Baroque Puritanism

One of the many challenges of Milton as a poet is that this austere puritan offers a vision of Eden that "has the fleshly abundance of a Venetian painting:"

Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm,
Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind,
Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true,
If true, here only, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed,
Or palmy hillock; or the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store,
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose:
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant;...


Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native honour clad
In naked majesty seemed lords of all:


His fair large front and eye sublime declared
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
She, as a veil, down to the slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved ...

So Wylie Sypher in Four Stages of Renaissance Style, excerpting Book IV of Paradise Lost.  Sypher continues: "Milton's own ethic was, we know, austere, disciplining strictly that 'visible and sensuous colleague, the body.'  Yet this Paradise of his shows how imperative a style can be, for it was created by the golden and copious vision of Counter-Reformastion art." 

Aside from the Venetians, Sypher compares Milton also to Rubens, with whom (Sypher says) Milton shares "a certain domain of baroque imagination...."    Rubens, he says, "is a witness to the heroic traditions of renaissance humanism--a humanism powerful enough to create its own myths simply by the splendor of its scenes."

Paging Harry Turtledove: What if it had been the Catalans?

When did the Italian Renaissance end? You might say the “The Sack of Rome” in 1527, or the beginning of the Roman Inquisition in 1542. Kenneth Bartlett in his superb lecture series isn't really transfixed by nny particular date: he's more disposed to the perspective of long, slow decline. But he does offer one provocative takeaway: it was he Spaniards wot done—more precisely, the Castilians, the men on horseback, the feudal lords who trailed in with the baggage of Hapsburg Emperor Charles V. These guys had exactly no interest in all the things that had made Italy great: commerce, intellectual curiosity, free discussion, a sense of res publica. The Italians quickly grasped that the jig was up: better not to make waves, accept the inevitable and settle into a mode of risk-averse mediocrity.

It's a theory worth considering, and I would like to like it to another bit of idle speculation. Note these were not Spaniards we're talking about here; they were Castilians—inland farmers with a tradition of soldiering and religion. How different from the Catalans on the Mediterranean cost, with their long tradition of enterprise and commerce. I've often wondered what would have happened had it been the Catalans and not the Castilians and not the Catalans who had conquered Central and South America. The standard mantra says it was “capitalism” that destroyed the New World, but I wonder if it might be just the opposite—whether the very absence of capitalism that led to an encounter so destructive to the victims.