Paradoxes, Folds and Transgressions: Seeing Bernini with Neo-baroque Eyes

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Notes

1. Rudolf Wittkower, Gianlorenzo Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, London, 1955; Irvin Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York, 1980.

2. Just to mention some of the most important works: Giovanni Careri, Envois d'amour. Le Bernini: Montage des arts et devotion, Paris, 1990 (English translation: Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion, University of Chicago Press, 1995); Tod A. Marder, Bernini and the Art of Architecture, New York, 1998; Sarah McPhee, Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the Vatican, Yale University Press, 2002; Tomaso Montanari, »Il »bel composto«. Nota filologica su un nodo della storiografia Berniniana«, Studi Secenteschi, No. 46, 2005, pp. 195–210.

3. Adaptation, produced by E. Saxon, V. Landay and J. Demme, Columbia Pictures, 2002. The first part of this article has been published in Swedish as Mårten Snickare, »Den nya barocken«, Valör. Konstvetenskapliga studier, No. 1, 2008, pp. 3–13.

4. Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief, Random House, New York, 1998.

5. Lope de Vega, »Lo fingido verdadero« (1608), in Obras de Lope de Vega, IX, Comedias de vidas de santos, I, ed. M. Menendez Pelayo, Madrid, 1964, pp. 51–107.

6. In Lope de Vega's »Comedias de Tema Religioso«: Re-creations and Re-presentations (Tamesis, Woodbridge, 2004), Elaine M. Canning argues that »the two concepts, religious drama and a metatheatrical approach, are not mutually exclusive but are interdependent«. See p. 98.

7. Lope de Vega (1608) 1964, p. 102. »Then I want to say my speech, and you will die in a play since you've lived in a play« (trans. author).

8. Lope de Vega (1608) 1964, p. 105. »My God, when I played Christian as a joke/You called me to a higher truth/I performed jokes that were so true/in the theatre of my vain intentions« (trans. author).

9. Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, Hill & Wang, New York, 1963, p. 60.

10. On the staging of Lo fingido verdadero in Lope's time, see Lo fingido verdadero, Acting is Believing: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts, trans. Michael D. McGaha, Trinity University Press, San Antonio, 1986, »Introduction«, p. 41.

11. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act II, scene VII, Yale University Press (1599) 1954, p. 42 (emphasis added). Even if Shakespeare mainly refers to the different ages of man, the quoted line suggests an understanding of life as theatricalized, and identity as unstable and shifting.

12. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, Oxford, 1962, particularly »Lecture IV«, pp. 39–52. Austin would have disqualified the salvation of Genesius as a fortunate performative act, because it occurred against the intentions of the persons involved. However, Judith Butler has convincingly argued that intention can never be in total control of a performative act. »If a performative provisionally succeeds (and I will suggest that »success« is always and only provisional) then it is not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech, but only because that action echoes prior actions and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices.« Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York and London, 1993, pp. 226–227. For a critique of Austin's understanding of »intentionality«, see also Jacuqes Derrida, »Signature, Event, Context«, Margins of Philosophy (Marges de la philosophie, 1972), Chicago, 1982, p. 326.

13. Catherine Connor, »Postmodernism avant la lettre: The Case of Early Modern Spanish Theater«, Gestos, 9, 1994, pp. 43–59. The term »Neo-baroque« appears already in the early twentieth century, but then in a rather limited sense, referring to a taste for the exuberant and extravagant in interior decoration and haute couture fashion. In the 1980s it was launched as a more wide-embracing theoretical concept by theorists in Latin America, Europe and USA. An overview is given in Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004, pp. 1–29.

14. Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (L'Eta Neobarocca, Rome, 1987) Princeton University Press, 1992. Quote on p. 15.

15. Calabrese, 1992, »Preface«, p. xiii.

16. Calabrese, 1992, pp. 45–46, 51. Recent examples, supporting Calabrese's argument, are The Day After Tomorrow (2004) in which the most extreme consequences of climate change are visualized in an astounding way, and Déjà vu (2006) where the technology of surveillance is taken beyond its limits, creating paradoxical folds of reality and temporality.

17. In this connection it is worth reminding ourselves of the fact that it was exactly the architecture of Borromini and Bernini that a century later gave rise to the pejorative term »baroque«. See e.g. Quatremère de Quincy, Dictionnaire historique de l'architecture, 1788.

18. Filippo Baldinucci, Vita del Cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernini. Scultore, Architetto e Pittore, Firenze, 1681. »It is the general opinion that Bernini was the first to attempt to unite architecture with sculpture and painting in such a way as to make of them all a beautiful compound [un bel composto]; he achieved this by removing all repugnant uniformity in poses, sometimes breaking up the poses without violating the good rules, but also without letting himself be bound by them. He used to say that those who do not sometimes step outside the rules will never reach beyond them« (trans. author. Cf translation in Filippo Baldinucci, The Life of Bernini (1681), Pennsylvania State University Press 1966, p. 74).

19. Irvin Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York, 1980, p. 6. For a thorough discussion of the concept, see Tomaso Montanari, »Il »bel composto«. Nota filologica su un nodo della storiografia Berniniana«, Studi Secenteschi, No. 46, 2005, pp. 195–210.

20. Lavin, 1980, p.145.

21. Baldinucci's keen interest in words and their meaning is particularly manifested in his Vocabolario toscano dell'arte del disegno, Florence, 1681, a dictionary of words and concepts related to the visual arts.

22. On S. Andrea al Quirinale, see Franco Borsi, La Chiesa di S. Andrea al Quirinale, Rome, 1967; Julia Smyth-Pinney, »The Geometries of S. Andrea al Quirinale«, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XLVIII, 1989; Giovanni Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion, University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 87–108.

23. The event is described in Caesar Baronius, Martyrologium Romanum, 1588: »In Patras in Achaia was born S. Andrew, the apostle who preached the Gospel in Trachea and Scythia. He was captured by the Aegean proconsul, imprisoned, tortured and finally crucified. As the proconsul was asked to take him down from the cross, a strong light shone from the sky and surrounded the Saint who subsequently gave up his breath« (trans. author).

24. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, foreword and translation by Tom Conley, (1988), University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 6.

25. Deleuze (1988) 1993, p. 122.

26. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La raison baroque: de Baudelaire à Benjamin, Paris, 1984.

27. Francesco Guardiani »Old and New, Modern and Postmodern: Baroque and NeoBaroque«, McLuhan Studies, issue 4 (http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies).

28. Paul Oskar Kristeller »The modern system of the arts«, Journal of the History of Ideas, No. 12, 1951, pp. 496–527, and No. 13, pp. 17–46. For a critique of Kristeller, see James I. Porter, »Is art modern? Kristeller's »modern system of the arts« Reconsidered«, British Journal of Aesthetics, 2009, pp. 1–24.

29. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London, 1982. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, London, 1962. The printing press was assuredly a fifteenth-century invention but, as Ong shows, it was not until the eighteenth century that its consequences for language and knowledge were fully visible.

30. Ong, 1982, p. 133.

31. Ong, 1982, p. 132.

32. Ong, 1982, p. 136.

33. Ong, 1982, p. 137.

34. Jacques Derrida, »Signature, event, context«, in Margins of Philosophy (1972), Chicago, 1982.

35. Roland Barthes, »The Death of the Author« (1967), in Image, Music, Text, ed. S. Heath, London, 1977.

36. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London, 1990; Bodies That Matter:On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York and London, 1993.