All great diversions are dangerous for a christian life, but among all those the world has invented none is to be so feared as that given by theater: it creates a representation so natural and so subtle of human passions that it excites and engenders them in our heart.

--Pascal, Pensées, 1655-62

Of all the brilliant splendors and alluring vices of baroque France, why would the stern philosopher Pascal dub theater the most dangerous of all social or artistic seductions? The answer is simple: though the period is known for its wildly opulent court festivities, its mania for gambling, and the worldly "gallantry" (as it was then decorously called) of its salons, none of these diversions exercised so forceful a hold on the public as did theater. As Pascal's remark makes clear, the stage captivated audiences with what seemed a perfect reflection of life, an image of human emotions "so natural and so subtle" that it could equal, and even best, the real thing.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the theater had allied art and technology to create a medium that vanquished all competitors. Corneille had molded French verse into a perfect dramatic instrument, one that Molière and Racine would soon perfect in their own styles, leaving epic and lyrical poetry well behind in prestige and popular favor. Great advances in stage machinery and design were ushering in a whole new genre of special-effects plays that recreated mythological marvels, miracles and cosmological journeys before captivated audiences. The physical energy, bodily heat, and even sweat and spit of celebrated performers were palpably close to spectators, especially those lucky and wealthy enough to be seated on chairs placed on the stage next to the actors. And thanks largely to some imported talent from Italy, France would soon be experiencing the enchantment of intertwining music and verse as the new form of the opera spread north.

Moreover, as this transalpine influence suggests, there was nothing geographically exceptional about the triumph of theater in France, despite timeless French claims to cultural singularity. In fact, theater obsessed the cultural imagination of Western Europe from the second half of the sixteenth century, when the first permanent theater buildings since antiquity were constructed in Italy; through the Spanish Golden Age; the French classical age; and the English Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration periods--in fact through the mid-eighteenth century, when the rise of the novel left the playhouse in an increasingly secondary position in cultural importance.

	Dramatists of the baroque period
	Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) Spanish novelist and playwright best known for his novel, Don Quixote. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English playwright and poet whose major works include King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. Lope de Vega (1562-1635) Spanish poet, playwright and novelist who, along with Calderón, dominated the stage during Spain's Golden Age. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) English playwright and poet who collaborated with architect Inigo Jones on the production of masques for the Stuart court. Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81) One of the leading playwrights of Spain's Golden Age, known for his autos sacramentales, one-act religious plays. Pierre Corneille (1606-84) French dramatist and poet, one of the dominant figures in the evolution of seventeenth-century neoclassical drama. Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière (1622-73) French actor-manager and dramatist, one of the theatre's greatest comic artists. John Dryden (1631-1700) Playwright whose heroic dramas, comedies, and tragedies dominated the English stage during the Restoration period. Philippe Quinault (1635-88) French dramatist and librettist who collaborated with Lully on a number of large-scale operas. Jean-Baptiste Lully (1637-82) Italian musician and composer whose career was spent in France, where he dominated musical life for three decades. Jean Racine (1639-99) The leading tragedian of seventeenth-century France, his plays include Phèdre, Esther, and Athalie. Reproduced with permission from The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, edited by Martin Banham. Copyright (c) Cambridge University Press 1988, 1992, 1995. All Rights Reserved.

The period art historians call the baroque was the age of theater. And just as diverse national traditions contributed to this outpouring, so too did various dramatic and poetic genres compete, collide and couple in an explosion of forms. Theater was universal in its ambitions. It represented humanity in historical grandeur, rustic simplicity, urban realism; it depicted gods, saints, and peasants; past kings and present fools. This embarrassment of riches is most famously catalogued (and lampooned) in Hamlet when the verbose Polonius details the traveling troupe's repertoire: "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comic, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited."

These last arcane terms, "scene individable, or poem unlimited," it should be added, signal one last sign of theater's cultural dominance: its hold on the attention of intellectuals and theorists, who spent an enormous amount of energy crafting a learned terminology and a set of abstract principles for the stage. In this case, "scene individable, or poem unlimited" refer to a much debated, and often ignored, rule requiring one single unchanged setting for the entire play, a rule justified by the famous "unities" of place, time and action. These and other elaborate principles were culled, often with great interpolative imagination, from Aristotle's Poetics by late sixteenth-century Italian theoreticians; for the next two centuries they provided fodder for innumerable theoretical prefaces and treatises by playwrights such as Lope de Vega, Corneille, Molière, Jonson and Dryden, as well as for a host of professional theoreticians and critics.

All of this creative activity and theorizing transformed theater into an intellectual and imaginative model for understanding the world in all its aspects. The ancient formula theatrum mundi, the world is a stage, became the motto for the age. Acting and sets, scripts and plot construction were metaphors applicable to every domain of human action: the science of politics, the metaphysics of the universe, the morality of private life--and even the art of painting and sculpting. It is this last aspect that interests us here, and this seminar will explore the most important elements of the dialogue between theater and the visual arts: the relation between dramatic unity and the concentrated storytelling of the canvas, between the actor's art and the rhetoric of gesture in painting and sculpture, between stage design and pictorial construction, and between the role of the theater spectator and that of the artwork's beholder, to name just a few.

But before looking at the power of theater to shape both artistic creation and art criticism, let us consider this simple question: Why then? Why did theater exert such a powerful influence over its sister arts in this period stretching from the late Renaissance through the early Enlightenment?

The power of the Church, the allure of the palace, the rise of a new elite
One impetus for the rise of theater came from a most unlikely source: the Church. After the Council of Trent (1545-63), the Church launched its powerful propaganda campaign against the Reformation, using all the powers of persuasion at its disposal: opulent architecture and decor, eloquent sermon oratory, powerful painting and sculpture. Despite its continuing distrust of the immorality of theater (actors were, for example, excommunicated), the Church could not easily afford to disdain the persuasive powers of the stage.

For the same reasons Pascal denounced theater--its capacity to move the emotions of its spectators with a lifelike replica of human existence--the Jesuits embraced theater as a pedagogical tool. Through a humanistic marriage of the heroic, secular virtues of antiquity and Christian morality, they created images both appealing to a larger public in their human drama and edifying in their intended effect. Dramatic reenactment could, through the power of declamation, gesture, and set machinery, put into living motion the kind of exalted religious images prized in painting and sculpture.

The University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art

Biblical scenes were popular subjects for painters, as in Noël Hallé's Joseph Accused by Potiphar's Wife.

Nevertheless, this Counter-Reformation embrace of theater could not everywhere entirely surmount the antagonism between pious devotion and worldly entertainment so powerfully suggested by Pascal. In France, the Jesuit playwright Corneille among others dramatized saints' lives, but these works were highly controversial for their representation of the "mysteries" of Christian faith, felt by many better left to the pulpit alone. Stories from the Old Testament, however, allowed religious passions and edification to enter the stage without the problematic depiction of Christian material. Racine distilled this form of drama to its purest state with his adaptations of Esther and Athalie, condensing the biblical accounts to their barest and most potent theatrical elements.

No doubt even more important than the Church in promoting the rise of theater was the political power of princely courts. As feudalism and its attendant dispersion of power died away, new centralized courts sought to increase their sway over the public's imagination with propaganda campaigns that equaled that of the Counter-Reformation Church. And again, nothing advertised their magnificence so well as dramatic spectacles. Presented both outside and indoors, in splendid gardens or palatial halls, court festivities allied the theatrical elements of costumes, sets and stage machinery, and mythological stories with the traditions of jousting games, processions and court balls. The resulting productions not only stunned the original spectators, but were often further publicized through engravings and festival books that illustrated the proceedings.

The University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art

"Entry of his highness representing the sun," from Jacques Callot's Combat at the Barrier (detail).

A superb example of this kind of publicizing activity is to be found in a series of prints by Jacques Callot. These engravings were created as illustrations for The Combat at the Barrier (Le Combat à la barrière), an account, in prose and poetry, of the opulent festivities staged by the Duke of Lorraine in 1627 in celebration of the visit of the politically potent Duchess of Chevreuse (Dunbar: see endnotes for references to critical works). All the elements of baroque splendor were employed in this extravagant production: in one engraving alone we find floating fountains, gardens, grottoes and orchestras--all propelled as if by magic by men hidden under the carts--as well as human figures metamorphosed into fruit-bearing trees, and, in a triumphant pose, the fabulously costumed Duke himself as Apollo.

The procession of floats and players toured the grand hall of the palace while saluting the hundreds of spectators in the six tiers of seating. The spectacle was occasionally spiced with some theatrical special effects, such as a simulation of exploding heavens and descending planets. This was followed by the chivalric games, which provided a gratifying opportunity for the noble participants/actors to exchange their roles of mythological gods for those of the gallant heroes of Renaissance and baroque romance.

The University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art

JACQUES CALLOT French, 1592 - 1635 The Combat at the Barrier, 1627 Engraving and etching This image was part of a set made to record an extravagant spectacle held by the Duke of Lorraine at his court in Nancy. The performance opened with the entry of the participants on elaborate floats. This was followed by a jousting tournament, carefully staged to assure the duke's victory. Callot's prints, together with a description of the spectacle and a transcription of its dialogue, made up a festival book that documented the events. This book was widely collected by the courts of Europe, and had considerable influence on stage design.

It was of course at Versailles that absolute monarchy created its most spectacular and theatrical expression of power. The formal gardens designed by André Le Nôtre were not only a figurative stage for the court life acted out before the backdrop of the palace; they were also literally a site of the greatest theatrical productions of the period. The grand festivities organized under Louis XIV interlaced fireworks, floats, ballets, and re-enactments of chivalric games with original plays produced on stages harmoniously set in the gardens or courtyards of the palace.

The Newberry Library, Chicago

In addition to hosting the premiere of Tartuffe, the gardens of Versailles provided the stage for Molière's La Princesse d'Elide.

Indeed, the great masterpiece of French theater, Tartuffe, was first staged by Molière not on the Paris stage but instead in the luxurious gardens of Versailles, where, after a successful performance, it was immediately banned for the next five years on the charge of suggested impiety. Louis XIV found Tartuffe amusing enough for the enlightened and gallant court, but feared the play's denunciation of religious hypocrisy would be dangerous for the wider public that frequented Paris theaters. The Sun King understood how potent the theater was, and how great an attraction it had for aristocrats and bourgeois alike.

It is precisely the theater's new-found fascination for an elite, moneyed and powerful audience that constitutes the final and no doubt most important contributing factor in the triumph of baroque drama. The elaboration of a civilization of manners in Renaissance Italy, exemplified by guidebooks to courtly refinement and culture such as Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, spread across Europe as the former feudal and warrior class of the aristocracy was domesticated under centralized monarchies and modern states (Elias). Concurrently, the rising bourgeoisie, often freed from day-to-day business concerns, increasingly mingled with the aristocracy while imitating its manners and decorum. The birth of this new large leisured class created a world in which distinction was no longer political or economic, but instead performative: an accomplished person of quality played his or her role in the social comedy with winning grace and wit. Theater became a metaphor for social role-playing as well as a school where spectators learned to improve their own performance at Town or Court.

The growing power of the stage

The Art Institute of Chicago

Laurent de La Hyre's Panthea, Cyrus and Araspus provides a magnificent example of the creative exchange between painting and the stage.

The dialogue between painting and theater is as old as the first aesthetic treatises from antiquity. Aristotle compared on several occasions the mimetic properties of painting and theater, paralleling, for example, tragic playwrights with flattering portraitists and comic playwrights with more satirical painters. The exchange between the two arts was strengthened in the Renaissance, though it was still largely painting, sculpture and architecture that dictated their authority to the re-awakening art of drama: sixteenth-century Italian stage designers, for example, learned to apply to theater the rules of perspective derived from the visual arts. However, by the early seventeenth century, theater began to play a more powerful role in this creative exchange, with the delicate balance tipping increasingly in theater's favor.

After the mid-seventeenth century, and particularly in France, the growth of academies and the rigidity of neoclassical criticism began to reflexively apply the rules of theater directly to painting, placing the visual arts in submission to dramatic theory. The renowned French painter Nicolas Poussin, for example, was praised at a 1667 session of Louis XIV's Académie de peinture et sculpture for what was described as his finest achievement: painting like a theoretically sound playwright.