On hellenistic visual rhetoric in the context of gender studies

Abstract

The paper studies visual rhetoric as an important part of Hellenistic art in close connection with the poetics of “recognition and changes” developed by Aristotle in terms of plot development in drama. A person of rhetorical culture could read a work of art doubly: assessing its individual performance and, first and foremost, a «message» that meant to be widely comprehensible. The poetics of recognition of common topics that referred a viewer to well familiar meanings, gave the image contemplation process a pleasure with a gush of senses, a peculiar catharsis. A skilful play with visual rhetorical figures that, in particular, was shown by an easel painting on the subject of Achilles Discovered on Scyros of the Greek master Athenion of Maronea which reached us in several replicas in Pompeii, raises expressiveness of the picturesque composition to the same level as the one in a tragedy of “complex plot”, enriching it with effective visual credibility. The core of the collision is composed of antisymmetry and gender change (substitution), the mankind’s natural division into male and female halves, which in its turn enables us to carry out a work of art analysis in context of gender studies. The rhetoric of pair portraits turns this natural distinction into opposition and complementarity of contrast types so that the artistic image as a whole receives a sharpness and internal dynamics (the so-called tondo of the Two Brothers from Cairo). The rhetoric of contrast continues to live under transfigured, inly alerted forms in some pair images of the subsequent times within the Rhetorical Era, e. g. in the Apostolados of El Greco.

Keywords:

Poetics of Aristotle, hellenistic art, visual rhetoric, rhetorical figures, gender, gender studies, Athenion of Maronea, frescos and mosaic Achilles Discovered on Scyros, Fayum portraits, tondo of the Two Brothers, Apostolados of El Greco