ABSTRACT
Like the dramatic soliloquies it mirrors, Carracci's Hercules enacts the baroque's exemplary awareness of the historical fate encoded in its protagonist's ironic self-entanglement. But while baroque art may image the historical condition shared with other modes of expression, it cannot conceptualize it. Nor, consequently, can it marshal reason in defence of the truth whose defeat it portrays. This is the task philosophers undertake on the strength of the special rationality their profession boasts. We have already discussed, in chapter 1, some aspects of what becomes of truth in the natural philosophy of baroque Europe. This led us indeed to the Pauline ontology of light-in-darkness that informs baroque selfportraiture and to the 'painterly' temporality embodied in the principle of immanence shaping the soliloquistic thrust of both visual and dramatic art. But though truth may prove as elusive and intractable for philosophers as for painters and dramatists, it does so with a difference that repays closer attention; and it is to this difference that we now turn.
