The Eloquence of Color – Rhetoric & Painting in the French Classical Age: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age: 18 (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics) - Hardcover

Lichtenstein, Jacqueline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520069072 ISBN 13: 9780520069077

Publisher: University of California Press, 1993

Synopsis

In this contribution to the theory of art, Jacqueline Lichtenstein discusses the importance of colour in reconciling ancient differences between rhetoric and painting. The visible world has been suspect since Plato accused the Sophists of relying on rhetorical show, of being in effect makeup artists. Before the 17th century, these differences were manifest in a valorization of design over colour. But in the 17th century, the image suddenly becomes an essential agent of thought. Rhetorical colour is revalued along with colour in painting, with cosmetics, and with all that belonged to the feminine, as a sensual force necessary to reconcile reason and pleasure, action and passion. Lichtenstein thus identifies a major shift in European theories of meaning, gender and the relationship between the world and the image.

About this title

About the Author

Jacqueline Lichtenstein is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley.

From the Inside Flap

"An outstanding book, one of the most intelligent, penetrating, and intellectually rigorous studies of pictorial theory in the literature of art history."Michael Fried, author ofAbsorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot

"Jacqeline Lichtenstein's groundbreaking contribution to intellectual history reconstructs the history of the age-old debate between philosophy and rhetoric, discourse and images, drawing and color, truth and delight. She shows how, in opposition to the Platonic suspicion of eloquence and colour, 17th-century French aesthetics discovers that painting involves deception more than imitation and delight rather than logic. Impressively erudite, Lichtenstein is also a seductive writer. A book about the pleasure of seeing and the pleasure of reading."Thomas Pavel, author of The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0520069072
• ISBN 13: 9780520069077
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 282