The Art of Chiaroscuro Writing: Condillac and the Question of Word Order

Abstract

AbstractCondillac's use of clair‐obscur to discuss the role of inversion and sentence construction is akin to the wish to make pictorial chiaroscuro an element of intelligibility of painting, as in de Piles. This article draws on the French heritage of the two elements clair and obscur, each long‐standing metaphors. By associating clair‐obscur with inversion, Condillac places it within a history of ‘la clarté française’, freeing from the dead metaphor ‘clair‐obscur’ a series of potential meanings that the visual arts' definition of chiaroscuro had not attended to, and which are key to the uses that writers such as Diderot and Rétif de la Bretonne will make of ‘clair‐obscur’ in their literary works.