Individualism dictated cheerfulness as the most beneficial emotion, since it served the self, and the cheerfulness ethic insinuated itself into the workplace. Most strong emotions lauded in centuries past-romantic love, “healthy” fear, grief, motherly love, and so forth-came to be seen in the early 20th century as signs of immaturity. In the 19th century, Victorian women’s culture redefined the home as a cheer-filled refuge from the world. Other Europeans linked good humor to egalitarianism and saw it variously as admirable or rude. based on friendliness.” Among the first Europeans to note the trait was British journalist William Cobbett, a 1792 émigré who repeatedly commented on “the good humour of Americans” and wished English laborers were as happy. In the New World, European courtesy was being displaced by “a new, casteless nicety. “Since cultural meanings form by opposition, the opposite emotion to sadness-cheerfulness-began to serve as a symbol for virtue.” “Moderns developed an impatience with helplessness, which was accompanied by a distaste for grief and later translated into male aversion to tears,” writes Kotchemidova. Economic ruin was often associated with a lack of moral and emotional control. Patience was definitely a virtue-especially since little could be done about perceived injustices in the early-modern Anglo-Saxon world.īut with the rise of the American middle class in the 18th century came a new emphasis on human agency and individualism, and on the necessity of managing one’s emotions in order to succeed. Traditional Christianity promoted suffering as a path to spiritual refinement. Early in American history melancholy prevailed, just as it did in Europe. We didn’t always walk around with smiles on our faces. As an outgrowth of its capitalist emphasis on individual self-worth, America has developed a national ethic of cheerfulness, writes Christina Kotchemidova, a culture and communication instructor at New York University. America’s national symbol should be that yellow smiley face reproduced on everything from T-shirts to Wal-Mart billboards. By outlining a cultural map by which this visual rhetoric of decapitation may be charted in relation to the Medici family, this article contributes yet a further layer of meaning to the Donatello sculptures within the larger context of early Medici patronage and politics and offers a new methodological approach for the investigation of early modern Florentine visual culture.The source: “From Good Cheer to ‘Drive-By Smiling’: A Social History of Cheerfulness” by Christina Kotchemidova, in Journal of Social History, Fall 2005.įorget the eagle. Although rarely mentioned in the vast art-historical literature on the Medici, visual allusions to beheadings in paint, performance and sculpture served a rhetorical function in Florence to describe the shifting political status of Cosimo de’Medici and his family. John the Baptist’s martyrdom, through the placement of the Donatello sculptures in the family palace in the 1460s. As this article argues, the Medici fostered a familial association with the iconographic, symbolic and practical language of decapitation in Florence since the Albizzi coup of 1433-4, when the family came to be associated with the feast of St. ABSTRACT: While Donatello’s bronze sculptures of Judith and David are stylistically discrete, and may have been originally created in and for different contexts, they are firmly connected to one another through their content: both figures clearly are characterized as active agents of decapitation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |