Via Pulchritudinis: the narrative of violence and vulnerability in painting in view of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics

Abstract

In the article, I explore the many faces of violence and vulnerability evoked in religious and secular painting. Drawing upon Hans-Georg Gadamer’s phenomenology of art as play, I aim to show that the creative activity of both the artist and the viewer exceeds the mere actualization of the past event or the instantiation of poetic fantasy. Bringing into conversation Bosch’s, Caravaggio’s, Millais’s, and Waterhouse’s masterpieces, this essay interrogates how their embodiments of the uncanny proximity of violence and vulnerability as two conflicting sides of our human experience complicate the expected symmetry and clear-cut distinction between belligerency and gentleness, powerfulness and the powerlessness, benevolence and malevolence. Inviting us to appreciate the authenticity of their subtle meanings in the continuous veiling and unveiling (Verbegung/Entbergung) of truth, the selected artworks prompt, simultaneously, a possibility of our self-recognition. In the process of our patient tarrying in front of them, we are called on to attend to and acknowledge the more complex realities that speak to our lived experience and defy its apparent homogeneity.