The Crisis in the Arts of the Seventeenth Century: a Crisis Of

Home , Aniello Falcone, Giambattista Marino, Italian Baroque, Pietro Paolini

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xl:2 (Autumn, 2009), 239–261.

CRISIS IN THE ARTS Peter Burke The Crisis in the Arts of the Seventeenth Century: A Crisis of Representation? Because the term crisis in general and the idea of a seventeenth-century crisis in particular have been the objects of acute criticism, a formal deªnition is in order. One might speak, for instance, of a “crisis of conªdence”— in other words, a decline. However, conªdence is not easy to measure, and, in any case, it is necessary to ask, “Conªdence in what” (church, state, or humanity)? In the context of witch trials, discussed in this issue by Edward Bever, the phrase “crisis of con- ªdence” is a precise one, but it becomes vaguer when it is used about the arts. To avoid such a problem, the deªnition of crisis employed herein is a fairly precise one, close to the medical origins of the term in ancient Greece, where it referred to the moment in an illness when a patient was poised between death and recovery, or to seventeenth-century usage, exempliªed by a speech in the House of Commons in 1627 by Sir Benjamin Rudyerd about the “crisis of parliaments” that would determine whether the Parlia- ment would “live or die.” Burckhardt, perhaps the ªrst historian to make a serious use of the term, also used the metaphor of a fever.1 The pathological overtones of this metaphor, however, are an obstacle to understanding, and in what follows an attempt will be

Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History and Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Languages and Communities in Early Modern Eu- rope (New York, 2004); Eyewitnessing (Ithaca, 2001). The author thanks Theodore K. Rabb and Edward Bever for their comments on the ªrst draft of this paper. © 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 Randolph Starn, “Historians and Crisis,” Past & Present, 52 (1971), 3–22; John H. Elliott, “Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe,” ibid., 42 (1969), 35–56; rpr. in Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith (eds.), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Lon- don, 1978), 110–133; J. B. Shank, “Crisis: A Useful Category of Post-Social Scientiªc Histori- cal Analysis?” American Historical Review, CXIII (2008), 1090–1099. Rudyerd quoted in Reinhard Koselleck, “Krise,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and idem (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1972– 1997), III, 620; Jacob Burckhardt, “Die geschichtlichen Krisen,” in Weltgeschichtliche Betrach- tungen (Leipzig, 1938; orig. pub. 1905), 157–205. For Burckhardt, see Theodor Schieder, “Die historischen Krisen im Geschichtsdenken Jacob Burckhardts,” in Begegnungen mit der Geschichte (Göttingen, 1962), 129–162.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 240 | PETER BURKE made to avoid them. In this article, the term will be used in a neu- tral manner to refer to a relatively short period of turbulence (a few decades at most) that is followed by structural changes that last for a relatively long time (a century or more). This deªnition is not so different from that employed by Clark in the introduction to his classic work The Seventeenth Century, when he spoke of a major “watershed” in European history in the middle of the seventeenth century, “a change accompanied by storms.” This idea implies a clear contrast between periods of crisis and periods of non-crisis, thereby helping to prevent the devaluation of our con- ceptual currency by ªnding crises everywhere. It also implies studying a crisis or crises in the seventeenth century rather than a crisis of the seventeenth century, giving particular attention to the years between 1640 and 1660 in order to test the notion that the century was “broken in the middle, irreparably broken.”2 As for the “arts,” the word will be employed herein to refer to the visual arts, literature, and music, focusing on cultural history in the traditional narrow or precise sense, distinguished from intellectual history (including the history of science), from the history of popular culture, and from the history of culture in the wide an- thropological sense of the term. Although it would be unwise to assume that developments in all of these arts followed the same chronology, we can at least point to some themes that were not conªned to one medium. The so-called “transverberation” of St. Teresa, for instance, appealed to the English poet Richard Crashaw as well as to the Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, and another of Bernini’s works, the transformation of Daphne into a laurel tree, was also the subject of poems by the Italian Giambat- tista Marino and the Pole Samuel Twardowski.

the historiography of crisis The idea of a seventeenth- century crisis is old enough, and controversial enough, to allow us to speak of an “Eighty Years’ War” fought over it. In 1929, Clark organized his study of the seventeenth century around the idea of a structural change in the middle of the period, even if he did not employ the term “crisis.” In the same year, Croce’s History of the

2 George N. Clark, The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1929), ix; Hugh R. Trevor- Roper, “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” Past & Present, 16 (1959), 20.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 241 Baroque Age in Italy, which concentrated on literature, described the baroque as the art of “decadence,” “perversion,” or “corrup- tion.” He occasionally used the term crisis, but only to refer to the invasion of Italy in 1494, not the seventeenth century. Clark and Croce were followed in the 1930s by Borkenau, Willey, and Haz- ard. The Austrian Marxist Borkenau studied a transition between two worldviews—one traditional and “feudal” and the other me- chanical, mathematical, and “bourgeois”—during the age of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, while the other two scholars discussed both literature and ideas. Willey discussed what he called the increasingly “precarious” position of poetry in a scientiªc age, exposed to what John Keats famously dubbed “the touch of cold philosophy,” whereas Hazard identiªed what he called a European “crisis of consciousness” in the 1680s and 1690s.3 All the same, it was not until the 1950s that the idea of a seventeenth-century crisis became a serious object of debate among academic historians. In Britain, Hobsbawm’s’s emphasis was pri- marily economic, and that of Trevor-Roper sociopolitical. In France, however, Mousnier, writing a general history of Europe over two centuries (from 1500 to 1700), took a more holistic approach. Mousnier gave culture a major role in his interpretation of the crisis, distinguishing a “crise de la sensibilité morale et religieuse” from a “crise de la science”; discussing Augustinianism, classicism, and Cartesianism in his section on “la lutte contre la crise” (the ªght against crisis); and returning to ideas and feelings in his analysis of the “renewed crisis” at the end of the century.4 Clark had already devoted a chapter to literature and another to painting and architecture, but Mousnier, in his pages about the baroque, was the ªrst historian to make the arts central to the interpretation of the crisis. Indeed, he claimed that the crisis was ªrst revealed in art (une crise...quiaétédécelée d’abord dans l’art), com- paring it to a psychological depression in an individual. Juxta- posing the visual arts to literature (Peter Paul Rubens to Pierre

3 Benedetto Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia (Bari, 1929), 3; Franz Borkenau, Die Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (Darmstadt, 1971; orig. pub. 1934); Basil Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background (London, 1934); Paul Hazard, Crise de la conscience européenne 1680–1720 (Paris, 1935). 4 Eric Hobsbawm, “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” Past & Present, 5 (1954), 33– 53; ibid., 6 (1954), 44–65; Trevor-Roper, “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” ibid., 16 (1959), 8–42; Roland Mousnier, Les 16e et 17e siècles (Paris, 1954).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 242 | PETER BURKE Corneille), Mousnier emphasized what he called “internal disorder” (désordre intérieur), asserting that the baroque lacked the sym- metry and the equilibrium of the Renaissance, that it sacriªced order to sensation, and that it “probably encouraged a general crisis of reason that showed itself ªrst in morality.” In the case of the late seventeenth century, a time of “renewed crisis” (une crise renou- velée), Mousnier’s emphasis fell on what he called, not unlike Willey, the “drying up” (dessèchement) of literature and the expul- sion of poetry.5 This bold attempt at a general synthesis owed a good deal to more limited studies by earlier scholars. Mousnier’s interpretation of the late seventeenth century followed Hazard, and his pages on the baroque drew from earlier French studies of art and literature by Lebègue, for instance, and by Mâle, whose famous book Reli- gious Art after the Council of Trent had appeared in 1932. Mousnier did not refer to the German art historian Weisbach, whose his pioneering work on the baroque, published in 1921, had linked the new style to a pessimistic view of life, associated with the Counter-Reformation, contrasting it with the optimism of the Renaissance.6 Mousnier’s view of baroque art was contradicted in the study of the baroque and classicism published by Victor Tapié in 1957: For his part, Tapié stressed magniªcence and triumphalism. How- ever, Mousnier’s interpretation was followed by Mandrou, in an article published six years later that completely ignored his prede- cessor. Mandrou described the baroque as the expression of an emotional, unbalanced sensibility or mentality (mentalité pathétique, déséquilibre mentale), and presented it as a response to the “social crisis” between 1590 and 1640. In similar fashion, six years after Mandrou’s article appeared, Chaunu, another historian associated with Annales, characterized the baroque in terms of tragic tension and as a response both to the end of economic growth and to the “crisis of consciousness” following the blow to traditional views of the cosmos administered by the natural philosophers.7

5 Mousnier, Les 16e et 17e siècles, 176–181, 331–334. 6 Emile Mâle, L’Art religieux après le Concile de Trente, étude sur l”iconographie de la ªn du XVIe, du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècles en Italie, en France, en Espagne et en Flandre (Paris, 1932); Raymond Lebègue, “Le Théâtre baroque en France,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, II (1941), 161–184; Werner Weisbach, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin, 1921), 3. 7 Victor-L. Tapié (trans. A. Ross Williamson), The Age of Grandeur: Baroque Art and Architec-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 243 If one reads Mousnier’s study today, more than half a century after it was ªrst published, it may seem to belong to another intellectual world, thanks to its personiªcation of the baroque, viewed as an agent independent of individuals, not to mention the author’s moralism and his fear of disorder and unreason, which he expressed still more clearly in his later study of rural rebellions, viewed as “peasant furies.” The work might have been more useful if the author had made more of an attempt to distinguish between description, explanation, and judgment. It might also be argued that Mousnier dilutes the idea of crisis too much by using the term in so many different contexts. All the same, Mousnier’s holistic vision of seventeenth-century culture is an illuminating one, and it may serve as a foundation—or possibly a springboard—for the discussion that follows.8 In focusing on the relationship between the general crisis and the arts, it is surely necessary to begin by distinguishing a number of problems or questions. In the ªrst place, was there a crisis in the relatively small world of the arts? Underneath this umbrella, it is necessary to consider the different arts separately, since it cannot be assumed that painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, drama, and the writing of what modern librarians call “non- ªction” follow the same trajectory. In the second place, moving from the microcosm to the macrocosm, did artists, writers, and other creators respond to what they perceived as a more general crisis? Or did the arts “reºect” or “express” a crisis in the wider society or culture? These questions will be discussed in the sections that follow.

the world of the arts Was there a crisis in the world of the arts? To answer this rather large question it may be useful to break it down into more manageable enquiries. In the ªrst place, did the arts experience a period of turbulence in the middle of the century? In the case of cultural history, in contrast to economic or political history, it is not very clear what turbulence might mean. One might choose as examples some of the buildings designed by

ture (London, 1960; orig. pub. 1957); Robert Mandrou, “Le baroque européen: Mentalité pathétique et revolution sociale,” Annales ESC, V (1960), 898–914; Pierre Chaunu, La civilisa- tion de l’Europe classique (Paris, 1966), 439–446, 512–516. 8 Mousnier, Fureurs paysannes: Les paysans dans les révoltes du XVII siecle (France, Russie, Chine) (Paris, 1967).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 244 | PETER BURKE Francesco Borromini around the middle of the century (from San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane to Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza), but the danger of subjectivity is a serious one, made more acute by our knowledge that Borromini’s personal life was indeed turbulent and by the tradition of interpreting works of art as expressions of individual personality. Other approaches to the design of these churches are at least equally plausible, as we shall see.9 In the second place, we might ask whether there were in the arts any shifts either in style or in subject matter that were analo- gous to the structural changes that economic, social, and political historians of the general crisis discuss. In so doing, it might be useful, while bearing in mind the necessary differences between histories of the arts and histories of science, to take up and adapt the idea of a “paradigm” as used by Kuhn in his Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions (1962). Kuhn suggested that major achievements pro- vide models or “paradigms” for what he calls “normal science,” performed by later workers in the ªeld. However, he also argues that these paradigms come to be viewed as less and less satisfactory after new discoveries are made, accumulating and so leading to a “crisis” only to be resolved by the emergence of a new paradigm.10 At one point, drawing on Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960), Kuhn compared the idea of progress in natural science and in painting, at a time when a major goal of painters was the representation of nature. Seventeenth-century painters had other goals be- sides this one, while architects and composers were still more dis- tant from it, but the idea of a paradigm that is ªrst followed with enthusiasm and later rejected, for whatever reasons, may still be helpful in this brief survey of the arts, provided that all necessary changes are made. For example, in Kuhn’s narrative, a new paradigm is accepted relatively rapidly and becomes part of “normal science,” whereas there may be greater time-lag in the case of the arts, in which a new style may be resisted or gradually adapted to local circumstances.11 The obvious name for the new seventeenth-century para-

9 On Borromini’s life and death, see Rudolf Wittkower, “Francesco Borromini, His Char- acter and Life,” in Studies in the Italian Baroque (London, 1975), 153–166. 10 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), 66–91. 11 Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1960). Ironically, Gombrich derived his idea of progress—shall we call it a paradigm?—from his friend Karl Popper, a philosopher of science.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 245 digm, despite its ambiguities, is the traditional one that Mous- nier chose for his discussion of crisis in the arts (though Clark generally avoided it in his chapters on literature, painting, and architecture)—baroque, a term that came into use among art historians in the late nineteenth century and spread more widely during the 1920s. Today, art historians working on the seventeenth century are divided into two groups, one continuing to use baroque as a general term to describe the arts after the Renaissance and the other distinguishing baroque from classicism, a less spectacular style that elaborated the rules of Renaissance art rather than breaking with them. In the narrower sense, baroque describes the art of Italy (where most of the innovations took place), Spain, Central Europe, and, for a brief period, France (some scholars extending the concept to Britain).12 In the case of architecture, one of the most successful formu- lations of the essential characteristics of the baroque style came from the Swiss scholar Wölfºin, a former student of Burckhardt’s. Deªning the baroque style against that of the Renaissance, he drew attention to two essential features, mass and movement (Massigkeit und Bewegung). He described the illusion of movement in architecture as a “painterly” style (malerisch), which involved breaking the rules of classical architecture as formulated by the ancient Roman Vitruvius and elaborated in the Renaissance, from Leonbattista Alberti to Andrea Palladio.13 The most spectacular examples of the new architecture come from Rome in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the competing works of Bernini and Borromini, in which mass, movement, and the breaking of the classical rules are all extremely visible. All the same, the shift from one paradigm to another began around 1600, or even earlier, rather than in the middle of the seventeenth century. A famous example, which served as a model for many other buildings, is the church of the Gesù in Rome, con- structed between 1568 and 1575. Although sculpture had fewer rules to break, once again a “painterly” style and an emphasis on movement became promi-

12 For a representative of the ªrst group, see John R. Martin, Baroque (London, 1977); of the second, Tapié (trans. A. Ross Williamson), The Age of Grandeur: Baroque and Classicism in Europe (London, 1960; orig. pub. 1957). Contrast Judith Hook, The Baroque Age in England (London, 1976). 13 Heinrich Wölfºin (trans. Kathrin Simon), Renaissance and Baroque (London, 1964; orig. pub. 1888).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 246 | PETER BURKE nent: The contrast between Michelangelo’s David, represented in repose, and Bernini’s David, shown a moment before he launches the stone from his sling, has become famous. Transformation is a recurrent theme in the baroque arts; Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne catches the nymph at the very moment of her metamorphosis into a laurel tree. The statues of the saints from this period—most famously, Bernini’s St. Teresa—express more emotion in their gestures and facial expressions than had been the case in the Renais- sance. The date of the David is around 1623–1624, of Apollo and Daphne 1622–1625, and of the Teresa, 1647–1652, but, as in the case of architecture, the new style was already visible at the beginning of the seventeenth century.14 The concept of the “painterly” obviously loses its usefulness in the case of painting itself, but painters like sculptors were concerned to express strong emotions. In their case, the sense of drama was heightened by the use of chiaroscuro as well as by theatrical gestures. The iconography of paintings changed as well as their style; Mâle’s famous study of religious art in Catholic Europe noted a new emphasis on death, visions, and ecstasies, the result of a conscious attempt by the clergy to reform art and to employ it in the service of the Counter-Reformation. Taking once again the most famous examples, Rembrandt, often but not always described as baroque, was active between the 1630s and the 1660s, thus spanning the middle years of the century. However, Rubens, the baroque painter par excellence, was at work a generation earlier, between 1600 and 1640, whereas the brief career of Caravaggio, sometimes viewed as the inventor of the new style— nuova maniera di pingere, as one contemporary put it—took place at the very beginning of the century, between 1600 and 1610. Only if the “high baroque” is distinguished from the earlier phase of the movement can the main action be located in the middle of the century.15 The idea of the baroque has been taken up by literary scholars but remains a somewhat debatable one in this domain. In Italy, a new style is associated with the Neapolitan Giambattista Marino,

14 On David, see Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750 (Harmondsworth, 1980; orig. pub. 1948); on transformation, Jean Rousset, La littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et le paon (Paris, 1953), 11–78. 15 Mâle, L’Art religieux. Wittkower, Art and Architecture, dates the high baroque as c.1625– 1675.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 247 who published a famous book of poems in 1602 and attracted many disciples, ªrst in Italy and then abroad. Explaining that the aim of the poet was la maraviglia, to surprise or shock—a description as appropriate to the works of Caravaggio, Bernini, and Borromini as to his own—Marino looked for unusual subjects (an ostrich, for one) and favored far-fetched metaphors. Following his example, seventeenth-century Italian poets showed their wit or ingenuity (ingenio, argutezza) by writing poems about clocks, dice, guns, maps, spectacles, and tobacco, as well as about women en- gaged in various occupations. Marino began with “a woman sew- ing,” and his followers wrote about female servants, beggars, laun- dresses, agricultural workers, fortune-tellers, chicken sellers, teachers, embroiderers, and bookbinders. Similar trends have been identiªed in seventeenth-century Spanish literature, particularly from Luis de Góngora to Francisco Quevedo, and in that of France, Germany, the Dutch Republic, Poland, and England, the home of so-called “metaphysical” poets such as John Donne.16 In the case of music, too, there was a major change in style in the seventeenth century, the shift from polyphony to monody, associated with the rise of opera in Florence, Venice, and elsewhere. This paradigm shift began, once again, around the year 1600, when Jacopo Peri wrote his Euridice, but might be said to have reached its apogee in the late work of Claudio Monteverdi, especially Il ritorno d’Ulisse (1641) and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642). The phase of “normal opera,” on the analogy of Kuhn’s “normal science,” might be said to have been reached in the time of Francesco Cavalli, whose thirty-three operas include Il Giasone (1649), L’Artemisia (1657), and Ercole Amante (1662).17 Summing up so far, if we work with the idea of a crisis in a paradigm leading to a new structure, we ªnd that this new structure appeared in Italy around the year 1600 and lasted until about 1750. It followed the late sixteenth-century age of “mannerism,” which has sometimes also been described as a time of turbulence, or indeed of “crisis.”18

16 René Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” Journal of Aesthetics, V (1946), 77–109; Helmut Hatzfeld, “A Clariªcation of the Baroque Problem in the Romance Literatures,” Comparative Literature, I (1949), 113–139. 17 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991). 18 Contrast the interpretation of mannerism in Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 248 | PETER BURKE Lebègue, one of the scholars who inspired Mousnier, saw the baroque style in terms of liberty—freedom from rules—and irra- tionality. He, too, referred to a “baroque crisis” but in a sense different from Mousnier, using the term to refer to the disappearance of the new style in France between 1635 and 1640, giving way to classicism. Other scholars, often working on other countries, have also detected a major change in style around the middle of the seventeenth century. Clark, for instance, noted the rise of clarity, har- mony, and purity in literature and the decline of “vulgarity and violence,” while painters “relinquished the grand and the grand- iose.” Mousnier, echoing a long tradition of French literary criticism, wrote of the rise of reason and rules, and Rabb of the shift from “the titanic struggles of the generations from Shakespeare to Milton” to “genteelness and calm.” It is indeed difªcult to deny that a shift of this kind took place. There was, for instance, less in- terest in theatricality or shock (la maraviglia). What is more doubt- ful is whether the shift should be described as the “resolution” of a crisis or as a change of paradigm. A vaguer description, such as a change of mood or perhaps a recovery of optimism, might be preferable.19 Another important question to ask about the world of the arts concerns its organization. Was there a crisis of patronage at this time? There is certainly a case for speaking of a crisis of patronage in the previous century, especially in the 1520s, with the with- drawal of much of the patronage of the Church. There might also be a case for locating a crisis of patronage in the following century, especially in the 1750s, linked to a structural change—the shift from the dominance of the patron system to the dominance of the market system in literature and painting. In the seventeenth century, on the other hand, when both the courts and, in Catholic countries, the Counter-Reformation Church were commission- ing many works of art and architecture, it seems implausible to speak of a general crisis. Short-term problems, such as the drying up of the ºow of commissions for paintings in Spain during the 1640s—the result of an economic downturn—were sooner or

Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (London, 1965), with that of John Shearman, Manner- ism (Harmondsworth, 1967), but both emphasize the breaking of rules. 19 Lebègue, “Le Théâtre baroque en France”; Clark, Seventeenth Century, 337, 357; Mousnier, 16e et 17e siècles, 212–219; Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Mod- ern Europe (New York, 1975), 100.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 249 later resolved. Only in the case of music is it possible to point to structural changes, with the rise of commercial opera in Venice in the middle of the century, followed by a more gradual rise of commercial concerts in London and other cities.20

the crisis of representation If we cannot usefully use the term crisis with respect to either style or patronage in the middle of the seventeenth century, there may still be a case for speaking of a “crisis of representation.” In several important respects, traditional views of the world were rejected, or at least questioned, at this time. In the ªrst place, the “correspondence,” as it was sometimes called, between a king and a father, or the state and the human body, or the microcosm and the macrocosm had traditionally been viewed as a real or an organic connection. These parallels or cor- respondences had been treated not as man-made analogies but as objective similarities. As Nicolson put it, “Our ancestors believed that what we call ‘analogy’ was truth, inscribed by God in the nature of things.” This view was increasingly challenged in the middle of the seventeenth century. Relatively early examples of the new attitude include two Englishmen—Bacon, who had a “strong inclination to reject the analogical mode of thought,” and Hakewill, who criticized the analogy between microcosm and macrocosm on the grounds that man and the universe “subsist not of the same principles, nor are in all things alike.”21 In the second place, traditional views of reality were challenged by the discoveries associated with the “scientiªc revolution” of the seventeenth century. Like the painters and architects

20 Simon T. Worsthorne, Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1954); Rosand, Opera, 66–109; John H. Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England (Reading, 1973). 21 Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992); idem, “The Demise of Royal Mythologies,” in Allan Ellenius (ed.), Iconography, Propaganda and Legitimation (New York, 1998), 245–254; Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian Eng- land, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, 1993); Thomas Luxon, Puritan Allegory and the Renaissance Crisis of Representation (Chicago, 1995); Marjorie H. Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Evanston, 1950), 108; Henri Gouhier, “Le refus du symbolisme dans l”humanisme cartésien,” in Enrico Castelli (ed.), Umanesimo e simbolismo (Padua, 1958), 65–74; John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton, 1961); Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1966). On Francis Bacon, see Sidney Warhaft, “The Providential Order in Bacon’s New Philosophy,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, IV (1971), 49–64. Hakewill quoted in William H. Greenleaf, Order and Empiricism in Politics (New York, 1964), 150–151.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 250 | PETER BURKE of the period, natural philosophers had a new sense of space; in Koyré’s words, they turned “from the closed world to the inªnite universe.” The connection between the space of the philosophers and the space of the artists (for example, the grand vistas in the many scenes of saints in heaven) is difªcult to deªne, but it is equally difªcult to deny. The new philosophical distinction between “primary qualities,” things as they really are, and “second- ary qualities,” things as they seem to human senses, is surely re- lated to a recurrent theme in baroque art and literature—the gap between appearance and reality, être and paraître, ser and parecer, Sein and Schein. Pedro Calderón’s play of the 1630s, La vida es sueño, is the most famous expression of this sense of life as a dream.22 Awareness of this gap between things and sensations was encouraged by the rise of purpose-built theaters during this period, with their painted scenery and special effects. Dramatists played with the idea: Plays within plays, for instance, were not uncom- mon at the time. They included le Sieur Gougenot’s Comédie des comédiens (1633) and Corneille’s L’illusion comique (1635). The story of St. Genesius had considerable appeal. According to the leg- end—which inspired Lope de Vega’s Fingido verdadero (1620), Nicolas-Marc Desfontaines’ L’illustre comédien (1644), and, Jean Rotrou’s St. Genest (c.1645)—Genesius, an actor during the reign of the emperor Diocletian, was converted to Christianity in the act of playing a Christian martyr and subsequently became a martyr himself.23 Going a little further in this direction, one might claim that the arts in the age of the baroque aspired to the condition of theater. Music became theatrical in the age of opera. Painting became theatrical at a time when the frescoes in churches and palaces resembled painted scenery. Architecture became theatrical as build- ers stressed mass and movement. Sculpture became theatrical, as in the case of Bernini’s chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Vit- toria in Rome, where members of the Cornaro family are shown watching the transverberation of St. Teresa from a balcony that re- sembles a box in a theater. In an indirect manner—a point that

22 Alexandre Koyré, From The Closed World to the Inªnite Universe (Baltimore, 1957). 23 Georges Forestier, Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVIIe siècle (Geneva, 1981); on Rotrou, see Imbrie Buffum, Studies in the Baroque from Montaigne to Rotrou (New Haven, 1957), 212–239.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 251 needs to be emphasized—this deliberate theatricality may be regarded as a response to the crisis of representation.

responses to crisis Widening out from possible crises within the world of the arts, it is time to consider the responses of artists and writers to the economic, social, political, or intellectual crises of their time, and especially artistic and literary representations of the conºicts of the period. We have recently been reminded that in the mid-seventeenth century, “more wars took place around the world than in any other era until the 1940s.” In the age of the Thirty Years’ War, there were many representations of battles and of the destruction that war brought in its train. The best- known examples are the famous series of etchings by Jacques Callot of Lorraine, known as Les grands misères de la guerre (1633), Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s picaresque romance Simplicissimus (1668), and Andreas Gryphius’ poem about the death of his baby niece—“born during the ºight, surrounded with swords and conºagration” (Geboren in der Flucht, umringt mit Schwert und Brand). However, any attempt at a complete list of seventeenth-century paintings and writings about war would be a long one.24 Some painters, such as Jacob de Haase (1574–1634), Vincent Leckerbetien (1595–1675), Michelangelo Cerquozzi (1602–1660), Pietro Paolini (1603–1681), Philips Wouwermans (1619–1668), and Giacome Cortese “il Borgognone” (1621–1675), specialized in battles or scenes from military life. Whether the battles represented were ancient or modern, they can be read as responses to the long and bitter conºict that took place between 1618 and 1648 and involved many European countries. In this context, it is note- worthy that a substantial minority of these representations, including those of Callot and Grimmelshausen, broke with the Renais- sance tradition, showing war in an unheroic light, as in the case of Cerquozzi’s Sack of a Village (1630); Wouwermans’ Plundering Sol- diers; and several of the works of Salvator Rosa, who also wrote a satire on war, as well as the aforementioned works of Callot and Grimmelshausen. The painting by Rubens of The Horrors of War (1638) does not stand alone. In this sphere, at least, we might speak

24 Parker, “Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Recon- sidered,” American Historical Review, CXIII (2008), 1056.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 252 | PETER BURKE of a crisis of representation that was closely linked to political and military events.25 The last years of the Thirty Years’ War coincided, not by ac- cident, with a wave of rebellions or revolutions in Italy, Spain, England, France, the Dutch Republic, and the Ukraine (not to mention the Ottoman Empire, China, Mexico, Brazil, Mozam- bique, and elsewhere) between 1640 and the early 1650s. The twentieth-century scholars who noted this wave had been antici- pated by writers from the period itself. Between 1643 and 1663, at least twenty-two histories of these recent revolts were published by Italian writers alone, dealing not only with the six famous cases that Merriman would later analyze but also with Piedmont, Sicily, Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the revolt against the Dutch led by the Portuguese settlers in Brazil. These writers used the term revolution in the traditional sense of circling or revolving. In order to appreciate the full resonance of the seventeenth-century term revolution, it may be useful to juxtapose it to the other words used at the time to describe the same events, including commotions (commotioni), risings (sollevationi), seditions (seditioni), internal wars (guerre intestine), tumults (tumulti), turbulences (turbolenze), or political earthquakes (terremoti di stato).26 The writers of these histories generally perceived the tumults like Mousnier did, in terms of blind fury. For archbishop Filomar- ino of Naples, the people “boiled” like liquid. To Alessandro Girafª, they resembled a thoroughbred horse that resisted saddle and bridle. Even an anti-Spanish account of the revolt of Tom- maso Aniello (better known as Masaniello) stressed the incon- stancy of the people, their passivity until incited by “those who fo- mented the tumult,” and their “strange madness” when aroused. Although Girafª approved of the rebels’ aims, he perceived their actions as “stravaganze” (irrational).27 In similar fashion, other writers employed the imagery of disease, “plague” or “poison” coursing through the veins of the body politic, or, as Count Maiolino Bisaccioni called the revolt of

25 On Rubens, see Rabb, Struggle for Stability, 139–143. 26 Ralph B. Merriman, Six Contemporaneous Revolutions (Hamden, Conn., 1963; orig. pub. 1938); Burke, “Some Seventeenth-Century Anatomists of Revolution,” Storia della Storiograªa, XXII (1992), 23–35. 27 Burke, “The Virgin of the Carmine and the Revolt of Masaniello,” Past & Present, 99 (1983), 3–21; rpr. in idem, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (New York, 1987), 191– 206.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 253 Palermo, a malign “fever.” Giambattista Birago described popular revolts as “contagious diseases” (morbi contagiosi). Vittorio Siri re- ºected on “this poison” (questo veleno) or “cancer” (cancro) threat- ening the Spanish Empire. His account of the origins of the Eng- lish civil war claimed that a long peace allowed “evil humors” (cattivi humori) to accumulate, “like the cessation of moderate exer- cise in the case of a convalescent.” The pathological approach to politics, as well as to the arts, has a long history.28 Historical writers were not the only ones to comment. Dra- matic events naturally appealed to dramatists. Gryphius’ play Caro- lus Stuardus (1649) was a direct, shocked response to the execution of Charles I. Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein’s Ibrahim Sultan (1653) dealt with the recent deposition and murder in 1648 of the Otto- man Sultan Ibrahim I. Joost van den Vondel’s play Zungchin (1667) was set during the crisis in China, the civil war leading to the end of the Ming dynasty and the establishment of the Qing. Thomas Asselijn, another Dutch playwright, wrote about the rise and fall of Masaniello in Op- en ondergang van Masaniello, of Napelse beroerte (1668). His example was followed by the German writer Christian Weise, whose Masaniello dates from 1683. Poets also offered comments on events. The Italian Ciro de Pers, for instance, wrote about the death in battle of King Gustav Adolf of Sweden. Cromwell was celebrated by Andrew Marvell in his ode “Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650) and by his colleague John Milton in “Sonnet XVI: To the Lord General Cromwell” (1652). In Poland, where the epic still ºourished on the frontier of Christendom, Waclaw Potocki wrote his Wojna Chocimska in the 1670s about the recent war with the Ottoman Empire, and Samuel Twardowski about the war with the Cossacks in Wojna domowa (1681). Masaniello’s revolt was condemned by several Neapolitan poets, among them Antonio Muscettola, Antonio de Rossi, Vincenzo Zito, and the Jesuit Giacomo Lubrano (who included a regretful reference to the British treatment of Charles I). Like the historical writers mentioned above, these poets presented the “tumults” as mindless “torrents,” the result of the fury, rage, and drunkenness of ungrateful, insolent plebeians and their “mad de-

28 Maiolino Bisaccioni, Guerre civili (Venice, 1652), 19, 424; Giambattista Birago, Turbolenze di Europa (Venice, 1654), 369.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 254 | PETER BURKE mocracies” (pazze democrazie). These texts all express a sense of shock, a response to events seen as both extraordinary and alarm- ing.29 Painters also produced images that may be read as comments on recent events. Paolini painted the assassination of Albrecht Wallenstein. Aniello Falcone and Micco Spadaro, both of Naples, produced unheroic or antiheroic paintings of the revolt of Masani- ello, to which Haskell has compared the “antiheroic confusion” of certain battle pieces by Cerquozzi. The arresting image of The Threatened Swan by the Dutch painter Jan Asselijn, the brother of playwright Thomas, has often been thought to refer to the political crisis in the Dutch Republic, which culminated in the murder of Johan and Cornelis de Witt and the re-establishment of the power of the Stadholder.30 Shifting from political crisis to spiritual or intellectual crisis, it is even easier to ªnd responses and comments in the arts. A classic, though much-debated, example is John Donne’s Anatomie (1611), a commissioned work to mourn the death of Elizabeth Drury, with its much-quoted lines “all coherence gone,” and “the new philosophy calls all in doubt.” In this case, we cannot afford to for- get either rhetoric associated with a particular literary genre or the traditional topos of the decay of nature, even if this idea was debated with particular intensity in the early seventeenth century.31 The prevalence of the literary and pictorial theme of death and its symbols (skulls, hourglasses, and so on), and hence that of the transience and vanity (vanitas) of all worldly things, may be interpreted as an indirect response to the wars of the time and the destruction that they brought in their train, as well as to the re- surgence of the plague in mid-seventeenth-century Europe, in northern Italy in (1630–/31), Leiden (1634), Naples (1656), Lon- don (1665), and elsewhere in Europe. Some poets and painters ex- plicitly chose plague as their grisly subject: Micco Spadaro’s View of Piazza del Mercato, Naples (1656), for instance, or Federico Men- inni’s poem about the same visitation of plague.

29 Giovanni Getto, Opere scelte di Giovan Battista Marino e dei Marinisti (Turin 1954–1962), II, 342–343, 381, 388–390; Croce (ed.), Lirici marinisti (Bari, 1910), 465–468. 30 Fritz Saxl, “The Battle Scene without a Hero,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti- tutes, III (1939/40), 70–87; Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New Haven, 1980; orig. pub. 1963), 138. 31 Mâle, L’Art religieux; Nicolson, Breaking of the Circle, 65–104. On the topos, see Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone: A Study of the Seventeenth-Century Controversy over Disorder and De- cay in the Universe (Chicago, 1949).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 255 The vanity of worldly things was a major theme in still-life painting at this time, especially in the Dutch Republic (see the works of David Bailly, Pieter Steenwyck, and others) but also in France, Italy, England, and elsewhere. In the case of Spain, for instance, one thinks of two paintings by Valdés Leal, both from the year 1672, one entitled Finis gloriae mundi (the end of the glory of the world) and the other In ictu oculi (in the twinkling of an eye). Poems about death, tombs, skulls, skeletons, and the like were common in Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and English. To take only Italian examples, they include Claudio Achillini’s “La morte,” Francesco Bracciolini’s “La morte esser inevitabile,” Pietro Casaburi’s “La fragilità della vita umana,” Giovanni Canale’s “Scheletro” and “Morte,” Gianfrancesco Materdona’s “Scheletro,” Pier Francesco Paoli’s “La tomba,” Michelangelo Romagnesi’s “Morte” and “Tomba,” and Vincenzo Zito’s “Teschio.”32 Given the apparent prevalence of such images (despite the problem of knowing whether they were really more common in one century than in another), it is tempting for historians to speak of a sense of mortality, fragility, and instability, and even of an “age of anxiety,” or Angst, or, like Mandrou, of a “mentalité pathé- tique.” Going a little further in this direction, one might speak of a fear of chaos underlying the emphasis on order and reason in the arts in the middle to late seventeenth century, the age of what Mousnier called “la lutte contre la crise” and Rabb, the “struggle for stability.” A similar idea informs Berman’s argument that the rise of classical music in the seventeenth century was an attempt to control, or even to “neuter,” the expression of emotion so important in the work of Claudio Monteverdi and his followers. Taking Marin Mersenne—a music theorist, natural philosopher, and priest—as his example, Berman presents the reform of music as the continuation of politics by other means.33 Another link between politics and culture concerns the cul-

32 Mâle, L’Art religieux; Ingvar Bergström (trans. Christina Bergström and Gerald Taylor), Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1956; orig. pub. 1947), 154–190; Liana Cheney, “Dutch Vanitas Paintings: The Skull,” in idem (ed.), The Symbolism of Vanitas in the Arts (Lewiston, N.Y., 1991), 113–176; Croce, Lirici marinisti, 175–176; Getto, Opere scelte, 260–261, 324, 383, 475–476; Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (ed.), Marino e i marinisti (Milan, 1954), 702, 736. On France, see Rousset, Circé, 105–167, which discusses “le spectacle de la mort.” 33 Mandrou, “Le baroque européen”; Mousnier, 16e et 17e siècles; Rabb, Struggle for Stability; Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses (London, 1990). My thanks to Edward Bever for this reference.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 256 | PETER BURKE tural balance of power in Europe. During the ªrst half of the seventeenth century, Spanish hegemony—what French historians used to call la préponderance espagnole—extended to the domain of culture, whereas the second half of the century was the age of the French. In politics, there was a brief period of “turbulence” during the 1660s, when Louis XIV asserted himself against his rival Philip IV. In the sphere of culture, however, the transition seems to have been more gradual. As is usually the case with this kind of grand generalization, however, distinctions as well as caution are in order. One important distinction was made by Hill when he contrasted the “lyric of internal conºict”—in other words, the open expression of (psychological, religious, or political) turmoil—in the work of such English poets as Donne and Marvell, with the more orderly style of the next generation. Concerning that second generation, Hill’s own account is marked by conºict. “Dryden and Waller perfected the rhyme couplet,” he wrote, “whose studied antitheses and bal- anced rhetoric reºected the greater stability towards which society was moving, and its fear of ‘enthusiasm.’” Was the classical couplet a reºection of society or the expression of collective emotion? Does it represent stability or fear?34 It is also worth remembering Macfarlane’s comment on Huizinga’s notorious emphasis on the preoccupation with death and hell in the late Middle Ages. In a study of Hans Memling, Macfarlane noted both the popularity of the painter with the edu- cated laity of the later ªfteenth century and the painter’s expression of hope rather than fear, using this example to argue against the danger of exaggerating late medieval morbidity. In similar fashion, one might use the example of Jan Vermeer (1632–1675) and the serenity expressed in his paintings as an argument against overemphasizing a seventeenth-century crisis in the arts.35 Another danger is that of taking as simple expressions of the emotion of an artist or writer what may be a strategy for working on the emotions of the audience, in the manner of Ignatius’ Spiri- tual Exercises (1520s), as suggested by the scholars who have been working on the “rhetoric of the baroque” since the 1950s. A third danger is that of exaggerating change and forgetting continuities.

34 Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London, 1961), 252. 35 K. B. McFarlane, Hans Memling (New York, 1971), 44–45; Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1996; orig. pub. 1919).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 257 Plague, for instance, was endemic between 1348 and the beginning of the eighteenth century, even if some of the outbreaks were on a larger scale than others. War too might be regarded as virtually endemic at this time. Reactions to these disasters followed a similar pattern—from the late medieval sense of the macabre, as described by Huizinga, to the baroque sense of mortality. As Delumeau has argued, fear may be taken as a constant in European life between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, a phenome- non of la longue durée.36 Nothwithstanding all of these warnings, the changes described above justify Clark’s idea of a major “watershed” at that time, if not the more theatrical concept of crisis, although there was no paradigm shift in the arts around the year 1650.

comparisons Discussions of both continuities and crises need to be comparative, since the difference between periods is relative rather than absolute. Looking back over the last 700 years of Euro- pean history, the crisis of the middle of the seventeenth century appears to be one of a number of such events, of which it may be useful to distinguish six. (1) Taking the ªrst place is the crisis of the Black Death, when plague ªrst struck Europe (and the Middle East) in 1347/48. This visitation of the plague, which killed about one-third of Europe’s population within a year, has a good claim to be regarded as the most traumatic event in European history. The effects of that crisis on the arts, more speciªcally on painting in Florence and Siena in the half-century that followed, were analyzed in exemplary fashion by Meiss more than ªfty years ago.37 (2) In the second place, there is the crisis of the Reformation, most acute or most visible during the 1520s, a period of turbulence that certainly led to structural changes in the Church and inevita- bly—given the importance of ecclesiastical patronage—in the arts as well. The idea of a concurrent crisis in the arts goes back at least as far as Dehio in 1916, writing about Germany after Albrecht

36 Enrico Castelli (ed.) Retorica e barocco (Rome, 1955); Huizinga, Autumn; Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles): Une cité assiégée (Paris, 1978). 37 Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1951). See also Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London, 2002).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 258 | PETER BURKE Dürer, and coupling the idea of a “double crisis” (Doppelkrisis)of Renaissance and Reformation with the idea of decline and fall.38 (3) The Reformation can be interpreted as a response to a late medieval “spiritual crisis.” It is still more obvious that the movement that historians now call the “Counter-Reformation” was at least in part a response to the crisis of the 1520s, and that the arts were enlisted in the service of the Catholic Church’s counter- offensive, especially from the 1580s onward. The Counter- Reformation encouraged some of the changes in iconography and style that this article has been concerned to discuss. If there is any moment in the history of the arts in early modern Europe when the term resolution seems appropriate, it is surely this one. (4) Some historians have identiªed a “crisis of the Renais- sance,” linked to the rise of the style now known as mannerism. For example, Hauser, a Hungarian émigré art historian, viewed mannerism as “the artistic expression of the crisis which convulses the whole of Western Europe in the sixteenth century and which extends to all ªelds of political, economic and cultural life.”39 (5) Following the seventeenth-century crisis came a relatively long period of stability that was interrupted by the French and In- dustrial Revolutions. This was also a time of rapid change in the arts, as classicism gave way to Romanticism and the Gothic re- vival. In this case, there is abundant evidence of the responses of artists and writers to the events and the social changes of their time, supporting movements for national independence or, like Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, and William Morris, turning to the example of the Middle Ages as an antidote to industrial capitalism. The effects of the French and Industrial Revolutions also provided a context for Burckhardt’s discussion of crises in history. Burck- hardt also had a strong sense of crisis in his own time.40 (6) If the crisis of the years around 1800 makes the mid- seventeenth-century crisis seem somewhat smaller by placing it in the perspective of the long term, the same point may be made still more forcefully for the years following 1900, marked by the

38 Georg Dehio, “Der krisis der deutschen Kunst im sechzehnten Jht,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, XII (1916), 1–16. 39 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (London, 1951), I, 96. See also idem, Mannerism, and André Chastel, La crise de la Renaissance, 1520–1600 (Paris, 1968). 40 Henri Brunschwig, La crise de l’état prussien et la genèse de la mentalité romantique (Paris, 1947); Schieder, “Krisen,” 145.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 259 middle-class fear of mass democracy, the loss of faith in Christian- ity, and then the shock of the World War I, the Russian Revolu- tion, and the Great Crash of 1929. The publication of Clark’s study of the seventeenth century in 1929 suggests that his discov- ery of a crisis in the past might have the result of a sense of crisis in the present. The fact that Dehio’s study of the German crisis of the sixteenth century was published in 1916 also reinforces this im- pression of a sense of afªnity (if not a projection of current preoc- cupations onto the past).41 In the case of the arts, a paradigm shift is even more visible around 1900 than it had been around 1800, given the repudiation of ornament in architecture and of realism in painting, including the rules of both proportion and perspective. There was a period of turbulence marked by the rise of competing styles—cubism, fu- turism, expressionism, and constructivism—with little in common except their rejection of traditional standards. There was a ques- tioning of the idea of art itself, exempliªed by the exhibiting of objets trouvés. The creation of a new pictorial space, breaking with a 500-year-old tradition, may be seen as a response to a more general sense of a new space and time following the spread of travel by automobile and by airplane, as well as by such new scientiªc con- cepts as relativity and the uncertainty principle. Just as seventeenth-century poets wrote about tobacco and clocks, so early twentieth-century artists and writers introduced airplanes, sky- scrapers, and ªlms into their work. Some artists, notably but not exclusively the Futurists, deliberately sought new styles in order to express their rejection of the past and their sense of living in a new age. Modernism and modernity need to be distinguished, but modernism in the arts was surely stimulated by the modernization of society. Given the afªnities between the two crises, the rediscovery of both mannerism and baroque in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in Germany and Austria, was virtually inevitable. El Greco and Bor- romini were coming to be viewed through eyes that had become accustomed to impressionism, expressionism, and modernism. For example, the modernity of the designs of the baroque architect Guarino Guarini has often been asserted, while Max Dvorák, the

41 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (London, 1983). On the “Krise der Moderne,” see Rüdiger vom Bruch et al. (eds.), Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900 (Stuttgart, 1989).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 260 | PETER BURKE Czech art historian who helped rehabilitate the paintings of El Greco, was also an enthusiast for the work of Oskar Kokoschka and Edvard Munch.42 There is surely little need for any extensive discussion herein about the current crisis, not so much the recent ªnancial crash but rather the whole sequence of changes that prompted the invention of the new period term, postmodern. The new sense of the ºuidity, fragility, or softness of what used to be thought of as hard social structures is particularly reminiscent of the baroque attitudes discussed above. The role played in the seventeenth century by the rise of purpose-built theaters and illusionistic special effects is played today by computers, the internet, and “virtual reality.” Twenty-ªrst-century theatrical spaces now house “liminal acts” that cross the threshold between performance and audience. Might we therefore speak of a contemporary return of the baroque?43

Not even with a relatively precise deªnition of crisis is it easy to decide what counts as a crisis in the arts, what counts as “turbulence,” what counts as a change in structure rather than mood, and what counts as “resolution.” The Kuhnian model of the structure of scientiªc revolutions cannot be applied to the arts without modiªcation, since the arts have no equivalent to the decisive un- dermining of a scientiªc theory by new discoveries. In the case of the arts, it is the beginning rather than the middle of a century that seems to be most important moment of changes in style. In the case of the seventeenth-century crisis, as in that of the crisis around the year 1900, artists appeared to anticipate crises before other people did. However, the reason for changes in style given at the time was either a desire to surprise or to shock the public or, in the context of religious art, to encourage piety, rather than either to express a tragic sense of life or respond to the economic, social, or political problems of the time. A new style, however, takes time to spread, especially in the collective—and expensive—art of architecture. It might be, and

42 On Impressionism and the revaluation of the baroque, see Hauser, Social History, I, 160. Wittkower, Art and Architecture, 403–415; Harold Alan Meek, Guarino Guarini and His Architec- ture (New Haven, 1988). 43 Susan Broadhurst, Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance Theory (London, 1999).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.239 by guest on 28 September 2021 CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 261 has been, argued that the events of the middle of the century helped to explain the favorable reception of an emotional, theatrical style, although the rule-bound classical style was a response to crisis, or a means of combating it. In any case, it is surely necessary to distinguish speculation about the unconscious or semiconscious expression of a certain malaise (about which we have heard a good deal, perhaps too much) from better-documented conscious responses of writers, artists, and composers to the events and trends of their time. Whichever response was more important, the conscious or the unconscious, the contrast between the mood or tone of the arts (especially literature and painting) in the early and in the late seventeenth centuries is a dramatic one.

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