From Epic and Tragic to Comic and Satiric: Reversed Perspectives in Painting and Writing from the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

IN THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY years or so before Racine, European painting and literature had seen a decisive shift towards a preference for the comic perspective. Although the tragic and the epic view behind the masterpieces of painters such as Poussin and Claude Lorrain, and of the tragic poets, Corneille and Racine, enjoyed immense prestige, especially in seventeenth-century France, I hope to show that, from the early 1500s through to the late 1600s, Democritus, the laughing philosopher, came increasingly to be seen as wiser than his companion figure, Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher. My focus in this paper will be on the Democritean perspectives in the Renaissance, on its presence in painting from Pieter Bruegel to Georges de la Tour, and on some of its manifestations in the work of Moliere, La Fontaine and La Bruyere. Aristotle on mimesis had said that poets, like portrait-painters, presented human beings in three ways: as worse than they are in real life, as better, or as the same. The first represents the comic perspective which views people through a diminishing lens, tending to focus on the lower orders, emphasising people's flaws and caricaturing their uglier features; such a perspective can often be funny, but is not necessarily so. The second evokes the nobler, tragic or epic perspective which magnifies the human condition, focusing on kings, courts and the gods of Greek myth. Aristotle took little interest in the middle perspective (Poetics, II, 1-7). Renaissance and seventeenth-century literary critics embraced the Aristotelian view that the tragic and epic gemes were intrinsically superior to the comic.2 The practice of many painters and writers, however, was different. Erasmus, for example, preferred the comic perspective, actively mocking the tragic perspective as an agent of distortion and falsehood. He played the Democritus (especially in Praise of Folly), laughing loudly at the farcical progress of this world's affairs. 3 Democritus and Heraclitus, especially the former, recur frequently in the painting and literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rabelais and Montaigne both took the side of Democritus. Among the many artists who painted him were Rubens, Velazquez and Rembrandt, the latter, most interestingly, as a self-portrait. Montaigne explains their symbolic value in his chapter