleasured. Going a little further, the topic of incest was not uncommon in the Baroque novel, as were the cases of Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses’s Los dos Mendozas (The Two Mendozas, 1623) and of Los hermanos amantes (The Siblings-Lovers, 1685) by Luis de Guevara, with its self-explanatory title. Juan Pérez de Montalbán ran afoul of the Inquisition with La mayor confusión (The Greatest Confusion, 1624), one of the most fascinating editorial conundrums of the time: its censors ordered three revisions of this story of double incest in which the protagonist unknowingly marries a woman who proves to be both his daughter and his sister—it comes as no surprise that the novel ended up included in the 1632 Inquisitorial Index, one of the several re-editions of the original Index Librorum (1612) that appeared in this century. The second half of the century, in which the genre of the novel yielded fewer masterworks, offered nonetheless some of the greatest novels of the Baroque, such as Baltasar Gracián’s three-part El Criticón (The Censurer, 1651, 1653, 1657).60 Gracián’s style is dense and sinuous, constructed of brief sentences, abundant plays on words, and the ingenious association of concepts, in which the world is seen as a hostile space full of deceit and illusion triumphing over virtue and truth, where Man is selfish and malicious. Many of his books are manuals of behavior that allow the reader to succeed gracefully by being prudent and wise through the art of dissimulation. El Criticón has been defined as an allegory of maturation and self-discovery featuring Critilo, the mature man of experience and understanding, and Andrenio, the young man of impulse, ignorance, and innocence. The two men travel from the island of Saint Helen in search of Felisinda (happiness), Critilo’s only love—and, as it happens, Andrenio’s mother. Through a journey that covers Spain, France, and Italy, they encounter personified passions and emotions, learning to see through engaño (deceit), and reach desengaño before they arrive at the island of immortality. The novel combined elements of philosophy, theology, allegory, Menippean satire, Byzantine, and picaresque adventures. In addition, Gracián cultivated didactic prose in treatises of moral intention and practical purpose, like El héroe (The Hero, 1637) and El discreto (The Discreet One, 1646), in which he created a full series that exemplified the prudent and sagacious man, and the virtues that must adorn him. Equally important was Oráculo manual y arte de la prudencia (The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 1647), a set of three hundred aphorisms composed to help the reader prevail in

510   the oxford handbook of the baroque the surrounding crisis. Gracián still holds great appeal nowadays, as his novels are read and studied as textbooks on prudence and leadership even outside academic circles. In 1665, Charles II of Spain came to power, inaugurating a new era that saw a drastic reduction in the editions of novels published in Spain. Nicknamed “the Bewitched,” he was weak and sickly, and unable to have children by either of his wives. As a result, he named Philip of Anjou, the future Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV of France, his heir. During his reign (1665–1700), continuous war with France worsened Spain’s decay, and the king’s death without direct heirs prompted the War of the Spanish Succession. Unsurprisingly, most of the existing novels of this period combined social and political satire with a heavy dose of pessimism, as did the Madrileño Juan de Zabaleta in his entertaining portraits of El día de fiesta por la mañana y por la tarde en Madrid (The Festive Day in the Morning and Afternoon in Madrid, 1663), where no archetype or profession was left untouched. The most important novelist of these last thirty years of the century, however, was Francisco Santos (1623–1698). Born in the neighborhood of Lavapiés in Madrid, he lived in some of Spain’s most important cities, such as Seville (1666) and Toledo. Between 1663 and 1697, he published sixteen works. In order to capture the prevailing sense of disillusionment, Santos used the image of the monstrous childbirth during the festivities of Lent to expose the excesses of the city—itself a monster in perpetual reproduction. As a prose stylist, his sentences are short, incisive, and full of highly Baroque liberties and registers, standing at the intersection of the picaresque and costumbrista in his portraits of urban life. As I have written, regarding his novel Día y noche de Madrid,61 his novels captured in great detail the decadence of his time, while at the same time inspiring some of the most important writers of the following century, such as Diego de Torres Villarroel (1693–1770) and José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827). The prestige of Spanish power, along with the extraordinary quality and variety of its literary and artistic achievements, established Spain’s domination in European literature. Because of Philip II’s isolationist policies, very little influence came from abroad except for certain Italian models like the novella. France, England, and Germany had no influence on Spanish letters despite having some writers (Francisco de Quevedo, Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, Miguel Barrios, Conde de Rebolledo) spending time beyond the Pyrenees. Some important novels written in Spanish, in fact, came from abroad, like Antonio Vital Pizarro y Cuña’s Excesos amorosos en cuatro novelas ejemplares (Amorous Excesses in Four Exemplary Novels, 1681) and José de la Vega’s Rumbos peligrosos (Dangerous Destinations, 1683), published in Lisbon and Antwerp, respectively. In Paris, Carlos García published a short novel “about crime and punishment”62 titled La desordenada codicia de los bienes ajenos (The Disorderly Greed of Other People’s Goods, 1619), which enjoyed more success in France (1621, 1623, 1632) and England (1638, 1650, 1657) than in Spain, where it was only published at the end of the nineteenth century. The Protestant teacher Juan de Luna, exiled in France, published Segunda parte de la vida de Lazarillo de Tormes. Sacada de las crónicas antiguas de Toledo (Second Part of the Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: Taken from the Old Chronicles of Toledo, 1620), in which he combined an acerbic anti-clerical tone with graphic sexual

the spanish baroque novel   511 scenes. The novel was popular in France—with no less than twelve editions, including a bilingual Spanish-French edition from 1660—as well as in England (The Pursuit of the History of Lazarillo de Tormes, 1622). Later translations into Italian (1625) and German (1653) made Juan de Luna “one of the most outstanding and influential Spanish exiles and propagandists of the seventeenth century,”63 proving the enormous popularity of a genre that contributed to Spain’s great appeal in the European courts of the era. But this appeal, ultimately, would have never acquired such complexity without Cervantes’s long shadow. In the end, Francisco de Robles’s instincts were right: if anything defined the early modern Spanish novel, it was Don Quixote in its ability to successfully combine so many of its preexisting elements, as well as in its capacity to present them as invitations to move the genre in new directions. Paradoxically, if Cervantes’s creation defied all labels and categorizations, the novel was only able to excel at home and abroad thanks to Cervantes.

Notes 1. Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, ed. Pierre Darnis (Madrid: Castalia, 2015). 2. For a general approach to the topic, see Isabel Colón Calderón, La novela corta en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto, 2001); Juan Ignacio Ferreras, La novela en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Taurus, 1988); Jean-Michel Laspéras, La nouvelle en Espagne au siècle d’or (Perpignan and Castillet: Publications de la Recherche, Université de Montpellier, 1987); and Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros, “La novela corta del Barroco: una tradición compleja y una incierta preceptiva,” Monteagudo 1 (1996): 27–46. 3. On Lazarillo de Tormes and its place in Spain’s literary history, see Francisco Rico, La  novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix-Barral, 2000), as well as the Introduction to his critical edition of the novel (Madrid: Cátedra, 1998), 13–136. 4. For a detailed account of the most important translations of Spanish novels taking place in these decades, see Roger Chartier, The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 98–119. 5. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, ed. Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Crítica, 2001). 6. On the so-called literature of the poor, see José Antonio Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social (siglos XVI–XVII) (Madrid, Taurus: 1986). See also Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 7. For a first approach to Alemán’s creation, see Michel Cavillac, Guzmán de Alfarache y la novela moderna (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2010). 8. A very useful catalogue of titles is provided by Begoña Ripoll, La novela barroca. Catálogo bio-bibliográfico (1620–1700) (Salamanca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca, 1991). 9. Francisco Rico, El texto del “Quijote”: Preliminares a una ecdótica del Siglo de Oro (Valladolid: Centro para la edición de los clásicos españoles, 2005), 150–152. 10. Howard Mancing, “Spanish Fiction of the Seventeenth Century,” in A History of the Spanish Novel, ed. J. A. Garrido Ardila (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 142. 11. See Rico, El texto, 278, where he argues that “one would have to be blind not to see Cervantes’s hand in the 1605 edition.” For a brief account of the documented changes made by Cervantes (“intervenciones seguras”), see 288.

512   the oxford handbook of the baroque 12. Ibid., 170. 13. For a useful overview of Hapsburg Spain’s social and political background, see John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Penguin, 2002). 14. See Jean Canavaggio, Miguel de Cervantes, trans. J. R. Jones (New York: Norton, 1990). The best account of Cervantes’s life continues to be Canavaggio’s. 15. Cervantes, Don Quijote, 54. 16. For a general approach to Spanish Baroque culture, see José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque. An Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). For an excellent overview of its representational mechanisms, see Fernando R. de la Flor, Barroco. Representación e ideología en el mundo hispánico (1580–1680) (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002). 17. For a reassessment of the develsopment of the genre, see Miguel Ángel Tejeiro Fuertes and Javier Guijarro Ceballos, De los caballeros andantes a los peregrinos enamorados: la novela española en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Cáceres, Eneida, Universidad de Extremadura, 2007). 18. Miguel de Cervantes, Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce (Madrid: Castalia, 1984). 19. On the different reincarnations of the picaresque genre, see Mancing, “Spanish Fiction,” 142–172; Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, El concepto de género y la literatura picaresca (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1992); and B. W. Ife, Reading Fiction in Golden-Age Spain. A Platonist Critique and some Picaresque Replies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 20. Much like Lazarillo de Tormes, some aspects of the book are still shrouded in mystery. A number of studies have questioned the possibility that Francisco López de Úbeda, a writer and doctor from Toledo, penned this novel. In his Bibliotheca Hispana Nova, Nicolás Antonio attributed the work to a Dominican from León called Andrés Pérez, a theory that was later supported by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. Marcel Bataillon’s well-documented attribution to Francisco López de Úbeda has prevailed for decades (see Marcel Bataillon, Pícaros y picaresca. La pícara Justina [Madrid: Taurus, 1969]), although recent scholarship by Anastasio Rojo Vega has shed light on a new figure, the Dominican theologian from Valladolid, Baltasar Navarrete. In his critical introduction to the text, Torres argues once again in favor of López de Úbeda, “honorable candidate to its authorship” (see Francisco López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, ed. Luc Torres [Madrid: Castalia, 2010], 25). 21. Peter Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 22. I don’t want to omit in this trajectory an early piece of pivotal relevance, Francisco Delicado’s La lozana andaluza (The Lush Andalusian, 1528), a monumental homage to feminine ingenuity that for many critics set the tone for things to come. The story, divided into three parts, contains sixty-six mamotretos, or memoranda, along with several short compositions as closing pieces: an apology, an explanation, an epilogue, an exchange of letters between the figure of the author and Lozana in which they allude to the infamous 1527 sack of Rome by the Spanish and German troops, and a digression. On the current debates surrounding its place within the genre, see Enrique García Santo-Tomás, “The Spanish Female Picaresque,” in The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature. From the Sixteenth Century to the Neopicaresque, ed. J. A. Garrido Ardila (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 60–61. 23. Francisco de Quevedo, El Buscón, ed. Pablo Jauralde (Madrid: Castalia, 1990). 24. On the taste for the grotesque in Quevedo, see James Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque, 2 vols. (London: Tamesis, 1978).

the spanish baroque novel   513 25. On the female picaresque, see Edward  H.  Friedman, The Antiheroine’s Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987); and García Santo-Tomás, “The Spanish Female Picaresque.” 26. Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, La hija de Celestina, ed. Enrique García SantoTomás (Madrid: Cátedra, 2008). 27. Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, Don Diego de noche, ed. Enrique García SantoTomás (Madrid: Cátedra, 2014). 28. Enrique García Santo-Tomás, Modernidad bajo sospecha: Salas Barbadillo y la cultura material del siglo XVII (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2008), 57–65. 29. See, for example, studies by Stephen Rupp, Heroic Forms: Cervantes and the Literature of War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). See also Miguel Martínez, Front Lines: Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 30. Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, ed. Jorge García López (Barcelona: Crítica, 2005). 31. Mary Malcolm Gaylord, “Cervantes’ Other Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 108. 32. Since the fifteenth century, there had been Spanish and Catalan translations of Decameron, which was praised and widely read, even though it was also included in the Inquisitorial Index (see Virgilio Pinto Crespo, Inquisición y control ideológico en la España del siglo XVI [Madrid: Taurus, 1983], 202). Francisco Truchado translated in 1580 Piacevoli notti by Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Matteo Bandello was translated from the French in 1589, and a year later Luis Gaytán translated into Spanish Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (see Laspéras, La nouvelle en Espagne au Siècle d’Or, 85–89). Many writers of the time knew Italian well, and as a result other authors like Sebastiano Erizzo, Niccolò Forteguerri, and Francesco Sansovino were known in Spain. 33. Gaylord, “Cervantes’ Other Fiction,” 115. 34. Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, Corrección de vicios. In Obras, ed. Emilio Cotarelo y Mori (Madrid: Tipografía de la Revista de Archivos, 1907), vol. 1; translation my own. 35. Juan Ignacio Ferreras, La novela en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Taurus, 1988), 35. 36. Luis Vélez de Guevara, El Diablo Cojuelo, ed. Ramón Valdés (Barcelona: Crítica, 1999). 37. Enrique García Santo-Tomás, Espacio urbano y creación literaria en el Madrid de Felipe IV (Pamplona, Frankfurt, Madrid: Universidad de Navarra, Vervuert, Iberoamericana, 2004), 19–72; Nieves Romero Díaz, Nueva nobleza, nueva novela: rescribiendo la cultura urbana del Barroco (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2002). 38. Enrique García Santo-Tomás, The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain, trans. Vincent Barletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 39. Jaime Moll, “Diez años sin licencias para imprimir comedias y novelas en los Reinos de Castilla, (1625–1634),” BRAE LIV (1974): 97–103. 40. On the institutional control of the novel, see also Pinto Crespo, Inquisición y control ideológico; Clive  H.  Griffin, Journeymen-Printers, Heresy, and the Inquisition in SixteenthCentury Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 41. Laura Bass and Amanda Wunder, “The Veiled Ladies of Early Modern Spain: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima,” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1 (2009): 97–144. 42. Isabel Colón Calderón, La novela corta en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto, 2001), 13. On the development of this form, see also Caroline B. Bourland, The Short Story in Spain in the Seventeenth Century (Northampton: Smith College Publications, 1927); Walter Pabst, La novela corta en la teoría y en la creación literaria. Notas para la historia

514   the oxford handbook of the baroque de su antinomia en las literaturas románicas, trans. Rafael de la Vega (Madrid: Gredos, 1972); and María del Pilar Palomo, Forma y estructura de la novela cortesana (Madrid: Planeta: Universidad de Málaga, 1976). 43. Lope de Vega, Novelas a Marcia Leonarda, ed. Antonio Carreño (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002). 44. Margaret R. Greer, María de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 45. John  H.  Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares. The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 360, 642. 46. Mancing, “Spanish Fiction,” 165. 47. Cervantes, Don Quijote, I, 38. 48. Henry Ettinghausen, Francisco de Quevedo and the Neostoic Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 49. Francisco de Quevedo, Sueños y discursos, ed. James O. Crosby (Madrid: Castalia, 1993). 50. Anthony Close, Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 51. Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Las harpías en Madrid, ed. Pablo Jauralde (Madrid: Castalia, 1985). 52. Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, La sabia Flora, malsabidilla, ed. Dana Flaskerud (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2007). 53. García Santo-Tomás, “The Spanish Female Picaresque,” 63. 54. Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, “La niña de los embustes, Teresa de Manzanares,” in Picaresca femenina, ed. Antonio Rey Hazas (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1986), 211–413. 55. Peter Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction, 245. 5 6. Scott Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 57. The collection features Los dos soles de Toledo, sin la letra A, La carroza con las damas, sin la letra E, La perla de Portugal, sin la letra I, La peregrina ermitaña, sin la letra O, and La serrana de Sintra, sin la letra U. 58. Magdalena Velasco Kindelán, La novela picaresca y cortesana de Castillo Solórzano (Valladolid: Institución Cultural Simancas/Diputación Provincial de Valladolid, 1983). 59. Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, La garduña de Sevilla y anzuelo de las bolsas, ed. Federico Ruiz Morcuende (Madrid: Ediciones “La Lectura,” 1924). 6 0. Baltasar Gracián, El Criticón, ed. Santos Alonso (Madrid: Cátedra, 1980). 61. Francisco Santos, Día y noche de Madrid, ed. Enrique García Santo-Tomás (Madrid: Cátedra, 2017), “Introduction,” 17–18. 62. Howard Mancing, “Guzmán de Alfarache and after,” in The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature. From the Sixteenth Century to the Neopicaresque, ed. J.  A.  Garrido Ardila (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 51. 63. Ibid., 52.

Further Reading Casey, James. Early Modern Spain. A Social History. London: Routledge, 2000. Castillo, David R. Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. De Armas, Frederick. Cervantes, Raphael and the Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

the spanish baroque novel   515 Defourneaux, Marcelin. Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. Gilman, Stephen. The Novel According to Cervantes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. González Echevarría, Roberto. Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Green, Otis, H. Spain and the Western Tradition. The Castilian Mind in Literature from “El Cid” to Calderón. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963–1966, 4 vols. Jauralde, Pablo. Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645). Madrid: Castalia, 1998. Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition. A Historical Revision. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Mariscal, George. Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth Century Spanish Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Mujica, Barbara. Women Writers of Early Modern Spain. Sophia’s Daughters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Rico, Francisco. The Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Point of View. Translated by Charles Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Riley, Edward C. Don Quixote. Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1986.

chapter 23

Ba roqu e Tr agedy Blair Hoxby

The Baroque—whether conceived as a style, an episteme, or a way of proceeding—has been discerned in various civilizations in different periods but is most strongly identified with the culture of Europe from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. These decades saw the development of centralized states governed by absolute monarchs; the launch of aggressive spiritual and artistic campaigns by the Counter-Reformation Church; and, despite theological resistance, the displacement of a symbolic cosmos centered on man by an impersonal universe of indefinite extent and duration.1 The arts of this period are characterized by their fascination with vastness, their sense of movement, their tension, and their will to astonish. Committed to exploring and mobilizing the passions of the soul, they may embarrass us by their refusal to ignore the flesh, yet their drive to counterbalance such mimetic energy with allegorical significance, to wean us from our attachment to the world, is equally remarkable. They often work at the intersection of the corporal and the spiritual, the immanent and transcendent, the temporal and the eternal. As heirs of Renaissance humanism, they can be academic, knowing, even reflexive.2 Yet they are grounded not on Antiquity imagined as a ­monolithic inheritance but on antiquities conceived as a cultural plurality—and therefore they are often eclectic or hybrid.3 Tragedy should be central to any account of the Baroque because it explores the powers and limitations of sovereign will; because the changeable fortune and wretched suffering of its illustrious persons can quiet our will to live; and because its preoccupation with the question “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” means that it must measure his stature and take his weight in relation both to God and to an indifferent Nature. Baroque tragedy is in certain respects a natural development of Renaissance humanist tragedy. But the Baroque system of the arts permitted all the arts—poetry, painting, sculpture, and music—to coordinate in the theater with a newfound freedom and virtuosity. As a result, the era could support a stunning range of tragic forms, from closet dramas to intercalated plays like the Jesuits’ (which often alternated acts of Latin dialogue with allegorical spectacles, ballets, or operas sung in the vernacular), to the operas and tragédies en musique of composers such as Monteverdi and Rameau.

baroque tragedy   517 This range could not have been supported had the arts not had a common point of reference. In fact, they had two: the passions of the soul, which they sought to represent and sway using a codified rhetoric of the passions, and a system of emblems with which they pointed to the super-sensible. If Baroque dramatists consider it their chief duty to represent and provoke the vehement passions of pity, terror, and wonder, they sometimes display a melancholy desire to penetrate through the vagaries of subjective experience to a realm of eternal verities. The Baroque’s divided allegiance—to a subjectivity that cannot be falsified by external observation and a transcendentalism that cannot liberate itself from convention—may find expression in compositions that spill over their frames, chiaroscuro, dissonance, ambivalence, paradox, and reflexivity. This selfdivision is one of the reasons that the Baroque often inspires wonder and disgust, anticipation and desolation. To refer to effects typical of the Baroque is, however, to risk implying that artists from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries were consciously cultivating a Baroque aesthetic. On the contrary, the word would have meant little to them. It began life as a term of opprobrium applied by eighteenth-century critics to works of art they deemed extravagant, willfully bizarre, strained, or given to emotional excess. It acquired academic respectability in the hands of Jacob Burckhardt and Wilhelm Lübke in the nineteenth century. But it has never shed its origin as a verdict of taste predicated on an ideal, a heritage memorably recalled in Benedetto Croce’s dictum, “Art is never baroque, and the baroque is never art.”4 Since Croce’s pronouncement of 1929, there has been no shortage of critics ready to defend Baroque aesthetics. But the Baroque has no existence independent of their theories. As Gilles Deleuze observes, “The best inventors of the Baroque . . . have had their doubts about the consistency of the notion. . . . It is easy to call the Baroque inexistent; it suffices not to propose its concept.”5 So, while it is possible to approach early modern tragedies directly by relying on the contemporary poetics underwriting them and by disregarding later critical developments such as the Idealist philosophy of the tragic, that procedure will not suffice here.6 We can encounter “Baroque tragedy” only through the mediation of critical theories and aesthetic judgments made since the nineteenth century—though we can bring those theories and judgments into contact with an earlier language of the arts. To do justice to the range of dramas that passed under the name of tragedy from 1565 to 1750, to the riches of early modern dramatic theory, and to the variety of Baroques that critics have theorized, this chapter therefore proposes to chart three constellations of Baroque tragedy that come into focus when we peer at them through the right lens. The first, which I call Baroque tragedy in the grand style, is modeled on the examples of Sophocles and Euripides and is informed by commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics. As such, it has much in common with Renaissance and Enlightenment tragedy. But I would argue that plays such as Torquato Tasso’s 1587 Il re Torrismondo and John Milton’s 1671 Samson Agonistes manifest a Baroque Will-to-Form like that first described by Heinrich Wölfflin in his 1888 Renaissance und Barock [Renaissance and Baroque] and later applied to literature by critics such as Wylie Sypher in his 1955 Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Arts and Literature, 1400–1700. The second constellation was

518   the oxford handbook of the baroque descried by Walter Benjamin in his 1928 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [The Origin of German Tragic Drama]. The Baroque Trauerspiel owes more to the Medieval Mysteries and to the revival of Seneca in a Christian culture than it does to Attic tragedy. Whereas tragedy in the grand style displays a formal assurance and magniloquence as it strives after the pathetic sublime, the Trauerspiel can be grotesque, even monstrous, reducing its dramatis personae—a collection of tyrants, saints, and intriguers—to the status of puppets. Rather than rehearse the Silesian examples that Benjamin dwells on, this chapter turns to the roots of the Trauerspiel in Jesuit school theater and to its apogee in Calderón’s 1629 Il principe constante [The Constant Prince]. The third constellation, regular Baroque tragedy, identifies the essence of tragedy with pathos, but it eschews magniloquent verse, the heightened song of choral odes, and improbabilities such as the appearance of a god from the machine to untie the knot. Relying entirely upon its arrangement of the fable, its use of entrances, exits, and the liason des scénes to set its persons in conflict, and a pellucid rhetoric that is liable to crack under stress, it charts the changing passions of its persons against a Cartesian grid, thus producing what René Rapin identifies in 1674 as the sole pleasure of tragedy: “the Soul is Shaken . . . ; its Trouble pleases, and the Emotion it finds, is a kind of Charm to it.”7 As an example of the form, I consider Jean Racine’s Iphigénie (1674)—a play that demonstrates Baroque tragedy’s differences from its Ancient models and its Neoclassical successors. All three of these constellations assume that Baroque tragedy shares intrinsic analogies with the visual arts (whether architecture, emblem books, or painting), and the critical discourse of the age justifies that assumption. For Aristotle’s Poetics (6.1450b1-4)—which compares the fable of a tragedy to the design of a painting and its depiction of manners and passions to its colors—licensed numerous parallels between “Tragedy and Picture”; and artists and art theorists, in turn, applied the poetic and rhetorical principles of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Tasso, among others, to the theory of painting. Such comparisons were justified by the consideration that both arts were “narrowly circumscrib’d by the Mechanick Rules of Time and Place.”8

Baroque Tragedy in the Grand Style Wölfflin writes of the Baroque as if it were a Demiurge expressing itself in a Will-to-Form.9 The Baroque is characterized by its grandeur, by its massiveness, by its creation and resolution of dissonances, by its repudiation of the principle of articulation in favor of absolute unity, and by its sense of movement and direction. Whereas “Renaissance art is the art of calm and beauty,” Baroque art “wants to carry us away with the force of its impact, immediate and overwhelming. It gives us not a generally enhanced vitality, but excitement, ecstasy, intoxication . . . . This momentary impact of baroque is powerful, but soon leaves us with a certain sense of desolation” (RB 38). With Wölfflin’s characterization in mind, I propose to consider how analogous formal properties and affective resonances manifest themselves in tragedies written by two

baroque tragedy   519 poets who not only recorded their theories of tragedy but who achieved an originality by means of their creative transformation, rather than rejection, of Greek tragic forms. Tasso’s 1587 Il re Torrismondo and Milton’s 1671 Samson Agonistes also exemplify two of the most important sub-species of Baroque tragedy conceived in light of Aristotle’s Poetics: the complex pathetic tragedy and the simple pathetic tragedy. Aristotle’s discussion of four species of tragedies that could be crossed—the complex, the pathetic, the ethical, and an unnamed species that many commentators took to be the simple (Poetics 17.55b32-56a4 and 24.59b8-17)—gave rise to these sub-species. The complex pathetic tragedy (exemplified by Torrismondo) relies on a tightly knit sequence of recognitions and reversals to impel a revolution of the passions. In his 1587 Discorsi dell’arte poetica e del poema eroico [Discourses on the Heroic Poem], Tasso observes that wonder plays an important role in this process because marvelous events are well suited to induce the horror and pity that can purge the soul.10 Even when epic and tragedy represent the same persons (Hercules, Theseus, Agamemnon, Ajax, Pyrrhus), the former paints their valor and excellence in arms, the latter portrays them “fallen through some error into unhappiness” (DHP 44). A tragic fable should possess a certain magnitude and unity, but the progress of civilization, which has jaded the palate of readers, necessitates that modern poets strive for a unity in diversity. Like the universe or a musical composition, a tragic poem is composed of contraries and dissonances that are held in tension and subordinated to a principle of organization and development (DHP 61–78). Although the style of tragic dialogue should be simpler than that of epic narration, it can nevertheless make use of strange words, epithets, roughness, difficulty, obscurity, allegory, and other linguistic effects or rhetorical figures to create an atmosphere of ominousness, gravity, and magnificence—a mood enhanced by the odes of the Chorus, who, standing apart like guardians of the action, can sing in a loftier style (DHP 120–138). Aristotle’s discussion of four species of tragedies that can in theory be crossed suggests to Tasso that the acme of tragedy must be the complex pathetic tragedy in which a reversal is the cause of pathos (DHP 79–82). In Tasso’s critical writing, as in the contemporary poetics of tragedy more generally, pathos refers both to the one plot element that a tragedy can never lack and to the imitation of profound emotion such as fear, grief, or mourning.11 As Tasso glosses the word, it is “a grievous perturbation full of anxieties, such as deaths and wounds and lamentations and complaints, which can move pity” (DHP 18). What he has in mind is clearly suggested by his extended analysis of “how the strong behave when grievously wounded”: he adduces the laments of the suffering Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, of Prometheus chained on Mt. Caucasus in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, and of the wounded Philoctetes in a tragedy by Accius that survives only in remnants (DHP 88–90).12 Tasso attempts to live up to his theoretical ideal in Torrismondo.13 In keeping with his advice that tragedians draw their matter “from Gothland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, the East Indies, or countries recently discovered in the vast ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules” (DHP 50), Tasso sets Torrismondo in the harsh and remote northern lands described in Johannes Magnus’s 1554 Gothorum Suenonumque historia [History of the

520   the oxford handbook of the baroque Goths and Swedes] and his brother Olaus’s 1558 Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus [History of the Northern Peoples].14 Following the example of Euripides and of Trissino’s Sofonisba (1515), Tasso uses the indistinct premonitions of a young woman—in which old and new; dark and light; and fortune, fate, and the stars mingle in confusion to establish a mood of dread and mystery: I yearn and dread, I’ll not deny it: but I know what I desire; What frightens me, I know not. Shadows and dreams I fear, and ancient portents, new monstrosities in nature, old promises and new ones, or better, threats of fortune, heaven, hostile fate, conspiring stars; and, woe is me, I fear I know not what ill-omened or appalling thing that an anguished thought instills in me, which wakes, confounds me, and gives me pain both night and day. (ll. 23–33)15

The reasons for Alvida’s dread begin to emerge in Act I: although she believes that Torrismondo, the King of the Goths, has brought her to Gothland as his wife, his intention was in fact to deliver her to his old comrade in arms Germondo, the King of Sweden, whom Alvida’s father will not countenance as a suitor because he holds him responsible for the death of his son. Torrismondo has thus committed a double violation of trust by misrepresenting his intentions to Alvida and her father and by taking the virginity that was supposed to be reserved for his friend. A monologue uttered by Alvida’s nurse underlines two points about Tasso’s conception of tragedy: that it should represent vehement passions and that it should turn on a struggle between virtue and fortune (not, as we have been trained to expect by scholars writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between freedom and necessity):16 I wonder if on earth there is a tranquil or a peaceful state that is not disturbed by hope or fear or joy or pain; or a greatness that is so solid, so well founded on its merits or in the favor of good fortune, that the inconstant goddess does not fell or quake or threaten. (ll. 203–209)17

Torrismondo believes that he is bound by a knot that can only be untied by death. The word nodo refers to the complication of a plot, but here it also signifies his dilemma. His counselor looks for a humane way to untie it. What if Torrismondo were to offer the hand of his sister Rosmonda to Germondo instead? Everyone in Torrismondo behaves

baroque tragedy   521 far too nobly and generously to spurn such sensible advice, but by Act IV we suspect that Alvida may be Torrismondo’s sister (who was covertly sent to Norway to forfend a prophecy) and that Rosmonda may be a commoner—a daughter of the Nurse, raised under false pretenses as if she were of royal blood. Soon enough, Torrismondo himself deduces Alvida’s identity. “The very best recognition, the finest of all, is the kind that issues from the working out of the fable itself and is linked with a change of fortune, like that of Oedipus or that of Alvida in Torrismondo,” writes Tasso (DHP 81–82). Even so, Torrismondo does not rush headlong to destruction. Like the Jocasta of Oedipus Tyrannos, he temporizes, simply advising Alvida to think of him as a brother and to turn her thoughts to a new husband. In response to his perceived slight, she stabs herself, but she does not die before recognizing that his words were not metaphorical. The high dignity of her formal address—“O more than brother and more than lover” (ll. 3054)18—makes the horror of their incestuous bond all the more poignant. Torrismondo, “speechless and sad;/dazed with pity and horror” (ll. 3058–3059), takes his own life.19 News of the death of two royal children fills the palace with horror and fright. Tasso’s striving after a poetic equivalent to the Titanic force of Julio Romano’s Sala dei giganti [Room of the Giants] in the Palazzo Te of Mantua (Figure 1), where the melancholic poet lived while finishing his tragedy, is evident in the lament of Torrismondo’s friend Germondo at news of this double catastrophe: The sky should lose the sun, the sun its rays, the day its light, and out of pity the dark night should hide man’s fault in its gloomy cloak: the sea should lose its shores, the flowing rivers their high banks, and inundate the ungrateful earth, since it fails to feel and recognize its own loss, and, possessed with anger, does not uproot beeches, ashes, pines, holms, and ancient oaks, lofty tombs, and unhappy death’s sorrowful and sad dwellings, and does not raze to the ground this great palace and the haughty towers, and fling mountains against hard mountains, and break their backs, and pitch huge boulders from the rough cliffs to the valley bottom, and in the valley’s depths enfold high ruins of pillars, of colossi, of columns, so as to make it a capacious and worthy tomb, and from valleys, woods and caverns why does the earth not roar loudly with a thousand dreadful voices, making their obsequies with utmost wailing, spreading perpetual panic through the world? (ll. 3161–3182)20

522   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 1  Giulio Romano, West wall of the Sala dei giganti, Palazzo Te, Mantua. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Germondo falls into the pathetic fallacy, and in his lament we hear the indignation and mourning of Baroque man: he is no longer at the center of the cosmos, and the world is disenchanted. We also sense that if Baroque tragedy strains mightily to hold its opposing forces in tension, it harbors a deep fantasy of plunging Nature into chaos. Yet Torrismondo manages to redirect that energy into memorialization. Responding to the Queen Mother’s plea that he end her life, Germondo declares that he would sacrifice himself to recover her children, but given that the stern law of destiny forbids it, he will instead inter them “with funereal and noble pomp” (l. 3291).21 In typically Baroque fashion, Germondo’s vision oscillates from the “great marble sepulcher” he proposes to erect in lieu of the pile that Nature declines to provide and his conception of a vast universe that alone can furnish a fitting tomb for unvanquished kings (ll. 3293–3296). Whereas the choruses that conclude the first four acts use the form of the Italian canzone to approximate that of the Greek choral ode (with its turn, counter-turn, and stand), the concluding ode is short and monostrophic. Beginning with the exclamation “Oh tears, oh grief,” it works through vanitas motifs to its desolate refrain: What else is there to hope for, what can we expect? After triumph and victory, here nothing remains for the soul

baroque tragedy   523 but mourning and wailing and tearful laments. What avails friendship? What avails love? Oh tears, oh grief! (ll. 3335–3340)22

What Tasso was trying to accomplish with these lines is suggested by his remarks on the meaning of catharsis and the function of lament. He reasoned that “since some things purge the body by excess, among which are honey, milk, wine, and must, if we believe Aristotle in the section of his Problems where he speaks of things medicinal, similarly terror, pity, anger, love, and other passions can, if I am not mistaken, purge the mind, not by contrary qualities but by excess.”23 Thus he concluded that it was right to respect the example of the Greeks and Latins “in the laments made for the death of friends and of children and in funeral rites,” for he was inclined to follow “the judgment of Aristotle and the other Peripatetics,” rather than Plato, the Stoics, or the Epicureans, on the subject of the passions.24 Tasso’s tragedy was printed in almost every capital of Northern Italy between 1587 and 1588. Milton studied it while staying with Giovanni Battista Manso, Tasso’s Neapolitan patron, and it was one of the models that he bore in mind when he himself chose to introduce a chorus “after the Greek manner, not antient only but modern, and still in use among the Italians.”25 It was staged over the next century and a half at venues such as the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the Théâtre du Marais in Paris, and the Teatro di San Luca in Venice.26 Yet its reliance on “unexpected and sudden changes of fortune” and on “the greatness of its pitiful and terrifying events” (DHP 43) would by no means set the only example for the next century. For Baroque tragedians were equally drawn to the simple pathetic tragedy. Relying on a single, continuous action that proceeds to its catastrophe without surprises, this tragic species forgoes recognitions and unforeseen reversals of fortune in order to exercise the passions of the audience through pure displays of pathos. It is more natural and more verisimilar than the complex tragedy because it is less contrived. Yet it must compensate for its dearth of intrigue by means of its just imitations of the passions and its effective use of discourse. Because it does not ask audiences to connect the ­present to the past and the future through a complex chain of causes and effects, it has the power to absorb them in the moment. Milton’s Samson Agonistes belongs to this tradition of simple pathetic tragedy ­modeled on Sophocles’s Ajax and Philoctetes.27 In his note “Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem which is Called Tragedy,” Milton says that only those “who are not unacquainted with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides” are fit to judge “the style and uniformity, and that commonly called the plot, whether intricate or explicit [i.e., complex or ­simple].” Yet his definition of tragedy tilts the scale in favor of the simple, for it emphasizes not deeds or plot twists but imitations of the passions: “Tragedy, as it was anciently composed, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such-like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred by reading or seeing those passions well ­imitated.”

524   the oxford handbook of the baroque And the argument that precedes the tragedy reinforces this impression. In the first “action” that it digests, Samson “comes forth into the open air . . . to sit awhile and bemoan his condition.” If Samson Agonistes is a simple pathetic tragedy, what makes it a Baroque exercise in the form?28 In the first place, its hero is a fallen Titan, a biblical remembrance of an ancient solar god.29 “Can this be he,” asks the chorus: That heroic, that renowned, Irresistible Samson? Whom unarmed No strength of man, or fiercest wild beast could withstand; Who tore the lion, as the lion tears the kid, Ran on embattled armies clad in iron, And weaponless himself, Made arms ridiculous.  (ll. 124–131)

Samson remembers himself in similar terms: When in strength All mortals I excelled, and great in hopes With youthful courage and magnanimous thoughts Of birth from Heav’n foretold and high exploits, Full of instinct, . . . . . . like a petty god I walked about admired of all and dreaded. (ll. 522–526, 529–530)

But gone are those days. Now blindness and imprisonment (“Prison within prison/ Inseparably dark” [ll. 153–154]) condemn Samson To live a life half dead, a living death, And buried; but O yet more miserable! Myself my sepulcher, a moving grave . . . .  (ll. 100–102)

Samson’s miseries are “So many, and so huge, that each apart/Would ask a life to wail” (ll. 65–66). Neither the chorus nor his father Manoa can console him. Although his suffering involves both body and mind, his mental torment and spiritual despair deject him most: My griefs not only pain me As a ling’ring disease, But find no redress, ferment and rage, No less than wounds immedicable Rankle, and fester, and gangrene,

baroque tragedy   525 To black mortification. Thoughts my tormentors armed with deadly stings Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts, Exasperate, exulcerate, and raise Dire inflammation which no cooling herb Or med’cinal liquor can assuage. . . .  (ll. 617–627)

Samson’s extended lament might well be modeled on Tasso’s analysis of “how the strong behave when grievously wounded.” Whereas Tasso relies chiefly on the arrangement of his fable to arouse a passionate response of wonder, pity, and fear, Milton puts his faith in the power of “passions well imitated” to raise up “pity and fear, or terror” before tempering them and reducing them to just measure. As he depends on our “reading” those passions, the style of his verse—which is often “Vast, unwieldy, burdensome” (l. 54)—is essential to the play’s effect. We might say with Wölfflin that the “oppressive weight is sometimes so powerful that we imagine that the forms affected are actually suffering” (RB 54). The unseen countervailing forces that have been supporting that weight are released in the catastrophe. After observing that the Philistine lords have watched his feats of strength “not without wonder,” Samson announces, “Now of my own accord such other trial/I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater,/As with amaze shall strike all who behold” (ll. 1642–1645): This uttered, straining all his nerves he bowed, As with the force of winds and waters pent, When mountains tremble, those two massy pillars With horrible convulsion to and fro He tugged, he shook, till down they came and drew The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder Upon the heads of those who sat beneath. (ll. 1646–1652)

Whereas the pathos of Il re Torrismondo is generated by Nature’s indifference to the mutable fortunes of Torrismondo and Alvida, the Baroque Will-to-Form manifests itself here in a destructive impulse so devastating that it foreshadows the final dissolution of the world.30 The conclusion compounds the Hellenic and the Hebraic.31 Manoa makes plans to fetch the body and clean it of its clotted gore; to build a monument shaded by the laurel and the palm; to hang it with trophies; and to commemorate his acts in legend and in song. He imagines that valiant youths will be inspired by his son’s example and that virgins will honor his feats on feast days. But the chorus dwells on the “unsearchable dispose” of the Jewish God (l. 1746). Beginning with an episodic mythic cycle, Milton forms a tragedy characterized by grandeur, respect for the dramatic unities, formal tension, cultural hybridity, and a sense of direction. Affirming Tasso’s homeopathic account of

526   the oxford handbook of the baroque catharsis (“so in physic things of melancholic hue and quality are used against m ­ elancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humors”), Milton trusts that his imitations of melancholy and spiritual despair will inflame, then temper and assuage, those and similar passions before dismissing readers with “calm of mind, all passion spent” (l. 1758). If Milton’s choice of lustratio to translate Aristotle’s “catharsis” on the title page of Samson retains any force at the end, it is to invite us to compare the perturbations of the spirit that we experience when reading the tragedy with the experience of divine furor described by Bernardo Tasso, father of the more famous Torquato. Such a furor, says Tasso, is “a lustration of the rational soul, by which God, having descended to it, from high and divine affairs to these low and earthly affairs, recalls it to celestial things.”32

Baroque Trauerspiel No one could mistake Il re Torrismondo or Samson Agonistes for Attic tragedies. The ­former blends the plot structure of a complex pathetic tragedy with themes drawn from chivalric romance; the latter infuses Hellenic forms with a Hebraic spirit. But it is not hard to see why Tasso’s contemporary Giulio Guastavini praised Torrismondo for its fidelity to Oedipus Tyrannos or why Goethe declared that Samson had “more of the antique spirit than any other production of any other modern poet.”33 Both plays can be measured against the example of the ancients and the rules of Aristotle. Benjamin’s 1928 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [The Origin of German Tragic Drama], on the other hand, seeks to rehabilitate whole swaths of the Baroque repertoire that owe less to the example of Attic tragedies, the Poetics of Aristotle, or French classicism than to the Mystery Cycles, the revival of Senecan tragedy in a Christian culture, and Jesuit school drama.34 Although he draws most of his examples from the Silesian poets Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius, Daniel Caspers von Lohenstein, and Johan Christian Hallman, his description of the Baroque Trauerspiel, or play of mourning, can also shed light on the Jacobean stage, the solemn tragedy of the Jesuits, the Schouwberg theater in Amsterdam, and the corrales of Madrid—none of which supported a purely Attic style of tragedy. In Benjamin’s hands, the Trauerspiel relates to the literary artifacts of the seventeenth century as a constellation relates to the stars; or, to invoke yet another of his analogies, it is like a Faustian mother who will remain obscure until phenomena gather round her and declare their faith (OGTD 34–35).35 Benjamin defines the idea itself in dialectical opposition to a metaphysical account of Tragödie erected by German Idealist and phenomenological critics stretching from A. W. Schlegel through Friedrich Nietzsche, to Franz Rosenzweig and Max Scheler. Tragödie, according to this tradition, is grounded in myth. It acts out a rite of sacrifice that “offers up the hero to the unknown god as the first fruits of a new harvest of humanity.” “In tragedy pagan man realizes that he is better than the gods, but this realization strikes him dumb, and it remains unarticulated” (OGTD 108–110). The Trauerspiel is grounded not in myth but in history, and its ­central figure is the monarch. Because he exercises a sovereign’s will in a creature’s

baroque tragedy   527 body, he is the most pure expression of the human condition. If even a monarch or a prince like Hamlet can be subject to melancholy, which of us can escape the condition? (OGTD 142).36 Free to pursue his selfhood to extremes, the sovereign is prone to play the tyrant or the martyr—and may play both in the same drama.37 We need think only of the several tragedies about the emperors Zeno and Leo Armenius, Queen Mary Stuart, or King Charles I (all of whom were assassinated or executed) to understand how the “royal ­purple and the carmine of blood” can “mingle in the same emblematic persona,” just  as  Jesus Christ could be king and sacrificial victim simultaneously.38 Despite being a product of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Trauerspiel is earthbound, corporeal, anti-transcendental. It requires an audience of the melancholy to behold its memorabilia of grief. And its most characteristic stage property is the corpse: “The characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter the homeland of allegory” (OGTD 217). Joseph Simons’s 1631 Zeno, Or Ill-Starred Ambition exhibits all the hallmarks of a Trauerspiel.39 That should come as no surprise, for Simons was an Englishman familiar with Jacobean tragedy and writing for pupils at the English College in St. Omer. Moreover, his plays furnished models for Gryphius.40 Zeno is founded on history.41 The story commences in ad 492 when Zeno, an Isaurian emperor “notorious for his debauchery and savagery,” rules the Empire of the East. Told by an astrologer that he will be buried alive, the emperor tries to cheat fate by murdering the nobility so that he can outlive them or at least transfer power to his brother Longinus, “likewise a monster of passion and ferocity” (Argument).42 The play turns on a stark opposition: “Either you are in power, or you are a slave, subject to power” (I.iv).43 As Zeno explains at the height of his fortune, “Private citizens may be governed by laws but kings by desire. What the prince wants, he gets” (I.v).44 Yet as an epileptic, he is subject to the frailties of the flesh: “One and the same law for all creatures. Nature exempts no one, not brute beasts, not even the king” (III.ii).45 Indeed, by the end of the tragedy, when he is besotted with drink, he will be addressed as a beast by one of his own subjects then buried alive (V.ix). As Benjamin would lead us to expect, almost every utterance in the play “exercises an immediate, palpable fatality over speaker and hearer”: it is an order, threat, promise, imprecation, prayer, or complaint.46 But the up-take of these speech acts changes. Drunk with power, the emperor can exclaim, “I swear by the waters of the Acheron, if I am ever lodged in a grave, the vault of the heavens will be shattered and come crashing down. I shall inter whole cities along with the homes of men; I shall smash whole kingdoms along with their populace. I shall throw all the elements into a massive heap which will revert to primeval chaos” (I.ii).47 Drunk and buried alive, he is reduced to counter-factual optatives (“If only the whole of creation would revert to chaos!”) and stifled pleas (“Air, air, give me air!, I’m suffocating”) (V.xi).48 The only resistance that most of the court can muster against the bloodlust of the king is ostentatious lamentation. A choir of orphaned children garbed in black appear periodically to make a “sepulchral wailing” (II.iii).49 Longinus seems to relish these affirmations of his own will to power. “Plead, wail, burst your guts with sobbing,” he taunts the virtuous counselor Pelagius, “Plague the gods with prayers. Break down the gates of heaven. Bombard the ears of the Thunderer. No god—even if he wanted—will

528   the oxford handbook of the baroque save you from me” (IV.v).50 Yet Longinus himself is not exempt from melancholy. Act II opens in his palace, where he and his attendants are garbed in black. “This black dress well suits the blackness of my soul,” he tells his lutenist: “Play music that’s gloomier than this robe of mine” (II.i.). “Meantime,” the stage directions inform us, “LONGINUS accompanies the music with facial expressions and gestures that reveal his melancholy mood.”51 This scene suggests that the entire play may be a melancholy projection. For it opens, in the style of Seneca, with the ghost of the deposed Basiliscus overturning all the imperial paraphernalia assembled on stage for the investiture of Longinus and observing that his former kingdom is the theater of Erebus. He summons up the ensuing action with the relish of a stage director: “Let passion pile high the victims of slaughter. Let the stars drip blood. Let the skiff of aged Charon groan under its burden of the shades of the dead. . . . Now let the stage grow thick with shadows and let dark veil the place” (I.i).52 As the stage grows gloomy, a graveyard appears with empty tombs marked with escutcheons and instruments of death. The next day will provide a corpse for every tomb. The ludic melancholy of this prologue persists in the action of the tragedy when Zeno, Longinus, and their opponents strive to outmaneuver each other with ballets de court (a progress of Mars and triumph of Bacchus) that are intended to be deadly traps disguised as witty allegories. These owe a debt to the inset masques of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies such as Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1587) and Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1620–1627). The play is replete with stage objects, but, as we would expect, the corpse is the ultimate emblematic property (OGTD 218). At the apparent high point of Zeno and Longinus’s fortune, the heads of ten of their victims are displayed on the city walls as the choir of orphans mourns, and eventually a corpse occupies each of the tombs laid ready in the prologue. Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600) and Calderón’s Il principe constante [The Constant Prince] (1629) modulate the forms of the Trauerspiel more masterfully and playfully. The former’s affinities with the Trauerspiel are apparent in the Hamlet’s mourning garb and melancholia; in the visitations of the ghost; in the atmosphere of court intrigue and lust; in the mousetrap play-within-a-play; in the graveyard scene, when Hamlet contemplates the skull of Yorick; and in the final duel with Laertes, when a trivial stage prop (a poisoned rapier) sends the prince to death.53 If Hamlet reveals one face of the Trauerspiel (preoccupied with tyranny, lust, and intrigue), Il principe constante explores the other (the face of tortured majesty). For once he declines to be ransomed at the cost of surrendering a Christian city to the Muslims, the Infante Don Fernando commences an inexorable journey of passive suffering until he is transformed into a corpse. In the play’s final stage action, the Portuguese ask the Muslims to return the relics of their constant prince in exchange for Fénix, the blooming captured daughter of the King of Fez: “Then send snow for crystals, January for this May, roses for these diamonds, and finally, an unhappy corpse for a divine image” (ll. 2736–2741).54 As Alban Forcione observes, the antithetical motifs that have structured the poetic world of El príncipe constante are momentarily suspended in “the revealing dissonance of an ecstatic summation.”55 In the midst of the request, the royal remains cease to resemble the snow of winter and the chill of January and become roses. Meanwhile the living beauty of Fénix—who is beset with

baroque tragedy   529 melancholy despite being a beauty surrounded by transient beauties—is hardened into diamonds and flattened to an icon. The tragedies of Shakespeare and Calderón display competing impulses toward the elemental (on the one hand) and the allegorical (on the other) (OGTD 228). But Baroque tragedy can no longer rest its faith in a Neoplatonic allegory that corresponds to divine thought or the occult sympathies of the universe.56 For by the seventeenth century, the scientific revolution had undermined the symbolic cosmos of the ancients, and emblem books had been printed in such profusion that the result was not a mastery of the book of Nature but a chaos of signs. Eventually, as Ernst Giehlow maintains in his classic study of hieroglyphs and the emblem tradition, “one and the same thing [could] just as easily signify a virtue as a vice, and therefore more or less anything.”57 The Trauerspiel, in Benjamin’s account, displays an attraction to the things of this world that is countered by a revulsion from history and nature as dealers of death. In its melancholy immersion, it surrounds itself with the ruins of history only to find these vile objects transforming themselves into allegories that—for a time—“fill out and deny the void in which they are represented” (OGTD 233). The affective resonance of the Trauerspiel is a product of this tug-of-war between things and significance.58

Regular Baroque Tragedy The name regular Baroque tragedy acknowledges that although the French stage in the early seventeenth century supported the “disorderly” plays of Alexandre Hardy and the self-consciously theatrical dramas of Jean Rotrou, both of which have struck some literary historians as characteristically Baroque,59 critics writing during the career of Pierre Corneille—including Jean Chapelain, the abbé d’Aubignac, and Corneille himself—began to distill a set of “rules” that although consonant with Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica were theoretically founded not on authority but on reason. If these rules pictured the playwright as a cool-headed technician, they also pre-supposed that the audience ought to become utterly absorbed by the violence of the passions re­presented on stage—that, in short, their reason should be disarmed by the very dramatic rules that reason and experience taught the playwright to follow.60 Therefore, by the time René Rapin published his 1674 Réflexions sur la Poètique d’Aristote [Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poetry]—the first commentary to take full account of René Descartes’s 1649 Traité des passions [Treatise of the Passions]—it seemed natural to him to translate the complex plot of Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos into a scripted affective response on the part of the audience: This flux and reflux of Indignation, and of Pity, this Revolution of Horrour and of tenderness, has such a wonderful Effect on the Minds of the Audience; all in this Piece moves with an Air so delicate and passionate, all is unravell’d with so much Art, the Suspensions manag’d with so much probability; there is made such a universal

530   the oxford handbook of the baroque Emotion of the Soul, by the Surprizes, Astonishments, Admirations . . . that it may not only be said, that never Subject has been better devised than this, but that never can be invented a better for Tragedy. (MRRA 114–115)

The peculiar pleasure that tragedy yields, according to Rapin, is precisely this arousal of the soul: “the Soul is Shaken, by Motions so Natural and so Humane, all the impressions it feels becom[e] Delightful; its Trouble pleases, and the Emotion it finds, is a kind of Charm to it” (MRRA 112). This is the critical climate in which Racine, at the apogee of his career, premiered his first and only tragedy at court during the 1674 Divertissements de Versailles celebrating the conquest of Franche-Comté.61 These fêtes commenced with a performance of Lully and Quinault’s tragédie en musique Alceste in the sumptuously decorated cour de Marbre and concluded on the sixth day with a performance of Racine’s Iphigénie in the Orangerie. The distinction between the fictional setting of the tragedy—the Greek army’s tents in Aulis—and its staging in the pleasure gardens of the Sun King must have been just the first of many Baroque contrasts that struck the distinguished spectators. Yet in his preface to Iphigénie, Racine praises not the taste of the court but the taste of his later Parisian audiences: “Taste in Paris turned out to be in line with that in Athens. The spectators of my play were touched by the same things which once moved to tears the most cultured people of Greece and which made people say that Euripides was the most tragic (τραγικώτατος) of the poets, that is to say that he was marvelously skilled in exciting compassion and terror, which are the real effects that tragedy should produce.”62 In his Epistle, Boileau amplifies the claim: “How you understand, Racine, to help an actor to astonish, to move, to ravish a spectator! Never did Iphigenia sacrificed in Aulis cost so many tears to assembled Greece, as were shed for la Champeslé in that role during the happy spectacle that unfolded before our eyes” (Epistle 7, ll. 1–6).63 Although Iphigenia in Aulis was one of Euripides’s few plays to be awarded first place at the Greater Dionysia, it did not escape subsequent criticism from Aristotle and his commentators. In their discussions of dramatic ēthos or manners, they frequently observe that Euripides’ Iphigenia does not conform to Aristotle’s advice that tragedies should concern someone who is not a paragon of virtue and justice and who falls because of some mistake (hamartia). The shift of a purely virtuous person’s fortune from good to bad, they observe, is not fearful or pitiable but morally shocking (Poetics 13.1542b28-53a7). Euripides’s Iphigenia also violates the rule of consistent manners. For in the climactic scene of Iphigenia in Aulis, the hapless girl, prompted by the prospect of death, sings an emotional lyric monody in which she laments her father’s abandonment of her (ll. 1283–1335). The meter shifts to trochaic tetrameters as Achilles enters, and he and Clytemnestra consider how to save her life. Then Iphigenia, whose mind has been working silently to untie the knot, interrupts them in mid line to sing a triumphal song expressing her determination to die gloriously as a willing victim for the liberty of Greece (ll. 1475–1499).64 Aristotle faults this scene because it violates his principle that the manners of persons should be consistent—or at least, consistently inconsistent (Poetics 15.1454a16-b7). In order to emend these “faults” in Euripides’s tragedy, Racine makes Agamemnon—a doting father who seeks the death of his daughter, a king of

baroque tragedy   531 kings whose every initiative is blunted, a man who is consistently inconsistent—the dramatic center of his play. Yet in order to avoid even the suspicion that Iphigénie might contradict herself, he has her announce her willingness to die as soon as she learns that she is intended for the altar (ll. 1174–1176/1170–1172). This proleptic diffusion of external conflict only redoubles the force of Agamemnon’s internal agon. Whereas Aristophanes could poke fun at Euripides’s indecisive dramatis personae—“Forward now, my passionate soul. Here’s the starting line. You hesitate, do you? Drink your dose of Euripides down and take off!” (Acharnians ll. 483–486)—it is precisely such passionate indecision that wins Racine’s admiration.65 It is unclear that Agamemnon performs a single action in the play that would meet the standard for a “deed” set by Idealist critics of tragedy: an action entailing volition, performance, and reflection. Or if he does, he hastens so quickly to reverse each deed that he appears more like the dead center of a cyclone than a force with direction. Having summoned Iphigénie to Aulis, he countermands the summons. He then wavers when Ulysse restates the case for sacrifice. Upon the arrival of Iphigénie and her mother, he lies and stalls for time. After arguing with Achille, he holds his cards close to his chest, but he eventually opts to send mother and daughter back to Mycenae and to block the marriage. When that ruse is frustrated, he falls in with the demands of the army that his daughter be sacrificed. Since she is instead spared, he acquiesces in the very marriage he has just debarred. The reason Racine’ s contemporaries could applaud this ineffectual agent at the center of a tragedy is that he is an effective sounding board for the passions. This is the context in which Andreas Friz, an early eighteenth-century Jesuit critic, could reduce Iphigénie to a gallery of monuments to the passions that should plunge the audience, alternately, into states of pity or terror.66 It is possible that Racine saw in Aristotle’s criticism of the incidents leading to the departure of the Greek fleet from Aulis another fault with Euripides’s conception: that the denouement of his play did not arise from the manners of his persons.67 However that may be, he felt certain that such a denouement could no longer pass the test of vraisemblence: “How could I possibly have succeeded in bringing my tragedy to an end with the help of a goddess and stage machinery, and by a metamorphosis that might have found some credence in Euripides’ days, but which would be too absurd and too incredible in ours?” Racine’s solution is to introduce to the Greek camp another princess, the unacknowledged daughter of Hélène and Thésée. Sure of her high birth, uncertain of her true name or parentage, resigned to being “the solitary victim” (l. 1126), this alterIphigénie, who goes by the name of Ériphyle, has been warned that the discovery of her identity will mean her death—a prognostication that her confidante assures her must be read allegorically.68 If Agamemnon’s daughter is full of sweetness and light (capable of nothing worse than jealousy in affairs of the heart), Ériphyle is a creature of darkness— driven by destructive and libidinous impulses that confuse violence and sex, self and other. Racine’s reliance on clair-obscur effects is nowhere more obvious than in the love triangle that he creates by setting Iphigénie on one side of Achille and the captured and dispossessed Ériphyle on the other. Only after Ériphyle has delivered Agamemnon’s daughter up to the altar and stands in anticipation of her rival’s immolation does Calchas makes his remarkable declaration: there is another princess present who is of the blood

532   the oxford handbook of the baroque of Hélène, and her birth name is also Iphigénie. Anticipating the inevitable, Ériphyle grabs the sacrificial knife and plunges it into her breast, thus confusing sex and violence, self-loathing and hatred of others one last time. Thus recognition and reversal coincide, just as they ought. Indeed, as George Forestier notes, the peripety is like that of the lost Lynceus, which Aristotle discusses: “Reversal, as indicated, is a complete swing in the direction of the action. . . In Lynceus, the one person is led off to die, while Danaus follows to kill him; yet it comes about that the latter’s death and the former’s rescue result from the chain of events” (Poetics 11.1452a22-9).69 This is the effect that Racine has striven for: a resolution of the plot that results from the chain of events and issues from the manners of his persons—yet is nevertheless a coup de théâtre that transforms Iphigénie into another of Aristotle’s species of tragedy: the complex ethical tragedy, in which the virtuous are eventually relieved of suffering. “The great Painters only are capable of a great design in their drafts, such as Raphael, a Julius Romanus, a Poussin,” says Rapin, and only great Poets are capable of a great Subject in their Poetry. An indifferent Wit may form a vast design in his Imagination, but it must be an extraordinary Genius that can work this design, and fashion it according to justness and proportion. For, ’tis necessary that the same Spirit reign throughout, that all contribute to the same end, and that all the parts bear a secret relation to each other, all depend on this relation and alliance; and this general design is nothing else but the Form which a poet gives to his Work.  (MRRA 26–27)

The fact that Rapin can invoke three painters in one breath whom more recent art historians might differentiate as High Renaissance, Mannerist, and either Baroque or Classicist should redouble our consciousness that the Baroque is a construct that was not recognized in its day. But what needs to be stressed is the way Racine epitomizes the design of his entire tragedy in Ulysse’s final recit. Racine was no doubt conscious that d’Aubignac had produced an ecphrasis of Timanthes of Cythnus’s famous portrayal of the sacrifice of Iphigenia in the analysis of the unity of action that he included in his 1657 La pratique du théâtre [The Whole Art of the Stage].70 Racine produces a rhetorical narrative of such vividness that it not only revises and surpasses d’Aubignac’s prose description, it rivals the arts of painting and opera themselves.71 “I am myself in this glad moment filled/With sacred horror, joy, and ecstasy,” Ulysse reports (ll. 1731–1732/1727–1728).72 He then paints the scene. Achilles is on the brink of violence against the entire Greek army. Then Calchas, wild-eyed and with hair erect, inserts himself between the contending sides to explain the oracle and the secret identity of Ériphyle. She does not wait to act: Frantic, she rushes to the altar, grasps The sacred knife, plunges it in her breast. Hardly has the blood flown, reddening the earth, Than the gods loose the thunder on the shrine. The winds furrow the air auspiciously, And the sea answers with a muffled roar. The shore far off resounds, whitening with foam.

baroque tragedy   533 Unlit by hand, the pyre bursts into flame. The heavens open, and the lightning’s flash Spreads sacred awe that reassures us all. *** Alone, Your daughter weeps over her enemy. (ll. 1775–1784, 1789–1790/1771–1780, 1785–1786)73

Thunder, winds, the roaring sea, and a leaping pyre—all these effects had been staged by Jean Rotrou in his Iphigénie of 1640, and many similar ones had been realized in Alceste on the opening night of the 1674 fêtes. But Racine insists that no stage spectacle, no matter how costly or elaborate, can match the enargeia of his verse. If the Baroque “establishes a total unity or a unity of the art,” as Deleuze observes, “it does so first of all in extension, each art tending to be prolonged and even to be prolonged into the next art.”74 It seems appropriate that Boileau should have published his Traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours [Treatise on the Sublime or Marvelous in Discourse] in 1674, for Racine’s final tableau demonstrates that the sublime is not a matter of lofty style per se, but “something extraordinary and marvellous that strikes us in a Discourse, and makes it elevate, ravish, and transport us.”75 With Boileau’s valorization of the sublime, French criticism recovered a vocabulary that could appreciate some of the very excesses and obscurities that had been celebrated by an earlier criticism that Wölfflin associates with the Roman Baroque: quello che non è sia, furia, stupore, terribilità.76

Conclusion Baroque tragedy is not easily distinguished from Renaissance tragedy, but it displays a stronger taste for grandeur, a greater reliance on strong contrasts of light and dark, a subordination of the parts to a unified statement, and a more evident intent to overwhelm. It lacks the simplicity of its Attic exemplars or its Neoclassical successors—a theme that runs through Pierre Brumoy’s comparison of Euripides and Racine in his 1730 Théâtre des Grecs. The manners of its persons can descend to the bestial, especially in Senecan-inspired court intrigues, but they more often belong to the decorous culture of Europe’s seventeenthcentury courts. That very refinement makes it difficult for Baroque tragedy to achieve the “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” that J. J. Winckelmann taught his later eighteenthcentury readers to find in Attic art.77 Even when it “maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors,” it rarely condones rebellion because it is, for the most part, a theatrical form countenanced by monarchs and princes of the church.78 (Samson Agonistes is an exception that proves the rule.) It is more likely to extol regal prerogative, the clemency of princes, the magnanimity of nobles, and the ecstatic submission of their subjects—whether to God or to his ministers on Earth—than it is to cultivate the inflexible masculine autonomy so valued by a later generation of German Idealist critics

534   the oxford handbook of the baroque who were seeking their own liberation in an as-yet-unrealized nation-state. Yet it opens a remarkable window onto the passions of the human soul, perhaps never more so than when those passions are at their most abject. And it makes us intensely aware that human experience assumes a form only through the shaping power of will, whether divine or human.

Notes 1. For synoptic accounts of the era that stress one or more of these cultural developments, see Carl J. Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque, 1610–1660 (New York: Harper, 1952); Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance & the Origin of Modern Art (New York: Knopf, 1965), Part 1; Germain Bazin, The Baroque: Principles, Styles, Modes, Themes, trans. Pat Wardroper (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968); and Jean-Claude Vuillemin, Épistémè baroque: Le mot et la chose (Paris: Hermann, 2013). 2. One need only think of Calderón della Barca’s 1635 La vida es sueño [Life Is a Dream], in which the distinction between living and dreaming is so thoroughly erased that we can only conclude that good deeds are never wasted, even in dreams; or of Jean Routrou’s 1645 Le Véritable St. Genest [The True St. Genesius], in which a Roman actor playing the role of a Christian is himself converted and dies a martyr. 3. For some of these points, see Peter Davidson, The Universal Baroque (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007), 12–21. 4. Benedetto Croce, Storia della età barocca in Italia: pensiero-poesia e letteratura vita morale (Bari, Italy: G. Laterza, 1929), 23. Where no translator is named, translations are my own. For histories of the Baroque as a term, see René Wellek, “The Concept of the Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5, no. 2 (1946): 77–109; and Helen Hills, “The Baroque: The Grit in the Oyster of Art History,” in Rethinking the Baroque, ed. Helen Hills (London: Ashgate, 2011), 11–36. 5. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 33. 6. For this approach, see Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 1. 7. René Rapin, Reflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote [1674], trans. Thomas Rymer as Monsieur Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie [1674] (London, 1694), 112; henceforth cited parenthetically as MRRA. 8. Quotations are from Dryden, Parallel, of Painting and Poetry (1695) in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–1989), 20: 53. For examples of artists relying on rhetorical or poetic treatises, see David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Nicolas Poussin, Lettres et propos sur l’art, ed. Anthony Blunt (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 167–174. 9. Peter Murray, “Introduction,” in Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961); henceforth cited parenthetically as RB. 10. Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 15; henceforth cited parenthetically as DHP. 11. See Blair Hoxby, “Passions,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 556–586. 12. His source in each instance is Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, 2.7–10.

baroque tragedy   535 13. For a fine reading that sees the play falling between Mannerism and the Baroque, see Marco Ariani, Tra classicismo e manierismo: il teatro tragico del cinquento (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1974), chapter 5. For a thorough, more recent account of the play, see Stefano Verdino, Il Re Torrismondo e altro (Allesandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2007). 14. The setting justifies a comparison to Hamlet in Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), chapter 7. 15. King Torrismondo, dual language edition, trans. Maria Pastore Passaro (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997): “Bramo e pavento,/no ‘l nego; ma so ben que ch’i’ desio;/ quel che tema, io non so. Temo ombre e sogni,/ed antichi prodigi e novi mostri,/promesse antiche e nove, anzi minacce/di fortuna, del ciel, del fato averso,/di stelle congiurate; e temo, ahi lassa,/un non so che d’infausto o pur d’orrendo/ch’à me confonde un mio pensier dolente,/lo qual mi sveglia e mi perturba e m’ange/la notte e ’l giorno.” 16. On this Idealist tradition, see Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Hoxby, What Was Tragedy? chapter 1. 17. “Non so ch’in terra sia tranquillo stato/o pacifico sì, che no ‘l perturbi/o speranza o timore o gioia o doglia;/né grandezza sì ferma, o nel suo merto/fondata o nel favor d’alta fortuna,/ che l’inconstante non atterri o crolli/o non minacci.” 18. “O mio più che fratello e più ch’amato.” 19. “E muto e mesto,/de la pietate de la l’orror confuso.” 20. “Perdere ancora il cielo il sol devrebbe,/e ’l sole i raggi, e la sua luce il giorno,/e per pietà celar l’oscura notte/il fallo altrui co ’l tenebroso manto;/perdere il mare i lidi, e l’alte sponde/gli ondosi fiumi, e ricoprir la terra/ingrata, or che non sente e non conosce/il danno proprio e non s’adira e sterpe/faggi, orni, pini, cerri, antiche, querce,/alti sepolcri, e d’infelice morte/dolente e mesto albergo, o pur non crolla/questa gran reggia e le superbe torri,/e non percote i monti a’ duri monti,/e non rompe i lor gioghi, e i gravi sassi/da l’aspre rupi non trabocca al fondo,/e nel suo grembo alta ruina involve/di mete, di colossi e di colonne,/perché sia non angusta e ’ndegna tomba;/e da valli e da selve e da spelunche/ con spaventose voci alto non mugge,/per far l’essequie con l’estremo pianto,/che darà al mondo ancor perpetuo affanno.” 21. “con funebre e nobil pompa.” 22. “Che più si spera o che s’attende omai?/Dopo trionfo e palma,/sol qui restano a l’alma/lutto e lamento e lagrimosi lai./Che più giova amicizia o giova amore?/Ahi lagrime, ahi dolore!” 23. Torquato Hathaway, Del giudizio sovra la Gerusalemme di Torquato in Opere, ed. Giovanni Rossi (Pisa, Italy: Pisa Capurro, 1823), 12: 345, translated in Baxter Hathaway The Age of Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 262. For more on Tasso’s evolving engagement with the notion of catharsis, see Verdino, Il Re Torrismondo, 32–36. 24. Tasso, Opere, 12: 341, translated in Hathaway, Age of Criticism, 260. 25. John Milton, “Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which Is Called Tragedy.” All quotations are from The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007). On Milton’s debts to Tasso, see F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), chapter 9. 26. For more on the play’s reception history, see Verdino, Il Re Torrismondo e altro, chapter 7; and Enricho Zucchi, “Dall tragedia all’epica e ritorno: Olindo e Sofronio, il drama eroico di Corneille e il recupero del Torrismondo nella critica teatrale primo-settecentesca,” in La

536   the oxford handbook of the baroque fortuna del Tasso eroico tra Sei e Settecento, ed. Trancredi Artico and Enrico Zucchi (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2017), 69–83. 27. Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, chapter 3. 28. The most sustained attempt to read Samson as a Baroque play is Roy Daniells, Milton, Mannerism, and the Baroque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), chapter 13. Although the comparison with Bernini’s S. Andrea al Quirinale is unpersuasive, Daniells makes other perceptive observations. Wylie Sypher also endorses such comparisons in Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400–1700 [1955] (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978), at 182; his reading appears at 227–234. 29. Michael F. Krouse, Milton’s Samson and the Christian Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949). 30. Barbara  K.  Lewalski, “Samson Agonistes and the ‘Tragedy’ of the Apocalypse,” PMLA 85 (1970): 1050–1062. 31. Daniells, Milton, Mannerism, and Baroque, 213–214. 32. Bernardo Tasso, Ragionamento della poetica, in Delle lettere di M. Bernardo Tasso (Padua, 1733–1751), 2: 533. 33. Teatro di Torquato Tasso, ed. Angelo Solerti (Bologna, 1895), 199; J. W. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), 346–347. 34. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 60; henceforth cited parenthetically as OGTD. 35. For Benjamin’s context, see Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 36. Hall Bjornstad, “‘Giving Voice to the Feeling of His Age’: Benjamin, Pascal, and the Trauerspiel of the King without Diversion,” Yale French Studies 124 (2013): 23–35. 37. For another account of tyrants in tragedy, see Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Theater (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 38. George Steiner, “Introduction,” in Benjamin, OGTD, 16–17. 39. On Simons, see William  H.  McCabe, An Introduction to Jesuit Theater (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Resources, 1983); James A. Parente Jr., “Tyranny and Revolution on the Baroque Stage: The Dramas of Joseph Simons,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 32 (1983): 309–324; Jan Bloemendal, “Neo-Latin Drama in the Low Countries,” in Neo-Latin Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jan Bloemendal and Howard  B.  Norland (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 293–364. 40. James A. Parente, Religious Drama and the Humanist Tradition: Christian Theater in the Germany and in the Netherlands, 1500–1680 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 181–185. 41. See Caesar Baronius, Annales Ecclesistici (Antwerp, 1658), 6: 462–463 [ad 490]. 42. Translations are from Zeno, trans. Marcus A. Haworth, in Jesuit Theater Englished: Five Tragedies of Joseph Simons, ed. Louis  J.  Oldani and Philip  C.  Fischer (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1989), though small changes have been made. The Latin is quoted from Zeno, Tragoedia (Rome, 1648): “homo luxuria atque immanitate infamis”; “libidinis item, & feritatis portento.” 43. “Aut imperas, aut servus Imperium subis.” 44. “Iura privatos regant,/Libido Reges. Quà volet Princeps, eat.” 45. “Lex una cunctis; bruta nec Rege eximit/Natura.” 46. Steiner, Introduction, in Benjamin, OGTD, 20.

baroque tragedy   537 47. “Testor Acherontis vada,/Me si sepulchrum condat, evulsus simul/Trahet ruinam Mundus, Infodiam solo/Cum domibus Vrbes. Regna cum Populis ruam./Revocabo priscum mole congesta Chaos.” 48. “vetustum cuncta si repetant chaos!”; “Aura, aura, anhelos aura destituit sinus.” 49. “feralem sonum.” 50. “Precare, plora, rumpe singultu latus,/Superos fatiga; frange Cœlituum fores;/Aures Tonantis tunde. Te nullus mihi/(Fac velle) Deus eripiet.” 51. “Benè est. Nigresco. Concolor menti toga est . . . . Hac nigriores veste fac plectri sonos”; “interim Longinus mæsti animi signa vultu, gestuque prosequitur.” 52. “aggerat caedes furor/Spargantur astra sanguine; umbrarum gemat /Sub onere vasto cymbo Tartarei senis /. . . . Iam scena noctem denset, ac furuus locum /Obuelet horror.” 53. For a recent account of Hamlet as a rejection of humanist pieties, see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 54. Calderón, El principe constante, ed. Enrica Cancelliere (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2000): “Envía, pues, /la nieve por los cristales, /el enero por los mayos, /las rosas por los dimantes, /y al fin, un muerto infelice /por una divina imagen.” 55. Alban K. Forcione, Majesty and Humanity: Kings and Their Doubles in the Political Drama of the Spanish Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 199. 56. On the shifting sands of allegory, see Blair Hoxby, “Allegorical Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 191–208. 57. Karl Giehlow, The Humanist Interpretation of Hieroglyphs in the Allegorical Studies of the Renaissance: With a Focus on the Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I, trans. Robin Raybould (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2015), quoted in Benjamin, OGTD, 174. 58. For an alternative interpretation, see Blair Hoxby, “The Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama: What Benjamin Got Wrong,” in Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda Machosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 87–116. 59. See Jean Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et le paon (Paris: Librarie José Corti, 1954); Jean-Claude Vuillemin, Baroquisme et théâtralité: Le théâtre de Jean Rotrou (Paris: Biblio 17, 1994); and Mary Ann Frese Witt, Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). 60. See John Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), chapters 1–2; and Georges Forestier, Passions tragiques e règles classiques (Paris: PUF, 2003). Sypher, Four Stages, 274–296, describes Racine as a “late baroque” writer who should be read in company with Descartes and Poussin. A more foundational study of Racine’s relationship to the Baroque is Philip Butler, Classicisme et baroque dans l’œuvre de Racine (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1959). 61. On the premiere of Iphigénie, see the “Notice” in Jean Racine, Œuvres complètes I: ThéâtrePoésie, ed. G. Forestier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); all French quotations and line references refer to this edition. Also see Benoît Bolduc, “Iphigénie: de la vaine éloquence à l’artifice efficace,” in Racine et/ou le classicisme, ed. Ronald W. Tobin (Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 2001), 93–112; and Larry Norman, “Playing with Fire: Iphigenia in Versailles,” in Céremonies et ritualisations, ed. D. Wetself (Berlin: Weidler-Verlag, 2003), 267–279. 62. All English translations are from Jean Racine, Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah, trans. John Cairncross (London: Penguin, 1963).

538   the oxford handbook of the baroque 63. Nicolas Boileau, Œuvres complètes, ed F. Escal, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1966): “Que tu sais bien, Racine, à l’aide d’un acteur, /Emouvoir, étonner, ravir un spectateur! /Jamais Iphigénie, en Aulide immolée, /N’a coûté tant de pleurs à la Grèce assemblée, / Que dans l’hereux spectacle à nos yeux étalé /En a fait sous son nom verser la Champmêlé?” 64. Iphigenia’s change of mind continues to provoke debate. See Bernard Knox, Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 243–244; and Jasper Griffin, “Characterization in Euripides: Hippolytus and Iphigenia in Aulis,” in Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, ed. Christopher Pelling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 128–149. 65. Aristophanes, trans. Benjamin Bickley Rogers, 3 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 66. Nienke Tjoelker, ed. Andrea Friz’s Letter on Tragedies (c. 1741–1744): An EighteenthCentury Jesuit Contribution to Theatre Poetics (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 246–248. The passions performed are: Agamemnon’s paternal love (I.i), Agamemnon’s sorrow (I.iii), Agamemnon’s paternal love (I.iii), Agamemnon’s sorrow (I.v), Ériphyle’s sorrow (II.1), Ériphyle’s love (II.i), Agamemnon’s sorrow (II.ii), Iphigénie’s jealousy (II.v), Clytemnestre’s sorrow (III.v), Achille’s anger (III.vi), Ériphyle’s jealousy (III.viii), Achille’s anger (IV.vi), Clytemnestre’s anger’s (IV.iv), Agamemnon’s sorrow (IV.viii), Achille and Iphigénie’s mutual love (V.ii), and Clytemnestre’s fury (V.iv). The affects that Iphigénie moves in the audience are distinct. The counsel that Agamemnon should sacrifice his daughter; the jealousy of the furious Ériphyle, who seeks to destroy her rival; the daughter of Clytemnestre, led without hope to the altar; the forceful entry of Achille into the temple; and the death of Ériphyle all inspire terror. The distress that Agamemnon’s paternal love causes him, the desperate grief of the mother, and the readiness of the daughter to sacrifice herself all arouse pity. 67. See Poetics 15.1454a28-b7, with the discussion in Gerald  F.  Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 68. “la seule infortunée.” 69. Forestier, “Notice,” 1570. The translation from Aristotle follows Stephen Halliwell’s translation of The Poetics of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 70. D’Aubignace, La pratique du théâtre [1657], ed. Hélène Baby (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2001), 137–140. 7 1. See Christian Delmas, Mythologie et Mythe dans le théâtre français, 1650–1676 (Geneva: Droz, 1985), 238–240, for the play’s relationship to tragédies en machines. 72. “Vous m’en voyez moi-même en cet heureux moment /Saisi d’horreur, de joie, et de ravissement.” 73. “Furieuse elle vole, et sur l’autel prochain /Prend le sacré couteau, le plonge dans son sein. /À peine son sang coule et fait rougir la terre; /Les Dieux font sur l’Autel entendre le tonnerre, /Les Vents agitent l’air d’heureux frémissements, /Et la Mer leur répond par ses mugissements. /La Rive au loin gémit blanchissante d’écume. /La flamme du Bûcher d’elle-même s’allume. /Le Ciel brille d’éclairs, s’entr’ouvre, et parmi nous /Jette une sainte horreur, qui nous rassure tous. /. . . La seule Iphigénie /Dans ce commun bonheur pleure son Ennemie.” 74. Deleuze, The Fold, 123. 75. Nicholas Boileau, The Works of Monsieur Boileau Despreaux, 3 vols. (London, 1714), 2: 7. Also see Nicolas Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2002); and Jules Brody, Boileau and Longinus (Geneva: Droz, 1958).

baroque tragedy   539 76. Summers, Michelangelo. 77. Translation based on J. J. Winckelmann, Winckelmann: Writings on Art, ed. David Irwin (London: Phaidon, 1972), 72. 78. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry [1595], ed. Forrest  G.  Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 45.

Further Reading Ariani, Marco. Tra classicismo e manierismo: Il teatro tragico del cinquento. Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1974. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1998. Bloemendal, Jan, and Howard B. Norland, eds. Neo-Latin Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Bloemendal, Jan and Nigel Smith, eds. Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Butler, Philip. Classicisme et baroque dans l’œuvre de Racine. Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1959. Daniells, Roy. Milton, Mannerism, and the Baroque. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963. Delmas, Christian. Mythologie et Mythe dans le théâtre français, 1650–1676. Geneva: Droz, 1985. Forcione, Alban K. Majesty and Humanity: Kings and Their Doubles in the Political Drama of the Spanish Golden Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Forestier, Georges. Passions tragiques e règles classiques. Paris: PUF, 2003. Hathaway, Baxter. The Age of Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962. Hoxby, Blair. “Passions.” In Early Modern Theatricality. Edited by Henry S. Turner, 556–586. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hoxby, Blair. “The Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama: What Benjamin Got Wrong.” In Thinking Allegory Otherwise. Edited by Brenda Machosky, 87–116. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Hoxby, Blair. What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Lyons, John D. Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999. McCabe, William H. An Introduction to Jesuit Theater. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Resources, 1983. Newman, Jane  O. Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and Baroque. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Parente, James A. Jr. Religious Drama and the Humanist Tradition: Christian Theater in the Germany and in the Netherlands, 1500–1680. Leiden: Brill, 1987. Parente, James A. Jr. “Tyranny and Revolution on the Baroque Stage: The Dramas of Joseph Simons.” Humanistica Lovaniensia 32 (1983): 309–24. Sypher, Wylie. Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400–1700. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978. Nienke, Tjoelker, ed. Andrea Friz’s Letter on Tragedies (ca. 1741–1744): An Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Contribution to Theatre Poetics. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Verdino, Stefano. Il Re Torrismondo e altro. Allessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2007. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance and Baroque. Trans. Kathrin Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961.

chapter 24

The Ba roqu e as a Liter a ry Concept Katherine Ibbett and Anna More

The Baroque as a Literary Concept The Baroque has often been “understood as a site inhabited by freaks,” writes Tim Hampton in the introduction to his Baroque Topographies.1 If Hampton’s 1991 volume explored baroque spatiality, its attention to borders, and what lies beyond them, such spatiality inevitably produces an uncomfortable relation to the nation-state. Hampton himself has more recently written of the baroque as a form of mediation common to “the emergence of the broader space of a new international order.”2 The literary baroque, that is, has emerged lately as a site inhabited by foreigners or as a counter-discourse of the colonized; it is turned to chiefly by those seeking to erode traditional national literary histories. This reshuffling of national order has caused critics attached to national histories to shun more expansive concepts of the baroque, even as those looking to disrupt such narratives embrace the same: the Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant, for example, draws on the historical baroque’s aesthetic upheavals as a way to figure “the upheavals of the world.”3 Another Caribbean author, José Lezama Lima, boldly claimed that the Latin American baroque was a “counter-conquest” that upended the colonial relationship to Spain and Portugal.4 Seen through the lens of these two authors, then, the baroque is entangled in the legacy of seventeenth-century globalism. Like the misshapen pearl (barrueco) that—in one widely accepted etymology— originated the term, the value of the baroque appears to be its ability to recall, many times in monstrously overwrought materialism, that regional traditions are always forged within global geopolitics. For theoretically oriented readers, the term “baroque” as indicator of a certain style or mode serves a range of functions in the twenty-first century, casting new light on ­visuality, on intermediality, or on the digital, via a neobaroque often inspired by Gilles Deleuze more than by the seventeenth century.5 Christopher Johnson writes that ­ id-20thc, the term baroque acquires so many, often contradictory meanings “by the m

the baroque as a literary concept   541 that it risks losing all methodological and conceptual value.”6 Yet this confusion also opened up new heuristic territories: for many, the term baroque is less a firm definition and more akin to what Deleuze has described as an “operative characteristic” rather than an “essence.”7 Notably, none of these authors restrict the baroque to literary studies; indeed, one of the hallmarks of the twentieth-century emergence of the baroque as a concept was its ability to traverse disciplines and media. Yet the twin observations that the baroque denotes deviance, monstrosity or distortion and that baroque expression can fruitfully contribute to geopolitical dialogue also mark specifically literary studies. This general pattern does not mean that the appearance of the baroque in literary studies has been harmonious or uniform across national literary and academic traditions. The truest account of the baroque as a literary concept would best unfurl, noisily, in many languages all at once, with each borrowing back and forth from each other. In what follows we want to insist on this comparative, sometimes explicitly internationalist character of literary studies that employ the term “baroque” as a generative disrupter by setting forth two case studies, one Francophone, the other Latin American.8 If the usefulness of the term “baroque” as a literary concept has been fiercely contested or simply ignored, that is in part because the term has always been understood as an interloper; the response to the concept pivots on a culture’s consideration of outside influences. From its beginnings as a European concept, the literary baroque was brought in from elsewhere. It was Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque (Renaissance und Barock, 1888), which first applied to literature a term usually applied to visual arts and conceived it as encompassing both formal and ideological concerns. Wölfflin’s relation between form and ideology has been taken up by different traditions of literary scholarship, which have embraced or rejected or hybridized the baroque as either a historical or stylistic label. For Eugenio d’Ors in 1936, the baroque was a cultural constant, even as he understood it to be embedded within a particular cluster of historical situations. René Wellek’s 1946 essay, giving an inventory of approaches to date, argued for it as a periodconcept with stylistic elements.9 Jane Newman suggests that turn-of-the-century arguments about the baroque often “rooted questions of style in specific cultural sites and in nations above all.”10 Yet scholars of the baroque also came to look beyond the nation: René Wellek launches his immediately post-war investigation by insisting “all students of English will realize that the term ‘baroque’ in literature is a recent importation from the continent of Europe.”11 In Wellek’s writing, central to a new American stylistics, “Europe” suddenly emerges from the war to appear uncomplicatedly whole, something to look back at: Newman describes Wellek’s project as something like Auerbach’s Mimesis of the same year, an attempt “to create an integral Europe out of the shards of the national civilization” that both Wellek and Auerbach, as central European exiles, had had to leave behind.12 In such a way the baroque’s borrowedness, its status as iterable import, allows us to read the flexibility of homegrown literary or scholarly cultures with regard to foreign others, whether they be imagined as unitary regional entities such as “Europe” or as ambivalent sources of cultural traditions, imported in the wake of colonial conquest.

542   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Even though the term “baroque” often delineates regional or national styles, the concept has enabled a comparative work thinking beyond national literary tradition, interrogating the political stakes of such a tradition itself. In this sense, it is worth noting that the geography of Wellek’s groundbreaking essay now appears remarkably provincial. His gaze is focused almost entirely to the European literary tradition, although he does comment briefly on US literary scholarship at the very end of his detailed survey. The Americas that appear are thus only the fledgling Puritan colonies, not the Spanish colonies with their already established regional baroque to the south. Undoubtedly Wellek only reproduces the nationalist myopia of his sources. Yet for this reason it is fittingly ironic that soon after the appearance of his essay the baroque would become the favored term by Latin American scholars attempting to understand the genealogy of their own relationship to the European order. If aspects of Wellek’s essay now appear dated, its value continues to lie as much in its honest delineation of limits as in the breadth of its literary topography. The lacunae in the essay, and especially the most glaring absence of the Iberian Americas, point out the fact that the baroque as a term has always pushed beyond boundaries and balanced order even as its excessive visual splendor inevitably creates blindspots and subcurrents.13 While valiant, Wellek’s survey has all the landmarks of an impossible attempt to shoehorn the use of the baroque into an order or, what is the same, to discover a hidden order under simultaneous occurrences. As if to flaunt this neat package, in the next two decades Latin American critics became the staunchest defenders of the term. But once lodged in American territory, the baroque itself mutated, as the moniker “neobaroque” would eventually acknowledge. Even as it promoted the idea that the term could functionally categorize cultural forms, the Latin American baroque also aspired to become all-encompassing, a term that could account for a regional essence. This hegemonic impulse, all the more ironic as it was initiated as a counter-imperial strategy, has generated its own backlash in a heated debate over the relationship between the baroque and Latin American regionalism. In this way, the expansiveness of the baroque can topple in on itself, producing melancholic lethargy or attempts to control its unbounded excess. In one version, best expressed by Walter Benjamin, baroque movement can easily become stalled.14 But even in this standstill, the baroque is exquisite in its detail and surprising in its combinations, able to disrupt and dislodge classical forms. In accordance with this movement, and true to its multidisciplinary genealogy, the baroque as a literary concept has never been content to remain solely focused on language. In traditional literary histories, the term often appears dispensable or descriptive of a period style, the equivalent of any other. As a more generative literary concept, its greatest boon appears to be its ability to tie the language arts into greater contexts, whether these be political, artistic, or ideological. And as opposed to period styles that seem to seek stability, the baroque has most often been understood to be a style that produces, or expresses, contextual crises. The baroque thus, inherently, creates the possibility of critique of tradition, including periodization itself. Like the emblems at the center of much baroque scholarship, and particularly

the baroque as a literary concept   543 the well-known icon of the two-faced Janus, the literary baroque constantly folds back upon traditions even as it looks beyond them.

A Francophone Baroque? The Case of Jean Rousset (Switzerland, 1910–2002) In 1946 Wellek’s review of the term “baroque” across various European traditions noted firmly that France “almost completely refused to adopt the term.”15 The conditions of this refusal were significant. The literary criticism of a Third Republic reeling from the 1870 defeat by Prussia had placed a certain reading of the seventeenth century at the heart of a pedagogical framing of French values and French style. In this reading, a “regular” style was discerned in writers ranging from tragedians to sermon writers, and this style was dubbed classical. The vigorously nationalist claiming of this French norm made space, even before the term “baroque” came into vogue, for something outside itself, brooding offstage. This non-classical baroque, functioning chiefly as an “esprit de contradiction,” is central to many French discussions of literary history, in which the baroque appears only as classicism’s shadow.16 Classicism has also fought a rearguard action, though: Marc Fumaroli has on multiple occasions sought to turn away from the terminology of the baroque by using instead the rhetorical descriptors Asianism and Atticism, terms he sees, in typically charged language, as “more simple and more natural.”17 In a much-cited introduction to a 1980 reissue of Tapié’s 1957 Baroque and Classicism (Baroque et classicisme), Fumaroli further insists on the sentimental imprecision of the term “baroque” as well as on its problematic status as an invasive German import, “inflated with nationalist ressentiment.”18 Fumaroli’s use of this nationalistic language is telling. It took another European war for the term “baroque” to stake its claim to a different sort of French style; and it took an outsider, the Swiss critic Jean Rousset, to set it out with lasting effect. But where French classicism was born from the Franco-Prussian war, Rousset’s baroque responds to the flaying of Europe in World War II. Rousset’s baroque is, from its earliest telling, a wartime love story. He begins his influential The Literature of the Baroque Age in France (La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 1953) with an account of its affective origins: “At the distant origin of this essay, there was a sort of love at first sight for the ornamental and decorative fantasies of the Dresden Zwinger and the marvelous ensemble of facades and belltowers that dominated the great curve of the Elbe river.”19 This “inclination” (already a romantically charged term for the writing of the period Rousset is studying) did not, he reports, diminish; it was instead strengthened by the sight of southern German churches and became a “durable love” in Bernini’s Rome. This enthralling baroque provides the occasion to fall in love again with a Europe devastated by the

544   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque war, and in particular with Germany and Italy. Where Maravall would, in 1976, seek to ground the concept of the baroque in the totality of a particular historical situation in order to eschew the question of his own personal taste, Rousset lets that taste, that love, allow him to trace a whole history of forms, and perhaps because of that love his version of the baroque is richly affective, a question of mood as much as style.20 But Rousset’s primal scene for the baroque is not only architectural; he also accounts for the shock in France of the essay by Eugenio d’Ors, taking care to note the name of its translator, Agathe Rouardt-Valéry—the daughter of poet and philosopher Paul Valéry. The reception and transmission of the foreign baroque thus makes room for itself within a more familiarly French tradition. Accounting for France’s particularity—both in its history and its scholarly conversations—came to define Rousset’s career, yet his account of France’s place in the baroque returns continually to the idea of a cross-European ­conversation. This is criticism as diplomacy. In Rousset’s reading, the baroque runs roughly from 1580 to 1670; his intermedial and transnational chronology describes this as the period from Montaigne to Bernini. Other key baroque figures, in this scheme, are Shakespeare, Calderon, Pascal, the French poet Sponde, the Jacobean dramatist Webster, and the poet Robert Herrick. It is worth noting that the persistent Francophone naming of some of Shakespeare’s plays—especially Hamlet—as baroque marks an absolute divide between Anglophone and Francophone scholarship. Where nineteenth-century French writers had claimed Shakespeare as Romantic in order to contrast his wildness with classicism, by the twentieth century it was the baroque that stood against classical order. For Rousset the baroque can be identified by a cluster of thematic concerns—change, inconstancy, illusion, ornament, funerary display, fugitive movement, and instability— that he groups under two figures, Circe and the peacock, figuring on the one hand metamorphosis and the other ostentatious display. These concerns, he contends, do not answer to a (French) scheme of classicism, nor can they be ascribed to a nascent romanticism. Prizing apart these two binaries of classicism and romanticism so beloved of nineteenth-century literary history and its long pedagogical legacy, Rousset saw something new, something obscured, justifying a new category to bring it to light; the figure of reanimation will be central to his new literary history.21 Rousset’s baroque sets itself up as a part of a national literary history, but from his earliest conception of it in 1953, he also allowed the baroque to explode such a narrative: “Instead of a century imagined as a progressive monochrome evolution, we would see sketched out several parallel, alternative or mixed versions of the seventeenth century.”22 For Rousset, the baroque was always out of time, and it becomes over the course of his career a way to reflect on time itself: in 1968, a chapter entitled “Adieu to the Baroque?” worried over the banalization of the term but clung on to its strategic value as a way to read the first half of the seventeenth century; and in 1998, his last book Last Look at the Baroque (Dernier regard sur le baroque) returned to the question again and in particular to the account of his engagement with it as a falling in love.23 The elderly Rousset notes in an essay subtitled “Short Autobiography of Adventures Past” [Petite autobiographie d’une aventure passée] that the term “baroque” has fallen from fashion but suggests we should think of it as “a brainstorm”: the term’s contingent,

the baroque as a literary concept   545 experimental quality is c­ entral to his reflection.24 If he comes to know the baroque through a sudden rapture of love, for Rousset critique itself is always fleeting and always affectively marked. In Rousset’s early work, influenced by Wölfflin, the true baroque is architectural, and he aims to distill its principles into a neatly transferable unit and apply them to a literary text: “Once gathered and sufficiently generalized these criteria could then serve as measuring instruments for non-plastic art forms.”25 But elsewhere he reflects more specifically on the conditions of “legitimate transfer,” between fine arts and literature, between other European traditions and France; in order to imagine these relations he marshals an army of metaphors. The baroque is “a European movement”; it allows France to “sing in a concert with many voices.”26 It is a “cosmopolitan movement” from which France has often tried to withdraw.27 Key to this internationalism is the Jesuit order, “international agents of penetration and exchange”; yet baroque’s internationalism is not only religious, and Rousset specifies that if it coincides with the counter-reformation it also surpasses it.28 This international inflection is true not only of the period works Rousset examines but also of the ways in which they came to scholarly light: he describes how the study of the poet Jean de Sponde, recently resurrected as a key instance of the French baroque, had come about because of the study of the English metaphysical poets. The international scholarly movements of the postwar period generated the baroque. Rousset’s own internationalism was central to his conceptualizations: as a language assistant in Germany between 1938 and 1943, he had seen something of the anti-Nazi resistance.29 In a 1997 glance back at his career, he writes that he had his eyes opened to the period between Renaissance and Enlightenment because of this teaching abroad; reading Gryphius, he then set out to pursue “forms whose equivalents I would seek out in Italy and France, gambling on a transnational unity in linguistic difference.”30 Michel Jeanneret’s moving obituary for Rousset points to the particularity of his career, between Germany, Paris, and Geneva, as what Jeanneret calls an “international agent.”31 In the eyes of classicism’s heralds such internationalism looks suspicious: Marc Fumaroli described Rousset as “another general of the baroque invasion.”32 Yet despite Fumaroli’s attempt at border policing, Rousset’s internationalism grants literary history a sort of agency. Reading Rousset’s baroque as a product of his own international history lets us get past the rehashing of style and historical situation that besets so many arguments about the baroque. Thinking through the relations between early and late modernity, the comparatist Jane Newman turns to Rousset’s essay “Les poètes de la vie fugitive,” which appeared in a Swiss journal in 1945 as an introduction to some translations into French of early modern—baroque?—German poetry. Here, Rousset urges his reader to consider this little-known literary past as a way of reflecting on Europe’s turbulent present and to consider “reanimating” another German history in order to imagine Germany otherwise: “once there was a Germany capable of humanism . . . making space for this version of Germany helps to revive it.”33 Rousset’s postwar reflection allows Newman, in turn, to reanimate a particular German tradition of engaging with the French seventeenth century, and to ask what is at stake in our criticism of the past. In this work, the baroque is not a passage to be identified in literary history but a tool with which to open up the notion of literary history itself.

546   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Expansion and Containment: The Baroque in Hispanic and Lusophone Scholarship As opposed to the suspicion with which mid-century French scholars received the ­concept of a literary baroque, Hispanists of the same period became almost proprietorial of the term. In 1946 Wellek could already attribute to Helmut Hatzfeld the position that “lo hispánico and the baroque have become identical.”34 Wellek bristles at this regionalist appropriation, noting that the seventeenth-century stylistics, then the basis of the concept of the literary baroque, appeared simultaneously in several European regions. Yet he also puts his finger on one of the reasons for Spanish possessiveness of the baroque: the centripetal force of the poetry of Luis de Góngora, all but synonymous with baroque stylistics that, after centuries of exile, had recently been reintroduced into the Spanish literary canon by the Generation of 27.35 Ironically, however, the obsessive focus on gongorismo in Hispanist literary criticism has often obviated the need for a fully developed concept of the baroque. Rather, twentieth-century Spanish debates around Góngora simply inverted the polemics that had accompanied his work since the seventeenth century.36 The year following Wellek’s essay Hatzfeld offered a rejoinder of sorts in his own attempt to delineate a specifically Hispanic baroque. More regionally and linguistically focused than Wellek’s groundbreaking essay, Hatzfeld’s summary indicates a fairly straight path from initial debates in German art history to literary scholarship, especially by German-speaking exiles such as himself. Although he employs the term as an umbrella concept to integrate diverse studies of seventeenth-century Spanish works, Hatzfeld is less concerned with the use of the term in Hispanist criticism than he is with clarifying the essence of the historical period itself. Thus, he locates an original Spanish contribution in the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s argument that the baroque originated not in Rome, as German art historians had asserted, but in Spain.37 On the other hand, he dismisses the unbounded use of the baroque by Eugenio D’Ors, most likely the target of his opening statement that his essay “by way of critical elimination of the extravagant” was aimed at the “presentation of the organic growth of our present picture of the Baroque.”38 Rather than the appearance of the term, Hatzfeld is concerned with sifting through the debates around the national origin of the style and with delineating a specifically Spanish world-view of the period. In the same way that the claiming of the label “classique” was, in France, a rejection of internationalism, in this reading the baroque becomes Spain-specific. In his survey of Hispanist scholarship, Hatzfeld does attempt to forge beyond an obsessive focus on Góngora.39 Indeed, the poet-scholars responsible for the revival of Góngora, the so-called Generación de 27 for their 1927 celebration of the tercentenary of the poet’s death, had showed only a muted interest in the term. While Wellek had cited the example of Dámaso Alonso’s use of the term barroquismo in his 1927 edition of

the baroque as a literary concept   547 Góngora’s Solitudes (Soledades) as evidence of the concept of a literary baroque in Spanish scholarship, the term gongorismo appears much more frequently in the many studies dedicated to the poet. Góngora, baroque poet by antonomasia, needed no stylistic epithet. Thus, despite Hatzfeld’s advocacy of the baroque as a term that could encompass authors as distinct as Cervantes and Góngora, Hispanist criticism continued to align itself in accordance with the original seventeenth-century stylistic terms, to appeal to idealized Spanish traits, or to turn to historical epiphenomena such as the Counter-Reformation or the Jesuit order to explain the explosion of artistic and literary works during the period. While the centrality of Spain for the baroque appeared undeniable, the term itself competed with philological or historical debates on the essence of Spanish national character. It is perhaps not surprising, in this sense, that the first vigorous use of the baroque as a critical term in literary Hispanism emerged not in Spanish scholarship but from across the Atlantic, when Spanish American scholars began to employ the term to insert a wedge between the seventeenth-century cultures of Latin America and Europe. The appropriation of the baroque by Spanish American scholars emerged from the early twentieth-century revitalization of the colonial baroque that ran parallel to, or even predated, the revival of Góngora in Spain. The Mexican diplomat and essayist Alfonso Reyes, whose interest in Góngora dates to 1915, had already produced substantial scholarship on the poet by the time he became involved in the cultural revolution of the Generation of 27 movement in Madrid.40 Yet while his work became central to this movement, Reyes was ultimately sidelined from the 1927 celebrations because, as one of their most prominent members expressed, “it was deemed best to limit [them] to those artists who were Spanish and youthful of spirit.”41 Reyes was neither and his marginalization during the Spanish revival of Góngora most probably contributed to his own turn toward the colonial baroque. In a 1929 essay, Reyes enumerates studies dedicated to gongorismo in colonial Spanish America, where poetic style had been modeled almost exclusively on his verse. As Reyes notes, while the new studies appear to have drawn inspiration from the Spanish revival of Góngora, they clearly outlined a barroquismo that had “appear[ed] to find such good soil in America.”42 Within the plethora of superficial imitations, several poets stood out and none more boldly than the late seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, Sor Juana was and continued to be an anomaly, monstrous because of her gender and ingenuity. Quintessentially baroque, in her deviation from norms, Sor Juana also combined the styles of several different predecessors, including Francisco de Quevedo and Pedro Calderón de la Barca and thus broke with the more straightforward imitations that abounded in institutional settings such as the colonial university and court.43 If Sor Juana could be seen as some sort of culmination of a stylistic movement that emanated from Europe, her figure also challenged the assumption that colonial imitations were belated and servile to metropolitan forms. Reading back from Sor Juana through the seventeenth century, scholars turned to the baroque to define the foundations of a distinctly Spanish American art.

548   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque By the time Wellek wrote his essay in 1946, a half century of Spanish American scholarship had found other cases that challenged the facile identification of the European and Latin American baroque. In his essay “Baroque in America” [Barroco en América], published in 1940, the Dominican scholar and friend of Reyes, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, cites baroque architectural examples from Spanish America to ask whether there is a literary equivalent.44 He finds one in the poet Bernardo de Balbuena, a Spanish transplant to the colonial Caribbean whose verse echoed the literary currents of the end of the sixteenth century, the very moment when Góngora and Quevedo were vying for literary dominance in Spain. The near simultaneity of Balbuena and Góngora and the much ­longer life of the baroque in the Americas, where gongoresque style was practiced through the end of the eighteenth century, leads Henríquez Ureña to declare that “America persists in her baroqueness [barroquismo] when Europe abandons the same.”45 While not quite a manifesto, the possessive is telling. Under Ureña’s pen, the baroque is neither a singular period nor a symptom of a simultaneous reaction to a shared historical condition, as it was for Wellek and Hatzfeld. Rather, in American scholarship the baroque gains a different life, mutating and persisting beyond the confines of disciplinary debates or of attempts to discern a seventeenth-century European worldview. Henríquez Ureña offers no reason for the singularity of the Latin American baroque and indeed any historical explanation might have deflated a certain ecstatic mystification of its diversity and longevity. Several years later, his friend and colleague Mariano Picón Salas focused on culture in general to develop a more explicitly vitalistic account of the Latin American baroque in his 1944 survey of Spanish American culture, From Conquest to Independence [De la conquista a la independencia]. Rather than a degeneration of the Spanish golden age, the American baroque captured and exaggerated its unique form of vitality: “in Hispanic America the problem presents new metamorphoses, due to the addition of a more primitive medium and to the hybrid influences produced by the clash of races and the violent action of transplantation.”46 For Picón Salas, the American context pushes the baroque, “which knows no middle term,” to its own conclusion.47 Weaving back and forth across the Atlantic, he cites both Peninsular and American examples while constantly emphasizing the extremism of the Spanish American baroque. In this move beyond boundaries, literature also becomes anthropomorphized as seeking to move beyond its limits: “In Góngora’s verses and Quevedo’s pages, literature wishes to be something more than literature and appears to invade the realms of all other arts in its desire for complete sensation”48 and “liberating itself from all useful or rational content, literature appears to constitute itself as an art of the autonomous word.”49 In Picón Salas’s account, gone is the excessive focus on Góngora or the attempt to delineate a Spanish spirit of the period. In its place, the baroque becomes caught up in a clash between colonial imitation, imposed by Spanish example, and a liberational impulse: “To the general tone of its culture that the metropolis imposed upon us, the American medium adds all the complexities that result from transplantation.”50 While liberational, literature is also reduced to the “privilege of an erudite minority and absent

the baroque as a literary concept   549 from the comprehension of the indigenous and mestiza masses.”51 The baroque, then, becomes the crucible for contradiction wrought by Spanish colonialism, at once the site of American origins and “a mysterious mode”52 that sublimates the violence of colonization. This possessive expansiveness clearly answered what had been Spanish scholars’ reduction of the literary baroque to parochial figures or nationalist concerns. The Peninsular disdain for the Spanish American baroque went beyond nationalist myopia. Scholars such as Henríquez Ureña and Picón Salas circulated in the upper echelons of North American academy and were certainly known by their European peers. Rather, the Spanish revindication of Góngora fed into a long-standing argument against the image of Spain as belated or backward, resistant to philosophical, scientific, and political modernity. Advocates of courtly poets such as Góngora were at pains to attribute this vision of Spain as backward to popular religion rather than literary culture. In 1927 Dámaso Alonso went even further when he associated this anti-Spanish bias with a confusion with its colonies that only a foreigner would make: “The foreigner who becomes enthusiastic about Spanish popular culture seeks barbarous primitivism and reduces our literature to little more than an art of Indians and blacks.”53 Against this strain of racist xenophobia, critics of the Spanish American baroque aggressively reclaimed the idea of popular artistic expression. In doing so, they also necessarily transgressed the academic fault lines between art history and literature that had marked the Spanish debate. The baroque became instead the name for a creative impulse that answered the violence of colonial origins. There is no better example of this position than the 1957 essay by José Lezama Lima, “Baroque Curiosity” [La curiosidad barroca].54 Under Lezama’s pen, the American baroque becomes a revindication, a “counter-conquest” that outdoes its European predecessor. The baroque becomes a central source for what Lezama terms “plutonism”—a creative force of destruction and recomposition that surpasses art to establish a “complete way of life.”55 Lezama’s essay does not focus on works but on their creators and their milieu; in this vortex there is no distinction to be drawn between the European-identified elite who dominated literature and the more popular artisan baroque of painters and architects, who were often times indigenous or of mixed racial origin.56 Lezama inaugurated what would later be called the neobaroque, a Latin American appropriation in which, as Irlemar Chiampi has written, the baroque “reappears to ­testify to the crisis/end of modernity and the very condition of a continent that could not incorporate the project of the Enlightenment.”57 The baroque becomes an ecstatic excess, undisciplined by institutional scripts or requirements. As would be the most notable exponents of the neobaroque, Lezama was himself an author whose style was heavily influenced by the baroque, especially by Góngora. His approach to reading the literary baroque can perhaps be best assessed through his 1951 “Serpent of Don Luis de Góngora” [Sierpe de don Luis de Góngora] an undulating essay that attempts to discover the poet’s creative force through an equally metaphoric language. In the previous generation of Spanish American scholarship, still closely tied to European cultural institutions, Alfonso Reyes had styled himself as a “humble bricklayer” in the philological

550   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque project to revive Góngora.58 Even the poet-scholars of the Generation of 27 had kept the infection of baroque literary style at bay in their academic writings, through historicist or philological approaches. Lezama’s neobaroque draws no such line between study and poetry. The baroque as a term and concept had been fleeting in previous academic approaches, always in tension in literary studies with the more traditional terms such as the “Spanish Golden Age” or subordinated to institutional ideologies such as the Counter-Reformation.59 By contrast, Lezama makes the baroque the centripetal center of a unique aesthetic force. The neobaroque thus inaugurated a new aesthetic in which the baroque became a form that signified vitality and renewal, naturalized and even mystified as uniquely American. As Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist and compatriot of Lezama Lima was to write of Latin America, “our art was always baroque.”60 In a rejection of all periodization and debates on transmission from metropolis to colony, the statement also suggested its chiasmic inversion, that the baroque had somehow always been American. In essence, the baroque becomes a sign for a formal definition, extracted from European examples but vastly applied to the mixed forms initiated by Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas. The inability to parse and segregate forms, the sense that colonization had created conditions not just for destruction but for composition, and even the long-standing association between the Americas and tropical fecundity all became enveloped in the term “baroque,” which now signaled an origin without clear causality, born of the artifice of colonial imposition but naturalized as an organic American essence. As the neobaroque liberated Spanish American scholars from the constraints of ­academicism and Spanish biases alike, it generated positions that further strained the transatlantic dialogue of Hispanism. Severo Sarduy, a Cuban exile in Paris, argued that the baroque was not unbounded but elliptical, basing his theory on both Lacanian psychoanalysis and seventeenth-century astronomy.61 Through its permutations, the Latin American baroque became a tradition unto itself, consciously adopted and even parodied by emerging artists. The Argentine poet Nestor Perlongher, in exile in Brazil, created a style that he titled neobarroso [neomuddiness] in a tongue-in-cheek wordplay in which he evokes the silty earth of the Rio de Plata.62 Even as the neobaroque spun out of the orbit of its more mundane predecessors, authors such as Sarduy and Perlongher continued to find inspiration in the historical baroque. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic the neobaroque may have been responsible for a boomerang effect as towering figures such as Dámaso Alonso finally began employing the concept of the baroque as a framework for formal analysis.63 Yet dissidents to the neobaroque position have been equally strident. In 1972, the Cuban critic Leonardo Acosta countered that the baroque in the Americas had been a “style imported by the Spanish monarchy as part of a culture closely tied to its imperial ideology.”64 In Spain, a similarly bold position was staked out by the historian José Antonio Maravall whose 1974 Culture of the Baroque [La cultura del barroco] grounded the idealism of previous approaches in a sustained argument that the baroque was a mental structure tied to the societal changes in seventeenth-century Spain. The most

the baroque as a literary concept   551 central of these changes was the rise of the absolutist monarchy, centered on the new Castilian capital of Madrid, through the subordination of regional feudal powers. While Maravall recognizes his debt to the literary historian Américo Castro, noting ironically that Castro himself rejected any suggestion of a specifically Spanish baroque, his own disciplinary training was the history of mentalities.65 Maravall’s argument was backed by an encyclopedic knowledge of seventeenth-­ century Spanish literature that belied his disciplinary background in sociology and history. Ordering a myriad of examples into idealistic categories that he argued defined Spanish baroque society, Maravall understood literature to actively form mental structures. He rejected any mystification of the baroque in favor of a complex structural transformation in which the absolutist state deployed culture in the “first techniques of mass social operation” to further its consolidation of political power.66 Not surprisingly, in his encyclopedic survey of major literary works, Maravall also shifts the focus from Góngora’s exuberant solipsism, which defined erudite taste over and against the popular masses, to the theater, especially Felix Lope de Vega’s wildly popular comedies produced for a new urban population. Despite the vigor of the debate on the Hispanic baroque, even the most innovative authors rarely looked beyond literature written in Spanish. Whether or not a French baroque existed, or whether there might be a general European culture that crossed ­seventeenth-century confessional lines, and whether an equally American baroque might be found in the British or French colonies is of no concern. If the baroque as a concept was born of a comparatist instinct, its regionalist appropriation in both Spain and Spanish America has been obsessed with delineating specificity and thus has generally avoided questions of cross-cultural analogies and genealogical transmissions. Likewise, the debate on the Hispanic baroque has created its own regional vortices and eddies that have rarely been translated or universalized for other regions. Surprisingly, despite the fact that Spanish American scholars often spoke in the name of a pan-Latin American baroque, the concept of the baroque has had a feeble life in Lusophone scholarship. In Portuguese scholarship it is possible that the dazzling example of Luis de Camões, more commonly categorized as renaissance or mannerist than baroque, has overshadowed the examples of the imperial Jesuit preacher António Vieira, an indisputable master of baroque oratory, or the peripheral satire attributed to the Bahian Gregório de Matos, both intricately conversant with seventeenth-century Iberian stylistic developments. Additionally, the famously anti-gongorist diatribe of the Portuguese Manoel Farias y Souza that pitted Camões against Góngora to the detriment of the latter appears to have initially ceded the baroque to Spain. The fact that the greatest examples of seventeenth-century Lusophone literature came from the imperial frontier rather than the Portuguese court might rather have led to a full-throated theorization of the Brazilian baroque, in much the same vein as the Spanish American neobaroque. Despite this potential, the baroque has never been seen as central to Brazilian literary history. Much of this downplaying of the baroque can be attributed to the enduring influence of António Candido’s Formation of Brazilian Literature [Formação da Literatura Brasileira], a 1959 anthology of Brazilian literature

552   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque framed by a theory of national literary formation that finds its origins not in the ­seventeenth century but in the eighteenth, with the rise of neoclassical arcadismo and the first stirrings of Brazilian independence from Portugal.67 Even as Candido’s anthology continues to play an oversized role in Brazilian literary criticism, his slight of the baroque has also been submitted to boisterous critique, beginning with the polemical text by the poet-scholar Haroldo de Campos, The Kidnapping of the Baroque in the Formation of Brazilian Literature: the Case of Gregório Mattos [O Secuestro do Barroco na Formação da Literatura Brasileira: o Caso Gregório de Mattos]. Inspired by the neobaroque’s inclusion of Brazil in its purview, Campos argued that Candido had effectively “kidnapped” the baroque by ignoring the robust satire of Gregório de Matos, indelibly marked by the colonial realities of late seventeenth-century Salvador da Bahia, where the majority of his poetry was written and circulated.68 The polemic between Campos and Candido has staked out a division within Brazilian studies, all the more insular as took place in the two major universities in São Paulo where the authors held positions. Campos’s stance, however, only underscores the deployment of the baroque as a tool to contest regionalist literary histories such as Candido’s. There are distinct characteristics of Brazilian literary studies that have made the polemic bloodier and more extreme than in other Iberian regions, with the exception perhaps of the original seventeenth-century bloodbath surrounding Góngora’s poetics. The outcome has only made more difficult any sense of a shared Lusophone literary history that includes the baroque, which has drifted between Portugal and Brazil as if a ship lost on the Atlantic. Perhaps not surprisingly, especially given the historically strong ties between Brazilian and Portuguese academic institutions, the result has been an author-centered version of scholarship that has been especially amenable to philological rather than interpretative study.69 In the same year that Campos published his manifesto in favor of Gregório de Matos’s eccentric baroque, another scholar from São Paulo, João Adolfo Hansen, contributed his own masterful interpretation of the Bahian poet. In a reading that rejects both Candido’s silence and Campos’s aestheticist appropriation of Gregório de Matos, Hansen has argued that the poet used satire to further the political agenda of the conservative local elite of his time. In accordance with this stance, Hansen has also argued that the baroque is a meaningless term: a neo-­ Kantianism initiated by Wölfflin that has obfuscated the intricacies of rhetorical and poetic structures of the period.70 In this, Hansen partakes of a recent resurgence in both Hispanic and Lusophone literary studies to more philological concerns that shun, once again, the utility of the baroque as a conceptual interpretative tool. Like the French case, albeit with a greater battle to be waged given the identification of the baroque with Iberian and Latin American aesthetic forms, these scholars have favored more technical terms drawn from rhetoric; or they have simply, and blandly, labeled the poetics they interpret by the century in which they occurred. Despite this rearguard action, which partakes of all the pretensions and limitations of the earlier philologically oriented studies of seventeenth-century authors, limiting themselves to delineating micro-genealogies and textual transmission, Iberian and Latin American studies still reflect the initial

the baroque as a literary concept   553 mid-century appropriation of the term “baroque.” In a fuguelike overlapping of voices, the Iberian baroque continues to return in new studies. Maravall’s interpretation has had a lasting effect that has been difficult to dislodge in interpretations of the period, although scholars have nipped at the edges of his monumental theory of state deployment.71 The neobaroque, aside from spawning a delirious series of spin-offs in visual arts, performance, and literature, has also been the basis for more complex interpretations of the period that return to questions of mental structures and ideologies.72 In Mexico, the Ecuatorian exile Bolivar Echeverrría confronted neobaroque mystification with a Marxist interpretation of the baroque as a useless aestheticism that provided an alternative to protestant capitalism.73 These latest avatars of the baroque as a concept have continued to deploy the term as an intricate connector of the arts and historical structures. While focused on the Iberian case, broadly conceived, those who continue to defend the use of the term “baroque” are most fully able to place this case in a global picture as a sign of imperial decadence or an alternative basis for modernity that gives hope in an apocalyptic time of late capitalism.74 In Iberian studies, the concept of literary baroque thus continues to generate productive cross-fertilization with outside traditions even as it locates its own unique contribution to global modernity.

Conclusion Despite their diverse trajectories, the Francophone and Hispano- and Lusophone cases at times shared common influences and on rare occasions even engaged one another. Since the 1960s, with the rise of French theoretical approaches, the convergence has been even more pronounced. One could point to the inventive neobaroque of Severo Sarduy, who drew on Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida to imagine an eccentric baroque form, or one could point to the influence of Gilles Deleuze’s form-concept of the “fold” that has inspired numerous interpretations linking matter to metaphysics.75 In all of these avatars, the baroque appears as disruptor, on the one hand of a homogenous narrative of nationhood and on the other of a unidirectional imperial transmission and universalism. As a disrupter, the baroque also wreaks havoc on a linear history imagined as a homogeneous time moving toward a particular end. In this version, the baroque’s various constellations—to use a term of that great reader of the baroque, Walter Benjamin— allow for a critique of such concepts. Benjamin’s baroque, as explored in the Origin of German Tragic Drama [Urspung des deutschen Trauerspiels] (1928), is drawn to a different way of reading both national tradition and history. Benjamin’s ursprung is translated in English and French as “origin,” but, he tells his readers in a famously knotty prologue, “The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and ­disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it

554   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque swallows the material involved in the process of genesis.”76 In his reading of the baroque, the notion of allegory breaks up a naturalized linear concept of history; for Benjamin, the baroque is not a set of stylistic devices, but its formal language (allegory, or emblem) proffers a way of reading points and counterpoints in constellation to one another. It creates eddies, petrified figures, and unexpected returns. Benjamin’s baroque book, written so early in his career that it both grounds and haunts his later works, indexes the inherent inconclusiveness of any comparative study of the baroque as a literary concept. Written at the very moment that the baroque was migrating in European criticism from art history to literary study, Benjamin’s idiosyncratic theory of the baroque has since passed through unlikely hands and been subject to other missed encounters. Many critics have slipped into the wake of this Benjaminian baroque, but the uneven—eddying—translation history of this difficult text has made its importance hard to grasp. In the Iberian context, Benjamin’s reading of baroque allegory as a sign of theological crisis has found its most enthusiastic reception among those who attempt to crack open the vault of imperial political theology.77 As a challenge to neobaroque exuberance, the melancholic emblems that adorn Benjamin’s study are themselves disrupters, a fact that explains a certain resistance to the work among those who view the baroque as a liberational American form. And in France, if the “origin” of Jean Rousset’s baroque lay in his engagement with German visual material, he was also an avid reader of Gryphius, whose works are central to Benjamin’s investigation of the trauerspiel. Later in life, Rousset’s account of Lafayette’s great seventeenthcentury novel The Princess of Cleves (La Princesse de Clèves) notes the “échanges obliques” (Passages, 1990) that take place between its characters, a reading that brings out a glimmer of a baroque eddy in that most coolly classical of texts. It is hard to ascertain whether Rousset knew Benjamin’s work—a text submerged for reasons institutional and otherwise—which has, since its translation (into English in 1977, Spanish in 1980, Portuguese in 1984, French in 1985) been resprung into a vigorous critical welcome. But if the concept of the baroque is built out of such oblique exchanges, it also invites us to imagine potential constellations, conversations, even those that did not take place.

Notes 1. Timothy Hampton, “Introduction,” in Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy ed. Hampton, special issue of Yale French Studies 80 (1991), 1. 2. Timothy Hampton, “La foi des traités: Baroque History, International Law, and the Politics of Reading in Corneille’s Rodogune,” in Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French Trauerspiel, ed. Hall Bjornstad and Katherine Ibbett, special issue of Yale French Studies 124 (2013): 135–151 (139). 3. Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 94 (all translations our own). Jane Newman notes that for some “the Baroque functions in a supersessionary way, allowing the periphery to become the center”: Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 7.

the baroque as a literary concept   555 4. José Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” in La expresión americana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 80. This and other essays on the Latin American baroque and neobaroque may be found in English in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kraup, eds. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 5. For a Deleuzian return of the baroque, see Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir: de l’esthétique baroque (Paris: Galilée, 1986); or, more recently, the readings in Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis, Peter Krieger ed. Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016). 6. Christopher Johnson, “Baroque,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 121–122. 7. Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold,” in Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy, ed. Hampton, special issue of Yale French Studies 80 (1991), 227. 8. Another comparative perspective on the baroque is given by David Bowie, who in an interview with US public television about the work of Lou Reed, notes that where Reed “never wasted words,” he finds his own work “far more baroque than Lou, but that’s the  British in me.” See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4kUmYoc1rE from 6.40. A sense that the baroque has created its own tradition in Latin America may be gauged by the statement of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado who, when questioned on his politics of representation, retorted “I’m not post-modern. I’m baroque; I’m from Minas Gerais.” Presentation at the Townsend Center for Humanities, Berkeley, CA. February 11, 2002. 9. Eugenio D’Ors, Du baroque (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). René Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5:2 (1946): 77–109. The most useful recent overview of the conceptualization of the baroque in ­various literary traditions and as a comparative concept is that of Christopher Johnson, “Baroque,” in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 121–126. 10. Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 24. 11. Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque,” 77. 12. Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 203. 13. On the question of baroque movement past borders, one only has to remember that in his most developed synthesis, one of Wolfflin’s five elements of baroque form was an openness: “The style of open form everywhere points out beyond itself and purposefully looks limitless, although, of course, secret limits continue to exist, and make it possible for the picture to be self-contained in the aesthetic sense.” Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1932), 124. For baroque visual regimes, see Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1988). 14. In Benjamin’s reading, baroque allegory is a dialectics that has become enmeshed in its own materialism, or as he famously puts it, “the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.” Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 166. 15. Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque,” 82. 16. Timothy Hampton: “The Baroque becomes the excluded, the repressed, that which the official history of literature cannot accept” (Baroque Topographies, 5). On the French hiding of the term baroque see Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Le Baroque: Profondeurs de l’apparence

556   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque (Bordeaux Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1973/1993); on the French baroque and its conceptualizations more broadly, Jean-Claude Vuillemin, L’Épistémè baroque, ­176–201. More recently Hélène Merlin-Kajman has argued—certainly in part through an  admirable esprit de contradiction—for a distinctively French classico-baroque: see “Un siècle classico-baroque?” Dix-septième siècle 223, no. 2 (2004): 163–172. 17. Marc Fumaroli, “Baroque et classicisme: L’Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis Jesu (1640) et ses adversaires,” in Questionnements du baroque, ed. Alphonse Vermeylen (Louvain-­ la-Neuve and Brussels: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1986), 75–111. 18. Fumaroli, introduction to V-L Tapié, Baroque et classicisme (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 13. Jean-Claude Vuillemin writes that distaste for the baroque is also a form of snobbery: the unevenness of the baroque marks it as vulgar or poor taste: Épistémè baroque: Le mot et la chose (Paris: Hermann, 2013), 11. For a still sharper critique of the baroque as a baggy concept, see Pierre Charpentrat’s Mirage baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1967), which criticizes “a rapid and limitless diffusion, almost mechanical” of the term (15). 19. Jean Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France. Circé et le paon (Paris: José Corti, 1953), 7. 20. A French equivalent to Maravall’s ambitious attempt to chart the baroque in society might be that of the historian Henry Mechoulan, who edited an important collection of essays on the French state in the first half of the seventeenth century: L’État baroque (Paris: Vrin, 1985). Another valence of French readings of baroque politics was shaped by Louis Marin, for whom the term baroque provides a useful prism through which to read the theatricality of the state in the period between reformation and absolutism: see especially his essay on Gabriel Naudé, “Pour une théorie baroque de l’action politique,” introduction to an edition of Naudé’s Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état (Paris: Éditions de Paris, 1989), 7–65. Rousset’s own volume has largely fallen from favor; instead of fighting classicism with the baroque, more recent work in French studies has largely chosen to inflect classicism with a sense of its historical production as a term, eroding classicism from within. 21. Jean Rousset, L’Intérieur et l’extérieur (Paris: Corti, 1968): the baroque “has resurrected the dead and disembalmed the mummies….a submerged world has arisen from its waters” (248). This thematic approach to identifying the French baroque was criticized by Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, who worried that it risked confusing the baroque with mannerism. “Discours baroque, discours maniériste. Pygmalion et Narcisse,” in Questionnements du baroque, ed. Alphonse Vermeylen. 22. Jean Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 9. 23. “Adieu au Baroque?,” in Jean Rousset, L’intérieur et l’extérieur: Essais sur la poésie et sur le théâtre au XVIIe siècle (Paris: José Corti, 1968); Jean Rousset, Dernier regard sur le baroque (Paris: José Corti, 1998). 24. Essay first published in Littérature 105 (mars 1997) and reprinted in Dernier regard sur le baroque (Paris: José Corti, 1998), 11. 25. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 8. 2 6. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 9. 27. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 237. 2 8. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 239–240. 29. Jeanneret, “Au cœur de l’œuvre, le Baroque,” in Rousset, L’aventure baroque, 7. 3 0. Rousset, Dernier regard sur le baroque, 14. 31. See http://www.unige.ch/lettres/framo/articles/mj_rousset.html. On Rousset see also Roger Francillon, Jean Rousset ou la passion de la lecture (Geneva: Editions Zoé, 2001).

the baroque as a literary concept   557 32. Marc Fumaroli, introduction to V-L Tapié, Baroque et classicisme, 12. One could trace the internationalism of the term across the many postwar movements of European scholars: Odette de Mourgues, for example, who first came to England as student of English literature and language assistant, later became a scholar of the French seventeenth century. She  considered the varied values of the terms “metaphysical” for English material and “baroque” for the French: see Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). 33. Rousset, Dernier regard sur le baroque, 27; Jane Newman, “Afterword: Re-Animating the Gegenstück, or the Survival of the French Trauerspiel in the German Baroque,” Yale French Studies 124 (2013): 152–170. 34. Wellek, “The Concept of the Baroque,” 93. 35. Wellek, “The Concept of the Baroque,” 91. For an overview of the literature on the revival of Góngora by the Spanish Generation of 1927, see Aurora Hermida-Ruiz, “ ‘Por un clavo se pierde un reino’: Alfonso Reyes, the Generation of 1927, and the Imperial Appropriation of Góngora,” Calíope 18, no. 2 (2013: 161–193). 36. As Andrée Collard has argued, the later adoption of the period term “baroque” by twentieth-century Hispanists attempted to bury the distinction, made since the seventeenth century, drawn between the florid culturanismo style associated with Luis de Góngora and the metaphysical style of conceptismo, associated with his rival, Francisco de Quevedo. Andrée Collard, Nueva poesia: conceptismo, culteranismo en la crítica española (Madrid: Castalia, 1971), 121. 37. Helmut Hatzfeld, “A Critical Survey of the Recent Baroque Theories,” Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 4, no. 3 (1948): 468. Ortega y Gasset, in turn, was following the argument of the British art historian Sacheverell Sitwell who in 1924 had argued the same in his survey of Spanish and Italian baroque architecture, Southern Baroque Art: A Study of Painting, Architecture and Music in Italy and Spain of the 17th & 18th Centuries. 38. Thus, he takes aim at the revival of Góngora and other “extreme ‘baroquisms’ ” that “hinder to focuss [sic] the attention on authors free from this slant during the same period.” Hatzfeld, “A Critical Survey,” 461. 39. Hatzfeld, “A Critical Survey,” 475. 40. See Hermida-Ruiz, “ ‘Por un clavo se pierde un reino.’ ” 41. Cited in Hermida-Ruiz, “ ‘Por un clavo se pierde un reino,’ ” 163. 42. Alfonso Reyes, “Góngora y América: reseña bibliográfica,” in Obras completas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996; reprint, 2nd ed.), 235. 43. If Sor Juana had been maligned through the end of the nineteenth century for her imitation of Góngora, the reversal of the Spanish poet’s critical fate likewise generated a new assessment of her works. Not only did Mexican literary critics turn to her works, as Reyes notes, but several prominent US Hispanists sought to delineate her unique blending of poetic influences and unusual circumstances of her life as a woman, nun, and poet. See, for instance, Dorothy Schons, “Some Obscure Points in the Life of Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz,” Modern Philology 24, no. 2 (1926). 44. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “Barroco en América,” in La utopía de América (Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989), 116. 45. Henríquez Ureña, “Barroco en América,” 117. 46. Mariano Picón Salas, “El barroco de Indias,” in Viejos y nuevos mundos (Caracas, Venezuela: Editorial Ayacucho, 1983), 163. 47. Picón Salas, “El barroco de Indias,” 163. 48. Picón Salas, “El barroco de Indias,” 164.

558   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 49. Picón Salas, “El barroco de Indias,” 166. 50. Picón Salas, “El barroco de Indias,” 169. 51. Picón Salas, “El barroco de Indias,” 169. 52. Picón Salas, “El barroco de Indias,” 162. 53. Cited in Hermida-Ruiz, “ ‘Por un clavo se pierde un reino,’ ” 177. 54. José Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” in La expresión americana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993). 55. Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” 80. 56. Lezama strikingly ends his essay with the figure of the notable eighteenth-century architect from the mining city of Ouro Preto in Brazil, Aleijadinho, whose buildings are the best colonial example of rococco. For Lezama, Aleijadinho personifies the eccentricity of the Latin American baroque: of mixed Portuguese and African origin, Aleijadinho was also crippled and according to myth traveled by mule at night to do his work. See Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” 105. 57. Irlemar Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 17. 58. Hermida-Ruiz, “ ‘Por un clavo se pierde un reino,’ ” 162. 59. See, for example, the influential essay by Stephen Gilman, published the same year that Wellek completed his survey of the baroque literary concept. Stephen Gilman, “An Introduction to the Ideology of the Baroque in Spain,” Symposium 1, no. 1 (1946). The comparatist Leo Spitzer’s approach to the concept of the Spanish baroque is steeped in his own encounter with popular Catholicism: Leo Spitzer, “The Spanish Baroque,” in Representative Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1944), 130–131. 60. Alejo Carpentier, “Problemática actual de la novela latinoamericana,” in Tientos y diferencias (Havana: Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 1974), 32. 61. Sarduy follows Johannes Kepler as a natural model for the baroque ellipsis. Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1974). 62. Nestor Perlongher, “Introducción a la poesía neobarroca cubana y rioplatense,” Revista chilena de literatura 41 (1993): 52–53 and 57. 63. Dámaso Alonso, “El Polifemo, poema barroco,” Atenea 142 (1961). 64. Cited in John Beverley, Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America (Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2008), 2. 65. José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica (Barcelona: Ariel, 1974), 14. 66. Maravall, Cultura del barroco, 49. 67. António Candido, Formação da Literatura Brasileira: Momentos Decisivos (1750–1880), 16th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul, 2017). 68. Haroldo de Campos, O Sequestro do Barroco na Formação da Literatura Brasileira: O Caso Gregório de Mattos (Salvador, Bahia: Fundação Jorge Amado, 1989). 69. See, for instance, Antonio J. Saraiva, O Discurso Engenhoso: Estudos Sobre Vieira e Outros Autores Barrocos (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1980). Saraiva places Vieira in the center of a rhetorically inflected baroque. 70. João Adolfo Hansen, A Sátira e o Engenho: Gregório de Matos e a Bahia do Século XVII (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989) and “Barroco, Neobarroco e Outras Ruinas,” Teresa 2 (2001). 71. See, for instance, the collected essays in Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo, eds., Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005).

the baroque as a literary concept   559 72. For an example of the first, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) and the catalogue for the exhibit Ultra Baroque: Elizabeth Armstrong et al., “Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art,” ed. San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001). For the second, see Fernando Rodríguez de la Flor, Barroco: representación e ideología en el mundo hispánico (1580–1680) (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002). 73. Bolívar Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco (México City: Ediciones Era, 1998). 74. For readings that follow the first line, see Anna More, Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and Ángel Octavio Álvarez Solís, La república de la melancolía: política y subjetividad en el barroco (Buenos Aires: Ediciones La Cebra, 2015). For a recent approach to contemporary politics that reads Latin American popular culture as baroque, see Verónica Gago, La razón neoliberal: economías barrocas y pragmática popular (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2015). 75. On Lacan’s influence on Sarduy see Rubén Gallo, “Severo Sarduy, Jacques Lacan y el ­psicoanálisis. Entrevista con François Wahl,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 59, no. 1/2 (2006). In criticism of the Hispanic baroque, the influence of Deleuze’s 1988 Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque has been at once pervasive and diffuse. Two studies that explicitly take on Deleuze are, William Egginton, “Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds,” in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005) and Anthony Cascardi, “Philosophy of Culture and Theory of the Baroque,” Filozofski Vestnik 22, no. 2 (2001). 7 6. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, 45. 77. For two examples, see Anna More, Baroque Sovereignty and Álvarez Solís, La república de la melancolía.

Further Reading Bjørnstad, Hall, and Katherine Ibbett, eds. Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French Trauerspiel. Vol. 124. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Hampton, Timothy, ed. Yale French Studies: Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/ Philosophy. Vol. 80. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Ibbett, Katherine. The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–1660: Neoclassicism and Government. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. More, Anna Herron. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Moser, Walter, Angela Ndalianis, and Peter Krieger, eds. Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2010. Newman, Jane O. Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Spadaccini, Nicholas, and Luis Martín-Estudillo, eds. Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.

chapter 25

Ba roqu e Discou rse Christopher D. Johnson

In his preface to the English translation of Les mots et les choses, Michel Foucault cautions: “Discourse in general, and scientific discourse in particular, is so complex a reality that we not only can, but should, approach it at different levels and with different methods.”1 Yet when it comes to “the period that has been termed, rightly or wrongly, the Baroque,” weirdly Foucault neglects this very complexity.2 This chapter considers how discursive expression in the Baroque period functioned as a sophisticated means not only of mediating between words and things but also between emergent, conflicted selves and a world perceived as wracked by the irreconcilable polarity of appearance and reality—or, as it was put in Spain, engaño y desengaño (illusion and disillusion). It argues that discourse often functioned as a form of self-critique and autopsia (seeing for oneself), one that thrived in the long shadow of Montaigne’s example as well as, more generally, within textual labyrinths constructed from a belated humanism. Baroque discourse, that is, encompassed retrospective and prospective, deductive and inductive modes of thought, modes that in formal and stylistic terms could be pointed, elliptical, perspicacious, obscure, ornate, syncretic, digressive, and/or encyclopedic, and that, thematically, saw cultural, political, metaphysical, and other concerns dramatically compete with epistemological ones. Although never explicitly formulated as such during the seventeenth century, discourse functioned as a family of writing comprising myriad nonfictional prose genres. These mutable genres, together with the various prose styles they licensed, enabled writers such as Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, Giambattista Marino, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Blaise Pascal, Athanasius Kircher, G. W. Leibniz, Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracián, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora to pursue diverse, often divergent, conceptual, aesthetic, and affective aims. Yet despite such heterogeneity, each of these exemplary writers constructed, if you will, a prosaic “I,” a discursive voice keen to express more than represent. Indeed, their discourses may all be called “Baroque” for how they prize ingenuity, difficulty, and novelty—for the witty ways they exhaust venerable topoi, resolve problems raised by empirical and skeptical philosophies, and respond to novel contingencies ranging from changes in taste to the specter

baroque discourse   561 of an infinite universe. They are Baroque for how they tend to construct coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) and discordia concors, or what Samuel Johnson called, in his “Life of Cowley” (1779), “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” They are Baroque, too, for how they finesse “early modern information overload.”3 Discoursing for these writers meant selecting, arranging, and ornamenting materials from the ever-growing archive of ancient and modern texts, even as they responded to the dizzying multiplicity and mobility of things and ideas. It meant wrestling with the copia verborum et rerum (abundance of words and things), prescribed in Erasmus’s influential 1512 treatise, even as faith in humanist methods and beliefs waned or was transformed. Generated inside and outside of institutional contexts, propelled by vernacularization and translation, and constituted in networks of imitation, circulation, and exchange, discourses traveled to and were remade in different places by writers keen to critique and express. Baroque discourse, in short, was a vital Denkraum, a “thought-space,” where form and content, authority and experience, were put in dynamic, if incommensurable relation(s).4

Genres As defined by early modern lexica, discourse (discursus [Lat.], discurso [Sp.], discour [Fr.], discorso [It.], Diskurs [Ger.]) is the attempt to give oral or written form to a subject. Often associated with the faculty of reason, in Spanish and English discourse is synonymous with “treatise” or any text that “contains diverse thoughts and reflections on any matter in order to persuade or ponder some intention.”5 In French, Jean Nicot defined it simply as “when one treats some matter scatteringly either by speech or writing.”6 Discourse can also mean, as Shakespeare and Cervantes attest, “conversation.” Further, in every vernacular the noun is accompanied by a verbal form. Discourse had spatiotemporal connotations, too. In Comentarios reales de los Incas [Royal Commentaries of the Incas] (1609), Inca Garcilaso, writing from Spain, far from his native Peru, and long after the events he describes, observes, “in the discourse of my life, I knew many of those named in history.”7 Such semantic breadth helps explain why writers as diverse as Quevedo, Browne, and Leibniz refer to their texts as discourses. As an umbrella term covering many species of nonfictional prose, discourse may be said to include already established genres (treatise, letter, dialogue, sermon, historia); reinvented ones (theatrum, meditation, and encyclopedia); and nascent ones (essay, pensée, and anatomy). Genre thus served as a crucial medium for numerous disciplines, themselves often in flux from internal developments and external factors. And as writers met and subverted generic norms, they sought to liberate discourse from decorum’s stringencies. For example, while a sermon as a public performance traditionally had a stricter decorum than, say, a privately circulated epistle, John Donne’s and Hortensio Paravicino’s homiletics, overflowing with wit and erudition of all kinds, invited auditors to ponder subjects seemingly incompatible with sacred

562   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque discourse. Alternatively, prefacing the expanded 1612 edition of his Essays, Francis Bacon writes of “certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called Essays. The word is late, but the thing is ancient, for Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius, if one marks them well, are but Essays, that is, dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the form of Epistles.”8 Attending to style and “form,” Bacon downplays his own refinement of the genre. But by omitting here Montaigne (though the first essay, “Of Truth,” and several others invoke him), as presumably writing too “curiously” and not “significantly” enough to advance learning, Bacon leaves the door open for more idiosyncratic, Montaignesque “meditations” by the likes of Burton and Browne. Moreover, to convey its discoveries, experimental science would exploit the essay’s discursive freedom. Thus Robert Boyle’s Proemial Essay . . . Touching Experimental Essays (1661) praises the essay as a means of combatting “Systems of Natural Philosophy.” The new science appropriated other genres as well. Galileo’s nimble Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo [Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems] (1632) defends Copernicanism. Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters (1664) promotes her eclectic natural philosophy. Generic markers also blurred the lines between fictional and nonfictional, Latin and vernacular prose. To skewer those fantastic vernacular historias of knight errantry, Cervantes wrote Historia de Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605), while his countryman, Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, following the Latin tradition of historia as “inquiry,” compiled Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae [Natural history, particularly exotic] (1635) for empirical, imperial, and theological ends.9

Styles Many prose writers prized ingenuity, difficulty, and novelty in their style; others valued clarity, still others versatility. Briefly put, prose styles were self-consciously diverse. Style mattered: it was constitutive of the quality of a writer’s thought—and yet never an end in itself. In his canonical study, “The Baroque Style in Prose” (1929), Morris Croll adumbrates two main types: the “curt” and “loose” styles.10 Avowedly “Senecan,” the curt style favors a “deliberate asymmetry” and “is always tending towards the aphorism, or pensée, as its ideal form.” The looser, more improvisatory style prefers antitheses, the excessive use of conjunctions, dependent and subordinate clauses, and absolute participial constructions; combining “the effect of great mass with the effect of rapid motion,” it was “the method of induced knowledge” and thus suited for gathering Baconian particulars. While Croll’s typology frequently proves too absolute, it does have the virtue of being mainly based on period terms and tastes. Reifying the dichotomy between “Asian” (Ciceronian) and “Attic” (non-Ciceronian) styles charted in an earlier essay,11 Croll contends that the latter style, with its characteristic figures, periods, and rhythms, permitted Montaigne, Bacon, Burton, Browne, Balzac, Pascal, and others to accomplish what amounts to a reversal of traditional priorities. “Their purpose was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking, or in Pascal’s words, la peinture de la pensée.”12

baroque discourse   563 Seductive judgments such as this and Croll’s close readings of individual passages led subsequent generations of scholars to take the period’s prose more seriously—but also to undertake more focused, less totalizing studies.13 For in making Baroque prose into a “movement” defining the age, Croll ignores contrary currents represented by the likes of Descartes, Boyle, and Milton. Indeed, different styles flourished together in the same time and place, as polemics in Madrid over Quevedo’s style and in Paris about Balzac’s confirm. Individual writers also adopted various styles, sometimes within the same text or paragraph. Senecan concision often subtly yielded to Ciceronian concinnity and vice versa. Given this, sustained analyses of the prose style of works by individual writers must proceed inductively, rather than deductively. The formal aspects of a style must first be parsed then viewed against the network of texts and contexts that inform them— only then can more synthetic claims be ventured. Since any concept of Baroque style is perforce anachronic, period attempts to identify and defend what is distinctive about its own discourse are especially valuable. These can also be critical in determining the extent to which discourse might betray a “periodconsciousness.”14 Unfortunately, seventeenth-century discourse about the nature of discourse was mostly occasional, sometimes analytic, and rarely systematic. To deduce a poetics of Baroque prose we must scour primary texts, including paratexts, letters, and treatises often ostensibly dedicated to other matters. It is also essential to consider that most contemporary evaluations of prose were indebted explicitly or implicitly to the rhetorical tradition. Even the reactions against the singular pursuit of eloquence, whether by Port-Royal or the Royal Society, were cast (initially at least) in terms ­borrowed from rhetoric. As John Guillory contends in his trenchant reevaluation of the debate in England over the “plain style,” it took a “misrecognition” of the nature of the “new kind of prose” to effectively dislodge it from “the system of rhetoric.”15 In other words, what subject matter was selected (inventio) and then how it was arranged (dispositio or divisio) remained cardinal questions. But more often than not, it was style (elocutio) and, more specifically, the use of figures of speech and thought, that most excited the reader’s attention. Further, whatever their style, writers typically invited active complicity and strong hermeneutic engagement from the reader. Writerly and readerly ingenuity were mutually constitutive. For us, in turn, the figures whose frequent use distinguishes Baroque discourse from what came before and after include: antithesis, asyndeton, auxesis (gradatio), compilatio, digression, ellipsis, enumeratio, hyperbole, occupatio, metaphor, paradox, parataxis, and syncrisis.16 Similarly, by revisiting cardinal topoi—such as the world as a theater, inn, or book, life as a dream—writers both rethought the humanist legacy and subverted it. Whether harping on the gap between appearance and reality or celebrating the virtues of play, the figures and topoi of Baroque discourse variously soliciting admiratio and other affects—affects inseparable from ways of perceiving and knowing the self and world. More particularly, in wrestling with the copia of words and things, Baroque discourse often tends either toward the witty or the encyclopedic, toward metaphoric condensation or erudite amplification. These extremes, at once spatial, qualitative, and quantitative, can be used to delimit our topic, even if, in many exemplary texts both are manifest.

564   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque For example, in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1622), Donne expresses his fervent doubts about the microcosmic–macrocosmic analogy by ingeniously experimenting with novel analogies, metaphors, and conceits. Having risen from his sick bed, he declares, “I am up, and I seeme to stand, and I goe round; and I am a new Argument of the new Philosophie,” only then to amplify and vary each key term in the conceit.17 Put another way, the dictum multum in parvo (much in little) variously holds for discourses as distinct as Marino’s Dicerie sacre [Sacred Rumors] (1614) and Leibniz’s Monadology (1714). Marino, for instance, in the first of the Dicerie makes a single metaphoric (but never allegorical) argument: namely, that the Shroud of Turin should be viewed as a painting containing encyclopedic knowledge. Thus aside from transforming performative, homiletic rhetoric into a form of ingenious play on the page meant for the cultivated few, Marino transforms metaphor into a vehicle for his ample erudition. In this he anticipates, as Erminia Ardissione notes, the methods later prescribed by Emanuele Tesauro’s Cannochiale Aristotelico [Aristotelian telescope] (1654, 1670), which, in fact, lauds the witty dedication of the Dicerie.18 The Dicerie, Marino himself boasts, “will surprise the world . . . and appear to be a thing extravagant and unexpected.” Further: “I do hope that they will please, either for their novelty and the strangeness of their invention, for each discourse contains but a single metaphor, or for the liveliness of the style and the manner of making witty conceits.”19 Here, then, the rule of metaphor assumes radically new discursive scope. Meanwhile, the examples of Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, Erasmus, Montaigne, and Justus Lipsius, but also that of sixteenth-century encyclopedists such as Theodor Zwinger, Conrad Gesner, and Jean Bodin, made writers in the Baroque period keenly aware of how prose might serve as an eloquent vehicle for erudite copia. In other words, NeoLatin prose continued to thrive and play a crucial intellectual-historical role. But with vernacular writing increasingly the norm, and with new ambitions, tastes, and contingencies to satisfy, the discursive strategies of writers facing the problem of copia diverged widely. Where Burton obsessively amplifies and digresses, Gracián condenses. Where Pascal elides, Sor Juana finds motives for hermetic emblems and ekphrases. In sum, while the theory of prose in the seventeenth century remained largely tied to notions of what oratio should be, in practice the slow, fitful loosening of rhetoric’s hold on writing allowed for the emergence of new forms of discursive expression that tended to ignore the strictures of decorum and expectations of genre. The following, then, describes a handful of texts that exemplify the generic and stylistic diversity of such expression, together with its transnational range.

English “Discourses” In 1621, Robert Burton pseudonymously published with an Oxford bookseller: The Anatomy of Melancholy./What it is. With all the kindes, causes, sumptomes, prognostickes

baroque discourse   565 & severall cures of it./In three Partitions, with their severall Sections, members & subsections./ Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically opened & cut up/By Democritus Junior./ With a Satyricall Preface, conducing to the Following Discourse. Amplified over five subsequent editions to nearly twice its original word count, Burton’s Anatomy pretends to give an exhaustive, analytic account of that Saturnine malady often made synonymous with the Baroque. In the event, however, his “Maceronicon” or “Cento” becomes a versatile, contradictory means of self-expression and examination that also inductively mediates “a vast Chaos and confusion of Bookes.”20 But Burton would anatomize his “Reader” as well. As his opening paragraph declares: “Thou thy selfe art the subject of my Discourse.”21 Appropriating numerous prose genres—anatomy, treatise, epitome, sermon, dialogue, digressio, commonplace book, paradoxical encomium, jeremiad, utopic fiction, picaresque novel, autobiography, consolatio, and essay—the Oxford divine refuses to distinguish between reading and experience, deduction and induction, thought and expression. Comparing his “stile” to a river coursing “per ambages [circuitously]. . . through a variety of objects,” Burton points to his subject matter to justify his invention: “In this Labyrinth of accidentall causes, the farther I wander, the more intricate I finde the passage, multae ambages, and new causes, as so many by-paths offer themselves to be discussed: to search out all, were an Herculean worke, and fitter for Theseus.”22 Elsewhere, when it comes to style and invention, Burton proves as disingenuous as he is ingenious: as a Beare doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lumpe, I had not time to licke it into forme, as shee doth her yong ones, but even so to publish it, as it was first written quicquid in buccam venit [whatever came into my head], in an extemporean stile, as I doe commonly all other exercises, effudi quicquid dictavit Genius meus [I poured forth whatever my Genius dictated], out of a confused company of notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I doe ordinarily speake, without all affectation of big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Acesta’s arrowes cought fire as they flew; straines of wit, brave heats, elogies, hyperbollical exornations, elegancies, &c. which many so much affect.23

Self-consciously performing the very “affectation” he denounces, Burton also supplies a typographical symbol for his inexhaustible invention: “&c.” signals here and throughout the Anatomy the compulsion to paratactically and digressively amplify. Similarly, to conclude his lengthy Satyricall Preface, Burton writes: “I have overshot myself, I have spoken foolishly, rashly, unadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomised mine own folly. . . . I will make amends in that which is to come; I promise you a more sober discourse in my following treatise.”24 That this pledge, thankfully, is not kept results in the English Baroque’s most ambitious, undecidable “discourse.” Burton’s excessive, capricious intertextuality “shewes a Schollar,” but it also encourages, as Angus Gowland writes, “a view of the encyclopedia as a fragile mass of doctrine with an inherent tendency towards fragmentation and internal contradiction.”25 Or to borrow Umberto Eco’s terms, the Anatomy may be read as marking the ambiguous transition in the late Renaissance from

566   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque logical representation seeking the “Utopia of a Porphyrian tree” to writerly expression generated by the “the idea of labyrinth.”26 Among the many compelling reasons why the Norwich physician, Thomas Browne has become a scholarly cynosure in recent decades, the Barockfrage, it is fair to say, has not been one of them. Studies by Claire Preston, Reid Barbour, and others have finely illuminated Browne’s writing, thought, and life, especially in the context of early modern English science.27 Preston, in particular, demonstrates how Browne’s writing, as it attempts to forge a now rigorous, now imaginative, but always “civil” form of Baconianism, defies classification by ranging between essay, epistle, dramatic monologue, encyclopedia, and the discursive equivalent of a Wunderkammer. Yet read more comparatively still, as emblematic of the period’s thirst for novelty caused and sometimes slaked by the copia of words and things, Browne’s works may also be said to comprise a decidedly Baroque Book of Nature.28 Browne himself often refers to his inimitable writing simply as “discourse.” He prefaces The Garden of Cyrus, or The Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, naturally, artificially, mystically considered (1658) by distinguishing it from the “massiest” botanical natural histories and by wittily excusing his presumption: “Had I not observed that Purblinde men have discoursed well of sight, and some without issue, excellently of Generation; I that was never master of any considerable garden, had not attempted this Subject.”29 At first glance this invites invidious comparison with Bacon’s essay “Of Gardens”; but instead of pursuing description and prescription, Browne, in constructing a metonymic, analogic “Network,” explicitly aims for novelty and imaginative freedom: We pretend not. . . to erect a new Phytology. The Field of Knowledge hath been so traced, it is hard to spring anything new. . . . In this multiplicity of writing, bye and barren Themes are best fitted for invention; Subjects so often discoursed confine the Imagination, and fix our conceptions unto the notions of fore-writers. Beside, such Discourses allow excursions, and venially admit of collaterall truths, though at some distance from their principals. Wherein if we sometimes take wide liberty, we are not single, but erre by great example.30

Underscored by the wordplay of “Discourses” and “excursions,” a discursive “Field” is mapped here in which digression and errancy mark Browne’s epistemological and stylistic ambitions. That his “great example” consists of obscure texts then ascribed to Hippocrates exemplifies Browne’s playful antiquarianism; while the discourse’s chief conceit—namely, that the quincunx is a ubiquitous, if hermetic figure prized by the ancients and yet still to be found (if sought with curious eyes) in all aspects of human and divine creation—becomes the vehicle of his ingenuity. The Garden of Cyrus is stylistically and conceptually wedded to the text with which it was published, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, Or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk. Together they form a chiaroscuro conceit expressing the tensions between life and death, generation and decay: a conceit informed by the copia of natural

baroque discourse   567 and civil history, as well as Browne’s own semantic riches.31 Occasioned by a local, chance event, Urne-Buriall eventually yields universal truths: But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.32

With a characteristic mix of antithesis, paradox, and aphorism, Browne enacts here and throughout his “Discourse” an eloquent “oscillation between the material and the transcendental.”33 His dedicatory letter paints an affecting portrait of the man and his motives: We are coldly drawn unto discourses of Antiquities, who have scarce time before us to comprehend new things, or make out learned Novelties. . . . Beside, to preserve the living, and make the dead to live, to keep men out of their Urnes, and discourse of humane fragments in them, is not impertinent unto our profession; whose study is life and death, who daily behold examples of mortality, and of all men least need artificial memento’s, or coffins by our bedside, to minde us of our graves.34

At once allusive and concrete, these antitheses characteristically verge on what Gracián (enthusiastically) and Pascal (dismissively) would call the sublime. As physician and natural philosopher, Browne dedicates himself to searching out empirical causes; while as metaphysician, he enthusiastically ponders first and last things, though never losing sight of his own subjectivity. To negotiate these extremes, he discourses in different styles. Or, as Samuel Johnson observed: “His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another.”35 Here we can discuss neither Browne’s Religio Medici (1638), a dialogic essay compassing his beliefs, written not long after his return from studying in Leiden and Padua, nor his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (first edition, 1646), an encyclopedic account of truth and error in natural history and beyond—which in acknowledging the multiplicity of opinions, would persuade rather than decree.36 I would, though, highlight one his favorite figures: occupatio (or paralipsis or praeteritio), which Preston defines as the “figure of concise omission” and Lausberg “the announcement of the intention to leave certain things out.”37 Browne relies on this figure to indicate earnestly or ironically both the limits and the potentially inexhaustible nature of his discourse. “To enlarge this contemplation unto all the mysteries and secrets, accommodable unto this number, were inexcusable Pythagorisme, yet cannot omit the ancient conceit”—so begins the concluding section of The Garden of Cyrus, which goes on to learnedly enumerate numerous subjects he cannot or will not explicate.38 In other words, Browne’s generative struggle with copia yields both presence and absence, tangible empirical and philological truths along with imagined, mystical considerations.

568   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Latin and Vernacular Expression Despite the lure of the vernacular, many Baroque writers with an eye on the Republic of Letters, still conveyed their learning in Latin. Throughout Europe and in parts of Asia and the New World, the Jesuits promoted Neo-Latin eloquence at the pulpit, in the classroom, and on the page.39 In philosophy, the eclectic Pierre Gassendi responded skeptically both to Aristotelianism and Descartes’s Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), as he tried to reconcile empiricism with Christian metaphysics. Rejecting Descartes’s criteria for clarity and distinctiveness, Gassendi concludes that “only confusedly and analogically” [nisi confusè, & analogicè] can reason make knowledge claims not based on the senses.40 His treatises and epistles—but especially the posthumously published Syntagma philosophicum (1649)—feature a curt, vigorous style indebted to Seneca and Lipsius but also to the vernacular efforts of Montaigne, Pierre Charron, and François de La Mothe Le Vayer.41 Latin also retained the greatest currency in encyclopedic discourse, as exemplified by texts ranging from Bacon’s Instauratio magna (1623) and Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta (1620, 1630) to Daniel Georg Morhof ’s Polyhistor, sive de auctorum notitia et rerum commentarii (1707).42 And even if Morhof and other polyhistors courted their own oblivion by writing “at fantastic length in barbarous Latin about tedious and terrifying subjects,” their place in intellectual history, as Anthony Grafton and others have observed, still merits consideration.43 Far from forgotten, but still insufficiently read, are works by Athanasius Kircher, whose identification with Baroque polymathy has become a critical commonplace. Kircher and his assistants produced some thirty-eight encyclopedic books, most of them large folio volumes adorned with elaborate frontispieces, numerous engravings and diagrams, and featuring extravagantly verbose Latin prose supplemented everywhere by polyglot citations. Paula Findlen writes of Kircher’s “terrifying prolixity,” and adds: “At the height of his career, Kircher created a kind of typographical labyrinth that temporarily trapped all the best minds of the mid-seventeenth century inside his books.”44 In Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–1654), filling more than a thousand folio pages with learned discourse and arcane diagrams, Kircher pretends to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ideograms of hermetic wisdom, hieroglyphs were envisioned as “nondiscursive”—an ideal productively at odds with Kircher’s own “metaphysical bombast” and “digressive, encyclopedic style.”45 And while contemporaries increasingly doubted the veracity of his knowledge, Kircher’s Ars magna sciendi (1669), which tries to refashion Lullian ars combinatoria to yield a universal science, embodied the hopes of many contemporaries, including John Wilkins and a young Leibniz. After writing his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666), Leibnitz wrote admiringly to the older Kircher.46 In Kircher’s and Leibniz’s Germany much discourse was generated by members of Sprachgesellschaften, societies dedicated to making the vernacular a nimbler and more capacious vehicle for expression and debate. For example, one of the leading lights of the

baroque discourse   569 Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, sought in the prose dialogues of his encyclopedic Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele [Women’s conversational games] (1641–1649) to teach German-speaking women and men the art of conversational “play” [Spiel].47 Stuffed with emblems and massively intertextual—its title page announces that the Gesprächspiele are “reliant on Italian, French, and Spanish writers”—Harsdörffer’s discourse has significant affinities with the combinatory, encyclopedic efforts of Kircher, Leibniz, and Quirinus Kuhlmann. Alternatively, Leibniz published two essays, “Ermahnung an die Teutsche, ihren Verstand und Sprache besser zu üben” [Appeal to the Germans to better use their understanding and language] (1679) and “Unvorgreiffliche Gedancken betreffend die Ausübung und Verbesserung der teutschen Sprache” [Unanticipated thoughts concerning the practice and improvement of the German language] (1697–1712), which regret the split between the elite’s use of Latin and French and the general population’s use of the vernacular, a split preventing German from becoming an instrument of scientific thought.48 Adopting a pragmatic, even nominalist stance on language’s ability to represent abstract ideas, Leibniz particularly objects to writers who needlessly mix various languages in their discourses. More interested in sciences (Wißenschafften) than literature, he neglects Germany’s literary prose stylists. He ignores, for instance, Hans Jakob Christoffels von Grimmelshausen, whose influential Der abenteurliche Simplicissimus (1668) naturalized the Spanish picaresque novel. Instead, improving the vernacular for Leibniz meant making language an instrument of transparent thought. Working in his own philosophy toward either a universal science based on mathematics or a metaphysics of the monad, Leibniz saw his own discursive task, for example in Discours de métaphysique (1686), as the demonstration of God’s perfection in designing the universe. In France, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac adapted the political values of Roman Republicanism to subtly critique the thought and culture associated with the Court of Louis XIII and Marie de’ Medici. Dubbed by contemporaries as the unico eloquente (uniquely eloquent) for his versatile “style moyen orné”—a style at once “Attic” and florid, ironic, and ingenious—Balzac gave voice to what Marc Fumaroli has aptly dubbed the age’s spirit of desengaño, while also anticipating the expressive values of French neoclassical prose.49 His Lettres (1624, 1636), which won him his greatest fame, address religious and secular figures such as Richelieu and Racan. They eschew the Jesuits’ ornate visual rhetoric and digressive, humanist erudition to fashion a vividly personal, yet still public form of expression. A 1654 English translation, which collected Balzac’s letters, included Jacques de la Motte Aigron’s illuminating 1624 preface.50 Distinguishing between “orations” and “letters,” Motte Aigron observes that while no difference exists between them “in regard of the dignity of the Subjects, the force of Reasons, the gracefulness of Discourses, nor in the sublimity of Conceits,” still, with letters, “we enter at the first dash upon the matter, nor do we scarce at any time, quit the same; the reasons go altogether alone without assistance, and all the ornament allowed them, is onely freedome of conceptions, the fecundity of language, and that they passe not promiscuously.” As for subject matter, “whatsoever may fall into discourse, and under reason, are the objects of Letters.”

570   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque And while Seneca’s and Cicero’s letters continue to be models, “this is the first time any thing of perfection hath appeared in our language.” Moreover, “to say that any hath joyned Art to abundance, and mingled mildnesse with Majesty, or hath raised his stile without either loosing himself, or straying from his subject, that is it which in truth we could not see till this present.” In short, Motte Aigron’s defense of “these brave and generous formes of discourse, and those great and strange conceptions wherewith these Letters were so curiously limned, and so plentifully graced,” points to a nascent poetics of prose, one that builds on Montaigne’s Essais and, conversely, paves the way for Pascal’s Lettres provinciales (1656–1657). Motte Aigron’s preface also belongs to a broader debate about the Lettres.51 Jean Goulu, in Lettres de Phyllarque à Ariste, où il est traité de l’éloquence française [Letters of Phylarch to Ariste, wherein French eloquence is treated] (1627–1628), charged Balzac with various stylistic crimes. In response, François Ogier’s Apologie de Monsieur de Balzac [Defense of Monsieur de Balzac] (1627) offered a wide-ranging justification of Balzac’s style (Balzac may have authored it himself), including a nimble defense of hyperbole as a classically sanctioned species of “raillerie.” Then, in 1628, Descartes penned a limpid Latin epistle defending the style and mode of argumentation in the Lettres.52 Tellingly, in the course of praising Balzac’s eloquence and clarity of thought, Descartes critiques four vices of prose style: being too Ciceronian, too Senecan, favoring an overly austere style, and an excessively ingenious one. By contrast, Balzac attains “a felicitious concord of words and content [felici rerum cum sermone concordia]”; for with him “the abundance of the most elegant discourse neither dissipates nor overwhelms the force of the arguments [elegantissimae orationis ubertas. . . vires argumentorum non dissipat, nec obruit].” Thus even if Descartes reads Balzac rather selectively, striking is his familiarity with the expressive possibilities of contemporary discourse. Elsewhere we have considered the Baroque aspects of Descartes’s writing and how these are inseparable from the meaning and affects of his thinking.53 Here we should stress only how the problem of copia troubles his discourse as well. In the seventh set of Objections and Replies in his Meditations, Descartes refutes the charge that the “excess” occasioned by his hyperbolic doubt mars his discourse, since he has adopted this “manner” to defeat the Skeptics, not to become one himself, as Pierre Bourdin charges. On the contrary, it is Bourdin’s text, “so full of words and so empty of reasons,” that merits Descartes’s verbose blame.54 Blaise Pascal travels a via media between Balzac’s renewal of “Attic” expression and Descartes’s attempt to geometrize thought. Celebrated by contemporaries for his elegant treatises on conic sections and arithmetical triangles, Pascal, in De l’esprit géométrique et de l’art de persuader [Of the geometrical spirit and the art of persuasion] (c. 1655), first describes how geometric reasoning can clarify and abbreviate discourse. But then he insists on language’s inability to define key concepts and first principles, or, more particularly, to represent infinity or to gauge the caprices of the human will. Briefly put, he claims ignorance of what discourse can do to attain “correspondence” [l’agrément] between subject and object, author and reader. Pascal has no doubt, however, as to what style vitiates good thinking:

baroque discourse   571 Nothing is more common than good things; it is only a question of discerning them. . . . It is not in extraordinary and bizarre things that excellence of whatever kind is to be found. . . . The mind need not be tricked. Strained and labored manners fill it with a foolish presumption through unnatural elevation and a vain and ridiculous inflation instead of a solid and vigorous nourishment. And one of the principal reasons why those who enter into knowledge of these subjects stray so far from the true path they should follow is that the imagination, which assumes at first that good things are inaccessible, names them great, haughty, elevated, sublime. This ruins everything. I would like to name these things lowly, common, familiar. These names are more suitable for such things. I hate those swollen words.55

Fumaroli generously interprets this as indicating the central role commonplaces should play in discourse, since these allow the apologist to draw on rhetorical conventions tested by experience.56 Unremarked, though, is how Pascal’s acute, eloquent antipathy for inflated eloquence maps the polar extremes of Baroque discourse. “True eloquence,” Pascal asserts in the Pensées (1656–1662), “makes a mockery of eloquence.”57 Thus he pretends to align his own “manner or writing” with that of Epictetus and Montaigne, which “is composed entirely of thoughts born from life’s ordinary discourses.”58 Yet pensées such as “Discours de la machine” and “Disproportion de l’homme” also employ rhetoric and logic to solicit extraordinary affects that would force sceptical or wavering readers to risk belief in God: “Yes, but one must wager. This is not voluntary; you are embarqued.”59 Indeed, with their curt syntax and insistent use of figures such as antithesis, paradox, ellipsis, litotes, metaphor, and hyperbole, the sometimes polished, often fragmentary Pensées make palpable irreconcilable tensions between knowledge and belief and seeming and being. In the process, the Baroque crisis of humanism reaches its most acute stage, as Pascal dramatically alternates between cataphatic and apophatic extremes, between implacable diagnoses of human misery and dizzying astonishment in the face of the cosmographical infinite and an incomprehensible God.60

Witty Prose Baltasar Gracián authored a treatise that should be ground zero for any discussion of the Baroque poetics of prose. The sixty-three “discursos” of Agudeza y arte de ingenio [Wit and the art of ingenuity] (1648) give an intertextual, analytic, and prescriptive account of the primacy of wit. In analyzing how ingenio is a subtle form of understanding able to express [exprimir] and reconcile extremes, embrace contingency, and appeal simultaneously to reason and the imagination, Gracián responds to contemporary poetry and prose in a manner paralleled only by Tesauro’s attempt to make sense of Marino’s maniera. At the same time, his theoretical claims and the numerous specimens he adduces also argue for a transhistorical, transnational Baroque. Devaluing the decorum prescribed by classical and Renaissance rhetoric, Gracián prizes instead the

572   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque cognitive and aesthetic effects of difficulty and novelty, which now furnish the hermeneutic criteria by which all writing and thinking should be judged. Since agudeza can occur “in the subtlety of thinking, in the elegance of saying, in the artifice of discoursing, in the profundity of proclaiming,” a new canon must be assembled.61 Prescribing many sources for erudite wit and approving a great variety of styles, Gracián recommends two principal kinds of prose: the “Asian and laconic.”62 Both have their virtues and contingent uses. As for classical models, Tacitus stands out for his subtle copia, Valerius Maximus for his “ponderations,” Cicero for his versatility, Seneca for his sentiousness, and Pliny the Younger for his witty praise.63 In Spanish prose, Mateo Alemán’s picaresque fiction and Paravicino’s sermons exemplify ingenuity.64 Moreover, in discoursing on wit, Gracián’s prose is itself witty and compendious. He was, as it were, studying and refining the style informing his other works, such as the aphoristic courtier’s handbook, Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia [A pocket oracle and art of prudence] (1647), and the allegorical, but always witty and thoroughly skeptical novel, El Criticón [The critic] (1651, 1653, 1657). All the more curious, then, is Gracián’s omission of the witty prose most admired and feared in Baroque Spain. In the course of his roller-coaster career, Francisco de Quevedo refined a prose style initially informed by Lipsius’s curt, Christian Stoicism but then increasingly marked by skeptical desengaño bent on enumerating the world’s ills. In genres including the treatise, commentary, memorial, historia, and picaresque novel, Quevedo proved a subtle thinker and unrivaled polemicist and satirist. He was a writer whose conceptista style gave vivid, pointed expression to philosophical, political, and literary-critical matters.65 Or, as Borges affirmed: “Like Joyce, like Goethe, like Shakespeare, like Dante, like no other writer, Francisco de Quevedo is less a man than a vast and complex literature.”66 Most representative of this literature is his Sueños y discursos de verdades descubridoradas de abusos, de vicios, y engaños, en todos los oficios y estados del mundo [Dreams and discourses of revelatory truths concerning abuses, vices, and deceptions in all the offices and classes in the world] (1627). These five satirical discursos, written over the course of decades then republished in a single volume, are framed as thinly veiled fictions or allegorical, infernal journeys, but read as skeptical philosophical and moral disquisitions. Expressing semantic and conceptual excess of all kinds, Quevedo obsessively maps the gulf between seeming and being to underscore the hypocrisy of pretending one thing is another, which he targets as the root cause of Spain’s cultural, political, and moral decline. Making palpable the unresolvable dialectic of engaño y desengaño, these discursos yield a kind of pragmatic knowledge or “adequation” or “accommodation.”67 For example, the fourth sueño, “El mundo por de dentro” [The world from within] invokes Francisco Sánchez’s skeptical treatise Quod nihil scitur (1581) before plunging its narrator into the affective and epistemological “confusion” of an allegorical Madrid.68 Here agency belongs only to the deceiving “world,” which manipulates our “desire” for “novelty” and “knowledge.” As the narrator observes: “And instead of desiring to leave the labyrinth, I managed to extend the illusion for myself.” But then he finds the guidance of “a venerable, gray-haired old man,” who turns out to be “Desengaño” himself and

baroque discourse   573 who, as they walk the “infinite” streets of the city, pointedly instructs him in the many kinds of “engaño.” As with a sequence of pensées by Pascal or a memento mori by Valdés Leal, Quevedo thus ruthlessly condemns the vanities of the world. Grounded in disenchantment with imperial Spain’s economy and society, his critique also functions as a skeptical riposte to the arbitristas, a class of writers who responded to the same perception of crisis with often outlandish schemes for reform.69 Remarkably, despite their local roots, the Sueños were soon transplanted into French, English, and German.70 An abbreviated, moralistic English translation (based on La Geneste’s French translation) was done by Richard Crashaw, arguably the most representative English Baroque poet, and later translator of Marino’s Sospetto d’Herode. While the German version by Johann Michael Moscherosch became a “discurs” cannily engaging the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War as well.

Transatlantic “Hieroglyphs” Baroque discourses traveled in other ways and to farther places. To celebrate the new viceroy’s arrival in Mexico City in 1680, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora each designed a triumphal arch adorned with emblematic paintings (which others executed) and then each penned a prose treatise to explicate their invention. Steeped in a culture of absolutism and spectacle, Sor Juana’s Neptuno alegórico, Océano de colores, simulacro político [Allegorical Neptune, ocean of colors, political simulacrum] and Sigüenza’s Teatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen a un príncipe [Theater of political virtues constituting a prince] are exorbitant, syncretic, cosmopolitan efforts to reconcile emblematic and encyclopedic expression.71 Further, both texts unfold within the larger intellectual-historical contexts of translatio studii, or the migration of learning between the Old and New Worlds; translatio imperii, in which Habsburg Spain palimpsestically replaces the Aztec Empire; and the dynamics of Baroque triumphal art, in which intermedial and intertextual modes play essential roles. At the same time, these elaborate prose ekphrases proceed quite differently. Sor Juana’s discourse makes conceptual and pragmatic arguments; Sigüenza’s makes moral and historical claims. A Hieronymite nun (whom contemporaries dubbed the Tenth Muse), Sor Juana is best known today for her epistles learnedly defending her right to study and write as a woman in the face of ecclesiastical opposition, as well as her thousand-line poem, the “Sueño” [Dream], which masterfully exploits classical myth, Aristotelian and Galenic science, and all the resources of Baroque poetics to narrate a failed attempt to attain epistemological certainty and metaphysical truths. Just as representative, though, is Neptuno alegórico, a complex, intermedial, and intertextual exercise in Baroque allegory and copia. “The Allegorical Neptune,” Octavio Paz comments, “is a perfect example of what is admirable and excreable in baroque prose: interlaced with prosopopeias, echoes, labyrinths, emblems, paradoxes, wit, and antitheses, sparkling with Latin quotations and Greek and Egyptian names, in interminable, sinuous phrases, slowed but not

574   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque overburdened by its trappings, it advances across the page with a certain elephantine majesty.”72 Mixing prose and verse, invoking architecture, painting, and emblems, Sor Juana adduces a dizzying host of classical and humanist authorities. Her title signals the principal conceit: The new viceroy is an American Neptune, whose arrival induces her to envision a sequence of fourteen paintings and “hieroglyphs,” a sequence drawing on copious material from humanist encyclopedias to represent timeless truths and local circumstances (such as the need for flood control around Mexico City).73 More particularly, Sor Juana ransacks three imported, mythological compendia: Vitoria’s Teatro de los dioses de la gentilidad (1620, 1623), Cartari’s Imagines deorum (1581), and Conti’s Mythologiae (1567). She also draws on Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (1556) and Alciato’s Emblemata (1531). Mining these sources, she wittily exploits Greco-Roman imagery to serve Creole cultural ambitions. For example, in her first canvas Sor Juana visualizes “the great similitude and connection” between past and present by placing portraits of the viceroy’s and vicereine’s faces on the bodies of Neptune and Amphitrite as they emerge from the sea on a cart drawn by hippocampi: These swimming monsters broke the white spume, which they augmented champing at the golden bits and which they blended with the green fetlocks of their feet. Triton, biform in figure, preceded the cart, with his twisted horn, a marine bugle trumpeting many glories, the music delighting the royal ears. And the Nereids, crowning their green locks with shells and pearls, obsequiously accompanied their masters.74

A Gongorist appeal to the eyes and ears, this ekphrasis and those that follow it exemplify how Baroque expressive values survived and thrived in the New World. Sigüenza was a poet, novelist, calendarist, ethnographer, mapmaker, and Mexico’s premier mathematician. His most important book, Libra astronómica y filosófica (1690), contests credulous accounts of the 1681 comet, in part by invoking Descartes, Kepler, Mersenne, and Gassendi. In the Teatro, by contrast, Sigüenza writes both as a belated humanist and as the leading Creole scholar of Pre-Columbian Mexico. Syncretizing indigenous myth and endogenous antiquity, he constructs an irenic vision in which the sequence of ten Aztec emperors are presented as emblems of virtue to be emulated by Spanish rulers.75 Rejecting the “mythological ideas of lying fables” borrowed from Greece and Rome, Sigüenza self-consciously pursues “the extraordinary” instead. Thus, though praising Sor Juana’s “ability in the Encyclopedia and universality of her letters,” he also blames her allegory.76 After citing Nieremberg and Augustine on how pagan myth can be used to teach eternal “truths,” he queries: “With the pleasant lights of truth alone is the noble encyclopedia of elegant learning made beautiful; but how could this be if it lacks some precise circumstance?”77 That the “circumstance” in the Teatro is furnished by Aztec history proves crucial, for it enables him to wittily remake “the encyclopedia” for a local audience. Like Sor Juana, Sigüenza constructs an incredibly dense web of citation and quotation to gloss the images he devises; but in defending his own ingenious invention or “liberty in discourses,” he also promotes a species of

baroque discourse   575 “hieroglyphics” intended to emulate how he supposed ancient Egyptian and Aztec ideograms to function.78 Still more ambitiously, the Teatro would reinterpret the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. To this end, Sigüenza compares arguments from Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus with those in “the ancient, original histories of the Mexicans, which I possess.”79 Juggling dubious etymologies and far-fetched metonymies, he then identifies Neptune as the son of the biblical Mizraim (Gen. 10:13), whose descendents, in turn, formed one of the lost tribes of Israel, who then migrated to Atlantis and later to the New World to become its original inhabitants. Not content with this, Sigüenza next links Mizraim to the Egyptian goddess of “Wisdom”—with whom, not accidentally, Sor Juana identifies herself in Neptuno alegórico. In this convoluted manner, sacred and profane history are rewritten and the alterity of Nahua culture is lessened, as the indios become the wise ancestors of their conquerors and colonizers. In sum, Neptuno alegórico and the Teatro variously accomplish what Sor Juana calls a “trasunto,” a copy or translation of an original or, perhaps, a figuration that displaces the original.80 These elaborate discourses look backward in time and sideways toward Europe, even as they show how prose expression could take new, hybrid forms to give voice to local and global phenomena. Their complexity, like that of the other exemplary texts discussed above, confirms the challenges faced by any comparative, transnational account of Baroque discourse. Only by attending first to this complexity can broader intellectual historical claims about the period later be ventured. Only then can we track how discourses crossed disciplinary, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. And only then can we try to trace how in each literary culture in Europe and the Americas Baroque discourses emerged, flourished, and then faded. Conversely, just as nonfiction prose offered the writers mentioned in this chapter a uniquely dynamic medium in which to reorder and critique the humanist archive, explore conflicting emergent subjectivities, and ponder the real and imagined contingencies of a mutable world, so it also prompts its belated readers to try to emulate this dynamism. It prompts us to adopt a synoptic view to bring together seemingly discordant things, and to find some measure of conceptual unity in the multiplicity and mobility of forms, styles, and themes. Indeed, that such perspectivism would not have been news to Burton, Marino, or Pascal is another argument for the anachronic vitality of the Baroque.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), xv. See also Timothy J. Reiss, Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). 2. The Order of Things, 42–43, 51–81. 3. See Daniel Rosenberg, “Early Modern Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 1–9; Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Edward Baring, “Ideas on the Move: Context in Transnational Intellectual History,” Journal of the History

576   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque of Ideas 77, no. 4 (2016): 567–587, which views “archives” as furnishing “contexts” that “allow scholars to bridge cultural differences.” 4. On “Denkraum,” see Christopher D. Johnson, “Configuring the Baroque: Warburg and Benjamin,” Culture, Theory and Critique 57, no. 2 (2016): 142–165. 5. Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid, 1732), 300: “contiene varios pensamientos y reflexiones sobre alguna materia, para persuadir ò ponderar alguno intento.” 6. Thresor de la langue française (Paris, 1606), 208: “quand ou de parole ou par escrit on traite esparsément de quelque matiere.” 7. Diccionario, 300: “en el discurso de mi vida, conocí muchos de los que se nombran en la historia.” 8. Francis Bacon, The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xix–xx. The essay form, as Bacon’s progressive expansion of his text over the course of the 1597, 1612, and 1625 editions indicate, proved highly amenable to amplifying “dispersed meditations.” 9. On Nieremberg, see José Ramón Marcaida López, Arte y ciencia en el barroco español: Historia natural, coleccionismo y cultura visual (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2014). 10. Morris W. Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose,” in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. M. Patrick and R. O. Evans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 207–233. 11. “Attic Prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon,” in Patrick and Evans, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, 167–202. 12. “The Baroque Style in Prose,” 210. 13. See George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968); and Croll is taken to task in Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 13, 96–119, 285. 14. See Epochenschwellen und Epochenbewußtsein, ed. Reinhart Herzog and Reinhart Kosseleck (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1987). 15. John Guillory, “Mercury’s Words: The End of Rhetoric and the Beginning of Prose,” Representations 138 (2017): 58–86; here 60. The comparative task, then, is to further complicate this insight by examining how other prose styles, in England and beyond, also productively misrecognize their place vis-à-vis “the system of rhetoric.” 16. For these figures, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. David E. Orton, and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 17. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 83. The Devotions consists of sixty-nine short prose pieces loosely based on Loyolan meditation. 18. Giambattista Marino, Dicerie sacre, ed. Erminia Ardissino (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2014), 33. For a synoptic appraisal of Italian Baroque prose, see Giovanni Getto, Il Barocco letterario in Italia (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000). 19. Quoted by Ardissino in Dicerie sacre, 10–11, 19. “faranno stupire il mondo. . . parrà cosa stravagante ed inaspettata.” “Spero che piaceranno, sì per novità e bizzaria della invenzione, poiché ciascun discorso contiene una metafora sola, sì per la vivezza dello stile e per la maniera del concettare spiritoso.”

baroque discourse   577 20. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 6 vols., ed. Thomas  C.  Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair; “Introduction” by J. B. Bamborough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2002), 1.10–11. 21. Burton, 1.1. 22. Burton, 1.18, 1.356, see also 1.364. See Rosalie Colie, Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 431–456; Susan Wells, “Genre as Species and Spaces: Literary and Rhetorical Genre in The Anatomy of Melancholy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 2 (2014): 113–136. 23. Burton, 1.17. See also 2.12 where, harping on his plain-spoken subjectivity, he pretends to “essay” like Montaigne, while invoking a litany of authorities old and new to protect his ethos. 24. Burton, 1.112. 25. Burton, 1.11. Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 135; see also Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 26. Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 80; also “From the Tree to the Labyrinth,” in From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 3–94. Eco informs Grant Williams, “ ‘The Babel Event’: Language, Rhetoric, and Burton’s Infinite Symptom,” in Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe, ed. Stephen Pender and Nancy S. Streuver (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 229–250. 27. Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 34–67; Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed, ed. Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Reid Barbour, Sir Thomas Browne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 28. See Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 1986), 97–98. 29. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 86. Forthcoming in 2019 is a new, eight-volume, Oxford edition of Browne’s works. 30. Browne, Religio Medici and Other Works, 86. 31. See Frank  L.  Huntley, “Sir Thomas Browne: The Relationship of ‘Urn Burial’ and ‘The Garden of Cyrus,’ ” Studies in Philology 53, no. 2 (1956): 204–219. 32. Browne, Religio Medici and Other Works, 123. 33. Barbour, Thomas Browne, 151. 34. Browne, Religio Medici and Other Works, 84. 35. From “The Life of Sir Thomas Browne” (1756), in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 486. Johnson also underscores “the novelty of paradoxes, the dignity of sentiment, the quick succession of images, the multitude of abstruse allusions, the subtilty of disquisition, and the strength of language.” 36. See William N. West, “Brownean Motion: Conversation within Pseudodoxia Epidemica’s ‘sober circumference of knowledge,’” in Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed, 168–187. 37. Barbour, Thomas Browne, 203–204. Lausberg comments: “The announcement of the intention to omit, on the one hand, and the fact that items are mentioned in the enumeration, on the other, lend irony to praeteritio” (Handbook, 393–394).

578   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 38. Browne, Religio Medici and Other Works, 169. 39. See Marc Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence, rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 231–423. Fumaroli stresses the Jesuit emphasis on visual effects. This “rhétorique des peintures” is achieved via such figures as hypotyposis, ekphrasis, and prosopopeia. Nicolaus Caussin was the preeminent Jesuit orator and theorist. 40. Pierre Gassendi, Opera Omnia, 6 vols. (Lyons, 1658); reprinted (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Germany: Friedrich Frommann, 1964), 3.322. 41. See Jean-Charles Darmon, Philosophie Épicurienne et Littérature au XVIIe Siècle en France: Études sur Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, La Fontaine, Saint-Evremond (Paris: PUF, 1998); Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 80–127. 42. See Bacon, Instauratio magna, Part 2: Novum organum and Associated Texts, ed. Graham Rees with Maria Wakely, The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); and Wilhelm SchmidtBiggemann, Topica universalis: Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner, 1983). 43. Anthony Grafton, “The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism,” Central European History 18, no. 1 (1985): 31–47, here 32. 44. Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4, 6. 45. Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 247–250. 46. Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna sciendi. . . (Amsterdam, 1669): “Sed haec iam regulis artis nostrae applicemus, idque methodo Lulliana,” 303. See Thomas Leinkauf, Mundus combinatus. Studien zur Struktur der barocken Universalwissenschaft am Beispiel Athanasius Kircher SJ (1602–1680), 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin: Akademie, 2009). Leibniz wrote to Kircher on May 16, 1670. 47. Georg Philipp Harsdorffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, ed. Irmgard Böttcher (Tubingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1969). Harsdörffer’s moniker as a member of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft was “Der Spielende.” On the German Baroque and its relation to the European Baroque, see Klaus Garber, “Barock,” in Literatur und Kultur im Europe der Frühen Neuzeit. Gesammelte Studien (Paderborn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 695–745. 48. G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie, 1986, 2008), 4.3.795–820; 4.6.528–565. 49. L’âge de l’éloquence, 544, 695–705. See also Jean Jehasse, Guez de Balzac et le génie romain (Saint-Etienne, France: Université de Saint-Etienne, 1977). 50. Letters of Mounsieur de Balzac/Translated out of French into English/Now collected into one volume . . . By Sr Richard Baker Knight, and others (London, 1654), unnumbered pages. All quotations in the main text are from this edition. Balzac also published an oration, Le Prince (1631), treatise, Socrate chrétien (1652), and, posthumously, a collection of essays, Les entretiens (1657). 51. See Mathilde Bombart, “Des écritures en polémique: autour de la querelle des Lettres de Guez de Balzac (1624-1630),” Littératures classiques 59, no. 1 (2006): 173–191. 52. See Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1897), 1.7–11. See also Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 50.

baroque discourse   579 53. Christopher  D.  Johnson, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 2010), 365–414. 54. Œuvres de Descartes, 7.547: “si pleine de paroles et si vide de raisons.” See also Descartes and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies, ed. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 208. 55. Pascal, L’art de persuader (Paris: Éditions Payor & Rivages, 2017), 157–158: “Rien n’est plus commun que les bonnes choses: il n’est question que de les discerner. . . . Ce n’est pas dans les choses extraordinaires et bizarres que se trouve l’excellence de quelque genre que ce soit. . . . Il ne faut pas guinder l’esprit; les manières tendues et pénibles le remplissent d’une sotte présomption par une élévation étrangère et par une enflure vaine et ridicule au lieu d’une nourriture solide et vigoreuse. Et l’une des raisons principales qui éloignent autant ceux qui entrent dans ces connaissances du véritable chemin qu’ils doivent suivre, est l’imagination qu’on prend d’abord que les bonnes choses sont inaccessibles, en leur donnant le nom de grandes, hautes, élevées, sublimes. Cela perd tout. Je voudrais les nommer basses, communes, familières: ces noms-là leur conviennent mieux; je hais ces mots d’enflure.” 56. Pascal, L’art de persuader, 52. 57. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Bordas, 1991): “La vrai éloquence se moque de l’éloquence” (#671). Compare Pascal’s use of the pensée with that of Pierre Bayle in Pensées diverses sur la comète (1682). 58. Pascal, Pensées, 618: “manière d’écrire”; “est toute composée de pensées nées sur les entretiens ordinaires de la vie.” 59. Pascal, Pensées, 680: “Oui, mais il faut parier. Cela n’est pas voluntaire, vous êtes embarqué.” 60. See Hyperboles, 415–485. 61. Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, 2 vols., ed. Evaristo Correa Calderón (Madrid: Castalia, 2001), 2.198: “en la sutileza del pensar, en la elegancia del decir, en el artificio del discurrir, en la profundidad del declarar.” 62. Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, 2.235. 63. Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, 2.235–242. 64. Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, 2.195–197, 203–206, 252. “El agradable Hortensio, juntó lo ingenioso del pensar con lo bizarro del decir; es más admirable que imitable.” 65. Francisco de Quevedo, Obras completas en prosa, 11 vols., ed. Alfonso Rey (Madrid: Castalia, 2003–). On Quevedo’s fluid approach to genre, see Santiago Fernández Mosquera, “El sermón, el tratado, el memorial: la escritura interesada de Quevedo,” La Perinola: Revista de investigación quevediana 2 (1998): 63–86. 66. J. L. Borges, “Quevedo,” in Obras completas, 1923–1972 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 660–666; here 666. 67. See José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, tr. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 157–158, 194–199, 202–203. 68. Sueños y discursos, ed. Ignacio Arellano, in Obras completas en prosa, vol. 1.1 (Madrid: Castalia, 2003), 359–360: “El mundo, que a nuestro deseo sabe la condición, para lisonjearla pónese delante mudable y vario, porque la novedad y diferencia es el afeite con que más nos atrae. Con esto acaricia nuestros deseos, llévalos tras sí y ellos a nosotros. Sea por todas las experiencias mi succeso, pues cuando más apurado me había de tener el conocimiento destas cosas, me hallé todo en poder de la confusión, poseído de la vanidad de tal manera que en la gran población del mundo, perdido ya, corría donde tras la hermosura

580   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque me llevaban los ojos y adonde tras la conversación los amigos, de una calle en otra, hecho fábula de todos, y en lugar de desear salida al labirinto procuraba que se me alargase el engaño. Ya por la calle de la ira descompuesto seguía las pendencias pisando sangre y heridas; ya por la de la gula veía responder a los brindis turbados. Al fin, de una calle en otra andaba (siendo infinitas) de tal manera confuso que la admiración aun no dejaba sentido para el cansancio, cuando, llamado de voces descompuestas y tirado porfiadamente del manteo, volví la cabeza. Era un viejo venerable en sus canas, maltratado, roto por mil partes el vestido y pisado; no por eso ridículo, antes severo y digno de respeto.” In “Of Truth,” when Bacon blames “certain discoursing wits,” Vickers sees an allusion to the sceptical Sánchez (4). 69. Quevedo satirizes the arbitristas directly in many texts. See Fernández Mosquera, 65–68. 70. Les Visions de Don Francisco de Quevedo . . . Traduites d’Espagnol par le Sieur de la Geneste (Paris, 1632); Visions, or Hels Kingdome, And the Worlds Follies and Abuses, Strangely displaied by R. C. of the Inner Temple Gent. (London, 1640); Wunderbahre Satyrische gesichte verteutscht durch Philander von Sittewald (Straßburg, 1640). 7 1. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Neptuno alégorico, ed. Vincent Martin (Madrid: Cátedra, 2009); Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Teatro de virtudes politicas (Mexico City: UNAM, 1986). See María Fernández, Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 26–67. 72. Octavio Paz, Sor Juana, Or, the Traps of Faith, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 158. 73. Neptuno alegórico, 76, 65. 74. Neptuno alegórico, 119–122: “Rompían estos nadantes monstruos las blancas espumas que aumentaban tascando los dorados frenos y matizaban con las verdes cernejas de sus pies. Precedía al carro, Tritón, de biforme figura, con su torcida trompa, marino clarín de tantas glorias; divertiendo los reales oídos las músicas; y acompañaban obsequiosas a sus dueños las Nereidas, coronando sus verdes cabellos de conchas y perlas.” 75. See Anna More, Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Helga von Kügelgen, “La línea prehispanica: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora y su Teatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen a un principe,” in Pensamiento europeo y cultura colonial, ed. Karl Kohut and Sonia V. Rose (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1997), 205–237. 76. Teatro, 12–13, 23: “capacidad en la Encyclopedia, y universalidad de sus letras.” 77. Teatro, 15: “Sólo con las luces apacibles de la verdad se hermosea la enciclopedia noble de la erudución elegante, pero ¿cómo pudiera serlo ésta si le faltasse aquella circunstancia precisa?” 7 8. Teatro, 12, 49–50. 7 9. Teatro, 33–34; Kircher’s books caused “a transatlantic encounter without parallel in the early modern world,” comments Findlen in “A Jesuit’s Books in the New World,” in Athanasius Kircher, 361. Sigüenza drew on the post-conquest Codex Ixtlilxochitl, which is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He also relied on the sixteenth-century Codex Mendoza, as partially transcribed by Kircher, who was mining Samuel Purchas’s version of the codex in Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrims (1625). For an account of this exemplary instance of “translation” and “mobility,” see Daniela Bleichmar, “History in Pictures: Translating the Codex Mendoza,” Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 682–701. 8 0. Neptuno alegórico, 100.

baroque discourse   581

Further Reading Barner, Wilifried. Barockrhetorik. Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1970. Croll, Morris W. Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll. Edited by J. M. Patrick and R. O. Evans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Flor, Fernando R. de la. Barroco: Representación e ideología en el mundo hispanico (1580–1680). Madrid: Cátedra, 2002. Fumaroli, Marc. L’âge de l’éloquence, rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique. Geneva: Droz, 1980. Garber, Klaus, ed. Europäisches Barock-Rezeption. 2 vols. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1991. Howell, W. S. “Baroque Rhetoric: A Concept at Odds with Its Setting.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 15, no. 1 (1982): 1–23. Kitay, Jeffrey, and Wlad Godzich, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Translated by Terry Cochran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. More, Anna. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Negri, Antonio. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Paravicino, Fray Hortensio. Sermones cortesanos. Edited by Francis Cerdan. Madrid: Castalia, 1994. Schwartz Lerner, Lía. Quevedo, discurso y representación. Pamplona, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1987. Spitzer, Leo. “The Spanish Baroque.” In Representative Essays. Edited by Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland, 123–139. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Tristan, Marie-France. La scène de l’écriture. Essai sur la poésie philosophique du Cavalier Marin (1569–1625). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002. Viera, Antonio. Six Sermons. Edited and translated by Monica Leal da Silva and Liam Brockey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Williamson, George. The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier. London: Faber and Faber, 1951.

chapter 26

Cl assica l Defense of th e Ba roqu e Hélène Merlin-Kajman

Taken in its most general sense, that which is Baroque derives its strength (and its charm) from its clash with Classicism: the Baroque is everything that Classicism is not. It shares the same paradigmatic equivalent of the Dionysian to the Apollonian. What we have here is a kind of meta-historical notional conflict: it posits the existence of an archaic depth, the existence of a primordial chaos susceptible to offshoots, and to finding shareable expression under certain circumstances. However, most often, societal demands for order make it shrink and suffocate it. Taken in their particular meanings, “Baroque” and “Classicism” seem to designate historically determined systems in which this quasirule would most fully reveal itself where the two anthropological (and dialectical) leanings are alleged to follow one another chronologically: namely, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. But does the conflict actually posit itself as two concepts facing one another in the sequential order of their appearance? Should one conceive of them as external one to the other? Can one exist without the other? We sometimes hear the following assessment made in reaction to some surprising decision or situation: “how Baroque!” By contrast, “how Classic!” designated an ­attitude, a denouement that one could safely anticipate. It is a curious thing that neither of these two appraisals were particularly commendatory. About someone, one could also say, “C’est un esprit baroque” (they have a “baroque”— or convoluted—“way of thinking”). And, in censuring eminently paradoxical and incomprehensible behavior, “you are really Baroque” could end an exchange. The person making this statement in an annoyed or resigned tone was thus admitting their defeat, announcing that they had given up trying to convince their interlocutor (friend or parent) to behave in a way that was a little more “Classic” (i.e., a little more in accordance with the norm, good sense or prudence). These judgments seem to have vanished.

classical defense of the baroque   583 The irregular pearl is not Baroque, except as it is compared to the smooth pearl. Henceforth (but since when? Until when? In what proportion?), we live in a world where even the strains, the areas of friction, the gaps have become shapeless, indeed in part detached, where only fights to the death seem to grab people’s attention. Time no longer moves either forward or obliquely; and probably it is no longer even still held in the “presentism” diagnosed a short while ago by François Hartog1: it nurtures more than anything, it seems, fears of disaster. It is, strictly speaking, disoriented. The Baroque had some good to it. It is, as Hall Bjørnstad aptly writes by way of introduction to his use of the word regarding a “Baroque Pascal,” “a Classic term for that which is not Classic.”2 Classic: in other words, customary and expected, practical, referential; in short, conveyed, and worthy of conveyance. To defend the Classical side of the Baroque is to affirm that the Baroque is worthy of being transmitted, and that it cannot be so, except along with Classicism. This bond, this co-implication that contaminates each of the terms is what this chapter refers to as “Classic-Baroque.”

The Baroque: A Unicorn? (Deleuze) The best inventors of the Baroque, the best commentators, have had their doubts about the consistency of the notion and have been bewildered by the arbitrary extension that despite themselves, the notion risked taking. The Baroque was seen as being restricted to one genre (architecture), or to an increasingly restrictive determination of periods and places, or yet again to a radical disavowal: the Baroque never existed. It is nonetheless strange to deny the existence of the Baroque in the way we speak of unicorns or herds of pink elephants. For in this case the concept is given, while in the case of the Baroque the question entails knowing if a concept can be invented that is capable (or not) of attributing existence to it. Irregular pearls exist, but the Baroque has no reason for existing without a concept that forms this very reason. It is easy to call the Baroque inexistent; it suffices not to propose its concept.3 According to Deleuze, what would be missing from the Baroque (at least until his book, Le Pli) is not the assurance of its historical or factual consistency but a concept capable as much of wrenching it away from any doubt about its very existence as from the insufficiency of its notion. Refuting, in just a few calm and rigorous words, historicist and positivist prescriptions that intimate that we should reject exogenous historical categories, the philosopher’s reasoning has the immense merit of liberating both imagination and thinking. And yet it can appear a little specious: the “concepts” of “unicorn” or of “pink ­elephant” did not confer upon them actual existence. As object of discourse and of recurring representations, an animal almost confirmed through commerce (fraudulently, of course) by “its” horn, the unicorn has not lacked in cultural evidence. If the animal has nevertheless

584   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque been effectively “denied,” it is by virtue of a change in authentification standards, an epistemological change. There came a time when direct observation, repeated and shared, became the only criterion in assessing the existence of physical beings. As such, the unicorn had never been spotted or described in its entirety (at least according to its “conceptualization”) by enough reliable witnesses such that its existence might truly be affirmed. Similarly, it is certainly because the concept of Baroque was born outside of any possible affirmation of its factual existence that it could be contested. If, in the field of literary history, not only the ontological but even the descriptive use of “Baroque”—just like that of “Classicism” incidentally—has often been rejected, it is because the people of the seventeenth century did not reflect upon any of their choices (be they artistic, literary, philosophical, scientific, moral, or even political) nor upon any aspect of their relationships to their own times (to its cadence, to its meaning) in these terms. These aesthetic and historiographic categories were invented after the fact, as everyone knows, and in a relationship of dynamic contradiction that continues therefore to characterize and to define them both one in terms of the other, and one with the other. Classicism has served to exalt (or to critique) imitation of the ancients by placing its apogee in France during the time of Louis XIV, having become the unsurpassable model.4 In the wake of Romanticism, Baroque, a notion forged after the notion of Classicism, was first defined as a degeneration in the imitation of the ancients. It then rapidly assumed the status of alternative model, demonstrating in particular that the Europe of this time period had not escaped Classicism by flaw or failure but rather because after the Renaissance, Europe had promoted its own aesthetics, no less remarkable than the other. Thereafter, scholars showed, not without investing the notion with the same liberating momentum, the Baroque had also flourished in France before the Classical period and the im­position of its rationality, its rules, its yardsticks, its norms. Invented therefore for ends that were not exactly the aims of historians, and in the absence of signposts giving them somewhat firmer historical consistency, these categories more than others found themselves naturally drawn to the realm of paradigm.5 This supposed ability to transit through history by designating transhistorical if not universal ways of being and doing managed to ruin them in the eyes of their adversaries, concerned about eliminating all “essentialism” in the analysis of cultural phenomena. This is why, with all due respect to Deleuze, the category of Baroque seems indeed to have something of the unicorn to it. Besides, like the imaginary animal, the Baroque holds a powerful, incontestable pull, though still a little suspect. How can one not be seduced by the hypothesis of a specifically Baroque vertigo? How can one not shiver under its metamorphic strength, be pulled along by its volatility, black or white, its flights of fancy, preludes as much to the most unbridled marvels as to the most extreme terrors?6 How can one not defend the existence of that which transgresses or topples the Classical order? But here’s the catch: would Baroque not draw its evidence therefore less from its existence (or from its concept) than from the desire that its description generates in a quasi-performative mode? We can understand fully the exasperation manifested by

classical defense of the baroque   585 Mitchell Greenberg on this topic at a recent debate. Recalling “that there is no more ­controversial or less ‘set’ etiquette,” he added: Until somewhat recently, French critics did not even want to recognize the existence of this “phenomenon” in France. And once recognized, how to define it? By borrowing from art history terms, from Wöllflin who was speaking of Italian painting from the end of the sixteenth century? And where might one find it? In the sixteenth ­century in the realm of painting, and in Italy, in the realm of architecture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Vienna or in Bavaria, never mind “Mexican Baroque” in the new world? In eighteenth century music, with Bach and Handel? And what should we do with its avatars “Mannerism” and “Rococo?” Not to mention those who would like to see within it a universal rhetorical trend going back to the ancient Greek quarrel between those who practice the Asiatic style (the Presocratics) and those for whom the Attic style is by far the best: a back and forth that will repeat itself across the millennia.7

Contemporary cultural history seems to have doubt as its primary spirit. Even endogenous categories pay the price: Libertinism, Jansenism, and préciosité, are suspected never to have existed as such. These polemical labels might also be misleading inventions (more or less dishonest or delirious but ideological in any case) arising from adversarial intellectual, moral, religious, social positions that they would have been used to caricature. On the other hand, Alain Viala has demonstrated in a compelling way the existence not just of a literary movement but perhaps even of a cultural and social one that had gone unnoticed until his work. According to him the Galant movement can readily be identified in the numerous print titles that include the adjective “galant.”8 And yet it remains invisible as long as one clings lazily to inherited categories. And of course, it is the Baroque and Classicism that are targeted: As long as one uses them, the risk is great of getting into endless quibbles to define them and to know to what they apply exactly. We will not waste our time here because I think that all of these titles that I was just citing suggest an obvious path forward. The naming of ‘galant’ constitutes an endogenous fact, a historical given, an empirical substrate.9

Once the Baroque and Classicism have been swept away, “Galant France” emerges in the full impartiality of history: The Galant authors and the Galant works of some authors did not fit well into the Classical tales: the French comédies-ballets are not models of strict rationalism, of Ancient imitation, of respect for rules. They would scarcely fit better into Baroque models. Thus the Galant works were neglected, and the authors who had only been practicing that particular style, suddenly reduced to minor ranks. And yet, as we have seen, both can be counted by the legions. Whereas for the works which would include the qualifiers of “Baroque” or “Classical” in their titles, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no such thing.10

586   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque An “Academic and Civic Note” closes the book. It summarizes the primary characteristics of the Galant style: “The Galant aesthetic choices emphasize the spirit, sweetness and joy. This notably had to do with feminine participation, and implied therefore a ­position taken on the relationship between the sexes.”11 Nonetheless we see clearly that one could immediately counter-propose to Alain Viala an analogous argument to the one he advances regarding comédies-ballets. Let us take La Princesse de Clèves, for example, the emblematic case in his eyes.12 This famous work celebrated for its Classicism was called a “Galant short story” by its contemporaries and was made the object of a “Galant question” asked of its readers by the gazette Mercure Galant. For all that, does the novel by Madame de La Fayette find itself truly illuminated by the characterization of “Galant aesthetic choices?”13 Certainly Madame de Clèves, whose inner journey the reader is invited to follow, truly becomes an autonomous subject during the course of the novel: as such, the novel does indeed take a “stand on the relationship between the sexes.” But here is a “Galant novel” that bathes in a type of melancholy, tenacious if discreet: the “taking of a stand on the relationship between the sexes” has neither lightness nor joy to it, to say the least. The protagonist traverses a plot based on hazards and tragic mistakes whose cruel testing grounds gradually map out for the heroine the limited scope of her leeway in decision making.14 With regard to the rest of the novel, one could draw parallels between her character and that of Corneille’s Chimène in Le Cid whose autonomy was scandalous, but in which it would be difficult to locate the “Gallantry.” In short, even if contemporaries of the novel called it a “Galant novel,” La Princess de Clèves seems to constitute rather the indictment of this Gallantry that Alain Viala’s work judiciously exhumes, rather than its illustration. The endogenous categories, thus, are themselves also lacking in finesse, certainty, or clarity. This is not surprising: analysis of “historical facts” and “empirical substrates” depend not only on a particular selection but also on theoretical decisions that necessarily project upon that selection their own exogenous shadow. With “Gallantry,” a deceptive category when compared to Baroque intensity on the one hand and to Classical grandeur on the other, Alain Viala wants to obtain for the reader, as though in return, a certain “modernity” for the period, no doubt denied by the Baroque and Classicism: All during these battles with the pen, Gallantry played the role of an indicator. An indicator of Modernity . . . . To look closely at the history of Gallantry is to give ourselves a chance to understand a bit better this problematic and nevertheless (because time passes and always imposes that which is recent and new) inevitable notion, which is Modernity . . . . The Moderns gained ground in worldly practices in the arts, in letters and in sciences and ultimately, in customs. The Ancients by contrast retained a powerful bastion, the School. In a word, the Moderns and the Galants won out in the world and the Ancients held strong in the School.15

We are thus assumed to understand that the ancients, still holding on, are those who believe in the Baroque and in Classicism. This surely would have made Deleuze and Foucault smile. This is to say, anyway, that the antithesis of endogenous versus

classical defense of the baroque   587 exogenous, itself exogenous, conceals a part of the function and meaning of Viala’s analysis undertaken in the name of historical objectivity. Thus, it would seem more judicious to add Gallantry to the number of useful concepts employed in analyzing cultural production from the period under consideration, rather than to use it to eliminate the Baroque and Classicism. All the while one can remain cognizant that, in the same way that the Baroque has inserted itself into a polemical relationship with Classicism, Gallantry has only become visible from the jumping off point of a polemical relationship with historiography—for which Classicism and Baroque, ancient and modern, are pertinent concepts.

“Early Modern”? Hence, a conflict. And critical analysis would be satisfied with searching repeatedly for adequate concepts to identify historical knots that, yet unnoticed up until the analyst’s work, nevertheless allow our period to be identified. From this fact, we can consider this ongoing conflict itself as a constitutive characteristic of the entire period. Baroque and Classicism fade away in the face of the English-language “early modern,” which in French is sometimes translated as “first modernity.” Even if, as Mitchell Greenberg comments, “the concept is one of the vaguest,” at least it allows for us to situate the analyses in an objective chronological frame by identifying the operative events that lead to irreversible changes, authorizing the historian to carve up the temporal continuum. The early modern period begins with the breakup of Christianity, namely with disturbances of all kinds, and the overthrow of prior symbolic reference points: If we listen to the different cries of alarm coming from the four corners of Europe, from England to Poland, from Paris to Naples, uttered by characters as different as the English orator, Jeremiah Wittaker, or the king of France, Louis XIV, one could discern therein an expression of fear, of course, of total social explosion, but also a fear-desire that is not without seductive powers. This fear of/desire for an explosion makes itself seen as much in the amped up metaphors of poetry, as in the art and architecture of Bernini, of Boromini, etc. who seem to celebrate a sort of Baroque erotica. But in this cry of alarm another desire can also be heard: a call to stop the anarchy and to impose Order on this dreadful chaos.16

“Cry of alarm,” “fear of total social explosion,” but “seductive powers”: these belong to the Baroque. But at the same moment of this first modernity, desire to “stop the anarchy and to impose Order on this dreadful chaos”: these belong to Classicism. Both are fused together, then, in the early modern. “Early modern” offers a second benefit, moreover, compared to other period names like “Antiquity.” A particular quality, suggested by its name, is added to the objectivity introduced by its chronological anchoring. If the period that largely follows the Middle

588   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Ages is “early modern,” it is still about “us,” it is tightly attached to what “we” are, and it even contains the seed of what still characterises “us,” “we” inhabitants of modernity: I will start therefore by assimilating the concept of “early modern” into the generalized crisis of European civilization and to differing responses, political, social and aesthetic, expressed in the period 1550-1700 that appear as so many efforts to resolve it; in doing so, the responses find themselves laid out in new ways in order to configure the human subject’s place within a symbolic system in complete metamorphosis. This metamorphosis will ultimately bring about a reformulation of diverse perimeters (economic, sexual, socio-theological) which will define the human subject’s place in the world. It is this new form of subjectivity that we recognize today as our own.17

It is therefore not certain at all that this chronological foothold will enable escape from the effects of any paradigm. The first paradigm of this kind projected on the period is undoubtedly simply that of “modernity.” One might note with humor that this “modernity” is very sought after. That is to say that even in the twenty-first century, to define modernity-from-before-modernity constitutes a challenge of auto-fictionalizing the present, of representing “ourselves,” which obviously projects its own shadow, once again exogenous, onto the past. The second effect of the paradigm has to do with the centrality ascribed to the “subject” in this modernity. Even though it has seen itself endowed with many contradictory qualities, from the most neutral or objective in appearance to the most hostile (e.g., “Cartesian” versus “bourgeois”), from the most stable to the most unsettled (“sovereign” versus “decentered”), the “subject” has become an unavoidable character in our representations of modern Western history. Its mere mention passes for an explanation, so great is its evidence. Yet not only does the “modern subject” not document itself as easily as the modern state, for example, whose progress one can at least follow, but in addition, it is striking that more often than not, one omits describing precisely what other mode of subjectification it opposes, supersedes or rips itself away from, or even more likely, which other genre or style of individual it competes against, including within the early modern period. It is perfectly possible that the “modern subject” can be dated (but is it “us” yet? and if so, which “us”?); but it is highly improbable that it will have caught hold of all of the possible selfhoods simultaneously. The non-modern subjectivities of the early modern period: are they nevertheless “early modern?” This question proves simply that the “early modern” concept, because it allows us to select the elements announcing “our modernity,” is not a chronological category nor “objectively” historical but instead, discreetly teleological. One can object that this criticism verges on the commonplace: the denunciation of teleological reasoning has become, in our intellectual discourse, a kind of marker of epistemological rigor, just like the denunciation of anachronism. It should be emphasized that the concept of modernity necessarily has a part of it tied to a teleological regime of historicity, even in its recurring desire to “make of the past tabula rasa.” Modernity, properly moving a step forward, or disengaging from the old with awareness

classical defense of the baroque   589 and desire to do so (and defining itself by this movement) has always needed to seek moments in its past that initiate this very act. Rather, with their paradigmatic merit, the Baroque and Classicism have the advantage of not pretending to describe the totality of history but only the identifiable polarities in the conflictual history of cultural production.18 Still the unicorn (Furetière, 1690): the Baroque, a crystallized dialogue In his dictionary’s “Unicorn” entry, Furetière surprises us. He primes his definition with a presupposition of categorical existence, if restricted: “The unicorn is found only in Africa. Its true native land is in the Province of Agoas in the Kingdom of Damot in Ethiopa.” In affirming “Only in Africa,” “its true native land,” Furetière clearly contradicts still invisible adversaries known to all of his readers—unless his adversaries are not themselves his readers. Despite spatial constraints, the rest of the chapter will guarantee this absolute ontological truth by mightily liberating the animal of all of its fabled attributes: It is an extremely shy animal who retreats into the woods, and yet who does hazard out sometimes onto the plains. It has a white horn in the middle of its forehead the length of five bars, such are they are portrayed here. It is the size of an ordinary horse, with a brown coat tending toward black, having a short, sparse, black mane, like its tail. In his Voyages, Father Lobo reports several testimonials by people who saw several, and it is in this way that Vincent le Blanc describes it in his Voyage d’Afrique.

“But this Author is deeply suspect,” Furetière adds at this point. “Elian only speaks of it doubtfully. André Marin, learned Doctor of Venice, wrote a Treaty on the false view of the unicorn.” After the certainties come the doubts, after the direct referential confirmation follows the mention of conflicting interpretations. Furetière enumerates the “other Authors who wrote about it,” then summarizes their differences: Some say that it looks like a horse or a foal, others say a donkey, others a deer or a goat given its beard, others an elephant, others a rhinoceros, others a greyhound. Munster and Thevet say that it is an amphibian living in the water and on land, and that its horn moves of the animal’s own accord. Others say that its strength is derived from its horn. And when it is pursued by hunters, it throws itself from rock heights and falls upon its horn which withstands the force of the fall such that it sustains no harm to itself. That is to say that all the Authors report differently the shape and the color, as much of the whole animal, as of its horn and all of its different parts.

“This is why those most sensible hold that it is a legendary animal” thus concludes Furetière. Is this a reversal? It is sometimes difficult to know what Furetière really thinks. His Dictionnaire ­universel is in effect essentially a compilation.19 And the more an object of the extralinguistic world is subject for caution, the more Furetière elaborates on it, giving space

590   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque for testimonials and contradictory assertions concerning it. Quite a few of the dictionary entries bear witness to the wonder that certain natural phenomena engender in him as well as the profusion of the descriptions that they have provoked. Obeying the rhetorical (and epistemic logic of copia print matter, Furetière amplifies it with an exceptional sort of ardor. But this abundance is sifted through a screen of ruthless, critical reasoning. The same occurs here. Since henceforth the purpose here was to convince “those most sensible” of the existence of this animal that they “hold” to be “legendary,” the rest of the article showcases new authorities, in order to carefully set aside the false assertions. He first takes on the presence of unicorn horns “in the cabinets of the curious”: they can be explained by the trafficking of the “tooth of a large fish called Narwal by the Icelanders.” This error gives way to a dramatic description of the agonistic usage of this “horn” by this “great fish,” which is not even (or no longer?) the object of the definition: This horn protrudes from the front of the upper jaw of this large fish, in which it has about one foot length’s worth of root as thick as the horn itself. It serves as much as weapon as for defense, to attack the largest of whales, and it thrusts it with such boldness that it is able to pierce a truly large vessel.20

After the narwal entry comes another “unicorn” creature and once again, the description swells: Paul Louïs Sachsius, Doctor, provides the description of a marine Monster which he calls unicorn or monoceros, which is a kind of whale that feeds on cadavers, that is fished off of the coasts of Iceland and Greenland, whose horn is the lone tooth on the upper jaw, spiraled, grooved, and ending in a point. The one seen by this Author was 9 inches long.

Though the lexicographer has evidently never seen either a narwhal or a monoceros, the very mention of these marvels borders on hypotyposis: imagination, his as much as our own, finds itself carried away by a spirit as much rhetorical, as poetic. After this brief digression over real animals, the latter stoking errors and lies regarding the unicorn, Furetière focuses once again on what is said about the unicorn: The Ancients believed that the unicorn horn served as an antidote; and that it dips it into the water to draw it up, when it wants to drink. Its rarity means that it is attributed with several medicinal virtues. But what remains unchanging, as Ambroise Paré proved clearly, is that this is pure quakery; and he says that he has tested out that all the virtues attributed to it are false, even though the Traders have put its price so high that a German sold one for twelve thousand crowns to the Pope, reported by André Racci, Doctor of Florence; and that in the shops, the pound, I6. ounces’ worth was sold as high as I536 crowns at a time when even the same weight in gold was only valued at I48. The Conciliator says that the unicorn sweats in the presence either of vipera rapellus or of leopard bile, something it does not do in the presence of other poisons. But this is still fable.

classical defense of the baroque   591 The movement of this passage summarizes well enough the whole of the article: from the definition that guarantees the unicorn’s existence through the geographic precision of its habitat, past mention of its “shy” character (which justifies the reason that one rarely sees it), the speech renders up (and delivers for us) the exotic pleasure of legends all the while regularly interrupting it with sharp-cutting error diagnostics: “But what does not change . . . is that this is pure quakery”; “But this too is fable.” The truth cleaver falls, slashing the imagination in flight . . . But the sovereign authority of reason is accompanied, perhaps, by secret disappointment. How to consider this entry, quite representative of the Dictionnaire universel, the first monolingual French dictionary, the first encyclopedic dictionary, also to be the foundation for the Dictionnaire de Trévoux republished several times in the eighteenth century? We can immediately put aside “gallantry”: Furetière is terribly misogynistic, not manifesting any particular sympathy for civility. And if he catalogues with great precision the contradictory uses of the words “galant” and “gallantry” as well as the ways in which they serve to influence, if, in this sense, he makes himself the witness to the undeniable appreciation of Gallantry in the seventeenth century, he does not make of it the center of his own values, far from it.21 Because for Furetière, if nature is the reservoir of marvels, society and the public are threatened from all sides. They are threatened not only by women but also by libertines whom he loathes, heretics, nobles, lawyers and prosecutors, actors and charlatans, preachers, scholars, courtesans, and finally, the people, princes and even the king, not to mention criminals of all types. If Furetière seems instead antiabsolutist, it is not out of progressivism: he wants severe justice, exemplary punishment, does not condemn torture, and more generally defends respect for all of the established hierarchies, not without reminding us incessantly of the preeminence of God over creation. What then remains as trustworthy in such a universe, other than Furetière himself? “Early modern” then? But the dictionary’s speaker is neither tormented nor agonized. His indignant vehemence rubs up against these marvels without particular tension. His passion for controversy renders it utterly impermeable to doubt. An obsessive, contradictory principle confers upon his text a permanent, polemical tint. The latter draws indirectly on pugilistic humor, readily satirical, from someone who mobilizes words and phrases by linking them in negation, upheaval, impact. More often than not, we cannot hear him except through the agonistic inflections of his writing, the organization of his entries and the choices of his examples: so many empowered sentences whose arrangement is far from insignificant. But he intervenes explicitly sometimes, like in the “Unicorn” entry with mention of “those most sensible,” or sometimes even in the first person singular. Furetière indicates his position, decides, inserts himself, exposes himself—in short, guides. This wish to persuade inflects his will to transmit everything: and thus this last goal avoids constant breakaways into the realm of error, legend, fable, and imaginary travel. His dictionary resembles these cabinets of curiosities about which he willingly details the enclosed objects, as in the case of the “unicorn horn”: the lexicographer collects all lexical, discursive, cognitive oddities. But he also gathers up all the “common words” of the language, those that solidify and build concensus.22 As such, his dictionary belongs

592   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque to the heritage of “Treasures,” destined to archive the writings worthy of preservation as public goods. The cabinet of curiosities is therefore not in the least the result of individual extravagance but rather a counting and ordering of the entire language with a view to its conservation and transmission. For all that, there is nothing Cartesian about it: Furetière does not follow a stable rational order; he exercises, rather, a sort of censorial judicature over the language, of which he makes “notte.”23 And if he favors certain modern learnings over “ancient” positions, one cannot identify any system in these choices. Neither Galant nor early modern, then. So still Baroque, already Classical? Baroque due to its excess and hyperbole, and its fascinated excursions into imaginary territory. But Classical each time reason brings us back to the realm of referential proof, logic and truth? Hypothesis is handy: it has been useful and not only for him. Still Baroque, already Classical: whether one celebrates or hates it, such an assessment sees in the Baroque a freedom or an archaism destined to be swept up by history’s irresistible movement and meaning. Once one organizes Baroque and Classical in terms of these two adverbs (“still”/“already”), telos, ultimately, is within reach. Corneille’s Médée and L’Illusion comique are still Baroque, but his Le Cid is already Classical. And Horace and Cinna are utterly Classical. Also belonging to Baroque is the famous, opening maxim of La Rochefoucauld’s first edition of Maximes (1662): Self-love is the love of one’s self, and of every thing on account of one’s self; it makes men idolize themselves, and would make them tyrants over others if fortune were to give them the means. It never reposes out of itself, and only settles on strange objects, as bees do on flowers, to extract what is useful to it. There is nothing so impetuous as its desires, nothing so secret as its plans, nothing so clever as its conduct. Its pliancy cannot be depicted, its transformations surpass those of Ovid's “Metamorphoses,” its refinements those of chemistry.24

One cannot imagine better concentrate of that which makes up the Baroque reputation; “fold on fold” Deleuze would add.25 La Rochefoucauld’s conclusion is no different: This is the picture of self-love, the whole existence of which is nothing but one long and mighty agitation. The sea is a sensible image of it, and self-love finds in the ebb and flow of the waves a faithful representation of the turbulent succession of its thoughts, and of its ceaseless movements.

But when the second edition of the Maximes appears, suddenly we see that this maximtorrent is eliminated. The moralist only keeps three maxims on self-love (maxims 2 to 4) in this, the collection’s keynote entry: 2. Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers. 3. Whatever discoveries may have been made in the territory of self-love, there still remain in it many unknown tracts. 4. Self-love is more artful than the most artful man in the world.

classical defense of the baroque   593 Yet, this dryness and brevity. Are these qualities truly less Baroque than the amplification in the omitted maxim? What La Rochefoucauld tells us here in “Classical” style, is that self-love, “le plus grand de tous les flatteurs,” “le plus habile homme du monde,” is a metaphorical, superlative, hyperbolic force—in sum, Baroque—whose folds can never stop seducing us. No point in trying to pull ourselves away from them. But no point either in looking to roam along it; there will always remain within “bien des terres inconnues.” In one fell swoop, this single maxim awakens in the reader a sort of intense curiosity over this unfamiliar intimacy. This enigmatic and reserved question—is it not part of a more haunting call? And is it not even more ambiguous or unreasonable than the eliminated maxim whose absence certainly haunts this maxim no. 3 more than its actual presence would have, doomed as it was by exhaustivity? If, with regard to the Maximes, the critic does not know how to decide between the hypothesis of a Libertine author (also rather Baroque) and the hypothesis of an Augustinian author (also rather Classical), it is perhaps that in some respects, or for certain stretches of the seventeenth century, that the question is poorly formulated. Or, without engaging in hubris, perhaps it is just that today we are able to propose an alternative formulation. Hall Bjørnstad’s book, Créature sans créateur. Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les Pensées de Pascal, shows how Pascal’s discourse adopts the libertine point of view in order to corner it, forcing it to play itself out over consideration of its “being-creature.” And, by choosing to not start with God but rather with the “extravagant creature” who dares to live without God, Pascal constrains himself to adopt his perspective. In analyzing his situation as precisely as possible, his self-perceptions and those of his feelings, he moves forward to the point where, indirectly, the Creator triggers a manifestation inside the “creature without creator” itself. Certainly, this companionship with the libertine is nothing but a means, and Pascal admonishes him to not take his desolation to the end, at the very moment when conversion (to Classicism?) becomes inevitable. But the call to the libertine includes a kind of test, both of the speaker in Pensées and of the reader: “chimaera” and “incomprehensible monster” like him (and all of us). Pascal even shares with him his “misery without God,” and lives within it. For Hall Bjørnstad, to defend the idea of a Baroque Pascal is to become sensitive to how radical this sojourn is, how radical this sharing by Pascal is, in which he has the experience with “us”—an “us” that includes him as much as a “king without amusement.” The speaker of the Pensées does not retreat in the face of any one of these jolts felt by all. Pascalian text finds its power in the movement between the fascination over the jolt and the attempt to grasp it, which can also be described as the back and forth between Baroque and Classical poles. Because the impact in question here is the epistemological darkness catching up to reason, it is the violent opening of the reader’s intellectual categories towards something yet to be mastered: exceptions, that which is not understood, that which is not understandable.26

“Melancholy,” is Benjamin’s diagnosis of the king without amusement who is also the central character in Trauerspiel: “Melancholy” which “emerges from the depths of the

594   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque creature’s domaine.”27 But it is not a tragedy since everything remains somewhat on a level playing field, at least as long as access to God is blocked. Of course, the overall flavor of the “Unicorn” entry can hardly be compared to that of Trauerspiel, or to that of the Pensées, not even in their moments of vehemence. It seems possible to me, however, to apply to it what Hall Bjørnstad calls here “Baroque.” Mobilizing a kind of moral philosophy of jolts (shock from fascination of the monstrous, shock from the truth that suddenly crushes no less than it illuminates), his article roams “dark places,” which are as much “departure points for an analytical endeavor”: he “opens the reader’s intellectual range towards the darkness which surrounds the little bit of understanding that he possesses.”28 In his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin writes this famous phrase: “The baroque knows no eschatology.”29 Allegory is present throughout, but only in traces. In this we plainly find the melancholy, in this tension between the memory of eschatology carried by allegory and its absence in the earthliness of history. It is this melancholic tension that Benjamin calls “Baroque.” The phrase “There is no Baroque eschatology” means that the Baroque remembers eschatology and feeds itself, however sadly, on this memory. In Furetière’s dictionary, the unicorn, vestige of ancient beliefs about the supernatural, is itself starting to leave the allegorical horizon. Diminished by the naturalist quest devoted to its disappearance, and yet still affirmed, it can live its life of vestige, sustaining the enigma of it. The whiff allows us to adjoin the true and the false; it even offers up its own evidence (in the fullest sense of the word: energy, enargeia, proof drawn from observation) in support of the definition. The entry draws our interest immediately to the animal by beginning with an affirmation of its existence, but on two conditions: it is shy, and it is in Africa. We want to see it, but we will not see it. You believe that it does not exist? Indeed, it does exist. You believe that it exists, at your disposal everywhere? No, it is merely shy and merely in Africa. Negation, say the linguists, is a “crystallized dialogue.”30 It is important that the ­unicorn exist but within a polemical phrase that launches the dialogue in order to then gather all the false rumors around itself and to untangle them one by one but not ­without making good on the power of the wondrous. To alternately deny and affirm the unicorn, to circle it, participates in its transmission: the focal point moves around. A subject approaches, gathers, organizes, dreams, bounces back, cuts out . . . Furetière ­dialogues both with the authorities and with the legends, and this fact in itself transforms the transmission. This is no longer a question of tradition. It is something new; new is now being understood as different from what came before. And the Dictionnaire universel notes it. It happens even to date the wording of it.31 And yet, in another sense, it is ageless as it gathers up all words, all things and all of the possible fragments of enunciations, organizing them by contrast, contradiction, negation, not by simple juxtaposition. But in synchronicity, we might say, not according to the game of “still” and “already.” And thus this point of friction is the very circumstance of the treatment, and the overall transmission, of “the Unicorn.”

classical defense of the baroque   595

Classic-Baroque: The Resurrection of a Rooster One hears analogous friction in the moral of one of La Fontaine’s fables, “The Power of Fables” (VIII, 4): “The world is old, it is said. I believe it. However/One must still entertain it as would a child.” On this occasion, the “still” puts the brakes on nothing—in any case nothing that affects a chronologically oriented axis. The “still” does not mess with an “already.” “The Power of Fables,” a fable, and even one of La Fontaine’s meta-fables: thus, we have a Classical writer, and perhaps even the most classical of Classicals. What do we find here? The setting is Athens, and the motherland is in danger: it could not be made more grave or more grand. An eloquent orator tries to capture the people’s attention, in vain. So he launches into a digression that elicits surprise: “Cérès, he begins, was traveling one day/With Eel and Swallow/A river stops them; and Eel by swimming,/ Swallow by flight/Crossed it shortly. The gathered in that moment/Called out with one voice: And Cérès, what did she?” The trap works: “the animal of frivolous mind” is captured.32 He listens. No doubt he will deliberate. The fabulist moves on to the moral: another surprise. It is not a lesson but rather a confession: We are all Athenians on this point and I myself At the moment that I compose this morale, If Donkeyskin were told to me, I would take utmost pleasure in it, The world is old, it is said: I believe, however One must still entertain it as a child.33

The great Classical writer does not exempt himself from folk animals, from animals in general, or from childhood. He affirms that everywhere, for everyone, dreams win out over reason, triviality over seriousness, and fable over history (the Baroque over Classicism?). A century later, Chamfort comments on the fable and then provides us with this even more surprising anecdote: And when La Fontaine adds that he would enjoy the Donkeyskin tale, he is painting the influence of his own personality. He has the steadfastness to go and see, three weeks in a row, a charlatan who was going to cut off his rooster’s head, and then put it back on the rooster on the spot. It is true that he always found pretexts to delay until the next day. Someone warned La Fontaine that tomorrow would not come. This was of the utmost surprise to him.34

596   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Our image of the Classical author shows some serious cracks. We must imagine him, with his great wig, consumed with curiosity while seeking firsthand evidence that a decapitated rooster might immediately be resuscitated. We must imagine him, in short, possessed by the irresistible hope that one can traverse death in both directions. “Utmost pleasure” but “extreme surprise”: Chamfort, somewhat superior, is amused by what strikes him as famous and popular naïveté on La Fontaine’s part. However, let us make special note. For Chamfort it is a simple attribute of naïveté, not the frightening sign either of obscurantism arising from another era, or of distressing superstition. For Chamfort, one might say that no boundary really exists between the pleasure experienced from a tale and the gullibility that gives credence to the magical powers of a fraudulent sorcerer. But upon reflection, would Chamfort’s account not itself be a fable? To answer this question is to want to settle it once and for all. But the seventeenth century abounds with bizarre anecdotes with which serious literary history, academic research, know not what to do. The anecdotes evade analytical frameworks and breach all uniformity. They speak of unclassifiable behaviors, Baroque (Baroque beyond even the Baroque, one might say), and one lets them get away because to hold them back would leave us too encumbered by them. Or, alternatively, we approach them from rhetorical and poetic angles. And the anecdote itself becomes a type of discourse and more than a real event from the past. This is not incorrect, of course. But it is a way to file away these tales, in order to rid oneself of them (in much the way that one says “case closed”). This charlatan, and this rooster which refused to be revived (but which Chamfort’s La Fontaine seems to imagine possible . . .) obstinately introduce a disturbance, a disturbance in the history, and a disturbance in the categories. Deleuze’s reasoning, refusing to let us deny the Baroque as we deny the unicorn, was evidently not specious reasoning. What he wanted to say is that once the concept of the unicorn is a given, we are fatally driven to “deny” it because no object ever announces itself in order to then be subsumed within itself. But on the one hand, no one could ­pretend to deny Baroque in the absence of its concept. Once the concept was well ­constructed, on the other hand, Baroque items were indeed appearing. Furetière made us step aside and understand, along with Pascal and La Fontaine (but obviously one could cite other examples) that the Baroque is still with us, even without the concept, and even denied. Because denying it does not eliminate it: the dialogue crystallizes. Furetière’s unicorn is Baroque. It was here even the very symbol of Baroque, like the rooster that La Fontaine wished to see resuscitated. That is to say, about Deleuze’s “pli sur pli” (“fold on fold”) it is appropriate to add an additional fold: the fold of time, just as minimally essentialist but just as operative as the fold that he defines as “Baroque.” Transmission, the invisible part of the history (which does not mean that it does not reside within the history), circulates among the folds of time. One has long associated Classicism with reason and order, to norms, to measurement, to understatement, etc. But not enough attention has been paid to the time delay presupposed by the notion: is “classical” not that which has been transmitted? In a 1648

classical defense of the baroque   597 text, for example, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac questions with irony the seriousness of word debates within the Purist movement: More than anything I was imagining that if one day the French language were to become a classical language and to be taught in school, that there might also be a variety of camps in favor of Fat William, and in favor of William the Fat.35

As burlesque as it may be, this hypothesis shows that Classicism is neither endogenous nor exogenous: it is a quality that the present is unable to decern. The present can set one’s sights on Classicism but it is only given by posterity, and with no guarantees. It teeters over two time frames. It is based then on a call, an address, a destination, a sort of safe arrival: this existence across two time periods, in a past and a present folded together by the future, does not allow itself to be inscribed either into a chronology or a linear, historical causality. I call “Classic-Baroque” the awareness of this fold in time:36 awareness of the men and women of the seventeenth century (but a seventeenth century that could, without difficulty, start in the sixteenth) and awareness of literary historians, if they take measure of their own thinking. It is therefore both a descriptive and a critical category. It allows me to identify, in this period indistinctly Baroque or Classical (“early modern,” as Mitchel Greenberg would say), points of friction, indeed irregularities which strike me as beneficial to observe today. This is not because they would lead to “our” modernity. “Our” modernity has shattered, like our “post-modernity” which had tried to save it. “We” are henceforth incapable of naming our time, that is to say its system of historicity, all the more illegible even than the “we” that resides inside it, which is problematic even beyond the designation. Our time is new, but is no longer modern. It is new, but does not have a depiction of the future. It is new, but has seen what one calls “returns”: return of the religious and notably of some irrationalisms of all kinds; and this is even the way in which it is so new.37 Would this not be due to the new religion which is the “supposedly reformed ­religion,” not to mention the New World, or new astronomy: the men and women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were placed under the sign of the “new.” Some elevated it to the ranks of promise, still others wanted to return to earlier ways: because this “new” did not orient (or not necessarily, or not yet). It was not governed by a providential plan, and nor did it arrange itself toward a historical end. Tied to accident, to the unpredictability of what happens, to the case by case and to the exceptional, to singularity and to the extraordinary, it was opening up—delicately—the range of possibilities for human investment. Who was this charlatan capable of making a La Fontaine believe that he would bring back to life a decapitated rooster? They were, at least, contemporaries. The ClassicBaroque irregularities (irregular from the point of view of earlier frameworks) are distinct in adding into “our” history (the history of Western culture) some contradictions and oddities that had been disregarded, set aside, or dismantled into distinctly separate

598   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque elements and rendered impermeable due to the magic of analysis. This is because they were unable to enter into progressive representation (indeed evolutionary representation) of history and to keep them from parasitizing that history. The Classical model loses its shape, even the Baroque blurs but enriches itself by being that which disturbs Classicism from the interior, the dialectic malfunctions, the “modern subject,” which one rarely sees today in all of its manifestations (Cartesian, bourgeois, soverain, decentered, galant . . .), reveals itself as a kind of irregularity in history, having always been fragile—and all of this in a historicity that no longer makes sense—that no longer brings us to ourselves (so null and void, this “ourselves!”). Between rapprochements and contrasts, Classic-Baroque can thus create a fertile disorientation: we can understand in synchrony that different modes of subjectivation, different modalities of the social link, different arrangements of the symbolic, coexist (as they do in the twenty-first century). To integrate these peculiarities and this darkness into our present is to lay our hands on what seems to us today the most foreign, having already existed in our past. It is also an invitation to ask ourselves what we hold dear, which conditions are necessary to make space for it, and for what purpose and which society? This is what the Classical-Baroque endeavor indicates: the task of transmitting, in a disoriented mode, and a disoriented present, a past whose meaning is uncertain much like our present. Far from prevailing gloom and doom, to live the folds of time is to bet on its return. Translated by Natasha Copeland.

Notes 1. François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002). 2. Hall Bjørnstad, Créature sans créateur. Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les Pensées de Pascal (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2010), 9. 3. “Les meilleurs inventeurs du Baroque, les meilleurs commentateurs ont eu des doutes sur la consistance de la notion, effarés par l’extension arbitraire qu’elle risquait de prendre malgré eux. On assista alors à une restriction du Baroque à un seul genre (l’architecture), ou bien à une détermination des périodes et des lieux de plus en plus restrictive, ou encore à une dénégation radicale: le Baroque n’avait pas existé. Il est pourtant étrange de nier l’existence du Baroque comme on nie les licornes ou les éléphants roses. Car dans ce cas le concept est donné, tandis que dans le cas du Baroque il s’agit de savoir si l’on peut inventer un concept capable (ou non) de lui donner l’existence. Les perles irrégulières existent, mais le Baroque n’a aucune raison d’exister sans un concept qui forme cette raison même. Il est facile de rendre le Baroque inexistant, il suffit de ne pas en proposer le concept.” See Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli. Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 46; The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 33. 4. Antithetical to the adjective “classical,” translation from the latin “classicus,” the notion of “classicism,” emerged, immediately controversial, upon Stendhal’s writing to define Romanticism. 5. One often symbolically dates Classicism’s triumph to the preference accorded to Perrault, Le Brun, and Le Vau’s project over that of Bernini, presented in 1665.

classical defense of the baroque   599 6. See Jean Rousset, “Introduction,” Anthologie de la poésie baroque française, I (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961). 7. Mitchell Greenberg, “Réponse à ‘Early Modern or Not’, ” in Transitions, May 24, 2014, rubric “Intensités,” Transition n 11. Mitchell Greenberg was responding here to the  response that four scholars had made to his text “ ‘Early modern’: un concept ­problématique ? ,” in Transitions, May 18, 2013, rubric “Intensités,” Transition 7. (Transition, 10, by Lise Forment, Sarah Nancy, Anne Régent-Susini and Brice Tabeling, “Early mod­ern (or not ?)—Une réponse à Mitchell Greenberg” (www.mouvement-­transitions.fr). See  for instance the entire discussion: http://www.mouvement-transitions.fr/index.php/ intensites/transition/sommaire-general-de-transition. 8. “Those who follow literature and its history closely know that during the classical period the most widespread journal was called Le Mercure Galant, [. . .] and that Madame de Villedieu published the Annales galantes, Fontenelle Lettres galantes,” see Alain Viala, La France galante. Essai historique sur une catégorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu’à la Révolution (Paris: PUF, 2008), 11. 9. Viala, La France galante, 13–14. 10. Viala, La France galante, 484. 11. Viala, La France galante, 486. 12. See chapter 9, where La Princesse de Clèves is designated as “the most beautiful jewel” of the Galant stories. See Viala, La France galante, 259. 13. We can say the same of La Princesse de Montpensier, which also illustrates the Galant short story according to Alain Viala. See Viala, La France galante, 266. 14. See John D. Lyons, The Phantom of Chance. From Fortune to Randomness in SeventeenthCentury French Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 15. Viala, La France galante, 256–257. 16. Mitchell Greenberg, “ ‘Early modern,’: Un concept problématique?” See footnote 7. 17. Greenberg, “Early modern.” 18. Responding to Mitchell Greenberg, Lise Forment, Sarah Nancy, Anne Régent-Susini, and  Brice Tabeling notably write: “The terms ‘Humanism’, ‘Classicism’, ‘Baroque’ or ‘Romanticism’ do not work, from this point of view, exactly from the same model as ‘early modern’: they vaguely name an historical period, a chronological space between two (fluctuating) dates, but at the same time they more specifically distinguish an estheticoepistemic regime and/or delineate from the social realm a circumscribed domain to which they specifically apply themselves, without being able to aim to represent in its totality this social realm. ‘The Humanist peasantry’? ‘The rise of the Baroque proletariat’? ‘The status of Romantic soldiers’? So many impossible headings. The qualification of ‘early modern’ and notably from the perspective with which you present, does not, on the contrary, effectuate any division be it sociological or epistemological: the expression claims to encompass the whole of the world in the years 1550–1700: the rural family, sexual practices or the theater are, or can be, early modern. Certainly, there will be an excessive use of ‘Classicism’ (of ‘Baroque’ of ‘Humanism’) that will seek to unify the collection of epistemological structures. But, if one must choose among terms that incorporate boundaries in their effort to identify a period and others which on the contrary overwhelm it, we would opt for the first insofar as from this circumscription emerges the critical game at the heart of which transitional practices, ‘Literature’ notably, can appear more noticeably.” (Lise Forment, Sarah Nancy, Anne Régent-Susini et Brice Tabeling, “Early modern (or not ?)— Une réponse à Mitchell Greenberg,” in Transitions, March 15, 2014, rubric “Intensités,” “Transition n 10” de (http://www.mouvement-transitions.fr).

600   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 19. As is clearly highlighted in his title: Universal dictionary generally containing all French words both ancient and modern, and all science and art terms [. . .] all drawn from the most excellent ancient and modern authors, gathered and compiled by the late Lord Antoine Furetière (1690). On Furetière’s dictionary and the debates sparked by his interpretation, cf. Le Dictionnaire universel de Furetière, ed. Hélène Merlin-Kajman, Littératures ­classiques, n°47, hiver 2003. 20. The narwhal, or unicorn of the seas (Monodon monoceros), is in fact a cetacean. 21. “GALLANTRY. noun. That which is galant; and reflects it in actions and things. Gallantry is natural to that man over there. This lover sent one hundred gallantries to his intended. Here is a beautiful trait of gallantry. The letters of this Author contain nothing but a false gallantry. GALLANTRY, also said of the attachment one has to courting the Ladies. It can be taken in good and bad ways. There is open gallantry between these two people; their interaction does not go beyond honest gallantry. One also says that a man has achieved some gallantry with a woman, as it were, some little favor from Venus that requires solutions. One also says figuratively and with hyperbole, That business there is nothing but pure ­gallantry, in order to say, It is of no consequence.” 22. The question of how far the lexicographic domain of Furetière’s dictionary extended was at the heart of his quarrel with the Académie Française, which he accuses of wanting to make itself “owner of the language’s common words”: “The public . . . knows perfectly well that the king and the magistrates make no pretense of themselves being owners of the language, much less to transfer and take away anyone’s ownership of it. What is constant is that usage belongs to all people as much as to that of entities, and that it is one thing that falls neither into the category of commerce nor monopoly.” See Antoine Furetière, in Recueil des Factums, ed. Charles Asselineau (Paris: Poulet-Malassis & De Broise, 1859), II, 3–4 and 125. 23. “NOTTE, also said of something that indicates a failing or imperfection. In a Dictionary one should add a ‘notte’ to a word when it is out of date or particular to an art or science. When it is part of common usage, no ‘notte’ is needed. This girl married an honest man, but he is a bastard, that is a significant ‘notte.’ When someone is hanged, this is a ‘notte’ affecting the whole family. One also calls it a ‘notte of infamy,’ with which a person is marked by his profession or by some verdict. The profession of Comedian carries a ‘notte of infamy,’ All condemnation even the slightest bit afflicting carries a ‘notte’ of infamy.” 2 4. La Rochefoucauld, Moral Reflections, Sentences, and Maxims (New York: William Gowans, 1851). 25. The formula is well known: “The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanessque, Gothic, Classical folds. . . Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity.” (Deleuze, The Fold, p. 3). 26. Bjørnstad, Créature sans créateur, 28. 27. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 146. 28. Bjørnstad, Créature sans créateur, 31. 29. Benjamin, The Origin, 66. 30. Oswald Ducrot, Les mots du discours (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 50.

classical defense of the baroque   601 31. “CORRIVAL. s.m. Relatively old word . . . Today one simply says rival with the same meaning.” 32. See Louis Marin, Le récit est un piège (Paris: Minuit, 1978). 33. La Fontaine, “Le Pouvoir des fables,” Fables 8, no. 4, 34–70. 34. Nicolas Chamfort, “Notes sur les Fables de La Fontaine,” in Œuvres complètes (Paris:  Editions du Sandre, 2009), 177. 35. Balzac (Jean-Louis Guez de), “Le Barbon,” in Les Œuvres (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1665), vol. 2, 711. 36. It is also this fold that the concept of “transitionality” allows me to consider: cf. Hélène Merlin-Kajman, Lire dans la gueule du loup. Essai sur une zone à défendre, la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 2016) and L’ Animal ensorcelé. Traumatismes, littérature, transitionnalité (Paris: Ithaque, 2016). 37. See in this vein the enlightening and courageous book by Denis Crouzet and Jean-Marie Le Gall, Au péril des guerres de Religion (Paris: PUF, 2015).

Further Reading Bjørnstad, Hall. Créature sans Créateur : Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les Pensées de Pascal. Quebec : Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010. Greenberg, Mitchell. Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Greenberg, Mitchell. Detours of Desire: Readings in the French Baroque. Columbus: Published for Miami University by the Ohio State University Press, 1984. Merlin-Kajman, Hélène. Animal ensorcelé. Paris: Ithaque, 2016. Merlin-Kajman, Hélène. L’ Absolutisme dans les lettres et la théorie des deux corps: passions et politique. Paris: H. Champion, 2000.

chapter 27

The Ba roqu e a n d Phil osoph y Michael Moriarty

It is easy to see how the idea of associating the baroque with philosophy might at first elicit a certain skepticism. One does not normally think of philosophers as aiming at the dramatic emotional effects associated with baroque art, architecture, and music. But, curiously enough, one of the suggested etymologies for the word “baroque” relates to scholastic philosophy. Carl J. Friedrich’s explanation is: “The most probable derivation is that which links baroque to the scholastic term baroco, a designation for one of the more complicated figures of formal logic. Thus it would be associated with the humanist dislike for scholasticism, and would mean ‘intricate,’ ‘perverse,’ and ‘eccentric.’ ”1 But there is nothing especially complicated or intricate about Baroco. It is a particular kind of syllogism. The vowels tell us what sort of propositions it is formed of: namely a universal affirmative premise (for which the conventional label is “A”), followed by a particular negative premise (“O”), the conclusion from which is another particular negative proposition. The figure baroco belongs to the second type (or “mood”) of the syllogism. In this mood, the middle term, which links the two premises and on which, therefore, the argument pivots, is in the predicate of each premise. And thus a syllogism in Baroco would look like this: All true artists challenge the status quo. Some popular novelists do not challenge the status quo. Therefore, some popular novelists are not true artists. It is hard to see what is particularly “baroque” (“perverse” or “eccentric”) about this kind of argument. Like all logical examples, this one is schematic; but what it expresses in schematic form is a perfectly useful and far from recondite argumentative technique. For instance, if it were claimed that baroque (defined, for the sake of argument, as a  highly ornamental style) is the universal aesthetic of post-Tridentine Catholicism,

the baroque and philosophy   603 someone who challenged the claim by giving examples of seventeenth-century Catholic churches that do not fit this description would be resorting, albeit no doubt informally and probably unconsciously, to a Baroco-type argument: All baroque buildings are highly ornamented. Some seventeenth-century Catholic churches are not highly ornamented. Therefore, some seventeenth-century Catholic churches are not baroque buildings. In other words, supposing that someone did invent the term “baroque” to imply that a certain artistic or architectural style is as weird as an argument in Baroco, one can only say that the comparison does not make a great deal of sense. If one were to use this conjectural etymology to get an idea of baroque philosophy, one might imagine that such a philosophy depended on the manipulation of arcane logical techniques, so as to produce bizarre results. But this is not true of any philosophy that one might want to call baroque, as we shall see. Friedrich himself sought to link baroque as a style to the emergence of the modern state.2 In different ways, the style and the self-assertion of the state reflect what he calls an “intoxication with the power of man,” which helps to explain how the baroque style displays a “theatrical exaggeration of reality.”3 From here, it is not too difficult to make the transition to philosophy: “Descartes’s exaggerated sense of the power of the mind was in its very emphasis typically and dramatically baroque.”4 But there is something problematic about this move. In the blissful self-abandon of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, in the hyper-virile, yet precarious, rigidity of Corneille’s Horace, we see the sculptor and the playwright deliberately resorting to emphasis and exaggeration for emotional and imaginative effect; but, to state the obvious, Descartes was not aiming at such effect—he thought that what he was saying was true, and gave reasons why we should accept it as true. So, it could be said that to read him as a baroque figure is to espouse an aesthetic perspective that belies his philosophical activity as such.5 By contrast, José Antonio Maravall’s historical approach plays down the making of stylistic analogies across different fields. He argues that any similarities there might be between the products of different baroque fields of activity are less important than the fact that all those fields belong to a single historical conjuncture; the different activities are responses to the same set of social and historical conditions.6 And, significantly, he does not regard Descartes as a baroque figure: he is a contemporary of the baroque;7 like Leibniz, Spinoza, or Berkeley, he is immersed in the baroque age, but does not wholly belong to it, for they are pioneers opening up a channel to another culture.8 In short, any serious approach to link the baroque to philosophy will involve difficult questions of method. Christopher Braider formulates these pertinently: Should we follow the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in using it [the term “baroque”] to denote an aesthetic style whose properties are logically independent of local motives, or does the term more properly denote an underlying ethos or mentality of which style constitutes a mere symptom? And in analyzing the baroque as an ethos

604   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque or mentality, may we see in it [. . .] a pervasive aesthetic tendency that transcends the immediate historical contexts in which we find it embodied; or should we focus on the socio-cultural factors defining a specific historical era?9

The approach adopted here will be historically specific. It will not rely on any one definition of the baroque nor shall I propound my own definition of the term. Taking for granted fairly conventional views of what constitutes baroque culture (or what constitutes a culture as baroque), it will consider various aspects of philosophy’s relation to that culture.10

Style and Rhetoric The dominant form of early-modern philosophy, in institutional terms, was the scholasticism of the colleges and universities. It might be thought that this has nothing do with the baroque: when reading scholastic philosophers or theologians, one does not expect to be dazzled by stylistic brilliance. But things may be more complex than this objection allows for. Critics of scholasticism as different as Hobbes and Pascal criticized its language as prone to meaninglessness. Both criticize the language of Aristotelian physics for imputing to inanimate bodies terms like “appetite” or “inclination” that could pertain only to animate entities.11 There is nothing in Hobbes’s language to suggest that he is targeting a distinctively baroque form of discourse. But there is a case for making this claim as regards Pascal. In his account of Pascal’s relationship to the baroque, Jean Mesnard draws attention to the linguistic dimensions of his critique of Père Noël’s riposte to his Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide.12 Pascal sets out his epistemological principles plainly: we can make assertions only on one of two conditions: either what we assert must appear so clearly and distinctly to the senses, or to the reason, depending on the subject-matter, that there is no room for doubt (in which case the assertion is a principle or axiom); or it must follow necessarily from such principles or axioms. Any assertion failing to meet these conditions is doubtful and uncertain.13 The kind of analogical argument that comes so readily to Noël is thus ruled out of court.14 And Mesnard draws attention to the language in which Pascal stigmatizes doubtful assertions: “vision” (in the sense of “delusion”), “caprice,” “fancy,” “idea,” and at best “fine thought” (“belle pensée”). These terms are associated with the imagination;15 moreover, in a baroque aesthetic, some of them at least might carry a positive evaluation. The downgrading of the imagination is consolidated in Pascal’s rejection of pseudo-explanations that depend on presupposing in the supposed cause the qualities that will account for the effect. Such explanations are fatally attractive to their inventors: “It is difficult for those who imagine them not to succumb to vain self-indulgence and to a secret charm they find in their inventions, especially when they have so well devised them that, from the suppositions of their imagination, they logically infer truths that are already obvious.”16

the baroque and philosophy   605 Again, the bad natural philosophers are thinking like baroque poets delighting in the fertility of their imagination. Pascal’s father, Étienne, sternly rebuked Père Noël for the unfairness of his attack on his son’s findings; again, as Mesnard points out, the criticism addresses issues of language and rhetoric. The title of Noël’s book Le Plein du vide (The Fullness of the Vacuum) is particularly stigmatized as “subtle, artificial, ornate, or rather made up of a figure termed antithesis, if I remember right.”17 Again, these are epithets we would think appropriate to the baroque. In his preface, Noël had claimed to be defending nature against the false accusation of emptiness, stringing together a host of legal metaphors to create an allegory; Étienne takes him to task over this too, not just for the malice he detects in Noël’s jokey language but for his flouting of the rules governing the use of metaphor.18 What is particularly striking is that he presents Noël’s shoddy rhetoric as good enough for the schools but unacceptable in the outside world.19 The issues at stake in this controversy belong to natural philosophy rather than to philosophy in the modern sense. But this imputed association between the institutions of scholasticism and a kind of rhetoric we can plausibly call baroque is not irrelevant to another controversy dealing precisely with issues of metaphysics and epistemology, namely the exchange between the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin and Descartes. Bourdin’s objections, the seventh set, are, for the most part, not especially philosophically interesting and Descartes constantly complains that Bourdin attributes views to him that he cannot recognize as his own and even views that no sane person could possibly hold.20 What is striking is the way in which Bourdin’s critique is couched. Much of it is conveyed through a lengthy development of the metaphor of the journey in search of truth (a metaphor Descartes had himself employed in the Discourse on the Method). Bourdin’s argument is divided into questions, in a standard scholastic mode. The second question is whether Descartes’s method of rejecting whatever can be doubted is sound. Bourdin says that he cannot answer it properly unless: I try out this method of yours, and we walk on a safe and well-trodden path, and ourselves investigate what in the end is to be found on it; and because you know all its twists and turns, all the footpaths and byways, and have familiarized yourself with it over a long time, you should agree to be my guide. [. . .] To this journey, even though it is outside my experience and frightening since I am unaccustomed to the dark, I gladly agree. [. . .] I will plant my foot wherever you have planted yours.21

Many of the subsections of this question allude to this metaphor.22 It is prolonged in the body of the objections: “Here let us stop here for a little, if you please, so that we may get our spirits back. The strangeness of this business has disturbed me not a little” / “Do not take it ill, if I look round thoroughly, if I am afraid at every step lest I fall into a trap.”23 The form of the discussion is a quick-fire dialogue, in which the guide, the Descartes-figure, expresses his views (or what Bourdin takes his views to be) and the follower casts doubt on them, with frequent recourse to rhetorical questions. He wields the rhetoric of ethos, characterizing himself as apprehensive and not very intelligent, as slow-thinking.24 When he argues (on the basis of a misreading of Descartes’s argument

606   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque in the Second Meditation) that Descartes may not have a sufficiently complete idea of body to deny he is a body, he tells a humorous anecdote of a countryman seeing a wolf for the first time, who denies it is an animal because it is not one of the animals he knows.25 Bourdin’s style, emphatic and ornate, combining the serious and the humorous, can fairly be called baroque. Moreover, in his reply, Descartes ironically marvels at the force of Bourdin’s imagination, the way in which he battles against an imaginary opponent conjured up out of his brain—the repeated reference to the physical organ (cerebrum) emphasizes that Bourdin’s imagination, not his intellect, is responsible for his ideas.26 It will be seen that the gravamen of his criticism is very similar to Pascal’s anti-baroque rhetoric. But it would be facile to imagine that we have a conflict between Bourdin’s exuberant baroque imagination and cold Cartesian rationalism and literalism. Descartes himself is not above indulging in protracted metaphor. He presents Bourdin’s affectation of unintelligence as an attempt to act the modern kind of stage clown who tries to raise a laugh by his silliness.27 The story of the countryman, he jibes, goes very well with this clown role, but the joke is on Bourdin, because the argument he is ridiculing is not Descartes’s but his own misconstruction of Descartes’s argument.28 A further extended metaphor is mobilized at the end of Descartes’s replies. From his earlier writings, in particular the Discourse on the Method, he takes up the metaphor of an architect, who in order to construct his building on solid foundations, has to clear away any sand that lies on top of the rock. That is, he must clear away what is doubtful in order to build on what is certain. Bourdin, on the other hand, is a mere mason (“Cæmentarius”) who is jealous of the architect’s reputation and ignorant of architectural method. He thinks that the architect’s method consists purely in clearing the foundations, and to persuade the populace of his view he puts on a series of comic sketches aimed at satirizing him; the fifth act of his play, however (corresponding to Bourdin’s summing up of the flaws of Descartes’s method) is a serious diatribe against the architect’s blunders. By now, the mason has made himself completely ridiculous because everyone can see that the architect has erected a solid and handsome chapel on the site he had cleared, and, realizing that he is actually mentally ill, his friends drag him away to the doctor’s.29 How would we distinguish between Descartes’s ruthlessly extended metaphor and those of Bourdin? If Bourdin’s extravagant style is baroque, is not Descartes’s also baroque? If Bourdin’s metaphors are out of place in philosophy, is not the same true of Descartes’s? And we might remember that Hobbes accused Descartes of relying on metaphors in lieu of argument.30 Descartes’s answer to Hobbes is that his use of metaphor (in this case, the image of illumination for intellectual understanding) has an explanatory not an argumentative function.31 The metaphor of light is employed to help us understand what it feels like to know something clearly. A similar point could be made here. It is fair to say that on each side of the dispute, the function of metaphor and, in general, rhetoric is polemical. Bourdin’s core argument is that Descartes is a poor logician: he accuses him of failing to apply basic scholastic techniques, in particular the Porphyrian tree and the

the baroque and philosophy   607 syllogism.32 Descartes’s central argument is that Bourdin has completely misunderstood his whole procedure. As Bourdin uses the metaphor of the journey to create an image of Descartes as an incompetent guide, so Descartes uses metaphor to create an image of Bourdin as a buffoon and a philosophical journeyman. In other words, we might suggest that, at least in this case, the role of metaphor and more generally rhetoric is para-philosophical. It is designed not to prove this or that thesis true but to accredit or discredit an author’s qualifications to engage in philosophy. Bourdin’s baroque rhetoric, like Noël’s, serves to defend scholastic thought against a new philosophical approach. Descartes, so to speak, goes baroque in order to counter this defense and legitimate his proposal of a new philosophical approach. We could therefore say that the baroque rhetoric of his replies to Bourdin is a more emphatic and dramatic version of the more sober deployment of metaphors in the Discourse on the Method, which likewise serve to explain and justify his novel philosophical approach. Here, Descartes uses two key images: the journey and the building. The first of these is, to be sure, almost a ­cultural universal, but it was one to which baroque writers were particularly attached.33 Descartes uses it to make what is for him a crucial distinction, between theory and practice: he resolves, in matters of theory, to walk very carefully, like a man alone in the dark; but in practical matters he will choose one path and stick to it, like a traveler lost in a forest, who advances resolutely in one direction, rather than wandering about in several.34 Images of building take two forms in the Discourse: one concerns the construction of an individual house, the other the design of a city. In the former case, the key emphasis is on the need to build on sound foundations: a metaphor amply developed by Montaigne, although he had used it to convey the instability of knowledgeconstructions, rather than, as Descartes uses it, to emphasize the preconditions of constructing knowledge successfully.35 In the latter, one may find a different kind of link with the baroque, which Maravall characterizes as a distinctively urban culture, and in particular with what Harbison refers to as “the conventional Baroque of rulers and of ambitious rational plans for new capitals or towns.”36 Descartes remarks that buildings that are the work of a single architect are customarily finer and better-arranged than can be achieved by a number of people refurbishing previous constructions, and that cities that have grown over the centuries are less well designed than those built from scratch can be. His point is to suggest that he will make more progress by developing his own philosophy than by trying to create it out of prior philosophies. But lest this appear as if he is identifying himself with an architect licensed by an absolutist ruler, or even with the ruler himself who gives the architect his instructions, he insists that he has no plans to pull down and rebuild the existing institutional structure of knowledge, only to reform his own opinions.37 What is being suggested, then, is that whether or not the concept of the baroque applies to the process of philosophizing, the exercise of philosophical reason, it certainly can be applied to the para-philosophical activity of legitimating (or discrediting) a particular kind of philosophical subject defined by his or her relationship (supportive or hostile) to the dominant institutions of philosophy.

608   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Themes But we might also consider the relevance of the baroque to what might be termed “pre-philosophy.” Clearly, philosophers do not generate all their concepts and arguments from their own individual minds—it might seem at first sight that Descartes attempted to do this: but his procedure in the Second Meditation involves developing his current idea of himself as a thinking thing by reference to his prior conceptions of soul and body, and these (although, in order to play down his anti-Aristotelianism, he does not spell out the point), came to him from scholastic philosophy. They may start with concepts or themes from outside philosophy, from another intellectual discipline, or from the culture at large. Literary and cultural historians have done much to identify certain cultural themes or motifs as distinctively baroque.38 We can see these being absorbed into philosophical discourse in two ways. First, we find philosophers picking up such themes and motifs and employing them as rhetorical topoi to be slotted into an overall argument.39 Second, the preoccupations of the culture furnish them with philosophical problems and sometimes with arguments aimed at solving them. I shall deal with the topoi first. A word of caution, though: we can explain the presence of a particular notion in an individual writer in more than one way. Take the motif highlighted by Maravall, of the ingrained egotism that sets human beings necessarily at odds with one another.40 Experience of courtly competition, of disloyalty and betrayal, might well foster this idea, crystallized in the expression homo homini lupus, which Maravall notes became a commonplace in the second quarter of the seventeenth century.41 We find this notion in Pascal, but in this case, as in that of other French moralists, it has certainly been nourished principally by his reading of St. Augustine, and not simply absorbed from a prevailing cultural atmosphere.42

Change and Variation We might want to classify the topoi by the field of philosophy to which they are most relevant. But this is difficult to do, precisely because, as elements of a structure of feeling, they connect different aspects of life, and resist compartmentalization.43 Take one of the paramount themes of baroque literature: universal movement and mutability.44 It is a feature of the world in general: “The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion.”45 And of human life in general: for Montaigne, “Our life is nothing but movement.”46 He is echoed by Hobbes: “Life itself is but Motion.”47 And by Pascal: “Our nature is in movement, complete rest is death.”48 It is borne out in subjective experience, as we shall see. But it also affects moral and legal values: ideas of justice and injustice change over time, sometimes within a few years.49 It is hard, then, to assign such a theme to a particular branch of philosophy. Variation in customs and values over time is complemented by variation over space. Writers of the period show an acute awareness of this. Montaigne’s chapter on the cannibals of Brazil exhibits his fascination with a society that has none of what

the baroque and philosophy   609 Europeans of his time would have taken to be the intrinsic characteristics of any society: no hierarchy, no property, no clothes, no farming—and no lying or treachery.50 Their wars are fought for glory, not gain; they eat their prisoners, but these face their fate with unflinching courage. Barbarous they may be, when judged by the yardstick of reason, but not in comparison to us, whose barbarity far exceeds theirs.51 It will be seen that this is not a completely relativist position; but in the more general discussion of variation of moral standards that comes in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne casts doubt on the possibility of identifying a universal moral standard: there may be natural laws, but they have been, paradoxically, screened from us by the workings of human reason.52 Pascal’s treatment of the subject is closely modeled on Montaigne’s, sometimes to the point of quasi-verbatim quotation. But his intention is different: to emphasize the fallen state of man by the contrast between our ability to conceive a universal standard and our incapacity to identify it securely and agree upon it. Descartes had drawn different conclusions from the same phenomena: variations in values between different peoples, and variations in fashion within a single people are signs that our attitudes are shaped by custom and example rather than knowledge; but since truth in complex issues is not determined by the majority opinion, we should not defer to anyone else’s views, but seek for truth by ourselves.53

The Mad World Any objective norms there may be fail, then to be instantiated in the empirical world. A sense of this absence comes across in another favorite theme of baroque writers: the mad world.54 It is heavily exploited by Pascal. The political order is not based on justice, but on the foolishness of the people, which necessitates a monarchical order.55 In their political theory, Plato and Aristotle were offering rules for running a lunatic asylum.56 This being so it would be folly to set out to cultivate an individual rationality: “Human beings are so necessarily mad that it would be mad, by another quirk of madness, not to be mad.”57 Nothing can liberate us from this madness but the divine folly of the Cross and of the doctrine of Original Sin.58

The Theater of the World “All the world’s a stage” is one of the best-known topoi of the baroque.59 If we read it chiefly as signifying the unreality of the world, it can be interpreted as a variation on the previous theme. But we might also see the motif as an attempt to identify some kind of comprehensible pattern in human life. Montaigne speaks of the confrontation with death as the last act of a person’s play.60 Pascal picks up the notion to memorable effect: “The final act is a bloody one, however fine the rest of the play has been. A little earth scattered on the head, and that is it forever.”61 Descartes gives the idea a very different slant. He urges Elisabeth of Bohemia to imitate those great souls who contemplate their own lives as if they were watching a play, and who, like the theatrical spectator, can

610   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque derive pleasure from intrinsically sad events.62 He recommends this attitude as a means to dealing with the vicissitudes of fortune, another typically baroque preoccupation.63

The Fugitive “I” But to play one’s part in the “theater of the world” requires acceptance of the role assigned to one. Hamlet is a performer who is uncertain whether to accept that role, and his uncertainty can be seen as reflecting a more general uncertainty over identity.64 The early modern fascination with the study of human nature often takes the form of what Charles Taylor has called “radical reflexivity,” an adoption of the first-person standpoint.65 As Maravall observes, baroque authors and their characters constantly ask “Who am I?” The question certainly at times has a generic dimension: “What, as a human being, am I?”66 At other times, however, “I” becomes the site of self-questioning as to one’s individual nature, as in Montaigne: Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two.67 Not only does the wind of accident move me at will, but, besides, I am moved and disturbed as a result merely of my own unstable posture; and anyone who observes carefully can hardly find himself twice in the same state. I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. All contradictions may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion.68

In its variations and oscillations, the self is part of the universal process of change: the connection is clear in the opening of Montaigne’s chapter on repentance in Essays III.2. He also, however, suggests that beneath all the fluctuations of thought and feeling, there resides an underlying character-shape, a “ruling pattern” (“forme maîtresse”).69 In the next section, we shall look at philosophical attempts to clarify the notion of the self.

Problems of Knowledge The variation over time in moral and legal values is a theme Pascal took from Montaigne and Montaigne from the ancient skepticism of the Pyrrhonist school.70 And perhaps the central problem for philosophy of the baroque period is to justify human claims to knowledge in the face of the skeptical challenge.71

Perspective One of the concepts mobilized by early modern writers in the service of skepticism, a concept crucial to baroque painting and architecture, is perspective.72 Montaigne, without

the baroque and philosophy   611 using the term, invokes the concept to complicate further the problem of the instability of the self. His thought-processes constantly change, and sometimes change direction altogether, “whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects.”73 He uses it also to account for variations in moral standards and codes: “Things may be considered in various lights and from various viewpoints: it is principally from this that diversity of opinions arises. One nation looks at one side of a thing and stops there; another at another.”74 Pascal’s explanation of error follows similar lines: it consists not in outright misperception, but in an accurate ­perception of one aspect of the truth that is then identified with the whole truth of the matter.75 That is, although he regards our apprehension of reality as perspectival, this does not mean that truth is purely relative to perspective. On the contrary, he uses the term “perspective” to establish the notion of an epistemological norm (albeit an unattainable one). A picture looks blurred when we come close, or when we are too far away; but there is an ideal point from which to view it, determined by the laws of perspective. But we lack a science of perspective where truth and morality are concerned.76 Only the Christian vision, in particular the doctrine of original sin, enables us to consider human nature in both the aspects, the greatness and the wretchedness, that force themselves upon our thinking.77 The problem of perspective is embodied in language. Each concept presupposes a certain distance from the object: we see a “town” clearly from the hill above it, but when we are in the town, we do not see the town as such, only houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grass, ants. Each object of perception can be magnified, so to speak, so as to dissolve; the ant disappears as we focus on its leg, and the leg would disappear if we focused on the smaller entities that comprise it, just as a human being appears as a single entity (a “suppôt”) but, viewed anatomically, disappears into a host of smaller and smaller parts.78

The Unreliability of the Senses In the Aristotelian theory of perception, the form of an object, that which makes it an object of a particular kind, is imprinted on the mind, without the matter of which the physical object is made up.79 There is no need then to worry about the accuracy of our perceptions. But not only are our sense-perceptions reliable: they are the basis of all our knowledge. Even concepts of immaterial entities are derived ultimately from senseperceptions, by means of abstraction.80 So when Montaigne states that the senses are “the base and the principles of the whole edifice of our knowledge,” this is not some bold assertion of human embodiment in the face of intellectual orthodoxy, it is the intellectual orthodoxy.81 But Montaigne goes on to draw the very unorthodox conclusion that we have no reliable knowledge. For the senses are possibly inadequate. Some animal species lack sight or hearing, so how do we know we do not lack other senses? Moreover, the senses are often deceptive; they are weaker in us than in other animals; and they can both disturb and be disturbed by our intellectual judgments.82 Skepticism as to the reliability of the

612   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque senses thus predates, the development of new aids to sensory perception (the telescope and the microscope) which has been seen as paradoxically accentuating the awareness of the senses’ limitations.83 Montaigne was to take his epistemological critique even further. He argues that not only is our knowledge circumscribed by the limitations of our cognitive faculties, in  particular the senses, these faculties actually transform the objects they receive. Therefore, we can never know objects as they are in themselves, only as they are represented by our senses. That things do not lodge in us in their own form and essence, or make their entry into us by their own power and authority, we see clearly enough. Because, if that were so, we should receive them in the same way: wine would be the same in the mouth of a sick man as in the mouth of a healthy man. [. . .] Thus external objects surrender to our mercy; they dwell in us as we please. [. . .] Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know what things are in truth; for nothing comes to us except falsified and altered by our senses.84

In other words, we have no longer any direct access to objects via their form, only to the representation of things in our mind.85 Descartes’s capitalizes on Montaigne’s skeptical legacy for his own project of replacing pseudo-knowledge by real knowledge. In the First Meditation, he reactivates the skeptical critique of the senses, using arguments he could easily have found in “An Apology of Raymond Sebond.” For instance, he argues that there is no clear criterion that can assure us that we are awake and not dreaming86—one could equally see him as appealing to a classic baroque topos (life is a dream).87 Secondly, Descartes picks up the baroque theme of madness, on the individual rather than the collective level: mad people have delusions as vivid as what we think of as our sane experience.88 This in fact helps him to argue that our knowledge is not, after all, founded on sense-perception: “the cogito” does not depend on the senses but on his awareness of himself as thinking. In sense-perception, it is true, we perceive not the objects as they are in themselves, but as they are represented by our senses. But this should be taken as a reason not to project our sensations on to objects, that is, not to imagine the objects themselves as endowed with qualities such as color and smell that pertain only to our perception. We can, on the other hand, have knowledge of physical objects based on a clear conception of properties that must be intrinsic to them, such as extension in three-dimensional space, shape, and movement. In this light, we can see that our qualitative sensations are, so to speak, translations of physical processes that can be explained in terms of movement.89

Identifying the Self In the Discourse on the Method, Descartes moves immediately from “the cogito” to the deduction that his mind is really distinct from his body, which, in the Meditations,

the baroque and philosophy   613 he permits himself only after establishing the existence and the veracity of God. But the language of the Discourse is particularly striking, in its identification of the self, designated by the nominalized form of the first-person pronoun, with the immaterial soul: “this ‘I’, that is to say, the Soul by which I am what I am.”90 A very similar expression is found in the French version of the Sixth Meditation.91 But if, from a certain point of view, it is possible for Descartes to say that “I” am distinct from my body, there is another point of view on selfhood, in which it is equally true to speak of “my body, or rather myself as a whole, in so far as I am composed of a body and a mind.”92 Elsewhere, Descartes speaks of the union of body and mind as a “primary notion.”93 In this latter passage, he makes clear that one cannot hope to reconcile those two conceptions. One is true from the point of view of metaphysics, the other from the point of view of daily experience, and each viewpoint is legitimate in its domain. It would therefore be wrong to think of Descartes as offering a simplistic solution to baroque anxieties about the nature of selfhood. Pascal’s handling of the nature of selfhood contains a similar duality. He can claim both that “the self consists in our thinking” and that “we are automaton as much as mind,” and both claims are essential to his philosophy.94 If our selfhood could be explained in purely material terms, there would be no reason to think of our nature as distinct from that of nonhuman animals; but it is our physical nature that means that many of our beliefs are formed not by reasoning but by custom (so that the would-be Christian must condition themself through ritual to an effective faith). And as in Descartes, the physical is conceived as the mechanical. Pascal’s own genius as a designer produced the extremely functional calculating-machine, which it is hard to see as a baroque artefact; but Descartes’s thinking about the human body was certainly inspired by automata, in the broadest sense, such as baroque architects loved to create.95 Here, then, as with the telescope and the microscope, we encounter an influence on philosophy not from the literary, but from the technological culture of the baroque. For Pascal, the significance of the telescope and the microscope was not just as proof of the limitations of our senses; the infinitely large and the infinitely small disturb any residual sense of what Charles Taylor calls an “ontic logos,” a cosmic order of value of which a human order is part.96 Our fulfilment cannot come from any encounter with or action in the physical world; the search for it must begin with reflection on our position as humans isolated in a silent cosmos.97 At the start of this chapter, I observed that philosophy is not generally understood as appealing to subjective response or aiming to stir the emotions, as baroque art is generally held to do. But undoubtedly, this is Pascal’s aim in those sections of the Pensées in which he is urging his readers to face up to the implications of his portrayal of the human condition and to investigate the possibility that Christianity is true. His consciousness of the tension between human experience, values, capacities, and aspirations on the one hand, and a hostile universe on the other can be seen, Jean Mesnard suggests, as baroque.98 I mentioned above the idea that baroque writers conceive of human beings as ­necessarily in hostile competition. We are in fact locked into ourselves, incapable of relationships with others.99 Although, as was also pointed out, Pascal’s view of human nature derives primarily from his reading of St. Augustine, he certainly shares this view

614   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque of the personality. He casts doubt on whether we can actually have a relationship with another person, another self, as such. For all we actually know in another person is their qualities, physical or mental, all of which are perishable and precarious.100 What has been attempted here so far is to show that philosophy was not isolated from the culture that has been identified as baroque. In their own way, philosophers participated in, negotiated with, or challenged baroque ways of thinking, feeling, or writing. But is there anything about their solutions that can be called baroque?

Philosophies It was pointed out above that philosophy of the baroque period is not distinguished by an excessive attachment to the more recondite aspects of formal logic. But it is true that some philosophers of the period take the logic of their thinking to extreme lengths, and there is something that might perhaps be called baroque in this extremism. I shall mention two, both, as it happens, priests, albeit of different denominations, who, in their different ways, propounded deeply radical, and radically theocentric, philosophies. Malebranche takes to its limit the central tenet of the new philosophy, the discrepancy between objective reality and our sensory experience of it. Indeed, he questions the very term “experience” when he lists “what is falsely called experience” among the key causes of error.101 The spontaneous illusions of experience fasten us more tightly to our bodies and to the physical world and thus prolong the effects of Original Sin; to effect a philosophical disillusionment is thus a spiritual therapy as well as an intellectual illumination.102 Nothing seems more patent in our experience than that, through our sense-perceptions, we encounter physical objects in the physical world we inhabit. But nothing is falser. The material world is strictly speaking invisible. For we would continue to “see” it even if God annihilated it, as long as he continued to produce the same traces in our brains as occur when it is actually present. The world we apprehend by our senses is therefore an intelligible representation of an inapprehensible physical world.103 “It is in that world [the intelligible world] that we exist and live, although the body we animate lives in another [world] and moves around another [world].”104 Another of our deepest-rooted illusions concerns causality. We see a soccer player’s foot strike the ball, and propel it into the net. At least we think we see that. But we do not. For we have a clear idea of the essence of matter, from which all its properties can be deduced: it consists in extension in three-dimensional space.105 But the power of selfmovement does not belong to this conception. So, bodies have no motive power. But at least the player willed this to happen: she willed to swing her foot at the ball with a particular force and in a particular direction. But there is no necessary connection between an act of volition and the motion of any body, and in this case, between her will to place the ball in the bottom-left-hand corner of the net and its ending up there. So, no finite

the baroque and philosophy   615 cause, bodily or mental, can bring anything about at all. The only true cause of this event, as of all physical and mental events, is God. This does not mean, as some accounts of this doctrine appear to imply, that God intervenes to move the player’s foot and then to move the ball. Rather, he has instituted general laws of the communication of movement which determine both that the player’s volition (to kick the ball with a certain force in a certain direction, away from the goalkeeper) is followed by the swing of her foot, and that the motion of the foot is followed by the movement of the ball into the net. What we took to be the real causes of this process were simply occasions for the manifestation of God’s will, insofar as it is expressed in the laws of motion he has established (for which reason the doctrine is termed occasionalism). As for the purely mental realm, such knowledge as we have depends on divine illumination and our volition depends on a divinely-instituted impulsion toward the good.106 The implications of this have been described as follows: “The structure of our everyday life, featuring ourselves, other people, and the world of bodies [. . .] is nothing but a stage-set: we are actors in a play of which God is author and director, but actors deluded into total identification with our characters.”107 It will not, perhaps, be felt unreasonable to apply the word “baroque” to this insistence on the tension between appearance and reality. Although Malebranche believed the physical world to be inapprehensible by our senses, he did not deny its reality. George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork, found even this a superfluous assumption.108 Suppose, he says in effect, as the new philosophies do, that we do not perceive objects directly, only via representations in our mind. What we directly perceive, then, is ideas in our mind.109 And from another point of view, what we directly perceive in physical objects is sensible qualities, such as color, taste, and smell. The sensations of these plainly do not exist in physical objects, any more than the pain caused by being too close to the fire is actually in the fire. They exist, then, only in our mind. Philonous, the lover of mind, succeeds, with some difficulty, in convincing Hylas (whose name derives from hyle, the Greek for “matter”) of all this.110 The philosophers whom Berkeley is challenging (such as Descartes, but also Locke) would regard the qualities so far discussed as secondary, to be distinguished from the primary qualities such as extension, shape, and movement that really do belong to bodies. But Philonous goes on to argue that the critique of secondary qualities applies just as effectively to the so-called primary qualities; they too are as relative to the perceiver as the secondary ones. So, the mind imparts to objects their primary as well as their secondary qualities.111 But surely these qualities, be they “primary” or “secondary” are accidents, modifications of an underlying material substance? No, says Philonous: the idea of a quality-less imperceptible substance is incoherent.112 In short, if we directly perceive not physical objects, but only our ideas, and if our ideas of physical objects are limited to their sensible qualities, and can’t be eked out by reason’s appealing to dubious categories like substance, then physical objects can be nothing other than clusters of sensible qualities (or sensible ideas, which comes to the same thing).113 They are thus mind-dependent; their esse (being) is percipi (to be perceived).114 The idea of a physical

616   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque object existing outside any mind whatever is inconceivable, for once conceived it is ipso facto in a mind.115 But sensible objects do not depend for their existence purely on my own mind, or on any other finite mind. It follows that they exist in so far as they are perceived by the infinite mind of God.116 This does not in the slightest (for Berkeley) mean that they are unreal; if they were not real, we could not perceive them.117 Surprisingly, it may seem, Berkeley presents this view as thoroughly compatible with ordinary people’s way of thinking: “I am of a vulgar cast, simple enough to believe my senses. [. . .] To be plain, it is my opinion that the real things are those very things I see and feel and perceive by my senses. [. . .] I cannot for my life help thinking that snow is white and fire hot.”118 Only, there is no underlying substance “snow” separable from the whiteness, softness, wetness, and so forth. The baroque concern with appearance, the idea that appearance is part of reality, is now taken to the extreme: the reality is the appearance.119 Both these writers resort on occasion to dialogue to advance their theories. The effect on the learner is in each case disconcerting. When Malebranche’s Théodore explains to Ariste the difference between the physical and the intelligible worlds, Ariste declares himself “somewhat dumbfounded.”120 Hylas finds himself “so amazed to see myself ensnared and as it were imprisoned in the labyrinths” into which Philonous has drawn him.121 Perhaps these reactions might be taken as warranting the description of Malebranche’s and Berkeley’s audacious theories as masterpieces of baroque philosophical architecture.

Notes 1. Carl J. Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque, 1610–1660 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 38 n. 1. 2. Ibid., xiii. 3. Ibid., 44. 4. Ibid., 114. 5. It could be said that the aesthetic perspective is warranted by the fact that most philosophers, since Descartes’s own time, have not accepted his arguments. Still, I take it that a properly philosophical approach must always be open to the possibility that an apparently discredited argument may in fact be sound. 6. José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1980), 28–29; Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran, foreword by Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 5–6. I refer henceforth where possible to the English version only. 7. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 75. 8. Maravall, La cultura del barroco, 38; there appears to be no corresponding passage in the English version. 9. Christopher Braider, Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads (Aldershot UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 5. For an ambitious attempt to develop a concept of the baroque specifically in relation to natural philosophy, see Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, Baroque Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

the baroque and philosophy   617 10. “Philosophy” in this period included natural philosophy, what we would now call science. The emphasis in this chapter is on ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics; on natural philosophy, see Gal and Chen-Morris, Baroque Science. 11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), I.2, 15; Blaise Pascal, Pensées, fragments number 199, 958 (according to the numbering in Œuvres complètes, ed. Louis Lafuma [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963]); 230, 795 (numbering in Pensées, opuscules et lettres, ed. Philippe Sellier [Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010]). Future references to the Pensées will be by the fragment number as follows: L 199/S 230. For other criticisms of scholastic language by Hobbes, see Leviathan, I.8, 59; IV.46, 472–473. 12. Jean Mesnard, “Baroque, science et religion chez Pascal,” in La Culture du XVIIe siècle: Enquêtes et synthèses (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 327–345 (see esp. 331–336). 13. Pascal, letter to Père Noël, October 29, 1647, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Michel Le Guern, 2 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2000), I, 377–378. All translations from Pascal are my own. 14. See Noël’s letter to Pascal, Œuvres complètes, I, 373–377 for examples of his analogical thinking. 15. Mesnard, “Baroque, science et religion chez Pascal,” 335. 16. Pascal to Noël, Œuvres complètes, I, 382: “Il est difficile que ceux qui se les figurent se défendent d’une vaine complaisance, et d’un charme secret qu’ils trouvent dans leurs inventions, principalement quand il les ont si bien ajustées, que des imaginations qu’ils ont supposées, ils concluent nécessairement des vérités déjà évidentes.” 17. Étienne Pascal to Noël, in Pascal, Œuvres complètes, I, 417: “subtil, artificieux, orné, ou plutôt composé d’une figure qu’on appelle antithèse, si j’ai bonne mémoire.” Étienne does not condemn antithesis in itself, only what he takes to be Noël’s misuse of it (417–418). 18. Étienne Pascal to Noël, Œuvres complètes, I, 418–422. 19. Étienne Pascal to Noël, Œuvres complètes, I, 417, 421. 20. René Descartes, Œuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols, rev. ed. (Paris: Vrin/ CNRS, 1996), VII, 459, 464. Where Latin and French versions are included in this edition, I shall give references to both (this does not apply to this text). Translations from Descartes are my own. 21. Œuvres, VII, 467: “tentem illam tuam methodum, tritam tutamque ineamus viam, exploremus ipsi, quid in eâ sit tandem; & quia flexus illius nosti, calles & diverticula, teque in eâ diu exercuisti, ducem mihi te præbe. [. . .] Ad illud iter, etsi n0vum & mihi tenebris non assueto formidandum, accedo lubens. [. . .] Ibi pedem figam, ubi fixeris.” Descartes parodies this speech later (Œuvres, VII, 539). 22. Ibid., 468, 477, 488, 493, 498, 502, 507. 23. Ibid., 469, 482: “Non aegre feres, si omnia circumspiciam, si ubique verear, ut ne in plagas incidam.” 24. Ibid., 472, 488. 25. Ibid., 496–497. 26. Ibid., 466, 511–512, 515–516. 27. Ibid., 492–493, 509–510. 28. Ibid., 510. 29. Ibid., 536–557. 30. [Hobbes], Third Objections, § XIII; Descartes, Œuvres, VII, 191–192/IX, 149. 31. [Descartes], Third Replies, XIII; Descartes, Œuvres, VII, 192/IX, 149–150.

618   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 32. Descartes, Œuvres, VII, 506, 507. Descartes replies that he does use syllogism when appropriate (522). 33. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 154, 180. See also Louis Van Delft, Le Moraliste classique (Geneva: Droz, 1982), 176–191. Van Delft uses “classique” here, as is conventional among French writers, to denote a historical period, not in contradistinction to “baroque.” 34. Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, in Œuvres, VI, 16–17, 24–25. 35. See Michael Moriarty, “Montaigne and Descartes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 351–353. 36. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 104–125; Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), x, 60–77. 37. Descartes, Discourse, in Œuvres, VI, 11–12, 13–14. 38. I shall for the most part locate these themes in secondary studies of baroque culture, especially those of Maravall and Rousset; to cite primary literary sources would be to usurp the task of other chapters in this volume. 39. As will be seen, I use “topos” here not in the primary sense of places or headings into which discourse is to be inserted, but in the derived sense of the prefabricated content that is inserted. See Roland Barthes, “L’Ancienne Rhétorique: Aide-Mémoire,” B.1.18–21, in Œuvres Complètes, 5 vols., ed. Éric Marty, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), III, 527–601 (575–579). 40. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 159–162, 166–167; see also Van Delft, 213–214. 41. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 159–160. 42. See Philippe Sellier, Pascal et saint Augustin, 2nd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). 43. For the notion of “structure of feeling” see Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution [1961] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 63–64, and Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–135. Fully to deploy the resources of this notion would require more reference to social factors than there is space for here. 44. Jean Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et le paon (Paris: José Corti, 1954), 46–47, 139–141, 182; Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 175–180. 45. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, III.2, in The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 610, and Montaigne, Les Essais [1924], 3 vols., ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L.  Saulnier paginated as one (Paris: Quadrige/ Presses Universitaires de France, 1992, 804: “Le monde n’est qu’un branloire perenne. Toutes choses y branlent sans cesse.” Page references are henceforth given to Frame’s translation, with the page number in Villey-Saulnier in square brackets. 46. Montaigne, Essais, III.13, 840 [1095]. 47. Hobbes, Leviathan, I.6, 46. 48. Pascal, Pensées, L 641/S 529. bis: “Notre nature est dans le mouvement, le repos entier est la mort.” 49. Montaigne, Essais, II.12, 436 [579]. Pascal echoes the point (Pensées, L 60/S 94). 50. Montaigne, Essais, I.31, 153 [I, 206–207]. 51. Ibid., I.31, 156 [210]. 52. Ibid., II.12, 436–438 [578–580]. 53. Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, II, in Œuvres, VI, 16. 54. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 150–152. 55. Pascal, Pensées, L 26/S 60. 56. Ibid., L 533/S 457. 57. Ibid., L 412/S 31: “Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous que ce serait être fou par un autre tour de folie de n’être pas fou.”

the baroque and philosophy   619 58. Ibid., L 695, 291/S 323, 574. 59. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, (First Folio: 1623), Act II, Scene VII; Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 28–31; Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 154–155, 197, 199–200. 60. Montaigne, Essais, I.19, 55 [79]. 61. Pascal, Pensées, L 165/S 197: “Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste. On jette un peu de terre sur la tête et en voilà pour jamais.” 62. Descartes to Elisabeth, May 18, 1645, Œuvres, IV, 202–203. 63. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 188–192; and see Emma Gilby, “The Language of Fortune in Descartes,” in Chance, Literature, and Culture in Early Modern France, ed. John D. Lyons and Kathleen Wine (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 155–167. 64. Terence Cave, Pre-Histoires: Textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 11–19, 111–127. 65. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 130. This reflexivity is also an aspect of baroque aesthetics, as witnessed in the fascination with plays-within-plays (as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Corneille’s L’Illusion comique) or pictures-within-pictures (Velázquez, Las  Hilanderas). See Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 182; Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 200. 66. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 168–169. On early modern “anthropology,” see Louis Van Delft, Littérature et anthropologie: nature humaine et caractère à l’âge classique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993) and Michael Moriarty, Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 61–108, 275–287. 67. Montaigne, Essais, III.9, 736 [964]: “Moy à cette heure et moy tantôt sommes bien deux.” 68. Ibid., II.1, 242 [335]: “Non seulement le vent des accidents me remue selon son inclination: mais en outre, je me remue et trouble moi-même par l’instabilité de ma posture; et qui y regarde primement, ne se trouve guère deux fois en même état. Je donne à mon âme tantôt un visage, tantôt un autre, selon le côté où je la couche. Si je parle diversement de moi, c’est que je me regarde diversement. Toutes les contrariétés s’y trouvent selon quelque tour, et en quelque façon.” 69. Ibid., III.2, 615 [811]. 70. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism [1933], trans. and ed. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1.14.145. 7 1. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle [1960] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Gianni Paganini, Skepsis: Le Débat des modernes sur le scepticisme (Paris: Vrin, 2008). 72. Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 181; Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 195–196. On perspective effects in the baroque visual arts, see Harbison, Reflections on Baroque, 10, 16, 27, 33, 112. 73. Montaigne, Essais, III.2, 611 [805]: “soit que je sois autre moy-mesme, soit que je saisisse les subjects par autres circonstances et considerations.” The “circumstances” are aspects of the subjects, not of Montaigne’s apprehension of them. 74. Ibid., II.12, 438 [581]: “Les subjects ont divers lustres et diverses considerations: c’est de là que s’engendre principalement la diversité d’opinions. Une nation regarde un subject par un visage, et s’arreste à celui-là; l’autre par un autre.” 75. Pascal, Pensées, L 701/S 579. 76. Ibid., L 21/S 55. 77. Ibid., L 131/S 164.

620   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 78. Ibid., L 65/S 99. 79. Ann Hartle, “Montaigne’s Turn to Modern Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 252–268 (259). 80. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, (Basel: 1485), Ia, q. 84, aa. 6–7. 81. Montaigne, Essais, II.12, 444 [588]. 82. Ibid., II.12, 444–454 [588–600]. 83. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 175; Ofer and Gal, Baroque Science, 8. 84. Essais, II.12, 422 [562], 453–454 [600]: “Or, notre estat accommodant les choses à soy, et les transformant selon soy, nous ne sçavons plus quelles sont les choses en verité: car rien ne vient à nous que falsifié et alteré par nos sens.” 85. Hartle, “Montaigne’s Turn to Modern Philosophy,” 259. 86. Descartes, First Meditation, in Œuvres, VII, 19/IX, 14–15; see also Montaigne, Essais, II.12, 451 [596]. 87. Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France, 61; Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 200–202. 88. Descartes, Œuvres, VII, 18–19/IX, 14. 89. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, I.68–70, IV.197–198, Œuvres, VII, 33–35, 320–323/ IX-2, 56–58, 315–317. 90. Discourse, IV, in Œuvres, VI, 33: “ce Moi, c’est-à-dire l’Âme par laquelle je suis ce que je suis.” The translation quoted is from Descartes, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, trans. Ian Maclean, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 91. Descartes, Sixth Meditation, in Œuvres, IX, 62. The Latin refers simply to “me” (Œuvres, VII, 78). 92. Descartes, Sixth Meditation, in Œuvres, VII, 81; see also AT IX, 65 for the equivalent French version. 93. Descartes to Elisabeth, June 28, 1643, Œuvres, III, 690–692. 94. Pascal, Pensées, L 135, 821/S 167, 661. 95. Descartes, De l’homme, I.2, in Œuvres, XI, 120, where he refers to clocks, fountains, and mills; see also Descartes, Discourse, V, in Œuvres, VI, 55–56. 96. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 144, 257. 97. Pascal, Pensées, L 199/S 230; on the silence and infinity of the cosmos see L 201/S 233. 98. Mesnard, “Baroque, science et religion chez Pascal,” 336–337. For an interesting reading of the Pensées in the light of a particular conception of the baroque, see Hall Bjørnstad, Créature sans créateur: pour une anthropologie baroque dans les “Pensées” de Pascal (Québec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2010). 99. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 203–204. 100. Pascal, Pensées, L 688/S 567. 101. Nicolas Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité, preface, in Œuvres, ed. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis and Germain Malbreil, 2 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1979–92), I, 4. 102. The term “disillusionment” is more or less synonymous with desengaño, a key term in Spanish baroque literature. Maravall, however, argues that desengaño in the latter context should be understood as learning not to detach oneself from the world but to manage one’s interests in it more successfully (Culture of the Baroque, 194, 202–203). 103. Malebranche, Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la religion [Conversations on Metaphysics and Religion], 1.5–6, in Œuvres, II, 677–678.

the baroque and philosophy   621 104. Ibid., 677: “C’est dans ce monde-là que nous sommes et que nous vivons, quoique le corps que nous animons vive dans un autre, et se promène dans un autre.” 105. Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité, 3–2.7.3, in Œuvres, I, 349. 106. Ibid., 6–2.3; Œuvres, I, 646–651. 107. Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 246. The chapter on Malebranche contains fuller discussion of the above points with indications of secondary reading. 108. George Berkeley clarifies his differences from Malebranche in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, II, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Desmond M. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 196. 109. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, I, 185; II, 196; III, 227, 228. 110. Ibid., I, 158–170. 111. Ibid., I, 170–177. 112. Ibid., I, 180–181. 113. Ibid., I, 158; III, 229. 114. Ibid., III, 211; the famous formulation “Their esse is percipi” is in George Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, I.3, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Desmond M. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 84. 115. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, I, 183; II, 195; III, 211. 116. Ibid., II, 194; III, 211–212. 117. Ibid., III, 211. 118. Ibid., III, 210; cf. I, 154–155; III, 215. 119. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 192–195. 120. Malebranche, Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la religion, I.6; Œuvres, II, 678 (“un peu interdit”). 121. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, I, 189.

Further Reading Cave, Terence. Pre-Histoires: Textes troublés au seuil de la modernité. Geneva: Droz, 1999. Desan, Philippe, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Friedrich, Carl J. The Age of the Baroque, 1610–1660. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952. Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-Morris. Baroque Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-Morris, eds. Science in the Age of Baroque. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Harbison, Robert. Reflections on Baroque. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Jolley, Nicholas. The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Maravall, José Antonio. La cultura del barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica, 2nd ed. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1980. Maravall, José. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Translated by Terry Cochran, foreword by Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Nadler, Steven. Malebranche on Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Nadler, Steven, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Paganini, Gianni. Skepsis: Le Débat des modernes sur le scepticisme. Paris: Vrin, 2008.

622   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Popkin, Richard  H. The History of Skepticism from Savonarola to Bayle [1960]. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Radner, Daisie. Malebranche: A Study of a Cartesian System. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1978. Rousset, Jean. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et le paon. Paris: José Corti, 1954. Sellier, Philippe. Essais sur l’imaginaire classique: Pascal, Racine, Précieuses et moralistes, Fénelon. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Van Delft, Louis. Littérature et anthropologie: nature humaine et caractère à l’âge Classique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.

chapter 28

The Ba roqu e as A n ti- Cl assicism: Th e Fr ench Case Larry F. Norman

France has a problem with the Baroque. Especially Baroque literature. And the problem goes back to the very origins of the term as a critical category. In 1946 the influential Czech-American comparatist René Wellek published the first comprehensive historical account of “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship.” Imported from the vocabulary of art history in early twentieth-century Germany, the literary application of the term begins in the 1920s and 1930s to spread rapidly across Italy, Spain, England, and America before meeting what, at the end of World War II, still appeared to be an impenetrable barrier at the French border: “France is, I think, the one major country which has almost completely refused to adopt the term.”1 Wellek ascribes this rejection in part to the pejorative connotations in French of the word “Baroque,” stained for centuries by its association with the bizarre and incongruous. But an even more powerful obstacle to the French embrace of the Baroque was the nation’s proud self-identification with the aesthetic category deemed to be its polar opposite: the classical. What could be more opposed to the values of regularity, rational clarity, and elegant simplicity that defined the Classicisme of the reign of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) than the exuberance, intricate convolution, and ornamental splendor associated with the Baroque? According to this long-held view, the period of French predominance in Europe under the Sun King, the nation’s Grand Siècle or golden age, was also a period of French cultural autonomy and exceptionalism. The powerful sway of Cartesian rationalism, the forceful rejection of earlier Italian and Spanish influence, the systematic foundation of royal academies regulating the arts, all made the reign of the Sun King nothing less than a singularity among European cultures. The Baroque need not apply. When, however, Wellek later returned to his account with a “Postscript 1962,” he noted with some astonishment that the most remarkable development of the postwar

624   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque period, one “inconceivable” sixteen years earlier, was the rising French willingness to acknowledge certain Baroque aspects of its national literary history. What happened in the intervening years? The rejection of prewar nationalisms undoubtedly brought to France an increased receptivity to international perspectives and renewed attention to pan-European cultural phenomena. This opening was further galvanized by the dissemination of work on the Baroque by key Central European scholars who had fled Nazism, including Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Arnold Hauser, and René Wellek himself.2 But even as late as 1962, this acceptance appeared grudging. First of all, critical work on the French literary Baroque, when not simply emanating (as it often did) from outside the Francophone world, was largely driven by French scholars working outside France, in particular by the Swiss critics Marcel Raymond and Jean Rousset.3 While writing in French largely for a French audience, the two made no effort to conceal the German origins of their critical perspectives: Raymond gave pride of place to Heinrich Wölfflin’s foundational art-historical categories and Rousset opened his landmark study of French Baroque literature by affirming that his interest in the subject was inspired by a transformative visit to Dresden, reinforced by tours of Austria and Italy.4 The implantation of the Baroque in the French literary landscape, even when sown in native French language, seemed always to be somehow of foreign seed.5 Indeed, one the chief defenders of French Classicism, Henri Peyre, could not help but revert in 1964 to the language of an earlier, less cosmopolitan, and more militaristic period, leveling an attack against the “intrusion” of the foreign category of the Baroque, a campaign he claimed was led by scholars prejudiced by the German resistance—dating back to “Lessing and the Schellings”—to French Classicism and its “cultural hegemony.” The French found “themselves besieged on their borders by these pan-Baroquists” swarming in from across Europe and even America.6 By the 1960s, Peyre’s blanket rejection of a French Baroque certainly no longer predominated, even in the more conservative confines of seventeenth-century literary studies. However, the critical tide had hardly washed away the foundations of French Classicism. Far from it. For, in another manifestation of the French exception, even the most ardent proponents of the French literary Baroque largely delimited its application to the era predating what was long considered the summit of the classical period, that of 1660–1680, the period that produced the great tragedies of Racine, comedies of Molière, and literary criticism of Boileau. In this sense, a newly conceived Baroque age simply replaced—and revised the understanding of—the period previously labeled “pre-classical.” It is in this tightly circumscribed application that one of the first scholars firmly established inside France (indeed in the Sorbonne) to embrace the Baroque, Raymond Lebègue, conceived of the term. The title of his thematic issue of the influential journal XVIIe siècle, which no doubt did much to first naturalize the concept for many French scholars, is telling: “From Baroque to Classicism.”7 The transition here is to be understood as chronological: the Baroque precedes the Classical without impinging upon it. The introduction reassuringly affirms a clearly demarcated periodization for the Baroque: 1580–1650. Even in Geneva, far from the Sorbonne, Raymond and Rousset equally restricted their Baroque periods with terminal dates in the 1660s, long considered the decade of the definitive triumph of the classical style.8 The “Age of Louis XIV,” at least

the baroque as anti-classicism: the french case    625 that of the monarch’s “personal rule” beginning in 1661, remained safe and secure from Baroque “intrusion.” Safe and secure—or even fortified. For by giving French Classicism a critical counterweight worthy of its prestige, an antithesis that dynamized its position in historical dialects, an Other against which to affirm its identity, the Baroque became the frère ennemi that reinvigorated a literary category in danger of losing relevancy. The neologism of “Classicism,” after all, was invented a century and half earlier as the opposing term to another category, Romanticism. That critical conflict, while reanimated in the early twentieth century by writers such as Hulme, Eliot, Valéry, and Gide, was fading. Classicism as a concept depends on binary opposition; the old one had been relegated to literary history; it happily found a vigorous new sparring partner in the Baroque. In France, however, the Baroque/classical dyad assumes an idiosyncratic and highly fraught character. The following pages will explore two of its distinct, yet intertwined, features. The first concerns the historicized conceptions of literature and the arts: their respective paths of evolution and paradigms of periodization. Here the French exception could not be more striking. Whereas Wölfflin inaugurated the scholarly examination of the Baroque by defining it as the successor to the Classicism of the earlier Renaissance, the French reversed the normal sequence and seem alone in resolutely conceiving of the Baroque as the predecessor of the classical. This inversion of evolutionary order disrupts a number of categories of art and literary history, including those of Classicism, Romanticism, and modernity. The second aspect concerns the ideological and political character attributed to the Baroque. The struggle over assigning an aesthetic label for French absolutism—classical or Baroque?—exposes the widely varying aristocratic, monarchical, and bourgeois underpinnings of these categories. The comparative national political structures in play also reveal the fissures splintering any unified conception of an “international style,” or simply a pan-European one. Both aspects of the problem invite us to broader reflections on the past history and present import of the Baroque. The debates erupting during the global tumult of the mid-twentieth century, when scholars first attempted a critical examination of the concept’s genesis and evolution, raise ongoing questions concerning the practice of cultural and aesthetic history, and particularly of its comparative and transnational aspirations.

Historical Sequences, from Renaissance to Modernity “It is the essence of classicism to come after.” Paul Valéry coined this phrase in 1924 to describe Charles Baudelaire’s mid-nineteenth-century revolt against the supposedly artless outpourings of the preceding Romantic generation.9 Valéry’s formula is not, however, limited in scope to this single historical moment. He also illustrates the essential posteriority or afterness of Classicism by explicitly identifying Baudelaire’s modern classical tendencies with the early modern ones of the Age of Louis XIV. Baudelaire’s

626   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque literary precursors two centuries earlier, Racine and Boileau, also reacted against the undisciplined writers of the epoch preceding their own. Valéry does not explicitly use the word “Baroque” here to describe what he sees as the disorder and lack of rational clarity that for him defines the preexisting state of artistic affairs that “classical” discipline will rectify. But the Baroque-Romantic tandem is in place for future authors, who will not hesitate to elucidate the implied parallel. Valéry’s dictum that “every classicism supposes an anterior romanticism” will soon be redeployed with the Baroque as the targeted predecessor. Mid-twentieth-century critics were equally inspired by another classicizing modernist of the interwar years, André Gide, whose outlook in this regard accords perfectly with Valéry’s: “The classical work reveals the triumph of order and measure over an interior Romanticism.” Gide’s own famously lapidary formula will also be frequently retooled to theorize the Baroque: the classical, he affirms, is a “tamed Romanticism” (romantisme dompté), one that has been trained and contained by rigorous artistry.10 In a seminal study of Racine published in 1931, Leo Spitzer was no doubt the first to apply Gide’s “tamed Romanticism” to Classicism as a tamed Baroque; André Chastel followed in 1944; and a critical commonplace was firmly established in French scholarship.11 It must be admitted that the language employed by Valéry and Gide sometimes suggests a timeless duality at the heart of all creative processes: a conflict between an instinctual expressive impulse and intellectualized self-restraint. The two currents often co-exist, with the prevailing flow shifting from age to age, and with individual artists leaning one way or another. This fundamentally anti-historicized reading of the classical and its adversary (Romantic or Baroque), indifferent to periodization, is representative of a broader, though still minority, trend of the time. Most famously, the Catalan critic Eugenio d’Ors conceived of the Baroque as a constantly recurrent force in art and culture, what he called an eon.12 In his view, the Romantic, like the Gothic, was simply a variant of an eternally unfolding anticlassical tendency, a mere facet of the everlasting Baroque, which prized instinct over intellect, the organic over the mechanical, freedom over authority. However tempted Valéry and Gide may have been by such abstractly eternalized concepts, they were nevertheless very aware of the power of historical contexts. It is telling in this regard that Valéry chose to elaborate a theory of Classicism in an analysis of Baudelaire, one of the great theoreticians of the idea of the modern and spiritual father of modernist poetry.13 Both Valéry and Gide sought to broaden and relax the concept of the “classical,” freeing it from the rigid rules of neo-Aristotelian theory, such as the three unities, no longer deemed relevant in modern life. Nevertheless, they refer consistently to seventeenth-century French classical authors such as Racine and Boileau as models for the fundamental values they espouse, those of restraint over exuberance and method over disorder. Above all, they promote an ideal of rigorous intellect, which Valéry refers to as the “scientific” spirit of modern times. The paradigm here is perfectly congruous with what was by then a well-established literary historical model celebrating the seventeenth-century triumph of “classical” poetic norms based upon reason, precision, and order. This model, with the key role it

the baroque as anti-classicism: the french case    627 assigned to the new Cartesian spirit, likewise emphasized the rising empire of rigorous modern method and conceptual clarity. The previous state of affairs that this new ­rationalist spirit triumphed over, however, lacked a descriptive term in French critical vocabulary other than the tautological designation of the “pre-classical.” The importation of the “Baroque” would fill that void in critical nomenclature. It would do so, however, at the cost of what we have seen to be a fundamental inversion of historical paradigms. Valéry’s declaration that Classicism necessarily succeeds rather than precedes its antithesis is no simple localized observation: it expresses a long- established law of French critical thought. Hence the necessity of reversing the Wölfflinian sequence of a Renaissance Classicism followed by a Baroque age extending through the seventeenth century.14 This chronological inversion reveals something of the troubled place of the Renaissance itself in French literary history. While in Italy the canonicity of a Renaissance classical ideal exemplified by Raphael was established as early as the ­sixteenth century (Vasari) and reinforced in the next (Bellori), French literary history was in contrast constructed by elevating the Age of Louis XIV above its Renaissance past. This development dates from the late seventeenth century itself, which largely dismissed Renaissance forerunners such as Ronsard while congratulating itself on the literature of its own time. It was reinforced by the Enlightenment celebration—typified by Voltaire’s The Age of Louis XIV (Le Siècle de Louis XIV)—of the clarity and elegance of that period’s great writers. The Romantics later renewed interest in French Renaissance poetry, but this revisionism was fiercely resisted by the orthodox classical tendency of critics such as Désiré Nisard, leading a potent reaction that would profoundly shape later literary historical scholarship.15 Unlike Spain (Cervantes) and England (Shakespeare), France thus developed a literary history that relatively undervalued the sixteenth century. In short, its Classicism was not to be sought in the Renaissance; it was firmly implanted in the later seventeenth century. But the Renaissance, while undercut by the French reversal of the normal Classical/ Baroque sequence, still plays here a significant, if somewhat subterranean, role.16 Even if the writers of the French classical period generally refused to express a debt to their Renaissance forebears, twentieth-century scholarship will later acknowledge it. After all, the Baroque is conceived of in France, as elsewhere, as distinct from and following a period called the Renaissance, even if the latter’s role is diminished. In this construction, the Baroque supersedes the still incipient (or proto-) Classicism of the French Renaissance, which fails to attain—but nevertheless lays a first foundation for—the heights of the seventeenth-century classical period. The implications of this sequencing for intellectual and cultural history are powerful. Renaissance Classicism, exemplified by Ronsard, is here (as elsewhere) seen to be characterized by a Humanistic idealization of the poetry and philosophy of pagan Antiquity. The following Baroque age, in contrast, is considered to be infused with the Christian revival of the Counter-Reformation, which radically destabilizes this humanistic ideal. The spirit of the Baroque does not of course fully eradicate the secularizing Renaissance adherence to Greco-Roman ideals, but it does at a minimum place rational humanism in constant conflict with the religious enthusiasm

628   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque of the times, creating a disconcerting tension that fuels the instability, irregularity, and dynamism of Baroque art forms. With this paradigm in mind, some critics argued for the conservative, indeed reactionary, nature of a Counter-Reformation Baroque. It follows that the new postBaroque Classicism of the later seventeenth century fully obeys the immutable law of coming after and instituting a modernizing reign of reason and order. So it is that post-Baroque Classicism, despite its debt to Greco-Roman ideals as transmitted through the Renaissance, is construed not as the restoration of a previous sixteenthcentury worldview but instead as an essentially progressive movement. This perceived modernity can be attributed to two factors already mentioned but that bear further examination. The first is a deflated conception of the French Renaissance, and the second the role assigned to the proto-Enlightenment “new philosophy” known in shorthand as Cartesianism. There is no doubt that the French classical period upheld elements of an earlier Humanist ideal in its resistance to the Counter-Reformation Baroque. In his canonical Art poétique of 1676, for example, Boileau railed against the ambiguous mixing of Christian and pagan elements that characterized Baroque works. The great poetic genres were instead, he insisted, to adhere henceforth to an entirely Greco-Roman repertory. The disconcerting intermingling of pagan myth with Christian traditions was proscribed: poetry must avoid what we would call a Baroque destabilization of the categories of fact and fiction and the anachronistic blurring of ancient and modern. Yet in his call to mold French poetry around Greco-Roman ideals, Boileau did not look backward. He adamantly rejected any debt to earlier Renaissance attempts at emulating Antiquity. He argued that in their artless imitation of ancient literature, sixteenthcentury poets lacked elegance and decorum, polluting French with pedantic neologisms and awkwardly derivative syntax. Ronsard, he complained, wrote French in Latin and Greek.17 This critique of an incomplete, even failed, first Renaissance attempt at a Classical style retained a powerful hold over the mid-twentieth-century conceptualization of the French Baroque. Even scholars specializing in Renaissance studies minimized the influence of their own period when analyzing the Baroque/Classicism sequence. The great scholar of Italian Renaissance art, André Chastel, for example, asserts that in the French case the Renaissance is only a “prelude to a classical art.”18 And when Marcel Raymond claims that France was alone among modern European countries to achieve a “grand art classique,” he is referring to what he calls “post-Baroque” Classicism, not the preBaroque (Renaissance) one ordained by the “normal” sequence.19 The arguments in favor of the essential modernity of post-Baroque Classicism were not, however, based solely on this discounting of the Renaissance past. There was also a positive affirmation of a revolutionary intellectual development breaking both with earlier humanism and with Baroque spirituality: Cartesian rationalism, conceived as the essence of the “French classical spirit” since its first appearance as critical category.20 The pioneering scholars of the French Baroque in the 1950s generally accepted with few reservations this reading of the Cartesian modernism of French Classicism. Its victory

the baroque as anti-classicism: the french case    629 over the Baroque, even when viewed with regret or suspicion, is defined as the triumph of order over instability, of rigorous clarity over free metaphorical play, and of reason over imagination.21 The sequential reading of a rationalist and secularizing Classicism conquering an exuberant and spiritualized Baroque is furthermore destined to be repeated in the future. It is notably applied to the following century, when the next avatar of the Baroque, the Rococo, will be supplanted by an Enlightenment return of the “grand” neoclassical style, culminating in the French Revolution.22 It is with such a view in mind that Arnold Hauser could boldly affirm in 1951 that “both classicism and rationalism were in keeping with the progressive trend of development” of modern Europe (187).23 We will later turn to the political dimensions of this contrastive reading of modernizing Classicism and retrograde Baroque. As concerns intellectual and aesthetic history, however, let us stop to consider the enticing questions raised by this mid-twentieth-century chronological construct. Might the postwar fascination with the Baroque—viewed as a temporary hiatus or regression within a process of secularization and rationalization from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and revolution—be perceived as an early indication of the incipient postmodern challenge to the victorious grand narratives of Western progress? Or, in the more limited confines of art and cultural history, viewed as foreshadowing an equally postmodern rejection of the austere modernism exemplified by Valéry and Gide—or turning to other arts, for example, by Bauhaus?

Baroque and Classical: Conflict, Coexistence, or Integration? Whatever responses such questions may solicit, there is no doubt that postwar criticism was captivated by the supposed resistance of the Baroque to classicizing modernity. This fascination with the winding turns of historical development led to intriguing investigations into the widely fluctuating evolutions not only of different national cultures but also of different art forms. The transnational and anachronistic case of Poussin was a frequent topic of interrogation: how was one to reconcile the pre-1660 flourishing— largely in Italy no less—of the unsurpassed master of French classical rigor and clarity? In the art of painting, had French Classicism paradoxically peaked outside of France before the classical age even began? And what of Versailles, often considered the grandest of all Baroque palaces, even though largely designed and constructed after the 1660 inauguration of the classical age?24 A signal case of such comparative historicization of the arts is found in a 1951 examination of seventeenth-century visual representations of dramatic literature. Interesting enough, the French literary scholar Raymond Picard first presented this analysis in English in London, far from the confines of the Sorbonne.25 The subject is the troubling tension between, on the one hand, the violent and swirling frontispiece engravings

630   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque that the artist François Chauveau’s created for Racine’s tragedies, and, on the other, the supposedly impeccable decorum and restraint of the dramatic works they illustrate. Unsurprisingly, Picard labels the first Baroque and the second classical. But there is a problem here. According to the normal French chronology, by the time of their publication in the 1670s Chauveau’s Baroque excesses should have been entirely suppressed by classical norms. And yet the rigorously disciplined Racine seems not to have been at all scandalized by the discordant presence of these gruesome and tortuous images in his published works. How, Picard asks, can we explain the startling “co-existence of these two contradictory aesthetics?”26 In response, he never places in doubt the fundamental opposition of Baroque extravagance and classical restraint. He does, however, offer a nuanced reading of their distinct but intertwining trajectories. The aesthetics of Chauveau and Racine remain for him dichotomous, yet they overlap in time. Picard does not deny that the 1660s saw an upsurge of classical tastes. He nevertheless ­recognizes that a “belated Baroque” continues to flourish with astonishing vigor through the end of the century. Perhaps even to dominate, given the period’s fascination with the relatively freewheeling form of the Opera. Indeed, the true oddity in the Age of Louis XIV, Picard muses, might be Racine’s classical purity, not Chauveau’s Baroque exuberance. The undeniable temporal co-existence of the Baroque and classical, however, endangers critical clarity regarding the two aesthetic categories. This overlap represents for Picard a conceptual blurring that requires remedy. Indeed, in order to ­maintain the integrity of the classical ideal, fundamentally antithetical to Baroque tendencies, he suggests simply sacrificing, in the name of rigorous exactitude, the imprecise application of these aesthetic categories to cultural periodization. Calling the two decades of 1660–1680 the “Classical Age” only leads to muddled attempts at explaining away the continuing survival of Baroque forms. In order to maintain a strict segregation of stylistic concepts, Picard argues that criticism forego such vast historical generalizations. One finds throughout French criticism of the 1950s similarly nuanced views of the surviving strands of the Baroque in the French classical period. Picard’s attitude, however, seems to encapsulate the general approach to the question. Scholars acknowledge the uneasy co-habitation after 1660 of a predominant classical tendency accompanied by a Baroque undercurrent. Yet they concede this chronological overlap without fundamentally questioning the underlying conceptual dichotomy. At best, the opposition between the two is seen as an intimate one, a “fraternal” conflict—but a conflict all the same.27 Even when the struggle is perceived as unfolding within a single author’s career, as in Philip Butler’s study of Racine, the binary seems only reinforced.28 This reluctance to integrate Classicism and the Baroque does not, however, extend outside the boundaries of French (or Swiss) scholarship. It is once again Germantrained scholars who first asserted the existence of a single unified “French classical Baroque.” The subtitle of Helmut Hatzfeld’s seminal 1935 article on seventeenth-century French literature pulls no punches: “The Classical as Baroque.”29 This integrative

the baroque as anti-classicism: the french case    631 f­ ormula is a world away from Lebègue’s 1953 contradistinctive and sequential phrasing of “From Baroque to Classicism.” An even earlier, and ultimately more influential, fusing of the two categories appeared in Leo Spitzer’s 1931 landmark study of Racine. His assessment is striking: “To put it plainly for once: French classicism is not classical in the German sense, it is baroque.”30 It is in this context that he elucidates his variation of Gide’s earlier evoked dictum: “French baroque is a measured, classical-like baroque, ‘un romantisme dompté’ as Gide says.”31 Note that this classicizing discipline does not, as in Gide’s original construction, vanquish and incorporate what it “tames.” Spitzer’s Classicism does not absorb the Baroque. The Baroque absorbs it. Rather than a Baroquelike Classicism, we have a “classical-like Baroque.” Spitzer’s observation is not limited to the description of one author’s style. Qualifying Racine, the great master of Classicism, as Baroque proves integral Spitzer’s larger program of assimilating French classicizing tendencies into a broadly trans-European, rather than strictly national, tradition—one that emphasizes a common Greco-Roman literary stylistic repertory refashioned first by Petrarchism and then by further Baroque elaborations. These latter tendencies, even in their most extravagant “baroque-précieux” manifestations, are for Spitzer deeply indebted to ancient models as recycled by the Renaissance. In this sense, Racine’s “delicate, elegant loosenings of classical shapes” represents a typical (if particularly “measured”) exercise in the Baroque reworking of Humanist poetic forms.32 According to this view, there is simply no French exception regarding Classicism. It is not a French “national style,” Arnold Hauser contends, but part of a European phenomena of the “classicistic baroque”: “Wherever baroque endeavors are found, we also discover a more or less developed classicism.”33 Hauser’s argument here, like Spitzer’s, fundamentally internationalizes the concept of seventeenth-century Classicism, no ­longer seen as the private domain of the French.34 That old proprietary claim was not simply a dusty cliché of university literary history but one that continued to be maintained even by an anti-nationalist modern writer like Gide himself, who could affirm that “Classicism appears to me such a French invention that I would almost consider as synonyms these two words: classical and French.”35 Such claims fell on deaf ears not only in Germany and Central Europe, but also in England and America. In a 1950 study provocatively titled The Freedom of French Classicism, the American critic E. B. O. Borgerhoff uncovered the surprisingly non-dogmatic and “liberal” nature of the literature of the Age of Louis XIV. Affirming the eclectic spirit of the time, Borgerhoff refuses to “distinguish between Classic and Baroque.” The period must instead be understood as “transcending but not excluding those antagonistic orders of reason and nature, of form and vitality, of the intellect and the senses.”36 Borgerhoff ’s study reveals something of a longer tradition of the anti-doctrinaire English-language reception of classical French authors, one that dates back to the seventeenth century itself. After all, the very same Boileau that France treated as a stern preceptor of rationalist doctrine was celebrated in England by the licentious Lord Rochester as a master of daring satirical verve, and by Dryden as the champion not of desiccated reason but instead of the exalted sublime.37

632   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Ideologies of the Classical/ Baroque Divide Such elastic and cosmopolitan views of French Classicism should not, however, blind us to certain national specificities that were a subject of debate in the early modern period itself. Thus Dryden, despite his manifest appreciation of certain French writers, disparagingly contrasts that nation’s “servile” obedience to rules with the freedom of English writers, distinguished by their “more masculine fancy and greater spirit.”38 The opposition between English aesthetic liberty and courtly French conformism will later be imported to France by writers such as Voltaire, who will, with some envy, compare the “poetic genius of the English” to a thickly branching “tree planted by nature” in juxtaposition to the neatly trimmed plants of a French formal garden.39 It is no accident that the garden cited by Voltaire, Marly, exemplifies the supremely ordered landscape design that defined the Sun King’s royal palaces. Here as elsewhere, the backdrop for the discussion of rule-bound Classicism is French absolutism. The association of the two is inescapable, whether it be accepted or contested—and it will be both. “The Latin classic is Roman or Latin power; the French classic is monarchical power.”40 Roland Barthes’s formula is indicative of a powerful current in mid-twentiethcentury criticism bent on exposing the repressive underpinnings of classical ideals. Eugenio d’Ors perhaps most exhaustively—and unmercifully—made this case. He tells the story of the regulatory power of Western Classicism in a continual struggle with the primal energy of the Baroque. It begins with the evolution from the pantheism and dynamism represented by the branching tree to its linear containment in the architectural form of the Greco-Roman column, emblematic of repressive rationalism and statism. Ever manifesting this “eternal Roman ideal,” all forms of Classicism are “by definition, normalist, authoritarian.” In contrast, “all Baroquisms are vitalist, libertine.” For d’Ors, French Classicism was simply a supremely potent incarnation of this timeless imperial tendency. Its dominion was inextricably both political and aesthetic: under Louis XIV “there is one tyranny, that of the State, and another tyranny, that of ‘good taste.’ ” Extending from a hegemonic France, all Europe fell under its sway, suppressing Baroque expressions until an eighteenth-century pre-Romanticism re-awakened its life force.41 This vision of an absolutist Classicism is powerfully reaffirmed by E. R. Curtius in one of the foundational texts of post-war comparative literary studies: Only France has a classical literary system in the full sense. The will to systematic regulation is in fact the earmark of the French seventeenth century. . . . This system could not have prevailed if it had not corresponded to the tendencies of the French mind, which at precisely this juncture, under Louis XIV, had attained to a powerful self-expression supported by the nation’s hegemony over Europe.42

Curtius traces a monarchical conception of the French classical age from the first great history of the period, Voltaire’s 1751 Age of Louis XIV. Voltaire enumerates four

the baroque as anti-classicism: the french case    633 great periods of literary and artistic flourishing: in chronological order, Greece, Rome, the Italian Renaissance, and seventeenth-century France. The philosophe identifies each, Curtius bemoans, with a single leader: Alexander, Augustus, and Leo X, Louis XIV.43 This strict correlation of autocratic rule and classical perfection, Curtius argues, will be fatal for future literary history, where the “petrification of the classical system in France” will be reinforced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by an insalubrious fusion with authoritarian anti-Republican and nationalist ideologies.44 For a happy contrast to this authoritarian Classicism, Curtius casts his gaze across the Pyrenees. “Spain neither refers to its period of literary florescence as ‘Classicism’ nor connects it with the name of a monarch; instead it calls it ‘the golden age.’ ”45 Refusing to identify literary perfection with monarchical power, the title of el siglo de oro instead harkens back to a Greek and Roman trope of the “golden age” that is of common European usage. With their eclectic and exuberant mixture of styles, genres, and traditions (including the non-European ones of North Africa and the Americas), authors from Cervantes to Calderón are portrayed by Curtius as boisterously anti-classical. Curtius nevertheless does not rush into the arms of the concept of the “Baroque.” He applies the term to the Spanish Golden Age, but only in square quotes. Fundamentally concerned as Curtius is with the continuing influence in the early modern period of Latin and medieval traditions, he prefers the label of “Mannerist” to describe the recurrent anticlassical trends in European literature, thus avoiding what he perceives as the too tightly circumscribed “historical associations” of the term “Baroque.”46 Curtius’ analysis fails to account for the absolutist tendencies of the Spanish Baroque (or Mannerist) age, it can be argued. And so it was argued by pioneering scholars of the French Baroque in the 1950s, such as Victor Tapié, Philip Butler, and Václav Černý. Was not the model for French absolutism precisely the Spanish centralization of power operated by the Habsburg monarchy?47 And was not Baroque art the ultimate propaganda tool employed not only by Catholic royal courts but also by the Counter-Reformation Church they so enthusiastically promoted? According to this view, it is the Baroque, rather than the classical, whose magnificence celebrates the “hierarchical society” of “Catholicism and Monarchy.”48 The non-rational forces of religious zeal and royal glory can thus be viewed as expressions of the “fideism or superstition, conformism or conservatism,” deeply rooted in the feudal past, which “is the heart of Baroque thought and also the basis of Baroque society.”49 In short, the Baroque here incarnates “what is not modern; it is always a reaction and reactionary.”50 The earlier evoked conception of an intellectually conservative Baroque takes on here a fundamentally political and social character. The two trends are intertwined: the Cartesianism perceived as fueling the rise of Classicism is now assigned to an emerging bourgeoisie profoundly resistant to the fading feudal and ecclesiastic order that embraces, for its own self-aggrandizement, Baroque splendor. A business-like French middle class, grounded in the reasoned calculation of fact, thus rejected “Spanish exaltation” or “Italian exuberance.”51 The bourgeoisie constitute nothing than less a powerful “enemy of the Baroque.”52 Following this logic—and in direct opposition to the view of a d’Ors or a Curtius— anti-Baroque Classicism is at heart anti-monarchical.53 Yet how might one explain its

634   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque flourishing under the reign of the Sun King? Here again a certain French exception saves the day. The first two decades of Louis XIV’s personal rule (1661–1680), coinciding with the perceived summit of French classical culture, are presented as a revolutionary period defined by the modernization and rationalization of the national state and its regulation of the arts. Under the influence of a powerful minister hailing from outside the nobility, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the monarchy is embourgeoisé. The restructuring of the regime “shake the two pillars of the Baroque order”: the glory of feudal aristocracy and the fervor of the Counter-Reformation.54 While Baroque exaltation perfectly served other royal courts, the most powerful of all European monarchies thus develops its own distinctly lucid and chastened style. Scholars outside France, however, even when they concurred with key elements of this grand historical narrative, generally saw little need to categorically oppose French Classicism to the Baroque. Hauser, for example, gave ample attention to the rising ­rationalist, bourgeois character of French absolutism, but simply attributed the resulting “classicistic” tendencies to a process of monarchical state centralization in which “Baroque culture becomes more and more an authoritarian court culture.”55 This integration of French Classicism into a pan-European “Baroque court culture” receives its most compelling examination in Erich Auerbach’s 1946 masterwork, Mimesis. His approach is radical.56 Rather than attempt, as other critics did, to somehow reconcile the perceived contradiction between Baroque exaltation and the disciplined purification of literary forms associated with Classicism, Auerbach boldly chooses to dismantle the very foundations of such a contradiction. Indeed, he claims that that this process of literary purification was, far from opposed to Baroque exaltation, instead absolutely integral to it. How so? Taking Racinian tragedy as his example, Auerbach follows traditional literary history in defining French classical style by its strict separation of genres (the elimination of all comic aspects from tragedy) and segregation of poetic registers (the maintenance of a “high” style purged of any contamination from common language). The result is a rarified and “sublime” form that isolates the tragic subject from any degrading connection to everyday life and speech. The chastening of literary form thus serves less to muffle tragic language than to intensify its elevated passions. In short, classical rigor does not constrain Baroque exaltation, it instead enhances it. Auerbach’s analysis of this aesthetic effect is founded in large part on a political and sociological analysis of the later French seventeenth century. The separation of literary styles correlates to a separation of social classes; the purified model of artistic form responds to the rarified ideal of a privileged elite existence. Through the special character of the [elite] minority to which classical French literature was addressed, and particularly through its social ideal, we can understand . . . the fashion of Baroque and exalted forms and also their being combined with rational categories of taste. It is, further, exclusively on the basis of the taste of the elite . . . that it is possible to explain the radical separation of the tragic from the realistic, of which the Baroque forms with their tendency to exalt the tragic personage are only a particularly striking symptom.57

the baroque as anti-classicism: the french case    635 The social elite in question, Auerbach argues, takes its values from a courtly ideal of aristocratic merit inherited from medieval and Renaissance chivalric traditions. These values, however, were modified (and indeed intensified) by the development of a modern absolutist regime that largely deprived the nobility of its practical exercise of political power, while maintaining its purely social distinction and economic privileges. Freed from the mundane concerns of governance, this elite could devote itself entirely to the idealization of its inner life, and in particular to the exaltation of its passions. Given this idealized abstraction of social class, elite values were furthermore not restricted to the aristocracy and served as a model for emulation by the upper bourgeoisie, likewise freed by its wealth from day-to-day business concerns. The resulting celebration of the passions, however, was hardly one of raw and uninhibited expression of the private. It instead operated in the highly codified realm of courtly social exchange. Sublime elevation was conferred by the gaze of one’s peers. Exaltation was never solitary; it depended on the admiration of others. Thus, what Auerbach calls the “Baroque absolutism” of Louis XIV creates a form of social self-fashioning and rigorous self-control that paradoxically promotes a kind of bedazzling sublimity. Auerbach elicits “an inner and exterior dignity . . . , a perfect self-discipline . . . in every word and gesture” as qualities that had hardly ever been developed to such perfection as in the second half of the seventeenth century in the French court; and it is these qualities which manifested themselves in forms of style and life which in the late Baroque once again appeared in all their luster, at the same time attaining an elegance and warmth they had not possessed before. Such, then is the society, such are the late Baroque forms filled with a new elegance.58

When highlighting passages of amorous intensity in Racine where a “Baroque tendency toward exaltation appears to meet romanticism,” Auerbach seems to go so far as to imagine the French playwright partaking in something like d’Ors eternally recurring anti-classicist force.59 Auerbach’s reading is, however, primarily historicizing. It aims to explain how modern self-disciplined forms, developing in tandem with a centralizing absolutist regime, represent evolutionary products of the Baroque exaltation of early modern princely courts.

Conclusion: a Cosmopolitan Baroque? In keeping with his mission of creating a comprehensive narrative of “Western literature,” Auerbach thus succeeds in reintegrating hallmark aspects of French classicism into a transnational Baroque. But it is an uneasy integration. For seventeenth-century French literature’s most distinctively classicizing elements, such as the strict separation of genres and styles, will exercise a toxic influence on the future evolution of Auerbach’s

636   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque central subject, the literary representation of reality. “We all know how great was the power of the classical French style throughout all Europe. It was only much later and under completely changed conditions that tragic seriousness and everyday reality could meet again.”60 Even while attempting to incorporate it within the Baroque, Auerbach cannot thus but discern in French Classicism a barrier to the transnational evolution of literature. It is a point hammered home by Curtius: “France has gained a great deal from her Classicism but she has paid a high price for it: that of being tied to forms of consciousness which have become too narrow for the European spirit.” An internationalist specializing (as a trained romanist) in foreign literature and writing during the horrors of fascism and war, Curtius terminated his work in the postwar environment of hope for a future European community. It is within this context that one must understand how a liberal proponent of “facilitating and accelerating the international exchange of literary products” would decry French exceptionalism as a threat to “literary cosmopolitanism.” The judgment is severe: “France’s tie to the Classicism of the seventeenth century has proved to be a tenaciously maintained attitude of opposition to Europeanism.”61 After World War II, it could thus appear that early modern studies in France could best promote “Europeanism” by embracing the Baroque. It certainly seemed like a daring challenge to French chauvinism. During the war, for example, Raymond Lebègue observed the intrinsically xenophobic character of the continuing resistance to the Baroque: cultivated French tourists, for example, would inevitably associate the term with the convoluted Italian churches from which they disdainfully “turned away their eyes.”62 It is precisely this turn of “the gaze to foreign literature and art” that pioneering critics considered essential to appreciating the “cosmopolitan movement” of the Baroque.63 This does not require rejecting all French “classical” specificities. But such idiosyncrasies can only be fully understood, it was argued, in relation to an international movement named the Baroque. As Rousset remarks: Seventeenth-century France, even if it played by its own rules, cannot be disassociated from a cosmopolitan culture and international art of predominantly Italian character. . . . It is indeed one of the virtues of the new notion [of the Baroque] that it forces us to develop a clear understanding of this European context and to turn more often to comparative methods.64

It is an eloquent appeal. But in this salutary search for a capaciously cosmopolitan critical category, might not scholars have turned with equal success to the notion of the “classical”? As an aesthetic category, it too was invented by German (in this case earlynineteenth century Romantic) critics; its earlier, more casual use furthermore stretches back to Latin antiquity; and its linguistic variants developed organically across a wide range of European languages (clásico, classique, klassisch, etc.).65 Furthermore, by the mid-twentieth century the term “classical” was employed, just like the “Baroque,” well beyond Europe, notably for East Asian and Mesoamerican cultural history.

the baroque as anti-classicism: the french case    637 Why then did mid-twentieth century French scholars not more frequently choose to follow what we have seen to be Francastel’s call to investigate an early modern “classicisme international”? The answer no doubt lies in the complicated ideological implications of the “classical.” There is no doubt that, since its inception as a term of evaluation in Late Antiquity, it has denoted a certain exclusionary hierarchy: it originally referred to membership in the highest class (classicus). Classicism’s association with Roman imperialism (so central to d’Ors pro-Baroquist stance) did not help. Nevertheless, the political resonance of the term is highly multivalent. The general association of classical aesthetics with ancient republicanism, for example, dates back at least to the Renaissance, and its more specific identification with Athenian democracy was crystalized by Winckelmann and promoted by later Enlightenment and Revolutionary neoclassicisms. The “classical” has thus served all ideologies, from authoritarian to emancipatory. Is not then the concept of the Baroque, so frequently paired with early modern monarchism and the Counter-Reformation (not to mention European colonialism), as politically fraught as Classicism? In the abstract, certainly. But in the particular context of postwar Europe, two key factors favored an anti-authoritarian conception of its rival, the Baroque. First, the most recent systematic political exploitations of Classicism had been noxious: the Roman brand favored by Italian Fascism, and the Greek one deployed by Nazism. It would take some time for the reputation of the classical to recover. The second aspect is more particularly French. The “petrification” of literary history decried by Curtius had not only repellently hardened the classical; it had, despite the best efforts of a Gide, weaponized it as a “French national spirit” against European neighbors. Furthermore, given an educational system that continued to inculcate the values of order and rationalism that Classicism supposedly incarnated, France could not easily embrace what Borgerhoff called its fundamentally liberal nature, the “freedom” at its creative heart. Hence the utility of the Baroque as an emancipatory and cosmopolitan concept. Given its dazzling manifestations across the globe, it is an exhilarating role that the Baroque can continue to play today, and in the future—though undoubtedly in a less antagonistic relationship to its frère ennemi of the classical.

Notes 1. “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship” in René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 83. A first version of the article appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5.2 (1946): 77–109. Wellek was hardly alone in highlighting the French exception. In a similarly comparative historiographical survey of Baroque criticism composed in 1948, Václav Černý ranges from Eastern Europe to Spain and England, before affirming the necessity of entirely omitting France, as this nation offers nothing but a history of “resistance and reluctance” concerning the Baroque. How, Černý asks, can you write about something that does not yet exist? “Les origines européennes des études baroquistes,” Revue de littérature comparée 24 (1950): 25–45. All translations from the French in the following pages are my own, unless otherwise noted.

638   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 2. On this postwar French interest, see Pierre Charpentrat, Le Mirage baroque (Paris: les Éditions de Minuit, 1967). See also Alain Mérot, Généalogies du baroque (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 83–109; and Jean-Claude Vuillemin, Épistémè baroque: le mot et la chose (Paris: Hermann, 2013) 176–201. 3. Marcel Raymond, Baroque et renaissance poétique (Paris: José Corti, 1955); Jean Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France. Circé et le paon (Paris: José Corti, 1953). Wellek also cites the less influential Swiss critic Gonzague de Reynold, whose work on the Baroque was also published outside France. 4. Raymond also translated (with his wife Claire) Heinrich Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principes fondamentaux de l’histoire de l’art [Paris: Plon, 1952]); Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque, 7. 5. In another early historiographical account, Pierre Kohler likewise observes the foreign or “French from abroad” sources of French Baroque studies. “Le baroque et les lettres françaises,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 1–2 (1951), 3–22, 5. 6. Henri Peyre, Qu’est-ce que le classicisme? Édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Nizet, 1964) 70–72. 7. XVIIe siècle 20 (1953). In an earlier article, Lebègue cites Antoine Adam as one of the rare prewar critics inside France to have employed the term Baroque for its national literature, though Adam’s comments are quite brief (Raymond Lebègue, “De la Renaissance au Classicisme: le théâtre baroque en France,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 2 (1942), 163. See Antoine Adam, Théophile de Viau et la libre pensée en France en 1620 (Paris: Droz, 1935), 145. 8. French literary periodization has largely maintained through today the chronological divide of the mid-seventeenth century, with the first half of the century often labeled “Baroque.” However, the last decades have also produced inside France some powerful critiques that synthesize the periods. See for example Hélène Merlin-Kajman, “Un siècle classico-baroque?,” XVIIe siècle 223 (2004), 163–172. 9. “Situation de Baudelaire” [1924], in Paul Valéry, Œuvres, vol. 1, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1957), 604. 10. “Billets à Angèle” [1921], in André Gide, Essais critiques, ed. Pierre Masson (Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1999), 280–281. 11. Leo Spitzer, “Racine’s Classical Piano” [1928–1931], in Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature, ed. David Bellos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 208; André Chastel,“Sur le baroque français,” in François Léger, La Fin de la Ligue (1589–1593). Trois études sur le seizième siècle (Paris: Les éditions de la Nouvelle France, 1944), 214. Chastel’s essay has been credited with the first application of Gide’s formula to the Baroque; see R. A. Sayce, “The Use of the Term Baroque in French Literary History,” Comparative Literature, 10, no. 3 (1958), 246–253, 253; Peyre more accurately attributes it to Spitzer (Qu’est-ce que le classicisme?, 77). 12. Eugenio d’Ors, Du Baroque (Paris: Gallimard, 1936). 13. See for example Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life [1863], trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon, 1995). 14. Wölfflin himself must have had some idea of the problem presented by the French case. As has been frequently remarked, he almost entirely skirts the case of the great model of French classical painting, Nicolas Poussin. See for example Sayce, “The Use of the Term Baroque,” 252. 15. See for example Claude Faisant, Mort et résurrection de la Pléiade (Paris: H. Champion, 1998) and Christopher Prendergast, The Classic: Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

the baroque as anti-classicism: the french case    639 16. French literary criticism of the 1950s tends to omit in this sequence a sixteenth-century “Mannerist” period, elaborated as historico-aesthetic category in the 1920s by critics such as Walter Friedlaender (Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting [New York: Columbia University Press, 1957]) and seen as intervening between the Renaissance and Baroque. 17. Art poétique in Nicolas Boileau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Françoise Escal (Paris: Gallimard “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1966) 160, 173–174. 18. Chastel, “Sur le baroque,” 212. 19. Raymond, Baroque, 11–12. 20.  See for example Emmanuel Bury, “Comment Nisard a-t-il compris le classicisme?,” in Redécouvrir Nisard, 1806–1888, ed. Mariane Bury (Paris: Klincksieck, 2009), 93–105. 21. Rousset, La littérature, 242–250; Raymond, Baroque, 35. 22. See for example Pierre Francastel, “Baroque et Classicisme: histoire ou typologie des civilisations?” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 14.1 (1959), 142–151, 150. For Enlightenment Classicism, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Norton, 1966); for a more recent analysis of the anti-Rococo Classicism of philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot, see Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 23. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Vol. 2, Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque [1951] (New York: Routledge, 1999), 187. 24. See for example Victor-L. Tapié, Baroque et classicisme [1957], 2nd ed. (Paris: Plon, 1972), 175–286. 25. Picard is often remembered principally for his reactive defense of traditional universitybased literary history against the groundbreaking nouvelle critique exemplified by Roland Barthes. This 1951 study of the Baroque, however, written during Picard’s years in England well before his Sorbonne appointment, reveals a more pioneering facet of his scholarship. 26. Raymond Picard, “Racine and Chauveau,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14, no. 3–4 (1951): 259–274, 267. 27. Rousset, La littérature, 243. Raymond cites Rousset approvingly (Baroque, 43). 28. Philip Butler, Classicisme et baroque dans l’œuvre de Racine (Paris: Nizet, 1959). 29. Helmut Hatzfeld, “Die Französische Klassik in neuer Sicht. Klassik als Barock,” Tijdschrift voor Taal en Letteren 23 (1935): 213–281. See Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque,” 78, 110. 30. Spitzer, “Racine’s Classical Piano,” 107. Spitzer claimed that the expression came from Erich Auerbach, but, according to Wellek, Auerbach “repeatedly denied Spitzer’s report” (“The Concept of Baroque,” 78). I will return below to Auerbach’s view of the French Baroque. 31. “Racine’s Classical Piano,” 108. 32. “Racine’s Classical Piano,” 107–108. 33. Hauser, Social History, 2:176. 34. Pierre Francastel is one of the few French scholars to fully integrate France into what he called pan-European seventeenth-century “Classicisme international” (“Baroque,” 146). 35. Gide, “Billets à Angèle,” 282. 3 6. E. B. O. Borgerhoff, The Freedom of French Classicism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 238–242. 37. See for example Ros Balaster, “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” in Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650–1740, ed. Steven Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University

640   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Press, 1998), 204–224, 216–217; and George McFadden, “Dryden, Boileau and Longinus Imitation,” in Actes du 4e Congrès de l’A.I.C.L., ed. François Jost (The Hague: Mouton, 1966) 2:751–755. 38. “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” in John Dryden, The Major Works, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 107–109. 39. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), 124. 40. “Réflexions sur un manuel,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. E Marty, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1993–1995) 2: 1243). For a stimulating contextualization of Barthes’ stance, see Hélène Merlin-Kajman, La langue est-elle fasciste? (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 63. 41. Ors, Du baroque, 117, 74, 100–101, 41. 42. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [1948], trans. W. R. Trask (New York: Pantheon 1953), 265. 43. While Curtius no doubt correctly finds a monarchical basis to Voltaire’s conception of classical apogees, it should be noted that in the case of Greece Voltaire mitigates, from the opening of the first chapter, this bias by attributing Athens’ greatness not only to King Philip and Alexander, but also to a figure attached to democracy, Pericles. Siècle de Louis XIV [1751], in Voltaire, Œuvres historiques, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1957), 616. 44. European Literature, 270. Curtius cites in particular the right-wing neoclassicism of the Action Française. 45. European Literature, 266. 46. European Literature, 273, 282. 47. See, for example, Butler, Classicisme, 52. 48. Tapié, Baroque, 172. 49. Butler, Classicisme, 53. 50. Václav Černý, “Le Baroque et la littérature française,” Critique 14.109–110 (1956), 517–533, 617–635 (523). Italics in original text. 51. Tapié, Baroque, 168–71. He also develops here a reading of the Jansenist rejection—in ­tandem with that of the bourgeoisie—of Baroque sensuality. 52. Peyre, Qu’est-ce que le classicisme? 75. 53. An argument made by Peyre (above) as well Francastel (“Baroque,” 149). 54. Butler, Classicisme, 85. 55. Hauser, Social History, 175. 56. Still radical enough twenty years later that that the 1968 translation into French included an apologetic footnote for Auerbach’s application of the term “Baroque” to French Classicism, aimed to reassure the bewildered reader: “This word ‘baroque’ may lead to confusion for a French reader. It has nothing here pejorative. For Germans, it is applied to the historic period dating from the Renaissance to the middle of the eighteenth century and its civilization. This period encompasses what French usage names the ‘classical’ era.” Auerbach’s argument regarding the Baroque is of course considerably more subversive with regard to French critical tradition than this note implies. Erich Auerbach, Mimésis. La Représentation de la réalité dans la littérature occidentale, trans. Cornélius Heim (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 378. 57. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 392. 58. Auerbach, Mimesis, 391. 59. The reference here is to Bérénice. Auerbach, Mimesis, 378.

the baroque as anti-classicism: the french case    641 60.  Auerbach, Mimesis, 394. 61. Curtius, European Literature, 266, 271–2. For further analysis, see Larry F. Norman, “Le classicisme, ou l’exception française: Auerbach, Curtius, Spitzer.” Œuvres & Critiques, 41, no. 1 (2016): 29–42. 62. Lebègue, “De la Renaissance au Classicisme,” 162. 63. Rousset, La littérature, 9, 237. 64. Jean Rousset, L’Intérieur et l’extérieur (Paris: José Corti, 1968), 254. 65. See for example, Salvatore Settis, The Future of the Classical, trans. Allan Cameron (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996) and Classicisms, eds. Larry  F.  Norman and Anne Leonard (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Further Reading Auerbach, Erich. “The Faux Dévot.” In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature [1953]. 2nd ed. Trans. W.  R.  Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003: 359–94. Borgerhoff, E. B. O. The Freedom of French Classicism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950. Hauser, Arnold. The Social History of Art: Vol. 2, Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque [1951]. London: Routledge, 1999. Mérot, Alain. Généalogies du baroque. Paris: Gallimard, 2007. Raymond, Marcel. Baroque et renaissance poétique. Paris: José Corti, 1955. Rousset, Jean. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et le paon. Paris: José Corti, 1953. Spitzer, Leo. Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature. Ed. David Bellos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Tapié, Victor-L. The Age of Grandeur: Baroque Art and Architecture [1957]. Trans. A.  Ross Williamson. New York: Grove, 1960. Vuillemin, Jean-Claude. Épistémè baroque: Le mot et la chose. Paris: Hermann, 2013. Wellek, René. “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship.” In Concepts of Criticism. Ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963: 69–127.

chapter 29

Is Ther e a Ba roqu e St y le of Pr e achi ng i n Ea r ly Moder n Fr a nce? Anne Régent-Susini and Laurent Susini

The difficulty of isolating a “baroque” period in France is well known, as well as the lasting attraction of the “(Neo)classical” French seventeenth-century grand narrative (which tends to relegate the “baroque” to the canon’s margins) and the critical isolationism sometimes associated to this national myth.1 Nevertheless, despite frequent reservations, the concept of baroque, often understood as a consistent set of representations and devices more than a distinct period, has cleared its path through French literary research, notably with Marcel Raymond and Jean Rousset’s pioneering works.2 And though it remains often used with a certain caution, it certainly is no longer absent from the metadiscourse regarding French literature. As such, it allows not only for a richer and more diverse outlook on early modern French literature but also for a more “connected” literary history, where the multiple links between French arts and their counterparts in Europe (or even in the world) appear more clearly. What remains surprising, however, is the limited attention preaching has received in  this historiographic and aesthetic reevaluation.3 There are, of course, noteworthy exceptions, such as Peter Bayley’s Selected Sermons of the French Baroque (1600-1650), which, as the author writes in his introduction, focuses on the “development of the form of the sermon before its ‘classical moment.’ ”4 Malraux, who very seldom mentioned baroque, derisively calls it a “pious Jesuit celebration” (“pieuse fête jésuite”5). More recently, Michèle Clément emphasizes that the same épistémè underlies both mystical discourse and baroque poetry.6 Yet while the connections of French preaching to its counterparts in Europe and the Americas are obvious—at least as deep as those of poetry and fiction—and while French pulpit eloquence appears in many respects as one of the most striking examples of a “baroque” art in the middle of Louis XIV’s reign, pulpit eloquence remains left out of most research works about baroque. In his comparative survey about baroque in European literature,7 Warnke only deals with religious baroque

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   643 through devotional and meditative poetry. Undertaking a “history of literary baroque in France,” Wilfried Floeck does not mention a single preacher.8 A decade later, the proceedings of a conference hold in 1991 in Cerisy-la-Salle about “Esthétique baroque et imagination créatrice” do not even mention funeral sermons and the spectacular ceremonies in which they were delivered.9 This chapter will therefore be an opportunity to bring back pulpit oratory into the baroque debate. We certainly do not claim to make a definitive conclusion about it, nor to present an exhaustive corpus of so-called baroque preachers. The point is to broaden the scope of the inquiry and try to enrich the approach by taking into accounts lesser-known types of discourses that are less strictly submitted to traditional literary periodization.

“Baroque” Pulpit Oratory: A Tridentine Offshoot? The religious context in which baroque pulpit eloquence develops is the period following the Council of Trent and the publication of its decreta (1563–1564).10 The main aspects of this “Catholic Reform” are well known: struggle against Protestantism and reassertion of the Catholic identity and unity under the authority of the church, whose primary aim is defined by Paul III as caring for the souls. This cura animarum has two main implications. 1) First, it justifies a specific interest in ceremonies, liturgy, and art in general: postlapsarian weakness of mankind makes adminicula exteriora, supposedly inherited from apostolic times, a necessity.11 In the council’s final session, the Trent Fathers thus promote art as a means of celebrating divine Creation, prompting virtuous imitation and revitalizing the love for God: “by means of the histories of our redemption, portrayed by paintings or other representations, the people are instructed, and confirmed in the habit of remembering, and continually revolving in their minds the articles of faith; as also that great profit is derived from all sacred images . . . because the miracles which God has performed by means of the saints, and their salutary examples, are set before the eyes of the faithful; that they may give God thanks for those things, may order their own lives and manners in imitation of the Saints; and may be excited to adore and love God and to cultivate piety.”12 Art is therefore conceived of as a way of serving faith through the senses and the affects, in an attempt both to counter the Reformation’s attacks against idolatry and to promote a fully “embodied” religion, supposedly most suitable to the nature of fallen man. 2) Second, the importance of a sound instruction for the faithful is valorized, which implies a more complete training for the clergy and a greater importance given to preaching.13 Two major texts implement this higher level of attention given to preaching: Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis (1582) and Instructiones Praedicationis Verbi Dei by Charles Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, whose influence on the

644   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque French Catholic Church at this time was huge, as the numerous panegyrics devoted to his praise illustrate.14 The former text makes preaching the main duty of bishops (praedication principum episcorum munus) and the latter defines the status of delectatio, by promoting a middle term between the ostentatious stylistic virtuosity of Second Sophistic, and the roughness of a style in no way oriented toward seduction.15 This renewal of the art of preaching could take two forms, which were both parts of the Tridentine effort to upgrade Christian eloquence as a major means of transmission of faith, and to celebrate the Christian orator as the imitator of the Christ and the apostles, the main agents of salvation history.16 However, they diverged as to whether Christian orators should appeal to the senses and the imagination and should look for suavitas and delectare. On the one hand, the grave ideal of what Fumaroli calls “Borromean rhetorics,” of which Luis da Granada’s Rhetoricae ecclesiasticae (1576) is the best example, aims at striking a balance between the simplicity of meditative oratio and the ampler movement of predicatio ad populum—just like Augustine himself adapting his Ciceronian practice to the evangelical message.17 Those “Borromean rhetorics,” which were promoted and practiced by French Gallicans such as Bossuet, and other prominent preachers such as the Jesuit Bourdaloue,18 shared their austere simplicity with the “Christian grand style” that had flourished earlier throughout Europe and combined the features of Hellenistic grand style (strictly controlled amplification, harshness of sound, suggestiveness) with various Hebraisms inherited from the Bible (strange and dissonant images or sounds), ellipses and brief clauses (style coupé), abrupt transitions (or absences of transition).19 On the other hand, most Jesuits, unlike Bourdaloue, were not really suspicious of suavitas, and focused less on the orator’s gravity than on the audience’s needs, which included imaginary representations and appeals to the senses. It was not all about seduction, however. The idea was, so to speak, to take human frailty, so unfit for religious truths, backward: since God is greater than words, one has to use innumerable words to meet him. Since God is unspeakable, one has to come closer to him by numerous tropes and language devices.20 Challenging clear dichotomies, in a Christian tradition that can be traced back to the Bible itself, this approach deliberately made use of man’s fallen nature to redeem him. Related to the wit as the “capacity for perceiving likeness beneath seeming unlikeness,”21 the conceits (conceptos) provoked man’s fragile reason, while the arousing of the senses, in this type of preaching just as in Loyola’s spiritual exercises, built on man’s usually sinful passions and affects. Several Renaissance influences underlay this second approach. Humanists such as Manutius revisited Longinus and used his view about the sublime to distance themselves from the scholarly rules of rhetoric and to promote a new “rhetoric of genius,” liberated from the narrow views of imitation.22 Furthermore, the Second Sophistic revival by Florentine and Venetian scholars put an emphasis on the epideictic genre, which primarily aimed at delectatio.23 Between 1555 and 1620, the combination of those influences gave rise to “the style of intensity, which stood out against Renaissance

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   645 Ciceronianism.”24 Combined with the political and religious context of the end of the sixteenth century, those elements quickly settled and developed into the greatest moment of baroque pulpit eloquence in Europe: the seventeenth century. The French context remains however somewhat atypical in this general movement.

Elements of Definition This sensual and imaginative eloquence can only be fully understood if considered in its setting, a global scenography paradigmatically illustrated by so-called extraordinary ceremonies but also exemplified by the ordinary liturgy of high mass—as the Council of Trent explained: Such being the nature of man that, without exterior aids, he cannot be easily elevated to a meditation on divine subjects, on this account our pious mother, the Church, has instituted certain rites; for instance, that some parts of the Mass should be pronounced in a low voice, other parts in an elevated tone. She has also employed ceremonies, such as mystic benedictions, lights, incense, vestments, and other things of this kind, in accordance with apostolic discipline and tradition, not only so that the majesty of such a great sacrifice might appear in becoming splendor, but that the minds of the faithful might, by these visible signs of piety and religion, be excited to a contemplation of those sublime things which lie hid in this sacrifice.25

The “visible signs of piety and religion” have to make that “which lie[s] hid” fully ­ resent to the mind. As Dompnier emphasized, “The presence of the invisible, hic et nunc, p is paradoxically created by the saturation of the seeing; the belief in the real presence is accompanied, or even imposed, by the suggestive show displayed before the eyes.”26 Hence the importance of signs of solemnity, the emphasis on gravity and decency of worship, the emotional and sensual dramatization of the setting (adorned fabrics, gold and silver, exuberant colors, lights, candles, flowers, temporary architecture) and the music (plain chant, great motets, singers, orchestra)—offer the audience a hyperbolical, exuberant, and cumulative experience. Hence, too, a sophisticated rhetoric based on the abovementioned reinvention of a “style of intensity,” impressive, enticing, and full of images. This “baroque” eloquence combined the pomp and gravity of a periodic style with a rich musicality (through figures of speech such as alliterations and assonances, homophony, paronomasias, etc.) and spectacular figures of speech (notably through figures of thought such as ekphrasis, prosopopeia, etc.). In those speeches essentially based on analogical reasoning, images were no longer merely ornaments: they were the sermon’s very framework and allowed for the display of a superficial but impressive erudition.27 Far from the usual static nature of doctrinal speeches, the numerous antithesis, paradoxes, and dialogical devices echoed the decor and created the impression of a never-ending movement of innumerable changes, while suggesting that there was both

646   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque meditative melancholy and ostentatious beauty in those metamorphoses and illusions. Inherited from Graciàn’s Agudezza y arte de ingenio (1648) and Tesauro’s Cannochiale aristotelico (1654), conceptism aimed at preventing the intellect from reaching stasis as well and dragged it into the endless movement of analogies.28 It established the supremacy of ingenium over judicium: agudezza, the attribute of ingenio, and concepto, its fruit, both aimed at offering beauty to admiration.29 This may challenge (more or less deliberately) “good taste,” but as Jean Rousset points out, defining the baroque as excess, exaggeration, and proliferation, or else as irregularity, whim, and confusion, reducing it to disorder would be missing its very nature; the proliferation of rhetorical devices (be it visual or verbal rhetoric) was actually meant to reveal structure—the architecture of the church as well as the architecture of the world.30 Those diverse elements were therefore closely linked, so that, for instance, the flashes of concepti created, when arranged in gradation, the emphatic luxuriance of periodic style. They illustrated the general tendency to revive an Asianist version of Second Sophistic, more suitable for larger audiences than its Atticist version, in order to generate an effect of presence.31 In other words, instead of a binary opposition between sensible and intelligible, visible and invisible, such a rhetoric was based on a ternary view of the soul, where senses, reason, and affects constantly interacted.32 This revaluation of movere (moving the heart and the will altogether) had been prepared by the Renaissance “grand style,” which used emotion as a means of “transformation of moral and spiritual life by awakening a rightly ordered love, by redirecting the self from corporeal objects to spiritual ones.”33 As Shuger has shown, Erasmus played a major role in the developments toward this model, by reaffirming the link between the Augustinian psychology of the will and rhetoric and the classical triple decorum of style, subject, and effect.34 Hence the three main functions of images in this kind of preaching: 1) Mnemonic (recordatio salutis): narrative images and allegoria in factis (symbolic value of historical events narrated in the Bible) helped the faithful to appropriate and remember the main moments of salvation history.35 2) Didactic (informatio rudium): symbols and allegoria in verbis (images elaborated by men to represent the invisible) helped the faithful to go beyond appearances and discover significationes translatae, (i.e., the intelligible meaning beyond senses, as the Christian definition of symbol implies).36 3) Affective (excitatio devotionis): according to a metaphor recurrent in Binet as well as in Bossuet’s discourses (among others), images “engraved” spiritual affects in the faithful’s heart, dramatized his own spiritual life, of which he was invited to become a spectator.37 As such, baroque eloquence was at the crossing of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, and Aquinas’s Summa theologica, where image is defined as a quintessentially human means of knowledge. One might wonder, then, if this preaching style was radically opposed to what is sometimes described as a European “neoclassicism” (and more specifically regarding

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   647 the French context) if the dichotomy baroque vs. classique so often used in literary history is suitable to describe the various forms of early modern (printed) preaching we have access to. As a matter of fact, a closer look reveals that baroque and neoclassicism should be defined, in many regards, in scalar rather than antithetic terms. On a geographical level, understandably enough, baroque affirmation of a Catholic identity seemed more insistent in areas of confessional coexistence such as the south of Germany and the Habsburg territories. Historians such as Austin Warren and Richard Crashaw thus viewed baroque as “a Catholic counterstatement to the reformer’s attacks on the wealth of the Church and her use of painting and sculpture.”38 However, one should refrain from positing a fundamental link between baroque and Catholicism, even if this link seems more obvious in preaching than in poetry for instance. On a thematic level, “baroque” themes naturally seem to imply “baroque” devices—but their “baroque” effect depends on their concentration, since baroque themes (instability, mobility, metamorphosis, disguise, illusion) in the early modern period, can be found almost everywhere.39 On a stylistic level, as Fumaroli and Shuger have clearly pointed out against more traditional approaches developed by Croll and subsequent scholars, there actually is an “Atticist and purist” version of baroque, inherited from the Roman Atticism of Thucydides and Sallust, and whose modern heirs could include Pascal, just as there is a “terse, rough and unschematic grand style,” dense and brief, inherited from Hellenistic authors and particularly well represented in sacred rhetoric.40 Franciscans, for instance, such as the famous bishop Cornelio Musso (b. 1511–d. 1574), who delivered the inaugural speech at Trent, worked out a new style of preaching that combined baroque (especially elaborated rhythms and word plays) and “simple” features.41 To grasp a unified essence of Christian baroque style in Europe therefore proves difficult. If baroque, a primarily Jesuit aesthetic, is also exemplified by Pascal, who nevertheless fights to promote Port-Royal’s Augustinianism (Jansenism) against the Jesuits’ lenient ethics and rhetoric of seduction; if baroque, a supposedly quintessentially Catholic aesthetic, is just as well exemplified by the Protestants D’Aubigné, Drelincourt, or Du Bartas, what could such a corpus be, and what could be its core identity?42 For lack of final answers to those questions, we shall try to explore more in depth the specific context of those authors, in a context where baroque seems both everywhere and nowhere: French Catholic preaching.

Baroque in French Early Modern Catholic Preaching Marc Fumaroli’s pioneering works describe the situation of sacred eloquence in ­seventeenth-century France in terms of an almost structuralist opposition between Jesuits (turned toward Rome) and Gallicans (defending a French national Church more

648   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque emancipated from the pope’s authority), the former reviving the Second Sophistic and the latter the strict ideal of “Borromean rhetorics,” and he presents all the actual rhetorical practices of this time as results of this unceasing debate.43 In a completely different perspective, pertaining to French discourse analysis more than rhetoric proper, Dominique Maingueneau shows that the Jansenist discourse developed inside the very framework of the opposite Jesuit discourse. In brief, as far as religious discourse is concerned, Gallican “neoclassicism” should be understood not as much as a sovereign and independent entity, but as part of a wide rhetorical movement including its very “opposite.” The two first decades of the seventeenth century were marked by the increasing influence of Court Jesuit preachers such as Richeome, Coton, Binet, as well as theoreticians of sacred sophistic such as Caussin and Cressolles.44 All aimed at responding to the prevailing taste by revisiting the art of Hellenistic oratory and adapting the main techniques of the Second Sophistic to the duties of Christian discourse—whatever they thought of the fundamental corruption of such rhetorical devices. Among the instances of this promotion of a “heroic” rhétorique des peintures were such Asianist manifests as Richeome’s Tableaux sacrés des figures mystiques du très auguste sacrement et sacrifice de l’Eucharistie (1601) and La Peinture spirituelle, ou l’art d’admirer, aimer et louer Dieu en toutes ses œuvres (1611), Coton’s Sermons sur les principales matières de la foi (1617) and Binet’s Essai des merveilles de nature et des plus nobles artifices (1621). Then followed Caussin’s multivolume work La Cour sainte (1624) and the two volumes of Le Moyne’s Peintures morales (1641–1643). The reedition, in 1614, of Blaise de Vigenère’s translation of Philostratus’s Tableaux de platte peinture, as well as the reopening, four years later, of the Collège de Clermont, the main Jesuit university college in France, also contributed to the flowering of a mostly epideictic rhetoric, which influenced French Catholic preaching for several decades. Quite telling would be, in that regard, the comparison between the last chapter of Binet’s Essais de merveilles de nature, dealing with the rainbow, to the exordium of a sermon by Etienne Molinier. Here is Binet: Riches, want do you want? The entire rainbow is nothing other than nature’s carcanet threaded with all of her precious stones, so many droplets, so many jewels of very rare beauty, some being pearls, the others having the diamond’s shine, the carbuncle’s fire, the ruby’s golden beam, the sapphire’s sparkle, I could just as easily have said that it is the quarry where nature hides all of her rarest stones and the richest piece of all of her treasures, from which she dresses herself up when she so pleases, it is her order’s necklace, her livery’s scarf, her chain of pearls and the most beautiful of all of her brooches, which she dons to please her heavenly spouse. It is, you say, nothing but a rainbow, I am happy for your sake, but on condition that it be a notable nothingness, adorned with all things . . . Good God, what sumptuous nothingness that is all things! Look at its shape, it is not the Pont au Change in Paris; rather wouldn’t you say that it is the bridge for angels in Paradise, entirely glitterous with celestial goldsmithery? It was said in past times that the Way of Saint James, the Milky Way, or the great trail of stars that appears in the sky, was the trail of the gods, when they would go to Jupiter’s Consistory, but that is nonsense. I would rather

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   649 believe that if there were some ordinary path by which angels came down to earth, and humans climbed to Heaven, we would not find a more beautiful one than the bridge always and forever decorated with so many beautiful stones.45

And here is Molinier: The Ancient Roman authors note that during the procession of the august and magnificent triumph that Pompey the Great ordered for his victories and conquests of the Asian provinces, in front of the triumphant chariot he had carried his embossed image, made entirely of pearls and daisies, which were both the ornament and the material, leaving the spectators in doubt as to what they should admire more, the price or the novelty. Here you have, Christian listeners, an image of the Virgin, an image of all of the pearls, that we today solemnly bless and consecrate by the ceremonies of the church. I say pearls, for it represents the tears that the Virgin shed the day of the Passion onto the pale and disfigured corpse of her son come down from the cross. The angels gathered these many tears, and we must collect them to make a carcanet for our neck, a plate for our chest, a crown for our devotion. Pearls are begot from the dew of Heaven, the Virgin is a living heaven and her tears a divine dew, from which are born in our hearts the pearls of a thousand holy thoughts. It is from the dew of these sacred tears that the Painter created rich pearls, I mean to say, the beautiful traits and the living, or rather dying colors, that enrich this painting, where love and death are portrayed. It is from these same tears that we must erect in our hearts for our weeping and desolate Mother near the Cross, an image of pearls, a name that I give to the holy meditations that we must form about the representation of dead Life, and of weeping love, of the Savior pierced with nails, and of the Virgin who is afflicted by the sword of pain, whom we will hail, Ave Maria, etc.46

Beyond the obviously different topics, the similarities are striking: same use of Ancient pagan culture, same emphasis on visual depiction, same tension created by the rapid succession of heterogeneous metaphors, same taste for precious matters mirrored by the speech’s preciosity, same meta-discursive shimmering of the discourse, same trajectories, through angels, from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth. A similar mannerist hopping from one image to another can be found in Bertaut’s Sermon pour la fête de la Conception: We hope that she will listen favorably nonetheless to the prattling of our affection and will not disdain the zeal which makes us open our mouths to recite her admirable privileges and the graces with which our Lord has so abundantly endowed her. Graces that truly cannot be represented equally to their virtue, and that the Church has rather written in terms that feel like hieroglyphics and emblems rather than direct and bare words, either by calling her an enclosed garden on all sides so that wild beasts of vice and sin may not enter to devour the beautiful flowers of its virtues; or a terrestrial paradise because, truly, she has brought the tree of fruit and life, of which whoever eats with dignity will have eternal life; or a sealed fountain of the true image of God; or an aurora that rises and that pulls up after it the true sun of justice onto the face of the world; or a rose from the fields for its sweet smell of

650   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque virtues, and because, like the snail that dies between the roses, thus he who harkens to sin dies near her, or a lily of the valley, due to its incomparable whiteness and purity of her mores and because as the lily smells so perfectly good, although it is born from fetid weeds, so she is always exempt from sin, although she came from a sinful womb, like the rest of the other human creatures.47

Most of the analogies are drawn from nature, viewed as a “conglomeration of sermons in stones which await exposition by human intelligence”: connecting topics as heterogeneous as material objects and theological ideas both does justice to the beauty and harmony of the Creation as a whole, and celebrates the orator’s God-given ingenium.48 As such, this use of images blurs the traditional distinction between proof and ornament, topic and amplification. Disparate analogies can be piled up one after the other, since it is their very incongruous accumulation that is supposed to impress and persuade. Another similarity can be observed between the list of “enrichments of eloquence” recommended by Binet, and their spectacular implementation, over a century later, in the peroration of a sermon by Charles de La Rue. First, Binet: Prosopopoeia. (. . .) Proposing the thing in front of one’s eyes by hypotyposis (. . .) Suspension of minds. [. . .] Contrariwise, make a mere nothing out of a great thing. (. . .) Well inserted apostrophes are very powerful. (. . .) Production of witnesses, authority. (. . .) Irony, to elude vividly what one opposes. Execration. Vigorous exclamation.49 And here, Charles de la Rue: I picture that horrid day; and this is not at all a chimeric idea. One day will come when this idea will be changed into the truth. I hear the sound of the trumpet; I see the shaken foundations of our temples; I see you all coming out of the hollows of the tombs. And to distinguish you from the crowd of nations by your Christianity, it seems to me that I can hear you crying like the Jews from the Prophet Jeremiah: Templum Domini, templum Domini. Temple of the Lord, temple of the Lord! I am a Christian: here is the temple of my God. Here is the font where I received the faith, here are the altars where I have prayed so many times. Here is the holy table where I have received so many Hosts; here is the confessional where I have declared my sins. Such subjects of confidence for a true Christian! But for you, continues Jeremiah, for you profaners who have not respected the holy home more than a den of thieves, for you, what a subject of fear and horror when the vengeful angels of divine temples, witnesses of your irreverence, will cry out against you with a fulmineous sword in their hands. Here where so many times you have scorned the presence of Eternal God. Here where you have troubled with unholy speech the silence due to prayer and holy ceremonies. Here where you have turned the divine word into ridicule. Here where you have set a trap for modesty. Here where with sly and specious confessions you have insulted the good faith of priests, and stolen absolution

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   651 from their hands. Here where with disgraceful and sacrilegious Communion you have come to the Lord’s table to eat your judgment and condemnation. What horror! What despair! When the stones of the walls that have hid your licentiousness crash down onto you!50

From the theory to its application, from the beginning to the end of the century, the coherence appears striking. The pulpit becomes a stage, but it also borrows from the novel some of its power of evocation—more specifically from the Greek novel, then recently rediscovered throughout Europe. Even Jean-Pierre Camus, usually rather cautious towards the edifying virtues of images, resorts to such appealing fictional devices: When mariners can no longer see the twin stars of Castor and Pollux, they begin to fear a shipwreck. What else can you expect, oh apostles battered by the storm in a small skiff, since the twin lights of the beautiful eyes of Our Lord were veiled to you by sleep: Ipse vero dormiebat. For this you ask: Domine, salva nos, perimus. Oh world, you are a boiling, stormy, and dangerous sea: who could ever save ­oneself in your reefs without the special help of the Lord? I will make you see, my beloved listeners, that the world is a sea of vanity, of greed, and of sensual pleasure, without veering too far from the imagery of the sea. As the sun runs through various dwellings and passes through several signs of the Zodiac, of different forms, qualities and complexions, without straying nonetheless the slightest bit from its ecliptic line, I wanted thusly to be led by the parts of this speech to ensure that I do not wander from the comparison of the world and the sea. And as this same sea that the poets call mare caeruleum changes color, like the neck of a dove, without transforming at all the substance of its waves, on these same tides we will diversify our metaphors. Thus, from the same kind of wood we can make different statues, and the same statue, made from like material, can have dissimilar parts in their shape, and like ones in their substance.51 Such examples and echoes should not mislead us though, since actually, the baroque peak of pulpit eloquence did not last much longer than the time of Bertaut, Camus, and Molinier (i.e., the first half of the seventeenth century). With a few exceptions, it was then soon outdated, which many scholars have interpreted as a sign of the rise of neoclassicism. However, this reaction against the “excesses” of baroque preaching (but is all excess baroque? And excess of what? Considering what norm?) actually took two very different forms: on the one hand, what Fumaroli calls the “misérabilisme oratoire” of a naked eloquence, deprived from all kinds of seduction; on the other hand, the sublime eloquence of Bossuet, Fléchier and their likes, which elaborated a new kind of “grand style,” combining Biblical stylistic features with the rhetorical legacy of the Ancient and the contemporary expectations of Louis XIV’s court. This relative failure of the baroque graft in France is hard to explain, but hypothesis can be offered at multiple levels. On a political level, the Gallican eloquence was, so to speak, supported by the regime, and Jesuits considered with more and more suspicion

652   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque by a whole range of influential political and religious opponents. On a philosophical level, Cartesianism, claiming that truth can be accessed by individual reason more than by imagination, analogies, and tradition, was certainly not easy to reconcile with baroque tableaux and conceptism, and with an eloquence based on a supposedly closed and stabilized body of knowledge.52 On a scientific level, realizing the infiniteness of the universe and demonstrating its discontinuity through the existence of the vacuum inevitably jeopardized the reassuring idea of a closed and continuous universe full of analogical mediations between the world and God.53 On a theological level, great French preachers, from Vincent de Paul to Bossuet and Thomassin de l’Oratoire, seem to have been more prone to a rhetoric of kenosis and its simplicity rather than to the ornaments of the genus medium.54 Vincent de Paul’s “petite méthode,” originally aimed at uneducated people, soon won him a paradoxical success among the elite—but he never departed from his initial claim of “simplicity”: Here is our manner of preaching: with a common way of speaking, quite simply, in its simplicity, ordinary. Gentlemen, we must, to preach as an apostle, in other words to preach well and usefully, we must do it with simplicity, with ordinary speech, so that everyone can understand it and benefit from it. . . . Without a doubt, to convince and win over men’s minds, we must act simply; one does not usually overcome the listener with eloquent and ceremonial discourse that is loudly shouted and makes great noise, and nothing more. All of these fine and learned speeches usually just move our inward parts. . . . And all of these inward movements do nothing if judgment is not convinced; if reason is only glanced at, all the rest passes by quickly, passes by quickly, and the speech remains useless. So long live simplicity!55

Saint Paul and Jesus Christ himself were called upon to exemplify this holy simplicity of preaching, be it by “Monsieur Vincent,” who said “The son of God, who was the word and eternal wisdom, wanted to treat the loftiness of all of his mysteries with ways of speaking that were, in appearance, low, common, and ordinary” or by Bossuet: “my words are strong because they are simple; it is their innocent simplicity that has confused human wisdom.” And “The flesh that he took was weak, the word that preaches is simple.”56 Thomassin, conversely, denigrated the worldly ornaments of a “fashionable eloquence,” which was becoming outdated anyway, at least in most Parisian churches: “It is a Sybarite ballet rather than a holy war against the sworn enemies of our salvation. The entire apparatus is nothing but a choice of fine words put into rhythm, with a mingle mangle of trivial antitheses that are ordinarily cold and forced, as if one had only thought of composing epigrams and sonnets.”57 Widely shared in ecclesiastical as well as worldly milieux, this judgment actually met the more general taste for natural, with the new social, moral and aesthetic ideals of honnêteté and conversation, involving a softly insinuating rhetoric and rejecting affectation (artificiality).58 Most French Jesuits, such as Marc-Antoine de Foix, embraced this evolution towards the end of the century, sometimes through criticizing fashionable preachers: “Would to God that all of our preachers had an idea of our Christian eloquence

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   653 as lofty and as grave an idea of eloquence as that the pagan authors attempted to give us, that they have taught us. We would not have the displeasure of hearing the word of God profaned by descriptions of trifles, by comparisons as useless as they are pompous, by puns, by cold allusions, by ridiculous interpretations of Scripture, by a hundred other even more unworthy things.”59 And at other times through the attacks against concetti, subtleties and rhetorical devices based on ingenium, which obviously move the discourse away from the truth: Is there nothing to be more justly indignant about than those who have enough good sense and are capable enough to preach about sensible things, and who allow themselves to preach eccentricities, that we call conceits? They are uttered from the pulpit like witty subtleties, and they are related in conversations, like very ridiculous extravagances. It is even more strange that one does not realize that such obvious falsehoods can only infinitely repel the listeners’ belief, and entirely ruin the preacher’s authority. To the blindingly obvious falsehoods I add the excessive hyperboles that usage has not yet sufficiently assuaged.60

To correct those flaws, De Foix advocated natural stylistic devices: “In general, the means to make all of these figures exempt of any suspicion of artifice is to study carefully in which situations and in which way only nature teaches us to use these figurative turns of phrase in unpremeditated and somewhat fervent conversations, and only to use them in the situations in which nature uses them, and in the only way she uses them.”61 And he recommended, rather than vehement excitation, soft and gentle movements: It is by these gentle movements that one gives very usefully and very pleasantly nearly all the thoughts and all the expressions a consistently passionate air that truly constitutes what we call Unction in our Christian eloquence . . . this unction is a natural and continuous sequence of various animated expressions that each express in few words some gentle and present disposition of the orator: little questions; little apostrophes to God, to respectable people, to sinners, to oneself; little astonishments; little wishes; a hundred other short and lively turns of phrase that move, that pique honor, that give strength, that create confusion, or that show compassion. All of that in such a gentle and obvious way that one does not even notice that the orator aims to stimulate any feeling whatever.62

Simultaneously, multiple criticisms arose against Jesuit pastoral practices which would later be called “baroque.” “Extraordinary” ceremonies (that is: special ceremonies which are not included in the regular liturgical cycle) and missionary practices were the main targets, through an opposition between superficiality and depth, between collective emotions and personal transformation, between the outer display of a spectacular rhetoric and the fragile inner fruit of such an eloquence. The famous Oratorian preacher Massillon thus reviled “the insufficiency and hypocrisy of a purely external form of worship.” Port-Royal was of course a prominent opponent of such practices, but many others, inside as well as outside the Catholic Church, promoted a better-ordered devotion

654   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque and denounced the Jesuits’ hyperbolic display of epideictic eloquence, along with the inappropriate introduction of worldly elements into the Catholic form of worship. Those criticisms increased during the century, in accordance with the growing need for spiritual intimacy and personal piety so characteristic of the eighteenth century.63 Those divergences came both from non-Jesuits and from the inside of the Society, thus manifesting the initial discrepancy between two Jesuit traditions: the Frenchspeaking Jesuit rhetors, and the Latin-speaking Jesuit scholars. As Fumaroli has shown, this dichotomy was inscribed, from the very beginning, at the core of the Jesuit institution, through its two founding texts and the difficulty of reconciling them: on the one hand, ultimate offshoot of the medieval spirituality, the Spiritual Exercices, with their feverish imagination and pathos; and on the other hand, ultimate offshoot of the sixteenth-century renovatio literarum, with its classical models, the Ratio Studiorum (1599), which standardized the training provided in the Jesuit global network of schools.64 Therefore, the graft does not seem to have succeeded, at least on a long-term basis: this is because of multiple oppositions, from the outside as well as the inside. It might be this quick decay, or at least mitigation of the French pulpit baroque that makes its very essence so difficult to grasp, and probably all the more difficult in that oppositions from the outside remain ambiguous, as the case of Pascal exemplifies. Fumaroli views him as a Gallican author, and as a matter of fact, Pascal’s criticism of Le Moyne in the 11th Provinciale can be read as a symptom of the opposition between a baroque eloquence of verba, and a Gallican eloquence of res. However, many critics have viewed Pascal as a baroque author, with unexpected images associating concrete and abstract notions, asymmetric constructions, repetitions, etc.65 Having synthetized the arguments pro et contra, Jean Mesnard concludes that Pascal elaborates a “limited, and most of all disciplined, baroque” (“un baroque limité, et surtout, discipliné”).66 Pascal, of course, was not a preacher, but it seems that Mesnard’s conclusions could apply to most great French seventeenth-century preachers. As Ferreyrolles explains about Pascal—but this, again, illuminates quite well most of French “classical” preaching, what emerges in the second half of the seventeenth century is not a rejection of imagination, but a new use of it. “Rational metaphorization makes the irrationality of bizarre metaphorization obvious.” This kind of metaphor does not compete with reason but multiplies its (already infinite) fecundity.67 It contains the seeds of a “new baroque . . . which being born from reason, and controlled by it, is even more powerful. . . . Imagination unites the fantastic and methodic functions: it is by dreaming the world that imagination reveals its truth.”68 Such approaches, though not primarily dealing with pulpit eloquence, reveal the oversimplifying nature of the traditional dichotomy classique vs baroque, and also warn us against the temptation of replacing it by another hypostatic opposition between Jesuits and Gallicans. It may not be indifferent to note that Boileau, the great translator of Longinus in early modern France, and therefore the main transmitter of the “genius rhetoric” which underlies and legitimates all “baroque” eloquence and poetry,69 is also one of the main voices of the “classical” doctrine.70 Instead of offering a final answer to our title question—“is there a baroque pulpit ­eloquence in early modern France?”—it may therefore seem more reasonable to end up by a few observations.

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   655 First, this question does not apply to all preaching genres. As Shuger has observed for the English context, the Puritan “doctrine-and-use” sermon (which simply revolves around the exposition of a doctrinal point and then its application to daily life), for instance, does not fit in the baroque/neoclassicism paradigm, because it emerges “independently of the categories of ancient rhetorical theory.”71 Second, pulpit eloquence shares the same Ancient models and references throughout Europe, which tends to play down national singularities and emphasize transnational rhetorical trends, such as “baroque” in the early modern period. However, the French context remains specific, in that the French (purely) “baroque” moment was only brief and was soon challenged by the emergence of what would later be called a “classical” taste. Third, this traditional representation of the irresistible rise of neo-classicism should immediately be qualified by the obvious persistence of baroque features in French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century preaching. This suggests that French early modern pulpit eloquence strongly supports Gérald Sfez’s hypothesis of a period which could be called “classicisme baroque” (from the Edict of Nantes to its revocation—and probably a bit beyond)—a reflection to which Hélène Merlin-Kajman has given a new impulse in her works.72 Preachers in the second half of the seventeenth century still frequently resort to baroque features and representations, but those are no longer viewed and implemented as mostly ornamental and amplificative devices. They are now fully part of a redemptive discourse, whose transformative power involves a certain “naturel” and excludes a too obvious sophistication. Following the shockwave of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode and Les Passions de l’âme, baroque is now meant to be both passionate and rational.

Notes 1. Among European literary scholars, French scholars have probably been the most reluctant to adopt the term “baroque.” See for instance Henri Peyre, Le Classicisme français (New York, 1942). 2. Regarding the cautious use of the “baroque” idea in the French history of religious discourse, and more specifically the complex links between “baroque” and Bremond”s “humanisme dévôt,” see Sophie Houdard, “Humanisme dévot et ‘histoire littéraire’,” in Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des Guerres de Religion jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 1 (Grenoble, France: Jérôme Millon, 2006), 50–51. 3. This should actually be put in the broader context of the preaching style(s) as a quasi-blind spot in literary scholarship—with the problematic question of the “literarity” of the sermon as a genre. Little has changed since Corrie E. Normand wrote: “Little recent scholarship has focused specifically on style in 16th century preaching” (Humanist Taste and Franciscan Values: Cornelio Musso and Catholic Preaching in Sixteenth-Century Italy [New York: Peter Lang, 1998], 68), and the seventeenth century is also often forgotten, whereas preaching then represents one of the main forms, if not the main form, of public eloquence. 4. Peter Bayley, Selected Sermons of the French Baroque (1600–1650) (London: Garland, 1983), ix. 5. Quoted by Jean Duvignaud, “Le baroque, imaginaire de rupture,” Esthétique baroque et imagination créatrice, éd. Marlies Kronegger (Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr, 1998), 271. 6. Michèle Clément, Une poétique de crise: Poètes baroques et mystiques (1570–1660) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996).

656   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 7. Franck  J.  Warnke, Versions of Baroque. European Literature in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972). 8. Wilfried Floeck, Esthétique de la diversité. Pour une histoire du baroque littéraire en France (Paris, Biblio 17, 1989) (traduction de Die Literarästhätik des französischen Barock. Entstehung—Entwicklung—Auflösung [Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1979]). This omission is not an exclusion of all religious texts: for instance, Floeck does mention François de Sales but not his sermons. 9. Marlies Kronegger, ed., Esthétique baroque et imagination créatrice (Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr, 1998). 10. In this regard, Protestant sermons would deserve a separate study, not only because Protestants thoroughly redefine preaching genres but also because the available sources are different, almost all of the surviving Protestant sermons dating from after 1625 (see Peter Bayley, Selected Sermons of the French, ix). 11. See Bernard Dompnier, “Les cérémonies, la piété et la culture. Conclusions,” dans Les cérémonies extraordinaires du catholicisme baroque (Clermont-Ferrand, France: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2009), 583. 12. Philip Schaf and Rev. Henry Wallace, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 14 (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 552. 13. See Christian Mouchel, “Rhétoriques post-tridentines (1570–1600): La fabrique d’une société chrétienne,” dans Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne (1450–1950), dir. M. Fumaroli (Paris: PUF, 1999), 431–433. 14. On the reprints and translations, in Paris, of several Italian panegyrics on Borromea, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, see Charles Dejob, De l’influence du Concile de Trente (Paris: E. Thorin, 1884), 143. 15. Christian Mouchel, “Rhétoriques post-tridentines,” 433–434. 16. See Marc Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et « res literaria» de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque Classique (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 140. 17. Voir Christian Mouchel,“Les rhétoriques post-tridentines,” 436–437. 18. See Marc Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence, 139. 19. See Deborah Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 165: “Historians of prose style have long recognized these qualities as characteristic of late Renaissance or baroque literature, but what has not been clearly enough seen is that they belong to the grand style through its Greek line of descent, that they are acknowledged aspects of the Renaissance grand style, and finally that they grow out of a deeply religious humanism.” 20. See Alain Michel, “Sublime et parole de Dieu : de saint Augustin à Fénelon,” (Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 1986), 52–61. Such a baroque eloquence is linked to the Augustinian reflection on the sign, which points toward what it cannot directly name. See Delphine Reguig, Le Corps des idées: pensées et poétiques du langage dans l’augustinisme de Port-Royal (Arnauld, Nicole, Pascal, Mme de Lafayette, Racine) (Paris: H. Champion, 2007). 21. Frank  J.  Warnke, Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 19. 22. See Marc Fumaroli, “Rhétorique d’école et rhétorique adulte: Remarques sur la réception européenne du Traité Du Sublime au XVIe et XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 1986), 33–51. 23. Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence, 216.

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   657 24. Christian Mouchel, Cicéron et Sénèque dans la rhétorique de la Renaissance (Hitzeroth, 1990), 316. 25. Council of Trent, Sessio. XXII, c. V: “Cum natura hominum ea sit, ut non facile queat sine adminiculis exterioribus ad rerum divinarum meditationem sustolli, propterea pia mater Ecclesia ritus quosdam, ut scilicet quaedam submissâ voce, alia vero elatiore, in Missa pronuntiarentur, instituit. Caeremonias item adhibuit, ut mysticas benedictiones, lumina, thymiamata, vestes, aliaque id genus multa, ex apostolicâ disciplinâ et traditione, quo et majestas tanti sacrificii commendaretur, et mentes fidelium per haec visibilia religions et pietatis signa ad rerum altissimarum, quae in hoc sacrificio latent, contemplationem excitarentur.” 26. Bernard Dompnier, “Les cérémonies, la piété et la culture,” 597. For instance, on the baroque setting of Portuguese churches, “the last licit theatre,” all the more so spectacular that gold, brought back from Brazil, was plentiful, see Ana Maria Binet, “Rhétorique de cour” et sermons d’église: quelques exemples dans l’œuvre du P. Antonio Vieira, jésuite portugais (1608–1697), dans La Religion des élites au XVIIe siècle (Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr), 156. There is a huge bibliography on the famous preacher Vieira; see for instance Margarida Vieira Mendes, A Oratoria Barroca de Vieira (Lisbon: Caminho, 2003). And for a more general survey of Lusitanian baroque rhetoric, see the works of Joao Adolfo Hansen. 27. See Bayley, Selected Sermons of the French Baroque, x. On the personal anthologies of locis communis, see Bayley, Selected Sermons of the French Baroque, xi. Such research and writing practices were also meant to counter Protestant claims that Catholic priests were ignorant, and as such, they can support a “Counter-Reformation” view of the baroque. 28. See Gracian’s definition of the conceit: “es un acto del entendimiento, que exprime la correspondencia que se halla entre los objectos” (“an act of the intellect, which expresses a correspondence which exists between objects,” Agudeza y arte de ingenio, 1648, 2). 29. See Florence-Vuilleumier, “Les conceptismes,” in Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne, 520–526. And on the use of conceits in early modern preaching, see O.C. Edwards Jr., “Varieties of sermon: A Survey of Preaching in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Joris Van Eijnatten (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 6–8. 30. See Jean Rousset, “Peut-on définir le baroque? Baroque 1 (1965), http://baroque.revues. org/88; doi: 10.4000/baroque.88, 6. 31. See Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence, 216. 32. See Ralph Dekoninck, Ad Imaginem. Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 128. Hence the major role played by the Jesuits in the elaboration and promotion of a visual culture, be it by its theory or by its practice of imagery, in theology as well as in devotion, teaching—and of course rhetoric (see Dekoninck, Ad Imaginem, 10). 33. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 138: “The criticism of passionate rhetoric as sophistic flattery and play fails because it ignores the Renaissance’s unplatonic view of the seriousness of rhetoric, based on its unplatonic psychology of the emotions and their relation to knowledge and salvation.” 34. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric. 35. Dekoninck, Ad Imaginem, 211–271. 36. Dekoninck, Ad Imaginem, 273–327. 37. Dekoninck, Ad Imaginem, 333–358. 38. Austin Warren and Richard Crashaw, A Study in Baroque Sensibility (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 65.

658   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 39. See Jean Rousset, La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France. Circé et le paon (Paris: Corti, 1953). In L’Intérieur et l’Extérieur : Essais sur la poésie et sur le théâtre au 17e siècle (Paris: Corti, 1968), published fifteen years later, Rousset reorientates his definition of the baroque to give more importance to the dialectics between the inside and the outside. 40. See Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence, 216 and Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 172. Significantly, while both Fumaroli and Shuger focus on national contexts (England for Shuger, France for Fumaroli), they trace back the origins of the sacred styles they explore in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century rhetoric that circulated in other parts of Europe, specifically in Italy. This is also an invitation, if not to minimize the French specificity, to understand it in a broader context; see Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 172. 41. See Thomas Worcester, “The Catholic Sermon,” Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period, ed. Larissa Taylor (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 21. It is significant that for Musso, the first Christian preacher ever (i.e., Christ himself) combined those two stylistic trends (see Normand, Humanist Taste and Franciscan Values, 80–81). 42. On the Protestant resonances of the typically baroque theme of illusion vs. reality, see  Peter Bayley, French Pulpit Oratory, 1598-1650: A Study in Themes and Styles, with a  Descriptive Catalogue of Printed Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 128. 43. See Marc Fumaroli, “Pascal et la tradition rhétorique gallicane,” in Méthodes chez Pascal, dir. J. Mesnard (Paris, PUF, 1979), 359–372. 44. Those preachers actually belong to three different generations: Louis Richeome (b. 1544– d. 1625) belonging to the first; Pierre Coton (b. 1564–d. 1626), Étienne Binet (b. 1569–d. 1639) and Louis de Cressolles (b. 1568–d. 1634) to the second, and Nicolas Caussin (b. 1583–d. 1651) to the third. 45. “Que voudriez-vous, richesses ? Tout l’arc n’est autre chose que le carcan de la nature enfilé de toutes les pierreries de nature, autant de gouttelettes, autant de joyaux de très rare beauté, les unes sont perles, les autres ont l’éclat du diamant, les flammes de l’escarboucle, le rayon doré du rubis, le bril du saphir, j’aurai plus tôt fait de dire que c’est la carrière où la nature a caché toutes les plus rares pierreries, et la plus riche pièce de tous ses trésors, desquels elle se pare quand bon lui semble, c’est le collier de son ordre, l’écharpe de sa livrée, sa chaîne de perles et le plus beau de tous ses affiquets, dont elle se pare pour plaire au Ciel son époux. Ce n’est rien, dites-vous, que l’Iris, j’en suis content pour l’amour de vous, mais à condition que ce soit un rien privilégié, et un rien habillé de toute chose. . . . Bon Dieu, quel brave rien, qui est toute chose ! voyez sa figure, ne diriez-vous pas que c’est non pas le Pont au change de Paris, mais le pont aux anges du Paradis, tout éclatant d’orfèvrerie celeste? On disait autrefois que le chemin saint Jacques, ou le grand chemin de lait, qui paraît au ciel, c’était le chemin des dieux, lorsqu’ils allaient au consistoire de Jupiter, mais cela n’est que sable; bien veux-je croire que s’il y avait quelque chemin ordinaire, par lequel les Anges descendent en terre, et les hommes montent au ciel, on n’en trouverait de plus beau que ce pont tapissé toujours, et toujours ennobli de tant de belles pierreries” (Binet, Essais de merveilles de nature, 603–604). We would like to express our utmost gratitude to Michael Meere for his translations of the sermons quoted in this chapter. 46. “Les auteurs romains remarquent qu’en la pompe de cet auguste et magnifique triomphe que Pompée dressa pour les victoires et conquêtes des provinces de l’Asie, il fit porter devant le char triomphant une sienne image en relief et en bosse, toute bâtie de perles et de marguerites, qui en étaient et l’ornement et la matière, laissant en doute les spectateurs qu’est-ce qu’ils devaient y admirer davantage, ou le prix, ou la nouveauté. Voici, Chrétiens auditeurs, une

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   659 image de la Vierge, image de toute de perles, qu’on a ce jourd’hui ­solennellement bénite et consacrée par les cérémonies de l’Eglise; je dis de perles, puis qu’elle représente les larmes que la Vierge répandit le jour de la Passion sur le corps pâle et défiguré de son chez Fils descendu de la croix. Larmes qui furent autant de perles que les anges ramassèrent, et que nous devons recueillir pour en faire un carquant à notre col, une plaque à notre poitrine, une couronne à notre dévotion. Les perles s’engendrent de la rosée du Ciel, la Vierge est un ciel animé et ses larmes une divine rosée, d’où naissent en nos cœurs les perles de mille saintes pensées. C’est de la rosée de ces larmes sacrées que le Peintre a formé les riches perles, je veux dire, les beaux traits et les vives, ou plutôt mourantes couleurs, qui enrichissent ce tableau, où l’amour et la mort sont pourtraits. C’est de ces mêmes larmes que nous devons dresser dans notre cœur à notre Mère pleurante et désolée auprès de la Croix, une image de perles, nom que je donne aux saintes méditations que nous devons former sur la représentation de la Vie morte, et de l’amour pleurant, du Sauveur percé de clous, et de la Vierge navrée du glaive de douleur, laquelle nous saluerons, Ave Maria, etc.” (Étienne Molinier, Sermon sur l’image de notre Dame de Pitié tenant Jésus-Christ mort entre ses bras). 47. “Nous espérons que tout de même elle écoutera favorablement le ramage de notre affection et ne dédaignera point le zèle qui nous fait ouvrir la bouche pour réciter ses admirables privilèges, et les grâces dont notre Seigneur l’a si abondamment enrichie: grâces qui véritablement ne se peuvent représenter à l’égal de leur mérite, et que l’Eglise a plutôt d’écrites en termes qui sentent l’hiéroglyphique et l’emblème, qu’en paroles expresses et nues, soit l’appelant un jardin clos de tous côtés, afin que les bêtes sauvages du vice et du péché n’y pussent avoir entrée pour gourmander les belles fleurs de ses vertus, soit un paradis terrestre, pource que véritablement, elle a porté l’arbre de fruit et de vie, dont quiconque mange dignement il a la vie éternelle, soit une fontaine cachetée de l’image propre de Dieu, soit une aurore qui se lève et qui tire après elle sur la face du monde le vrai soleil de justice, soit une rose des champs pour la bonne odeur de ses vertus, et pource que, comme l’escargot se meurt entre les roses, ainsi l’auditeur du péché meurt auprès d’elle, soit un lys des vallées, à cause de l’incomparable blancheur et pureté de ses mœurs et pource que comme le lys sent si parfaitement bon, quoi qu’il naisse de puantes herbes, ainsi fut-elle toujours exempte de péché, bien qu’elle procédât d’une souche pécheresse, comme le reste des autres créatures humaines” (Bertaut, Sermon pour la fête de la Conception). 48. Bayley, Selected Sermons of the French Baroque, xii. 49. Binet—Prosopopée. (. . .) Proposer le fait devant les yeux par une hypotypose (. . .) Suspension des esprits. [. . .] Au rebours, d’une grande chose, en faire un rien. (. . .) Apostrophes bien enchâssées sont toutes puissantes. (. . .) Production de témoins, autorité. (. . .) Ironie, pour éluder vivement ce qu’on oppose. Exécration. Exclamation vigoureuse. 50. “Je me représente ce jour affreux ; & ce n'est point une idée chimérique ; un jour viendra que cette idée sera changée en vérité. J'entends le son de la trompette ; je vois les fondements de nos temples ébranlez, je vous vois tous sortir du creux des tombeaux : & pour vous distinguer de la foule des nations par votre Christianisme, il me semble vous ouïr crier, comme les Juifs du Prophète Jérémie : Templum Domini, templum Domini. Temple du Seigneur, temple du Seigneur ! Je suis chrétien : c'est ici le temple de mon Dieu. Voilà les fonts où j'ay reçu la foi, voilà les autels où j'ay tant de fois prié : voilà la table sainte où

660   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque j’ai reçu tant d'hosties : voilà le tribunal où j’ai déposé mes péchés. Que de sujets de confiance pour un véritable chrétien ! Mais pour vous, poursuit Jérémie ; pour vous profanateur, qui n’avez pas plus respecté la sainte maison qu'une caverne de voleurs : pour vous quel sujet de crainte et d'horreur quand les Anges vengeurs des temples Divins, témoins de vos irrévérences, s'écrieront contre vous l'épée fulminante à la main : Voilà où tant de fois vous avez méprisé la présence de l'Eternel. Voilà où vous avez troublé par de profanes entretiens le silence dû à la prière et aux saintes cérémonies. Voilà où vous avez tourné la divine parole en raillerie. Voilà où vous avez tendu des pièges à la pudeur. Voilà où par des confessions malignes & captieuses vous avez insulté à la bonne foi des Prêtres, & dérobé de leurs mains l'absolution. Voilà où par des communions indignes & sacrilèges vous êtes venus à la table du Seigneur manger votre jugement & votre condamnation. Quelle horreur ! quel désespoir ! quand les pierres des murs qui auront caché vos désordres, éclateront contre vous !” Charles de La Rue, Sermon sur le respect dans les Eglises, in Sermons du P. de Rue, de la Compagnie de Jésus. Pour le Carême, t. 1 (Paris: Rigaud, 1719), 230–231. 51. “Quand les astres bessons de Castor & de Pollux disparaissent aux Nautonniers, ils commencent à redouter le naufrage. Que pouviez-vous attendre autre chose, ô Apôtres battus de la tempête en un petit esquif, puis que les lumières jumelles des beaux yeux de N. Seigneur, vous étaient voilées & voilées par le sommeil; Ipse vero dormiebat. Pour ce vous réclamez, Domine, salva nos, perimus. O monde, tu es une mer bouillante, orageuse, & périlleuse, & qui se peut sauver en tes écueils sans l’aide spéciale de Dieu ? Je vous vais faire voir, mes auditeurs très-aimés, 1. comme le monde est une mer, 2. de vanité, 3. de cupidité, 4. de volupté, sans m’éloigner des rapports de la marine. Comme le Soleil parcourt diverses mansions, & passe plusieurs signes de son Zodiaque, de différentes formes, qualités, & tempéraments, sans toutefois s’écarter tant soit peu de sa ligne ecclyptique: ainsi désirai-je me conduire en sorte par les parties de ce discours, que je ne face aucun essor des convenances du Monde avec la Mer. Et comme ceste même mer appellée mare caeruleum par les Poètes, change de couleurs, comme le col d’une colombe, sans muer en rien la substance de ses ondes, sur ces mêmes flots nous diversifierons nos conceptions. Ainsi d’un même bois on peut faire différentes statues, & une même statue, & de pareille matière, peut avoir des membres dissemblables en leur forme, & pareils en leur fonds.” JeanPierre Camus, Homélie pour le quatrième dimanche après l’Épiphanie, ou Sermon De la Mer du Monde (Les Homélies dominicales de Messire Jean Pierre Camus [Lyon: Rigaud, 1623], 81–82). 52. See what Marc Fumaroli writes about Le Moyne’s wit: “Les “mots” (la mise en œuvre éloquente d’un savoir clos et reçu) l’emportent sur les “choses” (l’énoncé d’un savoir critique)” (“Pascal et la tradition rhétorique gallicane,” 364). 53. See Fumaroli, “Pascal et la tradition rhétorique gallicane,” 364. 54. In Christian theology, kenosis (from the Grek κένωσις, kénōsis, lit. “the act of emptying”) refers to the renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the Incarnation. For those preachers trying to imitate this depletion in their own discourse, such a selfemptying allows for a superior power, in a typically Paulinian paradox (“My weakness is my strength”). 55. “voilà notre manière de prêcher : avec un discours commun, tout bonnement, dans la simplicité, familièrement. Il faut, Messieurs, pour prêcher en apôtre, c’est-à-dire pour bien prêcher et utilement, il faut y aller dans la simplicité, avec un discours familier, de sorte qu’un chacun puisse entendre et en faire son profit. (. . .) Il est bien certain que, pour bien

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   661 convaincre et gagner l'esprit de l'homme, il faut agir dans la simplicité ; l'on ne vient pas à bout, d'ordinaire, par les beaux discours d'apparat, qui crient haut, font grand bruit, et voilà tout. Tous ces beaux discours étudiés ne font ordinairement qu'émouvoir la partie inférieure. [. . .] Et tous ces mouvements de la partie inférieure ne font rien, si l'entendement n'est convaincu ; si la raison ne le touche au doigt, tout le reste passe bientôt, passe bientôt, et le discours demeure inutile. Vive donc la simplicité!” Vincent de Paul, Conférence du 20 août 1655 sur la méthode à suivre dans les prédications dans Correspondance, Entretiens, Documents, éd. P. Coste (Paris: Gabalda, 1920), 286. 56. Vincent de Paul: “le Fils de Dieu, qui était la parole et la sagesse éternelle, a voulu traiter la hauteur de ses mystères avec des façons de parler basses en apparence, communes et familières.” Conférence du 20 août 1655, 265; Bossuet, “mes discours sont forts parce qu'ils sont simples ; c'est leur simplicité innocente qui a confondu la sagesse humaine.” And “La chair qu'il a prise a été infirme, la parole qui le prêche est simple.” (Bossuet, Panégyrique de saint Paul). 57. “C’est un ballet de Sybarite plutôt qu’une guerre sainte contre les ennemis jurés de notre salut. Tout l’appareil n’est qu’un choix de belles paroles mises en cadence, avec un ramas de petites antithèses d’ordinaire froides et forcées, comme si l’on n’avait songé qu’à composer des épigrammes et des sonnets.” Louis Thomassin, Traité de l’éloquence chrétienne (Paris: Antoine Padelou, 1654), 37. See also ibid., p. 47: “Que l’éloquence à la mode porte le désordre partout.—Au lieu d’un corps solide, ils n’embrassent qu’une (sic) fantôme, et plus ils pensent l’étreindre, plus il s’enfuit.” 58. On the idea of naturel defined by Méré, amongst others, as an aesthetic, social and moral value carrying on the Renaissance ideal of grace, see Bernard Tocanne, L’Idée de nature en France dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIe siècle: contribution à l’histoire de la pensée classique(Paris: Klincksieck, 1978); See Laurent Susini, La Colombe et le Serpent. L’insinuation convertie: Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon (Paris: Garnier, 2019). The antithesis affectation vs naturel is at the very core of the opposition between what will be called French classicism and baroque. See Renate Baader, “La polémique anti-baroque dans la doctrine classique,” Baroque 6 (1973), http://baroque.revues.org/429, 4. 59. “Plût à Dieu que tous nos prédicateurs eussent une idée de notre éloquence chrétienne aussi haute et aussi grave que celle que ces auteurs païens ont tâché de nous donner de l’éloquence, qu’ils nous ont enseignée. Nous n’aurions pas le déplaisir d’entendre profaner la parole de Dieu par des descriptions de bagatelles, par des similitudes aussi inutiles que pompeuses, par des jeux de paroles, par des allusions froides, par des interprétations ridicules de l’Écriture, par cent autres choses encore plus indignes.” Marc-Antoine de Foix, L’Art de prêcher la parole de Dieu, contenant les règles de l’éloquence chrétienne (Paris: André Pralard, 1687), 22–23. Foix presents this book as a result of a long inquiry over years. This inquiry was probably first aimed at preparing lectures that were then organized into a textbook for Albi seminarians. 60. “N’y a-t-il pas de quoi s’indigner encore plus justement contre des gens qui ont assez de bon sens et assez de capacité pour prêcher des choses raisonnables, et qui ne laissent pas de prêcher des extravagances, que l’on appelle concetti ? On les débite en chaire comme des subtilités ingénieuses, et on les rapporte dans les conversations, comme des folies très ridicules. Il est encore plus étrange que l’on ne s’avise pas que des faussetés si visibles ne peuvent que rebuter infiniment la créance des auditeurs, et ruiner entièrement l’autorité du prédicateur. J’ajoute aux faussetés qui sautent aux yeux, les hyperboles excessives, que l’usage n’a pas encore suffisamment adoucies.” de Foix, L’Art de prêcher la parole de Dieu, 159–160.

662   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 61. de Foix, L’Art de prêcher la parole de Dieu, 414–415. 62. de Foix, L’Art de prêcher la parole de Dieu, 449–450. 63. See Bernard Dompnier, “Les cérémonies, la piété et la culture,” 593–594. 64. See Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence, 420; and Jean Marmier, “Les Provinciales, œuvre antibaroque,” dans Mélanges Lebègue (Paris: Nizet, 1969), 215–216. 65. See Franck  J.  Warnke, Versions of the Baroque. European Literature in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972 from its very first page; Mary Julie Maggioni, The Pensées of Pascal. A Study in Baroque style (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1950); Pierrette Fourcade-Guillaume, “Quelques aspects du baroque dans les fragments pour l’Apologie de Pascal,” Baroque 6 (1973), http://baroque. revues.org/426. 66. Jean Mesnard, “Baroque, Science et religion chez Pascal,” Baroque, no. 7 (1974): 78. 67. See Gérard Ferreyrolles, Les Reines du monde. L’imagination et la coutume chez Pascal (Paris: H. Champion, 1995), 225. 68. Ferreyrolles, Les Reines du monde, 226. 69. See Fumaroli, “Rhétorique d’école et rhétorique adulte,” 44. 70. Voir Sophie Hache, La Langue du Ciel. Le sublime en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: H. Champion, 2000), 247. 7 1. Deborah Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric. . ., p. 173. 72. See, in particular, Hélène Merlin-Kajman, L’Absolutisme dans les lettres et la théorie des deux corps : passions et politique (Paris, Honoré Champion, 2000); La Langue est-elle fasciste ? Langue, pouvoir, enseignement (Paris: Seuil, 2003); and “Un siècle classico-baroque ?,” XVIIe Siècle, no. 223 (2004/2): 163–172.

Further Reading Bayley, Peter. French Pulpit Oratory, 1598–1650. A Study in Themes and Styles, with a Descriptive Catalogue of Printed Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Bayley, Peter. Selected Sermons of the French Baroque (1600–1650), New York: Garland, 1983. Clément, Michèle. Une poétique de crise: Poètes baroques et mystiques (1570–1660), Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996. Fumaroli, Marc. “Pascal et la tradition rhétorique gallicane.” In Méthodes chez Pascal. Edited by J. Mesnard, 359–372. Paris: PUF, 1979. Hammond, Nicholas, and Michael Moriarty, eds. Evocations of Eloquence: Rhetoric, Literature and Religion in Early Modern France. Essays in Honour of Peter Bayley. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Houdard, Sophie, “Humanisme dévot et ‘histoire littéraire’,” In Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des Guerres de Religion jusqu’à nos jours., vol. I. Edited by H. Bremond, 21–51. Grenoble: France: Jérôme Millon, 2006. Merlin-Kajman, Hélène. L’Absolutisme dans les lettres et la théorie des deux corps : Passions et politique Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000. Merlin-Kajman, Hélène. La Langue est-elle fasciste ? Langue, pouvoir, enseignement Paris: Seuil, 2003. Merlin-Kajman, Hélène. “Un siècle Classico-Baroque?,” XVIIe Siècle 2, no. 223 (2004): 163–172. Normand, Corrie  E. Humanist Taste and Franciscan Values: Cornelio Musso and Catholic Preaching in Sixteenth-Century Italy. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

is there a baroque style of preaching in early modern france?   663 Parish, Richard. Catholic Particularity in Seventeenth-Century French Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Reguig, Delphine. Le Corps des idées: pensées et poétiques du langage dans l’augustinisme de Port-Royal (Arnauld, Nicole, Pascal, Mme de Lafayette, Racine). Paris: H. Champion, 2007. Shuger, Deborah. Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Van Eijnatten, Joris, ed. Preaching, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Worcester, Thomas. “The Catholic Sermon.” In Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Edited by Larissa Taylor, 3–34. Boston: Brill, 2011.

pa rt I I I

S O C I ET Y, I NST I T U T IONS , A N D PR AC T IC E S

chapter 30

Pr ay er, M editation, a n d R etr e at Mette Birkedal Bruun

Withdrawal from the world is a principal trait of baroque devotion.1 Everywhere sounds the call for withdrawal, be it perpetual or for a moment, and it is answered by monks, nuns, clergy, and lay people. Across confessions, early modern believers are encouraged to withdraw: sometimes into religious institutions, often into their chamber, and always into regular moments of prayer. The aim is the rehearsal of an inner zeal that enables them to turn to God with undivided attention. Sincerity is key, and the depths of the heart are evoked as the principal site of the encounter with God. This intense focus on the interior comes with elaborate pondering of ways in which inner motions can be expressed in or incited by exterior acts, things, and places. Inherently a matter of spiritual instruction and devotional practice, the urge to separate from the world in mind and lifestyle thus has corporeal, material, sociological, and spatial implications. The impetus to withdraw straddles boundaries that are otherwise manifest. A devout German aristocrat of Lutheran mold might savor French Catholic books on the topic as part of her cultural and religious horizon.2 Seventeenth-century France, our focus, saw an influx from the south of devotional trends linked to withdrawal, imported by way of the ubiquitous works of Theresa of Avila, the Dominican Louis of Grenada, and the Jesuit Alonso Rodriguez as well as in propagators of the Tridentine ethos such as Carlo Borromeo. Monastic inspiration for withdrawal from the world entered France with the Carmelites, the Theatines, and other originally foreign orders. From the north had blown the winds of the devotio moderna, bringing with it ideals of withdrawal in the shape of lay traditions and books fitted to support it, above all the Imitatio Christi.3 The particular French versions of withdrawal modulate such stimuli so that they suit the common believer who is embedded in the liturgical and sacramental program of his or her parish church, and inspired by devout manuals and edifying pictures of variegated quality: from crude prints sold by street hawkers to theologically refined works of art. Theirs is a world where rural priests are spurred on by reform-minded bishops,

668   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque and the devout upper crust, not least, are censured and titillated by preachers well-versed in pious eloquence. While monastic existence represents a life form of its own, many people in the upper strata are associated with abbeys in different ways: offices as commendatory superiors are sold and inherited, and some abbots and, to a lesser extent, abbesses roam the elite circles, brushing shoulders with diplomats and cultural figureheads; many people have family members who have professed religious vows, and many families have ancient, perhaps feudal, ties to particular monastic institutions.4 Thus, the call for withdrawal from the world cannot be separated from issues related to societal structures, aesthetics, and style: nor can it be reduced to just that.

Prayer and Meditation in the Baroque Prayer is an address to God. Set in the key of praise, gratitude, and contrition, prayer expresses a need or desire, expressed in vocal or silent pleas for grace. It is ideally the state in which the early modern believer constantly finds themself, but it is also a discipline, designed to foster pious action and self-mastery.5 Religious opinion of the grand siècle engages in a century-long and intense debate on prayer and its forms, and the era teems with instructions, expositions, and disputes regarding the invocation of the divine. At its opening, the directions of François de Sales (1567–1622) lay down the tenets of orthodoxy: at its close, any form of prayer tinged with mysticism is met with suspicions of “Quietism,” the umbrella term for a devotional tendency that was deemed akin to the mystical teachings, condemned by the Pope in 1687, of Miguel de Molinos (1628–1696). This chapter does not pretend to trace that chronological development, but pursues key motifs that run like red, if twirling, threads through seventeenth-century French devotion.6 Grand siècle notions of prayer retrieve two New Testament commands. On the one hand, they repeat the directive of 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to “pray without ceasing,” requiring the entire human life to be endless prayer;7 on the other hand, they describe prayer as a specific act, linked to particular moments of the day and epitomized in the Paternoster (Matt. 6:5–14). The two instructions are not mutually exclusive; rather the unceasing prayer is the disposition needed to secure the state of mind that will support particular prayers and help their efficacy. The general idea is that prayer is the locus of the union with God. This is a privileged place, but one that should, ideally, be sought again and again throughout the day at fixed hours as well as on any given occasion. All walks of life are obliged to pray. Priests administer the official prayers of the Church in a liturgy which is understood as a perpetual prayer;8 monks and nuns dedicate their lives to intercession on behalf of named and anonymous sinners in the world, thus buttressing societal well-being.9 The laity’s program is at once associated with the official liturgy and a distinct personal practice which consummates the individual commitment

prayer, meditation, and retreat   669 to the common liturgical service.10 Manuals such as the Jesuit Jean Suffren’s four-volume L’année chrestienne (1640–1641) lay out a cycle of devotion that follows the liturgical year, but is interlaced with particular subthemes fit for private meditation. The injunction to pray generates a multitude of texts. They emerge from all areas of the religious landscape and come in diverse genres. There are subtle theological expositions such as the Oratorian Jean-Jacques Olier’s Catéchisme chrétien pour la vie intérieure (1656) and devotional bestsellers such as the popular practical handbook Les exercices du chrestien intérieur (1664), the substantial tenth exercise of which is dedicated to prayer and promises its readers that it will enable them to carry out parfaitement both vocal and mental prayer. Some manuals such as Antoine Godeau’s Instructions et Prières chrétiennes pour toutes sortes de personnes (1646) and Pierre Le Moyne’s Dévotion aisée (1652) are keen to stress that a program of prayer and meditation need not be too taxing, but overall instructions teach and demand earnest absorption, albeit in different veins. The Jesuits pick up and amplify the legacy of Ignatius of Loyola, and in their works, prayer is closely linked to spiritual exercises as a central component of the Christian life, spelled out in such works as Jean-Baptiste Saint-Jure’s Méditations sur les plus grandes et les plus importantes vérités de la foi (1642) and Jérôme de Gonnelieu, Les exercices de la vie intérieure ou l’esprit intérieur dont on anime ses actions durant le jour (1684). They specialize in practices suited to a life at court with its blend of a full social round and the materially carefree leisure which comes with a risk of diabolic tedium. Also, at the other end of the spectrum, at the Abbey of Port-Royal, with its stern revival of an Augustinian focus on sin and its keen sense of the ever-looming danger of lukewarm devotion, is prayer pondered. The gardener and doctor of Port-Royal, Jean Hamon, dedicates a bulky treatise to the integration of prayer and work as the key means to securing the ideal state of perpetual prayer. He encourages his readers to keep not only their hands, but also their souls busy after the model of the desert fathers.11 Publications associated with Port-Royal also discuss the potential benefits of the terse prayer recommended by the Rule of Benedict over against a more elaborate oraison mentale. Examples are Antoine Singlin’s Instructions chrétiennes sur les mystères de Notre Seigneur (1644), Angélique de Saint-Jean’s Constitutions du monastère de Port-Royal, Ch. 8 (1665), and Pierre Nicole’s anti-mystical Traité de l’oraison (1679) that appears in an anti-Quietist revision as Traité de la prière in 1695.12 Early modern prayer is rooted in ancient traditions. In its structure, it follows the pulse of “the Office,” the canonical hours and their daily program of seven liturgical prayers, centering on the Old Testament Psalms, interlaced with biblical readings and expositions, responsories, and hymns. Such liturgical services hark back to the first centuries of the Christian Church, from where they move into Cathedral services and are institutionalized, above all, in the liturgical program, the Opus Dei, of Benedictine monasticism. It passes into early modern religious culture via monastic institutions and medieval lay devotion revolving around the Book of Hours: a personalized devotional handbook with Bible texts and prayers, often richly decorated.13 In its meditative drift, the prayer of seventeenth-century believers owes much to the Christocentric reflections of the devotio moderna and similar traditions intent on focused and imaginative meditation

670   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque on Christ’s life and passion. The Office remains a vital component of monastic prayer where monks and nuns are to let their hearts be shaped by the Psalmist’s words, aided by the affectual impact of music, but this kind of prayer resonates among lay people too in a host of translations and individualized versions of the Book of Psalms, the words of which are seen as a vocalization of the core experience of the Christian believer in its broad array of different moods: sorrow, doubt, hope, triumph, obedience, and so forth.14 The prayer instructions center on the three primary forms. The vocal prayer is the simplest and, according to the Capuchin d’Argentan, doable for everyman. It is stable and steady, defined as it is by the spoken word, but is not exactly heart-opening, and in this form of prayer, so d’Argentan, the believer addresses God like a servant his master. Mental or spiritual prayer is more demanding, but also more beneficial. While vocal prayer is comparable to the practice of virtues and charity done for a neighbor, mental prayer is more redolent of disengagement from the world. Since it is not limited to particular words, mental prayer is open to divine interaction, and it allows the soul to follow where God leads, thus establishing a more intimate relationship between God and soul, comparable to that of a friend with a friend or a bride with her groom.15 Finally, the brief and fervent verbal or mental oraison jaculatoire, akin to the desert fathers’ fiery prayer (oratio ignita), is considered ideal for turning the mind to God throughout the day.16 It is important to understand what prayer is not. Catechisms distinguish the correct form and object of prayer from superstitions and delusions. It is not licit, for instance, to pray for health, wealth, and success unless for the sake of God’s glory. Nor must prayer be confused with ancient practices deployed to preserve people from illnesses and loss of goods, for these are but diabolic traps. Instead, believers should pray for their neighbors, for God’s forgiveness of their sins, for a penitential spirit, for the grace to serve God, for Christian virtues, and for a good death. Prayers are not to be jabbered without dedication, and it is more important to say but one Paternoster and one Ave Maria a day with a sincere heart than to reel off prayers all day. For the broader community addressed in catechisms, prayers morning and evening, Sundays and Feast days are the required minimum.17 Meditation is a subgenre of the oraison mentale.18 It centers on topics of a narrative quality and invites the devout to imagine the figures involved in, say, Christ’s passion: their words, their acts, and their emotions. She who prays may contemplate, for example, the soldiers paralyzed by fear and Christ radiant as he exclaims that he has been given power over heaven and earth. Another meditative strategy is to conjure up similitudes and other figures that may give corporeal form to abstract thought.19 Such meditation enables the believer to wrap daily chores in pious ponderings, just as Catherine of Siena would transform the vilest tasks into pious deeds by way of meditation.20 Thus, getting dressed may readily be accompanied by saintly meditations on the prospect that death may strike this very day, or that there are needy people clad in rags who deserve one’s clothes better than oneself.21 Meals should turn the mind toward pious topics related to food, be they the salt and vinegar offered to Christ on the Cross; the thirst suffered by the rich man in Hell; or the lowly and vile quality of their food as well as its earthly origin

prayer, meditation, and retreat   671 and filthy end.22 Also the liturgical season offers topics fit for profound meditation in relation to otherwise mundane activities. Thus Advent, the period before Christmas, invites meditation on the Virgin and Christ in her womb, and when the believer dresses in the morning, it is appropriate for her to ponder how in the Virgin’s womb, Christ is dressed in our humanity, as in some poor garb; similarly, when the believer looks at himself in the mirror, he must meditate upon the fact that the Word incarnate is sometimes called a spotless mirror.23 Suffren devises a weekly program that takes the believer through the basics of doctrine in a meditative cycle. Such meditation could be organized around figures, themes, or particular divine graces such as the Trinity (Sunday), the Judgment (Monday), death (Wednesday), the Passion (Friday), and the Virgin (Saturday).24 Prayer requires a good technique, and manuals teach the drill. De Sales introduces “vne simple & briefue methode” for the oraison mentale; from the Carmelites emerges the Methode claire et facile pour bien faire Oraison Mentale (1650), and the Capuchin Paul de Lagny authors the Exercices methodiques de l’oraison mentale (1657). Another Capuchin, d’Argentan, defines prayer as the most sublime exercise because it enables the soul to soar above the body and speak to God face-to-face just like Moses; little wonder, then, that it requires rehearsal to reach expertise and that beginners must be particularly instructed.25 Not all instructions are licit, however, as shown by the evil fate of Mme de Guyon’s Moyen court et facile de faire oraison (1685), burdened as it was by charges of Quietism. De Sales’ instructions laid important groundwork and will serve as our guide to the ideal stages of prayer. According to de Sales, the believer must properly prepare herself, leading her spirit toward God and toward the topic that she wishes to meditate upon during prayer. First, she must bring herself into God’s presence and invoke his aid. Four expedients may help her entry into this presence, but should never be deployed all at once: the first is to recall God’s omnipresence; the second is to consider this presence specifically in the believer’s own heart and spirit as God is, indeed, the heart of her heart; the third is to visualize the Savior by way of simple imagination, as he looks down at the world, and especially the Christians, from heaven; and the fourth is simply to visualize the Savior in his humanity, close by and just as one would imagine a friend. Then follows the invocation which requires that she prostrate herself in profound reverence, recognizing her own unworthiness before a sovereign and pleading for his grace, for instance using brief and flaming words from the Psalter. Next to the twinned needs to assume a state of mental reverence and to beseech God’s grace, de Sales introduces a third element, akin to the Ignatian motif of the compositio loci, in which the believer identifies the topic she wishes to meditate upon and envisages its locale. For example, the person at prayer may imagine that she is on Mount Calvary during Christ’s passion. After these preparatory exercises follows the meditation proper, in which the believer moves her affection toward God. De Sales reminds his reader that this is a consideration distinct from study and other forms of pondering, and that its sole aim is to acquire virtue and love of God. At this stage, the one at prayer must enclose her spirit with the chosen topic and deploy her imagination. It may be necessary to visit several topics before finding the one that suits her mood, and de Sales compares this quest to a bee in

672   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque search of honey: just as, for bees, the first flower may be without yield, it may be necessary to search for a while before settling on a topic that is truly fruitful. The third part of the meditation concerns the affections & resolutions. At this stage, the meditation will ideally fill the will or the affective part of the soul with good motions: love of God and neighbor, desire for Paradise and zeal for salvation of souls, imitation of the life of Christ, compassion, admiration, fear of the loss of God’s grace, judgment, hell, and so forth. Good affections, however, are useless unless accompanied by quite succinct resolutions, for example, not to allow oneself to be upset by harsh words spoken by this or that neighbor or servant. The prayer is manifested in action when the devout imitates Christ’s goodness, mercy, death, and virtue in return for God’s goodness and mercy, and this translation from the ideal into the actual hinges on prayer. The practical outcome is vital, and in order to secure that meditation proceeds into deeds, de Sales recommends that mental prayer be closed with a supplication that God may give his grace, the virtues of his son, and his blessing of the affections and resolutions, so that they may be faithfully lived out. Broadening the outlook, conclusion comes with prayers for the Church, for priests, parents, and friends. Loyal to his project of offering a practical vademecum, de Sales advises that the devout must take from her meditation a selection of particularly edifying insights in the same way that one would bring a few flowers from a walk in a garden to retain their fragrance for the remainder of the day.26 The basic tenor of de Sales’s elaborate program resurfaces in various molds: from Olier’s theologically sophisticated exposition of self-annihilation as the precondition for and basic ambiance of prayer27 to the laconic counsel found in the broader catechetical instruction that the believer gather herself before the prayer and ban any distraction meanwhile.28

Retreat Prayer is the means and end of separation from the world. Seclusion in mind and, perhaps, body from worldly sin and divedrsion reinforces the undivided attention required by a jealous God. Retraite is an act and a place, and “separation from the affairs of the world during a certain period in order dedicate oneself to piousness” and “house, lodging” are two of the meanings given for “retraitte” in Furetière’s Dictionnaire (1690). Pious authors ponder the way in which a particular place or act of retreat may sustain the desired penitential zeal and concentration that is to permeate prayer as deed and mindset. The location enhances devotional focus. Not all retreats are religious, but here we center on those that are.29 Solitude is key. Away from the world, God’s grace is felt more keenly, avers the best-selling Le Chrestien interieur;30 away from the world, one’s own insufficiency is felt more acutely, retorts the Port-Royalist Pierre Nicole: “No matter how we try to occupy ourselves with ourselves in solitude, the images that we form of ourselves there are infinitely more somber than those aided by exterior objects.”31 The discourse of retreat into solitude latches on to the tradition of the desert as a place

prayer, meditation, and retreat   673 preeminently suited for devotional absorption.32 The desert has equal appeal to professed and lay believers of a certain type. An identification as solitaire becomes a badge of honor within austere monasticism, but Arnauld d’Andilly’s translations of the lives of desert fathers and mothers (1647) also disseminate religious expertise to a broader audience, and individual desert-dwellers provide devotional material for a pious public: translations of Dorotheus of Gaza’s instructions, Cassian’s Collationes, and the œuvre of Basil the Great feature in the libraries of devout aristocrats.33 From Antwerp, Maarten de Vos (1532–1603) and his collaborators had churned out 132 portraits of desert saints; the ideal is taken up by the Sadeler brothers, Johannes and Raphael, in a series of print collections that features model solitaires in an almost infinitude of variations of the ideal of desert retreat and its contemplative and ascetic implications.34 The wilderness is en vogue. Mme de Sévigné attests to an intense, even romantic, interest in the desert fathers;35 Anne d’Autriche has her apartment at the Val-de-Grâce adorned with desert scenes;36 and at the Hôtel de Guise, Mademoiselle de Guise fits out a set of rooms, the Apartemens des hermites, graced with panels with desert motifs. Walls reinforce retreat. Reform-minded bishops establish foundations where priests can withdraw for spiritual revitalization, and abbeys are sought out for retreats by clergy and lay people. Monks and nuns are considered experts of retreat, and lay believers are advised to seek their counsel;37 houses such as the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe and the Carmelite convent in the Faubourg St Jacques have a particularly saintly luster in the devotional lore, and the Jesuit Louis le Valoir recommends the Jesuit house in the Parisian area of St Germain for retreats, given its quiet location.38 Those who have the means partake for a while in the cloistered life as associates and spectators, and their published accounts enable others to share the genuine experience by proxy. If Claude Lancelot’s descriptions of La Grande Chartreuse, the center of the highly secluded Carthusian Order, which was enfolded in the account of his 1668 journey to the town of Aleth and addressed to the nun Angélique de St Jean Arnauld, provides an example aimed at a restricted audience of Port-Royalist inclination,39 the handy format and wide circulation of Félibien des Avaux’s report of his 1670 visit to the abbey of La Trappe, complete with a map of the precinct, indicate that its detailed portrayal of the seclusion of the Trappist monks served as a broader devotional inspiration fit for private meditation.40 Domestic space offers its own set of locales fit for withdrawal. Early modern believers abide by the New Testament command that prayer is best done behind closed doors. Matthew 6:6 has Jesus instruct that “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”41 Devout aristocrats furnish their palaces with chapels equipped to accommodate the entire household for the daily prayers that a master or mistress of a household owes to the souls in his or her care.42 As regards the attention to their own souls, these masters and mistresses have cabinets suited for private prayer throughout the day, elaborately fitted with pious artifacts and ornamentation.43 Where such spatial luxury is not at hand, a slightly withdrawn place will do.44 Contemporary hagiography ascribes monastic qualities to dedicated domestic devotion, and it becomes common to identify the home of pious models as a “little abbey.”45

674   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Robust spatial seclusion is not imperative, however. François de Sales and others set a fundamental tenor for the grand siècle notion of retreat with the view that monastic profession is not the only valid form of withdrawal and the cloister not the only solitude. In Introduction à la vie devote, de Sales explains to his addressee Philothée that she does not have to emulate Mary of Egypt, Antony, Arsenius, or the other desert saints. Indeed, a brief retreat into her chamber or her garden, but above all into her heart, is the proper point of departure for a recreation of her soul by saintly musing or edifying reading.46 Twinned with de Sales’s Introduction appear Antoine de Nervèze’s Le Iardin sacré de l’Ame solitaire (1602) and L’Hermitage de l’Isle saincte (1612) which merge pastoral idyll, penitential profundity, and meditative allegory. While the first proposes a set of meditations on the love of God, that the soul may engage in the garden of her thoughts, in the shade of the trees of her meditations, the second follows the oscillation of the protagonist soul between world and solitude, staged at sites such as a pastorally tinged desert, the ominous Palais du monde, and the foot of the cross. Eventually, inspired by the penitential model of Mary Magdalen, the soul takes up the cross and follows Christ in the solitude of the desert, there to assume a spiritual life of penitence. Even when such abstract spaces clad in concrete words are not evoked, however, the language is spatial whether the locus be material or spiritual, and believers who prepare for meditation are encouraged to entrer a certain spirit.47 Many authors follow de Sales and describe solitude as an interior quality rather than an actual location. This drift makes for a republication of the Solitude interieure (1643) by the “hermit preacher” Hubert Jaspart, even though, as the Avis of the 1695 edition states, it is clear from the awkward style that the author is but a Fleming trying to write in French. Jaspart’s work is originally penned under the shadow of the throes of the Thirty Years’ War, but its message accords well with the general temper of the latter half of the seventeenth century that has grown accustomed to the close association of solitude with sincere devotion, and the Solitude interieure dans laquelle le solitaire fidèle, comme aussi tout Chrestien [. . .] trouvera le moyen d’estre, vivre, mourir et operer en Dieu (1678/1685) enjoys some success. The principal locus of spiritual withdrawal is the depths of the heart and in France, as elsewhere, the interest in the inner religious dynamic makes for a detailed mapping of the heart as a site of devotion as writers and printmakers expound and exhibit the vital spiritual activities that happen there.48 The entries into these depths are multifarious, and we have already met some of the meditative paths. For a Port-Royalist such as Hamon, however, contempt for the world rather than contemplative absorption is the key resource for turning to this inner refuge and to the perpetual sacrifice of prayer on the heart’s altar.49 Retreat may spell radicalism, but we center on common norms.50 The act of retreat is prescribed in devotional manuals, complete with spiritual exercises and prayers. Programs of withdrawal of a week or ten days may be performed in one’s daily surroundings or relocated to a particularly secluded place, be it a rural mansion or an abbey. Some manuals target particular audiences: the Jesuit François Guilloré meant to address several groups, but settles for ladies in the world and in the cloister in his Retraite pour les dames (1684). Another Jesuit, Louis le Valoir, fulfils the comprehensive ambition, and

prayer, meditation, and retreat   675 in his Lettres sur la necessité de la retraite (1682) he details how different estates may benefit from retreat: priests may acquire insight and manifest the separation from the world that is ordered by their ordination, but not always obeyed; magistrates may consider themselves too busy for retreat, but they may in fact benefit the public by withdrawing for a while—did not Moses learn, during a forty-day withdrawal into the desert, how to govern his people and the substance of the laws he was to impose; did he not acquire discernment and the temperament necessary to administer justice? Magistrates may well achieve during an eight-day retreat what Moses achieved in forty. As for men of the sword, the solid devotion augmented by retreat will improve both their courage and their fortune in war; a lady of the world is bound to fall into sin and will be helped in her conversion by retreat; finally, a lady engaged in charitable works may well be so preoccupied with action that she neglects her interior welfare and her prayers; she too will benefit from retreat. Yet another Jesuit, Suffren, encourages his readers to spend ten days each year going through Ignatius’s spiritual exercises; if people do not have ten days at their disposal, an abbreviated version will suffice.51 In the Pédagogue des familles chrestiennes (1662), aimed at educating the Parisian clergy and their parishioners, Simon Cerné of the seminary of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet dictates that the devout reader should retreat for some days each year “in order to achieve a renewed fervor and in order to commit himself, more than usually, to mental prayer.”52 Retreats may readily be deployed for a specific meditation, and death is a favorite topic. Suffren teaches his readers to dedicate each new month to a renewal of their orientation to God, viewing this particular month as the last of their life, and beginning it with a careful evaluation of the last.53 D’Argentan enjoins his readers to set aside three days each month dedicated to the deeds required for the good death, to perform them as if death were imminent, and to add to this some days of meditation on the death of Christ. Ideally, they should also perform an annual retreat of eight or ten days; this, in the Capuchin’s words, would last only a short while when practiced, but last all their life in its effects.54 The Oratorian and eventually Jansenist luminary Pasquier Quesnel’s Le bonheur de la mort chrétienne: Retraite de huit jours (1689) is paradigmatic in its rehearsal of retreat as an exercise that should be used to strengthen the believer in the particular devotional discipline of the good death. Not all retreats are quite as penitential as the manuals decree. In an undated letter to his fellow poet Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654), Antoine Godeau (1605–1672), Bishop of Vence, comments on Balzac’s retreat to the Capuchin abbey at Angoulême where Balzac eventually died. The letter has the character of a public statement; the tone is light and literary, and the notion of retreat none too austere; it also hints at the challenges faced by monks and nuns when lodging lay guests who were seemingly intent on sharing monastic isolation:55 “I have heard about the retreat you have made into the abbey of the Capuchins in Angoulême. With you, however, the French and Latin muses, rhetoric, ethics, public affairs, and eloquence have retreated too. I do not know what dispensation the good fathers have been granted for their reception of so many virgins, and how they will accommodate them in their dormitory.”56

676   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque “But let’s be serious,” the bishop admonishes, “in the cloister one is definitely more likely to meet penitence and solitude, which are two faithful companions and two certain guides for the journey into the next world.”57 Having reminded his correspondent that age comes with regrets over past sins, Godeau congratulates Balzac on his new form of life: “A complete solitude was not suitable for you, and much company was risky; thus you have wisely chosen a life that has the sweetness of the one, but is without the harassment of the other. You will be a hermit in the cell that you have had built and you will have the innocent pleasure of saintly society in the company of your hosts. [. . .] You will be, so to speak, halfway to heaven, and there you will commune through prayer.”58

Instruments of Prayer and Meditation Exercises and gestures aid concentration and support imitation of Christ. Corporeal engagement sustains the pious mind; for example, the ideal morning program demands that as soon as the believer is decently clad, she must cross herself with blessed water, kneel, and turn if not her body then at least her mind in the direction of the parish church.59 Devotional objects, some of them lavishly ornamented, are also considered a means to heighten devotional sensitivity60—when they are not regarded with skepticism as mere outward paraphernalia obstructing profound sincerity.61 Chapels and devotional cabinets are furnished with prie-Dieus, crucifixes, images, chandeliers, stools, cushions, vases, statuettes, and reliquaries; add to this the paramentiques pertaining to the celebration of Mass: altar cloths, chasubles, stoles, chalices, patens, chalice veils, and so forth.62 Devotional images help to center prayer and to train the meditative capacity,63 and catechisms prescribe that morning prayers be performed before images of Christ, the Virgin, or a Saint,64 thus putting in devotional perspective the wealth of pious pictures of uncertain quality. Books and rosaries are portable devotional aids. Prayer books and other texts that are deemed particularly edifying, appear in pocket formats, and thus offer a convenient material entry into solitude. Catechisms encourage believers to keep their rosary to hand at all times in order to focus their prayer.65 Instruments of devotion, however, also come in grander formats, and Cerné reminds his readers how the tolling of the church bell helps the devout to turn his mind to God throughout the day. Thus, the three strikes—morning, noon, and evening—prompts him to say particular prayers, and each hour when the bell strikes, the believer is to cross himself, pleading to God for the grace never to offend him.66 Some resort to harsher means. D’Argentan, for one, recommends his reader to consider the benefits of a severe regime. Fasting on bread and water may enhance the effects of retreat, since a body made feeble by fasting leaves more strength for the soul to apply herself to prayer. Those who have made a profession of devotion, whether monastic or otherwise, are familiar, claims d’Argentan, with cilices, hair shirts, iron chains, and

prayer, meditation, and retreat   677 whips, and they know that with such arms they may conquer their passions and vices. Such tools may well be useful to others too, but must be deployed with discretion and under the watchful eye of a sage director able to instill the necessary moderation.67 The Good Friday devotion, in particular, invites that meditation be supported with some form of corporeal austerity in imitation of the Lord’s suffering. The Jesuit Paul du Barry recommends that the devout fast on bread and water, flog himself, or don a cilice. He recalls that on Good Friday, Catherine of Siena would flog herself with chains three times during the day: each time for almost one hour and a half, and that Colombe de Riety, a Dominican nun, would wear a horsehair cilice. He concedes that this is harsh, but that compared to Christ’s suffering, it is hardly unbearable to endure, for one day, severe fasting, the pain of a hundred strokes with a whip made of silk strings, or the pricking of a cilice or a hair shirt for a mere twelve hours.68 Such instructions must always be seen in context. Letters give a more nuanced picture of the complexities of devotional life and show how spiritual directors’ instructions as to the proportion of prayer, withdrawal, and bodily hardship were dependent on the status, physical strength, and baggage of sin of the penitent. One such example is a letter of December 23, 1672, from the abbot of La Trappe, Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) to his old friend, the Bishop of Grenoble, Étienne Le Camus (1632–1707).69 The letter shows how the practice of prayer is embedded in an overall penitential regime and negotiated according to particular circumstances. The abbot admires the bishop’s plan of forgoing meat, but warns against it; it will be seen as a novelty, and guests will perceive it as want of hospitality; instead, Le Camus should concentrate on abandoning delicacies and superfluities. Nor should he discard his silverware since people expect to see silver on the episcopal table, but if his tapestries are magnificent, he should remove them at some point. Otherwise, Rancé encourages the bishop to follow the abbot’s own example of sleeping on a spiked mattress and wearing a hair shirt during Advent and Lent, and he advises that an hour of prayer each night is highly sanctifying, and probably necessary given Le Camus’s former life in the world. As Le Camus’s health wanes over the years, Rancé nudges his friend toward a more lenient regime, and in a letter of August 10, 1682, he recommends that the bishop eat two eggs a day as well as roots and vegetables and allow himself a drop of wine. Finally, in a letter of December 7, 1682, Rancé explains that although the Rule of Benedict does not leave time for sleep after the nocturnal office, Benedict would have condoned it in a situation such as that of Le Camus.70

Public Attention to Private Devotion Portraits of saints and other models immersed in prayer and meditation are powerful instruments of devotion. The pious figure embraced by God while absorbed in prayer conveys a foretaste of beatitude and a strong ideal fit for emulation, and the fleeting encounter between God and human has been explored throughout the Christian tradition. Since the first centuries of the Church, biblical commentators have expounded the

678   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque embrace of the bridegroom and the bride in the Song of Songs as a meeting between Christ and the Church, and later between Christ and the human soul, peering into the bridal chamber with exegetical glee. Since the early martyrs, hagiographers have portrayed active manifestations of human dedication to God; and since Augustine’s Confessiones pious men and, to a lesser extent, women have sought to describe their own intense and private meeting with the divine. Reflections upon meditation and observations of human beings at prayer are not new phenomena, but the religious temper of the grand siècle, with its Post-Tridentine drive for lay edification, its penchant for penitence, and its desire for the desert adds acuteness to the invitation to observe fellow-creatures immersed in prayer, that is, at the very moment when they are alone with God and closest to him. The grand siècle has its own variant of the ancient quest for the moment when God touches the human heart. It is intensified by the concern with the transience of all things worldly, the looming shadow of death, and the interest in things hidden. The Baroque era treasures zeal, and the baroque devout desires a peek into that solitude which is the place par excellence of the zealous soul. Judging from the wealth of texts and images dedicated to the motif, the age thirsts for portrayals of the meeting between God and the soul in solitude. Thus, vistas of retreats are conveyed in texts, images, and music; fictive doors are opened onto chapels and cabinets, intimate visions of meditative moments disseminated, allowing devout and curious alike a glimpse of withdrawn wonders. Such conjurations inspire emulation in their exhibition of the secluded intimacy between God and human being. Saints and biblical figures give corporeality to the ideal of withdrawal. For centuries, painters had portrayed the entry of divine grace into the Virgin’s chamber in often architecturally detailed Annunciations; grand siècle painters such as Philippe de Champaigne continue the tradition with less interest in the Virgin’s furniture and more in the illuminative force of the spirit.71 Old Testament prophets and hosts of desert saints rub shoulders in the wilderness; even when fierce Judith stands tall with the gory head of Holofernes as the conqueror of sin, the heroine’s erstwhile retreat to her prayer chamber, clad in widow’s weeds, blends in.72 Mary Magdalene is one of the withdrawn models most frequently exposed to scrutiny. Images revere her voluptuous penitence; texts delve into its devotional and theological facets; the tonalities of her lachrymose contrition are explored in musical works such as Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s (1643–1704) ninth meditation on the Leçons de Ténèbres de la Semaine Sainte (1692). Modern readers who wonder where piety stops and aesthetics begins likely miss the point, for the message lies in the attraction. Drawing the viewer or reader into the chamber or the grotto by means of exquisite music or figural form, such representations entice her to identify with the saint and abase herself with her before the crucifix as if feeling under her fingers the skull and its presage of death and vanity. A few examples will hint at the genre and allow us to revisit in context some themes treated above. In Les tableaux de la pénitence (1654), the aforementioned Antoine Godeau, Bishop of Vence, presents a collection of prints and ekphrastic commentaries that display biblical and historical models of penitence, ranging from Adam outside

prayer, meditation, and retreat   679 Paradise to the Emperor Theodosius humbling himself before Ambrose. In the preface, Godeau avows that the volume comes out of his ineffectual preaching in the church of the Oratory during the Lent of 1652. That was a time, Godeau reminisces, when, owing to the Fronde, Parisians ought to have been receptive to discourses on penitence, but the preacher admits that, although he had a great crowd of listeners, his exhortations did not bear the hoped-for fruit; instead, they evoked protest and mockery, luxuriousness continued, and his flock merely brazened themselves against God’s wrath. Thus, he has now resorted to a more palatable and flowery style73—and to images, we may add. Godeau’s chapter on Mary Magdalene captures in essence the desire for a peep into the site and mood of withdrawn meditation of one’s own sin and God’s grace. The bishop first describes and expounds the image of the saint, drawing his readers’ attention to each little detail with scattered injunctions to observe, regard, and consider (observez, voyez, considérez), but soon moves to the pièce de résistance, the grotto and its inhabitant, remarking that what most deserves to be considered with due attention is the cavern, which has been depicted so deftly that it enables the spectator to see everything that is in it. This vista allows Godeau to share his reader’s view of Magdalene, drawing particular attention to her hair that, although specked with dust, still bears the mark of beauty; her face that, although pale and dejected, radiates majesty; and the left hand that supports her head, and which, although painfully emaciated, is still admirably well-shaped. “Her eyes rest on a crucifix where hangs the Savior, and she looks at him with an anguished regard, which attests to the profound sadness that possesses her soul and to the extreme attention of her spirit fixed on the object she observes. [. . .] This is Magdalen the Penitent. A mortal painter has made the image of her rock [. . .]. But a spiritual painter whose brush has been divinely directed, makes an image of her person, of her conversion, and of her grace, which merits much more consideration.”74 The Bishop of Vence goes through Magdalene’s vita and conversion in colorful detail and eventually returns to the observer: “you look at this painting of a veritable penitence, but it is vital that it transforms itself into a mirror for you and that you consider yourself attentively in it in order to see whether there are any traits in which you are in the least like her.”75 Thus, it is revealed that the reader has been drawn into the privacy of Magdelene’s grotto by, we may assume, a blend of pious interest and aesthetic craving, to confront the inevitable and expected message that this is what he or she ought to be. Funeral sermons are a genre well suited to allow an undisturbed gaze at the devout believer absorbed in prayer. In his oration for Anne d’Autriche (1666), the popular preacher, later Bishop of Aire Jean-Louis de Fromentières (1632–1684) summons his audience to follow the late Queen Mother into her retreat, deploying the hint of voyeurism to suggestive effect. Having displayed the deceased conscientiously fulfilling her public pious obligations, Fromentières continues with a direct address to his audience, encouraging them to study the devout Queen Mother while she believes herself hidden and unobserved by anyone but God in her “secret solitude”: Enter into her oratory, follow her into the cloister and into her retreats, tiptoe up on her there, if you can, while divested of her court, that troublesome crowd, the

680   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque unavoidable servitude of grandeur, while she believes there are no longer any other eyes on her than those of her God as witness of her deeds, while, like another Judith, she has enclosed herself with at the most only saintly girls in the secret solitude that she has built for herself. [. . .] Then you will see that her soul demeans itself even more before God than her body; you will recognize that her spirit says more to God, then, than her mouth; and you will avow that her heart honors God a thousand times better than her lips. However, since so few have had the fortune to follow her into her blessed retreats, since our pious Queen, having fulfilled the obligation to set us an example pressed upon her by charity, obeyed her humility that compelled her to hide, since even the most dazzling splendor of this royal daughter was completely interior [. . .], I realize that to show you the astonishing sincerity of her piousness I will have to relate one or two particular characteristics that you will be able neither to reject, nor dislike.76

Here, the deceased Queen Mother becomes herself an object of meditation as the listeners, seeing but unseen, are invited to join her in her retreat. In the course of this passage, Fromentières ushers his audience into the physical retreat of Anne d’Autriche, evokes the comparative commonplace of the widowed Judith immersed in prayer in her retreat; he points to the unseen inner devotion as the site of the real action, and draws back again, out of the retreat, out of the meditation, and back into the funerary eulogy and its biographical norms. Just as Fromentières opens the Queen Mother’s retreat to a host of spectators, monastic retreats are made accessible to a broader public. We saw how visitors’ reports allow for armchair tours of prominent cloisters, but conversion stories of monks and nuns offer a closer glimpse of the inmates of these epitomes of retreat: of solitude personified. The biographer of Pierre le Nain, sub-prior of La Trappe conjures up before his readers the sight (spectacle) of his protagonist’s earnest entreaties: “What vision could be more edifying than watching this worthy figure at the foot of the Crucifix, annihilating himself before God, and pleading with zeal and with ardor, that he show favor to him on his dying day?”77 Also, the popular relations of Trappist monks are a veritable gallery of written images of individuals in prayer, each with his particular tenor. There is the intellectually frugal Dom Dorothée who has made Scripture the sole object of his meditation and who finds in this meditation the only nourishment required for his penitential exercises, to strengthen him against diabolic temptations, to light his path and preserve him from traps and, finally, to provide him with a boundless supply of all sorts of grace and benedictions.78 There is the confident recluse, Fr. Euthyme III who, toward the end of his life, is restricted to a chamber in the Infirmary. His abbot remembers how, “as I had once asked him if he was not irked by a solitude that strict, he answered, ‘my days are but brief, Father, I spend them, praying, reading, and working with my hands’.”79 Finally, there is Dom Bruno who is familiar with penitentially tearful absorption and who “never said Mass without being seen shedding tears. As for his prayer, it had all the qualities needed in order to be agreeable in God’s eyes, and in order to be open to him like a sacrifice of pleasant fragrance, [. . .] it was pure, fervent, assiduous, and always accompanied with the sentiment of compunction that never left him.”80

prayer, meditation, and retreat   681 Dom Bruno, however, also mastered the ceaseless prayer: “We must always pray and never stop. His devotion on this point, as on every other, was so exact that we never came near him without catching him in this saintly occupation; and it had become so habitual for him that he had constantly on his lips either Psalms, hymns, or regular prayers.”81 Such portraits complement the manuals. They show superior models fit to reflect the imperfection of the general believer, but also offer personified manifestations of the ideal. Not least, however, they are in themselves objects suited for prayerful meditation, inviting the form of contemplation that should eventually lead to resolution and pious praxis.

Epilogue Prayer serves to establish a connection between the soul and God. The baroque believer considers it an art which may be refined through method and instruction, enhanced by the proper place and the right state of mind, and augmented by devotional objects. Prayer forms the backbone of private devotion, and although sometimes discernible through word, gesture, or demeanor, its key actions are secretive, concerning only God and the individual. This secret communication remains a vehicle of aesthetic appeal and profound edification, equally treasured by artists and authors of devotional literature. The locus of this secrecy is a retreat that comes on many scales. The full physical withdrawal behind monastic walls is the archetype, and it remains revered and sought after by lay people for longer or shorter periods of time. However, the era also generates a myriad of devotional programs where everyday schedules are inlaid with moments of withdrawal designed to stack up so as to fit the ideal of a life led in perpetual prayer with the view firmly directed toward the good death. Baroque devotion abounds in contrasts. Generally, the ever-looming presence of death was to shape every moment of one’s life, and each living day was to be a preparation for the good death turned to Christ. Within this overall framework, variety flourished, and while severe choices were made by some religious figures, the common grand siècle believer did not necessarily have to choose between abstinence and ornamentation, retreat and worldly involvement, austere penitence and aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, sometimes ornamentation was seen as a remedy for abstinence, and retreat might better the quality of worldly involvement, just as the right form of aesthetic indulgence might foster penitence. The dynamic between visible and invisible is at the heart of the matter. This shows in three ways. Firstly, the private devotion that has been our key concern is a more secretive complement to the official liturgy, and it derives some of its understood strength by being just that: personal, private, and often tied to other spaces than the church. Secondly, the personsat prayer and in retreat seek the invisible source of divine grace in their withdrawn efforts, but in this quest are often aided by visual and material means such as books, images, rosaries, and crucifixes. Such artifacts, be they richly embellished

682   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque or quite simple, are considered paths to grace because they help the believer to turn away from the world and into the depths of the heart in prayer. Thirdly and finally, persons at prayer, be they saints, biblical figures, or people perceived as devout icons by the era, do themselves become visible tokens of invisible grace. Portrayed in texts, images, and music, they offer a material entry into the hidden depths of divine insight, but also become figures of identification in the endeavor to translate the insight gleaned in  withdrawn prayer into charitable action in the world. Thus, a call for devout engagement with the world often underlies baroque injunctions to prayer, meditation, and retreat.

Notes 1. The research underlying this chapter has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. It was carried out in relation with the collective project SOLITUDES: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long Seventeenth Century (2013–2017); I thank my colleagues at this project, especially Lars Nørgaard. This chapter also publishes fruits of research into the relationship between public and private devotion at the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies, housed at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. 2. See Blake Lee Spahr, “Sibylla Ursula and Her Books,” in Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of Essays on German Baroque Literature, ed. Spahr (Frankfurt am Main and Bern: Lang, 1981), 85–94; Alice Perrin-Marsol, Echanges culturels entre le royaume de France et le Saint-Empire: La présence française au sein de la bibliothèque de Wolfenbuttel au temps du duc Auguste (1579–1666) (Tours: Université François Rabelais, 2005), 76–146; see also Jennifer Hillman, Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 72. 3. The devotio moderna is a late medieval religious movement emanating from the Low Countries. It took hold among lay people and brought with it an ethos of sincere pious practice over and against theological erudition. 4. See Éric van der Schueren, Les sociétés et les déserts de l’âme dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Brussels: Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises, 2001). 5. See Christian Belin, La conversation intérieure: la méditation en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), 10. 6. For the equally central role of prayer in the Protestant tradition, see, for example, Ferdinand van Ingen and Cornelia Niekus Moore, eds., Gebetslitteratur der frühen Neuzeit als Hausfrömmigkeit: Funktionen und Formen in Deutschland und den Niederlanden (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz Verlag, 2001). 7. Pierre Nicole, Traité de l’oraison (Paris: H. Josset, 1679), 6–7. 8. Daniel-Odon Hurel and Simon Icard, eds., La prière continuelle au XVIIe siècle: Exégèse, Liturgie, mystique (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 11. 9. Armand-Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé, Requeste présentée au Roy par le Reverend Père Abbé de la Trappe (Paris: J. Langlois fils, 1673), 4. 10. See Frédéric Cousinié, Images et méditation au XVIIe siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 120. 11. Jean Hamon, “Traité de la priere continuelle, & premiérement de la priere dans le travail,” in Traitez de piété [1675] (Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1689), 2, 1–649.

prayer, meditation, and retreat   683 12. See Belin, La conversation intérieure, 132–139; see also Simon Icard, Port-Royal et Saint Bernard de Clairvaux (1608–1709) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010), 308–327; and Benedetta Papasogli, La mémoire du cœur au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 205–221. 13. See Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c.1400–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); see also Mette Birkedal Bruun, “Time Well Spent: Scheduling Private Devotion in Early Modern France,” in Managing Time: Literature and Devotion in Early Modern France, ed. Richard Maber and Joanna Barker (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), 35–68. 14. Taking the Psalms as an inspiration for prayer was by no means only a Catholic practice. Following Luther’s appraisal of the Psalter as a “little Bible” in his 2. Vorrede auf den Psalter (1528) and his injunction that it be one of the core elements of daily devotion, the Lutheran tradition abounded in Psalm collections as well as prayer and hymns based on the Psalter; see WA Deutsche Bibel 10/1 in D. Martin Luthers Werke [1956], ed. Ulrich Köpf (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2001), 98–99; for references, see, for example, Jill Bepler, “The Use of Prayer Books at Court: the Example of Wolfenbüttel,” in Gebetslitteratur der frühen Neuzeit als Hausfrömmigkeit: Funktionen und Formen in Deutschland und den Niederlanden, ed. Ferdinand van Ingen and Cornelia Niekus Moore (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz Verlag, 2001), 47–62; for British examples, see Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 2016); see also Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David  L.  Orvis, Psalms in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2011). 15. See Louis-François d’Argentan, Les exercices dv chrestien interievr, Où sont enseignées les pratiques pour conformer en toutes choses nostre interieure auec celuy de Iesus-Christ, & viure de sa vie, 2 vols. (Paris: Claude Cramoisy, 1664), 250–262. 16. See François de Sales, Introdvction a la vie devote [1609/1619] (Paris: l’imprimerie royale du Louvre, 1641), 108; d’Argentan, Les exercices dv chrestien interievr, 270; Felix III Vialart de Herse, l’Escole chretienne, ou l’on apprend a devenir bon Chretien, & à faire son salut [1660] (Châlons: Jacques Seneuze, 1670), 590; see also Agnès Égron, La prière de feu (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1995), 81–92. 17. See Vialart de Herse, l’Escole chretienne, 329–334, 339. 18. Again we are well-advised to keep in mind that prayer and meditation are not exclusive to the French religious universe, but rest at the heart of early modern devotion across confessions, and that, to mention but one example, works such as Johann Gerhard’s Meditationes Sacrae (1606) and its lesser known peers decisively flavored seventeenth-century Germanic devotion; see Johann Anselm Steiger, “Meditatio sacra: Zur theologie-, frömmigkeits- und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Relevanz der ‘Meditationes Sacrae’ (1606) Johann Gerhards,” in Meditation und Erinnerung in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Gerhard Kurz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2000), 37–56. 19. See Nicolas Caussin, La Covr sainte dv R. Pere Nicolas Cavssin, de la compagnie de Iesvs. Mise en vn bel ordre, avec une notable augmentation des personnes illustres de la Cour, tant du vieil que du nouueau Testament [1624], 2 vols. (Paris: Claude Sonnius, 1647) 1, 119. 20. See de Sales, Introdvction, 322. 21. See Simon Cerné, “Un Prestre du Seminaire de S. Nicolas dv Chardonnet,” Le pedagogve des familles chrestiennes. Contenant vn Recueil de plusieurs Instructions sur diuerses Matieres. [. . .] Vtiles aux Curez & autres Ecclesiastiques, pour s’aquiter de leur deuoir; Aux Chefs de Familles pour l’instruction de leurs Enfans & Domestiques, & à toutes sortes de Personnes qui veulent viure selon Dieu (Paris: Pierre de Bresche, 1662), 40.

684   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 22. See Jean Suffren, Advis et exercices spiritvels pour bien employer les iours, les semaines, les mois & les années de la vie [1642] (Paris: Claude Sonnius & Denis Bechet, 1646), 77–80 (79). 23. See Jean Suffren, L’année chrestienne ov Le sainct et profictable employ du temps pour gaigner l’Eternité: Où sont enseignées diuerses practiques & moyens pour sainctement s’occuper durant tout le cours de l’Année, conformement à l’ordre de l’année, inspiré par le S. Esprit à l’Eglise Chrestienne, 4 vols. (Paris: Claude Sonnius, 1640–1641), 2.1, 88. 24. Suffren, Advis et exercices spiritvels, 101. 25. See d’ Argentan, Les exercices dv chrestien interievr, 2, 245, 288. 26. See de Sales, Introdvction, 81–92; see also John D. Lyons, Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005). 27. Jean-Jacques Olier, Catéchisme chrestien pour la vie intérieure (Paris: Jacques Langlois and Emmanuel Langlois, 1657), chaps. 7–13. 28. See Vialart de Herse, l’Escole chretienne, 335. 29. See Bernard Beugnot, Loin du monde et du bruit: Le discours de la retraite au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Hermann Éditeurs, 2015); for Saint-Amant’s poetic appraisal of solitude, to mention but one non-religious form, see Michael Taormina, “Noble Selfhood and Saint-Amant’s Nature Poetry,” in Spaces of the Self in Early Modern Culture, ed. David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 134–150. 30. See Jean de Bernières, “Un solitaire,” Le Chrestien interievr, ou La conformité interievre, Que doivent avoir les Chrestiens avec Iesus-Christ [1661] (Lyon: Jean Goy, 1683), 242. 31. Pierre Nicole, Essais de Morale contenus en divers traités sur plusieurs devoirs importants [1671] (Paris: Guillaume Desprez and Jean Desessartz, 1714) 3, 9. 32. See Jean-Louis Quantin, “Paradoxes of Christian Solitude in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Early Modern Christianity 1, no. 2 (2014): 219–231. 33. See Marie-Ange Calvet-Sebasti, “La traduction française des Pères grecs,” in Les Pères de l’Église au XVIIe siècle, ed. Emmanuel Bury and Bernard Meunier (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1993), 337–354; see also Hillman, Female Piety and Mette Birkedal Bruun, “A Solitude of Permeable Boundaries: The Abbey of La Trappe between Isolation and Engagement,” in Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures, ed. Christine Göttler and Karl Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 451–479. 34. See Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, “Helenus and Dorotheus: Marten de Vos and the Desert Fathers,” in Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700, ed. Walter Melion, James Clifton, and Michel Weemans (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 423–448. 35. See Bruun, “A Solitude of Permeable Boundaries.” 36. See Anne Bertrand, Art and Politics in Counter-Reformation Paris: The Case of Philippe de Champaigne and his Patrons (1621–1674) (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2001), 263–338. 37. See de Bernières, Le Chrestien interievr, 240. 38. See Louis le Valoir, Lettres sur la necessité de la retraite & sur divers états de la vie; écrites à diverses personnes (Paris: Estienne Michallet, 1682), foreword. 39. Claude Lancelot, Rélation d’un voyage d’Aleth contenant des mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire de la Vie de Messire Nicolas Pavillon, Evêque d’Aleth, par Monsieur Lancelot (“En France”: Théophile Imprimeur, à la Vérité, s.d. 1733), 23–34. 40. André Félibien des Avaux, Description de l’abbaye de La Trappe (Paris: Frederic Léonard, Imprimeur ordinaire du Roy, 1671). 41. New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 42. Armand-Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé, Conduite chrétienne adressée à son Altesse Royalle Madame de Guise (Paris: Florentin and Pierre Delaulne, 1697), 47.

prayer, meditation, and retreat   685 43. Alain Mérot, Retraites mondaines: Aspects de la décoration intérieure à Paris, au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1990); see also Hillman, Female Piety, 74–78. For medieval antecedents of the private chapel, see Jeanne Nuechterlein, “The Domesticity of Sacred Space in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands,” in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 49–79. 44. Charles Gobinet, Instruction de la jeunesse en la pieté chrétienne. Tirée de l’Ecriture Sainte, & des Saints Peres [. . .] nouvelle edition [1665] (Paris: François le Cointe and Urban Coutelier, 1688), 161; see also Louis Henri de Gondrin, Catechisme ou instruction chrétienne pour le diocese de Sens (Sens: L. Prussurot, 1669), 41. 45. Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4; see also Françoise-Madeleine de Chaugy, Les vies de VIII. venerables veuves religieuses de l’ordre de la Visitation (Annecy: Jacques Clerc, 1659). 46. De Sales, Introdvction, 280; see also Lyons, Before Imagination, 77–80. 47. Pasquier Quesnel, Le bonheur de la mort chrétienne. Retraite de huit jours [1689] (Paris: H. Josset, 1693), 24. 48. Benedetta Papasogli, Le “fond du cœur”: figures de l’espace intérieur au XVIIe siècle (Paris:  Honoré Champion, 2000); see also Frédéric Cousinié, “The Mental Image in Representation: Jean Aumont, L’Ouverture intérieure du royaume de l’Agneau occis dans nos cœurs (1660),” in Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700, ed. Walter Melion, Ralph Dekoninck, and Agnes Guiderdoni-Bruslé (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 203–246. 49. Jean Hamon, “Traité de la priere continuelle,” 31–33. 50. For radical forms of retreat, see Michel de Certeau, La Fable Mystique: XVIe–XVIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1982) and Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 51. Suffren, L’année chrestienne, 2.1, 676–840. 52. Cerné, Le pedagogve, 298–305 (299). 53. Suffren, Advis et exercices spiritvels, 254–256. 54. D’Argentan, Les exercices dv chrestien interievr, 2, 479, 364–477. 55. Bruun, “A Solitude of Permeable Boundaries.” 56. Antoine Godeau, Lettres de M. Godeau, evesque de Vence, sur divers sujets (Paris: Estienne Ganeau and Jacques Estienne, 1713), 270–271. 57. Ibid., 271. 58. Ibid., 270. 59. Cerné, Le pedagogve, 41; Vialart de Herse, l’Escole chretienne, 588. 60. See Mary Laven, “Devotional Objects,” in Treasured Possessions: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. V. Avery, M. Calarescu, and M. Laven (Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum, 2015), 239–244; see also Cissie Fairchilds, “Marketing the Counter-Reformation: Religious Objects and Consumerism in Early Modern France,” in Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Christine Adams, Jack R. Censer, and Lisa Jane Graham (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 31–58. 61. Nicole, Essais de Morale, 3, 9. 62. Hillman, Female Piety, 87–91; Mérot Retraites mondaines. 63. Cousinié, “Images et contemplation”; Cousinié, Images et méditation. 64. Gondrin, Catechisme, 41.

686   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 65. Vialart de Herse, l’Escole chretienne, 366–368; see also Nathan D. Mitchell, The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Reinvention of Catholicism (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 66. Cerné, Le pedagogve, 43. 67. See d’Argentan, Les exercices dv chrestien interievr, 381–382. 68. Paul du Barry, L’Année saincte, ov L’Instruction de Philagie pour viure à la mode des Saincts, & pour passer Sainctement l’Année [1641] (Lyon: Philip. Borde, Laur. Arnaud, & Cl. Rigaud, 1653), 1, 234–235. 69. Armand-Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé’s letter to Étienne le Camus of December 23, 1672, in Correspondance, ed. A.J. Krailsheimer, 4 vols. (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf and Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses, 1993), 1, 496–500. 70. Rancé’s letters to Étienne le Camus of August 10 and December 7, 1682, in Correspondance, 2, 703–704 and 772. 7 1. Bernard Dorival, “Les œuvres de Philippe de Champaigne sur le sujet de l’Annonciation,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’Art Français 1970 (1972): 45–71. 72. Mette Birkedal Bruun, Sven  R.  Havsteen, Eelco Nagelsmit, Kristian Mejrup, and Lars Nørgaard, “A Marvellous Model of Female Conduct: Judith in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Transfiguration 2014 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2018), 9–64. 73. Antoine Godeau, Les tableaux de la penitence [1654] (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1662), unpag. preface. 74. Ibid., 536–537. 75. Ibid., 553. 76. Jean-Louis de Fromentières, Oraison funebre d’Anne d’Autriche infante d’Espagne, Reine de France, et mere du Roi (Paris: Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1666), 10–11. 77. A. d’Arnaudin, La vie de Dom Pierre le Nain, religieux et ancien souprieur de l’Abbaye de la Trappe (Paris: Saugrain l’aîné, 1715), 77. 78. Rancé, Relations de la mort de quelques religieux de l’abbaye de la Trappe, 2 vols. (Paris: Florentin & Pierre Delaulne, 1696), 1, 248–249. 79. Ibid., 1, 102. 80. Rancé, Relations, 1, 205–206. 81. Ibid., 1, 224.

Further Reading Bayne, Sheila Page. Tears and Weeping: An Aspect of Emotional Climate Reflected in SeventeenthCentury French Literature. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag and Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1981. Belin, Christian. La conversation intérieure: la méditation en France au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002. Bergin, Joseph. Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580–1780. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Birberick, Anne L., Thomas M. Carr, and Russell J. Ganim, eds. The Cloister and the World: Early Modern Convent Voices. Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 2007. Briggs, Robin. Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Bruun, Mette Birkedal. “Time Well Spent: Scheduling Private Devotion in Early Modern France.” In Managing Time: Literature and Devotion in Early Modern France. Edited by Richard Maber and Joanna Barker. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017.

prayer, meditation, and retreat   687 Bruun, Mette Birkedal. “A Solitude of Permeable Boundaries: The Abbey of La Trappe between Isolation and Engagement.” In Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures. Edited by Christine Göttler and Karl Enenkel, 451–479. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Certeau, Michel de. La Fable Mystique: XVIe–XVIIe siècle. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1982. Certeau, Michel de. The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. Translated by Michael B. Smith and edited by Luce Giard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Cousinié, Frédéric. “The Mental Image in Representation: Jean Aumont, L’Ouverture intérieure du royaume de l’Agneau occis dans nos cœurs (1660).” In Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700. Edited by Walter Melion, Ralph Dekoninck, and Agnes Guiderdoni-Bruslé, 203–246. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Diefendorf, Barbara. From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Dinan, Susan E. Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. Fairchilds, Cissie. “Marketing the Counter-Reformation: Religious Objects and Consumerism in Early Modern France.” In Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France. Edited by Christine Adams, Jack R. Censer, and Lisa Jane Graham, 31–58. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Hammond, Nicholas, and Michael Moriarty, eds. Evocations of Eloquence: Rhetoric, Literature and Religion in Early Modern France: Studies in Honor of Peter Bayley. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. Hillman, Jennifer. Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Jansen, Katherine L. The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Laven, Mary. “Devotional Objects.” In Treasured Possessions: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Edited by V. Avery, M. Calarescu, and M. Laven, 239–244. Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum, 2015. Lyons, John D. Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Martin, Jessica, and Alec Ryrie, eds. Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. London: Routledge, 2016. Mitchell, Nathan  D. The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Reinvention of Catholicism. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Phillips, Henry. Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Quantin, Jean-Louis. “Paradoxes of Christian Solitude in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of Early Modern Christianity 1, no. 2 (2014): 219–231. Worcester, Thomas. Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching of Bishop Camus. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997. Woshinsky, Barbara R. Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010.

chapter 31

Ba roqu e Sexua lities Gary Ferguson

Baroque Sexualities Sexuality begins with sex, with a sex and with sexual desire and sexual relations—with the experience of passion and embodied practices, but especially with the understanding and representation of these, their cultural significance, as well as of other manifestations of the erotic, since the imaginary and the quotidian do not necessarily coincide. Common practices in any given place and time may correspond more or less closely to contemporary literary or artistic representations, making them often difficult to pin down. Representations, in turn, can be opaque or allusive, suggestive of multiple possibilities rather than denoting explicitly.1 The sexual, indeed, while it is sometimes represented and practiced openly, is more frequently discreet, covert, even secretive. Judicial records have been a precious source of information about forms of sexuality deemed illicit in the past and their policing. Testimony given in court or under interrogation poses problems of interpretation, however, requiring historians to consider who is telling a particular story and with what motivation or purpose. Where they exist in quantity, court records have formed the basis for wide-ranging social portraits, although necessarily focused through the lens of a particular legal concern.2 Over the 40 years since the publication of the foundational first volume of Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité, judicial, archival, artistic, and literary sources have offered rich areas for exploration and insight.3 The resulting studies enter into dialogue with one another, confirming, nuancing, revising, or challenging previous hypotheses and conclusions; slowly and collectively, they build up a more complete and accurate picture. Unlike the categories of Baroque music or opera, painting or architecture—pointing both to a chronological period and to an associated style, however understood— Baroque sexualities is a term without a history, a term not previously coined and deployed by scholars to any significant degree. Its inclusion in a handbook of the Baroque would seem to be motivated by a desire to examine the subject comprehensively from the different perspectives of the current major academic disciplines and

baroque sexualities   689 s­ ubdisciplines, within which gender and sexuality studies are now firmly established. The Baroque has been linked in historical studies to the body, perhaps because of the receptivity of the latter to the notion of stylization.4 Conversely, the relatively weaker aesthetic valence of terms like early modern (more globally) or Renaissance and Enlightenment (more specifically) may in part explain why they have attached more easily to sexualities.5 Within the span of the early modern, moreover, it has been the latter two periods, marking its outer chronological limits, that have attracted the greatest scholarly attention and come to be regarded as moments of particular significance. This is especially the case for the eighteenth century, identified by many historians as a watershed, a time of fundamental evolution marked by the establishment of modern sexual categories and identities and normative gender relations, based on a new understanding of the sexed body. By contrast, the sixteenth century has appeared to be more tied to older models, inherited from antiquity, even while forces of “modernization” began to be felt in crucial areas such as religious reform, producing wide-ranging consequences at both the individual and social levels. From this perspective, the Baroque invites more intense and careful study as a period of potentially dense significance, characterized by transition, lability, and the coexistence of multiple models, a period that might shed a particularly valuable light on the evolution of sexualities, illustrating the complex involutions of—or challenging and nuancing—historiography’s generally accepted schemata.

Body / Sex / Gender The early seventeenth century inherits from the sixteenth century a range of understandings about the sexed body destined to evolve. While the Renaissance strongly differentiated men and women in social terms, many medical theorists and practitioners subscribed to the idea that the sexed body formed a continuum rather than being structured by a radical dimorphism. What Thomas Laqueur has called the “one-sex model” was based on ancient Hippocratic and Galenic theories of human seed, the humors, and the conformity of male and female genital organs.6 According to Hippocrates, human seed is either male or female; both kinds are produced by men and women, and both men and women contribute seed to the generation of a fetus. If a child receives similarly sexed seed from each parent, it will be strongly male or female; if it receives differently sexed seed, its constitution will depend on the relative strength of each. The location in the womb where the fetus develops was also regarded as a determining factor (the left favoring the development of a female or feminine characteristics, the right, a male or masculine characteristics), as was the position adopted by a couple during intercourse. For his part, Galen identified four humors, each of which, corresponding to one of the four natural elements and representing a different temperament, was characterized by differing degrees of heat–coldness and dryness–wetness. The first of each of these pairs of contrasting qualities was associated with men (hot and dry), the second with women (cold and moist). While two humors produced strongly masculine or feminine

690   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque temperaments, two were of mixed nature: yellow bile/fire/choleric/hot and dry (m–m); blood/air/sanguine/hot and moist (m–f); black bile/earth/melancholic/cold and dry (f–m); phlegm/water/phlegmatic/cold and moist (f–f). Furthermore, individual men and women might be characterized more or less strongly by any of the four temperaments— a woman might be choleric, a man phlegmatic—creating a wide spectrum of sexual constitutions, from the hyper-masculine to the hyper-feminine. Finally, and most importantly for Galen, men’s and women’s genital organs were regarded as being identical in form and as differing only in their location. What caused female organs to remain inside the body was a lack of “masculine” heat that would force them to the outside. To be sure, not all sixteenth-century doctors subscribed to these Hippocratic–Galenic theories and Laqueur has been criticized for overlooking the importance of Aristotelian ideas on the division of the sexes.7 It is also the case that some writers affirmed not the identity of men’s and women’s genitals but only their analogy or likeness. Nevertheless, the “one-sex model” undoubtedly represented the beliefs of many early modern theorists and practitioners and an important current of thought within the medical profession and beyond. The absence of an absolute physiological division between male and female meant that sex was labile and might change, as is demonstrated by the case of a young woman named Marie, living in eastern France. One day, as she made a leap, Marie’s genitals were pushed to the outside of her body. Obliged to live subsequently as a man, she was renamed Germain by the local bishop. Marie–Germain’s story is related by Montaigne in his Journal de voyage (Travel Journal, 1580–1581) and discussed by the famous physician Ambroise Paré. Paré explains the change of sex both in terms of the rupturing of ligaments and an increase in body heat.8 Germain seems to have had difficulty adapting to his new sex since Montaigne records that he had no trade and remained unmarried. His story, however, was often associated with a classical myth involving both sex change and marriage, that of Iphis and Ianthe, found in Book Nine of Ovid’s enormously popular Metamorphoses. Iphis, a girl raised as a boy, falls in love with and becomes engaged to marry the young woman Ianthe. The strongly lesbian connotations of the women’s love, at once manifest and presented as an impossibility,9 are neutralized only when the goddess Isis intervenes to transform Iphis into a man. Sex change, in this instance, thus supports a heteronormative frame. Montaigne makes the link between Marie–Germain and Iphis and Ianthe in his essay “Of the power of the imagination.”10 A little later, in England, George Sandys did likewise in his 1632 vernacular translation of Ovid with commentary.11 At the same time in France, Isaac de Benserade turned the women’s story into a play which exploited and indeed augmented its homoerotic element, since the transformation of Iphis into a man takes place only after, not before, her marriage to Ianthe.12 The lability of sex did not translate into sexual equality, however, since most early modern thinkers maintained the Aristotelian hierarchy that made male superior to female. Indeed, many affirmed that since nature tended always toward perfection, the “degeneration” of male into female could never occur. Sandys reflects such a view in his commentary on Ovid’s story of the transformation of Tiresias into a woman, when he states that this can only be understood metaphorically. By contrast, the Spanish physician

baroque sexualities   691 Juan Huarte affirmed in his influential and much translated and reprinted treatise El examen de ingenios para las ciencias (The Examination of Men’s Wits, 1575) that sexchange was possible in both directions while the fetus was developing in the womb. The transformation would never be absolute, however, and remained subsequently legible. A female become male would retain effeminate traits, including a propensity to sexual passivity, a view that offered a physiological explanation for men who desired to be penetrated. While an inverse propensity to sexual activity would presumably characterize the sexual behavior of a female originally conceived male, Huarte does not draw this conclusion explicitly.13 A second manifestation of the absence of an absolute division between the sexes in the Renaissance and early Baroque is the figure of the hermaphrodite, the focus of intense interest as well as of considerable anxiety and debate, no doubt encouraged by the vogue of the neo-Platonic Androgyne.14 Whereas the latter was a mythical double human being of male, female, or mixed sex, associated with plenitude and perfection, however, the hermaphrodite tended to be associated with imperfection and diminishment, and with real human beings of indeterminate sex or nonconforming gender presentation. As an imaginary figure, the negative connotations of the hermaphrodite in fact go back to its originary story, found, once again, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book Four). The son of Hermes and Aphrodite, drawn into the pool of the nymph Salmacis, fuses with her. The result is not a person of double sex, but a male rendered effeminate. Similarly, the hermaphrodite in the early modern period was often synonymous with those who transgressed gender and sexual norms, particularly effeminate males. The Isle des Hermaphrodites (Island of Hermaphrodites, 1605), attributed to Artus Thomas (or Thomas Artus), is often read as a satire of the young favorites of the previous king of France, Henri III, assassinated in 1589. The text is complex, however, and its relation to the court of King Henri IV and its potentially utopian qualities have been much debated by critics.15 Hermaphrodites return in equally complex ways in the later seventeenth century. Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Australe connue (The Southern Land, Known, 1676) depicts the society formed by a people of perfect hermaphrodites, who, in this respect, resemble the more positive figure of the Androgyne. While the work has given rise to both utopian and dystopian readings, it is best understood as being of a profoundly skeptical character.16 In this way, if the hermaphrodite was a degraded figure, it also offered the ground for reflecting on pressing social and philosophical questions, extending beyond those of gender and sexuality. In the medical field, however, while some authorities believed in the existence of perfect hermaphrodites, that is, humans with functioning male and female genitals, this position was more and more contested over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming increasingly rare and eventually disappearing. Particularly influential in this respect was the early seventeenth-century case of Marie/ Marin Le Marcis. After living initially as a woman, then, as a man, having married another woman, Marie was tried and condemned to death for sodomy. She was saved on appeal to the parlement of Rouen, following a genital examination carried out by the court doctor, Jacques Duval, who testified that the accused possessed a functioning penis.

692   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque A decade later, however, Duval’s findings were challenged by Jean Riolan, professor of anatomy at the University of Paris. For Riolan, sex change was impossible and true hermaphrodites were a mere fable, as is made clear by the title of his 1614 treatise Discourse on Hermaphrodites, in which it is Demonstrated, Contrary to Popular Opinion, that there are no True Hermaphrodites.17 Riolan diagnosed Marie Le Marcis with a prolapsed uterus.18 By the end of the eighteenth century, the hermaphrodite would signify nothing more than imperfect sexual differentiation. The decline of the hermaphrodite was thus part of a much wider shift in the sexual landscape, increasingly defined by the notion of the physiological difference of male and female. In the words of Laqueur: “the older model, in which men and women were arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection, their vital heat, along an axis whose telos was male, gave way by the late eighteenth century to a new model of radical dimorphism, of biological divergence. An anatomy and physiology of incommensurability replaced a metaphysics of hierarchy in the representation of woman in relation to man.”19 Even those scholars who argue that Laqueur oversimplifies the picture for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, moreover, acknowledge “a dramatic, if gradual, transformation in thinking about sex and sex difference, rooted in a biologistic and medicalizing terminology that slowly supplanted the earlier metaphysical language.”20 In the eighteenth century, then, biology is mobilized to fix male superiority over female and justify the gendered social roles it prescribes. At the end of a period ­during which women’s social and cultural importance had steadily grown, biology was the tool that served to preserve male prerogatives, staying the democratic tide and ­preventing the greater rights gained by non-elite men from extending to women of all social classes.21 The later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in fact saw a number of advances for women, notably in the social and cultural realms. If the world of the humanists had remained largely homosocial, to the exclusion of women, the latter increasingly took up the pen to defend themselves and published works of all kinds: Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Katherine Philips (c.1631–1664), Aphra Behn (1640–1689), and Delarivier Manley (c.1670–1724) in England, María de Zayas (1590–1661) in Spain, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695) in Mexico, and Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678) in the Netherlands. In France, Madeleine and Catherine des Roches (c.1520–1587; 1542–1587) were followed by Anne de Marquets (c.1533–1588), Gabrielle de Coignard (c.1550–1586), Marguerite de Valois (1553–1615), Marie de Gournay (1566–1645), Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette (1634–1693), Marie-Catherine Desjardins (Madame de Villedieu) (c.1640–1683), Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (c.1650–1705), and Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier (1664–1734). Italy, in particular, saw a veritable explosion of writing by women from the early sixteenth century onward: Veronica Gambara (1485–1550), Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), Tullia d’Aragona (c.1510–1556), Laura Terracina (1519– c.1577), Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554), Veronica Franco (1546–1591), Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1617), Isabella Andreini (1562–1604), Margherita Costa (c.1600–1657), and Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652). Some of these women, like Gambara and Colonna, were noble; others, including d’Aragona, Franco, and Costa, were courtesans, cortegiane oneste, educated and cultured writers and musicians, who treated of sexual subjects openly. In France, Louise Labé (c.1520–1566) first gave a comparable voice to female

baroque sexualities   693 erotic passion; she was followed by Madeleine de l’Aubespine (1546–1596), whose poems, like many female-authored works, were written and circulated in the context of aristocratic literary salons.22 While the consolidation of the ideal of the companionate marriage did not fundamentally undermine claims of male superiority, it worked to the benefit of women, who increasingly claimed the right to relationships with men based on inclination or, no less radically, to refuse such relationships altogether. The plight of the married woman, especially the young wife of an old husband, was a literary topos, exploited by both women and men, notably, for example, by Nicole Estienne in her long poem Les Misères de la femme mariée (The Sufferings of the Married Woman, c.1587). Women were also active in the religious sphere, both in the context of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, although authorities on both sides of the confessional divide sought to curb women’s influence and channel their energies into traditional roles. Many women writers, however, belonged to this category, including Catholic nuns and founders or reformers of orders: Angela Merici (1474–1540; the Ursulines), Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582; the Carmelites), Jeanne de Chantal (1572–1641; the Visitation, with François de Sales), and Louise de Marillac (1591–1660; The Daughters of Charity, with Vincent de Paul). To the extent possible, the Catholic Church imposed enclosure on women, curbing initiatives to allow them to exercise a more active ministry. Enforced enclosure was vigorously protested by Tarabotti, although it did not always equate with a life of celibacy. Nuns might find sexual partners among priests and male religious, among laymen visiting from outside more or less legitimately or clandestinely, or among their sisters. One notable example of same-sex relations documented within the convent, occurring in the context of purported mystical visions, is offered by Sister Benedetta Carlini (1591–1661), abbess of the Theatines in Pescia.23 It is in this context of women’s greater cultural influence that we find the first documented cases of men cross-dressing and living as women. Previously, women had crossdressed in order to assume male social roles, to open possibilities for themselves to travel or to work in certain trades, for example. Cross-dressing women studied in the Netherlands by Rudolph Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, frequently engaged in sexual relationships with other women, sometimes even marrying their partners. Examples of the same phenomenon were recorded in France by Montaigne and Henri Estienne.24 Lesbianism and transsexuality, in such cases, are inextricably bound together. In the sixteenth century, young male actors cross-dressed on stage to play female roles in several European countries. As the works of Shakespeare and many others attest, female characters within a play then frequently cross-dressed in order to benefit from an expanded range of possibilities of action within the drama—that is, for the same reason as their counterparts in real life. Such situations often give rise to homoerotic scenes as a man/male actor finds himself attracted to a youth/young actor playing a woman impersonating a young man. By contrast, male characters within plays rarely cross-dressed, except in Italy, where they usually did so in order to gain access to a female character’s private quarters.25 While the motivation for the cross-dressing was thus heterosexual, homoerotic scenes again often resulted as a man/male actor found himself attracted to a young woman/youth in disguise/young male actor. If French theater offers only a

694   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque handful of male characters who disguise themselves as women, the shepherd–hero of Honoré d’Urfé’s pastoral novel, L’Astrée (1607–1628), must surely be the seventeenth century’s most famous male fictional cross-dresser.26 The story of Céladon’s transformation into Alexis, in order to gain the love of the eponymous Astrée, was translated into many European languages. It was later adapted for the stage in the form of an opera by Pascal Colasse with a libretto by Jean de La Fontaine (1691). Outside the realm of theatrical performance, cross-dressing had also been a familiar part of the revelries associated with Carnival throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Baroque offers us the first documented cases of men doing so in order to live as women. The earliest of these, of which I am aware, is that of the abbé François Timoléon de Choisy (1644–1724), whose mother reportedly accustomed her son to dressing as a girl along with the brother of Louis XIV of France, Philippe d’Orléans. According to the fragmentary text known today as the Memoirs of the abbé de Choisy Dressed as a Woman,27 the cleric lived as a woman known to be a man in Paris, where he attended the church of Saint-Médard. He later moved to the outskirts of Bourges, where he lived under the identity of the Comtesse des Barres for a period of several months. While most scholars have accepted the Memoirs at face value, their authenticity has recently been called into question.28 In either case, however, they point to the “thinkability,” in this culture and at this time, of a man dressing and living as a woman, both overtly transvestite and “passing.” Cross-dressing, indeed, is attested more generally at the French court and was practiced, as noted, by the Sun King’s own brother, as it had been earlier by King Henri III. Courtly manners, themselves, were overtly marked by female influence, to the point that they were considered by some to be effeminate.29 If the case of Choisy remains open to question, that, a little later, of Charles de Beaumont, Chevalier d’Éon (1728–1810) does not. The extraordinary adventures of this diplomat and spy are only equaled by his sexual metamorphoses over a life lived mostly in France and England, and for 49 years as a man and 33 years as a woman. The eighteenth century, finally, saw men adopting elements of dress and behavior considered feminine in the context of the homosexual subcultures that developed in London and Paris at the time. As we shall see, the greater legal equality of men, along with the definition of the private and public spheres, was to have profound implications for relations between men and especially for the establishment of homosexuality in terms of a shared and exclusive sexual desire for those of the same sex. By contrast, heterosexual desire would become the new criterion of masculine and feminine norms.

Social and Religious Institutions: Theories and Practices One of the major cultural and institutional transformations leading up to and into the Baroque period is constituted by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic or

baroque sexualities   695 Counter-Reformation sparked in reaction. Responding in this context to a situation deemed increasingly problematic, the Churches modified, with more or less eagerness, their rules concerning marriage. Catholic theology of matrimony is based on spousal consent, expressed in the free exchange of vows between a couple. Traditionally, no priest or even witness was necessary, provided a promise to marry in the future (verba de futuro) was followed by a statement of taking the betrothed as spouse in the present (verba de praesenti).30 Theologians were unable to require the consummation of marriage in the sex act, due to the belief that Mary and Joseph, the mother and foster-father of Jesus, were married but never had intercourse. Consummation was an important factor, nonetheless, and a promise of marriage followed by sexual relations came to be viewed as having been ratified de facto, whereas vows pronounced in the present but not followed by sexual relations could be dissolved under certain circumstances. This situation obviously afforded a fair degree of latitude to a couple, even if in practice—and especially if a family possessed land, property, wealth, or titles—marriage was very much a family and social affair, involving the legal transfer of assets and a public celebration expressing the approbation of the spouses’ relatives and community. Increasingly, powerful families, local magnates, and national rulers sought to gain greater control in disposing of their children and subjects in marriage, as a means of consolidating and advancing their own interests. Without challenging canon law directly, such initiatives frequently sought to raise the age of consent, thus increasing the length of dependent offsprings’ minority. Whereas the Catholic Church set the age of consent at 12 for girls and 14 for boys, for example, an edict issued by Henri II of France in 1556 allowed parents to disinherit any child who married without their agreement up to the age of 25 for a woman and 30 for a man. The Tametsi decree (1563), published in one of the Council of Trent’s final sessions, responded in part to pressure from secular authorities. While the new rules promulgated at this time did not require parental agreement, they did impose a number of conditions without which a marriage would henceforth be considered null and void: principally, the advance publication of banns (as had in theory been necessary since the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215), the celebration of the wedding in the parish church of one of the spouses, and the presence of the parish priest (or his delegate or the ordinary) and of two or three witnesses. Individuals had previously manipulated Church doctrine in order to claim or deny the existence of a marriage to suit their particular purpose at a given moment. They continued to do so, but following the Council, they had to work within a new set of rules and the constraints they imposed.31 At least eventually, for the new rules themselves took time to become established; in parts of Italy, for example, marriages continued to be celebrated before a notary at home for many decades. This situation is reflected in the literature of the period, the question of the validity of a given union being a rich theme not only for Matteo Bandello and Pierre Boaistuau in Italy and France in the 1550s, but in England in 1597, when Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was published, and in Spain in 1605, the year that saw the appearance of the first volume of Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, whose plot turns around three marriages of variously questionable legality.

696   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque In Protestant countries and regions, marriage was no longer considered a sacrament and parental rights were generally strengthened to the detriment of those of would-be spouses. In Geneva, divorce was permitted under certain circumstances. England seems to have been something of an anomaly in this regard in that, while it broke from Rome, it refrained from passing any legislation against so-called clandestine marriages until the very late date of 1753. The increasing regularization and control of marriage was accompanied by the ­disappearance of other historically recognized forms of relationship, such as sworn or wedded brotherhood or friendship.32 While these had mostly been concluded by two men, they sometimes involved a man and a woman. In the latter case, the legal arrangement would change the financial basis of a marriage; in the former case, historians have argued, it might constitute a form of same-sex union.33 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, same-sex couples also appropriated the institution of marriage itself, even if such relationships were recognized by neither Church nor state. Such cases are recorded among women in the Netherlands and in France (as noted earlier) and among men in Italy.34 In Italy, there was, moreover, a widespread culture of play surrounding the rites and imaginary of marriage. This was an element in the case of an “academy” of friars and adolescents in Naples (1591), as it was, in all likelihood, in that of a group of mostly Spanish immigrants who met at the Roman church of Saint John at the Latin Gate (1578).35 Marriage was undoubtedly the context for much sexual activity and the only licit one. At the same time, much stricter constraints were placed on women than on men in terms of engaging in sexual activity uniquely within the bounds of legal marriage. Whereas the pre- and extra-conjugal affairs of men might be viewed with considerable indulgence and even approbation, a bride’s virginity and a wife’s fidelity to her husband were veritable cultural obsessions. A notable reflection on marriage is found in one of the mature essays of Michel de Montaigne, “Sur des vers de Virgile” (“On some verses of Virgil,” 1588–1595). The modern reader is struck by the sense of distance, on the author’s part, between men/“us” and women/“them.” Marriage is a social obligation that, at its best, might approximate some of the qualities of friendship, without ever living up to the sublime potential of friendships between men—like that of the author himself and Étienne de La Boétie, lyrically described in the early essay “De l’amitié” (“Of Friendship,” 1580–1595). Real sexual pleasure, moreover, seems to be offered only by a relationship with a mistress. At the same time, Montaigne is also notable for arguing that women are justified in protesting their unfair treatment in marriage—the double standard on which it is based—and in seeking elsewhere the sexual fulfilment that is their right. Another striking witness to the extent to which sexuality, especially male sexuality, flourished outside of marriage, this time in England, is the diary kept by Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) between 1660 and 1669. Pepys began writing in the year Charles II returned from exile, following the death of Cromwell, and the English monarchy was restored. The king would set the tone with his many extra-conjugal liaisons, most famously with the aristocratic Barbara Villiers (Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland) and the celebrated actress Nell Gwyn. Although Pepys had married a woman of

baroque sexualities   697 Huguenot descent in 1655, he details numerous affairs with other women, beginning with one employed as his wife’s companion. Often, the sexual encounters described involved petting, groping, and masturbation, rather than penile–vaginal intercourse. They are recounted explicitly, although in veiled terms and not without feelings of guilt, in macaronic phrases mixing, principally, French, Latin, and Spanish. The diary also testifies to the degree to which the literate sexual imagination was fed by pornographic texts circulating throughout Europe. On February 8, 1668, Pepys bought a copy of L’Escole des filles, ou la Philosophie des dames (1655).36 He did so in a plain binding, with the intention of burning it later, anxious that it never be found in his library. Pepys termed L’Escole “idle,” “rogueish,” and “mighty lewd,” yet a book it was “not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world.” Famously, Pepys’s sober reading the following day ended with him masturbating.37 Published anonymously in France, L’Escole continues the tradition of sexual dialogue between two women, sometimes prostitutes, begun in Italy by Pietro Aretino, who wrote his Ragionamenti in the mid-1530s. It would continue with notable examples such as the Académie des dames (Academy of Ladies, 1680) by the jurist and historian Nicolas Chorier, first published in Latin as Aloisiæ Sigeæ 20 years earlier.38 Prostitutes, of course, existed throughout Baroque Europe, although attitudes toward them evolved.39 In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, brothels could be found in the center of many cities. Increasingly, due to pressure from reformers, they were relegated to more peripheral locations or else closed in both Protestant and Catholic areas. In the latter, moreover, religious orders existed whose mission it was to take in repentant prostitutes. Other women and in some places, to a lesser extent, young men worked independently, often managed by a male or female pimp. While some prostitution was associated with the milieus of petty criminality, courtesans, in particular in Italy, catered to an elite market. Montaigne describes those he encountered in Venice and in Rome, recording his wonder in the former city at seeing “a hundred and fifty or thereabouts spending like princesses on furniture and clothes, having no other funds to live on except from this traffic.”40 As noted above, a good number of prominent female writers and poets belonged to the class of cortegiana onesta. These women selected their clients carefully, selling not only sex but conversation, companionship, even, it has been argued, love.41 In any event, such relationships were sometimes accorded considerable social recognition and might even be deemed honorable.42 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe also saw sexuality marked by lethal disease on an epidemic scale for the first time, following the appearance of syphilis, probably introduced from the New World. Although mysterious in its cause and mode of transmission, it was, from the beginning, generally associated with sin. Gaspar Torrella, who treated Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, was one of the first to maintain that it was spread through sexual intercourse, although he did not rule out alternative means of contagion, such as sharing a bed or breastfeeding. By the seventeenth century, the disease’s venereal nature was widely accepted. The “French disease”—in France the “Neapolitan disease”—touched all levels of society and defied effective

698   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque medical treatment. The most commonly prescribed therapies involved guaiacum, also known as Holy Wood, and mercury, the effects of the latter being particularly brutal.43 If the Churches strove to control public morality ever more vigorously, the development of a current of profoundly skeptical thought, leading, for some, to free-thinking and libertinism, was equally a consequence of the religious controversy and violence of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, academies were at times the site of a fundamental questioning of Christian doctrine and morals.44 In France, the gentle skepticism of Montaigne’s Essays fed a much more systematic formulation, several decades later, in François de La Mothe Le Vayer’s “Banquet sceptique” (“Skeptical Symposium,” c.1630). Here, sexual liberties, notably homosexuality, are championed.45 A number of the French libertins are in fact known for their homosexuality, most famously Théophile de Viau. While Viau’s most significant and passionate relationship was with Jacques Vallée des Barreaux, he was also involved with the lesser-known poet Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, referred to by contemporaries as the “Prince of Sodom.” Saint-Pavin was a disciple of the noted writer Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, an atheist, linked by friendship and sexual ties to Charles Coypeau d’Assoucy and Claude-Emmanuel Luillier, known as Chapelle, to form what has been called a “gay trio.”46 Of course, not everyone rejected Christianity as a result of the ongoing doctrinal disputes. The Counter-Reformation is also, first and foremost, the story of the reinvigoration of Catholic religious practice in the face of Protestant challenge. A significant expression of pious, charitable action, indeed, focused on hospitals, many of which treated large numbers of syphilitics. This was the case for the hospital of Santiago in Toledo, which admitted four thousand sufferers between 1654 and 1665.47 It was also the case for San Giacomo degli Incurabili in Rome, where many prominent figures in the  Catholic reform movement, such as Gaetano Thiene (Saint Cajetan) and Gian Pietro Carafa (later Pope Paul IV), were active with the Compagnia del Divino Amore (Company of Divine Love). One of the most fundamental aspects of Catholic reform was the reaffirmation of the centrality of the sacrament of penance through the promotion—or indeed imposition— of the practice of confession. While annual confession had been mandatory for adult Catholics since 1215, a number of historians, including Michel Foucault and John Bossy, have argued that the seventeenth century came to place a much greater emphasis on introspection and on sexual sins, and not only on acts committed but on desire: “An imperative was established: Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse. . . . This scheme for transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ascetic and monastic setting. The seventeenth century made it into a rule for everyone.”48 It was sexuality that would reveal the “truth” of an individual, sexuality that became “the seismograph of our subjectivity.”49 In contrast, other historians have demonstrated the extent to which confession might maintain an older emphasis on social sins and play its traditional role in the reconciliation of social conflict—even in Milan, a city under the

baroque sexualities   699 authority of Charles Borromeo, the future saint, who was one of the Catholic Reformation’s most energetic prelates.50 It nevertheless remains undeniable that confession was “a privileged site for the evolution of the modern, introspective, sexual subject.”51 The particular importance of confession in the seventeenth century and the complex possibilities of desires it sets in play and seeks to manage found physical expression in a notable piece of Catholic ecclesiastical furniture introduced at this time. The purpose of the confessional or confession box was to afford privacy and anonymity to a penitent and thus encourage the full disclosure of sins perceived as shameful or embarrassing. Yet privacy and anonymity could also be generative of desire on the part of the priest, the penitent, or both.52 It was for this reason that Borromeo’s own design for the confessional—one that would be widely adopted—set the kneeling penitent at right angles to the seated priest, facing the side of his head, their legs and feet separated by 90 degrees. This was in contrast to the more traditional arrangement of a penitent kneeling in front of or alongside a priest, as continued to be stipulated by some bishops, for example François de Sales, that very different but no less influential force of Catholic Reformation, in his diocese of Geneva–Annecy. There is evidence of resistance on the part of sections of the laity to the imperative to confess, especially among men. Women, on the other hand, seem to have given themselves more readily to introspective reflection.53 What is undeniable is that the seventeenth century witnessed an “affective turn” in religious discourse, which became more sentimental and “feminized,” that is, it had frequent recourse to images and metaphors drawing on and valorizing female exemplars, female experiences—childbirth, motherhood, the care of infants, domestic tasks, and so on—and qualities traditionally coded as feminine, such as sweetness, tenderness, humility, and patience. The foremost example of this “sweet style” is again François de Sales, best known for his Introduction à la vie dévote (Introduction to the Devout Life, first edition c.1608), developed from spiritual counsels for women and seemingly read primarily by them, even if the bishop addressed men and women, with the intention encouraging both to embrace a life of piety. If women were prominent within the Counter-Reformation, one of the most influential, referred to earlier, was Teresa of Jesus (of Ávila), who, along with John of the Cross (1542–1591), worked to reform the Carmelite Order, which would eventually split to create a new “Discalced” branch. While Teresa, like François de Sales, was one of the major writers of the period, her subject and style were very different. Teresa was a proponent of contemplative prayer affording mystical union with God, the erotic charge of which is evident in her description of an experience of ecstasy mediated by an angel: I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one.

700   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.54

This passage from Teresa’s autobiography served as inspiration to Gian Lorenzo Bernini for his no-less-erotically-suggestive statue, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, completed in 1652, 20 years after its subject’s canonization.

Homo Sexualities: Between Men, Between Women The Renaissance reactivated many homoerotically charged ancient myths, like that of Iphis and Ianthe, discussed earlier. Among the most common referring to male–male sexuality was that of Ganymede, whose name became so familiar that it warranted an entry in Randle Cotgrave’s French–English dictionary in 1611: “The name of a Troian boy, whom Jupiter so loved (say the Poets) as he tooke him up to heaven, and made him his cup-bearer; hence, any boy thats loved for carnall abuse; an Ingle.”55 The story figures a pederastic (age/rank-graded) form of desire that might take shape between an adult man and a youth, slave, or male of lower status, in which the former played a sexually penetrative role, the latter a receptive one. Such relationships might involve any male and did not exclude having sex with women; they were, in Eve Sedgwick’s terms, universalizing as opposed to minoritizing.56 A young man’s refusal of a passive role and assumption of an active one thus constituted a marker of the transition to maturity and virility. Renaissance social structures did not correspond exactly to those of the ancient world and Christian morality made sodomy a crime. Nonetheless, pederastic relationships were common throughout Renaissance Europe and even, to some extent, institutionalized in a homosocial, patriarchal society—although they may have been somewhat more prevalent in some places than others, for example, Florence and Italy more generally.57 Since penetration in the Renaissance imaginary expressed masculinity and power, hierarchical social relationships could, conversely, be read sexually: a friend might quickly look like a sodomite if the social order were perceived to be transgressed.58 The monarchs James I of England (James VI of Scotland) and Henri III of France were both subject to this kind of accusation in relation to their young favorites. Whether such relationships included intercourse, as contemporaries claimed, it is impossible to know; certainly, however, they involved erotic affects and demonstrations of intimacy that today would be included within the broad category of the sexual, such as bed-sharing, embracing, kissing, and fondling. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such relationships were at once possible and liable to attract suspicion. Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (published posthumously, 1594) notoriously focused on the ambiguous

baroque sexualities   701 r­elationship between the fourteenth-century English king and his favorite Piers Gaveston. Among the materials on which Marlowe drew were polemical pieces depicting the same relationship produced in France in the 1580s to attack Henri III. Around the same time, or shortly afterward, the French ruler and his mignons (favorites) took center stage in Marlowe’s final play The Massacre at Paris.59 The notorious case of Mervyn T(o)uchet, second Earl of Castlehaven, on the other hand, leaves little to doubt in sexual terms. The earl was executed in 1631 for sodomy and as an accomplice to the rape of his second wife. Castlehaven had taken into his household several young men—two of whom were condemned to death shortly after their master—with whom he, his wife, and stepdaughter (a mere adolescent) had sex in various voluntary and coerced configurations. At stake in the trial was not only sexual impropriety, however. There was the scandal caused by the low social status of the earl’s favorites, the undeserved financial rewards he showered on them, and the social advancement he sought for them to the detriment of his own son. In Protestant England, the earl’s perceived Catholic leanings and sympathy for the Irish did little to help his case.60 More idealizing (neo-Platonically inflected) expressions of pederastic desire are also found throughout the period, as, for example, in the ardent sonnets Michelangelo Buonarroti addressed to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. When the two met in 1532, the famous artist and sculptor was 57 years old, the younger man was 23. Two centuries later, similar sentiments continue to characterize the writings of the noted German art historian, archaeologist, and Hellenist, Johann Winckelmann (1717–1768).61 More ambiguous are the relationships staged in Shakespeare’s sonnets (1609) between characters traditionally named the poet, the fair youth, the rival poet, and the dark lady. The sentiments expressed by the poet toward the young man are no less homosocial and misogynous than they are homoerotic.62 Even a description of friendship where a difference in age or status is not a marked feature can read like that of an erotic passion, as is illustrated by Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship.” The relationship between Montaigne and La Boétie was likely not of a sexual nature; nevertheless, the more the essayist describes it, seeking to delineate its difference from other forms of sexual relationship—including what he terms “Greek licence” or pederasty—the more he traces their common ground.63 The ancient figure informing “Of Friendship” is the Platonic Androgyne. In the Symposium, the double human had figured same-sex and opposite-sex desire. In the Renaissance, from Marsilio Ficino’s vastly influential commentary onward (1496), it tended to be allegorized and/or to be used to represent uniquely heterosexual passion, marriage, or same-sex friendships, although its potentially erotic charge was likely seldom wholly neutralized, at least for the more educated.64 In France, its homosexual nature came to the fore most readily in descriptions of relationships between women.65 If the actual word homosexual did not exist throughout the Baroque, the word lesbian did, at least in French, lesbienne, along with other more frequently used terms, such as tribade and fricatrice (derived, respectively, from the Greek and Latin verbs to rub).66 Tribade was also common in English, as was its vernacular-rooted equivalent rubster.

702   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque This is not to say, however, that lesbienne conveyed exactly the same meanings as it does today or that, in consequence, relations between women at the time correspond more closely to their twentieth- and twenty-first century counterparts than do those between men. As with those of men in the sixteenth century, female same-sex relations were not generally seen as exclusive of desire for and having relations with the opposite sex. The fundamental meaning of lesbian, moreover, was geographical: it designated a woman from the island of Lesbos, most frequently used in connection with Sappho—and with this acceptation it existed also in English. Following her rediscovery in the midsixteenth century, humanist scholars had worked to heterosexualize Sappho’s verses. As a result, ancient Greece’s only known female poet existed for many in early modern Europe as she was transmitted by Ovid in his Heroides: the rejected and suicidal lover of the young man Phaon. Nevertheless, the extent of Sappho’s heterosexualization has been overstated by some modern scholars and evidence of her homoerotic associations can be found from the later sixteenth century onward.67 In France, Pierre de Bourdeille, or Brantôme, for one, offers clear evidence that she was known as a lover of women. Brantôme was a soldier and a courtier before turning to writing; we can therefore be confident that his knowledge was not exceptional but typical of that shared by members of the French court. Brantôme began writing the second part of his Recueil des dames, often called Recueil des dames galantes (Lives of Gallant Ladies), in earnest in 1582, although his works were only published posthumously in the mid-seventeenth century. The Dames galantes draws on numerous Italian and classical texts. Among the former, Agnolo Firenzuola’s Discourse on the Beauty of Women (published in Italian in 1541 and in French translation in 1578) refers to the myth of the Androgyne to suggest that some women were created by Zeus of such a nature as to love those of their own sex. Among the ancient writers exploited by Brantôme, Lucian figures prominently, in particular the Dialogues of the Courtesans, included in the recent French translation of Lucian’s works in 1581. This was over a hundred years before Lucian’s works, including the same dialogue, were published in English (1685). Brantôme notes that sex between women can be penetrative or non-penetrative, a distinction that several scholars have emphasized as being fundamental to early modern understandings of female homoeroticism: whereas the former is said to have provoked anxiety and elicited strong condemnation, the latter failed to signify.68 The anxiety that existed around women’s use of dildos was exacerbated from the mid-sixteenth century on with the rediscovery of the clitoris by the medical profession, which seems to have provoked something of a panic among certain male writers.69 As Valerie Traub notes, however, both the dildo and the clitoris partake of a common “logic of supplementarity” with respect to the female body, the former in a legal context concerned with prosthesis, the latter in a medical context focused on anatomy (in particular, clitoral hypertrophy). In both cases, moreover, what is fundamentally at stake is the question of the transgression of gender roles, women’s “usurpation” of prerogatives culturally reserved to men.70 In fact, Brantôme’s description is much less rigid and systematic than has often been claimed. The Dames galantes can be read as expressing an anxiety about penetrative

baroque sexualities   703 sex between women using a dildo that undermines his defensive affirmations of the superior satisfactions offered by penile–vaginal intercourse. At the same time, the text points clearly to the most fundamental challenges posed to men by lesbian sexuality: that women might seek to free themselves from the hetero-patriarchal obligations of marriage and reproduction; and that they might in fact enjoy with each other a range of mutual pleasures they did not enjoy with men. In addition, Brantôme offers evidence that intimate friendships between women were not always read as nonsexual and insignificant; in fact, some men were quite suspicious that what appeared to be idealized relationships might well be a cover for a sexual liaison.71 A number of other writers also evoked passionate or/and sexual relationships between women. In France, in addition to Brantôme’s Dames galantes and Chorier’s Aloisiæ Sigeæ/Académie des Dames, there are poems by Pierre de Ronsard, Étienne Jodelle, Pontus de Tyard, and Madeleine de l’Aubespine. In England, female homoerotic desire was expressed, most notably, in poems written by and addressed to Katherine Philips. It is also represented in remarkably positive terms in John Donne’s elegy “From Sapho to Philaenis” (published posthumously in 1633 but probably written in the 1590s) and Aphra Behn’s “To the Fair Clarinda Who Made Love to Me, Imagin’d More Than Woman” (1688).72 For many historians of sexuality, a distinct male homosexual identity came into existence in the early eighteenth or perhaps late seventeenth century, concomitant with the emergence of subcultures in large cities, like the mollies in London and the gens de la manchette (people of the cuff) in Paris. Placed under surveillance by the police, members of these groups and their activities are extensively documented in criminal records.73 A little later in London, a lesbian identity can be associated with the women who called themselves sapphists or tommies.74 A homosexual identity might also be seen to be exemplified by a figure like Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712–1786), who, after the death of his father, lived apart from the wife he had been forced to marry and with whom he produced no heir. The king’s attraction to men and aversion to women is widely attested in his own writings and those of observers like Voltaire.75 Unlike earlier universalizing forms of same-sex desire and practice, the minoritizing form of identity in question represents a (more or less) permanent and exclusive desire for those of one’s own sex; its fundamental criterion is not the sexual role adopted but the sex of the object of desire. As such, it is not—principally—age/rank determined; it can involve two adults and a flexibility and versatility of sexual roles. The emergence of this new configuration—homosexuality as opposed to heterosexuality—goes along with the evolution in understandings of gender and the sexed body, described earlier. As men became more equal, all men could still dominate women, now viewed as constituting a separate, incommensurable, and weaker sex. Masculine desire and sexual penetration must now be reserved exclusively for women; penile–vaginal intercourse would increasingly come to be the only sexual practice considered “natural.”76 Excessive sexual activity with women, which earlier had been seen as a sign of effeminacy, now became the proof of hyper-virility. A minoritizing form of male and female homosexuality thus served to anchor the male–female divide.

704   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque The historical evolution described so far does not represent the whole picture, however. For if a universalizing model of same-sex relations largely disappeared in Western Europe from the eighteenth century on, a minoritizing one was not invented at that time; it existed earlier in various ways and to various degrees. Literary and other texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offer examples of women and men more or less permanently attracted to members of their own sex to the exclusion of the other. The individuals represented describe their desires as a taste, an appetite, an inclination, or a penchant, characteristics that might be fixed or evolving, and imply a degree of volition or choice or not. They talk of their nature, and of their taste, appetites, or inclinations as inborn or as forming part of their nature. At the same time, many men in this category were attracted primarily to youths and might be married. We can find aspects of a (homo)sexual identity in seventeenth-century France, for example, in a figure like Philippe d’Orléans, referred to earlier, who liked handsome young men and apparently adopted a passive sexual role. Philippe was, nonetheless, like Frederick the Great, a successful military commander; unlike Frederick, he fathered four children. Much of the detail of Philippe’s life comes from the letters written by his second wife, Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria, to members of her family in Germany. A  coterie formed around the prince, allegedly involving (according to one probably satirical source) the creation of an order in which members took an oath to engage in intercourse with women only for the purpose of procreation.77 For some scholars, evidence suggests that a figure like Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689) may similarly have been lesbian.78 In late sixteenth-century Italy, to return to the group of mostly Spanish immigrants who celebrated same-sex weddings at the church of Saint John at the Latin Gate in Rome, we also find evidence of many elements characteristic of a subculture and of a sexual identity, as these would develop more widely in the eighteenth century. Among the men, some appear to have been characterized by an exclusive and enduring homodesire and collectively they exhibit a multiplicity and flexibility of sexual practices: some have sex with each other (not only with youths) and take both active and passive sexual roles. In the eighteenth century, conversely, traditional forms of pederastic relations continued to be common, particularly in rural areas and institutional settings such as the army and navy, schools and universities. Nor were they absent from the new urban subcultures. Historians have highlighted numerous ways in which many of the activities associated with the gens de la manchette and the mollies remain embedded in traditional social and cultural practices, such as Carnival, Charivari, and compagnonnage. They improvised inventively on religious rituals, including baptism, marriage, and, in France, the taking of religious vows, and, coming mostly from the lower classes, the manners and dress styles of their aristocratic “betters.” The subcultures they created, that is, were not divorced from the wider societies of their time.79 In short, the eighteenth century is different from the sixteenth century but also echoes and looks back toward it, as certain groups in the sixteenth century anticipate and look forward to future developments. The Iberians at the Latin Gate and the mollies/gens de la manchette face each other—in their shared and their divergent characteristics—over 150 years of the Baroque.

baroque sexualities   705

Baroque / Sexualities / Historiography In terms of sexuality, the Baroque is a period of transitions, of complexity, and of the coexistence of differing models, configurations, practices, and ideas. It is perhaps this complexity, this messiness, that explains—at least in part—why Baroque sexualities as yet lack an adequate history. The period is marked by a movement toward more clearcut definitions and fixity: the establishment of two dimorphic sexes, sustaining physiologically grounded sexual and gender roles, concomitant with, and sustained in part by, the definition and marginalization of the homosexual. An object of surveillance, sexual dissidence comes to be no longer regarded in terms of sin but of social disorder, before being considered a pathology.80 The same process permits the crystallization of an identity that some individuals can claim, and for which they might experience persecution but are unlikely to be put to death. Hermaphrodites disappear leaving a small number of individuals whose “true” sex is affirmed through medical intervention. Marriage is subject to progressively tighter regulation by Church and state, becoming, in consequence, a more effective means of social control. Individuals are brought to turn inward to discover their true selves as subjects of desire. These developments are not swift or uniform, however, and so the Baroque is irreducibly a period marked by fluidity, multiplicity, and the coexistence of (apparent) contradictions. Too often, historians of sexuality have been proponents of either a “continuist” or a “differentialist” approach, the former emphasizing similarity, identity, and the endurance of categories, the latter emphasizing alterity, incommensurability, and rupture. The Baroque defies such dichotomous thinking, requiring insistently of those who would map its terrain, that similarity and difference “be construed less as an imperative choice than as shimmering tension.”81 As such, the Baroque poses in heightened form the challenge facing the historian (of sexuality) of any period.

Notes 1. This point is emphasized by Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 2. For example, Michael J. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); originally published as Histoire de la sexualité, I, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 4. For example, Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Mitchell Greenberg, Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

706   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque 5. The same periods have often determined larger historiographical frameworks. For example, Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Sexuality, gen. ed. Julie Peakman, offers, as vol. 3, the Renaissance (1450–1650), ed. Bette Talvacchia, and, as vol. 4, the Enlightenment (1650–1820), ed. Julie Peakman (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 6. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For a summary, see Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re)  Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 25–28. 7. Katharine Park and Robert A. Nye, “Destiny is Anatomy,” New Republic 204 (1991): 53–57. For an extended discussion, see Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013). 8. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 870; Ambroise Paré, Des Monstres et prodiges, ed. Jean Céard (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 29–30. See also Gary Ferguson, “Early Modern Transitions: From Montaigne to Choisy,” L’Esprit Créateur 53, no. 1 (2013): 145–157. 9. For discussions, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 283–288, and David  M.  Robinson, Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, EighteenthCentury (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 163–197. 10. Montaigne, The Complete Works, 69. 11. See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (London: Routledge, 1991), 80–111, esp. 84–87. 12. Isaac de Benserade, Iphis et Iante, ed. Anne Verdier, with Christian Biet and Lise LeibacherOuvrard (Vijon: Lampsaque, 2000). For Marianne Legault, Benserade’s portrayal of ­lesbian sexuality nonetheless remains negative, even as it exemplifies a number of characteristics of the Baroque—disguise, the deceitfulness of appearances, the grotesque, and the monstrous; see Female Intimacies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 96–118. 13. Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens [sic] Wits (London: Adam Islip for Thomas Adams, 1616), 269–270, chap. 15. This translation by Richard Carew, first published in 1594, was based on the Italian of Camillo Camilli. It has been reedited by Rocio  G.  Sumillera (London: MHRA, 2014). 14. Among a large bibliography, see, principally, Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002); Kathleen P. Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006); Patrick Graille, Le Troisième Sexe: Être hermaphrodite aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions Arkhê, 2011); Marianne Closson, ed., L’Hermaphrodite de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013). 15. See, for example, Jones and Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender,” 92, and Long, Hermaphrodites, 216, 235. 16. Gabriel de Foigny, The Southern Land, Known, trans. David Fausset (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993); La Terre Australe connue (1676), ed. Pierre Ronzeaud (Paris: STFM, 1990). For a summary of critical interpretations and the argument concerning the work’s skeptical nature, see Gary Ferguson, “L’Hermaphrodite sceptique: La Terre Australe connue de Gabriel de Foigny (1676),” in L’Hermaphrodite de la Renaissance aux Lumières, ed. Marianne Closson (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), 257–277.

baroque sexualities   707 17. Discours sur les hermaphrodits, où il est démonstré contre l’opinion commune qu’il n’y a point de vrays hermaphrodits. 18. For a full discussion, see Long, Hermaphrodites, 77–108. 19. Laqueur, Making Sex, 5–6. 20. Park and Nye, “Destiny is Anatomy,” 75. 21. See Sylvie Steinberg, La Confusion des sexes: Le Travestissement de la Renaissance à la Révolution (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 269–291. 22. Louise Labé’s status as a female poet has been called into question by Mireille Huchon, Louise Labé: Une créature de papier (Geneva: Droz, 2006). The argument remains a topic of debate. On l’Aubespine’s erotic poems, which include female homoerotic elements, see Anna Kłosowska, “Erotica and Women in Early Modern France: Madeleine de l’Aubespine’s Queer Poems,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 2 (2008): 190–215. 23. See Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 24. Henri Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote, ed. P.  Ristelhuber, 2 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1969), vol. 1, 178; Montaigne, The Complete Works, 869–870. 25. See Laura Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 26. The novel’s first three parts were published by D’Urfé. After the author’s death in 1625, his secretary, Balthazar Baro, completed and edited the fourth part and added a fifth. 27. Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme. 28. Paul Scott, “Authenticity and Textual Transvestism in the Memoirs of the Abbé de Choisy,” French Studies 69 (2015): 14–29. 29. See Lewis  C.  Seifert, Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in SeventeenthCentury France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 30. For a general overview of the history of marriage, see Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (London: Penguin, 2005). 31. See Cecilia Cristellon, “Does the Priest Have to Be There? Contested Marriages Before Roman Tribunals: Italy, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20, no. 3 (2009): 10–30. 32. See Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Allan A. Tulchin, “Same-Sex Couples Creating Households in Old Regime France: The Uses of the Affrèrement,” Journal of Modern History 79 (2007): 613–647. On Orthodox ceremonies of adelphopoiesis, see John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994). 33. See Tulchin, “Same-Sex Couples,” who is much less evasive than Bray. 34. See Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989) and Gary Ferguson, Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). 35. See Ferguson, Same-Sex Marriage. 36. The School for Girls, or the Philosophy of Ladies. 37. February 8–9 from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970-1983), vol. 9. 38. See James Grantham Turner, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in  Italy, France, and England, 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex,

708   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993). Ancient literature offered the precedent of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, referred to further below. 39. In what follows, I draw in particular on Guido Ruggiero, “Prostitution: Looking for Love,” in A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Renaissance, ed. Bette Talvacchia (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 157–174. On Rome, see Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a general overview, see Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s–2000s, ed. Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 40. Montaigne, The Complete Works, 920. 41. Ruggiero, “Prostitution.” 42. See Tessa Storey, “Courtesan Culture: Manhood, Honour and Sociability,” in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 247–273. 43. See, in general, Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) and Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 44. See George McClure, “Heresy at Play: Academies and the Literary Underground in Counter-Reformation Siena,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 1151–1207. See also Federico Barbierato, The Inquisitor in the Hat Shop: Inquisition, Forbidden Books and Unbelief in Early Modern Venice (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012). 45. See Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 238–240. 46. Madeleine Alcover, “Cyrano, Chapelle, Dassoucy: un gay trio,” in L’Autre au XVIIe siècle: Actes du 4e colloque du Centre international de rencontres sur le XVIIe siècle. University of Miami, 23 au 25 avril 1998, ed. Ralph Heyndels and Barbara Woshinsky (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1999), 265–275. On Viau, see Maurice Lever, Les Bûchers de Sodome (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 108–118. On Saint-Pavin, see Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, Poésies, ed. Nicholas Hammond (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012). 47. See Cristian Berco, From Body to Community: Veneral Disease and Society in Baroque Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 48. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 21, 20. See also John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25, fifth series (1975): 21–38. On confession in general, see Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 49. See “Sexuality and Solitude,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, I, Ethics, trans. Robert Hurley et al., ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 179. 50. See Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 51. Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 297. 52. See Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 293–308. 53. See Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 300, with reference to the work of Jean Delumeau. 5 4. The Life of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. David Lewis (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2011), 226 (chap. 29, para. 17).

baroque sexualities   709 55. Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1950), sv, my italics. 56. Eve  K.  Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1–2, 47. 57. See, notably, on England, Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982); on Italy, Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 109–145, and Marina Baldassari, Bande giovanili e “vizio nefando”: Violenza e sessualità nella Roma barocca (Rome: Viella, 2005); on Spain, Cristian Berco, Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); and, on France, Guy Poirier, L’Homosexualité dans l’imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 1996) and Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings. 58. See Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 40–61. 59. While the precise date of the composition of the two plays is uncertain, most critics believe that Massacre followed Edward II. Marlowe died in 1593. See Richard Hillman, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 72–111. 60. See, notably, Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 61. See Denis  M.  Sweet, “The Personal, the Political, and the Aesthetic: Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s German Enlightenment Life,” in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989), 147–162. 62. See the classic reading of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 28–48, and, more recently, Traub, Thinking Sex, 229–264. 63. See Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 191–243. 64. See Marian Rothstein, The Androgyne in Early Modern France: Contextualizing the Power of Gender (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and, more generally, Todd  W.  Reeser, Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 65. See Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 245–291. 66. See, for example, Brantôme, Les Dames galantes, ed. Pascal Pia (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 191, 193. See also Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 14, 272–284. 67. The heterosexualized Sappho is examined by Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For convincing discussions of a homoerotic Sappho, see Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 27–53, and, for France, Legault, Female Intimacies, 121–177, especially in relation to Madeleine de Scudéry. 68. Traub focuses on two kinds of women, the “tribade” and the “femme,” arguing that the two come together only in the mid-seventeenth century, at the same time as the rise of the “companionate marriage” or “domestic heterosexuality” (Renaissance of Lesbianism). For her part, Elizabeth Susan Wahl identifies a distinction between sexual relationships and idealized friendships, seen as nonsexual as long as they were not gender transgressive, that breaks down in the eighteenth century. See Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations:

710   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 69. Katharine Park, “The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570–1620,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (London: Routledge, 1997), 171–193. 70. Valerie Traub, “The (In)Significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” in Queering the Renaissance, 62–83, see 67; reprinted with some revisions in The Renaissance of Lesbianism, 158–187. 7 1. See Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 272–289. 72. See readings in Wahl, Invisible Relations; Andreadis, Sappho; Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism; and Robinson, Closeted Writing. 73. On the mollies, see Bray, Homosexuality, and Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830 (London: GMP Publishers, 1992). On the new  sexual identities, see Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), as well as many articles by the same author. On the gens de la manchette, see Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan Jr., eds. and trans., Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), as well as many articles by Merrick; Claude Courouve, Les Assemblées de la Manchette, Paris—1720–1750 (Paris: C.  Courouve, 2000); Michel Rey, “Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700–1750: The Police Archives,” trans. Robert  A.  Day and Robert Welch, in ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. Robert Purks Maccubbin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 179–191, and “Police and Sodomy in Eighteenth-Century Paris: From Sin to Disorder,” in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989), 129–146. For a fuller discussion, see Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 16–49, and Same-Sex Marriage, 143–158. 74. Randolph Trumbach, “London’s Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (London: Routledge, 1991), 112–141, and “The Origin and Development of the Modern Lesbian Role in the Western Gender System: Northwestern Europe and the United States, 1750–1900,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 20, no. 2 (1994): 287–320. 75. See Tim Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (New York: Random House, 2016), 55–60, 66–77, 189–194, 473–475, 480–485. 76. See Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). See also Ann Rosalind Jones, “Heterosexuality: A Beast with Many Backs,” in A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Renaissance, ed. Bette Talvacchia (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 35–50. 77. See Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 32–33. 78. See Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2003), 355–360. 7 9. See Ferguson, Same-Sex Marriage, 143–158, and George  E.  Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 44–59. 80. See Rey, “Police and Sodomy.” 81. Traub, Thinking Sex, 17.

baroque sexualities   711

Further Reading Andreadis, Harriette. Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Berco, Cristian. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Boswell, John. Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. New York: Villard Books, 1994. Bray, Alan. The Friend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. London: Penguin, 2005. Dekker, Rudolf M., and Lotte C. van de Pol. The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Dreger, Alice Domurat. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Ferguson, Gary. Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Ferguson, Gary. Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Fradenburg, Louise, and Carla Freccero, with Kathy Lavezzo, eds. Premodern Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1996. Gilbert, Ruth. Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Haggerty, George  E. Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Halperin, David M. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hitchcock, Tim. English Sexualities, 1700–1800. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. King, Helen. The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Robinson, David M. Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. Rocke, Michael  J. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Ruggiero, Guido. Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Steinberg, Sylvie. La Confusion des sexes: Le Travestissement de la Renaissance à la Révolution. Paris: Fayard, 2001. Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

712   The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque Traub, Valerie. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Trumbach, Randolph. Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Tulchin, Allan A. “Same-Sex Couples Creating Households in Old Regime France: The Uses of the Affrèrement.” Journal of Modern History 79 (2007): 613–647. Turner, James Grantham. Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534–1685. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

chapter 32

Pa r a dox e s: Ba roqu e Science Ofer Gal

From Copernicus’s Paradox to Newton’s Contradictory Scholia If in the spirit of Baroque playfulness and acknowledging the folly of such an exercise, historians of science were to announce a moment of origin to the early modern incarnation of their subject matter, many would point to this paragraph, from Nicolaus Copernicus’s (b. 1473–d. 1543) On the Revolutions: It is the earth . . . from which the celestial ballet is beheld in its repeated performances before our eyes. Therefore, if any motion is ascribed to the earth, in all things outside it the same motion will appear, but in the opposite direction, as though they were moving past it. Such in particular is the daily rotation, since it seems to involve the entire universe except the earth and what is around it. However, if you grant that the heavens have no part in this motion but that the earth rotates from west to east, upon earnest consideration you will find that this is the actual situation concerning the apparent rising and setting of the sun, moon, stars and planets.1

And if they had to continue the exercise and choose an epitome for the process starting with Copernicus’s declaration of the motion of the earth, it would likely be Isaac Newton’s (b. 1643–d. 1727) Principia, for which the following served as a draft: The whole space of the planetary heavens either rests (as is commonly believed), or moves uniformly in a straight line, and hence the communal centre of gravity of the planets . . . either rests or moves along with it. In both cases . . . the relative motions of the planets are the same, and their common centre of gravity rests in relation to the whole of space, and so can certainly be taken for the still centre of the whole

714   the oxford handbook of the baroque planetary system. Hence truly the Copernican system is proved a priori. For if the common centre of gravity is calculated for any position of the planets it either falls in the body of the Sun or will always be very close to it.2

Both texts are bold and confident, the latter celebrating the triumph of the former. But both are followed by much less self-assured insights. “To be sure,” writes Copernicus, there is general agreement among the authorities that the earth is at rest in the middle of the universe. They hold the contrary view to be inconceivable or downright silly (ridiculum).3

And Newton, in a moment of sincere reflection on the implications of the physics he developed to make sense of the earth moving as if it were a stone hurled in a sling, adds: By reason of th[e] deviation of the Sun from the centre of gravity the centripetal force does not always tend to that immobile centre, and hence the planets neither move exactly in ellipses nor revolve twice in the same orbit. So that there are as many orbits to a planet as it has revolutions . . . and the orbit of any one planet depends on the combined motion of all the planets, not to mention the action of all these on each other. But to consider simultaneously all these causes of motion and to define these motions by exact laws allowing of convenient calculation exceeds . . . the force of the entire human intellect. Ignoring those minutiae, the simple orbit and the mean among all errors will be the ellipse.4

The discrepancy between the boldness of the initial declarations and their nigh-untenable nature acknowledged in the latter ones is what makes these claims properly Baroque: Copernicus and Newton’s claims are not just radically new—they are seriously and reflectively paradoxical. It is the acknowledged, reflective, and fertile paradoxality of its claims and techniques that turns the New Science, stretching between the two quotes, into a representative and a shaping force of Baroque culture. Copernicus and Newton consciously dismantle not only the “authorities” of yore but also the very subject matter of their own disciplines. Both erase the questions they set out to answer as they invent new intellectual tools with which to answer them. Copernicus’s claim is “ridiculum” not only because the motion of the earth is strange, which indeed it is; more fundamentally, it is so because this motion has to be completely hidden. We on Earth are engaged, according to him, in three different motions—two of them extremely fast—without any direct discernible effect. This is a paradoxical thought: for all that Copernicus himself knows and believes in, it is not only that motion is the subject matter of astronomy, nature simply is motion. Motion is the cause behind all effects; effect-less motion is a paradoxical concept. The concept of motion Newton has at his disposal was elaborated to handle this very paradox—of motion that cannot be sensed—so he can confidently declare that “the Copernican system is proved a priori.” Yet the price of this new concept is another paradox, no less disturbing: “the celestial ballet,” it turns out, lacks harmony; “there are as many orbits to

paradoxes: baroque science   715 a planet as it has revolutions.” It is up to the “human intellect” to conjure a “simple orbit and the mean among all errors.” This idea is so unsettling that Newton removes the “Copernican Scholium” altogether from the printed version of the Principia, replacing it (from Principia’s second edition) with the famous “General Scholium,” in which he nonchalantly declares “Gravity towards the sun . . . decreases exactly as the squares of the distances . . .as is manifest from the fact that the aphelia of the planets are at rest”5— against his own arguments and evidence throughout the book.6

The Seriousness of It All We began with playfulness, but if we remain committed to the idea that playfulness is the hallmark of the Baroque, it is difficult to find a place for science in it. This is not simply because, in common lore, science means “rigorous standards in observing and experimenting.”7 Rather, it is because the contrast between the “forceful and occasionally forced paradox”8 of Baroque visual art and literature on the one hand, and the rigor of the New Science on the other, is what came to define early modern culture for historians. This is as true for those among them who are not committed to a progressive, hence self-explanatory and self-propelling idea of the coming to being of early modern science. Even Michel Foucault, the greatest iconoclast of all, is still wholly committed to this dichotomy, which he puts into the attractive garb of his powerful analysis of the break between Renaissance and Classical “epistemes”: At the beginning of the seventeenth century, during the period that has been termed, rightly or wrongly, the Baroque, thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not examine the obscure region of confusions.9

Crucially, in Foucault’s analysis it was not for the Baroque to replace “the noble, rigorous, and restrictive figures of similitude”10 with the yet-more rigorous and restrictive approach to knowledge, in which “there exist two forms of comparison, and only two: the comparison of measurement and that of order.”11 The fierce critics of resemblance quoted by Foucault—Francis Bacon (b. 1511–d. 1626) and René Descartes (b. 1596–d. 1650)—lived “during the period that has been termed . . . the Baroque,” but he does not see in them representatives of their own era. Rather, as the “age of resemblance is drawing to a close,” it “is leaving nothing behind it but games.”12 For Foucault, the Baroque replaces the earnest search for similitudes with Games whose powers of enchantment grow out of a new kinship between resemblance and illusion. In his Baroque, the chimeras of similitude loom up on all sides, but they are recognized as chimeras: it is the privileged age of trompe-l’œil painting, of the comic illusion, of the play that duplicates itself by representing another play, of the quid pro quo, of dreams and visions; it is the age of the deceiving

716   the oxford handbook of the baroque senses; the age in which the poetic dimension of language is defined by metaphor, simile, and allegory.13 Foucault is correct in one important sense: “Excluding resemblance as the fundamental experience and primary form of knowledge”14 is the key insight of Descartes’s thought—even more fundamental than Foucault grants. Concluding a section on “The Images that Form on the Back of the Eye,”15 Descartes concedes that “this picture [those images], in being so transmitted into our head, always retains some resemblance to the objects from which it proceeds,” just in order to immediately stress that “nevertheless,” “we must not hold, that it is by means of this resemblance that the picture causes us to perceive the objects, as if there were yet other eyes in our brain with which we could apprehend it.”16 Yet in labeling Descartes’s reasoning “classical thought” Foucault misses the points most crucial to us here: Descartes is not departing from the worries and resolutions of his time. Rather, he is elaborating an essential Baroque paradox; and there are no “games” involved: it is an immediate and serious implication of his science. Descartes does not deny resemblance. Rather, he denies it its ancient role as an unquestioned and unproblematic epistemological anchor for science and turns it, instead, into an object of the same scientific inquiry it used to anchor—a serious and carefully considered Baroque reversal. In fact, one can trace Descartes’s reversal back to the original Copernican paradox and its surprising consequences: the motion of the earth was undetectable but gave new meaning and new significance to the motion of other planets. The subject matter of astronomical observation thus changed, and a new concept of vision was needed to make sense of and legitimize its new ambitions. This concept left no place for resemblance.

Tycho’s Cosmological Paradox Here is a summary of this development. Viewed from the center, the planets presented only their relative positions against the backdrop of the celestial sphere. Off-center, these angles could be triangulated into real distances and real velocities. This made exciting sense: moving, the earth was a planet, and this meant that the planets were like Earth; the changing positions of spots of light observed by astronomers were real motions of real physical objects. For Johannes Kepler (b. 1571–d. 1630), this was a cause to celebrate another paradox—the removal from the center of the cosmos was not a fall from grace but an opportunity for epiphany: If the earth, our home, did not measure out its annual circuit in the midst of the other spheres, changing place for place, position for position, human reasoning would never struggle to the absolutely true distances of the planets, and to the other things which depend on them, and would never establish astronomy.17

paradoxes: baroque science   717

Figure 1  Tycho in his Observatory. From: Tycho Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (Nuremberg: Levinus Hulsius, 1602).

718   the oxford handbook of the baroque Neither “a game,” nor confounding or deterring, the paradox at the heart of the Copernican hypothesis—the motion we participate in without experiencing—became an engine of inquiry, and in the decades following Copernicus’s de Revolutionibus Europe saw an interest in observation whose bulk and sophistication had been, since Antiquity, the monopoly of the Asian astronomers. Defining this surge in the last quarter of the ­sixteenth century was the work of the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe (b. 1546–d. 1601) in Uranienborg, “The Castle of Urania (astronomy’s muse),” his observatory on the island of Hven in the Baltic Sea. Tycho reigned in Uranienborg as if it were an early exemplar of “big science”: financed by the Danish court, he employed some 100 people at any given time, from servants through instrument builders, apprentices, calculators, and expert astronomers (as well as alchemists), constructing and operating large, expensive, purpose-built instruments—the largest a building-size mural quadrant. These instruments allowed Tycho observations many orders of magnitude more accurate than those of his predecessors, and this accuracy in turn allowed him some bold empirical claims with unsettling cosmological implications. Already in 1572—before the establishment of Uranienborg—Tycho was observing a radiant object that had suddenly appeared in the sky, dazzling enough to be seen even during the day. Confident in the new accuracy of his instruments and calculations, Tycho declared that the object was further away than the moon—a Stella Nova, as the title of his publication asserts; a heavenly body. In 1577 he added a similar claim about a comet: this fleeting, ephemeral object was above the moon, within the heavenly spheres. Tycho’s claims were not only novel and bold but truly paradoxical: the assumption that there could be no new objects in the heavens was so deeply ingrained in both the theory and the practices of Tycho’s astronomy—indeed, in any astronomy and cosmology available to him—that his own project made little sense without it. Changes belonged under the moon, in the realm of the elements, where things came to be and passed away; above it, all was eternal and unchanging. This was why the heavenly bodies moved in simple and perfect motions—concentric circular orbits with uniform angular velocity—whereas the terrestrial elements moved in straight lines, towards or away from the center of the earth. Tycho’s observations, like any astronomer’s, were to provide the data needed to construct planetary models that followed—with all necessary compromises—the rules of this changeless motion. Tycho actually found the Copernican hypothesis too extreme, opting for a compromise in which the planets orbited the sun, but the sun itself moved around the earth, which stayed stationary. Yet even Copernicus did not contest the strict distinction between the realms separated by the lunar sphere; the static eternity of the heavens contrasted with the constant change within the terrestrial realm. If anything, with the earth no longer at the center of the cosmos, this distinction became more crucial: the integrity and uniqueness of the sphere of elements, rotating and orbiting as a whole, was the only Copernican way to explain how it is that clouds and birds do not drift west as we move east. And it is important to reiterate that Tycho’s paradox, like Copernicus’s before it and others to follow (some of which we will discuss below), was experienced as anything “but a game.” Its highly unsettling epistemological and cultural implications were as

paradoxes: baroque science   719 clear to outside commentators like Justus Lipsius (Joost Lips; b. 1547–d. 1606)—one of the most astute intellectuals among Tycho’s contemporaries. And howsoeuer the wit of man cloaketh and excuseth these matters, yet there haue happened and daily do in that celestiall bodie such things as confound both the rules and wittes of the Mathematicians . . . But beholde our Astrologers were sore troubled of late with strange [noui] motions, and new starres. This very yeare there arose a star whose encreasing and decreasing was plainly marked, and we saw (a matter hardly to be credited [difficulter creditum]) euen in the heauen itself, a thing to haue beginning and end againe.18

Finally—and where the New Science and the Baroque most clearly intertwine—rather than affecting skepticism or intellectual despair, the paradox itself became a locus of inquiry. Tycho assigned the task of defending the project of high-power instrumental astronomical observation to Kepler, his most inspired recruit, who joined his entourage in 1600 in Prague, after much intrigue forced Tycho to forsake his castle of astronomy and move to the very Baroque court of Rudolf II.19 Kepler was a disciple of Michael Maestlin (b. 1550–d. 1631), the first fully committed mainstream Copernican astronomer, and had already published (in 1596) a brazen hypothesis concerning the physicalmathematical make-up of the Copernican cosmos—Mysterium Cosmographicum. So when Tycho suddenly died and he found himself carrying the responsibilities and authority of the Imperial Astronomer, Kepler took to the task in a way that his departed mentor would have undoubtedly found too radical.

Kepler’s Optical Paradox Kepler set to resolve both sides of the paradox: the metaphysical conundrum of the changing heavens and the epistemological worry of our pretense to know these changes. He began to develop a physica coelestis—a proper physics of the heavens, in which the planets moved in real motions, affected by real forces, so the idea of “euen in the heauen itself, a thing to haue beginning and end againe” would not be so “difficulter creditum” (we will touch on this project towards the end). The other project, to legitimize the way “we saw” such “strange motions, and new starres,” is the origin of Descartes’s reversal of the role of resemblance—from the natural philosopher’s warrantor of verity to a phenomenon the philosopher is called upon to explain. The epistemological problem facing Kepler was twofold. First, it was the straightforward worry that “God the Creator placed [the celestial] bodies so far away from our senses that we are unable to . . . set out the causes of [their] particular appearances.”20 This sentiment was not restricted to general intellectuals such as Lipsius or Nicodemus Frischlin (b. 1547–d. 1590), from whose rendition of traditional astronomy these words are taken. Working astronomers like Kepler’s own mentor Maestlin and indeed Tycho himself

720   the oxford handbook of the baroque agreed that the heavens were too far and too different to allow us knowledge of “causes,” of physical knowledge of change: “No one is able to ascend to the aethereal region, where he would see everything in person”21 was the way Maestlin put it. The other, more specific epistemological objection was to the means by which Tycho’s ambitious observational projects were carried out; the large naked eye instruments that Tycho used, and even more so the optical ones, based on the camera obscura, which Kepler favored. The objection did not stem from a simple distrust of instruments; it was a fundamental implication of what vision was: a direct cognitive relation between mind and objects. Here is how this concept was elaborated by the father of medieval European Perspectiva tradition, Robert Grosseteste (b. c. 1168–d. 1253): A natural agent continuously multiplies its power from itself to the recipient, whether it acts on sense or on matter. This power is sometimes called species, sometimes a likeness, and it is the same thing whatever it may be called.22

Whether “species” or “likeness” (or for the atomists—simulacra), one thing was clear to all writers about vision from the Greeks, through the Muslim opticians led by Abū ʿAlī Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen; b. 965–d. c.?1040), to Grosseteste and his disciples in the thirteenth century. It was that vision is literally the re-presentation of the object—something of the object itself becoming present, through the eye, for reason to consider. This remained just as unquestionable to Renaissance masters of the visual arts such as the painter-theoretician Leon Battista Alberti (b. 1406–d. 1472). Summarizing optics to practitioners in his De pictura—in which he presents and teaches the new technique of linear perspective—Alberti stresses exactly this essential teleology, the “agency” by which vision is carried: Philosophers . . . say that surfaces are measured by certain rays, ministers of vision as it is (quasi visendi ministris), which they therefore call visual rays, since by their agency the images of things are impressed upon the senses.23

Reliable vision, this traditional understanding implied, was direct vision: when the agents of vision made their way, uninterrupted, from object to eye, they were in-and-of themselves authentic—actual replications of the observed object. Correspondingly, any mediation of this process was in and of itself a distortion: any instrument interrupted the species on their way to the eye, and especially so the optical instrument, whether camera obscura or telescope, which actively manipulated the visual rays with its lenses. Medieval scholars could excuse their spectacles, merely helping tired eyes with nearby manuscripts, and Tycho could excuse his sextants and quadrants, loyal to traditional astronomical humility and admitting the heavens are “inscrutable” (imperscrutabilis). But Kepler had little place for this modesty. Kepler’s resolution to the challenge of legitimizing instrumental observation was again paradoxical. Traditional optics discharged its epistemological task by guaranteeing an essentially cognitive relation between mind and objects, through the eye—a relation whose very essence was knowledge, carried by entities—Species, visual rays—with

paradoxes: baroque science   721 vague (if any) material realization but with a clear, teleological role: to in-form the mind of the object. Kepler provided epistemological legitimation to instruments by abolishing this cognitive warranty, turning vision itself into a physical process. “I firmly established,” he writes, by irrefutable experiments, that . . . from the Sun . . . species exactly alike are flowing . . . until for whatever reason, they fall on an opaque medium, where they paint their source: and vision is produced, when the opaque screen of the eye is painted this way.24

There are no “ministers of vision” in Kepler’s optics—no entities providing reason with authentic, unmediated, re-presentation of the object through the eye. There is only light, “flowing” from whatever source, bouncing off an object, until “for whatever reason” it falls on whatever “opaque medium.” There is nothing special about the eye: it is just another “opaque screen”; and nothing special to vision: it is “produced” like any other physical effect. The implications to optics and epistemology of Kepler’s reversal were just as radical, if not as famous, as the Copernican reversal was to astronomy and metaphysics. Kepler legitimized Tycho’s project by turning the eye into an instrument: if the eye was no ­better than an instrument, the instrument was no worse than the eye; if vision was physical mediation, then there was no fundamental epistemological harm in the mediation of the instrument. It was a paradoxical solution for two reasons. First, it did not legitimize the instrument by elevating it, but by denigrating the eye; it did not assign to the instrument the capacity for unmediated, cognitive apprehension of the objects but shunned this capacity altogether. Kepler was willfully aiming at a Pyrrhic victory. Secondly and related, Kepler was keenly aware that his naturalization of vision had the effect of taking the viewer out of nature. How this image or picture is joined together with the visual spirits that reside in the retina and in the nerve, and whether it is arraigned within by the spirits into the caverns of the cerebrum to the tribunal of the soul or of the visual faculty; whether the visual faculty, like a magistrate given by the soul, descending from the headquarters of the cerebrum outside to the visual nerve itself and the retina, as to lower courts, might go forth to meet this image—this, I say, I leave to the natural philosophers to argue about.25

The light touch of humor does nothing to obscure the seriousness by which Kepler takes his insight: optics studies a physical process, in which light produces an image, which just might be on the retina. This physicalization of optics was a great achievement, but it created a new, essential, and unexpected epistemological mystery: how does this physical image translate into vision? And Kepler stresses: This image, which has an existence separable from the presence of the object seen, is not in the humors or the tunics . . . Therefore, it is in the spirits, and vision occurs through this impression of images upon the spirits. However, the impression itself is not optical, but physical and mysterious [physica & admirabilis].26

722   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Descartes’s Paradox: Naturalizing the Mind There were two aspects to the optical paradox: the scientific understanding of vision made it lose its epistemological prowess, and the naturalization of the eye estranged the observer from nature. In the very year Kepler established both aspects in his Optics (1609), Galileo Galilei (b. 1564–d. 1642) presented his telescope, and reflecting on the instrument’s significance in later years, he would add a third aspect: since unmediated vision was exposed as a myth and the naked eye was therefore not epistemologically better than the instrument, and since the instrument was clearly optically better than the eye, it followed that the instrument was always preferable to the eye. The telescope was not there to assist the eye but to replace it: art preceded nature and empirical inquiry had to bypass the senses.27 The optical paradox thus merged into the fundamental Baroque conflation between nature and art.28 This again highlights the misdirection in Foucault’s influential reading of Descartes’s dismissal of resemblance. Descartes was not departing from the playfulness of his surrounding culture but carefully studying the very serious implications of the scientific achievements it was most proud of: It is necessary to beware of assuming that in order to sense, the mind needs to perceive certain images transmitted by the objects to the brain, as our philosophers commonly suppose; or at least, the nature of these images must be conceived quite otherwise than as they do. For, inasmuch as [the philosophers] do not consider anything about these images except that they must resemble the object they represent, it is impossible for them to show us how they can be formed by these objects, received by the external sense organs, and transmitted by the nerves to the brain.29

This was as volatile an insight as any we have already considered. The optical paradox, it turned out, necessitated not only a new theory of vision but also a new theory of the mind. “Images transmitted by the objects to the brain”—resemblances of objects—used to warrant the epistemological authenticity of the senses, but even more fundamentally, these images were the very entities that reason and its faculties operated on. Images were what the mind consigned to memory, retrieved, compared, and categorized. For Walter Charleton (b. 1619–d. 1707), a generation later, contemplating images was still so obviously the principal activity of human reason that it distinguished man from beast: In Man . . . the Rational Soul, as president of all the inferiour faculties, and constantly speculating the impressions, or images represented to her by the Sensitive [soul], as by a mirrour; doth first form to herself conceptions and notions correspondent to their nature, and then proceed to acts of reason, judgment and will. But as for Brutes that are irrational; in what manner the perception, distinction, appetite, memory of objects, and other acts resulting from an inferior kind of reason, are in them performd . . . is more than I can yet understand.30

paradoxes: baroque science   723 Depriving the mind of resemblance—of the essentially cognitive relation to the world embodied by visual rays, species, and simulacra—was to deprive it of its very subject matter. Descartes’s solution to this self-subverting intellectual move was another Baroque turn—another attempt, far from skepticism or playful disregard, to resolve a paradox produced by science by producing more science. He would naturalize the philosophical question Kepler had to “leave to the natural philosophers to argue about” and submit it to the modes of inquiry of the New Science itself: Though the human soul directs the whole body, it nevertheless has its principal seat in the brain; there alone it not only understands and imagines, but also senses. And it senses by means of the nerves which are extended like threads from the brain to all the remaining members.31

And with the “human soul” so naturalized, given a material locale and a causal function, Descartes turns to a properly natural and causal entity to mediate between reason and the world: The small nerves which extend to the heart and to the praecordia, although extremely tiny, create the other internal sense; in which consist all the stirrings, or passions, and all the states of the rational soul, such as happiness, sorrow, love, hatred, and similar things.32

This was a most promising project for Descartes but one he only had enough time to sketch in his Passions of the Soul, completed just before his death and published immediately after it. The passions could fulfill this complex role in the naturalized epistemology Descartes envisioned because, in the first place, they were a proper object of natural philosophy, hence of the New Science. He had a very long tradition of writing on the passions to draw from, ethical and pious but also medical and dietetic, stretching from antiquity through to late-Renaissance Neo-Stoicism to early modern natural history attempts such as Charleton’s.33 Secondly, in this tradition the passions fulfilled exactly the mediating role—between world and mind, causal and cognitive—demanded by Kepler’s optical paradox, and it is this role that Descartes assigns them: We also experience in ourselves certain other things which should be attributed neither solely to the mind nor solely to the body, and which . . . originate from the close and profound union of our mind with the body: specifically, the appetites of hunger, thirst, etc.; and similarly the emotions or passions of the soul (which do not consist solely in thought), for example, the emotions of anger, merriment, sadness, love, etc.; and finally all sensations, such as pain, pleasure, light and color, sounds, odors, tastes, heat, hardness, and the other tactile qualities.34

Mediating between mind and body, the passions could solve that most fundamental mystery created by Kepler’s separation of optics from visual perception: without authentic

724   the oxford handbook of the baroque re-presentation, without the objects truly present to the mind, how can reason recognize and distinguish between them, let alone contemplate about them? The challenge was to create subject matter of cognitive value from the purely causal processes prescribed by the new optics, and Descartes sketched the problem while marking the direction for its solution: From the fact that I sense a wide variety of colors, sounds, odors, tastes, levels of heat, grades of roughness, and the like, I rightly conclude that in the bodies from which these different perceptions of the senses proceed there are differences corresponding to the different perceptions—though perhaps the latter do not resemble the former.35

The passions provided an answer to the question how “different perceptions” can be translated to different “bodies” even though “the latter do not resemble the former” by reversing the cognitive order. It was not the recognition of objects that aroused the respective passions—it was the aroused passions that allowed the mind to recognize the respective objects: [The] objects which move the senses do not excite different passions in us in proportion to all of their diversities, but only in proportion to the different ways they can harm or profit us or, generally, be important to us.36

With this essential capacity to distinguish meaningfully between objects, the passions could also relieve some of the epistemological loss affected by relinquishing resemblance and the authenticity it guarantied. Passions warranted knowledge—though not certainty; this aspiration Descartes had long been abandoned in practice, if not always in rhetoric— because the passions were underwritten by our survival; that we eat rather than are eaten means that fear and hunger are directed toward, and allow us to recognize, their correct respective objects; that our species endures means that our desire is on the whole well calibrated and correctly conferred: The use of all the passions consists in this alone: they dispose the soul to will the things nature tells us useful.37

The submission of knowledge to the passions was a most spectacular Baroque reversal. “Passion is the road to corruption,” said Aquinas, putting a pagan ethical commonplace into medieval metaphysical lingo.38 The subjection of passions to reason was a dictum since Antiquity, even for those who wrote about it extensively and naturalistically, and in the Christian tradition it took, beyond its epistemological and medical significance, a heavy moral and religious onus because, as Augustine had put it in a definitive way, in our “very essence,” we are “mind, reason and judgment,” and “in this we are made unto the image of God.”39 Descartes’s contemporaries keenly understood the radical nature of his

paradoxes: baroque science   725 reversal, which Baruch Spinoza (b. 1632–d. 1677) took to the extreme: “Desire is the very essence of man,”40 was his conclusion, leading him to an ethical paradox (shared by Hobbes) with troubling consequences: We do not attempt, will, long for or desire a thing because we judge it is good. On the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we attempt, will, long for and desire it.41

At the End of the Process: Bernard Mandeville and his Unruly Bees For writers around the turn of the eighteenth century, the savants of Baroque science provided an explicit model of inquiry, so their conscious and reflective attention to paradoxes is particularly telling. Bernard Mandeville (b. 1670–d. 1733) found in Descartes and Spinoza’s turn to the passions a starting point for his study of mankind. “In the hope my Vanity forms of this I leave [the reader] with regret,” he closes his 1714 series of philosophical dialogues The Fable of the Bees, and concludes with repeating the seeming Paradox, the Substance of which is advanced in the Title Page; that Private Vices by the dexterous Management of a skillful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits.42 Mandeville’s paradox is that prosperity and peace are founded on greed, avarice and egoism. It is hardly a “seeming Paradox” he stresses that it is indeed a paradox many times throughout the text, and his readers, both contemporary and modern, both critical and admiring, have always taken it as such. Yet Mandeville is neither oblivious to nor deterred by the implications of arguing paradoxically. Indeed, he is careful to buttress his argument, so it will not turn against itself, as paradoxes often do: Should any of my Readers draw Conclusions in infinitum from my Assertions that Goods sunk or burnt are as beneficial to the Poor as if they had been well sold and put to their proper Uses, I would count him a Caviller and not worth answering: Should it always Rain and the Sun never shine, the Fruits of the earth would soon be rotten and destroy’d; and yet it is no Paradox to affirm, that, to have Grass or Corn, Rain is as necessary as the Sunshine.43

Mandeville first introduced the paradox “that Chastity may be supported by Incontinence, and the best of Virtues want the Assistance of the worst of Vices”44 ten years before the Fable of the Bees, in a short, sassy poem called The Grumbling Hive.45 There, the paradox had the juicy effect of satirical provocation—even if in the much more respectable Fable of the Bees Mandeville (perhaps tongue in cheek) denies it. Indeed, this provocation gained him much notoriety, notoriety he claims he would have been happier without, especially since the little pamphlet was plagiarized so fast that he saw no pecuniary benefit from it.

726   the oxford handbook of the baroque The original satirical edge came from the simple opposition between vice and virtue. The bees of the Grumbling Hive were a horde of crooks and loafers: All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, No Calling was without Deceit. The Lawyers, of whose Art the Basis Was raising Feuds and splitting Cases Opposed all Registers, that Cheats Might make more Work with dipt Estates.46

The punchline of this Chaucer- or Boccaccio-style irony was that instead of suffering for their despicable morals, the bees thrived in them: “Thus every Part was full of Vice, Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.”47 And the irony becomes a genuine paradox when Mandeville stresses that the hive’s “paradise” was not only oblivious to these vices but positively dependent on them. Once the gods tire of the “Sloth, Lust, Avarice and Pride”48 and put an end to the debauchery, the great prosperity collapses with it: As Pride and Luxury decrease, So by degrees they leave the Seas, Not Merchants now; but Companies Remove whole Manufacturies. All Arts and Crafts neglected lie; Content the Bane of Industry, Makes 'em admire their homely Store, And neither seek, nor covet more.49

But in The Fable of the Bees something quite dramatic changes. The paradox does not disappear; rather, one might say, it is topicalized: instead of poking fun, Mandeville sets out to explore the mechanisms that produce the paradox and its full extent. For example, There are . . . few People in London, of those that are at any time forc’d to go a-foot, but what could wish the Streets of it much cleaner than generally they are; while they regard nothing but their own Clothes and private Conveniency: but when once they come to consider, that what offends them is the result of the Plenty, great Traffick and Opulency of that mighty City . . . they will hardly ever wish to see the Streets of it less dirty.50

It is a careful empirical inquiry, and the causes for the paradox are found in the details: If we mind the Materials of all Sorts that must supply such an infinite number of Trades and Handicrafts, as are always going forward; the vast quantity of Victuals, Drink and Fewel that are daily consum’d in it, the Waste and Superfluities that must be produced from them; the multitudes of Horses and other Cattle that are always dawbing the Streets, the Carts, Coaches and more heavy Carriages that are perpetually wearing and breaking the Pavement of them, and above all the numberless swarms of People that are continually harassing and trampling through every part

paradoxes: baroque science   727 of them . . . we shall find that every Moment must produce new Filth; and considering how far distant the great Streets are from the River side, what Cost and Care soever be bestow’d to remove the Nastiness almost as fast as ’tis made, it is impossible London should be more cleanly before it is less flourishing.51

Yet as the empirical inquiry expands, Mandeville’s details take on a strong epistemological, even metaphysical, significance. The paradox, it turns out, has numerous facets, not all as amusing as the The Grumbling Hive suggests. For example, The Labour of Millions would soon be at an End, if there were not other Millions . . . Employ’d, To see their Handy-works destroy’d.52

Moreover, the paradox is reciprocal—virtue produces vice as much as vice produces virtue: Who would imagine, that Virtuous Women, unknowingly, should be instrumental in promoting the Advantage of Prostitutes? Or (what still seems the greater Paradox) that Incontinence should be made serviceable to the Preservation of Chastity?53

The original economic paradox—that personal greed and thievery lead to public wealth and prosperity—so Mandeville’s investigation reveals, is not a satirical device. It is an essential implication of both the subject matter he chose and the means he took to investigate it; an expression of the true paradoxical structure of our knowledge, if not of reality itself. “The paradox that private vices are public benefits,” Mandeville’s modern editor B. F. Kaye observes, “is merely a statement of the paradoxical mixing of moral criteria which runs through the book”—the ascetic criterion of personal virtue and the utilitarian criterion of public good.54 Kaye’s analysis is keen, but “merely” is the wrong adverb: this mixture of criteria is no confusion but an inevitable outcome of the very attempt to submit human moral behaviour to the procedures of the New Science. Mandeville makes it clear that his aim is indeed a Science of Man with the very first paragraph of his text: ONE of the greatest Reasons why so few People understand themselves, is, that most Writers are always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their Heads with telling them what they really are.55

And whether he intends to evoke it, or is even fully aware of it, Mandeville is echoing the naturalizing, “scientizing” sentiment expressed by Spinoza some thirty years earlier, leading him to the moral paradox discussed above: Most of those who have written about the passions and reason in human life make them look not as natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but as things which are outside nature. Indeed, [these writers] seem to conceive Man in nature as if a kingdom within a kingdom (imperium in imperio). For they believe that Man disturbs, rather than follows, the great order of nature, has absolute power over his actions, and is determined by no other cause but himself.56

728   the oxford handbook of the baroque Similarly to the effect it had on Spinoza, the naturalizing drive leaves Mandeville with little place for reason in his account of what “Men . . . really are,” and Spinoza’s “desire is the very essence of man” receives, in Mandeville’s hands, a powerfully materialistcorporeal rendition: “I believe Man (besides Skin, Flesh, Bones, &c. that are obvious to the Eye) to be a compound of various Passions.”57 These Baroque reversals of the philosophical-anthropological assumptions underlying common ethics and political thought led Spinoza to particularly pessimistic conclusions: No passion can be suppressed except by a stronger passion contrary to the passion to be suppressed, and . . . no one refrains from doing harm but for the fear of greater harm. . . . Society can therefore be established . . . if it has the power to set common rules of conduct and to establish laws and enforce them, not by reason, which is incapable of suppressing the passions, but by threats.58

Spinoza’s readers in the following century were keenly aware of the dark alleys into which his reasoning led. The effort to truly “understand” human ethical and economic behavior, to produce (as Mandeville would put it) “an enquiry into the origin of moral virtue”59 as a branch of natural philosophy, produced insights that were neither moral nor virtuous. To some, like Johann Musaeus (b. 1613–d. 1681), they were both morally repulsive and logically suspect; to others, like Alberto Radicati (b. 1698–d. 1737), they were liberating.60 Mandeville, we saw, belonged to the second camp: Spinoza’s naturalization of the human mind was his starting point, and the inversion of morality it implied he found more amusing than intimidating. But it was not because he was oblivious to the paradoxical conclusions or took them less seriously; in an important sense, it was quite the opposite. For Spinoza, the paradoxes were, indeed, only “seeming.” As far as he was concerned, once one relinquished the untenable assumption that humans constitute “a kingdom within a kingdom” and the moral demand that they should have free will—“absolute power over [their] actions”—these paradoxes disappeared.61 They disappeared because, for Spinoza, accepting the naturalizing assumption that humans, like everything else, “follow the common laws of nature” left nothing to disturb “the great order of nature.” But Mandeville does not see human “passions and reason” as introducing disorder into an orderly natural kingdom—just the opposite. This, as in Musick Harmony, Made Jarrings in the Main agree; Parties directly opposite Assist each oth’r, as ‘twere for Spight; And Temp’rance with Sobriety62

For Mandeville, vice can bring about virtue and passionate behaviour can bring about reasoned order because paradoxes are rooted in the makeup of the world: “harmony” stems from primal “jarring.”

paradoxes: baroque science   729

Conclusion: The Great Baroque Reversal This is a startling metaphysical reversal. Mandeville replaces the ancient drive “to save the phenomena”—to reveal the hidden order underlying our seemingly chaotic experience—with a suggestion that it is actually the other way around: an underlying disorder is dressed up with “Temp’rance.” The musical metaphor stresses that Mandeville is aware of the significance of his move: from Pythagoras on, musical harmonies were the emblem of and the evidence for the perfection and simplicity of the true reality from which our world of “parties directly opposite” emerges. Yet the reversal was not a novelty or idiosyncrasy introduced by Mandeville. Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi of 1618, as its name suggests, is still, to a large degree, a celebration of the uplifting notion of perfect harmonies hidden beyond the phenomena, but his idea of harmony already hints at the paradox that will excite and serve Mandeville: In general, in everything in which quantity, and harmonies in accordance with iyt, can be sought, their presence is most evident in motion rather than without motion. For although in any given straight line there are its half, third, quarter fifth sixth, and their multiples yet they are lurking among other parts which are incommensurable with the whole.63

The ancient, Pythagorean concept of harmonious cosmic infrastructure was essentially and necessarily static. Motion was change and change was “jarring”—what was perfect had no reason to change, so it always remained the same. In the mathematical disciplines close to Kepler’s heart, this meant reducing the phenomena to strict Euclidean structures—lines and angles in optics and circles and spheres in astronomy—a reduction he had no sympathy for. Refashioning himself as a philosopher of nature, much like his contemporary Galileo, Kepler had no patience for this mere-geometrical exercise: all things in God’s world, including those behaving mathematically such as light and planets, were related by forces and motions. His considerable skills as a mathematician were thus to be employed in discovering the mathematical curves created by nature’s motions rather than enforcing perfect ones upon them. If they were ellipses (or parabolas, to Galileo) rather than perfectly simple circles—so be it: The mind, without imagining certain motion, does not discern harmonic proportions from the confused infinite [proportions] surrounding them within a given quantity.64

It was this project, through much modification, which Newton would summarize in the scholia we quoted at the beginning: to relate all bodies, celestial and terrestrial alike, by forces and motions, using mathematics to describe real trajectories. Yet the outcome was not what Kepler expected: “The celestial ballet,” it turned out, had much less harmony

730   the oxford handbook of the baroque than assumed by astronomers, both before and after it was physicalized by Kepler; and mathematics, no longer in search of ideal structures, found itself directed at “ignoring minutiae” and constructing “the simple orbit and the mean among all errors,” which just happened to be, contingently and precariously, “the ellipse.”65 Mandeville’s deep paradox—the reversal that assigned to art the task of imposing human-size, unstable order to a “jarring” nature—was not a “game.” It was a fundamental insight of the great cultural achievement of the Baroque: the New Science.66

Notes 1. Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions, ed. Jerzy Dobrzycki, trans. Edward Rosen (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1978 [1543]), 27. 2. Isaac Newton, De Motu, translation edited from a quotation in John Herivel, The Background to Newton’s Principia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 301. 3. Copernicus, On the Revolutions, 26. 4. Newton, De Motu, 301. 5. Newton, Isaac, The Principia. Trans. and ann. I.  B.  Cohen and A.  Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 943. 6. Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, Baroque Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 172–173. 7. Rupert A. Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 (London: Longman, 1962), xi. 8. Helen  C.  White, et al. eds., Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, Vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 1:391. 9. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 56. 10. Foucault, The Order of Things, 57. 11. Foucault, The Order of Things, 58. 12. Foucault, The Order of Things, 56–57. 13. Foucault, The Order of Things, 57. 14. Foucault, The Order of Things, 58. 15. René Descartes, Optics, in Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 91. 16. Descartes, Optics, 101. Italics added. 17. Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World, trans. E.  J.  Aiton, et al. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997 [1619]), 496. 18. Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie (London: Richard Iohnes, 1594), 37–38 (italics added), cited in Raz Chen-Morris, “Imagination, Passions, and the Production of Knowledge,” in Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Asaph Ben-Tov et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 54. 19. On Kepler defending Tycho, see Nicholas Jardine, Birth of History and Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); on Rudolf ’s court, see Richard J. Evans, Rudolf II and His World (Oxford: Thames and Hudson, 1997). 20. Nicodemus Frischlin, De astronomicae artis . . . (Frankfurt: Ionnes Spies, 1586), 41, quoted in Nicholas Jardine, “Epistemology of the Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 700. See also Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein, “Realism

paradoxes: baroque science   731 and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy,” Perspectives on Science 6, no. 3 (1998): 232–258. 21. Michael Maestlin, De Astronomiae hypothesibus (Heidelberg: Jacob Mueller, 1582), f. A2r, cited in Barker and Goldstein, “Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy,” 249. 22. Robert Grosseteste, “De lineis, angulis et figuris,” in Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln, ed. Ludwig Baur (Münster: I. W. Aschendorff, 1912), 60. 23. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, in On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De pictura and De statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 41. 24. Johannes Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur (Frankfurt, 1604), henceforth Optics, in Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, 1571–1630, Bd. II, ed. Max Caspar, Walther von Dyck, and Franz Hammer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1937–2017), 33. 25. Kepler, Optics, 180. 26. Kepler, Optics, 181. 27. See Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, “Empiricism Without the Senses: How the Instrument Replaced the Eye,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge, ed. Charles Wolfe and Ofer Gal (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Verlag, 2010), 121–148. 28. See, e.g., Rosario Villari, ed., Baroque Personae, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and especially Paolo Rossi’s contribution, “The Scientist,” 271–272. 29. Descartes, Optics, 89. 30. Walter Charleton, Natural History of the Passions (London: James Magnes, 1674), 32. 31. René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine  R.  Miller and Reese  P.  Miller (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel, 1983 [1644]), IV.189, 276. 32. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, IV.190, 277. Italics added. 33. Susan James, Passion and Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 34. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, I.48, 21–22. 35. René Descartes, Meditations, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45. 36. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), II.52, 51. 37. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, II.52, 51. 38. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, http://www.logicmuseum.com/authors/aquinas/ Summa-index.htm, IIa, que. 22 arg. 2. 39. Augustine, Sermones, Sermo 43, 3, http://www.augustinus.it/latino/discorsi/discorso_054_ testo.htm: “Sed tamen amplius quid habemus? Mentem, rationem, consilium, quod non habent bestiae, non habent volucres, non habent pisces. In eo facti sumus ad imaginem Dei.” 40. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics [Ethica], trans. R. H. M. Elwes (eBooks@Adelaide, 2012), Aff. Def. 1. Italics added. 41. Spinoza, Ethica IIIp9s. For a different recent interpretation of these themes in Spinoza, as well as a bibliography of the vast literature on them, see Matthew J. Kisner, Spinoza on Human Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 42. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, comm. F.B. Kaye (The University of Adelaide Edition, 2014), 377. 43. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 355. 44. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 170.

732   the oxford handbook of the baroque 45. Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive, in his Fable of the Bees, 114–126. 46. Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive, 115. 47. Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive, 117. 48. Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive, 116. 49. Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive, 123. 50. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 109. 51. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 109–110. 52. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 161. 53. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 167. 54. Kaye in Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 37. 55. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Introduction, 127. 56. Spinoza, Ethica, III Praefatio. 57. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Introduction, 127. 58. Spinoza, Ethica, IV, 37. 59. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Title, 128. 60. Johann Musaeus, Spinosismus (Witebergae: J.L.  Meisel, 1708; Alberto Radicati Twelve Discourses, 2nd English ed. (London: J. Wilford, 1737). Neither would have made much sense of the Spinoza’s role as champion of human reason and bourgeois freedoms for which he is celebrated in the literature of recent decades. Classics of this literature are Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 61. Spinoza, Ethica, III Praefatio. 62. Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive, 171–175. 63. Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi (Linz, 1619), in Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. VI, ed. Max Caspar et al. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1937–2017), Book 4, chap. 3, 232. 64. Kepler, Harmonices, Book 4, chap. 3, 233. 65. Newton, De Motu, 301. See footnote 4. 66. Much of the material in this paper is an elaboration of various publications from the Baroque Science project shared with Raz Chen-Morris, and especially of chapters in our joint book by that title (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013). Raz Chen-Morris has also sketched the Foucault argument developed here. I owe my knowledge of Mandeville’s work to Jennifer Tomlinson, whose work on him is forthcoming. Cindy Hodoba-Eric edited the text for style and logical coherence and suggested several of the key arguments. I am deeply indebted to all three.

Further Reading Coppola, Al. The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Fuchs, Thomas. The Mechanization of the Heart: Harvey and Descartes. Trans. by Marjorie Grene. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001. Gal, Ofer. Meanest Foundations and Nobler Superstructures: Hooke, Newton and the Compounding of the Celestiall Motions of the Planets. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002. Gal, Ofer, and Roz Chen-Morris. Baroque Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. García Santo-Tomás, Enrique. The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

paradoxes: baroque science   733 Gribbin, John, and Mary Gribbin. Out of the Shadow of a Giant: Hooke, Halley, and the Birth of British Science. London: William Collins, 2017. Hodacs, Hanna, et al., eds. Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2018. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Raphael, Renée. Reading Galileo: Scribal Technologies and the Two New Sciences. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Schickore, Jutta. The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Wolfe, Charles, and Ofer Gal, eds. The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Verlag, 2010.

chapter 33

Ba roqu e Dipl om acy Timothy Hampton

The Baroque Subject In June of 1520, the French king Francis I and the English king Henry VIII met near Calais, in what is now northern France. They spent more than two weeks in proximity to each other, jousting, eating, drinking, and talking. They described themselves as brothers, and swore everlasting friendship between themselves and their two kingdoms. One hundred and ten years later, the representatives of over a hundred different political entities met to hammer out the so-called Peace of Westphalia, which helped put an end to the Thirty Years War and usher in a new notion of Europe as a collection of rival nations. The contrast between the first of these historical moments and the second sets the background to what we might call Baroque diplomacy. The Renaissance model of diplomacy, understood, ideally at least, to involve a conversation between princes, gives way to a world in which such conversations were understood to be useless, if not dangerous, and where the negotiation of international affairs was carried out by mediators, secretaries, and functionaries. “Praesentia nocet,” wrote the Baroque political thinker Saavedra Fajardo in his 1640 volume of Empresas Políticas: “Presence Kills.” That is, monarchs must never be set in any situation in which they come face-to-face, since they see even ceremony as a kind of duel, “and their families participate, like two military squadrons in an engagement.” “The surest thing,” concludes Saavedra Fajardo, “is for Princes to negotiate through their Ambassadors.” For the Baroque world, politics is increasingly conducted by diplomats, and diplomacy is increasingly the work of bureaucrats.1 Multiple historical factors shape these transformations in diplomatic practice and culture. The emergence of newly centralized national states, whose dynamic and ambitious rulers defined themselves independent of the old ideal of the respublica christiana, led to a dramatic increase in the size and complexity of diplomatic activity. The first glimmerings of a Europe organized as a “states system” meant that even the smallest political entity began to demand recognition in diplomatic exchanges. No less important was the expansion of European powers into territories outside of Europe, as well as increased

baroque diplomacy   735 communication with the Ottoman Turks. Extra-European contacts brought with them new diplomatic tangles, involving the jurisdiction of territory and the governance of the seas. New spaces were negotiated, new adversaries were engaged, and new forms of communication arose. Far indeed from the limited world of Tudor-Valois pagentry was the ambassador whom the French jurist Jean Hotman advised in a 1603 treatise to remain in frequent contact with his prince lest he be simply forgotten and left to rot in some distant city.2 Large political realignments were matched by new institutions and practices within diplomacy. The institution of the resident ambassador, which began in fifteenth-century Italy and quickly spread north, raised a number of theoretical questions about the nature of extraterritoriality and the movements of diplomats. The tradition of extensive reporting and intelligence-gathering first developed by the Venetian legates in the sixteenth century was imitated across the Continent and gave rise to an explosion of documents and reports. Increasingly, diplomacy became a topic for discussion by political theorists and legal scholars, giving rise to the beginnings of modern international law. A key moment came in the early 1580s, following the so-called Throckmorton Plot of 1583, in which the Spanish legate to the Tudor court, Bernardino de Mendoza, was accused of plotting to kill Queen Elizabeth  I.  The decision by the English to expel Mendoza (instead of simply killing him as a regicide) led to the definition of emerging diplomatic customs in Europe. Several important legal philosophers commented on the incident, including the Italian expatriate Alberico Gentili (in his De legationibus libri tres) and the French Protestant jurist Jean Hotman, mentioned above. Their work helped to codify the status of the diplomat as an agent bound by certain moral strictures but enjoying a legal “dignity” that set him apart from other political agents. Their formulations were developed further several decades later by the discussions of the rights of embassy in Hugo Grotius’s massively influential On the Rights of War and Peace (1625). These texts usher in the age of Baroque diplomacy. The newly complex and essential role of diplomacy in statecraft was acknowledged at the time. Whereas Machiavelli had scarcely even mentioned foreign affairs in his 1516 treatise, The Prince, Cardinal Richelieu writes in his 1638 Political Testament that the key to successful political power at home is a process of “constant negotiation” abroad. “It is absolutely necessary to the well-being of the state to negotiate ceaselessly, either openly or secretly, and in all places,” points out Richelieu. For Richelieu, one simply cannot do politics of any kind by focusing on one’s own court and kingdom, as had an earlier generation of princes, or by engaging with one or two adversaries. To be powerful at home, one must negotiate everywhere abroad, “especially in Rome.” For power to be concentrated, diplomacy must be expanded. This is a truth, concludes Richelieu, that he has only himself realized recently, but he has now put it into practice, in contrast to the policies of his predecessors.3 Multiple negotiation, endless negotiation, and constant negotiation are the characteristics of Baroque diplomacy. For the student of Baroque culture and politics, this means a proliferation of plot lines, an endless tangle of messengers, messages, secrets, and conversations. To describe the change in terms of literary genre, we might posit that grand

736   the oxford handbook of the baroque negotiations such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, with which I began, resemble the narrative direction of epic or the allegorical clarity of the court masque, whereas the simultaneously unfolding strands of Baroque diplomacy suggest the multiple plots of Ariostan romance or the confusions of the bedroom farce. Baroque diplomacy, with its tangled simultaneity, plays an ambiguous, largely neglected role in theoretical writing about the Baroque. Walter Benjamin’s seminal account of Baroque culture, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, takes Calderón de la Barca’s 1629 martyr play, The Constant Prince, or El Príncipe Constante as the culmination of Baroque tragedy in the Catholic world. Based on an episode from fifteenth-century Portuguese history, the play tells the story of the young prince Fernando, who is captured by the Moors in battle and held for ransom. The ransom demanded is the town of Ceuta, a Christian enclave coveted by the Moorish king. Given the choice between martyrdom and freedom at the expense of the many souls of Ceuta—who would be converted forcibly to Islam—Fernando chooses martyrdom. The martyrological impulse of the play offers an example, for Benjamin, of the Baroque’s “decisive confrontation between human-earthly perplexity and princelyhierarchical power.”4 For Benjamin, Baroque culture is haunted by a failure of transcendence. It strives for the totality of vision that was promised by the Christian culture of the Middle Ages and reinvented by the Classicism of the Renaissance. Yet the Baroque lacks the tools to achieve that vision. “For all that the increasing worldliness of the Counter-Reformation prevailed in both confessions, religious aspirations did not lose their importance,” writes Benjamin, “it was just that this century denied them a religious fulfilment, demanding of them, or imposing on them, a secular solution instead.”5 Thus the Baroque labors in the sphere of incompleteness, longing for the divine, stuck in the secular world. To compensate for its limitations Baroque culture takes refuge in images and forms that can mediate between human fallenness and the desire for transcendence—forms such as the fragment, the emblem, the ruin, or the allegory. El Príncipe Constante reflects this incompleteness. It depicts the struggle between the Moorish king, a terrestrial prince who claims absolute power but cannot have his way, and a martyr figure who can only achieve selfhood by dying. Yet what is striking about the play is that its plot is built upon a tangle of diplomatic encounters. To realize his radiant destiny, Fernando must reject the diplomatic efforts of his cousin Enrique—the figure we know as Henry the Navigator—who comes to Africa to negotiate his release. This rejection is then repeated, later in the play, as Enrique is replaced by Don Alfonso—the Portuguese king himself. As if this doubling of diplomatic encounters were not enough, Alfonso’s arrival coincides with the appearance of the Moroccan king Tarundante, who has come to sue for the hand of the beautiful Fénix, the daughter of the Moorish monarch. Tarundante has prepared the way for his suit by sending ahead a picture of himself—what Fénix’s father calls “a mute ambassador.” Now he arrives in person, announcing that he has come as “an ambassador for myself ” (embajador de mí mismo).6 Thus we have no fewer than four separate embassies that circulate around Fernando’s drive to martyrdom. Diplomatic representation becomes a kind of synechdoche for

baroque diplomacy   737 political agency itself in the third act, when both Enrique and Tarundante are seen demanding entry to the king’s chambers at the same time: one demands to discuss cross-confessional international politics, the other wants to make an offer of marriage. The scene descends into a shouting match. The king finally allows Alfonso to speak first, since, although of another faith, he deserves first honor (“por de otra ley, se le debe más honor”). Alfonso announces that he will be “brief ” before embarking on a harangue of some thirty lines until Tarundante interrupts him, even though he has no authority to speak, noting that, although only an ambassador, he will speak in place of the king, who is sitting nearby.7 Alfonso and Tarundante–two kings acting as ambassadors– descend into a bragging competition and threaten a duel. Praesentia nocet, as Saavedra Fajardo might say. Yet what is striking is that all of these embassies fail. Fernando prefers martyrdom to being ransomed, and the beautiful Fénix has given her heart to a virtuous but modest soldier named Muley and thus will not marry Tarundante. Each diplomat is turned away. Diplomatic success finally only comes after a battle. Once the Portuguese have defeated the Moors, a parley can occur and prisoners can be exchanged. Fernando appears in heaven and Fénix is betrothed to Muley. Even as Benjamin singles out El Príncipe Constante as the high point of Spanish Baroque drama he makes no mention of the fact that the play is obsessed with diplomacy. He reads the play as emblematic of the confrontation between two types of Baroque character who, he says, dominate the theater of the day. These are the martyr and the tyrant. Benjamin’s account of the Baroque emphasizes what we might call its verticality, the split between this world and a totalizing vision of transcendence. For  Benjamin, the “secular solution” to a failed transcendence is the province of Baroque melancholy. Yet it is also the province of diplomacy. In this context, Calderón’s repeated rejection of diplomacy in El Príncipe Constante might be read as a defensive gesture against the “secular solution” that Benjamin notes the Baroque proposes to the failure of spiritual transcendence. As the “constant prince” Fernando aims, in single-minded fashion, toward martyrdom and thus transcendence, his greatest enemy seems to be, not the Moors, but diplomacy. He must repeatedly reject the very figures who come to save him, even going so far at one point as to eat, on stage, a ransom letter sent by his family to the Moorish king. For the world of Calderón’s play, diplomacy is a kind of threat, a vehicle enabling an ideologically unacceptable potential resolution to a world-historical struggle between Christianity and Islam. Similarly, in the embassy of the Moroccan prince Tarundante to win the hand of the beautiful Fénix, we see traces of the genre of the “Moorish novel,” with its stories of love across confessional boundaries. However, the “modern” strategies of diplomacy offer a new model of cross-confessional reconciliation, and the play rejects all forms of negotiation. As it shunts aside diplomacy, the play simultaneously yokes together these different traditions—the Moorish novel, the border skirmish, the ransom parley—as options not taken, to be replaced by the grand vision of Christian martyrdom that offers, as Benjamin notes, perhaps the purest version of the Spanish religious tragedy.

738   the oxford handbook of the baroque Benjamin quotes Scaliger to the effect that the purpose of Baroque drama is to “communicate knowledge of the life of the soul.”8 In order to make this possible, he notes, we must be introduced to characters who can see the motivations of others. And he points out that even as the Baroque Trauerspiel takes the twin figures of the tyrant and the martyr as its political center, these characters are in turn aided by two others: “the intriguer, as the evil genius of their despots, and the faithful servant, as the companion in suffering to innocence enthroned.”9 Here, then, is the location of the ambassadorial figure in Benjamin’s version of the Baroque—at the side of the prince, either as intriguer, or servant. Yet Benjamin’s account is uniquely focused on domestic politics, on the establishment of royal power. By contrast, in the realm of foreign affairs, the “secular solution” that belongs to the ambassador, the diplomat fills both of these functions. He is, in fact, both intriguer and servant by turns. In this regard, the ambassador undoes the opposition set up by Benjamin’s account of the Baroque. And, once we move beyond the limited courtly focus of Benjamin’s Baroque, it is the ambassador who emerges as the Baroque subject par excellence.

Dramas of Mediation In 1631, 2 years after Calderón’s El Príncipe Constante, the French writer Jean de Rotrou presented a comedy entitled Les Occasions Perdues, or Lost Chances. The play is based on a Spanish original by Lope de Vega.10 It opens in Naples, where we watch a Spanish prince named Clorimand attacked by three other men. The Queen of Naples, passing by, sends her men to rescue him. He turns out to be an ambassador whose three companions had been instructed to kill him—an order that he was, reasonably enough, trying to resist. The Queen saves Clorimand, takes him to her court and, as she finds him mysterious and appealing, orders her lady-in-waiting Isabelle to flirt with him and learn more about him.11 Eventually, the Queen decides that she should meet Clorimand for an amorous conversation, without Isabelle. She hatches a plan to invite him to come to her window after dark. She sends a note, addressed to the “Spaniard” inviting him to meet with her. By a happy coincidence, however, the Spanish king of Sicily, Alphonse, has just landed in Naples and is headed, unexpected and unannounced, for the court. The letter of invitation to the tryst at the balcony, destined for Clorimand, comes by mistake to Alphonse—the new “Spaniard” in town. The delighted Alphonse arrives at the assignation, pleased at his good fortune, since he has come to Naples precisely to ask for the hand of the Queen. “Et moy mesme, je suis Ambassadeur pour moy” (“I am my own ambassador”)—he announces, using virtually the same phrase that Tarundante used in a different context in the Calderón play just discussed.12 As the King arrives, we see Clorimand, hiding in the bushes beneath the balcony, waiting to speak with Isabelle. Unable to see things clearly in the dark, Clorimand, who has been the king’s ambassador at the outset of the play, now mistakes the king for an ambassador. The Queen’s serving man, by contrast, mistakes Alphonse and his men for brigands and attacks them.

baroque diplomacy   739 Because Clorimand, the former ambassador, believes Alphonse, the king, to be an ambassador, and because ambassadors must be protected from harm, Clorimand leaps out of the bushes to rescue them—thus exactly paralleling the scene that opens the play, where he himself is rescued. At the moment peace is restored, the Queen’s voice is heard at the window: “Is it you my darling?” she asks.13 She emerges to find that she has not been talking through the window to Clorimand, a Spanish diplomat, but rather to Alphonse, a Spanish king who has been mistaken for a Spanish diplomat by the Spanish diplomat, but has, in fact, come as his own diplomat—“je suis Ambassadeur pour moy.” Alphonse identifies himself, asks for the Queen’s hand in marriage, and she accepts. When the dust settles we learn that, in fact, it was Alphonse who had ordered the attack on Clorimand that opened the play. They were childhood friends, and, of the two, Clorimand had always been the more dynamic and handsome. Upon taking the throne, Alphonse had grown jealous of his old friend, and, encouraged by his corrupt ministers, had sent him on the bogus diplomatic mission that we saw as the play opened. Now, having been saved by the man whose murder he had ordered, Alphonse takes Clorimand back and gives him the hand of his sister, who, we now learn, had been Clorimand’s true love all along. For all of its lightness, Rotrou’s play touches on serious theoretical issues involving both Baroque politics and Baroque culture. At one level, the play responds to Benjamin: here we get the figure of Clormand, who is initially mistaken by his master as an “intriguer,” then serves as an ambassador, and finally reveals himself to be a “faithful servant.” These functions, which Benjamin sets in opposition to each other, are unfolded as the plot devlops, located on either side, as it were, of Clorimand’s service as ambassador. Diplomacy mediates intrigue and service, making them two sides of the same coin. In questions of foreign policy, one man’s intrigue is another man’s service. And this makes it possible for us to posit the doubleness of Clorimand—both intriguer and faithful servant through his diplomatic service—as a model for what I called a moment ago the Baroque subject. In contrast to the high Renaissance model of subjectivity presented by, for example, Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors, where the superficial splendor of the diplomatic portrait hides a death mask suggesting the dark underside of earthly glory, the Baroque subject would seem to be much more fluid and transactional, changing his moral disposition according to his position and function in an equation of power relations between states.14 We can see this new mutability of the subject in the terminology through which diplomatic writers describe the ambassador. Late medieval and early Renaissance writers on diplomacy conventionally use the Latin term “orator” to refer to the ambassador. For writers schooled in the traditions of Renaissance rhetoric, the ambassador was principally a talker. He was someone who gave speeches and delivered harangues in public. However, Gasparo Bragaccia, in his 1625 treatise L’Ambasciatore, offers a quite different account. Bragaccia focuses on the importance of the ambassador as a mediator. He explains the term “ambassador” by placing his stress on the prefix “amb.” He notes that the Latin word “ambo,” which is retained in Italian, means “both” or “two.” The ambassador, says Bragaccia, is the man in the middle, the man caught between two

740   the oxford handbook of the baroque sides, chosen to reconcile two sides in the service of an ideal of political concord.15 This fanciful etymology suggests the mediating or active role of the ambassador in Baroque culture, as an agent of information, a crosser of spaces—the very double figure, indeed, whose adventures are staged in Rotrou’s comedy. His actions unfold in the penumbral space of partial knowledge, of limited vision, and of fragmented and scripted agency.

Bodies and Signs Rotrou’s farcical device of having the ambassador confused with his own prince—and then confusing the prince with the ambassador—points to a larger political anxiety. The problem of the powerful noble who might outshine the prince is a central preoccupation of much early modern French theater, as the French monarchy struggles for authority amid tensions with provincial families grown powerful during the late sixteenthcentury Wars of Religion. What is striking here is that Clorimand’s confused embassy is essential to the story; his wit and gallantry prepare the way for his prince to win the princess’s hand. Without being an ambassador, in effect, he fulfills an ambassadorial role. Diplomacy is essential to the affirmation of princely authority, yet it can only succeed if diplomatic representation is mistaken and complicated, if the ambassador has been confused with the prince. Only after the ambassador has stood in the way of his prince as his amorous rival can he then step aside and allow the royal wedding to take place. Diplomacy becomes both the essential mechanism to make the plot advance and a thematic motif that must eventually be discarded, here, as in Calderón, as the king emerges from the shadows to become “An ambassador for myself ” (“Ambassadeur pour moy”; “Embajador de mí mismo”). The theme of the ambassadorial switch, in which intrigue and service are interchangeable, occurs in a number of early modern literary texts. It is a main feature of Hamlet, where Claudius frets over Hamlet’s potential to become a popular monarch and displace him. And it is thus not by accident that the motif of the spurious embassy that we just saw in Rotrou turns up again, as Claudius sends his nephew on an “embassy” to England with instructions that he be killed. Hamlet escapes this fate and returns as, for the first time, a decisive political actor, ready to assume princely authority. Like Clorimand, his status changes after he passes through his diplomatic function. In Shakespeare, moreover, a new focus emerges. Whereas Rotrou’s Clorimand triumphs by virtue of his charm and virtue, Hamlet escapes his destiny through his manipulation of messages. This brings us to yet another feature of Baroque diplomacy—the concern for the material forms through which politics is communicated. Hamlet steals the letter commanding his death, and rewrites it. When Hamlet—who is described at one point as “th’ambassador that was bound for England” (Hamlet, IV. 6)—returns to Denmark and meets with Horatio, he explains his procedure: “Thus being benetted round with villainies. . . / I sat me down, / Devis’d a new commission, wrote it fair.” He points out that many politicians believe such writing to be a base activity, but that here it did him

baroque diplomacy   741 “yoeman’s service.” The prince now mimics the ambassador. And he signs off with his father’s signet ring, “Which was the model of that Danish seal” (Hamlet, V. 2).16 Hamlet locates diplomatic activity not in the world of grand harangues, orations, or even lover’s trysts, but in the material world of messages. Shakespeare’s play treats the same theme of ambassadorial-princely confusion as does Rotrou’s, but it shows the work of the diplomat to involve less the placement of bodies than the manipulation of material forms of communication—letters, messages, signets. This focus on the materiality of diplomatic life is a theme across Shakespeare, especially in his later plays. In his last composition, the History of Henry VIII or All Is True, co-authored with John Skelton, we get a different version of the same diplomatic theme. There we see Cardinal Wolsey, the master diplomat, called before the nobility and exposed as a traitor for his manipulation, not of royal presence, as in Rotrou, but of the material signs of royal presence. At Wolsey’s trial, Surrey first accuses Wolsey of abusing diplomatic authority: “First, that without the King’s assent or knowledge / Your wrought to be a legate, by which power / You maimed the jurisdiction of all bishops.” The climax comes a second later: “when you went / Ambassador to the Emperor, you made bold / To carry into Flanders the Great Seal” (Henry VIII, III. 2).17 Thus, Henry VIII stages the same problem of political and diplomatic representation as does Les Occasions Perdues: What happens when the prince and his ambassador are confused, when the ambassador is mistaken for the prince (treacherously, tragically) or (more comically) the prince for the ambassador? For Rotrou’s courtly comedy this is a pretext for a kind of political bedroom farce, as the lusty queen mistakes one Spaniard for another. In Henry VIII, it is more serious business, as the Cardinal seizes the position of ambassador and the ambassador seeks to play the king by appropriating the insignia of power—the royal seal—just as Hamlet had deployed his father’s signet ring to turn from ambassador into prince. For Shakespeare, here as in Hamlet, that moment of structural reversal—of turning the hierarchy against itself—involves the seizure and control of the material of communication, of messages, of insignia, and of signets. Through this emphasis on the practical materiality of diplomatic communication, Shakespeare offers a reflection on the situation of Baroque diplomacy, as it moves from a world of rhetorical harangues and orations to a world of spies and coded missives. It may not be coincidental, in this context, that the same moment that saw the rise of diplomacy as a textual practice saw the emergence of the new science that would come to be called “diplomatics”—the study of the authenticity and provenance of documents. The coincidence of names, while only a coincidence, suggests, nevertheless, the shift within Baroque culture to a concern with politics as script.18

Speaking for the Ambassador I have been arguing that the expansion of diplomatic activity across Europe around the end of the sixteenth century and in the early decades of the seventeenth—what Richelieu

742   the oxford handbook of the baroque calls “constant negotiation”—brings with it certain practical consequences: a proliferation of negotiations, a confusion of bodies, and an anxiety about messages. We have seen that these developments may be seen and explored most clearly by looking at the representation of diplomacy in the theater. As Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger notes elsewhere in this volume, Baroque politics is inherently theatrical, based on the manipulation of illusion. As such, we might posit that the Baroque will reveal its workings most clearly, not in its own rituals, but in symbolic forms such as the theater that explore the limits of illusion. And the illusions of Baroque politics run against their own limitations when they encounter the uncertain actions and varied customs of rivals and strangers. That is, in the practice of diplomacy. In contrast to the high Renaissance ideals of dialogue and diplomatic splendor, Baroque diplomacy generates a new type of legate, a figure whose identity is, by definition, malleable and double-sided. This is the figure whose sphere of action is less the vertical vector of courtly hierarchy and religious longing (Benjamin’s themes) than the horizontal vector of diplomatic messaging, of moving across space and changing functions according to situation. This figure is both intriguer and faithful servant—faithful servant because intriguer. Therein lies the Baroque character of his identity. Yet precisely because of his malleability, the drama of the period also shows a fascination with moments of confusion, of identitary crossing, when ambassador and prince are switched, either comically, or as an act of treason. These moments of reversal or confusion are, in Shakespeare, tied to a shift in the means of diplomatic communication. Although traditionally called an “orator” by Renaissance theorists, the ambassador is increasingly a reader and a writer. As Gasparo Bragaccia notes in Ambasciatore of 1609, which I cited earlier, the most important task of the ambassador after his mission is to write well about it. The Renaissance ambassador is an orator; the Baroque ambassador is a scribe. It may not be coincidental, in this context, that one of the best known diplomatic ­orations of the period never took place. The most widely-distributed ambassadorial handbook of the early seventeenth century was called Le Parfait Ambassadeur. It was a French translation of a 1620 text by the Spanish diplomat Juan Antonio Vera y Zuñiga. Midway through the first part of the dialogue, the two interlocutors, Louis and Jules, are discussing the required attributes of the ambassador. Louis stresses the importance of eloquence. This, he says, is not merely the ability to speak well, but the ability to speak well in all situations, to measure one’s words and make them conform to the context: “adjuster les paroles au temps et à l’occasion.”19 And there follows a digression in which, inserted into the text, we are provided with translations of two models of perfect diplomatic oratory. The first is the embassy of Ilioneus to Latinus in the eighth book of the Aeneid. The second and most splendid comes from the second canto of Torquato Tasso’s counter-reformation epic, the Jerusalem Delivered, or Gerusalemme liberata. In that scene, two strangers ride into the camp of the Christian crusaders who are amassed to recapture Jerusalem from Moslem control. The strangers, whose names are Alete and Argante, come from the prince of Egypt. They want to parley. They propose to the Christian leader Goffredo that he give up his goal of conquest and enter into an alliance with their ruler. In this way, he will be able to maintain control of the land he has conquered so far,

baroque diplomacy   743 and keep his great name safe from opprobrium if his enterprise should fail. Goffredo listens quietly to their embassy and then sends them on their way with a refusal. His duty is to the Crusade. Within the context of Tasso’s poem, this is a disruptive and troubling moment. The Saracen ambassador Alete, who delivers the speech, is described by Tasso as a lowborn and dishonest fellow who has risen through the ranks by virtue of his slick mastery of language. Alete is, in fact, a of parody of the amoral Renaissance courtier, willing to say anything to get ahead—even if it involves proposing a political scheme that would lead to the defeat of Christendom. There is no doubt that Tasso disapproves and even fears the damage that such rhetoric might do to the moral rightness of the Crusade. Yet Zuñiga’s diplomats are not troubled. They are impressed. Whatever praise you might offer about the Tasso speech, comments Louis, it will fall short of its merits. Here, truly, is perfect oratory, and every ambassador should know this speech by heart.20 Zuñiga’s text is not the only document of diplomatic theory to turn to the scene from Tasso as a model of how diplomacy should be done.21 And when it is seen against the background of such texts as Les Occasions Perdues, Bragaccia’s writing about ambassadors, and Hamlet, we can suggest that, in its form, Alete’s speech offers Baroque diplomacy a nostalgic version of diplomatic rhetoric. In a world of ciphers and forged documents, here we see an ambassador haranguing a great king, demonstrating the fruits of his study of rhetoric. Here, in the realm of fiction, lies the plenitude of language and form that the Baroque ambassador must constantly compromise if he is to act effectively in the service of his prince. If the form of Tasso’s speech seems nostalgic, its larger implications are completely modern. For neither of Zuñiga’s speakers seems to worry about the fictionality of Alete’s speech—let alone its ideological, ethical, or political implications. Nor do they seem to care that it is, within the plot of the poem, ineffective, vain eloquence. Yet their insouciance, their admiration of the speech for its rhetorical excellence, regardless of its ethics, suggests the importance for the Baroque ambassador of language as power, as a form of action that can effect change. If models of such language come from fiction instead of history, so be it. The turn to Tasso in Le Parfait Ambassadeur can help us gauge the stakes of the emergence of Baroque diplomacy. We have seen, through our discussion of various dramatic texts, the ways in which the emergence of a Baroque diplomatic subject (or what I have called, more baldly, the Baroque subject par excellence) is articulated, not through a set of ideals, such as one might find in the Renaissance humanism of a Castiglione or an Erasmus (however much those authors may differ in other ways), but through a set of operations, or practices. Absent the Ciceronian or Christian virtue that informs (however shakily) Renaissance political culture, and beyond the ideological antinomies of the Counter-Reformation, the world of the Baroque diplomat is defined by the goal of effective action. Because diplomacy involves the uncertainty of negotiation and encounters with the “strange,” it offers, in contrast to the more scripted world of court ritual, the space for tracking new types of action and new values. Tasso’s pagan ambassador Alete inspires Zuñiga’s fictional diplomats, not because of his success or his ideological

744   the oxford handbook of the baroque rightness, but because of the aesthetic power of his presentation. Nor, we should note, does the Renaissance humanist fascination with historical precedent seem any longer to carry much weight, as Jules and Louis are happier discussing Tasso and Virgil than, say, Livy or Guicciardini. In Baroque diplomacy, we have stepped into a space where history and fiction enjoy equal authority, where hierarchies and identities are often in play, and where he who controls language (such as Hamlet) comes out the winner—at least in the moment. This is the sphere of action that develops as part of the “secular solution” to the failure of Baroque transcendence that Benjamin chronicles in his study of German Baroque drama. Whereas Benjamin’s Baroque martyr longs to fix his identity once and for all with a triumphant death, the Baroque political agent is defined by the capacity to shift his relationship to power in an instant, from “intriguer” to “faithful servant.” Indeed, as I have suggested, these two roles define each other and cannot be separated. A century after the emergence of the practices I have been describing here, Europe will witness the emergence of new bureaucratic networks and systems of professional training that will reshape diplomacy yet again, turning it from a practice defined by messaging and the manipulation of illusions into a practice of allegiance, either to a professional corps or to a national idea. However, for the Baroque moment, the diplomatic figure comes as “Ambassador for myself,” as both the agent of his prince, and his own man.

Notes 1. Diego Saavedra Fajardo, Empresas Politicas: Idea de un Príncipe Político-Christiano Representada en Cien Empresas., ed. Rodrigo Fernández-Caravajal (Murcia: Real Academia Alfonso X el Sabio, 1994), 58, 4. My translation. On the meeting of Francis I and Henry VIII see Glenn Richardson’s excellent account, The Field of the Cloth of Gold (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). On the new social status of the modern diplomat Antoine Pecquet would reflect in the early eighteenth century, “The occupation of Negotiator seems to have become the expedient of those who have no wealth and choose a career by chance.” See his Discourse on the Art of Negotiation, trans. Aleksandra Gruzinska and Murray D. Sirkus (Amsterdam: Peter Lang, 2004), 9. 2. Jean Villiers Hotman, De la Charge et Dignité de l’Ambassadeur (Paris: 1603), 130. Hotman’s book was quickly translated into English as The Ambassador (London: 1609). I have dealt with some of the cultural implications of this new diplomacy world in Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). On new forms of espionage see Lucien Bély’s Espions et Ambassadeurs au Temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Fayard, 1990). Bély’s magisterial study L’Art de la Paix en Europe (Paris: PUF, 2007) offers background to these historical developments. 3. The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu, trans, Henry Bertram Hill (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), chapter 6. 4. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 84. 5. Ibid., 79. 6. References are to the El principe constante edition, ed. Fernando Cantalpiedra and Alfredo Rodríguez López-Vásquez (Madrid: Cátedra, 1996). The description of the portrait as “embajador que habla mudo” is on page 158, at I.111. Tarundante’s self-empowering

baroque diplomacy   745 ­ ronouncement is at III, 2095, page 173: “I have come from my kingdom / as an Ambassador p for myself / to see you, beautiful Fénix” (Embajador de mí mismo, / Fénix hermosa, por verte / desde mi reino he venido).” El Príncipe Constante is, with La Vida es Sueño, the play from Calderón’s massive work most frequently retranslated and performed across Europe. It seems to be the source of much of Benjamin’s knowledge of Spanish theater. 7. Calderón, 267, vv. 2103–2104. At v. 2137, Tarundante exclaims, “As I am only an ambassador, it is not for me to answer, / But as this touches the king, I will presume to speak” (Aunque, como embajador / no me toca responderte, / encuanto toca a mi rey, puedo, cristiano, atreverme . . .). Thus we get an adumbration of the reversals and confusions of king and ambassador that I discuss below. 8. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 99. 9. Ibid., 98. 10. References to Rotrou will be to the edition by Noémie Cortès, in Volume 11 of Rotrou’s Théâtre Complet, under the direction of Liliane Picciola (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2014). However, I have also worked with the 1636 Paris edition published by Quinet, available through the Gallica website (www.gallica.bnf.fr). I have consulted Lope’s version, Las Ocasiones Perdidas, which Rotrou elaborates, in Lope de Vega, Comedias XI, edited by Jesús Gómez and Paloma Cuenca (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro, 1995). 11. We note that when Clorimand and Isabelle flirt and seem to give in to a mutual attraction we have a structure of doubling, or love by proxy. The queen’s double seems to be falling in love with the diplomat, who is technically his prince’s double. 12. Rotrou, Quinet edition, 78. The line is slightly different in the modern edition: “Amour m’a fait de moy-mesme Ambassadeur” (“Love has made me myself an ambassador”). See 125, v.915. 13. “Est-ce pas toi, ma vie?” Rotrou, Théâtre Complet, 161, v.1646. 14. In my understanding of Holbein, I rely on Stephen Greenblatt’s influential reading in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 15. Gasparo Bragaccia, L’Ambasciatore, preface by Giulio Andreotti (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1989) 61. 16. References are to the Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982). I cite, IV.vi.9; 29, 32–33,49. 17. William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. Jay L. Halio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). I cite III.ii.311–313, 318–320. 18. It is worth noting as well the close relationship between the emergence of Baroque diplomacy and the book trade. Thus, for example, the correspondence of Peter Paul Rubens, artist and ambassador, is as concerned with book exchanges among friends as it is with diplomacy. Painting is a less often-mentioned theme. See The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, trans. Ruth Sanders Magurn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991). In my emphasis on writing matter I do not, of course, mean to suggest that oratory and performance are not crucial to seventeenth-century diplomacy. On this feature of diplomatic practice see the excellent work of Ellen R. Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). On Mabillon and the rise of “diplomatics” see Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Les Historiens et la Monarchie, Vol.1 (Paris: PUF, 1988). 19. Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga, Le Parfait Ambassadeur, trans. Le Sieur Lancelot (Paris, 1643), 183. 20. Zuñiga, Le Parfait Ambassadeur, 196. I have discussed the Tasso scene in detail in Fictions of Embassy, chapter 3. The translation from Tasso appears on pages 189–196 of Le Parfait Ambassadeur.

746   the oxford handbook of the baroque 21. The Tasso text, as well as his dialogue on diplomacy, “Il Messagiero,” appears frequently in diplomatic manuals of the period. It is a key document for Gentili, as well as for Abraham van Wicquerfort, whose L’Ambassadeur et ses Fonctions, written in the 1680s, was the major account of diplomacy in the late seventeenth century.

Further Reading Adams, Robyn, and Cox, Rosanna. Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2011. Frigo, Daniela. Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. McClure, Ellen. Sunspots and the Sun King: Sovereignty and Mediation in Seventeenth-Century France. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pirillo, Diego. The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Rivière de Carles, Nathalie. Early Modern Diplomacy, Theater, and Soft Power: The Making of Peace. London: Palgrave, 2016. Sowerby, Tracey, and Hennings, Jan. Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World, c. 1410–1800. London: Routledge, 2017. Watkins, John. “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 1 (2008): 1–14. Watkins, John. After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

chapter 34

The En d of W itch-H u n ti ng H. C. Erik Midelfort

The age of the baroque witnessed the rise, peak, decline, and demise of witch “hunting” in Europe. After a century of consolidation and slow growth, criminal prosecutions burst forth in the 1560s and rose almost inexorably for the next few decades before encountering several different outcomes in various parts of Europe, reaching unheard of heights of ferocity in the first three decades of the seventeenth century in some of the German territories, but also hitting serious legal roadblocks elsewhere. But any description of the end of witch-hunting in the age of the baroque must encounter three puzzles at the outset: What was “witch-hunting” in the first place? What do we mean by its end? And what, if anything, was baroque about the end of witch-hunting? Fifty years ago, the answers to these questions seemed clearer than they do today. Historians were fairly well united in their understanding of witchcraft and what brought its prosecution to an end. Social and legal historians, moreover, were fairly well united in rejecting or ignoring terms like Renaissance and baroque as useless in their specific fields, preferring to see those concepts restricted to areas of high culture.

Three Ways of Understanding Witchcraft Broadly speaking, historians have approached the history of witchcraft from three directions, which can be labeled rationalist, romantic, and community-based. In recent years the rationalist and romantic interpretations have yielded to community models that have emphasized grass-roots realities and the careful evaluation of surviving trial records.

748   the oxford handbook of the baroque

The Rationalist Model: Witchcraft as an Invention From the late nineteenth century, for almost one hundred years, most historians agreed that witchcraft was an imaginary crime invented and prosecuted by “the Inquisition” in the later Middle Ages and then turned over to the secular authorities in the early modern period. In Germany, this view was canonized by Joseph Hansen, the author of a definitive collection of sources and of a history of the “witch craze” in the Middle Ages.1 Hansen argued forcefully that the massive witchcraft trials beginning in the fifteenth century and extending into the eighteenth century needed to be kept conceptually distinct from the prosecution of mere magic. The notion of witchcraft did build on ideas of “sorcery” or harmful magic, but the essence of the crime, as reinvented in the Middle Ages, was the idea that witches formed a pact with the devil and participated in an elaborate satanic sect, modeled on notions of late medieval heresy.2 This fully elaborated, “cumulative” or “composite” idea of witchcraft involved flight to a “sabbath” or witches’ dance, where participants feasted on loathsome food or on babies; had sex with each other and (painfully) with the devil; received the (obscene) devil’s kiss and his “mark,” branding them as acolytes of the evil one; and performed magical rituals that caused harm to neighbors such as hail storms, frost, impotence within the marriage bed, crippling, sickness, miscarriages, and death among cattle and human beings, along with a long list of malignant interventions into the daily life of families such as cream that could not be churned into butter, beer that turned sour, and cows that gave blood instead of milk— a list that included almost any misfortune that did not have an easy, natural explanation. Until the 1960s, most scholars were agreed that the historian’s proper task was to chart the origins of this “cumulative” concept and then to examine the way it was implemented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The cores of the phenomenon, in other words, was the complex demonology that fueled a “hunt” for heretic-witches. In a much-read and often-cited synthesis, H. R. Trevor-Roper poured scorn on the study of mere sorcery, the “scattered folk-lore of peasant superstitions: the casting of spells, the making of storms, converse with spirits, sympathetic magic. Such beliefs are universal, in time and place,” and Trevor-Roper dismissed them in favor of studying “the organized, systematic ‘demonology’ which the medieval Church constructed out of those beliefs.”3 A combination of anticlerical, misogynist, and elitist sympathies concentrated his attention on how “the inquisitors” created a “systematic mythology of Satan’s kingdom and Satan’s accomplices out of the mental rubbish of peasant credulity and feminine hysteria.”4 Trevor-Roper’s anticlerical disdain can be traced back to the very beginnings of witchcraft historiography in the seventeenth century. One of the fountains of “erudite” libertinage, Gabriel Naudé, for example, attempted a defense of all the “great persons” who had been falsely suspected of magic, but he stopped short of his own day.5 What he implied, however, was far broader than what he stated explicitly, and his attitude was taken up in a more radical manner by Gottfried Arnold, whose “Impartial History of Church and Heresy” turned the tables on standard Christian history by validating or “rescuing” the position of almost every so-called heretic from the previous seventeen centuries.6

the end of witch-hunting   749 As a Lutheran Pietist, Arnold felt free to criticize or even malign the Catholic Church and its powerful structures of control. In his view, the Church of Rome had falsely branded as heresy any deviations from its preferred interpretations of doctrine and church governance, using inquisitions and the secular courts to impose orthodoxy. This new view of history had a profound impact on Christian Thomasius, who had come to believe that the very crime of witchcraft itself had been invented by “the Inquisition.”7 He declared that Arnold’s radical history was “the most useful work after the Bible.”8 One of Thomasius’s crucial insights was that the crime of witchcraft had been constructed in the recent past, that it was certainly no older than the late fifteenth century, and that “the common view of the pact of the devil with witches, his fornication with them, along with his gatherings with these witches . . . is hardly older than one and a half centuries.”9 History had become a weapon in the fight against “superstition.”10 That insight became the foundation of the rationalist (and usually Protestant) history of witchcraft that dominated historical research well into the twentieth century.11 And at its root lay the notion that witchcraft itself was far different from mere “sorcery,” the magical beliefs of common villagers. Instead, witchcraft was a fiction, a chimaera, a learned construct that had been imposed upon Europe by papal jurists. This contention fueled a great deal of useful research over the past two hundred years and also lay behind the great works that summarized this research, works by such scholars as Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan,12 Henry Charles Lea, George Lincoln Burr, and many others who stood on their shoulders.

The Romantic Approach: Witchcraft as the Repression of Something Real Under the surface of this scholarly consensus, however, another tradition was growing, one that saw the attack on witchcraft as actually an attempt to repress something else. A second definition of witchcraft contends that it was no mere scholarly or inquisitorial invention but rested on the reality of actual groups of women who supposedly banded together to preserve echoes of pre-Christian religion or for other reasons. In this view, first fully formulated in Jacob Grimm’s German Mythology (1835), witches were not the passive victims of ecclesiastical zeal but active dissidents, survivors, wise women, and preservers of ancient Germanic traditions that Christian missionaries and prosecutors had tried, all too successfully, to suppress.13 This Romantic view provided inspiration for a history “from below,” one that sought to capture forgotten or lost realities. In the version propagated by Jules Michelet, the historical witches did not so much represent the remnants of Germanic religion but rather were the embodiment of village resistance to authority, of feminist rebellion against the oppressive strictures of their society.14 She represented “the sole physician of the people” and an “offspring of despair.” Although historians were quick to label Michelet’s work a “poem” that rested on almost no research, it spoke to a widely felt desire to see beyond or beneath the superficial layers of official and orthodox history, to get at the social and natural realities of the “feudal age.”

750   the oxford handbook of the baroque As such, this vision had and continues to have a remarkable power.15 Feminists took up the notion that witchcraft was a misleading charge with which men sought to confine or suppress independent or unruly women. Some went so far as to suggest that witchhunting had led to a “women’s holocaust” in which as many as nine million died.16 Historians had thoroughly debunked such claims, but many of the best modern studies of witchcraft continue to reflect the belief that the trial records testify to more than oppression by “witch-hunters.” There had to be something “real” there, perhaps even some group of women (or women and men) who were doing something that offended others. Some have recently argued (without adequate evidence) that the so-called witches were really midwives and female healers, whom doctors, church, and state (or some mixture of these) sought to suppress.17 Others have thought that “witches” were indeed constructed by the Inquisition, but that they had done so by singling out members of a preexisting fertility cult.18 Modern feminist, psychological, and social historical research has refined and deepened Grimm’s and Michelet’s basic intuition that witchcraft trials revealed usually hidden tensions and conditions at the village or family level, which rarely found expression otherwise in an age when very few rural people could read and write. But the basic Romantic suspicion that the witchcraft trials uncovered some underlying ancient cult or some organized group of deviant practioners has proved hitherto generally impossible to substantiate. When scholars turned their attention to the decline of witchcraft or the end of witch “hunting,” they might have found the notion of pagan survivals useful. If the historical witches were the remnants of some archaic cult or some group of (probably female) ­dissidents, then it might be argued that the trials ended with their suppression. But ­proponents of these theories never paid much attention to this aspect of their construct, perhaps because the basic problem of the oppression of women did not simply go away, but in fact no solid trial evidence for such groups existed and therefore no evidence for their disappearance. Once it was shown that pre-Christian survivals did not actually manage to maintain any cultic presence, and that the numerous pre-Christian elements that did survive had been rather painlessly absorbed into medieval Christianity itself— at least until certain Protestants undertook to uproot them as part of a campaign to eradicate the unbiblical encrustations within medieval Catholicism—there was little reason to wonder why this sort of witchcraft died.19 It had never lived.

Community Models: Witchcraft as Harmful Magic Around 1970, however, a third understanding of witchcraft as the practice of harmful magic rose to prominence as historians turned their attention increasingly to what some anthropologists had called “sorcery.” Of course, the very definition of magic or sorcery is not beyond dispute, but most scholars would agree that it means the use or invocation of occult forces or spirits to achieve tangible results.20 In the classic study of religion and magic by Keith Thomas, harmful magic was the essential feature of English witchcraft trials, a mark that allegedly set those procedures in sharp contrast to the devil-infused

the end of witch-hunting   751 witchcraft trials of the Continent, where the emphasis was the witches’ pact with the devil.21 More recent studies of England and Scotland, however, have emphasized that the devil played a far larger role in ideas of witchcraft found in both the trials and in the treatises published there from the late sixteenth century onward. Moreover, other historians have stressed that the central region of witchcraft prosecutions on the Continent was the Holy Roman Empire, where the reigning law until the end of the eighteenth century was the Carolina, the criminal law code published under Charles V in 1532. Article 109 stated explicitly that “Zauberei” that caused harm was to be punished with death, but “Zauberei” that did not cause harm was to be dealt with “otherwise,” that is, more mildly.22 Remarkably, this crucial clause made no mention of the devil, the supposed pact with him, or any of the other constituent parts of the “cumulative” concept of witchcraft. Although certain German territories elaborated their legal understanding of Article 109 to bring it into alignment with notions of the demonic pact, this part of the basic criminal code of the Empire survived to the end of the eighteenth century. The consequences of recognizing this fact were wide-reaching. First, it meant that we must forget trying to distinguish English witchcraft trials from those of Germany or much of the Continent. For virtually all of Germany and most of Northern and Western Europe, the crime of witchcraft was defined and feared as the use of harmful magic, to which admittedly at various times and in different places demonic and organizational details could be added. The only important exceptions to this conclusion were the inquisitorial prosecutions in Mediterranean Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal), in which witchcraft was interpreted as heresy and amalgamated with other serious deviations from the faith. But second, it meant that the witchcraft feared and prosecuted in early modern Europe should be broadly comparable to witchcraft fears and prosecutions in other parts of the world and at other times. Third, it suggested that one might well fear witchcraft without prosecuting its practitioners in courts of law at all. Villagers and townspeople might take matters into their own hands or content themselves with gossip and slander, whispering campaigns that could last for decades. These are important consequences that fuel the essentially new account of witches and witch-hunts by Wolfgang Behringer, a work that starts in the ancient world and ends in the Africa of today.23 For Behringer, it is crucial to recognize that the fear of harmful magic has been virtually universal and that in many parts of the world it shows no sign of going away. Embracing the views of the anthropologist Peter Geschiere, Behringer even emphasizes the “modernity” of witchcraft.24 And it’s not just surviving or growing in what was once known as the “third world.” Owen Davies has recently shown that thousands of Americans (“Native, European, and African”) have been persecuted, abused and even murdered as witches in the three centuries after the Salem outburst of 1692.25 When witchcraft is recognized as harmful magic, rather than as the supposed crime of having a pact with the devil, it becomes crucial to note that magic of all sorts suffused the entire world of early modern Europe. Unseen forces were thought to influence the weather, the growth of crops, the health of cattle and children, childbirth, the success of business ventures, one’s feelings of security, human relations, and the future in general.

752   the oxford handbook of the baroque The right charm, incantation, or ritual might help secure a good outcome; the right herb, talisman, pilgrimage, or sacramental could be critical to good health. It was hard or impossible to distinguish these elements of “magic” from properly “religious” relics or prayers.26 One of the steady campaigns of clerics, both Catholic and Protestant, was to distinguish properly Christian prayers, rituals, and objects from their “superstitious” rivals. Conceptually, this task was difficult and never made much headway with the common people in their congregations.27 And so throughout most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, certain persons were known for their accurate prophecies while others were thought to have occult skills in finding lost or stolen objects, advising on potential marriage partners, deciding on days that might be auspicious for marrying, starting anything new, or for planting a crop. When things went wrong, magic might easily be suspected, and a magical healer might regularly be called in to consult or to offer healing. Scholars and social elites might scoff at such beliefs, but we should be careful not to draw too sharp a line between popular culture and the culture of the elites because they were usually intertangled, depending on one another.28 At the village level, belief in magic and ordinary responses to its practice could easily get confused with or intertwined with accusations of criminal witchcraft, and they might survive virtually untouched even when legal witchcraft prosecutions withered away. That fact in itself makes the discussion of “the end of witch-hunting” problematic because it can no ­longer be maintained that trials for harmful magic ended as common people became more “enlightened.”29

The End of Witch-Hunting Obviously, these definitions of witchcraft will steer any discussion of what the “end of witchcraft” or the “end of witch-hunting” looked like in the Europe of the baroque. If witchcraft trials were merely the blind imposition of a theological construct upon an essentially passive people, then changes in the demonology of the powerful would suffice to explain how, why, and when these trials came to an end. One could point to areas of greater enlightenment and other areas of comparative darkness; one could investigate the spread of skeptical and cautious ideas among different elites as physicians came to  understand illness increasingly in physical and mechanical terms, as theologians, priests, and ministers came to doubt the role of the devil in daily life or actually in any physical, palpable aspects of earthly existence, and as jurists came to insist that witchcraft was not some “crimen exceptum,” a crime so horrible that it required the relaxation of normal procedural restraints. Indeed, until the 1960s, these were the standard terms in which the cessation of witchcraft trials found expression. Trevor-Roper, for example, argued that the end of witch trials came in part as a consequence of the growing weakness of the clergy, which was earlier and more pronounced (he thought) among Protestants. In the Netherlands, for example, “the Calvinist clergy succeeded in condemning Arminianism, procured the exile of Grotius and hounded Greve from his parish at

the end of witch-hunting   753 Arnhem. But they were never able to capture criminal jurisdiction from the lay magistrates, and it was clearly for this reason, not because of any virtue in their doctrine, that no witch was burnt in Holland after 1597 and witch trials ceased in 1610.” Speaking more generally of Europe as a whole, he averred, “We can see the resistance of the laity to the witch-craze all through its course.”30 And yet, Trevor-Roper was aware that this emphasis on the laity could never be more than a partial explanation. After all, lawyers had long since absorbed the doleful notions of the papal inquisitors, so that merely turning trials over to them did not spell any necessary cooling of ferocity. If one were to attack witch trials “at its centre, not merely doubted at its periphery, it was clearly necessary to challenge the whole conception of the kingdom of Satan.”31 For most thinkers in the age of the baroque, this was difficult because it seemed to require rejection of many passages in the New Testament, which seemed to prove that Satan was the ruler of this world and that he did indeed have his own kingdom.32 There were, of course, ways to understand the devil and his physical powers that made him less threatening. From the early Middle Ages onward, for example, the church had emphasized just how deceptive the devil was; he could blind and bedazzle, so that one might think one had seen what was not there or even believe that one had traveled to a witches’ gathering when no such trip had occurred.33 The canon was incorporated into Gratian’s standard compilation of canon law, the Decretum (1140 CE), and thus achieved widespread recognition. Even during the ­fifteenth century, when witchcraft beliefs were solidifying into a much more coherent and frightening shape, skeptics could doubt such details as flight to a sabbath, transformation into animals, and physical contacts between demons and human beings.34 Almost no one, however, denied the existence of disembodied spirits and their control over extraordinary (preternatural) phenomena. For every doubt, there was a plausible and biblically-based response. A new age of criticism was launched by Johann Weyer (Wier) with his attack on witchcraft prosecutions in 1563, De praestigiis daemonum.35 Weyer did not dispute the existence or influence of the devil; indeed, he magnified his powers of control over the minds of human beings, especially over the minds of weak and silly women and those suffering from melancholy. But he minimized the likelihood that demons actually had physical effects in the world, emphasizing instead the way that Catholic priests and exorcists used the gullibility of simple people to enhance their authority. Similarly, Weyer doubted the force of charms, reasoning that demons had no reason to obey the gestures, rituals, or commands of mere mortals. Perhaps most explosively, he doubted that the Bible had been correctly understood and translated when it was used to justify the prosecution of witchcraft, a crime that did not merit censure in the New Testament.36 Therefore, in his view, those unfortunate women accused of harmful magic and of consorting with the devil were guilty, at most, of foolishly believing themselves to be guilty; they deserved Christian consolation and instruction rather than punishment. One might have supposed that such a bracing critique would be unanswerable, but in fact Weyer’s arguments could be easily deflected by admitting that, indeed, some suspects were merely imagining their crimes, but that that did not warrant any general skepticism

754   the oxford handbook of the baroque about the dangers of witchcraft.37 He enraged some of his readers, including Jean Bodin, Thomas Erastus, and King James VI of Scotland (soon to become James I of England), who all wrote specifically against Weyer and his book.38 Many less prominent thinkers joined them in the early decades of the seventeenth century. To be sure, some Protestant writers did take up Weyer’s ideas and attempt to show that witch trials were unjust and unreasonable. Unless one adopted a doctrinaire materialism or mechanism that excluded the influence of spirits of any sort in this world, the possibility of harmful magic and of having a pact with the devil could not easily be denied. One thinker who did doubt the very foundations of learned witchcraft theory was Reginald Scot, a Kentish gentleman and zealous Protestant, whose Discoverie of Witchcraft was published in 1584. Like many of his contemporaries, Scot argued that the proper Christian response to misfortune should be self-examination and repentance rather than blaming supposed witches. After all, God was in charge of this world so that even misfortunes were likely to be warnings and messages from God rather than evidence of witchcraft.39 The problem with this view was that opponents might respond by admitting that God was of course fundamentally in charge, but that criminals and evil doers were not necessarily God’s direct messengers; they still deserved punishment as both Old and New Testaments confirmed. But Scot went further. Relying in part on the analysis of Johann Weyer, Scot also claimed that the Bible had been grotesquely misunderstood; when the words of Scripture were properly translated and interpreted, they did not at all support the pursuit of witches. Indeed, the Bible seemed to show that no pact between a spirit and a human being was possible, no sexual contact could occur, the witches’ sabbath was nothing more than a figment of the scholastic imagination, and that the Bible was no longer a reliable guide to life in the current world of the late s­ ixteenth century. Spirits, even if they existed, were irrelevant. Magical beliefs were, in Scot’s view, childish, foolish, and fit only for melancholiacs and Catholics. He went so far, in fact, that he virtually ensured his lack of influence on others. By coming close to denying the very existence of spirits, he was violating one of the cardinal assumptions of the age of the baroque, one that united even “skeptics” with orthodox Christians down to the eighteenth century.40 Even those of skeptical disposition, such as Michel de Montaigne, did not attack the whole idea of witchcraft as developed in the later Middle Ages.41 Montaigne was content to doubt the reliability of forced confessions and the ­testimony of our easily deceived eyes. This was generally the stance of many intellectuals in the early seventeenth century. When later thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Benedict Spinoza eliminated the whole world of spirits by describing the world in material or purely natural terms, they were promptly labeled atheists and shunned, even though their thinking had planted intellectual timebombs that eventually exploded decades later. By the time theologians and jurists were questioning the cumulative notion of witchcraft as a whole, by the late seventeenth century, at least in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England, the executions themselves were dwindling away or had long ceased. And so even committed rationalists like Trevor-Roper had to admit some puzzlement. Why had the trials ended? It was not clear.42 It was a sign of a new

the end of witch-hunting   755 (postmodern) dispensation that when a major intellectual historian next attempted to survey the world of demonology, he deliberately separated the endeavor from any effort to explain the decline of witchcraft trials.43

A Paradigm Shift in Witchcraft Studies The rationalist paradigm had run its course. The time was ripe for what Behringer called a “paradigm shift,” which he located in several new studies from the 1970s.44 The shift came with the entry of historians into the archival wilderness of the surviving trial records, which also plunged historians into the lives of villagers and local elites. Along with that move came the acute awareness that witchcraft trials varied in intensity and in character from place to place. Even fairly small territories showed surprising variations, which could not be explained by variations in witchcraft theory. The clues lay elsewhere, on the local level, in the villages and small towns of early modern Europe, where few worried overmuch about witchcraft as heresy or as a pact with the devil. What most ordinary people feared was harmful magic. But this new understanding of witchcraft also presented real difficulties. If witchcraft was the use of harmful magic, one might suppose that the end of witchcraft trials came either when the elites stopped believing in harmful magic or when common people stopped accusing their neighbors of magical harm. But the problem is that across most of Europe, there is little evidence that such beliefs actually went into effective decline before the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century.45 This problem has grown more acute with the discoveries over the past generation of how intertwined villages and elite central courts were. One major advance came with the publication in 1991 of Walter Rummel’s regional study of “peasants, lords, and witches,” a remarkable work that detailed the operation of local witch-finding committees organized and run by villagers in the area governed by the prince electors (and archbishops) of Trier.46 This had been a territory in western Germany, centering on the River Mosel, that was widely known as one of the hot spots of witch-hunting, a small region that sent hundreds of supposed witches to their deaths, and a region about which the suffragan bishop of Trier wrote one of the key demonological texts of that age: Peter Binsfeld’s De confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum (1589).47 But Rummel overturned the prevailing notion that Binsfeld and his allies had used a centrally controlled Counter Reformation campaign to purify his principality. Instead, he found through careful study of remarkably full trial documents that the witchcraft trials had been driven almost exclusively “from below,” by witchcraft committees who used their mandate to settle political scores and exact revenge on village elites, burghermeisters, and estate managers by accusing and punishing their wives and daughters and often the elite male

756   the oxford handbook of the baroque leaders as well. The poor were not the victims in these attacks; they were often turning the tables on their supposed superiors.48 Here was a vision of the witchcraft trials that ran totally contrary to what a couple of centuries of enlightened historians had thought. How was that possible? The paradigm shift brought by the 1970s involved looking away from the printed sources by so-called demonologists and examining instead the millions of pages of trial documents.

Regional Variations in European Witchcraft Trials One of the signal results of recent scholarship is the recognition of dramatic differences in the history of witchcraft trials from one region to another. The Mediterranean world had a sharply different history from that of France or the Netherlands, Britain, and northern and eastern Europe. The German-speaking lands had generally the most severe trials of all.

The Mediterranean We now know better than scholars did 50 years ago that the Mediterranean was a huge area of low intensity, not so much despite the inquisitions that operated there as because of those inquisitions. The Roman, Spanish, and Portuguese Inquisitions developed an early procedural skepticism that distrusted tortured evidence and especially witness testimony supposedly gathered from those who admitted that they had attended the witches’ dance or sabbath.49 After the immediate threat of Protestantism declined in Italy, roughly after 1580, the Roman Inquisition paid increasing attention to such offenses as magic and superstition, but executed vanishingly small numbers of those convicted. As Monter and Tedeschi concluded, “In Italy (as in Spain), the rubric of ‘magic’ rarely involved witchcraft and apostasy to the Devil; and even when it did, the Italian Inquisitors, unlike secular judges, rarely punished the crime with death.”50 By the 1590s, at the latest, the Roman Inquisition had decided that denunciations of others brought by confessed witches should have no legal force;51 the result was that one could no longer trust any claim that a suspect had been seen at the sabbath, a conclusion that cut off the chain reaction trials in which single accusations mushroomed into the hundreds. By the 1620s, the Roman Inquisition was circulating a powerful Instruction Concerning Witchcraft Trials that blistered the procedural errors that had led to the death of innocents.52 The papacy had difficulties making these rules stick north of the Alps, where witchcraft cases were in secular hands even in the territories governed by prince bishops or prince abbots. But in Italy, it appears that the Roman Inquisition

the end of witch-hunting   757 succeeded in preventing executions for a crime that continued to trouble the church for over a century longer. In Portugal, it appears that the Inquisition managed to control most prosecutions for witchcraft and quickly evinced a sharp skepticism about the available evidence. As a result, we know of fewer than a dozen executions for the crime in Portugal.53 In contrast, the Spanish Inquisition showed a vigorous interest in pursuing witchcraft in the early sixteenth century but after 1550, it seemed to lose all interest. Then, in the early seventeenth century, in the Basque country around Logroño, a massive panic erupted during which several persons were executed in 1610, and many dozens of others were given lesser punishments. More importantly, however, the junior inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, began a serious investigation of almost two thousand other confessed witches, including many children. By comparing their stories and testing their supposedly magical objects, Salazar ruled that none of these confessions were credible—they seemed all to be the product of pure fantasy and illusion rather than evidence of magic, heresy, or other offenses.54 After foot-dragging, the case made its way to the central governing board of the Spanish Inquisition, which adopted measures that forbade capital punishment in future cases. The end of witch-hunting did not mean that the Inquisition showed no more interest in the spiritual offense of illicit magic—indeed investigations into “superstition and witchcraft” increased in both frequency and as a percentage of all the cases that the various tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition considered between 1615 and 1700.55 If these tribunals had governed and controlled all of the Mediterranean region as they intended, very few witches would have been executed altogether. But secular courts never entirely gave up their jurisdiction, especially in Aragon in northern Spain, where they executed some 150 witches in around 50 locations during the years 1614 to 1622. It was secular authorities who brought this series to an end, and from then on, Spain witnessed very few executions, even under secular tribunals.

France North of the Alps and the Pyrenees, it was very different. Secular courts were firmly in control of virtually all prosecutions from the sixteenth century forward. In France, for example, the secular control of justice meant that jurists were surprisingly reluctant to lend credence to the fully fledged “composite” crime of witchcraft and remained largely focused on harmful magic. The Parlement of Paris, whose jurisdiction covered most of northern France, was, moreover, notably more dubious about torture as a means of eliciting the truth than were the lower courts in France; when cases were appealed to the Parlement, local death sentences were usually overturned. Alfred Soman reported that by the early seventeenth century, the Paris Parlement was validating tortured confessions in only about two percent of the cases that came before it.56 As a result of this ­combination of skepticism about the crime in general and about torture as well, the

758   the oxford handbook of the baroque Parlement of Paris approved relatively few death sentences for witchcraft: only 104 out of the 930 appeals that came to it between 1550 and 1625.57 After 1625, the Parlement forbade all executions for witchcraft within its large jurisdiction.58 Of course, Paris was only one of about nine provincial parlements in France in the early seventeenth century, but it was by far the most important both in the size of its remit and in its influence. Most of the other parlements (with the notable exception of Rouen in Normandy) followed the example and instruction of the Paris Parlement. Starting in the 1580s, appeals of witchcraft convictions began to explode across much of France, reaching a peak probably in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the worst French panic occurred during 1608–1610, in the Labourd, the Basque lands just north of the Pyrenees where witchcraft accusations were running rampant. Henri IV commissioned the jurists Pierre de Lancre and Jean d’Espaignet to investigate and execute those they found guilty. Together, they heard hundreds of confessions, most of them allegedly unforced, from people who said that they had been to the witches’ sabbath. Suspects began to flee across the border with Spain, where they helped trigger the outburst of panic in Logroño, but before their royal commission expired in November 1609, the two investigators had convicted and executed perhaps as many as 80 witches. De Lancre sent the many cases he had been unable to settle on to the Parlement at Bordeaux, but that tribunal evinced such skepticism that they let most of these suspects go free. This humiliating set-back prompted de Lancre to write the first of several books insisting on the reality of the witches sabbath and on the reliability of torture and witness testimony.59 These became noteworthy additions to the swelling literature of witchcraft, but they did not shake the French courts’ growing reluctance to sentence anyone to death for the crime of witchcraft. In the 1640s, the Toulouse Parlement cemented its reputation for restraint, however, when an explosion of accusations led it to judge at least 641 accused witches and after upholding many local convictions and condemning 50 or 60 witches to death (mostly women), the Parlement realized that corruption had occurred. Almost all the remaining defendants were given sharply reduced sentences or simply released. So here, as in Paris, the legal skepticism of the Parlement of Toulouse stopped a major outburst of panic and made it seem unlikely that anyone would be burned again in Languedoc.60 Even so, isolated executions did persist, often as a result of accusations aimed at priests or exorcists, including the famous episodes at convents in Loudun and Louviers.61 Thus, the growth of skeptical attitudes and more cautious procedures among the French parlements did not bring stop all witchcraft trials. In 1678, an enormous scandal broke out at the royal court where word spread that a plot to poison Louis XIV had been uncovered. The ensuing investigation revealed a complex web of criminal magic and poisoners that involved more than 400 persons from the lowest to the highest ranks of society, including some 20 of King Louis’s female courtiers and even his mistress, Madame de Montespan. They seem to have been using illicit magic, potions, and “black masses” in an attempt to jockey dominance at court. By 1682, the special court that Louis established had ordered 36 executions along with other, lesser punishments,

the end of witch-hunting   759 but some 60 were never tried at all because their testimony was too inflammatory; they were sent into lifelong solitary confinement. This was the single biggest scandal of Louis XIV’s reign. The king aimed to end such problems with an edict (1682) that declared all acts of magic to be fraudulent; anyone pretending to perform any sort of magic was to be banished. Effectively, harmful magic was recategorized as poisoning while the diabolical pact and other religious elements of witchcraft were redefined as fraud or sacrilege, a reform that led to a burst of legal prosecutions and executions. But slowly such trials petered out.62 Altogether, the kingdom of France itself counted perhaps one thousand victims of legal and illegal (lynch mob) persecution; but the peripheral lands now incorporated in France (Dauphiné, Artois, Franche-Comté, the duchy of Lorraine, Alsace, Montbéliard, and the papal states around Avignon) added perhaps four thousand executions over the whole period of witch-hunting, 1400 to 1800. Lorraine alone probably oversaw the execution of 1,500 to 2,000 witches.63

The Holy Roman Empire The fact that conditions on the borders of France were so much harsher than in the kingdom of France introduces us to the stark variations in the severity of witchcraft prosecutions across Northern Europe. Historians have discovered that, in general, the worst episodes of persecution occurred in autonomous territories that had no direct or effective supervision from a strong central authority. The best estimates suggest that Europe as a whole saw over 100,000 trials for witchcraft and about 50,000 executions. Of that number, probably half occurred within the Holy Roman Empire, mostly in just the sort of lands with fragmented authority and a ruler who was trying to prove himself. The larger duchies of the Empire often exerted a restraining influence on the lower-level tribunals of their districts; and so we find surprisingly moderate history of witchcraft prosecution in Bavaria, Württemberg, the Palatinate, and a few other territories in the north. But by far the worst series of witch-hunting occurred during the first three decades of the seventeenth century in the ecclesiastical principalities of Electoral Mainz, Electoral Trier, Electoral Cologne, the bishoprics of Würzburg, Eichstätt, and Bamberg, and the princely monasteries of Ellwangen and Fulda. Horrific series of trials also took place in the aforementioned duchy of Lorraine, and several Protestant duchies in the north, especially Mecklenburg.64 Altogether eighteen imperial principalities accounted for well over 15,000 executions. Many of these were small states that were struggling to impose Counter-Reformation uniformity and obedience on their local nobles and subjects. In some instances, bishops or archbishops used witch-hunting in their efforts at “state formation” and zealous efforts to wipe out local Protestants.65 We should not imagine, however, that these excesses occurred only in Catholic territories, for several of the most dedicated were firmly Lutheran or Calvinist. What united them was their fragile governing structure and their feeble organs of central justice. It is noteworthy that

760   the oxford handbook of the baroque none of the larger cities of Europe engaged in large-scale witchcraft trials: London, Paris, Madrid, Naples, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Antwerp, or even the larger imperial cities (city states) such as Nuremberg and Augsburg.66

The Netherlands, North and South The Netherlands exemplified another approach to witchcraft. Trials began to proliferate in the Northern Netherlands in the 1540s and 1550s, and spread further down to the 1590s, but they ran into three distinct sorts of trouble. First, was the revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish rule, a revolt that persuaded many residents that they did not wish to impose some Dutch replacement for the Spanish Inquisition; and so torture and secret tribunals were discontinued in the seven United Provinces by the 1590s. The strong desire to reject what was seen and experienced as Spanish oppression marked the nascent Dutch sense of identity. Second, the Dutch trials of the 1540s and 1550s provided a trigger for the thought and publications of Johann Weyer (Jan Wier), who, we will recall, had argued that even voluntary confessions of witchcraft were not to be trusted because the old women who were usually suspected of the crime were melancholy and much given to vain imaginings. These views seem to have reinforced those of the Dutch heretical movement called the Family of Love, mystics who preached a nondogmatic, nicodemite Christianity. For them, Satan’s influence in the world was only spiritual, a claim that undercut notions of demonic magic. In the Netherlands, Johann Weyer and even the president of the High Council of Holland along with the rector of Leiden University were in close contact with these views; and these officials worked collaborated to forbid the use of torture against two suspects in 1593.67 They seem to have had more influence than we used to suppose. From the 1590s onward, permission to torture became almost impossible to obtain. The last execution in the United Provinces came in 1608. The Southern (Spanish) Netherlands were an entirely different matter. Artois had seen some of the first fierce prosecutions for the new (diabolical) notion of witchcraft in the fifteenth century. When the largest witchcraft trials took off in the second half of the sixteenth century, older histories tended to blame the severity in the Spanish Netherlands on the Spanish Catholic governments in charge; but more recent research has shown that while political leadership did make a difference, the chains of trials were not centrally directed. In Flanders and Brabant, witchcraft trials and executions persisted into the late seventeenth century, but they were not distinctly more severe than the northern provinces had been in the sixteenth century. The biggest contrast between north and south came in the Duchy of Luxembourg, and especially in the Germanspeaking parts of the duchy (which deployed secret witch-hunting committees like those in the nearby prince-bishopric of Trier). The best estimates now suggest that Luxembourg conducted between 2,500 and 3,000 trials and condemned at least 2,000 persons to death.68 Until 1683, the provincial government in Luxembourg and the central authorities in Brussels struggled without much success to impose restraints on legal abuses and corruption among local nobles and village courts.

the end of witch-hunting   761

Britain Turning to witchcraft prosecutions in Britain, a rough divide also separates English trials from those in Scotland. In England, witchcraft trials remained small and sporadic with probably no more than 200 executions over the period 1540 to 1640. The largest exception came during the Civil War (1642–1649) under the leadership of Matthew Hopkins, who styled himself the “Witch-Finder General.” He and John Stearne exploited local demands in East Anglia (especially in Essex) for help in eliminating witches, probably accounting for the deaths of 300 persons during the years 1645–1647.69 They managed to extract confessions of diabolical witchcraft (including a pact with the devil) by subjecting suspects to days without sleep and other forms of severe psychological pressure; when their series of trials collapsed, their harsh methods fell into disrepute so that after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, moderate opinion, even when it supported belief in witchcraft, had come to reject large-scale hunts because they now seemed redolent of the religious “enthusiasm” of the Civil War. The actual arguments over witchcraft had changed very little for one hundred years, but the climate had changed.70 By the late seventeenth century, witchcraft was beginning to seem like a relic of a distant past. The last trial in England came in 1712, when Jane Wenham was found guilty of witchcraft; the judge arranged a reprieve because he was appalled by the credulity and vindictiveness of her prosecutors. In contrast to the relative moderation of England, the thinly populated kingdom of Scotland probably tried about 4,000 persons and executed 2,500. These witch-hunts were among the most severe in all of Protestant Europe. As in much of the rest of Europe, about 85 percent were female.71 Historians have developed several models with which to explain the sharp differences between Scotland and England, but it should be recognized that stark variations can also be found in England itself, between East Anglia, for example, and much of the Home Circuit (Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex) where there were many fewer accusations and local recriminations.

Far Northern and Eastern Europe A generation ago, the survey of European witchcraft trials would stop about here because there were very few demonological treatises or pamphlets published in Scandinavia or Eastern Europe. The massive panic at Mora and Torsåker (Sweden, 1668–1676), was perhaps the only massive episode that most Western scholars knew about. But since then, archival scholars have not only filled in the blank spaces of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Latin America (the Portuguese and Spanish colonies), but their findings have challenged some of the complacent assumptions of scholars about witchcraft trials in Western Europe and about the history of local witchcraft beliefs over all of Europe.72 Scandinavia, for example, had far more and more serious outbreaks of prosecution than imagined, especially in Northern Norway. Finnish courts, moreover, dealt with some 2,000 accusations (and large numbers of men) but executed only about

762   the oxford handbook of the baroque 120, most of them between 1649 and 1684. The devil played hardly any role in most of these trials.73 Hungary presents other surprises. Out of a total of 4,582 known accusations between 1526 and 1848, about half came from the first half of the eighteenth century, and many of those charged were men.74 Trials did not really begin to decline until after a decree from Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa in 1758, which bore the stamp of the enlightened court physician Gerard van Swieten. Here, was one of the rare instances in which a state decree actually affected the course of prosecutions. In Russia, where Orthodoxy did not support accusations of witchcraft, secular trials for harmful magic occurred at a low rate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the question of sources remains vexing because local court proceedings and the punishments of serfs went unrecorded.75 From the records that survive, it seems that some 80 percent of those tried and convicted were men, and that in some 500 trials, fewer than 100 persons were executed.76 The archival revolution has also dramatically changed the history of Poland, whose reputation as a region of fanatic witch-hunting has recently been sharply diminished.77 Michael Ostling reports that at least 558 accused witches were tried under the Polish Crown between 1511 and 1776 (when the crime was abolished). But considering the loss of records, Ostling claims that “a total of perhaps two thousand witches burnt, while undemonstrable, seems likely.”78

Reasons for the Decline of Witch-Hunting Modern researchers have tended to concentrate their attention on changes in trial procedure, and especially the moderation of torture, but other approaches to the decline of witch-hunting have also attracted attention.

Was it “Witch-Hunting”? This all-too-rapid survey should suggest that answering the question of why witchhunting came to an end can have no single answer.79 Even the term “witch-hunt” is problematic because it suggests a centralized campaign to root out diabolical heretics or groups of sorcerers, and such campaigns were extremely rare. One text-book example might have been Matthew Hopkins and his East Anglian “hunt,” or one could point to the Counter-Reforming campaigns of the bishops and prince abbots of central Germany from Cologne and Mainz to Würzburg, Bamberg, and Fulda during the decades between 1610 and 1630, with a horrific peak in the late 1620s; but we must also recognize that in other regions, despite large numbers of suspects and executions, witchcraft prosecutions were more a symptom of festering neighborly dysfunction. A classic example

the end of witch-hunting   763 of this unhappy situation is provided by the duchy of Lorraine over the decades between 1570 and 1630.80 To speak of “witch-hunting” gives the wrong impression in such cases. In many instances, even when an episcopal or ducal authority was pushing for trials, suspicions and accusations usually erupted from the villages and were not centrally directed. So in that sense, there were far fewer panic-stricken “hunts” than historians have imagined.81 Many, perhaps most, witchcraft trials were triggered by fears of harmful magic rather than by notions of the enormous satanic conspiracy dreamed up by overheated theologians and jurists. Until the mid-seventeenth century, in many places, fears of diabolical conspiracy emerged only after learned jurists got involved. Probably more than half of those officially charged with the crime were acquitted or released with lesser punishments (banishment, fines, penances). And even after torture was discontinued or severely limited, smaller-scale suspicions of witchcraft continued to bubble below the surface of many neighborhood conflicts, and lynch justice often demonstrated that if satisfaction could not be found in the official courts, local people might take decisive action.82

Better Conditions for Villagers? It should also be clear that even though the witchcraft trials across Europe were often triggered by waves of illness and terrible weather, so much so that Behringer has linked their severity to the Little Ice Age,83 the disappearance of these trials cannot be linked to the return of happy days or to a restoration of some supposed village solidarity and neighborly good will. This is not the place for a full consideration of the many social and psychological preconditions and triggers of witchcraft trials, but Europe was undergoing harsh climatic conditions and political or military invasions and disasters at precisely the time that many regimes undid the mechanisms of prosecution for this secret crime.

Changes in Trial Procedure With all of these reservations, however, one can point to one major factor in the slow or rapid collapse of witchcraft prosecutions across most of Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: the changes in legal procedure and in the evaluation of ­witness testimony.84 Witchcraft trials were, after all, legal proceedings that depended crucially on evidence given by neighbors or by a defendant under duress. Only a tiny minority of cases depended on any demonstrated corpus delicti, any physical evidence of an actual crime.85 When courts relaxed their standards of proof, when they declared that witchcraft was a crimen exceptum, they were admitting that without looser standards of evidence, without relentless torture, they would find suspected witches very hard to convict. So right from the start, many jurists knew that they had to ignore the normal rules if they were to succeed in ridding their lands of witches.86

764   the oxford handbook of the baroque Where courts refused to relax their standards, they formed pockets that we can identify today as areas of leniency. Brian Levack has emphasized this to explain why so many Scottish witch trials were so much harsher than the English: Scots depended on relatively untrained local magistrates, without supervision from the center, while English trials were mainly conducted by judges in circuit courts sent from the central courts in Westminster. Soman has also emphasized that the centralized court in Paris waged a long and successful battle against village magistrates and rogue witch finders. Local control also meant harsher trials in most of the Holy Roman Empire—this is one explanation for the horrific witchcraft trials in Fulda, Bamberg, and Würzburg. The Empire was notoriously splintered, with ill-functioning central institutions; county and episcopal judges did not usually have to suffer supervision by imperial authorities. And the university jurists whom they consulted for advice on torture and other questions often lacked practical experience. But in the larger territories, such as the duchies of Bavaria and Württemberg, central authorities in the ducal capitals did manage to keep a lid on local excesses, allowing witchcraft trials within legal restraints. When a growing group of children in the Württemberg town of Calw brought accusations of witchcraft against seventy-seven adults, the authorities at the University of Tübingen tried to quash the local frenzy by discrediting the inconsistent and fantastic charges. A ducal commission blistered the local “superstitious” rabble for trying to take the law into their own hands, and finally the central government in Stuttgart restored order with military force. When conditions of more centralized control broke down, local townsmen and villagers sometimes used their newfound autonomy to settle scores and ignore orders from on high, sometimes even prosecuting a prince’s judicial agents as witches. So it could be unusually dangerous for those in authority to resist local pressures, and in both Habsburg Swabia and the Electorate of Trier, upper-class men and women and even magistrates were swept up as witches.87 When the major imperial courts did intervene, as the Reichskammergericht (“Imperial Chamber Court,” usually in Speyer) and the Reichshofrat (“Imperial Court Council,” usually in Vienna) sometimes did, they usually tried to curtail cruel and politically inspired prosecutions. That happened, for example, in the case of Balthasar Nuss, the infamous judge in the prince-abbey of Fulda, where political rivalries fueled a witchhunt that condemned 276 victims to death between 1602 and 1606. Appeals to the Reichskammergericht from well-placed citizens led to the imprisonment of Nuss in 1606 and finally to his execution in 1618.88 During the frightening series of witchcraft trials at Bamberg in the late 1620s, prominent citizens who managed to escape the bishopric appealed to the Reichshofrat in Vienna, who tried to stamp out the trials and punish the guilty. The jurists in Vienna finally threatened the bishop himself, who realized that he had to desist, but not before six hundred or more had lost their lives.89 Although the Reichskammergericht took on only 247 witchcraft appeals between 1500 and 1800, its decisions were widely cited by the much more active university legal faculties in the German lands, and seem to have added to a growing skepticism about the credibility of witnesses and the use of torture.90

the end of witch-hunting   765 Perhaps the most sensational intervention in an ongoing series of witchcraft trials came in between 1678 and 1680 in the alpine County of Vaduz, where Count Ferdinand Karl Franz von Hohenems oversaw a witch-hunt inspired in part by the desire to confiscate the possessions of those condemned. After fifty-four persons had been executed, the emperor intervened to nullify the proceedings. But the conflict between the count and his subjects escalated until the count was arrested on imperial orders and thrown in jail, but the scandals of his reign had so thoroughly delegitimized his dynasty that relatives had to sell off their lands to the princely house of Liechtenstein. In this way, a series of late witchcraft trials led to a financial and political crisis that transformed this little corner of the European map.91 Without internal checks or controls on judicial malfeasance, subjects of the count had relied on imperial institutions, which had finally done their job.

The Critique of Torture It appears that by 1630, in the German lands, torture had become controversial at the very least, and several courts were beginning to require a finding of some corpus delicti (some independent, physical proof that a crime had been committed) before arrests and investigations could begin. Jurists were beginning to realize that forced denunciations could lead to chains of accusations that easily included many innocents. This was the basic complaint voiced in 1631 by the Catholic poet, priest, and hymn-writer Friedrich Spee, S.J., who published (anonymously) his famous Cautio Criminalis, a scathing and moving attack on the judicial abuses that led countless defenseless persons to confess to crimes of which they were innocent.92 He also blamed the malice, rumors, and ignorance of common people, who pressured their lords to investigate supposed witches, whom “they themselves created . . . with their own tongues.”93 His book was rapidly reprinted and translated into German, Dutch, and French. Although he did not attack belief in the crime of witchcraft directly, his critique aimed to make convictions difficult or impossible. In doing so, he struck precisely the note that others of his day were also finding powerful. One did not have to become a skeptic or a materialist to doubt the justice of witchcraft trials; one only needed to show that the judicial procedures employed were hopelessly inadequate. They could lead only to injustice. No one work, whether by Spee and his fellow Jesuits or by similar Protestant critics, could bring the German waves of chain reaction trials to an end, but by 1630, the tide was turning. This is noteworthy because the German laws that permitted or encouraged witchcraft trials did not change until the eighteenth century. Most of those who brought the trials to an end could still believe devoutly in the power of the devil and in the largely unprovable crime of witchcraft. Alfred Soman has noticed the same thing in France, England, Sweden, Spain, and Bavaria.94 As Trevor-Roper noted, the theory of witchcraft and demonology had not changed, and certainly village communities across Europe continued to be riven by envy, distrust, and mutual recriminations among neighbors.

766   the oxford handbook of the baroque But after more than a century, legal procedures were slowly returning to a position of traditional caution. It is hard to say that this growth of judicial skepticism was characteristic of “the baroque,” but the distrust of torture and forced confessions seems to have led to judicial doubt that supposed eyewitnesses could be trusted in the absence of physical evidence. The development of centralized court systems run by regimes that were ready to enforce their rules with military force if necessary may also seem familiar to those who deal with the more familiar elements of baroque culture: the arts, literature, urban planning, and architecture.

Baroque Ideas of Witchcraft Children and Fantasy It is also true that the witchcraft beliefs of the seventeenth century presented several departures from what had developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Scholars have noticed that children began to play a much larger role in witch trials than they had in the sixteenth century.95 Children had been employed as witch finders in the Basque lands of Navarre as early as the sixteenth century, but young people became far more prominent in Northern European trials from the 1580s onward, and by the seventeenth century, children were not just accusing their elders; they had become suspects as well. The huge outburst at Logroño was fueled by hundreds of children who “dreamt” that they had attended the witches sabbath.96 The role of children both as accusers and as victims continued to grow as the new century wore on, perhaps precisely because they usually confessed without any torture or duress. One could doubt the efficacy of torture, in other words, without dismissing voluntary confessions or accusations. By 1700, as witchcraft trials were petering out in most of Western Europe, children came to dominate the ranks of both accusers and victims. In Augsburg, where witchcraft trials only began after 1630, the share of children among the accused rose to 92 percent for the ­period 1700–1730.97 We have long known about the child-witches of the Swedish outburst (1668–1676), the witch beggar-children of Salzburg (1677–1679), and the “afflicted” children and young women of Salem, Massachusetts (1692), but it’s only in the past 10 years or so that we have begun to make sense of the hitherto unexplained fact that the authorities all over Northern Europe took the testimony of children so seriously that their accusations led to the deaths of many adults, and even to the executions of many children.98 There was an obvious connection between these children’s witchcraft trials and the end of witch-hunting altogether. With the high proportion of children involved in the later prosecutions, and with the wild fantasies that often accompanied them, once they were delegitimized, once the “fantastic,” “dreamlike,” or “playful” evidence given by youngsters under the age of 14 was thrown in doubt, there was no easy way for “normal”

the end of witch-hunting   767 witchcraft trials to resume. Sometimes, as in Freising in the 1720s, even when they were acting with intense seriousness, judges revealed a growing confusion, an “inability to disentangle what they had earlier mixed up.”99 Judges slowly came to doubt all confessions, even if supposedly voluntary.

The Attempt to Hold It All Together This change in the evaluation of fantasy, however, was also connected to other ways in which ideas of witchcraft entered the European imagination during the age of the baroque. Lyndal Roper has emphasized, for example, that as the major witch panics faded out, witchcraft became a more prominent topic in literature, especially in the early novel.100 While the Elizabethan drama had offered many examples of magic, witches (“weird sisters”), and demons, the themes available after about 1650 became more playful. For Roper, this was characteristic of the German baroque aesthetic, which often displayed a “virtuoso shifting” from one mode to another, from tragedy to comedy to theology, from sexual titillation to fascination with the bizarre and to humor of an explosive, bodily sort.101 Instead of seeing wild fantasy as a symptom of madness, readers seem to have increasingly valued and even encouraged the bizarre and grotesque. This increasing emphasis on the emotional content of witchcraft narratives was not just “literary.” It appears that even on the village level and in trial documents, the records from the eighteenth century “ooze with emotion” in a way that cannot easily be matched in earlier centuries. It may be that common people were learning to tell their stories in a more riveting or terrifying manner, or that court recorders were now more attuned to such narratives and that jurists probed more intrusively for details of agonizing deaths, of “loves, tiffs, and jealousies.” As Lyndal Roper has observed, even on the village level “the Age of Sentiment had certainly dawned.”102 The Swabian priest and poet Sebastian Sailer combined many of these qualities in his plays and poems: a close attention to village rivalries, stock figures such as cunning peasants and rowdy youths, but also hideous, filthy, and frightening old women.103 It seems to me that one could go further, and describe “the baroque” as the increasingly desperate effort to hold it all together: religious orthodoxy, Scriptural revelation, historical investigations, the “new science,” everyday experience, emotional reality, body and soul. Before these topics and viewpoints were forced through some simplifying “Enlightenment” grid or disengaged from one another, before scholars learned to ignore what could be labeled “irrelevant,” witchcraft theorists felt a need to encompass the world, to engulf and subsume and reconcile all that was known and felt. That meant that during the late seventeenth century, with the rise of mathematically inspired natural philosophy, demonology could try to co-opt or incorporate all forms of empirical research, as one finds in Joseph Glanvill, one of the Anglican founders of the Royal Society, whose Saducismus Triumphatus (1681) tried to show that experience “proved” the existence of the spirit world and made belief in God more defensible.104 But it also meant that the most recent findings by antiquarians and ancient historians had to be

768   the oxford handbook of the baroque ­ tted into the received (Old Testament) truths that Christians held dear.105 This effort fi was increasingly fraught because such an all-encompassing approach to knowledge could mean that almost any finding from any part of the world, almost any experience, could potentially destabilize good theological and social order. Art historians, too, have recently moved beyond cataloguing the various sorts of images of witchcraft found in Western art.106 Claudia Swan, for example, has shown that the Dutch painter Jacques de Gheyn (1565–1629) combined an exacting attention to the natural world with remarkable images of the fantastic, melancholy visions, and witchcraft within the context of Dutch discussions of the imagination and the demonic. As elites became more familiar with the idea that the sick imagination could conjure up weird figures that disguised themselves as reality, the testimony of children or of supposed witches became ever more incredible, literally unbelievable, and, perhaps for that very reason, more playful, more delightful.107 This seems similar to what a literary scholar has described as “baroque horror,”108 and to the recent effort to reclaim the term “baroque” from the purists, who object that the term was never so widely applied in the early modern period.109 In this way, notions of witchcraft did not disappear with the cessation of witchcraft trials. They mutated into the metaphors for human aspiration, imagination, and tragedy with which we still live.

Notes 1. Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn: Georgi, 1901); Zauberwahn, Inquisition, und Hexenprozessen im Mittelalter und die Entstehung grossen Hexenverfolgung (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1900). Henry Charles Lea followed this line of interpretation in assembling his Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland and George Lincoln Burr (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939). 2. Jeffrey B. Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972). 3. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 97, see 185. His chapter on witchcraft was first a long chapter (90–191), which was later published separately as a book: The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Harper & Row, 1969). 4. Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 116. 5. Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de magie (Paris, 1625, 1669; The Hague, 1653, 1679; Amsterdam, 1712); see Maryanne Cline Horowitz, “Gabriel Naudé’s Apology for Great Men Suspected of Magic,” in Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 61–76. 6. Gottfried Arnold, Unparteyische Kirchen—und Ketzer-Historie, 2 vols. (Leipzig and Frankfurt: Thomas Fritsch, 1699–1700). 7. Christian Thomasius confessed that a careful reading of Naudé had opened his eyes about witchcraft. See Laursen, Histories of Heresy, 52. Thomasius had also been influenced by the history of the Spanish Inquisition by Philipp van Limborch. See Christian Thomasius, Vom Laster der Zauberei. Über die Hexenprozesse. De crimine magiae. Processus Inquisitorii contra

the end of witch-hunting   769 Sagas, ed. Rolf Lieberwirth (Weimar: Böhlau, 1967; reprinted Munich, 1986), 146–147, 158–159, 164–165. For Arnold’s connections with Thomasius, see Erich Seeberg, “Christian Thomasius und Gottfried Arnold,” Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift 31 (1920): 337–358. 8. Notker Hammerstein, Jus und Historie. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des historischen Denkens an deutschen Universitäten im späten 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), 124. 9. Thomasius, Vom Laster der Zauberei. Über die Hexenprozesse, 110–113. 10. Behringer notes that Thomasius was reviving the historical arguments of Johann Weyer from the late sixteenth century: Wolfgang Behringer, “Geschichte der Hexenforschung,” in Wider alle Hexerei und Teufelswerk. Die europäische Hexenverfolgung und ihre Auswirkungen auf Südwestdetuschland, ed. Sönke Lorenz and Jürgen Michael Schmidt (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2004), 485–668, at 499. But Thomasius did not argue only historically because he had developed a new notion of the devil and his powers as well: Martin Pott, “Aufklärung und Hexenaberglaube. Philosophische Ansätze zur Überwindung der Teufelspakttheorie in der deutschen Frühaufklärung,” in Das Ende der Hexenverfolgung, ed. Sönke Lorenz and Dieter R. Bauer (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1995), 183–202, at 193–198. 11. The historiography of witchcraft has become a flourishing field in its own right. See H. C. Erik Midelfort, “Recent Witch Hunting Research, or Where Do We Go From Here?” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 62 (1968): 373–420; William Monter, “The Historiography of European Witchcraft: Progress and Prospects,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1972): 435–451; H.  C.  Erik Midelfort, “Witchcraft, Magic and the Occult,” in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. Steven Ozment (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982), 183–209; David  D.  Hall, “Witchcraft and the Limits of Interpretation,” New England Quarterly 58 (1985): 253–281; Thomas A. Fudge, “Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of European Witch Hunting,” History Compass 4 (2006): 488–527; Wolfgang Behringer, “Historiography,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. Richard Golden (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2006), vol. 2, 492–498; Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies, eds., Witchcraft Historiography (Hound-Mills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Malcolm Gaskill, “The Pursuit of Reality: Recent Research into the History of Witchcraft,” The Historical Journal (2008): 1069–1088; H.  C.  Erik Midelfort, “Witchcraft,” in Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. David  M.  Whitford (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008), 355–395; Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo, eds., Writing Witch-Hunt Histories: Challenging the Paradigm (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Christopher Kissane, “Past, Present, and Future in Writing on Early Modern Magic and Witchcraft,” Reformation 20 (2015): 164–173. 12. Soldan’s Geschichte der Hexenprozesse (1843) was expanded by Heinrich Heppe (1880), and expanded and corrected again by Max Bauer (1912), and then repeatedly reprinted down to (most recently) 2011. 13. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie 2 vols. (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1835). On the roots and consequences of this view, see Wolfgang Behringer, “Geschichte der Hexenforschung,” 516–519. 14. Jules Michelet, La sorcière (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862). Even the original English translator of the work expressed doubts about Michelet’s trustworthiness even as he praised it as “a curious compound of rhapsody and souud reason, of history and romance, of coarse realism and touching poetry,” La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages, translated by L. J. Trotter (London, 1863), vii. 15. See Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1987).

770   the oxford handbook of the baroque 16. Wolfgang Behringer, “Neun Millionen Hexen. Entstehung, Tradition und Kritik eines populären Mythos,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 49 (1998): 664–685; now more easily available at https://www.historicum.net/purl/b7zym. 17. Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, Die Vernichtung der weisen Frauen. Hexenverfolgung, Kinderwelten, Menschenproduktion, Bevölkerungswissenschaft (1985), expanded paperback edition (Munich: Heyne, 1987). For refutations, see Robert Jütte, Die Persistenz des Verhütungswissens in der Volkskultur. Sozial—und medizinhistorische Anmerkungen zur These von der “Vernichtung der weisen Frauen,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 24 (1989): S.  214–231; and Walter Rummel, “ ‘Weise’ Frauen und ‘weise’ Männer im Kampf gegen Hexerei. Die Widerlegung einer modernen Fabel” in Europäische Sozialgeschichte. Festschrift für Wolfgang Schieder (Historische Forschungen 68), ed. Christof Dipper, Lutz Klinkhammer, and Alexander Nützenadel (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 353–375. 18. Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Turin, 1966); translated as The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by John and Anne Tedeschi (translators) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); see also Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York, 1990). Historians, while recognizing the brilliance and imagination of the author, have reacted critically about the central theses of these two books. See Gregor Julian Straube, “Fruchtbarkeitskulte,” (7 August 2009), in the online encyclopedia of witchcraft entitled Hexenforschung: https://www.historicum.net/de/themen/hexenforschung/lexikon and Kathrin Utz Tremp, “Häresie und Hexerei” (19 June 2008): https://www.historicum. net/themen/hexenforschung/lexikon. 19. One late-season flower among the Romantic historians that critiqued Margaret Murray but also seems to have been a clever attempt to salvage the sociological reality of groups of actual persons who might have been charged with heresy and witchcraft was proposed by Eliot Rose, A Razor for a Goat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 20. Even that simple definition may seem to beg several questions: What if the “magic” is out in the open? Why must magic invoke or manipulate “spirits” if the magician denies that he or she is doing so? If one invokes the idea of magic using or invoking “supernatural” forces, that raises awkward and confusing questions about what “nature” includes or excludes. How should it be distinguished from “religion” or “science”? For a sensible discussion, see Michael D. Bailey, Magic: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2017). 21. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971). 22. Keyser Karls des fünfften . . . peinlich gerichts ordnung [aka Constitutio Criminalis Carolina] ed. Friedrich-Christian Schroeder (Stuttgart 2000). Article 109 reads as follows: “Straff der zauberey. cix. ITem so jemandt den leuten durch zauberey schaden oder nachtheyl züfügt / soll man straffen vom leben zuom todt / vnnd man soll solche straff mit dem fewer thün. Wo aber jemandt zauberey gebraucht / vnnd damit niemant schaden gethan hett / soll sunst gestrafft werden / nach gelegenheit der sach / darinnen die vrtheyler radts gebrauchen sollen / wie vom radt süchen hernach geschriben steht.” This article is translated in H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), 23. 23. Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch Hunts: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). 24. Ibid., 216, 224, 247, citing Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft. Politics and the Occult in Post-Colonial Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). See also Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar, “The History of Witchcraft Accusations and Prosecutions in Africa,” in Späte Hexenprozesse. Der Umgang der Aufklärung mit dem

the end of witch-hunting   771 Irrationalen, ed. Wolfgang Behringer, Sönke Lorenz, and Dieter R. Bauer (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalegeschichte, 2016), 331–346. 25. Owen Davies, America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 226. 26. The literature here is oceanic but rather scattered. Two compendious accounts in English are Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (above, note 21) and Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (London: Hambledon, 2000). 27. Michael  D.  Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), esp.126–130, 193–200; see also Martin Pott, Aufklärung und Aberglaube. Die deutsche Frühraufklärung im Spiegel ihrer Aberglaubenskritik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992); for the vexed distinctions between religion and superstition, see esp. Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 28. Clarke Garrett, “Witches and Cunning Folk in the Old Regime,” in The Wolf and the Lamb: Popular Culture in France from the Old Regime to the Twentieth Century, Stanford French and Italian Studies, no. 3, ed. Jacques Beauroy, Marc Bertrand, and Edward  T.  Gargan (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1977), 57; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003). 29. For a remarkably long list of trials and executions or lynchings for witchcraft after 1700, see Wolfgang Behringer, “Letzte Hexenhinrichtungen 1700–1911,” in Späte Hexenprozesse. Der Umgang der Aufklärung mit dem Irrationalen, ed. Wolfgang Behringer, Sönke Lorenz, and Dieter R. Bauer (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2016), 365–427. 30. H. R. Trevor Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 158–159; For this point, TrevorRoper cites Jacobus Scheltema, Geschiedenis der Heksenprocessen (Haarlem: Loosjes, 1828), 258. 31. Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 159–160. 32. Matthew 4: 1–11; 12: 25–26; John 14: 30; 2 Corinthians 4: 4; Ephesians 2: 2. 33. This was the position of the famous canon Episcopi, dated about 906 CE but purporting to be a canon of the important Council of Ancyra in 314 CE. 34. Matteo Duni, “Skepticism,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 4, 11044–11050; Wolfgang Ziegeler, Möglichkeiten der Kritik am Hexen—und Zauberwesen im ausgehenden Mittelalter:zeitgenössische Stimmen und ihre soziale Zugehörigkeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 1983); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 35. The work expanded dramatically over several editions (1564, 1566, 1568, 1577, 1582, 1660; unauthorized French translation: 1567, 1569, 1579; German translation: 1565, 1566 [three editions], 1567, 1569, 1575, 1578, 1586). See Benjamin G. Kohl and H. C. Erik Midelfort, eds., Johann Weyer, On Witchcraft: An Abridged Translation of Johann Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum (Asheville: Pegasus, 1998), xli–xliii. 36. Michaela Valente, Johann Wier. Agli albori della critica razionale dell’occulto e del demoniaco nell’Europa del Cinquecento (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2003); H.  C.  Erik Midelfort, “Johann Weyer in medizinischer, theologischer und rechtsgeschichtlicher Hinsicht,” in Vom Unfug des Hexen-Processes: V. Klostermann Gegner der Hexenverfolgung von Johann Weyer bis Friedrich Spee, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Ulbricht (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), 53–64.

772   the oxford handbook of the baroque 37. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 198–210. 38. Jean Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers (Paris: Du Puys, 1580); see also Ursula Lange, Untersuchungen zu Bodins Démonomanie. (Frankfurt, 1970); Jonathan L. Pearl, “Humanism and Satanism: Jean Bodin’s Contribution to the Witchcraft Crisis,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 19 (1982), 541–548. Thomas Erastus, Repetitio disputationis de lamiis deu strigibus (Basel: Perna, 1578); see also Charles D. Gunnoe, Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate: A Renaissance physician in the Second Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2011); James VI (of Scotland), Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue (Edinburgh, 1597); Stuart Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship,” in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 156–181; more generally, Clark, Thinking with Demons, 619–633, 668–682. 39. James Sharpe, “Scot, Reginald (1537?–1599),” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 4, 1016–1018; Sydney Anglo, “Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft: Scepticism and Sadduceeism,” in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 106–139; David Wootton, “Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/The Family of Love,” in Languages of Witchcraft, ed. Stuart Clark (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 119–138. 40. Walter Stephens, “The Sceptical Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 101–121. 41. Brian Ribeiro, “Montaigne on Witches and the Authority of Religion in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy and Literature 33 (2009): 235–251; Jan Machielsen, “Thinking With Montaigne: Evidence, Scepticism and Meaning in Early Modern Demonology,” French History 25 (2011): 427–452; Susan E. Schreiner, “Appearances and Reality in Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare,” Journal of Religion 83 (2003), 345–380; Jonathan L. Pearl, The Crime of Crimes: Demonology and Politics in France, 1560–1620 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1999). 42. As Trevor-Roper admitted, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 162: “Why the witchbelief decayed—why the critical arguments which were regarded as unplausible in 1563 and in 1594 and in 1631 were found plausible in 1700—is mysterious still.” 43. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, vii-viii, 252, 255, 459–460. 44. Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry, and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4, 11, 89; also, “Witchcraft Studies in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland,” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belie, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 64–95, at 69; also, “Geschichte der Hexenforschung,” 589–592. 45. See, for example, Marijke Gijwijt-Hofstra, “Witchcraft after the Witch Trials,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 5: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (London: Athlone, 1999), 95–190; Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies, Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 46. Walter Rummel, Bauern, Herren und Hexen. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte sponheimischer und kurtrierischer Hexenprozesse 1574–1664 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991). See also Rummel’s general summary of the implications of his study: “Communal Persecution,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 1, 201–203. For an assessment of Rummel’s

the end of witch-hunting   773 contribution, see Johannes Dillinger, Evil People: A Comparitive Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier, tr. Laura Stokes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 15–16. 47. De confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum (1589); it was immediately translated into German Tractat von Bekanntnuß der Zauberer und Hexen (Trier, 1590; Munich, 1591; reprinted, ed. Hiram Kümper, Vienna, 2004). 48. Eva Labouvie drew comparable conclusions in her two books, Zauberei und Hexenwerk. Ländlicher Hexenglaube in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991) and Verbotene Künste: Volksmagie und ländlicher Aberglaube in den Dorfgemeinden des Saarraumes (16.–19. Jahrhundert) (St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1992). 49. Rainer Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition, tr. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); John Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (Binghamton: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1991); Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice 1550–1650 (New York: B. Blackwell, 1989); William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank,” in The Inquisition in  Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, ed. Gustav Henningsen, John Tedeschi, and Charles Amiel (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 100–129. 50. William Monter and John Tedeschi, “Toward a Statistical Profile of the Itialian Inquisitions. Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gustav Henningsen et al. (Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 130–57, at. 141–42; and 155–56, notes 58–70. 51. Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy, 111. 52. Ibid., 119–121. The Instruction was published in 1625 in an Italian handbook for inquisitors and was officially published in Latin in 1657. 53. José Pedro Paiva, Bruxaria e superstição num país sem “caça ás bruxas” (Lisbon: Noticias, 1997); Francisco Bethencourt, “Portugal: A Scrupulous Inquisition,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centers and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 403–422. 54. Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (1609–1614) (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980); also, The Salazar Documents: Inquisitor Alonso Salazar Frías and Others on the Basque Witch Persecutions (Leiden: Brill, 2004); William Monter, “Witchcraft in Iberia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 268–282, at 271–272. 55. Over the period 1615–1700, the nineteen Inquisitorial tribunals that Contreras and Henningsen studied investigated 2,520 cases of “superstition and witchcraft” out of 14,443 cases altogether for that period (or 17.4 percent). Compare that with the period 1560–1614, when 970 persons were investigated for that offense out of a total of 27,910 cases (or 8.6 percent). Contreras and Henningsen, “Forty-four Thousand Cases,” 118–19. Of the thousands investigated over the whole period 1540–1700, the Inquisition condemned only 59 to death. See Gustav Henningsen, “La Inquisicón y las brujas,” in Atti del Simposio internazionale. Città del Vaticano, 29–31 ottobre 1998, ed. Agostino Borromeo (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2003), 567–605; summarized in eHumanista (Journal of

774   the oxford handbook of the baroque Iberian Studies) 26 (2014): 133–152: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=5562701. The secular courts of Spain had different concerns and a different history. For an excellent account of Spanish trials for magic that examines both ecclesiastical and secular courts and compares rural and urban cases and women’s versus men’s magic, see María Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain: Abracadabra Omnipotens, tr. Susannah Howe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 56. Alfred Soman, “La justice criminelle aux XVIe–XVIIe siècles: le Parlement de Paris et les sièges subalternes,” in Actes du 107e Congrès national des Sociétés savantes, 2 vols. (Paris: C.T.H.S., 1984), vol.1, 38–49. 57. William Monter, “Witchcraft Trials in France,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 218–231, at 219–220. 58. Although Robert Mandrou had failed to understand the early procedural skepticism of the Paris Parlement, his studies of the growing skepticism of magistrates about other aspects of witchcraft continue to be extremely useful. Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1968); also, Possession et sorcellerie au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1979). 59. Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons: ou il est amplement traité des sorciers et de la sorcellerie (1612), ed. Nicole Jacques-Chaquin (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982); Gerhild Scholz Williams, ed. and tr., On the Inconstancy of Witches: Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (1612) (Tempe, AZ, 2006); Jonathan Pearl, “Lancre, Pierre de (1533–1630),” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 3, 622–623. It now appears that from Kramer in 1486 (with the Malleus Maleficarum) onward for the next 200 years, many of the most important demonological tracts were reactions to a series of witchcraft trials rather than inspirations for them. 60. William Monter, “Languedoc,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 3, 624–625. 61. Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, tr. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004); Brian  P.  Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), esp. chapter 8: “The Demoniac and the Witch.” 62. Monter in Levack, The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 227–228; Mollenauer “Affair of the Poisons,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, 10–12. The records of the Paris police in the eighteenth century reveal the continuing confusion about where the crime of fraud began and the offense of superstition ended. The authorities were also worried that “foreigners” and “cabals” or “sects” of troublemakers were disrupting the good order of the city. Ulrike Krampl, “When Witches became False: Séducteurs and Crédules confront the Paris Police at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century,” in Werewolves, Witches and Wandering Spirits. Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kathryn A. Edwards (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), 137–154. 6 3. Behringer, Witches and Witch Hunts, 150, 156. 6 4. Katrin Moeller, Dass Willkür über Recht ginge. Hexenverfolgung in Mecklenburg im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalegeschichte, 2007). 6 5. Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 108–135; Johannes Dillinger, “Politics, State-Building, and Witch-Hunting,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 528–547. 66. In Augsburg, however, after a long period of no executions, fourteen persons were condemned to death between 1649 and 1694. Anne Schmucker, Sie starben als Hexen (Augsburg: Achensee, 2006).

the end of witch-hunting   775 67. In England, the skeptical Reginald Scot was also a Familist, and the witchcraft skeptic Anton Praetorius may have been another. Hans de Waardt, “Netherlands, Northern,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, 810–813, at 812; also, “Witchcraft, Spiritualism and Medicine: The Religious Convictions of Johan Wier,” Sixteenth Century Journal 42 (2011), 369–91; Gary K. Waite, “Sixteenth-Century Religious Reform and the Witch Hunts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 485–506; also, “Radical Religion and the Medical Profession: The Spiritualist David Joris and the Brothers Weyer (Wier),” in Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert/Radicalism and Dissent in the Sixteenth Century ed. Hans-Jürgen Goertz and James M. Stayer (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), 167–185; David Wootton, “Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/The Family of Love,” in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture Stuart Clark (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 119–138; Jürgen Michael Schmidt, “Praetorius, Antonius,” in Hexenforschung, https:// www.historicum.net/themen/hexenforschung/lexikon/personen/artikel/praetorius-ant; Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 170; Lène Dresen-Coenders, “Antonius Praetorius,” in Vom Unfug des Hexen-Processes. Gegner der Hexenverfolgung von Johann Weyer bis Friedrich Spee, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Ulbricht (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), 129–138. 68. Dries Vanysacker, “Netherlands, Southern,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, 813–818, at 815; Rita Voltmer, “. . . Ce tant exécrable et détestable crime de sortilège. Der Bürgerkrieg gegen Hexen und Hexenmeister im Herzogtum Luxemburg (16. und 17. Jahrhundert),” Hémecht: Zeitschrift für Luxemburger Geschichte 56 (2004), 57–92; also, “Luxembourg, Duchy of,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 3, 677–680. 69. Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness. Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (London: Penguin, 1997). 70. Malcolm Gaskill, “Witchcraft Trials in England,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 283–99, at 296–98. See also Gaskill, “The Pursuit of Reality.” 71. Julian Goodare, “Witchcraft in Scotland,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 300–317, at 302. 72. Marko Nenonen and Raisa Maria Toivo, eds., Writing Witch-Hunt Histories: Challenging the Paradigm (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 73. Rune Blix Hagen, “Witchcraft, Criminality, and Witchcraft Research in the Nordic Countries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 375–392. 74. Ildikó Sz. Kristóf, “Witch-Hunting in Early-Modern Hungary,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 334–354, at 339. 75. Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 152; William Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight. An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); also, “The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?” The Slavonic and East European Review 76 (1998): 49–84. 76. Valerie Kivelson, “Witchcraft Trials in Russia: History and Historiography,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 355–374, at 358–359; also, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). See especially her list of seventeenth-century witch trials and of laws and decrees directed at witchcraft, 261–274. 77. Wanda Wyporska, Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Michael Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

776   the oxford handbook of the baroque 78. Michael Ostling, “Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 318–333, at 319, 323–324. 79. Regional studies again have much to teach. See, for example, Gunnar W. Knutsen, “The End of Witch Hunts in Scandinavia,” ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 62 (2006): 143–164; Per Sörlin, Wicked Arts: Witchcraft and Magic Trials in Southern Sweden, 1635–1754 (Leiden: Brill, 1999). 80. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); also, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also William Monter, A Bewitched Duchy. Lorraine and its Dukes, 1477–1736 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2007). 81. H.  C.  Erik Midelfort, “Witch Craze?: Beyond the Legends of Panic,” Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 6 (2011): 11–33. 82. Wolfgang Behringer, “Lynching,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 3, 682–685. 83. Wolfgang Behringer, “Climate Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities,” Climatic Change 1 (1999): 335–351; see also Christian Pfister, “Climatic Extremes, Recurrent Crises and Witch Hunts: Strategies of European Societies in Coping with Exogenous Shocks in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Medieval History Journal 10 (2007): 33–73; Wolfgang Behringer, Hartmut Lehmann, and Christian Pfister, eds., Kulturelle Konsequenzen der “Kleinen Eiszeit” (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). 84. Brian Levack, “Witchcraft and the Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 468–484. 85. Virginia Krause, Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 82–85; on the religious importance of confessing, even if it meant admitting that one had committed horrible crimes, see David D. Hall, “Witchcraft and the Limits of Interpretation,” New England Quarterly 58 (1985): 253–281, at 278–279; Ann Kibbey, “Mutations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Remarkable Providences, and the Power of Puritan Men,” American Quarterly 34 (1982): 125–148. 86. As Alfred Soman has pointed out, the acceptance of the idea that witchcraft was a crimen exceptum had brought with it ideas of the sabbath (a gathering of potential witnesses against one another) and “a number of ancillary shortcuts to conviction—trials by water, prickings for the devil’s mark, routine recourse to torture to obtain confessions, and the suborning of adolescents to testify against their elders. Charlatan witch finders made quick profits from bribery and corruption. These practiices degraded the judicial system. . .” Alfred Soman, “Decriminalizing Witchcraft: Does the French Experience Furnish a European Model?” Criminal Justice History 10 (1989): 1–22; reprinted in Alfred Soman, Sorcellerie et Justice Criminelle: Le Parlement de Paris (Hampshire: Variorum, 1992), XV: 1–22, at 14. 87. Dillinger, Evil People. 88. Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 110–112, 135–137; Peter Oestmann, “Balthasar Nuss (1545–1618),” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, 842–843. Similarly, a Bavarian witch judge, Gottfried Sattler, was executed in 1613 (Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 178). For another example, in Osnabrück in 1650, the judge-burghermeister Wilhelm Peltzer was jailed for suspected misconduct, and he died in prison; Erich Fink, “Peltzer, Wilhelm,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 53 (1907): S.  8–9, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/ gnd138740291.html#adbcontent. 89. Britta Gehm, Die Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg und das Eingreifen des Reichshofrates zu ihrer Beendigung (Hildesheim: Olms, 2000).

the end of witch-hunting   777 90. The Reichskammergericht was cited by the legal faculties of the universities of Ingolstadt, Jena, Altdorf, Würzburg, Rostock, Freiburg, Hagenau, Tübingen, Straßburg, and Kiel. Peter Oestmann, Hexenprozesse am Reichskammergericht (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997), summarized in “Reichskammergericht und Hexenprozesse,” online in Hexenforschung: https://www.historicum.net/themen/hexenforschung/lexikon/sachbegriffe/artikel/ reichskammerger. 91. Manfred Tschaikner, “Hohenems, Ferdinand Karl Franz von, Caount of Vaduz (1650–1686),” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 1, 500; also, Manfred Tschaikner, “ ‘Der Teufel und die Hexen müssen aus dem Land . . .’ Frühneuzeitliche Hexenverfolgungen in Liechtenstein,” Jahrbuch des Historischen Vereins für das Fürstentum Liechtenstein 96 (1998): 1–197; also, “Hohenemser Schreckensherrschaft in Vaduz und Schellenberg?—Graf Ferdinand Karl von Hohenems und die Hexenprozesse (1675–1685),” Montfort 64 (2012): 87–99. 92. Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, Cautio Criminalis, or a Book on Witch Trials, tr. Marcus Hellyer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 93. Ibid., 214. 94. Soman, “Decriminalizing Witchcraft,” 1–22; Soman admits (17) that the example of the Netherlands seems to present an exception because the United Provinces discontinued witchcraft trials even though their courts were decentralized. 95. See the excellent collection of conference papers in Wolfgang Behringer and Claudia Opitz-Bellakhal, eds., Hexenkinder—Kinderbanden—Strassenkinder (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalegeschichte, 2016). 96. The process by which children apparently came to dream similarly without communicating with one another remains an unexplained mystery. 97. Johannes Dillinger, Kinder im Hexenprozess. Magie und Kindheit in der Frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013), 244–45, citing Kurt Rau, Augsburger Kinderhexenprozesse, ­1625–1730 (Vienna, 2006); William Monter, “Children,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. 1, 183–185. 98. Rainer Beck, Mäuselmacher, oder die Imagination des Bösen (Munich: Beck, 2011). Nicole Janine Bettlé, Wenn Saturn seine Kinder frisst: Kinderhexenprozesse und ihre Bedeutung als Krisenindikator (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013). 99. Beck, Mäuselmacher, 866; so, for example, even when the judges released youthful ­suspects whose testimony they no longer trusted, they nevertheless imposed tough penalties upon them and their parents; ibid., 872–876. Brian Levack, “The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions,” 1–94, at 9–11, 27–30; for a briefer summary: Levack, “The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions, ” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft, 429–446. 100. Lyndal Roper, The Witch in the Western Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), chapter 5: “Witchcraft and Village Drama”; for her general interpretation of the often unconscious forces of envy, anger, resentment and other emotions in the imaginations of those who accused others of witchcraft, see Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); ses also Linda  C.  Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 101. Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 40–41, 47, 168–169. 102. Roper, Witch Craze, 230–231. 103. Ibid., 174–178. 104. Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1958); Clark, Thinking with Demons, 296–311.

778   the oxford handbook of the baroque 105. Anthony Ossa-Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Martin Mulsow, Enlightenment Underground. Radical Germany, 1680–1720, tr. H.  C.  Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 113–136; Martin Mulsow, Prekäres Wissen. Eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), 159–164; 387–391; 537, nn. 72–73. 106. Owen Davies, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 107. Claudia Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland. Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Charlotte Soehngen, Salvator Rosa’s Witchcraft Paintings: Comedy Or Criticism? (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 2004); Charles Zika, “The Corsini Witchcraft Scene of Salvator Rosa: Magic, Violence and Death,” in The Italians in Australia: Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art, ed. David R. Marshall (Florence: Centro Di, 2004), 179–190. 108. David Castillo, Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curosities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 109. Helen Hills, ed., Rethinking the Baroque (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011).

Further Reading Behringer, Wolfgang. “Letzte Hexenhinrichtungen 1700–1911.” In Späte Hexenprozesse. Der Umgang der Aufklärung mit dem Irrationalen. Edited by Wolfgang Behringer, Sönke Lorenz, and Dieter R. Bauer. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2016. Behringer, Wolfgang. Witches and Witch Hunts. A Global History. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Briggs, Robin. Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Davies, Owen. America Bewitched. The Story of Witchcraft after Salem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Golden, Richard, ed. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft. The Western Tradition, 4 vols. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2006. Levack, Brian. “The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions.” In Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 5: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark. London: Athlone, 1999. Levack, Brian, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Midelfort, H.  C.  Erik. “Witch Craze?: Beyond the Legends of Panic.” Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 6 (2011): 11–33. Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze. Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness. Witchcraft in England 1550–1750. London: Penguin, 1997. Soman, Alfred. “Decriminalizing Witchcraft: Does the French Experience Furnish a European Model?” Criminal Justice History 10 (1989): 1–22. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.

chapter 35

Ti m e a n d Chronom etry Roland Racevskis

The baroque period in Europe tracks time with beauty, both precision and imprecision, and a concerted tendency toward illusion. Inheriting from the Renaissance both the beginnings of an individual sense of time keeping and the menacing notion of time as a march toward death, temporality in baroque culture manifests itself along the lines of a tension between the useful and the artful. Time is situated between hope for optimizing life’s experience and despair at its fatal brevity. As Richard Glasser points out, “A particular epoch has its own feeling for, and evaluation of, time, expressing its general intellectual tendency.”1 To contemplate baroque time is to find beauty in imperfection in the assessment, measurement, and representation of time. How then does time take the shape of an asymmetrical pearl? Baroque time is multilayered, rife with contradictions, alternately exact and inexact, and highly particular in its cultural manifestations. For Erwin Panofsky, “No period has been so obsessed with the depth and width, the horror and the sublimity of the concept of time as the Baroque, the period in which man found himself confronted with the infinite as a quality of the universe instead of as a prerogative of God.”2 If the infinite to which time addresses itself is a quality of the universe, then it is humanity’s task to take the measure of this entity by means of chronometry. Both an art and a science, the measure of time comes to play an increasingly prominent role in ordering early modern human existence: “In this age of change and upheaval in politics, the sciences, religion, and philosophy, clockwork with its precision and orderliness was used to explain the workings of the universe, absolutist monarchies, new anatomical discoveries, and even the existence of God.”3 Lofty goals, for a science that was only in its embryonic stages during an era marked by substantial change in the apprehension of time: “Over some 400 years, from about 1300 to 1700, during that ­period which encompasses the Renaissance and the beginnings of our modern world, Western man’s perception of time and his ability to measure time underwent dramatic changes.”4

780   the oxford handbook of the baroque A modernity of individual concern with time is made possible by the first technological innovations in chronometry, such that it is clock time which, in the course of the early modern European centuries, enabled people to rationalize their activities independently of night, day, and weather. Scholars may debate the consequences of this momentous development—whether, for example, it led to increased secularization, enslavement of unskilled workers, scientific and medical advances, changing notions of human rights—but no one denies its immense importance.5

It is thus a dual question, of perception and ability to measure, to take stock technologically, of something seen in former ages as ineffable, due to its divine origin. From the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, to the baroque, we witness a series of transitions, in the technology of time keeping, in its epistemological underpinnings, and in the cultural manifestations of its understanding. During the Renaissance, an incipiently secularized time, uncoupled from the transcendent prerogatives leading man to eternity, emerged as a menacing force that required of man an urgent call to action. A clear example can be found in the iconography of Maarten van Heemskerck, whose representations of time and its symbols provoke a strong emotional response: “Heemskerck’s ‘Time’ is that of the high Renaissance, menacing and surrounded by timekeeping devices and evidence of decay. Such being their vision of time, it is no wonder that the common response to time in the Renaissance was one of militancy and fierce anger. Time, the enemy who could thwart all human endeavor, was bitterly opposed.”6 As we will see, baroque culture finds very different solutions from this attitude toward the destructive effects of the passage of time in daily life. At least initially, these reactions take the shape of an escape from Father Time, a figure that emerged from a misunderstanding. Ricardo J. Quinones traces a battle between humanity and time from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance: The picture that begins to emerge in the early 14th century is one of a dynamic, even desperate, contention between mankind and time. As Erwin Panofsky has shown in his classic essay “Father Time,” by a mistaken association of Chronos with Kronos (or Saturn) iconographically time was invested with new and destructive implements. Time was no longer a genial presence in which mankind was comfortably placed, as in the hands of God, but rather a challenging, deceiving, deadly force against which it is incumbent upon the individual to make some response, if he (the imposition does seem to have been laid mainly upon men) is to leave an adequate accounting of his life. If time has acquired lethal instruments, the individual is engaged in a war, and is furthermore subjected to new pressures for showing a favorable balance at the end of his mortal existence.7

Once time is no longer something received from a transcendent sphere that guarantees our existence, it becomes a material force to be reckoned with.

time and chronometry   781 This demystification shakes humanity’s poets and chroniclers to the core, at the point of transition between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Quinones points to the importance of Petrarch for understanding the cultural, and specifically literary, response to this struggle between humanity and the time that both defines and threatens it: If we wish to understand the nature of time in the Renaissance and its later developments, we must not lose sight of its dual nature. On the one hand, time is a cosmic force that challenges mankind to a great struggle in the balance of which hangs man’s very existence. On the other hand, while the struggle is heroic, the means employed are simple, and even mundane, calling for day-to-day diligence. . . . The figure who most fully represented these two forms of tempoal response—the heroic and the mundane—was Petrarch.8

Petrarch used both poetry and scheduling to try to get a handle on the menacing force of Renaissance time. In both his poetry and his diaristic writings, Petrarch brought a new kind of attention to quotidian experience, although the ultimate goal was to transcend this dimension of individual existence by means of the immortality of fame. The pursuit of this kind of transcendence of the human condition involved a new attention to daily life: Petrarch, deeply affected by a sense of the suddenness of death for which one was too often unprepared, attempted to contain time’s threat by careful scheduling, limited sleep, and meticulous record-keeping. He wrote, “Everything consists in the ordered disposition of time.” With his Triumphs Petrarch devoted a whole cycle of poetry to a consideration of the ravages of time.9

Cathy Yandell discusses both Petrarch and Ronsard in terms of the effort on the part of the poet to transcend time and cement an eternal legacy through poetry. In this she locates a gender divide between the male poet Ronsard, on the one hand, who tracks time through the development and decay of the body and aims for transcendence of time through poetry, and on the other hand Louise Labé, who deploys a women’s time more attuned to moments of existence surrounding the present: Ultimately, among the many antiphonal—and sometimes cacophonous—voices attempting to articulate women’s virtue and its relationship to time in mid-sixteenthcentury France, Louise Labé’s emerges as the most comprehensive. . . . Labé broaches ethical and psychological dimensions of temporality for writing women. Not only do women of letters contribute to the reputation of their sex by rising above jewels and spindles, she argues, but they also find pleasure for themselves in the discoveries that writing affords. By inviting female readers into the public domain as producers who will “surpass or equal” men, Louise Labé redefines what ought rightly to constitute “women’s time,” and indeed within sixteenth-century boundaries seeks to make such a consideration obsolete.10

782   the oxford handbook of the baroque Labé’s modernity lies in the gender-specific approach to time whereby women’s writing facilitates a new understanding of the present-related moments populating the Renaissance subject’s existence. Quinones observes comparable dynamics in the writings of Montaigne, in contrast both to Petrarch and Dante: For Dante, the vision of permanence needs prayerful protection from “human movements”; motions and energies of life must be comprehended within an enduring idea, texture contained in a text, before what is present can be redeemed. This was true for medieval Christianity and it was equally true for Renaissance humanism deriving from Petrarch. But for Montaigne, present things in their passingness and materiality are not debased; they are, in fact, all that man possesses.11

Montaigne thus ushers in a new era of appreciation for the present, as the form of the essay sounds out not only the deep past of the author’s erudition but also the fleeting moments, newly valorized, of the early modern individual’s existence: For the Christian Middle Ages, “Everything in the world was an effect of something beyond the world; everything in life was a step to something beyond life.” The same deferred fulfillment and ulterior references were part of humanism, which explains why fears of early and sudden death haunted the imaginations of Petrarch and Milton. But Montaigne would have us focus on the thing at hand, in itself, and find our fulfillment in its own basic worth. His modernity lies here.12

For the editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition on early modern time keeping, the Renaissance also included an affirmative response to the deleterious results of passing time: The effects of time concerned writers and artists in the Renaissance perhaps more than in any other period of history. In later centuries, when scientific discoveries explained much about nature and disease which had been unknown in the Renaissance, time was not so much an enemy to whom the ills of mankind were attributed, nor an instigator of progress, but a theoretical abstraction. And, as clocks and watches became ever more predominant, time became a commodity to be husbanded and a regulator of life. While we cannot rigidly document a progression in art and literature from one concept of time to another, we can note a maturing of the Renaissance view: a rich and hopeful response which acknowledged and accepted all that time could do for good as well as ill, and looked not so much for victory over time as fulfillment of human possibility within it.13

In his attitude toward the approach of death, Montaigne marks a new development in early modern subjectivity at the point of transition between the Renaissance and the Baroque. Taking stock of the fleeting nature of the present, Montaigne asserts the possibility of self-actualization within this ephemeral framework. As he meditates on a statement by Lucretius—”Jam fuerit, nec post unquam revocare lecebit” [Soon the present

time and chronometry   783 will be past, and we will never be able to bring it back]—Montaigne finds the impetus for seizing the moments of lived experience: I did not wrinkle my forehead any more over that thought than any other. It is impossible that we should fail to feel the sting of such notions at first. But by handling them and going over them, in the long run we tame them beyond question. Otherwise for my part I should be in continual fright and frenzy; for never did man so distrust his life, never did a man set less faith in his duration. Neither does health, which thus far I have enjoyed in great vigor and with little interruption, lengthen my hope of life, nor do illnesses shorten it. Every minute I seem to be slipping away from myself. And I constantly sing myself this refrain: Whatever can be done another day can be done today.14

This embrace of the present brings with it not only a renewal of the appreciation for everyday life but also a different approach to chronometry, a new interest in and use of the technologies available for tracking time. These technologies made a mark on Western culture from the late middle ages through the period in question here.

A Brief History of Early Modern Chronometry Although the exact date of the first clock is unknown, approximately between the years 1275 and 1325, Europe’s first clock driven by a weighted mechanism was built, and a new quantification of time became possible.15 The origins of the drive toward seizing a standard day-to-day time might (although this also remains uncertain) be found in the timetable of the monastery—Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers—as this sequence of ritual events required careful tracking for the orders to pursue their vocation consistently. This may have provided the impetus, sometime in the late Middle Ages, for the invention of new chronometric technology pointing toward early modernity: Weight-driven mechanical time-keepers came into being, probably in the late 13th century, in response to monastic needs and spread quickly through the monasteries, churches, and abbeys of Europe. The inventor, the place, and the date of the first mechanical clock are unknown, but by the 14th century there are numerous manuscript references to the new clocks which could indicate the time at night or on cloudy days and which did not freeze like the water-clocks which had been in common use.16

The first major step toward modern chronometry was the ability to pursue it independently of weather conditions. Hearing a mechanical clock sound the hours came to replace, or at least supplement, seeing the rise and setting of the sun; the new way of tracking the hours for communities was initially a matter of sound, an aspect that feeds into the etymology of the word “clock”:

784   the oxford handbook of the baroque The important function of the early clock was to sound the time rather than to display it on a dial, and indeed, few of the earliest clocks had dials or faces. The word “clock” does not derive from “horologium” (the Latin word which had been used to refer to any timekeeper—sundial, water-clock, etc.), but rather form the Middle English “clok” or bell (“glocke” in German and “cloche” in French).17

The sonority of this public device gave a new rhythm to daily life, initially to a collectivity to whom the sounds of the public clock were available: The famous clock of St. Mark’s cathedral in Venice, illustrated in Angelo Rocca’s de Campanis Commentarius, 1612, was just such a clock, looming high above the citizens below, a new force in their lives and a source of great civic pride. There was a shifting away from “natural time” and a new reliance on “artificial” or man-made time. The town clock brought a new kind of organization to daily life, its regular beat and tolling of the hours creating a new time consciousness.18

The clock at St. Mark’s moved the community toward artifice and rationality in its understanding of the passing of the daily hours. Hours were initially defined as one-twelfth of the available daylight and could thus vary considerably depending on the time of year: “We have arbitrarily divided our day into 24 equal hours, but at the beginning of the Renaissance, the hour was defined as 1/12 of the period of light in the day. The length of the hour varied therefore from season to season as the interval from sunrise to sunset lengthened or shortened.”19 From a kind of flow generated by the passing of the seasons and the changes in the light of day, time became something much more rationalized and standardized: “The widespread dissemination of the mechanical clock and the modern calendar meant that time was no longer experienced as an easy pattern of days flowing into night, each punctuated by sunrise, noon, and sunset, by which one determined mealtimes, labor in the fields, or devotional hours. Instead time became those measured moments that govern our lives today.”20 The invention of the mechanical clock permitted the standardization of these units of lived experience, and the public function of the clock gradually shifted toward private purposes. In the late Middle Ages, Western society began to move away from meteorology and toward technology in its temporal reckoning. As Alfred Crosby explains, It is not odd that medieval Western Europeans took in measuring time their first giant step forward in practical metrology. Nor is it odd that they did so in measuring hours, rather than in calendar reform. Hours were not bounded by natural event, but were arbitrary durations and susceptible to arbitrary definition. Days, in contrast, had such boundaries in darkness and light, and, furthermore, calendars were artifacts of millennia of civilization, stiff with encrustations of custom and sanctity.21

In contrast to calendar time, the time of the day in the early modern period was still in need of a new rationalization, as hours became standardized units of lived experience independent of meteorological conditions. Inherent, in fact, in the initial development

time and chronometry   785 of the public clock sounding the passing time for the community, was the potential for timekeeping to become a task for the individual—and this drive is already strongly ­present in Petrarch’s efforts to impose a specific temporal structure on his own daily activities, albeit in pursuit of transcendence of the everyday. The drive from the collective toward the personal marks the entire early modern period and takes some acute forms, both technically and aesthetically, in the first half of the seventeenth century. A prominent characteristic of baroque time is the development not only of the personal clock but also of the watch, which allowed the individual subject to estimate the passing of the day’s hours with increasing, albeit not yet sufficient accuracy: “The clock itself evolved slowly from a large public clock sounding the hours to a precision time-piece readily available for personal, commercial, and scientific use.”22 The transition from medieval, through Renaissance, to baroque time thus traces a movement from the public to the private in the tracking of daily diachrony, a newly valorized dimension of existence. This move in the apprehension of time, in the ability to track its effects and to develop reactions to it, parallels a trend in the production of time pieces from the public clock to the private clock and eventually the watch; first, the industry had to develop in order for these social trends to become possible: It was not until the 16th century that clockmaking developed into a professional craft in its own right. Thereafter, in addition to public clocks serving communities, a few domestic timepieces were artfully produced for the cabinets of curiosities of princes, prelates, and wealthy merchants. They were made as conversation pieces, ranging from models of the universe demonstrating unusual forms to delight the collector. The timetelling function was a secondary consideration for the most part, for until everyone could own a timepiece there was no need for precision timetelling.23

Thus, as we move toward the baroque era in Western European history, the accuracy of chronometry, though it remained a goal, also remained secondary to social and aesthetic concerns. A curiosity available only to the highest classes of society, the time piece held the promise of greater technical ability to track time while also embodying a kind of novelty and excitement about an aspect of existence the era both sought out and feared intensely. Some of the paradoxes marking chronometry in the baroque period manifested themselves in the pictorial arts related to clock- and watchmaking. Initially the decorative aspects of the clock and the watch compensated for the relative lack of accuracy of these devices: The fact that clocks and watches remained inaccurate timetelling devices in the 16th and early 17th centuries did not in any manner diminish their popularity with the wealthy. They were made to be featured in cabinets of curiosities, and the more ornate and complicated in appearance and function, the more they were prized. Favorites were those produced as “universes in miniature,” the movement supplemented with complicated globes and astrolabic dials to demonstrate astronomical phenomena, with the timetelling function reduced to a secondary role. These were in the tradition of the clockwork planetary models of the 14th century, a tradition which persisted with increasing sophistication.24

786   the oxford handbook of the baroque When precision lacked, other avenues for reflection on the passing of time flourished, and this would become characteristic of the baroque era of illusion and aesthetic pleasure, combined with the continued drive toward accuracy. While Nurenberg and Strasbourg were clearly established as centers for the origins and improvement of public and individual timekeeping from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, in France the small city of Blois became known as an epicenter for the decorative art of enamel painting of watches, as Catherine Cardinal explains: Perfected around 1630, the technique of enamel painting was brilliantly utilized by the jewelers of Blois in the decoration of watch covers. In the second third of the 17th century, this innovation led to the rise of clockmaking in Blois and highlighted the city’s watchmakers’ specialization in small-scale works. The enamel watches that came out of their workshops at that time enjoyed an exceptional popularity and garnered a significant clientèle, primarily at the French court.25

The master enamel painters of Blois benefited from an artisanal innovation that ­permitted elaborate decorations to be drawn on the cases of watches: “In about 1630, Jean Toutin invented a way of painting pictures in colour without having to run the enamel into separate chambers, which not only considerably simplified the task of the casemaker, but gave the enameller much greater freedom of design.”26 The covers of enamel-painted watches became known throughout Europe for the exquisite detail and lively colors of their portraits, landscapes, and allegorical scenes. Enamel painted watches, representing the innovations of the 1630s, may be considered emblematic of a baroque approach to the keeping of time, in that this approach included both the use of newly functional portable and thus individual chronometric devices and their aesthetic appreciation, which from the auditory origins of the public clock became in the private sphere of the use of the watch increasingly visual. Perhaps there was both an attention to and an escape from time observable in this phenomenon. The object tracking the passage of minutes and hours drew both the mind to its function and the eye to its beauty. Simultaneously the individual contemplated the passage of time and the diversionary framing of this inexorable process. In the first half of the seventeenth century, with the major breakthroughs in accuracy still in the offing, decoration took precedence over function. For many decades technologies of timekeeping inherited from earlier centuries persisted without any substantial improvements, such that from the last quarter of the sixteenth through the first half of the seventeenth century the technologies driving clocks and watches remained essentially the same. A spring mechanism operated a turning rod which was equipped to engage with the teeth of an escapement wheel that governed the motion generated by the spring. This process made actual time-keeping possible, generally for a period of twelve to, eventually, twenty-four hours: The period from 1650–1675 saw few technical improvements aside from the wider use of the infinite-corkscrew regulatory mechanism and the introduction of a fourth gear which extended the duration of the watch’s function. Indeed, the very first

time and chronometry   787 watches only kept time for 12 hours (which was sufficient for objects considered mainly as jewels). The addition of a fourth gear allowed for 24-30 hours of steady timekeeping for each winding of the watch.27

One form the individualization of chronometry took was fantastic watches. Their shapes— flowers, skulls, seashells—expressed a fascination with the passage of time and its apprehension, at a time when the technologies of grasping this dimension of life were still on their way to becoming modern weapons in humanity’s arsenal for the fight against Father Time, the struggle to make the most of the limited time of mortal existence. Entering the individual sphere of existence was a precious, small object that held great technological promise: The watch was far from accurate, but it was pretty, so it was worn more as jewellery than for timekeeping. The timekeeping element was an oscillating bar with knobs on the ends called a dumb-bell balance, or it was a wheel balance. The technical breakthrough came with the application of a spiral spring to the balance wheel. Suddenly the watch became reasonably accurate.28

In 1657 Christian Huygens, with the help of the technician Salomon Coster, applied Galileo’s pendulum to a clock mechanism and thus ushered in a new era of relative accuracy for clocks. Close to twenty years later, in 1675, Huygens would also revolutionize the construction of watches with the invention of the spiral spring, a regulator mechanism that allowed watches, now newly useful while still ornamental, to track time with increasing accuracy. This technical innovation would lead to techniques of watchmaking more readily associated with the reign of Louis XIV, during which Paris emerged as an international leader in horology. That prestigious position would be ceded to England and Switzerland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, as the Protestant craftsmen largely responsible for the improvement of personal timekeeping were forced to leave France for more welcoming social environments. The innovation of the spiral spring led to the decline of the “montre de fantaisie,” which was replaced by the more utilitarian, drab form of watches called “onions” during the reign of Louis XIV, time pieces that expanded with the increasing complexity of their mechanical innards. But the idea of the watch as imperfect jewel persisted nonetheless, as we can see when we look at some of the art objects that are still housed in catalogues of decorative arts of the baroque period. A compelling example of one of these partly utilitarian and enduringly beautiful objects can be seen in an early seventeenth-century watch whose case was in the form of a poppy blossom (Figure 1). An image of this watch shows an open cover seductively concealing the workings of the device beneath it. Time ticks away under cover of the artistic achievement of clock and watchmakers who could not yet forge ahead with the technological apparatus sufficiently to dispense with the beauty that surrounded the notion of time, an apprehension, inherited from the Renaissance, that was both life-affirming and threatening. The baroque era dealt with this duality at various levels of its culture. The two that the ­present essay focuses on are chronometry and comedy.

788   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 1  Poppy button-shaped watch, seventeenth century. Amber, silver, 2.5 cm × 3.2 cm. Inv# OA7071. Photo by Gilles Berizzi. Copyright RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

From the Broken Clock to the Comic Illusion Theater occupies a privileged place in the cultural history of chronometry, as dramatic performance, like music, must reckon with the actual time of performance ticking away. In addition, the language of dialogue and scenic indication reflects on the temporality of what takes place on the stage, both simultaneously with the action and over the longer duration of publication. This particular cultural configuration provides unique (although certainly not the only) insights into a multifaceted concept like baroque time. It allows us to articulate what an emblematic object like the montre de fantaisie re­presents, both esthetically and epistemologically. Often cast off as a curiosity of cultural history, this object is nonetheless crucial to our understanding what baroque time might be, and theater unlocks the perspectives required to see the complexity of this cultural temporality. In a study of baroque time in language and performance, Alban Forcione undertakes a reading of Lope de Vega and his “play,” or novel in dialogue, La Dorotea (1632), a sprawling

time and chronometry   789 text on the borderline between theater and prose that follows the development of the eponymous protagonist, a wealthy lady who is the object of the attempted seductions of rival lords Don Fernando and Don Bela. Forcione views this work as re­presentative of baroque time, firstly because time in La Dorotea is not linear, such that “the temporal order of events of the work is purposely disjointed in narration.”29 The time of unfolding events matches the image of the broken clock, in a dialogue that takes place over ten days of one year, while also evoking various temporalities past and future. A result of Lope’s technique of fragmentary narration, which refuses to present us with a readily graspable temporal order of events and which leaves truth always open, to be expanded and modified by subsequent treatment, is the disjunction of the unfolding dramatic movement of the work, the dissolution of the borderline between times past, present, and future, and the creation of the illusion that far more time passes before us in the work than is actually the case.30

Forcione thus identifies—in addition to non-linearity—disjunction, illusion, fragmentation, and multiple layers of temporality as characteristic of the baroque in time, theater, and narrative. The pleasant disorientation caused by Lope’s complex temporal constructs creates effects of chronometric amplification and reduction that perhaps mimic the ambiguities of timekeeping in the early modern era, observing a temporal rhythm of expansion and contraction, in which past, present, and future times constantly flow into and out of one another. Like the fragmentary presentation of information this combination of “dramatic” and “narrative” times creates an atmosphere of ambiguity and even unreality, which surrounds the events of the work and makes it difficult for us to place them in logical, temporal relationship to one another.31

The connection between temporal surface disorder and fantasy becomes clear here, as the action that Lope develops generates an otherworldly, magical atmosphere. Elsewhere, Forcione refers to “the disruption of temporal logic”32 in a process whereby “we have the impression that events slip away from us and flow into each other as we attempt to place them in a logical, temporal sequence, that the borderline between truth and falsehood, reality and the dream, disappears in the world of Fernando and Dorotea, that this work, whose truth Lope continually stresses, ceases to be ‘historia’ and becomes ‘fabula.’ ”33 In other words, the story (“historia”), which contains characters and events in their temporal unfolding, becomes the more abstract scheme of action designated by the term “fabula,” the basic set of narrative events that is not constrained by characters’ individuation or by linear time. Strict chronology does not have to be in effect for the basic scheme of the story to exist. Although the image of the broken clock is apt for Forcione, it is nonetheless insufficient for understanding baroque temporality in all its complexity: the illusion and fantasy generated by multilayered, disruptive temporality also function in compelling ways. A critical assessment of the notion of the relox deshecho (broken clock) in Lope sheds further light on an idiosyncratic kind of time:

790   the oxford handbook of the baroque The image of the broken clock, by which Don Fernando describes his life of imprudence, could well be used to describe the entire structure of the Dorotea. In playing with the time sequence of his narrative, offering the reader information in an unusual order, and foreshadowing and repeating events in tantalizing fragments of information, Lope veils the experiences of his characters in the impalpable atmosphere of a dream, in which precision seems constantly to fade away and in which the categories of cause and effect and time are not operative. If we examine the thematic level of the Dorotea, we will discover the importance of this peculiar, ‘anti-temporal’ structure and its relationship to the meaning of the work.34

For timekeeping and conceptions of time in baroque culture, the image of the relox deshecho is both highly suggestive yet inadequate for the complexity of this culture and its emerging technologies: instead of remaining completely unattainable, precision is always a goal for the individual subject, often momentarily achieved, by the ornate timekeeping devices of early modern Europe. But the often partly intentional misapprehension of time serves subjective and specifically esthetic purposes, as Forcione explains in a different context, that of the boisterous foolishness of the carnivalesque: In the world of the fool time is forgotten, for the various weights of all well-regulated clocks are allowed to fall into disorder. As another fool of the age says in another language: “Her tongue is like Clocks on Shrovetuesday, alwaies out of temper.” The Dorotea is a presentation of this “anti-tem-poral” world of folly, in which the inhabitants cling to the insubstantial beauties of the earthly life and colorfully disguise realities, attempting to forget that all must end at midnight.35

Like the enamel paint that holds the focus of the watchmaker when the mechanical innards of the device have reached a technological plateau, theater and narrative of willfully imprecise time brings the reader and spectator’s attention to a baroque esthetics of illusion, a playful lacework that hides the steady march of time’s arrow underneath. More ominously, evoking the Renaissance conception of time as impending death, “through the beautiful world of appearance the figure of time and death stalks, also disguised, patiently waiting to demand her toll when the gong strikes.”36 Performance, narration, and imagery all contribute to distracting the appreciative spectator and reader from the destructive effects of time’s march that the Renaissance identified, while bitterly lamenting it, as an integral part of human existence. The upshot for literary studies could not be more crucial for Forcione: “Literature or Literarisierung should be correctly seen then, in its function in the Dorotea, as the most noble of the illusions by which man resists time.”37 Now it has become a question not only of fantastic and illusory avoidance but indeed of resistance to the passage of time, a counter-tendency that, in the limited functionality of the baroque clock or watch, paradoxically emerges alongside time’s measure. The montre de fantaisie artfully occupies this paradoxical epistemological site. A bee, a flower, a skull—all provide shapes and images that both spur the reflection on time’s passing and distract the subject agreeably from the destructive effects of the aging process, a veritable obsession among

time and chronometry   791 the characters of the Dorotea. It is a fitting topic of discussion that opens the dilaogue between Gerarda and Teodora, in the first scene, a conversation that motivates “the desire of humanity to disguise time.”38 Gerarda queries Teodora in a dizzying assessment of the slippery concept of beauty in its relation to passing time, which can either be resisted, embraced, or avoided: “Come now, Teodora, tell me: is beauty the pier of a church or an ancestral seat up north in the mountains, to resist time, against whose ravages nothing mortal can be protected, or is beauty a carefree springtime from fifteen to twenty-five, a delightful summer from twenty-five to thirty-five, a late dry spell from thirty-five to forty-five?”39 Histories of chronometry that only pay attention to the drive toward greater precision in the measurement of time overlook the equally strong tendency, both aesthetic and technological, to conceal, embellish, and disguise time. Willful concealment of temporality complements the illusions of artistic processes, as Francione discusses in his analysis of Leo Spitzer’s theorization of baroque esthetics in the Dorotea: From his examination of La Dorotea Spitzer derives a theory of baroque style in general, claiming that the artist of the time was conscious of the illusory nature of art and the meaninglessness of the entire earthly life and yet found joy in the most beautiful and complex ways of expression which he could imagine. The artist is like a lover who adorns his beloved with his most dazzling jewels, and yet at the same time is aware of the illusory character of all earthly beauty and of love itself.40

Literature plays an important role in the reckoning with time that frames early modern subjectivity: “These examples and the numerous ones which Spitzer gathers in his study are of interest to us primarily because in the Dorotea literature is presented as the most beautiful of the illusions by which man avoids the ultimately necessary confrontation of reality and preparation for death. In literature the figures of this world seek a way to conquer time.”41 Perhaps, more specifically than literature, the art form that most powerfully works through this paradox is comedy. Lope uses both theatrical dialogue and the prose form to reflect on the modes of resistance to and flight from time that baroque aesthetics enacts. In the French tradition, Pierre Corneille carries out both similar and different comedic tasks, as his practice of comic illusion creates multiple layers of mediation between the spectator’s apprehension of comedic temporality and the “real” time of performance ticking away on the stage. In L’Illusion comique (1635), Corneille elaborates a comic concealment of time’s passing. The baroque art that creates the action of this play forms a tension between some facets of artful concealment of time and its ever-closer measurement and appreciation. Illusion functions, of course, to scuttle time away, at least temporarily as the action unfolds along multiple levels of acting and spectatorship. These superimposed comedic layers playfully and artfully hide the passage of time as the comedy unfolds through its five acts. The difference between Corneille’s comedy and Lope’s La Dorotea is that Corneille’s play both encompasses a wider diachrony of life’s events and circumstances and evokes (without adhering to it) the innovative time unity of neoclassical theater whereby the

792   the oxford handbook of the baroque action of the play must be carried out within twenty-four hours.42 This unusual dramatic work both manages partially to enact and deconstruct the unity of time. When the curtain opens, we begin to learn of the action at hand, the fortunes and misfortunes of Pridamant’s lost son Clindor. The father worries deeply about his son, who is pursuing a love interest in rivalry with a gentleman, Adraste. Meanwhile, Clindor also maintains the friendship of a Gascon captain, Matamore, who comically harbors delusions of grandeur. Pridamant’s friend Dorante informs the audience at the outset that Clindor’s story and current situation will appear before our very eyes thanks to the performative powers of the magician Alcandre but this will only happen as long as the latter is consulted at the right moment: And so, however eager, you must bide Your time till he’s no longer occupied. Each day he takes the air, and I’ve no doubt That very soon he will be coming out.43

Attention is called to the precise time at which Alcandre will make himself available, as the first scene of the play begins to unfold. Alcandre represents multiple temporalities. First, “son loisir” marks the time when he is available to provide the kind of spectacle within the spectacle that Pridamant needs to ascertain information about his son. That specific moment occurs regularly, as the wizard makes a habit of showing himself every day at the same time. In addition to this quotidian, present-focused temporality, Alcandre also has access to past and future times as part of his telepathy: “Enough that he can read men’s minds, and sees/The future and the past with equal ease.”44 Dorante focuses Pridamant’s attention on Alcandre’s magical resistance to the aging process as he describes his appearance and movements: Cheer up, my friend; the sage is coming out, And walks to meet us. His all-knowing soul, Which holds all nature under its control, Could not preserve from time, these hundred years, More than the skeleton he now appears; And yet his bodily strength does not abate, His limbs are supple and his bearing straight: Mysterious forces drive this old man’s heart, And all his steps are miracles of art.45

Alcandre is described like a miraculous time piece, whose inner functioning remains mysterious and thus can only be explained with an appeal to the miracles of art. Alcandre’s magic also distinguishes itself by a prodigious instantaneity, as opposed to the tricks of lesser magicians, who reveal their shortcomings in the delays that dilute their incantations: “Their herbs, their perfumes, and their ritual,/Manage to make our art seem slow

time and chronometry   793 and dull.”46 By contrast, Alcandre’s powers of illusion are evoked in a stage direction that emphasizes synchronicity: “He waves his wand and a curtain is drawn, behind which the most beautiful costumes of an acting troupe are displayed.”47 Alcandre thus creates an illusion for Pridamant, initially through the clothing of the actors who will represent the fortunes of Pridamant’s son Clindor: You could in an illusion contemplate His life’s adventures, played before your eyes By spirits who put on a mortal guise And have the power to speak and act, like us.48

At this point Dorante leaves the stage so that Alcandre can provide this ghostly spectacle for Pridamant in private: he promises this performace “ce soir,” that very evening, making reference to the time unity.49 He thus frames the action to come so that by nightfall there will be discussion of what will have been revealed. But within this time unity a young man’s entire life will be portrayed in its truth—crucial for the concerned father to learn— and yet shrouded in the mystery of comic illusion. Biographical chronology appears as a layer underneath theatrical illusion, which is framed within the neoclassical time unity. These multiple layers of temporality take on a complexity that goes far beyond the customary duality of the time of the fiction being narrated and the actual time of performance, as Madeleine Alcover explains: At first glance in this play, we find not two durations but four (which results from the plays within the play). So we have: 1) the duration of the performance, which is the real time of the audience; 2) the duration of the play’s action, or the time of level I; 3) the duration of the imagined action, or the time of level II and of part of level III: this corresponds to the duration of Clindor’s adventures since his first appearance onstage (II, 1) until the death of Theagenes (V, 5); 4) the duration lived by Clindor during the magical conjuring: Level III as it develops, starting with the description of the costumes (I, 2) up to the distribution of the earnings (V, 6).50

Corneille himself apologetically characterizes this play as a “monster” in its illusory complexities; Alcover sees in this acknowledgement a distinction between the baroque and the classical in the self-referential form of theater that takes as its primary concern theater itself: “The play that Corneille always called a ‘monster’ is unprecedented in dramaturgy, and it is no accident that it was performed during this time period: the ‘reflection’—in both the optical and philosophical sense of the term—being one of the characteristics of the baroque and the establishment of the classical concept of the theater requiring the authors to think self-reflexively about their own art form.”51 Corneille stages the character Alcandre to orchestrate this performance simultaneous with reflection on performance. The magician/director shows control of time, as not only is he distinguished from inferior practitioners by his ability to create illusion instantaneously; he also knows how to delay the process of representation and carefully controls the

794   the oxford handbook of the baroque rhythm at which he will reveal what Pridamant is dying to learn: “Watch quietly, and in no way be distressed./Your eagerness is such that my delay/Must aggravate you; but be patient, pray.”52 Ironically, the magician asks his privileged audience—and by extension the entire audience and readership—for complete trust precisely when he ushers us into the second level of comic illusion. In the second act, after a brief first scene in which Alcandre announces the spectacle, we reach this second level of performance, in which Alcandre and Pridamant watch a conversation between Clindor and his friend the charlatan Matamore. The audience quickly learns that Captain Matamore is a mythomaniac, aggrandizing his own imagined actions with hyperbole worthy of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s Les Visionnaires (The Visionaries).53 Of interest to the present study are ways in which Matamore specifically calls upon the notion of temporality to articulate his supposed powers. First, in a false tale of domination over Jupiter himself, Matamore claims to have obtained the instantaneous aid of the god of gods, who tempered Matamore’s attractiveness when the latter found himself too frequently accosted by importunate ladyfolk: “He did as I desired, and now, you see,/I’m handsome only when I choose to be.”54 The original French insists on the “moment,” the “now,” in which the gods granted his wishes. Matamore’s control over the time of immediacy creates a false double for Alcandre’s powers as we have witnessed them in the framing of this dialogue. A false and disorienting temporal palimpsest is thus laid over the initial magical temporalities that create comic illusion; meanwhile, the time of the overall theatrical performance ticks away underneath the layers of bluster and illusion, just as an elaborately decorated watch’s internal mechanisms quietly strain to measure the hours as the user contemplates the shimmering surface of its cover. From controlling the time of the moment, Matamore moves on to suspend time for the whole world, harboring and concealing the time generated by the sun, in the form of the goddess Aurora. He claims to have kept Aurora in his bedchambers until “The last of June became a day in December” (my translation).55 From this hyperbolic, cosmic disruption in temporality that leads to a burlesque inversion of calendar time, we come back to the time of the performance, at the second level of imbrication in which we observe Alcandre and Pridamant observing the conversation between Matamore and Clindor. The latter characters’ conversation, with a remark on the timing of action, opens onto a third level of observation as Matamore and Clindor will eavesdrop on a conversation between Clindor’s beloved Isabelle and the gentleman Adraste, who is also Matamore’s rival for her favors and of whom the charlatan is quite terrified: “Let us await here the hour that separates them” (my translation).56 Space and time are specified as we open onto this third level of representation within Alcandre’s (eventually Corneille’s) comic illusion: we are watching Pridamant and Alcandre, who watch Clindor and Matamore, who watch Isabelle and Adraste, and each level of representation takes on its own temporality. They are all imbricated, or to use language by Timothy Murray, they are enfolded, connected and yet at times indistinguishable in a complex and confusing construct that contributes to baroque

time and chronometry   795 theatrical esthetics.57 Adraste and Isabelle’s spiteful exchange includes its own reference to the play’s time unity, as the rigorous lady fends off her suitor’s advances: adraste  I hope to see, before this day is through, That what your heart can’t say, his will can do. isabelle  I hope to see, before this day is over, Disaster fall upon a tiresome lover.58

As scene four begins, Matamore claims to have scared off Adraste: “Did he not flee, the instant that I came?”59 Similarly, when later he speaks to Isabelle’s father Géronte, his empty threat takes temporal form: “Do you not know that mention of me makes/The Great Turk flee, and devils have the shakes?/That in a flash I could abolish you?”60 This focus on momentary time serves to strengthen the rhetoric of the lovers Clindor and Isabelle, as they intensely evoke their passion and dramatize its possible disappearance in tragic death. Isabelle refuses to live even an instant after Clindor: “A single moment joins our parting breaths:/Two amorous souls will reunite in death!”61 Clindor, for his part, evokes Cupid in a reflection on the fragility of inauthentic affections—“this foolish passion of a day,”62 in contrast to the solidity and durability of the kind of true love that he wishes to exemplify: “But this our love is solid, and remains.”63 Isabelle’s servant Lise corrects both lovers’ rhetorical excesses with a practical appreciation of time’s passing and its value as a precious resource as the dramatic action moves steadily toward its end: “You’re wasting precious time if you remain.”64 As she comforts her mistress, Lise creates a temporal antithesis to valorize her practical use of time: “My cheerful nature, which laughs when life is trying,/Does more in minutes than an age of  crying.”65 The emphasis on Lise’s temporal dexterity underlines the importance of tactical timing for the unfolding of the action of the comic illusion, as the final curtain draws ever nearer, hidden nonetheless in the pleasant obscurity of multiple layers of temporality, performance, and representation. Isabelle gives a sense of this paradoxical understanding of events when she says that her sight “Is all too clear, though in the dark of night.”66 Corneille has created a kind of chiaroscuro with the multiple temporalities governing the action in this play’s various levels. Isabelle’s comment brings our attention to the faulty perception of time by the comedy’s characters, the contradictions involved in trying to grasp this baroque temporality in different situations, at different levels of performance and representation. In scene 10 of act 4, we go back to the first level of performance, as Alcandre tells Pridamant that Isabelle and Clindor have fared well for two years. But he refuses to go into the details about the characters’ travels during that time. A huge temporal dilation is thus marked in the framing discourse that he provides for the performance. Then at the start of the fifth act, Alcandre and Pridamant have a brief conversation to present the action, which Lise opens with a metatheatrical temporal question: “Will this entertainment never

796   the oxford handbook of the baroque end,/And do you want to spend the night in this garden?” (my translation).67 Earlier she has described the theatrical illusion as a waste of time: Though I shared your laughter, I also cursed a bit. What a waste of time! ISABELLE I shall make up for it. (4.5.1215–1216)68

This exchange marks a significant moment when Corneille’s characters announce that the comic performance is lost time, a waste of time, but one that can be repaired (like Lope’s broken clock?) or redeemed. But how? Corneille provides a hint in the 1660 “Examen,” as he describes his play as “an extravagant adventure that has so many irregularities that it is barely worth considering, even though the novelty of this caprice has granted it enough success that I do not regret having wasted some time on it.”69 The play’s ending complements this ironic reflection and holds possible answers in the role that theater plays, to entertain us, to make us think, and to make us both find and lose time in the artful complexities of its evocation. The intertwining and enfolding of the various layers of temporality in L’Illusion comique creates the confusion and agreeable tension that prepare the dénouement, as all gets revealed when Alcandre allows Pridamant, and the play’s spectators, to see the troupe of actors dividing up their money after a successful performance. Pridamant enthusiastically assesses the illusion that has enraptured him in the preceding scenes: I don’t believe it! Yet more prodigies! My son, his murderers, his wife and Lyse! Some instant charm has ended all dispute, And mixed the living with the dead, to boot!70

Alcandre explains what is taking place while also singing the praises of the theater as a privileged art form for the times they are living in: Don’t be disturbed, Sir. Nowadays, the stage Is at so high a point, it’s all the rage. What in your youth was vulgar and debased Is now the chief delight of men of taste, The talk of Paris, the provincial’s dream The pastime which our princes most esteem, The people’s joy, the pleasure of the great, Who prize our drama at the highest rate71

Finally, Pridamant shows his understanding of the power of the comic illusion to make sense of his world and allay the fears that he had for his son—the initial drive toward

time and chronometry   797 dramatic action: “For such a gift, all thanks are trite and lame./But, great Magician, what today you give/Shall ever be remembered while I live.”72 The conceptual temporality of the play thus closes on a hyperbolic dilation to eternity, associated with memory. In contrast with and complementary to Francione’s reading of Lope’s Dorotea, we have in Corneille not a broken clock but one whose workings have been agreeably obscured by multiple temporal levels of illusion and comic performance. The actual time of the theatrical performance ticks away inexorably, but as it does so we are invited by the dialogue and action to contemplate temporalities, seen in a Pascalian perspective, that go from the infinitesimal to the infinitely expansive, from the focus on mere moments of action to eternity, memory, and history. Years have passed, and a concerned father tries to catch up to the life of his son, as a sorcerer controls multiple layers of comic representation to tell the story that his privileged spectator needs to hear. The entire time characters and spectators alike seek to orient themselves within the many folds of dramatic time that Corneille combines in this unique baroque play, one that manifests the temporal orientations of an in-between moment in the history of chronometry and its attendant cultural manifestations of time consciousness. For Alcover, “What we have here, in all its complexity and perfection, is a specimen of baroque art. The Theatrical Illusion is indeed a play about theater; more specifically, a play about baroque theater.”73 In terms of chronometry, the moment is also unique: it is a time prior to the technical innovations—the pendulum regulator for clocks, the spiral spring for watches—that will usher in a new era of accuracy for personal time-keeping, a time that will be marked by the de-aestheticization of chronometry concomitant to the rational organization of work and the search for longitude. As France loses an increasing number of its Protestant artisans and technicians with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the culture of baroque time gives way to aspects more characteristic of neoclassicism, as described by the ever-steadier tick-tick-tick of modern chronometry.74 No such regularity, yet, with baroque time; not a broken clock, but a beautifully misshapen one, a timekeeping device that has not yet decided whether it is primarily useful or beautiful. Like the watch in the shape of a poppy, with its gradually improving inner workings beautifully shrouded in precious materials, baroque time tenses toward the greater accuracy that will only come in the eighteenth century and beyond, while still reveling in the plays of shadow, light, and darkness, metamorphosis, confusion, mixed with glimpses of temporal accuracy, efficacy, and expansiveness, all contributing to a pleasing confusion about what time it is, and was, in the first half of the seventeenth century in Europe.

Notes 1. Richard Glasser, Time in French Life and Thought, trans. C.  G.  Pearson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 9. 2. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 92.

798   the oxford handbook of the baroque 3. Rachel Doggett, Susan Jaskot, and Robert Rand, eds., Time: The Greatest Innovator— Timekeeping and Time Consciousness in Early Modern Europe: An Exhibition, the Folger Shakespeare Library, October 1986-March 1987 (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986), 83. 4. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 8. 5. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 6. 6. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 88–89. 7. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 26. As Panofsky explains: “The Greek expression for time, Chronos, was very similar to the name of Kronos (the Roman Saturn), oldest and most formidable of the gods. A patron of agriculture, he generally carried a sickle. As the senior member of the Greek and Roman Pantheon he was professionally old, and later, when the great classical divinities came to be identified with the planets, Saturn was associated with the highest and slowest of these. . . . His sickle, traditionally explained either as an agricultural implement or as the instrument of castration, came to be interpreted as a symbol of tempora quae sicut falx in se recurrunt (time which repeats itself like a curved scythe); and the mythical tale that he had devoured his own children was said to signify that Time, who had already been termed ‘sharp-toothed’ by Simonides and edax rerum (devourer of all things) by Ovid, devours whatever he has created” (Studies in Iconology, 73–74). 8. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 27. 9. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 87. 10. Cathy Yandell, Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2000), 127. 11. Ricardo  J.  Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 204. 12. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 205. 13. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 92. 14. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, ed. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 61. 15. Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 18–19. 16. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 59. 17. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time. 18. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 62. 19. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 41–42. 20. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 43. 21. Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76. For a history of early modern ­calendar time, see Noah Shusterman, Religion and the Politics of Time: Holidays in France from Louis XIV through Napoleon (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010). 22. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 8. 23. Doggett, Jaskot, and Rand, Time, 15. 24. Ibid., 17. 25. Catherine Carindal, La montre des origines au XIXe siècle (Paris: Vilo, 1985), 32. 26. Eric Bruton, The History of Clocks and Watches (London: Orbis, 1979), 110. 27. Adolphe Chapiro, La Montre française du XVIe siècle jusqu’à 1900 (Paris: Editions de l’amateur, 1991), 28–32.

time and chronometry   799 2 8. Eric Bruton, The History of Clocks and Watches (London: Orbis Publishing Limited, 1979), 110. 29. Alban Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock: Baroque Time in the Dorotea,” Hispanic Review 37, no. 4 (October 1969): 463. 30. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock.” 31. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock,” 466. 32. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock,” 467. 33. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock,” 469. 34. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock.” 35. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock,” 484. The quotation refers to Robert Greene, The Scottish History of James IV 1598, ed. Swaen and Greg (Oxford, 1921), IV, iii, 1718–1719. 36. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock,” 484. 37. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock,” 474. 38. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock,” 475. 39. Lope de Vega, La Dorotea, ed. and trans. Alan S. Trueblood and Edwin Honig (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 12. 40. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock,” 472. 41. Forcione, “Lope’s Broken Clock,” 473. 42. In his 1660 “Examen” of the play, Corneille contrasts his use of place to that of time: “The unity of place is fairly regular, but that of time is not observed here.” See Corneille, Œuvres complètes, ed. André Stegmann (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 194. 43. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Corneille’s L’Illusion comique are taken from The Theatre of Illusion, ed. and trans. Richard Wilbur (London: Harcourt, 2007), and Théâtre complet, vol. 1, ed. Jacques Maurens (Paris: Flammarion, 1968): 1.1.15–18: “Si bien que ceux qu’amène un curieux désir/Pour consulter Alcandre attendent son loisir,/Chaque jour il se montre, et nous touchons à l’heure/Que pour se divertir il sort de sa demeure.” 44. 1.1.57–58: “Il suffira pour vous, qu’il lit dans les pensées,/Et connaît l’avenir et les choses passées.” 45. 1.1.80–88: “Espérez mieux, il sort, et s’avance vers vous./Regardez-le marcher, ce visage si grave/Dont le rare savoir tient la nature esclave/N’a sauvé toutefois des ravages du temps/ Qu’un peu d’os et de nerfs qu’ont décharné cent ans,/Son corps malgré son âge a les forces robustes,/Le mouvement facile et les démarches justes,/Des ressorts inconnus agitent le vieillard,/Et font de tous ces pas des miracles de l’art.” 46. 1.2.129–130: “Leurs herbes, leurs parfums, et leurs cérémonies/Apportent au métier des longueurs infinies.” 47. Pierre Corneille, The Theatre of Illusion, 9. 48. 1.2.150–153: “Sous une illusion vous pourriez voir sa vie,/Et tous ses accidents devant vous exprimés/Par des spectres pareils à des corps animés,/Il ne leur manquera ni geste, ni parole.” 49. Corneille, L’Illusion comique, 1.2.160. 50. Madeleine Alcover, “Les lieux et les temps dans L’Illusion comique,” French Studies 30, no. 4 (October 1976): 399–400. 51. Alcover, “Les lieux et les temps dans L’Illusion comique,” 393. 52. 1.3.208–210: “Voyez tout sans rien dire, et sans vous alarmer,/Je tarde un peu beaucoup pour votre impatience,/N’en concevez pourtant aucune défiance.” 53. Théâtre du XVIIe siècle, vol. 2, ed. Jacques Scherer and Jacques Truchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 405–492.

800   the oxford handbook of the baroque 54. 2.2.283–284: “Ce que je demandais fut prêt en un moment,/Et depuis je suis beau quand je veux seulement.” 55. 2.2.306: “Et le dernier de juin fut un jour de décembre.” 56. 2.2.345: “Attendons en ce coin l’heure qui les sépare.” 57. Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4. 58. 2.3.399–402: “ADRASTE: J’espère voir pourtant avant la fin du jour/Ce que peut son vouloir au défaut de son amour. ISABELLE: Et moi j’espère voir avant que le jour passe,/Un amant accablé de nouvelle disgrâce.” 59. 2.4.411: “M’a-t-il bien su quitter la place au même instant?” 60. 3.3.725–727: “Pauvre homme, sais-tu bien que mon nom effroyable/Met le Grand Turc en fuite, et fait trembler le diable,/Que pour t’anéantir je ne veux qu’un moment?” 61. Corneille, Three Masterpieces, trans. Ranjit Bolt (London: Oberon Books, 2000), 4.1.1015– 1016: “Et le même moment verra par deux trépas/Nos esprits amoureux se rejoindre là-bas.” 62. 5.3.1511: “Une folle ardeur qui ne vivra qu’un jour.” 63. 5.3.1505: “Mais celle qui nous joint est un amour solide.” 64. 3.5.811–812: “Ah! que vous prodiguez un temps si précieux!” 65. 4.2.1059–1060: “Ma belle humeur qui rit au milieu des malheurs/Fait plus en un moment qu’un siècle de vos pleurs.” 66. 5.3.1408: “Au milieu de la nuit je ne vois que trop clair.” 67. 5.2.1351–1352: “Ce divertissement n’aura-t-il point de fin,/Et voulez-vous passer la nuit dans ce jardin?” 68. 4.5.1215–1216: “J’en ai ri comme vous, mais non sans murmurer,/C’est bien du temps perdu./ISABELLE: Je le vais réparer.” 69. Pierre Corneille, Œuvres complètes, ed. André Stegmann (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 194: “Une galanterie extravagante, qui a tant d’irrégularités qu’elle ne vaut pas la peine de la considérer, bien que la nouveauté de ce caprice en aye rendu le succès assez favorable pour ne me repentir pas d’y avoir perdu quelque temps.” 70. Corneille: Three Masterpieces, trans. Ranjit Bolt (London: Oberon Books, 2000): 5.6.1749– 1752: “Je vois Clindor, Rosine. Ah Dieu! quelle surprise!/Je vois leur assassin, je vois sa femme et Lise,/Quel charme en un moment étouffe leurs discords,/Pour assembler ainsi les vivants et les morts?” 7 1. 5.6.1781–1788: “Cessez de vous plaindre, à présent le théâtre/Est en un point si haut qu’un chacun l’idolâtre,/Et ce que votre temps voyait avec mépris/Est aujourd’hui l’amour de tous les bons esprits,/L’entretien de Paris, le souhait des provinces,/Le divertissement le plus doux de nos princes,/Les délices du peuple, et le plaisir des grands;/Parmi leurs passetemps il tient les premiers rangs[.]” 72. 5.6.1822–1824: “Un si rare bienfait ne se peut reconnaître,/Mais, grand Mage, du moins croyez qu’à l’avenir/Mon âme en gardera l’éternel souvenir.” 73. Madeleine Alcover, “Les lieux et les temps dans L’Illusion comique,” 404. 74. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 8.

time and chronometry   801

Further Reading Bruton, Eric. The History of Clocks and Watches. London: Orbis Publishing Limited, 1979. Cipolla, Carlo M. Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700. The Norton Library. New York: Norton, 1977. Cipolla, Carlo M. “The Diffusion of Innovations in Early Modern Europe.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14, no. 1 (January 1972). Howard, Nicole. “Marketing Longitude: Clocks, Kings, Courtiers, and Christiaan Huygens.” Book History 11 (2008): 59–88. Quinones, Ricardo J. The Renaissance Discovery of Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Sauter, Michael J. “Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin.” The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 685–709. Yandell, Cathy. Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.

chapter 36

Cou rt Spectacl e a n d En terta i nm en t Guy Spielmann

In the global history of spectacles, the baroque era (which in this case stretches from the last third of the sixteenth century until the 1790s) constitutes an acme not only because it encompasses the most influential drama ever brought to the Western stage—the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Molière, Goldoni—but also because of the unprecedented use of stagecraft in the pursuit of political goals. At a time when the world-as-theater metaphor reached the apex of its relevance, nowhere was it more aptly enacted than in the royal, imperial, ducal and princely courts of Europe. Some of its high points have been extensively studied: the feste teatrali organized by various members of the Medici family in Florence between 1539 and 1637; the masques performed by and for and James I and Charles I in England from 1605 until 1640; the lavish fêtes de cour ordained by Louis XIV in Versailles (1664, 1668, and 1674); the festivities held in Vienna over the space of two years (1666–1667) to mark the marriage of Leopold I to Margarita Teresa of Spain. These particularly momentous events (which, as we will see, all share some basic common elements) were echoed in hundreds of lesser ones that regularly punctuated court life; although on the surface their purpose was providing entertainment in the modern sense of gratuitous distraction, their function was almost always more complex as it pertained to diplomacy, propaganda, or governance. Spectacle seems to have been an integral feature of court life since its earliest manifestations in Ancient kingdoms, and celebrated or notorious examples can be found throughout history: from Nero, who fancied himself the star performer of the Roman Empire, to René 1 d’Anjou, the medieval poet-king who wrote a treatise on the art of jousting and in the summer of 1446 organized a forty-day-long festival in his estate at Launay in the Loire Valley. However, politically oriented court spectacle only became generalized in the baroque era, owing to a conjunction of factors (the development of centralized power replacing the feudal system, technological advances, and aesthetic experimentation) that first took hold in the grand duchy of Tuscany in the first half of the sixteenth century.1 Virtually all that would follow until the early 1800s appears as a

court spectacle and entertainment   803 reiteration of what had been perfected under the patronage of the Medici, under myriad variations and occasional infusions of local traditions. The value of court spectacle was neglected in the nineteenth century when the emergence of republican regimes in Europe and the desire of monarchies to appear modern led to such a disdain for baroque pageantry that Roy Strong presented his 1973 survey as an attempt “to gather together, for the first time, all that has been written since the last war on Renaissance court fêtes,” since “at present no general work exists to introduce the reader to those complex, diffuse, and at the same time profoundly fascinating subject.”2 Since then, scholarly interest has burgeoned, rediscovering features and facts that had lost their self-evidence: “Theatricals at the court of Philip IV were not exclusively a spectator sport,” Bergman noted in 1974, “Amateur performances put on by the courtiers themselves now and then were included in the diversions marking special occasions.”3 Today, such a statement would seem redundant, as research projects and art exhibits have provided ample evidence and analysis toward a better understanding of the court in the baroque era and the importance of spectacle in its functioning. In and of itself, the socio-political entity usually called “the court” raises complex issues: as Malcom Vale notes, “an inability to produce a clear definition of the court has characterized much writing on the subject.”4 While we can only hypothesize that it dates back to the emergence of monarchy as a system of government, it appears clearly that “the court” held particular importance when absolutist regimes flourished, in the “Age of Kings” (1648–1789). Theorized by legal scholars (Jean Bodin in France, Pufendorf and Thomasius in Germanic lands) and political philosophers (Hobbes in England), absolutism came as a response to the severe upheavals of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, culminating in the Continent-wide Thirty Years’ War. By vesting unlimited, legitimate state power and authority in a single monarch, absolutism marginalized both sovereign courts and parliaments and, more importantly, the aristocratic grandees who, in the feudal system, often proved troublesome competitors to kings.5 Nowhere was the triumph of absolutism more complete than in France, which explains why Norbert Elias chose it as an example in his 1969 landmark study The Court Society.6 Under the rule of Louis XIII and cardinal Richelieu, and especially in the personal reign of Louis XIV (1661–1715), the court became an effective instrument for neutralizing unruly nobles—some of whom had led an armed rebellion, the Fronde (1648–1652);7 but it also constituted a self-contained, tightly regulated social unit that played an essential part in what Elias described as the “civilizing process.”8 As much as we need to remain aware of continuity in court life from one era to the next, crucial changes took place when autocrats throughout Europe managed to reinforce their power to the point of subverting the feudal order that had been in place for several hundred years.9 More than merely a potentate’s entourage, the absolutist court served as a cultural hub, a model (for behavior, correct linguistic usage, art, fashion, and myriad other domains) for European elites, but eventually also, through a trickle-down process, a model for the masses.10 Elias insisted on the “representative and central significance that the court had for most Western European countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth

804   the oxford handbook of the baroque centuries. In this period, it was not the ‘city’ but the ‘court’ and court society that were the centre with by far the most widespread influence.” Thus the courtly milieu accounted for much of the development and dissemination of what in the twenty-first century we would call baroque aesthetics in fine arts, decorative arts, architecture, dress, gardening, stage design, and music. As being admitted at court and favorably known to the monarch became the highest possible achievement for an ambitious aristocrat, the courtier, whose demeanor, appearance, and speech were minutely described by Castiglione (Il libro del cortegiano, 1528), Graciàn (El Oraculo Manual, 1647), and Méré (Conversations, 1648), came to embody an ideal combination of physical grace and strength, moral uprightness, wit, taste and perfect manners.11 A key element in this system was promoting idleness of the nobility, a status originally conferred upon warrior knights, who in most countries were not supposed to hold any sort of gainful employment, trade, or profession; women, at most, could do charity work by visiting hospitals and hospices, while men, outside of periods of armed conflict in which they were expected to participate in service to the king, had essentially nothing to do.12 Since their implication in politics had led to civil strife, they were increasingly kept out of government; the early Bourbon kings systematically appointed to cabinet positions lower-born men who would not take the honor for granted and who proved particularly loyal and hardworking, a policy that prompted the duke of Saint-Simon (who in spite of his prestigious lineage was denied an official position in which he could fulfill his lofty aspirations) to bemoan “a long reign of wretched bourgeois rule.”13 As a result, rather than a trifle to occupy leisure time, entertainment became the central component of court life; and providing it adequately (both quantitatively and qualitatively) turned into a major concern for the absolutist monarch. In this respect, another influential decision by Louis XIV involved removing the court from the kingdom’s capital city, Paris, and creating a completely new seat of power almost ex nihilo in Versailles, a palace amidst a vast complex of gardens that were designed from their inception as a gigantic set for spectacle. As other rulers implemented this model, court life became increasingly insular; festivities and pageants that were occasionally shared with the urban populace in the late Renaissance and early baroque era became exclusively geared toward a socially inbred elite numbering in the hundreds. Therefore, our contemporary concept of “entertainment” fails to provide an adequate point of reference to envision its purpose and modus operandi in the baroque court: A function of both interpersonal and mass communication in which the sender seeks to please and the receiver is expected to enjoy. . . . In relation to mass ­communication, entertainment can be seen as a function of media use . . . ; it is widely listed as one of the uses and gratifications of media use for users. One of the objectives of the mass media is to entertain, while the related objectives of the individual include enjoyment, relaxation . . . and escape. Unlike other functions, Schramm notes, entertainment requires a certain ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’. For the Frankfurt school, this was akin to political passivity, and Adorno argued that the real function of mass-media entertainment was to subdue the working-class.14

court spectacle and entertainment   805 In other words, we consider entertainment as a pursuit secondary to the serious business of work and politics, and as something in which we often assume a passive role as spectators (since it is provided mainly by “the media” and/or by hired performers); it is a full-time occupation for adults only when they are on vacation or retired. By contrast, entertainment was the main occupation at the baroque court and taken quite seriously not merely as a way to pass the time but also for its sociopolitical dimensions. As Sarah Carpenter pointed out, “By the sixteenth century all the courts of Europe were fully versed in the power of court performance as an instrument, however minor, of prestige, of diplomacy, of politics and sometimes even of government.”15 Moreover, courtiers, as well as the king and the royal family, frequently took an active role in many respects: as purveyors of material (verse, drama, music), as participants, and as performers alongside paid professionals. Whereas various types of entertainment and spectacle were merely transferred into the courtly setting with minimal adjustment— such as dramatic plays otherwise performed “in town”—much of it was specific to that setting, including endemic forms such as the French ballet de cour, the English masque, and in its original form, the Italian opera. As Elias argued, “the court” amounted to more than a place and a group of people: it functioned as a microcosm, with its own set of rules (some of which were made explicit in the étiquette) that did not always reflect the logic and principles prevailing in society at large.16 Thus we need to consider that even though the enormous amount of money, labor, and energy spent on entertainments seem disproportionate by our standards, they were rather congruent with the peculiar system that the court represented.17

The Fête In fact, the best-known manifestation of court entertainment in all of its splendor, the fête, tends to overshadow its otherwise quotidian nature. An exhibit at the Versailles palace, “Fêtes et divertissements à la cour,” provided a more balanced view by giving almost equal treatment to hunting, leisure walks (promenade), dramatic shows, concerts, gambling, dancing (balls), and pyrotechnics—all of which took place continually, with varying levels of intensity and frequency depending on budget sex, age, physical shape and personal inclination.18 A fête would typically combine all of these elements with a greater than usual deployment of means over a limited period of time, so as to create a sense of wonderment both among the courtiers themselves and among the hoi polloi who heard about the event through hearsay or (when they could read) through reports, often lavishly illustrated, that were widely disseminated. It had to remain an exceptional event by nature but also by necessity since it could only be achieved through considerable expense. A 2017 study on visitors in Versailles discusses at length the practice of incognito, by which illustrious guests of royal of princely rank came to court under an assumed name; although everyone knew who they really were, this subterfuge exempted the host from having to throw a full-scale fête, an honor expected

806   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 1  Setting for a banquet in the gardens of the estate at Sceaux, part of a court fête upon the occasion of a visit by Louis XIV on July 16, 1685. Fête donnée au Roi par M. le Marquis de Seignelai dans sa maison de Sceaux le 16 juillet 1685. Anonymous engraving, design by Jean Berrin

for a state visit, but whose multiplication would have been ruinous even for the most wealthy of rulers.19 Origins of the term—festa dei—and the concept hark back to religious practices, especially those—like Carnival and the Feast of Fools—that had been adapted from pagan rituals into Christian liturgy. It could also take as a pretext a special event demanding joyous celebration, most usually a high-profile wedding—the nuptials of Cosimo I de’ Medici and Eleonora de Toledo in 1539, of Louis-Auguste, duc de Berry and Maria-Antonietta von Lothringen-Habsburg in 1770—a state visit of a notable foreign dignitary, the signing of a peace treaty, or a military conquest. Whatever its motivation, a fête constituted a deliberate rupture in the flow of ordinary life, which at court implied unusual magnificence and events that could not be exactly replicated at another time and another place.20 A common way to achieve this was to erect temporary structures (ranging from bleachers to full-scale theaters) that would be disassembled afterward, and more generally to treat each component as a single-use item: thus the ephemeral nature of the spectacle was reinforced by the temporary status of the venue in which it was held—a typically baroque conceit. Extraordinarily lavish costumes, enhanced with actual jewels, were unimaginable in a public playhouse; dramatic and musical pieces were not only commissioned for the occasion but also performed in such a way that a reprise in another venue, if at all possible, would seem inferior to the original. Mostly, contrary to our current understanding, a fête at court was construed as much more than a party, and its frivolous dimension never completely overshadowed its political

court spectacle and entertainment   807 meaning—be it a mere reminder of a monarch’s generosity and grandeur that forced admiration and respect. A long-standing trend in scholarship has overstated the importance of “theater” in court entertainment: in the sense that we now understand it—non-musical, spoken drama with a linear plot, and verisimilar characters—it was far too subdued and not nearly glamorous enough for such occasions. As one peruses Nagler’s authoritative Theatre Festivals of the Medici [Theaterfeste des Medici] for instance, it becomes clear that “theatrical” applies only in a loose sense to the dozen extravaganzas he studies.21 Namely, there was always an element of fiction involved, a storyline serving as anchor to the diverse activities on the program, during which courtiers put on costumes and took on dramatic parts, even as they engaged in dancing, parading on horseback, jousting, or mock fighting. Music and special effects (obtained through a variety of techniques such as make-up, optical-illusion painting or machinery) clearly superseded the dramatic dimension proper.22 In addition, a straight dramatic show could at best provide one component in a series of events demanding the greatest possible variety. Theater certainly accounted for one necessary category but only next to the procession or parade, dancing in some form, singing and music, masquerading, banqueting (which could be theatricalized as well), and almost always some sort of physical activity requiring skill and endurance, be it a game or a military-themed exercise. For over two centuries, in Italy, France, England, and Germanic states, curial fêtes followed a similar model, only inflected by local customs and quirks; all of them were suffused with symbolism and allegory, which mixed mythological motifs favored by Renaissance humanism and medieval imagery dear to the nobility.

Fighting as Entertainment: Echoes of a Glorious Past The prominence of hunting—it came first in the 2016 Versailles exhibit—can easily be explained by its status as the aristocracy’s favorite pastime: it was a privilege (commoners caught hunting on a nobleman’s estate could be hanged on the spot without trial), a  welcome form of exercise for people who did not otherwise have physical activity through manual labor, and a substitute for war. The origins of Western European nobility as an equestrian warrior caste should not be underestimated, and they are abundantly reflected in court entertainment through the many activities involving horse riding, paramilitary games, and medieval chivalric themes. The best known of these activities, jousting, continued well beyond the Middle Ages and only fell into disfavor in the sixteenth century—the gruesome death of French king Henri II (1559) in a jousting mishap provides a likely terminus ad quem—only to be replaced by less violent forms of mock fighting, such as the sbarra at the 1579 wedding of Francesco I de’ Medici and Bianca Capello in Florence, or the very similar Combat à la barrière held at the ducal court of Lorraine in 1626, minutely documented through the etchings of Jacques Callot.23

808   the oxford handbook of the baroque Born in Nancy, Callot had spent time at the court of Cosimo II de’ Medici in Florence in 1611–1621, where he recorded in print impressive entertainments, including two “wars,” the “guerra d’amore” and “guerra di belleza” (February and October 1616), titles that clearly point to their martial inspiration.24 The “war of love” took place at carnival time.25 It began with a parade on the Piazza Santa Croce (on which a performance space had been set up, complete with bleachers), featuring elaborate floats representing India, surrounded by a hundred bow-carrying “Indians,” and an allegory of Dawn. Then two “armies” (one Indian, the other African) entered the arena, respectively led by duke Cosimo and his younger brother, Lorenzo, with more allegorical and fanciful figures on chariots rigged with ingenious mechanical devices. The costumed soldiers, both on foot and on horseback, went through several engagements (abbatimenti) that mimicked actual combat but followed a careful choreography; between these skirmishes, madrigals (then a dominant form of musical theater) were sung, and the war concluded with an equestrian ballet—similarly, the War of Beauty performed later that year along the same lines was described as a “festa a cavallo.”26

Figure 2  A public court fête in Florence—a mock infantry battle held in in the Piazza Santa Croce as part of the Guerra d’amore on Shrove Tuesday, February 12, 1616. “Uno de gl’abbattimenti della guerra d’amore.” Guerra d’amore/ festa del serenissimo grand duca/ di Toscana/ Cosimo secondo/ fatto in Firenze il carnevale del 1615 / in Firenze /MDC. XV. (Florence: Pignoni, 1616)

court spectacle and entertainment   809 However debonair these “wars” and “battles” may seem (the mock combat was more akin to dancing than to fighting), they served as constant reminders of the aristocracy’s glorious military past: the main cast members, all drawn from the ranks of the highest nobility, appeared as historical figures or, more frequently, as characters from medieval romances. In 1664, for the Plaisirs de l’Isle enchantée in Versailles—arguably the most extravagant fête of the seventeenth century—a young Louis XIV picked Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, a favorite 1532 epic that borrowed episodes and characters from the eleventh-century Song of Roland. The Sun King himself rode in as the Saracen hero Roger (Ruggiero), and with his entourage he engaged in a series of exercises aimed at demonstrating physical prowess and knightly skills, such as running at the ring and tilting at the quintain.27 Two years earlier, as a kind of rehearsal for the Plaisirs, Louis had staged in Paris a massive equestrian parade and ballet, known as a carrousel, which shared many ­elements with the feste a cavallo of the Medici court, including two crucial features: extraordinarily lavish costumes and participation by the ruler in person, surrounded by the cream of the aristocracy.28 While female courtiers did not partake in the more physical and warlike activities, they played a part in the fiction, acting as the fair ladies for whom the knights embarked on daring quests and affronted various perils (including monsters)—all in an effort to reactivate the medieval ethos of cortesia and to give the men a  chance to display heroism at a time when the military nature of their status appeared to be fading. In the Middle Ages, rulers and nobles personally led armies, which not infrequently put them in harm’s way: during the third crusade (1190) Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa drowned in Eastern Europe, while Richard I “the Lionheart” of England was held prisoner for two years in Austria; Louis IX of France succumbed to the plague in Tunisia during the eighth crusade (1270). As we all know from Shakespeare’s play, Richard III was killed at the  battle of Bosworth Field  in 1485—the last English king to die in action, as such occurrence became more and more rare: the demise of Louis II of Hungary at the fateful Battle of Mohács against the Ottoman troops of Suleiman I the Magnificent (1526) ranks among the last notable examples. Tellingly, in his Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, Castiglione pokes fun at the nobleman who persists in presenting himself as a hoary medieval warrior: A worthy lady once remarked jokingly, in polite company, to a certain man (I don’t want just now to mention him by name) whom she had honoured by asking him to dance and who not only refused but would not listen to music or take part in the many other entertainments offered, protesting all the while that such frivolities were not his business. And when at length the lady asked what his business was, he answered with a scowl: “Fighting . . .” “Well then,” the lady retorted, “I should think that since you aren’t at war at the moment and you are not engaged in fighting, it would be a good thing if you were to have yourself well greased and stowed away in a cupboard with all your fighting equipment, so that you avoid getting rustier than you are already.”29

810   the oxford handbook of the baroque Already, The “longbow victories” of English armies during the Hundred Years’ War—Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Agincourt (1415)—had heralded an “infantry revolution,” “when the common-born but well drilled infantryman . . . overcame the mounted nobility of Western Europe, leading to a change on the organization of war.”30 Two centuries later, the military nature of the aristocracy, though profoundly altered, still exerted a strong thematic influence on court life and the international popularity of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–1615): a lampoon of chivalry must be counterbalanced by the prominence of the medieval knightly model among the elites, who favored mock battles, carrousels, feste a cavallo, sbarre, and other bellicose forms of entertainment throughout the baroque era.31 Occasionally, the reference was not romance but actual conflict: the 1589 wedding festivities in Florence included a naumachia, a naval engagement, in which a Christian fleet defeated the Turks, after seizing their fortress (a temporary structure built for the purpose of being torn down). This could only be a reference to the naval battle at Lepanto (1571), and such spectacle amounted to reenactment more than to fantasy playacting.

Figure 3  A mock naval battle staged in Mantua on the occasion of the wedding of Francesco IV Gonzaga to Margaret of Savoy in 1608. Frederico Follino, “Disegno della Battaglia Navale/et del castello de fuocho trionfali/Fatti nelle felicissime nozze del Sereniss./S.r. Prencipe di Mantova et di Monferrato/Con la Serenissima Infanta di Savoia/Per opera, et architettura/di Gabriele Bertazzolo ingenero/dell’Alt. Sereniss. di Mantova/L’anno 1608.” Compendio/ delle sontuose/feste/fatte l’anno MDCVIII./nella citta de Mantova,/per le reali nozze del /serenissimo prencipe/d. Francesco Gonzaga, con la serenissima infante/Margherita di Savoia (Mantua, Italy: Aurelio e Lodovico Osanna, 1608)

court spectacle and entertainment   811

Dancing Next to the many types of pretend fighting, the most popular kind entertainment at court was indubitably dancing. Here again, our contemporary vision must be set aside in order to understand the importance and value of this activity, which also, to some extent, provided a chance for physical exercise (but mostly consisted in visual display). Under the heading of “dance,” two different approaches may be distinguished: one comes close to what we might now call social (or “ballroom”) dancing, the other one to ballet. In the early modern period, however, such a clear distinction would not be ­evident, partly because figurative dancing did not yet demand the level of training and athleticism that would later become indispensable for ballet performers. Also, a certain level of choreographic ability was expected of all members of the nobility so that they could hold their own honorably next to professionals—to them, merely watching a  dance show would have been unthinkable. This extended to royals as well: when emperor Joseph II remarried in 1765, he organized a fête at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace in which all the operatic and balletic roles were taken on by courtiers and members of  the imperial family, including a nine-year-old Marie Antoinette, who would later notoriously delight in playing simple peasants girls on stage.32 Louis XIV also took on solo parts since his boyhood (first in the Ballet de Cassandre in 1651) and remained an avid performer until he retired at age thirty; one of the best known portraits of emperor Leopold I shows him as a gallant shepherd in an exuberant red and gold costume for the pastoral play La Galatea in 1667.33 At a time when, in the higher strata of society, casual contact between unmarried people of both sexes was all but impossible (or at least illicit), dancing afforded a muchneeded opportunity for mingling, possibly in a connubial perspective. Although “balls” constituted an essential component of socialization among elites, at court they came to involve more than men and women moving together to music. First, participants tended to don costumes, as opposed to the finery that such people would be expected to wear at any public event, even outside of contexts—namely, the Carnival season—calling for a masquerade; second, the dance tended to be cast in a thematic and sometime narrative frame. These trends made some balls virtually undistinguishable from dramatic performances per se; thus Wiggins defines the masque as “a stylized form of drama performed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the English court and aristocratic country houses,” yet clearly identifies its origins as form of dancing: “According to the chronicler Edward Hall, the masque was “a thing not seen afore in England” when, on Twelfth Night 1513, King Henry VIII and eleven of his courtiers arrived at Greenwich in disguise and asked the ladies to dance.”34 Like most forms of baroque spectacle, figurative/narrative dancing originated in Italy, under the guise of the fifteenth-century ballo (or balletto), before spreading to the rest of the continent, notably in France, where it flourished and grew in complexity.35

812   the oxford handbook of the baroque Early treatises on dance were issued in 1581 (Il Ballarino by Caroso), 1589 (Orchésographie by Arbeau) and 1602 (Le gratie d’amore by Negri.36 Some fifty years later, Pierre Beauchamp, ballet master to Louis XIV, invented a notation system, eventually published by Feuillet (1700), while Swiss-born Noverre laid the theoretical foundations of classical ballet, a genre that finally came into its own in the mid-eighteenth century as an independent form with extremely elaborate principles and no longer accessible to amateurs.37 It therefore lost its appeal as a form of court entertainment and gave way to masked balls. Court ballet never completely severed its ties to the masquerade, and the dancer’s technique or the quality of the libretto remained less important than costumes, sets, and machinery; the same could be said of its English cousin, the masque. In the French version, this often translated into extremely fanciful and even grotesque themes that favored the uncanny and the bizarre. Whatever plot there was mostly served as the flimsiest of excuses for binding together the entrées, independent scenes with different figures that could include relatively straight dramatic characters but also animals, representative of (largely fantasized) exotic folk—Turks, Indians, Africans—and a vast array of people with physical deformities, fantastic beings, and monsters. The ballet de cour remained the favorite form of entertainment at the French court for almost exactly a century, from the early experiments in 1572–1573 (Le Paradis d’amour with verse by Ronsard, and the Ballet des Polonais) until the creation of a national opera in 1671. These productions betray an Italian origin linking them to the ballo: they were organized by a Piedmontese violinist, composer, and choreographer who served as musical tutor to the royal children, Baldassare da Belgiojoso (gallicized as “Balthasar de Beaujoyeux”). Queen Caterina de’ Medici must be credited for importing court spectacles familiar to her native Florence to Paris, where they benefited from unprecedented budgets and logistics, as well as from various aesthetic developments. In 1581, she commissioned Beaujoyeux to stage for the wedding of her sister Marguerite de Lorraine to the Duc de Joyeuse Le Ballet comique de la Royne, a five-and-a-half-hour extravaganza combining poetry, spoken dialogue, singing, and orchestral music in addition to dance, all complemented by lavish sets and costumes. The Ballet comique, which Beaujoyeux boasted was a “novel invention,” would eventually be considered an epoch-making show, and a forebear to opera, since it had a narrative structure, based on the episode of Ulysses’s encounter with Circe in the Odyssey. Mostly, it was a purely curial spectacle, not only because of its astronomical cost but also because performers (except for musicians and a few extras) and spectators all belonged to the highest nobility; eventually, the latter (including the royals) joined the former in the concluding “great ball.” In addition, under the guise of Circe’s story a political message was being delivered about the state of the kingdom: in the opening scene, a nobleman allegedly fleeing the magician’s lair stopped to harangue king Henry III in a long verse monologue, explaining how peace and prosperity would return to France after years of turmoil and urging him to take action against the threat at hand—a thinly veiled allusion to the religious strife that had considerably weakened the Valois throne.

court spectacle and entertainment   813

The Masque The British masque, whose kinship with its Continental cousins appears obvious, nevertheless illustrated possible variations. Early masques merely amplified “mummings” and “disguisings.”38 These were medieval forms usually associated with a seventeen-day period immediately preceding Lent, the Septuagesima or Shrovetide. Unlike other carnivalesque activities, which allowed social disorder to become the norm through various inversions of regular hierarchies, the masque focused on the figure of the ruler and celebrated the triumph of harmony over hostile forces.39 More than a theatrical form adapted for the curial setting, it emanated from the very essence of the court as a sociopolitical system.40 Much like the balletto or the ballet de cour, it involved a single-gender cast of mythological and allegorical characters enacting a fanciful story. But in a second phase (the “revels”) the masquers would break through the fourth wall, as it were, and bring out participants of both sexes who had theretofore been watching, to dance with them, after which the masquing troupe would retire. Beginning with The Masque of Queens (1609), a new component was added and became a fixture of the genre: the antimasque, a kind of counterpoint to the main show. The genre only lasted about half a century, under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I; from The Masque of Proteus and the Adamantine Rock, performed for the queen in 1595 by the barristers of Gray’s Inn, to William Davenant’s Salmacida Spolia (1640), the last representative of a genre that did not survive the Commonwealth period. In the meantime, it had known a golden age in the works of playwright Ben Jonson and designer Inigo Jones between 1605 (the Masque of Blackness, performed on Twelfth Night 1605) and 1630 (Chloridia, performed on Shrovetide 1630). Jones, a painter, architect and engineer, masterfully imported to England the designs and contraptions he had studied in Italy, going as far as to build for James I and Queen Anne a venue dedicated to masque performances, the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace (inaugurated with a performance of Time Vindicated on Twelfth Night 1622), in replacement of an earlier makeshift structure that had burned down.41 While elements from the masque could be interpolated in regular theater—most famously in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night and The Tempest— it remained a practice exclusive to the court for financial reasons but mostly because a masque was an interactive event rather than a show that could be transplanted to a public playhouse, all the more so as the glorification of God-ordained royal power was becoming increasingly contentious, culminating in the destitution of Charles I and his execution, symbolically staged in front of the Whitehall Banqueting House. In 1633, the puritan dissenter William Prynne had published Histriomastix, an incendiary pamphlet lambasting excesses of stage shows; it attacked court masque in such virulent terms that the Crown mistook passages against actresses as a criticism of French-born Queen Henrietta Maria, who had appeared in several parts.42 Prynne was arrested, tried,

814   the oxford handbook of the baroque convicted, fined, pilloried, mutilated (his ears were severed), and jailed, but by 1640 the masque had run its course: Salmacida Spolia (by William Davenant and Inigo Jones, music by Lewis Richard) would mark the end of an era, with a flourish—both Charles I and Henrietta Maria performed in it. The show was meant to foster a favorable opinion of the king in preparation for a new parliamentary session fraught with potential conflict; but the looming crisis proved impossible to avert and eventually led to civil war and Charles’s demise. At the 1660 restoration, the masque was not revived, and some of its constitutive elements migrated to other genres: Davenant refashioned his Salmacida Spolia as The Siege of Rhodes, generally considered the first British opera.

The Court as Creative Laboratory It is crucial to distinguish between royal and princely spectacles at large and those held within the confines of the court, even though they may appear quite similar in form. The first category notably included entries—in which a ruler made a formal ingress into a town in the welcoming presence of the local elites (having recently accessed to the throne, or somehow asserted dominion over a city), progresses—journeys by a ruler through his or her realm, punctuated by various shows, ceremonies and entertainments—and festivities held in public spaces, such as carrousels or the Flemish Ommeganck, a civic and religious pageant that sometimes played out like a combination between a monarch’s triumphal procession—with floats bearing allegorical figures and fantastic animals, similar to those in curial fêtes—and a carnivalesque street parade.43 Beyond the obvious quantitative differences in scale and expenditure, spectacles given at court tended to be characterized by greater complexity, notably in the use of allegory and symbols in expressing political messages, which could veer on the esoteric, even for a sophisticated audience. As a matter of fact, courtiers were not necessarily as educated as the artists and scholars whom monarchs typically entrusted with “inventing” suitable themes and figures for pageants, ballets, masques and fêtes, such as Vincenzio Borghini, the mastermind behind the extravagant Mascherata della genealogia degli dei de’ gentili, held in Florence on February 21, 1566. On that occasion, hundreds of performers paraded through the city on twenty-one chariots, offering coded tableaux that borrowed from dozens of symbological traditions and literary sources, from the most classical (Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) to occultist treatises like the Hieroglyphica. As Nagler remarks, “a goodly number of the figures could not have been identified without a sound knowledge of mythography,” “complicated visual puzzles to be solved” beyond the grasp of most aristocratic spectators, and indeed of the grand duke himself.44 While this might seem paradoxical, the point of such patronage was prestige: a ruler’s stature could only be enhanced by enrolling the most renowned intellectuals and ­artists (Holbein, Palladio, Tintoretto, Veronese, Vasari, Leonardo, Rubens all lent their talents to court spectacles), even if the exact value of their production was lost on the masses, but also on the royal or ducal entourage.45 Naturally, spectacles given in public

court spectacle and entertainment   815 venues could hardly make the same demands on their audience, and the productions of those who worked both at court and in regular theaters—playwrights Jonson and Molière for instance—demonstrate that the conditions were profoundly different. The baroque court thus appears as a creative laboratory in which all disciplines (drama, ballet, music, gardening, cuisine) could be practiced at the highest possible levels of excellence and in which new forms could be developed. What we now call “opera” emerged in such a context, although by the early 1700s it had become independent from the curial environment and, because of its eventual development, it is easy to overlook its origins as a form of court spectacle. Yet the circumstances of its creation in the late sixteenth century unambiguously point to its nature as an emanation of courtly aesthetics. On the one hand, the dramma per musica resulted from theoretical reflections by a coterie of scholars, the camerata fiorentina, under the stewardship of count Giovanni Bardi di Vernio. However, early experiments such as Dafné by Ottavio Rinuccini and Jacopo Peri, a musical favola pastorale performed in 1598 at the Florentine home of Jacopo Corsi, remained confidential. Opera really only came into its own when Rinuccini and Peri’s Euridice was performed in the Palazzo Pitti on October 6, 1600, for the wedding of Maria de’Medici and King Henri IV of France, and, even more decisively, with the February 24, 1607 premiere of Orfeo by Striggio and Monteverdi in the Mantua palace of duke Vincenzo Ι Gonzaga, then one of Europe’s most lavish patrons of the arts.46 On the other hand, a second source for opera can be found in intermezzi (or intermedii), song-and-dance interludes that were at first interspersed between the courses of banquets, then between the acts of a straight play—which, as noted above, could hardly satisfy the needs of courtiers for spectacle.47 Perhaps the most celebrated instance of this phenomenon took place during the fabled 1589 wedding of Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine, for which a pastoral commedia was programmed, La Pelegrina by Girolamo Bargagli.48 Whatever the merits of that play may have been, there were completely eclipsed by the six intermezzi that complemented it, directed by none other than count Bardi da Venio. Not only did these interludes, strung together, make up an complete dramatic unit, but they provided an opportunity for Bardi to showcase all that could then be accomplished in terms of spectacle: music and singing, of course, with the participation of seven different composers (including Bardi himself and his acolytes Jacopo Peri and Emilio de’ Cavalieri) and five librettists (including Bardi, again, and Ottavio Rinuccini) but also dancing, costume design (by Bernardo Buontalenti), and feats of special effects such as cloud and marine machines on which various deities made their entrances and exits, and a gigantic dragon (Python) that Apollo slayed with his arrows.49 All that was needed to turn these interludes into a full-blown opera was to perform them without the play that they allegedly supported.50 The themes of these early operas, and especially their pastoral inspiration, emanated from the same courtly taste prevalent in court spectacle, still very much present a century later, when it had almost completely disappeared from stage shows given in public venues. When Lully launched his own brand of opera, the tragédie en musique, in 1673, he envisioned it as a royal spectacle, even though his playhouse was in Paris

816   the oxford handbook of the baroque and Louis XIV never set foot in it. Lully’s works always premiered at court (except when he was temporarily disgraced in 1677 after Isis was perceived as a critique of the king’s mistress), and included a “prologue,” a supernumerary act unrelated to the main plot, whose sole purpose was to glorify the monarch. It should appear as no coincidence that Louis granted Lully an exclusive license (privilège) to stage operas when he decided to stop performing himself in the traditional aristocratic genre of ballet de cour, which thereafter became extinct. In the context of French court life, tragédie en musique functioned as the replacement of ballet de cour, regardless of what it may have meant to general audiences and of the development of opera in the public sphere. As a result, it became fossilized after a few decades and was eventually abandoned as the Sun King’s successors no longer patronized it; at the death of Rameau in 1764, tragédie en musique had effectively ceased to exist as court spectacle and was swept away by the tidal wave of Italian opera.

In Arcadia Ego As it can be gathered from the preceding pages, the single most influential artistic and literary current of the late Renaissance was the pastoral, an idealized vision of life and love in which pagan gods, mythological beings (nymphs, satyrs, centaurs) and verse-speaking sophisticated shepherds and shepherdesses comingled in a rustic setting and in perennially balmy weather. This fabulous chronotope—usually identified as Arcadia in the Golden Age—originated in Hesiod’s Works and Days (eighth century bce), was further developed in the Idylls of Theocritus (c. 308–c. 240 bce) and later popularized through Virgil’s eclogues (39 bce); by the sixteenth century, it had inspired hundreds of poems, novels, plays, paintings, and sculptures.51 Some of these productions—Arcadia, a romance by the Neapolitan Jacopo Sannazaro (1504); Aminta (1573), a pastoral play by Torquato Tasso; and Il Pastor fído (1589–1602), a tragicommedia by Giambattista Guarini of Ferrara— enjoyed European-wide diffusion, establishing the parameters of an aesthetic matrix that characterizes much of the Baroque era and only began to fade in the late 1700s. While emergent bourgeois taste began to veer toward realism by the eighteenth century, courts remained firmly attached to the pastoral in all of its forms, which perfectly matched aristocratic aspirations above the material contingencies of quotidian life. Furthermore, more than one ambitious ruler saw the myths of Arcadia and the Golden Age as ideal propaganda vehicles: the Medici family made liberal use of figures and symbols usually associated with it in the most elaborate pageants and fêtes staged in Florence from the time of Lorenzo the magnificent (reigned 1469–1492), which Vasari called “truly a golden age for men of talent.”52 Louis XIV appropriated the metaphor, which informed the development of Versailles in ways that could be intricately cryptic.53 It was clear that the entire territory of a kingdom or duchy could not be as effectively likened to Arcadia as the confined perimeter of the court. In the Renaissance, rulers tended to live nomadic lives, constantly moving between their estates for a variety of reasons: security (a roving prince made for a moving target, less vulnerable to assassi-

court spectacle and entertainment   817 nation attempts), seasonal appropriateness (potentates of some importance had summer and winter seats, and many spent much of the fall months in hunting lodges), or simply a taste for change. In the baroque absolutist period, the nature of the court evolved: no longer merely a group of people surrounding the ruler wherever he or she went, it also came to mean the place where this group resided more or less permanently. This led to unprecedented efforts toward creating a curial environment that would emulate the locus amoenus of ancient myth, a pleasantly bucolic yet luxurious venue in which beautiful people could bask in each other’s presence, insulated from the vagaries of ordinary existence: hence the name “Sanssouci”—“Carefree”—given by Frederick II of Prussia to his retreat in Potsdam. The crucial role of idealized nature in the pastoral conceit explains in part the obsession over gardens in baroque princely residences. Here again, we need to set aside our modern conception of the garden as an appendage to an urban dwelling in which one can enjoy some fresh air and commune with nature; centuries ago, Europeans viewed nature as a wild and hostile milieu to be tamed and gardens as exemplars of its domestication—man-made Arcadias in which courtiers could readily imagine themselves as the heroes of their favorite romance. In its most glorified form, a baroque garden did more than provide an agreeable setting for al fresco dining and leisurely strolls, or the static visual enjoyment provided by flowerbeds and sculptures: it had to provide dynamic entertainment. Surprise and motion were key elements, as illustrated by the international career of the most sought-after garden designer of the early baroque period, Jean Salomon de Caus.54 A French-born Huguenot raised in England, de Caus spent his formative years in Italy (1595–1598), studying villa gardens in Pratolino (by Bernardo Buontalenti) and Tivoli (by Pirro Ligorio and Alberto Galvani), before creating in 1614–1620 the Hortus Palatinus (Garden of the Palatinate) in Heidelberg for Elector Palatine Frederick V (Friedrich von Pfalz-Simmern). Although the Hortus made him famous, his forte did not lay in growing flowers or planting trees: he was a hydraulic engineer specializing in mechanical fountains and automata, which had become obligatory features of aristocratic gardens.55 After plying his trade in Brussels at the court of the Austrian Archduke Albert VII of Habsburg, governor of the Netherlands, and of King Charles I in London, de Caus eventually returned to his native land as “Ingénieur et architecte du Roy” under Louis XIII. De Caus was instrumental in placing moving water at the core of garden design, a trend that would culminate in the complex waterworks at Versailles and which reflected a yearning for motion and spectacle. His successor, André Le Nôtre, whose fame has endured to our day, expanded this principle to the broader conception of managing the grounds of an estate so as to impart a pervading sense of movement. At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the rural domain of finance minister Nicolas Fouquet, Le Nôtre experimented with visual trickery in what amounts, in the words of Hazlehurst, to “pure baroque theater.”56 Not only do “the many levels in the garden at Vaux often become apparent only when one walks through the landscape,” but the visitor keeps encountering surprises: features that have suddenly come into sight disappear again; some seem to change in scale, others in shape; buildings “appear to advance at one moment and recede at the next.”57

818   the oxford handbook of the baroque In 1661, Louis XIV, having dispatched Fouquet to prison for life, took in his service all those (Le Nôtre, Le Vau, Lully, and Molière) who had contributed to the splendor of Vaux and to the quasi-princely court that the finance minister kept there, with the mandate of replicating what they had achieved on an even grander scale. Within three years, he was able to hold the magnificent seven-day fête Les Plaisirs de l’Isle Enchantée, which took place in the gardens, temporary structures (including a playhouse) having been erected for the occasion. The king had prioritized work on the enormous park over the main palace building, and in the next ten years he would organize two more major fêtes, even as he did not consider Versailles to be completely inhabitable: he only moved his court there in May 1982, eighteen years after construction had begun. That he considered these gardens as the ultimate form of court spectacle is evidenced in the Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles [How to show the gardens of Versailles], a guide that went through six different iterations, one of which being the only known manuscript by his hand.58 This vademecum makes it perfectly clear that Louis XIV meant his gardens to be experienced in a very specific manner, under the aegis of a director (himself), and not an open space in which to stroll aimlessly, however pleasant that might be. Although he gave theatrical performances and concerts in the gardens as often as weather permitted it, he considered the gardens themselves as the greatest show of all. It is tempting to regard baroque court spectacle as reflective of a bygone era without much relevance to denizens of modern democratic nations. However, we need to acknowledge that the great courts of Europe, for all their failings, served as incubators for a vast palette of artistic forms that may not have flourished—or in some cases, existed at all—without the extraordinary, sometimes unreasonable patronage of kings, princes, and dukes eager to burnish their reputations. The curial microcosm encouraged excellence and experimentation, leading to the emergence of forms that, although doomed (as was the absolutist monarchic system itself) eventually mutated into other forms accessible to a wider audience. While the Italian and French “grand opera” (baroque in origin) has remained a province of elites, it has also spawned the musical, through the British ballad opera of the early eighteenth century; by the end of that century, high baroque gardens, Arcadian playgrounds for a small coterie of aristocrats, had evolved into “Vauxhalls” and “Tivolis,” providing entertainment to a growing populace: the forerunners to our amusement parks. The erstwhile conservative vision of the baroque court as a high point of Western civilization does not have to be negated in a now-dominant critical approach to the phenomenon: we may not regret the disappearance of absolutist monarchy, but we can still appreciate its artistic and cultural legacy, which is the byproduct of an inexhaustible craving for entertainment and spectacle.

Notes 1. See Riguccio Galluzzi, Istoria del granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della casa Medici (Florence: Ranieri del Vivo, Gaetano Cambiagi, 1781), 5 vols. 2. Roy Strong, Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power (Boston: Houghton, 1973), 8.

court spectacle and entertainment   819 3. Hannah E. Bergman, “A Court Entertainment of 1638,” Hispanic Review 42, no. 1 (Winter 1974), 67. 4. Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 16. 5. See Peter H. Wilson, Absolutism in Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2000). 6. Norbert Elias, The Court Society [Die höfische Gesellschaft, 1969], trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983; University College Dublin Press/Dufour Editions, 2006). For updates on and critiques of Elias’s thesis, see for instance The Princely Courts of  Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500–1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), and Jeroen Duindam, Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the Early Modern European Court [Macht en Mythe, 1992] (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995). 7. See Orest A. Ranum, The Fronde: A French Revolution, 1648–1652 (New York: Norton, 1993). 8. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations [Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 1939], trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000). 9. See Vale, The Princely Court, 17. 10. Elias, Court Society, 36. 11. Baldassarre, conte Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier [Il libro del corteggiano, 1528], trans. George Bull, (Cambridge: Penguin, 2011); Baltasar Gracián, y Morales, The Courtier’s Manual Oracle, or, The Art of Prudence. [El Oraculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, 1647] (London: Abel Swalle, 1685); The Art of Worldly Wisdom, trans. Joseph Jacobs (revised) (Boston: Shambhala Pocket Classics, 1993); and Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, Conversations (Paris: E. Martin, 1668); Œuvres complètes, ed. Charles-Henri Boudhors (Paris: Klincksieck, 2008). 12. In the early modern period, wars were still fought intermittently, as operations could only be carried out in reasonably fair weather; in the winter, soldiers went home—a practice abundantly referenced in plays, operas, and other shows given at court. 13. Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, “Un long règne de vile bourgeoisie,” in Mémoires complets et authentiques . . . sur le siècle de Louis XIV et la régence, ed. Adolphe Chéruel et Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Garnier frères, 1853), 147. 14. Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday, “Entertainment,” in A Dictionary of Media and Communication, ed. Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 15. Sarah Carpenter, “Performing Diplomacies: The 1560s Court Entertainments of Mary Queen of Scots,” The Scottish Historical Review 82, no. 214 (October 2003), 194. 16. Elias (Court Society, pp. 72–73) gives as an example the rule that people should spend according to their status, not to their means, which led numerous courtiers to financial ruin. 17. See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jean-François Fitou, Saint-Simon, ou le système de la cour (Paris: Fayard, 1997). 18. Élisabeth Caude, Jérôme de La Gorce and Béatrix Saule, eds., Fêtes & divertissements à la cour (Paris: Gallimard, “Albums Beaux Livres,” 2016). 19. Volker Barth, “Comme le dernier des bourgeois, Les princes en visite incognito,” in Visiteurs de Versailles: Voyageurs, princes, ambassadeurs, 1682–1789, ed. Danielle KislukGrosheide and Bertrand Rondot (Paris: Château de Versailles/Gallimard, 2018), 256–263; Vincent Bastien, “L’Incognito au service de la diplomatie: le séjour du comte et de la comtesse du Nord, 1782,” in Visiteurs de Versailles: Voyageurs, princes, ambassadeurs, 1682–1789, 274–277.

820   the oxford handbook of the baroque 20. See Jacqueline Boucher, “La Fête au XVIe siècle,” in La Fête au XVIe siècle: actes du Xe Colloque du Puy-en-Velay, ed. Marie Viallon-Schoneveld (Saint-Étienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2003), 9–18. 21. Alois M. Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 1539–1637 [Theaterfeste des Medici, 1960], trans. George Hickenlooper (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964; 1976). 22. One of the earlier notable examples was Baldassare Lanci’s work with changeable scenery (periaktoi) at the Florentine court in 1568–1569. See Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 36–48. 23. A sbarra was “a sort of chivalric tournament with hand weapons, embellished with choreography and a parade of allegorical floats” (“sorta di torneo cavalleresco ad armi corte, contornato dallo spiegamento di coregrafie e dalla sfilata di carri allegorici”); Siro Ferrone, Ludovico Zorzi, and Giuliano Innamorati, Il teatro del Cinquecento. I luoghi, i testi e gli attori (Perugia, Italy: Morlacchi Editore, 2008), 42. On the 1579 Florentine sbarra, see Nagler, 49–57; and see Gerald Kahan, Jacques Callot: artist of the theatre (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), 54–70. The French term barrière echoes the Italian sbarra, literally a bar, or barrier, which separated the contenders in a jousting bout. 2 4. See Kahan, Jacques Callot, 27–73, and Edwin De Turck Bechtel, Jacques Callot (New York: G. Braziller, 1955), 14–21. 25. Guerra d’amore/ festa del serenissimo grand duca/ di Toscana/ Cosimo secondo/ fatto in Firenze il carnevale del 1615 / in Firenze /MDC. XV. The textual material was authored by court poet Andrea Salvadori; costumes and sets were designed by Giulio Parigi. The Guerra d’amore also included a triumphal procession and a ballet on horseback; its premise was a rivalry between Indamoro, King of Narsinga (played by Cosimo II) and Gradamento, King of Melinda (Lorenzo, Cosimo’s brother) for the love of the Queen of India. Etching by Jacques Callot. 26. Guerra di belleza / festa a cavallo / fatta in Firenze / per la venuta del serenissimo / principe d’Urbino / grand duca / di Toscana / Cosimo secondo / L’Ottobre del 1616 / In Firenze, 1616. 27. Course de bague—“running at the ring” (catching it with one’s lance while at full gallop)— and course de tête—“tilting at the quintain” (hitting a spinning Mannikin while avoiding to be hit, also at full gallop)—were among the most common events in a medieval jousting tournament. See Robert Coltman Clephan, The Mediaeval Tournament (1919; New York: Dover, 1995), 6–7. 28. This Grand Carrousel involved five quadrilles (groups of riders) each representing a nation: the Romans (led by the King himself), the Persians, the Turks, the Indians, and the American savages. An official account penned by Charles Perrault, lavishly illustrated by Israël Silvestre and François Chauveau, was published as Courses de testes et de Bague Faittes par le Roy et par les Princes et Seigneurs de sa Cour en L’Année 1662 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1670). 29. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 58. 30. Helen  J.  Nicholson, Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice of War in Europe, 300–1500 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 58. 31. See Elias, Civilizing Process (2000), 192–194. 32. The performance of the ballet Il trionfo dell’amore was recorded on a painting by Johann Georg Weikert—one version is is Schönbrunn, the other in Versailles (MV 3945; INV 2183; B 1903)—showing Archduke Maximilian and Ferdinand as cupid and the Groom, and then-Archduchess Marie-Antoinette as the Bride. The chorus in the background featured Countesses Christine and Thérèse von Clary und Aldringen, and Christine and

court spectacle and entertainment   821 Pauline von Auersperg; Frederick Landgraf von Furstenberg, Count Franz Xavier von Auersperg, and Counts Joseph and Wenceslas von Clary und Aldringen. 33. Jan Thomas, Kaiser Leopold  I.  (1640–1705) im Theaterkostüm, in ganzer Figur [Emperor Leopold I in stage costume, full-figure portrait][as Acis La Galatea](1667), oil on copper, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, 9135. 34. Martin Wiggins, “Masque,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 35. See Julia Sutton with Barbara Sparti, “Ballo and Balletto,” in The International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen and The Dance Perspectives Foundation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 36. Fabritio Caroso, Il Ballarino [. . .] diviso in due trattati [. . .] (Venice, Francesco Ziletti, 1581); Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the Nobilta Di Dame (1600), trans. and ed. Julia Sutton (New York: Dover, 1995); Thoinot Arbeau [Jehan Tabourot], Orchésographie et traicté en forme de dialogue par lequel toutes personnes peuvent facilement apprendre & practiquer l’honneste exercice des dances (Langres, France: Jehan des Prez, 1589). Orchesography, 16th Century French Dance from Court to Countryside, trans. Mary Stewart Evans, ed. Julia Sutton (New York: Dover, 1948; 1995); and Cesare Negri, Le gratie d’amore (Milan: Pacifico Ponte and Giovanni Battista Piccaglia, 1602). 37. Raoul-Auger Feuillet, Chorégraphie, ou L’art de décrire la dance par caractères, figures et signes démonstratifs, (Paris: Michel Brunet, 1700). Orchesography; or, The art of dancing by characters and demonstrative figures Wherein the whole art is explain’d; with compleat tables of all steps us’d in dancing, and rules for the motions of the arms, &c. Whereby any person (who understands dancing) may of himself learn all manner of dances. Being an exact and just translation from the French of Monsieur Feuillet. By John Weaver, dancing master (London: J. Walsh, 1706); Jean-Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets, par M. Noverre, maître des ballets de son Altesse sérénissime monseigneur le duc de Wurtemberg (Lyon, France: Aimé Delaroche, 1760). Works of Monsieur Noverre translated from the French [1782] in Noverre, his circle, and the English Lettres sur la danse, ed. Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorp (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2014). 38. See Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002). 39. The reference study is Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his world (1941), trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 40. See Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 41. A survey of his massive output was published by Stephen Orgel and Roy C. Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973). See also Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 42. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix: The players scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie, divided into two parts: wherein it is largely evidenced, by divers Arguments . . . that popular stage-playes . . . are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions . . . and that the profession of play-poets, of stage players, together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of stage-playes, are unlawfull, infamous and misbeseeming Christians (London: Michael Starke, 1633). 43. Entries were very common during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when royal absolutism sought to establish its legitimacy and kings endeavored to take control of cities that, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, had often enjoyed a great deal of

822   the oxford handbook of the baroque independence. The study of this type of spectacle has generated much scholarship in the past two decades: see for instance The Royal Tour of France by Charles IX and Catherine de’ Medici: Festivals and Entries, 1564–6, ed. Victor Ernest Graham and W.  M.  Johnson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), and French Ceremonial Entries in the Sixteenth Century: Event, Image, Text, ed. Nicolas Russell and Hélène Visentin (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007); see for instance The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); the June 1662 carrousel given in Paris by Louis XIV in front of some ten thousand spectators was mirrored in the first phase of the 1664 court fête, Les Plaisirs de l’Isle enchantée, which also included a horse parade of knights and various jousting exercises, but in front of a restricted audience of a few dozen courtiers; the Ommeganck (“Procession” in Flemish) took place yearly in Brussels under the patronage of the Church of Notre-Dame du Sablon and the guild of Crossbowmen. The best known was organized by the College of Jesuits in Brussels on May 31, 1615, to honor Archduchess Isabella of Brabant (daughter of Philip II of Spain). In 1616, Isabella commissioned the Dutch artist Denys van Alsloot to produce six paintings of the Ommeganck, of which only four are now extant: two in the Museo del Prado in Madrid (Inv. P01347–P01348), and two in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Inv. 5928–1859 and 168/169). See Margit Thofner, “The Court in the City, the City in the Court: Denis van Alsloot’s Depictions of the 1615 Brussels ‘Ommegang,’ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 49 (1998), 184–207. 44. Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 30; Nagler (Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 31) speculates that some of the symbols were so obscure as to be understandable only by Borghini, and the authors of the report on the mascherata, Baldini and Cini. 45. See Strong, Splendor at Court, 16–17. 46. His extravagant spending, only ending with his death in 1612, just about bankrupted the city-state. See Maria Bellonci, A Prince of Mantua: The Life and Times of Vincenzo Gonzaga [Segreti dei Gonzaga, 1947], trans. Stuart Hood (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956). 47. Also known as intromessa, introdutto, trasmessa, tramezzo, intermède, entremets. See David Nutter, “Intermedio,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell, 2nd ed. (New York: Grove, 2001). 4 8. See James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 49. Each had a title: L’armonia delle sfere, (Harmony of the Spheres), La gara fra Muse e Pieridi [The singing contest between the Muses and the Pierides], Il combattimento pitico d’Apollo, [the fight between Apollo and the Python], La regione de’ demoni [The Region of Demons], Il canto d’Airone [The Song of Airon], and La discesa d’Apollo e Bacco col Ritmo e l’Armoni [The gift from of Apollo and Bacchus of Rythm and Harmony]. 50. It was recorded in 1973 as Una Stravaganza dei Medici. Intermedi (1589) per “La Pellegrina” by the Taverner Consort, Choir & Players, dir. Andrew Parrott (EMI “Reflexe”), and a staging was filmed by the BBC Four channel. See Nina Treadwell, Music and wonder at the Medici court: the 1589 interludes for La pellegrina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) and “She descended on a cloud ‘from the highest spheres’: Florentine monody ‘alla Romanina’, ” Cambridge Opera Journal 16:1 (2004), 1–22. 51. Most of the foundational studies on the Golden Age and Arcadia motifs are in German: Walter Veit, Studien zur Geschichte des Topos der goldenen Zeit von der Antike bis zum 18.

court spectacle and entertainment   823 Jahrhundert (Doctoral Dissertation, Universität Köln, 1961); Bodo Gatz, Weltalter, goldene Zeit und sinnverwandte Vorstellungen (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967); Klaus Garber, “Arkadien und Gesellschaft. Skizze zur Sozialgeschichte der Schäferdichtung als utopische Literaturform Europas,” in Utopieforschung. Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie, ed. Wilhem Voßkamp, (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), vol. 2, 37–81, and Arkadien. Ein Wunschbild der europäischen Literaten, (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2009). In English, see Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). and Ernst H. Gombrich, “Renaissance and the Golden Age,” in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), 29–34. 52. Giorgio Vasari, “The Life of Sandro Botticelli, Florentine Painter,” The Lives of the Artists [Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, 1550; 1568], translated with an introduction and notes by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 224. 53. See Guy Spielmann, “Le Mythe d’Arcadie dans le texte du pouvoir royal: sémiotique et ésotérisme,” in Et in Arcadia Ego, ed. Antoine Soare (Paris and Tübingen: Biblio 17, 1997), 259–275. 54. See Luke Morgan, Nature as Model: Salomon de Caus and Early Seventeenth-Century Landscape Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007). 55. De Caus himself published a detailed account of it: Hortus Palatinus. A Friderico Rege Boemiae Electore Palatino Heidelbergae Exstructus (Frankfurt, Germany: Bry, 1620). 56. F. Hamilton Hazlehurst, Gardens of Illusion: The Genius of André Le Nostre (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1980), 29. 57. Hazlehurst, Gardens of Illusion, 30; Hazlehurst, Gardens of Illusion, 40. 58. Christopher Thacker, “La Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles by Louis XIV and Others,” Garden History 1, no. 1 (September 1972), 49–69.

Further Reading Aercke, Kristiaan. Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Performances as Rhetorical Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Arnaldi di Balme, Clelia, and Franca Varallo. Feste barocche: cerimonie e spettacoli alla corte dei Savoia tra Cinque e Settecento. Milan: Silvana, 2009. Bauer, Volker. Die höfische Gesellschaft in Deutschland von der Mitte des 17. bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts. Versuch einer Typologie. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993. Bennett, Lawrence. Italian Cantata in Vienna: Entertainment in the Age of Absolutism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013. Berger, Robert W., and Thomas F. Hedin. Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles Under Louis XIV. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Betteridge, Thomas, and Anna Riehl. Tudor Court Culture. Susquehanna, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2010. Bevington, David, and Peter Holbrook. The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Christout, Marie-Françoise. Le Ballet de cour au XVIIe siècle. Geneva: Minkoff, 1987. Costa, Gustavo. La leggenda dei secoli d’oro nella letteratura italiana. Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1972. De la Gorce, Jérôme, and Pierre Jugie. Dans L’Atelier des Menus Plaisirs—Spectacles fêtes et cérémonies aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Archives Nationales, 2010.

824   the oxford handbook of the baroque Du Crest, Sabine. Des Fêtes à Versailles: les divertissements de Louis XIV. Paris: Aux Amateurs de livres, 1990. Ferrer, Teresa. Nobleza y espectáculo teatral, 1535–1622, Madrid: UNED, 1993. Grossegger, Elisabeth, ed. Theater, Feste und Feiern zur Zeit Maria Theresias 1742–1776: Nach den Tagenbucheintragungen des Fürsten Johann Joseph Khevenhüller-Metsch, Obersthofmeister der Kaiserin. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1987. Hammond, Frederick. Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage Under Urban VIII. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Jacquot, Jean, and Elie Konigson. Les Fêtes de la Renaissance. 3 vols. Paris: C.N.R.S., 1956–1975. Lindley, David, ed. The Court Masque. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984. Lindley, David, Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and Martin Wiggins. Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Malacarne, Giancarlo. Le feste del principe: giochi, divertimenti, spettacoli a corte. Modena, Italy: Bulino edizioni d’arte, 2002. McGowan, Margaret M. L’Art du ballet de cour en France, 1581–1643. Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1963. Mulryne, J.  R., and Elizabeth Goldring. Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics, and Performance. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002. Mulryne, J. Ronald, and Margaret Shewring. Italian Renaissance Festivals and their European Influence. Lewiston, UK: Edwin Mellen, 1992. Mulryne, J. R., Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring. Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot, UK: MHRA, 2004. Ravelhofer, Barbara. The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ricciardi, Lucia. Col senno, col tesoro e colla lancia: Riti e giochi cavallereschi nella Firenze del Magnifico Lorenzo. Florence: Le Lettere, 1992. Saslow, James  M. The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Scott, Virginia, and Sara Sturm-Maddox. Performance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen’s Day: Catherine de Médicis and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainebleau. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Streitberger, William  R. The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Strong, Roy. Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Thompson, Ian. The Sun King’s Garden: Louis XIV, Andre Le Nôtre, and the Creation of the Gardens of Versailles. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006. Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen. “Festival Books In Europe From Renaissance To Rococo.” The Seventeenth Century 3, no. 2 (1988): 181–201. Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen, and Anne Simon. Festivals and Ceremonies: A Bibliography of Works Relating to Court, Civic, and Religious Festivals in Europe 1500–1800. London: Mansell, 2000. Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen. Court Culture in Dresden: From Renaissance to Baroque. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Welch, Ellen. R. A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

chapter 37

The Ba roqu e State Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

Baroque: A Political Concept? Baroque is not a political category. The idea of the Baroque epoch is, as we know, an invention of the German-speaking art history of the nineteenth century.1 As a counter concept to Renaissance and classicism, “Baroque” had negative connotations from the outset. To this day, the concept is just as contentious as it is influential on cultural history. Not only is it used to denote a historical epoch; it has also been extended into a transtemporal typology of style of the “baroque spirit” as a “basic human feeling.” The use of the concept betrays at least as much about intellectual history in around 1900 as it does about art in around 1700.2 One might think that this makes the concept useless for a sober historiographical analysis. If I, nonetheless, still talk in the following of the “baroque state,” I am aware of possible objections and risks. In what sense, then, is the term used here? “Baroque state”—that implies that the epoch that is denoted as the baroque period by art historians, literary scholars, musicologists, historians of religion, and so on, also has, besides great diversity, certain significant commonalities in political terms. To speak of a “baroque state” means, in other words, describing a particular political epochal style that linked the countries of Christian Europe to one another. The question is: can we identify a signature that belongs to the epoch, one that links the arts, the sciences, and religion with the political? But what period of time are we talking about exactly? As we know, periodizations vary considerably, depending on whether one is talking about architecture, painting, literature, or music, and on the country to which one is referring. Some refer to the great epoch from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century as the baroque, others have in mind the whole of the seventeenth century, while a few still restrict the concept to the first half of the seventeenth century. From a German perspective, the baroque has been proposed as an alternative term for the period that used to be called “high-absolutism” and was distinguished from “enlightened absolutism.”3 From a French point of view, on the other hand, “the baroque” is usually reserved for the period of the

826   the oxford handbook of the baroque confessional wars and aristocratic revolts, while the reign of Louis XIV is regarded precisely not as baroque, but as the “âge classique.” If historians do speak in relation to France of “l’état baroque” (which few nonetheless do), they do not mean the state of classical absolutism, but rather the period of revolts beforehand, adopting from the history of art the pejorative value of the baroque as “irrégulier, bizarre, inégal.”4 Baroque serves as a negative foil here to help classicism in art, rationalism in thought, and the heyday of absolutism in politics, to stand out in all their glory. From the perspective of art history, “baroque” is closely connected to Catholic reform after the Tridentinum; “baroque piety” ­ opular is used, mostly in a derogatory sense, to denote the “superstitious” forms of p Catholic religiosity, which in turn means that the Dutch Golden Age does not belong properly to it.5 The Spanish historian José Antonio Maravall has understood by baroque a “unique period of European culture during the seventeenth century,” the characteristics of which he sought to prove “in any field of human endeavour,” although he primarily had the Golden Age of Spain in mind.6 In the face of all these differences, historians use “baroque” today mostly as a vague synonym for the epoch between Renaissance and Enlightenment, in order to avoid the oft-criticized term “absolutism,” without, however, linking a theoretical concept to it. A precise concept of the “baroque state” has not been developed. Is “baroque” an ideal category at all when it comes to looking at similarities between European states? Or is the case, rather, what a German historian of religion recently stated: “To speak of a baroque politics would be nonsensical”?7 In contrast, I would like to argue that in the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century, there was, throughout Europe, a similar political style that can be called “baroque.”8 This style is characterized by the idea of t​ he state as an artefact, coupled with a love of geometry, theatricality, and ceremonial order, a general climate of competition, and finally, a fundamental tension between ideal order and factual disorder. The arrangement of the “baroque state” was designed to counter the ubiquitous political chaos. Order and disorder are to be understood as dialectically related sides of one and the same coin. That is, order did not follow chaos; it did not eliminate it, as the older national master-narratives suggested; rather, order always contained disorder as its own reverse. The obsession with order that contemporaries had was their response to the great challenges that they saw themselves as facing. The seventeenth century, as is well known, was a time of extraordinary shocks, which contemporaries regarded as divine visitations. A long-term worsening of the climate led to crop failures, famines, and epidemics. Virtually no year passed without external or internal wars; talk was of the “Iron Age.”9 Even contemporaries were aware of the unusual accumulation of revolts: in Bohemia and Austria in 1618, in Scotland in 1637, in Catalonia and Portugal in 1640, in Ireland in 1641, in Naples and Sicily in 1647, in Ukraine in 1648, to name only the most important. When the Thirty Years’ War and the eighty-years uprising of the Netherlands against Spain were finally settled, the aristocracy revolted in France, and in England, the king was beheaded. The southeast of Europe was in constant fear of renewed invasion by the Ottomans, who in actual fact did besiege Vienna for the second time in 1683. External power-political conflicts combined complexly with internal religious and constitutional conflicts. Competition between powers in Europe was continued by other means as

the baroque state   827 competition for colonial sovereignty overseas. The polarization of denominations and the explosive increase of new knowledge took the foundations away from what people thought was self-evident. All these challenges brought with them an increased need for clarity, stability, and security. Order in the omnipresent chaos and the overcoming of the religious rift were promised by geometry, which astronomers and physicists used to describe the eternal laws of divine creation. “Geometry, which before the origin of things was coeternal with the divine mind and is God himself . . . supplied God with patterns for the creation of the world, and passed over to Man along with the image of God,” wrote Johannes Kepler in 1619.10 The human being sought to emulate this timeless geometrical harmony on earth. Monarchs staged themselves as “Gods on earth,” as “images of God,” who sought to oppose chaos with an order that they themselves had created.11 The most radical demand was formulated by Thomas Hobbes, who was concerned with establishing a new science of politics, one independent of religious controversy and promising absolute certainty.12 Hobbes drew an analogy between God, who created man, and man, who created the state—and according to the same deliberate, infallible rules that prevail in geometry. “Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal,” runs the well-known formulation, “for by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State, in Latin Civitas, which is but an artificial man.”13 As a product of human construction, the state, according to Hobbes, appeared just as calculable as a geometrical figure or a machine. “The skill of making, and maintaining commonwealth, consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry.”14 Hobbes was breaking here with the centuries-old Aristotelian tradition by claiming that all order— including the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, property, status, and rank—is based not on nature, but on human design. The mos geometricus prevailed not only in political theory, but everywhere else, too: in architecture and horticulture, music and dance, military and court ceremonials, fencing and riding, and so on and so forth.15 The ideal of artificial geometrical order, unity, and harmony was at the same time an aesthetic principle: order had to be visible. The baroque state was a theatrical state that was performed on many different stages and that also made use of all the arts—symptomatic of this was the founding of the first Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris in 1648. Sovereignty was aestheticized and art instrumentalized. The principles of political and social order—such as hierarchy, centrality, and discipline—were staged with the greatest magnificence: in processions and pageants, homages and weddings, triumphal arches, and elaborate catafalques.16 A similar political style was able to form everywhere in Europe, since almost all European potentates found themselves in competition with each other for power and greatness, glory and renown, and measured themselves nolens volens according to the same standards. This competition took place at very different levels; it was waged not only with weapons, but also with artistic means. Everywhere, there was a rhetoric of outdoing others.17 The omnipresent competition in the société des princes18 paradoxically led to the fact that the countries of Europe became ever more closely intertwined with each other

828   the oxford handbook of the baroque and knew about each other more and more. This was due not only to the ties of kinship between the dynasties, but also to the war campaigns and peace congresses, the exchange of ambassadors, the travels of artists and scholars, merchants and spies, the grand tour of young nobles, and not least, the increasing spread of printed materials. The increased competition—military and civil, economic, religious, and artistic—resulted in the fact that the countries of Christian Europe, with all their wealth of regional varieties, developed a common political style that was characterized by geometrical harmony, magnificence, and theatricality. The omnipresent pressure to outdo others was potentially ruinous, however, and in the long run, overstretched the resources of all parties involved. But it also initiated processes of structural change that led in the long term to an increase in central power. The theatrical character of the baroque state also constituted its ambivalence. The potentates were by no means as potent as they were presented as being—neither in military terms, nor in the economic, religious, or political sense. They all lived chronically above their means. Knowledgeable observers certainly saw through the façade of the baroque states, with their omnipotence, discipline, and harmony. For, there could be no front stage without a backstage, no formality without informal backdoors, no subjection without hypocrisy, and no military victory without immense sacrifice. Contemporaries had a sharpened sense for simulacra and were adept at the art of dissimulatio—be it in politics, religion, or art.19 Not by accident was “politics” in German another word for deception, intrigue, and deceitful machination. The masters of baroque wisdom taught the art of dissimulation.20 When contemporaries submitted themselves to the staged order, they did so with an inner reservation, reservatio mentalis. What was decisive was not the truth, but the success of the performance. Scarcely anybody made this point clearer than Michel de Montaigne. “That which I myself adore in kings is the crowd of their adorers,” he wrote, “all reverences and submission are due to them, except that of the understanding: my reason is not obliged to bow and bend; my knees are.”21

The Myth of Omnipotence The baroque state was not a sovereign state in an abstract, impersonal sense. The theory of sovereignty, as Jean Bodin had formulated it, was far ahead of the reality.22 “Sovereigns” were first and foremost princes, heads of dynasties. Sovereignty—in Latin, maiestas (majesty)—was a social status; it was something that could be seen.23 The state was the state of the prince or of his house, which was usually in the hereditary possession of the Crown, and which exercised central rule over a series of mostly loosely connected provinces—or claimed to exercise. Rule reproduced itself almost everywhere through heredity. Politics had, to a large extent, the character of dynastic action; that is, the highest goals were the renown, rank, and honor of the ruling house and its territory. These aims turned in the tracts of scholars and the memoranda of state servants into the general interest of “the state,” ratio status.

the baroque state   829 The absolute, godlike omnipotence of the baroque monarchs was not a political reality, but a symbolic fiction, a myth, albeit a thoroughly effective myth.24 The central power that overarched all others was maintained in the state only with the help of the elites comprising nobility, church, and urban citizenry. Even if the monarchs staged themselves as completely impartial, as bound to the superordinate interests of the state alone, they were nonetheless tightly interwoven through patronage and kinship with the aristocracy in their lands. The aristocrat could pursue his own family interests all the better by placing himself in the service of the monarch; the wars offered him the opportunity of glory, honor, and enrichment, too. Aristocratic families and dynasties of rulers were mutually dependent on each other, and were linked by a common loyalty to the hierarchy. For, no monarchy yet had its own central administrative and sanctioning apparatus that could have extended to the simple subjects. To levy and collect taxes, deploy troops, enforce laws, punish the disobedient, and discipline the simple subjects—in short, to exercise central authority—monarchs were everywhere dependent on intermediate powers. Even where they no longer summoned estate assemblies as institutional organs of participation, they still had to respect a certain independence of the provinces and could not forego for long cooperation with the elites located there. Without their participation, monarchs could not access the resources of their lands. In other words, successful monarchical rule was based on processes of negotiation and on compromises between Crown and estates. However, these processes of negotiation often failed significantly in the “long” seventeenth century—mostly because religion came into play and the estates strove aggressively for political independence. As a rule, that brought forth power-political rivals in the ruling dynasty, which could exploit the inner conflicts between Crown and estates. There were protracted and devastating conflicts, of which the Thirty Years’ War was only the most prominent. The unity of Christian Europe consisted in its discord. Not even the permanent external threat of the Ottoman Empire brought the Christian princes into a permanent community of defense. The great tendency to war was due, paradoxically, to the close family ties between the dynasties. The closer they were interwoven by reciprocal marriages, the more potentially competing claims to inheritance there were. Each potentate sought to extend his territories as advantageously as possible, and inheritances offered a welcome opportunity to do so. Numerous military clashes therefore followed conflicts of succession. But the republics were not much less warlike than the monarchies. And the competition between the powers was by no means confined to Europe, but continued in the form of colonial expansion. War was a powerful engine of structural change. A spiral of rearmament had begun at the end of the Middle Ages, one that chronically overburdened the financial resources of the princes. The steadily increasing financial needs of the ever-growing armies and fleets created great pressure to continue to expand outward and to use internal resources more intensively. Thus, a positive process of feedback came about: military armament required tremendous financial resources; the financial exploitation of countries required an apparatus of coercion. Both factors encouraged each other; the military allowed itself to be used against its own subjects. This interaction led to the formation of so-called fiscal-military states, albeit in different forms and at different speeds.25

830   the oxford handbook of the baroque All this changed the relationship of the central power to the simple subjects. The activity of regulation increased quantitatively and qualitatively. The subjects themselves often played an essential role here in that they called on the central power to intervene as a neutral authority in conflicts and, in turn, made use of its regulatory activity.26 The princes continued to regard themselves as the guardians of peace and justice, as those who took on the grievances of the subjects, settled their conflicts, and punished the culprits.27 However, they limited themselves to only a passive-responsive attitude less and less, and instead increasingly took on more and more tasks actively. Legislation was regarded as epitomizing all rights of sovereignty; it marked the sovereign. The Christian community was supposed to be designed according to the rules of “good policy”: church attendance was to be ensured, correct knowledge of belief conveyed, undue luxury inhibited, strict morals created, handicraft and trade controlled, coins, weights, and measures standardized—and so on and so forth; the list grew ever longer. But the princes far exceeded their possibilities with these far-reaching requirements to shape everything. Their ever-more detailed laws were hardly ever really enforced, even if they were repeated and sharpened again and again. But it was not a matter of enforcement alone. Legislation as such already had a symbolic meaning, since it provided the prince with the means to demonstrate his claim to omnipotence and universal jurisdiction. The baroque state was not a denominationally unified state—but it was intended to be so. Un Roi, une loi, une foi was and remained the motto, or cuius regio, eius religio. The monarchs continued to regard themselves as rulers by divine order; their reign had a sacred character, and not only where the ancient European rituals of ordaining the ruler continued to be practiced or were reinstated, as in France, the Roman-German Empire, England, and Sweden, but also where the sacral ritual was dispensed with in the succession to the throne, as in Spain. Despite all the forced concessions to the elites that had different faiths, “Monarchy as a symbol of national identity continued to have clear religious and confessional implications, however broadly defined.”28 The experience of divided faith shaped the consciousness of contemporaries. The great denominational churches had gradually emerged in a long, complex process of reciprocal delimitation based on clear, written avowals of faith. The princes benefited from the denominational division in that they placed on their own political agenda more consistently than ever before the religious disciplining of the subjects, and used the resources of the church to do so. Research on the process of confessionalization has shown that this was equally true of Lutheran, Calvinistic, Anglican, and Catholic authorities.29 The formation of the confessional churches went hand in hand with the strengthening of central secular power almost everywhere. Even if the confessional cultures differed visibly from each other, opposed each other polemically, and competed with one another, they nevertheless had structural similarities: the quest for dogmatic unequivocalness and ritual uniformity, for education and catechesis, and the use of religious propaganda in word, script, and image. The princes, no matter which confession, pursued similar goals in relation to the church, and sometimes used similar means to discipline the subjects religiously. What the European countries also shared across confessional borders was that they hardly ever achieved the religious homogenization of the entire body of subjects.

the baroque state   831 Disciplining also found its limits here.30 Those forced to move back and forth between different denominations developed a sharpened awareness of the arbitrariness with which confessional boundaries were drawn. Dissimulation, ambiguity, hypocrisy, and indifference were the other side of the political quest for religious uniformity and unequivocalness.31

War and Geometry The baroque states were warlike through and through. Experts in international law described the relationship between the states of Christian Europe as a “natural state” of potential war of each against all. But because war meant chaos and destruction, it was at the same time the greatest challenge for the warlords to establish order. It was necessary to curb physical violence and to make it an instrument in the hands of the monarch. It was precisely the “theater of war” that was the stage on which—exemplary for society as a whole—perfect geometrical harmony and discipline were to be established. This was to be done in two ways: on the one hand, through building perfect fortifications to dominate the territory; on the other hand, through transforming troops into artificial bodies that functioned like machines. Both aims were achieved with the aid of that art that served the measurement and design of space—namely, geometry. The relationship of the princes to space changed when rule was increasingly designed to be no longer so much rule over persons and corporations as rule over closed territories. It was necessary to establish as uniform a power as possible over a clearly defined area that was as uniform as possible—which in reality was usually a very distant prospect. In fact, the princes exercised a variety of different rights and prerogatives with regard to different persons and corporations. In order now to enforce the claim of sovereign power over a territory and to defend it against attackers, clear borders had to be drawn and the entire space controlled strategically.32 For this purpose, fortification lines were used that were as free of gaps as possible. In actual fact, most wars consisted in the siege of fortresses and fortified towns. Military commanders sought to avoid open battlefields, which became the exceptions. Fortress-building was probably the most spectacular practical application of geometry.33 Mathematicians, fortress engineers, architects, and learned laity constructed ever more complex fortification systems from the basic figures of the circle or rectangle, and they surpassed each other in developing ever more refined geometrical figures. Around the fortress core were placed more and more ramparts and bastions, courtines, ravelins, tenailles, bonnets, lunettes and demilunes, contregardes, faces, and couvrefaces. The fortified town of Neuf-Brisach, shown in Figure 1, was designed by Marquis de Vauban in 1698, and is a good example of a complex fortification system built using ravelins, tenailles, and contregardes. It was not just a matter of reacting to progress in artillery techniques; it was also a matter of creating works of perfect beauty and symmetry according to the unchanging

832   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 1  Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Plan de la ville de Neuf Brisach, construite sur ordre de Louis XIV après la perte de Vieux Brisach sur le Rhin (c.1697).

laws of geometry. The various “models,” published in elaborate printing works, were often only executed on paper; while in reality, care had to be taken of natural conditions. However, the actual fortifications also increasingly surpassed each other in terms of extent and geometrical refinement. This can hardly be explained by military usefulness alone. The symbolic function overlaid the practical function and sometimes even stood in the way of what contemporary critics had already noticed. The arrangements served not only the actual mastery of the space; they also and above all were a symbol of harmonious order and central rule—not unlike baroque horticulture and the arrangement of symmetrical plans of cities.34 The object of geometry was also the “evolutions,” that is, the precisely standardized movements of troops, as shown in Figure 2. From the necessity of defending themselves against the Spanish army, the counts of Nassau, as commanders of the insurgent Netherlands, invented a new form of military discipline.35 In order to make the foot troops more mobile with their pikes and rifles,

the baroque state   833 and to make the extremely cumbersome use of shotguns more efficient, they broke the movements of the soldiers down into the smallest units, with these movements being executed at the relevant command in a meticulously uniform manner. Instruction books depicted the individual elements of movement with great accuracy, so that they could be studied precisely. The specification of each individual grip during loading and shooting ensured that firing could take place in a regular rhythm in ordered salvos. The individual soldiers were arranged precisely in line with one another, and their movements were so exactly synchronized with each other, as in a ballet, that they could be moved on command in all directions. Through perfect “drill”—this concept was also new—the troop was to be turned into a single, flexibly controllable artificial body whose movements in the battle functioned just as precisely as they did in the exercises in the field camp.

Figure 2  Autographic sketch of military evolutions by Count Johann of Nassau-Siegen (1610). Werner Hahlweg, Die Heeresreform der Oranier: Das Kriegsbuch des Grafen Johann von NassauSiegen (Wiesbaden: Selbstverlag der Historischen Kommission für Nassau, 1973), 239.

834   the oxford handbook of the baroque The soldiers were not to respond individually to the enemy, but collectively to commands. Personal bravery and heroic individual combat were seen as superfluous. “You would think a whole Regiment well disciplined, as this was, were all but one body, and of one motion, their eares obeying the command all as one, their eyes turning all alike, at the first signe given, their hands going to execution as one hand, giving one stroake, yea many stroakes all alike, ever readie to strike, or hold up, as their Commander pleaseth.”36 The products of the art of war were, like works of art or music, measured according to aesthetic standards. Contemporaries perceived these perfectly disciplined troop bodies not only as strong in battle, but also as harmonious, beautiful, and “graceful.” Even though it is questionable how far this discipline could actually be sustained in the real battle, the drill undoubtedly increased the central controllability of military operations. The victories of the Netherlanders and later of the Swedes turned the new art of war into a model for success; it remained, in further developed forms, the yardstick at least until the French Revolutionary Wars. Military discipline had an effect that reached far beyond the military sector. It was the pattern for the control of the body and of the affects as a social ideal. A classic figure of baroque military science, Hanns Friedrich Fleming, regarded war as an essential driving force behind the general ceremonial normatization of behavior of which contemporaries were so proud: “The Ceremoniel has risen to the highest peak in our time; war itself has a very great role in this.”37 As a perfectly symmetrical, harmoniously arranged body set in motion by a single person, the drilled troops were the embodiment of what was imagined under a social order more geometrico. Just as fortress design, castle architecture, and horticulture made the ideal of central monarchical rule visible, so these troops symbolized the ideal of the disciplined group of subjects. “If anywhere at all, then it was on the exercise field that absolutism became reality.”38

Ceremonial Order One essential feature of the baroque political style was the extraordinarily strict ceremonial shaping of social intercourse. The ideal of geometrical order also prevailed here. The social hierarchy should be shown perfectly in the arrangement of the persons in the room. This was true not only, but primarily, for the princely courts. The court ceremonial normatized all daily routines, regulated how all court members behaved to each other, and channeled access to the monarch, to whom everything was oriented.39 In the course of the seventeenth century, ceremonial rules became more and more complex and precise. Formalized to the smallest detail were who, when, where may stand, walk, sit, or speak, who must approach whom in how many steps, who bows, kneels, takes their hat off to whom, who is served at the table by whom in what order, who may ride with how many horses and be accompanied by how many runners, and so on and so forth. In order to cope with this complexity, it became necessary to establish special offices for ceremonies and to record every procedure in writing. This began with the establishment

the baroque state   835 of its own ceremonial office at the imperial court in 1652, for example, and also the recording of all ceremonial events. At the same time, the monarchs issued ever more precise regulations governing rank for their courts. All this was, in turn, meticulously collected and published in massive compendia by learned “ceremonial scholars” such as John Finet, Théodore and Denys de Godefroy, Johann Christian Lünig, and Jean Rousset de Missy. These records had not only a descriptive, but also a prescriptive character: the way that a ceremony had once been held served as a precedent for the future. At the same time, the residential palaces had to be set up as stages for the ceremonial procedures and be adapted to the ever more complicated requirements: staircases of honor made possible an exact gradation in the literal sense in the rendering of honor; longer and longer apartment corridors increased the distance to the prince and staggered access to him. The essential purpose of the ceremonial was not only to make visible a clear hierarchy between all those present at the court, but, to a certain extent, to create this hierarchy in the first place. The rank of a courtier at court was evident to everyone by the space that they could enter on solemn occasions. But the more people there were in a limited space in the residence, the more complex were the relations of rank; the more sophisticated the ceremonial, the more competitive and conflicting it also became. This demanded in everyday life constant attention, self-control, and dissimulation on the part of all “persons of rank.” For as stable, harmonious, and natural as the hierarchical order of society was designed to be, it was of course not. There were ultimately quite different ranking criteria that did not match up with one another: birth, sex, office, ancienneté, and so on. There were, therefore, potential conflicts everywhere. Literally everything could be interpreted as a sign of rank and thus become the occasion for bitter controversy. This was by no means true only for the courts. At all other levels of society, people also fought over rank: in the estate assemblies, towns, universities, guilds, craft guilds, and in the church. Such conflicts by no means remained behind the scenes, but took place mostly on solemn occasions on the public stage, and were accompanied not infrequently by physical violence. They often went back several generations and were increasingly resolved in court. In principle, it was a matter for the princes to decide such conflicts. They were regarded not only as the highest judges, but also as legislators in questions of rank. “Establishing rank among the citizens is a matter for the highest authority,” wrote the legal scholars.40 It was ideally assumed that, following the example of the court, the entire body of subjects of a country could and would be hierarchically ordered and regulated in order to rule out conflicts over rank once and for all. Thus, a German encyclopedia of the early eighteenth century wrote: “It would be well to have everywhere not only correct and specific rules for the court, but also general rules of rank that would prescribe the rank to all subjects in the country according to their ­different statuses, offices, trades, and professions, and . . . would be strengthened by sovereign authority.”41 In reality, such proposals—if there really had been an intention to realize them—would have had little prospect of being enforced. The ideal of a perfect, clear, and always correctly readable social hierarchy was a phantasm. In the social reality, this ideal produced more conflicts than it provided order.

836   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Theater State The baroque state was a theater state. The topos of the world as a stage, theatrum mundi, Schau-Platz, teatro del mundo, or comédie was, as we know, used countless times in diverse ways in the various European literatures. The awareness that the whole of society constantly staged itself to itself, and that everybody played changing roles, was omnipresent. This was especially true of the princely courts, where everything from everyday activities to the great dynastic festivals had to follow a fixed script, although the participants were usually actors and spectators at the same time. That the court was a theatrical production, in which the monarch played the leading role, was not only metaphorical, but also literal. The princes did not restrict themselves to being glorified by artists and to watching from the box as they were rendered homage in grand operas, tragedies, and Grands Ballets. On the occasion of great court celebrations, they also appeared on stage and portrayed themselves mythologically in their role as ruler—as Jupiter, Apollo, Hercules, Alexander, or Augustus. Louis XIV as sol invictus in the Ballet Royal de la Nuit of 1653 is the most well-known example. Emperor Leopold I also appeared as Acis in La Galatea on the occasion of his own wedding, and his granddaughter Maria Theresa sang for her mother’s birthday in the musical drama Le grazie vendicate, which she had commissioned for this occasion from the court poet Metastasio.42 The great dynastic-political events were the occasions for such court spectacula: weddings and baptisms, coronations and homages, victories and peace deals. These were highly complex, total artworks to which all “arts”—in the premodern, broad meaning of the term—contributed: not only architecture and sculpture, painting and engraving, music and poetry, but also the art of artillery and fireworks, the art of costume cutters and wagon builders, harness makers, goldsmiths and armory, of the riding, fencing, and dancing masters, of porcelain makers and sugar bakers. They were all in the service of princely glorification, and often created their works for only one festive occasion. The simple subjects were also included in the design of the festivals; they had to provide for illuminations and decorations and to function as a celebratory backdrop, since nothing was more embarrassing for the prince at such a festival than a procession through empty streets without enthusiastic spectators. The court festivals were hybrid events. They consisted, on the one hand, of traditional ritual elements such as entrées, homages, and church services, and on the other hand of divertissements such as banquets, operas, masquerades, tournaments, fireworks, and sleigh rides.43 The roles of actors and spectators could scarcely be separated. All the elements of such great festivals used similar allegorical-mythological motifs and basic ceremonial forms; all were played out in the great public domain; all followed a previously negotiated and fixed procedure; all needed precise direction; and all had a rhetorical character and aimed at the affective overpowering of the participants, at movere, docere, and delectare. The boundaries between the genres were not yet clear; musical, dance, and spoken theater, pageants, and processions were mixed. Even the sacred and the secular

the baroque state   837 could hardly be separated; the forms in which God and the monarch were worshipped often looked so similar to one another as to be easily confused. Paradigmatic of the baroque spectacles to glorify the ruler and his dynasty are the courtly carrousels, different combinations of tournament, theater, equestrian ballet, music, emblematics, and masquerade.44 Designed as symbolic competitions between different “nations,” they contained everything that the courtly culture of the time had to offer: they combined extreme material splendor, geometrical harmony, and ceremonial discipline, artistic excellence, and astounding mechanical theater effects. The spectacula were the continuation of war by other means.45 The Parisian carrousel on the occasion of the birth of the French heir to the throne in 1662, when Louis XIV, as Apollo, drove the sun chariot (carrus soli), had an effect on style. The splendor and the grandeur of the spectacle put everything that had hitherto been present in the shade: an ephemeral amphitheater had been erected for it in the Tuileries that offered space for 700 horses and 15,000 spectators. But it was not just about displaying maximum splendor; it was also about staging power-political competition with symbolic means. The example of the relationship between the French king and the Emperor makes this particularly clear. In 1662, for instance, Louis XIV presented himself as Imperator Augustus, thereby directly challenging Emperor Leopold I at a symbolic level. The latter understood the challenge and accepted it. During 1666–1667, he had the festivities on the occasion of his wedding with the Spanish infanta Margarita Teresa culminate in a complex spectacle that depicted a contest between air and water, Contesa dell’aria e dell’acqua. At the height of a sequence of twenty-six allegorical scenes, a triumphal chariot descended from the sky onto the stage, which the Emperor himself boarded as Deus ex machina, as shown in Figure 3.46 The message was obvious: the house of Austria had always prevailed in the conflict about rank between the powers. In view of the fact that Louis XIV and Leopold I had both married a Spanish infanta, the two carrousels could be read as a symbolic anticipation of the conflict on the Spanish succession. Other monarchs tried to outdo these stagings. The fact that the Swedish Crown had established itself as a great European power in the Thirty Years’ War was also to be confirmed by symbolic means. Thus, in 1672, Charles XI of Sweden performed as chevalier de la gloire in a certamen equestre that was concerned with who led the European powers against the enemies of Christendom, the Turks. The printing work that bore witness to it was the most elaborate festival book that had ever been seen in Sweden.47 The courtly fashion of carrousels continued until well into the eighteenth century; the old major powers used them as much as the newcomers. Even Maria Theresa took part in a spectacular ladies’ carrousel in Vienna in 1743, during her war of succession, dressed as an Amazon; and she had a huge ceremonial painting of it done for posterity.48 And even Frederick II of Prussia, who enjoyed the reputation of a simple military commander and philosopher king who was disinclined to all courtly pomp, could not refrain from holding a magnificent carrousel after his military successes over the House of Habsburg in 1750, in order to show the European courts his new claim to great power.49

838   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Figure 3 “Gründliche warhafftige und eigentliche Beschreibung derer [. . .] vortrefflichen Festivitäten/welche sich bey der Hochzeit des unüberwündlichen Römischen Keysers LEOPOLD I. etc. zwischen denen zweyen Elementen dem Wasser und Lufft begeben haben.” Wolfgang Harms and Michael Schilling, eds., Deutsche Illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. III (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), no. 199, 391.

The later documentation of these court festivals in words and pictures was taken just as seriously, and in its own way was just as ornate and elaborate as the festivals themselves. Such printed representations—virtually stagings of the second order, so to say—were available in differently graded formats, from elaborate folios to illustrated single-page

the baroque state   839 prints. These works were addressed on the one hand to the participants themselves, the members of the court society, and the guests from abroad who were allowed to sun themselves in the glory and splendor of the festival. But they were also addressed above all to other European potentates and their courts with whom they were vying for who offered the most elaborate and original stagings, commissioned the most important artists, and drew the highest ranking aristocratic families to court. Leopold I personally sent ten copies of a depiction of his wedding spectacle to the Spanish court with the express wish that they be distributed there to the ambassadors, so that the message “reaches the world.”50 In short, competition between the European potentates was played out not only on the battlefield, but also on the field of courtly stagings.

Theatrum Praecedentiae Competition between the potentates and dynasties for status and rank at the Theatrum Europaeum was ubiquitous. No prince could escape this if he did not want to risk falling into insignificance or even losing his political independence. For, in essence, it was about who was entitled to play as an equal actor in the circle of the sovereign, and who was not. Many “middle powers,” such as Frederick II (I) of Prussia and Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, did everything they could to obtain a royal title and be included in the exclusive circle of “crowned heads.” Even princes without royal title had their own troops, and whoever was not in a position to do so at least competed in the competition for the most important residential palace, or the best court conductor—as the petty princes of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation did, for example. Also, republics such as the United Netherlands and Venice placed great value on not being moved back in the hierarchy behind monarchies; indeed, even the mayors of German imperial cities attempted, albeit in vain, to socialize with the princes on the same footing. The order of rank in Christendom had shifted more strongly than ever before. It had traditionally been regarded as stable and unchanging, as part of a God-given hierarchical order in the world that began with the divine Trinity itself, continued down through the celestial armies, to the emperors and kings, dukes and counts, down to the animals, the lowest worm, and even finally to inanimate nature.51 Even though there had never been full agreement on the exact ranking of the powers, and scholars had argued about it in innumerable tracts, the objective existence of a universal order of rank was something of which everybody was convinced. This changed noticeably in the seventeenth century. The ranking among the monarchs appeared increasingly flexible and contingent, as something in constant flux, something under constant attack and in need of defense. One reason for this was that there was no longer an arbitrator, a ruler over the hierarchy of Christendom. Since the Reformation, the Pope, who had been granted this role in around 1500, was no longer an option. Scholars put forward long lists of criteria to measure the preeminence, the precedence, of the European monarchs. Traditionally, such a yardstick had been, for example, which country first saw the gospel proclaimed, which dynasty

840   the oxford handbook of the baroque could be traced back the furthest into antiquity, or which king had made the most efforts to protect the church from infidels. Other criteria came to the fore in the seventeenth century: namely, how many territories a monarch had, how he had multiplied them through magnificent acts of war, and how unrestricted his power was. According to French scholars, the monarch that earned the higher rank had unlimited, hereditary potestas legibus soluta (free from the powers of law). On the other hand, German lawyers argued that preeminence was given to the ruler who had the higher-ranked, more powerful, and freer vassals.52 In short, there was already no consensus on how to rank the criteria used for ranking. In contrast to such unsuccessful scholarly speculations, concrete practice increasingly prevailed in the seventeenth century when it came to precedence at the Theatrum Europaeum. It was considered decisive how the potentates or their representatives, the ambassadeurs, dealt with each other in personal contact. The medium in which the princes agreed on the relations of rank was the diplomatic ceremonial. Since the second half of the seventeenth century at the latest, all the great courts maintained alternately permanent embassies.53 The collective rules of ambassadorial intercourse included a ceremonial code, which acquired over time ever greater precision. Specific details governing form of address and precedence became the standard vocabulary of this symbolic code, with new signs of differentiation being added constantly: for instance, the number of thresholds and stairway steps separating the introducteur des ambassadeurs from the ambassador, the number of coaches and horses that brought him, or the preciousness of the gifts that were exchanged with him. This code was the lingua franca of the European power system, a largely nonverbal yet very precise language. What was at stake here were anything but insignificant superficialities. The ceremonial honors that were shown, or not shown, to ambassadors at foreign courts not only represented the mutual relations of ranking between the potentates, but also rebalanced them. The precedence had a performative character; that is, it itself created what it represented. This meant that princes or their ambassadors who could not reach agreement on their respective rank had to avoid one another permanently. If they were to meet each other at a public event, the latent conflict could escalate quickly; in some cases, there were even instances of violence with deaths and injuries. The competition for rank between the European potentates was as passionate as it was futile. A contemporary wrote in around 1700 about the theatrum praecedentiae: So it has . . . now come through a saeculum that no king or crowned head wants to yield anything in rank or precedence to the other, and even less to be subordinated to him. For they no longer want to measure rank among themselves according to the antiquity of their kingdoms, royal splendour and name, and nor according to the puissance of their richness or size and richness of their country, but merely according to royal authority, honour and sovereignty, which no distinction suffers.54

In other words, it seemed increasingly illusionary to establish a universally accepted, “objective” ranking. Instead, it was much more fundamentally about who was able to play at all on the stage of the sovereign as an equitable actor. For this was the object of an

the baroque state   841 extremely hard struggle for survival. Not all princes succeeded by any means in preserving their political independence. A long-term power-political process of concentration took place at the Theatrum Europaeum, with many smaller potentates falling victim to it, while a few prevailed as great powers.

Conclusion Political style in the “Baroque Age” was shaped throughout Europe by competition between potentates. Since this competition was conducted with military, diplomatic, and artistic means at the same time, it makes sense to transfer the category “baroque” from art and literature to the political realm. This, however, is to take an aerial view of Europe, and I have completely ignored here the many profound differences between the states to which every expert will immediately point. The omnipresent competition led, on the one hand, to a strong concentration of power among a few, but on the other hand, to the long-term overstretching of resources among almost all parties involved. It seems that the mismatch between ambitious political goals and the resources that were available was seldom as extreme, and the gap between ideal geometrical order and chaotic reality seldom as deep, as in this epoch. But the tensions between front and back stage were something that the actors were well aware of. The staging of the political produced suspicions concerning external appearance and necessitated dissimulation and hypocrisy. The artificial character of the political order was as little hidden to the participants as the artificiality of baroque architecture, or the refinement of trompe-l’oeil painting. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz noted that only that king is king who is considered king and is treated as such by others.55 In the postmodern, such a spirit of constructivism is being appreciated again. As in the 1920s or the 1960s, talk is again in the twenty-first century of a “return of the Baroque.”56 This applies at least to literature and the fine arts. No one has yet spoken of a new political baroque, however. But there is also clearly a number of phenomena in the field of the political that are mutatis mutandis reminiscent of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century: failing states, asymmetrical military conflicts, the political instrumentalization of religion, and also a new autocratic-pompous political style. In short: dramatically increased political uncertainty and confusion. All this makes us turn to look again at the age of the Baroque.

Notes 1. Walter Moser, “Barock,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler 2000), I, 578–618; Ulrich Pfisterer, Dirk Niefanger, and Konrad Krüger, “Baroque,” in Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/ 2352-272_emho_COM_017336; Marcel Lepper, “Typologie, Stilpsychologie, Kunstwollen. Zur Erfindung des ‘Barock’ (1900–1933),” Arcadia 41 (2006): 14–28.

842   the oxford handbook of the baroque 2. See, for example, Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library. Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 3. For the fourth revised edition of 2007 of his overview The Age of Absolutism (Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte, Band 11) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), Heinz Duchhardt used the title Baroque and Enlightenment (Barock und Aufklärung) in order to avoid the concept of “absolutism.” He does not give any substantive reasons for the choice of the term “Baroque,” however. On the debate on the concept of absolutism see footnote 24. 4. Henri Méchoulan, ed., L’État baroque. Regards sur la pensée politique de la France du premier XVIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1985); see in particular ibid., 7–87. Ibid., VII–XXXV, uses in the same volume the term “classical monarchy” in the broader sense of the entire Early Modern period. 5. See Peter Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter, 2 vols. (Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder, 2006); Dieter Breuer, ed., Religion und Religiosität im Zeitalter des Barock (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995). 6. José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del Barroco: Análisis de una estructura histórica (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1975), here quoted from the English translation: Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986), Introduction, 6. See Rosario Villari, ed., L’Uomo barocco (Rome: Editori Laterza, 1991). 7. “Von einer barocken Politik zu sprechen wäre unsinnig.” Peter Hersche, “Barock in der Geschichte,” in Barock—Nur schöner Schein?, ed. Alfried Wieczorek, Christoph Lind, and Uta Coburger (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2016), 31. 8. I use the term “baroque state” as an ideal type in Max Weber’s sense, in order to emphasize and highlight certain aspects of historical phenomena. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 3 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1968), 190ff. As far as periodization is concerned, I understand the baroque epoch, very roughly, as the period from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, which is a very broad epoch. On the concept of political style, see Dietrich Erben and Christine Tauber, eds., Politikstile und die Sichtbarkeit des Politischen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Passau: Klinger, 2016). 9. See Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); see also Manfred JakubowskiTiessen, ed., Krisen des 17. Jahrhunderts. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999). 10. Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi (1619), English translation: The Harmony of the World, translated into English with an Introduction and Notes by E. J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan, and J. V. Field (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1997), 304, see ibid. 146. 11. The parallels between the omnipotence of God in heaven and the monarch on earth are found everywhere; for example, in Cardinal de Richelieu: Testament politique de Richelieu, ed. Françoise Hildesheimer (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995); or in Johann Christian Lünig, Theatrum ceremoniale historico-politicum, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Moritz Georg Weidmann, 1719–1720), I, 292. 12. On this generally, see Wolfgang Röd, Geometrischer Geist und Naturrecht. Methoden­ geschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Staatsphilosophie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (München: De Gruyter, 1970). 13. Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan,” in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Vol. 3, ed. William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839), ixf. 14. Hobbes, English Works, 195f.

the baroque state   843 15. According to Henning Eichberg, “Geometrie als barocke Verhaltensnorm. Fortifikation und Exerzitien,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 4 (1977): 17–50. 16. Examples in J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring, eds., Europa Triumphans. Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004); Pierre Béhar and Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, eds., Spectaculum Europaeum. Theatre and Spectacle in Europe (1580–1750) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999). 17. Wilfried Barner, Barockrhetorik. Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1970); Martin Disselkamp, Barockheroismus. Konzeptionen “politischer” Größe in Literatur und Traktatistik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002); Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles. The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 18. Lucien Bély, La société des princes, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 19. Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying. Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, “Simulation et dissimulation. Quatre définitions (XVIe–XVIIe siècle),” in Deceptio. Mystifications, tromperies, illusions. De l’Antiquité au XVIIe siècle, ed. Françoise Laurent and Francis Dubost (Montpellier: Publications de l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III, 2000), 49–75; Jon  R.  Snyder, Dissimulation and the Art of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 20. Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia [1647], translated into English, (London: Macmillan, 1892); Torquato Accetto, Della dissimulazione onesta (Bari: Laterza, 1641). 21. Michel de Montaigne, De l’art de conférer [1580], English translation: “On the art of conferring,” in The Works of Michel de Montaigne, With Notes, Life and Letters Complete in Ten Volumes, vol. VIII: Essays, trans. Charles Cotton (New York: Edwin C. Hill, 1910), 215. 22. Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1576). 23. André Krischer, “Souveränität als sozialer Status. Zur Funktion des diplomatischen Zeremoniells in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Diplomatisches Zeremoniell in Europa und dem Mittleren Osten in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Jan-Paul Niederkorn, Ralf Kauz, and Giorgio Rota (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 1–32. 24. Lothar Schilling, ed., Absolutismus, ein unersetzliches Forschungskonzept?/L’Absolutisme— un concept irremplaçable? Eine deutsch-französische Bilanz (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008); Wolfgang Schmale, “The Future of ‘Absolutism’ in Historiography. Recent Tendencies,” Journal of Early Modern History 2 (1998): 192–202. 25. M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618–1780 (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1988); Michael Duffy, ed., The Military Revolution and the State, 1500–1800 (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter, 1980); Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden as Fiscal-military States, 1500–1660 (London: Routledge, 2002); Philippe Contamine, ed., War and Competition between States (The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, vol. 5) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 26. André Holenstein, Ion Mathieu, and Wim Blockmans, eds., Empowering Interactions. Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe 1300–1900 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009). 27. Cecilia Nubola and Andreas Würgler, eds., Bittschriften und Gravamina. Politik, Verwaltung und Justiz in Europa (14.–18. Jahrhundert) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005). 28. Ronald G. Asch, Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment. The French and the English Monarchies 1587–1688 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 165.

844   the oxford handbook of the baroque 29. Fundamental here is Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformation­ sgeschichte 68 (1977): 226–251. 30. Heinrich Richard Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Plädoyer für das Ende des Etatismus in der Konfessionalisierungsforschung,” Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1997): 639–682. 31. See footnote  19; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and Andreas Pietsch, eds., Konfessionelle Ambiguität. Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit (Gütersloh: Mohn, 2013). 32. Karin Friedrich, ed., Die Erschließung des Raumes. Konstruktion, Imagination und Darstellung von Räumen und Grenzen im Barockzeitalter, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014). 33. Eichberg, “Geometrie als barocke Verhaltensnorm”; fundamental on fortress architecture is Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare. The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1494–1660 (London: Routledge, 1979) and Siege Warfare II. The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great (London: Routledge, 1985). 34. See in this volume. 35. See footnote 25; Michael Sikora, “Die Mechanisierung des Kriegers,” in Bewegtes Leben. Körpertechniken in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Rebekka von Mallinckrodt (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2008): 143–166; Jürgen Luh, Kriegskunst in Europa 1650–1800 (Weimar/Cologne/Vienna: Böhlau, 2004). 36. According to the Scottish officer Robert Monro in the Thirty Years’ War: William S.  Brockington jr., ed., Monro, His Expedition with the Worthy Scots Regiment called MacKeys (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 49. 37. Hanns Friedrich von Fleming, Der vollkommene Teutsche Soldat [Leipzig, 1729] (Osnabrück: Biblio, 1967), 94. 38. Sikora, “Die Mechanisierung des Kriegers,” 166. 39. Still essential, despite all criticism: Norbert Elias, The Court Society (The Collected Works of Norbert Elias) [1969], trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Stephen Mennell, (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006). See also Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, The Emperor’s Old Clothes. Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015); Fanny Cosandey, Le Rang. Préséances et hiérarchies dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Gallimard, 2016); Raphaël Fournier, De l’hierarchie à la souveraineté. Rangs, préséances et constitution du royaume de Louis XIII à la Régence (Issy-les-Moulineaux: Lextenso, 2017). 40. Samuel Pufendorf, De officio hominis et civis (Londini Scanorum: Sumtibus A. Junghans, 1673), II,14,15f.; see Hobbes, Works, II, 18. 41. Johann Heinrich Zedler, Großes Vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste, vol. XXX (Halle/ Leipzig: Zedler, 1732–1754), col. 812, s.v. “Rang.” 42. Martin Wrede, ed., Die Inszenierung der heroischen Monarchie. Frühneuzeitliches Königtum zwischen ritterlichem Erbe und kriegerischer Herausforderung (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2014); Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Jutta Schumann, Die andere Sonne. Kaiserbild und Medienstrategien im Zeitalter Leopolds (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004); Maria Goloubeva, The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle and Text (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2000); Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Maria Theresa. The Empress in Her Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), chapter VII. 43. See Béhar and Watanabe O’Kelly, eds., Spectaculum Europaeum and Mulryne et al., eds., Europa triumphans. See the contribution of Guy Spielmann in this volume.

the baroque state   845 44. Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, “Tournaments in Europe,” in Béhar and Watanabe O’Kelly, Spectaculum Europaeum, 628–630. 45. According to Friedrich B. Polleross, “Sonnenkönig und österreichische Sonne. Kunst und Wissenschaft als Fortsetzung des Krieges mit anderen Mitteln,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 40 (1987): 239–256. 46. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 97f.; Goloubeva, The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I, 103–120; Schumann, Die andere Sonne, 243–267; on illustrated leaflets, see ibid., 520–521, figure 27–28; “Gründliche warhafftige und eigentliche Beschreibung derer [. . .] vortrefflichen Festivitäten/ welche sich bey der Hochzeit des unüberwündlichen Römischen Keysers LEOPOLD I. etc. zwischen denen zweyen Elementen dem Wasser und Lufft begeben haben,” in Deutsche Illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. III, ed. Wolfgang Harms and Michael Schilling (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), no. 199, 390–391. 47. Lena Rangström, “Certamen equestre,” in Die Inszenierung der heroischen Monarchie. Frühneuzeitliches Königtum zwischen ritterlichem Erbe und kriegerischer Herausforderung, ed. Martin Wrede (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2014), 266–286; Mulryne et al., eds., Europa triumphans, II, 292–297. 48. Stollberg-Rilinger, Maria Theresa, chapter III. 49. Thomas Biskup, “Turnier und Kulturtransfer. Das Carrousel Friedrichs II. von Preußen und die Neudefinition königlicher ‘Größe’ im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,” in Die Inszenierung der heroischen Monarchie. Frühneuzeitliches Königtum zwischen ritterlichem Erbe und kriegerischer Herausforderung, ed. Martin Wrede (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2014), 287–316. 50. Schumann, Die andere Sonne, 253. 51. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936, 1961, 1970). See, for example, Barthélemy de Chasseneuz, Catalogus gloriae mundi (Frankfurt: Johannes Sauer, 1603). 52. See Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Die Wissenschaft der feinen Unterschiede. Das Präzeden­ zrecht und die europäischen Monarchien vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert,” Majestas 10 (2002): 125–150. 53. See André Krischer, “Das Gesandtschaftswesen und das vormoderne Völkerrecht,” in Rechtsformen Internationaler Politik. Theorie, Norm und Praxis vom 12. bis 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Michael Jucker, Martin Kintzinger, and Rainer Christoph Schwinges (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2011), 197–240; and Lucien Bély, La société des princes, and L’Art de la paix en Europe. Naissance de la diplomatie moderne XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: PUF, 2007). 54. Ehrenhart Zweyburg [psuedonym for Zacharias Zwanzig], Theatrum praecedentiae, 2 vols. (Berlin: Johann Michael Rüdiger, 1709), I, 12; see Lünig, Theatrum ceremoniale, I, 8. 55. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Anhang, betreffend dasjenige, was zu einem König erfordert wird,” [1838–1840], in Deutsche Schriften, ed. G. E. Guhrauer (Hildesheim: Olms, 1966), II, 303–312. 56. See Moser, “Barock,” 580–585; most influential has been Gilles Deleuze, Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Éditions du minuit, 1988); Christine Buci-Glucksman, Baroque Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity (London: SAGE, 1994); Peter  J.  Burgard, ed., Barock. Neue Sichtweisen einer Epoche (Weimar/Cologne/Vienna: Böhlau, 2001); Victoria von Flemming and Alma-Elisa Kittner, eds., Barock—modern? (Köln: Salon Verlag, 2010); Helen Hills, ed., Rethinking the Baroque (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011); Peter Hersche, “Barock in der Geschichte,” in Barock—Nur schöner Schein?, ed. Alfried Wieczorek, Christoph Lind, and Uta Coburger (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2016).

846   the oxford handbook of the baroque

Further Reading Anderson, M.  S. War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618–1780. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1988. Asch, Ronald G. Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment. The French and the English Monarchies 1587–1688. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Béhar, Pierre, and Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, eds. Spectaculum Europaeum. Theatre and Spectacle in Europe (1580–1750). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999. Burke, Peter. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Contamine, Philippe, ed. War and Competition between States. The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, vol. 5. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Duffy, Christopher. Siege Warfare. The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1494–1660. London: Routledge, 1979. Elias, Norbert. The Court Society (The Collected Works of Norbert Elias). Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Stephen Mennell. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006. Glete, Jan. War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden as Fiscal-military States, 1500–1660. London: Routledge, 2002. Goloubeva, Maria. The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle and Text. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2000. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986. Méchoulan, Henri, ed. L’État baroque. Regards sur la pensée politique de la France du premier XVIIe siècle. Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1985. Mulryne, J. R., Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring, eds. Europa Triumphans. Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

chapter 38

Sa i n ts a n d Ba roqu e  Piet y Thomas Worcester

Saints and Baroque Piety “Baroque” as a period usually refers to a period roughly from 1600 to 1750. But the usage in fact varies according to geography, according to a focus on religion or the arts or literature or other matters. Baroque may be used in a positive, approving way or in a dismissive, negative way. Together with the Rococo it is seen as a bridge (or perhaps as an interruption) between the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The Baroque is a chapter in European cultural history, and it also had (and perhaps still has) a wide range of manifestations elsewhere in the world. “Baroque” is often paired with Catholicism, its beliefs, its practices, and especially with what one might call the Catholic imagination.1 And central to that imagination, perhaps in all eras but certainly very prominently so in the early modern period (c. 1500–1800) were the saints, holy men and women, individuals officially recognized as a blessed (someone who is “beatified,” that is, someone to be venerated locally, in certain dioceses or certain religious orders), or as a saint (a “canonized” individual, someone to be venerated universally and throughout the Catholic Church), or perhaps individuals thought to be candidates or potential candidates for such recognition. They were apostles, martyrs, missionaries, bishops, pilgrims, preachers, penitents, contemplatives, mystics, monks, and nuns, as well as an array of strange people whose lives suggested that insanity and sanctity might be separated by only the finest of lines. Saints were both admired for their exceptionally holy lives and turned to in prayer as advocates and mediators able to obtain favors from the divine that ordinary people might be unable to gain on their own. Saints were also models for imitation, though some were so extreme in their practices that few could actually do what they did or be like them. The ideals of Catholic piety in the Baroque era were often extravagant, valuing excess and abundance in pious practices, even if most people concluded that they themselves were called to a more ordinary Catholic life. Saints were seen as liminal

848   the oxford handbook of the baroque figures, linking heaven and earth and providing some communication between the temporal and the eternal. They were greatly appreciated for this, as they bridged what otherwise could seem a chasm or even a closed border between the everlasting, unchanging, kingdom of heaven above, and the mundane, daily realities of sin, suffering, and death here below. The incarnation of the Word, born at Bethlehem as Jesus of Nazareth, linked the spiritual and the bodily, giving a dignity to human flesh it would not otherwise have. The saints were manifestations of the divine presence in and through human beings, in their full humanity of body and soul. Saints mediated God’s presence in and to the world, a mediation that was visible and tactile and endured in the relics of the saints after their death. The early modern period was also one of increasing centralized control by church and state, by an emphasis on discipline, order, and bureaucratization. These tendencies could be quite at odds with a cult of the saints who valued divine surprises outside the bounds of human management, a cult that prized direct personal experiences of God and God’s grace, not only experiences of grace that were predictable and institutionalized such as sacraments. There was tension between devotion to saints who seemed to have gone well beyond the boundaries of ordinary piety and the efforts of bishops and other administrators to normalize and routinize and control piety. Pope Urban VIII (r.  1623–1644), in particular, played a major role in standardizing how the Catholic Church came to recognize someone as a blessed or as a saint. The person’s life and any of his or her writings would be subject close scrutiny; there would an opportunity for a devil’s advocate to show why a candidate should not be declared blessed (beatification) or a saint (canonization); alleged miracles that could be attributed to a candidate’s intercession would be subject to examination by experts such as medical authorities. A blessed would be venerated primarily by a diocese, by a region or nation or a religious order; a saint was to be venerated by the entire church. Beatification was to precede canonization. The pope himself would have the final word in approval of a beatification or canonization.2 Regarding the life of a blessed or saint, or of a would-be blessed or saint, Jesuits who came to be known as Bollandists played a key role in establishing historical credibility. From the 1630s on, following the lead of Jean Bolland, a group of Jesuits in Antwerp, and later in Brussels, labored, and indeed still labor, to produce scholarly vitae of holy men and women, vitae that separate legends and other accretions from more verifiable narratives.3 This essay has four parts, each of which examines a number of case studies of an enormous topic. Part one will examine how older saints—that is saints who lived, or who were believed to have lived in the era of Jesus himself—in the centuries of the early church or in the medieval period were imagined or re-imagined in the Baroque era. The second part will consider persons who lived after c. 1500 and came to be considered as holy already during their lifetimes and/or after death in the era up to c. 1750. To be formally recognized as blessed or as saints they had to meet, especially by the 1630s and beyond, increasingly stringent Roman standards. The third part will look beyond Europe, to “saints” who lived in the Americas, or Asia, in eras of European exploration and exploitation of much of the rest of the globe. The fourth part will consider ways in

saints and baroque piety   849 which the Baroque “style” (or “styles”), including styles of sanctity, has/have reappeared in later eras, all the way up to the early twenty-first century. The sources will be visual as well as textual, as there has scarcely been a stronger impetus to production of the visual arts than saints and Baroque piety.

Early Saints From the first centuries of Christianity, saints were those who modeled their lives closely on the life of Jesus himself. Jesus had had laid down his life for others, and martyrdom, understood as dying for the sake of one’s faith and one’s life in imitation of Jesus, was the primary path to sainthood in the early church. The lives of the martyrs, from the periods of persecution prior to Emperor Constantine and toleration policies, were handed down over the centuries. The martyrdoms of apostles and bishops but also many other witnesses to Jesus, female and male, often highlighted gruesome tortures and deaths, a kind of theater in which perseverance in discipleship prevailed over horrific cruelty. The martyred body of the saint was in a sense the venue for a theatrical performance of good triumphing over evil, eternal life over death in this fallen world. Examples included Saints Peter and Paul, Lawrence, Stephen, Cecilia, Agatha, Perpetua, Apollonia, Catherine of Alexandria, and Lucy. By the early seventeenth century, especially in Rome, there was renewed interest in these lives, both because excavations in Rome uncovered more relics of what were believed to be the early martyrs, and because the deaths of Catholic missionaries in distant lands stoked devotion to a whole contemporary generation of martyrs. Baroque culture, with its dramatic style, was perfectly suited to promotion of such devotion.4 The juxtaposition of darkness and light, developed to perfection by a painter such as Caravaggio (b. 1571–d. 1610), invited viewers into a world where stark choices had to be made between good and evil, God and Satan, heaven and hell.5 The world was a stage on which paths to salvation or damnation were chosen; the saints showed everyone else how to make the right choices, even if it meant laying down one’s life. The Taking of Christ, a painting by Caravaggio in Rome produced in the first years of the seventeenth century but for many years believed to be lost, was identified in Dublin around 1990. It shows Judas embracing Jesus as a way of identifying for Roman soldiers the one they had come to arrest.6 Caravaggio depicts a soldier in armor like that of early modern Italy, and this would have made the scene contemporary for the painting’s viewers. Judas is shown in the moment of betrayal: the moment in which the terrible consequences of his sin, for Jesus, are about to become apparent. Jesus remains calm, prayerful, thus giving an example for his followers to imitate. A martyr of the early church whose popular cult gained much attention in the Baroque era was Saint Sebastian. A Roman soldier who was condemned to death for his conversion to Christianity, Sebastian was believed to have been shot with arrows, an attempted execution he survived, although he was later killed by other means.

850   the oxford handbook of the baroque Late medieval images of a mostly naked Sebastian often showed him with an unshakably calm countenance even when pierced with multiple arrows. The Baroque era addition to Sebastian’s life and to his iconography was Saint Irene and her maid, shown caring for the wounded Sebastian, removing the arrows and so on. It was an addition to Sebastian’s story that featured and promoted a new model of female sanctity, available to women other than contemplative nuns in a convent, to women actively engaged in the world, such as in providing health care.7 By the fourth century, and toleration of Christianity within the Roman Empire, models of sainthood other than martyrdom began to emerge. Of biblical saints, Mary Magdalene was one to gain much interest, through the Middle Ages and beyond. A kind of composite of perhaps three women in the New Testament, Saint Mary Magdalene and her relics (or what were said to be such) were a focus for pilgrimage in the medieval period, to Vézelay and to Provence, both in France, and each claiming to have her remains. In the first century or so after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which both clarified what was Catholic doctrine (as distinct from heresy) and called for internal (moral, institutional) reform of the Catholic Church, Mary Magdalene became a primary exemplar of conversion from sin and of zeal for the penitential life.8 Catholic piety after the Council of Trent emphasized that each person has choices to make, between good and evil, God and Satan, love of money or love of God. The apostle Saint Matthew known especially as one of four authors of a gospel, was often depicted in the Baroque era in the moment when Jesus called him to leave behind a career as a tax collector and to follow him. Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew, painted for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome (1599–1600), shows a hesitant Matthew pointing to himself as if to say, “Who, me?”9 An excellent example of a painting of the same scene, and greatly influenced by Caravaggio’s version, is The Calling of Saint Matthew, c. 1615–1630, by Bernardo Strozzi (b. 1581–d. 1644).10 Beyond the biblical saints and the martyrs of the first centuries, there emerged the contemplative and ascetical lives of desert fathers or mothers, and the scholarly life of a Saint Jerome (b. 347–d. 420), a translator of the Bible into Latin, who was also imagined at times as a cardinal and as an ascetic struggling to resist temptation to sin. With the exception of the Virgin Mary, every saint was believed to have been a sinner, at least before a kind of conversion: but even after a conversion, the saint might remain vulnerable to sin and need to work at avoiding backsliding or relapse. Eugene Rice has shown the complex attention Saint Jerome received in the Renaissance, in word and image.11 Such attention continued in the Baroque period, as Catholics sought to defend the Latin Bible against Protestant criticism and to affirm the value of the ascetical and celibate life against Protestant efforts to limit authentic adult Christian life to the married state.12 Two thirteenth-century saints stand out as gaining more attention in the Baroque era: Francis of Assisi (b. c. 1181–d. 1226) and Louis IX, King of France (b. 1214–d. 1270).13 Francis of Assisi captured the imagination of many not only in his own time and place of thirteenth-century Italy, but even more so (and well beyond Italy) after his canonization as a saint in 1228 just two years after his death. By the sixteenth century his friars were in many places the sought-after preachers and priests available for sacramental ministry.

saints and baroque piety   851 Saint Francis was held up as a model of imitation of the Jesus who lived in poverty and led an itinerant life of preaching and of various ministries to the poor; he was believed to have received the stigmata—the five wounds of Christ crucified—on his own body, a “gift” interpreted as a kind of proof of intimate and intense conformity of his own life to that of Jesus. Francis also played a central role in promoting the practice of the Christmas crib, that is, of celebrating Christmas with a replica of the “manger scene” of the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem. By the period after Trent, painters often painted scenes from the life of Francis in a way that provided people with a model of discipleship that included both faith and good works, faith in Christ and imitation of the life of Jesus, as distinguished from Protestant emphases on faith alone. Dramatic episodes from the life of Francis, such as his stripping of his clothes off in front of the bishop as a way of rejecting his father’s wealth, and of embracing a “naked” following of the “naked” Jesus all the way to the cross, were a perfect subject for Baroque painters, as was Francis receiving the stigmata. For Baroque Catholicism, sanctity was embodied, and not a matter of souls or spirits only.14 King Louis IX of France was canonized in 1297; although his cult grew in the late medieval period, it reached its apogee only in the 1600s, when the Bourbon monarchs of France, descendants of Saint Louis, bolstered their legitimacy and their credentials as devout Catholics by promoting devotion to their saintly ancestor.15 From the reign of Henry IV (b. 1589–d. 1610) and through the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century, this meant construction of new churches, hospitals, and other institutions given the name Saint Louis. Some of these incorporated large domes, an architectural innovation for early modern France, inspired by Roman examples such as the dome of what was then the new Saint Peter’s basilica.16 From 1610 to 1792 every king of France had the name Louis. Painters portrayed Louis as a devout Catholic engaged in prayer and in good works; Simon Vouet (b. 1590–d. 1649) painted a version of Saint Louis raised to heaven by angels.17 Though a king as saint might seem a model for imitation for other royals only, the seventeenth-century version of Saint Louis that was widely propagated featured Louis IX as receiving communion frequently, as caring personally for the poor and the sick, as eager for bodily mortification, as a model of piety accessible to all.18 The sanctity of the sister of Louis IX was also a focus of attention in the seventeenth century, as may be seen in a biography of her published by the Jesuit Nicolas Caussin (b. 1583–d. 1651) in 1644. Caussin stressed that Blessed Isabelle was neither a nun nor married and that she as a single person lived a very pious, exemplary life.19 The female saint who outranked all others, indeed who outranked male saints as well female saints, was Mary, the mother of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, the Virgin Mary. She was known, venerated, and invoked under many names and titles: Mother of God, Mother of Mercy, Mother of Sorrows, Our Lady, Refuge of Sinners, Queen of Heaven, Queen of the Rosary, etc.20 Sanctuaries and statues of Mary were the site of pilgrimages of individuals and of various groups of pilgrims.21 Protestant criticism of the cult of the saints at times targeted Marian devotion because so much attention given to her was seen as taking away from the attention and honor that should be rendered to God alone or Christ alone. While accepting biblical narratives about Mary, Protestants rejected the

852   the oxford handbook of the baroque non-biblical and post-biblical elaboration of Marian beliefs and practices of devotion to her. Catholics often responded by affirming these beliefs and practices, such as the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary. This teaching held that Mary was assumed into heaven body and soul—again, the utter centrality of embodiment of saints—thus anticipating in a way, as her son Jesus had, the resurrection of the body that would be accorded to all of the saved at the Last Judgment.22 The Assumption of Mary, on her way to heaven from earth, was a favored subject for painters catering to Catholic patrons in the Baroque era. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) is an excellent example of such painters. His 1626 “Assumption,” painted for the cathedral in Antwerp, is still displayed there.23 As an intercessor in heaven, Mary was favored above all other saints, both on account of the effectiveness of her intercession due to her closeness to her son, and for her exceptionally merciful way of responding even to grave sinners. Saint Joseph, Mary’s spouse, gained a new prominence in the early modern era. As the foster father of Jesus, he had often been rather marginal in medieval depictions, shown as an old man in the background while Jesus and Mary shared the foreground. The cult of the Holy Family grew rapidly after the Council of Trent, and it saw Joseph now portrayed (at least some of the time) as a much younger man, a more plausible husband for Mary, and perhaps as holding Jesus in his arms. Though not believed to be the biological father of Jesus, Joseph was henceforth presented as fully engaged in sharing with Mary the task of raising and teaching the child Jesus. Education played a central role in the internal reform of the Catholic Church, from the mid-1500s on, and the Holy Family came to be imagined as setting an example of learning that begins in the home.24 Both Mary and Joseph were saints one could turn to for help in times of fear and insecurity, illness and approaching death among them. Jean Delumeau, a historian known for his volumes on the history of fear, also argues that fear was countered by a “sentiment of security” promoted in large part by devotion to certain saints, especially Mary and Joseph.25 The “Hail Mary” prayer, the centerpiece of the rosary, was explicit in asking Mary for help at the hour of death. Among the many titles of Saint Joseph was that of patron of a good death, meaning a well-prepared-for death, prepared by reception of the sacraments, and a death in which faith remained firm and did not give way to doubts.

Saints After the Council of Trent The Council of Trent had sought to clarify what was and was not the content of the Catholic faith; the Council had also decreed an extensive reform of the clergy, starting with the bishops. No longer would it be tolerable for them to hold several bishoprics, collecting their income but failing to do the requisite pastoral work in any of them. Bishops were henceforth to be good shepherds, resident in their one diocese, and devoted above all to care of the flock entrusted to them. Such care was to include the preaching and teaching of Christian doctrine; periodic visitation of the diocese in order to root out ignorance and any irregularities in Catholic practices including those

saints and baroque piety   853 regarding the saints; promotion of the education of clergy; and creation of seminaries as a way of doing this. Both clergy and laity were to imitate the saints in order to make progress in their response to God’s grace.26 On November 1, 1610 (All Saints’ Day), Charles Borromeo (b. 1538–d. 1584), archbishop of Milan (1564–1584) was canonized in Rome by Pope Paul V. Saint Charles had played a major role in some of the sessions at Trent, and after his death, and even more so after his canonization, he became a frequently cited example of what a Tridentine bishop should be and do. In a series of homilies published in 1623, Jean-Pierre Camus, bishop of Belley in France, lauded Borromeo for his austere personal life and mortification of the flesh (submitting his back to the discipline with his own hand, and consuming only bread, water, fruits, and vegetables); for his humility; for his maternal tenderness in dealing with his flock and for his charitable giving to the poor; for his preaching from the heart in both urban and rural settings; for his devotion to the Shroud of Turin; and for remaining as much as possible in his own diocese and making but few and only necessary trips to Rome.27 Pierre Mignard (b. 1612–d. 1695), one of many French painters who spent considerable time in Rome, painted “Saint Charles Borromeo among the Plague-Stricken of Milan” (c. 1647), as a model for an altarpiece at the Roman church of San Carlo ai Catanari. It shows Saint Charles giving communion to a group of plague victims, some perhaps near death. Showing no concern for threats to his own physical health, Mignard’s Saint Charles puts the host on a woman’s tongue.28 Such a painting portrayed both the importance of reception of the Eucharist, perhaps especially by the sick and dying, and the self-sacrificing zeal for souls that bishops and priests were supposed to emulate. A younger cousin of Charles Borromeo, Federico Borromeo (b. 1564–d. 1631), was a cardinal and an archbishop of Milan (b. 1595–d. 1631), an art patron and collector, and the author of De pictura sacra (On sacred painting, 1624). In this work, Federico Borromeo explained the proper iconography of various saints and the taste and decorum to be observed by artists in painting such subjects.29 Founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola (b. 1491–d. 1556) was beatified in 1609 and canonized as a saint in 1622. Like many saints—the sinless Virgin Mary excepted—Saint Ignatius was remembered as having undergone a process of conversion in which he left behind a life a worldliness in favor of a life centered on discipleship of Jesus.30 In early modern Catholicism, such conversion was impossible without God’s grace, but it also required human cooperation with grace: the life of Ignatius was told as an exemplary case of an individual’s generous response to divine grace. In art, Ignatius was often shown in a humble posture such as kneeling, perhaps before the pope, the vicar of Christ, or before Christ himself. The vision at La Storta, an incident in the life of Ignatius dated to 1537, concerned a vision he had at a place not far from Rome, of Christ with his cross, along with the Holy Spirit and God the Father. The vision was also auditory: Ignatius heard spoken to him the words “I will be favorable to you in Rome,” words later Jesuits took to have foreshadowed both the approval of the Society of Jesus in 1540 by Pope Paul III, and the growth of Jesuit numbers and works under the leadership of Ignatius as the first superior general of the Society and of his successors in that role.31

854   the oxford handbook of the baroque The vision at La Storta was often the subject of paintings in the Baroque era; an excellent example is the model for an altarpiece by Giovanni Battista Gaulli, The Vision at La Storta of 1684–1685, now in the Worcester Art Museum.32 The risen Christ, floating on a cloud that links heaven and earth, holds his no-longer-burdensome cross over one shoulder, as he points Ignatius toward Rome on the horizon. Ignatius appears both surprised—a saint would never be so presumptuous as to expect the gift of such a vision—and rapt with attention. By the late 1600s Ignatius had been Saint Ignatius for some time; the path to his canonization as a saint had in part been prepared by development of an iconography imagined as suitable for a saint of that era.33 At the time of the canonization of their founder by Pope Gregory XV, in 1622, the Jesuits were not alone in praising and celebrating the new saint. For example, Jean-Pierre Camus, bishop of Belley, published a series of his homélies panégyriques on Ignatius.34 Ignatius of Loyola was portrayed as a saint in whom Catholics could find a model both of obedience to the hierarchical church, the pope in particular, and a model of intense, direct, individual experience of God. The spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius, based largely on his own experiences of God in prayer, formed generations of Jesuits and those to whom they ministered, in schools, in missions to rural parishes, as preachers, as confessors and spiritual directors, as chaplains and in other more menial roles in hospitals and prisons, and in many other ways.35 Ignatius was not the only Jesuit to be recognized as a blessed or saint in the Baroque era. Others include Francis Xavier (b. 1506–d.1552), who gained much recognition for his work as a missionary in Asia. Aloysius Gonzaga (b. 1568–d. 1591), from one of the most prominent families in Italy, left behind the prospect of wealth and fame in favor of the Jesuit novitiate in Rome. Not yet a priest, he undertook humble tasks such as basic, physical care of plague victims and eventually fell sick himself and died at a young age. After his death, he became a kind of model for young Jesuits and in general for young men: a model of chastity, and of devotion to the crucified Jesus, and to the sick poor. He was beatified in 1605 and canonized in 1726. His iconography, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often showed him either carrying a plague victim on his shoulder (perhaps like Christ carrying his cross) or as praying with a crucifix.36 Francis Borgia or Borja (b. 1510–d. 1574) was beatified in 1624 and canonized in 1670. From an even more prominent and powerful family than the Gonzaga, this Jesuit, like Aloysius, renounced his titles and privileges to enter the Society of Jesus. But Francis was not a youth: he entered the Jesuits as a widower in his mid-thirties and was quickly given important assignments in helping to create new Jesuit provinces in Spain and Portugal. From 1561 he was a general assistant to Jesuit superior general Diego Laínez, and in 1565 succeeded Laínez as superior general, a position he held until his death in 1572.37 As a saint, Borgia offered a model of one who left the world for religious life but neveertheless took with him considerable diplomatic and administrative talents and adapted to the circumstances and needs of a still new and rapidly growing religious order. Another Spanish saint gifted with administrative talents was Teresa of Avila (b. 1515–d. 1582), beatified in 1614 and canonized at the same time as Ignatius of Loyola in 1622. Teresa was responsible for a major reform of the Carmelite order in Spain, and the

saints and baroque piety   855 creation of Discalced Carmelites who would embrace poverty, humility, and prayer. Teresa was a writer as well, and her accounts of her own direct, intense, if not erotic experiences of God’s love, caught the imaginations of many Catholics in Spain, France, and well beyond. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy (1647–1652), commissioned for (and still in its original location) in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, is the sculptor’s visualization of Teresa’s descriptions of divine love as an arrow that pierces and wounds the soul.38 The viewer of Bernini’s work would likely see analogies with sensuality, eroticism, and perhaps even sexual intercourse and orgasm.39 In the Catholic culture of the Baroque era, divine and spiritual experiences mirrored human and bodily experiences. The incarnation of Jesus was central to the theological grounding of such mirroring.40 Like Teresa, John of the Cross (b. 1542–d. 1591) was a reformer of the Carmelites in Spain, a reform that eventually became international. To male Carmelites, as Teresa had for female Carmelite communities, John also brought his own deep life of prayer, a life he shared in writing. Perhaps best known in those texts for his descriptions of a “dark night” of the soul, John was beatified in 1675 and canonized in 1726.41 Michele Ghislieri (b. 1504–d. 1572) was a member of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans). What made his beatification (1672) and canonization (1712) highly unusual in that era is that he was also a bishop of Rome, Pope Pius V, from 1566 to 1572. Pamela M. Jones has shown how the path to his recognition as a blessed and then a saint highlighted some of what he did as pope: he published a Missal (1570) that became the norm for Roman Catholic liturgy; he created an alliance, a “holy league” that succeeded in defeating Turkish naval forces at the battle of Lepanto (October 7, 1571); he implemented the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent in many parts of the Catholic world; he opposed toleration of Protestants in Catholic lands. But the iconography of Saint Pius V also showed him kneeling in prayer, during the battle of Lepanto, and/or before a crucifix. Lives of Pius V had him attributing victory at Lepanto to intercession of Our Lady of the Rosary. This would be no surprise coming from a Dominican, as the Order of Preachers was closely associated with the rosary. The popes who sought beatification and then canonization of Pius V did so in ways that helped to shape expectations of the papacy, realistic or otherwise, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.42 Peter Burke, in his essay “How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” identifies the good shepherd, most likely a bishop, as one of five routes to holiness; the other four are founder of a religious order; missionary; charitable worker; and ecstatic or mystic.43 Pius V was made to fit, as it were, that of good shepherd, although the bellicosity that accompanied his prayerfulness was usually not part of what was remembered and honored in the lives of saintly bishops. The cause for the beatification (1661) and eventual canonization (1665) of Francis de Sales (b. 1567–d. 1622) focused on this bishop as gentle, kind, and compassionate and as an eloquent preacher who focused more on God’s love than on damnation or hellfire.44 In title bishop of Geneva, but in practice resident in the town of Annecy in neighboring Savoy—as Calvinist Geneva would not have permitted him entry—de Sales was also a best-selling author, especially for his 1609 work, Introduction à la vie dévote. Translated

856   the oxford handbook of the baroque from the original French into many languages, this book was written mainly for the laity; it encouraged everyone, of whatever rank or status or gender, married or single, to a life of piety in imitation of Jesus and of the saints. Heavily influenced by the optimistic spirituality of the Jesuits—de Sales had spent seven years as a student at the Jesuit college in Paris.45 The Introduction insisted on the love of God for humanity; he also asserted that frequent reception of communion was laudatory, a practice that was contested in the seventeenth century. Various enemies of the Jesuits contended that proper respect for the Eucharist mandated infrequent reception of the sacrament and long periods of awe-filled, penitential preparation.46 Saint Francis de Sales was also honored for his collaboration with Jane Frances de Chantal (b. 1572–d. 1641). Spiritual director to this widow and baroness, Francis helped Jane, in 1610, found the Visitation, a congregation of women that would be open to admitting, unlike the practice most female orders and congregations, older women and women perhaps in less than robust health. The baroness de Chantal would eventually be beatified and canonized, though this took a relatively long time.47 Care for the poor is what stood out most prominently in the life of Vincent de Paul (b. 1581–1660), beatified in 1729, and canonized in 1737. From a peasant family in southwestern France (the family name of Paul referred to a stream, and the “de” did not indicate nobility), Vincent obtained the necessary support to study for the priesthood and was ordained in Toulouse in 1604. Though he spent much of his life in rural France ministering to the poor and the ignorant, he also frequented Paris, where he became a tutor and chaplain to the powerful Gondi family and later became a spiritual advisor to the Queen Regent, Anne of Austria. In 1625 he founded the Congregation of the Mission (also known as Lazarists or as Vincentians), a congregation of priests devoted to missions among the poor and to the training of priests. In 1633, with Louise de Marillac (b. 1591–d. 1660), whose holiness would be officially recognized only in the twentieth century, Vincent founded the Daughters of Charity, a congregation of sisters who would not remain in the cloister but rather would work in the world, caring for the sick and the poor. In the 1640s and 1650s, Vincent devoted much of his time to ministry among military and civilian casualties of France’s wars with the Holy Roman Empire and with Spain.48

Saints Beyond Europe Spain and Portugal were the leading European colonial powers of the sixteenth century, and with their ships to Asia and the Americas went not only goods, merchants and military personnel, but also missionaries. For the Jesuits, their first overseas missionary was Francis Xavier (b. 1506–d. 1552), like Ignatius a Basque Spaniard, and a roommate and fellow student with Ignatius in Paris.49 In 1541 Xavier left from Lisbon on a Portuguese ship for Goa in India; he never returned to Europe but left a considerable record, through his letters to Ignatius and others, of his activities in India, Indonesia, and

saints and baroque piety   857 Japan; he died seeking entry to China. Publication of some his letters after his death proved popular, and many in Europe were greatly interested by his work of preaching, teaching, and baptizing, in distant lands.50 Many miracles were attributed to Xavier, in his lifetime, and even more were attributed to his intercession after his death. The path to his beatification (1619) and canonization (1622, at the same ceremony with Saints Ignatius, Teresa of Avila, Philip Neri, and Isidore the Farmer) was paved by a vibrant, growing cult animated by reports of miracles, and excitement in Europe about “new” worlds.51 The iconography of Saint Francis Xavier often showed him either raising an arm in preaching and/or baptizing, bringing about some kind of miracle, or in prayer at the hour of his death. Images of Francis Xavier often give insight into how Europeans imagined Asia, and India in particular, perhaps confusing them with “Indies” elsewhere.52 Rose of Lima (b. 1586–d. 1617) was born, lived, and died in Lima, Peru; her parents were Spanish colonists. A Third Order Dominican, she devoted much of her life to severe asceticism, to care for the poor of Lima, and to emulation of Saint Catherine of Siena (b. 1347–d. 1380). It was said that Rose worked ten hours a day, prayed for twelve, and slept for two, and that she received the Eucharist daily. Beatified in 1667, fifty years after her death, she was canonized in 1671. She was the first person born in the Americas to achieve that recognition.53 But how significant was the South American context of her holy life? Or was her sanctity mostly a European, Baroque model of holiness transported to another part of the world? Though the death and canonization of Francis Xavier were separated by not fifty but seventy years, this was not especially long compared some other saints, in particular with others who worked and died outside Europe. Europeans who lived in the ­period c. 1500–1750, who left their native continent for “missions” elsewhere, and who were eventually beatified and canonized, include the Jesuit martyrs of North America (Isaac Jogues [b. 1607–d. 1646], Jean de Brébeuf [b. 1593–d. 1649], et al.), Peter Claver (b. 1580–d. 1654), and Marie of the Incarnation (b. 1599–d. 1672). Most of the Jesuit martyrs were killed in what is now Ontario, with the others martyred in what is now New York state. Missionaries seeking to evangelize native peoples such as the Hurons and Mohawks, their lives and deaths became widely known in seventeenth-century France, through the Jesuit Relations, annual reports written by the Jesuits in Canada and published in Paris.54 Only in the twentieth century were the eight martyrs beatified (1925) and canonized (1930), by Pope Pius XI.55 Peter Claver was born in Verdú, Spain, and died in Cartagena, Colombia. A Jesuit from 1602, he lived most of his life in Colombia, providing spiritual and temporal care for African slaves. Said to have baptized some three hundred thousand slaves, he fell ill during an outbreak of plague in 1651 and spent the rest of his life a paralytic. Peter was beatified in 1851 by Pope Pius IX and canonized in 1888 by Pope Leo XIII.56 For many years, Marie of the Incarnation and the Ursulines worked alongside the Jesuits in Québec City; or one might say that the Jesuits worked alongside the Ursulines. A native of Tours, in France, Marie Guyart entered religious life and took the name Marie de l’Incarnation, after the death of her young husband, Claude Martin, and after making arrangements for her sister to care of their son.57 In 1639 she founded the

858   the oxford handbook of the baroque Ursuline convent in Quebec, and with it a school for indigenous girls who, it was hoped, would become Christians. Marie was the first female missionary outside Europe.58 Though in principle cloistered, the Ursulines in Canada emphasized education as their work and thus were in fact not cut off from the world around them but were active in it. Marie de l’Incarnation was beatified in 1980 by Pope John Paul II and canonized in 2014 by Pope Francis.59 Marie de l’Incarnation waited almost exactly as long as Kateri Tekakwitha (b. 1656– d. 1680) for recognition as a blessed (1980) and then as a saint (2012). Indeed, they were beatified at the same ceremony. Born of indigenous parents near what is today Auriesville, New York, Tekakwitha was young woman who chose baptism when it was offered by Jesuit missionaries; she took the baptismal name Catherine, after Catherine of Siena, and as Mohawks pronounced the name without the concluding n sound, her name came to be Kateri. A physically scarred survivor of smallpox and ostracized by her family for her conversion to Christianity, Kateri moved in 1677 to Khanawake, a Christian Iroquois community on the southern bank of the Saint Lawrence River, near Montréal. There she learned more about Christian practices and beliefs, from Jesuit missionaries and from Mohawk Christians, especially women.60 She embraced a severe, ascetical life focused on mortification of the body, with extreme fasting, self-flagellation, hair shirts, exposure to cold, and possibly much more. As Allan Greer puts it, the “experience of using pain and discomfort to cross the line into sacred ecstasy was an area of commonality linking Indian converts at Kahnawake, nuns in Montreal, and saints in medieval Italy.”61 She was also influenced by what the Jesuit missionaries at Kahnawake said about Aloysius Gonzaga, including his practice of sleeping on a bed of thorns; for several nights she slept on thorny bushes until she was persuaded to stop.62 Weakened perhaps by multiple illnesses, and by her severe austerities, she died in April 1680. What we know about Kateri is in large part due to hagiographic biographies composed by two Jesuits who knew her, Pierre Cholenec (b. 1641–d. 1723) and Claude Chauchetière (b. 1645–d. 1709). Though one could attribute the long delay in formal recognition of Kateri’s holiness to Roman hostility to and/or incomprehension of her indigenous identity, the cause for beatification and canonization of the Frenchwoman Marie de l’Incarnation actually took even longer. Women who worked as missionaries outside Europe seem to have often waited especially long for beatification and canonization. Was this because they were viewed with some suspicion by Roman authorities, who perhaps preferred to keep the nuns under the control of cloistered convents within Europe? Even women who remained in Europe but sought to develop un-cloistered or otherwise unusual forms of religious life for women could wait a long time for recognition as blessed or saints: Angela Merici (b. 1474–d. 1540), foundress of the Ursulines, was beatified in 1768 and canonized 1809; Jane de Chantal (b. 1572–d. 1641), foundress of the Visitation sisters, was beatified in 1751 and canonized in 1767; Louise de Marillac (b. 1591–d. 1660), foundress of the Daughters of Charity, was beatified in 1920 and canonized in 1934. Mary Ward (b. 1585–d. 1645), foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was declared Venerable in 2009 and awaits papal approval for beatification.63

saints and baroque piety   859 Images of holy persons both accompanied missionaries as they traveled from Europe to various parts of the world and were produced in situ in the Americas, Asia, and elsewhere. Those produced outside Europe were created by artists among the European missionaries or by indigenous persons recruited for the task. Extant images of Kateri Tekakwitha and of Kahnawake from her era are the work of Claude Chauchetière; they include a painting showing her in indigenous dress, holding a cross, and appearing to float over a valley with a lake and a church. From this painting the viewer would learn nothing of her severe mortification or of her smallpox-scarred skin. Her arms are crossed and her head bowed in prayer.64 Chauchetière was what we would call an amateur artist, but there were some Jesuit missionaries who were more than that. Bernardo Bitti (b. 1548–d. 1610) was a Jesuit brother trained as a painter in Rome and an early example of a European artist who went to Latin American, in his case to Peru. He was known especially for paintings of Christ and of the Virgin Mary.65 Giuseppe Castiglione (b. 1688–d. 1766) was an Italian Jesuit brother and artist who served at the court of the Chinese emperors, and though his paintings were for the most part portraits of the imperial family or landscapes, he did paint some church interiors in Beijing.66 It was not necessarily simply a matter of transfer of European styles and techniques to other parts of the world. For example, as Gauvin Bailey argues, a kind of “hybrid baroque” developed in places such as the churches of colonial Peru, drawing on both European and “American” arts.67

The Lasting Impact of Baroque Sanctity After the mid-eighteenth century cultural, political, and religious change intensified, and eventually with the French Revolution and its effort to eliminate Christianity, the era of the Reformations, Protestant and Catholic, was finally over. So, too, was the age of Baroque culture and piety. Or was it? In fact, some painters continued to do at least some of their work in a style that prolonged the Baroque age at least for a while. See for example a 1780 painting, Saint Roch interceding with the Virgin for the Victims of the Plague, by Jacques-Louis David (b. 1748–d. 1825), a work commemorating the 1720 plague in Marseilles. The painting looks as though it could have been done a century and a half earlier, perhaps in Italy, and shows in dramatic light and shadows both plague victims and Saint Roch as he kneels to implore the Virgin’s aid.68 Another painting by David, Saint Jerome Hears the Trumpet of the Last Judgement (1779), is even more dramatic and more retardataire in its Carvaggesque light, shadows, and drama. It is a painting that drew a great deal of attention in 2018 when the National Gallery of Canada proposed to raise the money needed to buy it from its owners in Québec City by deaccessioning and selling a painting of the Eiffel Tower by Marc Chagall. This possibility elicited a major debate in the Canadian press and beyond about the relative value in dollars and cultural

860   the oxford handbook of the baroque significance of both David’s works and a subject such as Saint Jerome versus Chagall’s works and a subject such as the Eiffel Tower.69 That many thought David’s Jerome at least as valuable for the twenty-first century as Chagall’s Eiffel Tower suggests an amazingly enduring power and attraction of at least some Baroque images of the saints, and perhaps more generally of Baroque culture. To be sure, the older David gained great fame as a classicizing portraitist of leaders such as Napoleon, but his works also demonstrate that the Baroque was not discarded after c. 1750 and that one should avoid simplistic periodization. Robert Harbison has argued that “no style has ever been so widely and irresponsibly copied or promulgated in so many unlikely new guises,” as the Baroque.70 Regardless of what Harbison may or may not mean by irresponsible, he identifies an amazing resilience and adaptability of the Baroque, far beyond the period 1600–1750. He largely ignores piety, but here I shall point to four examples of echoes post-1800 of a  Baroque engagement with holiness. The first are the nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century apparitions of Mary and how they have been celebrated, perhaps especially at Lourdes. Lourdes is all about a link between heaven and earth and the central role of Mary the mother of Jesus in it; the possible healing of the sick in body, mind, and spirit; and exuberant celebrations of the presence of God here and now.71 The second is Antoni Gaudí (b. 1852–d. 1926), a pious, Mass-attending Catholic and a brilliantly eclectic Barcelona architect. The styles he used, adapted, revised, and re-created included Baroque as well as Neo-Gothic, modernist, and Art Nouveau. His best known work, the basilica of the Sagrada Família, honors the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and is one of the main attractions for visitors to Barcelona in the twenty-first century.72 The third example is the 2018 Spring/Summer exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, entitled “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” an exhibition that drew extraordinarily large crowds and much attention from media and critics. Though the austere and the simple were given some space in this show, the exuberant and the theatrical dominated overall.73 And finally, it may be useful to note that Pope Francis, in an apostolic exhortation entitled Gaudete et Exsultate, published on March 19, 2018 (the feast of Saint Joseph), celebrated the saints and their enduring power to inspire the conversion of the arrogant, the greedy, and the ungrateful to lives lived joyously in humility, generosity, and gratitude.74 The exemplars he cited include Saints Matthew, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, as well as more recent figures such as Thérèse of Lisieux and Teresa of Calcutta.

Conclusion Saints who had lived in the medieval or earlier periods were sometimes reimagined in the Baroque era in ways that made them resemble the more contemporary saints. Saint Sebastian, a martyr from the early church, re-imaged with Saint Irene ministering to

saints and baroque piety   861 him, formed with her an early modern icon of holiness as martyrdom and/or as care for the sick. Care for the sick, in the early modern period, often meant risking or indeed ­giving one’s life, as in the case of Aloysius Gonzaga. Baroque piety was often extravagant, exuberant, extreme, enthusiastic, and often emphasized direct and emotional experience of the divine. Saints who lived in the Baroque era were often depicted in these ways, though beatification or canonization by the Catholic Church required, among other things, credible, historical evidence of a life that conformed to established (safe) patterns of holiness, such as bishop, founder of a religious order, martyr, missionary, model of charity, or mystic, and an absence of any evidence of deviation from doctrinal norms. A Baroque style of painting, such as seen in the paintings of Caravaggio, was especially well suited to display the dramatic, theatrical nature of Baroque piety, a piety in which the saints chose Christ over Satan, good over evil, charity over greed. The expansion of Christianity outside a Mediterranean and European context saw more opportunities for sainthood, especially for saints as missionaries or martyrs. But there was also a reluctance, in most cases, to move forward in Rome with formal recognition of blessed or saints who lived and worked in worlds unfamiliar to Europeans. Yet Pope Urban VIII set no time limit on causes for potential blesseds or saints, and that is still so, as Pope Benedict XVI’s canonization of the seventeenth-century Mohawk Kateri Tekakwitha demonstrates. Saints and Baroque piety may well have a bright future in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Notes 1. See Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 2. See Kenneth Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), especially 225–226 on Pope Urban VIII. On the complexities of Urban VIII’s papacy and how he was viewed at the time, see Sheila Barker, “Pasquinades and Propaganda: The Reception of Urban VIII,” in The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor, ed. James Corkery and Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 69–89. 3. See William O’Brien, “Bollandists,” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 110–112. 4. Larry  F.  Norman, ed., The Theatrical Baroque (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 2001). 5. Franco Mormando, ed., Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image (Boston: Boston College; distributed by University of Chicago Press, 1999). 6. See Mormando, “Just as Your Lips Approach the Lips of Your Brothers,” in Mormando, Saints and Sinners, 179–190. 7. On Sebastian and Irene and related questions, see Sheila Barker, “Plague Art in Early Modern Rome: Divine Directives and Temporal Remedies,” in Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, ed. Gauvin Bailey, Pamela Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas Worcester (Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum; distributed by University of  Chicago Press, 2005), 45–64. Another good example of a painting of Sebastian that

862   the oxford handbook of the baroque emphasizes Irene’s care for him, is Georges de La Tour (b. 1593–d. 1652), “Saint Sébastien soigné par Irène à la Torche” (c. 1649), reproduced in Jean-Claude Le Floch, La Tour: Le clair et l’obscur (Paris: Herscher, 1995), 60–61. 8. On Mary Magdalen, see Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994). 9. See Thomas Worcester, “Trent and Beyond: Arts of Transformation,” in Mormando, Saints and Sinners, 87–106, at 92–93. 10. Mormando, Saints and Sinners, plate 13. 11. Eugene Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 12. On the history of celibacy, see Helen Parish, Clerical Celibacy in the West, c. 1100–1700 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010). 13. On Saint Louis in his own time and as remembered and honored in the late medieval ­period, see Jacques LeGoff ’s Saint Louis, trans. Gollrad Gareth Evan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 14. On Francis of Assisi there is an extraordinary abundance of biographies, studies, etc., in many languages. See, for example, André Vauchez, François d’Assise (Paris: Fayard, 2009); Michael Robson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 15. On development of his cult in the late Middle Ages see, M.  Cecilia Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Late Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 16. On architecture in seventeenth-century Paris, see Nicolas Courtin, Paris Grand Siècle (Paris: Parigramme, 2008). 17. This was painted for the Jesuit Church of Saint Louis in Paris; see Les Jésuites à Paris: SaintPaul—Saint-Louis (Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 1985), 37–38. 18. On Saint Louis after 1589, see my “Saints as Cultural History,” in Exploring Cultural History: Essays in Honour of Peter Burke, ed. Melissa Calaresu, Filippo de Vivo, and Joan-Pau Rubiés (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 191–205. 19. Nicolas Caussin, La vie de Sainte Isabelle soeur du roy Saint Louis (Paris: Sonnius & Bechet, 1644); see my article, “Neither Married nor Cloistered: Blessed Isabelle in Catholic Reformation France,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 457–472. 20. For an overview of the history of devotion to Mary, see Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, 2 vols. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963–1965); Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 21. See for Bavaria, Philip Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 99–158. 22. For a detailed history of this doctrine, see Martin Jugie, La mort et l’assomption de la Sainte Vierge: Étude historico-doctrinale (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944). 23. See Irene Smets, The Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp (Ghent, Belgium: Ludion, 1999); Friedhelm Mennekes, “Two Realms of Light: Peter Paul Rubens’ ‘Assumption of Mary’ (1626) and Gregory Schneider’s ‘End’ (2008),” Religion and the Arts 15 (2011): 263–276. 24. On the history of the cult of Saint Joseph, see Joseph Chorpenning, Joseph through the Centuries (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press), 2011. 25. Jean Delumeau, Rassurer et protéger: Le sentiment de sécurité dans l’Occident d’autrefois (Paris: Fayard, 1989), especially 340–351, 389–396. For Delumeau on fear, see La peur en

saints and baroque piety   863 Occident (XIV e–XVIII e siècle) (Paris: Fayard,1978); Le Péché et la peur: La culpabilisation en Occident (XIII e–XVIII e siècle) (Paris: Fayard, 1983). 26. See John O’Malley, Trent: What happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); for holiness as imagined and lived after Trent, see Clare Copeland, “Sanctity,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, ed. Alexandra Bamji, Gert Janssen, and Mary Laven (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 225–241; for Trent as “modern” see Paolo Prodi and Wolfgang Reinhard, eds., Il concilio di Trento e il moderno, (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 1996). 27. Jean-Pierre Camus, Homélies panégyriques de Sainct Charles Borromée (Paris: Claude Chappelet, 1623). See also Hubert Jedin and Giusppe Alberigo, Il tipo ideale di vescovo secondo la Riforma Cattolica (Brescia, Italy: Morcelliana, 1985). 28. Bailey, Jones, Mormando, and Worcester, eds., Hope and Healing, 226–227. See also Pamela M. Jones, “San Carlo Borromeo and Plague Imagery in Milan and Rome,” in Hope and Healing, 65–96. 29. Federico Borromeo, Sacred Painting, Kenneth Rothwell trans., with notes by Pamela Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), especially 116–132. On Federico as collector and patron, see Pamela Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 30. What we know about the life of Ignatius includes a kind of autobiography that was written down and edited by Luis Gonçalves da Câmara; a life composed by Pedro de Ribadeneira, in the years after the death of Ignatius; and many later lives, especially after the 1622 canonization of Ignatius. See Carmel Cassar, “Autobiography of St. Ignatius,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 72–73; Pedro de Ribadeneira, The Life of Ignatius of Loyola, trans. Claude Pavur (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2014); Mark Lewis, “Loyola, Ignatius of, SJ, St. (1491–1556), in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 482–487; Robert Maryks, ed., A Companion to Ignatius of Loyola: Life, Writings, Spirituality, Influence (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 31. Of the thousands of letters extant of Ignatius, many concern his correspondence as general; on his letters see Patrick Goujon, Les conseils de l’Esprit: Lire les lettres d’Ignace de Loyola (Namur, Belgium: Lessius, 2017). 32. See Thomas Worcester, The Jesuits, 1506–2006 (Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum), 2006. 33. On some aspects of this question, see Ursula Koenig-Nordhoff, Ignatius von Loyola: Studien zur Entwicklung einer neuen Heiligen-Ikonographie im Rahmen einer Kanonisationskampagne um 1600 (Berlin: Mann, 1982). 34. Jean-Pierre Camus, Homélies panégyriques de Sainct Ignace de Loyola (Lyon: Gaudion, 1623.) 35. See Christian Wehr and Bernhard Teuber, “Exercices spirituels et rhétoriques: Aspects d’une genèse jésuite du style baroque,” in The Jesuits and the Education of the Western World (Rome: Bulzoni, 2004), 279–291. 36. See Barker, “Plague Art in Early Modern Rome,” 45–64, especially 53–57; and Bailey, Jones, Mormando, and Worcester, Hope and Healing, 214–215. 37. Inmaculada Fernández Arrillaga, “Borja (Borgia), Francis, SJ, St. (1510–72),” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 112–113; Enrique García Hernán and María del Pilar Ryan, eds., Francisco de Borja y su tiempo: Política, religión y cultura en la Edad Moderna (Valencia: Albatros Ediciones; Rome: Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu, 2011).

864   the oxford handbook of the baroque 38. See discussion in Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination, 54–65. On Teresa, see Carole Slade, St. Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Gillian Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). On Bernini, see Franco Mormando, Bernini: His Life and his Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 39. See essays on “Arts of Sanctity, Suffering, and Sensuality in Italy,” in From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy,  ca. 1550–1650, ed. Pamela M. Jones and Thomas Worcester (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 89–222; and Marcia Hall and Tracy Cooper, eds., The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 40. On Teresa’s writings and incarnation, see André Brouillette, Le lieu du salut: Une pneumatologie d’incarnation chez Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Cerf, 2014). 41. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 1959). 42. Pamela M. Jones, “The Pope as Saint: Pius V in the Eyes of Sixtus V and Clement XI,” in The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor, ed. James Corkery and Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 47–68; see also Nicole Lemaître, Saint Pie V (Paris: Fayard, 1994). 43. Peter Burke, “How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in his The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays in Perception and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48–62, especially 55–56. 44. For an example of how the cult of Francis de Sales as a blessed or saint was promoted, see Jean-Pierre Camus, L’Esprit du bienheureux François de Sales, évêque de Genève, 6 vols. (Paris: Alliot, 1639–41). On the saint’s life, see also André Ravier, Un sage et un saint: François de Sales (Paris: Nouvelle Cité, 1985). 45. For a discussion that shows some of the ways in which Francis drew heavily on his Jesuit education, see Thomas Worcester, “St. Francis de Sales and Jesuit Rhetorical Education,” in Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies, ed. Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 102–115. 46. For Francis on reception of communion, see Introduction to the Devout Life, trans. John Ryan (New York: Image Books, 1972), especially 118–119, 255. For the complete works, see Oeuvres de saint François de Sales, évêque de Genève et docteur de l’église, 26 vols. (Annecy: J. Niérat, 1892–1932). 47. Elisabeth Stopp, Essays and Talks on St. Frances de Chantal, ed. Terence O’Reilly (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 1999). 48. Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac, Rules, Conferences, and Writings, ed. Frances Ryan and John Rybolt (New York: Paulist Press, 1995); Pierre Miquel, Vincent de Paul (Paris: Fayard, 1996); Marie-Joëlle Guillaume, Vincent de Paul: un saint au Grand Siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2015); Alison Forrestal, Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). On what was in the 1600s a rather new and controversial model of religious life for women (in the world, as teachers, nurses, etc.), see Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in SeventeenthCentury France (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). 49. See Georg Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, trans. by M. Joseph Costelloe. 4 vols. Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973–1982. 50. Francis Xavier, The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992).

saints and baroque piety   865 51. For an overview of his life and legacy, see Leonard Fernando, “Xavier, Francis, SJ, St. (1506–1552),” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 846–852. 52. For such confusion/conflation, see, for example, the Italian Cirro Ferri (b. 1623–d. 1689), “Death of Saint Francis Xavier” (1670s), in Saints and Sinners, ed. Mormando, plate 21. On images of Xavier, see also the doctoral dissertation of Rachel Miller, Patron Saint of a World in Crisis: Early Modern Representations of St. Francis Xavier in Europe and Asia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2016); and Erin Kathleen Murphy and William Keyse Rudolph, eds., Highest Heaven: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Collection of Roberta and Richard Huber (San Antonio, TX: San Antonio Museum of Art, 2016), 152–153. 53. Kathleen Ann Myers, “ ‘Redeemer of America’: Rosa de Lima (b. 1586–d. 1617), the Dynamics of Identity, and Canonization,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (London: Routledge, 2003), 251–275, especially 255. 54. For an edition with both the original language and an English translation, see Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrow Brothers, 1896–1900). See also Emma Anderson, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 55. Jacques Monet, “Canadian/North American Martyrs,” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 130–131. 56. Jorge Salcedo, “Claver, Peter, SJ, St. (1580–1654),” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 172–174. 57. On Marie of the Incarnation, see Natalie Davis, Women on the Margins: Three SeventeenthCentury Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 63–139; for Marie’s transatlantic correspondence, see Marie de l’Incarnation, From Mother to Son: The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation to Claude Martin, trans. Mary Dunn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 58. See two works by Dominique Deslandres: “In the Shadow of the Cloister: Representations of Female Holiness in New France,” in Colonial Saints, 129–152; “Female Voices and Agencies on the Canadian Missionary Frontier, according to Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation (1599–1672),” in The Frontiers of Mission: Perspectives on Early Modern Missionary Catholicism, ed. Alison Forrestal and Séan Alexander Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 42–67. 59. On who has been recognized as having been holy in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Canada, see Timothy Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Canada (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). 60. See Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 61. Greer, Mohawk Saint, 124. 62. Greer, Mohawk Saint, 143–144. 63. Gemma Simmonds, “Ward, Mary,” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 835–837. 64. Greer, Mohawk Saint, 20. 65. Alison Fleming, “Bitti, Bernardo, SJ (1548–1610),” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 103–104; Gauvin Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 47–48. 66. Alison Fleming, “Castiglione, Giuseppe, SJ (1688–1766),” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 142–144. 67. Gauvin Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

866   the oxford handbook of the baroque 68. See Thomas Worcester, “Saint Roch vs. Plague, Famine, and Fear,” in Hope and Healing, ed. Bailey, Jones, Mormando, and Worcester, 153–176, especially 167–168. 69. See the article by Tom Spears in the Ottawa Citizen (www.ottawacitizen.com, accessed April 16, 2018). 70. Robert Harbison, Reflections on the Baroque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 192. On the very widespread extent of the Baroque, geographic, temporal, and otherwise, see also Peter Davidson, The Universal Baroque (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018). 7 1. See Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York: Viking, 1999). 72. See Gijs van Hensbergen, The Sagrada Família: The Astonishing Story of Gaudí’s Unfinished Masterpiece (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 73. See the review of Heavenly Bodies by Joanna Moorhead, in The Tablet (May 12, 2018), 4–5. 74. Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2018).

Further Reading Bailey, Gauvin. Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1556–1610. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Bayley, Peter. “Resisting the Baroque.” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 16 (1994): 1–14. Ditchfield, Simon. Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Glassie, Henry, and Pravina Shukula. Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomble Gods in Modern Brazil. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Leone, Massimo. Saints and Signs: A Semiotic Reading of Conversion in Early Modern Catholicism. Religion and Society, 48. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010. Levy, Evonne. Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Molina, J. Michelle. To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion 1520–1767. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Morgan, Ronald. Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1820. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. Semk. Christopher. Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017. Snodin, Michael, and Nigel Llewellyn, eds. Baroque: Style in the Age of Magnificence, 1620–1800. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2009. Wunder, Amanda. Baroque Seville: Sacred Art in a Century of Crisis. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017.

Index

Note: Figures are indicated by an italic ‘f ’ following the page number.

A

Abdülhamid I  351, 355 absolutism  803, 825–26. See also Baroque state academies Académie de Poésie et de Musique 274 Académie des sciences 442 Académie Royal de Danse 279 Accademia dei Lincei 440 Accademia del Cimento 440 Accademia di San Luca  215, 217 Cuzco school  165–68, 167f French Academy  215, 217 Institut de France 443 primary school of Ottoman Empire  350–51 Protestant Academies  439–40 Royal Academy of History  304 Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture 827 University of Louvain  432 University of Padua  439 Ácoma Pueblo  304 Acosta, Leonard  550 acting in court spectacle  836 decor for  73–75 homoeroticism in  693–94 illusion in  74 makeup and lighting for  75–78 in modern day  80–81 passion expressed through  66–69 performance space for  72–73. See also theater; spectacle Agucchi, Giovanni Battista  100 Ahmed III  336–37 Ahmed Pasha  348 Alberti, Leon Battista  410, 720

Albrecht IV of Bavaria  187 Alemán, Mateo  497–98 Aleotti, Giovanni Battista  387, 391 Alexander VII  213 Algardi, Alessandro  186–87 al-Haytham, Abū ’Alī Ibn  720 Allegrain, Etienne  95, 95f Allom, Thomas  352 Almansa y Mendoza, Andrés  240 Amadeus, Victor, II  839 amazement. See emotions ambassadors, role of. See diplomacy Americas, city planning and colonial ideology in  288–93 Ancien Régime  76, 374–75, 418–19 Ancients and Moderns, Quarrel of  430, 479, 586 Andean mestizo baroque  161, 168 Andrade, Oswald de  487 Angelus Australis  169, 170f anger. See emotions Arbeau, Thoinot  269 architecture of Baroque cities  211–12. See also cities, baroque Beylerbeyi Mosque  355–56, 355f city planning of Americas and Mexico  288–93, 290f. See also colonization of colleges  221 and fortress-building  831–32 Hamidiye Complex  351, 351f Hotel des Fermes 223 of housing  232–33, 298–300 and kalfas 341–42 Laleli Mosque  347–48, 347f, 349f, 353, 355 of military hospitals  221

868   index architecture (Continued ) and Orders of Architecture  410–11 ornamentation of  410–19, 412f, 424. See also gardens; urbanism Palacio Nacional  296f of performance venues  71–73, 305–8 Piazza del Popolo  214 Piazza of St. Peter  213 Piazza S. Ignazio 213 Piazza S. Maria della Pace  213 Piazza Santa Croce  808, 808f Pitti Palace  217 Place de la Bourse  222, 222f Place des Vosges  219 places royales  219 Place Vendôme  219 Plaza Mayor, Madrid  219 Plaza Mayor of Mexico City  289, 290f Plaza Nueva  300, 301f Taj Mahal  32–33 and The Ten Books on Architecture 289 of Topkapi Palace  336, 341, 342f of Tulip Era  336–38 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe  450 Ardissione, Erminia  564 Aristotle  518–19, 523, 530–31 Arnold, Gottfried  748–49 astronomy 716–21; See also science Audran, Claude, III  416 Auerbach, Erich  634–36 Austria and Ottoman Empire  337 automata 185–206 in art  193–201 clockwork  185–87, 189, 783–84, 785–87 conditions for  185 divinity of  201–6 and Merlin’s Mechanical Museum  204 and techne 201 technology for  186–93 and theoria 201 Triumphal Procession of Diana  193–95, 194f, 198 Triumphal Procession of Minerva  198–99, 199f See also gardens; machines Auzout, Adrien  441 Avellaneda, Alonso Fernández de  498

B

Bach, Johann Sebastian  322, 327, 330, 421 Bacon, Francis  434, 437–38, 442, 562, 715 Bailey, Gauvin Alexander  168, 302–3 Bakhtin, Mikhail  57 Balon, Claude  266 Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de  480, 569, 597, 675–76 Bandello, Matteo  695 Bardi di Vernio, Giovanni  815 Bargagli, Girolamo  389 Barnes, Djuna  155 Baroque as Age of Absolutism  229 classic 595–98 classicism vs.  582–83 crisis of  1–2 dialectic of  16–18 disbelief of  583–87 as early modern  587–94 in Hispanic and Lusophone scholarship 546–53 as literary concept  540–43 machines and  8–11 renewal of  14–16 themes leading to development of  3–8, 11–14 baroque (term) about  16–18, 517 as literary concept  540–45 and politics  825 Baroque state  825–41 ceremonial order in  834–35 and omnipotence  828–31 order and  826 political concepts in  825–28 as theater state  836–39 and Theatrum Europaeum 839–41 war and geometry in  831–34 See also absolutism Baroque theatricality. See theatricality Barrière, Domenico  451f Barthes, Roland  65, 81, 632 Bary, René  70 Batalla, Guillermo Bonfil  165 Battista Falda, Giovanni  89 Baudelaire, Charles  625–26

index   869 Bayle, Pierre  433, 642 beatification. See saints Beauchamps, Pierre  267, 812 Beauchamps-Feuillet notation system. See dance Beaujoyeux, Balthasar de  812 Beauvarlet-Charpentier, Jean-Jacques  330, 332 Beckman, Johann  140f Behringer, Wolfgang  751 Benedetti, Elpidio  393 Benedict XVI, Pope  861 Benjamin, Walter and crisis of baroque  15 and diplomacy  736–38, 744 on India  2 and literature  542, 553–54 on melancholy  593–94 and neobaroque  159–60 The Origin of German Tragic Drama 159, 594, 736 philosophies of  488–91 on tragedy  518, 526 Ursprung  488–91, 526, 553–54 Benmoussa, Mathilde  77 Benserade, Isaac de  690 Berain, Jean  243f, 244f Bergman, Hannah E.  803 Berkeley, George  8, 615 Bernier, François  29–33, 39 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo and automata  187 and city planning  217, 220 The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa  492, 603, 855 on experience and knowledge  455–56, 456f and machine plays  393 philosophies of  492, 603 and sainthood  855 Bertaut, Jean  649–50 Binet, Ana Maria  650 Binsfeld, Peter  755 Bitti, Bernardo  859 Bjørnstad, Hall  17, 583, 593 Bjurström, Per  391 Blome, Richard  128 Blumenberg, Hans  460 Blumenthal, Arthur  390

Boaistuau, Pierre  695 Böckler, Georg Andreas  104, 104f Bodin, Jean  828 Boileau, Nicolas  628 Bolland, Jean  848 Bonneval, Comte de  348 Booth, Stephen  461 Borgerhoff, E. B. O.  631 Borges, J. L.  459 Borghini, Vincenzio  814 Borja, Cardinal Gasper  240 Borja (Borgia), Francis  854 Borromeo, Charles  14, 643–44, 699, 853 Borromeo, Frederico  853 Borromini, Francesco  304, 451, 451f, 455–56, 455f Bosse, Abraham  122, 123f Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne  652 Bossy, John  698 Botero, Giovanni  211 Bots, H.  439 Boullay, Benoît  252 Bourdeille, Pierre de  702 Bourdieu, Pierre  291 Bourdin, Pierre  605–7 Bousseau, Jacques  108, 109f Boyceau, Jacques  89 Boyle, Robert  562 Boyvin, Jacques  321, 325, 329–30 Bragaccia, Gasparo  739–40, 742 Brahe, Tycho  717f, 718–20 Braider, Christopher  603–4 Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de 702–3 Brazilian literature  551–52 Bretez, Louis  218f Browne, Thomas  155, 157, 566–67 A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfalk 566 The Garden of Cyrus  157, 566–67 Hydriotaphia  157, 566 Urn Burial  155, 157, 566–67 Brun, Isaac  188f Buffequin, Denis  394–95, 397 Buffequin, Georges  392–93, 394–95 Buffet, Marguerite  473 Bulwer, John  69, 128

870   index Buonarroti, Michelangelo  701 Buontalenti, Bernardo  389 Burckhardt, Jacob  517 Burguen, Rocha  254 Burke, Peter  855 Burnacini, Giovanni  395 Burnacini, Ludovico Ottavio  393 Burton, Robert  128, 155, 564–65 Buti, Francesco  396 Butler, Philip  630

C

Cahusac, Louis de  378 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro El gran teatro del mundo 460–61 El Principe Constante  528–29, 736–37 La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream)  8, 460 Life is a Dream 8 Camerino, José  509 Campos, Haroldo de  552 Camus, Jean-Pierre  651, 853 canals. See gardens Candido, António  551–52 Capo Ferro da Cagli, Rodolfo  141, 141f Caravaggio  450, 849 Cardinal, Catherine  786 Caribbean 292–93 Carmelite Order. See Catholicism Carpenter, Sarah  805 Carpentier, Alejo  165, 550 Cartesianism  5, 202, 452, 458–59, 628–29, 652 cartography. See maps cascades. See gardens; water Castello, Dario  325 Castiglione, Baldassare  126–27, 254, 471, 809 Castiglione, Giuseppe  859 Castillo Solórzano, Alonso de  507, 508 Catholicism Baroque piety with  847 Carmelite Order  699 and Church of Il Gesù  411–12 confessional  14, 698–99 identity in  12 memento mori in  155 and Revocation  433

and witchcraft  752 See also Christianity; counter-reformation; preaching; saints Cattiaux, Bertrand  314, 316 Caus, Jean Salomon de  817 Caussin, Nicolas  851 Cavaillé, Fabien  65–66 Cavaillé-Coll, Aristide  332 Cavendish, Margaret  562 Celles, Bédos de  323 Cerné, Simon  675 Cervantes, Miguel de and crisis of baroque  8 and discourse  562 Don Quixote  8, 452, 497–99, 511, 810 Don Quixote II 498 El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha 501 and entertainment  810 on experience and knowledge  452 Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda 499 Novelas ejemplares 501–2 and sexuality  695 and Spanish novels  497–502, 508 Cesi, Federico  440 Challot, Jacques  807–8 Chamfort, Nicolas  595–96 Chapoton, François de  396, 398 Charles II, king of England  137 Charles II, king of Spain  510 Charles XI, king of Sweden  837 Charleton, Walter  722 Charlton, David  374 Charpentier, Balbastre  330 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine  330, 678 Charpentrat, Pierre  14 Chastel, André  626, 628 Chauchetière, Claude  858–59 Chauveau, François  630 Chiampi, Irlemar  150–52, 549 Choisy, François Timoléon de  698 Cholenec, Pierre  858 Cholet (term)  175 Christian I, elector of Saxony  187 Christianity 150 breakup of  587 fashion and  130 information exchange in  13

index   871 and kalfas 341–42 and machines  10–11 and neobaroque  162 organization and displays by  11–12 and Ottoman Empire  341 and politics  830 revival of  627–28 skepticism of  7 and witchcraft  752–55 See also Catholicism; Jesuits; Protestantism; Counter-Reformation; Council of Trent Christina, queen of Sweden  704 chronometry 779–97 creation of watches  785–87, 788f history of early modern  783–87 theater’s role in  788–97 and time measurements  779–83 See also machines churches confessional  14, 698–99 Counter-Reformation Church  516 churches (buildings)  295–98, 296f, 297f Cathedral of Havana, Cuba  298 Cathedral of Puebla, Mexico  297f cathedrals of Spanish America  295–97, 296f, 297f Chapel of the Holy Shroud  416, 417f Church of Il Gesù  411–15, 412f, 414f Church of San Esteban Rey  304 Church of Santa María  162–65, 163f, 164f Church of Santiago  303f Saint-Sarcedos Cathedral  314–17, 314f, 315f São Francisco Church and Convent of Salvador  294–95, 294f, 295f Überlingen church  418–19, 418f cities, baroque  211–34 about 211–12 Amsterdam 229–34 Bordeaux 221–24 Ludwigsburg and Karlsruhe  227–29 Neuf-Brisach 224–26 Paris 217–21 Rome 212–16 Venice 230 See also urbanism city. See architecture; urbanism civility and conversation  471–82

classic (term)  18 Classic-Baroque (term)  597–98 Classicism 543 baroque vs.  37 Baroque vs.  582 French  624–25, 629–37 themes of  596–98 Claver, Peter  857 Clément, Michèle  642 Clérambault, L.-N.  318, 319, 321 clocks. See automata; chronometry;  machines clothing. See fashion and style Colbert, Jean-Baptiste  255–56, 634 Collège des Quatre-Nations 221 Collège Royal 439 Colletet, Guillaume  274, 276 Colón, Isabel  504 colonialism  36, 256 colonization  3–4, 162–65, 288–93 Columbus, Christopher  286, 288 confessional  14, 698–99. See also Catholicism; Christianity Connor, Katie  238 Connors, Joseph  212 conversation and civility  471–82 Copernicus, Nicolaus  713–15, 718 Corneille, Pierre  220–21, 396–97, 473, 603, 791–97 Cornet 315–16 Coronelli Globes  4 Corpus Christi celebrations  308 Corrette, Michel  331–32 cosmology 716–21 Coster, Salomon  787 costumes. See fashion; and theater Cotelle, Jean  102, 102f, 104 cotton. See fashion and style Coulon, Louis  55 Council of Trent Catholic piety after  850 and crisis of baroque  11 decreta of  643–44 and knowledge organization  431, 433–34 on liturgy  645 saints after  852–56 Tametsi decree of  695

872   index Counter-Reformation 627–28 and French Baroque  633, 637 knowledge in  430–31 and sexuality  695, 698 women in  693 Couperin, François  313, 318, 320–22, 324 Couperin, Louis  313, 318–19, 326–30 Courtin, Nicolas  129 Courtine, J. J.  71 Crashaw, Richard  647 Creuzer, Friedrich  490 Croce, Benedetto  517 Croft, William  326–27 Croll, Morris  562–63 Crosby, Alfred  784 cross-dressing. See fashion; sexualities Cummins, Tom  289 Curtius, E. R.  632–33, 636

D

d’Alembert, Jean le Rond  378, 437 Dallam, Robert  331 Damrosch, David  177 dance  264–79, 272f, 278f about 264–66 Ballet comique 812 Ballet de la Nuit 266 ballets de cour  264, 266, 277, 805, 812, 816 ballets en action 264 Beauchamps-Feuillet notation ­system  267–70, 268f, 812 body aesthetic for  270–73 comédie-ballet 373 court ballet  812 as entertainment  811–12 expressive 273–76 masked balls  265 “Minor Choirs, The”  174–75 notation of  267–70, 812 pas de menuet 269 societal influences on  276–79 Dandrieu, Jean-François  330 Dangeau, Marquis de  323 d’Anglebert, Jean-Henri  322 Daquin, Louis-Claude  330 d’Argentan, Capuchin  670–71, 676 D’Aubignac, François-Hédelin  398–99

Davenant, William  814 David, Jacques-Louis  859–60 Davies, Owen  751 de Albayzeta, Juan  248 Dean, Carolyn  302 de’Cavalieri, Tommaso  701 de Celles, Dom Bédos  332 de Certeau, Michel  46 de Corte, Juan  251 De Foix, Marc-Antoine  653 de Geer, Maximilian  97f Dekker, Rudolph  693 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés  308 de la Guillotière, François  49–53, 50f, 52f Deleuze, Gilles on baroque  583–87 on experience and knowledge  449, 462–63 The Fold  462, 493 on literature  553 philosophies of  493–95 reenergizing baroque  15 and tragedy  517, 533 on unicorns  596 de l’Incarnation, Marie  857–58 della Casa, Giovanni  127, 471 de Luna, Juan  510–11 demonology 748 de Pontac, Arnaud III  222 de Pure, Michel  273–75 De Sales, François  668, 671–74, 699, 855–56 De Sanctis, Francesco  214 Descartes, René on amazement  2–3 and automata  185, 202–3 on baroque  715–16 on baroque as term  17, 570 on baroque themes  608 on city planning  226 on Deleuze  494 Discourse on Method  6, 226 on dreams  461–62 on duplicity  6 and experience  452–53 on experience and knowledge  458 First Meditation 612 on mechanical philosophy  10 in Netherlands  229

index   873 notation system by  279 Passions of the Soul  2–3, 458, 723 Principles of Philosophy 203 on resemblance  722–25 and self  612–13 and skepticism of knowledge  612 and tragedy  529–30 Traité des passions 529–30 The Treatise on Man 202 d’Espaignet, Jean  758 des Prez, Josquin  370 Dézailler d’Argenville, Antoine-Joseph  89, 92, 94 dictionaries  473–74, 591 Diderot, Denis  16, 437 diplomacy 734–44 ambassadors in  741–44 bodies and signs in  740–41 mediation in  738–40 negotiation and  735–36 subjects in  734–38 discourse 560–75 about 560–61 English 564–67 genres of  561–62 Latin and vernacular expression in  568–71 styles of  562–64 and transatlantic hieroglyphs  573–75 and wit  571–73 do Campos, Haroldo  152 Dom Bruno  680–81 Dompnier, Bernard  645 Donne, John  119–23, 120f, 134, 564 Donneau de Visé, Jean  242–44 Dordogne, mapping of  46 Doric Order  411 d’Ors, Eugenio  544, 546, 626, 632 Dryden, John  632 Dubos, Francis  378 Dumandré, Hubert  108 Duplessis, Jean-Claude  341 Dürer, Albrecht  195, 196f, 198, 490–91 d’Urfé, Honoré  45, 694 Duval, Jacques  691–92

E

Ebreo da Pesaro, Guglielmo  274 Echeverría, Bolívar  152, 163–64

Echeverría, Roberto González  152–53 Eco, Umberto  565–66 Edict of Nantes  225 El Greco  462 Elias, Norbert  803–5 Eliot, T.S.  152 eloquence. See discourse; preaching Emanuel, Max  96 emotions amazement  2–3, 9–10 anger  70, 275 and behavior  126 and dance  269, 275 fashion expressing  134 fear 275 makeup expressing  77 melancholy  134, 155, 593–94 and vernacular expression  568–71 and water  98 See also passion engineering gardens. See gardens military  211–12, 225–26 England automata in  204 French style in  137 sumptuary laws in  131 Enlightenment Baroque in  370 knowledge in  430 and learned sociability  438–39 and neobaroque  151 entertainment 802–18 Arcadia myth and  816–18 court festivals  836–37 court spectacle and  802–5, 814–16 dance as  811–12. See also dance fencing  141, 141f fête  805–12, 806f, 808f, 810f fighting as  807–10, 808f, 810f formal court balls  265 masques used in  813–14 motion in  817 surprise in  817 water use in  109–11 See also dance; spectacle; theater Epicureanism 435 Erasmus  126–27, 432

874   index Escobar, Jesús  288 Essex, John  267 Europe colonization changing  4 and India  37–38 political style in  827–28 witch-hunting in  751 Euthyme III, Fr.  680 experience 449–68 and doubling  460 of dreaming  460–62 and figures of force  454–59 and figures of form  459 figures of life displaying  463–65 and The Fold 462–63 Lacan on  492 style and  449–53 and wit  465–67 Eyüp  352, 352f

F

Faber, Giovanni  4 Fajardo, Saavedra  734 Falda, Giovanni Battista  101f Faret, Nicholas  472 Farnese, Alexander  413 Farnese, Isabella  108 fashion and style  238–57, 243f–45f, 247f–50f about 239–40 breeches 246 clothing norms in  246–53 collars  132–34, 251 cotton use in  254, 256 cross-dressing 693–94 disguises 7 globalization of  253–56 golilla 251 hair  122, 136–38 jewelry 240 and Le Mercure Galant  242, 243f, 244f, 246, 257 and looseness of clothing  120–21 makeup 76–77 of males  129–36, 138–40 moderation in appearance  127 for mourning  242 periwigs 137

portrait prints of  244–45 with precious metals  253 and privilege  239 and showing linen  131–32 status displayed through  240–46 and sumptuary laws  130–31 swords in  140–43 tailoring  248, 252 textile industry  130, 253–56 and theater  75, 162, 277, 811 three-piece suit  246 using wool  254 wigs 137 Faulkner, William  155 Fawkener, Everard  341 Feldman, Martha  374 Félibien, André  107 Féral, Josette  65 Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria  187 Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany  440, 442 Ferrari, Benedetto  395 Ferreyrolles, Gérard  654 fête. See spectacle Feuillet, Raoul-Auger  267, 270, 812 Findlen, Paula  568 Fischer von Erlach, Johann  111f Fish, Stanley  157–58 Fitelieu, Monsieur de  76 Flachat, Jean-Claude  337, 346 Fleming, Hanns Friedrich  834 Flutes (pipes)  315 Foigny, Gabriel de  691 Foix, Marc-Antoine de  653 Fontaine, Nicolas  9 Fontana, Carlo  89 Forcione, Alban  528, 788–89 Foucault, Michel  47, 560, 688, 698, 715–16 fountains 92 Bassin d’Apollon  105, 105f design of  103–5, 104f Diana-Fountain  108, 109f Fontaines de la couronne 105 Fontana dei Cigni 99 Fontana dei Dragoni 98 Fontana del Diluvio 98–99 Fontana dell’Ovato 99

index   875 and illusion  9 Latona fountain  93 and Marly Machine  9 Neptune Fountain  9 at Topkapi Palace  336 Trevi Fountain  9, 101, 214 See also machines; water France 623–37 absolutism in  803 and Baroque rejection  623–25 baroque term in  543, 825–26 classical and Baroque divide in  629–37 clocks in  786 and dance. See dance dialectic in  16–18 fashion in  246–48, 248f galant in  585–86 Indian influence in  28–29, 33–34, 37–38 language changes in  473–74 Louvre 220 Luxembourg Palace  217 modernity in  625–29 nationalism in  217 opera in  372–73 Paris  217–21, 703 Paris Parlement  757 religious war in  434 sumptuary laws in  131 theater spaces in  72 witchcraft trials in  757–59 Francesco Venturini, Giovanni  89 Francine, François  103 Francini, Brunelleschi Tommaso  392 Francis I, king of France  734, 744 Francis of Assisi  850–51 Francophone baroque  543–45 Franko, Mark  279 Franz von Hohenems, Ferdinand Karl  765 Frederick the Great, king of Prussia  703, 837, 839 Frémin, René  108, 109f Friedrich, Carl J.  602–3 friendship  438, 696 Friess, Joachim  191f Froberger, Johann Jacob  321 Fromentières, Aire Jean-Louis de  679–80 Fuentes, Carlos  156

Fumaroli, Marc  543–45, 571, 647–48, 654 Furetière, Antoine  32, 77, 271, 589–92, 594, 672 Furttenbach, Joseph  390, 393–94

G

Gabriel, Ange-Jacques  222, 224 galant  475–76, 585–86 Galen 689–90 Galilei, Galileo  4–5, 434–35, 503, 562, 722 Ganymede 700 García, Carlos  510 Garcilaso, Inca  561 gardens corals in  106 for entertainment  817 Fontaines de la couronne 105 fontainiers 103 formal 276–77 Isola Bella  110 parterres  94–95, 103, 277 parterres d’eau  94–95 Reggia di Caserta  93–94, 94f at Topkapi Palace  341 in Versailles  92–93, 93f, 96, 102–4, 110 Villa Aldobrandini  91–92 Villa Borghese  106 Villa d’Este  98 Garonne, mapping of  46 Gassendi, Pierre  29, 435, 568 Gaudí, Antoni  860 Gaulli, Giovanni Battista  413 Gaylord, Mary  501 gender and sexuality  689–94 genres of discourse  561–62 genres of organ music  320–31 duo 323–24 fond d’orgue  328 fugue 321–23 grand jeu  328–30 noëls 330–31 plein jeu  320–21 récit de basse 326–27 récit de dessus 324–25 récit en taille 325–26 trio 327–28

876   index Germany baroque term in  825 clockwork automata of  185–87 ornamentation in  417–18 protestant organ music  322, 331 witchcraft in  749 witch-hunting in  751 gestures creating 69–70 expressing horrible  70 and male behavior  128–29 passion expressed through  66–69 See also emotions Gheeraerts, Marcus  134 Ghislieri, Michele  855 Gide, André  626, 631 Giehlow, Ernst  529 Gigault, Nicolas  330 Girardon, François  106 Gisbert, Teresa  165–66 Glanvill, Joseph  767 Glasser, Richard  779 Glissant, Edourard  540 God belief in  312 and causality  615 and politics  827 See also religion Godeau, Antoine  669, 675–76, 678–79 Goldoni, Carlo  376 Góngora, Luis de  491, 546–48 Gonzaga, Aloysius  854, 861 Görres, Joseph von  490 Gottman, Felicia  28 Goulu, Jean  570 Gourmont, Jean de  48–49, 49f Gowland, Angus  565 Gracián, Baltasar Agudeza y arte de ingenio 466 and conversation  477 and crisis of baroque  6 El Criticón 509 on experience and knowledge  450, 464–67 and fashion  128 El Heroe  128, 477 Oracle, or the Art of Prudence 6 Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia 464

on prose  571–72 and Spanish novels  509–10 and time keeping  804 Grafton, Anthony  436 Grand Canal  93, 96, 110, 230, 233 Greenberg, Mitchell  585 Greene, Roland  153 Greer, Allan  858 Greer, Margaret Rich  393 Grigny, Nicolas de  313 Grimarest, Jean-Lénor Le Gallois de  66–67 Grimm, Jacob  749–50 Grosseteste, Robert  720 Grotius, Hugo  735 grottoes  92, 106–7, 107f, 110 Grotta Pavese  107f in Rome  106 Thetis grotto  106, 110 in Versailles  106 See also gardens Guamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe  291, 292f Guarini, Guarino  416, 417f, 419 Guazzo, Stefano  471 Guerrero y Torres, Francisco  304, 305f Guillory, John  563 Gutiérrez-Haces, Juana  304 Gutkind, E. A.  229

H

Habrecht III, Isaak  189, 190f Hadice Sultan  354 Hale, George  141 Hall, Edward  811 Hals, Frans  123–24, 124f Hamon, Jean  669, 674 Hampton, Timothy  17–18, 540 Handel, George Frideric  422–24, 423f Hansen, Adolfo  552 Hansen, Joseph  748 Harbison, Robert  287, 607, 860 Haroche, C.  71 Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp  569 Hasan, Abul  193 Hatzfeld, Helmut  546–47, 630–31 Hauser, Arnold  629, 631, 634 Haut-Brion estate  222 Hayls, John  135, 135f

index   877 Hazard, Paul  433, 435 Heemskerck, Maarten van  784 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro  548–49 Henry II, king of France  62, 695, 807 Henry III, king of France  440, 700 Henry IV, king of France  217, 691, 758, 815 Henry VIII, king of England  734, 741, 744, 811 hermaphrodite  691–92, 705–7 Herzberg, Julia  166–68 Hippocrates  566, 689 “History of Sapho”  474–75, 485 Hobbes, Thomas  10, 604, 606, 827 Holbein, Hans, the Younger  739, 745, 814 homosexualities 700–4 honnête homme  477, 481–82. See also civility Hopkins, Matthew  761, 762 Hotman, Jean  735, 744 Huarte de San Juan, Juan  465–66, 691 Huguenots  433–34, 697, 817 humanism  429–30, 432, 441 Hundred Years’ War  810 Hungary  498, 761–62 Huntley, Frank  157 Huygens, Christian  787 Huygens, Constantijn  130, 236

I

Ibero-American architecture and urbanism  286–88, 302, 308 Ignatius of Loyola  6, 7, 853–54 Île Saint-Louis  220 Imperiale, Giovan Vincenzo  106 India 27–39 European interest in  27–30 indiennes 34–37 indiennes from  34–37 influencing baroque  37–39 Mughal throne  31–32 peacock  27–28, 39 Peacock Throne  30–31, 38 Taj Mahal in  32–33 Indians (Latin American people) and neobaroque  162–65, 291, 549 Innocent X, Pope  214 Irene, Saint  860–61 Istanbul  334, 336. See also Ottoman Baroque

Italy homosexuality in  704 and Italian-style theaters  72 opera in  372–73 ornamentation in  421–22 stage hands in  392–95 stage in  391–92 water in  92–93 water theaters in  100

J

Jahan, Shah  30 James I, king of England  136, 700 Jaquet-Droz, Henri-Louis  204 Jaquet-Droz, Pierre  204 Jaspart, Hubert  674 Jeanneret, Michel  545 Jerome, Saint  850 Jesuits  192, 297, 431, 568 John of the Cross  699–700 Johnson, Christopher  540–41 Johnson, Samuel  561, 567 Jomelli, Niccolò  373 Jones, Inigo  393–94, 813–14 Jonson, Ben  813 Julius II, Pope  212 Jullien, Gilles  313 Justina, Rogue  499–500 Juvarra, Filippo  215

K

Kagan, Richard L.  289 Kalfa, Foti  356 Kant, Immanuel  454 Karlsruhe 228–29 Kaye, B. F.  727 Kepler, Johannes  151, 716, 719–21, 723–24, 729–30 Khan, Daneshmend  29 Kircher, Athanasius  568, 575 Klee, Paul  489 Kneller, Godfrey  136f knowledge 429–43 European dimension of  430–31 and learned sociability  437–39 organization of  429–30 and passions  724

878   index knowledge (Continued ) pedagogy 431 and perspective  610–11 problems of  610–14 and Ratio studiorum 431 and republic of letters  432–37 of stage machinery  392–95 and university  439–42 Krautheimer, Richard  415 Kubler, George  287

L

L’Abbe, Anthony  266 Labé, Louise  692–93, 781–82 Lacan, Jacques  491–93 La Dixmérie, Nicolas Bricaire de  377 La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine de  34, 479, 586 La Fontaine, Jean de  479, 595 La Framboisière, Nicholas Abraham  77 La Hoguette, Philippe Fortin de  437 Lalande, Michel-Richard de  330 Lancelot, Claude  673 Lanci, Baldassare  390 Lancre, Pierre de  758 Langenbucher, Achilles  199f Lanoë, Catherine  76 Laplace, P.-S.  443 Laqueur, Thomas  689 Largillière, Nicholas  119–20, 121f, 122–23 La Rochefoucauld, François de  592–93 La Rue, Charles de  650–51 Lasceux, Guillaume  332 La Storta  854 Latin America  162–71, 487, 540, 542, 568–71 Lavin, Irving  213 Lazardzig, Jan  394 Lebègue, Nicolas  313, 319, 321, 324–25, 329–30 Lebègue, Raymond  624, 636 LeBrun, Charles  70–71 Le Camus, Étienne  677 Le Cerf de la Viéville, Jean-Laurent  421–22 Le Clerc, Jean  433, 435 Le Faucheur, Michel  68, 69, 74–75 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm and Baroque state  841 and dance  279

and discourse  564, 568–69 on experience and knowledge  454 and knowledge organization  433, 443 Monadology 564 philosophies of  493 Leibsohn, Dana  302 Le Marcis, Marie/Marin  691–92 Le Moyne, Pierre  669 Le Nôtre, André  94–95, 817 Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor  836 Leo X, Pope  212 Lepage, Robert  392 Le Pautre, Jean  108f Lépine, Jean-Francois  314, 316 Lerma, Duke of  499 Levack, Brian  764 Le Vau, Louis  221 Lezama Lima, José  165, 540, 549–50 Ligorio, Pirro  89 Linnaeus, Carl  4 Lipsius, Justus  432, 719 literature comedy in  505 French. See Classicism; French and interlude  505 Isis 374 Lettre de M. *** à Mlle. *** sur l’origine de la musique 371–72 Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation 15 and libraries  441 Mémoire de Mahelot 73 montre de fantaisie 790–91 mythistoire 45 novela cortesana 504 pessimism in  505–7, 510 pícara 507–8 picaresque novel  499–500 pornographic texts  697 prayer books  676 Spanish novels  497–511 surge of baroque in  15 Ten Books on Architecture, The 289 and time keeping through poetry  785 Little Ice Age  763

index   879 Lomazzo, Giampaolo  107 Lope de Vega  499, 788–90 Lotti, Cosimo  393 Louis IX, king of France  850–51 Louis XIII, king of France  136 Louis XIV, king of France (Sun King)  103, 373, 623, 758–59, 809, 816, 818 age of  624–27, 630, 633–34 and city planning  217, 221, 225 and court spectacle  804 and fashion  240 and God  312 and indiennes 36–37 Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles 103 marriage of  241, 241f and organ music  331 in theater  836–37, 838f Louis of Grenada  667 Lübke, Wilhelm  517 Ludwig, Eberhard  227 Ludwigsburg  227–28, 227f, 228f Lugo y Dávila, Francisco  506 Lully, Jean-Baptiste  329, 373–74, 376, 378–80, 815–16

M

Mably, Gabriel Bonnot, abbé de  378–80 machine plays  386–99 origins and development of  388–92 at public theaters  395–99 Restorations spectaculars 398 and technological knowledge  392–95 theaters for  386–88 and theologeion 390 machines and baroque development  8–11 clockwork automata  185–87, 189, 783–84, 785–87 Marly Machine  9 and Merlin’s Mechanical Museum  204 personal clocks  785–87 public clocks  784–85 telescope 4–5 watches  785–87, 788f Maderno, Carlo  100

Maes, Nicolas  138–39, 140f Magendie, Maurice  472 Maggi, Giovanni  89 magic. See witchcraft Mahelot, Laurent  393 Mahmud I, Ottoman sultan  337, 339, 344, 346, 353 Malebranche, Nicolas  614–15 males 119–43 behavior of  126–29 clothes of  129–36 hair or  136–38 images of  119–26 nudity of  131–32 robes of  138–40 swords used by  140–43 Malherbian reform  472–73 Mancing, Howard  505–6 Mandeville, Bernard  725–28, 729–30 Mandrou, R.  429 Mantegna, Andrea  195 Manutius, Aldus  644 maps 44–60 of Amsterdam  231f Carte des rivières de France curieusement recherchée  55–57, 56f, 57f, 58f Carte de Tendre  58–60, 59f Cartes generales et particulieres de toutes les costes de France  53–55, 54f, 55f Charte de France  49–53, 50f “Fool’s Cap Map”  48–49, 49f and importance of water  44–45 molehills in  47 of Paris  218f provinces defined through  45–46 of Rome  215, 216f taupinière in  47 techniques in making  46–47 Theatrum orbis terrarum  47–48, 48f world 47–48 Maravall, José Antonio  2, 18, 449, 553, 603, 610, 826 Marchand, Louis  318–19, 329 Mariani, Giovanni Maria  393 María Teresa, Infanta of Spain  241–42, 241f Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria  837

880   index “Marie–Germain” 690–91 Marino, Giambattista  564 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de  17 Marlowe, Christopher  700–1 Marly Globes  4 martyrdom 849. See also saints Marvall, José Antonio  550–51 Mary, the mother of Jesus  851–52 Mary Magdalene  678–79, 850 masque and antimasque  811, 813–14 Master of Calamarca, The  166f Matthew, Saint  850 Maurice, Klaus  186 Mayr, Otto  186 Mazarin, Cardinal Jules Raymond  217, 312, 372, 393 McCarthy, Cormac  149–50, 153–61, 176–77 Medici, Caterina de’  812 Medici, Cosimo de’  142 Medici, Marie de’  217 meditation about 668–72 instruments of  676–77 and prayer  668–72, 676–77 in private devotion  677–81 and retreat  672–76 Mehmed the Conqueror  348 Meissonnier, Juste-Aurèle  419, 420f melancholy. See emotions Melanchthon, Philip  431, 435 Melling, Antoine Ignace  354 Mendoza, Bernardino de  735 Ménestrier, Claude François  273–76, 388 Méré, Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de  471, 804 Merlin, John Joseph  204 Merrim, Stephanie  305–6 Mersenne, Marin  67, 440–41 Mesnard, Jean  604–5, 613, 654 Metastasio, Pietro  376 Mexico city planning and colonial ideology in 288–93 Eurocentrism in  287 New World baroque in  162 Michelet, Jules  749–50

microscopes. See optics Mignard, Pierre  853 Mignolo, Walter D.  286 military engineering in  211–12, 225–26 hospitals of  221 swords envoking culture of  142 Milton, John  519, 523–26 modernism  151, 409, 628–29 Molière (Jean Poquelin)  77, 373 Molina, Tirso de  503–4, 508 Molinier, Etienne  648–49 Moll, Jaime  504 Montaigne, Michel de and crisis of baroque  17–18 on experience and knowledge  461 on fashion  121 on hair  137 on India  46 and perspective  610–11 on senses  611–12 and sexuality  696 “Sur des vers de Virgile”  696 on swords  140–41 and time keeping  782–83 and variation  608–9 on witchcraft  754 Montalbán, Juan Pérez de  504, 506 Monter, William  756 Monteverdi, Claudio  370, 451 Moroni, Giovanni  121, 122f Moser, Walter  149–51 mosques, sultanic  343–50, 353 Beylerbeyi Mosque  355–56, 355f Haci Kemalettin Mosque  353, 354f Laleli Mosque  347–48, 347f, 349f, 353, 355 Nuruosmaniye Mosque  344–48, 344f, 345f, 346f, 353 Nusretiye Mosque  357 Süleymaniye Mosque  346f Motte Aigron, Jacques de la  569–70 Munter, Cornelis  138 Murray, Timothy  794 Musaeus, Johann  728 Muschelwerk. See rococo ornament music  266, 370, 421–24, 450. See also opera; organ music

index   881 Musso, Cornelio  647 mythology and discourse  574 and entertainment  816 homo sexualities in  700 and machine theater  388 and masque  813 and sex  690–91 and water  90–91, 107–8

N

Nagler, Alois M.  807, 814 Nain, Pierre le  680 Naudé, Gabriel  748 Neapolitan disease  697–98 Nemeitz, Joachim Christoph  251–52 neobaroque  150–78, 549–50 Cormac McCarthy’s  153–61 defining 150–53 Demian Schopf ’s  161–76 and tequitqui art  162 tío in  171, 172f “Tiw” in  171 Nervèze, Antoine de  674 Netherlands canals in  95–96 sumptuary laws in  131 witchcraft trials in  760 Neuf-Brisach  224–26, 224f, 831, 832f Nevşehirli İbrahim Pasha  336 Newman, Jane  541, 545 Newton, Isaac  279, 440, 713–14 Nicot, Jean  561 Nişanci Ahmed Pasha  350 Nivers, Guillauame-Gabriel  313, 318–19, 322–29 Noël, Père  604–5 Nolli, Giambattista  215, 216f Norway, witchcraft trials in  761 Nuss, Balthasar  764 Nymphenburg 96

O

Ogier, François  570 Oldenburg, Henry  440 Oliva, Giovanni Paolo  413, 415 Oliver, Isaac  134

opera 370–81 about 370–72 and Ancien régime  374–75 dance in  265 dramma per musica  373, 376, 388, 815 emergence of  815–16 in France and Italy  372–73 intermezzi 815 language in  378–81 nested worlds in  375–78 Opéra Royal  387 pastorale 372–73 tragédie en musique  374–79, 815–16 Oppenord, Gilles  416 optics  4–5, 719–21 microscopes 4–5 telescope  5, 436, 467, 564, 612, 613, 720, 722 oratory  74–75, 451. See also preaching organ (structure)  315–17 Bourdons (pipes)  315 development of  10 Grand Orgue 314 Montres (pipes)  315 Pédale 314 Reeds in  315 of Saint-Sarcedos Cathedral  314–17, 314f, 315f organ music  312–32, 314f, 315f about 312–13 duo genre  323–24 fond d’orgue genre  328 and French influence abroad  331 French livres d’orgue 317–19 fugue genre  321–23 genres of. See genres of organ music grand jeu genre  328–30 and liturgy  319–20 during Louis XIV reign  331–32 noëls genre  330–31 Offertoire 320 and organ development  313–17 plein jeu genre  320–21 publishing of  317–19 quatuor genre  322–23 Récit 314 récit de basse genre  326–27 récit de dessus genre  324–25

882   index organ music (Continued ) récit en taille genre  325–26 trio genre  327–28 Orléans, Philippe d’  704 ornamentation  409–24, 412f, 414f, 417f, 418f and classical inheritance  410–11 “the grotesque” (term)  415–16 musical 420–24 operatic da capo aria  422 and Orders of Architecture  410–11 and social change  411–15 transformations of  415–19 Ortega y Gasset, José  546 Ortelius, Abraham  47–48, 48f, 49f Osman, Michael  491 Osman III, Ottoman sultan  344 Ottoman Baroque  334–58 about 334–35 architecture of  343–50 artistic developments of  335–40 and Baroque aesthetic development 340–43 ceremonial space in  350–57 ʿİmāret  339–40, 339f and Ottoman Greeks  341–42 and Ottoman Sultan  191–92 Ovid  107, 397, 690

P

Paleotti, Gabrielle  458 Palisca, Claude  370–71 Palladio, Andrea  214, 221, 394, 410 Panofsky, Erwin  780 Parasacchi, Domenico  89 Paré, Ambroise  690 Pascal, Blaise  5, 570–71 and behavioral identity  12 on Bjørnstad  593 machine development by  10 Pensées  5, 571 and preaching  654 on scholasticism  604–5 and self  613 on theater  372 passion expressing 66–69 of man  728 and opera  372

and perceptions  724 and tragedy  517 See also emotions Paul III, Pope  212 Paz, Octavio  573 Pécour, Guillaume-Louis  268f, 269 Peiresc, Nicolas  436, 441 Pellisson, Paul  478, 480, 482 Pepys, Samuel on clothing  129 extra marital affairs of  696–97 hair of  137 portrait of  135, 135f role of  138 and swords  142 Pérez, Juan  509 Peri, Jacopo  815 Perlongher, Nestor  550 Perrault, Charles  430, 480 Perrault, Claude  220 Perrault, Pierre  91 Peter the Great, tsar of Russia  340 Peyre, Henri  624 Peyssonnel, Claude-Charles de  344 Philip II, king of Spain  510 Philip IV, king of Spain  240, 251 Philip V, king of Spain  108, 248, 250, 250f Philips, Katherine  703 philology  434–35, 438 philosophy 602–16 change (theme)  608–9 of experience  614–16 “I” (theme)  610 “mad world” (theme)  609 mechanical 10 origin (term)  489, 553–54 and problems of knowledge  610–14 style and rhetoric in  604–7 themes in  608–10 variation (theme)  608–9 See also specific philosophers Picard, Raymond  629–30 Picón Salas, Mariano  548–49 Pierce, Ken  269 Pillorget, René  30 Pillorget, Suzanne  30 Pinchêne, Martin de  478 Pinelli, Gian Vincenzo  439, 441

index   883 Plat, Hugh  276–77 Platonism 435 plazas. See urbanism politics. See absolutism; Baroque state; diplomacy Pontormo, Jacopo da  456 Porpora, Nicola  373 portraits 120f, 121f, 123f, 124f, 125f fashion in  122–26 manliness displayed in  119 and prayer  677–78 Portugal and baroque as literary concept  551–52 colonization by  289, 293–94 independence of  505 saints in  856 witchcraft trials in  757 prayer about 668–72 books for  676 grand siècle  668, 674, 678, 681 instruments of  676–77 manuals for  669, 671 mental 670 oraison jaculatoire 670 in private devotion  677–81 and retreat  672–76 vocal 670 See also religion; meditation preaching 642–55 affective images for  646 elements of definition in  645–47 French early modern catholic  647–55 images for  646–47 mnemonic images for  646 on neoclassicism  646–47 and pulpit oratory  643–45 regulation of  13–14 sermons  450–51, 679–80 silent 458 suavitas in  644 See also religion Preston, Claire  566, 567 Protestantism identity in  12 and organ music  312. See also organ music Protestant Reformation  693–95 and witchcraft  752

Prynne, William  813–14 Puthois, Pierre  108

Q

Quevedo, Francisco de  254, 500, 504, 506–7, 572–73 Quinault, Philippe  373–74, 376–80 Quinones, Ricardo J.  780–82

R

Racine, Michel  530–33, 630–31, 634–35 Radesca di Foggia, Enrico  421 Radicati, Alberto  728 Raison, André  318–21, 323–25 Rambouillet, Marquise de  477 Rameau, Jean-Philippe  212, 223, 482 Abbrégé de la nouvelle méthode 269 Treatise on Harmony 212 Rameau, Pierre  267, 269, 323 Rancé, Armand-Jean de  677 Rapin, René  529–30 Rappaport, Joanne  289 Raymond, Marcel  624, 628 Reformation. See religion; See also Christianity, Counter-Reformation, Protestantism Regnaudin, Thomas  106 Regnault, François  80 religion behavioral conditioning in  12–13 Calvinism 232 confessional  14, 698–99 and duplicity  6 early saints  849–52 Good Friday devotion  677 illusion in  13 liturgy and organ music  319–20 and missionaries  28, 653, 858 and nuns  693 and organ music  319–21 prevalence of  312 and pulpit  13, 651 and religious edifices  13 and religious identity  12 and sexuality  694–700 signs of  645 women in  693 See also Catholicism; Christianity; God; prayer; preaching

884   index Rembrandt van Rijn  9, 125f, 126, 143 Renaissance  91–92, 131 Baroque in  370 experience in art of  452 and French Baroque  627 and human-centered experience  464 knowledge in  430 melancholia in  155 preaching in  644 sexuality in  689 time keeping in  780–81 Renata, Elizabeth  192 republic of letters  432–37 Retraite, defined  672 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes  433 Reyes, Alfonso  547, 549–50 rhetoric. See style and rhetoric; See also preaching Rice, Eugene  850 Richardson, Samuel  378 Richelet, César-Pierre  433 Richelieu, Cardinal  735 Rico, Francisco  498 Rinuccini, Ottavio  815 Riolan, Jean  692 Ritter von Gluck, Christoph Willibald  373 Robles, Francisco de  497, 511 Rocca, Angelo  784 rococo ornament  416–17, 418f, 419; See also ornamentation Rodriguez, Alonso  667 Roman Catholic church organization of  14 and organ music  312. See also organ music See also Catholicism Romano, Giulio  521, 522f Romanticism  370, 584 Roper, Lyndal  767 Rosand, Ellen  375 Rose of Lima  857 Rößler, Hole  394 Rotrou, Jean de  397, 738–40 Rouardt-Valéry, Agathe  544 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  372 Rousset, Jean  543–45 and anti-Classicism  624 on Baroque Age  44

and baroque as literary concept  554 baroque defined by  646 and French Baroque  636 on India  39 La Littérature à l’âge baroque 27 on peacocks  27–28 Rowland, Samuel  143 Royal Hospital at Chelsea  221 Rubens, Pieter Paul  128, 128f, 142 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor  187, 189, 201 Rummel, Walter  755 Russia, witchcraft trials in  762

S

Sabbattini, Nicola  390 Sacrati, Francesco  375, 377 Sailer, Sebastian  767 Saint-Lambert, Michel de  421 Saint Mard, Remond  379 Saint-Pavin, Denis Sanguin de  698 Saint Peter’s Basilica  456f Saint-Rémi, Rue  223 saints 847–61 after Council of Trent  852–56 and baroque piety  847–49 beyond Europe  856–59 early 849–52 lasting impact of  859–60 in Rome  849–50 scrutiny of  11 Salas Barbadillo, Alonso Jerónimo  500–2, 504 Salem, Massachusetts  766 Salgado, Cesar  162 Sallé, Marie  264 Salvador de Bahia  300, 301f Salvi, Nicola  101, 214 Sandys, George  690 Sanson, Nicolas  55, 56f, 57f, 58f Santos, Francisco  507, 509 Sappho 702 Sarduy, Severo  151–53, 550, 553–54 Sarti, Giuseppe  373 Sayavedra, Mateo Luján  497 Scandinavia, witchcraft trials in  761 Schenck, P.  232f Schiesari, Juliana  155 Schopf, Demian  149, 161–78, 169f–77f Asiel Timor Dei 171f

index   885 Los coros menores o los tío el diablo 149 Gula (Gluttony) 169f The Minor Choirs or the Uncles of the Devil, Diablo 172f, 173f, 177f La Nave  175–76, 175f La Nave, Ch’uta Mariachi 173f La Nave, Moreno 174f La Nave, Reception Hall of the Choque Multicentro 176f Schreffler, Michael  288 Schweizer, Stefan  91 science, paradoxes of  429–30, 713–30 and Baroque reversal  729–30 Copernicus’s and Newton’s  713–15 Descartes’s 722–25 Kepler’s optical  719–21 Mandeville’s 725–28 Tycho’s cosmological  716–19 and views of Baroque  715–16 scientific revolution  434–35 Scioppius, Gaspar  435 Scot, Reginald  754 Scudéry, Madeleine de  58, 59f, 473–74, 477–79, 481 Sebastian, Saint  849–50, 860 Sebil of Mehmed Emin Agha  338, 338f Second Sophistic revival  644–46, 648 Sedgwick, Eve  700 Selim III, Ottoman sultan  356 Selimiye Mosque  356, 357f Serlio, Sebastiano  410 sexualities 688–705 about  688–89, 705 age of consent  695–96 body/sex/gender and  689–94 cross-dressing 693–94 hermaphrodites  691–92, 705 homosexualities 700–704 illicit 688 lesbianism  693, 701–3 one-sex model  689–90 pornographic texts  697 prostitutes 697 and social and religious institutions 694–700 and syphilis  697 transsexuality 693 Sfez, Gérald  655

Shaftsbury, Earl of  212 Shakespeare, William All Is True 741 and Baroque city  211 and diplomacy  740–41 and entertainment  813 Hamlet  528–29, 544, 740–41 History of Henry VIII 741 homosexuality in works of  701 Macbeth 398 and machine plays  398 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 813 and sexuality  695 The Tempest 813 and tragedy  528–29 Twelfth Night 813 Shuger, Deborah  646, 655 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de  308, 573–75 Silbermann, Gottfried  331 Simeon (architect of Nurosmantye Mosque) 345 Simons, Joseph  527–28 Siris, P.  267 Six, Jan  125f, 133–34, 143 Skelton, John  741 skepticism of Christianity  698 and illusion  7–8 of knowledge  610–14 Platonism and  435 slave trade  223, 229 Sofa Kiosk  341, 342f Soman, Alfred  757, 764, 765 Sophie of Brandenburg  190 sorcery. See witchcraft Sorel, Charles  69–70, 132–33, 135 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz  547, 573–75 space changes in, and Baroque development 3–4 and geometry  831 in Ottoman Empire  350–57 and water  92–99 Spain colonization by  288–89, 292–95 fashion in  132, 246–48 female fashion in  251 male behavior in  127

886   index Spain (Continued ) saints in  856 urbanism in  291 Spanish Enlightenment  304 Spanish novels  497–511 spectacle camerata fiorentina 815 court  802–5, 836 festa dei 806 feste teatrali 802 fête  805–12, 806f, 808f, 810f incognito in  805 and nature  817 Palace of Buen Retiro  505. See also theaters; machine plays Spee, Friedrich  765 Spence, Joseph  204 Spinoza, Baruch  725, 728 Spitzer, Leo  626, 631, 791 Sponde, Jean de  545 Spranger, Bartholomeus  199, 200f, 201 St. Mark cathedral  784 Stearne, John  761 Steffani, Agostino  373 stoicism  435, 506–7. See also philosophy Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara  14, 742 Strong, Roy  803 style and rhetoric  604–7 of discourse  562–64 and experience  449–53, 467–68 “figures of force”  453, 454–59 “figures of form”  453, 459. See also ornamentation Suffren, Jean  675 Sun King. See Louis XIV, king of France Surgers, Anne  74 Sypher, Wylie  517

T

Taj Mahal  32–33 Tametsi decree  695 Tapié, Victor-L.  370 Tassin, Christophe  53, 54f, 55f Tasso, Torquato  519–23, 525–26 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste  29–32 Tavernier, Melchior  53, 55 Taylor, Charles  613

Tedeschi, Anne  756 Tekakwitha, Kateri  858–59, 861 telescopes. See optics tequitqui art  162 Teresa, Saint  462, 667, 699–700 Tesauro, Emanuele  467 theaters and auditorium interactions  71–73 in Baroque cities. See cities, baroque Castle Theater in Ĉeský Krumlov  387 and chronometry  788–97 Dorset Garden Theater  398 Drottningholm Court Theater  387 Ekhof Theater  387 fair 373 French playhouse  72 gestures in. See gestures Globe Theater  390 homoeroticism in  693–94 Italian-style 72 lighting for actors  75–78 machine plays. See machine plays machinery of  390–91 Marais theater  72 musicians in  80 performance venues  71–73, 305–8 and politics  836–39, 838f public 395–99 pulpit as  651 and sexuality  693–94 teatri d’acqua  100, 101 Teatro (Sigüenza)  574–75 teatro (term)  100 Teatro dell’acqua of Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati (Falda)  101f Teatro Farnese 391 Teatro Novissimo 391 Teatro San Cassiano 395 Théâtre d’eau 103 Théâtre du Marais  396 Theatre Festivals of the Medici (Nagler) 807 “theater of the world”  609–10 and urban stages  214–15 water 100–3 See also acting; spectacle; machine plays

index   887 theatricality 65–81 actors role in  73–75 Baroque theatricality (term)  65 defined 65–66 gestures and speech  66–71 and illusion  7–8, 79 lighting and makeup for  75–78 and Mémoire de Mahelot 73 natural (term)  78 and natural/artifice opposition  78–80 present day  80–81 and stage/auditorium interactions  71–73 Thirty Years War  734 Thomas, Artus  691 Thomas, Keith  750–51 Thomassin de l’Oratoire  652 Thorp, Jennifer  266 Throckmorton Plot of 1583  735 time keeping  780–81, 805. See also chronometry; automata; machines Tintoretto 456–57 Titelouze, Jehan  318, 327 Tkaczyk, Viktoria  392 Tomlinson, Kellom  267, 271, 272f, 273, 278f topography 46. See also maps Tordesillas, Treaty of  286 Torelli, Giacomo  391, 396 Torrella, Gaspar  697 T(o)uchet, Mervyn  701 Toulmin, Stephen  2, 11 Toussaint, Manuel  287 Tragedy 516–32 about 516–18 attic 526 complex pathetic  519 in grand style  518–26 machine 373 regular baroque  529–33 regular Baroque  529–33 simple pathetic  519 Trauerspiel  518, 526–29, 554, 738 Traub, Valerie  702 Trevor-Roper, H. R.  748, 752–53 Trouvain, Antoine  245f Tuby, Jean-Baptiste  105f Tulip Era  336–38

U

“unicorn”  583–84, 589–91, 594 urbanism 286–308 and city planning. See cities, baroque city planning of Americas and Mexico  288–93, 290f. See also colonization colonial ideologies in  288–93 cultural convergence in  302–5 Ibero-American architecture and  286–88 and literature  503–4 Palais Royal  220 Palazzo Farnese  213 perception and power influencing  293–302 performance and spectacle in  305–8 Piazza del Popolo  214 Piazza of St. Peter  213 Piazza S. Ignazio 213 Piazza S. Maria della Pace  213 Piazza Santa Croce  808, 808f Plaza Mayor, Madrid  219 Plaza Mayor of Mexico City  289, 290f Plaza Nueva  300, 301f and trident (street system)  213 Urban VIII, Pope  848, 861

V

Val-de-Grâce 218–19 Vale, Malcom  803 Valéry, Paul  625–27 Valla, Lorenzo  437–38 Valoir, Louis le  674–75 van de Pol, Lotte  693 Van Dyck, Anthony  123–24, 125f, 132, 137, 141, 143 van Musscher, Michiel  138, 139f van Nickelen, Jan, 98f Vauban, Marquis de  831, 832f Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de  224, 226 Vaucanson, Jacques de  203–4, 205f Vaugelas, Claude Favre de  473–78 Vaux-Le-Vicomte 95–96 Velásquez, Diego  132, 133f, 463 Vélez de Guevara, Luis  502 Venturini, Giovanni Francesco  98–99, 99f Vera y Zuñiga, Juan Antonio  742–44 Verney, Edmund  130, 135–36, 137

888   index Verney, Ralph  131 Vesalius, Andreas  9 Viala, Alain  585–86 Viau, Théophile de  698 Vigarini, Carlo  395 Vigarini, Gaspare  395 Vigarini, Ludovico  395 Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da  410 Vincent, Sue  129 Vincent de Paul  856 Vitruvius  289, 410–11 Voiture, Vincent  477–78 Voltaire 632–33 von Waldburg, Otto Truchsess  190 Vouet, Simon  851

W

Walker, Robert  134, 134f Walther, J. G.  330 Wanli Emperor  192 Waquet, F.  432 war  829, 831–32, 833f Warnke, Franck J.  642–43 Warren, Austin  647 watches. See chronometry; machines; automata water 88–111 ephemerality of  103–5 and Marly Machine  9 as mental mirrors  44 metamorphosis of  105–9 natura artifex of  106 significance of  88–92 and sociability  109–11 space and  92–99 theaters using  100–3 Tivoli 99 Watteau, Antoine  416 Weaver, John  264, 267 Essay towards an History of Dancing 274 The Loves of Mars and Venus 275–76 Wellek, René  177, 541–43, 546, 548, 623–24 Wenham, Jane  761

Westphalia, Peace of  734 Weyer, Johann  753–54, 760 Wiener, Jürgen  105 Wier, Jan  760 Wiggins, Martin  811 Wilde, Oscar  35 Wilhelm V.  190 Williams, Robet  224 Wilson, Bob  75 Winckelmann, J. J.  533 wit  465–67, 571–73 witchcraft Baroque ideas of  766–68 European trials of  756–62 studies of, shift in  755–56 understanding 747–52 witch-hunting 747–68 decline in  752–55, 762–66 European trials for  756–62 studies of  755–56 witchcraft and. See witchcraft Wölfflin, Heinrich  1, 14, 88, 92, 517–18, 625 women and confession  699 fashion of  251, 254 homosexuality in  701–2 as writers  692–93 Wren, Christopher  219, 221

X

Xavier, Francis  854, 856–57 xenophobia 549

Y

Yandell, Cathy  781 Yáñez y Ribera, Jerónimo Alcalá  501

Z

Zabarella, Giacomo  435 Zamora, Lois  152–53 Zayas, María de  505–6, 509 Zenos, Apostolo  373, 376 Zuccalli, Enrico  96