Introduction

This introduction chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Intent on finding a scapegoat for the assorted ills that delayed Italy's transition into modernity, nationalist historians of the Risorgimento attributed decadence to foreign invasions and Spanish domination. Decadence, the falling away or declining from a prior state of excellence in art and literature, is a term often applied to the period after the Renaissance. Mannerist refinement and artifice gave way to the robust naturalism of Baroque art, which subverted the High Renaissance models on which it claimed to be grounded. Baroque aesthetic theory, it now appears, represented yet another development in the humanist and Aristotelian ideas of literary criticism. Current work on the links connecting these developments to the reforms of the eighteenth century should provide fresh perspectives on the native origins of the Italian Enlightenment and serve to demolish the equation between decadence and the Baroque.