History of European Culture

Gloria Fiero's account of the history of European culture in the ages of the Baroque (the seventeenth century) and the Enlightenment (the eighteenth century) shows how developments in though were mirrored and promoted by works of art and literature. The Baroque era produced a new interest in scientific observation which led to fascination with the sources of human behavior and human potential to affect the world around us. In the Enlightenment era a belief in the power of human reason led to the conviction that humanity was capable of solving all its own problems through reason and transforming the world to satisfy human needs. Though it was soon seen that human reason had its limits, the transformation of the political and cultural spheres was profound as a new, more optimistic image of humanity emerged by the end of the eighteenth century.

The Baroque style in the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and music was tied to the emergence of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation movement. The growing success of the Protestant Reformation meant that the Church was forced to find ways to maintain its authority and its appeal. The principal religious reformer of the late sixteenth century, the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola, was a priest who founded the Society of Jesus, or Jesuit Order. The Jesuits called for a return to the fundamentals of Catholic teaching and were absolutely loyal to the Popes, whose authority had been so severely challenged by the Protestants.

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filled up as the senses registered experiences and the mind reflected on them. Thus all human ideas and even morals were the result of this process of experience and reflection. His ideas led to the optimistic, empiricist view of humanity which argued that since experience influenced human knowledge and behavior, improving the social environment would produce better human beings and overall human happiness. In the arts the new science is reflected most prominently in the Dutch painters whose still life painting showed the "obsessive precision and detail" with which they engaged in observing the world (50). They also turned their attention to ordinary human existence which was a big departure in the history of painting. Genre paintings "packed with images of everyday life" were enormously popular in seventeenth century Dutch society (52). Thus the exact observation promoted by science was turned on human life, much as the development of new systems of thinking had eventually resulted in turning thinkers to the clear observation of human behavior and human potential. The artist Jan Vermeer exemplified the Dutch "affection for the visible world and its all-embracing light" (54). Frans Hals and Judith Leyster carried out thi

Category: History - H