NINE

Comparisons of the Arts

There are three ways to approach comparisons of the arts. The first is historical and consists of investigating the processes, thoughts, and movements that lie behind the arts, as we did in the earliest chapters on ideas and theories current in the Baroque era. The second approach analyzes similarities of effects in the different arts. Such an approach derives its impetus from concepts such as ut pictura poesis and ut musica poesis, both of which tend actually to parallel rather than compare the arts and which rely for their justification on the process of creation as discussed in the chapters on rhetoric. The third approach compares the ways each art uses imagery from the others and explains what a work of art says through its reliance on the other arts. This last approach depends not only on ideas, theories, and practice but also on taste, both general and personal, as discussed in the last chapters.

I

Ut pictura poesis often has been defined and explained.¹ This notion came from Horace’s Ars poetica (l. 361) and means “as a painting, so also a poem”; that is, a poet in his poetry supposedly paints a picture. Poets often describe in their poems a painting or even the process of painting. Sometimes they hang, figuratively, a series of poetic pictures or portraits in an imaginary gallery. As Jean Hagstrum points out in The Sister Arts, Giovan Battista Marino uses the technique in his poem La Galleria (1620) as does Pope in his “Moral Epistle II” (1735). Another technique is to describe a painting in poetry. A poet could describe a real or an imaginary painting as he wrote, and readers should envision it when they read. Andrew Marvell’s “Last Instructions to the Painter” (1667) is in parts quite successful in conjuring up period paintings; Pope’s second “Moral Epistle” (1735) has excellent portraits; and Denham in “Cooper’s Hill” describes recognizable landscapes. But Waller, for example, in his “Instructions to a Painter,” states the obvious, recognizing that the device is not really functional :²

Lessing says, with Shaftesbury, that those who call a painting mute poetry and a poem a speaking picture are indulging in spurious criticism: “Despite the complete similarity of effect, the two arts differ both in the objects imitated as well as in the manner of imitation.”³ He says, more explicitly, “Objects or parts of objects which exist in space are called bodies. Accordingly, bodies with their visible properties are the true subjects of painting. Objects or parts of objects which follow one another [in time] are actions. Accordingly, actions are the true subjects of poetry.”⁴ He adds, however, that “nothing is more deceptive than the laying down of laws for our emotions” and affirms that the effects of each art are similar.⁵ Lessing therefore does not categorically deny that painting can imply action and poetry suggest objects. The arts are comparable but not parallel; their effects are communicated through the rhetorical devices proper to the means of each art. The same observations hold true for music and painting.

The differences between poetry and music are less striking than those between poetry and painting because the former arts move through time. But the piece of music that can be explained as a poem really becomes words in the explanation. The process of explaining is like the process of translating a lyric poem such as Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” from English into German. The poem is not the same poem but another work of art, more or less successful. The same result occurs when a poem is translated into music; in this case a different medium replaces the different language. Each art is separate, just as each work of art is separate from every other work of art, whether from poem to poem, or poem to sonata, or sonata to landscape, or landscape to poem. But the arts are similar because each poem, for example, differs no more in effect from every other poem on a similar subject, given the same intentions by the artist, than it does from a piece of music or a painting. Although the kind of art dictates to a great extent the kinds of approaches used and although there are different advantages and limitations for each art dependent on the devices available, intention and effect remain comparable. The deeds of Louis XIV are treated alike in painting, poetry, music, dance, and sculpture because they are similarly regarded by contemporary artists.

Effects that are the result of authorial intention are comparable. Effects that are not, are merely personal. Paula Johnson, in Form and Transformation, notes that Lessing’s distinction between arts, those that are spatial and those that operate through time, is now starting to break down, but she also says that there is a difference between those arts that in themselves do and those that do not determine the order of what can be perceived, that “no matter how open a musical work of Stockhausen or of Cage may be, the listener cannot choose to have its sounds presented to him in any other order than that in which they are in fact presented.”⁶ And the author or composer or performer (if the composer refuses to accept the responsibility) places the elements of a composition in a certain order because he has a particular idea either of how the piece should sound or of what he wants to happen or to say. Again, we are in the realm of rhetoric, in which intentions and effects of different kinds of art can be compared.

If we can temporarily ignore differences among creators and recognize that through diverse media artists try to achieve similar effects, then we can compare colors and tropes and sounds without paralleling them, using the rhetorical conventions the audiences or spectators associate with each art. Gerard LeCoat says,

Cicero’s Rhetoric and Quintilian’s De institutione oratoria, the basic texts used in universities of the time, helped the theorists of “Musica poetica” to devise tropes and figures related to metaphor, synecdoche, apocope, ellipsis, etc. Here the link between music and poetry is clearly defined. But so is the link between music and painting, because in the last analysis, the composer, like the poet, becomes a painter of the passions, the emphasis being on descriptiveness. . . . All the arts pool their resources.⁷

The idea that the arts pool their resources is useful and important. But painters, poets, and composers use rhetorical devices to represent, describe, and express the passions (thus homeopathically raising these passions in their audiences and spectators) rather than to paint them. Theorists from Plato on have frowned on the idea that a poet “paints the passions,” for that is to cross over into the fallacious realm of paralleling media in themselves through the use of metaphor. This point is not a useless cavil: abuse of this idea leads to fallacious considerations of parallelism between artistic media; it gives rise to all sorts of misleading parallels between the arts.⁸ Every Baroque poet thought he expressed himself like an architect, a painter, or a musician because the arts are comparable not parallel. The skill involved in each art is a part of that art, but it is less important than the whole movement of the mind or the force of the imagination in producing an artistic creation, not merely a piece of handiwork. An awareness of the rhetorical bases of art, combined with the analysis of the soul, and the knowledge of taste and preferences of individual artists for particular kinds of art, whether socially or philosophically induced, enable us to compare art of all kinds. We can compare intention, imagery (as part of invention), and effect in each art, showing how imagery from each art enhances the other arts; how creators intend certain effects; and how those effects reach and impress us. We can do so in general theory and in specific works.

In a third kind of comparison, we see that poetry, painting, and music use and enrich each other for pleasure and instruction by means of allusions and references within one work of art to other media. In the Baroque era, the ways one kind of art reinforce another is most obvious when similar topics or subjects or genres are used.⁹ Everyone took imagery from a common source or supply. Artists worked with specific topics, each of which has prominent characteristics and associations that stay with it, no matter in what medium it is presented and interpreted.

An artist can present a subject or topic in a straightforward manner or he may use variations and even inversions. Satire quite often shows the strength of a conventional topic by inverting it or breaking it down, and the seventeenth century is full of such inversions, reversals, or breakdowns of topics: Dryden’s mock-heroic “Mac Flecknoe” (1682), John Wilmot’s rather vulgar, mock-pastoral “Fair Chloris in a Pigstye Lay” (ca. 1680), and the Frenchman Paul Scarron’s complex burlesque Virgile travestie (1648). At the end of Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe,” Flecknoe, the king of dullness, falls through a trap door (conveniently a parody of Shadwell’s The Virtuoso [1676]) in an inversion of apotheosis. Dryden expected his audience to have in mind the conventional scenes of apotheosis in other poems and in paintings. Indeed, there are innumerable such scenes and they all are similar; their characteristics speak for themselves: Simon Vouet’s Apothéose de Saint Guillaume (ca. 1621-22) and Apothéose de Saint Louis (ca. 1640);¹⁰ Andrea Pozzo’s The Apotheosis of St. Ignatius Loyola (see Plate 5); Rubens’s Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham (1635; see Plate 8)¹¹ and The Apotheosis of James I, the central oval in the banqueting hall of Whitehall;¹² and Dryden’s “Eleonora” (1691):

II

Rhetorical conventions aid in communication, and a composer, painter, or poet expresses personal views with a generally accepted rhetorical tradition. The selection or discovery of a topic is part of invention. The artist first chose his subject from a groupof subjects or topics (note Aristotle’s use of topoi in his Rhetoric’), and his treatment of the subject depends on the view of reality he took—does he see people as better or as worse than they are. A subject like Venus and Adonis, for example, may be treated comically or seriously (nobly) no matter what topic from it is being used: Venus’s lament for Adonis, the advent of the hunt, or Venus’s expression of love. The creator then tried to achieve a certain effect through arrangement or design and the means of his art: color, lines, proportion, meter, words, rhyme, word order, sounds, instrumentation, and so forth. These means are the artist’s primary ways of expressing himself, his rhetorical tools, his means of affecting the senses. It is through examining the ways in which individual creators use the premises of invention and design or arrangement, and the means of a particular media, that we come to understand works of art, not by considering works as documents in an artificially imposed, anachronistic sequence of ideas. Communication was (and still is) accomplished through conventions, which we have to understand as much as possible in seventeenth-century terms if we are to understand art of that period. Since the number of genres and topics is so large, an analysis of some examples should demonstrate the kind of conventions generally existing; our analysis seeks to elucidate Baroque art and by extension all art.

An example of a topic that was supposed to achieve a specific effect is the lament, whether that lament is in poetry, painting, or music. When you hear a poetical or musical description or expression of lamenting despair, your memory and imagination should conjure up an image of appropriate paintings, and when you see a painting you should hear the kinds of expressions used in words and music. It is easier to understand Baroque attitudes toward this idea, if we view it as part of an established, historical assumption. There are various grades of laments such as that of an aspiring lover, of an abandoned wife or mistress, and of a Christian mourning the crucified Christ. The lover’s lament is not particularly serious, nor is it expressed as violently as the second or third kind because the lover is usually hopeful and somewhat comic. The effect of a lament by an abandoned wife or mistress is more serious. In A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Carvinge, and Building (trans. Richard Haydocke [London, 1598]), Lomazzo says:

Despaire hath actions betokening a privation of hope and contentment; as to beate with the hands, teare the lims and garmentes about a dead body, of whose recovery they have no hope: as Thisbe uppon Pyramus, when being out of love for herselfe, she cast her bodie uppon the pointe of the sword and so died; or for some notable disgrace taken in warre [Saul] ... ; or for the loss of some pleasure or contentment, as Cleopatra for M. Antonius ... ; and Dido for Aeneas, when (according to Virgill’s description) first stabbing herself with a dagger, she threwe herself with all her jewels and treasure, from an high rock into the sea; or as Cato ... ; or Nero ... ; and Lucretia, that she might not live after she was defiled; or Achitophel, and Judas Iscariot. ... Or finally for feare as well speaketh the poet:

And for diverse other mishaps, from whence does arise great variety of desperate motions; as strangling, falling down headlong from a steepe hill or rock etc. All which actions would be resembled deliberate, and such as may terrifie the desperate person from executing his purpose. [Book II, pp. 71-72]

All of the subjects that Lomazzo mentions (Dido and Lucretia, among them), as well as many others, are treated in the same way in all the arts, and all are supposed to have the morally useful purpose of dissuading the viewer from inflicting violence on himself. The person lamenting is mentally deranged, meaning that passion has overwhelmed his understanding. Words in poetry, gestures in painting, and intervals and keys and phrases in music all point this aberration out. At the same time, it is evident that the pressures that drove the unfortunate example to such a state are so great and so out of his or her own control that we are supposed to feel pity. Boileau in “L’Art poétique” describes authorial intention and supposed audience reaction to a properly executed depiction of Dido’s lament:¹³

The laments in all art follow a standard pattern and exhibit and express the same passions in the same conventional ways. Unlike tragedy, which is a natural genre based on the effect of what we say Aristotle calls pity and fear, lament has the effect of a pity mixed with a half-objective, half-felt horror at what happens when passions overcome the understanding. The victims of their passions become object lessons to the spectators or listeners. The victims all describe the state they are in but say they cannot help themselves. The pressures of events stimulate the uncontrollable animal nature of the passions in the second soul to overcome the understanding. This idea is true in the Renaissance and carries through into the eighteenth century. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra expresses the situation succinctly: “Patience is sottish, and impatience does / Become a dog that’s mad” (IV, xv, 82-83).

There are many examples of laments. Shakespeare uses several that Lomazzo gives, and others as well. In “The Rape of Lucrece” (1594), he introduces Lucrece’s lament by saying she is “frantic with grief” (l. 762).¹⁴ And so she is. Her passions assail her until death (l. 1725). Venus laments Adonis in much the same way, albeit more briefly.¹⁵ Shakespeare plays on the excesses of the well-known lament of Thisbe over Pyramus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V, i, 315-40). As Theseus says, “Her passion ends the play” (V, i, 308). Juliet laments for Tybalt and Romeo,¹⁶ and Cleopatra superbly laments Antony.¹⁷ One difference between English exuberance and French decorum becomes apparent in Racine’s Phèdre (1677) when Phèdre’s lament takes place offstage, the madness accompanying the lament deemed unfit for the decorous French theater. Panope describes her gestures:

Other examples of laments of despair are the composer Nicholas Laniers “Hero and Leander” (1683), the composer Claudio Monteverdi’s popular “Lamento d’Arianna” in Arianna (1614), the composer Henry Lawes’s “Ariadne Abandoned” (1653), the painter Peter Paul Rubens’s Death of Leander (1602-1605), the painter Nicholas Poussin’s Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651), the composer John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (ca. 1685; see Act III), and Arcabonne’s “Ah! tu me trahis, malheureuse” in the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Amadis tragédie (III, iii). Dido’s lament in the Aeneid is one of Virgil’s most touching, emotional passages. We pity her although we know that it is bad for passion to overcome the understanding. Virgil’s Aeneid was, of course, a favorite and much admired work in the Baroque age, and many treatments of the passion of Dido, both contemporary and earlier, were available. A classic visual presentation of the lament is Simon Vouet’s Mort de Didon (1643).¹⁹ Dido, overcome by passion, is a quite unattractive madwoman, especially when compared to Vouet’s usual, serene characters. Her distorted face, indicative of the passion in her soul, is the center of the painting; her limbs are indecorously disposed, her clothing in disarray. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689) treats the same subject in the passionate key of d and Antoine Coypel’s Death of Dido (1702-1704) depicts the subject in painting, with the same effect in mind.²⁰ Dryden’s famous and excellent translation of The Aeneid appeared in 1697 ^an impressive volume. There are also a number of Italian songs entitled “Didone Abandonata.”²¹

The pastoral mode encompasses a wide area of genres, including laments. Laments often appear in pastoral elegies and even pastorals but are less violent in these kinds of art. The ethos of the one who laments would be undesirable and unsympathetic if that person were overcome by the madness of passion, for pastoral subjects conventionally are agreeable, pleasant, and delightful—their ruling effect is that of beauty realized in the proportion and harmony of a rural, golden world. Virgil’s Eclogues had much influence on pastoral art; for example, Dryden’s “Ode on the Death of Henry Purcell” (d. 1695), set to music by John Blow, and the songs written for the same occasion by Daniel Purcell (words by Nahum Tate) and by H. P. Talbot. Other pastoral elegies, such as Milton’s “Lycidas” (1637), are well-known examples of pastoral laments, and so is Poussin’s serene Landscape with the Body of Phocion Carried out of Athens (1648). Some other works and kinds of works of art related to the pastoral are Poussin’s justifiably famous allegorical works The Kingdom of Flora, and Dance to the Music of Time and his four paintings of the seasons. The seasons as interpreted by Lully, Purcell, and Vivaldi also are related, as are the numerous paintings of the shepherds adoring Christ and of prelapsarian Adam and Eve. Triumphs and allegories that celebrate or villify certain manifestations of the second soul often are related to the pastoral through their rural settings. Poussin’s triumphs of Bacchus (Plate 13), Flora, Pan, Neptune, and Silenus (Plate 12), as well as his bacchanalian scenes, all are kinds of pastorals, as are the poetical, musical, and visual triumphs of Bacchus by Purcell, Vouet, Rubens, Titian, John Wilmot, and Dryden.

In triumphs, as in laments, the passions are represented more violently when apart from the pastoral mode. The triumph, like the lament, is a kind of rhetorical topic. According to André Félibien, Bacchus invented the triumph, and Alexander the Great and the Romans used it (Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes [Paris, 1666], II, pp. 87 ff.):

Anyone making a triumphal entry was seated in a two-wheeled chariot; which we have observed in several medals and as can still be seen in the Arch of Titus, where the chariot of the emperor is drawn by four horses.

[Ceux qui entroient en triomphe estoient assis sur un chariot à deux roües; ce que nous remarquâmes par plusieurs medailles, et comme on le peut voir encore dans l’arc de tite, où le chariot de cet empereur et tiré par quatre chevaux.]

Although he elaborates on the subject at length, the image is clear, the conventions precise. Charles Le Brun’s Le Triomphe d’Alexandre ou l’entrée d’Alexandre à Babylone (ca. 1664; see Plate 15) is an excellent example of a triumph. It uses elephants instead of horses, but the trumpets, the spoils of war, and the spectators all are appropriate. Likewise, the modes of architecture in the painting are appropriate: the Doric, for the majesty of the triumph and the power of Alexander; the Corinthian, for the festive quality of the event (the palm leaves used on occasions such as Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday).²² Félibien is talking about paintings of triumphs, and Le Brun’s is a fine visual depiction, but the same description applies to music, poetry, and staged productions. Louis XIV conducted his own triumphs (and other ceremonies) in real life and employed numerous musicians on these occasions (among Louis’s musicians the position of honor was occupied by twelve trumpeters).²³ On 26 August 1660, he staged a triumph:

Solemn entry of Louis XIV and Marie-Theresa into Paris. . . . In the vast program of decorations ordered by the city, Le Brun was entrusted with the responsibility for the Arch of Triumph erected on the Place Dauphine; he put up a large monument in the form of an arch surmounted by an obelisk and decorated with complex and subtle allegories.

[Entrée solonnelle à Paris de Louis XIV et de Marie-Thérèse. . . . Dans le vaste programme de decorations ordonné par la ville, Le Brun est chargé de l’Arc de triomphe élevé place Dauphine; il dress un ample monument, en forme d’arc surmonté dun obélisque et décoré d’allegories complexes et raffinées. . . .] [ Charles Le Brun, p. lv]

Nicholas Poussin also painted a number of triumphs; some vary from Félibien’s description on account of their subject matter. One is the pastoral allegory Le Triomphe de Flore (1631), in which there are no trumpets (as might be expected considering the subject matter) and in which the chariot is drawn by putti.²⁴ Others, more standard, are The Triumph of Neptune (ca. 1637), The Triumph of David (ca. 1626),²⁵ and The Triumph of Pan (1635-36). Triumphs by other painters are similar. Rubens, after Mantegna, for example, has a Triumph of Caesar.²⁶

The triumph is mostly spectacular, and thus visual, but the sounds of the musical instruments, mostly trumpets, and the attendant dramatic possibilities allow it to be used in other kinds of art as well, although mostly in highly visualized art. The visual and aural conventional images are represented by the music and dances in Lully’s Le Triomphe de l’amour (1681). There is a triumph in John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard’s The Indian Queen (1663-64).²⁷ In Betterton’s The Prophetess or Dioclesian (1690; music by Henry Purcell), the trumpets echo the sense of the triumph in “Sound Fame thy Brazen Trumpet sound.” Another of Henry Purcell’s triumphs is the prince of Gloucester’s fifth birthday song, in which Purcell indicates the use of a trumpet: “Sound the trumpet, and beat the war-like drums; / The Prince will be with laurels crown’d.” A satirical use of a triumph is in George Villiers’s Rehearsal (1671), an amusing, mock-heroic reversal of the convention. Prince Pretty-man says in Act V, scene i:²⁸

Bacchus’s triumph is a separate topic or genre, especially since Bacchus is supposed to have invented the triumph. Dryden’s triumph of Bacchus in “Alexander’s Feast” (1697) calls up both aural and visual images:

Dryden, because of his martial subject (Alexander the Great) in “Drinking is the soldier’s pleasure” (1. 57), then presents drinking as an activity important to soldiers, an idea that accords with the idealized conventions that soldiers drink and that truth resides in alcohol. Thus, Bacchus has an “honest face.” Handel, in setting “Alexander’s Feast” to music in 1736, used this line as part of a fine drinking song. The festive quality of the scene comes from Bacchus’s jollity. The passions connected to drunkenness (the triumph of the second part of the soul over the understanding) are celebrated not only with trumpets and drums but also with hautboys (the ancestor of the oboe). There are thus two kinds of passions represented: martial and amorous. The bulk of Dryden’s poem shows how Alexander in a destructive rage burned Persepolis because he succumbed to those two passions. When Handel sets Dryden’s poetry of Bacchus’s triumph to music, he uses horns and oboes primarily. The result is superb.

We can tell what kind of imagery Dryden had in mind by looking at seventeenth-century paintings and listening to seventeenth-century music. The copy after Poussin’s Triumph of Bacchus (1635-36; Plate 13) gives us a good idea of the visual image we are supposed to imagine in Dryden’s song. Poussin includes all of Bacchus’s allegorical accoutrements: the centaurs, the snakes, the leopard skins, the thyrsii, and so on.²⁹ Bacchus becomes representative of the triumph of the second soul, of the passions and appetites as they derive strength from the vegetative soul and are at odds with the reason. The painting also contains myriad wind instruments all associated with the passions: primarily martial (trumpets and drums) and erotic (pipes and reeds). Dryden mentions both passions (and Handel follows the convention). In Poussin’s painting, we see Apollo, the god of reason and light, in his chariot far above the bacchanalian rout, allegorically showing the superiority and nobility of the understanding. Dryden’s poem also shows the superiority of the reason. Without getting into the history of ideas and works of art about St. Cecilia, but realizing that celestial harmony appeals to the understanding, we see that heaven-inspired music, with its relation to the highest parts of the soul, is superior to Timotheus’s sway over the passions of the drunken Alexander. Both Poussin and Dryden impose a moral idea on their art. Invention, disposition, and meaning are approximately the same although the means of expression differ. The arts are comparable not parallel, just as Dryden’s poem and Poussins painting are comparable in effect and meaning, and each work uses imagery from other kinds of art.

III

An extended analysis of several lines from the first and last stanzas of Dryden’s “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1687) will demonstrate more clearly that Baroque artists with similar intentions, working through different media, use culturally shared imagery and topics to produce analogous effects. And the increased knowledge of how Dryden relies for effect on imagery from different artistic media will heighten our appreciation of his poem since the content and the effect of musical and visually artistic images he employs in his poetry are to a great extent both controlled and expanded by the way they are employed elsewhere. We can therefore relate or compare Dryden’s intentions, effects, and imagery to those of other arts. As examples, Vivaldi’s “Concerto for Two Trumpets in C” (ca. 1700), Rubens’s Le Coup de lance (Plate 6), Fra Andrea Pozzo’s ceiling The Apotheosis of St. Ignatius Loyola in the Church of Sant’ Ignazio in Rome (1691-94; see Plate 5), Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (Plate 1), and Rubens’s large Last Judgment all add to our understanding and appreciation of Dryden’s “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1687). These works depend on similar rhetorically oriented conventions and devices to signify elevated intentions and to produce in their audiences what their creators would have called the strong passions of admiration and astonishment (as well as others that are weaker).³⁰

Dryden’s ode, Andrea Pozzo’s ceiling, and Vivaldi’s concerto as Baroque works of art all contain stunning, artificial effects. As such, they appeal overwhelmingly to the passions rather than to the intellectual faculties. In other words, these works appeal rhetorically to our senses, stimulating our imaginations and passions to such an extent that our reasons are overwhelmed by their force. Their instruction is therefore not accomplished primarily through the understanding. Each work is designed to induce in us a sense of the truth through our emotions rather than to present the truth in harmony or beauty in the work of art itself. We are to be persuaded into a feeling about truth, truth justified before the work of art was made, truth terrestrially rather than mathematically or divinely conceived. There is too much propaganda in Andrea Pozzo’s ceiling, too much effect for its own sake in Vivaldi’s concerto, and too much in the last stanza of Dryden’s poem that is merely meant to awe people. Our belief in the power of music (at least while we are caught up in Dryden’s poem) and in the efficacy and holiness of St. Ignatius Loyola (at least while we are under the spell of Andrea Pozzo’s ceiling) is the result of our emotions rather than our understanding.³¹

The focus on the passions and the senses as the main targets for artistic devices means that there is little emphasis on appeals to the reasonable soul through mathematical proportions and allegory. Although allegory still exists as personification by Dryden’s time and later,³² the layered (historical, allegorical, and so on) conception of biblical and literary meanings preached by St. Augustine in De doctrina Christiana (ca. 427), practiced by him in his Confessions (ca. 400), expressed by Dante in his Convivio (ca. 1306), and practiced by Ariosto in Orlando Furioso (1532) and by Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1596) is not used by John Dryden³³ or Andrea Pozzo or Antonio Vivaldi. We do not have to search out complex allegorical meanings of the kind used by Renaissance artists. Any allegory in their works exists in a one-to-one ratio. Dryden’s allegory in “The Hind and the Panther” (1687) is of this simple kind : one animal equals one religious sect. The same sort of simple allegory exists in Andrea Pozzo’s Apotheosis of St. Ignatius Loyola (Plate 5), in which we see represented allegorically incidents from Loyola’s life. Vivaldi’s music works in the same way. All three works do not depend on the mysterious connections among all created things but rather on strong appeals to the passions that seek to persuade audiences, readers, and spectators to accept emotionally and willingly the makers’ versions of reality, their prime meanings are their emotional effects. The rhetorical devices used and the allusions made to the other arts therefore become central to our understanding of all three works of art.

In Andrea Pozzo’s ceiling in Sant’ Ignazio, we are deceived in the prospect of sublime elevation (elevation is synonymous with sublimity in the seventeenth century) by the false arches and columns, the effect of a contrived perspective, and by the trompe l’oeil, which produces the illusion of height, the deception of great space.³⁴ The use of the genre or topic of apotheosis (with its potential need for space) predisposes spectators to the kind of presentation Andrea Pozzo envisioned and expresses. Within its height, from bottom to top, the painting in the dome moves metaphorically or allegorically from hell’s fires to the heights of heaven. The senses of the viewer are supposed to be overcome by the space and by the motion provided by the upward thrust of the columns, the ray of light emanating from God, the upward flight of the characters, the wind that shows the movement through space, and the implied action, all of which produce strong motions (or emotions) in us. The instruction, the appeal to the reasonable soul, comes from the allegory, or history, of the Jesuits, but the first impression on the passions overwhelms the reason. The ceiling is splendid and sublime. We should be overcome, or stunned, by the deceit. The main effects emanate primarily from the vast, artistically enhanced space and the motion of the characters in and through that space, in short, from the vastness and sublimity of the spectacle.

In Vivaldi’s “Concerto for Two Trumpets in C,” the predominant effects again are space and motion.³⁵ The space is first of all literal since there is space between two trumpets no matter how close together they are. Furthermore, the answering trumpets probably would have been placed on opposite sides of wherever the work was performed, say, a relatively large cathedral. There probably also would have been reverberations enhancing that effect. The exact meanings of specific phrases that people of the time apparently identified in a work like Vivaldi’s are largely lost to us. Modern commentators point out his penchant for what we might call program music, and theorists of the time talk of what music says. Walter Kolneder says there were no textbooks dealing with musical rhetoric in Italian musical practice but that musicians were “thoroughly acquainted with musical formulae for the interpretation of words.” He says, “Vivaldi’s instrumental music is rich in characteristic turns of phrase . . . which are used in such a specific sense in his programmic works that in them may be found keys to the interpretation of his complete oeuvre.”³⁶ Mersenne (1636) says that musicians can talk with instruments so that others can understand the discourse,³⁷ and we know that many other theorists discuss the meanings of keys, modes, and instruments.³⁸ On the simplest level, a major key denotes gaiety rather than sadness. We have seen that the key of C is used for apotheoses, triumphs, and other works and events of like nature and that the trumpet is used for the same kinds of music. Vivaldi speaks a musical language, just as painters speak a visual language, and we can understand his more general meanings. He is trying to express something through artistic effects, specific effects sought by him. He differs from painters and poets in his employment of the medium of music.

The instrumentation, key, and meter all are part of Vivaldi’s effort to produce a certain kind of effect, one that transcends admiration to induce astonishment or sublimity. The reasonable soul is overcome through conscious, musical manipulation, through rhetorical devices. We in the twentieth century will react in the same way if the performance is given under the proper conditions (even though there probably are more specific meanings to the music than we are able to recognize) not because we know about the manipulation but because the effects of space and motion are a part of our culture and are related to natural phenomena. Through the brilliant dialogue between the trumpets, along with the rapid movement through time of the music itself, Vivaldi intends and produces a heightened effect of motion. The whole work is splendidly energetic and buoyant, building up to a climax of great strength and effort, a stunning exchange of open intervals in fanfares and a series of repeated high G’s (in a modern B-flat trumpet) between the instruments, after which comes the perfunctory ending. The sensory effect is at least as stunning, at least as sublime, as that of Pozzo’s ceiling.

John Dryden’s ode excites passions similar to those of Andrea Pozzo’s ceiling and Antonio Vivaldi’s concerto. The poem’s story is about the history of the world, from the beginning to the end of time, in terms of music and its effects. The most stunning intellectual, pictorial, and sound effects are located in the first and last stanzas, and since we are dealing with poetry, the meanings come from the words (reinforced by sound).³⁹ In the first stanza, diapason (in “the diapason closing full in man”) needs to be explained if we are to understand the imagery Dryden associates with the term, consonant with his elevated intentions. Our explanation takes us immediately to the other arts. We have no real conception of “the diapason closing full in man” unless we know what a diapason is to Baroque musicians and unless we know the related kinds of visual images created for the period by painters and engravers. Musically, diapason means unity, the full range of notes, and John Milton in “At a Solemn music” uses this word with that technical meaning (plus the allegorical equation of harmonious unity with God and godlike power):

The passion involved in the first sin jarred the harmony of the universe. The part of Milton’s image that we should see in pictorial terms is the unification of all prelapsarian creatures in a harmony, or diapason, of sounding praise. Motion is visual as well as passionate or emotional. The grandeur of Milton’s image is overwhelming if we see, hear, and feel the image. Paintings that seem to correspond to Milton’s visual image are Fra Angelico’s (d. 1455) Last Judgment and the Coronation of the Virgin (which Milton must have seen in Florence). Milton’s creatures, as the product of a later age, are less delicate and not as stiff as Fra Angelico’s, but the general idea is the same since both use similar topics—universal adulation and praise. In Fra Angelico’s balanced, regular painting, he wanted us to see, and in our imaginations hear, the music and the beings. Fra Angelico implies a vision larger than his own canvas, and Milton’s idea also exceeds what could be visually represented, the human imagination being more expansive than an existentially limited space. Both works imply the sound of a massed choir of all creatures on earth, which we realize through our experience with other artistic representations of varying quality and size. Each work of art through the conception of diapason represents the ideal harmony of the universe. Although a painting by Fra Angelico may not represent exactly in the same way the image that Milton uses (because of the time element or because of Fra Angelico’s temperament), the idea expressed is similar.

Roger Des Piles, in his analysis of Raphael’s The School of Athens, says that next to Pythagoras is a young man holding a tablet containing “diapente, diapason, diatessaron—terms well known to able musicians.” From these, he says, Plato “formed the accords and harmonick proportions of the soul.”⁴¹ In other words, a diapason is diagrammable. Thomas Mace (1676) also uses visual connotations when he says that of “All things ... in nature . . . some harmonize in diapason’s deep, / Others again more lofty circles keep.”⁴² The visual imagery here is embodied in deep and circles, whether they be places or circles as part of a diagram or places or circles as meetings of souls (or even groups of people). Something like Mace’s comment or Rubens’s Apotheosis of James I, on the ceiling at Whitehall, may have suggested to Dryden the visual imagery of diapason, but Pozzo’s ceiling or perhaps Rubens’s large Last Judgment, even though he never saw them, are better examples for revealing Dryden’s imagery and for explicating his poem.⁴³ A poet’s imagination may very well transcend the works of art at his disposal if the works lead him to greater ideas; if he hears descriptions of similar, but superior, unseen works; if other poets or theorists give him the image; or if his own imagination can transcend the limitations of his surroundings. Painters’ or musicians’ imaginations may, and often do, exceed the limits of their own works especially when they are trying to achieve specific, great effects, as does Dryden (or Milton). Works like Pozzo’s ceiling help us see, and thus feel, “the diapason closing full in man” much more vividly because of its own range, its own diapason. Dryden, too, relies on a visual diapason in “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” because of the connection between diapason and man (an object we can easily visualize). Dryden’s harmony is aural, too. In stanza one, he uses resonant, nasal sounds to echo the organ, the instrument with which the term diapason is most commonly associated. He was very conscious of the sounds of words, as he demonstrates in his poem and says in many places in his criticism.⁴⁴ “The diapason closing full in man” assumes added dimensions if the imagery is aural as well as visual, and the intention and the effect of Vivaldi’s concerto, Pozzo’s ceiling, and Dryden’s first stanza are generally similar in terms of admiration and astonishment.

The last stanza of Dryden’s poem tries to achieve even stronger effects than stanza one. Works of music, painting, and poetry that are similar in purpose can elevate us far enough to visualize, hear, and feel the astonishment and admiration that Dryden intends in his last lines:

By seeing and hearing Dryden’s imagery as much as possible in Baroque terms, we should recognize that he envisioned Judgment Day as a vast space, a great panoramic scene filled with sublime sounds. Since the trumpet is a central image in Dryden’s lines, the history of the trumpet and the art of using trumpets for sublime effects on the passions by composers of the period become worthy of consideration. We cannot understand the power of Vivaldi’s trumpet concerto, or the imagery in Milton’s “the wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,”⁴⁵ or Dryden’s ending in the “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” unless we have heard or imagined in some version the effects supposedly produced by trumpets in the works of composers of the time.

The significance and construction of the trumpet have changed since J. S. Bach, but there is no reason to think that the best trumpeters of earlier periods did not powerfully move audiences, whatever sound we may suppose trumpets to have had then. Bate says that army maneuvers were directed by trumpets with coarse sounds (p. 109) and that seventeenth-century writers point out how trumpets can rage and snarl (p. 126). But the English musician John Blow glorifies the trumpet, saying, “Our English trumpet. Nothing has surpast our English trumpet.”⁴⁶ Smithers points out that trumpet works are widespread and numerous in the Baroque period and notes that Henry Purcell extends the capabilities of the trumpet from “the normal principal register to the upper harmonics of the clarino tessitura” (p. 361). Since music was written according to the physical limitations of the players, Purcell must have had trumpeters of some ability.⁴⁷ Modern trumpet players are now developing the virtuosity and stamina to play Baroque trumpet pieces. The opinions offered about trumpets hardly suggest an instrument of a coarse, snarling sound. Mersenne speaks for everyone when he says that the trumpet is “marvelously grand when sounded to perfection, and when we consider the range of its tones, from the lowest to the highest, there are forty-two: so that it surpasses all claviers, some spinets, and some organs” [merveilleusement grande, lorsque I’on en sonne en perfection, et que l’on prend tous ses ton depuis le plus grave jusques au plus aigu, car elle fait un trent-deuzième : de sorte qu’elle surpasse tous les claviers des épinettes et des orgues].⁴⁸ And Mersenne lived in France, where the highest kind of trumpet playing (clarino playing, in the fourth octave) was least developed.⁴⁹ In other words, Dryden’s trumpet imagery and Vivaldi’s concerto excite the passions by employing trumpets with impressive, powerful sounds; it does not matter that these instruments lacked the versatility of the modern valve trumpet.

From the Renaissance through the early eighteenth century, there are, generally considered, two kinds of trumpet playing: a high, associated with the courts of princes and with elevated events; a low, associated with warfare, hunting, and other like activities. Rubens employs trumpets in different paintings that express obviously an association with violence, chaos, or splendor. In The Wolf and Fox Hunt (Plate 7), a violent, red-haired hunter blows his horn; his face is red, his cheeks puffed out, his head thrust forward. The scene projects the relatively base emotions surrounding the murder of a boar, as does Rubens’s The Wild Boar Hunt, in which not only does the horn player look the same but also is a depiction of the same person. In The Capture of Juliers, Rubens’s trumpeter is symbolic of prowess in battle. He displays violence and appears, framed by darkness, on a cloud behind the angel of death and destruction.⁵⁰ In Rubens’s large Last Judgment we have a version, though less impressive, of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment (see Plates 1 and 2). The trumpeters are impressively wild and energetic, cheeks puffed out, heads thrust forward. They are placed well below heaven’s serenity, next to the abyss of light (as in Michelangelo’s painting). The high style of trumpet playing and the low, violent style are united. We can see and hear (in our imaginations) what Rubens intended, just as we see and hear the images Dryden, in his poem, intended us to imagine.

Other painters and writers use the same kind of trumpet imagery as Rubens uses. We can see the low style connected to irrational or violent behavior, and the opposite as well. Claude Perrault says that there are “trompettes de guerre” as well as “cors de chasse” and “saquebouttes.” These trumpets, he says; speak appropriately to their function.⁵¹ Gerard Terborch has a Military Scene, Trumpet and Drinkers,” in which the trumpet is associated with low activities (for example, the trumpet player has puffed-out cheeks).⁵² Lully, just as every other composer, uses trumpets to indicate combat in Amadis tragédie (I, iv).⁵³ Henry Purcell, when he wants to praise the eternal glory of a great ruler, uses trumpets.⁵⁴ Charles Le Brun uses semi-cacophonous trumpets in a grand way in several important paintings. They are connected to war and destruction in Le Roi arme sur terre et sur mer (1679) and in Prise de la ville et citadelle de Gand en 6 jours 1678 (1679).⁵⁵ As they are connected to the actions of Louis XIV, trumpets are not low instruments, and they are God’s instruments in Le Trébuchement des anges, also known as La Chute des anges rebelles (ca. 1685), in which the good angels pursue the bad. Trumpets also are sounded to God’s glory in Le Brun’s Dieu dans sa gloire (1672-76).

To show how creators similarly use a common store of imagery connected to a topic, we can briefly look at various images of trumpets used in several paintings of Judgment Day.⁵⁶ The history of the actual form, use, and technique of playing instruments does not necessarily coincide with the use of instruments in painting. The depiction of embouchures in trumpet playing is an example of this phenomenon. Philip Bate points out that tense embouchures are depicted as early as the “woodcuts of Virdung and the so-called ‘Leckingfelde Proverbs’ of c. 1500” (p. 109), and Daniel Speer in 1687 insists on a tense embouchure for trumpet playing. Lomazzo, however, says that according to convention, players of wind instruments always are shown with puffed-out cheeks; for examples, he cites Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (Plate 2) and scenes of tritons blowing trumpets (Book II, p. 53; we can see how Lomazzo tends to classify at least some trumpet playing by the fact that he talks at the same time about the puffedout cheeks seen also in Mantegna’s rather low bacchanals and bagpipers). In other words, artists depicted trumpeters with puffed-out cheeks even after proper trumpet techniques had evolved to tense embouchures. Painters use the sound of trumpets and their symbolism without making their trumpets necessarily naturalistic.⁵⁷ Puffed-out cheeks show more emotion. The passionate and overwhelming nature of much trumpet imagery, and imaginary trumpet blasts, is evident.

Artists of an age earlier than the Baroque were not so much interested in depicting human passions as they were in showing the fundamental harmony of creation, of which music is representative and which their paintings also supposedly reproduce. The earlier Fra Angelico (d. 1455), for example, in his balanced, serene paintings, shows gentle trumpeters, with little emphasis on the instruments or players except as a part of the harmonious design. The angle at which each of the rather long trumpets is tilted up is set off by its opposite number on the other side of the painting. He uses the same design in his Last Judgment in the Convent of San Marco in Florence as well as his Last Judgment in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Although in each work half the earth is in chaos, the gentle trumpeters are a serene part of a harmonious heaven. He depicts trumpeters in the same general way in his Coronation of the Virgin (in the Uffizi in Florence), except that the trumpeter in the upper right shows a slight change: he is less decorous; with cheeks puffed out and head thrust slightly forward, the angel displays an energy slightly out of keeping with the composure of the rest of the benign company. As time goes on, there is a change in the depiction of trumpeters. In Luca Signorelli’s (d. 1523) Choir of Angels in the Orvieto Duomo, the trumpeters are positioned lower than the rest of the angels and are more indecorous, more energetic. Their clothes show motion, and their cheeks are puffed out.⁵⁸

In Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (Plate 1) for the first time we can “hear” the marvelous sound, that grand, loud, half-cacophonous noise of powerful trumpets. Both in Rubens’s large Last Judgment and in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, the trumpets and imaginary sounds emanating from them are set off by an abyss of light in front of the trumpet players, who overlook the chasm that separates earth from heaven. Each artist places his trumpet players lower than the prophets and the other heavenly beings that display love, concord, and the equilibrium of divine judgment. Power and disharmony are reflected in the way the angels are blowing, cheeks puffed out, their red faces showing great effort; the heads of the blowers and the trumpeters are thrust forward (see Plate 2). Fréart says that in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment the angels “grimace” in the “mouthing of their trumpets” (besides “the contortion of their bodies”). Fréart dislikes this vulgarity and “excess” and dislikes the violence in Michelangelo’s work in general, preferring Raphael’s sedate beauty.⁵⁹ Michelangelo connects his trumpeters with the chaos of earth through their violence, yet separates them from earth by an abyss of light, thereby communicating to us their affiliation both with earthly passions and with heavenly reason and harmony. The effects Rubens, Michelangelo, and Dryden produce are similar, and Dryden’s trumpet imagery is visual as well as aural. The paintings, and Dryden’s poem, thus give us a feeling of the passion, turmoil, and disharmony of Judgment Day, yet the unity and harmony that will result from that dread day are reflected by the placement on high of the judges themselves, who appeal to our reason. If we react as we should, these paintings and the poem in their totality excite our passions to the extent that we are engulfed in speechless admiration.

The kind of image Dryden calls up by the last three lines of the poem also is related to the effect of Michelangelo’s and Rubens’s paintings by means of the description of Judgment Day. Since all Baroque artists draw from a store of imagery common to all, we see Dryden’s image even more clearly if we know that elsewhere he envisions God’s “throne [as] darkness in th’abyss of light, / A blaze of glory that forbids the sight,” just as Rubens and Michelangelo separate God’s throne from the violence of the trumpeters and from earth by an abyss of light.⁶⁰ But other works of art can also help us in our consideration of Dryden’s imagery. The sublime paradox of the last line of the ode, “And MUSIC shall untune the sky,” rests partly on the harmony-disharmony conjunctive one finds in discussions of music. Disharmony moves to harmony as a musical piece moves from a relatively dissonant chord to the tonic. The dissonance of Judgment Day moves to the harmony of eternity, an image that rests on God’s sublime judgment and on harmony of thought and feeling, a unity talked about at length by sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century musicians. The octave and the tonic represent God’s unity, arousing in us the sense of harmony and peace we feel from the contemplation of an harmonious eternity and at the restful end of a piece of music. Peacham says that we relish concord more because of previous “jarres,” which are “harsh and discordant.”⁶¹ Mace, connecting music and religious mystical thought, says that the octave unites and harmonizes like unity itself and that the Holy Trinity is reflected in the three harmonical concords, the unison, the third, and the fifth. He says that a separation from unity in music is “irksome and unpleasing to a well-tuned soul.” To illustrate his point further, he includes a poem called “Great God”:

Mace goes on in the same vein, ending in unity, “In th’unconceived harmonious mystery.”⁶²

Dissonance, or lack of harmony, also produces certain effects in an audience. The lack of harmony in Rubens’s so-called Le Coup de lance (Plate 6) is an example of how the technique may be used in another kind of art. The complexion of the soldier with the spear denotes discordant choler (following Lomazzo’s description of what a soldier should be like). If we observe closely, the soldier appears to be pulling the spear out of Christ’s side (note his balance, the kind of grip he is using, and the spurting blood). The sky is streaked, dark, and wild, and the sun is going into eclipse. The writhing of the thieves augments the awful effect. These grisly and cacophonous motions produce uncomfortable, disharmonious emotions in us. Yet, we know that out of such discord, harmony will result. In Dryden’s poem, which also draws its imagery and its effects from religion, the disharmonious connotations of untunes are resolved by the open vowel of sky and by our knowledge of, and feeling for, the subsequent eternal peace, harmony, and unity that will result after Judgment Day. Since the universe is essentially in harmony, disharmony is a temporary phenomenon, an aberration that runs its course. We can see the working out of this belief in any comedy or tragedy in the period, from Shakespeare’s King Lear to Addison’s Cato. The mind and its passions, of course, also were thought of as a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm.

The sharing of imagery from different media can exist at any time. What varies is the individual artist’s sensitivity to the other arts and his willingness to use them for effect. Since the arts in the Baroque era were thought of as comparable, capable of achieving similar rhetorical effects, Dryden, who shows sensitivity to all the arts and who discusses them all at one time or another, uses imagery as he needs it, depending on his estimation of his audience’s knowledge and sensitivity. We cannot reach a full appreciation of Dryden’s intent and achievement unless we realize or feel the effects of the different arts that he employs. Dryden’s poem is sublime. When our rational souls or minds are temporarily overcome, or stunned into acquiescence, we have come under the spell of the sublime. When we see, hear, and feel the powerful complex of images Dryden uses to arouse our passions, our rational minds will be temporarily overcome by the splendor of the imagery, leaving us with feelings of astonishment and admiration. When we think about Dryden’s accomplishment in his own terms, he teaches us a number of things not only about God and music but also about poetic technique, the manipulation of audiences, the act of making public statements through poetry, and the glories of the human spirit. The more completely we understand the aesthetics behind his and other Baroque art, the more it can say to us.