6
PARTISAN REVIEW
was that exuberance of the counter-reformation, the ornamental
"manner"-a surrender to the operatic effects of the Carracci, Guido
Reni, or, above all, Rubens. Here too were illusion and
chang~nd
)
movement, and a purely visual appeal of the surface. This operatic
"manner," like the two preceding "manners," might expand into
"open" compositions in which the colossal ceased to be monumental
and became frankly and sumptuously rhetorical-the difference be–
tween Raphael's School of Athens and Rubens' Rape of the Sabines,
or Peace and War. In such paintings the recessional composition and
unstable equilibrium of the "shocking" realists were swept into large
decorative flourishes.
If
this rhetorical "manner" was at all realistic,
it played with the actual, as Wolffiin says, only for the sake of con–
trast. Lastly, there was a reaction against these three "manners" in
the somewhat academic pastoral of the Poussins, or the mellow idyls
of Claude Lorrain. This milder, more poised and measured rhetoric,
with few emphatic accents, might seem, at first glance, alien to the
baroque agitation; but no one could mistake either the Poussins or
. Claude for other than painters of their age. They were not less
"rhetorical" than Rubens, even if they were more stately and re–
strained. Lyric as it may be, the purely momentary luminescence of
Claude, his cultivation of the visual, would link him with the baroque
if nothing else did. Yet both Claude and the Poussins stood at the
terminus of the legitimate baroque, and showed effects not entirely
characteristic of it. The Poussins, especially, belonged in part to the
eclectic and academic
art
of Rome or the France of Louis XIV,
which had a sedate Augustan carriage of its own in Le Sueur, Le
Brun, and Le Notre. Nevertheless it must be realized that the "aca–
demic" art, usually contrasted with the baroque, may itself be distinc–
tively baroque when it strives for "elegance" rather than correctness
and severity-when, in short, it becomes rhetorical.
With certain modifications, what applies to painting applies
likewise to sculpture or architecture by Michaelangelo, Borromini,
Bernini, Wren, or Vanbrugh.
III
The passage from baroque to rococo (another matter often mis–
conceived) was an easy and natural one-the passage from Rubens
to Watteau, Boucher, or Tiepolo, or from the ornate heroic romances
like William Chamberlayne's
Pharonnida
to the nice precisions of
