Vladimir P. Goss Beyond Morse Peckham Love and Pain in the Art of Antoine Watteau Vladimir P. Goss University of Rijeka, Croatia vgoss@aol.com One of the most intriguing books of the late 20 th century on experiencing art is Man’s Rage for Chaos by Morse Peckham (1965). As opposed to common belief that art represents a drive for clarity and order, Peckham has proposed that it is a record of a “rage for chaos”, a yearning for darkness and disor- der. Peckham has supported his stance through brilliant analyses including that of Antoine Watteau’s, Embarkation for Cythera identifying a series of ‘discontinuities’ of form, which ultimately leads to a new understanding of content, i.e., that the famous painting represents fraught with the pain of separation rather than the happiness of union. It is stunning how, through blind assumption and prejudice, one could confuse such contradictory emotional states as union and separation when presented in visual form. Of course, acts of joy imply their painful opposite, as the pain and anxiety of imperfection of joy are inherent in the human condition. This is most delicately stated in the wonderfully complex and ambiguous art of Antoine Watteau, as the Embarkation, analyzed by Morse Peckham abundantly dem- onstrates. Keywords: Morse Peckham, Antoine Watteau, pain, iconography Pain could be physical and spiritual. Its image could be conveyed to our senses by forms and contents generally expected to elicit pain, or, more indirectly, by such that do not. A master of such a subtle approach is 18 th -century French painter, Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). I will reveal and explain here my casual encounter with Watteau which turned into a life-long friendship. 1 In the fall of 1969 I enrolled in the doctoral program at Cornell University. As most of the medieval art fac- ulty was on leave or guest lecturing somewhere else, the course pick was slim, so I ended taking, among some other semi-relevant oferings, a course on 18 th -century art taught by Professor Esther Dotson. I thought that it would be rather simple and safe, and would not endanger my A grade average which I had to maintain in order to keep my scholarship. Was I ever wrong! The course was safe enough but not plain or simple. Ms. Dotson, seem- ingly a sedate middle aged lady, was a superb teacher and she knew how to sell the materials she loved and knew so well. From one class meeting to another we were getting assignments to preparing us to co-teach the class and that teacher-class cooperation worked out splendidly. Those were times of initial copying and we would get our assignments on that lurid pre-xerox purplish and smudgy ofset. Reading was hard and pictures just pink blogs and smudges. Yet we enjoyed it all. One day Ms. Dotson distributed a handful of sheets from a book entitled Man’s Rage for Chaos by Morse Peckham. In spite of his Elizabethan name, Morse was not a contemporary of Shakespeare, but rather a profes-