Pictures of the Body: Affect and Logic, chapter 2, "Psychomachia"

Chapter 2 55 Psychomachia Chapter 2 P s y c h om a c hi a In brief, always and everywhere, the normal blond has positive, dynamic, driving, aggressive, domineering, impatient, active, quick, hopeful, speculative, changeable, and variety-loving characteristics; while the normal brunette has negative, static, conservative, imitative, submissive, cautious, painstaking, patient, plodding, slow, deliberate, serious, thoughtful, specializing characteristics. — The Job, the Man, the Boss 1 Before it became popular in the humanities, semiology was a branch of medicine, concerned with the ways that the body could be read. Like contemporary semiotics in art history, medical semiology finds itself bound up with the impossible task of reading a seamless, organic object in terms of discrete linguistic units. To the extent that art historical semiotics remains within a narrow conception of semiotic operation, involving the search for certain kinds of symbols and significant marks in pictures, it might find the wider variety of medical practices a fruitful model. In a short list, the body has been read in at least a half–dozen methodologically distinct ways:2 Katherine Blackford, The Job, the Man, the Boss (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1914), quoted in William Armand Lessa, Landmarks in the Study of Human Types (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1942), 141. 2 The table is adapted from Lessa, Landmarks, op. cit., table I, pp. iv-vi. Semiotics in art history is reviewed in my “Marks, Traces, Traits, Contours, Orli, and Splendores: Nonsemiotic Elements in Pictures,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 822–60. 1 Chapter 2 Doctrine Humoralism Physiognomy Phrenology Physiology Anatomy Somatotypology Encyclopedic semiology 56 Psychomachia Typological key Examples The four humors: sanguine, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric Sennert, Rivière, Laycock Movements of the face Polemo, Adamantius, Della Porta, Lombroso, Morel Cranial topography Gall, Spurzheim, Combe, Fowler Body systems: digestive, muscular, Cabanis, Troisvèvre, Rostan, Chaillou respiratory, cerebral Intestinal length, scapular form, embryonic layers Weight and dimensions of the body Syntheses of the above Spiegel, Treves, Huter, Graves, Beneke, Bean, Swaim Näcke, Bauer, Kretschmer, Sheldon Lichtenberg, Blackford, BurgerVillingen, Lessa Table 3. Systems of medical semiology.3 Some sources, in order (the full list is in the original edition of this book, Stanford University Press; the software will not permit a footnote this long): Hippocrates, The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, translated by Francis Adams (London: Sydenham Society, 1849); R. E. Siegel, Galen on Psychology, Psychopathology, and Function and Diseases of the Nervous System (Basel, 1973), and Galen on the Passions and Errors of the Soul, trans. P. W. Harkings (Columbus, 1963); Avicenna, A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine in Avicenna, translated by O. C. Gruner (London, 1930); D. Sennert, Nine Books of Physick and Chirurgy Written by the Great and Learned Physician Dr. Sonnertius (London, 1658); Lazaro Rivière, Opera medica universa. Editio novissima; cui praeter Jacobi Grandii (Geneva: De Tournes, 1737); T. Laycock, “Clinical Lectures on the Physiognomic Diagnosis of Disease,” Medical Times and Gazette 1 (1862): 1-3, 51-54, 101103, 151-54, 185, 205-208, 287-89, 341-44, 449-51, 499-502, 551-54, 635-37. Antonius Polemo (c. 88–145 C.E.) Physiognomics, in Scriptores Physiognomici Graeci et Latini, edited by Richard Förster (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1893); Adamantius (4th c. A.D.), 3 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 57 It would not be difficult to augment and subdivide this chart, adding disciplines such as dermatoglyphics (the study of skin folds), palmistry, and dactyloscopy (fingerprinting). Metoposcopy (or metoscopy, or mesoposcopy), which began in the sixteenth century, is the study of lines in the forehead.4 Iridology, the diagnosis of ailments by study of the patterns of the iris, continues to be popular. (The illustration here is from Iridology Simplified, by Bernard Physiognomics, in Ibid.; Giovan Battista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia libri III (Vici Aequensis, 1586); C. Lombroso, Le Crime: causes et remèdes (Paris, 1899), translated by H. P. Horton as Crime: Its Causes and Remedies (Boston, 1912); Bénédict Auguste Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1857). F. J. Gall, Philosophisch-medicinische Untersuchungen über Natur und Kunst im kranken und gesunden Zustand des Menschen (Vienna, 1791); Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Phrenology, third Amercan edition (Boston: Marsh, Capeu, and Lyon, 1834); George Combe, Essays on Phrenology (Edinburgh, 1819) andThe Constitution of Man (Edinburgh, 1828); O.S. and L. N. Fowler, Phrenology—Proved, Illustrated, and Applied (New York, 1836). 4 The principal source is Girolamo Cardano, Metoscopia (1558); see also Giovan Battista Della Porta, Metoposcopia, edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia (Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1990); Cavaliere Spontini, La metoposcopia (Venice, 1637); Philip Phinella, De metoposcopia (Antwerp, 1648). For plates see Kurt Seligman, The Mirror of Magic (New York: Pantheon: 1948), figs. 176–95; a plate from a 17th century manuscript on “mesoposcopy” is reproduced in Patrizia Magli, “The Face and the Soul,” translated by Ughetta Lubin, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, op. cit., vol. 2, 112. Chapter 2 58 Psychomachia Jensen.) Symbolic gestures, such as the right hand raised in benediction, are another partial system that has varied across cultures.5 Many of the systems are incomplete or specialized. In metoposcopy, for example, folds above the eyebrows are significant, but Venus’s necklaces (folds in the neck), crow’s feet, and other facial lines are not. (In this picture, Mercury ☿ is the creases between the eyebrows; the Sun ☉and Moon ☽ are the first lines above the eyebrows, and then some Venus ♀, Mars ♂, Jupiter ♃, and Saturn ♄.) Part of the face becomes a text, and most remains a cipher—or more exactly, a meaningless pattern. Manuals of fingerprint analysis are very precise about the “delta” the “loop,” the “core,” and other features, but say next to nothing about palmprints.6 (Fingerprint classification is interesting and can be learned in an afternoon.) Symbolic gestures are common in some settings, such as Roman reliefs and late medieval narratives, but they are often omitted or ambiguous. Since all interpretations of pictured bodies must employ some semiotic system, the this book might have been cast as a matter of negotiating these and other ways of reading. But I would resist that because the most interesting and Moshe Barash, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth–Century Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); and Die Beredsamkeit der Liebes, Zur Körpersprache in der Kunst, edited by Ilsebill Barta Fliedl and Christoph Giessmar, Veröffentlichung der Albertina no. 31 (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1992). 6 See the wonderful analysis of fingerprints in The Science of Fingerprints: Classification and Uses, printed for the United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1984), which includes instructions for taking fingerprints from dead and decaying hands. Palm prints are mentioned last, pp. 207-11. 5 Chapter 2 59 Psychomachia widespread systems are also the least amenable to rational exposition: metoposcopy and fingerprint analysis are precise in their limited realms, but “expressive dermatology” is both general and semiotically elusive: skin appears to have the capacity to express specific meaning, even though it normally eludes any exact interpretation. The subject this chapter is another general semiotic system I am calling psychomachia, by which I mean expressive twistings and turnings of the body—as opposed to the expressive existence of the body, which was part of my subject in the first chapter. I take it that the two principal examples, physiognomy and contrapposto, together constitute a basic field of possibilities for meaningful motions and positions of the depicted body. Physiognomy is an attempt at a semiotics of the face, and contrapposto is a language of bodily motion. Deleuze marks the difference by calling the face a “faciality machine,” capable only of generating facial effects, but I would hesitate to make a clear– cut division, because there are so many other ways of reading the body that depend on divisions within the body or the face.7 The existence of practices such as metoposcopy, which does not apprehend the face as a single visual or linguistic field, shows the limitations of a general (and largely non–visual) account such as Deleuze’s. Palmistry reads some lines, and metoposcopy and dermatoglyphics read others, and none of them depends on the distinction between a “faciality machine” and other mechanisms of meaning. Still, the face as a whole is often separated from the (headless or faceless) body, and the two subjects of this chapter are the places where theorization on those two regions has been most acute and systematic. In accord with the different ways that the face and the body are said to convey meaning, the semiotics of contrapposto and physiognomy are incompatible. In particular, they reach their limits in different ways: physiognomy suffers because it tends to become too Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., and Deleuze and Guattari, The Anti– Oedipus, translated by Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). For the concept of the face in China see Angela Zito, “Silk and Skin,” op. cit., 119–20. The concept of the face in general is explored in my Object Stares Back, op. cit., chapter 5. 7 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 60 precise, too much like a language, and contrapposto fails because it is too vague—the body can never quite convey determinate meaning without the support of narratives and symbols. Their failures provide two models for art historical semiotics as it seeks to read the visual; in a larger book, each of the other semiotic systems could also provide lessons in the ways that linguistic constructions are bent, and finally broken, on the illegible surface of the body. Assignment 1: create or find an artwork that analyzes the body according to iridology, metoposcopy, dactyloscopy, or some other system. (We will come back to humoralism, phrenology, and somatotypology, so don’t choose those.) On the disconnection of physiognomy and modernism Although physiognomy (and its later sister science, phrenology) is a dead issue in modernism and postmodernism, it may be better to describe the 20th and 21st centuries as anti-physiognomic rather than non-physiognomic. Modern artists were generally uninterested in what became known as psychological poetraiture—or to put it in premodern terms, telling the story of the soul on the face—and even those few portraitists who can be regarded as central to 20th century art (for example Bacon, Picasso, and Beckmann) typically do not belong to the tradition of psychological portraiture that begins in the fifteenth century and reaches a high water mark with Rembrandt. Instead they are anti-psychological. Beckmann gives us mask after mask, and never reveals himself, as Rembrandt does even under his theatrical costumes. Picasso quickly abandoned his early experiments in using analytic cubism to express psychological nuance. The pschologically odd portraits he attempted around 1910–11 are enough to show that cubism and this tradition of portraiture are an unhappy mixture, and that fact, apart from any other, may be decisive for the Chapter 2 61 Psychomachia twentieth century’s rejection of psychological portraiture.8 Our distance from psychological portraiture can be brought out by a look at an artist who believed in it, and founded his practice on physiognomic criteria. As Rudolf Wittkower emphasized, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was once “the brightest star” of the constellation of seventeenth century artists that also includes Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velázquez and Poussin.9 Given the immense industry that art history has become, it is always risky to call an artist underappreciated, but at least for undergraduate courses Bernini gets perhaps a little less than the usual summary appreciation. Students hear of his accomplishments as a litany of formal breakthroughs: in Wittkower’s words the “choice of a transitory moment, the breaking down of restrictions imposed by the block, the elimination of different spheres for sculpture and spectator, and intense realism and subtle differentiation of texture”—but somehow he does not often come alive to contemporary students or contemporary artists. Yet his is certainly not an instance of that slow, gentle slide into oblivion that is the fate of lesser artists—for example his near-contemporary, the elegant, taciturn Du Quesnoy, who was also once ranked with Michelangelo. I suggest that Bernini’s physiognomic practices can help account for his current absence from some lists of essential artists. The majority of his portraits adhere to the physiognomic Hans Dieter Junker, “Picassos Kunsthändlerporträts von 1910,” in “Was sind wir Menschen doch!…” Menschen im Bild. Analysen, Hermann Hinkel zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Dietrich Grünewald (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 1995), 41-50. 9 Wittkower, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 7. 8 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 62 tradition, which enjoins artists to depict expressions in the mid-range of human beauty and emotion, avoiding ugliness and caricature. Relatively little of Bernini’s work has the kind of physiognomic excess we tend to find congenial. When he wants to depict a violent emotion, he tends to explore formulaically contorted facial expressions: the Condemned Soul (Anima dannata, c. 1619) grimaces wildly, and the Neptune (1620) has a raggedly determined face. Bernini had a few precedents for these distorted faces—he was thinking of Hellenistic sculpture, the Carracci, and early Caravaggio—but he tempered the excesses of Hellenistic and Caravaggesque work by adhering to the ideals of physiognomic balance and decorum that are so much forgotten in the twentieth– century. It may be that we do not respond as strongly as we might because to a late modern sensibility, truly extreme emotions—those that express what we take to be the greater horrors of the 20th century—cannot be conveyed by tragic masks or simple grimaces.10 Just as the Laocöon no longer moves us (even though it shows a man and his two sons being killed by enormous snakes), so Bernini’s efforts at emotional extremes seem more contrived than passionate.11 Since German expressionism, the most intense suffering has not been directly represented; instead it has been conceived as something entirely off the scale of possibilities that facial muscles afford: beyond the classical woe of the Laocöon are 10 See Moshe Barash, “The Tragic Face: The Classical Mask of the Tragic Hero, and Expression of Character and Emotion in Renaissance Art,” and “‘Pathos Formulae’: Some Reflections on the Structure of a Concept,” Imago Hominis, Studies in the Language of Art, Bibliotheca Artibus et Historiae (Vienna: IRSA, 1991) 59–77 and 119–27 respectively. 11 Simon Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1992). Chapter 2 Psychomachia 63 the desolate blank masks of Kirchner’s young girls. We have come to expect great suffering to be shown to us by bodily distortions and not silly grimaces. After all, a wince may be the same whether it is in reaction to a stubbed toe or an amputated leg. I think we have developed a triple distrust of Baroque physiognomy: we don’t feel that emotions come in measured varieties; we wouldn’t risk depicting a strong emotion by a grimace that might look trivial; and we are rarely satisified to remain in the gray areas between the extremes, where passions are muted, mixed, and calmed by reflection and a sense of balance. A fourth obstacle is Bernini’s idea, which he held in common with physiognomists of the time, that faces should exhibit emotions that can be interpreted as “anger,” “frustration,” “sorrow,” and other common states. It is not an accident that the recent scholarship on seventeenth-century portraiture almost entirely eschews affective description in favor of economic, biographical, or formal questions. We prefer illegible complexity in faces, even though we have lost all confidence in our ability to put even a little of that complexity into words. As a science, physiognomy has entirely vanished: not only do current art historians and artists not believe it, they do not care about it, and contemporary artworks that concern the face avoid implying recoverable or specific psychological meaning. The 20th century was immoderate and skeptical. Yet physiognomy remains central to figurative painting despite these differences, because no Chapter 2 Psychomachia 64 one can entirely disbelieve that the face is a text for what lies behind it. In order to carry on even the most rudimentary conversation, I have to be able to look at a person and make a rough guess about what that person is like. And because physiognomics in this general sense remains necessary, it stands to reason that the fund of ideas we apply to our informal decryptions comes from traditions of interpretation that are already in place: that is, from physiognomics. The old doctrines are arguably more important than ever because they are only half known. When physiognomy flourished, at least it was possible to question a given reading, and to come to a working agreement about what some expressions mean. Contemporary artists read and create faces without noticing that the potential and the limitations of psychological portraiture are largely inherited from the Renaissance and Baroque physiognomists. Physiognomic awkwardnesses Like the other semiological systems, physiognomy and phrenology raise fundamental questions: Since the face is not inscribed with letters, how can it be read as if it were a text? In what way does it exhibit signs or propositions about the soul beneath? To ask these questions is to inquire about physiognomy from the inside: that is, to ask the kinds of questions that the eighteenth century doctors asked themselves. Johann Caspar Lavater’s admittedly fragmentary Essays on Physiognomy (originally called the Physiognomische Fragmente) is the principal document in this history, the closest the science came to producing a standard reference.12 As with so much of physiognomy, an initial problem with reading Lavater is that he is difficult to take seriously. I do not say this carelessly: even the physiognomists had their doubts Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, edited by Thomas Holloway, translated by Henry Hunter (London: John Murray, 1792). The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, edited by Ellis Shookman (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1983); Flavio Caroli, Storia della Fisiognomica: Arte e psicologia da Leonardo a Freud (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1995); and Norbert Borrmann, Kunst und Physiognomik: Menschendeutung und Menschendarstellung im Abendland (Cologne: DuMont, 1994), are helpful studies. For the history of reception see John Graham, Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, A Study in the History of Ideas. European University Studies, series 18, Comparative Literature, vol. 18. (Berne: Peter Lang, 1979). 12 Chapter 2 65 Psychomachia about their enterprise—they realized it was unreliable, potentially misleading, and “fragmentary.” Despite its voluminousness, Lavater’s work is repeatedly silly. He tries to read parts of bodies other than faces, and he even interprets the emotions of snakes, queen bees and worker bees, flies, mosquitoes, and fish. Of fish number three at the upper right, for example, he comments dryly, “what stupidity in the mouth… and particularly in its relation to the eye.” Lavater does not credit the “Sea-horse” or “monster” at the bottom—a hippo—with much intelligence. He finds it “destitute” of gentleness and tenderness, and says its mouth and teeth are “stupid, ignoble, [and] insensible, made for devouring without the pleasure of enjoying,” and in sum “the throat of the Sea-horse is a profound and horrible gulph, formed only to crush and swallow.”13 Lavater also studied parts of the face, including birthmarks and even warts, and he warns that women with hairy warts on their chins are industrious but also “amorous to [the point of] folly.” He recommends that the right way to treat them is with “a mildly cold dignity of demeanor.”14 Physiognomy is always cousin to caricature: it is inseparable from inadvertent humor, even when the physiognomists try to use humor to make their points.15 Vaught’s Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 126. The hippopotamus comes in for an even harsher attack in the unabridged original: “Die entsetzliche gleichfortgehende Breite der Stirn und Nase—oder vielmehr der Nasenlöcher und des Mauls—welch ein Ausdruck von dummwilder Unerbittlichkeit—und dann die Unregelmäßigkeit in der Positur und Figur der Zähne—welch eigentlicher Charakter, teuflischer doch planloser, sich selbst zerstörender Bosheit!” Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1777), vol. 3, p. 76. 14 Lavater, quoted by Lessa, Landmarks in the Science of Human Types, op. cit., 6. 15 On caricature see E. H. Gombrich, [ ]; Devin Burnell, “Art and Ambiguity: The Aesthetics of Caricature Considered in Relation to Nineteenth Century Romanticism and to the Work of Daumier,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1976, unpublished; and Maren Gröning, “Groteske Kopfe,” in Die Beredsamkeit des Leibes: Zur Körpersprache in der Kunst, edited by Ilsebill Barta Fliedl and Christoph Geissmar, Veröffentlichung der Albertina no. 31 (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1992), 100-12. 13 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 66 Practical Character Reader, published in Chicago in 1902, is full of inventive phrenological and physiognomical caricatures. The drawings are humorous mnemonics, serving the very serious purpose of inculcating awareness of the significance of skull contours. “The psychological railway” helps readers remember that a bump on the forehead indicates good powers of thought, because Boston is “the thought center of the country.” A lump in back of the head indicates “Amativeness”; and because Salt Lake City is the center of Mormonism, the text urges: “What faculty better represents polygamy?” Other cities are identified by their economic specialties. “Chicago’s two dominant characteristics are pig–sticking and money–making. She is well represented by the two elements, Destructiveness and Acquisitiveness.” By similar logic, Milwaukee represents “Alimentiveness,” and Pittsburgh “Constructiveness.”16 The author is joking, but also bringing out the unintentional, and unavoidable, humor of the phrenological enterprise itself. Both Lavater and the early phrenologists are ironic at certain moments, and their apparent naïveté may be partly a strategy for stifling the corrosive silliness of the new sciences. On the other hand, physiognomy balances this comedy with a desire of great moment— the daily necessity of reading peoples’ souls on their faces. Physiognomy has a universal purpose, but beyond the most basic, self-evident propositions, it becomes counter–intuitive. Why did the physiognomists compound the passions into unlikely concatenations—such as Lavater’s faces denoting “violence, tempered by cowardice and malice aforethought” or “candor, innocence and weakness”? At one point Lavater considers a series of nearly indistinguishable faces, and reads “an insufferable countenance, an absurd mixture of foolish terror and factitious rage,” a man who is “furious, passionate, vulgar, and ungovernable,” another whose face exhibits “the excess of rage of a low man, suffering, and divested of energy,” one who shows “the fury of a fool under flagellation,” and one who displays “a mixture of greatness and triviality—the grimace of a fool L. A. Vaught, Vaught’s Practical Character Reader, revised edition, with a preface by Emily Vaught (Chicago: Vaught–Rocind, 1902), 171–72. 16 Chapter 2 67 Psychomachia and an idiot.” It is no wonder that Mirabeau thought Lavater was a “bizarre mixture of dementia and wit, ignorance and knowledge”—itself a very Lavaterian diagnosis.17 Part of the reason for physiognomy’s eclipse may have to do with the way that the emotions were imagined in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as discrete faculties and “passions” rather than subtle moods. In this respect it is significant that in eighteenth–century novels, passions were still perceived as types, and the mercurial moods of the Sturm und Drang movement had not yet surfaced. But another way to answer the question has to do with the face itself, and its difference from writing. The signs of writing must be clearly separate from one another: they depend on what Jean–François Lyotard and others have called oppositionality or distinctness. The conviction that the face may be a different kind of sign, one capable of holding a number of signs in fluid suspension, may derive from our habits of associating peoples’ names (as distinct signifiers) with their faces (as indistinct signifiers). When I think of a person’s name as I look at her face, the face seems to express a great deal of what that person has come to mean, without my being able to condense any of it to a single phrase or description. But physiognomy cannot comprehend such an unspecific interpretation. If a face contains an encrypted lexeme, and its corresponding meaning—its sememe—is more intricate than an emotion such as violence or candor, physiognomy cannot dissect the sign into the wider range of emotions we might expect. There is no warrant for it in the face. Honoré-Gabriel-Victor de Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, Lettre du comte de Mirabeau à M… sur M. M. Cagliostro et Lavater (Berlin, 1786), quoted in J. Baltrusaitis, Aberrations, An Essay on the Legend of Forms, translated by Richard Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 49. 17 Chapter 2 68 Psychomachia Physiognomy failed because it couldn’t suppress its unintended humor, and because the physiognomists clung to a simple model of namable emotions, avoiding the real complexity of even the most ordinary states of mind. A deeper reason for its demise may have to do with the pictorial nature of the face itself. A face that blends too many emotions is palimpsestic and unreadable. It is not longer a text, but—in an exemplary way—a picture, a portrait that has no verbal equivalent. The coherence we demand of faces and people may be a model for the coherence we ask of artistic styles: all are holistic forms that retain a sense of structure and an inconsistent aura of individual elements.18 I tend to accept the features of a person’s face as signs of a single personality without being entirely conscious of what forms I am counting as elements, or what principles govern their coherence. What matters is the sliding sense that there is a structure or a set of elements, and that the elements do not need to be experienced separately. The same kind of partly illogical apprehension governs the experience of artistic style, where the elements of the work are present and yet blurred, and their principle of coherence is partly articulable and partly not. In this way style, personality, and the construction of the face meet on a common ground of incomplete clarity and coherence. This is argued, partly following E. H. Gombrich, in my “Style,” The Dictionary of Art (New York, Grove Dictionaries, 1996). 18 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 69 Physiognomy also encounters the kinds of problems any reading finds when it does not know how or when to stop.19 Are noses and ears significant? Are they texts in the same sense as the mouth, or the eyes? And if not, by what metalanguage do we understand that we should cease reading the face at a certain point, and begin seeing it as a meaningless pattern of forms? Lavater thought features like noses and ears are meaningful, but he said that it would not be appropriate to put much weight on their interpretation.20 Many physiognomists have been less circumspect. In the images of noses very large nostrils (top) are said to denote insatiable sensuality, small nostrils (middle) are the sign of a volatile sensuality, while those that are broad in back and narrow toward the front (bottom) signify a capacity to compensate for sensuality. (Lessing, the authors add, possessed this third and best type of nostril, and Mme. de Staël had unusually large nostrils.)21 A fourth problem with physiognomy, aside from its unintentional humor, its mechanical model of the emotions, and its misguided hope that the face works like a text, is its dependence on departures from a mean. Since physiognomy is the study of passions, it equates expression with facial forms that are not normal. In order to be meaningful, a feature has to stand out (like a hairy eyebrow) or move (like a furrowed, hairy eyebrow). A zero-degree face, one that is average in all respects and at rest, becomes unreadable by definition. Pierre Klossowski echoes this Stafford, “‘Peculiar Marks’: Lavater and the Countenance of Blemished Thought,” Art Journal 46 (1987): 185–92. 20 For Lavater on noses, see Eleonora Louis, “Der beredte Leib, bilder aus der Sammlung Lavater,” in Die Beredsamkeit des Leibes, op. cit., 113-55, especially 134. 21 R. Burger-Villingen and Walter Nöthling, Das Geheimnis der Menschenform, Lehrbuch der Menschenkenntnis auf Grund der Anlagenfeststellung (Wuppertal: Barger–Verlag, 1958), 272–73. See also Harold M. Holden, Noses (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1950). 19 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 70 eighteenth–century quandary when he writes of the body in terms of its resemblance to a “demonic” ideal outside all possible bodies.22 The problem of the zero–degree face accounts for physiognomists’ anxiety about depicting deception and falsehood, and it suggests that the semiotic system of physiognomy wavers when it comes to faces that are marked by the absence of traits rather than their presence. The contemporary interest in these zero-degree faces, mainly associated with artists like Thomas Ruff and Jaume Plensa, and poses the same problem: is an expressionless face potentially a profound reservoir of many half-glimpsed emotions, or is it a blank, registering only vacancy? In principle, a physiognomist would have no problem depicting a purely evil face, because it would have to possess all manner of facial distortions, asymmetries, and tics. In practice, it proved difficult to imagine what Judas (drawing on the previous page), or the Devil, could have looked like, because each distorted feature could be further distorted, ad infinitum. But even average faces presented difficulties. Usually Lavater describes mediocrity in negative terms, concentrating on what it is not, as in his figures labeled as “incapable of greatness,” and his gallery of less than noble people. Sometimes he waxes eloquent on the defects of ordinary people. The text to this plate is a typical, inadvertently funny example: 22 Klossowski, La rassemblance (Paris: Ryôan–ji, 1984). Chapter 2 Psychomachia 71 1 The physiognomy of a man of intensity and courage, in whom you may confide; but at the same time an ordinary face, destitute of sagacity and elevation. The want of greatness is particularly visible in the point of the nose. 2 The face of a groveling, sordid, cunning wretch. Though he be at present a very contracted being, his natural dispositions rendered him abundantly capable of instruction. Without being positively wicked, he is become contemptible through weakness and want of cultivation; and, in his actual state, presents a total want of honor and internal energy. 3 Impotent coquetry. The eye is strongly expressive of passion—the mouth, of weakness bordering on folly. 4 This face is neither great nor energetic—but it indicates a man possessed of considerable talents, susceptible of taste and instruction, capable of reflection, without the power of profound investigation. 5 The forehead, if I may use the expression, has not yet arrived at full maturity; and, considered with relation to the mouth, is not sufficiently furrowed, it is too childish. It is unnecessary to observe, that this is the profile of a changeling, indolent and good-natured: the imbecility is chiefly resident in the under lip, which advances far too much.23 If normalcy is difficult for physiognomics, then pure, untainted goodness is nearly impossible. What could mark could identify a face that is unstained by any thought of evil? The face of the Savior, of an angel, of a naïve and pious boy, spell trouble for physiognomy. Lavater’s plate of “Weakness Innocence and Goodness,” for instance, gives us something less than a real person: the boy’s face is a little embryonic, as if something were missing. But Lavater loves it: 23 Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 85. Chapter 2 Psychomachia 72 “what heart,” he says, “does not feel itself moved and attracted?” Physiognomy forces the strange equation of divinity—the culmination of all good qualities—and the tabula rasa.24 Assignment 2: physiognomics and the psychological portrait. Find a portrait, from any culture, that you can interpret with the help of these concepts. It may be a psychological portrait, in the European tradition, or a blank expressionless face in the postmodern manner. If it’s a psychological portrait, try analyzing it the way Lavater might have: read into the features whatever mindset you feel the person must have had. Conceptual problems with reading the face These four points are all questions that physiognomists put to themselves, and they contributed to the gradual decay of the discipline at the end of the eighteenth century. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 184. For the connection between this problem and signs “incapable of being misunderstood,” see Stafford, Body Criticism, 92–93. 24 Chapter 2 Psychomachia (Phrenology continued, mainly in America, through the nineteenth century.25) Physiognomy was always a fragile science, doomed by its own practitioners as much by its sometimes brilliant critics.26 Lavater was unsure from the very beginning: the Physiognomische Fragmente opens by quoting an anonymous critic who says physiognomy is unreliable. At the same time, we know that there must be some connection between thoughts (or the soul, or the mind) and the face. Haven’t we all looked at people and decided they were “childish,” “ordinary,” or even “wretches” or “idiots”? If we are to reject all the trappings of the Enlightenment “science,” what are we left with? What can a face say, if it cannot say anything reliable or determinate? Things only get more slippery if the people we’re trying to understand are putting on faces in order to deceive us. A twentieth– century physiognomic study of the “mimetic diagnostic” of faked emotions is a case in point.27 Since See for example Philippe Sorel, “Le phrénologie et l’art,” in L’âme au corps: arts et sciences 1793-1993, exh. cat., edited by Jean Clair (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 266-79. 26 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Über Physiognomik, wider die Physiognomen, op. cit. 27 Philipp Lersch, Gesischt und Seele, Grundlinien einer mimischen Diagnostik, third edition (Munich and Basel: E. Reinhardt, 1951 [1932]). 25 73 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 74 the author is concerned with acting problems, he is acutely aware of the difficulty of reading sincerity in expressions. But this is not merely a problem of coaching actors, since it casts doubt on the entire possibility of interpreting faces. We can often tell insincere expressions in life—but are there rules for that ability? The girl in the photo at the beginning of this chapter is supposedly responding involuntarily to the sound of a tuning fork—or is she play-acting, like some of Charcot’s patients? And what about cases of pathological degeneration or psychosis, when the facial expressions have broken free from their moorings in the mind?28 How can physiognomists determine when people aren’t sincere, so that they can rescind their interpretive claims? Certainly we have reason to be skeptical of systematic connections between mind and face. In medieval epics, gestures were “psychophysical”: the gesture meant the passion, and even though the heart was hidden—in accord with the doctrine of the occulta cordis—“symbolical connections remained between the body and soul, and facial expressions were a sign of this connection.”29 But the division between the “inner man” (homo exterior) and “outer man” (homo interior) has been remarked since the Renaissance, and the fall of physiognomy has only accentuated the difficulty of linking those two terms.30 It is interesting in this respect that physiognomy does not only demand that there is a connection between the motions of the mind and the movements of the face—it also requires that the homo exterior and interior remain at some distance from one another. As long as the soul has strings that allow it to move the body, and as long as the eyes remain windows to the soul, mind and skin are connected but separate, and even when the body moves the soul—as when a deformity propels a man toward evil—the two are still distinct. But physiognomy does not allow for a soul and body that are inextricable, or are a single thing, or are unaccountably divorced. It seems to me that the deepest criticism of physiognomy comes from this source. If the soul and face are taken to be inseparable, then the cause and effect relation that physiognomy posits might be erased or reversed. 28 See also H. Lamy, “Note sur les contractions «synergiques paradoxales» observées à la suite de la paralysie faciale périphérique,” Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière 18 (1905): 424-25. 29 L. J. Friedman, “Occulta Cordis,” Romance Philology 11 (1957–58): 103–19; C. Guillén, op. cit., 306. “Psychophysical” comes from L. Spitzer, “Le vers 834 du Roland,” Romania 68 (1944–45): 471–77. 30 Claudio Guillén, “On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective,” in Literature as System, Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 306-307. Chapter 2 Psychomachia 75 To say that physiognomy reads the face is to conceive part of the skin of the face as a text, and though that is a fruitful metaphor, is not entirely adequate. If we can continue to understand peoples’ expressions with some confidence, and if we still feel we can interpret the subtle moods and tendencies of mind depicted in the best psychological portraiture, it is not because something inside is writing on something outside. The relation of the two is more intimate, and physiognomics might ultimately be the name for a mechanical misunderstanding of the inextricable relation between them. The analytic of contrapposto The plasticity of the physiognomic sign finds its general form in the expressive movements of the body that are still properly known as contrapposto.31 Like physiognomics, contrapposto remains centrally important for figural art, even though it is seldom taught outside of Renaissance and Baroque art history. Beginning in the mid–15th century, and continuing through the plurifacial figures of the late sixteenth century such as those by Ammannati and Giovanni da Bologna, artists explored the possible motions of the human form, pushing it farther and farther toward the thresholds of pain or fantasy. Taken together, those achievements still provide a catalogue of possible bodily positions that can only be repeated or exaggerated by contemporary artists. Even images made by pressing the body directly against the canvas or paper, including Yves Klein’s sexist “anthropometries” to Jasper Johns’s self-impressions, stand directly in the tradition of contrapposto.32 As the skin stretches and compresses to fit the flat surface, and the body either twists and rolls (as in Yves Klein’s figures, which echo poses from Renaissance painting) or it pushes straight onto the canvas, the floor, or the paper (as in Jasper John’s images).33 Even Annie Sprinkle’s Tit Prints are the unpredictable progeny of frontal poses, Two principal sources are John Pope-Hennessey, The Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), and David Summers, “Contrapposto [ ],” The Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 336-61. 32 Sidra Stich, Yves Klein, exh. cat. (Cologne: Ludwig Museum, 1995), especially “Anthropometries,” pp. 171-91; for Johns’s “Studies for Skin” (1962) see Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, edited by Kirk Varnedoe, with an essay by Roberta Bernstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 23-24, pl. 91; I thank Roberta Bernstein for bringing Johns’s impressions to my attention. 33 For the Mandylion and related images see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence, A History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago 31 Chapter 2 76 Psychomachia portraits, and impressions. Even the most distorted figures, like some of Tracey Emin’s, rehearse the range of poses found in European art. There is no escape from the repertoire of poses first theorized in the Renaissance, and so it becomes crucially important to acknowledge and explore contrapposto’s original meanings, in order to see what they might contribute to new explorations of the figure. The history of contrapposto begins with an injunction about its limits, defining it in terms of what it is not. Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura enjoins that a figure should not twist more than “shoulder over navel,” both because it is impossible, and because it is inappropriate (non condicente).34 In another passage Alberti says that a figure should be balanced, and if it raises its right leg, it should also raise its left arm. These simple definitions are the seeds of the later Renaissance understanding of contrapposto, because they introduce contrapposto as something that expresses both the normal limits of the body and of expressive decorum. At the same time, we should not overlook the particular examples Alberti gives. The second is a matter of balance, and it conjures dancing or marching figures; but the first is a strange exercise that pits the torso against itself. As opposed to dancing or balancing, twisting can be futile and even unpleasant, and it can express a body badly reconciled with itself. Contrapposto has these two strains throughout Press, 1994), 208–24. Recent artists who have made body prints include Günter Brus and Doug Prince. For Prince see William Ewing, The Body: Photographs of the Human Form (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), 370-71; and for Brus in relation to Klein and others, see Silvia Eiblmayr, Die Frau als Bild: Der weibliche Körper in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Reimer, 1993), especially “Von der symbolischen Bildzerstörung bis zur aktionistischen Inszenierung des Körpers als Bild: Masson, Fontana, Wiener Aktionismus (Brus), pp. 97-105. Body impressions are also discussed in Frauen Körper Kunst, exh. cat., Frankfurt am Main, Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, edited by Martina Peter-Bolaender (Kassel: Furore, 1994). 34 Alberti, De Pictura Chapter 2 Psychomachia 77 the Renaissance: one dances, and the other deforms. The difference can be seen in a stock-in-trade comparison from midtwentieth century art history: the two competition reliefs for the doors of the Florence Baptistery by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. Ghiberti (below) offers a relaxed demonstration of his skill, close to the dancing definition of contrapposto. His Abraham sways gently in a C-curve. Brunelleschi (left) offers several tautly knotted contrapposti, including the classical figure of the spinario (at the lower left), the boy who removes a thorn from his foot. The difference between the two is sometimes put in terms of the two competitors’ fidelity to the emerging Renaissance: Ghiberti’s slightly swaying contrapposti are said to echo the late medieval International Style, and Brunelleschi’s are said to be more normatively Roman (he also reproduces the antique spinario, the boy pulling a thorn from his foot). Those historical connections can also be read as the poles of Alberti’s bifurcated definition of contrapposto: the one denotes the pleasure of dance and free movement, and the other expresses the displeasure of the body turning against itself. It may be that Alberti did not want his viewers to make a connection between the figures’ turns and their implied mental states (or the artists’ mental states), no matter how “overly excited” (troppo fervente et furioso) they might be.35 Various injunctions in De Pictura may be 35 D. Summers, “Contrapposto,” op. cit., 341. Chapter 2 78 Psychomachia read as further definitions of the limits of judicious contrapposto, including his reservations about “panache,” speed, and facility of execution (sprezzatura) and of judicious variety (varietà). But Alberti’s thoughts on the subject are less important than the ways they developed in the following two centuries, where the connection became integral to the effect. The formal laws of contrapposto may be read as an expressive vocabulary of the body, and for that reason they are worth looking at in detail. What I am calling dancing contrapposto the Renaissance has three canonical laws, which may be read as laws of balance, division, and constraint: (1) Balance: Alberti’s law of equal and opposite motion. If the limbs respond to one another in mirror reflection, so that when one arm is back the other is forward, then the body becomes a balancing act. This is not the usual way we imagine our bodies: it has more to do with artificial feats such as standing with one leg lifted high in the air. The fifteenth century examples of these balancing acts are showpieces for the special properties of painting, which can represent even the heaviest figures frozen in mid– flight, or perching on a single toe. The artificiality of this concept of balance made it ineffective as a general strategy. (2) Division: the rule of the Standbein and Spielbein. A second law, which meliorates the first, requires that one leg bear the figure’s weight (the Standbein), while another one trails ahead, behind, or to one side (the Spielbein). (Shown here in Andrea del Castagno’s portrait of Dante.) This injunction has a particular meaning in the language of psychomachia. When part of a figure bears weight, and part is nearly but not completely weightless, the figure is divided against itself in an especially unstable manner. Renaissance sculptures tend to exaggerate the normal habit of standing that favors one leg over the other, and the poses they adopt involve a variable light touch Chapter 2 Psychomachia 79 on the Spielbein. If I stand upright, and shift the majority of my weight onto one foot, while letting the other just touch the ground, I can feel myself divide into two sets of muscles: one set works hard to hold me upright, and the other is kept subtly tensed so that the Spielbein can remain in place. I can feel the muscles of the Spielbein pull and relax as they attempt to maintain the leg’s position. It is much easier, but not in the Renaissance spirit, either to have the Standbein carry all the weight and let the Spielbein rest against it, toe down (as many people naturally stand), or else to stand symmetrically, so that each foot has about half the weight. (Only a few Renaissance images opt for that very common pose, for example Castagno’s David in the National Gallery, Washington, who stands confidently, feet apart and almost equally weighted.) In Renaissance sculpture the body is usually hard at work maintaining a difficult balance between those two more reasonable possibilities. Michelangelo’s David is one of the best examples: to hold the David’s pose, it is necessary to plant the Standbein (the figure’s right foot), preferably by wedging the heel against a support (in the David, the heel is clamped in the double trunk of a tree stump). Then with the Standbein secured, extend the Spielbein, raise the heel slightly and curl the toes, pressing lightly down onto the ground so that the body does not cant to the opposite site. The pose is remarkably Chapter 2 Psychomachia 80 unnatural, taut, and uncomfortable, and it brilliantly expresses the half– rigid, tentative state of mind that the figure appears to evince. Donatello’s bronze David in the Bargello (c. 1430) does the same exquisite balancing act, this time with less force and more obviously sexual meaning. Both poses are nearly impossible to hold: half the body becomes exhausted cantilevering the other half, and then the body begins to tremble with the effort of mingling forceful tension and delicate balance. (3) Constraint: the plumb line rule. In some Renaissance theory there is also a median or plumb line that drops from the pit of the neck, through the center of gravity, and down to the weightbearing Standbein. From the second law, we learn that a figure should not stand straight up (to use the odd modern expression, it should not stand “foursquare”), but at the same time it must employ this geometric law of balance. For that reason figures that are disposed according to the plumb line rule look tend to look constrained, if not off–balance, and it is rare that the pit of the neck is over one ankle. In addition, the line tends not to bisect the figure, so that it looks lopsided in relation to the figure’s outline. In pictures where the plumb line can still be seen, such as Masaccio’s Tribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel (where plumb lines were scored in the wet intonaco plaster) the effect—looking at the figure together with its plumb line—is unbalanced and awkward. Standing farther back, so that the plumb line is invisible, the figures begin to appear more natural. This disharmony between the plumb line and the figure is important because it shows that contrapposto contains a principle of constraint, as well as of balance and division. Chapter 2 Psychomachia 81 The other contrapposto, which I will call the twisting contrapposto, also has several rules, which were elaborated in the late sixteenth century: (1) The taper: the rule of decreasing energy. The figura serpentinata is defined in two passages in Lomazzo’s Ideal del tempo nella pittura, and in the first he uses four similes to describe what he means.36 The figure, he says, is like a pyramid, or flames, or serpents, or Sshapes. Each is a tapering form, strong and wide at its base and attenuated near its tip. Lomazzo also says that the pyramid can be upright or inverted, opening the way for figures that are spindle-shaped and swell in the middle. What is important here is less the exact form of the taper—Lomazzo is rather diffuse in his descriptions and metaphors—but the concept of tapering, so that the body is imagined as possessing a relatively stable center of motion, with twists are applied to give it motion. The “serpentinated figure” (figura serpentinata) is a stable form, the figura, which has been attenuated into a flame or a serpent, serpentinata. The center is protected, 36 Lomazzo, Ideal del tempo nella pittura Chapter 2 82 Psychomachia and the unprotected margins of the body flail around it. Although the full figure is the normal model for this structure, it can occur in limbs as well—for instance in the fingers of the Magdalen in Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (previous page), or the feet of Jesus, whose toes almost twist free even though the rest of the body is nearly rigid. (The taper ends with an inverted “flame” of blood, which falls in ropes—themselves twisted—from the toes to the ground.) (2) The helix: the law of turning. The pyramid, flames, serpents, and Sshapes are names of things that spiral against some center or weighted axis, and in that they are different from the helix, which turns endlessly and with no resistance or diminution. When a contrapposto is imagined as a helix, the model is probably a twisted column, whose turns are artificially terminated at the top and bottom rather than organically spent like a serpent’s coils, or physically exhausted like a candle flame. A column can spiral gently, without the force or energy of snakes or flames. Quintilian was thinking more of helices in this sense than of tapering turns when he wrote about “that curve, I might almost call it motion,” that “gives an impression of… animation… grace and charm.”37 (3) The multiplied twist: the rule of figures “multiplied by one, two, and three.” After he mentions flames and S-shapes, Lomazzo says figures should be “multiplied by one, two, or three.”38 Like much in Lomazzo, this is unclear; it has been taken to mean that there should be more than one figure, or that the proportions in the figures should be 1:1, 1:2, and 1:3.39 It is also “Flexus ille et, ut sic dixerim, motus…,” Quintilian, Institutio oratoria II.xiii.9, translation quoted from The Institutio oratoria of Quintilian, translated by H. W. Butler (London: William Heinemann, 1963), 293. 38 Lomazzo, Trattato dell’Arte de la Pittura (Milan, 1584), 22–24. 39 K. Birch-Hirschfeld, Die Lehre von der Malerei in Cinquecento (Rome, 1912), 36–43, and John Shearman, Mannerism (Baltimore, 1967), 81–91, both cited in David Summers, “Maniera and Movement,” op. cit., 296, and for the passage in Lomazzo see pp. 271–72. 37 Chapter 2 83 Psychomachia possible that Lomazzo means twisting one, two, or three times, so that the figure turns once at the hips, again at the shoulders, and once more at the head. In a second passage, Lomazzo speaks of motions (moti) in addition to twistings (ravvolgimenti).40 The former are up and down, right and left, backward and forward, and he comments that there are “probably” others. If this passage is read together with the obscure comment on multiplying by “one, two, or three,” it appears Lomazzo may intend to evoke the idea of multiple motions within a single figure, and as evidence of that I note it is also in this second passage that Lomazzo introduces the term figura serpentinata by commenting 41 that “it is best to give such figures a serpentine form.” Triple turnings in single figures are common in mannerist art. Michelangelo’s Victory turns three times, twisting at the hips (to the left), shoulders (left), and neck (right). The Victory is not a helix because different parts turn in different directions. The simple helix, taper, or spiral is an image of infinity, of transcendence from the body and metamorphosis into flame; the multiplied twist is a figure of mortality, of a body struggling uselessly against itself. These two forms of contrapposto, together with their six more exact components, can be used to help map the possibilities of the contorted figure from the Renaissance to the present. In the twentieth century, for example, expressionist figures that seem initially to go beyond these concepts can be shown to be applying them more thoroughly than the Renaissance dared. A Lomazzo, L’Idea, op. cit., book VI, chapter 4. The term is attributed to Michelangelo, and Lomazzo may have gotten it via Marco Pino, who was in Rome in the late 1540’s, “precisely the years when Michelangelo was most concerned with writing a treatise on human anatomy and movement.” See D. Summers, “Contrapposto,” op. cit., 284. 40 41 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 84 figure by Max Beckmann that looks like a man dangling the broken bones of his legs, or a scarecrow blown off its stays, is nevertheless an example of the rules of multiple twistings and of equal and opposite motion. Here torsion is not applied to the vertical sequence from ankle to neck, but to individual limbs from shoulder joint to wrist, and from ankle to knee. The rule of equal and opposite motion distinguishes not only one arm from the other, but one wrist from the other, and each finger from every other, so that the figure looks splayed and broken, and there is no clear difference between the painfully wrenched wrist and the feet that turn and curl in sympathetic pain. Historically, Beckmann’s figure suffers a double torture: it is twisted and broken in itself, and racked by history—by the need to show the pain that Renaissance figures first showed, but to do it even more intensely. Assignment 3: find a representation of a figure that can be analyzed in terms of these possibilities of conteapposto, or a figure that breaks with those traditions. The indelibility of contrapposto: Lesson of the Dread Figure Contrapposto is still with us because it encompasses the possibilities of normal human movement, and because depicted bodies will often echo others made in very different contexts. Twisting contrapposto in particular has become so densely woven into our sense of the human figure that we probably cannot depict the body without it. One of the common paradoxes of history is that ideas have often been critiqued most effectively by the very people who first proposed them. Twisting contrapposto is an example of that phenomenon, because the impossibility of escaping or overturning it was demonstrated most conclusively by one of its best exponents, Michelangelo. Late in his life, beginning around 1550, Michelangelo attempted to erase the very repertoire of poses and movements that he had Chapter 2 85 Psychomachia been elaborating since the last decade of the fifteenth century. In the place of the conventionally twisting figure of the crucified Christ, Michelangelo tried to draw what are now known as “frontal” figures, in strictly symmetrical poses. His attack on contrapposto was motivated in part by the same reasons that prompted twentieth-century expressionists to return to “primitive,” hieratic and frontal figures: he mistrusted the ideological trappings of the Renaissance and wanted to find something that would not be tarnished by what the Renaissance had come to mean. The drawings in which this hopeless struggle take place are a diary of his failed attempt to extinguish, inch my inch, the last vestiges of visible agony from the Dread Figure. A close inspection of the sequence of overlapping marks reveals that the drawings began with strongly twisted poses, either in the Renaissance modes of fully articulated contrapposto, or in one of the late medieval forms of S–shaped or C– shaped figures. Michelangelo rubbed out his first efforts, or covered them in opaque white wash, repeatedly trying to constrain the figure to a more directly upright pose; but even the final drawings of the series preserve a faint but telling curve or turn of the body that recalls the entire panoply of differentially weighted contrapposti. Charles de Tolnay first showed that Chapter 2 Psychomachia 86 Michelangelo’s contemporaries would have associated the perpendicular pose he was after with the holy “plague crosses” of the thirteenth century, which were carried in parades to ward off the pestilence. The choice of the thirteenth century cannot be chance, and I read it as Michelangelo’s attempt to take art backwards, past the corrupted period that included his own lifetime, and toward a more spiritually and artistically pure period before the history of modern art had begun.42 Michelangelo’s failed assault on the repertoire of contrapposto concentrated on the the central figure of Christian art, and on the most pained moment of his life. It is therefore an exemplary case for the study of contrapposto in general. Doctrinally, Jesus’s agony is our agony, and his suffering is the type of all pain; even outside Catholic art, the Dread Figure continues to be central to the pictorial imagination. That is why it makes sense to say that the limits of contrapposto, and its grip on our sense of the figure, turn on how the crucified Christ can be imagined and depicted. Formally, the possibilities are limited: there are not very many ways of disposing a figure on the cross, short of abstraction or anatomically impossible expressionism. One thing an exhausted body does naturally when it is suspended by its arms is to bend at the knees. The L-shape that results is found throughout the thirteenth century; in a drawing by Villard de Honnecourt’s, Christ is snapped at the knees, frozen in a geometric schema. A second possibility is the Zig-Zag, in which the body bends at In my Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, op. cit., this sequence is analyzed from a different point of view, one that would ultimately undermine the iconographic reading I assay here. In that book the point of the analysis is that in these drawings, iconographic and narrative readings—that is, the usual readings—fail in an exemplary way, because the marks refuse to sort themselves out into discrete meaningful stages. But just as Pictures and the Words That Fail Them is not intended as a purely antisemiotic or antinarrative polemic, so the sequence of permissible crucified figures I sketch here would have underlain Michelangelo’s project, even when he was least concerned with identifiable poses and most enmeshed in the project of envisioning sacrifice. 42 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 87 knees and waist. A third is the C-arc, best known in Cimabue’s Crucifixion in Arezzo—a sinuous pose that Francis Bacon admired because when it is inverted it reminded him of a worm “undulating” or “crawling down the cross.”43 The rigid frontal pose, the L-shape, the Zig-Zag, and the C-arc were the principal options for a hanging body before the age of naturalism. In the Renaissance those options were adapted to the new ideals of balance and contrapposto. A tightened version of the L-shape (straight axis for the torso, rotated at the hips, knees together, feet crossed) was used by Mantegna and Northern artists such as Veit Stoss. Sinuous forms of the Zig-Zag, called “the Gothic wave” (l’ondeggione gotico), found their way into Renaissance practice as versions of the gravimetrically balanced contrapposto preferred by Brunelleschi. From Rubens and Rembrandt (who painted slack–bellied figures slumping down towards the Deposition) to Picasso, Graham Sutherland, and Francis Bacon, the Crucifixion has been an opportunity for meditation on the body’s gross weight, its struggles against itself, and its weakness in death. The literature on the ways that the nails must have been placed in order to avoid ripping out of the hand (supposedly they would have had to be put between the carpals rather than the metacarpals) is all modern. So too are 43 Francis Bacon Interviewed by David Sylvester (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 14. Chapter 2 88 Psychomachia attempts to verify Jesus’s most probable position; in at least one case a corpse has been crucified to determine the most naturalistic pose. In this example, a Chelsea pensioner, one James Legg, was crucified by the anatomist Joseph Constantine Carpue shortly after he had been shot in the chest. The resulting pose was cast in plaster, and then afterward the corpse was flayed, and another cast was made from the écorché. (Only the écorché survives.) Benjamin West, who was one of the artists involved in the project, is said to have remarked that he had “never before seen the human hand” before he realized the way it is stretched under the pressure of the crucifixion.44 The exercise shows that a crucified body might hang nearly vertically, with virtually no contrapposto—at least no more than the hint in Michelangelo’s last drawings of the subject. A full history of crucified bodies would also have to include the twentieth–century representations of the crucified Christ as a carcass, as a nearly abstract net of lines, and as a heterological assembly of wet rags, joints and ligaments. Because this subject is so important to the history of representations of the body, and so little studied, I append a working chart of the possibilities: Ilaria Bignamini and Martin Postle, The Artist’s Model, Its Role in British Art from Lely to Etty (Nottingham: University Art Gallery, 1991), cat. 91, pp. 96–97 (the quotation is p. 97); and see Julius Bryant, “Banks’s Anatomical Crucifixion,” Apollo (June 1991). 44 Chapter 2 Period Type Frontal, rigid I Medieval 89 Psychomachia L–shape Zig–Zag: Geometric Examples Anonymous images, from the 2nd to the 13th c. Villard de Honnecourt Examples from the 14th c. Zig–Zag: The Gothic wave Examples from 12th to the 14th c. (l’ondeggione gotico) II Gothic C–arc: Gentle curve C–arc: Strong segment L–shape III Zig–Zag: Examples from the 10th to the 14th c. Cimabue, Crucifixion (Florence, Uffizi, 1280–85) Masaccio, Trinity (Florence, S. M. Novella, 1428) Giotto, Crucifixion (Florence, S. M. Novella, before 1312) Renaissance C–arc: Figura serpentinata Wet–rag body IV Carcass: Modern made of flesh Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece (Colmar, 1510–15) From the 17th c.: Rembrandt, Rubens Francis Bacon, Crucifixion (1965) Carcass: Picasso, Crucifixion drawings (1932) made of bones, thorns, etc. Graham Sutherland, Thorn Cross (1954) Table 4. Positions of the crucified Christ. Chapter 2 Psychomachia 90 Michelangelo knew the Renaissance derivatives of the Gothic C-arc, L-shape, and ZigZag. He reproduced the C-arc in the Crucifixion for Vittoria Colonna, easily the most dramatic and least constrained of the series, and he also adopted the L–shape and Zig-Zag in several drawings, progressively forcing it to move less and less, until he ended with a “sort of contrapposto”: the faintest of turns to the torso, matched by the faintest of motions in the opposing leg.45 Yet even this exercise in Counter-reformation austerity does not silence the echoes of contrapposto. The reverberation of his former interests in the moving figure can be read by looking up and down the body’s midline: the eye that follows that line sways first to one side, then to the other. Michelangelo never managed to erase the repertoire of off–center balances that he had himself invented over the previous five decades, and so the series of Crucifixion drawings ends with a tremendously subtle, and nearly perpendicular, figure of Christ that still betrays the curves of Renaissance contrapposto. Michelangelo’s failure should be taken seriously, especially by modern artists who seek to move beyond contrapposto by abstracting figures, or disassembling them, or taking them from outside Western art. Contrapposto’s resistance to even the most concerted attack, launched by the person 45 For the C–arc see see also Tolnay 418, second state. It was copied in an especially detailed ivory; see M. Auclais, Images du Christ (Paris, n.d.), 108. For other examples see also the initial outlines—the first states—of Tolnay 418 and 416r, as well as T415, T417, and T419. Chapter 2 Psychomachia 91 who knew it better than anyone since, is a sign of how deeply it has stained our imagination of the figure. Assignment 4: find a series of representations of the Crucifixion, and see if you can determine where the poses come from. There are a number that are not listed here. Telos, the winding sheet Twisting contrapposto has been used to express many things, but it is normally taken as a sign of psychomachia, of the mind’s struggle against itself. In that interpretation the body is just an outward sign, and the soul is what matters. Just as physiognomy depends on distinguishing the mind and the face, so contrapposto requires the soul (or mind) and body to be distinct. If the face and the soul aren’t kept at arm’s length, the doctrines of physiognomy break down, and the same can be said of contrapposto. What if the body doesn’t merely express the torment of the soul: what if they are entangled in the same struggle? In that case, a twisted body might be trying to get away from itself: the soul might be trying to pry itself out of its wrapping of skin, or—even more hopelessly, and more carnally—the flesh might be at odds with itself, allergic to its own weight, its own fluids and masses. On this fundamental level, contrapposto expresses discontent with the ordinary condition of the body. Figures who stretch and twist may be plagued by guilt or bad conscience, or they may be aspiring to break the bonds of their sensual existence (as the Neoplatonic reading of Michelangelo implies): but they are also more or less ill at ease with their normal resting bodies. Turning pulls the skin taut, and makes limbs and joints twist against one other. Even in figures with gently balanced poses, contrapposto conjures unrest: if one part of the body is extended, raised, or turned, another part is forced to make a symmetrical movement in the opposite direction. Violent contrapposto expresses alienation from the skin as well as from the mind, and in doing so it evokes a more unsolvable unhappiness, and a long-term, disconsolate struggle. The way to this wider meaning was opened in the Renaissance. In the sixteenth century psychomachia, the battle within the soul, lost the special significance it had in Prudentius’s original text The Battle of the Soul (late 4th century A.C.E.; an 11th c manuscript is shown on the Chapter 2 Psychomachia 92 next page), or even in Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism (late 15th c.), and became the site of a more universal and indistinct sense of unease or tension.46 As specifically Christian meanings receded, the body’s struggle became more inward, more about itself; but even in what Leo Steinberg calls “modern oblivion,” where Renaissance concepts are largely forgotten, the twisting and turning of contrapposti and the figura serpentinata still signal both bodily and spiritual discomfort.47 Writhing bodies can express purely sexual tension, as in advertisements and pornography, or tortured self-hatred, as in some German expressionism: either way, the body is partly exhibiting the motions of an unsatisfied mind, and partly turning against itself, as if it were trying to twist free of itself. The Greek word telos is interesting in this connnection. It is usually translated as “end” or “consummation”; but in the Iliad and other early Greek sources, it has a more specific meaning, something like “band,” “wrapping,” or “winding sheet,” depending on the passage.48 “The telos of Moshe Barash, “Character and Physiognomy: Bocchi on Donatello’s St. George, A Renaissance Text on Expression in Art,” Imago Hominis, Studies in the Language of Art, Bibliotheca Artibus et Historiae (Vienna: IRSA, 1991), 36–46. 47 Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1989); David Summers, “Maniera and Movement: the figura serpentinata,” Art Quarterly 35 (1972): 269-71. 48 Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1951]), 426 ff. 46 Chapter 2 93 Psychomachia death covered his eyes and nostrils as he was speaking,” Homer says of one soldier.49 According to Richard Onians, “in sympathetic magic men used bands or wrappings to produce the effects produced by the mystic bands or wrappings of fate.”50 I would take this archaic sense of telos as a term as an essential quality of contrapposto that has so far gone unnamed: the sense that such figures are wrapped, wound about and confined, by their own skins. Literal wrappings are a sign of death and the grave or for the struggle against whatever is mortal or “lower” in human nature (as in Michelangelo’s so-called “slaves,” who fight against flimsy swaths). But in the end the adversary is the skin itself, the emblem of mortality and decay, the “filthy sack” of medieval theologians. Sometimes the body presses against its skin, as if it is trying to escape. That happens, for example, in the history of bandages, torture devices, prostheses, traction systems, death wrappings and mummifications.51 It also occurs when the body is 49 Iliad XVI, 502 f. Onians, Origins of European Thought, op. cit., 427. 51 For 18th c. texts on bandages see Johann Gottlob Bernstein, Systematische Darstellung des chirurgischen Verbandes, sowohl älterer als neuerer Zeiten (Jena: Akademischen Buchhandlung, 1798), 2 vols.; and Joseph Marie Achille Goffres, Précis iconographique de bandages, pansements et appareils ([ ]); and Jean Baptiste Jacques Thillaye, Traité des bandages et appareils, third edition (Paris: Crochard, 1815). A good modern history is William Bishop, A History of Surgical Dressings (Chesterfield, England: Robinson, 1959). 50 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 94 pressed into a resistant medium like plaster, as in various contemporary body-molding techniques. An ancestor of relief plaques by George Segal and others are fin-de-siècle occultists’ casts of astral beings, in which ghostly faces strain to impress themselves on the real world. In the best of them, made by the medium Eusapia Paladino, the hands and faces look as if they are trying to break through a skin separating their world from ours.52 Any forceful pressing of the body against a mold will conjure the body’s hopeless struggle against its own skin. Twisting contrapposto is one of the most eloquent forms of that desire because it is least dependent on mechanical devices, plaster, and other props. In the end, the twisting contrapposto wins against the dancing contrapposto, because a body’s battle against itself means more than its tilt against gravity. The figure must turn against itself, manacle itself, make movement impossible. In the words of another Renaissance theorist, such a body will become forced, unnatural, mysterious, and difficult (“tutta sforciata, misteriosa e 52 See the attack in F. Moser, Der Okkultismus, Täuschungen und Tatsachen, 2 vols. (Munich, 1935), vol. 2, 832 ff., and the defense in Everard Fielding, Sittings with Eusapia Palladino and Other Studies ([ ]: University Books, 1963). Chapter 2 Psychomachia 95 difficile”).53 In Renaissance terms, figures struggling against themselves were bedeviled by loss of faith or sin, and the more desperate the fight, the more evil the figure. There are grotesquely contorted figures of Judas, writhing in agony at his imminent betrayal of Christ. In some paintings, his figure is so twisted that it looks as if is literally broken by sin; such figures may well have reminded viewers of bodies broken on the wheel and other torture devices. In less virulent fights, the soul might still be saved (as in Michelangelo’s “slaves”). In the twentieth century, specifically Christian and Neoplatonic thoughts have been dispersed, but the fundamental meaning of the figures remains clear enough: contrapposto is still a matter of discontent, excessive unease, and pain, and its formal vocabulary will remain in place as long as the human anatomy remains constant. In this respect contrapposto is not only a European invention, though certainly its more specific meanings are Western. There are figural possibilities in non–European art that were never explored in the West—for example, there are terms describing how corpses can be fit in cramped graves (the Yamnaya posture, with knees up; the Lepinski Vir posture, with knees splayed to either side and feet together), and many other examples in Indian dance and the This is from Paolo Pino, quoted in David Summers, “Contrapposto,” op. cit., 278. See “Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di Pittura,” translated by Mary Pardo, PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburg, 1984 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: U.M.I. Dissertation Serives, 1994). 53 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 96 asanas of Hatha Yoga.54 I would only claim that in each instance, the body’s discomfiture at itself, or the figure’s mastery of its own rebellious body as it is expressed in the “lotus position” and other yoga poses, will be part of its meaning. Contrapposto is a universal sign for unease, and it can even be found outside of the human figure: in a dog that wrenches its body around in search of a flea, or in the contortions of fetuses incorrectly aligned for delivery. These are not human postures, but they express confinement even more directly because they are not. It would be painful to twist into a position like number 6, with the feet almost touching the nose, and the head pushed down and sideways: the inhuman shape speaks about compression and claustrophobia in a way no human figure can. There is nothing beyond contrapposto, and no way, I think, to leave it entirely behind: but there are new poses to be explored, and images like this are the most promising places to look for new configurations of the body. For postures in Neolithic graves, see L. V. Grinsell, Barrow, Pyramid, and Tomb, Ancient Burial Customs in Egypt, the Mediterranean and the British Isles (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 17–23. For asanas see Gavin Flood, Body and Cosmology in Kashmir Saivism (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993). Classical Indian dance postures are classified in the Visnudharmottara Purna, edited by Priyabala Shah (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1958). 54 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 97 Assignment 5: find representations of the figure (in art, archaeology, veterinary science…) that do not conform to the models of contrapposto, but still suggest a body struggling in a confined space. The very shape of our idea of bodily motion The body doesn’t separate and arrange affective signs the way that language does. Signs of emotion on the face are subject to blurring as one emotion clouds another, and they are prone to disappear when the face becomes neutral. Signs on the body fail to communicate reliably because they are indistinct, and even though it may be argued that the body has a larger repertoire of positions than the face, those positions are not unambiguously correlated with individual emotions, but collectively related to a small number of emotions that converge on thoughts of unhappiness and torment. Still, it does not make sense to abandon either physiognomics or contrapposto, because each is the only available lexicon of expressive motions aside from the narrower systems of medical semiotics, or the transient systems of symbolic gestures and expressions that each culture reinvents for itself. Bodies can only be in contrapposto, and they must finally take their meanings from the heritage of contrapposto, unless they choose one of five non– or anti–Western options: attempting to return to the periods before the Renaissance or before classical Greece, where frontal rigidity was the only available mode; trying to escape from Western modes altogether, by adopting non-Western conventions; breaking the body itself, as Picasso and Beckmann have done; exaggerating it in plastic or expressionist deformations, as Bacon has; or abandoning it for abstract gestures. But how sure can we be that even those strategies can avoid contrapposto? What about breaking the body, or pulling it into an outlandish shape?55 (I illustrate the “boneless body” from a comic book to show how surrealist strategies diffused into popular culture, losing their sexual edge while they gain in topological freedom. I wonder if the two have an inverse relationship: sexual readings are most clearly articulated when the represented body remains close to its possible shapes.) It seems to me that this strategy will also fail, because whatever meanings are elided by the fantasy of bonelessness, it won’t be possible to evade the basic The best discussions of surrealist distortions are in Rosalind Krauss, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, with an essay by Dawn Ades (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985). 55 Chapter 2 Psychomachia 98 possibilities of the normal body, and those possibilities will be circumscribed by Renaissance explorations of contrapposto. The undistorted part of the standing figure in this cell is pure Renaissance contrapposto, fleshed out with muscles that Michelangelo taught us to see, and shaded with a twentieth-century version of academic hatching, which was itself practiced most influentially by Michelangelo. When the battle is over, both these figures will snap back to their art-world molds. These strictures apply even more strongly to the face. What expressions have been invented in the last five hundred years? Even though each individual face continues to differ from every face that has appeared before it, the catalogue of expressions has not changed. And for that reason even the most ridiculous publications of the physiognomists deserve study, because they remain the closest inspections of the namable positions of the face. The correlations between face and mind are made just as crudely now as they were then, and our current timidity on the subject does not mean we understand faces more subtly than Lavater. Physiognomy, contrapposto, and the more arcane repertoire of medical semiotics encompass our concept of the motions of the depicted body: there is no depiction outside of their radically unreliable discoveries. In later chapters we will see this motion repeated: a disused “science,” whose aims and methods appear intellectually bankrupt, provides the best opportunity to study what is Chapter 2 Psychomachia 99 possible in pictured bodies. In the next chapter I want to continue and conclude the investigation of pain by asking what happens when the skin is not only twisted, but actually broken. Assignment 6: find artworks in comics or manga that stretch or distort the body in new ways. Are they independent of contrapposto?