Under Popes and Distant Kings: Italy in the Age of the Baroque

Abstract

While reflecting on the age that followed the Counter-Reformation, the early-twentieth-century historian, Benedetto Croce, observed that, while Italy’s rejection of Protestantism had kept the country in one sense united, it had done so at the price of a kind of cultural hibernation, cut off from the movement of ideas that spread across the rest of Europe, because of the domination of the Papacy and Spain. Italy, he claimed, ‘was resting, tired; and it is a beautiful and wishful metaphor, to say that she was not completely finished and dead’. These views were typical of a historiography that saw the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century as a period of decline between two glorious ages — the Renaissance and the Risorgimento. This was a reading influenced by nineteenth-century nationalism, which hoped that the Risorgimento marked a break with an era considered hostile to the ‘modern age’, in which Italy was disunited and subject to the will of foreign powers. This chapter explores the common threads of Italy’s culture and society in the period between the Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment, a long period which left important legacies for modern Italy, in terms of social discipline (as a result of the Council of Trent), of scientific discoveries, and of achievements in art, architecture, music and literature. As John Marino has remarked, while the French and Spanish invasions conquered Italy politically, Italy continued to export its culture to France and Spain, as well as to the rest of early modern Europe.