Rhetorical theory consists of one big idea and a very large number of individual doctrines. The big idea is that in any form of writing or speech-giving the speaker or writer must always think hard about the audience, the situation, the aim of the speech and what the audience already thinks about the topic. Rhetoric is centrally about how a speaker presents him or herself to an audience, and about how to assemble stories, arguments and emotional appeals which will persuade that audience. The individual doctrines relate to an exceptionally broad range of different topics. Thus for example a rhetoric manual will teach a student the use of voice and gesture, the ways to discover and present arguments, the arousal of emotions, ways to introduce a speech, ways to present oneself in relation to different types of audience, selection of vocabulary and style, patterning of words and sounds within a sentence, metaphor, allegory and the training of the memory. Today we would think of these doctrines as belonging to several different disciplines but historically they all formed part of rhetoric.
Second, the rhetoric textbook is only the beginning of the study of rhetoric. Textbooks tend to set out the different aspects of the subject in a simple way with only a few variables at each point because the real training in rhetoric will take place through study of previous speeches and through the pupils writing their own speeches under the direction of an experienced advocate. The handbook tends to show how the whole system works so the pupil can retain the main ideas; the practical training and the study of previous speeches shows how the doctrines can be used in practice.
Recently I have begun to think that rhetoric may be more useful as a set of categories or questions to apply to texts than as a corpus of instructions about writing. In renaissance grammar schools pupils were taught to read texts rhetorically. Rhetorical features such as amplification, the use of particular figures or the arrangement of particular arguments in a text were pointed out to them. Considering rhetoric as a series of questions which we can put to literary texts enables us to observe and learn from the innovative ways in which great writers used techniques of language. Learning a set of categories enables us to compare the ways in which different authors approached similar problems or used similar techniques. My suggestion to you today is that we should consider making the same move in relation to the visual arts. Let us try to think about rhetoric as a series of questions or categories which we can apply to any work of art in order to think about how it communicates and in order to compare the ways in which different works of art use the resources of communication.
I am now going to talk through a series of headings for categories taken from rhetorical theory which can be applied to works of art. I emphasize that this is just my selection of rhetorical ideas which seem to me promising. Through reading rhetoric books, such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s De oratore, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, Rudolph Agricola’s De invention dialectica and Erasmus’s De copia, you may find other rhetorical ideas which are more useful in relation to the visual arts.
Rhetorical categories
It seems sensible to begin with the way a painting is presented to the viewer. The painting implies certain statements about itself, about its maker and about the audience both in its form and in the way it is framed and located. Paintings are often addressed to several different audiences. For example the painter may be working to satisfy the requirements of the person who commissioned the painting, in relation to subject matter. At the same time the painter may be trying to display competence in painting to a wider audience both in the hope of securing further commissions, and for reasons of status. Owners of paintings and curators may have many different reasons for displaying them.
Secondly, Rhetoric helpfully advises that the introduction should make the audience attentive, receptive and well-disposed. This seems to provide a way of approaching the distant view of the painting, the initial impression made by the overall design, the lighting and the clothes and properties. Some paintings seem to convey a distance between subject and audience; others may appear to tell us that the saints are very much people like us. Paintings may announce their subject from a distance. Composition may present a long-distance visual pattern. Lighting may invite an initial focus on a particular detail. Paintings may suggest to us an initial itinerary of viewing. Such early impressions may dominate the audience’s view of the picture or may be overturned as viewers engage more thoroughly.
A third set of questions can be related to Rudolph Agricola’s concept of exposition. How does the painting convey its subject to the viewer? How does the representation of a figure of a saint permit the viewer to identify the figure and convey information and teaching? How does a portrait indicate the importance, profession or character of the sitter? If there is a narrative, how does the picture make the narrative plausible and convincing to the viewer? Or does it aim more at wonder than at plausibility? How does it bring a focus to the story? How does it compare with literary tellings of the story or with previous visual depictions? If the painting represents an historical figure, how does it allude to the narrative or other knowledge about that figure which the painter may wish to convey?
Fourthly, after exposition, rhetoric suggests that we investigate argument. If a painting has an argument it may be conveyed through the narrative, whether depicted or implied. The topics of invention may still be useful in analysing how a scene conveys an argumentative point. For example some element of torment, sorrow or joy may be depicted as an effect of the scene depicted. Or part of the image may show us what causes the principal scene. Or the painting may depict circumstances which reveal the rightness or undesirability of a particular action. The painting may invite us to make comparisons between different figures or different areas of the painting. Visual symbols, sometimes related to texts or commentaries, may show us the implication of the birth of Jesus or the capture of Rome. Agricola’s ideas about the role of the audience in making the connections which create persuasion may be important here.
The fifth category is style. We could begin with some general ideas related to the concept of style: amplification, the notion that some parts of a speech may be developed in more detail than others and the idea that in some sections the speaker will try for greater liveliness both seem to have important applications to the visual arts. Erasmus’s doctrine of copia encourages the writer to devise many different ways of expressing the same sentence or developing a single idea in order to achieve more intensity of expression. Just as readers were taught to notice passages of amplification and to think about the effect intended so viewers of pictures could ask themselves questions about the significance of some elements of an image being depicted with great detail and magnificence where others were treated more loosely or left in shadow.
The doctrine of figures of words offers students of writing ways of identifying and considering the effects of different kinds of repetition, patterning and interruptions. E. H. Gombrich once described this part of rhetoric as “the most careful analysis of an expressive medium ever undertaken” (Art and Illusion, p. 374) and it is easy to see how some figures of repetition and patterning could be adapted to visual use while by analogy specifically painterly figures could be built around brush strokes and juxtapositions of colours. Other figures describe attitudes which a speaker might present, for example hesitating, correcting what one has just said, offering to allow someone else to decide a question, speaking frankly, or expressing uncertainty. Some of these attitudinal figures could be applied to the gestures which different people employ in a narrative painting or in a set of panels depicting a series of saints or heroes.
The tropes form a special subdivision of the figures and include techniques like metaphor, metonymy (using a word or idea to refer to something closely connected) and synecdoche (using a part to refer to a whole or vice versa) which could be used to extend the meaning of an object depicted. Allegory and typology as means of interpretation are as familiar in the visual arts as in literature. We are now beginning to understand diminutio or brevitas as ways of establishing community with an audience by appearing to assume that even the smallest hint or allusion is sufficient to convey the message. Painters may flatter their audience in the same way by depicting the presence of important objects through a shadow, a reflection, or in part rather than portray it in full.
Sixthly, Agricola’s rewriting of the theory of disposition to require the writer to decide on the structure of a text through applying general logical principles and observation of classical models to the material which has been collected for a speech offer ways of thinking about pictorial composition. These ideas can supplement notions derived from patterns in space and from ideas of balance and progression related to the complex periodic sentence. The suggestion of studying and then deliberately varying previous literary models also offers a way of thinking about adaptations of iconography and the way visual images exploit and rewrite earlier written and visual presentations of a narrative.
Seventhly, Renaissance rhetoric gave a new impetus to the study of emotion for speakers and readers. Paintings may elicit emotions in a range of different ways, for example through the portrayal of particular scenes, allusion to events with resonances for particular audiences or through the twistings or gestures of a body or the expressions of face and hands. Rhetoric calls attention to the ways in which speakers or characters make connections with an audience and direct their responses in particular ways. Emotion my also result from the viewer’s struggle to view the body or object depicted and to respond adequately to the subject and its visual depiction. This is an area where it will be important to make connections with experiences related to theatre, dance and religious ritual.
Eighthly, alongside emotion renaissance rhetorical theory aimed to understand the ways in which a writer gives pleasure to a particular audience and the contribution which pleasure makes to the reception of narratives and arguments. In painting pleasure will arise from the recognition of people and objects, from an appreciation of the skill and liveliness with which they are depicted and from the sensation aroused by colours and their combinations. In confronting a picture we will very often want to ask ourselves what in the painting causes us pleasure and what that pleasure contributes to the other aspects of our response to the painting.
In ninth place I would raise the issue of endings. Rhetorical theory suggests that speeches should end with a summary, an appeal to the emotions and a turning back to the audience. How might we think of endings in relation to paintings? We could study the ways in which painters decide that a painting is complete or we could think about when viewers decide to stop looking at a particular image, to memorize it and to leave it behind.
Finally renaissance theorists developed a greater appreciation of the role of decorum in writing. In one sense style and argument must seem to fit in with the way your audience understands the nature and importance of your topic. But breaking decorum can be essential to making a forceful intervention and to prompting a reconsideration on the part of the audience. The visual arts need to depict objects and light in a way that is recognisable but also different, provocative and new.
Application to visual arts
After such a rapid exposition of rhetorical categories for thinking about art, I shall turn to some examples, and first to a painting about public speaking and audiences, Raphael’s Tapestry Cartoon “St Paul preaching in Athens”. This painting is a design for a tapestry intended to be hung on special occasions in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the personal chapel of the Pope. The painting is both a narrative and an argument. It tells the story of an episode from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 17 verses 16-34. Paul is in Athens. He is called to speak at the court of the Areopagus. He reminds the Athenians that they have an altar to the unknown God and he explains to them who this God is, speaking of the creation, God’s continual invisible presence in the world, the resurrection of the dead and the last judgement. Some of his audience mock him; some want to hear him again; two joined him and believed: Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris. The painting illustrates this narrative. On the left before the court building Paul preaches; the building on the right may be the Temple of the unknown god; around him a crowd of people listen; some look sceptical; some argue with each other; but on the right a man and woman listen intently and respond to Paul’s words; they are Dionysius and Damaris.
This painting is an argument as well as a narrative because preaching is one of the duties of the Priest, pre-eminently one of the duties of the Pope. In the Pope’s own chapel this painting reminds the clergy of the heroic age of preaching and of their obligation to take the message of Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection and the last judgement to people who do not believe. The painting provides an instructive example to the priestly onlookers.
This is also a painting which displays a variety of gestures: St Paul’s preaching, with his eyes firmly fixed on the heavens; the faces of the audience, some sceptical, some bored; some commenting to each other about what Paul has been saying; some staring with rapt attention. The faces of the men and their gestures of argument or puzzlement remind us that in verse 18 he had been called to speak by the philosophers, the Stoics and Epicureans, and also the comment in verse 21 that the Athenians and the foreigners there spent all their time in argument and in gathering novelty. Paul is portrayed as an orator, as someone who uses the resources of classical Athenian culture to teach something new and who therefore arouses mixed reactions. It is also a painting focused on emotion, as we look at the reactions of the different members of the audience, and especially at the emotion on the face of Damaris.
It is a picture with a very clear overall shape which enables the audience to read the narrative very easily at first glance: a man is speaking before a crowd in an elaborate classical cityscape; two members of the crowd regard him with especially rapt attention. But it is also a painting full of different figures which rewards close viewing. Raphael observes for us the variety of dress of different people; their different ages and attitudes, the indulgent and the ascetic, the wealthy and the poor, Athenians and foreigners. The overall style of the painting is extremely harmonious and elevated and yet within it there are many little details of everyday life. The painting portrays a populous, rich and varied city where different types of business are being transacted, different types of lives being led. For Dionysius and Damaris, this is the culminating moment of their lives; for others it is the start of a slow process of realisation; for others it is a philosophical amusement or even a distraction on the busy path of their own lives.
The next painting I want to discuss is one of the sublime masterpieces of Giovanni Bellini, a large altarpiece of the Madonna and Child enthroned with Saints Peter, Catherine, Lucia and Jerome, which he painted in 1505 for the Church of San Zaccaria in Venice, where it now hangs. The exquisite architectural framework, by echoing the carved columns of the altar, makes it clear that this painting was designed to fit exactly in its location, on the North wall of the church. The picture articulates a very clear pyramidal structure, radiant with colour and light and with an array of expensive cloths and marbles, intricately and beautifully described. It is about five metres high and 2.3 metres wide. It glows with light and luxury. At the centre of the picture, sitting on a marble throne, the virgin shows off her child who stands on her left knee. Beside her the saints are grouped symmetrically. Their attributes, the keys of St Peter, the broken wheel of St Catherine, the lamp of St Lucy and the cardinal’s robes and the book of St Jerome, make it easy to read them. Beneath the Virgin, to avoid vacancy a single musician angel plays the lira di braccio, while seated on a gorgeous marble step.
There is no narrative to this picture. It corresponds to no scene in the Bible. Rather it is a familiar object of meditation for the devout. The Virgin sits on her throne with her child. The role of the on-lookers is to admire them both and to contemplate what the Virgin and Jesus achieved on their behalf through the incarnation. Every important line in the picture points towards the infant Christ, whose right hand gives a sign of blessing, almost at the centre of the painting.. The figures in the painting do not interact, rather they stand rapt in their own meditations. The painting offers the onlookers models of heroic martyrdom and depictions of the founding objects of the Church, the keys which Jesus entrusted to Peter, and St Jerome’s Latin text of the Bible. Between these two old men, who face outwards frontally without engaging the gaze of the viewer, stand two beautiful young women, almost in profile, turning towards the steps before the throne. They stand for heroism and martyrdom, carrying their palms opposite each other. Above the Virgin is a head of Solomon, representing wisdom, and a beautiful mosaic half dome which surrounds a crystal lamp, signifying purity and an ostrich egg, symbolizing the virgin birth.
Only the angel looks out at the viewer of the painting and she appears to be absorbed in her pose and her music rather than trying to engage or communicate with the audience. The musician angel underlines the calmness and stasis of the whole painting. We are not being asked for an emotional response. We are invited to reflect on the individuals and symbols before us and above all we are invited to admire. We admire both the resplendent light and the amazing richness of the materials and the drapes. This picture addresses an audience for whom luxurious textiles and magnificence are almost synonymous, a wealthy and confident people, who find a place for the adoration of the virgin and child in their public and civic rituals.
Bellini painted many small panels of the virgin and child, with and without saints. Some of these are delightful, colourful, human. This panel from the Accademia shows that Bellini can depict the human scale of adoration for a domestic audience. But the San Zaccaria altarpiece elicits devotion on a grand and public scale. It demands that we be impressed with what we see. It does not teach us what religion demands or ask us to become emotionally involved.
My third example is Lorenzo Lotto’s painting of the miraculous trial of Santa Lucia now moved from a side chapel in the monastery of San Floriano in Jesi to the municipal art gallery. The contract from Jesi for the Pala of Santa Lucia dated from 1523, though the painting was only completed in 1532. It was probably painted in Venice. This painting displays Lotto’s skill with extraordinarily beautiful fabrics and powerfully organised colour and lighting. The yellow-clad figure of Santa Lucia is the strong focus of this crowded composition even when seen from far off. But there are plenty of other things to look at, many wonderfully painted details, particularly of the varicoloured fabrics and a stunning array of marvellous heads. The figured parts of the painting are extraordinarily full, a rhetorician would say, copious, in their depictions of faces, postures, gestures and rich fabrics. The copiousness of some sections of the canvas is set off by the calculated emptiness of other sections.
Lotto manages the canvas beautifully with a very pleasing alternation between the full lower section centre and right and the empty classicising vault above them, contrasted with the positioning of the ruler Paschasius on the left, both above the crowd and somehow irrelevant in spite of the position of apparent power. The fullness and emptiness of the left and right sections somehow balance each other, as if imitating the rhetorical figure of chiasmus. Lotto enriches the composition with a contrast between the holy spirit and the pagan idol in the top centre, and the rhyming scene of everyday life, with the nurse trying to restrain the child on the lower left.
The arrangement of the figures is attractively varied but not entirely convincing in the way the figures are linked. One can see that the three young men surrounding Santa Lucia are attempting to restrain her but somehow their bodies fail to convey force or to reflect in the distribution of their weight, the exertion of pulling. It is necessary that Lucia should not be moved but somehow the male figures need to be more evidently forceful to make the narrative point effectively. In terms of rhetoric’s ideas about narrative one could say that there is a problem in the depiction of coherence and consequence. Or one might say that the painting needed more study of force and equilibrium. Lotto seems to put the emphasis more on the colours, and the astonishing array of fabrics, faces, postures and hand gestures than on the postural consequences of the connections between the bodies. The figures seem to work astonishingly well separately and unconvincingly as an ensemble. Sometimes Lotto’s greatest effects are achieved through a separation of figures. Or perhaps in this painting he wants to make us consider the idea that everyday notions of equilibrium and force have been overturned by the miracle.
Writing envies the power of the eye. Rhetoric tells us that the greatest effect an orator can achieve is brought about through enargeia, through using language to bring an event before the eyes of the audience. Painting always brings something before our eyes, but it usually depicts one moment in a narrative. Painting depends on the audience’s previous knowledge of a story, but because it usually depicts only one scene it leaves more space for a viewer to reflect on different futures. When in 1654 Rembrandt painted this picture of Bathsheba, he could rely on his audience knowing that the letter in her hand, which she has read and is now reacting to, was a love-letter from King David, that Bathsheba would go to David, that David would arrange for Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to be killed in battle so that he could marry her, and that God would show his anger with David, through his prophet Nathan, and through the early death of David and Bathsheba’s first child. (2 Samuel 11-13) In the picture the already beautiful Bathsheba is being made more beautiful in preparation for meeting the King, but as Alpers points out, Bathsheba seems to reject the viewer’s attention. Her face seems to convey all the sadness of the world, as if she too knows the story in advance and can see the humiliation which will come to her and to David, and perhaps also the success she will eventually achieve after the birth of Solomon. She seems to know that she has no choice; that for an ordinary human body to be caught up in the wheels of history will inevitably bring difficult consequences. In theatrical terms one could say that she is experiencing the moment of recognition on which the tragedy will turn. In a way it would be easier to look at the picture if we could see her face only and not her body as well. But her body, turned towards the viewer, as the face turns away, dominates the picture, both in its magnificence and in its vulnerability. This picture foregrounds the awkwardness of our role as audience, looking at a woman who does not want to be looked at; but it is also a dressing-room scene. Bathsheba is being prepared for display to a different audience, King David. Sometimes painted Bathshebas welcome the viewer’s attention, as if they are already ready for David. This Bathsheba evidently does not; she will be ready; she will inhabit her role; but for now she is thinking about where it will lead. But what if David could see her as she is depicted here? Would Bathsheba’s recognition of what will come about deter him from the great sin he is preparing? Perhaps David’s failure to imagine the sadness of this Bathsheba is part of his moral failing. Bathsheba is the heroine of this picture as much in her understanding and sadness as in her beauty.
Alongside the confused heap of white cloths and the opulence of the gold and brocade robe, representing the before and after of this scene, Rembrandt offers us a second, restrained and proper figure to consider. By her concentration on her task, the maidservant accentuates Bathsheba’s loneliness. The maid’s presence adds an ambiguity to Bathsheba’s gaze. Bathsheba may be looking reflectively into the void or she may be looking at her maid, who refuses complicity at the same time as refusing judgement. Rembrandt’s portrayal of the maid reminds spectators of their freedom to regard actions in different ways and of the uncertainty of any judgements they might reach.
Finally I want to turn to a much later painting, Cezanne’s Mont St Victoire of 1904-6, now in Zurich. By 1904 Cezanne was painting primarily for himself, perhaps also for a few admirers and a future audience, and in order to further his own understanding of nature, light and colour. For him painting was a form of research and an assertion of his reason for existing. At this period of his life Cezanne typically works on four different scales: the close up still life of fruit and bottles with cloth, table and wall for background; the individual human figure; the landscape with trees, rocks and sometimes bathers; and the long view of the mountain itself. Working in different scales like this was one of Cezanne’s ways of thinking about light and vision. His other resource was colour, as we see in this picture. There are only a few lines: a horizon, blurred at the edges; a few ridges on the mountain and small perspective of a roofed building in the front foreground. But what colour: an amazing palette of greens and blues set off in the middle foreground with a range of yellowy browns.
On a distant view of the painting, and recognising the silhouette from other Cezannes, we identify the St Victoire; the hard blue-greys of the mountain contrast with the greens and browns of the plain and the foothills in front of it. As we move closer we are drawn to explore the details of the contrasted greens, the few striking highlights of red and pink and the brushwork of individual passages.
It makes some sense to think of our process of responding to this picture in rhetorical terms. We are first engaged by its style, the way in which paint is deployed, by its range, its amplification and its arresting juxtapositions. We know that Cezanne is the master of the individual tree but the foliage here is more general and more distant with the greens merging into blues and greys. As Paul Smith observes, this brings the details of the picture closer to us, making them more tangible. Then, in a sort of mix of exposition and argument the viewer has to think about the relations between adjacent segments of colour and about how to understand their place within an apprehension of the scene as a whole. But this thinking is hardly separable from an emotional response, wonder at the way particular passages of colour are thinned or darkened by successive strokes and amazement at the way the details harmonize with the viewer’s ever-changing sense of the different regions of the painting. As we step back the painting observes decorum and harmony, but when we step in the force of the brushstrokes and the expressive contrasts, the pink on the mountainside, the red and blue at the centre, is almost shocking.
This is a painting one should look at for hours or perhaps days. The painting is about the experiences of looking and of contemplating the ways in which paint renders the sensations of colour. It is as if Cezanne has made a record of some of the months of his lifelong contemplation of the ever-changing play of light on the mountain and of his attempt to harmonise local sensations of colour with a stable, tactile whole. The painting invites us to keep looking, concentrating, moving our eye across the canvas as we might regard a complex mid-distance landscape which we ourselves know well. To look at a painting like this is to experience the pleasure of sensing and thinking about colour, and also a sense of awe towards both artist and motif. Looking long at this painting is an education in every kind of seeing as well as in thinking about colour and light.
Conclusion
In this talk I have tried to show how rhetorical ideas about addressing an audience, about style, self-presentation, narrative, argument, emotion and decorum can suggest to us ways of looking at and thinking about paintings. My argument has focused on the way we look at paintings, but I want to insist that this poetics of looking is inextricably linked with the decisions made by painters and those who organise the display of art in churches or in galleries. Rhetorical theory would then be providing us with a range of categories and questions among which we can choose those which seem helpful in relation to a particular work. But rhetoric has a big idea as well. We might one day want to ask ourselves whether rhetoric with its focus on the transaction between communicator, medium, subject and audience, can provide a contribution to a broader theory of the way in which human beings communicate through words, gestures and objects.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Max Weber Stiftung (21. Januar 2015). Renaissance Rhetoric as a Source of Questions about Art. Bilderfahrzeuge. Abgerufen am 21. Juli 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/psyw