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Late-sixteenth-century and early-seventeenth-century Netherlandish literature witnessed what may be called an ethical turn. In this essay, a tragedy by the Antwerp playwright Willem van Nieulandt (1584–1635), Claudius Domitius Nero, is being analysed as a spectacle of various emotions, to be perceived, processed, and evaluated for moral betterment. Although Nero is of the Neo-Senecan sort, meaning that several characters are driven by – and consequently exhibit – excessive emotions, it nevertheless advocates a conditionally positive attitude towards them, depending on their capacity to incite the characters – as well as the audience – to possess virtuous behaviour. A key quality in this respect was empathy and the ability to become empathically engaged. Tragedy was supposed to spark a process of moral discernment in the spectators.

In: Motus mixti et compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500–1700

Abstract

Many Dutch seventeenth-century paintings and prints depict tempests with shipwrecks. Till today these images are often interpreted by reference to metaphorical readings. This essay explores the ways in which a metaphorical reading work in tandem with the arousal of mixed emotions. We go from sea to shore, so to speak, looking beyond the precarious situation of the sailors adrift in the turbulent water. Art historians have largely ignored the marine painters’ frequent inclusion of spectators perched on the rocky coast and of sailors whose tenacity and resilience have brought them safely to shore. These figures can be seen to function as epitomes of mixed emotion, conveyors not only of despair but also of hope, the emotional poles between which the viewer is placed. Moreover, by studying the diverse ways in which spectators are represented in these images, we can learn more about the intended responses of the beholders of the images. Through the shoreside figures, the artists explore a range of possible responses to viewing natural disaster, inviting analogies between the viewers both in the image and before it.

In: Motus mixti et compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500–1700
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Abstract

Especially from the second half of the 15th century the Croatians experienced the constant Ottoman attacks at first hand. For this reason, the intensity and the pathos of Croatian poetry on the ‘Turks’ appear with special vividness to register a sense of menace and shock, and it offers an important field for the investigation of complex, unstable and shifting emotions. In this essay special attention will be paid to the earliest poetic response to the Ottoman attacks published in Croatia, the Elegia de Sibenicensis agri vastatione (Elegy on the devastation of the district of Šibenik) of Georgius Sisgoreus. Through this example it will be demonstrated how conflicting or compound emotions, as well as ambiguous emotional states can be present in lyric poetry, and how the expressions of emotion can shift, one into another, although specific literary genres can theoretically represent a medium of basal emotions, which are codified as the core of the genre itself.

In: Motus mixti et compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500–1700
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Abstract

This essay addresses the biblical history painting of Pieter Lastman (1583–1633), in particular his preference for showing moments of conflict and moral dilemma expressed in/through dialogue. Lastman’s Paul and Barnabas in Lystra visualises the complex emotional state of the apostles, brought about by a sudden reversal of fortune. Organised around a conversation between Paul and the pagan priest, Lastman’s picture differs markedly from other Netherlandish examples: he dramatises the biblical scene by staging it in the manner codified by the local rederijkerskamers (chambers of rhetoric). Through narratological analysis, I demonstrate that Lastman shared with the rhetoricians an interest in representing shifting emotional responses to dramatic turning points in circumstances involving conflict and moral dilemma. Like the rhetoricians, Lastman focuses on Paul’s delivery of exasperated speech, which issues from and registers a shifting mixture of love, fear, and anger.

In: Motus mixti et compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500–1700
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Abstract

Jan Provoost’s diptych of Christ Carrying the Cross depicts strikingly distinct emotional states. On the left, a beleaguered Jesus is surrounded by both violence and cruelty, as well as compassion and grief. On the right, a Franciscan friar engages in meditative prayer. Although his countenance is inscrutable, a rebus inscribed on the diptych’s frame points to the mixed emotions of his heart. The rebus construes the cord of his Franciscan profession as a tether linking his heart to Christ’s and, by extension, to the complex emotions of the Passion. The meditative praxis of St. Bonaventure and the Observant Franciscans, along with the diptych’s trope of stone, illuminates the loving, mingled emotions that transit imperceptibly beneath the friar’s ‘petrified’ expression.

In: Motus mixti et compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500–1700
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Abstract

The oppositional theme of joy and sadness plays an essential role in the work of Rabelais and Montaigne. In thematising these emotions, both Rabelais and Montaigne set themselves against traditional discourses on them, each in their own way. Rabelais uses the theme as a source for laughter and literary parody, but also, in his paratexts, as a source for metadiscursive reflection on his own authorship. For Montaigne, in the first instance, that is, in the 1580 edition of the Essais, scholarly but conversational reflection on these emotions has the function of self-advertising that focuses on the French king Henri III as implied reader. In the second instance, in the 1588 and 1595 editions of the Essais, when self-advertising is no longer necessary, the thematisation of joy and sadness takes on a more and more personal character.

In: Motus mixti et compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500–1700

Abstract

This essay takes up the Italo-Baltic translation of the relic of Polish-Lithuanian prince, St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk, from Vilnius to Florence as a case study in the cross-cultural portrayal of entangled emotions during the Counter-Reformation. Focusing on Florentine religious culture under Grand Duke Cosimo III, I consider the transcultural reception and recontextualisation of Jagiellończyk’s cult, corporeal remains, and the reliquary made to transport, safeguard, and encapsulate his relic. The essay draws on distinct genres of source material to frame the significance of St. Kazimierz as a spiritual martyr and also calls attention to the symbolic materiality of the reliquary made to cultivate shifting emotions as instruments of devotion.

In: Motus mixti et compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500–1700

Abstract

The affective conjunction of fear and joy, and the complex layering of other discrepant emotions, are characteristic of the eremitical life of the desert Fathers, as portrayed by Abraham Bloemaert in the series of fifty desert Fathers and Mothers that illustrate Joannes Risius (Ryser), S.J.’s Sylva anachoretica (Anachoretic Woodland) of 1619. Ultimately based on Heribert Rosweyde, S.J.’s ’t Vaders boeck (Book of the Fathers) of 1617, Bloemaert’s pregnant images, like Risius’s textual digests, distil the complex emotional life of the Fathers, their constant struggle to control multifarious, often contrary feelings, and their heroic efforts to subdue these emotions as they strive to achieve a state of contemplative repose. Engendered by the many trials and tribulations they encounter in the desert – a hell on earth that their hard-won sanctity converts into a foretaste of paradise – their bodily expression of mixed emotion signals the precise moment when fear of the Lord turns into joy and, in the words of Psalm 125, what is sown in tears is harvested in felicity. In bodying forth the admixture cum transposition of sorrow into joy, Bloemaert adapted the criteria for portraying sorrow codified by Karel van Mander in his Grondt der edel, vry Schilder-const (Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting): Van Mander presents sorrow as a compound of pity, fear, and heaviness of heart shading into desolation of the spirit like unto sickness or death. And yet, Bloemaert also follows another of Van Mander’s figural canons, assimilating every anchorite to that graceful form of serpentine contrapposto which the Grondt canonised as the most perfect of bodily attitudes. The affective complexity of the Sylva anachoretica, in that it exemplifies the struggle to attain spiritual perfection, jointly exemplifies the perfection of Bloemaert’s art.

In: Motus mixti et compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500–1700
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Abstract

Joachim Du Bellay (1522–1560), a founding member of the Pléiade, the ‘brigade’ of mid-century French poets steeped in classical mythology and verse, sought to reform and renew the vernacular idiom in appealing to the ode and the Petrarchan sonnet. In dialogue with Pierre de Ronsard, the acclaimed and determined leader of the group, he suffused an ample oeuvre with mixed motivation and contradiction, and their attendant affects. Focusing on the form and formatting of works issued during Du Bellay’s lifetime, from L’Olive (1549) to Les Antiquitez de Rome, Les Regrets and Les Jeux rustiques (1558), this essay locates where pictorial and graphic design mobilise expressions of irony, self-deprecation, and a commanding sense of creative doubt.

In: Motus mixti et compositi: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Europe, 1500–1700