Formalism

Formalism (pronounced fawr-muh-liz-uhm)

(1) Strict adherence to, or observance of, prescribed or traditional forms, as in music, poetry and art.

(2) In religion, a strong attachment to external forms and observances.

(3) In philosophy (ethics), a doctrine that acts are in themselves right or wrong regardless of consequences.

(4) In mathematics (formal logic), a doctrine that mathematics, including the logic used in proofs, can be based on the formal manipulation of symbols without regard to their meaning (the mathematical or logical structure of a scientific argument as distinguished from its subject matter; the theory a statement has no meaning but that its symbols, regarded as physical objects, exhibit a structure that has useful applications).

(5) A scrupulous or excessive adherence to outward form at the expense of inner reality or content

(6) In Marxist criticism, scrupulous or excessive adherence to artistic technique at the expense of social values etc; also a view adopted by some non-Marxist critical theorists).

(7) In performance art, theatre a deliberately stylized mode of production.

(8) In both structural engineering and computer science, the notation, and its structure, in (or by) which information is expressed.

1830–1840: The construct was formal + -ism.  Formal was from the Middle English formel, from the Old French formel, from the Latin formalis, from forma (form) of unknown origin but possibly from the Etruscan morma, from the Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ) (shape, fashion, appearance, outward form, contour, figure), dissimilated as formīca and possibly formīdō.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek –ismos & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, often through the Latin –ismus & -isma, though sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Greek.  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form action nouns from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Although actual use of the word formalism dates only from its adoption (1830s) in critical discourse, disputes related to the matter can be found in texts since antiquity in fields as diverse as agriculture, literature and theology.  Formalism is a noun, formalist is a noun & adjective, formalistic is an adjective and formalistically is an adverb; the usual noun plural is formalists.

Comrade Stalin, Comrade Shostakovich and Formalism

Comrade Stalin (1878–1953; leader of the USSR, 1924-1953) didn’t invent the regime’s criticism of formalism but certainly made it famous after comrade Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was denounced in the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth) in January 1936, after the Moscow performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  Stalin didn’t like music he couldn’t whistle and the complex strains of Shostakovich’s opera, sometimes meandering, sometimes strident, certainly didn’t permit that; he labeled the composition формализм (formalism), "chaos instead of music", a self-indulgence of technique by a composer interested only in the admiration of other composers, an audience of no value in the school of Soviet realism.  It’s believed the Pravda article may have been written by Stalin himself and he used the word "formalism" in the sense it was understood English; formality being the observance of forms, formalism the disposition to make adherence to them an obsession.  To Stalin, the formal rules of composition were but a means to an end and the only legitimate end was socialist realism; anything other than that "an attack on the people".  Lest it be thought the defeat of fascism in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) might have mellowed his views in such matters, Stalin at the 1948 party congress made sure the point was hammered home in the Communist Party's brutish way:  

"Comrades, while realistic music is written by the People's composers, formalistic music is written by composers who are against the People.  Comrades, one must ask why it is that realistic music is always written by composers of the People? The People's composers write realistic music simply due to the fact that being by nature realists right to their very core, they simply cannot help writing music that is realistic, while those anti-People composers, being by nature unrepentant formalists, cannot help... cannot help... cannot help writing music that is formalistic."

Comrade Stalin signing death warrants.

In the Soviet Union, producing or performing stuff hated by Stalin was not good career move.  Shostakovich completed his Fourth Symphony in C minor, Opus 43, in May 1936 and, even after the attack in Pravda, planned to stage its premiere in Leningrad December but found the orchestra unwilling to risk incurring the Kremlin’s wrath and almost as soon as rehearsals began, the orchestra's management cancelled the performance, issuing a statement saying comrade Shostakovich had withdrawn the work.  Actual responsibility for the decision remains unclear but it was certainly in accord with the views of the Kremlin and not until 1961, almost a decade on from Stalin’s death, was it performed.

Comrade Shostakovich at his dacha.

Shostakovich became a realist, his response to denunciation the melodic Fifth Symphony in D minor, Opus 47.  Premiered in November 1937 in Leningrad, it was a resounding triumph, attracting a standing ovation that lasted more than thirty minutes.  The following January, just before its first performance in Moscow, an article, under the composer’s name, appeared in the local newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva in which he described the Fifth Symphony as "…a Soviet artist's creative response to justified criticism."  Whether Shostakovich actually wrote the piece isn’t known but there’s never been any doubt it’d never have been published without Stalin’s approval and the success of the Fifth Symphony re-personed Shostakovich.  Whatever it lacked in glasnost (openness), it made up for in perestroika (restructuring) and the party engineered his rehabilitation as carefully as it had his fall a couple of years earlier, anxious to show how those bowing its demands could be rewarded as easily and fully as dissidents could be punished.

Purple

Purple (pronounced pur-puhl)

(1) Any color having components of both red and blue (often highly saturated), the darker the hue, the more likely to be described thus.

(2) In color theory, any non-spectral color on the line of purples on a color chromaticity diagram or a color wheel between violet and red.

(3) A dye or pigment producing such a colour

(4) Cloth or clothing of this hue, especially as formerly worn distinctively by persons of imperial, royal, or other high rank.

(5) In the Roman Catholic Church, a term at various times used to describe a monsignor, bishop or cardinal (or their office), now most associated with the rank, office or authority of a cardinal.

(6) Imperial, regal, or princely in rank or position.

(7) Any of several nymphalid butterflies including the red-spotted purple and the banded purple)

(8) Of or pertaining to the color purple (or certain things regarded as purple).

(9) In writing, showy or overwrought; exaggerated use of literary devices and effects; marked by excessively ornate rhetoric (purpureal).

(10) In language, profane or shocking; swearing.

(11) In modern politics, relating to or noting political or ideological diversity (in the US based on the blending of Democrat (blue) and Republican (red); in other places red & blue indicate different places on the political spectrum).

(12) In drug slang; the purple haze cultivar of cannabis in the kush family, either pure or mixed with others, or by extension any variety of smoked marijuana (“purple haze” a popular name for commercially available weed in those places where such thing are lawful.  Purple haze was originally slang for LSD.

(13) In agriculture, earcockle, a disease of wheat.

(14) To make or become purple (or, in ecclesiastical use, to put on one’s purple vestments) .

Pre 1000: From the Middle English noun and adjective purple, purpel & purpur, from Old English purpuren & purpul, a dissimilation (first recorded in Northumbrian, in the Lindisfarne gospel) of purpure (purple dye, a purple garment), from the adjective purpuren (purple; dyed or colored purple), from purpura (a kind of shellfish, Any of various species of molluscs from which Tyrian purple dye was obtained, especially the common dog whelk; the dye; cloth so dyed; splendid attire generally), from the Ancient Greek πορφύρα (porphýra or porphura) (the purple fish (Murex)), perhaps of Semitic origin.  Purpur continued as a parallel form until the fifteenth century and was maintained in the rules of heraldry until well into the nineteenth.  The verb purple (to tinge or stain with purple) was from the noun and emerged circa 1400.  The earlier form was purpured, a past-participle adjective.  The adjective purplish (somewhat purple, tending to purple) was from the noun and dates from the 1560s.  Purple is a noun, verb & adjective, purpled & purpling are verbs, purplish, purpler, purply & purplest are adjectives and purpleness is a noun; the noun plural is purples.

1974 Triumph Stag in magenta.  Some of the shades of brown, beige, orange and such used in the 1970s by British Leyland are not highly regarded but some were quite striking.

The rhetorical use in reference to “the splendid; the gaudy” began as a description of garments (classically imperial regalia) and since the mid-eighteenth century, as “purple prose” of writing.  In US political discourse and commentary, purple has since been used (often in graphical or cartographic form) to indicating the sectional or geographical spaces in which the increasing division of the country into red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) was less apparent.  That this came into widespread use only by around 2004 is because the use of red & blue by the US news media became (more or less) standardized only by the 1990s, use have begun circa 1980, something without any relationship to the linking of the colors (red=left; blue=right) traditional in other parts of the English-speaking world.  Other words used to describe purplish shades include lavender, mauve, amethyst, violet (with many sub-types) lilac, orchid, indigo, mulberry, plum, eggplant (aubergine seems rare but is used in commerce), fuchsia, heliotrope, periwinkle, purpureus & thistle and while many directly reference the flowers of plants, one curiosity is magenta: It was so called because the dye of that shade was created at the time of the Battle of Magenta (1559) in which French and Sardinian forces defeated those of the Austrians.  Purple is widely used in zoology and botany to create common names of species to some extent colored purple.

Purple patch: 1970 Dodge Challenger (440 Six-Pack) in Plum Crazy (left) and 1971 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda in In Violet) (clone; right).

Chrysler had some history in the coining of fanciful names for colors dating from the psychedelic era of the late 1960s when the choices included Plum Crazy, In-Violet, Tor Red, Sub Lime, Sassy Grass, Panther Pink, Moulin Rouge, Top Banana, Lemon Twist & Citron Yella.  Although it may be an industry myth, the story told was that Plum Crazy & In-Violet (lurid shades of purple) were late additions because the killjoy board refused to sign-off on Statutory Grape.  The lurid colors soon disappeared, not only because fashions change but because at the time they depended on the use of lead which was banned from paint in the early 1970s.  Not until the early twenty-first century did manufacturers perfect ways economically to replicate the earlier colors without using lead.

Salma Hayek in eye-catching purple,  Cannes Film Festival May 2015.

In idiomatic use, purple is popular.  One “born into the purple” was literally one of royal or exalted birth although it’s now often used even of those from families somewhere in the upper middle class.  The “purple death” was hospital slang for Spanish influenza and it was an allusion to the cyanosis which, because of the difficulty breathing, which would turn the skin purple.  In the early post-war years “purple death” was also used to describe a cheap Italian wine.   The phrase “once in a purple moon” was a variation of “once in a blue moon” and some dictionaries include an entry, apparently only for the purpose of assuring us that not only is it extinct but it may never have been in common use.  “Purple bacteria” (the form only ever used in the plural) are a proteobacteria which produce their own food using photosynthesis; they are all classed as purple, even though some are orange, red or brown.  In the analogue-era world of the phone phreaks (hackers who used the telephone networks for other than the intended purpose), a “purple box” was a device which added a hold facility to a telephone line.  It was an allusion to the general term “black box” used in engineering and electronics to describe small devices with specific purposes; not all “purple boxes” were actually purple.  “Purple gas” was a Canadian term which described the gas (motor spirit; petrol) colored with a purple dye to indicate it was sold subject to a lower rate of taxation and for use only in agriculture and not on public roads.  Anyone found using “purple gas” beyond a farm could be charged and many countries use similar methods though the dye is not always purple.  “Purple gold” was a synonym of amethyst gold (a brittle alloy of gold and aluminium, purple in colour).

1994 Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6  (964) in Amethyst Metallic over Classic Gray.

A “purple passage” (also as “purple prose”) was any form of writing thought showy or overwrought, using an exaggerated array of literary devices and effects or marked by excessively ornate rhetoric.  It was a criticism but the later “purple patch” which describes any particular good period or performance (in any context) was wholly positive.  The “purple pill” was an advertising slogan used by a pharmaceutical company but unlike “little blue pill” (Viagra), it never entered the vernacular.  “Purple plague” has specific meanings in chemistry and electronics (relating to a chemical reaction which produces an undesirable purple compound) but a more amusing use is by Roman Catholic bishops noting a unwanted number of monsignors (who wear a purple sash) in their dioceses, sent there by the Vatican.  In US politics a “purple state” is a “swing state”, one which, depending on this and that, may vote either Republican (red) or Democrat (blue).  The “purple star” was the symbol worn by Jehovah's Witnesses in concentration camps in Nazi Germany (1933-1945), one of a number of color-coded patches, the best-known of which was the yellow Jewish star.  The Jehovah's Witnesses were an interesting case in that uniquely among the camp inmates, they could at any time leave if they were prepared to sign a declaration denying their religious beliefs.  In international air-traffic management, a “purple zone” (also “purple airway”) describes a route reserved for an aircraft on which a member of a royal family is flying.  In US military use, the “Purple Heart” dating from 1932, is still awarded to service personnel wounded in combat.  It’s origin was a decoration in purple cloth first awarded in 1782 which came to be known as the “wound stripe”.  In the mid 1960s, “purple haze” was slang for LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide, a psychedelic drug with a long history verging on academic respectability before becoming a popular hallucinogenic, users clipping the term to "acid"); it was later repurposed for various strains of weed.

Lindsay Lohan, admirer of all things purple.

The dye tyrian purple (all the evidence suggests it would now be thought a crimson), was produced around Tyre and was prized as dye for royal garments, hence the figurative use in the sixteenth century of purple for “imperial or regal power” (it was also the color of mourning or penitence among royalty or the upper reaches of the clergy).  Tyrian purple (also known as shellfish purple) was for long periods the most expensive substance in Antiquity (often (by weight) three times the value of gold, the exchange rate set by a Roman edict issued in 301 AD.  By the fifteenth century when the intricate process to extract and process the dye was lost, Tyrian purple had for millennia been variously a symbol of strength, sovereignty and money and its use had spread from the Classical world to Southern Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia and was so associated with the civilization of the Phoenicians (the color named after their city-state Tyre) that they were known as the “purple people”.  What many didn’t know was that the dye associated with the illustrious came not from a gemstone or some vivid coral but from the slimy mucous of sea snails in the Murex family.  Debate continues about what must have been the process used in extraction and production although, given many factories and artisans were involved over the years, there may have been many variations of the method.

It was in 1453 when the Byzantine capital Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) fell to the Ottomans that the knowledge of Tyrian purple was lost, something of a footnote to the end of the Eastern Roman Empire but still a loss.  Then, the infamously smelly dyeworks of the old city were the hub of purple production although, after a series of punitive taxes, the Catholic Church had lost control of the pigment which is the origin of the pope’s decision that red would become the new symbol of Christian power and this was adopted for the garb of cardinals; the story that the vivid red symbolized the blood cardinals mush be prepared to spill in the defense of their pope was just a cover story although one obviously approved of by the pontiff.

Beginning in 1968 with Shades of Deep Purple (left), the rock band Deep Purple sometimes used purple-themed album cover art and may have wished they'd stuck with that for their eponymous third album (1969).  The original cover (centre), featuring a fragment of one panel of the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) by Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450-1516), was declared "demonic" by the US distributors so an alternative needed hastily be arranged and whether because of the tight schedule or just wanting to play it safe, they stuck to purple (right).  They'd earlier had a similar difficulty with their US label when releasing their second album (The Book of Taliesyn (1968)), the objection that time that one song title (Wring That Neck) was "too violent" (it was an instrumental piece and the reference was to a technique used with the neck of a guitar but it was anyway changed to Hard Road).  Times have changed.

In literary theory, “to etiolate” a text is to remove or revise the “purple passages”.  In literature, purple passages are those sections of a text which are overly elaborate, flowery, or extravagant in style, often prioritizing ornate or decorative language and the use of needlessly long words, the meaning of which is often obscure.  Such writing is thought a literary self-indulgence or a mere pretentious display of knowledge; grandiose execution at the expense of clarity, the usual critique being “style over substance”.  The phrase is almost certainly derived from the historic use of the once rare and expensive purple dye being restricted (actually by statute or edict in some places) to royalty and even when availability became wider, the association with luxury & wealth continued.  The idea has long been a tool of critics, Roman lyric poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) in his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry, 19 BC) referring disapprovingly to the purpureus… pannus (a purple piece of cloth), the irrelevant insertion of a grandiloquent or melodramatic passage into a work.  Horace thought this disruptive at best and absurd at worst and “purple passages” continues to be used to describe writing which is needlessly ornate, florid and usually discordantly incongruous.  Used almost always pejoratively (although there do seem to be some admirers), comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) might have called such flourishes “formalism”.

Baroque

Baroque (pronounced buh-rohk or ba-rawk (French)).

(1) Of or relating to a style of architecture and art originating in Italy in the early seventeenth century and variously prevalent in Europe and the New World for a century and a half, characterized by free and sculptural use of the classical orders and ornament, by forms in elevation and plan suggesting movement, and by dramatic effect in which architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts often worked to combined effect (often used with an initial capital letter).

(2) In music, of or relating to the period following the Renaissance, extending (circa 1600-1750) which tended to be characterized by extensive use of the thorough bass and of ornamentation to create dramatic effects. Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, and Antonio Vivaldi were great composers of the baroque era.

(3) In literature, a style of prose thought extravagantly ornate, florid, and convoluted in character or style.

(4) An irregularly shaped pearl (rare except in technical use).

(5) In pre-modern twentieth century design or engineering, objects intricately or ornately detailed in a way no longer financially viable.

(6) Descriptively (of any object where the technical definitions don’t apply), variously (1) ornate, intricate, decorated, laden with detail & (2) complex and beautiful, despite an outward irregularity.

(7) In stonemasonry & woodworking, chiselled from stone, or shaped from wood, in a garish, crooked, twisted, or slanted sort of way, grotesque or embellished with figures and forms such that every level of relief gives way to more details and contrasts.

(8) Figuratively, something overly or needlessly complicated, applied especially to bureaucracy or instances like accounting systems which either are or appear to be designed to conceal or confuse.

1765: From the French baroque (originally “pearl of irregular shape”), from the Portuguese barroco or barroca (irregularly shaped pearl) which was in some way influenced by either or both the Spanish berrueco or barrueco (granitic crag, irregular pearl, spherical nodule) and the Italian barocco, of uncertain ultimate origin but which may be from the Latin verrūca (wart).  The etymology is however murky and some suggest the Portuguese words may directly have come from the Spanish berruca (a wart) also from the Latin verrūca (a steep place, a height (and thus “a wart” or “an excrescence on a precious stone”).  Most scholars think at some point it probably conflated with Medieval Latin baroco, an invented word for a kind of obfuscating syllogism although one speculative alternative is the word was derived from the work of the Italian painter Federigo Barocci (1528-1612), a founder of the style, but most think this mere coincidence.  The comparative is baroque and the superlative baroquest, both thankfully rare.  Baroque is a noun & adjective, baroqueness is a noun and baroquely is an adverb, the noun plural is baroques.

Marble Court, Palace of Versailles.  Commissioned in the 1660s by Louis XIV (1638–1715; le Roi Soleil (the Sun King), King of France 1643-1715), the Palace of Versailles is thought one of the the finest example of secular Baroque architecture.

Baroque is one of those strange words in English which has evolved to have several layers of meaning including (1) a term which defines epochs in music & architecture, (2) a term referencing the characteristics in the music & architecture most associated with those periods, (3) a term which is a negative criticism of those characteristics, (4) a term which is (by extension) a negative criticism of the excessively ornate in any field (especially in literature) and (5) a term applied admiringly to things intricately or elaborately detailed.  In English, baroque began as an expression of contempt for the style of architecture which most historians believe began in early seventeenth century Rome and which shocked many with its audacious departure from the traditions of the Renaissance which paid such homage to (what was at least imagined to be) the Classical lines from Antiquity.  In architecture, baroque has never been exactly defined, something some explain by analogy with Clement Attlee’s (1883–1967; UK prime-minister 1945-1951) observation that it was as pointless to define socialism as it was an elephant for “...if an elephant ever walked into the room, all would know what it was”.

Karlskirche, Vienna.The Vatican's Saint Peter’s Square is often used to illustrate Baroque architecture and all those colonnades do make quite a statement but Vienna's Karlskirche better represents the way church architects took to the form.  It was commissioned in 1713 by Charles VI (1685–1740; Holy Roman Emperor 1711-1740) after the end of the last great epidemic of Plague as an act of memorial to Cardinal Carlo Borromeo (1538-1584; Archbishop of Milan 1564-1584), revered as a healer of those suffering from Plague.

Actually, although etymologists would say that's true, that’s not how the word is actually often applied because the terms baroque and rococo are often used interchangeably by non-specialists when speaking of just about any building adorned with the elaborate details not seen since modernism, functionalism & brutalism prevailed.  What distinguishes things is less the actual shapes than the feeling imparted, baroque and rococo both noted for asymmetry, luxuriant detailing, extravagant, unexpected curves & lines and a polychromatic richness but where baroque’s language is of grandeur, weight & monumentalism, rococo’s implementations summon thoughts of lightness, playfulness and frivolity.  Tellingly, rococo, when used as a critique is applied almost always in the negative, suggesting something fussy, pointlessly elaborate and overstated whereas baroque is often used admiringly, literature about the only field in which use is universally negative.  The other common use of baroque in the negative applies to bureaucracy or tangled administrative systems when it’s used as a synonym of byzantine.  For those seeking a rule of thumb, except in literature, baroque tends not to be used negatively and when describing objects which contain ornate or intricate detailing, it’s adopted usually to suggest something complex and beautiful, despite an outward irregularity.  Baroque suggests restraint and good taste (there are many other words with which to describe the garish, crooked, twisted or grotesque) and to damn something as silly, over detailed and laden with decorations with no functional or aesthetic purpose, there’s rococo.

Winter Palace, Saint Petersberg.  Some do find the Winter Palace a bit rococo and there are elements of that in the interior but architecturally, it's an example of early baroque, albeit much modified by later renovations.  It was built as a residence of Peter the Great (Peter I, 1672-1725; Tsar of Russia 1682-1725) and remain an official palace of the Romanov Tsars between 1732 and the 1917 revolutions.  The present appearance reflects both the restorative work of the late 1830s when it was rebuilt after a severe fire and the restoration after the damage suffered during the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944).

The use in the language of literary criticism is, like any application of “baroque” in the non-visual arts, inherently imprecise.  Even in music, it’s understood as a period and many of the compositions which emerged from the era do have a style which is recognisably “baroque” but there was also much which was anything but.  The same can of course be said of the European buildings of the same period, the overwhelming majority of which were neither “baroque”, nor memorable, the adjective in what is now called the “built environment” making sense only when used of representational architecture.  That’s a well-understood distinction in architecture and even painting but more contentious in music, something made murkier still by musicologists having divided the baroque into the “early”, “middle” and late”, mapped onto a range of styles which were sometimes particular to one country and sometimes popular in many.  Interestingly, although as a generalized descriptor it needs still to be thought of as something which began as a term of derision in architecture (and it is from there it gained its parameters), there is an earlier, anonymous piece of (not especially serious) opera criticism which labelled a work as du barocque (in the sense of the original meaning “pearl or irregular shape”), damning the music as un-melodic, discordant and a roll-call of just about every known compositional device; something more like a student’s assignment than a opera.  It’s a critique not greatly different from that made some three centuries later by comrade Stalin (1878–1953; leader of the USSR, 1924-1953) who’d been displeased by one of comrade Dmitri Shostakovich’s (1906-1975) operas, calling it формализм (formalism), "chaos instead of music", a self-indulgence of technique by a composer interested only in the admiration of other composers.

L'Estasi di Santa Teresa (The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa) by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) is a sculptural group rendered in white marble, set in an elevated aedicule in the Cornaro Chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.  It’s thought one of the sculptural masterpieces of the High Roman Baroque and depicts Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish Carmelite nun and saint, in a state of religious ecstasy, a spear-holding angel watching over her.  The installation in 2007 (briefly one supposes) gained baroque sculpture a new audience when it was used in a popular meme which noted some similarity with an early morning photograph of Lindsay Lohan resting in a Cadillac.

The last days of baroque: 1967 Mercedes–Benz 600 Pullman Laudaulet (left & rght) and 1971 Mercedes-Benz 280 SE 3.5 Cabriolet (centre).  There was intricate detailing on the W111 and W100s, the last truly coach-built Mercedes-Benz.  Most were produced between 1963-1971 although the W100s continued in a trickle, substantially hand-built, until 1981.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), remembered as the philosopher who loomed over the French revolution, was also a composer and in his Dictionnaire de la musique (Dictionary of Music, 1767) declared baroque music to be that “...in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited...”, noting the term was a re-purposing of baroco (an alternative spelling of baroko (from a mediaeval mnemonic chant and a mode of syllogism used whenever some point seemed to be exist only pointlessly to obfuscate), used since the thirteenth century by philosophers discussing the tendency by some of their peers (usually those in the Church or university) needlessly to complicate simple concepts and arguments, just for the sake of grandiose academic gloss; formalism as it were.  Etymologists however remain unconvinced by Rousseau’s speculation and cite earlier evidence which suggests it was from architecture that the use in painting and music was derived, pondering that had Rousseau’s musicology been influenced by him being an architect rather than a philosopher, he too may have identified the source in brick and stone.  Anyway, baroque music as it’s now understood is a surprisingly recent construct, discussed as a thing only in the twentieth century, the term widely used only after the 1950s when the advent of long-playing (LP) records made the packaging and distribution of long-form composition practical and the industry became interested in categorizations, the Baroque something different from the Renaissance and the Classical despite the popular association of them all as one.

Etiolate

Etiolate (pronounced ee-tee-uh-leyt)

(1) In botany, to cause a plant to whiten or grow pale by excluding light.

(2) To cause to become weakened or sickly; to remove vigor.

(3) To drain of color; to make pale and sickly-looking; to become pale or blanched.

(4) In literary theory (usually as “etiolated verse” or etiolated text”), to revise a text to remove fanciful or pretentious forms.

1791: The past participle of the seventeenth century French étioler (to blanch) and used to mean “to make pale, to remove a light source from plants during growth to induce them to form in a lighter hue”, presumed to be a derivative of a Norman French dialect form of with the appended -ate suffix.  The suffix -ate was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate).  Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel.  It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate).  Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee.  The idea in French may have been derived from the notion of “to make the color of straw” or even literally “to become like straw” and it was used in a branch of horticulture to “turn a plant white by growing it in darkness”, the attraction of white being the association with “delicacy; purity” and it was a commercial approach in market gardens to create “high priced vegetables” and was from étiolé, past participle of the seventeenth century étioler (to blanch), probably from the Norman dialect étule (a stalk) and the Old French esteule (straw, field of stubble) from the Latin stupla from stipula (straw; stubble).  Etiolate is a verb & adjective, etiolation is a noun, etiolative is a noun & adjective, etiolated is a verb & adjective, etiolating is a verb and etiolatively is an adverb; the noun plural is etiolations.

In literary theory, “to etiolate” a text is to remove or revise the “purple passages” (known just as alliteratively also as “purple prose”).  In literature, purple passages are those sections of a text which are overly elaborate, flowery, or extravagant in style, often prioritizing ornate or decorative language and the use of needlessly long words, the meaning of which is often obscure.  Such writing is thought a literary self-indulgence or a mere pretentious display of knowledge; grandiose execution at the expense of clarity, the usual critique being “style over substance”.  The phrase is almost certainly derived from the historic use of the once rare and expensive purple dye being restricted (actually by statute or edict in some places) to royalty and even when availability became wider, the association with luxury & wealth continued.  The idea has long been a tool of critics, Roman lyric poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) in his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry, 19 BC) referring disapprovingly to the purpureus… pannus (a purple piece of cloth), the irrelevant insertion of a grandiloquent or melodramatic passage into a work.  Horace thought this disruptive at best and absurd at worst and “purple passages” continues to be used to describe writing which is needlessly ornate, florid and usually discordantly incongruous.  Used almost always pejoratively (although there do seem to be some admirers), comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) might have called such flourishes “formalism”.  Amusingly, in an example of how idiomatic use in English must baffle those learning the language, “purple patch”, also once applied to such tortured text, would come to be used to describes any particular good period or performance (in any context), the use always wholly positive.

Pencil sketch (circa 1845) of Anne Brontë (1820–1849) by her sister Charlotte (1816–1855).

What is a purple passage is a cultural construct and in literature fashions change, some works regarded still regarded as “literary classics” written in a style which if release now would be thought absurd or a parody.  That’s because such judgments tend now to be made on the basis of the manner in which people “actually talk” and although that is highly variable and influenced by social class and regional traditions, in the age of modern media there is probably a broad (if not at the margins wholly accurate) understanding of the range and it’s to this literature need to adhere.  So, consider what Anne Brontë has the Reverend Michael Millward say in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848):

“But I have heard that, with some persons, temperance—that is, moderation—is almost impossible; and if abstinence be an evil (which some have doubted), no one will deny that excess is a greater. Some parents have entirely prohibited their children from tasting intoxicating liquors; but a parent’s authority cannot last for ever; children are naturally prone to hanker after forbidden things; and a child, in such a case, would be likely to have a strong curiosity to taste, and try the effect of what has been so lauded and enjoyed by others, so strictly forbidden to himself—which curiosity would generally be gratified on the first convenient opportunity; and the restraint once broken, serious consequences might ensue. I don’t pretend to be a judge of such matters, but it seems to me, that this plan of Mrs. Graham’s, as you describe it, Mrs. Markham, extraordinary as it may be, is not without its advantages; for here you see the child is delivered at once from temptation; he has no secret curiosity, no hankering desire; he is as well acquainted with the tempting liquors as he ever wishes to be; and is thoroughly disgusted with them, without having suffered from their effects.”

Once that text is etiolated, the parson is suggesting if one’s children are introduced to strong drink under parental supervision, they’ll be less likely to grow up as drunken philanders and sluts.  Did, in general discourse, even the most loquacious Church of England clergy of the 1840s talk in the way the author would have us believe or did novelists write in an elaborated, formalized style because that’s what their readers wanted?  It can’t be certain because there are only letters and no audio recordings; such transcripts as we have are from formal, set piece events like public addresses or debates in parliament which are hardly representative but on the basis of what was reported as the way “educated folk” spoke in court proceedings, it was with nothing like the prolixity of Ms Brontë’s reverend gentleman.  But that was the way fiction so often was written and the works of some who have contributed much to the canon must strike the modern reader as “artificially ornate” including John Milton (1608–1674), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Herman Melville (1819–1891) and Thomas Hardy (1840–1928).  Write now as they did now and expect to be accused of writing purple passages.

Beans, etiolated (left) and not (right).

For most of human history, the purpose in agriculture was to cultivate plants for optimal growth and productivity but in the eighteenth century the technique of deliberate etiolation emerged as a niche industry with specific goals.  What the gardeners did was at certain point in a plant’s development to deprive it of light while continuing to supply water and fertilizer.  What this cause was for the foliage to lose its natural color and tend towards being white, manifested usually in a “straw-like” coloring although some outcomes truly were white.  Additionally, many plants would grow with long, weak & slender stems, the elongation thought elegant compared with the thick, robust structures of those which remained exposed to natural light.  In biological terms, what the plants were doing was devoting all available energy to grow longer in the search for light, that essential element of photosynthesis, the process with which plants convert the energy from light (historically sunlight) into the chemical energy (notably sugars) used by their metabolism.

Delightfully etiolated: A stunningly pale Lindsay Lohan leaving the Byron & Tracey salon, Beverly Hills, California, September 2011.

Although the technique was used of seedlings which were started indoors or in a sheltered spot, encouraging early growth before being transplanted outside in the spring, etiolated plants were valued most for their aesthetic appeal, the association of white with not only delicacy & purity but also wealth because the pale complexion of the rich was a symbol of a privileged existence not spent toiling in the fields under the harsh sun which so darkened the skin of peasants.  Thus, etiolated plants, with their long, slender stems were prized for their visual appeal in gardens and floral arrangements while small, leafed vegetables in an unusually pale hue were prized by the chefs of the rich because they were so useful in making food into “plate art” a thing then as now and that such produce invariably lacked taste was just a price to be paid for the effect.  Of course etiolation tended to weaken plants so it was only ever a niche product for a high-priced market segment but, in controlled conditions, it did prove a useful technique in selective breeding for specific traits and it’s believed some of the long-stemmed plants still cultivated today are varieties which date for the era.

Natural selection means plants do tend to grow towards the light but many like also to grow vertically, something Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) had plenty of time to observe while serving in Berlin’s Spandau prison the twenty year sentence he was lucky to have been handed by the IMT (International Military Tribunal) in the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) for war crimes (Count three of the indictment) and crimes against humanity (Count 4).  In his clandestine prison diary (Spandauer Tagebücher (Spandau: The Secret Diaries) (1975)) he noted the mixed behaviour of the seeds he planted:

June 25, 1951: A month ago I planted peas, in groups of three, at depths of seven, fifteen, twenty-five, and forty centimeters, and watered them plentifully.  Today I undertake a cautious excavation. Even when the eye was down, the shoot turned in a sharp arc and grew vertically upward. None of the many shoots left the vertical by so much as a few degrees, not even those that germinated at a depth of forty centimeters.  Only one pea at a depth of twenty-five centimeters lost its sense of direction and grew into a confused snarl of thick threads.  In greenhouses, heating cables often keep the temperatures under the roots higher than on the surface.  So it cannot be the sun’s warmth.  A pine tree twenty meters tall growing by a shady cliff in the Black Forest does not grow toward the light, but vertically upward. Gravity, then?  It is particularly important for technology, which tries to achieve reactions similar to that of the pea, to investigate such guidance mechanisms.  New experiment.  I have dug a pit forty centimeters in depth.  At the bottom of it I lay out a row of alternating beans and peas. I close off the side toward the south with a pane of glass.  Then I fill in the pit with topsoil.  The arrangement is such that the surface of the soil is just as far from the seeds as the pane of glass.  Consequently warmth and light operate with equal intensity on both sides.  If growth is determined by one of these influences, the peas would have to grow toward the glass.  But I am still assuming that the plants have a tendency to oppose the pull of gravity.

August 22, 1951: Once again the peas have grown upward with amazing directional impulse, without reacting to the sunlight offered from the side.  Out of thirty peas, eleven have found the long way, forty centimeters, to the surface. Two peas gave up after they had grown twenty centimeters, and several others became impatient with this long distance for growing.  About eight centimeters under the surface of the soil they sent out side shoots with formed leaves.  But these peas, too, were disciplined enough to abandon these energy-consuming shoots after half a centimeter. What vital energy is displayed in these physical achievements, elaborating from a tiny round pea a tube one to one and a half millimeters in thickness and forty centimeters in length.  As I suspected, no such strong biological “instinct” can be ascribed to the beans. Out of six beans, only a single one tried to make its way to the surface, and it too gave up several centimeters before it reached its goal, while the others, obviously confused, sent shoots out in various directions from the seed.  What brings about such different behavior in such closely related plants?

Mannerism

Mannerism (pronounced man-uh-riz-uhm)

(1) A habitual or characteristic manner, mode, or way of doing something; distinctive quality or style, as in behavior or speech; a distinctive and individual gesture or trait; idiosyncrasy.

(2) Marked or excessive adherence to an unusual or a particular manner, especially if affected; adherence to a distinctive or affected manner, especially in art or literature.

(3) A style in art, a principally Italian movement in art and architecture between the High Renaissance and Baroque periods (1520–1600) that sought to represent an ideal of beauty rather than natural images of it, characterized by a complex perspectival system, elongation of forms, strained gestures or poses of figures, and intense, often strident color (usually initial capital letter).

1795–1805: A compound word manner + -ism.  Manner was from the Middle English maner, a borrowing from the Anglo-Norman manere, from the Old French maniere, from the Vulgar Latin manāria (feminine form of manuarius (belonging to the hand)), from manus (hand).  In Romance languages, there was also the French manière, the Italian mannaia (ax, axe), the Portuguese maneira and maneiro (handy, portable), the Romanian mâner (handle), and the Spanish manera (way).  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Mannerism & Mannerist are nouns, manneristic & manneristical are adjectives and manneristically is an adverb; the most commonly use noun plural is Mannerists.

After the Renaissance

Classic Mannerism: Madonna dal Colla Lungo (The Madonna with the Long Neck (circa 1537-1540)) oil on wood by Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, 1503-1540).

Historians of art use (sometimes a little loosely) the term Mannerism to refer to a style of painting, sculpture and even architecture which developed in Florence and Rome in the first two decades of the sixteenth century, the later years of the High Renaissance and although it’s a bit of a cliché, Mannerism can be thought of as the transition between the idealized style of Renaissance art and the dramatic theatricality of the Baroque.  Early Mannerism (circa 1510-1535) tends to be known for what it was not: it was “anti-Renaissance” or “anti-classical” and a reaction against what had evolved to be a formal and prescriptive style while High Mannerism (circa 1535-1580) adopted a formalism of its own, intricate, self-referential and a visual language which focused on technique and an appeal to the sophisticated critics and patrons of the age.  A deliberate retreat or advance depending on one’s view) from the naturalistic traditions of Renaissance painting the artificiality became the an exaggerated idiom associated with the era and was applied to the strained poses, elongated human figures, distortions of scale, tricks of lighting or perspective which were often depicted in vivid, contrasting colors.  More than anything, it was an attempt to find a way in which the attributes of the emotions could be depicted by technique alone.  Because Mannerism is now so associated with its distinctive markers such as the wan-like necks and facial expressions suggesting something between bemusement and constipation, it’s often forgotten artists as diverse as Correggio (1489-1534), noted for his sentimental narrative paintings, Federico Barocci (1526-1612) the devoutly religious painter of sacred images and Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) known for his monumentally bizarre portraits which were collages of fruit and vegetable (still popular as posters) were all significant figures in the Mannerist tradition.  The best remembered of course remains Michelangelo (1475-1564) who influenced for centuries the portrayal of the Christ child by showing light radiating from the infant, his Sistine Chapel frescoes such as The Last Judgement (1536-1541) a landmark of the movement.

High Mannerism: El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz (The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586) oil on canvas by El Greco (Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos, 1541-1614) 

Mannerism did not develop merely as an artistic novelty.  The idealized works of the High Renaissance were an expression of stability in society which had by the sixteenth century evolved into what at the time seemed to many not only the highest level of civilization ever achieved but the highest that was possible to achieve.  That didn’t last and the turmoil which followed in the wake of the religious war of the Reformation against the Catholic Church shattered the certainties of centuries, something exacerbated by what was discovered and uncovered by science; not only was it clear that Europe was not the centre of a flat Earth, but the Earth itself was not something around which all the universe revolved.  The ordered harmony of the world explained by the church was crumbling and the adventurism of Mannerism was there to reflects the new uncertainties.

Vista de Toledo (View of Toledo, circa 1599), oil on canvas by El Greco.  Although most associated with depictions of the human form, Mannerism also spawned a school of landscape painting.  Vista de Toledo is the best known of El Greco's surviving landscapes, a portrayal of the city in which he lived and worked in for most of his life.  Mannerist depictions of the built environment actually belonged to the long tradition of emblematic rather than faithful documentary descriptions of city views and here, there's also a bit of artistic licence; viewed looking north-east, the artist has shifted the cathedral to the left of the Alcázar (the royal palace), just to provide the desired compositional balance.  The ancient Alcántara Bridge and the Castle of San Servando are both faithfully represented.

Some historians have argued that although Mannerism wasn’t at any time inevitable, something was because the artistic forms of the Renaissance had been perfected by Old Masters like Raphael and Leonardo who had refined their techniques to the point where their ability to render the natural and realistic transcended the two-dimensional space in which they often worked; at what they did, they couldn’t be improved upon.  This wasn’t an attractive thing for younger artists who wished to be more than just imitative and foreshadowing the iconoclastic movements which centuries later would remake what art could be thought to be, the mannerists formed a new pictorial language, one which was individualistic and mapped symbolism onto a visual structure in which the symmetry and balance so prized by the Old Masters were replaced by a dynamism so challenging that a viewer might be uncertain where their gaze should be focused.  It was a confident and exaggerated artificiality.

Nozze di Cana (The Wedding Feast at Cana, 1562–1563), oil on canvas by Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari, 1528–1588).  Nozze di Cana is sometime used in fine art studies, lecturers asking students to identify the elements associated with the High Renaissance and those then exclusive to Mannerism.

From Mannerism can be traced the path which led via almost a dozen different movements to the art of post-modernism in which the real & unreal, the spiritual world and the perceptible world, can not necessarily be distinguished, a notion which the masters of the High Renaissance would have thought absurd but just as Mannerism was once a disrupter, it became an orthodoxy so of course there were those who wanted to create their own unique things and the school begat “High Mannerism” which in the seventeenth century became “the Baroque” and, in a nice twist, the style (which at its core was illusionist) was with alacrity embraced by the Church which understood what needed to be done to make faith attractive.  It was at the Council of Trent (1562) when the framework for the strategy of the Counter-Reformation was first thrashed out that it was decided the mystical and supernatural would become a prominent part of the religious experience: Baroque art could do that like none other.  

A distinctive feature of Mannerism was the use of figurative serpentinata (serpentine figure) in the depiction of the human body with extended limbs and the elongation of forms, the figures presented an otherworldliness that departed from classical renditions and many Mannerist works presented individuals or scenes in non-naturalistic settings, oftentimes without any contextual basis, inviting the viewer to regard the work as something beyond the literal renditions of the Renaissance.  Elements of the Mannerist style are often seen in modern art.  Although he describes himself as a “modern Impressionist artist” Lucas Bufi (b 1987) allows motifs from other traditions to flavor his work and for Lindsay Lohan Playboy Painting (oil on canvas, 2012), which followed her photo-shoot for the January–February 2012 issue of Playboy magazine, he used a Mannerist technique.