Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth

Hercules at the Crossroads

Christopher Braider

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351955966
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

In his monumental study, Christopher Braider explores the dialectical contest between history and truth that defines the period of cultural transition called the 'baroque'. For example, Annibale Carracci's portrayal of the Stoic legend of Hercules at the Crossroads departs from earlier, more static representations that depict an emblematic demigod who has already rejected the fallen path of worldly Pleasure for the upward road of heroic Virtue. Braider argues that, in breaking with tradition in order to portray a tragic soliloquist whose dominant trait is agonized indecision, Carracci joins other baroque artists, poets and philosophers in rehearsing the historical dilemma of choice itself. Carracci's picture thus becomes a framing device that illuminates phenomena as diverse as the construction of gender in baroque painting and science, the Pauline ontology of art in Caravaggio and Rembrandt, the metaphysics of baroque soliloquy and the dismantling of Cartesian dualism in Cyrano de Bergerac and Pascal.

1
The Vindication of Susanna

Femininity and Truth in Baroque Science and Art

As we saw in the introduction, the term baroque exhibits a camel-like complexity. Not only does it indiscriminately identify a period, a sensibility and a style that, though related, remain different things; it also embraces the wide variety of conflicting themes, forms and conventions with which period, sensibility and style are traditionally associated. In painting, for instance, the naturalist commitment to the human body’s native colours, contours and attitudes is regularly hitched to idealizing fictions whose moral, political and devotional valence leaves unedified nature behind. Similarly, the taste for the breathtaking illusions of the art of trompe-l’œil goes hand in hand with the aggressive iconoclasm of the vanitas motif, exposing the euphoric delights of aesthetic experience to the memento mori’s melancholy reminder of sinfulness and death. Yet as contradictory as its concrete expressions may be, the baroque as a whole encodes a number of deep-seated constants; and chief among these is a tireless fascination with visual representation and the heightened acts of vision that representation mimics and promotes. The baroque marks indeed at once the apogee and crisis of early modern visual culture, simultaneously magnifying and deprecating human sight and the modes of depiction calculated to model and enhance it.¹

As Christine Buci-Glucksmann reports, the period’s insatiable appetite for novel visual experiences and for artful materials designed to satisfy it amounts to a kind of mania.² Even in the Protestant north, where iconomachic suspicion of idolatrous likenesses is a pious commonplace, we witness the production and consumption of pictures on an unprecedented, quasi-industrial scale. Artists, travelers, antiquarians, scientists and the publishers and dealers who merchandise their work generate an encyclopedic record of things seen and things imagined. The output is indigestibly multifarious and vast, flooding the new market in visual matter with paintings, drawings and prints depicting scenes and objects drawn from every field of human interest, every sphere of human activity and every corner of the globe.³ We find portraits, genre vignettes and still lives; landscapes and maps; pictures of notable buildings and diagrammes outlining the workings of complex machines; engravings of ancient coins and medals and of the ruins of ancient monuments; illustrations of human and animal anatomies and of the theatres in which physicians dissected them; emblems, allegories and ‘histories’ drawn from the Bible, classical mythology and epic poetry; representations of the sieges, battles, coronations, dynastic marriages and public executions that marked the highpoints of contemporary political events; and woodcuts illustrating the exotic flora, fauna and artifacts discovered in Europe’s growing colonies, jumbled together with images depicting the still more exotic physiognomies, mores and modes of dress by which Europe’s new colonial subjects were systematically classified.

The baroque craving for visual matter is invariably accompanied by anxieties about the reliability of the testimony such materials offer and their dubious moral influence on consumers. This is partly a function of sheer novelty. As Mary Campbell argues, the promiscuous taste for sensational wonders deepens an unsettling acquaintance with the ‘monstrous’ and strange that challenges the supposedly ‘natural’ arrangements of life in the metropolis. Exposed to models imported from distant cultures, homegrown canons of beauty, morality and social order look increasingly makeshift and impermanent. Whence one of Campbell’s richest case studies, the Puritan physician John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis. First published in 1650, with angry enlargements in 1653 and 1654, Bulwer’s book-length diatribe is the more telling in that the author’s animus toward contemporary fashions inspired by the outlandish costumes and cosmetic practices cultivated by colonized ‘savages’ leads him to apply the corrosive insights of cultural anthropology to his own society. The tattoos, pierced noses, moulded skulls, distended lips and ornamented ‘privy parts’ in which Bulwer sees disgusting and degrading disfigurations of the human body’s natural form become a template for the abominable mutations of metropolitan taste.⁴

The appetite to which the proliferation of images ministers is itself far from blameless. As Augustine of Hippo {Confessions 10.34) had long ago pointed out in acknowledging his own sinful susceptibility in this regard, the faculty of sight not only exposes us to temptations, but is a seat of prurient interest in its own right. From this viewpoint, the vogue for graphic depictions of the depraved customs exhibited in Europe’s colonies, where unbridled lust, cannibalism and unspeakable tortures are imagined to be the norm, is entirely of a piece with a highbrow taste for subjects drawn from ancient myth, whose concupiscent gods are just as lawless (and just as naked) as any African or American. But even at its most innocent, the growing curiosity to which the ever more widespread dissemination of images ministers constitutes a diversion in Pascal’s austerely disapproving sense.⁵ Instead of encouraging the exclusive focus on the at once ‘final’ and ‘invisible’ things that pertain to the cure of our eternal souls, pictures feed a desire for trivial escape into the world of carnal sensation. Where images are not directly criminal, they inveterately distract us from the true business of human life, namely, the pursuit of personal salavation in the world to come.

Yet if only because the period’s intense visual interests both survive and, as in vanitas and memento mori emblems, actively thrive on the uneasy second thoughts they occasion, the moral concerns representation causes merely confirm the phenomenon’s dominance. A logical place to start the present study is accordingly where the baroque does: in the decisive role pictures play in the concerted arts of vision on which early Western modernity depends.

Many things determine the critical position pictures occupy as a form and an ideal. Dating from Giotto’s great cycles of the Lives of Christ, his Virgin Mother and his earthly counterpart, St Francis of Assisi, visual narrative serves as a crucial means of popularizing the complex system of Christian belief. By engaging beholders in the face-to-face immediacy of direct visualization, images lend their special rhetorical weight to impressing the articles of the faith on believing hearts and minds. The holy stories that scripture records, the exemplary lives of the saints collected in the Golden Legend and even arcane points of doctrine concerning the holy Trinity, the antecedents of the virgin birth or the number, nature and function of the divine sacraments are granted a form the largely illiterate mass of the faithful can grasp and remember. In granting these things dramatic visual presence, pictures also propagate a fundamental change in late-medieval and Renaissance piety. In reenacting scenes from the Saviour’s life, images literalize the Franciscan programme of ‘imitating’ Christ. Artists accomplish in the medium of paint what St Francis does in the Christlike pattern of his works and sayings; and both demonstrate the same commitment to the twin mysteries of the incarnate Word and Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. In the visceral present of direct visual encounter and the acts of private meditation for which images provide a frame and a spur, art renews the work of intercession Christ’s humanation performed by representing sacred truth in a form adjusted to the carnal conditions of human experience.⁶

We witness a similar turn in secular verse. Breaking with the preeminently oral conventions of song informing the medieval chanson de geste and ballad, Renaissance poets redefine epic and lyric poetry as modes of imagery. Poets respond in this to the profound shift in taste and outlook theorized in the humanist doctrine of the Sister Arts distilled in a pair of slogans that dominate European aesthetics from the Renaissance to the Romantics: Simonides of Chios’ ‘witty’ chiastic conflation, poesia tacens, pictura loquens (‘painting is mute poetry, poetry a talking picture’), and the celebrated Horatian dictum, ut pictura poesis (‘as in painting, so in poetry’). Whatever other goals it may pursue, poetry’s presiding ambition is a visual one. In refining the techniques of rhetorical enargeia, creating vivid word pictures intended to rival painting itself, verse mimics the clarity and concreteness poets enviously identify with pictorial art.⁷

Finally, in the context of the problems I mean to explore more specifically in this chapter, notions of picturing become a major formative influence at the heart of Western philosophy and science. And nowhere is this influence more signally at work than in the baroque.⁸ Pictorial models of knowledge and thought begin to move to the formative centre of Western natural philosophy as early as the fourteenth century. For the via moderna of Ockhamite nominalism, the concept or ‘universal’ is ‘only a kind of picture’ (non est nisi fictio quaedam), a mental image constructed with a view to sorting the anarchic particulars of ordinary experience;⁹ and the mathematician and naturalist Nicole Oresme plots graphs enabling him to image ratios and proportional relations or to map otherwise impalpable temporal phenomena like the parabolic trajectory of an arrow.¹⁰ Still, it is with the inception of modernity proper in the seventeenth century that the philosophic picture comes fully into its own. Pictorial norms contribute to what Svetlana Alpers calls the ‘descriptive’ moment of Baconian induction. This visual emphasis is reflected not only in the enormous interest in prosthetic aids to sight in the form of microscopes and telescopes, but in the desire, most eloquently expressed by Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), that the secrets of nature such instruments disclose be preserved in images. The ‘sincere Hand’ of art thereby supplements the ‘faithful Eye’ of direct observation by fixing its findings in the both stable and readily reproducible form of pictures.¹¹ The commitment to pictures also dictates a guiding axiom in Johannes Kepler’s correction of the optical science of his time, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena [Supplement to Vitellius] (1604). Where Alberti’s De pictura of 1435 adheres to what would seem the natural order by constructing linear perspective on the model of empirical sight, Kepler’s ut pictura, ita visio sets optics on a rational footing by assigning vision a geometry derived from pictorial forms.¹²

But the philosophic picture receives perhaps its most influential expression in the person of Descartes. In a passage in the Discours de la méthode (1637) to which we will return in greater detail in a later chapter, Descartes summarizes his first major scientific work, the unpublished Le Monde, which sets out a complete system of the physical universe and the natural laws governing its genesis and operations. However, Descartes’s synopsis opens by describing not the system the earlier work contained, but rather the pictorial structure he gave its exposition. Faced with the task of conveying a notion of physical nature as a volumetric whole, Descartes adopts a mode of perspective foreshortening akin to the one employed by painters obliged, like him, to recover an image of three-dimensional truth in a two-dimensional medium. In painting, the reduction to two dimensions stems from the planar form of the panel or canvas on which the artist works. In philosophy, it is an artifact of the equally flattening medium of language and the temporal ordering language demands:

[J]ust as painters, being unable to represent equally all of the faces of a solid body on a flat canvas, choose one of the most important and, turning it alone toward the light source, leave the others in shadow, causing them to appear only so far as one can see them while looking at the first, so I, fearing I could not put in my discourse everything I had in thought, undertook to expose fully only what I understood of light; then, on the the occasion of light, to add something of the sun and the fixed stars, because it almost e...