Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe

In this book, Caroline van Eck examines how rhetoric and the arts interacted in early modern Europe.

Caroline Van Eck (Author)

9781107687851, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 August 2014

238 pages
25.1 x 17.5 x 1.5 cm, 0.59 kg

'This is a fundamental book on an important but elusive subject. The author examines how the arts of persuasive oratory, well-known through writings by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, influenced the theory and practice of the visual arts and architecture in early modern Europe.' Renaissance Quarterly

In this book, Caroline van Eck examines how rhetoric and the arts interacted in early modern Europe. She argues that rhetoric, though originally developed for persuasive speech, has always used the visual as an important means of persuasion, and hence offers a number of strategies and concepts for visual persuasion as well. The book is divided into three major sections - theory, invention, and design. Van Eck analyzes how rhetoric informed artistic practice, theory, and perception in early modern Europe. This is the first full-length study to look at the issue of visual persuasion in both architecture and the visual arts, and to investigate what roles rhetoric played in visual persuasion, both from the perspective of artists and that of viewers.

Introduction: rhetoric and the visual
Part I. Theory: 1. Gesture, representation and persuasion in Alberti's De Pictura
2. Theoretical foundations of persuasive architecture: Barbaro, Spini and Scamozzi
Part II. Invention: 3. How to achieve persuasion in painting: the common ground
4. Visual persuasion in British architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Part III. Interpretation: 5. Rhetorical interpretation of the visual arts
6. Only the human can speak to man: rhetorical interpretations of architecture.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Theory of architecture [AMA], History of art & design styles: c 1400 to c 1600 [ACN], Theory of art [ABA]