SESSION: The Proclivities of Pleasure in Early Modern Art
This session investigates how pleasure is represented in Early Modern art, examining visual cultures of enjoyment, indulgence, and sensuality across painting, print, and illustrated text. It traces motifs from the pleasure garden and decorative arabesque interior to scenes of polite sociability, erotic abduction, and libertine violence to ask who is depicted as consuming pleasure, who is relegated to serving it, and how such images construct hierarchies of class, gender, race and power.
Attending to sites and substances, representations of pleasure are read as negotiations of social, political, and philosophical norms in specific historical contexts. Special attention is given to the gendered and racialized uses of the female body in scenes of enjoyment, and to the ways artists’ strategies of display produce “pleasurable viewing” while also staging tensions around excess, morality, and restraint.
Bringing together case studies of particular artists and patrons with feminist, postcolonial, and class-based approaches, the session aims to rethink Early Modern pleasure as a site where desire, power, and visuality intersect, and to reconsider how these historical images continue to shape contemporary imaginaries of enjoyment and indulgence.
Session Convenors:
Sara Benninga, Tel Aviv University
Session Speakers:
Barbara M. Laux, Independent researcher
The Pleasurable Arabesques of Claude III Audran
At the turn of the eighteenth century, the French art critic Roger de Piles wrote about the notion of painting as an art of pleasing the eye. According to de Piles, such works did not instruct but gave his viewers the pleasure of seeing creations that might surprise, amuse, and move them, perhaps even spark witty conversation. Elite patrons cultivated aesthetic taste, which valued pictorial effects related to the pleasure of their cultural milieu. This dynamic interconnection enacted in artistic and viewing practices aligned with theories of social manners and the cult of honnêteté, which emphasized taste and social comportment as a sign of noble distinction.
This paper focuses on the ornamentalist Claude III Audran (1658-1734), whose career spanned over forty years as a maître of the Academy of Saint Luc. He devised hundreds of painted arabesque interiors for royal residences (Versailles, Marly, and Meudon) and Parisian mansions that brought pleasure to his elite patrons. Focusing on select commissions by Audran will illuminate how he ingeniously melded decorative ornaments with elements from popular culture. One such mansion’s ceiling design included allegorical references to a secret literary society. A country lodge’s ceiling had the goddess Diana and four types of deer with references to the hunt. A third commission included painted panels with characters from the Commedia dell’arte theatre. Audran’s success in creating visual pleasure through his cutting-edge arabesques interiors reflected his patron’s elite taste and exemplify De Piles notion of visual pleasure for the spectator of art.
Jane Simpkiss, Compton Verney Warwickshire
Polite and Worldly Pleasures: Canaletto’s Paintings of Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens
Whilst in England, Canaletto made three paintings unique in his oeuvre: two depicting the interior of the rotunda at Ranelagh Gardens (Compton Verney and the National Gallery, London), and one showing the Grand Walk of the New Spring Garden at Vauxhall (Compton Verney). Previous scholarship on Canaletto’s English paintings has focused on the architectural significance of his views as symbols of national power, but little has been said about the artist’s depiction of pleasure.
This paper will consider the significance of these three paintings in the conception of ‘polite’ pleasure in 18th-century England, through comparison with depictions of pleasure in Canaletto’s Venetian paintings, particularly Carnivale. These were predominantly purchased by English patrons, and this paper will explore the extent to which English viewers understood London as a ‘new’ Venice and saw their pleasurable activities as distinct or commensurate with those of Europeans.
Canaletto’s paintings have become the de facto depiction of London’s pleasure gardens in the 18th century and were widely disseminated in print at the time. However, they conceal as much as they reveal about pleasure in these spaces. Similarly, Canaletto’s Venetian scenes hide the debauchery in which many Grand Tourists revelled on their visits, privileging their ‘enlightened’ activities instead. This paper will consider to what extent Canaletto’s paintings supported an imagined conception of pleasure that could be politely displayed in patrons’ homes, and which confirmed their position in the social hierarchy, ultimately exploring how depictions of pleasure reflected Britain’s national identity at this time.
Lydia Yi, Duke University
Ravissement: Painting Desire and Power in Regency France
Erotic abduction, or to accurately name its consequence, rape, constitutes a recurring theme in ancient Greek and Roman mythology. My paper examines the redeployment of this theme in French painting during the Regency (1715–1723), which heralded a predilection for an aesthetic of sensual pleasure at the advent of the rococo style. Understood as ravissement, which translates to rapture and to ravish, the image of gods and heroes seizing maidens transformed into a delightful seduction in which victims were depicted experiencing pleasure alongside their assaulters. I consider how the imbrication of domination and pleasure in ravissement was particularly suited to express the politico-cultural ambitions of Regency France, in a society oriented towards pleasure and prosperity even as imperialism escalated. I situate paintings such as The Rape of Europa by Noël-Nicolas Coypel (1722) alongside discourses of sovereignty and colonialism, which deployed the thematics of pleasure to idealize the exercise of power. As ravissement paintings staged the pleasures of fulfilling desire with impunity, so too did colonial propaganda conjure fictions of reciprocal pleasure to promote exploitative policies. I argue that ravissement iconography and colonialism shared an insidious logic that imagined coerced possession or subjugation as consensual and mutually gratifying. Such paintings were enjoyed by an emerging class of patrons whose tastes were premised on pleasurable experience and whose wealth derived from colonial optimism. While eighteenth-century mythological paintings have been cast as frivolous confections of visual and erotic pleasure, this project demonstrates that those pleasures found uneasy proximity to discourses that romanticized oppression.
Adi Louria Hayon, Tel Aviv University
Scenes of Pain and Pleasure: Materialism and the Aesthetics of Form in Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine and L’Histoire de Juliette
This paper examines the intricate relations between text and image in La Nouvelle Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu, and L’Histoire de Juliette, ou Les Prospérites du Vice (1797/1801) by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade. Comprising engravings juxtaposed with text, these publications stage the production of pain and pleasure not merely as erotic spectacle but as the foundation of a materialist worldview, a mode of life, and a political stance. My analysis focuses on how Sade’s use of image and text together articulates an aesthetic philosophy grounded in a materialist dialogue with thinkers such as Lucretius and Baron d’Holbach. This aesthetic rests on the differentiation of primary and secondary qualities, in which the production of pain and pleasure reflects a moral tableau, revealing a world where the subject becomes the producer and legislator of form. This paper thus situates Sade’s texts and visual imagination at the intersection of materialism, aesthetics, and the emergence of an early modern conception of the self.