The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles le Brun's "Conference sur l'expression generale et particuliere.' - book reviews

Spying the love-smitten Juliet from afar, Shakespeare's similarly afflicted Romeo could know the state of her mind, even though she uttered no words: "She speaks, yet she says nothing; what of that? / Her eye discourses, I will answer it."(1) If it is true that facial expressions can "speak," their subtle visual eloquence is ultimately in the mind of the beholder, who must interpret their meaning. Thus, Lady Capulet elsewhere advises Juliet to "read" the features of Paris, her hapless suitor (1.3.81-86):

Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face, And find delight writ there with beauty's pen; Examine every married lineament, And see how one another lends content; And what obscur'd in this fair volume lies Find written in the margent of his eyes.

Painters and sculptors of the Renaissance tradition also knew the expressive capacities of the face, and many sought to exploit its possibilities through careful observation and imitation. Leonardo, who theorized that "the [pictorial] figure is most praiseworthy which by its actions best expresses the passion of its mind," also sought universal rules for facial expression, instructing, for example, that a man who is angry should be portrayed with his hair bristling, his brow knit and lowered, his teeth clenched, and the corners of his mouth grimly set.(2) Leonardo and his contemporaries could also rely upon the ancient literature of physiognomics; for example, David Summers has shown that the scowling face of Michelangelo's David, with its mane of curly hair extending down to the nape of the neck and its intensely knit, "cloudy" brow, may reflect the "leonine" character type described in the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica.(3) Both examples suggest that artists perceived the necessity for a universal theory of facial expression, but this need must have become even more urgent for 17th-century artists such as Domenichino and Poussin, for whom the expression of human sentiment was, if not the whole point of painting, at least its most powerful persuasive strategy. Thus, it is not surprising that Domenichino's pupil, the painter-biographer Giovanni Battista Passeri, should have lectured on physiognomics at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome as late as 1675, or that Poussin's admirer, the great French painter Charles Le Brun, should have lectured on the same topic at the Academie Royale in Paris only a few years earlier.(4)

Le Brun also developed a highly sophisticated and comprehensive theory of pathognomics, that is, a theory of how the expressive movements of the features may reveal the passions, as distinguished from physiognomics, the discipline more properly concerned with the judgment of human character from the features themselves. For Le Brun and his contemporaries; both disciplines pertained to the larger matter of pictorial "expression," which may be defined as that set of techniques which enable the artist to communicate sentiments to the beholder. Although Le Brun's pathognomic theory is known through the text of his academic lecture on the subject, the Conference sur l'expression, his physiognomics and the rest of his pictorial theory have come down to us only through fragmentary or secondhand sources. What survives indicates, however, that Le Brun had made a major contribution to the theory of visual expression.

In The Expression of the Passions, Jennifer Montagu reconstructs Le Brun's theories of expression, and assesses their impact upon later 17th- and 18th-century artistic practice. The result is first and foremost a much-needed addition to the art-historical literature on Le Brun. Indeed, in spite of Le Brun's extraordinary achievements as a painter, his extremely successful decorative projects at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the Louvre, and Versailles, his role in the founding of the Academie, his position as Premier Peintre to Louis XIV, and his directorship of the Gobelins tapestry works, the art-historical literature concerning him seems remarkably under-developed: Henri Jouin's monumental biographical study of 1889 and the catalogue of the 1963 Versailles exhibition (to which Montagu contributed) still constitute the core of Le Brun studies, and given the large number of lost and unidentified paintings, it will probably be some time before we have a reliable, comprehensive catalogue raisonne of his oeuvre.(5) Montagu has not undertaken this task, but what she has done enables us to understand a major aspect of the intellectual discipline through which Le Brun sought to perfect his art. The only comparable investigation of the theory of the passions is Thomas Kirchner's L'Expression des passions (1991), which is very different in scope and purpose; Kirchner's book surveys the development of the theory of the passions in 17th- and 18th-century France (his discussion of the 18th century is unsurpassed, as Montagu acknowledges), whereas Montagu is specifically concerned with Le Brun's theories, their origins, and their influence in the broader arena of European art.(6)

Her study revolves around the most completely preserved and best-known portion of Le Brun's pictorial theory, the pathognomic theory recorded in the Conference sur l'expression. The lecture was published only after his death, but numerous illustrated editions followed and were widely disseminated among artists - even into the early 19th century. Montagu's questions are these (p. xiii): what was Le Brun's purpose in this lecture, and why did artists require such instruction in the portrayal of the passions? The first part of the book answers these questions in a series of eight chapters. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the philosophical and psychological conditions governing the study of facial expression in art. Chapter 2 seeks to reconstruct Le Brun's complete theory of expression, including not only the pathognomic theory set forth in the Conference, but also his physiognomic theory, known through the contemporary accounts of Henri Testelin and Claude Nivelon and through the artist's own drawings, and his theory that pictorial expression operated according to a larger system that paralleled the modal system of ancient Greek music. Here, Montagu explains the intricacies of Le Brun's theory with crystalline clarity, and (using the artist's own drawings) illustrates how subtle adjustments of the features and their positions produce dramatically different expressive effects. Chapter 3 examines how Le Brun actually put this knowledge into practice in history painting. Next follows a series of chapters designed to place his ideas in various historical contexts, one devoted to theories of expression in the literary, dramatic, and musical arts, one on the tradition of expression in the visual arts up to Le Brun's own time, and another concerning alternative theories of expression that were current within the Academie Royale, including those of Nicolas Mignard, Gerard van Obstal, Michel Anguier, Roger de Piles, and Andre Felibien; de Piles was perhaps the harshest early critic of Le Brun's pathognomic system, for he insisted that painters needed only a mirror and their imaginations to master the representation of the passions. Chapter 7 examines the reception and practical influence of the Conference from its first publication in 1698 through the end of the 18th century. And finally, chapter 8 examines how 19th-century psychological, physiological, and evolutionary theories ultimately undermined Le Brun's most fundamental assumptions, thereby destroying the Conference's authority.

The second part of Montagu's study contains the text and a translation of the Conference. The text collates the five best early witnesses (including both manuscripts and printed editions), indicating all major variants in its critical apparatus; owing to Montagu's efforts, future scholars will be spared the weeks of painstaking work that would otherwise be necessary to understand the relationships between these texts, and to sort out their many errors and interpolations. The translation does not attempt skintight accuracy, but is aimed instead at making a difficult 17th-century French text intelligible to modern readers. Wherever possible, Montagu has even reproduced the illustrations that Le Brun had designed to accompany his lecture alongside the relevant passages of her translation, so that the reader can understand the artist's descriptions of subtle facial movements as he himself envisioned them.

Montagu also provides a series of appendixes designed to facilitate the reader's comprehension and use of Le Brun's Conference as an art-historical document. Appendix 1 establishes the date of the original lecture (April 7, 1668, perhaps continued on May 5). Here, she also examines the evidence for its reception in the academy, offering the intriguing hypothesis that the artist may have sought Colbert's protection to publish it, in spite of the academy's rules normally prohibiting individual members from publishing their lectures (pp. 142-43); the failure of this project would have been due to Le Brun's work on Versailles, which made it impossible for him to attend to the Conference until after Colbert's death in 1683. Appendix 2 catalogues the sixty-two drawings related to the Conference now preserved in the Louvre, dividing them into five groups: Sketches; Diagrams; Finished Heads; Ecorche Heads (copied from Vesalius); and School Drawings. Appendix 3 identifies the literary sources of the Conference, documenting Le Brun's borrowings from Descartes's Traite sur les passions, and from other sources. Appendixes 4 and 5 publish Testelin's and Nivelon's secondhand accounts of Le Brun's physiognomic theory. Finally, appendix 6 catalogues the numerous editions and versions of Le Brun's text and illustrations, including some that Montagu defines as "derivations," that is, versions "that make use of either the illustrations or the text in such a way that they cannot be regarded as original works" (p. 175).

Montagu's study is dedicated to Ernst Gombrich; in fact, it originated as a doctoral thesis written under Gombrich's direction and presented at the Warburg Institute in 1959. Montagu states that it was Gombrich who first suggested she should work on Le Brun's theory of facial expression, and that even at the time when she was writing her thesis, it would have been hard for her to know which ideas were her own and which were his (p. xiii). One can easily see how Montagu's topic relates to Gombrich's interests in the psychology of visual perception and its applications in art criticism; indeed, since Gombrich had been deeply influenced by Ernst Kris's psycho-analytic art history, it is significant that Kris himself if had explored the psychology of facial expression as early as 1932, when he published a remarkable essay on Franz Xavier Messerschmidt's character heads.(7) Gombrich later co-authored both an article and a book on caricature with Kris,(8) and further developed his ideas in the chapter "The Experiment of Caricature" in his Art and Illusion (1960); the latter piece features a discussion of Le Brun's Conference and its illustrations, complete with a citation of Montagu's thesis as a work in progress? In The Expression of the Passions, Montagu frequently employs a Gombrich-like approach, using the evidence of perceptual psychology to set the technology of facial expression in 17th-century art and theory against an "objective" background. For example, she cites (p. 2 and nn. 16, 17) the experiments of the filmmaker Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov to show that context can alter our perception of facial expression, underpinning this discussion with the more recent work of psychologists such as Paul Ekman; although the principle was unknown to Le Brun, its absence from his consciousness, the absence of its implications from his pictorial practice, locates him in a history of visual perception.

Montagu's text and its appendixes are clearly designed to provide a corpus of raw materials for future historical and critical autopsies. For example, her appendix on the drawings (pp. 144-55) should stimulate further investigation into the reasoning behind Le Brun's use of two different kinds of drawing to illustrate the passions, that is, the "diagrams" (schematic line drawings of frontal and profile views of the face) and the "finished heads" (fully or partially shaded three-quarter and profile views). The diagrams represent a generic Caucasian face with virtually no individuality beyond that of gender (which appears in each case to be male), while the finished heads are highly individualized, representing not only the facial movements associated with each passion, but also a great variety of physiognomic types, in both genders. The implication is that the "types" portrayed in the finished heads represent the sort of person that most perfectly expresses each sentiment; for example, a frightful, bearded old man with wild hair is used for "scorn and hatred," while a mature, classical-looking female with elaborately coiffed hair represents "wonder," and a rather younger, softer-looking female with disheveled hair portrays "rapture." Now that signs and referents have been permitted to go their separate ways, we may recognize such matchings as arbitrary, or even prejudicial, but Le Brun's thinking clearly reflects the 17th-century definition of the pictorial "figure" - whether the full human form, the face, or any other image - as a visible metaphor, the embodiment of a universal, incorporeal Idea in a carefully proportioned arrangement of shapes, lines, and colors. The Idea was fundamental to the theories of Le Brun's hero, Poussin, and to the sculptor Francois Duquesnoy, who, for example, deliberately selected sculptural subjects involving the figure of the infant because no other so perfectly embodied the lyrical sentiment of "tenderness" that he sought to express.(10)

The title of Montagu's chapter "Le Brun's Complete Theory of Expression" is not exactly correct, because the chapter does not examine the expressive implications of the theory of the Idea. Clearly, the notion of the Idea survived in the French academy (which made Giovanni Pietro Bellori - the theorist of the Idea par excellence - an honorary member in 1689), and the fact that Le Brun did not lecture on the topic can hardly be taken to mean that he rejected it.(11) However, his novel adaptation of Cartesian psycho-physiological principles as the basis for a theory of pictorial figuration may suggest that he had restructured the art-theoretical "Idea" around Descartes's radical redefinition of that term; indeed, it is significant that Descartes's new conception of the Idea is related to his conclusion that "naturalistic" images are no more expressive of reality than are simple diagrams of shape, for this might help to explain why Le Brun developed his linear, diagrammatic method of illustrating the passions.(12)

This book is exemplary in nearly every respect, being marred only by a certain discomfort with later Renaissance thought and its rhetorical forms. For example, the validity of Felibien's reading of Le Brun's Apotheosis of Hercules at Vaux-le-Vicomte is in part discounted simply because of its "display" of erudition (p. 41), and the 16th-century theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo's belief in the power of images to stir the passions is judged "absurd" because it does not square with modern perceptions (p. 64). The author often insists upon an arbitrary standard of reasonableness in choosing between interpretive options, even when the objects of her study could not possibly have shared that standard. A case in point is her description of Anguier's academic lectures on the passions as "offering nothing that would be of use to the artist, or which could be reproduced in paint or in marble" (p. 79), perhaps on account of the poetical language that characterizes the passages she has chosen to quote.(13) In my view, Anguier uses such figurative language to help his listeners conceptualize the passions of which he speaks; when he says that aged, malicious anger "causes a gnawing at the heart," and that people so afflicted "have a vulture devouring their entrails" (quoted on p. 79), he is not speaking nonsense, but is instead trying to spur our minds to creative furor, so that we can vividly envision the very Idea of that passion. What is there to gain by dismissing Anguier's discourses as irrelevant to practice? One learns much more by permitting oneself to speculate about the nature of their relevance.

ANTHONY COLANTUONO Department of Art History and Archaeology University of Maryland College Park, Md. 20742-1335

1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.12-13, from The Riverside Shakespeare, Boston, 1974, p. 1068.

2. Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks, ed. J. P. Richter, London, 1883, I, 292, no. 584.

3. D. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, Princeton, N.J., 1981, 340-41; cf. P. Meller, "Physiognomical Theory in Renaissance Heroic Portraits," in Studies in Western Art: Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art, Princeton, N.J., 1963, II, 53-69, esp. 67-69. See also M. Kwakkelstein, Leonardo da Vinci as a Physiognomist: Theory and Drawing Practice, Leiden, 1994.

4. N. Turner, "Four Academy Discourses by Giovanni Battista Passeri," Storia dell'arte, XIX, 1973, 239.

5. Montagu's rather bleak assessment of Le Brun studies may be found in her review "M. Gareau, Charles Le Brun, Premier Peintre du Roi Louis XIV, Paris, 1992," Burlington Magazine, CXXXV, 1993, 359. As Montagu has pointed out, however, Lydia Beauvais's survey of the Louvre's thousands of Le Brun drawings has already yielded rich rewards, and we can also look forward to Madeleine Pinault's catalogue of Le Brun's theoretical drawings.

6. T. Kirchner, L'Expression des passions: Ausdruck als Darstellungsproblem in der franzosischen Kunst und Kunsttheorie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Mainz, 1991; the book has been reviewed by T. Puttfarken, Burlington Magazine, CXXXIV, 1992, 733. Willibald Sauerlander's 1990 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art ("Changing Faces: Art and Physiognomy, A History of Representing the Passions," actually delivered in 1991) also constituted a major contribution to this subject, and it is to be hoped that they will eventually be published.

7. E. Kris, "Die Characterkopfe des Franz Xavier Messerschmidt," Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, n.s. VI, 1932, 169-228. For Kris's influence upon Gombrich, see esp. U. Kultermann, Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte, Vienna/Dusseldorf, 1966, 391; and E. H. Gombrich, A Lifelong Interest: Conversations on Art and Science with Didier Eribon, London, 1993, esp. 44-53. For Gombrich's thinking on the broader topic of "expression," see also K. Lepsky, Ernst H. Gombrich: Theorie und Methode, Vienna/Cologne, 1991, 166-87.

8. E. H. Gombrich and E. Kris, "The Principles of Caricature," British Journal of Medical Psychology, XVII, 1938, 319-42; and eidem, Caricature, Harmondsworth, 1940.

9. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, New York, 1960, 330-58, esp. 348.

10. See A. Colantuono, "The Tender Infant: 'Invenzione' and 'Figura' in the Art of Poussin," Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1986, 169-221; and idem, "Titian's Tender Infants: On the Imitation of Venetian Painting in Baroque Rome," I Tatti Studies, III, 1989, 207-34.

11. Testelin's summary of the academy's teachings regarding expression in the Sentimens (ed. princ. 1693), published in Montagu's appendix 4, contains several usages of the term Idee (e.g., p. 165); in context, these suggest that Idee signified the neo-Platonic essence of the literary "subject" being portrayed.

12. R. McRae, "'Idea' as a Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas, XXVI, 1965, 175-90, esp. 189-90 concerning Descartes's discussion of modes of representation in the Dioptrics, Discourse 4.

13. Montagu's skepticism regarding the importance of art theories that happen to survive only in manuscript or fragmentary form may also be in play here; see, e.g., her review "E. Cropper, The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa's Dusseldorf Notebook, Princeton, N.J., 1984," Burlington Magazine, CXX-VIII, 1986, 222-23, esp. 223, where similar doubts about the significance of Testa's theory are expressed.

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