PREFACE

Several years ago, I read a paper to a graduate seminar explaining why I thought John Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687” an ambitious failure. I later told my ideas and arguments to my old friend and teacher Samuel Monk, and after much discussion I decided to look again at the poem. This second look made me realize that things were more complicated than they appeared. The poem seemed to spring from a wealth of complex seventeenth-century thoughts and poetic practices. I started reading. In obscure but fascinating works, I encountered all sorts of ideas about the nature of seventeenth-century psychology, artistic creation, education, moral values, social mores, scientific discoveries, and issues of taste. Although the impetus for my studies came from the desire to learn about one poem, the results applied to all Baroque art. I gradually realized that the ideas I was finding allowed me to enjoy seventeenth-and eighteenth-century art much more than I ever had before, so I decided to write a book. Because of the nature of the material, this book is not a tightly organized argument in support of a clearly defined thesis. It is, rather, an explanation or a series of explanations of ideas and procedures aimed at enhancing our perception and appreciation of the glories, universality, and effectiveness of art of the Baroque era.

My approach is intensively and selectively historical. By that I mean I concentrate on carefully chosen historical beliefs and controversies about artistic methods, artistic results, and the ideas in and behind art and its creation during a period of time we may conveniently call the Baroque era. To elucidate the ideas considered and to show their application, I use mainly sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century theoretical writings and works of art. By such historical means, I hope to enable others to see the universal qualities that lie behind the different manners, conventions, and approaches of the Baroque era in terms of that time. It is through the study and comprehension of historical particularities that we can move to universal generalities, that we can perceive the human condition, that we can learn to appreciate an art built on modes of taste and belief different from our own. As John Dryden says, “Mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though everything is altered” (Preface to Fables [1700]).

I use the term Baroque era as an historical convenience; this term encompasses a period extending roughly from the early seventeenth through the early eighteenth century. Although I am concerned mainly with late seventeenth-century England, I move freely from one country to another and forward into the eighteenth, as well as back to the beginnning of the seventeenth, century. The Baroque era used as an historical concept allows me to do this. Since I use theories and examples of art from France and Italy, as well as from England, I did not want to be bound by an historical conception as narrow as the English Restoration Period. Latitude is necessary because many of the ideas I discuss were current throughout both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (as well as earlier or later in some cases), although with alterations and dissensions, and are international in scope or influence. To confine myself too strictly to dates or places would cripple my discussions of the development of ideas and of their manifestations in works of art. Despite national and cultural differences, Addison’s writings, Vivaldi’s music, Rubens’s paintings, Shaftesbury’s aesthetics, and Coeffeteau’s psychology all help elucidate seventeenth-century ideas, where they came from and what they lead toward. Even writers as diverse in time as Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) and Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) express ideas clearly manifest in the Baroque era, and sometimes a seventeenth-century French theoretician or a cinquecento Italian painter will be more important to our understanding of an English Restoration poem than an English contemporary. The freedom to move backward and forward in time also is necessary because ideas generally accepted by an age are often less extensively talked about in that time. New, as yet unaccepted, ideas are discussed more often but actually are more important to subsequent generations than to the age that produces them. Historical knowledge helps us judge which ideas are most relevant to a work of art.

It has been said that the seventeenth century began the modern age. The new perceptions of the construction of the universe and the remarkable changes in attitude toward the human condition were shocking to people of that time, and such changes influenced, as they still do, all considerations of human endeavor. Many assumptions alive in the twentieth century were debated in the seventeenth. The differences between the materialist Thomas Hobbes and the idealistic Cambridge Neoplatonists, for example, are still with us. Hobbes’s pessimistic view is that human beings are essentially animals, ruled by the worst and most savage passions, limited to an earthbound, materialistic existence, needing the protection of an all-encompassing state, and requiring a prescriptive form of education. The Neoplatonists think that human beings are innately good and virtuous but are warped by inadequate or improper education. They maintain that people would function best in a society that would allow innate virtue to grow to its natural bounds, a society wherein people would be able to perceive and to communicate with divine truth and absolute reality. Such conflicts in thinking have ever since been debated; they influence, among other things, conceptions of education, of artistic genius, and of the place in society of art and its creators, all of which in turn not only have influenced the kinds of art produced but also have found their expression in art. A clearer understanding of what others before us tried to do and say can help us better to perceive ourselves, our own time, and our own art.

There are differences between the Baroque era and our own which if not realized will distort our evaluation of Baroque art. Theories of mind and perception, for example, are quite different from our own, although we use their technical terms in everyday, twentieth-century conversation. Baroque poets, painters, and composers thought that each kind of art reached a person through the same route: first through the senses; then to the common sense, memory, and imagination; and finally to the understanding and the will, the only differences between the arts being the exterior sense each touches and moves. However, common sense, imagination, and understanding are not at all what we conceive them to be today, and this is a very important point, especially since the pragmatic and complex psychological conclusions of Baroque artists underlie all the arts and permeate all their theoretical writings. Moreover, theorists, painters, musicians, and poets of that time express, modify, and evaluate all their differing critical theories, aesthetic aims, political purposes, social predilections, and philosophical or theological beliefs through consciously employed rhetorical techniques and devices based on these psychological conclusions. So also, a consideration of rhetoric, rhetoric as they knew it, is essential to an understanding of Baroque aesthetics and art, for their rhetoric, among other things, is concerned with the process of making or creating art and with the ways to induce specific effects in viewers, spectators, and audiences. Since only the means of expression is special to each kind of art, the ideas of creativity or making, as well as results or effects, are common to all art, and all art of the period can be compared on common rhetorical bases.

There are two other topics I would like to mention. One is the structural interpretation of cultural periods used by those who discuss the divisions of Baroque, Mannerist, Renaissance, and Rococo. The Baroque Era as comparable to the Age of Romanticism is an important and useful label for an historical period. But usually when a work of art is defined as Mannerist or Baroque, it means that it fits into a particular aesthetic movement defined from a modern point of view as the spirit of the age. Conceptions such as Baroque and Mannerist as they are presently defined are difficult to use in interpretations of specific works, however, even when the meaning of a particular work lies in its general effect. Such a consideration often overlooks the historical problem of what a creator actually says or means in his works. There also are attempts to define aesthetic movements such as Baroque and Mannerist as precisely as possible by explaining them in terms of artistic, intellectual, and scientific movements that determine modes of perception during a certain period of time. Although ideas and kinds of expression keep evolving or changing one into another, there are periods of intellectual and artistic history that seem to be marked off by particular artistic styles, and I think that this kind of approach may prove to be fruitful. My purpose in this book, however, is to explain specific works of art and the historical ideas that help them come alive for us. Therefore, I do not discuss what constitutes Baroque, as opposed to Mannerist or Rococo, art, although perhaps my discussions of ideas behind art will help determine more precisely the boundaries of these aesthetic movements.

The second topic I would like to mention is the difference between comparing art forms and paralleling them. One compares the arts, or says that one art form is like another, on the basis of the complex aesthetic assumptions common to all works of art. Paralleling the arts, that is, equating one art form with another, results from the human tendency to equate metaphors. For example, if there is a metaphorical ship of state, the head of that state becomes like the captain of a ship. As long as there is a realization that the head of state is like the captain of a ship, distinctions may be made between the different kinds of duties expected of each. However, if the roles are equated, if the head of state is a captain of a ship, it is easy to draw spurious conclusions. The blurring of distinctions between the metaphorical tenor and vehicle has led to problems in the practice and theory of art and literature. Colors in painting, for example, often have been used to describe figures of speech, and vice versa, but colors and figures of speech are neither equivalent nor parallel. Any parallel or equivalency is based on metaphor. Horace in the Ars poetica distinguishes between painting and poetry (painting and poetry are merely like each other), but many who took his phrase ut pictura poesis (as a painting, so also a poem) out of context did not. Although some seventeenth-century writers say so, a figure or trope is not a color, nor is a musical revert a poetic apostrophe. The concept ut pictura poesis does not work if carried to the means of art. And neither does the concept ut musica poesis. Plato correctly says in The Laws, Book II, “To speak metaphorically of a melody or figure having a ‘good color’ ... is not allowable.” To parallel the arts is to overlook the fact that the different arts, in their means, have different disciplines, traditions, and logic. Although the process of invention in the different arts may be parallel, just as the emotions or ideas communicated are parallel, the means of expression are not. The arts can more accurately be compared, rather than paralleled, on the bases of invention, arrangement, and means, and since one artistic discipline may use or allude to another in its means, carefully chosen comparisons of specific works of different kinds can make art more sensually exciting and intellectually rewarding. The end of such an endeavor is increased pleasure and understanding.

The Musical Quarterly, Eighteenth Century Studies, and Studies in English Literature have allocated use of portions of articles originally published with them. Indiana University gave me extra funds for two summers and one semester during which I did research and wrote. I would also like to express a special thanks to Samuel H. Monk and Ernest Tuveson for reading and commenting on early versions of the manuscript; Samuel I. Stone, who helped with some of the difficulties of translation; the graduate students, colleagues, and other friends who have suffered my discourses over the years; and my family.