All currents of literature, music, and fine arts in western culture that are called “classical,” from the Siglo de Oro in 16th/17th-century Spain to the 17th-century French époque classique to Weimar Classicism (around 1800), developed in the early modern period. Three key factors go towards explaining this phenomenon.
(1) The emergence of new, normative aesthetic and cultural canons that came to be called “classical” by later generations, sometimes even by contemporaries, w…