17th century

The 17th century is a turning point in the book’s history of cultural expression: the printing press has become the dominant medium of human thought, while architecture, once a collective art that gave an age visible form, survives increasingly through imitation. The Val-de-Grâce stands as the century’s example of that decline, repeating the model of Saint Peter’s in Rome rather than restoring architecture’s former originality.

Architecture in Decline

The book places the 17th century within a long deterioration in which architecture loses the power to express the life of its age. As artistic form recedes, geometry becomes more prominent: the building is described as reduced from an expressive whole to a polyhedron, its lines cold and inexorable. The century’s architecture is part of this broader movement, not an isolated change in taste.

The palaces of Louis XIV are characterized as long barracks for courtiers: stiff, cold, and tiresome. This image makes the decline legible in the buildings’ very purpose and form. The architecture remains imposing, but grandeur has hardened into repetition and courtly order rather than the varied, living invention attributed to medieval work.

Copying Saint Peter’s

The century’s clearest architectural example is the Val-de-Grâce, identified as its own Saint Peter’s of Rome. The comparison places the building in a succession of copies of Michael Angelo’s church: an original work that the book considers the last great, distinctive achievement of architecture becomes a model repeatedly reproduced. The 17th century thus inherits not the invention itself, but its replication.

That repetition is presented as evidence of exhaustion. Michael Angelo’s Saint Peter’s had joined the Pantheon and the Parthenon in a monumental work that the narrator treats as architecture’s final original signature. Once the work is copied, each new Saint Peter’s demonstrates the diminished capacity of the art to create a form genuinely its own. The Val-de-Grâce is therefore significant less as a separate innovation than as a sign of architecture’s dependence on a completed past.

The Press and the Transfer of Cultural Power

The 17th century is also the period in which print is already sovereign and triumphant enough to give the world a great literary century. The book describes human thought as moving out of buildings and into books: as architecture ebbs, the printing press swells. The cultural resources once invested in edifices are now expended in printed works, shifting the chief medium through which a society records and communicates its ideas.

This change is not presented as a simple replacement of one technology by another. The press gains force as architecture loses vitality, and their contest marks a change in the form of public expression. By the century’s account, print has established its victory; in the 18th century it will take up the old sword of Luther and place it in Voltaire’s hand. The 17th century is therefore both the era of print’s literary ascendancy and the interval before its later political assault on the old European order.

The Medieval Measure

The period’s decline is measured against the medieval church as a work of collective creation. The façade of Notre-Dame Cathedral gathers portals, royal niches, a great rose window, lateral windows, arcades, columns, towers, sculpture, and carving into a single harmonious whole. Its many details remain legible as parts of an integrated design, a stone composition shaped by the joined forces of an age. Against that model, the copied monuments of the 17th century register a loss of originality and shared artistic life.

The cathedral also embodies a kind of meaning that print cannot simply duplicate. Claude Frollo studies its sculptures as a symbolic text, seeking hidden knowledge in its carved figures and signs; Quasimodo loves the church instead for its scale, beauty, and harmonies. Their contrasting attachments show the building operating at once as visible form and as an enigmatic record to be interpreted. This layered, materially present architecture supplies the historical measure by which the 17th century’s increasingly derivative buildings are judged.