Where does pathos collide?

In rhetoric pathos is one of Aristotle's three means of persuasion, alongside ethos and logos: the appeal that works by putting the audience into a state of feeling, since people judge differently when moved to pity, anger, fear, or confidence. Aristotle's The art of rhetoric (ca. 335 BCE) devotes much of its second book to cataloguing the emotions and how a speaker elicits them, and Lanham's A handlist of rhetorical terms records pathos as the emotional proof. The referent is a persuasive function of a speech, a lever the rhetor uses on an audience, and it is a different construct from the art historian's recurring visual formula for extreme emotion.[1][2]

Unit

The degree to which a discourse moves its audience to a target emotion

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed by identifying the emotions a text targets and the devices by which it attempts to arouse them

In art history pathos, through Aby Warburg's coinage Pathosformel (pathos formula), names a repeatable visual schema for bodies in states of extreme emotion or movement, a gestural formula inherited from antiquity and revived in later art so that the same charged pose recurs across centuries. Schade and Derieg's study of Warburg's reception and Schankweiler and Wüschner's concept entry set out how the formula carries affect as a transmissible image-pattern. The referent is a migrating pictorial convention for emotional intensity, tracked through the survival and return of motifs, which is distinct from the rhetorician's audience-directed emotional appeal despite the shared word.[3][4]

Unit

A single recurring visual pose encoding heightened emotion

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced by following the recurrence and transformation of emotionally charged poses across images and periods