Comparing the Arts in the Age of Baroque

Abstract

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POETS, painters, musicians, architects, and other artists saw their creations primarily as vehicles by which they could move their audiences or spectators in specific ways, affecting them with specifically intended passions. That is, they saw artistic creation and function not as organic but as rhetorical in nature. We can, therefore, compare the arts, whether in theory or in specific works, not only through the generally shared imagery by which artists produced their effects, but also in terms of artistic intention and rhetorically induced passion and emotion. In a limited way, I want to show why and how we can usefully compare the arts, rather than parallel one with another, a false analogy which both we and the artists so often make,1 how these comparisons work, and how our understanding of them enhances the effect and value of particular creations for us. Using several lines from the first and last stanzas of John Dryden's 1687 Song for St. Cecilia's Day as a focal point, I shall try to show and define first the rhetorical orientation of Western European artists and theorists in the seventeenth century, and next, how artists with similar intentions, working through different media, used culturally shared imagery to produce analogous effects. Artists and theorists of the seventeenth, and also the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, unlike most of us, conceived of artistic creation as nonorganic, that is, as consisting of separate, rhetorical parts.