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ESSAY PROMPT:
Select one Baroque poem, one Baroque musical selection, one Baroque painting or sculpture and show how they reflect Baroque style and culture in an essay of at least 500 words. Use the following prompts to help you focus.
1) Identify by title and artist the three selected pieces
2) Identify three elements that make each piece characteristically Baroque
3) Identify at least one way in which the selection reflects influences of the culture in which it was created
Support your ideas with specific details, references, and examples.
Unit Three: Background on the Baroque Age
The Baroque is an umbrella term which refers to an era (1600-1715) as well as to the art styles of that era. Just as the Renaissance came up with the term Gothic to describe medieval architecture, which they considered inferior, the 18th century gave the derogatory term Baroque to the previous art styles. You know that pearls are supposed to e out of the oyster perfectly round and shiny. Every once in a while the oyster has a bad day and out es an irregularly shaped pearl, full of indentations and irregularities. That is a Baroque pearl. When you look at the art of El Greco and the sculptures of Bernini, and when you read the Baroque poetry, you will see how well the term applies. Nevertheless, Baroque art is now seen as one of the great art styles of all time, and Baroque music is all the rage. You will learn some very famous names in this unit and see and listen to masterpieces.
Politically, this era saw the consolidation of power in the hands of European monarchs, the most powerful being Louis XIV of France. His Absolute Monarchy was long lasting (he reigned from 1661 to 1715!) and amazingly successful. His definition of government was terse and to the point: "I am the state." He did not allow the Protestants to follow their faith, and he controlled every aspect of French life. A charismatic man of great taste and intelligence, he moved his entire court from Paris to Versailles, where he enlarged and beautified his country chateau to the point where it could acmodate ten thousand people and it became the center of beauty and fashion for all Europe. With him lived the most powerful and wealthy nobles and their family, enticed by the lure of living with the king. Little did they realize that this was Louis' way of keeping them under control and preventing rebellions in their own areas of the country. He dazzled them with constant entertainment of all sorts, hunting parties, balls, banquets. They were so busy having fun that they never realized that the king had turned them into social puppets and stripped them of political power.
In spite of the magnificence of several European courts, religious intolerance and violence continued. The break-up of the Catholic Church and the influence of the Protestant Reformation were such that some northern countries became and remain to this day mostly Protestant. Such is the case of England, Holland, Germany and the Scandinavian countries. In Italy, Spain, Portugal and France the Counter-Reformation movement was quite successful and those countries remained primarily Catholic. The religious disturbances were particularly violent in France, a traditionally Catholic country that had to contend with the Huguenots, a large Protestant group which included several prominent French families. If you have time, I remend "Queen Margot," a film about this era. It does have violence and sexual content, and it is not appropriate for children.
Because the differences in the religious beliefs and practices of the Protestants and of the Catholics affect their artistic output, we will look at the subjects, styles and patrons of the art of this period in terms of the two strands, Protestant and Catholic.
Science and Technology
"These early modern scientists and philosophers countered faith with reason, dogma with skepticism, and divine intervention with natural law. They made mathematics their guiding star in the search for truth, accepting as true those things that could be proved mathematically and rejecting as untrue those that could not." Blue text, pp. 413-414
In the Middle Ages received knowledge came from one source: the Catholic Church. The Church dictated what was true and people were sure of what they knew. If the Church said lions existed, they did; if unicorns, they did. Around the 14th and 15th centuries, scientific discoveries and technological innovations flourished all over Western Europe and changed the way people thought. The culture shifted from one of certainty to a modern world of open inquiry. Many of these developments challenged what the church taught. Science didn’t accept what was received; instead, science was the discovery of knowledge through observation, reason, and experimentation.
The person generally thought of as best example of a Renaissance man is Leonardo da Vinci who left his notebooks - 5,000 pages of them - that documented his energetic burst of curiosity, discovery and exploration that characterize the Renaissance. He was particularly interested in technology, applied science, and sketched many designs for tanks, helicopters, and flying machines that were not actually invented until centuries later.
Here are several developments that occurred between the 14th and 17th centuries:
• Human anatomy and dissection. See pp. 419-420. Strongly discouraged by the Church, dissection was taken up by scientists and artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo who used the information to discover the workings of the human body and to portray the body accurately in their art.
• Linear perspective. See Unit One.
• Heliocentrism. See pp. 416-419. Nicholas Copernicus developed this theory not by observation but purely by mathematics. (People felt it was possible, using math, to determine the exact moment of creation: 9:00am on October 23, 4004 B.C.!) Almost a century later (1608) Galileo claimed a license for the manufacture of the telescope and with it discovered the four moons of Jupiter, proving through observation that not all things revolved around the earth. 25 years later, the Catholic Inquisition convicted him of heresy (1633) and forbade him to even refer to the heliocentric theory in his teaching.
The consequences of heliocentrism challenged the Church’s teaching (Bible passages said the sun moves). What would it mean if the church were wrong? And if the earth wasn’t the center of creation, were human beings still God’s best creation?
• The mechanical clock. Since time is a human construct we can measure it any way we care to. In the Middle Ages the Church measured it symbolically, by times of prayer: seven hours in daylight and none at night. That was all the measurement deemed necessary. Around 1330 the mechanical clock appeared (which both Galileo and Brunelleschi tried their hand at). It established the modern system with each hour 1/24th of a day including the night, based on scientific observation. (Not until the 18th century could people measure time precisely to the minute.)
• The printing press. Until the 1450's the only written material that existed was in manuscript form. Monks in monasteries hand-copied important works such as the Bible and illustrated (illuminated) the edges of the pages. It could take a year to copy a single book and the inevitable mistakes were repeated until every book had multiple versions. Johan Gutenberg responded to the Renaissance demand for classical writings. He took the idea of a winepress and invented a machine that made metal type, which could be arranged to form a page of print. With the press, pages could be standardized. Scholars began to pare various versions of a text for authenticity, a study that continues today. The idea of individual ownership of ideas (intellectual property) developed as books were no longer chained in libraries but became portable. In 50 years, 8 million books were printed on wide variety of subjects, including those by Protestant reformers whose ideas spread so wide and so fast in books that the Catholic Church could no longer contain them.
• Gridded maps. Throughout the middle ages there were no maps of the real world in western Europe as there had been in the Arab World from the 2nd c. A.D. African cartographer Ptolemy. A mathematician, Toscanelli, (Leonardo's teacher) applied perspective geometry to the globe, drawing lines of longitude around it. This gridded map could be used to chart a course across the open seas. It was Toscanelli’s globe that Christopher Columbus took with him when he set out for Japan in 1492.
• Columbus' voyages and subsequent claiming of his discovered land for Spain initiated the largest land grab in the history of the world as Western European countries colonized the continents of North and South America, Africa, Australia, and parts of Asia. After Portugal and Spain, the Dutch, British, French, and Italians became involved in shipping and trade. The most ignominious of these was the slave trade route, established because of the increased demand for labor in the sugar fields of the West Indies, the gold mines of Central America and the tobacco fields of North America. At first West Africans sold their POWs to Europeans for slaves; later the Europeans stole what they wanted.
• Improved gunpowder weaponry. This development gave Europeans a significant advantage in systematically subduing native peoples. Some developments had uplifting outes; others decidedly did not.
Baroque Music
Reference: Blue text, pp. 375-376; 405-408.
Baroque music is some of the all-time most popular music. If you’ve been to a wedding recently, you probably have heard Baroque music, and it’s in several TV ads. We'd like you to know the characteristics of it, its purpose, and how it fits with the time in which it was posed.
The social function of music and all the arts during this period was often to celebrate and, in effect, advertise the power and wealth of the absolute rulers and the nobility. Composers and other musicians typically worked for a patron–a ruler or some other rich aristocrat, or the church, or, in rare cases, the theater. Music was nearly always posed for a specific occasion or purpose as determined by the patron. Composers rarely thought of themselves as geniuses; they were craftsmen who often learned their trade within the family.
The overall style of Baroque music reflects this desire to impress. The purpose was to move the emotions in the same way that the dramatic use of light and color in painting was meant to do. In the spirit of exploration (remember this is the age of exploration), posers bined all the known styles of music to develop the most expressive, extravagant genre of the Western tradition - opera - as well as the concerto, sonata and fugue - instrumental works. Let's look at two: the concerto and the fugue.
Concerto - Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
The concerto is a type of position for one or more soloists and orchestra, usually in a symphonic form that stresses contrasts in tone color, melodic material, tempos, meters, keys, and dynamics. Vivaldi wrote over five hundred concertos, mainly while he was the music director of an orphanage in Venice.
Listen to CD 2 track 5: excerpts from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, “Spring.”
In "Spring," listen for the contrasts in tone color between the solo violins, lightly acpanied, and the whole orchestra. The orchestra plays the same or similar music called a ritornello (ri-tor-NELL-o, literally a "little return") each time it enters. The ritornello contrasts with the changing music of the solo violinists as they describe the different features of the season, including birdcalls zephyrs or winds and thunderstorms and lightning. Also, see if you can hear the contrast in tonality or key from major keys to minor keys.
This music is a big favorite and shows up everywhere, even in TV mercials.
Fugue - Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
The fugue is a position for several instruments in which a theme is introduced by one instrument and then repeated by each successively entering instrument so that a plicated weaving of themes, variations, imitations, and echoes results. The fugue grew directly out of Renaissance polyphony but uses contrasts in tonal harmony and only one main melody, called the subject Bach, employed by Lutheran churches in Germany, wrote hundreds of fugues, usually paired with introductory pieces called preludes or toccatas.
Listen to CD 2, track 7, “The Art of the Fugue”
In Fugues you often hear one voice introducing the subject and then, one at a time, the other voices enter, imitating the subject. Fugues can be extremely plex, more so than we can get into here. I will bet you've heard Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" (not included here, unfortunately) on late-night TV horror movies. Like all Baroque music, it's meant to appeal to our feelings. If you have not heard it, please try to do so. It’s spectacular.
Note: Your CD 2 has a couple of other Bach pieces, No. 4 which is a Cantata (sung) and No. 6, part of the very famous Brandenburg Concerto. They are both glorious and well worth listening to, so I hope you will take the time. They are not long pieces.
Opera - George Frederic Handel (1685-1759)
Opera has to at least be mentioned. Opera is a drama set to music and was the most important and first of the new musical genres developed during the Baroque period. Handel, a German poser trained in Italy, was the most celebrated poser of late Baroque opera. Later in his career he shifted to the genre of oratorio (oh-ruh-TOH-ree-yoh), an unstaged musical drama usually based on a religious subject.
Handel's oratorio Messiah with its famous "Hallelujah" Chorus is often performed at Christmas and is easily recognizable.
Baroque Poetry
Background
Reference: Sister Juana’s poem “In which she condemns….” pp.82-84 green text, Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress and John Donne’s To His Mistress Going to Bed. These last two poems are in the Course Documents for this unit.
Many of the characteristics of the Florid Baroque art style are part of Baroque Literature as well. It tends to be highly ornate, full of plex imagery, very dramatic, and sprinkled with oxymorons which unexpectedly mingle sensual and spiritual elements.
The Baroque art styles developed in many countries, and Baroque Literature has an international character as well. Writers sometimes insert an exotic element into their work by setting the story outside of their immediate surroundings, or by using foreign characters.
Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695)
A remarkable author, both for overing the obstacles of being a female poet in the 17th century, and also because of the outspoken nature and blunt style of her poetry. To add to her difficulties, she became a nun and wrote in Mexico, a traditional, patriarchic and intensely religious nation.
In the poem In which she condemns……some of the Baroque elements mentioned above are obvious and frequent. What images does she present? What is she plaining about? Where are the oxymorons? How is the theme of this poem surprisingly modern? Do you agree with her main point? Why or why not?
John Donne (1572-1631)
An Englishman, John Donne was raised Catholic but became Anglican. Both his life and his writings reflect the Baroque bination of the religious and the erotic. A brilliant preacher whose sermons are still read today, he was also involved in several passionate love affairs.
As you read To His Mistress Going to Bed, find the metaphors, the mixture of erotic and spiritual, the oxymorons, the ornate twists and turns of the language, the unusual word order. Think of Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, and you will see the mon elements between these two art forms.
Notice also how he alludes to the technology of that era. He mentions the mechanical clock, the discovery of America, and the planets.
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
Also from England, Marvell shares many of the above Baroque characteristics. When you read his poem To His Coy Mistress, Sister Juana’s poem In Which she Condemns…should e to your mind. The main point in Marvell’s poem is ancient and monly used in poetry. What is this main point? Does what the man wants in this poem justify what Sister Juana says in hers about men? Compare this poem also with John Donne’s, since they are both Carpe Diem poems. Whose images are the most vivid? Whose message is the most successful?
Don’t miss the interesting metaphors in this poem. In the first part, while the possibility of love exists, he sees it taking place in a garden, lush, green, and perfect. The second part, about love unfulfilled, brings about the image of the desert, ashes, and the grave. And he ties it all up together neatly in the third part by again bringing in nature images such as the dew, the birds, and the sun.
Conclusion
It is interesting to see how some of the most important Baroque characteristics permeate art forms which seem to have little in mon with each other. But the excessive ornamentation, the unexpected twists and turns, the contrasts and contradictions, the highs and lows, the erotically passionate and the devoutly spiritual are all mon elements in much of Baroque art, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music. Whether we like the artistic production of this era or not, we would probably agree that it is anything but dull.
ANDREW MARVELL (1621-1678)
TO HIS COY MISTRESS
1 Had we but world enough, and time,
2 This coyness, lady, were no crime.
3 We would sit down and think which way
4 To walk, and pass our long love's day;
5 Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
6 Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
7 Of Humber would plain. I would
8 Love you ten years before the Flood;
9 And you should, if you please, refuse
10 Till the conversion of the Jews.
11 My vegetable love should grow
12 Vaster than empires, and more slow.
13 An hundred years should go to praise
14 Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
15 Two hundred to adore each breast,
16 But thirty thousand to the rest;
17 An age at least to every part,
18 And the last age should show your heart.
19 For, lady, you deserve this state,
20 Nor would I love at lower rate.
21 But at my back I always hear
22 Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
23 And yonder all before us lie
24 Deserts of vast eternity.
25 Thy beauty shall no more be found,
26 Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
27 My echoing song; then worms shall try
28 That long preserv'd virginity,
29 And your quaint honour turn to dust,
30 And into ashes all my lust.
31 The grave's a fine and private place,
32 But none I think do there embrace.
33 Now therefore, while the youthful hue
34 Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
35 And while thy willing soul transpires
36 At every pore with instant fires,
37 Now let us sport us while we may;
38 And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
39 Rather at once our time devour,
40 Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
41 Let us roll all our strength, and all
42 Our sweetness, up into one ball;
43 And tear our pleasures with rough strife
44 Thorough the iron gates of life.
45 Thus, though we cannot make our sun
46 Stand still, yet we will make him run.
From Elegies
(spelling modernized)
Elegy XIX
To his Mistress
Going to Bed
Come, madam, e all rest my powers defy,
Until I labor, I in labor lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle °, like the heaven's zone glistering, 5
But a far fairer world enpassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th' eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now it is bed time. 10
Off with that happy busk, ° which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown, going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowry meads th' hills shadow steals.
Off with that wiry coronet and show 15
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven's angels used to be
Received by men; thou, Angel, bring'st with thee 20
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise, ° and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite:
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go 25
Before, behind, between, above and below.
O my America! My new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee! 30
To enter in these bonds is to be set free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole the joys. Gems which you women use 35
Are like Atalanta's balls, ° cast in men's views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like book's gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus arrayed; 40
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see revealed. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to a midwife, show
Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence, 45
There is no penance due to innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?
5. Belt
11. Undergarment worn over the breast.
21. The Muslim idea of paradise includes beautiful women
36. Atalanta agreed to marry Hippomenes if he could defeat her in a foot race. As she was about to overtake him, he cast in her path three golden apples given to him by Venus. Distracted by their beauty, Atlanta stopped to retrieve them, and Hippomenes won the race.
BAROQUE MUSIC:
Concerto - Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
The concerto is a type of position for one or more soloists and orchestra, usually in a symphonic form that stresses contrasts in tone color, melodic material, tempos, meters, keys, and dynamics. Vivaldi wrote over five hundred concertos, mainly while he was the music director of an orphanage in Venice.
Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, “Spring.”
BAROQUE POEM:
ANDREW MARVELL (1621-1678)
TO HIS COY MISTRESS
1 Had we but world enough, and time,
2 This coyness, lady, were no crime.
3 We would sit down and think which way
4 To walk, and pass our long love's day;
5 Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
6 Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
7 Of Humber would plain. I would
8 Love you ten years before the Flood;
9 And you should, if you please, refuse
10 Till the conversion of the Jews.
11 My vegetable love should grow
12 Vaster than empires, and more slow.
13 An hundred years should go to praise
14 Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
15 Two hundred to adore each breast,
16 But thirty thousand to the rest;
17 An age at least to every part,
18 And the last age should show your heart.
19 For, lady, you deserve this state,
20 Nor would I love at lower rate.
21 But at my back I always hear
22 Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
23 And yonder all before us lie
24 Deserts of vast eternity.
25 Thy beauty shall no more be found,
26 Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
27 My echoing song; then worms shall try
28 That long preserv'd virginity,
29 And your quaint honour turn to dust,
30 And into ashes all my lust.
31 The grave's a fine and private place,
32 But none I think do there embrace.
33 Now therefore, while the youthful hue
34 Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
35 And while thy willing soul transpires
36 At every pore with instant fires,
37 Now let us sport us while we may;
38 And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
39 Rather at once our time devour,
40 Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
41 Let us roll all our strength, and all
42 Our sweetness, up into one ball;
43 And tear our pleasures with rough strife
44 Thorough the iron gates of life.
45 Thus, though we cannot make our sun
46 Stand still, yet we will make him run.
There are faxes for this order.
