Scholarship

The learned conceits of Baroque art called for learned artists: Borromini eventually owned a thousand books, Bernini four hundred; Rubens studied with the classical scholar Justus Lipsius (1547-1606). In addition, artists and scholars often worked together to devise allegories, mythological representations, historical scenes, and frontispieces. Printed books opened a whole new range of options for engravers, many of whom developed a specific ability to reproduce designs created by other artists - or by authors, whose clumsy sketches a good book engraver could somehow turn into beautiful illustrations. Gianlorenzo Bernini’s sometime collaborator, the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, published a monumental series of folio picture books on subjects ranging from ancient Egypt to magnetism, geology, China, music, and optics, each volume more lavishly illustrated than the last. For many of these works, Kircher’s own forceful but clumsy drawings provided the basis for exquisitely polished illustrations that issued from the studios ofprofessional engravers in Rome and Amsterdam.

Although Baroque artists regarded the artists of classical antiquity as the supreme masters of style, they also noted the profound differences between that style and the styles of medieval, Byzantine, and Asian art: a pair of engraved illustrations in one of Father Athanasius Kircher’s books, China illustrata (China illustrated), depicts an Asian statue in the style of a Chinese ink drawing and then, on the facing page, shows the same work in Western style with cross-hatched shading. With similar care, artists in Baroque Rome copied early Christian paintings and mosaics for the ‘‘paper museum’’ of the wealthy antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657), who collected drawings of the objects he could not amass for himself. Although recognizable as seventeenth-century work, these copies for the ‘‘paper museum’’ make an evident effort to reproduce style along with subject matter. Dal Pozzo also commissioned a series of paintings from Nicolas Poussin of The Seven Sacraments (ca. 1637-42; Belvoir Castle, Grantham); these large, impressive works combined Church history with archaeological investigation to show the traditional Catholic ceremonies as if they were taking place in Early Christian times and in real locales around Rome.

Cassiano dal Pozzo’s combined interest in classical antiquity, nature, and exotic civilizations was typical of his time: in Florence, the Grand Dukes of Tuscany collected Aztec and Olmec figurines and carved elephant tusks alongside ancient Roman cameos. Athanasius Kircher’s famous museum in the Jesuit College of Rome contained Roman and Etruscan statues, skeletons, a stuffed armadillo (which still exists), a statue carved from a meteorite in the fourteenth century, dinosaur teeth, and a series of Egyptian amulets that he may well have produced himself. For the seventeenth century was also a century of outrageous forgeries. The most notorious may have been the pseudo-Etruscan documents ‘‘discovered’’ in 1634 by the young Tuscan nobleman Curzio Inghirami (1614-55) and definitively condemned as fake in 1640 by the Greek-Italian scholar Leone Allacci (1586-1669), but the temptation to create or embroider a classical heritage proved irresistible in every corner of Europe: as the Dutch identified themselves with the Batavians, in Sweden, the physician Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) gathered archaeological evidence and citations from classical authors to prove that the real site of lost Atlantis had been his own town of Uppsala. Some scholars contentedly embellished the ancient histories of their adopted homes: thus a Scotsman, Thomas Dempster (1579-1625), and a Frenchman, Guillaume Postel (1510-81), both concentrated their considerable ingenuity on further embellishing the history of the Etruscans. Amid this remarkable population of forged documents and embroidered histories, one genuine text stands out: in 1625, near Xi’an, China, the Jesuit Alvaro Semedo (1585-1658) discovered a 9-foot-tall monument inscribed in Syriac and Chinese that commemorated the introduction of Christianity (‘‘the Luminous Religion’’) in the year 781. This stele, called the ‘‘Nestorian stone’’ after a common, if inaccurate, name for the easternmost branch of the Church (now known as the Assyrian Church of the East), provided seventeenth-century scholars with a genuine, concrete clue to the real immensity of the ancient classical world and the Christian cultures that had descended from it. Indeed, between archaeological exploration and travelers' tales, the physical realities of the classical world seemed to become ever more tangible in the seventeenth century; the past was proving as exciting a source for new discoveries as nature itself.

For many scholars, the discoveries of the seventeenth century, whether about the classical past, the peoples of the world, or the structure of the universe, served only to reinforce their religious faith (Athanasius Kircher’s books are filled with praises of God), but the same kinds of questioning that led to the Protestant Reformation also led some seventeenth-century thinkers into deep skepticism, a stance that had its own impeccable classical roots. As the contours of the ancient world became better known, so did its differences from the modern world, and these differences may have been most apparent in the field of natural philosophy. To be sure, an ancient philosopher, Aristarchus, had already proposed a sun-centered world system, and even the idea of an infinitely large universe could find support among ancient authors, but nothing in antiquity could quite anticipate the discoveries of the telescope and the microscope. The very success of the humanist movement's concentration on the testing and scrutiny of ancient texts had led scholars and thinkers to a more general emphasis on empirical investigation, of texts, of traditions, of cultures, of the phenomena of nature, and the sense of perpetual movement that characterized the Baroque view of the world could make human institutions seem temporary, culture-bound, rooted in provisional rather than absolute truths. Beset by this sense of general unrest, the seventeenth century gave rise both to libertines and to Inquisitors, to Voltaire and to Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit cardinal who himself believed that space was a liquid rather than Aristotle's crystalline spheres, but who condemned the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who proclaimed the infinity of the universe, to burn at the stake for heresy in 1600. More than at any time in the history of the classical tradition, perhaps, the Baroque era put the very nature of that tradition to the test.