35 Anger’s Marks: expressions of sin, temperament, and passion Jane Kromm Anger was a complex phenomenon in the early modern world. As an independent condition, anger was both sin and vice, yet it also claimed a place as one of the strongest among the passions. Understood as part of a larger psycho-physiological system, anger was the baseline for the choleric temperament, and in its most extreme form, it was identified with furor and madness. This essay will trace the representational trajectory of anger in the early modern Netherlands through a concentration on facial expression, pose, and gesture in works of half-length or bust format. By closely examining works of art that articulate anger’s critical features, this study will delineate the ways in which ire was comprehended as emotional expression, and in addition, it will explore the ways in which anger developed into the visual measure of choice for representing the unexpected or unanticipated, for heightening projective pictorial illusionism, and for catalyzing the dynamic engagement between image and spectator. Anger by its nature could be enduring and persistent, but it was most often cast as a temporary, short-lived, or ad hoc phenomenon. It was in fact this very quality of immediacy that made the passion attractive to artists experimenting with ad hoc representational strategies to use in character studies, tronies, and self-portraits. In this way, the pictorial development of anger was supported by the empirical interests and analytic turn of the artists themselves, but also by a number of early modern discourses in play prior to the printing of D. P. Pers’ Dutch edition of Ripa’s Iconologia in 1644 and before the great codifying and systemizing works of academicians like Charles LeBrun.1 During this more experimental and observation-based phase in the representation of emotions, some of the most influential texts were neo-stoical works and early medical treatises that offered nuanced descriptions of behavior and motivation. Anger held a leading position among the vices and passions in both the pictorial and the textual tradition, and it was clearly the most visually assertive among them. Seneca for example observed in De ira that ‘other vices may be concealed and cherished in secret; anger shows itself openly and appears in the countenance, and the greater it is, the more visibly it boils forth.’2 Its difference from other emotions was that while they may Detail figure 2, show, ‘anger stands out,’ and it alone is ‘wholly violent.’3 And while ‘other Woman enraged, c. 1558 36 Jane Kromm vices incite the mind, anger overthrows it’.4 In fact, anger ‘doesn’t seduce but abducts the mind’.5 For many writers on the subject, from the church fathers to early modern political commentators, anger was privileged by its exteriority, its relationship to movement and reactiveness, and its connection to the social dynamics of display.6 While anger was passive to the extent that it was often a reaction to a perceived cause, it was also the most active and externalizing of the emotions because at base it was a wholly antagonistic phenomenon.7 These characteristics of anger are evident in some of its earliest representations, especially those related to the battle between virtues and vices associated with the psychomachia tradition.8 Most of these depictions emphasize one of anger’s great moral truisms: while it threatens to harm others with its violence, anger is ultimately a self- destructive phenomenon. In visual representations of the humors or temperaments, the choleric person has a hot and dry physiology, a tendency to fieriness and volatility, and is often shown to be a serious danger to others. This danger could be demonstrated in both allegorical or genre scenes depicting fights, battles, and other kinds of confrontations. Ira by Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525-1569) from the late 1550s combines the genre and the allegorical in a single scene of brawling men with two personifications of the sin alongside a vast landscape of military destruction (fig. 1). Pivotal to Bruegel’s composition is a genre motif derived from Hieronymous Bosch’s table top of the vices (Madrid, Museo del Prado): the motif is repeated in the vignette that fills the round, table- top shaped barrel opening in the image’s center and emphasizes the dangerous combination of drinking, arms, and hotheadedness. The larger personification of Ira carries a poison flask signifying the more indirect 1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Ira, 1558 engraving, 222 x 292 mm, Metropolitan Museum of Art (photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art).