Ballet and Opera

 

One of the many things the theater helps to explain is the breakthrough made by music, with the opera as its culminating form.132 As breakthroughs go, this one was rather complicated. It depended, of course, on the progress of the theatrical spectacle and therefore of the society that made that development possible and encouraged it. It also depended on the particular progress made by the musical entertainment. And finally it depended on the internal development of music itself, which had to be grafted on to the rest. Since its uses varied so much, music had to adapt. But by modifying itself, it was also modifying its position. There was in effect a musical “renaissance” in about 1600, one no less complex than its contemporary, the scientific renaissance. Did music and science go hand in hand? In both cases, their renaissance was delayed.

In the sixteenth century, until the very last years, music evolved without causing too much disturbance to tradition. But gradually the innovators and revolutionaries became more numerous. Zealous research into the music of antiquity—which had the reputation of being different in the very texture of its techniques as well as being clearer and more moving than the music of the late sixteenth century—combined with the need for something new, which was felt everywhere. It was a time when former innovations were being revived, almost rediscovered: the tonal scale of Giuseppe Zarlino (1517–1580) for instance, or the experiments in chromaticism of Niccolò Vicentino (1511–1572) and Cipriano de Rore (1516–1565), which would become widely known only after 1580, after the deaths of their creators. And the same was true of the basso continuo, the figured bass, which was to transform and destroy traditional polyphony.

And all this in order to resolve essentially simple problems that remained much the same: fitting dances to music, setting the words of poems to music, combining different instruments, composing the music for some fashionable stage performance. Theoretical debates about how these questions should be resolved slowed down and complicated musical development. One should certainly not assume a linear logical development with each step dictating the next. It seemed more as if music, like Saturn, was prepared to devour its own children, or at least to reject and ignore them, with the option of recalling them to favor later. In addition, the circumstances of history, the constraints of princely and aristocratic or even bourgeois societies, could not fail to weigh heavily on a world of fragile and competing forms: the ballet, the pastoral, the madrigal, the cantata, the oratorio, the opera. These forms developed in closely linked ways: the ballet and the pastoral led to the opera, while the madrigal, which was absorbed into the opera during Monteverdi’s lifetime, was to be one of the most fertile testing grounds for the renewal of musical style, perhaps the most profitable of all.

The ballet—the balletto—was introduced to France in the time of the Valois by Italian dancing-masters. What the French meant by this name (the diminutive of bal) was a dance in which the dancers were free to improvise their steps, as opposed to dances with fixed forms. The word was usually associated with bal, danse, entrées, entremets (intermezzi), carrousel. But before long the word would denote a combination of extravagant princely entertainments which in fact predated its other sense, since such events had already been put on at the court of Burgundy.

Let us consider the ballet then as an Italian initiative that underwent unexpected and expansive developments in France, becoming in the end a sort of yardstick of the fortunes of the French court—going from strength to strength; or meeting difficulty and decline. It was French ballet, also known as the court ballet, ballet de cour, which was exported from France; it would be imitated by the masks of the English court under James I and Charles I: their ephemeral beauty lasting one magical night inspired both the architect Inigo Jones and the poet Ben Jonson. Transformed by its stay in France, the ballet would even enjoy a new vogue on its return to Italy, where it was described (even by Monteverdi) as ballet alla francesa, as if the French royal court had invented it—which was not so far from the truth. It was equally true that the French ballet did not yet have a fixed form. It continued to be modified, appearing in almost unrecognizable shape from one spectacle to the next, until the mid-seventeenth century. Since the ballet was fabulously expensive to put on, and was always devised for the occasion, there were long gaps between these costly performances. Ballets were neither repeated nor did they resemble each other. The first known example, Le Paradis d’amour, was performed on August 20, 1572 (four days before the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre) for the wedding between Henri of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois. But the most famous and innovative was the Ballet comique de la reine (comique in this case meant in the form of a comedy) also known as Circe, which the Piedmontese Baldassarino di Belgioioso (known in France as Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx) arranged at the request of the charming Louise de Lorraine, wife of Henri III, in honor of the wedding of the Duc de Joyeuse and Mademoiselle de Vaudémont, the Queen’s sister, in 1581. Balthasar, an attractive figure who had been musical director and valet to the Queen Mother since 1567, and who according to Brantôme was “the best violinist in Christendom,” was one of the many musicians who emigrated at this time from the Milan region and Piedmont.

The novelty of Circe was that the action followed a plot, a real play (written by the poet Pierre de la Chesnaye) put into dialogue and song, with episodes all relating to a central theme: Circe, the sorceress who changed men into swine and immobilized and petrified some of the lesser gods. This theme linked all the scenes. If the whole thing had been sung, we would be looking at one of the early forerunners of the opera. That point had almost been reached. Balthasar said, or had the view attributed to him, that his innovation had been far parlare il balletto et usar canto e suono alla commedia. “I have enlivened the Ballet and made it speak, and have made the Comedy sing and resound; by adding to it several rich and rare ornaments, I may say I have pleased, in a well-proportioned body, the eye, the ear, and the understanding.”133

This was certainly an important step towards musical theater. But the score itself, divided among several composers, was not particularly remarkable. It was really derived from the polyphonic choir accompanying a soloist. One would not find here any hint of the stylistic experiments that would lead to the seconda pratica. But the fact that the music was entirely subordinated to the text led to “a concern for dramatic truth and for an expressive melody that would throw the words into relief.”134 The French court ballet would for this reason be closely studied in the Florentine camerate, which were enthusiastic about research into music and monody, especially the circle around the poet Jacopo Corsi, the composer and expert impresario Emilio Cavalieri, and the singer and composer Jacopo Peri. But it was on the pastoral that this group was to base the crucial experiments that would lead to the opera.

The literary origins of the pastoral went back to the fifteenth century and beyond that to antiquity. It had quite soon become associated, in the sixteenth century, with musical interludes, and the genre had been given a considerable boost by the success of Tasso’s Aminta, which was performed in Pesaro in 1573 with choral interludes. The first performance had been a year earlier at Ferrara, but without music. Between 1590 and 1600, Cavalieri and Peri in Florence, but also Guarini in Mantua, put on a series of pastorals in which the music was no longer confined to the intervals but invaded the action of the play, which was now being sung from start to finish. “The art of accompanying and commenting on a dramatic plot by music” had come to stay. The recitative for the stage had been born, with a “measured melody, already partly separated from its harmonic bass, with the singing containing inflections appropriate to the text.”135

All these deliberately experimental attempts culminated in Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, with a libretto by Rinuccini, which was given a lavish production on October 6, 1600 in the Pitti Palace on the occasion of the wedding of Marie de’ Medici and Henri IV of France. This is usually regarded as being the first opera. It was written throughout in the new recitative style, also known as rappresentativo (meaning representative of the words, which the music should underline, being content simply to transcribe the inflections and emotions of speech). This was the seconda pratica, the modern style as opposed to the stile antico, the old counterpoint, or polyphonic, style in which all the parts merged into a homogenous whole and in which the meaning of the words was unimportant. In French it was known as the “style concertant.”

Claudio Monteverdi, a musician in the service of the Duke of Mantua since 1590, had been present at the performance of Euridice. Its novelty did not entirely satisfy him. He found the recitativo secco and that “altromodo di cantare che l’ordinario” rather monotonous.136 He was thirty-three years old and already had a long musical career behind him, but one tending in a quite different direction from that of the Florentine circle. He had published three books of madrigals (in 1586, 1590, and 1592) and was about to publish two more. The madrigal was one of the freest musical forms of the time and was to be the chief vehicle of technical musical developments in the Renaissance. The Italian version of the Franco-Flemish polyphonic song, amorous or elegiac in tone, the madrigal was a short piece for five voices that could either “be treated as a very simple homophonic and syllabic counterpoint or in more elaborate polyphonic style [with] great freedom permitted in the writing . . . : fifths and octaves, or discordances, etc., which would be considered serious mistakes in any other genre, were regarded in the madrigal as elements tending to improve the expression.”137 The madrigal gave free rein to all kinds of fantasies and even to stravaganza in itself. It had even been used in experiments of “monodic form” by the Camerata of the Bardi in Florence.138

Monteverdi’s secret was that he took up all these different variants and practiced them with increasingly bold departures from the norm. Indifferent to theory, he was simply searching for an accurate expression of his own lyricism. In short, he was prepared to try out any form and was a composer of genius. Some months before the performance of Euridice, he had been violently attacked by Giovanni Maria Artusi, a canon of Bologna and a stickler for musical rules, in a pamphlet on “those new-style composers who day and night belabor their instruments to find new effects . . . [making] modern music disagreeable to the ear. One hears a cacophony of sounds, a jumble of voices and a grumbling of harmonies intolerable to the senses . . . Everything is singing, how can the mind recognize where it is in this whirlwind of expressions?” Characteristically, Monteverdi would reply (several years later) that “concerning consonance and dissonance” all he was interested in was “the satisfaction provided for the sense of hearing as well as for the reason”;139 his only aim, he added, was to “produce emotion.”

It is easy to see why Monteverdi’s Orfeo, performed during Carnival in 1607 in Mantua, should be considered the first “real” opera. Although in theory faithful to the seconda pratica that gave precedence to the words, Monteverdi was in fact too much of a musician to sacrifice music to poetry. “In his Orfeo, as if to challenge the Florentine Euridice operas, alongside the admirable recitative, by turns speaking and melodically developed, he sets airs, chorales and dances in a prodigious variety of forms.”140 The rich orchestra was not simply used to accompany the singers, but had its own dramatic function, with a particular instrumental sound for each of the characters, in which one can see the beginning of the orchestral theme, or leitmotif. In fact all the forms and possibilities of the opera of the future are already there.

All it lacked was its true name, opera, which was already being used, but which only became widely adopted much later, in the second half of the seventeenth century. Monteverdi’s opera was still only a “favola.” By the time opera got its name, it already had a long history behind it. In Italy, it had three essential homes: Florence until about 1627, Rome till about 1660, and finally Venice, which would eventually become the capital of opera, without by any means monopolizing it. This flowering came late and corresponded to the last glorious years of Monteverdi’s life: shortly before his death in 1643, he wrote two operas very different from Orfeo, since years had passed and public tastes had changed: Il Ritorno d’Ulisse (1641) and L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1642).

The first opera house, the San Cassiano theater, had been built in Venice in 1637. Over the next two years, there appeared the second—Santi Giovanni e Paolo—and the third, San Moisé. In 1641, the fourth, the Nuovissimo, opened its doors. In the previous year, the Venetian republic had embarked on what was to be a thirty years’ war to recover Candia (1640–1669), a running sore of a colonial war, which Venice nevertheless waged practically alone, with courage, determination, and resources indicative of the city’s wealth: ships purchased from northern Europe and even troops recruited in distant Scotland. The glory of the Venetian opera did not blossom in a poor, weakened, or gloomy city; rather it was a triumph of extravagance in a city of luxury, of high prices and comparatively high wages, a city that was a rendezvous for dazzled foreigners, but that was well able to support its theaters, with rich patrons sitting in the boxes and a less well-off clientele that thronged to the pit. The music, which had previously been heard free of charge, since it was paid for by the Signoria or some rich patrician, now had to be paid for by the public. The illustrious Tron family, which owned the San Cassiano theater, invented paying turnstiles—a move that was not without consequences: popular audiences would put an end to the refined opera of Monteverdi, which did not satisfy the newcomers. During the intervals, clowns, acrobats, and comedians from the commedia dell’arte offered their services to make spectators laugh, whether they were in the boxes or the pit. This was the boisterous and lively period presided over by one of Monteverdi’s pupils, Pier Francesco Cavalli, who willingly provided exaggerated effects.

Already opera had begun to spread all over Europe, being accepted with respect, enthusiasm, and gratitude. Italy, which was awash with music from Naples to Venice, in turn flooded Europe with it, even faraway England. Nothing could better indicate the success opera was enjoying abroad than the popular dimensions of what was being exported from Italy. By about 1660, “dozens of wandering or colonizing musicians” were setting off from Rome and Venice, their “satchels full of Orfeos or Artaxerces they had written themselves on two staves, mere outlines that the . . . singers would later develop or even transform completely. . . This was no longer an art, it was an industry.”141

In France, the grand première of the opera was another Orfeo (libretto by Buti, music by Luigi Rossi) in 1647, thanks to Mazarin, who had brought an Italian company to Paris. French music, which had grown up on the “tradition of the song and the court ballet” suddenly became “Italianized” on the death of Louis XIII—and its “de-Italianization” was equally swift and politically calculated, after the death of Mazarin in 1661.

Was this a natural reflex, like all the about-turns to which France has accustomed us? It was too deep and long-lasting for us to be content with a circumstantial explanation—though one comes readily to hand in the person of Giambattista Lulli, or Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), the Italian who wanted to be French.

It was apparently the frivolous Duc de Guise, the man behind the Naples uprising, who had, a few years earlier, in 1643, discovered and brought from Italy this child prodigy, a humble miller’s son born in Florence. He had brought him to France “to converse with Mademoiselle de Montpensier in the [Italian] language.” So the little boy was never, as some malicious tongues later suggested, a scullion in the household of La Grande Mademoiselle, where he completed his musical education. In 1652, he opportunely transferred to the King’s service. How he won the affection of the young Louis XIV (born in 1638), and how the King heaped honors on this Florentine “of somewhat unprepossessing appearance,” this youth of verve and talent, but with a strange look in his eye, was a long story, worthy of a novel. The musician of genius revealed himself to be tough, manipulative, presumptuous, and remarkably pugnacious. He was a courtier of unimaginable suppleness yet at the same time he was obstinate, touchy, and determined. When, during the year 1661, he completely transformed himself from an Italian musician specializing in the recitative into an all-French musician, it was merely a sign of the breakneck “de-Italianization” of the moment. The ebb tide carried him along, with his consent. But there was personal conviction in this about-turn, as well as unremitting ambition. And he would pay the price for it.

The Italian recitative had been based on a “word-stressed” language; unlike Italian and German, French is “sentence-stressed” and was therefore structurally resistant to the treatment it received in Italian music. Lully looked to the air de cour, the court song, to see whether some compromise was not possible between the French and Italian languages, to allow the transfer “from recitative to song.” How successful he was is a matter of debate among specialists qualified to judge. But his attempts were certainly good training for the arduous but glorious career ahead of him, for Louis XIV granted his official musician and musical director the monopoly of the “musical theater,” enabling Lully to eliminate his rival, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and to remain until his death in 1687 the unchallenged composer of all operas put on in Paris. The first of these, Cadmus et Hermione (1673), was a great success that led to the composer being offered, the following year, the theater in the Palais-Royal, until then occupied by Molière’s theater company. (Molière had just died.) In 1674, Lully put on a second opera, Alceste. Madame de Sévigné was enthusiastic: “It surpasses everything one has ever heard . . . The opera is a prodigy of beauty.” “French” though it was and deliberately sought to be, the opera had now conquered Paris. After that, working with his designer Vigarani, and his librettist Quinault, Lully would produce a new piece every year. The “French” opera was in business.

So too, to take one last example, was German opera, or rather Italian opera in Germany. For Germany would be more timid or more modest about opera. Its musical tradition was unrelated to the theater. Moreover, the country was just recovering from the Thirty Years War, which had brought to a halt, if not all musical life, at least all major court entertainments. So Italy reigned unchallenged in Germany when, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, the first opera houses were created in Vienna and Munich. The composers were all Italian: Bertali, Cesti, and Draghi in Vienna; Porro and Stefani in Munich. The works were Italian, both in musical style and in language; and the singers were mostly Italians. Dresden soon followed suit, and there the key figures were Carlo Pallavicino and Giovanni Andrea Bontempi. In 1671, for the first time in Germany, Bontempi’s Dafne was performed there “with a German libretto, with characters familiar to the German audience, and with interludes in the form of Lieder.” This was the first attempt, an isolated one, as yet, to give a national form to this completely foreign genre.

It was above all in Hamburg, where a German opera house had been founded in 1678, that there developed that hybrid genre known as the “German baroque opera,” written by German composers trained in the Italian manner, but drawing very largely on the German Lieder, often transforming the Italian recitative, and seeking to vary the subjects. This genre, of which the youthful Handel’s Almira was one example performed in Hamburg, did not survive very long. Handel, like most musicians of his generation, firmly turned his back on German opera to join the Italian camp. By the early eighteenth century, the German opera houses were one by one obliged to go over to Italian opera.

The future of German music in the eighteenth century is well known. But in that marvelous development, it was Italian chamber music and the concerto, rather than the opera, that would play an important role.

 

 

Poetry and the Baroque

 

With music and the wide range of comedy, we have traveled deep into the enchanted country of the Baroque. Another way to get there is along the complicated path of sophistication and preciousness that is baroque poetry. This was an age ready to plunge with delight into those verbal experiments which so often recur at intervals in the history of poetry, from the Alexandrian poets, or the Neoteroi of ancient Rome, to the Dadaists and futurism. At times like this, it is not so much the subject that matters as the language, the originality of expression, the wayward charm of the bizarre or the hermetic: the poem is a play on words, a combination of sounds, alliterations, onomatopoeia, and sometimes even a picture in words: the calligram was practiced in the seventeenth century. This kind of experiment can either lead to a lyrical renewal or become tedious and pretentious. In the event, the précieux was a temptation to which the Baroque frequently succumbed.

That the literary world of the Baroque originated in Italy, with Spain as a secondary influence, is too well known to call for comment. The Spanish Baroque, though very visible, was itself somewhat Italianized and the Spain whose influence we notice alongside Italy’s was, like Italy, in a period of decline from greatness, as if any culture that gave so much of itself abroad must consume the source of its own light.

With so many reflections flickering on the surface of Europe, it is easy to lose one’s bearings, especially if one is trying to distinguish authentic Italian influence from a complex of interrelated influences. Perhaps a single witness, examined as a case study, will suffice and speak for the others. Let us confer this distinction on the so-called “cavaliere” Marino, who was overpraised in his lifetime and probably over-disparaged after his death—perhaps because his reputation was indeed inflated beyond his talent. For our purposes, he makes an excellent witness, and a spectacular one. (Imagine perhaps, though this is a weak comparison, Anatole France in Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century.) By the time he arrived in France, he was certainly no anonymous traveler, eager to reach his destination. Between 1604 and 1614 he had written several collections of poetry, notably La Lira, and since then had been regarded as a prince among poets of his generation, something like the standard-bearer of the avant-garde, leading a rebellion against the literature of the previous age, in this case the Renaissance.

Born in Naples in 1569, Giovan Battista (Giambattista) Marino had apparently had an eventful life, both in Naples and in Turin, where he had taken refuge but had immediately got into trouble, even spending some time in prison. At last, in 1615, he reached France, where he made his fortune, returning to Naples only in 1623. France had been ripe for some years to receive with enthusiasm this complicated and brilliant Neapolitan poet, who knew how to advertise himself, and who was both ambitious and temperamental. Philarète Chasles, who disapproved of this adventurer, said that, like Naples in the early seventeenth century, he combined all the vices of both Italy and Spain.142 All the same, “le Cavalier Marin,” as he was known in Paris, was intelligent, sensitive, and witty. That he was thirsty for gain, or that he sent huge sums of money home to Naples, where he was having a palace built as well as a gallery overlooking the Posilipo, was neither here nor there. His protector in France, Concini, the Maréchal d’Ancre, apparently said to him at his first audience: “You may have five hundred crowns”—a generous sum. But Marino told the cashier who was counting out the money to pay him a thousand. Concini on hearing this exclaimed: “You certainly are a Neapolitan!” To which Marino replied: “I don’t understand a word of French. Now be a good chap and thank me—I might have understood you to say three thousand instead of one thousand.”143 The court loved the story.

Marino was certainly not short of talent. Who could fail to appreciate at least the prose of his letters, even the most fantastical, the so-called “burlesque” letters? In May 1615, he was on his way to France across the Mont-Cenis, leaving behind the troubles that had landed him in prison. A wretched hired horse was carrying him, or rather failing to carry him, as they reached the cold and snow of the high passes: “The slopes of the mountain were so white that they seemed to be covered in clotted milk, and winter, having turned academic painter, had daubed them with a coat of plaster and white lead. The few trees that had not completely disappeared under the snow were also so white that one would have said they were dressed only in their shifts and were shivering more from the cold than from the wind.”144

This style, which is at once contorted and concrete, perhaps illustrates the kind of intellectual game lying at the heart of a certain poetry—that practiced by Marino and his followers—whose message often can no longer reach us, or at any rate fails to inspire in us the enthusiasm it aroused in the seventeenth century. This was a poetry designed to surprise and strike the reader, not to move him. As Marino put it:

 

È del poeta il fin la maraviglia

Parlo dell’eccellente e non del goffo.

Chi non fa stupir vada a la striglia.

 

The aim of the poet is to create wonder

I speak of the excellent, not of the incompetent.

If he cannot astonish, let him be thrashed. 

 

He certainly knew how to astonish. Take this extract from a long poem describing the person of the Queen Mother:

 

Sentieri lattei onde van l’alme al cielo;

Valli di gigli, ove passeggia aprile;

Canal d’argento, che distilla odori,

Solco di neve, che sfavilla ardori.

 

Milky way, by which souls go to heaven,

Valleys of lilies, where April passes,

Silver channel that distills perfumes.

Furrow of snow that sparkles with ardor.

 

This purported to be a description of the breasts of Marie de’ Medici, and was no doubt a case of courtiership oblige, but these images probably strike the reader as being well beyond the call of duty. He should not on this account simply be dismissed as a charlatan. The three lines quoted earlier, which are his Ars poetica, would do very well to describe a trend in French poetry of the period. Marino took his calling very seriously, and allowed it to consume much of his time: the 40,000-line poem Adone, completed during his stay in Paris, was a mighty labor. His correspondence shows him at odds with the printers, tearing his hair at the misprints marring the work—a sure mark of the man of letters.

If Giambattista Marino met such success in Paris, where he had been preceded by his reputation as “the prince of modern poetry,” it was not of course purely on account of his talent, real or supposed. One also has to take account of the snobbery of the court, the only thing that enabled him to survive the mortal disgrace of his protector, the Maréchal d’Ancre, who was assassinated on April 24, 1617 on the orders of the young Louis XIII. One should also bear in mind the helpful friendships that the Neapolitan cultivated. Grandees often liked to play patron of the arts. That was why the Marquess di Manso, whom he had known in Naples, when passing through Paris gave Marino luxurious lodgings in his town house in the rue de la Huchette—that narrow winding street that still happily exists, a few yards from the Seine. Marino naturally frequented the Hôtel de Rambouillet (one would be surprised if he had not)—the residence in the rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre of the Marquise de Rambouillet, herself of Italian origin—a little literary court, like the princely courts of Italy. It was here that French aristocrats and literati learned good taste, distinction, politeness in female company, and the affectations of refined language—all in the name of Italian elegance and under the aegis of Ariosto and Tasso.

What needs more exploration is the degree to which everyday life in France was contaminated by foreign influence. Louis Courajod, being hostile to this “invasion,” observed and described it better than anyone else, and it is amusing to read him again. The worldly education of young noblemen, he says, “the academy, or the science of ‘high society’ was Italian. Italian too were the grooms in the stables, the fencing teachers, musicians, and dancing masters. “Even the “baigneurs” were Italian, that is the “purveyors of scented waters and trifles, as were the zingari, who were not so much Bohemian and Spanish as Italian.” One might add that Italian architects and engineers felt that in Europe they were “citizens of the world,” but this remark does not come from Louis Courajod.

France, or rather Paris, which was increasingly becoming the center of intellectual life in the kingdom, experienced its baroque period between the early seventeenth century and about 1660, though these are approximate and perhaps too generous dates: a more limited definition might confine it to the years 1620–1635. It was in 1635 that France entered the Thirty Years War. It was certainly not until 1660, however, on the eve both of Mazarin’s death and of the personal reign of Louis XIV, that classicism could really be said to have arrived.

The France of the pre-classical Baroque, which enjoyed its liveliest period during the reign of Louis XIII, a France open to influence from beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees, is in fact a fairly recent discovery for literary criticism,145 which has restored to favor a number of little-known or misunderstood writers, such as Jean de Lingendes (1580–1616) and Honorat de Racan (1589–1670); or those who had not previously received their proper due, such as Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552–1630), the author of Les Tragiques (1616); Claude Garnier; and Saint-Amant (1594–1661). All of these writers generally conform to the precept formulated at an early date by Mathurin Régnier (1573–1613): “Let the pen go where its inspiration takes it” or better still, as Théophile de Viau wrote, “Rules displease me, I write disorderedly/True wit does nothing if not effortlessly.”146

As the years went by, the French Baroque seems to have deteriorated from within by dint of talking of everything in terms of inspiration, by mixing all the genres, engaging in preciosity (a short-lived mode in fact), producing a spate of heroic comic poems, tragicomedies, or wild utopias, like those of Cyrano de Bergerac (1620–1655), and before long indulging in the dangerous fashion of the burlesque (such as Scarron’s L’Enéide travestie of 1648). While this French Baroque may have recently been granted naturalization papers, French literary criticism is still finding it hard to characterize it properly, to distinguish what is original about it, to make clear its true European dimensions and in particular to relate it to the specific influence of Italy. Although the same causes could well have produced the same results north and south of the Alps, there were indeed borrowings, and important ones.

But the baroque episode came to an early end in France; it was already beginning to fade out by mid-century. How did it come about that the Baroque, in which one would like to detect some kind of pre-classicism or even a French counterculture, gave way to classicism? This is a problem that has not yet been solved. One would have to read and reread contemporary works and resolve several tricky points. Can one in any sense classify Malherbe as belonging to the Baroque? What about the early Corneille? Or the writers between Chapelain and Boileau? In the novel, where matters are more clear, the Baroque certainly runs from L’Astrée (1620–1627) by Honoré d’Urfé to Le Grand Cyrus by Mademoiselle de Scudéry (1650).

So the Cavaliere Marino arrived at just the right moment, in a Paris witnessing rapid transformation, becoming more complex and open-minded. The reading and writing French public had for many years been welcoming great works by Italian writers, either in the original or in early translations: Boccaccio’s Decameron in 1545, the first fifteen cantos of Orlando Furioso in 1555, Bandello’s Tragic Tales in 1564, and so on. And it would be quite impossible to list the countless borrowings French authors took from Petrarch, whose Sonnets and Triumphs were so often published in French.

It was to these earlier conquests (although he took care to disavow them) that Marino owed his triumph during the ten years or so he spent in Paris. Triumph is the only word for it: the Queen would stop her coach to chat with him; he was the king of the magnificent and frivolous world of the Hôtel de Rambouillet: the salon of “Arthénice” was at his feet. Dante and Tasso were eclipsed, Petrarch sent packing. The man who from the beginning of his stay in Turin in 1610 had mocked “poeti tisicuzzi, i quali non sanno fabricare se non sopra il vecchio” (“incompetent poets who can make something only out of old stuff”),147 openly announced his intention of breaking with the past. And on this point, his influence must have been decisive, more so certainly than that of the great Luigi Alamanni whose destiny had been to become steward to Catherine de’ Medici, and whose Ars poetica was pillaged by the entire Pléiade, starting with Joachim du Bellay.

Marino’s triumph was a sign of the times, a measure of the impact of the Baroque. Whereas during the reigns of François I and Henri II, Italy had merely influenced French culture, during that of Louis XIII Italy simply submerged it. This was why France, the major target of this cultural bombardment, in the end reacted more quickly and vigorously than other countries and turned well-assimilated borrowings into something that was truly French: out of the Italian opera was born the French opera; out of the Renaissance and Baroque emerged what we call Classicism. The quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns finally bore fruit.

Surrounded by more or less servile flatterers, the Cavaliere did not however understand the growing power of the society before his eyes: he never mentions it in correspondence with his friends.

But one can still read and thoroughly enjoy the delightful picture of Paris—highly colored, burlesque, and full of telling details—that he sent to his friend Lorenzo Scoto in 1615. These are not considered reflections, simply the impressions of someone newly arrived and still suffering from culture shock.

 

Vi do aviso che son in Parigi . . . Circa il paese, che debbo io dirvi? Vi dirò ch’egli è un mondo. Un mondo, dico, non tanto per la grandezza, per la gente e per la varietà, quanto perch’egli è mirabile per le sue stravaganze. Le stravaganze fanno bello il mondo; percioché, essendo composto di contrari, questa contrarietà constituisce una lega che lo mantiene. Né più né meno la Francia è tutta piena di ripugnanze et di sproporzioni, le quali però formano una discordia concorde che la conserva. Costumi bizarri, furie terribili, mutazioni continue, guerre civili perpetue, disordini senza regola, estremi senza mezo, scompigli, garbugli, disconcerti e confusioni: cose, insomma, che la doverebbono distruggere, per miracolo la tengono in piedi. Un mondo veramente, anzi un mondaccio più stravagante del mondo istesso . . . Qui gli uomini son donne e le donne son uomini . . . Voglio dire che quelle hanno cura del governo della casa, e questi si usurpano tutti i lor ricami e tutte le lor pompe. Le dame . . . per esser tenute più belle, . . . si spruzzano le chiome di certa polvere di Zanni, che le fa diventar canute, talché da principio io stimava che tutte fossero vecchie . . . Gli uomini in su le freddure maggiori del verno vanno in camicia. Ma . . . alcuni sotto la camicia portano il farsetto: guardate che nuova foggia d’ipocrisia cortigiana . . . 

Hanno per costume d’andar sempre stivalati e speronati; e questa è pure una delle stravaganze notabili, perché tal vi è che non . . . cavalcò in sua vita, e tuttavia va in arnese de cavallerizzo. Né per altra cagione penso io che costoro sian chiamati “galli,” se non perché appunto come tanti galletti hanno a tutte l’ore gli sproni a’ piedi . . . Ma in quanto a me più tosto che “galli” doverebbono esser detti “papagalli,” poiché se ben la maggior parte, quanto alla cappa ed alle calze vestono di scarlatto, sí che paiono tanti cardinali, il resto poi è di più colori che non son le tavolozze de’ depintori. Penacchiere lunghe come code di volpi; e sopra la testa tengono un’altra testa posticcia con capelli contrafatti, et si chiama “parucca” . . . Anch’io per non uscir dall’usanza sono stato constretto a pigliare i medesimi abiti. O Dio, se voi mi vedeste impacciato tra queste spoglie de mamalucco, so che vi darei da ridere per un pezzo . . . Infine tutte le cose qui hanno dell’appontuto, i cappelli, i giubboni, le scarpe, le barbe, i cervelli, infino i tetti delle case. Si possono immaginare stravaganze maggiori? Vanno i cavalieri tutto il giorno et la notte “permenandosi” (così si dice qui l’andare a spasso); e per ogni mosca che passa, le disfide ed i duelli volano. Quel ch’è peggio, usan di chiamar per secondi eziandio coloro che non conoscono (eccovi un’altra stravaganza), et chi non vi va è svergognato per poltrone; onde io tutto mi caco di non avere un giorno ad entrare in steccato per onore e morirmi per minchioneria. Le cerimonie ordinarie tra gli amici son tante ed i complimenti son tali, che per arrivare a saper fare una riverenza, bisogna andare alla scuola della danza ad imparar le capriole, perché ci va un balletto prima che s’incominci a parlare . . . 

Circa il resto, per tutto non si vede che giuocchi, conviti, festini, et con balletti e con banchetti continovi si fa gozzoviglia e, come dicono essi, “buona cera.” Si fa gran guasto di vino, e per tutti i cantoni ad ogni momento si vede trafficar la bottiglia.

La nobiltà è splendida, ma la plebe è tinta in berettino; bisogna sopra tutto guardasi dalla juria de’ signori lacchè, creature anch’esse stravagantissime ed insolenti di sette cotte. Io ho opinione che costoro siano una specie di gente differente dagli altri uomini, verbigrazia come i satiri ed i fauni . . . Tutto questo è nulla rispetto alle stravaganze del clima, che, conformandosi all’umore degli abitanti, non ha giamai fermezza né stabilità. Le quattro stagioni quattro volte al giorno scambiano vicende, e perciò fa mestieri che ciascuno sia fornito di quattro mantelli per potergli mutare a ciascun’ora . . . Volete voi altro? Infino il parlar è pieno di stravaganze. L’oro s’appella “argento.” Il far colazione si dice “digiunare.” Le città son dette “ville.” I medici “medicini.” I vescovi “vecchi.” Le puttane “garze.” I ruffiani “maccheroni” . . . Eccovi fatto un sommario delle qualità della terra e delle uzanze di questa nazione . . . Apparecchiatemi dunque costì in Turino nel mio ritorno un bel gabbione da pormici dentro; perché, se non vorrete ch’io vi scusi beffana alla festa di san Giovanni nella Balloria, vi potrò almeno servire alla finestra per parrochetto, overo sarò buono per essere messo in piazza il giovedì grasso per passatempo de’ putti.148

 

“I must tell you I am in Paris . . . What shall I say about this country? I will tell you that it is a world. A world I say, not so much on account of its size, its people, and its variety, as because it is remarkable for its extravagance. Extravagances provide the beauty of the world, for, being composed of contrasts, it is the combination of these contrasts that maintains it. So France too is full of contradictions and disproportions, and these nevertheless combine to form a concordant discord, which perpetuates it. Bizarre costumes, terrible rages, constant changes, perpetual civil wars, disorders without rules, extremes without half-measures, tumults, quarrels, disagreements, and confusions, all these things in short ought to destroy it, yet by some miracle, they keep it upright. Truly this is a world, and indeed an impossible world, even more extravagant than the world itself. Here the men are women and the women men . . . I mean that the women are in charge of running the house and that the men have borrowed all their lace and finery from them. The ladies . . . in order to be thought more beautiful . . . shake on their hair a certain Zanni powder [from Zanni, the comedy character] that makes it turn white, so that at first I thought all the women were old. The men, even in the coldest weather, go about in their shirts. . . . But some of them wear a doublet under their shirt—see what a new kind of courtly hypocrisy there is! They are all in the habit of wearing boots and spurs all the time. And this is one of their signal extravagances, for some of them have never sat on a horse in their lives and yet there they go, wearing the clothes of a horseman. And I think the only reason they are called galli [in Italian this meant both Frenchmen and cocks] is because these galletti [little roosters] wear spurs on their feet all day. To my mind they should not be called galli but papagalli [parrots] for although most of them have capes and breeches of scarlet, so that they look like cardinals, for the rest of their costume they use more colors than a painter’s palette. Their plumes are as long as foxes’ tails and on their heads they wear another false head, with false hair: it is called a perruque [wig]. And I myself, so as to observe custom, have been obliged to adopt the same dress. Dio! if you could see me prancing about dressed like a pasha, I know I would make you laugh till you cried . . . Then everything here is pointed: hats, doublets, beards, shoes, brains, and lastly the roofs of the houses. Can one imagine greater extravagance? The gentlemen pass their days and nights “walking out” (what we would call andare a spasso) and every time a fly goes past, there are challenges and duels in the air. What is worse, they are in the habit of calling as witnesses people they do not even know (another example of their extravagance) and the man who refuses to turn up is branded a coward. So I am soiling my breeches at the idea that one fine day I might have to enter the lists in the name of honor and will meet my death through foolishness. Ordinary ceremonies between friends are such, and so great the compliments, that in order to learn how to bow, one has to go to dancing school and learn to do entrechats, because one has to go through a whole ballet before one can begin to speak . . . 

For the rest, there is nothing to be seen but games, invitations, feasts, and on the occasions when there are ballets and constant banquets, there is much eating and what they call here bonne chère [a play on words, buona cera meant good health]. Wine flows plentifully and in every corner at any moment you will find someone sampling a bottle.

The nobility is splendid but the plebeians are grey in color. One has above all to beware of the fury of messieurs the lackeys, who are also the most extravagant of creatures and diabolically insolent. They seem to me to be of a different race from other men, something like fauns and satyrs . . . And all that is nothing compared to the extravagance of the climate, which, matching the humor of the inhabitants, has no firmness or stability. The four seasons take it in turns to appear four times a day. So one has to provide oneself with four coats so as to be able to change every hour . . . Shall I go on? Even the language is full of extravagance. Here gold [money] is called silver [argent]. To take a meal is to digiunare [it meant “to fast” in Italian]; the clothes are called villas [ville]; . . . the whores are garze [gauze]; ruffians are maccheroni [maquereaux perhaps?]. Here is a summary of the qualities of the country and the habits of this nation. So on my return to Turin prepare a handsome great cage to put me in, for if you do not want me to be your beffana at the Balloria on St. John’s Eve,149 I can at least be a parrot to be shown in the window, or displayed on the piazza on Mardi Gras to amuse the children.”

 

We now find it easy to believe all the images, the white powdered wigs, the lace and the bright colors of men’s costumes. No doubt Marino would have been surprised to be told that this fashion had a long future ahead of it, that it would catch on in Italy, and that it marked the beginning of the influence, not to say grandeur of France.

 

 

Rome and the Baroque

 

The most familiar aspect of this widespread distribution of cultural goods by an Italy generous to excess nevertheless concerns the “mainstream” fine arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture. All these were lavishly distributed from the great center of imperial influence, Rome, which in its pioneering and championing of the new art played, mutatis mutandis, the same role that Paris was to play during and after the Impressionist era, on a world scale. Rome’s influence was largely confined to Europe, but some examples were exported to America, where a “colonial Baroque” put down strong roots and came up with some exotic vegetation.

The central role played by Rome is of obvious importance. Rome was the capital of Catholicism, the point of departure for a violent crusade against the Reformation—which had after all fired the first salvo. Behind the Baroque then, there was more than a fashion, a certain sensibility or a particular vision of life and of the world. This was a civilization rising up in anger, and using every weapon that came to hand, since religious life, in its struggle against the enemy, had enlisted the whole of cultural life on its side.

All artists went to Rome. Italians came from every region of Italy, to join Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Flemings, Spaniards (though these often preferred Naples), and Germans. Among the foreign arrivals were, for instance, Rubens, Valentin, Poussin, and Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), who first made the trip to Rome with one of his relations, a lace merchant. And there were many more. Once they got to Italy, they were often given pseudonyms. Nicolas Cordier from Lorraine, a sculptor, became Il Franciosino; the Dutchman Gerrit van Honthorst, Gherardo delle Notti, because of his paintings of nocturnal scenes with stark contrasts between light and dark. Joachim von Sandrart describes at length in his Teutsche Akademie the doings of the large colony of German painters. Many of these foreigners “allowed themselves to be captured by the fascination of the ancient city, at the risk of growing old alone there, [since they were] neither Italians nor any longer of another nationality,”150 for these journeyings came at a time when, for an artist, his home was where his work was or wherever he preferred to live.

The fascination arose from friendships struck up between colleagues, from the ease with which one could find employment, but also from the pleasures and habits of a milieu whose feverish atmosphere reminds us of Montmartre or Montparnasse in the days of Utrillo and Modigliani. It was a strange and not always happy world. Borromini, Bernini’s rival, killed himself in 1667; Valentin (1591–1634), a native of Coulommiers, drank himself to death; the Lucchese Pietro Testa (1607 or 1611–1650) threw himself into the Tiber. A curious bohemianism, both local and foreign, seems to have been the rule. It even created an original kind of painting, which had repercussions elsewhere. In 1625, Peter van Laer, a painter from the studios of Haarlem, arrived in Rome and joined a group of northerners who were living a merry life on the fringes of serious and academic painting. Presumably he carried a certain weight among his new friends, since his nickname, Il Bamboccio, became the name by which the whole group was known. Not long after his arrival, at any rate, the Bamboccianti began to sell little pictures of their own in shops and even in fairs. These quadri a passo ridotto depicted in the Dutch manner familiar scenes from life, beggars at the church porch, street and market scenes, peasants carrying out their rural tasks. It was in this vein that Herman van Swanewelt painted his Campo vaccino, the great cattle fair which in those days was held in the old forum.

This preference for popular realism contrasted sharply with the grand Italian painting of the time, and local artists were scathing in their sarcasm and dismissal of this vulgar form of art. As was remarked by Giovanni Battista Passeri (1610–1679), a painter and biographer of painters, it was simply a finestra aperta, an open window on to everyday life, and had nothing to do with Beauty. Nevertheless, this mode of painting, which was much appreciated in Spanish circles in Rome, even at the embassy, seems to have had some influence on Velázquez, who admired it when he passed through Rome in 1630, and possibly also on Le Nain at about the same time. It must surely have played some part in the development of Italian landscape painting; and we know that it found loyal customers since twenty years later, in the mid-seventeenth century, Andrea Sacchi and Albani were still complaining about the decadence of painting brought about by realism.151 So even in the days when the Roman academies enjoyed unrivaled prestige, the “bipolarization” of European art, the double presence of north and south, was able to gain a footing and maintain itself in the exclusive capital of the Italian Baroque.

For all that, it was in the end the Italians who dictated what happened—and what changed, in this passionate and strained world. The Italian painters, who formed the great majority of the artistic workers showered with requests and commissions, only rarely these days came from Florence. The Caracci and their followers, “a mafia of fellow countrymen as much as a school of painters,”152 Domenichino, Albani, and Guido Reni all came from Bologna. Francesco Borromini and later Carlo Fontana were from Lombardy; Caravaggio bore the name of his native village near Bergamo; Bernini, the architect of the Barberini and St. Peter’s, was a Neapolitan; Carlo Maderno was born in Switzerland. So it is hardly surprising that Piero da Cortone, one of the very few Tuscans then working in Rome, should seem very unlike a Florentine to a historian such as Yves Bonnefoy. Did the arrival of all these varied and even cosmopolitan recruits (since they included foreigners of renown) explain the end of Florence’s predominance in the art world, as there grew up a generation less learned, less intellectual, less rational perhaps, but a little closer to the reality of everyday life? It is not impossible. But art has to be paid for, and artists go where the work is. The dialogue between the artist and the patron who gave him a commission remained the alpha and omega of the trade.

And from now on, the art patron par excellence, far outdoing wealthy aristocrats and more often than not princes too, was the Church. Since the Council of Trent, the Church had resolutely gone on the offensive: in victory, the Church sought to hold on to her gains. The rectangular churches which were now being built, on the model of the ancient basilicas, were weapons in a bitter struggle. They enabled all the worshippers to see the high altar, to hear the voice of the preacher (from the pulpit which was located in the middle of one of the long sides), and to follow the Mass reading their missals, for these churches without stained glass were lit by a flood of white light, especially from the high windows of the cupola. They were also flooded with music, but the musicians and choir were hidden from view in galleries, so as not to distract the faithful. Only the organ, whose design became fixed between 1580 and 1640, was visible, with its enormous case and long pipes. On walls and ceilings, frescos, painted in a style designed to tug at the emotions, stressed the cult of the saints, the triumph of the Virgin Mary, and the beauties of Paradise. Everything was calculated. These churches were like theaters with a didactic aim. They were magnificent dwellings—after all they were the dwelling place of God for whom nothing was too good—but at the same time they were a statement of the splendor of the south, compared with the mean-spirited poverty of the north. Wherever we see the domes and symmetrical façades of these innumerable baroque churches, we know without being told that the prince or the Church, or both together, ruled here.

The great dates of the Baroque, forming so to speak its epicenter in Rome, correspond to the pontificates in particular of Urban VIII (1623–1644)—“the last of the great Popes”—Innocent X (1644–1655), and Alexander VII (1655–1667). The earthquake that sent tremors all over Europe essentially corresponded to the building of St. Peter’s and the countless other churches in the city, mostly the work of the two bitter rivals, Bernini (1598–1680) and Borromini (1599–1667). We need not enter into the detail of their fruitful rivalry, which is often cited in historical explanations. The interesting thing is how Rome became transformed into the capital of an immense spiritual empire, just as Madrid in the days of Lope de Vega attracted all the glories of the Golden Age, and became the capital of an empire on which the sun never set. The Baroque felt at home in empires: it had been imperial from birth.

 

 

Bernini Arrives in Paris Too Late

 

But what is of special interest to us at this point in our history is the way in which the Baroque reached the various regions of Europe, encountering a different history every time with its particular dates and local coloring. There are visible time-lags between the Italian Baroque intra muros and the various Baroques outside Italy. It is of course true, let me repeat, that the same causes could perfectly well produce the same effect and the foreign examples of the Baroque could have arisen of their own accord on distant soil. But they reflected back an image in which Italy is entitled to recognize itself, or rather to recognize by turns its architecture, literary thought, and most of all its painting, bearing the unmistakable stamp of Caravaggio. “Caravaggism” took Europe by storm, with its now familiar attributes: violent scenes, pathetic naturalism, and chiaroscuro effects, opposing night and day, God and the devil. It became such a structural feature of European art (even in the Protestant United Provinces) that it was possible to “conceive of a Caravaggism without Caravaggio, springing up at the opportune moment, so well prepared had the ground long been to receive it.153

All the same, imitations can be tracked to source, and the distant mirrors—France, Spain, central Europe—all reflected images and models familiar in Italy; there was a network of similarities, even when the reflected image displayed different contours or colors.

Spain, to be sure, was too powerfully and exclusively independent to be docile, even if it had tried to be. The Escorial, built by Philip II and his architect Juan de Herrera (1530–1597), was classical in its deliberate austerity. And since Herrera had followers, he imposed a sort of “penance,” as Pierre Lavedan has written,154 of which the major landmarks are the Church of the Incarnation in Madrid (1611–1616) and the Jesuit College at Salamanca (from 1617), both by Juan Gomez de Mora. It was not until 1617, with the arrival of the Italian Crescenzi, that the Roman Baroque reached Madrid. Between 1622 and 1626, the Jesuit father Marciano F. Bautista began to build the Jesuit church in Madrid on the model of the Gesù in Rome (it is today the Cathedral of San Isidro el Real).

If we jump to the end of the century, to consider the most famous of the three Churriguera brothers, José (1665–1725), “at once an El Greco and a Góngora,” according to his admirer Eugenio d’Ors, we find a form of national development going beyond the Baroque. “Churriguerism” attracted tremendous popular enthusiasm, intoxicating itself with its own appeal. Similarly the Spanish theatre of the Golden Age no longer had anything, to do with the commedia dell’arte. Where could we put Cervantes if we were charting influences? He is unclassifiable. And how would one classify Velázquez (1599–1660), who was more Italianized before his first visit to Italy in 1629–1631 than he was afterwards? In José Ribera (1588–1656) we would have an example of Italianism almost too good to be true, but Il Espagnoleto, as he was known, adopted Italy as his second homeland. He had closely studied the work of Correggio, in Parma, had fallen head over heels in love with the luminism of Caravaggio, and spent most of his life in Naples, where he died. So the best example might still be Francesco de Zurbarán (1598–1664): he never left Spain but, during his apprenticeship in Seville between 1613 and 1616, he encountered the Sevillian “tenebrismo.” In the eighteenth century, he had the reputation of having been “the Spanish Caravaggio” although this firm typecasting does not entirely account for an œuvre that changed a good deal in the course of a life itself subject to change.

Turning from Spain, an ambiguous case, to France, where the problems are clearer, though not necessarily resolved, we find that France, which was open to every European influence, and which welcomed the literary Baroque of both Italian and Spanish inspiration, was no less receptive to painting. A foreigner visiting Paris during the reign of Louis XIII would have had the overwhelming impression of an all-invading Baroque, “for everything that had been devised for the occasional or the temporary, decorations for festivals, processions, and funerals . . . was unquestionably baroque, as we can see from contemporary engravings: showing pyramids of symbols piled on triumphal arches, or theatrical catafalques intended to impress mourners. The Church readily drew on these effects in its liturgy, processions, and worship, and they eventually became immortalized in altarpieces.”155 But all the ephemeral displays were, of course, swept away by the wind of history and the essential monuments surviving today to bear witness to the age—the Luxembourg Palace, the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grace—are examples of a much toned-down Baroque, verging on the classical, with echoes of the Renaissance. The placid and regular Place Royale (today Place de la Concorde) of the reign of Henri IV, with its stone, brick, and slate, is already speaking another language, that of a kind of classicism, influenced by Flanders—though the arcades surrounding it are suggestive of Italy.

Does that give us a terminus a quo?—the death of Henri IV? The architectural Baroque would in that case begin only in about 1610, and we would be on the way to narrowing down the duration of the true French Baroque in architecture as in the case of literature. In 1613, the Carmelite Eglise des Carmes was built on a rectangular plan. Later landmarks, in Paris, were the Oratoire (1621), the Jesuit Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis (1627), and Notre-Dame-des-Victoires (1629). And the terminus ad quem might just be the building of the “second” Versailles by Le Vau in 1668–1678, clearly under Italian influence. Not everyone agrees about that: some experts156 think that there was a change, a shift in style about 1635, a date also remarked by literary specialists. From then on in France they suggest there began to take over that “desire for sobriety, the rule of ‘nothing to excess,’ that restraint in expression,” known as Classicism, whose praises French historians are all too inclined to sing. But what no one can tell us is the underlying reason for the classical takeover, a process that was slow and not at all clear. After all the Baroque did not melt away overnight.

If we turn to painting for clarification, the result may be equally disappointing and would lead us (if the experts, who are inclined to be nationalist, are correct) to a similar chronological shrinking of the baroque years. The first witness, hardly an arbitrary choice, must be Georges de la Tour (1593–1652). He was probably about twenty when, like so many others, he traveled to Italy; there he saw the paintings of Caravaggio, who had died tragically a few years earlier in 1610. He probably benefited from Caravaggio’s teachings via Guido, but that did not prevent him from joining the tenebrosi of the north, the Honthorst school, which also issued directly from Rome. Thus this painter from Lorraine was influenced both directly and indirectly by Italy. And he reinterpreted the chiaroscuro for others. So he is perhaps the earliest example; alongside him one might perhaps set the Le Nain brothers. The latest French example, though this selection is certainly debatable and open to challenge, could be Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674). A native of Brussels, and “originally under the spell of Rubens,” he was summoned to Paris at the age of nineteen to take part in the decoration of the Luxembourg Palace. “The French capital,” we are told, “weaned him away from the Baroque.”157 But it was not quite as simple as that. The question of Philippe de Champaigne’s “classicism” has been open to debate. Between 1643 and 1648, when he was about forty, Champaigne made contact with Port-Royal. Behind the motionless light and silent faces of his canvases there is an internal drama.158 Andreina Griseri, writing before Louis Marin (1970) and feeling, like him, that this painter was “a challenge to Classicism,” argues the point strongly: “Baroque, too, is that tension to be sensed in the paintings of Philippe de Champaigne, that exaltation of a rigor intended to be completely internal.”159 In this sense we may agree—but then should one also claim Racine for the Baroque? What seems clear is that there is a fundamental difference between this form of the Baroque—if that is what it is—and that of the Italian school of Rome of the same period. A certain kind of Classicism—whatever name one gives it—seems to have appealed early on to the French painters, even to those who lived in Rome. Poussin was only thirty-six when, after a few works that put him firmly among the Roman practitioners of the new style, to the enthusiastic applause of Bernini (in particular for the Martyrdom of St. Suzanne), he went off to engage in a personal direction, quite free from other influence. This freedom, which he owed to the material independence provided for him by his patron Cassiano del Pozzo, led Poussin to opt for a certain order and rationality, to abandon the frantic convulsions of the Baroque, and to refuse an excess of expressivity. Or rather the expression changed its object. It was Poussin who wrote, very much in the spirit of Descartes’s Treatise on the Passions (1644), “The subject is yourself.” Another French painter isolated in the art world of Rome was Claude Lorrain, who went off for days on end from dawn to dusk into the Roman campagna, becoming an obsessive pursuer after light. How are we to classify him?

To close this unsuccessful attempt to define chronological frontiers with a well-known event, let us take Bernini’s visit to France. Summoned by Louis XIV in May 1665 to draw up plans for the eastern façade of the Louvre, the “sovereign of the art” arrived with the firm intention of proposing a design “that will aim straight at the exceptional.” “I won’t hear of anything on a small scale!” he explained to the King at their first meeting. But the old man (now sixty-seven years old) had arrived too late by French time. He would never build the most baroque palace he had ever imagined. A classical solution was chosen rather than his.160

 

 

The Venetian Baroque

 

It was in the north-northeast sector of Europe that Italian influence was more pervasive and longer-lasting than anywhere else. As much as, or more than Rome, Venice was the source of this wave of influence—Venice, the home of that exemplary and original artisan of the Baroque, a contemporary of Bernini and Borromini, but one who remained faithful all his life to the city of St. Mark: Baldassare Longhena (1598–1662). A pupil of Scamozzi, he had worked alongside him on the building of the Procuratie Nuove and finished them after his master’s death. His masterpiece was the church of Sta Maria della Salute, which he began building in 1632, shortly after the outbreak of plague of 1629. This admirable monument was as much an influence in its way as St. Peter’s in Rome. But note the dates: it was roughly a hundred years later, between 1716 and 1723, that Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach built in Vienna the votive church of St. Charles Borromeo, the Karlskirche, which looks far more like the Salute than the Roman style of church. In that city of cities of the Baroque—Prague—where the Baroque is in the house fronts or the tiled roofs one looks down on from the old town, the early days were marked by the arrival of numerous architects, sculptors, painters, and masons from Italy. The superb Wallenstein Palace, at the end of the Mala Strana, was built between 1625 and 1629: a vast and strange palace, deserted almost as soon as it was completed, when Wallenstein died. In fact, from the outside it seems to be Renaissance in inspiration, but the internal decoration, the great banquet hall, the frescos, lunettes, stuccoes, and scallop-shell niches are all unquestionably inspired by the new Italian style. But perhaps the clearest example was the even more extravagant and even more authentically baroque palace built between 1669 and 1687 for Count Cernin at Hradcˇany. Thus the chronology inexorably brings us to the last third of the seventeenth century and could easily take us into the eighteenth, in this special zone of Europe, from Rome to Vilnius in Lithuania, taking in the Alps in a great curved sweep.161 This was not only the zone of baroque influence par excellence, but also the one in which the sights and sounds of Italy were best reflected.

Do these dates, roughly centered on the 1660s, have any significance in themselves? The reader may have guessed that we are returning by a roundabout route to the switchback curves of the conjoncture, the economic trend, which are always available as a source of explanation. One’s first impulse, no doubt rightly, is to mistrust them. But one has to admit that the facts are there: a new depression began to loom from the middle of the century, compounding the gloomy atmosphere of the preceding years. The result once more was the return of peace: in 1648 and 1659, major wars came to an end and would not erupt again until the bitter conflict of the Augsburg League (1684–1697). Once more we have the usual contrast: war comes to an end; the economic climate deteriorates; but culture and peaceful expenditure enter a phase of expansion. The thesis that has accompanied us throughout our travels seems to be serving as well as ever.

But can we really be sure? It is too easy to put words into the mouths of people who did not think of recording their thoughts for future historians. But perhaps one is allowed occasionally to imagine them. In 1660, Barelli began building the Church of the Theatines in Munich; Carlo Carloni, from the Ticino, began work in 1663 on the Church of the Nine Angelic Choirs in Vienna; and in 1701–1703 Fra Andrea Pozzo started work on the University Church, also in Vienna. Here were three Italians in charge of major building projects outside Italy. They would surely have been very surprised to be told that Italy—their different Italies—was already on the path towards inexorable decline. Just as surprised as I would have been in 1935, when I was teaching at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, alongside my colleagues the mathematician Fantappié from Bologna University, the poet Ungaretti, and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: if someone had asked us a question about the decline of Europe or of France, we should no doubt have smiled disbelievingly.

 

 

Science, a Misleading Yardstick?

 

Throughout Europe, the turn from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century represented a critical moment; some people have called it “the birth of modern science”; others describe it as the “scientific Renaissance.” The latter expression may seem debatable and possibly confusing, but there was in fact a “renaissance,” since the invention of printing had made available, belatedly but effectively, the pioneering thought of Archimedes and of Appolonios of Rhodes (on conics), and this contribution was decisive. One thinks of the times Leonardo da Vinci tried in vain to get hold of one of Archimedes’s manuscripts. Such publications made it easier for science to get off on a new footing.

It is probably improper to make a distinction, during these critical years at the very beginning of the long career of modern science, between pure and applied science, in other words between science and technology. The miraculous rendezvous between science and technology would take place only in the future; for the “practical knowledge of the artisan” would only very slowly combine with the abstract thought of scholars—or “logicians” as they were sometimes called by the men whom we should probably describe as the technicians of the period (such as the English Robert Norman, a former navigator and compass-maker, who published his book, The New Attraction, in 1581). Modern science would pursue a path between these two basic poles.

This was already the position of the pioneering thinker Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the “Christopher Columbus of philosophy”; here philosophy really meant science, or natural philosophy. In his De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1605), Instauratio magna, and the Novum organum (1620), Bacon recommended experiment and observation before any attempt at logical interpretation. He therefore “very clearly perceived the status of modern science. It was a question of apprehending the concrete in order to apply correct theories to it.”162

In all these disciplines—pure science, technology, experimental or empirical science—Italy in no way lagged behind the rest of Europe. During this key period when science needed “a bold pioneer, one who dared to advance on shaky ground, with unlimited confidence in his own intuition.”163 Italy promptly produced the fantastic work of Galileo. If there was a balance in these matters, at this point it came down heavily on the Italian side.

According to Alexandre Koyré, modern physics “was born with and in the works of Galileo Galilei, and brought to completion in those of Albert Einstein.”164 Galileo was a thinker whose work powerfully anticipated the future. “Without Galileo, there would have been no Newton, and it is hardly paradoxical to say that without Newton there would have been no Galileo.”165 Galileo’s principle of relativity must surely be regarded as a first step on the path later taken by Einstein. Einstein himself was well aware of this: his enthusiasm is evident in the preface he wrote to his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems; indeed he says that he is in danger of exaggerating and giving a superhuman image of his hero, so great is his fascination with him.166 Looking resolutely into the future, Galileo came very close to making discoveries that came to light later. I am inclined to agree with Umberto Forti167 (as opposed to Alexandre Koyré) that Galileo understood, and analyzed, if he did not perfectly formulate it, the principle of inertia, and that he came very close to discovering universal gravitation and the infinitesimal calculus that would have completed his explanation of the world.

Historians have also looked in the other direction, working backwards to discover his debts to writers of the immediate and distant past, in order to situate his work. And indeed Galileo’s thought pursued its careful course by examining the explanations, errors, and hypotheses of previous thinkers, for until the end of his life, Galileo seemed to be patiently and slowly following in the footsteps of his own genius. It is true that he failed to make good use of the work of Kepler; on the other hand, very early on, when he was still teaching the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy, and even before his famous letter to Kepler in 1597, he had accepted Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism, taking it as a hypothesis of which he patiently set out to discover the many consequences. He also made use of “all the methods imagined since the fourteenth century [by the philosophers of Oxford and Paris, including the great Nicolas Oresme] to discover the spatial and temporal properties of motion.”168 He also went as far back as the mathematics and hydrostatics of Archimedes. And it would be unfair to leave Aristotle out of the list: it was after all the Aristotelian explanation of the world that Galileo set out to demolish and the close attention he therefore accorded to that explanation makes it in a sense a component and determinant of his own work.

For Galileo, the great problem was the identification, once and for all, of the earth not as a fixed point in the center of the universe, but as a moving body, floating within the celestial world that surrounded it. Of the two worlds distinguished by Aristotle—one our own, imperfect and subject to corruption, the other perfect, divine, and heavenly—he sought to make a single one. The work of Kepler (1571–1630) would have helped him if Galileo had not been so allergic to the Pythagorean and mystical thought of his contemporary, who was possibly the greatest thinker of his age. But the mass of Kepler’s writings could itself conceal their astonishing potential. Galileo was much hampered by his failure to consider the theory of elliptical orbits devised by the German scientist, as well as Kepler’s theory of the tides, which was far superior to Galileo’s own. No doubt “the individual creator is often lacking in receptivity” as Einstein suggested, pleading extenuating circumstances on Galileo’s behalf. Moreover, Kepler did not have a very satisfactory answer to the question that haunted Galileo: that of the unity of the universe. His Physica coelestis of 1609 in theory brought the heavens within the laws of terrestrial physics—but only in theory. He continued to believe that motion and repose were opposites, “like light and darkness,” and even that “repose was ontologically at a higher level than movement.” These were odd hesitations for the exceptional man who had written “ubi materia, ibi geometria,” who discovered the scientific meaning of the term inertia, but who could nonetheless never completely rid his mind of the old formulae for the explanation of the cosmos. “The medieval world still refused to die”;169 to deny that world was no doubt a difficult step to take. But that left the way clear for a more freethinking mind. After the publication of Galileo’s Nunzio Sidereo (1610), Kepler, who verified for himself the existence of the moons of Jupiter that it announced, exclaimed: “Vicisti, Galilee!” “You have won, Galileo.’’

It was Galileo’s revolutionary explanation of the world that was to cause his problems. An infinitely geometrical world, in which all motion is eternally prolonged unless it encounters an obstacle, amounted to blasphemy. One of Galileo’s most loyal disciples, Benedetto Castelli (1577–1644) became anxious: “Conciosiachè se fusse vero che il moto fusse eterno, io potrei diventar ateista; e dire che di Dio non avevo bisogno,” “Given that if it were true that motion is eternal, I might become an atheist and say that I had no more need of God.”170

Was Galileo’s explanation an opinion or a demonstration? It seems more likely to have been an opinion, and Father Lenoble has pointed out how much it owed to intuition and imagination in the early stages. Galileo chose to make an extremely audacious wager. When in 1623 he wrote that “Nature is written in mathematical language,” he had not yet put together his observations of falling bodies. “Satisfactory formulae” date only from the Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems of 1632. But that did not stop him pursuing his idea. “For thought, pure and unalloyed, rather than experiment and the perception of the senses underlies the ‘new science’ of Galileo Galilei.”171 When, in the Dialogue, his Aristotelian adversary puts to him the question, “Have you carried out an experiment?”, he himself replies, “No and I do not need to. And I can declare without any experiment that it is so, because it cannot be otherwise.”

One evening toward the end of his life, Galileo was at Arcetri, depressed and virtually under house arrest. With him was Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703), at the time a lad of not yet sixteen. Galileo was explaining to him the laws of accelerated motion when the boy suddenly said, “Yes, but you have not demonstrated that mathematically.” The objection must have struck home. The old man did not sleep that night, and in the morning he had found the demonstration, which would appear in the later editions of his Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences (1638), his last and finest work. Viviani was no doubt thinking of this incident when years later, on August 20, 1659, long after the death of Galileo, he wrote to Prince Leopoldo de’ Medici and told him the famous anecdote of the young Galileo, in 1583 when he was not yet twenty, seeing the lamp swinging in Pisa Cathedral as a sort of experimental pendulum. Speaking once more of motion, Viviani added that “our great Galileo was the first to subject it to the strictest laws of divine geometry” (“seppe il primo sottoporlo alle stretissime leggi della divina geometria”).172 I would underline the last two words, and if I insist on geometrization, that is because it lies at the heart of the debate. “The transformation of physical problems into mathematical problems . . . is the true task of natural philosophy; this entails a certain number of requirements,” at the very least “a kind of conceptualization that is able, without deforming them, to render natural phenomena homogenous in the face of mathematical reasoning.” But that mathematical reasoning is itself a toolkit: either one possesses it or one does not. Galileo himself was hampered on one occasion because he did not have a correct theory of centrifugal force, another time because he did not have the theorem eventually formulated by Bernoulli in 1696, and so on.173

But our purpose is not to dwell on this remarkable man’s thought, overturning as it did the ancient conception of the world. Our problem is to situate it. It precedes Descartes and it precedes Newton. The discovery of a single infinite geometrical universe, including both heaven and earth, was Galileo’s achievement. The others, great though they were, were following the trail he had blazed. But it is only comparatively recently that he has received his due. “To English-speaking historians,” writes Louis Rougier, “the father of modern thought is Bacon; to the French it is Descartes. But Galileo preceded, completed, and surpassed them. Bacon saw only the role of experiment in scientific procedure; Descartes saw only mathematical deduction; Galileo combined mathematics and experiment to found the quantitative science of the Moderns. Yet the Baconian prejudice and the Cartesian prejudice remain so powerful that, with the exception of the Mécaniques de Galilée translated by Father Mersenne, there is no French edition of his major works, which is quite scandalous . . . It is as if the condemnation of 1633 has lasted down the years, banning the man without whom our civilization would not be what it is.”174

Galileo was not only a leading thinker in theoretical research, he was also fully up-to-date with experimental science. He describes in Nunzio Sidereo and also in Il Saggiatore how on hearing in Venice that a Dutchman had invented a spyglass “with which things appeared closer,” “the next day I made the instrument and I told them about it in Venice . . . Then I took pains to make one more perfect,” which he exhibited to friends and visitors for a month.

But the important thing, as everyone knows, is what he did with the instrument we still call “Galileo’s” telescope. To discover that there were mountains on the moon and spots on the sun was to destroy myths, proving that the heavenly bodies were no more perfect than the earth! The idea of the sunspots in particular seemed like sacrilege. Could there be for an Aristotelian “a more erroneous notion than that there should be a blemish on the eye of the world, which God had created to light up the universe”?175 Accordingly, Galileo’s colleague at the university of Padua, Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631), although a man of independent mind, refused, as a good Aristotelian, even to look through the diabolical spyglass. There is little purpose in retrospective superiority on our part, rather we should give a smile of recognition: we are well acquainted in our own time with fierce conflict between the “new” and the “old” mathematics—or the new and old schools of history for that matter.

We need not dwell on the debates of the time. Here I wish simply to point out the importance of experiment and technology in Galileo’s life, and thus indicate how his work extended into this important domain. He was, for instance, responsible for a patent for bringing water uphill (1593)—a machine that was tested in 1604; for the construction of a thermoscope, the forerunner of the thermometer (1606); for a study of the motion of projectiles in 1609 (remember that he visited the Arsenal in Venice); for observations made with the aid of a simple microscope (1614); and for a study of the tides (1614). He had been an adviser to the Grand Duke in Florence, whenever his engineers encountered difficulties. And it would surely be wrong to fail to mention alongside his own work that of his disciples, who continued to make paths of light through the dark night that is supposed to have engulfed Italy during the seventeenth century, sometime after Galileo’s own trial and sentencing in 1633, and especially after his death in 1642.

The greatest of his pupils and friends was perhaps the Jesuit, Francesco Buonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647), who was responsible for the diffusion in Italy of the principles of trigonometry and calculation by logarithm, and who with his theory of indivisibles was verging on the miraculous terrain of infinitesimal calculus. The best-known of his pupils was perhaps Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647) who in his brief lifetime dabbled in everything, from the flooding of the Arno to the problems of the fountain makers in Florence (hence his measurements of atmospheric pressure), from the parabolic trajectories of ballistic weapons to the properties of that curve that was for a while the infuriating center of research and disagreement in the scientific world: the cycloid. And the most curious of them was Vincenzo Viviani, who in his long life achieved many successes, both in research and in popularization (for instance in conics). In 1667, he was invited to Paris by Colbert, who was trying to attract the best astronomers and scientists at the time when the future Observatory was being built, and a year after the creation of the Académie des Sciences. Viviani, who could bask in the glory of having been the pupil of both Torricelli and Galileo, and who was the most celebrated member of the Accademia del Cimento, was approached at the same time as Huygens, Leibnitz, and Newton—an honor that indicates the continued influence of Italy in European scientific circles.

In the event, Viviani refused the French invitation, and it was transferred to another Italian, Gian Domenico Cassini, who had been born in Nice in 1625. A professor at Bologna, Cassini agreed to go after first visiting Viviani in Florence and attending a meeting of the Accademia del Cimento. He arrived in Paris on April 4, 1669, and was introduced to Louis XIV on April 6. (He immediately threw the plans for the Observatory into disarray.)

Where are the signs of Italian decadence in all this? Hardly visible, any more than they had been twenty years earlier, in 1644, when Father Mersenne wrote his important Magni Galilei et nostrorum geometrarum Elogium utile, which goes beyond Galileo’s own extraordinary case: “Taceo (a conventional formula] etiam subtilem Bonaventurae Cavallieri Geometriam per indivisibilia; praeclarosque tractatus ab acutissimo Tauricello Galilaei succesore brevi speramus,” “I will say nothing about the subtle geometry of indivisibles of Buonaventura Cavalieri; and we shortly expect the eminent treatises of Torricelli, the penetrating successor of Galileo.” The two pupils were thus associated with their master. One would like to quote everything from this Praise of Galileo and of his astronomical discoveries by the remarkable Father Mersenne, who was an ideal intermediary between scientists all over Europe. I particularly like his highly colored images, reminiscent of Rimbaud: Jupiter, “orange-red or tawny, Mars as black as earth, the Moon reddish-tinted, Venus very white, and Mercury tinged with blue.” Alongside the planets, “the solar disc . . . very bright in the center, its light verging on silver, and its rim surrounded by a less bright corona about a quarter of its radius wide, reddish or rather fiery in color.”176 One hopes Galileo saw the heavens in these colors through his telescope.

In short, without wishing to underestimate the acute tragedy for science represented by the trial of 1633, about which I shall have more to say, I cannot believe that Italian science and technology were immediately plunged into darkness. In the short term, it is simply not true. Neither science nor technology faded away overnight. In the crucial area of technology, Italy continued to export its engineers, who were probably the best of their time. They were to be found at work during the great siege of Antwerp in 1585, under the command of Alessandro Farnese, and at the equally large-scale siege of La Rochelle by Richelieu in 1628; they were still being employed in Vauban’s time.177 What was more, Italian treatises on machines were the finest in the world and often remained in use until the eighteenth century; examples are the works of Agostino Ramelli (published in Paris in 1588), Fausto Veranzio (1617), Vittorio Zonca (Novo Teatro di machine et edificii, Padua, 1624) and Benedetto Castelli (Delle Misure dell’Acque correnti, 1628).

Umberto Forti, the well-known expert on the history of science and technology, has recently re-edited the Nuove Macchine178 by Fausto Veranzio—a remarkable character, a humanist who wrote on every subject, amazingly intelligent and fascinated by all mechanical problems such as automatic milling, the various types of wind and water mills, even mills using tidal power. It is a pleasure to discover the ingenious processes the author proposes in this mechanical wonderland.

Finally, one should mention the pioneering activity of the Accademia del Cimento. It had been formed in 1651, though the official date of its foundation was 1657. The Grand Duke Ferdinand de’ Medici and his brother Leopoldo had had a laboratory built for their research scientists: the anatomist Borelli, the embryologist Redi, the anatomist and mineralogist Steno, and the astronomer Domenico Cassini all worked there. The experiments carried out by the Accademia were largely concerned with measuring temperature and atmospheric pressure, ballistics, the speed of sound and light, fluids, and the freezing point of water. But the Accademia was short-lived: in 1667, it was dissolved. Since this coincided with the moment when the Grand Duke’s brother Leopoldo was elevated to cardinal, it was rumored that the disbanding of the Accademia was the price for his cardinal’s hat; it is not impossible. Certainly, one of the members of the suppressed Accademia, Antonio Oliva, was arrested by the Inquisition in Rome: in order to avoid torture, he killed himself by jumping out of his prison window, one more sinister event in line with Galileo’s trial in 1633. But to look on the positive side, proof of the scientific value of this Florentine “Academy of Science” was provided by the success of the Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell’Accademia del Cimento published by Magalotti in 1667. These summaries were translated into English (1684), and into Latin (1731) for Dutch readers. A French edition appeared in 1755. Was this, as Georges Gusdorf called it, “the swan song of Italian science”?179

Possibly; in the life of a society, everything may stand or fall together. However—and this is the meaning behind the title of this section—we cannot view the scientific explorations of the past in terms of those of today. Today, science and scientific research have become major indicators of levels of economic development. Every nation has to show signs of excellence in these areas. In Galileo’s day, the important of science had not been carried to such a pitch. It could not be a yardstick of truth, but was simply one index among others; and, in the Italian case, by no means a negative one.