THREE

Rhetorical Theory
and Practice

Rhetoric, in practice as well as in theory, underlies all the arts from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century¹ and is closely related to Baroque theories of knowledge, taste, criticism, persuasion, expression, and creation. A study of rhetoric and the ways it manipulates or channels or describes the thinking process was a part of everyone’s formal and informal education in the Baroque age. Like the faculty psychology, rhetoric was so much a part of people’s intellectual baggage that our understanding of rhetorical intention and effect is fundamental to any consideration of Baroque art. This understanding is not essential to considerations of nineteenth-or twentieth-century art, in which the organic metaphor is used to describe artistic creation and in which a different kind of psychology is applicable, one oriented more toward art as the expression of the unconscious. In the seventeenth century, there was no organic metaphor such as we know it, drawn from science and applied to the arts. In fact, in the seventeenth century, plants were thought to grow like crystals. If anything, the seventeenth-century theory of vegetable growth supports a rhetorical conception of art, a work of art as something made in steps.² One result of this theory is that Baroque art is more conscious in intention than we tend to realize. It does not easily lend itself to psychoanalytic approaches.

Rhetorical art is essentially practical. It is concerned with producing certain results in audiences and spectators, no matter what kind of artistic medium is used, to move, to persuade, and to teach. Intention and effect are therefore important since rhetoric works within consciously controlled form and content. A successful rhetorically oriented artist has to be conscious of the way audiences or spectators think and feel, of their sociological, intellectual, and emotional predilections. Rhetorical art is thus fundamentally popular, that is, created with the audience in mind: not as the audience ought to be but as it probably is, with its limitations, prejudices, wrongheadedness, and orientation to cultural and social norms. Therefore, artists studied, under the aegis of rhetoric, the human soul (or mind): what its passions are and how they function; and how the soul can be taught, moved, and persuaded. It has often been observed that the traditional version of practical psychology also falls under the heading of rhetoric. Because of its rhetorical nature, Baroque art has always been said to be essentially a popular art rather than an art imposed upon its recipients from above by theorists of one kind or another. Actually, the best Baroque art is a mixture of abstract theorizing and popular effects presented through a rhetorical method and process.

The rhetorical process of composition is concerned with both instruction and pleasure, with the imagery through which the instruction and pleasure is effected, and with the souls of the receptors, especially the passions of the second soul: what they are, how they are raised, and how they are related to pleasure and persuasion. It is through the senses that art reaches the understanding. All Baroque artists intentionally employ specific devices they call, and so should we, rhetorical. There may be such a thing as abstract beauty and truth, but from a rhetorical viewpoint beauty and truth are approached from a variety of angles with many different techniques, one of which may appeal to people more at one time than at another. An artist with a rhetorical view of art may seem to be sacrificing higher ideals for more immediate ends, but he also may be less likely to deceive himself that one way of expression is the only way, and he may communicate his high ideals and images more effectively because he keeps his audience in mind. He is really interested in results. An artist may imitate nature as he sees it, as he thinks it ought to be, or as he envisions absolute beauty. Yet, no matter what he is trying to communicate or express, his artistic medium is the vehicle for moving or persuading his audience in specific ways. In the seventeenth century, the general suspicion of rhetoric that has existed from ancient times is present. But Aristotle’s answer in Rhetoric, Book I, is still standard: rhetoric itself is not bad although it may be put to bad uses.

It is evident from the numerous books on the subject that all artists, poets, painters, and musicians—indeed everyone who was exposed to the educational process—had to some extent studied rhetoric and had imbibed its principles either through study or through common assumptions of the times. In The Extravagant Shepherd (1653), a popular book translated from the French, John Davies assumes readers know all the details of the subject of rhetoric. In his “Translator to the Reader,” he describes how the protagonist, the foolish Lysis, receives a standard education. Before Lysis gets to physics and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy), he is instructed in the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic). From the satirical treatment of Lysis, we can assume that both Davies and the original author, Charles Sorel, know their readers are well acquainted with rhetoric as a part of the educational process.³ A knowledge of how rhetorical techniques and theories are used in all the arts leads to a clearer understanding of the works of art themselves, and it helps us understand how each kind of art uses and enriches the others. For although each artistic medium employs different means of expression, each draws upon common resources, each strives for similar purposes and effects in the sense that its audience or spectators as human beings are induced to feel the same emotions or are persuaded to similar ideas, and each is thought to be made in a comparable way. John Mulder says that in Bacon’s time (the age in which later seventeenth-century thinkers and writers were growing up),

Art was far more a means to an end than an end in itself. Poetry [for example], being a means of expression [like painting and music], was a part of rhetoric.⁴

Rhetoric was the blanket subject. It was not a part of poetry: poetry was a part of it. The same is more or less true of the other arts. Even the use of proportion and harmony for effect may be considered a part of rhetoric. Because each art aimed for persuasion or for similar effects, all were deemed similar by people of the Baroque era.⁵

I

Artists and theorists of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, unlike most of us, thought that the rhetorical process of artistic making or creating consists of five parts or steps. The three main parts are inventio, dispositio, and elocutio; actio (gesture) and memoria (memory) are the fourth and fifth steps. These parts or steps come primarily from Quintilian and Cicero, themselves organizers, not inventors, of the art of rhetoric.⁶ The first step, inventio, is the invention (or discovery) of a main idea (and even the moral) and its attendant images and ideas. Inventio is the step most applicable to all the arts. Invention uses the power of the imagination to draw forth forms of things from the memory. Thus, Dryden, in his most famous “spaniel” passage, says (1667):

The faculty of imagination in the writer, . . . like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after; or without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which it designs to represent.⁷

The forms of things, as the imagination retrieves them from the memory (experience), come from three kinds of place: other works (imitation of the great works that are nearest nature); nature itself; and the vision of what the creator thinks of as nonexistent absolutes, or as perfection. This last idea for all practical purposes originates with Plotinus; it elevates the creator as a communicator of divine truth and beauty. In the rhetorical process of creation, mimesis or imitation of nature can fall in any of the three areas invention (or imagination) draws on.

First, invention comes from other works or conventions postulated by other works. Thus, Monteverdi in Orfeo draws on the classical myth; Shakespeare hardly ever makes up his own stories; Virgil in his Aeneid relies heavily on Homer; there are many paintings of the crucifixion, of the last judgment, and of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden; there are myriad musical dialogues between shepherds and shepherdesses; Aphrodite emerges and reemerges from the sea; and authors like Plutarch provide subjects for all kinds of creators. Discovery or invention extends to minute details, and rhetorical devices or conventions are used to give specific effects of all kinds. In music, “dying falls,” wherein the sequence of notes also falls, represent ill turns of fortune; in poetry, an apostrophe heightens the emotion of the listener, usually through direct address as in stanza IV of Dryden’s “To the Pious Memory of . . . Mrs. Anne Killigrew” (1685). In paintings and in sculpture, the motion of the hair shows emotion or personality traits: Lomazzo points out how the motion of the hair signifies, for example, a station of life or a passion.⁸ And certain kinds of meter in music represent anger: Marin Mersenne describes how choler may be represented through accent at the end of measures. Dryden and Henry Purcell use this device in King Arthur (I, ii): “Come if you dare, our trumpets sound” (1691); and in the hissing anger of “What flat’ring noise is this” in Indian Queen (music ca. 1691, first performed as a play 1665).

Invention of the first kind draws its aims and objects from a pool of subject matter and imagery available to the age (used as an orator employs topoi) and is learned from formal and informal education.⁹ Classical learning is important to invention, as is biblical lore, to name only two examples. The many paintings of the triumph of Bacchus, the laments in music (such as that of Dido), and the plays about a great hero or heroine torn between love and duty all are taken from specific topics. The topic may be the same although the work has a different subject. For example, a play may be about Alexander the Great, Almanzor, Louis XIV (disguised under another name), or the king of England, but, except for peculiarities of the subject and the playwright’s adaptation of it, the heroes’ characteristics are remarkably similar, being gathered from earlier artistic works on the same topic. Dryden explains clearly, in “Of Heroic Plays: An Essay” (1672; in Watson, I, pp. 156-66), how he works. After pointing out that Spenser’s “Bower of Bliss” is taken from Tasso’s “enchanted wood” (I, p. 161), he says:

I must therefore avow, in the first place, from whence I took the character [of Almanzor in The Conquest of Grenada ]. The first image I had of him was from the Achilles of Homer, the next from Tasso’s Rinaldo (who was a copy of the former), and the third from the Artaban of Monsieur Calprenède (who has imitated both). [In Watson, I, p. 163]

Dryden’s other heroes are not dissimilar. Robert Isherwood notes commonplaces in French art under Louis XIV:

How often Louis in the operas [and dances] crushed Discord, received the laurel crown from Glory, and basked in the accolades of the Graces, Talents, . . . and Muses, as he does in Le Brun’s “Le roi gouverne par lui-même”¹⁰

Since learned material plays so important a role in the Baroque era, we need an historical background to fill in gaps between our own education and that of the creators of that age.

Second, invention can come from nature, actual or probable, which means that objects or actions that we observe in everyday life are imitated. If actual nature is imitated, learned, artificial devices and conventions are not so important. A character is not a type so much as an imitation of an actual person. Thus, the speeches of Thomas Shadwell’s characters, following Ben Jonson’s, often are imitations of London cant, speech rhythms, and turns of thought, as in The Squire of Alsatia (1688). In painting, the same thing is true of Continental artists who give us “recognizable, unidealized views of their own country,” painters like Adrien van der Velde.¹¹ In music, this kind of invention imitates rushing winds (storms), as in Antonio Vivaldi’s “Summer,” in his Le Quattro Stagioni,¹² and as in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689) when Dido and Aeneas take shelter from the storm. If probable nature is imitated, we are back in the realm of rhetorical topics, and conventions and character types become more prominent. A soldier should be bluff, honest, and hearty; a scholar should be meek and pedantic; a lover, pale, wan, and miserable. National stereotypes often are used: an Italian is intelligent and dishonest; a German is gluttonous; a Frenchman is foppish. Invention can imitate other art, which also can be considered as nature, and the better that art, the more likely it is to be considered as such. Ancient Greek and Roman art, for example, is considered in the Baroque period closest to nature because it is the best art and therefore is most worthy of being imitated in both kind and spirit. Alexander Pope imitates Virgil’s pastoral poems; Abraham Cowley, Pindar’s odes. John Dryden’s praise of Shakespeare’s works as nature itself is the highest praise he could give any author (and he gives it only to Shakespeare).

Since nature can be rhetorically idealized, presented as it is, or presented as worse than it is, depending on the effect the artist wants to produce, invention also begets the rhetorical use of genres, all of which exist as ready-made vehicles for certain kinds of ideas or attitudes. The qualifications of subject matter for a high genre like tragedy are rigid, but anything is fair game for satire, a low genre. The highest genres improve on nature for an effect, producing what the French call la belle nature. Dryden says (1695):

The imitation of nature is therefore constituted as the general, and indeed the only, rule of pleasing. . . . Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must of necessity produce a much greater. For both of these arts, as I said before, are not only imitations of nature, but of the best nature, of that which is wrought up to a nobler pitch. They present us with images more perfect than the life of any individual. [In Watson, II, pp. 193, 194]

Dryden says about the imitation of lower subjects:

There are other parts of nature which are meaner, and yet are the subjects both of painters and of poets. For, to proceed in the parallel, as comedy is a representation of human life in inferior persons, and low subjects ... [it is] a kind of picture which belongs to nature but of the lowest form. . . . There is yet a lower sort of poetry and painting, which is out of nature; for a farce is that in poetry which grotesque is in a picture.¹³

Aristotle in his Poetics, Chapter II, points out that different musical instruments, genres, and verse forms imitate nature as better, the same as, or worse than it is. This idea is an historical commonplace. In the Italian Renaissance, for example, Trissino in his Poetica (1529) maintains that the arts are unified in terms of how they imitate people. Thus, in painting, he says that Leonardo depicts people as better than they are, Mantegna worse, and Titian as they are. In dance, Giojosi, Lioncelli, and Rosine treat them as better, Padoane and Spingardo as worse. In music, fifes, flutes, organs, and “sounds and songs which call to battle and similar songs imitate the better”; other music imitates the worse. And in poetry, he says, Homer, Petrarch, Dante, and writers of tragedy treat people as better, while Theocritus, Burchiello, and Berni treat them as worse.¹⁴

How a creator sees nature also indicates to which part of the soul he wants to appeal. Thus, different genres as they imitate different kinds of activities are supposed to affect either the highest understanding or the lowest passions. The historical presence of this idea is quite strong. Dante, in his De vulgari eloquentia (1306-1309), classifies the genres according to the parts of the soul they appeal to: vegetable soul—defense and war poetry; sensible soul—delight and love poetry; rational soul—honor and virtue.¹⁵ Such feelings about genres were extant in the Baroque age. The higher the part of the soul appealed to, the higher the genre and the more elevated the art. The epic appeals to the highest part of the soul and is considered the highest genre. Then comes tragedy, then the great ode. Satire, with its raising of disharmonious passions, is lower and so are love lyrics. The same categories of imitation continue to hold true for eighteenth-century art. Handel and Mozart use musical disharmony to show the disharmonies passion causes in the soul, for example, in Handel’s “Bacchus ever fair and young” in Alexander’s Feast (1736), wherein he indicates pain (“Sweet is pleasure after pain”), and in the beginning of Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet (1785), which is resolved by the harmonious last movement. Mozart’s movement from dissonance to harmony is a kind of rising action from a passionate or ignorant discord to an intellectual or spiritual understanding in tune with idealized nature and with the highest parts of the soul.¹⁶ The difference in levels of imitation is readily apparent in Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791), in which the tinkly, charming tunes sung by Papageno (representative of the lower parts of the soul) contrast with the solemn, more elevated tones of Sarastro’s arias. Hogarth’s satirical paintings obviously show man as worse than he is; heroic paintings show him as better. Similar examples could be cited in literature. We are here interested in imitation of actual or probable nature as a part of invention; the subject of mimesis in general has been covered thoroughly elsewhere.¹⁷

The third kind of invention resides more with the imagination in its highest form. That is, the artist conceives of a vision identical with, or close to, a Platonic absolute. The closeness to perfection depends on the state of the creator’s soul. Once a creator has seen or created his idea or image or vision in his mind, his task as an artist is to communicate this vision, of necessity rhetorically, to his audiences or spectators. This kind of imitation of nature is close to the concept of la belle nature, nature improved, but it is not the same because la belle nature refers to the improvement of “nature-as-found-in-the-world,” while the imaginative vision is supposed to be a glimpse of a nonexistent, absolute reality. The status of the artist as a purveyor of truth is affected a great deal by differing attitudes toward this third kind of imitation or invention. Plato denigrated the artist by saying that art imitates reality at the third remove.¹⁸ Plotinus elevated the artist or creator as an analogue to God by saying that art imitates absolute reality itself, the most original and highest form of invention or artistic creation. Plotinus says of Phidias (ca. A.D. 265):

Thus Phidias wrought the Zeus upon no mode among things of sense but by apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight.¹⁹

As for poetry, he says that the world (the cosmos) is a true poem that the poet imitates. Poetry, on the contrary, is the universe in small, and so are dance, painting, and music (Ennead III, ii, 6 and elsewhere in Ennead II, ii). As for music, more specifically, the invention also produces a work that is an imitation of the harmony of the cosmos (the same thing is true for architecture and sculpture). The musician is repelled by “the unharmonious and unrhythmic. . . . He will have to be shown that what ravished him [through the way tone, rhythm, and sound affected the senses] was no other than the harmony of the intellectual world and the beauty in that sphere, not some shape of beauty but the all-beauty,” or beauty in and of itself and not merely something beautiful (Ennead I, iii, 1). This beauty is fundamentally mathematical or geometric and thus is a nonexistent or abstract reality.

II

The second step, the step that follows invention in the rhetorical process, is dispositio, the disposition or arrangement of the images, ideas, or arguments into the best, most effective sequence, commensurate with the central idea and the required effect. At this point in the making of a work of art, superfluous material is pruned away; the sequence of events in a plot is set, the positioning of figures on a canvas is determined, or the sequence of movements of a musical composition is arranged. Disposition thus means “design” or drawing to painters, arrangement to musicians, disposition and arrangement to poets. This step is clearly in the province of the judgment or understanding; whereas inventio, the first step, is a product of imagination as well as understanding. The judgment arranges or disposes according to the proper effect or meaning the artist wants to achieve. In public speaking, you put your best argument first, your second-best last, and your weakest in the middle. In painting, the most important figure is placed where the viewer will notice it first, and in a musical piece with a theme and variations the theme comes first. If an artist desires to express harmony, he makes a balanced arrangement; if he wants to show perturbation or discord, he creates an imbalance. These are simplified examples, but their ramifications are important to creation and analysis.

Dispositio as a product of the judgment has also to do with revision, rearranging, correcting a design, “retrenching” or pruning, and the selection of the appropriate images or discoveries called up by the imagination. All this arranging is rational and appeals to the reasonable part of the mind. It is the harmonious arrangement of parts that reflects God’s cosmic harmony. In other words, that harmonious order which is cosmically a product of God’s highest powers is communicated in all the arts by the artist’s own understanding and impresses itself on the highest part of the receptor’s mind or soul, teaching him what celestial harmony is and giving him the highest kind of pleasure, a pleasure divorced from discordant passion.

George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) can be a starting point for explaining Baroque ideas. In dividing up his whole discourse into the three rhetorical parts, he considers dispositio as synonymous with proportion. In “Of Proportion” (Book II), he correlates poetic stanza form, meter, and accent with musical chords, parts, and modes, as well as with proportions in painting. Puttenham mentions rhythmus, that musicality of verse that Dryden also talks about.²⁰ It is the creation of harmony as the function of the judgment in dispositio that makes the judgment so important to the creation of cosmic truth. In the later years of the seventeenth century, the judgment becomes less concerned with the higher harmonies of internal order and more concerned with order imposed externally, although its first function is still current. The rules of art, cherished especially by the French, are a product of the judgment, and so is clarity. Common sense to the English, bon sens to the French, become products of rationality and of the judgment, the faculty that orders all things well and discriminates between those things that appear to be alike. Verisimilitude, decorum, probability, and the unities all come from the judgment and are recognized as so derived. The change in the conception of judgment, as discussed in Chapter II, is primarily caused by the shift in the perception of man’s place in the universe. Cosmic harmony is not so important to those who are interested in man as an intelligent, earthbound animal. Order in society and in individual lives is important because serene existence, as much as it is possible, depends on it.

The use of dispositio in manipulating harmony or disharmony for effect can become complex. For example, the plot of a comedy, with its happy ending, resolves itself in harmony, as does a piece of music. Comedy as it treats people as they are or as worse than they are is an imitation of actions in the world. Yet the hope of harmonious endings can be otherworldly. The idea of the unification of the microcosm as an imitation of the macrocosm, whether in marriage or in society in general, may have its origin other than in Neoplatonic philosophy, but it was often felt that happy endings are allegories of the harmony of the universe or at least of ideal, serene existence. Dante, of course, ends his Commedia with the highest harmony. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), says hopefully, “The world shall end like a comedy, and we shall meet at last in Heaven, and live in bliss together” (p. 963). He shortly thereafter ends his great work with words from the Neoplatonist St. Augustine. Actual comedies and paintings were often more oriented toward the world, and many of Shakespeare’s comedies, for example, end lacking complete harmony: As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure. The Tempest is not set in the actual world, but the characters will return to it at the end of the play, without total harmonic resolution. The Dutch paintings showing convivial drinking and singing do not really depict the highest kinds of people, nor do they appeal to the noblest parts of the soul. The Restoration is full of plays with odd endings such as William Wycherley’s Country Wife (1675), which seems to end on a rather fragile, tenuous footing. Yet, Nahum Tate revised King Lear with a happy ending, and even today some audiences like the good feeling they get from a happy, harmonious ending to a comedy. The convention of the happy ending can be manipulated rhetorically by an artist for his own ends, with striking effects.

III

The third step, elocutio, is the one most closely associated with the kind of art used, although it was thought to be the least elevated in the process of composition. Roger Des Piles says, “The material part of painting is nothing else but the execution of the spiritual part.” The hand is to painting what the word is to poesy, and “both are servants of the mind” (Principles, p. 276). In music elocutio has to do with tones and musical figures, as in a dying fall. In poetry it has to do with words, tropes, figures, and style. In painting it concerns colors and shades. Elocutio is, as Dryden says, the last in the sequence of composition and least in importance,²¹ and that is why he says, in “The Life of Plutarch” (1683),

So in Plutarch, whose business was not to please the ear but to charm and instruct the mind, we may easily forgive the cadences of words and the roughness of expression.²²

Elocutio as the part of rhetoric that is most applicable to a specific medium of expression is the first part of a work that strikes the senses, and although it was considered the most superficial part of art because it concerns devices that affect the senses and lowest passions through colors, words, turns of phrase, and musical tones and figures, it is a necessary step and therefore important. Roger Des Piles says,

If we consider a painter by his invention, we rank him among the poets; if by perspective ... he is not distinguishable from the mathematician; and if by the proportions and measure of bodies, we confound him with the sculptor and geometer. So, though the perfect idea of the painter [inventio] depends on design [dispositio] and coloring [elocutio] jointly, yet he must form a special idea of his art only by coloring. [Principles, p. 190]

The problems peculiar to elocutio and the senses are discussed in Chapters IV and V.

Elocutio is also the area in which fallacious parallels between the arts are made; this problem arises because these parallels are based on the emotional effects produced by the techniques of the art rather than on the more important teaching and harmony impressed on the highest parts of the soul by invention and disposition or on the composite effects of all three steps. The sixteenth-century Ramistic separation of invention and arrangement from rhetoric, leaving only elocution and delivery,²³ is not convincing to seventeenth century thinkers, especially in comparing the arts, because of the low status of elocution. As Jean-Louis Guéz de Balzac says, in arguing against the Ramistic conception of rhetoric:

It is true I attribute much to elocution, and know that high things stand in need of the help of words, and that after these have been rightly conceived, they are happily to be expressed. It only angers me, that out of the poorest part of rhetoric received among the ancients, they [Ramists] will needs extract all ours. And that to please mean spirits, it is fitting (as they think) our works should resemble those sacrifices, whereout they take the heart, and where, of all the head, nothing is left save only the tongue.²⁴

IV

There are two more parts to the rhetorical process, actio and memoria, but they are separate only in oratory. In art these parts, especially memoria, usually are incorporated into the first three steps. Memoria, or memory, encompasses the remembrance of ideas, arguments, and images (and even the literal memorizing of a speech). For our purposes, it is a part of invention as it certainly fits in that section according to its position in the scheme of the faculty psychology. Actio, gesture or action, encompasses postures in painting, gestures by actors, and visual images alluded to by poets and musicians. Poussin refers to actio in his “Observations on Painting,” published by Bellori in Vite de’ pittori (1672):

There are two instruments which affect the souls of the listeners: action and diction. The first, in itself, is of such value and so efficacious that Demosthenes gave it predominance over the arts of rhetoric. Cicero calls it the language of the body, and Quintilian attributes such strength to it that he considers concepts, proofs, and expressions as useless without it. And without it, lines and colors are likewise useless.²⁵

Poussin not only refers to Quintilian on actio, or gesture, in his own right, he refers specifically to Quintilian’s reference to Demosthenes. In other words, he is well acquainted with Quintilian’s writings.²⁶ Poussin’s figures are drawn with a close knowledge of rhetorical conventions, and although his gestures largely correspond to natural emotions they are used conventionally, just as Quintilian distinguishes between artistic and common gestures (XI, iii, sects. 102, 121). All of Poussin’s finger pointings, body positions, eyebrows, eyes, arms, hands, and shoulders mean or express something relatively specific.²⁷

An interesting painting to analyze in terms of actio is Poussin’s The Judgment of Solomon (1649; see Plate 9), in which Solomon has just decreed that the disputed child shall be divided equally in two pieces between its claimants. The public character of the event corresponds to Poussin’s use of public gestures, and all the characters reveal their thoughts and emotions through gestures that are explained by Quintilian. Quintilian says, for instance, that raised eyebrows indicate refusal, dropped eyebrows indicate consent (XI, iii, sect. 79). Thus, each character except the impassive Solomon indicates either acceptance or rejection of the grisly decision. The false mother’s brows are lowered as are the brows of the rather odious man next to Solomon’s left hand. The other figures show various degrees of rejection and horror, even the child on the right. The soldier, for instance, indicates his reluctance to perform his duty. The only variation to this most simple of rhetorical indicators is the woman in the group on the right whose lowered brows indicate more extreme grief and whose writhing body indicates pain at the decision.

The hand gestures are equally significant. Quintilian says that the hands speak by themselves, that they express all passion in an international language (XI, iii, sects. 85-87). He says the eyes always are turned the same way as the gesture except where there is abhorrence. And we can see the most abhorrence, as far as the spectators are concerned, in the woman with the child, at the far right, and in the soldier at the far left. We also know, therefore, which of Solomon’s hands is most important to regard. At the moment of decision Solomon’s right hand indicates his dramatic, seeming insistence of purpose. Quintilian says that when three fingers are doubled under the thumb, the index finger is “used in denunciation and in indication, . . . while if it be slightly dropped after the hand has been raised toward the shoulder, it signifies affirmation, and if pointed as it were face downwards toward the ground, it expresses insistence” (XI, iii, sect. 94). If the fingers were held by the thumb more firmly, Solomon would be more emotional. As it is, his hand is descending since he has already pronounced his decision. His right hand, with its more gentle gesture, gives promise of the humane and wise judgment yet to come. His thumb and index finger indicate the point he is making. Quintilian has something to say about the gesture in which the last three fingers are folded: “It is much employed by the Greeks both for the left hand and the right, in rounding off their enthymemes, detail by detail. A gentle movement of the hand expresses promise or assent” (XI, iii, sect. 102).

Hand gestures also are important for characterization of the two main women in the painting. The real mother pleads her case eloquently, indicating her wish for the child to live even if he has to live with the other woman. Her left hand decorously indicates her desire to stop the execution, while her right is extended in an orators gesture. Quintilian says that in an especially rich and impressive style “the arm will be thrown out in a stately sidelong sweep, and the words will, as it were, expand in unison with the gesture.” He goes on to say that in continuous or flowing passages a becoming gesture is “slightly to extend the arm with shoulders well thrown back and the fingers opening as the hand moves forward” (XI, iii, sect. 84). This is an exact description of the gestures of the real mother. The other woman crouches emotionally, her neck indecorously outstretched (Quintilian disapproves; XI, iii, sect. 82). Her insistence that Solomon’s grisly decision be carried out is indicated by her pointing finger. To Poussin’s stoic tendencies, in keeping with his admiration of classical austerity, the good woman displays the qualities that Quintilian says typify the person of “dignity and virtue” (XI, iii, sect. 184), qualities the bad woman lacks.

Gestures indicate character as mute accompaniment to an imagined voice or thoughts. Quintilian (and Cicero, too) says gesture should be subservient to voice (XI, iii, sect. 14), but he elsewhere says gesture also should be adapted to thought, not to the actual words (XI, iii, sect. 89). Lomazzo agrees (II, p. 4). It is as if a painter had to imagine voices and thoughts before he drew his figures. Des Piles says the artist should look in a mirror to learn proper gestures; he indicates that gestures come originally from observed nature but he also quotes Quintilian explaining the ways in which passions are expressed through particular gestures used as conventions.²⁸ In his five-volume Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes (1666), André Félibien also describes the way in which the passions are to be depicted through gesture. The language of rhetorical gestures, besides the significance of color, helps us understand painting and raises emotions in us. Actio as it is expressive is mostly a part of eloquence. Insofar as it relates to the design, as when one kind of expression balances another, it is a part of dispositio.

All the parts of the rhetorical process form a unified whole. André Félibien in his Des Principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture, et des autres arts qui en dépendent (published 1670), for example, expresses in a number of places the unity he sees in Poussin’s work. Poussin uses the passions in harmony as a musician uses sounds (p. 25), and his colors also are used harmoniously (p. 85). Later he says that the beauty in Poussin’s works lies in the unity of their parts (p. 129). Félibien says also that beauty comes from a proportion of parts (I, p. 36). The fundamental unity can emanate from either inventio or dispositio or from both, but it will fail unless elocutio (coloring) and actio (gesture) also fulfill the artist’s intent.

The unification of the rhetorical creative process we have just described is depicted by the well-educated diplomat and painter Peter Paul Rubens in his Education of Marie de’ Medici (Frontispiece). The painting allegorically expresses the rhetorical divisions. Marie is being instructed in writing, and Athena, representing the faculty of judgment (concerned primarily with organization, arrangement, and the elimination of superfluous material), is overseeing the teaching and is correcting Marie. Hermes (the god of oratory and elocution) draws a curtain from the front of the springs on Mount Parnassus (representing inspiration and invention), showing us that through elocution we express our ideas (or images or conceptions), and his hand helps to guide Marie’s pen. Apollo, the god of poetry, music, sculpture, and painting, represents these arts, all of which are created in the same way, by the same rhetorical process. The Three Graces, the three nude figures, personify beauty that is beyond the contrivance of art but that is also associated with the symmetry and harmony that appeal to the understanding (and are defined as beauty). Their sweetness, gentleness, and softness all are qualities attributed to grace and beauty also. The effect of the craggy waterfalls is less harmonious and yet more exalted than that of the regularized beauty of the Three Graces. And the portrait at the bottom left represents the grotesque and ugly, or perhaps the uncomfortable passion of terror. The painting is an allegory of the rhetorical unification of all the arts in the process of creation and in artistic effect; the work centers on the person of Marie de’ Medici, who is learning about it, as we are.

The rhetorical devices Rubens uses in the painting itself correspond to the process we have described. The idea for the painting, the invention, Rubens received from his own learning. The harmonious arrangement of figures is the product of design and of the judgment. The small size of Marie de’ Medici herself draws attention to her and to the mythological existence and great powers and importance of the gods and personified abstractions that surround her. The gestures (actio) of the characters are appropriate to their roles, from the harmonious, graceful gestures of the Three Graces and the more agitated movement of Hermes to the circumscribed gestures and posture of Athena. The colors, as well as the gestures, are conventional indications of the characters and their roles. Athena is decorously dressed in sedate blue and gold, indicating vigilance. Marie herself is dressed in a rose-colored gown, indicating her joy, or delight, at the instruction. The red of Apollo’s drapery and of the curtain Hermes draws indicates the connection of music and eloquence to the passions that they arouse, red being indicative of the more violent passions. There are numerous other devices in the painting that are a part of both design and elocution, but they need not be explored here.²⁹ The painting not only is about the rhetorical process but also is constructed according to it for the pleasure and instruction of viewers. Because of the predominance of the allegory, the painting appeals in a unified way to our reason or understanding, in other words, to our highest soul (the reasonable). The whole purpose of education, since this painting is the Education of Marie de’ Medici, is to improve our understanding, the faculty that should rule all other parts of the soul. But the painting’s vividness and its rhetorical devices impress our senses first. As Rubens himself says, “Those things which fall under the senses are the most deeply impressed upon the mind.”³⁰

The process of creation in steps one and two (inventio and dispositio) are the same in all the arts, and in these areas the arts can be paralleled. The third step, elocutio, involves the medium of expression, and although the arts cannot be paralleled even here they can be compared because their various devices are intended to produce similar effects. For example, the modes of expression in a play, in a painting, and in a musical piece may all raise the same emotion, or at least the same kind of emotion, in their audiences or spectators. The important point here is how artists worked or rather how they thought they worked. From their many comments about it, artists themselves seem to have believed in the accuracy of their own analyses of the sequence of composition. Also, the kind of artistic making that results from the rhetorical process is oriented toward a conscious, intellectually conceived kind of art that can best be analyzed on its own terms as a consciously received kind of art. In other words, if we can ascertain artistic intentions through the conventions used to convey these intentions, we can understand what someone from another age is saying, not only to his own time but to us as well.