Seeing Things: The Dire Visibility of the French Baroque
- ISBN-10
- 0599426950
- ISBN-13
- 9780599426955
- Series
- Seeing Things
- Pages
- 202
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1999
- Author
- Marie Michelle Strah
Description
Christine Buci-Glucksmann has characterized in her work La folie du voir (1986) the period commonly called the "baroque" in early modern Europe as the privileged moment of the "folly of seeing." The articulation of a principle of "Etre, c'est voir" [to be is to see] during the years 1580--1670 is for Buci-Glucksmann emblematic of the baroque eye (I?). Her title indicates also an extravagance, an insanity of vision that arises from the conjunction of an admiration for the marvelous and the rhetoric of mathesis, taxinomia and genesis that Michel Foucault sees in the Classical episteme. The baroque effervescence of marvelous objects, colonial fetishes and early modern clutter catalogued in cabinets of curiosities and encyclopedic museums, revels in hypotyposis, the rhetorical "laying before the eyes" of these objects.
