AFTERWORD

The justification for this work (besides my own pleasure) is that it fulfills an important scholarly endeavor: to contribute to our own culture through an understanding of the past. When we absorb ideas from earlier periods, we cannot shed them entirely when we react to our own art, ideas, and institutions. We become more circumspect, more experienced, more sophisticated, less prone to accept modern conventions and ideologies uncritically. We feel a sense of what we have gained as well as a sense of what we have lost. But most of all we learn that fundamental issues and conflicts, such as the struggle to define the human condition, to explain the workings of the human mind and passions, and to solve the problems inherent in getting along with other people, do not change although language, manners, and artistic and behavioral conventions do. We learn that people always have been noble, conniving, envious, brutal, backbiting, loving, lustful, ignorant, loyal, wise. We learn that although words do not change, their connotations do; that the kinds of emotion a cultivated person can with propriety show will vary; that the ethos a writer or painter assumes when expressing ideas will vary according to what an age thinks impressive (for example, detached cynicism, sincerity, or earnestness); and that a collective belief in chance or a transcendent power capable of controlling human destiny may break down, becoming splintered by various views or various levels of unbelief. Whatever the ideas encountered in the Baroque era, and in whatever forms they are couched, they still concern the condition of man in relation to the universe.

I have tried to move through the important issues of the Baroque era and through the works of art themselves to both intentional and unintentional effects. There are two areas at the root of understanding Baroque art: the faculty psychology and the rhetorical process. They are intertwined and each is of universal importance. There is no reason to think that people now are more interested in how their minds work, both individually and collectively, than they ever were. Open any book of the Baroque era, peruse any musical score, look at any painting, and you will find references to, and uses of, the faculty psychology. The variations, the different stresses placed on the faculties or parts of the mind, indicate artistic purpose or intention. A Baroque artist also constructed his works of art according to certain rhetorical principles, each work containing assumptions by the artist about the psychology of the human mind and its place in the universe; each expressing an attitude or idea about the human condition; each assuming certain kinds of responses in receptors; and each, because of all the foregoing, projecting an effect consciously intended by the writer, composer, painter, or architect. If there were no intention, there could be no form of any kind because in rhetorical theory every mode of expression and nuance in that mode, whether in music, poetry, or color, means something.

Aesthetics, the study of cognition in relation to art, has much to do with man’s relation to, and conception of, the universe, and in the Baroque era aesthetics is an extension of the faculty psychology and rhetoric. Ideas about thought and feeling are important historically because such ideas have much to do with the tone and contents of works of Baroque art. An optimistic view of man’s potential will produce art different from one that places human beings closer to animals than to angels. The scope of an optimistic vision of human potential is larger. According to this vision, cognition occurs in ways that transcend the senses; the emotional responses to works of art and to natural phenomena are more fulfilling than works appealing to narrower conceptions of the soul because they assume a larger capacity in the human mind; and the breadth and power of understanding that is communicated through art enlarges the spirit of the receptor. We feel different after seeing Michelangelo’s Creation and Shakespeare’s King Lear than we do after seeing Le Brun’s paintings of Louis XIV’s battles or Otway’s play The Orphan. The first two works are products of a cosmic view that embraces much more than the earthbound visions of Le Brun and Otway. The difference is not so much in technique as in idea.

The parts of the soul also are related to ethics. For example, the choice presented to Hercules is more than a choice between sensual vice and heroic virtue; it also is a choice between living by means of one group of faculties or by another. The materialism and indulgence associated with the lower faculties of the sensible soul and the nobility, idealism, and self-denial associated with the faculties of the reasonable soul lead to two different kinds of life. The sort of choice Hercules faces is found in diverse works of art and is presented by different rhetorical means: in painting, by the colors associated with one side of Hercules’ or the other, which in turn correspond to the parts of Hercules soul (and those of the audience as well) they attract, as in Poussin’s The Choice of Hercules (ca. 1637); in music, by the keys, the instrumentation, and the tempos—as in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689; Aeneas’s choice between Dido and duty); in drama, by characterization by means of gesture, sentiments, and language—as in a performance of Thomas Otway’s The Orphan (1680); in poetry, by the length and the rhythm of lines and by images, diction, and sentiments—as in Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” (1697). The parts of the soul are depicted through rhetorical conventions. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of understanding the faculty psychology and the concepts of rhetoric in order to appreciate and to comprehend baroque art.

This book is written to increase the reader’s appreciation of, and pleasure in, specific works of art through greater understanding of the complex historical ideas behind those works. The rhetorical process is inverted: whereas the general Baroque idea is that the artist pleases or delights to make his instruction or great end palatable, I have tried to instruct to enhance pleasure. Another way to say the same thing is that the judgment or understanding is exercised to provide the imagination with images and sensations that stimulate the senses. We have come full circle. The purpose of this book is not pleasure to give instruction but instruction to give pleasure. The end is therefore the beginning.