In the chapter on multiplicity and unity, the affective or anthropological motifs are both more complex and more interesting. Wölfflin’s initial distinction is between “the articulated system of forms of classic art and the flow of the baroque” . Imagery of fluidity pervades the chapter, for water, according to Wölfflin, “was the period’s favourite element” . “Now, and now only,” he says, “the greatness of the sea could find its representation”, and as if to inculcate this affinity he places the (...) reproduction of a baroque seascape by Jan van Goyen at the head of the introduction to the book and a riverscape by Peter Brueghel at the head of this chapter, even though neither painting is discussed where it is reproduced. In fact it is worth observing that Wölfflin does not discuss any water paintings in this chapter, though of course he does so elsewhere. Where fluidity becomes the meaning of his category, it is absent from the contents of the paintings. Wölfflin’s procedure, as I have argued, is both objectively analytical and subjectively interpretive, and in this chapter he seems careful to preserve the distance between the forms he describes and the significances he reveals. Were he to treat water paintings here, he would obscure the fact that his analyses are always the prelude to translations.Though he conceals the fact, Wölfflin has here effected a translation of the baroque into itself, of water painting into fluidity. Baroque art has declared its true meaning, which is to be an art of flux—of time and, throughout this chapter, of momentariness. Suddenly here the baroque comes into its own, with a surprising reversal in Wölfflin’s categories. Until now he has associated the baroque with lawlessness and confusion, and classicism with the unifying force of symmetrical organization around a center. Unity is repose—the equation had been made explicitly in the discussion in Classic Art of Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna —and clearly in Principles of Art History Wölfflin seems to say that the unification achieved in Leonardo’s Last Supper was later lost Tiepolo’s version.21 As Wölfflin says in the first sentence of chapter 4, “The principle of closed form of itself presumes the conception of the picture as a unity.” But as the baroque now comes into its own, it appears that the unity of classicism is an illusory, “multiple unity,” whereas the true or “unified unity” actually pertains to the baroque. It is the usurping baroque, rather than the deposed classic, that now has “a dominating central motive.” And So Wölfflin returns in this chapter to the two Last Suppers in order to rescind his earlier position. He still claims that Leonardo’s painting is unified, but he offers Tiepolo’s version to illustrate the “possibility of surpassing this unity” . In becoming itself, baroque art has overthrown classicism.21. “Tiepolo composed a Last Supper which, while it cannot be compared with Leonardo as a work of art, stylistically presents the absolute opposite. The figures do not unite in the plane, and that decides”. (shrink)

There can be no question, of course, of any "influence" of Kant's or Rousseau's ideas on Mozart's musical structures. While I have used various loosely synonymous nonmusical terms—reverie, dream, unconscious, ethereal, and so on—the analysis could proceed on a nonmetaphorical, strictly technical basis. Indeed, much of it has. I should therefore clarify why I have superimposed this philosophical and literary layer on the musical analysis, even at the risk of giving the false impression that I wished to make the history (...) of music dependent upon the history of ideas.My answer lies, first of all, in the contention—in which I follow chiefly Michel Foucault, though with qualifications—that at every period in history a subterranean network of constraints governs the organization of human thought. Different fields develop and change in parallel not because they affect one another but because the infrastructures of mental activity affect them all. In this respect, the relationship of music and philosophy is no different from the relationship of literature and philosophy. The infrastructure is the precondition of thought and is by definition unconscious and unarticulated. Because it lies outside the limits of the individual disciplines, it cannot really be formulated within any of them. Hence arises the necessity of comparative study. The infrastructure comes to light at the juncture of independent fields. In the present case, it is accurate to say that music and philosophy mutually illuminate one another precisely because they are such different media; where they coincide lie the true invariants of eighteenth-century thought.Marshall Brown, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is the author of The Shape of German Romanticism, and Pre-Romanticism: Studies in Stylistic Transformation. (shrink)

Introduction : music and abstraction -- Music and fantasy -- German romanticism and music -- Negative poetics : on skepticism and the lyric voice -- Rethinking the scale of literary history -- Mozart, Bach, and musical abjection -- Moods at mid-century : Handel and English literature, 1740-1760 -- Passion and love : anacreontic song and the roots of romantic lyric -- Haydn's whimsy : poetry, sexuality, repetition -- Non Giovanni : Mozart with Hegel.