The Old Woman as Art Critic: Speech and Silence in Response to the Passions, from Annibale Carracci to Denis Diderot

Abstract

Representing the passions, or the affetti, was a primary concern of many seicento artists. It was a key area in which the visual arts competed with the prestige of literature, for expression was the very bond between the sister arts of painting and poetry. Painting could be muta poesis only by virtue of silently and statically depicting the changing states of the human soul, a task that poetry could achieve more directly through passionate speech that unfolds over time.' For most seicento writers on art, as well as for artists, expression was a critical touchstone in evaluating the worth of paintings. Yet even in this area of common concern, the affetti sparked competition between writer and painter. The Roman critic and biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori emphasised that his aim in discussing paintings was to capture painted affetti in words. In his introduction to Le vite de' pittori of I672 Bellori famously credited Nicolas Poussin with urging him to use the rhetorical technique of ekphrasis, or verbal description of artistic images.2 Bellori's form of ekphrasis consisted of describing only the sequence of passions that he observed within any given painting, as if the visual image were a demateri alised, transparent window onto the figures' feelings and thoughts. In an anec dote that Bellori ascribed to Annibale Carracci, however, we may see a small but important rift opening between artists and critics in their attitude toward judging the affetti.