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FOR NEARLY TWO CENTURIES AFTER Charles Le Brun presented his lecture on the visual representation of the passions to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1668, his drawings provided the textbook illustration of human emotion.1 Even today, if you Google "how to draw expressions," you will find, scrolling down through countless variations of mouth, eye, and brow, Le Bruns heads of passion.2 A sort of early modern version of Paul Ekmaris widely used POFA (Pictures of Facial Affect), these drawings codified the artistic representation of expressions including wonder, despair, terror, joy, love, fear, anger, hope, and laughter.3 Published in the late seventeenth century, the Conférence sur l'expression générale et particulière consists of Le Bruns lecture, articulating a Cartesianinspired theory of the passions adapted for the particular use of artists, and the series of drawings he made to illustrate the lecture, including sketched heads in black ink, diagram heads on a grid of vertical and horizontal lines, and finished heads of expression.4 Yet if Le Bruns Conférence is frequently coupled with Descartes's treatise on the passions, Les Passions de lame, it is another context, that of the paintings from which the artist modeled a number of the expressions illustrating the Conférence, that interests me here. And while the text and theory of the Conférence take us back to Descartes, its images and visual practice lead us to Louis XIV-and, more precisely, to the subject of absolutism, and her emotions.
Of these emotions, one passion in particular-that of "Admiration" (Wonder)-serves as my point of entry into an interrogation that seeks to rethink the affective economy of absolutism through a wider palette of emotions and affects than is tradionally acknowledged. Le Bruns finished head for wonder originates in his well-known history painting, Les Reines de Perse aux pieds d'Alexandre, composed for Louis XIV in 1660 or 1661, and disseminated in engravings, tapestries, and an official description of the painting penned by André Félibien (fig. I).5 The artists portrayal of the young king as a loving Alexander confronts the tranquil figure of Louis/ Alexander with the diverse feelings of his new subjects, the queens of Persia and their entourage. Painted at the beginning of Louis XIV s personal reign, Les Reines de Perse envisions absolutism through...