The Rise of Neoclassicism and the Flourishing of the Baroque Arts (17th–18th Century)

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European arts, literature, theater, music, and architecture were heavily influenced by Greco-Roman models, marking the emergence of Neoclassicism. However, in architecture and the visual arts, the period was still dominated by the Baroque style, characterized by grandeur, drama, and elaborate decoration.

In music, the Baroque period saw the development of complex polyphonic and contrapuntal techniques, as well as the birth of opera, oratorio, and cantata, laying the groundwork for later classical and Romantic music traditions.

Neoclassicism and the Baroque in Visual Arts and Architecture

• Neoclassicism emerged as a revival of Greco-Roman ideals, emphasizing harmony, symmetry, and simplicity.
• Despite this trend, architecture remained largely Baroque, featuring:
  • Elaborate ornamentation and curvaceous forms.
  • Dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.
  • Monumental scale and theatrical effects.
• In painting and sculpture, artists such as Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini brought Baroque dynamism and emotion to religious and mythological subjects.

The Evolution of Baroque Music

The Baroque period (c. 1600–1750) was marked by the rise of:

• Opera – A dramatic, fully staged musical form combining singing, instrumental music, and theatrical performance.
• Oratorio – A large-scale musical work for choir, soloists, and orchestra, often based on biblical stories (e.g., Handel's Messiah).
• Cantata – A shorter vocal work, typically performed in churches or courts, featuring recitative and arias.

Instrumental music flourished, leading to:

• The development of fugue, concerto, sonata, and suite.
• Innovations by Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, who explored contrapuntal (interweaving) techniques and harmonic progressions.

New Musical Instruments of the Era

The 17th and 18th centuries also saw the invention and refinement of several musical instruments, including:

• Clarinet (early 18th century) – A woodwind instrument with a rich, expressive tone.
• Pedal harp – An advancement that allowed greater versatility in key changes.
• Harmonica – A free-reed wind instrument, later popularized in folk and blues music.
• Accordion – A portable, bellows-driven instrument with both melody and harmony capabilities.

Conclusion: A Dynamic Era of Art and Music

The 17th and 18th centuries were a period of artistic evolution, where Baroque exuberance coexisted with Neoclassical ideals. While Neoclassicism would eventually dominate literature and architecture, the Baroque period revolutionized music, theater, and visual arts, leading to the creation of some of the most enduring works in European cultural history.

Louis XIV had initiated Les Invalides as a home and hospital for aged and unwell soldiers by an order dated November 24, 1670: the name is a shortened form of hôpital des invalides.

The architect of Les Invalides was Libéral Bruant.

The selected site was in the then suburban plain of Grenelle (plaine de Grenelle).

By the time the enlarged project was completed in 1676, the river front measured one hundred and ninety-six meters and the complex had fifteen courtyards, the largest being the cour d'honneur ("court of honor") for military parades.

It was then felt that the veterans required a chapel.

Jules Hardouin Mansart had assisted the aged Bruant, and the chapel was finished in 1679 to Bruant's designs after the elder architect's death.

The chapel is known as Église Saint-Louis des Invalides.

Daily attendance is required.

Shortly after the completion of the veterans' chapel, Louis XIV had commissioned Mansart to construct a separate private royal chapel referred to as the Église du Dôme from its most striking feature.

Inspired by St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the original for all Baroque domes, it is one of the triumphs of French Baroque architecture.

Mansart has raised its drum with an attic story over its main cornice, and employed the paired columns motif in his more complicated rhythmic theme.

The general program is sculptural but tightly integrated, rich but balanced, consistently carried through, capping its vertical thrust firmly with a ribbed and hemispherical dome.

The domed chapel is centrally placed to dominate the court of honor.

It is finished in 1708.

St. Paul's Cathedral, built to an English Baroque design of Sir Christopher Wren, as part of a major rebuilding program which took place in the city after the Great Fire of London, is completed within his lifetime.

The "topping out" of the cathedral (when the final stone is placed on the lantern) takes place in October 1708.

In fact, construction is to continue for several years after this.

Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa's alliance with Peter of Russia has caused heavy losses of Cossacks, and Russian interference in the Hetmanate's internal affairs.

When the Tsar refuses to defend Ukraine against the Polish King Stanislaus Leszczynski, an ally of Charles XII of Sweden, Mazepa and the Zaporozhian Cossacks alliy themselves with the Swedes on October 28, 1708.

Mazepa is hesitant and gathers the Starshyna Council to decide the further course of actions.

The council, composed of Cossack military officers, approves the negotiations with Charles.

He leaves his last Cossack reserves in Baturyn and moves to the Desna River for negotiations with Charles.

When Peter hears of this move, he sends Aleksandr Menshikov to Baturyn.

Evidence of settlement in the area of present-day Baturyn dates back to the Neolithic era, with Bronze Age and Scythian remains also having been unearthed.

According to some modern writers, the earliest fortress at Baturyn would have been created by the Grand Principality of Chernihiv in the  eleventh century.

The contemporary name for the settlement, however, is first mentioned in the 1625, likely referring to the fortress of Stefan Batory, King of Poland, Prince of Transylvania, and Grand Duke of Lithuania, which had been built and named in his honor.

The area had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (in the Kijów Voivodeship of the Crown of Poland) since before the Union of Lublin.

Control of the town had been wrested from the Commonwealth during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, after which natives of Ruthenia had gained some degree of autonomy under Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his Cossack state.

Baturyn had in 1648 been transformed into a Cossack regional center (sotnia), first hosting the Starodub Cossack Regiment, and then the Nizhyn Regiment.

Home to four hundred and eighty-six Cossacks and two hundred and seventy-four villagers by 1654, Baturyn had been granted Magdeburg Rights.

As the settlement has grown, more merchants have flocked to it, and great fairs are held quarterly.

The capital of the Cossack Hetmanate, an autonomous Cossack republic in Left-bank Ukraine, has been located in Baturyn from 1669.

The area has prospered under the rule of Mazepa, increasing in size and population (with upwards of twenty thousand residents).

The period of the Ruin was effectively over when Mazepa was elected hetman, and brought stability to the state.

He has united Ukraine which, once again, is under the rule of one hetman.

The Hetmanate has flourished under his rule, particularly in literature, and architecture.

The architectural style that has developed during his reign is called the Cossack Baroque, distinct from the Western European Baroque in having more moderate ornamentation and simpler forms, and as such is considered more constructivist.

Baturyn boasts forty churches and chapels, two monasteries and a college for government officials and diplomats (the Kantseliarsky Kurin).

Baturyn is mercilessly sacked and razed by the Russian army of Menshikov on November 13, 1708, and all of its inhabitants are slaughtered.

Dmytro Chechel, the commanding officer of the Baturin garrison, is broken at the wheel.

Historian Serhiy Pavlenko estimates that six thousand to seventy-five hundred civilians and five thousand to sixty-five hundred military personnel were murdered.

Marlborough House in Pall Mall, east of St. James's Palace, has been built for Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, the favorite and confidante of Queen Anne.

The Duchess had wanted her new house to be "strong, plain and convenient and good".

The architect Christopher Wren and his son of the same name have designed a brick building with rusticated stone quoins (cornerstones) that is completed in 1711.

It will serve for over a century as the London residence of the Dukes of Marlborough.

The new abbey church at Fulda, dedicated on August 15, 1712, stands on the site of the Ratgar Basilica (once the largest basilica north of the Alps), which was the burial site of Saint Boniface and the church of Fulda Abbey, functions which the new building is intended to continue.

The plans of the new church had been drawn up in 1700 by one of the greatest German Baroque architects, Johann Dientzenhofer, who had been commissioned by the Prince-Abbot Adalbert von Schleifras for the new building on the recommendation of the Pope after Dientzenhofer's study trip to Rome in 1699.

The deliberate similarity of the church's internal arrangement to that of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is testimony to Dientzenhofer's visit.

The Ratgar Basilica has been demolished to make way for the new Baroque structure, on which construction had begun on April 23, 1704, using in part the foundations of the earlier basilica.

The shell had been completed in 1707, the roof finished in 1708, and the interior in 1712.

The dedication tablet placed on the facade by von Schleifras gives the dedication as Christus Salvator.

Wren's later life is not without criticisms and attacks on his competence and his taste.

The Letter Concerning Design of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, circulates in 1712 in manuscript.

Shaftesbury, proposing a new British style of architecture, censures Wren’s cathedral, his taste, and his long-standing control of royal works.

Wren had been appointed to the Fifty New Churches Commission in 1711, but when the surveyorship starts in 1715 will be left only with nominal charge of a board of works.

The Spectator, a daily publication founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England after they met at Charterhouse School, lasts from 1711 to 1712.

Each "paper", or "number", is approximately 2,twenty-five hundred words long, and the original run consists of five hundred and fifty-five numbers, beginning on March 1, 1711.

These are collected into seven volumes.

The paper is revived in 1714 without the involvement of Steele, appearing thrice weekly for six months, and these papers when collected form the eighth volume.

Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison's, also contributes to the publication.

The stated goal of The Spectator is "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality...to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses" (No. 10).

It recommends that its readers "consider it part of the tea-equipage" (No. 10) and not leave the house without reading it in the morning.

One of its functions is to provide readers with educated, topical talking points, and advice in how to carry on conversations and social interactions in a polite manner.

In keeping with the values of Enlightenment philosophies of their time, the authors of The Spectator promote family, marriage, and courtesy.

Despite a modest daily circulation of approximately three thousand copies, The Spectator is widely read; Joseph Addison estimates that each number is read by sixty thousand Londoners, about a tenth of the capital's population at this time.

Contemporary historians and literary scholars, meanwhile, do not consider this to be an unreasonable claim; most readers are not themselves subscribers but patrons of one of the subscribing coffeehouses.

These readers come from many stations in society, but the paper caters principally to the interests of England's emerging middle class—merchants and traders large and small.

The first volume of Vitruvius Britannicus, or the British Architect..., Colen Cambbell’s major published work, appears in 1715 as the the first architectural work to originate in England since John Shute's Elizabethan First Groundes.

In the empirical vein, it is not a treatise but basically a catalogue of design, containing engravings of English buildings by Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren, as well as Campbell himself and other prominent architects of the age.

In the introduction that he appends and in the brief descriptions, Campbell belabors the "excesses" of Baroque style and declares British independence from foreigners while he dedicates the volume to the Hanoverian George I.

The somewhat promotional volume, with its excellently rendered engravings, comes at a propitious moment at the beginning of a boom in country house and villa building among the Whig oligarchy.

Campbell is quickly taken up by Lord Burlington, who replaces James Gibbs with Campbell at Burlington House in London and sets out to place himself at the center of English neo-Palladian architecture.

Brook Taylor was born in Edmonton.

Entering St. John's College, Cambridge, as a fellow-commoner in 1701, he had in 1709 and 1714 taken degrees of LL.B. and LL.D. respectively.

Having studied mathematics under John Machin and John Keill, he had in 1708 obtained a remarkable solution of the problem of the "center of oscillation," which, however, had remained unpublished until May 1714, when his claim to priority had been disputed by Johann Bernoulli.

Taylor's Methodus Incrementorum Directa et Inversa adds a new branch to the higher mathematics, now designated the "calculus of finite differences".

Among other ingenious applications, he used it to determine the form of movement of a vibrating string, by him first successfully reduced to mechanical principles.

The same work contains the celebrated formula known as Taylor's theorem, the importance of which will remain unrecognized until 1772, when J. L. Lagrange realizes its powers and terms it "le principal fondement du calcul différentiel" ("the main foundation of differential calculus").

In his 1715 essay Linear Perspective, Taylor sets forth the true principles of the art in an original and more general form than any of his predecessors; but the work suffers from the brevity and obscurity which affects most of his writings.

Taylor had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society early in 1712, and in the same year had sat on the committee for adjudicating the claims of Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and from January 13, 1714, acts as secretary to the society.

His studies from 1715  take a philosophical and religious bent.

He corresponds in this year with the Comte de Montmort on the subject of Nicolas Malebranche's tenets.