Author : Noel Grace Schiller
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 436 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0542790750
The Art of Laughter by Noel Grace Schiller Pdf
Artists, poets and their publics during the early modern period took seriously the Horatian dictum that, like poetry, art should both instruct and delight its viewer. This study examines the capacity of images to entertain their audiences by investigating how artists employed depicted laughter to engage their viewers. By the turn of the seventeenth century, a laughing face had long been recognized to have a persuasive power to produce a like response in the beholder. Laughing figures were employed to an unprecedented degree by artists in the circles of Karel van Mander, Frans Hals, and Gerard van Honthorst---painters who created innovative new pictorial subjects and experimented with depicting facial expressions and strong emotions during the years 1600-1640. The laughing painting or print is treated here as a social agent, and the act of viewing understood as a particular kind of ludic exchange. Whatever their moral implications, images, it is argued, preserve traces of the ways in which the viewing of art resembled other cultural interactions, such as jesting practices, and thereby can help us understand the comic function of art in the Golden Age.
