The purpose of playing . . . both at the first and now, was and is,
to hold as't were the mirror up to nature.

-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, lines 20-22

Hamlet's advice to the players offers a philosophy of the theater that was widespread throughout the baroque period, that of art mirroring nature. This philosophy was equally applied by playwrights and visual artists of the time--not surprising, since theater and painting had long been considered sister arts (Lee). But what is the "nature" the baroque artist and dramatist were to mirror? Renaissance scholars had inherited a clear perception of a hierarchical universe from the Middle Ages. According to this view, the world was a perfectly ordered structure, in which God reigns from heaven above, man exists on the earth below, and hell is an underworld lower still. The hierarchical structures of earthly institutions--led by divinely ordained representatives in both the political and religious spheres--mirror this larger, eternal order (Denton).

This vision came under assault as the dominance of Catholic theology--which placed man (earth) at the center of God's universe--was challenged both by scientific advances and the Protestant Reformation. In response to these tensions, the Church codified its doctrine at the Council of Trent (1545-63), leading to the establishment of the Counter-Reformation movement. This continuing theological controversy was a manifestation of a general need to restore a sense of harmony and order to the world. Baroque artists operated within this context, creating dynamic works that superimpose concerns about order and disorder upon the traditional representation of hierarchies, both earthly and heavenly.

The metaphor of theatrum mundi, or the world as stage, derives from classical sources such as Plato and Horace and from early Christian writers such as Saint Paul (Curtius, 138-44). While not a new concept, it was frequently employed by baroque thinkers to express an ordered world and the forces that threatened it. Throughout Europe, playwrights such as Moličre and Shakespeare used the motif in their works to emphasize the close relationship between the stage and life.

	Thinking Points
	How would you characterize the relationship between the Catholic Church and the theater? How did the Church use the stage to support its authority, and how was the theater viewed as a threat by Rome?

Nowhere was this metaphor more pronounced than in Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca's 1635 work El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theater of the World). In this play, Calderón proposed that (to quote William Shakespeare) "all the world's a stage" with God as the ultimate director. As the play opens, the Autor, both director of the play and a characterization of God, uses multiple metaphors to connect the creation of a play to the creation of the world. As actors arrive for their assignments, the Director/Creator gives each one a role that corresponds to a social category (i.e. Beggar, Peasant, King, Rich Man). As the play progresses, the actors must relinquish their earthly roles and pass into the eternal realm. Actors/souls are only allowed into God's presence if they have proven their worth in their roles/lives. Calderón not only reinforced the existence of a temporal or earthly hierarchical order, but he also stressed the ultimate supremacy of the eternal hierarchy found in God's kingdom. There is an illusory quality to the earthly hierarchy, as each man's assigned role in this world is only a shadow of the more permanent part to come.

This idea was presented on various stages throughout Europe. Shakespeare employed it (with temporal rather than theological focus) in works such as Hamlet, Macbeth,and most famously, As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

-- act 2, scene 7, lines 138-42

Visual clues and stage machinery

The University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art

In Pierre Daret de Cazeneuve's title page, heavenly power is directed downward to defeat the enemies of the Church.

Seeing an opportunity to reinforce the precepts of the Counter-Reformation, Catholic artists frequently represented the triumph of divine order in the world, employing a well-developed vocabulary of visual devices to do so. These are best seen in Pierre Daret de Cazeneuve's engraved title page (after a painting by Jacques Stella) for the Conciliorum omnium generalium et provincialium, collectio regia (right), a thirty-seven-volume work that describes the proceedings of various councils of the Church (both ecumenical and provincial) from 34 to 1623 CE. This engraving is an allegorical rendering of the Church's struggle against its enemies: a woman, symbolizing Faith or Divine Wisdom, defends herself from the figures--probably emblems of Heresy--who attack her. The power of the Holy Spirit, reflected off a brandished shield, allows her to repel these forces. A fragmentary view of a statue of Saint Peter, whose keys to the gates of heaven point directly down at the papal tiara, signals the source of the pope's authority and the channels of divinely controlled hierarchy.

As this image makes clear, composition is crucial in baroque depictions of hierarchy and theatrum mundi. The spatial arrangement of stage or canvas could demonstrate a naturally ordered universe through the manipulation of vertical and horizontal positioning. In response to new imperatives, theatrical space evolved from the bare medieval stage to an elaborate Italianate one, characterized by machinery, large sets, and spectacle. Playwrights across Europe used a vertical visual hierarchy: stage architecture, reflecting the architecture of the world, placed the heavens above and the underworld below. The highest spaces (balconies, platforms, the increasingly important "flying" machinery) denoted the province of kings, gods, and other lofty characters. For example, in The Tempest's wedding masque, the goddesses most likely appeared on the balcony while the sub-human Caliban inhabited the hellish world of the understage space, accessible through trapdoors.

A similar vertical hierarchy is evident in many of the objects considered in this seminar. For example, in Pierre Daret de Cazeneuve's engraved title page to the Concilium omnium generalium et provincialium, collectio regia, chains of command clearly flow from the top to the bottom of the work. The literal and figurative "highest" level contains both the statue of Saint Peter and the dove that represents the Holy Spirit. In the earthly realm directly below, the papal tiara represents the temporal version of Saint Peter's eternal ecclesiastical power. Interestingly, Faith pushes her enemies not only out of the frame of the picture, but also downward, toward hell. The lowest figure in the work, in fact, is a vanquished foe who has fallen to the ground and whose body disappears into darkness--all we can see of him is his left leg.

While verticality may seem to be a natural means of expressing hierarchy, the horizontal axis can also establish such an ordered structure. Calderón's El gran teatro del mundo exemplified horizontality on a baroque stage. The play has its origins in medieval autos sacramentales, religious dramas performed by traveling troupes around two carts. In the sixteenth century, emerging Spanish drama had moved into corrales, open-air theaters similar in design to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Religious drama followed suit, as playwrights took advantage of the new stage space. Calderón's autos featured stylized carts placed on the stage itself. The result was a space that encouraged playwrights to compare, left against right, two places or events. In El gran teatro del mundo, the two carts represent the earthly and heavenly reigns, creating a literal, theocentric theatrum mundi.

Francesco Fontebasso's painting The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine (below) also emphasizes a horizontal juxtaposition. The emperor, at the right, theatrically stretches his arm to guide the viewer's gaze horizontally across the painting to Catherine's impending execution. At that point the vertical axis comes into play, as light from above bathes the central figure. Catherine, at the moment of her martyrdom, thus represents the conjunction of the horizontal and vertical hierarchies and encourages a comparison between the earthly and divine orders.

The University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art

FRANCESCO FONTEBASSO Italian, 1709-69 The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine, 1744 Oil on canvas Fontebasso presents Saint Catherine's martyrdom as a sort of baroque spectacle. By placing the saint on a raised platform he recalls open-air stagings, while his depiction of a heavenly chorus suggests a deus ex machina, a great theatrical apparatus descending from the upper reaches of the stage. Like the baroque device of the play-within-a-play, the inclusion of an audience in the picture is a characteristic way of calling attention to the act of viewing and to the artifice of a work that, at the same time, is trying to convince us of its reality.

Fontebasso created a frame for this scene by arranging various figures around his heroine, Catherine, who occupies the middle ground. In a similar vein, discovery spaces that opened off the rear wall of the baroque stage could be used to disclose important events or characters, even though they were located farther away from the audience. For example, at the end of The Tempest, Prospero reveals the blissfully united Ferdinand and Miranda in the discovery space. Discovery spaces remind us that the baroque stage was open and expansive: dialogue was spoken from offstage, characters could enter or exit through trapdoors or from trapezes, and the discovery space added depth and dimension to the main stage area.

The Art Institute of Chicago

Laurent de La Hyre's Panthea, Cyrus, and Araspus.

In France where, in accordance with the rules of decorum, violent acts could not be shown on stage, the offstage space was particularly important. Pivotal events would be reported to the audience via a messenger character. Visually, the doorway in Laurent de La Hyre's Panthea, Cyrus, and Araspus (right) functions as a discovery space, by opening up the back wall and revealing a large massed army to the painting's audience. Both baroque painting and staging created tight dramatic spaces that opened up to accomodate sophisticated narrative structures; in the story presented by de La Hyre, the fate of the armies in the distance will largely determine the fortunes of the characters who occupy the foreground.

For the baroque artist, the world truly was a stage, reflecting the ever-present tensions of a changing world. Counter-Reformation theologians, challenged by new religious and scientific theories, strove to reestablish traditional perceptions of an ordered world. These ongoing controversies shaped the baroque view of the universe, paradoxically typified by both tension and order. Baroque artists and playwrights rose to the occasion with boundless energy and explosive creativity, questioning and redefining the relationship between art and life.

This session is adapted from Anita M. Hagerman-Young and Kerry Wilks, "The Theater of the World: Staging Baroque Hierarchies," in The Theatrical Baroque (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum/University of Chicago, 2001), 36-45. For a list of the critical works cited in this session, click here.