The pastoral genre that triumphed in baroque theater and art claimed a long and noble genealogy. Though it was born in Ancient Greece with Theocritus' Idylls (third century BCE), it is the Vergilian model of the pastoral (first century BCE) that most influenced writers and painters of the Renaissance and baroque periods. Vergil set his eclogues in Arcadia, which became the idealistic locus amoenus (pleasant place) where shepherds could poeticize freely, away from the vicissitudes of urban life; they could live in otium (leisurely), entirely devoted to poetic creation and musical expression. The Renaissance took on this literary model and developed it further; Italy in particular produced some major pastoral works that would have a tremendous impact on the formation of the baroque pastoral, and it introduced pastorals to the theatrical stage (Freedman, et al.).

During the baroque age, the pastoral genre evolved in harmony with new literary and pictorial aesthetics. Focusing primarily on France between 1650 and 1700, we will explore the close links between two domains: pastoral theater and pastoral painting. We will see that theater and painting share the same aesthetic rules, according to which the internal dynamics of the work are based on the tension between the harmony of nature and the disruptions of dramatic conflict; and we will explore how pastoral landscape eluded the boundaries between illusion and reality, between the fictional fields of the shepherds and the very real gardens of Versailles.

From its classical beginnings, the pastoral genre was associated with the stilus humilis (simple style); its standard format is the eclogue, a short dialogue between two shepherds extolling the beauties of nature. Pastoral poets had neither the intention nor the means to compete with higher genres such as the tragedy or the epic. There was no doubt among critics at the time that pastoral evocations must be plain, simple representations of a pliant, gentle nature. This simplicity, however, is not easy to achieve; as a result, pastoral settings are paradoxically complex.

Harmony and conflict

	Thinking Point
	Do you see the interest in both grand spectacles and pastoral simplicity as a contradiction? Or do these impulses arise out of a fascination with performances of all kinds?

Many baroque works of art, both literary and pictorial, portray an environment in essential but fragile harmony, with the threat of disruption never very far away (Panofsky, 17-88). This question of harmony is linked to the concept of les bienséances (decorum), which was central to the social life and thought of the seventeenth century. The pastoral had to give pleasure through a depiction of shepherd life that was simple and natural without being vulgar.

The famous French critic and poet Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle had criticized both ancient Greek and more recent French poets for creating shepherds that were either too close to the real thing, or that spoke of life in such philosophical tones that verisimilitude was lost. For him, the challenge in poetry was to find a delicate balance between refinement and rusticity, for an excess of one or the other was improbable or unpleasant.

The search for this simple harmony was also problematic for the pastoral landscape painter. The great art critic and theorist Roger de Piles was less concerned with the physical features of shepherds than with their activities; he stressed the necessity of avoiding potentially static inaction, and maintaining the interest of beholders. In literary pastorals, the action is extremely reduced and revolves around love and poetical creation. In paintings, some features stemming from this convention are noticeable--shepherds playing lutes, pipes, or pan flutes, or nymphs frolicking with satyrs--but the problem remains of exciting the viewer's interest in these conventional pastoral diversions. De Piles wrote in 1709:

I am persuaded that the best way to make figures valuable is, to make them so to agree with the character of the landskip [sic], that it may seem to have been made purely for the figures. I would not have them either insipid or indifferent, but to represent some little subject to awaken the spectator's attention, or else to give the picture a name of distinction among the curious (de Piles, 140).

The University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art

Claude Lorrain's Apollo Leading the Four Seasons.

It was a challenge for the pastoral landscape painter to represent a locus amoenus as a setting for action; it had to be peaceful and yet somehow stimulating to the beholder. Even when harmony is achieved, the threat of disruption is never far. In pastoral theater, harmony can be disrupted by death, rapture, or loss of love; these themes are also present in pictorial representations of pastoral landscapes.

Many baroque painters made use of the allegorical possibilities of pastoral landscape, most notably Claude Lorrain (Unglaub, 46-47). A closer look at Claude's Apollo Leading the Four Seasons (left) demonstrates the tenuous equilibrium on which the pastoral representation is built.

Illusion and reality

The University of Chicago. Library, Department of Special Collections

Like many productions of the baroque period, the opera Atys drew upon classical mythology.

This dialectic between harmony and disruption, which seems to underlie most baroque landscapes, provides the pastoral with its dramatic narrative force. But another tension, that between illusion and reality, makes the pastoral a uniquely theatrical form. While some literary genres of the seventeenth century, such as tragedy, relied heavily on the notion of verisimilitude and had to give the appearance of reality, pastoral aesthetics permitted obviously artificial devices on stage. For example, pastorals often include the intervention of a deus ex machina (literally, god from a machine). French baroque opera, which derived from the lyric pastoral of Pierre Perrin and its offspring the lyric tragedy, frequently featured magic, druids and pagan deities on the stage (Kintzler). In Atys, a lyric tragedy by Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully, several key moments in the action rely on supernatural interventions. In one instance, the goddess Cybele, jealous of Atys's love for a mortal woman, nearly drives him to suicide; in the end, she takes pity and changes him into a pine tree.

Many pastoral dramas and paintings depict magic, gods and monsters in a variety of contexts. Classical mythology was a favorite source; a more recent inspiration was Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1552), a chivalric romance set in Charlemagne's time. Cecco Bravo's painting Angelica and Ruggiero (below) depicts an episode from cantos X and XI: Angelica, princess of Cathay, is saved by the paladin Ruggiero from the monstrous Orca. Ruggiero leaves his winged steed (shown flying away in the background) and hastens toward the princess to claim his reward of a thousand kisses. Cecco Bravo depicts the moment just before Angelica, by means of a magic ring, disappears into thin air, leaving Ruggiero behind.

The University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art

FRANCESCO MONTELATICI, called CECCO BRAVO Italian, 1607-61 Angelica and Ruggiero, circa 1640-45 Oil on canvas The story depicted in this canvas comes from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1552), a favorite literary source for baroque spectacles. Here, the princess Angelica is about to escape her suitor Ruggiero, using the powers of a magic ring to make herself disappear. Illusionism was an important element of pastoral productions, which often made use of a deus ex machina. Literally a "god out of a machine," this invention permitted the staging of supernatural events, and satisfied the audience's demand for breathtaking theatrics.

The supernatural charms of Ariosto's world later provided a rich resource for theatrical spectacles, and we will return to one such example at Versailles momentarily. But the magical elements are only one of the most obvious ways pastorals play with the notion of illusion. In Theocritus's Idylls and Vergil's Eclogues, gods very often appear disguised as shepherds, but beginning in the Renaissance and intensifying during the baroque period, aristocrats appropriated this disguise. Indeed, the mask is of particular importance in the baroque period; in a society where the social gaze imposed a powerful pressure on the public persona, masks represented escape from scrutiny and a way of presenting oneself in a carefully constructed, highly artful guise. Very often aristocrats would play the role of shepherds, retiring to their locus amoenus and allowing themselves to compose poems and play music.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection

It is not surprising to see the arts of portrait and pastoral painting merge, as is the case in Anthony Van Dyck's portrait of Philip, Lord Wharton (left). Van Dyck portrayed Wharton as an elegant shepherd, with cape and crook, in front of a landscape. While a very subtle palette of tones seems to place the figure in perfect harmony with the background, a drape, hanging quite strangely from the top of the painting, separates the foreground and background, clearly revealing that the subject is only playing a role.

An even more complex means of revealing and deepening the illusion of representation is found in the widespread baroque strategy of constructing a mise en abyme, or a mirror effect. In the visual arts, this generally took the form of an image within an image; courtly spectacles often featured a play-within-a-play. Because pastoral references figured so prominently in courtly role-playing and self-fashioning, pastoral productions intensified this kind of self-reflexivity, constructing often dizzying relationships between reality and performance.

The Newberry Library, Chicago

A performance of Molière's La Princesse d'Elide in the gardens of Versailles, from the Plaisirs de l'isle enchantée.

Molière's 1663 Princesse d'Elide is exemplary here in its intricate game of illusions. The play was part of the Plaisirs de l'îsle enchantée (Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle), a three-day celebration that inaugurated the new palace of Versailles and that was set in the sumptuous gardens designed by André Le Nôtre. The theme of the spectacle was adapted from the ever-popular Orlando Furioso. Louis XIV himself appeared in the role of chevalier Roger and leading courtiers took on other roles. In one episode (in which Molière played Lycidias), Roger and the knights, held prisoners on an enchanted island, are allowed to present a play to pass the time--this play-within-a-play is La Princesse d'Elide. It is hard to know if the audience at Versailles identified Louis as the king or as Roger, and whether they interpreted the performance as a production directed at Roger's fictional retinue or as a modern entertainment created for the French court.

The play within the play being watched by Roger/Louis XIV complicates the illusion further by presenting numerous pastoral interludes. In a dizzying triumph of theatrical showmanship, the pastoral scenes on stage mirrored perfectly the garden setting of the audience. And just as Molière's interludes featuring satyrs, singing echoes and bucolic dances play ironically with the artificiality of pastoral conventions, so too Le Nôtre's formal gardens self-consciously mixed mythological statuary and heroic grandeur with the simple charms of nature. Thus the fictional stage world echoed the audience space in both pastoral simplicity and elaborate artifice. This was a breathtaking reconciliation of the tension between nature and artifice, but one entirely typical of an age that considered the enjoyment of pastoral simplicity an occasion for spectacular theatrical invention.

This session is adapted from Véronique Sigu, "The Baroque Pastoral or the Art of Fragile Harmony," in The Theatrical Baroque (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum/University of Chicago, 2001), 58-67. For a list of the critical works cited in this session, click here.