University of the Ozarks
 

HUM 2023

Humanities II

STUDY AIDS

Period Summaries

Much of the information in these summaries is based on the materials in your textbook (Matthews and Platt, The Western Humanities) but the summaries also include additional information that will be discussed in class but not found in the textbook.

• The Early Renaissance
• The High Renaissance and Early Mannerism
•  Northern Humanism/Religious Reformations/Late Mannerism
• The Baroque Age I
• The Baroque Age II (Scientific Revolution)
• 18th Century: The Age of Reason
•  Romanticism in the 19th century
• Romanticism to Realism: 1830-1891
• Early Modernism: 
• 20th Century: 1914-1945
• 20th Century: 1945-present

Renaissance

"Renaissance" means "rebirth," and it is used to describe a cultural movement that began in Italy in the 15th century. It was a period in which people broke with medieval thought and began to explore a more humanistic approach to life’s problems; rather than looking to the Church and its religious doctrines for answers, they placed their faith in the ability of human beings to find solutions. Interest in classical authors, philosophers and art increased, not solely as support for Church dogma (which was the aim of medieval scholasticism), but for their own intrinsic value and the insights they provided into the human condition. The Renaissance was a time of great optimism, when scholars, artists and musicians emphasized the beauty of the human form and explored human potential. Whereas the Middle Ages had produced an relatively closed society, the Renaissance featured explorations of the Americas, increased international trade, and great strides in technology. It was also, however, a time of intense political and religious strife. As people rebelled against the abuses of the late medieval church and began to explore the world in more secular ways, they came into conflict with the Church. This struggle ultimately resulted in the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent splintering of the church into a variety of denominations.

The Renaissance is usually divided into three phases: the Early Renaissance (1400-1494), the High Renaissance (1494-1520) and the Late Renaissance, the last period subdivided into Early Mannerism (1520-1564) and Late Mannerism (1564-1603).

Political/social conditions

• The Renaissance began in the city-states of northern Italy. After giving up republicanism for the rule by autocratic signori--powerful ruling families--and opting for diplomacy rather than warfare to solve disputes, the area was able to achieve the peaceful environment, as well as the wealth and leisure, to support the arts on a large scale. A number of signori established splendid courts that vied for the services of the best artists and musicians, making their states renowned for culture. Among the most famous of the signori was Lorenzo de Medici (Lorenzo "the Magnificent") in Florence.
• Although the divergences from medieval culture in art, music and scholarship were ultimately quite drastic, in other ways early Renaissance society was an extension of the Middle Ages: Women still had few rights; the church continued to dominate everyday life and was responsible for commissioning a great deal of art (thereby strongly influencing its evolution); science remained a relatively primitive discipline.

• Scholars in the early Renaissance, while espousing "humanistic studies," established the first liberal arts schools, which advocated an education that would "liberate" the mind. They rejected the scholasticism of the Middle Ages in favor of a fresh study of newly discovered Greek and Roman works in philosophy, history, grammar, rhetoric and literature. At first the emphasis was on Latin works but, after the fall of Byzantium to the Turks in 1453, the Greek works borne by fleeing scholars became the focus of study. Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446) reintroduced into education the ancient Greek ideal of nurturing the body as well as the mind, incorporating physical exercise and moral training in the curriculum.
• Platonism and Neo-platonism experienced a revival, especially through the efforts of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), who sought to harmonize Plato’s teachings on love with Christian ideas on divine love, inspiring allegorical paintings that equate classical images of human beauty with divine love/beauty. [See Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, p. 281 in your textbook.]. Ficino’s student, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), expanded upon these precepts; his Oration on the Dignity of Man explores the idea that each human being--having been blessed by God with reason, speech and free will--has the power to choose his/her fate, to be a higher creature or a lowly beast.
• Early scholars were primarily translators and textual critics; in their work they uncovered errors made by medieval copyists, sometimes in the process creating problems for the Church. For example, Lorenza Valla (1406-1457) proved that the Donation of Constantine--the document popes had used to justify their claim of political authority over secular rulers during the Middle Ages--was forged.

• The new humanistic spirit is seen most clearly in Renaissance art. Breaking with the extravagant late Gothic style, artists sought to revive the simple, harmonious, balanced style of Classical buildings and sculpture. Symmetry, simple decoration and mathematical harmony were prized; efforts were made to create realistic depictions of human anatomy and form (a process begun already in the late Middle Ages in the works of people like Giotto and Van Eyck).
• Among the most important artistic figures were:
  • Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), who is credited with the invention of linear perspective, focused on using mathematics to create the illusion of depth on two-dimensional surfaces.
  • Leone Battista Alberti (1404-1472), known for his treatise On Painting.
  • Donatello (ca. 1386-1466), a sculptor who revived the use of nude male sculptures, is best known for his bronze David.
• The painters
  • Masaccio (1401-1428)
  • Fra Angelico (ca. 1400-1455)
  • Piero della Francesca (ca. 1420-1492)
  • Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).

Music

• Although dramatic change in musical composition arose out of the humanistic attitudes, there was no direct influence from ancient music--no ancient Greek or Roman music manuscripts were available for study.
• Chant remained the primary musical material in the churches but Renaissance composers felt free to alter the rhythm and change the pitches of the original chant melodies in order to create new melodies for their multi-voice compositions. For church use, they composed Mass movements and motets. Polyphonic chansons were written for secular entertainment.
• The texture of the music changed from the stratified style of the late Gothic--with some voices moving in quick notes and others drastically more slowly--to one in which all voices are equal. Often one voice would imitate the melody just sung in another part, a technique called imitative polyphony.
• The music has a timeless, orderly, serene quality with a flowing rhythm and a emphasis on "sweeter" sounds than those of the Middle Ages.
• Whereas medieval music had a objective, abstract quality that served for all types of texts regardless of their subject matter, Renaissance composers attempted to express the meaning of each individual text through the music. They took pains to make the musical punctuation match the punctuation/phrasing of the text in order to make the words clearly understood; word painting was introduced, a technique that was to become especially prominent in the secular compositions of the later Renaissance. In word painting, an individual word is depicted musically: For example, the word "ascending" would be sung to a set of rising pitches; the word "sorrow" would be represented by a harsh, dissonant sound.
• Music-making for voices was still primarily a cappella or without instrumental accompaniment. Only later in the Renaissance is music for instruments developed seriously. The instruments available for dance music and the accompaniment of secular songs were much the same as in the Middle Ages: Sackbutts, cornetts, krummhorns and other sharp-timbred sounds were common.
• The best-known composers of the period were John Dunstable (ca. 1380-1453) from England and the Burgundian Josquin des Prez (ca. 1440-1521).

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The High Renaissance and Early Mannerism
1494-1564

• From 1494 to 1520 the new Classical ideals first pursued by early Renaissance artists and writers reached their creative pinnacle. Principles of beauty, serenity and order achieved near-perfect expression in the art of the period. During this time the center of activity moved from Florence to Rome, where the popes became the primary benefactors of the culture.
• After 1520, however, this humanistic model began to unravel and more negative visions of the world emerged. This attitude led to a style called "mannerism," in which artists pursued very individualistic, self-consciously mannered expression that delighted in the bizarre and distorted.
• Simultaneously in northern Europe the Protestant Reformation was unfolding, a subject that will be dealt with in Chapter 13.

Political/social conditions

• The High Renaissance was marked politically by the wars and machinations of three rulers: 1) Charles V, Hapsburg ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, 2) Ferdinard and Isabella of Spain, and 3) Francis I of France. These monarchs waged war constantly on weaker states in order to gain more power, and the Italian states were often the battleground for their conflicts, shattering the peace that had been achieved in the early Renaissance. Even the papal states were not safe from attack.
• Economically, there was good news and bad news. The lower classes suffered from constant inflation but the merchant classes and bankers experienced relative prosperity and a rise in the middle-class standard of living. Bankers were responsible for the first wide-scale expansion of commercial capitalism, investing, amassing capital and funding the many wars. With the discovery of the New World, there were new agricultural products to be sold and more abundant supplies of gold and silver. Slavery also became an important component in the economy; African slaves were shipped to European colonies in the New World to work in mines and plantations.

Literature

• The High Renaissance was primarily a phenomenon of the arts but there is also some literature supporting its ideals. Two such writers were the poet Gaspara Stampa (ca. 1524-1554)--who abandoned the medieval ideals of courtly love to express the suffering lover from the female point of view--and Castiglione (1478-1529), who wrote a treatise on courteous behavior called The Courtier.
• In contrast to the idealism and elegance of Stampa and Castiglione, the mannerist style is represented by Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose political treatise The Prince reveals a negative view of human nature. Machiavelli was cynical about his fellow human beings’ capacity for good and framed his arguments in distinctly non-Christian and often amoral terms. It is from Machiavelli that politicians adapted the adage: "The ends justifies the means." He believed firmly that Italy’s problems could only be solved by a strong monarch willing to do whatever it takes to keep order and maintain power, even if that meant duplicity, treachery and even murder.

Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting

• High Renaissance artists continued to pursue the humanistic ideals centered on Classical principles of order, harmony, symmetry and serenity first seen in the early years of the Renaissance. Realism, natural poses and perfect proportions were the goals of both painting and sculpture.
• Among the most important artistic figures of the High Renaissance were:
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), is famous for The Last Supper and Mona Lisa as well as the early Renaissance painting, The Virgin of the Rocks. Credited with introducing the half-length portrait, he was also known for creative use of light/color and harmonious composition. His use of space is precisely guided by mathematical principles but never obscures the expressiveness of his subjects’ faces and gestures.
  • Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was primarily a sculptor--renowned for his David and two Pietas--but was also pressed into service by Pope Sixtus IV to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a series of frescoes that are considered the greatest cycle of paintings in Western art (The Creation of Adam being the most famous). Although Michelangelo began his career pursuing High Renaissance ideals, his later works became mannerist; The Last Judgment is notable for its distortions and exaggeration of proportions and for an expressiveness that steps outside the bounds of the usual Renaissance restraint and balance.
  • Raphael Santi (1483-1520) was the quintessential High Renaissance painter; his work is marked by gracefulness and balance. Among his best-known works are The School of Athens and Sistine Madonna.
  • Titian (ca. 1488-1576) was a Florentine painter particularly known for rich, vibrant colors and expert use of light, using colors to shape his works in the same way other painters use symmetrical arrangement. See his Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.
  • Parmigianino (1503--1540) is considered the founder of Mannerism. His Madonna with the Long Neck is a good example of Mannerism; distortion and eccentricity mark the work--the expressions, gestures and postures of the characters as well as the overlay of sexuality seems at odds with the Christian perception of Mary.
  • There were two main architects of the High Renaissance: Donato Bramante (1444-1514), who was strongly classical in his designs, and Andrea di Pietro--known as Palladio--(1508-1580) who was the preeminent mannerist of his time. Bramante’s buildings, such as the Tempietto, are simply designed with a minimum of ornamentation and are present a unified effect in the same way as a piece of sculpture. Palladio’s architecture, such as the Villa Capra, although composed of Classical elements (symmetry, Greek columns and pediments, e.g.) is concerned with creating special effects and aims to surprise the visitor. His treatise on architecture, Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture) was influential; many 18th-century English aristocrats and Southern plantation owners in America commissioned buildings based on Palladian principles.

Music of the High and Late Renaissance

• High Renaissance music developed further the Classically-derived principles of the Early Renaissance. Masses and motets were written in imitative polyphony with gently flowing rhythms and careful matching of text with music; serene, orderly, harmonious sounds were the ideal and dissonance was carefully controlled.
• Composers continued to use Gregorian chants as the basis for their works but felt free to change the notes and rhythms to make the melodies suit their own artistic purposes; they also experimented with newly-composed melodies and secular tunes in their Masses (e.g. the famous bar-room song "L’homme arme" or "The armed man" was used by many Renaissance composers as the basis for a Mass despite the Church’s disapproval of the use of secular music in church services).
• These Classical ideals are probably most perfectly expressed in the works of the late Renaissance composer, Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594), who was the premier composer of the Catholic Counter-Reformation (an event we will explore in detail in the next unit).
• In keeping with the more secular sensibilities of the time, secular compositions became more numerous, especially madrigals.
  • Madrigals are pieces based on high-quality poetry in which the composer tries to express the meaning of the text expressively. Sung one person to a part, madrigals were the fashionable after-dinner entertainment of the aristocracy.
  • Originating in Italy, the style soon spread to England, where English composers created their own style of madrigal, often with fa-la-la refrains.
  • Word painting is used extensively in the madrigal.
  • Most of the preeminent composers of the English madrigal date from the Late Renaissance: Thomas Weelkes (ca. 1575-1623), Thomas Morley (1557-1602), Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) and John Wilbye (1574-1638).
  • In its final stages the Renaissance madrigal became a vehicle for extreme mannerist tendencies. In the works, e.g., of Carlos Gesualdo (ca. 1561-1613), technical virtuosity in word painting overshadows the other elements to create a bizarre pastiche of seemingly unrelated musical events; the overall expression of the music and its text is lost.

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 Northern Humanism, Northern Renaissance, Religious Reformations,
and Late Mannerism
1500 – 1603

During the Italian High Renaissance, northern Europe was engaged in its own brand of humanism. It was a movement concerned with the rebirth, not of ancient Classical principles, but the ideals of the early Christian church. Their attempts at fostering these ideals led to conflict with the Roman Church and ultimately resulted in the Protestant Reformation. As these new Protestants quarreled with one another over basic Christian doctrines, the Catholic Church launched its so-called Counter-Reformation. The rest of the century would be marked by religious wars as well as political conflicts masked by religious agendas.

The Reformation came about because of long-standing abuses and corruption in the Church (the selling of indulgences, clergy immorality, e.g.) as well as the persistence of the lay piety and anticlericalism that began in the Middle Ages.

Germany was at the center of the Reformation. Because of the popes’ preoccupation with worldly issues, secular rulers in France and England ran their countries free of church control, but Germany did not have a strong centralized state so they were subject to Roman control in matters of clerical appointments, taxes and ecclesiastical courts. The local princes resented church interference and ultimately sided with the new religious denominations, sheltering Protestant heretics and making their territories into independent states outside the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church.

Martin Luther founded the first Protestant sect in the 1520s. Inspired by his efforts but differing in doctrinal matters, John Calvin established his own church (later to evolve into the Presbyterian Church) in Geneva and King Henry VIII created the Church of England or Anglican Church.

Martin Luther (1483-1546)

• Luther had not initially intended to break with the Church but was concerned with reforming it. With his objections to the selling of indulgences as the catalyst, in 1517 he presented his famous Ninety-Five Theses, hoping that they would spark a debate leading to reform. His theses, however, contained a number of ideas that the Church would not condone and he was eventually excommunicated by Pope Leo X in 1520. He escaped punishment for heresy only because Elector Frederick the Wise kept him under his protection. Luther is, of course, the founder of Lutheranism.

• Salvation comes from God’s grace, not from good works.
• The Bible is the sole source of religious authority, not papal/council rulings
• People do not need priests or sacraments to mediate with God for them; they can live simple lives of piety and penitence.
• Only the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist) and Baptism are valid sacraments.
• Adoration of saints and the idea of purgatory are rejected.
• The church should minister to people in their own language, rather than in Latin. Luther was responsible for one of the first--and the most influential--German translations of the Bible, among 19 in print by 1518.
• Luther also created new texts and hymns in the vernacular for use in the service.
• The church service--which in the Catholic Church is centered on the celebration of the Eucharist--should focus instead on preaching.
• Education was one of Luther’s priorities; his supporters established their own schools financed by state taxes. These church schools also provided musical training for boys, training choirs for use in the local churches; often three or more churches would support the school and take turns having the choir at their services.
• Luther reformed the liturgy. He did not forbid the use of Latin--he himself preferred a Latin service--he recognized that ordinary people cannot be educated and ministered to if they do not understand the language. He created a German Mass and introduced a new type of hymn called a chorale, written in the vernacular and based on a more popular style of song. He wanted the people to have music easy enough so that they could participate in the service rather than be spectators as professional choirs presented the music. In order to facilitate this process, he often appropriated well-known secular songs--including love songs and barroom songs--and provided them with new religious lyrics. His philosophy could be summarized by the remark of a later writer: "Why should the devil have all the good tunes?" These chorales have remained an important part of the Lutheran heritage. In succeeding decades, they were used as the basis on many new musical compositions, just as plainchant had been used as the basis for so much music in the Catholic Church.

John Calvin (1509-1564)

• Calvinism differed substantially from Lutheranism. Calvin believed in an angry, wrathful, inaccessible God and predestination was central to his religious system. Calvin also insisted on strict, ethical standards and favored enforcement by a theocratic state. Puritanism later rose out of this theology. It was an ethical system that encouraged all the qualities later associated with the so-called Protestant work ethic: thrift, discipline, sobriety, and hard work. Such behavior often favors success in business ventures and eventually worldly success came to be seen as a sign of God’s approval, poverty a mark of spiritual disfavor.
• Calvinism was viewed even in its own time as a sober, joyless religion. Earthly pleasures were discouraged, including music-making. Whereas Lutheranism reached out to the secular world for musical inspiration, Calvinism restricted the use of music in services. Only Biblical texts were allowed to be sung. Metrical settings of the psalms were the main service music, sung in unison without accompaniment (no instruments were allowed in church, not even an organ). The Genevan Psalter is one of the most famous compilations of metrical psalms to come out of Calvinism; these psalters were brought to the U.S. by Puritans in later years.

Anglicanism

• King Henry VIII (reigned 1509-1547) formed the Church of England out of political expediency rather than religious fervor. When the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon after she had failed to produce a male heir, Henry set himself up as the head of a new English Church (and, of course, granted himself a divorce).
• After Henry’s death England was subject to great religious turmoil; depending on the current ruler, sometimes Catholicism was the official state religion, sometimes Anglicanism. Eventually Queen Elizabeth (reigned 1558-1603) created a compromise of sorts, granting limited religious tolerance to Catholics and Calvinists. However only Anglicans could serve in Parliament, earn university degrees or serve in the military; all public officials had to swear allegiance to Thirty-Nine Articles that affirmed the doctrines of the Anglican Church.
• The Anglican Church service was similar to the Catholic Mass but was rendered in English rather than Latin. Church musicians had a tough time during this period, often needing to change religious loyalties on short notice in order to retain their positions. Many composers, consequently, have left behind works for both the Anglican and the Catholic traditions; among these are William Byrd and Thomas Tallis.

 

THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

• The Roman Catholic Church responded to the defections to Protestant groups by instituting a Counter-Reformation that eventually slowed down the spread of Protestantism and won back many Catholics in southern and central Europe.
• The Counter-Reformation proceeded on three fronts: renewing the papacy, creating new monastic orders, and reforming church practice and liturgy through a special church council called The Council of Trent.
• The Church enforced clerical discipline throughout the ecclesiastical hierarchy, set up an Index of Forbidden Books in an effort to control heresy in written form, and recognized a new monastic group called the Society of Jesus or Jesuits in 1540. The Jesuits, under their founder the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola (ca. 1493-1556) and Francis Xavier (1506-1552), began as workers among the poor and unchurched but ultimately became the Church’s main educational/ missionary arm.
• The Council of Trent met in three sessions between 1545 and 1563 to reaffirm basic doctrine, retaining most of the practices criticized by Protestants-- monasticism, indulgences, relics, etc. They maintained that church tradition and Bible together were the source of religious authority; the Vulgate or Latin version of the Bible was retained as the only official, legitimate version of the Bible; the seven sacraments were deemed valid. However, they did initiate some reforms, particularly in clerical discipline and training and in the liturgy/music of the Mass.
• The sixteenth century, however, continued to be marked by religious warfare. Often the religion of the ruler became the religion of a state or region; only limited tolerance was extended to the religion that was not in ascendancy.

Christian humanism, or northern humanism, was the most influential literary movement in northern Europe. Although its writers/scholars were interested in Classical literature, they had a stronger concern with matters of church and spirituality; their writings were usually aimed at ecclesiastical reform.

Literature

The best-known Christian humanists were:

• Francois Rabelais (ca. 1494-1553), the author of the The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, a satire on monastic life
• Marguerite of Angouleme, queen of Navarre (1492-1549), who wrote a collection of sexual tales called the Heptameron;
• Sir Thomas More, whose Utopia was one of the first widely-known pieces of utopian literature
• Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1466-1536), a Dutch scholar whose The Praise of Folly satirizes human foibles at all levels of society

Among other writers working in Northern Renaissance culture, though not within the Christian humanist tradition but in the late Mannerist style, were:

• Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), known for his autobiographical Essays, and perhaps the most famous playwright in English literature
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616), a playwright/poet known for sonnets, comedies and tragedies but whose tragedies are regarded as his masterpieces, particularly Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet is mannerist in its shifting perspectives and protagonist’s elusive character, as well as a negative vision of human nature and the value of human life.

Northern Renaissance Painting

• Northern art had persisted with a late Gothic style into the sixteenth-century and had never really participated in the High Renaissance standards pursued in Italy during this period. However the confluence of the Protestant Reformation and Mannerism in the 1520s did produce three important artists from this region:
  • Albrecht Durer (1471-1528),
  • Matthias Grunewald (ca. 1460-1528)
  • Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525-1569).
• Northern artists tended to emphasize the grotesque and gory, even in works with sacred subjects, combining late Gothic emotionalism with Renaissance ideals of individuality and realistic representation.
  • Durer was known for his mystical self-portrait and his engraving called Knight, Death, and the Devil.
  • Grunewald’s masterpiece was the Isenheim Altarpiece Grunewald’s work is a continuation of late Gothic style.
  • Pieter Bruegel the Elder was known for his secular subjects, particularly scenes from country life such as his Wedding Dance.

   

Mannerist Painting in Spain and Italy

• The Council of Trent called for a reform of the arts, directing artists to create painting, sculpture, music and architecture that emphasized simplicity and accessibility--and decency (Michelangelo’s male nudes in the Last Judgment were declared obscene and loincloths painted over them). The Church wanted art that spoke to the masses; however, this was an ideal at odds with the elitism and complexity of current Mannerism and so, of limited influence except for a certain intensification of spiritual values in mannerist paintings. Spanish and Italian artists, in particular, were greatly influenced by the Counter-Reformation’s renewal of Catholic fervor, creating late mannerist works on sacred subjects that are preoccupied with mystical and illusionary effects.
• The works of the Greek-turned Spanish painter El Greco (1541-1614) include a portrait of Cardinal Guevara and The Burial of Count Orgaz.
• One woman artist also achieved fame during this period: Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532-1625).
• The preeminent late Mannerist artist in Italy was Tintoretto (1518-1594), whose rendition of The Last Supper stands in sharp contrast to Da Vinci’s classically- balanced and harmonious painting of the same title. Tintoretto’s work is characterized by an otherworldly feeling, dominated by eerie lighting and ethereal depictions of angels.

 The Baroque Age
1600-1715

In the early seventeenth century a new age dawned in Europe: The Baroque Period. This was a time of great splendor, opulence and theatricality, an era of absolute monarchs who ruled in magnificence and grandeur and of equally dazzling art used as political/religious propaganda. It was also a period marked by continuing religious warfare sparked by the Protestant Reformation and wars of expansion and conquest overseas.

The Baroque was, in many ways, a time of transition, still displaying many Renaissance characteristics but looking forward to the beginnings of modern scientific thinking. People of this time struggled with the balance between reason and passion, embracing both the passion and drama of the newly-born operatic entertainment and the cool, objective rationality of the Scientific Revolution.

• By the seventeenth century, the center of European political power had shifted from the city-states of Italy to military states in England, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia. These new monarchies were dominated by absolutists, rulers who exerted total control over their states, justifying their actions with theories of divine right and natural law.
• The most successful of these rulers was Louis XIV of France; France provided the most extreme example of absolutism. Louis XIV’s concept of government can be summarized in his own words: "L’etat c’est moi" ("I am the state"). He established elaborate bureaucracies that regulated every aspect of French life, including economics, art, publishing, and music; he founded academies in language, art, music and dance to control the arts/artists. He maintained spectacular residences at Versailles and in Paris to glorify his position, and forced his nobles to live there so that he could better control their activities. Court life was filled with elaborate entertainments--ballets, operas, formal dancing.
• James I, the first of the Stuart dynasty in England, also declared himself ruler by divine right. English nobles, however, were not as submissive as those of France and were able to exert some control over the King through their Parliament. They even disbanded the monarchy for a time in mid-century to form a republic called the Commonwealth; however, abuses by Commonwealth leader, the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, led to the return of monarchy in 1660. After a number of other crown-vs.-Parliament skirmishes, England ultimately settled into a limited monarchy that recognized individual rights, Parliamentary power over finances, and rule by written law with the consent of the people, the latter an idea that would have great currency among philosophers in the next century.

Baroque Art

Whereas Renaissance art strove for serenity and balance, Baroque style focused on expressiveness and movement. Realism was prized over idealized beauty. The art tends to have an exuberant, dynamic quality, marked by emotionalism and theatricality; the style is dominated by curves and ovals, dramatic contrasts of light and shadow (chiaroscuro), and rich, vibrant colors. Within this general framework, however, the style manifested itself in different ways, depending on the region. There were three principal variations on Baroque style: Florid Baroque, Classical Baroque and Restrained Baroque.

• Florid Baroque was the style that grew out of the Counter-Reformation. This was art with a twofold purpose: To impress upon the masses the power and grandeur of the Church and to serve as a teaching tool. The popes commissioned works that appealed to a mass audience with their dramatic emotionalism and basked in elaborate detail and grand design. Florid Baroque was the style that dominated Italy, Spain, Austria and Southern Germany.
  • The most important of the Florid Baroque artists was Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), known for his blending of architecture and sculpture. His best-known works are the sculptures made for the interior of St. Peter’s in Rome (as well as the design of the exterior plaza), including the baldacchino or canopy under the dome and The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.
  • Among the premier painters of the Florid Baroque were:
    • Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (1573-1610) who painted The Martyrdom of St. Matthew
    • Artemisa Gentileschi (1593-1653), a rare female artist in a cultural age dominated by men, painted in a style very similar to that of Caravaggio but differs from her mentor in her choice of themes--many paintings based on strong female   characters such as Judith and Cleopatra--and a much stronger emotionalism.
    • Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709), who specialized in architectural illusionism; in the Church of Sant’ Ignazio in Rome, e.g., he created imaginary extensions of a building’s architecture in his ceiling fresco, Allegory of the Missionary Work of the Jesuits.
    • Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), A Spanish painter who created works in the style of Caravaggio but with less dramatic intensity; in Las Meninas or The Maids of Honor, he shows mastery of chiaroscuro and illusionary effects.
    • Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who was a Flemish artists renowned for his sensuous, voluptuous female nudes painted in gorgeous colors and with masterful use of light. See his The Education of Marie de’ Medici.
• The Classical Baroque style was practiced principally in France, where the classical tastes of Louis XIV dominated the art world. Its best-known artists include:
  • Louis Le Vau (1612-1670), Andre Le Notre (1613-1700), and Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646-1708), who redesigned the palace at Versailles into a monumental elaborate complex of buildings, gardens, and waterways, with interiors profusely decorated with intricate designs, mirrors, multicolored marbles and ceiling paintings.
  • Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), who took a more detached approach to painting, as evident in his Et in Arcadia Ego.
• The Restrained Baroque style was concentrated in northern and western Europe and derived its greater simplicity from the pious middle-class sensibilities of the Protestant burghers who dominated the art market in this region. Portraits were the most popular art form of this style. Three major artistic figures, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Dyck dominated the scene.
  • Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) is known for his naturalism and lush colors. His works include: The Blinding of Samson, The Night Watch, and a variety of portraits, including many self-portraits.
  • Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) was best known for his domestic scenes, such as The Lacemaker.
  • Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), was a student of Rubens, who specialized in portraiture that his remarkable for its psychological insights. See, e.g., his portrait of James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox.
  • The English architect Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) created architecture that blended rich ornamentation with Classical design features such as domes and columns. His masterpiece was St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

• The most important literary expression of the Baroque period was drama--comedies, tragedies and epics were all important. Baroque writers, although distinct in their individual styles, tended to share certain characteristics, in particular a delight in ornate, dramatic rhetoric, a concern with characterization, and the exploration of emotional extremes. Corneille, Racine, Moliere and Milton were the preeminent writers of the period.
• Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) wrote tragedies based on Spanish legends and Roman themes, of which his best work is Le Cid.
• Jean Racine (1639-1699) also specialized in tragedy. Although using classical structures for his plays, he used tragedy to explore the conflict between reason and emotion in his characters. Phedre or Phaedra, based on Euripides’ story, is considered his masterpiece.
• Jean Baptiste Poquelin or Moliere (1622-1673) was the great comic playwright of the Baroque, using his plays to satirize all social types of his time. Among the comedies still performed today are his Tartuffe, The Miser, The Would-Be Gentleman and The Misanthrope. Moliere was Louis XIV’s official court entertainer.
• John Milton (1608-1674), whose attitudes were informed by English Puritanism, is best-known for his blending of ancient epic and Christian legend in Paradise Lost, often considered the Protestant response to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The language features a typically Baroque mixture of complex metaphors, lofty tone and exaggerated rhetoric.
• Travel literature was also prominent during the Baroque, as people began to concern themselves with the world beyond Europe.

Baroque Music

Like the literature, painting, sculpture and architecture of the period, Baroque music was concerned with emotional expression, ornate decoration, and grand effects.

Specific characteristics of Baroque music

• One can still find examples of Renaissance-style word painting, but composers are more concerned with expressing the overall meaning/emotion of the text. Ordinarily a musical piece in the Baroque will have only one Affekt or affect, express only one mood or emotion. In keeping, however, with the new spirit of scientific inquiry common to the age, theorists created elaborate technical descriptions of how to achieve these affects; they created lists of musical figures that could be used to depict certain emotions, and tried to systematize the use of different keys for different moods (e.g., one theorist might suggest that D major is best for royal or grand themes, and E minor for sorrowful themes). Although no two theorists/composers agreed on the exact formula, this type of categorization on the whole was referred to as The Doctrine of the Affections.
• Baroque melodies tend to be complex with many notes sung to one syllable (melismatic style); although often memorable, they are NOT tuneful melodies that can be easily reproduced by the ordinary concert-goer. Singers strove for virtuosity and dramatic flair.
• Baroque composers continued to use imitative polyphony but explored its possibilities in more intricate detail. Basing their compositions on one theme, they not only used imitation not only in a straightforward fashion, but also manipulated the theme through technical devices such as augmentation (making the notes of the melody twice as long as the original), diminution (twice as short), inversion (inverting the intervals of the melody), and retrograde (playing the melody backwards). The fugue is a composition that uses imitation in this manner.
• Despite the continuance of imitative polyphony--which is focused on the linear or melodic aspects--Baroque composers gave more emphasis to the vertical or harmonic dimensions of a work. Our modern major-minor systems of keys and functional harmony had their beginnings in the Baroque.
• Baroque musicians did not play the music exactly as notated but used the musical score as a framework for their own interpretations. They often embellished the music with ornamentation (adding extra notes to beautify the work--or dazzle the audience) and were expected to improvise fluidly. In addition, keyboard players in ensembles improvised their accompaniments when playing basso continuo or continuo. Continuo playing required two performers: an instrument to play the bass line and an instrument for improvising chords (usually harpsichord or organ, but sometimes lute). The keyboardist would improvise his chords from the bass line. The use of continuo playing is a prime characteristic of Baroque music--if you hear a harpsichord playing in the background of a vocal or instrumental piece, it is probably Baroque music.
• Instrumental music came into its own during the Baroque; performing technique and instrument construction improved and solo instrumentalists, like singers, strove for virtuosic effects with which to impress audiences. Also, the Baroque gave rise to the first real orchestras, as we understand the term. The Baroque orchestra, however, was smaller than the modern one, consisting mostly of string instruments (violins, violas, viola da gambas--forerunner of the modern cello) with the addition of oboes/flutes to double the violins and brass instruments used only for festive occasions.

Baroque forms and styles

• The major art-form to emerge from the Baroque was opera, which like the literature of the period, emphasized drama and theatricality.
  • Operas use essentially two types of music: arias and recitatives.
    • The recitative is a speech-like melody written in a free rhythm and used for dialogue and narrative.
    • The aria is a more organized melody with a definite rhythm and affect. When an aria is sung, the action is temporarily suspended and the characters reflects on his/her reactions and emotions.
  • French operas, which tended to be more classically restrained, also included dance numbers and choruses.
  • A close kin to opera were the oratorio and the cantata.
    • The oratorio is like an opera stylistically but has a sacred subject. It is performed without staging or costumes in concession to religious authorities’ objection to secular entertainment during penitential seasons and usually includes vocal choruses.
    • The cantata was also in operatic style but of a smaller scale, the length of an opera scene. Cantatas could be sacred or secular in content; sacred cantatas in the Lutheran church usually included vocal choruses and chorales.
• The major instrumental form to emerge from the Baroque era was the concerto. This was a type of composition that featured an alternation of soloists with full orchestra; it was usually organized into several contrasting movements. Keyboard music experienced a golden age during the Baroque; virtuosic music for both harpsichord and organ was plentiful.
• Another important musical genre of the Baroque was the aristocratic dance.
  • Popularized by Louis XIV--who demanded that all his nobles be proficient in dancing in order to retain their high positions at court--dance music was produced in large quantities in courts all over Europe.
  • These dances were not simple entertainments but elaborately choreographed items that required a level of proficiency that we know expect only of professional dancers; many nobles retained dancing masters. The dances developed at the court of Louis XIV eventually developed into the form we now call ballet.
  • Not all of this music, however, was produced to accompany dances; much of it was stylized, using the rhythms of the dance but not intended for actually dancing. Such stylized pieces were often compiled into collections of contrasting dances called suites.

Baroque Composers

• Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is often considered the greatest composer of the Baroque era. He composed works in every Baroque genre except opera, but is particularly admired for his sacred works for the Lutheran church (cantatas, oratorios, Passions), concertos and keyboard works.
• George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) was best-known in his own time as a composer of operas and oratorios (the Messiah being the most famous), but he also wrote a great deal of instrumental music.
• Antonio Vivaldi (1685-1757) is known today for his concertos, of which the best-known is the Four Seasons Concertos.
• Jean Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) was Louis XIV’s court composer and had jurisdiction over all music published in France. He worked primarily in the genre of opera and ballet, and was renowned in his time for assembling and rehearsing the most technically precise orchestra in Europe.
• Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was an early pioneer in opera, the first to establish the new expressive style of the Baroque in works like Orfeo and The Coronation of Poppea.

The Baroque Age II
1600-1715

We have already discussed the artistic accomplishments and political landscape of the Baroque age; there were also new developments in political philosophy and science. Even while absolutism reigned in many states, English philosophers were exploring the idea of government controlled by the people rather than a central monarch. The so-called Scientific Revolution spurred advances in astronomy, physics, medicine, chemistry and biology. At the same time, the new emphasis on empirical thinking created conflict between secular and religious thought; philosophy became increasingly estranged from theology. As philosophers turned their attention to secular issues, theology played only a minor role in the thinking of the time. Skepticism and rational proof, natural law and mathematical validity became the new tools for measuring truth.

The Scientific Revolution

• The new scientists rejected Aristotelian geocentrism (the theory of the universe as earth-centered) in favor of heliocentrism (sun-centered theory of the universe) and replaced deductive reasoning (a type of reasoning that seeks to ratify accepted truths) with inductive reasoning (reasoning from empirical data). They pursued a neo-Platonic agenda in which they sought to demonstrate the harmony of the universe through mathematics, stressing simplicity over complexity.
• Technology played an important role in the Scientific Revolution; the invention of the microscope and telescope around 1600 permitted the gathering of empirical evidence heretofore unavailable.
• Major figures in the Scientific Revolution include the following:

Astronomy and Physics

• Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543), in his Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, proposed that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. The Church--both Catholic and Protestant--considered this theory heretical because, in a decidedly unbiblical approach, it removed humanity from the center of the divine order. Copernicus’ book was included in the Counter-Reformation’s Index of Forbidden Books. In Catholicism the idea was resisted until 1822; Protestant thinkers gradually began to accept it during the Baroque period.
• Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) spent his life clarifying and refining Copernican heliocentrism. In his treatise On the Motion of Stars, he attempted to account for the varying speeds of planetary rotations and noted their elliptical rather than circular orbital patterns. He was among the first to suggest that the universe "operates with clocklike regularity" and a hidden mathematical harmony.
• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is best known for his precise observations of the heavens as well as his work in terrestrial mechanics. He made his own telescope in 1609, with which he discovered that Jupiter had moons and that heavenly bodies were not perfectly formed and unchanging. Most importantly, he gave earliest expression to the modern law of inertia, demonstrating that an object in motion will continue moving unless stopped by some outside force. Galileo, like Copernicus, had difficulties with the religious authorities; he was arrested by the Inquisition for heresy and forced to recant his views.
• Isaac Newton (1642-1727), an English mathematician, built on the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo, and is famous for introducing the theory of gravity to explain what held the planets to their orbits. He did not concern himself with what caused this phenomenon, only how it operated, demonstrating the objective approach that would come to be characteristic of modern scientific method.

Medicine and Chemistry

• Because the Church had always forbidden the use of autopsy, anatomical knowledge around 1600 was extremely limited; researchers could only generalize about the human body based on the information gleaned from animal dissections. Some advances were made however in understanding the circulation of the blood through the work of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), William Harvey (1578-1657) and Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694). The English physicist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) made progress distinguishing chemistry from alchemy and applying mathematics to analyze chemical reactions.

New scientific ideas had a strong impact on philosophy, giving rise to a wealth of literature exploring the ramifications of science for society and culture. There are three writers in particular whose contributions in this area are still admired: Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Blaise Pascal.

• Francis Bacon (1561-1626) had a clear, accessible prose style that made him the spokesman for the new science among laymen. In his writings he championed the use of inductive reasoning and expressed an optimistic belief that eventually science would lead to control over the natural world, a view summed up in the phrase "knowledge is power."
• Rene Descartes (1596-1650) in his Discourse on Method (1637) maintained that mathematics holds the key to understanding and mastering nature; he is considered the founder of analytic geometry.
  • Descartes’ approach was based on an assumption of "universal doubt." He believed that knowledge could be attained only by following these four steps:
    • accept nothing as true without rational proof
    • break down problems into smaller, manageable parts
    • seek solutions by starting with the simplest and proceeding to the most complex
    • review and reexamine all solutions
  • Descartes is the philosopher associated with the often-quoted phrase: "Cogito ergo sum"--"I think, therefore I am." He used his method to argue on rational grounds for the existence of God. Many readers of his works, however, accepted his notion of universal doubt but rejected his rational proofs, instead embracing atheism and the conviction that absolute truth is impossible.
  • Descartes also advocated dualism, a division between physical matter and human spirit/soul/mind. He believed that the mind could not be understood rationally in the same way as the physical world could be analyzed. Ironically, the field of human psychology grew out of attempts to prove Descartes wrong on this issue.
• Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was an even stronger advocate of radical doubt than Pascal.
  • His fervent Jansenism led him in his masterpiece, the Pensees, or Thoughts, to state that human beings cannot truly know themselves or the natural world in any absolute way. They could, however, attain limited measures of truth: Science could uncover some knowledge of nature; passion allowed human beings to experience religious truths directly.
  • His most famous quotation--"The heart has reasons that reason does not know"--is a perfect example of the conflict between reason and passion that raged throughout the Baroque in art, music, literature and philosophy.
  • Ultimately Pascal justified belief in God, not by Descartes’ rational proofs, but by postulating a cosmic wager: If God exists, we win; if God does not exists, we lose nothing--so why not take a chance and believe. He was a forerunner of modern Christian existentialism.

It must be emphasized that the new directions opened up by the Scientific Revolution represented incremental progress in baby steps. Acceptance--or even general understanding--of these findings was not universal and even the scholars involved were not completely scientific/objective in their views of the university, many holding on to superstition and mystical beliefs, neo-Platonism and astrology, alchemy and prophecy.

Political Philosophy

Political writers during the Baroque period addressed themselves to the question of who should hold the power of governance and how that power should be exercised. In their attempts to define the best form of government, they reached widely differing conclusions, some advocating divine right or absolutism, others arguing for liberalism.

• Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) argued in The Law of War and Peace that states should be founded on natural law, assuming that human beings are innately rational and, if given a choice, would opt for a just, fair and orderly society.
• Grotius was opposed by Bishop Bossuet (1627-1704), a French church leader who believed that monarchs ruled by divine right, that God chose certain kings to be his vessels on earth and, therefore, these kings had an indisputable right to order the lives of their subjects in whatever ways they deemed best. Rebellion against such kings was rebellion against God. Autocratic rule was necessary in order to control a corrupt and sinful human population.
• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in The Leviathan (1651) advanced a theory of government that assumes people are driven by two negative forces: the fear of death and the thirst for power. A society that allowed free play to man’s natural inclinations would, therefore, be unruly and brutal. In order to avoid such conditions, it was necessary for human beings to surrender their individual claims to sovereignty and assign absolute power to one ruler under the terms of a social contract between ruler and subjects. The ruler, whether a monarch or the head of a commonwealth, would keep the peace and rein in the destructive impulses of his subjects.
• John Locke (1632-1704) rejected Hobbe’s pessimism about human nature, believing that human beings were capable of governing themselves.
  • This political theory, liberalism, is expounded in his Two Treatises on Government. The ideal government must be guided by law, subject to the will of the people, and responsible for the protection of life and property. In this system, the subjects have the right to overthrow the government if the rulers do not keep the social contract; the power of rulers must be kept in check. This was an idea that would prove influential in the rise of the American and the French Revolutions.
  • Locke also dabbled in nonpolitical philosophy, grappling with epistemological issues. He maintained that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa (blank slate) onto which is written all knowledge acquired through the senses and life experiences. Reason and experience, then, complement one another; all knowledge is derived from human experience.

Exploration in North and South America since the sixteenth century spread European culture throughout the world, supplanting many native societies with European colonists. The Spanish and Portuguese dominated the New World in the sixteenth century but during the Baroque it was the French, English and Dutch who created large overseas settlements. This was the period during which the Pilgrims and Puritans settled along the Atlantic coast of North America; French explorers founded Quebec and occupied the West Indies. These colonies established trading patterns whereby the raw products of the New World were exported back to Europe and exchanged for finished goods. Important trade contacts were also made with Japan, China and India.

Innovations in science and philosophy had a strong impact on the arts--although, as noted earlier, the rationality of science was often in conflict with the prevailing passion and theatricality of the age. Composers and artists often sought to incorporate scientific principles of order and mathematics into their works, even if hidden beneath a profusion of surface ornament. The new analytical reasoning led to art marked by keen psychological insight; discoveries in astronomy and mathematics contributed to the illusionist art of the period as well as its delight in curves, ovals and movement.

The Age of Reason
1700-1789

The eighteenth century is often described as The Age of Reason. Building on the scientific advances of the seventeenth century, people in this age were devoted to objectivity, reason and order. The middle class rose to political and cultural prominence during this time, and supported progressive thinkers who were committed to ideas of social equality and justice. Such thinkers were part of a movement called the Enlightenment, and its ideas ultimately reshaped society from one controlled by aristocracy to one in which ideas of democracy and respect for human rights prevailed. The artistic styles moved away from the excessive, theatrical traits of the Baroque, first to a style known as Rococo, that was lighter and more graceful, and later to a Neoclassical style of refined elegance, simplicity and orderliness.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONDITIONS

• The rise of the middle classes was fueled by a relative lack of political conflict during the period and steady economic expansion and population increases. The society grew increasingly urbanized, especially in England where the Industrial Revolution was prominent. It was in these urban areas that the upper middle class population had the most influence; in other regions the traditional aristocracy still held sway.
• Women remained the social inferiors of men; African slavery flourished even in the face of Enlightenment ideas and the new concern with social justice.
• This was the last great age of kings in Europe. Democratic ideals eventually forced the absolutists from power. In Britain they yielded to a limited constitutional monarchy in partnership with a people’s Parliament; in other areas reforms were made by so-called enlightened despots--such as Frederick the Great (r. 1740-1786) of Prussia and the Austrians monarchs Maria Theresa (4. 1740-1780) and Joseph II (r. 1780-1790)--of Austrian, but in Russia absolutism prevailed under Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) and Catherine the Great (r. 1762-1796). At the end of this period, the American Revolution changed the political landscape. The French monarchy after Louis XIV went into decline, ultimately falling apart under Louis XVI who, along with his wife Marie Antoinette, were victims of the French Revolution.
•  

PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Eighteenth-century thinkers drew on Renaissance humanism and ancient Greek thought to develop an optimistic philosophy of human nature and potential. Their major tenet was that through the use of reason--including scientific use of empiricism, skepticism and experimental method and proper education--humankind could be perfected. Through essays, pamphlets, histories, and other literature--as well as encyclopedias such as that edited by Denis Diderot (1713-1784)--these thinkers or philosophes popularized the ideas of the Enlightenment.

The chief tenets of Enlightenment philosophy:

• Nature is orderly and good, and can be understood through science. As a corollary, man himself is good by nature and is only corrupted by society (the theory of the "noble savage"). Naturalness and simplicity were qualities to be admired.
• One should seek to follow natural law. A group of Physiocrats working under the umbrella of Enlightenment thought believed that natural laws governed society and all its activities, including the economy. They concluded that natural laws such as supply and demand should rule the economy and fought against the control of the economy by government and mercantile interests. This approach to economy based on free trade and free marked is called laissez faire (French for "let it be"). In conjunction with this, they believed that individual freedom required "unrestricted enjoyment of private property;" all society would benefit if people were permitted to pursue their own self-interest rather than be force to work for the good of the state.
• Change and progress can improve society; education could free humanity from ignorance.
• Faith should be placed in reason, not in religious doctrine.
• Institutions should seek "the greatest happiness for the greatest number."
• Happiness should be pursued on earth, not left to the afterlife. The arts in this area often focused on entertainment value rather than deep meaning.
• All men are inherently created equal; there was increasing concern with the common man and his rights.
• A focus on Deism--God as impersonal clockmaker rather than a personal God.
• The Enlightenment sprang from French soil and its principal philosophers were initially French, though the movement quickly spread to England and Germany:
  • Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was an admirer of English parliamentary democracy and John Locke; in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) he advocates the principle of the separation of powers as a defense against despotism, an idea adopted by the foundrs of the U.S. Constitution in the 1780s.
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was more libertarian; in The Social Contract (1762) he describes the General Will--a communal moral sense and collective will of the people--that must be central to each citizen’s voting habits if the society is to be its best. In Rousseau’s idea of state, the state must be relatively small so that all citizens know and recognize one another.

LITERATURE

The ideas of the Enlightenment made a strong impact on the literature of the period. These views were expressed in letters, poems, pamphlets, novels, plays, treatises, encyclopedias and histories. The era was particularly well-represented by satirists.

• Rousseau and Montesquieu, noted for their political treatises, also contributed to the literature of the time. Rousseau’s The Confessions was the frankest, most explicit autobiography published up until that time; Montesquieu’s Persian Letters use the device of a detached observer of Western life--imaginary Persian travelers--to publish social criticism of French institutions and customs.
• Francois-Marie Arouet or Voltaire (1694-1778) is probably the philosopher/writer who best personified the Enlightenment. Voltaire was a well-known atheist and a scathing satirist; he expressed himself in a variety of works, including the novel Candide and a series of essays and letters satirizing society. He was witty and urbane but deeply skeptical and pessimistic, rejecting the fashionable optimism of many eighteenth-century thinkers.
• Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is a poet representative of the English Neoclassical style. A sharp satirist of classical tastes and more optimistic than Voltaire, he is known for his statement "The proper study of mankind is man." In his Essay on Man, he tenders the belief that humanity could create a heaven on earth if they thought and behaves rationally.
• Another prominent satirist of the period is Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the Irish writer known for his biting satires, such as Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal.
• Edward Gibbons (1737-1794) wrote the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a massive six-volume work that analyzed history from a philosophical, secular, and objective viewpoint.
• The most important literary development in England was the rise of the modern novel, marked by realistic depiction of real-life events/people and based on historical events/legends as seen through the eyes of individual characters. The works of Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), who wrote Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded and Clarissa Harlowe, and Henry Fielding (1707-1754), known for his comic masterpiece, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, were the most popular novelists.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Rococo Style

Painting

• The Rococo style was essentially an aristocratic style that arose in France during the final years of Louis XIV’s reign. It differed from the dramatic, passionate Baroque style in its more intimate scale and lighter touch; it is graceful and gentle in comparison, preferring soft pastels to rich, vibrant colors. It is elegant, refined and sensual. It spread to Germany, Italy and Austria but never took root in England, where middle-class sentiments were stronger.
• Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was the preeminent painter of the Rococo. Most of his paintings portray aristocrats in bucolic settings; costumed actors were also a favorite subject. They are marked by a dreamy, understated eroticism.
• The paintings of Francois Boucher (1703-1770) have a more explicitly sexual content; he specialized in seductive nudes.
• Elisabeth-Louis Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was one of the few women in the period to achieve fame as an artist, and is known for her portraits of Marie Antoinette.  The least "frilly" of the Rococo painters, she created warm human portraits with soft edges.  She painted a series of self-portraits and many paintings of her daughter Julie..
• Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) was the last of the Rococo painters in France. His works show a particularly attentive treatment of nature although he focuses on the usual Rococo themes of flirtation and frivolity.
• Interior Design
• The Rococo style was also evident in interior design, especially in the use of rocaille--stucco wall and ceiling ornamentation in the form of fanciful ribbons, leaves, flowers, arabesques and curving lines, giving the impression that the surfaces were fleeting rather than solid. Mirrors and chandeliers were used to create glittering, luxuriant effects.
• Germain Boffrand (1667-1754) and Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753) were the major designers in this style.
• In England the Rococo was rejected in favor of a style more appealing to the moral sensibilities of its Protestant middle class. William Hogarth (1697-1764) was known for painting that were social/moral satires, such as The Countess’ Levee or Morning Party from Marriage a la Mode.

Neoclassical style

Neoclassical style arose in reaction against the Rococo, exploring Classical themes based on the works of ancient Greece and Rome.

Painting

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) was the principal artist of the Neoclassical style. His paintings, such as The Death of Socrates and The Oath of the Horatii, portray figures in sculptural poses imbued with the balance, simplicity and restraint that were characteristic of the Classical Style. He eliminated the fussy, busy backgrounds of the Rococo, choosing to omit distracting details and create stark, clear images.

Architecture

• Robert Adam (1728-1792) developed the premier Neoclassical style in architecture, borrowing forms and motifs from classical design--Greek columns, friezes, and triangular pediment, as well as Roman barrel-vaults and apses--blending these with the soft Rococo colors.
• In France the Neoclassical style was pursued by Jacques Germain Soufflot (1713-1780) who built pure Roman-style buildings without Adam’s Rococo traits.

MUSIC

Rococo style

• The Rococo style expressed itself musically in works that strove for light, elegant sounds and graceful melodies. The harpsichord was the vehicle for many rococo pieces in France because of its delicate, refined sound.
• The chief composers of the Rococo were Francois Couperin (1668-1733), known primarily for harpsichord works, and Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), who worked primarily in dramatic opera.

Classical or Classic style

• The piano was the preferred instrument of the Classic composers, replacing the harpsichord. However, these early pianos--or fortepianos as they were called--had a different sound from the modern-day grand piano, softer and thinner in timbre.
• Classic compositions showed the influence of Enlightenment ideals in three ways:
  • The use of music as pure entertainment. Compositions were aimed at a more popular audience, aiming to please by producing musical material that balanced repetition with variation and contrast in a way that would be easily accessible and appealing to ordinary listeners.
  • Employment of clear, simple, more natural melodies rather than the complex melodies of the Baroque. Composers turned to more folk-like tunes for inspiration, creating catchy memorable themes for their compositions.
  • Emphasis on rational, orderly structure and form [See diagrams below]:
• The sonata form, with its clear sections (exposition, development and recapitulation) and artistic manipulation of repetition, variation and contrast, was the most widely used form of the period.
• Other prominent forms included the Minuet-Trio and the Rondo.

 

SONATA FORM

	Exposition			Development		Recapitulation
A	bridge	B	cadence	variation	A	bridge	B	cadence
1st key		2nd key		variety of keys any or all themes	1st key		1st key

 

MINUET-TRIO

Minuet		Trio		Minuet
AABA	AABA	CCDC	CCDC	AABA

 

RONDO

A  B   A   C   A    D   A

• The instrumental compositions in fashion during the Classic period included sonatas (usually for piano), symphonies (compositions for orchestra), string quartets (a work for two violins, viola and cello) and concertos (pieces for soloist and orchestra).
• Classical opera differed greatly from those of the Baroque period.
• Instead of famous historical figures and nobility serving as the protagonists, classical opera emphasized ordinary middle- and lower-class characters and focused on comic plots rather than tragedies and other serious themes.
• Arias and recitatives remained the essential musical material but in some types of opera, notably the Singspiel, dialogue would be spoken rather than sung
• The aria melodies tended to be simple and elegant, in contrast with the complex, virtuosic melodies of the Baroque.
• Two composers dominated the Classic period: Haydn and Mozart.
• Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) worked at the court of the aristocratic Esterhazy family most of his life, producing 104 symphonies and 70 string quartets, as well as a variety of keyboard and vocal works.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was a child prodigy who was composing and performing at professional levels by the age of 6. Although a musical genius who composed whole symphonies in his head before notating them, and a prolific composer universally admired by other musicians, he was unable to obtain a patron who could provide financial security. He died young, from overwork and poor health, leaving behind a wealth of compositions, including sonatas, symphonies, concertos and operas. Among his famous operas are Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute. He is also famous for his Requiem or mass for the dead, a work that was never completed because of his own death.
• Ludwig van Beethoven also began his career in this period but was responsible for innovations that lead to the development of romantic style and so will be studied in Chapter 17.

Romanticism
1760 -- 1830

By the end of the 18th century, the Age of Reason gave way to a new age, one influenced by three major revolutions, two political and one technological: The American Revolution, The French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The middle class--or bourgeoisie as they were called--were now the standard-bearers of culture. Neoclassicism was eclipsed by Romanticism. Enlightenment ideals of order, reason and natural law were replaced by a Romantic belief in less scientific values:

• a delight in the irrational, emotional, unpredictable and exotic
• trust in human intuition, inspiration and, spirituality
• a love of freedom and rebellion;
• a strong sense of self-expression and individuality
• a view of nature as a spiritual entity rather than a abstract, scientific phenomenon
• the belief in subjective, rather than objective, truth.

 

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONDITIONS

Industrial Revolution

• The Industrial Revolution was fueled by three factors:
• wide-scale replacement of manual labor with mechanical labor (machines);
• the development of new sources of energy (water and steam, e.g.--the steam engine was patented in 1769) to replace human/animal power; and
• the plentiful availability of raw materials, particularly iron ore and coal.
• By 1800 England had mechanized the cotton industry, developing a factory, assembly-line system of labor that made home cottage industries practically obsolete (and at the very least, unable to complete economically with the factories). Capitalism becomes the prevailing economic system in western Europe.
• The factory system created a new class of labor, the "working class." It was a class of workers, however, that was poorly treated by its capitalist employers. Laborers often lived in crowded, miserable quarters; working conditions in the factories were usually unsafe and unhealthy. Wages were low, hours were long and tedious, and there were no benefits or security. Increasingly there developed class tensions between these workers and factory owners.
• The Industrial Revolution was fueled by the desire for profit and built on the laissez-faire/free market economic thinking of the Enlightenment.
• Adam Smith, you may remember, argued that economic acts of self-interest would ultimately benefit all of society and raise everyone’s standard of living.
• The Essay on the Principle of Population (1788) of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) added to this the idea that it was to the benefit of mankind that famines, plagues and wars take place--this helped control population and assured adequate food supplies. Within this framework, the working class laborers were seen as victims of their own overbreeding, and employers did not concern themselves much with their well-being.
• David Ricardo (1772-1823) maintained in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) that laborers would never be able to rise above subsistence-level wages and living conditions; he postulated that it was inevitable that they would be poor and miserable--and so industrialists need not worry about the degrading effects of industrialization on such employees.

 

Political Revolutions

• From the American Revolution came a number of new ideas about government. Building on the theories of Locke and Montesquieu, Americans, after achieving independence from Britain, developed a style of governance that was the most truly democratic of any thus far attempted--and the first successful democracy since that of fifth-century B.C. Athens. This revolution became a model for future revolutions.
• The constitutional convention and the written constitution were two new ideas of the U.S. founding fathers. They also discouraged the development of centralized power by creating a balance of powers between three branches of government: legislative, judicial, and executive. The role of the central government was limited so that state and individual rights would not be infringed upon. Such rights did not extend, however, to slaves or to women, who were not allowed to vote.
• The French Revolution was fomented initially by upper-middle class citizens, who formed a National Constituent Assembly in an attempt to create a representative government with a limited monarchy in the mold of the English system. However, in 1792 the revolution turned violent: members of the lower bourgeoisie and working class executed King Louis XVI and established a French Republic. They established universal male suffrage (women were still excluded from voting), abolished the slave trade and created a state education system open to all.
• The radical reforms, however, prompted strong opposition that resulted in civil war, foreign invasion and the infamous Reign of Terror (1793-1794), in which all suspected foes of the revolution were summarily executed (usually by guillotine).
• The social and economic breakdown that followed was not halted until Napoleon (1769-1821) formed a new dictatorship between 1799 and 1815; all the liberties gained from the Revolution were lost but Napoleon did establish internal peace, ended the civil war, and drafted a new universal law code based on the reforms of the revolution. Ultimately, however, Napoleon’s militaristic foreign conquests upset the European balance of power and other nations united to defeat his forces. He died in exile in 1821. The monarchy was restored--the Bourbons came to power--but with a charter guaranteeing a constitutional regime.
• By 1830 most western European states had governments elected by their people and a legal system based on the Napoleonic code. Only in eastern Europe and Russia did democracy and representative government not take root

NEOCLASSICISM IN ART AND LITERATURE

• Neoclassicism continued to hold sway in some quarters. The novels of Jane Austen, e.g., strove to represent the lives and morals of the middle-class world, creating serene settings of quiet domesticity through clear writing and detailed description. Pride and Prejudice is her best-known novel.
• The painter Jacques-Louis David remained the best exponent of Neoclassicism in painting through the mid 1820s. He was the official artist of the French Revolution, investing his depictions of contemporary events with an ancient classical aura, and giving them a universal meaning transcending the specific moment in French history. [See his Death of Marat, 1793 on p. 434 of your textbook]. David survived the Revolution to become Napoleon’s court painter. His work loses a bit of its Neoclassicism at this time as he made modifications that made the paintings more suitable for the purposes of political propaganda [See his Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine on p. 434].
• The Neoclassical style in architecture was particularly widespread in the United States, where the founding fathers of the newly independent country encouraged the use of Classical architecture for government buildings, both in the Washington capital and in private estates and state capitals. Thomas Jefferson, for example, who was an architect as well as a politician, designed his home in Monticello (see. p. 436) on the principles of Andrea Palladio (his Villa Rotonda was the model for Monticello) and used an ancient Roman temple as the model for the state house in the Virginia state capital.

 

ROMANTICISM IN THE ARTS

The Romantic ideals described in the introductory paragraph are described in more detail below. You should look for evidence of these characteristics in all the art, music and literature we study and discuss:

• Emotionalism: Rejecting Enlightenment ideals that emphasized reason and rationality, the Romantics had a tendency to embrace an emotional approach to the issues of the day, and were often drawn to the most extreme emotions-- madness, anguish, ecstasy, despair, etc.
• Love of and reverence for nature: They loved nature also in its extremes-- i.e. both in its wild moments--its most terrifying, cataclysmic manifestations (earthquakes, storms, e.g.) and in its most serene, divine moments, wherein bucolic scenes were viewed as indicative of the presence of Spirit or God.
• Fascination with the extraordinary: The Romantics were preoccupied with past-gone eras (particularly the Middle Ages), exotic locales, and the realm of the imagination and subconscious. The ordinary and mundane held no interest for them unless they could find something transcendent and transforming in the experience. They preferred heroics and dramatics to everyday order and routine.
• Concern with the spiritual rather than the scientific:
• This was exhibited not only in the search for God in nature and a Catholic renewal movement, but also in explorations of the metaphysical and supernatural phenomena-- ghosts, demons, fairy folk and mythological creatures are common characters.
• The Romantics fervently sought spiritual transcendence and transformation and developed a philosophy called idealism, which they offered as a substitute for conventional religion. They had a strong sense of art itself as a spiritual experience; the philosopher Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) espoused a belief in art as a kind of religion in which artists’ inspiration reveals divine truths.
• In reaction against the abstract objectivity of science, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) claimed that, although the physical world could be understood by science, there was a world beyond the physical that could only be understood by human intuition and imagination.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) explained human history as "the record of the World Spirit seeking to know its true nature." Hegel proposed that it was only through the struggles of opposites that the quest of this World Spirit is advanced; in this theory, wars and revolts were simply manifestations of spiritual growth.
• Revolution, rebellion, and revolt: Although Enlightenment thinkers talked a lot about liberty, social justice, and individual rights, Romantics were more apt to act on this humanitarian impulses and embrace the violence of revolutions. They idolized heroic gestures and triumphant battles.
• Nonconformity and self-awareness: As a corollary to their love of revolution, Romantics espoused a virulent cult of nonconformity and self-awareness, prizing personal expression and individuality above all else. Artists and musicians often wrote for posterity, scornful of public opinion in the present, feeling themselves "above it all."
• Nationalism: This exhibited itself initially as an interest in the native folk cultures and a rejection of foreign influences, but later developed into a more aggressive militant hostility toward "alien" groups.

 

Romantic Literature

Romantic literature was dominated by several outstanding writers and poets:

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), known particularly for his play, Faust
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850), an American poet
• Lord Byron (1788-1824)
• John Keats (1795-1821)
• Percy Shelley (1792-1822)
• Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the author of Frankenstein
• The American writer, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was also active during this period.

Romantic Art

• John Constable (1776-1837), Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), and Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840 are best-known for their nature paintings, which encompassed two different styles, the pastoral and the sublime.
• The pastoral style emphasizes scenes in which peasant life is equated with divine order in its moral link between humanity and nature. In its "cult of nature," such works try to reflect the universal presence of God in nature. Constable is known for his pastoral works. [See his The Hay Wain and Dedham Vale on p. 440 of your textbook.]
• The sublime style focused on the more devastating aspects of nature, its unpredictability and violence, its brooding, impenetrable qualities. This art reflects a sense that there is an order beyond our understanding and control. Turner and Friedrich were the chief exponents of the sublime style. [See Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, The Bay of Baiae and Monk by the Sea on pp. 442-443.]
• Three other painters from the period, the Spaniard Francisco Goya (1746-1828), Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) and Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) were concerned with the depiction of contemporary events. Their works are clearly connected with liberal, revolutionary ideals in their use of political allegory and the grim, emotional portrayals of violence and disaster. [See The Sleep of Reason, The Execution of the Third of May, 1808, The Raft of the Medusa, Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi, The Death of Sardanapalus, and Liberty Leading the People, pp. 444-448.]

 

Romantic Music

• For the first time in music history, the music world was no longer completely dependent on aristocratic patronage and musicians were able to earn a living as independent artists, taking on private students and performing in public concerts for which the middle class patrons paid fees. As a consequence, they became more individualistic (and often eccentric).
• The first of the great Romantic composers was Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), a German who worked most of his life in Vienna.
• He is a transitional figure, trained in Classical techniques, but expressive of Romantic ideals. His works, compared with Classical works, are longer and more emotional. He tampered with the standard classical forms, often introducing new material in places where the form called for repetition or blurring the divisions between movements. He also introduced the use of choral voices into the symphony--which had always been a purely instrumental genre.
• He is best known today for his symphonies, especially the Third (the "Eroica," originally dedicated to Napoleon), the Fifth, and the Ninth (which contains the famous choral finale based on Friedrich von Schiller’s poem "Ode to Joy"). He also wrote Masses, string quartets, piano sonatas (including the famous Moonlight and Pathetique sonatas), and a variety of other works.
• Another important composer of the Early Romantic period was Franz Schubert (1797-1828), also Viennese.
• Schubert is known primarily today for his Lieder or art songs, which are vocal pieces for a solo singer, usually accompanied by piano. He wrote over 600 art songs, often usually texts by contemporary poets such as Goethe. The works are noted for their sensitive, emotional rendering of the texts, as evident in works such as "Gretchen am Spinnrad" ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel") and "Der Erlkonig" ("The Erl-King").
• The Frenchman Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) is best known for his Symphonie fantasique (Fantastic Symphony), which is an example of program music. The work illustrates musically a series of opium-induced dreams surrounding the artist-hero’s beloved. Berlioz provides a written description of each movement for the program. It is original in its use of a recurring musical themes called an idee fixe (fixed idea) that is used to represent the hero’s beloved; in each movement this idee fixe is altered in some way to reflect changes in her character or circumstances as the dream progresses. Program music was to be an important genre throughout the Romantic period.

 

Romanticism to Realism
1830-1871 

PHILOSOPHY

Social Theories

There were a number of new ideas that influenced nineteenth-century events and attitudes, including three new social theories--liberalism, nationalism and socialism--along with a growing challenge to orthodox religious thinking posed by advances in science. In the United States Transcendentalism took hold in New England and various writers introduced philosophies in opposition to the materialism and social injustice of the times, including Sojourner Truth--a noted abolitionist and women’s rights advocate--and Henry David Thoreau, a transcendentalist who preached against materialistic lifestyles and urged civil disobedience in response to unjust laws.

 

Refer to your lecture notes for information on social/political theories.

 

Abolitionism

• The moral imperative for abolishing slavery in the United States gained influence in the North through thousands of published slave narratives that depicted the hardships and mistreatment Africans experienced under slavery.
• Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818-1895) escaped from slavery through the Underground Railroad in 1838 and published his autobiography in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
• Sojourner Truth was a northern slave who became an advocate for women’s rights, the temperance movement, vegetarianism and abolition of slavery. Unlike Douglass, she never learned to read or write but is known for her eloquent speeches for her causes. See your textbook, p. 172, for a transcript of a speech delivered at the 1851 Women’s Rights convention in Akron, Ohio, "Ain’t I a Woman?"

 

Transcendentalism and Civil Disobedience

• The Transcendental Movement was an American phenomenon centered in New England. Transcendentalists sought truth through transcendental, mystical experiences. They preached obedience to higher laws than those of man-made institutions and urged communion with nature as a path to ultimate truth.
• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), a student of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), embraced liberalism’s conception that individual rights were paramount and railed against intrusive government, believing that individuals must often follow a higher law than that enacted by governments.
• He showed himself a transcendentalist in his rejection of a society he felt too consumed with material success and superficialities. In March 1845 he moved to Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, in an experiment in living without the accouterments of modern society--he grew his own food and lived a minimalist, subsistence-level existence with little money and sparse social contact with others. The diary he kept during the two years he lived at Walden Pond was ultimately published as a book, Walden.
• His essay, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," was a response to his arrest while at Walden for failure to pay taxes. [See your reader, p. 173]. In his advocacy of passive resistance to laws he judged immoral or unjust, he had a great influence on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Religion vs. Science

• In a movement called higher criticism, Biblical scholars began to study the Bible as a piece of literature subject to varied interpretation, rather than as a work of divine revelation. They sought to determine sources and assess accuracy, and often treated the stories as mythology rather than historical fact.
• Meanwhile, geologists disputed the biblical story of creation and biologists the account of human creation.
• The fossil research of Charles Lyell (1797-1875) revealed the earth to be much older than Christians claimed. Protestants were able to reconcile this new knowledge with biblical accounts by treating the six days of creation as days in divine time (which is not limited by human limits--each day could be thousands of human years).
• Biology’s threat was much more problematic. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in his On the Origin of Species and Descent of Man (1871) used data to prove that all life on earth--plants, animals, and even man--evolved from simpler forms in a process he called natural selection.
• Several other scientists made discoveries that laid the groundwork for the modern world.
• Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) discovered that many diseases are caused by microorganisms or germs. He urged better sanitation, sterilization of surgical instruments, and the "pasteurization" of milk in order to kill the bacteria that cause food spoilage. He also conducted studied of anthrax and rabies that led to the first vaccines against these diseases.
• John Dalton (1766-1844) proposed a new atomic theory and Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1904) produced the first period table of elements based on atomic weights.
• Chemists introduced the use of painkillers--nitrous oxide and chloroform, etc.--leading the way to modern anesthesiology and surgical treatment of many diseases and wounds.

 

ART

Neoclassicism and Romanticism

Both Neoclassicism and Romanticism were embraced by the middle class but the styles often grew pretentious and stylized under their patronage, as art became more and more subject to marketplace pressures and the sentimental, moralistic tastes of its new patrons. Official academies often determined the success of an artist and restricting exhibition approval in the government-sponsored art shows to those who followed their rules.

The premier official artist was a Neoclassicist named Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who strove to please his middle class patrons with "chaste nudes in mythological or exotic settings." The Turkish Bath (textbook, p. 469) is a good example; the work is nicely realized but somewhat dispassionate and cold.

Delacroix continued to perfect his Romantic style with works such as The Abduction of Rebecca, filled with bold colors and a strong sense of violent movement.

Romantic architecture was nostalgic, drawn to exotic and bygone styles. With a particular love of the Middle Ages, romantic architects revived the use of Gothic style in their buildings. Charles Barry (1795-1860) and A.W.N. Pugin (1812-1852) chose a Gothic style for their House of Parliament in London in 1834, although their neoGothic style is not as fantastical as the original nor as concerned with vertical effects.

 

Realism

In reaction against the official art sponsored by institutions such as France’s Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, a new style emerged in the 1840s: Realism. This style dispensed with idealizing and romanticizing and presented its ordinary everyday subjects in a straightforward, unsentimental fashion. The trend may have been influenced in part by the invention of the camera in the 1830s with its ability to produce accurate pictures of its subjects.

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was often rejected by salon juries because he refused to prettify his work and did not follow conventional rules, mocking social attitudes and academic art. Representative of his work are the paintings, The Meeting, Interior of My Studio, and A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Life as an Artist; the latter two make use of allegory.

Honore Daumier (1808-1879) was known for satiric lithographs [see Freedom of the Press, textbook p. 473] and his accurate, detailed social observations of urban life [see handout).

Francois Millet (1814-1875) chose rural subjects for his realist paintings. Works like The Angelus and The Shepherdess [see handout] are sympathetic portrayals of the difficulties of laborers’ lives, considered "socialist" by contemporary critics. Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) was also known for her scenes of rural life, particularly animal subjects.

 

Other Developments in Art

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) occupies a place between Realism and Impressionism-the style that would emerge in the 1870s. Manet strove for a dispassionate style in which he rejected an approach to art that relied on the usual topics and stories. In his Luncheon on the Grass or The Bath he created "art for art’s sake," a painting in which none of the characters are connected by any obvious theme or narrative relationship.

Two types of camera techniques were perfected in 1839. Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre (1787-1851) created daguerreotypes and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) created negative-positive processing of photographic images. These developments led to the creation of photography as a new art form. Among the early photographers was the American Mathew Brady (ca. 1823-1896). [See his photograph of Lincoln and McClellan on p. 178].

 

LITERATURE

Romantic literature was also overcome by Realism around mid-century. Romantic writers concentrated on the exploration of emotional depth and the transformation/ transcendence of individual characters over ordinary events. The Realists, on the other hand, chose to "let the facts speak for themselves."

 

Romantic Literature

The leading Romantics in France were Victor Hugo (1802-1885), known for Les Miserables (1862) and George Sand (1804-1876), whose best novel is Indiana (1832).

In England Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) and Emily Bronte (1818-1848) wrote novels such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, that explore favorite Romantic conventions--apparitions and graveyard scenes, mysterious events and enigmatic characters, dark landscapes and unrequited love--in an imaginative style.

Realist Literature

• Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was the first Realist writer in France; Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) is considered France’s most outstanding Realist. His Madame Bovary is a story of a woman whose life was a failure because of unrealistic dreams and hopes. He depicted his characters in a detailed, objective way without moral interpretation.
• Charles Dickens (1812-1870) wrote stories that focused on the harsh world of industrialism and urban life. A strong advocate for social justice, Dickens filled his work with rich descriptions and biting satires of society in works such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Hard Times, and A Christmas Carol. George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] (1819-1880) also wrote novels--such as Middlemarch--that describe the ways in which human beings are trapped in social systems that feature a wide gap between the rich and the poor.
• Among the Russian Realists are Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910 and Feodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), who, like their English and French contemporaries, deal with the evils of industrialism and social oppression but infuse their works with religious and spiritual themes. Tolstoy’s most famous works are Anna Karenina and War and Peace, both monumental in size and wealth of characters. Dostoevsky is best known for Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov.

 

MUSIC

• The Romantic style in music remained dominant from 1830 through 1870. Composers strove more and more to create unique personal styles expressive of their individual feelings. Works became longer and more complex.
• Ethnic materials found their way into Romantic compositions as composers were influenced by nationalist sentiments.
• Although continuing to use the same genres as the Classic composers--operas, sonatas and symphonies--composers experimented with the forms to create new sounds, textures, and structures. Composers also strove to create exceedingly virtuosic piano works; such works required superhuman techniques and its performers achieved superstar cult status among the public as they played public concerts.
• Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) were Romantics with a bent toward more classical forms.
• Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was freer in his use of forms, creating new symphonic program music that he called tone poems.
• Robert Schumann (1810-1856) was known for his art songs as well as his piano and orchestral music.
• Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) created piano music of varying types, some quite virtuosic, others warmly lyrical.
• Among the most virtuosic of the pianists was Franz Liszt, at whose concerts women routinely swooned.
• Orchestras grew immensely in size to accommodate the new compositions; composers created a wide range of special orchestral effects, employing dynamic extremes and new timbres never explored in the Classic period. Orchestral program music became ever more popular and orchestras played greater roles in opera music.

Opera was a popular genre during this period; half the operas still performed today come from this period.

Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) was Italy’s greatest Romantic opera composer.

• Using plots derived from contemporary Romantic writers, Verdi wrote operas such as Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata, that explore his characters’ emotions and psychology with skillful orchestration and beautiful melodies.
• In Italian opera, unlike German opera under Wagner (see below), the voice would continue to be the most important element in the drama, but under Verdi the orchestra did play a more commanding role. It did not merely accompany, but set the mood and commented musically on the characters’ states of mind and feelings.
• Verdi was fiercely nationalist and there are nationalistic overtones in many of his operas. People interpreted his operatic characters and plots as allegories for the patriots and political events of their country.

Richard Wagner

• Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was the most revolutionary of the Romantic opera composers and is credited with important musical innovations.
• He wrote his own librettos as well as his own music, often borrowing his themes from German and Norse mythology as well as medieval romances.
• He sought to create something he called Gesamtkunstwerk-- total artwork--in which all elements of the drama--texts, voices, orchestra, plot, scenery, staging--were on equal terms. He called his operas music dramas.
• He did away with the traditional division of music between recitative and aria, creating scenes of continuous melody in which the music is wedded closely to the words.
• Without recitatives and arias to structure his works, Wagner developed a new method of unifying the dramas. He used leitmotifs, recurring themes associated with particular characters, events, objects, or ideas in the opera.
• Wagner had an opera house built to his specifications in Bayreuth, Germany, specifically to produce his operas. It had an orchestra pit located beneath the stage.
• The operas are VERY long [The entire Ring of the Nibelungen cycles takes 16-20 hours, usually performed over 4 nights].
• He was exceedingly nationalistic. He felt that his was a nationalist music, music that only Germans could understand. He was also known to be anti-Semitic; these sentiments are found in his theoretical writings and more subtly in his opera libretti.
• Wagner’s works include: Tristan and Isolde, The Ring of the Nibelungen, Der Meistersinger, and Lohengrin.

American Music

• Most American composers imitated European Romantic style. John Paine, e.g., wrote a symphony reminiscent of Beethoven’s Fifth, and Louis Gottschalk wrote Lisztian piano works.
• Of more artistic significance during this period in the United States were the African-American spirituals, which were the legacy of slavery in the South.
• These songs, which blended European hymn forms and harmony with African rhythm and performing style, provided the basis for important future musical developments: gospel music, blues, jazz--and ultimately rock ‘n’ roll.
• Originally work songs used in the fields, spirituals were usually sung using call-and-response technique (soloist intoning a verse and the chorus joining in on the refrain). The musical phrases and lyrics were simple but were subject to subtleties in performance, with improvised harmony and blue notes.
• U.S. slaves were ordinarily forbidden to have any percussion instruments--an important part of their culture in Africa—so they compensated by using elaborate clapping patterns, using their bodies and voices to communicate their native rhythmic sensibilities.
• Although the texts were based on biblical themes--many focused on reaching the Promised Land and the promise of a better life in the next world--the works, in fact, were often used to transmit information to other slaves, using certain phrases as code words to communicate escape plans.
• Composers also developed a native popular song tradition during this period, counterbalancing the European operetta-influenced parlor songs with more rugged and rhythmic songs made famous in the minstrel shows. Stephen Foster (1826-1864), whose works include "I Dream of Jeannie," "O, Susannah," and "Old Folks at Home," was the best of these new songwriters.

Early Modernism
1871-1914

Although this period was, on the surface, relatively peaceful and free of military conflicts, fervent nationalism, militarism and imperialism were rampant, eventually culminating in World War I. The period was dominated by a second Industrial Revolution and a movement called Modernism that rejected traditional Western views of religion and philosophy in order to establish new paradigms for modern life.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONDITIONS

• The Second Industrial Revolution was marked by new energy forms--oil and electricity--as well as the development of new machines, among them steam engines, automobiles and airplanes. Technology made great advances, resulting in the invention of the telephone, the typewriter, and the rotary press, which permitted easy duplication of daily newspapers. Refrigeration and lower transportation costs, as well international postal service, made life easier. Advertising began to become a strong force in the consumer economy. Increased leisure time spurred new recreational activities: resorts, musical halls, movies, and bicycles.
• The culture in industrialized countries became increasingly urban as residents of small towns and rural areas moved to the more exciting and wealthier cities; by 1900 almost 30 percent of the West’s population lived in cities, and the standard of living continued to improve as lower consumer prices allowed for more affluence in the middle classes.
• Miseries continued, however, among the lower working classes as urban slums grew more crowded and working conditions dangerous. In response, labor unions arose to combat poor conditions, using the strike to incite changes.
• Universal public education was enacted and women began to have more opportunities for employment as teachers, nurses, office workers and sales clerks, as well as the traditional domestic servants--although new time-saving appliances lessened the need for such services. Female and child labor in factories was now regulated; the female suffrage movement gained momentum, giving rise to feminism; women won the right to vote in the United States in 1920.
• Liberal governments battled on all sides against conservatives, labor leaders, and socialists as industrialism failed to supply the economic stability they sought.
• The industrialized nations engaged in increasingly aggressive colonization and imperialism, particularly in third-world countries in Africa and Asia; the U. S. fought imperialist wars against Mexico and the Philippines. One of Mark Twain’s works, The War Prayer (see your Supplementary Texts) was written in response to American imperialism.
• The period ends with the onset of World War I, a conflict rooted in nationalistic sentiments and complex military alliances--France, Great Britain and Russia against Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Because of advances in technology and industrial might, it was to be the bloodiest war on record to that point in history.

 

PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY

At first, the rapid advances in science and technology and increased standard of living caused great optimism. As people, however, engaged in new experimentation and sought novelty, ideas developed that questioned traditional Western beliefs about morality, freedom and reason. Modernism stressed personal individualistic perspectives rather than collective communal values. The impetus for these new ideas came primarily from the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, and two psychologists, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Nietzsche

• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) saw himself as the philosopher of the "perhaps," asserting that there were no absolute principles by which men could live, no moral certainties. Human civilization was a human invention and not something guided by a supreme principle or deity.
• He rejected middle-class and Judeo-Christian ideals as the values of "herds" or "slaves," predicting that a new morality would emerge that would rise above vulgar mass values, one that would extol human creativity and personal heroism.
• A radical individualist, he predicted the rise of Übermenschen or supermen who would live beyond the mundane concepts of good and evil currently observed by society.
• Ignoring his exaltation of the individual and his distaste for nationalism, the Nazis in the 1930s would use his writings to justify their theories of Aryan supremacy.

Freud

• The work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) repudiated the premise of Enlightenment thinkers that human nature is essentially rational. He argued that human personality is the result of fierce internal conflict between inner realities and external realities. The struggle took place between different parts of the psyche or self:
  • the id (primitive instincts and desires),
  • the superego (conscience) and
  • the ego (the public face that mediates and balances, resolving the conflicts).
• The mentally ill are those who cannot or will not reach a balance between these conflicting sources.
• Freud founded psychoanalysis, therapy focused on uncovering the roots of neurotic behavior through the use of free association and dream analysis. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), he described his methods for interpreting dreams; he viewed most dream symbols as expressive of wish fulfillment and/or having repressed sexual content, a view called into question by more recent research.

Jung

• The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) also believed that dream interpretation was essential to good psychoanalysis, but challenged Freud’s interpretative premises and methods.
• Jung argued that not all dreams could be analyzed as wish fulfillment; some dreams he regarded as premonitory, some as reflective of subconscious realities unacknowledged by the conscious mind and some as archetypal.
• He taught that the unconscious and its dream images had both personal content and a universal meaning, developing a theory of a collective unconscious that was revealed by archetypal images drawn from shared human experience. Such archetypes were to be found in dreams, myths and fairy tales.
• Jung also developed a system of personality type classification that is still in use--in modified form--today. He analyzed and labeled the various ways in which people operate in and relate to the world.
• Extroversion (E) vs. introversion (I)
• Thinking (T) vs. feeling (F)
• Sensing (S) vs. intuitive (N)
• Judging (J) vs. perceiving (P)

A person’s particular combination of these traits--there are 16 possible personality types--has great influence on personal relationships and the types of careers to which he/she is suited.

• He also theorized that every human being has both feminine and masculine elements in his/her personality and that these aspects must be balanced properly in order for a person to function properly as a social being. Every man has an inner woman--the anima--and every woman an inner man--the animus. In Jungian dream analysis, such figures appear as members of the opposite sex.
• Each individual also has a shadow, a repressed aspect of one’s personality, often representing a dark side having characteristics that are not socially acceptable or not approved of by close family or friends--the shadow, however, does not necessarily represent aspects of one’s makeup that are evil, just aspects that are repressed. Ignoring one’s shadow can lead to mental illness, the shadow often finding ways to express itself without the person being aware of what’s happening. The shadow, according to Jung, is usually represented in dreams by someone of the same sex.

 

LITERATURE

There are three main styles of literature characteristic of this period, each distinctive and often in conflict with the others, though united in their rejection of bourgeois values and cultural norms: Naturalistic, Decadent, and Expressionistic.

Naturalism

Naturalistic literature focused on sociological issues, striving for scientific objectivity and using harsh social commentary to depict modern industrial society in an unfavorable light. It also drew on the new insights into human temperament uncovered by contemporary psychology.

• Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the chief exponent of Naturalism. His novels deal with social ills, portraying all characters in a deterministic manner that depicts them as victims of their inborn dispositions.
• Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) wrote problem plays, such as A Doll’s House (1879) that dealt with social issues.
• Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), in works such as The Three Sisters, portrayed ordinary life in the small towns of Russia.
• Kate Chopin (1851-1904) concentrated on female characters in conflict with social morality and the restrictions of gender roles. Her masterpiece was The Awakening, one of the first novels to deal explicitly with feminist themes.  See "The Story of An Hour" in your reader for an example of her short stories.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a feminist writer best known for her chilling account of a woman's medical treatment in the short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Decadence

• Decadent literature arose in opposition to bourgeois society and its embrace of materialism and science. Writers in this style rejected these values, often filling their works with perversity, neuroses and vulgarity.
• Joris-Karl Huysman (1848-1907) was the founder of this movement.
• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) represented the Decadent movement in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray and his plays, such as The Importance of Being Earnest.
• The most admired Decadent writer was Marcel Proust (1871-1922), known for his Remembrance of Things Past.

Expressionism

• Expressionism felt that bourgeois-inspired art could no longer express the truth and sought new means of expression. Expressionists often probed the darker sides of human psychology.
• Although August Strindberg (1849-1912) was the originator of the Expressionistic style, its best writer was Franz Kafka (1883-1924). His stories question traditional ideas about reality and depict in vivid images the deep alienation and helplessness felt by modern man. The Metamorphosis (1919) and The Trial (1914) are his best-known works.

SCIENCE

• Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) established the new science of genetics, proving the existence of dominant and recessive traits and using mathematics to predict genetic patterns in succeeding generations.
• Radiochemistry, the study of radioactive materials was founded by Marie Curie (1867-1934). She identified polonium and radium as two new radioactive elements. Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (1845-1923) discovered X rays.
• Max Planck (1858-1947) developed a new quantum theory, laying the foundation for modern physics. Niels Bohr (1885-1962), using Planck’s research, created a theory of atomic structure that led to the development of nuclear energy, both for weapons and electricity.
• Albert Einstein (1879-1955), besides work in atomic physics, developed a special theory of relativity that replaced Newtonian concepts of absolute space and time.

ART

Modernism in art signaled a trend away from natural, realistic representation of objects to one rooted in the artists’ own psychological truths, rendered in subjective, nonrepresentational forms. Specific content was replaced by a dedication to the artistic process in itself. Ultimately realism was replaced by abstraction. In architecture, builders moved away from classical and Gothic styles to functional architecture devoid of decoration.

Impressionism

• Although the Impressionistic style that arose in the 1870s owes much to Realism and Romanticism, but abandoned naturalistic depictions to focus on transitory effects. Impressionist paintings lack solidity and depth but exult in broken colors and the play of light. Painters worked with fragments of color and subtle shadings to create shimmering effects and showed a distinct preference for outdoor subjects and settings. Often such works are almost incomprehensible when viewed up-close--where the discrete blotches of color are most obvious--but present beautiful, dreamy landscapes when seen at a distance.
• The most famous of the Impressionistic painters were Claude Monet (1840-1926)
• and Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). See pages 498-499 in your textbook for examples of their work.
• Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) was an American artisti who studied in Paris and produced impressionist paintings but she is perhaps best known for her works imitating Japanese woodcuts, a 17th-century style that was popular among 19th-century artists.   See The Bath on p.527 of your textbook for an example of this style.
• Initially, impressionism was not well-received by the public and none of this art was exhibited in the official salons.

Post-Impressionism

• The most important Post-Impressionist artists were Seurat, Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh.

Pointillism

Early Abstract art and Cubism

• Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) worked in a style that foreshadowed abstraction and Cubism, painting nature as composed of diverse geometrical forms. See his Mont Sainte-Victoire on p. 502.
• Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)--who will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 20--also created works during this period that moved painting closer to abstraction, although one can also find touches of other influences. Picasso was one of the founders of Cubism, a style that featured the fragmentation and reassembly of 3-dimensional objects into geometric patterns. Like Gauguin (see below), he used two-dimensional techniques, abandoning traditional perspective.

Primitivism

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) founded the movement known as primitivism, steeped in a fascination for non-Western culture and pre-Renaissance art; his works often depict subjects from primitive religions and cultures. He abandoned the use of perspective, instead using flattened shapes and bright colors. See p. 503 in your textbook for an example, Manao Tupapau--The Spirit of the Dead Watching.

Expressionism

• Although not officially a member of any of the Expressionist schools, the post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) practiced a form of Expressionism in which his art expressed his private emotions. Van Gogh had personal difficulties his whole life that resulted in mental illness--he committed suicide--and his canvases were obviously created out of his personal pain. He often applied paints with his fingers or with a palette knife, using slashing strokes and brilliant colors; the works are full of tension and turmoil. For an example, see. p. 504, The Starry Night.
• Expressionist painters emphasized color and line without specific content to express inner feelings. Their nonrepresentational or nonobjective paintings have no sense of connection to ordinary physical reality. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Edvard Munch--known especially for the swirling lines and colors and unnatural setting of The Scream (see. p. 496)--were prominent expressionists.

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Fauvism

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was the leader of Fauvism. Color was the prime concern and he painted a kaleidoscope of colors in his works that are the choice of the artist rather than derived from the natural colors of the objects being painted.

 

SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE

• There were few noted sculptors during this period other than Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).
• Architecture in the 1880s was dominated by the Chicago School, which produced new public buildings to accommodate dense populations and rising real estate costs, following the dictum "form follows function." The skyscrapers they built became symbols of Modernism and modern life.
• Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) concentrated on domestic architecture, creating homes that were harmonious with their natural surroundings and featured interiors without fixed walls to create more fluid effects.

 

MUSIC

Impressionism

Composers like Claude Debussy (1862-1918) sought to create in music the same effects as impressionist painters, using blurred sounds, flexible rhythms and meandering melodic lines. He used the orchestra to create delicate effects and a mood of dreaminess and transience. Among his most famous works is Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun).

Expressionism

• Expressionist composers, like their counterparts in literature and art, drew on Freudian psychology to express a distorted view of the world that focused on anguish, pain and alienation.
• To accomplish this, composers like Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) began to compose atonal music--music not set in a traditional key that lacked sense of center and employed extreme dissonance.
• In his Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot), Schoenberg introduced a new singing technique, Sprechstimme, in which the vocalist half-sings/half-intones the text.

His student, Alban Berg, was also a prominent Expressionist, whose most famous work, Wozzeck, is a quintessential example of the style [We will watch part of this opera in class].

Primitivism

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) is perhaps most famous today for his primitivist work, The Rites of Spring, a ballet that has as its subject primitive fertility rites. With its raw dissonance and furious rhythms--as well as the erotic choreography--it caused a riot at its first performance. Stravinsky, however, experimented in a variety of styles throughout his life, never remaining fixed artistically; he would later head a neoclassical school of composition in France.

Ragtime, Blues and Jazz

• After the abolition of slavery in the United States, new music emerged from African- American communities that practices derived from African traditions--call-and- response, complex rhythms and melodic inflections ("blue" notes).
• Ragtime, which was prominent from the 1890s to the end of World War I, was perfected by Scott Joplin (1868-1917).
• Blues was an expressive style of singing that evokes the pain and sorrow of life; the best-known commercial performer of early blues was Ma Rainey.
• [Note: Although your textbook identifies jazz as a product of this period and treats blues and ragtime as if they are forms of jazz, in fact, true jazz does not develop until the 1920s--blues and ragtimes are not considered by most jazz scholars to be jazz forms].

 

 

20th-Century: 1914-1945

During the first half of the twentieth-century a new mass culture took hold, a culture that catered to the tastes of ordinary working people from the lower middle and working classes. Like modernism, mass culture was a response to industrialism. New technologies permitted mass production of consumer goods and created new entertainments. Automobiles and household appliances were mass-produced. Radio programs, comic strips, professional sports, magazines, recordings, movies and Broadway musicals came into their own. Walt Disney (1901-1966) is often seen as a symbol of America’s new popular culture.

Modernists responded to popular culture with disdain, continuing to create art that was revolutionary and difficult to understand.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONDITIONS

• Liberalism came under fire during this period as wars and social upheavals created new totalitarian states in which individual rights were not a priority. Laissez faire economic theory and capitalism itself came under attack.
• In 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia, overthrowing the old tsarist system and creating a totalitarian Communist state under V. I. Lenin (1917-1924) that continued in an even more ruthless fashion under Joseph Stalin (1928-1953). Although loosely based on Marx’s economic theories, Lenin’s premise was that radical reform required, not a mass movement, but a small, elite group of people who would seize power in the name of the people. Russian communism was notorious for its forced collectivization of agriculture, rigid (though often inefficient) state control of all industries, vast networks of forced-labor camps (Gulag), and ruthless suppression of dissidents. This was the first of many such totalitarian states that would arise in the next 30 years. Such governments controlled every aspect of people’s lives through rigid control of the arts and vast propaganda machines that defined "truth" in the way the state saw fit.
• In 1929 the New York Stock Market crashed, precipitating a world-wide Depression marked by massive unemployment, mass protests and starvation. Governments turned to socialistic policies to ease the problems, discarding free trade in favor of government intervention. Public works projects and federally-funded insurance/retirement programs were started by the Roosevelt administration to battle the economic problems.
• Not all totalitarian governments were based on Communism. Germany’s problems during the Depression led to the rise of the Nazis (National Socialist Party), who created a totalitarian fascist government led by Adolf Hitler (1933-1945). Fascist governments fed on an extreme nationalism, achieved by emotional appeals, under which all citizens would be united in hostility to other cultures and in pursuit of aggressive colonization. Hitler’s agenda was specifically anti-Semitic and focused on a propagandistic revival of Germany’s purported glorious past, a regime he called the Third Reich. He engaged in aggressive military conquest of neighboring states and systematic genocide of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others through the use of concentration camps, a plan he called the Final Solution and which the world refers today as the Holocaust.
• Fascism was also dominant in Italy under Benito Mussolini (1922-1945) and in Spain under Francisco Franco (1939-1975).
• The two world wars--WWI (1914-1917) and WWII (1939-1945)--caused extensive damage throughout Europe. In the aftermath, the U.S. became the world’s leading power. The devastating effects of these wars and the horror evoked by the discovery of Nazi death camps and the unleashing of the atom bomb over Hiroshima led to the development of more pessimistic philosophy, although such tendencies were less apparent in the U.S., which did not suffer the same damage as countries in Europe and so retained a certain optimism.

PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

• Philosophy in the first half of the twentieth-century was dominated by existentialism, a philosophy that focused on personal freedom and responsibility, urging human beings to take responsibility for their own actions and decisions, to confront anxiety and death honestly, and to accept the ultimate meaninglessness of life beyond what each individual creates for himself/herself. Its primary exponents were Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), whose Being and Nothingness provides the best expression of this philosophy
• "Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is."--Sartre
• Most existentialists were atheist or agnostic and did not see human life as imbued with any cosmic purpose or meaning. They emphasized, however, that this condition was not an excuse for acting as if life doesn’t matter; each individual is responsible for creating meaning in his/her own life.
• Existentialist themes are very common in literature of the period: anxiety, the absurdity of existence, death, nothingness, alienation.
• Another philosophical current was logical positivism, in which Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1959) advocated subordinating philosophy--with its faulty language and simple truisms--to the service of science and mathematics in order to comprehend the world better.

MODERNISM IN LITERATURE

Modernist artists prided themselves on the complexity and individuality of their work; the general public, however, became increasingly alienated from avant-garde philosophies, viewing the works as incomprehensible, objectionable, or ugly. This did not deter the modernists; they reveled in their isolation and remained committed to experimentation, newness and deliberate difficulty.

Fiction

Modernist literature was concerned principally with depicting the subjective consciousness of its narrator, although individual writers differ widely in style. A large number of writers using a method called stream-of-consciousness for such depictions, a method in which one tries to emulate the narrator’s thinking and feeling processes without filtering or editing. On first reading, such accounts often sound fragmented, random, arbitrary, and even incomprehensible. Practitioners of the stream-of-consciousness method include James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.

• James Joyce (1882-1941), an Irish author, wrote Ulysses, The Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.
• The English feminist, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was the author of Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Room of One’s Own.
• William Faulkner (1897-1962) was an American writer known for The Sound and the Fury as well as a number of short stories such as The Bear and A Rose for Emily.
• Not all modernist writers in this period used stream-of-consciousness techniques. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) who wrote The Sun Also Rises, and D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) who wrote Lord Chatterley’s Lover explored human subjectivity in different ways, as did George Orwell, who is known for his scathing satires of political ideology of all types in Animal Farm and 1984.

Poetry

• Among the poets prominent in this period were William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), an important figure in the Gaelic Literary Revival in Ireland, and T. S. Eliot, author of The Waste Land. Both feature a difficult style filled with literary/mythological allusions.
• African-American culture produced two prominent authors--Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and Zora Neale Hurston (ca. 1901-1960)--both associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that also encouraged the development of jazz. Both writers try to express the difficulties of being black in a white culture.

Drama

• Believing that traditional theater merely reinforced class prejudices, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) invented "epic theater," a radical theater that focused on a technique called the "alienation effect." The purpose of this was to make the audience uncomfortable, using the outlandish, ludicrous and innappropriate to challenge expectations and make the audience more open to new moral/political messages. Brecht collaborated with composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) to create The Three-penny Opera.
• Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) began a movement in French literature of updating Greek classics; The Infernal Machine (1934) is a retelling of Sophocle’s Oedipus.
• Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) was the most prominent American dramatist during this period.

 

ART, ARCHITECTURE AND FILM

Painting

The styles that first emerged in the Post-Impressionist period continued to develop in this period: abstraction, primitivism and fantasy, and Expressionism.

Abstraction

• Abstract art is concerned with completely nonobjective art that conveyed emotions and philosophical ideas without depicting traditional subjects in a realistic fashion. Suprematism, Constructivism and De Stijl were all subsets of abstraction; its primary artists were Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). [See illustrations of their work in your textbook]. Malevich’s constructivism, however, was eventually declared decadent by the Soviet government and replaced with Socialist Realism, which was reliant upon the use of traditional techniques and style and expected to serve the propaganda needs of communism.
• Cubism remained the leading movement in abstract art, led by Pablo Picasso. Picasso’s works are based on a realistic source but depicted in flattened, geometrical shapes and angular forms. Guernica and The Three Musicians are his most famous paintings in this style.
• The American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) used a modified form of abstraction, depicting real subjects drawn from nature but in a greatly simplified form. Most of her images were drawn from the landscapes of the American Southwest and have surrealistic qualities.

Primitivism and Fantasy

• Dada was the most significant primitivistic movement of the twentieth century. Dada was essentially an anti-art movement, art that served as a rejection of traditional beliefs and values. It was led by the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Dadaists emphasized outrageous, obscene, and sexual subjects.
• Dada, in turn, led to Surrealism, a movement that sought to create the reality of the unconscious. Dreams imagery and hallucinatory effects were common. The leading Surrealists were Salvador Dali (1904-1989)--known for The Persistence of Memory--and Paul Klee (1879-1940), who stressed whimsy and childlike wonder in his works.

Expressionism

The early expressionism of Kandinsky and Munch were followed by new Expressionistic works by Henri Matisse and Max Beckmann (1884-1950). Expressionism emphasized distortion and anarchy as a response to the horror of the era. One of the best examples is Beckmann’s The Temptation of St. Anthony.

Architecture

Architects sought a pure, undecorated, functional style of building that would be conducive to social reform. Spartan interior decoration was the norm, along with all-white rooms, wooden floors and streamlined furniture. The International Style stressed sleek, geometrical buildings devoid of ornament.

Film

• Motion pictures were introduced early in the twentieth century and by the 1920s had become the most popular mass entertainment. Early black-and-white films, such as those of D. W. Griffith (1875-1948) and Sergei Einsenstein (1898-1948) were silent movies in the sense that no dialogue could be heard; the film-showings, however, were always accompanied by music, either a live pianist or orchestra.
• Sound films were created in the late 1920s and color films in the early 1930s as Hollywood, CA established itself as the center of the film industry. Many European musicians fled the Nazi regime to work in Hollywood, bringing with them a musical soundtrack style based on Wagnerian leitmotif principles.

 

MUSIC

• Arnold Schoenberg, known in the previous era for his atonality and Expressionism, continued to experiment with new musical techniques. During this period he invented a new type of music called serial or twelve-tone music. This music was dissonant and harsh, often inducing anxiety in ordinary listeners.
• Igor Stravinsky, noted earlier for his primitivist Rites of Spring, became the dominant figure in Neoclassicism, borrowing techniques and styles from 17th- and 18th- century music. His music emphasized clear, cool sounds and simple--if unusual--orchestration. His Neoclassic works include Pulcinella, Symphony of Psalms and The Rake’s Progress.
• American musicians developed their own idioms.
• Charles Ives (1874-1954) incorporated folk songs, hymns, marches and patriotic songs into his works but invested them with twentieth-century harmonies and rhythms, often using polytonality--the use of more than one key at the same time.
• Aaron Copland in his Rodeo and Appalachian Spring also drew on traditional American melodies but in a more Neoclassic style.
• Henry Cowell (1897-1965) was known for pieces like The Banshee, in which he used unorthodox piano techniques--e.g., using his forearm to play clusters of notes and playing the strings of the piano directly without using the keys. Along with other composers, Cowell often created his own exotic instruments.
• Jazz was most popular during the 1920s and 1930s as the form known as swing jazz captivated mainstream audiences and encouraged the growth of dance halls. Among its most famous musicians were Duke Ellington (1899-1974), Billie Holiday (1915-1959), Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) and Ella Fitzgerald (1918-1996).

 

20th Century: 1945-

In the decades immediately following World War II, fear of nuclear destruction and the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union dominated the world stage. Following the detente of the 1970s and the collapse of global communism, twentieth century culture has been increasingly concerned with global issues-- environmental, social and ethnic--as we have seen the rapid emergence of third-world countries and an increasing globalization of world culture and faced the challenges of ethnic/racial diversity. Philosophically and artistically these changes have resulted in a bewildering variety of new styles and approaches, most subsumed under the term Post-Modernism. Post- Modernist culture places emphasis on the universality of human experience and seeks such universalities in all cultures, not just Western traditions. Feminist thought has flourished under Post-Modernism along with radical theories of black identity and consciousness, prompted by the civil rights movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. Immense technological advances-- computers, birth control, medical advances, communication satellites, medical vaccines and organ transplants--have also had an effect on culture. It would be impossible in the time we have left to cover all the important trends from 1945 to the present, so below I will simply concentrate on a few clear representative examples.

ART

• Abstract expressionism was a movement influenced by Jungian psychology that spontaneity in the artistic process. American Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is considered the founder of this movement. Abstract expressionists dripped, spilled and splashed paint on their canvasses in seemingly arbitrary ways, concerned with expressing themselves through an interactive process rather than conscious representation.
• Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) initiated a new movement by adding ordinary objects to their works, creating a playful type of art that led to Pop Art. Andy Warhol (1927-1987) is the most famous of the Pop Artists, known for his treatment of icons from mass culture. Assembling his images in repetitive forms, he expressed the mundane, banal quality of mass culture. George Segal (b. 1924) was the most prominent Pop Art sculptor.
• Neorealism was a style that stressed photographic clarity. Philip Pearlstein and John De Andrea are neorealists.
• Neoexpressionists specialized in social criticism through their art. See examples in your textbook by Sue Coe (b. 1951) and Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945).

LITERATURE

• There has been in the second half of the twentieth century an increasing interest in literature from non-western perspectives and in works that examine racial and ethnic experiences. Be sure to read the following selections from your reader:
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
• Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"
• Elie Wiesel, Night
• James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village"
• Martin Luther King, jr. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

MUSIC

• Many composers have continued to create music that is dissonant and atonal. Others have focused on creating non-traditional sounds from traditional musical instruments; Black Angels by George Crumb, e.g., is a work for string quartet that requires each instrument to make sounds atypical of its use in traditional classical music.
• Electronically-manipulated music is an important genre; a type of electronic music called musique concrete used sounds made by ordinary objects, rather than traditional musical sounds, for manipulation. Poem electronique by Edgar Varese is a good example.
• Minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich use small bits of melody and sounds and repeat them over and over, every now and then making a small change, to create a hypnotic type of music, much imitated by purveyors of New Age music.
• Composers like John Cage (1912-1992) took a less serious and formal approach to music-making, insisting that the ordinary sounds that surround us constitute music. He wrote pieces for car radios, conch shells and living room furniture and is best known for his infamous work, 4’33", a piece in no music is played but the audience is expected to hear music in the other sounds present in the room. Cage is also known for his aleatory music or "chance" music, in which the composer provides some music for performing but leaves the order in which the parts should be played and by whom to chance operations, insuring that the piece will never sound the same from performance to performance.
• Performance artists who combine visual and aural experiences have become more common, such as Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) and Laurie Anderson (b. 1947); composers like Meredith Monk continue to experiment new ways of using the voice.
• Throughout this period jazz evolved from swing through bebop, cool jazz and fusion jazz, and its sounds were often imported into classical music. Non-western instruments, melodies and rhythms also found their way into Western music.
• A worldwide mass pop culture led to the rise and dissemination of rock, fast food, movies and cable TV throughout the world, creating its own culture. Scholars argue about the merits of popular culture; it is nearly impossible to predict at this point what art, literature and music we are now producing will survive and be valued in future centuries.