Description

According to David Herrliberger, one of Bernard Picart’s collaborators and the editor of the German edition of the Cérémonies, book illustrations not only satisfy aesthetic demands. They also function as a protocol, as a touchstone of reading, guiding the reader to a correct understanding. Picart himself, in the Discours sur les préjugés de certains curieux touchant la gravure, had postulated a central function for the art of engraving in the translation and dissemination of knowledge. In the overall iconographic conception of the Cérémonies, not least in the thematic concentration of the editorial project on exterior expressions of ‘lived religion’, this artistic and intellectual attitude was implemented. Jean Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart argued for the high heuristic power of comparison. This was the central premise of the Cérémonies and undoubtedly made the seven volumes, and namely the sophisticated choreography of the more than 200 plates, an important contribution to the debate on the diversity of religions in the eighteenth century. The question is how what I have termed a “con-visual” representation of so many religious ceremonies in one book was meant to perform a critical discourse on religion and religious diversity in the early modern period. In this lecture, Paola Von Wyss-Giacosa will focus on Picart’s skillfully staged frontispiece, the Tafereel van de voornaamste godsdiensten der waereldt. There is, as I will argue, a high level of performativity in this dense and complex composition. The large sheet was only presented to the public in 1727 – thus a few years after the publication of the Cérémonies’ first volumes – and it shows a remarkable convergence of semiotically charged pictorial motifs and (self-)references. What can we say about the iconographic strategies employed by Picart to make the entangled discourses on the ceremonies of religion visible? How does he set and emotionalize the scene? And can we measure whether these discourses, in their specific visual effectiveness and agency, were able to bring about a transformation in the minds or consciousness of the observers, thus contributing to a paradigm shift in the enlightenment discourse on religion? 

This ‘Meet the Expert Activity’ is part of the international conference ‘Performing theatricality and imaging religious ceremonies in early modern Western Europe’.