Introduction

The Portuguese word ‘‘barrocco’’ originally applied to misshapen pearls. To the eyes of eighteenth-century neoclassicists, the same kinds of deformity seemed to mar every aspect of the seventeenth century, from its religious extremism to its opulent art, elaborate rhetoric, and fledgling science, and thus an adjective describing a jewel came to describe a whole era. Baroque art, especially, carries an additional close association with Catholicism: in southern Europe, but also in Latin America and Asian outposts like Goa, Macao, and Beijing, where Jesuit missionaries created dense, genuinely global networks of communication from the late sixteenth century onward - and discovered, in their travels, that the classical tradition of Greece and Rome had reached Asia already in antiquity. The same age whose dogmatism condemned Galileo Galilei to silence and house arrest (in 1633) was also, therefore, an age of unprecedented openness to foreign cultures.

Both Galileo and the Jesuit missionaries opened European eyes to a world of infinitely greater complexity than that described by ancient authors. There were continents beyond Europe, Asia, and Africa, and by the sixteenth century philosophers and mathematicians had called into question the very structure of the universe as Aristotle and Ptolemy had described it: the fifteenth-century cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) and the sixteenth-century heretic Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) both argued that the universe was infinite, composed of an infinite number of ‘‘worlds’’ - that is, planetary systems. Western Christianity had split definitively into Catholic and Protestant, on the level of congregations, cities, and states. Former neighbors turned against one another with a vicious enthusiasm that may have been the most unsettling aspect of an unsettling age. It is no accident that Baroque art and music are so concerned with movement, with testing boundaries, with investigating limits of every kind, and it was no accident that in the same seventeenth century Newton and Leibniz, in two different ways and in two different

Places, would begin to explore the mathematics of motion and limits to arrive at the calculus (1684-7).

In this age dominated by political, religious, and cosmological uncertainty, the classical tradition provided Europeans (and their overseas correspondents) with a common language, Latin, and an overriding sense of cultural continuity. But then the classical tradition itself, from Periclean Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria to imperial Rome, originated in cosmopolitan cities, always incorporating elements from a variety of ages and civilizations into a shared civic culture. Furthermore, the qualities that enabled the works of ancient authors to survive so many previous centuries still held for the seventeenth. The religious wars of Baroque Europe might have claimed different pretexts than the Peloponnesian War, but human behavior hewed recognizably to the same patterns traced by Thucydides. Homer, Vergil, Tacitus, and Marcus Aurelius still wrote convincingly about life, no matter the details of their own religion or cosmology and the profoundly different beliefs of their readers. For yet another century, Vitruvius continued to dispense his advice about architecture and education, and for yet another century he continued to make sense.

At the same time, the seventeenth-century exploration ofthe classical tradition took its own distinctive directions, especially when investigating the tradition’s concrete reality: by seeking out the sites of ancient cities, by collecting ancient artifacts, by finding clues to the ancient world preserved in contemporary customs. In an age when every aspect of Christian doctrine was coming under question, the first centuries of Christian history, indivisible from the history of the Roman Empire, provided a sure foundation on which to base the Church, especially the Church of Rome.