the most brutal of gladiatorial combats) were an affront to God and a vulgar misuse of God’s gifts to man. By drawing connections between contemporaneous forms of public entertainment and myriad pagan rituals, Tertullian emphasizes the moral, ethical, and spiritual implications intrinsic to the creation, presentation, and reception of the dramatic arts.3
Following the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire in approximately 475 CE, the burgeoning Byzantine Empire codified the central tenets of Christian doctrine, and the Church began to emerge as the primary spiritual, civic, social, and governmental force in a Europe now devoid of the concentrated and unchallengeable authority of Imperial Rome. The Medieval World, therefore, would be informed and governed by Christianity in general, and the hierarchical structures of both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in particular. While a secular tradition remained intact, the dominant currents of artistic output were decidedly religious in nature, and their aesthetic sensibilities were dictated and enforced by the Ecclesiastical authorities. It was an aesthetic that was very strict in determining the manner in which religious content would be conceived and executed by artists, and one that anticipated the responses of a largely illiterate lay community that received its theological indoctrination largely through ritual and visual imagery. Religious iconography, for example, especially with regard to depictions of Jesus, embraced an abstract quality that emphasized Christ’s divinity rather than his humanity.
Byzantine Icon (ca. ninth century CE)
An interest in Aesthetics in service of religion continued throughout the Middle Ages. The Christian theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) appropriated Classical ideas in ways that supported a more general approach to the dissemination of Christian doctrine, maintaining that integrity, proportion, and clarity are the three conditions of beauty—a notion that feeds a particular understanding of artistic creation.4
The Medieval aesthetic began to slowly dissipate in the late thirteenth/early fourteenth centuries, as the conditions for the Renaissance began to take root. The Renaissance (from the French word meaning “Rebirth”) was a complex cultural, intellectual, artistic, and philosophical revolution, marked most prominently by a desire to reach back past the Medieval World and reconnect with and resuscitate the spirit of Classical Antiquity. The word “Medieval,” Latin for “Middle Ages,” was, in fact, pejoratively employed by Renaissance thinkers to distinguish themselves from that era between themselves and the Ancient Greco-Roman culture they would attempt to emulate. The reasons for this phenomenon were numerous, but primary among them was a reintroduction of Classical thought to Western Europe, which included various strains of pagan philosophies and a set of monumental and refreshing aesthetic approaches to art and creative endeavor. This occurred alongside a profound set of scientific and technological advances that deeply affected people’s understanding of the universe and their practical worldview, as many of the conclusions arrived at by the scientific community stood in stark opposition to Church doctrine.
Central to the Renaissance was its embrace of Classical Humanism, a philosophy that represented a shift away from religious thought and experience toward the secular aspects of the human condition. It concentrated on human beings’ corporeal realities and celebrated earthly life as something that is valuable in and of itself, and not merely as preparation for an unseen afterlife.
This revival of Classicism and its attendant Humanistic impulses greatly informed the aesthetic character of the Renaissance. The abstract, strictly stylized manner of the Medieval sensibility slowly gave way to a more robust, three-dimensional, realistic approach to figurative representation—one that embraced the minutiae, particularities, and textured nuances of human beings and the material world which they inhabited. Even renderings of mythological figures were rendered with an eye toward realistic detail.
Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli (1480s)
But attempts to codify a set of “rules” that would govern this newly conceived Neo-Classicism led to oppressive formulaic strictures and a certain rigidity with regard to artistic conception and creation, as well as the criteria by which the quality of creative output was measured. Theorists like Ludovico Castlevetro (ca. 1505–1571) and Francesco Robertello (1516–1567) translated their interpretations (sometimes misinterpretations) of Aristotle, Horace, and numerous other Classical artists and scholars into a kind of “how-to” manual for Renaissance artists. Their prescriptive musings concentrated on drama, but the aesthetic they championed was applicable to all the arts and emphasized the above-mentioned characteristics that they found indicative of the Classical aesthetic. As Neo-Classicism cemented itself as the monolithic standard by which artistic value would be assessed for the next two centuries, many artists slowly began to feel oppressed by what they felt was an externally imposed set of rules and regulations that stifled their own idiosyncratic styles, instincts, and sensibilities.
Another monumental event that occurred in the sixteenth century was the Protestant Reformation, sparked by Martin Luther (1483–1546), a German priest and theologian, who in 1517 published his The Ninety-Five Theses, which was a scathing assault on the Roman Catholic Church and some of its more corrupt and suspect practices. The revolution that Luther initiated drove inordinate numbers of Roman Catholics away from the Church toward more reform-minded Protestant ideas.
This budding movement was greatly aided by the newly minted printing press, which not only allowed literature in support of Reformation ideas to be mass-produced and widely disseminated across the European landscape but also helped to dramatically increase literacy among the lay communities.
In an effort to combat the mass exodus, the Church convened the Council of Trent (1545–1563), a series of ecumenical meetings of church authorities designed to lead a “Counter-Reformation,” which would both ensure the survival of Roman Catholicism and preserve its centrality in the Christian world.
One of the main decrees established by the Council of Trent encouraged the Church and its supporters to use art, storytelling, and visual imagery to spread religious themes and Christian doctrine in ways that were more emotionally direct, viscerally thrilling, and sensually arousing. The result was a widening artistic movement (covering painting, sculpture, architecture, theater, dance, music, and literature) that featured a dramatic exuberance, extreme grandeur, detailed ornamentation, and an over-the-top style of presentation that would come to be known as the Baroque.
The gaudy and untamed quality of the early Baroque period appealed directly to the emotional, spiritual, and primal desires of a largely uneducated populace (pejoratively regarded as a “pious mass”) and was often derided by more refined and well-heeled critics as vulgar and sensationalized. But its popularity was inarguable, tempered only by the restrained and formally ordered character of a competing Neo-Classicism that would reach its zenith of influence in the eighteenth century.
Ecstasy of Saint Theresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1652)
The dominance of the Neo-Classical sensibility was cemented by the French court, which, despite the movement’s origins in sixteenth-century Italy, became its self-appointed guardian and most aggressive champion. France, under Louis XIV (1638–1715), became the most powerful political, economic, military, and cultural force in Europe. Its centrality in world affairs compelled other European nations to submit to its primacy and/or emulate its most conspicuous features, which included a clearly defined set of aesthetic characteristics deeply rooted
