Century of Crisis and Innovation

Here is the July instalment of my column for Hankyeoreh newspaper. I describe the influence of developments in science on the painting ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’ by Artemisia Gentileschi. You may enjoy figuring out what the influence is, if you don’t know already. (You can eventually look here.) I’ve put this into the context of the 17th century, which was classified as a ‘Century of Crisis’ by the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eric Hobsbawm. See also the relatively recent book by Geoffrey Parker, which tries to find roots for the crisis in climate change. Among other sources of unrest, the century was plagued by systematic recurrence of the bubonic plague, killing more than a million people in the Kingdom of Naples, for example. It’s believed that Artemisia died together with a whole generation of Neapolitan artists during this outbreak. On the other hand, this was also the century of the scientific revolution, starting from Galileo and perhaps coming to a completion with Newton. Reading European history often gives me a sense of parallel universes, because the great leaps forward of civilisation and culture give little indication of the socio-political turmoil surrounding them, at least until I read quite carefully.