In Our Time - The Baroque Movement

Episode Date: October 23, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the culture of the Baroque. What do the music of Bach, the Colonnades of St Peter’s, the paintings of Caravaggio and the rebuilding of Prague have in common? The answer is the Baroque – a term used to describe a vast array of painting, music, architecture and sculpture from the 17th and 18th centuries.Baroque derives from the word for a misshapen pearl and denotes an art of effusion, drama, grandeur and powerful emotion. Strongly religious it became the aesthetic of choice of absolute monarchs. But the more we examine the Baroque, the more subtle and mysterious it becomes. It is impossible to discuss 17th century Europe without it, yet it is increasingly hard to say what it is. It was coined as a term of abuse, denounced by thinkers of the rational Enlightenment and by Protestant cultures which read into Baroque the excess, decadence and corruption they saw in the Catholic Church. With Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge; Nigel Aston, Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Leicester and Helen Hills, Professor of Art History at the University of York

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, what do the music of Bach, the colonnades of St. Peter's in Rome, the paintings of Caravacho and the rebuilding of Prague have in common? One answer is the Baroque,

a term used to describe a vast array of painting, music, architecture and sculpture from the mid-17th to the end of the 18th centuries. The word Baroque originally meant an irregularly shaped pearl, and that Baroque's often characterized as an art of sensuality and excess. The more we examine the Baroque, the more subtle and mysterious it becomes. It's impossible to discuss 17th century of Europe without it, and yet it's sometimes hard to say what it is. It's been a term but the praise and a probium,

an historical era, and a style that transcends history. with me to unpick the baroque are Helen Hills, Professor in Art History at the University of York, Nigel Aston, reader in early modern history at the University of Leicester, and Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History, and a fellow of Sydney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. Tim Blanning, can you start us off with a working definition of the Baroque, as we might understand it now?

We can do that in two ways. I think there's a very simple, chronological definition, as you indicated in your introductory remarks, as an era. one talks about the age of the Baroque, the Baroque period, meaning the 17th and early 18th century, but that's not very interesting and it doesn't get us very far. I think that much more important would be to define it as a term to denote a style used retrospectively by art historians and historians in general indeed. By that I mean the word Baroque was not used by people at the time, unlike Romantics, say. Romantics did, we're self-consciously aware that they were romantically, some of them.

were. But the Baroque architects and artists and painters and the rest of them were not aware in that way. So I think we have to do something for them, as it were. So here goes. This is certainly going to be open to challenge by my two colleagues, but I think we can define it as a style which emerges in the first half of the 17th century, in Italy, more specifically in Rome. It is characterized, the style is characterized by being dynamic, that is in the sense that it looks for movement. I forget who it was, described a Baroque building as a Renaissance building, seen through a screen of moving water. It's dynamic in that sense. It is theatrical, dramatic, it's flamboyant, it's colourful. It can also be described, I think, as organic. It seeks to

create a complete work of art, a total work of art, Gazumt Kunstwerk, if you like, by borrowing all kinds of elements and putting them together to form an organic, organic whole. It can also be described, and this may seem something of a contradiction in terms, as being both naturalist, and it seeks to be true to nature, but also illusionist, in that it seeks to break down the boundaries between this world and the next. Now, all that's very abstract, and at week I'm sure we shall add lots of adjectives in the course of the next 40 minutes or so, but just to give a specific example, which must be familiar to most of our listeners, and that is, We go straight to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

And there we find three great Baroque creations by Bernini. That is the Baldacino, the great Baldacino, which stands over the tomb, which is believed to be that of St. Peter's. The cathedral, petri, sort of multimedia, wonderful creation that Bernini created to house the chair of St. Peter. And finally, familiar to everybody. Surely in the world is the great colonnade outside which he built. Like the two arms, like two pinceres.

Exactly so. Away from the square in front of the F. St. Peter's and these two arms open at the bottom, but they seem to... Absolutely embracing. They'll get in there and it closed behind you and your gut. And big, big, big, capable of holding 100,000 pilgrims. And that's one characteristic of the Brock, especially, actually, and one might say in its secular manifestation, is that it prioritizes size.

For the Baroque size matters. Now, do you think that this, the expression, and I think it was you who you, used it, Tim. A culture of feeling was one of the, yes, you're did I get it right? No, you're quite right. Yes, I do, yes. Quite right. No, I'm wincing slightly

because it seems to invite an oversimplification. It was just a way of, I mean, one looks at the 17th century of the Baroque period, and one has thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of artifacts to try to make sense of, and you can say, well, we'll split them all up and they're all different, they're all CI generis.

Or we can be lumpers and try and lumped together and make some sort of sense. And the sense that I was trying to do in my book, The Pursuit of Glory, was to say that we have a tension or a conversation, a dialectic, whatever you like to call it, between a culture of feeling and a culture of reason. And the Baroque is very definitely a culture of feeling, which ultimately is challenged and overtaken by a cultural reason in the form of the European Enlightenment.

And if I can, again, just give a couple of specific examples to get us on the road, it's a contrast between, let us say, Bernini's statue of the ecstasy of St. Teresa of Avila, in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Fittoria, in Rome, where we see the saint in a state of almost orgasmic ecstasy, as a cynical French visitor, President de Bross said, well, if that's divine love, then I too have experienced it many times. You contrast that with, let us say, the philosophy, the rationalist philosophy, exactly contemporary, incidentally, of Descartes, whose mission was, as he put it, to lead the mind away from the senses. That's a very anti-Biroch, a very anti-Biroch, mission, if I may say.

We'll be coming back to St. Theresa. Nigel Ashton, can we dig away at this? It coincides with, and is it dependent on, and is it powered by the counter-Reformation? The Catholic Church had been massively indented, and part of its massively challenged by the Protestant movement, it gathered itself together again, and led by the Jesuits, there was the Counter-Reformation,

which had also great wealth at its disposal. Now, is this a coincidence, or is this a connection between the rise of the Counter-Reformation and the beginnings and rise of the Baroque, which in many cases, as Tim indicated, took enormous amounts of money? We're talking about sacred places and sacred palaces and the incredibly big, expensive buildings which bankrupted kings and so on. So can you bring those two together? Yes, I think we have to see the...

the coming of the Baroque in the early 17th century, as associated with a resurgent Roman Catholicism, a church which is feeling its feet again, which is confident that it's making its way in a Europe of confessional divide, but confessional divide which can be pushed back. The Council of Trent had decreed, which made very clear that art was to be policed, that there was to be an austerity,

that the church was to control what could and what couldn't go into artistic programmes. Now, by the early 17th century, there are signs that that's being relaxed, that the church is willing to celebrate what it's achieved already in the period from, say, 1570 through to the 1620s. And the Baroque, with its massive,

with its ornamentation and with its massive emphatic presence seems distinctively suited to a church which wants to celebrate above all the Eucharistic centrality of its teachings, which wants to shatter the boundaries between heaven and earth at the very point where the mass is celebrated. the Baroque in a religious sense is creating a magnificent tabernacle which can't be compromised, which is designed, as it were, to rub Protestant noses in the glory that is Rome and to celebrate this achievement. And any amount of money is worth spending on that. Think of the building programme of Urban the 8th, for instance, in the 1620s and the 1630s,

Tim mentioned the Baldacino in St. Peter's, where sculpture and architecture come together in a massive presence, which is celebrating the institutional power of the church militant. You mentioned this, I'm just taking up a point you've already made, but maybe elaborate on it a little bit. It is saying to stripped down Protestantism, it's saying to away with idle, idols Protestantism, look, we be able to. believe in sensuality, we believe in the luxuriance of the godhead, and we will celebrate it in the most enormously expensive way possible. We will put material at the service of the God that we are interested in. Here's one of the paradoxes of the Baroque, that it's a strong material presence, but it's also a material presence which is designed to encourage spirituality, where prayer sacred splendor, prayer can be combined with worldly magnificence

and bringing in some of the best designers that there are to be had. Did the Jesuits drive this? I mean, was there a point at which this was seen by people in the Counter-Reformation? It didn't sort of come together organically. He said, we can use this, we will drive this. This is a statement, almost an ideological, as well as a theological statement, that we can use to our benefit.

Undoubtedly, of course, the famous church of the Jesus Church in Rome dating from the 1560s is in many senses, one of the Western European harbingers of the Baroque style. The Jesuits, of course, still very much the shot troops of the Catholic Reformation in the early 17th century. And by that date, they have their own saints to celebrate, St. Francis Xavier Ignatius Loyola, etc. Alan Hills, Baroque's often associated with a certain sensuality and appeal to the emotion. Persons, when I've talked about historians, art historians in the past, when I've talked about Baroque. I've often talked about it, I think, very tellingly, by comparing it with the Renaissance, with the more classical. And that, I think, is a helpful way through.

Can you give us some idea of why that contrast was made, and maybe one or two examples of how we can see it? Tim referred to the ecstasy of century. there's no reason we shouldn't go back to her. It's an extraordinary piece of work, and then there are two Davids we can talk about. Could we talk about the vis-a-vis renaissance? That framing really is a 19th century German framing, so that's when that comes in.

So I think it's very important to realise that some of what's been said about the Baroque is very much through that lens. So the emphasis on sumptuousness and magnificence and so on wouldn't apply, for example, to the architecture of Francesca Boromini, who is in many ways quintessentially Baroque, who uses white plaster in his churches.

So the idea that it's to be understood over and against something in a sort of Hegelian mode is above all comes from Heinrich Welflin writing in the 1880s in a book Renaissance and Baroque who sets up oppositional ways of thinking about. It's really useful though. It's a wonderful book. It's a marvelous book. He sets up oppositional ways of thinking about Renaissance and Baroque.

largely, or partly, not largely, but informed by the invention of the lantern slide. So it's partly technologically derived this mode of comparison and contrast. And that's continued, I think, in our way of conceiving this as against something, which perhaps its practitioners would have fumbled to follow us. Well, do you want to talk about Centres, or do you want to talk about the two Davids, which I think shows this very clearly. Would you like to say a little about this great St. Teresa, we see this? Well, you tell us what we see.

I've got a reproduction in front of me. You can probably carry it in your mind every day of week. Well, I think it's an extraordinary piece of work, and it's very, very difficult to pin down. So when you were searching for a definition, it's a very useful artwork, I think, to focus upon because it defies being encapsulated readily in idea and in the word. So you're saying it's not, it doesn't really,

really ring the bell for being baroque here? It absolutely does, you know, through the Volf Linnian lens. And what I'd draw attention to there are some of the things that have already been mentioned, the orchestration of architecture, sculpture, stucco, painted, fresco, gilded metal, directed light, this multiplication of media to draw in the viewer, the central edicule in which the figure of St. Theresa lies on this

curious cloud which represents cloud. It's clearly denoted not just as an illusionistic cloud but as a representational cloud. That is contained within an edictule separated from us by dark, beautiful, polished

marble through which we look. So we too participate in a vision which she is experiencing. But the passion of it is very different from paintings in medieval certainly, but certainly even in the Renaissance, where we see a suffering Mary, suffering Mary Magline, suffering saints, women as well as men,

but we don't see them suffering in this particular way. I mean, there's a passion here, she's not suffering, this is ecstasy, and the attempt by Benin is to make us feel the ecstasy through the sculpture itself. I think it's a different operation. That's what I think, but who am I? I mean, the way you go. What's very interesting to me is the way that that sculpture,

when you look at it, is drained of flesh. If you look carefully at the body of St. Theresa, you do not see her body at all. You see the folds of drapery, which are alive, as if there's flame racing through between the flesh and the cloth, as if the spirit made visible. Yes, Tim Lunning.

Well, I'd just like to add that, and perhaps slightly modify it, in that when Benini carved this wonderful sculpture, he had in his, before him, indeed he had a text, And the text was St. Teresa's own account of her vision. And in her vision, she has a dream. And in the dream, a beautiful angel appears with a spear, with a glowing tip,

which she thrusts into her heart. And she experiences intense pain, but also intense pleasure. And that is what Benini is depicting here so very successfully, it seems to me. If I just add one other part, another, I think quite an important aspect of this, It is very theatrical. It is in the Cornaro Chapel. On either side, we see in high relief members of the Cornaro family, as if they were in theatrical boxes observing this wonderful creation.

Have we time? I think we have to, we have time, anyway. And to look at the two Davids, we have a David by Michelangelo, which many of our listeners are no calm, classical, at rest in a way, the stone having been slung or whatever. He is not in action. We have the David of Bernini where first of all is partly clothed

but he's just whipped off the stone The little basket of stones is by his side We can see the sling It's a completely different representation of David And that again seems to me to be a useful difference We've got the great Michelangelo Which takes a straight back to Greece You've got Benini which takes us straightforward to expressionism

Yes that's certainly one way of looking at it It's not particularly one that I must say I share but you can see that the Benini sculpture as embodying unrest movement, just as we said earlier on about the idea of a certain restlessness, a certain dynamic within Baroque. Tim, can we talk about the opera? This has been said to be the quintessentially Baroque art form. Well, they start together, don't they?

I mean, there is that coincidence, that chronological coincidence, which I don't think can entirely be accident. that is that opera emerges in just this period in the first half of the 17th century in Florence, originally rather than in Rome, and then Venice becomes another very important centre. But I think that what they have in common

is, well, many of the adjectives which we've employed already, opera is, it's very flamboyant, it's theatrical, it's dramatic, it aims at a total work of art, it is extremely expensive, it's big, it's one, actually one phrase we haven't used an adjective, haven't used so far, but perhaps we ought to introduce into the mix. It is representational. Representational in that is there to represent in the sense of making present the glory of the patron, the splendor of the patron. This is why big, big, big is so important, expensive, expensive,

so opera is an art form which can only be afforded by the very great and the very and the very rich. So I think there are plenty of analogies, but the analogies are structural as well as coincidental. And it lasted for eight hours, Nigelaston, and it was performed only twice the golden apple. But it does indicate the expensive, the economics of one end of the brook. Can you talk about that? We have mentioned it, but it's worth elaborating because of the vast sums of money, people going into bankruptcy, states and New Kingdom going into bankruptcy, to make these huge things.

We should always remember that 17th century monarchies and noble households tended to live in permanent state of indebtedness. And so investing in lavish entertainments, lavish building programs, was something that prestige require, and accountants could worry about that later, all the descendants of the kings at the time. So Tim has talked about the importance of patronage.

One can't understand the Baroque without visiting that repeatedly. I was thinking, too, of the link between the courtly market, in this period, how expensive that was. It's all part of a kind of dynastic build-up, which is essential to what one might call the state building program of greater and lesser states in the 17th century. But it is very expensive. Alan Hills, in 1643, Louis XIV, came to the throne of France.

And can you describe, tell us how he brought the Baroque into, or he helped, he was an instrument for bringing them. Baroque, which had been an Italian business, taking it into France and then extending it throughout Europe. Well, he does deploy huge resources to concentrate his court

politically and socially in one place, and he uses architecture to marshal them, and the idea that architecture is a machine of ritual and of ritualisation, I think, is very important in the Baroque. So you have enfilards, for example, which create

a hierarchy of space. within Versailles. And that is extended outside of Versailles too, of course. He also employed Genarendo Benini, for example, to make a fabulous portrait bust of him, which, unlike a static portrait busts, which just looks forward, actually has his head turned to one side,

as if there's wind flowing through the hair. So again, rather, if we think back to the St. Teresa, There there's fire between the flesh and the clothing. Here there seems to be wind. The elements are in some way deployed in relation to the sculptural form. And the head instead of being on a pedestal, it's sort of floating material or it could be clouds underneath, as if it's been...

The fact that he employed Benini was in itself a state. Yes, yes. But I think your point about... I want this central man from... Absolutely. But the point that it's not located on Earth, I think is terribly important. and he's not a ruler, even though he is a secular ruler,

who locates himself on earth through the Baroque. That portrait bust of Louis XIV, and I agree with everything that Helena said, it's just a wonderful creation, was as a kind of spin-off of a much more important project. That was that Bernini had been brought to Paris in 1665 to provide designs for the rebuilding of the Louvre. And I think this is a really crucial moment, 1665, Bernini arrives and he produces plans which are very Italianate, very baroque, lots of concaves and convexes with a facade that seems to move, you know, all the usual stuff from Italy. And it's rejected. They don't like it.

Colbert, in particular, who by this time has become, is in charge of French royal architectural or cultural policy, doesn't get on with Bernini. Indeed, Bernini used the C word to describe Colbert and his relations with him. And the upshot of all this is that Bernini goes back to Rome, this wonderful portrait bust has been created, but the east front of the Louvre is not designed by Bernini. It's known by a Frenchman by Perot. And I think this is quite an important turning point in a shift of cultural leadership in Europe from Italy to France

and was intended to be as such. Nigel. Yes, I think when we're talking about a building like the Louvre or, of course, Versailles, We're talking about buildings which we may decide to describe as Baroque, but these are Baroque spaces which are performance spaces. They're settings for courtly societies, just as the Baroque churches of Rome, are settings for the sacred performance of the Eucharist.

And Versailles will set the pattern for virtually every other European dynasty from about the 1670s, well into the 18th century. Helen. Yes, and even more than settings, they are actually machinic, aren't they? They produce a different form of society, and I think that's really important. So it's not as if we must think of social practices

as somehow existing already and then being rehoused. These new forms of building produce new social relations. Can you use the elaborator, that's fascinating? Well, I think if you... No, I can't actually at the moment. We'll come back to it, it's fine. Tim, you want to come in. Well, yes, I didn't want to interrupt,

but I think the example of Versailles is a very interesting one in that this is clearly a great Baroque space. But if we look at the facade of Versailles, or indeed at any part of it, I think, and we hadn't seen it before, it's difficult to imagine, but we were asked, in which country is this to be found? We would say, at once, this is French. This is French.

We are not in Italy. We're not in Austria or Bohemia or Poland. And I think that there is, there is, was a deliberate act on the part of Louis XIV and his cultural team, headed by Colbert, to create a style which is magnificent and granted, and all those other adjectives, but which has a distinctively French flavour. And indeed, in the course of the 1650s and 1660s, virtually all the creative arts, including music, are in effect nationalised or royalised, organised in academies,

rules are drawn up, and so a kind of an official style is developed. And so one finds in these French buildings a distinctively French flavour. It is more restrained, more austere, more, dare I say it, classical. Can I, I know you say what you want to say. Can you also answer the question I'd like to put you in Nigel? And that's the Habsburg's taking this up, where there are great victories. And the Habsburg and Habsburg using the Baroque style ideologically, particularly in Prague. But you want to add to what Tim and Helen said.

I just wanted to say how much I agreed with Tim. about the Frenchification of the Baroque at the hands of architects like Mancard, Le Marcierge, Adouin Mancard. There's a kind of unwillingness to emulate Italy in all its ways and a pride in the French classical achievement and a confidence that the Baroque and the French classical style can be blended.

Architects pick and choose. They take from the Baroque, what they want, I think. And so moving forward to your question, Melvin, about the Habsburgs, yes, of course, the Bourbon-Habsberg rivalry is one that dates back centuries. It's seen very vividly in the period from the 1670s right through to the 1740s and 50s. Through Leopold the First, the Holy Roman Emperor until 1705. The Habsbergs are regaining the confidence they have. earlier in the century, pushing back the Turks,

turning Vienna into an imperial capital, celebrating their dynasty against the upstart Bourbons. And what can be done at Versailles can be done at Vienna. So it's a statement of dynastic power and counter-Catholic Reformation principles in a kind of classical embodiment. But Prague particularly? Prague particularly as a city.

which had once been Protestant but is being recatholicised, whose buildings can emphasise just how important bohemia is to the Habsburg inheritance as a principality which had once been heretic, but whose buildings can show the recatholicisation of the whole of the empire at the expense of the Turks and the Protestants and celebrate new Catholic saints like St John Nepomouk. But the Baroque, as it were, was moved into Prague, wasn't it? Timbland.

It was, and I think the crucial date era of 1620 at the Battle of the White Mountain when the Protestants of Bohemia were decisively defeated by the army of the Catholic League. Until that point, Bohemia had been one of the great centres of heresy in Europe, a bit like Southern California.

There's every heresy known to man and a few that weren't there in Bohemia. So if Bohemia had gone, gone Calvinist in 1618 after the revolt, then the whole of European history might have been different. So when the Protestants are smitten, hip and thigh in 1620, and then there is a series of, well, it's up and down a bit, but on the whole, the rest of the 17th century is a trajectory of victories for the perhaps where it's culminating and the great defeat of the Turks outside Vienna in 1883. There's a great mood of self-confidence. I mean, the god of victories was clearly on the Catholic side, both against the infidel and against the herald.

And that creates in Prague really an entirely new city. And it's a city which I think is, I'm not sure whether Nigel would agree with this, but it's a very Italianate city. It doesn't look French at all. It looks Italian. And one of the reasons for that is that there are a huge number of Italian architect sculptors working in Prague. Meanwhile on the Western Front, Helen Hills, what was happening in this country in terms of the Baroque?

Well, again, I think it's quite interesting how there's now a sort of competition to try to bring or claim things as Baroque. So in the 1960s, 1960s, architectural historians in this country began to ask, is there an English Baroque, and began to find examples pointing to things like Wren, St. Paul's. The west front of St. Paul's particularly. Yes, the towers, the West Towers,

and, for example, some of the steeples of the city churches, if we think of St. Vedast, and the use, again, of Concade and Concade and convex and so on. But what I find most interesting there is not whether this is Baroque or the extent to which it can be seen as an English Baroque, but by that point, this desire to espouse a Baroque, that it's seen as somehow something we ought to have as well.

You know, the Continentals now have it and we want it to. And I'm talking about the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. You're talking about the view of his art historian then and almost now of back then. But do you think, let's just get it though. Do you think that the, I'm sorry to be so sort of plotting away, but do you think that there is real evidence

of the Baroque style in this country, in England? Do you think Wrens west side of St. Paul's Rehn's. Do you think anything to be blending? Well, I think there's a real problem in trying to essentialise a Baroque, and I suppose that's the position which I where I depart from my

colleagues here probably, that I think it is a construction, a historic construction and that we risk creating taxonomies and producing categories into which we can put buildings, but they don't actually illuminate very much either about the history or the buildings. So sure, one can say this is Baroque or that is Baroque and fight over the definitions of these categories. But ultimately that tells us more about who is doing the labelling than what is being

labelled. Well, let me reveal a bit more of myself, in which case I'm a lumper, not a splitter. And it seems to me that if one goes and looks at Blennon Palace, for example, it's difficult not to say, this is in many important senses a Baroque building, similarly at Castle Howard, not least because of the architects who were involved, Ambrough and Augsmore.

And there's one particular characteristic I want to pick up on because we haven't said very much about it, and I think it is absolutely crucial, and that is the representational nature of the Baroque style. It is very well suited to presenting the power, the prestige, the legitimacy of the patron. And in the case of the Duke of Morbara, the first Duke of Morbara, for whom Blenheim Palace was created,

that was rather important. He'd come from relatively humble gentry origins, and here he is as the first Duke of Morbara, the victor of Europe, the great diplomat, and he wants to produce something which makes a statement. And doesn't Blenem Palace ever make a statement? And that seems to me to be a truly Baroque building. it makes good sense and it is helpful to describe it as such.

I think that what Helen has surrendered to the mix is very interesting, the idea of how we decide we'll split up areas of history into containable sections and I think that does play into what we're all saying, does it, or what you're all saying, no, you know. Possibly historians have a slightly more robust approach to using a term like Baroque than art historians. For instance, it seems to me that art historians worry a lot about how one can categorise St Paul's Cathedral.

To me, it seems a splendid example of at least a quasi-baroque sacred space built on a massive scale in which the Anglican liturgy is performed in a building which looks very much like a Roman Catholic one which caused all sorts of problems for the clergy actually using the cathedral in the first century or so of its life? What do you do with that kind of space in a Protestant context? Helen?

Yeah, I think that what's happening, they all say, is a collapse of period into form, into appearance, and it's very interesting. I don't know, but I don't think there are historians of the Baroque in history departments. There are historians of the early modern. So actually historians will shrink even more from the term Baroque, then art historians.

Art historians actually have continued to use it, continue to deploy it and to discuss it, because it is very much part of our discipline. You know, that 1880s moment is also the formation of art history when Baroque is enunciated for the first time. So I think it's much more a critical view. It's not one in which we shrink from it as art historians. Tim.

Not really very much to add to that. I have a great deal of sympathy with looking at the nuts and bolts and the details of a particular façade. and identifying this, that and the other, and comparing it and finding differences and so on. But at the end of the day, if we're going to make sense of, especially of broad sweeps of history, I mean, looking at the whole of the 17th and 18th century,

and we haven't moved very much north of the ops except to Prague so far, then I think it does make sense to refer to, let us say, the Church of the Azzan brothers built in Munich, and to compare that with someone who was mentioned early on by Helen Boromini, And clearly the Azzan brothers took a great deal from Boromini, not least because they spent, both them spent a considerable amount of time in Italy, to compare that with some of the churches in Rome that Bernini and Boromini created, or Pietro da Cotona, and say, look, we are moving in the same kind of semiosphere here.

And that seems to me to make sense, to make cross-cultural comparisons. Would you go along with that, Nigel? I think cross-cultural comparisons are very important, particularly between Protestant and Catholic. Here one sees, if I can stay with England for the sake of argument, one sees Protestant patrons happily employing Catholic painters and architects, the stylistic divide between Protestant and Catholics within the elites, but by the end of the 17th century is pretty nominal.

English and indeed Scottish architects and practitioners want to exhibit signs that they've been to, to Rome, they've seen Bernini and Boromini, and like somebody like Thomas Archer, for instance, are capable of replicating those designs in an inspired way at home. Helen? I just wanted to say that the division between the Catholic and the Protestant is obviously important, but the Council of Trend also refers to the Muslims, doesn't it? Islam. So we have to be careful about just drawing it up in that binary opposition, which we're very familiar with.

and remember always that along with the Protestant heresy, the presence of Islam was one of the formative features. I think with an architect like Fischer von Erlach in Vienna, one sees him drawing on a range of visual motifs which go well beyond the simply Christian. Can we talk about, if we've sort of got this idea, the Baroque floated, can we now, puncture it.

And as it were, not as an idea, but it's time faded and another time took its place, because these things do roll through. I mean, I know, I mean, one of the interesting things about talking to serious academics is the qualifications and the historiography and the

finessing, and that's part of the joy of it. But things do move forward. I mean, Baroque was not like Benin's David, is not like Macalachia's David, and on we go. Given that there was a Baroque, just for the second, for the next ten minutes. How did it come to an end?

I mean, economics might have to play a part, but also the change of the culture of feeling to the culture of reason, which you alluded to much earlier, Tim. Yes. Well, I think there are many changes which take place, but a general observation is that no style can last forever. And, I mean, this is a very lumping kind of remark to make, but looking at the whole course of human history, you find that styles come and styles go.

And so in a way, every style has its own the seeds of its own decay built into it. The case of modernism passing to postmodernism for example, it's very good example.

Postmodern and it has certain Baroque characteristics, if I may say so, in its flamboyance, and it's like a movement and so on. However, that's taking us into different territory. Going back to your specific question

about what happens is that the kind of religiosity, the kind of churchmanship which the Baroque privilege which the Baroque liked falls into disrepute and I think probably

the greatest enemy of the Baroque was the Jansenist movement which proves to be so hugely important in late 17th into the 18th century and that as it were erodes the kind of religious culture on which the Baroque had been placed from within

but I'd like to hear what Nigel has to say about that and there's a lot more about it than I do. I'm not sure I would entirely subscribe to that I think that in certain areas, certain urban spaces, one can see Jansenist influences at work. This is a movement inside the church. Recapturing austerity.

Yes. I think that within Jansenist circles in France, it'd always been a certain uneasiness at the excessive decorative embellishments of the Baroque. That perhaps spreads more widely into educated urban circles in the first half of the 18th century in Western and Central Europe.

I'm not so sure how far one could really find it in say the pilgrimage churches or many of the village churches in Barraea where the Baroque continues to be powerful into the first half the century. But they fall out of fashion. They do fall out of fashion with the elite but perhaps at a lower level Well, no not at the lower level I think

but among the elites it certainly falls out of fashion so that the Empress Maria Theresia who succeeds in 1740 is very much opposed to the excesses of the Baroque and indeed has been described authoritatively I think as a Jansenist. So the exorcism is being set from above. I think that the kind,

I mean, Jansenism is a very general term. It isn't confined simply to the heresy or the views of Jansanias, but the general Jansen's position, which looks for an more austere kind of religious practice. Something which is more akin to Protestantism, that begins

with the elites and then it does begin to trickle down. So the funds are no longer available for these great Baroque abbeys. That's very true. There's a very big agricultural depression in the 1740s, which really takes the ground from underneath. I was going to come to the funding and the money was

excessive. I've mentioned once or twice perhaps rather too often of the bankruptcies that occur. Maybe it's a word that's around. And it was just too much. People could not keep up this massive building on this massive scale. Well, the Catholic Church couldn't give it. Many of the monastic foundations in Switzerland and Germany and Central Europe

try for a remarkably long time well into the 18th century. But the costs are almost insupportable. though many of these churches of pilgrimage churches and the number of pilgrims continues to rise throughout the 18th century. Europe is also recovering from the costs of the war of the Spanish succession.

Retrenchments needed. Baroque seems grandiloquent. It's associated with Louis XIV. His successors in France want to get away from that. Something lighter, frothier, more playful is called for and that goes with the rise of Jansenism and also private spirituality.

If you like the privatisation, of religiosity which one can find in the 18th century. Helen Hills, what do you think nowadays, what does the term Baroque mean to you? Well, I think it is this very long series of very interesting lenses that have been held up to try to individuate what the Baroque ears, was how one might consider it,

from a term of opprobrium through to something more of celebration to more recently with a thinker like Gilles de Lers as an anti-historicist critical strategy. So it has many different forms of deployment. Tim, where would you

place the Baroque? One of the things that's come out of this program for me anyway is that it's an uneasy beast, which makes it more interesting. He is there, it's uneasy, it escapes classifications is all, is Caravaggio Baroque, he's Baroque, but they're all around the same.

Is it this to do with the the congruence of a period of time and a style, these two things clashing and interconnecting. I think that's a very good way of putting it. I couldn't agree more. An image which I think appeals quite a lot to me is, as it were, a pebble thrown into a pond, and the ripples then spread out from Rome,

but with ever-diminishing speed and size. And so it sort of finally ripples up into Scandinavia just a little bit. So it's clearly running out of steam by the middle of the 18th century, by the middle of the 18th century, certainly. The tension you referred to, I think, is a very helpful way of looking at it, particularly a tension between earthly things and divine things, between sensual things and intellectual things,

and that edginess, which we see very often in Bernini's creations, is manifest. Well, thank you very much, Helen Hills, Tim Blanning and Nigel Asson. And next week we'll be talking about the Great Reform Act of 1832, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com. UK forward slash radio four.