In this module we'll be looking at the Baroque Period.
Remember that started around 1600 and ends at about 1750.
This is a period of time
where we have moved
back again to an extremely religious kind of orientation. As I said, we keep
swinging back and forth, so in the Middle Ages we are religious,
the Renaissance, a little more humanistic,
in the Baroque Period we swing back and become a little more religiously focused.
Not always in a good way.
The word Baroque comes from a Portuguese word that means an irregular pearl,
and it was considered a derogatory term when it was first applied.
It's a period of time where we will see
a lot of ornamentation, decoration,
perhaps overuse of decoration and we will look at some architectural
things that will give you a really good visual perspective on what that was like.
It's also a period of a lot of drama, so people were very interested in
stories. Opera comes out during this period of time, the ultimate dramatic thing
and as we talk about opera in more detail you'll see how that that really plays
out to fit the whole Baroque mold.
So this is a period of time that we had thae Thirty Years War which is from
1618-1648, so right at the beginning of the period of time
which was really a series of wars, not just one long war.
But the whole thing was about
religion so we had people who have been co-existing very nicely with their
different religions and then some ruler comes along and says, "Hey, I think
everybody should be Catholic now,"
and obviously people were resistant to that, so there were battles.
Other countries got involved. It was really sort of a mini-world war
considering that the world was pretty small at the time.
So lots of violence
It's a period of time when rape and murder were just commonplace.
So in the whole generation that grows up, you know, this is 30 years! This is a whole
generation of people.
They grew up
with violence
as a daily thing.
So you can see that if you were living with that kind of thing that you might
really focus back on religion because that seems like a much safer world than
the world in which they were living.
There are some very big names politically speaking during this period of time. So we have
Louis 14th (XIVth) in France
who was
not the kindest of monarchs.
We have Charles IInd in England, who thought Louis XIVth's model was really good
and so he thought he would apply that as well. So
we have rulers who were not necessarily taking the best interest of their
subjects to heart.
In Russia, we have Peter the Great
who at least did seem to be doing some things the right way. He is responsible for the
building of Saint Petersburg. So we have a wonderful
beautiful Russian city to thank Peter the Great for.
We're still seeing a lot of traveling around the world. We saw in the Renaissance
Period we started to explore,
opening up new continents that people didn't even know were there.
The Dutch were a pretty busy bunch of people at the time.
They sail their little boats around to Indonesia,
promptly closed it off and wouldn't let anybody else get in there.
The spice market was a big deal so they cornered the market on
spices there.
They also founded Cape Colony on what is now South Africa, so
they not only had
Indonesia locked up,
they pretty much had the whole
bottom half of Africa locked up where they could protect it and if they didn't want you to
get through, you probably couldn't.
They went the other direction, came to America,
and settled in what was then called New Amsterdam,is now what we call New York
City. So they were
spreading their wings in lots of different directions.
This is the first period of time where the rest of us sort of thought about Japan at all.
Oviously, Asian culture goes back
as long as anybody else does. It was just something we don't really
talk about a lot.
But in this period of time is the period of the Shogun in Japan. So we had
these Shoguns who were in charge of their particular sections of the
country
and it was a very good thing for them because they...
if you had a strong Shogun you had a strong
segment of your society there.
The economy got better,
people had
more peace in their lives; they didn't have to worry about people fighting all the time.
So it was actually a great time to be Japanese. In fact, it is referred to as the Golden
Age in Edo which was was the capital of Japan before (it became) Tokyo.
Lots of very sophisticated people, very elegant.
It was a great place to be.
Staying in Asia, the Taj Mahal which is probably the most famous
monument in Southeast Asia
was built during this period of time around 1653.
It is of course a memorial to the late wife of the shah who built it.
She died giving birth to their fifteenth child and he built her this
wonderful
elegant beautiful marble building in her memory.
That's a love story for you folks!
In America,
lots of things happening here as well.
The founding of Jamestown in 1607 right at the beginnning of the period.
So, you know, Columbus has been around a hundred years before but we don't
really see much activity in terms of making settlements, bringing people
over until the 1600's.
The Puritans came to Massachusetts in 1620.
As I said the Dutch came to New York and that was in 1624.
We're... a
little bit behind. Obviously you know we're getting a late start on a lot of
things. So, whereas in Europe many universities were founded in
the Renaissance Period,
Harvard, which is the oldest university in America
was founded in 1636.
So by American standards it's really old.
By European standards
not so much.
I find it sort of astonishing but we were actually exploring Alaska
during this period of time. So in the 1720's we were actually
going that far north. So
not only are they sailing the seas but we're starting to head north and south
and see what else is out there.
So that's sort of the geographic
perspective on things.
Let's talk about the scientific things that are going on during this time.
We already saw in the Renaissance Period
much more interest in scientific kind of study.
During the
Baroque Period is the period of time that the scientific method that you learned in
elementary school,
observe, experiment,
interpret,
those three little steps really comes around in the Baroque Period so scientists were
observing what they saw,
fiddling with it,
figuring out what those changes, how those changes played out
in the science.
Johannes Kepler during this period of time decided that,
"Gee, I think planets move in
elliptical orbits,
not circles."
Up until this time they just thought that all the planets moved around in nice neat
circles instead of
lovely elliptical planes.
Galileo during this time used his telescope and he discovered
that the earth moved around the sun instead of the other way around.
Needless to say that did not make him popular with the church
because as far as the church was concerned the earth was the center of the universe and
everything else revolved around us.
So Galileo got in a little trouble about that but as we know he was proved right
in the end.
Sir Isaac Newton is in this period of time, so that apple dropping on the
head and gravity,
all a Baroque thing.
We have people studying the structure of plants cells so not only
do we have telescopes, but we have microscopes, so we're looking at things in smaller detail.
We were able to determine how the human circulatory system works so we
saw how blood
flowed around the body.
These all seem like
kind of modern things
to me. I'm not a scientist but it seems to me that's pretty...
pretty uptown for the 1600's.
So in literature
the biggest name is John Milton who wrote 'Paradise Lost,'
and Jonathan Swift who wrote 'Gulliver's Travels.' Gulliver's Travels is a great story
for this period of time. It's all about exploring
and he runs into all these
very different kinds of people, you know, little tiny people, giant people.
But if you think about what people knew about the world at the time, yes they knew
there were other countries out there but they had no idea what those people were
like.
So Jonathan Swift just played right into that and gave them this lovely story of all different
kinds of people in different kinds of countries.
Fits perfectly with the whole idea of the Baroque.
In France, Molière is the big name. He's famous for writing
farces.
As we said they liked drama
in the Baroque period, and a farce is the perfect drama because it's got
silly characters
in crazy situations. It is
really your basic
1600's sitcom, so...
very big, very popular, not just in France.
So in painting we'll see that
the focus is now on everyday life. Everything painting up until now has
been pretty much religious paintings, even though we saw them
move from the very
formal sort of
static plastic-y kind of approach to religious paintings
to making our saints and
religious heroes a little more human,
and in the Baroque Period we start seeing paintings of actual people who are not
connected to religious ideas.
This is a period of time when people could actually afford to pay somebody to paint their
portrait so
they would do that but
they would be much more casual paintings than we might expect of a
portrait where, if you look at paintings from like the
1800's where everybody's very formal and you know
got their hand on their hip and all those fancy sorts of things. You don't see that
really much in the
Baroque Period.
So we're going to look at four artists from this period of time from
four very different kinds of
cultures actually.
First we're going to look at Rembrandt who was probably the most famous name
from the period.
So Rembrandt is really well known
for the way he used light and dark
in painting so
if you go into an art gallery and you see a big portrait of somebody
and its
got a lot of dark colors but there's some really striking light thing like a
ruff around the neck
or maybe a feather in the hat and lighting that obviously comes from a
specific direction
you can be fairly sure that that's either Rembrandt or somebody who
followed kind of his
approach.
One of his contemporaries,
country-persons I guess you would say
is one of the few
painters that we really know much about from the period of time.
Her name is Judith Lester and she was also Dutch.
She was actually married to a painter. So
she was lucky I guess because her husband wasn't really intimidated by the fact
that his wife was also talented,
and encouraged her to work.
So what we have here is one of my favorite paintings. It's a self portrait of her.
We see painters do self portraits of themselves all the time. Rembrandt did one and his is like,
'I'm a painter,' you know, it's very formal, staring at the camera kind of
look to it.
But here we have this lovely portrait that Judith has done of herself,
where it's like
you've just come into her studio and she's going...
'Hey, how are you doing, she turns around to greet you in the painting.
So, she's still got her paintbrush in her hand. It's like she's just stopped what she's doing to talk
to you.
Very informal,
very casual.
But you know she's a painter. She's got her paint brush. She's got her pallet with
her colors on it,
and there's even a painting there.
Probably a painting of her husband because
it's a man and he's playing the violin. Her husband was also a musician.
So, it's a portrait but not formal in the sense that we think of portraits
from a later period of time.
She
shows some influence of Rembrandt because of the way the light's used in there
but it's just a really lovely,
welcoming,
'Hi, I'm Judith, come on into my studio kind of painting which I think is just
wonderful.
Let's look now
at another type of
family portrait. We saw a portrait of George Washington's family when we did our sort of
quick trip through the periods.
This one is a
portrait of a sort of noble family by Velázquez, who's a Spanish painter.
And as we look at this painting,
this is a big painting and
oriented this way and about
two-thirds of the painting
is darkness.
Like the walls are dark
If you look really, really closely you can see there are some paintings hanging back there.
So, we're in a big room with paintings but the portrait is of this family
so we have some children.
There's a dog. We love our dogs in our paintings. This is the family pet.
But we even have the painter in the painting so he's sort of done a self-portrait of himself.
But it's not posed at all.
It looks like they're all just sort of hanging around and can't decide what to
do, like, 'Are we gonna go out and and play?
Are we gonna go do...
chase the dog or what?'
It's all...
You think... 'This is a family portrait?'
Really? It just sort of looks like I walked into the room and everybody was doing
their own thing and
I just happened to interrupt them.
But it does show the influence of
Rembrandt again with the use of light and dark so that's something that we can
think about as well.
The last painter we're going to look at is an American painter and this is
Copley whose
name is familiar
because half the things in Boston are named after him.
Copley Square and there's
probably a Copley Mall, I don't know. There's lots of things in the city named after him.
But he was an American painter,
and the painting that we're looking at is of Paul Revere so it's
you know, the quintessential American hero kind of guy from Boston.
You can see the influence of Rembrandt here or at least the thinking of Rembrandt
which is interesting because Copley hadn't even met him. He didn't know Rembrandt's
paintings at the time. So maybe this was just something in the atmosphere. The
painters were
grabbing onto darks and light.
So here we have a portrait of Paul Revere, who was a silversmith.
So in his hand he has
a piece of silver - a silver coffee pot perhaps.
The tools of his trade are on the table.
He's wearing the shirt sleeves that he would wear to work so
you know we're talking about Paul Revere who is a major American hero and even at that time he
was
you know, an important guy.
Painting is
very... 'I'm just good old Paul Revere, your next-door neighbor.'
Portraits of a different time.
OK, now let's take a look at architecture in the period of time because in the Baroque Period
architecture is a great way
to see
that sort of overdone
thing. We haven't seen it in paintings. The paintings don't seem overdone.
They seem
really quite reasonable.
Let's look here at this
painting, it's not a painting, it's a photograph.
This is the inside of a church in Duernstein, Austria which is
a very tiny little church, it's just in a little tiny village that sits on the banks of the Danube
River.
But look at this. It's just covered in gold. It's got gold on practically every surface
that we can get gold onto.
It's decorated
to the extreme. And this is a little church that probably only seats you know like a
hundred and fifty, two-hundred people. It's tiny
but you can see that they felt
very strongly about
making this church to the glory of God.
And one way to do that is to decorate it up. So we have
gold plate on lots of things, all the way up the walls.
We don't have it in this particular picture but in the back, there's an organ
loft and it's full of gold things as well.
We see
Cupid-like angels and things all over the place.
You look at this from today's perspective, or if you think about
looking at it from a 19th Century perspective you think
"Gee, really, did you just kind of get carried away here didn't you?" That's what people were thinking
when they thought, "Oh, the Baroque... it's a little over the top."
And it is a little over the top. But in a beautiful kind of way.
Let's look at one more piece of architectural... we'll call it whimsey from
the period of time.
This is the Plague Column in Vienna.
It was built in memory of all the people who died during one of the plagues.
Which you would think okay that's shouldn't be a particularly cheery kind
of thing. But
this is a big thing and it is kind of
busy looking. It's like bodies climbing on each other and I suppose these were plague victims
trying to escape.
But it's also got gold stuff
plastered all over it.
So even in a time when they were commemorating a particularly horrible
experience in their lives,
they decorated it to pieces.
So again you can see why from... through the perspective of time, people would
think that that was probably something they could have backed off just a bit on.
But, it gives us a really good picture of...
that you can keep in your... in your mental bank there, before we start looking at
the music of the period and how
composers did that same sort of decorative element
but with musical notes instead of
gold leaf and Cupids.