Appendix 6 --- Decorum and Verisimilitude

Some fifty years later [1719] Du Bos, whose native realism that was often damaging to the doctrines of the Academy probably led him to resent the conventionalizing implications of the term decorum, talks only of "vraisemblance," which he divides into two parts: "vraisemblance mécanique" and "vraisemblance poétique" [Réflexions critiques, I, 30, pp. 268 ff.]. The former consists, he says, "à ne rien représenter qui ne soit possible, suivant les loix de la statique, les loix du mouvement, et les loix de l"optique." This adherence to the truth of natural law, a reaffirmation of northern realism after two centuries of Mannerist and classical art in France, not to mention the formalistic theory of the Academy, coincides, interestingly enough, with the realistic reaction against classicism in the contemporary style of the Rococo. But 'vraisemblance poétique" on close examination turns out to be little more than the Horatian and Renaissance decorum, cleansed, however, of all implications of the instructive or edifying; for Du Bos admitted that art should give pleasure but denied that it should also instruct [see note 135]. It is clearly more closely related to Horation and Renaissance decorum than to Aristotelian probability, although Du Bos certainly had the latter in mind as well. And if Dolce's convenevolezza" were substituted in the following passage [ibid., p. 269] for "vraisemblance poétique," a phrase which Du Bos owed to his interest in the drama and in dramatic theory, there would be absolutely no difference in the sense: "La vraisemblance poétique consiste à donner à ses personnages les passions qui leur conviennent, suivant leur âge, leur dignité, suivant le tempérament qu'on leur prête, et l'intérêt qu'on leur fait prendre dans l'action. Elle consiste à observer dans son tableau ce que les Italiens appellent il Costumé, c'est-à-dire, à s'y conformer à ce que nos sçavons des mþurs, des habits, des bâtimens et des armes particulières des peuples qu'on veut représenter. La vraisemblance poétique consiste enfin à donner aux personnages d'un tableau leur tête et leur caractère connu, quand ils en ont un, soit que ce caractère ait été pris sur des portraits, soit qu'il ait été imaginé."

Two years after Du Bos' book appeared, Antoine Coypel published his Epître à mon fils, a short compendium in verse of what he considered it essential for the painter to know, that is a kind of pendant to Boileau's L'art poétique; and it was, in fact, Boileau who urged him to publish his verse epistle and the Dissertations that are a commentary upon it [p. 74] [see Jouin, op. cit., pp. 367 ff.]. In the latter, after listing a formidable array of subjects in which the painter must be learned, Coypel distinguishes [ibid., p. 333] between characters taken form history which must be "semblables" and those from fable which must be "convenables." Here "semblable" which equals "vraisemblable" [Coypel uses both terms interchangeably] has not the sense of the probable which it had for the classicizing theorists of the seventeenth century, who were close to the Aristotelian theory of poetry as illustrated in the French classical drama, and which it had partially in mind of Du Bos. It means rather "like the truth" in the sense of adherence to fact, a meaning which it had also, at times in Italian literary criticism of the sixteenth century, in Castelvetro, for instance, where this meaning coexists with the Aristotelian meaning of the probable [See Charlton, Castelvetro's Theory of Poetry, pp. 41 ff.]. If he is painting history, then, the painter is learned for the sake of "vraisemblance" in the sense that he will get his facts straight, but, Coypel does not add, as Félibien would have added, for decorum's sake, and it is interesting that he is far enough removed from the tradition of Félibien and Le Brun to hold of little account those rules for decorum that would maintain the dignity of religious subjects by imposing restraint on the rendering of "basses circonstances" like the ox and the ass in the nativity. The latter, Coypel agrees, should not by played up, "but whatever rules one may establish in this regard are always unfruitful if they are not sustained by the painter's judgment and delicacy of spirit" [ibid., p. 282]. But decorum or the "convenable" is for Coypel merely the proper form for rendering the figures of fable according to their recognized characters, and to illustrate this rather narrow meaning of the term, which appears in Horace as a kind of corollary to the larger meaning of decorum as that which is appropriate to the typical rendering of human life, he quotes the famous lines of the Roman poet about preserving the traditional characters of Achilles, Medea, Ixion, etc. [Ars poetica 119-27]. But the painter may, however, says Coypel, in the case of historical pictures, leave the "vraisemblable" to follow the "convenable" and, without losing sight of his characters, embellish their portraits. Here "convenable" seems to mean to idealize in a manner appropriate to the historical characters whom the painter will treat. But the upshot of the whole matter in Coypel is that the notions of "vraisemblance" and decorum which had definite meaning in the minds of the academicians of the time of Le Brun have here largely lost their original force, and are treated in a way that marks, even in a man who in many ways is still steeped in doctrines of the Academy, the beginnings of the dissolution of that point of view. For Coypel "vraisemblance" no longer means, as we have seen, the probable, but truth to historical fact; decorum has only the limited meaning of the traditionally appropriate rendering of characters from fable, or occasionally of personages from history, and its connotations of the decent and becoming in the moral or religious sphere that were strong in Félibien and Le Brun, have for Coypel no more than for Du Bos any significance in the domain of the rules, but are subject to the artist's personal taste. The notion of decorum is still in consistently present in 1765 in Diderot for all his insistence that "nature never makes anything incorrect" ["Essai sur la peinture" in ˜uvres complètes, ed. Assezat, Paris 1876, p. 461 and p. 487]. But in his fourth Discourse, delivered in 1771, Reynolds practically limits his remarks on decorum to the following: "Those expressions alone should be given to the figures which their respective situations generally produce. Nor is this enough; each person should also have that expression which men of his rank generally exhibit. The joy, or the grief, of a character of dignity is not to be expressed in the same manner as a similar passion in a vulgar face." In these remarks the elaborate rules of the French Academy have given way to a mere hint. As for verisimilitude, its meaning of factual truth does not exist in Reynolds who knew, furthermore, that "particularities" are inconsistent with the grand style; and its Aristotelian meaning of probability is not mentioned but is subsumed in ReynoldsÍ discussion of typical representation. Thus in the course of the eighteenth century, those concepts that had been of great importance in the doctrine ut pictura poesis during its heyday under Le Brun come to be seen in proper perspective or to disappear. The antiformalistic tendencies that were to culminate in the Romantic Revival, and to which Reynolds was sensitive, were enough virtually to dispose of decorum to which the Aristotelian "vraisemblance" had in the seventeenth century, as we have seen, been closely related. [p. 75]

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