The Arts in an Age of Crisis

Two new forms of artistic expression—professional theater and opera—provided an outlet for secular values in an age of conflict over religious beliefs. Religion still played an important role in painting, however, even though many rulers also commissioned paintings on secular subjects.

The first professional acting companies performed before paying audiences in London, Seville, and Madrid in the 1570s. A huge outpouring of playwriting followed upon the formation of permanent professional theater companies. The Spanish playwright Lope de Vega (1562–1635) alone wrote more than fifteen hundred plays. Theaters were extremely popular despite Puritan opposition in England and Catholic objections in Spain. Shopkeepers, apprentices, lawyers, and court nobles crowded into open-air theaters to see everything from bawdy farces to profound tragedies.

The most enduring and influential playwright of the time—in fact, the man considered the greatest playwright of the English language—was William Shakespeare (1564–1616), who wrote three dozen plays (including histories, comedies, and tragedies) and was a member of a chief acting troupe. Although none of Shakespeare’s plays were set in contemporary England, they reflected the concerns of his age: the nature of power and the crisis of authority. His tragedies in particular show the uncertainty and even chaos that result when power is misappropriated or misused. In Hamlet (1601), for example, the Danish prince Hamlet’s mother marries the man who murdered his royal father and usurped the crown. In the end, Hamlet, his mother, and the usurper all die. Like many real-life people, Shakespeare’s tragic characters found little peace in the turmoil of their times.

Although painting did not always touch broad popular audiences in the ways that theater could, new styles in art and especially church architecture helped shape ordinary people’s experience of religion. In the late sixteenth century, the artistic style known as mannerism emerged in the Italian states and soon spread across Europe. Mannerism was an almost theatrical style that allowed painters to distort perspective to convey a message or emphasize a theme. The most famous mannerist painter, called El Greco because he was of Greek origin, trained in Venice and Rome before he moved to Spain in the 1570s. The religious intensity of El Greco’s pictures found a ready audience in Catholic Spain, which had proved immune to the Protestant suspicion of ritual and religious imagery (see the illustration of Philip II of Spain).

The most important new style was the baroque, which, like mannerism, originated in the Italian states. In place of the Renaissance emphasis on harmonious design, unity, and clarity, the baroque featured curves, exaggerated lighting, intense emotions, release from restraint, and even a kind of artistic sensationalism. Like many other historical designations, the word baroque (“irregularly shaped”) was not used as a label by people living at the time; art critics in the eighteenth century coined the word to mean shockingly bizarre, confused, and extravagant, and art historians and collectors largely disdained the baroque until the late nineteenth century.

Closely tied to Catholic resurgence after the Reformation, the baroque melodramatically reaffirmed the emotional depths of the Catholic faith and glorified both church and monarchy. The style spread from Rome to other Italian states and then into central Europe. The Spanish built baroque churches in their American colonies as part of their massive conversion campaign. (See “Seeing History: Religious Differences in Painting of the Baroque Period: Rubens and Rembrandt.”)

A new secular musical form, the opera, grew up parallel to the baroque style in the visual arts. First influential in the Italian states, opera combined music, drama, dance, and scenery in a grand sensual display, often with themes chosen to please the ruler and the aristocracy. Composers could base operas on typically baroque sacred subjects or on traditional stories. Like many playwrights, including Shakespeare, opera composers often turned to familiar stories their audiences would recognize and readily follow. One of the most innovative composers of opera was Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), whose earliest operatic production, Orfeo (1607), was based on Greek mythology.