We have not yet settled on the protocols for the experiment suggested here. We will. I remain unmoved by the argument that the kinds of emotion pictures rouse – like those of music – are too refined to fall within the scope of the neurosciences. The argument that the most we can now say about the emotions are on a relatively gross level ought not to block research into the correlations between visual composition and emotion, however refined such emotion may be declared to be (or however contaminated by contextual factors).

In the meantime I offer a case study in Poussin and the history of the modes that seems to me to offer an interesting prolegomenon to the problem, not least because:

1) the paintings of Poussin present a kind of compositional clarity not often found in other pictures. In them, I believe, composition is indeed so clear that it is less likely, at least in the context of immediate or "early" vision, to be contaminated by issues of color, iconography, expression, etc.;

2) the historical problem of the modes offers an entirely different way of thinking about modality than current conceptions of that notion;

3) the historical parallel with the musical modes points once more to the single issue that has for so long stymied serious study of the relations between aesthetic objects and emotion, namely that the emotions are too ragged and irregular to be amenable to any kind of rule or law.

I

The idea of the modes in art (and in painting in particular) was not a common one, at least not until the middle of the seventeenth century. But from then it enjoyed a fairly long vogue. Its introduction into the mainstream of the history of art is due to the influence of one man alone.

On November 24, 1647, the French painter Nicolas Poussin wrote a long letter from Rome to his friend and patron Paul Fréart de Chantelou in Paris. "Those fine old Greeks", he said at one point, "inventors of everything that is beautiful, found several Modes by means of which they produced marvellous effects". What did Poussin mean by the "Modes", and what meaning could they have for us?

In 1647 Nicolas Poussin painted a Finding of Moses (for Jean Pointel), one of several he did of this comparatively unusual subject, and a scene of Ordination (part of a cycle of the Seven Sacraments) for Paul Fréart de Chantelou. Pointel and Chantelou were Poussin’s most important French patrons, though nothing like as important for his art as Cassiano dal Pozzo in Rome, for whom he painted the first series of Sacraments just before his brief return to Paris in 1641-2. Pointel was a banker, a bachelor, and eventually owned 21 of Poussin’s loveliest paintings. But Chantelou was evidently not satisfied with his painting of Ordination. He was constantly looking over his shoulder, and, as we learn from a famous letter by Poussin to him in November 1647, seems to have felt that Pointel’s Finding of Moses was the better picture. We may think that this is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, and Poussin obviously felt so too. Quite exasperated by Chantelou’s nagging, he wanted to settle the problem once and for all.

Then he had an idea. He would try to explain something very basic about pictures to Chantelou. Not having quite the right arguments to hand for painting, however, he turned to an example from the theory of music to explain what may seem obvious to us: that different subjects require different treatments. But he went still further than this, suggesting that different treatments might have different effects on the beholder:

Those fine old Greeks, inventors of everything that is beautiful, found several Modes by means of which they produced marvelous effects.

This word Mode means, properly, the ratio or the measure and the form which we use to to do something that constrains us not to move beyond it, making us work in all things with a certain middle course or moderation. And so this mediocrity or moderation is simply a certain manner or determined and fixed order in the process by which a thing preserves its being.

The Modes of the ancients were composed of several things put together; and from their variety there arose certain differences between the Modes; and from these one could understand that each Mode retained in itself a certain distinctiveness, particularly when all the things which entered into the composition were put together in such proportions that there arose the capacity and power to arouse the soul of the spectator to divers emotions. Observing these effects, the wise ancients attributed to each [Mode] particular effects arising from each one of them. For this reason they called Dorian the Mode that was stable, grave, and severe, and they applied it to matters that were grave, severe, and full of wisdom.

And passing on from this to pleasant and joyous things, they used the Phrygian Mode because its modulations were more refined [plus menues] than those of any other Mode and its aspect sharper. These two manners and no others were praised and approved by Plato and Aristotle, who deemed the others useless; they held in high esteem this vehement, furious, and highly severe Mode that strikes the spectator with awe.

I hope within a year to paint something in this Phrygian Mode; frightful wars provide subjects suited to this manner.

Furthermore they considered that the Lydian Mode was the most proper for mournful subjects because it has neither the simplicity of the Dorian, nor the severity of the Phrygian.

The Hypolidian Mode contains within itself a certain suavity and sweetness which fills the soul of beholders with joy. It lends itself to divine matters, glory and Paradise.

The ancients invented the Ionian which they employed to represent dances, bacchanals, and feasts, because of its cheerful character.
Good poets have used great diligence and marvelous artifice in adapting their choice of words to their verse and disposing the feet according to the propriety [convenanse] of speech, ..... So, when Virgil is speaking of love, he has cleverly chosen certain words that are sweet, pleasing and very gracious to the ear. Where he sings of a feat of arms or describes a naval battle or accident at sea, he has chosen words that are hard, sharp and unpleasing, so that on hearing them or pronouncing them they arouse fright. If, therefore, I had painted you a picture in which this manner was followed, you would imagine that I did not love you.

Were it not that it would amount to composing a book rather than writing a letter, I would like to bring to your attention several important things that should be considered in paintings, so that you could fully realize how much I exert myself to serve you well. For though you are very knowledgeable in all matters, I fear that the company of so many insensitive and ignorant people of the kind that surround you may corrupt your judgement by contagion.]

I remain, as always, your very humble and most faithful servant,

Poussin.

Obviously there is much in this letter that requires comment (the relation between reason and the senses, and the predictable parallels between painting and poetry for example); but for the moment I want to concentrate on what may seem the most arcane part of his letter, namely the part in which talks about the modes, and all those strange references to the grave Dorian, the sharp and warlike Phrygian, the suave Hypolidian, the cheerful Ionian, and so on and and so forth.

Where does all this come from? It comes, as Anthony Blunt discovered in l933, from ancient music theory. In fact, what Poussin wrote about the Modes is little more than a direct plagiarism from Giuseppe Zarlino’s Istituzioni armoniche, first published in 1558 and reprinted many times for the rest of the century. (To read Zarlino's text in PDF, click here.) But this is no reason not to take his ideas seriously. After all, while most of us can recognize the possibility that different kinds of music might stir us differently, the idea that different kinds of pictures move us in different ways would seem rather more resistant to formulation in any clear-cut or systematic way. Indeed, scholars of Poussin have mostly avoided doing so altogether. The usual approach to this letter has been to see it in terms of the twin doctrines of decorum and of the affetti. That is, Poussin has been understood to be making the rather conventional claim that the expression of the emotions within the paintings should somehow be appropriate to the kind of subject to be depicted. Poussin himself wrote in 1637 about another painting which did for Chantelou, the now almost unreadable picture of The Israelites Gathering the Manna that there were "certain natural attitudes within it", which enabled one to see in the Israelites "not only the misery and hunger to which they were reduced, but also the joy and happiness in which they found themselves; the amazement by which they were touched, the respect and reverence they had for their leader, and a mixture of women, children, and old men, and of different temperaments".

It was this latter kind of reading of a picture that was taken up in the famous Conférences or lectures in the French Academy of Painting from around 1667 on; and this is is exactly how almost all scholars have tried to deal with the problem. In almost futile ways they have tried to identify which pictures were painted in which modes. But to view Poussin’s letter in this way seems to me to gloss over what strikes me as the most crucial and interesting passage of the letter. After all, Poussin himself clearly and articulately observed that "each Mode retained in itself a certain distinctiveness, particularly when all the things which entered into the composition were put together in such proportions that there arose the capacity and power to arouse the soul of the spectator to divers emotions". This is the central claim of the letter. It goes far beyond the injunctions in his letters of ten years earlier about the Gathering of the Manna to "read the story" - lisez l’histoire et le tableau, he had said then, afin de connaître si chaque chose est appropriée au sujet. This notion, certainly, was based on the old parallelism between texts and paintings and on the notion of decorum and appropriateness. The point now was much more radical. It had little to do with reading a picture. It implied - no, it stated outright - that a composition may be put together in such a way as to arouse the soul of the spectator to particular emotions.

With music this seems self-evident, common-sensical, intuitive, and consistent with our experience, but with painting? Or sculpture? Or architecture? And could such modes be specifiable for pictures? Could, furthermore, the correlative emotions for the way particular pictures are put together be established? I think that anyone who reflects on these questions will realize instantly that a positive answer would entail a view of the relations between pictures and spectators that is not solely dependent on context, but is predicated instead on the possibility of being able to establish certain kinds of rules; and that certain kinds of responses are in fact innate. One has, therefore, to ask whether the kinds of correlations Poussin was suggesting might both be universal (which is what the letter implies) and universally applicable. After all, Poussin said that the modes were specifiable and that the effects of pictures on their beholders could be directly correlated with how they were composed and how they looked.

No one, as far as I know, has taken any of this sufficiently seriously to analyze the possibility that Poussin might indeed have been claiming not only something important about responses to images, but something basic. I think he was. Furthermore, I think that what he had to say has powerful implications for the philosophy of mind, and for how we think about the architectonics, as Kant would have put it, of mental operations. None other than Bernini seems to have caught something of this when, pointing to his forehead, he made his famous statement upon seeing the two great Phocion pictures in Paris in 1665 - one now in Cardiff, the other now in Liverpool - that "Signor Poussin è un pittore che lavora di la". (Blunt, incidentally, speculated that both pictures were in the Dorian mode). When I wrote The Power of Images I deliberately refrained from suggesting anything either about human nature or about the possibility of innate levels of response - although some critics caught some hint of this. But I now believe that I was not radical enough. My own sense is that Poussin was right, and that one ought to be able to establish a syntax of correlations between pictures and responses; and that that syntax is in principle discoverable through the idea of the modes.

All this is likely to arouse deep scepticism. I am not now primarily speaking of the relations between perceptual rules and how a picture looks. These, too, are relations whose rules may presumably be discovered, and much cognitive work has been done in this domain; but in proposing a tertium quid, I am indeed taking a further leap. Even if we assume that we may establish a syntax for the relations between how pictures look and how we cognize them, I believe that there is a further syntactical level: between the look of a picture and the emotions it arouses. And the rules for that syntax, I believe, are universal, innate, and specifiable. The general view is exactly the opposite. This more popular view would hold that the emotions are not subject to reason or to any specifiable set of rules; and that very little if anything can be said about the relations between pictures and feeling that is not purely contextual or idiosyncratic. That, of course, is not a view I share.

II

If the idea of the modes and the specific emotional qualities associated with them was uncommon in painting (though perhaps more common than usually assumed), this was not at all the case with the idea of the modes in music. As we have already seen, it was at least as old as the Greeks, and it went on to play an important role in all musical theory and much musical practice (from Chant through Beethoven) ever since. But one of the problems in music was whether the modes were somehow equivalent to the keys and with the emotions that were often associated with specific keys. The evidence for what have appropriately been called key characteristics is abundant, much more so than has generally been acknowledged.

Properties of the Modes
C-Major Gay and warlike
C-Minor Obscure and sad
D-Minor Grave and pious
D-Major Joyous and very warlike
E-Minor Effeminate, amorous and plaintive
E-Major Quarrelsome and peevish
Eb-Major Cruel and severe
F-Major Furious and quick-tempered
F-Minor Obscure and plaintive
G-Major Quietly joyful
G-Minor Serious and magnificent
A-Minor Tender and plaintive
A-Major Joyous and pastoral
Bb-Major Magnificent and joyous
Bb-Minor Obscure and terrifying
B-Minor Lonely and melancholy
B-Major Severe and plaintive

Much plaintiveness, as if to cover the possibility of some more precise emotion.

It was all in the air, this association of particular emotions with particular aspects of musical composition, this need to introduce rules into the correlation between the composition of a work and the emotions it aroused. Our list comes from Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Rules of Composition written around 1692 for the young Philippe d’Orleans; it was by no means the only one in the seventeenth century, but perhaps the most detailed. About thirty years later, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s chart entitled De la propriété des Modes & des Tons from his Traité de l’harmonie would make a similar set of connections. (To read Rameau's text in PDF, click here). But by then such ideas, however much they may have been theoretically renewed, adapted, and refined, were stale. In all of them, as Rameau’s heading makes clear, and as Poussin insists in his letter on the modes, the classical idea of decorum remains in the foreground. The emotions a piece of music expressed, or aroused, had to be fitting to its subject, just as with painting. Let us turn the clock back to times when these ideas were more urgent, less overtly mechanistic; and then remind ourselves of the central period - Poussin’s - when they were articulated in such a way that they might still be of relevance to the neurophilosophical problems we are pursuing.

Charpentier’s list is headed "properties of the modes", but it seems to provide nothing more than a list of keys with their emotional correlates. This was the commonest way in which the modes were understood in the seventeenth century and after. For the ancient Greeks too, the modes - the Greeks only had eight - corresponded, very roughly, with the notion of key characteristics. And they too thought of the modes both as representing particular emotions and as capable of provoking them with similar particularity. But can it only be a matter of key, however so understood? Of course not. There is much more to music besides key that can affect its hearers: modulation from one key to another, rhythm, harmony, and melody, for example. Not surprisingly, the modes were often taken to be something else besides, or a composite of various aspects of a musical composition. Then there was the perpetual issue of the relationship between music and its texts. In fact, this remained the central issue, if not always explicitly so, in every discussion of the relationship between the modes and the emotions from the earliest times on. At least until the eighteenth century. And so it is not at all surprising that in his letter to Chantelou about the modes, Poussin should have begun by insisting that Chantelou attend more carefully to the determining role of the subjects of the pictures that had provoked their contretemps in the first place.

Charpentier offered two justifications for his list. First of all - and straightforwardly enough - there was the need to accomodate different vocal ranges. But secondly - and much more importantly - there was its potential utility as a guide to "the expression of the different passions, for which the different key properties (energies, significantly enough) are appropriate". Always the need for the appropriateness and propriety of properties, as if propriety were the chief constitutive element of property. But if it all were simply a matter of key, the task would be relatively simple, at least in principle. It would not be much different, say, from attempting to establish the moods of particular colours in pictures (in which case "mood" would not implausibly serve as a rough substitute for "mode", and key a rough equivalent for colour). But just as there is more to music than just key, so too there is more to painting than colour. Certainly to speak only of colour would not satisfy the full implications of Poussin’s letter at all.

In 1640, in the wake of a cruel musical competition set up for him by Marin Mersenne, Johan Albert Ban, a slightly crazy and certainly obsessive priest and music theorist of Haarlem, wrote a letter to the famous Dutch bluestocking Anna Maria van Schuurman, in which he assigned emotional qualities to the consonances, thus:

minor third: soft, bland, and languid
major third: energetic
fourth: harsh, because it cannot be divided into two harmonic intervals
fifth: heroic and martial
minor sixth: more flattering and languishing than the minor third, because it is a wider interval
octave: merely pleasing, because it has no power of moving

Ban went on to observe that the dissonances could also affect the emotions in specific ways, but these he did not outline, as they had been in his now unfortunately lost Latin treatises on music. The issue of musical modulation intervenes here too; but all this raises another and conceivably more crucial possibility for the ways in which cognition and emotion may be seen to interact in works of music and the visual arts, namely the matter of intervals between notes, or what in painting could be called proportion. This is an issue that will be developed in the next historical instalment of this project.