III. Expression

This concern with the importance of expression in painting is not surprising among critics who believe that painting like poetry is an imitation of human life, and is, indeed, indispensable in any humanistic theory of the arts. For the humanist in insisting that great painting has the power through expressive movement to stir human emotion will readily agree with Horace that the artist must first possess in his own soul a capacity for deep and intense human experience. But the imaginative participation of the artist in the emotions of his characters is, to a great or less extent, recreated in him who experiences a work of art; and it is when he speaks of this experience of the beholder that Lomazzo carries his theory of expression to an unfortunate extreme and shows the danger that dwells in any too emphatic insistence on the participation of the spectator in the emotions of persons represented in a picture. For surely all semblance of that essential detachment which in aesthetic experience mysteriously accompanies and qualifies emotional participation, is completely lost when Lomazzo, commenting on Horace's si vis me flere, observes that a painting in which the movement of the figures is rendered in life-like fashion [con moti al naturale ritratti ] will cause the observer "to smile with him who smiles, think with him who thinks, . . . marvel with him who marvels, desire a beautiful young woman for his wife if he beholds a fair female nude in a picture, . . . desire to eat with him who eats precious and delicate foods, fall asleep with him who sweetly sleeps, etc."^ This passage--an unconscious parody of Horace's remarks on expression, with painting assuming in a curious way the rôle of his tragic actor in its power to stir emotion in the spectator through the human emotions or sensations contained within its lines and colors [just as Horace's actor feeling grief would cause others to grieve]--is a kind of reductio ad absurdum as well as of the modern theory of empathy. It is further interesting as showing the important influence that the typical Renaissance admiration of painting as a palpable and exact imitation of nature could have on a conscientious but confused critic who was attempting to deal with aesthetic ideas of a more advanced character. Lomazzo owes something here to Leonardo's praise of painting as superior to poetry in inciting men to acts of worship and of love through the realistic vividness of its imagery. That passage also contains the story of the man who always yawned when he behold a certain figure yawning in a picture^ and thereby recalls those stories of the efficacy of realistic art that delighted the writers of late antiquity^ -stories more often extravagant than edifying that frequently recur in the [p. 24] critical writing of the sixteenth century. Thus when Armenini, remembering Plutarch, tells how Cassander trembled before the life-like portrait of the dead Alexander whom he had learned to fear, he illustrates with the authority of antique example the concept that painting as an art expressive of human emotion has power to move the beholder.^ Horace, we have seen, was the foremost authority for this concept, but it should also be remarked that writers on expressive movement in painting, no less than critics of literature who were discussing the power of language to interpret and arouse the passions, also owed much to Cicero and Quintilian. For in shaping the education of the ideal orator, the ancient rhetoricians had been concerned not merely with words, but equally with gesture and facial expression as vital means of conveying human emotion. The Renaissance critics had, in fact, their invitation to compare painting with oratory in Quintilian's own observation that it is no wonder that gesture in oratory has a powerful effect on the mind, when the silent gestures in a painting can so penetrate to the heart that they seem to surpass in efficacy the power of speech itself.^

Alberti had counseled the painter to read the 'rhetorici,'^ and Leonardo may possibly remember Quintilian when he advises the painter to learn the fine points of expressive movement from the dumb whose only speech is gesture;^ but virtually always, as one would expect, Leonardo based his remarks on expression not on written prescription, but on his own keen observation of human life. Thus when he compares the movements of arms and hand that accompany the words of the orator intent on persuading his audience with those movements which must, if the painter's illusion of life is to be convincing [all the more, in fact, because painting is mere illusion, not reality], unfailingly express the mental activity of the persons represented,^ he is evidently not thinking of the counsel of a Quintilian, but remembering his own experience of advocates in the courts, including those stupid advocates who, as they sought to persuade without the proper use of gestures, resembled wooden statues--a warning to painters not to neglect the study of movement without which their own figures might seem equally wooden Leonardo's conviction that painting which does not convincingly externalize the passions of the soul^ --admiration, reverence, grief, suspicion, fear, joy, and the like--is, in his habitual phrase, "twice dead,"^ [p. 25] appears not only in his intense preoccupation as a draughtsman and painter with movement and facial expression, but also in the care with which he sometimes recorded in his writing the changing attitudes of the body under the stress of emotion, or the deformations of cheek, eyes, mouth, and hair.^

Nearly a century later Lomazzo's observations on expression lack entirely the empirical directness of Leonardo's which was not to appear again in Renaissance or Baroque criticism. The product of a pedantic age, they are an elaborate prescription for the painter in which a few Leonardesque remarks on gesture and facial expression are scattered among a long array of examples of the passions in scripture, history, and myth, many of which must have been suggested to Lomazzo by their illustration in notable paintings of the Renaissance.^ And frequently, following the ancient example of Cicero,^ he quotes passages from the poets--chiefly Ariosto and Dante--which vividly portray human emotion, thereby giving substance to his earlier statement that it is in the expression of the passions that painting most resembles poetry.^

In his commentary first published in 1668 on Du Fresnoy's De arte graphica, Roger de Piles at the end of a disquisition on the passions in which one may detect his reading of the ancients, Alberti, Leonardo, and Lomazzo [such is the inevitable accumulation of critical pastiches as one moves forward in time], remarks with indubitable correctness that the latter has written at large in his second book on every passion in particular; but then has the good sense to deliver this warning to prospective painters: "Beware you dwell not too long upon it, and endeavor not to force your genius."^ Here De Piles already gives evidence of a certain forward-looking distrust of the all-sufficiency of academic rules for the painter--a distrust which, despite his willingness to accept most of the doctrine founded on ut pictura poesis and his belief in the steadying effect of the rules, was to increase in his later writings; moreover, in his implication that genius should, in some measure at least, be free to spread its wings, he gives voice to an important doctrine that had already appeared chiefly under Neo-Platonic auspices in Italian criticism of the Mannerist age.^ [p. 26] And this doctrine in De Piles anticipates, four years before its translation by Boileau, the enormous influence that would gather momentum in the following century of the treatise of Longinus on the Sublime. De Piles was definitely influenced in his later writings by Longinus who had maintained that the sublime in art is the product of genius--of that inward greatness of soul that must from time to time inevitably transcend the rules, the correct observance of which by a lesser artist would result in mediocrity.^

Some thirty years later when the Longinian temper had grown upon him, De Piles again showed his skepticism of prescribed rules for expression when he criticized those definition of the passions that Le Brun in his treatise on the subject had taken from Descartes' Traité des passions de l'âme. De Piles remarks truthfully and, one may hope, a little caustically, that these definitions are not always accommodated to the capacities of painters, who are not all philosophers, though in other respects they may not want sense and good natural parts.^ He adds that Le Brun's definitions are very learned and fine but too general, and it is perfectly clear from the pages that follow that De Piles found the ancients who appealed to nature [he has Horace and Quintilian particularly in mind] more valuable sources of advice for the painters on this important subject than he found Le Brun, even though the latter's treatise carried with it the impressive sanction of the Cartesian philosophy. The modern reader of Le Brun's treatise will scarcely fail to agree with the opinion of De Piles, for nowhere did the aesthetic legislation of the Academy display itself in such absurdly detailed and absurdly abstract categories as in this attempt to specify the minute changes in facial expression by which each passion manifests itself through the complex action of those subtle vapors known as the esprits animaux which are the product of certain refinements of the circulatory system. One need not consider here the details of those deformations of pupil, eyebrow, nose, and mouth, or of those changes in complexion wrought by the esprits after sensory or imaginative stimuli have set them in motion. It should be remembered, however, that the treatise of Descartes, who shared the profound interest of his age in the perturbationes animae, was largely responsible for the special psycho-physiological character of the theory of expression during the last decades of the seventeenth century among the painter-theorists of the Academy who, legislating as they were for an art that would conserve the outward record of the soul's inner activity, were naturally far more precise in charting the details of expression than the philosopher himself had been. But behind the categorical exactitude with which they formulated the visible manifestations of these invisible states of the soul lay not only the rational thoroughness of the Cartesian method, but also the central concept of the Cartesian physics that the whole [p. 27] universe and every individual body is a machine, and all movement, in consequence, mechanical.^ Hence the exhaustively precise nature of Le Brun's anatomy of the passions which treats the body as a complex instrument that records with mechanical exactitude the invariable effects of emotional stimuli rather than as the vehicle of a humanly significant emotional life.^

Now no artist could undertake to follow precepts like Le Brun's without falling into the rut of arid formalism. It is enough for the artist, de Piles sensibly remarked, "without waiting for order or the judgment of reason" to know that the passions of the soul are caused by the sight of things and to ask himself how he would behave if seized with the passion that he would portray. But the rules for expression were nevertheless important to the honest theorists and second-rate painters of the Academy who with insufficient realization of the dangers that lurked about them, sought consciously to practice an exact, yet extensive pictorial rhetoric of gesture and facial expression that would both accord with their century's ideas of decorum and of "la belle nature" and satisfy its lively interest in the depiction of emotion. Through the heightened language of the drama, Corneille had created characters who embodied in typical mode the passions of the soul, and in the art of the greatest of French painters, whose profundity of mind and sentiment they never wholly understood, the Academicians discovered to their complacent satisfaction, and only with partial truth, a prefiguration of their chilling formulas for expression. Now everyone will acknowledge that the eminently rational genius of Poussin, who did not live to read the discourses of the Academicians, could invest the typical mode of rendering the passions with ideal significance and grandeur, and no one will deny that his interest in the expression of the passions was the intensely scrutinizing interest of his age. But the writing of those who admired him as a master of expression--of Le Brun, Testelin, and others--might better, in part at least, be the writing of physiologists rather than of aestheticians, so analytically precise is the method by which they chart those visible changes in the face that accompany the "mouvements intérieures" within the body in experience of the emotions;^ and although this type of quasi-scientific analysis could with its methodical prescriptions make a singularly barren contribution to the rules for good painting, it had nothing to contribute to the humanistic theory of the art. One may perhaps be permitted to quote at this point a remark of Addison's which, though it was made in another connection, is nevertheless appropriate here: "Great scholars are apt to fetch their comparisons and allusions from the sciences in which they are most conversant, so that many a man may see the compass of their learning in a treatise on the most indifferent subject. I have read a discourse upon love which none but a profound chymist could understand, and have heard many a sermon that should only have been preached before a congregation of Cartesians."^ Certainly no Dolce, or Bellori, or even Lomazzo who at times yielded to few in the gentle art of multiplying profitless distinctions, would ever have remarked that it [p. 28] was in the expression of the passions according to Le Brun that painting most resembles poetry.

It must be said, however, in favor of the Academicians that when they attempted during their conférences to analyze great masterpieces of painting, they habitually spoke of expression less in the psycho-physiological jargon of Descartes and Le Brun than in terms of the logical dramatic relationship of each figure in the painting to the cause of his emotion. Here, one should remember, another and far more significant aspect of the Cartesian philosophy exerted a dominant influence over the minds of the painter-theorists. This was the fundamental epistemological concept that the mind which knows itself more certainly than it knows the external world arrives at truth through the independently valid process of its own deductions, through its orderly procedure from one clearly-known proposition to another^ --a concept that was reflected in the view of the critics that every element in a painting whether formal or expressive must as the logical part of a rational order unfailingly contribute to the demonstration of a central dramatic idea.^ And this was a consummation which, theoretically at least, the painter could achieve only if the rules for historical invention, disposition or ordonnance, and coloring,^ were scrupulously observed. "Dans cette mÆme satisfaction d'une pensée bien conduite," writes a modern critic,"où Descartes avait discerné la vérité absolue, Le Brun plaça la beauté souveraine."^ Félibien remarks that the expression of subsidiary figures in a painting is related to that of the protagonist as arms and legs to the human body,^ and when he reports Le Brun's analysis of Poussin's painting of the Fall of the Manna in the Wilderness, he reports a discourse in which, it is true, some psycho-physiological commentary on expression is present, but in which the speaker is more particularly concerned with illustrating how diversely the characters in the pictorial drama react to the cause of their emotion; how diversely the expression of the passions is a dramatic illustration of the central idea of the painting--God's manifestation of his mercy to the suffering Israelites in causing the manna to descend upon them from heaven. "Monsieur Poussin," Le Brun is reported to have remarked in speaking of the expressions in the picture, "a rendu toutes ses figures si propres à son sujet, qu'il n'y en a [p. 29] pas une dont l'action^ n 'ait rapport à l'état où étoit alors le peuple Juif, qui au milieu du Desert se trouvoit dans une extrême nécessité, et dans une langueur épouvantable, mais qui dans ce moment se vit soulagé par le secours du Ciel."^ Le Brun then proceeds to demonstrate how the dramatic event causes the expression of such varied emotions among the Israelites as admiration, joy, benevolence, fear, surprise, religious awe, and even feminine vanity of a sort, and he insists again that out of this diversity of psycho-physical reactions to the dramatic event Poussin has achieved pictorial unity not only because the different movements and facial expressions of the figures are always referred to the principal subject, but because the painter has selected his "expressions" in such a way that the picture has this further claim to impeccable logic of structure: like a drama on the stage, it observes the Aristotelian unit of action in having a beginning, a middle, and an end.^ We shall discuss later this curious analogy between painting and dramatic poetry,--an analogy of more than doubtful validity yet a perfectly natural development of the doctrine ut pictura poesis under the impulse of the Cartesian passion for order and clarity.

Here we may note that Poussin himself evidently set great store by the diversity of emotional expression in this painting for when after long labor to finish it, he finally despatched it to Chantelou, he wrote his friend that he would easily recognize those figures "qui languissent, qui admirent, celles qui ont pitié, qui font acte de charité, de grande necessité, de désir de se repaître, de consolation et autres, car les sept premières figures à main gauche vous diront tout ce qui est ici écrit et tout le reste est de la même étoffe." "Lisez l'histoire et le tableau," he adds, "afin de connaître si chaque chose est apropriée au sujet."^ According to Poussin, then, the way in which to understand this painting is to "read" it, comparing it at the same time with the story in the twentieth chapter of Exodus. And although the critics would have looked carefully to see if the painter had been properly faithful to his text, Poussin does not advise Chantelou to "read" his picture merely that his friend may test his accuracy as an historical painter. This reading is rather to be a discriminating exercise of the intellect that will result in a judgment of the painting's excellence on more important grounds. A most fundamental condition of this excellence is the painter's ability to represent human emotions that are clearly appropriate to the [p. 30] subject--that are, Poussin means, representative of the behavior of different types of human beings under particular dramatic conditions.^ And in insisting on the logic with which Poussin relates his complex human material to the dominant dramatic idea of his painting, Félibien and Le Brun show themselves, as we have seen, loyal disciples of the Cartesian doctrine that the reason has the power to impose its own valid order on "toutes les choses qui peuvent tomber sous la connaissance des hommes." Thus when the critics commented on the diverse, yet ordered rendering of the emotions in a painting, it was this doctrine which by and large inyervened to discipline, if not actually dispel, the application of those elaborate rules for expression, gathered together by Le Brun, that reflected the mechanistic aspect of the Cartesian philosophy.

Something closely akin to the Cartesian rationalism was strong in Poussin himself who, like Descartes, distrusted the mirage of sense perception^ and valued only that selected and ordered knowledge which it was alone within the power of the clarifying reason to attain. "Mon naturel," he wrote to Chantelou in a famous letter of 1642, "me contraint de chercher et aimer les choses bien ordonnées, fuyant la confusion qui m'est contraire et enemie, comme est la lumière des obscures ténèbres."^ This passage written by a man who may never actually have read Descartes to expressed his sense of confusion at being requested to do within a given time a great deal more than he knew he could do well, might nevertheless have been written in another connection by Descartes himself.^ Some thirty years later when the admirable Boileau was writing in his L'art poétique what was to be perhaps the most influential statement in the history of French classicism of the rules for good poetry, he admonished the poets to love reason which alone could bestow value and lustre upon their labors,^ and in a passage of which both the thought and the imagery remind one of Poussin's confession to Chantelou, remarks that only clear conceptions born of the light dispensing reason, well thought out--in Poussin's phrase, "bien ordonnés" --could result in clarity and precision of literary form:

Il est certains Esprits, dont les sombres pensées
Sont d'un nuage épais toûjours embarrassées.
Le jour de la rasion ne le sçauroit percer.
Selon que nostre idée est plus ou moins obscure,
L'expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure.
Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement.
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.^

When Boileau summed up the rules which the Académie Française regarded as essential for correct writing in the various literary genres, he had been anticipated by a few years by those who legislated for the sister art of painting. Du Fresnoy's De arte graphica, based pretty squarely on Dolce and other Italians, owed the Cartesian philosophy little if anything. The author remarks, in fact, that he would not "stifle the Genius, by a jumbled [p. 31] Heap of Rules: nor extinguish the Fire of a Vein which is lively and abundant."^ But Félibien's preface to his report of six conférences of the Academy is, in its way, as complete a summary of the rules for painting as is Boileau's L'art poétique of the rules for poetry: and he is in perfect accord with Boileau's Cartesian dictum that clear writing attends upon the clear conception of what one will write about, when he remarks that if an artist would make a wise disposition in his mind of a work that he would execute, he must first "avoir une connaissance parfaite de la chose qu'on veut representer, de quelles parties elle doit être composée, et de quelle sorte l'on y doit procéder." And one could find no more thoroughly Cartesian definition of art than in the words which follow: "Et cette connaissance que l'on acquiert, et dont l'on fait des règles, est à mon avis ce que l'on peut nommer l'Art."^ A perfect painting, then, like a perfect poem, is a logical construction of the human reason, an achitectonic pensée with every least part causally related to the informing dramatic purpose of the whole. And within the abstract perfection of this edifice of the reason abide those rules which the mind may discover by the rational process of deduction--rules for invention, disposition, decorum, verisimilitude, expression, and the like--the whole Draconian code of the French Academy. To the question: In what art do you find that perfectly pure and cloudless connaissance from which you derive these rules? --Félibien, like Boileau would, of course, have answered: The antique; and as one legislating also for the art of painting, would have added Raphael, and, of course, Poussin. To the question: How binding are these excellent rules, and if you counsel the painter to observe them faithfully, in what does the originality of painting consist?--he might have answered, remembering Poussin, that within the precincts of the rules an intelligent and disciplined genius will always achieve "good and new disposition and expression." The eighteenth century was gradually to find this answer unsatisfactory, and in the end when the romantic imagination had outlawed the rational art of an earlier day, when nature no longer signified selected beauty or universal truth, and when genius had rejected forever the guiding hand of the rules, it would be repudiated altogether.

But since it is less the purpose of this essay to discuss the dissolution of the doctrine ut pictura poesis than to define its components and to sketch their development, it will be well to return to the central track of the argument and to consider some other elements of the doctrine that had their origin in the literary criticism of the ancients before they were incorporated by the Italians into their humanistic theory of painting and became, at length, essential elements of the aesthetic dogma of the French Academy. In the discussion that follows it will be further Horatian modifications of the Aristotelian theory of imitation that will engage our attention. Horace's encouragement of invention based on traditional forms and subjects, and his contribution to the doctrine of expression, have already been discussed.

[pp. 23-32]

* Symbol for the phonetic accent in this word not available on the computer.