Revisioning Premodern Fine Art as Popular Visual Culture

Using the concept of a rhetoric of emotion, I argue that in terms of their emotional appeals, European Premodern fine art is similar to today's popular mass visual culture. I argue that from ancient times, a rhetoric of emotion framed the theory and practice of the visual arts up until the 1700s when it began to be displaced In favor of an aesthetic of emotion, which became the basis of modernist art. With regard to emotional lure, Premodern art was the popular art of Its time. By revlsioning Premodern fine art in this way, today's popular mass visual culture is understood as neither a break nor decline from the past but rather, in terms of connection and continuity. The use of a rhetoric of emotion provides a visual culture orientation in art education (e.g., Duncum, 2011;Tavin, 2003) with a theoretical basis for rejecting the modernist legacy of viewing European fine arts through a honorific lens. Instead, the history of European fine art is made available to contextualize, with numerous historical precedents, the emotional lures of today's movies, television programs, and so on, as well as the social functions they serve.Revisiting RhetoricAristotle's (350/2007) definition of rhetoric from 2.5 millennia ago has remained the most common, general definition: "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (1355b). Rhetoric has a long and complicated past. In 4th century BCE Greece, the sophist Gorglas enthusiastically celebrated verbal rhetoric; Plato as fervently railed against it; and Aristotle, taking a middle path, described it in considerable detail. It was subsequently further theorized by the Romans, notably by Cicero and Quintilian; adopted by the early Christian church and applied to imagery, albeit unsystematically; revised and systematized during the Renaissance (Vickers, 1988); and then vigorously pursued during the Baroque (Minor, 2006). Its study lost favor during the 19th century and virtually disappeared for the first half of the 20th century, though in the second half of the last century, interest in rhetoric gradually grew. It is now employed in a wide variety of fields (e.g., Jost & Olmsted, 2004), and the idea of visual rhetoric is, once again, commonplace (e.g., Handa, 2004; Rampley, 2005).Aristotle on RhetoricContemporary theories of rhetoric understand rhetoric to permeate all forms of communication and always to involve the exercise of power (Herrick, 2009), assumptions I draw upon later in this article. Neither of these ideas is part of Aristotle's theorizing, but it remains useful to start with him. Just as Whitehead claimed thatall of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato, so it has been claimed that all subsequent theorizing on rhetoric constitutes a series of amendments and clarifications to Aristotle (Gross & Walzer, 2000).Aristotle (350/2007) began with a distinction that we would no longer make as absolute as he did: that between rhetoric and dialectics. Dialectics relied entirely on logical deduction and examined both sides of a question to test rival claims to truth. A purely Intellectual enterprise, Its domain was philosophical Inquiry. By contrast, in discourse on public matters, emotions were invariably involved. Emotions were invariably evoked whenever questions were raised about the expedient use of time, money, and other resources; or when beliefs and values were shaped by assigning people either praise or blame; or when deciding questions of truth or falsehood.' In all such cases, the reasoned, propositional nature of rhetoric was invariably infused with emotion. Aristotle, hereby, foreshadowed current theorizing about the intimately interrelated relationship between emotion and cognition (Brooks, 2011; Kasteley, 2004). Emotions are now understood to form the very ground from which reason springs; we think with our emotions and our emotions help us to think. For Aristotle, emotional appeals were threefold. …