The Idea of Decadence in Early Modern History, or The Apples of Freia
Identifieur interne : 000C69 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 000C68; suivant : 000C70The Idea of Decadence in Early Modern History, or The Apples of Freia
Auteurs : H. G. KoenigsbergerSource :
- European history quarterly [ 0265-6914 ] ; 1992-04.
English descriptors
- Teeft :
- Abbe dubos, Centre, Court patronage, Creative activity, Croce, Cultural decadence, Cultural decline, Cultural development, Cultural history, Cultural life, Decadence, Different causes, Divine providence, Dubos, Dutch republic, Ecclesiastical architecture, Eighteenth century, Florentine republic, Foreign powers, French influence, German historians, German sculpture, Golden ages, Human creativity, Industrial revolution, Italian humanists, Judgement, Koenigsberger, Many historians, Modern historians, Modern history, Natural sciences, Nineteenth century, Older generation, Political decline, Same time, Seventeenth centuries, Seventeenth century, Sixteenth century, Spain, Spanish painting, Translatio economici, Typical example, Word decadence.
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DOI: 10.1177/026569149202200201
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ISTEX:47ABE341D24A72C7EEA2F568BDB21F06E6B7F852Le document en format XML
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<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Koenigsberger</surname><given-names>H.G.</given-names></name><aff>King's College London, University of London</aff></contrib></contrib-group>
<pub-date pub-type="ppub"><month>4</month><year>1992</year></pub-date><volume>22</volume><issue>2</issue><fpage>163</fpage><lpage>185</lpage><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>sagemeta-type</meta-name><meta-value>Journal Article</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>search-text</meta-name><meta-value>163 The Idea of Decadence in Early Modern History, or The Apples of Freia SAGE Publications, Inc.1992DOI: 10.1177/026569149202200201 H.G.Koenigsberger King's College London, University of London On Sunday, 21 March 1741, the Reverend William Dodwell preached a sermon before the University of Oxford. Among other edifying matter, he pronounced this view of latter-day depravity: It is but too visible, that since men have learnt to wear off the Apprehension of Eternal Punishment, the Progress of Impiety and Immorality among us has been very considerable.... Unusual crimes have appeared: Uncommon heights of wickedness have been attained ...' I Dodwell's was a late version of a common sentiment: the present is a sad decline from a former golden age. Adam's fall and his expulsion from Paradise had, so to speak, built this sentiment into the very core of the Christian tradition of Europe. The pious lament for the sinfulness of one's own age and the fear of God's justified anger over this sinfulness are like a basso ostinato underneath the variations of religious sensibility through the history of Christendom. Nor did classical learning contradict this pessimism: . tempera, o mores!', as Cicero had exclaimed. Everything is always getting worse. We find this belief in all . aspects of social and cultural life. It could be applied to people, as in Orlando's fulsome thanks to Adam for giving him his life's savings: O good old man, how well in thee appears The constant service of the antique world, When service sweat for duty, not for need! Thou art not for the fashion of these times, Where none will sweat but for promotion ...~ Or it could be sharply ironical of a public situation, as when the jurist and historian ttienne Pasquier wrote to his son, in 1589, 'Nous ne sommes plus logez au royaume, nous sommes logez à 164 1'empire, parce que toutes choses vont en empirant.'3 For Machiavelli, it was the disappearance of republican and civic virtues. This disappearance made the rule of a prince necessary - and we know the methods which Machiavelli thought his prince would have to employ. For Luther and the other religious reformers, it was the corruption of the Church which had caused the decline of contemporary life. Many Catholics agreed with this view; but, of course, they drew different conclusions from it. For the humanists of the Renaissance, at least since Petrarch, the idea of decadence was a central part of their self-definition. Greece and Rome had fallen, and with this fall the highest civilization ever attained by man had declined into barbarism. Everyone agreed on this point; but they disagreed over two others. One was the cause of the fall of Rome. Did the declinatio begin as early as the end of the Roman Republic, i.e. with the decadence of the republican virtues? That was Leonardo Bruni's view. Or was it all the fault of the barbarians, i.e. attacks on Rome from the outside, as Bruni's younger contemporary, Flavio Biondo, thought? Either way, there then followed a thousand years of barbarism. In the nineteenth century some people turned the moral which the humanists had drawn from the decadence of Rome on its head. They spoke of the historically justified victory of the young, unspoilt, vigorous Germans over the ageing civilization and decadent morals of the Romans. In my school in Berlin, around 1930, we were taught that the Romans at their feasts tickled their throats with peacock feathers in order to throw up so that they could then go on eating. How could such degenerates have resisted the heroic Alaric? It was the victory of Tacitus's Germania, if you will, over Petronius's Satyricon - three hundred years later. As far as I can remember, I did not believe any of this, even at the age of twelve. The second point at issue among the humanists was this: now that one was finally managing to get over the barbarism of the previous thousand years, would it be possible to produce anything as good as that which the ancients had achieved, or possibly even better? This was not an altogether new issue. In the twelfth century, for instance, Bernard of Chartres had produced the famous formulation that ... we are dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more and further than they, yet not by virtue of the keenness of our eyesight, nor 165 the tallness of our stature, but because we are raised and borne aloft upon that giant mass. ' As we know, the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns continued well into the seventeenth century and even beyond. As late as 1697 Swift made fun of it in his Battle of the Books. Closely connected with this debate were two further ideas from antiquity and from biblical-Christian teaching: the ageing and decline of the gods or of the world, and the rise and decline of the world empires. A typical example of the doctrine of the succession of empires can be found in Johannes Sleidanus, the historian of the Lutheran Reformation. His empires were the Baby- lonian, the Persian, the Greek and the Roman. Not everyone agreed on this particular list; but that did not alter the pattern. The translatio imperii was thought to have a parallel in the succession of cultural centres, a translatio studii. In both cases the direction of the movement was from east to west, like the sun; but there were differences of opinion as to whether the high point had now arrived in Italy or in France.' But whether Italy or France, many thought they were again in a condition of decline, perhaps even near the ultimate end. Millenarianism remained a common belief, even among the educated, until the end of the seventeenth century. Peter Burke has identified six principal types of belief in decline in early modern Europe:' i) Cosmic decline. As a typical example he cites Godfrey Good- man, The Fall of Man (1616): '... the very elements themselves are much decayed in their wonted perfection ... we have lately discovered spots and shadows on the moon.' ii) Moral decay and decline of manners, through luxury and sloth. iii) The decline or fall of the Church, through affluence, luxury and pride. iv) Political decline, again through perceived affluence and lengthy peace. (I would, however, comment on this point that the early modern attitude towards war and peace was highly contradictory. The horrors of war and the benefits of peace were an equally popular topos, especially as contrasted in visual allegories.) v) Cultural decadence - a topic I have discussed with relation to the Italian humanists. 166 vi) Economic decline, a topic discussed with particular passion in seventeenth-century Spain. Burke says further that three causes were usually assigned to his six types of decline: the divine. the natural (such as old age or an astrological force) and the human (corruption of morals or external attacks 6 Burke's classifications are sensible, but they are modern and I doubt whether anyone would have taken them very seriously in the early modern period. The universe, both divine and human, was indeed regarded as stratified and hierarchical; but it was always thought of as unified in the sense that divine providence acted on all links in the great chain of being. Perhaps two distinctions would have been recognized: the first was inevitable decline, outside human will and action; and this could have been either divine or natural, for these two concepts were not usually regarded as antithetical. Secondly, there was moral decline, which depended on man's will and which could therefore be avoided or possibly even retrieved. For, together with the widespread belief in contemporary decline, there was also the opposite belief in the possibility of renewal, renovatio, or a renaissance. Many of the Italian humanists believed in such a renewal and the belief found particularly influential expression in Vasari's Lives of the Artists. Vasari's model of the rise of Italian art from Cimabue to Michelan- gelo proved to be so convincing that it was accepted in modern history of art almost until the present. Ironically, even the modern concept of the decadence of Italy after the Renaissance was largely based on this model. The concept of renovatio was, however, not identical with the idea of progress, which became important only from the turn of the seventeenth century. Renovatio meant exactly what the word signified, a renewal or return to a former golden age, no matter whether this was seen in moral, religious, political or cultural terms. For Newton, it was the prisca scientia, the now-lost, misunderstood or falsified pre-Aristotelian science. For Luther, it was the pure beliefs of the early Church. For John Pym and for Oliver Cromwell, the golden age was nearer, the time of Elizabeth. Characteristically, all these men felt called upon to recover their particular golden age. The feeling was shared quite generally by the moralists of the period. With the satisfaction derived from the recognition of the human failings of others they could hold up the 167 mirror of decadence to the eyes of their contemporaries. Thus the concept of decadence became protean and omnipresent. The idea of decadence is therefore a legitimate subject in the study of the mentality of early modern Europe. But are we, as historians, justified in using this idea as an explanation of cultural phenomena in early modern Europe? It has certainly been tried by many, among others Oswald Spengler, Johan Huizinga, Bene- detto Croce and Arnold Toynbee. Of course, most professional historians don't like being mentioned in the same breath as Spengler and Toynbee, not to mention the Nazis and the Stalinists and their ideas of decadence. So I won't say much about all these. But certain things stand out. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the idea of decadence largely lost its religious characteristics and compensated for this loss by adopting supposedly scientific foundations. These foundations could be economic, biological or, as with Spengler, 'morphological'. Whatever it was, however, it did nothing to cramp the user's style as a moralist. To show how this has worked out in practice I shall discuss five cases in the cultural history of early modern Europe: the end of the Renaissance in Italy; the end of the Renaissance in Germany; the decline of Spain in the seventeenth century; the end of the Elizabethan-Jacobean age in England; and the decline of Holland in the eighteenth century. All five countries had experienced an unusual flowering of cultural life. What has to be explained is the end, the non- continuation, of extraordinary creative activity. But first I have to clear up a semantic difficulty. All words which describe the problem, decadence, decline, fall, weakening, etc., contain both a value judgement and a moral judgement. I cannot do without value judgements in cultural history; but moral judgements in cultural history are not only tasteless, they do nothing to clarify our problem. I therefore propose for my purposes to define all these words, except the word decadence itself, as morally neutral. The first attempt to analyse systematically the conditions of the efflorescence of literature and painting was, as far as I know, that of the abbe Dubos in the eighteenth century.' Dubos believed that nature had distributed talent among men so that they should be dependent on each other, and the same he held to be true for different nations. He thought, however, that good poetry and 10168 painting had appeared only in the temperate zones, i.e. not in Scandinavia, nor south of the 25th degree of latitude or thereabouts.' He did not think highly of the art of Mexico or Peru, nor of that of Africa and Asia. In this he showed less discernment than DUrer about Mexican art, two hundred years earlier, and his judgement about Asia must have seemed old-fashioned when he wrote, in the second decade of the eighteenth century. Highly gifted children, Dubos wrote, tended to look for teachers. Le g6nie est donc une plante, qui, pour ainsi dire, pousse d*elle-m6me: mais la qualit6, comme la quantite de ses fruits, dependent beaucoup de la culture qu'elle reqolt.' The most fruitful ages are those in which genius is supported by the prince and by his fellow citizens and when he can find excellent teachers, and all this especially in times of peace. "' Dubos's four 'happiest ages' are the same which Voltaire chose twenty years later:" classical Greece, the Rome of Caesar and Augustus, Medi- cean Italy, and France in the age of Louis XIV. It follows logically from Dubos's model that great creative ages either will not occur at all or will come to an end when the favourable conditions he has enumerated do not exist or do not exist any longer. Dubos cites the case of France during the Wars of Religion. It is not necessary to accept Dubos's specific judgements in recognizing nevertheless that here we have a very different approach to the problem of cultural development from that of the religious and cosmological explanations current before. In the remainder of this paper I want to try to throw light on the problem of decadence with an approach which the abbe Dubos was, to my knowledge, the first to indicate. When did the golden age of the Italian Renaissance end? Guicciar- dini thought it was with the first French invasion of 1494. For Machiavelli, the decline had already started earlier, with the corruption of the ideal of citizenship. But, for all his pessimism, Machiavelli did not believe that this ideal was completely lost during his own lifetime. For many of his contemporaries the crisis came around 1530, with the sack of Rome by the Imperial army, the fall of the Florentine republic and the confirmation of Spanish 11169 supremacy in Italy. For an older generation of modern historians, from Burckhardt to Croce, Berenson and my own teacher, Previtd Orton, the political decline of Italy was paralleled by cultural decadence. They had little sympathy for the artistic and literary styles which followed the 'High Renaissance'. These were 'decadent forms', wrote Burckhardt. 'The art of the Renaissance strove for perfection; the Baroque wants to grip, to excite, to intoxicate with the power of emotion ... a barbarized language ... '12 Croce was even more dismissive. The Baroque - which he did not distinguish from Mannerism any more than Burckhardt had done, for this concept was a later invention - the Baroque was 'variations on ugliness'.'3 And again, The Counter-Reformation inspired no great book, that is, one which reveals man more profoundly to man. Nor did any poet do this, not even Torquato Tasso.... Neither did any artist, because the art of the seventeenth century, when it did not serve practical ends ... appeared frankly sensual. Austere men, heroic missionaries, open and generous minds certainly abounded still in the Roman Church, but this is not the point; these very worthy men lacked moral inventiveness, the ability to create new and progressive forms of ethical life." In a later article, Croce explained this decadence - and this is the word he used - in terms of the absence of liberty and, before the eighteenth century, of any striving for liberty." For Croce the Counter-Reformation was the negation of liberty. Not all of this is altogether wrong. The great Florentine tradition of political and historical writing, for instance, came to an end after the post-mortems on the fall of the Florentine republic in 1530. With or without irony, the Florentines were quite clear about this. According to Filippo Nerli, ... it did not seem necessary any longer to report on Florentine politics, since the city now lived under the dominion of such a prince (Cosimo de' Medici) our citizens have no cause to quarrel about matters of state and government." In contrast with Florence, Venice remained a free republic. Many artists and writers took refuge there after the sack of Rome. It is at least possible, as I have tried to argue on another occasion, that there is here a connection with the continued artistic vitality of Venice, a vitality which lasted at least until the end of the sixteenth century. 11 Croce says nothing about Venice. His idea of decadence 12170 remains subjective and partial. Not many historians now share his views on the Baroque. Croce either did not see or did not understand the highly original religious aspects of the works of Caravaggio, Bernini and Borromini, not even to mention the Venetian-trained El Greco. In passing, it might be mentioned that Spengler turned Croce's views upside-down and regarded the classical Renaissance style as degenerate and lacking in expressive- ness, an aberration between the great periods of the Gothic and the Baroque styles. In literature Croce's judgement was as uncertain as in art. Were Boiardo or Ariosto really morally more inventive than Tasso? We are talking here, after all, not about personalities but about poetry. But more important than Croce's rather subjective taste is what he has left out, and that is the natural sciences and music. He says nothing about Galileo and his followers. At this time of alleged decadence, the first academies of science were founded in Italy, the Accademia de Lincei in Rome, in 1603, and the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, in 1657. The Royal Society and the Acad6mie Royale des Sciences consciously followed the Italian models, two generations after the Lincei. Other European countries did not have academies of science until the eighteenth century. The Inquisition certainly played a baleful role in the history of Italian science; but it did not prevent Italy from remaining one of the great centres of European science in the seventeenth century. Croce and many historians of his generation were blind to this fact, either because, as literati, they did not understand science, or because they thought of it as an inferior activity, 'mere civilization' as against the 'higher culture'." A similar blindness, or rather deafness, appears in the case of music. Italian church music shows precisely that religious inventiveness Croce was looking for. Italian madrigals and instrumental music were, and still are, sung and played all over Europe. The music of Italian opera, from Monteverdi onwards, gave the Italian theatre the psychological and aesthetic depth which the English, Spanish and French theatre achieved through the poetry of its great dramatists. If one wants to speak of decline in Italian civilization after the Renaissance, then this is possible, if at all, only in the neutral sense in which I have defined this word, and only for some fields of creative activity. There were always quite specific social and political reasons for such a decline. The ducal families of the Este 13171 and the Gonzaga died out and with them died the patronage of the courts of Ferrara and Mantua. Just as important, perhaps, was the growing provincialism of other centres, such as Florence, in comparison with Rome. This was important especially for painting and architecture because in the patronage of these arts Rome had enormous advantages, with its papal court, the great aristocratic cardinals and their families, and the wealthy religious orders which drew their income from all over Catholic Europe. The wealthier members of the general Roman public were also becoming an increasingly important market for an international colony of painters. Of the other Italian cities, only Naples and Venice could still compete with Rome to some extent. In the case of opera they even had certain advantages, for in the city of the popes no type of theatre could entirely escape a reputation of unseemly frivolity. 19 To these achievements of the Italian Baroque in 'high culture' must be added popular art and especially the commedia dell' arte. While the quality of performances of the commedia varied greatly it appealed to all classes of the population, and its vitality was so great that its plots and characters spread over the whole of Europe and influenced art forms right up to the present, from Punch and Judy puppet theatres to Viennese operettas and the films of Bergman and Fellini. From the middle of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century Italy was certainly different from what it had been during the Renaissance. Milan, Naples and Sicily were under Spanish dominion. The other Italian states, with only the partial exception of Venice, had lost their political freedom of movement. Politically this was undoubtedly a decline, and in this sense the pessimists of the early sixteenth century were proved correct. But cultural life was a different matter. Here there was tragedy, but also triumph. There were geographical shifts and shifts in the fields of the highest creativity. But I cannot find any decadence. For Germany there has not usually been much talk of decadence. There has been much lamentation over the Thirty Years War; but one could put at least part of the blame for that catastrophe on foreigners. In contrast with Italy, only some relatively small border territories were lost to foreign powers and soon Austria compensated for them, so to speak, by reconquering Hungary 14172 from the Turks. The rise of Brandenburg-Prussia, precisely during this period, has been seen as another sort of compensation for the impotence of Germany in international politics, and everywhere the process of Staatsbildung, state formation, could be evaluated positively. But if German historians have not usually talked about decadence, they have talked about the decline of the visual arts and of literature, and of the ossification of Lutheran theology and, rather less, of religious thought in general. A decline in painting after about 1540 is certainly very evident. German historians have pointed to the depressive effects of Protestant doctrine on religious art and to the disastrous economic effects of the Thirty Years War. One of the best of the older generation of German historians of art, Georg Dehio, also argued that DJrer's epigones misunderstood his assimilation of the Italian Renaissance style and thus caused a break in the German artistic tradition which was retrieved only in the Baroque. 20 I am sceptical about this stylistic argument. Why were these followers of Durer epigones and not original artists? Why could they not continue in the way DJrer and others had shown so magisterially? For other German artists of the early sixteenth century, such as Riemenschneider and Grünewald, very successfully assimilated the Italian style in their own work, and quite differently from the way DJrer did.21 It seems to me more likely that art patronage was drying up. The great south German cities, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strasburg, became Protestant and also suffered economic and political decline. 22 Unlike Italy, Germany had no rich courts in big cities and therefore lacked the fruitful combination of court patronage with a market for art. As in Italy, the smaller courts in Germany found it difficult to compete with the big ones, in this case especially with the Prague of Rudolph II. Prague itself had no tradition as a cultural centre before Rudolph. When the emperor was overthrown by his brothers, the artists left the city as quickly as they had come.23 Maximilian I of Bavaria started to build up Munich as an artistic centre. But he employed mainly Italian architects and artists and his efforts were all too soon overwhelmed by the Thirty Years War - a catastrophe for which Maximilian himself must bear a great part of the responsibility. It looks as if by 1600, and even more definitely by 1650, the former artistic tradition of Germany had been broken. Artists' 15173 studios had reverted to being craftsmen's workshops. Gifted young painters went to the Netherlands or to Rome. 24 The development of music in Germany was very different. Luther had thought of music as the sister and equal of theology. Choral and organ music were central to the Lutheran church services. In hundreds of manses and in the more modest houses of the Kantors music-making became part of a bourgeois life- style. At the same time the princely courts patronized composers and musicians. It was cheaper than building palaces - an activity for which the means became available again only towards the end of the seventeenth century. The Habsburgs had always been and remained great lovers of music. The Wittelsbachs emulated them and, among others, brought the great Orlandus Lassus to Munich. The Catholic Church also maintained its old tradition as a patron of music, and many German composers showed an admirable doctrinal tolerance in composing church music for both Protestant and Catholic services, long before the most famous fruit of such tolerance, Bach's B minor Mass. The German Kleinstaaterei of the period, the multiplicity of small principalities, so often deplored by German historians, proved to be an excellent environment for the development of music and, from the turn of the seventeenth century, of architecture. The very obscurity of the constitution and political functioning of the Holy Roman Empire served as a stimulus to German jurists to develop the study of public law and political philosophy. Characteristically, the most famous of them, Samuel von Pufen- dorf, was the son of a Lutheran pastor. Even the formerly despised Baroque literature of Germany has been reappraised with much greater sympathy since at least the 1920s and this reappraisal has, more recently, come to include the vast corpus of Latin writings by German authors of this period. Professor Nottker Hammerstein makes this comparison with Italy: The absence of the piazza, the lack of the urban palazzo, the non-existent villa were compensated, so to speak, by the classroom and the professorial chair. A 'res publica litterata', an erudite society which spanned the estates, made up of professors, learned councillors and education-hungry aristocrats - this was the long-term fruit of ... (persistent) endeavours.2' It is not a question of which cultural development of the period, the Italian or the German, we may now find more congenial. In both countries it depended on the specific conditions of life to 16174 which creative minds had to adapt within the context of their earlier traditions if they wanted to function effectively. This was not decadence, either in Italy or in Germany. For Spain the problem of decadence looks quite different. Spain was not a politically divided country in which foreign powers fought for supremacy and annexed provinces or whole kingdoms - at least not before 1640. On the contrary. Spain was the first European world power, with an empire on which the sun never set. Spanish literature, especially the theatre, had reached unprecedented heights and this was equally true for religious and devotional literature, for jurisprudence and for the political and economic sciences. Spanish painting is equal to the finest produced anywhere during the Baroque." In the 1630s, in the middle of a desperate war on many fronts, Philip IV built himself the Buen Retiro, the biggest and most magnificent palace in Europe before Versailles .21 And yet, even before the turn of the sixteenth century, many people in Spain were anxious about decline and sometimes used the word decadence. This decline, apart from the normal Christian concern about salvation, a concern especially sharp in a country that was multiracial and, though never admittedly, multi-religious - this feeling of decline, or of the danger of decline, appeared in the first place to be economic. During the reign of Philip II there had been three state bankruptcies or, as we would now say, rescheduling of government debts." Government finances did not improve in the seventeenth century. Taxes increased and the silver coinage was re-minted into vellon, i.e. mainly copper. Evidently, Spain was unable to make economic use of the apparently immense wealth of the New World. It seemed, on the contrary, as if all the silver of Potosi had done nothing but tempt men into idleness. 'These kingdoms seem to have wanted to become a republic of enchanted men, living outside the natural order of things', wrote Gongales de Cellorigo in 1600.3° The moralizing tone remained characteristic of the ar-bitristas, the Spanish economists of the seventeenth century. Modern historians have picked it up and have made it the core of an elaborate historical model, 'the decline of Spain'. They have usually added, according to taste or religious-political preconception, a critique of the expulsion of the Moriscos, the restrictive activities of the Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish mania for 17175 limpieza de sangre, purity of blood from Jewish, Moorish or heretical contamination. None of these judgements is wrong in itself; but one has to remember that, in the seventeenth century, the Spaniards regarded their religious fervour as precisely not decadent. After 1640 there was unquestionably an economic and a military collapse. Catalonia and Portugal rose in rebellion. There were popular revolts in Naples and Sicily. Spain was finally forced to recognize the independence of the Netherlands and, somewhat later, of Portugal with its colonial empire. The government of the mentally feeble Charles II became a football of the court parties, and eventually the great Spanish empire itself became a football of the power politics of the cabinets of the European powers. Underlining this evident decline was the fact that Veldzquez and Murillo, Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Calder6n had no successors of indisputably equal stature. If there was a case of decline in early modern Europe, then surely it was Spain, and apparently without the saving grace of the sort of shift of creative activity into other fields such as we have observed in Italy and Germany. But was this decadence, with all the moral overtones of the word? That is surely not nearly so evident. The economic ethos of the hidalgos was not so very different from that of the hoberaux in France, the Ritter in Germany or even the gentry in England. All of them wanted to live as gentlemen, i.e. as rentiers. More important for the economic development of all these countries were, rather, the opportunities for and the traditions of investment, the growth or decline of populations, and the tax and monetary policies of their respective governments. Together with poor agricultural land and inadequate internal communications because of the absence of navigable rivers, it was the government's financial policies, the strains and burdens caused by its persistent militarist and imperialist policies, which made it so difficult for the Spanish economy to keep up with the economies of the other great western European countries. Decline, or at least a relative decline - yes. But with so much machismo, how can one talk about decadence? It is possible that the economic and political decline of Spain, however mundane the reasons for this phenomenon, had a depressive effect on Spanish cultural life. There was certainly less money available for it, especially at the court of Charles II. Philip V's court tended to look to Italy and France for cultural models 18176 and seems to have shut itself off from the native Spanish traditions.;' The unhappy results can be seen in the general tastelessness of Philip V's palace of La Granja. But much about the civilization of Spain at the end of the seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth is obscure. Spanish painting between the great peaks of VelAzquez and Goya is little known, even in Spain. Was it really decadent or did it simply not please a later taste? Such was certainly the case with the flamboyant Rococo style of architecture of the brothers Churriguera. It has frequently been despised; but looked at without preconceptions, it is, I think, an enchanting Mediterranean counterpart to the much more famous and highly regarded south German Baroque of the same period.12 In England it is only in the last few years that the end of the great age of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, art and music has been recognized as a problem to be studied systematically. Why did Marlowe and Shakespeare, or at least Webster and Jonson, not have successors of similar calibre? Perhaps even more problematical, why not Dowland, Morley and Byrd? With the miniaturists the problem is relatively less difficult. There were really only two outstanding ones, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. Their art, lacking religious or philosophical overtones, was designed exclusively for a narrow court society. After the turn of the sixteenth century the very success of this elegant genre stimulated imitation. But since there was no great native English tradition in painting, a rapid expansion of production could produce only relatively crude and shallow results. In the theatre the problem was very different. Here was a much older and richer tradition, with an audience spanning most social classes. Did this tradition really come to an end? Certainly there are few great names of playwrights or plays in the later 1620s and in the 1630s. Nevertheless, the plays of this period have recently been reappraised and judged more positively. There does not appear to have been a clear-cut antithesis between a courtly and an anti-courtly theatre, as we used to think. William Prynne's famous insult, 'women actors, notorious whores', whether or not it was directed at the queen, as the court alleged, did not in any case herald a general puritan attack on the theatre .13 Still, there were many who shared Prynne's views. 19177 The real problem, however, for the cultural historian is that tastes and patronage appear to have changed. Both the court and the independent aristocracy were spending more money on masques than on straight plays." In these entertainments the visual and the musical sides were at least as important as the verbal and dramatic. Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson had a famous quarrel about this. While we know something of the scenery and costumes of some of the masques from prints and engravings - and very splendid some of them must have been - the music of the masques is almost completely lost. It is therefore much more difficult to judge the English masques as complete works of art, in the way their audiences would have done, than the contemporary Italian operas. In 1642 the theatres were closed and in 1649 and 1656 the orders for closure were repeated. There is some controversy among historians about why this happened.35 But there is little doubt that the theatrical tradition of Shakespeare's time was effectively broken. When the theatres opened again, in 1660, it was in a very different social and political atmosphere and, naturally, the Restoration theatre reflected this atmosphere. Music was still obligatory for the stage; but apart from that of Purcell we know very little about it. Restoration comedy is still very much alive; but when will an enterprising producer put John Dryden's tragedies on the stage so that we can really judge the theatre of the later seventeenth century? With English music the problem is even more complex. Its greatest period was the climax of a long musical tradition. Court patronage was especially important. That of Henry VIII and of Elizabeth I is well known. Happily, there was also much ecclesiastical and lay patronage in the country. It has recently even been suggested that the cathedrals, in contrast with the monasteries and chantries, 'owed their survival in part to that love of music which the Tudor monarchy shared with so many of its leading subjects'.36 In the country houses of the nobility and the wealthy gentry there was a rich musical life: keyboard music on virginals, spinets and harpsichords, songs with lute accompaniment and, in brilliantly creative assimilation of the great Italian models, unaccompanied madrigal singing. If we are to believe Thomas Morley, every young gentleman and lady was brought up to be able to sight-read and sing madrigals - not at all an easy accomplishment. But was this, all the same, a narrower basis for a 20178 continued musical life than that of Italy and Germany? In England music was as open to attack by puritans as was the theatre. Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries certainly felt obliged to defend music very vigorously against such attacks." By the time of the civil war or even earlier, many country gentlemen appear to have given up their own music-making and had ceased to employ professional musicians among their servants. It is not clear whether this happened because of lack of money or time or inclination, or all of these.;R When the theatres were closed down, theatre music disappeared, too. Again, a great tradition had been broken. The decline or, rather, the end of the great age of English theatre and music must be explained in terms of a combination of a severe political-economic crisis of their sources of patronage with an at least partial victory of a hostile religious mentality. Other creative cultural activities, while not immune from this crisis, were not nearly as seriously affected and sometimes they were even stimulated. The outstanding examples are in the rich political-philosophical debates of the mid-seventeenth century and in the great advances in natural science. At the same time poetry, from Donne to Milton, Marvell and Dryden, remained very much alive. There was no cultural decline, let alone decadence, in England after the great Elizabethan-Jacobean age. But the shifts and changes in creative activity during the seventeenth century still need a great deal more systematic investigation than they have received so far. My last example is Holland in the late seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries. The problem of the decadence of Holland, or whether there really was such a thing, has recently come to be debated quite vigorously and in 1987 there was an international . conference in America with precisely this theme .3' The case of Holland is a kind of mirror-image of that of Spain. For both countries the rise to great-power status and the conquest of a huge colonial empire coincided with a 'golden age' in their cultural lives, the siglo de oro and the gouden eeuw. Both in content and in style the Spanish and the Dutch gold were rather different; but in both countries there was an unusual clustering of the highest quality of creative activity. In Holland the complaints about decline began later than in 21179 Spain, but in the eighteenth century they became a veritable flood of lamentations. Holland had lost its economic pre-eminence. It carried little weight in the counsels of the European cabinets. Its famous painters and poets had no comparable successors. The regent class, the patricians who controlled the town councils and sat in the provincial and general estates, had withdrawn from active commerce and had become socially and politically isolated. They and indeed the whole Dutch bourgeoisie had adopted French taste, manners and, sometimes, even language. Thus, it was claimed, the great Netherlands tradition of painting and literature had been ruined. Even in Dutch religious life, some people said, the good old native Calvinism had been watered down by foreign ideas of enlightenment, and so the moral fibre of the people had been weakened. With varying emphasis on these different causes, modern historians have, until quite recently, taken over this picture of decline. Huizinga is typical: 'The ideal of every burgher and of every gentleman was to live in comfortable peace and quiet.' This became dangerous for Dutch civilization 'especially since in the seventeenth century the Dutch patrician had progressively changed from being a merchant to being a rentier and a regent'. This 'economic-social shift' opened the door to 'French influence and finally what might be called the natural end of an epoch'." The most recent studies of Dutch economic history have given us a much more differentiated picture of the Dutch economy in the eighteenth century. It is true that Dutch shipping could not maintain its supremacy in European trade against English and French competition. Given the much greater economic resources of the two western powers, this is not really surprising. But Dutch shipping had not disappeared from Europe and the Dutch East and West India trade continued to function very effectively. Dutch agriculture remained as efficient as it had been, which was more efficient than that of most other countries. Most Dutchmen managed to maintain or even raise their standard of living. The shift of Dutch commercial capital into international banking might well be regarded as a rational response to changed economic con- ditions.~' It did, however, mean that it became more difficult to obtain capital for investment in industry and commerce. Inevitably, there was also unemployment, and perhaps this was also one of the reasons why the industrial revolution began in England and not in Holland. 22180 But if there was only relative and not absolute economic decline in Holland in the eighteenth century, the cultural decline must have different causes. Now, the problem with Dutch painting in the eighteenth century is much the same as with Spanish painting of the same period: it was not what the public, used to the style of the seventeenth century, expected. It is therefore not very well known. Recently, historians of art have also been saying: not understood, undervalued, and not nearly as strongly influenced by French models as Huizinga and others have assumed. 12 By contrast, in philosophy and in the natural sciences Holland had always been open to outside influences. A theory of decline in these fields because of French influence is therefore in any case untenable. On the contrary, it is now being plausibly argued that the great Huguenot intellectuals and the English emigrants, such as Locke, had too little influence on the intellectual life of their host country. They themselves showed little interest in it - in contrast to the South-Netherlands emigrants of a century earlier. At the same time, their own great debates about forms of government, the rights of citizens and the nature of public justice were not of immediate interest to their hosts; for the Dutch were convinced that they had already solved most of these problems.~3 The educated Dutch elite continued to show great interest in the natural sciences and was willing to spend money on them, but mainly on medicine, astronomy and navigation. There was less patronage for other applied sciences, especially engineering. This may well be another reason why Holland failed to have an industrial revolution. The picture of Holland in the eighteenth century is therefore one of a small country which, without notably regressing, was being economically, militarily and politically overtaken by its great neighbours. While its cultural achievements may not have reached the supreme peaks of its 'golden age', present-day scholars are no longer convinced that there was decadence. What conclusions can we now draw from our five examples? Most obviously that the contemporary feeling of decadence, and also the use of this concept by modern historians, tends to depend primarily on the political and military achievements of the country concerned. The victor, the conqueror, does not speak of decadence, and far too many modern historians have allowed them- 23181 selves to be dazzled by his fame. Only when the run of victories ceases, when one becomes the victim of other conquerors, do people begin to analyse and moralize. This habit tends to colour cultural history, even if in cultural history opinions are usually more varied than in political history. In the last analysis all theories of decadence are metaphors. At best they describe the history of a civilization; they do not explain it. For, as modern historians, we can be no longer content with explanations by divine providence or by a biological analogy of society with a single organism. Just as the gods of Valhalla in Wagner's Rheingold, every human society, as long as it biologically renews itself and is not overwhelmed by some natural or human catastrophe, always eats the apples of the goddess Freia, the food which provides creative energy. What I think we have to investigate is the clustering of great creative activity, the 'golden ages' of civilizations, in different countries and at different times. It follows - and this is the point of this paper - that we must also investigate the end of 'golden ages'. This is a much more difficult problem than the early modern moralists thought or than many modern historians have cared to admit. In spite of a considerable literature on decadence and in spite of several grandiose historical models, we have really not yet got very far with this complex of problems. This paper is little more than a beginning; but I think that at any rate two general conclusions have emerged. First, decadence is often simply a matter of taste - and it is not permissible to moralize our own taste. This is the trap into which Croce and Huizinga have fallen, in spite of all their literary and artistic sensitivity. Second, 'golden ages' in creative activity never comprise all fields of human creativity. Freia gave her apples to the individual gods with their limited, individual powers - not to the Almighty. There can be a decline in this or that cultural field. Such a decline, the end of an unusual clustering of great talent, must be explained from its specific historical circumstances. These circumstances can be quite different in different cases and they cannot be reduced to some simple biological or moral factor. Quite often, changing circumstances also lead to a shift in the fields of creative activity. In the seventeenth century, for instance, the new field of natural philosophy, i.e. science, proved to be more attractive to some of the most gifted young men than the field of theology, which was coming to be seen as responsible for the dreadful civil wars of the period The phenomenon of cultural 24182 shift is certainty characteristic of the continued creative vitality of early modern European civilization as a whole. On this point the abbe Dubos was surely right. I began this paper with quotations from an English divine and from Shakespeare. It is fitting that I should end it with a quotation from Goethe and one which, I think, every historian might do well to have constantly in front of him on his desk. Fausr to his nmamrertsis. Wagner: Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln. , What you now call the spirit of the age Is really what's now all the rage, A glass which mirrors your historians' minds. Notes A somewhat different, German version of this paper was read in December 1988 for the 600-year celebrations of the University of Cologne. It has been published in Spätzeit. Studien zu den Problemen eines historischen Epochenbegriffs edited by J. Kunisch (Berlin, Duncker & Humblot. 1990). 1. W. Dodwell, The Eternity of future Punishment asserted and vindicated (Oxford 1743), 85; cited in D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (London 1964), 3. 2. Shakespeare, As You Like It, II. 3, 56-60. 3. Etienne Pasquier to Nicholas Pasquier, Lettres historiques, livre XIII. No. 9: also cited in J. Delumeau. Le péché et la peur (Paris 1983). 137. Schiller used this pun in the famous Kapuzinerpredigt, the sermon of Abraham à Santa Clara, in Wallenstein's Lager: 'das römische Reich - dass Gott erbarm!/Sollte jetzt heissen römisch Arm'. 4. Recently Fernand Braudel has added the doctrine of a succession of world economic centres, a sort of translatio economici. Just as in its prototypes, the direction of the translatio economici is east - west, from Venice to Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, New York and now California and Japan. F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th - 18th Century, Vol. III: The Perspective of the World, translated by S. Reynolds (London 1984). 5. P. Burke, 'Tradition and Experience: The Idea of Decline from Bruni to Gibbon'. Daedalus, Summer 1976 (Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 3), 138-42. 6. Ibid., 142-3. 7. J. B. Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 2 volumes (Paris 1770; first edition 1719). 25183 8. Dubos probably knew Bodin's discussion of the effects of climate on cultural activity: Les Six Livres de la Republique ... (Lyon 1579), Livre 5, cap. I, 467: Et si on prend garde aux histoires de tous les peuples, on trouvera que tout ainsi que les grandes armees & puissances sont venues de Septentrion: aussi les sciences occultes, la Philosophie, la Mathematique, & autres sciences contempla tives sont venues du peuple Meridional: & les sciences politiques, les loix, la iurisprudence, la grace de bien dire, & de discoutir, ont pris leurs commence ment & origine aux regionnes metoyennes ... But Dubos, unlike Bodin, relates the general quality, but not the type, of creative activity to climate. My thanks to the editor, and through him to the anonymous referee of this paper, for drawing my attention to Bodin's discussion of this matter. 9. Ibid., II: 45. 10. Ibid., II: 136-8. Dubos quotes Horace: 'Et post punica bella quietus quaer ere coepit/Quid Sophocles et Thespis et Aeschylus utile ferrent.' 11. Voltaire, Siecle de Louis XIV (Paris 1919), 1-2. 12. J. Burckhardt, Der Cicerone, pt. 2 (Leipzig 1910), 344-6: 'ausgeartete Formen ... Die Kunst der Renaissance strebte nach dem Vollkommenen, das Barock will mit der Gewalt des Affekts packen, aufregen, berauschen ... ein verwilderter Dialekt.' 13. Quoted in V. Titone, La politica dell Età Barocca (Caltanissetta 1950), 37. 14. B. Croce, Storia dell' Età Barocca in Italia (Bari 1929), 16-17. 15. Idem, 'La crisi itallana del Cinquecento e il legame del Rinascimento col Risorgimento', La critica: Rivista di letteratura, storia e filosofia, 37 (1939), 401-11. 16. Quoted in S. Berner, 'Florentine Political Thought in the late Cinquecento', Il pensiero politico, III (1970), 184. 17. H. G. Koenigsberger, 'Decadence or Shift? Changes in the Civilization of Italy and Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', in idem, Estates and Revolutions (Ithaca NY and London 1971), 287-9. 18. In the article cited in note 15 Croce mentions the natural sciences but thinks that they represented only a relatively unimportant creative activity. He does not mention music at all. H. G. Koenigsberger, 'Republics and Courts in Italian and European Culture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', in idem, Politicians and Virtuosi (London 1986), 237-61. 19. See Hanns Gross, Rome under the Ancien Regime 1691-1789 (Cambridge 1990), ch. 11. 20. G. Dehio, 'Die Krise der deutschen Kunst im XVI Jahrhundert', in Kunsthi storische Aufsätze (Munich and Berlin 1914). 21. M. Baxandall, South German Sculpture 1480-1530 (HMSO 1974), 19-21, gives very similar reasons for the decline of German sculpture after 1530. In The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London 1980), especially 135-42, he argues that there was not much Italian influence, at any rate on German sculpture, before 1530. He does not discuss painting. I do not find his arguments entirely convincing; but, in any case, this difference of opinion on the degree and nature of Italian influence on German Renaissance art is not important for my own argument, viz. that there were other and more important reasons for the decline of German art. Perhaps Spengler picked up Dehio's argument, characteristically misunderstood 26184 it and then generalized it for his own arbitrary disparagement of the Renaissance style. Cf. above, p. 170. 22. Heinrich Lutz has pointed out that Dürer turned away from the Reformation in his last years precisely because he began to feel that it was hostile to art: 'Albrecht Dürer in der Geschichte der Reformation', in Politik, Kultur und Religion im Werdeprozess der frühen Neuzeit (Klagenfurt 1982), 75-6. 23. R. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his World (Oxford 1973); H. R. Trevor-Roper, Princes and Artists (London 1976), ch. 3. 24. J. von Sandrart, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Malerei-Künste von 1675, edited by A. R. Pelzer (Munich 1925), 49, simply translated his Preface in defence of his book on artists from Karel van Mander's Het Schilderboek of 1604. In my article 'Republics and Courts' (see note 18) I failed to spot this piece of plagiarism. 25. See, for instance, A. Buck and T. Klamiczay, Das Ende der Renaissance: Europäische Kultur um 1600 (Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissancefor schung, Bd. 6. Wiesbaden 1987). 26. N. Hammerstein, 'Universitätsgeschichte im Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation am Ende der Renaissance', ibid., 111. 27. It took, however, a long time before Spanish painting was fully appreciated outside Spain. Abbé Dubos, for instance, believed that there had never been a great Spanish painter: Dubos, Reflexions, II: 162. 28. Jonathan Brown and J. H. Elliott, A Palace for a King (New Haven and London 1980). 29. M. Steele, 'The Management of Spain's Debts under Philip II 1556-1598', Proceedings of the Ninth International Economic History Congress, Section IX (Berne 1986). 30. Martin Gonçalez de Cellorigo, Memorial de la política necessaria y útil restauración a la república de España (Valladolid 1600). 31. Y. Bottineau, L'Art de cour dans I'Espagne de Philippe V 1700-1746 (Bor deaux 1960). 32. Together with the classical-baroque churches of Wren, Hawksmoor and Gibbs, these were the last original styles in ecclesiastical architecture in Europe as well as North and South America, styles which, to use Croce's terminology, showed moral-religious inventiveness. After them came the flood of pseudo- gothic, pseudo-baroque and pseudo-byzantine fancy-dress churches of the nine teenth century. One is tempted to characterize this phenomenon as an all- European decadence in ecclesiastical architecture. But, if only in view of the sheer quantity of such building and hence the considerable resources European society was willing to devote to it, one must characterize it rather as evidence of the radically changed religious sensibilities of the nineteenth century. 33. M. Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642 (Cambridge 1984), 96-7. 34. See K. Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge 1987). 35. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 135-40, quotes these orders with their justifi cations as being issued mainly for the maintenance of public order. He concludes that they therefore had little to do with politics or puritanism. But Butler has himself pointed to the political criticisms contained in the plays presented at court before 1642. Was it therefore not much more likely that the parliamentary regime, at times of great political tensions and even civil war, wanted to eliminate these potential centres of adverse political propaganda? Governments often prefer to 27 185give uncontroversial reasons for their controversial actions. I agree with Butler that puritanism was neither monolithic nor completely identical with the cause of parliament. But a strongly puritan opinion against the theatre did exist at the time, just as it existed against music. 36. Felicity Heal, review of S. E Lehmberg, The Reformation of Cathedrals (Princeton 1989), in The Times Literary Supplement, 8-14 September 1989. 37. Koenigsberger, Politicians and Virtuosi, 192-3; P. Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England (Cambridge 1978), 52-4. 38. D. C. Price, Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance (Cambridge 1981), 205-8 and passim. 39. Margaret C. Jacob and W. W. Mijnhardt, eds, The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution, (Ithaca NY 1992). I would like to thank Professor Jacob for sending me copies of several of the contributions to this forthcoming volume. I also wish to thank Prof. Maarten Ultee for a copy of a seminar talk he gave on the same topic in London on 3 March 1988. 40. J. Huizinga, Holländische Kultur des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Jena 1932), 58-9 and passim. 41. E. H. Kossman, 'Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution', in Jacob and Mijnhardt, The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century. 42. F Grijzenhout, 'An Art Historian's Perspective', ibid. 43. W. W. Mijnhardt, 'Humanism, Nationalism and Decline', ibid. 44. Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York 1988), esp. 188-203. 45. Koenigsberger, 'Science and Religion in Early Modern Europe', Politicians and Virtuosi, cit. The possibility of such shifts in creative activity is, among other things, grounded in the universalism which, in many different forms, dominated the intellectual world of early modern Europe, from Nicolas of Cusa to Kant, Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt. Since all phenomena of the world were, in the final analysis, dependent on the unity of God, all fields of investigation and of human creativity were interrelated. A shift of man's energy from one field to another was therefore always possible and always legitimate. In practice such shifts often had psychological causes. See Dorothy Koenigsberger. Renaissance Man and Creative Thinking: A History of Concepts of Harmony 1400-1700 (Hassocks 1979), chs 6 and 7: and idem, 'Decadence, shift, cultural changes and the universality of Leonardo da Vinci', in Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob, eds, Politics and Culture in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge 1987), 285-303.</meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front><back><notes>
<p>1. W. Dodwell, <italic>The Eternity of future Punishment asserted and vindicated</italic> (Oxford 1743), 85; cited in D. P. Walker, <italic>The Decline of Hell</italic> (London 1964), 3.</p>
<p>2. Shakespeare, <italic>As You Like It,</italic> II. 3, 56-60.</p>
<p>3. Etienne Pasquier to Nicholas Pasquier, <italic>Lettres historiques,</italic> livre XIII. No. 9: also cited in J. Delumeau. <italic>Le péché et la peur</italic> (Paris 1983). 137. Schiller used this pun in the famous <italic>Kapuzinerpredigt,</italic> the sermon of Abraham à Santa Clara, in <italic>Wallenstein's Lager</italic>: 'das römische Reich - dass Gott erbarm!/Sollte jetzt heissen römisch Arm'.</p>
<p>4. Recently Fernand Braudel has added the doctrine of a succession of world economic centres, a sort of <italic>translatio economici.</italic> Just as in its prototypes, the direction of the <italic>translatio economici</italic> is east - west, from Venice to Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, New York and now California and Japan. F. Braudel, <italic> Civilization and Capitalism 15th - 18th Century,</italic> Vol. III: <italic>The Perspective of the</italic> World, translated by S. Reynolds (London 1984).</p>
<p>5. P. Burke, 'Tradition and Experience: The Idea of Decline from Bruni to Gibbon'. <italic>Daedalus,</italic> Summer 1976 (<italic>Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,</italic> Vol. 105, No. 3), 138-42.</p>
<p>6. Ibid., 142-3.</p>
<p>7. J. B. Dubos, <italic>Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture,</italic> 2 volumes (Paris 1770; first edition 1719).</p>
<p>8. Dubos probably knew Bodin's discussion of the effects of climate on cultural activity: <italic>Les Six Livres de la Republique</italic> ... (Lyon 1579), Livre 5, cap. I, 467: Et si on prend garde aux histoires de tous les peuples, on trouvera que tout ainsi que les grandes armees & puissances sont venues de Septentrion: aussi les sciences occultes, la Philosophie, la Mathematique, & autres sciences contempla tives sont venues du peuple Meridional: & les sciences politiques, les loix, la iurisprudence, la grace de bien dire, & de discoutir, ont pris leurs commence ment & origine aux regionnes metoyennes ...</p>
<p>But Dubos, unlike Bodin, relates the general quality, but not the type, of creative activity to climate.</p>
<p>My thanks to the editor, and through him to the anonymous referee of this paper, for drawing my attention to Bodin's discussion of this matter.</p>
<p>9. Ibid., II: 45.</p>
<p>10. Ibid., II: 136-8. Dubos quotes Horace: 'Et post punica bella quietus quaer ere coepit/Quid Sophocles et Thespis et Aeschylus utile ferrent.'</p>
<p>11. Voltaire, <italic>Siecle de Louis XIV</italic> (Paris 1919), 1-2.</p>
<p>12. J. Burckhardt, <italic> Der Cicerone,</italic> pt. 2 (Leipzig 1910), 344-6: 'ausgeartete Formen ... Die Kunst der Renaissance strebte nach dem Vollkommenen, das Barock will mit der Gewalt des Affekts packen, aufregen, berauschen ... ein verwilderter Dialekt.'</p>
<p>13. Quoted in V. Titone, <italic> La politica dell Età Barocca</italic> (Caltanissetta 1950), 37.</p>
<p>14. B. Croce, <italic>Storia dell' Età Barocca in Italia</italic> (Bari 1929), 16-17.</p>
<p>15. Idem, 'La crisi itallana del Cinquecento e il legame del Rinascimento col Risorgimento', <italic>La critica: Rivista di letteratura, storia e filosofia,</italic> 37 (1939), 401-11.</p>
<p>16. Quoted in S. Berner, 'Florentine Political Thought in the late Cinquecento', <italic>Il pensiero politico,</italic> III (1970), 184.</p>
<p>17. H. G. Koenigsberger, 'Decadence or Shift? Changes in the Civilization of Italy and Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', in idem, <italic>Estates and Revolutions</italic> (Ithaca NY and London 1971), 287-9.</p>
<p>18. In the article cited in note 15 Croce mentions the natural sciences but thinks that they represented only a relatively unimportant creative activity. He does not mention music at all. H. G. Koenigsberger, 'Republics and Courts in Italian and European Culture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', in idem, <italic>Politicians and Virtuosi</italic> (London 1986), 237-61.</p>
<p>19. See Hanns Gross, <italic> Rome under the Ancien Regime 1691-1789</italic> (Cambridge 1990), ch. 11.</p>
<p>20. G. Dehio, 'Die Krise der deutschen Kunst im XVI Jahrhundert', in <italic>Kunsthi storische Aufsätze</italic> (Munich and Berlin 1914).</p>
<p>21. M. Baxandall, <italic>South German Sculpture</italic> 1480-1530 (HMSO 1974), 19-21, gives very similar reasons for the decline of German sculpture after 1530. In The <italic>Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany</italic> (New Haven and London 1980), especially 135-42, he argues that there was not much Italian influence, at any rate on German sculpture, before 1530. He does not discuss painting. I do not find his arguments entirely convincing; but, in any case, this difference of opinion on the degree and nature of Italian influence on German Renaissance art is not important for my own argument, viz. that there were other and more important reasons for the decline of German art.</p>
<p>Perhaps Spengler picked up Dehio's argument, characteristically misunderstood it and then generalized it for his own arbitrary disparagement of the Renaissance style. Cf. above, p. 170.</p>
<p>22. Heinrich Lutz has pointed out that Dürer turned away from the Reformation in his last years precisely because he began to feel that it was hostile to art: 'Albrecht Dürer in der Geschichte der Reformation', in <italic>Politik, Kultur und Religion im Werdeprozess der frühen Neuzeit</italic> (Klagenfurt 1982), 75-6.</p>
<p>23. R. W. Evans, <italic>Rudolf II and his World</italic> (Oxford 1973); H. R. Trevor-Roper, <italic>Princes and Artists</italic> (London 1976), ch. 3.</p>
<p>24. J. von Sandrart, <italic> Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Malerei-Künste von</italic> 1675, edited by A. R. Pelzer (Munich 1925), 49, simply translated his Preface in defence of his book on artists from Karel van Mander's <italic>Het Schilderboek</italic> of 1604. In my article 'Republics and Courts' (see note 18) I failed to spot this piece of plagiarism.</p>
<p>25. See, for instance, A. Buck and T. Klamiczay, <italic>Das Ende der Renaissance: Europäische Kultur um 1600 (Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissancefor schung,</italic> Bd. 6. Wiesbaden 1987).</p>
<p>26. N. Hammerstein, 'Universitätsgeschichte im Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation am Ende der Renaissance', ibid., 111.</p>
<p>27. It took, however, a long time before Spanish painting was fully appreciated outside Spain. Abbé Dubos, for instance, believed that there had never been a great Spanish painter: Dubos, <italic>Reflexions,</italic> II: 162.</p>
<p>28. Jonathan Brown and J. H. Elliott, <italic>A Palace for a King</italic> (New Haven and London 1980).</p>
<p>29. M. Steele, 'The Management of Spain's Debts under Philip II 1556-1598', <italic>Proceedings of the Ninth International Economic History Congress,</italic> Section IX (Berne 1986).</p>
<p>30. Martin Gonçalez de Cellorigo, <italic>Memorial de la política necessaria y útil restauración a la república de España</italic> (Valladolid 1600).</p>
<p>31. Y. Bottineau, <italic>L'Art de cour dans I'Espagne de Philippe V 1700-1746</italic> (Bor deaux 1960).</p>
<p>32. Together with the classical-baroque churches of Wren, Hawksmoor and Gibbs, these were the last original styles in ecclesiastical architecture in Europe as well as North and South America, styles which, to use Croce's terminology, showed moral-religious inventiveness. After them came the flood of pseudo- gothic, pseudo-baroque and pseudo-byzantine fancy-dress churches of the nine teenth century. One is tempted to characterize this phenomenon as an all- European decadence in ecclesiastical architecture. But, if only in view of the sheer quantity of such building and hence the considerable resources European society was willing to devote to it, one must characterize it rather as evidence of the radically changed religious sensibilities of the nineteenth century.</p>
<p>33. M. Butler, <italic>Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642</italic> (Cambridge 1984), 96-7.</p>
<p>34. See K. Sharpe, <italic> Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I</italic> (Cambridge 1987).</p>
<p>35. Butler, <italic>Theatre and Crisis,</italic> 135-40, quotes these orders with their justifi cations as being issued mainly for the maintenance of public order. He concludes that they therefore had little to do with politics or puritanism. But Butler has himself pointed to the political criticisms contained in the plays presented at court before 1642. Was it therefore not much more likely that the parliamentary regime, at times of great political tensions and even civil war, wanted to eliminate these potential centres of adverse political propaganda? Governments often prefer to give uncontroversial reasons for their controversial actions. I agree with Butler that puritanism was neither monolithic nor completely identical with the cause of parliament. But a strongly puritan opinion against the theatre did exist at the time, just as it existed against music.</p>
<p>36. Felicity Heal, review of S. E Lehmberg, <italic>The Reformation of Cathedrals</italic> (Princeton 1989), in <italic>The Times Literary Supplement,</italic> 8-14 September 1989.</p>
<p>37. Koenigsberger, <italic>Politicians and Virtuosi,</italic> 192-3; P. Le Huray, <italic>Music and the Reformation in England</italic> (Cambridge 1978), 52-4.</p>
<p>38. D. C. Price, <italic>Patrons</italic> and <italic>Musicians</italic> of the English Renaissance (Cambridge 1981), 205-8 and passim.</p>
<p>39. Margaret C. Jacob and W. W. Mijnhardt, eds, <italic>The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution,</italic> (Ithaca NY 1992). I would like to thank Professor Jacob for sending me copies of several of the contributions to this forthcoming volume. I also wish to thank Prof. Maarten Ultee for a copy of a seminar talk he gave on the same topic in London on 3 March 1988.</p>
<p>40. J. Huizinga, <italic>Holländische Kultur des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts</italic> (Jena 1932), 58-9 and <italic>passim.</italic></p>
<p>41. E. H. Kossman, 'Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution', in Jacob and Mijnhardt, <italic>The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century.</italic></p>
<p>42. F Grijzenhout, 'An Art Historian's Perspective', ibid.</p>
<p>43. W. W. Mijnhardt, 'Humanism, Nationalism and Decline', ibid.</p>
<p>44. Margaret C. Jacob, <italic> The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution</italic> (New York 1988), esp. 188-203.</p>
<p>45. Koenigsberger, 'Science and Religion in Early Modern Europe', Politicians and <italic>Virtuosi,</italic> cit. The possibility of such shifts in creative activity is, among other things, grounded in the universalism which, in many different forms, dominated the intellectual world of early modern Europe, from Nicolas of Cusa to Kant, Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt. Since all phenomena of the world were, in the final analysis, dependent on the unity of God, all fields of investigation and of human creativity were interrelated. A shift of man's energy from one field to another was therefore always possible and always legitimate. In practice such shifts often had psychological causes. See Dorothy Koenigsberger. <italic> Renaissance Man and Creative Thinking: A History of Concepts of Harmony 1400-1700</italic> (Hassocks 1979), chs 6 and 7: and idem, 'Decadence, shift, cultural changes and the universality of Leonardo da Vinci', in Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob, eds, <italic>Politics and Culture</italic> in <italic>Early Modem Europe</italic> (Cambridge 1987), 285-303.</p>
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