Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s “Rhetoric of obedience” in the context of Russian-French artistic connections

Abstract

The paper concerns the rhetorical basis in works of French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who was a prominent representative of the Enlightenment. In the early twentieth century L. Hautecoeur has revealed literary devices that are used by Greuze in his paintings, but then scholars have not focused attention on this issue. In the opinion of the author, many of Greuze’s works were modelled on the rhetorical syllogisms that were described as far back as the Classical antiquity. Using Aristotle’s division of rhetorical sentences into common and specific topics or enthymemes, he reveals in the work of the French painter representative samples of both. Greuze’s favorite commonplace was the antithesis and other «figures of speech» closely related to this rhetorical topic, and he used it very variously, contrasting each other as whole pictures and images within a work, and these oppositions, in turn, have very different degrees of contrast. One of the most famous specific enthymemes created by Greuze is the iconographic cliché which is at the core of his very popular «expressive heads» — «têtes d’expression». Both kinds of figures of visual rhetoric found understanding and reflection in Russian culture of the 18–19 centuries, particularly in Russian literature.