5.3.4. FRENCH BAROQUE'S SOBRIETY

"Baroque:" The Portuguese term for a pearl of irregular form. 

COUNTER-REFORMATION ARTS DEFY PROTESTANT 

AUSTERITY AND RATIONALITY — EXCEPT IN FRANCE

There the importance of a powerful middle class brings a style that is more subdued than in other Catholic lands.*

*As said in Baroque et classicisme by Victor Tapié, 1957, a classic whose economic explanation would be unlikely today. 

I attended Monsieur Tapié's classes at the Sorbonne, and recall a flamboyant conservative who would illustrate the baroque by running his fingers through his flowing white hair, while wearing a giant ruby ring.

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Compare Santiago de Compostela, the church of a pilgrimage site in Spain, with Saint-Paul Saint-Louis, the first baroque church in France: 

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• Columns, carved vs. plain: 

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• Altar, gold vs. candles:

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*

• Saints look down from the summit:

Saint-James: The saint, a pilgrim, is traditional.

                                     Zoom 

Saint-Paul: The saint is a canonized king (Louis IX-Saint Louis), who wears a crown rather than a halo and stands under another, huge, crown that is easily seen from the street. He announces the power of monarchy, while the architecture and decor suggest that obedience to it is necessary for salvation.

Saint-Paul's relative simplicity characterizes other Parisian building of the time, place des Vosges and pont Neuf. Because the powerful, commerce-oriented French middle class resists what it considers exaggeration... 

And because a stronger monarchy

dominating the economy

means that riches don't (yet)

 have to be dispersed.

*Detour: Lack of opulence has a different reason after 1635, when France's entry into the Thirty Year's War and another civil war absorb ressources for a generation.

Little Louis XIV sleeps in torn sheets.

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Next,

5.3.5. 

In Spain, no civil war, no Protestants, no capitalists