Gendered Violence in Art: A Study of Baroque and Classical Ages

ages. Abstract. Art and history are always mirrors of each other. Their specific modes of functioning, despite being dissimilar to each other, are still consonant. Consciousness of time is common to them, traveling continuously through the past and future, creating the present. But art; its representation, subversion, methods, spaces, humans and life is sometimes contrarian to the march of history. Art often defies history by rejecting the 'present' and creating its own utopia. "Indeed, music protects its social truth by virtue of its antithesis to the society, by virtue of isolation, yet by the same measure, this isolation lets music wither. It is as if its stimulus to production, its raison d’être, had been withdrawn.


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International Journal of Culture and Art Studies (IJCAS) Vol. 06, No. 1, 2022 | 47 -59 This article seeks to 'find' the elements of gendered violence in art. Of course, our versions of gender and violence are newer compared to these object's d'art. While doing so, it also mentions the motives of the artist and the 'symbols' that can be constructed and derived. It must be obvious that art never has any 'intended' meaning. We impute our connotations because we are definite products of history, and art must always be seen as an aberration in our world.

Some Selected Paintings in the Baroque and Neo-Classical Eras
The Baroque era succeeded the original Renaissance. This era is remarkable for its location in the process of history. The period of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century is unique in anticipating the mammoth changes that were yet to come but not being sure of them. It does not have the optimism of the Renaissance but the hope of a glorious industrial revolution that would make Europe conquer the world. Holofernes, the Assyrian commander, after getting him drunk. Judith represents an Israel, who was helpless before a stronger invading army, wins due to the fear created after Holofernes's murder. Crucially, the Israelis were of an Abrahamic religion crouching against a pagan enemy.
The composition is equally interesting as the story. The general is caught unaware and naked before becoming the subject of fatal violence. He is shown halfway between life and death, and it is a woman who has killed him (one of whom would have given him birth). Judith's face shows abhorrence yet determination to carry out this unspeakably important task. She is accompanied by a maid who shows menacing attitudes, probably a representation of class attitudes that lower classes are much more tolerant and accepting of violence. This painting is a celebration of brutality. The norms of violence are turned as the meek widow is beheading the General.
An ancient textual discourse of Judith deciding to leave for the Assyrian camp to seduce the General and slay him is illuminating. "Lord God of my father Simeon, who gavest him a sword to execute vengeance against strangers, who had defiled by their uncleanness, and uncovered the virgin unto confusion" (...) "And who gavest their wives to be made a prey, and their daughters into captivity: and all their spoils to be divided to the servants, who were zealous with thy zeal: assist, I beseech thee, O Lord God, me a widow." The section where Judith is preparing to leave for her bloody assignment is also noteworthy. "And she called her maid, and going down into her house, she took off her haircloth and put away the garments of her widowhood." And she washed her body, and anointed herself with the best ointment (....), and clothed herself with the garments of her gladness (...) and adorned herself with all her ornaments. (...) And the Lord also gave her more beauty: because all this dressing up did not proceed from sensuality, but from virtue" (The Book of Judith). There are several themes in this composition that are worth noting while keeping the thirty years of war in the background; the violent widow, the naked and unprepared General, the huge but meek Assyrian army, religion and war, the pure vs. impure races, the crimson background, and the ugly maid. Interestingly, these two different portrayals of women are very unlike the next important work to be discussed.
The Milkmaid by Vermeer is a masterpiece in the artistic and aesthetic sense. The painting reeks of photographic realism, a technique mastered by the then-contemporary artists. In several insightful works on the depiction of working-class women of the time, a variety of issues crop up.
"The stereotypes of milkmaid and ploughman enjoyed a wide popular appeal throughout the long eighteenth century in Britain (....). It represented an ideal of peasant beauty and sexual attractiveness" (Ganev, 2007). For the male audience, this portrait would reflect an "element of fantasy as subtle as the shadows on the whitewashed walls" (Liedtke, 2009).
The sexual labels of "potency" of milkmaids are counterpoised against the impotent nobility, and thus, the consciousness of the socio-political need for a systemic change arises. The sociobiological views of the time fused with the evolutionary matrix ensured that sex was seen as beneficial, in concurrency with the physiologists whose only concern was the prevention of scarcity and depopulation. However, by the nineteenth century, the governmental discourse had professed the Malthusian concerns on sexual freedom. In the nineteenth century Europe suffered from politically volatile situations as leading to "poverty, wars, famines, and epidemics, (....) (the) direct and inevitable results of sexual promiscuity" (Ganev, 2007). The moral reformists of the eighteenth century lambasted these sexual stereotypes as symbols of degeneration. The Baroque era, despite being the product of counter-reformation, celebrated them in a subtle manner.
However, the nineteenth-century too rejoiced them in it its own way, the spread of mass media among the publicans ensured that songs like these were enjoyed-"Town Lass; looks with her white Face; And lips of deadly pale; but it is not so; with those that go; through frost and Snow with Cheeks; that glow; to carry the milking pail" (The Milking-Pail, 2021). The depiction of a woman in Baroque composition as a central figure also marks a departure from Da Vinci's Vitruvian man, i.e., one-dimensional and unisex subject. The space for the strict Victorian gender roles was created. A byproduct of this was class variations in the natures of men. The lustful, strong, warlike martial races of working-class led the imperial project of conquering the world.
In the Baroque era, they had dominated their own women; in the Classical epoch, they sought to subjugate the world.
The strong biological-anatomical meanings from The Milkmaid can also be seen in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. This piece marks the changing point of the Dutch Golden Age.
Rembrandt has employed a miss-en-scene, i.e., passive dramatics. The painting shows an investigation of the corpse of Aris Kindt, a criminal sentenced to death for armed robbery. Such anatomical lessons were conducted in public settings, as entertainment in Protestant countries, for some fees. The Church, however was averse to dismemberments as that desecrated the human body, a gift of God.  (Mitchell, 1994).
The reconciliation of science and art is very suggestive. The doctor uses his "scientific gaze" and wreaks violence on the body; his attention is perceptive of "the natural philosophy, (and) may be organized around the corpse, but in order not to see it" (Mitchell, 1994). "The painting represents "the social theater of mastery" (Mitchell, 1994). The dynamics of fully covered nobles in their respectable attire vs. the exposed and naked body of the criminal are brought to light. These men are "armoured" by their clothes and stable lives, whereas "Aris Kindt no longer even "owns" his body, which is the property of the state and is being dismembered. It is ironic that the thief's crime against private property has resulted in his loss of body ownership and has allowed Tulp and the guild members to acquire it" (Mitchell, 1994).
To interrogate the relationship of men with religion and economy, Caravaggio's masterpiece St.
Jerome Writing comes to mind. The principal figure of St. Jerome, a European saint, is of historical interest. He wrote to his friend about pagan widows, "Such women always paint their faces with rouge and about in silk dresses, they strut about in silk dresses, (....). They rejoice that at last, they have escaped from a husband's supremacy, and look about for another, not intending to obey him, according to the law of God, but rather command him" (Pence, 1941). A spiritual relationship crated through the "tangibility of the supernatural" (Chorpenning, 1987).
The characteristic counter reformative techniques "prescribed that the meditator imagine a religious scene as if it were taking place before him "now," or as if he were present at the historical moment, and then participate in it by means of the senses, or, more exactly, their analogs in the imagination" (Chorpenning, 1987). Thus, works of this kind created a gendered history that was not bounded b historical time and sought to produce intense imagery to impress the viewer. In the Baroque period, the paintings sought to idealize all the spaces while retaining penetrating natural humanism. The contradiction between the "actual" scene and the "false realistic" scene is visible in almost all the cited works. If one wishes to situate this in the libidinal political economy, one finds that the major historical landmarks of this age can suffice for explanations. This age can be deemed important for its accuracy were contradictions so aptly captured in art.     The music in the Baroque era underwent a revolutionary transition as a culmination of techniques and artistic sensibilities. Venice's first public space for a specific musical purpose was inaugurated in 1637. Pre-Baroque music had been denounced as childish and simplistic, devoid of emotional upheavals. The music of this epoch, without being too sentimental, incorporated the oftenparadoxical elements of tonal structure and its emotive aspects. The Church and Imperial Courts commissioned music, and the artists would travel across in the hope of funds and connections, thus creating European music per se.
There were several technical developments in musical composition. Many significant changes in instrument manufacturing techniques were incorporated; for instance, the most coveted Stradivarius and Amadi violins were a product of the Italian genius of those days. The pianoforte, an ancestor of the modern piano, was pioneered in the baroque age. These innovations were said to be the zenith of centuries-old experimentation. This resulted into diversifying of music into the evolution of operas (dramatic music), concertos, and sonata. This was a time of great scientific discoveries. Naturally, it made the musical experience an artistic science. The belief was that the harmonic tonality (similar to mathematical progressions) could lead to specific motives of the composer being conveyed through a piece. Since most of the music was contrapuntal, the individual notes always had a pattern to them.
The Four Seasons, a masterpiece by Vivaldi, is one of the classic examples where literary sensibilities meet music. The first movement of the concerto, titled as Spring is joyful and an exact imagination of the season. One can fancy the birds chirping, tress rejoicing, and the soft rain caressing the canopy in a grandiose fashion. It seems that this spring is not a product of the composer's genius or the audiences' imaginations, but rather a worldwide and pure existence.
One could express without "the intervention of intellect." The use of continuous rhythm and abrupt dynamics perhaps reflects the social mood of the time. Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama has attributed the use of allegories in Baroque music to Lutheranism. "The doctrine of justification by faith and the concomitant devaluation of the efficacy of good works (...) (is) a parallel to the allegorical process of the "emptying" of objects, images and words of (...) (their) inherent expressive (...) in order to make them function as pure signifiers" (Chafe, 1984).
The Baroque theological imagination carries with it the burden of "death" and "decay" of the Middle Ages. This violence caused by the allegorical dualism of the phonetics of alphabetical script and "hieroglyphic" or "emblematic metaphors" lies at the heart of western music. Manfred Bukofzer called Bach's music "an indirect iconology of sound" (Crist, 1996). The Baroque sense of movement in an earthly domain traversed by Godly omnipotence amidst human agency is the guiding philosophical force. The expression of dialectics is most crucial for Baroque music theory. Adorno suggested that Bach's "abstract instrumentation" is his endeavor to reconcile the "historical forces" while striving for a utopian dream. Thus, this music is a reflection of a communist heterotopia for music as it reconciled the elements of Renaissance and religious chorales. Bukofzer described Baroque music as a "heteronomous art, subordinated to words and serving only (...) to a dramatic end that transcended music" (Chafe, 1984). And yet its 'unknown' and passionate characteristics are a reflection of the contained human condition by the Church.
While remaining as religious music primarily, Baroque music gave a semantic statement against absolutism.
For Classical music, on the other hand, "The principle of polyphony (...) (was) no longer heteronomous to an emancipated harmony but as, instead, a principle at every point awaiting reconciliation with it" (Adorno, 2006). This continuous struggle was, in some manner, put to rest in classical music. "Yet dissonance is more rational than consonance insofar as it articulates the relationship of sounds, however complex, contained in it instead of buying their unity at the price of the annihilation of partial elements contained in it, that is, through a "homogenous" resonance" (Adorno, 2006). But these sets of reflections were made with the respect to Schoenberg's atonal music in the 20 th century. We must turn to classical music to understand this curious evolution. life has always been about the organic unity of life" (Sell, 2007). On the center stage of modernity, they embarked upon "theatricalized authenticity." "The bohemian myth gave existential firmness to the day-to-day chaos in which many Europeans lived, gave them a kind of an ontological language with which to express popular memory, existential authenticity, cultural prerogative, and political entitlement in a society that saw regular and legal violence against women; the poor; and political, ethnic, and epidemiological minorities" (Sell, 2007). Some have noticed Hegelian dialectics of this kind in Beethoven. Adorno drew attention to the fundamental process "of human consciousness trying to understand itself" through music by Beethoven. The composer realized that his works cannot exist without the constraints of the material world, and yet music could lead him to liberation from "particularity of the words and the words and concepts that poetry and philosophy cannot exist without." A process of a similar kind was noticed in Mozart, leading to some leading musicologists calling his music "feminine" and "demonic." In Don Giovanni, he was "able to express the dialectic between light and darkness without courting faith (...) (, he lets) his situations to retain their existential confusion" (Clive, 1956). This state of perpetual confusion in Mozart made Karl Barth comment that his harmonies are "providence in the coherent form of which darkness is also a part, but in which darkness is no eclipse, also the deficiency which is no flaw, the sadness which cannot lead to despair, also the gloomy which is not transformed into the tragic" (Clive, 1956). That he is able to reconcile and coexist Kierkegaard and a joyful Hyperion to nothingness was his genius.
"No discursive mediation of these two elements is possible, yet Mozart's music, without destroying the authenticity of either, expresses joyful affirmation always on the edge of profound nihilism." (Clive, 1956).
The "refined spirit, delicate, sentimental, feminine" music of Mozart "changed the sex of music.
(...) Instead of massiveness (of Bach and Handel) is flexibility in place of logic, sentiment, pathos in lieu of boldness," wrote Edmund Burke in Philosophical inquiry into the origins of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. In classical music we see "the seeking out of a remote past while peering ahead to an uncertain future" (Kamien, 1986). For some, Haydn was "childlike" and Beethoven "directly connected to politics and pathos of his time (...) (while) heroically battling for mankind" (Carpenter, 2010). The indisputable sense of otherness, the presence of impersonal and subjunctivization of self were responded to by such music.

Conclusion
"Art, therefore, is a structured approach to exposition, knowing and knowledge. In a cognitivist sense, works of art represent the artist's ability to create a structure of forms that are in their relationships analogs to the forms of feeling humans experience and their thought processes" (Akpang, 2020). No final remarks could sum up the complexity of the dialectics between the historical processes and the human spirit. These pieces of art of these eras were just an illustration of how a gendered analysis could proceed without making simplistic judgments on the 'meanings' of a certain piece.