In an argument that was to inflect for centuries discussions of genre and representation, Aristotle claimed that one could distinguish between different genres based on their approaches to the depiction of human individuals. According to his Poetics, art could represent men better than they are, worse than they are, or just as they are (Norman, et al.). Traditionally, tragedy sought to depict individuals as better than they are, while comedy trafficked in the portrayal of individuals as worse than they are. Most significantly, even in Aristotle's own original formulation, the third mode--in which artistic representation does not meaningfully depart or diverge from its object--never receives fuller qualification. This third mode remains an unfilled slot in the Poetics, and a possibility that medieval and Renaissance commentators left largely undiscussed.

fundamental departures from previous aesthetic debate, however, consisted in a sustained and anxious scrutiny of this empty slot. More precisely, baroque commentators considered not only how one might depict men just as they are, but what the stakes involved in such a move might be. Critical voices in the seventeenth century came to see these stakes as consequential indeed, concerning no less than the purpose and character of artistic portrayal, and the question haunted much of baroque aesthetic debate.

Much of the heat surrounding this debate proceeded from the opening of a novel gulf in seventeenth-century thought: the traditional privileges of art were set against the humbler work of accurate portrayal. Artistic imagination could either have free reign, the capacity to idealize and beautify the model in reference to an intellectual type, or it could restrain itself, aiming to do no more than render the true, understood to be what was visually present. Partisans of the first approach attacked practitioners of the second as mere copyists, while these artists in turn derided their critics as unskilled draftsmen, ill prepared for the challenges of duplicating nature (Félibien, et al.).

Whether portraits appeared in theatrical or pictorial form, all were subject to this dispute. The work of the satirist Molière provides especially telling examples in this context, since it became something of a commonplace in baroque discussion that his comic plays were fundamentally a series of portraits, copied and stitched together directly from life, without the mediation of artistic selection and control. The following excerpt about Molière from Jean Donneau de Visé's 1663 play Zélinde underscores the intersection of drama and painting when it comes to such pillaging and copying. The characters Argimont and Oriane explicitly address the matter, describing Molière's compositional method as follows:

Argimont: [Molière] had his eyes glued to three or four people of quality. . . . He appeared attentive to their discourse and it seemed that, by a movement of his eyes, he looked right into the bottom of their souls in order to see what they were saying. I even believe that he had some tablets and that, with the help of his coat, he wrote, without being seen, all the most remarkable things they said.

Oriane: Maybe it was a crayon, and he drew their expressions in order to represent them naturally on stage.

Argimont: If he did not draw them on the tablets, I don't doubt that he printed them in his imagination. He is a dangerous person (Donneau de Visé, 37-38).

Molière's actual working method probably bore little resemblance to the procedure that Donneau de Visé delineated, but what matters at present is the implication that Molière's work--as a species of comedic portraiture that allegedly goes so far as fully to copy the appearance and actual conversations of those it satirizes--represents an art form that duplicates rather than amplifies its subjects.

The art of representation

The National Gallery of Art, Washington

Anthony Van Dyck's portrait places the young Lord Wharton in the midst of a pastoral fantasy.

Anthony Van Dyck's Philip, Lord Wharton, for example, strives to do more than copy the visual aspect of its subject. While it is too much to say that the portrait presents Lord Wharton as necessarily better than he is, it does deploy the trappings of Arcadian and pastoral simplicity to assimilate him to a flattering type of humanity, quite possibly the contemporary ideal of the honnête homme. The seventeenth-century notion of honnêteté has two dimensions, both of which are relevant to the present discussion. On the one hand, it denotes ease, directness and a lack of affectation in manner. This species of man had no apparent recourse to artifice or self-composition in his bearing or social interaction, but carried himself in a way that was the perfect picture of the genuine, casual and unpretentious. Such an individual embellished himself and his conversation just enough to be engaging, but never so much as to seem precious or affected. Certainly, Van Dyck's decision to insert his wealthy patron into a rustic environ derived from a desire to treat Lord Wharton as an example of such a flattering type.

On the other hand, one needs to bear in mind that this perfect picture of the genuine and direct was precisely that, a "picture." That is, the baroque age tended to conceive the individual, above all in social interaction, as a construct, or product of art, whose image in the eyes of others was subject to manipulation and composition. The honnête homme distinguished himself from his peers not by the absence of art in his carriage and aspect, but by making it exceptionally difficult for observers to catch that art. In a way that parallels certain tenets of baroque aesthetic theory, the individual in social interaction was never to reveal the constructive means he deployed to make his image. The standard to which the artwork and the social being ultimately aspired was largely the same: an artfulness that did not reveal itself in too overt a fashion. Although Van Dyck did not openly proclaim that Lord Wharton practiced such an artfulness (that would ruin its effect), one might usefully think of the sitter in this portrait as an embodiment of perfect construction and seeming casualness, the very type of honnêteté.

The University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art

Franz Anton Maulbertsch's The Sausage Woman reflects the artist's efforts to depict the world as it was, rather than to idealize his subjects.

Franz Anton Maulbertsch's work exemplifies a very different aesthetic approach. In The Sausage Woman (left), Maulbertsch did not attempt to show, by incisive departures from surface appearances, the essence of these fairly humble individuals. He held himself to the humbler goal of trying to produce a visual record. He primarily attempted to duplicate the sort of scenes and views with which his audience would already have been familiar, because they were the scenes and views that comprised the audience's life. As though taking a species of visual dictation, Maulbertsch tried to amass observations and details taken directly from the world about him.

At times, the pleasures of duplication go so far as to permit the audience to participate in its own depiction. The work of Molière represents the finest theatrical specimen of this scenario. Donneau de Visé's description of Molière's working method again provides a key. Not only did Molière secretly copy down the words and physical appearance of those he met in society; these people--who would comprise the eventual audience of his plays--actually sent him material in the form of dialogues and incidents from their own lives that Molière proceeded to incorporate into his own work:

All those who give him memoires want to see if he uses them well; some go there [to his plays] for half a verse, others for a word, others for a thought which they pray him to use. . . . This justly makes one believe that the great number of self-interested theatergoers who go to these plays is what makes them succeed (Donneau de Visé in Molière, 1020).

	Discussion
	A debate among artists and critics centered around whether art should represent the world as it is, or present an idealized vision of life. Where do you stand in the aesthetic debate over art's role in portraying the world?

According to this argument, Molière's satires flourished from receiving "accounts of all that was happening in society, and portraits of their [the audience's] own faults, and those of their best friends, believing that they would be glorified by having their impertinences recognized in his works" (Donneau de Visé in Molière, 1019). Molière's work represented the pinnacle of portraits that were radically non-amplifying in their descriptive endeavor. Within the context of baroque discussion, Molière's status as copyist was such that he let the subject he chronicled and depicted, the audience and its social world, literally author itself. Although Molière, with his hidden pen and paper, certainly added observations of his own to his plays, one finds little indication in baroque discussions of the author that his depictions diverged on any essential level from the models he observed in society. Molière's satiric works thus amounted, in the mind of much of his public, to a generic transcript of social perception and derision.

	The appearance of emotion
	Correspondence between a mother and daughter provides evidence of the theatricality--and the self-consciousness of the actors--that characterized the baroque period. In a letter to her daughter dated May 21, 1676, Madame de Sévigné described the real-life performance of one Madame de Brissac: Mme de Brissac had colic today. She was in bed, beautiful and bonneted in the most sumptuous fashion. I wish you could have seen what she made of her pains, and the use of her eyes, and the cries, and the arms, and the hands which trailed over her bed-clothes, and the poses, and the compassion which she wanted us to have. Overcome with tenderness and admiration, I admired this performance and I found it so beautiful that my close attentiveness must have appeared like deep emotion which I think will be much appreciated. (Hammond, 115)

What made this most radical kind of duplication possible was the baroque conception of social life and social interaction. As we have seen in the case of the honnête homme, an individual's self-presentation was constantly subject to judgment by others. If an individual was seen to carry and compose himself badly, if he was clumsy in the art of self-presentation and self-construction, he became a potential target for derision and mockery. The stakes at play in such social evaluations were enormous; since the individual's position was conceived in relation to others, his very identity was on the line. These standards largely converged with the standards that were brought to bear in the evaluation of a work of art. A striking passage from the work of the seventeenth-century essayist Pierre Nicole throws light on this idea:

Man does not form his own portrait on what he knows about himself through himself, but also by seeing the portraits that he discovers in the minds of others. Because we are to one another like the man who serves as a model in the Academy of Painting. Each of those who surrounds us creates a portrait of us. . . . But what is most significant in this is that men do not simply make the portraits of others but that they can also see the portraits that one makes of them (Nicole, 3:16).

In Nicole's conception, an individual in the social world is a wanderer among a crowd of portraitists--portraitists whose work will help determine that individual's understanding of himself. Perhaps because so much depended on one's ability to make the right impression on others, baroque social existence came to resemble an unending duel of rival portraitists. One never escaped the viciously discerning gaze of others, nor the cutting remarks or savage depictions they might engender. It is not too much to describe this social world as the endless circulation of warring satires.

This session is adapted from Josh Ellenbogen, "Representational Theory and the Staging of Social Performance," in The Theatrical Baroque (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum/University of Chicago, 2001), 21-31. For a list of the critical works cited in this session, click here.