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AdventuresintheHumanSpiritbyPhilipE.Bishopz-lib.org.pdf
ADVENTURES
IN THE
HUMAN SPIRIT
Seventh Edition
Philip E. Bishop
Revising author Margaret Manos
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ADVENTURES
IN THE
HUMAN SPIRIT
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Front cover: Portrait of the Baker Terentius Neo and His Wife (formerly known as Portrait of a Magistrate
and His Wife), Pompeii, Italy, mid-1st century. Fresco on plaster, 22 7⁄8 × 20 1⁄2 ins (58 × 52 cm). National
Archaeological Museum, Naples.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bishop, Philip E.
Adventures in the human spirit. -- 7th ed. / Philip E. Bishop ; revising author, Margaret Manos.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-205-88147-5 (pbk.) -- ISBN 0-205-88147-5 (pbk.)
1. Civilization, Western--History--Textbooks. 2. Humanities--History--Textbooks. I. Manos, Margaret J.
II. Title.
CB245.B57 2013
909’.09821--dc23
2012027458
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Student Edition:
ISBN-10: 0-205-88147-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-205-88147-5
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ISBN-13: 978-0-205-88254-0
Books à la Carte:
ISBN-10: 0-205-88158-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-205-88158-1
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Preface 11
1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE 14
Creating a Sense of Self 16 Tradition: Nurturing the Creative Spirit 16 Modes of Expression and Reflection 16
The Visual Arts 17 The Pictorial Arts 17 Sculpture: The Art of Shaping 18 Architecture 20
The Performing Arts 21 Music 21 Dance 22 Theater 24 Opera 24
The Literary Arts 25 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : The First Humans 26
An Invitation to the Adventure 28
Chapter Review 29
T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 17, 22, 25 T H E W R I T E I D E A 2 5
2 THE ANCIENT WORLD 30
Mesopotamia 32 The Sumerians 32 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : Megaliths 32 Empires of the Near East 35
Ancient Egypt 36 Egypt: Religion and Society 36 The Arts of Egypt 37 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : Death at an Egyptian Banquet 38
Ancient Asia 39 The Indus Valley 39 Bronze Age China 40
Ancient America 42 K E Y C O N C E P T : Myth 43
Chapter Review 45
3 ANCIENT GREECE 46
Early Greece 48 The Aegean World 48 Early Greek Poetry 50 Religion and Philosophy in Early Greece 51 Art in Early Greece 53
The Classical Period 55 Athens in its Golden Age 55 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : The Plague of Athens 55
Classical Greek Art 56 The Athenian Acropolis 56 Classical Sculpture 59 K E Y C O N C E P T : The Classical Ideal 62
Greek Theater and Music 63 Greek Tragedy 63 Greek Comedy 65 Greek Music and Dance 65
Classical Greek Philosophy 66 The Sophists and Socrates 67 Plato 67 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : Confucius and Philosophy 68 Aristotle 69
The Hellenistic Age 69 The Hellenistic Legacy 69
Chapter Review 73
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 6 2 , 6 8 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 51, 63 T H E W R I T E I D E A 51, 64
4 ANCIENT ROME 74
The Drama of Roman History 76 The Rise of Republican Rome 77 K E Y C O N C E P T : Imperialism 78 Imperial Rome 79
The Art of an Empire 80 Sculpture as Propaganda 80 The Forum of Trajan 81 K E Y C O N C E P T : The World Citizen 84 The Romans as Builders 85
Roman Art and Daily Life 89 Roman Daily Life 89
Contents
6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 134
The Age of Charlemagne 136 Northern Edge of the Early Middle Ages 136 Charlemagne’s Empire 137 Carolingian Arts 137
Feudal Europe 140 Feudalism 140 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : Work in Charlemagne’s World 140 The Arts of Feudalism 141 The Bayeux Tapestry 143 The Flowering of Muslim Spain 143
Monasticism 144 The Monastic Ideal 144 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : The Blood of Maya Kings 146 Hrotsvit and the Classical Tradition 147
The Romanesque Style 147 Imperial Revival and the Romanesque Style 147 The Romanesque Church: Monks and Pilgrims 150 Romanesque Sculpture 152 K E Y C O N C E P T : Pilgrimage 153
Early Medieval Music and Drama 154 Musical Notation 154 Hildegard of Bingen: Musical Mystic 155 Drama in the Medieval Church 156 K E Y C O N C E P T : Mysticism 157
The Medieval Philosopher 158 Early Medieval Philosophy 158 Abelard 158 The Medieval Spirit and the First Crusade 160
Chapter Review 161
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 1 5 7 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 1 4 3 , 1 4 7 , 1 5 3 , 1 6 0
7 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 162
The Gothic Awakening 164 The Crusades and the Decline of Feudalism 164 The Rise of Towns and Cities 165
The Gothic Style 166 The Gothic Style and Divine Light 166 The Cathedral at Chartres 168 Gothic Sculpture 170
Music and Theater in the Gothic Age 172 The Evolution of Organum 173
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : A Marriage Contract of the Roman Era 90 Roman Theater and Music 93
The Romans as Poets and Thinkers 95 Early Roman Poets 95 Roman Epic and Satire 96 Philosophy in the Roman World 97 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : The Rise of Buddhism 98 Rome’s Division and Decline 100
Chapter Review 101
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 79, 84, 99 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 9 1 , 9 6
5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM 102
The Judaic Tradition 104 History and the Israelites 104 The Hebrew Bible 105 K E Y C O N C E P T : Monotheism 107 Job and the Trials of Israel 108
The Rise of Christianity 109 Jesus of Nazareth 109 The Growth of Christianity 110 Christianity in the Late Roman Empire 111 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : The Siege of Jerusalem 112
Philosophy: Classical and Christian 114 From Classical to Christian 114 Augustine of Hippo 115 K E Y C O N C E P T : Original Sin and Human Nature 116
The Christian Empires: Rome and Byzantium 117 St. Peter’s and the Pope 118 Justinian and the Byzantine World 118 Ravenna: Showcase of the Christian Arts 122
Christianity and the Arts 126 Early Christian Music 126 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : Teotihuacán: Sacred City of Mesoamerica 127 Christianity Against the Arts 128
The Rise of Islam 128 The Foundations of Islam 129 Islamic Arts and Science 131
Chapter Review 133
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 107, 112, 116 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 1 0 8 , 1 3 3
Chapter Review 221
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 193, 212 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 1 9 5 , 2 0 6 , 2 0 8 , 2 1 8
9 REFORMATION AND LATE RENAISSANCE 222
The Reformation 224 Luther’s Challenge 224 The Appeal of the Reformation 225 Calvinism 226
The Rise of Northern Europe 226 Kings, Commerce, and Columbus 226 K E Y C O N C E P T : The Protestant Ethic: God, Work, and Wealth 227 The Northern Renaissance Courts 228 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : The Ottoman Empire 232
Art and Humanism in Northern Europe 233 Faith and Humanism in Northern Art 233 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : A Midwife’s Advice 233 Erasmus and Humanism 239 Utopians and Skeptics 241
The Elizabethan Age 241 The Reformation in England 241 K E Y C O N C E P T : Skepticism 242 Theater in the Elizabethan Age 242 The Genius of Shakespeare 244 Elizabethan Music 245
The Late Renaissance in Italy and Spain 246 Palestrina and the Counter-Reformation 246 Renaissance Theater in Italy 247 The Renaissance in Venice 249 Late Renaissance Painting and Mannerism 251
Chapter Review 257
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 242 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 2 2 4 , 2 2 6 , 2 4 1 , 2 4 5 T H E W R I T E I D E A 227
10 THE BAROQUE 258
The Baroque in Italy 260 Bernini and Counter-Reformation Rome 260 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : The Taj Mahal 263 Italian Baroque Painting 264 The Birth of Opera 264
G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : Buddhism in Asia 174 Gothic Theater: From Church to Town 175
The New Learning 177 The Universities 177 K E Y C O N C E P T : Scholasticism 178 Thomas Aquinas 178
Court and City in the Late Middle Ages 179 Courtly Love and Medieval Romance 179 K E Y C O N C E P T : Chivalry 181 Music in the Late Middle Ages 182 Dante’s Divine Comedy 182 Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims 184 WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: The Plague and Prosperity 184
The Late Gothic 184 Reclaiming the Classical Past 185 Giotto and the International Gothic 186
Chapter Review 189
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 181 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 1 7 7 . 1 8 2
8 THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY 190
The Renaissance Spirit in Italy 192 The Italian City-States 192 K E Y C O N C E P T : Renaissance Humanism 193 Patronage of the Arts and Learning 194 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : The Violence of Renaissance Youth 196
The Arts in Early Renaissance Italy 196 Florence 1401: a Renaissance Begins 196 Brunelleschi’s Dome 199 Florentine Painting: A Refined Classicism 200 Italian Renaissance Music 202 K E Y C O N C E P T : The Science of Perspective 202 Early Renaissance Sculpture 205 The Decline of Florence 207
Renaissance Genius 207 Machiavelli and Humanist Politics 207 Leonardo da Vinci 208 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : Great Zimbabwe 209
The High Renaissance in Rome 211 Josquin des Préz 211 KEY CONCEPT: The Renaissance Man … and Woman 212 Raphael 213 Michelangelo in Rome 215 The New St. Peter’s 218
Neoclassical Painting 312 K E Y C O N C E P T : Neoclassicism 313
The Age of Satire 314 Swift 315 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : Women Gladiators 316 Satire and Society in Art 316 Voltaire 316
Chapter Review 319
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 304 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 3 1 6 T H E W R I T E I D E A 318
12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM 320
Revolutions and Rights 322 The Revolutionary Wave—1776 and 1789 322 The Napoleonic Era 324 K E Y C O N C E P T : Freedom 327 The Industrial Revolution 327 Revolution and Philosophy 328
The Romantic Hero 329 Faust and the Romantics 329 Delacroix and the Byronic Hero 331
Music and Dance in the Romantic Age 333 Beethoven: From Classical to Romantic 333 Age of the Virtuoso 333 Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique 334
Elements of Romanticism 335 Romantic Social Protest 335 The Romantics and Nature 337 K E Y C O N C E P T : Imagination 337 Romantic Escapes 341 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : Native Storytellers 342 Evil and the Gothic Novel 343
Chapter Review 345
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 327 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 3 2 3 , 3 3 0
13 THE INDUSTRIAL AGE 346
Materialism and Progress 348 The Victorians 348 Realism in Pictorial Art 350 The Realist Novel 354 The Modern City 355
The Baroque in Spain 268 Spanish Baroque Architecture 268 K E Y C O N C E P T : Absolutism 268 Velázquez and Cervantes—Masters of Illusion 269
The Baroque In France 272 The Palace of Versailles 273 Theater and Dance at Versailles 274 Painting in Baroque France 276
The Protestant Baroque 278 J. S. Bach—Baroque Genius 278 Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier 279 Rembrandt and Dutch Baroque Painting 280
The New Science 284 K E Y C O N C E P T : Empiricism 285 Tools of the New Science 285 Descartes and Newton 286
The English Compromise 286 English Baroque Poetry 287 Christopher Wren’s London 288 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : The Fire of London 289 Handel and Music in England 289 Politics and Philosophy in England 289
Chapter Review 291
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 268 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 2 7 7 , 2 8 4
11 THE ENLIGHTENMENT 292
The Rococo Style 294 The Rococo in France 294 The Rococo in Germany and Britain 299
The Enlightenment 301 The Philosophes 301 Enlightenment and Freedom 303 K E Y C O N C E P T : Enlightenment 304
The Bourgeois Response 304 The Bourgeois Style in Painting 305 The Rise of the Novel 306 The Bourgeois Theater in Germany 307
Music in the Age of Enlightenment 307 Mozart and Opera 307 The Classical Symphony 308 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : Kabuki Theater 309
The Neoclassical Style 310 Neoclassical Architecture 310
The American Scene 407 The Age of Jazz 408 World War and Holocaust 410
Chapter Review 411
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 397 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 3 8 5 , 4 0 5
15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT 412
The Age of Anxiety 414 Post-war America 414 K E Y C O N C E P T : Existentialism 415 Exploring the Absurd 416 The Theater of the Absurd 416 The Existential Hero 417
Art and Architecture in Postwar America 417 The New York School 417 Modern Architecture in Postwar America 418 American Sculpture in the Postwar Era 421 Black Mountain College and the Avant-garde 423
The Sixties 424 GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: Gandhi and Colonial Liberation 425 Visual Arts 426 Modern Music 427
The Postmodern 428 Postmodern Architecture 429 Postmodern Music 430 The New Fiction 430 WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: Living and Dying With AIDS 432 The Art of Pluralism 432
Global Awareness 434 Liberated Voices 435 A New Century: Promise and Challenge 438
Chapter Review 442
Epilogue 443
T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 4 1 5 , 4 3 1 T H E W R I T E I D E A 438
Notes 444 Glossary 447 Further Reading 452 Picture Credits 454 Index 456
Music and Modernity 358 Verdi’s Operas 358 Wagner’s Musical Revolution 359 K E Y C O N C E P T : Modernity 360 Late Romantic Music and Dance 362
Late Romantics and Early Moderns 362 W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E : A Musical Career 362 Symbolism and Art Nouveau 363 Debussy and Rodin—the Break with Tradition 364 Impressionism 367 G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E : The Japanese Color Print 369 Beyond Impressionism 371
The Dark Side of Progress 375 The Realist Theater 376 The Novel and Modern Philosophy 376 K E Y C O N C E P T : Human Will 377
Chapter Review 379
C R I T I C A L Q U E S T I O N 361 T H O U G H T E X P E R I M E N T 3 7 9
14 MODERNISM 380
A Turbulent Century 382 A New Science 382 The Great War 383 Fascism and the Rise of Mass Society 384
Modernism in Art 385 WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: War, Fashion, and Feminism 385 Picasso and the Revolution in Art 385 K E Y C O N C E P T : Primitivism 388 Toward Formal Abstraction 389 Expressionism and Dada 391
The Modern Mind 394 Freud and Surrealism 394 Modernism in Literature 397 K E Y C O N C E P T : The Unconscious 397
Modernist Music and Architecture 398 Stravinsky and Schoenberg—the New Music 399 Modernist Building and Design 400
Art and Politics 402 Brecht’s Epic Theater 402 Painting and Politics 403 Politics and the Cinema 404
In the American Grain 405 Regionalism and Renaissance 405
EXTRACTS
This book includes poems or short extracts from the following authors and works. Copyright information is given in the Notes on pages 444–7.
Woeser, Tibet Above 25 The Great Hymn to Aten 37 Herodotus, The Persian Wars 38 Homer, Iliad, Book XXIV 50 Sappho 51 Hesiod, Theogony 52 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War 55 Sophocles, Antigone 62 Catullus, To an Unfaithful Lover 95 Virgil, Aeneid, Book I, Book IV 96 Juvenal, The Satires 97 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe 97 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book VII 99 Book of Genesis 106, 107 Book of Job 108 Gospel of Matthew 109 Josephus, The Jewish Wars 112 St. Augustine, Confessions 115 The Qur’an (Sura 55) 130 Charlemagne, Admonitio, 789 140 Song of Roland (stanzas 173, 176) 142 Hrotsvit 147 Hildegard of Bingen 156 Bernart de Ventadorn, Quan vei la lauzeta mover 180 Beatriz de Dia 180 Ramón Llull, Book of the Order of Chivalry 181 Dante Alighieri, Inferno Canto V 183 Henry Knighton 184 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” 184 Petrarch, Sonnet 185 Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man 193 Lorenzo de’ Medici, Song of Bacchus 195 Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography 196 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince 208 Diane de Poitiers 233 Albrecht Dürer 237 Erasmus, In Praise of Folly 240 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II sc.ii 245 St. Teresa 260–61 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote Part I 272 Descartes, Discourse on Method 286 John Donne, The Canonization 287 John Milton, Paradise Lost 287 The Diary of Samuel Pepys 289 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract 303 Samuel Richardson, Pamela 306 Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal 315 César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England 316 Voltaire, Candide 318 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, Part 2 330
William Blake, London 335 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women 336 William Wordsworth, The World is Too Much With Us 338 Grenville Goodwin, Western Apache Raiding and Warfare 342
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 345 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 355 Lillian Nordica 362 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal 363 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House 376 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 378 William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming 382 Ray Strachey, “The Cause”: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain 385 Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis 398 Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems 414 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism 416 Jackson Pollock 417 Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 431 Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir 432 Denise Levertov, In Mind 438 Edward Thomas, Liberty 443
TIMELINES
28–9, 44–5, 72–3, 100–101, 132–3, 160–61, 188–9, 220–21, 256–7, 290–91, 318–19, 344–5, 378–9, 410–11, 442–3
MAPS
Prehistoric Europe 27 The ancient world 33 Ancient Greece 48 The Roman Empire 78 The spread of Buddhism 98 The spread of Christianity 110 The late Roman and Byzantine world 119 The Islamic world 129 Europe in the Romanesque period 148 The Crusades 164 Renaissance Italy 192 Western Europe during the Reformation, c. 1560 225 Renaissance and earlier monuments of Rome 267 The grand boulevards of Paris 357
Difficult and unfamiliar names and terms in the text are followed by their phonetic pronunciation in square brackets. A simple phonetic system is used which includes the symbols:
ah = raw oh = boat tch = righteous ay = late oo = boot zh = Asia g = get ow = bow (n), (r), etc = barely igh, eye = bite uh = plumb voiced or nasal
After Philip E. Bishop passed away in April 2010, the publishers of Adventures in the Human Spirit asked me to take over the revision of this, its seventh edition. While I have edited innumerable college textbooks in the arts and humanities during my 20 years as a freelance developmental editor, it is one thing to edit a book and quite something else to assume the responsibility for a book as its author. Over six editions, Philip had refined the most readable one-volume overview of the humanities available. His voice was personable and engaging, his coverage authoritative and judicious.
In updating Philip’s book, I have sought to maintain his readability, clarity, concision, and approachability, and to continue his discerning coverage of music, religion, literature, philosophy, and science. While extending the coverage of recent art and scholarship, we have also entirely recast the book’s design to further engage students with dramatic new chapter- opening spreads, a refreshed color palette, and a clear pedagogical structure.
All 15 chapters have been revised to include:
• New opening learning outcome questions that create clear signposts for study
• New comprehensive timelines that recap events in the chapter
• New review questions for student self-evaluation and chapter review
• New Thought Experiment questions that prompt reflections on the ways in which a subject touches students’ lives
• Enhanced coverage of non-Western high points in the humanities, including ancient and modern Asia, Africa, and the Americas
• More than 140 MyArtsLab links that connect students to Pearson’s formidable on-line resources, and include closer looks at art objects, virtual tours of landmark architecture, historical documents, and extended primary sources
• More than 125 brand-new color illustrations • A new and totally revised, comprehensive, detailed
map program
In response to reviewer suggestions, the following chapters have been thoroughly updated:
• Chapter 1 has been revised to engage students right from the start, with special attention to the recent work of notable contemporary artists, such as Tara Donovan, Trisha Brown, Rachel Whiteread, and Marlene Dumas.
• Chapter 2 has expanded its coverage of ancient civilizations to include more on Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the ancient Americas.
• Chapter 15 has been completely reorganized and updated to include coverage of contemporary computer/video art, green architecture, post- colonial and feminist art, and globalism in art and architecture. Featured contemporary artists include Cindy Sherman, Maya Lin, Fred Wilson, Louise Bourgeois, Kara Walker, Christian Marclay, and Takeshi Murata.
Along with adding the new Thought Experiment box feature, I have expanded the Global Perspective boxes to enlarge the coverage of non-Western arts and cultures. The popular Key Concept, Critical Question, Write Idea, and Windows on Daily Life features remain.
Students should note that in addition to the MyArtsLab assets, every location mentioned in this text can be explored on the web via Google Earth, a powerful resource for virtual tours of landmark sites worldwide.
I am grateful to the following reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions:
Lynn Brink, North Lake College Ron Cooper, College of Central Florida Judith Johnson, Harrisburg Area Community College Jennifer Keefe, Valencia College Mary Ann Murdoch, Polk State College Karen Rumbley, Valencia College David Underwood, St. Petersburg College Anthony Williams, Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College Warren Yarbrough, Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College
And for their support and assistance every step of the way, many thanks to Susie May, Kara Hattersley-Smith, designer Tim Foster, and picture researcher Peter Kent at Laurence King Publishing, and to Acquisitions Editor Billy Grieco at Pearson.
Margaret Manos New York City, 2012
Preface to the Seventh Edition
The new MyArtsLab delivers proven results in helping individual students succeed. Its automatically graded assessments, personalized study plan, and interactive eText provide engaging experiences that personalize, stimulate, and measure learning for each student. And, it comes from a trusted partner with educational expertise and a deep commitment to helping students, instructors, and departments achieve their goals.
The Pearson eText lets students access their textbook anytime, anywhere, and any way they want, including downloading the text to an iPad®. Personalized study plan for each student promotes critical-thinking skills. Assessment tied to videos, applications, and chapters enables both instructors and students to track progress and get immediate feedback. Closer Look tours—interactive walkthroughs featuring expert audio— offer in-depth looks at key works of art, enabling students to zoom in to see detail they couldn’t otherwise see, even in person. Art21 and Studio Technique videos present up-close looks at real-life artists at work, helping students better understand techniques used during different eras. 360-degree architectural panoramas and simulations of major monuments help students understand buildings—inside and out. Henry Sayre’s Writing About Art 6th edition is now available online in its entirety as an eText within MyArtsLab. This straightforward guide prepares students to describe, interpret, and write about works of art in meaningful and lasting terms. Discovering Art is a robust online tutorial for exploring the major elements and principles of art, art media, and art processes. The site offers opportunities to review key terminology, search a large gallery of images, watch videos, and more.
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Pearson arts titles are available in the following formats to give you and your students more choices— and more ways to save.
The CourseSmart eTextbook offers the same content as the printed text in a convenient online format—with highlighting, online search, and printing capabilities. www.coursesmart.com
The Books à la Carte edition offers a convenient, three-hole-punched, loose-leaf version of the traditional text at a discounted price—allowing students to take only what they need to class. Books à la Carte editions are available both with and without access to MyArtsLab.
Build your own Pearson Custom course material. Work with a dedicated Pearson Custom editor to create your ideal textbook and web material— publishing your own original content or mixing and matching Pearson content. Contact your Pearson representative to get started.
INSTRUCTOR RESOURCES
NEW! The Class Preparation Tool collects the very best class presentation resources in one convenient online destination, so instructors can keep students engaged throughout every class. With art and fi gures from the text, videos, classroom activities, and much more, it makes lecture preparation simpler and less time-consuming.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
NEW! Teaching with MyArtsLab PowerPoints help instructors make their lectures come alive. These slides allow instructors to display the very best inter- active features from MyArtsLab in the classroom— quickly and easily.
Instructor’s Manual and Test Item File.This is an invaluable professional resource and reference for new and experienced faculty. Each chapter contains the following sections: Chapter Overview, Chapter Objectives, Key Terms, Lecture and Discus- sion Topics, Resources, and Writing Assignments and Projects. The test bank includes multiple-choice, true/ false, short-answer, and essay questions. Available for download from the instructor support section at www.myartslab.com.
MyTest. This fl exible online test-generating software includes all questions found in the printed Test Item File. Instructors can quickly and easily create custom- ized tests with MyTest at www.pearsonmytest.com.
1An Invitation to Adventure 1.1 Doug Wheeler, DW 68 VEN MCASD 11, 1968–2011. Light installation. Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. California “Light and Space” artist Doug Wheeler (b. 1939) creates immersive “infinity environments,” where light is experienced as a tactile presence. Wheeler’s quest is to create a sense of absence. There is nothing to see—only light.
What distinguishes humans from other creatures? Other animals play,
and give care to one another; some build hives, nests, and lodges; some
live in seclusion, and some live in large communities; some seem to use
languages to communicate. So what makes us different? This is the basic
question of the humanities. Streams of images and thoughts occupy our
minds; they spill out in our speech, and take shape in the myriad forms
that make up human culture. What other animal tells myths and stories
or paints the walls of its dwelling, buries its dead or worships a divin-
ity? Such acts seem to be essentially human; such essences comprise the
humanities. Humans quest for meaning.
Listen to the chapter audio on myartslab.com
16 Chapter 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE
Tradition: Nurturing the Creative Spirit While utilizing an impossibly supernatural scenario, Woody Allen’s film explores the process by which humans preserve and transmit their collective values— the process called tradition. Traditions are transmitted in numerous ways: informally, through family customs, play, or folklore; or more formally, through training, schooling, and religious institutions. The humanities are the vehicle by which these traditions travel through time.
Traditions do not exist by magic. A tradition can sustain itself only by stimulating the creativity of each new generation. As individuals attain adulthood, they renew and extend the accumulated expression and reflection of past generations. Like Owen Wilson’s character, through encounters with the traditions of the past, we can each come to discover a unique, personal experience of the present.
Modes of Expression and Reflection The humanities encompass the creative process of tradition as it unfolded in the past and continues in the present. The humanities express our most intense experiences and reflect on our most essential truths. Conventionally, the humanities are said to include several modes of expression: the visual arts (drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, printmaking, photog- raphy, and film); the performing arts (music, dance, and theater); and the literary arts (poetry and prose). These divisions are somewhat arbitrary and were per- haps more true in the past than they are today, where numerous art forms combine characteristics of dif- ferent categories. For example, film is listed here as a visual art, but it clearly contains a high content of per- formance. Or, in another example, while existing in a book format and containing texts that narrate stories, graphic novels also are profusely illustrated: so are they literary or visual arts? Most original contemporary art- works pose conundrums like this.
Closely allied to the modes of expression are what may be called modes of reflection: philosophy, religion, and history. In these modes, humans reflect on funda- mental questions: “What is truth?” “What is the nature
For thousands of years, humans have reshaped the world in their quest for meaning. In the process, humans have formed families, families have joined communi- ties, communities have formed cultures, and cultures have created civilizations, every generation shaped in turn by its own upbringing. But for each new genera- tion, an adventure begins anew. Every generation must find meanings true to its own inner life (Fig. 1.1). Every generation must re-invent what it is to be human.
Creating a Sense of Self In Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris Gil, a frustrated novelist played by Owen Wilson (Fig. 1.2), is surprised to discover that by entering a limousine at a certain Parisian street corner on the stroke of midnight he can travel back in time. He cannot believe his luck when he realizes that he can hobnob with his idols, the expatriate artistic community of 1920s Paris: he parties with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, talks about writ- ing with Ernest Hemingway, submits his manuscript for Gertrude Stein’s review and criticism, and rubs shoulders with painters such as Pierre Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Just when he is about to seduce Picasso’s ex-mistress in this midnight realm, they are transported further back in time together to the era she idolizes, the Belle Epoch of nineteenth-century Paris, where she in turn is swept away by the idols of her imagination, artists such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet. And so the wheel turns. In this comedic fashion Gil comes to realize that, while he may idolize the achievements of his literary tradition, in the end he must create himself on his own terms, and in his own time.
1.2 Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris, 2011, written and directed by American Woody Allen (b. 1935). Film still. When interrogated by Ernest Hemingway: “You’ll never be a great writer if you fear dying. Do you?” Gil replies, “Yeah, I do. I would say it’s my greatest fear.”
Chapter 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE 17
The Pictorial Arts
Vision is arguably our most powerful sense, the sense we depend on most of all, and making pictures is one of humankind’s most primal impulses. Our desire to represent the world visually produces the pictorial arts. In today’s culture, pictorial images surround us in astounding numbers and intensity. In order to under- stand, interpret, and appreciate pictorial arts, here are some of the basic questions we can ask.
In what medium is the picture created? The medium (pl. media) is the physical or material means by which a picture is communicated. A painter might choose the medium of oil paint applied to wood or canvas (Fig. 1.3), or watercolor applied to paper. Each painting medium has its own technical require- ments and pictorial qualities. The transparent wash of a watercolor contrasts sharply with the tangible density of oil paint. Likewise, the pictorial media of printmak- ing and photography have their own complex technical requirements and unique aesthetic effects.
of the divine?” “What is the meaning of the past?” For example, until only recently the great preponderance of visual art was made in the service of religion. Along similar lines, we often find that the questions that pre- occupy the philosophical expression of an age are also reflected in the arts and letters of that period. In these ways, the humanities interpret these diverse modes— the arts, religion, philosophy—through fruitful interac- tion and interplay.
Can we take an active part in the creative process of the humanities? If we learn to command the modes of expression and reflection, will our experience be enriched? Will our powers of thought and creativity be enlarged? Can the study of the humanities help us develop as individuals? Can the humanities teach us, so that we may live more fully in the present?
The answer to all these questions is emphatically “Yes!” as you are free to discover for yourself.
The Visual Arts The visual arts can be logically divided into those media that are inherently pictorial in nature—drawing, paint- ing, printmaking, and photography—and those media that result in the creation of three-dimensional things— sculpture and architecture. Let’s look at each of these categories in turn.
1.3 Marlene Dumas, The Blindfolded Man, 2007. Oil on canvas, 39 1⁄2 × 35 1⁄2 ins (100 × 90 cm). David Zwirner Gallery, New York. Noted for her evocative figures, South Africa-born Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) handles paint with fluidity. In this painting, one of a series protesting the torture of political prisoners, only a few corrections in thick impasto—on the cheek, for instance—reveal that the medium is oil paint. Reckless brushwork and bruised color stress the trauma of violence.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT While the humanities are usually seen as distinctly different from mathematics and the sciences, advances in math and science, and the changes these bring to technology, also shape humanistic thought and expression. Should the humanities and sciences be considered distinct, or do these fields have more similarities than differences?
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Applied arts and crafts—such as pottery, weaving, glasswork, metalwork, and jewelry, as well as graphic design and industrial design—have not conventionally been considered humanities. In what ways do applied arts and crafts resemble the humanities? In what ways do they differ?
View the Closer Look at elements of pictorial expression on myartslab.com
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How are the parts of the picture combined into a meaningful whole? Composition is the combination of a picture’s elements into one whole. Composition may involve the picture’s division into major parts, such as foreground and background. With composition an artist can orchestrate the picture’s ele- ments into a complex pictorial statement.
Often, pictorial works communicate a narrative or symbolic message. In such cases, the following questions are also useful: Does the picture tell a story? Does it con- tain important symbols? Is there a dramatic action?
Sculpture: The Art of Shaping Sculpture is the shaping of material into a three- dimensional work of art. Like painting, it is one of the most ancient arts. Sculpture can take virtually any shape and can be crafted in virtually any material. To begin assessing sculptural works, the following ques- tions are useful.
Is the sculpture “in the round” or in relief? Sculpture in the round (also called “freestanding”) is shaped so that the work stands freely and can be seen from all sides. Such full-round statues may be on any scale, from small figurines to colossal statues. Relief
What are the picture’s important lines and shapes? A line is an extended point, the most basic element of pictorial communication. Lines help to define the picture as a whole: horizontal and vertical lines tend to define space as stable and orderly, while diagonal lines create tension and suggest motion. Lines can establish a direction for the eye to follow, even when the line is implied. A shape is the area bounded by a line; it may be curved or linear, regular or irregu- lar. Shapes also help to create a pictorial structure, and are used to evoke in the viewer a certain feeling. We respond differently, for example, to the organic shape of a shell than to the shapes of machines and buildings.
How does the picture use color and light? Pictures act directly on the viewer by their color. Aside from their visual and emotional quality, colors can also have symbolic importance. Additionally, light creates a sense of depth when it falls across an object. Light also creates dramatic interest by emphasizing important ele- ments or creating a play of light and shadow.
Does the picture contain significant pat- terns? A pattern is the repetition of a pictorial ele- ment according to a particular design. The pattern may consist of line, shape, color, or some other significant pictorial element. Patterns create a visual structure or rhythm that makes a picture’s meaning more emphatic (Fig. 1.4).
1.4 JR, Women are Heroes, 2008. Enlarged photographic prints pasted on architectural façades. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Seeking to provoke change by empowering community, Tunisian French graffiti artist JR (b. 1983) photographs the faces of women of impoverished areas and then enlists community members to paste enormous blow-ups of them throughout their neighborhoods. Through the unexpected use of scale and repeated pattern, JR’s public mural projects draw attention to the humanity of slum dwellers while decrying their plight.
View the Closer Look at the Descent of the Ganges relief, Mamallapuram, on myartslab.com
Chapter 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE 19
What is the sculpture’s texture? Texture is the way the surface of an object feels to the sense of touch. A painting can only suggest textures, but a sculp- ture’s textures may actually be touched and explored. Different sculptural materials appeal to the touch in different ways. Marble, for example, can be finished to an extremely smooth, sensuous texture. A clumsy, rough texture, on the other hand, has a different mean- ing entirely.
Does the sculpture imply movement? Though most sculptures are immobile, some can appear to move through the space that they occupy. Bernini’s fearsome David (see Fig. 10.2) has drawn his sling and is about to unleash the missile that will kill Goliath, while in Donatello’s more static version (see Fig. 8.16), David rests his foot on Goliath’s head. Twentieth- century artists freed sculpture so that some parts could actually move. The first “mobile” was invented in the early twentieth century, when the irreverent modernist Marcel Duchamp (see page 394) placed a bicycle wheel on a stool.
sculpture is attached to a wall or panel and is meant to be viewed from one side only.
From what materials is the sculpture made? Sculpture can be shaped from any material able to be carved, modeled, assembled, or cast (Fig. 1.5, Fig. 1.6). As with painting, a sculptor may work in a variety of media or materials. Some materials, such as stone and wood, are shaped by removing the excess, a subtractive process. Sculpture in clay or plaster, on the other hand, can be modeled by an additive process of building up layers of material. Metal can be beaten or bent into the desired shape, or it can be melted and then poured, or “cast,” into a mold.
1.5 Tara Donovan, Untitled, 2003 (detail). Styrofoam cups, hot glue, 6 ft (H) × 20 ft (W) × 19 ft 2 ins (D). Ace Gallery, New York. By massing everyday industrial products, American sculptor Tara Donovan (b. 1969) produces surprising forms. Here, a complex surface emerges from the repetition of a simple gluing procedure. Donovan’s explorations of process are a subtle commentary on unpredictability and the precariousness of environmental systems.
1.6 Rachel Whiteread, House. Completed Autumn 1993 and demolished in January 2004. Cast concrete. British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s House explores collective meaning and memory. By spraying concrete on interior walls and ceilings of a house in a neighborhood scheduled for demolition, Whiteread (b. 1963) produces a mysterious yet monumental expression of empty space. Her signature style derives from her use of architectural interiors as molds for casting sculpture.
Watch the studio technique video on sculpture carving (relief) on myartslab.com
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with the divine and holy, whereas a royal palace had a secular function, serving everyday needs.
Because the temple and the palace involved the com- munity as a whole, they are called public architecture. Houses and other structures used strictly by individuals are termed private or domestic architecture. Virtually all significant buildings have functions that combine sacred or secular purposes with private or public use.
From which materials is the building constructed? Materials are as essential to archi- tecture as they are to sculpture. The ancient Greeks built their houses from wood and their temples from stone. Consequently, Greek private architecture has disappeared, while ancient Greek temples still inspire architects today. Often new architectural materials incorporate the old. The Romans developed the use of concrete—a material made of cement, sand, stone, and water—but decorated this unsightly material with an outer layer of stone, in order to make their build- ings look like those of the ancient Greeks. Twentieth- century builders improved concrete by adding steel reinforcement.
What is the building’s design? The most important and complex aspect of a building is its design, the way the building is put together. Architectural design is akin to composition in painting, yet more essential. A poorly composed painting will merely languish in an attic; a poorly designed building may collapse. Architectural
What is the sculpture’s relation to site? Sculpture may have a specific relation to its site, that is, its location in a surrounding space. Naturally, a reli- gious sculpture is vitally related to the church, temple, or other place of worship in which it is housed.
Architecture Architecture, the art of enclosing a space to provide shelter, is sometimes called the “mother of the arts.” Compared with sculpture or painting, architecture requires considerably greater resources of wealth, mate- rials, technical know-how, and labor. Since only the most powerful members of a society can afford to con- struct large buildings, significant works of architecture are often associated with wealth and power (Fig. 1.7).
What is the building’s function? Nearly all buildings serve a function in the community that con- structs them. The earliest great buildings were temples to honor gods or palaces to house the mighty. Temples had a sacred function, because they were associated
1.7 Beijing National Stadium (“The Bird’s Nest”), designed by Swiss architecture fi rm Herzog & de Meuron, Beijing, China, 2003–2008. Built for the track and field events of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, the stadium seats 80,000. The outer steel frame supports a canopy that arches over seats in the red concrete bowl within. Activist Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), who collaborated on the design, later criticized the project as a “pretend smile” of Chinese public relations.
Chapter 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE 21
has color, which means simply how the tone sounds. Because they produce sound in different ways, the flute and violin have different colors, even when playing the same tone. Finally, musical tones have dynamics, depending on how loudly or softly the tones are played. By combining these elements of musical tone—pitch, color, and dynamics— composers and musicians create the infinite variety of the world’s music.
What are the music’s basic melody and rhythm? A melody is a series of tones that make some sense to the ear, creating a tune that the ear can follow. Anything the listener can hum is a melody. Anything one can tap a foot to is a rhythm, a beat cre- ated by regularly accented tones. Rhythm is essential to one of music’s most important functions, as an accom- paniment to dance.
The possibilities of melody and rhythm are infinite, yet most music follows particular rules for inventing melodic and rhythmic arrangements. In Western music melodies are expressed in a key—a series of seven tones with set intervals between tones. Rhythm is usually determined by a basic meter, the set number of beats per musical unit. The form of dance music called the waltz is easily recognized by its triple meter, or three beats per measure.
What instruments or voices perform the music? The color of a musical work depends on the combination of musical instruments or voices that perform it. In recent centuries, composers have written music calling for a specific combination of instrumen- tal or choral voices. Mozart composed frequently for a string quartet, while Brahms’s symphonic works require the orchestra to have a large brass section. Vocal music is written for voices in a certain range: an opera role, for example, may require a tenor voice or a baritone. A composition for voice may call for a specified number of soloists (one singer per part) and a chorus (several singers singing the same part).
Where is the music performed, and for what purpose? The setting of a musical perfor- mance is usually closely related to its function. As with architecture, music can serve either sacred or secular functions, depending on whether it is performed during a religious service or in a concert hall (Fig. 1.8). The setting and function also help determine the choice of instruments—a parade calls for a marching band, while a wedding reception would more likely employ a string ensemble.
design is so closely tied to function and materials that these three elements of architecture—design, function, materials—form an interdependent triad.
What is the relation between the exterior and interior of the building? A building pres- ents itself to the world through its exterior, yet usually serves its function through the interior. A building’s exterior and interior may reflect a common design, as with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York (see Fig. 15.8). Exterior and interior may exhibit different principles of design, creating a tension between outside and inside.
How does the building employ the other arts? Commonly, a building incorporates other arts for decorative purposes (this is why architecture is called the “mother of the arts”). Temples and churches com- monly use exterior relief sculpture to attract and edu- cate the faithful. However, buildings can also employ performing arts such as music or theater, often creating a mutual influence among the arts. The sound of choirs singing in St. Mark’s in Venice in the fifteenth century was so distinctive that the church’s architecture helped shape the development of Renaissance music.
The Performing Arts Unlike the visual arts that produce tangible objects, the performing arts produce transient events that take place temporarily. Taking place in time, they tend to have a beginning, middle, and end; and this structure lends them a story-telling character. Traditionally, the per- forming arts encompass music, dance, and drama, often in combination. Today, with the proliferation of broad- cast and recording media, the performing arts are not confined to live performance during a single moment; as broadcasts and recordings, they are freed from the confines of a single time and place.
Music Music depends upon performers—players or singers— to bring it to life. It is abstract and ephemeral, consisting only of sounds and silences. Music differs from ordi- nary sound—noise—in that it is consciously organized in a meaningful way. The basic component of music is the tone. A musical tone has a certain pitch that sounds either high or low. For example, a flute plays tones of a higher pitch than a cello, just as a soprano’s voice is pitched higher than a tenor’s. A musical tone also
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can usually begin with identifying its parts and seeing their relation.
The number of musical forms can be overwhelming. During the past 300 years, composers have invented and practiced dozens of different musical forms. The origin of these musical forms is closely related to a composition’s setting and function. For example, the cantata was a choral work that set a biblical story to music and was often performed in churches. The blues was a mournful song form that originated from the hollers of African-American slaves as they worked in the fields. Both forms are still performed today, the can- tata in churches and the blues in nightclubs.
Dance Like music, the performing art of dance is difficult to capture. Dance is the rhythmic and patterned move- ment of the human body, usually to musical accompa- niment. It is perhaps the most ancient art, and one that is still practiced in every known human culture. Dance can be as simple and spontaneous as the gyrations of a stadium crowd cheering for their favorite team or as formalized and complex as a classical ballet. Our his- torical knowledge of dance is limited since, like music, its performance leaves few historical traces.
What kind of dance is it? Dance is generally cat- egorized according to three types: popular dance, bal- let, and modern dance. Popular dance includes forms of dance passed on traditionally, such as folk dances, or dances practiced for social occasions, such as ballroom dancing. Popular dances can be highly complex and
What is the form of the musical composi- tion? As in the other arts, musical form means the arrangement of a composition’s parts into a unified and meaningful whole. A musical form may be very simple and brief, like a nursery rhyme with a single verse, or it may be very large, with the performance lasting several hours and requiring a full orchestra and a large chorus. Popular songs, for example, usually take the form of A–B–A. An initial melody and rhythm (A) are stated and often repeated. Then a verse is sung to a differ- ent but closely related second melody (B). Finally, the opening melody (A) is repeated to create closure. In the Western musical tradition, even larger and more complex forms—such as the movements of a sym- phony—follow this pattern of statement, variation, and restatement. Understanding any musical composition
1.8 Lady Gaga playing a keytar during the Monster Ball Tour, Consol Energy Center, Pittsburgh, 2010. American singer/songwriter Stefani Germanotta, better known as “Lady Gaga” (b. 1986), utilizes a bombastic style that combines the theatrical flamboyance of Italian opera with the droll wit of pop art. She says, “I went to a Catholic school, but it was on the New York underground that I found myself.” 1
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Expressions of popular culture—such as sitcoms, pop music, advertising, arcade games, clothing fashions—have only grudgingly been accepted as valid subjects of study for the humanities. Is “low culture” merely commercialized rubbish or is it truly revolutionary?
Chapter 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE 23
form of the minuet, which originated in France, was preserved in the eighteenth-century symphonies of Mozart (see page 310). In the 1970s, disco music fueled a popular dance revival among young people dissatis- fied with rock and roll’s informal dance styles. In the same way, the improvisational music of jazz (see page 408) has fostered the equally inventive form of jazz dance.
Is the dance mimetic? The term “mimetic” stems from the Greek word for “imitation.” Mimetic dance imitates the gestures and actions of real life and is especially important in ballet and other narrative forms. In a romantic ballet, for example, the dancers’ calcu- lated poses and movements may be choreographed to imitate the joy of a couple in love.
How are the dancing movements com- bined into a meaningful whole? A dance’s form, much like the form of music or theater, is the artful combination of dancing gestures and movements. In a dance performance, the dancers’ movements create a changing combination of line, motion, pattern, ten- sion, and rhythm. More so than with any other art, the form of dance is perceptible only in performance. The three-dimensional energy and complexity of a dance performance cannot be fully captured by a system of notation or even by film.
artistic and may require considerable training. Popular dances are not always performed for an audience.
Ballet is a theatrical dance that combines highly for- malized steps and poses with athletic leaps and turns. Even today, classical ballet dancers’ rigorous training begins with the five “positions” prescribed in the sev- enteenth century. The term “ballet” also describes the combination of ballet dance, music, and staging in a theatrical work such as Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty. In a ballet, the dancers’ steps and movements are orches- trated by the choreographer, who must coordinate the music, story, and dance to form an intelligible whole. A dance choreographer is part composer, part theatrical director, and part dance master.
The last of the dance types is modern dance, which includes the forms of dance created in reaction to clas- sical ballet. Modern dance seeks more freedom and expressiveness than ballet, but it still involves choreog- raphy and theatrical performance (Fig. 1.9). It is often more abstract and less oriented toward a story than tra- ditional ballet, and it often incorporates modern music and art.
What is the relation between the dance and the music? Dance is so closely allied with music that musical styles are often named for the dance they accompany. From the waltz to hip-hop, dance and music have been melded with one another. The dance
1.9 Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece, performed on 12 rooftops over a ten-block area in New York City’s SoHo, 1971. Photograph by Babette Mangolte. American Trisha Brown (b. 1936) has been a leading avant-garde choreographer and dancer since the 1960s. During this time, SoHo, an industrial area of Manhattan that had fallen into disuse, was becoming a mecca for young artists. In Roof Piece, each dancer transmits movements to a dancer on the nearest roof. The photograph illustrates the use of documentation for recording conceptual artwork.
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the script. Yet the director has no immediately visible role in the performance. The director’s decisions can only be inferred from the performance itself. A criti- cal audience should appreciate the director’s choices in casting—the choice of particular actors for certain roles. The director also determines how they move together on stage, and how quickly or slowly the action proceeds. With such decisions, the director controls the essential character of the whole theatrical performance.
Opera Opera can be defined simply as theater set to music. Yet such a simple definition cannot suggest opera’s spectacular effects. Opera combines all the performing arts—music, dance, and theater—in an artistic experi- ence that cannot be matched by any of these arts alone.
Unfortunately, opera suffers from an inaccessibility to audiences. The need for a precise match between the words of an opera and its music makes it difficult for operas to be translated. An opera written in Italian or French is usually performed in the original language, so an English-speaking audience must be satisfied with a program summary or translated dialogue titles pro- jected over the stage. In addition, opera has historically been an art of the upper classes, and it is still associated with elite audiences.
Theater Theater is the art of acting out dramatic literature in a live performance. Since most readers will have studied dramatic works as literature, this introduction consid- ers aspects of theatrical performance.
How is the play staged through set, light- ing, and costume? The stage is the physical space in which a dramatic work is performed. Most Western theaters today use a conventional proscenium stage. The proscenium stage is enclosed within a rectangular frame, and the audience views the action through an invisible “fourth wall.” A theater may instead have a thrust stage, in which a stage platform projects into the audience, or a stage in-the-round, which has a perfor- mance area completely surrounded by the audience.
The most complex elements of staging involve the theatrical set, which is made up of lighting and scenery. The set design creates the imaginary space in which the dramatic action is performed (Fig. 1.10). Sets may incor- porate elaborate scenery and stage machinery. Some medieval dramas known as morality plays managed to represent the Garden of Eden, a fiery hell, and the throne of heaven, all in one elaborate set. Twentieth-century expressionist theater used complicated revolving stages and sets to accommodate huge casts. With the advent of electrical lights, theatrical lighting became essential in shaping the theatrical performance. Lighting helps to underscore mood, character, and other elements of the dramatic action taking place on the stage.
The costumes worn by actors are also part of the staging and set the tone of a theatrical performance. The choice of costumes is an especially important decision when performing a play from the past. For example, should a director costume Shakespearean characters in modern dress or in period costume? Like theatrical lighting, costume can emphasize an aspect of the character or imply changes in a character during the performance.
How do the director and actors interpret the dramatic script? Acting is probably the aspect of theatrical performance that audiences are most sensi- tive to and critical of. Under the director’s guidance, actors are responsible for realizing the dramatic script in their words and actions on stage. An actor’s per- forming skill and discrimination largely determine the impact a character will have on the audience.
The director of a play governs every aspect of the performance, including staging, acting, and changes in
1.10 K. K. Barrett, scene design for Stop the Virgens, directed by Adam Rapp, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York, 2011. An operatic blend of technology, music, dance, and theater by Karen Orzolek (b. 1978)—better known as Karen O, lead singer of indie rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—Stop the Virgens was billed as the first “psycho-opera.” While a drummer in a punk band during the 1970s, Oklahoma native K. K. Barrett (b. 1955) initially learned production design by making music videos.
Chapter 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE 25
Above, won a national award in 2001. However, after her next book, Notes on Tibet, a prose collection on current Tibetan social realities, was banned by Chinese authorities, she lost her job and social benefits.
After a few years
You are at the original place
I am at the opposite end
ride on a plane
in a car
and I have already arrived there
After a few years
You have aged some
I have aged some
We seem to have been aging at the same time
still young
have tempers
After a few years
completely covered in dust
my countenance is also lost
Yet importuning poise
I take some bones
as jewelry
Hang them on my chest
as if without a second thought
After a few years
Your appearance
so very clean
An air of books
as if seventeen
as if the innermost teardrops
added a luster
that no one could outshine
After a few years
At last sitting together
first a little distant
then slightly closer
The voices carrying on around us
sights strange and colorful
I wish to speak but refrain
You wish to speak but do the same
What else can be said 2
Woeser (translated by D. Dayton)
“After a Few Years” from Tibet Above
http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/weise.html
Still, opera is a stunning art form that can, with a little cultivation, provide pleasure for any humanities student. From a student’s point of view, opera is inter- esting if only because it can stimulate so many of the questions asked already in this brief introduction to the arts: How is the opera staged? What is the relation between the words and the music? How has a director interpreted the script? What instruments and voices are used? How has a singer interpreted the musical score and the dramatic script? How is dance incorporated into the operatic narrative? The variety of questions suggests that opera, perhaps the least known of the performing arts, is the best- chosen introduction to those arts.
The Literary Arts Literature divides generally into two kinds: fiction, composed from the author’s imagination; and non- fiction, recounting the author’s actual thoughts or real events. The largest body of literature is fictional and divides further into three main genres: drama, poetry, and narrative fiction.
Drama is literature to be acted out in theatrical performance, an art discussed as the art of theater, above. Poetry is a literature of rhythmic sound and concentrated imagery. Poetry usually employs a regu- lar pattern of stresses (called a meter) and often con- tains highly condensed metaphor and symbol. Poetry may actually take the form of drama (Greek tragedy, for example) or narrative (the ancient epics). Poetry of the most personal and concentrated kind is called lyric, which can be written in particular forms (for example, the sonnet, elegy, or ode). About poetry, one may ask: What form does the poem take? What are its patterns of sound (meter, rhythm)? How does it employ meta- phor or symbol?
Tibetan poet Woeser (Weise in Chinese) (b. 1966) lives in Beijing, China. Her first poetry collection, Tibet
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT The idea of the humanities is a product of Western history and civilization. Some non-Western cultures do not even have a word for the concept. Should cultural productions from outside the West, from cultures deriving from other traditions, properly be considered as expressions of the humanities? If so, how? If not, why not?
WRITE IDEA What is it about poets that can threaten governmental authorities? To try to answer this question, research the life and work of a poet whose work has been banned by a government.
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G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
The first modern humans appeared some 200,000 years ago in Africa, gradually migrating to Asia and Europe and beyond. These early humans sustained themselves in small clans by hunting and gathering food, while devel- oping cultures that share much with later human civiliza- tions. They adorned their bodies with ornaments of shell and teeth, made specialized tools of wood, stone, and bone, and buried their dead with provisions for the next life. Around their fires, they must have chanted stories of cosmic conflicts and heroic deeds. Most of what we know about these earliest humans has been discovered only in the past 100 years, and many parts of the world have yet to be explored. Archaeologists are constantly drawing new conclusions from their examinations of the material and biological remains of early humans.
Early humans made their most rapid cultural progress during the Upper Paleolithic period, or Late Stone Age, from 40,000 to about 10,000 BC E. During this span, humans perfected methods of making stone tools, sewing clothing, building dwellings, and baking clay. Most remarkable is the flowering of the arts—drawing, painting, sculpting, print- making, even music making. The fingerholes of flutes from this time period made from vulture bones produce a musi- cal scale much like our own. Most spectacular perhaps are caves sometimes containing more than 400 painted and engraved images of wild animals—mammoths, bison, lions, and rhinoceros—rendered with uncanny realism and
immediacy. If we imagine them in a flickering torchlight, the oxen and horses at Lascaux [LAH-skoh] in France seem to thunder across the cave wall (Fig. 1.11). Footprints found at some cave sites seem to record dancing, suggesting that these Paleolithic chambers were used for ritual festivities and storytelling, a sort of prehistoric theater hall or movie house.
Late-Stone-Age sculptors rendered human images in vivid and stylized forms carved in stone or molded in clay. Most of the figures so far unearthed are female, often with exaggerated sexual features (Fig. 1.12). Scholars speculate about the function of these first sculptures: were they reli- gious objects, adornment, or perhaps magical charms to induce fertility and ease childbirth?
Because these peoples left no written record, we can only guess at the meanings and purposes of their art. Even so, in remote places around the world Stone Age cultures did persist up until modern times. For example, the Eskimos of the Arctic, the San bushman of Africa’s Kalahari Desert, the Aborigine of the Australian outback, all managed to thrive for thousands of years in places where a modern human would not manage to survive for even a month. By studying the lifeways of these peoples, who devote much of their time to cultural activities, we can imagine some of the experience of the earliest humans.
Around 10,000 BCE, the Paleolithic period gave way to the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, as humans began to
1.11 Hall of Bulls, Lascaux, France, c. 15,000–13,000 ABD . Paint on limestone. Paleolithic artists may have applied paint by chewing charcoal and animal fat, and spitting the mixture onto the cave walls. Note how the animal forms at center left are superimposed on one another, perhaps a representation of spatial depth.
The First Humans
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Chapter 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE 27
Dan ube
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Hamburg
Vienna Budapest
Warsaw
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master more of the physical environment itself, eventually creating megalithic (large stone) structures. The Neolithic saw perhaps the most important shift in humans’ way of life, from food-gathering to food-growing economies. Human domestication of crops and animals—today called the Neolithic revolution—enabled the first large-scale human settlements, first in Asia and eventually across the globe.
1.12 Woman from Willendorf, Austria, c. 30,000–25,000 BCE. Limestone, height 4 1⁄2 ins (11.5 cm). Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna. The swelling forms of the figure’s breasts, belly, and thighs are symbolic of female fertility. Such distortions also suggest a playful sense of humor. Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, this carving may have been inspired originally by the natural nick in the stone that marks the navel.
Map 1.1 Prehistoric Europe.
28 Chapter 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE
New achievements in the humanities are being made all the time, in every part of the world, by people of every race and ethnicity, young and old, female and male. Often their creations are composed of combina- tions of the categories we have mentioned, resulting in new hybrid categories. Interestingly, most every example incorporates some sort of rejection or defiance of tradition, some innovation over and above the past, some form of superseding. Yet none of them is based on merely breaking rules, on merely destroying the past. Instead, their creative defiance is in conversation with tradition, with the humanistic achievements of the past. Without this context, these works would be mere passing fads. It is the rich continuity of the humanities that creates a context for meaning, but without being familiar and conversant with this continuity, we may barely be able to respond to this artistry. Simply put, in order to question authority, we need to know some- thing about authority first. In order to be a creator in the humanities, we need to know something about the humanities first.
Therefore, we acquire a voice in the human conver- sation by asking ourselves: What is my response to the work of art? How is my response shaped by the work itself? How is my response shaped by my own back- ground and experience?
If, as some say, knowledge is power, knowledge is also pleasure. Knowledge of a human culture gives us power in that culture and pleasure in being a part of it. This is just as true for pop music as it is for the classical sympho- nies of Mozart and Beethoven. Knowledge broadens our potential to have power and find pleasure in the world.
The works of culture discussed in this survey offer a rich texture of meaning and experience. Understanding them is often hard work—one must grasp the basic
Narrative fiction is literature that tells a story. The most common forms of narrative fiction are the novel and the short story, which usually describe events and characters in believable, true-to-life detail. However, narrative can also take the form of fantasy, recounting a dream or vision. The narrator or author often sees the action from a specific point of view and may comment on the action or characters. In reading narrative fiction, it helps to observe: What form does the narrative take? What is the action (plot)? Who are the chief characters, and what are their significant speeches and actions? What is the author’s point of view?
Fictional works often contain underlying ideas, or themes, that develop across the whole work. Identifying a literary work’s themes often helps the reader to under- stand it as a whole and connect it to other works.
Nonfictional literature takes such forms as biog- raphy, the literary account of a person’s life, and the essay, a brief exposition of the author’s views on a par- ticular subject.
An Invitation to the Adventure We live in an age of information. High-speed electronic systems power a global Internet, enabling instanta- neous communication for nearly everyone, to nearly everything, nearly everywhere. Most of the foregoing examples were drawn from arts and letters originating in just the past few years. In every case, you can look these creators up online and spend hours learning more about each one of them. Never before has it been so possible to learn so much about the achievements of humankind so readily.
200,000 BCE
C H A P T E R 1 : T I M E L I N E
200,000 BCE First modern humans appear in Africa, migrate gradually to Asia and Europe
Chapter 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE 29
creativity are enlarged. This text aims to prepare read- ers for the challenges of the humanities and introduce them to their pleasures. You are invited to join in the adventure of the human spirit. This is your invitation.
principles of music, for example, while also attending to the subtleties of a symphony or opera. The rewards are substantial. As we learn to command more fully the cultures around us, our own powers of thought and
40,000 BCE 30,000 BCE 20,000 BCE 10,000 BCE 10,000–2300 BCE Neolithic (New Stone Age) Polished stone tools; domestication of plants and animals; Stonehenge (see Fig. 2.2); potter’s wheel (Egypt); rock art (Africa)
40,000–10,000 BCE Upper Paleolithic (Late Stone Age) Chipped stone tools; earliest stone sculptures (1.12); cave paintings (1.11); migration into America
CHAPTER REVIEW A summary of questions to help the reader discover the pleasures of the humanities:
The Pictorial Arts In what medium is the picture created? What are the picture’s important lines and shapes? How does the picture use color and light? Does the picture contain significant patterns? How are the parts of the picture combined into a meaningful whole?
Sculpture Is the sculpture full-round or in relief? From what materials is the sculpture shaped? What is the sculpture’s texture? Does the sculpture imply move- ment? What is the sculpture’s relation to site?
Architecture What is the building’s function? From which materials is the building constructed? What is the building’s design? What is the relation between the exterior and interior of the building? How does the building employ the other arts?
Music What are the music’s basic melody and rhythm? What instruments or voices perform the music? Where is the music performed, and for what purpose? What is the form of the musical composition?
Dance What kind of dance is it (popular, ballet, mod- ern)? What is the relation between the dance and the
music? Is the dance mimetic? How are the dancing movements combined into a meaningful whole?
Theater How is the play staged through set, lighting, and costume? How do the director and actors interpret the dramatic script?
Opera How is the opera staged? What is the relation between the words and the music? How has a director interpreted the script? What instruments and voices are used? How has a singer interpreted the musical score and the dramatic script? How is dance incorporated into the operatic narrative?
Poetry What form does the poem take? What are its patterns of sound (meter, rhythm)? How does it employ metaphor or symbol?
Narrative Fiction What form does the narrative take? What is the action (plot)? Who are the chief characters, and what are their significant speeches and actions? What is the author’s point of view?
Personal Response What is my response to the work of art? How is that response shaped by the work itself and by my own experience?
2300–1000 BCE Bronze Age Metal tools and weapons; development of writing (China, India)
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30 2
2The Ancient World In 1922 a British archaeologist and his Egyptian assistants were the fi rst people to
look on King Tutankhamen [too-tahnk-AHH-mun] (Fig. 2.1) in nearly 3,500 years.
In the 1970s, millions more would fi le through the exhibition of King Tutankhamen’s
tomb. What was the fascination of this god-king, dead at age 19, buried in such
glittering splendor in Egypt’s fertile valley? Perhaps King Tutankhamen could
reveal the secrets of the ancient world: its stories of creation and the gods, its rulers
worshiped as gods, its monuments to divine power and the mystery of death. In the
eyes of King Tutankhamen, so ancient yet so familiar, perhaps we see the elemental
beginnings of human civilization; from his lips, perhaps we hear the tales of the fi rst
adventures of the human spirit.
K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What were the religious themes and artistic features of ancient Near Eastern civilizations?
• What was the religious function of Egyptian art? • What shared patterns of development are illustrated by early human
civilizations in Asia?
• How did the development of civilization in the Americas differ from elsewhere?
2.1 Funerary mask of King Tutankhamen, c. 1340 BCE. Gold inlaid with enamel and semiprecious stones, height 21 ins (54 cm). Egyptian Museum, Cairo. The coffin of King Tutankhamen contained his mummified body beneath this splendid gold mask. The belief that the human soul lived on after death was one of the first and most important religious ideas of humans in the ancient world. Ancient tombs in Egypt, China, and the Aegean are essential sources for our knowledge of ancient civilizations.
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32 Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD
Mesopotamia Cities—the centers of human civilization—first arose in the ancient Near East (southwest Asia from present-day Turkey to Iran and Arabia). At this region’s heart were the easily irrigated plains of Mesopotamia (literally “between the rivers,” located in present-day Iraq)—a region justifi- ably called the cradle of human civilization (Map 2.1). In Mesopotamia [mez-oh-po-TAY-mee-uh], cities arose along the Tigris and Euphrates [yoo-FRAY-teez] rivers that nurtured achievements in the arts, writing, and law. Mesopotamia’s rich cities were also the prize for a suc- cession of empires that dominated the ancient Near East and northern Africa during ancient times.
The Sumerians By 3500 BCE, Mesopotamia’s fields and pastures sup- ported a dozen cities inhabited by the Sumerians [soo-MER-ee-uns], the first people to use writing and construct monumental buildings. Sumerian writ- ing (called cuneiform) originally consisted of pictures pressed into clay tablets, probably used to record con- tracts and tabulate goods. Sumerian cuneiform eventu- ally evolved into a word-based and then a sound-based system—a rapid and important progress for human civilization. The final stage would be alphabetic writ- ing, fully achieved later in Mycenaean Greece.
G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
Megaliths The domestication of plants and animals that developed during the Neolithic period required a measure of social organization beyond that of Paleolithic hunting and gath- ering. The process of agriculture required new approaches to land use, irrigation, and settled living. Increased food security supported increasingly larger population settle- ments, cities with buildings for residences, workshops, food storage, and worship. The practice of settled agri- culture also stimulated improvements in technology, later leading to metallurgy and high-fire ceramics.
The emergence of agriculture also seems to be con- nected to the construction of megalithic (large stone) structures. One of the earliest of these, begun as early as 10,500 BCE, has been found at Göbekli Tepe [guh-BECK- lee TEPP-ee], in modern-day Turkey, in the vicinity where wheat was probably first domesticated. Here early Neolithic
builders constructed successive sacred rings, of gigan- tic T-shaped pillars carved with animal figures, thought to house a cult of the dead. The most famous megalithic shrine, Stonehenge in England (Fig. 2.2), was begun much later, commencing around 3000 BCE. Its circular outer ring is composed of standing megaliths in post-and-lintel form. The stones’ astronomical alignment indicates that Stonehenge’s builders were measuring the annual cycle of time; on-site burials, recently discovered, suggest it was also likely a place of religious worship.
In addition to signaling a surplus of wealth sufficient to reward large work crews, megalithic projects such as Stonehenge required the emergence of the organizational leadership necessary to mobilize these large work crews to undertake long-term, large-scale cooperative enterprises.
2.2 Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, England, stone settings c. 2100–2000 BCE. The largest stones of this megalith, weighing 50 tons, were hauled from a site 150 miles away. The outer circle of standing stones, topped by lintels or beams, was oriented to mark the solstice.
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Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD 33
Sumer’s riches supported a substantial ruling class and the leisure time necessary for fine arts. In a Sumerian tomb at Ur, archaeologists have found the sound box of a spectacular lyre, decorated with a bull’s head (Fig. 2.3). The head itself is gold-covered wood, with a beard of lapis lazuli, a prized blue stone. The lyre was probably used in a funeral rite that included the ritual sacrifice of the musician who played it.
The double-sided panels of the Standard of Ur, from about the same time period, give us a picture of Sumerian society (Fig. 2.4). One side depicts “War,” where the ruler (larger than all other figures) presides over his army while receiving enemy captives who have escaped trampling beneath his horse-drawn chariots. On the panel depicting “Peace,” the ruler (once again the biggest of all) feasts among his ministers (slightly smaller) and receives a procession (of the smallest
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Gaza
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Samarra
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Heliopolis (Cairo)
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2.3 Sound box of a lyre from a royal tomb at Ur, Iraq, c. 2550–2400 BCE. Wood with gold, lapis lazuli, and shell inlay, height 17 ins (43 cm). University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. The decorative panel shows mythic animals bearing food and wine to a banquet. An ass plays a version of the bull’s head lyre, while at bottom a scorpion man gives a dinner oration to musical accompaniment.
Map 2.1 The ancient world. Large-scale urban civilization originated in Mesopotamia and spread westward across the Mediterranean and eastward into India and China.
34 Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD
bulls and horses of Paleolithic cave art stay in line and parade docilely.
The Sumerian religion, as with most ancient belief, is known through surviving fragments of myth (see Key Concept, page 43). The Sumerian creation myth, called the Enuma elish [ay-NOO-mah AY-leesh], reflects the violence of the ancient world. The mother goddess Tiamat does battle with the rowdy seventh generation of gods, led by the fearsome Marduk. After Marduk slays Tiamat, he cleaves her body in half to create the mountains of Mesopotamia. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates arise from the flow of Tiamat’s blood. The creation of humanity is equally gruesome. From the blood of a sacrificed deity, Marduk shapes the first man to serve the gods as a slave.
In their sacred buildings, the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia honored the divine forces that controlled the rain and harvests. The first monumental religious
figures) including porters bearing bundles of goods; herdsmen with their donkeys, sheep, goats, and cattle; and a musician and his female accompanist, a singer or dancer perhaps. The division of each panel into three registers underscores the depiction of social stratifica- tion. War-making requires great leaders who are sus- tained by the tribute of a class-society. In Ur, the wild
2.4 The Standard of Ur, c. 2600 BCE. Double-paneled wood frame inlaid with mosaic of shell, limestone, lapis lazuli, set in bitumen, each approx. 8 × 19 ins (20.3 × 48.3 cm). British Museum, London. The original function of this artifact remains a mystery. Found crushed in one of the largest graves in the Royal Cemetery at Ur (near modern Baghdad), this restoration is a guess of its original arrangement.
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Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD 35
Code depicts him before the throne of Shamash, god of the sun and justice, receiving his blessing.
The Old Babylonian empire was followed by that of the Assyrians, skilled and ruthless warriors whose conquests extended to lower Egypt. One Assyrian ruler decorated his palace at Nimrud (in modern-day Iraq) with scenes of lion hunts and luxuriant gardens (Fig. 2.6). When Babylonian rule was revived in the seventh century BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II [neh-buh-kahd-NEZZ- er] (ruled 604–562 BCE) rebuilt the capital. It included the imposing Ishtar Gate, made of turquoise bricks, and a great ziggurat described as having seven levels, each painted a different color.
The last and greatest Near Eastern empire was that of the Persians, established by the conqueror Cyrus II (ruled 559–530 BCE). His successor Darius built a pal- ace at Persepolis that boasted towering columns and a grand staircase, decorated with a procession of figures
structures were Sumerian stepped pyramids called ziggurats. Often made of mud-brick, the ziggurat was actually a gigantic altar. In mounting its steps, worship- ers rose beyond the ordinary human world into the realm of the gods. The great ziggurat at Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 BCE) was dedicated to the moon-god and was probably topped by a temple for sacrifices (Fig. 2.5).
Empires of the Near East The myths and art of the ancient Near East reflected the succession of conquerors and empires that governed the region. Rulers were regarded as gods, sons of the gods, or agents of the sacred realm. By this notion of sacred kingship, the gods’ power and blessings flowed directly through the king’s person. In the world’s oldest heroic story, the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 BCE), the Sumerian hero-king Gilgamesh learns that immortal- ity belongs only to the gods. He returns home to rule his kingdom with benevolence. The Old Babylonian king Hammurabi [hah-moo-RAH-bee] (ruled 1792– 1750 BCE) instituted a written legal code dictating the orderly resolution of disputes and uniform punishments for crime. A stone pillar carved with Hammurabi’s
2.5 Reconstruction drawing of the ziggurat of Ur-Nammu at Ur, Iraq, c. 2100 BCE. Rising from the Mesopotamian plain, the ziggurat lifted the altars of Sumerian worshipers toward the sacred region of the gods. Comparable “sacred mountains” can be seen in the pyramids of Egyptian and Mesoamerican civilizations.
2.6 Ceremonial Lion Hunt, from the Palace of Assurnasipal II, Nimrud, Iraq. c. 875–860 BCE. Alabaster relief, height approx. 39 ins (99.1 cm). British Museum, London. In a vivid illustration of acumen and valor, the ruler slays lions while dashing in a chariot.
0 100 ft
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36 Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD
Egypt: Religion and Society
The Greek historian Herodotus said the Egyptians were the most religious people he knew, and their religious faith inspired much of Egypt’s greatest art. Like most ancient peoples, the Egyptians believed in many gods, a form of religion known as polytheism. Some gods (often portrayed as animals) had only local powers. Other deities played roles in mythic dramas of national significance. The myth of Isis and Osiris, for example, reenacts the political struggle between lower and upper Egypt. The god Seth (representing upper Egypt) mur- ders and dismembers his brother Osiris. But Osiris’ wife Isis gathers his scattered limbs and resurrects him in the underworld. Henceforth, Osiris rules the realm of life after death. Seth, meanwhile, is defeated by the falcon- god Horus, in whose name Egypt’s pharaohs ruled the realm of the living.
bearing taxes and tribute from Mesopotamia’s rich cities. It was an unmistakable statement of Persian dom- ination. In the fourth century BCE, however, Persepolis itself fell to the Greek general Alexander the Great, who left its ruins to stand in the desert as a reminder of the vanity of power (Fig. 2.7).
Ancient Egypt In contrast to the upheaval and diversity of the Near East, the people of Egypt created a remarkably stable and homogeneous civilization that endured some 3,000 years. Geographically, Egypt was unified by the Nile River and enriched by its annual floods. Politically and religiously, it was united under the rule of the pharaohs, god-kings who erected stupendous monuments along the banks of the Nile. The vitality of Egypt’s religion fostered an achievement in the arts that still inspires awe today.
2.7 Ruins of Persepolis, Iran, c. 500 BCE. The Persian empire included nearly all the ancient Near East, from the Black Sea to Egypt; expansion westward into Europe was blocked by Greek resistance. Classical Greek sculptors may well have seen and imitated the decoration of the Persian palace in the friezes they created on classical temples.
2.8 Pyramids of Mycerinus, Chefren, and Cheops at Giza, Egypt, c. 2525–2460 BCE. In addition to their religious and political significance, the pyramids were massive state-sponsored employment projects.
Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD 37
The early Egyptians believed that life continued unchanged after death, an expectation that gave rise to the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom, monumen- tal tombs built to contain the bodies of the pharaohs. The Great Pyramids at Giza (Fig. 2.8) are gigantic con- structions of limestone block. They were part of a vast funerary complex that included lesser buildings and processional causeways lined with statues (Fig. 2.9). The largest pyramid covered 13 acres (5.2 ha) at its base, and was built of more than two million huge stone blocks. Shafts and rooms in the interior accommodated the pharaoh’s mummified body and the huge treasure of objects required for his happy existence after death.
Attention to the spirits of the dead remained a cen- tral theme of Egyptian religion and art. Though they never duplicated the pyramids’ scale, rock-cut tombs were carved into the rocky cliffs along the Nile in the so-called Valley of the Kings during the Middle Kingdom period. These tombs were hidden to protect them (unsuccessfully) from grave robbers.
The Arts of Egypt Even in the wall painting, informal sculpture, and other arts that made their lives colorful and pleasant, the Egyptians were conservative and restrained. The one exception was during the brief reign of Akhenaten [ahk- NAH-tun] (ruled 1379–1362 BCE), who introduced new religious ideas and fostered a distinctive artistic style of great intimacy. Shortly after he came to power, Akhenaten broke with the dominant cult of Amon-Re and its powerful priesthood at the temple complex in Thebes, where Akhenaten established a new royal resi- dence. He fostered the worship of the little-known god Aten, the sun-disc, whose life-giving powers he praised in a famous hymn:
Earth brightens when you dawn in lightland,
When you shine as Aten of daytime;
As you dispel the dark,
As you cast your rays,
The Two Lands are in festivity.
Awake they stand on their feet,
You have roused them;
Bodies cleansed, clothed,
Their arms adore your appearance.
The entire land sets out to work,
All beasts browse on their herbs;
Trees, herbs are sprouting,
Birds fly from their nests,
Their wings greeting your ka.1
2.9 Mycerinus (or Menkaure) and Queen Khamerernebty, Giza, c. 2515 BCE. Graywacke, height 541⁄2 ins (139 cm). Harvard University—Museum of Fine Arts Expedition. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This sculptural pair stood on the processional causeway leading to Mycerinus’ pyramid. The figures’ bodily proportions were calculated on a grid determined by a strict rule, or “canon,” of proportion, like Greek statues of the Greek classical era.
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38 Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD
Death at an Egyptian Banquet Well-to-do ancient Egyptians often dined on fish and roasted birds and drank a wine made from barley. When they were finished, reports the Greek historian Herodotus, they reminded themselves of their own mor- tality with this morbid custom:
In social meetings among the rich, when the banquet is ended, a servant carries round to the several guests a coffin, in which there is a wooden image of a corpse, carved and painted to resemble nature as nearly as possible, about a cubit or two cubits in length. As he shows it to each guest in turn, the servant says, “Gaze here, and drink and be merry; for when you die, such will you be.” 2
HERODOTUS The Persian Wars
2.10 Akhenaten and his family receive the blessing of the sun god Aten, Tell el-Amarna. Eighteenth dynasty, c. 1353–1336 BCE. Painted limestone relief, approx. 12 × 15 ins (31 × 38 cm). Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Agyptisches Museum. The strangely stylized proportions of the figures are distinctive to the short-lived “Amarna style” of Akhenaten’s reign. The technique used here is called sunken relief, in which the outlines of figures are incised deeply into a background that remains raised.
2.11 Painting from the tomb of Queen Nefertari at Thebes, Egypt, 1290–1224 BCE. At the left, the crowned queen approaches the ibis-headed god Thoth, the divine scribe who records human deeds. To the right, Osiris is seated on the throne where he judges the souls of the dead. Nefertari’s figure is carved in a high relief that captures the contours of fingers, legs, and facial detail.
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD 39
The Great Hymn to Aten was inscribed on a tomb at Amarna, the site about 200 miles (320 km) up the Nile from Thebes where Akhenaten established his new court. Distanced from the temples of Karnak and Luxor, the court at Amarna fostered a style of unprecedented intimacy. Images depict the royal family—Akhenaten, his queen Nefertiti, and their children—lounging beneath the life-giving rays of the sun-disc. The pha- raoh kisses one child, while Nefertiti bounces another on her knee (Fig. 2.10).
Akhenaten’s religious and artistic innovations were short-lived. His successor Tutankhamen (1361– 1352 BCE)—whose tomb was such a rich and famous discovery in the twentieth century—restored the cult of Amon-Re and destroyed most of the buildings dedi- cated to Aten. A late blossoming of Egyptian art under Rameses II (ruled 1292–1225 BCE) saw yet more monu- ments to power and richly decorated tombs.
It was not uncommon for Egyptian queens to attain considerable status and power within the royal court. Early in the New Kingdom, Queen Hatshepsut ruled all of Egypt for two decades (1479–1458 BCE) and memo- rialized herself with a huge colonnaded temple near the Valley of the Kings. At Abu Simbel, equal in size to the colossal statue of Rameses II was the figure of his favored queen Nefertari. Tradition holds that Nefertari assisted Rameses on diplomatic missions that helped expand the Egyptian empire.
Queen Nefertari’s tomb in the Valley of the Queens represents Egyptian art at a height of the nation’s international power (Fig. 2.11). The richly carved and painted walls depict the descent of the queen’s ka, or spirit, into the underworld. Gently led by the figure of Isis, the queen greets the pantheon of Egyptian gods, still celebrated in their ancient animal aspects. From each deity, Nefertari’s spirit acquires the powers that prepare her soul for final judgment before the imposing figure of Osiris. The delicate artistry of Nefertari’s tomb celebrates the continuity of a religious belief and artistic tradition that had evolved for thousands of years.
The height of Rameses II’s rule was followed by a long decline in Egypt’s power, as foreign incursions alternated with periods of independence. Invading from Nubia to the south, a Kushite kingdom briefly controlled all of Egypt (early eighth century–671 BCE). The Kush empire, with its unique blend of Egyptian and Nubian culture, ruled the middle Nile region for another thousand years. Lower Egypt fell to the Assyrians and then to the hated Persian empire, until Alexander the Great’s conquests in 332 BCE drew Egypt into the Hellenistic world.
2.12 Seal impression of an ecstatic yogi in seated meditation, Mohenjo-Daro, Indus Valley (modern Pakistan), c. 2500–1500 BCE. National Museum, Karachi. Scholars debate whether the Indus Valley civilization had a written language. Whereas several hundred different written signs like those seen here can be found, no text exists where they are strung together in sentences to form extended thoughts. They remain undeciphered.
Ancient Asia By the third millennium BCE, the rise of agriculture and urbanization supported rapid development in centers of human settlement, from Asia to the Americas. As in the ancient Near East, early civilizations in Asia arose in great river valleys.
The Indus Valley In the rich Indus Valley of southern Asia (today’s Pakistan and India), the ancient world’s largest civili- zation thrived for a thousand years. The Indus Valley (or Harappan) civilization (2600–1750 BCE) supported a network of comfortable cities that traded across a broad swath of the Indian subcontinent. Modern exca- vations at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa have revealed the remains of unfortified cities laid out on an orderly grid plan. With public baths, sanitary sewers, and large assembly halls, the Indus Valley cities offered comforts that some city-dwellers might wish for today.
The remains of Indus Valley civilization reveal a thriving cultural life but, surprisingly, nothing of the
40 Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD
humanity’s most ancient surviving religious traditions. The oldest Vedic texts are hymns to the sky-gods and prayers to accompany fire-sacrifice, the principal Vedic ritual. About 800 BCE, Vedic sages composed philo- sophical commentaries, known as the Upanishads, that speculated on the unity of the individual soul and the universe. The Vedic tradition blossomed again between 400 and 200 BCE with the composition of the popular epics Mahabharata and Ramayana. This rich body of scripture and poetry became the basis for India’s domi- nant faith, Hinduism, which took shape in the sixth century BCE. Hinduism sanctioned a rigid class or caste system, through which virtuous souls might ascend in a cycle of death and rebirth. Hinduism’s beliefs were the foundation of subsequent Asian faiths, including Buddhism.
Bronze Age China Of all the ancient civilizations, only China can trace its unbroken development from the present day to its
elaborate temple cultures found at other ancient cen- ters. Scenes on sculpted seals indicate that Indus resi- dents venerated sacred trees and horned animals such as their humped cattle (Fig. 2.12). Other Harappan sculpture was probably made for personal enjoyment. For example, the bronze figurine of a young dancer cap- tures the gangly insouciance of adolescence (Fig. 2.13). On the other hand, the dignified solemnity of a male bust with the low forehead and broad features charac- teristic of Harappan figures has given it the nickname “Priest King,” although we know neither whether he represents a priest or a king (Fig. 2.14).
About 1750 BCE, the spacious Harappan cities suf- fered a decline that scholars long attributed to foreign invasion but that is now blamed on climate change. About the same time, a warlike, horse-riding people who called themselves Aryans migrated into southern Asia. From Aryan language and lore arose the Vedas [VAY- duhz], India’s founding religious scriptures and one of
2.13 Figure of a young dancer, Mohenjo-Daro, Indus Valley, c. 2500 BCE. Cast bronze, height 3 7⁄8 ins (10.8 cm). National Museum of India, New Delhi. Harappan metallurgists used an advanced technique known as the lost-wax (cire perdue) process for casting bronze.
2.14 Torso of a “Priest King.” From Mohenjo-Daro, Indus Valley civilization, c. 2600–1900 BCE. Soapstone, height 6 7⁄8 ins (17.5 cm). National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi. The trefoil patterns of the tunic were drilled and filled with red pig- ment. The eyes, headband, and armband may also have been inlaid.
View the web resource on Mohenjo-Daro on myartslab.com
Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD 41
Bronze Age beginnings. Agriculture in ancient China dates to around 5000 BCE, town life to around 4000 BCE. Chinese civilization appeared in the valleys of the two great rivers of its central region, the Yellow (Huang He) and the Yangtze (Chang Jiang) rivers.
The continuity of Chinese culture is especially strik- ing if we consider that the system of writing in use in China today is essentially the same as that instituted nearly 4,000 years ago. Chinese writing first emerged as a way of recording the divination of oracles used to guide the daily decisions of state (Fig. 2.15). In due time, omens were codified in China’s oldest book, the Yijing (The Book of Changes) [ee-ching], compiled c. 1150 BCE, which spells out the oracular meaning of the 64 arrange- ments of the eight trigrams. Along with the Yijing, four other “great books” of ancient China survive: The Book of Rites (Liji), The Book of Odes (Shijing), The Annals (Chunqiu Shida), and the Book of History (Shujing). (A fifth, The Book of Music, has been lost.)
According to the Shujing, Bronze Age China begins its imperial history with three great dynasties: the Xia,
the Shang, and the Zhou. While the Xia is still consid- ered to be legendary, archaeologists may yet prove its existence as they have for the once-mythic Shang. The Shang [shahng] Dynasty (1766–1045 BCE) was a war- rior culture whose rulers built walled cities and gigantic tombs in the Yellow River Valley. Their principal artis- tic media were carved jade (a hard green stone) and cast bronze. Shang bronzes included food, water, and wine vessels used in the sacrificial rites of ancestor worship; they were profusely decorated with fantastic animals, including a design called the taotie, a bilaterally sym- metric animal mask with bulging eyes, suggestive of mysterious cosmic powers (Fig. 2.16).
The Shang fell to the conquering Zhou (1045– 256 BCE), a feudal kingdom whose king reigned as the Son of Heaven. Like the Shang, the Zhou [jo] practiced ancestor worship and excelled at the manufacture of ritual bronze objects. As evidence of his extraordinary love of music, one Zhou ruler was buried with a caril- lon of 65 bronze bells, among hundreds of other musi- cal instruments (Fig. 2.17).
2.15 Ox bone inscribed with written characters. Shang dynasty. Diviners asked a question of the ancestral spirits and then heated the “oracle bone” until it cracked. After interpreting the shape of the crack, the question and answer were inscribed on the bone with a bronze knife. These written characters are the direct ancestors of modern Chinese writing.
2.16 Covered ritual wine vessel or fang-yi, Shang dynasty, c. 1300–1100 BCE. Bronze, height 12 ins (30.2 cm). Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums. The ambiguous, mask-like design on this vessel, the taotie, can be interpreted as a face with the flaring nostrils of a horned beast, or as two dragons facing each other in profile.
42 Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD
In Mesoamerica, a civilization called the Olmec arose on the eastern coast of Mexico around 1500 BCE. Some scholars call the Olmecs the Americas’ “mother cul- ture” because their cosmology, calendar-making, and pyramid construction influenced so many others. In a distinctive artistic style, the Olmecs carved stone images of the jaguar and the feathered serpent, both impor- tant to Mesoamerican religious belief. The Olmecs also sculpted huge helmeted heads, some 8 feet (2.4 m) tall, probably images of chieftains whom they regarded as gods (Fig. 2.18).
While the later Zhou period was marred by warring factions until the Warring States period (402–221 BCE) finally splintered the dynasty, two great philosophical attitudes had arisen in Chinese culture: Confucianism and Daoism. Somewhat opposing and yet complemen- tary, Confucian ethics sought truth through a practi- cal connection with society, while Daoist ethics sought truth through a mystical connection with nature. These opposing outlooks—engagement in and withdrawal from public life—have remained perennial impulses at the root of Chinese arts and letters ever since.
Ancient America Modern humans first migrated into the Americas, or New World, some 20,000 years ago or possibly even earlier, probably along a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. The exact course of human immigration and occupation is still debated, but by 7000 BCE New World peoples were domesticating crops such as maize, squash, and cotton. The first settled urban centers appeared in Mesoamerica (today’s Mexico and Central America) and along the Andes mountain range in South America. Distinctive and often highly advanced civili- zations rose and fell in these two regions, supporting urban capitals and populations that may have equaled Old World cities in size and achievement.
2.17 Set of bells, from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, Suixian, Hubei, Zhou dynasty, 433 BCE. Bronze with bronze and timber frame, frame height 9 ft (2.74 m), length 25 ft (7.62 m). Hubei Provincial Museum, Wuhan. Excavated in a fully preserved state in 1978, this carillon has a six- tone scale in a 12-tone system based on fifths and thirds. Each bell sounds two precise tones, depending on where it is struck.
2.18 Colossal head, from San Lorenzo, La Venta, Mexico, Middle Formative period, c. 900 BCE. Basalt, height 7 ft 5 ins (226 cm). La Venta Park, Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico. The Olmecs carved colossal heads like this one.
Read the document on Daoism on myartslab.com
Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD 43
Later Mesoamerican cultural centers would bear the imprint of Olmec style and thought. In the high mountain valleys of today’s Mexico, a mysterious cul- ture built the region’s most sacred city, Teotihuacán, where Mesoamericans believed the gods themselves had been born (see Global Perspective box, page 127). The most impressive Mesoamerican city was the Aztec
imperial capital of Tenochtitlán, a spectacular floating city of pyramid altars and lush gardens. The Spaniard chronicler Bernal Díaz would write that Cortés’s sol- diers “who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome” had never seen “so large a marketplace and so full of people, and so well regulated and arranged.”3
K E Y C O N C E P T
Myth Ancient humans celebrated their most important beliefs in myths, stories that explained in symbolic terms the nature of the cosmos and humans’ place in the world. Myths arose from the earliest humans’ evident belief in a higher real- ity, a sacred dimension beyond or beneath human expe- rience. Myths described the beings of this hidden world, the gods themselves and the extraordinary humans who communed with the divine. A culture’s mythic lore passed orally from one generation to the next. This lore included myths proper as well as folk tales, legends, fables, and folk wisdom, all elaborated in a bizarre symbolic logic akin to that of dreams. Eventually cultures recorded their myths in written epics and sacred scriptures, the forms in which we inherit these stories today.
Myths served as the science and philosophy of ancient peoples, explaining cosmic mysteries in the graphic terms of human experience—virtue and trickery, birth and death, sex and war. Often, myths describe vivid scenes that seem bizarre to the modern mind. For example, in the Maya Popol Vuh, the gods create humans first from mud, then from wood. But the heaven’s rulers are so disappointed with the result that they obliterate the world in a dark, resin- ous downpour. Finally the gods shape a suitable race of
humans from ground maize: “of yellow corn and of white corn they made their flesh; of corn-meal dough they made the arms and the legs of man,” reads the ancient text. The gods then command humanity to honor them with prayer, blood sacrifice, and artful gifts.
The Maya creation story recounts themes common to mythic thinking: the world’s destruction by fire or flood, humans’ obligation to sacrifice to the gods, and human- ity’s penchant for violating divine commands (Fig. 2.19). In myth and ritual, humans celebrate the cosmic order and commune with divine forces that control their lives. Myths justify catastrophic events and individual misfortune as part of a greater purpose.
Anthropologist Bronislav Malinowski saw myths as social charters in narrative form, the equivalent of today’s political constitutions and social histories. Myths were “not merely a story told but a reality lived,” he claimed.
Modern thinkers have studied myth as a model of psy- chological truth. Religious scholar Mircea Eliade argued that myths revealed a “sacred history,” a mysterious and sublime truth that cannot be explained by rational or scien- tific language. Pioneer psychologist Carl Jung claimed that myths expressed universal mental images, or archetypes, images that also appear in dreams, literature, and art. Even today, mythic truth—the stories and lore of a sacred dimen- sion beyond our experience—lies at the core of religious and spiritual belief.
2.19 Archaeologist Richard Hansen in 2009, displaying a newly discovered frieze representing the twin heroes of the Popol Vuh, Hunapú and Ixbalanqué, c. 300 BCE, at El Mirador, Guatemala. The frieze illustrates the twins swimming after rescuing the head of their father, Hun Hunapú, who was deceived and decapitated by the gods of the underworld.
Read an excerpt from the Popol Vuh on myartslab.com
44 Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD44 2 The Ancient World44 Chapter 2 ANCIENT ROME
10,500 BCE 4000 BCE 3000 BCE3500 BCE c. 5000 BCE Human settlements arise in the Andes
c. 3500 BCE First Mesopotamian cities
3150–2700 BCE Egypt united; first hieroglyphic writing
3000 BCE Stonehenge begun (2.2)
c. 10,500 BCE Neolithic builders construct shrine at Göbekli Tepe
C H A P T E R 2 : T I M E L I N E
2.20 Stirrup-spout bottle of hammered sheet gold, decorated with a geometric design, Chavín style, Huarmey Valley, Peru, 900–200 BCE. AMNH, Anthropology 41.0/369. Chavín de Huántar, in the north central highlands of Peru, was an ancient oracle and pilgrimage center. Blending cultures on the coast and highlands, Chavín united the ancient world of pre-Columbian Peru. Although used by numerous later cultures in Peru, the symbolic meaning of the distinctive stirrup-handle-spout form is unknown.
Chapter 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD 45
In North America, human settlement was more dif- fuse and took a smaller scale, with important centers in the desert Southwest and the Mississippi River basin. Few North American peoples practiced large-scale agriculture or built the monumental urban centers of their sister civilizations to the south. One fascinating monumental construction was a great serpent mound in the Ohio River Valley. Small-scale art focused on decorated pottery; stone carving was rare.
Compared to their little-known beginnings, the end- ing of the New World civilizations is all too familiar. In the sixteenth century, European conquerors hungry for gold and silver subjugated Aztec and Inca empires and laid waste to their glittering cities. Native populations were devastated by European diseases, suffering death rates as high as 95 percent. In spite of resistance, the survivors fell to European’s colonial rule, their conti- nent’s glorious achievement all but a faint memory.
In the Andes, recent discoveries show that human settlements as early as 5000 BCE had mastered the culti- vation of crops, irrigation, and large-scale construction. The first great cultural flowering in the Andes came with the Chavín, contemporaries of the Olmecs, centered in the coastal regions of today’s Peru (Fig. 2.20). The Chavín culture created ceremonial complexes of pyra- midal altars and erected huge carved monoliths. Their iconography, typical of Andean civilization, included sacred animals like the caiman, serpent, and cat. The greatest ancient city was Tiahuanaco (also Tiwanaku), located on the high plateau of Bolivia near Lake Titicaca. At its height around 400 BCE, this city’s popu- lation may have reached 40,000 and its imperial power extended north along the Andean coast. Tiahuanaco’s highly stratified society anticipated the rule of the Inca a thousand years later, when the Andean region was unified in a brief but remarkable empire.
Ancient America 45Chapter 2 ANCIENT ROME 45
2500 BCE 2000 BCE 1500 BCE 1000 BCE 500 BCE 612 BCE New Babylon kingdom rules Mesopotamia
c. 560 BCE Gautama Buddha born in northern India
c. 500 BCE Palace of Darius and Xerxes at Persepolis (2.7)
480 BCE Confucius active in China
400 BCE Height of power, city of Tiahuanaco, in the South American Andes
400–200 BCE Indian epics the Ramayana and Mahabharata
c. 2000 BCE Epic of Gilgamesh
1790–1750 BCE Law code of Hammurabi
c. 1500 BCE Olmec civilization arises in Mesoamerica
1379–1362 BCE Temple to Aten built in Egypt (2.10)
c. 1340 BCE Death of Tutankhamen
c. 1150 BCE Yijing (The Book of Changes) compiled in China
2550–2400 BCE Sound box from royal tomb at Ur, Sumeria (2.3)
c. 2525 BCE Great Pyramids begun at Giza, Egypt (2.8)
c. 2500 BCE Dancing figure, Indus Valley (2.13)
CHAPTER REVIEW
Mesopotamia Why did cities first appear in Mesopotamia? How did the Sumerians develop the first forms of writing? What is the Enuma elish? Describe a ziggurat. Who was Gilgamesh? For what is the Babylonian king Hammurabi best remembered?
Ancient Egypt How did the geography of Egypt affect its civilization? What is a pharaoh? Describe the Egyptian concept of the afterlife. What was the purpose of the pyramids? What was unorthodox about the pha- raoh Akhenaten?
Ancient Asia What conditions led to the development of Harappan civilization? What are the Vedas? How was the Vedic tradition introduced in the Indus Valley? What were the primary media of Bronze Age China? Who were the Shang and the Zhou? What is the Yijing? Describe the philosophical outlooks of early China.
Ancient America Where did the first cities of the Americas arise? What is the Popol Vuh? Where did the Chavín culture arise?
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3Ancient Greece K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What did the earliest civilizations in Greece contribute to the rise of classical Greece?
• How did ancient Greece enter its Golden Age? • How does the Acropolis express the confi dence and pride of
ancient Athens?
• How did the Greeks develop the performing arts? • According to the Greeks, what are the aims of philosophy? • How does Hellenistic civilization differ from the civilization
that preceded it?
Even in ruins, the Parthenon of Athens stands perfectly balanced and
noble in its proportions (Fig. 3.1). The temple stood above Athens as the
city reached a pinnacle of cultivation and achievement seldom equaled
in history. The Parthenon’s harmonious outlines embody the classical
spirit of ancient Greece (Map 3.1): the belief that human intelligence
could bring order to the world and that art could capture the essence of
human form and feeling. From its height in ancient Athens, this spirit
spread across the Mediterranean, becoming a standard by which later
civilizations would measure themselves.
3.1 The Parthenon, Athens. As the Athenian leader Pericles predicted, the ruins of the temples of Athens still stand as “mighty monuments of our power, which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages.” 1
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48 Chapter 3 ANCIENT GREECE
Early Greece Of all the civilizations of the ancient world, one came to have the greatest influence on Western societies—that of the ancient Greeks, honored for their enduring achieve- ments in art, literature, philosophy, and science. Greek civilization originated in two Bronze Age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean, the Minoan (c. 2500– 1250 BCE) and Mycenaean (c. 1600–1150 BCE) cultures. Both were eventually destroyed by natural calamity and invasion, and after a “dark age” there arose the earliest Greek civilization proper (900–480 BCE).
The early Greeks were at first backward in com- parison to their Mediterranean neighbors, but they developed quickly, stimulated by contact with Egypt and Persia, and soon built colonies along the northern Mediterranean. They formed an ethnic identity around memories of the Mycenaean and Aegean cultures that lay in ruins around them. Those memories eventu- ally focused on a single legendary event—the siege of Troy—a tale that they embellished in poetry and in art.
The Aegean World The Minoans [muh-NOH-uns] established an expan- sive and distinctive civilization on the Mediterranean island of Crete. They were a skillful, pleasure-loving people, whose power and prosperity depended on a powerful navy. Their civilization reached a high point of social and artistic development around 1400 BCE. The Minoans constructed sprawling palace-cities of brightly colored and undefended buildings. Archaeologists named the island civilization after the legendary King Minos, whose queen bore the feared monster, the Minotaur. The bull was an important part of Minoan religious ceremony, which featured the spectacular sport of bull-leaping (Fig. 3.2).
The Minoans were skillful artisans, producing small objects that were easily traded with their Mediterranean neighbors. Minoans crafted jewelry and figurines in precious metal and ceramics, like the earthenware Snake Goddess (Fig. 3.3). The figure depicts a priest- ess engaged in cultic worship of a Minoan deity. The Minoan religion centered on the worship of female
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IA
THESSALY
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CRETE CYPRUS
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Knidos
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Athens
Naxos
Chios
Melos
Paros
Siphnos
50 km
50 miles
Map 3.1 Ancient Greece.
Chapter 3 ANCIENT GREECE 49
deities, and Minoan society granted women an equality and freedom unusual in the ancient world.
The Mycenaeans [my-suh-NEE-uns] were a war- rior civilization that inhabited fortified palace-cities on the Greek mainland. From their citadels, Mycenaean warriors mounted pirate expeditions to the rich cities of the Aegean basin. Later Greek epics dimly recall Mycenaean expeditions in search of plunder and slaves, and indeed modern archaeology confirms the possibil- ity of a Mycenaean expedition to Troy in Asia Minor, which was burned around 1250 BCE.
Excavations inside the Mycenaean palaces reveal a civilization of fantastic wealth, fascinated by death and the afterlife. At Mycenae, archaeologists have unearthed shaft graves where Mycenaean royalty was entombed. The rows of graves inside the fortress’s main gate most likely served as a circle of honor for ancestral heroes. The face of one such hero is visible in the famed “Mask of Agamemnon” (Fig. 3.4), discovered by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1876.
Mycenaean predominance in the Aegean was brief. Around 1150 BCE, invaders from the north entered Greece, overrunning the Mycenaean palaces and dispersing their civilization. Only a few Mycenaean
3.2 Bull-leaping in ancient Crete, fresco from the royal palace at Knossos, Crete, c. 1500 BCE. Male and female acrobats perform somersaults over the back of a charging bull. The painter portrays the athletes as if in a multi- exposure photograph: one grasps the horns, a second vaults across the bull’s back, and the third finishes her stunt.
3.3 Snake Goddess, from the royal palace at Knossos, Crete, c. 1600 BCE. Faience, height 11 ins (30 cm). Archaeological Museum, Heraklion. The bare bodice and flounced skirt were part of Minoan religious costume. The snakes in the priestess’s hands and the owl on top of her head were symbols of sacred power in ancient goddess- centered religions. The head and headdress are reconstructions.
3.4 “Mask of Agamemnon,” from a grave in Mycenae, c. 1500 BCE. Beaten gold, height 101⁄8 ins (26 cm). National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Such portraiture, delicately wrought in the region’s most precious metal, was reserved for Mycenaean royalty. In other ancient cultures (Egypt, China), such costly objects were buried with the owner to ease his life in the afterworld.
View the Closer Look at the Snake Goddess on myartslab.com
50 Chapter 3 ANCIENT GREECE
Like the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Indian Mahabharata, the Homeric poems are both epics, long narrative works that recount deeds on a heroic scale, centered on a hero who defines a sense of ethnic or national identity. Homer’s epic heroes were Achilles [ah-KILL-eez], the greatest warrior of the Greek forces at Troy, and Odysseus [oh-DIS-ee-us], the wily survivor who voyaged home from Troy. Homer’s heroes served as models of rightful action and skill- ful speech. Indeed, educated Greeks still quoted the speeches of Homer’s warriors seven centuries after the Mycenaean palaces had fallen into ruin.
In the Iliad, war between Trojans and Greeks (called Achaeans [ah-KEE-uns]) provides the setting for a tragic drama of wrath and sorrow. After being insulted by his chieftain Agamemnon, the Greeks’ greatest cham- pion Achilles angrily withdraws from battle. However, after his best-loved companion Patroclus tries to rally the Greeks by wearing Achilles’ armor into battle, but is instead killed by Troy’s greatest warrior Hector, Achilles rejoins the fray. He avenges Patroclus’ death by defeating Hector in mortal combat, and defiling his body (Fig. 3.5). Some nights later, King Priam of Troy steals into Achilles’ tent to beg for the return of his son’s body:
So he [Priam] spoke, and stirred in the other [Achilles] a
passion of grieving for his own father. He took the old
man’s hand and pushed him gently away, and the two
remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of Achilleus
and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and Achilleus
wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos.
The sound of their mourning moved in the house. Then
when great Achilleus had taken full satisfaction in sorrow
and the passion for it had gone from his mind and body,
thereafter he rose from his chair, and took the old man
by the hand, and set him on his feet again, in pity for
the grey head and the grey beard, and spoke to him and
addressed him in winged words: “… Such is the way the
gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in
unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows.
There are two urns that stand on the door-sill of Zeus.
They are unlike for the gifts they bestow: an urn of evils,
an urn of blessings. If Zeus who delights in thunder
mingles these and bestows them on man, he shifts, and
moves now in evil, again in good fortune. But when Zeus
bestows from the urn of sorrows, he makes a failure of
man, and evil hunger drives him over the shining earth,
and he wanders respected neither of gods nor mortals.”2
HOMER
Iliad, Book XXIV
centers (Athens, for one) remained intact. Following Mycenae’s fall, Greece entered the Dark Age (about 1150–900 BCE), when writing, artistic crafts, and other cultural skills were lost.
Early Greek Poetry Out of this turmoil emerged the people we call the Greeks. By 733 BCE, city-states on the Greek main- land were sending expeditions to establish settlements across the Aegean to Asia Minor, and by 600 BCE Greek-speaking colonies were scattered from the Black Sea to Sicily.
Though geographically diffuse and politically con- tentious, the early Greeks were unified by language, religion, and legend. The most important written works of early Greece—the first masterpieces of Western literature—tell of the siege of Troy, an ancient city in Asia Minor, in a pair of poems entitled the Iliad and the Odyssey, both attributed to the poet Homer and possibly composed in the eighth century BCE. The ancient Greeks acknowledged Homer as their great- est poet. Modern scholars, however, cannot agree on whether a poet named Homer ever existed, or if the two Homeric poems had the same author.
3.5 Fighting over the body of Patroclus, scene from a black-fi gure vase, c. 530 BCE. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Early Greek art drew images from legendary accounts of the Trojan War; here Greeks and Trojans contest the body of Patroclus, Achilles’ companion. Note the black-figure technique, in which details are scratched into the black glaze. Read the document on Greek poetry on myartslab.com
Chapter 3 ANCIENT GREECE 51
Religion and Philosophy in Early Greece
When Achilles complains of the sorrows sent by Zeus, he expresses the common Greek attitude toward the gods’ power over human destiny. The deities of Greek religion were highly anthropomorphic—shaped like humans—and took an active role in the lives of mor- tals. In the Iliad, for example, the gods Apollo and Hera visit pestilence and disaster on those who displease them. To win the gods’ favor, pious Greeks engaged in animal sacrifice at altars and temples, assisted by temple priests and attendants. The Greeks’ single most important religious institution was the oracle at Delphi, where a frenzied priestess squatted over the pool of Apollo and pronounced the god’s answers to the questions of believers.
Sappho’s Lyric Poetry When the Greeks tired of the epic’s high drama and elevated style, they could turn to lyric poetry, which took its name from the lyre, the stringed instrument used to accompany the recita- tion of these poems (Fig. 3.6). Lyric poems are brief, often written for a specific occasion, and express inner thoughts and feelings. While an epic bard might sing at court, lyric poetry was probably reserved for less for- mal occasions, such as a banquet among friends.
The most admired lyric poet of the ancient Greek world was Sappho, who lived on the Aegean island of Lesbos around 600 BCE. She was the leader of a circle of women devoted to music and poetry. Many of her poems, most preserved only as fragments, speak pas- sionately to younger members of this group.
The fragment quoted here displays the immediacy that gives Sappho’s poetry such bite.
Some say cavalry and some would claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is
the girl you love. And easily proved.
Did not Helen,a who was queen of mortal
beauty, choose as first among mankind
the very scourge
of Trojan honor? Haunted by Love
she forgot kinsmen, her own dear child
and wandered off to a remote country.
O weak and fitful
Woman bending before any man:
So Anaktoria, although you are
Far, do not forget your loving friends.
And I for one
Would rather listen to your soft step
and see your radiant face—than watch
all the dazzling horsemen and armored
Hoplitesb of Lydia.3
SAPPHO
a. Helen, wife of Menelaus. b. Hoplite, an armored foot soldier.
3.6 Citharode and listeners, from a vase painting by the Attic master Andokides, c. 530 BCE. Louvre, Paris. A lyric singer accompanies herself on the cithara, a larger and more elaborate version of the lyre. Lyric poetry was composed for official occasions—to praise the gods at a festival or honor an athlete—as well as for more intimate settings.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT How would the significance of Homer’s epic be affected if Achilles had simply continued to fight despite Agamemnon’s slights? Or if Patroclus had not died in Achilles’ place? Or if Achilles had still refused to fight after the death of his best friend? Or if Priam had sought to murder Achilles in his tent, or if Achilles had refused to return Hector’s body to his father? Do the morals in the Iliad still have their place today?
THE WRITE IDEA What kind of poem is this? What devices does the speaker use to describe her feelings? Who is Anaktoria? What kind of feelings does the speaker have toward Anaktoria? What do you think the occasion for this verse might have been?
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Greek philosophical thinking evolved rapidly. Parmenides (born c. 515 BCE) claimed that the cosmos was a single primal and universal substance—what Parmenides called the “what-is.” Parmenides regarded “what-is” as an unchanging perfect sphere encompass- ing all existence, such that nothing cannot exist, but he further thought that all sense experience was illusion. Greek pluralists such as Empedocles (c. 495–435 BCE) argued that the “what-is” actually consisted of four fun- damental elements—earth, air, fire, and water. Finally, the atomists returned to monism by claiming that tiny particles called atoms (atoma means “things indivis- ible”) made up everything in the cosmos. The entire world—the gods as well as humans and their natural surroundings—had come into being through the mind- less collision of atoms spinning through the void.
Early Greek philosophy often contained ethical teachings. Pythagoras advised his followers to eat no meat, lest they devour the soul of an ancestor, and Empedocles believed that, by living purely during suc- cessive lives, humans could achieve immortality. Such lively speculations set the stage for a philosophical revolution in fifth-century Athens.
Because early Greek communities were widely dis- persed, local traditions reflected a considerable vari- ety of beliefs and practices. Around 700 BCE, the poet Hesiod [HEE-see-ud] sought to consolidate and synthe- size Greek belief in his poem Theogony, which means “the making of the gods.” Following models from the ancient Near East, Hesiod described the cosmos as orig- inating in a succession of generations of gods, begin- ning with “Chaos” and the mother of all being, Gaia:
Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-
bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the
deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus,
and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth,
and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who
unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise
counsels of all gods and all men within them.4
By 600 BCE, Greek thinkers began to supplement such vivid myths with philosophical speculations on the nature of things. Active chiefly in the Greek cities of Asia Minor (today’s Turkey) and Italy, these earliest Greek philosophers asked, “What is the nature of the cosmos?” Their outlook reflected a new rationalism— that is, a belief that human reason is the surest source of truth about the world. Some reasoned that the natural world must be derived from a primal stuff, an idea called monism. The earliest, Thales [THAY-leez] of Miletus (c. 624–546 BCE), theorized that all nature was composed of water. Anaximenes thought the pri- mal stuff was air. Anaximander called it aperion, the unbounded; while Heraclitus held that change, sym- bolized by the element of fire, was all.
A different branch of early Greek philosophy fol- lowed the teaching of Pythagoras (active sixth cen- tury BCE), who advised a disciplined life of silence and restraint and believed in the transmigration of souls. His influential teachings involved the mathematical structure underlying the physical world. According to a later commentator, Pythagoras supposed “the ele- ments of numbers to be the elements of all things and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.”
3.7 Funerary krater from the Dipylon Cemetery, Athens, c. 750–700 BCE. Attributed to the Hirschfeld Workshop. Ceramic, height 42 5⁄8 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From their earliest arts—vase painting and figurative sculpture—the Greeks demonstrated their fascination with rationalism and the human figure. This geometric-style Greek vase employs complex meanders and other designs to enclose the central scene of a funeral bier and mourners. The monumental vase served as a grave-marker.
View the Closer Look at this funerary krater on myartslab.com
Chapter 3 ANCIENT GREECE 53
abstract geometric designs. This so-called geometric technique demonstrated the Greeks’ interest in intricate, rationalized patterns. The most spectacular geometric- style pots were the large funeral vases (Fig. 3.7) that marked the graves of Athens’s elite. By 600 BCE, Greek painters had mastered black-figure painting, achieved by incising the glaze (which turns black when fired) with details of dress and facial features (see Fig. 3.5). Black-figure technique facilitated an increasing naturalism—the attempt to represent objects as they appear in nature.
The most advanced form of vase painting was the red-figure technique, in which the background of a scene was entirely painted (appearing as black) and the figures were left unpainted (appearing as red) except for fine details of anatomy. The red-figure technique per- mitted subtle effects of bodily movement and expres- sive storytelling. Red-figure vases like the “Euphronios vase” (Fig. 3.8) illustrate early Greek artists’ command of the full range of human feelings and activity.
Art in Early Greece From 650 to 490 BCE, during this same period of philo- sophical evolution, the Greeks developed as well a distinctive style in the visual arts, now called Archaic. Although the Archaic style in Greece borrowed freely from more advanced Egyptian and Persian civilizations, the Greek artisans transformed these borrowings into an art concerned with natural beauty and the human form.
Since little Greek wall painting survives, we know early Greek painting chiefly through pottery vases. Manufactured at commercial centers such as Corinth and Athens, these vases were initially decorated with
3.8 Euphronios, The Death of Sarpedon, c. 515 BCE. Red-fi gure calyx-krater, terracotta, height 18 ins (46 cm), diameter 213⁄4 ins (55 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Blood streaming from his fatal wounds, the Homeric warrior Sarpedon is borne to the underworld by the figures of Death and Sleep. The red-figure painting technique permitted greater naturalistic detail than earlier methods.
View the Closer Look at the Euphronios krater on myartslab.com
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Late in the Archaic period, sculptors began to soften the rigid geometry of the Archaic style, lending their figures more supple curves. The koré [KOH-ray], or female version of the kouros, was less stringent in design, in part because the koré was always clothed (Fig. 3.10). The drapery created more varied lines, although the hair is still arranged in stylized geomet- ric patterns. The lips are pulled back in the “Archaic smile,” perhaps to lend the face more animation. The Calf Bearer (Moschophoros; Fig. 3.11) most likely stood next to an altar on the Athenian acropolis. Here,
Archaic sculpture showed a similar development from formalized representation to naturalism. The most common form of Archaic statue was the kouros, a freestanding nude male youth that served as a grave- marker or stood outside a temple. The early kouros shows the rigid symmetry and geometric hairdressing that the Greeks had borrowed from Egyptian statu- ary. The figure stands in a typical pose, with arms held stiffly at the sides, fists clenched, and the left foot placed in front of the right. The human form here is an exercise in stylized geometry (Fig. 3.9).
3.9 Kouros from Attica, c. 590 BCE. Marble, height 6 ft 4 3⁄4 ins (1.94 m). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Usually painted to enhance their naturalism, the Greek kouroi (pl. of kouros) were the ideal of youthful male beauty. This Archaic sculpture shows the early Greek interest in symmetry and geometric design.
3.11 Calf Bearer (Moschophoros), c. 570 BCE. Marble, height 5 ft 5 ins (1.65 m). Acropolis Museum, Athens. By the mid-sixth century BCE, Greek Archaic sculpture was increasingly naturalistic (compare Fig. 3.9), as seen here in the related forms of the youth and his sacrificial burden.
3.10 Koré from Chios, c. 520 BCE. Marble, height 22 ins (56 cm). Acropolis Museum, Athens. In Archaic and early classical sculpture, the female figure was always clothed. Compare the drapery of this koré to the more fluid treatment in the Parthenon goddesses (see Fig. 3.21).
3.12 Kritios Boy, c. 490 BCE. Marble, height 34 ins (86 cm). Acropolis Museum, Athens. Here the frontal stance of the kouros dissolves and the figure turns ever so slightly in space. The Archaic smile of earlier sculptures has disappeared.
Chapter 3 ANCIENT GREECE 55
have been no larger than ten or twenty thousand men. Within this limited group, however, Athenians of the Golden Age practiced a vigorous democracy, or “rule by the people”—they chose important offices by lot and decided important questions by majority vote of the whole polis. In some ways the Athenian government was more democratic than today’s common system of elected representatives.
Athens was led to a pinnacle of political power and influence by the statesman Pericles [PAIR-uh-kleez] (c. 495–429 BCE). After the Persian Wars, Athens formed a defensive alliance with other Greek city-states called the Delian League under his leadership. Soon however Athens began to bully the other members; and by the mid-fifth century BCE the Delian League had become an Athenian empire. The Athenians’ arrogant hunger for power led them into a disastrous war with Sparta, their chief rival and a great military power. The Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 BCE) resulted in the loss of the Athenian navy and its surrender to Sparta in 404 BCE. After the war, Athens retained its prominence as a cultural center—Pericles had proudly called it the
the physical bond between human and beast softens the rationalized design and symmetry of the Archaic style with subtle naturalism. The decisive turning point between the Archaic and classical style in sculpture appears in the Kritios Boy (Fig. 3.12). Dating to just before the Persian Wars, this figure no longer rigidly faces forward. Rather it turns slightly, weight shifted to one leg, cocking the hips and shoulders. The lines of the torso are softened and filled, as if it had taken a breath. Although still highly idealized, the Kritios Boy announces the masterful naturalism of classical Greek sculpture.
The Classical Period The classical period in Greece opened when the Athenian army prevailed over a Persian invasion at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. When the Persian force returned in 480 BCE, however, the Athenians had to abandon their city and watch it burned by enemy soldiers. But Athens had its revenge a few days later at the Battle of Salamis (between the island of Salamis and the Athenian port of Piraeus), when Athenian naval commanders lured the Persian fleet into a trap and destroyed it.
The Athenians interpreted their victories as a sign that Athens was destined to lead. Indeed, Greece entered a period of achievement that lasted until the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Its accomplishments in theater, architecture, sculpture, and philosophy came to define the essential character of Western civilization.
Athens in its Golden Age Athens was the glory of classical Greece. Between 480 BCE and its military defeat in the Peloponnesian Wars in 404 BCE, Athens enjoyed a period of prosperity and accomplishment known as the Golden Age. The heart of Athens, as with every Greek city, was its polis, a term usually translated as “city-state.” To the Greeks, the polis meant the citizens themselves, including their civic values and aspirations. The Greek philosopher Plato assumed that a properly organized polis would produce perfectly happy citizens. When Aristotle, the late classical philosopher, said that the human was a “political animal” (a zoon politikon), he meant that it was human nature to live in a polis.
Membership of the Athenian polis was limited to adult male citizens of the city, excluding all women, slaves, and non-native residents. In a city like Athens, with a population of perhaps 250,000, the polis may
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
The Plague of Athens In the second year of the Peloponnesian [pell-oh-poh- NEE-zhun] Wars, a plague struck Athens, devastating its population and disrupting social and religious customs. The historian Thucydides [thyoo-SID-uh-deez] reports that bodies filled the temples and sacred precincts.
The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane. All the burial rites before in use were entirely disregarded, and they buried the bodies as best they could. Many from want of the proper appliances, through so many of their friends having died already, lost all shame in burying the dead; sometimes, when a man had prepared a funeral pile, another came and, throwing his dead on it first, set fire to it; sometimes they tossed the corpse which they were carrying on the top of another that was burning, and went off.5
THUCYDIDES The History of the Peloponnesian War
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prostitutes. Some hetaerae were highly educated and skilled as dancers and musicians, able to act out Greek legends in dance or recite poetry. Hetaerae provided entertainment and companionship for men at evening banquets and are depicted on vase paintings as engag- ing in animated debate. They may also have been the only women permitted to attend the Greek theater. The most famous of the hetaerae was Aspasia [ah-SPAY- zhuh], the companion of Pericles from 445 BCE until his death. Aspasia bore Pericles a son and was rumored to advise him on political affairs. Because of her influ- ence, she attracted the criticism of Athens’s orators and playwrights.
Classical Greek Art The classical style in Greek art (c. 480–323 BCE) found its highest expressions in sacred architecture and the sculpted human form. Greek temples were monuments of religious devotion and civic pride. Temples stood at the heart of sacred centers like Delphi and Olympus, where pious Greeks gathered for worship and celebra- tion. In cities, Greeks built temples to their patron dei- ties on the acropolis (literally “high city”), high ground that served also as a citadel (Fig. 3.14). The classical period saw exquisite examples of two great building styles, the Doric and Ionic.
In classical Greece, sculpture remained largely a civic art rather than a private pleasure, often decorating tem- ples, treasuries, and sacred precincts. In style, the classi- cal age achieved a marriage of idealism and naturalism that would influence sculptors for millennia.
The Athenian Acropolis All of classical Greece enjoyed a great flowering of architecture and sculpture, but its artistic center was in Athens, flush with imperial confidence and wealth. In 447 BCE, Athens began to rebuild the acropolis temples burned by Persian attackers. The building program began with the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to the city’s patron deity, Athena (Fig. 3.15). It was one of the largest temples built in Greece during the classi- cal period, supervised by the leading citizen-artists of Athens and fashioned by craftsmen from all over Greece.
“school of Hellas”—but it never regained the influence and creativity of its Golden Age.
Women in Classical Athens The adult women of Athens—whether they were wives, slaves, or pros- titutes—were excluded from public affairs. Nearly all female citizens were married. Their duties as wives were restricted to organizing the household, supervis- ing slaves, and performing domestic labor (Fig. 3.13). Pericles said that the happiest wife was one about whom nothing was said, either good or bad. Athenian wives lived in quarters separate from the men and cus- tomarily did not even share the evening meal with their husbands.
An Athenian man was more likely to spend the evening with a hetaera [he-TAIR-a], the term for for- eign women employed as courtesans, entertainers, and
3.13 Grave stele of Hegeso, c. 410–400 BCE. Marble, height 4 ft 11 ins (1.5 m). National Archaeological Museum, Athens. This stele, or gravestone relief, depicts a Greek matron adorning herself with jewelry. After marriage, Athenian women customarily led secluded lives of child-rearing and domestic labor.
Chapter 3 ANCIENT GREECE 57
3.14 Model reconstruction of the Athenian acropolis. The sacred buildings of the Athenian Golden Age expressed the city’s wealth and power, especially since the construction was funded with taxes on her allied states. At the highest point of the acropolis was the Parthenon, a refined example of the Greek temple style.
3.15 Ictinus and Callicrates, the Parthenon, Athens, 447– 432 BCE. Pentelic marble, length 228 × 104 ft (69.5 × 31.7 m), height of columns 34 ft (10.36 m). Exterior and sectional view (reconstruction). Drawing with watercolor by Peter Connolly. While austerely grand as a ruin today (see Fig. 3.1), the Parthenon appeared much gaudier in classical times, with its sculptures brightly painted in red, gold, and blue.
Explore the architectural panorama of the Parthenon on myartslab.com
Statue
of Athena
Promachos
Erechtheion Parthenon
Propylaia
Temple of
Athena Nike
Picture gallery
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and simplicity; the Ionic order possessed an aura of refinement and sophistication; and the Corinthian order, developed in the later Hellenistic period, pro- jected imperial wealth and grandeur (Fig. 3.16).
The Parthenon was the most advanced example of the Doric order, the climax of two centuries of archi- tectural development. Its Doric columns rested directly on the temple’s step and were topped by heavy, square- block capitals. Deep grooves called flutes were carved into the column’s shaft, creating a shifting play of light and shadow as sunlight struck the column from
The temple’s construction and sculptural decorations are the high point of the classical style. Its basic form, like most Greek temples, was post-and-lintel. Post- and-lintel construction consisted of a series of columns (posts) with beams (lintels) laid across the top. Walls and a roof were added to this basic skeleton. The types of Greek temples were distinguished by their decoration of the vertical column and the horizontal beam, called the entablature. The decoration of column and entabla- ture was classified according to the classical orders, or styles: the Doric order communicated a stolid strength
3.16 The Greek orders. The classical architectural orders varied according to their decoration of the vertical and horizontal elements (column and entablature).
3.17 Plan of the Parthenon. The Parthenon shows evidence of a recurring mathematical ratio of 1:2 + 1, as in the number of columns (8:17).
Watch the architectural simulation of the Greek orders on myartslab.com
raking cornice
pediment
cornice
metope
triglyph
architrave
capital
shaft shaft
stylobate
column
entablature
frieze
Doric Ionic Corinthian
cornice
frieze
architrave
capital
column
base
volute
cella frieze
Doric colonnade
0
0
100ft
30m
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different angles. The columns surrounded the enclosed inner room, or cella (Fig. 3.17), that held the huge cult statue of Athena Parthenos, or Athena the Virgin (hence the building’s name), by Athens’s leading sculp- tor, Phidias (c. 490–432 BCE).
The Parthenon’s construction had subtle deviations from regularity. Apparently, Greek architects wished to balance their precise rationalism against the need for aesthetic appeal to the eye. Throughout the build- ing the numerical ratio of 1:2 + 1 recurs, evident in the number of columns across the end (eight) and along the sides (seventeen). The Parthenon’s columns bulge slightly, as if they strain under the weight of the roof, and they also lean inward slightly. The corner columns are slightly thicker and closer to their neighbors, as if to compensate for space visible between them. The temple floor rises about 4 inches (10 cm) in the center on all four sides. These refinements were not unique to the Parthenon, but they were seldom combined with such stunning results.
After the completion of the Parthenon, the Athenians turned to other buildings on the acropolis. They built a massive gateway called the Propylaea [pro-puh-LEE- uh], with ramps leading through a temple-like build- ing. The Propylaea was notable for its combination of the Doric and Ionic orders. Late in the Peloponnesian Wars, the Athenians began the Erechtheum [er-ick- THEE-um], an Ionic temple that encompassed several sacred sites. The Erechtheum was built on two levels and had two porches, one in the Ionic style with a con- tinuous frieze (Fig. 3.18), and the other with columns in the shape of maidens, called caryatids [kair-ee-AT-ids] who bear the heavy entablature on baskets atop their heads (Fig. 3.19). In its irregularity, the Erechtheum was a rather idiosyncratic example of temple design.
Classical Sculpture The development from Archaic to classical style is just as vivid in architectural sculpture as in the development from the kouros to the Kritios Boy seen above. A tem- ple had two sculptural elements: pedimental sculpture occupying the pediment, the triangular space formed by the roof’s gable, and a sculpted frieze, the name given to any continuous band of relief sculpture. Pedimental groups were usually carved in the round and rested on a broad ledge. Friezes were of two main types. The Doric order featured a frieze of geometric panels called tri- glyphs alternating with pictorial scenes called metopes. The metopes were carved in high relief, meaning that the figures project from the background (Fig. 3.20).
3.18 Mnesicles, Erechtheum (from west), Athens, c. 421– 409 BCE. Marble, length of temple 37 ft (11.3 m), width 66 ft (20.1 m).
3.19 Caryatid (south) porch, Erechtheum, c. 421–409 BCE. Instead of fluting to emphasize their stature, the caryatid columns have the fluid vertical lines of their gowns.
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In the Ionic order, the exterior frieze typically formed one continuous sculpted scene, sometimes extending around the entire structure.
The Parthenon’s sculptural program was as much a statement of civic pride as a tribute to the goddess. Supervised and probably designed by the sculptor Phidias, the pediments depicted events in the life of Athena: on the east, the goddess’s birth full-grown from the head of Zeus; and on the west, Athena’s competi- tion with the god Poseidon.
The pediments’ graceful and life-like figures con- tain the essence of classical Greek sculpture. On the east pediment, for instance, the Three Goddesses (Fig. 3.21) are divine witnesses to Athena’s remarkable birth. Beneath the graceful and fluid lines of their garments, the deities have the solid form of Athenian matrons. The drapery defines each figure individually and unifies the group while directing the eye from figure to figure. Phidias’ challenge in the metopes was to create a dra- matic action with only two figures, compressed onto a small block (see Fig. 3.20). The figures and background were brightly painted and sometimes augmented with brass details, such as horses’ reins.
The Parthenon was unique among Doric temples in having a second frieze that ran along the cella wall and across the inner columns. The Parthenon’s cella frieze was a stroke of genius, a sculpted pronouncement of Athenian civic virtue, which ran for more than 500 feet (152 m). Carved in low relief, with figures projecting only slightly from the background, the frieze depicts a noble procession of Athenian citizens, alluding perhaps to the great festival to Athena held every four years.
3.20 Lapith and Centaur, metope from the Parthenon’s outer frieze (south face), c. 448–442 BCE. Marble, 3 ft 11 ins × 4 ft 2 ins (1.19 × 1.27 m). British Museum, London. Such scenes of the Doric frieze may have symbolized the Athenians’ victory over the Persians, or, more generally, Greek civilization’s triumph over barbarism.
3.21 Three Goddesses, from the Parthenon’s east pediment, c. 438–432 BCE. Marble, more than life-size. British Museum, London. Though missing their heads and arms, these figures still express Greek classicism’s balance between naturalism and idealized beauty. Note how the finely carved drapery defines the figures’ poses and their dynamic connection to the central event of Athena’s birth.
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3.22 Athenian Horsemen, from the Parthenon’s inner frieze (west face), c. 442–432 BCE. Marble, height of panel 3 ft 7 ins (1.07 m). British Museum, London. The Parthenon cella frieze celebrated the heroism and nobility of Athenian citizens. The number of horsemen (approx. 192) matches the number of Athenians who died fighting the Persians at Marathon.
Nude horsemen sit astride their horses with a bearing typical of the classical period (Fig. 3.22). Athenian maid- ens lead a parade to the thrones of Zeus and Athena, who preside benignly over the celebration. Inspired by their supremacy among Greeks, the Athenians dared to portray themselves among the gods.
The classical period’s greatest freestanding sculptures are likewise a heroic union of human and divine, usu- ally an athlete or warrior or a god in human form. The most admired classical sculptors set the human figure in complex and expressive motion, while maintaining harmony and balance.
The over-life size Zeus of Artemision (also called Poseidon) is one of only a few original bronze statues surviving from the classical period (Fig. 3.23). Cast in exacting detail using the lost-wax method, the figure projects both the supreme confidence of a god and the powerful athleticism of a hero.
The late classical sculptor Praxiteles (born c. 390 BCE) was famed for his humanized portraits of the gods, among them his life-like versions of Aphrodite [af-ro- DYE-tay], the goddess of love. Praxiteles [prax-IT- uh-leez] exploited late classical sculptors’ newfound
freedom in portraying the female nude. The alluring Aphrodite of Cnidos (Fig. 3.24) is
3.23 Zeus of Artemision (also called Poseidon), mid-5th century BCE. Bronze, height 6 ft 10ins (2 m). National Museum, Athens. Balanced, dynamic, and strong, heroic nude figures embodied Greek ideals of male prowess and nobility.
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K E Y C O N C E P T
The Classical Ideal At the root of classical Greece’s wondrous achievements was a dynamic idea called the classical ideal. Scholars have long recognized the ancient Greeks’ need to discover in the world—or impose upon it—a logical order, propor- tion, and measure. But the Greeks also realized that human folly and ambition could undo any human endeavor, even the most noble and reasonable.
In the classical period, the Greeks’ confidence grew in human power and ingenuity, a belief called humanism. The tragic poet Sophocles, in his play Antigone, gave voice to Greek humanism in this hymn to human genius:
Numberless wonders, terrible wonders walk the world but none the match for man— …The blithe, lightheaded race of birds he snares the tribes of savage beasts, the life that swarms the depths— with one fling of his nets woven and coiled tight, he takes them all, man the skilled, the brilliant!… And speech and thought, quick as the wind and the mood and mind for law that rules the city— all these he has taught himself … ready, resourceful man!6
Though blessed by the gods with unmatched powers, humans failed often to live within the limits or law that the gods had set. Thus, Greek humanism was always balanced by the Greek sense of tragic fate—that humans’ pride and ambition might bring self-destruction.
The dynamic tension of the classical ideal was drama- tized in Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the King (see page 64). Oedipus surpasses all others in his intelligence and insight, yet discovers that he does not know his own par- ents and has committed the worst of crimes against them. The historian Thucydides (c. 460–c. 404 BCE) told the his- tory of the Peloponnesian War in the same light: Athens’s brilliant empire, the epitome of classical achievement, was destroyed by the city-state’s violent ambition.
Inspired by the classical ideal, the ancient Greeks defeated powerful foes and fashioned unrivaled works of civilization (Fig. 3.25). But wise Greeks, like the playwright Aeschylus, never forgot the ideal’s voice of warning: “Be mindful, men of Greece and Athens,” cautions a ghost in
CRITICAL QUESTION How does the classical ideal apply in your life? In your experience, what human powers have imposed order and proportion upon the chaotic world? Has an error of over-confidence or folly ever “wasted the blessings” you have?
Aeschylus’ tragedy The Persians, “lest one of you, pride- fully disdaining his present good fortune and lusting for more, waste the blessings he has.”
3.25 Praxiteles, Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, c. 340 BCE. Marble copy of original, height 7 ft 1 in (2.16 m). Archaeological Museum, Olympia. Praxiteles mastered the relaxed stance and fluid S-shaped torso that were typical of late classical sculpture. Note the engaging human action of the infant god Dionysus reaching for something—probably a bunch of grapes, now missing—that Hermes holds above him.
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Greek Theater and Music Other Greek cities joined Athens in creating the archi- tecture and sculpture of the period. However, Athens alone bears the honor of inventing the Greek theater. Seated beneath their acropolis, Athenians witnessed the birth of one of Western literature’s first great dramatic forms. Theater was the medium in which Athenians reflected on their culture’s most essential questions: the powers of the gods, the course of human destiny, the nature of love and justice. It was at once drama, poetry, religion, and philosophy. Their solemn spectacles of passion and suffering have been acted out countless times in succeeding centuries, yet later imitations of Greek tragedy would never wholly recreate its complex artistic form.
Classical tragedy and comedy arose from the wor- ship of Dionysus [dye-oh-NYE-sus], god of wine, revelry, and intoxication. Worshipers of Dionysus disguised themselves with masks, dressed in animal costumes, carried oversized fertility symbols, and sang hymns of praise to the god. The most solemn hymns were sung and danced by a chorus of performers. From this elemental beginning evolved the Greek tragedy, a drama involving mythic characters whose pride leads them into suffering and death. Athenian tragedy as we know it had evolved by the early fifth century BCE.
Greek Tragedy The performance of Greek tragedy was unlike the performances we experience today. Staged in open-air theaters seating up to 15,000 spectators (Fig. 3.26), the plays were solemn religious occasions where the priest of Dionysus presided. Wealthy citizens underwrote dramatic productions, and playwrights submitted their plays in a yearly competition. The audience viewed the action from the theatron (viewing place), originally a bare hillside and later covered by stone seats. Individual actors spoke their lines while standing in front of the skenē (the root of our word proscenium), a building that housed the props and provided a backdrop for the action. The actors wore heavy wool costumes and large masks that amplified their voices (Fig. 3.27). The chorus of twelve to fifteen actors chanted its songs rhythmically to a flute’s accompaniment, while engaging in a solemn dance on the orchestra, the circular area surrounded by the theatron.
Although many Athenians wrote tragedies, only a few works of three tragedians remain, each respon- sible for new accents in the tragic idiom. Aeschylus
depicted, her gown removed, an arm resting on an urn. The Aphrodite shows the pronounced S-curve, called in Italian contrapposto, that had originated in the high classical style a century earlier. The result was the final stage of late classical naturalism.
3.24 Praxiteles, Aphrodite of Cnidos, Roman copy after original of c.350–340 BCE. Marble, height 6 ft 8 ins (2.03 m). Vatican Museums, Rome. An example of the naturalism of late classical Greek sculpture. The original statue was probably colorfully decorated with gilded hair and jewelry, and rouged cheeks. Compare the posture and gesture of this female form to the athletes and warriors of a century earlier (see Figs. 3.22, 3.23).
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Imagine your home town 2,000 years from now. What buildings might remain standing? What would they look like? How might someone in the year 4000 judge today’s civilization based on the architectural and sculptural monuments left behind?
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the audience. In this story, Oedipus’ [ED-i-pus] royal parents try to evade the divine prophecy by having their child killed. A soft-hearted shepherd saves the infant, who is adopted in neighboring Corinth. As a young man, Oedipus unknowingly murders his true father. His cleverness wins him the throne of Thebes and an unwitting marriage to his own mother, the queen.
Sophocles begins his tragedy of Oedipus after these fateful events are complete, dramatizing Oedipus’ ago- nizing search for his own identity. In the beginning, Oedipus seems to be a paragon of humanism, a man whose intelligence and nobility raise him to the level of a god. But Oedipus’ self-confidence is later shown to be hubris, an arrogant pride that ignores the limits on human understanding. The gods’ power over human lives remains in spite of all efforts to evade it. When Oedipus stabs out his own eyes, his action symbolizes the blindness of human intelligence and the folly of defying the gods.
To the philosopher Aristotle (see page 69), Oedipus contained the essential elements of tragedy, which Aristotle analyzed in his Poetics. When a tragedy’s main character commits “some error of judgment,” taught Aristotle,7 he suffers a reversal of fortune and recog- nizes his folly. This spectacle achieves the tragedy’s purpose, a cleansing, called catharsis, of the audience’s fear and pity. As Aristotle’s analysis indicates, Greek tragedy was a drama of primal suffering and fear, and few Greeks left the theater unaffected.
The last great Athenian tragedian was Euripides (c. 480–407 BCE), who saw the city succumb to plague, war, and internal division. Euripides’ tragedies were filled with realism and biting social comment, often using unorthodox characters and plots. Sophocles himself acknowledged that his own plays showed people as they should be, while the plays of Euripides showed people as they were. Euripides’ characters are often gripped by violent passions. His Medea depicts the mythic sorceress who murders her own sons in vengeance against a husband who has abandoned her. Euripides’ own death was no less gruesome and bizarre. He was torn to pieces by dogs belonging to the king of Macedon, in whose palace he had taken refuge.
[ESS-kuh-lus] (525–456 BCE) reduced the role of the chorus and added a second actor, making true dialogue possible. The most famous of Aeschylus’ seven known works is a three-play cycle called the Oresteia. In this gory saga, King Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, who then is killed by her son. The murderous cycle finally ends when Athena intervenes and decrees that the rule of law will replace justice by vengeance. As was typical in Aeschylus’ dramas, human suffering and guilt even- tually led to the recognition of divine wisdom.
The most admired and prolific Athenian playwright was Sophocles (c. 496–406 BCE), whose career coin- cided with the Golden Age of Athens. Sophocles may have written 123 tragedies in all, although only seven are known. Sophocles added a third actor and created more tightly unified plots than Aeschylus. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King was the most admired tragedy of the classical period. It told the story of a man prophesied to murder his father and marry his mother, and like most classical tragedies, it retold a legend already familiar to
3.26 Theater at Epidaurus, Greece, c. 350 BCE. Diameter 373 ft (114 m), orchestra 66 ft (20 m). Remains of the skene are visible at the rear of the orchestra. The chorus entered and exited through the post-and-lintel gateways at left and right, called parodoi (singular, parodos).
THE WRITE IDEA Define “tragedy” as you use the term and illustrate your definition with an event or situation. How does your use of the term compare with the ancient Greek concept of tragic fate?
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suddenly marry. During the Hellenistic period, theaters were equipped with a raised stage and an elaborate backdrop containing several doors for appearances and disappearances. Because Hellenistic comedy aban- doned the religious overtones of earlier Greek theater, it proved a more broadly appealing entertainment.
Greek Music and Dance Music and dance played an essential role in Greek public and private life. Both were incorporated into sacred festivals and other public occasions. The mili- taristic Spartans even used military-style dances, with a costume of combat gear, as a part of military training. While educated slaves and prostitutes provided musi- cal entertainment at Athenian men’s dinner banquets, any well-educated young Greek person was likely to be taught both dance and music. The philosopher Plato believed that a child’s early education should consist only of gymnastics and music, a sufficient discipline for the body and soul.
The term music actually meant “of the Muses,” the Muses being the goddesses who inspired the cre- ative arts. Music was especially important in poetry, which was usually sung with musical accompaniment. Lyric poets sang their works while plucking the strings of the lyre, an instrument with five to seven strings on a U-shaped bow and a sounding board made of
Greek Comedy Although tragedy dominated the Greek theater, ancient Greeks enjoyed witty and irreverent comedies as well. Comedy is a dramatic form that humorously por- trays everyday themes and characters. Originating in Dionysian fertility rites, Greek comedy featured cho- ruses dressed as animals and actors in obscenely pad- ded costumes. Comic plots were usually fantastic, and included bawdy dialogue, slapstick shenanigans, and biting comment on current affairs.
The greatest comedian of the Athenian Golden Age was Aristophanes [air-i-STOFF-uh-neez] (c. 445–c. 383 BCE), who wrote comic satires on philosophy, war, and
the relations between the sexes. Aristophanes’ Clouds depicts the philosopher Socrates sitting in a basket sus- pended in air. In Lysistrata the women of Greece engage in a sex strike to halt the Peloponnesian Wars. Because its comedy was less high-minded than tragedy, it did not enjoy the same prestige. In fact, Aristotle hardly men- tions it in the Poetics. Comedy was, however, enthusias- tically adapted in Hellenistic and Roman times.
In the Hellenistic period (323–146 BCE), comedy played the role that the social comedies of today’s television and film do. The Athenian Menander (342– 292? BCE; see Fig. 3.27) was a master of tightly plotted action, full of twists and surprises, where a slave might turn out to be free-born, or where impossible lovers
3.27 The dramatic poet Menander holding a mask, Roman copy of a late Hellenistic original. Museo Gregoriano Profano, Vatican Museum, Vatican State. The poet holds a mask suitable for playing a tragic king such as Agamemnon or Oedipus. A satyr’s mask rests on the table.
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induce courage and moderation and banned music that fostered effeminacy. To the Greek mind, music—more than any other Greek art—embodied the balanced har- mony of reason and feeling.
Classical Greek Philosophy The ancient Greeks’ fascination with rational inquiry gave rise to the enterprise of philosophy, which in Greek meant “love of wisdom.” The earliest Greek phi- losophers had been primarily concerned with natural philosophy, the rational examination of the physical universe. In the classical period, however, philosophy’s attention turned to human morality and social being. This new concern with human affairs set the stage for
tortoiseshell. Dramatic poetry called for the use of a double reed pipe called the aulos (Fig. 3.28), played as the tragic chorus chanted and danced about the orches- tra. The aulos continued to be used in drama through the Roman era.
Greek theories of music have influenced Western civilization more than Greek music itself, since its actual sounds and performance cannot be reconstructed. The Greeks preferred a seven-tone musical scale, with intervals between tones that could be expressed as the ratios 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4 (the octave, third, and fourth). The Pythagoreans took this as evidence of a musical– mathematical structure within the entire cosmos, based on the mystical properties of the number 10 (the sum of 1, 2, 3, and 4). More practically, ancient Greek musi- cians employed scales called modes, combinations of eight notes of varying intervals. Each mode was further subdivided into four-note groupings called tetrachords. Music in the different modes was thought to arouse different emotional states. The philosopher Plato devel- oped a doctrine of ethos (root of the modern term ethics), which held that music could be used to shape human character and influence behavior. In his ideal state, Plato preferred musical modes he believed would
3.28 Contest of Apollo and Marsyas. Relief from Mantineia, Greece, c. 350 BCE. National Museum, Athens. To the ancient Greeks, music contained the principles of harmony that unified both nature and human society. They associated the lyre with Apollo, god of light and knowledge, and the reed pipe (or aulos) with Dionysus, god of intoxication and patron of tragedy.
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Future philosophers would view Socrates’ life and death as a model of principled integrity, of areté, or vir- tue in action. He refused to take payment for teaching or to flee from the city whose laws he had respected all his life. In Plato’s Crito, Socrates resolutely rejects his friends’ urging to escape from prison. Such an action would violate the moral principles of a lifetime, princi- ples worth more to Socrates than his own life. Socrates vowed that death would bring his final release from ignorance and desire, the philosopher’s ultimate goal.
Plato Because Socrates wrote no books, we know his teach- ings chiefly through the works of his student Plato (427–347 BCE), whose vast writings and influence make him one of history’s most important philosophers. Plato left Athens after Socrates’ death and spent ten years composing his ideas in philosophical dialogues. These include the Apology and the Crito, which describe Socrates’ last days. Plato continued to employ the dia- logue as a form of philosophical debate in later works, where the character Socrates becomes a voice for his own ideas.
Plato’s dialogues engaged anew with an enduring problem of Greek thought: the tension between change and permanence. Like the Pythagoreans, Plato held that the changing reality known by the senses was founded on a higher reality of permanent Forms (in Greek, eide). In his famous Theory of Forms, Plato drew a line across creation, dividing all things known through sense expe- rience from things known through rational contem- plation. Sensible objects—every cat, dog, and pot of stew—were all in an impermanent and imperfect state of Becoming. If humans would set aside their unreliable senses and apply their reasoned intelligence, they could glimpse a perfect world of Being—unchanging truths like geometric figures, perfect beauty, and ultimately the Good. For Plato, philosophical inquiry led the vir- tuous soul across the “divided line” from opinion and doubt toward certain knowledge of the Forms.
Plato illustrated this progress in a famous passage from The Republic entitled the “Allegory of the Cave.” The Allegory describes ordinary citizens as prisoners chained in a cave, who see shadows flicker across the wall and believe the images are real. Only a few brave and virtuous souls free themselves, recognize the world of illusion in which they have been captive, and clamber out of the cave into the light of truth.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the Greeks who defined the essential questions of Western philosophy.
The Sophists and Socrates The first philosophers to change Greek society were the sophists, professional teachers who embodied the humanist spirit of skepticism and self-reliance. Where the early Greek philosophers composed treatises, the sophists debated with their students about such prac- tical matters as love, justice, truth, and beauty. The sophists were attracted above all to Athens, the vibrant “school of Hellas.” Here they employed themselves as teachers to the sons of wealthy families, and taught public speaking and debate, the skills of Athenian democracy. The sophists’ skepticism reflected the confident sophistication of Athens in the Golden Age. Protagoras (480–411 BCE), a well-known sophist, pro- nounced, “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not;”8 meaning that truth was always relative to the individual person’s knowledge and perceptions. Laws, customs, concepts of right and wrong, were all the creation of humans, not the gods.
While Protagoras gave voice to the new humanist spirit, other sophists fostered cynicism. They taught their pupils to gain advantage through verbal trickery, a technique still called “sophistry.” Our knowledge of the sophists is obscure, since few of their writings were preserved. We know them chiefly through the vehe- ment anti-sophist writings of Plato.
The sophists’ abuses rankled their rival Socrates (469–399 BCE), the Athenian who founded classical Greek philosophy without writing a word. Like the sophists, Socrates examined human affairs and taught through questioning. Socrates’ philosophical technique, now called the Socratic method, was based on ques- tion and answer in which the careful definition of terms (“love,” “justice,” “the good”) produced insights into the truth. Unlike his rivals, Socrates believed firmly that absolute truths could be known and taught, although he denied that he himself possessed correct knowledge. He described himself as a “midwife” for knowledge born from the minds of his students. Socrates’ pot-bellied fig- ure was a familiar sight to Athenians, playing the gadfly to pester complacent Athenians into action. According to Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
In 399 BCE, however, the philosopher became bitterly and fatally entangled in affairs of state. In the turmoil following the military defeat of Athens, Socrates was tried for impiety, and sentenced to die. Read the Plato’s Crito on myartslab.com
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Plato’s Republic was full of unorthodox ideas: poetry should be abolished and women should exercise naked alongside the men. But it was still concerned with the Socratic agenda of practical human concerns. Plato’s later works returned to the cosmic questions of early Greek philosophy, often adapting Pythagorean ideas. In his Phaedo, which dramatizes Socrates’ last hours, he proposes that the human soul is reincarnated at birth. The newborn loses its perfect knowledge of the Good but can recollect the truth through reasoned thought. In the Timaeus, a work that influenced medieval science, Plato describes a cosmos created in a perfect math- ematical and musical order. This is, in fact, an inquiry into the Good; it attunes the philosopher’s soul to the perfect harmonies of the cosmos.
In the “Allegory,” Plato was no doubt portraying Athens’s imperfect and foolish citizens, who had exe- cuted Socrates for trying to lead them from the darkness of error. Plato’s Republic described the perfect polis, a utopia governed by enlightened authoritarianism rather than Athenian-style democracy. The Republic begins with a debate about true justice and ultimately connects the orderly society to a properly ordered and virtuous soul. The human soul should govern itself by reason, using moral courage to rule its appetites and attaining “self-mastery and beautiful order” by “harmonizing” its three parts.9 Likewise, there are three parts to the ideal society: philosopher-kings who rule wisely; mili- tant guardians who enforce their rule; and ordinary citizens who perform all physical labor.
G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
It was not just ancient Greek philosophers who concerned themselves with the question of individual virtue and social cohesion. Across the Eurasian world, in the advanced urban civilizations of middle and eastern Asia, other think- ers formulated alternatives to traditional myth and ritual. In Persia, it was Zoroaster; in India, it was Gautama Buddha (see page 98). And in China, it was the philosopher Kong- Fuzi, better known as Confucius (551–479 BCE). Within the span of time from Socrates to Aristotle in Greece, these Eastern thinkers proposed revolutionary ideas that con- tinue to shape our thinking today.
Like Plato and Aristotle both, Confucius emphasized the individual citizen’s responsibility within society. His teach- ing defined the duty of the gentleman (or “superior man”) to fill his assigned role with ethical integrity and respect for tradition. He urged China’s rulers to give up their aris- tocratic concept of exalted birth and inherited privilege. They should adopt instead a personal ethic of wisdom and humanity, Confucius counseled, and rule by example and moral persuasion rather than coercion. Confucius’s ideal ruler had something in common with Plato’s philosopher- king, though it was practical virtue that guided the Confucian gentleman, not the contemplation of ideal truth.
This individual virtue was termed jen [run], meaning “human-heartedness.” Jen required the cultivation of indi- vidual benevolence and humanity, as expressed in a life of right action. The cultivation of jen led to a respect for custom and propriety (li [lee]), another essential Confucian idea. Li included obedience to one’s parents and to the
rulers of the state, and was also demonstrated in the arts, which honored and preserved abiding traditions.
Confucius viewed the cultivation of harmony and order in the individual soul as the only means to an orderly society. The state could not create justice among citizens who did not seek justice in their own hearts. In The Great Learning, a synopsis of Confucius’s moral and social program, the teacher said, “From the emperor down to the common peo- ple, all, without exception, must consider cultivation of the individual character as the root. If the root is in disorder, it is impossible for the branches to be in order.”10
It was this stress on “cultivation of individual character” that Confucian thinking shared with Socrates and classical Greek philosophy. Mere obedience to the gods and ritual sacrifice were not the most important signs of virtue. To be in harmony with one’s family and one’s society—this was the way to right living.
CRITICAL QUESTION If, as Confucius suggests, the right way of living is to be in harmony with one’s state, then how is the citizen of a despotic regime to transform society? Does Confucian emphasis on obedience make social reform impossible?
Confucius and Philosophy
Read excerpts from Confucius’s Analects on myartslab.com
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governance (kingship, aristocracy, and democracy) in achieving the purpose of the state—a “good and self- sufficing life.” Aristotle concludes that a constitutional democracy best suits the Greeks, giving power equally to the virtuous and the wealthy.
Ironically, Aristotle would see the demise of Greece’s independent city-states at the hands of the Macedonian conqueror who had been his patron and pupil. The niceties of his political theory were swept aside by the armies of a new empire.
The Hellenistic Age The classical age in Greece ended when the general Philip of Macedon (ruled 359–336 BCE) managed to subdue and unite the independent Greek city-states. Philip was succeeded by his twenty-year-old son Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), a pupil of Aristotle, who became one of the world’s greatest conquerors. Alexander was a great lover of classical civilization. In the wake of his military conquests, Greek culture was diffused across a vast Mediterranean empire. This Hellenistic (or Greek- like) culture dominated the eastern Mediterranean world for the next thousand years.
Beginning in 333 BCE, Alexander launched a whirl- wind campaign against the great empires of Persia and Egypt (Fig. 3.29). Without losing a battle, he brought their vast territories and resources under his rule. His armies continued into what is now India until the hero succumbed to a fever in 323 BCE. On his death, Alexander’s military empire was divided into three large kingdoms, which adopted the Persian-style government of absolute monarchy and a strong central state.
The Hellenistic Legacy Hellenistic civilization was a composite of Greek and Near Eastern elements that differed substantially from its classical predecessor. Politically, the Greek city-states lost the self-sufficiency that had encouraged the burst of classical creativity in Athens. At the same time, stan- dards of living rose, and women gained wider respect and legal standing.
In the arts and letters, Hellenistic civilization lacked the audacious originality of classical Greece. Hellenistic kings collected classical manuscripts in great librar- ies that served as centers of scholarship. The most famous of these libraries was in Egyptian Alexandria, a
Aristotle Having formulated his ideas in philosophical dialogues, Plato returned to his native city and founded a school called the Academy that reestablished Athens as the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean world. The Academy’s most renowned student was Aristotle (384– 322 BCE), who challenged Plato’s teachings and became, alongside Plato, a towering figure in world philosophy. Together Aristotle’s works form an encyclopedia of Greek knowledge about the world, including treatises in science, ethics, logic, politics, and literature, among other disciplines. As a philosopher, Aristotle prized careful observation of the world as it actually existed. At his school in Athens, called the Lyceum, he assem- bled a library of maps and manuscripts and a museum of natural specimens. His teaching had direct impact: he briefly tutored the young Macedonian prince Alexander (the Great), who would soon conquer the Mediterranean world.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics begins with the pronounce- ment that all humans “by nature desire to know.” In his Nichomachean [nik-oh-MAHK-ee-un] Ethics, Aristotle defined human happiness as the act of knowing. Eudaimonia (well-being) was something achieved in the exercise of humans’ deepest nature: their intellectual capacity to know truth. Much as Plato thought the best kings would be philosophers, Aristotle believed the hap- piest people were people philosophizing. In consonance with Greek ideas of measure and harmony, Aristotle defines virtue as the deliberate and rational choice of a “mean” between extreme vices. With regard to plea- sure, for example, the rational choice is temperance, a mean between excessive self-indulgence and self-denial.
In metaphysics (the study of ultimate being), Aristotle disputed Plato’s claim that an object’s form existed in a separate realm of universal Forms. The form of a manufactured object, such as a table, is immanent, or contained in the object. The material stuff of a table is mixed with the form—the shape and purpose—given it by a carpenter. The objects of nature, such as a tree or apple, take the shape given them by the Prime Mover, the creator God who is the world’s “first cause.” Thus, every creature of nature is imprinted with the purpose or good that the Prime Mover intended for it at creation.
In his Politics, too, Aristotle opposed his mentor Plato’s ideas. For Aristotle, the human was “by nature a political animal” and the state a creation of nature.11
This meant that Greek political institutions like prop- erty, slavery, and the subordination of women were natural, too. Aristotle evaluates the chief forms of
Read an excerpt from Aristotle’s The Creation of Democracy in Athens on myartslab.com
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Epicureans, the stoics’ ethical teachings were rooted in their view of the cosmos. The stoics held that, because divine reason controlled the universe, humans should strive to live in harmony with the rational laws of nature. Stoics found happiness—or at least a sense of well-being—in calming their passions and performing the duties of their social role. Events beyond one’s con- trol ought to be regarded with indifference, or apatheia. Even the death of a loved one should not disturb the wise person’s emotional detachment. Stoicism was to find wide application in the Roman era and in Christian philosophical thinking.
While in classical Greece philosophy and science had been independent pursuits, in the Hellenistic age rulers generously patronized learning. They founded scientific institutions like the Museum and Library in Alexandria, Egypt, and fueled a burst of scientific discovery in astron- omy, medicine, and mathematics. Euclid (c. 300 BCE) codified a system of geometry; astronomers asserted for the first time that the planets revolved around the sun. The mathematician Archimedes (c. 287–212 BCE) invented such marvelous devices as a screw for lifting water. Even during the Roman era, Greek scientists continued their investigations. The most important was Ptolemy (c. 100–178), whose complex scheme describ- ing planetary motion remained in use for 1,500 years.
Architecturally, the new Hellenistic cities preserved classical Greek traditions but employed new methods of urban planning. Planners effectively integrated reli- gious and civic buildings into an urban grid, connecting and framing them by colonnaded stoae and peristyles. The acropolis of Pergamon, in present-day Turkey (Fig. 3.30), radiated upwards from the steeply inclined
sprawling cosmopolitan city with perhaps one million inhabitants. Artists were keen to imitate and elaborate the forms and ideas of classical Greece. In theater dra- matists proved most inventive in comedy, developing Menander’s comedy of manners. In philosophy, the influence of Athens and Plato’s Academy continued while philosophical schools formed around new ideas. Epicurus (341–271 BCE), for example, claimed that humans could live happily by understanding nature. “Pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily,” according to Epicurus. However, Epicureanism [epp- uh-KYOO-ree-un-ism] did not teach the hedonistic pursuit of sensation at all cost. Unbridled pleasure was certain to result in pain, Epicurus warned, and so the wise person learned to moderate desire. The aim of an Epicurean’s moral conduct was ataraxia (untroubled- ness or tranquility). Epicurus’ theory of nature was heavily influenced by earlier Greek philosophers. He taught that nature resulted from the chance collision of atoms and obeyed purely mechanistic laws. There was nothing to fear from the gods; they did not control events or punish wrongdoing.
The philosophy of stoicism also originated in Hellenistic Athens. It was named for the stoa, or porch, in Athens where its adherents gathered. Its founder Zeno (c. 335–262 BCE) was a student of the Platonic Academy and an admirer of Socrates’ ethical teaching. In the stoics’ view, the material world is composed of a fiery divine substance called the logos. Divine reason inhabits and rules the entire cosmos, and hence every event in the world-process is a consequence of reason. The natural law of reason is the necessary and ines- capable cause of all events and all actions. As with the
3.29 Alexander at the Battle of Issus, from the House of the Faun, Pompeii, 2nd century BCE (copy after original painting of c. 320– 311 BCE). Mosaic, 8 ft 10 ins × 16 ft 9 ins (2.69 × 5.11 m). Museo Nazionale, Naples. In the decisive battle of 333 BCE, the bareheaded Alexander (at left) leads a cavalry charge that causes the Persian king Darius to flee. Alexander’s conquests and his love of classical Greek civilization spread Greek culture across the Mediterranean world and beyond.
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theater to important temples, the royal palace, and the great Altar of Zeus. A two-story stoa housed the city’s great library. The Altar of Zeus shows how Hellenistic art often re-configured elements of its classical Greek models. The sculpted frieze (a scene of the battle of gods and giants) is placed at eye level and the colon- nade, traditionally a roof support, is moved to the top, as a freestanding peristyle that encloses the actual altar.
Hellenistic sculpture often portrayed ordinary indi- viduals sympathetically, aiming for direct emotional impact on the viewer. The Dying Gaul (Fig. 3.31) was
part of a statue group that a Hellenistic ruler com- missioned to honor his battlefield opponents. The
warrior has just committed suicide with his sword, which has fallen from his hand. The sculptor
communicates his heroic resigna- tion through individualizing
detail, such as his coarse
3.30 Acropolis at Pergamon, c. 150 BCE. Reconstruction model. Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. At Pergamon, a Hellenistic capital built from scratch, urban planners integrated important structures into a grandly terraced demonstration of Hellenistic urban architecture. Note the Altar of Zeus (center right), a colonnaded platform decorated by a sculptural frieze some 9 ft (2.3 m) high.
3.31 Dying Gaul, Roman copy after bronze original, c. 225 BCE. Marble, height 35 1⁄2 ins (91 cm), length 6 ft 3 ins (1.91 m). Museo Capitolino, Rome. Compare the pose and mood of this Hellenistic statue with the classical Zeus of Artemision (also called Poseidon) (Fig. 3.23). What different emotional responses might the two works cause in a viewer?
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hair and his necklace, unlike the idealized nudes of clas- sical Greek sculpture.
The most dramatic of Hellenistic sculptures may be Laocoön and his Two Sons (Fig. 3.32), which portrays a Trojan priest and his sons as they are set upon by ser- pents. The treatment of the Laocoön [lah-OH-koh-on] is more turbulent and impassioned than any classical sculpture. The figures’ violent struggle creates a sense of dramatic conflict and emotion. The face of Laocoön
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2500 BCE 1000 BCE 900 BCE 800 BCE 700 BCE c. 800–650 BCE Composition of Homeric epics
c. 1550 BCE Mask of Agamemnon, Mycenae (3.4)
c. 1250 BCE Mycenaeans conquer Troy
c. 2500 BCE Beginning of Minoan civilization, Crete
C H A P T E R 3 : T I M E L I N E
3.32 Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes, Laocoön and his Two Sons, c. 150 BCE. Marble, height 8 ft (2.44 m). Vatican Museums, Rome. Trace this dynamic sculpture’s crisscrossing diagonal lines overlaid with the contorted serpent’s body. Laocoön had tried to warn the Trojans against accepting the Greeks’ fateful gift of a wooden horse.
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of Homer’s epics and other classical Greek literature. When Roman armies conquered the Hellenistic world in the second century BCE, these texts would be the prim- ers of the Mediterranean world’s next great imperial power—Rome. Hellenistic scholars and artists revered classical Greece even as they sought to surpass it: an attitude that the Romans would share.
shows the agony of one terrible moment, rather than the calm balance of a timeless pose.
Hellenistic artists and scholars consciously looked back to classical Greece as the standard for measur- ing their accomplishments. In Hellenistic libraries, for example, scholars meticulously edited classical manuscripts and compiled the first scholarly editions
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600 BCE 500 BCE 400 BCE 300 BCE 200 BCE c. 300 BCE Menander, Hellenistic comic playwright (3.27)
c. 180 BCE Altar of Zeus, Pergamon (3.30)
c. 150 BCE Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes, Laocoön and his Two Sons (3.32)
146 BCE Roman conquest of Greece
399 BCE Socrates’ trial and execution
387 BCE Plato founds Academy
c. 350 BCE Theater at Epidaurus (3.26)
342 BCE Aristotle tutors Alexander
c. 340 BCE Praxiteles, Hermes and Dionysus (3.25)
336–323 BCE Conquests of Alexander the Great
c. 615 BCE Kouros from Attica (3.9)
c. 600 BCE Sappho, lyric poet
551–479 BCE Life of Confucius
c. 550 BCE Pythagoras, numerical basis of music
480 BCE Greeks defeat Persians at Salamis
447–432 BCE Parthenon, Athens (3.1, 3.14)
438–432 BCE Three Goddesses, Parthenon, Athens (3.21)
432–404 BCE Peloponnesian Wars, Athens defeated
429 BCE Sophocles, Oedipus the King
421–409 BCE Erechtheum, Athens (3.18, 3.19)
411 BCE Aristophanes, Lysistrata
CHAPTER REVIEW
Early Greece What did the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures contribute to the emergence of Greek civiliza- tion? What are the differences between epic poetry and lyric poetry? Who were Homer and Sappho? How did the early Greeks picture their gods? Describe the devel- opment of early Greek philosophy. How does it com- pare to the development of Archaic Greek sculpture?
The Classical Period What is a polis? What historical events gave rise to the classical period (480–323 BCE) of ancient Greece? Who was Pericles? Describe the characteristics of Athens’s Golden Age. How did these characteristics contribute to its downfall?
Classical Greek Art In what ways does the Athenian acropolis represent civic virtue? Compare and contrast the Doric and Ionic architectural orders. What was the Parthenon? How did Greek figurative sculpture embody the classical ideal?
Greek Theater and Music How did tragedy and comedy arise in Greek theater? Who were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides? How did they differ from Aristophanes? What were the connections between music and reason in the minds of the early Greeks?
Classical Greek Philosophy What is a sophist? How did Socrates “found classical Greek philosophy” with- out writing a word? What was Plato’s Republic? How did Aristotle’s views differ from those of his teacher Plato? What is eudaimonia and how can it be achieved?
The Hellenistic Age What are the primary characteris- tics of the Hellenistic age (323–145 BCE)? How do these characteristics differ from those of the classical period before it? Compare and contrast the sculpted figure of Laocoön with that of Zeus of Artemision. How do these differences relate to the development of stoicism?
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4.1 Colosseum, Rome, c. 72–80 CE. Long axis 620 ft (189 m), short axis 513 ft (156 m), height 160 ft (49 m). The Colosseum was a triumph of Roman engineering and a tribute to the Romans’ taste for popular spectacles. The decorative relief columns are reminders of Rome’s artistic debt to Greek art. But the complex arrangement of arches and vaulting that supported seating for 50,000 spectators was a purely Roman invention.
K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• How did Rome develop from a republic to an imperial power? • How did Roman imperial art convey political messages? • What does Roman art reveal about the daily lives of ordinary Romans? • What are the characteristics and achievements of Roman
poetry and philosophy?
Ancient Rome 4 Sprawling imperial Rome—a city crowded with stupendous buildings (Fig. 4.1, Fig.
4.2), alive with pleasures and entertainment—was the hub of a world that stretched
from England to Iraq. Here was where Roman emperors paraded their war captives.
Here was where Romans brought their plundered Greek treasures. Here was where
future empires would look for an example of greatness. This was the imperial spirit
of Rome: the power to impose the city’s law on subject peoples, the will to civilize
them in the Roman way, the sense of destiny that Rome could bring peace and order
to the world (Map 4.1).
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The Drama of Roman History Few peoples have been as conscious of their history as the ancient Romans, and few histories have been reen- acted as often as ancient Rome’s. Shakespeare’s Brutus, standing over the murdered Julius Caesar, asks how many times their scene will be enacted on the world’s stage. He spoke more prophetically than Shakespeare could have known. The drama of Roman history has provided the script for revolutions and conquests many times over. Even the collapse of Rome’s ancient empire has been compared to the decline of the British and Russian empires in the twentieth century.
4.2 Scale model of ancient Rome. Museo della Civiltà, Rome. Rome at the height of its power, crowded by imperial buildings: at upper right, the Colosseum; center, the emperor’s palace and race course; and upper left, the Forum of Trajan.
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The Rise of Republican Rome The Romans’ sense of history began with the city’s founding, set by legend in 753 BCE. However, Roman cultural development dates from the era of Etruscan domination. The Etruscans were a resourceful people of central Italy, who dominated the Italian peninsula in the sixth century BCE. When the last Etruscan king was expelled from Rome around 510 BCE, the Romans were left with a valuable Etruscan legacy. Although its origins are obscure, Etruscan art (Fig. 4.3) shows a vigor and confidence that the Romans would not match for centuries. Etruscan skills in engineering and architecture, including the use of the arch for construction, were also part of their legacy.
In 509 BCE, the Romans established a republic —a government of representatives chosen to act for the people at large. Etruscan rule had left the early Romans with a distaste for kings, and they intended republican government to protect them from the abuses of mon- archy. In modern times and for similar reasons, revo- lutionaries in eighteenth-century North America and France founded republics modeled after the Roman republic.
From 509 to c. 250 BCE, two struggles propelled Roman history: externally, the Romans set out to con- quer the Italian peninsula, establishing themselves as a leading Mediterranean power; internally, the Romans struggled over the distribution of political power within the republic. The struggle was won at first by the con- servative upper-class patricians [pah-TRIH-shuns], who ruled through the Roman Senate. Gradually, the opposing class of poor commoners (called plebeians [pleb-EE-uns]) gained political power and constitu- tional recognition of their rights.
Once the Romans had achieved control of Italy, they turned to subdue their Mediterranean rivals. Rome’s chief opponent was the north African commercial and naval power of Carthage. The Romans defeated the Carthaginians in a series of three wars called the Punic [PYOO-nik] Wars (264–146 BCE), the last of which ended in the vengeful razing of Carthage and Rome’s total domination of the western Mediterranean. By this
4.3 Apollo, from the Portonaccio Temple, Veii, c. 520– 500 BCE. Terracotta, height 5 ft 9 ins (1.75 m). Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia, Rome. This Etruscan statue resembles the Archaic Greek kouros, especially in its striding stance and formalized smile. Greek colonies in southern Italy exerted early influence on Etruscan and Roman cultures.
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Imperialism The concepts of empire and imperialism suggest both great achievement and hateful oppression. An empire is a large territory or a number of territories dominated by a single political authority. The imperial authority may be a city-state such as Rome, or a nation such as Great Britain, which once controlled a vast empire including the present-day United States and Canada. Today, some call the United States an imperialist power, because of its domination of smaller nations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, its far-flung military presence around the world, and its repeated use of military force overseas.
Imperial authority often brings cultural progress and political unity to the diverse territories under its rule. For example, the Indian parliament still uses English, the
language of its imperial oppressor, as a principal language, and only the English language transcends India’s regional and cultural divisions. Ancient Rome also brought the rule of law and a cosmopolitan culture to its imperial territories. Rome’s provinces enjoyed these gifts at the cost of bowing to the Roman eagle and worshiping the Roman emperor.
The ancient Romans built their empire with an aggres- sive, well-trained army and a talent for efficient adminis- tration. By 265 BCE, the Romans controlled all of the Italian peninsula. Within a hundred more years, they controlled much of Europe and the entire Mediterranean rim (see Map 4.1). Like America’s expansion westward during the 1800s, Rome’s rise to power seemed to fulfill a divinely sanc- tioned national destiny. Unlike North American pioneers,
Map 4.1 The Roman Empire.
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time, Rome’s eyes were already turning east, and in 146 BCE Romans conquered the Greek capital of Corinth. In the decades that followed, Rome’s empire absorbed virtually the entire Hellenistic world, with its wealth, libraries, and art treasures.
By the second century BCE, Rome was no longer an agrarian city peopled by yeoman farmers and small merchants. It had become a vast and wealthy empire with large professional armies. Tantalized by the prospect of ruling this empire, power-hungry leaders convulsed Rome in a series of civil wars (90–31 BCE). Private armies clashed in distant provinces, while thou- sands died in political assassinations and reprisals. The leading player in this turbulent era was Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE), a charismatic figure who reformed Roman law and reorganized its public administra- tion. Playing on his military successes in Gaul (modern France), Caesar had himself named dictator for life in 46 BCE. However, he was assassinated two years later by senators fearful that he would establish a monar- chy. Caesar’s death set off another bloody civil conflict, from which his adopted nephew Octavian emerged vic- torious. Octavian (63 BCE–14 CE) defeated his uncle’s assassins and then faced his own former ally, Mark Antony. In 31 BCE, Octavian vanquished the forces of Antony and his sponsor Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, leaving Rome to his own command.
Imperial Rome During the early republican era, the Romans remained uncivilized, at least compared with their Greek contem- poraries. At the time of the Athenian Golden Age, the Romans were little more than rude farmers and villag- ers. In the late republican era, contact with Hellenistic Greece stimulated the first bloom of Roman literature. The Romans’ greatest cultural achievements did not begin until the reign of Octavian, who called himself Caesar Augustus (ruled 27 BCE–14 CE). Although the Senate called him Rome’s “First Citizen,” Augustus was in fact dictator of Rome from 27 BCE onward. His reign inaugurated the long succession of Roman emperors who would rule the Western world for five centuries.
Caesar Augustus established a period of relative peace and prosperity called the Pax Romana, which lasted until the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius [oh-REEL- yuss] (in 180). During his reign, Augustus consolidated his imperial power, even while he preserved the illusion of republican rights and senatorial prerogatives. In the arts, he sponsored a building program that would make Rome the equal of the grand Hellenistic capitals it now
however, Rome did not usually displace the residents of conquered territories. Instead, it instituted Roman law and culture alongside native customs and offered citizenship to the social elite of subject nations. Rome’s imperial system was so vast and effective that it thrived under good emperors and survived under bad ones.
Later empires and would-be emperors measured themselves against the standard of Roman great- ness (Fig. 4.4). The French military genius Napoleon adopted the symbols and fashions of imperial Rome, styling himself a world conqueror in the Roman mold, and Adolf Hitler boasted that his Nazi regime would last a thousand years. Napoleon honored his victories with a triumphal arch in Paris that was twice the size of any in Rome, while Hitler’s architect designed a still larger arch for Berlin.
4.4 Arch of Trajan, Benevento, 114–17. Marble, height 51 ft (15.55 m). In ancient Rome, the triumphal arch became a symbol of imperial power and achievement. Compare this arch with that built by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 1800s (Fig. 12.4).
CRITICAL QUESTION What are the arguments in favor of the United States’ influence over other nations? What are the arguments against U.S. imperial power?
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idealized, though still recognizable. The dolphin at his side alludes to the goddess Venus, mother of the Trojan hero Aeneas, from whom Augustus claimed descent. By associating the emperor with gods, heroes, and Roman history, this work of art is effective propaganda.
A more elaborate work of sculptural propaganda was the Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace)
controlled. Augustus proclaimed proudly that he had found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.
Augustus’ protégé, the epic poet Virgil (70–19 BCE), stated Rome’s cultural ambitions with more modesty. In his poem the Aeneid, Virgil acknowledged that other races would “hammer forth more delicately a breathing likeness out of bronze, coax living faces from the mar- ble, [and] plead causes with more skill.” “Romans,” wrote Virgil, “concern yourselves with commanding the nations; your arts shall be to impose the rule of peace, to spare the submissive, and to crush the proud.”1
Despite Virgil’s proclamation, Caesar Augustus and, later, his successors were determined to develop a distinctive Roman civilization, even if much of it had to be borrowed from the Greeks. Two essential obser- vations can be made of the Roman civilization of the late republic and the empire: first, the Romans avidly absorbed classical Greek and Hellenistic civilization; and second, they remained resolutely practical and util- itarian in their attitude toward the arts and philosophy. For the Romans, culture had to serve the useful ends of justifying imperial power and providing comfort and entertainment for Roman citizens.
The Art of an Empire After the leadership of Julius Caesar, virtually every Roman leader strove to leave a memory of himself in stone. The emperors of the Roman Empire built statues and buildings that were both political advertisements and artistic statements, impressing upon their people a message of their power and generosity expressed through the styles of classical and Hellenistic Greece. By adopting the Greek-style arts, the Romans could associ- ate themselves with the prestige of classical Athens and Alexander the Great.
During the reign of Augustus, the art of the Roman Empire began to flourish. Artists skillfully adapted classical Greek sculpture to the emperor’s propaganda purposes. Augustus and his successors built elaborate new complexes at the center of Rome, the grandest of which was the Forum of Trajan, built at the height of Rome’s power in the second century CE.
Sculpture as Propaganda Augustus was the first Roman ruler to place statues and busts of his own image in public squares and buildings. The so-called Augustus of Primaporta (Fig. 4.5), discovered in a provincial Roman town, is typi- cal of these official portraits. Augustus’ face is slightly
4.5 Augustus of Primaporta, c. 20 BCE. Marble, height 6 ft 8 ins (2.03 m). Vatican Museums, Rome. Caesar Augustus propagated official images throughout his empire, fostering a personal cult of the emperor. The emperor’s armor breastplate depicts his greatest diplomatic achievement— the return of Roman army standards captured by a foreign rival.
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The Forum of Trajan
The most impressive monument to Augustus’ reign was the forum he built at the center of Rome, of which little now remains. A forum, originally a “marketplace,” was the social and political center of a Roman city. Rome’s oldest forum, the republican Forum, was the site of important temples and law courts, as well as shops, banks, and schools. Julius Caesar and Augustus both built new forums, glorifying their own names, adjacent to the old republican Forum.
It was the Emperor Trajan (ruled 98–117) who built the grandest of the imperial forums (Fig. 4.8), a suitable
(Fig. 4.6). The Ara Pacis [AH-ruh PAH-kiss] was built to commemorate Augustus’ safe return from a campaign in Gaul. In a larger sense, it celebrated the emperor’s twin goals of general peace (after a century of civil war) and a return to Rome’s agrarian tradi- tions. The altar itself and the wall enclosure are deco- rated with relief sculpture, probably executed by Greek artists. On the screen enclosure, an elaborate two-part frieze consists of floral designs and the procession led by Augustus to consecrate the altar (Fig. 4.7). Even the altar’s site was symbolic of Augustus’ program of peace—it was built in a park that had once been a drill field for the Roman army.
4.6 Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace), Rome, 13–9 BCE. Marble, 36 × 33 ft (11 × 10 m). The Romans effectively adapted Greek classicism to convey a social and political message. This elaborately symbolic work represented Augustus’ political program of peace and agrarian values. The right front panel depicts a key scene from the life of Aeneas, the legendary hero from whom Augustus claimed descent.
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4.7 Imperial Procession, detail of the Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, 13–9 BCE. Marble relief, height approx. 5 ft 3 ins (1.6 m). The altar’s sculpted screen shows how effectively the Romans adapted the classical Greek style to the purposes of imperial propaganda. Compare this imperial procession scene, which here shows members of Augustus’ family, to the Parthenon cella frieze, whose mounted horsemen glorified the dead heroes of Athenian military victories (Fig. 3.22).
4.8 Plan of the imperial forums, Rome. Built to glorify imperial rulers, the forums crowded Rome’s center with Greek-style temples and other public buildings (compare Fig. 4.12). The largest forum was Trajan’s, dominated by the imposing Basilica Ulpia; a large Greek-style temple dedicated to Trajan; and the unique Column of Trajan (see Fig. 4.10).
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monument to the peace and prosperity that character- ized his reign. The Forum of Trajan included an expan- sive marketplace, a hall of justice, and two libraries, one each for Greek and Latin texts. The hall of justice of Trajan’s Forum, named the Basilica Ulpia (Fig. 4.9), was a typical Roman basilica—a rectangular public hall, usually with a flat ceiling. On the ground floor, visitors circulated through a forest of grand Corinthian columns. Law courts met in semicircular niches recessed in the end walls. The basilica was a traditional Roman building, old-fashioned even in Trajan’s day but still expressing the imperial grandeur of Rome.
The centerpiece of Trajan’s Forum was the Column of Trajan (Fig. 4.10), a sculpted column depicting scenes of the emperor’s victories over the rebellious Dacians (in present-day Romania). The campaign was a suitable topic for imperial propaganda: the gold from Dacian mines funded public welfare and imperial construction during Trajan’s reign. The column is, nonetheless, a
4.9 Apollodorus of Damascus, Basilica Ulpia, Forum of Trajan, Rome, 113. Restored perspective view of the central hall. The basilica was a traditional Roman building used for legal proceedings and other public affairs. Later Roman architects would adapt the basilica’s large central hall in building Christian churches (see page 117). In this restoration view, the Column of Trajan is visible through the second-story columns.
4.10 Apollodorus of Damascus, Column of Trajan, Rome, 106–13. Marble, height of base 18 ft (5.5 m), height of column 97 ft (29.6 m). One of Rome’s most remarkable achievements in sculpture, this column’s spiraling narrative depicts a military campaign with typical Roman realism. In Trajan’s time, the column could be viewed from the upper stories of opposing libraries and from the Basilica Ulpia.
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The World Citizen As the Mediterranean world and ancient Near East were unified by conquest—first Alexander’s (see page 69) and then the Romans’—philosophers began to think beyond the limits of ethnic and national boundaries. It was prob- ably the Cynic philosopher Diogenes who first declared, “I am a citizen of the world” (in Greek, kosmou polities), in Diogenes’ case most likely in order to justify his con- tempt for the laws of his city-state. The stoics, in turn, converted this critical attitude into a positive philosophy. When the stoic philosopher Epictetus told his followers to be “citizens of the world,” he expected them to obey the cosmic laws of divine reason as faithfully as they followed their city’s laws. Stoics were the first Western thinkers to recognize the essential unity of humans—at least male humans—as one brotherhood. Since they were bound in common citizenship, cosmopolitans were obliged to care for one another without regard for nationality. A world citizen’s character is “to hold nothing as profitable [only] to himself; to deliberate about nothing as if he were detached from the community …”2
In the Roman era, the cosmopolitan ideal was rooted in the practical problems of applying Roman law across an
empire of many different local traditions. Roman stoics nat- urally felt some tension between loyalty to the “fatherland” (patria) and to the world order. The cosmopolitan ideal re- emerged in Western thought when early modern Europe drew together the world under its colonial rule. In the eigh- teenth century, the Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant imagined the evolution of human society toward a “perpet- ual peace” established and governed by the rule of reason. The tension between patriotism and cosmopolitan humani- tarianism persists in the contemporary age, when nations use humanitarian aims rather than national self-interest to justify military actions.
CRITICAL QUESTION Imagine a situation in which you feel torn between an obligation to your community or nation and the responsibility you feel to the good of humanity the world over. What factors would you consider in resolving this tension reasonably?
4.11 Trajan Addressing His Troops (the Adlocutio), detail of Trajan’s Column, Rome, 113. Height of fi gures approx. 27 1⁄2 ins (70 cm). Sculptors unified the column’s long narrative with recurring appearances of the emperor, who here addresses the troops prior to battle. Note the larger scale of the figure of Trajan (center top), which identifies him clearly, and the realistic details in the figures’ dress and posture.
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might read a Hellenistic romance. Many Roman public buildings were used daily and served multiple purposes, in contrast to classical Greece, where most significant buildings had only a religious function. The Romans constructed their public buildings on a grand scale, decorating the interiors with colored marble, gilded statues, and wall paintings. The grandeur and comfort of Roman buildings depended on the Romans’ revolu- tionary innovations in construction, particularly the use of concrete and the arch.
The Romans developed the arch into a highly flex- ible architectural form, which could be used in many types of constructions. The arch was superior to the post-and-lintel design of Greek temples (see Fig. 3.15) for a simple technical reason—too much weight on the stone lintel would cause it to snap. Because in an arch the stones are compressed and not bent, it can bear more weight than the post-and-lintel. The arch’s sim- plest use was in bridges, such as the Pont du Gard in France (Fig. 4.13), in which three series of arches are stacked on top of each other. While arched bridges and aqueducts were essential to commerce and everyday
remarkable work of art. The narrative sculpture spirals around the column to a length of more than 650 feet (200 m). The story is told in a continuous scene (Fig. 4.11), as if to recount a series of uninterrupted events. The realistic details include the construction of pontoon bridges and the beheading of captive troops. While the sculptural style is still governed by Augustan classicism, the form—a continuous narrative in sculptural relief— had no precedent in the Greek world. Only the art of Chinese scroll painting, probably developed about the time of the late Roman Empire, created visual narra- tives of a scope similar to Trajan’s Column.
The Romans as Builders For all their splendor, many of ancient Rome’s great buildings (Fig. 4.12) were dedicated to practical ends: the basilicas served as areas where Romans could settle their legal and political affairs; the temples accom- modated religious ceremonies (a matter of civic obli- gation); the baths were where men exchanged gossip while lounging in the pools; and in the library women
4.12 Temple of Portunus (also known as Temple of Fortuna Virilis), Rome, late 2nd century BCE. The Roman Greek-style temple was a ubiquitous type of Roman building that typically stood facing a forum or other public area. In contrast to classical Greek temples, the Roman type was raised on a podium with a front stairway. Freestanding columns defining the portico, or porch, give way to relief columns along the sides of the cella.
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4.13 Pont du Gard, near Nîmes, France, late 1st century BCE. Stone, height 162 ft (49.4 m). The arch was essential to Roman engineering of roads and bridges. The Pont du Gard’s graceful arches bore traffic and fresh water to a provincial Roman city, assuring its quality of life and its connection to Roman authority.
4.14 The arch and its applications. In the basic arch (a), wedge-shaped stones called voussoirs transferred the weight to load-bearing vertical piers. An extended continuous arch, open at either end, created a barrel or tunnel vault (b). The intersection of two barrel vaults formed a cross vault (c), open on four sides and supported by piers at the four corners. In a dome, a series of arches intersected around a central axis.
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usefulness of their buildings, in keeping with the practi- cal spirit of Roman civilization.
The most spectacular interiors are those in build- ings devoted to recreation. The Roman baths were the ancients’ combination of health spa, beauty salon, pub- lic library, and shopping mall. The baths’ central hall consisted of connected cross vaults soaring high above the floor. These vaults were supported on either side by barrel-vaulted chambers, like the ones that remain from the Basilica of Constantine (Fig. 4.15). Under this spec- tacular vaulting, decorated with colored marble and paintings, were pools of hot, warm, and cold water. The Baths of Caracalla also housed a separate swim- ming pool, gymnasium, massage and steam rooms, res- taurants, and a library. It is no wonder that Romans flocked to the baths, and that an elaborate system of aqueducts was required to supply these baths with water.
The Romans loved entertainment as much as they loved pleasure, and theaters, amphitheaters, and racetracks were spread throughout the city. Romans crowded their stadiums for entertainments that were every bit the match of today’s stadium events. The most famous Roman amphitheater was the Colosseum
living, Roman architects learned to use the arch for more daring constructions. The barrel vault (Fig. 4.14) could bear tremendous weight and was often used as a structural support in buildings’ foundations. The cross vault was usually connected in a series of three vaults to form an open rectangular hall, with ceilings as high as 180 feet (55 m). The dome created a spacious and majestic interior space, of which the grandest was in the Pantheon (see Fig. 4.16).
Equal in importance to the arch was the use of con- crete in Roman building. Concrete was a mixture of rub- ble and a mortar that hardened when mixed with water. Concrete was customarily used with brick to construct a building’s core; the exterior was then decorated with a marble veneer. This enabled the Romans to construct buildings with the grand appearance of Greek classicism but without the expense of a quarried stone core.
The flexibility and economy of Roman construc- tion and the cramped conditions of building in Rome produced buildings of a different nature from those of classical and Hellenistic Greece. Instead of creating spectacular exterior settings, like the Parthenon’s in Athens, the Romans created spacious interiors with lav- ish marbles, mosaics, and gilding, and emphasized the
4.15 Basilica of Constantine (or Maxentius), Rome, c. 306–13. Brick and concrete. The high vaulted ceilings and large windows allowed light to flood the spacious interior, illuminating the colorful mosaic decoration. This basilica, the only law court built in the grand style of the Roman baths, was the last great pagan building of ancient Rome.
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combat of today’s sporting events seem rather tame by comparison.
The Pantheon The beauty and grandeur of one Roman building far outweighed its usefulness. The Pantheon (Fig. 4.16) was famed for its magnificent dome, rising above the interior in a perfect hemisphere, resting on a cylinder of exactly the same diameter (144 feet; 44 m; Fig. 4.17). For a Roman, to stand under this magnificent dome was like standing under the heavens themselves.
(see Fig. 4.1), which dominated the skyline of imperial Rome from its location near the republican Forum. The Colosseum’s outer walls rose nearly 160 feet (49 m) high. The arena floor could be landscaped for wild animal combats. The Romans preferred their entertain- ment to be spiced with violence and gore. According to the historian Suetonius, 5,000 wild beasts were slaughtered in a single day at the Colosseum’s inau- guration. Thousands of gladiators and some Christian martyrs also met their deaths on the Colosseum’s sand floor. Such scenes of Roman cruelty make the padded
4.16 Pantheon, Rome, c. 120. Height of portico 59 ft (18 m). The Pantheon’s perfect geometry and lavish interior decoration made it one of antiquity’s most admired buildings. To Romans, its interior hemispherical dome symbolized the unity of the cosmos and of the Roman imperial world.
4.17 Pantheon, Rome. Plan and cross-section. The building’s interior dome and supporting drum contain a perfect sphere.
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character and customs are best revealed in the arts of painting and portrait sculpture. Their taste for public entertainment—theater, music, and dance—is evident in the theaters and amphitheaters of even a small city such as that excavated at Pompeii.
Roman Daily Life In ancient Rome, family ties were the basis of social identity. The male head of the family, known as the paterfamilias [PAH-ter fah-MEE-lee-us], controlled the family’s membership and its fortunes. A newborn infant was not legally a family member until the pater- familias had recognized the infant and given it his name. Unrecognized children were sometimes given for adoption to other families. More commonly, new- borns (especially girls) were “exposed,” that is, left in the forum to die or be adopted as foundlings. Bearing a family name through adoption was no disadvantage: the young Octavian became Rome’s first emperor after he had been adopted by Julius Caesar.
Married women enjoyed relative freedom, but still suffered confined social roles. Roman women accom- panied their husbands in public, often to banquets and other public occasions. As in Greece, they supervised the household, but in Rome women might also hold and inherit property. Women could divorce their husbands
The Pantheon was built around 120 by the emperor Hadrian at the height of Rome’s imperial power. The temple was dedicated to the seven planetary gods, although Hadrian also used it for Senate meetings and other ceremonial occasions. Seen from the outside, the Pantheon now appears rather dull, since it has been stripped of its marble covering and its bronze pedimen- tal relief sculpture. Inside, however, the observer can still sense the building’s original beauty (Fig. 4.18). The dome was punctuated by a 30-foot (9 m) opening called an oculus. The oculus was the principal source of light inside the building and also repeated the interior’s geo- metric motif. Around the walls were niches, containing divine statues and recesses behind Corinthian columns of colored marble. With its geometric rhythms and soaring interior, the Pantheon seemed to merge all of creation in a perfectly harmonious whole.
Roman Art and Daily Life The imperial buildings of Rome tell us much about the Romans as engineers, conquerors, and administrators, but little about them as ordinary people. Christian his- torians later condemned the licentious style of Roman living, blaming Rome’s fall on sinful ways. In fact the daily life of the average Roman was relatively modest and centered on the family. The Romans’ domestic
4.18 Cutaway view of the Pantheon.
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layer of ash when the nearby volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted and spewed its ash over the city. The town’s inhabitants were smothered by toxic gas, and their bodies left hardened volcanic casts where they fell. The Pompeiians’ houses and domestic possessions were first excavated in the eighteenth century, offering a glimpse of the Roman household and its artistic decoration.
Even the finest Pompeiian city houses were relatively dark and crowded. The largest houses were centered
and be divorced, often through a simple public declara- tion. If her husband died or was sent into exile, a wife would inherit her husband’s household and wealth. She could entertain suitors, take a lover, or cloister herself in mourning, sheltered from the world’s hypocrisy.
The houses, forums, theaters, and amphitheaters of one entire Roman city were preserved by a great acci- dent of history, the destruction of Pompeii [pom-PAY- ee] in 79. Pompeii was buried under a 15-foot (4.6 m)
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
A Marriage Contract of the Roman Era In the Roman era, marriage among the upper classes cus- tomarily required only a simple contract between husband and wife (Fig. 4.19). A Roman wife maintained control of her own property, including the right to her dowry should the husband seek divorce. The marriage contract below bound a couple living in Alexandria, the cosmopolitan Hellenistic capital, in the first century BCE.
Let Apollonia be the wife of Philiscus, having been persuaded by him that it is fitting for her to be his wife, and let her have mastery in common with him over all their possessions. And let Philiscus provide for Apollonia all the things that she needs and her clothing and all the rest that is suitable for a married woman to have provided for her—and let him do this wherever they live, according as their means allow. And let him take no other wife but Apollonia, and no concubine, and let him have no boyfriends or beget children from any other woman so long as Apollonia is living nor inhabit any other household than the one over which Apollonia rules; nor let him repudiate her or do violence to her or treat her badly or alienate any of their property in a manner which is unfair to Apollonia. If he is caught doing any of these things … then let him pay back immediately to Apollonia her dowry of two talents and four thousand drachmas of bronze. By the same token, let Apollonia not be permitted to spend the day or the night away from the house of Philiscus without his knowledge, nor may she sleep with another man, nor may she squander their common household property, nor may she disgrace Philiscus in the ways in which men get disgraced. But if Apollonia willingly does any of these things, let her be sent away from Philiscus, and let him repay to her the dowry simply within ten days of her departure.3
4.19 Portrait of the Baker Terentius Neo and His Wife (formerly known as Portrait of a Magistrate and His Wife), Pompeii, Italy, mid-1st century. Fresco on plaster, 22 7⁄8 × 20 1⁄2 ins (58 × 52 cm). National Archaeological Museum, Naples. This Pompeiian couple has recently been correctly identified as a baker and his wife, who had themselves portrayed in solemn attire and with the refined air of a couple of intellectuals. He holds a papyrus scroll against his chin, while she has her stylus and diptych open, as if in the act of finishing a poem. Roman married couples frequently sat for portraits of themselves together.
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on an atrium, a reception room with an open roof and a pool beneath. The atrium in the House of the Silver Wedding (Fig. 4.20) is exceptional in its size and gran- deur. The other rooms were windowless, and usually several people slept in the same room. The most pleas- ant aspect of the finer houses was an adjacent garden, surrounded by a colonnade, where Pompeiians dined.
An important feature of a Roman household was that part of the dwelling or its furnishings set aside for the veneration of the family and ancestors. In promi- nent or wealthy families this would take the form of the most original of the Roman arts—portrait sculp- ture, which was commissioned to honor and remember beloved and illustrious family members. This portrait sculpture showed the Roman era’s keen interest in real- ism, with an intense attention to individual detail and in some cases a psychological insight into character. Early Roman portraits captured the rugged naturalism of republican Rome, when Romans proudly extolled the virtues of courage, patriotism, and hard work. The bust of Cicero (Fig. 4.21) suggests the hard-headed realism and self-reliance of this leader of the republican era.
In fine Roman households, however, the primary decorative feature was often the walls themselves, which were decorated with lavish paintings in a vari- ety of styles. A famous example is contained in the
cubicula
cubicula
peristyle courtyard
dining room
vestibule atrium
pool
4.20 Plan and reconstruction drawing, House of the Silver Wedding, Pompeii, Italy, early 1st century CE. A volcanic eruption suffocated Pompeii’s inhabitants but left the town’s buildings remarkably intact. This reconstruction drawing is of the house of a wealthy Pompeiian family. It was considerably more luxurious than the norm. Imposing Corinthian columns surround a pool in the house’s atrium.
4.21 Bust of Cicero, 1st century BCE. Marble, life-size. Uffi zi, Florence. Inspired by the Romans’ veneration of their ancestors, Roman sculptors excelled in portraiture. Here the late-republican orator and philosopher Cicero is portrayed as a man of principle and deep conviction.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT If the city or town in which you live were buried, just as it is today, and uncovered a thousand years from now, what physical evidence might be the most puzzling to future scholars and archaeologists? What arts of daily life might interest students a thousand years from now?
Read a letter from Cicero to Atticus on myartslab.com
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4.22 The Dionysian Mysteries (detail), Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, Italy, c. 60 BCE. The scenes depict the rites of initiation into the cult of Dionysus. At right a nude worshiper of Dionysus dances ecstatically, while the initiate (left) prepares for a ritual flagellation. Another figure holds a thyrsus, the staff carried by Dionysus and his devotees.
4.23 Sosus, Unswept Floor (detail), Roman copy of Hellenistic original, 2nd century BCE. Mosaic. Vatican Museums, Rome. Like much Roman decorative art, this realistic floor mosaic was copied from an original by Sosus at Pergamon, the Hellenistic capital.
Watch a video about Pompeii on myartslab.com
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(c. 254–184 BCE), whose plays apparently all followed Greek plots. Plautus [PLAH-tus] relied heavily on the comedy of exaggerated and absurd situations known as farce, a style that satisfied the Romans’ taste for coarse humor. Roman audiences were known to ask for a per- forming bear show between acts of a play. Despite his audiences’ low demands, Plautus’ plays are still admired for their wit and literacy.
A more important innovator in Roman drama was Terence (193–159 BCE), who developed character more fully than was usual in Hellenistic comedy. Terence instituted more complicated double plots, often revolv- ing around mistaken identities. A favorite device was a boy and girl who think they are twins but still fall in love. In the final scene they are revealed as adopted orphans who are free to marry. Like his predecessors, Terence set his plays in Greece and used Greek char- acters—it was easier to mock the folly of the Greeks than that of his Roman audience. Terence’s plays were widely read throughout the Middle Ages and frequently adapted: the medieval canoness Hrotsvit (see page 147) wrote Christianized versions of Terence’s plays, and William Shakespeare borrowed one of Terence’s plots in his Comedy of Errors.
The most important Roman tragedian was Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE), who adapted Greek stories by making them more sensational and moralistic. In Seneca’s ver- sion of Oedipus, a pregnant Jocasta rips her incestuous offspring from the womb. Roman tragedy’s gruesome plots appealed to the same coarse Roman tastes as comic farce. Its melodramatic exaggeration was much imitated in the English theater of Shakespeare’s era.
Under the Roman Empire, the popularity of relatively literate playwrights such as Plautus and Terence faded, to be replaced by bawdier theatrical entertainments. There was rugged competition for audiences in imper- ial Rome. Spectators were known to leave the theater in mid-performance to see a gladiator contest nearby. To keep the public’s interest, playwrights and theaters turned to simpler dramatic forms such as pantomime, in which actors used no words. A pantomime might be performed entirely by one actor, accompanied by a chorus. Roman comedy incorporated elements of farce, the use of improbable situations, exaggeration, and physical horseplay to draw the audience’s laughter. In the late empire, theaters resorted to elaborate and often obscene spectacles. The excess of these displays led the early Christian Church to threaten to expel those believers who attended the theater. The Roman theater continued to decline, and in the fifth century barbarian emperors halted dramatic performances altogether.
so-called Villa of the Mysteries (Fig. 4.22) in Pompeii, named for the wall painting in its spacious dining room. The paintings apparently depict the reenactment of scenes from the life of the god Dionysus. Other wall paintings from the same period create elaborate archi- tectural perspectives, probably to lend rooms a sense of spaciousness. Such pictures show that Roman artists could master large subjects, including the human fig- ure. In general, however, wall paintings of this period were not pictorial masterpieces and were derived from superior Hellenistic examples. The Romans were more interested in pleasant domestic surroundings than in high standards of artistic beauty.
A minor Roman art related to painting was mosaic, pictures made from tiny bits of colored marble or ceramic cemented to a floor or wall. Like so many Roman arts, mosaic developed in ancient Greece and was imported to Roman cities. Hellenistic designs often consisted of geometric patterns or mythological scenes. One of the most imitated pavement mosaics was the Unswept Floor (Fig. 4.23), attributed to the Hellenistic artist Sosus. With his delicate bits of mosaic tile, Sosus created realistic effects such as the chicken’s leg, the fish’s skeleton, and the snail’s shell. In later Rome, mosaic was used for the more exalted purpose of reli- gious art.
Roman Theater and Music The ancient Romans considered public entertainment to be a birthright of the Roman citizen. In Rome itself, lav- ish public shows helped occupy the sometimes threaten- ing masses of poor and unemployed. In the provinces, theater and sporting spectacles were a measure of the good life. Roman music was largely an accompaniment to theater, sport, and banqueting.
The origins of Roman drama lie probably in ancient religious dances. The development of a genuine theater, however, began with the influx of Greek culture. The first Roman play with a plot was attributed to a Greek slave of the third century BCE, and nearly all known Roman plays, both comedy and tragedy, are derived from Greek originals. Comedy and tragedy coexisted in the Roman theater, although comedy was more popular, and both became important influences on later drama.
Romans borrowed their comedy directly from the comic theater of Hellenistic times, with its stock char- acters and slapstick comic devices. Audiences were well acquainted with Hellenistic comedy’s misers, brag- gart soldiers, and good-hearted prostitutes. The first well-known Roman comic playwright was Plautus
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As with the Greeks, Roman tragic and comic actors wore masks and wigs. Masks were necessary in part because men played all the roles. Actors had little social standing and were often slaves, kept by their masters for entertainment.
Roman music and dance were strongly associated with bawdy entertainments and orgiastic banquets. The Romans almost certainly imitated the musical forms and instruments of Greek civilization. However, there is little evidence that they shared the Greeks’ interest in musical theory. Like the Greeks, the Romans believed that music could have a great emotional effect on the listener. In fact, Roman orators were known to have musicians stand behind them and strike the desired tone at a particular moment in their speech. In their mili- tary processions Romans played a tuba, a long, straight trumpet, probably invented by the Etruscans. The Romans later also used a horn (in Latin, cornu) with circular tubing, something like today’s French horn.
The most spectacular musical instrument used by the Romans was an organ called the hydraulis [high- DRAW-liss]. The hydraulis had a wide harmonic range and produced piercing tones, easily heard across the expanses of a Roman amphitheater (Fig. 4.26). Christians later associated the hydraulis with religious persecution, which the Romans carried out as public entertainment and accompanied with music. Because of this stigma, the organ was banned from Christian churches for several centuries. The Romans also
Roman theaters (Fig. 4.24) were often gigantic physical structures with multi-storied stages. Their auditoriums could accommodate as many as 60,000 spectators. The stage was narrow and was raised sev- eral feet (1–2 m). Behind the stage, a façade called the scaenae frons [SAY-nay fronz] rose two or three stories high (Fig. 4.25). By the first century BCE, some theaters were equipped with a curtain that was raised from a slot in the stage floor.
4.24 Plan of the Theater of Marcellus, Rome, 23–13 BCE. Besides conventional drama, Romans mounted elaborate spectacles, such as mock sea battles that required the theater or amphitheater to be flooded. Typically, stage and seating were joined to form a single, freestanding architectural unit.
4.25 An ancient Roman theater (with modern restoration) at Sabratha, Libya, c. 180. The Roman stage’s multi-storied scaenae frons was decorated with pedimented niches, statues, and gilded columns and doors. The raised stage served as an imaginary street, where all the dramatic action took place; actors entered and exited through three doors in the scaenae frons.
proscenium
stage
0 100 200ft
0 20 40 60m
Chapter 4 ANCIENT ROME 95
and gossipy personal lyrics. He had studied the Greeks well—among his works is a translation of a fragment by Sappho.
Catullus is best remembered as a love poet for the 25 poems concerning his love affair with “Lesbia,” actu- ally an aristocratic woman named Clodia. Catullus’ poems frankly disclosed his feelings, from the foolish enthusiasm of new love to the final bitter recrimination.
Enough, Catullus, of this silly whining;
What you can see is lost, write off as lost.
Not long ago the sun was always shining,
And, loved as no girl ever will be loved,
She led the way and you went dancing after.
Those were the days of lovers’ games and laughter
When anything you wanted she approved;
That was a time when the sun truly shone.
But now she’s cold, you must learn to cool;
Weak though you are, stop groping for what’s gone,
Stop whimpering, and be stoically resigned.
Goodbye, my girl. Catullus from now on
Is adamant; he has made up his mind:
He won’t beg for your favor like a bone.
You’ll feel the cold, though, you damned bitch, when
men
Leave you alone. What life will you have then?
Who’ll visit you? Who’ll think you beautiful? Who’ll
Be loved by you? Parade you as his own?
Whom will you kiss and nibble then?
Oh fool,
Catullus, stop this, stand firm, become stone.4
CATULLUS
To an Unfaithful Lover
The poet Ovid [AHH-vid] (43 BCE–17 CE) was banished from Rome in late life. His crime may have been to witness a sexual impropriety by the emperor’s granddaughter. Ovid’s poetic masterpiece was the Metamorphoses, a sprawling collection of stories from
adapted versions of the Greek aulos (pipes) (see page 66) and the cithara [SITH-uh-ruh], a large 12-stringed lyre. Such instruments were used to accompany poetry in the Greek fashion and were sometimes combined in orchestras for large-scale musical entertainments.
The Romans as Poets and Thinkers Like most other Roman arts, Latin poetry grew up under the powerful influence of Greek civilization. Still, the lyric poet Catullus and the epic poet Virgil created their own significant variations on Greek poetic forms. In poetic satire, Roman poets made their most unique contribution to the Western literary tradition. Roman philosophy was governed by the Romans’ sense of the practical and the necessary. From the diverse strands of Hellenistic Greek philosophy—especially Epicureanism and stoicism—the Romans took what best suited their national character.
Early Roman Poets Poets in late republican Rome imitated the polished forms and meters of Hellenistic verse. Their poetic works circulated among an educated elite that was well versed in Hellenistic literature. The lyric poet Catullus (c. 84–c. 54 BCE) was part of that elite, an urbane, versa- tile poet, who wrote a variety of wedding songs, elegies,
4.26 Gladiatorial contest, accompanied by orchestra. Mosaic from villa near Zilten, North Africa, c. 70. Museum of Antiquities, Tripoli. Roman public entertainment of the most deadly kind often involved musical accompaniment. Here, musicians perform on a long trumpet; two curved corni (horns); and a hydraulis, or organ.
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from Carthage, Dido curses him from atop a funeral pyre. Her wretched death would inspire artists and composers for 2,000 years.
Terrible Spirits of Avenging Curse! Angels of Death
awaiting Elissa! All of you, hear me now. Direct the
force of your divine will, as you must, on the evil here,
and listen to my prayer. If that wicked being [Aeneas]
must sail surely to land and come to harbor, because it is
the fixed and destined ending required by Jupiter’s own
ordinances, yet let him afterwards suffer affliction in war
through the arms of a daring foe, let him be banished
from his own territory, and torn from the embraces of
Iulus [Aeneas’ son], imploring aid as he sees his innocent
friends die, and then, after surrendering to a humiliating
peace, may he not live to enjoy his kingdom in days of
happiness; but may he lie fallen before his time unburied
on a lonely strand. That is my prayer and my last cry,
and it comes from me with my life-blood streaming.6
VIRGIL
Aeneid, Book IV
Roman Satire In one literary form, the Romans claimed superiority over the Greeks. They excelled in verse satire, the artistic form that wittily ridicules human folly or vice, often with the aim to improve individuals or society. One of Rome’s greatest satirists was Horace (65–8 BCE), a contemporary of Virgil’s. He wrote two books of satires in the mid-30s BCE, adopting a casual style and avoiding the mockery of individuals. One satire recounts a journey with friends (including Virgil), while another tells humorously of his attempts to escape a boorish friend. Horace’s most famous satire compared the virtues of city and country life, ending with the well-known fable “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.” Horace himself preferred country living and retired to an estate given him by a patron. His satires and other writings (including a famous essay on the art of poetry) would become perhaps the most widely read literature of ancient Rome.
In contrast to Horace’s gentle manner, the satires of Juvenal [JOO-vuh-null] (c. 55–c. 127 CE) are savagely
classical and Near Eastern sources. The Metamorphoses was a source for some of the best-known works of later European writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Roman Epic and Satire Under Caesar Augustus, Latin literature enjoyed its “golden age,” in some forms equaling its Greek prede- cessors. Of course, the greatest Greek poems were the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the golden age produced Rome’s answer to Homer. The great Roman epic was the Aeneid [ee-NEE-id], composed by the poet known as Virgil (70–19 BCE). Virgil was already an established poet when he began the Aeneid, a sprawling tale of pas- sion and heroism. The Aeneid also served Augustus’ propagandistic aim of justifying imperial power and predicting a future of peace and order.
The Aeneid (composed 29–19 BCE) tells of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who leaves his burning city to travel to Italy. Aeneas is destined to subdue Italy’s hostile resi- dents and blaze a glorious path for the Roman race. In his story, Virgil combines the themes of the Iliad (the story of a great war) and the Odyssey (the story of a hero’s adventurous journey):
This is a tale of arms and of a man. Fated to be an exile,
he was the first to sail from the land of Troy and reach
Italy, at its Lavinian shore. He met many tribulations on
his way both by land and on the ocean … [And] he had
also to endure great suffering in warfare.5
The Aeneid’s unifying theme is destiny, and the poem bestows upon Aeneas a destiny that anticipated Augustus’ own. Roman tradition held that Aeneas was chosen by the gods to found the Latin race. In a similar way, Virgil’s epic suggests that Augustus was destined to establish a great and peaceful world empire. Virgil skillfully weaves the history of Rome into the legendary account of Aeneas. In his journey, Aeneas continually glimpses the spirits of Rome’s future heroes and the scenes of future Roman victories. His destiny is to inau- gurate a history that Augustus will bring to completion.
The epic’s most famous and touching episode is Aeneas’ encounter with the passionate Queen Dido [DYE-doh], which stirs a conflict between Aeneas’ destiny and his personal desires. Dido is the widowed queen of Carthage, in northern Africa, where Aeneas has been shipwrecked. Aeneas succumbs to his desire for the queen, but after a year, he is reminded by the gods of his destiny to reach Italy. As Aeneas’ ships sail
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Do you believe that destiny controls some part of your life’s course? What about the life of your family, or your nation? Discuss the ways that destiny might affect the course of a career, love, war, politics, and history.
Chapter 4 ANCIENT ROME 97
Cicero’s speeches were the Roman works most widely studied and admired in later eras.
A less popular but no less important work from the republican era was the didactic poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe), written in Latin by the poet Lucretius [loo-KREE-shus] (98–c. 55 BCE). Lucretius’ poem elaborated Epicurean thought in the classical world’s most systematic work of philosophi- cal materialism. Lucretius’ description of the movement and collision of atoms as they combine to form the physical universe had a moral purpose. He hoped to relieve his readers of their guilt and the fear of death. The gods have no power over our lives, he advised, and so cannot punish humans for our impiety. As for death, Lucretius wrote:
Suppose that Nature herself were suddenly to find a
voice and round upon one of us in these terms: “What
is your grievance, mortal, that you give yourself up to
this whining and repining? Why do you weep and wail
over death? If the life you have lived till now has been a
pleasant thing—if all its blessings have not leaked away
like water poured into a cracked pot and run to waste
unrelished—why then, you silly creature, do you not
retire as a guest who has had his fill of life and take your
carefree rest with a quiet mind? Or, if all your gains
have been poured profitless away and life has grown
distasteful, why do you seek to swell the total? The
new can but turn out as badly as the old and perish as
unprofitably. Why not rather make an end of life and
labor? Do you expect me to invent some new contrivance
for your pleasure? I tell you, there is none. All things are
always the same. If your body is not yet withered with
age, nor your limbs decrepit and flagging, even so there
is nothing new to look forward to—not though you
should outlive all living creatures, or even though you
should never die at all.” What are we to answer, except
that Nature’s rebuttal is justified and the plea she puts
forward is a true one?8
LUCRETIUS
From On the Nature of the Universe
Though he advised, “We have nothing to fear in death,” Lucretius was not entirely consoled. He admit- ted that his resolute materialism was not able to still this “deplorable lust of life that holds us trembling in bondage to such uncertainties and dangers.”9
For all its intellectual clarity, Epicureanism did not spread far in the Roman world. Epicureans violated Roman convention by welcoming slaves and women as members and by counseling withdrawal from social life and civic duty. Epicureanism survived mainly through the eloquence and rigor of Lucretius’ De rerum natura.
ironic in their criticism of Roman life. Juvenal attacks the corruption and hypocrisy of Roman society at the height of its wealth and self-indulgence. Few aspects of Roman society escaped Juvenal’s satirical whip: sexual depravity; the extravagant banquets of the rich; the influence of Greek immigrants; the folly of tyrannical emperors. In this passage, he asks what employment he might find in a city perverted by patronage and deceit:
What should I do in Rome? I am no good at lying.
If a book’s bad, I can’t praise it, or go around ordering
copies.
I don’t know the stars; I can’t hire out as assassin
When some young man wants his father knocked off for
a price; I have never
Studied the guts of frogs, and plenty of others know better
How to convey to a bride the gifts of the first man she
cheats with.
I am no lookout for thieves, so I cannot expect a
commission
On some governor’s staff. I’m a useless corpse, or a
cripple.
Who has a pull these days, except your yes men and
stooges
With blackmail in their hearts, yet smart enough to keep
silent?
. . . Never let the gold of the Tagus,a
Rolling under its shade, become so important, so precious
You have to lie awake, take bribes that you’ll have to
surrender,
Tossing in gloom, a threat to your mighty patron
forever.7
JUVENAL
From The Satires
a. Tagus, a river in Spain and Portugal.
Juvenal’s mockery reaches a climax in the famous tenth satire, where he exposes the vanity of human desire for wealth and fame. His call for a life of patient humil- ity would be echoed by the Renaissance satirist Erasmus and the satirical geniuses of eighteenth-century Europe.
Philosophy in the Roman World As in so many other areas, Roman philosophy was at first largely derived from Hellenistic Greek teachings (see page 70). The versatile rhetorician and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE; see Fig. 4.21) adapted Greek stoic thought in his writings on happi- ness and the nature of the gods. Cicero’s unmatched achievement was in the stylish speeches composed as he strove to save Rome’s republic from dictatorship.
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P a c i fi c
O c e a n
I n d i a n
O c e a n
B a y o f B e n g a l
S o u t h
C h i n a
S e a
E a s t C h i n a
S e a
INDIA
SRI LANKA
CAMBODIA
VIETNAM
THAILAND
MYANMAR
(BURMA)
SIKKIM
BHUTAN
TIBET
NEPAL
AFGHANISTAN
UZBEKISTAN
TAJIKISTAN
MONGOLIA
CHINA
KOREA
JAPAN
INDONESIA
JAVA
Tashkent
Samarkand
Silk route
Bodh Gaya
1000 km
1000 miles
1st century CE
1st & 2nd century CE
6th century CE
Early spread 300 BCE
Starts 500 BCE in Bodh Gaya
G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
By the force of its imperial might, Rome spread through the Western world two religions: first, its public religion of grand temples and sacrifices to Greco-Roman deities, and then the Near Eastern faith of Christianity adopted in the fourth century. In Asia, military conquest led to the rise of a different faith, the Buddhist teaching of withdrawal from family and public life, in the effort to achieve a detached enlightenment.
Buddhism is rooted in the life and teaching of Siddhartha Gautama [sid-DAR-tuh GOW-tuh-muh] (c. 560?–480? BCE), known as the Buddha [BOO-duh], meaning “the enlight- ened one.” According to Buddhist tradition, the young prince Gautama was perplexed by the problem of human suffering (in Pali, dukkha). Leaving his family and royal obligations, he sought the advice of Hindu sages, who counseled him to fast and meditate. But this asceticism brought no satisfaction. Finally, while sitting under a tree (the bo tree), Gautama attained enlightenment (bodhi)—a perfect understanding of the middle way between desiring and self-denial. The Buddha entered upon a life of preach- ing, showing by example and teaching how others might achieve enlightenment (Fig. 4.27).
It was the Indian conqueror Ashoka (who was ruling c. 270 BCE, at the time of the Hellenistic empire and Rome’s first Punic War) who renounced his brutal military ex- pansionism and declared universal religious tolerance
throughout his empire. Ashoka encouraged Buddhist missionaries to carry the faith into south Asia (especially present-day Thailand and Cambodia; Fig. 4.28).
The Buddha’s forceful and confident teaching (called the dharma) is summarized in the “Four Noble Truths,” his fundamental assertions about the nature of existence:
• life is permeated by suffering; • suffering originates in selfish craving or grasping; • suffering can be ended by the cessation of craving or
desire, including the craving for enlightenment; • the way to cessation of craving lies in a discipline of
mindfulness and ethical living.
Much like Roman stoicism, the Buddha’s philosophy counseled followers to minimize their bodily and material desires and to concentrate on that which lay within the in- dividual’s own power. And like Aristotle’s ethical philoso- phy (see page 69), Buddhism marked a path between the extremes of striving and detachment, the so-called “middle
4.27 Death of the Buddha, detail of relief from Gandhara, Kushan, late 2nd century to early 3rd century. Dark gray- blue slate, height 26 3⁄8 ins (67 cm). Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gandhara lay along the busy trade routes between the Roman world and East Asia. This relief dates to a time when Buddhist belief increasingly saw the Buddha as an incarnation of the divine, rather than a noble and enlightened teacher. The nude man in Buddha’s death scene represents an extreme ascetic; other figures adopt poses of lamentation often seen in Christian scenes of the death of Christ or the Virgin Mary.
Map 4.2 The spread of Buddhism.
The Rise of Buddhism
Chapter 4 ANCIENT ROME 99
Educated Romans were more easily drawn to the Hellenistic philosophy of stoicism, which taught that one must do one’s duty, practice moral virtue, and submit to a divinely ordered destiny. Roman stoicism developed through several stages from its origins in Hellenistic philosophy. As the Roman republic was replaced by imperial authority, stoicism became a medium for patrician resistance to the power of emper- ors. One stoic philosopher, having angered the emperor Nero, was commanded to commit suicide and impas- sively complied. It was Nero’s former slave Epictetus (c. 55–c. 135) who best embodied the moral philosophy of Roman stoicism. Epictetus declared for the brotherhood of all humanity and called on his followers to be “citi- zens of the world” (see Key Concept, page 84). Even a slave, who had no bodily freedom and who suffered his master’s beatings, could be happy if he adopted a stoic detachment from events that he could not control. In this regard, stoicism broke with the Aristotelian ideal of happiness, which required a minimum of freedom and physical comfort.
Ironically, the stoic Roman character was finally revealed in the writings of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161–180; Fig. 4.29). During the military cam- paigns that occupied the last ten years of his reign, Marcus Aurelius wrote twelve books of Meditations in the form of diary entries, possibly written in a military tent while his soldiers slept and tapers flickered in the breeze. In these surroundings, Marcus exhorted himself to act always with reason and restraint, to recognize the limit of his power over others, and to accept the necessity of death.
In the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius described a uni- verse unified by a single natural law, the law of reason that governed all creatures. A human’s most important task was to understand and obey this law of reason:
All things are interwoven with one another, and the bond
which unites them is sacred; practically nothing is alien
to anything else, for all things are combined with one
another and contribute to the order of the same universe.
The universe embraces all things and is one, and the god
who pervades all things is one, the substance is one, the
law is one, the Reason common to all thinking beings is
one, the truth is one, if indeed there is one perfection for
the kindred beings who share in this selfsame Reason.10
MARCUS AURELIUS
From The Meditations, Book VII
Even an emperor had to practice a disregard for the wrongs of others who harm only themselves. “I do my duty,” he wrote; “other things do not disturb me.”
way.” Buddhists pursued this aim by a discipline called the Eightfold Path, requiring clarity of mind, measured action, and a regimen of meditation. Along this path, the dedicated believer might attain enlightenment and, at death, be released from the cycle of rebirth. This release brought the ultimate state of tranquility called nirvana— the extinction of both being and non-being.
The teachings of Gautama Buddha in southern Asia, Confucius in eastern Asia, and Socrates and Plato in the Mediterranean world—roughly the period 600– 400 BCE—mark a revolutionary turn in human thinking. Philosophers have called it the Axial Age—the emer- gence of a new kind of ethical thinking that focused on individual action and integrity, rather than mythic he- roes and ritual obligation. Yet it must be remembered that these new ideas were often spread by military domi- nation and, as with Buddhism in the time of early Rome, imposed by imperial patronage or decree.
4.28 Great Stupa at Sanchi, India, mid-3rd century BCE. The Indian emperor Ashoka (c. 265–238 BCE) promoted Buddhism throughout India, often by founding shrines like the stupa at Sanchi. The stupa, a hemispherical commemorative monument, often housed relics of the Buddha’s life.
CRITICAL QUESTION In what ways do religious beliefs contribute to the formation of a culture? A civilization? An empire? Does the role of religion change in each of these cases? Or does religion’s role remain essentially the same in each case?
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100 Chapter 4 ANCIENT ROME
He assured his happiness by limiting personal desires, relying only on himself, although such happiness was gained at the cost of indifference to others’ suffering.
The Meditations’ tone of self-admonishment some- times resembles the self-help manuals so popular today, as Marcus reminds himself to concentrate his ener- gies on the present moment. True to the stoic belief, his emphasis was always on duty, surely an admirable moral guide for any ruler: “Firmly, as a Roman and a man should, think at all times how you can perform the task at hand with precise and genuine dignity, sym- pathy, independence, and justice, making yourself free from all other preoccupations.”11
Rome’s Division and Decline The last centuries of the Roman Empire saw increas- ing division and a decline of the empire’s cohesion. In the third century, tribes of barbarian (that is, non- Roman) invaders pressed back the empire’s borders in central Europe and plundered cities as far east as Greece. Barbarian chieftains made shifting alliances with Roman authority and even declared themselves emperor. The emperor Diocletian (ruled 284–305)
750 BCE 650 BCE 550 BCE 450 BCE 350 BCE c. 300 BCE Epicurus teaching in Athens
c. 270 BCE Rule of Ashoka
264–146 BCE Punic Wars
560–480 BCE Life of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)
530 BCE The Buddha’s sermon at the Deer Park, Benares, India
520–500 BCE Etruscan Apollo of Veii (4.3)
509 BCE Roman republic established
753 BCE Rome founded
4.29 Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161–180). Gilded bronze, height 16 ft 8 ins (5.1 m). Capitoline Museums, Rome. This official statue of the stoic emperor confirms the Romans’ interest in realistic portraiture. The honesty and critical self- examination of Marcus’ philosophical writings are all the more notable when one remembers that the empire’s inhabitants honored him as a god.
C H A P T E R 4 : T I M E L I N E
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Chapter 4 ANCIENT ROME 101
arisen in the old Hellenistic East. Its adherents called themselves Christians and by Diocletian’s death in 305 their faith had spread from India to Gaul. Early in the fourth century, Christianity would convert an emperor, who would build the first Christian Roman city in the east. Even though the Western empire failed and impe- rial power shifted eastward, the city of Rome itself would remain the psychic center of Western civiliza- tion. All roads still led to Rome, and for centuries yet to come pilgrims of all sorts would journey there to taste its spiritual riches.
recognized that the empire had grown unwieldy, and for administrative reasons divided it into eastern and western sections. He named a co-emperor to rule with him and took for himself and his cohort the names of gods and divine heroes. When Diocletian [dye-oh- KLEE-shun] abdicated the imperial throne, he retired to a palace-fortress he had built at Spalatum on the Adriatic Sea (now Split, in present-day Croatia).
Diocletian’s reforms only temporarily halted the decline of a weary empire. In addition to Germanic bar- barians pressing in from the north, a new religion had
150 BCE 50 BCE 50 CE 150 CE 250 CE 106–13 Column of Trajan, Rome (4.10)
117–138 Rule of Hadrian c. 120 Pantheon, Rome (4.16)
284–305 Rule of Diocletian
c. 65 BCE Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
54–68 CE Rule of Nero
64 Rome burns
106–43 BCE Life of Cicero
29–19 BCE Virgil, The Aeneid
27 BCE–14 CE Octavian rules as Emperor Caesar Augustus
23–13 BCE Theater of Marcellus, Rome (4.24)
13–9 BCE Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace), Rome (4.6)
161–180 Rule of Marcus Aurelius
CHAPTER REVIEW The Drama of Roman History Who were the Etruscans, and what is their connection to the found- ing of the Roman republic? What were the concerns of Rome during the republican era (509–90 BCE)? How did Julius Caesar rise to power? Who was Caesar Augustus, and what was the Pax Romana?
The Art of an Empire During Augustus’ reign, what pur- poses did Roman art serve? From where did the Romans derive their artistic influences? What is a forum? Describe the Column of Trajan. What were the innovations of Roman architecture? Describe the Romans’ interest in architecture’s utilitarian value. What was the Pantheon?
Roman Art and Daily Life Describe the developments of wall painting, mosaic, and portrait sculpture in Roman art. What is Pompeii, and what does it tell us about Roman daily life? Explain the significance of portrait sculpture in Roman art. What were the Romans’ atti- tudes to comedy and tragedy? Explain the Hellenistic influences on Roman drama. Who were Plautus and
Terence? What were the occasions for and purposes of Roman music and dance?
The Romans as Poets and Thinkers In what ways did Roman poets borrow from the Greeks? Who was Catullus, and what is the principal characteristic of his work? Who is Virgil, and what is the Aeneid? Describe how Romans connected the work of Homer to their own sense of historic destiny. Who is Juvenal, what is satire, and what were the objectives of his Satires? What characteristics especially distinguish Roman philosophy from its Greek predecessors? Explain the differences between Epicurean philosophy and Stoicism. Who were Lucretius and Epictetus? Who was Marcus Aurelius, and what was the main message of his Meditations?
What events brought about Rome’s decline during the third century? Who was Diocletian, and how did he attempt to reform Rome?
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5.1 The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, late 7th century. In Jerusalem, Muslim rulers and architects intended this splendid shrine and its companion mosque to rival the great churches of Jerusalem built by Constantine and his successors. The gilded dome encloses the rock where Jews believed Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac and where Muslims held that Muhammad ascended to visit heaven.
5Monotheism: Judaism, Christianity, Islam In the year 120, when the emperor Hadrian built the Pantheon, the great dome sym-
bolized the unity of a cosmos that was inhabited by many gods. Five centuries later,
when a Muslim ruler built the Dome of the Rock (Fig. 5.1) at the center of Jerusalem,
its dome symbolized the one true God who ruled all things. The idea of a single,
supreme, and all-powerful god—the spirit of monotheism—arose in a minor Near
Eastern people called the Hebrews or Jews. From Jewish monotheism grew two other
great monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, each of which, by the year 750,
had converted or subdued the peoples of the ancient classical world. What we know
as Western civilization today grows from two roots: the classical spirit of ancient
Greece and Rome, and the monotheistic spirit of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• How did the ancient Israelites contribute to the foundation of Western civilization?
• How did Christianity arise, and how does it differ from Judaism? • How did classical philosophy and paganism shape Christian
theology?
• How did the Christian empires of Rome and Byzantium come about? • What were early Christianity’s attitudes to the arts? • How did Islam arise, and how does it differ from Judaism and
Christianity?
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104 Chapter 5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM
The Judaic Tradition Beginning in the fourth century, the Roman Empire was transformed by its conversion to the new Christian religion. To understand the causes of this transforma- tion, we retrace our steps to the ancient Near East, to the time of ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Persia. The Christian faith that would conquer Rome was rooted in the religious ideas of the ancient Israelites (also known as Hebrews or Jews). Few nations or peoples with so small a population as ancient Israel have so greatly influ- enced Western civilization. The Israelites’ belief in one all-powerful God is the cornerstone of modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the faiths that would dominate the Western world.
Politically and culturally, the Israelites were a minor nation of the ancient Near East. They shared the fates of other small nations in the region, suffering domina- tion by the great powers of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Religiously, however, the Israelites were unique: they rejected their neighbors’ polytheism and embraced monotheism, devoting themselves to one God, and regarded themselves as his chosen people. This special relationship between the Israelite nation and its god was chronicled in the Hebrew Bible, a masterpiece of reli- gious literature.
History and the Israelites By the historical and archaeological evidence, the origins of the ancient Israelites are obscure. The Israelites’ own epic account of their beginnings, as told in their Bible, is a stirring tale of trials and triumph. Tradition holds that Abraham was the first patriarch, or chieftain, and founder of the Israelite nation. According to the same tradition, the patriarch Moses led the Israelites in a dra- matic exodus from Egypt (dated perhaps 1250 BCE), an event that they interpreted as God’s delivering them from their captors and tormentors. The exodus was triggered when God’s angel of death visited the last of ten plagues upon the Egyptians, slaying their first-born children but sparing those of the Israelites. With Moses leading them, the Israelites fled into the Sinai desert, where he received directly from God the Ten Commandments that pious Israelites must obey. The first commandment established the principle of monotheism: “You shall have no other gods besides Me,” commanded Yahweh (the Hebrew name for God). In reward for their obedience to the law, God pledged to the Israelites that they would settle in the land of Canaan (today’s Israel and Palestine).
By the 900s BCE, the Israelites’ tribal egalitarianism had evolved into a monarchy. Their first great king was David (ruled c. 1000–961 BCE), who centralized Hebrew
5.2 Scale model of the Second Temple in Jerusalem as reconstructed by King Herod the Great, c. 19 BCE. The Second Temple built after the Jews’ return from Babylonian exile was entirely reconstructed by Herod the Great in grand Hellenistic style. Sacrifice at the Temple was required annually of pious Jews, and Jewish pilgrims in Jesus’ time would have crowded the courtyard on holy days.
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domination by the Hellenistic and Roman empires. The rebuilt temple at Jerusalem (see Fig. 5.2) was refur- bished grandly by King Herod the Great (died 4 BCE). However, repeated Jewish insurrections incited the Romans to storm Jerusalem in 70 CE (Fig. 5.4). The temple was again destroyed and, following a second war from 132 to 135, the Romans forced the Jews to leave Judea—their homeland and religious center—an action known as the Diaspora [dye-ASS-por-uh] (dispersion). Wherever they settled, most Diaspora Jews lived as a religious and cultural minority, resolutely preserving their language and faith in spite of frequent persecution.
The Hebrew Bible The Israelites’ God, named Yahweh [YAH-way], was present to them through his holy scripture. This Hebrew Bible (from the Greek word for book, biblos) served much the same function for the Israelites as the Homeric epics did for the Greeks. The Bible compiled a stock of story and wisdom that was transmitted orally for centu- ries before being written down sometime after 1000 BCE.
The Israelites divided their scriptures into three major parts. The first five books constituted the Torah (instruction), a history of the early Israelite nation. The Prophets comprised writings of charismatic leaders such
worship at his court in Jerusalem. David was himself a talented musician and developed a liturgy of psalms of praise to God. King Solomon (ruled 961–922 BCE) consolidated and expanded the Israelites’ power in a splendid reign, regarded by many Jews as a golden age. Solomon built an elaborate temple at Jerusalem, employ- ing artisans and religious symbols from neighboring cultures. The temple and its replacement, destroyed in Roman times, are still the focus of Jewish devotion and nationalism today (Fig. 5.2, Fig. 5.3). Biblical authors would judge the righteousness of the Israelites by the righteousness of their king.
In the centuries after Solomon’s reign, the Israelite kingdom declined and in 587 BCE suffered an inva- sion by a Babylonian army that razed the temple and forced many Israelites into exile. The years of exile (587–c. 450 BCE) had an immense cultural effect on the Israelites. They adopted a new calendar and a new language (Aramaic), and came to be called Jews, from the Aramaic name for their homeland. Their religion absorbed elements from Babylonian and Persian belief, such as the notion of a Satan, an evil force opposing God. The Israelites interpreted the Babylonian exile as God’s punishment for their unfaithfulness.
Some Jews eventually returned to Palestine after the Persian conquest of Babylonia, but suffered successive
5.3 Jews praying at the Western Wall, Jerusalem. This foundation is all that remains of the Second Temple at Jerusalem, built in the sixth century BCE and destroyed by a Roman army in the year 70. The Western Wall is contemporary Judaism’s most sacred site, the physical reminder of Jews’ national history and identity.
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to an orderly hierarchy of all creatures. Here, the cre- ation of humanity is a generic, universal act in harmony with the story’s tone. Human beings form the capstone of God’s universe, the pinnacle of a divinely fashioned order:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after
our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of
the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle,
and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that
creeps upon the earth.” So God created man in his own
image, in the image of God he created him; male and
female he created them. And God blessed them, and God
said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth
and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea
and over the birds of the air and over every living thing
that moves upon the earth.”1
Genesis 1:26–28
The second Genesis story (2:4–3:24) is attributed to a biblical author called the Jahwist, who typically wrote with drama and economy. The Jahwist recounted the memorable episode that proved so influential in Judeo- Christian civilization—the story of Adam and Eve. God forbids Adam and Eve, without explanation, to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A serpent appears to tempt Eve to taste of the forbidden fruit and its powers.
as Isaiah and Jeremiah, who reminded Israelites of their duty to God. Finally, the Writings included psalms and other wisdom literature.
The Hebrew Creation The Hebrew Bible’s power and complexity are evident in the first chapters of Genesis, the two accounts of the creation (Genesis 1–3:24). The creation stories illustrate an important dif- ference between the Hebrew God and his pagan coun- terparts—the Hebrew God was no longer associated with particular locales and aspects of nature, he was the original author of the world, the source of all creation, whose power was universal.
The first Genesis story (1–2:3) tells of a majestic creation that spans six days. Biblical scholars believe this story was written by Israelite priests during the Babylonian exile, after they had heard other creation myths on the same grand scale. In this account, God’s creation progresses from a primal world of nothingness
5.4 The Spoils of Jerusalem, relief from the Arch of Titus, Rome, c. 81. Marble relief, height 6 ft 7 ins (2 m). Roman soldiers sacking Jerusalem in the year 70 carry off the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum that is now a national symbol of Israel. The Second Temple’s destruction profoundly disrupted Jewish religious life; out of the ensuing crisis emerged both rabbinical Judaism and the new Christian faith.
Chapter 5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM 107
K E Y C O N C E P T
Adam and Eve succumb to temptation and suffer expulsion from the Garden of Eden. God declares that as punishment Eve will suffer the pain of childbirth and Adam the toil of labor.
The Jahwist’s story illustrates what the Israelites believed was humanity’s most fundamental failing: the disobedience of God’s command. Yet the story also con- tains essential themes found in the myth and legend of the ancient world. In Adam and Eve, we see the human
He [the serpent] said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You
shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” And the woman
said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees
of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit
of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither
shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to
the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when
you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like
God, knowing good and evil.”2
Genesis 3:1–5
Monotheism The Israelites gave the Western religious tradition the unique concept of monotheism, the belief in one all- powerful and beneficent god. The Hebrew Bible describes the Israelite God as an all-powerful enigma, the author of all creation, yet himself un-created. Through Moses, God prohibited his followers from representing him in statues and even declined to be named directly. The Israelites called him originally by the sacred consonants YHWH, pro- nounced as “Yahweh.” Despite these mysteries, the faithful believed God revealed himself again and again, command- ing their obedience and rewarding their righteousness.
God’s most important revelation was the Ten Commandments, which Moses received on Mount Sinai and which became the basis for all Hebrew law. The Commandments established the leading principles of Israelite tribal life. The first was a principle of universal jus- tice, that all humans were governed by one divinely sanc- tioned law. From this followed a second principle, that all humans (or at least all Israelites) were equal before God’s law and worthy in God’s sight. Compared to the class soci- eties of the ancient world, the Israelites were notably egali- tarian. Their principles obliged them to treat the poor and unfortunate with kindness and generosity.
Hebrew moral teachings may be summarized as ethical monotheism, the belief that obedience to God’s law requires righteous action in all aspects of moral life. Any sin is dis- obedience to God and deserves divine punishment. These ethical ideas were developed in later Christianity and Islam. The Hebrew ethical tradition differed significantly from the ethics of Aristotle and other classical philosophers, who believed moral conduct lay in a balance between extreme actions. For the Hebrew tradition, moral conduct lay in rig- orous obedience to God’s command.
In the ancient world, Hebrew monotheism offered a powerful religious alternative to the dominant polytheism.
CRITICAL QUESTION What, in your opinion, is the ultimate cause of evil in the world? How can the existence of evil be reconciled with a belief in a benevolent and all- powerful God?
THE HEBREW BIBLE The Torah The Prophets The Writings Genesis Joshua Psalms Exodus Judges Proverbs Leviticus 1st & 2nd Samuel Job Numbers 1st & 2nd Kings Song of Songs Deuteronomy Isaiah Ruth
Jeremiah Lamentations Ezekiel Ecclesiastes Twelve Minor Esther Prophets Daniel
Ezra Nehemiah 1st & 2nd Chronicles
But monotheism also generated some perplexing theo- logical questions. For example, if God was the source of all things, was he therefore the origin of evil? If God could intervene in history, then why did he not halt war and catas- trophes? How did one judge among the religions that each claimed to obey the God of Abraham? Such questions still confront the heirs of Hebrew monotheism: modern-day Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
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108 Chapter 5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM
Job and the Trials of Israel The trials of the Israelite nation were symbolically repre- sented in the story of Job—a righteous man, once favored by God, who loses his family and fortune through a series of calamities. The Book of Job, dated somewhere between 600 and 400 BCE, is one of the Hebrew Bible’s most richly poetic books and compares the humans’ narrow moral viewpoint with the immense majesty of God’s power. Three friends come to console Job, plying him with the conventional wisdom of Hebrew moral- ity. One says Job must have sinned greatly to deserve so terrible a punishment from God; another proposes that Job’s suffering is a test of his faith and that he will be rewarded in the end. Convinced of his own righteous- ness, however, Job demands that the Almighty show him the nature of his sin. God answers Job but refuses to justify himself in human terms. Instead, he reminds his servant Job of God’s incomprehensible power and maj- esty. Confronted by the vastness and eternity of God’s universe, Job acknowledges that his own sufferings are as nothing.
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without
knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
“Or who shut in the sea with doors,
when it burst forth from the womb;
when I made clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?”3
Job 38:1–11
The Book of Job echoed the lament of a nation still suffering the yoke of conquest and persecution. During the period 200 BCE to 50 CE, many Jews expected an apocalypse [uh-POCK-uh-lips], a cataclysmic revelation of God’s will that would liberate and redeem Israel. At the apocalypse, they believed God would judge all humanity and restore the Jewish temple at Jerusalem as
interest in moral knowledge, the desire to escape death, and the violation of a divine taboo, all common themes of ancient myth. These Hebrew creation stories are not only models of concise storytelling—they also echo other ancient literary themes, from the Greeks’ Oedipus legend to the Egyptian tales of the afterlife.
The God of the Covenant Most of the Hebrew scriptures recount God’s relationship with his chosen people, the Israelite nation. The Israelites viewed this special bond as a covenant, or agreement, between God and themselves, whereby the Israelites were bound to obey God’s law, while God promised to favor and defend his chosen nation. Much of the Torah was devoted to a historical account of this troubled but indissoluble bond between God and Israel. Thus, in the Hebrew Bible, reli- gious faith and national history overlap.
The Israelites’ covenant with God was confirmed by decisive moments in their history. One such moment was Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), in which God commands the aged patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his favored son. Proving his complete obedience to God, Abraham holds the knife to Isaac’s throat before God’s angel intervenes and halts the killing. Throughout their history, the Israelites celebrated and affirmed the cov- enant with God in religious ritual. During Passover, for example, modern Jews commemorate an incident from the Egyptian captivity, in which God’s angel of death slew the Egyptians’ first-born children but spared those of the Israelites.
God’s command to moral righteousness was ampli- fied by prophets who were fervent mouthpieces of divine judgment. Israelite prophets often opposed offi- cial priests and the temple, criticizing ritualized obser- vance of the law. Prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah stressed inner obedience to God and the creation of a just society. The prophets frequently predicted a future of redemption, as in Isaiah’s famous saying, “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4).
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Does the story of Adam and Eve confirm or conflict with your notions of male–female relations, sin, and sexuality? In either case, from whence do you believe your notions on such matters arise?
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graphic language and simple stories appealed to his poor, uneducated followers, and he frequently used illustrative stories called parables to dramatize his vision of God. In the parable of the “prodigal son” (Luke 5:11–32), for example, a foolish son wastes his inheri- tance on riotous living. On returning home repentantly, the son is forgiven by his loving father, who had feared he was lost. Jesus’ parables illustrated through analogy the nature of God and his kingdom. He stressed that God loved and forgave his faithful servants, as the father did his profligate son.
The teachings of Jesus are summarized in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), a compilation of sayings that reinforced his relation to the Hebrew tradition and scripture. The Sermon on the Mount called for an inten- sification of ethical monotheism, the ancient Hebrew obligation to respect and care for everyone in the com- munity. Jesus said he had come “not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them.” By intensifying their love for others, said Jesus, his followers prepared themselves for entry into the impending kingdom of God. Like earlier prophets, Jesus also demanded a right- eousness of the heart. Conspicuous acts of faith and formal obedience to the law were not sufficient. A sinful thought was as evil as a sinful action.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit
adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at
a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with
her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck
it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one
of your members than that your whole body be thrown
into hell.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist
one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right
cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would
sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as
well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with
him two miles. Give to him who begs from you, and do
not refuse him who would borrow from you.”4
Gospel of Matthew 5:27–29, 38–42
The last days of Jesus’ life were to become the piv- otal moment of the Christian faith. The Gospels tell that he entered Jerusalem to the acclaim of its citizens. Though he declined the mantle of a political messiah— a new David come to restore Israel’s independence— Jesus’ apocalyptic teachings had apparently alarmed the Roman authorities. They arrested Jesus and cruci- fied him, a method of execution reserved for political offenders. But this humiliating public execution was,
the center of the world. The Jews associated the apoca- lypse with the appearance of a messiah, meaning one anointed by God, who would overthrow Israel’s foreign overlords and restore the glories of David’s kingdom.
The Rise of Christianity It seems unlikely that belief in an obscure Jewish prophet would supplant the diverse paganism of the late Roman world. In its first two centuries, the new religion of Christianity was just one of many religious cults prac- ticed in the vast Roman Empire. By the early fourth cen- tury, however, the Christian faith counted the emperor among its converts, and by 400, Christianity was the Roman Empire’s official religion.
Historians cannot fully reconstruct the history of early Christianity. Nevertheless, we know that by the second century many early Christians believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the divine Son of God, who had been resurrected from the dead to save all humanity. Believers in Jesus were promised forgiveness of sins and everlasting life after death. Christians eagerly expected the imminent end of time, when Jesus would come again to reward the faithful and judge the wicked. From these fundamentals of faith, Christianity successfully broad- ened its appeal as it spread through the Roman Empire.
Jesus of Nazareth Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish teacher and healer whose life and person became the center of the Christian faith. His teaching attracted a few devoted followers before he was executed by Palestine’s Roman authority. Jesus’ public life preaching to the poor folk of rural Palestine was so brief that no contemporary source refers directly to his ministry. Virtually all that we know of Jesus must be gleaned from the Gospels, the four accounts of his life and teachings composed a generation after his death. These accounts are professions of Christian faith rather than historical records of Jesus’ life.
Jesus was born at a time (c. 4 BCE) when the Jewish nation was deeply troubled by Roman oppression and ripe with messianic expectations. His preachings that a “kingdom of God” would soon be established appealed to his followers’ apocalyptic hopes. The kingdom of God would radically alter human relations and bring a divine judgment of humanity. To prepare for the com- ing apocalypse, Jesus urged his followers to abandon their property and families, love one another without reservation, and meet evil with passive resistance.
The Gospels portray Jesus as a skillful teacher. His
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hands of a risen Christ. Paul’s letters exhorted the faith- ful to piety and advised them on matters of marriage, charity, and ritual, arguing that non-Jews could join the faith without submitting to the male circumcision and dietary restrictions required by traditional Judaism.
The Jewish world in which Paul lived was shat- tered in 70 when a Roman army sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, the center of Jewish rit- ual. In the wake of this political and religious cataclysm, Jewish faith reshaped itself under the leadership of the Pharisees, community leaders who assumed the role of rabbi (teacher). The new faith, which we now call rab- binical Judaism, stressed pious obedience and study of the Torah, in place of the temple sacrifices that once had been every Jew’s obligation. The reading and venera- tion of the Torah became ritualized in places of worship called synagogues, and rabbinical scholars wrote scrip- tural commentaries that were attuned to Judaism’s new circumstances. Though alienated from its traditional center in Palestine, this revived Judaism won new con- verts and unified Jewish communities throughout the late Roman world.
paradoxically, the starting point of a powerful new reli- gious faith. Jesus’ followers would claim that he rose bodily from the dead, a resurrection proving that Jesus was indeed the messiah (in Greek, Christos). The earli- est believers anticipated that the resurrected Jesus would return in a “second coming” to redeem the faithful and usher in the kingdom of God.
The Growth of Christianity Messianic belief in Jesus was largely consistent with Jewish apocalyptic nationalism, and it evidently thrived in small communities of Jews in Palestine and the eastern Greco-Roman world (Map 5.1). In its first decades, the new faith’s most effective advocate was the apostle Paul (died 64?), whose tireless travels and passionate letters to believers promised them imminent redemption at the
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Tarsus
Syracuse
Messina
Monte Cassino
Rome
Pisa
Florence Ravenna
Verona
Canterbury
Paris
Cologne
Bremen
Mainz
Milan
London
Vienna
Regensburg
Clonard
Lithuanians (13th century)
Prussians (14th century)
Czechs (c.1000)
Magyars (950–1050)
Russians (989–1015)
Poles (962–1025)
500 km
500 miles
200–325 CE
(by the time of Constantine)
Areas first reached by
Christians, 50–150 CE
325–600 CE
(by the time of Gregory I)
600–800 CE
and beyond (see dates)
Map 5.1 The spread of Christianity. Once Rome’s emperors adopted Christianity, the faith spread quickly as Rome’s official religion. In Ireland and eastern Europe, new believers adopted Christianity and classical Greco-Roman culture as one system of belief.
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The Second Temple’s destruction also profoundly affected early Christianity. The official Gospels, most likely all written after 70, show signs of the crisis and an ensuing rivalry between Christian belief and Pharisaic Judaism. By the early second century, a distinctively Christian faith had emerged, professing the divinity of Christ and centered on communal celebrations of the Eucharist [YOO-kuh-rist], a reenactment of the Last Supper (Fig. 5.5) that Christ shared with disciples.
Early Christianity shared elements of belief and ritual with other mystery religions in the late Roman world. Worshipers of Dionysus, for example, celebrated their
5.5 Last Supper, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy, c. 520. Mosaic. Greco-Roman mosaicists adopted a new iconography based on Christian stories and symbols. Here a typical Roman banquet scene is recast as the Last Supper, with the purple-robed figure of Christ opposite the traitor Judas. This panel is from the series that appears above the clerestory windows of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (see Fig. 5.17).
THE NEW TESTAMENT Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, John The Acts Letters of Paul Romans, 1st & 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1st & 2nd Thessalonians, 1st & 2nd Timothy, Titus, Philemon Other Letters Hebrews, Epistle of James, 1st & 2nd Peter, 1st, 2nd, & 3rd John, Jude Revelation
god with wine-drinking and orgiastic banquets. The cult of Isis, the Egyptian goddess, told of a murdered god who was resurrected in the afterlife. Converts to Christianity also underwent the rite of baptism, which erased sins of the old life and prepared the believer to enter the kingdom of God. The emperor Constantine postponed his baptism until he was near death, hoping to erase all but a few days of sin.
Early Christian ritual was accompanied by readings from a growing body of scripture written in Greek. The Christian New Testament consisted of diverse materi- als. The letters of Paul were the earliest Christian writ- ings, while the four official Gospels and Luke’s Acts of the Apostles (written c. 70–120) were professions of Christian faith written as biography and history. The New Testament ended with an apocalyptic vision of Christ’s second coming, the Book of Revelation. Later, Christian scripture incorporated the Hebrew Bible as well.
Christianity in the Late Roman Empire By the third century, Christianity had established itself as a leading cult in the Greco-Roman world. Christian churches formed tight-knit, supportive communities in the disorderly world of late antiquity. New believers embraced Christianity’s benevolent monotheism and welcomed its promise of resurrection after death. To the
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empire’s slaves and lower classes, Christianity granted an equal membership in the community of faith; to the wealthy—especially women—it offered freedom from oppressive family and social obligations. Widows seem to have occupied esteemed positions and women appar- ently served as church officers.
The religious diversity of the late Roman Empire is illustrated by Dura-Europos, a border town in Roman Syria (modern Iraq) that was partially buried in 256.
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
The Siege of Jerusalem When a Roman army besieged Jerusalem in 70 CE, star- vation drove its citizens to madness. This account is from Josephus, a Jewish historian:
Throughout the city people were dying of hunger in large numbers and enduring indescribable sufferings. In every house the merest hint of food sparked violence, and close relatives fell to blows, snatching from one another the pitiful supports of life. No respect was paid even to the dying; the ruffians searched them, in case they were concealing food somewhere in their clothes, or just pretending to be near to death. Gaping with hunger, like mad dogs, lawless gangs went staggering and reeling through the streets, battering upon doors like drunkards, and so bewildered that they broke into the same house two or three times in an hour. Need drove the starving to gnaw at anything. Refuse which even animals would reject was collected and turned into food. In the end they were eating belts and shoes, and the leather stripped off their shields. Tufts of withered grass were devoured, and sold in little bundles for four drachmas.5
JOSEPHUS The Jewish Wars
CRITICAL QUESTION In what ways do people today claim divine sanction or approval for their actions? How are calamities and misfortune still taken as signs of divine judgment or disapproval? How can such outlooks be reconciled with modern science and rationality?
5.6 The Good Shepherd. Late 3rd–early 4th century. Marble, height 38 1⁄2 ins (98 cm). Museo Pio Cristiano, Vatican. Much early Christian art adapted Greco-Roman motifs, such as the shepherd. A pagan might have interpreted the figure as Hermes, guide to the souls of the dead; a Christian would likely have seen Christ, the shepherd of souls.
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Excavations at Dura-Europos [dyoor-a yoo-ROPE-us] have uncovered temples to more than a dozen Greek and Roman gods, as well as smaller sanctuaries of Judaism, Christianity, and other cults. The Jewish syna- gogue at Dura contained a gigantic wall fresco show- ing biblical scenes, including Moses leading the exodus. A small Christian baptistery, in a house employed for worship, was painted with scenes of Jesus’ miracles and two women at a sarcophagus, presumably the women at Jesus’ tomb.
The house church at Dura is clear evidence that third- century Christians were developing a rudimentary reli- gious art, largely adapted from Greco-Roman traditions. Christians’ evolving set of sacred symbols and images, known as iconography, often had pagan meanings. One iconographic symbol was the fish, which Christians used as an acrostic for Jesus’ name but pagans employed widely in their art. Likewise, Christians employed the pagan motif of the “Good Shepherd,” which appears at Dura, on catacomb ceilings in Rome and in stone sculpture (Fig. 5.6). Other early Christian images depict
Christ as Helios, the sun god, or Orpheus, the mythic musician who descends into hell and charms the god of Hades. Christian images in the Roman catacombs (burial caverns) often stressed deliverance and resurrec- tion, such as the Hebrew tale of Jonah and the whale.
The fusion of Christian and pagan motifs is illus- trated in the stone coffin, or sarcophagus [sar-KOFF- ah-guss], that one wealthy Christian had carved for his burial. On the sarcophagus (Fig. 5.7) of Junius Bassus, a fourth-century Roman official, a Roman god supports Christ’s throne in heaven (above, center). Daniel, the
5.7 Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, 359. Grottoes of St. Peter, Vatican. The carved sarcophagus was a Roman tradition readily adapted to Christian use. Here, with figures in a finely carved classical style, scenes of affliction and sin (Job with the counselors, Adam and Eve in Eden) alternate with scenes of redemption (Christ entering Jerusalem, the prophet Daniel among the lions).
View the Closer Look at the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassius on myartslab.com
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late Hebrew prophet (below, near right), stands like a stoic philosopher among the lions. Here Hebrew wis- dom blends with Christian revelation, all in a classical style rooted in pagan tradition.
Constantine and Christianity A turning point in Christianity’s rise came under the reign of Constantine [KON-stan-teen] (ruled 312–337), the first emperor to embrace the Christian faith (Fig. 5.8). The night before a crucial battle, Constantine was said to have seen a fiery cross against the sun, with the words below “In this sign you will conquer.” Following his vic- tory, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan (313), which legalized Christianity and ended official persecution. While continuing to pay homage to the official pagan gods, Constantine had his sons brought up as Christians and made his new capital, Constantinople [kon-STAN- ti-noh-pull] (the ancient city of Byzantium; now the Turkish city of Istanbul), the first Christian city.
With one exception, every Roman emperor after Constantine favored Christianity, and by the end of the fourth century the religion had entered a new phase in its development. These Christian emperors built lavish new churches, advancing the synthesis of Christianity and the pagan tradition. Christian leaders now repre- sented the power of the Roman state that had once per- secuted them. By the fifth century, the Christian faith had become the wealthiest and most powerful social institution in the Western world.
Philosophy: Classical and Christian The world of late antiquity saw a gradual and some- times troubled merger of classical and Christian philos- ophy. The philosophy of Neoplatonism, the last great Greek philosophy, was expounded in the schools where both pagans and Christians studied. By 400, a new syn- thesis emerged in the writings of Augustine of Hippo. As Augustine and other Christian clergy became politi- cians and civic leaders in the late Roman world, they adapted classical ideas to the intellectual challenges of the new faith.
From Classical to Christian The classical world’s last great philosophical system was founded on the Neoplatonist teachings of Plotinus (205–270), compiled in the Enneads. Adapting ideas from both Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus described all
5.8 Head of Constantine, from a colossal statue that stood in the Basilica of Constantine, Rome (see Fig. 4.15), 313. Marble, height of head 8 ft 6 ins (2.59 m). Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. Inclined to visionary mysticism, the emperor Constantine founded dozens of Christian churches in Rome and Constantinople, the new capital of his empire.
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the youthful theft of some pears with the same bitterness as his years with the anonymous mistress who bore him a son. Of the theft, Augustine writes:
Some lewd young fellows of us went and took huge
loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs.
And this, but to do what we like only because it was
misliked.6
Of the mistress, whom he renounced at his family’s insistence, he says, “The heart, to which she stuck fast, was cut and wounded in me, and oozed blood.”
In probing “the depths of his soul,” Augustine found that only God’s immense grace could save him from sin. His own will was too weak. Human freedom, Augustine argued, was only the freedom of the will to commit sin. The Confessions portray Augustine’s soul in a constant struggle against its desires, in constant conflict with its own sinful nature. Thus, Augustine’s Christian view of the human soul differed sharply from the classical tradition in which it was rooted. For classical philosophers such as Socrates and the stoics, the wise soul could successfully live at peace with itself and the cosmos; the Christian’s soul, said Augustine, was always at war with itself.
Augustine articulated Christianity’s newest ideas with logical force and clarity. In his long treatise On the Trinity, for example, he addressed the logical difficulties of viewing God as both one and three. Augustine offers several elegant analogies between God and the human self. When we say, “I love myself,” he reasoned, the “I” that loves, the “self” that is loved, and the love shared between them are all distinct but all aspects of the same self. Likewise, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are dis- tinct aspects of one divine being.
Augustine’s most comprehensive philosophical work, City of God (written 413–426), responded to the sack of Rome in 410 by a Germanic army. Pagan traditional- ists blamed Rome’s fall on the Christians, who refused to do public service or honor Roman deities. Augustine replied that Rome’s decline was part of God’s historical design for human salvation, a vision of history without precedent in ancient philosophy.
Augustine presented human history as a battle between two symbolic cities. The “city of the world” (civitas terrena) was peopled by pagans and Christian heretics. The “city of God” (civitas dei) was founded in heaven but encompassed the Christian faithful living on earth. According to God’s plan of history, the earthly city would eventually be destroyed altogether and its inhabitants cast into damnation. Righteous Christians would live in a state of blessedness and universal peace at the end of history. Until this time, Augustine advised
creation as flowing from a single and perfect source, the One or the Good. In Plotinus’ view, the One was beyond being and defied description. From it emanated an orderly hierarchy of being, descending from Nous (intellect) to the World Soul to the material world. A virtuous human life involved the soul’s effort to return to the One through rational contemplation and suppres- sion of material desires. Plotinus did not regard bodily desire as sinful or evil; the flesh merely retarded the soul in its mystic quest to know the One and the Good. Plotinus’ system maintained Plato’s distinction between soul and body, but emphasized the unity of all existence. Both ideas appealed to later Christian thinkers.
In the fourth century Neoplatonists actively defended traditional Roman religion and often conflicted with Christian believers. For example, Hypatia [hyuh-PAY- shuh] (c. 370–415), late antiquity’s most significant woman philosopher, led a lively Neoplatonist school at Alexandria in Egypt. She made significant contributions to mathematics and astronomy, but suffered a hideous murder at the hands of Christian zealots. Hypatia’s death and the burning of Alexandria’s famous librar- ies ended the city’s preeminence as a center of classical learning.
Through the fourth century, Christian intellectuals gradually did harmonize their beliefs with classical tra- ditions, affirming Plato’s division of body and soul as well as the stoics’ restraint of passion and acceptance of divine will. The agents of this philosophical compro- mise were the so-called Fathers of the Church, whose writings formed the patristic tradition (from Latin for father, pater). One legacy of patristic scholarship was the Vulgate Bible, primarily the work of the Church father Jerome (c. 347–419/420). The learned Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible from the original Greek and Aramaic; by the sixth century, his text had become the basis of the Vulgate (from Latin for common edi- tion, editio vulgata), henceforth the standard Bible of Latin Christianity.
Augustine of Hippo By far the most important patristic philosopher was Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine’s best-known writing is the Confessions (397–401), a remarkable work of spiritual introspection unparalleled in the clas- sical literature of Augustine’s day. It details Augustine’s attraction to both Neoplatonism and Manicheism [man- i-KAY-ism], which saw the world as a conflict between good and evil, and describes Augustine’s inner struggle against his own sinful will. In repentance, he remembers
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K E Y C O N C E P T
Original Sin and Human Nature Augustine believed that sinfulness and the need for repen- tance were the unrelenting truths of human experience. His beliefs engaged him in fierce debate over sin and human nature. Christian thinkers disagreed on whether baptism erased sinfulness or whether sin remained forever rooted in the human soul. Augustine answered this ques- tion with his doctrine of “original sin.” A fundamental con- cept of Western views of human nature, original sin refers to Adam and Eve’s first violation of divine command in the Garden of Eden (Fig. 5.9). According to Augustine, when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they condemned all humanity to a state of sinfulness. Because all humans descended from Eve, every human soul, including that of a newborn infant, was, by connection, inevitably wicked.
The Greek scholars of the Eastern Church (which later became the Greek Orthodox Church) disputed Augustine’s concept of original sin. As they read the Bible, sin resulted from individual acts of will, and humans were justly pun- ished according to the degree of their sin. However, according to Augustine, sin resulted from human nature, not from human action. The stain of sinfulness existed from conception and could not be erased by acts of repentance. Augustine’s more radical interpretation won the day and his view of original sin became official doctrine. It remains a cornerstone of Western Christian belief today.
The concept of original sin had enormous importance in the Western view of human nature. It meant that humans could not naturally govern themselves or achieve a state of goodness by their own effort. As children, humans required the rigorous discipline of parental guidance; as adults, they required the limits imposed by law and a paternal government. Later philosophers would chal- lenge Augustine’s doctrine of human depravity, or cor- ruption. Some eighteenth-century philosophers claimed that humans were naturally good and corrupted only by the influence of a depraved society. Augustine’s defini- tion of human nature still affects the way that parents rear children, schools instruct students, and governments rule their citizens.
5.9 Adam and Eve, detail of Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, 359. Marble. Grottoes of St. Peter’s Basilica (Treasury Museum), Vatican, Vatican City. Adam and Eve hide their shame in the moment when, according to Augustine, both sin and knowledge of good and evil entered the world.
CRITICAL QUESTION In your opinion, are humans naturally inclined to greed, rebellion, and evil? What forces, both inner and outer, cause humans to do evil? What forces cause them to do good?
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Rome, suffered barbarian invasion and political tur- moil. A Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, centered at Constantinople, grew more prosperous and powerful, sustaining Roman imperial traditions while the Western empire disintegrated.
The empire’s division also affected the newly influ- ential Christian churches. Authorities in both the Latin and Greek churches fought bitterly against unorthodox ideas, especially the Arian heresy, which disputed the nature of Jesus as both fully divine and fully human. In 325 Constantine convened the first of several ecumeni- cal councils to affirm orthodox doctrines and suppress the heresy. But gradually a disaffection grew between the Latin Church, with its centers of power in Rome and northern Africa, and the Greek Church, which was strongly allied with the powerful Byzantine emperors. The division expressed itself in growing theological and artistic differences that would eventually split the Roman Catholic (universal) Church and the Byzantine Orthodox Church.
good Christians to “obey the laws of the earthly city whereby the things necessary for the maintenance of this mortal life are administered.” With such words, Augustine commanded Christians to obey the very Roman state that barely a century earlier had bitterly persecuted them.
The Christian Empires: Rome and Byzantium In the year 330, the emperor Constantine dedicated his new capital Constantinople, built on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium [biz-AN-tee- um] (hence the term Byzantine). The consecration of a “new Rome” at Constantinople signaled a piv- otal change. Henceforth, the two parts of the Roman Empire, west and east, would suffer different historical fates. The Latin-speaking Western empire, centered at
5.11 Section view of a basilica-style early Christian church. Note the spacious colonnaded nave and aisles to accommodate standing worshipers.
5.10 Old St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, c. 320–30. Length of grand axis 835 ft (254.5 m), width of transept 295 ft (86.9 m).
clerestory
side aisles
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atrium
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encourage lawfulness and censure abuses. In the east- ern Byzantine Empire, on the other hand, the emperor’s power remained unshakable and the Eastern Church was closely wedded to imperial authority.
Justinian and the Byzantine World
Compared with the upheavals in the West, the Byzantine Empire was a paragon of stability and conservatism. Its founder had equipped Constantinople with an impe- rial palace, a hippodrome, numerous churches, and the other trappings of Roman urban life. Constantinople quickly absorbed the Greek climate of cultivation, spiri- tuality, symbolism, and intrigue, and grew into a vibrant cultural and intellectual center.
The Byzantine world (Map 5.2) reached its height under the rule of the emperor Justinian (527–565), who achieved significant legal reforms and artistic renewal. Justinian [juss-TIN-ee-un] was a skillful nego- tiator, more inclined to compromise than conquer. His armies overthrew barbarian rule in the West and briefly reunited the two empires. Justinian is best remembered for his vast reform of Roman law, the so-called Code of Justinian, the first thorough revision of Roman law since Julius Caesar.
Justinian was notable also for sharing power with his wife, Theodora, a confident and capable woman who ruled as co-empress. Theodora [thee-oh-DOH-ruh] rose to power from humble beginnings as an actress and courtesan. The empress is credited with saving the emperor when he faced a civil insurrection. Reportedly, Theodora stopped her husband from fleeing the capital, saying of her royal gown, “The empire is a fine winding sheet.” Inspired by her example, Justinian ordered his army commander to slaughter 30,000 protesters in the hippodrome. The emperor’s rule was never again seri- ously threatened.
During this revolt a fire destroyed the center of Constantinople, including the great church of Hagia Sophia [hah-JEE-ah soh-FEE-ah] (Holy Wisdom). At Justinian’s direction and enormous expense, Hagia Sophia (Fig. 5.12) was quickly rebuilt on a gigantic scale. The new church’s designers, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, were both mathematicians and scientists, not professional architects. Their daring plan for a domed interior astonished even Justinian, who took a personal interest in the construction. Two work crews built simultaneously from the north and south. By Christmas 537, less than six years after it was begun,
St. Peter’s and the Pope Roman emperors had always favored their subjects with lavish public buildings, a policy that now benefited the newly legalized Christian Church. In Rome, Constantine endowed about 15 new churches that rivaled the pagan temples in their size and splendor. The largest and most important was St. Peter’s (Fig. 5.10), built on the Vatican hill outside Rome over the tomb of the apostle Simon Peter. The St. Peter’s of Constantine (built c. 320–330) was to be Latin Christianity’s most famous shrine for a thousand years, until it was demolished and replaced during the Renaissance.
St. Peter’s was typical of basilica-style Christian churches, which were modeled after the Roman basilica (see Figs. 4.9, 4.15), with its coffered ceilings and rows of columns (Fig. 5.11). Worshipers entered the church through a wide, shallow narthex, or vestibule, and then traveled along the columned aisles. The church’s cen- tral hall, called the nave, had an elevated roof and could accommodate several thousand standing worshipers. The architect of St. Peter’s added a crossing transept at the altar to provide additional space for worship- ers. This created a cross-shaped floor plan. Behind the altar was the apse, another holdover from the Roman basilica. The apse’s half-dome was typically decorated with sacred images in paint or mosaic. St. Peter’s basil- ica design was to become the basic pattern of Latin Christianity’s greatest churches.
Constantine’s generosity to the Church did not reverse the decline of Rome or protect it against a new wave of barbarian invasion. Barbarians had long occupied parts of the old empire, often ruling without disturbing the underlying structure of Roman society. About 400, a new onslaught crossed the Rhine and overran the Western empire, demanding tribute and ter- ritory. In 402 the Roman government was moved to the more easily defended town of Ravenna, on the Italian Adriatic coast. In 410 Rome itself was sacked by the Goths, shocking the entire empire, and in 476 the last Roman emperor abdicated in Ravenna. The Western empire would henceforth be ruled by barbarian kings. By the sixth century, the old Roman Empire had become a patchwork of barbarian settlements, its government in shambles and its cities in ruin.
In Rome the vacuum of power was soon filled by the pope, the Christian bishop of Rome. By the fourth century, the pope was acknowledged by Western Christians as the Church’s supreme spiritual authority. As imperial order declined in the West, the pope and other bishops assumed a civic role and were able to
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aura of mystery and subtle cultivation, well suited to the Byzantine spirit.
Hagia Sophia’s interior decoration expressed the Byzantine love of intricate design and sumptuous mate- rials. The foundation columns were topped by capitals with the undercut carving of the Byzantine order. The interior walls and domes were decorated with lavish mosaics that covered a total area of 4 acres (1.62 ha). Illuminated by rows of windows, including 40 win- dows in the central dome, these mosaics reflected the brilliance of the Byzantine Church and court. A con- temporary observer wrote, “The golden stream of glit- tering rays pours down and strikes the eyes of men, so that they can scarcely bear to look. It is as if one were to gaze upon the mid-day sun in spring, when it gilds every mountain height.”7
the awesome new Hagia Sophia was dedicated. It would remain the largest church in the Christian world for 900 years.
The architects of Hagia Sophia stretched the tech- niques of domed building to the very limit of possibility (Fig. 5.13). They expanded an existing Byzantine build- ing form called the “domed basilica”—a rectangular hall with a dome in the center. Using pendentive con- struction rather than squinches (Fig. 5.14), their design rose through half-domes and curving walls to a dome more than 180 feet (55 m) high (Fig. 5.15). From the outside, Hagia Sophia’s dome appears to rest upon a mountain of masonry; on the inside, the dome floats above the cavernous nave, supported by a combina- tion of columns, arches, pendentives, and half-domes. Hagia Sophia’s joining of mass and space creates an
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Map 5.2 The late Roman and Byzantine World. The Byzantine Empire expanded from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to the west under the Emperor Justinian. By 1025 it had contracted again to the east.
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5.12 Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), Istanbul (Constantinople), 532–7. Justinian’s gigantic church seemed a divine miracle to observers in later centuries. Though today somewhat obscured by additional buttressing, Hagia Sophia’s dome rises on a series of supporting half-domes. The minarets date from after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
5.13 Plan of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, 532–7. Exterior dimensions 308 × 236 ft (93.9 × 71.9 m). The central dome was supported by half-domes on the east and west sides, and filled arches on the north and south sides.
5.14 Supporting a dome. Byzantine architects typically employed one of two methods: In (a) beams called squinches are placed diagonally across the opening and support the dome. In pendentive construction (b), triangular pendentives curve up and in from supporting piers, forming a circular base for the dome. Compare with the Pantheon (see Fig. 4.16), in which the dome rests on cylindrical walls.
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5.15 Interior, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, 532–7. Height of dome 183 ft (55.8 m). The interior of Hagia Sophia expresses the spirit of Byzantium with its articulation of space to create a numinous atmosphere. The shields bearing Arabic script were added when Muslims converted the church to a mosque after 1453.
View the web resource about Hagia Sophia on myartslab.com
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a half, patrons from both Latin and Greek Christianity built their churches, mausoleums, and baptisteries in Ravenna, a record of Christian art that was unmolested by later conquest or artistic modification.
The earliest churches of Ravenna retained the Roman architectural vocabulary: columns, arches, mosaic deco- ration, and the rectangular basilica plan (see Fig. 5.11). While usually plain brick on the outside, these churches were richly decorated within.
The mosaics of Ravenna reveal the evolution of early Christian art. Compared with pagan mythology, Christianity at first possessed a meager stock of stories and images: scenes and stories from the life of Christ, the lives of saints and martyrs, and Hebrew tales. The most familiar images represent Jesus in scenes from the Gospels, such as Christ as the Good Shepherd (Fig. 5.16), Christ feeding the multitudes, and Christ calling his disciples. At Ravenna, this range expanded as the imagery transformed.
The noblest work of interior decoration at Ravenna is Sant’Apollinare Nuovo [sant-ah-poll-ee-NAR-ay noo- WO-voh], which was built under the reign of the barbar- ian ruler Theodoric (445–526). Above the nave columns, stately processions of the saints and virgin martyrs (Fig.
Standing in his great church for the first time, Justinian compared his achievement to the temple in Jerusalem. The emperor is said to have murmured, “Solomon, I have surpassed thee.” In the sheer ambition of its design, Hagia Sophia surpassed every building of classical times.
Ravenna: Showcase of the Christian Arts By historical accident, the best-preserved early Christian art is found not in Rome or Constantinople, but in the small town of Ravenna on Italy’s northeast coast. During the fifth and sixth centuries, Ravenna became a refuge for Roman emperors as well as barbarian rulers. After its capture in 540 by Justinian’s army, Ravenna was briefly drawn into the Byzantine orbit and benefited from Justinian’s generous patronage. For a century and
5.16 Christ as the Good Shepherd, 5th century. Mosaic from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna, Italy. In this brilliant mosaic, a scene of Christ as the good shepherd is composed to fit the half-oval shape of a lunette. The youthful Christ tenderly rubs a sheep’s chin in this pastoral scene.
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5.17) bear gifts toward Christ and the Virgin Mary. The parade of virgins is led by the Three Wise Men, passing before palm trees that recall Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, when he was supposedly hailed as a king (Mark 11:1–10). (Artists stressed images of Christ’s royalty and majesty to please their imperial patrons.) The Ravenna mosaics’ visual style indicates the weaken- ing hold of Roman naturalism on early Christian artists. The virgins of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo are abstracted from the background in a way that emphasized their spirituality. This trend toward spirituality and symbolic representation intensified in later Byzantine art.
5.17 Procession of Virgin Martyrs, c. 560. Mosaic. Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy. On the wall above this church’s nave arcade, a mosaic scene depicts a procession of female martyrs to the new faith. The women are led by the three Magi toward the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, sitting on a throne and guarded by archangels.
5.18 San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy, c. 527–47. Diameter 112 ft (34.2 m). Genuinely Byzantine rather than Roman, the church’s octagonal design is compromised with a shortened nave (beneath the gabled roof in this view) and apse. Like Hagia Sophia, San Vitale has no true façade and its plain brick exterior gives little hint of the sumptuous decoration inside.
124 Chapter 5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM
gallery accommodated female worshipers, who were strictly segregated in the Byzantine liturgy.
The interior of San Vitale (Fig. 5.20) bears striking mosaic portraits of Justinian and Theodora with their retinues (Figs. 5.21, 5.22). Justinian is flanked by clergy- men (including the archbishop Maximian) and by impe- rial soldiers; the portrait represents the union of state power and Church power. The portrait of Theodora presents her as a regal figure, holding a jeweled chalice
San Vitale of Ravenna The only truly Byzantine church in Ravenna is San Vitale (Fig. 5.18), built dur- ing Justinian’s reign and emphatically unclassical in its design and decoration. San Vitale [sahn vi-TAHL-ay] is an example of a central-plan church, so-called because its dome and walls are organized around a central axis (Fig. 5.19). The church is a double octagon: the domed inner octagon is supported by arches, while the outer octagon encloses a vaulted walkway. The second-story
5.20 Interior looking toward apse, San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy, c. 527–47. San Vitale’s interior is perhaps the most complete and authentic example of Byzantine decoration from Justinian’s era. The half- domed apse of basilica-style Christian churches created a theatrical setting for the Christian Mass, celebrated at the raised altar.
gallery
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5.19 Plan and section of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy, c. 527–47. Note the underlying octagonal plan, interrupted and embellished with a nave, apse, and atrium.
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5.21 Justinian and His Court, c. 547. Mosaic. San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy. These figures’ exaggerated eyes and strictly frontal poses are features of Byzantine pictorial art, which moved toward greater spirituality and abstraction, away from classical-style naturalism. Emperor Justinian holds a bread basket symbolizing an element of the Eucharist (Last Supper). On the soldier’s shield are the Greek initials chi and rho, the first letters of the Greek word for Christ.
5.22 Theodora and Retinue, c. 547. Mosaic. San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy. This scene of a regal Theodora faces Justinian and his Courtiers on the opposing wall. The shape of the jeweled chalice is echoed in the baptismal font at left; on the hem of Theodora’s gown are the Three Wise Men bearing gifts to Christ, a favorite theme of imperial Christian art. Compare the mosaic artists’ treatment of emperor and empress in these matching portraits.
Explore the architectural panorama of the church of San Vitale on myartslab.com
126 Chapter 5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM
Christian who went to the theater instead of church on feast days. Early Christianity’s struggle with Roman music and theater was the first of Christianity’s many battles with the free spirit of artistic creation.
Early Christian Music The ancient Roman world possessed a wealth of musi- cal styles and instruments. Music accompanied virtually every public entertainment, from a bawdy farce to the slaughter of wild animals and Christians in the circuses. The Church associated instrumental music with such pastimes, and therefore banned musical instruments from church services. Thus early Christian music was almost entirely vocal music, and would remain so for centuries.
Initially varying widely in form and language, early Christian music consisted of chanted hymns and psalms that accompanied worship services and communal meals. The earliest Christian singing may have paral- leled the psalms and hymns sung in Jewish places of worship. Chants and hymns were sung mainly in two ways—in responsorial singing, with the choir respond- ing to a soloist, or in antiphonal singing, in which two choirs sang alternating verses. Both responsorial and antiphonal forms of chant and song became ingrained in the Christian musical tradition.
As authority in the Latin Church became more cen- tralized, Christian song was gradually unified into dis- tinct repertories of sacred melody. One style of chant, known as Ambrosian chant, associated with the bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, was practiced in northern Italy. The most influential early Church music was the Gregorian chant (also known as plainchant or plain- song), a body of song consolidated in Rome during the seventh century, although tradition grants authorship to Pope Gregory I (590–604; Fig. 5.23). By the eighth century a Roman school existed for training young men and boy singers. In the ninth century, Gregorian chant was systematically compiled at the court of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, who sought to impose the Gregorian style on all of the Western Church.
The Christian liturgy, or Mass, required differ- ent music according to the religious season. The Mass
of the Eucharist, while a priest reveals at her right the baptismal font.
The church of San Vitale embodies the ultimate fusion that distinguished the Byzantine from the Roman Church, the fusion of imperial splendor and Christian piety.
Christianity and the Arts Early Christians adopted Roman architecture and decoration in their churches rather easily. However, the other arts of pagan Rome—especially music and theater—inspired their deep suspicion. The irreverent spirit of Roman theater threatened Christian religiosity. Furthermore, performing entertainments competed with the Church for the attention of the faithful. A bishop of Carthage even threatened to excommunicate any
5.23 Tenth-century ivory book cover depicting Gregory recording chants. Gregory’s authorship of the so-called Gregorian chant was more legendary than historical. Tenth-century artists portrayed the early Christian pope as inspired by the Holy Spirit, represented by a dove.
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The main influence on the theory of music was the early Christian philosopher Boethius [boh-EETH-ee-us] (c. 480–c. 524). He theorized that the harmony of the universe and soul was underlaid by music, and that this harmony rested on the numerical orderliness of musi- cal tones and chords. Music was a demonstration of the order in God’s creation. Boethius’s treatise De institu- tione musica (The Fundamentals of Music, early sixth century) was the most widely read book of musical theory in the Christian Middle Ages.
accommodated the yearly cycle of Christian holidays, while maintaining its basic form. The chants were largely monophonic (one-voiced), consisting of a single melodic line sung in unison that rose and fell in a mystic undula- tion. Christian music, always tradition-bound, remained largely monophonic until the twelfth century.
Music was seen as responsible for creating an atti- tude of devotion in Christian worshipers. The classical doctrine of ethos still echoed in early Christian music.
G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
About the time that Christianity was transforming the capitals of the Mediterranean world—roughly 350–650—a sacred city of Mesoamerica (present-day southern Mexico and Central America) was reaching the height of its influ- ence. The city of Teotihuacán [TAY-oh-TEE-hwah-KAHN], located in the Valley of Mexico (about 33 miles/53 km northeast of modern Mexico City), was one of the ancient world’s largest cities and one of the most sacred. Its resi- dents believed it to be the birthplace of the world, the site at which the gods sacrificed themselves to create the sun and moon. For more than a thousand years after its decline as a city, Teotihuacán (the name meant “where one becomes a god”) would attract pilgrims and devotees. Aztec rulers of Mexico would later revisit the sacred places and reen- act the founding events of their faith, much as Christian pilgrims visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem or Muslims the Qa’aba in Mecca.
Teotihuacán’s most important temples and palaces were arranged along a processional causeway, called the Way of the Dead (Fig. 5.24), which served as a stage for ceremonial processions. The largest temples were the Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon, whose swelling forms mim- icked the shape of the surrounding mountains. Beneath the Pyramid of the Sun was a natural lava cavern thought to be the womb from which the gods themselves were born.
The temples’ terraced walls sloped up to rectangular panels that were carved with the ferocious heads of feath- ered or fiery serpents. Inside the city’s palaces, painted murals depicted the Spider Woman, a figure still known in American Indian legend, and a Water Goddess whose headdress blossoms into a fertile profusion of butterflies and flowers. The mythical beings that decorated the tem- ples and palaces of Teotihuacán were worshiped through- out Mesoamerica.
Teotihuacán suffered an unexplained decline about 650 when the city was burned, perhaps by invaders or perhaps by its own citizens in an act of ritual self-sacrifice. It con- tinued as a shrine for later peoples until the Spanish con- quered Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century.
5.24 The Way of the Dead, Teotihuacán, Mexico, 1st–6th century. Mesoamerican architects designed Teotihuacán’s central precinct as an architectural stage for religious ceremony. The Temple of the Sun rising in the background was originally topped by a temple and altar. The stepped altars (foreground) radiate around the northern end of the ceremonial causeway called the Way of the Dead.
Teotihuacán: Sacred City of Mesoamerica
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128 Chapter 5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM
support was withdrawn and official theater expired in the western regions of the old Roman world. It would not appear again until the beginnings of Christian religious drama some 300 years later. Theater in the Western world survived in two forms: in the classical texts stored in libraries and read only by monks, and in the pagan folk festivals that gradually infiltrated the Christian calendar.
Early Christianity’s hostility to the arts peaked in Byzantine iconoclasm [eye-KON-o-klaz-um], which reached its height from 730 to 843. Iconoclasm, mean- ing the “smashing of icons,” was a violent response to the popular taste for sacred images. The Byzantine faith- ful attributed healing powers to icons, usually mosa- ics or painted wooden screens (Fig. 5.25). Byzantine theologians defended icons as a way to know spiritual truth through a material form. However, the Byzantine emperor Leo III blamed icon-worship for the empire’s military losses to the Arabs. In 730 he decreed that icons be removed from churches and palaces. With the emperor’s sanction, the iconoclasts splintered iconic panels and painted over mosaics, often replacing gor- geous images with a rudely painted cross.
Although iconoclasm was official policy, it never enjoyed great popular support. When the controversy subsided in 843, icons soon reappeared in Byzantine churches. The episode echoed the Judeo-Christian tradi- tion’s old hostility toward the visual arts—“You shall have no graven images,” commanded God—and antici- pated future struggles between Christian faith and the creative arts.
The Rise of Islam The internal dissension of the Christian empires of Rome and Byzantium proved to be mild compared to the onslaught of a new religious force in the Western world. Arising out of Arabia, the faith of Islam inspired a militant expansion that swept across the Near East to southwest Europe. Founded by the prophet Muhammad [moo-HAM-ad] (570–632), Islamic belief superseded ancient ethnic loyalties and forged a powerful unity among the Arab people. By the time of Muhammad’s death, virtually the entire Arabian peninsula was con- verted to Islam and unified Arabs were poised to expand northward and westward (Map 5.3). Muhammad’s successors authorized campaigns of religious conquest against the armies of the Byzantine and Persian empires. The Arabs were skilled horsemen and fierce fighters, but they also believed that death in defense of Islam would bring them immediately to the rewards of paradise.
Christianity Against the Arts
In the late empire, Roman theater had become increas- ingly lurid and spectacular. Sex acts were permitted on stage, and the emperor Diocletian decreed that a crucifix- ion be part of a theatrical performance. Even Augustine confessed, “I had a violent passion for these spectacles, which were full of the images of my miseries and of the amorous flames which devoured me.” Besides this sen- sual wickedness, Roman mimes and comic actors fre- quently aimed their mockery and sacrilegious outrages at the pious Christians.
Not surprisingly, early Christian authorities con- demned the Roman theater more fiercely than any other art. Baptism was forbidden for actors (an exception was made for Justinian’s empress, Theodora). Professional actors—never highly esteemed in the Roman world— virtually disappeared from Western society. The pub- lic theaters declined until, in the seventh century, state
5.25 Christ Pantocrator, c. 1080–1100. Mosaic. Church of the Dormition, Daphne. Byzantine Christians attributed healing and redemptive powers to icons, sacred images in mosaic, like this image of a stern Pantocrator (world ruler), or painted wooden screens. Many such images were attacked and mutilated during the iconoclastic controversy.
Chapter 5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM 129
Islam’s founder, the prophet Muhammad, was born about 570 in the Arabian trader city of Mecca. In mid- life Muhammad received an angelic command to “rise and warn” the Arabian people in the name of their chief deity, Allah. About 613 Muhammad began preaching in Mecca but then had to flee his opponents in 622, settling in Medina, north of Mecca. This flight, called the hegira [HEEJ-ruh], is the event from which Muslims date their calendar. Eventually, Muhammad led a force against Mecca and successfully established the worship of Allah at Arabia’s holiest shrine, the Qa’aba [KAHH-buh].
Muhammad’s message, like that of Moses and Jesus, was radically simple and focused on obedience to God and respect for others. He proclaimed that Allah was the sole god and creator of the universe. All believ- ers were equal before God, and were charged to treat each other with kindness and regard. A day of judg- ment was coming that would reward the faithful with infinite pleasures and punish the evil with eternal mis- ery. The faith acknowledged the prophets of Judaism and Christianity—Abraham, Moses, and Jesus—as
In barely more than a century, Islam’s armies had spread the faith as far east as the Indus River, in what is now Pakistan. They had marched westward across North Africa and into Spain, where a Frankish army finally halted their advance in 732. By 750, Islam’s empire dwarfed the shrunken borders of Rome. In Jerusalem, sacred to the faiths of Abraham and Jesus, a Muslim ruler boldly raised a domed shrine (see Fig. 5.1) that proclaimed Islam’s victory. The Dome of the Rock occupied the Temple Mount where Herod’s temple had stood, while its splendor surpassed the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by Constantine. On the ruins of past empires and amidst the shrines of their religious rivals, Muhammad’s faithful would build a new civilization.
The Foundations of Islam La ilaha illa Allah; Muhammad rasul Allah—“There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” In Arabic, these words are the simple but powerful profes- sion of faith in Islam, the world’s youngest great religion. The word islam means simply “surrender to God.” For believers of Islam, or Muslims, “surrender” requires belief in and obedience to the prophet Muhammad’s teachings, which set out a strict religious and moral code.
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Map 5.3 The Islamic world. Except for Spain, the regions conquered by 750, from India to Morocco, remain largely Muslim today. A later wave of expansion by Turkish Muslims pushed Islam deeper into central Europe and Asia.
130 Chapter 5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM
Mankind and jinn.a We shall surely find the time to judge
you! Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?
Mankind and jinn, if you have power to penetrate the
confines of heaven and earth, then penetrate them! But
this you shall not do except with Our own authority.
Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?
Flames of fire shall be lashed at you, and molten brass.
There shall be none to help you. Which of your Lord’s
blessings would you deny?
When the sky splits asunder, and reddens like a rose or
stained leather (which of your Lord’s blessings would
you deny?), on that day neither man nor jinnee will be
asked about his sins. Which of your Lord’s blessings
would you deny?
The wrongdoers will be known by their looks; they shall
be seized by their forelocks and their feet. Which of
your Lord’s blessings would you deny?
That is the Hell which the sinners deny. They shall wander
between fire and water fiercely seething. Which of your
Lord’s blessings would you deny?
But for those that fear the majesty of their Lord
there are two gardens (which of your Lord’s blessings
would you deny?) planted with shady trees. Which of
your Lord’s blessings would you deny?8
The Qur’an
Sura 55 The Merciful
a. jinn, supernatural spirits who, like humans, would face divine
judgment.
Muhammad’s predecessors, but carefully emphasized the status of Muhammad as the last of God’s spokes- men. From Muhammad’s teachings evolved the essential tenets of Muslim faith, called the Five Pillars of Islam, which remain the unifying precepts of Islam throughout the world today: bearing witness, to Allah as the one true God; prayer, normally five times daily while facing Mecca; almsgiving, both to the poor and to the Islamic state; fasting, during the holy month of Ramadan; and pilgrimage (the hajj), to the Qa’aba in Mecca. (The poor and infirm are excused from the obligations of almsgiv- ing and pilgrimage.)
The Qur’an Muhammad’s most important act was to receive the revelations of God, recited to him by the archangel Gabriel over a period of 20 years. These rev- elations are inscribed in the Qur’an (Koran), Islam’s scriptures (Fig. 5.26). Written in Arabic, the Qur’an [kor-AHN] is divided into 114 suras [SUH-ruhs], or chapters. It blends ecstatic praise of Allah with wisdom derived in part from Jewish and Christian sources. In most suras, Allah speaks directly to the faithful, as in Sura 55, when he describes the judgment of souls:
5.26 Qur’an page written in Kufi script, from Great Mosque, Kairouan, Tunisia, 950. Parchment, 9 4⁄5 × 13 3⁄4 ins (25 × 35 cm). Bibliothèque Nationale, Tunis. The Arabic text of the Qur’an, here presented in decorative calligraphy, was also incorporated in Islamic art as a constant reminder of the commanding will of Allah.
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For Muslims, only the Arabic version of the Qur’an is God’s true revelation and, because of its influence, Arabic became the universal language of Islamic faith and learning. However, as he worked to govern his new community, Muhammad made pronouncements and established new customs that entered Muslim tradition as hadith (reports) of the Prophet’s deeds and sayings. By the 800s, Muslim scholars had defined Muslim law, or sharia, as resting on both the Qur’an itself and the interpretation and moral example of Muhammad. By about 900, Muslim intellectuals had reached consensus on the foundations of the “Muslim way,” though ques- tions about the application of Qur’an and the authority of hadith still animated the faith.
Islamic Arts and Science By the eighth century, Muslim rulers were faced with administering a vast empire and synthesizing a new civilization from the diverse cultures within its bounds. The Muslim state was ruled by a caliph (suc- cessor or representative), who wielded political but not religious authority. The first dynasty of caliphs, the Ummayads, ruled from Damascus in Syria. But they fell to the Abbasids, who in 762 founded a splendid new capital, Baghdad, in Iraq. Baghdad quickly grew to a city larger than Constantinople, an imperial center of trade and learning. The Abbasid caliphs built a splen- did green-domed palace and sponsored the House of Wisdom (in Arabic, Bayt al-Hikma), a center of learn- ing where scholars translated Greek and Persian works
5.27 Great Ummayad Mosque, Damascus, Syria, c. 715. The Muslim mosque had to provide space, in an open courtyard or under roofed cover, for the entire male population to observe Friday prayers. The mosque at Damascus featured domed roofs and an arcaded courtyard.
5.28 Interior, Great Mosque of Córdoba, Spain, c. 736. Muslim architects preferred the horseshoe arch and in Córdoba’s Great Mosque stacked one arch on top of another. This ingenious system was originally devised to compensate for the relatively short columns, less than 10 ft (3 m) high, which are extended by masonry impost blocks.
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132 5 Monotheism: Judaism, Christianity, Islam
buildings to use as mosques. In Damascus, for example, the great congregational mosque (Fig. 5.27) had origi- nally been a Roman temple and a Christian church. When Muslims rebuilt it, they turned the façade inward to face the tiled courtyard and decorated the walls with mosaic scenes of a city in paradise. Under the Abbasids, congregational mosques contained a rectangular open court and a prayer hall with roof supported by columns, as in the Great Mosque of Córdoba in Spain (Fig. 5.28). Examples of this columned, or hypostyle, mosque also survive in Iraq, Egypt, and Tunisia (Fig. 5.29). The aisles of the hypostyle prayer hall oriented the believer toward Mecca, indicated by a niche called a mihrab, toward which the faithful turn in prayer. Mosques—as well as Islamic pottery and fine art—were commonly deco- rated with Qur’anic script or abstract designs like the
of philosophy and science into Arabic. The House of Wisdom had its own observatory and its scholars published their translations and commentaries on inexpensive books of paper, a material that Muslims learned about from the Chinese.
By the ninth century, Baghdad was the vibrant center of the golden age of Islamic civilization, which saw major advances in medicine, optics, and astronomy. Arabic physicians were licensed by the state and routinely performed surgery for cancer and other diseases. The physician Razi (865–925) was the first to describe the clinical symptoms of smallpox. Arabic mathematicians shared the Islamic artists’ fascination for abstraction and devised a numeral system based on the zero (in Arabic, sifr) and the mathematics of algebra (in Arabic, al-jabr). Even as the Abbasids’ political power weak- ened, Baghdad endured as the cosmopolitan capital of Islamic civilization until 1258, when a Mongol army sacked the city. Survivors said that the Tigris River ran black with ink from books tossed into its waters.
One Abbasid accomplishment was to standard- ize the architecture of the mosque, the Muslim place of worship. Early Muslims had often adapted existing
132 Chapter 5 ANCIENT ROME
1000 BCE 1 CE 100 CE 587 BCE Babylonians destroy temple; Israelites in exile
1000–961 BCE Life of David, King of the Jews
c. 960 BCE Temple of King Solomon, Jerusalem
C H A P T E R 5 : T I M E L I N E
5.29 Great Mosque of Kairouan, Tunisia, 836 and after. The great stepped tower, or minaret, overlooking the courtyard resembles a nearby Roman lighthouse. The covered prayer hall contained more than 400 columns, most salvaged from Roman or Byzantine buildings.
70 CE Romans sack Jerusalem, destroy Second Temple
c. 70–120 CE Christian Gospels composed
132–135 CE Jewish Diaspora, Romans force Jews to leave Judea
c. 19 BCE Herod the Great reconstructs Second Temple, Jerusalem (5.2)
c. 4 BCE Jesus born in Palestine, crucified 30 CE
The Rise of Islam 133Chapter 5 ANCIENT ROME 133
200 CE 300 CE 400 CE 500 CE 600 CE c. 500 Sacred pyramids of Teotihuacán, Valley of Mexico (5.24)
527–65 Reign of Justinian
532–37 Hagia Sophia, Constantinople (5.12)
c. 547 Mosaics at San Vitale, Ravenna (5.21, 5.22)
622 Muhammad’s flight (hegira) from Mecca
622–722 Muslim conquests from India to Spain
650 Decline of Teotihuacán
313 Emperor Constantine legalizes Christianity
c. 320–30 St. Peter’s, Rome (5.10)
330 Constantinople founded as capital of Eastern empire
397–401 Augustine, Confessions
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Compare the fundamental beliefs of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. In what ways are these religions compatible with one another? In what ways are they incompatible?
arabesque, a design that repeated a basic line or pattern in seemingly infinite variations.
The rise of Islam initiated a long history of religious rivalry and uneasy coexistence in the Mediterranean world. While Muslims placed Islamic shrines on sacred sites of Judaism and Christianity, Muslim rulers granted special status to Jews and Christians as “people of the Book.” War erupted frequently, however, and in com- ing centuries Christians and Muslims often took bloody vengeance on each other. From the beginning, a com- mon religious heritage was insufficient to resolve the
political and cultural tensions among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
CHAPTER REVIEW The Judaic Tradition What is monotheism? How did the ancient Israelites come to reshape the Roman Empire? What was the covenant between the Jews and their god? How did historical events come to shape the Jewish outlook? What is the meaning of diaspora?
The Rise of Christianity What was the original context of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth? What doctrines inspired the earliest Christians? What are the Gospels? Who was Paul? How did Christian belief spread across the Greco-Roman world? Who was Constantine?
Philosophy: Classical and Christian Who was Plotinus? Describe Neoplatonism. What did St. Augustine do to synthesize classical and Christian ideas? What is original sin? According to Christianity, what is god’s plan for humankind?
The Christian Empires: Rome and Byzantium What were the immediate historical consequences of Rome’s division into Eastern and Western empires? To what
does the term Byzantine refer? Describe the differ- ences between a basilica plan church and a central plan church. Who were Justinian and Theodora? Where is Ravenna, and why is it significant?
Christianity and the Arts How did the Christian Church regard the arts of music and theater? What is liturgy? How was early Christian music incorpo- rated in the Christian Mass? Explain the iconoclastic controversy.
The Rise of Islam How was Islam founded? Who was Muhammad and what is the Qur’an? What are the Five Pillars of Islam? How do the cities of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, and Bagdhad each figure in Muslim history? What are the distinctive features of Muslim architec- ture? How did Islamic learning influence the West?
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6.1 Gislebertus, Last Judgment, tympanum sculpture, west portal, Cathedral of St.-Lazare, Autun, France, c. 1120–35. At the Last Judgment, Christ calls all souls to rise from the dead (across the lintel); while some are admitted to heaven (left), many more are weighed on the scales of righteousness (right) and damned to punishment.
6The Early Middle Ages K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• How did Christian culture develop during the age of Charlemagne?
• What were the social conditions that gave rise to feudalism, and how did the feudal spirit express itself in Europe?
• How did the development of monasticism infl uence the art and culture of medieval Europe?
• What are the characteristics of the Romanesque style? • How did medieval music and drama evolve in Christian
Europe?
• How did medieval culture and religion shape the growth of philosophy?
I alone give order to all and crown the righteous;
Those who follow crime, I judge and punish.
Here, let those bound to earthly error be struck by terror.
The horror of those you see here will be their fate.
With these fearsome words, the image of Christ greets the believers who
pass beneath. From his throne, he judges the souls of the dead at the
Last Judgment (Fig. 6.1). Some are lifted through the gates of heaven.
More—many more—are cast into the torments of hell.
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136 Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
The hierarchical order of this heaven and hell reflects the spirit of the early Middle Ages. God and believer, lord and peasant, abbot and monk—all were bound in a system to defend against a violent and demon-infested world. The rise of a new empire in Europe and the Church’s efforts to preserve the arts and learning were not always enough to protect the Middle Ages from the fiends of war, ignorance, and folly.
The Age of Charlemagne By the 700s, a new culture was emerging in the outer regions of the former Roman Empire. In the British Isles and Scandinavia, pagan cultures blended with Roman and Christian influences. Monasteries in Ireland and England became centers of evangelism and learning. Their distinctive religious symbolism and decorative style gave a new stamp to Latin Christian civiliza- tion. This synthesis of Northern styles and classical Mediterranean civilization reached its height around 800 in the rule of Charlemagne, who unified Europe in a Christian empire and fostered a renaissance in learn- ing and the arts.
Northern Edge of the Early Middle Ages The Roman Empire did not subdue Britain until the year 43 and never colonized Ireland or Scandinavia (today’s Denmark, Norway, and Sweden). As Rome declined, Germanic warlords called Anglo-Saxons took power in England, and Scandinavian raiders sailed as far as Byzantium and North America. In Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, descendants of Europe’s ancient Celtic cul- ture adopted Christianity while preserving their Celtic language and traditions.
The remote monasteries of Ireland and Britain helped preserve classical learning by becoming centers of book production. Before the invention of the printing press and the use of paper, books were hand copied on sheets of animal skin, a process both exceedingly costly and rare. Christian monastic libraries were repositories of classical works as well as sacred Christian texts. Here, Irish and English monks piously hand-copied texts, dec- orating, or “illuminating,” the pages in a style we now call Hiberno-Saxon (from Hibernia, Latin for Ireland). Hiberno-Saxon artists preferred fantastic animal fig- ures and decorations of intricately patterned interlace. A page from the Book of Kells, a famous gospel book, represents the text’s initial letter “T” as a bizarre ani- mal with clawed feet and serpentine neck (Fig. 6.2).
This animal devours another creature formed of color- ful interlace that fills the “T’s” inner curve.
The delicacy of Hiberno-Saxon illumination makes a decided contrast to the violent action of the Anglo- Saxon epic Beowulf (composed c. 700), based on a story brought to England by Danish invaders. Its young warrior hero saves the court of the Danish king by slay- ing the monster Grendel and displaying its severed arm as a gruesome trophy. Beowulf must eventually enter a lake of demons and also subdue Grendel’s mother.
As Beowulf shows, the Scandinavian or Norse cul- ture possessed its own vivid mythic and heroic tradi- tions. In the Norse sagas, we find the best evidence of the Germanic religion that preceded Christianity. The Eddas, poetic sagas composed in Nordic Iceland about 1000, recount for example the apocalyptic destruc- tion of the world of the gods. Norsemen had reached Iceland in their oar-powered longboats, invented about 800, and attacked Constantinople in 860. During the Viking age (800–1000), Norse raiders plundered the towns and monasteries of the British Isles and north- west Europe, disrupting the early medieval economy.
6.2 Tunc crucifi xerant XPI, Book of Kells, fol. 124r, late 8th or early 9th century. Illuminated manuscript on vellum, 9 1⁄2 × 13 ins (24 × 33 cm). Library of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
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administrative orders, and since he recruited most of his officials from the clergy, Charlemagne advocated clerical education. He urged bishops and abbots to fos- ter literacy in their domains and to promote clergymen based on learning and ability. In one district, priests were ordered to establish free schools for all boys—an early but short-lived attempt at universal education.
Carolingian Arts At the center of the Carolingian renaissance was a vigorous “culture of the book.” Carolingian painters and illustrators consciously imitated Hellenistic and Byzantine styles imported from the Mediterranean world (Fig. 6.3). However, the Carolingian artists, some of them immigrants from Byzantium, could not resist Hiberno-Saxon art’s intricate fantasy and gro- tesque energy (Fig. 6.4). One notable synthesis of these
The Vikings were fearless sailors who by 1000 had settled Greenland and explored North America.
Charlemagne’s Empire In northwestern Europe, a warlike people called the Franks had halted Muslim incursion by 750 and estab- lished a kingdom along the Rhine River (in today’s Germany). When the Frankish ruler Charlemagne [SHARL-main] (ruled 768–814) took power, he expanded his kingdom with an imposing force of mounted Frankish knights. His warrior nature was ruthless: he once beheaded 4,000 Saxon warriors to punish a rebellion and forced the survivors to convert to Christianity. In 800, Charlemagne made a pilgrimage to Rome where, on Christmas Day, the pope crowned him Holy Roman Emperor, the first acclaimed emperor of Europe since Roman times.
Charlemagne was not only a bold military leader and politician. His avid interest in learning and the arts created what scholars call the Carolingian [kair-o-LIN- jee-un] renaissance. The Carolingian (from Carolus, Latin for Charles) renaissance briefly centralized a lively imperial culture at Charlemagne’s court. Scholars of Charlemagne’s palace school supervised reforms in Church music, oversaw the copying and illumination of books, and chronicled the life of Charlemagne. In concept, Carolingian art and ideas reflected an impe- rial ideal borrowed from ancient Rome and the still- reigning Byzantine emperors. In practice, Carolingian art works were nearly all produced at Charlemagne’s palace school and at monasteries sponsored by the king. After Charlemagne’s death, the talent dispersed and within a generation the Carolingian renaissance was no more.
The most influential intellectual in Charlemagne’s circle was Alcuin of York (735–804), an Anglo-Saxon monk, librarian, and teacher. Alcuin [AL-kwin] is cred- ited with reforming the Catholic orders of worship and supervising a new translation of the Bible. Perhaps most important, he fostered a general revival of learn- ing under Charlemagne’s reign. At the imperial court (which he called a “new Athens”), Alcuin tried to create an aura of biblical royalty and classical achievement, dubbing courtiers with nicknames such as “David” (Charlemagne) or “Homer” (Alcuin himself). He taught the king grammar and read to him from Augustine’s City of God, Charlemagne’s favorite book.
Alcuin’s influence also indicates the importance of education and literacy in Charlemagne’s empire. Charlemagne needed officials who could read his
6.3 The four evangelists, from the Gospel Book of Charlemagne, early 9th century. Manuscript illustration. Palace School of Charlemagne, Aachen, Germany; Cathedral Treasury, Aachen. An illuminated page produced in the palace workshops of Charlemagne depicts the four gospel-writers with their symbols. The evangelists are shown in the pose of the medieval copyist, bent over a stand with quill in hand.
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Sculptural decoration was also incorporated into the Carolingian culture of the book, since sculptors could decorate book covers without risking the sin of idola- try. A Crucifixion ivory plaque compresses the biblical scene into a unified action (Fig. 6.6). Mary and other followers mourn Christ’s suffering. Roman soldiers with a spear and wine-soaked sponge are flanked by rounded tombs, from which figures rise in praise of Christ’s sacrifice. Above Christ’s head are medallion figures of the sun and moon, representing eternal time. These Carolingian carvers were more interested in the subject’s spiritual pathos than in naturalistic anatomy or pictorial realism.
At his palace complex at Aachen [AHKH-un] on the River Rhine, Charlemagne built a residence to reflect his imperial office. The palace at Aachen (in French, Aix-la-Chapelle [AYKS-lah-shah-PELL]) included a
illumination styles was the Utrecht Psalter [oo-trekt SALT-er] (Fig. 6.5), a collection of the psalms produced in the workshops of Ebbo, archbishop of Reims in France. The artist depicted each significant phrase as a separate vignette, connecting the vignettes with swirl- ing clouds or landscape. At the scene’s center, angels implore a sleeping God, “Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off for ever!” While imitating Roman-style fresco, the workshop art- ist at Reims animated his figures with a bizarre energy, suffusing the classical Mediterranean style with a mys- tic aura that emanated from the north.
In the age of Charlemagne, the art of life-size sculp- ture virtually disappeared, in part because of the icono- clastic controversy (see page 128). Sculpture did find an outlet in the demand for reliquaries (see Fig. 6.23), richly decorated containers of holy objects, or relics.
6.4 Crucifi xion, from the front cover of the Lindau Gospels, c. 870. Gold and jewels, 13 3⁄4 × 10 1⁄2 ins (35 × 27 cm). Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. This crucifixion scene reflects the influence on the Carolingian artist of Hiberno-Saxon art in its dazzling and intricate arrangement of florettes of gems set in gold across the surface of the cover. The more classically inspired figures are the beardless, crucified Christ attended by angels above, and, in mirror-image below, the Virgin Mary, St. John, and Mary Magdalene (?).
6.5 Psalm 44, from the Utrecht Psalter, c. 820–40. Pen and ink on vellum, 12 7⁄8 × 10 ins (33 × 25 cm). University Library, Utrecht. One of the most remarkable works of the Carolingian era, this psalter illustrates different verses of each psalm with a separate vignette. In Psalm 44, the psalmist’s words, “Through thee we push down our foes,” are illustrated in the quailing army at lower left. Tambourine players at right try to awaken a sleeping Lord.
View the Closer Look at Psalm 23 in the Utrecht Psalter on myartslab.com
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 139
great hall for imperial business and a chapel modeled after Byzantine churches. Even before he was crowned emperor, Charlemagne imported a statue of a Roman king to stand before his palace. By the standards of Hagia Sophia or St. Peter’s, the chapel was rather modest. However, its sensible eclecticism reveals the discernment of Charlemagne’s court. The chapel is a double octagon (Fig. 6.7), plain brick on the outside in the Byzantine style. Inside (Fig. 6.8), the chapel has none of the airiness and grace of its Byzantine model— instead, the two-story inner octagon is supported by heavy stone piers. The king’s marble throne stood in
6.6 Crucifi xion, from Metz, c. 850–75. Ivory plaque, 8 1⁄5 × 4 3⁄4 ins (21 × 12 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Even working on the scale of a book cover, sculptors in the Carolingian era achieved considerable expressiveness and narrative detail. The snake curled at the foot of the cross refers to Adam and Eve’s original sin. Note the leafy border, which recalls the decoration of Corinthian columns.
6.7 Section drawing of the palace chapel of Charlemagne, Aachen, Germany, 782–805.
6.8 Interior, palace chapel of Charlemagne, Aachen, Germany, 782–805. Charlemagne’s chapel on the River Rhine was a more modest version of the Byzantine imperial style. Compare the arches with those of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy (Fig. 5.20) and the Córdoba Mosque, Spain (Fig. 5.28).
clerestory
tribune
aisle
Watch a video on Aachen Cathedral on myartslab.com
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refuge for the estate’s population in time of war. In the early Middle Ages, the lord’s manor house was hardly more than a crude timber fort encircled by a stockade. Later, after Christian crusaders (see page 160) had encountered Byzantine and Turkish castles, Europe’s nobles built their castles of stone, with sophisticated defenses against siege. Still, no castle was impregnable. Attackers could tunnel underneath the castle walls, batter them with siege weapons, or simply wait for the defenders’ food and water to give out.
Compared with the lavish houses of Pompeii or Byzantium, European castles were rather sparsely fur- nished and decorated. The walls were typically painted with designs of flowers, or covered by cloth wall hang- ings, such as tapestries from Flanders or France, which helped subdue wintry drafts. More elaborate tapestries, imported from Islamic regions, did not appear until the fourteenth century.
Outside the castle, the peasants of a feudal estate endured the backbreaking labor of plowing, planting, and harvesting food crops (Fig. 6.9). To assure a cap- tive labor force, feudal law prohibited serfs from mar- rying a daughter outside the village or giving a son to a monastery. In return, the lord was obliged to provide a feast for his peasants on harvest days and religious
the gallery, from where Charlemagne could overlook the chapel’s altars and the throng of courtiers who gathered below. While perhaps lacking the grandeur of courts at Rome, Baghdad, or Constantinople, this less formal arrangement was more practical for a ruler who needed to redirect his attention rapidly in order to actively engage all matters of state. Unlike Alexander’s Hellenistic empire, which endured for two centuries, Charlemagne’s kingdom was split by political dissen- sion and war only a generation after his death. The Frankish kingdom splintered into regional territories governed by dukes and barons. The disintegration was hastened by waves of new invasions in the ninth and tenth centuries. Muslims from the south, Hungarians from the east, and especially Vikings—all terrorized Europe and disrupted settled society.
Feudal Europe After Charlemagne’s rule, medieval Europe struggled to preserve its communal life. France and England, especially, devolved into decentralized patchworks of small estates, governed by land-owning nobles. Largely self-sufficient, such medieval communities, or manors, functioned without cities or centralized governments. The culture that arose reflected the values of the land- owners—a culture of epic battles and military conduct that may be called the feudal spirit. On the other hand, in medieval Spain meanwhile, Muslim rule established a cosmopolitan culture where Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisted in relative peace.
Feudalism The system of landholding and political alliance that prevailed in medieval Europe is called feudalism, in which oaths of allegiance and military service are exchanged for the possession of land. Under feudal- ism, an aristocratic warrior elite ruled Europe chiefly by force. The link between war and land was the feudal oath, which bound a lesser lord, or vassal, to serve a higher lord in battle. In return for his service, the vassal received title to a grant of lands (in Latin, foedum). The vassal assumed the right to rule and tax the peasants on his estate, which financed the maintenance of his horses and weaponry, while also enjoying the produce of its farms, vineyards, and villages. Virtually the entire life of a feudal noble—war, marriage, political alliance— concerned the acquiring and keeping of land.
Life on a medieval estate centered on the manor house or castle—the residence of the lord’s family and
Work in Charlemagne’s World From the following prohibition against work on Sunday, we gain an idea of the labors that occupied Charlemagne’s subjects during the rest of the week:
Let no servile work be done on Sunday and no one be required to work in the fields on that day: none should cultivate the vine nor plow the fields, nor harvest, nor make hay, nor prune the hedges, nor clear forests, nor cut trees, nor dress stones, nor build houses, nor work in their gardens, nor attend law courts, nor hunt. Only three sorts of cartage will be authorized on Sunday: deliveries to the army, deliveries of provisions, and, if the need should arise, the burial of the lord. Women should not work at cloth: none should cut out clothing, nor do needle work, nor card wool, nor pound flax, nor wash clothes in public. For all must be obligated to rest on the Lord’s Day.1
CHARLEMAGNE Admonitio, 789
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 141
who fights bravely against an overwhelming force of Muslim knights (called Saracens).
The Song of Roland was written in Old French, com- posed as early as the ninth century and first recorded in the eleventh century. It was the most famous of many chansons de geste [shah(n)-SOH(n) duh ZHEST], tales of chivalric deeds sung by minstrels in Europe’s feudal courts. The chansons de geste celebrated a knight’s valor in battle and loyalty to his lord, ideas certain to please a minstrel’s host. Unlike later medieval romances, the chansons de geste gave virtually no place to women: the only female in the Song of Roland is Aude, the hero’s
for his peasants on harvest days and religious holidays, which occupied as much as one-third of the calendar.
Christian feast days were celebrated with song, dance, and other traditions rooted in ancient pagan ritual. One tradition was mumming, in which villag- ers disguised themselves as animal or human charac- ters. The masked mummers marched silently into the household of a lord or other social superior, danced and celebrated, and then offered gifts to the host and took their leave in silence. Itself obscurely rooted in pagan celebrations, mumming was the origin of masquerades and other masked dances. Like much early medieval peasant dance and music, it thrived on the edge of Christian orthodoxy.
The Arts of Feudalism The feudal nobility of early medieval Europe encouraged an oral literature of military exploits and feudal values, similar to the Greek epics that had praised the heroes of the Trojan War. Feudalism’s greatest war story was the Song of Roland (Fig. 6.10), an epic that recounts a battle from Charlemagne’s campaigns in Islamic Spain. The epic’s hero is Roland, a lieutenant of Charlemagne,
6.9 A 12th-century medieval calendar showing peasants at their labors. Rheinisches Landmuseum, Bonn, Germany. Peasant life was governed by agrarian labor and cultural traditions rooted in pre-Christian times. Peasants owed their lord a specified amount of rent and labor in kind.
6.10 Illustration from a 15th-century manuscript of the Song of Roland. Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. The Song of Roland embellishes a knight’s death with the elements of chivalrous heroism: feudal treachery, combat with evil pagans, a loyal companion, and a sacred sword. The hero lies dying with his sword, Durendal, nearby, while Charlemagne’s forces assault the Saracen force.
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Roland the Count strikes down on a dark rock,
and the rock breaks, breaks more than I can tell,
and the blade grates, but Durendal will not break;
the sword leaped up, rebounded toward the sky.
The Count, when he sees that the sword will not be
broken,
softly, in his own presence, speaks the lament:
“Ah Durendal, beautiful, and most sacred,
the holy relics in this golden pommel!
Saint Peter’s tooth and blood of Saint Basile,a
a lock of hair of my lord Saint Denis,b
and a fragment of blessed Mary’s robe:
your power must not fall to the pagans,
you must be served by Christian warriors.
May no coward ever come to hold you!
It was with you I conquered those great lands
that Charles has in his keeping, whose beard is white,
the Emperor’s lands, that make him rich and strong.”
... He turned his head toward the Saracen hosts,
and this is why: with all his heart he wants
King Charles the Great and all his men to say,
he died, that noble Count, a conqueror;
makes confession, beats his breast often, so feebly,
offers his glove, for all his sins, to God. AOI.c 2
Song of Roland
a. Saint Basile, the founder of an important monastery.
b. Saint Denis, patron saint of France.
c. AOI, a refrain uttered at the end of stanzas; scholars cannot
explain its meaning.
betrothed, who appears at the end and dies on hearing of Roland’s death.
The Song of Roland is a considerably romanticized account of an episode from Charlemagne’s Spanish campaign in 778. As the king’s forces withdrew from Spain, his rearguard was ambushed by Christian Basque fighters at the pass of Roncevalles [roh(n)ss-VAHL] in the Pyrenees. According to Charlemagne’s biographer, a certain “Hruodlandus, prefect of the forces of Brittany” was included among the Frankish dead. Medieval min- strels transformed this fatal encounter into a tale of feu- dal courage, violence, and treachery, told in a manner to gain the admiration of medieval audiences. Instead of Basque peasants, the attackers are devilish Saracen knights, whom the courageous knight Roland impetu- ously engages. Overwhelmed by the Muslims, Roland finally recalls Charlemagne’s main army, blowing his great horn (named Olifant) and bursting his temples with the effort. Delayed by treachery, Charlemagne rushes to Roland’s side, to learn the hero has died in battle.
Despite its violence, the Song of Roland constantly invokes Christian values. Christianity provides the rationale for war against the Saracens, who are a mirror-image of the French in dress, manner, and val- ues. Because they are pagans, however, the Muslims deserve to perish. At the moment of death, Roland tries to break his sword, Durendal, lest it become a trophy for a Saracen knight. He swears by the sacred Christian relics held within the sword’s hilt and, in a knight’s dying gesture, Roland offers his glove to God in submission, a sign of the poem’s union of feudal and Christian values:
6.11 Detail from the Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1073–88. Wool embroidery on linen, height 20 ins (51 cm), length of tapestry 231 ft (70.4 m). Town Hall, Bayeux, France. The tapestry’s embroidery renders the mêlée of battle in gruesome detail, including a severed head and an English foot soldier’s assault on a horse. Note the treatment of the horse’s rear legs in a contrasting color, a device suggesting spatial depth.
View the Closer Look at the Bayeux Embroidery on myartslab.com
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 143
The Flowering of Muslim Spain Feudal Christian Europe spawned nothing that could match the glittering cities of the medieval Muslim civi- lization to the south. On the Iberian peninsula, Muslim Spain—known by its Arab name al-Andalus [ahl-AHN- dah-loos]—produced a civilization where Muslims, Jews, and Christians often coexisted peacefully. As a conduit for Islamic scholarship and artistry, medi- eval Muslim Spain would deeply influence Western civilization.
Muslim armies from North Africa first conquered the Iberian peninsula in 711. Muslim control was most extensive under Abd-ar-Rahman (912–961), who declared his independence from the Abbasids in Baghdad and established his own Caliphate of Córdoba (929–1031). With a population of half a million, Andalusia’s capital, Córdoba, was among the largest cities in the world. Court poets sang the praises of the caliph al-Mansur (ruled 979–1002), who sponsored an anthology of Hispano-Arabic poetry called the Kitab al-Hadàig (Book of Orchards). In 1031, the Caliphate disintegrated into a number of smaller independent kingdoms. Its political power declined, but art and learning continued to thrive. The poet Ibn Hazm (died 1064) composed idealized love poetry that influenced the troubadour poets of southern France. Grammatical treatises and religious commentaries of Andalusian scholars attained wide currency in the Muslim world.
The Caliphate of Córdoba’s relative tolerance of Jews fostered what some scholars call a “golden age” of Jewish civilization. As Jewish academies declined in the Near East, Spanish Jews (called Sephardic Jews) fostered centers of learning and built lavish synagogues in Córdoba and Granada. Sephardic Jews prospered as merchants and physicians, and elite Jews (as well as Christians) occasionally served prominently in govern- ment. For example, the Jewish physician and diplomat Rabbi Hisdai ibn Shaprut (c. 915–c. 970) negotiated with delegations from Byzantium and the Saxon ruler Otto I. Under later Muslim rule in Spain, Jews and Christians suffered persecution and sometimes forced conversion.
After 1085, when a Christian ruler reconquered Toledo, scholars of all three faiths fled there to work at the School of Toledo. Under Christian patronage, scholars translated philosophical and scientific texts from Arabic and Hebrew into Latin. The School of Toledo transmitted the intellectual heritage of Muslim civilization to Christian Europe where it would spark an intellectual renaissance during the later Middle Ages.
The Bayeux Tapestry The Song of Roland may have been the inspiration for feudalism’s most ingenious pictorial work, the Bayeux Tapestry. The Bayeux [beye-(y)UH] Tapestry is in fact an embroidered wall hanging that celebrates one of medieval Europe’s most decisive conflicts. The tapestry depicts William the Conqueror’s victory over the English at Hastings, a battle that deeply affected English history, language, and religion.
William the Conqueror (c. 1028–1087) was a Norman, descended from Viking invaders who settled in northwest France. In a campaign of territorial expan- sion, William laid claim to the throne of England, then held by Edward the Confessor (ruled 1046–1066). William’s rival was Harold, son of England’s most powerful family. When Edward died, the disputed suc- cession was decided by war, in typical feudal fashion. William’s Norman army invaded England in 1066 and defeated the English at Hastings, killing Harold.
The Bayeux Tapestry (Fig. 6.11) recounts this chain of events in a complex pictorial narrative. Wall hang- ings depicting scenes from legend or history commonly decorated feudal halls. The 231-foot-long (70.4 m) Bayeux Tapestry was probably designed by an English cleric who had studied illuminated manuscripts. The designer was clearly not a propagandist for one side or the other. For example, the tapestry depicts Harold’s oath of loyalty to William, an event supporting William’s claim to the English throne; yet, it also shows King Edward’s death-bed designation of Harold as his rightful successor. It is actually not true woven tapes- try, but rather a stretch of linen cloth embroidered with figures and captions. The embroidery, an art known throughout Europe as opus Anglia (English work), was probably stitched by English women. In both physical size and the span of its narrative, the tapestry recalls the great continuous friezes left by classical civilization, especially the triumphal column of emperor Trajan (see Fig. 4.11), which could still be admired by medieval pil- grims to Rome.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT If you were chronicling a military triumph today, how would you go about it? What medium would you use? Why would you use this medium? What advantages would it have over alternative media?
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The Monastic Ideal The monastic ideal—the renunciation of normal life to pursue a life of solitary devotion—thrives in many world religions. Besides Christianity, for example, Hinduism and Buddhism have encouraged the monastic life as the surest way to enlightenment and salvation. A Christian monk believed he was adopting the vita apostolica, the life of Christ’s apostles, who left their families to fol- low Jesus. Three vows were the essence of the monastic order—poverty, chastity, and obedience. Just as the original apostles had left their homes to follow Christ, so a person entering a monastic order forfeited all prop- erty and vowed to live in poverty. A vow of celibacy protected a monk from carnal temptations and concen- trated his attention on matters of the spirit. A monk also vowed to obey religious authority. In pursuing the monastic ideal, a Christian renounced the natural com- munity of family and friends and embraced a spiritual communion with God and like-minded companions.
Nearly all European medieval monasteries followed the guidelines set forth in the Rule of St. Benedict. Authored by Benedict of Nursia (480–c. 547), founder of the first monastic order in the early sixth century, St. Benedict’s rule laid down concise, straightforward instructions for monastic discipline and communal harmony. He admonished the abbot, the elected leader of the monastery, to govern his charges “according to each one’s character and understanding” so that “he may not only suffer no loss in the flock, but may rejoice in their increase.”
Retreating before Christian forces’ successful reconquest (in Spanish, Reconquista), Spain’s Muslim rulers established their last capital at Granada. On a hill outside the city, they built (1238–1358) the Alhambra citadel and palace, a fantastic complex of official build- ings, living quarters, and luxuriant courts and gardens. The Alhambra’s centerpiece was the Court of Lions (Fig. 6.12), whose graceful colonnaded pavilions sheltered musical performances and poetry readings. Muslim Spain’s remarkable civilization ended emphatically in 1492 with the final reconquest of Granada. Muslims and Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or be expelled; many Sephardic Jews migrated to north Africa, the Americas, and Poland.
Monasticism From the beginnings of Christianity, believers felt called to renounce the world of material things and pursue a solitary existence of prayer and devotion. The first Christians to adopt this austere spiritual ideal were Egyptian hermits who retreated alone to the desert. With time, these solitary believers became known as monks (from the Greek word for one, monos), and by the fourth century they had organized themselves in monasteries throughout the Christian world. By the sixth century the monasteries of Italy and northern Europe were oases of learning and outposts of missionary fervor in a pagan world. Monasticism was to become a powerful force in the Christianizing of northern and eastern Europe.
6.12 The Court of Lions, the Alhambra, Granada, Spain, 1354–91. Originally planted with gardens, this courtyard is an architectural rendition of the pleasures of the Islamic paradise. The columned pavilions jut into the yard, creating an interplay of light and shadow. The lions were said to represent the “lions of the Holy War,” meaning Muslim Spain’s ongoing defense against the Reconquista.
Watch a video about the Alhambra, Generalife, and Albayzín, Granada, on myartslab.com
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 145
Benedict recommended a humble diet of bread and vegetables. Meat was permitted only in the infirmary, reason enough for a monk to suffer occasional illness. Monks were not supposed to drink wine. However, “since nowadays monks cannot be persuaded of this,” Benedict advised that no more than half a pint a day should be allowed. Abbots were warned to see “that neither surfeit nor drunkenness result.”
A monk’s waking hours were punctuated by the offices, hours of prayer that were sounded by a bell. Prayer began with the night office at 2 a.m., followed by Lauds at dawn, and four more offices throughout the day. Twilight brought Vespers. The day’s last office, called Compline, was spoken after the evening meal. Monks would also chant psalms and listen to readings from sacred books and the lives of the saints. When followed rigorously, this routine assured a monk’s focus on the life of the spirit.
The Plan of St. Gall A monastery’s inwardness and self-containment were reflected in its architectural organization as illustrated in the plan of St. Gall, an ideal plan for building a great abbey of the Carolingian age. Although St. Gall in Switzerland was not built exactly to this design, the plan served as a model for other abbeys built in the prosperous regions of Carolingian Europe (Fig. 6.13).
The plan centered on a great church, which had an apse at each end and a pair of towers on the west. The nave was 300 ft (91 m) long and divided into chapels, since there was no need for space for a large
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6.13 Plan of the monastery of St. Gall, Switzerland, c. 820. This influential but idealized plan was probably more compact and coherent than any actual monastery of the early Middle Ages. The focus of monastic life was in the church, a place of constant prayer and worship, and in the adjacent cloister.
6.14 The cloister of St. Domingo de Silos, Spain, c. 1085–1100. The cloister was both functional and symbolic: It provided a sheltered passageway and gathering place for monks or nuns, while symbolically shutting out the world’s temptations and directing the community’s attentions inward.
View a web resource on the plan of St. Gall on myartslab.com
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G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
By the ninth century, large monasteries were feudal estates in their own right, holding lands that extended far beyond their walls. The monastic standard of living rose accordingly. The plan of St. Gall included a large infir- mary, ample lodging for guests, and, despite Benedict’s injunctions against meat-eating, a piggery. Quarters were provided for the servants and artisans who per- formed menial tasks or labored in workshops. Monks
congregation. To perform their offices, monks often entered the church from their dormitory, attached directly to the transept. The cloister (Fig. 6.14) was an arched walkway opening onto a courtyard, which might serve as a classroom for instruction in music or theology or a gathering place for readings.
Christian religious belief was a powerful motivation and jus- tification for warmaking in feudal Europe. Charlemagne’s conquests wrested territory from the heathen Saxons and Magyars, and so were a triumph for Christian faith. In Central America, the Maya people engaged in war to cap- ture enemy soldiers for ritual sacrifice.
For the Maya of the Classic Period (300–900), humans were duty-bound to shed their own blood as sustenance for the gods. The Mesoamerican creation myths told how gods had sacrificed their own blood to create the universe. Humans must shed blood in return, if the gods were to grant a fertile earth and wombs.
The principal Maya centers were independent city- states, ruled by royal dynasties, and they were spread across the Yucatán peninsula (present-day Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras). At the height of the Classic Period, there were a dozen Maya cities with populations as large as 40,000. Architecturally, the Maya centers fea- tured stepped pyramid-temples (probably modeled on Teotihuacán’s; see page 127), as well as palaces with vaulted rooms, and ball courts where sacrificial rites took place. The remains of their civilization reveal achievements in astronomy, mathematics, and calendar-making.
Maya blood sacrifice was not only a reason for war, but also the occasion for religious spectacle, monumental build- ing, and art. Carved and painted murals on Maya buildings record the religious ceremonies in which royalty shed their
own blood or priests offered the hearts of war victims, placed on public altars. At the city of Yaxchilán [yax-chi-LAN], a master sculptor depicted a king and queen in elaborate cos- tume, engaging in a blood-letting ritual that was a royal duty to the gods (Fig. 6.15). The royal blood was usually shed by piercing the tongue, earlobe, or penis. Numbed by intoxi- cants and loss of blood, the participants often experienced intense religious visions. Painted murals at other sites record the torture and sacrifice of the hearts of captive warriors.
Like Teotihuacán, the Maya centers of the Classic Period suffered a mysterious decline, perhaps attributable to environmental devastation. By 900, the time of the Viking invasions in Europe, nearly all the Maya cities lay in ruins.
6.15 Maya blood-letting rite, lintel 24 from Yaxchilán, Mexico, c. 725. Limestone, 43 1⁄4 × 32 ins (110 × 81 cm). British Museum, London. A Maya king holds a torch over his kneeling queen, who draws a rope strung with thorns through her tongue in a ritual blood- letting. The blood-soaked paper in the basket below will be burned to sustain the gods. Note the intricate textures of the royal garments and the compositional effect of the ceremonial torch.
The Blood of Maya Kings
View the Closer Look at lintel 24, Yaxchilán, on myartslab.com
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 147
as Terence had. Hrotsvit’s women were models of Christian virtue:
Therefore I, the Strong Voice of Gandersheim, have not
found it objectionable to imitate him in composition,
whom others study in reading, so that in that very same
form of composition through which the shameless acts of
lascivious women were depicted, the laudable chastity of
sacred virgins may be praised within the limits of my little
talent.4
Not only was Hrotsvit the earliest significant medieval dramatist; in addition, her works run counter to the gen- erally negative view of women in medieval Christianity.
The Romanesque Style Beginning about 900, a new line of rulers took power in Germany, reviving imperial traditions and found- ing impressive new churches. In the same period, an influential monastic order, centered at Cluny in France, sponsored reforms in Western monasticism. Inspired by the cult of saints and the Virgin Mary, pious Christians undertook pilgrimages to Europe’s shrines, further stimulating new church construction. As one commen- tator remarked, it was as if Christendom were newly clothed in “a white mantle of churches,” all in a style we now call the Romanesque.
Imperial Revival and the Romanesque Style In Germany, the title of Holy Roman Emperor was revived by a succession of powerful Saxon rulers, the Ottonians. Beginning with Otto the Great (912–973), the Ottonian emperors actively promoted their claim to the imperial legacy of Charlemagne. Otto the Great held his election as Saxon king in Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, while his grandson, Otto III, made a pilgrimage to Aachen in 1000, opening Charlemagne’s tomb and bowing before the great ruler’s seated corpse. The Saxon rulers restored political order to the German provinces, fought back Slavic invaders, and exerted their authority over the Church. Otto the Great deposed the pope who had crowned him and forced the election of a pontiff friendly to his political aims. The Ottonians became the first of many German rulers to interfere in papal affairs.
Ottonian ambitions also fostered a new style in sacred architecture characterized by massive walls and piers, and rich sculptural and fresco decoration (Fig. 6.16). Historians now call this style Romanesque because it used distinctive elements of Roman architecture, such
themselves worked as cellarers, cantors, and above all, copyists in the scriptorium, where manuscripts were copied and preserved. Monastic scriptoria were the sole producers of books in the early Middle Ages.
Hrotsvit and the Classical Tradition The monastic scribes and scholars who copied the sacred writings of Christianity also copied the writings of clas- sical authors. Although monastic life did not encour- age artistic creativity, the classical tradition sometimes inspired literary imitators. Perhaps the most remarkable was Hrotsvit [(h)rots-VEET] of Gandersheim (active c. 970), a Saxon noblewoman who wrote witty adapta- tions of Roman comedies. Most likely, Hrotsvit’s dra- mas were never performed, and instead were read in the small circle of educated women in the community at the abbey of Gandersheim in Germany. Hrotsvit’s abbey was supported by wealthy Saxon rulers and accepted only daughters of aristocratic families. In the early Middle Ages, such female communities governed themselves and provided virtually the only avenue for women to pursue a scholarly life.
Hrotsvit probably entered the abbey of Gandersheim as a young girl and studied in its library of Greek and Roman authors. A gifted scholar, she began writing Latin verse “in the hope that my little talent given by God should not lie in the dark recesses of the mind and be destroyed by the rust of neglect; hoping, rather, that through the mallet of devotion, my little talent may sound the little tinkling chord of divine praise.”3
Hrotsvit wrote a book of Christian legends in addi- tion to Christianized adaptations of Roman dramas. The plots usually involved chaste Christian women being threatened by lascivious pagans, or harlots whose souls were saved by Christian love. In one play, a chaste wife prays for death rather than submit to a pagan’s adulterous advances. The lustful Roman who intends to violate her dead body is converted at her tomb.
While Hrotsvit consciously imitated the style and plots of the Roman comedian Terence (see page 93), she did not portray women as harlots and temptresses
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT For what reasons might someone your age decide to enter the monastic life? What might be the rewards of poverty and spiritual devotion to a person who has grown up in contemporary society?
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as the rounded arch and barrel vault. Romanesque churches were the first medieval European buildings to rival the buildings of imperial Rome in both size and beauty. The style’s associations with Roman imperial tradition appealed to the Ottonian emperors.
In the Saxon town of Hildesheim, an ambitious bishop named Bernward (a former tutor and cousin to Otto III) built two large Romanesque churches—a cathe- dral and an abbey church. For the Benedictine church of St. Michael’s, Bernward had cast great works of bronze sculpture that evoked the glories of Rome. One was a bronze relief column in the style of Trajan’s Column in Rome, with spiraling scenes of the life of Christ. Another was a set of bronze doors, cast in delicate relief with episodes from the Old and New Testaments (Fig. 6.17).
6.16 Visitation, detail of Catalan fresco, 11th–12th century. Episcopal Museum, Vich, Spain. Romanesque churches, especially in Italy and Spain, were often showcases of fresco decoration. This is a vibrant depiction of the Virgin Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, as described in Luke 1:39–45.
Seine R.
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Jerusalem
Constantinople
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Map 6.1 Europe in the Romanesque period. Europe was divided into small political and economic entities united by powerful families.
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 149
6.17 Bronze doors, with scenes from the Old and New Testaments, c. 1015. Hildesheim Cathedral, Germany. This Romanesque-style sculpture shows a typical interest in fluid lines and emotional expressiveness. The scenes are paired to create thematic parallels from the Old and New Testaments: the presentation of Eve to Adam (second from top, left) is matched with the angel announcing Christ’s resurrection to the women at the tomb.
The Fall
Temptation and Fall of Adam
and Eve
Accusation and Judgment of
Adam and Eve
Life in the World
Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise
Adam and Eve Laboring
Eve’s Children
Offerings by Cain (grain) and Abel (lamb)
Cain Murders Abel
Mary’s Child
Nativity
Annunciation
Infancy of Jesus
Presentation of Jesus in the Temple
Adoration of the Magi
The Passion
Crucifixion
Judgment of Jesus by Pilate
Promise of Return to Paradise
Noli me tangere (Touch me not)
Three Marys at the Tomb
Life in Paradise
Formation of Eve
Eve presented to Adam
third church
second church main gate
abbot’s residence
stables and guest house
monks’ cloister kitchen
monks’ refectory
novices’ dormitory
novices’ cloister
monks’ dormitory
latrines
infirmaries
cemetery and chapel
The simplicity of design in these panels emphasizes the human feeling of the actors: scenes of the anguish of humans’ first sin are paralleled with the joys of Christ’s birth and triumphant resurrection.
The Romanesque Church: Monks and Pilgrims The Ottonians’ imperial reach was rivaled in the monas- tic world by the abbey of Cluny, a Benedictine order founded in 910 in Burgundy, France. The Cluniacs initiated monastic reforms and led a monastic resur- gence that helped stabilize medieval European society. Exempted from the control of local bishops and nobles, Cluny built a federated network of some 1,500 monas- tic houses throughout Western Europe.
As kings and nobles richly endowed the Cluniac monasteries, the order spent its wealth building fine churches, especially in France. The Romanesque style’s vaulted naves offered an arena for the Cluniacs’ grand processions and an auditorium for their great choirs. To match the showy Ottonians, Cluniacs modeled their church façades after imperial Roman theaters. At Cluny itself, the abbey church was rebuilt twice in less than two centuries. The final church, now known as Cluny III, was the largest building in Europe and the center- piece of a monastic “new Jerusalem” (Fig. 6.18). Its massive stone construction and decoration consciously mimicked the buildings of classical antiquity. The vaults
6.18 Reconstruction of the Romanesque monastery and third Abbey Church of Cluny, France, c. 1157. The powerful abbey of Cluny in southeast France built a succession of three great abbey churches, at a cost that nearly bankrupted the order. The last one, Cluny III, was immense, with a double transept and chapels clustered around the nave and transept arms.
6.19 Nave, third Abbey Church of Cluny, France, 1095–1100. Reconstruction drawing by Kenneth J. Conant. The cavernous nave, with its austere rhythm of ribbed vaulting, provided a dramatic setting for Cluniac chants and processions. The decorative Corinthian capitals and fluted pilasters are frank imitations of ancient Roman architecture.
150 Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
Read an early description of the monastery at Cluny on myartslab.com
monks’ dormitory
novices’ dormitory
novices’ cloister
monks’ refectory
kitchen monks’ cloister
stables and guest house
abbot’s residence
main gate second church
third church
cemetery and chapel
infirmaries
latrines
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 151
of the central nave (Fig. 6.19) reached 98 feet (30 m) above the floor. About Cluny III, a seventeenth-century admirer wrote, “If you see its majesty a hundred times, you are overwhelmed on each occasion.”
For Ottonian rulers and Cluniac abbots, the Romanesque expressed grand political and religious designs. But the style also responded to popular feeling, especially the upsurge in pilgrimage (see Key Concept, page 153). Along the four great “roads” to Santiago de Compostela, churches were built to house sacred relics and accommodate the thousands drawn to venerate them.
The abbey church of Sainte-Foy in Conques [kohnk], southwest France, defined the type of these pilgrimage churches (Fig. 6.20). Conques’s main attraction was the relics of “Saint Faith” (see Fig. 6.23), a fourth-century teenage martyr, stolen about 880 from a rival monas- tery. By the early twelfth century, a new church was built: its barrel-vaulted nave had an upper-story gallery that allowed light into the interior. Curving around the apse was a broad ambulatory, or walkway, punctuated by radiating chapels (Fig. 6.21). Circulating through the vaulted ambulatory, crowds of pilgrims could pray and leave offerings before the relics. This configuration of apse, ambulatory, and chapels—called the chevet [sheh-VAY]—enabled a dual use: pilgrims could vener- ate the relics while the monastic community performed
6.20 Abbey church of Sainte-Foy, Conques, France, completed 1120. The Romanesque church at Conques was relatively compact, owing in part to the steep site. It was one of the earliest pilgrimage churches to have stone-vaulted ceilings, a great protection against fire hazard.
6.21 Abbey church of Sainte-Foy, plan. On the exterior, the radiating shapes of apse, ambulatory, and chapels created a pleasing cascade of rounded shapes. Compare the chevet of Cluny III, Fig. 6.18.
View the web resource on the Abbey church of Sainte-Foy on myartslab.com
infirmaries
sanctuary
transeptcrossingtransept
chapels
apse
c h
o ir
n a v e
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their liturgical duties. The chevet was employed in larger pilgrimage churches later built at Toulouse and Compostela.
Romanesque Sculpture While the churches of Charlemagne’s era were usu- ally decorated with painting, the Romanesque style increasingly preferred relief sculpture, in the fashion of ancient Rome. However, the Romanesque visual style was inspired more by the fantastic shapes of Hiberno- Saxon art (see Fig. 6.2) than by Roman classicism. Romanesque sculptors appealed to the believer’s imagi- nation with vivid storytelling and an inventive visual style. Mystical events and grotesque beasts adorned the passages through which pilgrims walked, no doubt craning their necks at these wonders.
The main portal of a Romanesque church bore its principal exterior sculpture. A portal’s sculptural theme was established by the tympanum, the large semicir- cular space above the door. At Autun [OH-tan(h)], in Burgundy, one tympanum bore a great scene of the Last Judgment, carved by a master sculptor named Gislebertus [GEEZ-luh-BAIR-tus] (see Fig. 6.1). As Gislebertus’s Christ judges the blessed and the damned, horrible demons try to tip the scale that weighs a soul. On the beam beneath the tympanum, called the lintel, Gislebertus shows the hands of God grasping a scream- ing sinner. Such vivid depictions instructed illiterate churchgoers in the horrors awaiting the unrepentant at the Last Judgment.
While Gislebertus worked at Autun, anonymous artisans were decorating the sumptuous pilgrimage church of La Madeleine at nearby Vézelay [vay-zuh- LAY], reliquary of the bones of St. Mary Magdalene. The tympanum at Vézelay (Fig. 6.22) shows Christ conferring his saving power to the apostles, the eventual founders of the Christian Church. Christ’s otherworld- liness is emphasized by the sculpture’s low relief and by the almond-shaped symbol of eternity that encloses him. The apostles are ranged on either side of Christ in the order of their significance. Across the lintel below, citizens and creatures of the world’s different regions are sculpted in high relief. In the archivolts, the deco- rative moldings that frame the arch, emblems of the
6.22 Narthex door, Church of La Madeleine, Vézelay, France, c. 1120–32. Note how the Romanesque style entirely surrounded the church’s entrance with sculpted images. The coordinated scenes of tympanum, lintel, and archivolts here depict aspects of a single Christian theme or story.
6.24 Mystic Mill: Moses and St. Paul Grinding Corn, nave capital sculpture, Church of La Madeleine, Vézelay, France, c. 1130. In this column capital, the Romanesque sculptors showed a plastic, sometimes grotesque sense of the human form. Observe how the curling lines of St. Paul’s hair and beard (right) merge with the abstract lines of his garment.
Watch an architectural simulation of a Romanesque portal on myartslab.com
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 153
K E Y C O N C E P T
the available space, without regard for naturalism or classical proportion. In the Mystic Mill, Moses pours grain (symbolizing the old law of the Hebrews) into a grinder, while below him, Paul bags the ground meal (representing the new law of the Gospels). Paul’s con- torted body follows the curvature of the capital, and the background foliage contributes to the fantastic effect (Fig. 6.24). The scene is characteristic of Romanesque
seasons and the astrological zodiac represent the uni- verse of time and space over which Christ has domin- ion. Spaces for life-size sculpture were provided by the post between the doors, called a trumeau [troo-MOH], and by pedestals on the door jambs.
In the interior at Vézelay, sculptural decoration is limited to the capitals of columns, as was typical of the Romanesque style. Sculptors molded their scenes to fit
Pilgrimage By the year 1000, secure from feudal war and invasion, Europe experienced a new enthusi- asm for pilgrimage—the journey to a saint’s shrine or other sacred place. In summer, with the planting done, Europeans of all classes set out for the shrines of the saints and the Virgin Mary. Their principal destination was Santiago de Compostela, the shrine of St. James located in northwest Spain, a safer journey than the way to Rome or Jerusalem. Guidebooks instructed the pilgrim in proper dress and equipment (a tunic, staff, and leather purse), warned of dangers, and related the miraculous pow- ers of relics. Pilgrims wore badges, such as the palm of Jericho or the cockleshell of St. James, as tokens of their quests.
Medieval Christian pilgrimage was rooted in the cult of saints, the pious ven- eration of the Christian saints and their relics. From Christianity’s beginnings, the faithful believed that saints could heal sickness, perform miracles, and intercede for a soul at the Last Judgment. A pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine earned the believer the right to appeal for assis- tance. A pilgrimage could also serve as penance for a sin or crime. The greatest cult was the Virgin Mary’s, the Queen of Heaven and powerful advocate of repentant sinners. Popular belief in the Virgin’s miraculous powers still draws Christian pilgrims to sites such as Lourdes (in France) and Guadalupe (in Mexico).
Pilgrimage aroused a lively commerce and sometimes bitter competition in relics—saints’ bones, slivers of the cross, vials of Christ’s blood, and other sacred objects. An important relic brought prestige and income to an abbey or town. After repeated attempts, for example, the Benedictine monks at Conques stole the bones of Sainte-Foy (Fig. 6.23)
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Where would you journey if you wished to change your life? What insights would you hope to attain through this journey? Would it be necessary to leave your everyday surroundings to have these insights? If so, why?
from a rival abbey. Instantly, their church became a beacon to pilgrims. When European Crusaders sacked
Constantinople in 1204, they plun- dered the Byzantine emperor’s sub- stantial collection of relics, including a crown of thorns supposedly worn by Jesus at the crucifixion.
The journey to a sacred shrine is an important motive in many of the world’s religions. Muslim pilgrims on the hajj flood to Mecca annually by the millions. Hindus traditionally journey to the banks of the Ganges or other sacred waters of the faith. The site of the Buddha’s enlightenment at Bodh Gaya in India is the first among Buddhism’s chief pilgrimage destina- tions. In all these religions, a pilgrim- age brings believers in contact with the sacred.
6.23 Reliquary statue of Sainte-Foy, Conques, France, late 10th century. Gold and gemstones over a wooden core, height 33 1⁄2 ins (85 cm). This spectacular figure reliquary, a container in the shape of the saint’s body, was displayed in a great assembly of such figure reliquaries in 994.
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very long melodies—repeatedly entrusted to memory— escaped from my poor little head, I began to reason with myself how I could bind them fast.” The solution was to add words to the melisma as an aid to memory. These devices were called tropes, musical additions to the tra- ditional Gregorian chant. The most important tropes were set to words, usually a biblical phrase.
A proliferation of musical tropes eventually compli- cated the problems of musical instruction. Monastic cantors and choristers had to learn chants for all the Church seasons, plus melismatic variations and tropes, plus a body of psalms and occasional music. With so much to memorize, it was no wonder that monastic schools devoted so much time to musical education (Fig. 6.25).
Medieval musical theorists responded to this chal- lenge with new systems of musical notation. Since most monks and nuns were trained to read, it was natural for them to learn a system for reading music. The most important steps in musical notation are credited to a Benedictine monk named Guido of Arezzo [GWEE- doh of ah-RETZ-oh] (c. 991–c. 1033), who devised a
sculpture, where symbolic meaning prevails over natu- ralistic appearance.
The rich display of Romanesque religious art and architecture alarmed some observers. The French theo- logian St. Bernard of Clairvaux [clair-VOH] complained especially of lavishly decorated monastic churches. “O vanity of vanities,” wrote Bernard. “The church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor; she clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked; the rich man’s eye is fed at the expense of the indigent.”5
Early Medieval Music and Drama The great Romanesque churches provided an awe- inspiring setting for the Catholic Mass, a spectacular combination of music and ceremony. For illiterate peas- ants and pilgrims, sacred music gave regular form to the annual cycle of the Christian liturgy. The evolution of medieval music was determined by slow innovation marked by the need for a system of musical notation. At the same time, medieval drama evolved from the sea- sonal rituals to be found in the Mass.
Musical Notation The most widespread medieval Church music was based on the flowing lines of Gregorian plainchant that had been codified under Charlemagne. The traditional Gregorian chants hardly changed in the early Middle Ages. The music was taught and performed in mon- asteries, themselves conservative institutions, and the chants were taught through oral instruction. The range of early medieval music was limited by the memories of medieval choristers. The first cautious innovations came as singers added short chains of notes, called melismas, to syllables of key words in the text. Thus, a six-note melisma might be sung on the last syllable of “Alleluia.” Melismatic chant, as it was called, gave a modest flourish to the basic Gregorian chant.
By the ninth century, though, the body of sacred music was outgrowing the limits of oral instruction. As one monk wrote from St. Gall, “When I was still young, and
6.25 Nuns in Choir, illustration from Cotton Domitian A XVII, fol. 177v. British Library, London. Like monks, nuns received an intensive musical education so that they could perform the offices of the Church. Though most female composers remained anonymous, the abbess Hildegard of Bingen earned wide fame for her musical compositions and mystical writings.
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 155
Hildegard of Bingen: Musical Mystic European monasticism produced its share of geniuses— musicians, scholars, spiritual leaders—but few are more intriguing than Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), a German abbess who composed a considerable body of mystical poetry and music. In 1151, Hildegard led a secession of nuns (with their dowries) from their male- governed abbey and founded a new, independent con- vent at Bingen. The abbess’s correspondents included the Holy Roman Emperor and fellow mystics Bernard of Clairvaux and Elizabeth of Schöngau [SHE(R)N-gow].
Hildegard’s imaginative works included a moral- ity play set to music (in effect, a medieval opera) and a grand mystical vision entitled De operatione Dei (The Book of Divine Works). The Book laid out an elaborate cosmology that was revealed to Hildegard in painful, ecstatic visions that seized her for seven years, beginning
six-note scale and an ingenious memory device called solmization. Solmization associated each tone with the first syllable of a familiar hymn. The musical scale that was sung on the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la, was written above the words of the musical text.
Guido’s most important invention was the musical staff, in which each line and space represented a tone in the scale. A key letter, or clef, indicated the tone for one line and hence for all the staff’s lines and spaces. In the Middle Ages, the customary clefs were F or C, often drawn in red. Since most chants in medieval times required a range of only eight or nine notes, Guido’s single four-line staff (Fig. 6.26) was sufficient. (The modern staff, Fig. 6.27, adds a fifth line.) Guido’s fame was such that the pope invited him in 1028 to instruct the Vatican choir in his methods.
Despite Guido’s renown, the early centers of musical innovation were located outside Italy, especially at the abbeys of St. Gall in Switzerland and Cluny in France. The monasteries that had long guarded Christian civi- lization through writing were now able to preserve Christianity’s music through written musical notation. Thus, we know far more about medieval sacred music than we do about the secular musical tradition, which at this time was still largely unwritten.
6.26 The Guidonian staff. The four-line staff attributed to Guido allowed composers to represent precisely musical tones and intervals.
6.27 The modern staff. Adapted from medieval notation, the modern staff accommodates a wider range of tones. The sign for treble (higher-pitched) clef, shown here, is adapted from “G” in medieval script, the bass (lower-pitched) clef from “F.”
6.28 Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias, plate 1: the Seeress. Abbey of St. Hildegard, Rüdesheim am Rhein, Germany. Hildegard’s literary and musical achievements drew talented women from all over Germany to her convent. The abbess is shown receiving her first vision, while a monastic scribe records her testimony.
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According to the St. Gall script, monks were cos- tumed to represent the three women and the angel, and the church altar stood for the empty sepulcher. With this rudimentary mime, theater first appeared in the medieval church as part of the ritual drama of the Catholic Mass. Like melismas and tropes, the early music-dramas served to embellish the conservative core of medieval liturgy.
In the next three centuries, such music-dramas evolved and expanded into longer plays. By the twelfth century, medieval playwrights had created a repertory of about 15 standard sacred plays. These included renditions of the Three Wise Men, Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents, and the Raising of Lazarus. Written by choirmasters and performed in musical Latin, the plays were usually brief. Still, clerical playwrights developed characters and action that appealed to church audiences (Fig. 6.29). The popular Play of Herod featured rowdy swordplay and the histrionic ranting of King Herod the Great, frustrated in his search for the Christ Child. Centuries later, Shakespeare’s Hamlet would warn his actors not to “out-Herod Herod” in overplaying their scene.
in 1163 (Fig. 6.28). Hildegard’s insights arrived as pow- erful yet not quite rational images—for example, the world conceived as an egg surrounded by luminous fire.
Hildegard’s musical works were no less vivid. Her compositions employed the standard Church modes, eight scales of notes that were loosely associated with classical Greek sources. Poetically, Hildegard’s songs were rich in mythic associations. In one hymn to the Virgin Mary, she describes the mother of Jesus in imag- ery suggesting the Greek deity Demeter, goddess of the earth’s fertility:
Hail to you, O greenest, most fertile branch!
You budded forth amidst breezes and winds
In search of the knowledge of all that is holy.
When the time was ripe
Your own branch brought forth blossoms. …6
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
Hildegard’s most famous hymn, O Ecclesia, was sung in praise of St. Ursula, a fifth-century saint who refused marriage in the name of her faith and then perished with 11,000 other women at the hands of unbelievers. Like the Virgin Mary, Ursula embodied a woman’s devotion to God, to whom she cries in Hildegard’s hymn, “I have desired to come to you, and to sit with you in the heav- enly nuptials.” Members of Hildegard’s convent would have sung this hymn on the saint’s day at the office of Lauds, the hour reserved for singing psalms.
Drama in the Medieval Church Medieval Europeans thought music was the highest expression of human devotion to God. Little wonder then that medieval music was also the vehicle for the rebirth of European theater, largely dormant since late Roman times. In fact, the first known medieval dramas were sce- narios dramatizing Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection.
Monastic records show that sometime during the tenth century, the monks of St. Gall acted out the dialogue of an Easter text. The text, entitled in Latin Quem queritis (“Whom do you seek?”), dramatized the scene in which three women came to dress Christ’s crucified body. The angel who guards Christ’s empty tomb speaks to them:
1st Voice: Whom do you seek in the sepulcher?
2nd Voice: Jesus of Nazareth.
1st Voice: He is not here; he is risen as foretold when it
was prophesied that he would rise from the
dead.
2nd Voice: Alleluia! The Lord is risen!
All Voices: Come and see the place.
6.29 Nativity, c. 1130–40. Ivory panel, 15 3⁄4 × 4 5⁄8 ins (40 × 12 cm). Schnütgen Museum, Cologne. Scenes from the Gospel of Luke’s birth narrative provided popular plots for medieval sacred drama. The shepherds were commonly portrayed as clownish bumpkins, who respond in ignorant astonishment to the angel’s announcement of Christ’s birth.
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K E Y C O N C E P T
costume might well have been a man, music-dramas were performed in both convents and abbeys.
Church drama eventually developed a theatri- cal vigor that overshadowed the solemn rites it was intended to represent. Church officials were unhappy with the “worldliness” brought into the sanctuary by the plays. By the early thirteenth century, for reasons not entirely known, theater productions were moved outside of churches into the town, although the Church remained an important sponsor of theater into the late Middle Ages.
The venue for these playlets was the church itself. Scenes were either staged on elevated platforms in the choir, with players moving from one scene to another, or sets were placed around the church in doorways, arches, or bays, with the audience following from one scene to the next. Costumes were at first just the regular vestments appropriate to the Church season. In time, however, the plays required more elaborate costum- ing: the Play of Daniel called for lion costumes and the Raising of Lazarus dictated that Mary Magdalene don the “habit of a whore.” While the actor wearing this
Mysticism The religion of the everyday—prayer, sacrifice, ritual, or the reading of sacred texts—defines the routine activity through which most believers are content to know God. But, in nearly every faith, some believers have sought a more immediate and complete experience of the transcendent. Mysticism is the name for this pursuit of direct contact with an ultimately unknowable and mysterious divine pres- ence. The name derives from mysterion, the Greek word for the secret knowledge revealed to initiates when they were admitted to a mystery cult. The practices of mysticism— the search for secret knowledge—are nearly as various as they are universal across the world’s religious traditions.
Mystical thinking appeared early in Christian belief, which is so fraught with paradoxes of faith. The Pseudo- Dionysius, a sixth-century Eastern writer, wrote of God as “a darkness clearer than light.” Dionysius counseled that by rejecting all names and properties that might describe God, believers could press through to an illumination beyond the darkness of un-knowing. “By the ceaseless and limitless going out of yourself and out of all things else you will be led in utter pureness rejecting all and released from all, aloft to the flashing forth, beyond all being, of the divine dark,” he advised in the treatise Mystical Theology.7
Typically, Christian mystics taught a stepwise discipline of ascetic denial and contemplation that would lead to mys- tical illumination. “I have discovered that the place where you are found unveiled is girded about with the coincidence of contradictories,” wrote Nicholas of Cusa, a German mys- tic, describing the “wall of paradise that bounded God’s mystery.”8 But others, such as Hildegard of Bingen, experi- enced their mystical insight through visionary experience. “And it came to pass,” wrote Hildegard, “that the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole
CRITICAL QUESTION What aspects of reality or experience still remain beyond human understanding? What limits the human capacity to know such mysteries? How do humans still seek to overcome these limits and know hidden truth?
heart and breast like a flame not burning but warming … and suddenly I understood the meaning of the exposition of the books….”9 Hildegard illustrated her visionary work Scivias with paintings of her visions of the transcendent realm.
Mystics often tested the boundaries of orthodox belief, and not only in the Christian tradition. A lively mystical tradition called Sufism arose in Islam’s first centuries, but its practitioners often ran foul of official orthodoxy. During a mystical transport, the ninth-century Persian mystic al-Hallaj cried out, “I am divine Truth”—and was promptly executed for heresy. The German medieval scholar Master Eckhart (c. 1260–1327) declared in a sermon that: “a holy soul is one with God. Go completely out of yourself for God’s love, and God comes completely out of himself for love of you. What remains there is a simplified One.”10 Eckhart’s descriptions of his soul’s union with God earned him a charge of heresy. He died while awaiting a church trial.
With its religious paradoxes and ascetic monks, the Christian Middle Ages offered fertile ground for mystical experience. But even in the scientific rationalist culture of the contemporary age, the desire for secret truths and con- tact with an ultimate reality remains unquenched.
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original of the Arabic-language philosophers was Ibn- Sina [EE-bunn SEE-nuh] (980–1037), known in Latin as Avicenna [ah-vuh-CHENN-uh]. Ibn-Sina claimed to have read Aristotle’s Metaphysics 40 times before he finally understood it. He also compiled an immense encyclopedia of medical knowledge that was widely used by European physicians. The greatest philosopher of Muslim Spain was Ibn-Rushd (1126–1198), known in Latin as Averroës [ah-VER-roh-us], whose com- mentary offered the definitive medieval interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy. Ibn-Rushd’s attempts to rec- oncile Muslim faith with Aristotle’s natural philosophy were not always welcome. Muslim clerics once incited a mob to attack him, and his philosophical writings were burned by an intolerant caliph. The conflict of reason and faith also engaged the scholar Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), a Sephardic Jew who wrote his Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic. Maimonides’s [may-MAHN-i- deez] Guide offered advice for regaining one’s lost faith in God through the use of reason. Maimonides also wrote extensive commentaries in Hebrew on the Torah, including the “Ladder of Charity” still applicable to philanthropy today. Maimonides counseled the faithful that the lowest level of charity was to give grudgingly. The highest was to help the needy before they became impoverished, by offering them a loan or employment.
The philosophical atmosphere spawned renewed interest in dialectic and disputation. Schoolmasters adopted a method called the questio that subjected a traditional commentary to spirited debate. The questio produced more comprehensive summations of medieval philosophy, but disturbed the traditionalists, who com- plained about the schoolmasters that, “as if the works of the holy Fathers are not enough, they dispute publicly against the sacred canons concerning the incomprehen- sible Deity; they divide and rend the indivisible Trinity; and there are as many errors as there are masters.”
In the Muslim world, philosophy always remained at some distance from religious authority. In medi- eval Christian Europe, the grip of Church teaching on philosophy began to loosen. Cathedral schools in the towns came to rival the monasteries as centers of learn- ing. Christian philosophers also benefited from new translations of Aristotle’s writings and Arabic commen- taries, produced by important schools of translation in southern Europe (Fig. 6.30).
Abelard The most famous schoolmaster was Peter Abelard (1079–1142), a pivotal figure in medieval philosophy.
The Medieval Philosopher Like theater and music, early medieval philosophy was cultivated in the monastery—the center of medieval learning. Christian philosophers chiefly addressed phil- osophical problems encountered within Christianity. The translation of Arabic philosophers and the writings of Aristotle stimulated more skeptical and contentious attitudes, especially in the cathedral schools. A pivotal figure in this change was Peter Abelard [AB-eh-lard], famous for his passion as well as his philosophy.
Early Medieval Philosophy One of the period’s most original thinkers was John the Scot, called Erigena (active mid-ninth century), who migrated from Ireland to the Frankish court of Charlemagne’s grandson in 851. Erigena knew Greek, a rarity in medieval Europe, and his Christian philosophy reflected as well his reading of Neoplatonist treatises (see page 114). In his most famous work, On Nature, Erigena described four great categories of being. The first was God the creator, the second contained the Platonic Ideas that bore God’s creative design, and the third was the material world, made in the shape of the Ideas. Human nature spanned the second and third, since the human soul was cloaked in a body but took part in the heavenly realm of ideas. Erigena’s fourth category of being was God (again) as the final end of creation, toward which all things must return at the end of time. Though he quoted the Bible profusely, Erigena’s philosophy was more a Neoplatonist pan- theism—the belief that God exists in all things—than orthodox Christianity. Eventually the Church banned its teaching.
A far more orthodox thinker was St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), author of a famous onto- logical proof of the existence of God (that is, a proof from the nature of being). Anselm argued that it was impossible to imagine God as “that than which noth- ing greater can be conceived” and then to deny that this greatest being truly exists. Logically and therefore in fact, God’s nature requires that God exists. Anselm’s views reflected his career in the Church as Benedictine monk, abbot, and finally archbishop. For him, faith in Christian teaching was the starting point, not the result, of philosophical speculation. Anselm’s motto was credo ut intelligam—“I believe in order to understand.”
In the Arabic world, philosophers were able to read classical Greek texts, especially Aristotle, a great advantage over a thinker like Anselm. The most
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 159
Abelard was trained at the cathedral schools of several French cities and taught at several others, always quar- reling with intellectual authorities. He established him- self by writing commentaries on Aristotle’s logic and dialectic.
Part of Abelard’s fame, however, rests on an incident that had little to do with philosophy. While teaching in Paris in 1119, he began a love affair with Héloïse [ay-loh-EEZ], a young pupil of exceptional intelligence and education (Fig. 6.31). Abelard’s autobiography, A History of My Calamities, recounts their ill-fated love. “Under the pretext of study,” Abelard wrote of his les- sons with Héloïse, “we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret oppor- tunities that our passion craved.” Their union ended when Abelard was assaulted and castrated by friends of Héloïse’s powerful uncle. The lovers both withdrew to a monastic life, and later exchanged passionate, some- times bitter love letters. Their correspondence reveals that Héloïse was the philosopher’s match in strength of will and intellectual honesty. As he wrote to her, “For you, although you are a woman, are one of those crea- tures whom the prophet Ezekiel saw, who should not only burn like coals of fire, but should glow and shine like lamps.”11
Aside from this famous romance, Abelard was a thinker of originality and courage. Above all, Abelard used his dialectical method to examine important points of Church doctrine. His best-known work was Sic et Non (For and Against), which posed theological questions and then quoted conflicting Church authori- ties. The effect was to expose inconsistencies in Church teachings. In the manner of a schoolmaster, Abelard examined the articles of Christian faith as one might
6.30 Medieval scholars studying in Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic at a school in Sicily. Italian, c. 1200. Bürgerbibliothek Bern, Codex 120 II, f. 101r. Schools in Sicily, Italy, and Spain were vital in the transmission of Arabic and Hebrew scholarship to Christian Europe. Latin versions of Aristotle’s writings were often based on Arabic translations, not on the original Greek, and depended on the collaboration of scholars from different faiths.
6.31 Abelard Teaching Héloïse, manuscript illumination from the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, 13th century. Musée Condé, Chantilly. The love affair of this medieval teacher and his pupil inspired the medieval literary imagination. An account of their affair is included in the Roman de la Rose, a hugely popular erotic allegory.
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mark this period as beginning the “high” Middle Ages, roughly 1100–1300.
Ironically, this waxing spirit led to medieval Europe’s bloodiest and most controversial moments—the First Crusade. It began in 1095, when Pope Urban II impul- sively called on Christian knights to capture the Holy Land from its Muslim rulers. The pope warned that a new Turkish regime was desecrating Christian shrines and molesting pilgrims to Jerusalem. Although the threat was exaggerated, Europe’s response to Urban’s appeal proved astounding. The call inaugurated the first of the Crusades, wars fought to defend Christians against non-believers or to recover Christian lands. During the following three centuries the Crusades enlisted feudal knights in search of adventure, pilgrims expecting sal- vation, and even an army of children believing their innocence might recover Jerusalem.
In 1099, the First Crusade ended in an orgy of bru- tality when Christian knights slaughtered Jerusalem’s Arabs and Jews. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres was an eyewitness: “On top of Solomon’s Temple,” he wrote, “about ten thousand were beheaded. If you had been there, your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain. What more shall I
a scholar’s disputation. One of the liveliest philo- sophical debates in Abelard’s day was the nominalist controversy. Nominalism denied the existence of “uni- versals,” the Platonic idea of “red,” for example, that denotes all red. According to nominalists, “red” was a name for the resemblance among all red things. The opposite position was realism, which ascribed existence to “redness,” claiming that an object’s properties had an objective existence. Abelard compromised with a position called conceptualism. He described universals as “utterances,” verbal terms or concepts that exist in the mind but not in the real world.
Despite Abelard’s arguments, the realists eventu- ally carried the day. Realism made it easier to claim the actual existence of religious concepts like the Holy Trinity. But Abelard’s brand of conceptualist skepti- cism survives in modern debates around the philosophy of mathematics and science. Abelard’s daring reason- ing earned him frequent condemnation from Church authorities but also the devotion of students who fol- lowed him wherever he wandered. No other medieval master succeeded so brilliantly, strictly by the power of his teaching and writing.
The Medieval Spirit and the First Crusade Peter Abelard’s career illustrates the expansive new spirit in European medieval life around 1100. Church authorities had successfully established a “Truce of God” that limited warring among feudal lords. Advances in agriculture—especially the iron plow and the horse collar—stimulated prosperity and increased population. Towns thrived from greater commerce and the flow of pilgrims to local shrines. Historians
160 6 The Early Middle Ages160 Chapter 6 ANCIENT ROME
300 CE 782–805 Charlemagne’s palace chapel at Aachen, Germany (6.7)
800 Charlemagne crowned emperor by pope
c. 800 Codification of Gregorian chant under Charlemagne
c. 820 Plan of St. Gall (6.13)
820–840 Utrecht Psalter (6.5)
900 Viking invasions in Europe
c. 900 Maya decline
c. 900 Song of Roland
925–1031 Abd-ar-Rahman establishes caliphate, Córdoba, Spain
300–900 Maya Classic Period
480–547 Life of St. Benedict
c. 700 Beowulf
711 Muslim armies invade Iberian peninsula
C H A P T E R 6 : T I M E L I N E
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT If you directed a charitable institution, what directions would you follow for giving to the needy? Explain your motivations for sharing your prosperity and good fortune. On what religious or philosophical rationale would you base these motivations?
800 CE 850 CE 900 CE
Chapter 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 161
The Crusades continued through the high Middle Ages, finding opponents and victims among Christians as well as Muslims. Though fraught with cruelty and folly, the Crusades would also open new paths of com- merce and learning, and help to awaken Europe to the Gothic age.
tell? Not one of them was allowed to live. They did not spare the women and children.”12
Abandoning their lofty ideals, the Crusade’s com- manders promptly divided their conquered territory into feudal estates. Within a century, however, Muslims had regained Jerusalem and subsequent Christian cru- saders were unable to match the bloody victory of 1099.
The Medieval Philosopher 161Chapter 6 ANCIENT ROME 161
950 CE 1000 CE 1050 CE 1100 CE c. 1120–1132 Sculpture of La Madeleine, Vézelay, France (6.24)
1121 Peter Abelard, For and Against
1126–1198 Ibn-Rushd; reconciled Muslim faith with Aristotle’s philosophy
1135–1204 Moses Maimonedes, Sephardic Jew; wrote his Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic
1354–1391 Alhambra, Granada, Spain
c. 970 Dramas of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim
c. 980 Muslim poets thrive in Córdoba, Spain
991–c. 1033 Guido of Arezzo, invention of musical notation
c. 1015 Bronze doors of Hildesheim Cathedral (6.17)
1033–1109 Anselm of Canterbury; argued that God’s nature requires that God exists
1066 Normans conquer England at Battle of Hastings
c. 1073–1088 Bayeux Tapestry (6.11)
1085 School of Toledo founded
1095 First Crusade called by Pope Urban II
1095–1100 Third abbey church at Cluny, France (6.18)
1098–1179 Life of Hildegard of Bingen
CHAPTER REVIEW
The Age of Charlemagne How was classical learning preserved during the early Middle Ages? Describe the characteristics of the Hiberno-Saxon style of decora- tion. What sorts of objects exhibit the Hiberno-Saxon style? What were the Eddas? Who was Beowulf? What were the principal accomplishments of Charlemagne? Describe the cultural influences that Charlemagne con- sciously tried to imitate. What became of Charlemagne’s empire?
Feudal Europe What is a manor, and how did it shape the social system of medieval Europe? What two factors fused to form medieval culture in Europe? In what ways do the epic poem The Song of Roland and the Bayeux Tapestry illustrate the feudal spirit? In what ways did Muslim Spain differ from Christian Europe? What was the Alhambra?
Monasticism What was monasticism, what are its great achievements, and how did it shape medieval life? What vows were required to enter the monastic life? In what ways did monasteries shape intellectual activity? What is a scriptorium? Who was Hrotsvit of Gandersheim?
The Romanesque Style Describe the main features of the Romanesque style of art and architecture. What was the appeal of the Romanesque style to the Ottonian emperors and the Cluniacs’ monastic order? How did the practice of religious pilgrimage affect medieval life? Who was Gislebertus? What is a tympanum?
Early Medieval Music and Drama How did medieval music and drama evolve? Who was Guido of Arezzo? What is mysticism? Who was Hildegard of Bingen?
The Medieval Philosopher What influences combined to cause medieval philosophy to thrive? Describe the theological differences between John the Scot (called Erigena) and Anselm of Canterbury. Who were Peter Abelard and Héloïse? Explain the nominalist contro- versy. What were the Crusades and how did they come about?
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162 7
7.1 Notre-Dame-de-Belle- Verrière (Our Lady of the Beautiful Glass), stained- glass window. Chartres Cathedral, France, 12th century. The Virgin Mary sits on the throne of heaven, the Christ Child in her lap, adored and praised by heaven’s angels. At Chartres, a garment supposedly worn by the Virgin at Christ’s birth attracted pilgrims to the town’s splendid Gothic church.
7The Late Middle Ages K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What social changes in Europe brought about the Gothic awakening? • What characterizes the Gothic style in architecture and art? • In what ways did sacred music and drama change during the Gothic
Age?
• How did scholasticism change the atmosphere of Gothic society? • How did the ideals of courtly love express themselves in medieval
music and literature?
• How do Petrarch and Giotto refl ect the developments of the Late Gothic?
Queen of the skies and regent of the earth
And sovereign empress of the realms of hell,
Receive me, Mary, though of little worth,
Yet heavenward bent, a child of Christian birth.1
With these humble words, a medieval Christian addressed the Virgin Mary, mother
of Christ and Queen of Heaven. Like the earth goddesses of old, the Virgin showered
her blessings upon all who appealed to her mercy: prosperity to the merchant, wis-
dom to the scholar, healing to the sick, forgiveness to the sinner. From the walls and
windows of medieval Europe’s churches, she gazed upon the faithful with a mother’s
kindness (Fig. 7.1).
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164 Chapter 7 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
Under the Virgin’s benevolent reign, it seemed that medieval Europe had awakened from a nightmare of feudal war and ignorance. In this Gothic awaken- ing—the age of the later Middle Ages in Europe (1150– 1400)—towns and kingdoms thrived, grand churches were built across Europe, and a new spirit of learning and beauty suffused the Western world.
The Gothic Awakening In the later Middle Ages, more of Christian Europe roused itself from a traditional life governed by a con- servative Church and the feudal estate. Crusades (Map 7.1) brought contact with the Islamic world and loos- ened the stable hierarchy of feudalism. European soci- ety began to move to the quicker rhythms of its growing
towns and cities. This new current in European life is called the “Gothic awakening” after the artistic style that it stimulated and supported.
The Crusades and the Decline of Feudalism By 1200, the Crusades were having unintended con- sequences for life in Europe. Crusaders (Fig. 7.2) returned to their homelands with Arab and Asian foods and cloths, creating a new demand for these goods and enlarging Europe’s money economy. Italian ports such as Venice and Genoa profited both as departure points for crusading expeditions and as the crossroads for Mediterranean commerce. Contact with Arabic civilization and learning was stimulating an intellectual revolution in Europe’s schools and universities.
Though led by feudal lords, the Crusades eventu- ally undermined feudalism and coincided with bit- ter disputes between the Church and secular leaders. The fiercest disputes concerned Church offices and the
M e d i t e
r r
a n
e a n S e a
B l a c k S e a
N o r t h
S e a
A t l a n t i c O c e a n
R e d
S e a
AQUITANE
LANGUEDOC
LORRAINE
FLANDERS
NORMANDY
ROMAN
CATHOLIC
ORTHODOX
SULTANATE
OF RUM
KINGDOM OF THE FATMIDS
K I N
G D
O M
O F T H E A L M O R A V I D S
Toledo
Paris
Cluny
Genoa
Marseilles Pisa
Rome
Palermo
Tunis
Ratisbon
Venice Lyons
Metz
Iconium
Antioch
Damascus
Acre
Jerusalem
Damietta
Vienna
Durazzo
Valencia
Taranto
Alexandria
Constantinople
Nicaea
Toulouse
Moissac
Le Puy Saint-Gilles- du-Gard
Jaca
Clermont
Santiago de Compostela
León
Burgos
Roncesvalles
Poitiers
Tours
Limoges
Vézelay
Chartres
Santa Domingo de la Calzada
Puente-la-Reina
Seville
Lisbon
Candia
500 km
500 miles
Second Crusade 1147–49
Third Crusade 1189–92
Pilgrimage routes
First Crusade 1096–99
Crusader kingdoms
in East
Muslim areas
Map 7.1 The Crusades. European crusaders’ initial success established feudal kingdoms in the Near East. Although the Crusades ultimately failed in regaining European control of the Holy Land, the campaigns reinforced social changes already under way in Europe.
Chapter 7 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 165
Church’s vast wealth. Feudal nobles wanted to appoint their own bishops and tax Church property within their own territory. Pontiffs sought to regain those powers for Rome. The pope’s greatest weapon against trouble- some interference was excommunication, the power to bar Christians from receiving the Church sacraments, such as marriage, confession, and the Eucharist.
Clashes between Church and crown could be dra- matic and bloody. When Henry II of England (ruled 1154–1189) tried to expand his power, for instance, he quarreled with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. Believing the king wished to be rid of this “trou- blesome priest,” Henry’s followers hacked Becket to death at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral (Fig. 7.3). In another episode, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV (ruled 1084–1105) suffered excommunication twice in disputes over the power to appoint bishops and abbots. During the period called the Great Schism (1378–1417), two popes were at the head of the Christian Church, one resident at Rome and the other at Avignon, in France, each righteously excommunicating his counterpart. The Great Schism represented a low point of papal prestige.
As the power of the popes waned, the power of the kings increased, especially in England, France, and Spain. Monarchs such as Henry II of England and Louis XI of France enlarged their royal power and domains at the expense of feudal lords. Monarchs granted char- ters to cities, offering the cities autonomy from feudal obligations in exchange for the right to tax urban com- merce. Such policies stimulated the cities’ prosperity and enhanced royal might at the nobility’s expense. Requiring heavily armed knights and cannon, war became too expensive for lesser nobles to pursue, and power was increasingly centralized in a single authority.
The Rise of Towns and Cities The Gothic awakening was most dramatic in Europe’s towns and cities. Although small by today’s standards (Paris had a population of about 50,000), the cities of medieval Europe recovered the vitality lost in the Roman Empire’s decline. In contrast to the great cities of antiquity, medieval towns were crude, filthy places. Rats and pigs ran in the narrow streets, and residents
7.2 French knights under Louis XI besieging Damietta, Egypt, Seventh Crusade, 1249. Ms. Fr. 13568 fol. 83. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
7.3 Murder of St. Thomas, 13th-century miniature. Carrow Psalter Ms W.34 f15v. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Ambitious medieval kings often clashed with Church leaders. The independent-minded Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was gruesomely decapitated by King Henry II’s agents as he prayed at the cathedral altar. To atone for the murder, Henry II is said to have worn a hair shirt for the rest of his life.
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spirit of God, the beauty of light was reflected in pre- cious gems and golden reliquaries. Light could even symbolize the mystic incarnation of Christ: God’s holy spirit had passed through Mary’s womb without alter- ing her virgin purity, much as light filtered through a stained-glass window. For Suger, the mysticism of light symbolized the deepest mysteries of medieval Christianity, a belief that is inscribed at his abbey church at Saint-Denis [san(h) duh-NEE], Paris:
The dull mind rises to truth through that which is
material.2
In 1137, Abbot Suger began rebuilding his abbey church. By ingenious technical innovation, he was able to surround his new church choir with walls of colored glass, which seemed like a shimmering miracle of color and light. The abbot connected his architectural inven- tion with the lux nova (new light) of Christ’s coming. He wrote:
For bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright,
And bright is the noble edifice which is pervaded by the
new light.3
Saint-Denis’s walls of translucent glass depended on a subtle combination of three architectural elements: the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, and the flying but- tress. Abbot Suger and his architect (who is unknown) merged these elements in a daring innovation that
enjoyed no facilities comparable to a Roman bath. Yet for the price of this walled squalor, city-dwellers gained important freedoms: urban residents were free from feudal bonds and protected from the rapacious armies of kings and dukes.
The town’s citizens, called burghers (from burg, meaning town or fortress), jealously guarded their lib- erties. Burghers sought guarantees from their sponsors in the form of a charter or constitution, forerunners of today’s national constitutions. In France, the number of chartered cities increased tenfold in a hundred-year span. Such cities were a significant factor in the generation and development of ideas and provided a haven for schools and universities that vied for the age’s most famous scholars. Towns such as Champagne and Chartres held great fairs, where local products could be exchanged for costly goods from Italy or the East. Medieval town- dwellers formed a growing social group known as the middle class, who thrived on a traffic in goods and ideas that neither pope nor king could control.
The Gothic Style Stimulated by the Gothic awakening, the towns and monasteries of northern France and southern England launched a sacred building program that, relative to their size and wealth, has few historical parallels. Within a span of 100 years beginning about 1150, dozens of great churches were begun or remodeled in a daring new style that we now call Gothic. The style was characterized by soaring vertical lines and jewel- like stained-glass windows, a synthesis of stone and glass inspired by the most profound religious feeling. The new churches glorified Notre Dame, or Our Lady the Blessed Virgin, to whom most were dedicated. They also reflected the prestige of the abbot or local bishop who said Mass at the altar. The Gothic building pro- gram reflected not only religious fervor but also the dynamics of power and wealth in the Gothic age.
The Gothic Style and Divine Light The Gothic style in architecture was first realized by Abbot Suger (c. 1085–1151), who rebuilt his church’s choir to emphasize light and luminosity. Abbot Suger [SOO-zhay] subscribed to a medieval belief that God revealed himself through the material world, allow- ing God’s spiritual truth to be understood through the study of material things.
Light—brilliant but immaterial—offered the abbot the perfect analogy to God’s spiritual being. Like the
7.4 Gothic-style construction. The technical basis of the Gothic style was the pointed arch and cross-ribbed vaulting. The rounded arches of the Romanesque style, (a) and (b), were limited in width and height. Vaults of pointed arches (c) could span a wider, rectangular bay, while rising to a uniform height (d).
Read an excerpt from Suger of Saint-Denis’s On the Consecration of the Church of Saint-Denis on myartslab.com
a b
c d
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supported the ceiling’s weight and counteracted its out- ward thrust, permitting the nave walls to be filled with glass instead of masonry and creating the luminous effects of Saint-Denis’s choir.
The Gothic style’s structural elements—the pointed arch, ribbed vaulting, and external buttresses—created a framework of soaring lines that lift the eyes and the spirit. The Gothic ribs and arches were both decorative and functional: they made possible the churches’ daring heights, and also made the churches a visual metaphor for the orderliness of God’s world.
defined the Gothic style in architecture. The Gothic pointed arch replaced the Romanesque style of rounded arches, which were limited by width and height (Fig. 7.4). The ceilings were supported by ribbed vaulting; literally, thin skeletons of stone that were erected first and then filled with a layer of ceiling masonry. In the Romanesque style, the ceiling’s weight was supported by massive piers along the nave. The Gothic architects moved these heavy piers to the exterior, creating stone arms that braced the nave wall called flying buttresses (Fig. 7.5). The system of buttresses and flying buttresses
7.5 Schematic drawing of Chartres Cathedral. The interior design of the Gothic-style church was clearly defined in three sections—nave arcade, triforium gallery, and clerestory window. These sections were unified by the delicate ribs, which rose without interruption from the nave floor to the ceiling vaulting.
Explore the architectural panorama of Chartres Cathedral on myartslab.com
gable
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was one of Christian Europe’s holiest shrines, housing the tunic that believers claimed was worn by the Virgin Mary at Christ’s birth. When the town’s Romanesque cathedral was burned down in 1194, the Virgin’s tunic was rescued from the ruins of the building unharmed. Chartres’s citizens interpreted this miracle as a sign that the Virgin desired a new shrine in her honor. Funds were solicited throughout Europe to rebuild Chartres’s church. The faithful responded so generously that the church’s new Gothic nave was completed in 1220, barely 25 years after reconstruction began.
Chartres’s new floor plan (see Fig. 7.5) maintained the basic form and dimensions of the earlier Romanesque church, which had partly survived the 1194 fire. Gothic architects added broader and more elaborate portals on the north and south porches of the transept. The choir, located behind the altar, was screened off from the nave, which was noisily occupied by merchants and townspeople. The coexistence of secular and sacred activity was typical of medieval cathedrals, and for a while, Chartres’s wine merchants sold their goods within sight of the altar.
The differences between Gothic and Romanesque styles are more dramatic when one stands inside a Gothic cathedral. Looking down the nave, one sees— instead of massive Romanesque stone walls—a har- mony of soaring lines and gem-like luminosity. Like the floor plan, the Gothic church’s vertical design has a three-part division. The nave arcade is formed by weight-bearing piers, whose mass is disguised by verti- cal shafts. Above the arcade are the triforium, an arcade of pointed arches sometimes opening onto a gallery, and the tall clerestory windows. The visible structure of the nave interior represented the beauty and propor- tion of God’s ordered cosmos, a visible manifestation of divine truth. Chartres Cathedral was not the highest or most daring example of the Gothic style. However, its beauty made the splendor and meaning of God’s revela- tion manifest to the human senses.
In earlier Byzantine and Romanesque churches, paintings and mosaic had decorated the masonry walls. The stone walls of the Gothic church were filled instead with stained glass, an art in which Chartres surpassed all its Gothic rivals. Chartres’s windows contained
The Cathedral at Chartres In the century after Suger rebuilt Saint-Denis, Gothic cathedrals arose in the towns around the Île-de-France, the royal domain surrounding Paris. The towns of the Île-de-France competed in building higher and more splendid cathedrals. The contest ended in a construc- tion disaster at Beauvais, where the choir collapsed in 1284. While the new style was soon imitated through- out Europe, its origins were unmistakably French, and it was then called simply the “French style.”
The cathedral at Chartres [SHART-(r)] (Fig. 7.6) surpassed all others in the perfection of its architectural design, stained glass, and sculpture. Located in a rich farming town southwest of Paris, Chartres Cathedral
7.6 West façade, Chartres Cathedral, France, 1194–1240. South spire, c. 1180, height 344 ft (105 m); north spire, 1507– 13, height 377 ft (115 m). The three parts of the exterior façade—portal and two towers— reflect the interior’s relatively narrow nave and its flanking aisles. The original north spire was destroyed by fire and replaced in the late-Gothic “flamboyant” style.
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rose windows were framed in tracery of finely carved stone, assembled in place and then filled with glass. Lancet windows, shaped like pointed arches, filled much of the remaining wall space. In all the windows, the pieces of colored glass were held by thin lead strips and reinforced by iron bars. Chartres’s trade and craft guilds underwrote the cost of many of the cathedral’s windows. Some 43 different trades are represented in “signature” scenes in Chartres’s windows.
The most admired window at Chartres is the Notre- Dame-de-Belle-Verrière [NOHT(r) DAHM duh BELL
22,000 square feet (2,050 m2) of colored glass, filling the interior with a subdued light that symbolized God’s mysteries. The windows represented quite literally the word of God. Each one depicted a biblical story, the life of a saint, or a principle of Church doctrine. A Gothic cathedral’s windows therefore created a visual “Bible of the poor,” instructing the illiterate citizens and pilgrims who worshiped there.
Over each portal stood a rose window (Fig. 7.7), representing both the sun, the source of light, and the Virgin Mary, the perfect “rose without thorns.” The
7.7 Rose window, north portal, Chartres Cathedral, France, 1223–6. Diameter 44 ft (13.4 m). At the center of the rose are Mary and the Christ Child, surrounded by angels and Old Testament kings.
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vair-ee-AY(r)] (Our Lady of the Beautiful Glass) (see Fig. 7.1). The predominant colors of blue and red were the favorites of Gothic glassmakers—symbolizing the Virgin, they gleam like gems of sapphire and ruby.
In another window, the Tree of Jesse over the west portal, religious devotion was blended with the practi- cal truths of politics (Fig. 7.8). Read in the medieval fashion (left to right, bottom to top), the window shows the Old Testament lineage of Christ. The figures are framed by lily flowers, symbolizing the French king who subsidized the window. Thus, the Tree of Jesse connects the justifications of biblical genealogy and royal lineage.
Gothic Sculpture On the outside of Chartres Cathedral, the sculpted fig- ures on the massive three-door portals were as detailed and systematic as the writings of the theologians who taught at Chartres’s cathedral school. Most likely, the school’s teachers supervised the design of Chartres’s exterior sculpture. The carved symbols and stories were carefully coordinated to attract and instruct the pil- grims who entered the shrine.
The famed west or “royal” portal of Chartres (Fig. 7.9), for example, depicts the glory and power of Christ in three aspects. The tympanum over each door states its theme. On the right, the Madonna and Child represent the Incarnation of Christ—that is, Christ’s manifesta- tion in the flesh through the womb of Mary. On the left door is Christ’s Ascension into Heaven, his return to the realm of spirit. Over the center door, Christ in His Majesty reigns as king over heaven, ringed by symbols of the four Evangelists (authors of the Gospels). The themes of royal birth and majesty are repeated from the Tree of Jesse, one of the lancet windows set above these doors. In some cases, the exterior sculpted figures mirror scenes from the windows.
These doors possess a complex symbolic meaning. On the right door, for example, the Incarnation is told as the Life of the Virgin Mary, a theme of spe- cial significance at Chartres. The tympanum scene of the Madonna and Child mirrors the famed window
7.8 Tree of Jesse, lancet window, west portal. Chartres Cathedral, France, c. 1150. In a conventional medieval image of Christ’s royal ancestry, a tree sprouts from the loins of Jesse, father of the Hebrew king David, and emanates at top in the Virgin Mary and Christ himself. Observe the elaborate floral imagery.
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Chartres, this evolution is best illustrated in the jamb sculptures that flank the doors. On the west doors, still sculpted in the Romanesque style, the ancestors of Christ are rigid, austere, and clearly bound to the col- umns behind them. The later Gothic sculptures of the north and south doors are more animated and natural looking. The most dramatic of these, Abraham and
Notre-Dame-de-Belle-Verrière. On the lintel below are scenes from Mary’s life, including the Annunciation, the visitation of St. Elizabeth, the birth of Christ, and the presentation of the Christ Child at the temple. On this door, the archivolts contain symbols of the seven liberal arts—grammar, logic, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—the curriculum of medieval learning. The liberal arts refer both to the cathedral school and to Mary herself, who was considered patron of all learning.
The Gothic spirit effected changes in sculpture that resemble the evolution of ancient Greek sculpture, from stylized austerity to a more lifelike humanism. At
7.9 The three doors of the west portal, Chartres Cathedral, France, c. 1145–70. The three tympanum scenes depict Christ’s birth (right); his ascension into heaven (left); and his reign in heaven (center), where symbols of the four evangelists surround him and the twelve apostles fill the lintel below.
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the Naumburg master gave his figures the quality of sculptural portraits.
Music and Theater in the Gothic Age The Gothic church achieved a rich texture of artistic elements—architecture, stained glass, and sculpture— that were drawn from older medieval traditions. A similar process of evolving traditions brought changes in theater and music during the Gothic age. Musicians
Isaac (Fig. 7.10), shows young Isaac bound for sacrifice and Abraham raising the knife to slay him. Both look up, as if toward the angel who stays Abraham’s hand.
German sculptors who had trained in French workshops bore the Gothic sculptural style to their homeland. A master sculptor at Naumburg in central Germany furnished his cathedral with a set of scenes and figures that are notable for their naturalism and dignity. The life-size figures of Ekkehard and Uta (Fig. 7.11), noble patrons of the church and ancestors of the Bishop of Naumburg, appear to keep watch over the faithful. In his treatment of posture and facial detail,
7.10 Abraham and Isaac, Chartres Cathedral, France, 1205–40. Compared to the stiffly elongated figures of the Chartres portal (see Fig. 7.9), this jamb sculpture creates an animated drama. Preparing to sacrifice his son, Abraham turns toward the angel who instructs him instead to slay the ram (at his feet).
7.11 Count Ekkehard and Countess Uta, Naumburg Cathedral, Germany, c. 1240–50. Later Gothic sculptors like the “master of Naumburg” increasingly lent their figures individualized expression and vitality. This self-possessed noble couple, attached to columns on the cathedral’s interior, indicates the Gothic style’s growing realism.
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of melismatic phrases that were also derived from ear- lier Church music. These developments made possible the great syntheses of medieval music that composers achieved during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The Notre Dame School The Gothic era’s lead- ing musical inventors gathered at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, where they were called the “Notre Dame School of Music.” Here a master composer named Léonin [LAY-oh-nan(h)] (c. 1163–1201) worked in the years of Notre Dame Cathedral’s construction. Léonin compiled an influential book of sacred music in orga- num duplum called the Magnus Liber Organi (Great Book of Organum), important above all for recording the improvisational singing techniques of this period. It is most likely that Léonin did not actually compose the Magnus Liber’s contents but organized and notated what he had learned as a master singer.
Léonin’s successors at Notre Dame and other schools continued to enrich the growing body of orga- num music. Pérotin [PAIR-oh-tan(h)] (active early thirteenth century) is credited with adding a third and sometimes fourth voice above the tenor. In Pérotin’s complex works, the organal passages were often bal- anced against sections of the plainchant melody sung in unison. The rich and sometimes dissonant harmo- nies of the upper voices were punctuated with forms of cadence, the musical resolution at the end of a phrase. Some troubled Church authorities feared their congre- gations would go mad from the “riot of the wantoning voice” and the “affectations in the mincing of notes and sentences.”
With Pérotin, the growing body of organum became the impetus for further change in medieval music. Coordinating the several voices required greater rhythmic precision and stimulated the rise of rhyth- mic modes. The intricate textures of organum also demanded more advanced musical notation and train- ing, techniques developed and propagated by the Notre Dame Cathedral school. Composers began to split off the organal voices and recombine them in a new type of polyphonic song called the motet, from the French mot [moh] (word). The thirteenth-century motet combined two or three voices, usually singing different but related texts. A sacred motet would preserve the Latin plain- chant melody; a secular motet would discard the Latin text and use the tenor melody as instrumental accompa- niment. The freedom to compose new and varied poetic texts fostered a motet enthusiasm across Europe; in the thirteenth century alone, monastic songbooks record thousands of motets from this era.
devised complex new accents in sacred music, without abandoning traditional chants. Their sophisticated musical techniques affected the course of Western music for centuries. Sacred drama moved outside the church, even though its popular spectacles maintained their religious emphasis. Thus, the Gothic forms of music and drama grew from deep roots in Christian faith and symbolism, even as they became more worldly.
The Evolution of Organum The most striking development in medieval music was the evolution of polyphony (many voices) from tradi- tional, monophonic plainchant. Polyphony involves two or more melodic lines playing simultaneously. It may have arisen in secular music, as singers “doubled” the melody with a second voice. While polyphony prob- ably began in musical improvisation, it was gradually incorporated into the composed music of sacred chant. This medieval invention of polyphony sets Western music apart from virtually all the world’s other musical traditions.
The earliest references to medieval polyphony are in a ninth-century musical handbook, which describes Church singing in two voices. This early polyphony was designated organum, perhaps because it resembled the sound of an organ. In organum’s most basic form, two voices moved in a parallel direction, creating par- allel organum. Parallel organum consisted of a princi- pal melody (usually a traditional chant) and a second, “organal” voice sung below the principal melody. The second voice moved at set intervals (usually an octave, fourth, or fifth) below the basic chant.
Gothic composers began to elaborate on this simple but revolutionary musical invention. They cautiously experimented with different intervals (such as the third), made the two voices move in contrary motion, and added rhythmic variety. By the late eleventh cen- tury, a new version of organum had been developed, called organum duplum. In duplum, the traditional plainchant melody was shifted to the lower voice and sung in long, held notes. This lower voice was called the tenor (from Latin tenere, to hold). Above the tenor, the duplum voice sang freer, more complex musical phrases. Organum duplum was Western civilization’s first truly polyphonic music, since the two distinct melodic lines moved independently of one another.
Despite its novelty, organum duplum was firmly rooted in tradition. The tenor voice intoned a tradi- tional plainchant, a spiritual reminder of Christianity’s musical roots. The duplum melody was often composed
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G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
Under the rule of Frankish kings, Christianity was estab- lished in medieval Europe as a religion of monastic dis- cipline and a popular faith that mixed easily with pagan belief. In a similar fashion, Buddhism spread eastward from India through Asia in two guises: a monastic asceti- cism and a teaching of compassion and salvation.
The first of these paths, based on the Theravada (Doctrine of the Elders), adhered to the original teaching of the Buddha. The follower of Theravada [thair-uh-VAH- dah] sought the liberation of self through meditation and moral discipline, a path that required withdrawal into a monastic order (the Sangha). Lay people were obliged to support the Sangha, while postponing their own pursuit of a saintly life. Adherence to the Theravada spread to Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the third century BCE and from there to southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Vietnam).
A more popular Buddhist faith took shape in the Mahayana, or “Greater Vehicle,” which fostered the deifi- cation of the Buddha and emphasized personal salvation rather than ascetic denial. In the Mahayana [mah-hah- YAH-nah], some believed that the Buddha continually vis- ited the world in new incarnations. Others appealed to the powers of Bodhisattvas [boh-dee-SAHT-vah], pious and generous saints who postponed their own entry into nir- vana in order to save others. Cults of various Bodhisattvas encouraged mythic embellishment of the Buddha’s
teachings, including the belief in a paradise (the Pure Land of the West) waiting after death. A later Chinese version of this belief promised that the Maitreya Buddha (Buddha of the Future) would return to earth and establish paradise in this life. With less emphasis on Hindu ideas of karma and reincarnation, the Mahayana faith was easily embraced in China and Japan, where it was blended with Taoist teach- ings to create Ch’an (Japanese Zen) Buddhism.
The enthusiasm for the Buddhist faith in Asia encour- aged elaborate artistic expressions. The great temple of Borobudur (Fig. 7.12) in Java (in present-day Indonesia), for example, was constructed as a vast holy mountain, rising in nine terraces to a sealed chamber containing an image of the Buddha. The central chamber and the surrounding peaks all take the form of a bell-shaped stupa (literally, “hair knot”), a rounded sacred enclosure used in Hindu and Buddhist architecture. The temple plan’s concentric squares and circles, symbolizing the wheel of life, were adopted in other great temple complexes of southeast Asia, such as Angkor Wat (Cambodia) and Ananda (Burma).
7.12 Stupa of Borobudur, Java, Indonesia, Sailendra Dynasty, 835–60. Lava stone, perimeter of lowest gallery 1,180 ft (359.6 m), diameter of crowning stupa 52 ft (15.8 m).
Buddhism in Asia
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in late spring. At Chartres, trade guilds and civic leaders paid for building the town’s cathedral. In other towns, these same groups helped to produce the local Corpus Christi drama cycle. A play involving Noah’s Ark would be assigned to the local carpenters, and goldsmiths and money-changers would costume and portray the Three Wise Men. Drama festivals were sanctioned by Church authorities, but depended on hundreds of townspeople to plan, finance, and stage their productions. The scale of participation commanded by the medieval Church might well be the envy of directors of civic theater today (Fig. 7.13).
Gothic drama blended sacred and secular concerns. Mystery plays were cycles of plays depicting bibli- cal stories. A cycle usually centered on the Passion of Christ, but might also reenact the fall of Adam and Eve, the sacrifice of Isaac, or the Flood. The dramatic climax came when Christ descended through the gaping mouth of hell and defeated a buffoonish devil. Christ then sat in judgment upon the wicked and the pure. A mystery cycle was typically an elaborate affair, lasting several days, with spectacular stage effects such as flying angels and hellish flames.
Another type of play, called the miracle play, recounted the lives of saints from childhood to death
Gothic Theater: From Church to Town By the eleventh century Church authorities were com- plaining about another clamor: the raging Herods and violent massacre scenes that had become part of liturgi- cal drama. One German abbess objected to “the clang of weapons, the presence of shameless wenches and all sorts of disorder” that liturgical plays brought to her church’s nave. As its scripts and staging became more elaborate, sacred drama outgrew the Catholic Mass that it was supposed to illustrate. The simple scenarios depicting three women at Christ’s tomb had become elaborate recreations of the Journey of the Wise Men and the Slaughter of the Innocents. Consequently, sacred drama was shifted outside the church to the town squares, where it was performed by ordinary folk instead of priests and nuns, often in the spoken vernac- ular instead of Latin.
Like building a cathedral, staging a play in the Gothic era was a cooperative effort between the Church and the people of the town. Theatrical productions were based on religious stories and nearly always coincided with religious holidays. The most common occasion for civic drama was the Feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated
7.13 Scenery for the Valenciennes Mystery Play, 1547. Contemporary drawing. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. The stage provided for elaborate stage effects, including fire spouting from the mouth of hell (right).
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7.14 Scene of the Martyrdom of St. Apollonia, from a 15th-century miniature by Jean Fouquet. Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. A scene from a miracle play depicting the life and martyrdom of St. Apollonia. The play’s director (in miter hat, center right) holds a prompt book and directs the music with his baton. Elaborate scenic scaffolds enclose the stage at the rear.
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studies—theology, law, or medicine. University educa- tion, however, almost entirely excluded women. The late medieval decline of independent convents and abbeys for women further reduced women’s opportu- nity for advanced learning.
Though they were all men, medieval university fac- ulties and students were a remarkably international group. The preeminent medieval university was at Paris, recognized by the French king in 1200. Paris was famed for its theological faculty and was dubbed “mother of the sciences” by one pope. Universities at England’s Oxford and Cambridge modeled themselves after Paris, while the university at Bologna specialized first in law, then in medicine.
Although relaxed and wholly voluntary, life at a medieval university was rather strenuous by today’s standards. A typical day began at 5 a.m. with prayers and study, followed by lectures, a group debate, and then further study before bed. Because few students had textbooks, their courses consisted mainly of the master’s lectures. Lectures (from the Latin lectio mean- ing reading) in theology consisted of a master reading from the Bible or a standard commentary, followed by his own interpretation. At Bologna in northern Italy a master could be fined for extending his lecture even a minute past the allotted time.
A course of study usually began in the liberal arts, primarily the trivium of grammar, logic, and dialec- tic. Ideally, the trivium comprised the introductory course of study, to be followed by instruction in the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. A young scholastic demonstrated his learn- ing in the disputation, a form of philosophical debate modeled on Plato’s dialogues. In a disputation, the master announced an issue for discussion, and then his advanced students answered objections from the audi- ence. Finally, the master himself closed the discussion with a definitive and authoritative answer. Student examinations were entirely oral, and they were usually held during Lent, the season of fasting and self-denial.
The Rediscovery of Aristotle In the Gothic age, scholastic learning was invigorated by access to Arabic civilization and its deep knowledge of classical philosophy and science. Thanks to schools of translation in southern Europe, medieval Europeans could read for the first time the masterpieces of Greek mathematics and astronomy. Most important were translations of the so-called new Aristotle, the Greek philosopher’s writings on nature and human affairs. European scholastics immediately began to assimilate Aristotle’s views into a comprehensive
and often included vivid scenes of battle and torture (Fig. 7.14). The morality play, which appeared in the fifteenth century, depicted the struggle between the vices and virtues over a sinner’s soul. The best-known morality play, Everyman, represents an ordinary man’s struggle to escape the summons of death. Everyman required little scenery and scarcely more than an hour to perform. The play was well suited to the fledgling bands of professional actors who were beginning to entertain in Europe’s palaces and town squares.
Despite their diversity, the plays of the Gothic era shared some essential traits. First, theater in this age was thoroughly popular. It was written and performed in the vernacular, the language spoken by common people, and the plays involved hundreds of citizens in the production itself. The audience may well have been the town’s entire population. Second, the mystery and miracle plays emphasized spectacular staging rather than subtleties of dramatic text. Like the citizens of ancient Rome, medieval townspeople preferred a grand show to literary niceties. Although performed outside the church walls, Gothic theater stood very much in the Church’s shadow.
The New Learning The cities of the Gothic age gave birth to a new learn- ing, based on scholasticism (see Key Concept, page 178), and pursued in cathedral schools and universities. Within the university’s lecture halls, scholastic philoso- phers achieved a grand synthesis of Christian doctrine and the Western philosophical tradition.
The Universities The medieval university was quite unlike any school seen before: a self-governing organization of schol- ars formed to teach and certify a professional class of lawyers and clerks. Medieval universities were gov- erned either by their faculties or by their students, who together formed the universitas (whole body). Most universities offered the basic baccalaureate (bachelor’s degree), while specializing in one of three advanced
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT What steps would you need to take to produce a dramatic production in your community? What would this process reveal about the values of your community?
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human reason were distinct but not contradictory. “Reason does not destroy faith but perfects it,” he wrote. According to Aquinas, humans came to know God’s world both through the Bible’s revealed truth and the logical workings of human understanding. God, the highest reality, would always remain a mystery to human reason, hidden even in the words of Christian scripture. Still, Aquinas argued, God revealed himself in other ways, through the works of nature and the work- ings of human reason. He held that God and nature were one, forming a harmonious order that was intel- ligible to the human powers of reason. Thus the study of nature led ultimately to an understanding of God.
Aquinas’s synthesis may be illustrated by a common example. Observing a wren from his window, Aquinas could study the bird for itself as a creature of nature, as Aristotle might have. However, Aquinas would also know (as Aristotle would not) that the wren was a part of God’s hierarchical order of creation. Aquinas’s knowl- edge of the bird was itself part of God’s purpose, which intends for humans to employ their powers of reason.
philosophy of ethics, law, and nature. By 1250, Aristotle’s dominance in the universities was so complete that he was known simply as “the Philosopher.”
Thomas Aquinas The most influential scholastic thinker was Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who achieved a vast synthesis of medieval theology and Aristotelian philosophy. Aquinas [uh-KWEYE-nuss] said he wanted to make “a science of faith.” His greatest work was the Summa Theologica (begun 1266), a summation of medieval knowledge about God’s plan for the natural and human world. The Summa showed Aquinas’s genius for creating har- mony and order among diverse philosophical elements. The result was a thoroughly Christian philosophy that still influences thinkers in politics, education, and law.
For Aquinas, the spheres of divine revelation and
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Scholasticism Like Gothic art, philosophy in the later Middle Ages devel- oped by crossing the boundary between the sacred and secular. The rise of the cathedral schools and disputa- tious scholars such as Peter Abelard (see page 158) stim- ulated a philosophical movement called scholasticism. Scholasticism encompassed the philosophical debates and methods of learning practiced by theologians during the later Middle Ages. Scholasticism’s skepticism and vitality thrived outside the monastic cloister, in the cities’ schools and universities.
Although scholasticism was not a unified system of thought, the scholastics did share some fundamental principles for understanding God’s truth and his universe. They wanted to incorporate philosophy (the study of truth in general) into theology (the study of God’s word). In effect, this made theology a comprehensive system of all human knowledge. Also, scholastics relied on the Greek philosopher Aristotle as a model of logical method, and considered the pagan Greek philosopher to be an authority equal to the Bible itself. Finally, the scholastics practiced a method of formal argument by which issues could be debated logically and systematically—a method that gave consistency and rigor to medieval philosophical disputes.
Scholastic teachers were famed for the audacity of their reasoning and the size of their student following. These teachers often wandered from school to school, comparing themselves to the sophists of ancient Greece. Peter Abelard, who reckoned himself “as the only true phi- losopher left in the world,” attracted students whether he taught at the cathedral school in Paris or a monastery in the wilds of western France.
Nowadays, because of its emphasis on logic and argu- ment, medieval scholasticism suffers from a reputation for arid debates about obscure topics, perhaps in the same way that today’s university researchers sometimes suffer ridicule for their obscure and seemingly irrelevant projects. Scholastic philosophers wrote in a specialized and artificial language that non-experts could barely understand, and their argumentation lacked the personal and engaging tone of early Christian writings such as Augustine’s Confessions. However, the scholastics’ dispu- tations addressed issues that still concern today’s thinkers: the nature of law, the authority of the state, the definition of life. The scholastics themselves were the precursors of today’s university intellectuals, who in their academic enclaves often debate the same vital issues.
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Courtly Love and Medieval Romance The term courtly love describes an elaborate code of behavior governing relations between the sexes at medi- eval courts. According to the rules of courtly love, the young man pledged spiritual devotion and servitude to his love, usually a noblewoman. The lady, who was usually already married, felt flattered by the lover’s attentions, but had to reject him. Knowing that his desire must remain unsatisfied, the lover’s mood shifted between joy and despair, devotion and betrayal. The male troubadour’s songs and poems alternated between praise for his lady’s beauty and complaints about her cruelty. The female troubadour often praised her suit- or’s character and warned him against betrayal.
For Aquinas, the hierarchy of human knowledge reflected the order of creation. His understanding of God’s mystery was supported and confirmed by his knowledge of the natural world. Thus, the natural phi- losophy of Aristotle was complemented by Aquinas’s rich and flexible understanding of divine purpose. Like the world created by God, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica was encyclopedic in its scope and hierarchical in its orga- nization. His masterwork described a universe in which everything had its proper and logical place, although the Summa was left unfinished, appropriately enough, since one’s praise of God could never be complete.
Court and City in the Late Middle Ages Life at the medieval court—the residence of royalty and nobles—achieved a new sophistication in the later Middle Ages. With feudalism’s decline, new powers and wealth accrued at the royal courts in London, Paris, Prague, and Spain. These courts and their major satellites stimulated a revived interest in poetry and sto- rytelling. Rather than epics of bloody combats, the late medieval minstrels and writers were more likely to tell stories of romantic adventure. Medieval romances, as these stories were called, gave rise to a culture of love, courtesy, and graciousness in some medieval courts (Fig. 7.15). Associated with courtesy was an elabo- rate code of knightly conduct called chivalry (see Key Concept, page 181).
In Europe’s growing cities, poets exploited the atmo- sphere of freedom to interpret medieval traditions. Two poetic masterpieces—the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–c. 1400)—synthesized the Middle Ages’ sacred and secular traditions, both of them utilizing the pilgrimage as their primary literary and philosophical metaphor.
7.15 Limbourg Brothers, “May,” illustration from Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, MS 6 5⁄1284 f. 5v, early 15th century. Vellum, 11 1⁄2 × 8 1⁄4 ins (29.4 × 21 cm). Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. From a famously illustrated book of religious devotions, this page shows courtiers enjoying the “May jaunt,” a pageant celebrating the verdant May landscape. This book was produced for the Duke of Burgundy, who kept one of medieval France’s most lavish courts.
View the Closer Look at “February” from Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry on myartslab.com
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The origins of troubadour song probably lie in Arabic love poetry from Muslim Spain. Troubadours mixed the sensual images of Arabic poetry with the Neoplatonist idealism of popular philosophy. The most famous troubadour was Bernart de Ventadorn [vahn- ta-DORN] (c. 1150–c. 1180), who serenaded Eleanor of Aquitaine at the court of Poitiers. In his poems, Bernart’s unquenchable hope for love was often mixed with despondency and rejection, as seen in these stanzas of Quan vei la lauzeta mover:
When I see the lark beating
Its wings in joy against the rays of the sun
That it forgets itself and lets itself fall
Because of the sweetness that comes to its heart,
Alas! Such great envy then overwhelms me
Of all those whom I see rejoicing,
I wonder that my heart, at that moment,
Does not melt from desire.
Alas! How much I thought I knew
About love, and how little I know,
Because I cannot keep myself from loving
The one from whom I will gain nothing.
She has all my heart, and my soul,
And herself and the whole world;
And when she left, nothing remained
But desire and a longing heart.5
BERNART DE VENTADORN
Women troubadours (trobairitz [TROH-bair-itz] in the Provençal language) were frequently noblewomen themselves, like Beatriz de Dia [BAY-uh-treez duh DEE-ah] (born c. 1140), wife of the Count of Poitiers. Women troubadours often spurned the poetic euphe- mism preferred by male singers, instead demanding a forthright profession of their lover’s feelings. These lines from Beatriz assert her own worth and fidelity while questioning her lover’s fidelity:
My worth and noble birth should have some weight,
My beauty and especially my noble thoughts;
So I send you, there on your estate,
This song as messenger and delegate.
I want to know, my handsome noble friend,
Why I deserve so savage and so cruel a fate.
I can’t tell whether it’s pride or malice you intend.6
The troubadours and trobairitz nurtured a blossom- ing romance literature in late medieval Europe. The medieval romance was a long narrative in verse that told of chivalric adventures and courtly lovers. The same romance stories were revised and elaborated by different medieval authors. The most popular French
The culture of courtly love reached its zenith at the courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122–1204). Eleanor was a powerful duchess who became the queen of two kings and was the mother of two sons who became kings. In 1170, the fiery and independent Eleanor was estranged from her royal husband, Henry II of England. She withdrew to her feudal lands in France and revived her court at Poitiers [PWAH-tee-ay]. Here Eleanor established elaborate rules of courtly dress, manners, and conversation.
Scholars are not sure whether Eleanor’s prescrip- tions had any real influence on behavior at Poitiers or elsewhere. The rules of love are recorded in The Art of Courtly Love (Tractatus de Amore), written about 1180 by Andreas Cappellanus. Andreas defined love as “a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the oppo- site sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love’s precepts in the other’s embrace.” Andreas ends his treatise with a faintly mocking list of what love’s “precepts” might be:
• Marriage is no real excuse for not loving. • He who is not jealous cannot love. • The easy attainment of love makes it of little value;
difficulty of attainment makes it prized. • Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of
his beloved. • Love can deny nothing to love.4
Even if the rules of courtly love were never seri- ously practiced, they reveal significant paradoxes of medieval society. Since marriage was a social obliga- tion for medieval nobles, it was seldom an occasion for romantic fantasy and tenderness. Instead, romance was expressed through the quasi-adulterous games of courtly love, which made the lady a powerful lord and the male lover her servant. In this way, courtly love fancifully inverted the normal medieval arrangement of male–female power.
The paradoxes of courtly love found poignant expression in the songs of troubadours, the lyric poet- singers of the region of Provence in southern France. The troubadours’ love songs celebrated medieval courtly life and idealized the troubadours’ aristocratic patrons. Their style was quickly imitated in Germany by the Minnesänger, and in northern France by the trouvères. Through the bitter-sweet love songs of these poet-composers, the conventions and popular stories of courtly love spread throughout late medieval Europe.
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Chivalry Medieval romances painted a fanciful picture of chivalrous knights who dueled for the favor of their lady. In fact, chiv- alry (from the French chevalier meaning horseman) was a code of conduct that governed medieval warfare; it dictated the rules of mercy and fair play. Under the rules of chivalry, medieval knights pledged to serve God and their lord faith- fully, and to treat others with courtesy and generosity.
Chivalry most likely sprang from the need to enforce vows of feudal loyalty. By accepting knighthood, a war- rior promised not to kill his lord, sleep with the lord’s wife, or surrender his lord’s castle. Violations of this trust were punished swiftly and brutally. Ganelon, who betrays Roland in the medieval epic Song of Roland, is executed by having his limbs torn apart by horses. In the later Middle Ages, chivalry expanded to include religious devotion and service to ladies. Thus, chivalry evolved as a means of civi- lizing the rough fighting men of feudal Europe, who were otherwise little inclined to acts of kindness and courtesy. In philosophical terms, chivalry established a compromise between medieval warfare and the principles of Christian love.
The cult of chivalry involved an elaborate program of activity to occupy knights during peacetime. The Spaniard Ramón Llull’s Book of the Order of Chivalry (late thirteenth century) described the chivalric ideal:
A knight should ride warhorses, joust, go to tournaments, hold Round Tables, hunt stags and rabbits, bears, lions, and similar creatures: these things are a knight’s duty because to do them exercises a knight in the practice of arms and accustoms him to maintain the order of knighthood.7
Chivalric tournaments (Fig. 7.16) were spectacular competitions that also involved feasting, pageantry, and dance. The competitions resembled military combat, often resulting in serious injury or death. A skilled combatant could enrich himself by capturing horses and armor, or by claiming ransoms from his vanquished opponents. Thus, chivalry opened a narrow path of social advancement in medieval society.
Chivalry led to the creation of a well-trained and ambi- tious class of professional warriors in medieval Europe, who responded to calls for a military campaign or a crusade to the Holy Land. As part of this military culture, great epic
CRITICAL QUESTION Discuss the idea that training a military elite such as the medieval knighthood increases the likelihood of war. Does military training today provide opportunities for social advancement, as it did in the Middle Ages?
K E Y C O N C E P T
poems such as the Song of Roland told of valor and loyalty in battle. Possibly not since the Greece of Homer’s epics had warfare and military values so dominated Western civiliza- tion as in the medieval “age of chivalry.”
7.16 Medieval tournament scene from the Manasseh Codex. Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg, Germany. Medieval tournaments involved combat nearly as deadly as warfare itself. Here a lady arms her champion for the contest, while courtly spectators applaud.
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an unprecedented unity and refinement. Machaut was the first medieval composer to compose a large body of both sacred and secular music. His Messe de Nostre Dame was the first Mass composed as a coherent musi- cal whole. Machaut’s secular poetry was largely in the courtly love tradition. His lais, set monophonically, were the last of the troubadour tradition. More impor- tantly, Machaut composed a number of motets, ballads, and other polyphonic song forms. Often, in Machaut’s motets, a lute or recorder played the tenor and the two upper voices sang different texts. Sometimes the poetic texts interlocked, with one voice sounding while the other rested. Machaut often employed the Ars Nova technique called isorhythm, in which a rhythmic pattern is repeated cyclically without regard for the melody.
Though barely perceptible to the ear, such Ars nova refinements as isorhythm appealed to the educated sen- sibilities of Machaut’s courtly audiences. He composed mostly for the dukes and kings whom he served as poet, musician, and secretary. During his lifetime, his works circulated widely in manuscript throughout western Europe.
Guillaume de Machaut died just as the Catholic Church was rent by the Great Schism. Machaut’s career shows that, in place of a corrupt and discredited Church, Europe’s courts and cities had become leading centers of power and patrons of the arts.
Dante’s Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri [DAHN-tay al-ig-YAIR-ee] was born in the dynamic medieval city of Florence in Tuscany (cen- tral Italy), where he was richly educated in the politics, poetry, and philosophy of his day. When Florence’s bitter political divisions caused Dante’s exile in 1300, he undertook the composition of his Divine Comedy, a three-part epic that recounts the poet’s vision of the afterlife. The Comedy is not only a kind of poetic summa of medieval values; it is also a synthesis of medi- eval poetic techniques, including courtly love poetry and the classical poetic tradition.
In Dante’s epic poem, the poet’s own journey through the afterlife is an elaborate metaphor for the pilgrimage through life. In the “Inferno” (Fig. 7.17), Dante is guided into the pit of hell by the epic poet Virgil, a symbol of human reason and the classical poet whom Dante most admired. In the “Purgatorio,” the travelers climb the mountain of purgatory, encountering souls whose sins are not yet forgiven. In the “Paradiso,” Dante takes the hand of his idealized lady, Beatrice [bay-uh-TREE-chay]. At the center of heaven, Dante is permitted to look briefly
romance was the Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose), begun by one poet around 1240 and extended by another about 1275. The Roman de la Rose was an allegorical tale of ideal love, adventure, and social satire, widely read and imitated throughout Europe.
An equally famous romantic elaboration was the tale of the legendary King Arthur and his court. Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter encouraged her court poet Chrétien de Troyes [KRAY-tee-an(h) duh TWAH] (active 1160–1190) to embellish the Arthurian legend along the lines of courtly love. Chrétien responded, somewhat reluctantly, with his Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart. Chrétien’s Lancelot introduced the famous love affair between Lancelot, King Arthur’s lieuten- ant, and Guinevere, his queen. These Arthurian lovers became a kind of romantic trope, reappearing in differ- ent romantic contexts.
The greatest female writer of medieval romance was also connected to Eleanor’s court. Marie de France (active 1160–1215) may have been the half-sister of Henry II and probably lived at English courts. Among other forms, Marie de France composed verse narra- tives called lais, written in medieval French. Of the dozen lais that survive, several show a concern for women’s experiences that was unique in the romance tradition. Some of Marie de France’s heroines escape from their possessive husbands by creating a fantasy of spiritual and fulfilling love. The Frenchwoman’s poems circulated widely among European storytellers, perhaps helping to achieve a measure of civility and equality between the sexes.
Music in the Late Middle Ages By the fourteenth century, the monophonic songs of troubadour and trouvère were being supplanted by a more refined secular music. Increasingly, secular songs were given polyphonic settings and were enriched by rhythmic complexities. Developed in northern France, this new style was called the Ars nova (new art).
The master of the Ars nova style was Guillaume de Machaut [gee-YOHM duh mah-SHOH] (c. 1300– 1377), a poet and composer whose works achieved
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT What rules govern love in today’s romantic relationships? How do these rules relate to medieval traditions? How do they work to the advantage of women? Of men?
Chapter 7 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 183
“Inferno”’s most famous episode, Dante meets Paolo and Francesca [POW-loh, fran-CHAY-skah], lovers murdered in their bed by Francesca’s husband (Paolo’s brother). At Dante’s request, Francesca describes the moment of their first love, when they sat reading the medieval romance of Lancelot and Guinevere.
“Love, which in gentlest hearts will soonest bloom
Seized my lover with passion for that sweet body
From which I was torn unshriven to my doom.
Love, which permits no loved one not to love,
Took me so strongly with delight in him
That we are one in Hell, as we were above.a
Love led us to one death. In the depths of Hell
Caïna waits for him who took our lives.”b
… One day we read, to pass the time away,
Of Lancelot, how he had fallen in love;
We were alone, innocent of suspicion.
Time and again our eyes were brought together
By the book we read; our faces flushed and
To the moment of one line alone we yielded:
It was when we read about those longed-for lips
Now being kissed by such a famous lover,
That this one (who shall never leave my side)
Then kissed my mouth, and trembled as he did.
Our Galehotc was that book and he who wrote it.
That day we read no further.”8
DANTE ALIGHIERI
From “Inferno,” Canto V
a. The pair’s bodiless souls are bound together and blown about hell
by hot winds, symbolic of the passion that destroyed them in life.
b. Caïna, a region of Dante’s hell reserved for murderers of their
own kin. Giovanni Malatesta, Francesca’s husband and Paolo’s
brother, will dwell here because his violent sin is more serious than
the lovers’ lustful passion.
c. Galehot, the go-between who urged Lancelot and Guinevere on;
also, in Italian, the word for “pander.”
The “Paradiso” is suffused with a more exalted and spiritual love. Guided by Beatrice, a symbol of human beauty, love, and grace, Dante discourses with Thomas Aquinas and heaven’s other saintly inhabitants. The great poem ends with a lyrical prayer to the Virgin Mary, who permits Dante to gaze for a moment upon God. Because of that vision, Dante says, he is turned, with “feeling and intellect balanced equally,” inevitably toward divine love.
Dante’s Comedy was an immediate and popular success among literate Italians, and its Tuscan-flavored language set a standard for modern spoken Italian. Just 50 years after Dante’s death, an inscription by the poet Giovanni Boccaccio praised Dante as a “dark oracle of wisdom and of art.”9
at the blazing glory of God himself. As the pilgrim in his own epic, Dante faces the trials of the ordinary Christian believer. To reach his destination, he must master his own sinful nature, submitting to the commands of human reason (Virgil) and sacred truth (Beatrice).
The Divine Comedy synthesized religious symbolism with Dante’s views on politics and language. The entire poem was written in a three-line stanza form called terza rima [TAIR-zuh REE-muh]. The holy number three reappears in the 33 cantos of each main section, which (when added to an introductory canto) equal another “perfect” number, 100. The pilgrim’s conver- sations with the souls allow Dante to espouse his per- sonal political belief that Europe should be governed by a secular emperor, not the pope. Significantly, Dante composed the Divine Comedy in the Italian vernacular (spoken language), rather than in Latin.
Dante’s Lovers Dante’s poetic style was shaped by Florentine love poetry and he borrowed characters and stories from the European romance tradition. In the
7.17 Diagram of Dante’s “Inferno.”
Read Dante’s “Inferno” on myartslab.com
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to vain self-delusion. The pilgrims also reveal a cross- section of English society, including the dissolute and hypocritical as well as the pious and noble. Chaucer describes them and recounts their tales with a marvel- ous sense of irony and insight into human psychology.
In its literary form, Chaucer’s great work borrows from the Decameron of the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio [jyoh-VAH-nee boh-KAH-chee-oh] (1313– 1375), in which the occupants of a country villa, gathered to escape the plague, entertain themselves by telling stories. Originally, Chaucer intended that each of the 30 pilgrims should tell four stories, but only 24 tales and a prologue were actually completed.
One of Chaucer’s most memorable characters is the Wife of Bath, who has outlived five husbands and seeks a sixth on her journey. Her frank sensualism is a direct challenge to the medieval Church’s teachings about women. To those who condemn women who do not seek the chastity of the convent, she says:
As in a noble household, we are told,
Not every dish and vessel’s made of gold,
Some are of wood, yet earn their master’s praise,
God calls His folk to Him in many ways.11
Chaucer’s insight into such ordinary folk makes The Canterbury Tales a kind of “human comedy” as pro- found as Dante’s magisterial work. The two poets’ appreciation of human diversity and their worldly understanding of human nature engendered the two literary masterworks of late medieval culture.
The Late Gothic The fourteenth century was a turbulent age in Europe, marked by war and the pestilence of the Black Death, a plague that wiped out one-third of Europe’s population at mid-century. The Black Death contributed to a gen- eral economic crisis in Europe, compounded by labor shortages, peasant revolts, and reduced harvest due to climatic cooling.
Intellectual life centered in Europe’s towns and courts, where it was less restricted by Church doctrines. Poets and artists looked to classical antiquity for mod- els of beauty and reason. The poet Petrarch recovered the classics and defined a new poetic style, while the philosopher Christine de Pisan eloquently defended the heritage of women. In the arts, an “International Gothic” style emerged, and Giotto’s revolutionary innovations won him praise as the one “through whose merit the lost art of painting was revived.”
Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims Like Dante, Geoffrey Chaucer was a versatile poet, wise in the ways of the world, a diplomat and court- ier in London, who wrote his poetic works to enter- tain a circle of courtly friends. His masterpiece was The Canterbury Tales (begun c. 1387), a set of stories told by a group of imaginary pilgrims journeying to Canterbury in southeast England. Chaucer sketches his pilgrims with knowing irony and wit. Each is journey- ing to Canterbury for a different reason, revealing the spectrum of human motivation, from religious piety
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
The Plague and Prosperity For those in Europe who survived the plague known as the Black Death of 1348, standards of living actu- ally improved. Food was more plentiful and labor more scarce, forcing up wages. The King of England resorted to drastic (and futile) measures to hold wages at their customary levels:
Meanwhile the King sent word into all the separate companies of the kingdom that reapers and other workers should not take more than they were accustomed to take under penalty of the fixed statute. … The artisans [laborers], however, so puffed up and contrary, would not heed the mandate of the King, but if anyone wished to have them it was necessary to pay them according to their wish and either to lose his produce and his crops or satisfy the proud and greedy desire of the workers. Wherefore, when it was known to the King that employers would not obey his mandate and that they granted greater payment to the laborers, he imposed heavy fines upon the abbots and the priors, and upon the greater and lesser knights. … Then the King set about to arrest many of the laborers and send them to prison; many such withdrew and hid in the forests and woods for the time, and those who were captured were heavily fined. The greater part of them were bound under oath that they would not take daily payments [wages] beyond the old custom, and thus they were freed from prison. In a similar way it happened to the other artisans in the towns and villages.10
HENRY KNIGHTON (1348)
Read Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales on myartslab.com
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form of the sonnet (a 14-line poem). His most famous sonnets concern his mysterious beloved named Laura, whom he met while living at the papal court in Avignon. Laura succumbed to plague in 1348, and in this sonnet, Petrarch praises her beauty while mourning her loss.
The eyes that drew from me such fervent praise,
The arms and hands and feet and countenance
Which made me a stranger in my own romance
And set me apart from the well-trodden ways;
The gleaming golden curly hair, the rays
Flashing from a smiling angel’s glance
Which moved the world in paradisal dance,
Are grains of dust, insensibilities.
And I live on, but in grief and self-contempt,
Left here without the light I loved so much,
In a great tempest and with shrouds unkempt.
No more love songs, then, I have done with such;
My old skill now runs thin at each attempt,
And tears are within the harp I touch.12
PETRARCH
Reclaiming the Classical Past
The reconciliation of Gothic style and classicism took sculptural form in the works of Nicola Pisano (c. 1220– c. 1278/84). Commissioned about 1260 to create a stone pulpit in Pisa, Italy, Nicola adapted lessons from ancient Roman sarcophagi that he could study first- hand in Tuscany. In Nicola’s scene of the Annunciation and Nativity (Fig. 7.18), Mary reclines like a serene Roman matron and the Christ Child sleeps in a hefty manger carved much like a Roman sarcophagus. Nicola Pisano’s handling of drapery and his uncrowded com- position lend this scene a stoic calm that Italian sculp- ture had not seen for a millennium.
In philosophy and literature, the late medieval atti- tude of compromise between classicism and Christianity was called humanism, and it would dominate thinking and art in Italy for the next century. Humanism’s most important proponent was the Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304–1374), who avidly studied and translated ancient Roman texts. Petrarch [PET-rark] stressed the continuity between the teachings of antiquity and the Christian faith, assert- ing that classical wisdom had been fulfilled in Christian revelation. Aside from his classical studies, Petrarch also defined a lyrical new style of poetry, perfecting a
7.18 Nicola Pisano, Annunciation and Nativity, 1259–60. Marble relief from the pulpit. Baptistery, Pisa, Italy. Compare the classicism of this depiction of the Virgin Mary to earlier medieval renderings, for example Fig. 6.29.
Read excerpts from Petrarch’s letters to Cicero on myartslab.com
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Giotto and the International Gothic Italy in 1300 was a bustling economic and artistic cross- roads, well positioned to profit from commerce with the Byzantine empire and Islamic world. The maritime city of Venice, with its powerful navy, dominated Europe’s trade with the East. It cultivated friendly relations with the Ottoman Turks, who ruled much of the Muslim Middle East. Indeed, Muslim building styles clearly influenced the grand palace built for Venice’s elected duke, or doge. The Doge’s Palace (Fig. 7.19) seems to float serenely on Venice’s lagoon, a decided contrast to the civic buildings of Florence or Siena, Venice’s com- mercial rivals.
Trade and travel across late medieval Europe helped stimulate a diverse style called International Gothic, centered in northern Italy, Burgundy (southeastern France), and Bohemia (in today’s Czech Republic). In Italy, especially at Siena, the International Gothic absorbed the influence of Byzantine icons, with their gilded surfaces and otherworldly atmosphere. Bohemian artists applied these lessons while working at the Holy
Petrarch was the first great humanist, publishing not only his collected poems as a single work but also works of philosophy, politics, and religion. Christine de Pisan (1364–c. 1430) had a similar, if less famous, intellec- tual career. Christine grew up in the French royal court and eventually supported her family by writing poetry, moral philosophy, and a king’s biography. Her most important work was The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), which retold the lives of goddesses and heroic women. The “city of ladies” was a heavenly bastion against the contempt for women that Christine found in such medieval works as the Romance of the Rose. Christine framed her arguments in the form of the dia- logue, in imitation of the classical philosophers Plato and Boethius. Adapting Augustine’s “heavenly city” as a metaphor for the afterlife, she included pagan figures among her heroines—much like Virgil and the “virtu- ous pagans” in Dante’s hell.
7.19 Doge’s Palace, Venice, 1309–1424. The Doge’s Palace seemed to stress the Venetian republic’s command of the Mediterranean. In the second story of its two- story arcade (a row of arches), the columns blossom into quatrefoil medallions that counteract the weight of the upper story.
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introduced a new spatial and emotional realism into Europe’s pictorial language. Giotto [JYAH-toh] was a contemporary of Dante and probably apprenticed in a Florentine workshop. His break with medieval convention can be seen in his Madonna Enthroned (Fig. 7.21), which achieves a new volume and vitality in the human form. The drapery falls naturally over the Madonna’s knees and breasts. The throne is clearly three-dimensional, creating a new realism of visual space.
Giotto’s masterpiece was a three-part cycle of paint- ings in the Arena, or Scrovegni, Chapel in Padua, Italy. Italian Gothic churches provided large expanses of wall, which medieval painters decorated in the ancient art of fresco. Giotto painted the Scrovegni Chapel with three narrative sequences: the Life of the Virgin, the Life
Roman Emperor’s court in Prague. In a scene of the Virgin Mary’s death (originally part of an altarpiece), a youthful Christ blesses his mother as she sleeps (Fig. 7.20). Behind him, the twelve apostles are arrayed in a timbered room, whose realism is balanced against the figures’ gilded haloes.
The International Gothic also produced gorgeous works of manuscript illumination, particularly the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry (see Fig. 7.15). This devo- tional prayer book, or “book of hours,” was the work of the three brothers Limbourg, commissioned by a duke of Burgundy. The illustrations of the months depicted the lives of both nobility and peasants, often showing the duke’s several residences in realistic landscape.
The revolutionary of late Gothic painting was the Italian Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1337), who
7.20 Bohemian Master, Death (or Dormition) of the Virgin, 1350–60. Tempera on panel, 39 3⁄8 ins × 28 ins (100 × 71 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The scene is the dormition (“falling asleep”) of the Virgin Mary for three days at her life’s end, a Byzantine Orthodox feast day that corresponds to Roman Catholics’ celebration of Mary’s “assumption” into heaven. Bohemian painters excelled in panel painting and in miniatures.
7.21 Giotto, Madonna Enthroned, c. 1310. Tempera on wood, 10 ft 8 ins × 6 ft 8 ins (3.25 × 2.03 m). Uffi zi, Florence. Giotto’s revolutionary technique used shading to create a feeling of volume and depth. Note other visual clues—the foreground angels, receding lines, obscured background figures—that contribute to the sense of spatial realism.
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7.22 Giotto, Pietà (Lamentation), c. 1305–6. Fresco, 7 ft 7 ins × 7 ft 9 ins (2.31 × 2.36 m). Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. Giotto gave his scenes emotional force by compositional devices, such as the mountain ridge’s bold diagonal slash. The line draws the eye toward Christ’s head and connects Christ’s sacrifice to the symbolic tree in the upper right.
188 Chapter 7 ANCIENT ROME
1000 CE 1100 CE 1200 CE c. 1122–1204 Eleanor of Aquitaine
1144 Dedication of choir at Saint-Denis, Paris
1194–1240 Chartres Cathedral, France, rebuilt in Gothic style (7.6)
c. 1085-1151 Life of Abbot Suger
1096–1099 First Crusade, sack of Jerusalem
C H A P T E R 7 : T I M E L I N E
View the Closer Look at Giotto’s Arena chapel on myartslab.com
Chapter 7 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 189
grieving mother, while their faces and gestures express individualized emotional responses.
Giotto’s interest in human emotion and individual- ity anticipated the values that would arise in the newly prosperous and sophisticated cities of fourteenth- century Europe, the centers of the Renaissance’s cul- tural revolution.
of Christ, and the Passion of Christ. To Giotto’s con- temporaries, the pictures of the Scrovegni Chapel were stunningly new. Giotto radically simplified his com- positions, eliminating detail and amplifying a scene’s visual and emotional effect. In the Pietà [pee-uh-TAH] (Lamentation; Fig. 7.22), the mourners’ eyes converge on the poignant figures of the dead Christ and his
CHAPTER REVIEW
The Gothic Awakening What events in medieval European society caused the “Gothic Awakening”? How did exposure to the Islamic world during the Crusades affect feudal society? Why did medieval mon- archs in France and England struggle for influence with popes and bishops? What were the consequences of the thriving commerce of this period?
The Gothic Style Who was Abbot Suger, and how did he initiate the Gothic style? In what ways did Gothic art and architecture symbolize the order of God’s universe? Explain the significance of stained glass in Gothic art. How did sculpture develop in Gothic architecture?
Music and Theater in the Gothic Age What is orga- num? How did cathedral schools shape the composition of sacred music? What is a motet? Why did medieval theater move from church to town? What were the themes and subjects of medieval drama cycles and mys- tery plays?
The New Learning What factors helped give rise to the university? Who was Peter Abelard? What teachings did medieval scholars combine to form scholasticism?
Chapter 7 ANCIENT ROME 189
1300 CE 1400 CE 1405 Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies
1303–1321 Dante, Divine Comedy
1305–1306 Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel frescoes (7.22)
1348 The Black Death
c. 1387 Geoffrey Chaucer begins The Canterbury Tales
c.1260 Nicola Pisano, pulpit (7.18)
1266 Thomas Aquinas begins Summa Theologica
Who was Thomas Aquinas, and how did he reconcile faith and reason?
Court and City in the Late Middle Ages What ideals inspired the music and poetry of the medieval court? What is the code of chivalry? Who were the trouba- dours, and what did they celebrate? Who was Guillaume de Machaut? How do Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales employ the theme of pilgrimage? How does Dante reflect the age’s philosophical and religious concerns? How does Chaucer treat the sins and failings of humankind?
The Late Gothic What events and characteristics made fourteenth century Europe turbulent? Who was Petrarch and how did he seek to synthesize the Christian and the classical? What is a humanist? Describe the artistic style called International Gothic. Who was Giotto, and what did he introduce that anticipated the Renaissance style?
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8.1 Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 1485–6. Tempera on canvas, 5 ft 8 ins × 9 ft 15⁄8 ins (1.73 × 2.79 m). Galleria degli Uffi zi, Florence, Italy. Botticelli’s depiction of Venus was one of the first large-scale depictions of classical mythology since antiquity. The newborn goddess is blown to shore by the wind god Zephyr and cloaked in a floral drape by a goddess of the seasons.
8The Renaissance in Italy K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What is the Renaissance and why did it arise in Italy? • What were the key technical innovations of Renaissance art
in Florence?
• In what ways did Leonardo da Vinci embody Machiavelli’s concept of the “universal man”?
• How does the Renaissance in Rome compare with the Renaissance in Florence?
Like the goddess Venus, blown ashore by the breath of a classical god
(Fig. 8.1), a spirit of rebirth and renewal visited Italy about 1400. The
Renaissance spirit in Italy combined a love for classical beauty and
wisdom with an innovative spirit and unfailing belief in human rea-
son and creativity. Across Italy from about 1400 to 1600, this spirit
inspired some of history’s greatest achievements in art. At their height,
Renaissance Florence and Rome rivaled classical Athens in their artistic
and intellectual genius. In this great fl owering of the human spirit, it
seemed as though Italy had been visited by the goddess of beauty.
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The Renaissance Spirit in Italy The Renaissance in Italy sprang from a vigorous inter- est in the culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans and a conviction that the achievements of classical antiq- uity were being restored in this new age. Hence the name Renaissance, which means “rebirth,” a term first applied to the period in the early nineteenth century. The Italian Renaissance was a period of spectacular advances in learning and the arts, led by artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, whose genius impressed kings and popes, leaving works of unmatched excellence. One contemporary Italian described the Renaissance as a “new age, so full of hope and promise, which already rejoices in a greater array of nobly-gifted souls than the world has seen in the thousand years that have preceded it.”
The Italian City-States The cultural revolution of the Italian Renaissance was underwritten by the wealth of Italy’s independent city- states in this period (Map 8.1). Italy had long been the conduit for commerce and travel between Europe and the East. Dominated by Venice’s navy, the Adriatic Sea provided access to the Byzantine Empire, to the wealth and learning of Turkish civilization, and to the riches of India and China. Ships from Genoa and Italy’s other western ports plied the Atlantic, bearing wool from England and other materials for the workshops in Italy.
Italy’s independent city-states were governed in various ways. Some, such as Milan and Ferrara, were ruled by hereditary nobles, while others, such as Venice and Florence, proudly declared themselves—in title at least—as republics, with governments elected by the citizens. In fact, power was tightly controlled by rul- ing elites of merchant princes—wealthy citizens who sometimes held public office but more often wielded power from behind the scenes. The most famous and prominent family of merchant princes were the Medici [MAY-dee-chee] of Florence, established by Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464). While serving as the pope’s
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Map 8.1 Renaissance Italy. The cultural achievements of the Renaissance originated in Italy’s prosperous and independent cities, which were centers of trade, manufacture, and banking.
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Renaissance Humanism In contrast to the medieval Christian view of humans as sinful and depraved, Italian Renaissance thinkers praised the human character as God’s highest creation. The Renaissance humanists combined respect for classical learning with supreme confidence in human ability. This humanism played a role in the age’s greatest achieve- ments, and is evident in the statues modeled after ancient nudes and in the translations of classical authors.
In Renaissance times, a humanist was simply a stu- dent of Greek and Roman literature, history, rhetoric, and ethics. These subjects comprised the studia humanitatis (the course that made one human). In the studia humani- tatis, scholars reconciled Christian belief with the moral teachings of the ancients. Renaissance humanists also challenged the medieval notion that the material world con- tained only temptation and evil and, instead, glorified the beauty and order in nature—as can be seen in Leonardo’s drawing of the geometric proportions of the human body (Fig. 8.2).
The definition of Renaissance humanism has now broadened to mean the age’s glorification of human pow- ers. The human capacity for knowledge and creativity made humans almost the equals of God. The Florentine humanist Pico della Mirandola [PEE-koh dell-ah meer-AHN-doh-lah] (1463–1494) exalted human freedom in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, in which God says to humanity:
We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall prefer. You shall have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. You shall have the power, out of thy soul’s judgement, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.1
Of course, such a divinely sanctioned human freedom presented both opportunity and risk. According to Pico’s God, humans could develop and apply their powers until they became like the angels. Yet humans could also fall into cruelty and corruption, if they ignored the moral teach- ings of ancient philosophy and the Church. Several promi- nent figures of the Renaissance agonized in fear that they had gone too far in glorifying the human spirit.
While Renaissance humanism did not immediately affect the lives of common people, its belief in human
K E Y C O N C E P T
reason and scholarship soon stimulated monumental changes: the Bible translations of the sixteenth-century German reformer Martin Luther depended on his humanist training in ancient languages. Humanist printers, such as Aldus Manutius of Venice, who published translations of Plato and Roman dramatists, used their printing presses to spread Renaissance ideas throughout Europe. Although its flame was lit by a handful of Italian artists and thinkers, Renaissance humanism inspired human achievement for centuries after its high point.
8.2 Leonardo da Vinci, Proportions of the Human Figure (“Vitruvian Man”). Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice. In this famous image, Leonardo plotted the human figure within a circle and square, recalling the principles of classical rationalism.
CRITICAL QUESTION How do you define human nature? How does your definition compare with Pico’s description of human nature in his Oration on the Dignity of Man?
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civic humanism (Fig. 8.3). Civic humanism derived from the republican ideals of the ancient Romans and espe- cially from the writings of Cicero. It bound Florence’s citizens to balance their pursuit of self-interest—some- thing the Medici never failed in—against their obliga- tion to the civic good. The virtuous citizen engaged in the city’s politics and employed his wealth to benefit all its citizens. The Medici family, for example, rebuilt churches, sponsored hospitals and other civic projects, and commissioned public art works. Cosimo de’ Medici subsidized an academy of Renaissance learning that attracted to Florence scholars from all over Europe. The Medici patriarch, himself a humanist scholar,
banker, Cosimo obtained a lucrative mining monopoly and went on to build a highly successful commercial empire. Perhaps out of concern for his soul, he spent half his fortune on artistic patronage and religious charity, yet his family had wealth enough to dominate Florentine politics for a century after his death.
Though economically dynamic, Renaissance Italy’s cities were often bitterly divided by political factions and plagued by war with their rivals. In 1478, a rival family tried to assassinate Lorenzo de’ Medici, Cosimo’s grandson, during Mass in Florence Cathedral. Though his brother was killed, Lorenzo evaded the assassins and saw that they were publicly hanged in the city square. Political ambition and economic competition spurred Italy’s five largest states—Florence, Milan, Venice, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples—to con- tinual war. To fight their wars, Italian city-states often employed mercenary military commanders called con- dottieri [kon-DOT-tee-air-ee], who frequently used their victories to seize power for themselves. The ruthless and mercenary strategies of the condottieri inspired the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli to write his famous trea- tise The Prince, a foundation of modern political science.
Patronage of the Arts and Learning The wealthy rulers of Italy’s cities and courts spent lav- ishly on the arts and learning. Especially in Florence, artistic patrons were guided by the Renaissance idea of
8.3 Circle of Piero della Francesca, An Ideal City, mid-15th century. Oil on panel, 23 1⁄2 × 79 ins (59.7 × 200.6 cm). Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. This view of a city, perfectly balanced and harmonious, embodies the Renaissance idea of civic humanism.
8.4 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Laurentian Library, San Lorenzo, Florence, begun 1524, staircase completed 1559. The Medici were avid antiquarians, commissioning this severely classical library by Michelangelo to house their collection of ancient manuscripts. Michelangelo’s staircase and vestibule employ a classical vocabulary in an arbitrary and illusionistic design—staircases leading nowhere, columns supporting nothing—that anticipates Renaissance mannerism.
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Lorenzo’s civic obligations did not distract him from the arts. He loved music and wrote bawdy lyrics to be sung in the street or the saddle. Following Dante’s lead, Lorenzo composed in his native Tuscan language, not in the stuffy Latin of scholars. His hedonistic carnival songs were sung at Florence’s raucous carnival cel- ebrations. They capture the pagan spirit of Florentine life, caught up with the sensual pleasures of love and festivity.
Ladies and gay lovers young!
Long live Bacchus, live Desire!
Dance and play; let songs be sung;
Let sweet love your bosoms fire;
In the future come what may!
Youths and maids, enjoy today!
Nought ye know about tomorrow.
Fair is youth and void of sorrow;
But it hourly flies away.2
LORENZO DE’ MEDICI
Song of Bacchus
Lorenzo became the patron and protector of the most prominent artists and intellectuals of the early Renaissance. As youths, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who was discovered by Lorenzo copy- ing a Roman statue in his gardens, may have dined at the family table. Lorenzo also saw that the painter
collected a famous treasury of ancient books and manu- scripts (Fig. 8.4). In 1453, the Medici collection swelled with Greek manuscripts brought by scholars fleeing the Turkish occupation of Constantinople.
The flowering of arts in the Renaissance grew from a flexible system of patronage by which wealthy families and individuals employed artists. A Renaissance patron normally engaged an artist through a written contract that outlined the work’s specifications and a schedule of payments. The wealthiest patrons might maintain an artist at their court, expecting the performance of certain duties, such as supervising building projects or directing a choir. Though women were generally dis- couraged from artistic professions, with wealth and high birth they did at least become avid patrons. The courts of Lucrezia Borgia and Isabella d’Este (see Key Concept, page 212), for example, were famed for their glittering musical culture. The Renaissance system of patronage sometimes brought troubled relations between artists and their patrons. In his Lives of the Painters (1550), the biographer Giorgio Vasari told of a painter who was locked in a room to finish a com- mission. The recalcitrant artist escaped through the window to spend three days in Florence’s taverns and brothels. In another example, Pope Julius II, impatient with Michelangelo’s progress on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, once threatened to throw the artist off his scaf- folding. Michelangelo replied quietly but forcefully, “I think not, my lord.”
In Florence, the high point of the Renaissance came with the reign of Lorenzo de’ Medici (ruled 1469–1492) (Fig. 8.5), called “the Magnificent,” who not only patronized the arts but was himself an accomplished poet. He was tutored by the classical scholar Marsilio Ficino [fi-CHEE-noh] (1433–1499), the age’s leading translator of Plato. Lorenzo later said that, without knowing Plato, one could not be a good citizen or a good Christian. When, at age 21, Lorenzo was asked to assume political leadership of the city, he responded to his duty with the commitment of a good civic humanist.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Do private citizens of today’s cities have an obligation to support civic projects and public works of art? Does the government have an obligation to support the arts? If so, what policies should be put in place? If not, why not?
8.5 Andrea del Verrocchio, Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1478⁄1521. Terracotta, 25 7⁄8 × 23 7⁄8 ins (65.8 × 59.1 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Lorenzo de’ Medici, grandson of Cosimo, presided over the late bloom of Renaissance culture in Florence. Verrocchio, a favorite of the Medici, was the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci.
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Florence 1401: A Renaissance Begins One might well say the Renaissance began in Florence in 1401. In that year, city officials declared a competi- tion to decorate a new set of doors for the Baptistery. The eight-sided Baptistery, Florence’s oldest and most revered religious building, stood facing the city’s cathe- dral. The new doors’ gilded bronze panels would match a set installed in 1336. The 1401 competition commanded Florence’s artists to submit competition panels depicting Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac (Genesis 22). The winner was a 21-year-old Florentine goldsmith named Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455), whose illustrious career would be devoted largely to the Baptistery commission. In his competition panel, Ghiberti [gee-BAIR-tee] had rendered a nude Isaac on the altar that seemed to be borrowed from antiquity itself—an embodiment of humanism and an echo of ancient Rome.
Over the next 50 years, all of Florence watched Ghiberti’s progress as he cast panels for both the north and east doors (Fig. 8.7). The Baptistery doors proved to be a fitting challenge to the Renaissance master, since the creative process involved so many different arts: skill in drawing and architectural design to compose the scenes; sculptural technique to shape the wax models for the figures; and finally, expertise in metalworking to supervise the meticulous casting, finishing, and gild- ing of the panels themselves. Thus, Ghiberti’s doors became a catalogue of the evolving Renaissance style in the arts. Later, the young Michelangelo so admired the master’s accomplishment that he dubbed the east doors the “Gates of Paradise,” a name they still bear.
The panel of The Creation of Adam and Eve (Fig. 8.8) from the Gates of Paradise indicates Ghiberti’s mastery of sculptural storytelling. The panel tells the story’s different episodes (Genesis 2:4–3:24) in a fluid and unified narrative. At lower left, in high relief, God lifts Adam to life under the gaze of heaven’s host. At center God calls a nude Eve into glorious being. At lower right, expelled from paradise, Eve twists her form in anguish, looking back toward the angel of God. In other panels on the east doors, Ghiberti applied the new rules of optical perspective (see Key Concept box, page 202) to create unified architectural settings for his action. Ghiberti’s innovations would reappear in the works of later Renaissance masters—for example, in Raphael’s School of Athens (see Fig. 8.26)—who stud- ied his doors and visited his workshop.
Botticelli and the sculptor Verrocchio received gener- ous commissions for their work. When the scholar Pico della Mirandola was tried for heresy in Rome, Lorenzo invited him to Florence and protected him from the pope. The golden age of the Florentine Renaissance came to an end, however, with the decline of the Medici fortune and the death of Lorenzo in 1492.
The Arts in Early Renaissance Italy Towering above Florence was a symbol of Renaissance humanism, the marble-ribbed dome of the Cathedral, designed by the young architect Filippo Brunelleschi (Fig. 8.6). The dome acted as a beacon to artists and scholars. Young artist prodigies such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti came to apprentice in Florence’s workshops and academies, while some of Europe’s leading composers served in its courts.
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
The Violence of Renaissance Youth Swordplay and other violence were common in the rough-and-tumble urban life of Renaissance Italy. In his autobiography, the Florentine goldsmith and sculp- tor Benvenuto Cellini [tcheh-LEE-nee] (1500–1571) describes this duel between his 14-year-old brother and an older rival in the streets of Florence.
They both had swords; and my brother dealt so valiantly that, after having badly wounded him, he was upon the point of following up his advantage. There was a great crowd of people present, among whom were many of the adversary’s kinsfolk. Seeing that the thing was going ill for their own man, they put hand to their slings, a stone from one of which hit my poor brother in the head. He fell to the ground at once in a dead faint …I ran up at once, seized his sword, and stood in front of him, bearing the brunt of several rapiers and a shower of stones. I never left his side until some brave soldiers came from the gate San Gallo and rescued me from the raging crowd.…3
BENVENUTO CELLINI The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1558–1562)
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8.7 Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise, east doors of the Cathedral Baptistery, Florence, 1425–52. Gilt bronze, height 17 ft (5.2 m). Ghiberti’s north and east doors for the Florence Baptistery were touchstone works of the early Renaissance; the project of designing and casting the doors occupied Ghiberti for nearly his entire career.
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8.6 Florence Cathedral (Santa Maria del Fiore), begun 1296. Dome by Filippo Brunelleschi, 1420–36; façade remodeled late 19th century. Overall length 508 ft (154.9 m), height of dome 367 ft (111.9 m). The soaring cathedral dome by Brunelleschi, completed in 1436, became the city’s trademark. The campanile (bell tower) was designed by Giotto in the previous century. The octagonal roof of the Baptistery is visible at center right.
8.8 Lorenzo Ghiberti, Creation of Adam and Eve, panel from the Gates of Paradise, Cathedral Baptistery, Florence, 1425–52. Gilt bronze, 31 1⁄4 ins (79 cm) square. Ghiberti’s panels varied the degree of relief from high to low, to enhance the visual impression of three-dimensional space.
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Brunelleschi built the Pazzi Chapel in the courtyard of a Florentine monastery. Both inside and out, the build- ing’s dimensions were multiples of a basic module, creating a mathematical regularity reinforced by the recurring geometric shapes (especially the circle and square). Inside the Pazzi Chapel the dramatic use of gray stone (called pietra serena) lends a peaceful sim- plicity to the pilasters and arches (Fig. 8.10).
Brunelleschi’s Dome The losing finalist in the Baptistery competition was the aspiring young Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), who would become Florence’s greatest Renaissance architect. Rather than mourn his defeat, Brunelleschi [BROO-neh-LESK-ee] went to Rome to sketch and measure ancient buildings. He returned to Florence and received the commission to build a domed roof over Florence’s cathedral altar (see Fig. 8.6). For years, the cathedral’s massive drum had been uncovered because no architect knew how to span such a wide space.
Brunelleschi’s solution produced a building that truly appealed to Florence’s civic vanity. The design was a double roof, with inner and outer shells connected by a hidden system of buttresses and reinforcement (Fig. 8.9). The double shell was unlike anything built in antiquity. With its crowning lantern, the finished dome rose 367 feet (112 m) above the floor, inspiring one observer to say that it seemed to rival the hills surround- ing Florence. The soaring red-tiled roof was outlined by swelling marble ribs, with each section underscored by a round clerestory window (see Fig. 8.6). The visual effect was a triumph of simplicity and reason.
The cathedral commission established Brunelleschi’s reputation as an architect, and he soon set to work serving the wealthy families of Florence. For the power- ful Pazzi [POT-zee] family, rival of the ruling Medici,
8.9 Brunelleschi’s double-shell design for the dome of Florence Cathedral. Brunelleschi’s dome embodied the humanism of the Italian Renaissance—a respect for classical models mixed with a celebration of human ingenuity. A system of internal braces connected the outer roof and interior ceiling, supporting the dome without the elaborate buttressing of Gothic design.
View the Closer Look at Brunelleschi’s dome on myartslab.com
8.10 Filippo Brunelleschi, interior of the Pazzi Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence, c. 1429–33. The use of pietra serena emphasizes the geometric shapes and proportions of the chapel’s interior. The recurring pilasters, and the continuous frieze and molding, all unify the interior space.
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The grace and piety of their chapel did not extend to the characters of the Pazzi family themselves. In 1478, the Pazzi tried to assassinate Lorenzo de’ Medici in the cathedral on Easter Sunday. Lorenzo survived, and 12 Pazzi conspirators were hanged.
Florentine Painting: A Refined Classicism Early Renaissance Florence was justifiably famous for its painters, whose techniques established a striking new visual style in the arts. To satisfy their patrons’ demands, Florentine artists were trained in anatomy (to create life-like figures), modeling (to suggest volume in round objects), and perspective (to organize and unify the pic- torial space). The Florentine painters were especially known for their technique in fresco, suited to decorating the walls of Florence’s new churches and chapels.
The most influential innovator was Tommaso di Giovanni, known as Masaccio [mah-ZAHH-chee-oh] (1401–28), whose mastery of perspective and three- dimensional modeling affected every artist who trained in Florence. Masaccio quickly applied the new system of linear perspective. His Holy Trinity (Fig. 8.11) encloses the crucifixion of Christ in a barrel-vaulted architec- tural setting. The patron and his wife kneel in realistic space before the opening, while the Virgin and John are seen from below, in foreshortened perspective. Above the figure of God the Father, painted piers and vaulting render a perfectly believable architectural space.
With his life-like modeling of human figures and their clothing, Masaccio advanced Italian painting beyond the threshold set by Giotto. Figures in the central group in The Tribute Money (Fig. 8.12) are given solidity and depth by the light and dark shading in their robes, a technique called chiaroscuro [KYAH-ruh-SKOO-roh]. Chiaroscuro enabled Italian painters to render three- dimensional objects by the convincing use of shadow. The painting’s illusion of depth is enhanced by blurring the distant hills and trees, a technique called atmospheric perspective, which Masaccio invented. Finally, the impression of space is reinforced by linear perspective in the building at right. Masaccio’s paintings in the Brancacci [brahn-KAH-chee] Chapel served as a “school of art” for future geniuses of Renaissance painting.
Florentine painting took on a more learned and refined aspect in the works of Sandro Botticelli [BAH- ti-CHELL-ee] (1444–1510), a member of the Medici circle. The goddess in his Birth of Venus (see Fig. 8.1) was modeled after a statue in the Medici collec- tion. Botticelli was also likely inspired by classical
8.11 Masaccio, Holy Trinity, 1425. Fresco (now detached from wall), 21 ft 9 ins × 9 ft 4 ins (6.67 × 3.17 m). Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Masaccio sets the crucifixion in a barrel-vaulted niche that applies linear perspective with such mathematical precision that it could be built exactly as drawn. Compare the architectural setting of Raphael’s School of Athens, Fig. 8.26.
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8.12 Masaccio, The Tribute Money, c. 1427. Fresco (after restoration, 1989), 8 ft 4 ins × 19 ft 8 ins (2.54 × 5.9 m). Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Masaccio’s frescoes in this Florentine chapel pioneered the techniques of Renaissance painting. As recounted in Matthew 17:24–7, a tax collector demands a tax from Christ and his apostles (center); at Christ’s direction, Peter finds a coin in a fish’s mouth (left); Peter then pays the tax, rendering “unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” (right).
8.13 Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera (Birth of Spring), c. 1478. Tempera on panel, 6 ft 8 ins × 10 ft 4 ins (2.03 × 3.14 m). Uffi zi, Florence. Botticelli synthesizes his classical subject with Christian and contemporary themes. The painting’s symbolic references include the orange fruits (an allusion to the Medici family crest), the bed of flowers (for the city of Florence), and Venus’ red and blue garments, which associate her with the Virgin Mary.
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descriptions of a painting by Apelles, the ancient Greek master, depicting “Aphrodite rising from the sea.”
In his La Primavera (Birth of Spring) (Fig. 8.13), Botticelli blended classical mythology with Christian symbols in a visual document of Renaissance human- ism. Though the painting’s precise meaning is disputed, scholars agree that the central figure is Venus, the clas- sical goddess of love and fertility, who raises her hand in benediction over the scene. Both this gesture and the color of her robe associate Venus with the Virgin Mary, the Christian embodiment of maternal love. On the right, Zephyr, the god of wind, pursues a nymph who is miraculously transformed into Flora, goddess of the flowers. In the foreground, the classical Three Graces celebrate spring’s arrival in filmy garments; to the far left stands the god Mercury and above the imp- ish Cupid prepares to shoot his arrow into the scene.
Italian Renaissance Music Renaissance Italy trained its own painters, but for music, the peninsula’s rich patrons looked beyond the Alps to musicians schooled in northern Europe. Working in Italy’s courts and cities, French and Flemish composers married their skill in polyphonic textures to the lyrical Italian language, and a vibrant new musical style was born.
One important transitional figure in this musical syn- thesis was Guillaume Dufay (c. 1398–1474), a French native who served various Italian patrons, as well as the glittering court of Burgundy in France. Dufay [doo- FAY-ee] synthesized the Ars Nova style (see page 182) with the varied textures of Renaissance music. His most famous work was an isorhythmic motet entitled Nuper rosarum flores (Recently Roses Blossomed) sung at the dedication of Florence’s cathedral in 1436.
Renaissance composers such as Dufay continued to compose liturgical music—sacred Masses and motets— and traditional secular song. But in Italy, music was increasingly exposed to humanist ideas, in the belief that music, like the other arts, should imitate the ancients. Following the musical theories of Plato, Aristotle, and Boethius, musical scholars advocated a closer link between music and poetry. While serving Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, for example, the well-traveled Flemish composer Heinrich Isaac (c. 1450–1517) set to music more than 100 Italian songs. Isaac’s most famous work is a German love song entitled In Innsbruck muss ich dich lassen (In Innsbruck I must leave you).
Renaissance Italy’s appetite for music made it Europe’s most important center of musical innovation
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The Science of Perspective The Renaissance’s greatest advance in the pictorial arts was the invention of perspective—a pictorial tech- nique for representing a two-dimensional scene so that it appears to be three-dimensional. As Masaccio showed in his Tribute Money (see Fig. 8.12), painted objects could be shaded to create the illusion of volume, or slightly blurred to create the illusion of distance. Painters achieved the most dramatic illusion of depth with linear perspective, in which a picture’s straight lines all converge toward a vanishing point.
Although Brunelleschi probably invented linear perspective, it was his colleague Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) who codified linear perspective’s elaborate rules. In the treatise On Painting (1435), Alberti detailed a system for projecting a pictorial scene onto a grid of perspective lines. Perspective involved one or two van- ishing points for lines perpendicular to the canvas, and additional points on either side at which oblique lines seemed to converge. Perugino’s Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter (1482) is a perfect application of Alberti’s direction (Fig. 8.14, Fig. 8.15). A courtyard laid out on converging perspective lines defines a pictorial space of perfect symmetry and order, anchored by the trium- phal arches and the central church. In the foreground, Christ hands to Peter the key symbolizing the founda- tion of the Christian Church. The diagrammatic per- spective underscores the painting’s dramatic moment: our eye is drawn upward from the key into the church’s central door, which contains the picture’s vanishing point.
In an age when artists were also engineers and math- ematicians, perspective offered a scientific way of map- ping and mastering the world. Its principles echoed the ancient Greeks’ belief that mathematical values were the foundation of the universe. It established the indi- vidual’s mind and eye as the origin of knowledge and perception. Renaissance perspective was, in sum, the visual equivalent of Renaissance humanism, confirm- ing both the wisdom of the ancients and the glory of human intelligence.
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8.14 Pietro Perugino, Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter, 1482. Fresco, 11 ft 51⁄2 ins × 18 ft 8 1⁄2 ins (3.5 × 5.7 m). Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome.
8.15 Perspective lines of Perugino’s Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter.
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in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One popular song form was the frottola (pl. frottole), which flour- ished under the patronage of Isabella d’Este of Mantua (see page 212). The frottola [FROTT-oh-lah]—a ballad-like song with refrain—was usually composed in four parts, or voices. But the parts were usually based on a few musical chords, allowing them to be sung in solo or duet, accompanied by a lute.
It was the madrigal, however, that defined Renaissance Italy’s national style and provided Italy with its first great musical export since plainchant. The Renaissance madrigal was a song set in four parts, each performed by one singer (in effect, a work of vocal chamber music). Its text was usually a poem of high literary value (such as a Petrarchan sonnet) and hence the madrigal was “through-composed,” meaning it had no repeating stanzas or refrains. The madrigal’s devel- opment was propelled by an enthusiasm for the poet Petrarch. Petrarch’s love poems, with their seriousness and verbal musicality, supported adventurous musical effects, especially word painting—the musical depiction of the text’s meaning. With word painting, for exam- ple, a Petrarchan line that complained, “O my jarring thoughts,” was set in dissonant harmony to reflect the speaker’s dissonant thoughts.
The madrigal’s expressive power made it hugely popular among Italy’s cultivated elites, affecting both musical performance and musical publishing. At the court of Ferrara, a famous “ladies’ consort” of four female singers developed a virtuoso performance style well suited to the madrigal. Ferrara’s famed ensemble inspired composers across Europe, who dedicated their madrigals to the Duchess of Ferrara, hoping that their works “might receive the true and natural spirit of music from such divine voices and such a noble con- sort.”4 Italy’s new commercial printers, especially in Venice, exploited the popularity of Renaissance song by publishing books of frottole and madrigals, advertising them as “suitable compositions for all occasions and situations of amorous and courtly life.”
The first woman to publish her music, Maddalena Casulana (c. 1540–c. 1590), eventually published a series of three books of madrigals, the first one being reprinted three times in her lifetime. Maddalena knew well how to earn the favor of her patrons. In a dedica- tion to Isabella de’ Medici, duchess of Bracciano, she hopes that her compositions would “show the world (for all that has been granted to me in this profession of music) the vain error of men” who believe themselves the sole “possessors of the high arts of the intellect.”5
8.16 Donatello, David, c. 1430–2. Bronze, height 5 ft 2 1⁄4 ins (1.58 m). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. With this graceful youth, Donatello revived the classical tradition of nude statuary in bronze. The young hero’s Tuscan hat gives a Florentine accent to the biblical theme.
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turmoil in Florence shifted the center of Renaissance culture to Rome.
The dominant figure in early Renaissance sculpture was Donatello (1386–1466), who virtually reinvented the freestanding nude in the classical style. Donatello assisted Ghiberti on the Baptistery doors of Florence cathedral and accompanied Brunelleschi on his trips to Rome to study antique sculpture and building. Donatello left an imposing legacy of stone and bronze statuary— works that decorate Florence’s cathedral and palaces.
Donatello’s revival of antique sculpture is most strik- ing in his David (Fig. 8.16). This statue was the first life-size, freestanding bronze nude since classical times.
Early Renaissance Sculpture By the 1490s, the century-long ascendancy of Renaissance Florence was threatened by decline. Lorenzo de’ Medici’s neglect of family finances threat- ened the Medici’s hold on political power, and the incompetence of Lorenzo’s successor exposed Florence to its political enemies and to popular challenge within. The political turmoil of these years actually served as a stimulus to the city’s sculptors. Renaissance sculpture achieved a new heroic power portrayed in the works of Donatello and the young Michelangelo. Eventually, however, the decline of the Medici family and civic
8.17 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietà, 1498–9. Marble, height 5 ft 9 ins (1.75 m). St. Peter’s, Rome. Consider the emotional impact achieved by Michelangelo’s distortion of the figures’ relative scale: the adult body of Jesus cradled in Mary’s gigantic lap. How might a more realistic scale be less affecting to the viewer?
View the Closer Look at Michelangelo’s Peità on myartslab.com
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Donatello’s David stands with one foot on Goliath’s head, clad in boots and a Tuscan hat. Although the theme is biblical, the sculptor’s treatment is entirely pagan. He adopted the S-shaped pose of classical Greek statuary, but not its treatment of anatomy. The adoles- cent lines of David’s torso could be described as lyrical, almost sweet. The contrast between the youth’s extrav- agant hat and Goliath’s burly head emphasizes David’s boyishness rather than his heroic strength.
By the age of 22, Michelangelo Buonarroti [BWAH- na-RAH-tee] (1475–1564) had already established him- self as a rival to Donatello. In the late 1490s, Michelangelo was called to Rome, where he executed a work every bit as lyrical as Donatello’s David. Michelangelo’s Pietà (Fig. 8.17) was a graceful interpretation of the Virgin mourning the dead Christ. The Madonna’s face is like that of a maiden’s, its purified beauty unmarked by age or grief. Yet, from this delicate apex, the Madonna’s form broadens into a massive pedestal for the body of Christ. Slumped in the cascading drapery of his mother’s garment, Christ’s nudity becomes an emblem of suffer- ing and grief. In the Pietà Michelangelo makes artistic technique serve the pathos of his subject, as Giotto had done in his earlier fresco version (see Fig. 7.22). With this statue, the young Michelangelo announced his own extraordinary talent and ambition, and a new heroic scale in Renaissance art.
Michelangelo’s heroic aspirations were first real- ized in his statue of David (Fig. 8.18), a statement of the sculptor’s—and his city’s—audacious confidence. Florence’s city fathers had lured Michelangelo back from Rome with the opportunity to carve, from a giant block of marble, a male statue for Florence Cathedral. Michelangelo chose to create a David that combined classical values with a biblical subject. The slayer of Goliath is portrayed in the style of a Greek god, who looks defiantly over the countryside in search of his enemy. The muscled torso of the naked figure suggests monumental energy, while the right hand is calm as it loosely grasps a stone. The combination of energy and control recalls the balance of classical sculpture, yet what distinguishes Michelangelo’s statue is the
8.18 Michelangelo Buonarroti, David, 1501–4. Marble, height 18 ft (5.49 m). Accademia, Florence. Compare Michelangelo’s heroic Renaissance nude to the heroic nudes of ancient Greece. Note the similarities and differences in subject, style, material, and treatment of the figure.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT What inner qualities of character was Michelangelo trying to express in the idealized physical form of his statue of David? What was the message of the scale of the piece?
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heroic force that exceeds the classical rules of mea- sure and moderation. It also expressed Michelangelo’s confidence in the Florentine republic, restored after the Medici’s fall in 1494. When the stupendous figure was unveiled, the Florentines chose to place it in the city square, next to Donatello’s statue of the Hebrew heroine Judith. Donatello’s work bore the inscription, “Kingdoms fall through luxury, cities rise through vir- tues; behold the neck of pride severed by humility.” Donatello’s and Michelangelo’s defiant works of art were intended as talismans against tyranny.
The Decline of Florence The end of the fifteenth century saw a decline in Florence’s status as a center of innovation in the Renaissance. The voice of this decline belonged to the fiery monk Savonarola (1452–1498), whose apocalyp- tic sermons made him virtual dictator of the city for four years (1494–1498). Savonarola [sah-VAH-nah-ROLL- ah] condemned the pleasure-seeking paganism of Florentine Renaissance culture. As proof of Florentine sinfulness, he cited a popular melody in praise of the Virgin Mary, entitled “Queen of Heaven.” The same tune, Savonarola complained, served as a love song to the “Queen of my heart.” With his puritanical message, Savonarola rose to power in the vacuum created by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in 1492.
In 1497, Savonarola’s supporters created a great “bonfire of the vanities” in Florence’s town square, and piled the fire high with dice, playing cards, cosmet- ics, indecent books and pictures, and other evidence of Florence’s sinful luxury. However, just one year later, Savonarola was defeated by his rivals and was burned at the stake as a heretic near the site of his “bonfire.”
While wealthy Florentines reverted to their lavish gaiety, Savonarola’s message was not entirely forgotten. This message affected the age’s greatest figures, includ- ing Botticelli, who destroyed the nude paintings in his workshop and afterward painted only religious themes, and Michelangelo, who 40 years later, while working on a scene of the Last Judgment, said he could still hear Savonarola’s condemnations ringing in his ears.
Renaissance Genius Just as the civic humanists predicted, the dynamic urban life of Renaissance Florence encouraged genius to flourish. Two figures unique in their achievements were the artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and the political historian Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). In
his masterpiece of worldly political theory, The Prince, Machiavelli coldly articulated the rules by which Renaissance Italians practiced politics, hoping he might aid his countrymen in combating tyranny. Leonardo pursued idiosyncratic and groundbreaking ideas in the arts, science, engineering, and mathematics that made him a paragon of Renaissance grace and intelligence.
Machiavelli and Humanist Politics Renaissance Italy was a viper’s nest of political intrigue and cynicism, apparently unguided by prin- ciples of Christian or classical virtue. The one observer who grasped the logic of Italy’s history was Niccolò Machiavelli [MAH-kee-ah-VELL-ee], a Florentine dip- lomat who described the harsh realities of power in Italy in his masterpiece of political philosophy entitled The Prince (1513). The Prince was the first attempt in the Christian era to analyze politics from an entirely secular viewpoint. Like the classical Greek philosopher Plato in The Republic, Machiavelli reflected on his age’s politics in the hope of saving a declining form of government. Where Plato was an idealist of political philosophy, however, Machiavelli was a realist.
Machiavelli was an active Florentine diplomat for 14 years, until he was dismissed from his diplomatic post in 1512, when the Medici returned to power. Writing (as Dante had) in exile from his native Florence, Machiavelli coldly analyzed the motives and methods of political power. In The Prince he describes the ideal “prince,” or ruler, of an Italian city-state, modeled on the cruel Cesare Borgia, illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, who plotted with his father to unify Italy under his control. Though Borgia’s plans were foiled, Machiavelli urged Italian rulers to be equally ruthless in seizing and preserving power. A ruler should model himself after the fox and the lion, he wrote: “One must be a fox in avoiding traps and a lion in frighten- ing wolves.”6 He believed that only strong rulers could keep Italy’s city-states free from foreign domination. Such ruthless politics earned Machiavelli a reputation for cold-heartedness, and he was condemned for coun- seling ambition, cruelty, and deceit in the pursuit of political aims. This trait has carried over in the term “Machiavellian,” which describes a person believed to be unscrupulously pursuing political gain at any cost. Yet Machiavelli demonstrated a humanist conception of political behavior. Politics embodied rational action in a world where humans were responsible for their behavior—a concept in keeping with the time, and guided by the classical authors.
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Leonardo da Vinci The most diverse and enigmatic talent of the Renaissance was Leonardo da Vinci [da VEEN-chee], whose genius fascinated his contemporaries as much as it does us today. Trained as a painter and sculptor in Florence, Leonardo abandoned that vibrant city to seek new interests. He served the Duke of Milan as a designer of fortifications and water projects and ended his life in service to the King of France. Never loyal to one city or patron, Leonardo was consumed by an insa- tiable appetite for knowledge about the world. In his notebooks, projects, and paintings, he demonstrated an understanding of the world that still amazes. Western civilization has probably never known a greater or more restless intelligence.
Leonardo filled the pages of his Notebooks (Fig. 8.19) with thousands of sketches and designs that attest to his keen insight. He was fascinated with the natural world in all its aspects. His notebooks contain sketches and written descriptions of such things as the movements of water, and of the fetus in the womb, the motion of birds in flight, and the circulation of blood. His fascination with the human body and his interest in
Machiavelli’s analysis of power can still throw light on the actions of politicians today. In advising rulers on the use of cruelty, Machiavelli wrote:
I believe that this depends on whether cruelty is used
well or ill. It may be said to be well used (if we may
speak of using well a thing in itself bad) when all cruel
deeds are committed at once in order to make sure of the
state and thereafter discontinued to make way for the
consideration of the welfare of the subjects. Bad use of
cruelty we find in those cases where the cruel acts, though
few to begin with, become more numerous with time.
Those who practice the first kind may find some defense
for their state in the eyes of God and man, but, as for the
second class, it is impossible for them to stay in power.
Whence it is to be noted that a prince occupying a new
state should see to it that he commit all his acts of cruelty
at once so as not to be obliged to return to them every
day, and thus, by abstaining from repeating them, he will
be able to make men feel secure and can win them over
by benefits.7
MACHIAVELLI
From The Prince (1513)
But Machiavelli acknowledged that fortune, more than political calculation, determined one’s political fate, writing that “men will prosper so long as they are in tune with the times and will fail when they are not.” Judged by his own standard, Machiavelli was unfor- tunate. When Florence’s republic fell in 1512, he was tortured briefly and exiled. He could not please either of Florence’s rival factions. His service to the republic made him suspicious to the Medici family, while his overtures to the Medicis tainted him in the republicans’ eyes. Machiavelli died in 1527, a few months before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s troops sacked Rome, realizing Machiavelli’s worst fears about foreign domination of Italian politics. As Machiavelli wrote: “In the actions of all men, and especially princes, where there is no court of appeal, the end is all that counts.”
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Under what circumstances do you believe that the end would be so compelling that it would justify any means of achieving it?
8.19 Page from Leonardo’s Notebooks, 1510. Pen and ink. Royal Collection, Windsor, © 2000 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Leonardo’s interests in anatomy, mechanics, engineering, and botany were not uncommon for a Renaissance artist, who was expected to be able to design a hoist as readily as to paint a portrait.
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the mathematics of nature are represented in a famous drawing of how the proportions of the human figure generate the perfect geometry of the circle and square (see Fig. 8.2). “Let no one read this book who does not know mathematics,” he wrote in his Treatise on Painting.
Believing that machines were more reliable than men, Leonardo designed countless devices that were ahead of his time. His notebooks outline versions of such modern technology as the tank, submarine, and airplane. Mechanically, Leonardo’s machines were perfectly designed, though they lacked a means of propulsion. Yet, in his lifetime, most of Leonardo’s
designs remained unrealized—Leonardo was himself more interested in the theoretical solution of a problem than the full-fledged execution of an idea. His scien- tific insights, which might have revolutionized anatomy and mechanics, remained locked in his unpublished notebooks.
Leonardo’s mastery of drawing and pictorial mood ranks him as one of the greatest painters ever to live. In his Madonna of the Rocks (Fig. 8.21), for example, Leonardo captured a graceful beauty reminiscent of Botticelli’s Birth of Spring (see Fig. 8.13). Leonardo sur- passed his predecessor in the complexity of foreground and background and the deeply symbolic effects of light and dark. The foreground group of the Madonna
G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
Great Zimbabwe The vestiges of Roman architecture and sculpture that surrounded Renaissance Italians were indisputable evi- dence of ancient Rome’s greatness. However, when modern explorers first discovered the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, in southeast Africa, human memory of this noble civilization had evaporated. Europeans doubted that Africans could have built such imposing structures. Eventually, archaeologists confirmed that Great Zimbabwe was a great kingdom that traded its natural wealth for costly Arabian and Chinese goods.
The complex at Great Zimbabwe (from a word mean- ing “house or court of the king”) was a royal center, resi- dence of a sacred ruler, where other chieftains gathered for assemblies. It included outlying living quarters for the king’s wives and courtiers. At the center was the Great Enclosure or Elliptical Building, surrounded by an outer wall more than 30 feet (9 m) high, containing some 900,000 granite blocks (Fig. 8.20). The Great Enclosure probably served a ceremonial purpose, possibly as a site for initia- tion rites for marriage-age boys and girls. One feature is a conical tower that may have represented a granary, symbol of royal and perhaps male power. Yet more distinctive are
several soapstone sculptures of seated birds, mounted on pillars, that resemble nothing else known in Africa.
The civilization of Great Zimbabwe reached its height after 1200, supplying gold, copper, and iron to traders in nearby ports on the Indian Ocean. The king of Zimbabwe probably commanded a realm of some 100 stone-walled towns. The kingdom’s natural bounty allowed them to pur- chase fine Chinese pottery, glass beads, textiles, and other fine goods for royal consumption. The region’s decline probably came from failing agriculture, and the stone- walled centers were abandoned around 1450.
8.20 Great Enclosure wall and conical tower, Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, c. 1470. The Great Enclosure was probably the residence of Zimbabwe’s great chief and may also have been used in ceremonial rites of initiation. Nearby are smaller stone-walled enclosures where wives and visiting chiefs likely resided.
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includes the infant John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, an angel, and the Christ Child. The group forms a solidly classical triangle, a favorite compositional technique of the Renaissance. The gestures of praying, pointing, and benediction unify the group psychologically. Behind the central group, through an arch of rocks, a mysterious landscape opens into an infinity of time and distance. Across the whole picture is a hazy aura created by the use of sfumato [sfoo-MAH-toh], a shading technique in which outlines are slightly blurred. Sfumato, also used to supreme effect in the Mona Lisa (Fig. 8.22), imitated
8.21 Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Rocks, c. 1485. Oil on panel, 6 ft 3 ins × 3 ft 7 ins (1.91 × 1.09 m). Louvre, Paris. Compare the mood created by Leonardo’s mystical landscape— the grotto and the distant river—to Raphael’s architectural background in the School of Athens (Fig. 8.26). How is each setting well-matched to the painting’s theme?
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the effects of human vision, and was Leonardo’s own variation on the chiaroscuro technique developed by Masaccio and other early Renaissance masters.
Leonardo defended painting as the highest art and claimed that painting permitted unlimited range to the artist’s imagination. “If the painter wishes to see enchanting beauties,” or “from high mountain tops he wants to survey vast stretches of country,” Leonardo wrote, the painter “has the power to create all this.” Indeed, he concluded, “whatever exists in the universe, whether in essence, in act, or in the imagination, the painter has first in his mind and then in his hands.”8
The High Renaissance in Rome While the Italian Renaissance blossomed in Florence, the age bore its greatest fruit in the city of Rome. Rome had long been famed for its dedication to high living and fine art. About 1500, it witnessed an outburst of artistic creation that transformed the city. The period known as the High Renaissance saw the masterful application of techniques and ideas developed in Florence. The achievements of Raphael and Michelangelo in paint- ing, Josquin des Préz in music, and Leonardo da Vinci in several arts, make this an unsurpassed age of heroic genius. The center of activity of the High Renaissance was Rome, but it also spread to other cultural centers of Europe (Fig. 8.23).
Josquin des Préz In his papacy (1513–1521), Leo X liked to meditate in the Sistine Chapel while his choir filled the hall with
8.22 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503–5. Oil on panel, 30 × 20 ins (76 × 53 cm). Louvre, Paris. The sitter’s bemused calm contrasts to the spectacular landscape, with its craggy peaks and misty rivers. Leonardo’s skill in portraiture made him the most sought-after painter of his age, even though he completed only a handful of pictures in his long career.
8.23 Hans Burgmair, Maximilian with His Musicians, illustration from Der Weisskönig, 16th century. Woodcut. Renaissance musicians migrated to the courts of patrons such as Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor. Among the instruments shown here are early versions of the harp, organ, trombone, flute, and viola.
View the Closer Look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa on myartslab.com
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To many of his contemporaries, Leonardo embodied the ideal of the Renaissance courtier: witty, handsome, learned, and skillful in many arts. Leonardo could have been the model for the ideal gentleman described in The Book of the Courtier (1528) by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529). Castiglione [kass-TEE-lee-OH-nay] defined the Renaissance ideal of the uomo universale (universal man) skilled in the arts and sciences valued by the Renaissance. The uomo universale [WO-mo oon-ee-ver-SALL-ay] had to be adept at soldiering and riding, well-bred, and handsome. He should be able to dance, read music, quote ancient authors, and woo a lover. And the Renaissance man had to do all this with a carefree disdain that Castiglione called sprezzatura [sprets-a-TOOR-a].
While Castiglione’s courtiers agreed about the quali- ties of a Renaissance man, they disputed those of a Renaissance woman. One speaker passionately claimed that women could match the perfection of the Renaissance man, that women “do not wish to become men in order to make themselves more perfect but to gain their freedom and shake off the tyranny that men have imposed on them by their one-sided authority.”9 The woman who best real- ized this Renaissance ideal of courtliness and indepen- dence was Isabella d’Este [DESS-tay] (1474–1539) (Fig. 8.24). Isabella had the education, family connections, and refined tastes of a Renaissance aristocrat. By the age of 14 she was an accomplished dancer, had studied Virgil, and had seen the dramas of Plautus and Terence performed in her father’s court. As duchess of Urbino, Isabella was an enthusiastic patron of the arts, especially music. She also proved herself an able political manager, much to her hus- band’s discomfort—after six years as a political prisoner, the duke returned to find his city running a bit too well under the rule of a woman.
The Renaissance “universal person” embodied the clas- sical ideal of virtù—a person, like Isabella, who could mas- ter the practical problems of government; like Leonardo,
CRITICAL QUESTION Should a modern education require that graduates master a variety of skills—for example, fencing and music as well as writing and mathematics?
K E Y C O N C E P T
produce elegant works of imagination; and then, like Federico da Montefeltro, withdraw to his study to read and contemplate (Fig. 8.25). Renaissance virtù, or excellence, lay in the versatility of the person.
8.25 Piero della Francesca, Federico da Montefeltro, c. 1474. Oil on wood panel, 18 ½ ins × 13 ins (47 × 33 cm). Galleria degli Uffi zi, Florence.
The Renaissance Man … and Woman
8.24 Titian, Isabella d’Este, 1534–6. Oil on canvas, 40 1⁄8 ins × 25 3⁄16 ins (102 × 64.1 cm). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
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music as glorious as Michelangelo’s ceiling painting. The pope’s music was provided by his cappella, the group of musicians (exclusively male) who provided a court with music for all sacred services and other occasions. Through the cappella, boys were given a thorough musical education and often found their way to the musical profession. A musical girl, on the other hand, had to be taught privately or to enter a convent, both less advantageous for professional advancement.
The repertoire of Leo’s choir almost certainly included motets and Masses by Josquin des Préz [zhoss- KAN(h)-day-PRAY] (c. 1440–1521), who served the papacy for more than a decade (c. 1486–1501). Born in northern France, Josquin was the greatest composer of the High Renaissance, blending the rich polyphony of his native northern Europe with sweet Italian lyricism. Josquin parlayed his mastery into a truly international career: besides the papal court, he also served the courts of Paris, Milan, and Ferrara.
Josquin’s compositions were admired for their har- monious structure as well as the matching of their words and music. By Josquin’s time, composers were freeing themselves from the standard texts and melodies of the medieval tradition. They combined all the voices of a composition at once, tying them more closely together both rhythmically and harmonically. Josquin’s genius lay in melding the north European style of complex polyphony (several melodies played simultaneously)
and the Italian preference for chordal harmonies (based on three-tone chords).
Josquin’s preferred form was the motet (see page 173), of which he composed more than 100 examples. Earlier Renaissance composers had freed the motet from isorhythmic constraints, allowing Josquin to cre- ate sweeter harmonies and explore the musical qualities of words. In particular, he excelled at word-painting—a technique developed by madrigalists. Josquin also made frequent use of the contrapuntal technique known as imitation, in which one voice states a melody that is duplicated in turn by succeeding voices. Such imitation marks the opening of the motet Ave Maria … virgo serena (Hail, Mary … serene virgin) (1520), where the voices build and overlap in an architecture of melody. Josquin frequently balanced counterpoint against sim- pler chordal passages and paired voices to emphasize the clarity of the text.
Josquin’s musical complexities demanded an atten- tive and educated audience, which he found at Europe’s most prestigious courts. He inspired such admiration among humanist patrons and musical contemporaries that they compared him to the titanic Michelangelo.
Raphael In 1509, Pope Julius II followed his architect’s advice and commissioned a young painter to decorate his
8.26 Raphael, School of Athens, 1509–11. Fresco, 26 × 18 ft (7.92 × 5.48 m). Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Palaces, Rome. Here Raphael pays homage to the wisdom of the classical past; his tribute to Christian learning occupies the wall opposite the School of Athens. Note the horizontal division between the painting’s human actors and the classical architectural setting; and the vertical division between the philosophical theme of abstract thought (left) and practical knowledge (right).
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apartment chambers. The artist, known as Raphael, was already famed for a series of graceful Madonnas painted in Florence. Working under the pope’s patron- age, Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520) became Renaissance Rome’s busiest and most beloved artist. Besides paint- ing, Raphael used his talents on projects for the pope, such as the excavation of Roman ruins and the con- struction of the new St. Peter’s basilica. In a city of intrigues and jealousies, Raphael was loved for his good
8.27 Raphael, Transfi guration, 1517. Oil on panel, 15 ft 1 ins × 9 ft 1 ins (4.6 × 2.8 m). Vatican Museums, Rome. Compare the restful and balanced arrangement of figures in Raphael’s School of Athens (see Fig. 8.26) to the concentrated and complex drama of this foreground scene. Note especially the lines created by the figures’ gestures and gazes.
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8.28 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Moses, 1513–15. Marble, height 8 ft 4 ins (2.54 m). San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. Michelangelo intended this awesome figure as the central figure of a great tomb for his patron, Pope Julius II. The finished statue has some of Julius’s fearsome demeanor. Note the statue’s poised energy, evident in the tensed legs and the left arm’s bulging muscles and sinews. The horns on his head are a consequence of a biblical mistranslation.
humor and modesty. When he died at 37 (“of too many women,” grumbled one rival), he was the most popular artist of the Renaissance.
As a painter, Raphael was known for the clarity and spiritual harmony of his works, which eloquently embodied the High Renaissance style. His most famous work, the School of Athens (Fig. 8.26), is a virtual text- book of Renaissance painting, a synthesis of human- ism and Renaissance technique. The School of Athens depicts a gathering of the great pagan philosophers. The two central figures are Plato, who points to the world of ideal forms above, and Aristotle, reaching for the natural world below. On either side, figures repre- senting ancient philosophy are arranged in lively sym- metry, balanced between the abstract and the practical. To Plato’s right, for example, a brown-cloaked Socrates ticks off arguments on his fingers and Pythagoras checks proportions on a slate. On Aristotle’s side, prac- titioners of the applied sciences include the astronomer Ptolemy holding a globe in the right foreground. The diverse group is unified by the great arch that encloses the whole scene. The barrel vaults recede to a vanish- ing point between the heads of Plato and Aristotle. The painting’s overall effect is of learning, tolerance, perfect harmony, and balance.
Raphael’s last great painting, the Transfiguration (Fig. 8.27), demonstrates the rapid development of the Renaissance style. Raphael divides the image into two religious dramas, the transfiguration of Christ on Mt. Tabor and Jesus’ disciples’ failed attempt to cure an epi- leptic boy thought to be possessed by demons. Unbelief and contention suffuse the dark lower register, which bristles with the contorted postures and crisscrossing lines. In the midst of this anguished failure, however, some figures point toward the miraculous event above. There, a few faithful disciples are permitted to gaze directly at a Christ transfigured by divine light and joined by the prophets Moses and Elijah. Raphael cre- ates a grand pictorial scheme through the interlocking triangular arrangement of the figures, rather than by a diagrammatic architectural setting. The painting shows the restive harmonies of the High Renaissance about to burst into the innovations of mannerism.
Michelangelo in Rome In 1505, Michelangelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II, who wished the brilliant young sculp- tor to build his tomb. Michelangelo’s designs dem- onstrate the heroic scale anticipated by his Florentine David (see Fig. 8.18). He envisioned a gigantic façade rising in three stages, decorated with 40 life-size stat- ues. Michelangelo’s grandiose tomb remained unfin- ished, although the project occupied him for 30 years. Michelangelo himself referred to it as his “tragedy.”
One sculpted figure from Julius’s tomb ranks among Michelangelo’s greatest works. The Moses (Fig. 8.28) embodies the fierce power called terribilità that Michelangelo himself possessed in abundance. Moses holds the tablets of commandments received from the hand of God. Looking over his shoulder, Moses sees the Israelites worshiping a pagan idol. Possessed by righ- teous anger, he rises to dash the tablets of God’s law
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Separation of
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8.29 Plan of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
8.30 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508–12. Fresco, 44 ft × 128 ft (13.41 × 39.01 m). Vatican Palaces, Rome.
Chapter 8 THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY 217
8.31 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Temptation and Expulsion from the Garden, detail of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1509–10. Fresco. Vatican Palaces, Rome. The forbidden tree divides these two fateful scenes: on the left Adam and Eve reach eagerly for the fruit of moral knowledge; on the right, they cower in fear as God’s angel drives them from the garden.
8.32 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Creation of Adam, detail of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508–12. Fresco. Vatican Palaces, Rome. In the ceiling’s pivotal central panel, the creator God trails a cloak that contains Eve and all the rest of future humanity. Adam lies passively against a lifeless hillside, bound to the earth.
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218 Chapter 8 THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY
as Michelangelo becomes more confident of his vision and overcomes the cramped composition of earlier scenes. In the Creation of Adam (Fig. 8.32), God moves toward a languid Adam with a commanding divinity. He holds Eve in the crook of his arm and trails a cloak that contains all of future humanity. The final paintings show God creating the cosmos from a void, scenes that remind us of Michelangelo’s own heroic creativity.
The New St. Peter’s Michelangelo spent his last years devoted to archi- tecture. In 1547, he was appointed chief architect of St. Peter’s, a project that had already suffered delays and complications. The rebuilding of St. Peter’s had begun under Pope Julius II. The old basilica, first built by the Emperor Constantine, had become a crumbling hodgepodge of old-fashioned designs. In a bold act of Renaissance confidence, Pope Julius II ordered that the great church be demolished and replaced with a mod- ern design. When the cornerstone of the new St. Peter’s was laid in 1506, it began the High Renaissance’s larg- est and most expensive undertaking. The mammoth project would take more than 150 years to build and would occupy the epoch’s leading architects.
As chief architect for the new church, Pope Julius II first engaged Donato Bramante (c. 1444–1514). Bramante produced a symmetrical design shaped like a Greek cross and centered around a flattened dome. His inspiration had come from Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence, and from the sketches of Leonardo, which included a central-plan church much like Bramante’s. Bramante’s plan was never built. The classical symme- try of its exterior is suggested, however, by the archi- tect’s Tempietto (Fig. 8.33), a shrine he completed in another part of Rome in 1502. The Tempietto’s deli- cately classical proportions would have been enlarged to a gigantic scale in the new St. Peter’s.
Bramante’s plan was expanded and revised by his successors (including Raphael) (Fig. 8.34). When Michelangelo assumed the project in 1547, he returned to the idea of a symmetrical, Greek-cross plan—a cen- tral dome surrounded by four arms of equal length. The dome itself was actually built much as Michelangelo envisioned. On the exterior, it is ribbed in the style of Brunelleschi and unified by repeating pairs of Corinthian columns circling the base and giant pilas- ters on the outer wall. On the interior, the dome rises in gilded splendor over the altar of St. Peter. However, where Michelangelo’s Greek-cross plan would have been dominated by the dome, later architects instead
and condemn his tribe. The muscular pose of Moses embodies the fierce power of God’s judgment, and even his beard is like a living thing, animated by anger. Next to this work of mature vigor, Michelangelo’s David (see Fig. 8.18) seems like a lyrical poem of youth.
In 1508, Julius directed Michelangelo to interrupt the tomb project and paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo protested that he was a sculptor, not a painter. Nevertheless, here, in the same chapel where Josquin had sung, Michelangelo created a visual poem on the powers of creation and the frailty of human flesh that was to become his most famous work.
For the Sistine Chapel ceiling (Fig. 8.29, Fig. 8.30), Michelangelo employed a complex philosophical and religious scheme, probably with advice from papal scholars. Among its guiding ideas were a Neoplatonic symbolism of light and dark, and the Old Testament’s prefiguring of Christ’s coming. The central panels depict scenes from Genesis—the Creation, the Fall, and the story of Noah. Arranged around the narra- tive scenes are figures that symbolize the reconciliation of Christian and classical ideas—Hebrew prophets to represent divine revelation, and Roman sibyls (pagan prophetesses) to symbolize human wisdom. In the cor- ners are four narrative scenes that foretell the coming of Christ. The various parts are delineated by an architec- tural border and nude “athletes.”
Despite its obscurity, the Sistine Chapel ceiling is clearly a work of Renaissance humanism. It combines classical and Christian ideas, recognizing in human- ity the tension between a divine spirit and sinful flesh. When read from the Creation to the story of Noah, the central panels tell how the divine beauty and order of creation were corrupted by human weakness. The frailty of human will is visible in the shamed and shriv- eled Adam and Eve as they are driven from paradise (Fig. 8.31).
However, Michelangelo actually painted the panels in reverse order. Read from Noah to the Creation, the central panels suggest the triumph of the creative spirit,
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT In what ways does the Sistine Chapel ceiling express optimism about the future of humanity? In what ways does it express pessimism? If Michelangelo were living today, what sorts of artworks do you imagine he might make?
Chapter 8 THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY 219
8.33 Donato Bramante, Tempietto, San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, 1502. Height 46 ft (14 m), diameter of colonnade 29 ft (8.84 m). Here, on a small scale, we see the domed symmetry and overt classicism that Bramante would employ in his designs for the new St. Peter’s. A Doric colonnade circles the building (it is a shrine marking the site of St. Peter’s martyrdom) and a balustrade eases the transition to the central dome.
8.34 Plans for the new St. Peter’s, Rome, 1506–1606. The Italian Renaissance’s most daring and expensive project was the reconstruction of Europe’s holiest Christian shrine. The Greek-cross plans of Bramante and Michelangelo were compromised in Maderno’s completed version, which added the traditional long nave and extended the church’s length to more than 600 ft (183 m).
Bramante, 1506 Sangallo, 1539 Michelangelo, 1547
Carlo Maderno, 1606
220 Chapter 8 THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY220 Chapter 8 ANCIENT ROME
1400 CE 1420 CE 1440 CE 1460 CE 1420 Brunelleschi begins cathedral dome, Florence (8.9)
1425 Masaccio, Holy Trinity (8.11)
1430–1432 Donatello, David (8.16)
1434 Cosimo de’ Medici controls Florence
1435 Leon Battista Alberti codifies rules of linear perspective in On Painting
1444–1510 Life of Botticelli
1453 Greek scholars flee Constantinople, settling in Florence
1469–1492 Lorenzo de’ Medici, patron of learning and the arts, governs Florence
c. 1470 Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe (8.20)
1401 Ghiberti wins Baptistery competition, Florence (8.7)
C H A P T E R 8 : T I M E L I N E
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8.35 Michelangelo Buonarroti, St. Peter’s, Rome, view from west, begun 1547. Dome completed by Giacomo della Porta, 1590. Height of dome 452 ft (137.8 m). Michelangelo intended the church to be dominated on all sides by the massive dome, as it is in this view, which shows only the three short arms of the Greek-cross plan. Note the restrained classical decoration: there are gigantic Corinthian pilasters on the ground story and double engaged columns around the dome, separating pedimented windows.
Chapter 8 THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY 221
the ambitions of patrons and designers (a total of 12 architects and 22 popes) far exceeded their ability to execute. Actual construction was hampered by the Church’s limited treasury and by a conflict of archi- tectural purposes. Like the sketches in Leonardo’s Notebooks, St. Peter’s was more perfect in conception than in reality.
lengthened the nave and added a giant façade, obscur- ing the dome in the front view (see Fig. 8.34). On the exterior, Michelangelo’s intentions are visible today only when St. Peter’s is viewed from the rear (Fig. 8.35).
The construction of the new St. Peter’s revealed the Renaissance spirit at its best and worst. The grand church was a monumental project, influenced by clas- sical models and conceived on a heroic scale. However,
Chapter 8 ANCIENT ROME 221
1480 CE 1500 CE 1520 CE 1540 CE 1501 Michelangelo, David (8.18)
1503–1513 Reign of Pope Julius II
1506 Bramante begins new St. Peter’s, Rome (8.34)
1508–1512 Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican Palace, Rome (8.30)
1509–1511 Raphael, School of Athens (8.26)
1513 Machiavelli, The Prince
1547 Michelangelo named architect of St. Peter’s, Rome (8.35)
1480s Portuguese explorers’ contact with Benin, West Africa
c. 1485 Leonardo, Madonna of the Rocks (8.21)
1486 Pico, Oration on the Dignity of Man
1486 Composer Josquin des Préz active in papal choir, Rome
1490 Isabella d’Este, patron of music at Mantua (8.24)
CHAPTER REVIEW
The Renaissance in Italy Describe the conditions of the Italian city-state of the fifteenth century. From what interests did Renaissance humanism arise? In what ways did ancient Greece and Rome shape the Renaissance? How did Italy’s merchant princes express their civic humanism? Who was Lorenzo the Magnificent?
The Arts in Early Renaissance Italy How did the Renaissance begin in Florence? Who was Lorenzo Ghiberti? In what ways do the doors of the Florence Baptistery demonstrate the evolution of Renaissance style? Explain the technique of perspective. Describe the landmark achievement of Filippo Brunelleschi. What was revolutionary about the paintings of Masaccio? Describe how Botticelli’s paintings reconcile Christian and pagan ideas.
Describe the developments of madrigal music in Italy. What is musical word-painting? Discuss the prin- cipal achievements of the early Renaissance sculptors Donatello and Michelangelo. Who was Savonarola?
Renaissance Genius Who was Machiavelli, and what did he advocate in his book The Prince? Describe the Renaissance ideal of the “universal man.” Who was Isabella d’Este? Enumerate the accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci.
The High Renaissance in Rome What circumstances drew European artists to Rome? Who was Josquin des Préz? Who was Raphael? Why did Michelangelo call the tomb of Pope Julius II his tragedy? What is the Sistine Chapel?
In what ways can the new St. Peter’s in Rome be called the High Renaissance’s greatest undertaking? Enumerate Michelangelo’s accomplishments as sculp- tor, painter, and architect.
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222 9
9Reformation and Late Renaissance K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What were the causes and consequences of the Protestant separation from the Roman Catholic Church?
• What brought about the rise of Northern Europe? • How was Renaissance spirit expressed in Northern Europe? • What was the great achievement of the Elizabethan Age? • How did the Late Renaissance differ from the High Renaissance?
Tradition holds that in October 1517, a plump young professor nailed a notice
to the wooden door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. With his
hammer, Martin Luther (Fig. 9.1) drove a wedge between the Mother Church
and her German followers. He was condemning the practices of the Roman pope,
whose agents were selling salvation to German peasants. If the pope could so easily
grant entry into heaven, Luther asked indignantly, why did he not freely release all
the souls from purgatory, regardless of whose relatives could pay? And, the German
princes added, why should Germans’ hard-earned coin fl ow back to Rome to fund
its extravagant artistic projects?
9.1 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Portrait of Martin Luther (detail), c. 1526. Oil on wood, 15 × 19 ins (38 × 24 cm). Uffi zi, Florence. The pious Augustinian monk Martin Luther set off a religious revolution in 1517 when he questioned the Church’s teachings on confession and forgiveness. Luther’s Ninety-five Theses challenged the theological basis for the sale of papal indulgences—written guarantees of forgiveness. Within months, German printers made Luther’s dry theological argument a bestseller.
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224 Chapter 9 REFORMATION AND LATE RENAISSANCE
Luther’s challenge would widen into a religious move- ment called the Reformation, the pivotal event of a troubled and transitional time when militant religious zeal coexisted in Europe with tolerance and love of learning. The reform movement eventually divided Christian Europe into Protestant and Catholic nations, as the political and commercial dynamism of Northern Europe began to define the early modern world.
The Reformation For centuries, German emperors had quarreled with popes over the power they shared in European Christendom. But it took the bookish challenge of the university scholar Martin Luther (1483–1546) to split Christian Europe in two (Map 9.1). Luther’s critique of corruption and error in the Roman Church exploded into a religious revolt called the Reformation—the movement that divided Western Christianity into the Roman Catholic and the new Protestant faiths. The Reformation spawned many “reformed” creeds, whose followers were called Protestants because of their protest against Catholic doctrine. The Reformation’s effects were broad. Theologically, the Reformation revived the Christian debate over free will and human nature. Intellectually, it elaborated the ideas of Christian humanist scholars, although reformers and humanists sharply disagreed on some issues. Socially, the Reformation appealed to a German people who resented the Catholic Church’s heavy taxation. Martin Luther’s revolt eventually touched every aspect of European life.
Luther’s Challenge Martin Luther published his famous Ninety-five Theses in 1517, as propositions for theological debate among the university scholars in Wittenberg. The religious issues he addressed were not new: What power did the Roman Church exercise over individual believers? What foundation did its doctrines have in biblical scripture? Luther would answer these questions in a succinct and radical maxim: Scriptura sola, fide sola, gratia sola (“Only scripture, only faith, only grace”). With the phrase scriptura sola, Luther rejected every aspect of the Catholic faith not grounded in biblical teaching. This rejection applied to the sacraments especially, those ritual acts—such as communion, penance, and mat- rimony—that conferred divine grace on the believer. Because the sacraments could be administered only by a priest, the Church controlled the believer’s access
to salvation. Luther argued that only baptism and the Eucharist (communion) had biblical precedent. On the same basis, he also repudiated the celibacy of priests and the authority of the pope. In the phrase fide sola Luther’s challenge went deeper. Citing the apostle Paul—“For by grace are you saved by faith . . . not of works” (Ephesians 2:8–9)—Luther questioned whether any act of piety was enough to earn salvation. If salvation was an undeserved gift of divine grace (gratia sola), Luther argued, then no devout German had to buy a papal indulgence or pay the Church’s taxes.
Luther’s message of religious freedom and national- ism exploded onto Europe in a series of pamphlets pub- lished in 1520. Luther asserted the individual believer’s right to appeal directly to God, without a priest as intermediary. He declared that Christian believers were bound only to the word of God, not to the doctrines and institutions of the Church. And, mindful of the politics in religion, he pleaded with Germany’s princes to take the lead in reforming the Church. By the end of 1520, Luther’s writings had sold more than 300,000 copies, a figure that attests to Luther’s popularity and to the literacy of his German followers.
A generation earlier, such a brash reformer might quickly have been burned at the stake. Luther, how- ever, was saved by circumstance. In Rome, Pope Leo X was too busy with his artistic projects to bother with this “monkish squabble.” Also, Church authorities hesitated to anger Luther’s political sponsor, a power- ful German noble. When finally, in 1521, Luther was threatened with excommunication, he burned the papal edict in Wittenberg’s town square. Summoned to a trial before the Holy Roman Emperor, Luther entered the city of Worms [vorms] like a conquering hero, amidst walls plastered with his portrait and pamphlets. To the demands that he recant, Luther replied defiantly: “I neither can nor will recant anything, since it is nei- ther right nor safe to act against conscience. God help me. Amen.” Luther’s political protector sheltered him from imperial condemnation; in hiding, he undertook a translation of the New Testament into German, giving
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT What are your most fundamental beliefs about the nature of the divine, the nature of human beings, and their relationship with each other? How do your beliefs on these matters compare with Luther’s?
Read a selection of Luther’s Ninety-fi ve Theses on myartslab.com
Chapter 9 REFORMATION AND LATE RENAISSANCE 225
Luther wrote simple hymns such as Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress is Our God), based on familiar popular melodies. Thus, instead of listening to a choir singing Latin polyphony, Lutheran congregations could sing their own hymns of piety and nationalism.
The Reformation also appealed to Europe’s human- ist intellectuals, who recognized their own ideas in Luther’s doctrines. Protestantism echoed the humanist criticism of religious corruption and ignorance, and it shared humanists’ interest in studying and translating ancient texts. Humanists also approved of Luther’s preference for simple piety over the Church’s quibbling scholasticism and elaborate ritual. At the same time,
his lay followers the chance to read God’s word for themselves.
The Appeal of the Reformation Luther’s challenge was theological in its substance, but political and social in its appeal. His writings contained an underlying message of freedom and equality: that God offered divine grace equally to the rich and poor, clergy and lay, and that believers could speak directly to God and interpret the Bible themselves. Such radi- cal ideas had unforeseen consequences. Luther’s ideas helped to inspire peasant revolts that German rulers bloodily suppressed, with Luther’s approval.
Protestantism made the Christian faith accessible to the common believer. Luther’s translation of the New Testament enabled a pious Lutheran family to read the Bible in their own language. For Protestant worship,
Map 9.1 Western Europe during the Reformation, c. 1560. Except in England, the Lutheran Reformation thrived where the commercial middle classes were the strongest and absolutist rulers did not enforce religious orthodoxy.
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John Knox had instituted a Calvinist regime in 1559, Scottish Calvinists asserted that God had granted politi- cal sovereignty to his people. Therefore, wrote one Scottish firebrand, “the people have the right to confer royal authority upon whomever they wish”2—in effect, the right to elect their own king. Such Calvinist belief helped set in motion the religious wars and political rebellions of the next century.
The Rise of Northern Europe While Luther’s Reformation recast Europe’s religious landscape, sixteenth-century Europe began to take a shape recognizable as the early modern world. In sev- eral nations—principally England, France, and Spain— strong monarchs established centralized nation-states by subduing feudal rivalries and ending dynastic wars. The same monarchs fostered commerce within their borders and sponsored voyages of exploration that opened Africa, Asia, and the New World to European domination. Power and wealth shifted dramatically from the Mediterranean world to northern Europe and its Atlantic seaports. In the courts and cities of northern Europe, there was no dramatic “rebirth” of classical learning and art, although for convenience histori- ans refer to this period as a “Northern Renaissance.” Instead, Northern patrons imported Italian artists and styles while also supporting local and national tastes in culture.
Kings, Commerce, and Columbus The nation-states of England, France, and Spain domi- nated the European continent during the sixteenth century. The monarchs of these strong nations had each consolidated power in their own way. In France, Louis XI (ruled 1461–1483) regained territories from England and strengthened his power to levy taxes. In Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella combined their regional thrones in 1479 and ended the Muslim rule in southern Spain. They were succeeded by a line of Spanish mon- archs called the Habsburg Dynasty, who eventually controlled territories through much of Europe. Henry VII of England (ruled 1485–1509) ended a period of civil war and established the Tudor Dynasty, which later included the famous monarchs Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
Europe’s strong monarchs encouraged a commercial revolution that brought wider prosperity to northern
reformers and humanists differed on crucial philosophi- cal points. Where the humanists asserted the nobility of the human spirit, Luther insisted (in the tradition of Augustine) that humans could not achieve goodness by their own effort. For Luther, human freedom led straight to moral damnation.
Calvinism A second wave of Protestantism originated in the Swiss city of Geneva, where John Calvin (1509–1564) emerged as a new leader of the Reformation. Calvin was a Reformation thinker of precision and subtlety, and as a reformer, his influence extended to France, Scotland, England, and America. The French-born Calvin received a humanist training in the works of classical and early Christian authors. Because of his radically Protestant views, he was forced to leave predominantly Catholic France, and settled in Geneva, which welcomed his strict moral teachings. Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) defined Protestant doctrine and became the Reformation’s most widely read theological work. It elaborated the principle of predestination, the belief that God determines before their birth which Christians will gain salvation. If believers could not affect their destiny by good works—“by faith alone,” cried Luther—then God must designate the saved before birth. But how would Calvinist believers know if they were among the righteous elect? Calvin’s answer was to define hard work and earned wealth as the visible signs of elec- tion (see Fig. 9.2). Confident of their predestined place in paradise and busy with God’s work on earth, most Calvinists submitted willingly to their communities’ rigid and intolerant social discipline.
Religiously obedient, the Calvinists were politically rebellious, challenging the authority of rulers over God’s people. In France, where Calvinist Huguenots suffered constant persecution, one anonymous political tract vowed in 1579 that “all kings were at first elected.” Monarchs who seem “to have their crowns and royal authority by inheritance,” the author asserted, “receive, or should receive, their first and most important confir- mation from the people.”1 In Scotland, where reformer
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT In today’s society, from what sources and principles should we derive the rules that govern moral behavior?
Chapter 9 REFORMATION AND LATE RENAISSANCE 227
The Reformation’s success among the prospering town- dwellers of northern Europe created an apparent paradox. Enterprising Protestant merchants and artisans busily enriched themselves, while they condemned the greed of priests and popes. In modern times, the sociologist Max Weber coined the term Protestant ethic to describe the ascetic industriousness encouraged by Calvinist theology. In his controversial study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), Weber argued that the Calvinists’ single-minded effort and self-denial helped nurture north- ern Europe’s budding capitalist economy.
The Protestant ethic was rooted in the anxieties brought on by Calvinist religious ideas. If believers could not earn salvation, Weber asked, how could they know if they belonged to God’s “elect”—those destined for salvation and everlasting life? The Calvinists’ answer, said Weber, was to define hard work and wealth as the visible signs of elec- tion. Thus, wealth was a sign of God’s blessing, so long as it was not misused in idleness, leisure, or the spontaneous
THE WRITE IDEA Describe your own views about the relation of work, prosperity, and moral virtue. What moral judgments do you make about the poor? The indolent? The wealthy?
K E Y C O N C E P T
enjoyment of material possessions. This Protestant ethic, with its mixture of acquisitiveness and asceticism (Fig. 9.2), encouraged small-scale capitalism and may have contrib- uted to Protestants’ material success.
The English Puritans who migrated to North America brought this Calvinist attitude with them. Today many peo- ple will recognize it in some North Americans’ approval of a strong work ethic and disapproval of a life of contemplation or pleasure-seeking.
Weber’s thesis has been discounted by modern soci- ologists, however, because it proved no causal relation between Calvinist doctrine and economic behavior. It is true that capitalist economies have succeeded mightily in such places as Hong Kong and Japan, where acquisi- tiveness and asceticism stem from Eastern religions, not Calvinism. Yet the essential features of Weber’s Protestant work ethic—work, self-denial, the moral virtue of wealth— are still visible in Western attitudes and behavior today, and maintain a form of religious significance.
9.2 Quentin Massys, Moneychanger and His Wife, 1514. Oil on wood, 28 × 26 3⁄4 ins (71 × 68 cm). Louvre, Paris. Calvinism’s approval of material prosperity explains the sociologists’ term “Protestant ethic”—the religious sanction of industriousness, asceticism, and moral high-mindedness that characterized Europe’s merchant and shop-owning classes. This Renaissance portrait illustrates the danger that acquisitiveness, symbolized by the husband’s hoard, may distract the pious wife from her devotional.
The Protestant Ethic: God, Work, and Wealth
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The Northern Renaissance Courts Economic prosperity and royal power created an extravagant court life in Northern Europe’s royal pal- aces, attracting artistic talent from all of Europe. The French king Francis I (Fig. 9.3) sheltered Leonardo da Vinci at his château in Amboise in the Loire Valley in France and invited the Italian mannerist painters to his court. Henry VIII favored the German portraitist Hans Holbein [HOHL-bine] (Fig. 9.4), native of the vibrant Renaissance city of Augsburg.
While Northern Renaissance kings engaged in sub- stantial building programs, their architecture generally struck a compromise between medieval traditions and Italian-style classicism. A telling example was Francis I’s château at Chambord [shan(h)-BOH(r)] (Fig. 9.5), in the Loire Valley. Chambord’s busy mass of roof dormers, chimneys, and turrets suggests medieval
European towns and cities, often at the expense of Mediterranean trading powers like Venice. Europe’s rulers removed traditional restraints against enterprise. The Church relaxed its rules against charging interest on loans, allowing banking houses to accumulate enor- mous profits while fostering trade and manufacture. Traditional communal farms were divided and planted for cash crops. Many peasants either became land- owners or sought their fortunes as laborers in the grow- ing towns. Martin Luther’s father, for example, was a displaced German peasant who found work as a miner and eventually acquired his own mines and foundries. His wealth allowed him to afford a university education for his son Martin, who changed the course of Western civilization.
An entirely new factor in the sixteenth-century commercial revolution was Europe’s exploration and colonization of the Americas. Financed by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and guided by new inventions in navigation, the explorer Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) opened the “New World” to European conquest in 1492. Spanish conquistadores subdued the Aztec and Inca empires of Central and South America, and seized their fantastic treasures of precious metal objects. The indigenous American peoples were dev- astated by European disease, and many were enslaved to work in gold and sil- ver mines. The influx of precious metals temporarily made Spain the wealthiest nation in Europe, and fueled the com- mercial revolution. Portuguese explorers mapped new sea routes along the African coast to India and the East Indies, linking Europe to longstanding Muslim trade ports. This commercial traffic shifted Europe’s balance of economic power away from Italy to the Atlantic ports of London in England and Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
9.3 Jean Clouet (?), Francis I, c. 1525–30. Tempera and oil on wood, 37 3⁄4 × 29 1⁄8 ins (96 × 74 cm). Louvre, Paris. A humanist and a generous patron of the arts, Francis I negotiated with Erasmus to establish the Collège de France, a French academy. Despite his humanist principles, he ordered the slaughter of French Protestants after a Lutheran indiscreetly posted a religious bulletin on his bedroom door.
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9.4 Hans Holbein the Younger, Allegorical Portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (The Ambassadors), 1533. Oil and tempera on wood, 6 ft 9 1⁄8 ins × 6 ft 10 1⁄4 ins (2.06 × 2.09 m). National Gallery, London. These Renaissance ambassadors reflect the prosperity brought by northern Europe’s commercial revolution and overseas exploration. They proudly stand next to the instruments that guided Europe’s merchant fleets—telescope, globe, astrolabe. The court painter Hans Holbein has also incorporated allusions to Europe’s religious discord—the open hymn book and the lute with a broken string—and a memento mori (reminder of death), the haunting skull hovering in the foreground. This is distorted by a trick of perspective so that it can only be properly read if seen from the side.
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9.5 Château de Chambord, France, begun 1529 to the designs of Domenico da Cortona and Trinqueau: façade (above) and plan (left). Designed by an Italian architect for the French king, Chambord’s symmetrical and unified plan was marked by round turrets at the corners. The rationality of its design is compromised by the irregular eruptions of dormers and chimneys. Italianate classical moldings and balustrades unify the building’s central section. How does Chambord’s plan compare to the designs for the new St. Peter’s in Rome (see Fig. 8.34)?
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from a unicorn in the pleasures of the five senses. In the sixth scene, titled “To my only desire” (Fig. 9.6), a handmaiden offers the lady a box of treasures from her suitor. The unicorn and lion, both symbols of male power and desire, hold the corners of her canopy.
haphazardness. The decorative details, however, are borrowed from Italian Renaissance models and the floor plan reveals an Italian Renaissance heart.
On the walls of northern castles and town houses hung treasures of this age’s most sumptuous art, woven tapestry. Under the influence of Persian and Ottoman imports, European weavers especially in Flanders (today’s Belgium) and France began producing large- scale tapestry around 1300. Cycles of tapestry scenes depicted every imaginable theme, both sacred and secular, woven in wool and silk thread. Such tapestry was so costly that a French duke once ransomed his life from an Ottoman sultan with two packhorses loaded with hangings. One famous example, The Lady and the Unicorn, shows a young lady receiving instruction
9.6 French school, The Lady and the Unicorn: “To my only desire,” late 15th century. Wool and silk, 12 ft 5 3⁄5 ins × 15 ft 1 2⁄3 ins (3.8 × 4.64 m). Musée National du Moyen Âge et des Thermes de Cluny, Paris. This sumptuous tapestry is one of six in a cycle focusing on the theme of the lady and the unicorn and celebrating the pleasures of the senses. The meaning and sequence of “To my only desire” is obscure: the lady may be accepting a necklace from her lover or she may be renouncing the necklace and the pleasure it symbolizes.
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G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
When Columbus made his famous voyage westward toward India, there was good reason that he did not sail east. Eastward passage to Asia from Spain was blocked by the formidable Ottoman Empire, which by 1500 had conquered the ancient Byzantine Empire and ruled most of Islam’s capitals west of Persia. During the time of the Reformation, the Ottoman expansion aggressively threat- ened the heart of Europe, reaching at one point the walls of Vienna. In the Muslim world, the Ottomans’ domination lasted into the nineteenth century, leaving an indelible mark on the politics of today’s Middle East.
Nomadic Turkmen had first entered the Islamic world in the twelfth century as mounted soldiers of the caliph
in Baghdad. They settled in Anatolia (today’s Turkey), pressing on the weakened Byzantine state and repelling a crusade in 1444. In this era, Ottoman rulers relied on a loyal corps of infantry called the Janissary, made up of youths recruited from Christian households. Led by the Janissary corps, Ottoman armies conquered southeastern Europe and finally took Constantinople itself in 1453. The great walled city—built by a Roman emperor and center of a Greek Christian empire—would become Islam’s greatest capital under the new name of Istanbul.
Ottoman rule reached its height under the sultans Selim I (ruled 1512–1520) and his son Suleyman the Magnificent (ruled 1520–1566). Selim’s armies assumed control of the Middle East’s venerable Arabic cities—Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem—and the Arabian shrines of Mecca and Medina. As intellectuals and artists migrated to Istanbul, the Ottoman capital became a robust Muslim city and Muslim civilization in turn added a Turkish layer to its exist- ing Arabic and Persian cultures. The sultan Suleyman [SOO-luh-mahn], known to Ottomans as “the Lawgiver”
9.7 Sinan, Selimiye Mosque, Edirne, Turkey, 1568–74. The Ottoman Empire’s greatest architect, Sinan, here achieved the geometrically perfect design of a square base capped by a circular dome. This interior view shows some of the eight great pillars, connected by arches and half-domes, that support the dome.
The Ottoman Empire
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Art and Humanism in Northern Europe Northern European artists at first paid little atten- tion to the revolutionary innovations of the Italian Renaissance. Northern painters were interested in an intense visual realism, rather than the intellectual unity and classical references of Italian art. Even so, northern artists were eventually deeply affected by the age’s intel- lectual ferment and religious reform.
Faith and Humanism in Northern Art In the period of the Renaissance, Northern European painters developed a stunning visual realism that matched, in its own way, the achievements of Italian Renaissance painters to the south. The techniques of Northern realism differed from those of Italian art
for his legal reforms, sponsored a building program that established a definitive Ottoman style. His master builder Sinan designed a series of mosques modeled after the Hagia Sophia (see page 121), the great domed Byzantine church from the sixth century. Sinan sought to “perfect” Hagia Sophia’s irregular proportions into a geometrically regular arrangement of circles and squares. In such majestic buildings as the Selimiye in Edirne (Fig. 9.7), Sinan created his own formulaic model for the Turkish-style mosque—all to the glory of God and his sultan masters.
In its later years, Suleyman’s reign was marked by a measure of tragic folly. His armies extended Muslim rule into Hungary and were on the verge of victory in a siege of Vienna in 1529. But far from home and fearing the Austrian winter, the Ottoman commanders with- drew. Never again would Suleyman and Islam reach so near the heart of Christian Europe. The sultan’s passionate love for a woman of his harem, Roxelana, also brought him sorrow. A master of palace intrigue, Roxelana helped convince Suleyman that he was threatened by those closest to him. Both his eldest son and his lifelong friend and advisor were executed on Suleyman’s orders. After Roxelana’s death, Suleyman ended his rule in feeble old age, the most powerful ruler in the world but bereft of those he had loved.
As Europe’s smaller nation-states were creating the early modern world, the Ottomans’ vast realm remained cohesive but relatively stagnant. Its very efficiency sup- pressed the dynamic change by which Europe surged ahead. When the European imperial powers divided the Ottomans’ empire after World War I, they formed sev- eral of today’s Middle East nations from its territories.
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
A Midwife’s Advice Diane de Poitiers [dee-AHN duh PWAT-ee-ay] was famed for her beauty and influence, as cherished com- panion of King Henry II of France (ruled 1547–1559), and also for her skills in medicine and midwifery. Here she gives advice to a friend about the wet nurse to the infant prince of France, the Duke of Orleans.
Madame my ally, I am well pleased about what has happened at Blois, and that you are in good health; as to that which I am overseeing, you would do well to do what is necessary there. The King and Queen are writing to you concerning the health of monsieur d’Orléans, and also to see whether the wet nurse has milk as good as required. For here they say that it is not good and that it upsets him, on account of which it seems to me that you would do well to investigate the situation, and if she is not good, to hire another for him. And I believe that if her milk has worsened since I saw her, it is because she has not conducted herself as she should have. It seems to me that if you make her drink cider or beer, that should refresh her thoroughly. I think that the doctors would agree with me on this. I trust you to put all this in good order. …3
DIANE DE POITIERS May 20, 1551
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Van Eyck’s career was unique among his contempo- raries. While excelling as a portraitist in the prosperous Low Countries (today’s Belgium and the Netherlands), he also served as a well-paid diplomat for Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. Van Eyck’s best-known paint- ing today, the Arnolfini Portrait (Fig. 9.10), was long thought to be a wedding portrait, a view now contested by scholars. Certainly, Van Eyck has surrounded the prosperous merchant and his demure wife with symbols of fidelity and fertility. The wife is not pregnant, but the green dress and the pagan figure on the bedpost do
in important ways, however. Rather than fresco, Northern painters preferred the lustrous medium of oil paint, which enabled them to render precise detail and to over-paint. Rather than plastered walls, Northern churches were often decorated with elaborate wooden altarpieces—cabinets with hinged doors that opened to display religious scenes.
The acknowledged master of Northern realism was Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441), a Flemish painter who excelled in jewel-like detail and vivid colors. At a time when Masaccio was revolutionizing painting in Italy (see Fig. 8.11), Van Eyck was perfecting a command of subtle pictorial detail. Jan’s largest work was the Ghent Altarpiece (Fig. 9.8), begun with his brother Hubert. The panels depicting Adam and Eve (Fig. 9.9), credited to Jan, show a new subtlety in handling light and space. Standing in niches, the figures appear as if seen by a viewer standing at the altar, from below and to the side. Their upper torsos recede into the space, while Adam steps forward out of the niche—perhaps the first paint- ing to show the bottom of a foot! The figures’ natu- ralism of gesture and subtle three-dimensionality make them the equal of any nudes painted in Renaissance Florence or Rome.
9.8 Hubert and Jan van Eyck, the Ghent Altarpiece (open), completed 1432. Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent, Belgium. Tempera and oil on panel, approx. 11 ft × 15 ft 1 in (3.35 × 4.6 m). The cabinet-like altarpiece, with its hinged panels, provided a very different format for pictorial composition compared with the broad walls of Italian churches. In this masterpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, the upper portion depicts Christ reigning among the heavenly host; below, a pageant of worshippers approaches to adore the Lamb of God. The subtle detail of Flemish oil painting inspired avid imitation among Italian Renaissance artists.
View the Closer Look at the Ghent Altarpiece on myartslab.com
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promise fertility. The convex mirror on the back wall is a virtuoso turn of realistic painting. Its scalloped frame bears scenes of Christ’s passion and the mirror reflects the entire room, including two visitors in a doorway, whom the merchant welcomes with raised hand. No painter of Van Eyck’s day could rival such mastery of light, color, and pictorial space.
In contrast to Van Eyck’s benign realism, the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450– 1516) employed his brush to paint a dark vision of wicked and foolish humanity. Bosch’s triptych (or three- part painting) titled The Garden of Earthly Delights is
9.10 Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni (?) Arnolfi ni and his Wife, 1434. Oil on panel, 33 × 221⁄2 ins (82 × 60 cm). National Gallery, London. The portrait, no longer thought to be a wedding portrait, depicts a Netherlandish couple surrounded by evidence of their wealth. The graffito inscription above the mirror reads, in Latin, “Jan van Eyck was here 1434.”
9.9 Jan van Eyck, Adam and Eve, detail of the Ghent Altarpiece, completed 1432. Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent, Belgium. Tempera and oil on panel, each panel 6 ft 8 ins × 18 ins (204 × 32 cm). Compare van Eyck’s Adam and Eve to Michelangelo’s nudes in the Sistine Chapel ceiling (Fig. 8.31). The Flemish painter contains his figures within cleverly lighted architectural niches and provides a visual caption in the sculpted scenes of Cain and Abel above (see Genesis 4). How would you explain these images’ comment on the nature of human sin?
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pocked by the effects of the bubonic plague (the altar- piece was commissioned by a monastery that cared for plague victims). His tortured figure communicates the intense piety and almost grotesque emotionalism that belong to the Northern Renaissance sensibility.
The first genuinely humanist artist of the Northern Renaissance was the German Albrecht Dürer
a pictorial sermon against human depravity (Fig. 9.11). On the left panel, God creates Eve, the origin of sen- sual desire and, therefore, all human sinfulness. The central panel, traditionally titled “Before the Flood,” is a bizarre catalogue of sensual indulgence and perver- sion. On the right, humanity justly suffers torments as vivid and grotesque as its former pleasures. Though his hallucinatory vision may resemble modernist surreal- ism, Bosch’s stern view of human sinfulness properly belongs to the age of Calvin.
As northern painters absorbed the lessons of the Italian revolution in painting, some maintained a religious mood of medieval intensity, as in Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion (Fig. 9.12), a panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece. Grünewald [GRYOO-nuh-vahlt] (1475?–1528) portrays the agonized figure of Christ as
9.11 Hieronymus Bosch, The Creation of Eve: The Garden of Earthly Delights: Hell (triptych), c. 1510–15. Oil on wood, 7 ft 2 5⁄8 ins × 6 ft 4 3⁄4 ins (219 × 77 cm) (center panel), 7 ft 2 5⁄8 ins × 3 ft 2 1⁄4 ins (219 × 97 cm) (each side panel). Prado, Madrid. Bosch was able to give visual reality to the most fantastic and grotesque creatures.
View the Closer Look at Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights on myartslab.com
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Through instruction we would like to be competent in
many things, and would not tire thereof, for nature has
implanted in us the desire of knowing all things . . . If we
want to sharpen our reason by learning and to practice
ourselves therein, having once found the right path we
may, step by step, seek, learn, comprehend, and finally
reach and attain unto some of the truth.5
Dürer portrayed himself with a self-absorption bor- dering on vanity. In Self-portrait in a Fur-collared Robe (Fig. 9.13), the artist’s flowing hair and thoughtful face suggest an image of Christ, an idea reinforced by the subdued colors and pyramid-like composition, which lend the image a religious solemnity. Yet Dürer painted the beard and fur collar with a precision characteristic of Jan van Eyck.
Dürer achieved widest success in his woodcuts and
(1471– 1528), a master painter and graphic artist who also wrote treatises on pictorial technique. Dürer [DYOO-ruh(r)] was trained as an engraver in the impe- rial city of Nuremberg, a center of Germany’s thriving printing trade. However, the young artist was not satis- fied as an artisan who dutifully executed his patrons’ orders. Like Leonardo da Vinci and the other Italian masters, he wanted to exalt the artist’s standing as a thinker and creator. Dürer traveled twice to Italy, where he embraced Italian theories of proportion and perspec- tive and envied the prestige of his Italian counterparts— from Venice he wrote, “Here I am a gentleman; there I am a parasite.”4 More than the Italian Renaissance masters, Dürer praised the artist as genius and justified the artist’s vocation:
9.12 Matthias Grünewald, Crucifi xion, exterior panel from the Isenheim Altarpiece, completed 1515. Oil on panel, 8 ft × 10 ft 1 in (2.44 × 3.07 m). Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, Germany. Northern painters often combined precise visual realism with an unrestrained religious emotionalism. Grünewald’s Crucifixion follows medieval iconographic conventions: John the Baptist (right) points to the sacrifice of Christ while Mary Magdalene (kneeling) and the Virgin Mary, supported by the apostle John, mourn the tortured Christ. The Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) stands over the chalice that will hold the sacrificial blood of Christ.
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In contrast to Dürer, Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525–1569) showed little interest in Italian technique and human- ist debate. Bruegel [BROY-gull] expressed a profound affection for natural beauty and the simple life of Flemish peasants. His worldly subjects and attitude make Pieter Bruegel the North’s first important post- Reformation painter.
Bruegel was fascinated by the lives of common folk and their relationship to the land. An early biographer told how the painter disguised himself as a peasant to join in village festivals. He depicted common people in many genre pictures, or scenes of daily life, that often achieved a breathtaking perspective and philosophical sophistication. In Hunters in the Snow (Winter), the failure of the hunt is evident in the dogs’ drooping tails (Fig. 9.15). In emotional contrast, a group on the left
engravings—graphic arts associated with the rise of the printing press. In sixteenth-century Europe, woodcuts and engravings had the immediacy of today’s photog- raphy and video, and were frequently used as weap- ons in the age’s political and religious controversies. For example, Dürer’s engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil may be an illustration of a religious text of his day. The Northern humanist thinker Erasmus had warned the faithful in his Handbook of the Militant Christian, “You must be on guard when you eat or sleep, even when you travel in the course of worldly concerns and perhaps become weary of bearing this righteous armor.”6 Dürer’s resolute Christian knight sits astride a well-proportioned horse, and shows no fear of Death at his side, holding an hourglass, or of the grotesque devil disguised as a wild boar (Fig. 9.14).
9.13 Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait in a Fur-collared Robe, 1500. Oil on panel, 26 1⁄4 × 19 1⁄4 ins (67 × 49 cm). Alte Pinakothek, Munich. The German Dürer consciously aspired to the heroic status attained by Italian artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo. The long fingers of the right hand draw attention not only to the collar’s delicate texture but also to the hand itself, the repository of Dürer’s painting skill. The inscription says “I, Albrecht Dürer, painted myself with everlasting colors in my twenty-eighth year.”
9.14 Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1513. Engraving, 9 3⁄4 × 7 1⁄2 ins (25 × 19 cm). Unlike most other Northern artists, Dürer used his art to engage in the religious controversies of his day. Though clearly inspired by Erasmus’s praise of militant piety, the symbolism of this engraving is obscure. The dog may represent loyalty or vigilance, while the salamander (a creature supposedly invulnerable to fire) may allude to Savonarola, the religious zealot burned at the stake in Florence in 1498.
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9.16). Ordained as a priest in 1492, he began a cam- paign to free the Church from corruption and scholastic pretension, while himself pursuing a life of quiet devo- tion and moral virtue.
Erasmus’s best-known work was In Praise of Folly (1509), an exposé of the vanity and corruption
prepares to slaughter a hog, a promise of feasting and gaiety. From this foreground action, the eye follows the trees down the hill to the skaters below and in the background. The skaters are oblivious to the returning hunters and seem insignificant against the vast winter landscape. A single bird floats across the sky, unifying the human drama with the timeless Alpine peaks in the upper right.
Erasmus and Humanism The Northern humanist thinkers are often called Christian humanists to distinguish them from the clas- sical humanists of Renaissance Italy. The most impor- tant and famous Christian humanist was Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), whose translations and writings embodied a spirit of piety and humble learning. Born in the Netherlands, Erasmus was trained early in a simple life of piety and humility based on the Gospels (Fig.
9.15 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565. Oil on panel, 3 ft 10 ins × 5 ft 3 3⁄4 ins (1.17 × 1.62 m). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The Fleming Bruegel chose to paint landscapes and scenes of daily life in part because of Protestant hostility to religious art. This painting was one of a series of calendar paintings, a medieval pictorial tradition that marked the passage of nature’s seasons. Analyze the relations among the returning hunters, their village, and the natural world, as depicted in the painting’s complex spatial composition.
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constant adversaries, the scholastic theologians. In the author’s view, the pretensions of the scholastics kept them from true piety. Folly suggests that study of the Bible itself should replace scholastic commentaries and Church dogmas. While readers were delighted with Erasmus’s mockery of lawyers, merchants, monks, and theologians, his satire earned him intellectual enemies throughout Europe, reason enough for the scholar to seek protection from the pope.
Erasmus’s opinion on lawyers: … the most self-satisfied
class of people, as they roll their rock of Sisyphusa and
string together 600 laws in the same breath, no matter
whether relevant or not, piling up opinion on opinion
and gloss on gloss to make their profession seem the most
difficult of all. Anything which causes trouble has special
merit in their eyes.
On the pope’s court: Countless scribes, clerks, lawyers,
advocates, secretaries, muleteers, grooms, bankers
and pimps (and I nearly added something rather more
suggestive, but I didn’t want to offend your ears)—in
short, an enormous crowd of people now a burden on the
Roman See (I’m sorry, I meant “now an honor to”) …
On scholastic theologians: … so happy in their self-
satisfaction and self-congratulation, and so busy night
and day with these enjoyable tomfooleries, that they
haven’t even a spare moment in which to read even
once through the gospel or the letters of Paul. And
while they’re wasting their time in the schools with this
nonsense, they believe that just as in the poets Atlasb
holds up the sky on his shoulders, they support the entire
Church on the props of their syllogisms and without
them it would collapse.7
ERASMUS
From In Praise of Folly (1509)
a. Sisyphus [SIZ-i-fuss], the Greek condemned to roll a stone
perpetually up a hill.
b. Atlas, the Greek god who supports the sky.
Erasmus considered his In Praise of Folly a trifle compared to his translations of the Bible and the writ- ings of the early Church fathers. In 1516, Erasmus made a revolutionary advance by publishing a version of the New Testament in the original Greek, accompa- nied by his own commentary. Erasmus’s Greek Bible exposed substantial errors in the Church’s official Latin translation, and Church scholars vigorously attacked it as a threat to the Church’s religious authority.
Despite his differences with the Church, Erasmus rem- ained distant from Martin Luther’s reforms, for reasons of both philosophy and self-preservation—Erasmus’s
in Renaissance society. In Praise of Folly was the Renaissance’s greatest example of satire, a work that criticizes society through humorous exaggeration and parody. The book was a popular triumph, in Erasmus’s lifetime appearing in 42 Latin editions and in English and German translations.
In Praise of Folly takes aim at the hypocrisy and vanity of Renaissance society, and contrasts its vices with the inner piety and moral striving that lead to Christian salvation. Speaking in the satirical voice of Folly, Erasmus rails against the folly of war, espe- cially as practiced by warrior popes such as Julius II. Folly reserves her most biting criticism for Erasmus’s
9.16 Albrecht Dürer, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1526. Engraving, 9 3⁄4 × 7 1⁄2 ins. Private collection. Dürer met Erasmus on several occasions and engraved this portrayal of scholarly preoccupation some years later. As the ideal humanist, Erasmus stands at his writing table, surrounded by books. Lilies symbolize his intellectual purity. The Latin inscription reads: “This image of Erasmus of Rotterdam was drawn from life by Albrecht Dürer” with the date, 1526, in Roman numerals, and the artist’s monogram. The Greek inscription says: “A better portrait his writings show.”
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(1533–1592) practiced skepticism and an unflinch- ing self-examination. Montaigne [mohn(h)-TEN(y)] was born to a noble family in Bordeaux (in southwest France), received an exemplary humanist education, and served as a courtier and advisor. In 1571, however, he retired to his family home and began to write his Essais (Essays; 1580, 1588), conversational and intro- spective prose works that defined a new literary type: the essay.
Montaigne’s essays were uniquely personal, full of anecdote and self-observation and ranging over every topic of concern to him—friendship, religious tolera- tion, death, nature. Montaigne’s most famous essay, Apology for Raymond Sebond, questioned the superior- ity of humans to other creatures, which was a common- place of humanist thought. “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” he asks in a famous illustration. Montaigne’s skepticism toward intellectual pretensions led him to rely chiefly on his own experience and observation—a starting point for the scientific attitude that would revo- lutionize European thought in the coming centuries.
The Elizabethan Age England was able to match the Renaissance achieve- ments of Italy and Germany only in the late sixteenth century. By this time, navigational inventions such as the telescope had helped to expand England’s mari- time economy, while agricultural production had also increased. The new prosperity and political stability maintained by the English monarchy created the condi- tions for a renaissance in England. Although influenced by European fashions, it achieved its own distinctive expression in music and theater.
The Reformation in England The English Reformation began as a political dispute that resulted in religious schism. King Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) appealed to the pope to dissolve his mar- riage with Catherine of Aragon, which had produced no male heir. When the pope refused, Henry split with the Roman Church, and established himself as head of the Anglican (English) Church, enabling him to divorce his wife by his own decree. He also confiscated monas- tic lands, and sold them at a large profit. While reject- ing papal authority, the Anglican Church maintained its Catholic religious beliefs and vigorously opposed Lutheranism. The English king evenhandedly burned Protestants for religious heresy and Catholics for
patrons all opposed Luther. Philosophically, Erasmus held the humanist view that people were, by free acts of will, able to improve themselves morally. Luther, on the other hand, saw humans as absolutely dependent on God’s grace for salvation. Erasmus finally voiced his disagreement with Luther in a critical treatise entitled De libero arbitrio (On the Freedom of the Will; 1524), which challenged Luther’s fundamental belief in human sinfulness. Luther replied with his own pamphlet, pointedly titled De servo arbitrio (On the Slavery of the Will), which argued that nothing good came through human freedom. Erasmus agreed with the reformers that God’s word was supreme and that piety was more important than good works. But he never abandoned his Catholic faith or his belief in human freedom and self-determination.
Utopians and Skeptics Erasmus was not the only sharp-tongued human- ist critic of Northern Europe’s social ills. His English friend Thomas More (1477–1535) described an alterna- tive society of Christian justice and piety in his Utopia (1516), in essence a Christian answer to Plato’s Republic. The title of More’s book meant literally “no place.” It described a fictional island where industrious citizens had solved the problems of war, poverty, and crime.
Thomas More was chiefly interested in criticizing the greed, violence, and corruption in contemporary England rather than seriously proposing a utopian way of life. More’s Utopia was a rather cheerless republic of industrious austerity. Its citizens all wore the same plain woolen clothing and went to bed at eight o’clock. Evening lectures offered education and self-improvement. Illicit sex was severely punished, because otherwise, More suggested, citizens would have no reason to get married. More reserved his sharpest criticism for greed. While Utopians meet their material needs with a few hours’ labor, by contrast, English society seemed more like a “conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society.”
While Erasmus and More prized humble piety, the Christian humanist Michel de Montaigne
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Describe the perfect society as you envision it. How will your Utopia sustain itself?
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cities, joining the flood of peasants displaced from the countryside. London, the site of Elizabeth’s lavish and pleasure-loving court, swelled with new inhabitants and became the capital of Elizabethan civilization.
Theater in the Elizabethan Age One art thrived above all others in Elizabethan times: the theater. Religious divisions in England’s towns had virtually ended the production of medieval drama cycles by the mid-sixteenth century. In their place, tour- ing companies of professional actors presented plays in inn courtyards and other makeshift theaters. Actors’ companies were often censored by town authorities, who feared for their citizens’ morals. To thwart this censorship, acting troupes gained the sponsorship of prominent nobles, who also employed the company to perform at their courts. With a virtual monopoly on theatrical entertainment, the professional companies
political treason. Under Henry VIII’s successors, first Edward VI and then Mary I, Protestant and Catholic factions alternately gained the upper hand, each perse- cuting their religious opponents.
Finally under Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603; Fig. 9.17), the Anglican faith was reinstated and religious toleration prevailed. Elizabeth demanded outward obedience to the official Anglican faith, while allow- ing Catholics to practice their faith secretly. As for the Protestants, Elizabeth frequently suppressed the Puritans, whose Calvinist doctrine threatened royal power. Thus, while the European continent was rav- aged by bloody religious wars, England enjoyed rela- tive religious peace, prosperity, and cultural revival—a period known as the Elizabethan Age.
This revival commenced in 1588 with the English naval victory over Spain, which boosted England’s national spirit and maritime economy. At the same time, refugees from Europe’s religious wars fled to English
Skepticism The Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola declared that humanity’s place in creation was higher even than that of the angels. The essayist Michel de Montaigne would have viewed Pico’s enthusiasm with sardonic skepticism. Humans don’t dwell in the clouds, thought Montaigne, they are “lodged here, amid the mire and dung of the world.” Only in their boundless presumption and vanity can humans imagine they are the equal of God.
Though he was not a systematic scientist or philoso- pher, Montaigne’s conclusions about human knowledge were to have considerable influence on both. “What does truth preach to us … that of all vanities the vainest is man?”
Through his essays, he became an important voice in the rise of skepticism, a systematic attitude of doubt toward any claim of knowledge. Humans should apply their intelligence to study of the world, Montaigne believed. While “our capacity can lead us to the knowledge of some things,” he wrote, still “it has definite limits to its power, beyond which it is temerity to employ it.”8 With his knowl- edge of the classics, Montaigne could point to a tradition of skeptical thought in ancient Greece and Rome. A school of Hellenistic thinkers in fact sought to find peace of mind in the suspension of all judgments. Montaigne himself determined that, lacking certain knowledge of the world, we should live according to nature, custom, and the word of God.
CRITICAL QUESTION Are you inclined, like Erasmus, to remain loyal to groups or institutions that you recognize are sometimes flawed? Or are you, like Montaigne, basically skeptical about commitment and belief?
K E Y C O N C E P T
Montaigne’s skepticism was mixed with more than a lit- tle misanthropy, fueled in part by his own nation’s religious discord. In his Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne asked, “Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as that this miserable and puny creature”—a man, that is— “should call himself master and emperor of the universe, the least part of which it is not in his power to know, much less to command?”9
Renaissance skeptics helped to justify the revolution in experimental science undertaken, most famously, in Galileo Galilei’s observational astronomy and physics. Science was propelled by a practical and philosophical mistrust in traditional teaching and received opinions. All knowledge might ultimately be “presumption and vanity,” to use Montaigne’s words. But knowledge gained from direct observation and experience must be the least pre- sumptuous and the most reliable guide to truth.
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and could accommodate as many as 2,000 spectators. Because the stage jutted into the central yard, an actor standing downstage was surrounded on three sides by a noisy audience. Thus, Elizabethan actors favored a declamatory acting style, with broad gestures to dem- onstrate the character’s emotional state. Also, the open- air arrangement of the theaters meant that actors had to be quick enough to finish a long play by dusk.
Elizabethan plays were a lively mixture, drawing on both classical and medieval forerunners. Elizabethan comedies were modeled loosely on those of the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence, whose plays were
enjoyed commercial success and produced plays of high literary quality.
The era of prosperity of the Elizabethan theater began in 1576, when the Theatre in London was built. This was the first of London’s public theaters, perma- nent houses whose popular plays attracted a diverse audience. The Theatre was later renamed the Globe (Fig. 9.18), the famous “wooden O” where many of William Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. London’s public theaters were built on the Thames River’s south bank, where they were free of the city’s censorship. Here, theaters were also handy for such alternative entertainments as bear-baiting and prostitu- tion. London’s glittering Elizabethan society streamed across the Thames’s bridges to see plays there—for a penny admission, even a humble apprentice might see dramatic spectacles that rivaled those of ancient Rome.
The public theaters reflected the needs of their per- formances. They were polygonal or circular structures,
9.17 George Gower, Elizabeth I (Armada Portrait), c. 1588. Oil on panel. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, UK. Elizabeth I sits arrayed in pearls, symbols of her purity, her navy (window at upper left) triumphant over the Spanish armada (upper right). The queen’s hand rests on a globe showing the Americas, indicating England’s colonial ambitions in the New World.
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contemporary, had pioneered the verse forms of Elizabethan drama. Marlowe’s play The Historical Tragedy of Doctor Faustus (first performed 1588) anticipated Shakespeare’s great tragedies—such as Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear—in its psy- chological depth and epic sweep. Marlowe’s Faustus is motivated by a boundless thirst for knowledge and power, which leads him into a bargain with the devil. The popularity of such works helped create the condi- tions for Shakespeare’s success.
As a dramatist, Shakespeare disdained the classical rules of form favored by his university-trained rivals, who included his younger friend and protégé Ben Jonson (1572–1637). Shakespeare’s plays were loosely plotted, with action that sprawled across weeks or even years. Instead of imitating Latin poetry, Shakespeare shaped Elizabethan speech into blank verse, a five- stressed poetic line (pentameter) that feels both natural and dignified in English. Shakespeare (Fig. 9.19) may not have been a humanist, but to his contemporaries he was a poet of great humanity.
The play that best reveals Shakespeare’s bond to the Renaissance is the tragedy Hamlet, the tale of the brood- ing prince. Called home to Denmark from his university studies, Hamlet is commanded by his father’s ghost to avenge his murder at the hands of Hamlet’s uncle. The uncle, Claudius, has been elected king and has married Hamlet’s mother, the widowed queen. Anguished by doubt and disgust, Hamlet delays by feigning madness,
read in Latin by English schoolboys. Whatever its lit- erary pedigree, Elizabethan comedy contained enough broad humor and slapstick to please the illiterate com- moners in the pit. History plays, or chronicles, were also immensely popular in the patriotic aftermath of England’s naval victory over the Spanish. The chron- icles incorporated elements of the medieval mystery plays, with their panoramic biographies of saints and gory on-stage torture. Elizabethan tragedy borrowed from the sensational plots of the Roman writer Seneca, often mixing themes of revenge with a severe Calvinist morality. Late Elizabethan tragedies were often set in Italy, which seemed the perfect setting for political intrigue, murder, and depraved sexuality. With its vari- ety and inventiveness, the theater captured the essence of Elizabethan society, much as Hollywood films cap- tured America in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Genius of Shakespeare The most acclaimed dramatist of the English language is William Shakespeare (1564–1616), the genius of Elizabethan theater. Shakespeare was a provincial who, like many Elizabethans, came to London to seek his fortune. He found rich opportunities awaiting him in the theater. By the 1580s, several professional acting companies were well established and the pub- lic theaters were a commercial success. Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), Shakespeare’s most talented
9.18 Globe Theater, London, 1599–1613. Reconstruction drawing by C. Walter Hodges. The Elizabethan theater was modeled after the inn courtyards where English actors had long presented their performances. The wealthiest patrons sat comfortably in the galleries, while common playgoers (including a cadre of pickpockets and prostitutes) stood crowded together in the “pit” in front of the stage. Note the ample stage machinery beneath the roof and a trapdoor (used in the ghost scene in Hamlet).
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he banters wittily with companions, improvises a court drama, and handles a sword with deadly effect. But Hamlet’s character is also touched by the skepticism of Montaigne, who questions whether humanity is much superior to the animals. Hamlet’s praise of human nobility turns suddenly to disheartenment:
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how
express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in
apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust? man delights not me …10
For all its philosophical overtones, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was filled with engaging action. Educated theatergoers might savor themes of moral corruption and philosophical speculation, whilst the unlettered customer enjoyed a good show of wit, pageantry, and swordplay. Hamlet was in every way a paragon of Elizabethan theater.
Elizabethan Music Queen Elizabeth admired pageant and festivity, and her royal court was alive with music, dance, mime, and other spectacles. A courtier was expected to play
but finally orchestrates a duel in which the innocent die along with the guilty.
In Hamlet, Shakespeare engages the leading ideas of the Renaissance. Fashioned after Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (see Key Concept box, page 212) or Hilliard’s Youth Leaning Against a Tree (Fig. 9.20), Hamlet cuts a fine figure and has an abundance of what Castiglione called sprezzatura, or nonchalance:
9.19 Frontispiece of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, 1623. Shakespeare cared so little about the literary value of his plays that he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon without publishing them. The first complete edition, with a dedication by Ben Jonson, appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death.
9.20 Nicholas Hilliard, A Youth Leaning Against a Tree with Roses, c. 1590. Parchment, 53⁄8 × 2 3⁄4 ins (14 × 7 cm). Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Hilliard’s portrait of an Elizabethan courtier represents an ideal of courtly devotion and worldliness. The subject wears black and white, the queen’s colors, and is surrounded by eglantine roses, her favorite flower.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT What entertainments in your community draw mixed audiences of different social classes or groups, like the Elizabethan theater? What does this reveal about the society you live in?
Read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 on myartslab.com
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The Late Renaissance in Italy and Spain While Northern Europe thrived in the sixteenth cen- tury, Renaissance Italy suffered political and eco- nomic decline. Luther’s German revolt had jolted the papacy and in 1527 the mercenary army of the German emperor Charles V sacked Rome, plundering the city and stabling its horses in the Sistine Chapel. Italian Renaissance art also suffered losses. By 1520, Leonardo and Raphael were dead. Of the High Renaissance mas- ters, only Michelangelo lived on, stifling others by his greatness while suffering his own profound religious doubts. Innovation persisted in Italian theater and in Venice, and the Roman Church gathered itself to answer the reformers’ challenge.
Palestrina and the Counter- Reformation The Catholic reaction against the Reformation was slow. When Catholic bishops finally met in the Council of Trent (1545–1564), they scrutinized Church doc- trine and practice. The result was called the Counter- Reformation, the Catholic Church’s effort to reform itself and mount a religious counter-offensive against Protestantism. Especially in Spain, the Counter- Reformation spawned a wave of Catholic religious enthusiasm. The revival’s most important figure was Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1566), a Spanish nobleman whose Spiritual Exercises (1548) sought to imitate the sufferings and spiritual disciplines of the saints. The Exercises described a program of devotion and prayer by which the devout believer might reproduce the psychological experience of the saints and so par- take in their piety. Ignatius’s charismatic faith won him the pope’s endorsement, and in 1539 he founded the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits. The militant and missionary Jesuit order dedicated itself to defending the Catholic faith against reformers and spreading Christianity to the New World.
Like the Inquisition—the Church office that enforced doctrine and punished heresy—the Council of Trent censored books and prescribed artistic standards. Regarding music, the Council of Trent declared:
… in the case of those Masses which are celebrated
with singing and with organ, let nothing profane be
intermingled, but only hymns and divine praises. The
whole plan of singing in musical modes should be
a musical instrument, most likely the lute or virginal (a type of harpsichord favored by the queen), and to join in a vocal ensemble. The most popular songs and dances were imported from Italy but were usually imbued with English vitality.
The Elizabethan court’s most gifted and versatile composer was William Byrd (1543?–1623), whose diverse productivity matched Shakespeare’s output in drama. As a composer, Byrd was forced to contend with his country’s religious divisions; he fended off the Puritans, who considered all sacred music mere “pop- ish” ornament, and wrote music for both the Anglican Church and his own Catholic faith. Though he wrote three Catholic Masses, these works could not be per- formed publicly in Protestant England. Byrd served both royal and noble patrons, for whom he composed music for all occasions. Emulating Shakespeare’s ver- satility in the theater, Byrd excelled in all the musical types, including the motet and the popular madrigal.
Like Shakespeare and other Elizabethan artists, musi- cians enthusiastically adapted Italian forms to suit the tastes of their English public. Books of Italian madri- gals reached England by the 1580s and were promptly “Englished”—republished with an English translation beneath the Italian text. Besides translations of Petrarch, native English songs of love and lament were also well suited to this form. The Englishman who did most to popularize the madrigal was the composer and pub- lisher Thomas Morley (1557–1602). Morley lived in the same London district as Shakespeare and set some of the playwright’s verse to music. At the height of the form’s popularity, Morley published nine volumes of madri- gals in seven years, including an anthology called The Triumphes of Oriana (published 1601). Oriana was a fanciful name for Elizabeth, the “maiden queen.” In “As Vesta Was Descending,” composed by Thomas Weelkes, the antics of nymphs and shepherds at dusk (attending Vesta, virgin goddess of evening) are the occasion for cheerful word-painting. In its final exclamation, “Long live fair Oriana,” this madrigal shows itself perfectly adapted to the cult of adulation around Elizabeth I:
As Vesta was from Latmos Hill descending,
She spied a maiden Queen the same ascending,
Attended on by all the shepherds swain;
To whom Diana’s darlings came running down amain
First two by two, then three by three together
Leaving their Goddess all alone, hasted thither;
And mingling with the shepherds of her train,
With mirthful tunes her presence did entertain.
Then sang the shepherds and nymphs of Diana:
Long live fair Oriana!
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Super flumina Babylonis (By the Rivers of Babylon, 1581) matched the musical rhythms perfectly to the mournful words of the biblical text (from Psalm 137). In Palestrina’s sacred music, imitative passages and chordal phrases blend with exceptional clarity and grace.
Renaissance Theater in Italy It was no accident that most of Shakespeare’s worldly- wise comedies were set in Italy and were based on Italian plots. Italian Renaissance plays not only defined a new type of comedy, but they were also published and distributed widely—making them another Italian import to Shakespeare’s England.
Italian dramatists derived their innovative comedy from ancient Roman comedy, with its stock characters and everyday situations. To the classical models, how- ever, the Italians gave a new coherence of plot, usually dividing the action into five acts and providing its events with realistic plausibility. The new variety of commedia was called grave (serious) or erudita (learned) comedy, because it was based on ancient models. But Italian playwrights also freely incorporated local theatrical tra- ditions and modernizing plots.
The realism of modern Italian comedy owed much to the Italians’ inventions in stage design and machin- ery. Renaissance theater in Italy generated many of the
constituted not to give empty pleasure to the ear, but
in such a way that the words be clearly understood by
all …11
This pronouncement by the council challenged two basic principles of Renaissance music: first, it criticized complex polyphony in the style of Josquin des Préz and other northern French and Flemish-born composers; second, it condemned the “intermingling” of religious and non-religious elements common in Renaissance sacred music.
The condemnation gave rise to a new conservatism among Italian composers. The composer best attuned to the changes was the Italian Giovanni da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594). He abandoned secular composition, later occupied several prestigious musical posts in Rome, and finally became director of the pope’s Sistine Choir. Palestrina’s stately and flawless compositions were the high point of sacred music in late Renaissance Italy.
Musically, Palestrina returned to sacred composi- tions based on traditional plainchant, while using more restrained dissonances than Josquin’s. He composed the Mass of Pope Marcellus (1567) in six voices to dem- onstrate that complex polyphony need not violate the dictates of piety. In the Kyrie, for example, he balances upward movement of the melodic line immediately by downward movement. Within these stricter bounds, the music is always full and fluid. Palestrina’s elegiac motet
9.21 Andrea Palladio and Vincenzo Scamozzi, Teatro Olimpico, interior, Vicenza, Italy, 1580–4. Palladio’s theater design combined overt imitation of classicism with illusionist perspective stage sets. The decoration of the stage’s façade is a Renaissance conglomeration of classical elements, modeled after surviving Roman theaters (compare Fig. 4.25). The fixed architectural perspectives of this revolutionary theater were not widely imitated; instead, Italian theater preferred movable sets and painted scenic flats.
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provided spectators with the illusion of a deep space, the same perspective view as in Renaissance painting.
The inaugural production at the Teatro Olimpico was yet another influential Italian innovation with a classicist flavor—a translation of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Oedipus the King. A learned Florentine society called the Camerata had long devoted itself to the study of Aristotle’s Poetics and the revival of Greek tragedy. The landmark production of Oedipus in 1585 incor- porated dance and music by Andrea Gabrieli, but bore little resemblance to a performance in ancient Greece. Eventually, the Camerata’s classicist idea of Greek trag- edy set to music would blossom into a new theatrical art, called opera.
The most popular Italian export of the Renaissance was a robust form of comic theater called the comme- dia dell’arte (Fig. 9.22)—improvisational comedy in
innovations—stage devices, plot structure, comedic con- ventions—that defined the modern European theater as a mirror of reality. Stage designers applied the perspec- tive techniques of Renaissance painting to create the illusion of a deep, three-dimensional space on stage. On the temporary stages that were the norm—permanent theater buildings were rare in sixteenth-century Italy— scenic designers employed huge perspective backdrops. Movable painted wing scenery was angled inward to cre- ate the appearance of a long city street or a forest vista.
The Italians’ innovative stagecraft, along with humanist research into Roman theater architecture, reached a climax in Andrea Palladio’s design for the Teatro Olimpico (Fig. 9.21). The Teatro Olimpico was a small-scale replica of an ancient Roman theater, with a multi-storied façade and decorative statues and columns. Palladio’s permanent architectural stage sets
9.22 A commedia dell’arte performance at the French court, c. 1670. Collection Comédie Française, Paris. Italian commedia players became so popular in France that French theater troupes had them banned. A commedia performance included such stock figures as the Harlequin (left of center, in his identifying brightly colored costume) and the slapstick pair of Pantalone and Pulchinella (far right). Note the illusionist perspective scenery, also an Italian invention, provided by stage sets and a painted backdrop.
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landmark, but also the center of a rich musical culture. Based on a friendly accommodation between state and Church, Venetian civic life glittered with lavish pro- cessions, sumptuous festivity, and artistic brilliance. The Venetians’ love of revelry suffused even suppos- edly religious occasions and subjects, such as Paolo Veronese’s [vair-oh-NAY-zay] painting Marriage at Cana (Fig. 9.23).
The grand style of Venetian music provided a suitable accompaniment to the city’s habitual pomp and celebra- tion. The city was served by a line of distinguished com- posers—first Flemish musicians and later native-born composers. The last of the Renaissance composers was Giovanni Gabrieli (1558–1612), whose uncle had com- posed the music for the Florentine Camerata’s version of Oedipus the King. Like his predecessors, Gabrieli’s sacred music was strongly affected by the unique archi- tecture of the city cathedral. Instead of just one choir
which actors invented dialog to fit the bare outline of a plot. Commedia performances drew freely on popular novels, gossip, and current events. The usual scenario involved a cast of a dozen stock characters, including the innocent young lady, the spendthrift lover, and the stuffy doctor. For a few decades at least, commedia dell’arte troupes included female actors, and they took their brand of improvisational wit and physical comedy to audiences through much of Europe.
The Renaissance in Venice Late Renaissance Venice was a liberal and cosmo- politan city, largely untouched by the age’s religious conflicts. The wealthy aristocracy supported a rich artistic culture, and commissioned portraits and built country villas in neoclassical style. The city’s grand St. Mark’s Square was not only a splendid architectural
9.23 Paolo Veronese, Marriage at Cana, c. 1560. Oil on canvas, 21 ft 10 ins × 32 ft 6 ins (6.65 × 9.88 m). Louvre, Paris. Veronese excelled in the large-scale festive scenes beloved among his Venetian patrons. Christ and the Virgin Mary, seated at center, are distinguishable only by their haloes; among the musicians (foreground) is supposedly a self-portrait of the artist with Titian. The architectural setting resembles a perspective theater set (see Fig. 9.21).
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space, St. Mark’s Basilica had two opposing choirs, each with its own organ. Venetian composers exploited this setting by devising a polychoral style, which used two or more groups of singers or instruments spaced some distance apart. In Gabrieli’s Canzone Duodecimi Toni (1597), two brass choirs engage in stereophonic dialog, employing a characteristic canzona rhythm of “LONG-short-short.” As each section ends, the poly- phonic melodic lines unite in a final chord (two or more tones played at the same time). These chordal endings were called cadences, musical resting points that pro- vided a sense of resolution and completion. Gabrieli’s pronounced cadences signaled a move away from the polyphony of Renaissance music.
The Venetians’ grand style of living proved fortunate for its most prominent Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). Although he designed numer- ous churches, Palladio is best known for his country estates. Venetian economic troubles had forced many of its wealthy merchants to take up farming, and Palladio showed skill in adapting his classical style to building country villas for such patrons.
9.24 Andrea Palladio, Villa Rotonda (Villa Capra), Vicenza, Italy, begun 1550. 80 ft (24.38 m) square, height of dome 70 ft (21.34 m). The classical porticoes on all four sides took advantage of the surrounding vistas. The hilltop site inspired, among others, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia (see Fig. 11.20).
9.25 Plan of the Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, Italy, begun 1550. From Palladio’s Quattro libri dell’architettura (Four Books of Architecture), 1570. Palladio’s use of a central dome in a non-sacred building was unprecedented in the Renaissance and would influence the choice of domed buildings for residences and capitols throughout Europe and the Americas.
Read an excerpt from Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture on myartslab.com
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Giorgione [jyor-jee-OH-nee] (1478–1511), a mas- ter of pictorial mood. In the Tempest (Fig. 9.26), for example, the city landscape manages to suggest both profound peacefulness and foreboding. The figures in the foreground—the sentinel and the nude mother with infant—remain largely unexplained. They suggest the complementary qualities of strength and tenderness. Apart from the possible hint at the Madonna and Christ Child in the form of the mother and infant, Giorgione’s pastoral scene is entirely non-religious.
Giorgione’s brief career contrasts with the life of Titian (c. 1488–1576), a master of color who became the wealthiest and most successful artist of his day. While Michelangelo’s energies were absorbed by the
Palladio’s typical design for the country villa is evi- dent in the Villa Rotonda (Fig. 9.24), although this residence was a rural retreat and not a farmhouse. The rigorously symmetrical floor plan (Fig. 9.25) consists of a circle within a square, with four identical classical- style porticoes. Partly through Palladio’s influence, such pedimented façades and central domes became a common feature of secular buildings in later periods. Palladio was an enthusiastic student of ancient Roman building, though his designs often freely combined clas- sical elements. His Four Books of Architecture (1570), a copy-book of classical designs and decoration, became a principal textbook for architects over the three centu- ries that followed.
Late Renaissance Painting and Mannerism Because the city’s damp climate discouraged fresco, Venetian Renaissance painters preferred oil paint and with its rich hues produced works of mystery and grand spectacle. Venice’s most mysterious painter was
9.26 Giorgione, Tempest, c. 1505. Oil on canvas, 32 1⁄4 × 28 3⁄4 ins (82 × 73 cm). Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice. The Venetian Giorgione excelled at creating elusive and sometimes enigmatic moods. Note the contrast here between the stormy background and the placid foreground figures. Allegorically, the painting’s meaning is obscure: the stork on the rooftop and the mother’s white cloak are traditional symbols of purity, while fortitude is suggested by the sentinel’s staff and the broken columns.
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9.27 Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, c. 1520. Oil on canvas, 5 ft 8 ins × 6 ft 7⁄8 ins (1.73 × 1.85 m). National Gallery, London. The first Renaissance artist to earn a fortune by his skills, Titian excelled at every type of Renaissance subject, including portraiture and sacred themes. Here notice the painting’s dynamic composition, created by dividing it diagonally. Bacchus’ revelers fill one triangle at right, while Ariadne stands alone in the triangle on the left. The leaping Bacchus connects both triangles at the center.
View the Closer Look at Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne on myartslab.com
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women pupils, finally opening the profession of paint- ing to talented young women.
The dynamism and tensions of Titian’s painting show the effects of a style that arose in Florence and Rome around 1520. This style, termed mannerism, employed exaggeration, distortion, and expressiveness in an elegant and inventive play on Renaissance con- ventions. Scholars originally applied the term derisively, implying a derivative or decadent style; they now regard mannerism as a search for new expressive method. The mannerists often toyed with the rules of perspective and proportion, highlighting a tension between pictorial illusion and spatial reality.
The carefully refined distortions of the mannerist style are visible in the Madonna with the Long Neck (Fig. 9.29) by Parmigianino [PAR-mee-juh-NEE-noh] (1503–1540). The central figures violate the rules of proportion that had been elaborated by Renaissance studies of anatomy. The Christ Child lolls in his moth- er’s arms like a corpse. The row of unfinished columns echoes the Madonna’s vertical form, but the use of perspective is unorthodox, abandoning the carefully
new St. Peter’s, Titian [TEE-shun] fulfilled commissions for the Italian aristocracy. One of his most striking works, Bacchus and Ariadne (Fig. 9.27), is a celebra- tion of the pagan spirit, painted to decorate a duke’s country home at Ferrara in northern Italy. The wine god Bacchus impetuously leaps from his chariot to wed Ariadne. The entire picture is dominated by exuberant blue, gold, and pink, reflecting the mood of the revelers who crowd in from the right. The torsion and move- ment in the figures are a sharp contrast to the restful harmonies of much High Renaissance painting.
The late Renaissance witnessed the international success of women artists such as Sofonisba Anguissola [ahn-gwee-SOH-lah] and Lavinia Fontana, both from northern Italy. Anguissola (1532?–1625) excelled as an innovative portraitist whose works were sought by an international clientele. Her group portraits depicted subjects engaged in conversation and play, rather than mutely facing the viewer (Fig. 9.28). While Anguissola spent 20 years as a court painter in Spain, Fontana (1552–1614) worked at the papal court in Rome. The success of these artists encouraged male teachers to take
9.28 Sofonisba Anguissola, The Artist’s Family: Minerva, Amilcare, and Asdrubale, c. 1557–8. Oil on canvas, 61 3⁄4 × 48 ins (157 × 122 cm). Nivaagards Malerisamling, Niva, Denmark. Anguissola was among the first European portraitists to depict her subjects in moments of play or, as here, familiar intimacy.
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9.29 (left) Parmigianino, Madonna with the Long Neck, 1534–40. Oil on panel, 7 ft 1 ins × 4 ft 4 ins (2.16 × 1.32 m). Uffi zi, Florence. Mannerist painters toyed with Renaissance techniques of spatial scale and proportion. In this image, compare the space at left, with its crowded band of angels, to the space at right, where the prophet Isaiah stands before the columns of an unfinished classical building.
9.30 (opposite, top) Jacopo Pontormo, Deposition, c. 1528. Oil on wood, 10 ft 3 ins × 6 ft 4 ins (3.13 × 1.92 m). Santa Felicità, Florence. Mannerist distortion of anatomy and compression of pictorial space lend a bizarre pathos to Pontormo’s version of this conventional religious subject. The bearded figure in the upper right is a self- portrait of the artist.
9.31 (opposite, bottom) Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Supper, 1592–4. Oil on canvas, 12 ft × 18 ft 8 ins (3.65 × 5.7 m). San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. The pious Tintoretto’s works were fired with Counter- Reformation religious enthusiasm. The apostles and Christ are crowded behind an obliquely angled table, while the smoking lantern and ghostly angels illuminate ordinary servants and house pets attending the feast.
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balanced pictorial space of the Renaissance style. The painter Jacopo Pontormo exulted in mannerism’s sty- listic license. His scene of the Deposition (Fig. 9.30) contorts postures and compresses the pictorial space to create a sense of a cosmos violated by the death of Christ. The gazes and gestures of the participants in this sorrowful drama lead the viewer’s gaze outward to the picture’s borders, rather than inward to Christ’s body.
The mannerists’ experiments with pictorial space freed the Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto (1518– 1594) to present traditional Christian subjects in dra- matic new ways. In Tintoretto’s Last Supper (Fig. 9.31), Christ is nearly lost among the disciples arranged along the table’s plunging diagonal line. The lantern’s smoke is transmuted into angels, much as the wine and bread of the Eucharist are mysteriously transubstantiated into the blood and body of Christ.
This stylistic ferment reached Spain in the person of El Greco (c. 1541–1614), who combined Renaissance technique with subjects of intense religiosity. Born Domenikos Theotocopoulos [THAY-o-to-KOH- po-luss] on the Greek island of Crete, the young El Greco (The Greek) trained as a painter in Venice, where he absorbed the lessons of Titian and the Italian mannerists. Around 1570, he resettled in Toledo,
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9.32 El Greco, The Burial of Count Orgaz, 1586. Oil on canvas, 16 ft × 11 ft 10 ins (4.88 × 3.61 m). Santo Tomé, Toledo, Spain. Trace the picture’s horizontal and vertical axes. Note the contrary motion along the vertical axis (the count’s soul flying up to heaven, his armored body falling into the crypt below) and the vividly realistic style of the human mourners versus the mannerist stylization of the host of heaven.
1425 CE 1450 CE 1475 CE 1500 CE 1500 Albrecht Dürer, Self- portrait (9.13)
1509 Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
1510–1515 Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (9.11)
1517 Martin Luther’s Ninety- five Theses, marks beginning of Reformation
1520–1566 Suleyman the Magnificent rules Ottoman Egypt
1434 Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Arnolfini and his Wife (9.10)
C H A P T E R 9 : T I M E L I N E
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CHAPTER REVIEW
The Reformation How did Martin Luther initiate the Reformation? What were Luther’s disputes with the Roman Catholic Church? What were the primary characteristics of Protestant religions? Who was John Calvin? What is the “Protestant ethic”? What were the political repercussions of Calvinism?
The Rise of Northern Europe What conditions helped create the early modern world in northern Europe? How did the growth of commerce and the discovery of the New World help European monarchs consolidate power?
Art and Humanism in Northern Europe In what ways do the techniques of oil painting and fresco differ? How does the art of the Northern Renaissance differ from that of the Renaissance in Italy? How do the artworks of Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, and Pieter Bruegel compare and contrast with one another?
What was In Praise of Folly? Who were Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, and Michel de Montaigne, and how did they each approach the topic of hypocrisy? In what ways did Erasmus’s outlook compare and contrast
with Luther’s? What was Thomas More’s purpose in writing Utopia? How did Montaigne invent the essay?
The Elizabethan Age Why did Henry VIII split with the Catholic Church? Describe the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. What was the Elizabethan theater? Who was William Shakespeare? How did music develop in Elizabethan England?
The Late Renaissance in Italy and Spain What was the Counter-Reformation? Who was Ignatius of Loyola? How did the works of the composer Palestrina reflect the new conservatism of Late Renaissance Italy? What was the commedia dell’arte? Who was Palladio? Who were Giorgione and Titian? What is mannerism? How did the paintings of Parmigianino, Jacopo Pontormo, Jacopo Tintoretto, and El Greco differ from the paint- ings of the High Renaissance? Who was Sofonisba Anguissola?
1525 CE 1550 CE 1575 CE 1600 CE 1529 Francis I builds château at Chambord, France (9.5); Luther, A Mighty Fortress is Our God
1545–1564 Council of Trent directs Counter-Reformation
1550 Palladio, Villa Rotonda, Vicenza (9.24)
1558 Elizabeth I ascends to English throne
1559 John Knox establishes Calvinism in Scotland
1564 Birth of Shakespeare
1569 Death of Bruegel
1570 El Greco settles in Toledo, Spain
1571–1594 Giovanni da Palestrina director of papal choir, Rome
1570s–1580s Sofonisba Anguissola, court painter in Spain (9.28)
1580 Montaigne, Essays
1585 Giovanni Gabrieli organist of St. Mark’s, Venice
1588 English navy defeats Spanish armada
1592–1594 Tintoretto, Last Supper (9.31)
1601 Thomas Morley’s madrigals dedicated to English queen; Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Counter-Reformation Spain’s most religious city, and there he spent his career painting portraits and religious subjects for Toledo’s churches.
Typical of El Greco’s church commissions is The Burial of Count Orgaz (Fig. 9.32), painted above the count’s tomb in a small church. The painting shows El Greco’s command of color and philosophical depth. The Burial of Count Orgaz pays homage to a saintly
knight at whose funeral St. Stephen and St. Augustine supposedly appeared. In heaven, El Greco shows the austere figures of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist imploring Jesus to accept the count’s soul. The clarity of color in the faces and costumes below yields to an acid contrast of blues, yellows, and greens in the heav- enly host above. The dynamic whole announces a new stylistic synthesis that would be called the baroque.
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10The Baroque
10.1 Gianlorenzo Bernini, altar canopy (baldacchino) of St. Peter’s, Rome, 1624–33. Gilt bronze, height approx. 100 ft (30.5 m).
K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What were the monumental achievements of the Baroque spirit in Italy? • What was distinctive about the Baroque in Spain? • How did the reign of Louis XIV affect French art? • How did the emergence of the middle classes affect the Protestant
Baroque?
• What were the origins of the Scientifi c Revolution? • What conditions made the Baroque in England different from the rest
of Europe?
Gianlorenzo Bernini’s decoration of the new St. Peter’s was one of the greatest and
most expensive undertakings of the baroque era. The undulating columns and
volutes of Bernini’s altar canopy, or baldacchino, provide a baroque counterpoint to
the classical regularities of Michelangelo’s dome and vaulting (Fig. 10.1). The spirit
of baroque [bar-OKE]—the love of extravagant and monumental beauty, the tension
between simplicity and embellishment, the confl ict between science and faith—char-
acterized the seventeenth century in Europe. While baroque kings and popes built
palaces and collected art, a new science was mastering the mysteries of the cosmos
and reshaping Western civilization. This dynamic era—roughly 1600 to 1700—was
the time when modern science and modern government were born. It left an indel-
ible mark on the Western world.
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260 Chapter 10 THE BAROQUE
The Baroque in Italy The tumultuous seventeenth century gave rise to an artistic style that reflected the age’s dynamism and divi- sion. We now call this the baroque—originally a dis- paraging term that may be derived from a Portuguese word for a misshapen pearl. The baroque style took dif- ferent forms in Europe’s nations and colonies, reflecting the different audiences it had to satisfy in Italy, Spain, France, and the Netherlands.
In Italy, the Catholic Church had withstood the challenge of the Reformation and celebrated its victory with a flurry of new building and artistic patronage that exceeded even the splendor of the Renaissance (see Map 10.1). To a renewed religious devotion, the Italian baroque style added a love of ornamentation, a flair for the dramatic and theatrical, and a dedication to works of monumental scale.
Bernini and Counter-Reformation Rome When Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, he said to the artist Bernini: “Your luck is great to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini pope; but ours is much greater to have Cavalier Bernini alive in our pon- tificate.” Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) possessed an inexhaustible imagination and the energy to see his works through to completion. His sculpture infused Renaissance technique with the dynamism and emo- tional force of the baroque style. His David (Fig. 10.2), for example, provides a vivid contrast to Michelangelo’s Renaissance David (see Fig. 8.18). As the giant Goliath approaches, Bernini’s David prepares to cast his stone, creating the diagonal twisting so typical of baroque sculpture and painting. The determined grimace on David’s face may be a self-portrait of Bernini’s facial expression as he worked intensely at the stone.
Spurred by Rome’s last great burst of Church- sponsored patronage, Bernini surpassed the Renaissance titans in ambition and virtuosity. Commissioned to complete and decorate St. Peter’s basilica, Bernini built an immense altar canopy of gilded bronze, to stand beneath Michelangelo’s imposing dome. Abandoning his predecessors’ classicism, Bernini supported the canopy or baldacchino (see Fig. 10.1) with twisted col- umns, ornately covered with laurel leaves (an emblem of his Barberini patron). As a triumph of sculpture and architecture, the baldacchino [bal-da-KEE-noh] mediates between the human worshiper and the super- human scale of Michelangelo’s basilica.
Bernini’s masterpiece of illusionism and virtuoso technique is the Cornaro Chapel. The chapel’s sculp- tural centerpiece, the Ecstasy of St. Teresa (Fig. 10.3), depicts the saint’s ecstatic union with God. In sensuous language, Teresa described her vision of an angel:
In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron
tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged
into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my
entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them
10.2 Gianlorenzo Bernini, David, 1623–4. Marble, height 5 ft 6 1⁄4 ins (1.68 m). Borghese Gallery, Rome. The figure’s tension and energy extend from the furrowed brow to the toes of the right foot, which clench the edge of the supporting plinth. Cardinal Borghese, for whom this work was executed, was one of baroque Rome’s most important art patrons. The cardinal’s Roman villa is now an important museum.
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Chapter 10 THE BAROQUE 261
group seems to float on a heavenly cloud. The chapel’s theatrical setting (Fig. 10.4), where sculpted figures of the Cornaro family watch from the balconies, heightens the sculpture’s lavish illusionism.
In 1656 Bernini, already the age’s greatest sculptor, undertook baroque Rome’s last great monument: a public square in front of St. Peter’s basilica. Bernini’s piazza (Fig. 10.5) had to begin at the wide façade; nar- row to allow for existing buildings; and then widen into a broad piazza, where thousands could gather to receive
with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of
God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several
moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so
extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is
one’s soul then content with anything but God.1
In Bernini’s depiction, the angel (which is also a cupid, symbol of erotic love) has withdrawn his spear. Eyes lidded, and body limp, overwhelmed by God’s “gentle wooing,” Teresa is consumed in equal measure by plea- sure and pain. Amidst swirling gowns, the sculptural
10.3 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1645–52. Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Marble and gilt bronze, life-size. In a depiction of St. Teresa’s ecstatic vision, the angel of God pierces Teresa’s heart with the barb of divine love. The drama seems to be illuminated by the light of God; actually, the light comes from a hidden window above the sculpture.
10.4 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, 1640s. Observe Bernini’s baroque fusion of the arts in the theatrical setting for the Ecstasy of St. Teresa. It includes a complex architectural niche for the main sculpture, backed by gilded rays of divine light; an elaborate ceiling painting; and, most unusual, sculpted figures of the Cornaro family in balconies at either side. The family views Teresa’s dream as if it were a staged drama.
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the pope’s blessing. Bernini’s solution was a triumph of ingenuity. Flanking colonnades defined a trapezoidal forecourt, then opened into a gigantic ellipse like arms of embrace (Fig. 10.6). Bernini completed St. Peter’s with a triumphant baroque flourish, expanding its set- ting on a monumental scale and providing a dramatic entrance to the church of Bramante and Michelangelo.
Alongside such works of stupendous scale, counter- Reformation Rome also nurtured artistic projects of subtlety and intricate sophistication. One was the
10.5 St. Peter’s, Rome, aerial view. Nave and façade by Carlo Maderno, 1606–12; piazza, colonnades designed by Gianlorenzo Bernini, 1656–63. Height of façade 147 ft (44.8 m), width 374 ft (114 m). Carlo Maderno’s gigantic façade, with columns more than twice the height of the Parthenon’s in Athens, completed the century- long project begun by the Renaissance pope Julius II. The baroque master Gianlorenzo Bernini designed the colonnaded piazza, which resembles a giant keyhole, symbol of the keys to God’s kingdom that Christ gave to St. Peter.
10.6 Plan of St. Peter’s and piazza, Rome, 1656–63.
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Chapter 10 THE BAROQUE 263
The Taj Mahal As European conquerors and missionaries colonized the Americas, Islam had extended its influence into India. From 1526 to 1761, a succession of Muslim rulers in India established the Mughal empire, and under their reign India prospered from growing international trade. The first Mughal [MOO-gahl] conquerors originated in central Asia, descended from Mongols (hence the name Mughal or Mogul) but emphasizing their Turkish heritage. The Mughal rulers intermarried with Hindu nobility, and their civilization blended Muslim, Persian, and Indian cultures.
The most celebrated art work of the Mughal period was a tomb, the Taj Mahal (Fig. 10.7) at Agra in northern India. In general, Mughal rulers were more inclined to build mon- uments and tombs than Muslim mosques or shrines. The Taj Mahal [TAHZH muh-HAHL] followed a longstanding Turkish custom of commemorating a man’s devotion to a woman—in this case, Mumtaz-i-Mahal, the favorite wife of Shah Jahan (ruled 1628–1658).
In form, the Taj Mahal is a cube surmounted by a bul- bous central dome, with archways on the four sides leading into the octagonal central space. The white marble build- ing rests on a pink sandstone base and is approached by
long reflecting pools on two sides. The building’s setting is perhaps its most spectacular aspect, overlooking a river and set between a hospice and a mosque.
On the exterior and interior, the Taj Mahal is decorated with arabesques inlaid with semiprecious stones, Qur’anic script, and stone floral mosaics. The decoration is a blend of Islamic themes and the native Indian skill in stonecut- ting. Symbolically, the entire complex is both a profession of love and a vision of the Muslim paradise. A Mughal poet said the Taj Mahal was “wrapped in a veil of concord with the air.”
10.7 Taj Mahal, Agra, India, 1632–48. The tomb of a Mughal emperor’s wife, the Taj Mahal floats on a pedestal of pink stone, above a garden and reflecting pools that suggest the pleasures of Islamic paradise. Compare the Taj Mahal’s symmetry and balance to European neoclassical buildings such as the Escorial Palace in Spain (see Fig. 10.12) or St. Paul’s Cathedral in England (see Fig. 10.32).
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G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
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Italian Baroque Painting The Italian painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573– 1610) used dramatic contrasts of light and dark to depict realistic biblical scenes. Caravaggio’s [kair-a- VAH-jee-oh] biblical characters looked so much like Italian peasants that his work was often rejected by patrons who preferred idealized, conventional treat- ments to contemporary settings and realism.
The Calling of St. Matthew (Fig. 10.9) depicts a rude tavern much like those that Caravaggio frequented during his brief, turbulent life. On the left, Matthew is shown among a group of finely dressed courtiers, who count the day’s tax collections. Into this humble room steps Christ himself, accompanied by St. Peter. Christ calls Matthew to leave a dark world of sin and error (Matthew 9:9). The call is issued not from Christ’s shadowed face, but in the warm shaft of light that flows from an unseen window. Even a despised tax collector may be lifted from sin’s darkness by the sudden light of God’s grace: Caravaggio’s technique embodies the spirit of baroque religiosity.
Caravaggio’s dramatic use of chiaroscuro, or effects of light and shadow, influenced artists throughout Europe. In Italy, one inventive follower was the artist Artemisia Gentileschi [jen-ti-LESS-kee] (1593–1652), whose life demonstrates the challenge of being a female artist in Europe in the seventeenth century. As a pupil, Gentileschi was sexually abused by the painter employed by her artist father to train her. After a scandalous rape trial, Gentileschi resumed her career in Naples, adopting the dramatic effects of Caravaggio’s techniques. One of Gentileschi’s favorite themes was Judith and Holofernes, a Hebrew legend widely illustrated in Renaissance and baroque art. The Israelite heroine saved her besieged city by murdering Holofernes, commander of the attacking Assyrian army (Fig. 10.10). The brilliant foreground lighting pushes the action forward toward the viewer, increasing the sense of horror and violence.
The Birth of Opera Italian styles and attitudes dominated European music in the baroque era, much as they did in painting and sculpture. Italy’s greatest musical invention of this era was opera—a stage drama set to music, with virtuoso singers, orchestral accompaniment, and elaborate stag- ing. Opera grew from musical roots in the Renaissance, when Italians had begun adapting the lyricism of the madrigal to dramatic poetry. In Renaissance Florence,
Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638–1641), designed by Bernini’s architectural rival Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) (Fig. 10.8). Borromini laid out the tiny church’s ground plan in a complex scheme of overlapping triangles, circles, and ellipses. Above the undulating walls is an elliptical dome with coffers in eccentric shapes. The coffers shrink as they rise toward the central window, creating the illusion of a much higher dome.
10.8 Francesco Borromini, interior of dome of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, c. 1638. Width approx. 52 ft (15.8 m). Borromini’s intricate dome caps a space that is no larger than a single pier of St. Peter’s. Working in such compact dimensions, Borromini managed a design of baroque dynamism and illusionist effect.
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10.9 Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew, c. 1597–8. Oil on canvas, 11 ft 1 ins × 11 ft 5 ins (3.38 × 3.48 m). Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Caravaggio’s dramatic use of light and dark defined a style eventually imitated by many others, including Rembrandt. Here, as Christ calls Matthew to discipleship, the tax collector (pointing to himself) responds with bewilderment. Christ’s languid gesture is reinforced by the angled stream of light pouring into the room from the right. Note the picture’s symbolic contrasts: light vs. dark, rich garments vs. simple cloaks, dueler’s sword vs. disciple’s staff.
10.10 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, c. 1620. Oil on canvas, 6 ft 6 1⁄3 ins × 5 ft 4 ins (1.99 × 1.63 m). Uffi zi, Florence. Gentileschi painted several versions of the story of the Israelite heroine Judith, who slays an Assyrian general besieging her city. Note the “Caravaggesque” use of a dark background and brightly lit foreground action and the radiating lines that draw the eye to the central action.
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Already a master of madrigal technique, Monteverdi was employing madrigal-style word-painting to dra- matize his character’s inner emotional state. He used chordal dissonances—groups of tones that caused the listener to feel discomfort and to anticipate a resolu- tion—for emotional effect. In his operatic masterpiece, Monteverdi had invented a music that could move an audience to tears.
In baroque Rome and Venice especially, opera devel- oped in form and grew in popularity. In 1637 a troupe gave in Venice the first operatic performance before a paying public. Increasingly, the singing was divided between speech-like recitative and more song-like aria. With the aria, the dramatic action halted temporar- ily while the character revealed his or her feelings in song. Gradually, opera matured into two forms—opera seria and opera buffa. Opera seria was based on the lofty mythological themes favored by courtly aristo- crats, while opera buffa was comic opera with broader
a group of humanist intellectuals called the Camerata tried to re-create Greek tragedy. Beginning in the 1570s, Camerata members devised a style of solo sing- ing, called recitative style, to express the serious emo- tion of tragic poetry.
The first operatic synthesis of these elements came from the pen of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). At the court of Mantua in 1607, Monteverdi [mohn- te-VAIR-dee] produced the first operatic masterpiece, Orfeo [or-FAY-oh]. Monteverdi’s Orfeo dramatized the myth of Orpheus’ journey to the underworld in hopes of recovering his beloved Eurydice. Until this performance, recitative [ress-uh-tah-TEEV] had been delivered in a half-sung, half-spoken tone of limited emotional range. Especially in the famous solo Tu se’ morta (You are dead), Monteverdi charged the recita- tive with a new emotional intensity. Orpheus grieves his lover’s death in a melodic line that draws him toward the underworld.
You are dead, my life,
and I breathe?
You have left me,
Never, never more to return,
and I remain?2
10.11 L. O. Burnacini, Opera on the Cortina, Vienna, 1665–6. Engraving. Historisches Museum der Stadt, Vienna. Opera’s commercial success in Italy led to the construction of lavish public opera houses throughout Europe. The rows of box seats permitted status-minded patrons to observe each other with as much interest as they viewed the performance.
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Indeed, the best-known Italian baroque composer, Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741), spent virtually his entire career as musical director of a conservatory. Vivaldi’s demanding works were probably first performed by young female musicians, at fund-raising concerts for the conservatory.
Vivaldi was a master of the baroque concerto (or concerto grosso [kun-CHAIR-to GROH-so]), a musi- cal form in which a small group of instruments plays in concert with a larger orchestra. Vivaldi’s most famous work is The Four Seasons (1725), a suite of four con- certos still widely performed today. The first concerto, La Primavera (Spring), is in three movements, with alternating tempos (fast-slow-fast). In the first move- ment of Spring, violins dramatize the arrival of spring: its birdsongs, murmuring streams, and sudden thun- derstorms. These dramatic episodes are connected by a recurring melody (called a ritornello, something that returns), which provides an explicit regularity to the
appeal to the urban middle class. Theaters dedicated to opera were built in Venice, Rome, and Naples and soon throughout Europe (Fig. 10.11).
Vivaldi and Italian Baroque Music Baroque Venice was a vital musical center in other regards as well. The Venetian Barbara Strozzi (1619–after 1664) was the first European composer to achieve renown strictly through publication of her works. Strozzi per- formed not for the public, but only for her learned father’s gatherings of connoisseurs. The Venetian institution of the conservatory—a home and school for orphans—offered girls a new entry to the musical profession, besides family education or the convent.
Map 10.1 Renaissance and earlier monuments of Rome This map indicates principal projects in the revitalization of Rome during the Renaissance, as well as monuments from antiquity surviving at the time.
Hadrian’s Tomb (Castel Sant’
Angelo)
Pantheon
Il Gesù
Ara Pacis Augustae
Villa Farnesina
San Pietro in Vincoli
Capitoline Hill
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Forum
San Giovanni in Laterano
St. Peter’s
Papal Palace
Sistine Chapel
Imperial Fora
Trajan’s Forum
Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine
Colosseum
Arch of Constantine
Arch of Titus
Church of Santa Sabina
Temple, dedicated to Portunus
Baths of Caracalla
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268 Chapter 10 THE BAROQUE
Spanish Baroque Architecture Fired by Counter-Reformation fervor, King Philip II of Spain (ruled 1556–1598) had a stark palace built at El Escorial, about 30 miles (48 km) outside the royal city of Madrid (Fig. 10.12). The building complex func- tioned simultaneously as a palace for the king, a tomb for the king’s father, and a monastery dedicated to St. Lawrence. The entire scheme of the Escorial borrowed from the rigorous classicism of Michelangelo’s design for St. Peter’s in Rome (see Fig. 8.34)—a debt evident in the dome of the central church. Three generations of Spanish royalty decorated the Escorial’s galleries in baroque splendor, financed largely by gold and silver plundered from the Americas.
In Spain’s American colonies, governors and mis- sionaries erected baroque-style churches to assert the authority of Christian culture and promote the inhab- itants’ conversion. At the Inca capital of Cuzco, in
composition. Within this somewhat rigid structure, Vivaldi achieved brilliant variations and embellish- ments. Music publishers disseminated Vivaldi’s music to all corners of Europe, where it was studied by Johann Sebastian Bach and other masters of the later baroque.
The Baroque in Spain Ruled by monarchs of the Habsburg dynasty (1506– 1700), baroque Spain was flush with wealth from its New World possessions and shaped by two decisive forces: the Catholic Counter-Reformation and absolut- ism. The Habsburg kings, especially Philip II and Philip IV, patronized major building projects and talented artists, fostering a “Golden Age” of Spanish art. The Spanish taste for baroque was also reflected in the colo- nial style of its American colonies. Among many tal- ents, the Golden Age nourished two artists of universal genius: the painter Velázquez and the author Cervantes.
K E Y C O N C E P T
Absolutism The turbulence and emotion expressed in baroque art reflected deeper and more fatal divisions in seventeenth- century European society. Incessant war and civil disorder ravaged Germany, where the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) destroyed one-third of the population. England was split by a bitter civil war between parliamentarians and royal- ists that saw one king beheaded, another king restored, his successor deposed, and a fourth installed with limited powers.
From this civil war and religious strife, the era’s chief political problem emerged: how to maintain social order and the rule of law in the nations of Europe. One solution was to give absolute power to a monarch, who could then sub- due the contending factions. This doctrine of absolutism dictated that a monarch exercise supreme political power and control over every aspect of national life. An absolutist monarch was able to end quarrels among political factions and impose uniform national laws and economic policies. Although today it is a synonym for tyranny, in the seven- teenth century absolutism was a progressive and modern political idea.
Absolutism’s leading philosophical defender came from the royalist ranks of divided England. In 1651, while the Puritans ruled England, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1669) published Leviathan, which defended the rule of a monarch from a realist and secular perspective. Hobbes’s treatise
CRITICAL QUESTION Is a central government to be trusted or not? Under what circumstances and for what reasons would you support a strong central government? When and why would you oppose one?
reflected his deep pessimism about humanity. Without a king to rule them, Hobbes believed people could expect a barren life that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The all-powerful sovereign, or “Leviathan,” imposed a brutal but benevolent order on the life of an unruly nation.
One need not share Hobbes’s pessimism to see the advantages of the absolutist state. In France, the royal bureaucracy improved the efficiency of government, raised a standing army of half a million, and generously supported the arts. France’s king symbolized the nation’s unity and international prestige. According to the famous motto attributed to Louis XIV, L’état, c’est moi—“I am the state”—personal homage to the king was an act of patrio- tism. Indeed, many features of modern political life now associated with republican democracies first arose under the absolutism of the seventeenth century.
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faiths. Baroque elements continued to predominate in Latin American building long after the style had faded in Europe.
Velázquez and Cervantes— Masters of Illusion The greatest painter of Spain’s Golden Age was Diego Velázquez [ve-LASS-kess] (1599–1660), court painter to Philip IV from 1623 until his death. As a painter, Velázquez achieved a vibrant realism with his daring brushwork. As a courtier, he relentlessly pursued social and intellectual status for himself and his profession in an aristocratic culture that disdained the artisan.
Velázquez’s Triumph of Bacchus (c. 1628; Fig. 10.14), for example, illustrated the scholarly belief that pagan mythology reflected historical fact or popular custom. Leering peasants crowd the painting at right, while a pudgy Bacchus turns his eyes doubtfully aside from his rowdy, sunburned entourage. As with all his subjects, Velázquez charged his gods and goddesses with psychological complexity.
Soon after painting the Bacchus, Velázquez accom- panied the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens on a year- long sojourn in Spain. Under the influence of Rubens and a visit to Italy, Velázquez’s vibrant but roughhewn early style developed into technical finesse and intel- lectual complexity. Few paintings are a more complex puzzle than Velázquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor; Fig. 10.15). The work presents itself as a genre picture, a scene of everyday life. The paint- ing shows a casual moment in the artist’s palace studio.
modern Peru, the Jesuit church of La Compañia (begun 1651) was literally built on top of ancient Inca walls. La Compañia’s distinctive façade contained stacked arches within a unifying trefoil (or cloverleaf) arch and a curv- ing entablature. In Mexico City, the great Cathedral of Mexico (1718–1737), Latin America’s largest church (Fig. 10.13), contained fantastically elaborate inte- rior decoration. Its placement on the site of the Aztec Temple of the Sun, center of the Aztecs’ sacred city of Tenochtitlán [tuh-NAHK-tit-LAHN], stated emphati- cally the triumph of Christian colonialism over native
10.12 Juan Batista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, Escorial Palace, near Madrid, Spain, 1553–84. Engraving. Louvre, Paris. Like El Greco’s paintings, the Escorial Palace was a bridge between Renaissance and baroque styles. The grid-like plan of the palace’s inner sections had a gruesome symbolism: it represented the gridiron on which St. Lawrence was roasted to death.
10.13 Cathedral of Mexico, Mexico City, 1718–37. In the colonized New World, the Spanish baroque style symbolized Christian Europe’s dominance over native peoples and their pagan religions.
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slavery, and debtors’ prison. Desperate to overcome the poverty of his own prosaic world, Cervantes [sair- VAHN-teez] created one of the great utopian heroes of Western literature.
The hero of Cervantes’s tale begins as an impover- ished Spanish noble who has spent too many hours in his library reading popular chivalric romances. Inspired to become a wandering knight, Quixote dresses him- self in a ludicrous suit of armor and gains the services of a squire, Sancho Panza. Together, this unlikely pair sally forth on a series of adventures (Fig. 10.16). Don Quixote, the gaunt and aristocratic knight, becomes so enamored of romantic fantasies that, in his eyes, a windmill is a giant and a rude tavern is a castle. Sancho Panza, the coarse peasant, is a realist who marvels at Quixote’s delusions. The two extremes of idealism and
Historians have identified the figures of the five-year-old Princess Margarita in her dazzling costume, her atten- dants, a pair of dwarfs, and the artist, standing before a canvas the size of Las Meninas itself. The most enig- matic figures are the king and queen, reflected in the mirror at the rear, and who may be sitting for their por- trait. Just as possibly, they could be visiting the painter and thus honoring him in his studio. Velázquez deepens these ambiguities with the figure of the courtier who has opened a door and gazes back at the scene. The com- position of Las Meninas is apparently accidental, yet it attains a nuance and complexity of composition that appealed to the sophisticated patrons of the baroque era.
The tension between art and life visible in Las Meninas also inspired the greatest literary work of the seventeenth century, Don Quixote. The idealistic knight Don Quixote [DON kee-HOH-tay] de la Mancha con- stantly confuses the real world with his chivalric fan- tasy. Yet he draws others into his idealized world and ennobles them, much as Velázquez’s palpable realism draws the viewer into his illusionary painter’s studio.
The author of Don Quixote was Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), an impoverished veteran of foreign wars,
10.14 Diego Velázquez, The Triumph of Bacchus (Los Borrachos), 1629. 65 × 88 1⁄2 ins (1.65 × 2.25 m). Prado, Madrid. With color and skin tone, Velázquez creates dramatic contrast between the rough commoners at right and the boyish god of wine. Even as painter to the royal court, Velázquez was always a close observer of different social types and classes.
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10.15 Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), 1656. Oil on canvas, 10 ft 51⁄4 ins × 9 ft 3⁄4 ins (3.18 × 2.76 m). Prado, Madrid. Velázquez explored the relation between appearance and reality, art and the court, and the artist and patron, with unmatched subtlety. By including himself with his royal subjects—the princess in the foreground, the king and queen reflected in the mirror on the rear wall—Velázquez slyly assured himself a kind of artistic immortality. The red cross indicates his membership in a noble order usually closed to artists, an honor that Velázquez avidly pursued.
View the Closer Look at Velázquez’s Las Meninas on myartslab.com
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the words, “Now the theater changes.” Planning to make France a grand stage for his majesty and power, within a year he began the construction of his palace at Versailles [vair-SIGH]. Louis XIV proved to be a mas- ter in the guises of absolutist power.
An enthusiast of dance and theater, Louis XIV did not hesitate to enlist the arts in supporting his reign. He exerted absolutist control in cultural affairs via the academies, state-sponsored agencies that oversaw train- ing of artists and performers, while also dictating stan- dards of taste. Under Louis XIV, academies governed all the major arts, including theater, dance, opera, and painting and sculpture. Although they brought order to the patronage of art in France, the academies also imposed rules that stifled artistic innovation. These rules depended on the revival of classical Greek and Roman forms, creating a style termed neoclassical.
realism illuminate one another, and highlight the limi- tations of each of these attitudes.
At this point they caught sight of 30 or 40 windmills
which were standing on the plain there, and no sooner
had Don Quixote laid eyes upon them than he turned to
his squire and said, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better
than we could have wished; for you see there before you,
friend Sancho Panza, some 30 or more lawless giants
with whom I mean to do battle. I shall deprive them
of their lives, and with the spoils from this encounter
we shall begin to enrich ourselves; for this is righteous
warfare, and it is a great service to God to remove so
accursed a breed from the face of the earth.”
“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.
“Those that you see there,” replied his master, “those
with the long arms some of which are as much as two
leagues in length.”
“But look, your Grace, those are not giants but
windmills, and what appear to be arms are their wings
which, when whirled in the breeze, cause the millstone to
go.”
“It is plain to be seen,” said Don Quixote, “that you
have had little experience in this matter of adventures. If
you are afraid, go off to one side and say your prayers
while I am engaging them in fierce, unequal combat.”3
CERVANTES
From Don Quixote, Part I
The novel, first published in 1605, was popular enough to inspire a plagiarized sequel by an anony- mous author. Cervantes responded by writing his own Part II (published 1615), in which Quixote’s adventures continue and the philosophical complexity of the novel increases. Quixote and Sancho are now famous for their exploits in Part I, and meet characters who seek to manipulate and deceive the heroes. In one telling epi- sode, a friend of Quixote dresses himself as a “Knight of Mirrors,” so that when they duel, Quixote is doing battle with his own reflected image. It is a duel that Velázquez might have liked to sketch. Quixote finally is unable to sustain his illusions, and his quest ends with a poignant scene. As Quixote, defeated and dying, relin- quishes his chivalrous ambitions, it is Sancho Panza who urges him to revive his fantasies. To live in a disen- chanted world is, as Sancho says, to die “in the hands of melancholy.”
The Baroque in France The power of spectacle was never better understood than at the court of Louis XIV of France. In 1660 Louis took personal control of the French government with
10.16 Don Quixote attacking the windmills, from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 1863 edition, Hachette, Paris, illustrated by Gustave Doré. Deluded by his reading of medieval chivalric romances, Cervantes’s hero continually mistakes the prosaic inhabitants of his world for characters in imagined knightly adventures.
Read Cervantes’s Don Quixote on myartslab.com
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Jules Hardouin-Mansart [mahn-SAH(r)]. Together the designers created a unified and symmetrical design, an architectural universe with the king at the center.
The palace complex at Versailles expanded to accom- modate Louis XIV’s changing vision of the absolutist court. The palace was originally intended as a retreat from the bustle of the Paris court. Soon, however, Louis demanded that the influential French nobility come to live with him at Versailles, where he could control their influence—a move that impoverished the nobility by extravagant living. Eventually the palace accommo- dated a population estimated at 50,000. Aside from the main palace, the Versailles complex incorporated royal stables for 12,000 horses and elaborate gardens covering several hundred acres. As a whole, Versailles projected absolutist power according to a scheme that was to influence city planning for the next century.
The palace’s garden façade synthesized neoclassi- cal and Italian baroque elements as designed by Jules
Under Louis’s patronage, the French arts finally threw off their dependence on Italian artists and mod- els, enabling France to become an influential cultural center in its own right. For more than a century, France influenced the tastes of foreign rulers who aspired to the magnificence of the court at Versailles.
The Palace of Versailles The Palace of Versailles was balanced and restrained in its design, yet lavish in scale and decoration—a com- promise between baroque excess and neoclassical rules, the ultimate synthesis of styles. Louis XIV’s minister Colbert once advised him that “with the exception of brilliant military actions nothing speaks so eloquently of the grandeur and cleverness of princes as build- ings.”4 Taking this advice to heart, in 1661 Louis began enlarging his father’s hunting château near the village of Versailles, about 20 miles (32 km) outside Paris. The site offered the king’s architects and planners the freedom they had lacked in remodeling the Louvre Palace in Paris. The original architect, Louis Le Vau [luh VOH], worked together with designers of the gar- dens (André le Nôtre) and interior decoration (Charles Lebrun). Later modifications, principally the long projecting wings, were made by Le Vau’s successor,
10.17 Louis Le Vau and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, garden façade, Palace of Versailles, France, 1669–85. Le Vau and Mansart’s façade is a grand statement of the baroque neoclassical style—classical decoration in a building shaped entirely by the baroque taste for grandiosity and spectacle. Supplying the palace’s fountains with water required the diversion of an entire river.
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matters of literary form and taste, imposing strict neo- classical rules on the theater. The Academy decreed that plays performed by Paris’s emerging professional theater must be divided into five acts, obey the unities of time and place, and provide an uplifting moral.
Only an exceptional playwright could thrive under these restrictions. The age of Louis XIV could boast of two, the tragedian Jean Racine [rah-SEEN] and the comedian Molière [mohl-YAY(r)]. Jean Racine (1639– 1699), following the path of his older competitor Pierre Corneille [kor-NAY-(ee)], presented classical themes in a consciously artificial academic style. Racine’s tragedies were strictly governed by the neoclassical unities, concentrating the plot in a single main action and locale. The characters spoke in an exalted rhymed verse, as dictated by the Academy. His themes were
Hardouin-Mansart (Fig. 10.17). Neoclassical style is evident in the restraint of the three levels of the palace building: a plain ground arcade; the main level with its shallow columned porticoes; and the upper level topped by elaborate statues and balustrade. The simplicity and charm of Mansart’s façade are dwarfed somewhat by the palace’s wings, which stretch nearly 2,000 feet (609 m) from end to end.
Mansart’s greatest stroke of genius is visible inside the palace, in the famed Hall of Mirrors (Fig. 10.18). Here, overlooking the garden, Mansart built a row of floor-length windows and on the facing wall placed matching windows of mirrored glass. With its grand length, brilliant light, and gilded decoration, the Hall of Mirrors embodies the lavish splendor of Louis XIV’s court.
Theater and Dance at Versailles King Louis XIV generously patronized the theater and dance of his country, while enforcing stringent control. He granted dictatorial power over the performing arts to the academies, whose influence in the arts dates from 1636, when a royal minister asked a scholarly group called the Académie Française to judge a popular trag- edy. The Academy quickly became official judge in
10.18 Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Charles Lebrun, Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles, France, begun 1676. Length 240 ft (73.2 m), width 34 ft (10.36 m). The long hall provided a spectacular setting for the king’s daily promenade from his bedroom at one end to his offices at the other. The arched mirrors opposite the exterior windows create a sense of spaciousness that belies the room’s modest width.
Watch a video about the Palace and Park of Versailles on myartslab.com
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today. Beauchamp’s positions were designed to present the dancers’ movements effectively to an audi- ence seated before a stage rather than around the dancers in a pal- ace room or courtyard. Among the
French court’s other advances were the first appearance of professional women dancers in ballet (1681) and the publication of a manual of choreography (1700) that standardized dance notation.
usually drawn from ancient Greek tragedy, though Racine’s noble characters were often subject to ordinary human weakness and pas- sion. Despite academic restrictions, Racine’s tragedies presented a com- pelling drama of characters driven by their own desires and folly. He was often criticized for being too realistic. The neoclassical trag- edies of Corneille and Racine have remained in the standard repertoire of French theater until this day.
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as Molière (1622–1673), used biting wit to attack the hypocrisy and vice of French society. Molière was play- wright, actor, and part-owner of his own theatrical company (Fig. 10.19) and had early gained the favor of Louis XIV, who granted his company a theater inside the Louvre in Paris in 1658. Several of Molière’s master- pieces were first performed at court. Among his greatest comedies were Tartuffe (1664), the story of a religious hypocrite, and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Would- be Gentleman; 1671), which mocked France’s boor- ish social climbers. His plays were exceptional in their relentless wit and consistent moral attitude, and showed a careful observation of social manners of the time.
In music and dance, the French court’s most important figure was Jean-Baptiste Lully [LOO-lee] (1632–1687), innovator in both French opera and the French court bal- let, or ballet de cour [ball-AY duh KOOR]. In 1653, Lully was a dancer in the ballet de cour that gave young Louis XIV his name “the Sun King.” Louis danced the role of the god Apollo, wearing a sun-ray headdress and a solar emblem on his chest. Establishing himself first as a ballet composer at court, by 1661 the Italian-born Lully headed the court’s Royal Academy of Music. From this position Lully ruled as virtual dictator over French music, opera, and dance.
Under Lully’s regime, French dance was profession- alized and the ballet de cour evolved into a flexible and unified art form. Court ballets usually featured as inter- ludes and entrées during the performance of a comedy or an opera. However, the playwright Molière incor- porated ballet directly into the plot of his comedies, collaborating with the royal dance master and chore- ographer, Charles-Louis Beauchamp [boh-SHAN(h)]. Traditionally, court dancers were aristocratic amateurs. To train professional dancers, Lully established a dance school at the Academy, where Beauchamp developed the formalized foot and leg positions still used in ballet
10.19 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) as Sganarelle in The Doctor in Spite of Himself. Engraving. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. In satirizing French society’s hypocrites and social climbers, the comic playwright Molière championed moderation and common sense.
10.20 Jean-Baptiste Lully, performance of the opera Armide (1686). Engraving. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Through his control of the Royal Academy of Music, Lully professionalized French music and dance. He used the staging devices of Italian theater to create spectacular entertainment for his patron, Louis XIV. Here a palace collapses beneath a flight of devils.
Listen to an excerpt from Armide by Lully on myartslab.com
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Rubens excelled in the favorite themes, both reli- gious and secular, of his aristocratic patrons. At his busy workshop in Antwerp, he produced great art to order: tapestry designs, altarpieces, and ceiling paint- ings, as well as easel paintings. Scenes such as his Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (Fig. 10.21) permitted the patron to identify with figures of mythological and romantic prowess. Here, the two gods Castor and Pollux visit earth to take two mortal women as wives. The two sisters’ energetic resistance to their violent kidnapping is emphasized in the twisted forms of their bodies. The furious motion of the picture leads upward, one sister being lifted awkwardly but inevitably toward heaven.
With his wealth, Rubens built a grand house in Antwerp and in 1630, after his first wife’s death, married the 16-year-old Helena Fourment. In his later career, Rubens’s affection for Helena and their
Lully also proved a versatile operatic composer: in 14 years he wrote 20 operas that remained standards for more than a century. Like French architecture, French opera grew up under the shadow of the popular Italian version. The French aristocracy preferred their opera with Italian-style elaborate staging and elevated mythological themes (Fig. 10.20). Lully developed a national style in opera that suited the French desire for pomp and spectacle.
Painting in Baroque France The European nobility’s favorite baroque painter was the Flemish Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), who served patrons from Spain to Rome to England. The artist himself traveled frequently from Flanders (now Belgium) to the royal courts, earning a fortune from artistic commissions and his service as a diplomat.
10.21 Peter Paul Rubens, Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, c. 1618. Oil on canvas, 7 ft 3 ins × 6 ft 10 ins (2.21 × 2.08 m). Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Rubens, a master of baroque dynamism, here presents a striking contrast of textures in the translucent flesh of the nude women, Castor’s swarthy skin and shell-like armor, and the dappled horses. Trace the diagonal lines that meet at the painting’s center, where the sisters’ bodies nearly touch.
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essence of baroque neoclassicism, in both style and sensibility. While Rubens thrived in court politics, Poussin [poo-SAN(h)] fled Paris and spent most of his career quietly in Rome among artistic friends and select patrons. He studied stoic philosophy and expressed its ideals in masterful “heroic” landscapes.
One of Poussin’s exemplary subjects was St. John of Patmos, author of the Christian Book of Revelation, pictured among the monumental ruins of classical civi- lization (Fig. 10.23). Poussin strikes a perfect balance between the order of nature and the reasoned endeavor of humanity. Like the light of divine reason, sunlight falls impassively across the figure of John himself, the uneven ground of nature, and the broken pedestals and columns of civilization. Exiled to Patmos by the Roman emperor, St. John stoically records Revelation’s fiery vision. Poussin may have identified with his St. John: living in his own self-imposed exile in Rome, the painter defined a pictorial classicism that dominated French art for a century.
children inspired a newly tender and heartfelt style. In the so-called Garden of Love (Fig. 10.22), Rubens welcomes his young bride into the gallant conversation and flirtation of the group at center. A second group of bon-vivants occupies the porch at rear and a statue of Venus at upper right blesses the scene with the elixir of love.
In contrast to Rubens’s effusive dynamism, the French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) was the
10.22 Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Love, c. 1638. Oil on canvas. 6 ft 6 ins × 9 ft 3 1⁄2 ins (1.98 × 2.83 m). Prado, Madrid. Rubens, aided by a putto (cherub), introduces his young bride to the pleasures of love. Note how the couples stepping in from either side draw the eye to the group of lovers at center.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Compare Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (see Fig. 10.10) with Peter Paul Rubens’s depiction of the Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (see Fig. 10.21). What do the two paintings say about the artists’ attitude toward men, women, power, and sexuality?
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By contrast, the Netherlands in this age experienced an upsurge of national feeling and cultural vitality, fueled by vigorous commerce and political indepen- dence. Formed from the Protestant northern provinces of the Low Countries, the Netherlands fought a long war, concluded finally in 1648, for independence from the Spanish monarchy. Their war experience left the Dutch suspicious of the extravagant absolutist courts and the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. Their Calvinist churches were bare, but they decorated the walls of their town houses and public halls with paintings. The vigorous market in painting nurtured a golden age of artistic genius, most famously the painter Rembrandt van Rijn.
J. S. Bach—Baroque Genius Bach excelled in the musical forms, both secular and sacred, that were regularly performed in Germany’s courts and churches. His music typically exhibited two essential features of baroque concert music. One was
The Protestant Baroque The predominantly Protestant regions of northern Germany and the Netherlands nurtured a range of achievements that differed from that of the Catholic and absolutist nations. The German principalities were politically divided at this time, and suffered greatly from the strife and devastation of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). German nobles often imitated French cultural styles. Artists had to find patronage at small German courts or in Germany’s prosperous cities. From such circumstances emerged the baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), who is now acknowledged as one of the world’s most prolific musical geniuses (Fig. 10.24).
10.23 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with St. John on Patmos, 1640. Oil on canvas, 40 × 531⁄2 ins (101.8 × 136.3 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, A. A. Munger Collection, 1930.500. A subtle pyramid unifies the elements of fore- and middle-ground, while a curving line draws the eye from lower left past the center temple to the city (an imagined Rome!) on the distant shore.
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the last days of Christ’s life, and its emotions ranged from the despair of the crucifixion to the triumphant joy of resurrection. The St. Matthew Passion is a gigantic work, calling for two orchestras, two choruses, organs, and solo voices. Bach ren- ders the events of Christ’s last days and hours in music of an emotional
range that shows he might well have succeeded in the opera houses of London or Vienna.
Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier Bach’s works illustrated the development of a new sys- tem of composition in baroque music. As early as 1600, European composers had devised a system of musical keys to replace the traditional modes used by ancient and medieval musicians. In a musical key, the seven intervals between the eight notes of an octave scale are arranged according to a specific formula of whole and half tones. A musical key’s principal pitch, called a tonic, serves as a tonal center to the entire composi- tion. For example, a melody written in the key of C usually begins and ends on the tonic C. Baroque com- posers also learned to transpose a melody from one key to another without altering the tune, a technique called modulation. Bach composed a set of musical exercises, entitled the Well-tempered Clavier (1722), to prove that a clavier (any stringed keyboard instrument) could be tuned to accommodate all 24 major and minor keys. (“Tempered” refers to the tuning, not a mood.) The sense of order and the possibilities for infinite variation in this modal system appealed to the baroque taste for mathematical complexity.
Bach’s compositions for the organ and other key- board instruments exploited fully the major–minor key system, often in the musical forms of prelude and fugue. The prelude (also called toccata) is a free form designed to show off the keyboard player’s virtuoso ability. The fugue is a polyphonic musical form in which a theme is developed through elaborate coun- terpoint. The fugue typically begins with a theme (or “subject”), which is answered by another melodic line
elaborate counterpoint, that is, the combination of two or more melo- dies of equal importance. The term “counterpoint” is sometimes used as a synonym for polyphony, but traditionally is associated with the age of Bach. The second feature is the basso continuo, a prominent bass line that harmonically sup- ports the polyphonic lines.
Both counterpoint and basso continuo are prominent features of the six Brandenburg Concertos (1721), which Bach composed for a friend of his noble patron. In the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, an ensemble of recorder (for which the flute is sometimes substituted), oboe, trumpet, and violin engages in a polyphonic conversation. A continuo provides a har- monic ground. Like his predecessor Antonio Vivaldi, Bach employs a recurring ritornello to punctuate the ensemble’s melodic explorations.
After serving in noblemen’s courts for 20 years, in 1721 Bach was appointed music director and composer of the St. Thomas’s choir school in Leipzig, a post of considerable civic and musical prestige. He composed music for the city’s four major churches, served as organist for the church of St. Thomas, instructed the choirs, taught at the school, and undertook additional commissions for German nobles. Still, the composer found time to give music lessons to his children and hold musical concerts at home.
For each week’s religious service at St. Thomas’s church, Bach wrote a cantata, a choral work that pro- vided the principal music of Lutheran worship. The text for the cantata was chosen for a particular Sunday or feast day, and celebrated the yearly cycle of the church calendar. Typically, the cantata contained recitative and aria-like forms, and served as a kind of sacred opera for the Lutherans. Bach frequently closed his can- tatas with a familiar Lutheran hymn that the congrega- tion might join in singing. For example, Cantata #80 (1715, revised 1740) was composed for the Feast Day of the Reformation and ended with a four-part setting of Martin Luther’s famous hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God. The tireless Bach composed about 300 cantatas in all, enough for five complete cycles of the liturgical year.
Though Bach composed no operas, he was the author of a monumental masterpiece of musical storytelling, the St. Matthew Passion (1727). A “passion” recounted
10.24 Johann Sebastian Bach, c. 1746. Engraving. Bach’s younger contemporaries criticized his music for its old-fashioned baroque intricacy and virtuosity, although later generations highly praised these qualities.
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painters could enter the profession more easily than in countries where a royal academy controlled training and patronage. Judith Leyster (1609–1660), a contem- porary of Rembrandt, was the first woman admitted to the painters’ guild of her city. Rachel Ruysch (1664– 1750) excelled at the popular genre of flower and fruit painting (Fig. 10.25), and was still painting at the age of 83.
The most remarkable painter of Dutch genre scenes was Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675). Vermeer’s feel for the Dutch interior is apparent even in his most philo- sophical work, The Allegory of Painting (Fig. 10.26), an intricate fabric of allegorical and visual patterns. The painter’s model is costumed as Clio, the muse of history. The curtain drawn back on the left and the painter’s fanciful costume enhance the painting’s theatrical air. A cool light suffuses the entire scene. With this picture, Vermeer seemed to claim for himself and his modest art the respect accorded to tragedy and music, symbolized by the mask and sheet music on the table.
Vermeer was virtually unknown in his day but is now regarded as a master of light and color. There is often a subtle contrast between the naive intimacy of his subject and the objective tone created by light and composition (Fig. 10.27).
Rembrandt van Rijn [van RINE] (1606–1669) spent most of his career in the Dutch capital of Amsterdam, where for a while he enjoyed prodigious success. He was an artist who mastered all the popular subjects of his age, taking from the Italian school of painting his religious and historical themes, and from the Dutch school his scenes of ordinary life and studies of human character. He transcended his peers in the visual and psychological richness of his achievement.
The height of Rembrandt’s popularity is represented by the Sortie of Captain Banning Cocq’s Company of the Civic Guard (Fig. 10.28), an example of the group portraits often commissioned by Dutch civic groups. The picture was known as The Night Watch until a cleaning in the 1940s revealed it to be a daytime scene. Rembrandt shows the guard on march from the city
(the “countersubject”). The voices continue to build, repeating the subject or countersubject and exploring contrapuntal variations. Especially on the organ, which allows three voices (both hands and the foot pedals), Bach’s compositions highlighted the virtuosity of com- poser and player, and appealed to the baroque love of intricacy and embellishment.
Rembrandt and Dutch Baroque Painting In the baroque era, the Dutch republic—what we know now as the Netherlands—witnessed a free mar- ket in painting that bypassed the traditional channels of European artistic patronage. To please anonymous buyers who shopped for paintings in a gallery or mar- ket stall, Dutch artists offered individualized styles and subjects suited to modest domestic interiors. They pre- ferred landscapes and cityscapes, portraits, still lifes, and genre subjects such as tavern scenes and domestic inte- riors. The market could be cruel: the first great Dutch baroque painter, Frans Hals (c. 1581–1666), who was noted for his boisterous portraits of tavern characters, ended his career in poverty. On the other hand, women
10.25 Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Vase, 1698. Oil on canvas, 23 × 17 1⁄2 ins (58.5 × 44.5 cm). Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. The popular genre of flower and fruit painting involved not only careful botanical observation, but also a moralizing undertone. Ruysch’s flowers reminded her Dutch audience of the transience of physical beauty, and the worm on the table top—nature’s memento mori—warned them of impending death and divine judgment.
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10.26 Johannes Vermeer, The Allegory of Painting, c.1665–70. Oil on canvas, 4 ft 3⁄18 ins × 3 ft 7 1⁄4 ins (1.30 × 1.10 m). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Vermeer’s paintings typically showed an interior scene of quiet drama, illuminated by a cool, brilliant northern light. The female figure, costumed as a muse, holds a trumpet and a history book that will someday announce the fame of the anonymous painter in the foreground.
View the web resource on Vermeer on myartslab.com
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The technique was well suited to Rembrandt’s interest in light, and he frequently reworked etching plates to enhance the effects of light and shadow.
Rembrandt painted himself more than 60 times. Early in his career, Rembrandt often presented him- self as a worldly sophisticate, dressed in fashionable attire. Later on, the self-portraits served to promote his international renown as a painter, as when Rembrandt portrayed himself as the Hellenistic painter Apelles (Fig. 10.30). In his last decade, when age and troubles had punctured his vanity, Rembrandt painted himself dressed in humble painter’s clothes. The painter exam- ined even his own failure with unflinching psychologi- cal insight.
gate, led by the handsome captain and his dandified lieutenant in white. The theatrical lighting strikes the curious figure of the girl, who adds a whimsical air to the solemn occasion.
Perhaps because of changing artistic fashion, Rembrandt suffered a loss of patronage in the 1640s. At the same time, his wife died and he floundered in self-imposed personal and financial difficulties. During this period, Rembrandt created his most famous reli- gious work, the etching of Christ Healing the Sick (Fig. 10.29), also called the Hundred Guilder Print. In etching, lines are scratched on a wax-covered metal plate; the plate is treated with acid that “etches” the exposed metal; prints are then taken from the plate.
10.27 Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, c. 1658–60. Oil on canvas, 17 7⁄8 × 16 1⁄8 ins (45.5 × 41 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Vermeer’s genre scene lavishes attention on simple objects and modest but enduring truths: bread, milk, and a maid’s coarse dress (with its sleeves rolled). The blurred points of light and slightly enlarged foreground objects suggest that Vermeer composed his pictures with a camera obscura, a popular seventeenth-century optical device. Note how the modulated light across the back wall emphasizes the maid’s figure and the repeated whites suggest her innocence.
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10.29 Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Healing the Sick (Hundred Guilder Print), c. 1649. Etching, 10 7⁄8 ins × 15 3⁄8 ins (28 × 39 cm). British Museum, London. Rembrandt’s religious art reflected his interest in human psychology, particularly the variety of common humanity. Christ stands at the center, blessing the needy and healing the infirm, who crowd through an arch (right). Well-dressed elders at left criticize Christ’s violation of the religious law prohibiting work on the sabbath.
10.28 Rembrandt van Rijn, Sortie of Captain Banning Cocq’s Company of the Civic Guard (The Night Watch), 1642. Oil on canvas, 11 ft 9 1⁄2 ins × 14 ft 4 1⁄2 ins (3.59 × 4.38 m). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Rembrandt excelled at creating drama and visual interest in large group portraits like this, a standard subject of Dutch baroque painting. Here the muskets, spears, and swords create a complex rhythm of crisscrossing diagonals. Note also where Rembrandt has illuminated faces and figures arbitrarily, applying a theatrical (rather than naturalistic) principle of lighting.
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The New Science In a period spanning the late Renaissance and baroque eras (about 1550 to 1700), Europe witnessed an intel- lectual movement that altered human history and, more than any other force, created the modern world. This movement was the Scientific Revolution, the historical process by which modern science became the authorita- tive method for investigating and describing the world. The modern scientific method rested on two principles:
• the empirical observation of nature as the means for arriving at scientific truths, and
• the verification of proposed truths through experi- ment and mathematical calculation.
Thinkers of the Scientific Revolution overthrew Aristotle’s natural philosophy, long the basis of Western science, and eventually separated scientific truth from the doctrines of the Christian Church. The new scien- tists employed new instruments of scientific study such as the telescope and invented new forms of mathematics to make accurate and verifiable scientific predictions.
The Scientific Revolution began in earnest with the publication in 1543 of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). The Polish astronomer proposed a heliocentric theory of the uni- verse: that is, the sun stands stationary at the universe’s center with the planets (including Earth) revolving around it. Copernicus intended in his treatise to sim- plify mathematical calculation of the planets’ move- ments, which were absurdly complex under Ptolemy’s ancient astronomical system whereby the Earth was the unmoving center of things. In fact, Copernicus’s tables of planetary motion were not much better, since he assumed (under the influence of Neoplatonic ideas) that the planets orbited the sun in perfect circles. Despite his error, De Revolutionibus was the stimulus for further scientific challenges, and a potent symbol of the coming revolution in scientific thought.
Copernicus’s revolutionary theory spread quietly among scientists, inspiring an obscure German math- ematician, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), to resolve its flaws. Again working from Neoplatonic assumptions, Kepler at first posited that the planets are arranged within a framework of concentric geometric solids. This system still could not account precisely for the planetary motions. Finally, while working as court mathemati- cian in Prague, Kepler realized that the planets moved in elliptical orbits, not circles. In 1609 he published his
10.30 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-portrait, c. 1665. Oil on canvas, 45 × 37 1⁄2 ins (114 × 94 cm). The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London. Though his career had failed by this time, Rembrandt proudly painted himself as the famed Hellenistic painter Apelles, who, like Rembrandt, was criticized for his unnatural use of light. An ancient story told that Apelles had visited an absent friend and left only a perfectly drawn circle on the wall as his calling card.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Both Vermeer’s The Allegory of Painting (Fig. 10.26) and Rembrandt’s Self-portrait (Fig. 10.30) concern the artist’s quest for fame. What does each artist seem to be saying about his artistic craft and himself?
View the web resource on Rembrandt on myartslab.com
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under his dinner table. In 1572 Brahe observed the appearance of a new star (a supernova, in today’s terms), which cast doubt on the ancient notion that the heavens never changed. Winning royal patronage in Denmark and Prague, Brahe built observatories and made precise catalogs of the movements of extra-terrestrial bodies, hoping to prove either the old Ptolemaic or the new Copernican systems.
The great hero of scientific observation was the Italian astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Galileo used the newly invented telescope to revolutionize astronomy. He observed moons around Jupiter, spots on the sun, and craters on the moon, all contradictions of conventional scientific wisdom. Galileo was appointed court scientist to the Medici and won the pope’s favor. But his Copernican ideas soon fell foul of the Counter-Reformation. When
New Astronomy, positing laws of planetary motion that finally overturned the classical model.
Tools of the New Science Both Copernicus and Kepler employed scientific deduc- tion, the discovery of a truth through logical calculation. In the same way, the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) clinched his theory of the blood’s circu- lation by mathematical calculation, without observing the circulatory system directly.
An equally powerful tool of the new science was induction, reasoning from particulars of fact and sys- tematic observation of the world. One pioneer of sci- entific observation was the colorful Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe [TEE-koh brahh] (1546–1601), known for his artificial nose and the dwarf he sometimes kept
Empiricism The philosopher John Locke’s question was bold: “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished?” he asked in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). The answer was bolder still: “To this I answer, from experience.”
No ideas except from experience—that is the philosophi- cal motto of empiricism, and Locke’s Essay was the most important statement of empiricism in seventeenth-century European thought. Locke argued that the human mind began as a tabula rasa, a blank slate. The mind was “fur- nished” with ideas from two sources of experience: the observation of external objects (sensation) and of its own inner workings (reflection). Every idea of human thought came from these sources. No ideas were innate. Locke’s entire essay on Understanding was, therefore, a veiled attack on Descartes and his philosophical rationalism (see page 286). Where Descartes relied on “clear and distinct ideas” that were intuitively true, Locke dealt in ideas that were “determinate or determined”—determined by the mind’s contact with experience.
The opposition of Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism still inhabits scientific thought today—in debates on the acquisition of language, for example. But their disagreement is easily overstated. Both philosophers were pioneers in the epistemology of modern science—that is, the philosophical explanation of what humans know and how they know it. Locke’s Essay provided an epistemological
underpinning for science’s empiricist practice. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) took empiricist skepti- cism a step further in his study of causation. In Hume’s view, if one billiard ball strikes another, the movement of the first seems to cause the motion of the second. But how could we be certain that this succession of events would be repeated the next time? Hume argued that neither reason nor experi- ence were able to establish a causal connection based on inductive observation alone. It was our “imagination”—not entirely a reasonable faculty—that actually created the belief in causality. “Even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect,” wrote Hume, “our conclu- sions from that experience are not founded on reasoning or any process of understanding.”5 Causation might, in fact, exist in the world, but our ideas about causal sequences were the inventive creation of our minds.
Empiricism would become a virtual dogma of the Enlightenment during the eighteenth century. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant spoke of awaking from his “dogmatic slumbers” to challenge empiricism in his Critique of Pure Reason (1787). Kant would insist that the mind actively shapes experience rather than merely regis- tering impressions from the outside world. But twentieth- century philosophy would revive empiricist skepticism to challenge all metaphysical thinking, including Kant’s. The empiricist tradition that John Locke inaugurated still sup- ports modern scientific thinking and continues to shape our understanding of the human mind.
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Descartes had arrived at the first principle of his sci- entific method—Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). From this principle, he could deduce other per- fectly clear and distinct ideas, including the existence of God and the certainty of his own mathematical propo- sitions. With his methodical line of reasoning, Descartes had vanquished his own skepticism and expounded a philosophy of the new science.
Descartes’s confidence in the rational mind was confirmed by the age’s most important discovery, Newton’s universal theory of gravitation. In his Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles, 1687), the Englishman Isaac Newton (1642–1727) syn- thesized the discoveries of Galileo and other scientists in a unified theory. Newton asserted that all bodies—large and small, earthly and heavenly, natural and mechani- cal—were subject to the same gravitational force. He showed how gravity’s pull could be quantified pre- cisely. At first, scientists rejected Newton’s theory in favor of Descartes’s deductively derived system. Only in the eighteenth century was Newton’s theory of uni- versal gravitation widely accepted among scientists.
By the 1660s, the success and promise of the new science attracted government sponsorship. The Royal Society in England (founded 1662) and the Paris Academy of Sciences (1666) sponsored scientific activi- ties and published scientific papers. Governments also built observatories and botanical gardens, hoping to harness science to the service of royal prestige and national prosperity.
The English Compromise The religious and political turmoil of the baroque age convulsed the British Isles as deeply as any part of Europe. King Charles I (1600–1649) hoped to unify his rule over England, Scotland, and Ireland and make his monarchy the match of France or Spain. He acquired rich collections of art from Italy and brought to his court the prestigious Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck [dike] (1599–1641). In less than a decade, Van Dyck painted some 40 royal portraits of Charles and 30 of his queen. In the best known (Fig. 10.31), the mon- arch stands dismounted and commands the English countryside with elegance and grace.
But Charles I failed to command his nation with such ease. Seeking religious uniformity, he angered the Scots, who rebelled. Needing revenues, he con- vened the English parliament, whose members defied him. Finally, in 1642 civil war erupted between the chiefly Puritan parliament and the royalists. In 1649
Galileo debunked traditional astronomy in his Dialog on the Two Chief Systems of the World (1632), the Church responded emphatically, threatening the scien- tist with trial and torture. Reluctantly, Galileo knelt in Rome and recanted his belief that “the sun is the center of the world and moves not, and that the earth is not the center of the world and moves.”6
In retirement and under house arrest, Galileo con- tinued his studies, using both deduction and experi- ment, and wrote his most important scientific work, Discourses on Two New Sciences (1638), on the physics of moving bodies. Here Galileo completely overturned Aristotelian physics by treating the forces of motion as pure, mathematical quantities. Prudently, he published the book in the Protestant Netherlands, where the long arm of the Counter-Reformation did not reach.
Descartes and Newton The troubles between Galileo and the Catholic Church caused the French mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) to postpone publication of his own study of Copernicus. Descartes had already angered Church authorities with his provocative Discourse on Method (1639), a philosophical manifesto of the new science and a preface to his discoveries in mathematics and sci- ence. Descartes’s Discourse is still regarded as a pro- found statement of scientific confidence and rigor.
In the Discourse on Method, Descartes describes the painful uncertainty and skepticism of his youth. In his rigorous education and broad experience, he had found nothing that he could believe with conviction— skepticism had poisoned everything but mathematics. Descartes wondered why all knowledge cannot resem- ble those “long chains of reasoning, quite simple and easy,” that geometry used in its proofs. Determined to find certainty, Descartes practiced doubt. He rejected as completely false any thought that could be doubted for any reason. This rigorous doubt took him to the essential core of human thought.
But immediately afterwards I became aware that,
while I decided thus to think that everything was false,
it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must
be something; and observing that this truth: I think,
therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all
the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were
not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it
without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I
was seeking.7
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and widely traveled author, Donne was also a deeply religious man who applied his complex imagery to both sacred and secular themes. His famous poem Death, Be Not Proud is an affirmation of the triumph that salva- tion wins over death. Donne’s love poetry is charac- terized by jarring associations and comparisons: in one poem, he compares the intertwined legs of lovers to the hands of a clock. The stanzas below are from one of his best-known love poems, The Canonization. Donne understood well the costs of love; in 1600 he sacrificed his career to marry the niece of his patron.
Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We’re tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we too being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love …
JOHN DONNE
From The Canonization (c. 1603)
John Milton (1608–1674) wrote works of truly baroque scale. His masterpiece Paradise Lost (1667) is an epic poem that recounts the original drama of Christianity: the fall of Adam and Eve and their expul- sion from the garden of Eden. The learned Milton was well aware of his classical precursors in the epic form, and interwove his Christian saga with allusions to clas- sical mythology and literature. He portrays the loss of Eden as a tragedy that will be redeemed by the coming of Christ, as indicated in the poem’s famous opening lines:
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse …
JOHN MILTON
From Paradise Lost (1667)
Parliamentarians beheaded the king and only in 1660 was the British crown reinstated and an uneasy balance restored between royal and legislative power.
The achievements of British culture played a part in the age’s stresses and tensions. Native talents such as John Milton and Christopher Wren melded English traditions with continental styles and tastes. Imported artists such as van Dyck and the composer George Frideric Handel cagily appealed to the diverse British public. In politi- cal philosophy, the British developed ideas that would profoundly shape events in Europe in the next century.
English Baroque Poetry It was in poetry that seventeenth-century England found its most original geniuses. Some critics rank John Donne [dunn] (1572–1631) close to Shakespeare in the richness of his poetic achievement. Donne’s intellectu- alized style and complexity of emotion place him in a group called the metaphysical poets. A well-educated
10.31 Anthony van Dyck, Charles I of England, c. 1635. Oil on canvas, 8 ft 8 3⁄4 ins × 6 ft 9 1⁄2 ins (2.66 × 2.07 m). Louvre, Paris. Rather than the mounted equestrian portrait favored by Spanish monarchs, Charles and his painter chose this flattering pose, which minimized the king’s short stature and made the horse seem to bow to Charles’s royal command.
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Milton was also an outspoken critic of absolutist government. His most famous secular work is the Areopagitica (1644), which defended the right to pub- lish without government censorship. Milton fervently asserted his belief that truth could prevail in “a free and open encounter” with error.
Christopher Wren’s London The artistic compromises of late seventeenth-century England are perhaps best seen in the work of Christopher Wren (1632–1723). Until the 1660s, Wren was a pro- fessor of astronomy and founding member of London’s Royal Society. Wren’s architectural hobby became his profession when he was appointed as the royal surveyor of works and asked to modernize English architecture. In 1665 he traveled to Paris, where he encountered con- tinental baroque architecture through Bernini (who was there to redesign the Louvre) and Mansart, the architect of Versailles.
Wren’s architectural task gained urgency when, in September 1666, a great fire destroyed three-quarters of London, including the original cathedral of St. Paul’s. The disaster presented Wren with an unprec- edented opportunity to leave his artistic signature on an entire city. He spent the remainder of his life rebuilding London’s parish churches, gracing the city with their distinctive spires and neoclassical simplicity.
Wren’s largest assignment was the construction of the new St. Paul’s (built 1675–1710). His designs had to mediate between his patrons’ traditional tastes and his own preference for the prestigious neoclassical style of Versailles. Wren’s compromises are visible in St. Paul’s façade and floor plan (Fig. 10.32, Fig. 10.33). The neoclassical double portico is flanked by towers that use the principles of both Gothic and baroque styles. Above the portico rises the towering dome, indebted to Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, but somewhat obscured by the imposing façade. Wren’s fusion of styles left unresolved tensions but evidently satisfied his patrons.
The interior of St. Paul’s is only barely related to the exterior. Wren, often less architect than engineer, placed little value on this connection. The architect aimed for the central unity of a Renaissance design, while his clerical patrons insisted on a traditional Gothic floor plan. The interior’s most distinctive feature is the domed crossing. The dome rests on eight arches, four on the sides opening to the nave, choir, and tran- septs, and four on the corners closed off with apse-like niches. In the church’s overall design, Wren achieved a unique synthesis of Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque
10.32 Christopher Wren, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 1675–1710. Length 514 ft (156.7 m), width of façade 250 ft (76.2 m), height of dome 366 ft (111.6 m). Wren’s eccentric combination of Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque neoclassical elements responded to the contending forces of seventeenth-century English culture. It is the only major British building of the Renaissance and baroque built by a single architect.
10.33 Plan of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 1675–1710.
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of the baroque style and shows how art forms could be adapted to the tastes and attitudes of audiences. Although German by birth, Handel (1685–1759) lived half his life in England and was honored as the nation’s leading composer of the baroque period. As a youth, Handel learned the art of opera in Italy and then, in 1712, settled in London. There he was named musical director of the Royal Academy of Music (founded in 1720), which exploited the English fashion for Italian opera. London attracted the finest international opera singers, including Faustina Bordoni (1697–1781), who commanded the highest fees in Europe. Bordoni was able eventually to retire comfortably from her earnings. But Handel’s Academy had failed within a decade of its founding, and the debt-ridden composer suffered a stroke and a mid-life career crisis.
Handel rescued his career by turning to oratorio, a narrative choral work containing the musical elements of opera, but without action, scenery, or costumes. For Handel, working on a tight budget, this was a perfect compromise. In his remaining life, Handel composed and produced many oratorios, most written on biblical themes and performed in public concert halls.
Handel’s most famous oratorio was Messiah, first presented in Dublin, Ireland, in 1742 and still among the most widely performed baroque works. Messiah recounts Jesus’ birth, his death and resurrection, and the promised redemption of all humanity. The reli- gious feeling and grandeur of the story were matched by Handel’s music. The famous chorus “Hallelujah” (Hebrew for praise God) combines intricate counter- point and imitation with simpler chordal passages of dignified majesty. The chorus builds to a jubilant finale, with a unison so magnificent that the British king stood up on first hearing it. The commercial success of Handel’s other oratorios was enhanced by the stirring Old Testament themes, which appealed subtly to the patriotism of his English audience.
Politics and Philosophy in England By 1688, the English political compromise had unrav- eled. King James II, absolutist and Catholic, had so enraged his parliamentary opponents that the monarch fled London in fear of his life. The parliament quickly installed a new king and queen from the Protestant Netherlands, a political drama called the “Glorious Revolution” because virtually no blood was shed in the king’s overthrow. Britain had traded its absolutist king for a constitutionally limited monarchy.
styles and created London’s most admired architectural landmark.
Handel and Music in England England nourished one native genius of musical drama— Henry Purcell (1659–1695), who wrote music of all sorts but excelled in music for English theater of the Restoration period. Purcell [PERSS-ull] wrote one great opera, Dido and Aeneas (1689), based on Virgil’s great Latin epic. In the opening aria, the queen of Carthage describes her love for Aeneas as a secret “grief”:
Ah! Belinda, I am prest
With torment not to be Confest,
Peace and I are strangers grown.
I languish till my grief is known,
Yet would not have it guest.
From the outset, Purcell’s aria conveys Dido’s complex emotional state—love mixed with grief and resigna- tion—with compact eloquence. Purcell’s achievement was overshadowed by the popularity of Italian-style opera in England and the career of George Frideric Handel, which illustrates the international character
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
The Fire of London Diarist Samuel Pepys [peeps] provides this eyewitness account of the devastating fire that consumed much of London in 1666.
So I down to the water-side, and there got a boat and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michell’s house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way, and the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steele-yard, while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and fling into the river or bringing them into lighters [barges] that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the fire touched them and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.8
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Listen to “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas on myartslab.com
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balance between individual rights and social order. “It is evident that absolute monarchy, which by some men is counted the only government in the world,” he wrote, “is indeed inconsistent with civil society, and so can be no form of civil government at all.”10 From the social contract, citizens retained “unalienable” rights—to quote the American Declaration of Independence—that no government should ever violate. Theorizing that citi- zens might justly overthrow a tyrannical government to establish a state that respected individual rights, Locke was writing a license for political revolution. He set the tone for the combative age of reason to come.
Just two years later, John Locke (1632–1704) pub- lished a philosophical justification of the Glorious Revolution (Fig. 10.34). Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1690) argued that governments originated in the voluntary association and consent of humans act- ing in their rational self-interest. Like his predecessor Thomas Hobbes, Locke predicated that human society had arisen from a “state of nature.” Where Hobbes asserted humans were naturally greedy and violent, Locke claimed they were reasonable and cooperative. Hobbes’s pessimistic view convinced him that only an absolute monarch—the “Leviathan”—could impose social order. Locke’s more optimistic position located the beginnings of civil order in the social contract—an agreement in which humans traded the absolute free- dom of the state of nature for the limited freedoms of civil society. By vesting a government with some pow- ers of legislation and enforcement, Locke theorized, humans secured their most cherished freedoms. “And this puts men out of a state of nature into that of a commonwealth,” wrote Locke, “by setting up a judge on earth with authority to determine all the controver- sies and redress the injuries that may happen to any member of the commonwealth.”9 Despite the empiricist principles that Locke applied to the theory of knowl- edge, he claimed no empirical basis for the social con- tract. It was a philosophical hypothesis that explained in abstract terms the proper relation between the indi- vidual and the state.
Locke’s theory of the social contract became a foun- dation of classical liberalism—the political doctrine that prizes individual rights and freedoms and strives for a constitutional government that secures individual autonomy. The idea of absolutism—that one person can rightly claim all power—violated Locke’s liberal
1550 CE 1575 CE 1600 CE 1625 CE 1632 Galileo, Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World; condemned by Church 1633
1638 Rubens, The Garden of Love (10.22)
1639 Descartes, Discourse on Method
1642 Rembrandt, The Night Watch (10.28)
1648 Taj Mahal, Agra, India (10.7)
c. 1550–1700 The Scientific Revolution
1553–1584 Escorial Palace, Madrid, Spain (10.12)
1578–1657 Life of William Harvey
1599–1667 Life of Borromini
c. 1600–1700 The Baroque
1605, 1615 Cervantes, Don Quixote
1607 Monteverdi, Orfeo
1618–1648 Religious wars in Germany
c. 1620 Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (10.10)
1623–1624 Bernini, David (10.2)
C H A P T E R 1 0 : T I M E L I N E
10.34 Portrait of John Locke, English philosopher, c. 1680–1704. Locke’s views on human nature and the state are the foundation of modern liberal democracy.
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CHAPTER REVIEW The Baroque in Italy How do the works of Gianlorenzo Bernini exemplify the baroque style? Who was Francesco Borromini? What was the character- istic innovation in the painting of Caravaggio? How did opera arise in baroque Italy? Who were Claudio Monteverdi and Antonio Vivaldi?
The Baroque in Spain What circumstances fostered a Golden Age in Spanish art and letters during the baroque period? What is the El Escorial? Who was Diego Velázquez? Who were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?
The Baroque in France In what ways did Louis XIV exemplify absolutism? What is Versailles? What were the purposes of the French royal academies? Who were Corneille, Racine, and Molière? What innovations did Lully and Beauchamp bring to dance? In what ways do Peter Paul Rubens and Nicolas Poussin represent the two contrasting trends of pictorial style?
The Protestant Baroque What was the effect of the middle classes on the baroque arts of northern Europe? Who was Johann Sebastian Bach? Explain the differ- ences between concerto grosso, cantata, and fugue.
How did Bach demonstrate the flexibility of the new major–minor key system?
What is genre painting? Who was Johannes Vermeer? Explain the achievements characteristic of the art of Rembrandt van Rijn.
The New Science What is empiricism? What scientific discoveries set off the seventeenth-century revolution in scientific thinking? Who was Tycho Brahe? Explain the differences between Copernicus’s and Kepler’s theo- ries of planetary motion. Why did the pope threaten to excommunicate Galileo Galilei? Who was René Descartes? What was Isaac Newton’s theory of univer- sal gravitation? Explain the difference between deduc- tive and inductive reasoning.
The English Compromise What became of the English king Charles I? How did John Locke’s and Thomas Hobbes’s views of human nature affect their theories of government? Describe the characteristics of English baroque poetry. How did the London Fire of 1666 affect the career of Christopher Wren? Who were Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel? What is an oratorio? Explain Locke’s theory of the social contract.
1650 CE 1675 CE 1700 CE 1725 CE 1653 Young King Louis XIV dances as Sun King in Ballet de la Nuit
1656 Velázquez, Las Meninas (10.15)
1660 Louis XIV takes absolute control of French government
1663 Bernini completes piazza of St. Peter’s, Rome (10.6)
1664 Molière, Tartuffe
1666 The Great Fire of London
1667 Milton, Paradise Lost
1669–1685 Le Vau and Mansart, garden façade, Versailles Palace, France (10.17)
1674 Lully’s first opera performed at Versailles
1676–1710 Wren, St. Paul’s, London (10.32)
1678–1741 Life of Vivaldi
1687 Newton publishes his universal theory of gravitation
1688 Glorious Revolution in England
1690 Locke, Two Treatises on Government
1721 Bach, Brandenburg Concertos
1742 Handel, Messiah
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11.1 Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, 1717. Oil on canvas, 4 ft 23⁄4 ins × 6 ft 4 3⁄4 ins (1.29 × 1.94 m). Louvre, Paris. A pioneering example of the rococo fête galante: note the gently curving line from the head of Venus’ statue (right) along the party of picnickers to the boat at left. Watteau’s use of color may have been influenced by the introduction of pastel.
11 It is a scene of dalliance and fanciful pleasure. A smartly costumed boat-
ing party has spent the day on a mythic island of love, acting out a
frivolous drama of fl irtation and seduction (Fig. 11.1). As the picnickers
depart, the twilight seems to dim over an entire way of life: the leisured
decadence of eighteenth-century Europe’s nobility, who wittily amused
themselves in elegant gardens, town houses, and country manors, while
revolution brewed.
The Enlightenment
K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What qualities of art most appealed to eighteenth-century patron classes?
• How did the Enlightenment philosophes wish to reform eighteenth-century society?
• What artistic styles and themes appealed to the middle-class public of the eighteenth century?
• What musical forms evolved during the eighteenth-century? • How did neoclassicism express both conservative and
revolutionary values?
• What aspects of eighteenth-century society were criticized by the age’s great satirists?
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Not everyone in Europe and America was so idly engaged. In middle-class drawing rooms and coffeehouses, think- ers were fired by a spirit of Enlightenment—the belief in the supremacy of reason, and a conviction that humans could perfect society through the application of the intellect to human affairs. The thinkers of the Enlightenment published encyclopedias, pursued sci- ence, built neoclassical country homes, and eventually incited revolutions. In this age (c. 1700–1780), sober advocates of reason and enlightenment endured an uneasy coexistence with an aristocratic society devoted to artful pleasure.
The Rococo Style When Louis XIV died in 1715, the French nobility fled the grand baroque Palace of Versailles, where it had been captive for 50 years. The wealthy settled in new Parisian town houses and adopted an informal and light-hearted style called the rococo [ro-ko-KOH], a softer and more delicate style than the baroque (Fig. 11.2). The name “rococo” probably derives from the French rocaille, a shell-like decoration used in fash- ionable gardens; the very sound of the word indicates something of the artistic style: gay, witty, and often frivolous.
The Rococo in France Intellectual and artistic culture in France centered on the Paris salon—a regular social gathering that pro- vided occasion for dining, entertainment, and conver- sation. A salon was customarily sponsored by a wealthy woman and held once or twice weekly in her hôtel (the name given to an aristocratic town house). The aim of the salon, wrote contemporary observers, was to bring together “good company—a sort of association of the sexes” characterized by “the perfection of its charm, the urbanity of its usages, by an art of tact, indulgence, and worldly wisdom.”1 The most famous of Paris’s salons was held by Madame Geoffrin [ZHOFF-ran(h)], whose husband had made a fortune manufacturing ice-cream. Madame Geoffrin regularly entertained the leading figures of Parisian society. Prominent women in Berlin and Vienna took up the fashion, and for several decades, upper-class women became sponsors of music, art, and intellectual debate.
The rococo style was reflected in Parisian town houses, or hôtels, the fanciful interior decoration of which (Fig. 11.3) compensated for their modest exte- riors. In these urbane and pleasant settings, the arts
did not express profound ideas of political majesty or intense religious feeling. Instead, art could be witty and playful; succumb to melancholy or erotic fantasy; or distill the modest ideals of love, grace, and happi- ness. Rococo was art for pleasure and for decoration, and expressed perfectly the values and pastimes of the aristocracy.
The wistful mood of rococo painting was captured by Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), whose style set the tone for his eighteenth-century successors. Watteau [wah-TOH] discarded the grand manner of the baroque style, preferring instead peaceful scenes with pastel col- ors and dreamy atmospheres. His paintings were typi- cally tinted with melancholy, such as Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (see Fig. 11.1). The painting (there are
11.2 Clodion (Claude Michel), Intoxication of Wine (Nymph and Satyr Carousing), c. 1780–90. Terracotta, height 23 1⁄4 ins (59.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The rococo style delighted connoisseurs with its intimate scale; soft colors and shapes; and playful, sensual themes. This work of frank eroticism depicts worshipers of Dionysus who have given themselves over to sensual delight.
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11.3 Gabriel Germain Boffrand, Salon de la Princesse, Hôtel de Soubise, Paris, c. 1740. This room, an elegant showcase of rococo design, is built on an oval plan. Note the arch repeated in window, doorway, and mirror; and the delicate sculpted transition from wall to ceiling, here painted with murals in dreamy rococo style.
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The more sensual and decorative side of rococo appears in the works of François Boucher (1703–1770). Boucher [boo-SHAY] was the favored painter of Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour, a patron of pro- gressive writers and artists who decorated the Palace of Versailles in rococo fashion. Boucher’s The Toilet of Venus (Fig. 11.5) was commissioned by Madame de Pompadour, who must have identified with the subject. The alluring goddess dreamily prepares herself for a visitor, as cupids coif her hair and toy with her jewels. Boucher achieved a luxurious surface with the gilded furnishings and glowing pinks and blues.
The light-hearted charm of the rococo style is evident in a four-painting cycle entitled The Progress of Love by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806). The paint- ings were commissioned by the French king’s mistress and illustrate typical rococo subjects of flirtation and seduction. In The Meeting (also called Storming the Citadel), Fragonard [frag-o-NAHR] depicts two lovers,
two similar versions) shows a fashionable party of pic- nickers ready to leave Cythera [SITH-a-ra], the mythi- cal island of the love-goddess Venus. The celebrants have already decorated Venus’ statue with flowers and exchanged their vows of love, and now turn reluctantly to leave their idyll.
Watteau’s picture defined a new category of paint- ing in the eighteenth century, the so-called fête galante (genteel celebration) of well-dressed and urbane rev- elers. Watteau drew the costumes and imagery of the fête galante from the commedia dell’arte, but his scenes also mirrored the fashionable costumed entertainments of eighteenth-century aristocrats. Another technical advance in this era is credited to the Venetian Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757), who introduced pastel crayon as a medium of portraiture (Fig. 11.4). Carriera used pastel to create the soft tones and loose texture that suited the easy style of rococo. Her works were admired by Watteau and collected by the kings of Europe.
11.4 Rosalba Carriera, A Young Lady with a Parrot, c. 1730. Pastel on blue laid paper, 23 2⁄3 ins × 19 2⁄3 ins (60 × 50 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago. Carriera perfected the use of pastel crayon, instead of oil paint, for portraits of the well- to-do in Venice, Paris, and Vienna. Here the parrot pulls at the subject’s gown to accentuate her physical charms.
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for her success. The painting’s popularity aided Vigée- Lebrun’s election to the French Royal Academy, which customarily admitted no women.
During the French Revolution, Vigée-Lebrun would make a dramatic escape from Paris, fleeing the night that Marie Antoinette and the king were arrested. In exile from revolutionary France, Vigée-Lebrun charmed Europe’s nobility and earned a large fortune painting their portraits. She returned in 1802 to become a prom- inent figure in Parisian society, sponsoring salons and writing her memoirs.
Eighteenth-century Dance In France, profes- sional dance developed rapidly in the eighteenth cen- tury, propelled by the influence of the Paris Opéra’s professional dance school, which opened in 1713. The opera school produced a steady supply of well-trained dancers, including Marie Anne de Cupis de Camargo, called “the first woman to dance like a man”—meaning
in fashionable costume, at their first crucial moment alone (Fig. 11.6). The young man steps off his ladder with high expectation, but the woman turns away, momentarily withholding her assent to love, just as Venus (the statue above) withholds the quiver of arrows from her petulant son Cupid. Charming but ultimately trivial, Fragonard’s picture makes no pretense of tran- scendent purpose.
Another artist marked by royal favor was Marie- Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun (1775–1842), portrait- ist and confidante of Marie Antoinette, queen of Louis XVI. To quell rumors of the queen’s licentious infidelity, Vigée-Lebrun [VEE-zhay luh-BRUH(n)] once painted a celebrated portrait of her posed with her children in quiet and affectionate domesticity. Vigée-Lebrun’s dynamic Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (Fig. 11.7) shows a painter confident of her powers and a woman sure of her beauty and stylishness. Here is a self-made woman, a bourgeoise who need not rely on aristocratic birth
11.5 François Boucher, The Toilet of Venus, 1751. Oil on canvas, 42 5⁄8 × 33 1⁄2 ins (108.3 × 85.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Boucher spent his career decorating France’s royal residences under the patronage of the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour. He treats this erotic theme as if it were a piece of theater: the curtain, the painted backdrop, the props and costumes, all enhance the mood of dalliance and playfulness.
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Innovations in ballet training and costume were coupled with changes in the form and setting of the dance itself. In the baroque period, ballet had usually formed an interlude in an opera or comedy, illustrat- ing or adorning the larger dramatic work. During the eighteenth century, dancers created the ballet d’action, in which the ballet itself communicated dramatic action through dancers’ movements. In Letters on Dancing and Ballet (1760), Jean Georges Noverre called for bal- lets to be “unified works of art” in their own right, with dance and music contributing to the narrative theme. Thus ballet emphasized less spectacular display and more emotional expression, changes made possible by new techniques and greater freedom of costume.
The Rococo in Germany and Britain In German-speaking Europe of the eighteenth cen- tury, French influence seemed to be everywhere. In the imperial capital of Vienna, Emperor Joseph II enjoyed the same grand artistic diversions as his royal coun- terparts in Paris. In the Prussian capital, Berlin, the enlightened despot Frederick the Great recruited French intellectuals to advise him. And in Germany’s small principalities, minor nobles imitated the lan- guage and culture of the Parisian stage and salons.
In German cities, as a middle-class counterpart to the Parisian salon, coffeehouses sprang up to satisfy a new- found taste for coffee, tobacco, and political debate, providing a new setting for discussion and social criti- cism. Coffeehouse patrons could also read the dozens of newspapers and journals that serialized novels, reported political events, criticized culture, and propa- gated Enlightenment ideas.
The rococo style found its most abandoned architec- tural expression in eighteenth-century German palaces and churches. Indeed, with its grand scale and intense religiosity, German rococo art is sometimes consid- ered a late variation of the baroque style. In Catholic southern Germany and Austria, wealthy and powerful prince-bishops became ambitious sponsors of the new style. After designing a grand palace for the bishop of Würzburg, the architect Balthasar Neumann [NOY- mahn] (1687–1753) created a pilgrimage church of the Vierzehnheiligen [FEER-tsain-HIGH-lee-ghen] (the Fourteen Saints; Fig. 11.8), in southern Germany. The interior is a riot of rococo shapes and colors. The church’s floor plan (Fig. 11.9) consists of intersect- ing ovals that draw the pilgrim toward the elaborate oval altar. The church’s interior is the rococo aesthetic
she danced with the technical virtuosity of male danc- ers. To demonstrate her technique, Camargo discarded the high-heeled dancing shoes of Louis XIV’s era and shortened her skirts so audiences could see her feet. Camargo’s chief rival was Marie Sallé (1707–1756), who discarded the conventional hoop skirt and wig and danced the lead role in her ballet Pygmalion (1733) costumed in a cotton shift.
11.6 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Progress of Love: The Meeting (Storming the Citadel), 1771–3. Oil on canvas, 12 ft 5 ins × 8 ft (3.18 × 2.44 m). The Frick Collection, New York. The lovers, dressed in fashionable “Spanish costume,” are caught in a moment of tense anticipation—the woman turning away from her suitor, the man peering apparently beyond his beloved, perhaps from fear of interruption.
11.7 Marie-Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Self-portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782. Oil on canvas, 381⁄2 × 273⁄4 ins (97.8 × 70.5 cm). National Gallery, London. The painter wears the luxurious but relaxed costume of a fashionable middle-class woman, a contrast to the stiff, formal attire of the royal court.
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way. The gauzy shawl curls around her like a summer breeze, framing her gaze of melancholy and longing. Mrs. Sheridan had given up a singing career for mar- riage to the dramatist and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a notorious philanderer. Gainsborough called these his “fancy pictures”—a romanticized and empa- thetic treatment of subjects in a rustic setting.
applied to religious experience—fanciful and sensuous, yet pious in its exaltation.
In England the wealthy classes adopted the rococo fashion in dress and in painting. Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) rejected the classicizing “grand manner,” preferring a more candid and informal style. He places Elizabeth Sheridan (Fig. 11.10) in a vaguely pastoral setting and elongates her form slightly in a flattering
11.8 Balthasar Neumann, interior of the Pilgrimage Church of the Vierzehnheiligen, near Bamberg, Germany, 1743–72. Note the sculpted stucco and ceiling painting that soften the lines of the vaulting. Compare the rococo treatment of this pilgrimage church to Boffrand’s design for a Paris residence (Fig. 11.3).
11.9 Balthasar Neumann, ground plan (preparatory design) of the Church of the Vierzehnheiligen, 1743. The repeated ellipses of Neumann’s plan soften the Latin cross of traditional church architecture. The central ellipse enclosed an island altar in the nave.
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Europe’s horizon of experience; the Scientific Revolution had opened new vistas of intellectual inquiry; and the Glorious Revolution in England had improved national life. Especially in France, the authority of absolutism paled under the scrutinizing light of Reason.
The Philosophes Eighteenth-century Paris became the cradle of the Enlightenment, a movement of intellectuals who popu- larized science and applied reason to human affairs. They educated and provoked with their writings, which
The Enlightenment The freedom and informality of eighteenth-century society created an explosive mixing of noble and middle classes. In the salons of Paris, France’s nobility mixed with middle-class wits and philosophers. In the smoky coffeehouses of London, Edinburgh, and Berlin, men gathered to read newspapers and debate. Inevitably, ideas that challenged political and religious orthodoxy percolated through these conversations.
The preceding century had brought irreversible changes: exploration and colonization had widened
11.10 Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1785–7. Oil on canvas, 7 ft 2 5⁄8 ins × 5 ft (2.2 × 1.5 m). Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gainsborough made his career painting portraits of British high society in London and the resort town of Bath. Compare his informal treatment of this sitter to the neoclassical style of his rival, Joshua Reynolds (Fig. 11.21).
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that the chief barrier to human progress and happi- ness was not human nature, as Christianity taught, but social intolerance and injustice. The watchwords of the Enlightenment were freedom and reason.
The great project of the philosophes was the Encyclopedia, subtitled “A Classified Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts.” The Encyclopedia was an ambitious attempt to compile systematically all human knowledge. The mammoth work appeared in 28 volumes (including 11 volumes of illustrations) from 1751 to 1772. The editor, Denis Diderot [deed- uh-ROH], enlisted as authors the most progressive
included novels, plays, pamphlets, and, above all, the mammoth Encyclopedia (1751–1772). These thinkers of Paris called themselves philosophes, a French term applied to eighteenth-century thinkers who advocated reason and opposed traditional ideas. The philos- ophes’ intellectual godfathers were Isaac Newton, dis- coverer of the universal laws of gravitation, and John Locke, champion of individual rights. The philosophes were materialist and empiricist in their outlook: they believed that everything had a material cause and that all ideas came from experience. Above all, the philos- ophes sought the practical application of human reason to real human problems.
Inspired by the Scientific Revolution, the philos- ophes searched for universal laws in every sphere of human affairs. They believed politics and history must also be governed by an equivalent to the law of gravi- tation. They praised science for its promise of bound- less material prosperity, and scorned superstition, including most of Christian belief. They also believed
11.11 Joseph Wright, Experiment with an Air Pump, 1768. Oil on canvas, 5 ft 11 5⁄8 ins × 7 ft 11 3⁄4 ins (1.82 × 2.43 m). National Gallery, London. In this view of Enlightenment science, a lark suffocates as the air is pumped out of the glass bell, showing that air is necessary for life. The children exhibit a mixture of scientific curiosity and sentimental feeling.
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or Education (1762), the first sentence reads, “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” Even so, Rousseau reasoned in The Social Contract, humans were right to exchange natu- ral liberty for the civil liberty of organized society. In the unregulated freedom of nature, “which knows no bounds but the power of the individual,” humans were ruled by mere personal impulse and self-interest. In civil society, liberty acquired a moral dimension:
… we might add to the acquisitions of the civil state that
of moral liberty, which alone renders a man master of
himself; for it is slavery to be under the impulse of mere
appetite, and freedom to obey a law which we prescribe
for ourselves.2
Humans attained enlightened self-mastery, para- doxically, only under the sanction of what Rousseau called the “general will.” The general will was the col- lective interest of the citizens of a state, as guided by civic virtue and an interest in the public good. It was not simply the sum of individual desires and private interests, something represented today by opinion polls. Individual actions gained rational legitimacy when they were sanctioned by the organic whole of society—mere “possession” became rightful “property.” In his con- cept of the general will, Rousseau broke with the tenets of classical liberalism, seeking to reconcile the individu- al’s innate freedom and autonomy with a vision of the greater civic good.
The same moral impulse inspired the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790) to write his Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations (1776), one of the founding documents of classical liberalism. Stimulated by eighteenth-century Scotland’s lively commerce of ideas and commodities, Adam Smith connected humans’ desire for the good—their own good as well as others’—with their freedom to labor and produce. Smith attacked the paternalistic system of privileges and monopolies through which European monarchs were manipulating the new global trade. He argued that the economy instead should be governed by the principles of a “natural liberty” that he derived from classical liberal philosophy. He advocated an economic system in which “every man, as long as he does not vio- late the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way.”3 When individuals pur- sued their self-interest, as a whole their decisions would produce the greatest prosperity and happiness for all— as if guided by an “invisible hand,” in Smith’s famous phrase. Liberating producers and laborers from gov- ernment sanction would, in “a well-governed society,”
minds of his day. With articles, both theoretical and practical, on topics from human language to surgery, the Encyclopedia was a fulfillment of the belief that reason should enhance humanity’s material well-being. The Enlightenment’s expansion of scientific knowledge, dramatized in Joseph Wright’s painting Experiment with an Air Pump (Fig. 11.11), confirmed the philos- ophes’ belief that human knowledge was perfectible and that human progress was inevitable.
The philosophes’ scientific attitude led them to doubt the articles of Christian faith; most philosophes abandoned the Christian Church altogether. Many philosophes were deists, who believed that God cre- ated the universe to operate by rational laws. A rational god would never intervene in nature’s operations or reveal his will in a bible. “Deism is good sense not yet instructed by revelation, and other religions are good sense perverted by superstition,” explained the writer known as Voltaire (see p. 316) in his Philosophical Dictionary. As for morality, he said, “reason and con- science were perfectly adequate” to guide human con- duct. When the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume visited Paris, he was shocked by the philosophes’ contempt for organized religion. Voltaire was the most vehement: “Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.”
Enlightenment and Freedom Throughout Western society, thinkers sought to apply Enlightenment principles to the practical problems of human existence. In politics, economics, and ethics, thinkers asked how humans’ natural freedom might serve the improvement of society.
In politics, the most influential example was the youngest philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712– 1778), a radical and troubled man who became the Enlightenment’s most popular writer. The son of a Swiss watchmaker, Rousseau [roo-SOH] joined Parisian soci- ety in the 1740s, where his ideas stirred controversy even among the philosophes. Rather than adopt the Enlightenment’s dogmatic empiricism and rationalism, Rousseau prized the natural goodness of humanity and praised feeling over reason.
Rousseau’s philosophy rested on the worth of the human individual and the value of human freedom and equality. Following the social contract theory of the English philosopher John Locke, Rousseau imagined that humans had lived in a state of nature as “noble savages”—creatures who were free, rational, and “naturally” good. In his educational treatise Émile,
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K E Y C O N C E P T
choices were “universalizable,” or true and right for all. With his assertion of human moral freedom, Kant made each enlightened person a “universal legislator,” responsible for creating universal moral law through reasoned individual action.
The Bourgeois Response Paris’s most popular play in 1784 was a pointed response to the hereditary status of Europe’s nobility. The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre Beaumarchais (1732– 1799) criticized the arrogance of Europe’s nobles and championed a morally upright servant. It contained a stirring indictment of aristocratic privilege: “Nobility, fortune, rank, and position have made you so proud! What have you done to deserve such things?” Figaro asks his master, the Count. “You’ve gone to the trouble of being born, nothing more.”9
In Paris, bourgeois audiences cheered Figaro’s speech and the play’s success was a sign of changing attitudes. As the middle classes gained influence, they demanded art
assure that “universal opulence extends itself to the lowest ranks of people.” It is not from the “benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” he wrote, “but from their regard to their own interest.”7
The Enlightenment’s emphasis on individual free- dom and self-interest raised profound questions for moral philosophy. At the end of the eighteenth cen- tury, the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) addressed this moral question directly. In the pursuit of enlightenment, Kant [kahnt] argued, individuals freed themselves from tradition and author- ity, including the authority of moral teaching. But how might enlightened individuals choose to do right, instead of merely gratify individual interest or desire? According to Kant, enlightened moral decisions should obey the categorical imperative: “Act only on that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law,” as Kant stated it.8 The categorical imperative required that reasonable people act as if their actions defined a moral law—as if their
Enlightenment The goal of the Enlightenment as a philosophical move- ment was enlightenment of the individual—that is, the education of citizens so that they could exercise their pow- ers of reason unhindered by tyranny and superstition. In 1795, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as the ability to reason for oneself, free from authority or received opinion. “Enlightenment is the libera- tion of humanity from its self-imposed state of immaturity,” wrote Kant. He proclaimed as the maxim of enlighten- ment: “Sapere aude! [Dare to know!] Dare to use your own understanding!”4
Education was the way to enlighten individuals and society as a whole. In Émile, or Education, his novel depict- ing the enlightened upbringing of a boy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserted that a child needed only education in the powers of reason and the senses: “All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to the human estate, is the gift of education,” he wrote in Book I. But even in Rousseau’s romance, mature autonomy and independent thought do not guarantee happiness. Émile’s marriage to Sophie, the girl reared as his modest and submissive mate, ends in infidelity and estrangement. The course of true enlightenment did not always run smooth.
CRITICAL QUESTION Reflect on an occasion where you “dared to know.” How did this decision affect your powers of understanding and action? What were the direct developments of your decision?
Eighteenth-century thinkers were confident that enlight- ened education would eventually lead to world peace and general prosperity. The philosophe Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794) sketched ten stages in the histori- cal progress of the human mind. “By appeal to reason and fact,” asserted Condorcet [ko(h)n-door-SAY], humans could achieve a limitless progress in culture and society. “The per- fectibility of man is truly indefinite,” he wrote.5 Kant likewise predicted that enlightenment would lead humans toward a world government that guaranteed equal rights and univer- sal education. Reviving the cosmopolitan ideal of the stoics, Kant believed that world peace required only the application of sufficient human reason. “The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent,” Kant concluded.6
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that reflected their attitudes and taste: sober virtue and a straightforward depiction of life. Yet, like the nobility, they wanted education for their children, entertainment for their leisure, and tastefully decorated houses.
The Bourgeois Style in Painting The bourgeois style in painting coexisted with the playful rococo style. The painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin [shar-DAN(h)] (1699–1779), for example, countered the rococo style with a clarity of color and form. Chardin’s paintings mostly depict ordinary scenes of the middle class, such as Boy Spinning Top (Fig. 11.12). His subjects and colors are reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting—adapted to the tastes of his French public. Chardin took great plea- sure in the straightforward spatial order and palpable textures of his still lifes. His interior scenes present a world of domestic peace and contentment.
The most popular French painter of the mid- eighteenth century was Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725– 1805). Technically, Greuze [gruhz] was a lesser painter than Chardin, but he was a greater phenomenon in his
11.12 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Boy Spinning Top, 1741. Oil on canvas, 26 1⁄2 × 28 3⁄4 ins (67 × 73 cm). Louvre, Paris. Chardin painted mostly still-life and genre scenes that possessed charm, simplicity, and a subtle moralizing tone. Here a boy has set aside his studies to play with a toy he has kept in the drawer—a mild pictorial sermon on the dangers of idleness.
11.13 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Bride of the Village, 1761. Oil on canvas, 46 1⁄2 × 36 ins (118 × 91 cm). Louvre, Paris. In contrast to the elegant but frivolous rococo, the European middle classes patronized works of sobriety and sentimentality. In Greuze’s moralizing tableau, note the reactions of the principal females: the dreamy bride, the fretting mother, and (behind the father) the envious sister.
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sympathizes with young servant girls who have faced the assaults of their masters:
But, dear father and mother, what sort of creatures
must the woman-kind be, do you think to give way to
such wickedness? Why, this it is that makes every one
to be thought of alike: and, a-lack-a-day! what a world
we live in! for it is grown more a wonder that the men
are resisted, than that the women comply ... But I am
sorry for these things; one don’t know what arts and
stratagems men may devise to gain their vile ends; and
so I will think as well as I can of these poor undone
creatures, and pity them. For you see, by my sad story,
and narrow escapes, what hardships poor maidens go
through whose lot it is to go out to service, especially to
houses where there is not the fear of God, and good rule
kept by the heads of the family.11
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
From Pamela (1740–1742)
The most popular of these eighteenth-century sen- timental novels was Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Héloïse, 1761), a bestseller
day. His genre pictures appealed directly to the cult of sensibilité (feeling or compassion), which swept over jaded Parisians at mid-century. Many of his pictures, such as The Bride of the Village (Fig. 11.13), presented touching family scenes that might well be tableaux from the bourgeois sentimental drama. In this moraliz- ing picture, the father hands over his daughter’s dowry while delivering a sermon on the virtues of fidelity. The philosopher Diderot, who helped to popularize Greuze’s paintings, said the spectator of such pictures “was seized by tender feeling.” With his pictorial anec- dotes, Greuze aroused nostalgia for a simpler provincial life among Parisian sophisticates.
The Rise of the Novel A German philosopher once said of the novel that it was “the epic of the middle class,” though, unlike the epics of ancient times, it did not retell tales from mythology or legend. Rather, the eighteenth-century novel was a long work of narrative fiction with realistic characters and settings—much as we know it today. Often tak- ing the form of a journal or a series of letters (called an epistolary novel), the early novel provided ample latitude for its characters’ introspection and moral self-examination.
The novel’s popularity grew with the rising tide of literacy in eighteenth-century Europe. In England, wrote Samuel Johnson, “general literature now per- vades the nation through all its ranks,” and every house is “supplied with a closet of knowledge.”10 Male lit- eracy may have reached 60 percent by 1750. The new reading public (which included a growing number of women) patronized coffeehouses, lending libraries, and book clubs (Fig. 11.14). Critics such as Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) labored to guide the public’s reading tastes. Johnson wrote a great dictionary of English and an influential introduction to Shakespeare, whom he defended as a native English talent.
Eager for self-improvement, the eighteenth-century middle classes wanted books to uplift them as well as entertain them, and the novel gratified the bourgeois reader’s expectations for an educational and moralizing literature. In England Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740–1742), pro- vided just the moral inspiration that bourgeois readers were seeking. The book’s heroine, Pamela, is a simple country girl who must withstand the seductions of her wealthy employer. The psychological drama of her struggle is revealed through her letters, which form the bulk of the story. In a letter to her parents, Pamela
11.14 Ned Ward, The CoffeeHous Mob, frontispiece to Part IV of Vulgus Britannicus, or the British Hudibras (London, 1710). British Library. For an increasingly literate European middle class, coffeehouses offered access to newspapers and opportunity for public discussion and debate.
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joins a peasant revolt and thus proves a passionate com- mitment to justice and fairness. In Götz, Goethe gave to German theater its first great dramatic hero and a pow- erful expression of the Sturm und Drang movement.
Music in the Age of Enlightenment By 1750 Europe’s painters and sculptors had become artistic free agents, seeking commissions wherever they could find them. By contrast, especially in central Europe, musicians and composers were often still feu- dal servants in the household of a noble patron. Despite these strictures, the Age of Enlightenment fostered an explosion of musical genius that we now call the Classical period in music (c. 1750–1820).
The first important Classical composers were Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Both were immensely prolific, composing music for court occa- sions, religious services, and public concerts that were the standard musical fare of the eighteenth century. The Austrian composer Haydn (1732–1809) spent nearly three decades as composer for the Esterházys, a fam- ily of Hungarian aristocrats. In service to his patrons, Haydn [HIGH-dn] composed with considerable range and originality within the limits of the Classical style. By the 1790s, he was recognized as Europe’s leading composer, excelling in all the popular musical forms.
Mozart (1756–1791) began his adult career in ser- vice to the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. When the nobleman rudely discharged him in 1781, Mozart [MOH-tsart] eagerly migrated to the great musical cap- ital of Vienna, where he hustled to support himself as a freelance performer, tutor, and composer (Fig. 11.15).
Mozart and Opera In Vienna the vivacious Mozart proved himself a master of the galant style, as it was then called—a music that was clear, lively, and “natural” compared to the artifi- cial counterpoint of baroque styles. Mozart’s composi- tions were carefully tailored to the tastes of his audience and were suited to performance in the small palaces and town houses of rococo society. His solo works for piano, such as the Piano Sonata in A major, showed off his virtuoso skill at the keyboard. The movements in this sonata—including one in minuet tempo and a rondo alla turca (in the Turkish style)—were chosen to please the audiences of Paris, where the piece was prob- ably composed. In such works, Mozart had to balance
that ran to 72 editions. Rousseau’s novel was based on the famous medieval love story of Abelard and Héloïse, and played on the racy themes of seduction and marriage between social classes. The virtue of Rousseau’s heroine is suspect until she dies sacrificially in the last pages of the novel. All of Europe wept for Rousseau’s Julie.
By the end of the century, the sentimental novel had evolved into a more subtle exploration of sensation and feeling. As perfected by Jane Austen (1775–1817), the so-called novel of manners was a carefully observed and gently satirical study of social life among the English gentry. In Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), Austen examined her heroines in the crucial moment of betrothal and marriage, as they sought a livable balance among affection, social stand- ing, and personal integrity. Austen’s finely wrought novels of manners gave the novel its first modern cast.
The Bourgeois Theater in Germany The bourgeois response in Germany was tinged with both sentimentality and nationalism. Through the early eighteenth century, Germany’s dozens of small courts slavishly imitated the culture of absolutist France, with its artificial manners and neoclassical tastes. A rebellion against French influence was led by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), a critic and dramatist who single- handedly created a German national theater. Lessing was the founder of the Aufklärung [OWFF-klair-oonk] (enlightenment) in Germany. To him, the term implied not only philosophical enlightenment but also a clari- fied national spirit in the German states. Lessing’s criti- cal works condemned neoclassical formalism, while his plays depicted characters of more direct and genuine feeling. A typical example of this bourgeois sentimental drama was his Miss Sara Sampson, the Greek tragedy of Medea refashioned with a bourgeois heroine.
Lessing’s sentimental drama prepared the way for an impassioned group of young German authors called the Sturm und Drang [STOORM oont DRAHNK] (Storm and Stress) movement. Writers of the Sturm und Drang protested social injustice and praised rebellious genius. Dedicated to German nationalism, they hoped to free German culture from its insipid imitations of French neoclassicism. The movement’s most important fig- ure was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Goethe’s [GUH(r)-tuh] sprawling play Götz von Berlichingen explicitly violated neoclassical norms and emulated Shakespeare’s dramatic scope and diversity. Its hero, Götz [guhts], is a fiery medieval knight who
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his interest in musical innovation against the limitations of his audience’s ear. In a letter, he once praised a set of his concertos for striking “a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid.”
In Vienna, Mozart’s most important audience was the enlightened Emperor Joseph II, who sponsored his entry into Viennese opera, a world of international prestige and cut-throat intrigue. Opera in Vienna had already felt the influence of reformers who wished to free German opera of ornamental singing and far- fetched plots. The reforms had the effect of widening opera’s appeal to the mixed aristocratic and middle- class audiences of Vienna and Prague. Mozart enjoyed his greatest successes in these musical cities.
Mozart proved a genius at balancing music and drama in opera. One of his operatic masterpieces, Le
Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), cap- tures the rococo mood of gaiety and frivolity, while also presenting a musical drama of sophistication and wisdom. The libretto, or dramatic text, was writ- ten by Lorenzo da Ponte in Italian—still the language used in most eighteenth-century opera. The Marriage of Figaro recounts the impending marriage of Figaro and Susanna, servants in the house of Count Almaviva. Susanna fears that the philandering count will force himself on her. Figaro alternates between determina- tion to foil the count’s intentions and suspicion of his fiancée. However, jealousy and anger never entirely obscure the opera’s underlying humor and optimism. Its final scene—a virtuoso creation of ensemble sing- ing—resolves all the mistaken identities and disguises, distrust and suspicion. When the count kneels to ask his wife’s forgiveness, the whole party affirms its faith in a candid and worldly love.
Mozart’s later operas are also acknowledged as mas- terpieces of the operatic form. Don Giovanni [DON jee-oh-VAHN-ee] (1787) recounts the demise of the famous lover Don Juan, whose romantic exploits are enumerated in the “Catalog” aria, sung by his sar- donic servant Leporello. In his last year, Mozart scored a popular success with Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791). Set in Egypt, the opera’s magical atmo- sphere and light-hearted music delighted the Viennese public, while its symbolism celebrated the philosophical themes of harmony and enlightenment.
The Classical Symphony It was Mozart’s elder, Joseph Haydn, who developed the symphony in its Classical form. The symphony is an orchestral composition usually in four movements or sections. These movements are usually known by Italian terms that describe the tempo (speed) at which the music is played. The Classical symphony usually opens with a fast movement, followed by a slow and lyrical movement, then a graceful dance in moderate tempo, and finally a fast and animated fourth move- ment. Haydn could achieve intricate musical effects in just the brief span of a minuet (a dance form), as in the Minuet and Trio from his Symphony No. 45 (1772). He was also a musical joker: his “Surprise Symphony” and the “Joke Quartet” (1781) violate the predictable patterns of Classical form for comic effect.
Each symphonic movement was also written in a specific formal pattern. As developed by Haydn, the Classical symphony’s first movement is the most impor- tant, setting the musical tone for the entire work. This
11.15 Joseph Lange, Mozart at the Pianoforte, 1789. Oil on canvas 13 6⁄8 × 1113⁄16 ins (35 × 30 cm). Mozart Museum, Salzburg. The misery of Mozart’s last years has been much exaggerated in the popular imagination, although he was unable to achieve the artistic independence that marked the later career of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Listen to “Madamina, il catalogo e questo” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni on myartslab.com
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G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
Kabuki Theater In Europe, increasingly middle-class theater audiences demanded a theatrical style that was more natural and can- didly sentimental. But in Japan, during roughly the same period, a rising and confident merchant class supported a theater of exquisite and extreme artifice. The contrast between European sentimental drama and the Japanese kabuki theater demonstrates the variety of world cultures even under similar social conditions.
The kabuki [kuh-BOO-kee] theater (Fig. 11.16) com- bined stylized acting with song, dance, colorful costume, and spectacular staging. It arose in Japan during the Edo period (1616–1868), as Japan emerged from feudal wars and the influence of the royal court at Kyoto waned. A new mer- chant class in Edo (Tokyo) and other commercial centers supported a vital new secular culture. These townspeople sought amusement in the entertainments of the ukiyo—the “floating world” of sensual pleasures—entertainment dis- tricts containing restaurants, theaters, and brothels.
Kabuki was invented in this floating world in 1603, sup- posedly by a young female dancer named Izumo no Okuni. By the eighteenth century, kabuki was so popular that per- manent commercial theaters were built to hold audiences of several thousand. At a time when European theater stressed simpler plots and staging, kabuki productions reveled in artifice. Elaborate theatrical devices—revolving stages, elevators, multiple curtains, intensely colored cos- tumes, and elaborate scenery—made kabuki a visual spec- tacle. The kabuki stage’s most distinctive feature was a ramp leading through the audience, called the hanamichi,
or flower path. The hanamichi [hahn-uh-MEE-chee] per- mitted theatrical entrances and exits by star actors, often with dramatic pauses and stylized poses. Kabuki staging borrowed its formalized gestures from the more traditional Noh drama, long popular with Japan’s feudal warrior class. But the new genre also drew from the exuberant Japanese puppet theater, called bunraku.
Some kabuki actors specialized in impersonating female characters (females were banned from the stage early in kabuki’s history). Others perfected a “rough” act- ing style suitable for gangster or soldier roles, or a “soft” style for playing merchants or lovers. The kabuki enhanced the actors’ highly stylized gestures and poses with extrava- gantly colorful costumes and make-up. Typically, kabuki performances lasted for an entire day; a small orchestra provided a varied musical accompaniment to the action.
The stories of the kabuki theater included histori- cal dramas, roughly equivalent to the history dramas of Shakespeare’s theater, and domestic dramas with comic plots or tales of doomed lovers. In one typical plot, two lovers—a banished priest and a courtesan—both survive a mutual suicide attempt, but then continue their lives while each thinks the other has been lost. In its conventional- ized plots, spectacular effects, and virtuoso performance, Japanese kabuki shares more with European opera than with realistic drama.
11.16 Utagawa Kunisada, scene from Sukeroku, c. 1835. Woodblock print (detail), whole block 8 1⁄2 × 22 1⁄2 ins (21.6 × 57.2 cm). Private collection.
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The Neoclassical Style “There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequaled; I mean, by imitating the ancients.”12 These were the words of the eighteenth cen- tury’s greatest enthusiast of the “ancients,” the German writer Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), in his Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. Like so many enlightenment thinkers, Winckelmann [VINK-el-mahn] praised the Greeks to condemn something in his own age, in par- ticular the feeble softness and capricious excesses of the rococo. Winckelmann’s teachings helped define the neoclassical style of the later eighteenth century, which explicitly imitated the art of ancient Greece and Rome. This era’s neoclassicism was abstract and moral, impos- ing universal ethical principles on art. Neoclassicism was also versatile: under different circumstances, it was used to revive the grandeur of Versailles, to demonstrate the good taste of the rising middle class, and to educate and civilize an unsophisticated provincial nation.
Neoclassical Architecture The bible of neoclassical building was Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture—a collection of meticulous drawings of ancient Roman buildings by the famous Italian Renaissance architect. The English gentry built imitations of Palladio’s villas on their estates, often combining neoclassical buildings with landscaped set- tings to achieve picturesque vistas. Henry Hoare’s Park at Stourhead (Fig. 11.18) exemplifies the English taste for the picturesque, with its balance between neoclassi- cal order and the rustic irregularity of nature.
Perhaps the purest example of neoclassical taste and cultivation was the Petit Trianon [PUH-tee
first movement was in the sonata form, which weaves two musical themes together in a three-part structure. In the sonata form, the two themes are first stated in the exposition, which presents the movement’s basic musi- cal ideas in a musical “argument.” The first theme is stated in the home key, the second theme in a contrast- ing key. Then, in the development, the themes undergo various musical changes. The melodies may be broken apart, turned backwards or upside down, or played in different musical keys. Finally, the tensions created in the development are resolved in the recapitulation, when both themes are restated in the home key. The movement may finish with a brief coda, or tail. The sonata form offered Classical composers an orderly, harmonious structure that could accommodate consid- erable musical variation.
The formal symmetry of the eighteenth-century Classical symphony is demonstrated in Mozart’s pre- cise symphonic compositions. In 1788, in the span of six weeks, Mozart composed three symphonies, includ- ing the Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. The symphony’s first movement begins with a motif, or melodic idea, of three rapid falling notes that create an insistent, almost neurotic energy. As was typical of the sonata form, the second theme (in a contrasting key) is more lyrical, even languid. The exposition is usually played twice. In Mozart’s development, the first theme’s three notes are sounded in different keys and build to a piercing climax. The tension is resolved in the recapitulation, as both themes return to the home key of G minor. The symphony demonstrates Mozart’s ability to cre- ate effortless transitions between sections and to build a perfectly symmetrical structure for his musical ideas. The work embodies the musical “enlightenment” of the Classical symphony, with its emphasis on clarity and balance (Fig. 11.17).
11.17 Typical seating plan for a modern symphony orchestra. Note, however, that the modern orchestra includes many instruments that were missing from the eighteenth-century orchestra of Mozart and Haydn.
h a rp
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pe rc
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trum petshor
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tu b acla
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TREE-a-non(h)] (Fig. 11.19), a residence built for Louis XV in the grounds of Versailles Palace. The architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, avoided repeating the pompous grandeur of the main palace and instead aimed for per- fect balance and austere simplicity. Except for the four subdued pilasters, the building is almost free of decora- tion. Nothing distracts from its geometric regularity.
The most ingenious of the neoclassical architects was neither French nor English, but American. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), revolutionary philosopher and American president, was also an accomplished
builder. While ambassador to France in the 1780s, he studied the neoclassical style and came to believe it represented European cultivation and enlightenment. Jefferson adapted the neoclassical style in his designs for buildings in America, such as his country hilltop estate Monticello (Fig. 11.20), built much in the spirit of Palladio’s Italian villas. In some of the decorative details, Jefferson slavishly followed Palladio’s architec- tural drawings. In other cases, he showed his own inge- nuity. The home’s connecting outbuildings are hidden below ground level, giving Monticello its elegant profile
11.18 Henry Hoare, the Park at Stourhead, Wiltshire, 1743–4. In contrast to the formal gardens of Versailles, designers in England sought to reproduce the natural landscapes of the classical poets. Landscape designers strove for an effect called the “picturesque.” Note in this view, the distant small-scale classical temple framed by the bridge, lake, and foliage.
11.19 Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the Petit Trianon, Versailles, France, 1761–4. This small residence in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles expresses the elegance and decorum of the eighteenth-century neoclassical style. Compared to the main palace, the scale and decoration here are restrained and the residence’s interior was ingeniously arranged for comfortable living.
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antique statuary or portrayed as mythological figures. When a London politician commissioned a monumen- tal portrait of his fiancée and her sisters, Reynolds painted the women as the classical Graces, performing ancient rites before Hymen, the Roman god of marriage (Fig. 11.21). In praising the foundation of the Royal Academy, Reynolds argued that a painter’s genius was demonstrated not by faithfulness to nature, but by the imitation of “authentic” models. The Swiss-born artist Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807) made a career of the ancient history subjects that were a commonplace of academic exhibitions (see Fig. 11.22). Kauffmann, who lived in London for some years, eventually settled in Rome, where she befriended literary and artistic nota- bles making the fashionable “Grand Tour” of Italian cities. With their high moral tone, Kauffmann’s paint- ings appealed to a public that sought uplift in sentimen- tality, but also desired exalted subjects of antiquity.
Not until Jacques-Louis David [da-VEED], how- ever, did the neoclassical style produce truly electrifying paintings. David (1748–1825) astounded the art public in 1784 with his stern tableau of Roman heroes, the
while serving its function as a farmhouse. The dome and the appearance of a single story (in fact there are three) were elements borrowed from the fashionable hôtels that Jefferson had seen in Paris.
Neoclassical Painting The popularity of neoclassicism supported a thriv- ing style in painting throughout Europe and North America. The English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), first president of the British Royal Academy, pioneered a “grand style” of portraiture. Reynolds commonly showed his subjects sitting among
11.20 Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, 1770–84; remodeled 1796–1806. Compare the visual effect of Jefferson’s neoclassical residence, with its use of native American materials (brick, wood), to the French palace, the Petit Trianon (see Fig. 11.19). Note the use of round windows and the fan-shaped Palladian window in the triangular pediment.
View the web resource on Monticello on myartslab.com
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Neoclassicism Western art had borrowed from the art of ancient Greece and Rome throughout history, but during the eighteenth century it swelled with a new enthusiasm for classical styles. This artistic fashion is called neoclassicism, mean- ing the conscious effort to revive the values of classical art and history. Compared with earlier classical revivals, eighteenth-century neoclassicism was particularly rigid and often austere. However, like other versions of clas- sicism, it sought to recreate a world of timeless truth and beauty (Fig. 11.22). It also had a great capacity for mean- ing different things to different people. To the royal court, it signaled a relief from the preciosity of the rococo style and a return to the grand style of Louis XIV. To the royal academies, it represented the authority of the past, a basis for teaching good taste and disciplined technique. To the newly educated middle classes, neoclassicism offered a high-minded moralism and a sure standard of taste and decorum.
It is no wonder, then, that an explosion of neoclassical paintings, buildings, and statues burst upon the later eigh- teenth century. The fashion was ignited by theorists such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who praised the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of ancient Greece (without ever having seen a Greek temple). Enlightened citizens
lived in the style of antique heroes, modeling their lives and their clothes after the ancient Greeks and Romans.
This vision of antiquity was usually derived from earlier versions of neoclassicism rather than from antiquity itself. In fact, neoclassical theorists were somewhat dismayed by excavations at the ancient cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii (begun in 1737). The bawdiness of actual Roman wall paintings did not match neoclassicism’s idealized image of antiquity. Whatever the illusions about antiquity, however, neoclassicism expressed a desire for universal moral truths and enduring standards of reason and beauty. It responded to a common impulse in Western civilization: the desire to return to a simpler and more glorious past.
11.22 Angelica Kauffmann, Cornelia Pointing to her Children as her Treasures, c. 1785. Oil on canvas, 3 ft 4 ins × 4 ft 2 ins (1.02 × 1.27 m). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, The Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund. Kauffmann was one of two female founding members of the British Royal Academy and excelled at history painting, the most prestigious category of eighteenth-century academic painting. This scene is taken from Roman history: when a visitor asked to see her family’s jewels, Cornelia supposedly pointed to her two sons, who would become leaders of the Roman Republic.
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11.21 Joshua Reynolds, Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen, 1773. Oil on canvas, 7 ft 6 ins × 9 ft 6 ins (2.3 × 2.9 m). Tate Britain, London. In works such as this, Reynolds defined a new kind of neoclassical presentation for his aristocratic subjects. The three sisters, portrayed as the classical Graces, dance around a statue of the god of marriage, decorating it with a looping garland of flowers. Compare this group portrait to Watteau’s intimate scene of lovers in Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (Fig. 11.1).
Oath of the Horatii (Fig. 11.23). Visitors to the painter’s Rome studio placed flowers before the picture as if it were an altar. King Louis XVI admired the work, and it was purchased immediately by the French government, though today the picture is often seen as a premonition of the French Revolution. In a scene from the history of Rome, three brothers pledge to defend the city’s honor against the Curatius family of a neighboring town. The Horatian women—on the right—grieve because one is sister to the opposing family and another is engaged to a Curatius. In David’s version, this gripping scene
is purified of all ornament. The painting embodied the leading principles of neoclassicism: didactic purpose, purity of form, and deep passion restrained by good taste. In its simplicity and rigor, it was a declaration of neoclassicism’s revolt against the whimsical style of the rococo.
The Age of Satire The Enlightenment was as critical of human folly as it was convinced that social evils could be corrected. The age was characterized by satire, the literary or artistic attitude that aims to improve society by its humorous criticism. Imitating the satirical poets of ancient Rome, Enlightenment satirists lightened their attacks on social ills with wit, mockery, and comic exaggeration. Often, they broadcast their satire in the pamphlets, engrav- ings, and adventure tales that were staples of the read- ing public of the time. In every case, eighteenth-century satirists hoped that laughing at social evils would help to correct them.
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Swift, would reduce surplus population and provide income for the children’s impoverished parents. He even calculated the reasonable price a gentleman should pay for the “carcass of a good fat child.”
I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration,
that of the 120,000 children, already computed, 20,000
may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part
to be males, which is more than we allow to sheep, black-
cattle, or swine, and my reason is that these children
are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not
much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will
be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining
100,000 may at a year old be offered in sale to the
persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom,
always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully
in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat
for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an
entertainment for friends, and when the family dines
alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable
dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very
good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.13
JONATHAN SWIFT
From A Modest Proposal (1729)
Swift Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), perhaps the greatest Enlightenment satirist, was a deeply pessimistic man who spent his literary talents on efforts for social reform. As an Anglican churchman, Swift led a highly public life that engaged him in the major political and social debates of his time. He was deeply sympathetic to the poverty and economic oppression in his native Ireland. In his famous pamphlet A Modest Proposal (1729), Swift made a bitterly ironic recommenda- tion, that the children of the Irish poor be butchered, roasted, and served upon the Sunday dinner tables of their oppressive English landlords. Eating children, said
11.23 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784–5. Oil on canvas, 10 ft 10 ins × 14 ft (3.3 × 4.27 m). Louvre, Paris. In this manifesto of neoclassicism, David’s statuesque figures and simplified design captured neoclassicism’s moral passion in paint. Compare the resolute stance of the men to the languid lines of the grieving women.
View the Closer Look at David’s Oath of the Horatii on myartslab.com
Read A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift on myartslab.com
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also inhabited by ignoble savages called Yahoos, who are prone to bickering, avarice, and gluttony. They possess, in other words, the worst features that Swift observed in his human companions. Swift saw human beings as all the more responsible for their folly and cruelty, since humans could reason. Compared to the philosophes, he was less convinced that human decency and hard work could improve the world. In humans, Swift mused, reason is a quality “fitted to increase our natural vices.”
Satire and Society in Art Swift’s mockery of eighteenth-century vice found its pic- torial counterpart in the satirical paintings of William Hogarth (1697–1764). Hogarth is best known for sev- eral series of pictures telling stories of moral corrup- tion. These pictorial narratives were engravings, which he sold by subscription to a middle-class public eager to laugh at the folly of their neighbors.
Hogarth’s series Marriage à la Mode (1744) mocked the bourgeois social climbers and degenerate nobles who married off their children for their own advantage. In the first painting, The Marriage Contract (Fig. 11.24), the dissolute Earl of Squander points to his family tree to prove the noble pedigree of his son, the prospective bridegroom. The merchant, father of the bride, has laid the dowry on the table and scrutinizes the contract like a good businessman. Meanwhile, the bridal couple ignore both the negotiations and each other. The groom admires himself in the mirror and the bride is distracted by the flattery of the lawyer, Counselor Silvertongue. Later scenes in Marriage à la Mode recount the lawyer’s seduction of the young countess, with disastrous results. Such moralizing, along with his command of narrative detail and satiric touch, made Hogarth’s works highly successful among a new middle-class art public.
Voltaire The Enlightenment’s most famous satirical voice— indeed, the figure who came to symbolize enlighten- ment itself—was François Marie Arouet, known as
Swift’s satiric masterpiece was Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a journal of the fantastic travels of Lemuel Gulliver. Its playful tone disguises a savage exposé of human folly and corruption. Swift recounts Gulliver’s adventures in several lands, using each new encounter to mock human vices and political corruption. The bit- terest episode describes Gulliver’s encounter with the Houyhnhnms [HOO-ee-nimms], a race of horses “so orderly and rational, so acute and judicious” that they put humans to shame. The land of the Houyhnhnms is
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
Women Gladiators English theater of the eighteenth century was still the scene of wild entertainments. A Frenchman who visited the theater at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London gave this account of a gladiatorial combat between two women, which followed a performance of the opera Orpheus in the Underworld, with elaborate stage machinery.
The day I went to see the gladiators fight I witnessed an extraordinary combat, two women being the champions. As soon as they appeared on the stage they made the spectators a profound reverence [bow]; then they saluted each other and engaged in a lively and amusing conversation. They boasted that they had a great amount of courage, strength, and intrepidity. One of them regretted she was not born a man, else who would have made her fortune by her powers; the other declared she beat her husband every morning to keep her hand in. Both these women were very scantily clothed, and wore little bodices and very short petticoats of white linen. … After a time the combat became very animated, and was conducted with force and vigor with the broad side of the weapons, for points there were none. The Irishwoman presently received a great cut across her forehead, and that put a stop to the first part of the combat. The Englishwoman’s backers threw her shillings and half-crowns and applauded her. During this time the wounded woman’s forehead was sewn up, this being done on the stage; a plaster was applied to it, and she drank a good big glass of spirits to revive her courage, and the fight began again. …14
CÉSAR DE SAUSSURE From A Foreign View of England (1728)
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT If you were to author a satirical diatribe today, what aspect of society would you satirize, and what form would your satire take?
Chapter 11 THE ENLIGHTENMENT 317
Voltaire (1694–1778). Voltaire [vol-TAIR] had a fertile literary intelligence and from his pen poured a stream of pamphlets, plays, tales, and poetry. His Philosophical Letters (1734), for example, helped to popularize English philosophy and science among French thinkers, while bitterly attacking France’s political and religious establishment.
A masterful conversationalist, Voltaire (Fig. 11.25) was a prized guest at the courts and salons of Paris. In later life, he moved to an estate in Ferney, Switzerland, just across the French border, where a stream of visi- tors came to pay homage. From the safety of Ferney, Voltaire attacked France’s religious zealots with the battle-cry “Écrasez l’infame” (“Crush infamy”)—by which he meant oppose the evils of religious bigotry. He openly mocked his religious opponents, saying, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”
11.24 William Hogarth, The Marriage Contract from Marriage à la Mode (Scene I), 1744. Oil on canvas, 27 × 35 ins (69 × 90 cm). National Gallery, London. Hogarth filled his painting with telling narrative detail: the botched neoclassical building, evidence of the aristocrat’s faulty taste; the dogs chained together, symbolic of the couple’s ill-fated union; and the syphilitic pox marks on the bridegroom’s face, proof of his dissolute living.
11.25 Jean-Antoine Houdon, Voltaire, 1781. Marble, height 4 ft 6 ins (1.38 m). Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Though he portrays the philosopher as an aged man, Houdon conveys the irrepressible wit and intelligence of Europe’s most famous intellectual. The statue was commissioned by Russia’s Catherine the Great, an “enlightened despot” whom Voltaire greatly admired.
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Lisbon earthquake, an actual disaster in 1755, and suffer persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. When all the characters are reunited, they are still perplexed by the meaning of their suffering. They finally meet a Turkish merchant who rejects philosophical specula- tion altogether and works to make a comfortable life for his family: work, says the merchant, wards off the “three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” At the tale’s conclusion Pangloss sums up the adventures and misfortunes from the entire tale, and Candide resolves to “work without theorizing.”
The whole small fraternity entered into this praiseworthy
plan and each started to make use of his talents. The
little farm yielded well. … Pangloss sometimes said to
Candide: “All events are linked up in this best of all
possible worlds; for, if you had not been expelled from
the noble castle, by hard kicks in your backside for love
of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been clapped
into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about
America on foot, if you had not stuck your sword in the
Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the land of
Eldorado, you would not be eating candied lemons and
pistachios here.”
“ ’Tis well said,” replied Candide, “but we must
cultivate our garden.”15
VOLTAIRE
From Candide (1759)
Voltaire’s Candide The activism of Voltaire’s later years dates from 1759, when he published his most famous and enduring work, the philosophi- cal tale Candide [kan(h)-DEED]. This simple story of a naive young man’s “enlightenment” lacks the fiery indignation of Voltaire’s pamphlets, but truthfully exposes human vice and folly. With Candide, Voltaire addressed himself to the age’s most perplexing philo- sophical problems: human suffering and evil, belief and doubt, and the possibility of reasoned action in an irra- tional world.
Voltaire’s Candide (his name suggests his candor or innocence) subscribes to the philosophical “optimism” of Pangloss, his tutor. Pangloss’s optimism is a parody of conventional Enlightenment belief. It resembles the ideas of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), who saw an absolute har- mony between divine order and the material world. The rationalist Leibniz [LIPE-nits] was describing a world organized such that every part is perfectly bal- anced against all others. Leibniz’s ideas supported the optimism expressed in Alexander Pope’s philosophical poem An Essay on Man (1734), which claimed that if humans could glimpse God’s entire plan, they would see that “Whatever is, is right.”
This philosophical complacency infuriated Voltaire, who once wrote that “doubt is not a pleasant condi- tion, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Candide is a relentless parody of rationalist optimism, since each new twist in the unlikely plot brings a new calamity. The tale is all the more horrifying because it portrays disasters and atrocities that could be documented in Voltaire’s time. Candide and Pangloss witness the great
1740–1742 Samuel Richardson, Pamela
1744 Hogarth, Marriage à la Mode (11.24)
1749 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
1600s Kabuki theater arises, Edo, Japan (11.16)
1709–1784 Life of Samuel Johnson
1715 Louis XIV dies
1717 Watteau, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (11.1)
1719 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
C H A P T E R 1 1 : T I M E L I N E
1600 CE 1710 CE 1725 CE 1740 CE 1726 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
1727–1788 Life of Gainsborough
1734 Pope, An Essay on Man
1646–1716 Life of Leibnitz
1699–1779 Life of Chardin
WRITE IDEA Do you believe that “all events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds”? Was Voltaire serious or was he kidding?
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Chapter 11 THE ENLIGHTENMENT 319
cultivate oneself, to work hard, and see that one’s own life is comfortable and reasonable. Voltaire believed that humans had the resources, in their intelligence and industry, to make the world better—but not perfect.
Voltaire’s solution to evil and bigotry is, as Candide’s ending suggests, a modest one. To “cultivate our gar- den” means to reject speculative and merely philo- sophical solutions to the world’s problems. It means to
1755 CE 1770 CE 1785 CE 1800 CE 1751–1772 Diderot edits the Encyclopedia
1759 Voltaire, Candide
1762 Rousseau, The Social Contract
1786 Mozart, Marriage of Figaro
1788 Mozart, Symphony No. 40
c. 1770 Haydn develops symphony in its classical form
1776 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
1781 Houdon, Voltaire (11.25)
c. 1782 Vigée-Lebrun, Self- portrait in a Straw Hat (11.7)
1784–1785 David, Oath of the Horatii (11.23)
1784 Jefferson completes Monticello, Virginia (11.20)
1811 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
CHAPTER REVIEW The Rococo Style What characterized the rococo? What was a Paris salon? What was the ballet d’action? How did the rococo style express itself in Germany? Who was Thomas Gainsborough?
The Enlightenment What were the goals of the Enlightenment? Who were the philosophes, and how did they aim to reform society? What was the Encyclopedia? Explain the ideas of Rousseau in edu- cation, Adam Smith in political economy, and Kant in moral philosophy.
The Bourgeois Response How did the tastes of the middle classes differ from wealthier patrons? Describe how the paintings of Chardin and Greuze appealed to the middle classes. Describe the early development of the novel. How did the bourgeois theater help to estab- lish a German national culture?
Music in the Age of Enlightenment What is Classical music? Who was Joseph Haydn? Enumerate the accom- plishments of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. How did Mozart appeal to both noble and middle-class audi- ences? Describe the structure of a Classical symphony.
The Neoclassical Style What factors inspired eighteenth-century neoclassicism? What virtues were symbolized by the neoclassical residences built through- out Europe and America? Who was Joshua Reynolds, and what is the “grand style”? How was David received by French society?
The Age of Satire What is satire? Describe the satiri- cal works of Jonathan Swift. How did William Hogarth ridicule the moneyed classes? Who was Voltaire? What is the moral of Candide?
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12 It is a vivid and dramatic scene, symbolic of its time: as the French revolutionary
champion Jean-Paul Marat sits in his bathtub writing a pamphlet, a young noble-
woman enters his quarters and stabs him fatally in the breast (Fig. 12.1). Marat
becomes a martyr of the revolution, the woman an image of her nation’s agony.
Revolution and Romanticism
12.1 Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas, 5 ft 33⁄4 ins × 4 ft 23⁄8 ins (1.62 × 1.28 m). Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. The revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Marat was assassinated by a young noblewoman as he sat in his bath. The painter David emphasized the pathos of this revolutionary tableau, contrasting the simplified design of rectangular shapes with the drooping posture of Marat’s head and shoulder.
K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What were the leading philosophical and political ideas of the American and French revolutions?
• What are the essential characteristics of the romantic hero? • How did music change from the Classical to the romantic period? • How were the various expressions of romanticism linked to the
historical and social circumstances of the age?
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322 Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM
As memorialized by the neoclassical painter Jacques- Louis David, the pale body of Marat is a symbol of the spirit of revolution: a dedication to the principles of equality, reason, and representative government. However, the overthrow of kings in America and France did not end injustice or establish a utopia of reason. As middle-class society took shape, a new sen- sibility arose, called romanticism, which glorified the individual and prized feeling over reason and intellect. This period of revolutionary change and romantic reac- tion (1775–1850) laid down the principles, and discov- ered the demons, of the first modern society.
Revolutions and Rights The political revolutions in America in 1776 and France in 1789 are turning points in the history of Western civi- lization. Today’s leading political ideas, such as democ- racy, republicanism, and equality before the law, were first tested in those revolutionary upheavals. Many of today’s political institutions—congresses, presidencies, constitutions—resulted from those revolutionary con- flicts. Yet scholars and politicians still debate whether the revolutions were righteous and the outcomes ben- eficial, and whether other nations can apply the lessons in other times. Since 1789, each generation has had to answer these questions for itself.
The Revolutionary Wave—1776 and 1789 The revolutionary wave began on the colonial fringes of Western civilization. Through the early eighteenth century, Britain’s American colonies had grown pros- perous from trade in fish, tobacco, and other New World commodities. By the mid-eighteenth century, the American colonists had begun to resent the burden of Britain’s economic and political control. In summer 1776, a handful of bold American colonists gathered to discuss their grievances against the British king George III (ruled 1760–1820). In their minds, he had violated their basic rights as British citizens and threatened their prosperity with heavy taxation. Believing that the king’s oppression left them no choice, they declared their inde- pendence of the British government and embarked on the dangerous course of revolution.
The American revolutionaries readily cited classical precedents and enlightened principles in justifying their rebellion. They compared their uprising to the Romans’ revolt against the Etruscan kings that had established the Roman republic. Their leader George Washington
(Fig. 12.2) was later honored by a statue portraying him as the ancient Roman Cincinnatus, who left his plow to defend the Roman republic. Like the humanists of Renaissance Florence, they called for a republic of morally virtuous and publicly minded citizens. By cast- ing off the tyranny of Britain’s monarchy, the American revolutionaries intended to establish an American com- munity of independent farmers and merchants, dedi- cated to the common good. The American Declaration of Independence applied the liberal doctrines of the
12.2 Jean-Antoine Houdon, George Washington, 1786–96. Marble, life-size. State Capitol, Richmond, Virginia. The famous French sculptor shows Washington as a dutiful republican, who returns to a life of farming after serving his military duty.
Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM 323
The American revolutionary doctrine was not easily contained. Frenchmen who fought with the American colonists returned to their homeland fired with radi- cal ideas. Their fervor helped to ignite a revolutionary inferno that consumed France in Europe’s widest and most divisive upheaval since the Reformation. The revolutionary drama began in earnest in 1789, as King Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1793) and France’s ruling fac- tions jockeyed for power. Representatives of the edu- cated and wealthy middle classes pressed their political demands for a constitutional monarchy. On July 14, 1789, a Parisian crowd assaulted the Bastille, a royal prison that had long been a symbol of royal authority and the medieval past. When the warden surrendered, the crowd executed him and triumphantly paraded his head on the end of a pike to the city hall. In August 1789, revolutionary delegates issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, endorsing the prin- ciples of liberal constitutional government.
The French Declaration was clearly derived from Enlightenment political doctrines, especially Rousseau’s belief in equality and popular sovereignty. It promised a society of merit, where success depended on talents and not on inherited rank. It proclaimed the legal equality of all citizens and their right to basic freedoms. Like the United States Constitution, the Declaration also enshrined property as an inviolable right. The del- egates, many of them wealthy bourgeois and nobles, did not care to sacrifice their fortunes to equality. Nevertheless, more than any other single document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man embodied the ideas of Enlightenment political philosophy. Every contending faction in France’s revolutionary struggle would quote its principles of liberty, equality, and brotherhood.
Between 1789 and 1795, France was seized by politi- cal intrigue and revolutionary turmoil. In 1793, King Louis XVI and his widely hated queen, Marie Antoinette, were beheaded by the new “scientific” instrument of execution, the guillotine. Leaders declared a “Republic of Virtue,” built churches to Reason, and instituted a new calendar attuned to the cycles of nature. Economic crisis and the threat of invasion led to the so-called
social contract, popular sovereignty, and individual freedom. Claiming that the British monarchy had worked to destroy the people’s liberty and sovereignty, the Declaration proclaimed:
… that whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their Safety and Happiness.1
The Americans’ successful revolution was followed by an intense struggle over the proper organization of their republican government. Should it be a loosely fed- erated group of independent states, like the cantons of Switzerland? Or should the states be subordinate to a strong central government with a powerful executive? The Americans’ solution came in the United States Constitution of 1787, which established, for the first time among Western nations, a republican government with an elected executive and a guarantee of individual rights.
The new constitution was defended in a remark- able series of political essays known as the Federalist papers, published anonymously in newspapers during 1787–8. The Federalist writers defended the proposed constitution’s balance between state authority and the rights of the individual, applying the theories of repub- licanism and liberalism in the laboratory of history. The constitution’s complex system of checks and bal- ances among the branches of government reflected the Enlightenment belief in a self-correcting mechanism. But one essay, written by future U.S. president James Madison (1751–1836), acknowledged that no system could entirely overcome the defects of human nature:
It may be a reflection on human nature that such [checks
and balances] should be necessary to control the abuses
of government. But what is government itself but the
greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were
angels, no government would be necessary.2
For all their brilliance, the Federalist papers did not address one central question of the American repub- lic: slavery. Despite declarations on the equality of all men, the new constitution allowed the continuation of slavery as an economic necessity. Since early colonial days, slaves had been imported from Africa to work on plantations in the southern American colonies and the Caribbean islands. The new United States continued to sanction slavery until the practice was ended by the American Civil War (1861–1865).
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT If you were writing a “Declaration of Human Rights” today, what rights would you deem essential? What would you do if your government denied you those rights?
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to the soldiers of his army. Known as La Madeleine (Fig. 12.5), the temple stood atop a 23-foot (7 m) high podium and was surrounded by a gigantic Corinthian colonnade.
The painter David’s devotion to the emperor earned him control of the government’s artistic patronage, and the title “First Painter.” Even so, David’s pupils did not always hew to the official line. Marie Guillemine Benoist (1768–1826) presented her riveting portrait of a turbaned black woman (Fig. 12.6) at the official Salon in 1800. Six years earlier, France’s revolutionary gov- ernment had abolished slavery in the nation’s colonies, but had so far declined to grant French women equal rights. On the contrary, remarked the exiled painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, before 1789 “women reigned; the Revolution dethroned them.” Benoist’s portrait has been interpreted as a subtle reproach to the French Revolution’s failures on women’s rights.
Reign of Terror (May 1793–July 1794), during which a small group of revolutionary leaders sent thousands of French citizens to the guillotine. To some observers the horrors of the Terror confirmed the folly of exchanging the traditional rule of law for a republic of abstractions. The British conservative Edmund Burke (1729–1797) remarked that by “changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the com- monwealth would be broken.” If one generation were to break so readily its ties to the last, wrote Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, “men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”3
The Napoleonic Era By 1799, ten years after revolution erupted, the French found their republic of virtue inhabited by citizens full of greed and prejudice. Having beheaded a king, the French now entrusted their hard-won liberties to the military hero Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). To many French people, Napoleon personified the prin- ciples of their revolution, even as he imposed dictatorial control over the nation (Fig. 12.3). In France, Napoleon satisfied his middle-class supporters by revising France’s legal system and modernizing its government, thus erasing the vestiges of absolute monarchy and aristocratic privilege. He satisfied his own dreams of a French empire by crowning himself emperor in 1804 and embarking on a military campaign that devoured virtually all of Western Europe. With each conquest, Napoleon proclaimed the revolutionary values of lib- erty and republicanism, infecting Europe with liberal ideas.
At home in France, Napoleon proved a skillful pro- pagandist for his own reign, disguising his power and cleverly manipulating the symbolism of the revolution. Where the revolutionaries had posed as heroes of the Roman republic, Napoleon now presented himself as a Roman emperor and set out to make Paris an imperial capital on the scale of ancient Rome.
Like the Roman emperors, Napoleon advertised his power by patronizing the arts and starting an ambi- tious building program. The royal palace of the Louvre became a museum to hold the artistic plunder brought from Italy and Egypt. He erected arches of triumph on public squares (Fig. 12.4) and a triumphal column (modeled after the Column of Trajan in Rome) cast from the metal cannons of defeated armies. To face the Place de la Concorde (where the guillotine had stood), he commissioned a great neoclassical temple dedicated
12.3 Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1800. Oil on canvas, 8 ft × 7 ft 7 ins (2.44 × 2.31 m). Musée de Versailles. David’s stirring portrait of Napoleon depicts him following the path of ancient generals such as Hannibal and Charlemagne (whose names are carved in the rocks). Like many revolutionaries, David approved of Napoleon’s rule, believing that he could restore order to a weary France.
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12.4 Jean-François Chalgrin, Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, Paris, 1806–37. Napoleon’s great arch surpassed in scale any comparable triumphal work of ancient Rome (compare the Arch of Trajan, Fig. 4.4). The monument’s sculptures, including François Rude’s stirring rendition of Departure of the Volunteers, 1792 (La Marseillaise), were not finished until the 1830s, years after Napoleon’s fall.
12.5 Pierre-Alexandre Vignon, La Madeleine, Paris, 1762– 1829. Length 350 ft (106.7 m), width 147 ft (44.8 m), height of base 23 ft (7 m). Napoleon adapted the fashion for Roman antiquity to legitimize his dictatorial rule. Compare this Napoleonic monument to the ancient Roman Temple of Portunus (Fig. 4.12) in its method of construction, scale, and decoration.
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Benoist’s impassive subject provides an interesting counterpoint to the sculptural portrait of Napoleon’s sister by the Italian Antonio Canova (1757–1822). Canova was commissioned to portray members of the Bonaparte family, whom Napoleon had placed on the thrones of conquered Europe. His frigidly neoclassi- cal sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte shows her as Venus (Fig. 12.7), reclining on a divan that might almost have been excavated from the ruins of Pompeii.
Colonial Revolutionaries The revolution- ary turmoil in Europe had repercussions in the American colonies of France and Spain. In 1793, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the freed slave François Dominique Toussaint-l’Ouverture [TOO-san(h) LOO- vuh-tyoor] (c. 1743–1803) assumed command of a slave revolt. By 1801, Toussaint’s skilled and ruthless leadership secured the abolition of slavery in the island’s French and Spanish colonies. Though professing repub- lican ideals, Toussaint imposed a constitution on the island that gave him nearly absolute power. In 1802, he surrendered to a French military force dispatched by Napoleon, demanding only a French promise not to reimpose slavery.
In South America, the Creoles—native-born colo- nials of European descent—instigated the struggle for independence from Spain. Their charismatic leader was Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), nicknamed El Libertador (The Liberator) for his role in liberating much of South America from Spanish rule. Inspired by Napoleon’s example, Bolívar envisioned a united Spanish America, governed by constitutional republics and a president
12.6 Marie Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of a Black Woman, 1800. Oil on canvas, 32 × 251⁄2 ins (81 × 65 cm). Louvre, Paris. Though painted in the restrained neoclassical style of her teacher, Jacques-Louis David, Marie Benoist’s portrait of an African woman is remarkably empathetic. The bare-breasted pose presents the sitter as a classical goddess, most likely Liberty. Compare Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Fig. 12.12).
12.7 Antonio Canova, Pauline Bonaparte as Venus, 1808. Marble, life-size. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Canova portrays Napoleon’s sister Pauline as holding the apple of Venus, the prize of beauty granted to the goddess by Paris’ famous judgment. Compare the figure’s awkward posture, which presents her head in profile but turns her nude torso entirely to the front, to Marie Benoist’s Portrait of a Black Woman (Fig. 12.6).
Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM 327
The Industrial Revolution By 1820 Great Britain was being transformed by the rise of industrial production, a revolution every bit as profound as the liberal political revolutions. The use of water- and steam-driven machinery in textile factories dramatically increased the pace and lowered the costs of cloth manufacture. The factories drew laborers to new industrial towns and cities, and factory owners soon were investing their enormous profits in other inno- vations—especially railroads. By the 1840s, industrial
elected for life. From 1817 to 1822, he undertook a long campaign that eventually freed the Spanish colony of Gran Colombia (present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador). By 1825 Bolívar had also defeated Spanish forces in Peru, and had been named president of a Latin American federation. But Bolívar’s grand vision succumbed to his own authoritarian tendencies and the forces of regional independence. Civil war flared and the federation disintegrated, leaving South American nations independent but insecurely republican, and still governed by the Creole elite.
Freedom “Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains,” pro- claimed Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The liberal revolutions of 1776 and 1789 declared their aim to restore humanity to its natural condition—liberty from tyranny and oppression. The doctrines of individual freedom—the call for sover- eignty over one’s self and one’s property—were perhaps the most important and lasting achievement of the liberal revolutions and the political philosophy that inspired them.
The liberal concept of individual freedom had arisen out of centuries of social experience in Europe. The ancient Greeks’ aim of personal autonomy had been subjected to Augustine’s Christian philosophy, which regarded free- dom as the root of human sin and error. Further, Augustine maintained, to oppose legitimate political authority was to oppose God’s ordained hierarchy. By the Renaissance, however, European city-dwellers were successfully gain- ing their autonomy from both feudal lords and Christian popes. The conditions of legal and moral self-responsibility started to feel natural, in contrast to the practices of serf- dom and slavery still widely practiced in the world.
The liberal revolutions were most concerned with the freedom from arbitrary government authority. Perhaps the most ardent and radical voice against government tyr- anny was that of Thomas Paine, the British-born author of Common Sense (1776). “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one,”4 wrote Paine. The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights specified the individual free- doms—among them, freedom of speech, association, and the press—that the new government might not infringe. With persistent struggle, the revolutions and reforms of the nineteenth century enshrined these principles in most Western constitutions and law.
CRITICAL QUESTION Name two activities in which you engage, one that society may justly regulate and one that should be free from government coercion. How do you justify the distinction between them?
K E Y C O N C E P T
As Western governments increasingly reflected the will of social majorities, however, the liberal concept of free- dom showed itself to be fraught with paradox. In his classic statement On Liberty (1859), philosopher John Stuart Mill reconsidered the principles of liberalism. As a core prin- ciple, he declared that the “only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to oth- ers.” But, Mill asked, what human actions are purely “self- regarding”? And why, he added, should society not prevent individuals from harming themselves? In answer to his own objections, Mill argued that a social majority might justly coerce individuals to respect their “distinct and assignable obligations to others.”5 For each individual, there are two zones of action—one where society may properly regulate individual freedom and one where individual freedom is inviolate.
The movable boundary between Mill’s zones of free- dom—one subject to just authority and the other abso- lute—marks the history of debate over human freedom in the modern world.
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monotonous row, where cramped quarters bred tuber- culosis and other disease. Industrial society achieved material progress at great spiritual cost. “Civilization works its miracles,” said a foreign journalist on a visit to Manchester, “and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.”7
Revolution and Philosophy Nineteenth-century philosophers strove to understand the dynamics of revolution and social change that ani- mated Western societies. The German thinker Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) dominated European philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century. Hegel [HAY-gull] was a philosophical idealist—idealism here meaning the phil- osophical belief that reality is grounded in the workings of the mind. For Hegel’s predecessor Immanuel Kant, reality had been grounded in the passive mental cat- egories of space and time; but for Hegel, the essential powers of Mind were always active in the world and engaged with actuality, giving shape to concrete real- ity as lived by humans. Historical reality reflected the needs of Mind, or, as Hegel put it, “The real is rational, the rational is real.” Abstract reason could be realized only through the concrete particulars of historical time and place. The rise of the Roman Empire, for example, reflected the action of Mind in the world. So did its decline and the subsequent rise of medieval Christianity. Mind engaged in a creative struggle with history’s mate- rials and circumstances that Hegel called the dialectic. The dialectic begins with thesis and antithesis—Mind and the opposing particulars of a historical moment.
production had spread to continental Europe and the United States, and the construction of railways effected a revolution in the experience of time and space, bring- ing Europe’s capitals within just a day’s travel of each other and effectively shrinking the North American continent.
The new industrial cities—for example, Manchester and Leeds in England, or Lowell, Massachusetts and New York City in the United States—produced two distinctly new classes: a commercial bourgeoisie and a “proletariat” of factory laborers. Business owners did not aspire to noble rank and an aristocratic lifestyle, as had previous generations of the newly rich. Instead, they developed their own cultural institutions, subscrib- ing to music and theater series, establishing societies for the advancement of learning, and reading the magazines in which novels and stories were often first published. Middle-class clients provided new support for the arts, in addition to traditional state-sponsored patronage. Politically, the commercial middle class sought freedom from traditional restraints on commerce and wages, invoking the principles of liberalism. By abolishing long- standing protections for small farms and wage laborers, they effectively depressed wages and assured a supply of low-paid workers for their mines and factories.
For the workers who operated the machines and stoked the furnaces, the new industrial cities were mis- erable places (Fig. 12.8). The romantic critic Thomas Carlyle bemoaned the atmosphere of Manchester with “its cotton-fuzz, its smoke and dust, its tumult and contentious squalor.”6 After working a 12-hour day, urban laborers retired to tenements built row upon
12.8 Philip James de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale at Night, 1801. Oil painting. Science Museum, London. The infernal glow of the iron furnaces at the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Entrepreneurs made fabulous profits from industrial mills, while impoverished laborers lived in unimaginable soot and squalor.
Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM 329
The German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) seemed cast by fate to be the ultimate suffering, romantic genius; Delacroix once said that Beethoven [BAY-toh-ven] had endured the pains that were the “nourishment” of romantic genius. Beethoven was abused by an alcoholic father and appointed his brothers’ guardian before the age of 18. By 25, the composer’s hearing began to fail. In 1802, Beethoven wrote a desperate “testament” to his brothers, confess- ing his ailment and its emotional effects. It reveals a man tortured by his social isolation and convinced that others misunderstood him—the epitome of the roman- tic hero. Thinking of suicide, Beethoven confessed that “art alone restrained my hand.” He wrote:
Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one
sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in
others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest
perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession
enjoy or ever have enjoyed.9
The profound crisis caused by deafness did not ham- per Beethoven’s work as a composer: he recovered from his depression to compose works of unprecedented scope and feeling.
Faust and the Romantics In Germany, the towering figure of the romantic age was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [GUR-tuh] (1749– 1832), whom the English poet Byron called “the undisputed sovereign of European literature.” During the early 1770s, Goethe had been a leader of the pre- romantic Sturm und Drang movement, but then rejected his youthful emotionalism in favor of a more restrained classicism. Goethe even once said, “Romanticism is sickness, classicism is health.” Only later in his career did he regain a sympathy for his youthful works and return to romantic themes, completing his masterpiece, the two-part drama Faust (1808, 1832).
Goethe’s Faust [fowsst] symbolized the romantic urge to burst all constraint and indulge in an unquench- able desire for all human experience. In Goethe’s ver- sion of the medieval legend, the university professor Faust bargains with the devil—in the person of the wily Mephistopheles [meh-fiss-TOFF-e-lees]—for the power to feel all “that is allotted to humankind,” to “embrace all human selves.” If his striving spirit is ever once satisfied, Faust vows, then Mephistopheles may have his soul. Having signed this pact in his own blood, Faust voices the romantic desire for an experi- ence without limit.
In their struggle, they create a new set of circumstances (the synthesis), with which Mind will engage once again as a new antithesis.
As applied to history, Hegel’s dialectic described an organic, stage-like progress from lower to higher forms. At each historical moment, an immanent World-Spirit expressed itself in concrete forms of government and in particular world-historical individuals. In his own time, Hegel recognized Napoleon as the bearer of the World- Spirit. He wrote, “The Emperor—this World-Spirit—I saw riding through the city to review his troops. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual who, here concentrated into a single point, reaches out over the world and dominates it.”
Inspired by the political ferment of the 1840s, politi- cal philosopher and economist Karl Marx (1818–1883) recast the terms of Hegel’s idealist dialectic of history. Rather than great men or a World-Spirit, Marx argued, history was propelled by material forces and the struggle of classes. The industrial revolution had created the final stage of a historical dialectic—a world-historical struggle between the rulers of industry and their laborers. The vic- tory of labor would inaugurate a socialist or communist society, in which the tools of production are collectively owned and their products equitably distributed. Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) summoned factory labor- ers to overthrow their industrial masters. “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,” Marx cried. Marx and other socialists worked to combat the abuses of industrial society. They advocated the right to vote for all citizens, including women; an eight-hour workday with a minimum wage; free medical care; and the right to organize workers’ unions.
The Romantic Hero Even as industrialism was creating a world of humdrum labor and utilitarian values, the post-revolutionary age produced a new sensibility, called romanticism, that arose gradually between 1775 and 1850. Romanticism appeared first in England and Germany, then in post- revolutionary France and North America, during the same era as the industrial revolution. The romantic attitude preferred feeling and imagination to the sober dictates of reason and also prized the powers of creative genius. Romanticism was embodied in the romantic hero, whose genius was like a force of nature—“the fire of a volcano which must absolutely burst into the open, because its nature absolutely compels it to shine, to illuminate, to astonish the world,” as the nineteenth- century romantic painter Eugène Delacroix wrote.8
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Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel, depicting a scene from the earliest version of Faust. The song’s accompaniment creates the musical image of the spinning wheel, while in the song’s text Gretchen alternates between passion and despair. The song begins and ends with the same words: “My heart is heavy, my peace is gone.” In 1859, the French composer Charles Gounod (1818–1893) based a successful opera on Faust. Gounod’s [goo- NOH] stirring finale is set in Gretchen’s prison cell, where Mephistopheles insistently calls Faust to leave, Faust implores his lover to escape, and Gretchen prays for forgiveness for murdering her child.
In the depths of sensuality
Let us now quench our glowing passions!
And at once make ready every wonder
Of unpenetrated sorcery!
Let us cast ourselves into the torrent of time,
Into the whirl of eventfulness,
Where disappointment and success,
Pleasure and pain may chop and change
As chop and change they will and can,
It is restless action makes the man.10
J. W. VON GOETHE
From Faust, Part 1 (1808)
I have only galloped through the world
And clutched each lust and longing by the hair;
What did not please me, I let go,
What flowed away, I let it flow.
I have only felt, only fulfilled desire,
And once again desired and thus with power
Have stormed my way through life; first great and strong,
Now moving sagely, prudently along.11
J. W. VON GOETHE
From Faust, Part 2 (1832)
As Mephistopheles promises “No limit is fixed for you,” Faust embarks on a romantic quest for all that love, power, and science can bring him. In Part 1, he explores the world of personal feelings through his love for the innocent girl Gretchen. He succeeds only in destroying Gretchen, who is imprisoned and condemned for drowning their child. Faust is left unsatisfied.
In the drama’s second part, written some 25 years later, Faust’s quest for the whole range of human experi- ence extends to science, politics, and history. The action ranges across great stretches of space and time in a fan- tastic plot that no stage could actually accommodate. Though he cannot balance his visionary designs with a sympathy for human limitations, Faust does not regret his endless quest for satisfaction and achievement.
The scope of Faust’s ambitions reflects those of Goethe himself. The poet had supervised building projects, engaged in diplomatic missions, and directed cultural affairs for his patron, the Duke of Weimar [VYE-mar]. But, like Faust, Goethe felt that his achieve- ments never quite matched his designs, leaving him with a residue of longing and desire.
Goethe’s drama exercised a great stimulus on the romantic imagination. The painter Eugène Delacroix illustrated a French translation of the first part of Faust with appropriately demonic lithographs (Fig. 12.9). Among the most famous of Viennese composer Franz Schubert’s art songs (composed at age 17) was
12.9 Eugène Delacroix, Faust Visits Marguerite in Prison, illustration from the French edition of Goethe’s Faust, 1828. Here the hero of Goethe’s romantic tragedy visits Gretchen (“Marguerite” in French), who has murdered the child of their union, while Mephistopheles calls him away. Gretchen refuses Faust’s offer of rescue, recognizing that he no longer loves her.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Who do you think best deserves the label of “genius,” in the romantic sense? Does this genius exert both creative and destructive forces?
Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM 331
Delacroix and the Byronic Hero French romantic artists of the 1820s were not much interested in the scientific ambition and German con- science of Goethe’s Faust. The French were more attracted to the defiant sensuality of the life and works of George Gordon, Lord Byron, the English poet. Byron (1788–1824) lived a life of sexual freedom, political idealism, and exotic travel (Fig. 12.10). His unfin- ished poetic masterpiece was Don Juan (begun 1819), in which he portrays himself as the legendary lover. Byron’s works and life defined what came to be known as the Byronic hero, the rebellious genius whose intel- lectual and moral freedom isolates him from an unsym- pathetic world. The Byronic hero appealed to young French artists repelled by the conventional morality and avid commercialism of middle-class society.
The French artist most inspired by the Byronic hero was the painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). Delacroix [dell-ah-KWAH] cut a dashing and aristo- cratic figure in the Parisian salons. He was one of a gen- eration of young romantics that included the composer Hector Berlioz, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, and the spokesman for French romanticism, dramatist Victor Hugo (author of Les Misérables). As a painter, Delacroix
12.10 Thomas Phillips, Lord Byron in Albanian Costume, 1814. Oil on canvas, 29 1⁄2 × 24 1⁄2 ins (75 × 62 cm). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. The romantic hero as noble savage: the scandalous poet Byron, dressed in native Albanian costume, on his first trip to aid the Greek rebellion against the Turks. Byron’s unconventional morality and enthusiasm for political causes inspired a generation of romantic artists and poets.
12.11 Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1826. Oil on canvas, 12 ft 11 1⁄2 ins × 16 ft 3 ins (3.95 × 4.95 m). Louvre, Paris. Assess the emotional effect of placing Sardanapalus in the background, and Delacroix’s use of color and line to define an atmosphere of erotic violence.
332 Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM
of Paris barricaded their streets in July 1830, and again overthrew their king—the Bourbon monarchy that had ruled France for 15 years. The Bourbon king abdi- cated and was replaced by the “Citizen-King,” Louis- Philippe, whose monarchy endured until insurrection again convulsed France in 1848.
During the July insurrection, some romantic novel- ists and artists took their places on the barricades, while Delacroix observed the events from a balcony. He said months later, “If I did not fight for our country, at least I will paint for her.” His depiction of the July revolution,
mounted his own rebellion against the official academic style of French painting, which emphasized line and skillful drawing. Delacroix instead preferred riotous color, turbulent compositions, and exotic themes. He painted an enormous range of subjects—many drawn from literary works (including Byron’s)—that reflect an artistic rebellion against the society in which he lived.
The Death of Sardanapalus (Fig. 12.11), for exam- ple, depicts an orgy of egoism, violence, and sexuality that scandalized Parisian art circles. The theme is taken from a play by Byron. According to legend, the Assyrian monarch Sardanapalus [sar-da-NAP-a-luss] destroyed himself and all his possessions when threatened by a rebellion. In Delacroix’s version, slaves deliver the fatal blow to a concubine (on the right) and to the king’s struggling horse (on the left). Meanwhile, Sardanapalus lies propped on his pillow in sadistic detachment, his own cup of poison at hand.
Delacroix was among the many French roman- tics inspired by the July 1830 revolution in France. Recalling the revolutionary spirit of 1789, the citizens
12.12 Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas, 8 ft 6 ins × 10 ft 8 ins (2.59 × 3.25 m). Louvre, Paris. Delacroix’s visual hymn to patriotic revolution is unified by his use of the French tricolor flag. The red, white, and blue are echoed in the uniform of the kneeling guardsman who gazes up at Liberty and in smoke rising above the cathedral of Notre Dame at right.
View the Closer Look at Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix on myartslab.com
Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM 333
with its compelling theme and volcano of sound. This symphony has been interpreted as the composer’s con- frontation with fate, a struggle depicted in the shift- ing modulations between minor keys. The composer himself supposedly described the symphony’s opening four tones as “Fate knocking at the door.” Their men- acing rhythm—three short beats and one long—domi- nates the symphony’s long first movement. Beethoven enlarges the Classical mold through the recurring four- note motif (a term for a short musical idea). The motif moves through repeated moments of harmonic tension and ends the movement with a dynamic coda, or closing. Even here Beethoven has still not exhausted his motif, which recurs throughout the symphony, unifying its complex structure and further expanding the Classical symphonic form. At the end of the third movement, Beethoven added yet another innovation. Instead of the customary pause, the music continues directly into the last movement. Symphony No. 5 achieves a heroic grandeur that matches the stature of its composer.
Age of the Virtuoso The romantic era in music was marked by the unprec- edented fame acquired by musical virtuosos—perform- ers of spectacular ability whose flair appealed to the wider audiences of the nineteenth century. In his day, perhaps the most famous of these virtuosos was the Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), who toured Europe displaying his dazzling technical ability. Paganini [pah-gah-NEE-nee] employed a showman’s tricks, but also inspired several composers to more dar- ing compositions for violin.
Virtuosos of the voice displayed their expressive tal- ent through the German art song (called in German the Lied, pl. Lieder [leet, LEE-der]). Lieder were often romantic poetry set to music, such as The Erlking (1815) by Viennese composer Franz Schubert (1797–1828). In a ballad by Goethe, a father bears his delirious son in his arms on a frantic ride through the night forest. Over an insistent and ominous piano accompaniment, the boy describes how the king of the elves, symbol of death, beckons to him. Schubert’s Lied creates in the three voices—boy, father, and elf—a compelling drama of romantic death.
On the piano, the era’s greatest virtuoso was the Polish musician Frédéric Chopin (1809–1849). The delicate appearance and rhapsodic compositions of Chopin [SHOH-pan(h)] defined a romantic musical type very different from the burly Beethoven. Chopin’s compositions used smaller musical forms, including
Liberty Leading the People (Fig. 12.12), embodies the event’s romantic spirit, with a combination of the gro- tesque and the ideal. Delacroix’s picture centers on an allegorical figure of Liberty, who strides triumphantly across a barricade littered with the bodies of fallen reb- els. On the left, a grimy worker fights beside a dandy in a top hat, symbolizing the unity of working and middle classes. Caught in a moment of political romanticism, Delacroix forgets his Byronic irony and detachment, joining in the revolutionary enthusiasm of his fellow citizens.
Music and Dance in the Romantic Age The romantic period saw dramatic changes in the stand- ing of Western musicians and composers. Aristocratic patronage declined and a new urban middle class became music’s primary audience, attending concerts in large music halls and auditoriums. Composers increas- ingly worked as free artists, the middle-class peers of their audience, and many were virtuoso stars of the concert stage. Romantic musical works grew longer and reflected the romantic concern for feeling and empathy.
Beethoven: From Classical to Romantic Ludwig van Beethoven began as musical heir to the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart and ended as a titanic figure of musical romanticism. The young Beethoven made his name as a pianist, performing in the courts and concert halls of Vienna. Passionately com- mitted to the republican ideals of the French Revolution, he was often disdainful of his aristocratic audiences—a position he could afford to take, since, unlike Mozart, Beethoven supported himself largely through the publi- cation of his compositions. He overcame personal crisis to revolutionize concert music in Europe, enlarging and loosening the conventions of Classical style to serve the direct expression of feeling. Beethoven expanded the symphonic orchestra, adding the piccolo and trom- bone, and he exchanged the elegant dance movement of Haydn’s and Mozart’s symphonies for a rougher, more vigorous scherzo [SKAIR-tso] (joke). Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, called the Eroica, was a watershed between the Classical style in music and the more ambi- tious and adventurous romantic style.
Beethoven’s expansion of the Classical sonata form is audible in his Symphony No. 5 in C Minor,
Listen to the fi rst movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor on myartslab.com
334 Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM
of Hector Berlioz [BAIR-lee-ohz] (1803–1869; Fig. 12.14). Composed in 1830, the Symphonie fantastique described a lurid fantasy, based on Berlioz’s own obses- sive love for an Irish actress who had rejected him:
A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent
imagination in a paroxysm of lovesick despair has
poisoned himself with opium. The drug, too weak to
kill, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by
strange visions. His sensations, feelings, and memories
are translated in his sick brain into musical images and
ideas. The beloved one herself becomes for him a melody,
a recurrent theme that haunts him everywhere.13
Throughout the symphony, the artist’s beloved appears musically through the recurring idée fixe [ee-DAY FEEKS], a term coined by Berlioz for a melody that recurs, with variations, in different movements. The Symphonie fantastique’s last movement is a phantas- magoria of the demonic and macabre. The artist sees himself “at a witches’ sabbath surrounded by a host of fearsome specters who have gathered for his funeral.” The idée fixe, initially charming and playful, turns “trivial and grotesque” as played by a mocking clarinet. The lover’s tune is interwoven with other melodies—
Polish dances such as the mazurka and polonaise, and explored the piano as an instrument of delicate nuance. The Étude in C Minor, called the “Revolutionary” (1831), likely written in response to Russia’s invasion of Poland, begins with tumultuous downward pas- sages in the left hand. The melody begins dramatically, quietens, and then finishes in crashing chords. Chopin was famous also for his love affair with the flamboyant George Sand (the male pseudonym of the female novel- ist Aurore Dudevant). Sand nursed Chopin as he slowly died of tuberculosis, and later described their relation- ship in a novel.
Romantic genius was often associated with ecstatic states that bordered on madness. Composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856) eventually succumbed to mental illness (probably manic depression), but man- aged to compose the most lyrical of romantic songs and symphonies. After his mental collapse and death, Schumann’s wife, Clara (1819–1896), continued to perform his music and support their family with her own professional career. When her friend, the com- poser Johannes Brahms, chastised her for leaving her children to continue concert tours, she replied: “You regard them merely as a means of earning money. I do not! I feel I have a mission to produce beautiful works.” Clara Schumann’s achievement as a pianist and com- poser—she excelled in writing Lieder—came by fierce dedication to her art, which, she said to Brahms, “is the very air I breathe.”12
The romantic age also witnessed virtuosos of the dance, especially the professional ballerinas (Fig. 12.13) who perfected dancing “on point” (in French, en pointe)—that is, on tiptoe in slippers with a hard- ened toe cap. The ballerina Marie Taglioni (1804– 1884) dazzled audiences in the premier of La Sylphide (1832), in which the star plays a fairy-like forest crea- ture. Ballerinas shortened their skirts to display their technique and were lifted by male partners or on wires to emphasize their ethereal qualities. Romantic ballet stories such as Giselle (1841) gave greater prominence to women characters and star ballerinas, who earned fortunes for their stage performances.
Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique Romantic composers, so often inspired by literature and art, frequently told musical stories or described musical scenes, a practice called program music (because descriptions were printed in the concert pro- gram). Perhaps the most bizarre and ambitious example was the Symphonie fantastique (Fantastic Symphony)
12.13 Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide, Souvenir d’Adieu, c. 1832. Colour lithograph. Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Ballerinas such as Taglioni used the dance en pointe to emphasize their technical ability and give even greater prominence to women in nineteenth-century dance.
Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM 335
Romantic Social Protest The early romantics thrilled at the revolutionary dec- larations of equality and freedom issued in 1776 and 1789. On the other hand, the romantics were witness to the misery and bondage of large-scale industrial society, especially in the towns of England. In factory towns, workers starved in the midst of industrial plenty; women turned to prostitution to feed their families; children labored frantically in factories and mines. Fierce images of urban oppression appeared in the early poetry of the Englishman William Blake (1757–1827). Blake was a visionary mystic who created his own elaborate per- sonal mythology, saying he “must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” He was a sympathetic observer of those enslaved by the industrial city and pas- sionately condemned the evils of urban existence with dense, powerful images. For Blake, “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”
In Blake’s poem London, the miserable faces of London’s poor are portrayed. The poem rails against the “mind-forg’d manacles” of law, religion, and mar- riage—social institutions that Blake believed had the effect of creating their opposites: poverty, violence, and prostitution.
I wander thro’ each charter’da street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,b
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.14
WILLIAM BLAKE
London (1794)
a. charter’d, Blake suggests that the streets and the river have been
licensed to private commerce.
b. ban, a curse or public denunciation.
a ponderous melody from a Mass for the dead and a swirling “witches’ dance.” Berlioz’s symphony not only captured the romantic spirit of the macabre, it also exudes a romantic sense of excess and vitality.
Elements of Romanticism The heroic individualism evident in Faust and in the life and works of Lord Byron is just one element of the romantic movement. Other common elements recur in the arts and movements of the romantic period (c. 1800–1850). Romantics in several nations raised a protest against political and social injustice. Some romantics were attracted to nature or indulged in a nostalgia for a medieval past, while others exhibited a fascination with the evil and exotic. Thus, romanticism was a mosaic of artistic and philosophical concerns, not a unified movement or style. What the romantics shared was a sensibility that responded to their social and historical circumstances.
12.14 A concert of Hector Berlioz in 1846. Contemporary engraving. In this caricature, Berlioz directs a mammoth orchestra, including cannon, while the audience covers its ears in horror. The French composer greatly expanded the orchestra’s size and range of sound.
Listen to the fi rst movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique on myartslab.com
336 Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM
comparison—soldiering was supposedly the most mascu- line of occupations—supported her advocacy of women’s education. It also responded to Rousseau’s claim that women were inferior because they could not perform military duty. Wollstonecraft’s appeal for recognition by men was to be echoed by later generations of feminists:
Would men but generously snap our chains, and be
content with rational fellowship instead of slavish
obedience, they would find us more observant daughters,
more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more
reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens. We
should then love them with true affection, because we
should learn to respect ourselves …15
Romantic Feminism A more genteel roman- tic protest was heard in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), author of the first femi- nist manifesto. Wollstonecraft lived a life of intellectual and personal freedom. She became the lover of the radi- cal social theorist William Godwin (1756–1836), and died soon after the birth of their daughter Mary (author of Frankenstein). In applying the French Revolution’s principles to women, Wollstonecraft answered conser- vatives such as Edmund Burke, the British politician and theorist, and the revolution’s philosophical god- father, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau had patron- ized women in his writings on education, calling for the protection of wives and mothers from society’s harsh demands. Wollstonecraft countered this idea, claiming that sheltering women from society stifled their creative energies and deprived society of their contribution.
In her manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Wollstonecraft boldly compared middle- class women to soldiers. Both received a narrow train- ing and suffered from their assigned roles. Her startling
12.15 Francisco Goya, Executions of the Third of May, 1808, 1814–15. Oil on canvas, 8 ft 8 3⁄4 ins × 13 ft 3 3⁄4 ins (2.66 × 3.45 m). Prado, Madrid. Goya’s romantic protest against the cruelty of war offers none of the idealism in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (see Fig. 12.12). Spanish resisters against Napoleon’s invasion are lined up for gruesome slaughter by faceless French soldiers, who embody the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality gone mad.
Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM 337
west wind. The English poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was the leading nature poet of the roman- tic age. Where Goethe’s Faust had sought “infinitude” in human ambition, Wordsworth found infinity in the sublime experience of nature. Nature served as the cata- lyst to the poet’s own spiritual development or renewal, reflecting and confirming his own powers of imagina- tion. This correspondence between nature and the art- ist’s inner soul was a commonplace of romanticism.
Often, the romantic’s contemplation of nature caused a profound sense of melancholy. The purity of nature reminded the romantics of their lost innocence and alienation from the natural world. In the poem The World is Too Much With Us, Wordsworth bemoans the distractions of a “too busy world” and envies the ancient Greeks’ naive vision of nature. The knowledge that his wish is impossible makes his melancholy all the more acute.
However, the revolutions that sought the liberty and education of men merely added to legal and social restrictions on women. In France, Napoleon’s revision of the legal code denied women the right to hold prop- erty within marriage, and most Western nations denied women the right to vote. Mary Wollstonecraft’s protest for the rights of women was largely forgotten until the revival of the women’s suffrage movement in the 1840s.
Goya and Spain The greatest artist of roman- tic protest was the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746–1828), whose paintings and drawings depicted the senseless brutality of war and oppression. Goya was court painter in Madrid when Napoleon’s army invaded Spain in 1808 to overthrow the weakened Spanish monarchy. Spanish citizens rose in sporadic but violent resistance to the French army, fighting the first guerrilla (little war). The uprising generated mutual reprisals of extreme brutality, which Goya sketched in a horrify- ing series called The Disasters of War. In Executions of the Third of May, 1808 (Fig. 12.15), Goya depicts the execution of Spanish insurgents with such a raw truth- fulness that the picture has been called “the explosion of modern painting.” Goya shows us a sacrifice without ideals, a martyrdom without redemption. In his white shirt, the Christ-like central figure draws the viewer’s eye to his dead compatriots. The scene is lighted by a stable lantern, normally a symbol of enlightenment and grace that here merely serves to illuminate the soldiers’ grisly work. The moral realism in Goya’s painting is a testimony to the demonic forces of war, loosed on a world without reason or optimism.
The Romantics and Nature As Western societies became more urbanized, nature assumed a new significance for the romantic sensibil- ity. Since ancient Greece, nature had symbolized the divine cosmos, of which human society was a part. For the romantics, however, nature became the nega- tion of society, a world of beauty unspoiled by human endeavor. Among the English romantics, nature also represented a childlike existence that was lost to adults, except through moments of poetic transcendence. In their imagination, English romantic poets momentarily felt communion with the natural world and, through nature, with themselves.
The poetry of English romanticism often portrayed the poet’s imaginative union with nature, such as John Keats (1795–1821) contemplating a nightingale’s song, or Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) listening to the
K E Y C O N C E P T
Imagination Enlightenment thinkers had embraced the philoso- pher John Locke’s bold metaphor for the workings of the human mind—the “blank slate” that mechani- cally records sense experience. With their emphasis on genius and human feeling, the romantics naturally rejected this mechanical and passive notion of the human mind. To the romantics, the human mind was more like the hand of God at the moment of creation. The English poet William Blake even said, “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, Divine Vision.” In the view of romantic poets, at least, imagination was that faculty of mind that creatively shaped experience and rendered it as the poet’s unique vision of the world. The romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) explained that imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissi- pates, in order to re-create.” In other words, the creative imagination acts on, adds to, and reshapes the facts of sense experience, to create a perception entirely indi- vidual and new. In this way, a painter such as J. M. W. Turner might imaginatively recreate a maritime disas- ter in a fictional work—a fiction that is more truthful than mere observational data (see Fig. 12.18)
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338 Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM
that individuals possessed within themselves the capac- ity to know all things. Thoreau’s love of nature was more matter-of-fact, as expressed in his book Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). By living for a year close to nature, Thoreau hoped he could learn the essentials of human existence and escape the “lives of quiet des- peration” led by most inhabitants of the modern world.
If Wordsworth was romanticism’s greatest nature poet, his compatriot John Constable (1776–1837) was its greatest nature painter. Declaring that “there is room enough for a natural painter” in London’s art world, Constable undertook a series of so-called “six- foot landscapes” depicting his native Stour River valley. The first of these, The White Horse (1819; Fig. 12.17), won him election to the Royal Academy, and the series became his best-loved works. The white tow horse is being poled across the Stour River, its red collar the one splash of color in the rustic and ramshackle scene. Though he claimed that painting was “scientific as well as poetic,” Constable’s country landscapes in fact depicted the painter’s own nostalgic vision, a pictur- esque alternative to the industrial city where he lived.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteusa rising from the sea;
Or hear old Tritona blow his wreathèd horn.16
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
The World is Too Much With Us (1807)
a. Proteus and Triton, Greek gods of the sea.
The romantic return to nature (Fig. 12.16) reached a final expression in the writings of the Americans Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). Emerson claimed that all humanity was part of the divine “Over-soul,” and
12.16 Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Mists, c. 1817–18. Oil on canvas, 29 1⁄2 × 37 1⁄4 ins (75 × 95 cm). Kunsthalle, Hamburg. The German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich depicts a wanderer struck by the sublime power of nature. In Friedrich’s view, much like Wordsworth’s, all of nature contained the presence of God. “The Divine is everywhere,” he said, “even in a grain of sand.”
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12.17 John Constable, The White Horse, 1819. Oil on canvas, 51 3⁄4 × 74 1⁄8 ins (131.4 × 188.3 cm). Frick Collection, New York. The river’s bend creates a fluid three-part composition, each part with its own center of attention: the boat and horse; the tumbledown shack; and the browsing cattle.
12.18 Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On), 1842. Oil on canvas, 35 3⁄8 × 48 1⁄4 ins (91 × 123 cm). Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund. In this romantic phantasmagoria of natural and human violence, Turner depicts an incident from the British slave trade. Fishes devour the body of a cast- off slave (lower right), while the doomed ship sails into a blood-red storm. Compare this painting’s perspective on humans’ relation to nature with John Constable’s The White Horse (Fig. 12.17).
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ject not as a political protest but rather out of interest in its apocalyptic atmosphere (Fig. 12.18).
Romantic landscape painting gained a special place in North American culture, where the proximity of the wil- derness gave the genre religious overtones. The painter who established this American genre was Thomas Cole (1801–1848), founder of the so-called Hudson River school. Cole’s carefully rendered scenes of the Hudson River Valley in New York almost always bore some heroic or moralizing detail, and purported to reveal the presence of God through unspoiled nature. Cole’s contemporary, Asher B. Durand, said of their landscape subjects: “To the spectator, a landscape becomes com- panionable, holding silent converse . . . touching a chord that vibrates to the innermost recesses of the heart.”17 A second generation of American landscape painters spe- cialized in grand views of the American West. Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) painted his majestic panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Valley (Fig. 12.19) for urban collectors back east, who valued the anthropological details of Native American cultures that were being destroyed by encroaching settlement.
In his technique, however, Constable was inventive and forward-looking. He laid on daubs and dashes of pure color that created a shimmering vitality. His intense use of color influenced Delacroix and has been linked to French impressionism.
The paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) show nature as a violent and mysterious force, overwhelming the puny inventions of humanity. Even more obsessively than Constable, Turner experi- mented with color—especially blues and yellows—fre- quently transforming and fusing his colors to convey the effects of fog, steam, or smoke. Sometimes, it seems, color was the mystic veil through which Turner revealed humanity and nature. In The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On) a turbulent sea swallows up the bodies of diseased slaves. Because Britain’s slave trade had been abolished for 20 years, Turner probably chose the sub-
12.19 Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, 1868. Oil on canvas, 5 ft 11 ins × 10 ft (1.83 × 3.05 m). National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Bierstadt first visited the American West in 1859, sketching and making photographs of its grand mountain vistas. In this gigantic landscape, the tiny foreground wildlife set off the spectacular scale and brilliant light of the cliffs and peaks.
View the Closer Look at The Oxbow by Thomas Cole on myartslab.com
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called his work “Tudor details on a classic body.” Still, the irregular towers and intricate exterior carving made it an impressive presence in London architecture (Fig. 12.20). In North America, the medieval revivalist James Renwick (1818–1895) designed two of the continent’s most familiar buildings. He copied the towering St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City from medieval French examples of the Gothic style. His design for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., reverted to the stone masses of the medieval Romanesque style.
With the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, the societies of Europe and North America settled into a comfortable routine of middle-class life. Ironically, as European societies succumbed to conservatism, they were drawn to art of the exotic and grotesque. Middle- class readers and patrons wished to be transported outside the narrow limits of middle-class experience. Artists reacting against Enlightenment rationalism were also eager to explore the domains of evil and exoticism.
Europe’s contact with the Islamic world and Asia aroused a romantic taste for exotic “Oriental” cultures.
Romantic Escapes Each age finds in the past a reflection of its own val- ues, and the romantics were no exception. Because the cataclysmic French Revolution made the past feel more distant, the romantics were better able to recognize that each past age had its own unique sensibility. Romantic works sought to recreate the past in historical detail, sometimes preferring to reconstruct the past instead of observing the present.
In romantic Germany especially, a revived interest in Gothic styles included the imitation of Gothic archi- tecture and the use of Gothic settings in literary works. The German poet Heinrich Heine [HIGH-nuh] (1797– 1856) defined romanticism as “the re-awakening of the life and thought of the Middle Ages.” The medieval Gothic cathedral became a feast of romantic symbol- ism: the ancient, the mystic, the picturesque, and the organic. In Germany, romantics engineered the comple- tion of Cologne’s Gothic cathedral in 1834, a project that fused romantic medieval nostalgia with German cultural nationalism.
The gigantic Houses of Parliament in London — rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1834—were more Gothic in decoration than in construction. The impos- ing façade facing the Thames is as regular and geometric as any neoclassical building’s. Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–1852), the designer of the Gothic decoration,
12.20 Sir Charles Barry and A. W. Pugin, Houses of Parliament, London, 1840–65. Length 940 ft (286.5 m). The massive Houses of Parliament in England were the romantic era’s greatest public building in the Gothic style. Note the tension between the building’s symmetrical core and the irregular towers.
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The romantics’ Orientalism, however, was largely their own imaginary invention. For example, in England, when the Prince of Wales redesigned his residence at Brighton, the architect John Nash (1752–1835) created a fantastic confection of Arabic, Chinese, and Indian styles. Nash’s Brighton Pavilion (Fig. 12.21) used exotic elements with little regard for authenticity. The exte- rior’s exotic forms and motifs were carried over into the interior decoration.
French romantics’ Oriental fantasies were inspired by French colonial expeditions to northern Africa. Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) became the standard-bearer of academic classicism in France. But critics puzzled over his Grande Odalisque, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1819 (Fig. 12.22). The subject is an odalisque [oh-duh-LEESK], a slave girl in a Turkish sul- tan’s harem. Ingres [ang(r)] elongated the woman’s body to emphasize the languorous line of her back and right arm. Yet her gaze seems guarded, even disdainful, as if her eyes are negating the sensual promise of her nudity. Ingres would paint many more conventionally classical subjects, but his odalisques appeared in major works right up to his career’s end. In 1832, Ingres’s romantic rival, the painter Delacroix, undertook an unlikely (and dangerous) mission to Morocco, sketching an actual Moorish harem and observing a Muslim wedding.
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
Native Storytellers The native peoples contacted or uprooted by European colonialism often struggled to maintain the integrity of their cultural traditions. Here, an American Indian woman born in Arizona in 1837 describes an Apache custom for etching stories in the memories of young people.
In the old days when a person got ready to be told a story, from the time the storyteller started no one there ever stopped to eat or sleep. They kept telling the story straight through till it was finished. Then when the story was through, the medicine man would tell all about the different medicines. There would be a basket of corn seeds there, and for each line that was spoken, that person who was listening would count out one corn seed. This way there would be sometimes 200 corn seeds. Then that person would have to eat them all. If he could eat them, then he would remember all the words he had been told. If you fell asleep during this time, then the story was broken and was no good. That is the way we used to do.18
GRENVILLE GOODWIN From Western Apache Raiding and Warfare
12.21 John Nash, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England, 1815–21. Nash’s Royal Pavilion was typical of romantic exoticism. It arbitrarily borrowed elements from Islamic and Asian design, and combined them into an artificial but delightful architectural fancy. Compare this building to the fantasy architecture of contemporary theme parks and tourist attractions.
Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM 343
Evil and the Gothic Novel Where Enlightenment rationalists expected evil to be defeated by moral diligence, the romantics found it to be as mysterious and irrepressible as the human imagina- tion itself. The Spanish artist Francisco Goya provided the most succinct image of the romantic fascination with evil. In The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters (Fig. 12.23), from a series of etchings on Spanish super- stitions, he drew a man asleep at a worktable, with his brushes beside him. As he sleeps, the demons of his imagination liberate themselves and rise above him. The inscription reads, “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” It suggests that behind wakeful reason, the destructive fiends of the human imagination are lurk- ing. With such insights, the romantics anticipated the discoveries of modern psychology.
The literary fascination with evil and the demonic was evident in the Gothic novel, a genre character- ized by horror, supernatural occurrences, and often a medieval setting. The most spectacular Gothic atmo- spheres were created in the stories of American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). Such tales as The Pit and the Pendulum and The Fall of the House of Usher
12.22 Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814. Oil on canvas, 36 × 63 3⁄4 ins (91 × 162 cm). Louvre, Paris. Compare Ingres’s exotic reclining nude to more strictly neoclassical treatments such as Benoist’s or Canova’s (Fig. 12.6 and Fig. 12.7). Note Ingres’s distortions of anatomy for sensual effect; critics estimated that the woman was endowed with three extra vertebrae.
12.23 Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, from Los Caprichos, 1796–8. Etching, 8 1⁄2 × 6 ins (21.6 × 15.2 cm). British Museum, London. This etching—the frontispiece to a book of prints titled Caprices— recorded Goya’s insight into the darkness of the human soul. Goya’s original caption read, “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”
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344 Chapter 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM
Mary Shelley (Fig. 12.24) traced the genesis of her
Frankenstein to a night in Switzerland, when she and her liter-
ary companions had challenged each other to a ghost-story competition. She had
dreamed that night about a “hideous phantasm of a man stretched out” who, “on the working of some powerful engine, shows signs of life, and stirs with an uneasy, half vital motion.” In Shelley’s novel, this “phantasm”—the grotesque creature—owes its exis- tence to Victor Frankenstein, a romantic version of the Greek hero Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. Believing that he has discovered the secret to life, Victor chortles that “a new species would bless me as its cre- ator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.” But when his hideous creation springs to life, Victor is horrified and aban- dons the monster, who embarks on his own odyssey of loneliness and despair. The creature finally appeals to Frankenstein to fashion a mate for him, an “Eve” to share his miserable state:
demonstrate Poe’s mastery of Gothic horror and his insight into human fear and remorse. In Europe, the sisters Charlotte and Emily Brontë both used the wild landscapes of their remote English homeland to frame stories of tortured and will- ful souls. In Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights (both published 1847), the central figures are impelled by their passion and loneliness to confront social obligation and moral choice. The stories of these and other roman- tic authors became prototypes of the Gothic-style narratives of horror and romance still popular today.
The best-known Gothic novel today is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), which synthesized Gothic atmosphere with the romantic themes of genius and the noble savage. The life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) might well have been a romantic drama, with its acts of pas- sionate abandon and lonely struggle. The daughter of freethinking radicals, the precocious Mary eloped with the young romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was estranged from his wife and child. The Shelleys became companions of Lord Byron in his dissolute European exile. Their idyll ended when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Mary Shelley returned to England with the couple’s son and became a professional writer, earning a living and educating her son, while also editing and publishing her husband’s poetic works.
12.24 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, shown in a miniature by Reginald
Easton. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. More than any other Gothic novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein engaged the romantic themes of genius, heroic alienation, and the protest against society’s evils.
1775 CE 1785 CE 1795 CE 1805 CE 1808, 1832 Goethe, Faust, Parts I and II
1808–1882 Life of Emerson
1814–1815 Schubert, Lieder settings of Goethe’s poetry
1814 Ingres’s Grand Odalisque (12.22)
1814–1815 Goya, Executions of the Third of May, 1808 (12.15)
1776 American colonists declare their independence from the British crown
1776–1783 American war of independence
1788 Constitution ratified in the United States
1788–1824 Life of Byron
1789 Paris mob storms royal prison at Bastille; French parliament declares “Rights of Man and the Citizen”
1789–1799 French Revolution; Reign of Terror 1793–4
1792 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
1793 David, Death of Marat (12.1)
1793–1802 Toussaint-l’Ouverture leads rebellion against slavery and colonial rule in Haiti
1794 Blake, London
1799 Napoleon seizes control of French revolutionary government
1799–1815 Napoleon rules France
1804 Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 (Eroica)
C H A P T E R 1 2 : T I M E L I N E
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“What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand
a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself: the
gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it
shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off
from all the world; but on that account we shall be more
attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but
they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now feel.
Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude
towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the
sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my
request!”19
MARY SHELLEY
From Frankenstein (1818)
1815 CE 1825 CE 1835 CE 1845 CE 1815–1821 Nash, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England (12.21)
1817–1818 Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Mists (12.16)
1818 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
1820–1870 Industrialization of Europe and the United States
1840–1865 Barry and Pugin, Houses of Parliament, London (12.20)
1842 Turner, The Slave Ship (12.18)
1830 “July Revolution” in Paris
1830 Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique
1830 Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (12.12)
1848 Marx, Communist Manifesto
1854 Thoreau, Walden
Victor refuses the appeal, and the two figures—creator and creature—are finally locked in a tortuous pursuit, determined to destroy each other.
In Frankenstein, Shelley created a hero who suffers a conflict between his God-like ambitions and his moral blindness. In the creature, she imagined the noble sav- age, who learns hatred and cruelty from humans whose civilization has failed to make them kind. With all its interwoven themes, Shelley’s Gothic tale is one of the richest documents of romanticism.
CHAPTER REVIEW
Revolutions and Rights How did Enlightenment philosophy lead to revolution in America and France? Compare and contrast the French and American revo- lutions. What were the Federalist papers? What was the Reign of Terror? In what ways was Napoleon a vin- dication of the French Revolution? In what ways did Napoleon negate the Revolution’s principles? How did Napoleon employ the arts? What were the repercus- sions of the Industrial Revolution in England? Compare and contrast the theories of history of Hegel and Marx.
The Romantic Hero How did Romanticism differ- entiate itself from the Enlightenment? Summarize the events of Goethe’s Faust. What is a “Byronic hero”?
Music and Dance in the Romantic Age What is Lieder music? Explain the effects of the rise of the middle-class on symphonic music. Who was Ludwig van Beethoven? What is a virtuoso? Who was Clara Schumann? What
qualities make Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique an example of romantic music?
Elements of Romanticism Enumerate the differ- ent ways in which romanticism can be seen as “the reawakening of the life and thought of the Middle Ages.” Who was Mary Wollstonecraft? Discuss social protest in the works of William Blake and Francisco Goya. What was the role of the human imagination in romanticism? Compare and contrast the pictorial styles of Delacroix and Ingres. Who was Edgar Allen Poe? What is a Gothic novel? Describe the events in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Compare and contrast the paintings of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Joseph Mallord William Turner, and John Constable.
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13 Finely dressed shoppers stroll down a rainy boulevard in 1870s Paris (Fig. 13.1),
the “capital of the nineteenth century.” Fashionable apartments rise like modern
pyramids behind them. Within a decade, the great Eiffel Tower, a masterpiece of
engineering and design, will be erected nearby. Like other capitals of modernity—
Berlin, New York, Chicago—this glistening Paris is a triumph of materialism: the
belief that science, technology, and industry can know all truth, solve all problems,
and create human happiness.
The Industrial Age
13.1 Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street: Rainy Weather, 1877. Oil on canvas, 6 ft 11 1⁄2 ins × 9 ft 3⁄4 ins (2.12 × 2.76 m). Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1964.336. This scene of Paris’s modern boulevards shows the painter’s fascination with oblique angles and uneven proportions. Compared to the romantics’ view of humans in nature, what does this picture say about humans in the urban landscape? What elements of the picture make it feel “modern”?
K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What advances contributed to the idea of social and artistic progress during the Industrial Age?
• How was Wagner’s concept of the “total work of art” realized in opera? • Why did middle-class society reject the symbolists and other artists of
the period?
• In what ways did Ibsen and Dostoyevsky criticize industrial society?
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348 Chapter 13 THE INDUSTRIAL AGE
But we must ask about these urbane citizens of the industrial age, striding purposefully into a modern future: do they feel a bit of nostalgia for the old Paris? Are they alienated from the others—the workers, the poor, the powerless—who share their sidewalk? What, ultimately, are the spiritual costs of their materialism and prosperity? These are the questions that came to perplex the great age of industry (1850–1910), when modernity prevailed in Western civilization and brought astounding material progress.
Materialism and Progress In the mid-nineteenth century, Europe and North America entered a new age of material production, an economic boom of machines and commodities fueled by discoveries in applied science and industrial technology. Western societies hailed the age’s material prosperity and prized the values of utilitarianism—the philosophic belief that moral good lies in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But new ideas such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution shook traditional beliefs, as philosophy sought the laws and logic of future his- torical change.
The Victorians In Great Britain, the most prosperous and powerful of all the industrial nations, this age took its name from the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). During the
Victorian era, the burgeoning middle classes of Britain’s new industrial cities witnessed rising standards of living and stunning technological advances. In 1876, the first transatlantic telegraph cable connected Europe with North America, enabling swift telecommunication. Programs of sanitation and vaccination began to eradi- cate epidemic diseases such as smallpox and typhus. By the end of the century, water-powered electrical plants were providing electricity for Thomas Edison’s newly invented light bulbs. The British Victorians, and their bourgeois counterparts in Vienna, Paris, and New York, were justifiably optimistic about scientific and technological progress, and suffered only occasional qualms about the injustice of their urban slums and colonial empires (Fig. 13.2).
The triumph of the Victorian era was the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, housed in Joseph Paxton’s magnificent Crystal Palace (Fig. 13.3). Paxton (1801– 1865), a former gardener, employed new methods of iron-and-glass construction in his design, which resem- bled a monumental greenhouse. The building’s iron
13.2 Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834, 1834. Lithograph, 11 1⁄2 × 17 1⁄2 ins (29 × 44.5 cm). The realist painter and illustrator Honoré Daumier was deeply engaged in the political struggles of the mid-nineteenth century. This scene shows the aftermath of an atrocity by government soldiers against a poor Parisian family. Daumier’s lithographic prints were published frequently in newspapers and pamphlets, achieving an immediacy and evocative power that today characterizes journalistic photography and videography.
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positively and empirically measured. He claimed to have reduced moral judgment to a calculus of “felicity.” Bentham removed all religious consideration from ethi- cal action—God had nothing to do with happiness— offering instead a straightforward secular hedonism that appealed to Victorian practicality. The philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) developed a more subtle position, advocating women’s right to vote and other social reforms based on their utility to society. In his concise essays On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill defended social justice by a rigorous but flexible utilitarian standard. “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happi- ness,” he wrote in a succinct maxim.1
Though the Victorians were great believers in human progress, one Victorian idea aroused a fire- storm of objection. When the biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published his Origin of Species (1859), he challenged the Judaic and Christian teachings
framework and glass panels were manufactured off- site, prefabricated for easy assembly and disassembly. The entire building, nearly 2,000 feet (c. 610 m) long and covering 26 acres (10.5 ha), was constructed in less than ten months. Full-size elm trees were planted inside the Palace’s arched central “nave,” as Paxton called it—implying that his grand hall was like a cathedral of materialism.
The 1851 Exhibition’s pavilions, piled high with the produce of British industry, reflected the Victorians’ belief that material comfort and consumption were unquestioned goods. The philosophical version of this belief was expressed in utilitarianism, a moral philoso- phy that evaluated all actions against a single standard of judgment—the greatest pleasure for the greatest number. Like the ancient Epicureans, utilitarians argued that the good consisted in the pleasure and well-being of humans and other sentient beings. Utilitarianism’s founder, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), argued that the happiness promised by social reforms could be
13.3 Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace, London, 1851. Cast iron and glass, length 1,851 ft (564.2 m). Paxton’s glass-and-iron palace housed the 1851 Great Exhibition, a celebration of Victorian England’s progress and ingenuity. Its prefabricated parts of cast- and wrought-iron were so precisely manufactured that the entire building was assembled in a few months.
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Realism in Pictorial Art The spirit of science and materialism did not transform painting and sculpture quite as it did religion and phi- losophy. In Victorian England, a group of young paint- ers did reject academic painting, preferring brilliant color and honest feeling over artificiality and classicism. The group called itself the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, thinking they would return painting to the primitive clarity that preceded the High Renaissance masters. In his painting of the drowning Ophelia (Fig. 13.4), Pre- Raphaelite John Everett Millais (1829–1896) precisely
on humanity’s origins. Rather than originating in a primeval act of God, Darwin argued, humans had evolved naturally from lower animals, according to inexorable laws of mutation and adaptation. By these laws of natural selection, species survived in nature depending on how well they adapted to scarcity or threat. All species were engaged in a competition for scarce resources—the “struggle for life,” as Darwin called it. Humanity was no different—humans, too, had evolved from ape-like species through the gradual process of natural selection. Humans appeared to be far advanced beyond the highest apes, but “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind,” as Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin’s ideas had impact far beyond biological science. Victorian think- ers developed a “social Darwinism,” using Darwin’s naturalist principle of natural selection to justify the class divisions in industrial nations and Europe’s colonial exploitation of Africa and Asia.
13.4 John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1852. Oil on canvas, 30 × 44 ins (76 × 112 cm). Tate Britain, London. Millais depicts the suicidal heroine of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, singing nonsense songs as she floats to her death. Though admired for their realistic rendering of fabrics, flowers, and other detail, the Pre-Raphaelites often chose subjects from literature and legend.
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honesty, including a beadle (in red) flushed with drink. Realism, Courbet would say, was “democracy in art.”
In 1860s Paris, a controversial painter stepped from Courbet’s shadow and boldly recast the Western tra- dition of painting in modern terms. Edouard Manet (1832–1883) had been trained in the prevailing aca- demic style and his most famous pictures were styled after masterworks of the old masters. But Manet updated traditional paintings in ways that scandal- ized the French art world. His Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass; Fig. 13.6) roused even greater official outrage in 1863 than Courbet’s Burial at Ornans had done 15 years earlier. The Paris public was shocked by its vivid juxtaposition of a nude female and clothed men in a contemporary setting. Even more, they protested Manet’s style of painting, which rendered the woman’s nude form in a flat, chalky white. While the public accepted nudity in paintings with classiciz- ing subjects, they were scandalized by Manet’s nudity because it was all too real.
Critics found a more palatable brand of realism in the works of Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), the most famous female painter of her day. Bonheur’s [BOHN-err] father belonged to a socialist group that believed firmly in women’s equality, and Rosa lived by his teachings. She wore men’s clothes (which required a police permit),
depicted the woodland flowers and the model’s silver- inlaid gown. Millais [muh-LAY] had painted the scene on site, in open air, over several months, rendering each flower with vivid immediacy. But the Pre-Raphaelites’ taste for medieval and religious subjects set them at odds with realist painting in France, which allied itself with science and social progress.
As defined by French painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), realism meant the truthful and objective representation of the social world, without illusion or imaginative alteration. He declared that painting “can only consist of the presentation of real and existing things.” Rather than legend or ancient history, Courbet [koor-BAY] painted the ordinary people and common events of provincial society, presenting subjects without nobility or sophistication. One example was his Burial at Ornans [or-NAHN(h)] (Fig. 13.5), which shocked the 1851 Paris Salon (the official exhibition of painting and sculpture). Critics attacked the picture of funeral- goers from Courbet’s native town as the incarnation of socialism. They considered the picture to be carelessly composed, and complained that the subject lacked any hint of heroism or exalted truth. Courbet had, in fact, portrayed the mourners crowded around the open grave with no regard for social hierarchy—the priest, pall-bearers, and attendants are depicted with utter
13.5 Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849. Oil on canvas, 10 ft 3 5⁄8 ins × 21 ft 9 3⁄4 ins (3.14 × 6.65 m). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Courbet’s realism outraged the official art world, which expected painters to depict mythic allegories and historical subjects. With this monumental scene of an ordinary incident in village life—Ornans was his provincial hometown—what might Courbet be saying about the heroic and idealized subjects of academic painting?
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352 Chapter 13 THE INDUSTRIAL AGE
documented the sufferings of the poor and caricatured the folly of the powerful. Daumier worked under relent- less deadlines to produce up-to-the-hour images of current events (see Fig. 13.2). By 1850, photography was becoming an affordable means of portraiture. In 1854, a photographic entrepreneur patented the photo- graphic cartes de visite (calling cards) mass-produced images of studio portraits. But photography quickly found more serious applications. The Parisian photog- rapher Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar (1820–1910), not only photographed the most famous personages of his age (Fig. 13.8), he also documented the streets and sewers of the modern city and built his own helium balloon to make the first aerial photographs. In the United States, images of the American Civil War were preserved by the cameras of Mathew Brady (1823– 1896) and his team of photographers, who captured the faces and bodies of fallen soldiers “with a terrible distinctness,” as one contemporary critic put it.
smoked cigarettes, and never married, living instead with female companions. Her painting was as bold as her life. The Horse Fair (Fig. 13.7) depicts a sweeping parade of horses animated by a fierce energy that nearly overwhelms their handlers. Bonheur’s approach was less political than Courbet’s scenes of provincial life, and earned her popularity in Victorian England.
Pictorial realism achieved its greatest immediacy in printmaking and the new medium of photography. In France, the prints of Honoré Daumier [dome-YAY]
13.6 Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863. Oil on canvas, 7 ft 3⁄4 ins × 8 ft 10 3⁄4 ins (2.15 × 2.71 m). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Manet’s painting scandalized the public with its bold juxtaposition of the nude female and her clothed companions in a contemporary setting. Analyze the effect of the painting’s harsh frontal lighting and the nude woman’s bold gaze at the viewer.
View the Closer Look at Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe on myartslab.com
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In the post-war United States, realists competed with American imitators of European academic styles. In the works of Winslow Homer (1836–1910) and Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), realist technique was combined with American matter-of-factness. After working as a wartime magazine illustrator, Homer visited Paris, where he saw the works of Courbet and Manet. Homer’s favorite subjects were scenes of children at play or of high drama at sea. Eakins [AY-kunz] studied in Paris with an academic history painter and composed his outdoor subjects—rowers, sailors, and swimmers— with precise attention to perspective and balance. In The Gross Clinic (Fig. 13.9), he portrayed a famous Philadelphia doctor demonstrating a daring surgical
13.7 Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1853–5. Oil on canvas, 8 ft 1⁄4 in × 16 ft 7 1⁄2 ins (2.44 × 5.06 m). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rosa Bonheur studied her animal subjects with scientific detachment, frequently visiting slaughterhouses and animal markets. The artist herself compared this parade of animals to the Parthenon frieze of the acropolis at Athens (see Fig. 3.22).
13.8 Nadar, portrait of Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). Photograph taken in the late 1870s. Nadar’s photographic studio was celebrated for its portraits of notable Parisians. He made his first portrait of French actress Sarah Bernhardt when she was 20. Here she is costumed as one of the characters that she made famous on the international stage.
Read excerpts from the Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur on myartslab.com
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its cruelty to children. Dickens knew this cruelty from experience—his father was often in debtors’ prison and he himself was working in a factory by the age of 12. Young Dickens educated himself, becoming a lawyer’s assistant and later a parliamentary reporter. By the age of 24, he was a literary success and was soon serializing his novels in his own weekly publications. He later fic- tionalized his rise from poverty to literary prominence in the novel David Copperfield (1849–50). His other novels also drew from his experience as a child and young adult—for example, Bleak House (1852), a bit- ter portrait of the English legal system.
Dickens’s ability to draw memorable characters and to fill his novels with unlikely coincidences and sentimentality made his books immensely popular. They too were a product of industrialism, appearing in
procedure. The physician’s attendants hold open the bloody incision in the patient’s thigh, while he impas- sively lectures his medical student audience.
The Realist Novel While the romantic sensibility was most intensely expressed through lyric poetry, the description of industrial society was best accomplished in the social novel, which became the dominant literary form of the later nineteenth century.
Of the many novelists who flourished in this age, the English writer Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was perhaps the most outspoken in his protests against the injustices of industrialism. His novels portrayed the social evils of nineteenth-century England, particularly
13.9 Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875. Oil on canvas, 8 ft × 6 ft 6 ins (2.44 × 1.98 m). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Thomas Eakins’s uncompromising realism was based on careful observation of human anatomy but often repelled art patrons. Note how the light falls across the doctor’s forehead to the patient’s exposed thigh, where attendants with bloody hands hold open an incision. Compare the emotional responses of Dr. Gross, the note-taking scribe, and the female relative of the patient (left, middle ground).
View the Closer Look at Eakins’s The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic on myartslab.com
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The Modern City The modern city was the scene of the triumphs and traumas of the industrial age. It was in the modern city, for example, that the romantic American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) experienced the unity of being in all its vibrant and vulgar diversity. Where earlier romantics had contemplated nature in solitude, Whitman roamed the raucous streets of New York City, celebrating his own sense of being alive amidst Manhattan’s teeming life. In his poem Leaves of Grass (1855), an enthusiastic hymn to modernity and American-style democracy, Whitman wrote:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to
you …
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or
apart from them,
No more modest than immodest. …3
In architectural terms, the mid-nineteenth century Western city was a mishmash of architectural styles. Neoclassicism contended with Gothic and Renaissance revivals as the proper style for new urban buildings. The only genuinely new style in architecture was based
installments beside advertisements for new products. The novels often appealed directly for industrial and social reform. Dickens’s anger from his early life of poverty never cooled. His works pointedly compared the miseries of industrial society with the complacent life of the wealthy.
The French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was in many ways the opposite of Dickens. Where Dickens suffered an impoverished London childhood, Flaubert [floh-BAIR] grew up in a comfortably middle- class French provincial family. Where Dickens wrote quickly, sometimes only days ahead of publication, Flaubert spent hours searching for le mot juste, the most appropriate word. Flaubert’s best-known work was Madame Bovary (1865), the story of a naïve provincial woman overwhelmed by the sophistication of the mod- ern world. Emma Bovary’s idealized view of life and sentimentality lead her to adultery, debt, and finally sui- cide. The novel’s plot scandalized the French public and Flaubert stood trial for obscenity after its publication. Flaubert’s most complex novel, L’Education sentimen- tale (The Sentimental Education, 1869), was his cynical reflection on French political events in the revolution- ary period of the 1840s. The novel deals with themes of illusion and disillusionment, romantic hope and cynical realism, lofty principle and mean-spirited hypocrisy. The novel’s hero, the young provincial Frédéric Moreau, is so absorbed in his own sentimental conceits that he fritters away opportunities for success, while history swirls around him. In the novel’s account of the 1848 Paris uprising, Flaubert bitterly portrays the cruelty of the French National Guard, which in February had supported a liberal revolt, but in June turned against the republic’s supporters. To Flaubert, the different factions had achieved an ironic equality—“an equality of brutish beasts, a common level of bloodstained sav- agery.” The disillusioned narrator of The Sentimental Education concludes, “For the fanaticism of the rich was as great as the frenzy of the poor, the aristocracy was as prey to the same madness as the rabble, and the cotton nightcap proved as hideous as the revolutionary bonnet. The mind of the nation was unbalanced, as it is after great natural upheavals.”2
13.10 Henri Labrouste, reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1854–75. The use of slender iron arches and glass skylights lends Labrouste’s interiors a graceful airiness that compares favorably to ancient Roman baths or Gothic-style churches. Note the recurring geometric pattern of circles, arcs, and rectangles.
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on a new material, the combination of iron and glass in building. Not since the ancient Romans introduced concrete had a building material so revolutionized con- struction. During the nineteenth century, iron-and-glass construction was mostly used to enclose large, open spaces—railway stations, shopping arcades, or exhibi- tion halls like Paxton’s Crystal Palace.
The aesthetic possibilities of iron construction were mastered by Henri Labrouste (1801–1875) in his Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library) in Paris (1854–1875). Labrouste showed iron’s flexibility in handling different spaces. The library stacks rise to five levels on iron girders, while the reading room has the flavor of a Romanesque monastery (Fig. 13.10). Its ter- racotta vaulting and glass-covered oculi are outlined by iron and supported on graceful iron columns. The most ambitious iron structure of the industrial age was the Eiffel Tower (Fig. 13.11), the controversial landmark of the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris. Like Paxton’s Crystal Palace, the cast-iron tower designed by Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) was more a feat of engineering than architecture. It soared to a height of 984 feet (c. 300 m), an obelisk in pure metal far surmounting Napoleon’s grand imperial monuments.
The industrial age actually saw greater advance- ments in urban planning than architecture. Early mod- ern architects and city planners had been called upon to build entire cities from scratch, such as the United States capital, Washington, D.C., and St. Petersburg in Russia, each built on a vacant site. To build a fine modern city in a vacant swamp was one thing; it was quite another to transform an ancient city, with its cramped streets and dingy quarters, into a plan of grand boulevards and spacious parks. This greater chal- lenge—to modernize the city of Paris—was taken up by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann [(h)OHSS-mahn] (1809–1891), inventor of the modern city. Haussmann was appointed by Emperor Napoleon III (Bonaparte’s nephew), who wanted an opulent imperial capital and an efficient center of modern commerce and industry. The emperor also wanted a seat of government secure from the French capital’s habitual political uprisings.
To build the straight new boulevards, Haussmann plowed through traditional neighborhoods, demol- ishing some 12,000 buildings, including many homes of the poor and working classes. He lined his boule- vards with uniform, fashionable apartment buildings and punctuated his streets with broad plazas, where Parisians could stroll and play (Fig. 13.12). In all, Paris gained some 95 miles (150 km) of new streets and a feeling of spaciousness and regularity (Map 13.1).
13.11 Gustave Eiffel, Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1887–9. Cast and wrought iron, height 984 ft (299.9 m). Except for the decorative arches connecting the legs, the tower is the pure expression of engineering in metal. It echoes the technical virtuosity of such engineering achievements as the Brooklyn Bridge, New York, begun in 1868.
Explore the architectural panorama of the Eiffel Tower on myartslab.com
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The first truly modern buildings arose not in Paris but in the North American heartland. In 1871, fire destroyed Chicago’s urban center. Chicago architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) responded by designing the modern skyscraper—a building of several stories constructed of a fire-resistant interior steel cage or frame. Sullivan’s Chicago-style, steel-cage skyscrapers, such as the Wainwright Building in St. Louis (Fig. 13.13), were usually clad in a stone or ceramic exterior skin. The windowed façade expressed the steel frame’s underlying rectilinear structure. Sullivan expounded, “Form ever follows function.” But he also softened
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13.12 Camille Pissarro, The Avenue de l’Opéra, Sunlight, Winter Morning, c. 1880. Oil on canvas, 35 3⁄4 × 28 3⁄4 ins (91 × 73 cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims, France. The impressionist Camille Pissarro repeatedly painted this view of Baron Haussmann’s broad avenue. In the distance stands the landmark building of Haussmann’s new Paris, the opulent Opéra, designed by Charles Garnier and inaugurated in 1875.
Map 13.1 The grand boulevards of Paris.
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Verdi’s Operas Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) rose from humble begin- nings. Born to a family of small landowners, he learned music helping play the town organ. His career reached a climax in 1851–1853, with the success of three master- pieces: Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata. All three had stories touched by tragedy, and featured dramatic songs of luscious beauty. In Rigoletto, a philandering duke takes advantage of Gilda, the sheltered daughter of his court jester. In Act III, he sings the famous aria La donna è mobile (“Women are fickle”) to rationalize his sexual license. Ironically, although the duke sings, “Women are changing forever, constant (ah!) never,” it is Gilda’s true love and sacrifice that saves his life at the opera’s climax. At the height of his fame, Verdi retired to the life of a gentleman farmer, but the world still sought him out. Egypt’s ruler commissioned an opera
his buildings’ rigidity with decorative cast-iron detail. Chicago-style skyscrapers were “commercial palaces;” by 1910, they lined commercial avenues in cities across North America.
Music and Modernity The centerpiece of Baron Haussmann’s modern Paris was the opulent Opéra (completed in 1875; see Map 13.1). In this luxurious building, fashionable Parisians could enjoy the age’s most spectacular musical art. Given opera’s popularity, it is not surprising that the industrial age should spawn two geniuses of the art. Giuseppe Verdi [VAIR-dee] was the idol of Italy’s opera-loving public, hailed like today’s popular-music and sports stars. Richard Wagner [VAHG-ner] envi- sioned himself as musical high priest of the German nation and his operas as a mythic ritual.
13.13 Louis H. Sullivan, Wainwright Building, St. Louis, Missouri, 1890–1. Missouri Historical Society Sullivan’s skyscraper style— clean, modern, without historicist decoration— originated in Chicago and spread quickly to other American cities.
View the Closer Look at Sullivan’s Wainwright Building on myartslab.com
Chapter 13 THE INDUSTRIAL AGE 359
music, design, and production. For his stories, Wagner rejected the plots of conventional opera and turned instead to Germanic myth and legend, vowing that myth “is true for all time; and its content, no matter how terse or compact, is inexhaustible for every age.”4
Wagner’s Musical Innovations In Wagner’s theory, the orchestra should be the master of the dra- matic action, not a mere accompaniment to the singing. The orchestra is able to reflect every feeling and action through the use of an underlying Leitmotif (leading motive). A Leitmotif [LITE-moh-teef] is a distinct melody or melodic fragment associated with a char- acter, object, or idea; when any element appears in the drama, its Leitmotif is sounded in the orchestral music. Wagner intertwined Leitmotifs in complex develop- ments, so that they evolve with the opera’s action. The climactic Liebestod [LEE-buss-toht], or Love-Death, of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde (1865) is built from two motives, “yearning” and “love-death.” These are unified in a third motive (“transcendental bliss”) whose last chords represent the lovers’ blissful union in death.
Wagner’s third musical innovation is more technical. He increasingly used all 12 of the tones in a scale (in a C major scale, the black keys as well as the white keys on the piano). This is called the chromatic scale (from chroma, meaning coloring). Wagner’s use of chro- maticism, or tonal color, tended to dissolve traditional tonality and lend his music its restless emotionalism.
to mark the opening of the Suez Canal, one of the age’s great engineering feats. The result, Aïda [eye-EE-duh] (1871), was staged in Egypt with a cast of 300, a pro- duction so bombastic that even Verdi was disgusted.
Though his operas excelled in lyric beauty and dra- matic effect, Verdi had not been a great technical inno- vator. Late in his career, however, he was spurred by two challenges: the musical ideas of his contemporary Richard Wagner, and the chance to set Shakespeare to music. In his last operas, Verdi proved able to match Shakespeare’s breadth of action and depth of charac- ter. In Otello (1887), he dramatized the tragedy of the Moorish general Othello, who is incited to murder his bride by the evil Iago. In Falstaff (1893), Verdi captured the comic vigor of Shakespeare’s lusty braggart from Henry IV.
Musically, Verdi’s Shakespearean operas followed Wagner’s lead, advancing beyond the standard opera form of aria alternating with recitative. Verdi experi- mented with “accompanied recitative,” which instead of stopping for a song kept the plot moving forward, the orchestral accompaniment mirroring the charac- ters’ moods and emphasizing the action, much as film soundtracks today. Verdi was such a rousing success that when Otello premiered at the famous opera house La Scala in Milan, the aging composer had to answer 20 curtain calls. Afterwards, admirers pulled his car- riage through the streets in triumph.
Wagner’s Musical Revolution Compared with Verdi, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was a flamboyant egoist whose life had enough pas- sion and betrayal, triumph and failure, to be an opera itself. He blamed his initial musical failures on opera’s commercialism and finally convinced a Bavarian king to finance his operas at the lavish Festspielhaus (Festival House) at Bayreuth (Fig. 13.14). Throughout his career, he engaged in titanic love affairs with the wives of patrons and musical colleagues. Late in life, the composer would receive his fanatical disciples at Bayreuth [BEYE-roit] while dressed in velvet cap and satin gown.
Wagner’s musical ideas exceeded even the extrava- gance of his life. Wagner envisioned opera as the syn- thesis of all the arts—myth, music, poetry, drama, and pictorial design. He called this concept the Gesamtkunstwerk [ghe-SAHMT-koonst-vairk] (total work of art) and compared it to the classical tragedy of ancient Greece. To achieve this, Wagner believed that he had to control everything about his operas: the text,
13.14 Cross-sectional view, Bayreuth Festspielhaus, Bavaria, Germany, 1876. Wagner’s entire Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) was first performed in 1876 at this special festival playhouse in southern Germany. Built to Wagner’s specifications, the playhouse placed the orchestra beneath the stage, bringing the audience closer to the performance, while optimizing the acoustical integration of orchestra and vocalist.
View the Closer Look at Wagner’s world on myartslab.com
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Wagner’s musical innovations culminated in his gigantic four-opera masterpiece titled Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, 1876). The Ring tells how the Nordic gods’ own desires ultimately corrupt and destroy them. Wagner’s story takes some 16 hours in performance to tell, and it contains some of opera’s most famous moments. At the opening of Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), the dwarf Alberich chases the teasing river maidens and then snatches the gold that will doom the gods (Fig. 13.15). In Siegfried, the hero tastes the blood of the slain dragon and hears the song of nature. The loping music of the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) has become associ- ated with doom. In the finale of Götterdämmerung [guh(r)-ter-DEMM-er-oonk] (Twilight of the Gods), the heroine Brünnhilde rides onto her own funeral pyre, while the palace Valhalla collapses in flames. But no list of highlights can do justice to the musical complexity of Wagner’s masterpiece or its impact on his own and future generations.
13.15 Arthur Rackham, illustration to Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), part of Wagner’s Ring cycle, 1910. Wagner enjoyed a great vogue among symbolist poets and artists at the turn of the century. Here the illustrator Arthur Rackham imagines the heated grasping of Alberich (the Nibelung of the cycle’s title) at the elusive Rhine maidens; the dwarf’s frustration leads him to renounce love altogether and seize the Rhine Gold.
K E Y C O N C E P T
Modernity Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal was guided by the spirit of modernity, the process by which the new, the up-to-date, and the contemporary replace the outmoded and traditional. In the nineteenth century, modernity swept away the antiquated remnants of tra- ditional existence, what Marx called “the dead weight of the years,” and in its place installed the standard- ized products and routines of modern life. The cities of Paris, Berlin, New York, and Chicago were dynamic metaphors of modernity, with their vibrant industry and busy avenues. Economic modernity usually involved replacing human or animal labor with machines, or inef- ficient machines with more efficient ones. For example, horse-drawn street cars were replaced by electric cars, and antiquated iron foundries by new open-hearth fur- naces. The advance of modernity in the late nineteenth century accomplished a “second industrial revolution,” in which first-generation machinery was replaced with more efficient improvements. Even today, “moderniz- ing” an industrial plant or office usually means install- ing new machinery and uprooting workers from old places or habits.
Critics of modernity ranged from the sentimental to the visionary. To some, modernity was an assault on the human spirit. The French poet Charles Baudelaire reflected on Haussmann’s changes to Paris, saying that “old neighborhoods turn to allegory, and memories weigh more than stone.” The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky was perhaps the most impassioned critic of modernity. He symbolized all of modernity’s prom- ises in the “tower of Babel,” an emblem of human vanity and self-destruction. In Dostoyevsky’s view, modernity would lead ultimately to a cannibalistic mass society (Fig. 13.16).
The conflict between modernity and tradition is not yet resolved. Today, voices still decry modernity’s negative effects on family and cultural life. Nations hold fiercely to their religious or cultural traditions, while accommodating themselves to a constantly moderniz- ing world. Faced with modernity’s ceaseless changes, people still wonder about the human heart.
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13.16 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1892–5. Oil on canvas, 4 ft 1⁄2 in × 4 ft 73⁄8 ins (1.23 × 1.41 m). The Art Institute of Chicago. The garish faces and heated atmosphere in this cabaret scene imply a spiritual alienation peculiar to modern city life. How does the framing of the singer at right and the table at lower left contribute to the claustrophobia of the scene and its central group?
CRITICAL QUESTION How does modernity threaten traditional ways of life? When does the victory of modernity over tradition represent genuine progress? When does it represent disaster?
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to be latter-day romantics because of their praise for artistic genius and fascination with evil and the exotic. They also rejected crass materialism and the superficial entertainments preferred by the middle classes. Yet, in withdrawing from modern industrial society, these last romantics anticipated the artistic techniques that defined the artistic modernism of the twentieth century; and in their reaction against industrial society, they foreshadowed a coming revolution.
Late Romantic Music and Dance Where Wagner’s music was relentlessly innovative, his principal German rival, the late romantic composer Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), looked back to the Classical era. Of the titanic Beethoven, Brahms once wrote, “You will never know how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us.” Despite his reservations, Brahms’s symphonies come closer than any others to matching the scope and sophisticated design of Beethoven. Brahms rejected romantic-style program music and all four of his sym- phonies (composed between 1876 and 1885) possess the weighty structure and inspired variations that he admired in his Classical predecessors. Brahms repre- sents the last great composer of “absolute” music in the tradition of Mozart and Beethoven.
Another development of late romantic music was the rise of musical nationalism, especially among compos- ers from eastern Europe. The 1812 Overture by the Russian Peter Tchaikovsky [tcheye-KOFF-skee] (1840– 1893) and The Moldau by the Czech Bedrich Smetana [SMET-tun-uh] (1824–1884) celebrated the valor of the two composers’ peoples and the beauty of their home- lands. The musical nationalists typically incorporated native folk music and programmatic musical descrip- tions into their compositions.
Tchaikovsky composed some of his greatest music for the style of ballet that blossomed in czarist Russia under the creative genius Marius Petipa (1818–1910). As director of the Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, Petipa invented a grand style that became so widely popular that it is now referred to as the classi- cal ballet—the repertoire of works and style of dancing still performed and taught in the contemporary world. In Swan Lake (1877) and The Sleeping Beauty (1890), both composed by Tchaikovsky, Petipa perfected the full-length ballet as spectacle. He used the corps de bal- let (the large company of dancers) in majestic formation and choreographed showpiece duets for his company’s leading ballerinas and danseurs. Petipa’s influence helped make nineteenth-century Russia an international center of ballet performance and training.
Late Romantics and Early Moderns Richard Wagner’s explorations of inner experience found a deep sympathy among artists in the late nine- teenth century. On first glance, these artists appear
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
A Musical Career Lillian Nordica (1857–1914) was an American-born soprano who succeeded as an opera singer in Europe, performing notable Wagnerian roles at Bayreuth. On her first trip to Europe, her mother describes the hard- ships that industrial-age women encountered in pursu- ing a professional career.
It is no child’s play to learn an opera. If you think so, listen to five or six hours of digging at Aïda every day, besides two hours [of] French verbs. … Lilly has done an immense amount of work in the last four months, taking into account the 70 concerts. Since the twelfth of August she has had 40 lessons with Belari in Italian repertory, and the same number or more from Delsarte in dramatic action, besides her French lesson every day.
I take care of everything connected with her dress and wait upon her by inches, because I know that she is doing all she can consistently. She sings most charmingly, and could, if at home, no doubt have all [the engagements] that she could do. But the question now is, study!!! …
Lilly commences at nine o’clock every morning a preparatory lesson in acting; at ten a pianist from Belari comes to the house to assist her in learning the notes and Italian of operas; at half past eleven she practices until twelve, then breakfasts; then French for two hours; at three music study; at four acting with Delsarte. So her whole time is occupied. She generally lies on the sofa while studying or reciting French and in that way gets rested. …
The truth of the matter is, Lilly can be great, but she must have time to study without injury to her health, just the same as others have done.5
(1878)
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Baudelaire became an icon for the symbolist group, but where he had praised the busy boulevards and fash- ions of modern Paris, the symbolists flatly rejected the values of industrial mass society. They saw themselves as an artistic elite, aloof from the petty lives of the mid- dle class. The leading poet of the symbolists, Stéphane Mallarmé [MALL-ar-may] (1842–1898), said, “Let the masses read works on morality, but for heaven’s sake do not give them our poetry to spoil.” The symbolists’ philosophy also included the principle of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake)—a slogan coined by the English writer Walter Pater in 1868—which placed art in a par- allel universe to the real world, governed by its own special rules and methods. The symbolist poets pol- ished their works like jewels of language, full of secret symbols and cryptic phrases. Though the doctrine of l’art pour l’art was rooted in romantic ideas of artis- tic genius, it was later sustained by twentieth-century artists who escaped from mass society into a separate universe of art.
Symbolism and Art Nouveau The French symbolist poets were a literary group known for their dream-like and deeply symbolic poetic works. The symbolists created a poetic language of rich ambiguities that expressed their intuitive insights and fascination with language. At the same time, they emphatically rejected the moral hypocrisy and greedy materialism of modern civilization. The later symbol- ists withdrew into a world of mysticism and decadence, mocking the banality of middle-class existence.
The symbolists’ acknowledged inspiration was the poet Charles Baudelaire [boh-de-LAIR] (1821–1867), whose poetry explored the sensational connections between the sordid and the sublime. Baudelaire’s col- lection Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) was so frankly erotic that the poet was prosecuted on morals charges after its publication. Many Baudelaire poems were morbid in their self-analysis and grotesque imagery. In the prologue to Les Fleurs du Mal, entitled “To the Reader,” Baudelaire draws the reader into the poet’s satanic world of violence and oblivion.
Like a poor profligate who sucks and bites
the withered breast of some well-seasoned trull,
we snatch in passing at clandestine joys
and squeeze the oldest orange harder yet.
Wriggling in our brains like a million worms,
a demon demos holds its revels there,
and when we breathe, the Lethea in our lungs
trickles sighing on its secret course.
If rape and arson, poison and the knife
have not yet stitched their ludicrous designs
on to the banal buckramb of our fates,
it is because our souls lack enterprise!
But here among the scorpions and the hounds,
the jackals, apes and vultures, snakes and wolves,
monsters that howl and growl and squeal and crawl,
in all the squalid zoo of vices, one
is even uglier and fouler than the rest,
although the least flamboyant of the lot;
this beast would gladly undermine the earth
and swallow all creation in a yawn;
I speak of Boredom which with ready tears
dreams of hangings as it puffs its pipe.
Reader, you know this squeamish monster well,
—hypocrite reader,—my alias,—my twin!6
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
From Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)
a. Lethe, the mythic river of forgetfulness; Baudelaire may refer to
opium smoking.
b. buckram, a stiff cloth used to line clothing.
13.17 Louis Comfort Tiffany, vase, 1893–96. Favrile glass, 14 1⁄8 × 11 1⁄2 ins (35.9 × 29.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Louis Comfort Tiffany’s workshop artists incorporated “organic” Art Nouveau motifs into their designs for interior furnishings.
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Gaudí y Cornet (1852–1926). The undulating wall mosaics of Gaudí’s [gow-DEE] Casa Batllò, a resi- dential townhouse in Barcelona (Fig. 13.18), shimmer with fantasy. The balconies resemble strange masks; the upright supports, bones; the tiled roof, a scaly dragon. Whatever it was called—in Spain Modernismo, in Germany Jugendstil, in Vienna the Sezession—Art Nouveau reached back to romantic organicism while pushing forward to modernity.
In Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Art Nouveau became the vehicle of protest against a stuffy cultural establishment. In 1898, a group of art- ists declared that they would “secede” from Vienna’s official institutions and sponsor their own independent exhibitions. The most important painter of this Vienna “Secession” was Gustav Klimt, who presented erotic subjects in an intensely decorative style. In Klimt’s The Kiss (1907–1908), for example, the vivid garments and jewelry seem to envelop the lovers in a cloak of erotic energy, while also shielding their passion from the viewer (Fig. 13.19). At the high point of the Vienna Secession in 1900, the emperor himself dedicated a new pavilion topped by a gilded floral globe—nicknamed “the golden cabbage.” Klimt contributed a scandalous allegorical mural titled the Beethoven Frieze, in which “hostile powers” of the cosmos are represented by a giant ape and a pregnant nude. Though their works were not as technically daring as those of the later mod- ernists, the Secessionists helped to break the power of official institutions and acclimatize the public to the spare and abstract style of modernism.
Debussy and Rodin—the Break with Tradition In music and sculpture, two Frenchmen—Claude Debussy and Auguste Rodin—typified this period’s break with longstanding European traditions. Though he disdained the musical pretensions of Richard Wagner, the French composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918) fol- lowed Wagner in exploring new harmonic relationships and exotic tone colors. Debussy [deh-BYOO-see] was affected by two musical influences: Wagner’s operas, heard on a visit to Wagner’s Bayreuth playhouse, and the gamelan [GAMM-uh-lan] orchestras of Java (part
Symbolism’s reaction against industrialism was shared by Art Nouveau [arr noo-VOH], a style of deco- rative art and architecture that used floral motifs and stressed the organic unity of artistic materials and form. Art Nouveau’s love for sinuous, vegetal forms can be seen in the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, which often achieved a sinister combination of eroticism and evil. A favorite Art Nouveau medium was colored glass: the workshops of the American Louis Tiffany, for example, produced popular glassware, lamps, and furniture in floral design (Fig. 13.17).
In architecture, Art Nouveau was largely a decorative style applied to the surface of otherwise conventional buildings. The style’s originator, Belgian Victor Horta (1861–1947), typically employed Art Nouveau motifs in wrought-iron details, wall decoration, and floor tiles. The one architect who integrated Art Nouveau prin- ciples into a building’s form was the Catalan Antoni
13.18 Antoni Gaudí, Casa Batllò, Barcelona, 1900–7. Though Art Nouveau was typically a decorative style employed in building interiors and furnishings, Gaudí applied its principles throughout his designs. Here, the façade remodels the exterior of an existing townhouse.
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13.19 Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907–8. Oil and gold on canvas, 5 ft 10 7⁄8 ins × 5ft 10 7⁄8 ins (1.8 × 1.8 m). Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. Klimt achieved success as an easel painter after the break-up of the Vienna Secession in 1905. In this painting, note how the contrasting decorative motifs in the two lovers’ garments distinguish the identity and form of each while the gilded background merges them in erotic union.
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of today’s Indonesia), which toured Paris in the 1880s. The Javanese gamelan orchestra consisted of various gongs, chime-bars, and a solo string instrument called the rebab, producing a rich blend of tone colors and playing in harmonic modes rather than Western keys. Drawing on these musical influences, Debussy’s compo- sitions evoke dream-like moods and suggestive impres- sions, much like the symbolists’ poetic images. Even Debussy’s titles—Clouds, Waves at Play, Reflections on the Water—suggested poetic reverie.
Debussy’s most famous work was inspired by a Mallarmé poem about a satyr and wood nymphs. The Prélude à “L’après-midi d’un faune” (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun,” 1894) was the musical equivalent of an idle erotic daydream. The opening flute sounds a musical theme that dreamily dissolves into another musical idea. The vagueness derives in part from Debussy’s use of a whole-tone scale, the six whole tones of a normal scale without the half-steps. The whole-tone scale sounds unstable to anyone more accustomed to conventional Western major and minor scales, and creates a musical fuzziness akin to the impressionist style of painting. This was music wafting into the twentieth century like a nymph’s song.
Where Debussy rejected the rational structure of Classical music, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) broke with the heroic style of commemo- rative public sculpture. While exploring a new mode of figural sculpture, Rodin [roh-DAN(h)] established himself as the precursor of modern sculpture but also exposed himself to ridicule and scorn.
In 1877, Rodin was engaged to sculpt a decorative portal for a Paris museum. He conceived his portal as The Gates of Hell (Fig. 13.20), intending to depict the tortured souls of Dante’s “Inferno.” The Gates of Hell
13.20 Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell, begun 1880. Bronze (cast from plaster model), 20 ft 8 ins × 13 ft 1 in (6.3 m × 3.99 m). The Rodin Museum, Philadelphia. Inspired by Dante’s “Inferno,” Rodin’s masterpiece is a sculptural essay on the tortures of guilt and the vanity of hope. It contained some 186 figures, including the famous Thinker, who broods over the tortured products of his imagination. Compare the roiling figures of Rodin’s Gates to the Renaissance clarity of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise in Florence (Fig. 8.8).
13.21 Auguste Rodin, Honoré de Balzac, 1892–7. Plaster, height 9 ft 10 ins (3 m). Musée Rodin, Paris. Even to Rodin’s sophisticated patrons, this portrait ventured too far from academic conventions of heroic sculpture. Rodin himself could see the statue’s link to the bronze warriors of ancient Greece, but his public could not.
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Impressionism In 1874 a group of younger artists led by the painter Claude Monet (1840–1926) mounted their own exhi- bition in Paris, certain that their work would never be accepted by the official art world. A derisive critic labeled them “impressionists,” after Monet’s painting titled Impression: Sunrise (Fig. 13.22). For a decade, this group formed a loose circle and exhibited their work together, shocking the traditional art world with their spontaneity of technique, scientific detach- ment, and innovations in pictorial design. Encouraged by Edouard Manet, the controversial realist who had challenged conventional academic painting, the group included Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, and the American expatriate Mary Cassatt. Following in Manet’s footsteps, the impressionists became the first painters of modernity.
The “pure” impressionist style of Monet, Renoir, and Morisot sought to capture the fleeting effects of light
soon took on a life of its own, as Rodin worked intensely for eight years, furiously adding and subtracting figures, and generating sculptural ideas that he later turned into separate life-size figures. When The Gates of Hell (in plaster model) was exhibited in 1900, the two massive panels seethed with dozens of tortured figures. Above the door lurks the now-familiar form of The Thinker, originally conceived as the poet Dante brooding over his creation. Below him are figures seared by the hot pangs of unfulfilled desires.
Rodin’s most controversial work was a statue of the French novelist Honoré de Balzac [ball-ZAHK], who had died 30 years before the commission (Fig. 13.21). To grasp his subject, Rodin had a suit made by Balzac’s old tailor, found some lost photographs, and finally made seven life-size studies in his studio. Atop the striding figure, a massive lion-like head suggested the immense appetites and prolific energy of the great novelist. But Rodin’s Balzac was rejected by the liter- ary society that had commissioned it and condemned as an insult to France. Critics compared it to a heathen god—an effect that Rodin was striving for. The artist insisted, “I had forged a link between the great, lost traditions of the past and my own time which each day will strengthen.” With Rodin, as with other late roman- tics, art was becoming an increasingly subjective affair, not easily shared with society at large.
13.22 Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. Oil on canvas, 19 1⁄2 × 24 1⁄2 ins (49.5 × 62 cm). Musée Marmottan, Paris. In the painting that gave impressionism its name, Monet used broad swatches of grays and orange to suggest the sun’s reflection and the ghostly ships at rear. He borrowed the arrangement of rowboats along a receding diagonal perspective from Japanese woodblock prints.
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Monet [moh-NAY] in particular painted many ver- sions of the same subject—a cathedral, grain stacks in a field, or his lily pond—hoping to capture each sub- ject as it was altered by changing light. In 1877 Monet applied his method to the St.-Lazare railroad station in Paris (Fig. 13.24), an urban subject seemingly without picturesque qualities. As rendered in ten different paint- ings, the scene beneath St.-Lazare’s glass roof became for Monet like a Wagnerian musical motif, transform- ing itself in the different light at different times of day.
and color with rapid, sketchy brushstrokes. Pictures such as Berthe Morisot’s Summer’s Day (Fig. 13.23) discarded the conventional subjects of academic paint- ing and, instead, painted the shifting light of the land- scape and the ceaseless motion of the everyday. Like other impressionists, Morisot [MOR-ee-soh] painted outside in the “open air,” applying colors directly to the canvas without mixing them on the palette. The results were pictures of vibrant, shimmering color that carried no evident moral or intellectual values.
13.23 Berthe Morisot, Summer’s Day, 1879. Oil on canvas, 17 1 3⁄16 × 29 5⁄16 ins (47.5 × 75.2 cm). National Gallery, London, Lane Bequest, 1917. In this oil painting shown in the 1880 impressionist exhibition, two respectable young ladies are boating on the lake of a fashionable park in a Paris suburb. The adventuresome setting and free brushwork vie with the confined existence women endured at the time.
13.24 Claude Monet, St.-Lazare Station, 1877. Oil on canvas, 29 1⁄2 × 41 ins (75.5 × 104 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Here Monet applies his impressionist method to a gritty urban subject. The locomotive nearly obscured by steam, the anonymous figures on the platform, and the apartment building in the background, are all rendered in loose, sketchy brushstrokes.
View the Closer Look at Monet’s Water Lilies on myartslab.com
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G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
The Paris of the impressionists was awash in a great wave of Japanese art, especially the inexpensive color prints called ukiyo-e [OO-kee-yoh-AY]—“pictures of the floating world.” The “floating world” referred to the pleasure districts of Japan’s commercial cities in the Edo period (1616–1868). The principal visual art of this milieu was the multi-color (or polychrome) woodblock print, usually depicting scenes of everyday life. The early ukiyo-e printmakers excelled in por- traits of gracious courtesans and actors from the kabuki the- ater. The master Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753–1806) portrayed geisha entertainers with a wistful delicacy that has been compared to the French rococo painter Antoine Watteau. Ukiyo-e prints were immensely popular in Japan and also inexpensive, selling usually in series or bound in books.
The polychrome print enjoyed a late flowering in the nineteenth-century works of Katsushika Hokusai [HOHKS- eye] and Ando Hiroshige [hee-ruh-SHEE-gay]. In 1823, Hokusai began producing his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, portraying Japan’s famous mountain in various aspects— transformed by rain, set against blossoming trees or a toss- ing sea (Fig. 13.25). Hokusai’s younger rival, Hiroshige, created a competing series entitled Fifty-three Stations of
the Tokaido, which depicted life on the busy road from Edo to Kyoto.
The Japanese aesthetic expressed in these prints exer- cised an immense influence on the impressionist and post-impressionist Europeans. In the prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, especially, we find the techniques that helped revolutionize European painting: dramatic settings, the tension between foreground and background, high and low points of view, and decorative fields of solid color.
13.25 Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanazawa, from the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, 1823–9. Polychrome woodblock print, 10 × 14 ins (25.5 × 37.5 cm). Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In this famous print, Hokusai contrasts the heaving waves against the quiet stability of Mt. Fuji in the background. What statement does this image make about the place of humans in the natural world?
The Japanese Color Print
View the Closer Look at Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanazawa on myartslab.com
Watch a video about Hokusai and Hiroshige: Great Japanese Prints from the James A. Michener Collection on myartslab.com
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undertone of alienation and spiritual exhaustion. In style and subject, Degas [duh-GAH] was close to the realists. But the arbitrary framing of his subjects made his paintings as disconcerting as Monet’s sketchiness. Typically he created off-center compositions, such as The Dancer in Green, whose figures seem to be anony- mous robots of the ballet (Fig. 13.27). The perspective nearly tilts the dancer into our laps, and two other fig- ures appear only as torsos and legs. This painting uses devices that were characteristic of Japanese prints—an off-center composition, with objects placed along a receding diagonal or cut off by the picture’s edge. Such techniques gave Degas’s colorful scenes a disorientating tension.
Degas was a friend and mentor to the American Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), who began exhibiting with the impressionists in 1879. Cassatt painted theater and opera scenes, exploring the social and sexual dynam- ics of Parisians’ favorite entertainment (a half-million attended the theater weekly). In the Loge (Fig. 13.28) depicts a serious-minded middle-class woman, dressed for a Sunday matinee. She peers across the theater from her box (or loge), while at the rear a man leans out to peer at her in turn. In a place where glances between
In his late career, long after the impressionist group had dissolved, Monet painted his most famous series, abstracted views of the lily pond at his provincial home in Giverny.
The impressionist paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) were more lyrical than Monet’s, less bound to the empirical facts of perception. Renoir [ren- WAH(r)] captured the informal mood of city life in his café scene Le Moulin de la Galette (Fig. 13.26). In the open-air dance hall, young working women enjoy their day off, dancing rather gracelessly with male compan- ions. Typical of impressionist composition, Renoir has created an accidental pattern of yellow straw hats and a variation in the prints of the women’s cheap dresses. The whole scene can be taken as a modern and unpre- tentious version of the rococo fête galante.
The works of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), socially the most conservative of the impressionists, have an
13.26 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Oil on canvas, 4 ft 3 1⁄2 ins × 5 ft 9 ins (1.31 × 1.75 m). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. In this painting of ordinary city-dwellers at their leisure, Renoir used the full range of impressionist colors, dominated by the yellow of the straw hats and the chair back on the right.
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men and women might be charged with sexual innu- endo, Cassatt’s operagoer asserts her own gaze, instead of demurely reacting to the man’s. In later works, Cassatt often depicted women in private spaces, at the dressing table or with children. These later works were deeply influenced by Japanese prints, with their flat- tened perspective and unbroken fields of color.
Beyond Impressionism In the 1880s and 1890s, several important artists intensified the impressionists’ break with traditional pictorial methods. These artists are now termed post- impressionists because their works extended impres- sionist techniques in different directions. The most important post-impressionists are Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Each represented a step, in form or style, away from impres- sionism toward modernist painting.
Of the post-impressionists, Georges Seurat [surr- AHH] (1859–1891) was the closest in technique to Monet’s pure impressionism, depicting scenes of urban life and applying unmixed colors directly to the canvas. However, Seurat reacted against the improvisation and
13.27 Edgar Degas, The Dancer in Green, c. 1879. Pastel and gouache on paper, 25 × 14 ins (64 × 36 cm). Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. The composition in Degas’s paintings of commonplace subjects is often off-center in a vaguely disturbing way. Here he plots the figures along a sharp diagonal outlined by the central dancer’s arms.
13.28 Mary Cassatt, In the Loge, 1878. Oil on canvas, 32 × 26 ins (81.3 × 66 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The assertive foreground presence of Cassatt’s female subject contrasts with the voyeuristic man in the distance. The two are connected by the curving line of the balcony rail.
View the Closer Look at Degas’s The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage on myartslab.com
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studied the permanent structure of natural forms. He once advised a young painter to “treat nature through the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.”
Cézanne’s style as a painter matured when he aban- doned Paris in the 1880s and returned to his native southern France. There he frequently painted outdoors in the warm Mediterranean light, striving to capture nature’s immediacy while also exploring its essence. Dozens of times he painted Mont Sainte-Victoire, a low peak near his home town (Fig. 13.30). In Cézanne’s paintings, the mountain is an enduringly solid arrange- ment of masses and planes, a monumental puzzle
informality of the impressionist style. Where Monet had dashed his brush across the canvas, Seurat applied paint in tiny, meticulous dots, a method he called poin- tillism. With his pointillist technique, Seurat claimed he could scientifically control the mood of a painting.
Seurat’s most famous picture, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Fig. 13.29), illustrates the formalism of the pointillist style. The subject, a typi- cal scene of Parisian modernity, shows Sunday after- noon strollers on an island park. Unlike impressionist paintings, Seurat creates a subtle pattern of parallel lines and interlocking shapes. The pattern is created in the repeated shapes of the umbrellas, the ladies’ bustles and bodices, and the gentlemen’s hats and canes. Each figure is treated with scientific dispassion and precision, flattened and contained by Seurat’s formulas.
Under the same influences, Paul Cézanne (1839– 1906) wanted to “make of impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums.” That is, Cézanne [say-ZANN] wanted to find in impression- ist subjects the enduring forms of nature that were the basis of traditional art. Like his impressionist contem- poraries, Cézanne painted directly from nature in bril- liant colors, especially greens, blues, and yellows. But more than transient effects of light and color, Cézanne
13.29 Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–6. Oil on canvas, 6 ft 9 1⁄2 ins × 10 ft 3⁄4 ins (2.07 × 3.05 m). Art Institute of Chicago. Seurat’s carefully calculated pointillist technique resulted in paintings that were cousins to impressionism, but more formal and distant. In this picture, does the rhythm of shapes create a mood of unity and tranquility among these city-dwellers enjoying their leisure? Or is the mood better described as the anonymity and self-absorption of life in the modern city?
View the Closer Look at Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte on myartslab.com
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of nature’s forms. While Monet could not paint fast enough to be true to his subject, Cézanne let the fruit rot on the plate while he studied his still-life models (Fig. 13.31).
The impact of Cézanne’s vision on other European painters has been compared to Giotto’s reinvention of painting in the fourteenth century. Giotto’s innovations in visual realism set the stage for the Renaissance masters and the 500-year phase of art that followed. In the view of critics and admirers alike, Cézanne brought that long phase of painting to an end. His works prepared for a new art of abstraction and formal purity—modernism.
Two post-impressionist painters—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)— achieved intense expressiveness through bold design and intense color. Gauguin (Fig. 13.32) sought in painting to express the elemental forces of human feeling, to enter “the mysterious center of thought.” With his career failing in impressionist Paris, Gauguin [go-GAN(h)] undertook “a reasoned and frank return to the beginning, that is to say to primitive art.” First he lived in the Caribbean and then among Breton peasants (in northwest France); then in 1891 he settled in the South Pacific Polynesian islands, hoping to “live like a savage.” His painting became increasingly abstract, employing large blocks of color. Among Gauguin’s first Polynesian paintings was his exotic treatment of a traditional Christian subject, Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary). Two maidens attend a Polynesian Madonna and Christ Child. A yellow-winged angel can barely be
13.30 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves, 1902–4. Oil on canvas, 27 1⁄2 × 35 1⁄4 ins (70 × 89.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Cézanne’s paintings of nature are as fresh and immediate as those of the impressionists; yet he also sought the solid, enduring structures beneath the surface of nature. The painter said of the neoclassical painter Nicolas Poussin: “I want to do Poussin over again, after nature.”
13.31 Paul Cézanne, Apples and Oranges, 1895–1900. Oil on canvas, 29 × 36 3⁄4 ins (74 × 93 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Compare Cézanne’s carefully defined shapes and complex composition to the orderliness of Chardin’s commonplace scenes (Fig. 11.12).
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distinguished among the tropical foliage. Gauguin has flattened the pictorial space and compressed shapes and colors into a single decorative surface (Fig. 13.33). The picture is as much feeling as reality. In Polynesia, far from the “rotten Babylon” of Paris, Gauguin believed he had found the primitive core of human imagination.
The Dutchman Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was also drawn to the countryside and peasant life. Instead of Gauguin’s rather self-conscious primitivism, how- ever, van Gogh [van GOH] was motivated by a reli- gious sympathy for the peasants’ harsh existence. In his realist early pictures, he painted dark and crudely powerful images of the rural poor. When he came to Paris in 1886, van Gogh was struck by the intoxicat- ing energy of the modern city and the bright hues of impressionist paintings. Color became such an exten- sion of feeling that, as he said of one painting, he could “express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.” In van Gogh’s Starry Night (Fig. 13.34), the swirling lines generate a palpable, almost violent energy. The pulsating life of the skies, released in vivid yellows, overwhelms the quiet innocence of
13.32 Paul Gauguin, Self-portrait with Halo, 1889. Oil on wood, 31 3⁄8 × 20 3⁄8 ins (79.6 × 51.7 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The post-impressionist Gauguin shared the symbolists’ disaffection with conventional society (see page 363), regarding himself as a misunderstood genius. In a letter to a fellow artist, Gauguin wrote: “What does it matter to me if I’m setting myself apart from the rest, for the masses I’ll be an enigma, for a few I’ll be a poet, and sooner or later quality finds its true place.”
13.33 Paul Gauguin, Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary), 1891. 44 3⁄4 × 34 1⁄2 ins (113.7 × 87.6 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In treating religious subjects with his intensely decorative style, Gauguin hoped to act directly on the viewer’s feelings. He was a powerful influence on Matisse and the primitive ideal in modernist art.
View the Closer Look at Gauguin’s Mahana no atua (Day of the God) on myartslab.com
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canvases were painted in the midst of depression. In letters to his art-dealer brother, van Gogh despaired whether the modern world could recognize what he and the post-impressionists had done.
The Dark Side of Progress The astounding material progress of the industrial age exacted an awful toll of suffering in mines and factories. While Western nations prospered through global trade and technological inventions, these same forces brought colonial oppression to Asia and Africa. Western civi- lization’s dedication to wealth, science, and progress had unleashed immense powers of change. But some feared that progress had been purchased with spiritual impoverishment.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a hand- ful of thinkers explored the darker side of the material- ist spirit. The dramatists Anton Chekhov and Henrik
the village and countryside below. Although the work may seem a spontaneous expression of emotion, van Gogh’s sketches show the painter’s careful plan for the picture’s formal elements. He applied the paint thickly, often with a palette knife, creating a bold design that was influenced by his love of Japanese art.
Inevitably, we associate van Gogh’s paintings with his unhappy life. Yet some of his most brilliant, joyous
13.34 Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 × 36 1⁄4 ins (74 × 92 cm). Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Van Gogh expresses the awesome forces of the cosmos by means of blue and yellow. Trace the swirling lines of the sky across the scene, then down to the tranquil village below, and over to the cypress tree at left. What might this composition say symbolically about the relation of humans to the cosmos?
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household and bearing his children, but taking no deci- sive actions on her own. In the play’s final scene, Nora declares to her patronizing husband her intention to leave him and seek her freedom:
When you’d recovered from your fright—and you never
thought of me, only of yourself—when you had nothing
more to fear—you behaved as though none of this had
happened. I was your little lark again, your little doll—
whom you would have to guard more carefully than ever,
because she was so weak and frail. At that moment it
suddenly dawned on me that I had been living here for
eight years with a stranger and that I’d borne him three
children. I can’t bear to think about it! I could tear myself
to pieces!7
HENRIK IBSEN
From A Doll’s House (1879)
The final scene ends as Nora closes the door of her past life with a decisive reverberation. It was said that the sound of that door echoed across the theaters of Europe.
The Novel and Modern Philosophy Like the realist theater, the late nineteenth-century novel was increasingly concerned with the inner life of psychologically complex characters. Two examples are the works of the American novelists Henry James (1843–1916) and Edith Wharton (1862–1937), who shifted their stories’ focus from external action toward their characters’ perceptions and feelings. These writ- ers aimed to reveal subtle shifts in consciousness and ironically complex social situations. James’s exquisitely crafted novels were associated with the l’art pour l’art movement of the late nineteenth century.
The psychological novels of the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) voiced a profoundly philo- sophical criticism of modern progress. In his early career, Dostoyevsky championed humanitarian values and utopian socialist schemes, steeped himself in Western philosophy and literature, and voiced his disgust at Russia’s backwardness and its repressive czarist regime. He was nearly executed for political activity and then sent to Siberian exile for eight years. In Siberian prisons, he experienced the moral anarchy and class hatred that would be such a force in his later novels.
Dostoyevsky’s prison experience convinced him that only Christian love and the simple faith of the Russian peasantry could redeem Western society, which had been seized by materialism and spiritual alienation. Dostoyevsky’s mature works reflect a profound
Ibsen explored beyond the formal limits of realism, into the realms of psychology and symbolism. The novelist Dostoyevsky [doss-stoy-EFF-skee] unraveled the con- flicts between belief and doubt, while the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche [NEETS-shuh] embraced the ego- ism of the industrial age, preaching that an elite race of supermen would rule mass society.
The Realist Theater By 1870, theaters throughout Europe were recovering from a decline suffered during the romantic era. This recovery was based in part on the success of plays in the realist mode. Usually written in prose, realist plays had plots contrived according to strict rules of plausibility. Such “well-made plays,” as they were called, absorbed the audience in a compellingly logical plot. Stage direc- tions and sets were carefully defined, and the use of cur- tains and electric lighting further enhanced the stage’s realism.
In the late nineteenth century, playwrights began to employ realist techniques to delve into human psychol- ogy. In Russia, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) empha- sized the complexity of human character in realistic settings. His greatest plays, The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), deal with the Russian land- owning class in crisis. Chekhov’s characters are caught between Russia’s slow modernization and their bonds with their aristocratic heritage. Typically, in confronting the changes in Russian society, they prove unable to face the reality that impinges on their idealistic dreams.
The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1826–1906) also examined the inner conflicts of middle-class society. The topics of his plays were often controversial—vene- real disease, marriage, the role of women—but Ibsen was also widely praised for exploring subjects of social and philosophical interest. Among his masterpieces were The Wild Duck (1884) and Hedda Gabler (1890). Ibsen’s psychological insight into character shifted theater away from merely ingenious plots. His use of powerful and ambiguous symbols such as the wild duck explored a symbolic depth in theater that reached beyond realist conventions. His psychological realism probed beneath the appearances of middle-class soci- ety. There, he found spiritual emptiness and hypocrisy.
Ibsen’s most shocking play was A Doll’s House (1879), in which the heroine, Nora, has committed forgery to pay for her husband’s medical treatment. Nora’s husband, Helmer, condemns her deceit, even though the money has saved his life. Nora realizes that she is expected to act like a doll, adorning her husband’s
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richly detailed narrative. Despite its realistic tone, The Brothers Karamazov achieves an atmosphere of mys- tery and evil, and explores the moral and psychological alienation of humans in an age of material progress. The characters’ faith in redemption is balanced against their moral freedom to commit the most hideous crimes.
At the heart of The Brothers Karamazov is the story of the Grand Inquisitor, a parable that one brother recounts to another. It tells of a fictional sec- ond coming, when Christ appears in Spain during the Great Inquisition. Christ is challenged by the Grand Inquisitor, who explains how a priestly elite has “cor- rected” Christ’s message of moral freedom. The elite offer the masses material wealth and mystic rituals, he says, rather than the anguished doubt of freedom. The Inquisitor ominously predicts that society will be misled by the promises of materialism and modernity, and in the end it will submit to an elite, powerful and charis- matic, offering security and certainty.
ambivalence between his religious conviction and the rationalist skepticism of modern civilization. He believed that God was necessary, yet could not answer the skeptics’ doubts that God even existed. In a letter he wrote, “If someone proved to me that Christ is out- side the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”8 Dostoyevsky’s ambiva- lence infects his literary works; each character’s beliefs are “tried in the crucible of doubt,” as Dostoyevsky called it.
Dostoyevsky’s great novels—including Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Idiot (1869)—deal with a spiritual crisis in which the characters’ moral kind- ness and generosity inexplicably turn into cruelty and murder. The most complex of his works is The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which concerns three brothers, one of whom is accused of murdering their father. Dostoyevsky weaves his characters into a vast,
Human Will The scientist Charles Darwin was a dedicated naturalist not given to metaphysical speculation. But his evolutionary theories touched on a haunting premise of human civiliza- tion that also intrigued philosophers. What if humans were much like animals, motivated by a deep biological urge that intellect and reason could never subdue?
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) identified this urge—a blind and relentless striving that is rooted in our animal nature—as the will. Schopenhauer [SHOH-pen-HOW-er] readily granted to Kant and the idealists the powers of reason to perceive the world. But, he wrote, “consciousness is the mere sur- face of our mind, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside but only the crust.” Beneath the crust of intel- lect was the blind force of will, which caused humans to love and want in spite of reason, and therefore assured human suffering. In his chief work, The World As Will and Representation (1819), Schopenhauer explained that two worlds exist within the human entity: an intellect that seeks to understand everything; and a will that motivates every- thing, but can never be understood. The will “is the pri- mary and substantial thing; the intellect, on the other hand, is something secondary and additional, in fact a mere tool in the service of the will.”9
Schopenhauer’s understanding of the will—and indeed, his own brooding nature—led to his famous pessimism. “Life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome—to be got over,” he wrote in later life. But, more importantly, he challenged the split between mind and body that was an essential premise of both Plato and Descartes. The will and the body were one, and in our will, humans were linked to the vital life of nature.
It took the iconoclastic writings of Friedrich Nietzsche to affirm the will as a creative cultural force. Nietzsche saw morality and tradition as encrusted human weakness and mediocrity. Happiness came in humans’ assertion of the “will to power,” the will to live without guilt or regret. Nietzsche acknowledged readily (and without regret) that the will to power might be exercised in war and domina- tion. But the same will to power and life also accounted for humanity’s greatest acts of creativity. To Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Nietzsche’s answer was straightforward. “What is good?—All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power,” he wrote in 1888. “What is happiness?— The feeling that power increases …”10
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of “good” and “evil.” While rejecting Christian self- denial, Nietzsche also attacked the complacent opti- mism and materialism of modern society, which would lead humanity to become the blinking dullard that he called “the last man.” The hope of humanity lay in reaching “beyond good and evil,” as Nietzsche titled one of his writings, and casting off the stultifying bonds of morality and materialism.
Nietzsche expected that only a few humans would be able to free themselves from the deadening constraints of conventional morality. He called these audacious types Übermenschen [YOO-ber-mensh-en] (supermen). The superman was an artist of the self, able to create a personal life and a personal system of values in total freedom. Of such figures, Nietzsche wrote, “They have awoken again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of joy in the new, daring, untried, they have compelled men to set opinion against opinion, model against model.”12 The Nietzschean superman was able to live with the inevitable contradictions of human experience—that the impulses to love and cre- ate lie close to the psychic well-springs of hatred and destructiveness, for example. From these contradic- tions, however, arose the superman’s creative powers. Nietzsche imagined the German poet Goethe as such a superman and also himself, portrayed as his philosophi- cal alter-ego in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1892). Critics have also seen the dynamics of Nietzsche’s superman in Dostoyevsky’s tortured main characters, including Ivan Karamazov and the diabolical hero Stavrogin in The Possessed (1871–1872).
Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche both anticipated the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and the post- modern idea that no absolute truth or morality exists. Both presented ideas and values in contest with each
Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought,
of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to
build their tower of Babela without us, they will end, of
course, with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to
us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of blood.
And we shall sit upon the beast and raise the cup, and on
it will be written, “Mystery.” But then, and only then,
the reign of peace and happiness will come for men. Oh,
we shall persuade them that they will only become free
when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us.
And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be
convinced that we are right, for they will remember the
horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedomb
brought them.11
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
From The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
a. For Dostoyevsky, a symbol of materialism and human vanity; see
Genesis 11.
b. The “free verdict of the human heart” that Christ offered to his
followers.
In defending his Christian belief, Dostoyevsky antici- pated the most modern of conditions: mass society gov- erned by an elite who offer them material comforts and the illusion of freedom.
The specter of submissive masses and authoritar- ian elite took a different shape in the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Nietzsche rejected both Christianity and democracy, which were based on what he called a “slave moral- ity” of self-denial. He believed that every conception of God, especially Christianity’s obsessive concern with guilt and sin, prevented humans from affirming their true power and creativity. “God is dead,” a Nietzschean character declared, and so modern society had to recre- ate its values by discarding Judeo-Christian definitions
1810 CE 1820 CE 1830 CE 1840 CE 1848 Revolutionary uprisings throughout Europe
1848 Marx, Communist Manifesto
1849–1850 Dickens, David Copperfield
1800s–1840s Hokusai and Hiroshige, Japanese color print-makers (13.25)
1834 Daumier, Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834 (13.2)
1837–1901 Queen Victoria reigns in England
C H A P T E R 1 3 : T I M E L I N E
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other, with no one position or character providing a perspective of secure and absolute truth. Nietzsche’s attacks on conventional religion and morality were a prelude to the broader assault on tradition in science and the arts that set off the twentieth century’s modern- ist revolutions.
CHAPTER REVIEW Materialism and Progress What was the effect of industrial production in Western society? Where was the growth of the new urban middle class most pro- nounced? Explain the moral philosophy of utilitari- anism. Who were Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill? What is the theory of evolution? Who were the Pre-Raphaelites? Describe the realist painting of Gustave Courbet. How did Edouard Manet challenge the rules of academic painting? In what ways did pho- tography affect the traditional relations of art and reality? Describe the realist novels of Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert. Who was Baron Haussmann? Describe the achievements of Louis Sullivan.
Music and Modernity What factors fostered a golden age in opera? Describe the effects of nationalism on nine- teenth century music. Who were Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner? Describe Wagner’s musical innova- tions. What is a Leitmotif? What is Gesamtkunstwerk? How was classical ballet first created?
Late Romantics and Early Moderns Who was Charles Baudelaire? Explain the principle of l’art pour l’art (“art
1850 CE 1860 CE 1870 CE 1880 CE 1851 Paxton, Crystal Palace, London (13.3)
1851–1853 Verdi, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata
1853–1855 Bonheur, The Horse Fair (13.7)
1854–1875 Labrouste, National Library, Paris (13.10)
1855 Whitman, Leaves of Grass
1857 Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
1859 Courbet, Burial at Ornans (13.5)
1859 Darwin, Origin of Species
1871 Verdi, Aïda
1874 First impressionist exhibition, in Paris
1875 Paris Opera opens; Eakins, The Gross Clinic (13.9)
1876 Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle, Bayreuth, Germany
1879 Ibsen, A Doll’s House
1869 Flaubert, The Sentimental Education
1860s Haussmann modernizes Paris boulevards
1863 Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (13.6)
1880 Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
1884–1886 Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (13.29)
1885 Brahms, Symphony #4
1887–1889 Eiffel Tower, Paris (13.11)
1890 Death of van Gogh
1890s Tiffany glass (13.17)
1892–1897 Rodin, Balzac (13.21)
1894 Debussy, Prélude à “L’après- midi d’un faune”
1900 Gaudí, Casa Batllò (13.18)
for art’s sake”). Describe the stylistic characteristics of Art Nouveau. What was the Vienna Secession? Who was Antonio Gaudí? Explain the connection between the Symbolist poets and the music of Claude Debussy. Why was the sculptor Auguste Rodin criticized? Who were the impressionists and what is impressionism? Why are Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh called post-impressionists? In what ways can Charles Baudelaire and Paul Cézanne be said to originate modernism?
The Dark Side of Progress How did the dramatists Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen depict middle-class society? Describe the conflicts central to the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. How did Friedrich Nietzsche elaborate on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer? What are Übermenschen?
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Is human progress best achieved through greater human freedom or less? What are the likely consequences of expanding the freedom to make moral decisions? What are the likely consequences of restricting the freedom to make moral decisions?
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14 In 1913, a new mode of thought and expression exploded across the Western world.
In Paris, an innovative ballet called The Rite of Spring—pulsing with primitive
rhythms and unconventional dancing—incited an audience riot at its premiere (see
page 399). In New York, an exhibition of strange new art scandalized the American
public. Visitors to the Armory Show were especially outraged by Nude Descending
a Staircase (Fig. 14.1), which one critic called “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
Modernism
14.1 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, 1912. Oil on canvas, 58 × 35 ins (147.3 × 89 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. Duchamp’s abstract painting was the most notorious work in the 1913 Armory Show, which stunned the American public with art by Picasso, Matisse, and other early modernist masters.
K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• What historical forces shaped the rise of modern mass society? • How did modernism transform traditions in the visual arts? • What were Freud’s views on the role of sexuality in human thought? • How were modernist music and architecture accepted by popular
audiences?
• How were political beliefs expressed in the works of modernist artists? • Who were the most signifi cant American innovators of the
modernist era?
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382 Chapter 14 MODERNISM
The next year, 1914, witnessed a global explosion—a world war that would kill nine million people and end with Russia convulsed by communist revolution. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats [yates] (1865–1939) succinctly grasped the crisis of Western civilization. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” he wrote. Out of this failing center, born between freedom and anarchy, came the spirit of modernism, the aggressive style of 1900–1950 that demolished cultural traditions and defined a bewildering future for the twentieth century.
A Turbulent Century In the first decades of the twentieth century, new dis- coveries and catastrophic events seemed to overturn the very foundations of Western civilization. Scientists revised Isaac Newton’s universal laws of physics to describe the physical universe in terms of relativity and probability. Western civilization’s smug assump- tions about its cultural advancement were dissolved in a bloody world war from 1914 to 1918. Out of that war arose disturbing social and political forces—com- munism in Soviet Russia and fascism in Germany—that employed new forms of mass culture and totalitarian methods of social control. Yeats registered the new cen- tury’s bloodied disorientation in the vivid images of a falcon escaping his master’s call:
Turning and turning in the widening gyrea
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.1
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
From The Second Coming (1920)
a. gyre, gyration; here, circling flight.
Yeats’s poem foresees more cataclysms to come but voices the faint hope that something new—if not bet- ter—would be born from civilization’s trauma. The world that Yeats anticipated—shaped by war, revolu- tion, and the rise of mass culture—was created in the period 1900–1950. In many ways, it is the world we live in today.
A New Science Seeking to reconcile discoveries in electromagnetism with the motion of electrons, German physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) proposed in 1905 a theory of relativity. Postulating that the laws of physics are the same everywhere, and that the speed of light is con- stant everywhere in every direction, Einstein reasoned that no observer’s experience of time holds a privileged position, that there is no single clock for the entire uni- verse. Einstein imagined passengers in a spaceship leav- ing the planet at nearly the speed of light. By a clock in their spaceship, the travelers send a signal back to earth every quarter hour. But to observers on earth, the signals would arrive ever more slowly, until even- tually they were decades apart. Time as observed in the speeding space ship was actually slower than time observed on earth. But if observers do not measure time equally—if time is relative—then space must be relative too. This led to the further surprisingly simple conclusion that mass and energy are interchangeable forms of the same essence.
In 1916, Einstein expanded his theory of relativity to describe gravity. What to Newton had appeared to be the mutual attraction of objects—gravity—was actually the acceleration of objects through the four- dimensional continuum of “space-time.” For most objects, Newton’s conception of space provided ade- quate explanation. But massive objects such as the sun actually warp the geometry of space-time around them, affecting the behavior of even distant objects like the planets. Newton’s laws of mechanics could not explain the complex geometry of space-time in a way that applied to all frames of reference. Einstein’s gen- eral theory of relativity does.
Einstein made fundamental contributions to another vein of modern physics called quantum mechanics, though he objected to some of its conclusions. Atomic scientists determined that sub-atomic particles behave at times like particles of matter and at other times like light energy moving in waves. This meant that an atom’s electrons could not be measured or plot- ted precisely. According to German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” we could know precisely an electron’s position or its velocity, but not both. The quantum physicists concluded that, at the sub-atomic level, the universe is “probabilistic”— that is, calculable according to statistical likelihood. Einstein’s response was, “I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.”2
Chapter 14 MODERNISM 383
of abstract design that won praise from modernists in Western Europe (Fig. 14.2). Soviet actors and dra- matists organized agit-prop (agitation-propaganda) troupes who carried the revolutionary message to Russian villages. Agit-prop theater rejected the subtle- ties of realism, aiming for a bold impact on its largely uneducated audiences. However, Stalin gradually sup- pressed Soviet artistic experiments, finally declaring “socialist realism” the only true revolutionary style. Modernist art was squelched and artists either fled to the West or disappeared into prison camps.
The Great War The path-breaking discoveries of modern physics had little immediate effect on daily life. By contrast, the “Great War”—World War I—changed the lives and consciousness of an entire civilization. In 1914, with the nations of Europe locked in conflicting alliances, a political assassination in central Europe set off a war of unprecedented carnage and futility. World War I was the first modern world conflict, demonstrating how effectively industrialized nations could mobilize and supply armies to annihilate one another in pointless conflict. Barbed wire and rapid-fire machine guns made troop entrenchments virtually impregnable. Poison gas was used to dire effect by German and British troops alike, while the tank and the airplane made their first appearances.
The Great War’s technologies of destruction pro- duced three years of stalemate on the battlefield. Dug into their defensive trenches, troops endured constant artillery bombardment. Under this deadly fire, the nov- elist Erich Remarque wrote, “the world as they had taught it to us broke into pieces.” Offensive assaults on trench lines were as lethal as they were ineffective. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916, more than a million were dead or wounded, though barely 100 square miles (259 ha) changed hands.
The Russian Revolution The deprivations of war produced an event in Russia as momentous as the Great War itself. In October 1917, the radical Bolsheviks—the Russian Social Democratic Party— overthrew a temporary government and established the first socialist state in Europe. The Bolshevik Revolution was led by Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), who deter- minedly applied Marxian socialism to the backward nation, theorizing that a highly trained party elite could compensate for Russia’s lack of a class-conscious proletariat.
In fact, Lenin centralized power in the hands of party leaders, who used the czarist secret police to suppress dissent. Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), undertook a massive industrialization, increasing the Soviet Union’s steel production five-fold in a single decade. Along with progress came suffering, including mass starvation, caused by Stalin’s forced collectiviza- tion of farming. As many as 20 million Soviet citizens perished, many in brutal prison camps.
The first years of Soviet communism stimulated a lively artistic avant-garde. Soviet artists put themselves at the service of the workers’ state and produced works
14.2 Vladimir Tatlin, model for Monument to the Third International, 1919–20. Wood, iron, and glass. Contemporary photograph. Tatlin’s projected structure was 1,300 feet (396.2 m) tall and was to be built of iron and glass. It would have had three levels, each rotating slowly at different speeds—truly a revolutionary design for a revolutionary age.
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speeches pounded away at Nazi themes of German ethnic pride, anti-communism, and anti-Semitism (the hatred of Jews). When the Nazis took power in 1933, they ousted Jews from official positions and stripped them of German citizenship. The Nazis were masters of simplified slogans and symbolism, using mass media radio and film for political purposes. Nazi supporters attended massive party rallies festooned with flags, banners, and uniforms. In German town squares, Nazis burned the literary works of well-known intellectuals, and many prominent artists quickly left the country.
While fascism did not flourish in the United States, Americans too came under the spell of mass media. The new art of commercial filmmaking established itself in Hollywood, California, churning out movies with stan- dardized storylines and star actors. President Franklin
Fascism and the Rise of Mass Society Western political leaders feared that Lenin’s revolu- tion would inspire workers in Western Europe and the United States. Instead, anti-communist reactions spawned the new ideology of fascism, which proved just as devastating and fatal. Fascism (from fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of authority) prized nation and race over individual rights and used government compulsion to regiment social life and suppress opposi- tion. Fascist movements arose in Italy and in Germany, where the National Socialist (Nazi) party was led by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945).
In Germany, the fascists proved to be masters in appealing to the masses of unemployed. Hitler’s
14.3 Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936. Gelatin silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Lange and other documentary photographers of the New Deal era strove to arouse the viewer’s sympathy, while also truthfully recording the visual facts. Lange took this photograph in a California migrant workers’ camp filled with refugees from drought and famine. Note the details of pose and gesture that communicate the subjects’ anguish.
View the web resource on Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother on myartslab.com
Chapter 14 MODERNISM 385
redefinition of art. For all their differences, the modern- ists were responding to an era of turbulent change, to exhausted artistic tradition, and to each other’s radical new visions of artistic truth and beauty.
Picasso and the Revolution in Art The Spaniard Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was to become the twentieth century’s most versatile and influ- ential artist. The young Picasso had mastered traditional techniques of drawing and form, as was evident in his first original works, the paintings of his “blue period” and “rose period.” By 1907, already a success in the Paris art world, Picasso was determined to discard the Renaissance artistic tradition and formulate a new set of artistic rules.
The first great manifesto of modernist paint- ing was Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [lay
Roosevelt (1882–1945) gave “fireside chats” on radio to reassure an American people beleaguered by the Great Depression. To justify his economic programs, dubbed the “New Deal,” Roosevelt’s administration employed legions of writers and artists. Their mis- sion was to document poverty and suffering by using documentary arts (reportage, photography, and film), that recorded social conditions directly and objectively. Photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange (Fig. 14.3) illustrated the hardships of the rural and urban poor. Concerned for artists’ survival during the Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal also provided support to theaters and other traditional arts.
Communism, fascism, and the New Deal all employed new media—posters, photography, radio, and film—that had broader appeal than the traditional arts. With the introduction of television by 1940, these media would constitute a new mass culture that soon overshadowed traditional forms of artistic expression.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT In an age when photography can picture reality more accurately and cheaply than painting, what is the art of painting good for?[end Thought Exp box]
Modernism in Art In the emerging mass society, the traditional arts rede- fined themselves by exploding tradition. The diverse artistic innovations of the period 1900–1950 are grouped loosely under the label of modernism. Like romanticism, modernism was more an attitude than a coherent philosophy or style. Nearly all modernists negated some part of the realist tradition in painting and sculpture, and nearly all were interested in new artistic forms and materials. Modernist art sought to free itself from the depiction of external reality, and concentrated instead on pure color, form, feeling, or idea. One radical and revealing example was the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), which he explained as “a desperate attempt to free art from the burden of the object.”3
The modernists often banded together to repel their detractors and educate the public about their artistic aims. Modernism’s various movements, or “-isms,” ran in different veins: one toward formal abstrac- tion, another toward the expression of feeling and states of mind, and yet another toward the wholesale
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
War, Fashion, and Feminism Shortly after the Great War ended, women in Britain and in the United States gained the right to vote. Their cause was aided by the dislocations of war, which forced changes in women’s fashion. Here Ray Strachey, a British feminist, associates the new freedom in wom- en’s dress with their growing social independence and opportunity.
For a long time fashion fought valiantly against any further development of physical freedom for women. … The war, however, brought deliverance. Under the necessities of the time fashion gave way, and short- skirted uniforms, and even breeches, became familiar sights. Women, when they had once really tasted the joys of this deliverance, refused to be put back into the old costumes. The trade tried, indeed, when the war was over, to reinstate the old ideas; but they did not “take.” Skirts grew shorter and shorter, clothes grew more and more simple and convenient, and hair, that “crowning glory of a woman,” was cut short. With one bound the young women of 1919 burst out from the hampering conventions, and with their cigarettes, their motor-cars, their latch-keys, and their athletics they astonished and scandalized their elders.4
RAY STRACHEY From “The Cause”: A Short History of the Women’s
Movement in Great Britain (1928)
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT In an age when photography can picture reality more accurately and cheaply than painting, what is the art of painting good for?
386 Chapter 14 MODERNISM
space, Picasso was defying pictorial traditions more assertively than any painter before him.
By painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso began to define cubism, a style that analyzed natural forms into planes, angles, and geometric shapes. The Frenchman Georges Braque [brawk] (1882–1963) was the co-inventor of cubism with Picasso. Between 1907 and 1914, the two worked so closely—“roped together like two mountain climbers,” said Braque—that some of their paintings are virtually indistinguishable.
During these years, Picasso and Braque methodically dissected the pictorial tradition, defining a technique of formal abstraction that established an entire branch of modernism. In Braque’s The Portuguese (Fig. 14.5), the sitter’s features dissolve into flattened shapes, distin- guishable as a fez-like hat, shoulder epaulets, and gui- tar. Neither the tantalizing lettering nor the image itself can be fully reconstructed. In this so-called analytical phase of cubism, Picasso and Braque largely restricted their colors to browns and grays. They wanted no color
demm-WAW-zell dah-veen-YOHN(h)] (Fig. 14.4), which depicts a group of prostitutes parading naked before their customers. Instead of the traditional allur- ing female nude, these women are aggressively gro- tesque. The central pair gaze frankly at the viewer with faces that resemble archaic Spanish sculpture, while the masked figures at right threaten unmasked hostility.
Scholars identify two creative influences on Picasso in the years 1906 and 1907. At a retrospective Cézanne exhibition, Picasso saw a Cézanne sketch entitled The Bathers that clearly influenced his treatment of the nude form. In the same period, Picasso visited a museum of non-Western art in Paris. There he saw African and Polynesian masks that stylized the human face in ways reprised in Picasso’s grotesque prostitutes. Despite the painter’s later denials, Les Demoiselles shows the unmistakable influence of primitivism. A third factor in shaping Les Demoiselles was Picasso’s own experimen- tation with the elements of visual expression. By decon- structing the human form and flattening the pictorial
14.4 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. Oil on canvas, 8 ft × 7 ft 8 ins (2.43 × 2.33 m). Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Picasso’s acid deconstruction of the female nude was a manifesto of pictorial modernism. Note the abstracted treatment of the nude female form and flattening effect of the background curtain. Compare to a traditional female nude such as Boucher’s (Fig. 11.5).
View the Closer Look at Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon on myartslab.com
Chapter 14 MODERNISM 387
14.5 Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911. Oil on canvas, 46 1⁄4 × 32 1⁄4 ins (117.5 × 82 cm). Kunstmuseum, Basel. The cubist Braque presents the figure as if in multiple exposure, captured not by the eye but by the intellect. His portrait of a bar-room singer with guitar is punctuated by the cryptic lettering “Bal” (“dance”) and “10.40” (evidently a drink tab). Note the underlying pyramidal form.
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Primitivism No study of Picasso’s paintings fails to mention the evi- dence in his work of primitivism, the influence of arts from supposedly “primitive” tribal cultures in Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Picasso and other modernists collected tribal art the way the impressionists collected Japanese prints. The modernists had little interest in the anthropo- logical study of primitive art or its place in tribal culture. They were more concerned with the formal inventiveness of tribal artists who were unschooled in realist techniques. Some modernists also hoped to tap the savage vigor (real or imagined) they felt in tribal art, thus shocking their own exhausted civilization into new life.
The works of tribal artisans exhibited formal qualities that paralleled the innovations of modernist artists. Tribal artists did not show things as they were seen by the eye, a rule that had governed Western art since the Renaissance. Tribal masks and sculpture were governed by abstract and symbolic stylization: Picasso owned an African mask that depicted the eyes as protruding cylinders and the mouth as a block. In tribal styles, some modernists found confirmation of their search for an art of concept rather than empirical perception. Others sought in primitivism
K E Y C O N C E P T
an art of intense feeling, as in the German expression- ist Emil Nolde’s Masks (Fig. 14.6). Nolde combines popu- lar carnival masks with versions of Oceanic, African, and South American tribal masks (Fig. 14.7) that he had seen in European collections.
In one sense, modernists were responding to tribal art- ists’ use of a universal visual language. Removed from its cultural and religious context, tribal art struck the modern- ists as remarkably free and inventive in its use of shape, line, and proportion. In another sense, the modernists were refurbishing the romantic myth of the noble savage. Some presumed that tribal art delved closer to the core of human experience, beneath the falsifying veneer of Western civi- lization. But where the romantics saw in the noble savage a model of reason and nobility, the modernists saw in the primitive a violent expressiveness that violated the polite boundaries of Western art. Inevitably, the modernists judged primitive art in terms of their own culture and artis- tic interests, welcoming its affirmation of their own artistic inventions. Their borrowings cannot be taken as a measure of tribal art’s meaning or value.
14.6 Emil Nolde, Masks, 1911. Oil on canvas, 28 3⁄4 × 30 1⁄2 ins (73 × 77.5 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Nolde combined popular carnival masks (center) with versions of Oceanic and South American tribal masks that he had seen.
14.7 Ram mask, Kwele peoples, Congo, 19th–20th century. Wood and paint, height 20 3⁄4 ins (52.7 cm). Modernist artists looked to tribal cultures as an ideal of unbridled erotic freedom and savage energy.
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Toward Formal Abstraction Though Picasso never abandoned pictorial representa- tion, other artists followed the cubist path to its logical end and created works of pure abstraction. The result was non-objective (also non-figurative) art, which depicts no object at all. The trend toward non-objective art is visible in the works of the Italian futurists, an aggressively modernist group that touted the automo- bile and modern war as the salvation of the world. The futurists toured Europe’s capitals before 1914, giving scandalous performances and calling for a new “machine art.” World War I ended their ambitions and their optimistic view of new technology. The futurist Umberto Boccioni [boh-chee-OH-nee] (1882–1916) embodied the group’s love of speed and motion in his sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Fig. 14.10). Although clearly a striding human form, the figure also evokes the surface of a windswept sea.
The Paris studio of sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) was a laboratory of modernist abstrac- tion. Brancusi [bran-KOO-zee] usually began with an organic shape, such as the bird or egg, and sought the formal or abstract idea in that shape. In his Bird in Space (Fig. 14.11), he sought “the essence of flight,” as he called it, distilling a bird’s shape to a pure artistic concept. The highly polished bronze surface and the
to distract from the abstracted lines and intersecting planes of their portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. By abandoning perspective—the Renaissance technique of showing three dimensions in two—analytical cubism achieved a fourth dimension, the object as seen in time or motion.
By 1912 the cubists entered a second phase, called synthetic cubism, in which they glued objects—newspa- per, string, even sawdust—directly to the painting sur- face. This technique was called collage (from the French coller, to glue), and it restored (literally) a third dimen- sion to cubist pictures. Instead of dissolving objects into planes and angles, as in analytic cubism, the cubists now constructed their paintings from scraps of “real” objects. In Le Courrier (Fig. 14.8) Braque overlaid his drawing of a café table with pasted scraps represent- ing a newspaper, playing card, and cigarette pack. The collage technique extended cubism’s original purpose, which was to supersede the pictorial tradition.
Picasso’s collaboration with Braque ended abruptly with the outbreak of war in 1914, although cubist tech- niques enjoyed a vigorous afterlife in his later works. In 1920 he began two versions of The Three Musicians. In the version here (Fig. 14.9), the raucous shapes and colors are more vivacious than in the cubist paintings. The painting appears to be a collage of disparate pieces that nevertheless merge into an amusing whole.
14.8 Georges Braque, Le Courrier, 1913. Pasted paper and charcoal, 20 × 22 1⁄2 ins (51 × 57 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952. By gluing paper, string, and other objects to the canvas—the technique of collage— Braque hoped to make “the reality in the painting” compete with “the reality in nature.” The pasted paper shapes define the work of art as an object in its own right, not an illusionist window through which the viewer looks.
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streamlined shape surely suggest a soaring bird more directly than metal beak and feathers ever could.
The modernist trend toward formal abstraction reached a brief zenith in Russia. At a 1915 exhibition in Moscow, Kasimir Malevich (1878–1935) installed his abstract paintings as if they were religious icons. Malevich [mal-YAY-vitsch] painted monochromatic squares—red, black, and even white (Fig. 14.12)—on a white ground. He was, in his view, inventing the picto- rial language for a new society. Malevich set the tone for post-revolutionary Soviet constructivism, which rejected traditional easel painting and declared that art should help build the new Soviet society. Soviet constructivists applied geometric abstraction to stage design, posters, dishware, and textiles, a functional approach to art that would later influence the Bauhaus in Germany.
14.9 Pablo Picasso, The Three Musicians, 1921. Oil on canvas, 6 ft 7 ins × 7 ft 3 3⁄4 ins (2.01 × 2.23 m). Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. Picasso continued to use cubist technique long after his collaboration with Braque ended. Here, two figures from the commedia dell’arte, a pierrot and harlequin, join a somber monk in a carnival concert. Note the comically irregular shapes, such as the harlequin’s gaping jaw and the dislocated dog.
14.10 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913. Bronze (cast 1931), 43 7⁄8 × 34 7⁄8 × 15 3⁄4 ins (112.2 × 88.5 × 40 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. The Italian futurist Boccioni’s sculpture captures the dynamism of analytical cubism, but in more fluid and organic shapes. The undulations define the figure’s volume but also engage the enclosing space.
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Other artists sought philosophical truth rather than social revolution through abstraction. For the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) [peet MOHN- dree-ahn], “the particulars of appearance” veiled the pure, underlying universals of line and color. Mondrian simplified his images to flat, rectangular grids of pri- mary colors and black lines in asymmetrical composi- tions, seeking to reveal the inherent harmony and unity of the human mind.
Expressionism and Dada Alongside the trend toward formal abstraction, other modernists were pursuing an art of pure expression— communicating feelings and states of mind directly and intensely. The most important painter of feeling was the Frenchman Henri Matisse (1869–1954), a mod- ernist whose influence on twentieth-century art rivaled Picasso’s. Matisse [mah-TEESS] was associated with a group labeled the fauves [fohv] (from the French fauve, wild beast), a short-lived group so-named by a critic in 1905. In fact, the fauves were wild only in their unbri- dled use of color. Their pictorial subjects—landscapes, portraits, and city scenes—were quite conventional.
The wildest of the fauves was certainly Matisse, whose monumental pastoral scene The Joy of Life (Fig. 14.13), first exhibited in 1906, incited Picasso to paint his acid masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (see Fig. 14.4). Matisse has painted his own “garden of earthly delights,” as a critic has said,5 a scene in which lovers caress and figures dance to a shepherd’s tune. With its free application of color in figures and land- scape, the painting is like an erotic daydream, in which desire is as freely felt and expressed as color.
Matisse asserted that color used in such boldly decorative arrangements created its own pictorial struc- ture. “Expression to my way of thinking,” he wrote in 1908, “does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty space around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.”6 In his Notes of a Painter, he said his dream was “an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter.”7
German Expressionism Compared to the fauves, expressionism in Germany generated an art more dynamic and psychologically intense. German expressionism was also more regionally diffuse than French modernism. In Dresden, for example, a group
14.11 Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, c. 1928. Bronze (unique cast), height 4 ft 6 ins (1.37 m). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Denying that his works were abstract, Brancusi said, “I pursue the inner, hidden reality, the very essence of objects in their own intrinsic fundamental nature.” To increase the viewer’s sense of motion and freedom, Brancusi sometimes placed his works on a rotating base.
14.12 Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918. Oil on canvas, 31 1⁄4 × 31 1⁄4 ins (79.4 × 79.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. ”One can speak of creation,” Malevich wrote, “only where form does not imitate nature, but instead emanates from the pictorial masses, without repeating or modifying the primordial forms of natural objects.” For Malevich, “pictorial realism,” or Suprematism, was “painting constituting its own objective.”
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formed in 1905 that called itself Die Brücke (The Bridge). Their colors were cruder and more direct than even the fauves’. The Brücke [BRYOOK-uh] called on their generation to “wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established forces.” When the group moved to Berlin in 1911, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) painted a series of street scenes that captured the danger and excite- ment of Berlin before the Great War (Fig. 14.14). The
14.13 Henri Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905–6. Oil on canvas, 5 ft 8 ins × 7 ft 9 3⁄4 ins (1.74 × 2.38 m). The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In Matisse’s modernist pastoral (an idyllic country scene of shepherds), free-form shapes and bizarre colors create a sensuous atmosphere of harmony, peace, and desire. Compare the threatening mood of Kirchner’s urban street scene (Fig. 14.14).
14.14 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913. Oil on canvas, 47 1⁄2 × 35 7⁄8 ins (120.6 × 91.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Contrast the eroticism of Kirchner’s modern city to the leisurely and playful pastoral of Matisse’s Joy of Life. Note that the prostitutes’ pinched waists are mirrored by the picture’s overall composition.
View the Closer Look at Kirchner’s Street, Berlin on myartslab.com
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lines and shapes, with no discernible subject (Fig. 14.15). Kandinsky wanted to achieve an immediate effect on the viewer, and believed the effect of color was most power- ful if not mediated through a pictorial subject.
Another member of Der Blaue Reiter was Paul Klee (1879–1940), a painter whose career intersected with every major style in the modernist idiom: cubism, expressionism, and the Bauhaus style of modern design. Klee [klay] tapped the primitivism of the child, recap- turing by intellectual effort the freshness and simplicity of a child’s consciousness (Fig. 14.16). The pictorial
prostitutes’ decadent allure in Kirchner’s [KEERSCH- ner] street scenes contrasts to the idyllic, “primitive” sexuality in many Brücke landscapes.
A second German expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), organized itself in Munich in 1911. Der Blaue Reiter [BLOW-uh RYE-ter] (named for its almanac published in 1919) included among its members the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866– 1944). Kandinsky’s work pushed artistic expression to the very limits of non-objectivity. His most innovative pictures consisted of swirling colors and freely drawn
14.15 Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (Second Version), 1912. Oil on canvas, 3 ft 7 7⁄8 ins × 5 ft 3 7⁄8 ins (1.11 × 1.62 m). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. To stress the nonobjectivity of his paintings, Kandinsky titled dozens of them Improvisation. He wrote that color was like the keys of the piano that the artist touched “to cause vibrations in the soul.”
14.16 Paul Klee, Battle Scene from the Comic Opera “The Seafarer,” 1923. Watercolor, 19 11⁄16 × 13 5⁄8 ins (50 × 34.5 cm). Kunst museum, Basel, Switzerland. For Klee, everything is connected. In lectures of this time, he compared the things of life to the root of a tree, the artist to the trunk, and artwork to the tree’s leafy crown.
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slogans. “Art is dead.”9 The dadaists frequently engaged in scandalous “manifestations,” raucously improvised performances of nonsense poetry, theater, and anti- war protest. Some manifestations turned into riots. Dada groups eventually formed in Paris, New York, and Berlin. The German dadaists, in particular, created actual works of art, developing the technique of photo- montage—pasting together scraps of photographs and newspaper print—into a biting political art.
The most radical figure within dada was Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), who playfully redefined art by erasing the boundary between art and non-art. After experimenting with cubist-style painting (see Fig. 14.1), Duchamp [doo-SHAN(h)] abandoned what he called “retinal art,” art designed to please the eye. Instead, in 1913 he began devising readymades, works that presented ordinary objects as art. In one readymade Duchamp attached a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool. In another, he submitted a porcelain urinal, entitled Fountain, to a New York art exhibition; it was rejected. In 1919, Duchamp “rectified” Leonardo’s iconic paint- ing Mona Lisa (Fig. 14.17) by defacing a reproduction with graffito mustache and beard.
Duchamp’s readymades were a kind of anti-art: art could be anything and anything could be art. This cre- ative nihilism would profoundly influence twentieth- century culture, from happenings and performance art to pop art and even punk rock.
The Modern Mind If modernism in the visual arts revolutionized the ways humans saw the world, the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud [froyd] and modernist literature revo- lutionized how humans saw themselves. Freud (1856– 1939) theorized that human consciousness was in a constant struggle with repressed, unconscious desires. Modernist authors explored the rambling and allusive process of human discourse, far beyond the old familiar landmarks of narrative and poetic form.
Freud and Surrealism In 1900, seven years before Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (see Fig. 14.4), Freud published his study The Interpretation of Dreams, a work that revolutionized psychology much as Picasso transformed art. According to Freud, the mind was not the seat of reason and self-mastery, but a battleground between unconscious desires and the oppressive demands of society. The family was not a sanctuary of innocent
techniques of modernism—abstraction, the autonomy of shape and color, the preeminence of feeling and intellect over pictorial subject—are all subordinated to Klee’s own private and mystical vision.
Duchamp and Dada The most radical of the early modernists’ redefinition of art was dada, an international group devoted to undermining art and questioning the value of reason and logic. Dada was founded in 1916 in Zürich by artists escaping the Great War; the nonsen- sical name “dada” conveyed their mockery of conven- tional meaning. “DADA is the voluntary destruction of the bourgeois world of ideas,” declared their nihilistic
14.17 Marcel Duchamp, L. H. O. O. Q., 1919. Rectifi ed readymade, pencil on reproduction, 7 3⁄4 × 4 7⁄8 ins (19.7 × 12.2 cm). Private collection. Pronounced in French, Duchamp’s caption makes an obscene suggestion about Leonardo’s famous beauty. The beard created a sexual ambiguity that, Duchamp said, “went very well with the homosexuality of Leonardo,” in that day a taboo subject.8
Watch a video about Duchamp’s Fountain on myartslab.com
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compelling logic of the unconscious mind. Painted in 1914, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (Fig. 14.18) shows a girl playing on a street that narrows between two arcaded walls. Like a dream, the images possess a startling clarity—the brightly illuminated arcade, for example—but are combined in obscure and ominous associations.
The first artists consciously to adopt Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind were the surrealists, a group of writers and painters initially based in Paris who sought to release unconscious images and words in their art. The result was an art “beyond reality” (in French, surréalisme), or, as the surrealists claimed, a transmutation of dream and reality. The surrealists’ leader, French writer André Breton [breh-TOHN(h)] (1896–1966), issued a manifesto in 1924 in which he defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”— that is, the straightforward “dictation” of unconscious thoughts into writing or art, without any rational control. Automatism in writing produced a poetry of
love, but a cauldron of incestuous attachments and murderous wishes. Freud analyzed subjects that were normally taboo—masturbation, incest, perversion. His writings produced a new vocabulary, including now- familiar terms such as “unconscious,” “ego,” and “Oedipus complex.” Every domain of the humanities, from surrealist art to philosophy and religion, has been affected by Freud’s theories.
Freud was the inventor of psychoanalysis, a method of treating mental illness by analyzing unconscious desires. One psychoanalytic method required the patient to talk freely about his or her thoughts and feelings. This “free association” of ideas revealed the unconscious thoughts behind the mental symptom and exposed the patient’s thoughts to interpreta- tion. Through analysis, the patient eventually could acknowledge the sexual wish or fear that caused the symptom. All human activity was motivated by a pow- erful psychic energy that Freud called libido (Latin for wish or desire). Most people had successfully repressed their libido along the paths of marriage, work, parent- hood, and other ordinary human activities. The person who suffered from mental illness or sexual perversion, however, had unsuccessfully repressed the libido.
The most controversial aspect of Freud’s theory was his view of child sexuality. Western civilization had long thought children were free of sexual motives. However, Freud asserted that children were driven by libido from the beginning of their psychic lives. The child was reluctant to give up the erotic attachment to his or her parents and, according to Freud, mentally reenacted the Greek legend of Oedipus. In the Oedipus complex, the child unconsciously wished to murder his or her parental rival and preserve a sexual attachment to the parent of the opposite sex. According to Freud, these wishes influence our relations with our parents, our choice of a mate, even our choice of occupation.
In later years, Freud generalized his psychological theories to the domains of mythology, religion, and politics. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1925), for example, he argued that civilization was built on an inevitable conflict between humans’ true desires and the requirements of work and achievement. In other works on religion and mass psychology, Freud applied his theories to the major social and psychic phenomena of his day, usually with controversial results.
Freud’s interest in dreams corresponded to a trend in the visual arts, to be seen for example in the work of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978). Working without any knowledge of Freud, de Chirico [day KEE-ree-koh] captured something of the eerie,
14.18 Giorgio de Chirico, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914. Oil on canvas, 33 1⁄2 × 27 1⁄4 ins (85 × 69 cm). Private collection. De Chirico arrived in Paris at the height of cubism. Note the ominous relation between the silhouetted girl and the looming shadow, framed by arcaded walls in oblique and disorienting perspective.
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The most accomplished painter of the Paris surre- alists was Joan Miró (1893–1983), a Spaniard whose method foreshadowed the abstractions of post-World War II art. Of his painting, Miró [mee-ROH] said, “I begin painting and as I paint, the picture begins to
dream-like associations and arbitrary word play. The surrealists compared automatism with the free asso- ciation of thoughts and feelings in Freudian psycho- analysis. Inspired by Freud, they called aggressively for liberation from sexual taboos.
14.19 Joan Miró, Personage Throwing a Stone at a Bird, 1926. Oil on canvas, 29 × 36 1⁄4 ins (73.7 × 92.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Of this work, Miró said, “my paintings no longer showed the pull of gravity; I wanted to give it an astral quality.” André Breton praised Miró as “the most Surrealist of us all.”
14.20 Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas, 9 1⁄2 × 13 ins (24 × 33 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. What elements of this Dalí scene most directly evoke the logic and imagery of dreams? How might the symbols here be interpreted?
View the Closer Look at Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory on myartslab.com
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K E Y C O N C E P T
which contained a famous scene of a razor slicing open an eyeball.
Modernism in Literature Twentieth-century literature explored new forms with the same intensity as the other arts, resulting in the similar disorienting effects. Storytellers could not make their works entirely non-objective, as Malevich and Kandinsky did in painting. They could, however, experiment with poetic language and narrative form. Modernist poets often discarded poetic meter and rhyme, writing in vers libre [VAIR leeb(r)] (free or non- metrical verse). Novelists concentrated more on the inner lives of their characters, registering subtle grada- tions of consciousness. With fewer causal connections,
assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work.”10 Miró used “biomorphic” shapes that suggested organic crea- tures without defining them (Fig. 14.19).
The method of another surrealist, Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), was more mannered and self-conscious. Dalí [dah-LEE] called his paintings “hand-painted dream photographs,” and works such as The Persistence of Memory (Fig. 14.20) combined minute detail with bizarre images and vividly painted landscapes. Of the limp watches in The Persistence of Memory, Dalí said they “are nothing more than the soft, extravagant, solitary, paranoiac-critical Camembert cheese of space and time.”11 Dalí also contributed, with director Luis Buñuel [boon-(y)-WELL] (1900–1983), to the surreal- ist film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928),
The Unconscious A century before the modernists, the romantics had praised the mysterious source of creativity in the uncon- scious mind. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had mocked the puny efforts of reason to control the irratio- nal powers of dream and imagination. Not until Sigmund Freud, however, did the concept of an unconscious mind enter the philosophical calculation of Western civiliza- tion. In Freud’s theory, the unconscious was composed of powerful memories suppressed from consciousness, but still affecting thinking and behavior. The unconscious was like an underground river, hidden but powerful, that might erupt in an eerie dream or a caustic slip of the tongue.
Freud saw the unconscious as a psychic reposi- tory, a mental attic stuffed full of old memories. Stored there were the psyche’s most powerful and frightening thoughts—thoughts of death, violence, and sexual desire. To protect against its own dangerous ideas, the conscious mind censored these thoughts, repressing them into the unconscious. However, Freud found that this repression was never entirely successful. Unconscious thoughts reappeared as dreams or neurotic symptoms, disturbing normal thought with their insistent desires and fears. In Freud’s mental system, the conscious mind had to work constantly to control unconscious thoughts and transform their energy into socially acceptable activity.
Freud found evidence of the unconscious mind in virtually every aspect of human thinking. The appar- ently accidental forgetting of a friend’s name revealed
CRITICAL QUESTION Record a particularly vivid or puzzling dream in as much detail as you can. Then, explain as best you can the meaning or mental associations of the dream’s images.
an unconscious desire that she die. The artistic works of Sophocles and Leonardo, men long dead, left a record of their unconscious fantasies. Above all, the dream—that ordinary but puzzling mental work performed by every human every night—revealed the workings of the uncon- scious. The dream was, as Freud said, the “royal road” to the unconscious.
The existence of an unconscious mind put a question mark beside the entire history of Western thought. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, Western philosophy had enshrined reason as the core of human thinking. In his theory of the human psyche, however, Freud claimed that unconscious thoughts were more powerful and in a sense truer than conscious thinking. Logic and rationality were a necessary but inadequate defense mechanism against repressed desires and fears. After Freud, reason would never be the same again.
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type of hero. While the traditional realist novel was still primarily focused on the exploits or moral development of a central character, modernist literature was more likely to present an ironic hero, a character who frus- trates or disappoints the reader’s expectations for deci- sive action and moral growth. The modernist hero is over-self-conscious, unable to take action, immobilized by anxieties. One Eliot character asks with neurotic insecurity, “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”
The stories and novels of Czech author Franz Kafka (1883–1924) had a more sinister cast than Eliot’s ironic wit. Kafka imagined his central characters caught in absurd and terrifying circumstances, yet recounted their experiences with detached matter-of-factness. His novels created an insane, nightmarish world that we now describe with the adjective “Kafkaesque.” In Kafka’s story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), for example, the character Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find himself transformed:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy
dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into
a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were
armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little
he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into
stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt
could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off
completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin
compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before
his eyes.12
FRANZ KAFKA
From The Metamorphosis (1924)
Gregor’s family gradually abandons him to his degraded condition and he dies in loneliness and desperation.
Modernist Music and Architecture Modernist currents in music led in two different direc- tions. In one of these, exemplified by Stravinsky’s ballets, music achieved its own version of modernist primitivism, while the other path led toward esoteric innovation. Modernist architects strove for a rational- ism and functionality that would make architecture the most accessible of the modernist arts.
the action in modernist novels could be less coherent than in conventional works. The modernist style was distinguished by its writers’ desire to alter or expand traditional literary forms and discover new topics for the literary imagination.
Modernist prose fiction concentrated on char- acters’ inner thoughts, recording unconscious asso- ciations. Such inwardness characterized the novels of Englishwoman Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). Woolf developed the technique of interior monologue (also called stream of consciousness), which reproduces the flow of a character’s inner thoughts. Interior mono- logue gave to fiction the same kind of subjective com- plexity and relativism that we find in cubist painting. In Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for example, the events of a single day are described through the inte- rior thoughts of several characters. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) was the first modern work of feminist criticism, addressing the question of why there had been no female Shakespeare and “what effect had poverty on fiction.” She answered that a woman who wanted to write required an independent income and “a room of one’s own.”
The most influential modernist novelist was the Irishman James Joyce (1882–1941). His novel Ulysses (1922) is the story of a day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom. This long novel recounts Bloom’s adventures selling newspaper advertisements and argu- ing with friends, comparing them (often ironically) to the exploits of the epic hero Ulysses. Packed with dense allusions and symbolic associations, Joyce’s style makes Ulysses difficult to read, but gives the novel a rich tex- ture of meaning.
In poetry, the path to modernism had been blazed by the symbolists. Modernist poets extended the symbol- ists’ use of intensely imagistic and allusive language, and wrote in vers libre. In 1922 Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) published The Waste Land, probably the most influential modernist poem in English. Eliot’s poem evoked disturbing images of spiritual desolation, contrasting modern despair with ancient symbols of fertility and regeneration. To achieve unity, The Waste Land relied on literary allusion and recurring mythic symbols, drawn from anthropology, religion, and the musical works of Richard Wagner. By his use of sym- bolism, Eliot contradicted the romantic idea that a poem expresses the author’s inner state of mind or emotion. Instead, Eliot’s poem adopts a pose of ironic detach- ment, speaking through images that are chosen—some- times quite arbitrarily—from diverse sources.
The new forms in literature were coupled with a new Read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis on myartslab.com
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(1874–1951) were formed by the intense aestheticism and expressionist fervor of early-twentieth-century Vienna. Schoenberg [SHUH(r)N-bairk] rejected the Classical tradition of orchestral music as completely as Kandinsky broke with objective painting.
A Viennese contemporary of Freud and associate of expressionist painters, Schoenberg packed his early music with chromatic scales (scales using the half-tones of a musical key). Determined to “emancipate disso- nance,” as he said, Schoenberg abandoned the major– minor key system and created the first “freely” atonal music—that is, music not composed in a musical key. His atonal compositions were called musical “expres- sionism” because of their intense emotionality.
Stravinsky and Schoenberg—the New Music The scandalous Paris debut of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) in 1913 announced a new agenda for the performing arts. Where traditional works had intended to entertain and delight their audiences, mod- ernist performances seemed determined to provoke and perplex, even when rejected by an artistic public that was comfortable with traditional arts.
The Rite of Spring involved the collaboration of several geniuses of modernism. Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) was artistic director of the Ballets Russes, a Russian dance troupe that typified the modernist atti- tude. Diaghilev’s [DYAW-ghe-lev] daring productions made him the single most important figure in the rise of modernist ballet. His principal dancer was Vaslav Nijinsky (1888–1950), a brilliantly inventive dancer and choreographer who had outraged Parisian audiences with his erotic ballet for Debussy’s Prélude à “L’après- midi d’un faune.” Leon Bakst’s costume designs (Fig. 14.21) were themselves masterpieces of modernist style and had a formative effect on the art deco style.
Stravinsky’s music attacked the truisms of traditional music, the use of a consistent meter and key. Instead of using a single meter, Stravinsky employed numerous meters within a section, often changing the number of beats from one measure to the next. The use of different time signatures simultaneously or in rapid succession is called polyrhythm, and it gave Stravinsky’s music a jagged, “primitive” pulse. The Rite of Spring also exploited polytonality, the use of two or more musi- cal keys at the same time. Polytonality expanded the harmonic possibilities of music and allowed for broader dissonances—the tension created by unexpected chords. The dissonances in Rite of Spring are pronounced and prolonged, accounting for the ballet’s disturbing effect on the audience at its premiere.
Stravinsky later moved from the primitivism of his compositions for the Ballets Russes to music structured somewhat in the Classical style of Haydn or Mozart. The composer was partly motivated by his opposition to the cult of Wagner, with its subordination of music to feel- ing, story, and myth. Stravinsky’s later compositions, though Classical in form, continued to rely on modern- ist techniques of dissonance and innovative rhythms. Much of Stravinsky’s influence in modern music can be attributed to this eclectic attitude—a borrowing from many sources, both modern and traditional.
While Stravinsky’s music was rooted in Russian folk traditions, the musical ideas of Arnold Schoenberg
14.21 Vaslav Nijinsky, portrayed by costume designer Leon Bakst. Leon Bakst’s set and costume designs for the Ballets Russes defined a style of lushly colored exoticism that broadly influenced modern design.
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forms that were suited to the industrial and social needs of the early twentieth century. Some called their new buildings “machines for living in.”
In Germany and the Netherlands especially, archi- tects developed design principles that would define the essence of the modern. At the progressive German art school called the Bauhaus [BOW-howss], directed by the architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969), designers subordinated artistic form to function, creating steel- tube chairs and unadorned lamps that could be cheaply produced to serve the masses. The same principles of clean, functional, modern design were applied to archi- tecture when Gropius constructed the school’s new Weimar campus in 1926. The Bauhaus studio is a con- glomeration of rectangular forms, constructed of steel, ferro-concrete, and glass. Gropius’s signature invention was the so-called curtain wall, an exterior wall of glass that also displays the interior design of the building (Fig. 14.22). Through the curtain wall, a building could present itself with total honesty of form and material, free of any decorative façade to obscure or falsify.
The greatest visionary of modernist architecture was the Frenchman Charles Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887–1965). Trained by the same teacher as Gropius, Le Corbusier [luh kor-BYOO-zee-AY] shared the German’s aim of a socially useful architecture. He envisioned “radiant cities” based on his designs of glass skyscraper apartments and super-highways. Le Corbusier’s actual buildings in the 1920s and 1930s were more modest than his visionary designs. The Villa Savoye (Fig. 14.23) in Poissy, France, embodied his principles of geometric regularity and utility. The cubical box, 60 feet square (18.3 m2), is supported on pylons, to emphasize its independence from its site. Le Corbusier’s post-World-War-II buildings were built on the same principles and would define the “International Style” of modernist architecture.
The commercial buildings of the later 1920s and the 1930s typically employed a less severe, more popular style of modern design now generally called art deco. At the time the style was called “Moderne,” “zig-zag,” or “jazz-modern.” Art deco combined sleek, simple shapes with distinctive decorative motifs—the chevron, the zigzag, Egyptian and Central American symbols, and vegetal forms. As with Bauhaus-style productions, art deco objects typically employed modern materials such as chromium, stainless steel, and plastic. But, where the Bauhaus advocated a purist functionalism that served the masses, art deco’s eclectic sense of luxury and elegance appealed more to a middle- and upper-class public. Art deco’s most exuberant statement came in
Schoenberg applied his free atonality in both instru- mental and vocal works. The Six Little Piano Pieces (1911) are short fragments of atonal ideas. His song cycle Pierrot Lunaire (Pierrot Moonstruck, 1912) is a tour de force of musical modernism. The 21 songs in Pierrot Lunaire [PEE-(uh)-roh loo-NAIR] are written for a female vocalist and five instrumentalists. They relate the neurotic musings and misadventures of a clownish night-wanderer. The vocalist was to declaim the texts cabaret-style in a haunting delivery that Schoenberg called Sprechstimme [SPREKH-stimm-uh] (speaking voice). Without a tonal center toward which the dissonances resolve, Pierrot’s motives float and stagger through a free harmonic space.
The most popular work of atonal music was the opera Wozzeck (1925), composed by Schoenberg’s student Alban Berg (1885–1935) and considered a masterpiece of musical expressionism. Based on a fatalistic nineteenth- century play, Wozzeck [VOH-tsek] depicts opera’s most compelling modernist hero. The opera’s atmosphere of paranoia and despair relies upon Berg’s intricate musical score and frequent use of Sprechstimme. Its atonal har- monies are contained within tightly defined traditional forms, such as the sonata and fugue. In the opera’s final scene, Berg uses children’s songs to give the tragic story a final, aching twist.
Musically, Berg’s Wozzeck contains elements of Schoenberg’s most radical innovation: the creation of an entirely new system of tonality. By 1923, Schoenberg had invented the method now called serial composition (also serialism or the 12-tone method). For each serial work, Schoenberg set the 12 chromatic tones (the black and white piano keys in a musical scale) in a fixed sequence. Each tone in this tone-row, or “series,” had to be played before any tone was repeated; thus, the music could never gravitate toward a tonic note. While Schoenberg’s serialism brought a new abstract unity and coherence to music, it did not orient the audience with conventional melodic themes or motifs. Serialism’s high demands on the audience’s ear prevented popular success, even as later composers embraced its rigor and inventive possibilities.
Modernist Building and Design Modernists in architecture discarded the histori- cal revivalist styles of the late nineteenth century and conceived a building style based on simple geometric forms, functionality, and modern industrial materials. Working with glass, steel, and steel-reinforced concrete (called ferro-concrete), modernist architects sought
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14.23 Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1929–30. The exterior is rigorously simple with a ribbon window stretching along the whole wall, a design that became a common feature in modernist building. The building’s design is more forgiving on the interior, with its pastel colors and roof garden.
14.22 Walter Gropius, workshop wing, Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 1925–6. The sheer simplicity of Gropius’s glass and steel design recalls the purified abstraction of modernist painting. Among the numerous artistic refugees escaping Nazi Germany, Gropius became an influential teacher in America.
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the skyscrapers, department stores, cinemas, and hotels of North American cities. The spire of the art deco Chrysler Building in New York (Fig. 14.24), designed by William Van Alen, was clad in radiating stainless steel chevrons, soaring above gigantic “gargoyles” in the shape of automobile hood ornaments.
Art and Politics Just as in the Reformation and the French Revolution, so too in the 1920s and 1930s artists and writers were drawn into the political conflicts of their time. Sharp lines were drawn over such issues as communism, fas- cism, labor unions, and the poor. Modernists spoke with eloquence from many points on the political spectrum, commenting on events and agitating for change through the media of drama, painting, film, and photography.
Brecht’s Epic Theater Devastated by inflation and unemployment, Germany in the late 1920s was splintered into political factions, with increasing polarization between left-wing parties and the Nazis. An atmosphere of decadence and politi- cal cynicism pervaded German cities, where party mem- bers battled in the streets and cabaret singers mocked the corruption of wealth.
German artists responded with an ironic soberness exemplified in the works of the poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Rejecting the extravagant staging of German expressionist theater, Brecht devised a theory of acting and dramatic presentation that he called epic theater, which the playwright combined with Marxist political ideas. In Brecht’s method, the dra- matic action was interrupted by song, narrative com- mentary, and other techniques intended to break the “illusionist” spell of the conventional stage. In the epic theater, audiences would act as experts able to judge the action, like spectators at a boxing match. In 1928, despite his growing radicalism, Brecht and the composer Kurt Weill (1900–1950) scored a gigantic theatrical hit with Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). Brecht and Weill’s sardonic “ballad opera” compared the decadent ruling class to the criminal underworld of gangsters, beggars, and prostitutes. Weill’s [vile] music was full of bitter melancholy and modernist dissonance and contrasted sharply with the mythic Wagnerian opera that dominated German stages.
In 1933, Brecht went into exile, not long before Nazi censors ordered his works to be burned.
14.24 William Van Alen, Chrysler Building, New York, 1928–30. Especially in North America, the art deco style celebrated the inventiveness of industrial production and glamorized consumption. The Chrysler Building’s stainless steel chevrons were typical of art deco motifs; the building was under construction at the same time as New York’s other great art deco skyscrapers, the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center.
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In the early 1930s, murals by Orozco and Rivera affirmed Mexican national identity, celebrating the Aztec and Maya past and criticizing colonial oppression of Mexico’s indigenous people. Rivera’s Enslavement of the Indians (Fig. 14.25) decorates the walls of the palace built by the Spanish conqueror Cortés. Orozco painted the entire history of American civilization on the library walls of a New England college. His history led from the vitality of pre-Columbian myth and ritual to the spiritual degradation of modern materialism.
Another Mexican painter of this circle, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), has become an icon of Mexican mod- ernism, though not for her left-wing politics. At age 18 Kahlo was injured in a bus accident and took up painting in her hospital bed. Ten years later she married Diego Rivera and the artistic couple began a tumultuous,
Painting and Politics
The political passions of the 1920s and 1930s deeply touched the art of painting. In Mexico a bold style of mural painting arose out of the country’s popular revo- lution against a colonial-era dictatorship (1910–1920). In the revolution’s wake, the painters José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Siqueiros were com- missioned to paint the walls of Mexican public build- ings, reviving the mural traditions of Renaissance Europe and pre-Columbian Mexico. Like the artists of the Soviet avant-garde, the Mexicans wanted their art to serve the popular struggle. “We repudiate so-called easel painting,” proclaimed one muralist manifesto, “and we praise monumental art in all its forms, because it is public property.”13
14.25 Diego Rivera, Enslavement of the Indians, 1930–1. Fresco. Palace of Cortés, Cuernavaca, Mexico. In the tradition of the great Renaissance fresco painters, the muralist Diego Rivera used an emphatic visual style to depict native Mexicans’ suffering under Spanish colonialism. Note the sagging lines of the bundled sugar cane, repeated in the curving backs of the Indians, the overseer’s riding crop, and (inverted!) the lounging hacienda owner’s hammock.
14.26 Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944. Oil on canvas, 15 3⁄4 × 12 1⁄4 ins (40 × 31 cm). Fundación Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City, Mexico. Kahlo’s paintings were largely autobiographical, exploring a persona of fortitude and creative conviction in the face of physical suffering. Compare Grünewald’s depiction of the crucifixion in the Isenheim altarpiece, Fig. 9.12.
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held by a ghostly witness illuminate the atrocity. While drawing on the vocabulary of artistic modernism, Picasso created a monumental work of passionate pro- test in the great Spanish tradition of Goya.
Politics and the Cinema The art of cinema rose from gritty working-class begin- nings to the preeminent popular art form of the twen- tieth century. The silent film era’s greatest pioneer was D. W. Griffith (1880–1948), whose three-hour epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) established the funda- mental techniques of moviemaking. By the 1920s, the silent cinema was a thriving international industry that defined distinctive movie genres—from the comic genius of Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) to the brooding German expressionism of Nosferatu (1922), the first vampire movie.
In the Soviet Union, a generation of filmmakers adapted film to political purposes. In 1925, Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) made the classic film Battleship Potemkin, an international success and one of the most influential films in the history of cinema. The film recounts a 1905 mutiny on a czarist warship, an uprising that foreshadowed the Bolshevik Revolution. To tell the story, Eisenstein [EYE-zen-STINE] used an editing technique called montage, the rapid juxtaposi- tion of different images to create an idea or emotion in the viewer. Potemkin’s most famous montage sequence is the “Odessa Steps,” when czarist soldiers slaugh- ter the townspeople who are cheering the mutineers (Fig. 14.28). The sequence cuts rapidly back and forth between soldiers and victims, while a baby carriage
lifelong love affair. Essentially self-taught as a painter, Kahlo used self-portraiture as a vivid diary of her suf- fering and conviction. The Broken Column (Fig. 14.26) depicts her body pierced by nails and braced by a steel corset. The torso is cleft to expose a broken Ionic col- umn in place of her spine.
The single most famous political painting of this era must be Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (Fig. 14.27), an allegory of suffering and inhumanity. Picasso was responding to an incident from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), in which Spain’s progressive republican government battled an insurgent army of conservatives and fascists. In 1937, in support of the Spanish fascists, German bombers attacked the Basque city of Guernica [GAIR-nee-ka]. It was the first massive aerial bombard- ment of a civilian target, and the city, which had no military value, was obliterated.
Treating this outrage in modernist terms, Picasso depicted the city’s people allegorically as a picador’s horse, pierced by a spear and fragmented into jagged planes. Its anguished cry is shared by the human figures engulfed in the flaming city. An eerie eye and a lantern
14.27 Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Oil on canvas, 11 ft 5 1⁄2 ins × 25 ft 5 3⁄4 ins (3.49 × 7.77 m). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Picasso’s masterpiece protested an atrocity of the Spanish war by translating the event into an allegory of the bullfight. Hulking over a mother and her dead child is the bull, which represented “not fascism, but brutality and darkness,” according to Picasso.
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a Nazi party rally at Nuremberg, with financing from the Nazi government. The resultant film The Triumph of the Will (1934) contained shots of massed troops and Nazi flags, as well as scenes of Nazi youths. While presenting itself as documentary, Triumph of the Will was pure propaganda, promoting Hitler as an inspired orator and man of the people.
In the American Grain The modernist period—about 1900–1950—saw an artistic flowering in a North America stimulated by its contact with Europe but no longer culturally domi- nated by Europe. New York City was the center of New World modernism, although post-revolutionary Mexico, Chicago, and California all fostered modernist genius, too. In New York Duchamp created his ready- mades, and the 1913 Armory Show of cubist paintings and abstract art drew tens of thousands.
Regionalism and Renaissance In New York City, a group of gifted Americans gath- ered around Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), often called the father of modern photography. Stieglitz pioneered the art of “straight” photography—photographs that artfully captured visual truth without manipulation or influence from other arts. Stieglitz was joined in New York by the painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986),
careens down the steps—an image symbolizing the vul- nerability and innocence of the people.
The introduction of talking movies in 1927 revo- lutionized the art of cinema, and by the early 1930s international film was dominated by the Hollywood studio system. The commercial film studios produced thousands of movies in a standardized narrative and visual style, carefully fitting star actors into appropriate genres—musical, comedy, Western. In this era of the classic Hollywood cinema (about 1930–1950), artistic genius flourished, and defined film as a popular and richly varied narrative medium—comparable to the novel in its heyday.
The classic Hollywood cinema offered welcome relief from economic depression and war. In Germany, however, the Nazis used cinema as a medium of politi- cal propaganda. Hitler found his own cinematic genius in Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003). Riefenstahl [REEF- en-stahl] was commissioned to make a documentary of
14.28 Sergei Eisenstein, shot from the “Odessa Steps” sequence from the fi lm Battleship Potemkin, 1925. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin symbolized to many Westerners the cultural progress of revolutionary Russia. This famous montage sequence illustrated Eisenstein’s effective alternation of brief shots.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Choose a contemporary work of film, video, or photography that you would classify as propaganda. Analyze how its use of the visual medium conveys its political message.
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whose works transmuted organic shapes—flowers, skeletons, landscapes—into abstract forms. O’Keeffe’s attraction to the pure forms of nature was shared by a group of West Coast photographers who called themselves the f/64 Group. Rather than Stieglitz’s city scenes, the f/64 photographers trained their cameras on Western landscapes and the curves and volumes of flowers and fruit (Fig. 14.29), finding there a purity of form and eternal beauty that linked them to the American landscape tradition.
In Harlem, uptown from Stieglitz’s New York avant-garde gallery, a dynamic group of poets and art- ists created the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African-American letters in the 1920s. The movement’s intellectual father was W. E. B. Du Bois [doo-BOYZ], who declared in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”14 Among its most important figures were poets Countee Cullen (1903–1946) and Langston Hughes (1902–1967). Hughes powerfully expressed the frustrated desires of black Americans in such poems as Harlem, with its potent questions: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? . . . Or does it explode?” The Harlem Renaissance also included the young folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a
14.29 Imogen Cunningham, Magnolia Blossom, 1925. Photograph. © The Imogen Cunningham Trust, Berkeley, California. By photographing her floral subjects in extreme close-up, Cunningham revealed the abstract purity of line and shape in nature. Compare the approach of romantic nature painting (see page 338), which sought in nature the revelation of moral and philosophical truth.
14.30 Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942. Oil on canvas, 33 × 60 ins (84 × 152 cm). Art Institute of Chicago. Hopper painted lonely pastorals and American cityscapes, stylistically more naturalistic than European modernism.
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years.” Thinking she was recreating the ancient art of Greek dance, Duncan was actually challenging the regi- mented world of classical ballet with her freely interpre- tive movements. She was famous for her “free dances,” in a flowing white costume, moving lyrically on her scan- dalously bare feet to the strains of Beethoven or Wagner.
Less flamboyant but no less legendary experi- menters followed Duncan’s example. Trained in the Ballets Russes and the Russian ballet tradition, George Balanchine (1904–1983) found the artistic freedom in New York to create what was called modern ballet. Balanchine maintained a rigorously classical training, but his modern ballet sought a more abstract version of classical dance and a freer relationship to music. Martha Graham (1894–1991) fashioned a system of teach- ing modern dance that made it as rigorous as ballet. Graham taught dance as a means of directly expressing inner states of mind. Her dancers learned to feel oppos- ing forces in their bodies—forces that would draw their bodies down to the floor and then back upright again. Graham’s methods were proved in dance works that usually centered on her own performance. She first worked only with female dancers, and she often worked with women’s themes. Her works included Primitive Mysteries (1931) and Appalachian Spring (Fig. 14.31),
novelistic rendering of a young black woman’s search for love.
Outside New York, American artists drew their liter- ary or artistic innovations from the speech and land- scape of American locales—the kind of distinctively American scenes captured by painter Edward Hopper (Fig. 14.30). Among these American “regionalists,” known by their association with various American regions, were the novelist Willa Cather (1876–1947), whose novels were often set in Nebraska, and William Faulkner (1867–1962), who created an imaginary Mississippi county filled with intriguing characters. Faulkner’s most important novels, such as Absalom, Absalom! (1936), achieved a richness of language and complexity of form that ranked him with other masters of the modernist style in fiction.
The American Scene The invention of modern dance—the expressive and often spontaneous dance form based on a rejection of ballet’s classical rules—is often credited to the free- spirited American Isadora Duncan (1878–1927). Duncan earned her first dancing job after she exclaimed, “I have discovered the art which has been lost for 2,000
14.31 Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring, 1944, with music by the American composer Aaron Copland and sets by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Copland’s music for the last scene of Appalachian Spring builds on variations of the familiar tune “Simple Gifts,” a melody from the Shaker faith.
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the mountain vacation home he called “Fallingwater” (Fig. 14.32). Built for a department-store magnate in southwest Pennsylvania, Fallingwater is constructed literally around a waterfall: from a central core, ter- races of reinforced concrete are cantilevered out over a stream. The living room flows freely around a cen- tral fireplace, with mitered glass windows looking out over the wooded site. Technically daring but serene, Fallingwater became the most famous house of the twentieth century.
The Age of Jazz The most distinctly American art form was jazz, a music of popular melodies played with improvisational inven- tion and a characteristic “swing” rhythm. By 1920, jazz music could be heard in the clubs and dance halls of every city with a large African-American population, and by the 1930s it had become popular throughout America and Europe. Mainstream composers adapted jazz melodies and rhythms to concert music, particu- larly George Gershwin (1893–1937) in his Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and his opera Porgy and Bess (1935).
Jazz originated as an ensemble music, usually played in collective improvisation, that blended diverse African and European musical elements. Improvisation is the technique of composing the musical work while it is
a portrayal of a heroic pioneer woman. The music to Appalachian Spring was composed by Aaron Copland (1900–1990), whose works frequently quoted from American ballads and folk songs.
The American scene also fostered a budding genius in symphonic music. Composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) captured the aural flavor of American popular life—the Fourth of July, marching bands, and camp meetings— in his Three Pieces in New England (1903–1911). One of the work’s movements, called “Putnam’s Camp,” records the sounds of an Independence Day festival, punctuated by a dream sequence full of musical energy. Ives’s musical techniques had none of the abstract rigor of Schoenberg’s methods, but did explore broad dissonances.
The American scene produced an architect of genius, Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959), whose buildings reflected his sense of the American place. Working in Chicago before the Great War, Wright devised a “Prairie Style” of residential construction: homes of uncluttered interior space with long, low rooflines that reflected the prairie horizon. Wright’s Prairie Style embodied his belief that a house should connect the building, its occupants, and its natural surroundings— what he called “organic architecture.”
Wright’s career suffered in the 1920s and early 1930s, to be revived with his most spectacular achievement:
14.32 Frank Lloyd Wright, “Fallingwater” (Kaufmann House), Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1936–7. With his design and choice of materials, Wright organically connected house and natural setting. Compare the self-contained design of Le Corbusier (see Fig. 14.23), which Wright dismissively described as a “box on stilts.”
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being performed. Typically, a jazz soloist improvises variations on a familiar melody, inventing new rhyth- mic or melodic ideas at the moment of performance.
The first great genius of the jazz solo was trumpeter Louis Armstrong (1900–1971; Fig. 14.33), probably the best-known figure in the history of jazz. Armstrong migrated from New Orleans to Chicago, where he even- tually led his own jazz groups, the “Hot Five” and the “Hot Seven.” With his cornet or trumpet, Armstrong was able to mimic jazz singers by bending notes up or down, creating a mournful effect. In songs such as Hotter than That (1927), composed by his wife, the pia- nist Lil Hardin, Armstrong altered the tempo for dra- matic effect and “played around the tune,” exploring melodic variations in improvisational style. Armstrong also invented scat singing, vocals of nonsense syllables that imitate a jazz instrumental solo. Later in his career Armstrong became an icon of American culture, known
14.33 Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, 1925. Louis Armstrong’s recordings with the “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven” in the 1920s defined jazz music as a soloist’s art. Armstrong’s brilliant gift for musical improvisation influenced every generation of jazz musicians in the twentieth century.
for his performance of popular tunes such as Mack the Knife and Hello, Dolly.
The jazz ensemble was revived with the large dance bands of the 1930s and 1940s. These so-called swing bands expanded jazz’s appeal as dance music, especially to white audiences. To meet the enormous demand for jazz compositions, several important jazz compos- ers became prominent, among them Duke Ellington (1899–1974). As one of his players said, “Duke played the piano but his real instrument was the band.” Although he composed longer works, Ellington’s most famous pieces, such as It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) and Satin Doll, were short enough to be recorded on 78-rpm records. Ellington’s music spanned moods from ebullience to melancholy, and it skillfully took advantage of the qualities of his gifted band members.
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World War and Holocaust The buoyant sound of jazz swing bands consoled America and the world through the hardship of the Great Depression. But when Adolf Hitler’s German armies invaded the rest of Europe and ignited World War II (1939–1945), the Depression dissolved into global war, pitting the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) against the Allies (France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States). The war witnessed the first use of large-scale aerial bombard- ment, tank warfare, and atomic weapons. Ultimately in Europe, the determination of the Soviet Red Army and U.S. industrial power defeated Germany. In the Pacific, savage fighting had brought Japan to the brink of defeat when the United States employed its awesome new atomic bomb against Japanese cities.
The end of World War II brought more horror to light. As they liberated Europe, Allied forces discovered death camps where the Nazis systematically slaugh- tered millions of Jews, Slavs, and others, a calamity now called the Holocaust. Christian Europe’s ancient anti-Jewish prejudice had culminated in the Nazis’ “final solution,” a program to eradicate the Jews and other supposed inferior races. Revelations of the death
14.34 Cloud from the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, August 9, 1945. The bomb killed some 74,000 people—more than a third of the city’s population. U.S. President Harry Truman said on that day: “I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb ... It is an awful responsibility which has come to us ... We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
1900 CE 1905 CE 1910 CE 1915 CE 1917 The Russian Revolution
1918 Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White (14.12)
1900 Freud, Interpretation of Dreams
1905 Die Brücke forms in Dresden
1905–1906 Matisse, The Joy of Life (14.3)
1907 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (14.4)
1907–1954 Life of Frida Kahlo
1910–1920 Mexican Revolution
1911 Der Blaue Reiter organizes in Munich
1912 Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (14.1)
1912 Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire
1913 Stravinsky and Ballets Russes, Rite of Spring
1914–1918 World War I
C H A P T E R 1 4 : T I M E L I N E
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Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II with a display of awesome and deadly power, ushering in a new age of anxiety (Fig. 14.34). Apocalyptic in the scale of its destructiveness, a mushroom cloud now hung over the world.
camps shook Western values to their core. As German philosopher T. W. Adorno put it, “After Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbarism.”15
Holocaust of another sort was unleashed by the United States’s invention and use of atomic weaponry.
1920 CE 1925 CE 1930 CE 1935 CE 1922 Joyce, Ulysses; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
1930s Murals by Orozco and Rivera (14.25)
1931 Dali, The Persistence of Memory (14.20)
1933 Hitler takes power in Germany
1925 Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (14.28)
1925 Gropius, Bauhaus studio, Dessau, Germany (14.22)
1925 Louis Armstrong, jazz soloist, records with “Hot Five” (14.33)
1926 Miró, Personage Throwing a Stone at a Bird (14.19)
c. 1928 Brancusi, Bird in Space (14.11)
1928 Brecht, The Three-Penny Opera
1929 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
1929 Stock market crash, beginning of Great Depression
1936 Lange, Migrant Mother (14.3)
1936–1937 Lloyd Wright, “Fallingwater,” Pennsylvania (14.32)
1937 Picasso, Guernica (14.27)
1939–1945 World War II
1942 Hopper, Nighthawks (14.30)
1944 Graham and Copland, Appalachian Spring
CHAPTER REVIEW
A Turbulent Century How did modern physics revise the understanding of the universe? How did the Great War of 1914–1918 affect the European outlook? What was the Bolshevik Revolution? Who was Vladimir Lenin? Compare the effects of the Great Depression on Germany and the United States. What is fascism? How was mass media used to appeal to disaffected masses?
Modernism in Art How did African and Pacific art influence modernist art? How did the cubist style develop? What is non-objective art? How did Marcel Duchamp change the definition of art? What is dada? Compare expressionism in Germany and France. Who were Pablo Picasso, Pierre Matisse, and Wassily Kandinsky? What are Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter?
The Modern Mind What was Sigmund Freud’s the- ory of the unconscious? How did the surrealists apply Freud’s ideas? What is psychic automatism? What is stream of consciousness in writing? How did modernist authors and poets portray the hero?
Modernist Music and Architecture What was the Ballets Russes? Who was Igor Stravinsky? What is atonal music? What is the Bauhaus? Who was Walter Gropius? Describe the art deco style.
Art and Politics Describe Bertolt Brecht’s epic the- ater. Why did Mexican painters revive the Renaissance mural tradition? Why did Picasso paint Guernica? Who were Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl? How was the cinema used as propaganda?
In the American Grain How did Alfred Stieglitz affect the development of photography as an art? What was the Harlem Renaissance? Explain regionalism in American art. Who were Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham? How did Charles Ives, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington typify a budding American genius? What is the Prairie Style? What was Auschwitz?
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15.1 Takeshi Murata, still from Cone Eater, 2004. Video animation, color; sound approx. 4 minutes, looped ed. of 1 + 1AP (sound by Robert Beatty of Hair Police). Compared to traditional media such as painting or sculpture, electronic media are relatively unexplored, promising new ranges of expression, production, and distribution via computer and the World Wide Web.
15 While totalitarian fascism was turned back by the forces of democracy
in World War II, terrible questions remained. If the eminently civilized
Germans could claim they were “just following orders” in their attempt
to exterminate the entire Jewish people, what did this say about the pros-
pects for the human race? If American scientists could create weapons
to destroy entire cities in fl ashes so bright that survivors were reduced to
wandering blind, their eyes having melted from their sockets, what did
this say about the prospects for technological progress?
The Contemporary Spirit
K E Y Q U E S T I O N S
• How did art and philosophy express the anxieties of the atomic age?
• What modernist trends and techniques characterized postwar American art and architecture?
• How were the arts transformed by the social changes of the 1960s?
• What stylistic tendencies characterize postmodern art and literature?
• What is globalism and how is it shaping us today?
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Yet time ever marches forward. Louis Lumière invented the motion picture camera in 1895. Alan Turing cre- ated a conceptual blueprint for the electronic digital computer in 1936. Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs perfected the use of cel (celluloid) anima- tion in a motion picture in 1937. Alan Kay developed the crucial advancement of human–computer interac- tivity, the graphical user interface, in 1972. Timothy Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990.
Developments in motion picture and computer tech- nology converge today in the work of Japanese-American Takeshi Murata (b. 1974), who combines hand-drawn animation with computer graphic programming. In the screen capture from Cone Eater (Fig. 15.1), Murata manipulates flaws, defects, and broken code, amplifying programming errors and processing glitches to churn digital video images that are barely recognizable. A faint hiss from the bang that ended World War II lingers on in the background like cosmic radiation.
The Age of Anxiety The peace following World War II was anxiety-ridden and perplexed. The phantom of nuclear annihilation assumed a life of its own, fed by a rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union known as the Cold War. Meanwhile, Europe’s former imperial colonies won their independence, sometimes peacefully but more often with bloody struggle.
Amidst the shambles of history, western Europeans pondered a new interpretation of the human condition: Was it possible that life had no ultimate or transcendent meaning, that human existence was absurd? Even in the United States, which had survived the war relatively unscathed, peacetime prosperity could not quench some artists’ thirst for spiritual meaning.
Post-war America By 1950 the United States had emerged as the world’s dominant economic power, its consumer products and brands giving the world an American stamp. North American artists reacted to the widening consumer cul- ture with a deepening desire for inner truth and artistic purity. Jazz, for example, saw a revival of improvisa- tional purism in the style called “be-bop.” Be-bop’s jagged, adventurous style was perfected by saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker (1920–1955). On such be-bop classics as Little Benny (1947) and Bloomdido (1950), Parker’s relentless, searching improvisations main- tained only the chords of the original tune.
Parker’s exploratory solos of be-bop jazz marked the direction that jazz took in the postwar era. The insistent experimentation of musicians such as Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and their successors later restricted jazz to small and musically knowledgeable audiences. But it also spawned the immensely popular forms of rock and roll and rhythm and blues, the basis of most contemporary pop music.
As in the nineteenth century, materialism was asso- ciated with spiritual alienation and emptiness. The poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) belonged to a 1950s group called the Beats, American writers who explored themes of rootlessness and the endless quest for mean- ing. In one poem, Ginsberg describes an encounter with the ghost of Walt Whitman, the nineteenth-century American poet, in a California supermarket. Ginsberg’s consumer images seem to ask whether well-stocked supermarket aisles mask a spiritual desolation in the midst of material prosperity.
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing
the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork
chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the
store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every
frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)1
ALLEN GINSBERG
From Howl and Other Poems (1955)
While the Beats’ quest took them “on the road” (the title of a Beat novel), a group of American women authors turned inward. Called the “confessional poets,” these writers recorded intensely intimate accounts of their personal lives. Their spiritual self-searching was compounded with their protest against the subordi- nate roles often forced on them as women. The poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974) employed graphic images of female sexuality and menstruation, topics seldom explored by male poets. Another confessional, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), wrote the autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963), which described her fascination with suicide. Both Plath and Sexton eventually took their own lives.
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Existentialism In the postwar world, the fresh memories of holocaust were overlaid by Cold War confrontations and a mass society of avid consumption. Some philosophers responded to this situation by rebelling against all systems, asserting the need for authentic, individual action in an indifferent world. This attitude was called existentialism, a philosophy determined to live without the illusions of a universal order or an essential human nature. Jean-Paul Sartre, a promi- nent French existentialist philosopher, said human “exis- tence precedes essence.” That is, humans must live their lives without absolute values or divine laws. For the exis- tentialist, there were no assurances of human happiness or worth. However, there was an absolute freedom—for better or worse—to define what humanity was.
The existentialist hero typically was caught in a Kafkaesque world (see page 398), faced with a choice between conformity and an anguished but genuine freedom. The French writer Albert Camus (1913–1960) described this predicament in his reinterpretation of the ancient myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a stone perpetually up a hillside. To Camus [kam-YOO], Sisyphus’ labor was a metaphor for the absurdity of all human action. The hero recognizes that his efforts will never lead anywhere, never attain fruition or transcendence. Yet, in Camus, Sisyphus resumes his perpetual labor with a smile, thus affirming his absurd condition.
Although easily exaggerated and caricatured, exis- tentialism was rooted in a longstanding philosophical issue. Christian philosophers had long assumed that God controlled the universe and gave purpose to human life. Enlightenment philosophers had assumed that reason guided human history; existentialist philosophers stripped away such presumptions. Sartre believed humans were “condemned to freedom.” No divine order had prevented the Nazis’ horrible crimes against humanity. On the other hand, no innate human nature prevented humans from acting kindly and responsibly toward each other.
In the works of Sartre and Camus, existentialism was ultimately an affirmative philosophy. In their view, humans could live decently and “in good faith,” but only if they understood how precarious and uncertain their values were. To live life fully and responsibly required a recogni- tion of the universe’s final absurdity (Fig. 15.2).
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Select an event in your life that taught you about the essential nature of your existence. How does your insight from this experience compare with the outlook of existentialist philosophy?
K E Y C O N C E P T
15.2 Alberto Giacometti in his studio, photo by Ernst Scheidegger, c. 1960. Heroically dedicated to the task of “representing what I see”—a task he despaired was impossible—Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) was regarded as the existentialist artist par excellence.
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Sartre was closely associated with the existentialist woman of action Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). De Beauvoir [BOH-vwah(r)] was author of The Second Sex (1947), a founding text of modern feminism that criti- cized “the feminine” as a philosophical category. When women were treated as essentially different from men, she argued, they were robbed of their existential free- dom. Their value as persons was defined by and against men’s. De Beauvoir wrote frequently about the obstacles to free and equal male–female relationships, including her lifelong relationship with Sartre. As an activist, she closely linked the personal and the political. Her study of existentialism and action, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1949), examined the difficulty of making ethical choices in a world without universal rules or values.
The Theater of the Absurd The “theater of the absurd” rejected realistic devices or explicit political messages. Instead, absurdists used dream, burlesque comedy, and nonsensical language as dramatic metaphors for the emptiness of the human condition. The dramatist who most vividly dramatized a world without God was the Irishman Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), whose comically pathetic characters inhabit a wasteland of empty hopes and futile action. His plays stripped drama to its bare essentials—pairs of characters yoked to each other by dependency, speak- ing words that barely communicate, acting out the grotesquely exaggerated gestures of farce. Reflecting on the existential situation of the artist, Beckett explained: “… there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obliga- tion to express.”3
In Beckett’s theater, loneliness and alienation are afflictions that dwarf all other human suffering. In his “tragicomedy” Waiting for Godot (1952), the tramps Vladimir and Estragon spend their days waiting for a command from Godot [GOD-oh] that will give their lives purpose. These characters dwell in pointless trivial- ity—no work, no love, no sense of time. They encounter only the sado-masochistic pair of Lucky and the blind Pozzo, who renders the play’s bitterest commentary on human life: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”4 In the play’s final scene, Vladimir and Estragon decide not to hang themselves from the nearby tree because neither wants the other to be left alone. Better to confront the futility of their wait for Godot together, than for one to be condemned to loneliness.
Exploring the Absurd Amid the horror and spiritual desolation left by World War II, a new philosophy explored the possibilities for human freedom and meaningful action in the nuclear age. The philosophy of existentialism [eks-iss-STEN- shull-ism] sought engagement in a world that was essentially “absurd,” empty of fundamental or ultimate meaning. The existential hero typically faced a circum- stance that negated all human effort, like the doctor who combats the bubonic epidemic in Albert Camus’s novel The Plague (1947). In the face of a meaningless universe, Camus’s existential hero can only savor brief moments of joy or achievement.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was an existentialist man of action. With Camus, Sartre [SART(r)] was a leader of the French Resistance during World War II, writing and producing his first play in Nazi-occupied Paris. After the war, he associated himself with the French communists and the movement to free France’s colonies, declining the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 for political reasons. When Parisian students and workers revolted in May 1968, they acclaimed Sartre as an intellectual father of the student movement. Sartre followed his own prescrip- tion for l’homme engagé, the human individual engaged in the struggles of his own time.
Sartre expressed his complex and often contradic- tory philosophical positions in literary works. His best- known play was Huis clos (No Exit, 1944), in which three characters serve as each other’s tormentors in hell. In a revealing scene, a woman guilty of overriding van- ity finds that there are no mirrors in her part of hell. She must rely on a companion to apply her lipstick, and finally despairs that her perceptions of herself must be transmitted through others. The character's pessimistic conclusion is the play’s famous motto: “L’enfer, c’est les autres”—“Hell is other people.”
Sartre’s literary works reinforced his teaching that every human must ultimately take responsibility for his or her own actions. For this reason, Sartre found the existence of God to be incompatible with human freedom. Like Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche before him, Sartre argued that, even if God existed, humans were still left utterly free. He wrote:
Dostoyevsky said, “If God didn’t exist, everything
would be possible.” That is the very starting point of
existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God
does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because
neither within him nor without does he find anything to
cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.2
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One reason for New York’s prominence was the war itself. Numerous leading European artists had fled Nazi Europe to the United States, where they were an enormous stimulus to American artists. Meanwhile, the European art world was temporarily suppressed by the war’s aftermath and dominated by aging masters of modernism. The innovative spirit erupted in New York. Radical new styles were celebrated as a symbol of the West’s artistic freedom, and compared to the repression of Soviet-style communism.
The New York School Out of the heady atmosphere of postwar America arose a confident group of artists now called the New York school, whose artistic styles pushed aggressively toward abstraction. Taking their cue from European modernists, the New York school developed a style called abstract expressionism. While each painter had an individual style, most abstract expressionists also shared a non-objective style that also had the emotional directness of the expressionists. Hence the combina- tion of “abstract,” in the manner of Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, and “expressionist,” in the manner of Henri Matisse and Emil Nolde.
The best-known abstract expressionist was Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), an intense artist whose radi- cal methods symbolized the New York avant-garde. Pollock had been trained as a realist, but in the 1940s his work grew increasingly abstract. Finally, he dis- carded the brush altogether and took to dripping and splattering paint on the canvas, often mixing paint with sand or crushed glass (Fig. 15.3). Pollock described his painting method in these words:
My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever
stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the
unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need
the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more
at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since
this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides
and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method
of the Indian sand painters of the West.
I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s
tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks,
trowels, knives, and dripping fluid paint or a heavy
impasto with sand, broken glass, and other foreign
matter added.7
His method was self-consciously unconscious, akin to the psychic automatism of the surrealists. Such a spontaneous method was also called “action painting.”
The Existential Hero In the fiction of the 1950s, a kind of existential hero emerged who was searching for individual identity in the face of an oppressive or insanely bureaucratic system. The archetype of this existential hero appears in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952). Ellison (1914– 1994) relates a young black man’s encounters with a white-dominated world, including racist civic leaders in his home town, a hypocritical college president, and a political party that wants only to exploit his talents.
Invisible Man is an existentialist Bildungsroman (novel of education), a form established in the eighteenth century. Ellison’s main character (whose name we never learn) struggles to find his own identity, while the absurd world perceives him through stereotyped masks. His invis- ibility, the narrator says, is not simply a consequence of the color of his skin. It is a condition of the eyes through which others see him. As the narrator says in the novel’s prologue, when others “approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagina- tion—indeed, everything and anything except me.”5
In Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961), World War II is a symbol of the absurdity of human existence. Heller (1923–1999) portrays the futile efforts of the bomber captain Yossarian to escape from his maniacal commander. The commander keeps raising the quota of bombing missions necessary to be sent on leave. Yossarian hopes to save himself by claiming insanity, but is trapped by the impossible situation of a “Catch- 22,” which gives the book its title: a pilot “would be crazy if he wanted to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t, he was sane and had to.”6
Like Beckett and Ellison, Heller exploited irony and wit to expose the insanities of Yossarian’s world. Underneath the comedy, however, is an unrelenting horror at the senselessness of human suffering.
Art and Architecture in Postwar America For a long while, Western artists had migrated to Paris to join the newest movements or study the latest style. After 1945, the French capital lost its preeminence in the visual arts to New York City. New York in the postwar era was to be the heart of the artistic avant- garde, a label applied to artists and writers who define the newest wave of artistic experiment.
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in their luminous rectangles of color. Rothko left the edges of his rectangular shapes vaguely defined, so that the fields of color gently merged. Hence critics gave the name “color-field painting” to his work. His majestic canvases evoke a mood of spiritual contemplation (Fig. 15.5). A so-called second generation of abstract expres- sionists emerged in the 1950s to extend the range of New York school abstraction. These included Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2012), who “washed” thinned paints onto raw canvas. Her stained canvases (Fig. 15.6) were evanescent, free-form abstractions that had none of the existential anxiety of Pollock and her other predecessors.
Modern Architecture in Postwar America As architecture was revived in the postwar period, the monolithic glass towers of the International Style devel- oped into the dominant language of urban building. The centers of North American cities became canyons of glass skyscrapers in the austere, geometric style of modernist architecture. At the same time, architects
He said, “I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess.”8
A host of other New York painters practiced similar principles of abstraction, but with substantially dif- ferent results. Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), for example, often combined abstraction with recognizable forms, as in his wild—almost violent—depictions of women (Fig. 15.4). The works of Mark Rothko (1903– 1970), on the other hand, possess religious overtones
15.3 Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948. Oil and enamel on unprimed canvas, 5 ft 8 ins × 8 ft 8 ins (1.73 × 2.65 m). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. Labeled “Jack the Dripper,” Pollock was the best known of the avant-garde New York painters called “abstract expressionists.” Some critics saw existential despair in Pollock’s “drip” method. Others saw his cryptic canvases as the transcript of a pure and “existential” encounter between artist and materials.
View the Closer Look at Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) on myartslab.com
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15.5 Mark Rothko, Green and Maroon, 1953. Oil on canvas, 7 ft 7 1⁄8 ins × 4 ft 6 7⁄8 ins (2.3 × 1.3 m). The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Rothko wanted his “color-field” paintings to destroy the “finite associations” of ordinary life and refer to a “transcendent realm” of human experience.
15.6 Helen Frankenthaler, Formation, 1963. Acrylic on canvas, 6 ft 4 ins × 5 ft 5 ins (1.93 × 1.65 m). Private collection. Compare the mood created by Frankenthaler’s acrylic blues, yellows, and pinks to the colors of the medieval stained-glass window Notre-Dame-de-Belle-Verrière (Fig. 7.1).
15.4 Willem de Kooning, Woman and Bicycle, 1952–53. Oil on canvas, 76 1⁄2 × 49 ins (194.3 × 124.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. De Kooning said, “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it—drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space.”9
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experimented with more sculptural designs, especially in smaller-scale building. While these postwar styles realized the architects’ artistic aims, they also often suffered from a tension between architectural form and intended function. In the postwar era, the artistic visions of modern architecture were also put to the test of social usefulness and durability.
The German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe [MEES van-der-ROH-uh] (1886–1969) was already a leading architect of the pre-war International Style when he emigrated to the United States. Once Mies set- tled in Chicago in 1938, he boldly redefined the city’s skyscraper tradition, proclaiming that, in architectural design, “Less is more!” Mies’s monolithic glass-and- steel towers served as high-rise apartment buildings and as government offices.
Mies’s restrained style became the preferred idiom of office buildings. His Seagram Building in New York, co-designed with Philip Johnson (1906–2005), was an austere 38-story box on metal stilts, with an exterior of bronze I-beams and a gray-tinted glass skin. His use of metal beams as both a decorative and a struc- tural element resembles the Greek architectural orders in its spare economy. The Seagram Building (Fig. 15.7) offered North American corporations a style of unadorned purity on a grand, if somewhat dehuman- izing, scale.
The triumph of Mies’s angular purity did not pre- vent other architects from seeking other directions. In the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, his last great building commission, Frank Lloyd Wright achieved an organic unity that few modern buildings possess (Fig. 15.8). As Wright said, “Here for the first time archi- tecture appears plastic, one floor flowing into another (more like sculpture) instead of . . . stratified layers cut- ting and butting into each other.”10 The building’s inte- rior was a single ramp spiraling gradually upward to envelop a great central, glass-domed atrium. The same spiral was expressed on the exterior. The Guggenheim Museum was, indeed, a beautiful work of sculptural architecture. However, built to house a famous collec- tion of modern art, the Guggenheim’s slanted floors, curving walls and low ceilings were oddly suited to its primary function.
15.7 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Seagram Building, New York, 1954–8. Height 512 ft (156.2 m). Mies’s glass-and-steel box was the logical outcome of the International Style, invented by modernist pioneers Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Similar skyscrapers dominated the skylines of North American cities in the 1960s and 1970s.
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amused friends—many among them artists, such as Noguchi—with performances of a miniature sculptural circus composed of innumerable acts fashioned simply in wire. His six years in Europe exposed him first-hand to the ideas of the leading artists of the day. Eventually Calder’s characteristic works became playful assem- blages of cut-out shapes suspended in air, dubbed
American Sculpture in the Postwar Era The careers of four independent-minded sculptors describe the arc of American sculpture during this period.
Illegitimate son of a Japanese poet and an American schoolteacher, Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) studied stone sculpture in Constantin Brancusi’s Paris studio after receiving one of the first Guggenheim Fellowships in 1927, traveling thereafter through Russia, China, Japan, and Mexico. Returning to America, he earned a living through portraiture, and made stage sets for Martha Graham’s dance troupe. After Pearl Harbor, he first voluntarily entered a Japanese internment camp in Arizona, but he escaped while on furlough some months later, making his way back to New York City: “I henceforth resolved to be an artist only.” In 1946, the Museum of Modern Art included him in its exhibi- tion Fourteen Americans (Fig. 15.9). During the decade that followed he designed numerous gardens through- out the world, inspired by the rock gardens of Japan.
After finishing a degree in engineering, Alexander Calder (1898–1976) moved to Paris in 1926 where he
15.9 Isamu Noguchi, installation view, Museum of Modern Art exhibition Fourteen Americans, 1946 (view through Kouros). Photo by the artist. In the exhibition catalogue, Noguchi says, “I say it is the sculptor who orders and animates space, gives it meaning.”11
15.8 Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1957–9. Largest diameter 128 ft (39 m), height 92 ft (28 m). Guggenheim Museum, New York. Completed after Wright’s death, the Guggenheim realized his ambition to create a purely sculptural building.
View the web resource on the Guggenheim Museum on myartslab.com
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15.12 David Smith, Cubi XVIII, Cubi XVII, Cubi XIX, 1964, 1963, 1964. Heights 9 ft–9 ft 8 ins (2.74–2.95 m). Art © Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Smith’s Cubi series combined large geometric shapes in dynamic composition. Consider Smith’s play with balance and mass in these monumental standing constructions. How does the natural setting shown here enhance their visual impact?
15.10 Alexander Calder, Spring Blossoms, 1965. Painted metal and heavy wire, height 4 ft 4 ins (1.32 m). Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. Calder often suspended his mobiles from the ceiling, where a breath of air might set them in motion. His mobiles provided an important connection between the modernists and postwar sculpture.
15.11 Louise Nevelson, Black Wall, 1959. Wood, 112 × 85 1⁄4 × 25 1⁄2 ins (264.2 × 216.5 × 44.8 cm). Tate Modern, London. Nevelson rolled a wheelbarrow through New York’s streets to scavenge wood scraps and other materials for her wall assemblages. Compare her use of found objects to Rauschenberg’s in Monogram (Fig. 15.13).
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he said. Iron, Smith averred, “possesses no art craft.” Later, in his Cubi series, Smith exploited the aesthetic qualities of stainless steel: burnishing shimmering sur- faces with the strokes of a grinder to animate the reflec- tions of the natural surroundings at his “sculpture farm” up the Hudson River from New York City (Fig. 15.12).
Black Mountain College and the Avant-garde Founded in 1933 in North Carolina as an experimental college dedicated to progressive education, and empha- sizing the creative arts, Black Mountain College became a refuge for artists fleeing Nazi Europe, and home to numerous maverick spirits. In the years before its closing in 1957, Black Mountain became a well-spring of sub- terranean tendencies that would surface in the 1960s.
Robert Rauschenberg [ROW-shun-berg] (1925– 2008) studied at Black Mountain College, where he came into contact with other avant-garde innovators. Rauschenberg’s works followed in the tradition of dada artists, who often created art from discarded objects. In the 1950s, Rauschenberg devised mixed-media com- positions of photographs, silk-screens, and “found” objects. His “combine painting” Monogram (Fig. 15.13) rehabilitates the refuse of mass society in accord with Rauschenberg’s credo: “to close the gap between art and life.”
mobiles by Marcel Duchamp. The polymorphous shapes in Calder’s mobiles seemed to be borrowed from surrealist paintings (Fig. 15.10). By delicately suspend- ing these shapes on wires, Calder introduced move- ment through interaction with even the slightest chance breezes. Other Calder mobiles were motorized so that the motion was constant and predictable.
Louise Nevelson (1900–1988) used the refuse of industrial society to compose her sculptures of dis- carded boxes, furniture, and other off-casts. Sculpture built up from such disparate “found” material is called assemblage, a method pioneered by cubism and Duchamp. Nevelson composed her assemblages from found wood objects—chair slats, spindles, and boxes she originally collected to feed the fire of her studio woodstove. These odd components, assembled within crate-like compartments and built into an imposing wall of shapes and textures, were usually unified by a single color of paint, often black (Fig. 15.11). The paint emphasizes these mundane elements as artistic shapes, as well as the artistic process of rehabilitating the refuse of modern urban life.
Iron was the preferred medium of David Smith (1906–1965). As a teenager, Smith learned to weld in an automobile plant. His early sculptures were abstract arrangements of welded wrought iron he called “draw- ings in space” that clearly represented the machine age. “My reverence for iron is in function before technique,”
15.13 Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955–9. Construction, 5 ft 4 1⁄2 ins × 3 ft 6 ins × 5 ft 3 1⁄4 ins (1.64 × 1.07 × 1.61 m). Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Art © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Rauschenberg’s “combine” paintings merged painting and printmaking into three- dimensional sculptures with “found” objects like the stuffed goat and tire here.
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The signature composition of aleatory music was Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), which called for 12 radios, each tuned to a different frequency. Another famous Cage work reached to the very bound- ary of sound itself—silence. His 4ʹ33ʺ (1952) instructed the performer to sit with his or her instrument for the specified time, playing nothing. The “music” consisted of the audience’s reaction and other chance sounds in the auditorium. Cage’s purpose was to show how the sounds that surround us are all music, if only we listen.
The Sixties The direction of the twentieth century turned decisively during the 1960s. In 1961 a youthful new American president announced to an astonished Congress a new national purpose: to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. In 1963 a young Baptist minister from Alabama stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and proclaimed to a crowd more than 200,000 strong that he had been to the mountaintop. Inspired by the non-violent principles of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) defied white America to make good on the ideals of liberty and justice for its black citizens as well. But by 1968, the youth of America had taken to the streets to protest not only America’s persistent
In dance, Black Mountain’s spirit of improvisation and collaboration was realized in Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), a graduate of Martha Graham’s modern dance school. Although Cunningham’s dance choreogra- phy was classically abstract and technically demanding, he built spontaneity into his performances—sometimes choosing the sequence of movements in a dance by flip- ping a coin. Several of his works were performed with sets designed by Rauschenberg and other artists of his time, and he believed that music, dance, and setting should be independent of one another, creating visual dissonances that arrested the audience’s attention.
Both Rauschenberg and Cunningham were influ- enced in their association with John Cage (1912–1992), a witty creator of highly unconventional music who had come to teach at Black Mountain (Fig. 15.14). Cage joined the New York avant-garde scene in the 1940s, after studying in Europe with Arnold Schoenberg. In New York, he became interested in Oriental philosophy, especially the Zen Buddhist principle of non-intention, or wu-wei. Under the influence of Zen, Cage composed works that reduced the role of choice or decision in composition. In 1951, he wrote a piece for piano by flipping a coin to decide the sequence of tones—hence the term aleatory music [AY-lee-uh-tor-ee] (from the Latin alea, or dice).
15.14 John Cage made Variations V in 1965 for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, performing here for a television taping session in Hamburg, Germany. In the foreground Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma operate equipment to modulate sounds triggered by dancer movements; video manipulations in the background are by video artist Nam June Paik.
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G L O B A L P E R S P E C T I V E
In the post-1945 period, the nations of Africa and Asia shed the yoke of Western imperialism and won national independence. The first triumph in this historical process was India’s struggle against British rule, led by the activ- ist sage Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948; Fig. 15.15), known as Mahatma (“Great-souled”). Gandhi’s philosophy of prin- cipled, non-violent resistance would influence many of the century’s struggles against injustice.
As an Indian lawyer in South Africa, Gandhi had suf- fered the humiliation of that nation’s race laws. In organiz- ing South Africa’s Indian community (he lived and worked there for 21 years, from 1893 to 1914), Gandhi first articulated the principle of satyagraha (devotion to truth), the peaceful non-cooperation with unjust laws. Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence was derived from his eclectic interpretation of Christian, Muslim, and Hindu writings, especially the Bhagavad-Gita, the ancient dialog between the god Krishna and an anguished warrior.
Gandhi’s principles characterized the pursuit of truth as a kind of combat but without violence. Satyagraha, he wrote
in his autobiography, “did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent.” Instead, the opponent “must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy.”12 Gandhi also preached Indian self-sufficiency, urging Indians to weave their own cloth and to boycott British schools.
Gandhi’s campaign against Britain’s imperial rule of India reached a dramatic climax in 1930 with his famous Salt March. Gandhi’s example mobilized thousands of Indians to suffer British violence in disobeying imperial salt laws. When India finally won its independence in 1948, however, Gandhi could not prevent his country’s violent partition into separate Hindu and Muslim nations, modern Pakistan (today Pakistan and Bangladesh) and India.
In the next two decades, nations across Africa and Asia gained their independence, often through peaceful nego- tiation but sometimes in bloody conflict, for example in Algeria and Vietnam. Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of satya- graha was more often adopted in Western democracies, where advocates used non-violent resistance to protest against racial discrimination, nuclear weapons, and war.
15.15 Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi made the spinning wheel a symbol of Indian independence from the manufactured products of British imperialism. When his followers accepted arrest in non- violent resistance to imperial laws, they overwhelmed the justice system and eventually British rulers agreed to Indian national rule.
Gandhi and Colonial Liberation
Read a speech by Gandhi on civil disobedience on myartslab.com
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the mass-produced commercial art of magazines, televi- sion, and movies, and incorporated iconic images and objects—for example, flags or beer cans—into works that posed as “high” art. By embracing mass culture, however ironically, pop art discounted the elitist spiri- tual pose of abstract expressionism and sought to depict the reality of consumer society.
The most flamboyant pop artist was Andy Warhol (1928–1987), whose works of mass-culture images show little visible attempt at artistic creativity. Warhol worked with the most banal and familiar images he could find, like a Coca-Cola bottle or a Campbell’s soup can. His silk-screened images of actress Marilyn Monroe (1962; Fig. 15.16) and stacks of Brillo boxes directly challenged the aesthetics of abstraction. By bringing consumer icons to attention, however, Warhol imbued them with an aesthetic value that the same objects lacked when sit- ting on a supermarket shelf. In other words, any image could be art, just as any person (no matter how banal) could be a celebrity. Warhol summed up this idea in his sardonic proclamation: “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”
The process of making art more and more abstract led to a style that was expressly anti-expressionist, called minimalism. Minimalist painters worked in large geometric forms of uniform color. Their fields of color were flat and delineated by a precise “hard-edge.” The sculptural version of this trend used large-scale geomet- ric forms, stripped of all content and decorative intent. Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd (1928–1994) purged his work of any reference to other objects or ideas (Fig. 15.17). He sought to do away with “illusionism,”
racism, but America’s far-off war in Vietnam, one they considered unjust and were unwilling to serve in and die for. These powerful social changes were magnified by television and the pop industry of a strapping young consumer society. Their force was multiplied by the pre- ponderance of youth, baby boomers conceived during the giddy postwar years, now come of age. While these social changes were reflected by transformations in the visual arts, no art form touched the public like music, and no form of music affected the public as widely as popular music.
Visual Arts Avant-garde artists stressed art as idea and process. In 1959 Allan Kaprow coined the term “happening” to describe intentionally provocative environments and improvisational multimedia art events in which the spectators were expected not merely to watch but to actively participate. By disrupting the historic traditions of art, by making artists and audiences equal partners, happenings sought to close the gap between art and life, transforming art and its reception by the public.
This transformational spirit was felt around the world. The Japanese group Gutai, the international Fluxus movement based in Germany, and the French Situationist International, were all experimenting with the same general ideas at about the same time.
The predominating New York avant-garde move- ment that followed abstract expressionism was pop (for popular) art, a style far removed from the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. Pop art borrowed from
15.16 Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Oil, acrylic, and silkscreen on enamel on canvas, 6 ft 8 7⁄8 ins × 4 ft 9 ins (2.06 × 1.45 m). Tate Modern, London. Warhol was the best known of the pop artists, who drew their imagery from the mass culture of post-war consumer society.
View the Closer Look at Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych on myartslab.com
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North American rock and roll was transmitted via tours and recordings to Britain, where it was taken up by bands from working-class areas. The resultant “British wave” of rock and roll was led by The Beatles, a clean- cut group from Liverpool whose love songs charmed the Anglo-American public. The Beatles’ revolutionary album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) was a landmark in popular music: it was the first rock-and-roll record to present itself as a coherent musi- cal whole, rather than a collection of popular tunes.
American pop music reflected political currents. Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan (b. 1941) was the prophet of the youth counterculture, writing stirring protest songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They are a-Changin’.” Influenced by the poetry of the Beats, Dylan and other folk singers sang about civil rights and social justice, and spoke out against the Vietnam War. In San Francisco in 1967, community activists organized a countercultural happening, the Human Be-In, a festival featuring speeches by Timothy Leary and music by local bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. It proved to be the model for future music festivals, such as Monterey Pop (later in 1967) and Woodstock (in 1969). Meanwhile, the civil rights movement and racial integration provided new avenues for African-American musicians. The signature style of this new era was rhythm and blues (also called soul), music with a strong rhythmic ground and blues inflections. James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Marvin Gaye, among others, came to define much of the r & b music of this era and became pop stars on a grand scale, known around the world.
which he called one of “the most objectionable relics of European art.”13 Judd even did away with the artist, and had his works manufactured for him in ordinary machine shops.
The trend towards minimalism was publicized and explained in the obscure essays of art magazines. This naturally led to theory-laden conceptual art, which pre- sented the notion that art might simply be an idea; the artwork itself could practically be eliminated. Like the happenings at the beginning of the decade, minimalism and conceptual art were probing ways to abandon the easel, escape the studio, and defy the museum.
Arising out of the general atmosphere of protest of the times, these movements were not merely reactions to abstract expressionism; they were critiques of his- tory, of the idea of cultural progress, of the belief in scientific objectivity—in short, of the universal tenets of modernism itself.
Modern Music While happenings, pop art, minimalist art, and con- ceptual art would come to shape the art that followed, none of them had the impact of music on the feelings of the times.
The hip-rolling rebellion of rock and roll—a pop style featuring electric guitars and a strong rhythmic drive—matched the rebellion of the age. In the 1950s, Elvis Presley and other early rock and rollers skillfully reinterpreted traditional African-American blues styles for their white audiences and infused this tradition with youthful energy.
15.17 Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968. Stainless steel and plexiglass, 33 × 68 × 48 ins (83.8 × 172.7 × 121.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Art © Judd Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Although fervently rejecting the label “minimalist,” Donald Judd created radically understated sculptural works. The artist removed himself emphatically from the work’s manufacture, employing an industrial shop to fabricate the “sculpture” according to his exact specifications.
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• an emphasis on the local and particular rather than the universal; and
• in the arts, a tendency toward parody, pastiche, and an eclectic mixture of styles.
Postmodern artists have had to find a place between two overwhelming cultural forces. On the one side is the legacy of modernism and its heroic inventors. On the other side is the mass culture of television, film, and advertising, with its capacity to dominate and devour all communication. In it but not of it, postmodern art- ists must adopt an ironic attitude.
The photography of Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) is emblematic of the fluid identity adopted by the post- modern artist. Having enjoyed “dressing up” since childhood, Sherman poses herself in costumes, wigs, and make-up, always trying to portray someone who she is not while exploring the stereotypes of womanhood and personality (Fig. 15.18). Rather than telling the viewer what to think, Sherman’s work confirms the malleabil- ity of identity; everyone sees something different.
According to one critic, the challenge for postmodern artists is “to choose and combine traditions selectively, to eclect (as the verb of eclecticism would have it) those aspects from the past and present which appear most relevant for the job at hand.”14 As a result, postmodern works are often stylistic hybrids. A postmodern novel
The Postmodern It is hard to distinguish where modernism ends and post- modernism begins. By the same token, it is debatable whether we are still in the postmodern era or whether things have moved along such that we are in a later, yet to be named, historical epoch, or even whether his- tory as we have understood it any longer exists. What we can say is that the tendencies of happenings, pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art coalesced with the general feeling of criticism and protest: against colonialism, against the subjugation of women and minorities, against the denial of inalienable human rights. Meanwhile, the awareness that future human well-being depends upon common interests, shared all around the globe, has grown.
One social critic called the later twentieth century a “post-industrial society,” dominated by the exchange of information rather than material production. This new age is characterized by rapid social change, shifting boundaries, and uncertainty. In response, a new sensi- bility emerged called postmodernism, which could be summarized as: • skepticism toward any representation of reality that
claims to be universal or objective; • a focus on the “construction of reality” through lan-
guage and symbol;
15.18 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978. Black and white photograph, 8 × 10 ins (20.3 × 25.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. While studying painting, Sherman began to ask herself, “Why am I wasting my time elaborately copying things when I could use a camera?”15
She purposely developed her earliest photographs to look like cheap promotional giveaways.
Watch a video about Cindy Sherman's work on myartslab.com
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language of orthodox Modern architecture. … I am for messy vitality over obvious unity.”16
One flamboyant response to modernist purism was the high-tech architecture of the Georges Pompidou National Center for Arts and Culture in Paris (1977; Fig. 15.19). Dedicated to contemporary art, music, and culture, this museum was a political monument (to a former French president) and a statement of French nationalism.
Designed by Renzo Piano (b. 1937) and Richard Rogers (b. 1933), the Pompidou Center is a high-tech fantasy. Instead of being hidden within, the building’s mechanical guts—heating and cooling ducts, plumb- ing, service elevators—are its skin, brightly colored for visual emphasis. Although Parisians initially opposed this brazenly nontraditional arrangement, the museum’s plaza became a lively stage for Parisian street life almost immediately, surpassing both the Louvre Museum and the Eiffel Tower as a tourist attraction.
During the 1980s, the postmodern style was applied as well to the large, urban office buildings that had been the staple of modernism. The first significant public building in postmodern style is Michael Graves’s Public Services Building (Fig. 15.20) in Portland, Oregon, known as “the Portland.” The building’s decorative façade distinguishes it immediately from the uniformity
such as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) could be detective fiction, Gothic novel, and learned treatise, all in one. Postmodern buildings quote decora- tive motifs from Renaissance and neoclassical architec- ture. Meanwhile, postmodern philosophy questioned whether the author or artist really exists. It claimed that, in the postmodern era, the human “subject”—the autonomous, individual, rational self—is disappearing, its place being taken by the “protean” self, a constantly changing and evolving self, made of the interwoven voices and images of post-industrial culture.
Postmodern Architecture Postmodernism is easiest to see in architecture, where it arose as a reaction against modernism. Modernists such as Mies van der Rohe had insisted on buildings in which nothing distracted from the clarity of form. Postmodern architects favored eclecticism. They enter- tained a willingness to borrow from history (including modernism, which they regarded as simply another, if most recent, historical epoch) as well as a willing accep- tance of the complexity and contradiction of actual conditions. Robert Venturi (b. 1925), a pioneer of this new eclecticism, wrote in 1966: “Architects can no lon- ger afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral
15.19 Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Georges Pompidou National Center for Arts and Culture, Paris, 1977. The museum’s high-tech exterior of exposed struts and pipes explicitly violates the modernist ideal of a smooth exterior shell. By placing these elements on the outside of the building, the architects also expanded the interior space available for exhibitions.
View the web resource on the Georges Pompidou Center on myartslab.com
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and Philip Glass, broke away from their training in the twentieth-century tradition of atonality. They stripped music down to a few bare musical fragments that were repeated with slow and subtle variations. For example, Terry Riley’s (b. 1935) In C (1964) consists of 59 musical fragments in the key of C, to be played by the ensemble in any order they choose.
The best known of these composers is Philip Glass (b. 1937), who developed a minimalist technique in more ambitious works involving dance and theater. His early music consists of the repetitive interweaving of melodic patterns. Glass achieved popular success with an opera staged together with Robert Wilson (b. 1941) entitled Einstein on the Beach (1976), which sold out perfor- mances in the traditionalist Metropolitan Opera in New York (Fig. 15.21). Part of Glass’s enthusiastic audience consisted of fans crossing over from rock music. The success of Einstein on the Beach as Gesamtkunstwerk in the mold of Wagnerian opera paved the way for other modern operas, most significantly Laurie Anderson’s (b. 1947) four-part, four-night, eight-hour multimedia United States (1983) and John Adams’s (b. 1947) Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991).
The New Fiction When the novelist John Barth (b. 1930) suggested in the 1960s that literature was “exhausted,” he meant that literary modernists had used up the novel and the short story. Compensating for this exhaustion, works such as Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1967) and Thomas Pynchon’s (b. 1937) Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) exhib- ited a dizzying self-consciousness of language and form, with convoluted plots and shifts among different fic- tional forms.
Such postmodern works are sometimes called meta- fiction because they seem to be stories about stories and fictions about fictions. The acknowledged master of contemporary meta-fiction is the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), whose metaphysical style influenced a generation of postmodern writers. Borges’s [BOR-hayss] short fiction and essays (he never wrote a novel) are largely concerned with the sphere of intellectual games and fantasy. Rather than describe social reality, Borges created intricate but artificial liter- ary worlds that were more interesting and more intel- ligible than the real.
Borges’s dominant metaphor for this artificial world is the labyrinth, a self-contained maze that defines its own rules and signposts. In one well-known story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges tells of a 40-volume
of modernism. Two piers rise on either side of a seven- story barred window, ending in “eyebrow” ledges. Graves (b. 1934) mounted the squat tower on a base of darker granite, a technique adapted from the art deco of the 1920s. The entire exterior is a historical pastiche, overblown with Egyptian flavor, and embellished with a colossal allegorical figure of “Portlandia” hammered in sheet copper (like the Statue of Liberty) and mounted over the building entrance.
Postmodern Music In the 1960s, a small group of avant-garde compos- ers, chiefly Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich,
15.20 Michael Graves, Public Services Building (“the Portland”), Portland, Oregon, 1980–3. Note the decorative elements (“eyebrow” ledges, the wreaths on the side) that Graves employs to emphasize the building as an image.
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planet?” the narrator asks. “Tlön may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.”18
In Latin America, Borges was precursor to an adven- turous new style called magic realism, for its blend of realistic narrative and elements of fantasy and myth. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928) received international acclaim for his One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). The novel recounts the lives of seven generations of a family in the fictional village of Macondo. García Márquez [gar-SEE-a MAR-kez] merges surreal circumstances with realistic observations of social class and politics. At one point, for example, the villagers all lose their memory and need to erect signs to remind them of the names of things. One sign reads simply, “God exists.” In a typical postmodern gesture, the narrative’s last pages incorporate characters from other Latin American novels, acknowledging their influence by giving their characters a new fictional life. García Márquez’s splendid mix of fantasy and realism inaugurated a new wave of Latin American fiction.
encyclopedia describing life on the imaginary planet of Tlön. The encyclopedia of Tlön resembles a labyrinth in its inescapable complexity.
One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of
denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined,
that the future has no other reality than as present
hope, that the past is no more than present memory.a
Another school declares that the whole of time has
already happened and that our life is a vague memory
or dim reflection, doubtless false and fragmented, of an
irrevocable process. Another school has it that the history
of the universe, which contains the history of our lives
and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting
produced by a minor god in order to communicate
with a demon. Another maintains that the universe is
comparable to those code systems in which not all the
symbols have meaning, and in which only that which
happens every 300th night is true. Another believes that,
while we are asleep here, we are awake somewhere else,
and that thus every man is two men.17
JORGE LUIS BORGES
From Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1956)
a. Bertrand Russell (The Analysis of Mind, 1921, page 159)
conjectures that our planet was created a few moments ago, and
provided with a humanity which “remembers” an illusory past.
[Borges’s note]
Borges’s narrator compares the benevolent fantasy of Tlön’s inventors to the ideological fictions of mod- ern politics. “Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered
15.21 Einstein on the Beach, as staged by Robert Wilson in 1976. Photo © Babette Mangolte; Théâtre de la Ville, Avignon, France. As staged by Robert Wilson, the four-hour “science- fiction opera” uses oversized dramatic tableaux—including a trial, a steam locomotive, and a futuristic spaceship— to portray physicist Albert Einstein’s fascination with numbers, music, and philosophy.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Which is more attractive: the virtual worlds of films, games, and fantasies, or real experience? Why? What are the psychological and moral consequences of absorbing ourselves in fictional (but reasonable) worlds like Borges’s Tlön?
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was Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970; Fig. 15.22), a spiral form built from black basalt, limestone rocks, and earth in the Great Salt Lake of Utah. For Smithson (1938–1973), the work evoked a geological time that superseded the brief history of artistic fashion. In 1977, James Turrell (b. 1943) undertook the reshaping of Roden Crater in the wilderness of Arizona. Turrell con- structed tunnels beneath the crater that aligned with the cardinal directions in the manner of ancient temples. Said Turrell, “the separation that occurs in a gallery between spectator and artwork is impossible when the ‘work’ surrounds you and extends for a hundred miles in all directions.”20
Like the earth artists, the artists Christo (b. 1935) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009) conceived works that burst the bounds of the studio and gallery, but their main focus became the social experiences required to accomplish such art making. Christo and Jeanne- Claude's projects transform their rural or urban set- tings temporarily (and in this way they are installations, artistic works created for a particular site and then dismantled), but they also require lengthy processes of public hearings beforehand to gain legal permits, and the large scope of their works require extensive logistical preparation as well as legions of workers (Fig. 15.23). Lasting for only 14 days, Running Fence (1976) is a poetic commentary on the transitory nature of political boundaries that may divide people, but can never outlast the earth itself.
From 1980 to 1983, neoexpressionist German painter Anselm Kiefer [KEE-fer] (b. 1945) created works revisiting the monumental architectural schemes of Nazi Germany. Inspired by a poem by labor camp survivor Paul Celan, Shulamith (1983; Fig. 15.24) depicts a menorah, the symbolic seven-branched cande- labrum of Judaism, flickering on the far altar of a 1939 design for the Hall of Soldiers in Berlin—transforming a building dedicated to the memory of Germany’s fallen soldiers into a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Born the year the war ended, Kiefer describes himself as “bringing to light things that are over, that are forgot- ten.” The painter’s works brood over Germany’s past and quest for atonement.
National reconciliation was also sought by America’s Vietnam veterans, who sponsored an open design com- petition in 1981 for a Vietnam War memorial on the National Mall. The only design requirement was that the memorial honor the 58,191 names of the fallen. This requirement all but guaranteed that the design needed a large surface to inscribe all those names, but no one could have foreseen the dramatic simplicity of
The Art of Pluralism Painting and sculpture in the postmodern era are char- acterized by pluralism, with no one style or influence predominating. The variety of trends includes the revival of earlier styles, the combination of historical styles with modernist ones, and the use of new media such as electronic media singly and in combination with other media, new and traditional. Pluralism has resulted in a diversity of new artistic stratagems, such as installation, performance, appropriation, and relational aesthetics.
Arising from the trend in minimal art and concep- tual art to move outside the studio and find a new rela- tion to nature and the social world, earth art (or land art) merged sculpture with the environment. Earth art was constructed of materials virtually identical to the surrounding natural site, often primeval landscapes in the desert or prairie. The best-known work of earth art
W I N D O W S O N D A I L Y L I F E
Living and Dying With AIDS AIDS, the often fatal virus infection that has killed mil- lions worldwide since it was first identified in 1981, struck arts communities especially hard. Here is novelist and poet Paul Monette’s (1945–1995) account of the early days of the AIDS crisis, soon after his companion had been diagnosed with AIDS symptoms and seven years before his own death from AIDS:
Has anything ever been quite like this? Bad enough to be stricken in the middle of life, but then to fear your best and dearest will suffer exactly the same. Cancer and the heart don’t sicken a man two ways like that. And it turns out all the certainties of health insurance and the job that waits are just a social contract, flimsy as the disappearing ink it’s written in. Has anything else so tested the medical system and blown all its weakest links? I have oceans of unresolved rage at those who ran from us, but I also see that plague and panic are inseparable. And nothing compares. That is something very important to understand about those on the moon of AIDS. Anything offered in comparison is a mockery to us. If hunger compares, or Hamburger Hill or the carnal dying of Calcutta, that is for us to say.19
PAUL MONETTE Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988)
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15.22 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Black basalt, limestone rocks, and earth, length 1,500 ft (457.2 m). Great Salt Lake, Utah. Smithson became euphoric while filming Spiral Jetty from an aircraft: “It was as if the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral.”21
15.23 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, 1972–76. Photo: Jeanne-Claude © 1976 Christo. Running Fence was a white nylon curtain hung on steel cable suspended on poles across 24 1⁄2 miles (39 km) of California landscape. As Christo explained, “… they are beyond the ownership of the artists because freedom is the enemy of possession, that’s why these projects do not stay.”22
Watch a video about Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty on myartslab.com
View the web resource on Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates on myartslab.com
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the winning entry by a 21-year-old Chinese-American architecture student from Athens, Ohio (Fig. 15.25). Maya Lin’s (b. 1959) design of a V-shaped polished black granite wall sunk into a cut in the earth sparked protest from those who wanted something represen- tational, more heroic looking, more masculine, with American flags. In fact, her design was following the modernist dictum “Less is more.” What proved to be postmodern were the aesthetics of social pluralism: the open process, the supplements eventually added to the memorial to mollify objectors, and the catharsis of a divided nation able finally to touch the names.
Global Awareness The ancient Greek scientist and philosopher Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.” Spaceflight to the moon enabled humans to see the entire Earth whole for the first time, a delicate blue orb poised in the dark vastness of space and time. This new perspective has provided a longer lever for increas- ing global awareness—for moving the world.
15.24 Anselm Kiefer, Shulamith, 1983. Oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, straw, and woodcut fragments on canvas, 114 × 145 ins (2.9 × 3.68 m). White Cube, London. Mixing paint with straw and other media, Kiefer’s monumental works possess an apocalyptic mood. The canvas’s inscription refers to the refrain in "Todesfuge" ("Fugue of Death," 1945), a poem by Paul Celan: “your golden hair Margarete, your ashen hair Shulamith.” Margarete is the fair maiden corrupted by Goethe’s Faust. Shulamith is the “dark and comely” Jewish princess of the Song of Solomon.
15.25 Maya Lin, Original design submission for Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. The Mall, Washington, D.C., 1981. Black polished granite, two wings, each 246 ft (75 m) long. Consisting of little more than a V-shaped granite wall engraved with names of the dead, Lin’s memorial became a shrine at which mourners leave flowers, war medals, and other mementoes.
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Bearden composed his works from fragments of pho- tographs, cloth, and other ordinary objects. He com- pared his process of composition to mosaic, in which the artist carefully chooses and arranges small pieces of glass. Bearden’s collages recall the patchwork quilts that slaves once sewed with coded messages about the Underground Railroad.
Through often bitter struggle, opportunities grew for African Americans in other media. Alvin Ailey (1931–1991) formed the American Dance Theatre in 1958, creating dance works based on the rhythms of blues and jazz. He created for dancer Judith Jamison
The twentieth century’s last decades saw a rising consciousness among groups long denied a voice in pol- itics and culture. By 1970, a determined movement in the United States had abolished racial segregation and gained basic civil rights for American blacks. An inter- national women’s movement likewise demanded equal rights for women. In Africa, Latin America, and other former European colonies, writers and artists reasserted national traditions.
The 1980s and 1990s saw an increasingly integrated and interdependent global culture, no longer defined by national or regional boundaries. With the break-up of the former Soviet Union in 1989, demonstrators joy- fully demolished the Berlin Wall, symbol of Europe’s Cold War divisions. In Africa, the last bastion of white supremacy, South Africa, achieved a peaceful transition to black majority rule.
These epochal events had profound effects on arts and ideas in the West. The diversity of new voices demands a revision of the canon, the body of artistic and philosophical works recognized as the best and most important. As cultures and artists formerly pushed to the margins gain recognition, fresh controversy has been introduced to debates over artistic and historical value, and a new era of truly global art has opened, one that addresses the world as a whole.
Liberated Voices As African nations gained their independence from colonial powers, Africans stepped onto the world’s liter- ary stage. In 1959 Nigerian Chinua Achebe [ah-CHAY- bay] (b. 1930) published his landmark novel Things Fall Apart, an anguished tale of the clash between traditional Africans and missionary intruders. Another Nigerian, Wole Soyinka [shah-YENG-kah] (b. 1934), often criti- cizes Africa’s political authoritarianism in his poems, plays, and essays, applying the existentialist ideal of the “engaged” writer.
In the United States, the African-American artist Romare Bearden [ROH-muh-ree BEER-dun] (1912– 1988) rose to prominence in the 1960s, when he began using techniques of collage and photomontage. A contemporary of the New York school, Bearden was never entirely comfortable with subjective abstraction or hard-edged minimalism. In concert with the civil rights movement, Bearden’s works increasingly cele- brated African-American ritual, myth, and community (Fig. 15.26). Rejecting the individualistic propensity of avant-garde art, he emphasized African-American com- munity life.
15.26 Romare Bearden, Sermons: The Wall of Jericho, 1964. Photomechanical reproductions, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paperboard, 117⁄8 × 9 3⁄8 ins (30 × 23.7 cm). Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Bearden himself noted the “prevalence of ritual” in his collage works—rituals of work, play, and religious faith. “When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me,” he explained. “Because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.”23
Watch a video in which Romare Bearden discusses his work on myartslab.com
436 Chapter 15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT
Of African, American Indian, and European descent, conceptual artist Fred Wilson (b. 1954) gained wide attention in 1992 with a landmark exhibition, Mining the Museum, at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. Wilson used his experience as a freelance curator to curate the museum’s existing collection of historical artifacts—extracting things from storage, rearranging them, and placing them in new combina- tions while using museum-style labels, lighting, wall color, and display cases. His goal was to indicate the subtle ways racism affects how museums collect and display objects, consciously or unwittingly reinforc- ing racist beliefs. Sometimes subjects are dramatized by absence, such as the empty spaces above labels for Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Benjamin Banneker, notable black Marylanders whose portraits were absent from the Historical Society’s collection. Sometimes Wilson’s juxtapositions create an explo- sion of emotion, such as a crude wooden cruciform whipping post surrounded by fancy dinner chairs. Recontextualizing wrought-iron slave manacles with the ornate Baltimore silver service in a display case labeled “Metalwork, 1723–1880” creates a similar effect (Fig. 15.28). Opening on the occasion of the annual conference of the American Association of Museums, this radical conversion of an entire museum floor was seen by thousands of museum professionals, shocking this audience to raise its consciousness and effect institutional change.
In their struggle for equal rights, feminists sought to recover a lost tradition of women’s history and art. One example was The Dinner Party (1979), a work of installation art by the feminist avant-garde artist Judy Chicago (b. 1939). In The Dinner Party (Fig. 15.29), she set up a three-sided dinner table with place set- tings for 39 women figures, both historical and mytho- logical. Chicago wanted to acknowledge the domestic decorative arts of china-painting and embroidery, long practiced by American women. However, the sugges- tive design aroused such controversy that the show was closed soon after its opening. Women’s groups responded by raising enough funds to send the exhibi- tion on a successful North American tour.
The feminist age nourished an unprecedented flower- ing of women writers. Novelist Toni Morrison (b. 1931) gained wide acknowledgment for her novel Beloved (1988), in which a ghost child revisits the mother who murdered the girl to save her from slavery. Morrison’s novel involved a complex narrative technique, based on flashback and fragmented narrative voices, that harked back to early modernism.
the demanding solo piece Cry (1971), which was set to jazz and soul music and dedicated to “all black women everywhere—especially our mothers.” Jamison, dressed in a flowing white dress, gave a landmark performance of modern dance (Fig. 15.27).
African-American authors gained broad readership and critical esteem as the literary canon widened to include them. The poet Gwendolyn Brooks’s (1917– 2000) soft-spoken poems recorded racial wounds with an uncommon candor and sensitivity. Playwright August Wilson (1945–2005) created a series of ten dramas that presented “the unique particulars of black American culture” in each decade of the twentieth cen- tury. In Fences (1987), for example, set in the 1950s, the main character, Troy Maxson, bitterly recalls the baseball career that was denied him by racial segrega- tion. The spiritual costs of a life of responsibility lead Troy to alienate his son and wife, building “fences” between him and his loved ones.
15.27 Judith Jamison in Cry, 1971. Alvin Ailey, choreographer. Courtesy American Dance Theater, New York. Jamison’s acclaimed performance represented what choreographer Ailey called the vitality of “all black women everywhere—especially our mothers.”
Chapter 15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT 437
15.28 Fred Wilson, installation view, Mining the Museum, 1992. Metalwork. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. Of his unorthodox artistic practice, Wilson says: “I get everything that satisfies my soul from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.”24
15.29 Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979. Multimedia installation, china painting on porcelain with needlework, 48 × 48 × 48 ft (14.6 × 14.6 × 14.6 m). Chicago’s 39 painted plates commemorated goddesses, queens, poets, and other women figures of historical note. Each setting contains a hand-painted plate decorated with an abstract design of butterflies or vulva-like flowers.
View the web resource on Judy Chicago's feminist art on myartslab.com
438 Chapter 15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT
or tradition. One such building is Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (Fig. 15.30), designed using aerospace software. Gehry (b. 1929) compares his gleaming jumble of curvaceous forms to a flower. While the Guggenheim Bilbao’s cav- ernous and irregular interior galleries may not always be perfectly suited to displaying art, and some criti- cize the museum as “art architecture”—more artistic statement than functional structure—the museum has effectively spearheaded the urban revival of Bilbao as a center for culture and tourism.
Globalization has brought about a new aware- ness of the limitation of resources, the degradation of the environment, the loss of species, and the need for sustainability. Here too architecture plays a role, and important projects need not be enormous. One exam- ple of “green architecture,” design based on practices of sustainable consumption, is provided by the greenhouse and sun room that sits atop a nineteenth-century row house in downtown Pittsburgh (Fig. 15.31). Designed by studio d’ARC, with a sawtooth roof that contrasts with the brick homes of a century ago, the project uses passive heating together with new efficient equipment that also pumps fresh air into the building. Three large south-facing windows collect sunlight while hydroponic and soil planting systems offer produce and flowers for the building’s tenants. An Energy Recovery Ventilator exchanges 90 percent of the heat from the greenhouse air to the house’s fresh-air supply. Warm filtered air is pumped into the apartments below, improving comfort and efficiency. Fresh air can also be brought in through an “urban snorkel” that penetrates the center of the roof. Low-impact material and high recycled-content materials were used throughout, and a solar hot-water system is planned as well. Applications of “green tech- nology” in small, everyday projects like this promise immense future efficiencies.
The globalizing culture continues to sharpen the critique of traditional ideas about racial, gender, and national identity. Today’s feminists, the daughters of 1970s feminists, have staked out a position of “third- wave” feminism that challenges not only traditional power structures but also the very idea of a fixed sexual identity. Kara Walker (b. 1969) satirizes American racial stereotypes with racially and sexually charged images of the antebellum American South (Fig. 15.32). Reviving the nineteenth-century technique of the black, cut-paper silhouette, Walker presents her room-size images in multimedia settings so that the shadows of viewers enter into the scenes of fornication, abuse, may- hem, and rebellion, and thereby become complicit. For
The poet Denise Levertov [LEFF-er-toff] (1923– 1997) maintained an outspoken commitment to poetry as a literary enterprise rather than a vehicle for ideas. Yet she was also actively involved in protests against the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation. Her poem In Mind aptly expresses an ambivalence that many women of her era felt.
There’s in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but
fair-featured, and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears
a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she
is kind and very clean without
ostentation—
but she has
no imagination.
And there’s a
turbulent moon-ridden girl
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs—
but she is not kind.25
DENISE LEVERTOV
In Mind (1964)
A New Century: Promise and Challenge
The twenty-first century offers both promise and challenge. Like the telegraph and the railroad 150 years ago, electronic communication and air travel have suddenly compressed the world’s economies and societies. Across the global computer network— appropriately named the World Wide Web—“users” can create instantaneous global communities and vir- tual worlds, telling their stories in a new medium for word and image.
In the global culture, architecture especially can speak an international language detached from locale
THE WRITE IDEA Compare the clothing of the two kinds of women described in Levertov's poem In Mind. How does their garb symbolize them? Which of these contrasting types of people are you drawn to? Why?
Chapter 15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT 439
Walker, these issues translate into the personal: “Who am I beyond this skin I’m in?”
With globalization, local phenomena can quickly gain global reach. In the 1980s, urban black and Latino neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles had fostered a “hip-hop” culture of dance, graffiti art, and the music of rap—chanted lyrics accompanied by vocalized or synthesized percussion. By the 1990s, rap’s improvisational wit and rhythmic energy had earned it a worldwide audience. In the new millennium, youths in India adapted the funky rhythms of hip-hop to tra- ditional Indian popular songs, and rap could be heard in Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese. The 1950s rock-and- roll youth rebellion had been transmitted through vinyl records; hip-hop spread through music downloads and Web 2.0, Internet programs that allow users to upload their own images and sound to the Internet.
Globalization is empowering voices that would oth- erwise never be heard. Originating from the tiny island of Reunion off the coast of east Africa in the Indian
15.31 studio d’ARC, greenhouse and sunroof, residential addition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2011. Tenants are given space to garden and relax while taking in the city views and the sunshine.
15.30 Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, 1997. Gehry designed the varied and irregular curving forms of the museum with the aid of sophisticated computer programs. The interior includes a gigantic central gallery for the exhibition of large-scale contemporary sculpture and installation art.
440 Chapter 15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT
corridor punctuated with windows and light bulbs, one for each of the 91 victims, along with copies of accusations, confessions, and sentences in each case; and a separate glass cube housing Bourgeois’s installa- tion. Her artwork consists of a circle of seven mirrors that surround and reflect a flaming steel chair inside a hollow concrete cone (Fig. 15.34). This brooding remembrance of a brutal and unforgiving past—a col- laboration between nations, generations, genders, dis- ciplines, and the living and the dead—on a rugged and remote island at the northeasternmost point of Norway promises to become a place of pilgrimage in the era of globalist art.
Known for his use of vinyl records and turntables for sound collages, Swiss-American Christian Marclay (b. 1955) spent three years assembling The Clock, a 24-hour video collage installation (2010; Fig. 15.35). Meticulously splicing together hundreds of snippets of motion pictures from all over the world, Marclay's Clock is synchronized with the time of its viewing, count- ing down the day in real time. As much performance art as video, The Clock registers time, minute by minute, in a relentless montage of cinematic timepieces (or men- tions of the time of day in dialogue). While it might
Ocean, Thierry Fontaine (b. 1969) creates photographic works and sound installations. Now living alternately in Paris and New Caledonia, he identifies himself as a sculptor and treats questions of ethnicity as well as the difficulties of social and personal isolation. Fontaine addresses these topics in a series he calls The Cry (Fig. 15.33). The Cry may be shown, exhibited, drowned out, or screamed.
French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911– 2010) was marginalized as a woman artist for much of her career, and only began to achieve widespread recognition after a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1982. She was active in the arts until the very end of her long life. Among her final works is a collaboration with Swiss architect Peter Zumthor (b. 1943): the Steilneset Memorial at Vardø, Norway, commemorating those persecuted and burned at the stake in the Finnmark witchcraft trials of the sev- enteenth century. Perched on the jagged coastline of the icy Barents Sea, the somber memorial consists of two structures: a 410-foot (125-meter)-long fabric-shrouded
15.32 Kara Walker, Darkytown Rebellion, 2001. Cut paper and projection on wall, 14 × 37 ins, 14 × 37 ft (36 × 94 cm, 4.3 × 11.3 m) overall. Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jen, Luxembourg. Walker’s artistic alter-ego, a black girl in braids and tatters, is a resourceful survivor of racism, bondage, and misogyny, who uses stereotypes as a fuel for her own empowerment. Walker says: “I knew that if I was going to make work that had to deal with race issues, they were going to be full of contradictions.”26 15.33 Thierry Fontaine, Cry in the Night, 2001, color
photograph, dimensions variable. Until recently, African artists were virtually absent from the contemporary Euro-American art world.
View the web resource on Kara Walker's art on myartslab.com
Chapter 15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT 441
sound absurd to sit and watch a movie where nothing “happens” but the passing of time, viewers report the pleasure of anticipating how the next minute is going to be portrayed, and enjoy thrills of recognition from familiar outtakes, and laughs from surprising images. Minutes in the morning often feature getting out of bed, and moments at night the reverse. Afternoon minutes often include the rush of footsteps, hooves, or train station clocks. While it might sound like an impossible task, Marclay has, with research help from six assis- tants—and in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp—created a mesmerizing “theater of found time” that triggers both collective memory and private memory.
Sometimes modest projects show the greatest prom- ise. Photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva (b. 1985) grew up in Tiksi on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, which she remembered as a magical village. But when she was eight, the Soviet Union collapsed, and she and her parents moved away. After graduating from college, Arbugaeva spent a year living with and photographing nomadic reindeer herders she remembered from her childhood village: “Imagine one day the village is filled with reindeer sleds and people in native … clothing.
15.35 Christian Marclay, The Clock, 24-hour video collage, 2010. Photo courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery. When accepting the Golden Lion, the highest honor of the 2011 Venice Biennale, Marclay thanked the jury for “giving The Clock its fifteen minutes.”
15.34 Louise Bourgeois, installation view of The Damned, The Possessed, and The Beloved in the Steilneset Memorial (part of architect Peter Zumthor’s contribution is visible in the background), Vardø, Norway, 2008–11. Zumthor says, “I had my idea, I sent it to her, she liked it, and she came up with her idea, reacted to my idea, then I offered to abandon my idea and to do only hers, and she said, ‘No, please stay.’” Bourgeois passed away during the process at the age of 98.
442 Chapter 15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT
They sing, dance, put their tipis on the lake, construct- ing a magical tipi town. Men organize reindeer racing, women show their best embroidery and sewing. These [are the] kinds of memories I have from that time.”
After this, she made her way to New York City to study at the International Center of Photography. Beginning in 2010 Arbugaeva returned to Tiksi with her camera to find out whether all the magical things she remembered about it were true (Fig. 15.36).
Perhaps the effort of recapturing the magic of youth is our greatest hope for increasing global awareness.
15.36 Evgenia Arbugaeva, from the Tiksi series (in process), color photograph, 2010. Courtesy of the artist. “After I finish this project, my own childhood will be officially over,” Arbugaeva has said. “So I don’t ever want to finish it.”
1940 CE 1950 CE 1960 CE 1970 CE 1971 Alvin Ailey and Judith Jamison, Cry (15.27)
1976 Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach (15.21)
1979 Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (15.29)
1939–1945 World War II
1940–1950 Rise of New York avant-garde
1944 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
1947 Albert Camus, The Plague
1947 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
1948 India gains independence from Britain
1950s Elvis Presley and the birth of rock and roll
1952 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
1957–1959 Frank Lloyd Wright, Guggenheim Museum (15.8)
1961 President John F. Kennedy announces plan to put a man on the moon
1963 Civil rights March on Washington
1965 Alexander Calder, Spring Blossoms (15.10)
1967 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
1960s–1970s Feminist movement seeks equal rights for women
C H A P T E R 1 5 : T I M E L I N E
CHAPTER REVIEW
The Age of Anxiety What effects did the Cold War have on Western art and thought? What were the simi- larities between be-bop jazz musicians, the beat writ- ers, and the confessional poets? What is existentialism? Who were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir? Describe the theater of Samuel Beckett. What is an exis- tential hero?
Art and Architecture in Postwar America What was the New York school? Who were the abstract expres- sionists? Describe the innovation of Jackson Pollock. Describe the tendencies of postwar sculpture. What was the International Style? Who was Mies van der Rohe,
Chapter 15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT 443
1980 CE 1990 CE 2000 CE 2010 CE 1980–1983 Michael Graves, Public Services Building, Portland, Oregon (15.20)
1981–1984 Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial (15.25)
1989 Fall of Berlin Wall; end of Cold War
2001 Kara Walker, Darkytown Rebellion (15.32)
1990 Invention of the World Wide Web
1992 Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum (15.28)
1997 Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (15.30)
2010 Christian Marclay, The Clock (15.35)
and what did he mean when he said, “Less is more”? How did members of the Black Mountain College attempt “to close the gap between art and life”? Who was John Cage?
The Sixties What social changes were reflected in the art of the 1960s? What are the main characteristics of pop art? Who is Andy Warhol? How did happenings challenge conventional definitions of art? What role did music play in the culture of the 1960s?
The Postmodern What is meant by the term postmod- ernism? How did postmodern architecture differ from modernist architecture? Describe minimalism in music. How did photography influence the arts? What is earth art? What was the attitude of conceptual art towards the studio? What is meta-fiction? Describe magic realism.
Global Awareness How are the civil rights and femi- nist movements reflected in art today? Explain Fred Wilson’s innovation. Describe the promise of global- ism. What are the challenges to global culture? What terms are parts of the international vocabulary of the arts today? How will technological change, the Internet, and global communications affect the art of the future?
EPILOGUE In pondering the riches of our globe, we have only scratched the surface of what has been, but we have not spoken of what might have been. Edward Thomas (1878–1917) began writing poetry in 1914 and might have become a great English poet had he not been slain on the battlefield of World War I three years later:
The last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm’s shadow.
It is as if everything else had slept
Many an age, unforgotten and lost—
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live yet and here stand idle over a grave
Where all is buried. Both have liberty
To dream what we could do if we were free
To do some thing we had desired long,
The moon and I. There’s none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
And nothing is to his mind. If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
And I could take and carry them away
I should be rich; or if I had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.
And yet I still am half in love with pain,
With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,
With things that have an end, with life and earth,
And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.27
EDWARD THOMAS
Liberty (1914) Study and review on myartslab.com
444 Notes
Chapter 1 1 Lady Gaga, quoted in an article by Neil McCormick in The Daily
Telegraph (London) (Feb 16, 2010): “Lady Gaga: ‘I’ve always been famous, you just didn’t know it.’”
2 Woeser, “After a Few Years,” from Tibet Above, 1999, trans. D. Dayton. In The Drunken Boat, Spring/Summer 2006, Vol. 6, Issues 1–11 (www.thedrunkenboat.com).
Chapter 2 1 The Great Hymn to Aten, quoted in N. Grimal, A History of Ancient
Egypt, trans. Ian Shaw. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 228–9. 2 Herodotus, History of the Persian Wars, Book II.78, trans. George
Rawlinson. See Charles A. Robinson, Jr., ed., Selections from Greek and Roman Historians. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1957, pp. 12–13.
3 Quoted, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., 500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians. New York: Gramercy, 2002 p. 100.
Chapter 3 1 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Benjamin Jowett.
In Charles A. Robinson, Jr., ed., Selections from Greek and Roman Historians. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1957, p.80.
2 The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richard Lattimore. Chicago: U. of Chicago Pr., 1951, 1976, pp. 488–9. Copyright © 1951 The University of Chicago Press. Used by permission.
3 Willis Barnstone, Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets (rev. ed. of Greek Lyric Poetry). New York: Schocken, 1988. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1988 by Willis Barnstone. Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books, published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
4 Hesiod, Theogony, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Loeb Classical Library. New York: Macmillan, 1914.
5 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II.52, trans. Richard Crawley. See Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, ed. John H. Finley. New York: Modern Library, 1951, p. 113.
6 Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Robert Fagles. In The Three Theban Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, pp. 76–7. Translation copyright © 1982 by Robert Fagles. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
7 Aristotle, comment on Oedipus in Poetics [1453 8]. 8 Protagoras: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers; see J. B.
Wilbur and H. J. Allen, The Worlds of the Early Greek Philosophers. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1979, p. 245.
9 Plato, from The Republic [443d, Bollingen p. 686]. 10 The Great Learning, in W. T. de Bary and others, Sources of Chinese
Tradition, Vol. 1. New York: Columbia U. Pr., 1960, p. 115. 11 Aristotle, from The Politics [1253a].
Chapter 4 1 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. W. F. Jackson Knight. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Classics, 1956, p. 173. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Copyright © G. R. Wilson Knight, 1956.
2 The Creed of Epictetus as contained in the Discourses, Manual and Fragments. Trans. Ulysses G. B. Pierce. Boston: Beacon, 1916.
3 Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 1st ed. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1977, p. 75. Copyright © 1977 by Houghton Miffl in Company. Used with permission.
4 From The Poems of Catullus by Catullus, trans. James Michie. Translation copyright © 1969 James Michie. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
5 Virgil, Aeneid, ibid., p. 27. 6 Virgil, Aeneid, ibid., p. 116. 7 The Satires of Juvenal, trans. Rolfe Humphries. Indianapolis: Indiana U.
Pr., 1958. © 1958 Indiana U. Pr. Used by permission. 8 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1951, p. 124. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Copyright © R. E. Latham 1951.
9 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, ibid., pp. 24–5.
10 Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, trans. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Pr., 1963, Book VII.9, pp. 62–3.
11 Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, ibid., Book II.5, p. 13.
Chapter 5 1 Genesis 1:26–28. Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard
Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.
2 Genesis 3:1–5, ibid. 3 Job 38:1–11, ibid. 4 Matthew 5:27–29, 38–42, ibid. 5 Josephus, The Jewish Wars, trans. William Whiston. See The Works of
Flavius Josephus. Philadelphia: International Pr. [1904], p. 818. 6 St. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. E. B. Pusey. In Great Books of
the Western World, Vol. 18. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, pp. 10–11.
7 John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries. New York: Knopf, 1989, p. 203.
8 The Koran (Qur’an), trans. N. J. Dawood. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1956, 6th rev. ed. 1990. Copyright © N. J. Dawood 1956, 1959, 1966, 1968, 1974, 1990.
Chapter 6 1 Charlemagne, quoted in Pierre Riché, Daily Life in the World
of Charlemagne, trans. Jo Ann McNamara. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1983, pp. 133–4.
2 From The Song of Roland, trans. Frederick Goldin. Copyright © 1978 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
3 Hrotsvit, quoted in Katharina Wilson, Medieval Women Writers. Athens, Georgia: U. of Georgia Pr., 1984, p. 38.
4 Hrotsvit, quoted in Wilson, Medieval Women Writers, ibid., p. 38. 5 Bernard of Clairvaux, “Apologia” to William, Abbot of St.-Thierry.
In Elizabeth G. Holt, ed., A Documentary History of Art, Vol. 1. The Middle Ages and Renaissance. New York: Doubleday, 1957, p. 20.
6 Hildegard of Bingen, De Sancta Maria, from Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works, ed. Matthew Fox. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bear & Co., 1987. Reprinted with permission. © 1987 Bear & Co.
7 The Pseudo-Dionysus, Mystical Theology, quoted in Denise L. Carmody and John. T. Carmody, Mysticism: Holiness East and West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 205.
8 Nicholas of Cusa, Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. by H. Lawrence Bond. New York: Paulist Press, 1997, pp. 251–2.
9 Hildegard, quoted in Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 1098– 1179: A Visionary Life. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1998, p. 4.
10 Master Eckhart, quoted in Denise L. Carmody and John. T. Carmody, Mysticism: Holiness East and West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 207.
11 Peter Abelard, trans. Mary Martin McLaughlin. Quoted in The Portable Medieval Reader, James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, eds. New York: Viking Press, 1949, p. 333.
12 Fulcher of Chartres, quoted in Branu Leone, ed., The Middle Ages: History Firsthand. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 2002, p. 154.
Chapter 7 1 François Villon, “For His Mother to Our Lady,” in French Lyrics in
English Verse, trans. William Frederic Giese. Madison, Wisconsin: U. of Wisconsin Pr., 1946.
2 Abbot Suger, quoted in Gerda Panofsky-Soergel, ed., Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton U. Pr., 1979, p. 49.
3 Abbot Suger, quoted in Panofsky-Soergel, Abbot Suger, p. 51. 4 Andreas Cappellanus, The Art of Courtly Love. New York: Columbia
U. Pr., 1990. 5 Bernart de Ventadorn, from “Quan vei la lauzeta mover,” trans. Craig E.
Bertolet, ed., Frederick Goldin. 6 Beatriz de Dia, “A chantar m’er de so qu’ieu non volria” (Of things I’d
rather keep in silence), from Magda Bogin, The Women Troubadours,
Notes
Notes 445
p. 87. New York: Norton, 1980. Reprinted by permission. 7 Ramón Llull, Book of the Order of Chivalry, quoted in Maurice Keen,
Chivalry. New Haven: Yale U. Pr., 1984. 8 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. Vol. 1: Inferno, Canto V, trans.
Mark Musa. Indianapolis: Indiana U. Pr., 1971. © 1971 Indiana U. Pr. 9 Boccaccio, trans. D. G. Rossetti. In The Portable Medieval Reader, ed.
James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, eds New York, Viking Press, 1949, p. 386.
10 Henry Knighton, from Chaucer’s World by Edith Rickert. © 1948 Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. New York: Columbia U. Pr., 1948, pp. 353–4.
11 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. Neville Coghill. London: Penguin, 1977, p. 279.
12 Petrarch, Sonnet CCXCII, “Gli occhi di ch’io parlai sí caldamente,” Sonnets, trans. Edwin Morgan.
Chapter 8 1 Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. Elizabeth
Forbes. In Robert Warnock and George K. Anderson, eds., The World in Literature. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1959, p. 546.
2 Lorenzo de’ Medici, “A Carnival Song,” trans. J. A. Symonds. In James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, eds., The Portable Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking, 1953, pp. 432–4.
3 Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book VIII, trans. J. A. Symonds. Immortal Classics edn, p. 62.
4 Quoted in Leeman Perkins, Music in the Age of the Renaissance. New York: Norton, 1999, p. 688.
5 Quoted in Women and Music: A History, Karen Pendle, ed. Bloomington: Indiana U. Pr., 1991, p. 48.
6 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Thomas G. Bergin. Wheeling, Illinois: Crofts Classics Series, © 1947 Harlan Davidson Inc., pp. 50–51. Used by permission.
7 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Thomas G. Bergin. Wheeling, Illinois: Crofts Classics Series, © 1947 Harlan Davidson Inc., pp. 25–26. Used by permission.
8 Quoted in Leonardo on Painting, Martin Kemp, ed. and trans. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale U. Pr., 1989, p. 48.
9 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p. 221.
Chapter 9 1 “The Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants” (1579), translated into English
in 1688. See J. H. Hexter, ed. The Traditions of the Western World, Vol. 2. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967, p. 380.
2 George Buchanan, The Law of Government Among the Scots (1579). Quoted in Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World. New York: Three Rivers, 2001, pp. 18–19.
3 Diane de Poitiers, in Katherine M. Wilson, ed., Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. Athens: U. of Georgia Pr., 1987, p. 166.
4 Albrecht Dürer, from a letter. In Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art 1400–1600: Sources and Documents. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1966, p. 91.
5 Albrecht Dürer, from a draft of his study of proportion. In Elizabeth G. Holt, ed., A Documentary History of Art, Vol. 1. The Middle Ages and Renaissance. New York: Doubleday, 1957, p. 311.
6 Erasmus, Handbook of the Militant Christian. In John P. Dolan, The Essential Erasmus. New York: New American Library, 1964, p. 39. Copyright © 1964 by John P. Dolan. Used by permission of New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
7 Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1971, pp. 150, 179, 161–2. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Translation copyright © Betty Radice, 1971.
8 The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Pr., 1958, p. 421.
9 The Complete Essays of Montaigne, ibid., p. 329. 10 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, sc. ii, lines 160–71. 11 Quoted in Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance, rev. ed. New York:
Norton, 1959, p. 449.
Chapter 10 1 Quoted in Life of St. Teresa, trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1957, p. 210. 2 Claudio Monteverdi, L’Orfeo. London: J. & W. Chester, 1923, pp. 51–2.
3 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. In The Portable Cervantes, trans. Samuel Putnam. New York: Viking, 1951, pp. 110–11. Translation copyright © 1949, 1950, 1951 by Viking Penguin, Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
4 Jean-Baptiste Colbert: Quoted in T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789. London: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 35.
5 David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” IV, ii. In Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill. New York: Modern Library, 1939, p. 603.
6 Galileo, quoted in Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955, p. 312.
7 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, pp. 53–4.
8 Samuel Pepys’s Diary, ed. Richard Le Gallienne. New York: Modern Library, n.d., pp. 199–200.
9 John Locke, Essay on Civil Government. In Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Locke. New York: Modern Library, 1939, p. 438.
10 Locke, Essay on Civil Government, p. 438.
Chapter 11 1 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, The Woman of the Eighteenth Century,
trans. Jacques de Clercq and Ralph Roeder. New York: Minton, Balch, 1927, p. 44.
2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Charles Frankel. New York: Hafner, 1947, p. 19.
3 Adam Smith, quoted in Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World. New York: Three Rivers, 2001, p. 218.
4 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. New York: Knopf, 1991, pp. 10, 13. 5 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What
is Enlightenment?. Trans. Lewis White Beck. New York: Liberal Arts, 1959, p. 39.
6 Marie Jean Antoine de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Trans. June Barraclough. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955, pp. 4–5.
7 Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?, ibid., p. 39.
8 Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?, ibid., p. 39.
9 Samuel Johnson, quoted in Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World : The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. New York: Norton, 2000, p. 75.
10 Pierre Auguste Caron de Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro, ed. E. J. Arnould. Oxford: 1952, p. 129).
11 Samuel Richardson, Pamela. London: Dent, 1962, p. 57. 12 Johann Winckelmann: On the Imitation of the Paintings and Sculpture
of the Greeks (1755). In David Irwin, ed., Writings on Art. London: Phaidon, 1972, p. 61.
13 Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal. In Swift, Satires and Personal Writings, ed. W. A. Eddy. London: Oxford U. Pr., 1973, pp. 23–4.
14 César de Saussure, “A Foreign View of England.” In Eyewitness to History, ed. John Carey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Pr., 1987, p. 215.
15 Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1946, pp. 114–15.
Chapter 12 1 The Declaration of Independence. New York: Oxford U. Pr., 1947,
pp. 3–7. 2 The Federalist, #51 (1788); The Federalist Papers. New York: New
American Library, 1961, p. 322. 3 Edmund Burke, Refl ections on the Revolution in France (1790). See
J. H. Hexter, ed. The Traditions of the Western World, Vol. 2. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967, p. 538.
4 Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776). In Collected Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995, p. 6.
5 J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859). Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978, pp. 9, 79. 6 Thomas Carlyle, quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From
1750 to the Present Day. New York: New Press, 1999, p. 65. 7 Industry and Empire, ibid., p. 65. 8 Eugène Delacroix, quoted in Lorenz Eitner, Neoclassicism and
Romanticism 1750–1850, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970, p. 101.
446 Notes
9 Ludwig van Beethoven, “Heiligenstadt Testament,” in Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, rev. ed., Vol. 1, Elliot Forbes, ed. Princeton: Princeton U. Pr., 1967, pp. 304–6.
10 Goethe’s Faust, Parts I and II, trans. Louis MacNeice, p. 61. Copyright © 1951, 1954 by Frederick Louis MacNeice; renewed 1979 by Hedli MacNeice. Reprinted by permission.
11 Goethe’s Faust, ibid., p. 282. 12 Clara Schumann, quoted in Women Making Music, ed. J. Bowers and
J. Tick. Urbana: U. of Illinois Pr., 1986, p. 265. 13 Berlioz’s program for Symphonie fantastique, quoted in Joseph Machlis,
The Enjoyment of Music, 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1977, p. 106. 14 William Blake, “London,” from Songs of Experience. In Northrop Frye,
ed., Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Modern Library, 1953, p. 46.
15 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. New York: Norton, 1988, pp. 149, 150.
16 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book XIV, lines 70–75. In Mark van Doren, ed., Selected Poetry. New York: Random House, 1950, p. 384.
17 William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much With Us.” In Selected Poetry, p. 536.
18 “Letters on Landscape Painting,” Letter IV, Crayon, no. 7 (February 14, 1855), p. 98.
19 Grenville Goodwin, Western Apache Raiding and Warfare, ed. K. Basso. Tucson: U. of Arizona Pr., 1971, p. 29.
20 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, pp. 190–91.
Chapter 13 1 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government. New
York: Dutton, 1951, p. 8. 2 Gustave Flaubert, The Sentimental Education, trans. Perdita
Burlingame. New York: Signet, 1972, p. 330. Translation copyright © 1972 Perdita Burlingame. Used by permission of New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
3 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. In Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: Library of America, pp. 188, 210.
4 Richard Wagner, quoted in Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner, rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford U. Pr., 1988, p. 5.
5 Lillian Nordica, Lillian Nordica’s Hints to Singers. New York: Dutton, 1923, pp. 13–14.
6 Charles Baudelaire, “To the Reader,” Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard. Boston: Godine, 1982, pp. 5–6. Translation © 1982 Richard Howard. All rights reserved c/o Writers Representatives LLC, New York, NY 10011. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. and Richard Howard.
7 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, trans. Eva LaGallienne. In Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen. New York: Random House, 1957.
8 Dostoevsky, quoted in Peter Conradi, Fyodor Dostoevsky. New York: St. Martin’s Pr., 1988, p. 17.
9 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. Payne, New York, Dover, vol. 2, p. 205.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, quoted in A Nietzsche Reader, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, p. 231.
11 Fyodor Dostoevski (Dostoyevsky), from The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett, edited with a foreword by Manuel Komroff. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1948, pp. 37–8. © 1960 by Manuel Komroff. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
12 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, quoted in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1968, p. 93.
Chapter 14 1 W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A
New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: © 1924 Macmillan Publishing Co, renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
2 Albert Einstein, quoted in Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times. New York: World, 1971, p. 340.
3 Kasimir Malevich, quoted in H. H. Arnason, A History of Modern Art, 4th ed., 1998, p. 224
4 Ray Strachey, “The Cause”: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Pr., 1969, p. 389.
5 Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso. Cambridge, MA: Icon Edition/Westview Press, 2003, p. 26.
6 Henri Matisse, quoted in Nikos Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981, pp. 23–4.
7 Matisse, quoted in John Canaday, Mainstreams of Modern Art. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959, p. 407.
8 Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-garde. New York: Penguin, 1976, p. 45. 9 Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968, p. 376.
10 Joan Miró, quoted in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 435. 11 Salvador Dalí, quoted in Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dalí. New York:
Abrams, 1976, p. 30. 12 Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, from Short Stories of Franz Kafka.
New York: Random House. Copyright © 1952 Random House Inc, pp. 19, 20.
13 David Alfaro Siqueiros, quoted in Desmond Rochfort, Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros. San Francisco: Chronicle, 1993, p. 39.
14 W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, Dover, 1994, p. 9. 15 T. W. Adorno: “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1959). Trans. Samuel
and Shierry Weber. In Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1981, p. 34.
Chapter 15 1 Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” from Collected Poems
1947–1980. Copyright © 1955 Allen Ginsberg, copyright renewed. San Francisco: City Lights, 1959, pp. 29–30. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism,” trans. Bernard Frechtman. In Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Philosophical Library, 1957, p. 22.
3 Samuel Beckett, “The Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit.” Colombey-les-Deux-Églises: transition 49, 1949. 4 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1966, p. 57.
5 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. New York: Modern Library, 1952, p. 3. 6 Joseph Heller, Catch-22. New York: Dell, 1961, p. 47. 7 Jackson Pollock, quoted in Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art.
Berkeley, California: U. of California Pr., 1968, pp. 547–8. 8 Pollock, quoted in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, ibid., pp. 547–8. 9 Willem de Kooning, quoted in an article in The New York Times, 1951. 10 Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture.
New York: Oxford U. Pr., 1985, p. 742. 11 Isamu Noguchi, quoted in Museum of Modern Art catalogue for “14
Americans” exhibition, 1946. 12 All Men are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi as Told in
his Own Words, UNESCO, 1958, p. 88. 13 Donald Judd, quoted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art.
A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writing, Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds. Berkeley: U. of California Pr., 1996, p. 116.
14 Steiner Kvale, “Themes of Postmodernity,” in The Truth about the Truth, Walter Truett Anderson, ed. New York: Tarcher/Puttnam, 1995, p. 27.
15 Cindy Sherman, quoted in an article by Carol Vogel in The New York Times (Feb 16, 2012). 13 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977, p. 16.
16 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977, p. 16.
17 Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” from Ficciones, trans. Alastair Reid, © 1962 by Grove Pr., renewed copyright © 1990 Grove Weidenfeld. Used with permission of Grove/Atlantic Monthly Pr. In Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, eds., Borges: A Reader. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981, pp. 116–17.
18 Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” ibid., pp. 121–2. 19 Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. New York: Harcourt
Brace. Copyright © 1988 Paul Monette, reprinted by permission of Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
20 James Turrell, quoted in Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984, p. 83.
21 Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” (1971) in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Nancy Holt. New York: New York University Press, 1979, pp. 109–13
22 Christo, quoted from an interview in “Eye Level,” a blog produced by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, posted April 1, 2010.
23 Romare Bearden, quoted in the James A. Michener Art Museum website, under “Romare Bearden: Enchanter in Time,” about a show that ran from Oct 29, 2005 to Feb 5, 2006.
Glossary 447
26 Kara Walker, from Culture Shock, on Public Broadcasting Service, quoted on the PBS website (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/ provocations/kara/2.html).
27 Edward Thomas, “Liberty,” from Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.
24 Fred Wilson, from Featured in Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 3 (2005), on Public Broadcasting Service, quoted on the PBS website (www.pbs.org/art21/artists/fred-wilson).
25 Denise Levertov, “In Mind,” from Poems 1960–1967. Copyright © 1966 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
atrium The inner courtyard of a Roman house; also, the forecourt of an Early Christian church.
avant-garde The group of artists or writers who are considered at the time to be the most “advanced” in their methods or subject matter.
ballet A dramatic art combining dance, pantomime, and music, usually to tell a story or evoke a mood; also, a musical composition to accompany ballet.
baptistery The part of a church where baptism is performed; in Early Christian and medieval churches, often a separate building constructed on a circular plan.
baroque A style of European art and music in the period c. 1600–1750, characterized by theatricality, elaborately decorative design, and monumental scale.
barrel vault (also tunnel vault) A vault composed of an extended, continuous arch (Fig. 4.14).
basilica In ancient Roman architecture, a colonnaded hall used for law courts or other public functions; form later adapted to Christian churches (Fig. 5.11).
bass The lowest range of the male voice; also, any bass instrument. black-figure A Greek painting technique achieved by incising the glaze
(which turns black when fired) with details of dress and facial features. blank verse Unrhymed poetic meter consisting of iambic pentameter, or five
iambs (ˇ ¯) in a line. blues A mournful song form that originated from the hollers of African
American slaves as they worked in the fields. Bodhisattvas In Buddhism, pious and generous saints who postponed their
own entry into nirvana in order to save others. Bronze Age Period of human culture in Europe and Asia characterized by
use of bronze tools and weapons (from c. 4000–3000 BCE to c. 1000 BCE). Buddha Meaning “the enlightened one,” the name taken by Siddhartha
Gautama, whose life and teachings are the roots of Buddhism. burghers Citizens (from burg, meaning “town” or “fortress”). buttress In architecture, a supporting arm or post, usually to brace a wall,
arch, or vault.
cadence In music, a conclusion or resting place. caliph Ruler of the Muslim community. canon In architecture or sculpture, a set of rules for proportion; also the
body of artistic and philosophical works recognized as the best and most important; generally, any officially prescribed set of books.
cantata A form of musical composition for voice and orchestra, consisting of several movements or sections, often including opera-like arias and recitative; as developed by Bach in the baroque period, the most important musical component of Lutheran worship.
capital The upper part of a column; see order. caryatid A sculpture of a draped female figure that acts as a column to
support an entablature. casting A sculptural process in which a liquid material (wax, plaster, clay,
or metal) is poured into a mold; when the liquid has hardened, the mold is removed, leaving a replica of the original shape.
catharsis According to Aristotle, the cleansing of the emotions experienced by the audience of an ancient Greek tragedy (Greek, “purgation”).
cella The inner room of a Greek temple, usually containing a cult image of a deity.
central plan A church design in which the dome and walls are organized around a central axis.
chant See plainchant. chapel A small space in a church or other building usually containing an
altar.
absolutism The political philosophy that a monarch should exercise absolute political power and control all aspects of national life.
abstract expressionism The term commonly applied to a group of painters active in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s; their works are characterized by the highly abstract use of color, line, and shape.
academy The Academy was originally the school established by Plato in Athens; generally, the term refers to an officially established school or group that dictates (usually conservative) rules and standards of taste.
additive sculpture Sculpture that is fashioned by building up a shape (as with plaster or clay), constructing a shape from raw materials (such as metal), or assembling a shape from various materials.
aleatory music Music in which significant choices in the composition or performance are left to chance or whim (from Latin alea, “dice”).
allegory A literary or artistic device in which characters, objects, or actions represent abstract ideas or meanings; in Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, the poet’s journey stands allegorically for every human’s journey through life.
Ambrosian chant A style of chant associated with prestigious bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, and practiced in northern Italy.
ambulatory The walkway around the choir of a Christian church, giving access to the apse and chapels.
antiphonal Music in which two or more groups sing or play in alternation (hence “antiphonal singing”).
apocalypse A cataclysmic revelation of God’s will. apse Originally the semicircular niche at the ends of a Roman basilica;
in Christian architecture, the niche-like eastern end of a church, usually housing the altar.
arabesque An intricate surface decoration, often consisting of repeating linear designs and, in Islamic art, containing no figures.
arch A highly flexible architectural form, developed by the Romans, which could be used in many types of constructions. Because in an arch the stones are compressed and not bent, it can bear more weight than the post-and- lintel. The arch’s simplest use was in bridges, but Roman architects learned to use the arch for more daring constructions. The barrel vault could bear tremendous weight and was often used as a structural support in buildings’ foundations. The cross vault was usually connected in a series of three vaults to form an open rectangular hall. The dome created a spacious and majestic interior space.
Archaic A period of ancient Greek art (c. 700–480 BCE), typified in sculpture by the stylized kouros and koré figures.
architrave In classical architecture, the horizontal beam that forms the lowest part of the entablature.
archivolt The molding that frames an arched doorway. aria A song usually found in operas, oratorios, and cantatas, commonly
sung as a solo and often the occasion for virtuoso singing (Italian, “air”). Ars Nova In music, a style of polyphony (current c. 1320–1400)
characterized by greater refinement and expressiveness (Latin, “new art”). art deco In visual art and architecture, a style prevalent between 1925
and 1940 characterized by geometric designs, bold colors, and the use of plastic and glass materials. The style reflected the introduction of industrial process and its name derives from the 1925 Arts Décoratifs exhibition in Paris.
Art Nouveau In art, a style of decoration and architecture (current c. 1890–1910) characterized by floral and plant motifs (French, “new art”).
assemblage A process in which a work of art is built up, or “assembled,” from miscellaneous three-dimensional materials.
atmospheric perspective (also aerial perspective) The perspective technique that creates the illusion of depth by blurring the outlines and altering the color tones of distant objects.
atonal Music that is not composed in a key.
Glossary
448 Glossary
dada The movement of European artists characterized by provocation and mockery of traditional art; active c. 1916–1922 in Zürich, Paris, and Berlin.
deism Religious belief in the existence of a God who has created the universe and left it to operate according to rational laws; prominent among Enlightenment intellectuals.
Diaspora The “dispersion” when the Romans forced the Jews to leave their homeland.
dissonance A combination of notes that violates the prevailing harmonic system, producing discord and a feeling of tension in the listener.
dome A hemispherical vault, composed of an arch rotated 180 degrees. Doric A classical order of architecture characterized by austere simplicity
(Fig. 3.16).
Earth art (also land art) A form of art that merges sculpture with the environment.
empire A large territory or a number of territories dominated by a single political authority.
empiricism Philosophical belief that all knowledge is derived from experience and the senses; denies the existence of innate ideas independent of experience; compare rationalism.
engraving Process of printmaking by incising a metal plate, which is then inked and used to print an image; also, the print itself.
Enlightenment The term given to the eighteenth-century intellectual movement that sought to apply reason and science to human affairs; also the period (c. 1715–1800) of the movement’s greatest prominence.
entablature In classical architecture, the horizontal section above the columns, consisting of architrave, frieze, and cornice (Fig. 3.16).
entasis The slight outward swelling in the shaft of a classical column. epic A long narrative poem recounting the adventures of a heroic central
figure, who is usually aided by supernatural forces. Epicureanism The philosophical belief that the universe is composed of
atoms and void, and that the highest good lies in moderate pleasure. epistles Letters, especially the letters of Paul and the apostles in the
Christian New Testament. epistolary novel A novel that recounts its story through letters written by
one or several of the characters. essay In literature, a brief work of analytic, interpretive, or critical prose,
often dealing with its subject from a personal point of view. etching The process of engraving in which the metal plate is incised, or
eaten away, by acid. ethics The branch of philosophy concerned with human conduct. ethos In ancient Greece, the belief that music could shape human character
(Greek, “character”). Eucharist In Christian belief, the ritual celebration of the Last Supper or
Lord’s Supper, consisting of bread and wine that symbolize the body and blood of Christ (Greek, “thanksgiving”).
evangelist One of the four authors of the Christian Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).
existentialism Philosophical belief that asserted the absurdity of human existence and stressed the necessity for human struggle and individual responsibility; popularized by Sartre and Camus during the period 1940–1960.
exposition See sonata form. expressionism An artistic or literary style that seeks to express the author’s
emotions or inner vision; as a movement, applies to writers and artists active, especially in German-speaking Europe, in the period c. 1910–1930.
façade The front of a building. farce A comedy of exaggerated expressions and ludicrous situations. fauvism A style of painting emphasizing free use of color, practiced by a
group of French artists, led by Matisse, in the years 1905–1907. feudalism The system of landholding and political alliance prevalent in
medieval Europe, in which oaths of allegiance and military service are exchanged for possession of land.
fluting In architecture, vertical grooves carved into the shaft of a column. flying buttress The external support of a Gothic church, formed by an
arched arm that braces the nave wall and transfers its thrust to a vertical buttress.
form The overall design or structure of a literary, musical, or artistic work. Forum Originally a “marketplace,” a forum was the social and political
center of a Roman city. fresco A technique of wall or ceiling painting in which paint is applied to
wet plaster (Italian, “fresh”).
chevet The configuration of a church’s eastern end that combines apse, ambulatory, and radiating chapels.
chiaroscuro In painting, the use of shades of light and dark to suggest volume; also, strong contrasts of light and dark for dramatic effect (Italian, “light–dark”).
chivalry The rules and customs governing knightly conduct in the Middle Ages, requiring loyalty to the lord, fairness in combat, and courtesy toward women (from French chevalier, “horseman,” “knight”).
choir The part of a church where the service is sung, usually east of the nave (Fig. 6.25).
chord Any combination of two or more notes sounded together. choreographer The artist who devises and directs the movements of dancers. chorus In ancient Greek theater, a group of singers and dancers who
commented on the action; in music, a group of singers who perform together, usually singing in parts; also, the section of a musical work designated for choral singing.
classical Pertaining to the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome; also (usually Classical), the period in European music, c. 1750–1820, as defined by the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
clef In musical notation, the sign placed at the beginning of a staff to indicate the pitch of one line, and hence establishing the range of notes for all the lines and spaces (French, “key”).
clerestory The row of windows along the top of the nave walls of a basilica or church.
cloister The enclosed courtyard of a Christian monastery, often surrounded by covered, arcaded walkways.
collage The technique of pasting materials—paper, string, cloth, etc.—to a canvas or board, often combined with painting (from French coller, “to paste”).
colonnade A row of columns. column An upright post, usually a support but sometimes built
independently as a monument (Fig. 4.10); in the classical orders (Fig. 3.16), it consists of shaft, capital, and base.
comedy A literary or dramatic form involving wit, humor, and ridicule, usually intended to provoke laughter.
conceptual art An art form originating in the 1960s proposing that art might simply be an idea, and the artwork itself may practically be eliminated.
concerto A musical composition for an ensemble of instruments; in the baroque concerto grosso, a small group of instruments plays in contrast with a larger orchestra; in the Classical concertos of Mozart and Beethoven, a solo instrument plays with an orchestra.
constructivism An ideology of post-Soviet Russia that rejected traditional easel painting and declared that art should help build the new Soviet society.
contrapposto A pose of the human figure in which the upper torso is twisted slightly, so that the shoulders and hips form an oblique angle (Italian, “opposite;” Fig. 8.23).
Corinthian order A classical order of architecture, with finely carved leaf capitals, popular in Hellenistic Greece and imperial Rome.
cornice In classical architecture, the horizontal ledge overhanging the entablature; hence, any horizontal projection along the top of a wall.
counterpoint As a synonym for polyphony, the musical technique of combining two different melodic lines played simultaneously; also applies to systematized methods in Renaissance and baroque music for combining contrapuntal voices (from Latin contrapunctum, “against note”).
Counter-Reformation The Catholic Church’s effort to reform itself and mount a religious counter-offensive against Protestantism.
courtly love An elaborate code of behavior governing relations between the sexes at medieval courts. According to the rules of courtly love, the young man pledged spiritual devotion and servitude to his love, usually a noblewoman.
cross vault (also groin vault) Vault formed by the intersection of two tunnel vaults (Fig. 4.14).
Crusades In the Middle Ages, wars fought to defend Christians against non-believers or to recover Christian lands.
cubism The abstract style of art developed by Picasso and Braque in the period 1907–1914; its early phase, analytic cubism, decomposed objects into abstract planes and shapes; its later phase, synthetic cubism, combined collage with abstract painting.
cult of saints The pious veneration of the Christian saints and their relics, in which medieval Christian pilgrimage was rooted.
Glossary 449
impressionism The movement and style of painting developed by Monet and others, chiefly in the period 1870–1890, characterized by the effort to capture the transient effects of light and color in outdoor scenes.
improvisation Spontaneously creating or adding to a musical work as it is being performed; especially prominent in baroque music and jazz.
installation art A work of art erected or arranged (usually temporarily) in a particular site or exhibition space.
International Gothic A style of the late medieval period, centered in northern Italy, Burgundy and Bohemia, that absorbed the influence of Byzantine icons.
interval The distance between two musical pitches; designated by counting up or down on the seven-tone scale from the starting point (C up to G is an interval of a “fifth”).
Ionic A classical order of architecture with slender columns and elegant scrolled capitals (Fig. 3.16).
isorhythm A technique in which a rhythmic pattern is repeated cyclically without regard for the melody.
jamb The vertical member that frames a doorway. jazz A type of popular music characterized by improvisation on popular
melodies and a swinging rhythm; originated by African-American musicians in the early 1900s.
jongleur A medieval wandering minstrel.
Kabuki Emerging during the Edo period (1616–1868), this style of Japanese theater combines stylized acting with song, dance, colorful costumes, and spectacular staging.
key The tendency of a musical work to gravitate toward a tonal center (the “key” note, or tonic); also, in keyboard instruments, the lever that causes sound to be made.
keystone The central stone in an arch or vault. Koran See Qur’an. kouros A nude male statue of the Archaic period in ancient Greece,
characterized by a frontal stance and stylized anatomical features; the female version (koré) was always clothed.
lancet window A tall narrow window, shaped like a pointed arch. Latin cross A cross with a longer vertical arm that bisects the shorter
crossing arm. Leitmotif In opera, a well-defined theme that symbolizes a character, object,
or idea, often recurring with variations to reflect developments in the dramatic action (German, “leading motif”).
liberalism The political doctrine that prizes individual rights and freedoms and strives for a constitutional government that secures individual autonomy.
libretto The written text of an opera (Italian, “small book”). linear perspective The perspective technique that creates the illusion of
depth by making parallel lines converge in the far distance. lintel The horizontal beam spanning the gap between posts or columns. liturgy The formalized and official rites used in public worship. lost-wax A technique that casts a replica of a sculpture in exact detail. lyric A genre of poetry, originally designating poetry recited with musical
accompaniment; generally, any brief poem, often expressing direct emotion and suggestive of song (Greek lura, “lyre,” a stringed instrument).
madrigal A type of song popular in Renaissance Italy and England; the Italian madrigal (popular 1350–1560) was a two- or three-voice song of several verses with repeating music; the English madrigal (popular in Elizabethan England) was a secular song in five or six voices often set to love poetry.
major In music, a seven-tone scale or key that contains half-step intervals between the third and fourth and seventh and eighth steps in the scale.
mannerism In painting and sculpture, a style prominent in Italy between the Renaissance and baroque periods, characterized by elongated figures and deliberate distortions of color, perspective, and scale.
manor The estate or district over which a lord holds power; also, the lord’s residence.
masonry In architecture, stone or brickwork. Mass In religion, the liturgy of the Eucharist in the Catholic Church,
composed of the Ordinary (text always the same) and the Proper (texts vary according to liturgical season); in music, a musical composition to accompany the Mass.
frieze Any horizontal band of sculptural decoration; in classical architecture, the sculpted band above the architrave and beneath the cornice.
fugue A form of musical composition in which a theme is developed usually by counterpoint.
futurism The movement of artists and intellectuals who rejected tradition and exalted the speed and machines of modern life; active in Italy and Russia c. 1909–1928.
gallery In architecture, the passageway above the church aisles. general will The collective interest of the citizens of a state, as guided by
civic virtue and an interest in the public good. genre In painting, the depiction of scenes from ordinary life; generally, a
type or category of art or literature (portraiture as a genre of painting, the novel as a genre of literature).
geometric A vase-painting technique of the ancient Greeks characterized by abstract, geometric designs.
Gesamtkunstwerk (German, “total work of art”) The term coined by Wagner to describe his vision of opera as the perfect union of music, theater, dance, and the visual arts.
Golden Age A period of exceptional cultural achievement; in ancient Greece, refers to Athens in 480–404 BCE.
Gospels The first four books of the Christian New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), devoted to accounts of, and commentaries on, the life of Jesus (“good news”).
Gothic In art history, a style associated with the later European Middle Ages (c. 1200–1450); in literature, a genre employing horror, supernatural effects, and medieval settings.
Gothic awakening The age of the later Middle Ages in Europe (1150– 1400).
Greek cross A cross with arms of equal length. Gregorian chant A form of plainchant attributed to Pope Grego ry I
(590–604) but probably unified as a body of sacred vocal music during the reign of Charlemagne, c. 800.
Guidonian hand A method of musical notation, attributed to Guido of Arezzo (active early eleventh century), in which different parts of the hand represented different tones.
Harlem Renaissance Movement of African-American authors and artists in Harlem (New York City) during the 1920s.
harmony The combination of notes to produce chords and the successive use of chords in a progression that pleases the ear.
Hegira Muhammad’s 622 flight from Mecca to Medina, the event from which Muslims date their calendar.
hippodrome In ancient Greece and Rome, an oval stadium for horse races. homophonic The term for the type of polyphony in which a principal
melodic line is accompanied by subordinate lines in chordal harmony, as distinct from counterpoint, in which the melodic lines move independently (Greek, “like-voiced”).
hubris Greek for arrogant or excessive pride. humanism The philosophical belief in the nobility of human character and
achievement; in the Renaissance, a humanist was a scholar who studied ancient Greek and Latin authors.
hydraulis An ancient type of organ that used water to control the wind pressure in the organ’s pipes.
hymn A religious song of praise and adoration.
icon In the Byzantine Church, paintings on panel representing holy persons (Greek, “image”).
iconoclasm A movement in the Byzantine Christian Church (730–843) to destroy icons and other visual images (Greek, “image smashing”).
iconography Any system of symbols and their meanings. idealism The philosophical belief that a permanent and unchanging world
exists apart from the world known through sense experience. idée fixe The term coined by Berlioz for a melody that recurs, with
variations, in different movements of a work. imitation In music, the immediate or overlapping repetition of a melodic
phrase by different voices, often at a different pitch. impasto In painting, thick applications of oil paint. imperialism The domination by a single nation or city-state over the life of
other areas.
450 Glossary
natural selection According to biologist Charles Darwin, the scientific process by which species survive in nature depending on how well they adapt to scarcity or threat.
nave The rectangular space of a church where worshipers congregate (Latin, “ship”).
nave arcade In a Gothic church, the area formed by series of weight-bearing piers, their mass disguised by vertical shafts, that marks the separation between the nave and its side aisles.
Near East Region of the ancient world from present-day Turkey to Iran and Arabia.
neoclassicism The revival of the styles and tastes of ancient Greece and Rome, especially as pursued in France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
neoplatonism A late classical philosophy derived from Plato that asserts three levels of reality leading to the One or the Good; widely adapted by Christian philosophers in the medieval and Renaissance eras.
nominalism The medieval philosophical doctrine that denied the existence of “universals,” the ideas referred to by such general terms as “red” or “beauty.”
notation Any system for writing music.
octave The interval between one note and the next note of the same pitch, for example, from middle C to the next C higher or lower; on the seven- tone scale, the interval of an “eighth.”
oculus A circular opening in a wall or a domed ceiling. opera A musical drama in which all or some of the dramatic text is sung to
orchestral accompaniment. oratorio An extended musical composition for voices and orchestra, usually
with a sacred text; contains the musical elements of opera but without costume or theatrical staging.
orchestra In ancient Greek theater, the circular space where the chorus danced and sang its part; in music, an instrumental group that includes stringed instruments, organized to perform musical works (Greek, “dancing place”).
order In architecture, a style of decorating a classical temple, distinguished by the treatment of column and entablature (Fig. 3.16).
organum Generally, the forms of medieval polyphony based on plainchant; usually with a slow-moving lower voice and one or more higher, more rapid voices.
original sin From the Bible, Adam and Eve’s first violation of divine command in the Garden of Eden.
overture An orchestral composition that introduces an opera, oratorio, or ballet.
pantomime (also mime) A dramatic form in which actors use gestures without words.
parable A simple story that teaches a lesson or illustrates a moral principle. Passion The events of Jesus’ last hours, from the Last Supper to his death;
also, an oratorio recounting these events. patriarch Chieftain. patricians The conservative upper class who ruled Rome through the
Roman Senate. Pax Romana The long period of relative peace and prosperity established by
Caesar Augustus. pediment The triangular area formed by the gabled roof and cornice of a
classical temple. pendentives Concave, triangular devices that support a dome (Fig. 5.14). performance art Type of art consisting of performances by visual or musical
artists, rather than actors or dancers, often provocative in nature. perspective In the visual arts, techniques for creating the illusion of three-
dimensional depth on a flat surface. philosophes Eighteenth-century French intellectuals who professed
Enlightenment beliefs. philosophy The enterprise of rational inquiry (Greek, “love of wisdom”). photomontage A collage of photographic images. pier A masonry support, usually square or rectangular, for a roof or vault. pietà A painting or sculpture depicting the Virgin Mary grieving over the
dead Christ. pilgrimage A journey to a shrine or holy place. pitch The quality of a sound that fixes it, high or low, on a scale. plainchant (also plainsong) The monophonic, unaccompanied vocal music
arising in early Christianity and performed with the Christian liturgies (see Gregorian chant).
materialism In ancient philosophy, the belief that all things are composed of physical matter; in modern thought, the belief that all existence is the manifestation of physical reality and that the good lies in physical comfort or well-being.
medium (pl. media) In general, the physical or technical means by which a work of art is realized (in painting, for example, oil paint vs. fresco).
megalith A large stone block, often arranged or aligned in Stone-Age structures.
melisma In Gregorian chant, a chain of several notes sung on a single syllable.
melody A series of musical tones arranged in succession, in a rhythmic pattern, to form a recognizable unit.
Messiah One “anointed” by God. meter In poetry, any regular scheme of stressed and unstressed syllables; in
music, a regular pulse of beats, grouped in larger units called measures (or bars), usually containing two (duple meter) or three (triple meter) beats per measure.
metopes Square slabs, often decorated with sculpture, that alternate with triglyphs in the frieze of a Doric temple.
mihrab The niche in a mosque that orients worshipers toward Mecca, toward which the faithful turn in prayer.
minimalism In the arts, a highly conceptual style of the 1960s that sought to eliminate art’s expressive or symbolic qualities; in music, a style of composition using repetition and static harmony, prominent in the United States in the 1970s.
minor In music, a seven-tone scale or key which, in its natural version, contains half-step intervals between the second and third and fifth and sixth steps in the scale.
miracle play A medieval drama depicting the life and martyrdom of a saint (see mystery play).
mobile A type of sculpture in which different parts move freely or are moved by a motor.
mode Any group of notes that form a musical scale and serve as the basis for a musical composition.
modernism The styles and movements in the arts, literature, and music associated with the rise of the modern world, especially in the period 1910–1945.
Modernity The process by which the new, the up-to-date, and the contemporary replaced the outmoded and traditional in the nineteenth century, particularly in the cities of Paris, Berlin, New York, and Chicago.
modulation In music, the change from one key to another. monism The idea that the natural world must be derived from a primal
stuff, such as water. monophonic The term for music consisting of a single melodic line, such as
plainchant (Latin, “one-voiced”); compare polyphony. monotheism Religious belief in a single, usually all-powerful deity. montage In film, the rapid editing of brief film segments so as to create a
powerful effect on the viewer; see also photomontage. morality play A medieval drama that illustrates a Christian moral teaching,
usually through allegory. mosaic A pictorial medium consisting of colored pieces of glass, stone, and
tile cemented to a wall, floor, or ceiling. mosque A Muslim religious building for communal prayer. motet A polyphonic musical form used widely in the period c. 1250–1750;
in medieval and Renaissance versions, the upper voices often sang different texts (French mot, “word”).
motif (also motive) A brief, often fragmentary musical idea, usually elaborated or developed in a larger composition.
movement In music, a section of a larger composition, such as a symphony.
Mughal empire Established by a succession of Muslim rulers under whose reign India prospered between 1526 and 1761.
mural A painting on a wall. mystery play A medieval religious drama that depicts biblical stories. mysticism The experience of a direct, subjective union or communion with
God or an ultimate reality; also, the belief that such direct experience of God or spiritual truth can be attained subjectively or intuitively, often in a trance or vision.
myth Ancient story or belief usually explaining, in metaphoric or symbolic terms, cosmic origins or sacred truths.
narthex The porch or vestibule of a church. naturalism In the visual arts, any style that seeks fidelity to nature.
Glossary 451
rococo An eighteenth-century artistic style, especially in France, characterized by soft colors, decorative designs, and frivolous mood (French rocaille, “shell-work”).
Romance A long narrative written in verse that told of chivalric adventures and courtly lovers.
Romanesque The medieval artistic style of c. 900–1200, in architecture characterized by the use of rounded arches, tunnel vaults, and other features of Roman architecture (hence the name “Romanesque”).
romanticism An artistic movement or sensibility prominent c. 1775–1850, characterized by heroic individualism, a nostalgia for nature or the past, and the prevalence of feeling over reason.
sacraments The ritual acts, such as communion, penance, and matrimony, that Christians believe confer divine grace on the believer.
satire Any work that criticizes wickedness and folly through wit and humor, usually with the intent to correct and improve.
scale In music, a sequence of tones in ascending or descending order of pitch; in general, the relative size or proportion of an object of art.
scholasticism The method in medieval theology and philosophy characterized by a synthesis of Christian doctrine and the works of Aristotle.
Scientific Revolution The intellectual movement of seventeenth-century Europe that developed the principles and methods of modern science, especially the empirical observation of nature and the verification of truth by experiment and mathematical calculation.
scriptorium The place in a monastery where manuscripts were copied and preserved.
sculpture Any type of art in which a three-dimensional object is fashioned either by removing material (subtractive sculpture) or by building up a shape from one or several materials (additive sculpture).
serial composition (also twelve-tone method) The method of musical composition, devised by Schoenberg c. 1920, based on the varied combination of a series, or “row,” of twelve tones.
sfumato In painting, a shading technique in which outlines are slightly blurred; developed by Leonardo as a variation on chiaroscuro.
skenē In ancient Greek theater, the building that housed costumes and props and served as a backdrop for the performance.
skepticism A systematic attitude of doubt toward any claim of knowledge. socialism The philosophical and political belief that society should be based
on collective ownership and control of the production of goods. social contract John Locke’s term for the agreement in which humans trade
the absolute freedom of the state of nature for the limited freedoms of civil society.
solmization A memory device in which each tone was associated with the first syllable of a familiar hymn.
sonata A work for solo piano or a piano with another instrument, usually in three or four movements.
sonata form A three-part musical form, employed in the Classical symphony, consisting of musical themes elaborated through an exposition, development, and recapitulation.
sonnet A form of lyric poem composed of 14 lines in one of several traditional rhyme schemes.
sophists A group of teachers in fifth-century Athens who taught persuasion in argument and questioned the independence of knowledge from the knower (Greek sophos, “wisdom”).
squinches A system of columns or beams placed diagonally so as to support a dome.
staff In music, the set of horizontal lines and intervening spaces on which music is written.
stoicism The philosophical belief, prominent in classical Rome, that reason governs the universe and that individuals should accept events beyond their immediate control.
stupa A rounded sacred enclosure used in Hindu and Buddhist architecture; literally “hair knot.”
subtractive sculpture Sculpture fashioned by carving or chipping away material (such as wood or marble) from an unshaped block.
superrealism In the visual arts, a style of extreme realism, prominent in the United States in the 1970s.
surrealists A group of writers and painters initially based in Paris who sought to release unconscious images and words in their art.
symbolism A literary and artistic movement, c. 1885–1910, characterized by a reaction against realism and the use of evocative but often private symbols.
plebeians The class of poor Roman commoners. pointed arch An arch with a pointed apex; characteristic of Gothic
architecture. pointillism A technique of painting in tiny, meticulous dots; developed by
the post-Impressionist Georges Seurat. polyphonic The term for music in which two or more independent melodic
lines sound simultaneously (Greek, “many-voiced”); compare monophonic and homophonic.
polytheism Religious belief in many gods. pop art A style of art based on “popular” or mass cultural forms such as
advertising, commodity packaging, popular music, and film; prominent in the United States during the 1960s.
post-and-lintel An architectural form based on columns supporting horizontal beams, as in a Greek temple.
post-impressionism A style in painting (about 1880–1900) that developed from impressionism.
predestination The Christian belief that God determines before a person’s birth whether or not that person will achieve salvation.
prelude In music, a movement that introduces a larger instrumental work; often performed unattached as an independent work.
primitivism The influence of arts from “primitive” tribal cultures in Africa, Oceania, and the Americas particularly on modernist artists.
prophets The mouthpieces of divine judgment (Hebrew, “navi”). proscenium In ancient Greek theater, the area in front of the skenē building
where the principal actors performed their parts (Greek, “before the skenē ”).
Protestant ethic The ascetic industriousness encouraged by Calvinist theology. psalter Book containing the Psalms of the Bible.
quadrivium In medieval learning, the higher division of the seven liberal arts, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
Qur’an The Muslim sacred scriptures, as recorded by the prophet Muhammad.
rationalism The philosophical belief that emphasizes the power of human reason over emotion or divine revelation; also, in contrast to empiricism, the belief that some ideas are innate to the human mind.
readymades An artistic technique, developed by Marcel Duchamp, in which ordinary objects were presented as art.
realism An artistic and literary style of the mid-nineteenth century that sought truthfulness to life, instead of traditional idealized representations; used generally, a synonym for naturalism.
recitative In opera and similar forms, a style of singing that follows the natural rhythms of the voice, as distinguished from song-like arias and ensembles.
Reconquest (also Reconquista) Campaign by medieval Spanish Christians to regain Muslim-held territories in Spain.
red-figure A vase painting technique in which the background of a scene was entirely painted (appearing as black) and the figures were left unpainted (appearing as red) except for fine details of anatomy.
Reformation The movement that divided Western Christianity into the Roman Catholic and the new Protestant faiths.
relativity The scientific principle of modern physics that time and distance are relative to the observer’s frame of reference.
relics Objects (often bones or possessions) venerated because of their association with a holy person.
relief Sculpture attached to, and projecting from, a backing wall or panel; low-relief sculpture projects slightly, while high-relief sculpture projects farther.
reliquary A container for sacred remains, such as a saint’s bones. Renaissance The literary and artistic period, c. 1400–1600, characterized
by artistic innovation, new confidence in human abilities, and interest in classical civilization.
republic A government of representatives chosen to act for the people at large. responsorial singing A form of plainchant in which a soloist sings and a
chorus responds. rhythm In music, a regular pulse or beat; in the visual arts, the repetition of
some element (line, shape, etc.). ribbed vault A vault supported by thin ribs of stone (Fig. 7.4). rock-and-roll A pop music style that features electric guitars and a strong
rhythmic drive.
452 Further Reading
Ancient Rome Boardman, John, and others, eds. The Oxford History of the Classical World.
1988. Connolly, Peter. The Ancient City: Life in Classical Athens and Rome. 1998. Freeman, Charles. The World of the Romans. 1993. Grant, Michael. Cities of Vesuvius: Pompeii and Herculaneum. 1971, 2005. Hadot, Pierre. What Is Ancient Philosophy? 2002. Hopkins, Keith, and Mary Beard. The Colosseum. 2005. Kleiner, Diane. Roman Sculpture. 1992. Ward-Perkins, J. B. Roman Imperial Architecture. 1992.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam Anderson, Bernhard W. Understanding the Old Testament. 5th ed. 2006. Armstrong, Karen. A History of God. The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. 1993. Brown, Raymond. An Introduction to the New Testament. 1997. Ettinghausen, Richard, and others. Islamic Art and Architecture 650–1250.
2nd ed. 2003. Fredriksen, Paula. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the
Emergence of Christianity. 2000. Freeman, Charles. The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and
the Fall of Reason. 2004. Friedman, Richard. Who Wrote the Bible? 1987. Jensen, Robin Margaret. Understanding Early Christian Art. 2000. Lapidus, Ira M. A History of Islamic Societies. 2nd ed. 2003. Lowden, John. Early Christian and Byzantine Art. 1997. McManners, John, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity. 1991. Shanks, Hershel, ed. Ancient Israel: A Short History From Abraham to the
Roman Destruction of the Temple. Rev. ed. 1999.
Early Middle Ages Barbero, Alessandro. Charlemagne: Father of a Continent. 2004. Conant, Kenneth. Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture 800–1200.
1979. Diebold, William J. Word and Image: An Introduction to Early Medieval Art.
2001.
General Brown, John Russell, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre. 2001. Cumming, Robert. Annotated Art: The World’s Greatest Paintings Explored
and Explained. 1995. Janson, H. W. History of Art. 8th ed. rev. 2008. Jonas, Gerald. Dancing: The Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement. 1998. MacGregor, Neil. A History of the World in 100 Objects. 2011. Sadie, Stanley, ed. The Norton/Grove Concise Dictionary of Music. 1988. Solomon, Robert, and Kathleen Higgins. A Passion for Wisdom: A Very Brief
History of Philosophy. 1999.
Ancient World Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. 2005. Arus, Joan, ed. Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the
Mediterranean to the Indus. 2003. Dalley, Stephanie, tr. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood,
Gilgamesh, and Others. 2009. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. 1997. Grimal, Nicolas. A History of Ancient Egypt. 1994. Robins, Gay. The Art of Ancient Egypt. Rev. ed. 2008. Saggs, H. W. F. Civilization before Greece and Rome. 1989. Schele, Linda. The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. 1993.
Classical Greece Beard, Mary. The Parthenon. 2002. Boardman, John. The Oxford History of Classical Art. 1993. Cantarella, Eva. Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in
Greek and Roman Antiquity. 1987. Comotti, Giovanni. Music in Greek and Roman Culture. 1989. Ford, Andrew. Homer: The Poetry of the Past. 1992. Green, Peter. Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the
Hellenistic Age. 1990. Howatson, M. C., ed. Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. 2nd ed.
1989. Pollitt, J. J. Art and Experience in Classical Greece. 1972. Vlastos, Gregory. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. 1991.
Further Reading
symphony An extended form of musical composition for orchestra, usually with three or four movements.
tempera A paint made of pigment, water, and egg yolk. tempo The “time” of a musical composition, determining the speed of
its performance; traditionally designated by Italian terms (for example, allegro, “quick”).
tenor In medieval organum, the lower voice consisting of long, sustained notes (Latin, tenere, “to hold”); also, the highest range of the male voice in regular use.
theme The self-contained melody on which all or part of a composition may be based.
thrust The force that causes a roof to push supporting walls outward. tonality In music, the series of relationships among pitches as based on one
central note (the tonic); in particular, the system of keys governing Western music from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.
tone (also note) A musical sound of particular pitch. tone row In serial composition, the series of 12 tones that forms the basis of
the composition. tonic The main note in a musical key. tracery Decoratively-shaped openings in a Gothic church window. tragedy In ancient Greece, a form of poetic drama involving song and
dance, usually relating the fall of a hero through some tragic error; in general, a serious drama involving a character’s courageous struggle against destiny or defeat (Greek tragoidia, “goat song”).
transept The crossing arm of a cross-shaped church. triforium Arcaded wall passage facing onto the nave of a church. triptych A painting on three panels.
trivium In medieval learning, the lower division of the seven liberal arts, consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic.
tropes Musical additions to the traditional Gregorian chant. troubadours Poet-musicians of southern France, prominent c. 1100–1350. tympanum In medieval architecture, the area enclosed by the lintel and
framing arch of a doorway.
utilitarianism The attitude or philosophical belief that utility, or usefulness, should be the standard for judging an object or action.
utopia An ideal society (Greek for “no-place”).
vanishing point In linear perspective, the point at which parallel lines seem to converge.
vault A masonry ceiling or roof constructed on the principle of the arch. vernacular The spoken language of a region or country, as opposed to a
literary or cultured language; for example, Luther translated the Bible into vernacular German from medieval Latin.
virtuoso In music, a performer of exceptional brilliance or skill. voice In musical composition, one of the several melodic strands or parts of
a polyphonic work; for example, the tenor voice or a fugue in three voices.
whole-tone scale Musical scale consisting only of whole-tone intervals, without the half-tone steps in a traditional musical key.
woodcut The process of printmaking by incising a plank of wood, which is then inked and used to print an image; also, the print itself.
word painting The musical depiction of the meaning of a word or phrase in the text; for example, a quickened rhythm on the word “joyous.”
ziggurat Mesopotamian stepped pyramid.
Further Reading 453
Hoppin, Richard. Medieval Music. 1978. Lacey, Robert. The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First
Millennium—An Englishman’s World. 1999. Lawrence, C. H. Medieval Monasticism, 2nd ed. 1989. Lewis, David Levering. God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Modern
Europe, 570–1215. 2008. Marenbon, John. Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150). 2nd ed. 1988.
The Gothic Age Armstrong, Karen. Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s
World. 1991. Gallagher, Joseph. To Hell & Back with Dante: A Modern Reader’s Guide to
The Divine Comedy. 1996. Hyman, Arthur, and James J. Walsh, eds. Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The
Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions, 2nd ed. 1983. Knowles, David. The Evolution of Medieval Thought. 1962. Labarge, Margaret Wade. A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in
Medieval Life. 1986. Scott, Robert. The Gothic Enterprise: A Guide to Understanding the
Medieval Cathedral. 2006. Sekules, Veronica. Medieval Art. 2001.
Italian Renaissance Bramly, S. Leonardo: Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci. 1991. De Grazia, Sebastian. Machiavelli in Hell. 1989. Fenlon, Iain, ed. The Renaissance: Man & Music. 1989. Hartt, Frederick. History of Italian Renaissance Art. 6th ed. 2006. Kelley, Donald. Renaissance Humanism. 1991. King, Ross. Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented
Architecture. 2000. Olson, Roberta J. M. Italian Renaissance Sculpture. 1992. Perkins, Leeman. Music in the Age of the Renaissance. 1999.
Reformation and Late Renaissance Arnold, Dennis. Giovanni Gabrieli and the Music of the Venetian High
Renaissance. 1979. Hale, John. The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. 1993. Harbison, Craig. The Mirror of the Artist: Northern Renaissance Art in its
Historical Context. 1995. McGrath, Alister. Reformation Thought: An Introduction. 1988. Nauert, Charles. The Age of Renaissance and Reformation. 1981. Ozment, Steven. The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and
Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. 1981. Rosand, David. Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Titian, Veronese,
Tintoretto. 1997. Rowse, A. L. Elizabethan Renaissance: The Cultural Achievement. 1972.
The Baroque Bergin, Joseph, ed. The Seventeenth Century: Europe, 1598–1715. 2001. Brown, Jonathan. Painting in Spain, 1500–1700. 1999. Downes, Kerry. The Architecture of Wren. 1982. Garrard, Mary D. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in
Italian Baroque Art. 1991. Montclos, Jean-Marie. Versailles. Rev. ed. 1997. Morrissey, Jake. The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the
Rivalry That Transformed Rome. 2005. Palisca, Claude. Baroque Music, 3rd ed. 1991. Pendle, Karin, ed. Women and Music: A History. 2nd ed. 2001. Schwartz, Gary. Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings. 2nd ed. 1991.
The Enlightenment Craske, Matthew. Art in Europe 1700–1830. 1997. Downs, Philip. Classical Music: The Era of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
1992. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. 1969. Heartz, Daniel. Mozart’s Operas. 1990. Honour, Hugh. Neo-classicism. 1977. Jones, Stephen. The Eighteenth Century. 1985. May, Gita. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of
Revolution. 2005. Porter, Roy. The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the
British Enlightenment. 2000.
Yolton, John, and others. The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment. 1992.
Revolution and Romanticism Bennett, B., and C. Robinson, eds. The Mary Shelley Reader. 1990. Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Revolution 1750–1800. 1987. Dabundo, Laura, ed. Encyclopedia of Romanticism: Culture in Britain,
1780s–1830s. 1992. Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Revolution. Europe 1789–1848. 1962. Rosen, Charles. The Romantic Generation. 1995. Rosenblum, Robert, and H. W. Janson. 19th Century Art. 1984. Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. 1989. Wood, Gordon. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. 1992.
The Industrial Age Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of
Modernity. 1982. Butler, Ruth. Rodin: The Shape of Genius. 1993. Conradi, Peter. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 1988. Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of
Life. 1995. Donington, Robert. Opera and its Symbols: The Unity of Words, Music, and
Staging. 1990. Garb, Tamar. Women Impressionists. 1986. Herbert, R. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. 1988. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
4th ed. 1989. Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. 1987. Naifeh, Steven, and Gregory White Smith. Van Gogh: The Life. 2011. Whittall, Arnold. Romantic Music: A Concise History from Schubert to
Sibelius. 1987.
Modernism Arnason, H. H. A History of Modern Art, 6th ed. 2008. Breger, Louis. Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. 2000. Cantor, Norman. The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern
Times. 1997. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 1975. Ogren, Kathy J. The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of
Jazz. 1989. Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932.
2010. Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. 2007. Varnedoe, Kirk. A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern. 1990.
Contemporary Age Brindle, Reginald S. The New Music: The Avant-garde since 1945. 2nd ed.
1987. Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 4th ed. 2007. Docherty, Thomas, ed. Postmodernism: A Reader. 1993. Harris, Jonathan, ed. Globalization and Contemporary Art. 2011. Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945–2000. 2000. Jencks, Charles. The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of
Postmodernism. 2002. Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Rev. ed.
1975. Madoff, Steven, ed. Pop Art: A Critical History. 1997. Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Selz, eds. Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. 1996. Walker, Kara. Kara Walker: After the Deluge. 2007.
454 Picture Credits
The author, publisher, and Laurence King Ltd. wish to thank the institutions and individuals who have kindly allowed works to be reproduced in this book. Museums and galleries are given in the captions; copyright notices and other sources of photographs are listed below.
Cover: Fotografica Foglia, Naples
1.1 Museum purchase, Elizabeth W. Russell Foundation and Louise R. and Robert S. Harper Funds. Photographer: Philipp Scholz Rittermann. © Doug Wheeler
1.2 The Kobal Collection/Gravier Productions 1.3 Photo courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Gallery 1.4 © Antonio Lacerda/epa/Corbis 1.5 Photo courtesy the artist and Ace Gallery,
Los Angeles 1.6 Image courtesy and © John Davies 1.7 © Xiaoyang Liu/Corbis 1.8 Photo courtesy and © Anirudh Koul 1.9 (1973) Copyright by Babette Mangolte (All
Rights of Reproduction Reserved) 1.10 Image courtesy and © K.K. Barrett 1.11, 1.12 Scala, Florence
2.1 Scala,Florence 2.2 © Ocean/Corbis 2.3 (84-11004) © University of Pennsylvania
Museum 2.4, 2.6 © The Trustees of the British Museum 2.7 Corbis/ZEFA/Maroon 2.8 Dr. E. Strouhal/Werner Forman Archive 2.9 Harvard University—Museum of Fine Arts
Expedition, 99.22. Reproduced with permis- sion. Photo © 2003 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved
2.10, 2.14 Scala, Florence 2.11 Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich 2.12, 2.13, 2.16 The Bridgeman Art Library 2.17 Asia Art & Archaeology, Inc./Corbis 2.18 Richard Hewitt Stewart/National Geographic
Stock 2.19 Eduardo Gonzales/AFP/Getty Images 2.20 Photo courtesy John Bigelow Taylor
3.1, 3.27 Werner Forman Archive 3.2, 3.3 The Art Archive/Heraklion Museum/
Gianni Dagli Orti 3.4, 3.10, 3.12, 3.26 © 2000 Craig and Marie
Mauzy, Athens 3.5 The Art Archive/National Archaeological
Museum Athens/Gianni Dagli Orti 3.6 Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library 3.7, 3.8, 3.9 Image copyright The Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence 3.11 Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece/Index/
The Bridgeman Art Library 3.13 National Archaeological Museum, Athens/
Scala, Florence 3.15 akg-images/Peter Connolly 3.18 © M. Timothy O’Keefe/Alamy 3.19 © Wolfgang Kaehler/Corbis 3.20, 3.21, 3.22 © The Trustees of the British
Museum 3.23 National Archaeological Museum, Athens,
Greece/The Bridgeman Art Library 3.24, 3.25, 3.28, 3.32 Scala, Florence
3.29 Fotografica Foglia, Naples 3.30 © 2005, Photo Scala, Florence/BPK,
Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin
3.31 Photo Scala, Florence—courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali
4.1 © BL Images Ltd/Alamy 4.2, 4.4, 4.5, 4.15, 4.22, 4.23, 4.28 Photo Scala,
Florence 4.3 The Bridgeman Art Library, London 4.6, 4.7 Andrea Jemolo/AKG-Images 4.9 James E. Packer 4.10, 4.12, 4.16 © Vincenzo Pirozzi 4.11 DAI, Rome 4.13 Photo © Paul M. R. Maeyaert, Mont de
l’Enclus (Orroir), Belgium 4.19 Fotografica Foglia, Naples 4.21 Photo Scala, Florence/BPK, Bildagentur fuer
Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin 4.25 Robert F. Sisson/Getty Images 4.26 © Roger Wood/Corbis 4.27 Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C. Purchase F1949.9 (detail) 4.29 Canali Photobank
5.1 © Nordicphotos/Alamy 5.2 © Israel images/Alamy 5.3 © Boaz Rottem/Alamy 5.4 Werner Forman Archive 5.5 Photo Scala, Florence—courtesy of the
Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali 5.6, 5.7, 5.9, 5.17, 5.18, 5.20, 5.25 Scala,
Florence 5.8 Canali Photobank 5.12, 5.15 © Altun Images 5.16, 5.21, 5.22 © CAMERAPHOTO Arte, Venice 5.23 The Bridgeman Art Library 5.24 Corbis/Zefa/H. Gratwohl 5.26 Jean Louis Nou/AKG-Images 5.27 © Julian Love/JAI/Corbis 5.28 © Paul Almasy/Corbis 5.29 © Roger Wood/Corbis
6.1, 6.8 Photo © Paul M. R. Maeyaert, Mont de l’Enclus (Orroir), Belgium
6.2 Bridgeman Art Library, London/© The Board of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
6.3 Bildarchiv Photo Marburg/Domkapitel Aachen/photo Munchow
6.4, 6.11, 6.12, 6.14, 6.16, 6.23 Scala, Florence 6.5 University Library, Utrecht, Ms. 32, fol. 1r. 6.6 © V&A Images. All rights reserved 6.9 LVR—Landesmuseum, Bonn 6.10, 6.31 Bridgeman Art Library, London/
Giraudon/Musée Condé, Chantilly, France 6.15 © The Trustees of the British Museum 6.17 Bildarchiv Photo Marburg/Dom Museum,
Hildesheim. Photo by Frank Tomio 6.18 Kenneth J. Conant, “Cluny: Les Eglises et
la Maison du Chef d’Ordre”, The Medieval Academy of America, Cambridge, MA © 1968
6.20 akg-images/Erich Lessing 6.22 © Gianni Dagli Orti/CORBIS 6.24 Photo © Paul M. R. Maeyaert, Mont de
l’Enclus (Orroir), Belgium and Bulloz, Paris 6.25 British Library, London 6.28, 6.29 Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne 6.30 Burgerbibliothek, Bern
7.1 White Images/Scala, Florence 7.2 © Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy 7.3 The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore 7.6, 7.9, 7.19 Scala, Florence 7.7 © SuperStock/Alamy 7.8, 7.14, 7.15 Bridgeman Art Library/Giraudon 7.10 © Dean Conger/Corbis 7.11 Andrea Jemolo/Scala, Florence 7.12 © ImageState/Alamy 7.13 Bridgeman Art Library, London/Giraudon/
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 7.16 © Heidelberg University Library 7.18 © Alinari Archives/Corbis 7.20 © Burstein Collection/Corbis 7.21 Scala, Florence—courtesy of the Ministero
Beni e Att. Culturali 7.22 Studio Fotografico Quattrone, Florence
8.1, 8.11, 8.12, 8.13, 8.16, 8.18, 8.22, 8.25 Studio Fotografico Quattrone, Florence
8.2 © CAMERAPHOTO Arte, Venice 8.3 Scala, Florence—courtesy of the Ministero
Beni e Att. Culturali 8.4, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.14, 8.17, 8.26, 8.27, 8.28
Scala, Florence 8.5 Samuel H. Kress Collection 1943.4.92.©
Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
8.9 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 8.10 akg-images/Rabatti-Domingie 8.19 The Royal Collection. © 2000 Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II/The Bridgeman Art Library 8.20 © Karin Duthie/Alamy 8.21 Bridgeman Art Library/Giraudon/Louvre,
Paris 8.23 Private Collection, London 8.30, 8.31, 8.32 Vatican Museums and Galleries,
Vatican City, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library 8.33 © Vincenzo Pirozzi, Rome 8.35 © James Morris, London
9.1 Scala, Florence—courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali
9.2 © RMN (Musée du Louvre)/Gérard Blot 9.3, 9.32 Scala, Florence 9.4 © 2009, National Gallery, London/Scala,
Florence 9.5 Bridgeman Art Library, London/Giraudon 9.6, 9.19 Bridgeman Art Library 9.7 © Images & Stories/Alamy 9.8, 9.9 © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW Photo:
Hugo Maertens/The Bridgeman Art Library 9.10 National Gallery, London, UK/The
Bridgeman Art Library 9.11 Museo del Prado, Madrid 9.12 Musee d’Unterlinden, Colmar, Germany/
Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library 9.13 © Blauel/Gnamm—ARTOTHEK 9.14, 9.16 Private Collection, London 9.15 akg-images/Erich Lessing 9.17 © The Gallery Collection/Corbis 9.18 C. Walter Hodges, Shakespeare and the
Players, London 1948, pp. 62–3 9.20 © V&A Images. All rights reserved 9.21 © 2007 DeAgostini Picture Library/Scala,
Florence 9.22 Bridgeman Art Library/Jean-Loup Charmet,
Paris 9.23 © RMN (Musée du Louvre), Paris
Picture Credits
Picture Credits 455
9.24 Bridgeman Art Library/Merilyn Thorold 9.26 Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/The Bridgeman
Art Library 9.27 © 2009, National Gallery, London/Scala,
Florence 9.28 Nivaagards Malerisamling, Niva, Denmark/
The Bridgeman Art Library 9.29, 9.30 Studio Fotografico Quattrone, Florence 9.31 © CAMERAPHOTO Arte, Venice
10.1 akg-images/A. F. Kersting, London 10.2 Scala, Florence—courtesy of the Ministero
Beni e Att. Culturali 10.3 Scala, Florence/Fondo Edifici di Culto—Min.
dell’Interno 10.4 © Vincenzo Pirozzi, Rome 10.5 © Alinari Archives/Corbis 10.7, 10.9, 10.10 Scala, Florence 10.8 © Angelo Hornak/Corbis 10.11 Historisches Museum der Stadt, Vienna 10.12 © RMN 10.13 © Nik Wheeler/Corbis 10.14, 10.15, 10.21 © The Gallery Collection/
Corbis 10.16, 10.19, 10.24, 10.34 Private Collection 10.17 © Douglas Schwartz/Corbis 10.18 © Massimo Listri/Corbis 10.20 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 10.22 akg-images/Erich Lessing 10.23 Photography © The Art Institute of
Chicago 10.25 © ARTOTHEK, Städel Museum, Frankfurt
am Main 10.26 © Francis G. Mayer/Corbis 10.29 Yale University Art Gallery 10.30 © English Heritage Photo Library/The
Bridgeman Art Library 10.31 The Art Archive/Musée du Louvre Paris/
Alfredo Dagli Orti 10.32 The Bridgeman Art Library
11.1 © 2009, White Images/Scala, Florence 11.2 © 2007, Image copyright The Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence 11.3 © 2008, White Images/Scala, Florence 11.4 The Bridgeman Art Library 11.5 Bequest of William K. Vanderbilt, 1920
(20.155.9). Photo © 1993 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
11.6 © Corbis 11.7 The National Gallery, London/Scala,
Florence 11.8 akg-images/Erich Lessing 11.9 Private collection 11.10 Bridgeman Art Library, London 11.11 © 2009, National Gallery, London/Scala,
Florence 11.12 Photo © Réunion des Musées Nationaux,
Paris/Jean Schormans 11.13 Photo © Réunion des Musées Nationaux,
Paris/J. G. Berizzi 11.14 Hulton Archive/Getty Images 11.15 Scala, Florence 11.16 Digital Image Museum Associates/LACMA/
Art Resource NY/Scala, Florence 11.18 © Arcaid Images/Alamy 11.19 Bridgeman Art Library, London/Giraudon 11.20 © David Muench/Corbis 11.21 © Tate, London, 2003 11.22 © 1999 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/
photo Katherine Wetzel 11.23 © Photo Josse, Paris
11.24 © 2009. National Gallery, London/Scala, Florence
11.25 © Leoid Bogdanov/SuperStock
12.1, 12.8, 12.16 Bridgeman Art Library, London 12.2 Virginia State Library and Archives 12.3 Réunion Des Musées Nationaux, Paris/
Arnaudet; J. Schormans 12.4, 12.5 © Paul M. R. Maeyaert, Mont de
l’Enclus (Orroir), Belgium 12.6 Scala, Florence 12.7 Scala, Florence/Luciano Romano—courtesy
of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali 12.8 SSPL/Getty Images 12.9 Private Collection 12.10 Government Art Collection/Bridgeman Art
Library 12.11, 12.12, 12.22 © Photo Josse, Paris 12.13 Bridgeman Art Library/Jean-Loup Charmet,
Paris 12.14, 12.16 akg-images 12.15 The Art Archive/Museo del Prado Madrid 12.17 © Geoffrey Clements/Corbis 12.18 (99.22) Reproduced with permission. Photo
© 2003 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved
12.19 Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
12.20, 12.21 A. F. Kersting/akg-images 12.23 © The Trustees of the British Museum
13.1 (1964.336) The Art Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved
13.2, 13.3, 13.15, 13.21 Private Collection 13.4 Tate Images 13.5, 13.6, 13.26 ©Photo Josse, Paris 13.7 (87.25) Photo © 1997 The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
13.8 © Bettman/CORBIS 13.9 © 2008, Photo The Philadelphia Museum of
Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence 13.10 Paul Almasy/Corbis 13.11 Photo © Paul M. R. Maeyaert, Mont de
l’Enclus (Orroir), Belgium 13.12 White Images/Scala, Florence 13.13 Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis/Emil
Boehl 13.14 From Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A
History of the Wagner Festival. 1994. © Yale University Press/Spotts
13.16 Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1928.610) © 1998 The Art Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved
13.17 Gift of H. O. Havemeyer, 1896 (96.17.10) Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
13.18 Vincent Abbey Photography 13.19 © Fotostudio Otto, 2001 13.20 The Rodin Museum, Philadelphia: Bequest
of Jules E. Mastbaim, 1929. The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
13.22, 13.24 Bridgeman Art Library, London 13.23 © The National Gallery, London/Scala,
Florence 13.25 © V&A Images. All rights reserved 13.27 Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala, Florence 13.28 Reproduced with permission. Photo ©
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved
13.29 Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.224) © 1998 The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved
13.30 The George W. Elkins Collection, 1936/The Bridgeman Art Library
13.31 Photo © Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris/H. Lewandowski/Orsay
13.32 Chester Dale Collection (1963.10.150. (1814)/PA) © 2000 The Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
13.33 © 2007, Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
13.34 Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. © 2003 Digital Image. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
14.1 Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950/© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp
14.3 Library of Congress 14.4 Digital Image. The Museum of Modern
Art, New York/Scala, Florence/© 2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.5 The Bridgeman Art Library/Estate of Georges Braque © 2012/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.6 The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of the Friends of Art, 54–90
14.7 © Charles & Josette Lenars/Corbis 14.8 Philadelphia Museum of Art: A. E. Gallatin
Collection, 1952 Estate of Georges Braque © 2012/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.9 Digital Image. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence/© 2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.10, 14.12, 14.14 Digital Image. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
14.11 given anonymously. Digital Image. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence/© 2012/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
14.13 © The Barnes Foundation, Lincoln University, Merion, Pennsylvania. Artwork: © 2012 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.15 © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York/Estate of Wassily Kandinsky © 2012/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/photo David Heald
14.16 Coll. Trix Duerst-Haass, Muttenz, Switzerland. /The Bridgeman Art Library/Estate of Paul Klee © 2012/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.17 © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp
14.18 © 2012 Estate of Giorgio de Chirico/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.19 Digital Image. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence/© Succession Miró 2012/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.20 given anonymously. © Digital image. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.21 Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal, Paris, France/ Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
14.22 akg-images 14.23 © Corbis
456 Index
Figure numbers are shown in bold type
Aachen, Germany: palace 138–9; palace chapel 139–40, 147, 6.7, 6.8
Abbasids, the 131, 132, 143 Abd-ar-Rahman 143 Abelard, Peter 158–60, 178, 6.31 Abraham 104, 108, 129 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 407 absolutism 268 abstract expressionism 417–18 “absurd, theater of the” 416 Abu Simbel, Egypt 39 academies: British 289, 312; French 272, 274, 286 Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart 435 Achilles 50, 51 Acropolis 56, 3.14; Erechtheum 59, 3.18, 3.19;
Parthenon 47, 56, 58–9, 60–61, 3.1, 3.15, 3.17, 3.20–3.22; Propylaea 59
“action painting” 417–18 Adam and Eve (van Eyck) 234, 9.9 Adam and Eve (relief) 5.9 Adams, John 430 Adorno, T. W. 411 Aeneid (Virgil) 80, 96 Aeschylus 62, 63–4 African Americans: art 435; dance 435–6;
literature 406–7, 435, 436; music 22, 408–9 Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of
Rhodes: Laocoön and his Two Sons 72, 3.32 Agra, India: Taj Mahal 263, 10.7 Ai Weiwei 1.7 AIDS 432 Ailey, Alvin 435; Cry 435–6, 15.27 Akhenaten 37, 39, 2.10; Hymn to Aten 37, 39 Alberti, Leon Battista: On Painting 202 Alcuin of York 137 Aldus Manutius 193
aleatory music 424 Alexander at the Battle of Issus (mosaic) 3.29 Alexander VI, Pope 207 Alexander the Great 36, 39, 55, 69, 80, 3.29 Alexandria, Egypt 69, 70, 115 Alhambra, Granada, Spain 144, 6.12 Allegory of Painting, The (Vermeer) 280, 10.26 Allen, Woody: Midnight in Paris 16, 1.2 Amarna 39; style 2.10 Ambassadors, The (Holbein) 9.4 Ambrosian chant 126 ambulatories 151 American Civil War 323, 352 American Dance Theatre 435–6 American Declaration of Independence 322–3 American Revolution 322 Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California
(Bierstadt) 340, 12.19 amphitheaters, Roman 87–8, 90, 94, 4.1 Anaximander 52 Anaximenes 52 Anderson, Laurie: United States 430 Andreas Cappellanus 180; The Art of Courtly
Love 180 Anglo-Saxons 136; Beowulf 136 Anguissola, Sofonisba 253; The Artist’s Family...
252, 9.28 Anselm of Canterbury, St. 158 Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus:
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul 118–19, 122, 5.12–5.15 Aphrodite of Cnidos (Praxiteles) 61, 63, 3.24 apocalypse, the 108–9 Apollo (terracotta) 77, 4.3 Apollodorus of Damascus: Basilica Ulpia, Rome
83, 4.9 Appalachian Spring (Graham and Copland)
407–8, 14.31 Apples and Oranges (Cézanne) 373, 13.31 aqueducts, Roman 85, 4.13
Aquinas, Thomas 178–9; Summa Theologica 178, 179
Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustus Peace) 80–81, 4.6, 4.7
arabesques 132–3 Arabs 128, 158, 160, 180 Arbugaeva, Evgenia 441–2; Tiksi series 442, 15.36 Arch of Titus, Rome 105, 5.4 Archaic period (Greece) 53–5 arches: Gothic 167, 7.4; Roman 79, 85, 87, 4.4,
4.14; Romanesque 148, 167, 7.4 Archimedes 70, 434 architecture 20–21, and see specific eras and styles Areopagitica (Milton) 288 Arian heresy 117 Aristophanes 65; Lysistrata 65 Aristotle 55, 68, 69, 98, 99, 114, 158, 177–8, 202,
215, 284; Nichomachean Ethics 69; Poetics 64, 248; Politics 69
Armory Show (New York, 1913) 381 Armstrong, Louis 409, 14.33 Arnolfini Portrait (van Eyck) 234–5, 9.10 Ars nova 182, 202 art deco architecture 400, 402 “art for art’s sake” 363 Art Nouveau 364, 13.17, 13.18 Arthur, King 182 Artist’s Family..., The (Anguissola) 253, 9.28 Aryans 40 “As Vesta Was Descending” (Weelkes) 246 Ashoka, Emperor 98 Aspasia 56 Assyrians 35, 39 astronomy 70, 115, 242, 284–6 At the Moulin Rouge (Toulouse-Lautrec) 13.16 Athenian Horsemen (Parthenon frieze) 61, 3.22 Athenodorus see Agesander Athens 55–6; Academy 69, 70; Lyceum 69; women
56; see also Acropolis
14.24 © Hemis/Corbis 14.25, 14.26 © 2012 Banco de Mexico Diego
Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.27 © 2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
14.28 Ronal Grant Archive/Goskino 14.30 (1942.51) © 2000 The Art Institute of
Chicago. All Rights Reserved 14.31 © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis 14.32 © Richard A. Cooke/Corbis 14.33 Getty Images/Hulton Archive/Frank Driggs
Collection 14.34 Corbis/Bettmann
15.1 Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
15.2 Photo Ernst Scheidegger © Estate of Ernst Scheidegger, 2012
15.3 Digital Image. The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence/© 2012 The Pollock- Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
15.4 purchase 55.35/© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
15.5 The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC/© 2012 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
15.6 © 2012 Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York 15.7 © Angelo Hornak/Corbis 15.8 © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
New York 15.9 Photo by the artist, courtesy of Isamu
Noguchi Foundation, New York. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
15.10 Palmer Museum of Art at The Pennsylvania State University. Gift of the Class of 1965. © 2012 Alexander Calder/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
15.11 Tate Images/© 2012 Louise Nevelson/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
15.12 Tate Images/Art © Estate of David Smith/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
15.13 Art © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
15.14 Photographer: Hervé Gloaguen. Courtesy of the John Cage Trust
15.15 Topfoto.co.uk/Dinodia 15.16 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
15.17 purchase with funds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation Inc. 68.36/Art © Judd Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York
15.18 Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
15.19 Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy 15.20 Courtesy Michael Graves Associates
15.21 Photo (1976) © by Babette Mangolte (All Rights Reserved)/2009–2011 Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation & Robert Wilson
15.22 © Gianfranco Gorgoni/Contact Press Images
15.23 Copyright © Christo & Jeanne-Claude 15.24 © the artist and Courtesy White Cube 15.25 © Maya Lin Studio, Inc., Photograph
courtesy the artist and The Pace Gallery 15.26 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn,1966 (Acc. No. 66.408/Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
15.27 Copyright © Max Waldmann, New York. Courtesy American Dance Theatre, New York
15.28 Photograph from the Museum Department (MTM010)
15.29 © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2012/photo Donald Woodman
15.30 © Tibor Bognar/Corbis 15.31 Courtesy Massery Photography, Inc. 15.32 Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins
& Co. 15.33 Image courtesy and © 2001 Thierry
Fontaine 15.34 Image courtesy and © Andrew Meredith 15.35 Photo courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery 15.36 Courtesy and © the artist
Index
Index 457
atomists, Greek 52 Aufklärung 307 Augustine, St., of Hippo 114, 115, 116; City of
God 115, 117, 137; Confessions 115, 178; On the Trinity 115
Augustus, Emperor (Octavian) 79–80, 81, 89, 96 Augustus of Primaporta (marble) 80, 4.5 aulos 66, 95, 3.28 Austen, Jane 307 automatism 395–6 Autun, France: Last Judgment tympanum
(Gislebertus) 152, 6.1 avant-garde 423–4 Avenue de l’Opéra, Sunlight, Winter Morning
(Pissarro) 13.12 Averröes (Ibn-Rushd) 158 Avicenna (Ibn-Sina) 158 “Axial Age” 99 Aztecs 43, 45, 269
Babylon/Babylonia 35, 105 Bacchus and Ariadne (Titian) 253, 9.27 Bach, Johann Sebastian 268, 278–9, 10.24 Baghdad 131, 132, 232; House of Wisdom 131–2 Bakst, Leon 399; Nijinsky 399, 14.21 Balanchine, George 407 Baldacchino (Bernini) 259, 260, 10.1 ballet 23, 275, 299, 334, 362, 381, 398, 399 Ballets Russes 399, 407 Balzac, Honoré de: statue (Rodin) 367, 13.21 barbarians 100, 118 Barcelona, Spain: Casa Batllò (Gaudí) 364, 13.18 Baroque period 259, 260; architecture 261–2, 264,
268–9, 273–4, 288–9; ballet 275; literature 270, 272, 287–8; music and opera 264, 266–8, 276, 278–80, 289–90; painting 264, 269–70, 276–7, 280, 282, 286; philosophy 285, 290; politics 286–7, 289–90; sculpture 259, 260–61; theater 274–5
Barrett, K. K.: scene design 1.10 Barry, Sir Charles: Houses of Parliament, London
341, 12.20 Barth, John 430 basilicas: Christian 118, 5.10, 5.11; Roman 83, 4.9 baths, Roman 85, 87 Battle Scene from the Comic Opera “The
Seafarer” (Klee) 393, 14.16 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein) 404–5, 14.28 Baudelaire, Charles 360, 363; Les Fleurs du Mal
363 Bauhaus 400; workshop wing (Gropius) 400, 14.22 Bayeux Tapestry 143, 6.11 Bayreuth, Germany: Festspielhaus 359, 364, 13.14 Bearden, Romare 435; Sermons: The Wall of
Jericho 15.26 Beardsley, Aubrey 364 Beatles, The 427 Beatriz de Dia 180 Beats, the 414 Beauchamp, Charles-Louis 275 Beaumarchais, Pierre: The Marriage of Figaro
304–5 Beauvoir, Simone de 416; The Second Sex 416 Becket, Thomas 165, 7.3 Beckett, Samuel 416; Waiting for Godot 416 Beethoven, Ludwig van 329, 333 Beethoven Frieze (Klimt) 364 Beijing: National Stadium (Herzog & de Meuron)
1.7 Beloved (Morrison) 436 Benedict, St., of Nursia 144 Benedictines 148, 150, 154 Benevento, Italy: Arch of Trajan 4.4 Benoist, Marie Guillemine 324; Portrait of a Black
Woman 324, 326, 12.6 Bentham, Jeremy 349 Beowulf 136 Berg, Alban: Wozzeck 400
Berlioz, Hector 331, 334–5, 12.14 Bernard of Clairvaux, St. 154, 155 Bernart de Ventadorn 180 Berners-Lee, Timothy 414 Bernhardt, Sarah: portrait (Nadar) 13.8 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 260; Baldacchino 259, 260,
10.1; Cornaro Chapel 261, 10.4; David 19, 260, 10.2; Ecstasy of St. Teresa 260–61, 10.3; Louvre 288; St. Peter’s Piazza 261–2, 10.5
Bernward 148 Bibles: Hebrew 105–8; New Testament 111;
Vulgate 115 Bicycle Wheel (Duchamp) 19 Bierstadt, Albert 340; Among the Sierra Nevada
Mountains in California 340, 12.19 Bilbao, Spain: Guggenheim Museum (Gehry) 438,
15.30 Bird in Space (Brancusi) 389–90, 14.11 Birth of a Nation, The (Griffith) 404 Birth of Spring (Botticelli) 202, 8.13 Birth of Venus (Botticelli) 200, 8.1 Black Death 184 Black Mountain College, NC 423–4 Black Square (Malevich) 385 Black Wall (Nevelson) 423, 15.11 Blake, William 335, 337; London 335 Blaue Reiter, Der (The Blue Rider) 393–4 Blindfolded Man, The (Dumas) 1.3 Boccaccio, Giovanni 183; Decameron 184 Boccioni, Umberto: Unique Forms of Continuity
in Space 389, 14.10 Bodhisattvas 174 Boethius 127, 202 Bohemian Master: Death (or Dormition) of the
Virgin 187, 7.20 Bolívar, Simón 326–7 Bologna University, Italy 177 Bonaparte, Pauline: Pauline Bonaparte as Venus
(Canova) 326, 12.7 Bonheur, Rosa 351–2; The Horse Fair 352, 13.7 Book of Changes 41 Book of Kells 136, 6.2 Bordoni, Faustina 289 Borges, Jorge Luis 430; Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius 430–31 Borgia, Cesare 207 Borgia, Lucrezia 195 Borromini, Francesco 264; San Carlo alle Quattro
Fontane, Rome 264, 10.8 Bosch, Hieronymus 235; The Garden of Earthly
Delights 235–6, 9.11 Botticelli, Sandro 195–6; Birth of Venus 200–1,
8.1; Primavera (Birth of Spring) 202, 8.13 Boucher, François 296; The Toilet of Venus 296,
11.5 Bourgeois, Louise 440; The Damned… 440,
15.34; Steilnest Memorial, Vardø 440 bourgeois-style painting 305–6 Bourke-White, Margaret 385 Boy Spinning Top (Chardin) 305, 11.12 Brady, Mathew 352 Brahe, Tycho 285 Brahms, Johannes 21, 334, 362 Bramante, Donato 218; St. Peter’s, Rome 218,
8.34; Tempietto, Rome 218, 8.33 Brancusi, Constantin 389, 421; Bird in Space
389–90, 14.11 Braque, Georges 386; Le Courrier 389, 14.8; The
Portuguese 386, 14.5 Brecht, Bertolt 402; The Threepenny Opera 402 Breton, André 395 Bride of the Village, The (Chardin) 305–6, 11.13 Brighton, England: Royal Pavilion (Nash) 342,
12.21 Britain 136; monasteries 136 Brontës, the 344 bronzes: Shang dynasty 40, 2.16 Brooks, Gwendolyn 436
Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky) 377–8 Brown, James 427 Brown, Trisha: Roof Piece 1.9 Brücke, Die (The Bridge) 391–3 Bruegel, Pieter 238; Hunters in the Snow (Winter)
238–9, 9.15 Brunelleschi, Filippo 196, 202; Florence Cathedral
199, 202, 218, 8.6, 8.9; Pazzi Chapel 199–200, 8.10
Buddha/Buddhism 68, 98–9, 144, 174 Bull-leaping fresco (Minoan) 48, 3.2 Buñuel, Luis: Un Chien Andalou 397 burghers 166 Burgmair, Hans: Maximilian with His Musicians
8.23 Burial at Ornans (Courbet) 351, 13.5 Burial of Count Orgaz, The (Greco) 257, 9.32 Burke, Edmund 324, 336 Burnacini, L. O.: Opera on the Cortiina 10.11 Byrd, William 246 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 329, 331, 335, 344,
12.10; Don Juan 331 Byzantine Empire 117, 118; architecture 118–22; map
5.2; iconoclasm 128; mosaics 119, 122–3, 124
Caesar, Julius 76, 79, 80, 81 Cage, John 424, 15.14 Caillebotte, Gustave: Paris Street: Rainy Weather
347, 13.1 Calder, Alexander 421–2; Spring Blossoms 423,
15.10 Calf Bearer (Moschophoros) 54, 3.11 caliphs 131 Callicrates see Ictinus Calling of St. Matthew, The (Caravaggio) 264, 10.9 Calvin, John/Calvinism 226, 227, 242, 244, 278 Camargo, Marie Anne de Cupis de 297, 299 Cambridge University, England 177 Camus, Albert 415; The Plague 416 Candide (Voltaire) 318–19 Canonization, The (Donne) 287 Canova, Antonio: Pauline Bonaparte as Venus 326,
12.7 cantatas 279 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) 96, 179, 184 Caravaggio, Michelangelo 264; The Calling of St.
Matthew 264, 10.9 Carlyle, Thomas 328 Carolingian Empire 136, 137–40 Carriera, Rosalba 296; A Young Lady with a
Parrot 296, 11.4 Carrow Psalter 7.3 cartes de visite 352 Cartesianism see Descartes, René Carthage/Carthaginians 77, 96, 126 caryatids 59, 3.19 Casa Batllò, Barcelona (Gaudí) 364, 13.18 Cassatt, Mary 367, 370; In the Loge 370–71, 13.28 Castiglione, Baldassare: The Book of the Courtier
212, 245 castles, medieval 140 Casulana, Maddalena 204 Catch-22 (Heller) 417 Cather, Willa 407 Catullus 95; To an Unfaithful Lover 95 cave paintings 26, 1.11 Celan, Paul 432 Cellini, Benvenuto 196 Cervantes, Miguel de 270; Don Quixote 270, 272,
10.16 Cézanne, Paul 371, 372, 373; Apples and Oranges
373, 13.31; The Bathers 386; Mont Sainte- Victoire from Les Lauves 372–3, 13.30
Chalgrin, Jean-François: Arc de Triomphe, Paris 324, 12.4
Chambord, France: Château (Cortona and Trinqueau) 228, 231, 9.5
Chaplin, Charlie 404
458 Index
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 305; Boy Spinning Top 305, 11.12
Charlemagne, Emperor 126, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 146, 154
Charles I, of England 286–7; portrait (van Dyck) 286, 10.31
Chartres, France 166; Cathedral 168, 175, 7.6; sculpture 171–2, 7.9, 7.10; stained glass 168–70, 7.1, 7.7, 7.8
Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales 96, 179, 184 Chavín culture, Peru 45, 2.20 Chekhov, Anton 375, 376 chevets 151–2 chiaroscuro 200, 211 Chicago, Ill. 357, 360; skyscrapers (Sullivan) 358 Chicago, Judy: The Dinner Party 436, 15.29 Chien Andalou, Un (Buñuel and Dalí) 397 China: bronzes 40; philosophies 42, 68; scroll
painting 85 chivalry, medieval 179, 181 Chopin, Frédéric 333–4 Chrétien de Troyes: Lancelot 182 Christ see Jesus Christ Christ as the Good Shepherd (mosaic) 122, 5.16 Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter (Perugino) 202,
8.14, 8.15 Christ Healing the Sick (Rembrandt) 282, 10.29 Christ Pantocrator 128, 5.25 Christianity/Christians 93, 101, 103, 107, 109;
and drama 156–7; early churches 118, 5.11; growth 110–14, map 5.1; iconography 113; music 126–7, 154–5; philosophy 114, 117; see also Jesus Christ; monasteries
Christine de Pisan 184; The Book of the City of Ladies 186
Christo and Jeanne-Claude 432; Running Fence 432, 15.23
Chrysler Building, NY (Van Alen) 402, 14.24 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 91, 97, 4.21 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) 395 “classical ideal” 62 Classical music 307–8, 310 Classical period (Greece) 55–62 Clock, The (Marclay) 440–41, 15.35 Clodion (Claude Michel): Intoxication of Wine
(Nymph and Satyr Carousing) 294, 11.2 Clouet, Jean (?): Francis I 9.3 Cluny, France: Abbey Church 150–51, 155, 6.18,
6.19 Coalbrookdale at Night (de Loutherbourg) 12.8 coffeehouses 299, 301, 306, 11.14 Cole, Thomas 340 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 337 collages 389, 435, 14.8 Cologne, Germany: Cathedral 341 Colosseum, Rome 87–8, 4.1 Coltane, John 414 Columbus, Christopher 228 comedy: Elizabethan 243–4; French 275; Greek
65, 70; Italian Renaissance 247–9; Roman 93, 94
commedia dell’arte 248–9, 9.22, 14.9 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 329 conceptual art 427 concerto/concerto grosso 267 concrete, Roman 87 Condorcet, Antoine Nicolas de 304 condottieri 194 Cone Eater (Murata) 414, 15.1 “confessional poets” 414 Confucius/Confucianism 42, 68, 99 Conques, France: Sainte-Foy 151, 6.20, 6.21;
reliquary 6.23 conquistadores 228 Constable, John 338, 340; The White Horse 338,
12.17 Constantine, Emperor 111, 114, 117, 118; Head,
Rome 5.8
Constantinople 114, 117, 153; see also Istanbul contrapposto 63 Copernicus, Nicolaus: On the Revolutions of
Heavenly Bodies 284 Copland, Aaron: Appalachian Spring 407 Córdoba, Spain 143; Great Mosque 132, 5.28 Corinthian order 58, 89, 3.16 Corneille, Pierre 274, 276 Cornelia Pointing to her Children as her Treasures
(Kauffmann) 313, 11.22 Cortona, Domenico da: Château de Chambord
231, 9.5 Counter-Reformation 246, 257; and architecture
262, 264; and astronomy 285–6; and music 246–7; and sculpture 260–61
Courbet, Gustave 351; Burial at Ornans 351, 13.5 Courrier, Le (Braque) 389, 14.8 courtly love 179–80 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder: Luther 9.1 Creation of Adam (Michelangelo) 218, 8.32 creation stories 34, 43; Hebrew 106–8 Creoles 326–7 Crucifixion (from Lindau Gospels) 137, 6.4 Crucifixion (ivory plaque) 138, 6.4 Crusades, the 153, 160–61, 164, 7.2; map 7.1 Cry (Ailey) 435–6, 15.27 Cry in the Night (Fontaine) 440, 15.33 Crystal Palace, London (Paxton) 348–9, 356, 13.3 Cubi (D. Smith) 423, 15.12 cubism 386, 389 Cullen, Countee 406 cuneiform writing 32 Cunningham, Imogen: Magnolia Blossom 406,
14.29 Cunningham, Merce 424; Variations V 15.14 Cuzco, Peru: La Compañia 268–9 Cyrus II, of Persia 35
dada 394 Dalí, Salvador 397; The Persistence of Memory
397, 14.20 Damascus, Syria 131; Great Ummayad Mosque
132, 5.27 Damned..., The (Bourgeois) 440, 15.34 dance 22–3, and see specific eras Dancer in Green, The (Degas) 370, 13.27 Dante Alighieri 195, 207, 367; Divine Comedy
179, 182–3, 366 Daoism 42 Darius, of Persia 35–6 Darkytown Rebellion (Walker) 438, 15.32 Darwin, Charles 348, 349–50, 377 Daumier, Honoré 352; Rue Transnonain 13.2 David (Bernini) 19, 260, 10.2 David (Donatello) 19, 205–6, 8.16 David (Michelangelo) 206, 8.18 David, Jacques-Louis 312; The Death of Marat
321–2, 12.1; Napoleon Crossing the Alps 324, 12.3; Oath of the Horatii 312, 315, 11.23
David, King 104–5 Davis, Miles 414 Death of Marat, The (David) 321–2, 12.1 Death of Sardanapalus, The (Delacroix) 332,
12.11 Death (or Dormition) of the Virgin (Bohemian
Master) 187, 7.20 Debussy, Claude 364, 366, 399 Decameron (Boccaccio) 184 de Chirico, Giorgio 395; The Mystery and
Melancholy of a Street 395, 14.18 Degas, Edgar 367, 370; The Dancer in Green 370,
13.27 deists 303 Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Le (Manet) 351, 13.6 de Kooning, Willem 418; Woman and Bicycle
418, 15.4 Delacroix, Eugène 329, 331, 342; The Death
of Sardanapalus 332, 12.11; Faust Visits
Marguerite in Prison 330, 12.9; Liberty Leading the People 332–3, 12.12
Delian League 55 Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les (Picasso) 385–6, 391,
14.4 Deposition (Pontormo) 255, 9.30 Descartes, René 285, 286 Descent of Man, The (Darwin) 350 Dessau, Germany: Bauhaus workshop wing
(Gropius) 400, 14.22 Diaghilev, Sergei 399 dialectic, the (Hegel) 328–9 Diane de Poitiers 233 Diaspora, the 105 Díaz, Bernal 43 Dickens, Charles 354–5 Diderot, Denis 306; Encyclopedia 302–3 Dido and Aeneas (Purcell) 289 Dinner Party, The (Chicago) 436, 15.29 Diocletian, Emperor 100–1, 128 Diogenes 84 Dionysian Mysteries (wall-painting) 91, 93, 4.22 Dionysus, worshipers of 111 Dipylon vase 53, 3.7 Discourse on Method (Descartes) 286 Disney, Walt: Snow White 414 Divine Comedy (Dante) 179, 182–3, 366 Doge’s Palace, Venice 186, 7.19 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen) 376 Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem 103, 129, 5.1 Don Giovanni (Mozart) 308 Don Juan (Byron) 331 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 270, 272, 10.16 Donatello 205; David 19, 205–6, 8.16; Judith 207 Donne, John 287; The Canonization 287 Donovan, Tara: Untitled 1.5 Doric order 58, 59, 3.16 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 360, 376–7, 378, 416; The
Brothers Karamazov 377–8 drama see theater(s) Du Bois, W. E. B. 406; The Souls of Black Folk
406 Duchamp, Marcel 394; Bicycle Wheel 19;
L.H.O.O.Q. 394, 14.17; Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 381, 14.1
Dufay, Guillaume 202; Recently Roses Blossomed 202
Dumas, Alexandre 331 Dumas, Marlene: The Blindfolded Man 1.3 Duncan, Isadora 407 Dura-Europos, Iraq 112–13 Dürer, Albrecht 236–8; Erasmus of Rotterdam
9.16; Knight, Death, and the Devil 238, 9.14; Self-portrait in a Fur-collared Robe 237, 9.13
Dyck, Anthony van 286, 287; Charles I of England 286, 10.31
Dying Gaul (sculpture) 71–2, 3.31 Dylan, Bob 427
Eakins, Thomas 353; The Gross Clinic 353–4, 13.9 earth art 432 Ebbo, Archbishop 138 Eckhart, master 157 eclecticism 428, 429 Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose 429 Ecstasy of St. Teresa (Bernini) 260–61, 10.3 Eddas 136 Edirne, Turkey: Selimiye Mosque (Sinan) 233, 9.7 Edison, Thomas 348 Egypt, ancient 36–7, 69; mask of Tutankhamen
2.1; pyramids 37; sculpture 37, 39; tombs 39 Eiffel, Gustave: Eiffel Tower, Paris 347, 356,
13.11 Einstein, Albert 382 Einstein on the Beach (Glass and Wilson) 430,
15.21 Eisenstein, Sergei: Battleship Potemkin 404–5,
14.28
Index 459
Eleanor of Aquitaine 180, 182 Eliot, T. S.: The Waste Land 398 Elizabeth I, of England 226, 242, 246; Armada
Portrait (Gower) 9.17 Elizabethan age 241; literature 244–5; music
245–6; theater 242–4, see also Shakespeare, William
Elizabeth of Schöngau 155 Ellington, Duke 409 Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man 417 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 338 Émile, or Education (Rousseau) 304 Empedocles 52 empiricism 285, 302, 303 Encyclopedia (Diderot) 302 Enlightenment, the 294, 301, 337, 343; and music
307–8, 310; philosophes 301, 302–3; and philosophy 303–4; and satire 314–19; see also neoclassicism
Enslavement of the Indians (Rivera) 403, 14.25 Epic of Gilgamesh 35 epic theater (Brecht) 402 epics 35, 40, 50; Beowulf 136; Song of Roland
141–2; see also Homer; Virgil Epictetus 84, 99 Epicurus/Epicureanism 70, 97 Epidaurus, Greece: theater 63, 3.26 Erasmus, Desiderius 238, 239, 9.16; In Praise of
Folly 239–40 Erigena (John the Scot) 158; On Nature 158 Erlking, The (Schubert) 333 Escorial Palace, Spain 268, 10.12 Este, Isabella d’ 195, 212, 8.24 Etruscans 77; sculpture 77, 4.3; tubas 94 Eucharist, the 111 Euclid 70 “Euphronios vase” 53, 3.8 Euripides 64; Medea 64 Evans, Walker 385 Executions of the Third of May, 1808 (Goya) 337,
12.15 existentialism 415, 416, 417 Experiment with an Air Pump (J. Wright) 303,
11.11 expressionism 391; German 391–4 Eyck, Jan van 234; Arnolfini Portrait 234–5, 9.10;
Ghent Altarpiece (with Hubert van Eyck) 234, 9.8, 9.9
f/64 Group 406 “Fallingwater” (Wright) 408, 14.32 fascism 384, 413; see also Nazis Faulkner, William 407; Absalom, Absalom! 407 Faust (Goethe) 329–30, 335, 337 Faust Visits Marguerite in Prison (Delacroix) 330,
12.9 fauves 391 feminism 336–7, 385, 436 Fences (A. Wilson) 436 Ferdinand and Isabella, of Spain 226, 228 Ferrara, Italy 192, 204, 213 fêtes galantes 296 feudalism 140–41, 164–5, 179, 181, 6.9 Ficino, Marsilio 195 Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Hiroshige) 369 film 16, see movies Flaubert, Gustave 355; Madame Bovary 355; The
Sentimental Education 355 Fleurs du Mal, Les (Baudelaire) 363 Florence, Italy 182, 186, 192, 194, 196, 200,
205, 207, 208, 322; Baptistery doors 196, 205, 8.7, 8.8; Brancacci Chapel frescoes 200, 8.12; Camerata 248, 266; Cathedral 199, 202, 218, 8.6, 8.9; Laurentian Library 195, 8.4; Pazzi Chapel 199–200, 8.10; Santa Maria Novella (fresco) 200, 8.11
Flowers in a Vase (Ruysch) 280, 10.25
flying buttresses 167 Fontaine, Thierry 440; The Cry series 440, 15.33 Fontana, Lavinia 253 Formation (Frankenthaler) 418, 15.6 4ʹ33ʺ (Cage) 424 Four Seasons, The (Vivaldi) 267–8 Fourteen Americans (Noguchi) 421, 15.9 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré: The Progress of Love:
The Meeting 296–7, 11.6 Francis I, of France 228, 9.3 Frankenstein (M. Shelley) 336, 344–5 Frankenthaler, Helen 418; Formation 418, 15.6 Franklin, Aretha 427 Frederick II (“the Great”), of Prussia 299 French Revolution 297, 321, 322, 323–4, 341 Freud, Sigmund 378, 395, 396, 397; The
Interpretation of Dreams 394–5 Friedrich, Caspar David: The Wanderer Above the
Mists 12.16 friezes: Greek 59, 60–61, 3.20, 3.22; Hellenistic 71 frottole 204 fugues 279–80 Fulcher of Chartres 160–61 futurists, Italian 389
Gabriel, Ange-Jacques: Petit Trianon, Versailles 310–11, 11.19
Gabrieli, Andrea: Oedipus 248 Gabrieli, Giovanni 249–50 Gainsborough, Thomas 300; Mrs. Richard
Brinsley Sheridan 300, 11.10 Galileo Galilei 242, 285–6 Gandhara, India: relief 98, 4.27 Gandhi, Mahatma 424, 425, 15.15 García Márquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of
Solitude 431 Garden of Earthly Delights, The (Bosch) 235–6,
9.11 Garden of Love, The 277, 10.22 Gates of Hell, The (Rodin) 366–7, 13.20 Gaudí y Cornet, Antoni 364; Casa Batllò,
Barcelona 364, 13.18 Gauguin, Paul 371, 373; Ia Orana Maria (Hail
Mary) 373–4, 13.33; Self-Portrait with Halo 373, 13.32
Gaye, Marvin 427 Gehry, Frank: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 438,
15.30 Genesis 106–8 Genoa, Italy 164, 192 Gentileschi, Artemisia 264; Judith Slaying
Holofernes 264, 10.10 Geoffrin, Madame 294 George III, of Britain 322 German expressionism 391–4 Gershwin, George 408 Gesamtkunstwerk 359, 430 Ghent Altarpiece (van Eyck) 234, 9.8, 9.9 Ghiberti, Lorenzo: Florence Baptistery doors 196,
205, 8.7, 8.8 Giacometti, Alberto 15.2 Ginsberg, Allen 414; Howl 414 Giorgione 251; Tempest 251, 9.26 Giotto di Bondone 187; Madonna Enthroned 187,
7.21; Pietà 189, 7.22; Scrovegni Chapel frescoes 187, 189
Giselle (ballet) 334 Gislebertus: Last Judgment 135, 152, 6.1 Giza, Egypt: pyramids 37, 2.8 Glass, Philip 430; Einstein on the Beach 430,
15.21 globalization 438–40 “Glorious Revolution” 289, 290, 301 Göbekli Tepe, Turkey 32 Godwin, William 336 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 329; The Erlking
333; Götz von Berlichingen 307; Faust 329–30, 335, 337
Gogh, Vincent van 371, 373, 375; Starry Night 374–5, 13.34
Good Shepherd, The (marble) 113, 5.6 Goodwin, Grenville 342 Gospel Book of Charlemagne 137, 6.3 Gospels, the 111 Gothic Revival architecture 341, 355 Gothic style 164, 165, 166; architecture 166–8,
186; drama 175, 177; music 172–3; sculpture 170–72, 185; stained glass 168–70
Götz von Berlichingen (Goethe) 307 Gounod, Charles: Faust 330 Gower, George: Elizabeth I (Armada Portrait) 9.17 Goya, Francisco 337; Executions of the Third of
May, 1808 337, 12.15; The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters 343, 12.23
Graham, Martha 407, 421; Appalachian Spring 407–8, 14.31
Granada, Spain 143, 144; Alhambra 144, 6.12 Grande Odalisque (Ingres) 342, 12.22 Grateful Dead 427 Graves, Michael: Public Services Building,
Portland, Oregon 429–30, 15.20 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) 430 Great Exhibition (London, 1851) 348–9, 13.3 Great Schism (1378–1417) 165, 182 Great Wave off Kanazawa, The (Hokusai) 369,
13.25 Great Zimbabwe 209, 8.20 Greco, El 255, 257; The Burial of Count Orgaz
257, 9.32 Greece, ancient 20, 48; architecture 47, 56–9;
architectural orders 58, 3.16; dance 65; music 51, 65–6; poetry 50–51; philosophy 52, 67–9; religion 51–2; sculpture 54–5, 59–61; theater(s) 62, 63–5; vases 53, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8; see also Athens; Hellenistic period
Greek Orthodox Church 116 Green and Maroon (Rothko) 418, 15.5 Gregorian chant 126, 154, 5.23 Gregory I, Pope 126, 5.23 Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel (Schubert) 330 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 305–6; The Bride of the
Village 306, 11.13 Griffith, D. W.: The Birth of a Nation 404 Gropius, Walter 400; workshop wing, Bauhaus
400, 14.22 Gross Clinic, The (Eakins) 353–4, 13.9 Grünewald, Matthias: Crucifixion (from Isenheim
Altarpiece) 236, 9.12 Guernica (Picasso) 404, 14.27 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (Gehry) 438, 15.30 Guggenheim Museum, NY (Wright) 21, 420, 15.8 Guido of Arezzo: musical scale 154–5, 6.26 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 316
hadith 131 Hadrian, Emperor 89 Hail Mary (Gauguin) 373–4, 13.33 Hals, Frans 380 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 156, 244–5 Hammurabi’s Code 35 Handel, George 287, 289; Messiah 289 “happenings” 426 Harappan civilization 39–40 Hardin, Lil 409 Hardouin-Mansart, Jules: Palace of Versailles
273–4, 288, 10.17, 10.18 Harlem (Hughes) 406 Harlem Renaissance 406–7 Harvey, William 285 Hatshepsut, Queen 39 Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugène 356, 358, 360 Haydn, Joseph 307, 308, 310, 333 Hegel, Georg W. F. 328–9 hegira 129 Heine, Heinrich 341 Heisenberg, Werner 382
460 Index
Hellenistic age 69–70; architecture 58; libraries 70, 73; philosophy 70; sculpture 71–3; theater 65, 70
Heller, Joseph: Catch-22 417 Henry II, of England 165, 180, 182 Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor 165 Henry VII, of England 226 Henry VIII, of England 226, 228, 241–2 Heraclitus 52 Hermes and the Infant Dionysus (Praxiteles) 3.25 Herodotus 36, 38 Herzog & de Meuron: Beijing National Stadium
1.7 Hesiod: Theogony 52 hetaerae 56 Hiberno-Saxon style 136, 137, 152 Hildegard of Bingen 155–6, 157; Scivias 157, 6.28 Hildesheim Cathedral, Germany: bronze doors
148, 150, 6.17 Hilliard, Nicholas: A Youth Leaning Against a
Tree 245, 9.20 Hinduism 40, 144 “hip-hop” culture 439 Hiroshige, Ando 369; Fifty-three Stations of the
Tokaido 369 Hiroshima, bombing of 411 Hitler, Adolf 79, 384, 405, 410 Hoare, Henry: Stourhead Park 310, 11.18 Hobbes, Thomas 268, 290 Hogarth, William 316; Marriage à la Mode 316,
11.24 Hokusai, Katsushika: The Great Wave off
Kanazawa 369, 13.25 Holbein, Hans 228; The Ambassadors 9.4 Holy Trinity (Masaccio) 200, 8.11 Homer 50; Iliad 50, 51, 73; Odyssey 50, 73 Homer, Winslow 353 Hopper, Edward 407; Nighthawks 14.30 Horace 96 Horse Fair, The (Bonheur) 352, 13.7 Horta, Victor 364 Houdon, Jean-Antoine: Voltaire 11.25; George
Washington 12.2 House (Whiteread) 1.6 Houses of Parliament, London (Barry and Pugin)
341, 12.20 Howl (Ginsberg) 414 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim 93, 147 Hudson River school 340 Hughes, langstone 406; Harlem 406 Hugo, Victor 331 Huguenots 226 humanism/humanists 62, 64, 185, 225; Northern
239–41; Renaissance 193, 194, 202, 322 Hume, David 285, 303 Hundred Guilder Print (Rembrandt) 282, 10.29 Hunters in the Snow (Winter) (Bruegel) 238–9,
9.15 Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching
God 406–7 hydraulis 94 Hypatia 115
Ia Orana Maria (Gauguin) 373–4, 13.33 Ibn-Rushd (Averroës) 158 ibn Shaprut, Rabbi Hisdai 143 Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) 158 Ibsen, Henrik 375–6; A Doll’s House 376 iconoclasm 128 iconography, Christian 113 Ictinus and Callicrates: Parthenon see Greece Ideal City, An (Piero della Francesca) 8.3 idée fixe 334 Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises 246 Iliad (Homer) 50, 51, 73 Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (Cage) 424 imperialism 78 Impression: Sunrise (Monet) 367, 13.22
impressionist painting 367–8, 370–71 Improvisation 28 (Kandinsky) 393, 14.15 In Mind (Levertov) 436 Inca empire 45, 268–9 Indus Valley 39–40 Industrial Revolution 327–8 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 342; Grande
Odalisque 342, 12.22 Inquisition, the 246–7 installations 421, 432, 436, 440–41 International Gothic 186, 187 International Style architecture 418, 420 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud) 394–5 In the Loge (Cassatt) 370–71, 13.28 Intoxication of Wine (Clodion) 294, 11.2 Invisible Man (ellison) 417 Ionic order 59, 60, 3.16 iron construction, 19th-century 356 Isaac, Heinrich 202 Isaiah (prophet) 106, 108 Isenheim Altarpiece (Grünewald) 236, 9.12 Isidorus of Miletus see Anthemius of Tralles Islam/Islamic culture 103, 104, 107, 128–30,
133, 164; architecture 131–2; map 5.3; Qur’an 130–31; see also Muslims
Israelites 104–5, 106, 107, 108–9 Istanbul: Hagia Sophia 118–19, 122, 5.12–5.15;
see also Constantinople Ives, Charles: Three Pieces in New England 408
Jahwist, the 106–7 James, Henry 376 Jamison, Judith 435–6, 15.27 Jane Eyre (C. Brontë) 344 Japanese prints 369, 13.25 Java, Indonesia: Stupa of Borobudur 174, 7.12 jazz 408–9, 414; “be-bop” 414 Jeanne-Claude see Christo Jefferson, Thomas 311; Monticello 311–12, 11.20 Jefferson Airplane 427 Jeremiah (prophet) 106, 108 Jerome, St. 115 Jerusalem 110, 112, 160–61, 232; The Dome of
the Rock 103, 129, 5.1; Second Temple 105, 110–11, 5.2; Western Wall 5.3
Jesuits 246, 269 Jesus Christ 109–10, 113, 117, 123, 129, 135; as
Good Shepherd 113, 122, 5.6, 5.16 Jews 104, 105, 110–11, 160; and the Holocaust
410–11, 413; in Spain 143, 144 Job 108 Johnson, Philip: Seagram Building, NY 420, 15.7 Johnson, Dr. Samuel 306; Dictionary 306 Jonson, Ben 244 Joseph II, Emperor 299, 308 Josephus: The Jewish Wars 112 Josquin des Préz 213, 247 Joy of Life, The (Matisse) 391, 14.13 Joyce, James 398; Ulysses 398 JR: Women are Heroes 1.4 Judaism 103, 104, 110–11; Hebrew Bible 104,
105–9 Judd, Donald 426–7; Untitled 15.17 Judith (Donatello) 207 Judith Slaying Holofernes (Gentileschi) 264, 10.10 Julie (Rousseau) 306–7 Julius II, Pope 195, 213–14, 215, 218, 240 Jung, Carl 43 Justinian, Emperor 118, 122; Code 118 Justinian and His Court (mosaic) 124, 5.21 Juvenal: Satires 96–7
kabuki theater 309 Kafka, Franz 398; The Metamorphosis 398 Kahlo, Frida 403–4; The Broken Column 404,
14.26 Kairouan, Tunisia: Great Mosque 132, 5.29
Kandinsky, Wassily 393, 397, 417; Improvisition 28 393, 14.15
Kant, Immanuel 84, 304, 377; Critique of Pure Reason 285
Kaprow, Allan 426 Karen O: Stop the Virgens 1.10 Kauffmann, Angelica 313; Cornelia Pointing to
her Children as her Treasures 313, 11.22 Kaufmann House see “Fallingwater” Kay, Alan 414 Keats, John 337 Kepler, Johannes 284–5 Kiefer, Anselm 432; Shulamith 432, 15.24 King, Martin Luther 424 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 392; Street, Berlin 392–3,
14.14 Kiss, The (Klimt) 364, 13.19 Kitab al-Hadaig (Book of Orchards) 143 Klee, Paul 393–4; Battle Scene from the Comic
Opera “The Seafarer” 14.16 Klimt, Gustav 364; Beethoven Frieze 364; The
Kiss 364, 13.19 Knight, Death, and the Devil (Dürer) 238, 9.14 Knighton, Henry 184 Knox, John 226 kouros/koré 54, 3.9, 3.10 Kritios Boy 55, 3.12 Kunisada, Utagawa: scene from Sukeroku 11.16 Kushites 39 Kwele ram mask 14.7
Labrouste, Henri: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 356, 13.10
Lady and the Unicorn, The (French tapestry) 231, 9.6
Lady Gaga 1.8 lais 182 land art 432 landscape design 310, 11.18 Landscape with St. John on Patmos (Poussin) 277,
10.23 Lange, Dorothea: Migrant Mother… 385, 14.3 Lange, Joseph: Mozart 11.15 Laocoön and his Two Sons (Agesander et al.) 72,
3.32 Lapith and Centaur (Parthenon metope) 59, 3.20 Lascaux, France: cave paintings 26, 1.11 Last Judgment tympanum (Gislebertus) 134, 152,
6.1 Last Supper (mosaic) 5.5 Last Supper (Tintoretto) 255, 9.31 La Venta, Mexico: Olmec head 42, 2.18 law codes: Hammurabi 35; Justinian 118; sharia
131 Leary, Timothy 427 Lebrun, Charles: Hall of Mirrors, Versailles 274,
10.18 Le Corbusier 400; Villa Savoye, Poissy 400, 14.23 Leeds, England 328 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 318 Leitmotiv 359 Lenin, Vladimir 383 Le Nôtre, André: Versailles gardens 273 Leo III, Emperor 128 Leo X, Pope 211, 224 Leonardo da Vinci 192, 195, 196, 207, 208, 209,
211, 228; Madonna of the Rocks 209–10, 8.21; Mona Lisa 210–11, 8.22; Notebooks 208–9, 8.19; “Vitruvian Man” 193, 8.2
Léonin 173 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 307 Le Vau, Louis: Palace of Versailles 273, 10.17 Levertov, Denise: In Mind 436 Leves (Whitman) 355 Leyster, Judith 281 L.H.O.O.Q. (Duchamp) 394, 14.17 liberalism 290 Liberty Leading the People (Delacroix) 332–3, 12.12
Index 461
Lieder 333, 334 Limbourg Brothers: Les très riches heures du Duc
de Berry 179, 187, 7.15 Lin, Maya: Veterans War Memorial 432, 434,
15.25 Lindau Gospels 137, 6.4 literature 25, 28 Llull, Ramón: Book of the Order of Chivalry 181 Locke, John 285, 290, 302, 337 London: Crystal Palace 348–9, 13.3; Fire (1666)
289; The Globe Theatre 243, 9.18; Houses of Parliament 341, 12.20; St. Paul’s Cathedral 288–9, 10.32, 10.33
London (Blake) 335 Louis XI, of France 165, 226, 294 Louis XIV, of France 272–3, 274, 313 Louis XVI, of France 297, 323 Loutherbourg, Philip de: Coalbrookdale at Night
12.8 Lowell, Mass. 328 Lucretius: De rerum natura 97 Luke, St.: Gospel 111, 6.29 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 275, 276; Armide 10.20 Lumière, Louis 414 Luncheon on the Grass (Manet) 351, 13.6 Luther, Martin 193, 223–5, 228, 240–41, 246, 9.1;
A Mighty Fortress is Our God 225, 279
Machaut, Guillaume de 182; Messe de Nostre Dame 182
Machiavelli, Niccolò 207, 208; The Prince 194, 207–8
Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 355 Maderno, Carlo: St. Peter’s Rome 8.34, 10.5 Madison, President James 323 Madonna Enthroned (Giotto) 187, 7.21 Madonna of the Rocks (Leonardo) 209–10, 8.21 Madonna with the Long Neck (Parmigianino) 253,
255, 9.29 madrigals 204 Magic Flute, The (Mozart) 308 Magnolia Blossom (Cunningham) 406, 14.29 Mahabharata 40 Maids of Honor, The (Velázquez) 269–70, 10.15 Maimonides, Moses: Guide for the Perplexed 158 Malevich, Kasimir 390, 397; Black Square 385;
Suprematist Composition: White on White 14.12 Malinowski, Bronislav 43 Mallarmé, Stéphane 363, 366 Manasseh Codex 7.16 Manchester, England 328 Manet, Edouard 351, 367; Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
(Luncheon on the Grass) 351, 13.6 Manicheism 115 mannerist painting 253–7 manors 140 manuscripts, illuminated 136, 179, 187, 6.2, 7.15 Marclay, Christian: The Clock 440–41, 15.35 Marcus Aurelius 99; equestrian statue of 4.29;
Meditations 99–100 Marie Antoinette, Queen 297, 323 Marie de France 182 Marilyn Diptych (Warhol) 426, 15.16 Marlowe, Christopher 244; Doctor Faustus 244 Marriage à la Mode (Hogarth) 316, 11.24 Marriage at Cana (Veronese) 249, 9.23 Marriage Contract, The (Hogarth) 316, 11.24 Marriage of Figaro, The (Beaumarchais) 304–5 Marriage of Figaro, The (Mozart) 308 Marx, Karl 360; Communist Manifesto 329 Masaccio (Tommaso di Giovanni) 200; Holy
Trinity 200, 8.11; The Tribute Money 200, 202, 8.12
“Mask of Agamemnon” 49, 3.4 Masks (Nolde) 388, 14.6 masks, tribal 388, 14.7 Mass(es), Christian 126–7, 154, 156, 182, 202,
246–7
Massys, Quentin: Moneychanger and His Wife 9.2 materialism 302, 348, 349 Matisse, Henri 391, 417; The Joy of Life 391,
14.13 Matthew, St.: Gospel 109 Maximilian with His Musicians (Burgmair) 8.23 Maya civilization 43, 146, 6.15 Mecca 129, 132, 232; Qa’aba 129, 130 media 17 Medici, Cosimo de’ 192, 194–5 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 194, 195–6, 202, 205, 8.5;
Song of Bacchus 195 medieval period: dance 141; drama 156–7,
175, 177; literature 141–2, 181, 182–4, 185–6; music 126, 154–6, 173, 182; philosophy 158–60; romances 179–82; scholars 158, 6.30; sculpture 170–72, 185; towns and cities 165–6; see also monasteries
Medina 129, 232 megaliths 32 melismas 154 Menander 65, 70, 3.27 Meninas, Las (Velázquez) 269–70, 10.15 Mesoamerica 42–3 Mesopotamia 32 messiah, the 109 Messiah (Handel) 289 Metamorphosis, The (Kafka) 398 metopes 59, 3.20 Mexico City: Cathedral of Mexico 269, 10.13 Michelangelo Buonarroti 192, 195, 196, 205, 207,
246; David 206, 8.18; Laurentian Library 195, 8.4; Moses 215, 218, 8.28; Pietà 206, 8.17; St. Peter’s, Rome 218, 221, 251, 8.34, 8.35; Sistine Chapel frescoes 195, 207, 218, 8.29–8.32; tomb of Julius II 215
Midnight in Paris (Allen) 16, 1.2 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 420, 429; Seagram
Building 420, 15.7 Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (Lange) 385,
14.3 mihrabs 132 Milan, Italy 192, 194, 213 Milkmaid, The (Vermeer) 280, 10.27 Mill, John Stuart 327, 349 Millais, John Everett 350; Ophelia 350–51, 13.4 Milton, John 287; Areopagitica 288; Paradise
Lost 287 minimalism 426–7 Mining the Museum (F. Wilson) 436, 15.28 Minnesänger 180 Minoan civilization 48–9, 3.2, 3.3 miracle plays 175, 177, 7.14 Miró, Joan 396; Personage Throwing a Stone at a
Bird 397, 14.19 Mnesicles: Erechtheum 59, 3.18 “mobiles” 19 modernism 385; in architecture 398, 400, 402,
408; in dance 407–8; in literature 397–8; in music 399–400, 402; in photography 406, 406
Modest Proposal, A (Swift) 315 Mohenjo-Daro 39, 2.12, 2.13 Moldau, The (Smetana) 362 Moliêre (J.-B. Poquelin) 274, 275, 10.19 Mona Lisa (Leonardo) 210-11, 8.22 monasteries/monasticism 136, 144–7; see also
Cluny Mondrian, Piet 417 Monet, Claude 367, 370, 373: Impression: Sunrise
367, 13.22; St.-Lazare Station 368, 13.24 Monette, Paul 432 Moneychanger and His Wife (Massys) 9.2 monism 52 Monogram (Rauschenberg) 423, 15.13 monotheism 103, 104, 107 Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves (Cézanne)
372–3, 13.30 montage 404–5, 14.28
Montaigne, Michel de 241; Apology for Raymond Sebond 241, 242; Essais 241, 242
Montefeltro, Federico da 212; portrait (Piero della Francesca) 8.25
Monteverdi, Claudio 266; Orfeo 266 Monticello, nr Charlottesville, Va (Jefferson)
311–12, 11.20 Monument to the Third International, model for
(Tatlin) 383. 14.2 More, Thomas: Utopia 241 Morisot, Berthe 367; Summer’s Day 368, 13.23 Morley, Thomas 246; The Triumphes of Oriana
246 Morrison, Toni: Beloved 436 mosaics: Byzantine 119, 122–3, 124, 5.16, 5.17,
5.20–5.22; Roman 93, 3.29, 4.23, 4.26; Gr eco-Roman 5.5
Moschophoros 34, 3.11 Moses 104, 107, 129 Moses (Michelangelo) 215, 218, 8.28 mosques 132–3, 5.27–5.29 motets 173, 202, 213 Moulin de la Galette, Le (Renoir) 370, 13.26 movies 397, 404–5, 414 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 21, 307–8, 310,
333, 11.15 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) 398 Muhammad, Prophet 128, 129–30, 131 Mumma, Gordon 15.14 mumming 141 Murata, Takeshi: Cone Eater 414, 15.1 music/musical instruments 21–2, 279; prehistoric
26; see also opera and specific eras music festivals 427 Muslims 140, 143–4, 160, 161, 228, 232, 233;
philosophers 158; see Islam Mycenae/Mycenaeans 49–50, 3.4 Mycerinus and Queen Khamerernebty 37, 2.9 Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, The (de
Chirico) 394, 14.18 mystery plays 175, 177, 7.13 mysticism/mystics 155–6, 157 myths 43; creation 34, 43
Nadar 352; Sarah Bernhardt 13.8 Nagasaki, bombing of 411, 14.34 Name of the Rose, The (Eco) 429 Napoleon Bonaparte 79, 324, 326, 329, 337 Napoleon Crossing the Alps (David) 324, 12.3 Napoleon III, of France 356 Nash, John: Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England
342, 12.21 nationalism, musical 362 Native Americans 42, 45, 342 Nativity (ivory panel) 6.29 naturalism 53 Naumburg Cathedral, Germany: sculpture 172,
7.11 Nazis 79, 384, 402, 405, 410–11, 416, 423 Nebuchadnezzar II, of Babylonia 35 Nefertari, queen: tomb 39, 2.11 neoclassicism 272, 310, 313; in architecture 288,
294, 310–12, 355; in painting 277, 312–14, 321–2; in sculpture 326; in theater 274–5
Neolithic period 26–7 Neopalladianism 310, 311 Neoplatonism 114–15, 158, 180, 218, 284 Nero, Emperor 99 Neumann, Balthasar: Vierzehnheiligen 299–300,
11.8, 11.9 Nevelson, Louise 423; Black Wall 423, 15.11 “New Deal” 385 New York 328, 360, 405, 417; Armory Show
(1913) 381; Chrysler Building 402, 14.24; Guggenheim Museum 21, 420, 15.8; St. Patrick’s Cathedral 341; Seagram Building 420, 15.7
New York school 417
462 Index
Newton, Sir Isaac 302, 382; Principia Mathematica 286
Nicholas of Cusa 157 Nietzsche, Friedrich 376, 377, 378, 397 Night Watch, The (Rembrandt) 280, 282, 10.28 Nighthawks (Hopper) 407, 14.30 Nijinsky, Vaslav 399, 14.21 Nîmes, France: Pont du Gard 85, 4.13 Nimrud, Iraq 35; relief 35, 2.6 No Exit (Sartre) 416 Noguchi, Isamu 421; Fourteen Americans 421,
15.9 Nolde, Emil 417; Masks 388, 14.6 nominalism 160 Nordica, Lillian 362 Nosferatu (movie) 404 novels 16, 270, 272, 306–7; 19th-century 343–5
(Gothic), 354–5, 376–9; 20th-century 397–8, 417, 430
Noverre, Jean Georges 299 nuclear weapons 410, 411, 14.34 Number 1 (Pollock) 417, 15.3 Nuns in Choir (medieval illustration) 6.25 Nymph and Satyr Carousing (Clodion) 294, 11.2
Oath of the Horatii (David) 312, 315, 11.23 Octavian see Augustus, Emperor oculus 89 Odyssey (Homer) O’Keeffe, Georgia 405–6 Olmecs 42, 43; heads 42, 2.18 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez) 431 opera 24–5, 264, 266–7, 276, 289, 307–8, 358–9,
430 Ophelia (Millais) 350–51, 13.4 “oracle bone”, Chinese 41, 2.15 Oration on the Dignity of Man (Pico della
Mirandola) 193 orchestra(s) 63, 359, 3.26, 11.17, 13.14 organum 173 Origin of Species (Darwin) 349–50 “original sin” 116 Orozco, José Clemente 403 Orthodox Church 117 Otello (Verdi) 359 Otto I 143, 147 Otto III 147, 148 Ottoman Empire 232–3 Ottonians 147, 148, 150, 151 Ovid 95; Metamorphoses 95–6 Oxford University, England 177
Padua, Italy: Scrovegni Chapel frescoes (Giotto) 187, 189, 7.22
Paganini, Niccolò 333 Paine, Thomas: Common Sense 327 Paleolithic period 26 Palestrina, Giovanni da 247 Palladio, Andrea 250; Four Books of Architecture
251, 310, 311; Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza (with Scamozzi) 248, 9.21; Villa Rotonda, Vicenza 251, 9.24, 9.25
Pamela (Richardson) 306 Pantheon, Rome 88–9, 4.16–4.18 pantomimes, Roman 93 papacy, the 118, 165 Paradise Lost (Milton) 287 Paris 165, 179, 213, 356, 360, 13.1, 13.12; Arc
de Triomphe 324, 12.4; Bibliothèque Nationale 356, 13.10; Eiffel Tower 347, 356, 13.11`; Hôtel de Soubise 11.3; hôtels 294, 312; Louvre 288; La Madeleine 324, 12.5; map 13.1; Notre Dame School 172; Opéra 358; Opéra dance school 297; Pompidou Center 429, 15.19; Saint-Denis 166–7; Salon 351; salons 294; theater/drama 274, 304–5; University 177
Paris Street: Rainy Weather (Caillebotte) 347, 13.1 Parker, Charlie “Bird” 414
Parmenides 52 Parmigianino: Madonna with the Long Neck 253,
255, 9.29 Parthenon see Acropolis Pater, Walter 363 paterfamilas 89 patterns 18 Paul, St. 110, 111, 224 Paxton, Joseph: Crystal Palace, London 348–9,
356, 13.3 Peloponnesian Wars 55, 59, 62, 65 Pepys, Samuel: Diary 289 Pergamon, Turkey: acropolis 60–71, 3.30 Pericles 55, 56 Pérotin 173 Persepolis 35–6, 2.7 Persian Empire 35–6, 39, 55, 56, 69 Persistence of Memory, The (Dalí) 397, 14.20 Personage Throwing a Stone at a Bird (Miró) 397,
14.19 perspective: atmospheric 200; linear 200, 202 Perugino, Pietro: Christ Giving the Keys to St.
Peter 202, 8.14, 8.15 Petipa, Marius 362 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 185–6, 204 Phidias 59, 60 Philip of Macedon 69 Philip II, of Spain 268 Philip IV, of Spain 268, 269 Phillips, Thomas: Lord Byron in Albanian
Costume 12.10 philosophes 301–3, 304 photography 352, 385, 405, 406, 441–2 Piano, Renzo, and Rogers, Richard: Pompidou
Center, Paris 429, 15.19 Picasso, Pablo 385, 388, 389; Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon 385–6, 391, 14.4; Guernica 404, 14.27; The Three Musicians 389, 14.9
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 196, 242; Oration on the Dignity of Man 193
picturesque, the 310 Piera della Francesca: Federico da Montefeltro
8.25; (circle of) An Ideal City 8.3 Pierrot Lunaire (Schoenberg) 400 Pietà (Giotto) 187, 189, 7.22 Pietà (Michelangelo) 206, 8.17 pilgrimage 151, 153 Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (Watteau)
293, 294, 296, 11.1 Pisano, Nicola 185; pulpit, Pisa Baptistery 185,
7.18 Pissarro, Camille: The Avenue de l’Opéra,
Sunlight, Winter Morning 13.12 Pittsburgh, Penn.: greenhouse and sunroom
(studio d’ARC) 438, 15.31 Plague, The (Camus) 416 plainchant 126, 154, 173, 5.23 Plath, Sylvia 414 Plato 55, 65, 67, 68, 69, 99, 177, 195, 202, 215;
Crito 67; Phaedo 68; Republic 67–8, 207, 241; Timaeus 68; see also Neoplatonism
Plautus 93, 212, 243–4 Play of Daniel 157 Play of Herod 156 Plotinus: Enneads 114–15 pluralism 432 Poe, Edgar Allan 343–4 poetry 25; lyric 25, 51; see also epics and specific
eras Poissy, France: Villa Savoye (Le Corbusier) 400,
14.23 politics: and art 493–4; and cinema 404–5;
humanist 207–8; and philosophy 84, 207–8, 289–90, 303–4; and poetry 438; and theater 402
Pollock, Jackson 417–18; Number 1 417, 15.3 Polydorus of Rhodes see Agesander polyphony 173
Pompadour, Madame de 296 Pompeii 90–91, 313; Alexander at the Battle of
Issus (mosaic) 3.29; The Dionysian Mysteries (fresco) 91, 93, 4.22; House of the Silver Wedding 91, 4.20;
Pont du Gard, Nîmes, France 85, 4.13 Ponte, Lorenzo da: The Marriage of Figaro 308 Pontormo, Jacopo 255; Deposition 255, 9.30 Pope, Alexander: An Essay on Man 318 Popol Vuh 43, 2.19 Portland, Oregon: Public Services Building
(Graves) 429–30, 15.20 Portrait of a Black Woman (Benoist) 324, 326, 12.6 Portrait of the Baker Terentius Neo and His Wife
(fresco) 4.18 Portuguese, The (Braque) 386, 14.5 post-and-lintel construction 58 post-impressionist painting 371–5 postmodernism 428; in architecture 429–30; in
literature 430–31; in music 430; in philosophy 429; in photography 428–9;
Poussin, Nicolas 277; Landscape with St. John on Patmos 277, 10.23
Prairie Style (Wright) 408 Praxiteles 61; Aphrodite of Cnidos 61, 63, 3.24;
Hermes and the Infant Dionysus 3.25 Prélude à “L’après-midi d’un faune” (Debussy)
366, 399 preludes (musical) 279 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 350–51 Presley, Elvis 427 Primavera, La (Botticelli) 202, 8.13 primitivism 386, 388 Prince, The (Machiavelli) 194, 207–8 Principia Mathematica (Newton) 286 printing 193 Progress of Love: The Meeting (Fragonard) 296–7,
11.6 Prophet, the see Muhammad, Prophet Prophets, the 105–6, 107, 108 Protagoras 67 “Protestant ethic” (Weber) 227 Protestantism 224, 225, 226, 241; see also Calvin,
John; Reformation psalters: Carrow Psalter 7.3; Utrecht 137–8, 6.5,
7.3 Pseudo-Dionysius 157 Ptolemy 70, 215 Pugin, Augustus Welby: Houses of Parliament,
London 341, 12.20 Punic Wars 77 Purcell, Henry 289 Puritans 227, 242, 246, 286 Pynchon, Thomas: Gravity’s Rainbow 430 pyramids: Egyptian 37, 2.8; Maya 146;
Teotihuacán 127, 146; see also ziggurats Pythagoras 52, 215 Pythagoreans 67, 68
Qur’an, the 130–31, 5.26
Racine, Jean 274–5 Rackham, Arthur: Das Rheingold 13.15 Raising of Lazarus (play) 157 Ramayana 40 Rameses II, of Egypt 39 Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (Rubens)
276, 10.21 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) 192, 213–15; School
of Athens 196, 215, 8.26; Transfiguration 215, 8.27
rationalism 52 Rauschenberg, Robert 423, 424; Monogram 423,
15.13 Ravenna, Italy 118, 122; Mausoleum of Galla
Placidia (mosaic) 122, 5.16; Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (mosaics) 122–3, 5.5, 5.17; San Vitale 124, 126, 5.18–5.22
Index 463
Temple of Portunus 4.12; Theater of Marcellus 94, 4.24; Trajan’s Column 83, 85, 4.10, 4.11
Roof Piece (T. Brown) 1.9 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf) 398 Roosevelt, President Franklin D. 384–5 Rothko, Mark 418; Green and Maroon 418, 15.5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 303, 327, 336; Émile 304;
Julie 306–7; The Social Contract 303 Royal Society, London 286, 288 Rubens, Peter Paul 269, 276–7; The Garden of
Love 277, 10.22; Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus 276, 10.21
Rue Transnonain (Daumier) 13.2 Running Fence (Christo and Jeanne-Claude) 432,
15.23 Russian Revolution 383 Ruysch, Rachel 281; Flowers in a Vase 10.25
Sabratha, Libya: Roman theater 94, 4.25 sagas, Norse St.-Lazare Station (Monet) 368, 13.24 Saint-Denis, Paris 166–7 St. Domingo de Silos, Spain: cloister 146, 6.14 St. Gall, monastery of, Switzerland 145–6, 154,
155, 156, 6.13 St. Louis, Missouri: Wainwright Building
(Sullivan) 357, 13.13 St. Paul’s Cathedral see London St. Peter’s Cathedral see Rome Sallé, Marie 299 Sanchi, India: Great Stupa 4.28 Sand, George (Aurore Dudevant) 334 Sangallo, Antonio: St. Peter’s, Rome 8.34 Santiago de Compostela, Spain 153 Sappho 51 Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus 113–14, 5.7, 5.9 Sartre, Jean-Paul 415, 416; No Exit 416 satire 314–19; Roman 96–7 satyagraha 425 Saussure, César de 316 Savonarola, Girolamo 207 Scamozzi, Vincenzo: Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza
(with Palladio) 248, 9.21 Scandinavia 136 Schliemann, Heinrich 49 Schoenberg, Arnold 399–400, 424 scholasticism 177, 178, 225 School of Athens (Raphael) 196, 215, 8.26 Schopenhauer, Arthur 377 Schubert, Franz 333; Gretchen at the Spinning
Wheel 330 Schumann, Robert and Clara 334 science and technology 70, 284–6, 301, 302, 303,
356, 434, 438 sculpture 18–20, and see specific eras and styles Seagram Building, NY (Mies van der Rohe and
Johnson) 420, 15.7 seals, Indus Valley 39, 2.12 Secession, Vienna 364 Second Coming, The (Yeats) 382 Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir) 416 Self-portrait (Rembrandt) 282, 10.30 Self-portrait in a Fur-collared Robe (Dürer) 238,
9.14 Self-portrait in a Straw Hat (Vigée-Lebrun) 297,
11.7 Self-Portrait with Halo (Gauguin) 373, 13.32 Seneca 93, 244; Oedipus 93 Sentimental Education, The (Flaubert) 355 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(Beatles) 427 serial composition 400 Sermons: The Wall of Jericho (Bearden) 435,
15.26 Seurat, Georges 371–2; Sunday Afternoon on the
Island of La Grande Jatte 372, 13.29 Sexton, Anne 414 sfumato 210–11
Shakespeare, William 76, 243, 244, 9.19; Comedy of Errors 93; Hamlet 156, 244–5; Midsummer Night’s Dream 96
Shang Dynasty: bronzes 40, 2.16 sharia 131 Shelley, Mary 336; Frankenstein 336, 344–5 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 337, 344 Sheridan, Elizabeth: portrait (Gainsborough) 300,
11.10 Sherman, Cindy 428; Untitled Film Still #21 15.18 Shulamith (Kiefer) 432, 15.24 Siena, Italy 186 Sinan, Koca: Selimiye Mosque, Edirne 233, 9.7 Siqueiros, David 403 Sistine Chapel, Rome 246, 247; frescoes
(Michelangelo) 195, 218, 8.29–8.32 skepticism 242 skyscrapers 357–8, 402, 418, 420 Slave Ship, The (Turner) 337, 340, 12.18 Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Mosters, The (Goya)
343, 1 2.23 Smetana, Bedrich: The Moldau 362 Smith, Adam 303: The Wealth of Nations 303–4 Smith, David 423; Cubi 423, 15.12 Smithson, Robert: Spiral Jetty 432, 15.22 Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
(Renwick) 341 Snake Goddess (Minoan) 48–9, 3.3 “social contract” 290, 303 Social Contract, The (Rousseau) 303 Socrates 67, 68, 70, 99, 215 solmization 155 Solomon, King 105 Song of Roland 141–2, 143, 181, 6.10 sonnets 185 sophists 67 Sophocles 64; Antigone 62; Oedipus the King 62,
64, 248 Sosus: Unswept Floor 93, 4.23 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois) 406 Soyinka, Wole 435 Spanish Civil War 404 Sparta/Spartans 55, 65 Spiral Jetty (Smithson) 432, 15.22 Sprechstimme 400 Spring Blossoms (Calder) 423, 15.10 Stalin, Joseph 383 Starry Night (van Gogh) 374–5, 13.34 Stieglitz, Alfred 405 stoicism/stoics 70, 84, 99, 115 Stonehange, England 32, 2.2 Stourhead Park, England (Hoare) 310, 11.18 Strachey, Ray 385 Stravinsky, Igor: The Rite of Spring 399 Street, Berlin (Kirchner) 392–3, 14.14 Strozzi, Barbara 267 studio d’ARC: greenhouse and sunroom,
Pittsburgh 438, 15.31 Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement
307, 329 Sufism 157 Suger, Abbot 166 Suleyman, Sultan 232–3 Sullivan, Louis: skyscrapers 357–8; Wainwright
Building, St. Louis 357, 13.13 Sumerians 32–5 Summer’s Day (Morisot) 368, 13.23 Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte (Seurat) 372, 13.29 Suprematist Composition: White on White
(Malevich) 390, 14.23 surrealists 395–7 Swift, Jonathan 315; Gulliver’s Travels 316; A
Modest Proposal 315 Sylphide, La (ballet) 334, 12.13 symbolism/symbolists 363–4, 13.15 Symphonie fantastique (Berlioz) 334–5 symphonies 21, 308, 310, 333, 362
Razi 132 Realism 160; in novels 354–5; in painting 350–54;
Northern Renaissance 233–4; in theater 376 recitative 266 Reconquista 144 Reformation 224–6, 228, 260; in England 241–2;
map 9.1 regionalists, American 407 Reich, Steve 430 reliquaries 138, 152, 153, 6.23 Rembrandt van Rijn 278, 280; Christ Healing the
Sick (Hundred Guilder Print) 282, 10.29; The Night Watch 280, 282, 10.28; Self-portrait 282, 10.30
Renaissance, the 191, 192, 196; architecture 199–200, 228, 231; humanism 193, 194, 202, 322; map 8.1; music 202, 204, 211, 213, 247; painting and frescoes 200–2, 208–11, 213–14, 218, 233–9 (Northern), 251, 253 (late); patronage 195; politics 207–8; printing 193; sculpture 196, 205–7, 215, 218; theater 247–9; uomo universale 212; women 212, 253
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 367; Le Moulin de la Galette 370, 13.26
Renwick, James: St. Patrick’s Cathedral, NY 341; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 341
Reynolds, Sir Joshua 312; Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen 312, 11.21
rhythm and blues 414 Richardson, Samuel: Pamela 306 Riefenstahl, Leni 405; The Triumph of the Will
405 Riley, Terry 430 Ring des Nibelungen, Der (Wagner) 360, 13.15 Rite of Spring, The (ballet) 381, 399 ritornello 267, 279 Rivera, Diego 403; Enslavement of the Indians
403, 14.25 rock and roll 414, 427 Rococo style 284; architecture 299–300; in
England 300; in France 294–7; in Germany 299–300; interior decoration 294; painting 293, 294, 296–7, 300; sculpture 294
Rodin, Auguste 364; Balzac 367, 13.21; The Gates of Hell 366–7, 13.20
Rogers, Richard see Piano, Renzo Roman Catholic Church 117, 137; sacraments 224 Roman de la Rose 182, 186 Roman Empire 73, 76, 77, 78–9, 100–1, 118, 136,
328; architecture 85, 87–9, 94; and Christianity 104, 109, 111–14; concrete 87; frescoes 91, 93; houses 90–91; literature 80, 95–7; map 4.1; marriage 90; mosaics 93, 3.29; music 94–5; Pax Romana 79; philosophy 84, 97, 99–100; portraits 91; sculpture 80–81, 83, 85, 91; theater(s) 90, 93–4, 128; women 85, 89–90; see also Rome
Romanesque style 147, 154; architecture 147–8, 150–52, 168; frescoes 147; sculpture 148, 152–4
Roman Republic 77, 79 romances, medieval 179–82 romanticism 329, 335; and architecture 341, 342;
and feminism 336–7; and literature 329–30, 335, 337–8, 343–5; and music 329, 330, 333–5; and nature 337–8,340; and “Orientalism” 341–2; and painting 329, 331–3, 338, 340
Rome 75, 79–80, 89, 101, 4.2; Ara Pacis 80–81, 4.6; Arch of Titus 105, 5.4; Basilica of Constantine 87, 4.15; Basilica Ulpia 83, 4.9; Baths of Caracalla 87; catacombs 113; Colosseum 87–8, 4.1; Cornaro Chapel (Bernini) 261, 10.4; dance 94; Forum 81, 83, 4.8; map 10.1; Old St. Peter’s Basilica 118, 5.10; opera 266; Pantheon 88–9, 4.16–4.18; San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane 264, 10.8; St. Peter’s 214, 218, 221, 259, 8.34, 8.35, 10.5, 10.6; St. Peter’s piazza 261–2, 10.5, 10.6; Tempietto 218, 8.33;
464 Index
tabula rasa 285 Taglioni, Marie 334, 12.13 Taj Mahal, Agra, India 263, 10.7 taotie 41 tapestries, Flemish and French 231, 9.6 Tatlin, Vladimir: model for Monument to the
Third International 383, 14.2 Tchaikovsky, Peter 362 Tempest (Giorgione) 251, 9.26 Ten Commandments 104, 107 Tenochtitlán, Mexico 43, 269 Teotihuacán, Mexico 43, 127, 5.24 Terence 93, 147, 212, 243–4 Thales of Miletus 52 theater(s) 24, and see specific eras Thebes, Egypt: tomb of Queen Nefertari 39, 2.11 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) 406–7 Theodora, Empress 118, 128 Theodora and Retinue (mosaic) 124, 126, 5.22 Theodoric 122 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 435 Thinker, The (Rodin) 367 Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Hokusai) 369,
13.25 Thoreau, Henry David 338; Walden 338 Three Goddesses (Parthenon) 60, 3.21 Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen
(Reynolds) 312, 11.21 Three Musicians, The (Picasso) 389, 14.9 Threepenny Opera, The (Brecht) 402 Thucydides: The History of the Peloponnesian
War 55, 62 Tiahuanaco, Bolivia 45 Tibet Above (Woeser) 25 Tiffany, Louis Comfort 364; vase 13.17 Tiksi series (Arbugaeva) 442, 15.36 Tintoretto, Jacopo 255; Last Supper 255, 9.31 Titian 251, 253; Bacchus and Ariadne 253, 9.27;
Isabella d’Este 8.24 Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Borges) 430–31 Toilet of Venus, The (Boucher) 296, 11.5 Toledo, Spain 143, 255, 257 Torah, the 105, 107, 108, 110 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de; At the Moulin Rouge
13.16 Toussaint-l’Ouverture, Dominique 326 tragedies: French 274–5; Greek 63–4; Roman 93,
94 Trajan, Emperor 81, 83; Trajan’s column 83, 85,
4.10, 4.11 Transfiguration (Raphael) 215, 8.27 Trent, Council of 246–7 très riches heures du Duc de Berry, Les (Limbourg
Brothers) 179, 187, 7.15 Tribute Money, The (Masaccio) 200, 202, 8.12 Tristan and Isolde (Wagner) 359 Triumph of Bacchus (Velázquez) 269, 10.14 Triumph of the Will, The (Riefenstahl) 405 Trojan War 50, 64, 3.5 troubadours/trouvères 179, 180, 182 Troy 49, 50 Tudor, David 15.14 Turing, Alan 414 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 340; The Slave
Ship 337, 340, 12.18 Turrell, James:Roden Crater 432 Tutankhamen, King 31, 39; funerary mask 2.1 twelve-tone method 400 Two Treatises on Government (Locke) 290 tympana 135, 152, 170, 6.1, 6.22, 7.9
ukiyo 309; ukiyo-e prints 369 Ulysses (Joyce) 398 Ummayads, the 131 “uncertainty principle” 382 unconscious, the 397 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Boccioni)
389, 14.10
United States (Anderson) 430 universities, medieval 177–8 Unswept Floor (Sosus) 93, 4.23 Untitled (Donovan) 1.5 Untitled Film Still #21 (Sherman) 428, 15.18 uomo universale 212 Upanishads 40 Ur (Iraq): Enuma elish 34; lyre sound box 33, 2.3;
Standard of Ur 33, 2.4 Urban II, Pope 160 Urban VIII, Pope 260 Ursula, St. 156 Utamaro, Kitagawa 369 utilitarianism 348, 349 Utopia (More) 241 Utrecht Psalter 137–8, 6.5
Van Alen, William: Chrysler Building, NY 402, 14.34
Vardø, Norway: Steilneset Memorial (Bourgeois and Zumthor) 440
Vasari, Giorgio: Lives... 195 vases, Greek 53, 3.5–3.8 vaults: barrel/tunnel 87, 4.14; cross 87, 4.14, 4.15;
ribbed 167, 7.4 Vedas, The 40 Velázquez, Diego 269; Las Meninas (The Maids
of Honor) 269–70, 10.15; Triumph of Bacchus 269, 10.14
Venice, Italy 164, 186, 192, 194, 204, 228; Doge’s Palace 186, 7.19; music 249–50; St. Mark’s Basilica 250
Venturi, Robert 429 Verdi, Giuseppe 358–9; Otello 359 Vermeer, Jan 280; The Allegory of Painting 280,
10.26; The Milkmaid 280, 10.27 Veronese, Paolo: Marriage at Cana 249, 9.23 Verrocchio, Andrea del 196; Lorenzo de’ Medici 8.5 vers libre 397, 398 Versailles, Palace of (Le Vau and Hardouin-
Mansart) 272, 273–4, 310, 10.17; gardens (Le Nôtre) 273; Hall of Mirrors (Hardouin-Mansart and Lebrun) 274, 10.18; opera 275, 10.20; Petit Trianon (Gabriel) 310–11, 11.19; theater and dance 274–5
Vézelay, France: La Madeleine 152–3, 6.22, 6.24 Vicenza, Italy: Teatro Olimpico 248, 9.21; Villa
Rotonda 251, 9.24, 9.25 Victorian era 348–51; architecture 348–9; painting
350–51; philosophy 349 video art 15.1 Vienna 232; Secession 364; theater 267, 10.11 Vierzehnheiligen, Germany (Neumann) 299–300,
11.8, 11.9 Vietnam Veterans War Memorial (Lin) 432, 434,
15.25 Vietnam War 426, 427 Vigée-Lebrun, Élisabeth-Louise 297, 324; Self-
portrait in a Straw Hat 297, 11.7 Vignon, Pierre-Alexandre: La Madeleine, Paris 324,
12.5 Vikings 136–7, 140, 146 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France (Le Corbusier) 400,
14.23 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A
(Wollstonecraft) 336 Virgil 80, 183; Aeneid 80, 96, 289 virtuosi, musical 333–4 Visitation (Catalan fresco) 6.16 “Vitruvian Man” (Leonardo) 193, 8.2 Vivaldi, Antonio 267, 279; The Four Seasons
267–8 Voltaire 303, 316–17, 11.25; Candide 318–19
Wagner, Richard 358, 359, 362, 364, 398; Ring cycle 360, 13.15; Tristan and Isolde 359
Wainwright Building, St. Louis (Sullivan) 357, 13.13
Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 416 Walden (Thoreau) 338 Walker, Kara 438–9; Darkytown Rebellion 15.32 Wanderer Above the Mists, The (Friedrich) 12.16 Ward, Ned: The CoffeeHous Mob 11.14 Warhol, Andy 426; Marilyn Diptych 426, 15.16 Washington, George 322; statue of (Houdon) 12.2 Washington, D.C. 356; Smithsonian Institution
341 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 398 Watteau, Antoine; Pilgrimage to the Island of
Cythera 293, 294, 296, 11.1 Wealth of Nations, The (A. Smith) 303–4 Weber, Max 227 Weelkes, Thomas: “As Vesta Was Descending”
246 Weill, Kurt: The Threepenny Opera 402 Weise see Woeser Wharton, Edith 376 Wheeler, Doug: DW 68 VEN MCASD 11 1.1 White Horse, The (Constable) 338, 12.17 Whiteread, Rachel: House 1.6 Whitman, Walt 355; Leaves 355 William I (the Conqueror) 143 Wilson, August: Fences 436 Wilson, Fred: Mining the Museum 436, 15.28 Wilson, Robert 430 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 310, 313 Woeser: Tibet Above 25 Wollstonecraft, Mary 336; A Vindication of the
Rights of Women 336 Woman from Willendorf 27, 1.12 Woman and Bicycle (de Kooning) 418, 15.4 Women Are Heroes (JR) 1.4 women: and art 264, 296–7, 380; dancers 275,
297, 299; early Christian 112; gladiators 316; Greek 51, 56, 69; monastic 147, 177; and music 213, 267; in Paris salons 294; mystics 155–6; poets 51, 180, 182; Renaissance 195, 212, 213; Roman 85, 89–90; troubadours 179, 180; see also feminism
Woolf, Virginia 398; Mrs. Dalloway 398; A Room of One’s Own 398
word painting 204 Wordsworth, William 337; The World is Too
Much With Us 337–8 World is Too Much With Us, The (Wordsworth)
337–8 World War I 382, 383 World War II 410, 413, 414, 416 World Wide Web 414, 436 Wozzeck (Berg) 400 Wren, Christopher 287; St. Paul’s Cathedral
288–9, 10.32, 10.33 Wright, Frank Lloyd 408; “Fallingwater”
(Kaufmann House) 408, 14.32; Guggenheim Museum, NY 21, 420, 15.8; Prairie Style 408
Wright, Joseph: Experiment with an Air Pump 303, 11.11
Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë) 344
Yahweh 105, 107 Yaxchilán, Mexico: lintel 146, 6.15 Yeats, William Butler: The Second Coming 382 Young, La Monte 430 Young Lady with a Parrot, A (Carriera) 296, 11.4 Youth Leaning Against a Tree, A (Hilliard) 245,
9.20
Zeno 70 Zeus of Artemision (bronze) 61, 3.23 Zhou dynasty 41–2; bronze bells 41, 2.17 ziggurats, Sumerian 34–5, 2.5 Zumthor, Peter: Steilneset Memorial, Vardø 440
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 AN INVITATION TO ADVENTURE
- Creating a Sense of Self
- Tradition: Nurturing the Creative Spirit
- Modes of Expression and Reflection
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The Visual Arts
- The Pictorial Arts
- Sculpture: The Art of Shaping
- Architecture
- The Performing Arts
- Music
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Dance
- Theater
- Opera
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The Literary Arts
- THE WRITE IDEA
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: The First Humans
- An Invitation to the Adventure
- Chapter Review
- 2 THE ANCIENT WORLD
- Mesopotamia
- The Sumerians
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: Megaliths
- Empires of the Near East
- Ancient Egypt
- Egypt: Religion and Society
- The Arts of Egypt
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: Death at an Egyptian Banquet
- Ancient Asia
- The Indus Valley
- Bronze Age China
- Ancient America
- KEY CONCEPT: Myth
- Chapter Review
- 3 ANCIENT GREECE
- Early Greece
- The Aegean World
- Early Greek Poetry
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- THE WRITE IDEA
- Religion and Philosophy in Early Greece
- Art in Early Greece
- The Classical Period
- Athens in its Golden Age
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: The Plague of Athens
- Classical Greek Art
- The Athenian Acropolis
- Classical Sculpture
- KEY CONCEPT: The Classical Ideal
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Greek Theater and Music
- Greek Tragedy
- THE WRITE IDEA
- Greek Comedy
- Greek Music and Dance
- Classical Greek Philosophy
- The Sophists and Socrates
- Plato
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: Confucius and Philosophy
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Aristotle
- The Hellenistic Age
- The Hellenistic Legacy
- Chapter Review
- 4 ANCIENT ROME
- The Drama of Roman History
- The Rise of Republican Rome
- KEY CONCEPT: Imperialism
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Imperial Rome
- The Art of an Empire
- Sculpture as Propaganda
- The Forum of Trajan
- KEY CONCEPT: The World Citizen
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- The Romans as Builders
- Roman Art and Daily Life
- Roman Daily Life
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: A Marriage Contract of the Roman Era
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Roman Theater and Music
- The Romans as Poets and Thinkers
- Early Roman Poets
- Roman Epic and Satire
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Philosophy in the Roman World
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: The Rise of Buddhism
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Rome’s Division and Decline
- Chapter Review
- 5 MONOTHEISM: JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM
- The Judaic Tradition
- History and the Israelites
- The Hebrew Bible
- KEY CONCEPT: Monotheism
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Job and the Trials of Israel
- The Rise of Christianity
- Jesus of Nazareth
- The Growth of Christianity
- Christianity in the Late Roman Empire
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: The Siege of Jerusalem
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Philosophy: Classical and Christian
- From Classical to Christian
- Augustine of Hippo
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- KEY CONCEPT: Original Sin and Human Nature
- The Christian Empires: Rome and Byzantium
- St. Peter’s and the Pope
- Justinian and the Byzantine World
- Ravenna: Showcase of the Christian Arts
- Christianity and the Arts
- Early Christian Music
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: Teotihuacán: Sacred City of Mesoamerica
- Christianity Against the Arts
- The Rise of Islam
- The Foundations of Islam
- Islamic Arts and Science
- Chapter Review
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- 6 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
- The Age of Charlemagne
- Northern Edge of the Early Middle Ages
- Charlemagne’s Empire
- Carolingian Arts
- Feudal Europe
- Feudalism
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: Work in Charlemagne’s World
- The Arts of Feudalism
- The Bayeux Tapestry
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The Flowering of Muslim Spain
- Monasticism
- The Monastic Ideal
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: The Blood of Maya Kings
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Hrotsvit and the Classical Tradition
- The Romanesque Style
- Imperial Revival and the Romanesque Style
- The Romanesque Church: Monks and Pilgrims
- Romanesque Sculpture
- KEY CONCEPT: Pilgrimage
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Early Medieval Music and Drama
- Musical Notation
- Hildegard of Bingen: Musical Mystic
- Drama in the Medieval Church
- KEY CONCEPT: Mysticism
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- The Medieval Philosopher
- Early Medieval Philosophy
- Abelard
- The Medieval Spirit and the First Crusade
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Chapter Review
- 7 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
- The Gothic Awakening
- The Crusades and the Decline of Feudalism
- The Rise of Towns and Cities
- The Gothic Style
- The Gothic Style and Divine Light
- The Cathedral at Chartres
- Gothic Sculpture
- Music and Theater in the Gothic Age
- The Evolution of Organum
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: Buddhism in Asia
- Gothic Theater: From Church to Town
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The New Learning
- The Universities
- KEY CONCEPT: Scholasticism
- Thomas Aquinas
- Court and City in the Late Middle Ages
- Courtly Love and Medieval Romance
- KEY CONCEPT: Chivalry
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Music in the Late Middle Ages
- Dante’s Divine Comedy
- Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: The Plague and Prosperity
- The Late Gothic
- Reclaiming the Classical Past
- Giotto and the International Gothic
- Chapter Review
- 8 THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY
- The Renaissance Spirit in Italy
- The Italian City-States
- KEY CONCEPT: Renaissance Humanism
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Patronage of the Arts and Learning
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: The Violence of Renaissance Youth
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The Arts in Early Renaissance Italy
- Florence 1401: a Renaissance Begins
- Brunelleschi’s Dome
- Florentine Painting: A Refined Classicism
- Italian Renaissance Music
- KEY CONCEPT: The Science of Perspective
- Early Renaissance Sculpture
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The Decline of Florence
- Renaissance Genius
- Machiavelli and Humanist Politics
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Leonardo da Vinci
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: Great Zimbabwe
- The High Renaissance in Rome
- Josquin des Préz
- KEY CONCEPT: The Renaissance Man … and Woman
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Raphael
- Michelangelo in Rome
- The New St. Peter’s
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Chapter Review
- 9 REFORMATION AND LATE RENAISSANCE
- The Reformation
- Luther’s Challenge
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The Appeal of the Reformation
- Calvinism
- The Rise of Northern Europe
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Kings, Commerce, and Columbus
- KEY CONCEPT: The Protestant Ethic: God, Work, and Wealth
- THE WRITE IDEA
- The Northern Renaissance Courts
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: The Ottoman Empire
- Art and Humanism in Northern Europe
- Faith and Humanism in Northern Art
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: A Midwife’s Advice
- Erasmus and Humanism
- Utopians and Skeptics
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The Elizabethan Age
- The Reformation in England
- KEY CONCEPT: Skepticism
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Theater in the Elizabethan Age
- The Genius of Shakespeare
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Elizabethan Music
- The Late Renaissance in Italy and Spain
- Palestrina and the Counter-Reformation
- Renaissance Theater in Italy
- The Renaissance in Venice
- Late Renaissance Painting and Mannerism
- Chapter Review
- 10 THE BAROQUE
- The Baroque in Italy
- Bernini and Counter-Reformation Rome
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: The Taj Mahal
- Italian Baroque Painting
- The Birth of Opera
- The Baroque in Spain
- Spanish Baroque Architecture
- KEY CONCEPT: Absolutism
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Velázquez and Cervantes—Masters of Illusion
- The Baroque In France
- The Palace of Versailles
- Theater and Dance at Versailles
- Painting in Baroque France
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The Protestant Baroque
- J. S. Bach—Baroque Genius
- Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier
- Rembrandt and Dutch Baroque Painting
- The New Science
- KEY CONCEPT: Empiricism
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Tools of the New Science
- Descartes and Newton
- The English Compromise
- English Baroque Poetry
- Christopher Wren’s London
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: The Fire of London
- Handel and Music in England
- Politics and Philosophy in England
- Chapter Review
- 11 THE ENLIGHTENMENT
- The Rococo Style
- The Rococo in France
- The Rococo in Germany and Britain
- The Enlightenment
- The Philosophes
- Enlightenment and Freedom
- KEY CONCEPT: Enlightenment
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- The Bourgeois Response
- The Bourgeois Style in Painting
- The Rise of the Novel
- The Bourgeois Theater in Germany
- Music in the Age of Enlightenment
- Mozart and Opera
- The Classical Symphony
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: Kabuki Theater
- The Neoclassical Style
- Neoclassical Architecture
- Neoclassical Painting
- KEY CONCEPT: Neoclassicism
- The Age of Satire
- Swift
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: Women Gladiators
- Satire and Society in Art
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Voltaire
- THE WRITE IDEA
- Chapter Review
- 12 REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM
- Revolutions and Rights
- The Revolutionary Wave—1776 and 1789
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- The Napoleonic Era
- KEY CONCEPT: Freedom
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- The Industrial Revolution
- Revolution and Philosophy
- The Romantic Hero
- Faust and the Romantics
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Delacroix and the Byronic Hero
- Music and Dance in the Romantic Age
- Beethoven: From Classical to Romantic
- Age of the Virtuoso
- Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique
- Elements of Romanticism
- Romantic Social Protest
- The Romantics and Nature
- KEY CONCEPT: Imagination
- Romantic Escapes
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: Native Storytellers
- Evil and the Gothic Novel
- Chapter Review
- 13 THE INDUSTRIAL AGE
- Materialism and Progress
- The Victorians
- Realism in Pictorial Art
- The Realist Novel
- The Modern City
- Music and Modernity
- Verdi’s Operas
- Wagner’s Musical Revolution
- KEY CONCEPT: Modernity
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Late Romantic Music and Dance
- Late Romantics and Early Moderns
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: A Musical Career
- Symbolism and Art Nouveau
- Debussy and Rodin—the Break with Tradition
- Impressionism
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: The Japanese Color Print
- Beyond Impressionism
- The Dark Side of Progress
- The Realist Theater
- The Novel and Modern Philosophy
- KEY CONCEPT: Human Will
- Chapter Review
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- 14 MODERNISM
- A Turbulent Century
- A New Science
- The Great War
- Fascism and the Rise of Mass Society
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Modernism in Art
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: War, Fashion, and Feminism
- Picasso and the Revolution in Art
- KEY CONCEPT: Primitivism
- Toward Formal Abstraction
- Expressionism and Dada
- The Modern Mind
- Freud and Surrealism
- Modernism in Literature
- KEY CONCEPT: The Unconscious
- CRITICAL QUESTION
- Modernist Music and Architecture
- Stravinsky and Schoenberg—the New Music
- Modernist Building and Design
- Art and Politics
- Brecht’s Epic Theater
- Painting and Politics
- Politics and the Cinema
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- In the American Grain
- Regionalism and Renaissance
- The American Scene
- The Age of Jazz
- World War and Holocaust
- Chapter Review
- 15 THE CONTEMPORARY SPIRIT
- The Age of Anxiety
- Post-war America
- KEY CONCEPT: Existentialism
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- Exploring the Absurd
- The Theater of the Absurd
- The Existential Hero
- Art and Architecture in Postwar America
- The New York School
- Modern Architecture in Postwar America
- American Sculpture in the Postwar Era
- Black Mountain College and the Avant-garde
- The Sixties
- GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: Gandhi and Colonial Liberation
- Visual Arts
- Modern Music
- The Postmodern
- Postmodern Architecture
- Postmodern Music
- The New Fiction
- THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
- WINDOWS ON DAILY LIFE: Living and Dying With AIDS
- The Art of Pluralism
- Global Awareness
- Liberated Voices
- THE WRITE IDEA
- A New Century: Promise and Challenge
- Chapter Review
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Glossary
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- Z
- Further Reading
- Picture Credits
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- Y
- Z
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- 2018-01-09T08:27:55+0000
- Preflight Ticket Signature
