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Neer uncovers a key moment in the history of early modern art, when painting was understood to be a tool for self-transformation and for living a philosophical life. 
 
In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer shows how French painters of the seventeenth century developed radically new ways to connect art, perception, and ethics. Cutting across traditional boundaries of classicism and realism, Neer addresses four case studies: Nicolas Poussin, renowned for marrying ancient philosophy and narrative painting; Louise Moillon, who pioneered French still life in the 1630s; Georges de La Tour, a painter of intense and introspective nocturnes; and the Brothers Le Nain, specialists in genre and portraiture who inspired Courbet, Manet, and other painters of modern life. Setting these artists in dialogue with Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, and others, ranging from the studios of Rome to the streets of Paris, this book provides fresh accounts of essential artworks—some well-known, others neglected—and new ways to approach the relation of art, theory, and daily life. 
 

After the heroic nudes of the Renaissance and depictions of the tortured bodies of Christian saints, early seventeenth-century French artists turned their attention to their fellow humans, to nobles and beggars seen on the streets of Paris, to courtesans standing at their windows, to vendors advertising their wares, to peasants standing before their landlords. Fascinated by the intricate politics of the encounter between two human beings, artists such as Jacques Callot, Daniel Rabel, Abraham Bosse, Claude Vignon, Georges de la Tour, Jean de Saint-Igny, the Brothers Le Nain, Pierre Brébiette, Jean I Le Blond, and Charles David represented the human figure as a performer acting out a social role. The resulting figures were everyday types whose representations in series of prints, painted galleries, and illustrated books created a repertoire of such contemporary roles. Realism and Role-Play draws on literature, social history, and affect theory in order to understand the way that figuration performed social positions.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.