PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Since the Age of Enlightenment, the authority and importance of rhetoric has been seriously called into question. The fundamental transformations to which rhetoric was subject around 1800 also affected the discourse on art. The new aesthetical framework of art theory and emerging ‘philosophies’ of art reinforced the emancipation of the visual arts from the paradigm of language or poetry. In the age of Romanticism, discourses and theories of art stressed that art is not teachable and that neither the genius nor the divinely inspired artist follows rules that can be compared to a rhetorical system. Nonetheless, several concepts of rhetoric seem to have been appropriated and transformed by Romantic theories of art. Artists and theorists emphasized the idea that works of art and particularly paintings should not deny their artificiality, but accentuate the difference between the represented and its representation. By adapting concepts such as the sublime, the allegory or irony, theories of art in the age of Romanticism tried to describe new performative qualities of works of art.