Pour une encomiastique visuelle

Abstract

The paintings that represent Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, exhibited in 2004 by the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) and reproduced in an album in 2008 by the German printing house Steidl, show the difficulties that a rhetoric of eulogy can encounter in a democratic society.The rich traditions of eulogy may be considered a source of inspiration for these paintings. The aims of this research are: to identify the ways artists persuasively bind glorifiable meanings and techniques, to discover the combinatory potential of certain techniques cherished by eulogy, and to bring to light the rhetorical invariants of the genre.

Keywords

• visual rhetoric
• argumentation
• legitimacy