Abstract
Employing the concept of a rhetoric of emotions, European Premodern fine art is revisioned as popular culture. From ancient times, the rhetoric of emotion was one of the principle concepts informing the theory and practice of all forms of European cultural production, including the visual arts, until it was gradually displaced during the 1700s and 1800s by an aesthetic of emotion. Under Modernism, a rhetoric of emotion was repressed when addressing fine art, but it was used to denigrate emotional appeals in popular culture. Where Western fine art was understood to express the uniquely felt emotional reactions of individual artists, popular mass culture was condemned as merely exhibiting emotional symptoms and deliberately arousing viewers’ emotions for base purposes. However, with regard to emotional appeals, many connections exist between Premodern fine art and today’s popular mass culture. Examples include images of emotionalism, sentimentality, horror, violence, exoticism, and eroticism; these appeals are enabled by a similar use of realistic styles, narratives, and formulas.
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