An Approach to "Pathosformeln" Comic and Humoristic Mob

Abstract

This paper accounts for an emotional form characteristic of some Derisory Discourses, in which it can be found a sort of “Pathosformel of the Multitude”, of which abundant examples throughout the History of Art can be found. As it is well known, the Pathosformel –visual concept coined by the cultural theorist Aby Warburg– is a sort of certain configuration of representative and significant forms that reinforce the understanding of the meaning of what is represented through the induction of an affective field, in which the emotions that a culture underlines as basic for social life unfold. According to this, in the treatment that, for example, Pieter Bruegel the Elder gives to some frequent moral themes in his pictures, the kind of humor characteristic of that cultural configuration that has its origins in the Renaissance but whose influences can be traced up to the present can be discovered.