1. The Baroque World

2. Chapter 15: The Baroque World Outline Chapter 15 OUTLINE
The Counter-Reformation Spirit
The Visual Arts in the Baroque Period
Painting in Rome: Caravaggio and the Carracci
Roman Baroque Sculpture and Architecture:
Bernini and Borromini
Baroque Art in France and Spain
Baroque Art in Northern Europe
Baroque Music
The Birth of Opera
Baroque Instrumental and Vocal Music:
Johann Sebastian Bach
Philosophy and Science in the Baroque Period
Galileo
Descartes
Hobbes and Locke
Literature in the Seventeenth Century
French Baroque Comedy and Tragedy
The Novel in Spain: Cervantes
The English Metaphysical Poets
Milton's Heroic Vision
Outline Chapter 15

3. Timeline Chapter 15: The Baroque World
1534 Loyola establishes the Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
1601 Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew
1620 Artemesia Gentileschi, Judith and Holofernes
1629 Bernini appointed official architect of St. Peter's, Rome
1632 Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
1639 Poussin, Et in Arcadia, Ego
1642 Rembrandt, Night Watch
1645 Bernini, Saint Teresa in Ecstasy
1656 Velázquez, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor)
1665 Vermeer, The Girl With Pearl Earring
1682 Louis XIV moves court to Versailles
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding;
Second Treatise on Government
1720 Vivaldi, The Four Seasons
1721 J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concertos

4. The Counter-Reformation Spirit
If the history and culture of the sixteenth century were profoundly affected by the Reformation, the prime element to influence those of the seventeenth century was the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church's campaign to regain its authority and influence. By clarifying and forcefully asserting their teaching, backed up with a vigorous program of missionary work, church leaders aimed to present a positive and optimistic appearance that would eliminate past discords.
The Counter-Reformation
The Catholic church was not caught unawares by the Reformation. It had been steadily battling opposition, resistance, and heresy for over four hundred years; much of the opposition against the church throughout the fifteenth century involved issues that closely paralleled those splitting the church in half during the early Reformation. In answer to the growth of the Protestant movement, the Catholic Church instituted its own series of reforms that balanced real reform with a strident and conservative reaction to Protestantism. This movement was called the Counter-Reformation.    Many aspects of this movement were genuine reforms. Groups such as the Modern Devotion and the Oratory of Divine Love were organizations that included both clergy and lay people and encouraged a return to simple ethical living and piety, principles that had been championed by Desiderius Erasmus.    Other aspects were conservative reactions to the criticisms levelled against the church by Protestants and Reformers. The most important of the reactionary movements was the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits, founded by Ignatius of Loyola in the 1530's and recognized officially by the Catholic church a decade later. Ignatius was a brilliant and visionary man; he was also an uncompromising and severe fanatic. The basis of the Society of Jesus was a return to the strictest and most uncompromising obedience to the authority of the church and its ecclesiastical hierarchy. The entire spirit of the Society can be summed up in Rule 13 of Ignatius's "Rules for Thinking with the Church": "I will believe that the white that I see is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it." Ignatius was a brilliant and intelligent man, so the extent of his fanaticism in regard to obedience is hard to explain, but its origins can be found in his conversion experience. In 1521 he was wounded in a battle with the French. While recovering, he read the classics of Christianity and was deeply impressed by the lives of the martyrs and the saints. This instilled in him a deep sense of the value of absolute sacrifice; he underwent a conversion and dedicated his life to the same level of self-sacrifice that he saw in the lives of the saints.    While his first and most important theme was unquestioning obedience to anything and everything that the Church hierarchy said, his second and more lasting theme was self-mastery. His book, Spiritual Exercises , was designed to teach people how to deny themselves completely. The purpose of this self-denial, of course, was obedience to the church. Unless one could perfectly deny one's self and one's feelings, one could never perfectly obey the dictates of the church hierarchy.    At the start, the Jesuit movement was a small movement. The original Society of Jesus had only ten members. By 1630, it had over fifteen thousand members all over the world. For Ignatius dedicated the mission of the Society to the extirpation of heretics who refused to obey the church—this not only included Protestants, but non-Christians as well. The Society of Jesus became over the next few centuries the most powerfully influential carrier of Western culture and Christianity to the non-Western world.    The Protestant gains in Europe and the chaotic evolution of the Counter-Reformation finally forced Pope Paul III in 1545 to convene a council in Trent in order to define church doctrine once and for all. This council, called the Council of Trent, worked on this problem in three separate sessions from 1545 to This council eventually advised some far-reaching reforms in the abuses practiced by the church, such as the selling of indulgences. The Council forced bishops to reside in the region they presided over and also forbad the selling of church offices. On the reactionary side, the Council advised that a seminary be built in every diocese so that church doctrine could be fully and accurately represented. The reforms were very bold in many respects, but they were too little and too late. The new Protestant churches were the wave of the future; and Catholicism—although it would remain a major religion—would in a few centuries cease to be the majority religion in the Western world.
In this example of Catholic propaganda, the Pope holds his ears while
Calvin and Luther battle, with the Bible as one of the weapons.

5. Europe After the Reformation

6. Counter-Reformation Art
Among the resources used by Counter-Reformation reformers were the arts. Imposing architectural complexes like Saint Peter's Square in Rome, paintings and sculptures, music and verse could all serve to reinforce the glory of the church. In some cases works were commissioned officially; in others artists responded individually to the spirit of the times. Bernini's Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, a statue that reflects the artist's own devout faith, was commissioned for the church in Rome in which it still stands. Richard Crashaw's poetry represents a more personal response to the religious ideas of his day.
St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome
Emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, ordered to build a basilica on Vatican Hill. The location was symbolic: this was the place where Saint Peter, the chief apostle, was buried in 64 A.D. A small shrine already existed on the site but it was now replaced by a new building church was completed around 349 A.D. In the middle of the 15th century, the basilica was falling into ruin and pope Nicolas V ordered the restoration and enlargement of the church after plans by Bernardo Rossellino. After Nicolas V died, works were halted. In 1506 pope Julius II laid the first stone of a new basilica which was to become the largest in the world. Julius II appointed Donato Bramante as the chief architect of the new Basilica. In 1547 Michelangelo succeeded Bramante. He designed the imposing dome and altered some of the original plans. Michelangelo died in 1624, two years before the completion of the dome. The St. Peter's basilica was dedicated by pope Urban VIII in Ever since, this church has been the center of Christianity, drawing pilgrims from all over the world. The building itself is truly impressive. The largest church in the world, it has a 218 meter long nave. The basilica's dome, designed by Michelangelo is the largest dome in the world measuring 42m in diameter and reaching 138 meter high (more than 450ft). The interior, which includes 45 altars, is decorated by many famous artists. Some of the most important works in the church are the Pietà by Michelangelo, the papal altar by Bernini, the Throne of St. Peter - also by Bernini - and the Monument to the Stuarts by Canova. The opulent interior can be visited daily for free although a strict dress code is enforced. You can also visit the dome itself (entrance is not free, but it's worth it). You have the option of taking the elevator or the stairs, the latter being a bit cheaper. The elevator brings you to the bottom of the dome from where a small, long and mostly spiral staircase brings you to the top of the dome. From there you have a magnificent view of Rome and of the Saint Peter's square in particular. The famous square with long symmetrical colonnades was designed by Bernini. It features a central obelisk and two identical fountains. Near the entrance of the Basilica you will probably encounter some of the famous Swiss guards. Since 1506 when pope Julius II invited Helvetian soldiers to join the small Vatican army, they have been the guards of the Vatican and the pope in particular. All entrants to the army must be Swiss, catholic and they must take the oath of loyalty to the pope. This oath is taken May 26th, to commemorate the sacking of Rome on the same day in 1527 when Swiss guards protected pope Clement VII during his escape to the Castel Sant'Angelo. Of the 189 guards, only 42 survived. St. Peter's is located in Vatican state, across the river Tiber, west of Rome's center. Vatican State is completely surrounded by the city of Rome.
Bernini
The Ecstasy
of Saint Therese Marble
Saint Peter's Square and
Saint Peter's Basilica, Rome

7. The Rise of Science
For all the importance of religion, the seventeenth century was also marked by significant developments in philosophy and science. Galileo, the father of modern physics, revolutionized astronomy by proving Copernicus' claims of the previous century correct. Thinkers like Descartes and Hobbes, instead of accepting official church teachings, tried to examine the problems of human existence by their own intellectual approaches. Descartes was the founder of modern rational thought (although a believer in a supreme being); Hobbes was the first modern materialist
Nicolaus Copernicus
Born: 19 Feb 1473 in Torun, Poland Died: 24 May 1543 in Frauenburg (now Frombork), Poland
Nicolaus Copernicus is the Latin version of the famous astronomer's name which he chose later in his life. The original form of his name was Mikolaj Kopernik or Nicolaus Koppernigk but we shall use Copernicus throughout this article. His father, also called Nicolaus Koppernigk, had lived in Krakow before moving to Torun where he set up a business trading in copper. He was also interested in local politics and became a civic leader in Torun and a magistrate. Nicolaus Koppernigk married Barbara Watzenrode, who came from a well off family from Torun, in about They moved into a house in St Anne's Street in Torun, but they also had a summer residence with vineyards out of town. Nicolaus and Barbara Koppernigk had four children, two sons and two daughters, of whom Nicolaus Copernicus was the youngest.
You can see a picture of the house in which Copernicus was born.
When young Nicolaus was ten years old his father died. His uncle Lucas Watzenrode, who was a canon at Frauenburg Cathedral, became guardian to Nicolaus and Barbara Koppernigk's four children.
You can see a picture of Lucas Watzenrode.
Nicolaus and his brother Andreas remained in Torun, continuing their elementary education there. In 1488 Nicolaus was sent by his uncle to the cathedral school of Wloclawek where he received a good standard humanist education. After three years of study at Wloclawek he entered the University of Krakow (situated in what was then the capital of Poland). By this time Lucas Watzenrode was Bishop of Ermland and he envisaged a church career for both of his nephews. Andreas, Nicolaus's brother, entered the University of Krakow at the same time, and both their names appear on the matriculation records of
University education at Krakow was, Copernicus later wrote, a vital factor in everything that he went on to achieve. There he studied Latin, mathematics, astronomy, geography and philosophy. He learnt his astronomy from Tractatus de Sphaera by Johannes de Sacrobosco written in One should not think, however, that the astronomy courses which Copernicus studied were scientific courses in the modern sense. Rather they were mathematics courses which introduced Aristotle and Ptolemy's view of the universe so that students could understand the calendar, calculate the dates of holy days, and also have skills that would enable those who would follow a more practical profession to navigate at sea. Also taught as a major part of astronomy was what today we would call astrology, teaching students to calculate horoscopes of people from the exact time of their birth.
While a student in Kraków, Copernicus purchased a copy of the Latin translation of Euclid's Elements published in Venice in 1482, a copy of the second edition of the Alfonsine Tables (which gives planetary theory and eclipses) printed in Venice in 1492, and Regiomontanus's Tables of Directions (a work on spherical astronomy) published in Augsburg in Remarkably Copernicus's copies of these works, signed by him, are still preserved.
It was while he was a student at Krakow that Copernicus began to use this Latin version of his name rather than Kopernik or Koppernigk. He returned to Torun after four years of study at Krakow but, as was common at the time, did not formally graduate with a degree. His uncle Lucas Watzenrode was still determined that Copernicus should have a career in the Church and indeed this was a profession which would allow security for someone wanting to pursue leaning. So that he might have the necessary qualifications Copernicus decided to go to the University of Bologna to take a degree in canon law. In the autumn of 1496 he travelled to Italy, entering the University of Bologna on 19 October 1496, to start three years of study. As a native German speaker he joined the "German Nation of Bologna University". Each student contributed to the "German Nation" an amount they could afford and the small contribution that Copernicus made indicates his poor financial position at that time.
While he was there his uncle put his name forward for the position of canon at Frauenburg Cathedral. On 20 October 1497, while in Bologna, Copernicus received official notification of his appointment as a canon and of the comfortable income he would receive without having to return to carry out any duties. At Bologna University Copernicus studied Greek, mathematics and astronomy in addition to his official course of canon law. He rented rooms at the house of the astronomy professor Domenico Maria de Novara and began to undertake research with him, assisting him in making observations. On 9 March 1497 he observed the Moon eclipse the star Aldebaran.
In 1500 Copernicus visited Rome, as all Christians were strongly encouraged to do to celebrate the great jubilee, and he stayed there for a year lecturing to scholars on mathematics and astronomy. While in Rome he observed an eclipse of the Moon which took place on 6 November He returned to Frauenburg (also known as Frombork) in the spring of 1501 and was officially installed as a canon of the Ermland Chapter on 27 July. He had not completed his degree in canon law at Bologna so he requested his uncle that he be allowed to return to Italy both to take a law degree and to study medicine. Copernicus was granted leave on 27 July 1501 [13]:-
... principally because Nicolaus promised to study medicine, and as a helpful physician would some day advise our most reverend bishop and also the members of the Chapter.
As this quotation indicates, the Cathedral Chapter liked his proposal to study medicine and provided the necessary funds. He set off again for Italy, his time going to Padua. Copernicus had another reason to return to Italy, which he almost certainly did not disclose, and that was to continue his studies of astronomy.
Padua was famous for its medical school and while he was there Copernicus studied both medicine and astronomy. At that time astronomy was essentially astrology and, as such, considered relevant to medicine since physicians made use of astrology. In the spring of 1503 he decided formally to obtain his doctorate in Canon Law, but he did not return to Bologna but rather took the degree at the University of Ferrara. After receiving his doctorate, Copernicus stayed in Ferrara for a few months before returning to Padua to continue his studies of medicine. There is no record that he ever graduated from Padua.
When he returned to his native land, Copernicus was again granted leave from his official duties as a canon in the Ermland Chapter at Frauenburg. This was allow him to be physician to his maternal uncle Lucas Watzenrode, the Bishop of Ermland, but he carried out far more duties for his uncle than medical ones becoming essentially his private secretary and personal advisor. For about five years he undertook these duties and during this period he lived at Heilsberg Castle, a few miles from Frauenburg, the official residence of the Bishop of Ermland.
In 1509 Copernicus published a work, which was properly printed, giving Latin translations of Greek poetry by the obscure poet Theophylactus Simocattes. While accompanying his uncle on a visit to Krakow, he gave a manuscript of the poetry book to a publisher friend there. Lucas Watzenrode died in 1512 and following this Copernicus resumed his duties as canon in the Ermland Chapter at Frauenburg. He now had more time than before to devote to his study of astronomy, having an observatory in the rooms in which he lived in one of the towers in the town's fortifications.
You can see a picture of Copernicus's observatory in Frauenburg.
Around 1514 he distributed a little book, not printed but hand written, to a few of his friends who knew that he was the author even though no author is named on the title page. This book, usually called the Little Commentary, set out Copernicus's theory of a universe with the sun at its centre. The Little Commentary is a fascinating document. It contains seven axioms which Copernicus gives, not in the sense that they are self evident, but in the sense that he will base his conclusions on these axioms and nothing else; see [79]. What are the axioms? Let us state them:
There is no one centre in the universe.
The Earth's centre is not the centre of the universe.
The centre of the universe is near the sun.
The distance from the Earth to the sun is imperceptible compared with the distance to the stars.
The rotation of the Earth accounts for the apparent daily rotation of the stars.
The apparent annual cycle of movements of the sun is caused by the Earth revolving round it.
The apparent retrograde motion of the planets is caused by the motion of the Earth from which one observes.
Some have noted that 2, 4, 5, and 7 can be deduced from 3 and 6 but it was never Copernicus's aim to give a minimal set of axioms. The most remarkable of the axioms is 7, for although earlier scholars had claimed that the Earth moved, some claiming that it revolved round the sun, nobody before Copernicus appears to have correctly explained the retrograde motion of the outer planets. Even when he wrote his Little Commentary Copernicus was planning to write a major work, for he wrote in it (see [77]):-
Here, for the sake of brevity, I have thought it desirable to omit the mathematical demonstrations intended for my larger work.
It is likely that he wrote the Little Commentary in 1514 and began writing his major work De revolutionibus in the following year.
Given Copernicus's nature it is clear that he would have liked to have lived a quiet life at Frauenburg, carrying out his (relatively few) duties conscientiously and devoting all his spare time to observing, developing his theories of the universe, and writing De revolutionibus. It is equally clear that his fame as an astronomer was well known for when the Fifth Lateran Council decided to improve the calendar, which was known to be out of phase with the seasons, the Pope appealed to experts for advice in 1514, one of these experts was Copernicus. Many experts went to Rome to advise the Council, but Copernicus chose to respond by letter. He did not wish to contribute more to the discussions on the calendar since he felt that the motions of the heavenly bodies was still not understood with sufficient precision.
The peace which Copernicus wished, however, was not easy to find in a period of frequent wars. The fortifications of Frauenburg that formed Copernicus's home had been built to protect the town which had been captured by various opposing groups over the years. In 1516 Copernicus was given the task of administering the districts of Allenstein (also known as Olsztyn) and Mehlsack. He lived for four years in Allenstein Castle while carrying out these administrative duties.
You can see a picture of Allenstein Castle where Copernicus lived.
Always keen to make observations, Copernicus returned to his home/observatory in Frauenburg whenever there was a reason to attend a meeting or consult with the other canons, always taking the opportunity to further his researches. However when war broke out between Poland and the Teutonic Knights towards the end of 1519 Copernicus was back in Frauenburg. After a period of war, Copernicus was sent to participate in peace talks in Braunsberg as one of a two man delegation representing the Bishop of Ermland. The peace talks failed and the war continued. Frauenburg came under siege but Copernicus continued making his observations even at this desperate time. By the autumn of 1520 Copernicus was back living in Allenstein Castle and had to organise its defence against attacking forces. The castle resisted the attack and by 1521 an uneasy peace had returned.
As a reward for his defence of Allenstein, Copernicus was appointed Commissar of Ermland and given the task of rebuilding the district after the war. His close friend, Tiedemann Giese, another canon in the Chapter, was given the task of assisting him.
You can see a picture of Tiedemann Giese.
As part of the recovery plan, Copernicus put forward a scheme for the reform of the currency which he presented to the Diet of Graudenz in However, despite attending the Diet and arguing strongly for his sensible proposals, they were not acted on.
Copernicus returned to Frauenburg where his life became less eventful and he had the peace and quiet that he longed for to allow him to make observations and to work on details of his heliocentric theory. Having said that he now had the peace he wanted, one should also realise that he was undertaking his mathematical and astronomical work in isolation with no colleagues with whom to discuss matters. Although Copernicus was a canon, he had never become a priest. In fact on 4 February 1531 his bishop threatened to take away his income if he did not enter the priesthood, yet Copernicus still refused.
A full account of Copernicus's theory was apparently slow to reach a state in which he wished to see it published, and this did not happen until the very end of Copernicus's life when he published his life's work under the title De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Nuremberg, 1543). In fact had it not been for Georg Joachim Rheticus, a young professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Wittenberg, Copernicus's masterpiece might never have been published. In May 1539 Rheticus arrived at Frauenburg where he spent about two years with Copernicus. Rheticus wrote of his visit:-
I heard of the fame of Master Nicolaus Copernicus in the northern lands, and although the University of Wittenberg had made me a Public Professor in those arts, nonetheless, I did not think that I should be content until I had learned something more through the instruction of that man. And I also say that I regret neither the financial expenses nor the long journey nor the remaining hardships. Yet, it seems to me that there came a great reward for these troubles, namely that I, a rather daring young man, compelled this venerable man to share his ideas sooner in this discipline with the whole world.
We should note that Rheticus was a Protestant, so in those troubled times of the Reformation he took somewhat of a risk visiting a Catholic stronghold. In September 1539 Rheticus went to Danzig, visiting the mayor of Danzig, who gave him some financial assistance to help publish the Narratio Prima or, to give it its full title First report to Johann Schöner on the Books of the Revolutions of the learned gentleman and distinguished mathematician, the Reverend Doctor Nicolaus Copernicus of Torun, Canon of Warmia, by a certain youth devoted to mathematics. The publication of this work encouraged Copernicus to publish the full mathematical details of his theory which he had promised 27 years earlier. Swerdlow writes:-
Copernicus could not have asked for a more erudite, elegant, and enthusiastic introduction of his new astronomy to the world of good letters; indeed to this day the "Narratio Prima" remains the best introduction to Copernicus's work.
In his First Report Rheticus wrote about Copernicus's way of working (see [80]):-
... my teacher always had before his eyes the observations of all ages together with his own, assembled in order as in catalogues; then when some conclusion must be drawn or contribution made to the science and its principles, he proceeds from the earliest observations to his own, seeking the mutual relationship which harmonizes them all; the results thus obtained by correct inference under the guidance of Urania he then compares with the hypothesis of Ptolemy and the ancients; and having made a most careful examination of these hypotheses, he finds that astronomical proof requires their rejection; he assumes new hypotheses, not indeed without divine inspiration and the favour of the gods; by applying mathematics, he geometrically establishes the conclusions which can be drawn from them by correct inference; he then harmonizes the ancient observations and his own with the hypotheses which he has adopted; and after performing all these operations he finally writes down the laws of astronomy ...
While living with Copernicus, Rheticus wrote to several people reporting on the progress Copernicus was making. For example on 2 June 1541 Rheticus wrote that Copernicus [80]:-
... is enjoying quite good health and is writing a great deal ...
while he wrote that on 9 June Copernicus [80]:-
... had finally overcome his prolonged reluctance to release his volume for publication.
By 29 August De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was ready for the printer. Rheticus took the manuscript with him when he returned to his teaching duties at Wittenberg, and gave it the printer Johann Petreius in Nürnberg. This was a leading centre for printing and Petreius was the best printer in town. However, since he was unable to stay to supervise the printing he asked Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran theologian with considerable experience of printing mathematical texts, to undertake the task. What Osiander did was to write a letter to the reader, inserted in place of Copernicus's original Preface following the title page, in which he claimed that the results of the book were not intended as the truth, rather that they merely presented a simpler way to calculate the positions of the heavenly bodies. The letter was unsigned and the true author of the letter was not revealed publicly until Kepler did so 50 years later. Osiander also subtly changed the title to make it appear less like a claim of the real world. Some are appalled at this gigantic piece of deception by Osiander, as Rheticus was at the time, others feel that it was only because of Osiander's Preface that Copernicus's work was read and not immediately condemned.
In De revolutionibus Copernicus states several reasons why it is logical that the sun would be at the centre of the universe:-
At the middle of all things lies the sun. As the location of this luminary in the cosmos, that most beautiful temple, would there be any other place or any better place than the centre, from which it can light up everything at the same time? Hence the sun is not inappropriately called by some the lamp of the universe, by others its mind, and by others its ruler.
Copernicus's cosmology placed a motionless sun not at the centre of the universe, but close to the centre, and also involved giving several distinct motions to the Earth. The problem that Copernicus faced was that he assumed all motion was circular so, like Ptolemy, was forced into using epicycles (see for example [78]). It was consequently considered implausible by the most of his contemporaries, and by most astronomers and natural philosophers until the middle of the seventeenth century. In the intended Preface of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium Copernicus showed that he was fully aware of the criticisms that his work would attract:-
Perhaps there will be babblers who, although completely ignorant of mathematics, nevertheless take it upon themselves to pass judgement on mathematical questions and, badly distorting some passages of Scripture to their purpose, will dare find fault with my undertaking and censure it. I disregard them even to the extent as despising their criticism as unfounded.
Its notable defenders included Kepler and Galileo while theoretical evidence for the Copernican theory was provided by Newton's theory of universal gravitation around 150 years later.
Copernicus is said to have received a copy of the printed book, consisting of about 200 pages written in Latin, for the first time on his deathbed. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage.
Brahe, who did not accept Copernicus's claim that the Earth moved round the sun, nevertheless wrote:-
Through observations made by himself [Copernicus] discovered certain gaps in Ptolemy, and he concluded that the hypotheses established by Ptolemy admit something unsuitable in violation of the axioms of mathematics. Moreover, he found the Alfonsine computations in disagreement with the motions of the heavens. Therefore, with wonderful intellectual acumen he established different hypotheses. He restored the science of the heavenly motions in such a way that nobody before him had a more accurate knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies.
Rudnicki [13] gives this appreciation of Copernicus:-
He was truly creative. His scientific method, though determined by the horizons of contemporary knowledge and belief, was yet ideally objective. Ethically, his actions throughout his life bear witness to the highest standards. He did good. He earned the general respect and honour of his contemporaries. For many years he served self-sacrificingly the cause of his native country. But he knew no private, domestic joys.
Galileo
Galileo Galilei
Born: 15 Feb 1564 in Pisa (now in Italy) Died: 8 Jan 1642 in Arcetri (near Florence) (now in Italy)
Galileo Galilei's parents were Vincenzo Galilei and Guilia Ammannati. Vincenzo, who was born in Florence in 1520, was a teacher of music and a fine lute player. After studying music in Venice he carried out experiments on strings to support his musical theories. Guilia, who was born in Pescia, married Vincenzo in 1563 and they made their home in the countryside near Pisa. Galileo was their first child and spent his early years with his family in Pisa.
In 1572, when Galileo was eight years old, his family returned to Florence, his father's home town. However, Galileo remained in Pisa and lived for two years with Muzio Tedaldi who was related to Galileo's mother by marriage. When he reached the age of ten, Galileo left Pisa to join his family in Florence and there he was tutored by Jacopo Borghini. Once he was old enough to be educated in a monastery, his parents sent him to the Camaldolese Monastery at Vallombrosa which is situated on a magnificent forested hillside 33 km southeast of Florence. The Camaldolese Order was independent of the Benedictine Order, splitting from it in about The Order combined the solitary life of the hermit with the strict life of the monk and soon the young Galileo found this life an attractive one. He became a novice, intending to join the Order, but this did not please his father who had already decided that his eldest son should become a medical doctor.
Vincenzo had Galileo return from Vallombrosa to Florence and give up the idea of joining the Camaldolese order. He did continue his schooling in Florence, however, in a school run by the Camaldolese monks. In 1581 Vincenzo sent Galileo back to Pisa to live again with Muzio Tedaldi and now to enrol for a medical degree at the University of Pisa. Although the idea of a medical career never seems to have appealed to Galileo, his father's wish was a fairly natural one since there had been a distinguished physician in his family in the previous century. Galileo never seems to have taken medical studies seriously, attending courses on his real interests which were in mathematics and natural philosophy. His mathematics teacher at Pisa was Filippo Fantoni, who held the chair of mathematics. Galileo returned to Florence for the summer vacations and there continued to study mathematics.
In the year Ostilio Ricci, who was the mathematician of the Tuscan Court and a former pupil of Tartaglia, taught a course on Euclid's Elements at the University of Pisa which Galileo attended. During the summer of 1583 Galileo was back in Florence with his family and Vincenzo encouraged him to read Galen to further his medical studies. However Galileo, still reluctant to study medicine, invited Ricci (also in Florence where the Tuscan court spent the summer and autumn) to his home to meet his father. Ricci tried to persuade Vincenzo to allow his son to study mathematics since this was where his interests lay. Certainly Vincenzo did not like the idea and resisted strongly but eventually he gave way a little and Galileo was able to study the works of Euclid and Archimedes from the Italian translations which Tartaglia had made. Of course he was still officially enrolled as a medical student at Pisa but eventually, by 1585, he gave up this course and left without completing his degree.
Galileo began teaching mathematics, first privately in Florence and then during at Siena where he held a public appointment. During the summer of 1586 he taught at Vallombrosa, and in this year he wrote his first scientific book The little balance [La Balancitta] which described Archimedes' method of finding the specific gravities (that is the relative densities) of substances using a balance. In the following year he travelled to Rome to visit Clavius who was professor of mathematics at the Jesuit Collegio Romano there. A topic which was very popular with the Jesuit mathematicians at this time was centres of gravity and Galileo brought with him some results which he had discovered on this topic. Despite making a very favourable impression on Clavius, Galileo failed to gain an appointment to teach mathematics at the University of Bologna.
After leaving Rome Galileo remained in contact with Clavius by correspondence and Guidobaldo del Monte was also a regular correspondent. Certainly the theorems which Galileo had proved on the centres of gravity of solids, and left in Rome, were discussed in this correspondence. It is also likely that Galileo received lecture notes from courses which had been given at the Collegio Romano, for he made copies of such material which still survive today. The correspondence began around 1588 and continued for many years. Also in 1588 Galileo received a prestigious invitation to lecture on the dimensions and location of hell in Dante's Inferno at the Academy in Florence.
Fantoni left the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa in 1589 and Galileo was appointed to fill the post (although this was only a nominal position to provide financial support for Galileo). Not only did he receive strong recommendations from Clavius, but he also had acquired an excellent reputation through his lectures at the Florence Academy in the previous year. The young mathematician had rapidly acquired the reputation that was necessary to gain such a position, but there were still higher positions at which he might aim. Galileo spent three years holding this post at the university of Pisa and during this time he wrote De Motu a series of essays on the theory of motion which he never published. It is likely that he never published this material because he was less than satisfied with it, and this is fair for despite containing some important steps forward, it also contained some incorrect ideas. Perhaps the most important new ideas which De Motu contains is that one can test theories by conducting experiments. In particular the work contains his important idea that one could test theories about falling bodies using an inclined plane to slow down the rate of descent.
In 1591 Vincenzo Galilei, Galileo's father, died and since Galileo was the eldest son he had to provide financial support for the rest of the family and in particular have the necessary financial means to provide dowries for his two younger sisters. Being professor of mathematics at Pisa was not well paid, so Galileo looked for a more lucrative post. With strong recommendations from Guidobaldo del Monte, Galileo was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Padua (the university of the Republic of Venice) in 1592 at a salary of three times what he had received at Pisa. On 7 December 1592 he gave his inaugural lecture and began a period of eighteen years at the university, years which he later described as the happiest of his life. At Padua his duties were mainly to teach Euclid's geometry and standard (geocentric) astronomy to medical students, who would need to know some astronomy in order to make use of astrology in their medical practice. However, Galileo argued against Aristotle's view of astronomy and natural philosophy in three public lectures he gave in connection with the appearance of a New Star (now known as 'Kepler's supernova') in The belief at this time was that of Aristotle, namely that all changes in the heavens had to occur in the lunar region close to the Earth, the realm of the fixed stars being permanent. Galileo used parallax arguments to prove that the New Star could not be close to the Earth. In a personal letter written to Kepler in 1598, Galileo had stated that he was a Copernican (believer in the theories of Copernicus). However, no public sign of this belief was to appear until many years later.
At Padua, Galileo began a long term relationship with Maria Gamba, who was from Venice, but they did not marry perhaps because Galileo felt his financial situation was not good enough. In 1600 their first child Virginia was born, followed by a second daughter Livia in the following year. In 1606 their son Vincenzo was born.
We mentioned above an error in Galileo's theory of motion as he set it out in De Motu around He was quite mistaken in his belief that the force acting on a body was the relative difference between its specific gravity and that of the substance through which it moved. Galileo wrote to his friend Paolo Sarpi, a fine mathematician who was consultor to the Venetian government, in 1604 and it is clear from his letter that by this time he had realised his mistake. In fact he had returned to work on the theory of motion in 1602 and over the following two years, through his study of inclined planes and the pendulum, he had formulated the correct law of falling bodies and had worked out that a projectile follows a parabolic path. However, these famous results would not be published for another 35 years.
In May 1609, Galileo received a letter from Paolo Sarpi telling him about a spyglass that a Dutchman had shown in Venice. Galileo wrote in the Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius) in April 1610:-
About ten months ago a report reached my ears that a certain Fleming had constructed a spyglass by means of which visible objects, though very distant from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen as if nearby. Of this truly remarkable effect several experiences were related, to which some persons believed while other denied them. A few days later the report was confirmed by a letter I received from a Frenchman in Paris, Jacques Badovere, which caused me to apply myself wholeheartedly to investigate means by which I might arrive at the invention of a similar instrument. This I did soon afterwards, my basis being the doctrine of refraction.
From these reports, and using his own technical skills as a mathematician and as a craftsman, Galileo began to make a series of telescopes whose optical performance was much better than that of the Dutch instrument. His first telescope was made from available lenses and gave a magnification of about four times. To improve on this Galileo learned how to grind and polish his own lenses and by August 1609 he had an instrument with a magnification of around eight or nine. Galileo immediately saw the commercial and military applications of his telescope (which he called a perspicillum) for ships at sea. He kept Sarpi informed of his progress and Sarpi arranged a demonstration for the Venetian Senate. They were very impressed and, in return for a large increase in his salary, Galileo gave the sole rights for the manufacture of telescopes to the Venetian Senate. It seems a particularly good move on his part since he must have known that such rights were meaningless, particularly since he always acknowledged that the telescope was not his invention!
By the end of 1609 Galileo had turned his telescope on the night sky and began to make remarkable discoveries. Swerdlow writes (see [16]):-
In about two months, December and January, he made more discoveries that changed the world than anyone has ever made before or since.
The astronomical discoveries he made with his telescopes were described in a short book called the Starry Messenger published in Venice in May This work caused a sensation. Galileo claimed to have seen mountains on the Moon, to have proved the Milky Way was made up of tiny stars, and to have seen four small bodies orbiting Jupiter. These last, with an eye to getting a position in Florence, he quickly named 'the Medicean stars'. He had also sent Cosimo de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, an excellent telescope for himself.
The Venetian Senate, perhaps realising that the rights to manufacture telescopes that Galileo had given them were worthless, froze his salary. However he had succeeded in impressing Cosimo and, in June 1610, only a month after his famous little book was published, Galileo resigned his post at Padua and became Chief Mathematician at the University of Pisa (without any teaching duties) and 'Mathematician and Philosopher' to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In 1611 he visited Rome where he was treated as a leading celebrity; the Collegio Romano put on a grand dinner with speeches to honour Galileo's remarkable discoveries. He was also made a member of the Accademia dei Lincei (in fact the sixth member) and this was an honour which was especially important to Galileo who signed himself 'Galileo Galilei Linceo' from this time on.
While in Rome, and after his return to Florence, Galileo continued to make observations with his telescope. Already in the Starry Messenger he had given rough periods of the four moons of Jupiter, but more precise calculations were certainly not easy since it was difficult to identify from an observation which moon was I, which was II, which III, and which IV. He made a long series of observations and was able to give accurate periods by At one stage in the calculations he became very puzzled since the data he had recorded seemed inconsistent, but he had forgotten to take into account the motion of the Earth round the sun.
Galileo first turned his telescope on Saturn on 25 July 1610 and it appeared as three bodies (his telescope was not good enough to show the rings but made them appear as lobes on either side of the planet). Continued observations were puzzling indeed to Galileo as the bodies on either side of Saturn vanished when the ring system was edge on. Also in 1610 he discovered that, when seen in the telescope, the planet Venus showed phases like those of the Moon, and therefore must orbit the Sun not the Earth. This did not enable one to decide between the Copernican system, in which everything goes round the Sun, and that proposed by Tycho Brahe in which everything but the Earth (and Moon) goes round the Sun which in turn goes round the Earth. Most astronomers of the time in fact favoured Brahe's system and indeed distinguishing between the two by experiment was beyond the instruments of the day. However, Galileo knew that all his discoveries were evidence for Copernicanism, although not a proof. In fact it was his theory of falling bodies which was the most significant in this respect, for opponents of a moving Earth argued that if the Earth rotated and a body was dropped from a tower it should fall behind the tower as the Earth rotated while it fell. Since this was not observed in practice this was taken as strong evidence that the Earth was stationary. However Galileo already knew that a body would fall in the observed manner on a rotating Earth.
Other observations made by Galileo included the observation of sunspots. He reported these in Discourse on floating bodies which he published in 1612 and more fully in Letters on the sunspots which appeared in In the following year his two daughters entered the Franciscan Convent of St Matthew outside Florence, Virginia taking the name Sister Maria Celeste and Livia the name Sister Arcangela. Since they had been born outside of marriage, Galileo believed that they themselves should never marry. Although Galileo put forward many revolutionary correct theories, he was not correct in all cases. In particular when three comets appeared in 1618 he became involved in a controversy regarding the nature of comets. He argued that they were close to the Earth and caused by optical refraction. A serious consequence of this unfortunate argument was that the Jesuits began to see Galileo as a dangerous opponent.
Despite his private support for Copernicanism, Galileo tried to avoid controversy by not making public statements on the issue. However he was drawn into the controversy through Castelli who had been appointed to the chair of mathematics in Pisa in Castelli had been a student of Galileo's and he was also a supporter of Copernicus. At a meeting in the Medici palace in Florence in December 1613 with the Grand Duke Cosimo II and his mother the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, Castelli was asked to explain the apparent contradictions between the Copernican theory and Holy Scripture. Castelli defended the Copernican position vigorously and wrote to Galileo afterwards telling him how successful he had been in putting the arguments. Galileo, less convinced that Castelli had won the argument, wrote Letter to Castelli to him arguing that the Bible had to be interpreted in the light of what science had shown to be true. Galileo had several opponents in Florence and they made sure that a copy of the Letter to Castelli was sent to the Inquisition in Rome. However, after examining its contents they found little to which they could object.
The Catholic Church's most important figure at this time in dealing with interpretations of the Holy Scripture was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. He seems at this time to have seen little reason for the Church to be concerned regarding the Copernican theory. The point at issue was whether Copernicus had simply put forward a mathematical theory which enabled the calculation of the positions of the heavenly bodies to be made more simply or whether he was proposing a physical reality. At this time Bellarmine viewed the theory as an elegant mathematical one which did not threaten the established Christian belief regarding the structure of the universe.
In 1616 Galileo wrote the Letter to the Grand Duchess which vigorously attacked the followers of Aristotle. In this work, which he addressed to the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, he argued strongly for a non-literal interpretation of Holy Scripture when the literal interpretation would contradict facts about the physical world proved by mathematical science. In this Galileo stated quite clearly that for him the Copernican theory is not just a mathematical calculating tool, but is a physical reality:-
I hold that the Sun is located at the centre of the revolutions of the heavenly orbs and does not change place, and that the Earth rotates on itself and moves around it. Moreover ... I confirm this view not only by refuting Ptolemy's and Aristotle's arguments, but also by producing many for the other side, especially some pertaining to physical effects whose causes perhaps cannot be determined in any other way, and other astronomical discoveries; these discoveries clearly confute the Ptolemaic system, and they agree admirably with this other position and confirm it.
Pope Paul V ordered Bellarmine to have the Sacred Congregation of the Index decide on the Copernican theory. The cardinals of the Inquisition met on 24 February 1616 and took evidence from theological experts. They condemned the teachings of Copernicus, and Bellarmine conveyed their decision to Galileo who had not been personally involved in the trial. Galileo was forbidden to hold Copernican views but later events made him less concerned about this decision of the Inquisition. Most importantly Maffeo Barberini, who was an admirer of Galileo, was elected as Pope Urban VIII. This happened just as Galileo's book Il saggiatore (The Assayer) was about to be published by the Accademia dei Lincei in 1623 and Galileo was quick to dedicate this work to the new Pope. The work described Galileo's new scientific method and contains a famous quote regarding mathematics:-
Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.
Pope Urban VIII invited Galileo to papal audiences on six occasions and led Galileo to believe that the Catholic Church would not make an issue of the Copernican theory. Galileo, therefore, decided to publish his views believing that he could do so without serious consequences from the Church. However by this stage in his life Galileo's health was poor with frequent bouts of severe illness and so even though he began to write his famous Dialogue in 1624 it took him six years to complete the work.
Galileo attempted to obtain permission from Rome to publish the Dialogue in 1630 but this did not prove easy. Eventually he received permission from Florence, and not Rome. In February 1632 Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican. It takes the form of a dialogue between Salviati, who argues for the Copernican system, and Simplicio who is an Aristotelian philosopher. The climax of the book is an argument by Salviati that the Earth moves which was based on Galileo's theory of the tides. Galileo's theory of the tides was entirely false despite being postulated after Kepler had already put forward the correct explanation. It was unfortunate, given the remarkable truths the Dialogue supported, that the argument which Galileo thought to give the strongest proof of Copernicus's theory should be incorrect.
Shortly after publication of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican the Inquisition banned its sale and ordered Galileo to appear in Rome before them. Illness prevented him from travelling to Rome until Galileo's accusation at the trial which followed was that he had breached the conditions laid down by the Inquisition in However a different version of this decision was produced at the trial rather than the one Galileo had been given at the time. The truth of the Copernican theory was not an issue therefore; it was taken as a fact at the trial that this theory was false. This was logical, of course, since the judgement of 1616 had declared it totally false.
Found guilty, Galileo was condemned to lifelong imprisonment, but the sentence was carried out somewhat sympathetically and it amounted to house arrest rather than a prison sentence. He was able to live first with the Archbishop of Siena, then later to return to his home in Arcetri, near Florence, but had to spend the rest of his life watched over by officers from the Inquisition. In 1634 he suffered a severe blow when his daughter Virginia, Sister Maria Celeste, died. She had been a great support to her father through his illnesses and Galileo was shattered and could not work for many months. When he did manage to restart work, he began to write Discourses and mathematical demonstrations concerning the two new sciences.
After Galileo had completed work on the Discourses it was smuggled out of Italy, and taken to Leyden in Holland where it was published. It was his most rigorous mathematical work which treated problems on impetus, moments, and centres of gravity. Much of this work went back to the unpublished ideas in De Motu from around 1590 and the improvements which he had worked out during In the Discourses he developed his ideas of the inclined plane writing:-
I assume that the speed acquired by the same movable object over different inclinations of the plane are equal whenever the heights of those planes are equal.
He then described an experiment using a pendulum to verify his property of inclined planes and used these ideas to give a theorem on acceleration of bodies in free fall:-
The time in which a certain distance is traversed by an object moving under uniform acceleration from rest is equal to the time in which the same distance would be traversed by the same movable object moving at a uniform speed of one half the maximum and final speed of the previous uniformly accelerated motion.
After giving further results of this type he gives his famous result that the distance that a body moves from rest under uniform acceleration is proportional to the square of the time taken.
One would expect that Galileo's understanding of the pendulum, which he had since he was a young man, would have led him to design a pendulum clock. In fact he only seems to have thought of this possibility near the end of his life and around 1640 he did design the first pendulum clock. Galileo died in early 1642 but the significance of his clock design was certainly realised by his son Vincenzo who tried to make a clock to Galileo's plan, but failed.
It was a sad end for so great a man to die condemned of heresy. His will indicated that he wished to be buried beside his father in the family tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce but his relatives feared, quite rightly, that this would provoke opposition from the Church. His body was concealed and only placed in a fine tomb in the church in 1737 by the civil authorities against the wishes of many in the Church. On 31 October 1992, 350 years after Galileo's death, Pope John Paul II gave an address on behalf of the Catholic Church in which he admitted that errors had been made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the Galileo case closed, but he did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo on a charge of heresy because of his belief that the Earth rotates round the sun.
René Descartes
Born: 31 March 1596 in La Haye (now Descartes),Touraine, France Died: 11 Feb 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden
René Descartes was a philosopher whose work, La géométrie, includes his application of algebra to geometry from which we now have Cartesian geometry.
Descartes was educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche in Anjou. He entered the college at the age of eight years, just a few months after the opening of the college in January He studied there until 1612, studying classics, logic and traditional Aristotelian philosophy. He also learnt mathematics from the books of Clavius. While in the school his health was poor and he was granted permission to remain in bed until 11 o'clock in the morning, a custom he maintained until the year of his death.
School had made Descartes understand how little he knew, the only subject which was satisfactory in his eyes was mathematics. This idea became the foundation for his way of thinking, and was to form the basis for all his works.
Descartes spent a while in Paris, apparently keeping very much to himself, then he studied at the University of Poitiers. He received a law degree from Poitiers in 1616 then enlisted in the military school at Breda. In 1618 he started studying mathematics and mechanics under the Dutch scientist Isaac Beeckman, and began to seek a unified science of nature. After two years in Holland he travelled through Europe. Then in 1619 he joined the Bavarian army.
From 1620 to 1628 Descartes travelled through Europe, spending time in Bohemia (1620), Hungary (1621), Germany, Holland and France ( ). He spent time in 1623 in Paris where he made contact with Mersenne, an important contact which kept him in touch with the scientific world for many years. From Paris he travelled to Italy where he spent some time in Venice, then he returned to France again (1625).
By 1628 Descartes tired of the continual travelling and decided to settle down. He gave much thought to choosing a country suited to his nature and chose Holland. It was a good decision which he did not seem to regret over the next twenty years.
Soon after he settled in Holland Descartes began work on his first major treatise on physics, Le Monde, ou Traité de la Lumière. This work was near completion when news that Galileo was condemned to house arrest reached him. He, perhaps wisely, decided not to risk publication and the work was published, only in part, after his death. He explained later his change of direction saying:-
... in order to express my judgement more freely, without being called upon to assent to, or to refute the opinions of the learned, I resolved to leave all this world to them and to speak solely of what would happen in a new world, if God were now to create ... and allow her to act in accordance with the laws He had established.
In Holland Descartes had a number of scientific friends as well as continued contact with Mersenne. His friendship with Beeckman continued and he also had contact with Mydorge, Hortensius, Huygens and Frans van Schooten (the elder).
Descartes was pressed by his friends to publish his ideas and, although he was adamant in not publishing Le Monde, he wrote a treatise on science under the title Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences. Three appendices to this work were La Dioptrique, Les Météores, and La Géométrie. The treatise was published at Leiden in 1637 and Descartes wrote to Mersenne saying:-
I have tried in my Dioptrique and my Météores to show that my Méthode is better than the vulgar, and in my Géométrie to have demonstrated it.
The work describes what Descartes considers is a more satisfactory means of acquiring knowledge than that presented by Aristotle's logic. Only mathematics, Descartes feels, is certain, so all must be based on mathematics.
La Dioptrique is a work on optics and, although Descartes does not cite previous scientists for the ideas he puts forward, in fact there is little new. However his approach through experiment was an important contribution.
Les Météores is a work on meteorology and is important in being the first work which attempts to put the study of weather on a scientific basis. However many of Descartes' claims are not only wrong but could have easily been seen to be wrong if he had done some easy experiments. For example Roger Bacon had demonstrated the error in the commonly held belief that water which has been boiled freezes more quickly. However Descartes claims:-
... and we see by experience that water which has been kept on a fire for some time freezes more quickly than otherwise, the reason being that those of its parts which can be most easily folded and bent are driven off during the heating, leaving only those which are rigid.
Despite its many faults, the subject of meteorology was set on course after publication of Les Météores particularly through the work of Boyle, Hooke and Halley.
La Géométrie is by far the most important part of this work. In [17] Scott summarises the importance of this work in four points:-
He makes the first step towards a theory of invariants, which at later stages derelativises the system of reference and removes arbitrariness.
Algebra makes it possible to recognise the typical problems in geometry and to bring together problems which in geometrical dress would not appear to be related at all.
Algebra imports into geometry the most natural principles of division and the most natural hierarchy of method.
Not only can questions of solvability and geometrical possibility be decided elegantly, quickly and fully from the parallel algebra, without it they cannot be decided at all.
Some ideas in La Géométrie may have come from earlier work of Oresme but in Oresme's work there is no evidence of linking algebra and geometry. Wallis in Algebra (1685) strongly argues the the ideas of La Géométrie were copied from Harriot. Wallis writes:- ... the Praxis was read by Descartes, and every line of Descartes' analysis bears token of the impression.
There seems little to justify Wallis's claim, which was probably made partly through partiotism but also through his just desires to give Harriot more credit for his work. Harriot's work on equations, however, may indeed have influenced Descartes who always claimed, clearly falsely, that nothing in his work was influenced by the work of others.
Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, was published in 1641, designed for the philosopher and for the theologian. It consists of six meditations, Of the Things that we may doubt, Of the Nature of the Human Mind, Of God: that He exists, Of Truth and Error, Of the Essence of Material Things, Of the Existence of Material Things and of the Real Distinction between the Mind and the Body of Man. However many scientists were opposed to Descartes' ideas including Arnauld, Hobbes and Gassendi.
The most comprehensive of Descartes' works, Principia Philosophiae was published in Amsterdam in In four parts, The Principles of Human Knowledge, The Principles of Material Things, Of the Visible World and The Earth, it attempts to put the whole universe on a mathematical foundation reducing the study to one of mechanics.
This is an important point of view and was to point the way forward. Descartes did not believe in action at a distance. Therefore, given this, there could be no vacuum around the Earth otherwise there was way that forces could be transferred. In many ways Descartes's theory, where forces work through contact, is more satisfactory than the mysterious effect of gravity acting at a distance.
However Descartes' mechanics leaves much to be desired. He assumes that the universe is filled with matter which, due to some initial motion, has settled down into a system of vortices which carry the sun, the stars, the planets and comets in their paths. Despite the problems with the vortex theory it was championed in France for nearly one hundred years even after Newton showed it was impossible as a dynamical system. As Brewster, one of Newton's 19th century biographers, puts it:-
Thus entrenched as the Cartesian system was ... it was not to be wondered at that the pure and sublime doctrines of the Principia were distrustfully received ... The uninstructed mind could not readily admit the idea that the great masses of the planets were suspended in empty space, and retained their orbits by an invisible influence...
Pleasing as Descartes's theory was even the supporters of his natural philosophy, such as the Cambridge metaphysical theologian Henry More, found objections. Certainly More admired Descartes, writing:-
I should look upon Des-Cartes as a man most truly inspired in the knowledge of Nature, than any that have professed themselves so these sixteen hundred years...
However between 1648 and 1649 they exchanged a number of letters in which More made some telling objections, Descartes however in his replies making no concessions to More's points. More went on to ask:-
Why are not your vortices in the form of columns or cylinders rather than ellipses, since any point of the axis of a vortex is as it were a centre from which the celestial matter recedes with, as far as I can see, a wholly constant impetus? ... Who causes all the planets not to revolve in one plane (the plane of the ecliptic)? ... And the Moon itself, neither in the plane of the Earth's equator nor in a plane parallel to this?
In 1644, the year his Meditations were published, Descartes visited France. He returned again in 1647, when he met Pascal and argued with him that a vacuum could not exist, and then again in 1648.
In 1649 Queen Christina of Sweden persuaded Descartes to go to Stockholm. However the Queen wanted to draw tangents at 5 a.m. and Descartes broke the habit of his lifetime of getting up at 11 o'clock. After only a few months in the cold northern climate, walking to the palace for 5 o'clock every morning, he died of pneumonia.
Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
Born: 5 April 1588 in Westport, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England Died: 4 Dec 1679 in Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, England
Thomas Hobbes's father, also named Thomas Hobbes, was the vicar of Charlton and Westport, close to Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Thomas Hobbes senior was described by Aubrey in [13] as:-
... one of the ignorant Sir Johns of Queen Elizabeth's time; could only read the prayers of the church and the homilies; and valued not learning, as not knowing the sweetness of it.
Thomas Hobbes senior had an older brother, Francis Hobbes, who was a wealthy merchant with no family of his own. Thomas Hobbes, the subject of this biography, had one brother Edmund who was about two years older than he him. Thomas began his schooling in Westport Church when he was four years old. However, when he was seven years old, his father had an argument with another vicar at the door of his church. Blows were exchanged and Hobbes' father ran off. It is unclear what role his mother played in his upbringing after that, but he was certainly brought up by his uncle Francis after this.
From age eight Hobbes, who was by this time proficient at reading and arithmetic, attended Mr Evan's school in Malmesbury, then later Robert Latimer's private school in Westport. Hobbes showed his brilliance at this school and was an outstanding Greek and Latin scholar by the time he left this school at age fourteen, having already translated Euripides' Medea from Greek into Latin iambics. Aubrey in [13] tells us that as a young boy Hobbes was sometimes playful, but also sometimes withdrawn and melancholy. Often at school [13]:-
... he would get himself into a corner, and learn his lesson by heart.
After leaving Robert Latimer's school, he entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford in 1603 where he continued to be supported financially by his uncle Francis. At that time the teaching at Oxford was dominated by a study of Aristotle and Hobbes soon found that his opinions differed sharply from what was being taught [13]:-
He did not much care for logic, yet he learned it, and thought himself a good disputant. He took great delight there to go to the bookbinders' shops and lie gaping on maps.
He graduated with a B.A. in 1608 and on the recommendation of Sir James Hussey, Principal of Magdalen Hall, he became the tutor of William Cavendish, later the Second Earl of Devonshire. For around two years Hobbes did little in the way of academic studies, being more of a companion to Cavendish who was only a little younger that he was. In 1610 Hobbes went with Cavendish on a European tour and they visited France, Germany, and Italy. He learnt French and Italian on this trip, but more importantly, it reinvigorated his desire for learning and he decided that he would pursue a study of classics. On his return Hobbes took up studying Greek and Latin again. He had progressed from being a tutor to Cavendish to being his secretary and having few duties he had plenty of time to devote to his studies.
In 1626, on the death of his father, William Cavendish inherited the title the Earl of Devonshire, but two years later William died and Hobbes lost a friend as well as his secretarial post. William Cavendish's son was only eleven years old and Hobbes' services were no longer required by the Cavendish family at this time.
Hobbes was tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clinton of Nottinghamshire, from 1628 to During this period, in 1629, he published his translation of Thucydides which he had been working on for several years. So far we have not mentioned any interest by Hobbes in mathematics, and perhaps even more surprisingly no particular interest in philosophy. In fact Hobbes was about forty years old before he became fascinated by mathematics. Although Aubrey's description of Hobbes encountering mathematics for the first time is, like so much of Aubrey, rather overdone, nevertheless his description in [13] is well worth recording:-
He was forty years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the forty-seventh proposition in the first book. He read the proposition. 'By God,' said he, 'this is impossible!' So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proof; which referred him back to another, which he also read. ... at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry.
He undertook a second trip to the continent from 1629 to 1631 with his new pupil. In 1631 the Cavendish family requested his services again and he returned from Paris to become tutor to the third Earl of Devonshire, a position he held from 1631 to During this time he again visited the continent, being there from 1634 to On the continent he met Galileo, Mersenne, Gassendi and Roberval and became enthusiastic about the mechanical universe and began building his philosophical position relating everything to motion. In fact his views at this time appeared to be very much in line with the latest scientific ideas of the period. Back in England in 1637 Hobbes worked on The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic which was not published at the time. He described his mechanistic approach to perception in this work as follows:-
Whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they be not there, but are seemings and apparitions only; the things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which these seemings are caused.
When the Civil War began in 1640 Hobbes feared for his life, especially as he was a well known Royalist, and he fled to save his life. He lived in Paris from 1640 where again he made contact with Mersenne's circle of scholars. There he wrote his objections to Descartes' Meditations and he published De Cive (Concerning Citizenship) in 1642 which contained his ideas on the relation between the church and the state. After this he worked on optics, which was one of his favourite topics. Malet [28] writes:-
Hobbes's theory of optical images [was] developed in his optical magnum opus "A minute of first draught of the optiques" (1646) and published in abridged version in "De homine" (1658). ... Hobbes's theory of vision and images serves him to ground his philosophy of man on his philosophy of body. Furthermore, since this part of Hobbes's work on optics is the most thoroughly geometrical, it reveals a good deal about the role of mathematics in Hobbes's philosophy.
Hobbes published a new expanded edition of De Cive in 1647, then three years later, in 1650, his earlier work The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic was published without his permission. It appeared in two parts as Humane Nature (Human nature) and De Corpore Politico (Of the body politic).
Hobbes was the mathematics tutor of the Prince of Wales between 1646 and He remained on the continent until 1651, the year his most famous work Leviathan was published then, late in that year, he returned to England. In fact he was now in some difficulties with all sides of the political spectrum. In England the Royalists, with Charles I dead, seemed to have lost their struggle for power. Passages near the end of the Leviathan appeared to indicate that Hobbes was trying to make his peace with the English government, which angered the Royalists. In fact in these passages Hobbes was remaining consistent with his view that one showed allegiance to a ruler only so long as that ruler could provide protection. Hobbes had also attacked the Roman Catholic Church which made his position in Paris pretty untenable.
Hobbes' masterpiece Leviathan set out his ideas with great clarity. He argued that people want to live in peace and security and to attain this they must organise themselves into communities for protection. Since there will always be some in the community who cannot be trusted, people must set up a government with their authority to make and enforce laws necessary to protect the community. It is, Hobbes argues, the rational way for people to behave so moral behaviour is rational. Although Hobbes was himself a Christian, these arguments were seen as many as removing the need for God as the giver of moral code, for Hobbes argues that it follows by reason alone. Another aspect of the work which caused many to attack it was Hobbes' vitriolic arguments against the university system.
Before this Hobbes had been seen by many as promoting a mechanistic scientific approach which was much in tune with those who would form the Royal Society. Indeed he had argued that since what we know and understand only comes through our senses and all objects that our senses can detect are material, we can only view the world in a material way. He promoted an approach through language and mathematics to analyse experience which he claimed would lead to a complete mechanistic understanding of the world. The certainty of mathematics would lead to correct and indisputable conclusions about society and about man. His argument that all was material was seen as denying the existence of the immaterialistic soul and intellect. Seth Ward, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, wrote:-
... he hath much injured the mathematics, and the very name of demonstration, by bestowing upon it some of his discourses, which are exceedingly short of that evidence and truth which is required to make a discourse able to bear that reputation.
At this stage, however, although Hobbes had published little in the way of mathematics, he certainly was considered by some as a leading mathematician on a par with Roberval and Fermat.
In 1655 Hobbes published De Corpore (On the Body) which, was one part of his trilogy of philosophy. He had already published De Cive (1642) and the third part, De Homine (On man), would appear in De Corpore contained a large amount of mathematical material; in fact Chapters 12 to 20 are devoted entirely to the topic. Hobbes saw mathematics as an essential part of knowledge, but he also saw his own materialistic approach as revolutionising the subject and he set out to reform mathematics in this work. His approach is certainly consistently materialistic, denying abstract ideas; for Hobbes mathematics is the study of quantity, and quantities are the measures of 3-dimensional bodies. His definition of a point in De Corpore (which totally differs from that of Euclid) is as follows:-
If the magnitude of a body which is moved (although it must always have some) is considered to be none, the path by which it travels is called a line, and the space it travels along a length, and the body itself is called a point. This is the sense in which the earth is usually called a point and the path of its annual revolution the ecliptic line.
Lines, therefore, are the paths of moving points, surfaces are the paths of moving lines, volumes are the result of moving surfaces. He then proceeded to study ratios and angles, then acceleration, projectiles and the ideas of Galileo followed by a study of indivisibles and the ideas of Cavalieri, the rectification of the spiral, and finally squaring the circle. It is fair to say that much of Hobbes' mathematical ideas are generalised from Galileo's study of mechanics and of motion. The new method of indivisibles, as put forward by Cavalieri, was accepted by Hobbes but he rejected Wallis's version as given in Arithmetica infinitorum.
Jesseph writes of Hobbes' attempt to square the circle [5]:-
... it is clear that he hoped to assert preeminence in the learned world largely on the basis of the solution of the problem of squaring the circle.
Hobbes had originally planned De Corpore without this result and, having added it late on, it did not really fit with the material surrounding it. Before De Corpore reached completion, however, Hobbes' friends pointed out an error in his squaring the circle argument. Hobbes did not remove the "proof" but renamed it "From a false hypothesis, a false quadrature". He then added a second proof which he quickly changed to only claim it was "an approximate quadrature". Finally he attempted a third exact proof but when the book was being printed he realised that it too, of course, was wrong. He had to leave the incorrect claim but added at the end of the chapter:-
... the reader should take those things that are said to be found exactly of the dimension of the circle ... as instead said problematically.
This was a phrase that Wallis would pour scorn on when he attacked Hobbes' ideas. Although Hobbes did not believe that the "proofs" in De Corpore proved the result, he would go on to publish several "proofs" of squaring the circle over the next 25 years which he did believe to be correct.
Wallis attacked the whole of Hobbes' mathematical work of De Corpore and a vigorous argument between the two arose which lasted for 25 years. To Hobbes mathematics was geometry and only geometry, and Wallis's Algebra he described as:-
... a scab of symbols [which disfigured the page] as if a hen had been scraping there.
Hobbes claimed that the algebraic symbols could denote different things such as lines, surfaces or volumes, and therefore were unreliable in mathematical proofs. Hobbes responded to the attack by Wallis and others of De Corpore by publishing Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics in the University of Oxford in 1656.
In 1660 Hobbes attacked the 'new' methods of mathematical analysis. In Dialogus Physicus, sive de Natura Aeris (1661) he attacked Boyle and those setting up the Royal Society which, as a matter of interest, never elected Hobbes as a Fellow (it is probably that since he was perceived as an atheist entry would have been impossible). Wallis replied with telling mathematical arguments, but also with unfair charges of disloyalty. Hobbes ended the argument about disloyalty with Mr. Hobbes Considered in His Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners (1662). Hobbes could win arguments when his morality was attacked, but when it came to mathematics Wallis had a clear upper hand understanding mathematics far more deeply than Hobbes.
Over the years Hobbes attempted to solve a number of outstanding mathematical problems. Jesseph, in [22], studies:-
... Hobbes's attempts to resolve three important mathematical controversies of the seventeenth century: the debates over the status of analytic geometry, disputes over the nature of ratios, and the problem of the 'angle of contact' between a curve and tangent.
Although Hobbes is highly regarded as a philosopher, his mathematics has been essentially laughed at. However some have seen more in it than just errors. De Morgan wrote that Hobbes:-
... was not the ignoramus in geometry that he is sometimes supposed. His writings, erroneous as they are in many things, contain acute remarks on points of principle.
Grant, in [21], evaluates Hobbes' mathematical contributions and concludes that he was:-
... an amateur of mathematics in the original and best sense of the word, and through his role as a minor stimulant of others' success he merits a modest place in its annals.
Hobbes defended his mathematical works to the end of his life. His errors were demonstrated so clearly that by 1670 essentially everyone considered him a mathematical illiterate, yet still he wrote articles in his defence even though it is doubtful whether anyone continued to read them. Let us end with the summary of what Hobbes believed that he had achieved in mathematics, written near the end of his life. Hobbes writes about himself in the third person (see for example [5]):-
In mathematics, he corrected some principles of geometry. he solved some most difficult problems, which had been sought in vain by the diligent scrutiny of the greatest geometers since the very beginnings of geometry; namely these:
To exhibit a line equal to the arc of a circle, and a square equal to the area of a circle, and this by various methods.
To divide an angle in a given ratio.
To find the ratio of a cube to a sphere.
To find any number of mean proportionals between two given lines.
To describe a regular polygon with any number of sides.
To find the centre of gravity of the quadrant of a circle.
To find the centres of gravity of all types of parabolas.
He was the first to construct and demonstrate these, and many other things besides, which (because they will appear in his writings are less important) I pass over.
He was 91 years of age when he died, a remarkable age for someone in that period. At age 87 he completed translating the Iliad and the Odyssey into English verse and left London, where he had lived for many years, and spent his final years with the Cavendish family with whom he had been so closely connected throughout his life. At age 91, shortly before his death, he was working on yet another book on squaring the circle. The dedication contains the sentence:-
And so, after I had given sufficient attention to the problem by different methods, which were not understood by the professors of geometry, I added this newest one.
His final words are reported to have been:-
I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
Let us end this biography with a final thought. If Hobbes' mathematics was worthless why has so much effort been expounded on it even in the last few years (as the references show). There is no doubt that Hobbes' mathematics is wrong, but strangely, that does not seem to make it worthless! As a philosopher he was a leading figure, having a major influence on political thought.
Copernicus
Galileo
Descartes
Hobbes

8. The Arts in the Baroque Period
The principal artistic style of the seventeenth century was the baroque, a term originally used for the visual arts but also applied by extension to the other arts of the period. Although the Baroque style was created in Italy, it spread quickly throughout Europe and was even carried to the New World by missionaries.

9. Common Features of the Arts of the Baroque Period
Baroque art is marked by a wide range of achievements, but there are a number of common features. Artists in the seventeenth century were concerned to express strong emotions, either religious or personal. This in turn led to an interest in exploring human behavior from a psychological point of view. With the new subjects came new techniques, many of them emphasizing the virtuosity of the artist. These in turn led to the invention of new forms: in music that of opera, in painting that of landscape scenes, to take only two examples

10. Baroque Painting
The chief characteristics of baroque painting were created in Rome around 1600 by two artists. Caravaggio's work is emotional and dominated by strong contrasts of light and darkness. Annibale Carracci painted scenes of movement and splendor, many on classical themes. Both strongly influenced their contemporaries and successors. Caravaggio's use of light was the forerunner of the work of artists as diverse as the Spaniard Vel·zquez and the Dutchman Vermeer, while Carracci's choice of classical subjects was followed by the French Poussin. The two greatest painters of northern Europe, Rembrandt and Rubens, were also influenced by the ideas of their day. Rembrandt used strong contrasts of light and dark to paint deeply felt religious scenes as well as the self-portraits that explore his own inner emotions. Rubens, one of the most versatile of artists, ranged from mythological subjects to historical paintings like the Marie de' Medici cycle to intimate personal portraits.

11. Painting in Rome: Caravaggio – dark contrasts
The Fortune Teller Oil on canvas
The Taking of Christ c Oil on canvas
St. John the Baptist
(Youth with Ram) c Oil on canvas
Caravaggio
Biography
Caravaggio, byname of Michelangelo Merisi, Italian painter whose revolutionary technique of tenebrism, or dramatic, selective illumination of form out of deep shadow, became a hallmark of Baroque painting. Scorning the traditional idealized interpretation of religious subjects, he took his models from the streets and painted them realistically. His three paintings of St Matthew (c ) caused a sensation and were followed by such masterpieces as The Supper at Emmaus ( ) and Death of the Virgin ( ).
Early life
Caravaggio was the son of Fermo Merisi, steward and architect of the Marquis of Caravaggio. Orphaned at age 11, Caravaggio was apprenticed in the same year to the painter Simone Peterzano of Milan.
At some time between 1588 and 1592, Caravaggio went to Rome. He was already in possession of the fundamental technical skills of painting and had acquired, with characteristic eagerness, a thorough understanding of the approach of the Lombard and Venetian painters, who, opposed to idealized Florentine painting, had developed a style that was nearer to representing nature and events. Caravaggio arrived in Rome and settled into the cosmopolitan society of the Campo Marzio. This decaying neighbourhood of inns, eating houses, temporary shelter, and little picture shops in which Caravaggio came to live suited his circumstances and his temperament. He was virtually without means, and his inclinations were always toward anarchy and against tradition.
These first five years were an anguishing period of instability and humiliation. According to his biographers, Caravaggio was "needy and stripped of everything" and moved from one unsatisfactory employment to another, working as an assistant to painters of much smaller talent. He earned his living for the most part with hackwork and never stayed more than a few months at any studio. Finally, probably in 1595, he decided to set out on his own and began to sell his pictures through a dealer, a certain Maestro Valentino, who brought Caravaggio's work to the attention of Cardinal Francesco del Monte, a prelate of great influence in the papal court. Caravaggio soon came under the protection of Del Monte and was invited to receive board, lodging, and a pension in the house of the cardinal.
Despite spiritual and material deprivations, Caravaggio had painted up to the beginning of Del Monte's patronage about 40 works. The subjects of this period are mostly adolescent boys, as in Boy with a Fruit Basket (1593; Borghese Gallery, Rome), The Young Bacchus (1593; Uffizi Gallery, Florence), and The Music Party (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). These early pictures reveal a fresh, direct, and empirical approach; they were apparently painted directly from life and show almost no trace of the academic Mannerism then prevailing in Rome. The felicitous tone and confident craftsmanship of these early works stand in sharp contrast to the daily quality of Caravaggio's disorderly and dissipated life. In Basket of Fruit (1596; Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan) the fruits, painted with brilliance and vivid realism, are handsomely disposed in a straw basket and form a striking composition in their visual apposition.
Major Roman commissions
With these works realism won its battle with Mannerism, but it is in the cycle of the life of St Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel that Caravaggio's realistic naturalism first fully appears. Probably through the agency of Del Monte, Caravaggio obtained, in 1597, the commission for the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. This commission established him, at the age of 24, as a pictor celeberrimus, a "renowned painter," with important protectors and clients. The task was an imposing one. The scheme called for three large paintings of scenes from the saint's life: St Matthew and the Angel, The Calling of St Matthew, and The Martyrdom of St Matthew. The execution ( ) of all three, in which Caravaggio substituted a dramatic contemporary realism for the traditional pictorial formulas used in depicting saints, provoked public astonishment. Perhaps Caravaggio was waiting for this test, on public view at last, to reveal the whole range of his diversity. His novelty in these works not only involves the surface appearance of structure and subject but also the sense of light and even of time. The first version of the canvas that was to go over the altar, St Matthew and the Angel, was so offensive to the canons of San Luigi dei Francesi, who had never seen such a representation of a saint, that it had to be redone. In this work the evangelist has the physical features of a plowman or a common labourer. His big feet seem to stick out of the picture, and his posture, legs crossed, is awkward almost to the point of vulgarity. The angel does not stand graciously by but forcefully pushes Matthew's hand over the page of a heavy book, as if he were guiding an illiterate. What the canons did not understand was that Caravaggio, in elevating this humble figure, was copying Christ, who had himself raised Matthew from the street.
The other two scenes of the St Matthew cycle are no less disconcerting in the realism of their drama. The Calling of St Matthew shows the moment at which two men and two worlds confront each other: Christ, in a burst of light, entering the room of the toll collector, and Matthew, intent on counting coins in the midst of a group of gaily dressed idlers with swords at their sides. In the glance between the two men, Matthew's world is dissolved. In The Martyrdom of St Matthew the event is captured just at the moment when the executioner is forcing his victim to the ground. The scene is a public street, and, as Matthew's acolyte flees in terror, passersby glance at the act with idle unconcern. The most intriguing aspect of these narratives is that they seem as if they were being performed in thick darkness when a sudden illumination revealed them and fixed them in memory at the instant of their most intense drama.
Caravaggio's three paintings for the Contarelli Chapel not only caused a sensation in Rome but also marked a radical change in his artistic preoccupation. Henceforth he would devote himself almost entirely to the painting of traditional religious themes, to which, however, he gave a whole new iconography and interpretation. He often chose subjects that are susceptible to a dramatic, violent, or macabre emphasis, and he proceeded to divest them of their idealized associations, taking his models from the streets. Caravaggio may have used a lantern hung to one side in his shuttered studio while painting from his models. The result in his paintings is a harsh, raking light that strikes across the composition, illuminating parts of it while plunging the rest into deep shadow. This dramatic illumination heightens the emotional tension, focuses the details, and isolates the figures, which are usually placed in the foreground of the picture in a deliberately casual grouping. This insistence on clarity and concentration, together with the firm and vigorous drawing of the figures, links Caravaggio's mature Roman works with the classical tradition of Italian painting during the Renaissance.
The decoration of the Contarelli Chapel was completed by Caravaggio, though not yet 30, overshadowed all his contemporaries. There was a swarm of orders for his pictures, private and ecclesiastical. The Crucifixion of St Peter (1601) and The Conversion of St Paul (both in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome), The Deposition of Christ ( ; Vatican Museum, Rome), and the Death of the Virgin ( ; Louvre Museum, Paris) are among the monumental works he produced at this time. Some of these paintings, done at the high point of Caravaggio's artistic maturity, provoked violent reaction. The Madonna with Pilgrims, or Madonna di Loreto ( ), for the Church of San Agostino, was a scandal because of the "dirty feet and torn, filthy cap" of the two old people kneeling in the foreground. The Death of the Virgin was refused by the Carmelites because of the indignity of the Virgin's plebeian features, bared legs, and swollen belly. At the advice of the painter Peter Paul Rubens, the picture was bought by the Duke of Mantua in April 1607 and displayed to the community of painters at Rome for one week before removal to Mantua.
Culmination of mature style
Artists, men of learning, and enlightened prelates were fascinated by the robust and bewildering art of Caravaggio, but the negative reaction of church officials reflected the self-protective irritation of academic painters and the instinctive resistance of the more conservative clergy and much of the populace. The more brutal aspects of Caravaggio's paintings were condemned partly because Caravaggio's common people bear no relation to the graceful suppliants popular in much of Counter-Reformation art. They are plain working men, muscular, stubborn, and tenacious.
Criticism did not cloud Caravaggio's success, however. His reputation and income increased, and he began to be envied. The despairing bohemian of the early Roman years had disappeared, but, although he moved in the society of cardinals and princes, the spirit was the same, still given to wrath and riot.
The details of the first Roman years are unknown, but after the time of the Contarelli project Caravaggio had many encounters with the law. In 1600 he was accused of blows by a fellow painter, and the following year he wounded a soldier. In 1603 he was imprisoned on the complaint of another painter and released only through the intercession of the French ambassador. In April 1604 he was accused of throwing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter, and in October he was arrested for throwing stones at the Roman Guards. In May 1605 he was seized for misuse of arms, and on July 29 he had to flee Rome for a time because he had wounded a man in defense of his mistress. Within a year, on May 29, 1606, again in Rome, during a furious brawl over a disputed score in a game of tennis, Caravaggio killed one Ranuccio Tomassoni.
Flight from Rome
In terror of the consequences of his act, Caravaggio, himself wounded and feverish, fled the city and sought refuge on the nearby estate of a relative of the Marquis of Caravaggio. He then moved on to other places of hiding and eventually reached Naples, probably in early He remained at Naples for a time, painting a Madonna of the Rosary for the Flemish painter Louis Finson and one of his late masterpieces, The Seven Works of Mercy, for the Chapel of Monte della Misericordia. It is impossible to ignore the connection between the dark and urgent nature of this painting and what must have been his desperate state of mind. It is also the first indication of a shift in his painting style.
At the end of 1607 or the beginning of 1608, Caravaggio traveled to Malta, where he was received as a celebrated artist He worked hard, completing several works, the most important of which was The Beheading of St John the Baptist for the cathedral in Valletta. In this scene of martyrdom, shadow, which in earlier paintings stood thick about the figures, is here drawn back, and the infinite space that had been evoked by the huge empty areas of the earlier compositions is replaced by a high, overhanging wall. This high wall, which reappears in later works, can be linked to a consciousness in Caravaggio's mind of condemnation to a limited space, the space between the narrow boundaries of flight and prison. On July 14, 1608, Caravaggio was received into the Order of Malta as a "Knight of Justice"; soon afterward, however, either because word of his crime had reached Malta or because of new misdeeds, he was expelled from the order and imprisoned. He escaped, however.
Caravaggio took refuge in Sicily, landing at Syracuse in October 1608, restless and fearful of pursuit. Yet his fame accompanied him; at Syracuse he painted his late, tragic masterpiece, The Burial of St Lucy, for the Church of Santa Lucia. In early 1609 he fled to Messina, where he painted The Resurrection of Lazarus and The Adoration of the Shepherds (both now in the National Museum, Messina), then moved on to Palermo, where he did the Adoration with St Francis and St Lawrence for the Oratorio di San Lorenzo. The works of Caravaggio's flight, painted under the most adverse of circumstances, show a subdued tone and a delicacy of emotion that is even more intense than the overt dramatics of his earlier paintings.
His desperate flight could be ended only with the pope's pardon, and Caravaggio may have known that there were intercessions on his behalf in Rome when he again moved north to Naples in October Bad luck pursued him, however; at the door of an inn he was attacked and wounded so badly that rumours reached Rome that the "celebrated painter" was dead. After a long convalescence he sailed in July 1610 from Naples to Rome, but he was arrested enroute when his boat made a stop at Palo. On his release, he discovered that the boat had already sailed, taking his belongings. Setting out to overtake the vessel, he arrived at Port'Ercole, a Spanish possession within the Papal States, and he died there a few days later, probably of pneumonia. A document granting him clemency arrived from Rome three days after his death.
Influence
The many painters who imitated Caravaggio's style soon became known as Caravaggisti. Caravaggio's influence in Rome itself was remarkable but short-lived, lasting only until the 1620s. His foremost followers elsewhere in Italy were Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia Gentileschi, and the Spaniard José de Ribera. Outside Italy, the Dutch painters Hendrick Terbrugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen made the city of Utrecht the foremost northern centre of Caravaggism. The single most important painter in the tradition was the Frenchman Georges de La Tour, though echoes of Caravaggio's style can also be found in the works of such giants as Rembrandt van Rijn and Diego Velázquez.
Supper at Emmaus 1606 Oil on canvas
Madonna
with the Serpent 1606 Oil on canvas

12. Painting in Rome: Carracci – brilliant light
Biography
The Carracci was a family of Bolognese painters, the brothers Agostino ( ) and Annibale ( ) and their cousin Lodovico ( ), who were prominent figures at the end of the 16th century in the movement against the prevailing Mannerist artificiality of Italian painting.
They worked together early in their careers, and it is not easy to distinguish their shares in, for example, the cycle of frescos in the Palazzo Fava in Bologna (c ). In the early 1580s they opened a private teaching academy, which soon became a center for progressive art. It was originally called the Accademia dei Desiderosi ('Desiderosi' meaning 'desirous of fame and learning'), but later changed its name to Academia degli Incamminati (Academy of the Progressives). In their teaching they laid special emphasis on drawing from the life (all three were outstanding graphic artists) and clear draughtsmanship became a quality particularly associated with artists of the Bolognese School, notably Domenichino and Reni, two of the leading members of the following generation who trained with the Carracci.
They continued working in close relationship until 1595, when Annibale, who was by far the greatest artist of the family, was called to Rome by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese to carry out his masterpiece, the decoration of the Farnese Gallery in the cardinal's family palace. He first decorated a small room called the Camerino with stories of Hercules, and in 1597 undertook the ceiling of the larger gallery, where the theme was The Loves of the Gods, or, as Bellori described it, "human love governed by Celestial love". Although the ceiling is rich in the interplay of various illusionistic elements, it retains fundamentally the self-contained and unambiguous character of High Renaissance decoration, drawing inspiration from Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's frescos in the Vatican Loggie and the Farnesina. The full untrammelled stream of Baroque illusionism was still to come in the work of Cortona and Lanfranco, but Annibale's decoration was one of the foundations of their style.
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the Farnese Ceiling was ranked alongside the Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's frescos in the Vatican Stanze as one of the supreme masterpieces of painting. It was enormously influential, not only as a pattern book of heroic figure design, but also as a model of technical procedure; Annibale made hundreds of drawings for the ceiling, and until the age of Romanticism such elaborate preparatory work became accepted as a fundamental part of composing any ambitious history painting. In this sense, Annibale exercised a more profound influence than his great contemporary Caravaggio, for the latter never worked in fresco, which was still regarded as the greatest test of a painter's ability and the most suitable vehicle for painting in the Grand Manner.
Annibale's other works in Rome also had great significance in the history of painting. Pictures such as Domine, Quo Vadis? (National Gallery, London, c.1602) reveal a striking economy in figure composition and a force and precision of gesture that had a profound influence on Poussin and through him on the whole language of gesture in painting. He developed landscape painting along similar lines, and is regarded as the father of ideal landscape, in which he was followed by Domenichino (his favorite pupil), Claude, and Poussin. The Flight into Egypt (Doria Gallery, Rome, c.1604) is Annibale's masterpiece in this genre.
In his last years Annibale was overcome by melancholia and gave up painting almost entirely after When he died he was buried accordingly to his wished near Raphael in the Pantheon. It is a measure of his achievement that artists as great and diverse as Bernini, Poussin and Rubens found so much to admire and praise in his work.
Annibale's art also had a less formal side that comes out in his caricatures (he is generally credited with inventing the form) and in his early genre paintings, which are remarkable for their lively observation and free handling (The Butcher's Shop, Christ Church, Oxford). Agostino assisted Annibale in the Farnese Gallery from 1597 to 1600, but he was important mainly as a teacher and engraver. His systematic anatomical studies were engraved after his death and were used for nearly two centuries as teaching aids. He spent the last two years in Parma, where he did his own "Farnese Ceiling", decorating a ceiling in the Palazzo del Giardino with mythological scenes for Duke Ranuccio Farnese. It shows a meticulous but somewhat spiritless version of his brother's lively Classicism. Ludovico left Bologna only for brief periods and directed the Carracci academy by himself after his cousins had gone to Rome. His work is uneven and highly personal. Painterly and expressive considerations always outweigh those of stability and calm Classicism in his work, and at its best there is a passionate and poetic quality indicative of his preference for Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano. His most fruitful period was , but near the end of his career he still produced remarkable paintings of an almost Expressionist force, such as the Christ Crucified above Figures in Limbo (Sta Francesco Romana, Ferrara, 1614).
The Caracci fell from grace in the 19th century along with all the other Bolognese painters, who were one of Ruskin's pet hates and whom he considered (1847) had "no single virtue, no color, no drawing, no character, no history, no thought". They were saddled with the label "eclectic" and thought to be ponderous and lacking in originality. Their full rehabilitation had to wait until the second half of the 20th century (the great Carracci exhibition held in Bologna in 1956 was a notable event), but Annibale has now regained his place as one of the giants of Italian painting.
Agostino's illegitimate son Antonio (1589?-1618) was the only offspring of the three Carracci. He had a considerable reputation as an artist in his day, but after his early death was virtually forgotten, and it is only recently that his work has been reconsidered.
Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne Fresco Palazzo Farnese, Rome

13. Artemisia Gentileschi
Biography
Artemisia Gentileschi, the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi ( ) was one of the greatest of Caravaggesque painters and a formidable personality. She was precociously gifted, built up a European reputation, and lived a life of independence rare for a woman of the time. Born in Rome, she worked mainly there and in Florence until she settled in Naples in 1630 (she also visited her father in England in ).
In 1610 she painted her first extant signed and dated work, Susanna and the Elders. In February or early March 1612, Agostino Tassi, employed as Artemisia's perspective teacher, was accused of raping her and subsequently tried and imprisoned. In July Orazio wrote to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany vaunting Artemisia's artistic prowess and requesting the enforcement of Tassi's sentence. Perhaps to mitigate her plight, at the end of that year she married the Florentine Pierantonio Stiattesi, left Rome and moved to the Tuscan capital.
The dating of some of her most celebrated early paintings remains controversial. These include Judith Beheading Holofernes (Naples and its later variant in the Uffizi, Florence), a response to Caravaggio's canonical interpretation of the subject, Lucretia (Pagano Collection, Genoa) and Judith and her Maidservant (Galleria Palatina, Florence). Artemisia signed herself Lomi, her father's real surname, on Florentine works such as Gael and Sisera (1620, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest). Highly regarded, she joined the Accademia del Disegno in 1616 as its first female member. Baldinucci's brief biography describes her prolific activity as a portraitist, though few examples have survived.
In 1620 she wrote to Cosimo II de' Medici informing him of a proposed trip to Rome and is documented there in 1621 and again between 1622 and By 1627 she was in Venice but later moved to Naples where she signed her earliest securely datable Neapolitan work, the Annunciation (1630, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples). It seems she lived there until her death, except for a sojourn in England in 1638 to assist her elderly father.
Susanna and the Elders 1610 Oil on canvas
Judith Beheading Holofernes Oil on canvas

14. Baroque Architecture
Although the seventeenth century saw architects increasingly employed in designing private houses, most of the principal building projects were public. At Rome the leading architect was Bernini, also one of the greatest sculptors of the age, whose churches, fountains, and piazzas changed the face of the city. In his sculpture Bernini drew on virtually all the themes of Counter-Reformation art, including mythological and religious works and vividly characterized portraits. The other great building project of the century was the palace built for Louis XIV at Versailles, where the splendor of the Sun King was reflected in the grandiose decoration scheme.
The Ecstasy of S. Teresa of Avila,
the centerpiece of Bernini’s
Cornaro Chapel at the Church of
S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome

15. Roman Baroque Sculpture and Architecture: Bernini and Borromini
BERNINI, Gian Lorenzo (b. 1598, Napoli, d. 1680, Roman)
Biography
Italian artist who was perhaps the greatest sculptor of the 17th century and an outstanding architect as well. Bernini created the Baroque style of sculpture and developed it to such an extent that other artists are of only minor importance in a discussion of that style.
Early years
Bernini's career began under his father, Pietro Bernini, a Florentine sculptor of some talent who ultimately moved to Rome. The young prodigy worked so diligently that he earned the praise of the painter Annibale Carracci and the patronage of Pope Paul V and soon established himself as a wholly independent sculptor. He was strongly influenced by his close study of the antique Greek and Roman marbles in the Vatican, and he also had an intimate knowledge of High Renaissance painting of the early 16th century. His study of Michelangelo is revealed in the St Sebastian (c. 1617), carved for Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who was later Pope Urban VIII and Bernini's greatest patron.
Bernini's early works attracted the attention of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a member of the reigning papal family. Under his patronage, Bernini carved his first important life-size sculptural groups. The series shows Bernini's progression from the almost haphazard single view of Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius Fleeing Troy (1619; Borghese Gallery, Rome) to strong frontality in Pluto and Proserpina ( ; Borghese Gallery) and then to the hallucinatory vision of Apollo and Daphne ( ; Borghese Gallery), which was intended to be viewed from one spot as if it were a relief. In his David ( ; Borghese Gallery), Bernini depicts the figure casting a stone at an unseen adversary. Several portrait busts that Bernini executed during this period, including that of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine ( ), show a new awareness of the relationship between head and body and display an ability to depict fleeting facial expressions with acute realism. These marble works show an unparalleled virtuosity in carving that obdurate material to achieve the delicate effects usually found only in bronze sculptures. Bernini's sensual awareness of the surface textures of skin and hair and his novel sense of shading broke with the tradition of Michelangelo and marked the emergence of a new period in the history of Western sculpture.
Patronage of Urban VIII
With the pontificate of Urban VIII ( ), Bernini entered a period of enormous productivity and artistic development. Urban VIII urged his protégé to paint and to practice architecture. His first architectural work was the remodeled Church of Santa Bibiana in Rome. At the same time, Bernini was commissioned to build a symbolic structure over the tomb of St Peter in St Peter's Basilica in Rome. The result is the famous immense gilt-bronze baldachin executed between 1624 and Its twisted columns derive from the early Christian columns that had been used in the altar screen of Old St Peter's. Bernini's most original contribution to the final work is the upper framework of crowning volutes flanked by four angels that supports the orb and cross. The baldachin is perfectly proportioned to its setting, and one hardly realizes that it is as tall as a four-story building. Its lively outline moving upward to the triumphant crown, its dark colour heightened with burning gold, give it the character of a living organism. An unprecedented fusion of sculpture and architecture, the baldachin is the first truly Baroque monument. It ultimately formed the centre of a programmatic decoration designed by Bernini for the interior of St Peter's.
Bernini next supervised the decoration of the four piers supporting the dome of St Peter's with colossal statues, though only one of the latter, St Longinus, was designed by him. He also made a series of portrait busts of Urban VIII, but the first bust to achieve the quality of his earlier portraits is that of his great patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1632; Borghese Gallery). The cardinal is shown in the act of speaking and moving, and the action is caught at a moment that seems to reveal all the characteristic qualities of the subject.
Bernini's architectural duties increased after the death of Carlo Maderno in 1629, when Bernini became architect of St Peter's and of the Palazzo Barberini. By this time he was not only executing works himself but also having to rely on assistance from others as the number of his commissions grew. He was successful in organizing his studio and planning his work so that sculptures and ornamentations produced by a team actually seem to be all of a piece. Bernini's work, then and always, was also shaped by his fervent Roman Catholicism (he attended mass every day and took communion twice a week). He would agree with the formulations of the Council of Trent ( ) that the purpose of religious art was to teach and inspire the faithful and to serve as propaganda for the Roman Catholic church. Religious art should always be intelligible and realistic, and, above all, it should serve as an emotional stimulus to piety. The development of Bernini's religious art was largely determined by his conscientious efforts to conform to those principles.
Under Urban VIII Bernini began to produce new and different kinds of monuments - tombs and fountains. The tomb of Urban VIII ( ; St Peter's, Rome) shows the pope seated with his arm raised in a commanding gesture, while below him are two white marble figures representing the Virtues. Bernini also designed a revolutionary series of small tomb memorials, of which the most impressive is that of Maria Raggi (1643). But his fountains are his most obvious contribution to the city of Rome. His first, the Barcaccia in the Piazza di Spagna ( ), is analogous to the baldachin in its fusion of sculpture and architecture. The Triton Fountain in the Piazza Barberini ( ) is a dramatic transformation of a Roman architectonic fountain - the superposed basins of the traditional geometric piazza fountain appearing to have come alive. Four dolphins raise a huge shell supporting the sea god, who blows water upward out of a conch.
Bernini's early architectural projects, however, were not invariably successful. In 1637 he began to erect campaniles, or bell towers, over the facade of St Peter's. But, in 1646, when their weight began to crack the building, they were pulled down, and Bernini was temporarily disgraced.
Patronage of Innocent X and Alexander VII
Bernini's most spectacular public monuments date from the mid-1640s to the 1660s. The Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome's Piazza Navona ( ) supports an ancient Egyptian obelisk over a hollowed-out rock, surmounted by four marble figures symbolizing four major rivers of the world. This fountain is one of his most spectacular works.
The greatest single example of Bernini's mature art is the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, in Rome, which completes the evolution begun early in his career. The chapel, commissioned by Cardinal Federigo Cornaro, is in a shallow transept in the small church. Its focal point is his sculpture of The Ecstasy of St Teresa ( ), a depiction of a mystical experience of the great Spanish Carmelite reformer Teresa of Ávila. In representing Teresa's vision, during which an angel pierced her heart with a fiery arrow of divine love, Bernini followed Teresa's own description of the event. The sculptured group, showing the transported saint swooning in the void, covered by cascading drapery, is revealed in celestial light within a niche over the altar, where the architectural and decorative elements are richly joined and articulated. At left and right, in spaces resembling opera boxes, numerous members of the Cornaro family are found in spirited postures of conversation, reading, or prayer. The Cornaro Chapel carries Bernini's ideal of a three-dimensional picture to its apex. The figures of St Teresa and the angel are sculptured in white marble, but the viewer cannot tell whether they are in the round or merely in high relief. The natural daylight that falls on the figures from a hidden source above and behind them is part of the group, as are the gilt rays behind. The Ecstasy of St Teresa is not sculpture in the conventional sense. Instead, it is a framed pictorial scene made up of sculpture, painting, and light that also includes the worshiper in a religious drama.
In his later years, the growing desire to control the environments of his statuary led Bernini to concentrate more and more on architecture. Of the churches he designed after completing the Cornaro Chapel, the most impressive is that of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale ( ) in Rome, with its dramatic high altar, soaring dome, and unconventionally sited oval plan. But Bernini's greatest architectural achievement is the colonnade enclosing the piazza before St Peter's Basilica. The chief function of the large space was to hold the crowd that gathered for the papal benediction on Easter and other special occasions. Bernini planned a huge oval attached to the church by a trapezoidal forecourt - forms that he compared to the encircling arms of the mother church. The freestanding colonnades were a novel solution to the need for a penetrable enclosure. The piazza guides the visitor toward the church and counterbalances the overly wide facade of St Peter's. Bernini's oval encloses a space centred on the Vatican obelisk, which had been moved before the church by Sixtus V in Bernini moved an older fountain by Maderno into the long axis of the piazza and built a twin on the other side to make a scenographic whole. The analogies to Bernini's oval plan of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale are fascinating, as are the differences in meaning and function.
Bernini's most spectacular religious decoration is the Throne of St Peter, or the Cathedra Petri ( ), a gilt-bronze cover for the medieval wooden throne (cathedra) of the pope. Bernini's task was not only to make a decorative cover for the chair but also to create a meaningful goal in the apse of St Peter's for the pilgrim's journey through the great church. The seat is seemingly supported by four imposing bronze figures representing theological doctors of the early church: Saints Ambrose, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, and Augustine. Above, a golden glory of angels on clouds and rays of light emanates from the Dove of the Holy Spirit, which is painted on an oval window. The cathedra was produced about the same time as the piazza, and the contrast between these two works shows Bernini's versatility. Both works were done for the Chigi pope, Alexander VII ( ), who was one of Bernini's greatest patrons. The tomb that Bernini designed for Alexander VII ( ; St Peter's) was largely executed by his pupils.
In addition to his large works, Bernini continued to produce a few portrait busts. The first of these, of Francesco I d'Este, duke of Modena ( ; Este Gallery and Museum, Modena), culminates his revolution in portraiture. Much of the freedom and spontaneity of the bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese is kept, but it is united with a heroic pomp and grandiose movement that portray the ideals of the Baroque age as much as the man.
Trip to France
Bernini went to Paris in 1665, in what was his only prolonged absence from Rome. The trip was made in response to invitations that for many years had been extended to him by King Louis XIV, and the purpose was the design of a new French royal residence. By this time, Bernini was so famous that crowds lined the streets of each city along the route to watch him pass. His initial reception in Paris was equally triumphant, but he soon offended his sensitive hosts by imperiously praising the art and architecture of Italy at the expense of that of France. His statements made him unpopular at the French court and were to some degree responsible for the rejection of his designs for the Louvre. The only relic of Bernini's visit to France is his great bust of Louis XIV, a linear, vertical, and stable portrait, in which the Sun King gazes out with godlike authority. The image set a standard for royal portraits that lasted 100 years.
Later years
Bernini's late works in sculpture are inevitably overshadowed by his grandiose projects for St Peter's, but a few of them are of outstanding interest. For the Chigi Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, he carved two groups, Daniel in the Lions' Den and Habakkuk and the Angel ( ). These works show the beginnings of his late style: elongation of the body, expressive gesture, and simplified yet emphatic emotional expression. The same characteristics are already found in the figures supporting the Throne of St Peter and culminate in the moving Angels for the Sant'Angelo Bridge in Rome, which Bernini redecorated with the help of assistants between 1667 and Pope Clement IX ( ) so prized the Angels carved by Bernini that they were never set up on the bridge and are now in the church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte in Rome.
The redecorated Sant'Angelo Bridge leading across the Tiber forms an introduction to the Vatican, and Bernini's other works - the piazza, Scala Regia, and the baldachin and cathedra within St Peter's - form progressively more powerful expressions of papal power to support and inspire Roman Catholic pilgrims to the site. Bernini completed one more decoration in St Peter's in his last years: the altar of the Santissimo Sacramento Chapel ( ). The pliant, human adoration of the angels contrasts with the timeless architecture of the bronze tabernacle that they flank and typifies Bernini's late style. In his last years he seems to have found the inexorable laws of architecture a consoling antithesis to the transitory human state.
Bernini's greatest late work is the simple Altieri Chapel in San Francesco a Ripa (c. 1674) in Rome. The relatively deep space above the altar reveals a statue representing the death of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni. Bernini consciously separated architecture, sculpture, and painting for different roles, reversing the process that culminated in the Cornaro Chapel. In that sense, the Altieri Chapel is more traditional, a variation on his church interiors of the preceding years. Instead of filling the arched opening, the sculpted figure of Ludovica lies at the bottom of a large volume of space, and is illuminated by a heavenly light that plays on the drapery gathered over her recumbent figure. Her hands weakly clutching her breast make explicit her painful death.
Bernini died at the age of 81, after having served eight popes, and when he died he was widely considered not only Europe's greatest artist but also one of its greatest men. He was the last of Italy's remarkable series of universal geniuses, and the Baroque style he helped create was the last Italian style to become an international standard. His death marked the end of Italy's artistic hegemony in Europe. The style he evolved was carried on for two more generations in various parts of Europe by the architects Mattia de' Rossi and Carlo Fontana in Rome, J.B. Fischer von Erlach in Austria, and the brothers Cosmas and Egid Quirin Asam in Bavaria, among others.
Borromini
Francesco Borromini (Bissone near Lugano, Switzerland, September 25, Rome, Italy, August 3, 1667) was a Baroque architect, and rival of Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Son of stone mason Giovanni Domenico Castelli, Borromini began his career as a stone mason himself, and soon moved to Milan to study and practice this activity. When in Rome (1619) he changed his name (from Castelli to Borromini) and started working for Carlo Maderno, his distant relative, at St. Peter's. When Maderno died in 1629, he joined the group of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, with whom he completed Maderno's Palazzo Barberini.
In 1634 he had his first personal work, the reconstruction of the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (some authors say it is here that he changed his name).
Borromini's works include:
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane
Sant'Agnese in Agone
Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza
San Giovanni in Laterano
Cappella Spada, San Girolamo della Carità (however, it is uncertain if Borromini really is the architect of the chapel)
Sant'Andrea delle Fratte
Oratorio dei Filippini
Collegio de Propaganda Fide
Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori
San Giovanni in Oleo (restoration)
Palazzo Giustiniani (with Carlo Fontana)
Palazzo Falconieri
Santa Lucia in Selci (restoration)
For Sant'Agnese in Agone, he reverted the original plan of Girolamo Rainaldi (and his son Carlo Rainaldi), which previously had its main entrance on Via di Santa Maria dell'Anima. The façade was expanded to include parts of the bordering Pamphilii palace, gaining space for the two bell towers (each of which has a clock, as in St. Peter's, one for Roman time, the other for tempo ultramontano, European time).
Borromini lost this work before this was ended due to the death of the Pope Innocent X in The new Pope, Alexander VII, and Prince Camillo Pamphili called back Rainaldi, but this one didn't change very much and the church is mainly considered a notable expression of Borromini's concepts.
He was also called "Bissone", by the place in which he was born.
In the summer of 1667, Borromini, suffering from nervous disorders and depression), committed suicide after the completion of the Falconieri chapel (the main chapel) in San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where he was buried.
Francesco Borromini was featured on the 100 Swiss Franc banknote current in the 1980s.
Gian Lorenzo BERNINI
David Marble
The headquarters of the Propaganda fide in Rome,
housed by architects Borromini and Bernini:
etching by Giuseppe Vasi, 1761

16. Palace of Louis XIV at Versailles
Versailles Palace, facade
One of the most visited monuments in France, amongst the three most visited, is the Palace of Versailles. Wanting to escape the busy life in Paris, and to keep the nobility under his control, Louis XIV built this chateau in which he set up home and installed the government. Louis Le Vau was commissioned to renovate and extend an old hunting lodge, Le Notre created the gardens from swamp land, and Mansart masterminded the hydraulic display of the fountains. Beginning in 1664, the construction of the château lasted viltually until Louis XlV's death in the Palace of Versailles was never meant to be a home; kings were not homely people. Second only to God, and the head of an immensely powerful state, Louis XIV was an institution rather than a private individual. His instability, comings and goings, were minutely regulated and rigidly encased in cere- mony, attendance at which was an honour much sought after by courtiers. Versailles was the headquarters of every arm of the state. After the death of Louis XlV, the château was abandoned for a few years. Then Louis XV moved in in It remained the residence of the royal family until the Revolution of 1789, and at this time the furniture was sold and the pictures dispatched to the Louvre. Thereafter it fell into ruin and was nearly demolished by Louis- Philippe. And in 1871, during the Paris Commune, it became the seat of the nationalist government, and the French parliament continued to meet in Louis XV's opera building until The restoration only began between the two world wars. The many buildings attached to the chateau form a small town. The whole complex is a magnificent monument. The garden facade is 575 metres long with various annexes dotted here and there in a park which is several kilometres in both length and breadth. The park shows the skill of Le Notre in making good use of the natural resources on the site.
Versailles Palace, coutyard

17. Baroque Art in France and Spain
Georges de La Tour
Nicolas Poussin
Claude Le Lorrain (Claude Gellee)
El Greco
Diego Velazquez

18. Georges de La Tour Fortune Teller 1632-35 Oil on canvas
LA TOUR, Georges de (b. 1593, Vic-sur-Seille, d. 1652, Luneville)
Biography
French painter, mostly of candlelit subjects, who was well known in his own time but then forgotten until well into the 20th century, when the identification of many formerly misattributed works established his modern reputation as a giant of French painting.
The son of a baker, he is first documented as a painter in his native Vic at the time of his marriage contract in Three years later he moved to Lunéville, where he seems to have remained for the rest of his life. A few commissions and contracts for pictures are recorded, but none of them can with certainty associated with pictures known today. La Tour became a master painter. King Louis XIII, Henry II of Lorraine, and the Duke de La Ferté were among the collectors of his work. Although the chronology of La Tour's output is uncertain, it is clear that he initially painted in a realistic manner and was influenced by the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio or his followers.
The paintings of La Tour's maturity, however, are marked by a startling geometric simplification of the human form and by the depiction of interior scenes lit only by the glare of candles or torches. His religious paintings done in this manner have a monumental simplicity and a stillness that expresses both contemplative quiet and wonder.
The body of his work was conclusively identified by the German art historian Hermann Voss and by other scholars after La Tour's work also exhibits a high degree of originality in colour and composition; the characteristic simplification of forms gives many of his pictures a deceptively modern appearance. Among La Tour's most impressive candlelit scenes are The Newborn, St Joseph the Carpenter, and The Lamentation over St Sebastian. The Hurdy-gurdy Player and The Sharper are among his less numerous daylight compositions.
Fortune Teller Oil on canvas
Magdalen of Night Light Oil on canvas

19. Nicolas Poussin The Triumph of David 1630-31
Midas and Bacchus Oil on canvas
POUSSIN, Nicolas (b. 1594, Les Andelys, d. 1665, Roma)
Biography
French painter, a leader of pictorial classicism in the Baroque period. Except for two years as court painter to Louis XIII, he spent his entire career in Rome. His paintings of scenes from the Bible and from Greco-Roman antiquity influenced generations of French painters, including Jacques-Louis David, J.-A.-D. Ingres, and Paul Cézanne.
Childhood and early travels
Poussin was born in a small hamlet on the Seine River, the son of small farmers. He was educated at the nearby town of Les Andelys, and he apparently did not show any interest in the arts until the painter Quentin Varin visited the village in 1612 to produce several paintings for the Church of Le Grand Andely. Poussin's interest in the arts was awakened, and he decided to become a painter. As this was impossible in Les Andelys, he left his home, going first to Rouen and then to Paris to find a suitable teacher. His poverty and ignorance made this search very difficult. He found no satisfactory master and studied at different times under several minor painters. During this period Poussin endured great hardships and had to return to his paternal home, where he arrived ill and humiliated.
Recovering after a year, Poussin again set out for Paris, not only to continue his studies but also to pursue another aim. While previously in Paris, he had been exposed to the art of the Italian High Renaissance through reproductions of Raphael's paintings. These engravings, according to his biographer Giovanni Battista Passeri, inspired him to go to Rome, which was then the centre of the European art world. But only in 1624 was Poussin successful in reaching Rome, with the help of Giambattista Marino, the Italian court poet to Marie de Médicis.
First Roman period
Marino commissioned Poussin to make a series of mythological drawings illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses. Poussin meanwhile experimented with various painting styles then current in Rome, an important influence being that of the Bolognese painter Domenichino. Poussin's culminating work of this period was a large altarpiece for St. Peter's representing the Martyrdom of St. Erasmus (1629). But it was a comparative failure with the artistic community in Rome, and Poussin never again tried to compete with the Italian masters of the Baroque style on their own ground. Thereafter he would paint only for private patrons and would confine his work to formats rarely larger than five feet in length.
Between Poussin's arrival in Rome in 1624 and his departure for France in 1640 he came to know many of Rome's most influential people, among them Cassiano dal Pozzo, secretary to Cardinal Barberini, whose rich collection of ancient Roman artifacts had a decisive influence upon Poussin's art. Through Pozzo, who became Poussin's patron, the French painter became a fervent admirer of ancient Roman civilization. From about 1629 to 1633 Poussin took his themes from classical mythology and from Torquato Tasso, and his painterly style became more romantic and poetic under the influence of such Venetian masters as Titian. Such examples of his work at this time as The Arcadian Shepherds (1629) and Rinaldo and Armida (c. 1629) have sensuous, glowing colours and manage to communicate a true feeling for pagan antiquity.
In the mid-1630s Poussin began deliberately to turn toward Raphael and Roman antiquity for his inspiration and to evolve the purely classical idiom that he was to retain for the rest of his life. He also began painting religious themes once more. He began with stories that offered a good pageant, such as The Worship of the Golden Calf (c. 1636) and The Rape of the Sabine Women (c. 1637). He went on to choose incidents of deeper moral significance in which human reactions to a given situation constitute the main interest. The most important works that exemplify this phase are those in the series of Seven Sacraments painted in for Pozzo. While other artists painted in the style of the Roman Baroque, Poussin tried in these works to fashion a style marked by classical clarity and monumentality. This style was inspired by Roman pre-Christian architecture and Latin books on moral conduct, as well as by the nobility and greatness of Raphael's works, which, as he believed, had renewed the spirit of antiquity.
Painter to Louis XIII
Between 1638 and 1639 Poussin's achievements in Rome attracted the attention of the French court. Louis XIII's powerful minister Cardinal Richelieu tried to persuade Poussin to return to France. Eventually Poussin reluctantly acceded to this request, journeying to Paris in Though received with great honours, Poussin nevertheless soon found himself in trouble with the ministers of the king as well as with the French artists, whom he met with the utmost arrogance. He was offered commissions for kinds of work he was not used to nor really qualified to execute, including altarpieces and the decoration of the Grande Galérie of the Louvre palace. What he produced did not elicit the praise he expected, so he left Paris in defeat in 1642 and returned to Rome. Unfortunately he did not live to see his own style of painting accepted and eventually glorified by the French Academy in the late 17th century.
Second Roman period
Many of Poussin's paintings on religious and ancient Roman subjects done in the 1640s and '50s are concerned with moments of crisis or difficult moral choice, and his heroes are those who reject vice and the pleasures of the senses in favour of virtue and the dictates of reason - e.g., Coriolanus, Scipio, Phocion, and Diogenes. Poussin's painterly style was consciously calculated to express such a mood of austere rectitude: such solemn religious works as Holy Family on the Steps (1648) exhibit only a few figures, painted in harsh colours against the severest possible background. In the landscapes Poussin began painting at this time, such as Landscape with the Body of Phocion Carried out of Athens (1648) and Landscape with Polyphemus (1649), the disorder of nature is reduced to the order of geometry, and the forms of trees and shrubs are made to approach the condition of architecture. The composition in these paintings is worked out very carefully and has an unusual clarity of structure.
Poussin's health declined from 1660 onward, and early in 1665 he ceased to paint. He died that year and was buried in San Lorenzo in Lucina, his Roman parish church.
Assessment
Poussin believed in reason as the guiding principle of art, yet his figures are never merely cold or lifeless. They may resemble figures used by Raphael or ancient Roman sculptures in their poses, but they retain a strange and unmistakable vitality of their own. Even in Poussin's late period, when all movement, including gesture and facial expression, had been reduced to a minimum, his forms harmoniously combine vitality with intellectual order.
The Rape of the Sabine Women is a mythological event from just after the founding of Rome. The young city of Rome had granted citizenship to criminals and lawless persons to grow quickly, and was therefore winning the wars againgst its neighbours, but a lack of women made it clear that the greatness of the city would vane in a generation or two due to lack of male offspring.
The neighbouring town scorned at Roman requests to marry their women, but accepted an invitation to a huge religious celebration in honour of Neptun. In the middle of the party, the Romans rushed in and abducted the Sabine women, who were the forced to marry their rapists.
The Sabines were horrified at this open breach of the rules of hospitality, and went home to prepare for war. When they later returned in arms to take back their women by force, the Sabine women had reconciled with their now husbonds, and stopped the commencing battle before it started by placing themselves inbetween the two battleready groups.
The Romans and the Sabines were reconciled and the city of Rome could continue on the path to greatness.
The Rape of the Sabine Women Oil on canvas

20. Claude Le Lorrain (Claude Gellee)
Landscape with Acis and Galathe Oil on canvas
Claude Lorrain ( )
Claude Lorrain, French painter, who, like Nicolas Poussin was one of the great masters of 17th-century classical landscape painters. Drawing its inspiration from classical antiquity, this school of painting presents nature as harmonious, serene, and often majestic. Subject matter is taken from Greek, Roman, or biblical sources, and human figures in the landscape are often depicted in pastoral or antique dress. Claude's particular contribution to the ideal landscape was his masterly treatment of light. From his early paintings, which have strong, dramatic lighting effects, to his later ones, which are softly drenched with limpid light, he was unsurpassed as a illuminist.
Claude, who was also known by his pseudonym Le Lorrain, or as Claude Lorraine, was born in the duchy of Lorraine (from which his name is derived). He traveled to Rome before he was 20 years old and, with the exception of one trip back to France from 1625 to 1627, he lived in Rome all his life. His principal teacher was the Italian painter Agostino Tassi, who taught him the elements of landscape, seascape, and perspective. He was also influenced by the German painter Adam Elsheimer, whose strong depiction of light Claude adapted and refined, and by the Italian painters Annibale Carracci and Domenichino, whose monumental landscapes led him to enlarge his scale.        The gradual evolution of Claude's style falls into three main periods. In the first, his landscapes often featured slanting light and employed other experimental lighting effects. He also painted idealized scenes of seaports, usually with ships at anchor in a harbour flanked by palaces. In Harbour Scene (1634, Hermitage, St Petersburg) he shows the sun on the horizon, and characteristically uses the sun to give the painting depth. Forgeries of his work began to appear in the 1630s, and to aid to their identification Claude began compiling his Liber Veritatis ("Book of Truth"; British Museum, London) in about In it he sketched drawings of almost all his paintings, creating a record of his work. In the second phase, which began after 1640, his paintings became more tranquil, bathed in a warm, even light. Their subject matter is drawn from Classical or biblical sources, as in Landscape: The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah (1648, National Gallery, London). During the 1660s, the third phase, although Claude continued to work in his prior mode, some of his works showed a tendency towards a more visionary, symbolic style, with a colour range of cool, silvery tones and a renewed use of dramatic lighting.
Claude died in Rome on November 23, His art influenced later Dutch, French, and especially English landscape painters through the middle of the 19th century. J. M. W. Turner was especially indebted to Claude and was inspired by his compositions.     Extract from Microsoft Encarta
 Lorrain’s masterful drawings and etchings, usually pastoral landscapes of the Roman countryside, sometimes including religious or mythological themes, were highly prized by the English aristocracy visiting France and Italy on their grand tours in the 18th Century.  Done in sepia, these drawings and etchings found their way into most of the great English noble art collections. In 1819, Richard Earlom in London published his Liber Veritatus, a beautifully engraved set of  Claude Lorrain drawings and etchings in private collections.  The prints are aquatints in sepia, with copperplate engraved titles. Sizes vary from 8" x 10¼" to 9¼" x 12¼".  In 1840, F. C. Lewis in London published another number of Claude Lorrain sepia drawings and etchings in his Liber Studiorum.
Embarkation of St Paula Romana at Ostia
Landscape with Apollo and Mercury Oil on canvas

21. El Greco
The Pietà
(The Lamentation of Christ) Tempera on panel
GRECO, El (b. 1541, Candia, d. 1614, Toledo)
Biography
Cretan-born painter, sculptor, and architect who settled in Spain and is regarded as the first great genius of the Spanish School. He was known as El Greco (the Greek), but his real name was Domenikos Theotocopoulos; and it was thus that he signed his paintings throughout his life, always in Greek characters, and sometimes followed by Kres (Cretan).
Little is known of his youth, and only a few works survive by him in the Byzantine tradition of icon painting, notably the Dormition of the Virgin discovered in 1983 (Church of the Koimesis tis Theotokou, Syros). In 1566 he is referred to in a Cretan document as a master painter; soon afterwards he went to Venice (Crete was then a Venetian possession), then in 1570 moved to Rome. The miniaturist Giulio Clovio, whom he met there, described him as a pupil of Titian, but of all the Venetian painters Tintoretto influenced him most (e.g. Christ Healing the Blind, c. 1570), and Michelangelo's impact on his development was also important (e.g. Pietà, c. 1572, Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Among the surviving works of his Italian period are two paintings of the Purification of the Temple (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and National Gallery of Art, Washington), a much-repeated theme, and the portrait of Giulio Clovio (Museo di Capodimonte. Naples). By 1577 he was at Toledo, where he remained until his death, and it was there that he matured his characteristic style in which figures elongated into flame-like forms and usually painted in cold, eerie, bluish colours express intense religious feeling. The commission that took him to Toledo — the high altarpiece of the church of S. Domingo el Antiguo — was gained through Diego de Castilla, Dean of Canons at Toledo Cathedral, whom El Greco had met in Rome. The central part of the altarpiece, a 4-m. high canvas of The Assumption of the Virgin (Art Institute of Chicago, 1577), was easily his biggest work to date, but he carried off the dynamic composition triumphantly. A succession of great altarpieces followed throughout his career, the two most famous being El Espolio (Christ Stripped of His Garments) (Toledo Cathedral, ) and The Burial of Count Orgaz (S. Tome, Toledo ). These two mighty works convey the awesomeness of great spiritual events with a sense of mystic rapture, and in his late work El Greco went even further in freeing his figures from earth-bound restrictions: The Adoration of the Shepherds (Prado, Madrid, ), painted for his own tomb, is a prime example.
El Greco excelled also as a portraitist, mainly of ecclesiastics (Felix Paravicino, Boston Museum, 1609) or gentlemen, although one of his most beautiful works is a portrait of a lady (Pollock House, Glasgow, c ), traditionally identified as a likeness of Jeronima de las Cuevas, his common-law wife. He also painted two views of Toledo (Metropolitan Museum, New York, and Museo del Greco, Toledo), both late works, and a mythological painting, Laocoön (National Gallery of Art, Washington, c. 1610), that is unique in his oeuvre. The unusual choice of subject is perhaps explained by the local tradition that Toledo had been founded by descendants of the Trojans.
El Greco also designed complete altar compositions, working as architect and sculptor as well as painter, for instance at the Hospital de la Caridad, Illescas (1603). Pacheco, who visited El Greco in 1611, refers to him as a writer on painting, sculpture, and architecture. He had a proud temperament, conceiving of himself as an artist-philosopher rather than a craftsman, and had a lavish lifestyle. although he had little success in securing the royal patronage he desired and seems to have had some financial difficulties near the end of his life.
His workshop turned out a great many replicas of his paintings, but his work was so personal that his influence was slight, his only followers of note being his son Jorge Manuel Theotocopouli and Luis Tristan. Interest in his art revived at the end of the 19th century and with the development of Expressionism in the 20th century he came into his own. The strangeness of his art has inspired various theories, for example that he was mad or suffered from astigmatism, but his rapturous paintings make complete sense as an expression of the religious fervour of his adopted country.
Assumption of the Virgin 1577 Oil on canvas
Christ on the Cross Oil on canvas
View of Toledo Oil on canvas

22. Diego Velázquez Peasants at the Table
(El Almuerzo) c Oil on canvas
Prince Baltasar
Carlos on Horseback Oil on canvas
VELAZQUEZ, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y (b. 1599, Sevilla, d. 1660, Madrid)
Biography
The greatest painter of the Spanish School. He was born in Seville, where in 1610/11 he was apprenticed to Pacheco (possibly following a brief period of study with Herrera the Elder). In 1617 he qualified as a master painter and in the following year he married Pacheco's daughter. Velázquez was exceptionally precocious and while he was still in his teens he painted pictures that display commanding presence and complete technical mastery. Pacheco's style in religious paintings was Italianate, dry, and academic; Velázquez revitalized it by following his master's advice to 'go to nature for everything', and in works such as The Immaculate Conception (National Gallery, London, c. 1618) and The Adoration of the Magi (Prado, Madrid, 1619) he developed a more lifelike approach to religious art in which the figures are portraits rather than ideal types (his young wife may be the model for the Virgin in both these pictures). The light, too, is realistically observed, even though it has a mysterious, spiritual quality. In their strong chiaroscuro as well as their naturalism such pictures show an affinity with the work of Caravaggio and his followers. The clotted but supple brushwork is, however, already entirely Velázquez's own. Contemporary with these religious works were a series of bodegones, a type of genre scene to which he brought a new seriousness and dignity, as in The Waterseller of Seville (Wellington Museum, London, c. 1620).
In 1622 Velázquez paid a short visit to Madrid, during which he painted a portrait of the poet Luis de Gongora (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). In the following year he was recalled to the capital by Philip IV's chief minister, the Count-Duke Olivares, and painted a portrait of the king (now lost) that pleased Philip so much that he appointed him one of his court painters and declared that now only Velázquez should paint his portrait. Thus, at the age of 24, he had suddenly become the country's most prestigious painter, and he kept his position as the king's favourite unchallenged for the rest of his life. With his appointment as court painter, the direction of Velázquez's work changed. He entirely abandoned bodegones, and although he painted historical, mythological, and religious pictures intermittently throughout his career, he was from now on primarily a portraitist. Technically, too, his work changed as a result of his move to Madrid, his brushwork becoming broader and more fluid under the influence particularly of the Titians in the royal collection. Although his portraits of the king and his courtiers are grand and dignified, he humanized the formal tradition of Spanish court portraiture derived from Mor and Coello, setting his models in more natural poses, giving them greater life and character, and eliminating unnecessary accessories. The king (who was six years younger than Velázquez) had an extremely high opinion of the artist's personal qualities as well as his artistic skills, and the warmth with which he treated him was considered astonishing, given the stiff etiquette for which the Spanish court was renowned. In 1627 Philip made Velázquez 'Usher of the Chamber', the first of a series of appointments that brought him great prestige but took up much of his time in trivial bureaucratic matters, thus partially accounting for his fairly small output as a painter. He was conscientious in his duties, however, and apparently well suited to them temperamentally.
In Rubens visited Spain on a diplomatic mission and he and Velázquez became friends. Palomino records that the contact with Rubens 'revived the desire Velázquez had always had to go to Italy', and the king duly gave him permission to travel there. Velázquez was in Italy from 1629 to 1631, visiting Genoa, Venice, and Naples, but spending most of his time in Rome. Two major paintings date from this period - Joseph's Coat (Escorial, Madrid) and The Forge of Vulcan (Prado), works that show how his brushwork loosened still further under the influence of the great Venetian masters and how his mastery of figure composition matured.
The 1630s and 1640s (before he again left for Italy) were the most productive period of Velázquez's career. His series of royal and court portraits continued and he expanded his range in a series of glorious equestrian portraits (Prado). In these he showed an unprecedented ability to attain complete atmospheric unity between foreground and background in the landscape. Their rhetorical poses are in the Baroque tradition, but they are without bombast or allegorical embellishments and as portraits are characteristically direct.
The same ability to look beyond external trappings to the human mystery beneath is seen in his incomparable series of portraits of the pitiful court fools (Prado) — dwarfs and idiots whom Philip, like other monarchs, kept for his amusement. Velázquez presents them without any suggestion of caricature, but with pathos and human understanding, as if they too are worthy of his respect.
During the 1630s and 1640s Velázquez occasionally painted religious and mythological works, but they are all eclipsed by his great masterpiece of contemporary history painting, The Surrender of Breda (Prado, ), one of a series of twelve paintings by various court artists glorifying the military triumphs of Philip's reign that were executed for the new Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid. The composition is highly organized, but Velázquez creates a remarkable sense of actuality and no earlier picture of a contemporary historical event had seemed so convincing. Characteristically, he concentrates on the human drama of the situation, as Ambrogio Spinola, the chivalrous Spanish commander, receives the key of the town from Justin of Nassau, his Dutch counterpart, with a superb gesture of magnanimity.
Between 1648 and 1651 Velázquez paid another visit to Italy in order to purchase paintings and antiques for the royal collection (he may have been there briefly in 1636 but the evidence is inconclusive). Again, he spent most of the time in Rome, where he painted several portraits, including two of his most celebrated works - Juan de Pareja (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1650) and Pope Innocent X (Doria Gallery, Rome, 1650). Juan de Pareja (c.l610-c.l670), who was himself a painter, was Velázquez's mulatto slave (he granted him his freedom while they were in Rome), and Velázquez painted this portrait because he felt he needed some practice before tackling that of the pope. The Innocent X is by common consent one of the world's supreme masterpieces of portraiture, unsurpassed in its breathtaking handling of paint and so incisive in characterization that the pope himself said the picture was 'troppo vero' (too truthful). While in Rome Velázquez fathered an illegitimate son, Antonio, by a widow named Martha, but nothing is known of what became of mother or child. They may have been on Velázquez's mind when he applied for (and was refused) permission to return to Italy in 1657, but his life and work continued to unfold with the same serious dignity and the skeleton in his cupboard remained hidden until 1983, when the documentation was published.
In his final years in Madrid, Velázquez continued to acquire new honours (the greatest was being made a knight of the Order of Santiago in 1659) and to reach new heights as a painter. His last portraits of the royal family are mainly of the new young Queen, Mariana of Austria, and of the royal children. In these works his brushwork has become increasingly sparkling and free, and the gorgeous clothes the sitters wore (such a change from the sombre costumes of the king and male courtiers) allowed him to show his prowess as a colourist (several examples are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Velázquez never ceased to base his work on scrutiny of nature, but his means grew increasingly subtle, so that detail is entirely subordinated to overall effect. Thus in his late works space and atmosphere are depicted with unprecedented vividness, but when the pictures are looked at closely the forms dissolve into what Kenneth Clark called 'a fricassee of beautiful brushstrokes'. As Palomino put it, 'one cannot understand it if standing too close, but from a distance it is a miracle.'
The culmination of his career is Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) (Prado. c. 1656). It shows Velázquez at his easel, with various members of the royal family and their attendants in his studio, but it is not clear whether he has shown himself at work on a portrait of the king and queen (who are reflected in a mirror) when interrupted by the Infanta Margarita and her maids of honour or vice versa. Velázquez's prominence in the picture seems to assert his own importance and his pride in his art, but in the background he has included two pictures by Rubens showing the downfall of mortals who challenge the gods in the arts. Apparently spontaneous but in the highest degree worked out, it is both Velázquez's most complex essay in portraiture and an expression of the high claims he made for the dignity of his art. Luca Giordano called it 'the Theology of Painting' because 'just as theology is superior to all other branches of knowledge, so is this the greatest example of painting'. Posterity has endorsed his verdict, for in a poll of artists and critics in The Illustrated London News in August 1985, Las Meninas was voted — by some margin — 'the world's greatest painting'.
The number of good contemporary copies of Velázquez's work indicates that he ran a busy studio, but of his pupils only his son-in-law Mazo achieved any kind of distinction. As with most Spanish painters, Velázquez remained little known outside his own country until the Napoleonic Wars, but from the early 19th century the technical freedom of his work made him an inspiration to progressive artists, above all Manet, who regarded him as the greatest of all painters. Most of Velázquez's work is still in Spain, and his genius can be fully appreciated only in the Prado, which has most of his key masterpieces. Outside Spain, he is best represented in London — in the National Gallery, which has his only surviving female nude, the Rokeby Venus (c. 1648), in the Wellington Museum, and in the Wallace Collection.
The Immaculate Conception c Oil on canvas

23. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas
Las Meninas Oil on canvas
This is a composition of enormous
representational impact. The Infanta
Margarita stands proudly amongst
her maids of honour, with a dwarf
to the right. Although she is the
smallest, she is clearly the central
figure; one of her maids is kneeling
before her, and the other leaning
towards her, so that the standing
Infanta, with her broad hooped skirt,
becomes the fulcrum of the
movement. The dwarf, about the
same size as the Infanta, is so ugly
that Margarita appears delicate,
fragile and precious in comparison.
On the left in the painting, dark
and calm, the painter himself can
be seen standing at his vast canvas.
Above the head of the Infanta, we
see the ruling couple reflected
in the mirror.
This is a composition of enormous representational impact. The Infanta Margarita stands proudly amongst her maids of honour, with a dwarf to the right. Although she is the smallest, she is clearly the central figure; one of her maids is kneeling before her, and the other leaning towards her, so that the standing Infanta, with her broad hooped skirt, becomes the fulcrum of the movement. The dwarf, about the same size as the Infanta, is so ugly that Margarita appears delicate, fragile and precious in comparison. On the left in the painting, dark and calm, the painter himself can be seen standing at his vast canvas. Above the head of the Infanta, we see the ruling couple reflected in the mirror.
The spatial structure and positioning of the figures is such that the group of Las Meninas around the Infanta appears to be standing on "our" side, opposite Philip and his wife. Not only is the "performance" for their benefit, but the attention of the painter is also concentrated on them, for he appears to be working on their portrait. Although they can only be seen in the mirror reflection, the king and queen are the actual focus of the painting towards which everything else is directed. As spectators, we realize that we are excluded from the scene, for in our place stands the ruling couple. What seems at first glance to be an "open" painting proves to be completely hermetic - a statement further intensified by the fact tbat the painting in front of Velázquez is completely hidden from our view.

24. Baroque Art in Northern Europe
Rubens
Vermeer
Rembrandt

25. Rubens Venus at a Mirror c. 1615 Virgin and Child c. 1604 Oil on panel
RUBENS, Pieter PauwelFlemish painter (b. 1577, Siegen, d. 1640, Antwerpen)
Biography
Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting's dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. His work is a fusion of the traditions of Flemish realism with the classical tendencies of the Italian Renaissance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps best known for his religious and mythological compositions.
Early life
Although Rubens' father, Jan, was born a Roman Catholic, his name had appeared on a list of Calvinists as early as This accounted for the Rubens family's exile to Germany, where Peter Paul was born. Jan Rubens became a diplomatic agent and adviser to the Protestant princess Anna of Saxony (d. 1577), second wife of William the Silent, who led the resistance to Spanish rule of the Netherlands. An unfortunate pregnancy revealed the intimate extent of the relationship between this princess of the house of Orange-Nassau and Rubens' father. She obtained clemency from her husband for Jan, but he and his family were placed under house arrest at Siegen, a Nassau stronghold in Westphalia. The Rubens children were grounded in the classics by their exiled father, who was a doctor of both civil and canon law. Jan died in 1587, after he had been allowed to go to the German city of Cologne. Rubens' mother then took her four surviving children to Antwerp, where Jan had been an alderman.
Antwerp training
At the age of 10, Peter Paul was sent with his brother Philip to a Latin school in Antwerp. In 1590, shortage of money and the need to provide a dowry for his sister Blandina forced Rubens' mother to break off his formal education and send him as a page to the Countess of Lalaing. Soon tired of courtly life, Rubens was allowed to become a painter. He was sent first to his kinsman Tobias Verhaecht, a minor painter of Mannerist landscapes. Having quickly learned the rudiments of his profession, he was apprenticed for four years to an abler master, Adam van Noort, and subsequently to Otto van Veen, one of the most distinguished of the Antwerp Romanists, a group of Flemish artists who had gone to Rome to study the art of antiquity and the Italian Renaissance.
Italian period
In May 1600, with two years' seniority as a master in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke, Rubens set out with Deodatus del Monte, his constant traveling companion and first pupil, for the visual and spiritual adventure of Italy. He was offered employment by Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, which duchy held one of the largest and finest collections outside the Vatican of works by Italian artists. During the eight years that Rubens was to call Vincenzo his lord, he had unmatched opportunities for fulfilling his expressed intention "to study at close quarters the works of the ancient and modern masters "
Rubens was sent to Rome ( ) by the duke to paint copies of pictures and to live under the protection of Cardinal Montalto. There, through Flemish connections, he obtained his first public commission, to paint three altarpieces for the crypt chapel of St. Helena in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. In Rome the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci and his assistants were at work in the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese. Their bold scale in drawing and working methods decidedly influenced the young Rubens. He assimilated Venetian colour, light, and loose application of paint first through the works of Tintoretto, then through those of Veronese, long before he could penetrate the inward meaning of Titian's art. Rubens' copies, and his reworking of drawings, offer the most complete survey of the achievement of 16th-century Italian art in a markedly personal revision.
In 1603 he was entrusted with his first diplomatic mission, to take costly presents from Mantua to Philip III and the Spanish court. This mission gave him a first view of the royal collections in Madrid. His resourcefulness and tact in dealing with the temperamental regular Mantuan representative to the Spanish court raised him in the duke's estimation and helped prepare him for future diplomatic missions.
The only major works he executed for Mantua were the three pictures finished in 1605 for the Jesuit Church of SS. Trinità: The Baptism of Christ (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp), The Transfiguration (Fine Arts Museum, Nancy), and The Gonzaga Family in Adoration of the Most Holy Trinity (Ducal Palace, Mantua). In the same year he completed the Circumcision for the high altar of the Jesuit Church of Sant' Ambrogio in Genoa. Portraits of court beauties by Rubens were commissioned by the duke for the Gonzaga Gallery, of which Rubens was curator.
Toward the end of 1605, Rubens obtained leave from the Duke of Mantua to continue his studies in Rome. There he shared a house with his brother Philip, then librarian to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, a member of one of Rome's most wealthy and powerful families. Daily contact with Philip, a brilliant student of the famed Flemish humanist and classical scholar Justus Lipsius, added zest to his personal discovery of the antique world.
In the summer of 1607 Rubens was asked to accompany the Gonzaga court to the Italian seaside resort of San Pier d'Arena, where he continued to paint with splendour portraits of the Genoese aristocracy. Chronic arrears in payment of his salary, and an ambition to establish himself as an international, rather than just a Mantuan, artist, motivated him to accept other patronage. He received the backing of the wealthy Genoese banker to the papacy, Monsignor Jacopo Serra, who was instrumental in obtaining for him the coveted commission for the painting over the high altar of the Roman Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella. He concurrently painted the altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds for the Oratorian Order in Fermo. In October 1608 his brother summoned him to their mother's deathbed in Antwerp, but she died before he could reach her.
Return to Antwerp
Soon after his mother's death Rubens was "bound with golden fetters" to the service of the Spanish Habsburg regents of Flanders. The house that he built for himself, the pride of Antwerp, was filled with paintings, statuary, cameos, coins, and jewels from Renaissance and ancient Roman Italy. He built a private pantheon to house his antiquities. Rubens himself helped design the new church of the Jesuits in Antwerp, St. Charles Borromeo; he was also the master decorator for its interior and provided oil sketches as designs for the ceiling paintings, on which he was assisted by his most talented pupil, Anthony Van Dyck, and others.
Settling permanently in Flanders, Rubens in October 1609 married Isabella, daughter of Jan Brant, a leading Antwerp humanist. He became not only the court portraitist but a major religious painter. His Baroque altarpieces of The Raising of the Cross (1610) for St. Walburga's in Antwerp and the Descent from the Cross ( ) for Antwerp Cathedral established Rubens as the leading painter of Flanders. Because of his prestige, he was allowed to live in Antwerp, rather than in Brussels, where the Flemish court was based. Rubens' international reputation spread partly because of the large number of works produced in his workshop, which came to employ a great number of assistants and apprentices. Many of the large-scale pictures that issued from his studio were in fact painted by these assistants, though the underlying design and certain key areas of paint were done by Rubens himself. To present models of prospective large-scale paintings to clients, Rubens might also sketch out the design beforehand in tones of brown, gray, and white on a small prepared wooden panel only inches high.
Among Rubens' major works from the second decade of the century are the religious paintings The Last Judgment (c. 1616; Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and Christ on the Cross (1620; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels) and the mythological paintings Battle of the Amazons (c. 1618; Alte Pinakothek) and Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (c ; Alte Pinakothek). His pictures of wild animals culminated in the Hippopotamus Hunt (c ; Alte Pinakothek) and similar hunting scenes.
Diplomatic career
In the period between 1621 and 1630, Rubens was increasingly used as a diplomat by the Spanish Habsburg rulers. His contact with the leading political and intellectual figures of Europe, as well as his gracious manner, made him the ideal political agent. Furthermore, as a painter, he could often act as a covert diplomat or observer. His first important diplomatic functions were in connection with the attempt of Spain to renegotiate the Twelve Years' Truce ( ) between the Habsburg-controlled area of Flanders and the Dutch Republic to the north. Rubens became an adviser to Archduchess Isabella, the regent of Flanders and daughter of the Habsburg ruler of Spain, Philip II. On her behalf Rubens tried to intercede with the Dutch, but war soon broke out again in the Netherlands between the Protestant Dutch and the Catholic Flemish and continued for the rest of Rubens' life.
Early in 1622 Rubens was summoned to Paris by Marie de Médicis, the widow of Henry IV and mother of the reigning king of France, Louis XIII. This Florentine princess, whose wedding by proxy Rubens had attended in Florence in 1600, commissioned him to paint two series of paintings for two long galleries in her newly constructed Luxembourg Palace. One cycle of 21 pictures representing episodes from Marie's life now hangs in the Louvre Museum, while the other proposed series of pictures, dealing with the life of Henry IV, was never completed. After six weeks of discussion and arrangements, Rubens returned to Antwerp, where he worked for two years on this, his most artistically important secular commission. He returned to Paris in 1625 to install the Marie de Médicis pictures.
In 1628 Rubens traveled to Madrid, where he tried to lay the groundwork for peace negotiations between Spain and England. There he was made an envoy by King Philip IV and sent on a special peace mission to Charles I of England in It is to Rubens' personal diplomacy that the peace treaty of 1630 between England and Spain can largely be attributed. In reward for his services he was knighted and given an honorary degree by Cambridge University. Charles I also commissioned him to decorate the ceiling of the royal Banqueting House ( ) designed by the court architect Inigo Jones as a part of Whitehall Palace. Finished in 1634, the nine huge panels allegorize the reign of James I, the father of Charles I.
Late years in Flanders
On his return to Flanders in 1630, Rubens was rewarded by the archduchess with exemption from further diplomatic missions. The peace Rubens had worked for nearly 10 years to achieve, however, did not last, and for most of the next 20 years Europe continued to be embroiled in the Thirty Years' War.
Having been a widower for four years, Rubens in 1630 married the 16-year-old Hélèna Fourment, whose charms recur frequently in such late figure paintings as The Garden of Love (1634; Prado Museum, Madrid), The Three Graces (c ; Prado), and The Judgment of Paris ( ; Prado), as well as in Hélèna Fourment with Fur Cloak (c ; Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna) and other portraits. Rubens bought the château of Elewijt in 1635, and in his last years he spent much time there depicting the rural life and scenery outside of Antwerp in such paintings as The Kermesse (c ; Louvre Museum, Paris). His long-established interest in landscape painting reached its grandest and most emotionally romantic expression in such late works as Landscape with a Rainbow (c. 1634; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg) and Chateau de Steen (c ; National Gallery, London). Rubens' major commission during these last years, however, was to provide for King Philip IV of Spain (the brother of the infante Ferdinand, who had succeeded Archduchess Isabella as regent of Flanders) models for about 120 scenes from the writings of the Roman poet Ovid and other classical authors to decorate the Torre de la Parada, the royal hunting lodge near Madrid. Rubens died at Antwerp in 1640 when gout, which had for months troubled his painting arm, reached his heart.
Achievement
Rubens was one of the most methodically assimilative and most prodigiously productive of Western artists. His abundant energy fired him to study and emulate the masters both of antiquity and of the 16th century in Rome, Venice, and Parma. His warmth of nature made him responsive to the artistic revolutions being worked by living artists, and robust powers of comprehension nourished his limitless resource in invention. He was able to infuse his own astounding vitality equally into religious and mythological paintings, portraits, and landscapes. He organized his complex compositions in vivid, dynamic designs in which limitations of form and contour are discounted in favour of a constant flow of movement. Rubens' voluptuous women may not be to the taste of modern viewers but are related to the full and opulent forms that were the ideal of womanhood during the Baroque period.
The larger the scale of the undertaking the more congenial it was to Rubens' spirit. The success of his public performance as master of the greatest studio organization in Europe since Raphael's in Rome has obscured for many the personal intensity of his vision as evinced in such works as his oil sketch for All Saints (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and in his deeply felt study for the head of St. John in the Antwerp cathedral Descent from the Cross, as well as in portraits of his family and friends and in his treatment of the mood and grandeur of landscape. Rubens' most immediate influence was on Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, and other painters in Flanders, but artists at almost every period have responded to the force of his genius. He is a central figure in the history of Western art.
Rubens' own deepest love as a painter, consummated by his second visit to Spain, was for the poetry, the control of glowing colour, and the sheer mastery in handling of oil paint that distinguish the art of Titian. In these qualities Rubens himself became supreme, whether with the brilliant play of fine brushes over the white reflecting surface of a small panel, or with masterful gestures often more than six feet long, sweeping a richly loaded brush across a huge canvas.
Venus at a Mirror c. 1615
Virgin and Child c Oil on panel
The Union of Earth and Water c Oil on canvas

26. Vermeer Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window 1657 Oil on canvas
The Milkmaid c. 1658
VERMEER VAN DELFT, JanDutch painter (b. 1632, Delft, d. 1675, Delft)
Dutch painter. Among the great Dutch artists of the 17th century, he is now second in renown only to Rembrandt, but he made little mark during his lifetime and then long languished in obscurity. Almost all of the contemporary references to him are in colourless official documents and his career is in many ways enigmatic. Apart from a visit to The Hague in 1672 (to act as an expert witness concerning a group of Italian paintings of disputed authenticity), he is never known to have left his native Delft. He entered the painters' guild there in 1653 and was twice elected 'hooftman' (headman), but his teacher is not known. His name is often linked with that of Carel Fabritius, but it is doubtful if he can have formally taught Vermeer, and this distinction may belong to Leonaert Bramer, although there is no similarity between their work.
Only about thirty-five to forty paintings by Vermeer are known, and although some early works may have been destroyed in the disastrous Delft magazine explosion of 1654, it is unlikely that the figure was ever much larger; this is because most of the Vermeers mentioned in early sources can be identified with surviving pictures, whilst only a few pictures now attributed to him are not mentioned in these sources - thus there are few loose ends. This small output may be at least partially explained by the fact that he almost certainly earned most of his living by means other than painting. His father kept an inn and was a picture-dealer and Vermeer very likely inherited both businesses. In spite of this he had grave financial troubles (he had a large family to support his wife bore him fifteen children, and she was declared insolvent in the year after his death).
Only three of Vermeer's paintings are dated - The Procuress (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, 1656), The Astronomer (Louvre, Paris, 1668), and its companion The Geographer (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, 1669). (Another signed and dated work, St Praxedis mopping up the Blood of the Martyrs of 1655, appeared in the 1970s, but it is of doubtful authenticity. It is in a private collection.) It is difficult to fit his other paintings into a convincing chronology, but his work nevertheless divides into three fairly clear phases.
The first is represented by only two works - Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) and Diana and her Companions (Mauritshuis, The Hague} - both probably dating from a year or two before The Procuress. They are so different from Vermeer's other works - in their comparatively large scale, their subject matter, and their handling - that Diana and her Companions was long attributed to the obscure Jan Vermeer of Utrecht (c after 1692), in spite of a genuine signature. The Procuress marks the transition to the middle phase of Vermeer's career, for although it is fairly large and warm in tonality - like the two history paintings - it is a contemporary life scene, as were virtually all Vermeer's pictures from now on.
In the central part of his career (into which most of his work falls) Vermeer painted those serene and harmonious images of domestic life that for their beauty of composition, handling, and treatment of light raise him into a different class from any other Dutch genre painter. The majority show one or two figures in a room lit from the onlooker's left, engaged in domestic or recreational tasks. The predominant colours are yellow, blue, and grey, and the compositions have an abstract simplicity which confers on them an impact out of relation to their small size. In reproduction they can look quite smooth and detailed, but Vermeer often applies the paint broadly, with variations in texture suggesting the play of light with exquisite vibrancy - the critic Jan Veth aptly described his paint surface as looking like 'crushed pearls melted together'. From this period of Vermeer's greatest achievement also date his only landscape - the incomparable View of Delft (Mauritshuis), in which he surpassed even the greatest of his specialist contemporaries in lucidity and truth of atmosphere - and his much-loved Little Street (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Another painting of this period is somewhat larger in scale and unusual in subject for him - The Artist's Studio (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), in which Vermeer shows a back view of a painter, perhaps a suitably enigmatic self portrait.
In the third and final phase of his career Vermeer's work lost part of its magic as it became somewhat harder. There are still marvellous passages of paint in all his late works, but the utter naturalness of his finest works is gone. The only one of his paintings that might be considered a failure, the Allegory of Faith (Metropolitan Museum, New York), belongs to this period. His wife was a Catholic and he may well have been converted to her religion, but his rather lumbering figure shows he was not at ease with the trappings of Baroque allegory. There are symbolic references in other of his paintings, but they all - except for this one - make sense on a straightforward naturalistic level.
No drawings by Vermeer are known and little is known of his working method. It is virtually certain, however, that he made use of a camera obscura; the exaggerated perspective in some of his pictures (in which foreground figures or objects loom unexpectedly large) and the way in which sparkling highlights sometimes appear slightly out of focus are effects duplicated by unsophisticated lenses. The scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek ( ), celebrated for his work with microscopes, became the executor of Vermeer's estate and it may well have been an interest in optics that brought them together.
Woman
Holding a Balance
View of Delft

27. Rembrandt The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 1632 Oil on canvas
Self-Portrait 1659 Oil on canvas
REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van RIJNDutch painter (b. 1606, Leiden, d. 1669, Amsterdam)
Biography
Rembrandt was born in Leiden on July 15, his full name Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. He was the son of a miller. Despite the fact that he came from a family of relatively modest means, his parents took great care with his education. Rembrandt began his studies at the Latin School, and at the age of 14 he was enrolled at the University of Leiden. The program did not interest him, and he soon left to study art - first with a local master, Jacob van Swanenburch, and then, in Amsterdam, with Pieter Lastman, known for his historical paintings. After six months, having mastered everything he had been taught, Rembrandt returned to Leiden, where he was soon so highly regarded that although barely 22 years old, he took his first pupils. One of his students was the famous artist Gerrit Dou.
Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in 1631; his marriage in 1634 to Saskia van Uylenburgh, the cousin of a successful art dealer, enhanced his career, bringing him in contact with wealthy patrons who eagerly commissioned portraits. An exceptionally fine example from this period is the Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts (1631, Frick Collection, New York City). In addition, Rembrandt's mythological and religious works were much in demand, and he painted numerous dramatic masterpieces such as The Blinding of Samson (1636, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt). Because of his renown as a teacher, his studio was filled with pupils, some of whom (such as Carel Fabritius) were already trained artists. In the 20th century, scholars have reattributed a number of his paintings to his associates; attributing and identifying Rembrandt's works is an active area of art scholarship.
In contrast to his successful public career, however, Rembrandt's family life was marked by misfortune. Between 1635 and 1641 Saskia gave birth to four children, but only the last, Titus, survived; her own death came in at the age of 30. Hendrickje Stoffels, engaged as his housekeeper about 1649, eventually became his common-law wife and was the model for many of his pictures. Despite Rembrandt's financial success as an artist, teacher, and art dealer, his penchant for ostentatious living forced him to declare bankruptcy in An inventory of his collection of art and antiquities, taken before an auction to pay his debts, showed the breadth of Rembrandt's interests: ancient sculpture, Flemish and Italian Renaissance paintings, Far Eastern art, contemporary Dutch works, weapons, and armor. Unfortunately, the results of the auction - including the sale of his house - were disappointing.
These problems in no way affected Rembrandt's work; if anything, his artistry increased. Some of the great paintings from this period are The Jewish Bride (1665), The Syndics of the Cloth Guild (1661, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Bathsheba (1654, Louvre, Paris), Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (1656, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Kassel, Germany), and a self-portrait (1658, Frick Collection). His personal life, however, continued to be marred by sorrow. His beloved Hendrickje died in 1663, and his son, Titus, in only 27 years of age. Eleven months later, on October 4, 1669, Rembrandt died in Amsterdam.
Descent from the Cross 1634

28. Music in the Counter-Reformation
In music, as in the visual arts, the Baroque period was one of experimentation and high achievement. Counter-Reformation policy required that music for church use should be easily understood and appreciated, as was already the case in the Protestant countries of northern Europe. At the same time there was a growing demand for secular music for performance both in public and at home.
Music was an essential part of civic, religious, and courtly life in the Renaissance. The rich interchange of ideas in Europe, as well as political, economic, and religious events in the period 1400–1600 led to major changes in styles of composing, methods of disseminating music, new musical genres, and the development of musical instruments. The most important music of the early Renaissance was composed for use by the church—polyphonic (made up of several simultaneous melodies) masses and motets in Latin for important churches and court chapels. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, patronage was split among many areas: the Catholic Church, Protestant churches and courts, wealthy amateurs, and music printing—all were sources of income for composers. The early fifteenth century was dominated initially by English and then Northern European composers. The Burgundian court was especially influential, and it attracted composers and musicians from all over Europe. The most important of these was Guillaume Du Fay (1397–1474), whose varied musical offerings included motets and masses for church and chapel services, many of whose large musical structures were based on existing Gregorian chant. His many small settings of French poetry display a sweet melodic lyricism unknown until his era. With his command of large-scale musical form, as well as his attention to secular text-setting, Du Fay set the stage for the next generations of Renaissance composers. By about 1500, European art music was dominated by Franco-Flemish composers, the most prominent of whom was Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521).Like many leading composers of his era, Josquin traveled widely throughout Europe, working for patrons in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Milan, Rome, Ferrara, and Condé-sur-L'Escaut. The exchange of musical ideas among the Low Countries, France, and Italy led to what could be considered an international European style. On the one hand, polyphony or multivoiced music with its horizontal contrapuntal style continued to develop in complexity. At the same time, harmony based on a vertical arrangement of intervals, including thirds and sixths, was explored for its full textures and suitability for accompanying a vocal line. Josquin's music epitomized these trends, with Northern-style intricate polyphony using canons, preexisting melodies, and other compositional structures smoothly amalgamated with the Italian bent for artfully setting words with melodies that highlight the poetry rather than masking it with complexity. Josquin, like Du Fay, composed primarily Latin masses and motets, but in a seemingly endless variety of styles. His secular output included settings of courtly French poetry, like Du Fay, but also arrangements of French popular songs, instrumental music, and Italian frottole. With the beginning of the sixteenth century, European music saw a number of momentous changes. In 1501, a Venetian printer named Ottaviano Petrucci published the first significant collection of polyphonic music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A. Petrucci's success led eventually to music printing in France, Germany, England, and elsewhere. Prior to 1501, all music had to be copied by hand or learned by ear; music books were owned exclusively by religious establishments or extremely wealthy courts and households. After Petrucci, while these books were not inexpensive, it became possible for far greater numbers of people to own them and to learn to read music. At about the same period, musical instrument technology led to the development of the viola da gamba, a bowed string instrument. Amateur European musicians of means eagerly took up the viol, as well as the lute, the recorder, the harpsichord (in various guises, including the spinet and virginal), the organ, and other instruments. The viola da gamba and recorder were played together in consorts or ensembles, and to facilitate this often were produced in families or sets, with different sizes playing the different lines. Publications by Petrucci and others supplied these players for the first time with notated music (as opposed to the improvised music played by professional instrumentalists). The sixteenth century saw the development of instrumental music such as the canzona, ricercare, fantasia, variations, and contrapuntal dance-inspired compositions, for both soloists and ensembles, as a truly distinct and independent genre with its own idioms separate from vocal forms and practical dance accompaniment. The musical instruments depicted in the studiolo of Duke Federico da Montefeltro of Urbino (ca. 1479–82) represent both his personal interest in music and the role of music in the intellectual life of an educated Renaissance man. The musical instruments are placed alongside various scientific instruments, books, and weapons, and they include a portative organ, lutes, fiddle, and cornetti; a hunting horn; a pipe and tabor; a harp and jingle ring; a rebec; and a cittern. From about 1520 through the end of the sixteenth century, composers throughout Europe employed the polyphonic language of Josquin's generation in exploring musical expression through the French chanson, the Italian madrigal, the German tenorlieder, the Spanish villancico, and the English song, as well as in sacred music. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation directly affected the sacred polyphony of these countries. The Protestant revolutions (mainly in Northern Europe) varied in their attitudes toward sacred music, bringing such musical changes as the introduction of relatively simple German-language hymns (or chorales) sung by the congregation in Lutheran services. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/26–1594), maestro di cappella at the Cappella Giulia at Saint Peter's in Rome, is seen by many as the iconic High Renaissance composer of Counter-Reformation sacred music, which features clear lines, a variety of textures, and a musically expressive reverence for its sacred texts. The English (and Catholic) composer William Byrd (1540–1623) straddled both worlds, composing Latin-texted works for the Catholic Church, as well as English-texted service music for use at Elizabeth I's Chapel Royal. Sixteenth-century humanists studied ancient Greek treatises on music that discussed the close relationship between music and poetry and how music could stir the listener's emotions. Inspired by the classical world, Renaissance composers fit words and music together in an increasingly dramatic fashion, as seen in the development of the Italian madrigal and later the operatic works of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). The Renaissance adaptation of a musician singing and accompanying himself on a stringed instrument, a variation on the theme of Orpheus, appears in Renaissance artworks like Caravaggio's Musicians and Titian's Venus and the Lute Player.
17th Century Musical Instruments:
Violin, Recorder, Lute, Double Virginal

29. History of Opera in Italy to the 17th Century
The Birth of Opera
One of the most important innovations of the seventeenth century was opera. The first opera was performed just before 1600 in Florence, and by the middle of the century opera houses were being built throughout Europe to house the new art form. The first great composer of operas was the Italian Monteverdi, whose L'Orfeo is the earliest opera still to hold the stage. Among later musicians of the period to write works for the theater was the German Georg Frideric Handel, many of whose operas were composed to Italian texts for performance in England
History of Opera in Italy to the 17th Century
Renaissance: During the 15th and much of the 16th century Italy functioned largely as an importer of musical talent. Nevertheless, toward the end of the 15th century, distinctively Italian secular music began to reappear at some of the Italian courts. In Florence, during the time of Lorenzo de'Medici ( ), carnival celebrations were enriched by canti carnascialeschi (carnival songs). In Mantua composers developed the frottola, a homophonic (chordal), clearly phrased, strophic piece. The carnival songs and frottole were significant in preparing the ground for the 16th-century madrigal, one of the great flowerings of Italian musical art. In the earlier part of the 16th century madrigals were written by French and Netherlandish composers as well as Italians such as Costanzo Festa ( ). The late madrigal, written in the last third of the century, was dominated by the Italians Luca Marenzio, Carlo Gesualdo, and Claudio Monteverdi. Sacred music developed in two main centers--Rome and Venice. The Roman school is epitomized in the works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Working under the influence of the Counter Reformation, Palestrina wrote several hundred motets and 105 masses. The Venetian school had its founding father in the Flemish composer Adrian Willaert, who was director of music at Saint Mark's Cathedral from 1527 to Willaert, his student Andrea Gabrieli, and Andrea's nephew Giovanni Gabrieli developed a polychoral (multiple choruses) style of composition that gave special force to the contrast and opposition (both spatial and aural) of mixed groups of performers. Venice was also an important center of music printing from as early as the beginning of the 16th century. The Odhecaton, printed by Ottaviano dei Petrucci in 1501, is the first printed collection of part songs. Petrucci printed more than 50 volumes of secular and sacred vocal music as well as a few volumes of music for the lute.
Baroque: The period of Italy's greatest musical influence throughout Europe lasted from the end of the 16th to the middle of the 18th century. During this time new attitudes toward the relationship of text and music and toward the states of mind most suitable for expression in music generated changes in the treatment of dissonance, rhythm, and texture. The resulting style of the baroque music affected old genres and brought forth several new ones, such as the opera, oratorio, cantata, concerto, and sinfonia. The earliest operas that have survived complete are Euridice by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, performed in Florence in 1600, and Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo by Emilio de Cavalieri (c ), performed in Rome in Peri, Caccini, and Cavalieri were all associated with a group of Florentine humanists called the Camerata, who hoped to achieve in their own time the great effects attributed to music by the ancient Greeks. To accomplish this goal they instituted a style of reciting in music, the stile recitativo (recitative), that allowed the text to be projected with clarity. The voice was accompanied by chords notated in a shorthand called figured bass. The full expressive possibilities of the new style were first demonstrated by Monteverdi in his opera Orfeo (1607). Rome was a center of operatic composition from about 1620 until the late 1630s. In 1637 the first public opera house opened in Venice, and until the end of the 17th century, Venice was the operatic capital of Italy. Some of the finest Venetian operas were written by Monteverdi and his pupil Pier Francesco Cavalli.

30. Bach and Handel
Handel also wrote oratorios, sacred dramas performed without any staging; indeed the most famous of all oratorios is his Messiah. The oratorio was a form with a special appeal for Protestant Germans. The greatest of all Lutheran composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, wrote masterpieces in just about every musical form other than opera. Like many of the leading artists of the age, Bach produced works inspired by deep religious faith as well as pieces like the Brandenburg Concertos for private entertainment.
Bach
It has been observed that Bach's melodies are harmonically conceived and his harmonies melodically conceived. This is a pithy way of saying that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach is the culmination of not only the Baroque era, but the Renaissance as well. The Baroque era began as a reaction against the highly refined and intellectual Flemish contrapuntal style that is the essence of the high Renaissance. Early Baroque opera led to our modern concept of harmony by declaring the primacy of a single melodic line supported by chords designated by a figured bass. The concept of melody with harmonic accompaniment was the beginning of thinking about harmony and harmonic progressions as an important entity and not just the by-product of intersecting lines. Two hundred and fifty years later, Schumann, great student of Bach that he was, would declare that in the chess game of music melody is the queen but the game depends on harmony, the king. Bach's music reconciles these two aspects; the horizontal (melodic) and the vertical (harmonic) in complete balance. While his music often has the linear complexity of Renaissance polyphony, it also has a sure and inevitable harmonic architecture that always gives the music a sense of solid form and direction. For instance, in the great Preludium of the Partita for Solo Violin, the constant stream of sixteenth notes reach important arrival and departure points on E, c#, A, f#, B, and back to E. The descending thirds give us a large structural I, ii, V, I cadential progression that girds the entire piece. Bach's music also synthesizes the prevailing French and Italian styles that dominated the Baroque era. The Italian style, with its emphasis on operatic singing and string playing, tends to be more rhythmically straight forward, emotionally extroverted, and prone to the use of repeating harmonic sequences. French music, on the other hand, grows out of a love for wind instruments and dancing, and the emotional quality is often subtle and less overt. One need look no further than any of the Bach keyboard suites - the so-called French Suites (such as the French Suite No.4 in Eb, BMV.815), English Suites (for example, the English Suite No.3 in G: 1.Prélude; 2.Allemande; 3.Courante; 4.Sarabande; 5.Gavottes I and II; 6.Gigue), and the Partitas (No.1 in Bb; No.2 in C; No.3 in A; No.4 in D; No.5 in g; and the No.6 in E) to see the comfortable juxtaposition of a French Allemande with an Italian Corrente, followed by a French Saraband overlaid with flamboyant, Italian operatic ornamentation. Bach's cosmopolitan style belies the fact that he travelled so little, although in his youth he did famously walk 200 miles to hear Buxtehude play the organ. Unlike Handel, who studied in Italy, Bach absorbed much of his Italian influence by copying out large amounts of Vivaldi. From Froberger, a German harpsichordist who lived in France, he assimilated the French keyboard style. The latter was in turn influenced by the "broken style" of the French lutenists who found a way to suggest more than one part within a single line. This is an important feature of Bach's melodic style and even the single subject of a fugue will contain contrapuntal elements within it. This ability is also what allowed Bach to write his solo violin and cello sonatas, partitas and suites where a single voiced instrument weaves a tapestry of contrapuntal implications. Most of Bach's working life was spent as a Kapellmeister of various important churches, where he was responsible for the music performed at weekly Sunday services, in addition to such onerous activities as teaching Latin (which he regularly complained about). In his own life Bach was known more as a virtuoso organist and improviser and he was considered learned but eccentrically old fashioned as a composer what with his obsessions with arcania such as fugue and ricercar. His sons (J.C., W.F. and C.P.E. Bach) were much more up to date. It should be mentioned that in addition to his large and uniformly high level musical output, he had twenty children by two wives. Bach's devout Lutheran faith pervades all his works, be they instrumental or vocal, and one cannot fully understand him without knowing many of the over two hundred sacred cantatas he wrote for Sunday services (such as Christ Lag in Todesbanden; Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet; and Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring from "Herz Und Mund Und Tat Und Leben"), or the great masses and passions, such as the Mass in b (excerpts include 1.Kyrie eleison; 11.Cum sancto spiritu; 23.Dona nobis pacem) and the St. Matthew Passion (excerpts include Herzliebster Jesu; Erbarm' dich Mein Gott, and O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden), written for Easter and other high holy days. Here one can discover the elaborate use of musical figures employed to express text, which also pervade the purely instrumental music. Throughout his life, Bach seemed to be driven to systematically explore all the possibilities of a given style or genre. In his organized and numerologically based way there are six Brandenburg Concerti - the essence of the Italian style as opposed to the four Orchestral Suites, (including the Allegro from the Brandeburg Concerto No.1; the Adagio from No.2, and the Allegro from No.5), six of each of the keyboard suites mentioned above, six cello suites, six solo violin works, etc. Each of the pieces in these collections explores or emphasizes another possibility within the type. A veritable bible for musicians, the two books of The Well-Tempered Klavier (includes the Prelude and Fugue No.1 in C and Prelude and Fugue No.17 in Ab from Book 1, and the Prelude and Fugue No.13 in F# from Book 2) twice present preludes and fugues of every imaginable type in every key. The miracle of these pieces is that the overwhelming intellectual mastery is always in the service of an even higher emotional character and spirit, explored with unending variety. At the end of his life Bach was still exploring the ultimate possibilities of counterpoint in The Art of the Fugue (contains Contrapunctus 12 rectus and Contrapunctus 12 inversus) and The Musical Offering. Bach left supreme works in every genre of his age except opera. Ironically this great conservative who really did nothing new, but only better and more completely, is for many musicians the true beginning of modern music. In many works (e.g. the chromatic variations of the Goldberg Variations) we can see the harmonic possibilities of the future. Bach's materials are often made from the most basic stuff of music-scales and arpeggios-and this perhaps partly explains the health and solidity of his music. For musicians, it is the universal folk music in which we bathe to purify our souls.
Handel
Just as the classical masters Mozart and Haydn are often paired together, so too are the masters of the high baroque, Bach and Handel. And yet it is the differences that are at least as illuminating as are the points of comparison. Both composers were complete masters of the prevailing Italian and French styles that comprised the basic language of the Baroque. But whereas Bach effected a personal synthesis of the two styles with German counterpoint, Handel showed a strong early proclivity toward the extroverted and dramatic world of Italian opera, and ultimately became the most important composer of an essentially Italian style, albeit with a French grandeur. Although he was certainly a virtuoso contrapuntalist, counterpoint was often for Handel a dramatic means, and not an end unto itself as it was for the more introverted Bach, composer of the Well Tempered Clavier and the Art of the Fugue. (Perhaps this is partly why Handel was a greater inspiration to Beethoven than was Bach.) Bach had no interest in opera but wrote instead profoundly religious cantatas, passions and masses, while treating the voice essentially as a melodic instrument with the most intricate demands of counterpoint expected of it. With Handel on the other hand, even religious oratorios such as the Messiah, have a theatrical quality that is not exclusively of the church and that communicates to an already burgeoning middle class audience. Handel's writing for the voice is completely idiomatic and the freer contrapuntal textures are more vocally conceived and are contrasted with powerful chordal writing. Finally, Bach, who never traveled outside of Germany, was not truly valued by the larger world until 75 years after his death, while Handel, the cosmopolitan composer and impresario, was internationally famous in his own lifetime. Unlike Bach, George Frideric Handel was not born into a musical family, but his gifts were so obvious that his barber-surgeon father begrudgingly allowed him to take lessons from the director of music at the principal church in Handel's native town of Halle, in Saxony. Handel became an accomplished organist, harpsichordist, and studied violin and oboe. His knowledge of counterpoint and contemporary composition came from the time honored method of copying scores of other composers. At the age of 18, rather than become a church cantor, Handel went to Hamburg, the center of German opera, where he stayed until Here he composed his first opera, "Amira," performed in From 1706 to 1710, Handel was in Italy, where he had contact with the major musicians in Rome, Florence, Venice, and Naples. He was recognized as an emerging talent and met among others, Corelli, Allesandro Scarlatti and his son Domenico, who was exactly Handel's age. By the time Handel left Italy at the age of 25 to become Music Director at the Court of Hanover, the basic foundation of his style had been developed. Handel took an almost immediate leave from his new position and went to London where his opera "Rinaldo" caused a sensation. In 1712, he was granted a second leave on condition that he return "within a reasonable time." Two years later he was still in London when the Elector of Hanover was proclaimed King George I of England. Legend has it that the truant Handel restored himself to the good favor of the new monarch by composing wind music to be played as a surprise for the King's boating party. This music was published in 1740 under the title "Water Music." Meanwhile, Handel settled down to a long and prosperous career in London where Italianate music had always found favor, becoming a naturalized citizen in Around this time, sixty noble and wealthy men formed a joint stock company called the Royal Academy of Music to present the fashionable Italian operas to the public. Handel and two Italians, Bonosini and Ariosti, were engaged as composers. This company flourished from 1720 to 1728 and for it Handel produced some of his finest operas, including "Giulio Cesare" in However by 1728, with the success of Gay's "The Beggars Opera" in English, it was clear that the public was growing tired of Italian opera. When the company dissolved, Handel took over the theater with a partner and became an entrepreneur, traveling to Italy and dealing with increasingly highly paid and temperamental singers as well as composing. In the 1730's however, Handel realized that his style of opera could no longer be financially successful and he turned to a kind of composition that could be mounted at less expense, namely the English oratorio (Overture from "Julius Caeser in Egypt;" Arrival of the Queen of Sheba from "Solomon"), which can be said to be Handel's most original contribution to music. Handel had already set English words in sections of some operas and most notably in "Alexander's Feast" in After suffering a stroke in 1737 caused by the strains of running an opera company, two works, "Saul" and "Israel in Egypt" established the popularity of the Handelian oratorio on biblical subjects in Handel at this time leased a theater for annual performances of Lenten oratorios and even improvised on the organ at intermissions. These performances completely won over the English public and made Handel's music supreme in England until Edward Elgar came to maturity in the late nineteenth century. All in all, Handel produced 26 oratorios, the most famous of course being the "Messiah," which was first performed in Dublin in Although Handel was known to be imperious at times, and to have a huge temper as well as an enormous appetite, he was also known for his sense of humor and generous, honorable and pious nature. In his last seven years of life, Handel was blind and yet continued to conduct and revise his works with the help of his devoted friend, J.S Schmidt. By the time he died in London in 1759, he had become an English institution. Although Handel's greatest music and innovations were in the field of vocal music, he composed superb intrumental music throughout his life. There include two groups of Concerti Grossi, Op.3 (1734) and Op.6 (1740) (Polonaise from Concerto Grosso No.3 in E-, Op.6), and five Concerti for orchestra (1741), as well as twelve organ concerti (Allegro from No.7 in F "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale;" No.6 in Bb). Eight "Suites de Pièces" for harpsichord published in 1733 contain much famous music, including the variations on a theme known as the "Harmonious Blacksmith" and the well-known Sarabande in D-. The fifteen solo sonatas of Op.1 (No.5 in F, Op.1 No.11; No.6 in B-, Op.1 No.9) published in 1724 are playable on a variety of instruments, such as the flute, oboe, and violin. In addition, there are many other duets, solo, and trio sonatas as well as the "Music for Royal Fireworks" (La Réjouissance; Minuet I & II) of Handel, along with Bach, is one of the supreme glories of his age for many reasons, not the least of which is the sincerity and clarity of his emotional meaning. While Bach's profund religiosity is the result of a restless and questioning introspection, the more worldy Handel seems to be less troubled and more accepting, but no less believing in the givens of his faith. Handel and Bach stand above their contemporaries for the power and surety of their music. The underlying harmonic architecture, which is one of the great contributions of the Baroque, achieves an unprecedented richness and solidity with both composers. As with much of the greatest art, the music is often surprising, yet inevitable.
Bach
Handel

31. The baroque interest in emotion and drama, exemplified by the invention of opera, led to important developments in writing for the theater as well as in the style of poetic composition and the invention of new literary forms. In France the comedies of MoliËre and the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, written in part under the patronage of Louis XIV, illustrate the dramatic range of the period. The religious fervor of the English metaphysical poets is yet another sign of baroque artists' concern with questions of faith and belief. The more practical problems involved in reconciling ideals with the realities of life are described in Don Quixote, one of the first great novels in Western literature. The most monumental of all literary works of the seventeenth century, Milton's Paradise Lost, aimed to combine the principles of Renaissance humanism with Christian teaching. Its drama, spirituality, and psychological insight mark it as a truly baroque masterpiece.
Baroque Literature
The novel Don Quixote actually consists of two parts: the first was published in 1605 and the second in 1615 (a year before the author's death). In 1614, between the first and second parts, a fake Don Quixote sequel was published by somebody using the pen-name Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda. For this reason, Part II contains several references to an imposter, whom Quixote rails against, and Part II ends with the death of Don Quixote (so no imposter could experiment with Cervantes' character).
Cervantes tells that the first chapters come from the "chronicles of La Mancha", and the rest was translated by a morisco from a found manuscript by the original Arabic author Cide Hamete Benengeli ("Mr. Hamid Eggplant"). This and other narrative resources parody the knight genre.
Don Quixote is knighted by an inn-keeper
The plot covers the journeys and adventures of Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza. Alonso Quijano or Quesada is an ordinary Spaniard (an hidalgo, the lowest rank of the Spanish nobility) who is obsessed with stories of knights errant (libros de caballerías). His friends and family think him crazy when he decides to take the name of Don Quixote de la Mancha and become a knight errant himself (a quixote in Spanish was a piece of armor). Then he sorties to wander Spain on his thin horse Rocinante, righting wrongs and protecting the oppressed.
Don Quixote is visibly crazy to most people. He believes ordinary inns to be enchanted castles, and their peasant girls to be beautiful princesses. He mistakes windmills for oppressive giants sent by evil enchanters. He imagines a neighboring peasant to be Dulcinea del Toboso, the beautiful maiden to whom he has pledged love and fidelity.
Sancho Panza, his simple squire, believes his master to be a bit crazy, in particular he knows that there is "really" no Dulcinea, but he plays along, hoping to get rich. He and Quixote agree for instance that because Dulcinea is not as pretty nor does she smell as good as she should, she "must have been enchanted", and from that point on the mission is to disenchant her.
Both master and squire undergo complex change and development throughout the story, and each character takes on attributes of the other as the novel goes on. At the end of the second book, Quixote decides that his actions have been madness and returns home to die. Sancho begs him not to give up, suggesting that they take on the roles of shepherds, who were commonly heroes of pastoral poems and stories.
Master and squire have numerous adventures, often causing more harm than good in spite of their noble intentions. They meet criminals sent to the galleys, and are victims of an elaborate prank by a pair of Dukes.
Many Americans may be more familiar with the musical Man of la Mancha than with the book itself. If they read the book, they would be in for some surprises: for example Dulcinea, or Aldonza Lorenzo, one of the main characters of the play, is never seen in the book.
In the novel, she is constantly invoked by Don Quixote as his lady, but never appears, allowing his hyperbolic statements of her beauty and virtue to go untested. However, the peasant girl he has mistaken for her, eventually, comes to his death-bed and acknowledges that she is, in fact, "his Dulcinea".
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost (published 1667) is an epic poem, originally in 10 books, later revised in 12, of blank verse by the 17th century English poet John Milton. It narrates the Christian story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
The protagonist of this Protestant epic, is the fallen angel, Satan. Today it would appear that Milton presents Satan sympathetically, as an ambitious and prideful being who defies his tyrannical creator, omnipotent God, and wages war on Heaven, only to be defeated and cast down. Some critics regard the character of Satan as a Byronic hero.
The story is innovative in that it attempts to rectify the Christian and the Pagan; like Shakespeare, Milton found Christian mythology lacking. The inclusion of a largely pagan Satan allows the vitality of Pagan imagery and maintains the poem's piety.
Many tough theological issues are grappled with, including fate, predestination, and the Trinity. Milton did not strictly believe in the Trinity. He presents a Father who is good but angry and sarcastic, and a Son who is genuinely giving and optimistic.
Milton's story contains two story arcs: that of Satan and that of Adam and Eve. Satan's story is an homage to the old epics of warfare. It begins in media res, after Satan and the other rebel angels have been defeated and cast down by God into Hell. In Pandæmonium, Lucifer must employ his rhetorical ability to organize his followers; he is aided by Mammon and Beelzebub. At the end of the debate, Satan volunteers himself to poison the newly-created earth. He releases Sin and Death into the world, and braves the dangers of the Abyss in a manner reminiscient of Odysseus or Aeneas.
The other story is a fundamentally different, new kind of epic: a domestic one. Adam and Eve are presented for the first time in Christian literature as having a functional relationship while still without sin. They have arguments, passions and personalities, as well as sexual intercourse. Satan successfully tempts Eve, who in turn convinces Adam. They again have sex, but in a way which implies rape. After realizing their crime, they fight, but make ammends thanks to Eve's humility. They are then cast out of Eden, but the coming of Messiah is foreshadowed, and an angel adds that one may find "A paradise within thee, happier farr."
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Context
Influences include the Bible, Milton's own Puritan upbringing and religious perspective, Edmund Spenser, and the Roman poet Virgil.
Milton wrote the entire work after he lost his sight with the help of secretaries and friends, notably Andrew Marvell. On April 27, 1667 the blind, impoverished Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10.
Later in life, Milton wrote Paradise Regained, charting the temptation of Christ by Satan, and the return of the possibility of paradise. This sequel has never had a reputation equal to the earlier poem.
Don Quijote and Sancho,
engraving, by Gustave Dore