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, no seventeenth-century dictionary takes note of this positively connoted meaning of the verb “éblouir”. 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 éblouissement and seduction is reflected — i.e., at once activated, represented, and questioned: the firework displays of Ancien Regime celebrations; the machine tragedies of the mid-seventeenth century; the representation of light in painting from Le Lorrain to the Colorists; and the ekphraseis found within the correspondence of the Princess Palatine, which carry the trace of a singular “style” of seeing.
Investigating the conflicting models for generating adherence 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 resistance toward the official regime of representation.