What cloud machines tell us about early modern emotions

Abstract

Abstract While nineteenth century art critic John Ruskin laments that artists do not observe the skies and their clouds enough, seventeenth-century stage machinists were close to meteorologists in the precision they brought to cloud formations on stage. In French late seventeenth-century drama, clouds framed stages like a proscenium, they lowered and lifted heavenly or other flying bodies, abducted figures, served as vessels for lighting that gave beauty and depth to the stage, and hid all sorts of machinery that risked taking away from the set’s credibility, all with unprecedented meteorological precision. Moreover, given the human physiology that was tied to meteorological learning at this time, it is also important to consider the extent to which stage machinists understood the link between their machines and the human body and its psychology. Not only did the theatrical context of their machines generate a psychological moment, but the rigging, the springs, and the movements of the machine’s parts were large, mechanical recreations that imitated Cartesian passions of the soul. In this light, stage clouds may have been engineered, artisanal recreations of the external world of nature, but they were also a kind of live experiment that revealed the mechanisms of the inner world of human emotion. By exploring the possibility that stage engineers were not only natural philosophers but also Cartesian machine psychologists, this essay proposes an affective history of stage clouds in Andromède (1650), Cadmus et Hermione (1673), and Isis (1677).