ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Giorgio Vasari’s bella maniera can be identified with the art of the Classical rhetorical trope of enargeia, which enables the artistic recreation of life in a descriptive manner so vivid that it transforms art into life itself, as represented through artistic vision and enactment. Enargeia is a Greek rhetorical trope, classified by Aristotle, who argued that enargeia’s definition could best be understood through example, in his Nicomachean Ethics, where he cited pleasure and happiness, as two examples. Enargeia can also mean clarity and self-evidence in a search for truth of existence. Enargeia’s development within oratorical tradition gave it a contextual meaning of persuasion. As Anne Sheppard has discussed, enargeia partakes of recreation, description, aesthetics, detail, emotion, artistry, imagination, and knowledge in order to bring audiences to a state of receptive exaltation that enables the promotion of participatory empathy in events real or imagined.
