Rhetorical Figures of Viewing in Classical and Academic Art

Abstract

The article is a mirror for the author's work on the iconographic motif of Venus pudica. Like Venus, the image of a sleeping satyr from the famous Barberini Faun statue has become a figure of visual rhetoric in modern times, with a similar meaning of viewing the human body, but this time a male body. French artist Nicolas Poussin and Italian painter Giovanni Battista Pittoni used this recognizable iconic form to express a complex set of meanings, often in opposition to each other. In the arsenal of academic art, it has been applied in creating artistic images by Russian painters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Anton Losenko, Andrei Ivanov, and his brilliant son Alexander. At first glance, this article only continues, using new material, the series of studies initiated by Aby Warburg (1866-1929) on visual patterns invented in antiquity that then became part of Modern art. However, unlike iconological studies, which only state such borrowings, the author examines these visual metaphors from the perspective of their internal form, which for a long time could hold and transmit important messages from the artist to others. The author believes that rhetoric from antiquity until the beginning of the nineteenth century (in Russia to the middle of the nineteenth century), and in academic art even later, held a leading position in the education of the artistic consciousness of masters of fine arts, and, directly or indirectly, in the management of practicalactivities - even playing the role of art theory, which began to form as an independent discipline at the turn of the twentieth century.