Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T04:18:39.741Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Historians Define the Baroque: Notes on a Problem of Art and Social History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Louis Menashe
Louis Menashe
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Can the historian bring his presumably hard-headed and objective analytical devices to bear upon so impalpable a subject as man's art? At both ends of esthetic experience there is an elusive subjectivity: the artist (his “style” and “expressive content“) and the beholder (his “taste” and “feeling”) seem to take part in the experience on the basis of no rigidly determinable criteria. Yet here, as in the other gossamer realms of religion, philosophy, personal psychology or “national character”, the historian has never let mere impalpability daunt him. He may be aware of a caveat or two, but up into the rarefied heights he soars determined to transmit the historian's-eye view of the whole of human experience.

Type
Style
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , April 1965 , pp. 333 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1965

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Kirchner, W., Western Civilization Since 1500 (N.Y., 1958), 78–79.Google Scholar

2 Johnson, E.N., An Introduction to the History of the Western Tradition (Boston, 1959), II, 28.Google Scholar

3 Friedrich, C.J., The Age of the Baroque, 1610–1660 (N.Y., 1952), esp. 38–92,Google Scholar from which the following quotations were taken.

4 Nussbaum, F.L., The Triumph of Science and Reason, 1660–1685 (N.Y., 1953), 28–61.Google Scholar

5 The third volume covering the period in the “Rise of Modern Europe” series, Wolf, J.B., The Emergence of the Great Powers, 1685–1715 (N.Y., 1951),Google Scholar is considerably more balanced in treating the baroque; see esp. 244–276. Sir Clark, Georgeprovides another sober analysis in his The Seventeenth Century (2nd ed., London, 1947),Google Scholar Chap. XXI.

6 Cf. Hazard, P., La Crise de la Conscience Europé'enne (Paris, 1935Google Scholar). Robert Mandrou, in a brilliantly suggestive essay, also treats the “baroque sensibility” in terms of a generalized European crisis. But Mandrou's crisis is socially-based; the “mentalité pathétique” which he sees in baroque, particularly Spanish baroque art might be traced, he argues, as a class reflex to the waning aristocratic and hierarchical order. Characteristically, he reins in the temptation to over-generalize: “II n'est done pas question d'établir une loi; mais reconnaissons qu'en l'occurrence, durant ces années 1590–1640, la crise économique et sociale n'a pas peu contribué a créer le climat psychologique dont le Baroque est sorti, dont il s'est inconsciemment nourri.” “Le Baroque Européen: Mentalité pathétique et révolution sociale”, Annales, XV, 5 (1960), 914. I am indebted to Professor Thrupp for calling my attention to this essay.

7 The great advantage of this approach is that it “confers on the beholder a great sense of introspective certainty, for there is no possible way of contradicting the ‘discovered’ identity which he has himself fabricated. The observer simply agrees with himself.” Mueller, J.H., “Baroque — Is It Datum, Hypothesis, or Tautology?”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XII, 4 (1954), 424.Google Scholar

8 See the comprehensive bibliography in Wellek, R., “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, V, 2 (1946).Google Scholar For related discussions see Mark, J., “The Uses of the Term ‘Baroque’”, Modern Language Review, XXXIII (1938), 547–563;CrossRefGoogle ScholarSypher, W., “The Metaphysicals and the Baroque”, Partisan Review, XI, 1 (1944), 3–17.Google Scholar

9 “Baroque—Is it Datum, Hypothesis, or Tautology?”, 421.

10 See for example the article “Baroque” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, III (1958).Google Scholar

11 Storia delta Età. Barocca in Italia (Bari, 1929),Google Scholar 20ff.; cited in Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship”, 77.

12 Tapié, V.L., Le Baroque (Paris, 1961), 6,Google Scholar

13 Stones of Venice (N.Y., 1885), III, 3.Google Scholar

14 Cited in Wellek, “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship”, 86–88.

15 As an example of the last see S. SitwelTs impressionistic and sometimes surrealistic Southern Baroque Art (London, 1951).Google Scholar

16 Le Baroque, 9.

17 See Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, translated as Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (London, 1932).Google Scholar For a short summary of Wölfflin's life and theories see Sir Herbert Read's introductory essay to Wölfflin's Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (N.Y., 1952).Google Scholar For a critique see Hauser's, A.The Philosophy of Art History (Cleveland, 1963),Google Scholar Chap. IV.

18 The Decline of the West (N.Y., 1927), I, 202.Google Scholar See also the tables at the end of Vol. 1.

19 Ibid, I, 313–314; II, 316.

20 A Cultural History of the Modern Age (N.Y., 1930), II, 62–63.Google Scholar

21 El Barroquismo (Barcelona, 1943), 17–19.Google Scholar

22 Lectures on Art (N.Y., 1896), II.Google Scholar

23 L'Art Réligieux Après Le Concile de Trente (Paris, 1932), viii.Google Scholar

24 Webb, G., “Baroque Art”, Proceedings of the British Academy, XXXIII (1947), 20.Google Scholar

25 A History of Modern Culture (N.Y., 1930), I, 598;Google Scholar 579.

26 Lucien Febvre as quoted by Tapié, Le Baroque, 13.

27 Hauser, A., The Social History of Art (N.Y., 1951), I, 455.Google Scholar

28 Curran, C.P., “Jesuit Influences in Baroque Art”, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, XXIX (1940), 352.Google Scholar

29 Tapie, , Baroque et Classicisme, translated as The Age of Grandeur (N.Y., 1960), 23.Google Scholar

30 The Seventeenth Century, 345.

31 Hauser, , The Social History of Art., I, 467.Google Scholar

32 Cf. Febvre, Lucien, Combats pour L'Histoire (Paris, 1953), 296.Google Scholar

33 See note 32.

34 The collection of essays Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts edited by Rhys, H.H. (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar is one attempt to deal with this all too-neglected problem. The conclusions of each of the four authors reveal varying correlations between the arts and science of the period. One author, Douglas Bush, pointedly dispenses with the term baroque entirely in his discussion of seventeenth-century science and literature: “We cannot talk about ‘the seventeenth century mind’ any more than we can about ‘the twentieth century mind’, since in any period such a label covers a wide spectrum of variations. (I might add that I shall never, except now, use the word ‘baroque’.) Moreover, within an individual mind of the seventeenth—or twentieth — century there normally co-exist beliefs and attitudes, old and new, which to posterity appear incompatible; two eminent exemplars of such mixtures are Bacon and Descartes, and a list would include almost every scientist and thinker and writer as well as the crowd of men in the street” (p. 30).