The art of laughter: Society, civility and viewing practices in the Netherlands, 1600--1640.

Artists, poets and their publics during the early modern period took seriously the Horatian dictum that, like poetry, art should both instruct and delight its viewer. This study examines the capacity of images to entertain their audiences by investigating how artists employed depicted laughter to engage their viewers. By the turn of the seventeenth century, a laughing face had long been recognized to have a persuasive power to produce a like response in the beholder. Laughing figures were employed to an unprecedented degree by artists in the circles of Karel van Mander, Frans Hals, and Gerard van Honthorst---painters who created innovative new pictorial subjects and experimented with depicting facial expressions and strong emotions during the years 1600-1640. The laughing painting or print is treated here as a social agent, and the act of viewing understood as a particular kind of ludic exchange. Whatever their moral implications, images, it is argued, preserve traces of the ways in which the viewing of art resembled other cultural interactions, such as jesting practices, and thereby can help us understand the comic function of art in the Golden Age. This investigation begins with a consideration of interpretive problems and historical contexts for understanding early modern laughter. Four case studies follow which explore the ethical, philosophical, and socio-historical implications of laughter on viewing practices. The second chapter utilizes paintings of Democritus and Heraclitus by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem to situate the challenge of depicting laughter within contemporary art theoretical discourses of the passions of the soul and in contemporary Neostoic thought. Chapter Three considers derision in representations of 'tooth-pulling,' arguing that mocking laughter visually articulates (failed) judgment. The fourth chapter examines the relationship between pictorial laughter and love, focusing on both Karel van Mander's writings and on images of laughing courtesans in the oeuvre of Gerard van Honthorst. Finally, Chapter Five reconsiders images of Bacchus, jolly topers and merry musicians in relation to satirical literature on drinking. Rather than focusing on moralizing warnings, these analyses explore the ways in which paintings might be understood as both inspiring and reflecting the ludic pleasures of their viewers.PhDArt historyCommunication and the ArtsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125876/2/3224739.pd