It may be interesting to compare some remarks on the expression of the passions by theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, noting significant changes as we advance in time and as we move from Italy to northern Europe. Leonardo, for instance, at the end of the Quattrocento gives the painters the following directions for representing the passion of wrath [Trattato, III, 381]: "Alla Figura irata farai tenere uno per li capegli col capo storto à terra, et con uno de' gionocchi sul costato, et col braccio destro levare il pugno in alto; questo habbia li capegli ellevati, le ciglia basse e strette, et i denti stretti, et i dui stremi decanto della bocca archati; il collo grosso, et dinanzi, per lo chinarsi al nemico, sia pieno di grinzi?" Leonardo thus thinks of a wrathful figure in actively dramatic terms: his knee is on his enemy's chest, his right first is raised in the air before the blow is struck, his left hand has seized his enemy by the hair; the movements of the body that express the passion of ira have no abstract existence but are represented as Leonardo might have observed them in a Florentine brawl or elsewhere, and the same is true of his remarks on facial expression--the eyebrows low and contracted, the teeth clenched, the corners of the mouth drawn back to produce accentuated curved lines on either side. This passage, which may well be a description of one of Leonardo's own drawings, shows how directly he approached nature in his study of the passions. Lomazzo in defining ira, a century later [Trattato, II, 11, p. 136] shows none of this realistic approach to nature of the Renaissance but speaks either in generalizations that lack entirely the direct sense of observation that one finds in Leonardo, or in terms of examples drawn from books: "L'ira," he writes, "che non è altro che grandissima infiammatione d'animo, fà i moti stizzosi, colerici, e violenti; si come appare in quelli, à cui si gonfia la faccia, gl'occhi s'accendono, et avampano, come bragia; et i moti di tutte le membra, per l'impeto, e violenza della colera, si fanno gagliardissimi, e molto più risentiti, come in Mosè, quando per l'adoratione del vitello, ruppe impetuosamente le tavole della legge . . . in Allessandro quando uccise Calistene, e molti suoi amici. Si che ciascuno in quel furore gli sgombrava dinanzi, poiche tanto poteva in lui, che si legge una volta essersi gli veduto in India uscire, e lampeggiar faville di foco dal corpo" [other examples follow]. To say as Lomazzo does that the movements of an angry man are "passionate, choleric and violent such as appear in one whose face swells and whose eyes catch fire and burn like coals, whose limbs . . . move most vigorously and in a much more lively fashion [than usual]" is to describe the passion of wrath in very general terms indeed, and one easily detects here, and in Lomazzo's method of piling up examples from books, that same tendency to avoid direct experience of nature that appears in the Mannerist doctrine that the Idea of beauty which the artist should follow is not gathered from nature but exists a priori in his mind, a theory that has its counterpart in the well-known deviations from nature in Mannerist art [see notes 48 and 108]. Le Brun, a century after Lomazzo, is not abstract like the latter through imprecision, but because his effort to "préciser les passions" has been carried to such a ridiculous extreme of categorical detail. It is characteristic of Le Brun as a theorist of the north of Europe, with a long artistic tradition behind him of emphasizing the face rather than the body as the chief vehicle of human expression, that he should declare [Traité des passions in Jouin, Charles Le Brun, p. 377] that "le visage est la partie du corps où elle fait voir plus particulièrement ce qu'elle resent," and then devote the major part of his treatise to illustrating the changes that occur in the physiognomy under the influence of the passions. Leonardo, as a student of human psychology, was [p. 73] deeply interested in facial expression, but as a southern European with an artistic tradition behind him in which the body is more expressive of human emotion than the face, naturally he was enormously concerned both as an artist and theorist with bodily movement, to which Le Brun in his treatise gives scant attention. Lomazzo is likewise a typical Italian theorist in being far more interested in bodily movement than in facial expression. In the following passage describing chiefly the facial manifestations of the passion of anger, Le Brun like Lomazzo notes the inflamed eyes and swollen face, and he undoubtedly owed to Leonardo, whose Trattato was first published in Paris in 1651 with illustrations by Poussin, the bristling hair, swollen neck [neither, be it noted, facial expressions], clenched teeth, and perhaps a hint for what he says about the movement of the eyebrows; for the rest he notes changes of his own prescribing in the pupil, forehead, nostrils, lips, complexion etc., and at the end makes brief reference to one aspect of the internal, physiological cause of the external expression [ibid., p. 387]:
"Lorsque la colère s'empare de l'â me, celui qui ressent cette passion, a les yeux rouges et enflâmés, la prunelle égarée et étincelante, les sourcils tantôt abattus, tantôt élevés l'un comme l'autre, le front parôitra ridé fortement, des plis entre les yeux, les narines paroîtront ouvertes et élargies, les lèvre de dessous surmontera celle de dessus, laissant les coins de la bouche un peu ouverts, formant un ris cruel et dédaigneux.
"Il semblera grincer les dents, il paroîtra de la salve à la bouche, son visage sera pâle en quelque endroit, et enflamé en d'autres et tout enflé; les veines du front, des tempes, et du col seront enflées et tendues, les cheveux hérissés, et celui qui ressent cette passion, s'enfle au lieu de respirer, parce que le cțur est oprressé par l'abondance du sang qui vient à son secours." [p. 74]
[Lee, Rensselaer W. Ut Pictura Poesis, The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. 1967.]