ABSTRACT:

Bernard Lamy's treatises on rhetoric (L'Art de parler, 1675) and on perspective (Traité de perspective, 1701) demonstrate the fundamental role which the art of painting plays in discursive and interpretative practices at the time of French classicism. The particularity of Lamy's oeuvre lies in its combination of Cartesian rationalism and Augustinian religious thought. In an attempt to unite reason and faith, theory and practice, Lamy depends on the logical discursivity of texts and the sensual appeal of images for the purposes of interpreting Scripture.

Unlike Descartes, who dismissed rhetoric, Lamy devoted many years to the writing, revision and reorganization of his rhetorical treatise. Whereas his contemporaries made rhetoric a specialized theory of legal and religious discourse, Lamy relegitimizes the general applicability of rhetoric by insisting on its importance for forming any utterance, whether banal or sublime. Lamy demonstrates that the arts of eloquence and painting are not only linked by a correspondence between the painted image and rhetorical figures such as hypotyposis, but painting also provides a model for constructing a persuasive discourse.

Lamy considers his Traité de perspective an important component of his interpretation of Scripture. Perspective's role as the fundamental organizing principle of painting is explicitly compared to rhetoric's theoretical role for the art of eloquence. But this relationship between eloquence and painting, rhetoric and perspective is more than a clever comparison; it forms an analogy that suggests a more universal conception of how verbal and visual representations are organized, composed, and received.

Lamy's Introduction à l'Ecriture Sainte (1709) exemplifies his attempt to unite rhetoric and perspective for the purposes of interpretation. Through eloquent and pictorial representations of his subject, Lamy seeks to prepare the reader for the multiple difficulties of reading the Bible. The author concretely shuttles between text and image in order to effectively explain and clarify the historical, cultural, and figurative filters which obscure the truth of Holy Scripture.

In conclusion, Lamy's oeuvre testifies to an interdisciplinary approach towards interpretation and representation. By uniting word and image, on the levels of presentation and on the level of their fundamental principles, Lamy demonstrates how the two orders supplement each other so as to surpass their individual limits. His "modern" intuition that persuasive texts have to be made accessible to their readers is a response to the growth of secular civil society in the seventeenth century and prefigures the emergence of bourgeois sensibility in eighteenth century aesthetics.