In a manner appropriate to its subject, The Theatrical Baroque is slender in size but broad in scope. The catalogue, like the exhibition it accompanied at the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, explores a wide range of interactions between the visual and performing arts in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The project’s structure also sets forth an ambitious agenda, as it proposes that faculty and students working together across disciplinary boundaries can generate new and meaningful insights into the often neglected collections of a university art museum.

An introductory essay by Larry F. Norman, Assistant Professor of French Literature at the University of Chicago, explains the exhibition’s genesis. Making use of an innovative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—designed to foster interdisciplinary approaches to the objects in the Smart Museum’s collections—Norman offered a graduate seminar in 1999 on the subject of the “theatrical Baroque.” The seminar sowed the seeds for the exhibition, and selected participants wrote the catalogue essays. When the show opened in the winter of 2001, it featured thirty-one works drawn not only from the university’s holdings, but also from private and public collections in Chicago and beyond. In lieu of individual catalogue entries, a checklist documents the works in the exhibition. True to the spirit of the Baroque, the small number of objects encompasses diverse media, including sculptures, oil paintings, prints, drawings, printed books, and even a bowl and platter set from the Chantilly porcelain manufactory. Although France is the primary focus, works are also drawn from Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Norman’s argument, as expounded in both the exhibition and the catalogue, maintains that “theater obsessed the cultural imagination of Western Europe” (1) from the beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century. Indeed, it is the popularity of theater that defines the Baroque for Norman, who delimits the period according to developments external to the history of art. Norman’s Baroque ends not with the birth of Rococo or even the rise of neoclassicism, but rather with the emergence of the novel and the concomitant valuation of private reading and interiority over shared viewing and exteriority. In his estimation, theater’s unrivaled persuasive powers made the genre especially useful in an era when institutions as diverse as the Counter-Reformation Church and princely or national courts sought to dazzle, instruct, and direct both elite and popular audiences. Moreover, Norman looks to the “rising bourgeoisie” (7) as a growing source of new spectators. Theater-going, he argues, became a way for the newly monied classes to imitate and mingle with the aristocracy. Even more importantly, theater itself “became a metaphor for social role-playing” (7) that, increasingly, determined an individual’s place in society.

Indeed, Norman believes that theater provided “metaphors applicable to every domain of human action,” and especially to “the art of painting and sculpting” (2). While acknowledging that analogies between the performing and visual arts date back to antiquity, he argues that, in the Baroque era, “the growth of academies and the rigidity of neoclassical criticism promoted the reflexive application of the rules of theater directly to painting, placing the visual arts in submission to dramatic theory” (9). For example, he reads the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture’s conférence of 1667 on Poussin’s Fall of Manna in the Wilderness as an attempt to derive laws of history painting from ancient theories of tragedy. Thus, the Academicians forgave Poussin for representing more than one moment of the Israelites’ tale with the acknowledgment that the master had “to condense” the “story in order to dramatize the essential moment of the ‘change of fortune’” (10) that Aristotle terms the peripeteia.

By highlighting the influence of performed theater, rather than written poetry, on Baroque theories of painting, Norman’s adds his own twist to Renssalear W. Lee’s classic interpretation of links between the so-called sister arts from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Lee’s Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967) stresses the French Academy’s vested interest in allying painting and poetry, noting that painting’s claims to a liberal-arts status generally rested on this analogy. By shifting the focus from poetry to theater, Norman opens up a number of avenues for exploration. For instance, his model of “theatricality” enables him to consider such sweeping concerns as depicted space and social performance in relation to painting, sculpture, and court society.

Each of the seven shorter essays written by students in Norman’s seminar relates individual works of art to one of the exhibition’s central concepts. The first of these, Robert S. Huddleston’s discussion of “Baroque Space and the Art of the Infinite,” begins to pin down some of the specific corollaries between the theater and the plastic arts of the Baroque. The illusion of motion central to Baroque art, Huddleston argues, adds a dimension of time to the otherwise static media of painting and sculpture. As it unfolds in both space and time, Baroque art borrows its form from theater. Moreover, as works of art blur boundaries between the illusory and the real, they unite “the painting and the viewer in a single coextensive space” (14). In this way, viewers are transformed into audience members separated from a staged play only by an invisible fourth wall.

More specifically, Véronique Sigu argues that pastoral theater and pastoral painting “share the same aesthetic rules” (58). In “The Baroque Pastoral or the Art of Fragile Harmony,” Sigu proposes that both art forms thrive on a “tension between the harmony of nature and the disruptive forces of dramatic conflict” (58). She explores this premise in an iconographic reading of Claude Lorrain’s Apollo Leading the Four Seasons in a Dance, where a ruined palace and a bearded personification of Time remind us that the cheerful frolic of the gods cannot last. More thought-provoking, however, is Sigu’s understanding of how tensions in pastoral painting and theater work both to reveal and to deepen “the illusion of representation” (65). The depicted image-within-the-image, she proposes, serves the same function as the play-within-the-play, as both tropes simultaneously naturalize and call attention to the artifice of their forms. This kind of reflexivity reached its pinnacle in a 1663 production of the Plaisirs de l’isle enchantée, staged in André Le Nôtre’s recently completed gardens at Versailles. Surrounded by the gardens’ fantastic mingling of reality and mythology, viewers were presented with a stage representing an enchanted island, upon which Louis XIV and his courtiers played the roles of Roger and his knights. Illusion and reality became even more intricately entwined when the playwright himself, Molière, appeared on stage in the role of a knight who, in turn, participated in a play-within-the-play.

Moving away from staged performances, Josh Ellenbogen’s “Representational Theory and the Staging of Social Performance” explores the tensions that structured representation in the social world of the French court. Investigating the elite ideal of honnêteté, Ellenbogen argues that the honnête homme designed his self-representation according to a strict set of conventions. These inherently artificial conventions, however, were successful only insofar as they disguised themselves as artless and natural. A drawing by Gabriel Saint-Aubin, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin Executing the Portrait of the Bishop of Chartres (1768), exemplifies this approach to representation. The work depicts the artist hidden behind a screen and surreptitiously sketching the bishop, who dines only a few feet away. Presumably, the portrait will only be “real” if the sitter is caught unaware. Yet, as an honnête homme dining in company, the bishop must already be performing a role that the portraitist will never be able to unmask. As artifice and illusion swirl about in a dizzying dance, viewers are left with a vertiginous sensation of representational play.

With essays whose brevity and purpose preclude exhaustive investigations of their far-reaching subjects, The Theatrical Baroque whets our appetite for more sustained explorations of specific relationships between drama and art in the Baroque era. A discussion of Bernini’s forays into the theater, for example, or perhaps further consideration of particular set designs, might have proven fruitful. More broadly, readers may yearn for more rigorous working definitions of both the “theatrical” and the “Baroque,” concepts that remain frustratingly fluid despite their central roles in the book’s thesis. Dix-huitièmistes will surely puzzle over how Norman’s notion of “theatricality” squares with the influential model put forth by Michael Fried in his Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Nonetheless, the volume offers an exemplary vision of a fruitful dialogue across disciplines and a productive collaboration between university departments. By tackling ambitious problems in a slim volume, Norman and his collaborators may have raised more questions than they have answered. Yet, by stimulating further scholarship, these questions may help to shape our understanding of the tensions that define the Baroque.