Passioni dell’anima ed espressioni del volto: una storia “cartesiana” della compassione in Francia (Descartes, Charles Le Brun e gli enciclopedisti)

Abstract

The article revisits some of the theories of compassion developed in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the influence of Cartesian philosophy and Descartes’ writings. It begins with an examination of Descartes’ philosophy, which links compassion to pity, while distinguishing between the ‘generous’ compassion of the “plus grands hommes” and the ‘tearful’ compassion of weaker souls. The second section addresses the artistic representation of compassion in Charles Le Brun’s renowned Conférences académiques, where Louis XIV’s Premier Peintre drew the ‘mask’ of compassion with geometrical precision, based on Cartesian physiology of Les Passions de l’Âme and L’Homme, translating inner movements of the body-machine into visible facial expressions. Building on this, the third section examines the description on the passions included in Louis de Jaucourt’s entry Passion (Peinture) in the Encyclopédie. Despite being written in an era marked by the decline of Cartesian ‘romances’, de Jaucourt offered a broadly ‘Cartesian’ definition of the passions in support of a classicist aesthetic of art as disciplined imitation of nature. Operating within Rousseau’s intellectual climate, de Jaucourt also observed that passions were increasingly concealed by social dissimulation in a mannered and civilized nation. This reflects the philosophical abandonment of the theory of transparent passions, where appearances prevail over authenticity and the simulation of emotion obscures genuine inner life.