This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
Table of contents
Questions
- What was the ideological/religious origin of Baroque?
- What is the main characteristic of the Baroque?
- What was the ideological/religious origin of Neoclassicism?
- Name Baroque artists
- Name Neoclassical examples in architecture.
Question for students at the end of class:
What are your impressions (ethical, aesthetic, or ideological, etc.) of the recent periods studied in class: Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassicism?
Reform and Counter-Reformation 1545-1650
The Baroque, or how to win back a soul
In 1517, a German monk nailed his objections to a church door, and Europe never again had a single God, or at least a single administrator of God. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli broke the unity of Western Christianity and, with it, Rome’s monopoly on salvation. Protestants called images idolatry. In Zurich and the Netherlands, churches were stripped bare. Faith withdrew into the Word: the Bible in the people’s own language, the sermon, the hymn sung together. Whoever could read no longer needed an intermediary. That was the real heresy.
Rome answered the way power always answers when it loses an argument: by changing the stage. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) reaffirmed doctrine, disciplined the clergy and defended sacred images as tools of teaching and devotion. It asked of art what is asked of good propaganda: that it be clear, faithful and moving. The Jesuits, founded in 1540, carried the program into schools, missions and churches like the Gesù in Rome. Where the Protestant preached, the Catholic would dazzle.
So the Baroque was born, the dominant style in Europe and its colonies from about 1600 to 1750. Caravaggio’s light tears through the shadows. Bernini’s colonnade at St. Peter’s embraces the crowd like an open arm. Ceilings dissolve into painted skies, and saints swoon in ecstasy or bleed in martyrdom. Architecture, sculpture and painting merge into a single overwhelming experience. Its aim was never only to please the eye. It was meant to move the viewer, and to move the faithful back toward Rome.
Rome tried to defeat austerity with splendor and doctrine with the senses. The Counter-Reformation (c. 1545–1650) understood something the powerful never forget: people are rarely won over by reason alone. They are won over by what they feel, especially when that feeling has been designed beforehand. The Baroque was the most beautiful art of persuasion the West ever produced.
The Elect and the Ledger
In 1525, Martin Luther answered the leading Catholic humanist of the Northern Renaissance, Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536), with The Bondage of the Will. Fallen man, he argued, cannot choose the good by himself; salvation is an undeserved gift that comes by faith alone, sola fide. Moralist John Calvin took the logic to its cold conclusion: double predestination. Before the creation of the world, God had already chosen who would be saved and who would be damned, and nothing a person did could change the sentence. It was not exactly fatalism, since God had decided and not blind fate, but in practice it looked very much like it. Rome, by contrast, held at the Council of Trent that human beings keep their free will and that, moved by grace, they cooperate in their own salvation through faith and works. Confession, penance and charity still had a price in heaven.
That was the quiet revolution: faith was separated from moral bookkeeping. For the Protestant, good works no longer bought salvation; at most, they were its fruit, the visible sign of a decision already made in eternity. Morality stopped being a transaction with God and became a matter of discipline and conduct in this world. The doubt that no one could answer remained: am I one of the elect? With no priest to absolve them and no works to secure their fate, believers lived with an anxiety that, like every unbearable anxiety, sought somewhere to go.
It found that place in work. In 1905 Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the Calvinist turned his trade into a calling (Beruf), a duty assigned by God. He worked tirelessly, spent little, avoided luxury, and reinvested his profits. Weber called this «worldly asceticism»: the monk left the monastery and entered the counting house. Prosperity did not save anyone, but it could be read as a sign that one was saved. Calvin, moreover, accepted moderate interest on loans, which medieval Church teaching had condemned as usury. Salvation was not for sale, but success became its unofficial certificate.
Weber’s thesis is still debated. There were bankers in Catholic Florence and Genoa long before Geneva, and capitalism also owes much to empires, plunder and the slave trade. Still, the idea is powerful: a theology that denied people the freedom to save themselves produced the most tireless people in history. When faith became a private matter and morality a matter of productivity, wealth no longer had to justify itself. It only had to keep growing. In time God stepped out of the ledger, but the ledger stayed open, and capitalism inherited the asceticism and the anxiety without the heaven.
The idea that God chooses in advance who will be saved goes back to Paul (Romans 8–9) and was systematized by Augustine in the 5th century. It persisted through the Middle Ages: Gottschalk taught double predestination, and Aquinas affirmed predestination. However, it was John Calvin who gave double predestination its most rigorous and central form: God decreed from eternity who would be saved and who damned, and nothing a person does can change it. Calvin himself called the decree “dreadful,” warned believers not to pry into it, and told them to seek assurance in Christ, not in themselves and not in their prosperity. But the doctrine produced an unbearable question, “Am I one of the elect?”, and in the late 16th and 17th centuries his followers answered it practically. Theodore Beza and the English Puritan William Perkins taught that election shows itself in a sanctified life: diligence, sobriety and faithfulness in one’s worldly calling. Pastors like Richard Baxter went further and made profitable work a duty of custodianship. Puritan preachers never formally taught that wealth proves election, and many warned against greed.
Max Weber argued in 1904-1905, in a thesis still debated, that in practice, disciplined success came to function as a visible sign of being chosen, and that combining tireless work with a ban on luxury led believers to reinvest. That “worldly asceticism” had an “elective affinity” with the spirit of modern capitalism, though Weber never claimed it was its sole cause.
Calvin left his followers a terrible certainty: God had already chosen, from eternity, who would be saved and who damned, and nothing could change his mind. He warned them not to look for signs. They looked anyway. The Puritans found them in diligent work, and Weber found in them the spirit of capitalism: work like a slave, spend like a monk, reinvest like a banker. Wealth did not buy heaven, but it began to look like a receipt.
Four centuries later, the «prosperity gospel» kept the receipt and threw away the monk. Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar and Jesse Duplantis asked their faithful for private jets worth tens of millions of dollars. Edir Macedo, a billionaire by Forbes’ count, built himself a Temple of Solomon in São Paulo. Valdemiro Santiago sold «blessed beans» against COVID. The Puritan worked so that God would see him. Today’s pastor preaches so that the poor will pay for the jet. It is the oldest trick of every religion turned business: the indulgence Luther fought, now sold by Luther’s heirs.
Baroque
Iconoclastic fury (Calvinism)
The Statues Did Not Scream
In August of 1566, in a small Flemish town called Steenvoorde, a crowd entered a monastery and began breaking saints. The saints did not resist. They never do. This is perhaps why they were chosen.
History would call it the Beeldenstorm, the Iconoclastic Fury, as if the anger belonged to the storm and not to the people. It is an old habit of those who write history to turn hunger into weather. The winter of 1565 had been cruel, bread had become a luxury, and Calvinist preachers spoke in open fields because the churches belonged to someone else. When a man cannot reach the king, he reaches for the king’s god. When he cannot break the empire, he breaks the plaster.
The Calvinists said the images were idols, and they were right in a way they did not fully understand. Every age has its idols, and every age is certain that idolatry is something other people practice. The crowds who smashed the Virgin in Antwerp’s cathedral believed they were freeing God from wood and paint. They did not notice that they were also freeing a few merchants and nobles from Spain, who would later write the new catechism of property and commerce with the same devotion.
Philip II, from far away, understood the matter perfectly. For an empire, a broken statue is not a theological dispute. It is a broken order. So he sent the Duke of Alba, and Alba sent the Council of Troubles, which the people, with that precision that only the persecuted possess, renamed the Council of Blood. Thousands were executed for attacking objects. The statues were restored. The people were not.
That is how the Dutch Revolt began, and eighty years later a new republic was born, Protestant, prosperous, and soon an empire of its own, with its own ships, its own colonies, and its own sacred images, now printed on stock certificates of the East India Company.
The fury passed. The idols changed address.
The Wedding Guests
«One never does evil so fully and so cheerfully as when one does it out of conscience.» Blaise Pascal (1670).
In August of 1572, Paris prepared a wedding. A Protestant prince would marry a Catholic princess, and peace, like so many peaceful things, would be sealed with a contract between powerful families. The Huguenot nobility (French followers of John Calvin) came to the capital dressed for celebration. They did not know they had been invited twice: once to the wedding, and once to their own funeral.
A few days later, someone shot Admiral Coligny and missed. Power does not forgive its own failures, so it corrected the error. In the early hours of August 24, the feast of Saint Bartholomew, the church bells rang, not to call the faithful to prayer but to call them to work. Coligny was killed in his bed and thrown from a window. The rest of the city understood the signal. Neighbors who had sold bread to each other for years discovered, overnight, that the man across the street was a heretic.
The king and his mother had wanted to cut off a few heads. But fear, once given permission, does not obey orders. It has its own appetite. The killing spread from the palace to the streets, from Paris to Lyon, Rouen, Toulouse, Bordeaux. The Seine, which had carried wine and grain, now carried bodies. Historians still argue about the number, which is the polite way of saying that no one bothered to count the poor. More than 5.000 people died. Twice that much, according to modern estimations.
The bridegroom, Henry of Navarre, survived by converting to Catholicism. It was neither the first nor the last time a man saved his life by changing his god, and years later, already king, he would summarize the lesson with admirable cynicism: Paris was worth a Mass.
In Rome, the Pope ordered a Te Deum and struck a medal to celebrate the victory. Every massacre needs its medal, its hymn, its official story. The murderers always believe they are defending civilization from barbarians. That is precisely what makes them so dangerous, and so ordinary.
Four centuries later we remember the date with horror and assure ourselves that we have learned. Perhaps. But each generation keeps its own list of heretics, and every list begins with a wedding, a feast, a celebration of unity.
The Reformation of the Stake
Luther, or the Freedom of the Princes
Martin Luther freed Christians from the Pope and then handed them over to the princes. It was a reasonable transfer of property. When the German peasants read in his words that all souls were equal before God, they made the unforgivable mistake of believing that this also applied on earth. In 1525 they rose up. Luther, who had defied an emperor, did not hesitate to side with the lords. He wrote that the rebels should be stabbed, struck down and killed like rabid dogs. The princes obeyed with a diligence rarely seen in matters of charity. Some hundred thousand peasants died, and the Reformation was saved, which is to say, the order was saved.
Years later, old and bitter, he turned to the Jews. Burn their synagogues, he wrote, destroy their houses, take away their books, put them to work with axes and spades. Four centuries later, other Germans would read those pages with great interest. Ideas are like seeds: no one knows in what soil they will finally bloom, but everyone knows who planted them.
Calvin, or the City Without Sin
Geneva wanted to be a city without sin, which is the first step toward becoming a city without mercy. Under John Calvin, the Consistory watched over souls with the vigilance that other cities reserve for borders. Dancing was punished, cards were punished, laughter in church was punished. In 1545, during the plague, the authorities discovered that disease, like heresy, always has human culprits. More than twenty people were tortured until they confessed to spreading it, and then executed. Torture is very efficient at producing the truth that power needs.
In 1553, fleeing religious persecution, a Spanish physician named Michael Servetus passed through Geneva. He had studied the circulation of blood from the Arab medicine, but his real crime was doubting the Trinity. Calvin, who knew him through letters, helped send him to the stake. He asked, as a kindness, that he be beheaded instead of burned. The kindness was refused. Servetus burned slowly, with green wood, on a hill outside the city. Shortly after, a man named Sebastian Castellio wrote that killing a man is not defending a doctrine, it is killing a man. Few listened to him. Heretics are always more interesting when they are dead.
The Others, or the Democracy of the Stake
The Reformation promised to multiply the paths to God, and it did. It also multiplied the bonfires. In Zurich, Zwingli’s city, the Anabaptist Felix Manz was drowned in the river in 1527. The authorities found the joke irresistible: those who insisted on baptizing adults would receive a third baptism. Humor has always been one of the privileges of the executioner.
Melanchthon, the gentle scholar, applauded the burning of Servetus. Theodore Beza wrote a treatise to prove that magistrates had the duty to kill heretics. In Scotland, John Knox blessed the murder of a cardinal. In England, Henry VIII, who reformed the Church to reform his marriages, beheaded Catholics for loving the Pope and burned Protestants for loving God too much. In Münster, the radical prophets built their New Jerusalem, and the bishops destroyed it, leaving the bodies of its leaders in iron cages hanging from a church tower, where the cages still hang today.
Nothing of this was a Protestant invention. Rome had perfected the art long before, with its Inquisition and its autos-da-fé. The reformers simply proved that one does not need a Pope to have an Inquisition. It is enough to be certain. Every power that believes it owns the truth eventually concludes that those who doubt it are not adversaries but impurities. And impurities, as every good believer knows, must be burned.
Chiaroscuro, decorated.
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (Bernini)
Rembrandt **, **
Vivaldi **
Façade of San Carlos (Francesco Borromini, Rome, 1645)
Gian Lorenzo Bernini: St. Peter’s Square colonnade.
Palace of Versailles (1660-) King Luis XIV.
Catherine Palace ( St. Petersburg, 1720)
Kyiv St. Andrew’s Church / Bulbous Domes
Age of Enlightenment
Neoclassicism
Rediscovery of Herculaneum (1735) and Pompeii in 1748. **,
Descartes, etc.
Reaction against the baroque.
Archeology, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (History of Ancient Art, 1764)
Grand Tour,
Autocratic governments in Europe. Later rising power in the US
Painting: Neoclassicism ** / Romanticism **
Arc de Trionphe, Paris. **, **,
Frances Blondel
Pantheon, Paris. Napoleon.
Rue de Rivoli
Revolution of 1848
US Capitol
Brandenburg Gate
Reaction of Romanticism (neo-Gothic) against neoclassicism.
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