The MIT Press The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

The Crisis in the Arts of the Seventeenth Century: A Crisis of Representation?
Author(s): Peter Burke

Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 40, No. 2, The Crisis of the
Seventeenth Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Autumn, 2009), pp. 239-261
Published by: The MIT Press
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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xl:2 (Autumn, 2009), 239-261.
Peter Burke
The Crisis in the Arts of the Seventeenth Century:

A Crisis of Representation? Because the term crisis in
general and the idea of a seventeenth-century crisis in particular
have been the objects of acute criticism, a formal definition is in
order. One might speak, for instance, of a "crisis of confidence" -
in other words, a decline. However, confidence is not easy to
measure, and, in any case, it is necessary to ask, "Confidence in
what" (church, state, or humanity)? In the context of witch trials,
discussed in this issue by Edward Bever, the phrase "crisis of con-
fidence" is a precise one, but it becomes vaguer when it is used
about the arts. To avoid such a problem, the definition of crisis
employed herein is a fairly precise one, close to the medical origins
of the term in ancient Greece, where it referred to the moment in
an illness when a patient was poised between death and recovery,
or to seventeenth-century usage, exemplified by a speech in the
House of Commons in 1627 by Sir Benjamin Rudyerd about the
"crisis of parliaments" that would determine whether the Parlia-
ment would "live or die." Burckhardt, perhaps the first historian
to make a serious use of the term, also used the metaphor of a
fever.1
The pathological overtones of this metaphor, however, are an
obstacle to understanding, and in what follows an attempt will be
Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History and Life Fellow of Emmanuel College,
University of Cambridge. He is the author of Languages and Communities in Early Modern Eu-
rope (New York, 2004); Eyewitnessing (Ithaca, 2001).
The author thanks Theodore K. Rabb and Edward Bever for their comments on the first
draft of this paper.
© 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary

History, Inc.
1 Randolph Starn, "Historians and Crisis," Past & Present, 52 (1971), 3-22; John H. Elliott,
"Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe," ibid., 42 (1969), 35-56; rpr. in
Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith (eds.), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Lon-
don, 1978), 1 10- 133; J. B. Shank, "Crisis: A Useful Category of Post-Social Scientific Histori-
cal Analysis?" American Historical Review, CXIII (2008), 1 090-1 099. Rudyerd quoted in
Reinhard Koselleck, "Krise," in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and idem (eds.), Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisai- sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1972-
1997), III, 620; Jacob Burckhardt, "Die geschichtlichen Krisen," in Weltgeschichtliche Betrach-
tungen (Leipzig, 1938; orig. pub. 1905), 157-205. For Burckhardt, see Theodor Schieder, "Die
historischen Krisen im Geschichtsdenken Jacob Burckhardts, " in Begegnungen mit der
Geschichte (Gôttingen, 1962), 129-162.
240 I PETER BURKE
made to avoid them. In this article, the term will be used in a neu-
tral manner to refer to a relatively short period of turbulence (a
few decades at most) that is followed by structural changes that last
for a relatively long time (a century or more). This definition is
not so different from that employed by Clark in the introduction
to his classic work The Seventeenth Century, when he spoke of a
major "watershed" in European history in the middle of the sev-
enteenth century, "a change accompanied by storms." This idea
implies a clear contrast between periods of crisis and periods of
non-crisis, thereby helping to prevent the devaluation of our con-
ceptual currency by finding crises everywhere. It also implies
studying a crisis or crises in the seventeenth century rather than a
crisis of the seventeenth century, giving particular attention to the
years between 1640 and 1660 in order to test the notion that the
century was "broken in the middle, irreparably broken."2
As for the "arts," the word will be employed herein to refer
to the visual arts, literature, and music, focusing on cultural history
in the traditional narrow or precise sense, distinguished from intel-
lectual history (including the history of science), from the history
of popular culture, and from the history of culture in the wide an-
thropological sense of the term. Although it would be unwise to
assume that developments in all of these arts followed the same
chronology, we can at least point to some themes that were not
confined to one medium. The so-called "transverberation" of
St. Teresa, for instance, appealed to the English poet Richard
Crashaw as well as to the Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, and
another of Bernini's works, the transformation of Daphne into a
laurel tree, was also the subject of poems by the Italian Giambat-
tista Marino and the Pole Samuel Twardowski.
the historiography of crisis The idea of a seventeenth-

century crisis is old enough, and controversial enough, to all
to speak of an "Eighty Years' War" fought over it. In 1929,
organized his study of the seventeenth century around the i
a structural change in the middle of the period, even if he did
employ the term "crisis." In the same year, Croce's History o
2 George N. Clark, The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1929), ix; Hugh R. T
Roper, "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century," Past & Present, 16 (1959
CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 241
Baroque Age in Italy, which concentrated on literature, described

the baroque as the art of "decadence," "perversion," or "corrup-
tion. " He occasionally used the term crisis, but only to refer to the
invasion of Italy in 1494, not the seventeenth century. Clark and
Croce were followed in the 1930s by Borkenau, Willey, and Haz-
ard. The Austrian Marxist Borkenau studied a transition between
two worldviews - one traditional and "feudal" and the other me-
chanical, mathematical, and "bourgeois" - during the age of René
Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, while the other two scholars dis-
cussed both literature and ideas. Willey discussed what he called
the increasingly "precarious" position of poetry in a scientific age,
exposed to what John Keats famously dubbed "the touch of cold
philosophy, " whereas Hazard identified what he called a European
"crisis of consciousness" in the 1680s and 1690s.3
All the same, it was not until the 1950s that the idea of a sev-
enteenth-century crisis became a serious object of debate among
academic historians. In Britain, HobsbawmYs emphasis was pri-
marily economic, and that of Trevor-Roper sociopolitical. In
France, however, Mousnier, writing a general history of Europe
over two centuries (from 1500 to 1700), took a more holistic ap-
proach. Mousnier gave culture a major role in his interpretation of
the crisis, distinguishing a "crise de la sensibilité morale et religieuse"
from a "crise de la science"; discussing Augustinianism, classicism,
and Cartesianism in his section on "la lutte contre la crise" (the fight
against crisis); and returning to ideas and feelings in his analysis of
the "renewed crisis" at the end of the century.4
Clark had already devoted a chapter to literature and another
to painting and architecture, but Mousnier, in his pages about the
baroque, was the first historian to make the arts central to the in-
terpretation of the crisis. Indeed, he claimed that the crisis was first
revealed in art {une crise . . . qui a été décelée d'abord dans Vart)> com-
paring it to a psychological depression in an individual. Juxta-
posing the visual arts to literature (Peter Paul Rubens to Pierre
3 Benedetto Croce, Storia delYeta barocca in Italia (Bari, 1929), 3; Franz Borkenau, Die
Ùbergang vom jeudalen zum biirgerlichen Weltbild (Darmstadt, 1971; orig. pub. 1934); Basil
Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background (London, 1934); Paul Hazard, Crise de la conscience
européenne 1680-1720 (Paris, 1935).
4 Eric Hobsbawm, "The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century," Past & Present, 5 (1954), 33-
53; ibid., 6 (1954), 44-65; Trevor-Roper, "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,"
ibid., 16 (1959), 8-42; Roland Mousnier, Les 16e et 17e siècles (Paris, 1954).
242 I PETER BURKE
Corneille), Mousnier emphasized what he called "internal disor-

der" (désordre intérieur), asserting that the baroque lacked the sym-
metry and the equilibrium of the Renaissance, that it sacrificed or-
der to sensation, and that it "probably encouraged a general crisis
of reason that showed itself first in morality." In the case of the late
seventeenth century, a time of "renewed crisis" (une crise renou-
velée), Mousnier's emphasis fell on what he called, not unlike
Willey, the "drying up" (dessèchement) of literature and the expul-
sion of poetry.5
This bold attempt at a general synthesis owed a good deal to
more limited studies by earlier scholars. Mousnier's interpretation
of the late seventeenth century followed Hazard, and his pages on
the baroque drew from earlier French studies of art and literature
by Lebègue, for instance, and by Mâle, whose famous book Reli-
gious Art after the Council of Trent had appeared in 1932. Mousnier
did not refer to the German art historian Weisbach, whose his
pioneering work on the baroque, published in 1921, had linked
the new style to a pessimistic view of life, associated with the
Counter-Reformation, contrasting it with the optimism of the
Renaissance.6
Mousnier's view of baroque art was contradicted in the study
of the baroque and classicism published by Victor Tapie in 1957:
For his part, Tapie stressed magnificence and triumphalism. How-
ever, Mousnier's interpretation was followed by Mandrou, in an
article published six years later that completely ignored his prede-
cessor. Mandrou described the baroque as the expression of an
emotional, unbalanced sensibility or mentality (mentalité pathétique,
déséquilibre mentale), and presented it as a response to the "social
crisis" between 1590 and 1640. In similar fashion, six years after
Mandrou's article appeared, Chaunu, another historian associated
with Annales, characterized the baroque in terms of tragic tension
and as a response both to the end of economic growth and to the
"crisis of consciousness" following the blow to traditional views of
the cosmos administered by the natural philosophers.7
5 Mousnier, Les 16e et îye siècles, 176- 1 8 1, 331-334.
6 Emile Mâle, L'Art religieux après le Concile de Trente, étude sur l" iconographie de la fin du
XVIe, du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècles en Italie, en France, en Espagne et en Flandre (Paris, 1932);
Raymond Lebègue, "Le Théâtre baroque en France," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance,
II (1941), 161-184; Werner Weisbach, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin, 1921),
3-
7 Victor-L. Tapie (trans. A. Ross Williamson), The Age of Grandeur: Baroque Art and Architec-
If one reads Mousnier's study today, more than half a century

after it was first published, it may seem to belong to another intel-
lectual world, thanks to its personification of the baroque, viewed
as an agent independent of individuals, not to mention the au-
thor's moralism and his fear of disorder and unreason, which he
expressed still more clearly in his later study of rural rebellions,
viewed as "peasant furies." The work might have been more use-
ful if the author had made more of an attempt to distinguish be-
tween description, explanation, and judgment. It might also be ar-
gued that Mousnier dilutes the idea of crisis too much by using the
term in so many different contexts. All the same, Mousnier's holis-
tic vision of seventeenth-century culture is an illuminating one,
and it may serve as a foundation - or possibly a springboard - for
the discussion that follows.8
In focusing on the relationship between the general crisis and
the arts, it is surely necessary to begin by distinguishing a number
of problems or questions. In the first place, was there a crisis in the
relatively small world of the arts? Underneath this umbrella, it is
necessary to consider the different arts separately, since it cannot
be assumed that painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry,
drama, and the writing of what modern librarians call "non-
fiction" follow the same trajectory.
In the second place, moving from the microcosm to the mac-
rocosm, did artists, writers, and other creators respond to what
they perceived as a more general crisis? Or did the arts "reflect" or
"express" a crisis in the wider society or culture? These questions
will be discussed in the sections that follow.
the world of the arts Was there a crisis in the world of the
arts? To answer this rather large question it may be useful to break
it down into more manageable enquiries. In the first place, did the
arts experience a period of turbulence in the middle of the cen-
tury? In the case of cultural history, in contrast to economic or po-
litical history, it is not very clear what turbulence might mean. One
might choose as examples some of the buildings designed by
ture (London, i960; orig. pub. 1957); Robert Mandrou, "Le baroque européen: Mentalité
pathétique et revolution sociale," Annales ESC, V (i960), 898-914; Pierre Chaunu, La civilisa-
tion de l'Europe classique (Paris, 1966), 439-446, 512-516.
8 Mousnier, Fureurs paysannes: Les paysans dans les révoltes du XVII siècle (France, Russie,
Chine) (Paris, 1967).
244 I PETER BURKE
Francesco Borromini around the middle of the century (from San

Carlo aile Quattro Fontane to Sant'Ivo alia Sapienza), but the dan-
ger of subjectivity is a serious one, made more acute by our
knowledge that Borromini's personal life was indeed turbulent
and by the tradition of interpreting works of art as expressions of
individual personality. Other approaches to the design of these
churches are at least equally plausible, as we shall see.9
In the second place, we might ask whether there were in the
arts any shifts either in style or in subject matter that were analo-
gous to the structural changes that economic, social, and political
historians of the general crisis discuss. In so doing, it might be use-
ful, while bearing in mind the necessary differences between his-
tories of the arts and histories of science, to take up and adapt the
idea of a "paradigm" as used by Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962). Kuhn suggested that major achievements pro-
vide models or "paradigms" for what he calls "normal science,"
performed by later workers in the field. However, he also argues
that these paradigms come to be viewed as less and less satisfactory
after new discoveries are made, accumulating and so leading to
a "crisis" only to be resolved by the emergence of a new para-
digm.10
At one point, drawing on Gombrich's Art and Illusion (i960),
Kuhn compared the idea of progress in natural science and in
painting, at a time when a major goal of painters was the represen-
tation of nature. Seventeenth-century painters had other goals be-
sides this one, while architects and composers were still more dis-
tant from it, but the idea of a paradigm that is first followed with
enthusiasm and later rejected, for whatever reasons, may still be
helpful in this brief survey of the arts, provided that all necessary
changes are made. For example, in Kuhn's narrative, a new para-
digm is accepted relatively rapidly and becomes part of "normal
science," whereas there may be greater time-lag in the case of the
arts, in which a new style may be resisted or gradually adapted to
local circumstances.11
The obvious name for the new seventeenth-century para-
9 On Borromini's life and death, see Rudolf Wittkower, "Francesco Borromini, His Char-
acter and Life," in Studies in the Italian Baroque (London, 1975), 153-166.
10 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), 66-91.
11 Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, i960). Ironically, Gombrich derived his
idea of progress - shall we call it a paradigm? - from his friend Karl Popper, a philosopher of
science.
digm, despite its ambiguities, is the traditional one that Mous-

nier chose for his discussion of crisis in the arts (though Clark
generally avoided it in his chapters on literature, painting, and
architecture) - baroque, 2l term that came into use among art histo-
rians in the late nineteenth century and spread more widely during
the 1920s. Today, art historians working on the seventeenth cen-
tury are divided into two groups, one continuing to use baroque as
a general term to describe the arts after the Renaissance and the
other distinguishing baroque from classicism, a less spectacular
style that elaborated the rules of Renaissance art rather than break-
ing with them. In the narrower sense, baroque describes the art of
Italy (where most of the innovations took place), Spain, Central
Europe, and, for a brief period, France (some scholars extending
the concept to Britain).12
In the case of architecture, one of the most successful formu-
lations of the essential characteristics of the baroque style came
from the Swiss scholar Wolfflin, a former student of Burckhardt's.
Defining the baroque style against that of the Renaissance, he
drew attention to two essential features, mass and movement
(Massigkeit und Bewegung). He described the illusion of movement
in architecture as a "painterly" style (malerisch) , which involved
breaking the rules of classical architecture as formulated by the an-
cient Roman Vitruvius and elaborated in the Renaissance, from
Leonbattista Alberti to Andrea Palladio.13
The most spectacular examples of the new architecture come
from Rome in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the
competing works of Bernini and Borromini, in which mass,
movement, and the breaking of the classical rules are all extremely
visible. All the same, the shift from one paradigm to another began
around 1600, or even earlier, rather than in the middle of the sev-
enteenth century. A famous example, which served as a model for
many other buildings, is the church of the Gesù in Rome, con-
structed between 1568 and 1575.
Although sculpture had fewer rules to break, once again a
"painterly" style and an emphasis on movement became promi-
12 For a representative of the first group, see John R. Martin, Baroque (London, 1977); of
the second, Tapie (trans. A. Ross Williamson), The Age of Grandeur: Baroque and Classicism in
Europe (London, i960; orig. pub. 1957). Contrast Judith Hook, The Baroque Age in England
(London, 1976).
13 Heinrich Wôlfflin (trans. Kathrin Simon), Renaissance and Baroque (London, 1964; orig.
pub. 1888).
246 I PETER BURKE
nent: The contrast between Michelangelo's David, represented in

repose, and Bernini's David, shown a moment before he launches
the stone from his sling, has become famous. Transformation is a
recurrent theme in the baroque arts; Bernini's Apollo and Daphne
catches the nymph at the very moment of her metamorphosis into
a laurel tree. The statues of the saints from this period - most fa-
mously, Bernini's St. Teresa - express more emotion in their ges-
tures and facial expressions than had been the case in the Renais-
sance. The date of the David is around 1623-1624, of Apollo and
Daphne 1622-1625, and of the Teresa, 1647-1652, but, as in the
case of architecture, the new style was already visible at the begin-
ning of the seventeenth century.14
The concept of the "painterly" obviously loses its usefulness
in the case of painting itself, but painters like sculptors were con-
cerned to express strong emotions. In their case, the sense of
drama was heightened by the use of chiaroscuro as well as by the-
atrical gestures. The iconography of paintings changed as well as
their style; Male's famous study of religious art in Catholic Europe
noted a new emphasis on death, visions, and ecstasies, the result of
a conscious attempt by the clergy to reform art and to employ it in
the service of the Counter-Reformation. Taking once again the
most famous examples, Rembrandt, often but not always de-
scribed as baroque, was active between the 1630s and the 1660s,
thus spanning the middle years of the century. However, Rubens,
the baroque painter par excellence, was at work a generation ear-
lier, between 1600 and 1640, whereas the brief career of
Caravaggio, sometimes viewed as the inventor of the new style -
nuova maniera di pingere, as one contemporary put it - took place at
the very beginning of the century, between 1600 and 1610. Only
if the "high baroque" is distinguished from the earlier phase of the
movement can the main action be located in the middle of the
century.15
The idea of the baroque has been taken up by literary scholars
but remains a somewhat debatable one in this domain. In Italy, a
new style is associated with the Neapolitan Giambattista Marino,
14 On David, see Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1730 (Harmonds worth, 1980;
orig. pub. 1948); on transformation, Jean Rousset, La littérature de l'âge baroque en France: Circé
et le paon (Paris, 1953), 11-78.
15 Mâle, L'Art religieux. Wittkower, Art and Architecture, dates the high baroque as c.1625-
1675.
who published a famous book of poems in 1602 and attracted

many disciples, first in Italy and then abroad. Explaining that the
aim of the poet was la maraviglia, to surprise or shock - a descrip-
tion as appropriate to the works of Caravaggio, Bernini, and
Borromini as to his own - Marino looked for unusual subjects (an
ostrich, for one) and favored far-fetched metaphors. Following his
example, seventeenth-century Italian poets showed their wit or
ingenuity (ingenio, argutezza) by writing poems about clocks, dice,
guns, maps, spectacles, and tobacco, as well as about women en-
gaged in various occupations. Marino began with "a woman sew-
ing," and his followers wrote about female servants, beggars, laun-
dresses, agricultural workers, fortune-tellers, chicken sellers,
teachers, embroiderers, and bookbinders. Similar trends have been
identified in seventeenth-century Spanish literature, particularly
from Luis de Gôngora to Francisco Quevedo, and in that of
France, Germany, the Dutch Republic, Poland, and England, the
home of so-called "metaphysical" poets such as John Donne.16
In the case of music, too, there was a major change in style in
the seventeenth century, the shift from polyphony to monody, as-
sociated with the rise of opera in Florence, Venice, and elsewhere.
This paradigm shift began, once again, around the year 1600,
when Jacopo Peri wrote his Euridice, but might be said to have
reached its apogee in the late work of Claudio Monteverdi, espe-
cially // ritorno d'Ulisse (1641) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642).
The phase of "normal opera," on the analogy of Kuhn's "normal
science," might be said to have been reached in the time of
Francesco Cavalli, whose thirty-three operas include II Giasone
(1649), U Artemisia (1657), and Ercole Amante (1662). 17
Summing up so far, if we work with the idea of a crisis in a
paradigm leading to a new structure, we find that this new struc-
ture appeared in Italy around the year 1600 and lasted until about
1750. It followed the late sixteenth-century age of "mannerism,"
which has sometimes also been described as a time of turbulence,
or indeed of "crisis."18
16 René Wellek, "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship," Journal of Aesthetics, V

(1946), 77-109; Helmut Hatzfeld, "A Clarification of the Baroque Problem in the Romance
Literatures," Comparative Literature, I (1949), 113- 139.
17 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth- Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley,
1991).
18 Contrast the interpretation of mannerism in Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the
248 I PETER BURKE
Lebègue, one of the scholars who inspired Mousnier, saw the

baroque style in terms of liberty - freedom from rules - and irra-
tionality. He, too, referred to a "baroque crisis" but in a sense dif-
ferent from Mousnier, using the term to refer to the disappearance
of the new style in France between 1635 and 1640, giving way to
classicism. Other scholars, often working on other countries, have
also detected a major change in style around the middle of the sev-
enteenth century. Clark, for instance, noted the rise of clarity, har-
mony, and purity in literature and the decline of "vulgarity and
violence," while painters "relinquished the grand and the grand-
iose." Mousnier, echoing a long tradition of French literary criti-
cism, wrote of the rise of reason and rules, and Rabb of the shift
from "the titanic struggles of the generations from Shakespeare to
Milton" to "genteelness and calm." It is indeed difficult to deny
that a shift of this kind took place. There was, for instance, less in-
terest in theatricality or shock (la maraviglia) . What is more doubt-
ful is whether the shift should be described as the "resolution" of a
crisis or as a change of paradigm. A vaguer description, such as a
change of mood or perhaps a recovery of optimism, might be
preferable.19
Another important question to ask about the world of the arts
concerns its organization. Was there a crisis of patronage at this
time? There is certainly a case for speaking of a crisis of patronage
in the previous century, especially in the 1520s, with the with-
drawal of much of the patronage of the Church. There might also
be a case for locating a crisis of patronage in the following century,
especially in the 1750s, linked to a structural change - the shift
from the dominance of the patron system to the dominance of the
market system in literature and painting. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, on the other hand, when both the courts and, in Catholic
countries, the Counter-Reformation Church were commission-
ing many works of art and architecture, it seems implausible to
speak of a general crisis. Short-term problems, such as the drying
up of the flow of commissions for paintings in Spain during the
1 640s - the result of an economic downturn - were sooner or
Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (London, 1965), with that of John Shearman, Manner-
ism (Harmondsworth, 1967), but both emphasize the breaking of rules.
19 Lebègue, "Le Theatre baroque en France"; Clark, Seventeenth Century, 337, 357;
Mousnier, 16e et 17e siècles, 212-219; Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Mod-
em Europe (New York, 1975), 100.
later resolved. Only in the case of music is it possible to point to

structural changes, with the rise of commercial opera in Venice in
the middle of the century, followed by a more gradual rise of com-
mercial concerts in London and other cities.20
the crisis of representation If we cannot usefully use the term

crisis with respect to either style or patronage in the middle of the
seventeenth century, there may still be a case for speaking of a
"crisis of representation." In several important respects, traditional
views of the world were rejected, or at least questioned, at this
time. In the first place, the "correspondence," as it was sometimes
called, between a king and a father, or the state and the human
body, or the microcosm and the macrocosm had traditionally been
viewed as a real or an organic connection. These parallels or cor-
respondences had been treated not as man-made analogies but as
objective similarities. As Nicolson put it, "Our ancestors believed
that what we call 'analogy' was truth, inscribed by God in the na-
ture of things." This view was increasingly challenged in the mid-
dle of the seventeenth century. Relatively early examples of the
new attitude include two Englishmen - Bacon, who had a "strong
inclination to reject the analogical mode of thought," and
Hakewill, who criticized the analogy between microcosm and
macrocosm on the grounds that man and the universe "subsist not
of the same principles, nor are in all things alike."21
In the second place, traditional views of reality were chal-
lenged by the discoveries associated with the "scientific revolu-
tion" of the seventeenth century. Like the painters and architects
20 Simon T. Worsthorne, Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1954);
Rosand, Opera, 66- 109; John H. Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth- Century
England (Reading, 1973).
21 Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992); idem, "The Demise of Royal
Mythologies," in Allan Ellenius (éd.), Iconography, Propaganda and Legitimation (New York,
1998), 245-254; Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian Eng-
land, 1660-1740 (Ithaca, 1993); Thomas Luxon, Puritan Allegory and the Renaissance Crisis of
Representation (Chicago, 1995); Marjorie H. Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the
Effect of the "New Science" upon Seventeenth- Century Poetry (Evanston, 1950), 108; Henri
Gouhier, "Le refus du symbolisme dans 1 "humanisme cartésien," in Enrico Castelli (éd.),
Umanesimo e simbolismo (Padua, 1958), 65-74; John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky
(Princeton, 1961); Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1966). On Francis Bacon, see
Sidney Warhaft, "The Providential Order in Bacon's New Philosophy," Studies in the Literary
Imagination, IV (1971), 49-64. Hakewill quoted in William H. Greenleaf, Order and Empiricism
in Politics (New York, 1964), 1 50-1 51.
250 I PETER BURKE
of the period, natural philosophers had a new sense of space; in

Koyré's words, they turned "from the closed world to the infinite
universe." The connection between the space of the philosophers
and the space of the artists (for example, the grand vistas in the
many scenes of saints in heaven) is difficult to define, but it is
equally difficult to deny. The new philosophical distinction be-
tween "primary qualities," things as they really are, and "second-
ary qualities," things as they seem to human senses, is surely re-
lated to a recurrent theme in baroque art and literature - the gap
between appearance and reality, être and paraître, ser and parecer,
Sein and Schein. Pedro Calderôn's play of the 1630s, La vida es
suehOy is the most famous expression of this sense of life as a
dream.22
Awareness of this gap between things and sensations was en-
couraged by the rise of purpose-built theaters during this period,
with their painted scenery and special effects. Dramatists played
with the idea: Plays within plays, for instance, were not uncom-
mon at the time. They included le Sieur Gougenot's Comédie des
comédiens (1633) and Corneille's L'illusion comique (1635). The story
of St. Genesius had considerable appeal. According to the leg-
end - which inspired Lope de Vega's Fingido verdadero (1620),
Nicolas-Marc Desfontaines' L} illustre comédien (1644), and, Jean
Rotrou's St. Genest (c.1645) - Genesius, an actor during the reign
of the emperor Diocletian, was converted to Christianity in the
act of playing a Christian martyr and subsequently became a mar-
tyr himself.23
Going a little further in this direction, one might claim that
the arts in the age of the baroque aspired to the condition of the-
ater. Music became theatrical in the age of opera. Painting became
theatrical at a time when the frescoes in churches and palaces re-
sembled painted scenery. Architecture became theatrical as build-
ers stressed mass and movement. Sculpture became theatrical, as in
the case of Bernini's chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Vit-
toria in Rome, where members of the Cornaro family are shown
watching the transverberation of St. Teresa from a balcony that re-
sembles a box in a theater. In an indirect manner - a point that
22 Alexandre Koyré, From The Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957).
23 Georges Forestier, Le Theatre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVîîe siècle (Geneva,
1981); on Rotrou, see Imbrie Buffum, Studies in the Baroque from Montaigne to Rotrou (New
Haven, 1957), 212-239.
needs to be emphasized - this deliberate theatricality may be re-

garded as a response to the crisis of representation.
responses to crisis Widening out from possible crises within

the world of the arts, it is time to consider the responses of artists
and writers to the economic, social, political, or intellectual crises
of their time, and especially artistic and literary representations of
the conflicts of the period. We have recently been reminded that
in the mid-seventeenth century, "more wars took place around
the world than in any other era until the 1940s." In the age of the
Thirty Years' War, there were many representations of battles
and of the destruction that war brought in its train. The best-
known examples are the famous series of etchings by Jacques
Callot of Lorraine, known as Les grands misères de la guerre (1633),
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's picaresque romance
Simplicissimus (1668), and Andreas Gryphius' poem about the
death of his baby niece - "born during the flight, surrounded with
swords and conflagration" (Geboren in der Flucht, umringt mit
Schwert und Brand). However, any attempt at a complete list of
seventeenth-century paintings and writings about war would be a
long one.24
Some painters, such as Jacob de Haase (1 574-1634), Vincent
Leckerbetien (1 595-1675), Michelangelo Cerquozzi (1602-1660),
Pietro Paolini (1603-168 1), Philips Wouwermans (1619-1668),
and Giacome Cortese "il Borgognone" (1621-1675), specialized
in battles or scenes from military life. Whether the battles repre-
sented were ancient or modern, they can be read as responses to
the long and bitter conflict that took place between 161 8 and 1648
and involved many European countries. In this context, it is note-
worthy that a substantial minority of these representations, includ-
ing those of Callot and Grimmelshausen, broke with the Renais-
sance tradition, showing war in an unheroic light, as in the case of
Cerquozzi's Sack of a Village (1630); Wouwermans' Plundering Sol-
diers; and several of the works of Salvator Rosa, who also wrote a
satire on war, as well as the aforementioned works of Callot and
Grimmelshausen. The painting by Rubens of The Horrors of War
(1638) does not stand alone. In this sphere, at least, we might speak
24 Parker, "Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Recon-
sidered," American Historical Review, CXIII (2008), 1056.
252 I PETER BURKE
of a crisis of representation that was closely linked to political and

military events.25
The last years of the Thirty Years' War coincided, not by ac-
cident, with a wave of rebellions or revolutions in Italy, Spain,
England, France, the Dutch Republic, and the Ukraine (not to
mention the Ottoman Empire, China, Mexico, Brazil, Mozam-
bique, and elsewhere) between 1640 and the early 1650s. The
twentieth-century scholars who noted this wave had been antici-
pated by writers from the period itself. Between 1643 and 1663, at
least twenty-two histories of these recent revolts were published
by Italian writers alone, dealing not only with the six famous cases
that Merriman would later analyze but also with Piedmont, Sicily,
Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the revolt
against the Dutch led by the Portuguese settlers in Brazil. These
writers used the term revolution in the traditional sense of circling
or revolving. In order to appreciate the full resonance of the sev-
enteenth-century term revolution, it may be useful to juxtapose it
to the other words used at the time to describe the same events,
including commotions (commotioni) , risings (sollevationi) , seditions
(seditiom), internal wars (guerre intestine), tumults (tumulti), turbulences
(turbolenze) , or political earthquakes (terremoti di stato).26
The writers of these histories generally perceived the tumults
like Mousnier did, in terms of blind fury. For archbishop Filomar-
ino of Naples, the people "boiled" like liquid. To Alessandro
Giraffi, they resembled a thoroughbred horse that resisted saddle
and bridle. Even an anti-Spanish account of the revolt of Tom-
maso Aniello (better known as Masaniello) stressed the incon-
stancy of the people, their passivity until incited by "those who fo-
mented the tumult," and their "strange madness" when aroused.
Although Giraffi approved of the rebels' aims, he perceived their
actions as "stravaganze" (irrational).27
In similar fashion, other writers employed the imagery of dis-
ease, "plague" or "poison" coursing through the veins of the body
politic, or, as Count Maiolino Bisaccioni called the revolt of
25 On Rubens, see Rabb, Struggle for Stability, 139-143.
26 Ralph B. Merriman, Six Contemporaneous Revolutions (Hamden, Conn., 1963; orig. pub.
1938); Burke, "Some Seventeenth-Century Anatomists of Revolution," Storia della
Storiografia, XXII (1992), 23-35.
27 Burke, "The Virgin of the Carmine and the Revolt of Masaniello," Past & Present, 99
(1983), 3-21; rpr. in idem, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (New York, 1987), 191-
206.
Palermo, a malign "fever." Giambattista Birago described popular

revolts as "contagious diseases" (morbi contagiosi). Vittorio Siri re-
flected on "this poison" (questo veleno) or "cancer" (cancro) threat-
ening the Spanish Empire. His account of the origins of the Eng-
lish civil war claimed that a long peace allowed "evil humors"
(cattivi humori) to accumulate, "like the cessation of moderate exer-
cise in the case of a convalescent. " The pathological approach to
politics, as well as to the arts, has a long history.28
Historical writers were not the only ones to comment. Dra-
matic events naturally appealed to dramatists. Gryphius' play Caro-
lus Stuardus (1649) was a direct, shocked response to the execution
of Charles I. Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein's Ibrahim Sultan (1653)
dealt with the recent deposition and murder in 1648 of the Otto-
man Sultan Ibrahim I. Joost van den Vondel's play Zungchin (1667)
was set during the crisis in China, the civil war leading to the end
of the Ming dynasty and the establishment of the Qing. Thomas
Asselijn, another Dutch playwright, wrote about the rise and fall
of Masaniello in Op- en ondergang van Masaniello, ofNapelse beroerte
(1668). His example was followed by the German writer Christian
Weise, whose Masaniello dates from 1683.
Poets also offered comments on events. The Italian Ciro de
Pers, for instance, wrote about the death in battle of King Gustav
Adolf of Sweden. Cromwell was celebrated by Andrew Marvell in
his ode "Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" (1650) and by
his colleague John Milton in "Sonnet XVI: To the Lord General
Cromwell" (1652). In Poland, where the epic still flourished on
the frontier of Christendom, Waclaw Potocki wrote his Wojna
Chocimska in the 1670s about the recent war with the Ottoman
Empire, and Samuel Twardowski about the war with the Cossacks
in Wojna domowa (168 1).
Masaniello's revolt was condemned by several Neapolitan po-
ets, among them Antonio Muscettola, Antonio de Rossi,
Vincenzo Zito, and the Jesuit Giacomo Lubrano (who included a
regretful reference to the British treatment of Charles I). Like the
historical writers mentioned above, these poets presented the
"tumults" as mindless "torrents," the result of the fury, rage, and
drunkenness of ungrateful, insolent plebeians and their "mad de-
28 Maiolino Bisaccioni, Guerre civili (Venice, 1652), 19, 424; Giambattista Birago,
Turbolenze di Europa (Venice, 1654), 369.
254 I PETER BURKE
mocracies" (pazze democrazie). These texts all express a sense of

shock, a response to events seen as both extraordinary and alarm-
ing.29
Painters also produced images that may be read as comments
on recent events. Paolini painted the assassination of Albrecht
Wallenstein. Aniello Falcone and Micco Spadaro, both of Naples,
produced unheroic or antiheroic paintings of the revolt of Masani-
ello, to which Haskell has compared the "antiheroic confusion" of
certain battle pieces by Cerquozzi. The arresting image of The
Threatened Swan by the Dutch painter Jan Asselijn, the brother of
playwright Thomas, has often been thought to refer to the politi-
cal crisis in the Dutch Republic, which culminated in the murder
of Johan and Cornelis de Witt and the re-establishment of the
power of the Stadholder.30
Shifting from political crisis to spiritual or intellectual crisis, it
is even easier to find responses and comments in the arts. A classic,
though much-debated, example is John Donne's Anatomie (1611),
a commissioned work to mourn the death of Elizabeth Drury,
with its much-quoted lines "all coherence gone," and "the new
philosophy calls all in doubt." In this case, we cannot afford to for-
get either rhetoric associated with a particular literary genre or the
traditional topos of the decay of nature, even if this idea was de-
bated with particular intensity in the early seventeenth century.31
The prevalence of the literary and pictorial theme of death
and its symbols (skulls, hourglasses, and so on), and hence that of
the transience and vanity (vanitas) of all worldly things, may be in-
terpreted as an indirect response to the wars of the time and the
destruction that they brought in their train, as well as to the re-
surgence of the plague in mid-seventeenth-century Europe, in
northern Italy in (1630-/31), Leiden (1634), Naples (1656), Lon-
don (1665), and elsewhere in Europe. Some poets and painters ex-
plicitly chose plague as their grisly subject: Micco Spadaro's View
of Piazza del Mercato, Naples (1656), for instance, or Federico Men-
inni's poem about the same visitation of plague.
29 Giovanni Getto, Opere scelte di Giovan Battista Marino e dei Marinisti (Turin 1954- 1962),
II, 342-343, 381, 388-390; Croce (éd.), Lirici marinisti (Bari, 1910), 465-468.
30 Fritz Saxl, "The Battle Scene without a Hero," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti-
tutes, III (1939/40), 70-87; Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between
Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New Haven, 1980; orig. pub. 1963), 138.
31 Mâle, L'Art religieux; Nicolson, Breaking of the Circle, 65-104. On the topos, see Victor
Harris, All Coherence Gone: A Study of the Seventeenth- Century Controversy over Disorder and De-
cay in the Universe (Chicago, 1949).
The vanity of worldly things was a major theme in still-life

painting at this time, especially in the Dutch Republic (see the
works of David Bailly, Pieter Steenwyck, and others) but also in
France, Italy, England, and elsewhere. In the case of Spain, for in-
stance, one thinks of two paintings by Valdés Leal, both from the
year 1672, one entitled Finis gloriae mundi (the end of the glory of
the world) and the other In ictu oculi (in the twinkling of an eye).
Poems about death, tombs, skulls, skeletons, and the like were
common in Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and English.
To take only Italian examples, they include Claudio Achillini's
"La morte," Francesco Bracciolini's "La morte esser inevitable,"
Pietro Casaburi's "La fragilità délia vita umana," Giovanni
Canale's "Scheletro" and "Morte," Gianfrancesco Materdona's
"Scheletro," Pier Francesco Paoli's "La tomba," Michelangelo
Romagnesi's "Morte" and "Tomba," and Vincenzo Zito's
"Teschio."32
Given the apparent prevalence of such images (despite the
problem of knowing whether they were really more common in
one century than in another), it is tempting for historians to speak
of a sense of mortality, fragility, and instability, and even of an "age
of anxiety," or Angst, or, like Mandrou, of a "mentalité pathé-
tique." Going a little further in this direction, one might speak of a
fear of chaos underlying the emphasis on order and reason in the
arts in the middle to late seventeenth century, the age of what
Mousnier called "la lutte contre la crise" and Rabb, the "struggle
for stability." A similar idea informs Berman's argument that the
rise of classical music in the seventeenth century was an attempt to
control, or even to "neuter," the expression of emotion so impor-
tant in the work of Claudio Monteverdi and his followers. Taking
Marin Mersenne - a music theorist, natural philosopher, and
priest - as his example, Berman presents the reform of music as the
continuation of politics by other means.33
Another link between politics and culture concerns the cul-
32 Mâle, L'Art religieux; Ingvar Bergstrom (trans. Christina Bergstrom and Gerald Taylor),
Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1956; orig. pub. 1947), I54-T9o;
Liana Cheney, "Dutch Vanitas Paintings: The Skull," in idem (éd.), The Symbolism of Vanitas in
the Arts (Lewiston, N.Y., 1991), n 3-176; Croce, Lirici marinisti, 175-176; Getto, Opere scelte,
260-261, 324, 383, 475-476; Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (éd.), Marino e i marinisti (Milan, 1954),
702, 736. On France, see Rousset, Circe, 105-167, which discusses "le spectacle de la mort."
33 Mandrou, "Le baroque européen"; Mousnier, 16e et 17e siècles; Rabb, Struggle for Stability;
Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses (London, 1990). My thanks to Edward Bever for this
reference.
256 I PETER BURKE
tural balance of power in Europe. During the first half of the sev-
enteenth century, Spanish hegemony - what French historians
used to call la preponderance espagnole - extended to the domain of
culture, whereas the second half of the century was the age of the
French. In politics, there was a brief period of "turbulence" during
the 1660s, when Louis XIV asserted himself against his rival Philip
IV. In the sphere of culture, however, the transition seems to have
been more gradual.
As is usually the case with this kind of grand generalization,
however, distinctions as well as caution are in order. One impor-
tant distinction was made by Hill when he contrasted the "lyric of
internal conflict" - in other words, the open expression of (psy-
chological, religious, or political) turmoil - in the work of such
English poets as Donne and Marvell, with the more orderly style
of the next generation. Concerning that second generation, Hill's
own account is marked by conflict. "Dry den and Waller perfected
the rhyme couplet," he wrote, "whose studied antitheses and bal-
anced rhetoric reflected the greater stability towards which society
was moving, and its fear of 'enthusiasm.'" Was the classical cou-
plet a reflection of society or the expression of collective emotion?
Does it represent stability or fear?34
It is also worth remembering Macfarlane's comment on
Huizinga's notorious emphasis on the preoccupation with death
and hell in the late Middle Ages. In a study of Hans Memling,
Macfarlane noted both the popularity of the painter with the edu-
cated laity of the later fifteenth century and the painter's expres-
sion of hope rather than fear, using this example to argue against
the danger of exaggerating late medieval morbidity. In similar
fashion, one might use the example of Jan Vermeer (1632- 1675)
and the serenity expressed in his paintings as an argument against
overemphasizing a seventeenth-century crisis in the arts.35
Another danger is that of taking as simple expressions of the
emotion of an artist or writer what may be a strategy for working
on the emotions of the audience, in the manner of Ignatius' Spiri-
tual Exercises (1520s), as suggested by the scholars who have been
working on the "rhetoric of the baroque" since the 1950s. A third
danger is that of exaggerating change and forgetting continuities.
34 Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (London, 1961), 252.
35 K. B. McFarlane, Hans Memling (New York, 1971), 44-45; Johan Huizinga, The Autumn
of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1996; orig. pub. 19 19).
Plague, for instance, was endemic between 1348 and the begin-
ning of the eighteenth century, even if some of the outbreaks were
on a larger scale than others. War too might be regarded as virtu-
ally endemic at this time. Reactions to these disasters followed a
similar pattern - from the late medieval sense of the macabre, as
described by Huizinga, to the baroque sense of mortality. As
Delumeau has argued, fear may be taken as a constant in European
life between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, a phenome-
non of la longue durée.36
Notwithstanding all of these warnings, the changes de-
scribed above justify Clark's idea of a major "watershed" at that
time, if not the more theatrical concept of crisis, although there
was no paradigm shift in the arts around the year 1650.
comparisons Discussions of both continuities and crises need to

be comparative, since the difference between periods is relative
rather than absolute. Looking back over the last 700 years of Euro-
pean history, the crisis of the middle of the seventeenth century
appears to be one of a number of such events, of which it may be
useful to distinguish six.
(1) Taking the first place is the crisis of the Black Death, when
plague first struck Europe (and the Middle East) in 1347/48. This
visitation of the plague, which killed about one-third of Europe's
population within a year, has a good claim to be regarded as the
most traumatic event in European history. The effects of that crisis
on the arts, more specifically on painting in Florence and Siena in
the half-century that followed, were analyzed in exemplary fash-
ion by Meiss more than fifty years ago.37
(2) In the second place, there is the crisis of the Reformation,
most acute or most visible during the 1520s, a period of turbulence
that certainly led to structural changes in the Church and inevita-
bly - given the importance of ecclesiastical patronage - in the arts
as well. The idea of a concurrent crisis in the arts goes back at least
as far as Dehio in 19 16, writing about Germany after Albrecht
36 Enrico Castelli (ed.) Retorica e barocco (Rome, 1955); Huizinga, Autumn; jean Delumeau,
La peur en Occident (XIVe-XVHIe siècles): Une cité assiégée (Paris, 1978).
37 Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 195 1). See
also Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance
Europe (London, 2002).
258 I PETER BURKE
Durer, and coupling the idea of a "double crisis" (Doppelkrisis) of

Renaissance and Reformation with the idea of decline and fall.38
(3) The Reformation can be interpreted as a response to a late
medieval "spiritual crisis." It is still more obvious that the move-
ment that historians now call the "Counter-Reformation" was at
least in part a response to the crisis of the 1520s, and that the arts
were enlisted in the service of the Catholic Church's counter-
offensive, especially from the 1580s onward. The Counter-
Reformation encouraged some of the changes in iconography and
style that this article has been concerned to discuss. If there is any
moment in the history of the arts in early modern Europe when
the term resolution seems appropriate, it is surely this one.
(4) Some historians have identified a "crisis of the Renais-
sance," linked to the rise of the style now known as mannerism.
For example, Hauser, a Hungarian emigre art historian, viewed
mannerism as "the artistic expression of the crisis which convulses
the whole of Western Europe in the sixteenth century and which
extends to all fields of political, economic and cultural life."39
(5) Following the seventeenth-century crisis came a relatively
long period of stability that was interrupted by the French and In-
dustrial Revolutions. This was also a time of rapid change in the
arts, as classicism gave way to Romanticism and the Gothic re-
vival. In this case, there is abundant evidence of the responses of
artists and writers to the events and the social changes of their
time, supporting movements for national independence or, like
Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, and William Morris, turning to the
example of the Middle Ages as an antidote to industrial capitalism.
The effects of the French and Industrial Revolutions also provided
a context for Burckhardt's discussion of crises in history. Burck-
hardt also had a strong sense of crisis in his own time.40
(6) If the crisis of the years around 1800 makes the mid-
seventeenth-century crisis seem somewhat smaller by placing it in
the perspective of the long term, the same point may be made still
more forcefully for the years following 1900, marked by the
38 Georg Dehio, "Der krisis der deutschen Kunst im sechzehnten Jht," Archiv fur
Kulturgeschichte, XII (191 6), 1-16.
39 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (London, 1951), I, 96. See also idem, Mannerism,
and André Chastel, La crise de la Renaissance, 1520-1600 (Paris, 1968).
40 Henri Brunschwig, La crise de l'état prussien et la genèse de la mentalité romantique (Paris,
1947); Schieder, "Krisen," 145.
middle-class fear of mass democracy, the loss of faith in Christian-

ity, and then the shock of the World War I, the Russian Revolu-
tion, and the Great Crash of 1929. The publication of Clark's
study of the seventeenth century in 1929 suggests that his discov-
ery of a crisis in the past might have the result of a sense of crisis in
the present. The fact that Dehio's study of the German crisis of the
sixteenth century was published in 1916 also reinforces this im-
pression of a sense of affinity (if not a projection of current preoc-
cupations onto the past).41
In the case of the arts, a paradigm shift is even more visible
around 1900 than it had been around 1800, given the repudiation
of ornament in architecture and of realism in painting, including
the rules of both proportion and perspective. There was a period
of turbulence marked by the rise of competing styles - cubism, fu-
turism, expressionism, and constructivism - with little in common
except their rejection of traditional standards. There was a ques-
tioning of the idea of art itself, exemplified by the exhibiting of
objets trouvés. The creation of a new pictorial space, breaking with
a 500-year-old tradition, may be seen as a response to a more gen-
eral sense of a new space and time following the spread of travel by
automobile and by airplane, as well as by such new scientific con-
cepts as relativity and the uncertainty principle. Just as seven-
teenth-century poets wrote about tobacco and clocks, so early
twentieth-century artists and writers introduced airplanes, sky-
scrapers, and films into their work. Some artists, notably but not
exclusively the Futurists, deliberately sought new styles in order to
express their rejection of the past and their sense of living in a new
age. Modernism and modernity need to be distinguished, but
modernism in the arts was surely stimulated by the modernization
of society.
Given the affinities between the two crises, the rediscovery of
both mannerism and baroque in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in
Germany and Austria, was virtually inevitable. El Greco and Bor-
romini were coming to be viewed through eyes that had become
accustomed to impressionism, expressionism, and modernism. For
example, the modernity of the designs of the baroque architect
Guarino Guarini has often been asserted, while Max Dvorak, the
41 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880- igi8 (London, 1983). On the "Krise
der Moderne," see Riidiger vom Bruch et al. (eds.), Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900
(Stuttgart, 1989).
260 I PETER BURKE
Czech art historian who helped rehabilitate the paintings of El

Greco, was also an enthusiast for the work of Oskar Kokoschka
and Edvard Munch.42
There is surely little need for any extensive discussion herein
about the current crisis, not so much the recent financial crash but
rather the whole sequence of changes that prompted the invention
of the new period term, postmodern. The new sense of the fluidity,
fragility, or softness of what used to be thought of as hard social
structures is particularly reminiscent of the baroque attitudes dis-
cussed above. The role played in the seventeenth century by the
rise of purpose-built theaters and illusionistic special effects is
played today by computers, the internet, and "virtual reality."
Twenty-first-century theatrical spaces now house "liminal acts"
that cross the threshold between performance and audience.
Might we therefore speak of a contemporary return of the ba-
roque?43
Not even with a relatively precise definition of crisis is it easy to

decide what counts as a crisis in the arts, what counts as "turbu-
lence," what counts as a change in structure rather than mood, and
what counts as "resolution." The Kuhnian model of the structure
of scientific revolutions cannot be applied to the arts without
modification, since the arts have no equivalent to the decisive un-
dermining of a scientific theory by new discoveries.
In the case of the arts, it is the beginning rather than the
middle of a century that seems to be most important moment of
changes in style. In the case of the seventeenth-century crisis, as in
that of the crisis around the year 1900, artists appeared to anticipate
crises before other people did. However, the reason for changes in
style given at the time was either a desire to surprise or to shock
the public or, in the context of religious art, to encourage piety,
rather than either to express a tragic sense of life or respond to the
economic, social, or political problems of the time.
A new style, however, takes time to spread, especially in the
collective - and expensive - art of architecture. It might be, and
42 On Impressionism and the revaluation of the baroque, see Hauser, Social History, I, 160.
Wittkower, Art and Architecture, 403-415; Harold Alan Meek, Guarino Guarini and His Architec-
ture (New Haven, 1988).
43 Susan Broadhurst, Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance Theory
(London, 1999).
CRISIS IN THE ARTS | 2ÔI
has been, argued that the events of the middle of the century
helped to explain the favorable reception of an emotional, theatri-
cal style, although the rule-bound classical style was a response to
crisis, or a means of combating it. In any case, it is surely necessary
to distinguish speculation about the unconscious or semiconscious
expression of a certain malaise (about which we have heard a good
deal, perhaps too much) from better-documented conscious re-
sponses of writers, artists, and composers to the events and trends
of their time. Whichever response was more important, the con-
scious or the unconscious, the contrast between the mood or tone
of the arts (especially literature and painting) in the early and in the
late seventeenth centuries is a dramatic one.

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The MIT Press The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

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The Crisis in the Arts of the Seventeenth Century: A Crisis of Representation?

Author(s): Peter Burke

The Crisis in the Arts of the Seventeenth Century:

© 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary

the historiography of crisis The idea of a seventeenth-

Baroque Age in Italy, which concentrated on literature, described

Corneille), Mousnier emphasized what he called "internal disor-

If one reads Mousnier's study today, more than half a century

Francesco Borromini around the middle of the century (from San

digm, despite its ambiguities, is the traditional one that Mous-

nent: The contrast between Michelangelo's David, represented in

who published a famous book of poems in 1602 and attracted

16 René Wellek, "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship," Journal of Aesthetics, V

Lebègue, one of the scholars who inspired Mousnier, saw the

later resolved. Only in the case of music is it possible to point to

the crisis of representation If we cannot usefully use the term

of the period, natural philosophers had a new sense of space; in

needs to be emphasized - this deliberate theatricality may be re-

responses to crisis Widening out from possible crises within

of a crisis of representation that was closely linked to political and

Palermo, a malign "fever." Giambattista Birago described popular

mocracies" (pazze democrazie). These texts all express a sense of

The vanity of worldly things was a major theme in still-life

comparisons Discussions of both continuities and crises need to

Durer, and coupling the idea of a "double crisis" (Doppelkrisis) of

middle-class fear of mass democracy, the loss of faith in Christian-

Czech art historian who helped rehabilitate the paintings of El

Not even with a relatively precise definition of crisis is it easy to

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