CONSTANTS OF NATURE BAROQUE SCIENCE - University ….docVIP

From Divine order to Human approximation: Mathematics in Baroque Science Draft Ofer Gal University of Sydney 1. Baroque Science? Forceful and occasionally forced paradox; violent contrast; reliance on sensual detail, particularly color and touch, to indicate moral condition and religious theme; deliberate distortion of regular structures to produce the asymmetric effect of baroque art; and unity of thought more dependent on imagery than on logic. (White et al., Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, Vol. 1; 391) These are the words used by the Macmillan’s anthology of seventeenth-century literature to describe the writing of Richard Crashaw (b. 1612 or 13, d. 1649), a poet of turbulent life and modest, though not completely negligible repute. They are interesting for two reasons. First, because Crashaw is the definitive ‘Baroque’ English poet. Literally so; here is the very definition of “baroque” in Hollander and Kermode’s The Literature of Renaissance England: (1) originally (and still), an oddly shaped rather than a spherical pearl, and hence something twisted, contorted, involuted. (2) By a complicated analogy, a term designating stylistic periods in art, music and literature during the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. The analogies among the arts [continue Hollander and Kermode] are frequently strained, and the stylistic periods by no means completely coincide. But the relation between the poetry of Richard Crashaw in English and Latin, and the sculpture and architecture of Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), is frequently taken to typify the spirit of the Baroque.” (Hollander and Kermode, The Literature of Renaissance England; 1049) Secondly, the words used to characterize Crashaw’s style are interesting because they represent an exact mirror image of what we are accustomed to think of the great cultural achievement of Crashaw’s life time—the New Science: “Forceful and occasionally forced paradox” is a clear opposite of the strict logical coherence advoca