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| Peter Lely The Finding of Moses 1640s wash drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Arcadian Scene 1640s wash drawing British Museum |
"First of all, we must recall that Western culture, in one of its major currents, has certainly not left description outside meaning, and has furnished it with a finality quite "recognized" by the literary institution. This current is Rhetoric, and this finality is that of the "beautiful": description has long had an aesthetic function. Very early in antiquity, to the two expressly functional genres of discourse, legal and political, was added a third, the epideictic, a ceremonial discourse intended to excite the admiration of the audience (and no longer to persuade it); this discourse contained in germ – whatever the ritual rules of its use: eulogy or obituary – the very idea of an aesthetic finality of language; in the Alexandrian neo-rhetoric of the second century A.D., there was a craze for ecphrasis, the detachable set piece (thus having its end in itself, independent of any general function), whose object was to describe places, times, people, or works of art, a tradition that was maintained throughout the Middle Ages. As Curtius has emphasized, description in this period is constrained by no realism: its truth is unimportant (or even its verisimilitude); there is no hesitation to put lions or olive trees in a northern country; only the constraint of the descriptive genre counts; plausibility is not referential here but openly discursive: it is the generic rules of the discourse which lay down the law."
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study Sir Edward Carteret, Usher of the Black Rod Bruno Ryves, Dean of Windsor and Register of the Order ca. 1663-71 drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study Knight in newly designed Garter Robes ca. 1663-71 drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study Knight in newly designed Garter Robes ca. 1663-71 drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study George Morley, Bishop of Winchester and Prelate of the Order ca. 1663-71 drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study Canopy-bearer for the Sovereign ca. 1663-71 drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study Canons of Windsor ca. 1663-71 drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study Poor Knights of Windsor ca. 1663-71 drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study Poor Knights of Windsor ca. 1663-71 drawing- British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study Poor Knight of Windsor afflicted with blindness ca. 1663-71 drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Order of the Garter portrait study Poor Knights of Windsor ca. 1663-71 drawing British Museum |
"There is, in Nietzsche and in Bataille, one theme in common: that of regret. A certain form of the present is disparaged, a certain form of the past is exalted; neither this present nor this past is actually historical; they are both read according to the formal, ambiguous movement of a decadence. Thus is born the possibility of a non-reactionary regret, a progressive regret. Decadence is not read, contrary to the world's accepted connotations, as a sophisticated, hypercultural condition, but on the contrary as a deflation of values: return of tragedy as farce (Marx), clandestinity of festal expenditure in bourgeois society (Bataille), critique of Germany, disease, exhaustion of Europe, theme of the last man, of the vermin "that diminishes everything" (Nietzsche). We might add Michelet's diatribes against the nineteenth century – his own – the century of Boredom. In all, the same disgust provoked by bourgeois deflation: bourgeois man does not destroy value, he deflates it, diminishes it, establishes a system of the paltry."
– Quotations are from The Rustle of Language by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (New York : Hill & Wang, 1986)
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| attributed to Peter Lely Studies of women 17th century drawing British Museum |
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| Peter Lely Nymph carried off by Satyr 17th century chalk drawing British Museum |
I am grateful to the British Museum for making these images available.