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Temperamental!: Prints in the Collection of Bryn Mawr College

Jacques Callot (French 1592-1635), The Large Hunt (1619). Etching; state i/iv, signed in plate; Lieure 353; Gift of Howard L. Gray, Professor of History, 1915-1940; 1946.16.

A riding party enjoys a stag hunt across a capacious woodland. In early modern France, par force hunting was a skilled leisure activity reserved for the aristocracy. Since they had the means to afford happiness, it was believed that the upper classes were more likely to be of a sanguine temperament. One of Callot’s important innovations in etching was a slanted, steel-tipped tool which imitated the lines of engraving. The repetitive interlace of tapered lines in this print indeed resembles an engraving. However, the enhanced sense of depth in this landscape is made possible by etching’s ability to modulate light and dark in the lines of the print.

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Personality and Class
What makes us who we are? Just as today we might turn to personality tests and horoscopes to explain our dispositions and destinies, our early modern counterparts looked to the four temperaments. Decided by the configuration of planets at birth, an excess of a bodily humor could account for one's disposition and life trajectory. One's disposition also experienced day-to-day fluctuations, influenced by the movement of the planets and changes in environment or diet. These dispositions or temperaments, in turn, could be used as explanations for a rigidly hierarchical society. Artists could attribute the hardship of beggars and peasants to their phlegmatic, and therefore idle, or choleric, and therefore dangerous, qualities. A privileged soldier's choleric violence, in contrast, could be celebrated as the strong will of Napoleon—or does the phlegmatic gesture of his idle hand undermine this reading?