1660-1715: France’s golden age

culture, politics, achievement, influence

power and measures of it:

Colbert (Louis XIV’s finance minister): "apart from striking actions in warfare, nothing is so well able to show the greatness and spirit of princes than buildings; and all posterity will judge them by the measure of those superb habitations which they have built during their lives" (quoted in Fleming, p. 410).

-a top-down approach to arts: tends to minimize emotionalism

-with Colbert, minister, the sun king regularizes style through academics

-recall Plato Republic: the poets must be brought to bow to Reason

-artists cannot fully be trusted

-Philosophers (those best able to use Reason must decide what others can create and consume)

-Alan Keyes (from debate): "Philosophers in their closets" don’t move human hearts…

Peter Paul Rubens

-Mother of Louis XIII

-Rubens’ task: glorify a rather ordinary woman

-movement, diagonals, cut off figures implying continuation of scene

-Rubens vs. Poussin (Fleming, pp. 416-421, 435)

-Analyze according to:

-emotional expressiveness

-Rational rules and formulas

-academic baroque vs. free baroque

Claude Lorrain Disembarkation of Cleopatra at Tarsus 1647 (Fig. 14.14)

-Landscapes

-receding space; vividness recedes with depth

-characters have only incidental importance

Advances in science

-Galileo (1561-1642) Letter to the Duchess Christina of Tuscany

• Confirms Copernicus’ heliocentric theory

• Galileo believes "The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes."
• God reveals himself through the Bible and Nature
• Senses and demonstration are the best place to start when trying to discern Nature
• Why would God give us Reason to investigate Nature only to have us forgo their use?
• Opponents to Galileo show "a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth"

** Threat: science challenges the religious and humanistic view that humans are the sole purpose of creation.

-creationism vs. evolutionism

Test your senses:

• Does the earth appear to you to be spinning on an axis?
• Does the sun appear to be going around the earth?

-the world appears x, but it is really y.

BUT…BUT…BUT

-who figures out reality in spite of misleading appearances????

-Galileo’s answer: Humans using sense extension (e.g., telescope) and Reason.

Yeah!! Humans can access Nature more effectively.

-Isaac Newton Principia

-mass, force, momentum

-embraces "complete and systematic view of an orderly world based on mechanical principles, capable of mathematical proof, and evident by accurate prediction" (Fleming, p. 436).

Ignatius Loyola (Jesuits)

-"Soldiers of Christ"

- "If we wish to be sure that we are right in all things, we should always be ready to accept this principle: I will believe that the white that I see is black, if the hierarchical Church so defines it."

-**In a world where appearances may fool us (the world looks x way to us even though it really is not that way), we must be guided by spiritual authority.

-Obedience has its privileges!

Rene Descartes ("The Father of Modern Philosophy")

-Can we really trust our sense?

-How do we know that we have knowledge?

-Knowledge cannot rest on perception!

-C.f. Copernicus, Galileo

-Method: doubt everything until certain proposition is arrived at

-Cogito, ergo sum® "I think, therefore I am"

Meditations overview

Francis Bacon

-In praise of the inductive, scientific method

-By divine bequest we have inherited power over nature

-But we must obey nature to command nature

-True philosopher (scientist) is more like a bee than an ant or spider: Why?

Deism- God orders the world and then withdraws himself

The Argument from Design (proponent: William Paley)- God orders the world in a way similar to but far exceeding the ways in which humans order their machines

Argument from Design questions (see Hume reading on website)

Louis XIV- orders his kingdom according to Reason; brings every aspect into unity

-Versailles is a metaphor

-feudal, decentralized government® modern, centralized state

-The Gardens of Versailles (Andre Le Notre)

-The ordering of Nature and simultaneous embrace of it

-logical system of terraces, avenues, pathways, clearings embellished by fountains, pools, canals, pavilions, and grottos

Versailles Palace 1669-85

-built on a wooded area 1/2 the size of Paris

-to be a symbol of supremacy of Louis XIV

-grand design is logical and symmetrical

-early example of urban planning

-vision of whole

-connection between units of living and nature

Lully: French Opera

-writes incidental music for Moliere for some of his comic ballets

-later comes up with lyrical tragedy (e.g., Aceste)

Operatic Form

-opera form becomes crystalized early for 2 centuries

-form was aloof; for aristocratic class

-Charles I tries to assert absolute monarchy

-civil war follows

-Parliamentary rule is established: Charles I condemned to death

-But Oliver Cromwell alienates aristocracy

-COMPROMISE: limited monarch

Compromises characterize the English spirit (Fleming, p. 425, ¶2)

Architecture- St. Paul’s Cathedral (p., 425)

Music-

Dryden

Purcell: English Opera

Handel: Opera, Oratorio