My writings

Monteverdi (1567-1643) and the Birth of Opera

(chap 20)

Claudio Monteverdi, a chapel master of Saint Mark’s in Venice, was the greatest Italian composer of the early seventeenth century as well as the first master of the baroque music-drama. He wrote religious music like ballets, madrigals and operas. He also set aside the original way to write Renaissance chamber music and made it much more dramatic, with contrasts. He wanted his music to express much more than music was expressing until that time. He associated specific sounds with specific emotional states: anger, for instance, with the high voice register, moderation with the middle voice register, and humility with the low voice register. Because he was so concentrated on music as well as speech, he finally gave birth to a new kind of music which is called opera: a form of theater that combines all aspects of baroque artistic expression- music, drama, dance, and the visual arts.
Opera was used to revive the music-drama of ancient Greek. However none of the humanists were able to put a sound on the Greeks music which led them to only imitate the ancient unity of music and poetry. The first performance of an opera was very similar to what was the Renaissance masque, a form of musical entertainment that included dance and poetry, along with rich costumes and scenery. But what mostly differentiated operas from masques was the music complexity and dramatically cohesive. By 1700 in Italy, there were seventeen opera houses built, the first one being in Venice. As we can see, operas became very popular. Some of the opera houses were magnificent with their life-sized sculptures and illusionist frescoes, which were aesthetically indistinguishable from Italian baroque churches and chapel interiors.
Monteverdi’s first opera (full-length) was called Orfeo which he composed in 1697. The text for the opera, called libretto, wasn’t written by him, but by Alessandro Striggio and was based on the descent of Orpheus (the Greek poet-musician to Hades).

Emperor Akbar (at the top of this image in

a white gown) directs building work at

Fatehpur Sikri. (1570 - 1574 AD)
Absolute Power and the Aristocratic Style in India

(chap 21)

It is in the sixteenth century that the Muslim dynasty called the Moguls (name deriving from “Mongol”) has united all of India. Before that, Muslims ruled only some parts of the country for almost a century. Moguls managed to rule India as absolute monarchs from 1526 to 1707. As Louis XIV imported Italian culture into France, the moguls imported the Persian culture and language into India. The new Indian cultural style was a mix of Muslim, Hindu, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and African traditions. There was also an aristocracy in India, similar to the one of the Sun King ( served as an adjunct to majesty).
Akbar was a thirteen year old boy that came to the throne and was the founder of the Mogul empire. Since Emperor Asoka, Akbar was the most dynamic ruler. Because India wasn’t united and different religion groups lived in all India, Akbar was tolerating the religions practiced. He even finally took the time to bring in to his court learned representatives of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and other religions to debate with the Muslim theologians.
The lower class of India was very poor because they had to pay enormous taxes to finance all the luxuries of the upper-class elite. But India was the wealthiest state in the world; they surpassed France’s revenue by ten.
One of the Mogul innovations was the recording and illustrating first-hand accounts of specific historical event as a miniature of the birth of Akbar’s son (The Humanistic Traditions book 4 48). These kinds of miniatures representing an event are still present on Asian carpets.

Agra, Red Fort, Jahangiri Mahal (1565 AD)

Agra, the new city, Fatehpur Sikri (1570 AD)

Bach and Religious Music

(chap 22)

Very near the castle in Eisenach where the first transcript of the Bible in German was written by Martin Luther was where Bach was born. Bach wrote music to God, he was asked to compose music for each Sunday services at the Lutheran Church of Saint Thomas in Leipzig and also for all holy days. Bach himself even dedicated his works “to the glory of God” because he got his inspiration from Luther’s teachings and Lutheran hymns tunes. Bach did not travel very far during his life, a couple of hundreds miles was the further he got from Eisenach. Bach was known as the finest of organ virtuos and was a consultant for the construction of baroque organs which were the glories of the Protestant churches thanks to the ornately embellished casings.
His vocal music were oratorios, Masses, and cantatas. The cantata is a multi-mouvement work with a text in verse sung by chorus and soloists and accompanied by a musical instrument or instruments. As is the oratorio, cantatas may be sacred or secular in subject matter and lyric or dramatic in style. Bach has 195 cantatas that survived and they were usually inspired by the simple melodies of Lutheran chorales. The basic of his instrumental compositions were also taken from religious work, the Protestant chorales as well as the 170 organ preludes written to precede and set the mood for congregational singing. Bach’s music invested Protestant Christianity with a sublime and deeply personal sense of human tragedy.

One of Bach's preludes bwv995

Bach's traveling map

Baroque Instumental Music

(chap 23)

Instrumental music became much more popular, not surprising after the writings of some of the earliest composers which led to the improvements and refinements in tuning. It came to the point that composers where composing even more instrumental music. The principal instruments that were perfected were the violin, viola, and the cello, as string instruments and the organ and harpsichord. During the early eighteen century equal temperament was adopted by musician. The equal temperament is a system of tuning in which the octave was divided into twelve half-step of equal size. Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach’s fugues and his collection of preludes showed how Bach could use that tuning system and create sublime music with it. He wrote two pieces in every possible key. All these efforts to improve the quality of music of the instruments as well as the techniques mirrored the efforts of scientists and philosophers of the time to bring perfection and uniformity also to the tools used as well as the scientific inquiry.

stradivari violin

The world center for violin manufacturing during the seventeenth century was in northern Italy. Great quality violins were made at that time. Some of the names are The Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivari families of Cremona. They had their techniques that became famous, because violinists playing in the greats courts of Europe have purchased those kinds of violins. The techniques used were kept very secret, it only passed from father to son and even to this day, violin manufacturers cannot imitate them. It has always been unsuccessfully. As for other instruments, around the year of 1650, they were standardized and refined. The instrument known as the shawm wasn’t going to be unique anymore, all of those instruments became the modern oboe.

The Encyclopedic Cast of Mind
(chap 24)
In the eighteenth century there was something that had a huge impact on the culture of the time, it was the Encyclopédie. However it wasn’t understood by the majority, rather the minority of the people, it fostered an encyclopedic cast of mind. All work done from that time, was stored, accumulated, preservated which had a direct link with the Scientific Revolution and to the Enlightenment “bible”, Newton’s Principia.
Chemistry, Biology, Electricity and medical sciences were the fields which have known enormous amounts of advances during the eighteenth-century by scientists. What had appeared in society’s everyday lives? The mercury thermometer, the stethoscope and an introduction to the science of immunology to the West - about 7 centuries after the Chinese.

Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) - the Elementary Treatise of Chemistry, chemistry which was an exact science
Carolus Linnaeus (1701-1778) - systematic method for classifying plants
Georges Luis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, French naturalist (1707-1788) - made landmark advances in zoology

In the domain of arts, the same strategies were adopted - accumulating and classifying knowledge. The first dictionary of the English language was published by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) as well as the first Western dictionary of music by Rousseau. As for the social sciences, in 1756, a seven-volume general history written by Voltaire was considered as the new model of history-writing. Voltaire recognized that Europe had a debt to Arab science as well as Asian thought. He was a very critical man when it came to the role of the Catholic Church in Western history, he rejected explanations based on faith and not rationality. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) went to the point to say that Christianity was to blame for the collapse of the Roman Empire. His interpretation of ancient cultures was later on written in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776.
In the East however, these “encyclopedias” weren’t comprehensive collections of contemporary knowledge, but anthologies of the writings of Chinese artists and scholars.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

Baruch Spinoza was born to Portuguese Jews living in exile in Holland, but his life among the Marranos there was often unsettled.

Spinoza's first published work was a systematic presentation of the philosophy of Descartes, to which he added his own suggestions for its improvement. The Principles of Descartes's Philosophy (1663) contain many of the characteristic elements of his later work, but Spinoza seems to have realized that a full exposition of his own philosophical views would require many years of devoted reflection.

Chap. 23 - René Descartes

René Descartes
Philosopher

1596 -1650

If you would be a real seeker after truth,
it is necessary that at least once in your life
you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

—Descartes

René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596 in La Haye, France. Descartes became one of the most influential thinkers in human history, and is sometimes called the founder of modern philosophy.

Descartes' parents were Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard. His mother died the year following his birth. His father was a lawyer and magistrate, which left little time for raising a family. René and his brother and sister, Pierre and Jeanne, were raised by their grandmother.

From 1606 until 1614, Descartes attended La Fleche, a Jesuit college in Anjou. He spent the following two years in Paris studying mathematics, and being introduced to fashionable French society. In 1616, he began the study of law at University of Poitiers, but in 1617, set out for the Netherlands where he volunteered in the Dutch army. Over the following eleven years Descartes travelled throughout Europe, settling in the Netherlands in 1628. He completed two additional years of education in the Dutch cities of Franeker and Leyden. Descartes later claimed that his formal education provided little of substance, and that only mathematics, any real knowledge.

Descartes published his major philosophical work, "A Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy" in 1641, the year before Galileo died and Isaac Newton was born. Because he lived at a time when traditional ideas were being questioned, he sought to devise a method for reaching the truth. This concern and his method of systematic doubt had an enormous impact on the subsequent development of philosophy. Descartes introduced the now famous Latin phrase "cogito ergo sum," or in English "I think, therefore I am."

In Descartes' view, the universe was created by God on whose power everything depends. He thought of God as resembling the human mind in that both the mind and God think, but have no physical being. But he believed that God is unlike the human mind in that God is infinite and does not depend on a creator for His existence.

In addition to his accomplishments as a philosopher Descartes was an outstanding mathematician, inventing analytic geometry and attempting to devise the simple universal laws that governed all physical change.

In 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden persuaded Descartes to come to Stockholm. On February 26, 1650, after only a few months in that cold climate, he died of pneumonia.

Chap. 21 - Louis XIV

Louis XIV

When Louis XIV came to the throne as a five-year-old boy (actually four years, eight months) on 14 May 1643, the Thirty Years' War was still in progress, and Cardinal Richelieu, the French éminent grise, had died the preceding year. The situation did not look good for France, but the young boy became one of the world's great monarchs and the embodiment of the divine-right, absolute monarch ("L'état, c'est moi"). Louis (5 September 1638-1 September 1715) ruled France for seventy-two years, one of the longest reigns in recorded history, and dominated European cultural and political affairs.
The roi du soleil (sun king) was the son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, born at the royal chateau in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1638. Since his parents had been married for twenty-two years without a child, they called him "Louis the God-Given." When his father died, the regency fell to the hands of the intensely-disliked queen and Cardinal Jules Mazarin.
Mazarin (Giulio Mazarini, 1602-1661) played a role similar to that of Cardinal Richelieu, who had been the chief advisor (sometimes called l'eminent grise) to King Louis XIII. Mazarin, a Sicilian by birth, had studied in Spain and then in Rome before embarking on a career as a captain of an infantry regiment and then later as a diplomat for the pope. While serving in France, he came to the attention of Richelieu and, around 1638, accepted the cardinal's offer to work for France. As regent, although careless about state finances-especially at his profit-and antagonistic towards the nobles, Mazarin did steer France through the torturous problems of war, civil war, the negotiations at Westphalia and internal chaos.
The first major challenge for Mazarin was La Fronde (1648-1653), a confused revolt that included many different groups.

• Nobles
• Parisian bourgeoisie
• The Parlement of Paris

There were a variety of complaints, such as the noble's suspicions of the growing power of the king and the Parisian mob's unrest because of famine, but the key unifying ground of all the discontents was hatred for Mazarin as a foreign intriguer. The Fronde left a deep impression on young Louis, who had to flee Paris on a number of occasions for his safety--In 1651, rebels even entered the king's bedroom; Mazarin had to flee France twice. Louis felt humiliated by the nobles and threatened by Parisians, and he never forgot it.
In order to ratify the peace treaty ending the war that had begun in 1635 between France and Spain, in 1660 Louis XIV married Marie Thérèse of Austria, daughter of the King of Spain-despite his love for Mazarin's niece, Marie Mancini. When Mazarin, his godfather and prime minister, died on 9 March 1661, the 23-year-old king seized the moment and announced that he himself would govern-something that had not happened since the reign of Henry IV. He obtained support from key ministers, such as Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), the Marquis de Louvois (1639-91), Hugues de Lionne (1611-1671) and Michel Le Tellier (1603-85)--all expert administrators who had been groomed by Mazarin.
Louis was dignified and imposing with charming manners, but he was also hard working, patient and self-disciplined with an iron physical constitution. He maintained a strict routine of official business, every day. Short of height, he was of modest intelligence (not much helped by his upbringing undertaken largely by his servants) and lacking of a sense of humor. Possessed of a colossal pride, he loved grandeur, glory, military reviews and petty details (uniforms, equipment, drill).
Louis was the epitome of the absolute monarch and embodied the idea of divine right monarchy. As God's representative on earth, he felt that he was due respect and that his word was law; he was responsible to God alone. As an absolute monarch, Louis XIV wielded unlimited authority with all decisions made by him; however, it was not despotism nor arbitrary power, as kings still had to justify their actions to churchmen, entrepreneurs and nobles.
Having taken the reigns of government, Louis now had to contend with the nobility, church, bureaucracy and the rest of Europe to achieve his idea of France.
The chief opposition to the central monarchy was the French, feudal nobility. The king continued the process of destroying the nobility as a class by increasing the use of commoners to run the state and by establishing Versailles as a seventeenth-century "Disneyland" to keep the nobility occupied with non-political amusements after the court moved there in 6 May 1682.
To solidify support from the church, Louis acted in a highly favorable manner. In 1685, the L'Edit de Fountainbleau revoked the Edict of Nantes, and Huguenots, forbidden to practice, left France in droves. On one hand, this created religious unity within France and secured the friendship of the church, but, on the other hand, it aroused the implacable hatred of Protestant states and deprived France of some of its most industrious citizens.
To create a more responsive and effective bureaucracy, Louis instituted new administrative methods to strengthen his control.
Weekly ministerial conferences
Continuity in the top four ministries (finance, army, navy, public works), only sixteen ministers in fifty-four years of his personal reign
Ministers chosen by ability not birth
Intendants continued to rule the 36 generalités (provinces)--but they never served where they were born.

Financial reform of taxes
Colbert, as controller general, worked to improve the French economy through a policy called mercantilism--state intervention to create a self-sustaining economy. Colbert used an aggressive tariff policy to manipulate the import of raw materials and the export of manufactured goods to improve the balance of payments. He also fostered domestic trade and industry by improving communications (roads and canals), eliminating internal tolls, expanding the navy, increasing colonial trade through the East India Company and by subsidizing certain industries (tapestries and furniture).
The economic gains wrought by Colbert and the administrative improvements allowed Louis to pursue an activist foreign policy. Over the course of his long reign, the Sun King essentially confronted all of Europe at one time or another over his ambitions to secure the "natural" boundaries (Alps, Pyrenees, Rhine, Atlantic Ocean) of France. At his disposal, Louis had the largest and best standing army of the day (increased from a peacetime force of 20,000 to a wartime machine of 400,000 professionally-organized men).
The War of Devolution (1667-68) was an attempt to gain the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium). Louis had married Marie Thérèse, the daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, and when her brother died, Louis claimed that his wife should inherit the Netherlands, based on the custom of "Devolution" (Property passes to the children of a first marriage in precedence of later marriages). After a brilliant military campaign, Louis had to retreat in the face of English and Dutch pressure--He never forgave the Dutch-and in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668), Louis did get part of Belgium, including Charleroi, Tournai and Lille.
The Dutch War, 1672-78, resulted from Louis' irritation with Dutch commercial power, the perceived Dutch treachery in the War of Devolution and Dutch Protestantism. The long war ended with the Treaties of Nijmegen (1678) in which Spain gave France the Franche Comté (the area to the northeast of Switzerland), and France kept the province of Lorraine.
Louis XIV was at his peak. He had defeated a formidable coalition (Spain and the Holy Roman emperor had joined the Dutch against him) and dictated terms to the enemy. He had extended the frontier of France in the north and in the east. His fleet now equaled those of England and Holland.
Meanwhile, great changes had taken place in his private affairs. In 1680 the Marquise de Montespan, who had replaced Mme de La Vallière as Louis's mistress in 1667, was implicated in the Affair of the Poisons, a scandal in which a number of prominent people were accused of sorcery and murder. Fearful for his reputation, the King dismissed Mme de Montespan and imposed piety on his entourage. Although the king openly renounced pleasure, he still found solace in the arms of his newest favorite, the pious Mme de Maintenon, widow of the satirist Paul Scarron and former governess of the king's illegitimate children. In 1682 the court moved to Versailles. The following year, the Queen died, and the Louis secretly married Mme de Maintenon, to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life.
The War of the League of Augsberg (1688-97) resulted from the formation in 1686 of the League of Augsberg by Emperor Leopold (Holy Roman Empire) with Spain, Sweden and some German princes to resist further French expansion. When in September 1688, Louis invaded the Palatinate on a trumped up claim and occupied Cologne, the English, Dutch and the League united in a grand alliance to resist the French in a war lasting almost nine years. In the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), Louis gave up all lands, including the Palatinate, that he had seized, except Strasbourg, with Lorraine restored to its duke.
This set the stage for the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). When Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain and Louis' brother-in-law, died in 1700, the nearest male heir was Leopold of Austria, who wanted the Spanish throne for his son the Archduke Charles. Having foreseen the forthcoming conflict over succession to the Spanish throne, European diplomats had earlier worked out an agreement for Prince Joseph of Bavaria, a grandnephew of Leopold, to inherit the throne, but Prince Joseph died in 1699 before Charles II. French diplomats then persuaded Charles II to name a French heir, and a month before his death, Charles II did so, agreeing to leave his undivided lands intact to Philip of Anjou (Philip V), the grandson of Louis XIV. After brief hesitation, Louis accepted on Philip's behalf even though he knew the decision meant war (Louis did not have many options with both England and the Holy Roman Empire already hostile to France.).
A new grand alliance of England, Holland, Savoy, Brandenburg-Prussia, Hannover, the Palatinate, Portugal and the Holy Roman Empire united against France. Although the French army fought bravely, the tide began to turn at Blenheim (13 August 1704) on the Danube River, the first major French defeat in decades. By 1709, France had come perilously close to losing all the advantages gained over the preceding century, but a French victory at the Battle of Denain combined with the Tories coming to power in England led to the end the war. According to the far-reaching treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt, and Baden (1713-14), Philip became king of Spain on the condition that the French and Spanish crowns never unite. France retained its conquests in Flanders and on the Rhine.
The wars had cost France an enormous sum in both financial and human terms. There was bankruptcy, depression, heavy taxation and dissatisfaction. Moreover, a series of deaths in the royal family deprived the king of his son (the Grand Dauphin), two of his grandsons (the Ducs de Bourgogne and Berry), his great grandson (the Duc de Bretagne) and the Duchesse de Bourgogne.
When Louis XIV died in 1715, at the age of seventy-seven, there was great rejoicing in France that he was finally gone. His heir, Louis' great-grandson, was a five-year-old child not expected to live long. Louis had wanted to leave actual power in the hands of the Duc du Maine, his son by Mme de Montespan and had drawn up a will to that effect, but the Parlement of Paris nullified the will after his death, thus setting in motion the course of events that led to the revolution of 1789.
Under Louis XIV, France, had, at a heavy price, become a modern state with an effective armed forces, able bureaucracy and a practical theory of politics. France had added territory and supplanted Spain as the most powerful continental power. In addition, Louis encouraged an extraordinary blossoming of French culture that ensured French cultural predominance for centuries.

Chap. 21 - Molière

Molière

Molière, whose real name was Jean Baptiste Poquelin, composed 12 of the most durable and penetratingly satirical full-length comedies of all time, some in rhyming verse, some in prose, as well as six shorter farces and comedies. As a comic dramatist he ranks with such other distinctive masters of the genre as Aristophanes, Plautus, and George Bernard Shaw. He was also the leading French comic actor, stage director, and dramatic theoretician of the 17th century. In a theatrical period, the early baroque, dominated by the formal neoclassical tragedies of Mairet, Rotrou, du Ryer, Pierre and Thomas Corneille, and Racine, Molière affirmed the potency of comedy as a serious, flexible art form. He also wrote a number of pastorals and other indoor and outdoor divertissements, such as his popular comedy-ballets, that depended on a formidable array of stage machinery (mostly imported from Italy) capable of providing swift and startling changes of sumptuous scenic effects.
He was born on Jan. 15, 1622, to Marie and Jean Poquelin; his father was a Parisian furniture merchant and upholsterer to the king. Jean Baptiste received his early education at the College de Clermont, a Jesuit school, becoming a promising scholar of Latin and Greek. Although he proceeded to study law and was awarded his law degree in 1642, he turned away from both the legal profession and his father's business. Instead, he incorporated (1643) an acting troupe, the Illustre Theatre, in collaboration with the Bejart family, probably because he had fallen in love with their oldest daughter, Madeleine Bejart, who became his mistress. At roughly the same time he also acquired the pseudonym Molière. With this company, Molière played an unsuccessful season in Paris and went bankrupt, then left to tour the provinces, primarily in southern and southwestern France, from about 1646 to 1658. During these 12 years he polished his skills as actor, director, administrator, and playwright. In 1658 the troupe returned to Paris and played before Louis XIV. The king's brother became Molière's patron; later Molière and his colleagues were appointed official providers of entertainment to the Sun King himself.
In the following 24 years, starting with The Precious Maidens Ridiculed (1659), which established him as the most popular comic playwright of the day, and ending with The Imaginary Invalid (1673), Molière advanced from being a gifted adapter of Italian-derived sketches and a showman who put on extravaganzas to a writer whose best plays had the lasting impact of tragedies. Unwittingly, he made many enemies. The clergy mistakenly believed that certain of his plays were attacks on the church. Other playwrights resented his continual experiments with comic forms (as in The School for Wives) and with verse (as in Amphitryon). Famous tragedians such as Montfleury and Hauteroche envied his success with the public and the royal protection he enjoyed. Molière responded by incorporating some of his detractors into his comedies as buffoons and ineffectuals.
In 1662 he married Armande Béjart, a 19-year-old actress who was either Madeleine's sister or (as some of the playwright's rivals claimed) her daughter by Molière. They had one child, Esprit-Madeleine, born in 1665. The marriage led to more than one separation and reconciliation between the playwright and his wife, who was 21 years his junior.
In the late 1660s, Molière developed a lung ailment from which he never recovered, although he continued to write, act, direct, and manage his troupe as energetically as before. He finally collapsed on Feb. 17, 1673, after the fourth performance of The Imaginary Invalid, and died at home that evening. Four days later, on the night of February 21, he was interred in Saint Joseph's Cemetery. Church leaders refused to officiate or to grant his body a formal burial. Seven years later the king united Molière's company with one of its competitors; since that time the French national theater, the Comédie Francaise, has been known as the House of Molière.
The strongest influence on Molière's theater came from the Italian commedia dell'arte troupes -- with their stock characters and situations -- that he encountered during his travels. This influence was enhanced by Molière's sharing of the Théâtre du Petit-Bourbon in Paris with the Italian Players, led by the celebrated Scaramouche. In his longer comedies, Molière immensely refined the commedia themes and techniques, setting most of his plots in and around Paris and raising neoclassical French comedy to a plane of artistry and inventiveness never attained before or since. He applied the alexandrine , or rhymed hexameter line -- borrowed from contemporary tragedies, many of which he had staged -- to a relaxed dialogue that imitated conversational speech. He also created a gallery of incisive portraits: Tartuffe the religious hypocrite, and Orgon, his dupe; Jourdain the social climber; Don Juan the rebel and libertine; cuckolds such as Arnolphe, Dandin, and Amphitryon; Alceste the stony idealist; Harpagon the miser; Scapin the trickster; Argan the hypochondriac; Philaminte the pretentiously cultured lady; and many more.
Molière's principal short plays (in one or two acts) are: The Jealous Husband (1645), The Flying Doctor (1648), Sganarelle (1660), The Rehearsal at Versailles (1663), and The Forced Marriage (1664); the longer plays (in three or five acts) include The School for Husbands (1661), The School for Wives (1662), Tartuffe (1664), Don Juan (1665), The Misanthrope (1666), The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1666), Amphitryon (1668), The Miser (1668), George Dandin (1668), The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670), Scapin (1671), The Learned Ladies (1672), and The Imaginary Invalid (1673).

I present to you

The life of Moliere

Paintings

Leonardo Da Vinci - The last supper

Jacopo Tintoretto - Venice - in the sacristy of the Basilica of Salute - mannerist

Caravaggio - Boy with a basket of fruits, 1593 - Italian baroque

Chap. 20 - Mannerism

The Visual Arts

Mannerism The High Renaissance in Italy coincided with the lives and art of three great artists, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Later artists studied and emulated the idealized beauty of Leonardo and Raphael, and the dynamism and grandeur of Michelangelo. However, faced with the perfection of the High Renaissance, a younger generation of painters began to explore different artistic possibilities.
This late period of the Renaissance, which lasted approximately from 1520 to 1600, is called Mannerism from the Italian maniera meaning "style" or "stylishness." To some extent, Mannerism mirrors the religious anxiety and political confusion resulting from the Protestant Reformation and the weakened authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Where High Renaissance art had been concerned with the harmonious balance of naturalism, composition, and color, art now found delight in exaggeration, artificiality, odd perspective, and jarring color.
Although Mannerism began in Florence and Rome by Italian artists, painters from Northern Europe (France, Flanders, and Germany) frequently studied in Italy where they adopted the fashionable Mannerist style. Upon returning to their native countries, they carried this style with them. Prints (such as etchings and engravings) were another important way that the Mannerist style was spread throughout Europe.
The Italian Baroque Italy in the seventeenth century was very different from the unified country we know today. Cities like Florence, Venice, Genoa, Bologna, and Naples formed small individual states with distinct local customs, traditions, dialects, and even artistic traditions. Binding these different cities and their territories together was the Roman Catholic Church, centrally located in Rome at the Vatican and ruled both temporally and spiritually by the Pope.
While most of Northern Europe had been violently affected by the Protestant Reformation, Italy remained staunchly Catholic. Recognizing the need for change and reform, the Catholic Church answered the Protestant Reformation with its own Counter-Reformation. Some Protestant sects protested the use of art in the church setting. The Catholic Church, however, which had been the greatest patron of the arts for centuries, affirmed the importance of the visual arts in propagating personal faith by depicting the lives of Christ and the saints. As a result, artistic commissions for churches and private patrons blossomed in 17th century Italy and nowhere more so than in Rome. Here and throughout Italy, Baroque artists created work that was realistic and yet believably illusionistic, personal, and intensely dramatic.
Seventeenth Century Dutch PaintingHolland (or the Low Lands) had succeeded in breaking away from Catholic Spain’s domination in the late sixteenth century. One important result was that most of Holland embraced Protestantism, and with the exception of a few cities like Utrecht, the effect in Dutch art was the elimination of most religious and mythological themes. Dutch seventeenth century painting tends to be more conservative than that of other European countries, focusing on the land and the pastimes of the Dutch people who were an increasingly prosperous merchant middle class.
Dutch artists depicted their world in direct portraits, realistic still lifes, landscapes, marine scapes, and genre paintings showing scenes of everyday life. However, some Dutch artists like Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrick Terbrugghen came under the strong influence of the Italian painter Caravaggio. These painters favored dramatic, emotion-filled or colorful subjects and used Caravaggio’s theatrical lighting. Other artists followed the example set by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn whose psychological explorations of the human spirit and emotion brought new depths of expression to painting.
Seventeenth Century Flemish PaintingWhile neighboring Holland broke away from the political control of Catholic Spain in the late 16th century, Flanders (Belgium) remained under Spanish domination. Thus, the Catholic Church, which was a significant patron of the arts, continued to influence Flemish art throughout the seventeenth century. Italy also continued to exert its artistic dominance, drawing artists to study the works of its leading painters. One such visitor was Peter Paul Rubens, who traveled to Italy as a young man and was drawn to Caravaggio’s dramatic style and the brilliant colors used by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. One his return to Flanders, Rubens synthesized these various artistic traditions, creating an exuberant, dramatic and colorful style that set the tone for all Flemish Baroque painting.
Rubens led a cosmopolitan life and enjoyed phenomenal success, serving among other things as court painter to the Archduke of Austria. His vast output was made possible by a large studio of assistants, many of whom - like Jacob Jordeans and Sir Anthony van Dyck - became famous in their own right. As a result, Rubens' Flemish Baroque style continued to influence the course of art far beyond the borders of Flanders and long after he died in 1640.