The painter's point of view: pictorial writing and moral gaze in Jean de La Bruyère

How can one create portraits of individuals in a society that values the concealment of appearance and character? This problem of representation is the central issue of Les Caractères by Jean de La Bruyère. From a didactic perspective, La Bruyère uses literary portraits to accomplish his goal of the moral improvement of his reader. In relation to mimesis, La Bruyère emphasizes not the theoretical possibility of imitation, but its realization through writing. The challenge that the court poses to La Bruyère—as a society that systematically and normatively masks faces and behaviors—will yield give way to the following basic inquiry: the very creation of a portrait. I argue that La Bruyère draws heavily on the painter’s approach (Félibien) to managing the act of representation, which compels us to reconsider the distance this writer maintains from the moralists writers (La Rochefoucauld, Pascal) and orators (Bossuet, Fénelon) who constitute his intellectual heritage. By examining artistic techniques and the formal visual analyses within La Bruyère’s work, we will explore how his influential style and keen observations—often considered the guiding thread of an otherwise baroque, fragmented, and contradictory work—are the product of a perspective that blends two distinct yet complementary roles: the painter and the writer. In sum, the artistic discourse in Les Caractères is neither metaphorical nor ornamental. The ability to paint an Other is conveyed to the reader as a way of life, as a method for ethical and societal understanding and interaction.