Serpentine Life: The Nature of Movement in Gothic, Mannerism and Baroque

In many ways, movement is a test case for visual art as much as for philosophy: for both, we have to answer the question of whether they create real movement or merely a representation of it. Does the event really take place or is it only an illusion? This is a problem that pertains especially to Mannerism and the baroque, which rely heavily on the vocabulary of force and movement that has invested the field of art since the Renaissance. Although these styles are still dominated by classical figuration, they also introduce all sorts of distortions, deformations, and exaggerations in it. Mannerism and the baroque are attempts, within representation, to present the unrepresentable and to render visible the invisible. As a consequence, stable form is no longer the foundation of the image, but rather the limit of visual evidency. Inseparable from its relation to the formless, extension itself becomes a delimitation of intensity, a participation in the infinite. Yet the question remains: Have these attempts merely produced sensational and metaphorical works of art that are meant to move us by generating an illusion of movement in what is undeniably a stable structure or a framed picture, or are they somehow literally moving in themselves? The second position is held by Gilles Deleuze. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, he develops a deep connection between Bacon and Michelangelo, since Mannerist painting discovered the ‘figural’: the point at which abstract movements or forces are rendered visible within classical figuration such that the organic figurability of sensation is enriched with an inhuman becoming. In his The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze then goes on to show how the baroque introduces movement in classical art by means of infinite folding, such that forms would emerge from and dissolve into folds: ‘[t]he object is manneristic, not essentializing: it becomes an event’. The first position, by contrast, is taken up by Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design (2011), who contrasts Mannerism and the baroque with the Gothic, arguing that while the former work away from static form to deformation, only the latter directly imitates the vicissitude and variety of living nature and produces movement in its continuous working towards form. For no matter how much we deform the painted figure and render it dynamic, it remains imprisoned within a frame hanging motionless on a wall. And no matter how much we cover a classical structure with lifelike ornament, it remains a lifeless construction. Worse still, each time we produce an image or effect of movement in this way, our experience actually becomes more detached from real movement than attached to it. ‘The Baroque,’ Spuybroek therefore concludes, ‘is merely distorted classicism’. The proposition I put to the test is that, to a certain, to be determined extent, we should differentiate between Mannerism and the baroque in a way analogous to Spuybroek’s distinction between the Gothic and the baroque. For while the Mannerist fine arts certainly do not arrive at the free aggregation of lines of Gothic ornament, as they are based on the (dis)proportional variation of the single human body rather than on configural variation, they also lack, or do not yet succumb to, the continuity and smoothness of the baroque. Whereas the baroque brings all movement back to a spectacular sensuality and physicality, we still find a much more abstract, or inorganic, experience in Mannerism. It is that of the life of the serpentine line, or what William Hogarth would later call the ‘line of grace’.