Sylvaine Guyot

My project aims to outline a historical anthropology of visual emotions, by examining how different regimes of theatricality overlapped and contradicted one another in early modern France.

It is generally accepted that the capacity to “bedazzle” — to unify the audience in unanimous amazement — characterizes the purpose of the arts during the French neoclassical age. However, oddly enough, no seventeenth-century dictionary takes note of this positively connoted meaning of the verb “éblouir”. In Les Scénographies de l’éblouissement (under contract, Classiques Garnier, 2020), the bedazzlement that interests me is that for which the seventeenth-century dictionaries gave no definition, but which was nonetheless a central issue in many discourses and representations of the period.

I analyze a constellation of objects in which the tension between the theologico-political model of éblouissement and the socio-esthetic model of séduction is reflected — i.e., at once activated, represented, and questioned: the firework displays that, in Ancien Régime Europe, celebrated canonizations, coronations, and peace treaties (i); the machine tragedies that encountered huge success in the mid-seventeenth century (ii); the representation of light in painting from Le Lorrain, who was the first to place the sun within the painted landscape in the 1630s, to the Colorists of the early eighteenth century (iii); and the ekphraseis found within the correspondence of the Princess Palatine and the Mercure galant, which carry not only the imprint of the bedazzling principle of official iconography, but also the trace of a singular “style” of seeing what “touches the heart” (iv).

Investigating the conflicting models for generating adherence through spectacularity in early modern culture, Les Scénographies de l’éblouissement sheds light on the paradox of absolutism: at the moment when the ideology of power endorsed the consensual power of the spectacle, theatricality revealed itself to be an “interstitial” practice, open onto ambivalence, contradiction, and resistance toward the official regime of representation.