The realities of seventeenth-century politics led other European powers to challenge Rome’s claim to ownership of the classical tradition, and, by extension, of cultural supremacy. The most insistent challenge of the seventeenth century came from France, for Paris, unlike Rome, ranked as one of the largest cities in the world and the French monarchy nurtured ambitions on a comparable scale. A close relationship developed between the Florentine Pope Urban VIII Barberini (1622-44) and the French court, resulting in a series of lavish classical publications, sponsored by the papacy, adorned with title pages by the greatest engravers of the day, and issued by the French Royal Press, including works of Vergil, Horace, Theocritus - and the poetry of Urban himself. But France also emphasized its distinctive heritage, from the Gauls to Charlemagne, taking pride in the way that the French language had evolved from Latin, and the way in which French scholars and French universities had upheld the classical heritage. With the encouragement of King Louis XIII (reigned 1610-43), the powerful Cardinal Richelieu rebuilt the Sorbonne (1626-9) and founded the Academie de France (1635) to ensure that French intellectual life, and the French language, challenged Latin and Latin-based culture as the basis of international exchange. After the death of Pope Urban VIII in 1644, the young King Louis XIV (reigned 1643-1715) adopted the late pope’s Egyptian-inspired solar imagery to become the Sun King par excellence. For this same long-lived monarch, the physician and architect Claude Perrault (1613-88) produced an illustrated translation of Vitruvius in 1673, and an Ordonnance des cinq especes des colonnes selon la methode des anciens (Order of the five types of columns according to the method of the ancients) in1683, implicitly transforming the French king into a new Augustus and identifying France, not Rome, as the place where the classical tradition in architecture continued to grow and thrive with the greatest vigor. When Perrault defeated no less than Gian Lorenzo Bernini for a commission to design a new wing at the Louvre, the transfer of the classical mantle to France was seen as complete, at least in French eyes.
But France was not the only European country to claim its place in the classical tradition, or to use Baroque art and architecture to cement that claim. Belgians, Swedes, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Hungarians all scoured ancient Greek and Latin authors to find connections between their forbears and the cultures of Greece and Rome, and commissioned works of art to promote those connections. The haunting picture by Rembrandt (1606-69) of The Oath of Claudius Civilis (1661), now in the National Museum of Stockholm, provides a telling example: commissioned by the City Council of Amsterdam to adorn the City Hall, it shows a scene recounted by Tacitus: in ad 69, Claudius Julius Civilis, the one-eyed king of the ancient Batavians, swore with his comrades to overthrow Roman rule. The Batavians had inhabited the Low Countries in ancient Roman times; Rembrandt’s huge, dramatic painting not only celebrated local antiquity and local independence, but also made pointed reference to recent history: Spain had ruled all the Low Countries into the late sixteenth century, and Flanders well into the seventeenth. It was not hard to recognize Catholic Spain in imperial Rome, or Protestant Amsterdam in the Batavians. Unfortunately, the subject was not classical enough for Amsterdam’s regents (the Batavians look like a rough, unrefined crew): they ordered Rembrandt to remove the ‘‘pagan’’ work, and he slashed it to pieces - the canvas in Stockholm is a fragment.
In Spain itself, Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), court painter to Philip IV, more safely cast contemporary political figures (possibly including Pope Urban VIII) as classical gods in The Forge of Vulcan of 1630 (now in Madrid’s Museo del Prado). Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), a diplomat and scholar as well as a consummate painter, used classical gods to denounce the brutality of the battles between Catholics and Protestants in the Thirty Years War (1618-48). He painted Allegory on the Blessings of Peace (1629; National Gallery, London) on a diplomatic mission to King Charles I of England. As he attempted, successfully, to convince Charles to exchange ambassadors with Spain, he made an equally fervent plea in paint: Peace, a ripe Rubens nude, squirts milk from her breast into the mouth of baby Plutus, the embodiment of wealth (the pairing of Peace and the child Plutus, as Rubens well knew from the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, went back to a famous statue by the Athenian sculptor Cephistodotus, father of Praxiteles). Just in front of Peace, a satyr looks hungrily at the fruit tumbling from a cornucopia, while one of the leopards of Dionysus bats at a trailing grapevine like a huge, playful kitten. Just behind this sexy scene, a rather stolid-looking Mars, flanked by the fury Allecto, still tries to rush into battle, but he is blocked by a shield borne on the strong arm of Minerva, her blazing armor fully a match for his in brilliance. Peace, Rubens implies, brings abundance. Peace is the intelligent choice. In 1630, Charles I and Philip IVof Spain signed a treaty.
The peace that Rubens helped to foster would not last; his painted protest against resumption of hostilities, The Consequences of War (1637-8; Galleria Palatina, Pitti Palace, Florence), composed on a forceful diagonal sweep that moves from lower left to upper right, centers on a contest between Venus and Allecto, each pulling on an arm of a Mars run amok, bloodied sword at the ready. Beautiful as she is, Venus has lost the contest to the dark hag Allecto; Mars pulls away from his mistress as he and his demonic troops, egged on by the screaming Fury, trample women and children underfoot. Rubens’s agitated brushwork adds an electric charge to the sense of chaos and overwhelming ugliness. Just as in ancient times, when Aristophanes could cast contemporary politicians as gods, heroes, or Paphlagonian slaves, classical myths provided Baroque authors and artists with ways of telling stories, rendering opinions, and recommending action without explicitly naming names. The ancients’ freedom in showing the human body allowed Baroque painters and sculptors a similar freedom for their art; Velazquez’ voluptuous Venus with a Mirror (now in the National Gallery, London), Rubens’s plump, rosy Three Graces and Andromeda, along with Guido Reni’s (1575-1642) endless legions of gasping, snowy-breasted Lucretias and Cleopa-tras, were heroically nude rather than shamefully naked, as was Bernini’s big, smiling Allegory of Truth Revealed by Time (1645-52), who holds the blazing sun of enlightenment in her hand, burning the consciences of liars but not her own dimpled hand.
World History
