RA3, 2018 November 19th. Baroque Response to the Renaissance
Nov 20, 2018 4:59:22 GMT
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Post by Napoleoff (INTP) on Nov 20, 2018 4:59:22 GMT
From 1545 to 1563 the Northern Italian city of Trent, located in the Adige glacial valley just south of the Dolomite Mountains, hosted the 19th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. As with previous councils, the Council of Trent summoned the main theological experts and ecclesiastical dignitaries from around the Catholic world to discuss and vote both on articles of Church doctrine and on disciplinary issues, and finally to promulgate their conclusions via official statements and documents. This convocation (initiated by Pope Paul III and carried on by his successors Julius III and Pius IV) was a response to the Protestant Reformation which since 1517 had been ripping through Germany, conflagrating at last the centuries-long political and cultural influence of the Roman Church there, and which in the 1530s started spreading to other lands. The Council of Trent thus formed an important part of what became known as the Counter-Reformation (or alternatively, because it also stemmed from a revival that had been happening inside the Catholic Church since the 1200s long before the Protestant split, the "Catholic Reformation").
The Baroque style of architecture, art and music was promoted by the Catholic Church as a result of the decisions made at the Council of Trent. Before the Council, the Counter-Reformation had imposed a serious academic style on religious architecture which appealed to the learned but not to ordinary people in the congregation. After the Council, the new Baroque style used contrast, movement, exuberant detail, deep colour, grandeur and surprise to achieve a sense of awe. Churchmen thought this extravagant style could be integrated with the devotional thoughts and feelings required of the true Catholic believer, providing an attractive way of increasing the piety of the faithful and forestalling apostasy thereby containing the Protestant Reformation.
Not all Protestants were iconoclasts, notably the Lutherans who when the Baroque period arrived adopted and adapted their own Baroque style to create what is known as Lutheran Baroque. As with the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church was likely strengthened in opposition to Calvinism throughout the 1600s and first part of the 1700s by its use of the Baroque because it contrasted with the dour and austere styles of the Calvinists which left many people uninspired.
The Renaissance cultural period, which immediately preceded the Baroque, had been characterized by an attempted revival of the styles and thoughtforms of Classical Antiquity. Renaissance humanism, the intellectual foundation of the Renaissance, was conjured based on the Ancient Roman civic concept of 'humanitas' (the latter term encompassing the love of human nature, civilization and kindness) and on the thinking of Ancient Greek philosophers like Protogoras who said "Man is the measure of all things." The culture of the Renaissance was coterminous with revolutions in many areas including science, art, architecture, music, literature, religion and politics (actual political upheavals in the final case).
The Baroque style of architecture, art and music was promoted by the Catholic Church as a result of the decisions made at the Council of Trent. Before the Council, the Counter-Reformation had imposed a serious academic style on religious architecture which appealed to the learned but not to ordinary people in the congregation. After the Council, the new Baroque style used contrast, movement, exuberant detail, deep colour, grandeur and surprise to achieve a sense of awe. Churchmen thought this extravagant style could be integrated with the devotional thoughts and feelings required of the true Catholic believer, providing an attractive way of increasing the piety of the faithful and forestalling apostasy thereby containing the Protestant Reformation.
This plan was successful to a great degree, likely in no small part because of the lively contrast the Baroque style provided against the austere architectural and artistic styles implemented by Protestant sects such as the Calvinists who were iconoclasts and who had started the 'Beeldenstorm/Bildersturm' ('statue storm' and 'image/statue' storm in Dutch and German respectively) also known as the Iconoclastic Fury or Great Iconoclasm which took place sporadically between 1522 and 1566 across Holland, Switzerland, the Holy Roman Empire and other parts of Europe. These pre-Baroque iconoclastic outbreaks (which can be seen as an echo of the iconoclasm that swept the Byzantine world centuries before) involved the destruction of religious images, attacks on Catholic Churches in which church fittings and decorations were destroyed, and a general destruction of public religious imagery and statuary. 'Beeldenstorm' refers specifically to a spate of attacks that spread across Holland in the summer of 1566. Such iconoclastic attacks also started happening in 1535 in England and 1559 in Scotland and after 1560 in France during the French Wars of Religion.
Not all Protestants were iconoclasts, notably the Lutherans who when the Baroque period arrived adopted and adapted their own Baroque style to create what is known as Lutheran Baroque. As with the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church was likely strengthened in opposition to Calvinism throughout the 1600s and first part of the 1700s by its use of the Baroque because it contrasted with the dour and austere styles of the Calvinists which left many people uninspired.
The word 'baroque' is Portuguese and denotes a pearl (barocco) of irregular shape. It tended to be used with a negative connotation in the 1700s to describe music perceived as confused and incoherent and overloaded with harsh dissonance, modulation and other complexities; this was before scholars in the late 1800s expanded the word 'baroque' to mean architecture and art of the 1600s and early 1700s instead of just music, and removed its negative connotation. Today, the Baroque is widely regarded as one of the most fertile periods in the history of architecture, art and music.
One of the most famous examples of Baroque architecture is the nave of St Peter's Basilica and the canopy, known as St. Peter's Baldachin, within:
The Renaissance cultural period, which immediately preceded the Baroque, had been characterized by an attempted revival of the styles and thoughtforms of Classical Antiquity. Renaissance humanism, the intellectual foundation of the Renaissance, was conjured based on the Ancient Roman civic concept of 'humanitas' (the latter term encompassing the love of human nature, civilization and kindness) and on the thinking of Ancient Greek philosophers like Protogoras who said "Man is the measure of all things." The culture of the Renaissance was coterminous with revolutions in many areas including science, art, architecture, music, literature, religion and politics (actual political upheavals in the final case).
One way of viewing the Renaissance is as a bourgeois, mercantile phenomenon. The proto-Renaissance had been developing in some form in Italy since the Late Middle Ages with such characters as the writers Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Petrarch (1304–1374) as well as the painter Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337), but the Renaissance is often dated by scholars as having started in about 1401 when Lorenzo Ghilberti and Filippo Brunelleschi vied with each other for the contract to build the bronze doors of Florence Cathedral, a contest won by Ghilberti. Other scholars see the more general creative interplay and competition of polymaths and scholars in Italy around this time as being the source of Renaissance creativity. The patronage for this feverish creative activity had been coming increasingly from the merchant class which had been responsible for the quickening of financial and commercial activity in Italy beginning in the Late Middle Ages. As trade to Asia and other parts of Europe increased in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, the private wealth held by merchants and bankers grew to unprecedented levels, allowing them to indulge themselves in funding artists, musicians and architects. Before this time, architecture and the arts were more controlled and patronized by the Church and the warrior nobility and so tended to have perennial, spiritual themes, but the pragmatic-minded merchants were drawn more to ancient proto-rationalism and materialism which is why they had an affinity for the artists and polymaths who thought more like them and who opposed traditional spirituality and hierarchies. This shift of the locus of culture from the Church and nobility towards the merchants may account for the rise of humanism and secular thought and the gradual undermining of the spiritual foundation of the West which proceeded in fits and starts up until the present day.
The Baroque was hence the response of the ancient, perennial, hierarchical, priestly class to the rising cultural mercantilism of the time and to the materialism that followed with it. The decidedly aristocratic and spiritual genre of the Baroque represented the hierarchical majesty of the divine, and was dramatically representational in terms of the human and other forms, as was most art before the turn of the 20th century. With the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church created a set of guidelines for artists and architects which directed their collective creativity into a channel narrow enough to give them an illuminating framework to work within but broad enough for them to let their imagination flow freely. Thus ensued one of the most remarkable eras in all of cultural history, enabled by its aspirations to the divine.
Incidentally some of the greatest Baroque music was produced in the Lutheran milieu, which though recently split from Catholicism took its cues from the Catholic Church in this regard. The apotheosis of this is often cited as being Johann Sebastian Bach, though there were other leading composers such as Handel who were also Lutherans. Bach was in the habit of writing S.D.G. ("Soli Deo gloria" - Glory to God alone) at the end of all his Church compositions and most of his secular ones, and other Protestant composers did the same. In the Baroque, Catholic artists, musicians and architects were similarly oriented towards God.
J.S. Bach, cantata 66, "Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen" ("Rejoice, you hearts"):
Contrasting with art, music and architecture being devoted to God, Renaissance thought revolved teleologically around man and therefore may have been more prone to inducing vainglory in artists and architects and to being limited by its materialistic orientation. Having its earliest manifestations in the late 1500s the Baroque formed a resistance against the encroachment of the cthonic earth cult of materialism, preserving some of the old world of nobility, priesthood, spirit and divinity and magic (equivalent to the sky cult of Paglia and Evola) in coexistence with the new humanism until about 1760 when an updated resurgent form of rationalism brought about the Enlightenment, the cult of man that caused the French Revolution and the comprehensive overthrow of the old order of Church and nobility, and ushered in the Classical period of music, art and architecture. From there the cultural focus on reason and man alone degenerated into the often excessive sentimentality of the Romantic period which, though it produced great artists like Chopin was now thoroughly a downward path of egalitarianism and irreligious humanism, a path we are even further along today.
The nature of the Baroque was explained very well through the medium of Bach by the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould in a television program he made for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This program is well worth watching:
The Baroque is a prime example, perhaps 'the' prime example, of the success of a very hierarchical civilization in producing a cultural environment conducive to artistic and spiritual progress and human achievement. In taking the focus away from man and putting it on to God, the Baroque brought about some of the greatest works of art and architecture in history.
