Baroque allegory confronts history as a petrified landscape of decline

Evidence

The Trauerspiel presented history as the natural history of the transience of God’s creatures. The core of the allegorical interpretation was the perception of history as the Passion of the world', significant only in the stations of its decline’. `Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 358

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the symbol vs. allegory distinction as Benjamin frames it — allegory shows history’s decay, symbol idealizes destruction.
• XREF: Connects to Lukács’s ‘second nature’, ‘alienation’, ‘reification’ categories, and to Benjamin’s wider arc from Trauerspiel to materialist history. — connects to: Allegory suits the fragmented material world of baroque courts — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 317; Baroque art countered rationalism by making knowledge’s incompleteness its value — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 427; Baroque aesthetics abandoned the pursuit of summarizing the world into essential harmonies — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 428

Broader Connections

• Allegory suits the fragmented material world of baroque courts #expands (0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 317