Bram Van Oostveldt

How to Find God in the Dutch Golden Age

In the 1654 tragedy Lucifer Joost van den Vondel shows how the titular character revolts against God because he cannot fathom His plans. Vondel presents Lucifer as an identifiable character within the format of the tragedy. Hence, the poet breaks with the long-standing tradition of representing the character as completely baleful and depraved. Even though this tragedy is one of the most discussed works in Dutch literary history, the question why Vondel chose Lucifer as the leading character for a tragedy remains unanswered. To contextualize Vondel’s choice, this article first discusses an interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of catharsis from the author’s milieu. Leiden humanist Daniel Heinsius uses this concept to point out how problems with which a tragedy deeply confronts its audience realize an emotional habituation and enforce the correct handling of similar problems in the world outside the theatre. Likewise, with the representation of Lucifer’s harrowing doubts concerning God’s plans, Vondel wanted to teach his audience how to deal with their own problems with divine inscrutability. By presenting and even magnifying the doubts about God in the tragedy, the theatre-maker wanted to purify the audience from these doubts. The genesis of the devil is the ideal subject matter for a tragedy to reinforce the audience’s faith.

De Antwerpse wereldtentoonstelling van 1894 als ambigu spektakel van de moderniteit

This article discusses how in the late nineteenth century the modernity of the world exhibition was an extremely ambiguous phenomenon. The world exhibition is not only the place par excellence where unbridled belief in the future is celebrated, but is also the place where tension and alienation can be observed. Here the notion of the spectacle has exceptional heuristic potential. On the one hand the spectacle alienates man from his social reality and encloses him in an endless circulation and consumption of images. On the other hand the spectacle attempts to neutralize the tensions that modernity brings, by expelling everything that does not fit within the image. The Antwerp world exhibition of 1894 well illustrates this ambiguity. In realistic mises en scenes, such as the Congo village and the Oriental neighborhood, the audience was invited to step into the image and take it as real. This immersive strategy was used to its greatest extent in Old Antwerp. In this highly accurate reconstruction of a sixteenthcentury quarter the visitor imagined that by plunging into history he could escape all the commotion and exhaustion of modern life.

One never sees monsters without experiencing emotion: Le merveilleux and the sublime in theories on French performing arts

This chapter deals with the aspired effect of excessive machinery in theories on French performing arts from 1650 until 1750. Many critics put forward that machinery and scenography could arouse an intensive response. No writer made a connection between Boileaus merveilleux in literature and rhetoric and le merveilleux in the discussions on the tragedie lyrique . In the chapter, the authors try to elucidate why both concepts named with the same term are not explicitly related to one another. D’Aubignacs use of le merveilleux is not to be described in simple terms of deception; it constituted a more complex set of ideas concerning visuality in the theatre. The spectacularity of tragedie lyrique was far from an obstacle to attain the sublime. In stressing the visuality of the theatrical performance, they corrected the literary perspective of Nicolas Boileau and brought back the appeal of the intensely visual character of the Longinian sublime. Keywords:D’Aubignac; French Performing Arts; le merveilleux ; Nicolas Boileau; theatre; tragedie lyrique

Re-enacting a scrutinised past at the Antwerp world exhibition of 1894

On 5 May 1894, Leopold II inaugurated the second world exhibition in Antwerp. He entered the grounds through a most impressive entrance which exposed the fin-desiècle taste for grandeur and glamour (Plate 1).1 This atmosphere persisted throughout the exhibition, certainly in the huge halls which covered 85 000 m2, where more than 2,000 entrepreneurs and numerous nations presented diverse glories of modernity in the arts and sciences. With such impressive numbers, the Belgian newspapers emphasised that the exhibition did not have to stand in the shadows of its direct precursors in Paris (1889) and Chicago (1893).2 The rationale of this statement was not only founded on the exhibition halls. Most journalists presented Old Antwerp (Oud-Antwerpen), a reconstruction of a sixteenth-century city quarter, as the true pearl of the exhibition.3 In Old Antwerp, many historical buildings (such as theKipdorpGate,Plate 2) were meticulously rebuilt, the exteriors as well as the interiors. Only few years before, several of these buildings had been demolished in the course of the modernisation of the city.4 The reconstruction was no end in itself. It functioned, rather, as a most exquisite setting to stage divergent re-enactments, from everyday events, such as the activities in a barbershop (Plate 3), through open-air theatre and puppet shows to tournaments, processions, and ceremonial entries. Time and again, the organisers and journalists presented Old Antwerp as a locus of nostalgia, the ideal place to retreat after all overwhelming novelties had been viewed. An anonymous Dutch guide, Views of the Antwerp World Exhibition, writes: “A sixteenth-century city view in the middle of the jumble of a World Exhibition Anno Di. 1894! Already this contrast gives you a sense of well-being”.5 Most recent studies thus define Old Antwerp as the antithesis of modernity and a place of escapism.6 More general research on the world exhibitions underlines a similar anti-