Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts 9789048527069

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Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts

Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts

Edited by Alessandra Violi, Barbara Grespi, Andrea Pinotti and Pietro Conte

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Department of Philosophy ‘Piero Martinetti’ of the State University of Milan.

Cover illustration: Giambattista Piranesi, detail of Rovine delle antiche fortificazioni del monte e della città di cora, Antichità di Cora 1764. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 90 8964 852 5 e-isbn 978 90 4852 706 9 doi 10.5117/9789089648525 nur 600 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Introduction

Learning from Stone Alessandra Violi, Barbara Grespi, Andrea Pinotti and Pietro Conte

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I.  Statue: The Imaginary of Uncertain Petrification 1. Theatre and Memory: The Body-as-Statue in Early Modern Culture 25 Greta Perletti

2. Translated Bodies: A ‘Cartographic’ Approach

45

3. Pantomime in Stone: Performance of the Pose and Animal Camouflage

63

4. Animated Statues and Petrified Bodies: A Journey Inside Fantasy Cinema

89

Silvia Romani

Barbara Grespi

Michele Bertolini

5. The Ephemeral Cathedral: Bodies of Stone and Configurations of Film Vinzenz Hediger

105

II.  Matter: Size, Hardness, Duration 1. Bodies That Matter: Miniaturisation and the Origin(s) of ‘Art’

133

2. Brancusi’s ‘Sculpture for the Blind’

159

3. Cinema, Phenomenology and Hyperrealism

169

Michele Cometa

Elio Grazioli

Pietro Conte

4. Ephemeral Bodies: The ‘Candles’ of Urs Fischer

179

5. The Celluloid and the Death Mask: Bazin’s and Eisenstein’s Image Anthropology

189

Cristina Baldacci

Antonio Somaini

III.  Corpse: Fossils, Auto-Icons, Revenants 1. Funeral Eulogy: Post-Mortem Figures and Redeemed Bodies, in Images

211

2. On Jack Torrance As a Fossil Form

231

3. Technical Imagesand the Transformation of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany

243

4. Glass, Mixed Media, Stone: The Bodily Stuffs of Suspended Animation

261

5. Bodies’ Strange Stories: Les Revenants and The Leftovers

277

Luisella Farinotti

Barbara Le Maître

Anna Luppi

Alessandra Violi

Luca Malavasi

IV.  Monument: Embodying And Grafting 1. The Impassibly Fleshly, the Statue of the Impossible

295

2. Frozen into Allegory: Cleopatra’s Cultural Survival

305

3. The Orphan Image

317

Filippo Fimiani

Elisabeth Bronfen

Federica Villa

4. The Well-Tempered Memorial: Abstraction, Anthropomorphism, Embodiment

325

5. Monuments of the Heart: Living Tombs and Organic Memories in Contemporary Culture

343

Index

361

Andrea Pinotti

Sara Damiani

Introduction Learning from Stone Alessandra Violi, Barbara Grespi, Andrea Pinotti and Pietro Conte The extension of life to inert matter is one of the most fascinating turns taken by modernisation: over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emergence of technologies that appear to be endowed with vital properties, sensory faculties and cognitive functions called into question the demarcation between the animate and the inanimate and opened a new vision of what it is to be an object. Or one might also say that it reactivated an ancient readiness to recognise the lives of things, which is the common denominator of various artistic experiences and, over the two centuries, has become the focus of a dedicated line of thought.1 Since the nineteenth century, this development has placed at centre stage the media both because, conceived of as nervous bodies,2 they occupy a special vantage point on reality and because, insofar as they are ‘technical objects’, they are endowed with their own life, intelligence and language. The cinema has been particularly fruitful in this animist turn, presenting itself as a machine able to breathe life into bodies and at the same time to reveal ‘the face of things’;3 not only the theories but also the films of Jean Epstein bear the most eloquent witness to this shared sensibility and have been the object of a widespread re-evaluation in recent cinema studies. 4 Nevertheless, the life of inorganic things that has been rediscovered by technology and the media raises an insistent question of significance for modern man, who is still faced with death. The fact of the cadaver remains 1 Cf. Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic. 2 For a reconstruction of nineteenth-century thought on the relation between media and the enhancement of perceptual and nervous faculties, see Andriopoulus, Psychic Television. 3 Balázs, Visible Man, p. 46. 4 And this applies not only in the French-speaking world: in addition to Aumont, Jean Epstein, see Keller and Paul (eds.), Jean Epstein, and Wall-Romana, Jean Epstein.

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_intro

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the principle obstruction for the line of thought that envisages an osmosis between the animate and the inanimate, so much so that it has become the object of a specific imaginary that embraces photography, sculpture, archaeology and, above all, the sciences, within which stone—the material to which tends flesh bereft of life—takes on a wholly novel guise. The body of stone in its widest sense, running from the mere mineral object to the literally petrified cadaver, from the anthropomorphic statue to the monument, from the catatonic body to the fossil, from the miniature to the autoicon, thus offers us a privileged object of analysis through which to investigate a sort of secondary effect of animism: the aesthetics of suspension in between states—between life and death, organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate—taking account of both its anthropological roots and its modern and contemporary expressions. How has this state of suspension been conceived and represented? For a start, it has to do with a state of uncertainty between immobility and movement, the possibility of bodies that are at once immobile and in becoming. Certain natural forms attracted attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as models for aesthetic experience focused on this aspect: for instance, fossils that survive for millions of years in a state of transformation so slow that it cannot be seen; or those mimetic animals that practice an apparently perfect immobility that they can snap out of; again, ever-greater attention was paid to the life of the Earth considered both as a planet in orbit and as a geological body subject to eruptions and thus in a paradoxical state of (perceived) stasis in movement. And for similar reasons, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the peculiar features of organic materials such as wax attracted the attention of philosophers, giving rise to an aesthetics of precarious immobility. The essays in this volume show how certain modern bodies—in the arts, the cinema and the media—find a performative model in the fossil, the mimetic animal and the process of liquefaction (of wax or volcanic lava). These may be articulated as the possibility of fixing fictional identities over multiple time scales, as the performance of a gesture that fuses the human image with the mineral, as the creation of sculpted objects that exhibit their own decomposition, or as the emergence of superheroes who are stone in movement. It is no surprise that cinema has been most taken up with this kind of suspension, given that it is technically dependent on the immobility of the single frame and the movement produced by the speed of the film’s passage: as a reverse of the fossil, the cinema involves a purely optical movement, one that can be seen though it does not belong to the ‘body’ of the images. Inspired by Bergson, Gilles Deleuze theorised this feature

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of cinematic language, proposing a threefold articulation of the relation between image and movement. In The Movement Image, he distinguishes between the image as an emblem of a movement (pose éternelle), the image corresponding to an unmoving segment of a movement (coupe immobile), and the image that makes up a moving segment of a movement (coupe mobile).5 Cinema renders this last typology and thus succeeds in representing the root of movement, becoming the image of its self-activation and thus of the very possibility of a dialectic between fixity and mobility. Building on Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben suggests that the movement of the cinematic image is a descendent of the Greek myth of the awakening statue and that it is a non-narrative but rather technical re-elaboration of the mythic tale, allowing there to be images that do not immobilise bodies but liberate them and ‘disenchant’ them, setting them in flux by disrupting the state of inertia (‘break the ties holding them and begin to move’).6 The intense interest directed by cinema, and especially in such genres as fantasy and horror, toward the figure of the statue that becomes animate—which is examined in several of the essays below—may thus be read as a narrative reconversion of the aesthetic vocation of a medium that feeds on states of suspended motion. More obvious still is the relation between photography and immobility. This emerges, especially in the nineteenth century, in an enormous archive in which the body, fixed on a plate, is presented as the alter ego of the statue. At the same time, the immobilisation of the subject is not just an effect of the image but a requisite for the image to succeed in reproducing the pose. In Roberto Rossellini’s film The Machine that Kills Bad People (1952), the lead character uses the camera to bring about well-aimed petrifications: by re-photographing the photographs of the village’s baddies, the apparently benevolent do-gooder paralyses their bodies, turning them into statues that adopt the same pose as they were in when they were originally snapped. But their paralysis does not last. The bodies have not been mineralised once and for all but have only been suspended and are ready to be ‘disenchanted’ and set once more in movement. Rossellini’s parable picks up on a latenineteenth-century photographic genre of the baby portrait in which the infant is held still by the mother and so is granted a potential for movement, though this is blocked into an unnatural pose. A further way that the body in stone can be suspended— which is a focus of the essays below—concerns the uncertainty about the line between life 5 Deleuze, Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image, pp. 7-8. 6 Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, p. 58 (italics added).

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and death. This touches also on the photographic series just mentioned, which is one element in the rich modern imaginary of ‘Life in Death’, which aligns the creatures of gothic literature and film—reanimated corpses, the undead, vampires and zombies—with bodies that are still living but that are photographed out of fear of premature death, as with many other forms of monumentalisation based on the purely material exchange of flesh and stone. Traditionally, the monumental idea (the kolossos, the headstone, the wax death-mask, the mummy) starts from the cadaver as the ‘object’ which, as George Hersey has suggested,7 is produced with a view to the monumental gesture. In particular, the architectural monument is the outcome of a violent (and sacred) gesture as the terminus of a sacrificial rite involving the destruction of one body and its replacement by a stone structure. In the classical world, the pagan temple is the final stage of a process that passes through the erection of architectures of ‘flesh’ built out of the butchered limbs of the victim. Thus the architectural object hides the destructive gesture from which it originates, recomposing the fragments into an organic whole that looks ever less human. This anthropological snippet also gives support to the Vitruvian metaphor of the building as body (the façade as face, the columns as legs and so on) as well as making an important connection between architecture and cinema, which are both expressive forms based on the re-composition of the parts of the sacrificed body torn into pieces. Sergei M. Eisenstein viewed the origin of montage in the light of the myth of Dionysus: in archaic cultures, various cults took literally this myth in which the Greek deity is ripped apart by the titans and then magically recomposed. In primitive tribes, the periodic killing of the chief, who is then cut up and eaten, was aimed at making those who partake in the act become one with the tribe and a part of an organic and cohesive unity, an effect that could only be achieved by a bodily experience. In the evolution of society, the ritual became ever less fierce, passing from human to animal sacrifice and then from the flesh and blood body to its symbols (not least the Eucharist as the emblem of the holy body consumed for the communion of the Church). Yet Eisenstein wants to show that cinema represents modernity’s more radical and definitive leap: the narrative dimension of the myth is abandoned and replaced by a purely conceptual structure in which only the principle is retained. Montage is thus in its way the monumentalisation of a body and its re-composition in a form that restores unity and confers on it an infinitely higher value that is different from the sum of its parts. The awareness achieved through the experience of filmic montage permits a retrospective 7 Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture.

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re-interpretation of the pre-cinematographic forms of montage; it is in this sense that Eisenstein describes the Athens Acropolis as ‘the perfect example of one of the most ancient films’.8 The conceptual linkages among stone-architecture-cinema open the way to a fresh way of thinking about monumentality. Even if the founding experience of death does not disappear, what does disappear is the cadaver, which is imagined under the guise of various re-integrations at the service of a new, mixed and suspended body with different borders. Various case studies in this volume explore some of the most interesting contemporary approaches to somatic monumentality: for instance seeing the body that undergoes organ transplant as a biological monument, an organic memory of the donor, or analysing artistic productions with a monumental function that conform to new properties of the human body, not only its shape—which it shares with the cadaver—but its temperature, which denotes its vitality. For all that it overlaps in many ways with those already mentioned, the suspension of the body of stone between the animate and the inanimate is a mode that also has its own specific characteristics. Are bodies that act, react, operate and perform animate even when they are in part mineral? The question resonates down the tradition of statues that come to life, the Golem and the multifarious forms of androids, humanoid robots and cyborgs that simulate ever more naturalistically the living human body: this is the complex constellation that Victor Stoichita has dubbed the ‘Pygmalion effect’.9 Progress in simulation is not, however, a continuous approximation to perfect equivalence: as Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori already noted in 1970, up to a certain point, the greater an android’s similarity to man, the greater this latter’s sense of familiarity and confidence with it, but when the simulation of the human reaches very high levels, we encounter a crash in what we might call positive empathy toward the cyborg, which Mori represents graphically as a downturn that he calls ‘uncanny valley’.10 Only when faced with androids that are effectively indistinguishable from humans—a result nearly achieved by Hiroshi Ishiguro’s recent Geminoids11—does the graph begin to climb again. Our reference to empathy in this context calls for closer reflection on the phrase ‘animation of the inanimate’. If we take the genitive in its objective 8 9 10 11

Eisenstein, ‘Montage and Architecture’, p. 60. See Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect. Mori, ‘The Uncanny Valley’. http://www.geminoid.jp/en/robots.html (accessed 9 December 2019).

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use, then the formula presupposes a conception of the inanimate as an empty and inert recipient ready to welcome the vitality that the living subject infuses in it. This reading embraces all the subjectivist and psychologistic models that are founded on processes of projection and attribution. If, on the other hand, we take the genitive in its subjective use, then it is the inanimate itself that appears paradoxically endowed with its own soul, its own personality and expressiveness, capable of interacting intersubjectively with the human. The aesthetics of the doll and the puppet, such as we find for instance in Kleist, Hoffmann, Poe, Baudelaire, Bergson, Rilke, Benjamin, Klee and Worringer have explored many features of these oxymoronic landscapes. Or at least they seem to be oxymoronic from the viewpoint of a dual logic that enforces a rigid opposition between the animate and the inanimate. But the renewed attention in the most innovative recent enquiries in cultural anthropology toward the notion of ‘animism’12 is an eloquent symptom of the need for a radical re-thinking of the relation between the animate and the inanimate. It is to this call that the present volume seeks to respond, articulating in the essays that make it up the possibility of dissolving the rigid opposition between the two terms in an osmotic process that turns the border into a threshold that can be traversed in both directions. The following sections are tagged with four keywords for objects, aspects or states that best bring out the features of the aesthetics of suspension that is the subject of the volume as a whole. Statue, Matter, Corpse and Monument may be taken as standpoints from which to view a many-faceted subject that is at once fleeting and beguiling and that can be captured only in fragments presenting the first tiles of a mosaic that has yet to be brought to completion. On the one hand, each of the pieces is freestanding and calls for treatment on its own terms, while on the other they are interconnected and can be seen as mutually illuminating. Thus, the sculptural cases presented in various sections of the volume (especially the second and the third) all share the notion that anthropomorphism involves the sense of touch rather than visual perception, though the stress falls differently, from the quality of the materials in upsetting the border between inert matter and life to the memorial form that the materials produce. Likewise, the image of the wax statue that gradually melts recurs across the second and the third sections, either as the experiment of a work of art on its own materials or as a proper science-fictional character that stimulates a reflection on the status of the corpse. Transverse themes 12 See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture; Ingold, Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought; Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics.

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emerge, especially between the third and the fourth sections, also from the various media in play: cinema as an archive of gestures in stone, or photography as a fossil image that evokes and awakens a fictional character, or the touching history of a human life. These are just some of the many cross-connections woven into the mesh of a volume that was conceived as a network of open questions, case studies, scientific hypotheses and philosophical outlooks; and it is in the spirit of an operation that makes no claims to being systematic but rather is offered as scouting a landscape that we leave to the reader the pleasure of uncovering other knots within this fabric. All this, of course, within an underlying approach shared by all the contributors according to which modern and contemporary culture has witnessed the re-emergence of an ancient—even ancestral—form of (pseudo-) animism that has been worked over and re-launched in the terms of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sciences that sought mineral bodies that were living differently and capable of giving birth to a powerful imaginary that in turn powered the visual culture. In these ways, there is a back-and-forth among the pieces of the mosaic we are presenting. Nevertheless, we have chosen to identify the single sections with some of the principal junctures in the parallelism between the fleshy body and the mineral body. The introduction of each section seeks to give some account of the outlines and the inner connections among the papers presented, but it is worth setting out the guidelines that motivated our adoption of these four working hypotheses as well as of the underlying model that unites them. As the most obvious sort of body of stone that one could think of, the statue is a virtually obligatory stepping-off point. Since antiquity, the statue as an uncanny object has aroused fantasies of the reanimation of bodies and conversely of their regression into the mineral state. The section begins by recalling how the classical myths of petrification were taken up and subject to a first modern recounting in the narrations and depictions of possible transitions from flesh into stone and back again. The trajectory is towards the cinema, which, in various moments during the twentieth century and with ever more complex linguistic strategies, conjured up the passages from one state to the other. The second section is dedicated to matter, the apparently insuperable and concrete boundary between the terms of the binomial: organic vs. inorganic. In media and visual studies, there has been a recent return to matter as a result of a renewed attention to the hardware of supports and its effects on symbolic processes. In this light, the essays in the second section consider the various strategies of hybridisation and of the treatment of materials in their ever-closer entanglements with the human body. Here too, the line of enquiry begins with primitive cultures as a literal

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closeness (the miniature attached to the body) and evolves into a perceptual closeness (the fascination with wax as an unaccountable material). The third section seeks to bring into focus the thorniest of the terms in play—the corpse—by way of the bridge between arts and sciences that was built by the revolutionary anatomical modelling in the eighteenth-century Florentine Natural History Museum. The section takes in corpses at all levels: imagined corpses that can be glimpsed within still living bodies in some photographic styles; concrete bodies that have been vitrified, desiccated and mummified by science; and corpses whose organoleptic properties have been reinvented by science fiction. In these ways, science, science fiction and fantasy offer a first mapping of ways to get around the main obstacle to any idea of widespread, suspended or delayed animation. Lastly, the fourth section is given over to the most important cultural facet of the transformation of a body into stone: the process of monumentalisation. Seen from this point of view at the end of our itinerary, we can make out the impact that the imaginary of suspension has had down the centuries, so often in relation to the theme of memory. The need to externalise this internal dimension of human beings often underlies this mineralisation of the body, taken in the broad sense and following an arc that runs from the unmasking of the self to the mummification of one’s own cadaver, from the construction of non-anthropomorphic (but still bodily) commemorative objects to the use of the flesh-and-blood body as a sepulchre in which to bury and conserve parts of others’ bodies. *** The editors are profoundly grateful to all contributors for their generous participation in this collective effort to illuminate such a complex constellation in ancient and modern theories and practices of arts and media; their warmest gratitude to Richard Davies for many consultations and moral support. The editors also thank Maryse Elliott, commissioning editor of the AUP series “Film, Media & Communication Studies”, for her valuable support in successfully bringing our volume into a safe haven.

Works cited Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’ (1991), in Means Without End. Notes on Politics, trans. by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Cesarino (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Stefan Andriopoulos, ‘Psychic Television’, Critical Inquiry 313 (2005): 618-637.

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Béla Balázs, ‘Visible Man’ (1924), in Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. by Erica Carter, pp. 1-90, (New York: Bergham Books, 2010). Jacques Aumont (ed.), Jean Epstein. Cinéaste, poète, philosophe (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1998). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image (1983), trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1986). Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2005), trans. by Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Sergei M. Eisenstein, ‘Montage and Architecture’ (1937), in Towards a Theory of Montage (1937), trans. by Michael Glenny (London/New York: Tauris, 2010). Jean Epstein, Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). George L. Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture. Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988). Tim Ingold, ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought’, Ethnos. Journal of Anthropology 71, 1 (2006): 9-20. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991), trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Masahiro Mori, ‘The Uncanny Valley’ (1970), trans. by Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato, Energy 4 (1970): 33-35. Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic. Art, Architecture and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect. From Ovid to Hitchcock (2006), trans. by Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Christophe Wall-Romana, Jean Epstein. Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics. For a Post-Structural Anthropology (2009), trans. by Peter Skajish (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014).

About the authors Pietro Conte is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on illusion, hyperrealism, immersion and the multifarious practices of un-framing, a thematic cluster that he has addressed in the monographs Unframing Aesthetics and In carne e cera. Estetica e fenomenologia dell’iperrealismo (Flesh and Wax: Aesthetics and Phenomenology of Hyperrealism).

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Barbara Grespi is Associate Professor at the University of Bergamo where she teaches Cinema and visual culture. She has written extensively on the theme of gesture, on the relationship between cinema and photography, and on the theories of montage. Her essays have appeared in the international journals Acoma, Agalma, Bianco&Nero, Ikon, Interface, L’anello che non tiene, Aisthesis, Cinema&Cie (of this last she is also editor). Her main publications include Memoria e Immagini (ed., 2009), Cinema e montaggio (2010), Gus Van Sant (ed., 2011), Fuori quadro (co-ed., 2013), Overlapping Images (co-ed., 2016), Harun Farocki (co-ed., 2017), Il cinema come gesto (2017), Figure del corpo (2019). She was on the Selection Committee of the Torino Film Festival from 2007 to 2017. Andrea Pinotti is Professor in Aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti”, State University of Milan. His research focuses on image theories and visual culture studies, memorialisation and monumentality, phenomenological aesthetics, empathy theories and the morphological tradition from Goethe to the present day. His publications include Il corpo dello stile. Storia dell’arte come storia dell’estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wölfflin (1998), Memorie del neutro. Morfologia dell’immagine in Aby Warburg (2001), Empathie. Histoire d’une idée de Platon au post-humain (2016), Cultura visuale. Immagini sguardi media dispositivi (in collaboration with Antonio Somaini, 2016). In 2018 he was awarded the Wissenschaftspreis der Aby-Warburg-Stiftung in Hamburg. He is currently directing an ERC Advanced project entitled An-iconology. History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images. Alessandra Violi is Full Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Bergamo. Her research work has focused on the points of contact among literature, aesthetics and the human sciences, with particular attention to the medical imaginary and, specifically, the sciences of anatomy and neuropathology, on which she has published the volumes Le cicatrici del testo, (Bergamo, 1998) and Il teatro dei nervi (Milan, 2004). In addition, she has written books on the theme of the body as a medium (Impronte dell’aria, Bergamo, 2008), as artistic-anthropological material (Capigliature, Milan, 2008), and in the cultural imaginary (Il corpo nell’immaginario letterario, Milan, 2013).

The imaginary of the body suspended between animate and inanimate f inds its roots in the ancient myths of petrif ication, which have been thoroughly revised since the dawn of modernity. The irreversibility of the classical metamorphoses, from organic to inorganic or vice versa, has been put in question within a broad and eclectic body of literary, artistic and cinematographic work that ranges from Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Antonia Byatt, taking in also Charlie Chaplin and Italian horror director Riccardo Freda. Though this section does not claim to give a chronological account of how this new mythology developed tropes of uncertain, reversible, incomplete, hybrid and repeated transformations, it offers samples of some key stages in this reconfiguration. The following essays turn on the figure of the statue as an inevitable starting point for the itinerary mapped out in the volume as a whole. For the statue condenses the suspensions of time, of movement and of affect that have always conjured the idea of a body that is degenerate, rigid and imprisoned, while at the same time it unsettles and seduces, encouraging the uncertainties of the gaze and threatening the fixed points of perception. The statue sheds its definitive immobility already on the Elizabethan stage, where characters often undergo various states of freezing that fix the body in long-lasting poses that are akin to petrification but that are never certain or definitive. Greta Perletti’s essay reads the recurrence of actors’ bodies as para-statues as a meditation on memory and, in Shakespeare in particular, as an effort to undermine its monumental aspect and its link to medieval artes memoriæ. On the threshold of modernity, words are better vehicles of memory than statues and, conversely, it is words that create statues of flesh paralysing the bodies that recall painful events. In Shakespeare, the memory that is harmful to the body is thus translated into a state of semi-lethargy and, more in general, into a register of dysfunctions and interruptions of the confines between flesh and stone that redefine the ancient magic in terms of the pathologies—above all female—of de-animation. Silvia Romani takes off from the classical theme of female petrification to bring out the ambiguity intrinsic in the suspended state. When, in ancient myths, the female body, regarded as more liquid and softer than the male, turns to mineral, it is in the first instance by divine intervention, but in the background there is a link to a strong psychological stress of which petrification is a metaphor (as in the cases of Aglauros, Caenis and Ariadne). This allows for minimal vestiges of movement and life in the petrified women, as in the case of Niobe, whose body is turned to marble by grief for her lost sons but which does not stop weeping: a stream of tears flows from her stony eyes, which stops her body from disappearing

completely in the mountainous landscape. A story by Antonia Byatt of 2003 disintegrates this motif, putting in its place the image of a petrification in movement, according to which the female body’s becoming inorganic does not imply fixity but only hardness. The Stone Woman of the title is a woman who is also physically transformed by mourning, which conducts her into a state of multi-coloured minerality in which she can nevertheless continue to live, moving and even dancing so as to become a pure spectacle of a body in between states and realms. But midway between the myths and Antonia Byatt’s postmodern solution, we encounter the curious late-nineteenth-century phenomenon of the wildly popular spectacle of posing as a statue. Under the influence of Delsarte, the performing arts in the United States took this in the first instance as a part of an actor’s training and then as a stage number in its own right, whose charm was that the public was challenged to discriminate between statue and body, object and subject, stone and flesh. Barbara Grespi interrogates the meaning of this type of spectacle at the cusp of dance, theatre and cinema within the wider process of the de-humanising of the actor’s body in the era of silent film, in which the leading model is that of animal mimicry. Charlie Chaplin’s work with gesture is situated among pantomime, mimesis and mimicry, as we see in his encounters with statues in his first films and which is the underlying allegory of City Lights (1933). This last was being filmed in precisely the years that Roger Caillois was developing his theory of animal mimicry as at once creative and psychasthenic. More in general, this was a period in which aesthetics and anthropology were investigating imitative processes, their pathological roots and their potential for knowledge gathering. Chaplin’s body, at once animal and mineral, camouflages itself in a marble group, bringing to the screen in a wholly novel way the dialectic between the actor and his archive of gestures; this is then the highpoint of the reassessment initiated by modernity of the statue as an emblem of a state that is only partially inanimate. If in Chaplin it is the management of the body that upsets certainties about the mineral, in horror movies, especially in the Italian style discussed by Michele Bertolini, it is the cinema itself, with its technical means, that rewrites the imaginary of the statue as a body that is still alive, not immobile, not immutable and not immortal. It is a two-way exchange because, by use of superimposed images, camera angles and sound effects, stones often come alive and bodies are petrified, both in the gothic sub-genre and in the post-organic of Cronenberg. In The Haunting (R. Wise, 1963), Villa Crane becomes a living organism that is progressively constructed by the camera as a face with eyes, a chest that breathes and a throat that produces a voice. Conversely, in I vampire (R.

Freda, 1957), a long take allows us to observe all the phases of the petrification of the countess’ face as she ages under our eyes and hardens into a stone mask, as if the camera had modelled and sculpted it live. In this direction, we witness ever more complex cine-photographic transformations, in which the statue can even be set up within a face of flesh in an inversion of roles that we find in certain artistic experimentations, such as the plaster casts of sculptor George Segal to which Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) alludes. Vinzenz Hediger then takes up the theme announced by Bertolini of the relation between sculpture and cinema. His essay investigates the ways that the statue functions as a very special sort of cinematic prop that can produce a filmic configuration, which is to say a visual articulation in which two spatiotemporal variations on the human gesture are set one alongside the other. The Hungarian critic Béla Balázs had already associated film with the cathedral, whose essence Victor Hugo had identified as a sculpted body, in both of which bodily expressiveness is liberated. This association comes to life every time a statue is brought into the frame alongside a character, as the nude that appears next to Dietrich in The Song of Songs (R. Mamoulian, 1933), as the diva’s Doppelgänger, or as the caryatid with which Agnès Varda frames the real body of a naked man, both of whom are surreally ignored by the Paris traffic in her documentary Les Dites Caryatides (1982). The friction thus set up animates one body and de-animates the other in a ceaseless dialectic that is of the essence of cinema, which is its power ‘to endow any given object with the capacity to respond to, and replicate, human agency’. And this, in turn, leads to the nexus of subjects that are the focus of the following section. Barbara Grespi

1.

Theatre and Memory: The Body-asStatue in Early Modern Culture Greta Perletti

Abstract This chapter relates the statue-like bodies of some Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays to the theories about memory and forgetting that were circulating in late sixteenth-century philosophical and medical discourse. In particular, the chapter shows how memory images, which in antiquity played a pivotal role in the art of memory, were represented as inducing a paralysing, statue-like state in living bodies. Shakespeare’s work partakes in this re-assessment of memory images, as words are more powerful memory triggers and carriers than monuments and statues. Moreover, while Shakespeare’s tragedies stage bodies turning into stone because of the destructive fixedness of the past, his late plays manage to set in motion the images produced by memory and by so doing resist death-like paralysis. Keywords: Cultural representation of memory; memory images; lethargy; pathological memory; statue-like bodies

Cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago. ‒ Ovid, Metamorphoses XV, 178

My exploration of the cultural significance of ‘bodies of stone’ will be focused on the threshold of modernity, and in particular on the early modern stage. During that age, dominated by important epistemological changes, spectators would quite frequently find plays staging characters whose bodies temporarily or permanently experienced some kind of statue-like state. Frozen in death, real or apparent, fixed in the present moment or simply unable to move or take action, these characters certainly offer a

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chI01

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spectacular unsettling of the boundaries separating the animate from the inanimate and the human from the non-human. In this chapter I would like to relate the stone-like bodies that may be found in a number of Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays to some theories about memory and forgetting that were circulating in late sixteenth-century philosophical and medical discourses. In particular, I shall attempt to explore the contrast between the immovable and the moving statue-like body from the perspective of the different attitude towards memory that these bodies entail.

Statues of memory Early modern culture inherits from the Middle Ages a fascination with the power of visual exempla to assist the processes of remembrance. As scholars such as Frances A. Yates, Lina Bolzoni and Pietro Corsi have amply demonstrated, the so-called art of memory was a system of mnemonic techniques that, dating back to the Classical age, bloomed in the Renaissance thanks to its eminently visual power.1 Central to this technique in its early modern form was the sophisticated quality of memory images. Besides being evocative of the things to be remembered, these images were also deemed to be conveniently placed in mental loci that could be imaginatively accessed and explored. In recent years, much work has been devoted to uncovering the ramifications of the art of memory, as memory images—far from being confined to adepts of mnemonics—were widespread in early modern culture. William E. Engel’s study on death and drama, for example, has shown how the proliferation of emblems, heralds and imprese in late sixteenth-century England may be accounted for in the light of Renaissance memory arts.2 Moreover, since tombs and memorials were endowed with mnemonic power, it is not surprising to find that the flourishing of funerary art, which Philippe Ariès relates to changing attitudes toward death and its representation,3 should match the contemporary revival of memory arts. From this perspective, also statues—or bodies that are turned into statues (both implicitly and in a more literal way, as we shall see)—may be revealed to partake in the same cultural interest in memory and memory images. 1 Yates, The Art of Memory; Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory; Corsi, The Enchanted Loom. A selection of the main texts of early modern art of memory can be found in Engel (ed.), The Memory Arts in Renaissance England. 2 Engel, Death and Drama in Renaissance England. 3 Ariès, The Hour of Our Death.

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My analysis of the relations between bodies of stone and memory will take stock of this memorial and mnemonic imagination in order to consider not just the dissemination of memory images in Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre but also their often-problematic status. In fact, insights into early modern cultural texts will show that no matter how relevant the function of recollection, the entrenched memorial paradigms of the art of memory were being gradually eroded, partially challenged and subtly modified. According to the established paradigm, the training of memory was relevant not just to the intellectual faculties but also, more importantly, to the human soul: a shared belief since the Middle Ages was that a disciplined cultivation of memory would be essential to the empowering of the self, since memorial skills were held to confirm the God-like and immortal nature of the soul. It is not coincidental that in the sixteenth century, the art of memory should appeal to alchemists and Neo-Platonic philosophers as well as to more controversial thinkers, such as Giordano Bruno and Robert Fludd (both very influential in Elizabethan and early Jacobean culture), who viewed the use of mental memory images as a powerful way to attune the human mind to the divine macrocosm. As emblematically shown in Shakespeare’s theatre, memory and memory images can, however, take on entirely different meanings, which foreground the painful and even destructive nature of remembrance. From this perspective, even memorial statues happen to be more dismal and dispiriting than relieving. In Romeo and Juliet (1597), for example, the tragedy ends with the Montagues and Capulets jointly promising they will raise statues of Romeo and Juliet, in order to ensure that the tragedy of the young lovers will never be forgotten: MONTAGUE: I will raise her statue in pure gold, That whiles Verona by that name is known, There shall no figure at such rate be set As that of true and faithful Juliet. CAPULET: As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady lie, Poor sacrifices of our enmity! (5.3.315-20)4

Contrary to what happens in Shakespeare’s sources for this play—where the bodies of the two lovers are buried together in one private tomb, thereby 4 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.

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sealing their eternal union in death5—here we are left with two separate memorial statues, which supplant displaced bodies. Despite its dazzling power, the ‘pure gold’ of these memorials fails to dispel the darkness that lingers on in the ‘glooming peace’ (5.3.321) at the end of the play, in fact leaving intact the pattern of rivalry that has led to the tragic epilogue. As is well known, Shakespeare’s work repeatedly stages the memorial ineffectuality of stone. A famous case in point is Sonnet 55, since here the sonnet (or the sonnet collection) itself—‘this powerful rhyme’ (v. 2)—is set against ‘marble’ and ‘gilded monuments’ (v. 1), which time will deface into ‘unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time’.6 Against ‘wasteful war [which] shall statues overturn’ (v. 5), ‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity’ (v. 9), only poetry stands, granting the beloved fair friend, if not immortality itself, at least some time-bound fame: ‘So, till the judgement that yourself arise / You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes’ (vv. 13-14). The fact that words may be triggers and carriers of memory more effectively than monuments and statues might also provide a clue to the meaning of the dumb show that precedes the Mousetrap in Hamlet (1603). As Hester Lee Jeffries suggests,7 Hamlet may well have intended the dumb show as a real memory image concocted with the statue-like bodies of the actors and possibly including some of the items proposed in the Ad Herennium (still one of the key texts for the Renaissance art of memory). Contrary to Hamlet’s expectations, Claudius’ conscience does not stir here in response to the show. The King’s vehement reaction, albeit with no public disclosure of the guilt, comes only later, as a follow-up to the verbal action to be found in the actual play in the play. Shakespeare thus exposes as ineffective the image constructed in the dumb show, which Engel includes in his survey of the ‘emblematic spectacles’ widely employed in early modern drama as a form of memory art.8 In much the same way, although the Sonnets may be intended as a way of building a visual-verbal memory image of the loved friend, ‘like a Ficinian painting or a Brunian seal, […] a jewel in black ink’ that is set in contrast to more conventional images,9 Shakespeare partakes in a larger cultural trend that increasingly undermines the strong paradigm associated with the art of memory according to which images (painted, sculpted or simply imagined) could provide a lasting and safe means for preserving and training memory. 5 Targoff, Love after Death in the English Renaissance, p. 166. 6 Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 7 Lee-Jeffries, Shakespeare and Memory, p. 32. 8 Engel, Death and Drama, p. 38. 9 Sarkar, The Magic of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 259.

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In addition to such devaluation of the mnemonic power attributed to monuments, statues and statue-like bodies, the early modern concern with memory also includes investigations into the ways that memory images can induce a statue-like state in living bodies. This aspect is fascinatingly explored in Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), a dramatic refashioning of Books I, II and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid.10 Upon arriving in Carthage, Aeneas is confronted with a statue of Priam, which prompts his painful memory of the defeat of Troy (2.1.15-21).11 As many scholars have noted, this is a significant departure from Virgil’s poem, where the hero describes scenes of the fall of Troy which he can see—to his surprise—painted on the walls of Juno’s temple, built by Dido and the Carthaginians. No matter how painful, the ekphrastic description to be found in the Aeneid functions as a cathartic device for Virgil’s Aeneas, not only confirming to him how far the fame of Troy and his family has travelled but also spurring him to action: first via his narrative to Dido, and then by indirectly convincing him to pursue his mission as the founder of a new, powerful city. In Marlowe’s Dido, instead, the replacement of the mural paintings with Priam’s statue seems to complicate the relation between painful memory and action. Priam’s statue confronts Aeneas with a visual reminder of his past that, instead of conferring renewed strength and inspiration to the hero, actually freezes him into hallucination and despair: AENEAS Achates, though mine eyes say this is stone, Yet thinks my mind that this is Priamus; […] Achates, see, king Priam wags his hand! He is alive; Troy is not overcome! ACHATES Thy mind, Aeneas, that would have it so, Deludes thy eyesight; Priamus is dead. (1.2.24-32)

As Anthony B. Dawson puts it, in his translation from epic to drama, ‘beside shortening the Virgilian passage, Marlowe has psychologized it, and in a way 10 For an analysis of Marlowe’s use of Virgil’s Aeneid as a source for his play, see Gill, Marlowe’s Virgil. 11 Marlowe, The Tragedy of Dido.

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trivialized it’.12 Unlike the epic hero, the protagonist of Marlowe’s tragedy is unable to use the visual image of his past in a creative and masterly way. Rather, the cathartic experience is replaced by a traumatic reaction, as Aeneas’ delusion and amazement freeze him in the past, thus preventing him from distinguishing between actual perception and mental projections. The contrast with Virgil’s Aeneas, who appears tearful but also proud and ready to take up his mission, could not be more striking: although the protagonist of Marlowe’s play evokes Pygmalion—‘would my prayers (as Pygmalion did) / Could give it life’ (2.1.16-17)—his encounter with the statue of the great Trojan king paradoxically reverses Pygmalion’s power to infuse life into inanimate matter. On the contrary, Priam’s statue seems to drain life from Marlowe’s Aeneas, virtually transforming the hero into a body of stone: not only does he appear paralysed but he also, tellingly, describes his own pain by evoking Niobe, the Theban mother who ‘dry with grief, was turn’d into a stone’ (2.1.5). Aeneas’ hallucinating is not unlike Hamlet’s despair at his inability to revenge his father, the wronged king murdered by Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, and forgotten too hastily by Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. Hamlet too is thrown into statue-like inaction after his encounter with the fully armed ghost of his father, a striking image of his painful past. What both Aeneas and Hamlet are confronted with is the failure to live up to the stronger memory paradigm of the classical, pre-modern past. While the art of memory, with its emphasis on the careful construction of the images to be remembered and on the strict rules to be followed when visiting the mental loci, shapes a cultural imaginary where memory is associated with self-regulation and discipline, for Hamlet, as for Aeneas, recollection brings about disorder and emasculation. Hamlet is crowded with memory images that, like the father’s ghost and Yorick’s skull, seem designed to remind the Prince of Denmark of the desultory and trivial quality of recollection. Hamlet struggles in vain to train his mind to comply with the Ghost’s famous injunction ‘Remember me’ (1.5.91)13 and to be ‘apt’ (1.5.32) to the revenge project that is supposed to ensue from regulated memory. In one of his most famous soliloquies, Hamlet sternly engages with recollection by attempting to control and discipline his memory: Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? 12 Dawson, Priamusis Dead, p. 64. 13 Shakespeare, Hamlet.

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Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe aways all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there. And thy commandment alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmix’d with baser matter. (1.5.96-105)

Although Hamlet acknowledges the memorial paradigm that couples memory with discipline, and even though he sets out to behave accordingly, the technology he resorts to is bound to fail. The ‘table’ to be written upon contemplates the co-existence of memory and forgetting, and possibly even the dependence of the former on the latter. As Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, John Franklin Mowery and Heather Wolfe argue in a seminal essay on Renaissance technologies of writing, Shakespeare’s references to the tables of memory in all of his work invariably entail oblivion, since the very act of writing on the table requires that all previous imprints—be they things or images (for Hamlet, the ‘baser matter’)—should be erased.14 Arguably, the problem with Hamlet lies in the failure to come to terms with a new way of conceiving of memory—one that, against the oblivion vs. recollection view entrenched in the old paradigm, envisaged oblivion and recollection as one compound. Much of Hamlet’s despair comes from his repulsion at the contamination of ‘godlike Reason’ (4.4.37) with ‘bestial oblivion’ (4.4.39): in line with the art of memory paradigm, forgetting for Hamlet entails the emasculating lack of discipline that results in his ‘dull revenge’ (4.4.32), a form of ‘somatic slackness’ that, as Garrett Sullivan’s study has amply illustrated, is associated with the debasing humoural ailment known as ‘lethargy’.15 While Marlowe’s Aeneas is paralysed by the pain evoked by the memory image of Priam’s statue, Hamlet’s body remains statue-like and dull of action because he fails to acknowledge the ductility of the wax tables, which appear simultaneously firm and malleable, retentive and oblivious, hard as rocks and yet prone to change their shape. And yet the conflation of memory and forgetting, which was unsettling the ideological and aesthetic values of the art of memory paradigm, will gain increasing prominence in early modern discourses about memory. As we shall see, in his late work and in the context of the new genre of the 14 Stallybrass, Chartier, Mowery and Wolfe, Hamlet’s Tables. 15 Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama, p. 31.

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romance, Shakespeare will try out the theatrical productiveness of the entanglement of remembrance and oblivion by bringing about movement and animation in the statue-like body. In the story of Niobe as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a source significantly unmentioned by Marlowe’s Aeneas), the mourning mother has been transformed into a marble stone that perpetually sheds tears,16 as a rivulet of water springs from the immovable rock. In a similar way, early modern theories of forgetting introduce movement and liquidity in the discourses on memory, with fruitful consequences for the imagination linked to bodies of stone.

‘Amid the waves, a mighty rock doth stand’. Memory images and forgetting in early modern culture As we have seen, classical and medieval memory arts were strewn with visions of order and regulation, supposedly resulting from the disciplined use of imagination and memory. In contrast to this, recent contributions in the field of memory studies have taken great pains to illustrate how Renaissance texts tend to represent memory as a potential source of chaos and confusion.17 While as early as in St. Augustine’s Confessions, memory had been imagined to be stored in ‘secret and unimaginable caverns’,18 early modern authors emphasise the difficulty—or the impossibility—of moving about in the overcrowded imaginary mental place hosting memory. In Book II of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), for example, where the castle of Alma is designed as an allegory of the human body, memory is represented as a chaotic library, situated in one of the three chambers (corresponding to imagination, understanding and memory) of the high turret.19 As Bruce Smith notes, ‘[d]espite its vital activity, there is an unsettled and unsettling disorder’ in the chamber of memory,20 which is ruled by Eumnestes, an ‘old man, halfe blind, / And all decrepit in his feeble corse’ (II.IX.55.5-6), who has to rely on the young Anamnestes to fetch books and 16 Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 157. 17 This point is made by a number of studies in the thriving academic field of early modern memory studies, such as Lee-Jeffries, Shakespeare and Memory; Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre; Karremann, The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History Plays; Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories; Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting; Ivic, Williams (eds.), Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. 18 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. xi. 19 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, pp. 325-327. 20 Smith, Speaking What We Feel About King Lear, p. 28.

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scrolls. Similarly, in his Passions of the Minde (1601), Thomas Wright laments the incessant proliferation of the ‘forms’ of memory, which threatens to confuse the whole process of recollection.21 Whereas in the traditional paradigm of the art of memory, adepts could explore the loci by imaginatively walking in systematic and often pre-arranged ways, now the movement of memory shifts from the remembering self to the innumerable forms and items of memory. Actually, early modern authors seemed to be particularly puzzled even by the memory images on which the art of memory itself was relying. As Bolzoni notes, the elaborate care taken to construct Renaissance memory images accounts for their ‘resilience and vitality’:22 indeed, some images seem so vivid that they acquire a life of their own, as it were, which makes the process of removing them from the mind increasingly complex. While the classical art of memory granted special power to imagines agentes (or ‘moving images’) because of their animation, now the movement of images seems to elude the controlling agency of the self because of its unpredictability. It comes as no surprise that, parallel to these reflections, mnemonics should also be devalued. We may date the process of separating mnemonic processes from ‘higher’ mental faculties back to the late sixteenth century: Michel de Montaigne is usually credited with being the first to undermine the validity of mnemonics and indeed of memory itself,23 but also the Spanish physician John Huarte Navarro, whose work on the mind was translated into English in 1594, claimed the impossibility of enjoying both good memory and good understanding, as the two faculties are envisaged as ‘powers opposit (sic) and contrary’.24 While memory loses its importance for the mental as well as the physical well-being of man, forgetting starts to receive new attention: thus for the first time John Willis’ popular Mnemonica (1618) implements the traditional art of memory by devoting a section to the important practice of ‘deposition’, or ‘discharging Things connected to the Mind’, while Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) admits that love-sickness may only be cured when the patient is able to discard the haunting image of the beloved.25 An important consequence of such changes in the representation of oblivion 21 Quoted in Tribble, ‘“The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time”. The Tempest and Memory’, p. 152. 22 Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory, p. 144. 23 Harald Weinrich considers Montaigne crucial to understanding the importance of what he terms ‘the art of forgetting’. See Weinrich, Lethe, pp. 43-45. On Montaigne’s views about memory’s detrimental power, see Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting, pp. 47-48. 24 Quoted in Smith, Speaking What We Feel, p. 41. 25 Both Willis and Burton are discussed in Ivic, Williams, Forgetting, pp. 7-10.

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is the thinning out of the dichotomy between memory and forgetting. As Sullivan reminds us, the uncontrollable ‘shuffling up’ of memory images was indeed perceived as being akin to forgetting,26 sharing the same discursive reference to the lack of discipline and mastery over the mind. The shifting nature of memory finds its counterpart in the increasingly liquid memories that are deployed to represent it and that were formerly ascribed especially to forgetting, traditionally associated with the river Lethe of classical mythology. As Lina Perkins Wilder shows in her work on Shakespeare and early modern conceptions of memory, recollection seems somehow inseparable from the liquid ‘ventricles’ in which it was believed to be situated, ‘awash with animal spirits that carry information through and from the brain’.27 Together with the movement of memory images, watery metaphors highlight the fact that memory sits uneasily among other intellectual faculties in Elizabethan and early Jacobean culture. As they foreground the entanglement of memory with forgetting and self-forgetting, they also shed light on its enmeshment with what John Sutton calls ‘the dirt added to thoughts by the body’.28 Moreover, water also evokes the female body, dominated by bodily fluids such as milk and the menses, and more generally imagined as phlegmatically ‘cold and moist’.29 As a result, early modern culture witnesses a profound transformation of the imagination that for centuries had separated memory from forgetting but also from mental confusion and unbecoming behaviour. Henry Peacham’s image, in his emblem book Minerva Britanna (1612), of the ‘Manlie Constancie of mind’ as a ‘mighty rock’ amid the waves30 might well be used to describe early modern representations of memory as a faculty struggling against the action of oblivion and yet already immersed in it by way of its problematic contamination with the body and its fluids.

Shakespeare’s late plays: ‘[A] most majestic vision’ Shakespeare’s alertness to the multifaceted cultural discourses available in his lifetime is well known: countless critical studies have traced the extent of his engagement with (and questioning of) the paradigms of early modern 26 Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting, p. 27. 27 Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre, p. 48. 28 Sutton, Body, Mind, and Order, p. 129. 29 I dealt with this aspect more in detail in Perletti, ‘“A Thing like Death”. Medical Representations of Female Bodies in Shakespeare’s Plays’. 30 Peacham, Minerva Britanna, p. 158.

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philosophy as well as of medicine. As far as memory is concerned, his late plays offer ample ground to explore the blurring of boundaries between memory and forgetting or the questioning of their respective values. On the one hand, as Jonathan Baldo shows, Shakespeare’s later historical plays already stage ‘creative uses of forgetting both for answering traumatic loss and for establishing a sense of national unity’.31 On the other hand, in the final years of his life Shakespeare was keen to experiment with the genre of dramatic romance, which he used also as a way to revisit some of his past dramatic oeuvre. Written after the deaths of Queen Elizabeth (1603) and of Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet (1596), these plays arguably attempt to offer a non-traumatic vision of remembrance through a refashioning of the memory images that appeared problematic on account of their moving and liquid nature. Shakespeare’s manipulation of the images of memory and forgetting, in turn, highlights the power that bodies of stone could embody in early modern theatre. In The Winter’s Tale (1611), Shakespeare stages a story of jealousy and redemption, where a potentially tragic ending is prevented by a new approach to memory that takes into account the changes in its early modern representation. Recollection is crucial to an understanding of The Winter’s Tale: while tragedies, as we have seen, display the impairing action of memory, which turns the protagonist into a statue-like body, here Shakespeare sets in motion memories from his earlier plays, which are put forward and then metamorphosed in view of a more serene outcome. Thus, while Leontes’ unjust cruelty towards his wife Hermione most obviously recalls Othello’s jealousy, in The Winter’s Tale the register of tragedy is only allowed to last until the end of Act 3, after which comedy sets in and repentance takes the place of jealousy. This applies also to the play’s treatment of Hamlet, whose echoes appear profoundly altered by the pastoral setting of Bohemia in the second part. Here the main example is provided by Perdita, Leontes’ ‘lost’ daughter, who, Ophelia-like, hands out flowers and mentions garlands that this time, however, are imagined: like a bank for Love to lie and play on, Not like a corse; or if, not to be buried, But quick in mine arms. (4.4.130-32)32

While in Hamlet the garlands of flowers had indirectly occasioned Ophelia’s death by drowning, here death is evoked only to be dismissed. The motionless image of the corpse (the ‘corse’) morphs into the animate living and moving 31 Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories, p. 3. 32 Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale,

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(‘quick’) body of Florizel, her lover, the son of Polixenes (the king of Bohemia, former friend of Leontes and the cause of his absurd jealousy). As is well known, Leontes’ regeneration will not be accomplished until another animation occurs: until, in Act 5, scene 3, Hermione’s body, believed to have been frozen in death for 16 years, appears on stage as a statue skilfully crafted only to be animated by Paulina’s command ‘descend: be stone no more’ (5.3.99). As the statue-like queen comes back to life, the play enacts a neat reversal of Cleopatra’s suicide in Anthony and Cleopatra (1606), where a queen turns statue-like as she enters death.33 The visual impact of this scene on contemporary spectators must have been tremendously powerful. Not only does Shakespeare channel wonder away from the trite cliché of agnition (Perdita’s finding is in fact just reported but not shown on stage); he also amazingly discloses a moving statue that bears resemblance to the imagines agents of mnemonics. As it happens, Hermione’s wondrous coming to life relies on mnemonics and on the art of memory, since her re-generation is subject to the repentance of Leontes, whose memory has been suitably trained to this purpose by Paulina, the guardian of Hermione’s innocence. Leontes’ response to the early signs of motion in Hermione’s statue-like body is one that complies with the Neo-Platonic view of memory as a mighty purifying power: ‘There’s magic in thy majesty, which has / My evils conjured to remembrance’ (5.3.39-40). At the same time, however, and much like the moving memory images of early modern culture, Hermione’s moving statue also points to new attitudes towards memory and forgetting and to the demystification of the art of memory paradigm. As it underwrites the healing power of remembrance, The Winter’s Tale also acknowledges the painful and problematic aspect of memory. As noted by Lee-Jeffries, Leontes’ refusal to get married, for instance, casts a sinister shadow on the beneficial role of recollection. As he stays obdurately secluded and captivated by the memory of his dead queen’s innocence, Leontes not only proves unable to forgive himself but he also ends up ‘forgetting his role as a king, and being apparently resigned to being heirless and forgotten’.34 In other words, memory is inseparable from (self-)forgetting: the regenerating paradigm of the Neo-Platonic art of memory is not incompatible with the careless neglect of duty associated with Lethean oblivion. Seen in the context of Shakespeare’s corpus, moreover, Hermione’s moving statue achieves more ominous connotations. Shakespeare’s women are quite often seemingly frozen in statue-like death: Hero in Much Ado about 33 Lyne, Shakespeare’s Late Work, p. 38. 34 Lee-Jeffries, Shakespeare and Memory, p. 181.

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Nothing (1599?), Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well (1609), Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Imogen in Cymbeline (1610?) and Thaisa in Pericles (1608) are all cases in point. Kaara Peterson has related the Shakespearean motif of female apparent death to early modern theories on female pathology. Because they paralysed the body into a seemingly lifeless condition, hysterical ailments were especially deemed to blur the boundaries between life and death and were held responsible for many ‘revivification narratives’35 both in medical and cultural discourse. In Shakespeare’s work, late romances such as Pericles and The Winter’s Tale—unlike tragedies and comedies, which undermine either the happiness that should derive from discovering that death was only apparent or the revivification itself, which was only a fake one—–stage the purifying function of women’s return to life after a long absence. What happens is, in Janet Adelman’s words, a ‘penitential cleansing’ of the impurities connected to the female body, especially after giving birth.36 By coming back to life after sixteen years, Hermione’s body therefore simultaneously occludes and foregrounds its problematic corporeality, thereby both forgetting and remembering, in a way, Leontes’ belief that the female organism may be akin to a ‘sluiced […] pond’ (1.2.193-94). In other words, when Hermione’s statue is animated on the stage, this moving image, once the highest symbol of the art of memory paradigm, appears tainted both by movement and by the underlying watery and ‘slippery’ (1.2.271) female body. While staging Leontes’ regeneration, the play does so by highlighting the contradictory connotations that memory takes on in early modern discourse as well as its entanglement with forgetting and self-forgetting. The use of complex images to account for the processes of recollection is amplif ied in The Tempest (1611),37 which is traditionally taken to be Shakespeare’s spectacular adieu to his audience and his last major play. While Prospero has been read as a counterpart of Shakespeare himself, The Tempest fascinatingly recapitulates much of Shakespeare’s earlier works, from Richard II to Hamlet, and from Anthony and Cleopatra to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest explores the extent to which the interplay between memory and forgetting may transform tragedy into comedy or romance; however, more than any other Shakespearian play, it also exposes the beneficial role of oblivion, without which no forgiveness could ever be possible. As Michael O’Neill argues, Shakespeare here ‘suggests a way by which “remembrance” can free us 35 Peterson, Popular Medicine, p. 71. 36 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 199. 37 Shakespeare, The Tempest.

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from the burden of the past into a blessed kind of oblivion’.38 This process is visible in the implicit comparison between the imperative of Hamlet’s ghost ‘Remember me’, requiring revengeful action from his son, and the much softer exhortation—‘I pray thee mark me’ (1.2.67)—that Prospero addresses to his daughter Miranda, who is allowed to sleep after the revelation of her father’s real identity and of the trials they both had to undergo after her uncle’s usurpation. Unlike Hamlet’s paralysing recollection, memory in The Tempest appears proximate to the liquid obliviousness of sleep. Appropriating the island’s ‘forgetfulness’ and resistance to history, Prospero shows that the petrifying potential of memory can be eluded. As proved by Prospero’s maimed attempts to shape Miranda, Ariel and Caliban’s memory, mnemonics on the island is bound to fail; moreover, the metaphors that foreground confinement—from Ariel’s imprisonment in the pine to Prospero’s ‘old brain’ in his ‘beating mind’ (4.1.149,153)—establish a pattern ‘intimately linked to the play’s overriding concerns with the nature of memory’.39 Paralysis, suffocation and statue-like inaction can be avoided in this play by animating the past: that is, by setting in motion the images produced by memory. The animation of the past is most visible, as Baldo argues, in ‘the general movement of the play forward in order to go backward’: 40 thus, the apparently ‘new’ characters that Miranda and the spectators encounter on stage will be shown to belong to Prospero’s past, just as the conspiracies occurring on the island will re-enact the plotting against Prospero. In this way, painful memories are displaced onto the future-oriented wonder that is characteristic of Miranda (and which is encrypted in her very name). The conversion of future into past actually operates also in the case of The Tempest’s collocation in the First Folio, with this play intended as a prologue to Shakespeare’s whole corpus precisely because it offers itself, as Baldo puts it, as ‘a recollection of old issues, themes, characters, and worlds’. 41 What the play puts forward against the fixedness of the past is animation and the liquid dissolution of forgetfulness, which is the condition for forgiveness to occur. A striking example is Prospero’s tableau in Act 5, scene 1: as the play approaches conclusion, the audience is confronted with the sight of the characters involved in Prospero’s story of usurpation and exile. Frozen, in statue-like state, they ‘stand charmed’ (5.1) within the magic circle 38 O’Neill, Remembrance and Revenge, p. 49 39 Tribble, ‘“The Dark Backward Abysm of Time”’, p. 153. 40 Baldo, Exporting Oblivion, p. 136. 41 Ibid., p. 142.

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that the magus has drawn. As Prospero speaks, it becomes clear that the stage has been temporarily transformed into his personal memory theatre: as he moves among the images of his past, he recollects the deeds of each character, from Gonzalo’s acting as his ‘true preserver’ (5.1.71) to Alonso’s cruel ‘use’ (5.1.75) of Prospero and Miranda, and to Antonio’s remorseless ambition (5.1.80). And yet, as was the case with the imago agens in The Winter’s Tale, the paradigm of the classical art of memory is evoked only to be profoundly revised. As soon as Prospero sets his memory theatre up, ‘[t]he charm dissolves apace’ (5.1.66), revealing its precarious nature: in fact, Prospero’s visit to the images of his charmed locus runs parallel to the gradual awakening of the characters involved. The images in this strange theatre of memory appear therefore immovable but also seem to share the liquidity of Prospero’s charm. ‘Melting the darkess’ (5.1.68), they set about to abandon their statue-like unconsciousness in the same way as ‘the approaching tide’ that ‘[w]ill shortly fill the reasonable shore’ (5.1.86-87). As if to dismantle the rigid view of a past that cannot be altered and re-worked and, at the same time, to confirm a more fluid conception of the different temporal levels, Prospero asks Ariel to fetch the symbols of his power, so that he will be able to be converted into a new kind of memory image that ideally fuses together future, present and past: ‘I will… myself present / As I was’ (5.1.92-93). The island itself actually seems to challenge the fixedness of encrusted beliefs, entrenched habits or preconceptions by setting them in motion or, in a way, liquefying them. When first confronted with the ‘most majestic vision’ (4.1.108) offered by Prospero’s masque, Ferdinand yields to idealisation: Let me live here ever! So rare a wondered father and a wise Makes this place Paradise. (4.1.123-35)

Ferdinand was probably not alone in his feeling impressed by the visual display of the masque, a type of spectacle that was typically associated with the splendour of the court. However, Ferdinand’s indulging in this fantasy is abruptly interrupted by Prospero’s injunction to be silent and, shortly after, by Prospero’s sudden recollection of Caliban’s conspiracy. The dissolution of the masque intriguingly displays the entanglement of memory and forgetting in Prospero’s mind and body: after suddenly remembering that he has been oblivious (‘I had forgot’ [4.1.129]), he for a moment forgets himself, as Miranda implicitly remarks: ‘Never till this day / Saw I him touched with anger so distempered’ (4.1.144-45). At the same time, and just

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like Ferdinand, the audience too is made to stop enjoying the spectacle not only because the masque is dismantled but also because they realise that the ‘picture’ they have been contemplating is not the one they had expected. Since, as often noted, the structure of this Shakespearean masque reverses the usual disruption/harmony structure to be found in most early Jacobean masques,42 the memory of contemporary audiences familiar with this popular genre was most likely unsettled, in line with the perplexing movement and transformation emphasised in all instances of the fixed past in this play. It is not surprising then that, given such a context, Gonzalo’s proposal to entrust the memory of the vicissitudes described in this play to ‘lasting pillars’ (5.1.208) engraved with gold should be distrusted. Instead, the fading away of Prospero’s art and the vanishing of the play itself into thin air in the conclusion are fully consistent with the play’s fascination with the watery metaphors of oblivion. Against any rigid conception of memory—whether embodied in a monument, a painful recollection or in statue-like bodies— The Tempest offers itself as an island that condenses the present moment and the present play on the background of a liquid past and future. Much like human life, which Shakespeare famously describes as ‘rounded with a sleep’ (4.1.158), our memory of the play will be animated by forgetfulness as well as by the resurfacing of its traces in unpredictable manners. What remains is, in Michael Carlson’s words, the ‘ghosting’ of The Tempest, namely its performative echoes.43 Rather than creating bodies of stone, the kind of memory Shakespeare adumbrates in his last major play is aptly shaped to take the challenge of the ‘insubstantial pageant’ (4.1.155) and fully equipped to stride into modernity.

Works cited Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers. Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (New York/London: Routledge, 1992). Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (1977), trans. by Helen Weaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Jonathan Baldo, ‘Exporting Oblivion in The Tempest’, Modern Language Quarterly 56 (1995): 111-144. 42 See for example Walch, ‘“What’s past is prologue”. Metatheatrical Memory and Transculturation in “The Tempest”’. 43 Carlson, The Haunted Stage, p. 95.

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———, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories. Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (London/New York: Routledge, 2012). Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory. Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001). Michael Carlson, The Haunted Stage. The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2003). Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Pietro Corsi, The Enchanted Loom. Chapters in the History of Neuroscience (Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Priamusis dead. Memorial Repetition in Marlowe and Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. by Peter Holland, pp. 63-84. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) William E. Engel, Death and Drama in Renaissance England. Shades of Memory (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). William E. Engel (ed.), The Memory Arts in Renaissance England. A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Roma Gill, ‘Marlowe’s Virgil: Dido Queene of Carthage’, The Review of English Studies 28, 110 (1977): 141-155. Christopher Ivic, Grant Williams (eds.), Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Lethe’s Legacies (London/New York: Routledge, 2004). Hester Lee-Jeffries, Shakespeare and Memory (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Isabel Karremann, The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare’s Late Work (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Christopher Marlowe, ‘The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage’, in The Complete Plays, ed. by John Barry Staene (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Michael O’Neill, ‘Remembrance and Revenge. Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest’, in Johnson and Shakespeare, ed. by Ian Donaldson, pp. 35-56 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1983). Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Stanley Lombardo (Cambridge, MA: Hacklett, 2010). Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London: Dight, 1612). Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre. Recollection, Properties, and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Greta Perletti, ‘“A Thing like Death”. Medical Representations of Female Bodies in Shakespeare’s Plays’, Gender Studies 12, 1 (2013): 93-111. Kaara L. Peterson, Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare’s England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

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Malabika Sarkar, ‘The Magic of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Renaissance Studies 12, 2 (June 1998): 251-260. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. by Gwynne Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. by Katherine Duncan Jones (London: Arden, 1997). William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Arden, 1999). William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006). William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. by John Pitcher (London: Arden, 2010). Bruce R. Smith, ‘Speaking what we feel about King Lear’, in Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. by Peter Holland, pp. 23-42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London: Penguin, 2003). Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, John Franklin Mowery, Heather Wolfe, ‘Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly 55, 4 (2004): 379-419. Garrett A. Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). John Sutton, ‘Body, Mind, and Order. Local Memory and the Control of Mental Representation in Medieval and Renaissance Sciences of the Self’, in 1543 and All That. Image and Word, Change and Continuity in the Proto-Scientific Revolution, ed. by Guy Freeland and Anthony Corones, pp. 116-146 (Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer, 2000). Ramie Targoff, ‘Love after Death in the English Renaissance’, in Love after Death. Concepts of Posthumous Love in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Bernhard Jussenand Ramie Rargoff, pp. 147-166 (Berlin/Munich/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015). Evelyn Tribble, ‘“The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time”: The Tempest and Memory’, College Literature 33, 1 (2006): 151-168. Guenter Walch, ‘“What’s past is prologue”. Metatheatrical Memory and Transculturation in “The Tempest”’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. by Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems, pp. 223-238 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Harald Weinrich, Lethe. The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2004). Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre. Recollection, Properties, and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Ark, 1984).

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About the author Greta Perletti is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Trento, Italy. Her research interests focus on the interaction between literary and scientific discourse. In addition to several articles and chapter, she has published a monograph on Victorian mental sciences and culture (Le ferite della memoria. Il ritorno dei ricordi nella cultura vittoriana, Bergamo University Press, 2008), a monograph on pulmonary consumption and the making of the interesting self in the nineteenth century (Il mal gentile. La malattia polmonare nell’immaginario moderno, Bergamo University Press, 2012) and has co-edited with Raul Calzoni the volume Monstrous Anatomies in Nineteenth-Century German and British Culture (Vandenhoech&Ruprecht Unipress, 2015).

2.

Translated Bodies: A ‘Cartographic’ Approach Silvia Romani

Abstract This contribution uses a contemporary comparandum, namely Antonia Byatt’s story The Stone Woman (2003), to think about the ancient idea that the petrification of a female body is not simply the result of a divine intervention or a magical act. On the contrary, this should be understood as the materialisation, the incarnation of an emotional petrification that derives from an inner trauma. To support this hypothesis, an analysis is offered of some case studies taken from ancient myths (the cases of Aglauros, Caenis and Ariadne), which show how the petrification of the body often occurs at a delicate moment in the growth phase of a young woman: that of the transition from childhood to adulthood. Keywords: Classical heritage; metamorphosis; female myths; ancient biological theories

‘The challenge lies in thinking about processes rather than concepts […]. The point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become, how to represent mutations, changes and transformations, rather than Being in its classical modes.’1 This is what Rosi Braidotti claims at the opening of her Metamorphoses: Towards a Material Theory of Becoming. It might be a matter of dispute what exactly a ‘classical way’ of being really is, but in any case, we can take Braidotti’s manifesto as a good starting point for a reflection devoted to petrification. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the most static of human transformations—i.e. petrification—is also the most challenging, the most fluctuating and kinetic sort of 1 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, Introduction.

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chI02

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metamorphosis. Taking Braidotti’s clue, I would like to concentrate on the role of processes in the construction of a mythological self. As Forbes Irving observes in his Metamorphosis in Greek Myth, petrification requires a specific definition within the multifaceted regnum of metamorphosis in Greek mythology:2 as petrification permanently fixes an object (and a stony person) in a place, being petrified is often described in terms of being rooted to the ground. At the same time, transformation into stone represents the final destination of a human being or an animal; it is the inanimate exitus of a living creature. For this reason, petrification shows a proximity to the Underworld that singles it out from other kinds of metamorphoses: it is a memorial of a dead person, a step towards eternity.3 People who get transformed into animals, trees or flowers are, sooner or later, destined to death: only stones, marble statues, are meant to last forever. So people turned into stones remain among us for all to see, to remember the animate being they were before: they are, as Forbes Irving points out, a continuing anomaly, a compromise between an inanimate substance and the human form, between men (and animals) and the other world. 4 Petrification is a contradictory status: kinetic process/movement on the one hand and immobility on the other. The best illustration of this permanent anomaly is the narrative of the Teumessian fox and the dog of king Cephalus, as fully depicted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses VII and in Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses (41).5 It tells of a prodigious dog, which is Minos’ gift to Prokris, Cephalus’ wife, that no prey can escape, and of a special fox that no hunting dog is able to catch. Both the dog and the fox will run all around the walls of Thebes until a God (Zeus in Antoninus’ narrative) stops their running and transforms Cephalus’ dog and its prey into stones: medio duo marmora campo / adspicio (‘I see the two of them petrified in the middle of the field’), Ovid says (l1. 790-791). This peculiar kind of metamorphosis does not involve any change of shape: a stony dog will have the appearance of a living dog, and a stony fox of a living fox. The rather more teasing change is in the relation between movement and the absence of movement, between running and lying fixed to the ground. You could still have the feeling of a hunt in progress while looking at these two stony animals transformed into stones: fugere hoc, illud captare putares 2 Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis, pp. 140 ff. 3 See the groundbreaking Vernant, The Figuration of the Invisible. 4 Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis, pp. 140 ff passim. 5 On the Teumessian fox and the dog of Cephalus, see Epigonoi fr. 5 (Bernabé); Aristodemus FrGrHist 383 F 2; Istros FrGrHist 334 F65; Ovid, Metamorphoses 7, 767 ff.; ps. Eratosth., Cat. 33; Apollod. II, 4, 7; Antoninus Liberalis 41.

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(‘You’d dare to say that one was still escaping, the other one was still trying to capture’), Ovid remarks (l. 791). They are grounded, translated into stones in the acme of their running, like the Phaeacian ship petrified by Poseidon while taking Odysseus home to Ithaka: when the vessel ‘in its light coursing had almost made the land, [Poseidon] turned her into a rock firmly rooted upon the bottom of the sea’,6 a rock of the same size and shape as the Phaeacian ship. Here, again, speed stands against immobility: a magic ship, capable of reaching its destination in a heartbeat, paralysed by the gods, like insects trapped in amber. Various commentators have pointed out the role of divine portent in these kinds of stories: without Zeus, maybe the dog and its prey would have run around Thebes forever. Without Poseidon, the Phaeacian sailors would never have stopped taking the survivors of a shipwreck back home. So we may reasonably infer that petrification is the consequence of a direct contact with some god or of the intrusion by some supernatural spirit/daimon.7 Most victims, as we should call them, of metamorphoses, suffer from a sudden, violent intervention from above. In most mythological narratives this is a matter of fact, but what the petrifications of the dog-fox and of the ship really suggest is that petrification is also about revealing a character or at least a behaviour. By means of metamorphosis, the author of the story (the poet Ovid in particular) can bring forth the hidden essence of a personality in a ‘visual’ form, closely related to the physicality of the body. The attitude of the gods to human/animal characters and objects in the story is not, therefore, what we should be looking at. Rather, we should focus on the characteristics of translated bodies, especially on the threshold that divides what the medium of stone necessarily extinguishes—namely, the animate substance inside living bodies—from what, on the contrary, stone preserves for eternity thanks to its monumental function.8 Ovid’s Metamorphoses is all about bodies, Charles Segal claims in his fundamental study on Ovid’s metamorphic bodies.9 Ovid is a ‘poetical anthropologist’, Richard Lanham adds in his Motives of Eloquence.10 Metamorphoses is indeed a poem whose main subject is the body, its materiality. Human bodies and animal bodies are expertly designed and organised as a 6 Homer, Odyssey 13 ll. 154-164; trans. by Colonel T.E. Lawrence (i.e. the legendary Lawrence of Arabia). 7 Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis, pp. 140-141. 8 On the importance of the paradigm of movement for petrification tales, see Macrì, Pietre viventi, pp. 5-40; Johnson, The Body in the Mind; Murray, Bodies in Flux, pp. 80-96. 9 Segal, Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies, p. 39 and passim. 10 Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence, pp. 59-60 f. (New Haven 1976, 59 f.).

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map for a definition of the human condition, of male and female identities. Ovid’s narratives are thus the best lens through which to look at petrified bodies in classical mythology. Just compare the narrative virtuosity with which Ovid’s poem tells the story of the marvellous dog and the magic fox, and the version from Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses, where only three words—they became stones—are given over to the change. Antoninus Liberalis, an Ancient Greek grammarian who probably flourished under the Antonine Emperors, offers a useful counterpart to Ovid’s poem if we want to analyse the literary genre of myths devoted to transformations of human/animal bodies. Nonetheless, and any criticism of his prose apart, Antoninus devotes no attention to the stages of metamorphosis, to the single fragments of the process as Ovid does. Ovid’s is a world of pervasive corporeality, where the boundaries between human and non-human, between liquid and solid bodies, between inner and outer are extremely and dangerously weak. He goes a step further than the revolutionary approach of Lucretius’ poem but stops short of entering the chaotic explosion of Lucan’s narratives, the ‘dissolution of corporeal boundaries’.11 In Ovid’s world of shifting boundaries, a taxonomical approach to the body comes into being: as Charles Segal suggests, male and female bodies do not receive the same treatment. If Ovid’s depictions emphasise the vulnerability, the porosity of the body, it is certainly true that the translated male bodies are totally different from the female. Segal is right when he insists on the immobilisation of female bodies as depicted in Ovidian tales: they acquire a statue-like pose that would legitimate the male erotic attitudes towards these translated heroines.12 The most convincing parallel is the story of Perseus and Andromeda as narrated in Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: here the hero who defeated Medusa, while flying to the Ethiopian land, forgets to flap his wings, touched by the sight of the poor Andromeda chained to the rock, her body immobilised in a statue-like pose. Only her waving hair and a warm tear on her face reveal that she is alive: nisi quod levis aura capillos / moverat et tepido manabant lumina fletu, /marmoreum ratus esse opus (ll. 673-675). This Ovidian picture, with its exotic scenery—the Ethiopian landscape, the sea storm hitting the rock where Andromeda is chained, the monster that threatens the maiden—is pervaded by an erotic allure. The body of the maiden is completely exposed to Perseus’s gaze: a ‘statue-like spectacle for a male viewer’. Andromeda cannot even try to protect herself from male 11 Segal, Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies, p. 10. 12 Ibid., p. 11.

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desire (at once that of Perseus and of the reader), and she can only cry to cover at least her eyes to avoid seeing, given that she cannot avoid being seen.13 Alongside Andromeda, the parallel of Philomela, Procne’s sister, violated by the Thrachian king Tereus, Procne’s husband, is quite convincing as well.14 In the savage Thrachian land, a sadistic Tereus immobilises Philomela, grasps her hair, forces her hands behind her back in order to rape her while she is chained. He will become a hoopoe, she a swallow. These similes imply some sort of erotic treatment of those stories of metamorphosis that involve female bodies: Andromeda and Philomela are maidens who look like statues as the famous statue of the sculptor Pygmalion resembles a young girl who will actually be transformed into a real maiden by Aphrodite. If, again with Segal, we assume that the female body in Metamorphoses is characterised by its status as a visual object by being prey (the fox in our first tale), by its passivity, we are pushed back to the traditional male/female hierarchies. If we place the dichotomy between movement and immobilisation alongside the male-female polarisations of these narratives, what we seem to be getting is a binary taxonomy: male movement against female immobilisation.

I do not want to be soft any more ‘At first she did not think of stones’: this is the incipit of a relatively littleknown short story by Antonia Byatt (b. 1936), an English novelist and poet whose peculiar and elegant style is the medium through which she depicts a world often caught in between fantasy and reality, where the fantastic itself oscillates between being an alternative to everyday life or the eruption of psychosis from a land within the self. It is what we may call an Ovidian style of writing, a brilliant way of interweaving fantasy and reality, playing with the unintelligible aspects of psychological processes. This is the case of A Stone Woman, a short story published on 13 October 2003 in The New Yorker and then in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.15 Ines, the protagonist, is a researcher for an etymological dictionary who experiences the sorrowful loss of a female figure: her mother or an 13 See Metamorphoses 4, ll. 663-762; Segal, Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies, p. 19. 14 See Metamorphoses 6, ll. 453-674; this very complex and gloomy tale has a long history beginning with Sophocles’ Tereus (now lost) and climaxing in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, based on the Ovidian story. 15 Antonia S. Byatt, ‘A Stone Woman’, in Little Black Book of Stories (London: Chattus &Windus, 2003 = Vintage Books 2004), pp. 128-183.

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older lover, as we infer from the first pages of the story. The psychological reaction to this loss goes well beyond deep sorrow; rather, it involves a physical transformation, a metamorphosis from human into stone. The depth of her pain slowly transforms Ines from the inside, like a karstic phenomenon spreading from the navel and the belly to the whole body. Ruddy veins, white flesh, and soft skin cede to the explosions of fire opal, black opal, geyserite and hydrophane. It takes her weeks of patient watching before glimpsing, somewhat to her surprise, ‘a bubble of rosy barite crystals breaking through a vein of fluorspar, and opening into the form known as a desert rose, bunched with the ore flowers of blue john’.16 The smooth, ‘porous’ and vulnerable female body has metamorphosed into the mineral hardness of the petrified body, from softness to hardness. In her wanderings around the city emptied by a coming storm, Ines follows the silent paths of a graveyard, where the stony people of the deceased appear silent and motionless at the same time. Here she meets an Icelander, a stonecutter whom she will follow to the ends of the world, to Iceland where the earth is still young and riven through by metamorphic mineral processes. Her biggest fear, Ines confesses to the Icelandic stonecutter, is to be motionless…17 but in spite of her worst fear, she will end her mortal life dancing like a fairy queen with her new stony body and laughing in the wind. As we can easily infer from this brief synopsis, Byatt’s tale is an Ovidian manifesto of sorts: a metamorphosis in slow motion in which the active processes of becoming and of transformation pass through deep sorrow and the most extreme change of the self. Ines seems to have stopped living the day her mother/lover died: she will not be a young woman anymore, as the text points out: ‘Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman in an instant’. Ines’ metamorphosis into stone is cadenced by the theme of death: an old woman’s death, Ines’ death, always accompanied, in the metamorphosis, by a deep fear of becoming motionless. Ines’ petrification is a visual manifesto of an inner transformation into stone. It is the terrible distress she has gone through that produces the transformation of her body into a colourful mineral map of her deepest emotional life. Through a narration that insists on each and every moment of the change, Byatt interweaves physical changes and emotional processes so that, at the end, we are convinced that petrification is nothing but a visual representation of a psychological metamorphosis. The reason for this petrification has nothing to do with a physical trauma: it is a deep inner pain that generates 16 Ibid., p. 142. 17 Ibid., p. 158.

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the transformation, and this is the main point of comparison between Ines’ metamorphosis and the mythological petrifications from the Ovidian oeuvre. To further illustrate this similarity, we may just recall, per antithesis, the well-known transformation of Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s seminal novella The Metamorphosis (1915), in which the travelling salesman Samsa awakens and finds himself transformed into a giant insect (a sort of horrible vermin). The novella explores the inner metamorphosis of Samsa’s self, the emotional transformation he has to go through in order to deal with his new monstrous habitus. In Kafka’s story, the psychological transformation follows and is determined by the physical change; ‘insectification’ is the reason behind a psychological change. Apart from the ‘emotional’ side, another element of continuity between Ines’ stonification and the mythological narrative is worth pointing out, namely the emphasis on the binomial pair softness-rigidity in the transformation process. The whole world that surrounded the dead old lady of Byatt’s novella was soft, smooth. After her death, Ines has to pack ‘it into plastic sacks—creamy silks and floating lawns, velvet and muslin, lavender crêpe de chine, beads of pearl and garnet’.18 When this creamy world is discarded, Ines will notice her body becoming a land of sharp edges: ‘Where she had been soft and flat, she was all plumpings and hollows, like an old cushion.’19 As in Ines’ tale, the Ovidian cartography of bodies’ transformations into stone usually plays on the threshold between softness and rigidity and, respectively, between the female and the male body. One parallel can stand for all: the marvellous story of Caeneus, narrated by the ‘hero of heroes’, Nestor of Pylos, the old and sage warrior who, in the Iliad, represents the inner storyteller. At the beginning of Book XII of Metamorphoses, Nestor is telling his comrades, gathered at a banquet in the midst of the Trojan war (even Achilles was there!), the marvellous tale of Caeneus, in ancient times the only warrior who was able to bear a thousand strokes without being injured; a macho paradigm, brave, strong and invulnerable. However, as Nestor remarks, Caeneus used to be a girl in his former life: at ipse olim patientem vulnera mille / corpore non laeso Perrhaebum Caenea vidi […] quoque id mirum magis esset in illo, / femina natus erat (‘And I did see one time Caeneus from Thessaly, a man able to bear unharmed a thousand strokes […] and yet, strange to say, by birth he was a girl’; 12, ll. 171-175). Raped by Poseidon and shocked by his divine assault, the former Caenis, the most beautiful girl in Thessaly, asked for a compensation for the violence 18 Ibid., pp. 129-130. 19 Ibid., p. 132.

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perpetrated by the god: a body capable of sustaining all assaults and impossible to penetrate. She was granted her wish to become invulnerable and to be a man (da, femina ne sim, ‘let me not being a woman anymore’; l. 202), a warrior whose peculiarity was precisely his body’s invulnerability. Told in the middle of the quasi-epic battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths, Caeneus’ tale is the story of a liberation from the vulnerability of the female body: Caeneus cannot be defeated even by the super-macho equine version of the Omeric heroes, the Centaurs. You can even find a misogynous interlude (ll. 470-476), with the Centaurs playing the role of a bunch of savage soldiers laughing at the invincible Caeneus, whom only a pile of tree trunks over his head would kill. Buried under the mountain of trunks, Caeneus, with his marble-like body, will transform himself again and become the Phoenix. As Charles Segal points out, this story ‘provides the strongest possible negative definition of the female body. It is penetrable, as the male is not (12, l. 166), is subject to iniuria, outrage (l. 202), and to rape’.20 At the same time, we are gradually led to a gendered formulation of the set of metamorphic tales devoted to petrification in the Ovidian narrative. Caenis, as a vulnerable girl, was porous and open (to male assaults in particular); as Caeneus, he/she is hard and cannot be penetrated: Placa facit gemitus in corpore marmoris icti, / fractaque dissiluit percusso lamina callo (‘The flesh resounded like a marble block, the keen blade shattered on the unyielding skin’; ll. 487-488). Caeneus’ body is callous… as Ines’ body was during her metamorphosis. The emphasis on ‘changes and transformations’, to recall Braidotti’s words, allows Ovid to explore every single aspect of the metamorphosis in order to emphasise the very importance of the process. Sometimes the poet shows the body, the inner part of human anatomy taking over the mind, the emotional life. This is the case of a well-known tale in the Metamorphoses: the story of Aglauros, princess of Athens, who, jealous of Mercury’s love for her sister Herse, more beautiful than she is, tries to stop the god entering the Athenian palace.21 Aglauros’ hybris: Aglauros’ negative attitude causes divine revenge; Envy, a supernatural monstrous form enters Athens, withers the fields, dries the grass and finds her way to Aglauros’ bedroom and to the princess’ body. 20 Segal, Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies, p. 24. 21 A papyrus has revealed that Ovid didn’t invent Aglauros’ story (Henrichs, Cronache Ercolanensi, pp. 33-43); Apollodorus mentions the myth without offering details about petrification (Apollod. III, 14, 3). An interesting parallel is the story of Karia and her sisters (Servius ad Buc. 8, 29). On Aglauros’ story as a kind of iconic myth in the construction of the Athenian identity, see Burkert, Kekropidensage und Arrhephoria, pp. 1-25; Wimmel, Aglauros, pp. 326-333; Romani, Ragazze pietrose, pp. 45-63.

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Aglauros’ mental suffering is described through metaphors that visualise her emotional life in an extremely physical way: Envy transfers her moral monstrosity to her victim, touching her breast with a hand tainted with rust and blowing into her a mortal poison, which spreads a pitch-like venom through Aglauros’ body, through her veins, her bones, her lungs (II, 798-801). The tormented girl suffers from a physical and a psychological disease at the same time. When Mercury knocks at the door of the palace, he finds a creature sitting on the threshold, trying to prevent him from entering: Aglauros is still a human being when she meets Mercury, but she is partly transformed as well. The god won’t need his famous power of enchantment because the transformation is already under way: But the joints of her knees grow stiff and the cold lips through the toes and fingernails, and her veins grow pale with the loss of blood. And just as an evil, incurable cancer is wont to creep in and add the uninjured parts (of the body) to those that have been corrupted, so the deadly wintry cold little by little comes into her breast and closes off the paths of life and breath (II, 823-828).22

The neck is now made of stone (of saxum), and a pale signum is sitting at the door instead of an Athenian princess: a statue non albus, says Ovid, not ‘white’, because of the mind’s pollution (Book II, 830-832). Aglauros’ story is full of divine presences: Mercury from the beginning to the end, and Minerva, whose disappointment at Aglauros’ behaviour is the instigation for Envy entering the narrative. Nonetheless, these gods have an ancillary function within the metamorphosis. It is worth remembering how Mercury’s rabdos, the ‘rod’, is a traditional magic tool for petrification: a few lines before introducing Aglauros’ tale, Ovid narrated the well-known episode of the theft of Apollo’s cattle by Hermes/Mercury. In the Metamorphoses version of the story, we have a man called Battos from Pylos, the informer, who accepts a reward from a disguised Hermes and reveals the truth about the famous theft. The god wanted to test Battos’ loyalty, and having found out his duplicity, the rod in hand, changes him into the rocks that bear his name: the watch posts of Battos.23 In Aglauros’ narrative, Mercury does not need any magical tools: laughing is enough. He laughs cruelly at Aglauros’ ridiculous opposition and he quietly 22 English translation in Segal, Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies, p. 15. 23 See the Hesiodic fragment 256 M.-W. (Antoninus Liberalis 23); Homeric Hymn to Hermes ll. 88-93; Apollod. III, 10, 2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 2, ll. 685-707.

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waits for her stonification. Ovid conveys the horror of the story in the emotional process: the young princess has always been a stone, the poet suggests: petrification is only a visualisation, an intensification of an already existing stone-like state of mind. The pervasive use of stone metaphors in the narrative suggests the necessity of either an inhuman or cruel character or attitude as a precondition for the explosion of a metamorphic process if a stone body is involved. As well as Aglauros, we may recall Anaxarete’s story. This is a curious narrative, an aetiological myth that explains the origin of a widespread iconographic topos: the so-called Venus Prospiciens or Parakyptousa Aphrodite.24 Ovid re-envisages the story, depicting the extremely beautiful Cypriot maiden, Anaxarete, transformed into stone by Aphrodite while she is looking out the window to scorn the funeral of her poor suitor Iphis, who had tried in vain to persuade her to accept his courtship. When the beautiful maiden mocks his funeral, she is changed into a statue-like stone, petrified in the window’s oval. She was even harder than iron and stone, remarks the poet: durior et ferro […] et saxo (Book XIV, 712-713). According to Ovid, the statue was preserved at Salamis in Cyprus, in the temple of Venus Prospiciens. As a frivolous digression, we may observe that Cyprus seems to be the place where this pervasive metamorphic corporeality finds its way out: Cyprus also provides the setting for Pygmalion’s story, the most important and well-known case of the Ovidian ‘triumph of bodies’ as well as a necessary counterpart to all petrification narratives in ancient mythology, some kind of oxymoron to the transformation of Anaxarete.25 Although Pygmalion’s tale is beyond the scope of this paper, it may be worth recalling that the coming to life of his lover-statue restores the familiar hierarchies between the male and the female bodies, and the fruitful distinction between softness and hardness, vulnerability and invulnerability.

Petrified girls (and an old mum as well) In his quasi-epyllion or small-epic poem, i.e. the sixty-fourth poem, Catullus pushes to its limits the form of the Hellenistic epyllion and the ekphrastic 24 See Metamorphoses 14, ll. 698-758; Antoninus Liberalis 39 (with different names); Hermesianax fr. 4 Powell. See especially Bettini, The Portrait of the Lover, pp. 147-157, with notes; Fauth, Aphrodite Parakyptousa; Herbig, Aphrodíte Parakýptousa, pp. 917-922. 25 We may also recall Propoitides’ myth: the stony-hearted Propoitides are changed into stones because they have desecrated Venus’ gifts by becoming the first prostitutes. Ovid is the only author to have narrated this story (Metamorphoses 10, 238-242). The exemplum of the Propoitides is the very reason for Pygmalion’s disgust for women.

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technique (or digression), describing a visual work of art: a statue-like Ariadne, petrified after Theseus has abandoned her at Naxos, embroidered onto another visual work of art, the coverlet of Peleus and Thetis’ nuptial bed, a masterpiece of embroidery, a textile artefact described as a masterpiece of sculpture. Catullus’ revolutionary synaesthesia interweaves three different levels of sensorial experience: words, images and sculpture, each and all involved in this experimentum. Ariadne’s famous unfortunate fate is set exactly in the middle of the Catullian Carmen (ll. 50 ff.), encapsulated inside the main narrative devoted to the mythical marriage of Peleus and Thetis. This is the most celebrated Ariadne, the young heroine left alone while sleeping by a shameful Theseus. And it is the mythological figure mostly remembered even by those who know nothing about her myth, because her silhouette has stuck in everybody’s mind: namque fluentisono prospectans litore Diae (‘And, looking out from the wave-deep-resounding shore of Dia’; l. 52), her arm over the head, immobilised while watching the horizon where Theseus’ ship is leaving. The embroidered narrative on the coverlet starts with a pervasive feeling of anger, grief and confusion: Ariadne awakens and finds that Theseus has left her alone (ll. 52-75). The reader has to feel this anguish, share the emotional distress before ‘seeing’ the young maiden. Even the manipulating artist, as Rebecca Armstrong calls Catullus,26 seems captured by Ariadne’s sorrow (ll. 61, 71), so that when Ariadne is transformed into a statue-like Bacchant, we are already accustomed to her feelings: saxea ut effigies bacchantis, prospicit, ‘like a stone statue of a Bacchant, she looks out’ (l. 61), the poet says. And while she is transforming into a stone, all her garments, the smooth band around her white breast, the headband on her blond hair, all that is soft slips down from her stony body, as we saw happen in Byatt’s novella. The visual transformation shows forth her deep distress, so that petrification seems to be crystallising a shocking change in her life. In her statue-like mood, Ariadne realises that her days as Minos’ daughter in Crete will never come back. At the same time, as the smoothness of her maiden’s days is passing away, she knows that Theseus will never marry her and he will never take her to Athens. Catullus’ revolutionary approach to the narrative topos of female desertion becomes a leitmotiv of Ariadne’s tales as well as of a whole set of stories about young ladies abandoned by their lovers. A petrifying river will flow from this first archetypical Ariadne embroidered on a coverlet down to Ludovico Ariosto or to Marguerite Yourcenar, transforming the flexible bodies of heroines into statues of stone. 26 Armstrong, Cretan Women, p. 191.

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The Ovidian Ariadne,27 who is deeply indebted to her Catullan counterpart, restages this petrification, adding a more ‘metaphorical’ attitude when she becomes a Bacchant seated on a rock, a stone maiden (lapis ipsa fuit, 50), in Heroides 10, the tenth chapter of the first collection of fictional letters written by mythological women to their lovers, expressing their sadness at being separated from them. Ariadne’s tale is a pervasive narrative within the Ovidian oeuvre, but here, in the fictional gallery where the ancient heroines have their portraits, Ariadne is struck by an unbearable pain consuming her mind and her body; it is both an inner flow and a physical illness, since the poison of the rock she is sitting on slowly turns the soft anatomy of the maiden into stone as if by a chemical reaction. Such an open comparison with the Catullan simile plays with the antecedent by separating the image into two components: Ariadne is moving madly like a Bacchant (l. 48), but she is as motionless as a stone at the same time (ll. 49-50). This kinetic oxymoron represents a female body torn between movement and the immobility of a petrified heart. This is the very meaning of Ariadne’s myth as well: a never-ending struggle between immobility and movement. Should I stay or should I go, Minos’ daughter seems to be thinking, considering how dangerous the future she dreams of with Theseus is by comparison with the quiet life in the Minoan palace in Crete. Many, many years later, when Marguerite Yourcenar creates her own Ariadne in the pièce Qui n’a pas son minotaure? (1963), the Minoan maiden will be petrified on the ‘mineral masterpiece’ of Naxos island. Ariadne’s reaction to her affliction marks a new way of depicting inner psychological afflictions; it is the explosion of subjectivity through the body and its metamorphosis. Returning once more to the Metamorphoses, we are confronted with some sort of psychosomatic meaning of the metamorphic process, which is conceived as an instrumentum through which an explosive feeling totally out of control comes to the surface and can be perceived. It is a rather modern way of considering the relation between body and soul. Without forgetting the role of divine interventions in metamorphic tales, it is definitely true that a transformed body is often accompanied by a change of mind, by a shocking event, by a deep distress. Despite the magical nature of bodily transformations and besides the role played by human behaviours 27 As Armstrong points out (p. 221), Ovid follows Ariadne’s f ictional biography along the narrative line in later poems, so that we have Ariadne freshly deserted in Heroides 10, the meeting with Bacchus in Ars Amatoria 1 and a little cameo in Metamorphoses 8, ll. 172-182.

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inside the stories, what seems to be emerging is a very influential idea of the inner self, especially when female bodies and petrification are involved. Inside the Metamorphoses, one can investigate the contiguity between the human body and the materiality of stone, and the proximity, not only on a metaphorical level, between the anatomy of men and women blocked by pain, envy and anger, and the rigidity of stone. ‘We could become stones for a bad attitude as well’, says one of Andromeda’s suitors while Perseus is transforming him into stone, thanks to Medusa’s magical head (Metamorphoses V, ll. 195-196). And the Ariadne portrayed by Ovid in the Heroides seems entrapped in that letalis hiems, a ‘winter of death’, that grips Aglauros as well before she becomes a stone (Metamorphoses II, l. 823). The most convincing parallel is a very famous myth of petrification, maybe the most famous: the tale of Niobe as depicted again by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. It first appears as an exemplum in the Iliad (24, ll. 602 ff.), but the only long account left of the story is Ovid’s (Metamorphoses VI, ll. 146 ff.). The story of Niobe needs special consideration since, in this case, the divine punishment for her ‘boldness of speech’ is the killing of her children: i.e. she claims to be worth more than the goddess Latona, mother of Apollo and Artemis, because she has fourteen children and Latona only a couple of twins. The petrification is the second stage of the story and it is only related to the tremendous grief Niobe experiences when she discovers that her family has been killed by Artemis and Apollo. She will cry so much that she becomes a stone, a mountain. The Niobe mountain is, first of all, a symbol of her deepest grief: the special qualities of this transformed stone are its silence and its stillness. Niobe is a mourning stone, silent and isolated, always between life and death—a sorrowful monument reminding us of the death of Niobe’s children and of the enormous pain of their mother: nullos movet aura capillos, / in vultu color est sine sanguine. […] Nihil est in imagine vivo […] Intra quoque viscera saxum est. […] et lacrimas etiam nunc marmora manant: ‘Her hair is motionless, her face pale. Nothing in this image is alive. Even her flesh is made of stone […] and her marble image is always distilling tears (even when she is transformed into a mountain)’ (VI, 303-312).28 Looking at Niobe’s sad metamorphosis, we have no doubt: divine punishment and petrification are often different matters (we can put Aglauros among these similes as well): feelings that lay in the inner part of the self, scarcely known and often misunderstood, find their way to the surface. 28 See also Pherecydes FGrHist 3 F38; Apollod. III, 5, 6; Hellanicus FGrHist 3 F 38; cfr. Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis, pp. 294-297; Macrì, Pietre viventi, pp. 41-62; Romani, Ragazze pietrose.

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Interiority becomes something you can see, feel and touch: psychological processes are not something impalpable or tenuous anymore. They are now written on the human body, and the body is a cartographical representation of something that is inside it. Subjectivity asserts itself as part of human physiology. It often happens when the psyche, to use the Greek term, cannot be contained within the precinct of the body anymore. It happens when subjectivity is out of control: too much envy (Aglauros), too much cruelty (Anaxarete), too much love (Ariadne), too much grief (Niobe). Sometimes, this surfacing of the inner self through petrification comes at a very peculiar stage in life, so that we can speak of a coming-of-age story pattern. The petrification suffered by young maidens who will never become adult women is quite special and forms a genre apart. They are known as the ‘girls of Artemis’, by which we mean a specific set of narratives where transformation into stone is specifically related with the process of growing up. Britomartis is one of these: Antoninus Liberalis (40) tells how Britomartis, the virgo from Gortyna, Crete, after escaping Minos who wanted to rape her, comes to Aegina on the boat of some fishermen who have saved her from Minos. When one of the fishermen tries to rape her, she flees and disappears. She will be back in a statue-like form in the temple of Artemis.29 We can also mention the story of Aspalis, a beautiful young girl who hanged herself so as not to be raped by Tartarus, a cruel tyrant of Melite in Pthia. Her brother kills the awful tyrant and throws his body into the river, but Aspalis’ body has vanished and will reappear only as a cult statue next to Artemis’, inside the temple of the goddess.30 We have plenty of parallels for these kinds of narratives: a large set of stories of young girls who will never become women. Here petrification is a way of freezing the growing-up process: these unfortunate girls will never be wives, mothers or old women. They will be forever young, in their new stony life, forever stuck in a time when the body knows nothing about illness, pain and old age. They will always be perfect because petrification stops their decay; it stops the blood flowing in their veins and it freezes their biological processes.31 29 See also Pausanias III, 14, 2; Diodorus Siculus 5, 76. For an index of sources, see De Lazzer, Il suicidio delle vergini, pp. 95-96; Greek heroines and their divinization in Dowden, Death and the Maiden, and Larson, Greek Heroine Cults, pp. 23-24; on this very broad subject, see also Willets, Cretan Cults; Gallini, Katapontismos; Seppilli, Sacralità delle acque, pp. 130-131; Romani, Il mito di Arianna, pp. 103-108, 140-144. 30 Antoninus Liberalis 13, quoting Nicander. 31 See Romani, Il mito di Arianna, pp. 129-184 with notes.

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The anonymous ancient author of the peri parthenion,32 the manual par excellence of young girls’ diseases, warns that too long a pause on the threshold that separates the adolescent from the adult age can be unnatural and dangerous. When it is time to be a wife, you cannot be a maiden anymore, the peri parthenion author asserts; this unnatural pause causes a sort of maiden’s madness: fever, quivers, homicidal mania, suicidal tendencies. These manifestations are accompanied by physical dramatic changes: when the upper parts of the body get filled with blood, the heart grows numb and then itself stiffens, while the arms and the feet become stone: the ‘petrified mood’ of Aglauros in Ovidian narrative. Medical disease and metamorphosis are, of course, not equivalent; still, considering this contiguous vocabulary, we may detect a clear familiarity between that putrid lethargy, a prelude to mental disease and suicide, and the black fluid that inundates Aglauros’ or Anaxatere’s bodies. We should maybe create a new category of plastic arts that is not the product of an artistic creation but the effect of a sui generis evolutionary process that mineralises these petrif ied lives, these bodies blocked at the very moment they have to transform. What we have here is a perfect stop-motion of a natural condition that will no longer be alive. Within this frame, the petrification has a cameo-like function: it crystallises the edge of existence—the time of youth, the maternity status (Niobe)—and it preserves it for the future.33

Works cited Valeria Andò, ‘La verginità come follia. il Peri Partheniôn ippocratico’, Quaderni storici 75 (1990): 715-737. Rebecca Armstrong, Cretan Women. Pasiphae, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait of the Lover (1992), trans. by Laura Gibbs (Berkeley/ Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1999). Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002). 32 See Corpus hippocraticum VIII, 466-470 Littré; see Girard, La femme dans le corpus hippocratique, pp. 69-80; Manuli and Sissa, Madre Materia; Andò, La verginità come follia, pp. 715-737; Flemming and Hanson, Hippocrates, pp. 241-252; King, Hippocrates’ Woman; King, The Disease of Virgins; Romani, Il mito di Arianna, pp. 129-184. 33 See the seminal study by Didi-Huberman, La peinture incarnée.

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Walter Burkert, ‘Kekropidensage und Arrhephoria. Vom Initiationsritus zum Panathenäenfest’, Hermes 94, 1 (1966): 1-25. Kenneth Dowden, Death and the Maiden. Girls’ Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology, (London/New York: Routledge, 1989). Clara Gallini, ‘Katapontismos’, Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 34 (1963): 61-90. Georges Didi-Huberman, La peinture incarnée (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985). Marie-Christine Girard, ‘La femme dans le corpus hippocratique’, Cahiers des Études anciennes 15 (1983): 69-80. Alessandro De Lazzer, Il suicidio delle vergini. Tra folclore e letteratura della Grecia antica (Turin: Ananke, 1997). Wolfgang Fauth, Aphrodite Parakyptousa (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften un der Literatur in Mainz, Abhandlungen der Geistes und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, 1966). Rebecca Flemming and Ann E. Hanson, ‘Hippocrates “Peri Parthenion” Diseases of Young Girls. Text and Translation’, Early Science and Medicine 3, 3 (1998): 241-252. Paul M.C. Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Albert Henrichs, ‘Die Kekropidensage im pHerc. 243. Von Kallimachos zu Ovid’, Cronache Ercolanensi 13 (1983): 33-43. Reinhard Herbig, ‘Aphrodíte Parakýptousa (die Frau im Fenster)’, Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 2 (1927): 917-922. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Thomas E. Lawrence (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence. Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1976). Jennifer Larson, Greek Heroine Cults (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman. Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London/New York: Routledge, 1998). ———, The disease of virgins. Green sickness, chlorosis and the problems of puberty (London/New York: Routledge, 2004). Sonia Macrì, Pietre viventi. I minerali nell’immaginario del mondo antico (Turin: UTET, 2009). Paola Manuli and Giulia Sissa, Madre Materia. Sociologia e biologia della donna greca (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1983). Penelope Murray, ‘Bodies in Flux. Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, in Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings. Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity, ed. by Dominic Montserrat, pp. 80-96 (New York/London: Routledge, 1998).

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Silvia Romani, ‘Ragazze pietrose (ad Ov. Met. II 708-835)’, Annali della Facoltà di lettere di Ferrara 7, 2 (2012): 45-63. Silvia Romani, Il mito di Arianna, with a novella by Maurizio Bettini (Turin: Einaudi, 2015). Charles Segal, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies. Art, Gender, and Violence in the Metamorphoses’, Arion 3, 5, 3 (1998): 9-41. Anita Seppilli, Sacralità delle acque e sacrilegio dei ponti (Palermo: Sellerio, 1990). Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘The Figuration of the Invisible and the Psychological Category of the Double. The Kolossos’ (1965), in Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. by Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort, pp. 321-332 (New York: Zone Books, 2006). Ronald F. Willetts, Cretan Cults and Festivals (London: Routledge, 1962). Walter Wimmel, ‘Aglauros in Ovids Metamorphosen’, Hermes 90 (1962): 326-333.

About the author Silvia Romani is Associate Professor of History of Religions, Anthropology of the Classical World and Mythology at the State University of Milan. Her studies have long concentrated on myth and ritual schemes related to ancient theatre, in particular to Aristophanes. She has also worked on the Homeric Hymns, especially on the Hymn to Hermes. Her writings on female myths and rituals include Nascite speciali, devoted to birth-related behaviours in antiquity (Alessandria, 2004); Il mito di Arianna (Turin, 2015); as well as a volume, with Tommaso Braccini, dedicated to the afterlife in the ancient authors (Una passeggiata nell’Aldilà in compagnia degli antichi, Turin, 2018). Her most recent publications include Arianna. The Pitfalls of Love and Aphrodite. The Springtime of Love (Milan, 2019).

3.

Pantomime in Stone: Performance of the Pose and Animal Camouflage Barbara Grespi

Abstract This essay addresses cinema slapstick stars as figures of the body poised between flesh and stone: by matching the gestures of stone with those both of the statue and of the mineral as such, the silent actor becomes the emblem of how a body can be de-animated in a way that evokes at once certain pathological states and the freezing of a mimetic animal. Analysing in particular Charlie Chaplin’s work with gesture in his first encounters with statues and in the famous “fight” with the marble group of City Lights (1933), the paper interrogates the aesthetic meaning of the pose within the wider process of the de-humanising of the actor’s body as theorised in early film theories, in which one leading model was animal mimicry. Keywords: Statue; mimicry; acting; film theories; slapstick comedy

The gestural expressions of actors and the way in which they interpret the environment and interconnect with objects, positioning the human being in space, express a thought about the body that cinema has continued to elaborate throughout its history. Because of its capacity to produce similarities even among very different entities, imitative gesture in particular has often been discussed in theories of acting and constantly practiced by actors with ever new shades of meaning. The phenomenon of animal camouflage reinterpreted by Roger Caillois in the 1930s can be taken as a paradigm to understand the thought of the body that cinema developed around a very particular form of imitation: that in which the actor takes as a reference point some mineral object, even one that is not itself anthropomorphic. Although Caillois weaves a net of correspondences between the animal and the human, first and foremost

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chI03

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defining mimicry as a form of creativity, he nevertheless tends to keep apart the behaviours of the two kingdoms, distinguishing the empirical and corporeal mode of the animal from the symbolic and rational mode of the human being. As his thesis famously put it, the cellular metamorphoses of the animals represent the biological equivalent of the mythical storytelling elaborated by the humans. Animals are capable of producing a regression toward lower states of life, of simulating death through perfect petrifications that are plausible and in part real in their corresponding to a condition of self-negation, and finally they are able to experiment with invisibility by blending with the environment. These affects acted by the animal body are expressed by humans through art, literature and mythical stories.1 However, the link that Caillois establishes between these two ways of creating is not the most predictable: a myth does not represent the symbolisation of a biological fact; on the contrary, it is the empirical phenomenon which, by stimulating affectivity, leaves its imprint on the imaginary and molds it in its own resemblance. What happens, then, in the field of the performing arts when another body, that of the actor, fills the gap between the empirical and the symbolic, interposing himself as a medium and reincarnating something that was originally already in the body? Even more than theatre and dance, cinema works on a form of embodied imaginary, in which the actor is a medium equipped with many instruments through which to make the Other appear. First among these instruments are the actor’s own gestures, which became crucial especially in silent cinema, where the identity of the character coincided with a corporeal style. Especially in the 1920s, the actor’s practice of passivity and de-individualisation represented an important step toward a modern re-thinking of the body, in which clear contrasts (between life and death, subject and object, animate and inanimate) tended to be suppressed, admitting the existence of various states of suspension.

Camouflaging, miming, imitating The first formulation of Caillois’ thinking on mimicry takes shape around a particular gesture—that of the praying mantis. In the first essay devoted to the insect (1934), Caillois is struck by two aspects of its posture: its capacity to rouse human affectivity at all times and places, producing emotions and 1 Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, p. 31 (but the thesis is better developed in the book Le mythe et l’homme).

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inspiring mythical stories; and its automatic feature, namely, its capacity to bypass the control of the nerve centres, presenting the image of a body that acts, creates and ‘decides’ on the basis of purely cellular knowledge. The first aspect is connected to the meaning of its pose: keeping the forelegs lifted and the centre of gravity slightly tilted forward, the mantis evokes mating and at the same time connects it to the cannibalistic act which, in its case, usually completes it; the association between the posture and prayer, argues Caillois, is on the contrary only censorial, its sole purpose being to suppress the uncanny effect produced by the concrete value of the pose. The gesture of the mantis is pure imagination—embodied, objectified, enacted—and constitutes one of those phenomena ‘which concretely realize the lyrical and passional virtualities of the mind in the outside world’.2 Caillois calls these phenomena idéogrammes objectifs, interpreting them as structures of mediation between the external world of nature and the inner world of the human being; the ideograms constitute the empirical foundation of the imagination, a dimension that is by no means transcendental but on the contrary anchored to perceptible phenomena and to their impact on our senses. The second aspect, the automatism, is engendered by the apparently ‘unnatural’ biological faculties of the animal, which is able to carry out its vital functions, including camouflaging and simulating death, even after it has been deprived of its head. […] it is a fact that there are very few reactions that mantis cannot perform in a decapitated state—that is, without any centre of representation or of voluntary activity. In these conditions, it can walk; regain its balance; sever a threatened limb; assume the spectral stance; engage in mating; lay eggs; build an ootheca; and (this is truly frightening) lapse into feigned rigor mortis […].3

What is disturbing, thus, is not the generic anthropomorphism of the animal but the memory of the human inside an apparently inorganic body: a rigid, fragmented shell similar to an android, already mineral in itself, neither animate nor inanimate, capable of playing the corpse while actually being a corpse. This uncontrolled performance, the totally irrational need that pushes the animal not only to repress movement—a behaviour that Caillois admits can be merely defensive—but also to literally play dead and perform excessive 2 3

Caillois, ‘The Praying Mantis’, p. 80 (italics in the original). Ibid., p. 79.

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tricks (becoming stiff, lying face down, showing itself insensitive to touch, simulating the shape and consistency of a stone) are the corporeal equivalent of psychasthenia, a psychological condition identified at the beginning of the century by Pierre Janet and described as a progressive outflow of psychic energy, a ‘decreasing of psychological tension’ that translates into an acute feeling of incompleteness and the loss of rational control. Psychasthenia produces a regression to lower forms of life, the stone for the animals and catalepsy for the humans, this latter being a state of total passivity in which the body becomes a thing and lets itself be infected by the deanimation of the surrounding objects. But it is important to remember that psychasthenia is partially undergone, partially enacted: the petrificaction of the animal is a mixture of mise en scène and affection, it is both play and extreme somatisation. In the psychasthenic body, performance and pathology shade into each other, opening up a wide space of creativity and even indicating a possible expressive ‘method’ which is not too far from that aesthetic principle of ecstasy that surrealist culture around Caillois praised in its various inflections (eroticism, hysteria, religious transport, shamanism, etc.). 4 From this perspective, Caillois’ theory of mimicry can be related to some important theories of acting in the 1920s that considered the body as a support for gestures which the actor should learn how not to control, accepting that he remain in a condition of passivity. In particular, Meyerhold’s biomechanics makes explicit reference to the animal dimension of the actor (‘The actor is an animal’),5 to his camouflaging (and not mimicking) abilities. Meyerhold uses precisely the term mimicry, defining it as a generic imitative capacity of the actor and referring to Vladimir M. Bekhterev for its biological meaning. Bekhterev—who, together with Pavlov, was an important voice of Russian reflexology in the 1920s—mentions animal mimicry as a corporeal act placed between consciousness and instinct, both in the case of chromatic imitation, which he calls ‘protective’, and in the case of some more inventive metamorphoses.6 With his theory of ‘associative reflex’, Bekhterev sketches the possibility of a reflexology of imitation that fascinates Meyerhold, at least as a starting point in a cycle of artistic training. Indeed, Meyerhold writes: ‘Mimicry, its inferior degree (imitation without intellectual contribution), superior idea (mask), its deepest levels (grotesque, tragic, tragicomic)’.7 4 Cheng, ‘Mask, Mimicry, Metamorphosis’, pp. 68-70. 5 Meyerhold, L’attore biomeccanico, p. 8. (my translation). 6 Bekhterev, General Principles of Human Reflexology, p. 72. 7 Meyerhold, L’attore biomeccanico, p. 107 (my translation).

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The reflection on the imitative capacity of the human being was actually quite widespread in the 1930s. It proved interesting also for an anthropologist such as Marcel Jousse with a totally different outlook and for the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who was so intrigued by Caillois’ theory that in 1937 he advised Adorno to read it.8 But Benjamin had already considered mimicry in his two influential essays on mimetic faculties (both dated 1933), ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ and ‘Doctrine of the Similar’, where he developed crucial reflections on the human capacity for imitation and its evolution across the centuries. Later, in a note to the second draft of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he moved towards the field of performance, analysing imitation in mime and dance. The well-known opening of ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ gives great importance to mimicry: Nature produces similarities; one need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift for seeing similarities is nothing but a rudiment of the once powerful compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically.9

While in the Work of Art the mime takes the place of the camouflaging animal: The mime presents what he mimes merely as semblance [Der Nachmachende macht, was er macht, nur scheinbar]. And the oldest form of imitation had only a single material to work with: the body of the mime himself. Dance and language (gestures of body and lips) are the earliest manifestations of mimesis. The mime presents his subject as a semblance [Der Nachmachende macht seine Sache scheinbar]. One could also say that he plays his subject.10

According to Benjamin, in ancient times (phylogenetically and ontogenetically speaking), human beings possessed much wider mimetic faculties, which included language, magic and astrology. Mimesis was a great capacity of the senses, rooted in the body and instinctive like animal camouflage; 8 Adorno will review Caillois’ essay on the mantis and will discuss it in a correspondence with Benjamin, as referred in Eidelpes, ‘Roger Caillois’ Biology of Myth and the Myth of Biology’, p. 8. 9 Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, p. 720. 10 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 127.

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today, only the mime who, like the dancer, still uses the body as an instrument for imitating continues to exercise the mimetic faculty to the highest degree. The mime presents the appearance of what he imitates, that is, as Miriam Hansen puts it, ‘he does not merely evoke an absent other, but also enacts, embodies what he mimes’.11 This embodiment is at the root of his gestural performance; like the camouflaging animal, the mime ‘interprets’ the Other, fusing himself with its corporeal form. This capacity of the human being to re-present the Other through his own body takes centre stage in the anthropology of Marcel Jousse, who, in the mid-1930s, coined a new term—‘mimisme’—in order to indicate the way in which the human being ‘rejoue’ [re-plays] (another neologism) through his own gestures the appearance of the phenomena with which he comes into contact.12 Like Meyerhold, Jousse too thinks of mimicry as the degree zero of an imitative process that gets highly refined in the human being, given that it does not involve morphological, chromatic or material alterations of skin and flesh but rather complex modes of taking and giving back forms through gesture: in Jousse, gesture is a tool that mediates between perception and cognition, a veritable modality for apprehending the world and connecting with it. The great interpreter of this general process is the actor, who makes use of his gestures to become similar; not the actor of the bourgeois theatre, who mostly confirms an iconography, but rather the modern actor of cinema, who has to do with a language that fragments gesture and compels us to rethink the dialectic between stillness (the freezed body of the statue) and motion (the body in movement of the living being).

Statues of flesh This filmic elaboration of the mimetic gesture takes indeed the motif of the statue as its core, not so much through the ancient Pygmalionesque myth but rather in the idea of becoming statue as a technique for suspending individuality. Chaplin will be a master in this technique, though the motif stems less from slapstick comedy than from a broader cultural imaginary of the late nineteenth century, strongly rooted in that field of nervous pathologies that was probably among the sources for Caillois’ later theorisations (precisely psychasthenia, which indeed he will mention). 11 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 190. 12 Jousse, Anthropologie du geste, p. 27.

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In L’automatisme psychologique (1889), Janet defines the cataleptic body as a statue-like body, a muscularly plastic but immobile statue of flesh ‘characterized by suspension of intellect and of sensitivity’.13 This veritable statue ‘vivante’, as he calls it, realises concretely the eighteenth-century analytic model of Condillac, who imagined ‘producing’ such a statue by emptying out a human being and filling him progressively with different sensations that could thus be isolated and related each to its corresponding ideas. ‘The experience that Condillac dreamt’, Janet writes but could not experiment, today can be achieved almost completely. We can have fully living statues, whose spirit is devoid of thoughts, and into this [potential] consciousness, we can introduce one by one each phenomenon of which we intend to study the psychological development. Thanks to a state of disease long familiar to doctors, but not so much studied by philosophers, we will find this statue. It is the nervous illness generally designated with the name of catalepsy that will provide us with such abrupt and total suppressions, then this gradual reactivation of consciousness of which we want to take advantage for our experiences.14

More than an experiment, Condillac and Janet describe a theatrical scene: the spectacle of the human being reduced to an object and suspended in an intermediary state of life. As is well known, medical science staged various scientific spectacles around this kind of nervous body (such as the theatres of hysteria and hypnosis),15 but at the turn of the century, the popularity of the statue of flesh went well beyond medicine, establishing the motif in the areas of theatre, dance, music hall and even in the context of the newborn ‘cultivation of body’. The act of becoming a statue originates as a technique of acting that consists of freezing the body in the pose of a recognisable sculpture in order to learn its gesture, but it quickly becomes a minimal spectacular unit: a theatrical performance, a music hall attraction or a bourgeois therapy for recovering corporeal harmony.16 Genevieve Stebbins, a pupil of François Delsarte and the main populariser of his attitudes in the United States, is responsible for the vogue of female ‘petrif ication’, which is obtained through a specif ic training f inalised 13 Janet, L’automatisme psychologique, p. 12 (my translation). 14 Ibid. 15 On the the hysterical body as spectacle, see: Violi, Il teatro dei nervi. 16 There was a bourgeois application of statue posing and Henrietta Hovey was the leading figure in this. See Ruyter, The Cultivation of Body and Mind, pp. 31-44.

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at the perfect imitation of the poses of classical statues. The technique reformulates the medieval and Renaissance tradition of the tableau vivant, where actors—singly or in a group—reproduce the poses depicted in famous works of art, echoed also by the scenery in the background. In the second edition of her Delsarte System of Expression (1902), Stebbins includes in an appendix reproductions of thirty-two classical statues, male and female, and invites actors to imitate them on the basis of a three-dimensional model or even a photographic print, provided that it does not induce a ‘photographic’ interpretation. Indeed, Stebbins was not staging a series of scenes each devoted to a work of art and interrupted by moments when the actors awakened and became themselves; her method, by contrast, tended to give shape to a series of images connected by fluid and slow transitions. Usually, a pose session included the imitation of as many as fifteen statues that took shape and dissolved, metamorphosing from one to another, and in this new dialectic of stillness and motion, a mimetic act becomes an act of mimicry. An 1893 New York Times review testifies the effect produced by Stebbins’ innovation. She stood in front of the stage, bare and with no signs of white powder or other makeup, and slowly assumed the form of Venus Genitrix. A moment later she swayed gently about and became the Satyr playing the Lute. The lovely audience applauded rapturously, whereat Mrs. Stebbins undulated gracefully into the statue of Melpomene. […] The poses flow gracefully onward from the simple to the complex. They commence with a simple attitude and continue with a slowly, rhythmic motion of every portion of the body.17

As the insect slows down its movement until it reaches the total immobility of a branch or a stone and then comes back slowly to life, the American actress slows down to immobility and so the statue appears; then she starts slowly to move again as the shape breaks apart. Thus, the show performed by Stebbins was about the manipulation of the subtle line between being a woman and being an ornamental object of the set, between standing out and blending with the environment, which is precisely the mechanism of camouflage. The cinema—or at least an author such as Charlie Chaplin—grasps this particular shade of the practice and reformulates the posing/camouflaging act with extraordinary precision. In The Face on the Bar Room Floor (Charlie Chaplin, 1914), Chaplin reworks more evidently than elsewhere the Stebbins 17 Quoted in Ruyter, The Cultivation of Body and Mind, p. 117.

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Fig. 1: The Face on the Bar Room Floor (C. Chaplin, 1914). Still Photography. From the archives of Roy Export Company Limited. Scan courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna.

culture of the pose, presenting precisely the artistic process through which an immobilised female body slowly becomes an object blending into the environment. Here Chaplin’s gaze, and his paintbrush, depict a young model posing as Venus, but in doing this, he transforms her into an amphora. The atelier of the artist is a throng of female sculptures of every shape and size, and the girl he is portraying, frozen behind his shoulders in the pose of Venus, could be mistaken for one of these; or at least this is the way in which Chaplin sees it: trying to draw her, he almost automatically strengthens her legs until they become columns, and he does the same with her hips, which become a pedestal; then, with a final touch, he adds the handles (Figure 1). Obviously, the dialectic between visibility and invisibility becomes more complicated in the case of human camouflaging. As Slavoj Žižek argues in the wake of Lacan, human perception, unlike that of the animal, sets up a negative connection between visibility and movement: by blurring the contours of bodies, movement makes them indistinguishable to the human eye; on the contrary, immobility makes things visible by guaranteeing perfect focusing. Thus, the human being seems to conquer a stable visible existence only through death, while the animal, who is always blind in front of inert bodies, is visible for its peers only when alive. ‘What we have here is the

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opposition between pre-symbolic real life, which sees only movement, and the symbolized gaze, which can see only “mortified”, petrified objects.’18 The slowing down of corporeal movement is thus a figure of suspension for the human eye; it represents a step toward the full visibility of the object-body as well as a progressive invisibility of the animated subject inhabiting it. In the contemporary era, the motif of the slowed-down gesture resurfaced in the visual arts in famous artistic experiences that entail the same logic of mimicry, or at least the same address to the spectator’s eyes. For instance, this effect is suggested in 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon (1993), the paradoxically slowed-down version of the Hitchcock movie, through some sort of crystallisation or mineralisation of its matrix; or even in Bill Viola’s animated photographs (The Quintet of the Astonished, 2000; Observance, 2002), which are images of mimetic but also camouflaged bodies, invaded by a barely perceptible movement and thus suspended between stillness and motion. The point of indefinite expressiveness sought by Viola in his photo-cinematic bodies—that dynamic instant always on the brink of translating itself into a precise passion but also immediately deflected towards another—is very similar to the ‘infinite capacity for expression’ that Stebbins tries to reach through her slow flux of suspended gestures and which she indicates as the strongest difference between her own technique of statue posing and more ordinary versions of statue impersonation: Some years ago, when a species of statue posing departing widely from classic art began to be thought in various part of the country, I prefixed the word “artistic” to the word “statue posing” to distinguish classic ideal from ordinary statue-impersonation and tableaux mouvants. Artistic statue posing, in the sense I use the words, means embodiment and careful following out, as far as human things can, of the divine ideal of fine art. […] The difference between “statue posing” and “artistic statue posing” is that the former conveys the expression of human thought and emotion, while the latter conveys, or ought to convey, the idea of absolute calm and repose of an immortal soul, possessing infinite capacity for expression, but at the same time giving no definite expression, except that of capacity and power in reserve.19

In music hall, the whitened human statues aim at overcoming stone, substituting it completely with the human body; performers not only reproduce a 18 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 109. 19 Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, p. 444.

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precise sculptural gesture but rather try to prolong as long as possible their state of immobility in view of an ambiguous spectator’s pleasure, which is at once erotic and sensational, linked to the charm of the object-body and to the thrill of challenging its limits.20 Artistic statue posing, conversely, works on the suspension of corporeal states, on the idea of stone as an archive of gestures in perpetual transformation. It is worth remembering that while Stebbins was performing and theorising the slow-motion statue posing, Aby Warburg was elaborating his famous theory of Pathosformeln (Fragments of Expression was written between 1888 and 1903, and his study on Dürer—the full formulation of this theory—appeared in 1905). In those years, the German art historian was giving shape to the idea of gestures as neutral matrixes that allow for the possibility of a polar inversion and, with the passage of time, undergo energetic inversions.21 Stebbins’ figures, which call for the shift from positive to negative emotions in the continuity of a gesture gradually reconfigured and altered in meaning, resonate as a sort of (simplified) visual complement to Warburg’s thinking. Both were probably part of the same cultural sensibility for ‘bodies of stone’, that is, bodies that continue to live and change despite being in a mineral state. Warburg expressed his interest in the life of stone also through the concept of the fossil, which Georges Didi-Huberman considers the very paradigm of Warburg’s thinking in that it evokes embodied memory and the survival and awakening of forms.22 Like the fossil, the statue too entails gestures that only seem immobile while, in fact, they have been in movement through the centuries. This is the modern appeal of statues, their capacity to seduce beyond what they represent, attracting and infecting the performer who ends up playing his own psychasthenic surrender to stone. Ted Shawn, one of the pioneers of modern dance, based his own professional identity on his image as a statue-like body. In addition to creating elaborate choreutic pièce with himself as a dancing statue, he also circulated self-portraits in mineral guise. In one photograph, he presents himself as Shiva, the Indian god of dance, whose bronze miniature he interprets with maniacal precision; in another he is Adonis, a marble-like body curled up on a low column and ready to leap out, but only to perform the death (a return to stone) of the boy (Figure 2). Finally, besides the dancers’ and body builders’ bodies exposed on a pedestal, a comic version of the living statue appears in music hall; in pantomimes, 20 On the tradition of the mythic pose in music hall and on the general phenomenon between literature and performing arts, see the pivotal Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose, pp. 66-67. 21 See the idea of the neutral memory in Pinotti, Memorie del neutro, especially pp. 177-184. 22 Didi-Huberman, ‘Leitfossil, ou la danse des temps enfouis’, in L’Image survivante, p. 235.

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Fig. 2: Ted Shawn in Death of Adonis. erome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. (1923). Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-8807-a3d9-e040e00a18064a99. Public domain.

the statue tends to be transformed into a wind-up toy, an object not necessary still but that can be made to move. David Robinson, the biographer of Chaplin, describes a sketch by Marceline, the clown of the legendary Hippodrome in London, involving a mechanical marble statue which at the turn of a handle jerks into poses, resembling the attitudes of Delsarte: Marceline and his brother, a clown, receive a present of a wonderful marble statue. On turning a handle, it moves into various striking attitudes, in one of which Marceline is actually struck by the statue. Marceline’s brother decides that they must have a photographer to take ‘lots of photographs, heaps of photographs’, and leaves his brother in charge while he goes to fetch the photographer. Marceline is told to dust the statue, and his nervous approach with a feather broom is very comic. Marceline’s confidence grows as he dusts, and he puts the statue in such a number of ‘new positions’ that it finally breaks. Fearful of telling this to his brother, Marceline dresses up in a sheet, puts the statue’s helmet on (backwards) and seizes his sword and shield. Marceline, however, is not careful enough with the sheet and is discovered by his brother after some very comical imitations of the statue’s positions.23 23 Robinson, Charlie Chaplin. His Life and Work.

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The clumsy fetishism of Marceline is a parody of the seductive power of statues. In a way it is a reversal of their ‘desire’, so to say: far from trying to enchant the admirer and absorbing him in its own world of stone, this statue threatens to run him through with a sword. Its mechanical movement is suspended in a limbo between active and passive, but it is clear that a criminal intent on the part of the statue can be suspected: rebelling against this rough handling, the automaton stabs its owner. It is difficult not to recognise in this aggressive statue the ancestor of the one that will appear, many years later, in City Lights (1933): as an active habitué of the Hippodrome at the time of Marceline and a great admirer of the clown, Chaplin may well have seen that sketch; but even if he didn’t, it is very likely that the comedian frequently came across the performance of the statue of flesh in one of its multiple versions.

The gesticulating monument In the opening sequence of Chaplin’s fifth feature film, City Lights, a large marble group is about to be unveiled by the civil authorities in a crowded public square, but the ceremony risks being interrupted by the inappropriate apparition of the tramp interpreted by Chaplin, awakening in the lap of one of the statues, where he spent the whole night, using the inauguration veil as a bedsheet. In all probability, the set designer conceived this monument on the basis of a description given by Chaplin, though the archive bears no trace of this.24 What we know is that it was evidently designed and built ad hoc according to the dictates of the gag, taking the poses of the statues from the classical tradition, albeit very loosely. For this reason, it is an integral part of the performance and, in its own way, already a cinematic ‘rewriting’ of the gesture of statuary (Figure 3). 24 In the different drafts of the script, the statues are described in different ways and called by different names. In a typewritten document (‘Notes for Story’, p. 41), uncertainly dated 1928, the first idea of the sequence appeared: the monument was presented as ‘a group representing Civic Pride, Democracy, Industry and others’. Charlie is ‘asleep in the arms of Industry […] his cane hooked on the ear of Civic Pride, while his hat is hung on the nose of Charity […] he sits on the upturned face of the kneeling figure of Prosperity […] and backed into the gun held by the figure of Patriotism’. From here to 22 April 1929, the date on which the scene was shot, the monument changes physiognomy and becomes the group that we know, which is precisely described by Chaplin only in 1931 in Continuity. So, the path that leads from the vague idea of 1928 to the 1929 gag remains mysterious. A special thanks to Cecilia Cenciarelli (Cineteca di Bologna) for her help with Chaplin’s documents.

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Fig. 3: City Lights (C. Chaplin, 1933). Still Photography. Copyright © Roy Export Company Limited. Scan courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna.

In a typewritten document of 1931 called ‘Continuity’, Chaplin describes this monument precisely, clarifying the identity of each of the three figures in togas according to the gestures they perform, or perhaps according to how he interpreted these in the course of the gag. 25 The statues’ poses were intended on the one hand to rouse memories of antiquity and on the other hand to trigger his creative interpretations. These two requirements produce an absolutely syncretic object: a monument designed according to the compositional schema of neoclassical allegorical art but that, on closer inspection, presents figures that are in no way believable, almost parodic.26 25 We read: ‘On the left is a draped figure kneeling on left knee, the left hand hanging at the side with the palm upturned and the right hand is extended even with the face of the figure in an attitude to represent peace. On the right is a figure in reclining position, the right hand of which holds a sword. There is a centre figure of a woman seated’. See ‘Continuity’, p. 3. 26 The distribution of the three figures—a woman sitting in the centre (Prosperity) and two men on the ground on either side (Peace on the left and Civic Pride on the right)—recalls the structure of the mural Peace and Prosperity by the American Elihu Vedder (1896) (a painting located in the Lobby to Main Reading Room, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, Washington).

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Prosperity is sitting in a generic regal pose, forearms resting on the armrests, while Civic Pride lies on his left hip and elbow, a pose typical of river deities but here combined with the pose of the warrior with his unsheathed sword. The most complex is the kneeling figure caught in the act of performing a gesture that Chaplin described thus: ‘The right hand is extended even with the face of the figure in an attitude to represent peace.’27 But no allegory of Peace behaves in this way; rather the gesture is taken from religious iconography and grafted onto a figure in Greek-Roman shape, creating a totally eclectic posture. Chaplin’s Peace performs the so-called Palm Out, an ancient gesture that can be traced back to Phoenician culture and re-emerges partially in the Christian blessing (and, even more precisely, in the sitting Buddha).28 The Palm Out is perfect for the gag that Chaplin has in mind, provided that the huge palm in stone is brought down to human height: hence the expedient of genuflection, which however brings to mind other gestures—for example swearing an oath, perhaps the closest to the stance of the statue.29 In reality, there is no model for this pose; rather the statue is made up of the montage on one single trunk of a series of gestures vaguely compatible with the idea of peace. The left arm performs yet another gesture, sticking out laterally with hand held open as if to sustain a weight, which is obviously missing. When the tramp sits on the providential surface, in front of our eyes there flashes the image of Eirene, the Greek statue of Peace who held the infant Pluto with her left arm. It is a paradoxical image, because on the one hand it completes the idea of the marble group giving birth to the tramp, on the other it creates a polar oscillation in the ‘maternal’ posture, suspended in a limbo that also includes the act of fondling (Figures 4-5).30 Taking the role of Pluto—hardly more than a vague ghostly memory, though very much alive in American culture at the time31—Chaplin situates 27 Chaplin, Continuity, p. 3. 28 See Frechette, Mesopotamian Ritual Prayers, pp. 51-53. Frechette distinguishes between ‘upward hand gestures performed by mortals toward deities and horizontal gestures performed by deities toward mortals’. The blessing comes from this latter variant. 29 In the Hebrew Bible, the oath is performed kneeling and with the palm wide open, even though the fingers are united. 30 Chaplin mimes a slight embarrassment, as if the statue has fondled him. Kenneth Gross too noted the statue’s pro-activism. See Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, pp. 3-5. 31 The Greek original, now lost, is attributed to Cephisodotus the Elder (c. 370 BCE); the most ancient copy is conserved in the Glyptothek of Münich, but in 1906 a fragmentary version in Penthelic marble was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and it was also reproduced and discussed in Edward Robinson’s 1903 article, ‘A Statue of Eirene’. Thus, in Chaplin’s times, memories of this statue circulated in the American context; note that the copy

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Fig. 4: Eirene (Peace) bearing Plutus (Wealth), Roman copy after a Greek votive statue by Kephisodotos (ca. 370 BC) which stood on the agora in Athens. Glyptothek, Munich. Public domain. Fig. 5: City Lights (C. Chaplin, 1933). Screen capture. City Lights © Roy Export S.A.S.

statue posing inside a totally new imaginative process in which we don’t see a statue filling the void of the absent (dead) body but, vice versa, a body replacing the statue. This deep exchange of properties is confirmed by his style of acting, which alternates fluxes and freezes, gliding movements that awaken the statues and produce their imaginary reactions as well as instants of stillness in which his body petrifies, becoming part of the monument. It all starts with the sitting figure ‘expelling’ the dazed tramp. Chaplin remains for some moments in her lap, representing the fruit of her prosperous womb, and then he begins the manoeuvres needed to climb down by way of Civic Pride, which however—as a worthy descendant of Marceline’s mechanical statue—seems to skewer him on purpose so that he remains suspended swinging in the air. The untimely national anthem forces him to stay like this, frozen in empty space with his bowler over his heart, a perfect trophy in stone completing the statue of the patriot. Finally, Peace offers him firstly the palm of a hand as a place to sit and then a knee as a temporary base on which to retie his shoelaces, which the tramp does, finding himself sculpted in the same pose as his ‘support’. in New York was devoid of upper limbs and head (ready for Chaplin’s transplant …) and that anyway, the Greek Pluto has already passed through a series of transformation: in the original sculpture, he held a cornucopia or an amphora; in later copies, the child disappears to be replaced by synecdoche with the objects with which he is associated, or by a symbolic olive branch (in Vedder’s mural, both the surrogates are present and distributed between the two male figures). In Roman coinage, the standing Peace has the olive branch on the right and the cornucopia on the left.

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Fig. 6: Limelight (C. Chaplin, 1952). Screen capture. Limelight © Roy Export S.A.S.

The alternation of gestures that animate the statues and imitative gestures that de-animate the living body produces a sort of choreography if not a proper dance, a form of art that Chaplin often indicates as a model for his way of acting (‘Everything I do is a dance. I think in terms of a dance. I think more so in City Lights, the blind girl—that’s a beautiful dance there. Call it a dance. Purely pantomime.’).32 But what is most striking in his performance is the very peculiar character of his gestures, which are very far from those of classic miming and very close to those of a camouflaging animal. This does not entail that Chaplin is unable to mime stone, even in its non-anthropomorphic guise: a brilliant demonstration of this can be found in Limelight (C. Chaplin, 1952) through the character of Calvero, a former maestro—now in decline—of late nineteenth-century London music hall pantomime. In order to teach his melancholic friend what the art of miming is based on, Calvero takes up the challenge of imitating a bonsai, a rose, a pansy and finally a stone, which he reproduces in the act of ‘containing itself’, by crossing his arms on his chest and clenching his fists (Figure 6). With that gesture, Chaplin-Calvero translates emphatically the ‘psychological’ condition of a stone; he interprets its external shape as an expression of internal qualities, following the human parameters of physiognomy. 32 See David Robinson, Charlie Chaplin, p. 400

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Indeed, his is an attempt not to resemble stone but in fact to make stone resemble a human being. His relationship with the monument in City Lights is exactly the opposite: Chaplin undergoes the allure of the statue with which he keeps himself warm during the night, with which he blends, and inside which he disappears, given that, as a tramp, his body is socially inconvenient, condemned to invisibility, and certainly not authorised to impose himself in the sight of the whole gathered community. By tracing his path across the monument, he demonstrates with conscious and unconscious gestures that stone is alive (warm, reactive, in motion), and at this point taking on a resemblance to it becomes perfectly natural. As he is about to leave each of the statues, Chaplin holds still in some almost photographic images, as if to prove that his silhouette is totally integrated into the mineral. While leaving Prosperity, he superimposes his back on the feminine bust and ‘wears’ her huge hands of stone, while in the case of Civic Pride, he substitutes the marble head with his own. Finally, the white thumb of Peace attracts the tip of his nose, and the mischievous Pluto stands up in order to melt into the statue and invert its gestural polarity: from peace to challenge (Figure 7).

Gestures of inert matter Chaplin is not the only mimetic animal in slapstick comedy. Although he wears better than other comedians his ‘fluid interspecies identity’, as Tom Gunning has wonderfully defined it,33 he is surrounded by a large group of performers fascinated by the allure of the statue; some even feel attracted by raw stone or rock, so that they learn to blend with mineral landscapes or to produce radical hybridisations of the organic and the inorganic. By transfusing themselves from one species to another, these particular gestures put into question the traditional idea of the body. The simplest and most recurrent gag is the disappearance into the statue, often connected to a symptomatic form of blindness on the characters’ part, which prevents them from seeing the difference between sculptures and human beings: there are statues that turn out to be men and, vice versa, men ‘used’ as statues, at least until they rebel. In The Goat (1921), Buster Keaton waits for hours queuing behind a row of dummies he believes to be men. Some minutes later, he strikes a match on the costume of what seems to 33 Gunning, ‘Chaplin and the body of modernity’, p. 243. André Bazin sensed precociously Chaplin’s nature, describing him in the act of ‘playing dead’, becoming invisible by camouflaging himself as a tree, hiding himself under the sand like a crab. See Bazin, What is cinema?, I, p. 149.

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Fig. 7: City Lights (C. Chaplin, 1933). Screen captures. City Lights © Roy Export S.A.S.

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be the classic mannequin of the ‘dime-store Indian’, which turns out to be a Native American in flesh and blood, posing on a pedestal at the corner of the street. Just like a perfect mimetic animal, Keaton camouflages himself as a statue, but only until the material betrays him. In Hard Luck (1921), he is able to escape from the police by disappearing into the monument to General Harrison Gray Otis, a veteran of the American Civil War. He positions himself on the rock behind him and, staying perfectly still, he assumes the pose in bronze of the lookout, harmonising it with that of the general. But the same trick fails in The Goat, where Buster tries to hide on a statue of a horse, completing the composition with its rider. The situation is the same as that which we would see again twelve years later in City Lights (an artist unveils his sculpture in front of its patrons and discovers an intruder on top of it), but here, when the veil is stripped away, Buster appears already in the marble pose of Man O’War. Nonetheless, his perfect stillness is of no use, because the horse—which is made of plaster rather than marble—moves, its legs bending under the unexpected weight, and refuses to play its part. Keaton’s gag celebrates the definitive exchange of properties between man and statue, also demolishing the final juxtaposition, that between movement and stillness. At the same time, he puts a very particular accent on the physiognomy of the minerals, which are no longer simple archives of human gestures but rather ‘living’ materials that inspire human gestures and perform their own. In early cinema theory, the idea that minerals could have a physiognomy and are to be connected to some human gestures more than to others was very much alive, especially in the writings of the poet Vachel Lindsay. In The Art of the Moving Picture, Lindsay proposes a classification in different genres according to the materials in which the gestures of the actors would be sculpted if the movies were translated into statues: there are gestures in bronze, in wood and in marble, and if you try to imagine ‘the [relative] figures with the same massing and interplay suddenly invested with life’,34 the corresponding stories will take a narrative form adapted to the properties of the materials. Gestures in bronze are heroic, in wood they are sketchy, those in marble are suitable to render the rhythmic sequence of bodies. In rough stone, finally, are sculpted the highly dramatic gestures, immersed in the landscapes that cinema enhances; in those movies, the characters too ‘become wave-beaten granite, yet living creatures none the less’.35 34 See especially the chapter ‘Sculpture-in-motion’ in Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, p. 85. 35 Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, p. 92.

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Fig. 8: Our Hospitality (B. Keaton, 1923). Screen captures.

Several scenes in Buster Keaton’s cinema could be imagined in stone, and the very identity of the comic actor, summed up in his nickname ‘The Stone Face’, is in tune with Lindsay’s words. In the scene where he is fishing under the waterfall in Our Hospitality (1923), Keaton’s essential minerality is highlighted in every way. Buster takes his place among the rocks, blending into a uniform but animated landscape that seems to have eyes—his eyes—and remaining camouflaged there, until the roar of the water floods over him and makes him disappear altogether (Figure 8). The chase scene in Seven Chances (1925) is even more precise: here Buster’s running body camouflages itself by moving at the same speed as the landscape, which is not still as the rocks were in the previous scene. Keaton is trying to escape from a mob of suitors of every age, and he throws himself down a slope, kicking up stones and boulders that start to landslide, tumbling over and over (Figure 9). At a certain point, he tries to hide behind a stone bigger than the others, apparently wedged firmly into the soil. But nothing in this landscape is fixed, and the gigantic boulder drags him down head over heels. It becomes clear that the bodies in stone are chasing the body in flesh, taking the place of the would-be brides, at least until the enraged ladies present themselves at the bottom of the hill and all the landscape, covered in dust, merges, in a crush of plummeting indistinguishable bodies. Finally, another slapstick comedian—Charley Bowers, the American cartoonist and actor of the 1920s, well known in France under the name of ‘Bricolo’—puts radically into question the opposition between animate and inanimate beings through crazy hybridisations that affect also gestures. Bowers offers a different interpretation of mimicry, which in his cinema is never completed, thus producing bodies weirdly suspended between the organic and the inorganic, animal and vegetal, human and mineral. In Bowers, stones—huge mineral eggs—give birth to animals (and in particular, to a strange bird that feeds only on metal—It’s a bird, 1930); and vice versa,

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Fig. 9: Seven Chances (B. Keaton, 1925). Screen capture.

appropriately treated eggs can hatch, bringing to life small cars that ‘stand up’ and learn to ‘walk’ with the same gestures that we saw a moment earlier in a newborn turkey. In other movies, rudimental mechanical devices are able to perform the extremely refined gestures typical of human beings, thus eroding the distinction between animated and unanimated. In He Done His Best (1926), a mechanical hand plants a seed in a vase, waters it and heats it with a light bulb, but the monstrous plant that germinates in only a few seconds bears inanimate fruit: its seed pods open and push out a can of beans, which dangles from the branch with an organic gesture. In Fatal Footsteps (1926), the mechanical shoes that allow Bricolo to dance the perfect Charleston are objects onto which human gestures are ‘grafted’; they are objects that can be ‘worn’ and therefore gestures that can be automatically performed by everyone, even by fish, as we see. Finally, in Now you tell one (1926), Bricolo fabricates a universal liquid that allows him to cultivate every kind of fruit, vegetable and inert thing all together, to harvest hard-boiled eggs from aubergines and to grow in a pot shoelaces that are able to thread themselves into the eyelets. An extreme experiment induces Bowers to ‘transplant’ a farmer, who is penetrated by the branches of a rapidly growing tree: it worms its way into his clothes, or maybe into his flesh, with the final result being a crucifixion (Figure 10).

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Fig. 10: Now You Tell One (C. Bowers, 1926). Screen capture.

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Fig. 11: Shoulder Arms (C. Chaplin, 1917). Screen capture.

This aggressive triumph of the plants over the human performed by Charley Bowers is quite different from the vegetal regression of the other, more popular Charlie, who in Shoulder Arms (Chaplin 1917) camouflages himself as a tree in order to defeat the enemy (Figure 11). Instead, in Now you tell one, the tree seems to be resolved on camouflaging itself as a man. Bowers doesn’t conduct experiments on himself, he creates ‘bachelor machines’—with purely aesthetic functions—to be applied to nature; his mechanics of hybridisation produces bodies that are at the same time human, animal, vegetal and mineral. Like statues, they too are archives of gestures: gestures of different materials, unfettered by bodies, transferable across species and surviving through time.

Works cited André Bazin, What is cinema? (1958), selected and transl. by Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1967-1971; repr. 2004). Vladimir M. Bekhterev, General Principles of Human Reflexology (1928), transl. by Emma and William Murphy (New York: International Publishers, 1932).

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Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1933), in Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, 1931-1934, vol. 2, pp. 720722 (Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). ———, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility’, in Selected Writings, 1935-1938, vol. 3, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, pp. 251-283 (Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). Roger Caillois, ‘The Praying Mantis. From Biology to Psychonalysis’ (1934), in The Edge of Surrealism. A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. by Claudine Frank, pp. 66-81 (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2003). ———, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’ (1935), trans. by John Shepley, October 31(1984): 16-32. ———, Le mythe et l’homme, (Paris: Gallimard, 1938). Charlie Chaplin, ‘City Lights. Notes for Story’, 22 May [1928?], (Bologna: Charlie Chaplin Archive). ———, ‘City Lights. Continuity’ [1931?], (Bologna: Charlie Chaplin Archive). Joyce Cheng, ‘Mask, Mimicry, Metamorphosis. Roger Caillois, Walter Benjamin and Surrealism in the 1930s’, MODERNISM/modernity 16, 1 (2009): 61-86. Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002). Rosa Eidelpes, ‘Roger Caillois’ Biology of Myth and the Myth of Biology’, Anthropology & Materialism [Online] 2 (2014): 1-18. Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1992). Tom Gunning, ‘Chaplin and the Body of Modernity’, Early Popular Visual Culture 8, 3 (2010): 237-245. Pierre Janet, L’automatisme psychologique. Essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de l’activité humaine (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889). Marcel Jousse, Anthropologie du geste (Paris: Les Éditions Resma, 1969) Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: MacMillan Company 1915; repr. 1922). Vsevolod Meyerhold, L’attore biomeccanico, ed. by Carlo Malcovati (Bologna: Cue Press, 2016). Andrea Pinotti, Memorie del neutro. Morfologia dell’immagine in Aby Warburg (Milan: Mimesis, 2001). Carrie J. Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose. Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). David Robinson, Charlie Chaplin. His Life and Art (New York: Da Capo Press, 1985).

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Edward Robinson: ‘A statue of Eirene’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 1, 12 (1906): 147-149. Nancy Chalfa Ruyter, The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism (Westport, CT/London: Greenwood Press, 1999). Genevieve Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression (1886) (New York: Edgard S. Werner, 1903). Alessandra Violi, Il teatro dei nervi. Fantasmi del moderno da Mesmer a Charcot (Milan: Bruno Mondadori 2004) Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London/NewYork: Verso 1997).

About the author Barbara Grespi is Associate Professor at the University of Bergamo where she teaches Cinema and visual culture. She has written extensively on the theme of gesture, on the relationship between cinema and photography, and on the theories of montage. Her essays have appeared in the international journals Acoma, Agalma, Bianco&Nero, Ikon, Interface, L’anello che non tiene, Aisthesis, Cinema&Cie (of this last she is also editor). Her main publications include Memoria e Immagini (ed., 2009), Cinema e montaggio (2010), Gus Van Sant (ed., 2011), Fuori quadro (co-ed., 2013), Overlapping Images (co-ed., 2016), Harun Farocki (co-ed., 2017), Il cinema come gesto (2017), Figure del corpo (2019). She was on the Selection Committee of the Torino Film Festival from 2007 to 2017.

4. Animated Statues and Petrified Bodies: A Journey Inside Fantasy Cinema Michele Bertolini

Abstract The essay aims to show the aesthetic and philosophical implications of the polarity between the animation of stone and the petrification of the body through a journey inside fantasy cinema and horror movies. The examples offered by horror movies like The Haunting (Robert Wise), Un Angelo per Satana (Camillo Mastrocinque) and La Venere d’Ille (Mario and Lamberto Bava) re-enact the mythical imagery of the animated statue as the intertwining of simulacrum and living body. Unlike these gothic models, two postmodern masterpieces, After Hours (Martin Scorsese) and Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg), evoke at the same time the ghost of contemporary sculpture and the cinema device as simulacra-producing machine. Keywords: Fantasy cinema; animation; horror movie; simulacrum; virtual body

Since its very origins, cinema has had a strong attraction to the imagery of statues, that is to say petrified bodies, providing a new interpretation in particular of the polarity between the animation of stone and the petrification of the body. This polarity has been a leading thread—at times submerged, at times explicit—in the Western imagination since the history of archaic sculpture up to the contemporary debate on simulacra, from Ovid ̕ s tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to the myth of Medusa. The inventory I present here—consisting of three examples directly stemming from genre movies in addition to two more examples somehow more heterogeneous and problematic—does not aspire to be exhaustive nor exemplary. It rather acts as a distinctively interesting

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chI04

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incentive inasmuch as it triggers unprecedented conceptual and media-related flashes of insight through the comparison of the mythical imagery of statues, its literary version codified according to somewhat institutionalised fantasy (i.e. fantasy literature), and ultimately the cinematic interpretation of this conceptual hub. The reference to archaic and mythical imagery within movies harks back to a pre-cinematographic background as it enters into dialogue with cinema’s specific means. Conversely, it is equally possible to detect cinematographic anticipations in the history of visual devices, in mythical tales, as well as in the history of aesthetics and theory of art. A general methodological premise is nevertheless required here: the words ‛fantasy cinema’ in the title should be taken in their wider and inter-media (stimulating the interaction of several media) meaning, as outlined by Jean-Louis Leutrat in his text Vie des fantômes: le fantastique au cinéma. Besides this taxonomic and historical endeavour, featured as well in other enquiries into the topic, Leutrat ventures towards remote lands on the borderline between cinema genres, thus tracking down some sort of genuinely cinematographic fantasy, which stems from the nature of the device itself, following in the footsteps of theoretically prestigious predecessors such as Sigmund Freud (Das Unheimliche), Roger Caillois (Au cœur du fantastique), and Tzvetan Todorov (Introduction à la littérature fantastique). According to Caillois, fantasy actually stands for some scandal, wound or unusual intrusion that is almost unbearable in the realm of reality, some sort of suspension of the accepted order that is, however, not ascribable to the realm of fairy tales or natural wonders, hence triggering incertitude, hesitation of meaning outside the limits of institutional, intentional, explicit fantasy.1 Such a category of fantasy may well be connected to cinema fantasy, whose territory, according to Leutrat’s perspective, encompasses markedly heterogeneous materials as a truly transversal category involving the whole cinema realm—the Lumière brothers as much as Méliès.2 The notion of border, limit, threshold is then crucial to the full understanding of fantasy inasmuch as it entails a crossing movement from inside to outside, from living to inanimate, and back. The very polarities of interior-exterior, animated-inanimate, stillness-movement trace a possible journey through fantasy cinema. The opposite poles should be investigated in both directions: from the body to the statue and from the stone to the bodily memory it preserves. 1 See Caillois, Au cœur du fantastique, p. 61; Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, pp. 28-29; Lazzarin, Il modo fantastico. 2 See Leutrat, Vie des fantômes, p. 10.

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The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963), adapted from the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, belongs to the Gothic tradition. It is articulated according to a double line, where the Impossible swings between figuration and its absence, between an incarnated ghost and a simulacrum dissolved in atmosphere, breath, puff. The movie presents indeed a wide range of horror sound effects matching its powerful visual effects. The theme of the progressive rediscovery of bodily memory within the lugubrious monument, here Villa Crane, is remarkably articulated in The Haunting. The gloomy villa, where mournful and terrible events took place and is now a stone monument enshrouded in silence, acquires little by little a face; it palpitates, lives, breathes, it has its own voice. From the very moment she gets there, the main character, Eleanor, is under the horrible and shameful impression that the walls, towers and deformed absurd windows are watching her. Reciprocal glances between the woman and the surrounding things are further embodied by the proliferating number of heads and faces featured by the heavy architecture and interior design of the house. Faces are found on doorknobs and shutters as well as on staircase balustrades. There are sculpted veiled heads, protruding angels and face-like forms appearing amidst the walls’ decorative shoots. Villa Crane has thousands of eyes observing its passing-by guests. Eleanor ends twice her hasty running through corridors bumping into her own face, filled with horror, in the reflection of a mirror. Her own face scares her even more, as if it were that of another woman. Thus the movie aptly expresses the delicate balance between horror subjectivity and objectivity. Furthermore, the characters’ passivity towards external hostile powers is suggested and reinforced by zooming in while simulating the aggression of the house on its guests. Such an aggression is therefore filmed from the ‛subjective’ viewpoint of the house itself. Endowed with gaze, Villa Crane is also a speaking, sound-emitting, noise-producing, trembling and vibrating organism. In the key episode of the visit to the conservatory, the several giant statues gathered there trigger a discussion concerning the identity of the sculpted figures, since they are unlisted in the catalogue of the house belongings. At first identified as a religious group (‛Saint Francis sharing donations’), the guests quartet ventured into the fully anachronistic identification of the subsequent inhabitants of the villa, starting with Lord Crane, his two wives, who tragically died in the villa, his daughter Abigail and Abigail’s maid, who died suicidal in the library. The encounter with the statue plays the role of a return to the origins, to the point of contact with the beginning of the curse. One last interpretation is offered: the group of sculptures would represent, even more anachronistically, the four actors of the story,

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who would be waiting to get back to stone, with Eleanor replacing the maid (both guilty of neglecting their ill and invalid mother/mistress the night they died) and the anthropologist John Markway replacing Lord Crane.3 Eleanor starts dancing around the group of marble pieces and, holding his hand, she invites Lord Crane, the master of the house (implicitly Markway, whom she discovers she is in love with) to join in. When seen from the viewpoint of Eleanor, who experiences the encounter with the statue as the metaphor of an erotic contact, the sudden animation has both disquieting and revitalising effects, acting as the space for the discharging of desire. Based on the groove traced by Pygmalion, one might argue that cinema and sculpture share the same desiring vocation channelled by gaze and tact. One movement, seen out of the corner of one’s eye, maybe real, maybe not, achieves the transformation of architecture into a pulsing, physical body. This is the conquest of figurativity, of shape and body, that the supernatural strives for, as anticipated by the anthropologist at the beginning of his experimental sojourn in the villa. In the very maybe, in the oscillating between seeing and not-seeing, between implicit and explicit, the whole fantasy of cinema̕ s specificity is played out, that is to say the undecidability of an always suspended uncanny, which possibly means also the overcoming of genre-limited perspectives. 4 The movement towards the body, moreover, is nothing but the reverse journey of what is outlined by the prologue, that is to say the body transforming into stone. The prologue and the story relate to each other in The Haunting as the front and back side of the same process of petrification of life and figuration of the supernatural, which is the core of Villa Crane’s curse. Abigail’s fate—orphaned in the big villa, never married, living all her life in her nursery room, hemmed in by the strict biblical admonitions of her father—is visually rendered by a series of crossed fading in and out, rapidly showing her child face ageing in bed until decrepit and gradually petrified into a mortuary mask.5 This sequence might evoke the famous ageing of the vampire-countess Marguerite Du Grand in I vampiri (Riccardo 3 The provisional identif ication of Markway with lord, or with the personif ication of the house, is also suggested by the prologue, where a male voice tells the origins of the curse on Villa Crane. The identity behind the voice, later replaced by Eleanor, is not clearly determined: whose voice is this? Does it belong to an external narrator? To Markway? Is it the voice of the personified house? See Leutrat, Vie des fantômes, pp. 106-107. 4 See Cappabianca, Trame del fantastico, pp. 37-38. 5 Cross fading is the syntax of the whole prologue of The Haunting, suggesting the continuity, circularity and repetition of the curse affecting the dwelling. It also evokes a ghostly, undifferentiated matter, a non-image. See Leutrat, Vie des fantômes, pp. 78-79.

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Freda, 1957), which displays the petrification of female beauty in the horror of a mask, this time in long take. By appealing to ‘some standard situation of horror movies since the ’30s’, the sudden decaying of someone’s face on screen, as ‘codified semantic element’,6 transforms the film camera into a sculptor, that is to say a Medusa-like gaze which is able, thanks to the specifically cinematographic device, to sculpt flesh in virtue of a frightful acceleration of life timeframes. Based on the equivalence of sculpture and death, the camera is able to take up the sculptor’s job, thus embodying the powers of a haptic gaze that touches and transforms the targeted matter. Next to the idea of cinema as body sculpting, one may place the reference to sculpture—still within movie language—as cast, automatic imprint, moulage. As Dominique Païni points out: ‘irresistibly sculpture and cinema lead us towards a common denominator, corralling their comparable vocation to illusion: cinema replicates movement, sculpture replicates the volume of bodies, both are a matter of moulding.’7 The realism of the cast was previously outlined by Bazin and has been recently refreshed by Deleuze and Didi-Huberman.8 Such a viewpoint does not represent an overused comparison between the arts but rather the possibility of inhabiting an intermediary space between sculptural images and cinema images, the entre-images, and thus, for instance, to approach sculpture as a photo-cinematographic device for the sedimentation of time. The petrification of the face is linked to one of the two mythical figures presiding over the processes of animation of the statue, or vice versa of petrification of the body: Medusa and Pygmalion. While Pygmalion is the sculpture who, by hand and chisel, builds up, shapes and adorns death, Medusa ‘is the Gorgon sculptor who petrifies, on the spot, what touches. Thus, death and statue call mutually upon each other like silent signs constantly referring to one another to make one say what the other withholds.’9 The statue then stands for a body reduced to a corpse, deprived of the specific features of a living body.10 Granted that the corpse is the reverse of the living body, the statue doubles the corpse itself, introducing the principle of multiplication and generation of images that pertains to the logics of simulacra. The animation of stone and the petrification of the body can thus be taken as two dynamic polarities of the same mythical structure that encompasses 6 See Di Chiara, I tre volti della paura, p. 67, and Prawer, Caligari’s Children. 7 See Païni ‘Le complexe de Pygmalion: sculpter à l’écran’, p. 117. 8 See Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, pp. 9-16; Deleuze, Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image; Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact. 9 See Chareyre-Méjan, Le réel et le fantastique, p. 95. 10 See Rosset, Principes de sagesse et de folie, pp. 108-110.

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the imagery of statues, that is to say petrified bodies, as the intertwining of simulacrum and living body. Such imagery, as Aurélia Gaillard points out in Le corps des statues, pervades Western civilisation from classical antiquity to the Pygmalionic mania of the eighteenth century.11 One may also recall that Pygmalion’s tale, as presented by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, is preceded by the short episode concerning the metamorphosis of the Propetides, who are turned into stone statues because Aphrodite is offended by their indecent and lascivious behaviour. This is also the premise to Pygmalion’s renunciation of women and to the idea of shaping a simulacrum without imitating any model. The examples provided by Un angelo per Satana (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1966) and La Venere d’Ille (Mario and Lamberto Bava, 1978) are full of nineteenth-century literary impressions derived from the disturbing and threatening imagery of the animation of statues, where the feminine, embodied by the legendary married Venus of the early Middle Ages, is a destructive force against the masculine. Also in this case, it is the presence of the sculpture and of its ghost within the cinematic device (not exclusively on the explicit level of narrative fiction) that produces the most interesting effects, giving rise to some second-level phantasy pertaining to cinema as a simulacrum-producing machine. Un angelo per Satana by Camillo Mastrocinque is a late product of Italian gothic cinema—a sub-genre related to melodrama, with no strict autonomy within the Italian cultural production context of the 1950s and 1960s. It incorporates several literary elements ranging from Fogazzaro’s Malombra (twice adapted to cinema: by Carmine Gallone in 1917 and by Mario Soldati in 1942)—which is somehow the archetype of Italian literary gothic due notably to its lake-side outdoor location—to Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille, in which the topic of the discovery of a misfortune-casting cursed statue is also explored, although Mastrocinque’s direct literary source is identified in one of Luigi Emmanuele’s short stories. In this case, the statue belongs to the idealised classical era, and it is fished out of the lake (Mérimée’s story, adapted by Mario and Lamberto Bava in 1979, features instead a dark, black Venus emerging from the earth). Its function is to serve as a mysterious narrative artif ice introduced to feed the audience a false lead of interpretation. The fantasy element of the statue possessing the main character, the statue depicting a nymph closely resembling a family ancestor, is actually rooted in very mundane intrigues, orchestrated by Harriet’s uncle and his lover. Beyond the clearly narrative function of the 11 See Gaillard, Le corps des statues.

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statue—the missing link between the young sculptor and the leading character Harriet—it is worth investigating how the marble statue, the image of an idealised and normative body, actually interacts with another monumental body, that is to say the virtual body of the genre-cinema star, Barbara Steele. The superimposition of statue and body triggers a dynamic exchange. The statue generates an internal scission in Harriet’s character, as her original identity as a young and shy girl is thrown off balance and an erotic, transgressive, predatory, disquieting charge is set free. Such a pattern is widely employed by Italian gothic cinema, whose pivotal centres are feminine figures and the topics of duplicity and body.12 In actual terms, the splitting of the character does nothing but mirror the ambiguity of Barbara Steele’s acting roles. In 1966, she had already collected several ‛double’ roles. In this respect, also a minor movie such as Un angelo per Satana can be taken as the ultimate recapitulating chapter of a cinema genre and career, where the classical statuary model entertains a dialectical relationship with the vampire charm of a female character actor whose beauty is clearly anti-classical. The theme of feminine internal splitting and of the evocation of a double side—overturned, stimulated or generated by the statue’s presence—is also chosen by Mario and Lamberto Bava, together with literary critic Cesare Garboli (co-screenwriter), in the adaptation of Mérimée’s fantasy short story, La Vénus d’Ille.13 This medium-length movie was finally commissioned by RAI TV show I giochi del diavolo. Storie fantastiche dell’Ottocento. At variance with the literary source, director and screenplayer emphasise here the originally only lightly suggested affinity between the two Venuses: the black, sombre, menacing statue and Alfonso’s pale, shy, delicate wife-to-be, whose name in the movie, Clara, has more than clear connotations. At first sight, the two characters display opposite features and inclinations. The statue is all terrestrial, as it is extracted from the earth, while Clara is as celestial as her name suggests. However, from the perspective of the narrative—which in the movie, unlike in the original story, is not an unnamed narrating ego fully external to the events but a real character in flesh named Matteo, directly involved and attracted by the charm of both the statue and Clara—the two figures overlap and replace one another. While sketching the statue for professional reasons, Matteo ends up portraying Clara’s profile. With her he also has a short affair, which is completely missing in Mérimée’s 12 See Curti, Fantasmi d’amore. 13 The story attracted also Jean Cocteau’s attention as far as its cinema adaptation was concerned.

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account. Just one brief passage in the original story mentions the affinity between the young bride and the statue: She was not only beautiful, she was alluring. […] Her kind look, which yet was not free from a touch of malice, reminded me, in spite of myself, of my host’s Venus. While making this inward comparison, I asked myself if the incontestably superior beauty of the statue did not in great measure come from its tigress-like expression; for energy, even in the service of evil, always surprises us and inspires a sort of involuntary admiration.14

Mérimée’s text presents furthermore those structural elements of the statue’s imagery as petrified body: gaze, movement, speech. The dark Venus from Roussillon, whose beauty is fierce and cruel, has a hint of movement even while standing still, her evil smile looks like it is about to talk. The inscription on the statue pedestal—CAVE AMANTEM—has an ambiguous meaning and supports two potential translations: ‘Beware of your lover’ or ‘Watch out if she (Venus) loves you’. And finally, the truth of her shapes looks as if the statue was modelled or even moulded by nature itself.15 The doubling of the Venus statue into Clara prompts, furthermore, Bava to achieve one of the most deservedly praised shots of this career-crowning medium-length movie, which is also a meta-filmic moment of reflection on the evocation potential of strictly cinematographic phantasy. The statue, placed in the garden, perfectly still and heavy in its rigid three-dimensionality, takes on a double appearance entering Matteo’s room when he opens the window and finds the head of the statue very close to him in the glass reflection, as if the statue was actually in the room and could reflect itself on this projective screen. Cinema devices are thus evoked as the mechanism of production of bi-dimensional and evanescent, phantasmagorical and moving simulacra. The room serves as a metaphor for cinema’s projection rooms (or as a pre-cinema vision device: a darkroom), whose mirrors, glasses or windows may act as projection screens or ghost-reflecting screens. Granted that the leitmotif of the double as the persistency of the past floating back in the present and disturbing the characters’ minds is often rendered in cinema through portraits (see the proliferation of ‛portrayed women’ in cinema literature), what exactly is the role of the statue in cinema’s evocation of simulacra? On the one hand, the sculpted object provides a concrete, bodily presence to cinema’s virtual bodies by playing contrapuntally on 14 See Mérimée, The Venus of Ille. 15 See ibid.

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the contrast with film image, which is closer to the painting medium due to its bidimensionality. The simple stillness-movement antithesis appears to place sculpture and cinema at opposite poles of some ideal scale, thus giving way to the claim according to which sculpture’s presence in cinema bears testimony to some directors’ fascination and disquiet ‘concerning a condition prior to conquered cinégénie, […] the threatening or staggering return’ of an archaic state prior to the conquest of movement: ‘freeze, arrest, immobility, standstill’.16 On the other hand, the sculpted simulacrum is the idol ready to animate itself and thus the closest image competing with what Dominique Païni has defined as cinema’s ‛Pygmalion’s complex’ (the reverse parallel of Bazin’s ‛mummy complex’), that is to say the original vocation of cinema, according to some interpreters, to engender animated simulacra, endowed with gaze and movement. The issue at stake concerns a form of inter-mediality or meta-picture allowing the comparison between still images and moving pictures, thus opening the way to and inaugurating cinema’s internal discussion on its medium and pictures in general.17 In relation to sculpture, however, cinema often does not offer a new version of Pygmalion’s myth (even though Pygmalion and Galatea is the subject of Méliès’ movie) but rather is the explicit result of Pygmalion’s complex: the example of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) is paradigmatic, as aptly argued by Stoichita at the end of The Pygmalion Effect.18 More than his friend and Madelaine/Julie’s deceit and trickery, the main character Scotty cannot stand the idea of being a second-level Pygmalion, given that the ‛first’ Julie has been modelled, clothed and trained by his friend to play the role of Madelaine/Carlotta Valdez. The simulacrum has been assembled and animated by someone else: the statue is already there; it is never assembled in front of the audience. Movies come in later, hinting at a second-level interpretative and theoretical action. Like the figures of the sculptor-restorer in Un angelo per Satana and of the archaeologist-designer in La Venere d’Ille, it works on previously existing shapes, already fully formed. Compared to the gothic models initially considered here, which do not depart from the rules of their cinema genre and provide overtly traditional references to sculptures, the examples provided by Cronenberg and Scorsese present two directors committing to a more direct and much more explicit reference to contemporary art and notably to contemporary sculpture. 16 See Païni, ‘Le complexe de Pygmalion’, p. 110. 17 See Mitchell, ‘Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science’, pp. 11-30. 18 See Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect.

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For instance in After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985), one traditional motif of thriller and horror genre cinema is fully reversed: human corpses are hidden and masked as wax or plaster statues, gathered in a macabre horror museum functional to the display of the creative desires of failed artists.19 The papier-maché shell that simultaneously petrifies and saves the young office worker, Paul, at the end of his crazy night in New York, after being chased and harassed by a crowd of citizens and enraged women in Soho, is some sort of protective layer that allows the return from the night hell into a livid and uncertain daybreak. His liberation is not only spatial—at the end of the night, Paul is finally able to get out of the magic neighbourhood that was holding him hostage in the spare time of after hours and finds himself in front of the entrance of his firm,—but also a return back in time, inside a symbolic maternal womb, prepared and handcrafted by Jane, an artist with a maternal protectiveness for the unfortunate Paul. She saves him from lynching by hiding him in a piece of art that looks like a disguised sculpture by George Segal. It is precisely George Segal who is the object of the amused verbal exchange between the two flat burglars, Neil and Pepe, who smuggle the statue hosting Paul. It is, however, a George Segal double, as the two mistake the actor George Segal for the homonymous sculptor from New York who produces plaster bandage casts of his own body.20 The camouflage is double: a fake artwork hiding a human being downplaying him to the condition of internal organ. The fear of death, emasculation and mummification permeate the whole of this entertaining noir and surreal comedy. Kiki Bridges’ statue, which follows Paul’s traces into the night as a disquieting warning, is inspired by Munch’s Scream and it acts as a mirror of his condition, almost an anticipation of his destiny. A 20-dollar banknote is stripped from the statue by Paul, the same 20 dollars he lost; his own body is full of strips of newspaper and glue. The final petrification in plaster and newspapers is inversely the possibility of a re-birth. The body becomes a work of art, or better yet, it pretends to be one. A living body sneaks in and hides in a plaster shell as a last resort for the seemingly impossible return back home. As suggested by the title, in the exchange between body and plaster statue, the retrieval or loss of a certain amount of lifetime is at stake. Paul enters the Soho night 19 See for instance, Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933), its remake (by André De Toth 1953), Il mulino delle donne di pietra (Giorgio Ferroni, 1960), the latter with its carillon of full-scale statues depicting martyrs at the stake or famous female murderers, some of which are actually real bodies covered in painted wax, or also Games (Curtis Harrington, 1967). 20 The sculptor is also interested in cinema as daily common environmental or situational space.

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in a crazy speeding taxi where he loses his 20 dollars, a material symbol of the freedom to dispose of one’s own time and body. The nighttime eludes him; everything flows too fast or too slow after hours. At any rate, time is uncontrollable for the subject. The slow circular time of the mummifying process with newspaper strips allows Paul to conquer again the space of a new birth in mundane time. It is not a matter of replacement or splitting, it is rather the incorporation of the living body within the simulacrum body. The sculpture functions as a mask, a saving mask at the cost of disappearing, paid for by the protagonist’s becoming invisible.21 Unlike the mirror-screen, which doubles the image on one single surface—and which is crucial to Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)—here the image of Paul’s face slips inside the statue, inhabits it from within, anyway allowing the acknowledgment of the gap, fracture, the animated eyes seeing through the protective shell. The doubling of the simulacrum in Dead Ringers suggests instead multiplicity, that is to say the multiplication of the same image. The female figure of Claire not only ‘is an actress, profession prone to doubling, but she has in the deepest intimacy of her person a triple uterus, which reproduces the trio structure she forms with the twins’.22 Dead Ringers marks, from this viewpoint, a step further compared to fantasy tales revolving around the double (alter ego or doppelgänger) generated and moved by the discovery or retrieval of a statue, of an automaton. The statue, doubling as a corpse, as Michel Serres writes in Statues, is the shifting of a subject—lying underneath in the tomb—into an object in front of us but referring to the excluded third, which is the hic jacet, the corpse, and which requires whenever visible a shifting movement, someone to replace it.23 At first sight, Dead Ringers revolves around a process of continuous replacement between the two twins, progressively acquiring in the story different names and features, specific characters, dualities triggered by Claire Niveau’s arrival, the actress who is the lover of both of them. The female figure not only has a dramatic function of breaking and separating the inseparable couple but also triggers a process of continuous doubling in the two male figures, which see her as changing, thus bearing a metamorphic power that can be made visible or carried out. Beverly and Elliot acknowledge themselves as internally pervaded by continuous doubling: each brother conceals himself under the identity of the other. The ghost of sculpture, then, comes back to cinema in Dead Ringers, not anymore in the form of a comparison between the living and the simulacrum, 21 See Cappabianca, ‘Il doppio insanguinato’, pp. 36-37. 22 See Leutrat, Vie des fantômes, p. 67. 23 See Serres, Statues.

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between the three-dimensional body and its reflected image—potentially aspiring to the life of the original and to replace it—but rather as an attempt to provide visible shape and body to the internal beauty of mutant organs, as mentioned by one of the Mantle twins, who wishes there were beauty contests for the inside of bodies still waiting for the achievement of their metamorphosis. Two elements of the movie deserve particular attention: the sculptural, plastic presence of gynaecological tools, figuratively included from the opening credits almost as instruments of torture, and the twin nature of the main characters, evoking both the simulacrum-like nature of the film body of actors and the ability of cinema to generate simulacra through the process of duplication of the image. The gynaecologist tools devised by [one of] the twins, the inventors of the ‛Mantle Retractor’, are unusable for surgery and are exposed as works of art in Anders Wolleck’s gallery. These are tools that wish to elude both their identification with mere anatomical instruments to be used on corpses—the result, then, of a merely intellectualistic and cold approach to the mystery of the living body and its inside—and their assimilation of the hybrid mixtures of flesh and steel resulting from the post-organic synthesis of living and inanimate, following the imagery familiar to Cronenberg, starting from the gun-hand of Videodrome. These tools would instead embody the twins’ monstrous dream of providing an external cast—in reverse—of an internal organ that does not yet exist, of an imaginary body fitting and modelled on the morphology of technique, without being penetrated or anatomised by the tool. After risking the death of a patient with his tool, Beverly replies to Elliot: ‘It’s nothing the matter with the instrument. It’s the body. The woman’s body was all wrong’. The tools are supposed to simultaneously embody the cold lucidity of a clinical gaze and the eros of a desiring and living body, grasping the point of contact between bios and techne, but they end up incarnating Beverly and Elliot’s mental demons. The tools are casts of an absent interior; they are doubles without their originals, just as the twins themselves appear to be doubles without a matrix. They are indeed a hendiadys that got lost in the ‘journey back to the origin, inside the maternal body’24 in the attempt to repeat the moment of birth, the moment in which the one was displayed as two—as double—opening themselves up to a disturbing metamorphosis. The journey to the interior of the body that Cronenberg inaugurates in Dead Ringers—deviating from the paradigm of contamination between flesh, body and technological mediums as well as from the obsession with the hybridisation of different living species supposedly engendering the 24 See Grünberg, ‘Inseparabili, ovvero la prova della solitudine’, p. 93.

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‛new flesh’—is solved in the aporia of an absent, missing origin. The woman figure, always potentially fertile in Cronenberg’s cinema, is here either sterile due to an excess of matrix or unreachable. It is then reduced to the full flatness of film bodies, as made explicit by cinema screens due to the technical device in use. The perfected use of split screen in the movie makes Beverly the mirror reflection of Elliot, two ghostly silhouettes without depth, two bodies made virtual by the cinema medium, thus producing an even more disquieting effect due to the absence of the ‘reassuring middle line of the old split screen, easily identified as a suture trace’.25 The screen appears therefore to be doubled by a double ghost (as if it is split in two), invaded by a double embodied actor, for instance in the final sequences before the murder of Elliot by Beverly, where the two identical bodies run one after the other and repeat the same gestures. Their roles are indefinitely mixed up. There is no more an older brother and a younger brother, a father brother and a son brother, a cynical and aggressive one and a shy and sensitive one (as shown in the first half of the movie, where their difference emerges as a difference among indiscernibles only clear to Claire). The absence of any reference or hint of the reality of the double body, to the double role of Jeremy Irons, brings forward a similar doubt concerning the nature of cinema images as deprived of all reference, as able to duplicate and to split into film spectres. Arguably the use of twins is typical of contemporary simulacra, where ‘the flesh reality of their bodies is annihilated by their similarity, by the contiguity of the same’. Faced with the image of twins, as Baudrillard argues in L’échange symbolique et la mort, ‘the gaze can only go from one to the other, and these poles enclose all vision. This is a subtle means of murdering the original, but it is also a singular seduction, […] perhaps this is the seduction of death.’26 The seductive power of death actually finds a plastic, almost sculptural result in the final image of Dead Ringers, which is almost a sculpted Piety, an overturned fraternal and filial piety between identical people, where Beverly lies down in Elliot’s lifeless lap. In Cronenberg’s cinema, the heroes of his bizarre contes philosophiques (from Videodrome to The Fly and Dead Ringers) are often alone but never unique, never identical. Like cinema stars, they are never one, they are living body and ghost together. And even their death—or their suicide—must be double. (Translated from the Italian by Tessa Marzotto)

25 See Cappabianca, L’immagine estrema, p. 114. 26 See Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 73.

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Works cited Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: SAGE, 1993). André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), in What is cinema? (1958), selected and transl. by Hugh Gray, vol. 1, pp. 9-16 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1967-1971; repr. 2004). Roger Caillois, Au cœur du fantastique (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). Alessandro Cappabianca, ‘Il doppio insanguinato’, in Martin Scorsese, ed. by Edoardo Bruno, pp. 31-37 (Rome: Gremese, 1992). ———, L’immagine estrema. Cinema e pratiche della crudeltà (Milan: Costa & Nolan, 2005). ———, Trame del fantastico. Riflessi e sogni nel cinema (Cosenza: Pellegrini Editore, 2011). Alain Chareyre-Méjan, Le réel et le fantastique (Lille: Atelier national de reproduction des thèses, 1994). Roberto Curti, Fantasmi d’amore. Il gotico italiano tra cinema, letteratura e tv (Turin: Lindau, 2011). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image (1983), trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1986). Francesco Di Chiara, I tre volti della paura. Il cinema horror italiano (1957-1965) (Ferrara: UniPress, 2009). Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact. Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Les Ėditions de Minuit, 2008). Aurélia Gaillard, Le corps des statues. Le vivant et son simulacre à l’âge classique (de Descartes à Diderot) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003). Serge Grünberg, ‘Inseparabili, ovvero la prova della solitudine’, in David Cronenberg. La bellezza interiore, ed. by Michele Canosa, pp. 80-93 (Genoa: Le Mani, 2005). Stefano Lazzarin, Il modo fantastico (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2000). Jean-Louis Leutrat, Vie des fantômes. Le fantastique au cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1995). Prosper Mérimée, The Venus of Ille, trans. by Myndart Verelst (New York: Minton, Brentanos, 1887; repr. 2005). William J.T. Mitchell, ‘Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science’, in Visual Literacy, ed. by James Elkins, pp. 11-30 (New York: Routledge, 2008). Dominique Païni, ‘Le complexe de Pygmalion: sculpter à l’écran’, in SculpterPhotographier. Photographie-Sculpture, ed. by Michel Frizot and Dominique Païni, pp. 109-119 (Paris: Marval, 1993). Siegfried S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Clément Rosset, Principes de sagesse et de folie (Paris: Les Ėditions de Minuit, 1991).

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Michel Serres, Statues. Le second livre des fondations (Paris: Bourin, 1987). Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect. Towards a Historical Anthropology of Simulacre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970).

About the author Michele Bertolini teaches Aesthetics and Art Criticism at the Accademia di Belle Arti “Carrara” (Bergamo). His research focuses on the links between the verbal and the visual, on the aesthetics and ontology of moving images, on the aesthetics of spectatorship. As well as writings on aesthetics, art theory (Diderot, Balzac, Cassirer, Malraux, Fried) and cinema (Bazin, Bresson, Lang, Tarkovskij, Tourneur, Welles), he is the author of Quadri di un’esposizione. I Salons di Diderot (Aracne, 2018) and La rappresentazione e gli affetti. Studi sulla ricezione dello spettacolo cinematografico (Mimesis, 2009). He has translated and edited: André Bazin, Jean Renoir (Mimesis, 2012), Diderot e il demone dell’arte (Mimesis, 2014), and co-edited: Abstraction Matters. Contemporary Sculptors in their own Words (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019).

5.

The Ephemeral Cathedral: Bodies of Stone and Configurations of Film Vinzenz Hediger

Abstract At first sight, a statue that appears in a film is a prop among others. It can serve to situate the action, it can be an attribute of a character, indicating the person’s taste and social status, and it can become a world-making detail, as in historical epics set in antiquity, where statues serve as the kind of ornament used to describe the world of the film and lend it credibility. But as it appears in a film, it raises questions about film as an art of the gesture, and about the power of film to endow inanimate objects with agency. Keywords: Film theory; film and architecture; gesture; visual culture

La lettre écrite m’a enseigné à écouter la voix humaine, tout comme les grandes attitudes immobiles des statues m’ont appris à apprécier les gestes. [The written word taught me how to listen to the human voice, just as the great immobile attitudes of the statues taught me how to appreciate gesture.] ‒ Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien

Two kinds of props Statues in film are props, but they are props of a particular kind. Props are inanimate objects that serve to situate the action, explain the character and/ or lend credibility and substance to the world the film evokes. Props are,

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chI05

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variously, non-thematic elements of a backdrop, attributes of a character, or the kind of excessive yet indispensable detail that Roland Barthes has in mind when he describes the reality effect of literary realism.1 As such, props, while inanimate, can take on a life of their own and shift from backdrop to attribute to world-making detail in a matter of seconds. And sometimes, their transformation goes even further. The furniture in Hou Hsiao Hsien’s A Time to Live and a Time to Die is a case in point (Figure 12). Towards the end of the film, the children of An-Hsiao’s family discover their father’s autobiography among the items bequeathed to them by their late mother. From these few short pages they learn something important about the bamboo furniture in their house, with which the viewer has been made familiar since the first shots of the film. Expecting to return to Mainland China in a matter of years, the father had bought bamboo furniture because it was cheap and could be left behind once he and his family would be leaving. But he stayed in Taiwan for the rest of his life. He even ended up dying in the cheap bamboo chair during a power outage. The chair, which has been standing there all along, suddenly acquires the power to tell the true story of the father’s life: not just a story of almost perpetual respiratory illness but the story of a tragic failure, of an ambition never fulfilled and a life lived on hold. The chair’s unthematic Zuhandenheit, to use Heidegger’s term (‘ready-to-hand’, in John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s translation2), its availability for the purpose for which it was designed, shifts towards a focus on its meaning, and Hou’s bamboo chair becomes reminiscent of Van Gogh’s painting of his chair. We realise that all along it has been a literal still life, understood as an agent-in-waiting—to substitute for the vitalist vocabulary of early film that of a more contemporary approach like actor-network theory—that is a potential actor with the power to make us re-evaluate the entire narrative once its meaning becomes clear. But while Hou Hsiao-hsien’s mastery of cinematic narrative is uncommon, the agency of objects in film is not. When Judy Garland turns her living room furniture into dance partners in A Star is Born, she engages in bricolage, as Jane Feuer succinctly puts it, borrowing a term from Lévi-Strauss. But Garland also highlights—one is tempted to say: incarnates—film’s ability to endow any given object with the capacity to respond to and replicate human agency. With another term borrowed from anthropology, and threading in the footsteps of Balázs and Bazin, who gave a great deal of thought to a small film in which a red balloon is the protagonist, we could call this the comprehensive animism of film. In that sense, animation—the kind of 1 See Barthes, The Reality Effect. 2 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 135.

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Fig. 12: A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1985). Screen capture.

film that features singing and dancing teakettles as a matter of course (as in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast)—is not an art apart but a model of film’s power to grant agency to inanimate objects. At first sight, a statue that appears in a film is, in fact, a prop among others. It can serve to situate the action; it can be an attribute of a character, indicating the person’s taste and social status; and it can become a worldmaking detail, as in historical epics set in antiquity, where statues serve as the kind of ornament used to describe the world of the film and lend it credibility. Yet the bamboo chair is still—and first and foremost—a bamboo chair. It never entirely loses its Zuhandenheit, its being there for the specific purpose of seating. A statue, by contrast, is an artwork and serves no primary purpose other than that of producing meaning or raising questions about meaning, be it as a symbol of status and social order or as a supposedly autonomous artwork. Compare Hou’s bamboo chair to the following examples: Marlene Dietrich posing alongside her sculpted double in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 film The Song of Songs; Delphine Seyrig, a statuesque presence surrounded by or associated with marble statues in numerous shots in Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961); George C. Scott on a terrace framed by statues in Patton (1970). We know why the chair is in the picture: for someone to take a seat. But statues raise questions: why are they there; what do they say about the character; and what do they contribute to the story? In Montage intérdit, Bazin argues that, at one point in a film, the two main elements of a physical action have to be present and visible in the same frame—an observation borne out, among others, by safari films, which never go without a shot of hunter and wild animal in direct confrontation.3 3

See Bazin, Forbidden Montage.

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Conversely, we can argue that the placement of two objects in the same frame raises the expectation that the two objects are meaningfully related or will be so in the future course of the story. A frame showing a man sitting in a chair relates two elements of the action, but it hardly raises any questions about the meaning of the relationship between the two elements. Or rather, the question is always already answered, because the meaning of the chair is, self-evidently, its Zuhandenheit. And sure enough, for the first two hours of Hou’s film, nobody asks what the chair says about the person sitting in it. Only in the last fifteen minutes does it become the harbinger of the sad truth about the father’s life. But if you put a human figure and a statue in the same frame, the expectation of a meaningful relationship cannot be muted. Patton is probably the least explicit case. Statues abound in Italian parks and palaces, and the likelihood of an American visitor ending up amongst them is high. Yet there Patton is, standing amongst statues in one frame, the result of the director’s decision, an artistic choice. The statues exemplify some of the character’s qualities: he is a historical figure, a man of grand gestures, and unflappable like a figure hewn from stone. But there is also a tension: Patton is a man of action par excellence; the statues are gestures frozen in time, both potentially encapsulating and transcending the fleeting, ephemeral moment of history. L’Année dernière à Marienbad is a film that is all about meaning, or rather about the impossibility of making sense through narrative. Delphine Seyrig’s constant association with statues can be said to point to her as a figuration of presentness, to draw on Gilles Deleuze’s reading of the film. 4 The statues’ frozen gesture would thus reflect her lack of memory of what supposedly happened last year in Marienbad (Figure 13). But no matter how one tries to make sense of their co-presence in the same frame, it is not possible to merely treat the statues as décor, as unthematic backdrop. The statues always want to make sense. In The Song of Songs, the unclad statue obviously serves to introduce a strong element of full frontal female nudity, which a Hollywood film would not otherwise be allowed to show even in the period prior to the full implementation of the production code in 1934 (Figure 14). It belongs in the time-worn tradition of what we might call marble pin-up porn, which runs through the entire history of Western sculpture and from sculpture into painting—just think of Rubens’ appropriation of antique and baroque sculptures for his paintings. But the statue is also Dietrich’s Doppelgänger. As such, it brings into play all of the uncanniness associated with Doppelgänger 4 Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time Image, p. 79.

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Fig. 13: L’Année dernière à Marienbad (A. Resnais, 1961). Screen capture.

narratives. A country girl who is sent to the city and becomes the object of a sculptor’s adulation and later the wife of one of his clients, the Dietrich character ends up destroying her sculpture to free herself from the trap it represents: the trap of a male desire and an intense adulation that leaves her no life beyond the reified, idealised conception of herself that the statue represents. But once again, it is the statue’s entry into the frame that drives the narrative. But the statue does not always have to be in the same frame to draw attention to itself and become an agent in the f ilm. Taking a cue from Eisenstein’s concept of intellectual montage, Godard inserts a number of shots of Greek statues, some of them painted as they originally would have been, in the early parts of Le Mépris (1963) (Figure 15). There is no apparent connection between the statues and the film’s purported narrative other than that they serve as props for the film version of Homer’s Odyssey. But it is their appearance in a montage of unconnected shots that underscores the fact that these statues are more than mere props. Statues, then, are props whose agency is never muted by mere availability and which become agents through framing and montage. This agency at the micro level of cinematic composition also finds an echo in what we might call the macro level of narrative. Stories of statues and statuesque figures acting as or like humans are a staple of romantic and gothic literature—think of Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’île. But they abound in cinema, from Paul

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Fig. 14: The Song of Songs (R. Mamoulian, 1933). Original movie poster.

Wegener’s Der Golem (1919) to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) to the Terminator franchise and replicant stories like Blade Runner. Comparing and contrasting Hou’s bamboo chair to statues in film raises the question whether the agency of statues in film is merely attributable to their character as artworks, i.e. to the fact that their primary purpose is never just to be available. At the same time, the abundance of statues with agency in cinema suggests that there is more at play than merely a shift

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Fig. 15: Le Mépris (J.L. Godard, 1963). Screen capture.

from unthematic Zuhandenheit to a quest for meaning, or the difference between a material object for daily use and an artwork. Cinema has been called, by Giorgio Agamben among others, an art of gesture. The true medium, the element of cinema, argues Agamben, is not the image but gesture. Cinema appears in the late nineteenth century at a point where gesture has been lost or segmented and fragmented through the scientific analysis of movement. The photographic image simultaneously reifies and obliterates gesture by breaking it down into component parts and arresting it. The power of film, according to Agamben, is that it ‘leads images back to the homeland of gestures’.5 If, for Bazin, perspective is the original sin of painting and if photography—and by extension, cinema—is the redemption of painting, for Agamben, photography is the original sin in the arts of gesture, and cinema is the redemption. One could argue, of course, that statues, like photographs, reify and arrest gesture, and that film also has the power to redeem the reified gesture of the sculpted human figure and similarly lead it back to the ‘homeland of gestures’. But perhaps it is not the similarity between photography and sculpture which matters, but that between sculpture and film. One of the things that the scene in Patton could be said to highlight is, in fact, a similarity between sculpture and f ilm. The juxtaposition of the historical f igure of the legendary American general with sculptures speaks, among other things, to the ability of sculpture and film—which is, after all, a technique for recording temporal objects—to encapsulate and transcend fleeting moments in time. If cinema, for Agamben, is a repository of gesture restored to its original meaning and expressive potential, we can, at least for the purpose of devising a heuristics, take Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian by 5

Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, p. 55.

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his word and treat sculpture also as a repository of gesture from which something about gesture can be learned. Sculpture and cinema would thus be two related modes of storing, and restoring, gesture and making it legible. Rather than frame the connection between sculpture and film in terms of sin and redemption, then, i.e. in terms of an eschatology in which sculpture is the original sin and film the redemption, I propose to dwell on the relation between sculpture and film in terms of analogy.

Difference and affinity, relation and variation Lists create order by connecting otherwise unconnected things. They tend to be transitory and open-ended, and almost any category can be used to make one. As such, lists uncouple ontology from metaphysics. Rather than expressing the essence of things, lists can aggregate entities that emerge from relations between things. Siegfried Kracauer proposes such a list in his Theory of Film: a list of affinities between film and certain aspects of the physical world. Kracauer argues that certain objects—material things, processes and events—reveal their inherent cinematic properties once they enter into contact with the photographic medium of film, i.e. once they are recorded and the results are projected. Kracauer identifies five such objects to which film has a particular affinity: the Unstaged, the Fortuitous, Endlessness, the Indeterminate and the ‘Flow of Life’.6 According to Kracauer, the specific aesthetic purpose of film is the redemption of physical reality, and the five affinities describe the areas where film best fulfills this purpose. Affinity is a term that originates from medieval alchemy. In modern scientific chemistry, affinity describes ‘the property or relation in virtue of which dissimilar substances are capable of entering into chemical combination with each other’.7 The concept of affinity or Wahlverwandschaften became part of the German literary and philosophical tradition through Goethe’s eponymous 1809 novel. It entered the lexicon of social and cultural analysis through the works of sociologist Max Weber, who used the term to describe the mutual selection, convergence and reinforcement of cultural forms—whether intellectual, religious or economic—that share analogies, kinships and layers of meaning.8 As a highly educated German, Kracauer 6 Kracauer, Theory of Film, pp. 60-74. 7 Chisholm, Affinity, Chemical, p. 301. 8 See Löwy, ‘Le concept d’affinité élective chez Max Weber’.

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was familiar with both Goethe and Weber.9 In his theory of film, he adapts Weber’s sociological understanding of the affinity between cultural forms to describe the relation between film technology and physical process. According to Kracauer, the emergence of a new technology—film—creates a new class of objects, which consists of a set of relations between film and pro-filmic events, things and processes. The list defines this class of objects by aggregating them. It becomes a tool for a relational ontology: affinity describes the mode of existence of the ‘filmic’ object. Kracauer’s list does not cover film’s possible affinities with other arts. Many of Kracauer’s predecessors in the history of film theory, from Lukàcs and Münsterberg to Lindsay and Arnheim, worked on a def inition of film as art. In the tradition of Lessing’s Laokoon essay, they assumed that artistic achievement is bound to the affordances of a given art’s medium, and they def ined these affordances by comparing the medium of f ilm to those of other arts (for instance, the theatre in the case of Lukács and Münsterberg, or poetry and sculpture in the case of Lindsay). But for Kracauer, cinematic achievement is only partially artistic achievement. A film that does justice to its medium is one in which the inherent tendency of the photographic medium to redeem physical reality is balanced against whatever artistic intention may have gone into its creation. Goethe and Weber take the place of Lessing, so to speak: rather than a matter of difference between media, the medium specif icity of f ilm is a matter of aff inity between the medium and its contents. And since f ilm can never be entirely an art, the question of its aff inity with other arts is of little interest. About a quarter of a century before Kracauer published his theory of film, Walter Benjamin had already shifted the ground from under classical film theory with his artwork essay. Benjamin’s question was not whether film could be an art but rather what art was once there was film. Defining film is no longer a question of seizing the differentia specifica of film through a comparison of the film medium with that of other arts. Rather, it is a question of understanding film as an element in a set of relations that may be described as the system of the arts and of understanding how the emergence of technical reproduction—of which film is an epitome—transforms those relations. 9 While Goethe’s novel is part of the German literary canon, Kracauer cites Max Weber as a paradigmatic case of secular scepticism in his 1922 essay ‘Die Wartenden’, which is about the similarities—or affinities—between three different dominant intellectual attitudes in a post-religious environment. Cf. Kracauer, ‘Die Wartenden’, p. 165, passim.

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Or, in other words: while Kracauer defuses the question of art by defining film through a set of affinities rather than differences between media, Benjamin argues that the emergence of film forces us to entirely rethink what art is.10 André Malraux developed his ‘imaginary museum’ out of Benjamin’s insight. Malraux never tired of stressing how much the framing of the museum and the availability of photographic reproductions changed the status and very nature of these artworks. He pointed out that what we now consider to be a sculpture, a painting and a statue are in themselves artefacts of an institutional and discursive framing: A Roman crucifix was not a sculpture to begin with, Cimabue’s Madonna was not a painting to begin with, even Phidias’ Pallas Athene was not a statue to begin with. The role museums play in our relationship with artworks is so important that we have difficulty acknowledging that they do not exist and have never existed where the civilization of modern Europe is or was unknown, and that they have only been around for less than two hundred years.11

The modern philosophy of art—starting with Lessing’s Laokoon, which takes its title from a Greco-Roman sculpture and picks up where Ovid had left off in his discussion of ut pictura poesis—may discuss artworks from 10 Recently, another philosopher from Frankfurt combined Kracauer’s interest in affinities with Benjamin’s argument about the transformative power of film to develop what we might call a relational aesthetics of film based on a discussion of film’s affinities with other arts. In his 2013 book Die Künste des Kinos [The Arts of Cinema], Martin Seel argues that the question of f ilm as art has long been settled (f ilm is indeed an art). Instead, he explores what kind of art film is by asking how film recognises itself in the other arts and modifies the other arts by incorporating them. Seel’s list of affinities covers, in particular, architecture, music, acting and literature. Conspicuously absent is a chapter on sculpture. One can argue, of course, that sculpture can be subsumed under architecture. The human figure hewn from stone, cast in bronze or modelled from clay has served as a functional element in architecture for thousands of years, from Mesopotamian steles to the caryatids of the Parthenon and those of nineteenth-century Paris. Yet as much as sculpture can be integral to an architectural design, the sculpted human figure is an aesthetic object in its own right. As an artwork, it lacks a purpose other than to evoke and represent the human figure, while as an element of architecture, it transcends its possible static function precisely by virtue of also being an artwork. 11 ‘Un crucif ix roman n’était pas d’abord une sculpture, la Madone de Cimabue n’était pas d’abord un tableau, meme la Pallas Athéné de Phidias n’était pas d’abord une statue. Le rôle des musées dans notre relation avec les oeuvres d’art est si grand que nous avons peine à penser qu’il n’en existe pas, qu’il n’en exista jamais, là ou la civilization de l’Europe moderne est ou fut inconnue; et qu’il en existe chez nous depuis moins de deux siècles’ (Malraux, Les Voix du Silence, p. 205. Translated by the author).

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antiquity. But it proceeds from an understanding of the arts and works towards a definition of the arts with which it is coeval. Like the technology of film, which for Benjamin promises to transform it, our understanding of art is relatively recent and thoroughly modern. It should not surprise us, then, that well into the second century of the history of film, the arts that seemingly predate it, including sculpture and the plastic arts, have failed to evaporate. They persist along with the institutional apparatus of their cultivation, from specialised schools to museums and academic disciplines devoted to their study, and they persist in part thanks to the continuing operation of this apparatus. In fact, even the transformative technology of film itself has become codified as one of the arts, with its own museums and its own dedicated academic discipline (of which this text is a testament). So the question of the relationship between sculpture and film is not just a question of cinematic framing but of institutional framing: it is a question of a possible affinity between two art forms that are in and of themselves the outcome of a process of institutional and discursive framing. There may be chemistry between sculpture and film, but it is, as Weber already noted, a chemistry between cultural forms. To account for the historicity of these cultural forms, we should address appearances of statues and sculptures in film not just as images or representations but rather as configurations of film. The concept of ‘configurations’ has gained some currency to describe and analyse the uses of the moving image beyond the classical dispositive of cinema.12 While cinema has long been defined in film studies through the trias of index (film as a medium of photochemical reproduction), dispositive (the classical cinema as the defining locus of film) and the canon (major works from major auteurs), the concept of configuration shifts the focus to an analysis of the moving image as a constitutive element in a wide variety of spatio-temporal arrangements. Moving away from established notions of medium specificity, the concept of configuration assumes that film does not have ‘an invariable substrate to which relational variations would stand as predicates’. Rather, to quote anthropologist and philosopher Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘it is not the relations that vary, but rather the variations that are related’.13 To inquire into the affinity of sculpture and film, in that sense, would mean not to start with medium specificity and then compare and contrast two art forms but to consider sculpture and film as spatio-temporal variations of gesture that are related, either through framing or montage. 12 See De Rosa and Hediger, ‘Post-what? Post-when?. 13 Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, p. 13.

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The terms of the relation, then, are two variations of gesture: the body in stone and the filmed body. In order to better understand how these variations are related, we can turn to a classical film theorist who focused his thinking about film on the expressive potential of the human body but, almost unwittingly, proceeded from a relation between the filmed body and the body of stone.

Architecture as drama What happens when we film the human body? We release its expressive potential. This is the gist of Béla Balázs’ 1924 book The Visible Man. But the release of the expressive potential of the human body is more than just film’s timeless essence: it is a historical event of epochal proportions. More specifically, it is a re-release, a restoration. Balázs opens his book with a preliminary chapter that contains, among other things, one of the first mentions of the term ‘visual culture [Visuelle Kultur]’. It begins with the following observation: Victor Hugo once wrote that the printed book has taken over the role of mediaeval cathedrals and has become the repository of the spirit of the people. But the thousands of books fragmented the single spirit of the cathedrals into a myriad different opinions. The printed word smashed the stone to smithereens and broke up the church into a thousand books.14

The reference to Hugo is to his 1831 historical novel Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482. The book tells the story of Quasimodo, the hunchback who lives in the towers of Notre Dame, and his rivalry with Claude Frollo for the love of La Esmeralda, a gipsy girl who turns out to have a very different background. Much like Don Quixote, Quasimodo has long taken on a life that is quite independent of the book in which he first appeared. Hugo’s book, which together with Les Misérables and Les Travailleurs de la mer forms a trilogy on the theme of Ananke and on fate, is a romantic tale set in Paris in the late Middle Ages, but it is also a book on architecture and, in fact, a treatise on media theory. The third chapter of the book contains a description of Paris at the time of the writing of the book which is both expansive and extremely detailed. It is a work of architectural restoration in the medium of literature, anticipating by just a few years the restorations of medieval 14 Balázs, Visible Man, p. 96.

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architecture according to ideal type by Eugène-Edouard Viollet-le-Duc, of which Notre Dame in its current shape is the prime example, together with the city of Carcassonne and the cathedral of Reims. In the third chapter, Hugo argues that architecture was the highest form of human expression and the primary means for the communication of ideas up until the invention of printing. The novel is explicitly set in 1482, just before the invention of printing, to capture the last moment in which architecture served this purpose of the primary means of communication. ‘L’architecture’, writes Hugo, ‘a été jusqu’au quinzième sciècle le register principal de l’humanité.’ Not a single thought appears up to this point that does not find expression in a building. Up until Gutenberg, architecture is ‘l’écriture universelle’, the universal script. But in the fifteenth century, everything changes: ‘Le livre va tuer l’édifice’, the book (and through it the printed letter) kills not the spirit but the building.15 Ever since architecture has lost this mission, Hugo adds, there has been no architecture worth our attention: everything built in Paris after 1500 is either pastiche or worse. This is also why Hugo declares in the introduction to the book that, for lack of new monuments, we should conserve the old ones: ‘En attendant les monuments nouveaux, conservons les anciens.’ But Hugo’s critique of post-1500 architecture is not part of a larger cultural critique or an element of Kulturpessimismus. Quite to the contrary. While critiquing the architecture of his time as pompuous and irrelevant, Hugo celebrates the advent of printing. With the book, human ideas have found a means of expression that is both more ephemeral and more durable than architecture. For Hugo, books are indeed the ‘repository of the spirit of the people’, as Balázs writes. But where Hugo sees progress, Balázs sees a catastrophic loss. At f irst sight, Bálàzs reprises a familiar critique of the impact on printing on social cohesion. After all, one of the first books ever printed was Luther’s German translation of the bible, which led to a proliferation of Protestant denominations and a splintering of the once unitary Christian faith into a ‘myriad of opinions’. But Balázs argues not for the restoration of the unity of the Christian faith but rather for the restoration of a different unity: that of body and soul. Assessing the damage wrought by the invention of printing, he continues: In this way, the visible spirit was transformed into a legible spirit, and a visual culture was changed into a conceptual one. […] Since the advent of printing the word has become the principal bridge joining human 15 Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, pp. 180-182.

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beings to one another. The soul has migrated into the word and become crystallized there. The body, however, has been stripped of soul and emptied.16

What is lost in the transition to print culture, then, is not so much the community of human beings. Communication—which is, according to John Dewey and others, the act of creating a community 17—still happens, only it now happens through the printed word rather than through architecture. What is lost is the communion of the human being with herself, with her body, and by extension a community created not through the word but through bodily expression. But while this loss is a tragic fall from grace, salvation has arrived in the form of a new art form that restores the expressive visibility of the body and thus the unity of body and soul, namely cinema. For Balázs, film, not the book, is the new cathedral. Even more ephemeral than the book, film still has the power to restore ‘the single spirit of the cathedrals’. In his introduction, Bálàzs offers yet again an eschatological scenario in which cinema redeems the original sin of another technique or technology: printing for Balázs, perspective for Bazin, photography for Agamben. As in the case of other, similar scenarios, it is useful to dwell on the original state of grace that the invention and intervention of the diabolic new technique or technology supposedly degraded and destroyed. For Balázs, the original state of grace was one where concrete visibility prevailed over conceptual abstraction and immanence over transcendence, i.e. where body and soul were inseparable and the body was a medium of spiritual expression, a spirit that Balázs variously characterises as ‘single’, ‘visible’ and the ‘spirit of the people’. With both his reference to and his argument against Hugo, Balázs accepts the poet’s premise, which is that the medieval cathedral represents the apogee of architecture as a medium of expression of the ‘single’, ‘visible’ spirit ‘of the people’. But how can architecture be understood as the repository and the safeguard of the visible unity of body and soul? The answer to that question remains implicit in Balázs’ text but is explicit in Hugo. Architecture is not just built space. It includes sculpture. The ‘single spirit of the cathedrals’ finds expression not just in structure and volume but in the figural ornaments, which are, in fact, much more than mere ornaments: they are the primary means of communication, the visible bodily expression of the spirit. 16 Balázs, Visible Man, p. 96. 17 Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air, pp. 7, 17.

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Accordingly , much like Yourcenar’s Hadrian, Hugo, and by implication Balázs, we should treat sculpture as a repository of gesture from which something about gesture can be learned. In his treatise Vers une architecture, Le Corbusier famously scoffed at the Gothic cathedrals by stating that they were ‘drama, not architecture’.18 Viollet-le-Duc, who was the target of this remark, considered the cathedral to be the paradigm of an architecture that is both progressive and popular (an expression of ‘French genius’) and thus a model for modern architecture. Viollet would have objected on the grounds of a different view of modernity. But Hugo’s response could have been that Le Corbusier was, in fact, half right, in the sense that cathedrals are architecture as drama. In the book, Quasimodo makes his first appearance as a figure among figures, a human being who blends in—first with a parade of grotesque ‘grimaces’, or masks at a festival that are modeled on statues like the ‘mascarons’ on the Pont-Neuf,19 and later with the grotesque shapes of the figures in the upper echelons of the cathedral’s façade. Once discovered to be more than just a mask among masks at the festival, Quasimodo remains mute and immobile for a moment, like a statue.20 In his prose style, Hugo often employs lists of items that read like montages of objects, and his association of statues with masks and of both with Quasimodo’s face and body can also be read as a statement of his poetics. The work of restoration through literature is one of bringing to life and of turning into drama the visible expression of the spirit in the body of stone, of releasing the agency of the inanimate object of the sculpture. For Balázs, literature, bound as it is to the conceptual abstractions of the printed word, can never accomplish what film accomplishes with the greatest ease, namely to restore the full visibility of the human body as a means of expression. Hugo certainly comes close. A separate essay could be written on the proto-cinematic style of Hugo’s prose, with its emphasis on visuality, its descriptive tableaux that are reminiscent of establishing shots and pans, followed by zoom-ins and cuts on action. The cinematic potential of Hugo’s descriptions was certainly not lost on William Dieterle’s 1939 film version with Charles Laughton in the title role. The film features a series of shots in which Quasimodo appears amongst his grotesque brethren in stone, and one of these shots is also featured in the original trailer for the film (Figure 16). 18 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, p. 19. 19 Hugo, Notre-Dame, p. 49. 20 Ibid., p. 53.

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Fig. 16: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (W. Dieterle, 1939). Screen capture.

But what exactly does a shot like that of Quasimodo and the sculptures in Dieterle’s film show when we consider it against the backdrop of Balázs’ fall-and-redemption scenario of cinema as the harbinger of a new visual culture, as the new, ephemeral cathedral? Is it a visualisation of two successive, historically and materially distinct modes of storing gesture, and is the frame a case of cinema celebrating itself as the new cathedral that restores gesture and re-unites body and soul? In his reading of Rousseau, Jacques Derrida argues that the state of nature is neither temporally nor genealogically prior to the state that supposedly succeeds it. Rather, the state of nature designates an—ultimately impossible—equilibrium that is implied by, and therefore coextensive and coeval with, the state for which it proposes to be a remedy.21 In eschatological scenarios in film and media theory, film is the remedy, but it only appears as a remedy in contrast to a disequilibrium that supposedly preceded it. In Balázs’ scenario, for instance, film makes visible and reminds us of the loss of visibility for which it is a remedy. In that sense, we could argue that the shot that frames Laughton and his grotesque brethren in stone shows that the state of grace, which it restores, only emerges as such by being restored by film itself. Or, again in Derridean terms: the pharmakon is both poison and cure. 21 See Derrida, On Grammatology.

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Fig. 17: Les Dites Caryatides (A. Varda, 1982). Screen capture.

Regardless of Balázs’ dramatic scenario of redemption and restoration, one thing is clear: a shot that shows a sculpture and a human figure is not merely the document of a pro-f ilmic meeting of a sculpture and a human figure. It is a configuration of film, a spatio-temporal relation of two variations of gesture through an act of framing that simultaneously turns the sculpture into a prop and releases that which makes it more than a prop, or a prop of a particular kind, its agency, its ability to create meaning through gesture. Whether photography really is the death of gesture, as Agamben claims, and whether sculpture is categorically different and has a greater affinity with f ilm when it comes to the storage and restoration of gesture, as I assumed here for heuristic purposes, is a question to be resolved at a later point.

Epilogue: naked in the city Sculptures in f ilm hardly go unnoticed, precisely because the framing draws them to our attention. Sculptures in urban spaces go unnoticed more often than not. Agnès Varda offers proof in her 1982 short documentary

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Les Dites Caryatides, when she trains her camera on the sculptures that adorn the outside of buildings in Paris, particularly from the 1860s and 1870s (Figure 17). Caryatides is a term derived from Greek mythology and refers to the women of a Peloponnese city abducted into captivity after a lost war. In late nineteenth-century architecture, caryatids are naked or barely clad female figures, usually coming in pairs that are symmetrical but not identical, which take the place of columns and appear to sustain the building with their gracious gestures. Their male counterparts, the Atlantes, named after the Greek god Atlas who carried the entire world on his shoulders, are less numerous and display considerably more muscle and effort. How little attention the inhabitants of the city devote to them becomes clear towards the end of the film, when Varda films a monstrous caryatid that stretches over several floors of an apartment building. Not even the inhabitants of the building had noticed the figure, as Varda found out when she asked them, let alone the passers-by in the street. And Varda cannot find out who created the caryatid, either. The fact that Varda mentions this suggests that she tried and succeeded in identifying the artists who created some of the other caryatids. But she does not mention them. Her film is not about nobilitating the caryatids; it is about sharing with her audience her appreciation of their ‘great immobile attitudes’. Less than props in the world outside the film, Varda makes them the stars of her short film. Varda combines the f igures with poems by Baudelaire on the soundtrack, odes to female beauty and goddesses from a poet who was their contemporary. And she tells the story of Baudelaire’s insistent courtship of Madame Sabatier, who f inally gives in to him on the night of the trial regarding Les fleurs du mal, only to be rejected the next day. ‘You were a goddess’, Baudelaire wrote to her in his farewell note, ‘now you are a woman’. Film stars have routinely been compared to goddesses, particularly in the f irst decades of f ilm history. It would seem then, that by filming these figures and by making their poses and gestures readable through the prism of Baudelaire’s poetry, Varda highlights their aff inity with the human—and particularly the female—figure in film. Goddesses, not mere women. But it would be a mistake to think that Varda’s film merely reiterates nineteenth-century gender stereotypes. For one, just as Varda tells the story of Baudelaire and Madame Sabatier in voice-over, we see a woman standing in front of Baudelaire’s grave and having her picture taken by another woman, a scene that is followed by another set of caryatids, over

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which Varda tells the story of Baudelaire’s premature and miserable death. But it takes Varda only two shots at the beginning of the film to completely upend these gender stereotypes. In the first shot, the camera pans upward along a free-standing sculpture of a scantily clad female figure, who, as we discover, carries a street lantern on her head. The second shot is of a similar, equally unclad female figure holding a lantern, but this time the figure is part of a portal. The shot is a nighttime view, which then dissolves into a daytime shot of the same figure. Through the open door, a naked man steps into the frame. He stops, then walks out into the street. The camera pans and shows the naked man from behind as he walks along the street. Naked bodies in public spaces have been a staple of performance art since the 1970s. But as bourgeois as the neighbourhood is by the looks of it, Varda does not release this naked man into the streets in an exercise of épater le bourgeois. There is traffic in the background, but nobody is seen to react to the spectacle. The naked man appears to be as invisible to the denizens of Paris as the caryatids. ‘You don’t see many naked people on the streets’, Varda slyly remarks in voice-over, ‘except on the walls of certain buildings’. Yet while the naked man draws no reaction and disappears from the film after the third shot, he continues to haunt the streets of Paris in Varda’s film. Finding oneself naked in public is the stuff of nightmares, and the presence of the naked man in the third shot, next to the statue of the naked woman, reminds us that these are, indeed, statues of naked women in public spaces. On one level, the shot of the naked man walking down the street evokes a fantasy: the dreamlike scenario of walking through the city naked without being looked at. At another level, the shot introduces a layer of shame derived from the thought of discovering that one is being looked at while being naked in public. And in all this, it matters that the naked figure is a man. It is sufficient to engage in a little thought experiment, a commutation exercise, and think about what would happen if Varda replaced the naked man with a naked woman. The film would be all about male desire and visual pleasure, and female shame. Instead, the presence of the naked man creates a structure of empathy that cuts across gender lines. Getting bodies of stone to teach us how to appreciate gesture through film is not just a matter of framing and montage but also of mise-en-scène, obviously. But as Varda reminds us with her film about sculptures that, without this film, would be less than props, the appreciation of the great immobile attitudes of sculptures is also a matter of who is looking, why and when.

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Works cited Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (1996), trans. by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, pp. 49-62 (Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Béla Balázs, ‘Visible Man, or the Culture of Film’ (1924), Screen 48, 1 (March 2007): 91-108. Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’ (1968), in The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard, pp. 141-148 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). André Bazin, ‘Forbidden Montage’ (1956), Film Culture 22-23 (Summer 1961): 43-51. Hugh Chisholm, ‘Aff inity, chemical’, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), p. 301. Miriam de Rosa and Vinzenz Hediger, ‘Post-what? Post-when? A Conversation on the “Posts” of Post-media and Post-cinema’, Cinema & Cie 26-27, 16 (Spring-Fall 2016): 9-20. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time Image (1983-85), trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 1989). Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology (1967), trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482 (1831) (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Die Wartenden’ (1922), in Schriften, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 160-170 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011). ———, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (1923) (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). Michaël Löwy, ‘Le concept d’affinité élective chez Max Weber’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions 127, 3 (2004): 93-103. André Malraux, Les Voix du Silence. Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, no. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). Martin Seel, Die Künste des Kinos (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2013). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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About the author Vinzenz Hediger is professor of cinema studies at Goethe Universität Frankfurt, where he directs the Graduate Research Training Program ‘Configurations of film’ (www.konfigurationen-des-films.de). He is a cofounder of NECS (European Network of Cinema and Media Studies, www. necs.org), the founding editor of Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (www. zfmedienwissenschaft.de) and a Member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature. His publications include Films That Work Harder. The Circulations of Industrial Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming) and Nostalgia for the Coming Attraction. American Movie Trailers and the Culture of Film Consumption (Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

This section focuses on ‘petrified’ bodies understood from the perspective of their material agency. How do qualities such as bulk, hardness and durability impact upon the experiencer? And in what ways can these physical properties be challenged, modified or even radically altered so as to transform an inanimate artefact into an ‘animated’ body? What strategies can be pursued to make an object be regarded as an active agent? These questions obviously do not imply a recrudescence of animistic visions: objects are not considered as endowed with any sort of intentional agency or conscious influence but rather with the intrinsic ability to affect—thanks to their materiality—anyone who happens to relate to them. All the essays collected in this section deal with this affective power of the animated ‘stone’ bodies. As many recent studies in the field of ethology and evolutionary aesthetics have shown, Homo sapiens’ aesthetic behaviour is deeply rooted in the multifarious processes of so-called ‘artif ication’, a specif ically human disposition to intensify and deliberately make an object salient through the intentional manipulation of its ordinary features. By way of artif ication, mere matter comes to be invested with powers that far exceed its physicality: a whole sphere of possible meanings supervenes upon the domain of matter and its qualities. Consequently, things are transformed into cultural objects and acquire the ability to affect human perception—and, in turn, understanding—of the world. In this sense, the notion of agency, traditionally understood to denote an epistemic capacity of solely human subjects, can also be applied to artified objects and material-cultural phenomena. Within this general framework, one has to reflect on what kind of power specific materials possess and how they impact differently on the observer depending on their specific physical properties. As famously pointed out by Ernst Gombrich in Art and Illusion, a marble or bronze bust will, for instance, never look like a head cut off, but the very same bust, if only modelled in wax, will convey precisely that impression (and the uncanny feeling associated with it). The following essays, therefore, focus on different materials with the aim of shedding light on their different agencies and, more precisely, on the various ways they can be exploited in order to produce a veritable animation of the inanimate. In ‘Bodies that Matter’, Michele Cometa investigates the role that stone miniatures play within primitive cultures. Because they can be handled, transported, worn and in their turn incorporated into their owners, miniatures are bearers of power, both as a form of control over a world reduced to the size of a hand and as a vehicle of magical influences. Miniatures can be led to assume the function of prosthetic extensions of the Self and to act as

a stand-in for the human body. In this sense, they come to be perceived as alive: rather than ‘representations of’, they are Ersätze, ‘representations for’. This kind of artified objects challenges the traditional understanding of the images as depictions meant to be contemplated from a distance by a viewer who remains clearly aware of the ontological gap separating the real world from the image world. Rather than representing something external to them, they present themselves as specific agents, and in so doing, they tend to negate their very nature as images: they are to be considered as embodied presences rather than as representations. The blurring of the threshold between the images and reality in the flesh becomes all the more evident when the role of sight as the distal sense par excellence of aesthetic enjoyment is drastically undermined. This is what happens in Constantin Brancusi’s Sculpture for the Blind, which forms the subject of Elio Grazioli’s essay. An enigmatic middle way between inorganic stone and organic body, Brancusi’s stone-body magnifies the power of matter by turning the traditional, ‘detached’ aesthetic viewer into an experiencer brought into the immediate presence of the work by the proximal sense of touch, which can give us access to the anthropomorphism of even a mineral object: in virtue of its tactile qualities, a perfect ovoid comes to exemplify the structure of the human brain. Cristina Baldacci’s chapter concentrates on a different, metamorphic material, halfway between flesh and stone: wax. Focusing on the perfect wax reproduction of the seventeenth-century sculpture The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna that Urs Fischer created in 2011 under the title Candles, the author highlights the ambiguous process of construction and deconstruction, of birth and decay, that makes the fleshy body turn into a rigid statue (and the other way around). While wax brings out the fleshliness of the original marble, the flames gradually melt the bodies and set them in motion, creating the effect of sculptures that slowly decay, of mortal statues that wilt before the spectator’s eyes. What we are confronted with is the life not only of images but also of materials: the transition of wax from one state to another (namely, from solid to liquid) comes to symbolise the passing of time, the change from stillness to movement, from the inanimate to the animated—in a word, life. Pietro Conte, too, focuses on wax as the material best suited to challenge the traditional way of contrasting the material consistencies of the body and of stone in terms of such categories as incorruptibility/corruptibility, rigidity/flexibility and eternity/transience. Wax is an intermediate material that upsets these oppositions and merges the organic with the inorganic. Indeed, wax figures are a typical example of the uncanny experience of

perceiving dead matter as if it were ‘alive’. A phenomenological approach is employed in order to show that the animation of the inanimate is to be regarded as a condition of possibility of cinema and of cinematic experience, as paradigmatically exemplified by a series of classic movies exploring the enigmatic nature of wax statues and the transformation of the organic into the inorganic—and vice versa. The section ends with Antonio Somaini’s essay tracing the historical roots of contemporary image and media anthropology back to the funerary practices and techniques aimed at preserving the visual appearances of dead bodies after their disappearance due to physical decay. The embalming of the body that produces a mummy and the moulding of the face that produces a death mask: these two different modes of petrification play a crucial role in the genealogy of techniques that eventually led to the cinema and the recording of images onto celluloid film. In this case, the emphasis is on the material agency of imprints: connecting Bazin’s ‘mummy complex’ with Sergei Eisenstein’s anthropological reflections on the ways that celluloid produces a sort of cast, Somaini points out that the film enters into direct contact with reality and literally alights on it, and has then to be removed from it. Pietro Conte

1.

Bodies That Matter: Miniaturisation and the Origin(s) of ‘Art’ Michele Cometa

Abstract Small things matter, especially in the so-called ‘arts’. From the visual arts to music and literature, ‘miniatures’ are a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon that involves our aesthetic attitudes but also our everyday life, our emotional, social and cognitive life. Miniaturisation characterises our cognitive life and, of course, the ‘cognitive life of things’ that we produce, manipulate and discard. My paper is articulated into two sections: the first gives a quick overview of the miniatures of Homo sapiens, especially those of the paleolithic age, and a brief survey of the very challenging history of miniature-interpretation in twentieth-century philosophy of culture. In the second part I focus on five cognitive interpretations of miniature, which are supported by some experimental evidence. Keywords: Miniaturization; paleolithic figurines; perceptual primitives; off-line cognition; animism; liberated embodied simulation

The miniature, then, is an attempt to reproduce the universe in graspable form. It represents a desire to possess the world more completely, to banish the unknown and the unseen. We are teased out of the world of terror and death and under the enchantment of the miniature we are invited to become God. ‒ Steven Millhauser

Small things matter, especially in the so-called ‘arts’. From the visual arts to music and literature, ‘miniatures’ are a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon that involves our aesthetic attitudes but also our everyday life,

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chII01

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our emotional, social and cognitive life.1 Miniaturisation characterises our cognitive life and, of course, the ‘cognitive life of things’ that we produce, manipulate and discard. We can study miniaturisation as a particular way of handling things that characterises the whole evolution of Homo sapiens and, to the same degree, all human cognition. In a certain sense, we could say that all ‘art’ is a kind of miniaturisation—from palaeolithic Venuses to Japanese netsuke, from bonsai to Chinese micro-mountains, from miniature portraits to daguerrotypes and stereoscopies. I use the compromised term ‘art’ as a provocation only to challenge our aesthetic theories because, like Tim Ingold,2 I am convinced that in order to study miniatures it is much better to move outside the history of representation or to concentrate on ‘the material form of representation’3—as Randall White puts it—especially if we consider the ‘aesthetic behaviour’ of Homo sapiens in the wider context of ethology and evolutionary theory. Following Ellen Dissanayake, miniaturisation is a kind of ‘artification’, a way of ‘making special’ which produces what Nöe calls ‘strange tools’, including works of art. As Douglass W. Bailey, one of the most important scholars to have analysed the cognitive life of Neolithic miniatures, has put it, it is less risky to work on miniatures as ‘representation for’ rather than as ‘representation of…’. 4 This paper is articulated into two sections: the first gives a quick overview of the miniatures of Homo sapiens, especially those of the palaeolithic age, and a brief survey of the very challenging history of miniature interpretation in twentieth-century philosophy of culture and anthropology, which I consider a kind of pre-history of the cognitive interpretation of miniaturisation. In the second part, I will focus on four cognitive interpretations of miniature that are supported by some experimental evidence and offer a fifth, which starts from Gallese’s notion of ‘liberated embodied simulation’.5 From the 500,000-year-old Tan Tan Venus to the 250,000-year-old Berekhat Ram Venus, from the abstract and redundant paleolithic Venus of Hohe Fels and the spearthrower of Mas D’Azil to the small Aurignacian animals found in Germany—the latter a whole collection of miniatures, which are particularly interesting because they are very old (about 35,000 BP), 1 See Mack, The Art of Small Things; Stewart, On Longing. 2 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 130. 3 White, Substantial Acts, p. 93. 4 Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, p. 138. 5 See Gallese and Wojciehowski, How Stories Make Us Feel.

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completely different from one another (in subject, technique and material), and covered with signs/notations on their bodies—and, last but not least, the abstract and tiny f igurines found in Monruz near Neuchâtel or in Nebra (Germany), these very ‘small things’ were literally scattered throughout Europe, from France to Siberia. They testify to the wide range of technologies and materials (ivory, serpentine, limestone, bone, hematite, etc.) that were used over more than 25,000 years.6 No wonder scholars have tried to find the profound—i.e. unifying—meaning of these artefacts: the fertility mythologies of the first pioneers of prehistoric archaeology (Piette, Breuil), Neumann and Gimbutas’ Great Mothers, Eaton’s ‘sexual trophies’, Marschack’s sexual instructions for women, White’s amulets for pregnancy, McDermott and Delporte’s self-representation of women, and the paleo-porn of the twentieth-century ‘male’ archaeology (Absolon, Collins, Onians, Guthrie). After more than a century, we only have projections of our biases onto these artefacts, mere conjectures if not paleofantasies. We know much more about the Neolithic, modern and post-modern uses of miniatures. For Neolithic miniatures, we can at least hypothesise a purpose: an aesthetic, funerary, ludic, religious purpose. But when we work on paleolithic times, the context in most cases does not help. The common denominator for all these things that help us to live is that they are small, the outcome of a miniaturisation process. Let me now introduce a brief survey of their ‘cultural’ interpretation in twentieth-century cultural theory and anthropology. This is a way to revitalise some issues of our historical or historicist approach to miniatures that I still consider useful for two reasons: many analyses of the past century can be considered a kind of cognitive interpretation ante litteram and the pre-history of the life histories of these ‘things’. All the books I will introduce, from Benjamin to Gell, from Bachelard to Lévi-Strauss, contain very important hints for the anthropological, literary and historical—which is to say culturalist—interpretation of miniatures, but I will stress only the pre-cognitive statements, which will bring us to the contemporary discussion on the cognitive implications of creating and using miniatures.7 Walter Benjamin refers above all to the toys of his childhood and, in some famous essays, he sketches the cultural and social history of toys; he collects 6 Dobres, Reconsidering Venus Figurines, p. 246, table 1. 7 These are only a few examples of the richer tradition of twentieth-century interpretations that I will discuss in my forthcoming book, The Lure of the Archaic. Palaeolithic and Contemporary Visual Cultures.

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them and prepares a visual atlas of old toys. He interprets miniatures as tools to dominate and ‘remove’ the otherwise oppressive reality of adult everyday life: When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating. Surrounded by a world of giants, children use play to create a world appropriate to their size. But the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes the sting by playing with its image in reduced form.8

Gaston Bachelard moves from the literary presence of miniatures in twentieth-century writers—the history of Le Petit Poucet (Little Thumblin) from Charles Perrault to Gaston Paris is a leitmotif of his analysis—connecting miniature with dreaming, utopias and a ‘reconciled’ landscape in which pacified humans dominate reality again through the non-reality (or sur-reality) of imagination. Confronting miniatures is a kind of mental travel through a utopian landscape, a simulation of a real travel, but liberated from the burden of reality: Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness […]. I feel more at home in miniature worlds, which, for me, are dominated worlds. And when I live them I feel waves that generate world-consciousness emanating from my dreaming self. For me, the vastness of the world has become merely the jamming of these waves. To have experienced miniature sincerely detaches me from the surrounding world, and helps me to resist dissolution of the surrounding atmosphere. Miniature is an exercise that has metaphysical freshness; it allows us to be world conscious at slight risk. And how restful this exercise on a dominated world can be! For miniature rests us without ever putting us to sleep. Here the imagination is both vigilant and content […]. Distance disperses nothing but, on the contrary, composes a miniature of a country in which we should like to live. In distant miniatures, disparate things become reconciled. They then offer themselves for our ‘possession’, while denying the distance that created them. We possess from afar, and how peacefully!9

Claude Lévi-Strauss gives the most important interpretation of miniatures in twentieth-century anthropology starting from an art-historical example: the portrait of Elisabeth of Austria painted by François Clouet (1752), or 8 Benjamin, Old Toys, p. 100. 9 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, pp. 155 ff., p. 161.

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more precisely the miniaturisation of the lace in this painting: ‘The choice of this example is not accidental. Clouet is known to have liked to paint at less than life-size. His paintings are therefore, like Japanese gardens, miniature vehicles and ships in bottles, what in the “bricoleur’s” language are called “small-scale models” or “miniatures”.’10 In Lévi-Strauss’ interpretation, miniatures are a ‘mode of cognition’ that allows humans to perceive the whole before the parts, giving them a ‘sense of pleasure that can be called “aesthetic”’.11 Miniaturisation gives us the ‘illusion of control’; it gratifies the intelligence and lends intelligibility to a complex whole: What is the virtue of reduction either of scale or in the number of properties? It seems to result from a sort of reversal of understanding. To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it. Reduction in scale reverses this situation. Being smaller, the object as a whole seems to be less formidable. In the case of miniatures, in contrast to what happens when we try to understand an object or living creature of real dimensions, knowledge of the whole precedes knowledge of the parts. An even if this is an illusion, the point of the procedure is to create or sustain the illusion, which gratifies the intelligence and gives rise to a sense of pleasure, which can already be called aesthetic on these grounds alone.12

Gell’s groundbreaking interpretation of the ‘agency’ of images/pictures in his posthumous book could not neglect the role of miniaturisation in human (cognitive) artefacts. Miniaturisations and miniatures are, in this case, the mise-en-scène of a deep-rooted human belief: the idea that what is ‘small’ and ‘inside’—even a stone in a box—can be spontaneously considered a metaphor of the mind. Gell is thinking of a Salagrama (Shaligram), a typical aniconic representation of God in Indian religions, actually a ‘mind in a box’ with its agency and powers and sometimes a manifestation of Vishnu himself: My argument is that the indexical form of the mind/body contrast, is primordially spatial and concentric; the mind is ‘internal’ enclosed, surrounded, by something (the body) that is non-mind. It is often the case 10 Lévy-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 15. 11 Ibid., p. 16. 12 Ibid., p. 16.

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that the human body (with an implied interior indicated by orifices) is used to index this primordial inside-outside relation. But there are other ways of achieving this as well. Suppose, instead of drilling ‘eye’ holes in the (an ideal) spherical idol, we leave it as it is, but place it in a box, an ark. At this moment it becomes possible to think of the spherical idol in a different way; we can easily suppose that the stone inside the box is the locus of agency, intention, etc. and the ark is the sacred ‘vessel’ which, body-like, contains and protects this locus of agency. Once the idol is in the ark we have, once more, the physical configuration necessary for thinking of the stone as ‘opposed to’ something else in the way that the mind (interior) is opposed to the body (exterior). The ‘homunculus effect’ […] can be achieved without anthropomorphizing the index.13

I cannot delve here into another important insight in Gell’s ethnography of miniature: the discussion of the well-known statue of A’a, a carving from Rurutu, an anthropomorphic figure that bears thirty smaller figures on his body. The hollow body, accessed by a removable panel at the back, houses another twenty-four smaller figures. Gell interprets it as a ‘fractal figure which demonstrates the property of self-similarity at different scales of magnification/minification’.14 I do not need to underline the animistic meaning of these two ‘things’, another step, as I will argue soon, towards a cognitive interpretation of miniatures, but I feel obliged to make a short digression concerning another pre-history of miniature’s interpretation, one that links miniatures and animistic beliefs. This is a very important subject of art theory, at least since David Freedberg’s work on the power of images, and in recent years has been at the core of the anthropology of figuration proposed by Philippe Descola and discussed in its ontological implications by many other scholars such as Viveiros de Castro, Marshall Sahlins, Tim Ingold or even Tom Mitchell. I am referring to Edmund Carpenter’s animistic interpretation of Inuit miniatures. Carpenter, who was a good friend and companion of Marshall McLuhan’s, was the leading Eskimo anthropologist between the 1950s and the 1970s. He believed, along with many others (from Francis Galton to his mentor Carl Schuster), that there was a continuity and an analogy between palaeolithic modes of representation (or, better, picture-making) and those of the Inuit. Above all, he stated that their picture-making depended very closely on an 13 Gell, Art and Agency, pp. 132 ff. 14 Ibid., p. 137.

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animistic attitude, which is not only a form of belief but an ontology, a way of thinking about materials, the environment, art, society and reality. The most important statements of Carpenter’s masterpiece, the book Eskimo Realities (1959-1973), are worth mentioning because they are the core of the animistic interpretation of Inuit ‘art’ (not by chance, Tim Ingold quoted them in his challenging essay Totemism, animism and the depiction of animals): As the carver holds the unworked ivory lightly in his hand, turning it this way and that, he whispers, ‘Who are you? Who hides there?’ And then, ‘Ah, Seal!’. He rarely sets out, at least consciously, to carve, say, a seal, but picks up the ivory, examines it to find its hidden form and, if that’s not immediately apparent, carves aimlessly until he sees it, humming or chanting as he works. Then he brings it out: Seal, hidden, emerges. It was always there: he didn’t create it; he released it; he helped it step forth. Aivilik has no real equivalents to our ‘create’; or ‘make’; which presuppose imposition of the self on matter […]. The carver is indifferent to the demands of the optical eye; he lets each piece fill its own space, create its own world, without reference to background or anything external to it.15

To Carpenter, Inuit miniatures appeared to be like paleolithic ones, as his friend Carl Schuster wrote to him during his researches in the North: Both these female figurines, and the male figure shown on page 116, were discovered in an ancient village on Southampton Island. In 1966, Carl Schuster wrote to me: ‘She is a great beauty, very “Aurignacian”, and I feel sure she was a pendant, before the piece was broken out between her feet. Henry Collins was wild about her and said she was Dorset for sure’.16

The ethnological comparison between Inuit cultures and paleolithic ones was present even in the first attempts to understand prehistoric art (Francis Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 1883) and are still useful. If we consider the animistic attitudes that Carpenter detected in the profound ontology of Inuit picture-making and rituals, we find many startling analogies. Moreover, the Inuit figurines share many features with palaelothic sculptures. I can list here only some convergences without commenting on them: 15 Carpenter, Eskimo Realities, p. 59. 16 Ibid., p. 152.

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a) Inuit figurines were used as pendants, as were the paleolithic;17 b) Inuit modes of representation, like the paleolithic, are very distant from ours. For instance, they don’t need orientation or perspective and can profit from a double orientation;18 c) Inuit forms of representation tolerate—or better yet, activate (because it is a deeply rooted cognitive habit!)—superimpositions. Derek Hodgson has demonstrated that superimposition has nothing to do with ‘breaking through the rock membrane’ during shamanistic practices, rather ‘from a neurovisual standpoint […] superimpositioning can be interpreted as a form of surrogate camouflage that would have been inherently engaging because it stimulates the visual system in particular ways for the ability to discriminate signal from noise’;19 d) Inuit figurines stimulated performances and rituals. They were used in performances and were broken for ritual purposes, like the exploded clay figurines of Dolní Věstonice; e) Inuit figurines, like Aurignacian portable art and Middle Stone Age inscriptions on ochre at Blombos, may have supported the earliest forms of notation; f) Inuit artists, like paleolithic ones, created hybrids between animals and humans;20 g) they created connections between figurines (human and animal) which can have a sexual or mythological meaning as in many forms of rock art.21 And they also produced hybrids that, following Steven Mithen, are ‘au coeur du fantastique’. They are, as Carlo Severi would put it, emblems that can be considered the first attempt at an evolved mental imagery for creativity, for cognitive fluidity, for modern human brains and an animistic attitude towards living beings. This link to the animistic attitudes of Homo sapiens must be considered in the cognitive interpretation of miniaturisation. But before proceeding, I need to make a more general statement on the study of prehistoric picture-making. Since Aby Warburg, we have become accustomed to considering anachronism and achronia in the life of pictures not as a limit but as a form of their empowerment. Since Benjamin, we have 17 Ibid., pp. 146 ff. 18 Ibid., pp. 144 ff. 19 Hodgson, The Emergence of the Representation, p. 33. 20 Carpenter, Eskimo Realities, pp. 106 ff. 21 Ibid., pp. 113 ff.

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accepted the deep a-chronic substance of images and pictures, so that the immemorial dimension of paleolithic art does not disturb us anymore, especially if we consider the family resemblance between our picture-making and that of our paleolithic ancestors. Moreover, we are now accustomed not to consider ‘meanings’ as the main purpose of pictures and picture-making. We have had a history of art without names and more recent attempts are trying to think of a cultural history without meanings, based only, as Hans Gumbrecht has put it, on the ‘presence’ of things, on their ‘materiality’, or rather, materials.22 To modern archaeology, especially cognitive archaeology, we owe the first emancipation from ‘unique’ meaning, as in Margaret Conkey’s famous words: We cannot expect to capture ‘meaning’ as a single, inclusive, empirical entity or category of our inquiry […]. I suggest, for example, that some of the studies of ‘technological style’ or a materials-oriented approach not only can lead to identification of the marking and marked features that are sought in the first round of symbolic interpretation, but will also be able to ‘displace the question of meaning from the individual boundaries of particular images’ to the productive contexts within which the imagery ‘comes to be invested with (partial) meaning’.23

Meaning therefore is not a ‘thing’ but a process, the description of a performance, of an embodied movement in the environment. As Randall White puts it: ‘I wish to emphasize the multidimensional nature of constructed and construed meanings, meanings viewed here not so much as ideas but as highly contextualized productions, performances, choices and skills.’24 ‘The logical extension of this’, Meg Conkey writes, ‘is that the meaningfully constituted material record is not an “expression” or “reflection”, nor even a “record” but an active, constructing, constituting agency, which does not express meaning, but produces it.’25 As Ellen Dissanayake also argues considering the first development of children’s meaning-making: ‘The making itself IS the meaning.’26 Instead of meanings, we still have ‘things’ and therefore ‘embodied actions’. When I say ‘no-meanings’, I am not saying that things/objects/materials have no 22 Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, pp. 52 ff. 23 Conkey, New Approaches, p. 425. 24 White, Substantial Acts, p. 119. 25 Conkey, The Structural Analysis, p. 151. 26 Dissanayake, Born to Artify, p. 245.

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signification but only that our (re)search for meanings is very different from that of traditional art history, aesthetics or even visual culture studies. We are looking for the ‘life histories of things’, following scholars like Meg Conkey, Randall White, Colin Renfrew and Lambros Malafouris among others. They move from the idea that ‘things are very good-to-think WITH or THROUGH, but not so good-to-think ABOUT’.27 We are asking, with Chris Gosden (and Tom Mitchell), ‘What do things want?’, ‘What do things do for the mind?’ or ‘How is human thought built into and executed through things?’. The theoretical premise is consequently, following Clark and Chalmers, that we are speaking of ‘distributed minds’ and ‘distributed cognition’. The idea is that our mind continues and is made of an external network of memories, public behaviours, social norms, external storage devices, etc.28 Our minds are not individual but collective. As Daniel C. Dennett has put it: ‘Brain is not enough to explain mind.’ And further: This reminds us that tool use is a two-way sign of intelligence; not only does it require intelligence to recognize and mantain a tool (let alone fabricate one), but a tool confers intelligence on those lucky enough to be given one. The better designed the tool (the more information there is embedded in its fabrication), the more potential intelligence it confers on its user.29

Or, to put in another way: ‘Just as you cannot do very much carpentry with your bare hands, there is not much thinking you can do with your bare brain.’30 If this is true, we have to reintroduce, in the study of figurines, the old concept of chaîne opératoire, which we propose to extend beyond the simple ‘combination of gestures and tools’ and, following Randall White, consider as a complex process (as in decoration) that involves: a) Cultural assumptions about personhood. b) Beliefs about the relationship between materials, representational acts, re-presented constructs and social supernatural efficacy. c) Choice and acquisition […] of raw materials. d) Choice of forms, textures, colours and subject matter. e) Organisation of production (social, temporal and spatial). 27 Malafouris and Renfrew, The Cognitive Life of Things, p. 1. 28 See Cometa, Perché le storie ci aiutano a vivere, pp. 72 ff. 29 Dennett, Kinds of Minds, pp. 99-100. 30 Ibid., p. 134.

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f) Combination of gestures and tools into technique for ornament production that are coherent with the encompassing, regional technical system and that enable that production. g) Representations of desired signifiers of social identity, age, reproductive status, supernatural associations, etc. h) Use of the ornamental representations in (socially, aesthetically and cosmologically) meaningful acts. i) Purposeful (based on intentions for future retrieval/use or ideas about their residual power and efficacy).31 But miniatures are not only ‘ornaments’ or produced things that improve our cognitive skills, ‘tiny embodiment[s] of thought’—as Ingold has written about Inuit carvings—but rather ‘they are thought. For the carver would not separate thinking with the head from thinking with the hands.’32 Miniatures are not only external devices that scaffold our memories, desires and ideas (especially religious), they are eminently parts of our Selves and our Bodies, at least as metaphors of ourselves (I would say metonymies), because they belong to the domains of the ‘near’, the ‘available’, the ‘touchable’, the ‘ready-to-hand’ (in Heidegger’s sense), with all their philosophical and phenomenological implications. I can refer here to the wonderful sketch of the body as source domain for metaphors by Clive Gamble and Fiona Coward,33 who follow Lakoff and Johnson’s very famous interpretation of ‘peripersonal’ metaphors.34 As we can see, the miniatures belong to the centre. They belong to intimacy, to the personal, given how the body is the ultimate essential measure of scale.35 They belong, after all, to the Self. In the pre-history of cognitive interpretations of miniatures, we have found many scattered inputs. Now I shall try to ‘translate’ them into the language of an evolutionary and cognitive approach to miniatures. I shall only note four possible lines of research, four key thoughts that today I consider particularly promising and that demonstrate the scientific applicability of this approach to miniatures. To these four pathways I shall add a fifth—particularly important from a philosophical point of

31 White, Substantial Acts, p. 95. 32 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 126. 33 Coward, Metaphor and Materiality. 34 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 35 Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, p. 28.

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view—which takes up a challenging proposal made by Vittorio Gallese and Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski (2011). The f irst is the classical research into ‘perceptual primitives’, from twentieth-century Gestalt theory to contemporary evolutionary aesthetics in its unorthodox version (Hodgson, Dissanayake); the second is the more nuanced family of cognitive approaches based on the extended mind (Clark, Chalmers)36 and the forms of offline cognition and external storage; the third is the study of miniatures, especially Neolithic ones, as a kind of cognitive empowerment due to the reduction of scale (Bailey); the fourth studies the role of the miniature in the context of an animistic ontology (Ingold, Hodgson). The f ifth approach is more recent and descends from Gallese and Wojciehowski’s hypothesis of a liberated embodied simulation as a common aesthetic experience, based on a kind of ‘neotenic retention’,37 which could explain the ontogenetic basis of aesthetic behaviour and the prolongation of our animistic attitudes during our entire life span. Not by chance, I have chosen as representative figures an archaeologist devoted to the study of the Neolithic age (Douglass W. Bailey), two philosophers of the mind (Andy Clark and Matthew Day) who work on the non-biological scaffolding of the extended mind, an anthropologist (Ellen Dissanayake) and a cognitive archaeologist (Derek Hodgson)—both interested in the evolutionary origins of the ‘arts’ and the so-called ‘aesthetic or perceptual primitives’—and, again, an anthropologist, Tim Ingold, to whom we owe some insightful interpretations of animism. This mix shows that miniatures are ‘new objects’ for an interdisciplinary research—in Barthes’ sense—and do not belong to any discipline. It is not a complete catalogue, of course. Scholars such as Philippe Descola, Clive Gamble, Colin Renfrew, Lambros Malafouris, Carl Knappet, Chris Gosden, Ian Hodder, Martin Porr, Whitney Davis, John Halverson, Stephen Davies and Christopher Collins must be mentioned, if only because they have offered an articulated interpretation of the cognitive operations involved in ‘primitive’ and ‘paleolithic’ picture-making. I mention these scholars because they are representative of deep-rooted traditions in their respective fields, which need to be compounded in future research. To these I will add Vittorio Gallese and Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski’s ‘Liberated Embodied Cognition’.

36 Clark and Chalmers, The Extended Mind. 37 See Gallese, Neoteny and Social Cognition.

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The following pages are only a brief introduction to these four approaches, which are firmly rooted in evolutionary and cognitive analyses, and to their respective vocabulary. 1) Perceptual and Aesthetic Primitives

2) Empowerment

3) Off-Loading, Off-Line Cognition, Material Surrogacy

4) Animism

5) Liberated Embodied Simulation

pattern and outline recognition, simplification, closure, repetition, seeing-in, symmetry, exaggeration/ canonic-al perspective, good continuation (D. Hodgson, E. Dissanayake)

re-negotiate affordances, trascend physical space and time, destroy the Albertian space, control of, liberate imagination, fill the gap, subvert visual habits, proximal knowledge, touch (D. Bailey)

decoupling, pretence, make believe, suppressing details, relaxing time (M. Day, A. Clark)

better safe than sorry, movement detection, relation to animals, animation/ agency (T. Ingold, D. Hodgson)

Entlastung (unburdening, relief), illusion of control, flow, neotenic retention (V. Gallese, H. Wojciehowski)

In other terms, we can study miniatures in the context of technologies of the Self, as devices for the external storage of memories, as figurations that arise in different ontologies, as representations that profit from the neurological constraints of our mind and, last but not least, as a kind of ‘unburdening’ or ‘relief’ device, using Arnold Gehlen’s words and the long tradition of philosophical anthropology from Herder to Blumenberg.38 1) Perceptual and aesthetic primitives Small things exploit and enhance the evolved neurological basis of human visual perception and visuality. Therefore, miniatures must be studied as an embodiment of our evolved perceptual skills. Ellen Dissanayake and Derek Hodgson went beyond the classical perceptual approach, namely the tradition from Ernst Gombrich to Richard L. Gregory, giving to humans’ evolved perceptual skills a wider anthropological and behavioural interpretation in the context of making special, or artification, which can be explained both philogenetically and ontogenetically:

38 Cometa, Perché le storie ci aiutano a vivere, pp. 267 ff.

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What is art? A behavior of art can be conceptualized fundamentally as an evolved capacity (called ‘artification’) for making ordinary reality extraordinary or ‘special’. Perceptual, thematic, bodily, and behavioral primitives are artified by means of ‘aesthetic operations’ (formalization, repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, and manipulation of expectation) in response to biologically-important circumstances in which the artifier has an emotional investment.39

Miniaturisation is not only an application of our evolved perceptual preferences, it is a kind of empowerment of the formal characteristics of things. Edmund Carpenter, writing about Inuit miniatures, underlined the power of these ‘reductions’: ‘The tiny carvings share a quality of sizelessness. Magnified photographically, they suffer no qualitative change effect. Each has been reduced to basic essentials.’40 But that is not all. We must consider more complex issues such as the incompleteness of the figurines, which enhances the human capacity to fill the gap (closure, good continuation, etc.), which is to say that miniatures are devices that improve and exercise human cognitive fluidity. 2) Empowerment Small things empower the (be)-holder, and smallness empowers things. It is a reciprocal action. ‘A reduction in dimension’, Susan Stewart writes, ‘does not produce a corresponding reduction in significance.’41 Things have in any case a stabilising effect. As Mihály Csíkszentmihály wrote in his pathbreaking essay Why we need things, things demonstrate the owner’s power, reveal to the subject the continuity of her Self, and create a network of relationships to live in. 42 And even Hannah Arendt underlined the capacity of things to empower the Self. In The Human Condition, we read: From this viewpoint, the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that […] men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table. In other words, against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of the man-made world rather than the sublime indifference of an untouched nature […]. Only we who have erected the objectivity of a world of our 39 Dissanayake, Aesthetic Primitives, p. 18. 40 Carpenter, Eskimo Realities, p. 103. 41 Stewart, On Longing, p. 57. 42 Csíkszentmihály, Why We Need Things, pp. 23 ff.

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own from what nature gives us, who have built it into the environment of nature so that we are protected from her, can look upon nature as something ‘objective’. Without a world between men and nature, there is eternal movement, but no objectivity. 43

Working on Neolithic figurines, Douglass W. Bailey has demonstrated that almost every material characteristic of miniatures empowers the be-holder: they re-negotiate the affordances of the object through abstraction and compression, allowing a dominance that is not given in real life, especially because they enlarge the owner or the spectator and thus comfort her. At the same time, they stimulate her cognitive fluidity, inducing her to complete the absent parts. Paradoxically, the absent parts of a figurine could be considered the most important, and in any case they stimulate the viewer to fill the gap: What one saw is not necessarily what one got: body parts that were depicted were less important than those that were absent. Critically, the thought processes that were stimulated by absence opened up complex, though not necessarily conclusive, conceptualizations of what were the important physical parts of being human. 44

Although this essay does not allow me to develop this intuition here, I would stress that this ‘stimulation’ to fill the gap empowers and enhances our cognitive skills. More important: the process of stereotyping (as we find in every reduction of complexity) has an anti-stress function: ‘From the perspective of stereotyping, figurines are the product of anxieties and insecurities of the f igurine maker’, 45 an argument that resonates with Dissanayake’s anti-stress function of artification or making special through repetititon, recognition and simplification. 46 Every figurine is a complex mixture of reassurement and unsettling (estrangement) processes that gives access to ‘alternative realities’; in this sense, they ‘liberate the viewer’, permitting her to ‘create and allow access to alternative worlds and realities’, offering a ‘separate physical space’ and ‘a psychic one’. 47 We shall return to this topic later. 43 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 137. 44 Bailey, Figurines, Corporeality, and Origins, p. 251. 45 Ibid., p. 253 46 Cometa, Perché le storie ci aiutano a vivere, pp. 301 ff. 47 Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, pp. 32-34.

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Compression of space leads to compression of time as measured by the subjects’ brain clock. Douglass W. Bailey follows Alton De Long’s well-known statement on the subjective relation between time and space48 according to which ‘a reduced-scale enviroment speeds up the central nervous system: the larger a person is, relative to their surrounding, the faster that individual’s brain experiences time’. 49 The space-compression of a miniature produces temporal compression—another kind of ‘enlargement’ of the viewer/owner. Even the ‘subversion’ of gender, of visual habits and social norms that the miniatures instigate, are forms of empowerment of the (be-)holder. This is a very important statement if we consider that the power of these small things consists in challenging our (visual and haptic) habits. If this is true for modern visual culture, why shouldn’t it be true for palaeolithic visual cultures? Subversion, distortion, negation, carnivalisation and resistance could be attributed as well to palaeolithic pictures. As Bailey has pointed out: ‘Figurines do. Figurines act. Figurines affect. Figurines afford. Most critically in the context of the study of gender, figurines construct.’50 Figurines are also ‘strange tools’, as Nöe puts it, that improve our cognitive skills. After all, they are philosophical devices tout court: As stimulants for thought about ourselves and our relationships with others, f igurines are best def ined as philosophies. As philosophies, f igurines have no exact meaning or function… Miniaturism powers anthropomorphs in ways that are not available to the life-size or larger. Miniaturism reduces the massive scale of philosophical issues down to a manageable and manipulatable size. Miniaturism allows people to engage, display, discuss and handle issues of identity, status, inter-personal, intergroup differentiation in comfortable and unthreatening ways. Miniature anthropomorphism allows the abstraction of issues of human identity, individuality, difference and similarities from the highly complex, almost ethereal and inconceivable down to the simple, graspable and physical. However, just as it aids thought and enables philosophical contemplation about identity and humanity, miniaturism also complicates; it invests these engagements of issues of identity, status and philosophy with the mystery of the paradoxic and the unbalance of the uncanny.51 48 See De Long, Spatial Scale. 49 Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, p. 36. 50 Bailey, Figurines, Corporeality, and Origins, p. 246. 51 Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, p. 85.

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3) Off-loading, off-line cognition Miniatures are the best candidates to be that kind of ‘non-neural resource’ for thinking (Clark) ‘that make[s] us smarter’ (Norman) and enhance our off-line thinking. They are ‘bio-external sources of order and information’,52 which help us not only to store what exceeds our brain capacity, not only to save memories that we would otherwise lose (not by chance, they are devices for notation and signs, etc.), but also to be ‘imaginary companions’. But they are more than that as well: as Matthew Day and Andy Clark have pointed out, miniatures (for example in the form of religious idols) are the kind of ‘material surrogates’ that brings forth new ways of thinking. Like sketches, prototypes and thumbnails, ‘they allow human reason to cope with coupling-resistant (absent, counterfactual, even impossible) targets by means of local coupling-friendly surrogate material structures’.53 By introducing tangible features of the world—Matthew Day writes—that can be physically manipulated and tracked in real-time, the cognitive scaffolding afforded by religious material culture seems tailormade for allowing people to do the ‘kinds of things they are naturally good at doing’ (i.e., recognizing patterns, modeling simple worldly dynamics, and manipulating objects). In principle, the strategic use of structured environments (e.g., ‘sacred spaces’) and external representations (e.g., statues or likenesses of the gods) could put individual human agents in a position to better utilize their basic perceptual, motor, and social cognitive skills in these domains.54

This is not to say that palaeolithic miniatures are religious devices! Couplingresistant targets are also instructions for women (amulets for pregnancy) or even elusive ideas about society, status and gender. Mark well: an artefact becomes ‘coupling-friendly’ through the suppression of concrete details and by ‘relaxing temporal constraints on reasoning’,55 two themes that we have already found in the reductions of visual perception and in the trascending of physical space and time, which abolishes the ‘non-negotiable temporal restrictions’ of real life. 52 Clark, Material Surrogacy, p. 23. 53 Ibid., p. 24. 54 Day, Religion, p.117. 55 Clark, Material Surrogacy, p. 25.

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4) Animism Small things belong to the Self. They belong to the soul. We have already mentioned the animistic interpretation of Inuit miniatures proposed by Edmund Carpenter. Although he did not use the word ‘animism’, his description of Inuit carving is founded in the animistic attitudes of the Inuit. Carpenter stressed especially the relationship between carving and self-shaping, given how the sculpture offers a way to attain the metamorphic structure of being: They enter into an experience, not as an observer, but as a participant […]. Here the artist or hunter participates in seal-ness, becomes one with seal, and thus finds it easy to portray, for he is, himself, Seal […]. In Eskimo thought […] the lines between species and classes, even between man and animal, are lines of fusion, not fission, and nothing has a single, invariable shape.56

Again, I need only quote Tim Ingold to integrate Carpenter’s observation into a more structured theory of animism: The important thing in hunting is never to impose one’s will upon animals, to force them against their inclination. When it is ready, but not before, the animal reveals itself to the hunter, who can then gracefully receive its gift of bodily substance. In just the same way carving is not the wilful imposition of preconceived form on brute matter, but a process in which the carver is continually responsive to the intrinsic qualities of the material […]. Rather, like memories, they are held close to the person—generally fastened to the clothing—and are carried around with that person wherever he or she goes […]. These little animals are like tokens in the ongoing relationship of give and take between human hunters and the spirit beings on whose continued generosity the supply of game depends. They are, in that sense, equivalent to the animals actually killed in the hunt, and this accounts for the realism of their depiction.57

Many palaeolithic miniatures were carried around fastened to clothing, belts, tools and used as paraphernalia by shamans. They are, as we can say in the terms of cognitive archaeology, parts of the Self in a double way: as the embodiment of thoughts and gestures and as metonymies of the 56 Carpenter, Eskimo Realities, p. 16. 57 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, pp. 126 ff.

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Self. They are parts of our metaphorical embodiment within the environment and extend our peripersonal space as tools included in our selves. As media scholar Sheenagh Pietrobruno has written, working on photographic miniaturisation: ‘A miniature can be simultaneously a physical object and a metaphor.’58 As ‘things ready to hand’, miniatures are the best candidates for prosthetic extensions of the Self. Their affective, emotional valorisation descends directly from the body-schema and belongs to the primary metaphors of closeness, control, understanding via grasping, similarity, etc. Maravita and Iriki speak of the ‘inclusion of tools’ in our body schema: this inclusion is not only metaphorical. It produces neural modifications, as we learn from studies on peripersonal space. They are ‘incorporated into the body schema’.59 5) Liberated embodied simulation Small things liberate us. If miniatures give us a feeling of control (because of their reduced scale but also as a product of making special), if they cooperate to ‘remove’ the burden of contingency and free us from the ‘surrounding world’, allowing a kind of regression to our neotenic state,60 if miniatures allow us to travel in parallel worlds and to sharpen our cognitive skills, if they produce a reassuring estrangement of reality thus giving us aesthetic pleasure, if miniatures can be animated as a part of our selves, they are, after all, the kind of aesthetic things, of bodily prostheses, that can fuel our embodied simulation, but a special kind of simulation that Vittorio Gallese—in accordance with the great tradition of philosophical anthropology—has called ‘liberated’. Miniatures, as we have already shown, operate exactly this kind of liberation, of relief, of unburdening, thanks to their scale reduction, to their intimacy, to the process of their production which cannot be obtained without the full immersion in what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi would have called the ‘flow’.61 I quote Vittorio Gallese and Hannah Wojciehowski: Artistic fiction is often more powerful than real life in evoking our emotional engagement and empathic involvement. Why? Perhaps because in aesthetic experience we can temporarily suspend our grip on the world of our daily occupations. We liberate new energies and put them into 58 Pietrobruno, Miniaturization, n.p. 59 Maravita, Iriki, Tools for the Body (Schema), p. 79. 60 See Gallese, Neoteny and Social Cognition. 61 Cometa, Perché le storie ci aiutano a vivere, p. 322.

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the service of a new dimension that, paradoxically, can be more vivid than prosaic reality […]. When reading a novel, looking at a visual art work, or attending a theatrical play or a movie, our embodied simulation becomes liberated, that is, it is freed from the burden of modeling our actual presence in daily life. We look at art from a safe distance from which our being open to the world is magnified. In a sense, to appreciate art means leaving the world behind in order to grasp it more fully […]. Another important element of liberated simulation consists in the fact that when we read a novel (or watch a movie, a theatrical play, or behold a painting), we do it almost completely still. It is a sort of regression to, or, better, a neotenic retention of developmental time when our interactions with the world were almost exclusively mediated by a simulative perception of the events, actions, and emotions populating our social landscape.62

Not by chance, Douglass W. Bailey has connected the sense of Bachelard’s ‘liberation’ in his Poetics of Space63 with the sense of liberation in manipulating figurines: It is a liberation of the senses most characteristic of the imagination. It is the potential to lose oneself in an alternative space […]. It is the liberation of the narcotic. The recognition that Neolithic f igurines worked in these ways and had the potential to stimulate thought, provoke inference and facilitate entry into other worlds, brings us closer to understanding their meaning. Figurines were philosophies in the politics of being in the Neolithic. Figurines do not mean any one thing, yet they meant everything; they were philosophies. They questioned the familiar and comfortable orientations and made people aware of their contact in the world. They altered the ways that people saw the world around them. They created a series of parallel realities that ran along the actual; in doing so they were part of people’s (possibly subconscious) definition of the edges of their visible realities and of what made each person distinct (if they were distinct at all) from those other places, times and individuals. Figurines made people question who they were, where they were, what they were, and what their relationships to others were.64 62 Gallese and Wojciehowski, How Stories Make Us Feel. 63 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 154. 64 Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines, p. 202.

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I cannot develop here the philosophical, evolutionary and cognitive implications of these positions.65 Suffice to say that it implies a view of the humans as ‘defective beings’, looking for compensation and searching for relief and unburdening (Entlastung), for that suspension of reality, of its burden, which can reduce our anxieties about the environment and our conspecifics, and which can contain the uncertainty—anxiety is the feeling of uncertainty—about the future and death. Miniatures as things and as aesthetic objects give us compensation and relief. No wonder they were so widespread from the beginnings of time. In conclusion, let me quote another example from twentieth-century cultural history which seems a plaidoyer of the necessary collaboration between the humanities and the sciences pursued in this paper. It is a passage from a classic of anthropology, Arnold Gehlen’s Man. His Nature and Place in the World (1940), where the author attempted an ‘anthropobiological view that brings together the peculiar physical structure of man and his complex and complicated inner life’.66 The concept of relief is central in this anthropobiology: Man’s special biological conditions—to be a ‘not determined animal’ and to be exposed to uncertainty and anxiety about the environment and the future—make it necessary that he sever his ties to the world from the immediate present […]. The end result of this process is that man creates great symbols filed in vision, language, and imagination which provide him with indications as to how to behave most effectively. Furthermore, the motor functions are relieved and put at rest but they can easily be reemployed toward any desired end […]. Thus we find the first evidence of the principle of relief. Man transforms his fundamental handicaps into opportunities for survival; his sensorimotor and intellectual skills […] propel each other to higher levels, until a point is reached where circumspect control of action becomes possible. We could better understand these highly complex processes of relief and control if the science of neurology were able to tell us something def initive about sensorimotor processes.67

This is exactly what neuroscience, cognitive sciences and even the sciences of our past are trying to do today. The question of the origins (of ‘art’) remains 65 Cometa, Perché le storie ci aiutano a vivere, pp. 315 ff. 66 Gehlen, Man. His Nature and Place in the World, p. 9. 67 Ibid., pp. 54 ff.

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at stake, but something is changing: we now look definitively at ‘art’ as a behaviour, at the artworks as tools, at the artification process as a way of thinking. Our origins are not only in the past. As Karl Kraus and Walter Benjamin stated: ‘Origin is the Goal.’68 The study of origins will be in any case the study of our present development.

Works cited Karel Absolon, ‘The Diluvial Anthropomorphic Statuettes and Drawings. Especially the So-Called Venus’, Artibus Asiae 12, 3 (1949): 201-220. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). Douglass W. Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines. Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic (London/New York: Routledge, 2005). ———, ‘Figurines, Corporeality, and Origins of Gendered Body’, in A Companion to Gender Prehistory, ed. by Diane Bolger, pp. 244-264 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013). Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, trans. by Harry Zohn, ed. and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, pp. 253-264 (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). Edmund S. Carpenter, Eskimo Realities (New York/Chicago/San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). Andy Clark, ‘Material Surrogacy and the Supernatural. Reflections on the Role of Artefacts in “Off-line” Thinking’, in The Cognitive Life of Things. Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, ed. by Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, pp. 23-28 (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2010). ——— and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis 58, 1 (1998): 7-19. Desmond Collins and John Onians, ‘The Origins of Art’, Art History 1, 1 (1998): 1-25. Michele Cometa, Perché le storie ci aiutano a vivere. La letteratura necessaria (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2017). Margaret W. Conkey, ‘The Structural Analysis of Paleolithic Art’, in Archaeological Thought in America, ed. by Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky and Philip Kohl, pp. 135-154 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

68 See Benjamin, Theses, p. 261.

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———, ‘New Approaches in the Search for Meaning? A Review of Research in “Paleolithic Art”’, Journal for Field Archaeology 14 (1987): 413-430. ———, Olga Soffer, Deborah Stratmann (eds.), Beyond Art. Pleistocene Images and Symbols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Fiona Coward, Clive Gamble, ‘Metaphor and Materiality in Earliest Prehistory’, in The Cognitive Life of Things. Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, ed. by Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, pp. 47-58 (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2010). Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, ‘Why We Need Things’, in History from Things. Essays on Material Culture, ed. by Steven Lubar and William David Kingery, pp. 20-29 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). Whitney Davis, ‘The Origins of Image Making’, Current Anthropology 27 (1986): 193-215. Matthew Day, M., ‘Religion, off-line cognition, and the mind’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 4, 1 (2004): 101-121. Alton J. De Long, ‘Spatial scale, temporal experience and information processing. An empirical examination of experiential reality’, Man-Environment Systems 13 (1983): 77-88. Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds. Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Philippe Descola, Par-delà de la nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). ——— (ed.), La Fabrique des images. Vision du monde et formes de la représentation (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2010). Ellen Dissanayake, ‘Aesthetic Incunabula’, Philosophy and Literature 25, 2 (2001): 335-346. ———, ‘The Artif ication Hypothesis and its Relevance to Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Neuroaesthetics’, Cognitive Semiotics 5 (2009): 136-158. ———, ‘Born to artify. The universal origin of picturing’, in Origins of Pictures. Anthropological Discourses in Picture Science, ed. by Klaus Sachs-Hombach and Jörg R.J. Schirra, pp. 200-219 (Cologne: Halem, 2013). ———, ‘Aesthetic Primitives. Fundamental Biological Elements of a Naturalistic Aesthetics’, Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 8, 1 (2015): 6-24. Marcia-Anne Dobres, ‘Reconsidering Venus Figurines. A Feminist-Inspired ReAnalysis’, in Ancient Images, Ancient Thought. The Archaeology of Ideology. Proceedings of the 1990 Chacmool Conference, ed. by Sean A. Goldsmith et al., pp. 245-262 (Alberta: Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary, 1992). Randall Eaton, ‘The Evolution of Trophy Hunting’, Carnivore 1 (1978): 110-121.

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David Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Vittorio Gallese, ‘Neoteny and Social Cognition. A Neuroscientific Perspective on Embodiment’, in Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture. Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World, ed. by Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs and Christian Tewes, pp. 309-331 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016). Vittorio Gallese and Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, ‘How Stories Make Us Feel. Toward an Embodied Narratology’, California Italian Studies 2, 1 (2011): unpaginated. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: MacMillan and Co., 1883). Arnold Gehlen, Man. His Nature and Place in the World (1940), trans. by Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer, with an introduction by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Alfred Gell, Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989). ———, The Civilization of the Goddess. The World of Old Europe (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). Chris Gosden, ‘What Do Objects Want?’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12, 2 (2005): 193-211. ——— and Yvonne Marshall, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archaeology 31, 2 (1999): 169-178. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Cloud. A New Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). John Halverson, ‘The First Pictures. Perceptual Foundations of Paleolithic Art’, Perception 21 (1992): 389-404. Derek Hodgson, ‘The Emergence of the Representation of Animals in Paleoart. Insights from Evolution and the Cognitive, Limbic and Visual System of the Human Brain’, Rock Art Research 23, 2 (2006): 3-40. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London/New York: Routledge, 2000). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Claude Lévy-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. by George Weidenfield and Nicholson Ltd. (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

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John Mack, The Art of Small Things (London: British Museum Press, 2007). Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, ‘The Cognitive Life of Things. Archaeology, Material Engagment and the Extended Mind’, in The Cognitive Life of Things. Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, ed. by Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, pp. 1-9 (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2010). ——— (eds.), The Cognitive Life of Things. Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2010). Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki, ‘Tools for the body (schema)’, Trends in Cognitive Science 8, 2 (2004): 79-86. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization. The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol, and Notation (New York/St Louis/San Francisco/Toronto/ Mexico City/-Düsseldorf: McGraw-Hill, 1972). LeRoy McDermott, ‘Self-representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines’, Current Anthropology, 37, 2 (1996): 227-275. William J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind. A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science (London: Phoenix, 1996). Erich Neumann, The Great Mother. An Analysis of the Archetype (1955), trans. by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Alva Nöe, Strange Tools. Art and Human Nature (New York: MacMillan, 2015). Donald A. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart. Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Boston: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1993). Sheenagh Pietrobruno, ‘Miniaturization, Miniatures and the Digital’, NMediac. Journal of New Media & Culture 6, 1 (2009), http://www.ibiblio.org/nmediac/ summer2009/digital_miniatures.html (accessed 9 December 2019). Martin Porr and Hannah Rachel Bell, ‘“Rock-art”, “Animism” and Two-way Thinking. Toward a Complementary Epistemology in the Understanding of Material Culture and “Rock-art” of Hunting and Gathering People’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 19, 1 (2011): 161-205. Marshall Sahlins, ‘On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture’, HAL. Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, 1 (2014): 281-290. Carlo Severi, Il percorso e la voce. Un’antropologia della memoria (Turin: Einaudi, 2004). ———, ‘L’espace chimérique. Perception et projection dans les actes de regard’, Gradhiva 13 (2011): 9-47. Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1993). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere (Manchester: Hau Masterclass Series, 2012).

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Walter Benjamin, Old Toys. The Toy Exhibition at the Märkisches Museum, in Selected Writings 1927-1934, ed. by Howard Eliand, pp. 98-102 (Cambridge, MA/London: The Belkamp Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). Randall White, ‘Beyond Art. Toward an Understanding of the Origins of Material Representation in Europe’, Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 537-564. ———, ‘Substantial Acts. From Materials to Meaning in Upper Paleolithic Representation’, in Beyond Art. Pleistocene Images and Symbols, ed. by Margaret W. Conkey, Olga Soffer, Deborah Stratmann, pp. 93-122 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

About the author Michele Cometa is Full Professor of Cultural History and Visual Culture. His research interests include biopoetics (cognitive bases of narrativity and picture-making, literature and evolution), aesthetics and visual culture (especially word-text relations, iconotexts and optical devices in literature), eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century literature and culture (German cultural history, the age of Goethe, Romanticism). He has edited the Italian translation of many classics of aesthetics and literature. His most recent publication are: Archaeologies of Visual Culture. Gazes, Optical Devices and Images from 17th to 20th Century Literature (Göttingen, 2016); Perché le storie ci aiutano a vivere. La letteratura necessaria (Milan, 2017); Letteratura e darwinismo. Introduzione alla biopoetica (Rome, 2018).

2.

Brancusi’s ‘Sculpture for the Blind’ Elio Grazioli Abstract One of the lesser-known works by Brancusi, Sculpture for the Blind is actually a key work, paradigmatic of the artist’s entire output. Perfectly oval in shape, it is the endpoint of Brancusi’s trajectory towards abstraction, which leads from the head to the egg as a symbol of origin. But, destined for the “blind”, on the one hand it displaces fruition from sight to touch, highlighting the importance of this modality also for other works; on the other hand it indicates the importance of “blinding” for understanding art; finally it denounces in its own way the blindness of so many self-styled art users. The essay reconstructs the history of the sculpture, its interpretations and its further implications. Keywords: Brancusi; sculpture; blindness; egg; perception

Sculpture for the Blind is one of Constantin Brancusi’s less well-known—or at least less discussed—works. Nevertheless, it lies at the heart of several important open questions. Among the reasons for its relative neglect may be the difficulty it poses for art historians because the documents that regard it are few, fragmentary and, when not, as some think, actually misleading, in part unreliable or controversial. On the other hand, if we take the title literally, it raises nothing less than the question of blindness, which is an intriguing problem for art.1

1 It is so for the artist and for the viewer as well as for the critic, for if the original form of proto-criticism is, as has become commonplace, the sort of ekphrasis of which the first written instance is the description of Achilles’ shield at the end of Book XVIII of the Iliad, then the tradition ascribes it to an author who was himself blind. Jean-Pierre Criqui (De visu, p. 80) comments: ‘It may be noted that this mythic motive of the originary blindness of art criticism is not associated with some poverty in commentary, but rather with a sort of excess in the description

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chII02

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The first version of the sculpture, in marble, dates to 1916 and was presented at the Independents’ Exhibition in New York the following year. This must be the same as the piece that Brancusi sold to the collector John Quinn in 1922,2 that then, in 1935, passed with Duchamp’s mediation to the Arensberg Collection and that is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A second version is dated to 1925; it is in alabaster and was first presented at the Salon des Indépendents in Paris in 1926 and then at the Brummer Gallery in New York in 1933; it is now in the Atelier Brancusi in Paris. All other information is yet more uncertain. The first version is the object of the most controversial testimony. This is Henri-Pierre Roché’s claim that at the Independents’ Exhibition in New York, it was presented ‘wrapped up in a bag, with two sleeve-holes through which the hands could pass […] and it was a “revelation for the hands” without the eyes, though most of the people thought it must then be a joke’.3 Almost all Brancusi scholars take this account to be a bit of whimsy on Roché’s part or perhaps a canny move on Duchamp’s part, who could have exhibited Brancusi’s piece in that way without telling the sculptor so as to draw him in the Dadaist orbit, of which Duchamp was then the leading figure in New York. No other witness to the exhibition has left any account one way or the other; the historical case is pending and so is hardly mentioned and almost never commented on. The positive reminiscences record the friendship and companionship between Brancusi and Duchamp and others in the Dadaist circle, his sense of humour and explicit declarations of sympathy for Dadaism, 4 but they regard as merely episodic, fleeting and quickly left behind anything that might have pushed Brancusi to do or to allow others to do anything like the act of exhibition that is attributed to him. For his part, in his short text, which was unpublished and not reused in his more articulated published work, Roché puts all the emphasis on the tactile features of the act. We ought not to forget that, at the time, the introduction of what language must represent: what makes the existence of an object like Achilles’ shield improbable is in the first instance the super-abundance of the details presented by “Homer”’. 2 And here we come full circle if the collector too is blind. We dare not venture whether some dealer or gallery owner may have made use of blindness, though, given how things go these days, the question seems relevant. 3 Roché, ‘Notice sur le “Commencement du Monde” de Brancusi’, p. 129. 4 The most detailed reconstruction of these relations is to be found in the various texts collected in the ‘Carnet de l’Atelier Brancusi’ under the title Brancusi & Duchamp. In particular, Balas (Brancusi, Duchamp et Dada, p. 75) makes a direct reference to Sculpture for the Blind: ‘We can see a Dadaist source for the idea of presenting Sculpture for the blind in a bag, so that it cannot be seen but only felt with the hands when it was exhibited in New York in 1917 (?)’—the parenthetical question mark is hers, as a mark of the suspension of historical judgment we have already noted.

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of tactility was an important novelty as well as the object of an ongoing priority dispute between Dadaists and Futurists. Serge Fauchereau recounts: It was a great innovation to take account of and to try to satisfy the sense of touch in the creation of a work of art. [Sculpture for the Blind] appeared at the same time as Edith Clifford Williams’ Plaster to Touch, which was exhibited at the New York gallery of Marius de Zayas in 1916 or 1917. Apollinaire spoke about it several times in his reviews after seeing a reproduction of it in the magazine Rongwrong. These precedents would be of use to Francis Picabia in contesting F.T. Marinetti’s claim to have invented ‘Tactilism’; but Picabia makes no mention of Sculpture for the Blind.5

Roché was writing much later, in 1955, and had apparently shrugged off the polemics of those years. But the sense of touch is central to his line of thought. He begins by recalling that Brancusi liked to hold The Beginning of the World—the sculpture closest to Sculpture for the Blind—in his hands. It is not insignificant that he removed it from its pedestal, given the attention that Brancusi, more than almost any other artist, paid to pedestals. But he would hold the sculpture ‘set down […] on his knees, he would touch it with his hands with eyes closed’.6 The italics, which are Roché’s own, give the sense of a generalisation and invite us to imagine a Brancusi who would often stroke his own creations, just as he obsessively polished them, and even fondle them ‘with eyes closed’. In short, Roché suggests that the first blind man here is Brancusi himself, taking the position of the consumer of his own works. Roché then establishes a direct link between The Beginning of the World and Sculpture for the Blind: though it is pretty obvious, it is nonetheless interesting to connect the ovoid shapes, the heads and ‘the mystery of Creation’, as he calls it. He then recalls what Brancusi himself said: ‘I have put into it [my philosophy/all my efforts at reflection], my curiosity about the unknown—an egg in which little cubes are in movement, a human brain.’ And finally he introduces another dimension and interpretation of blindness and of the darkness in which the blind find themselves, which is the dimension of depth and of the inside: ‘[Spiritually] it is an investigation of depth, of the inside [it is even more extraordinary than the Bird in space], as its name suggests.’7 5 Fauchereau, Sur les pas de Brancusi, p. 76. 6 Roché, ‘Notice sur le “Commencement du Monde” de Brancusi’, p. 129. 7 Ibid., pp. 129-130. The square brackets are an artefact of the editor of the volume of Roché’s writings.

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What did Brancusi mean by this last sentence? Or what did Roché mean by embracing it at this point? Certainly, Roché has Brancusi assert the centrality of Sculpture for the Blind. But what are those ‘little cubes’ that turn the egg into a ‘human brain’? What does this have to do with what he thinks is the perception of a blind person? Thus, in his turn Roché says he feels ‘veiled, contradictory forms, the “egg”, an elongated skull full of virtual angular structures underlying it’.8 Now the most salient feature of Sculpture for the Blind is that it is a pure and simple ovoid that, unlike all Brancusi’s other ovoids, has not undergone any surface intervention. What, then, can Roché feel ‘inside’ this smooth, opaque, hard and impenetrable solid? What are these ‘veiled, contradictory forms’, these ‘virtual angular structures underlying it’ that he speaks of? We are told no more and the statement remains a mystery, but it is clear that the sense of touch is given a peculiar role, a capacity and an effect that outstrips the sense of sight as much as it does ‘tactilism’. It is neither arbitrary nor wayward to speak of a mystery here. And Roché himself insinuates some allusively esoteric terms when he writes that ‘the initiated find it miraculous’.9 Nor is this the only hint in this direction: Roché insisted on the function of touch on the hand and on the closed eyes not only here but also in two other texts regarding Brancusi. One, on the burial of Brancusi, makes great play of a hand proferring objects, such as flowers or food, as we find in Romanian funeral customs, and then refers to a memory of how Brancusi, ‘receiving beautiful women in his workshop would put a fine handkerchief over their eyes and raw onion covered with double cream cheese, and would say “Bite and guess what it is”’.10 Here the memory refers to the sense of taste rather than touch, but it stresses Brancusi’s close interest in the practice of ‘closed eyes’. In the second passage, Roché describes Brancusi as a ‘magician with his hands’, indeed as a ‘wizard’, a sorcier.11 In Roché’s view, the darkness and the obscurity in which we are immersed when we close our eyes concentrates the attention of the ‘blind man’ not only and not so much on the surface of the object that he touches as on the inside of the object—after all, also taste, unlike smell, has to do with the inside and indeed carries with it the fact that we have to bite. Perhaps for Roché, this was connected with magic or at least with a different and ‘deeper’ understanding, the understanding of the Beginning (of the world) and of (the mystery of) Creation. 8 Roché, ‘Notice sur le “Commencement du Monde” de Brancusi’, p. 129. 9 Ibid. 10 Roché, ‘L’Enterrement de Brancusi’, p. 138. 11 Roché, ‘Constantin Brancusi’, p. 141.

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As is well known, the theme is anything but alien to the context if we recall its circulation among the people that both Roché and Brancusi associated with in those years, namely the New York Dadaists led by Duchamp in the first instance but also by Picabia. And suffice it to cite the title of The Blind Man, the famous one-off journal that Duchamp promoted along with Roché, and Duchamp’s refusal of the ‘retinicity’ of painting, which is to say that sort of painting that does not go beyond the retina or sight to reach the mind, the brain and depth, to cite the terms that recur in Roché’s text.12 But let us return to Brancusi. In 1922, John Quinn, a lawyer and the major collector of his works, bought Sculpture of the Blind from him. As a gesture of friendship,13 Brancusi gave him also Hand, which he had sculpted in 1920. The association is obviously significant and all the more so given that Brancusi is known for the care he dedicated to the ‘wholes’ of his works. Like Sculpture for the Blind, Hand is a smooth sculpture, without cuts made into the surface, and is hardly modelled. Hand is also one of the few sculptures that was never repeated, never came in various versions nor gave rise to explicit developments, except within the series of works that include hands that support heads, in which the cheeks rest on them, such as Muses and Mademoiselles Pogany. Indeed, in addition to Hand, Brancusi also gifted to Quinn a study drawing for Mademoiselle Pogany as well as a cup, which is a further significant clue because it is probably a metaphor of the hand itself and so a further way of underlining the offer not only of Brancusi’s gift but also of the hand that offers and receives, that sustains, caresses and rests rather than doing, acting or operating. Brancusi’s hand is not Rodin’s but is rather its opposite. It is the form, the smooth hand, without even signs of fingers or anything else. Hand, then, further connects—and quite explicitly—Sculpture for the Blind with the series of heads:14 in this way, the bag ends up holding not just 12 A simplistic view would contrast the open ‘conceptual’ approach initiated by Duchamp with the more historically anchored approach of Brancusi. Such a contrast is only partly true and useful, where what we are more interested in are the affinities and the analogies, so as to bear in mind how far Duchamp too was bonded to these themes and manners, which throw a fresh light on his work, just as Brancusi was not averse to the most extreme avant-garde positions of Duchamp and other friends and associates. 13 Friendship, too, has to do with blindness, as does the hand that we shake as a sign of it. It is well known that Brancusi chose his company and his friends with great care and was ruthless with those who invaded his space or were mere sightseers. 14 Serge Fauchereau acutely observes: ‘Conceived to be felt by the blind, its rotundity is suggestive. It is the head and the face that the blind touch in the first place to give shape to a person. A good sculpture makes someone who can see it want to touch it and caress it’ (Sur les pas de Brancusi, p. 76).

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the egg of the beginning, of the creation, but also the head, a head that is thus plunged into a darkness like that of the blind man. The beginning, the creation, enters into a short circuit in a vortex that returns on itself, with a blind man who touches the head of a blind man as if it were his own, which is perhaps the head of the artist, the origin and the end of creation; all cast into the deep darkness of eyes that do not see. The connection with Muses comes into the open when, in 1926, Brancusi exhibits the second Sculpture for the Blind at the Paris Salon under the title Sleeping Muse (Sculpture for the Blind). In addition to the other references present, there is that to sleep, another form or another moment of having the eyes closed and of being enclosed in darkness as well as of being concentrated and shut in on oneself: the ‘brain’ is at work and produces on its inside something that the eyes do not ‘see’, for all that they show up in the form of images. Indeed, gradually the eyes in Brancusi’s sculptures of heads disappear or close, not only in the sleeping figures but also in Blonde Negress and White Negress—where in the ‘negress’ of the titles we can intuit the darkness in which blindness is immersed—as well as Pogany and other portraits. That is to say, the heads themselves and the persons portrayed themselves become blind: this is sculpture not only for the blind but of the blind, where the genitive—a genitive of modernity, so to say, that expresses the union of form and content—is double and speaks not only of the blindness that is represented, of the represented heads, but also the blindness of sculpture itself. Loving to caress his own sculptures with his eyes closed, Brancusi does not just put himself on the side of his ideal blind end-user, but he also remains the artist who conceives-perceives and executes the work as a blind man. Here perhaps a further aspect of Brancusi’s work comes into play in relation to Sculpture for the Blind. This is what appears as his clear and general tendency towards “abstraction”, towards ‘a progressive purging of form’,15 of which Sculpture for the Blind is perhaps the first moment and, in any case, the most fully worked-through. What strikes us in it is what is lacking, it is the elimination of every anatomical reference, the smooth ovoid that coincides with itself, with its perception—as Kazimir Malevich might have said—thus connecting beginning and end. Is this Brancusi’s reply to abstraction, or is it his version of it?16 That is to say, would abstraction for him be art for the blind, the art of blindness is the sense that we are trying to bring out, in favour of a vision that goes beyond sight and its retinicity, 15 Fauchereau, Sur les pas de Brancusi, p. 74. 16 In the exchange of letters with Quinn concerning the sale of Sculpture for the Blind in 1922, the piece is called ‘abstract woman’s head’, but it is Quinn and not Brancusi who writes this.

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of which darkness and the sense of touch are the perceptual supplement and the interpretive key? As Fauchereau comments: ‘Touch has been unjustly overlooked. We see with our whole body; looking is a form and a matter that suffices to allow us to imagine their feel, their temperature, their roughness, their smooth or rugged or granular texture […]. Conversely, touch allows us to see or nearly so.’17 But this is not enough: what it is all about is another vision, a ‘vision’ that sees within and in the dark and so connects with blindness.18 As we are metaphorising him here, if not in reality, the blind man is immersed in darkness and has in his hand an object that he fondles and that he moves in his hands. What does he feel? Not the surface, or at least not its two-dimensional character—which is a matter of sight—but, by way of touch, he will feel the three-dimensionality of the object, what we feel of the within by way of the without, the surface as revelatory of the volume and of the inside. Moreover, because of the darkness that envelops him, the blind man also feels the outside of the object, its surrounding and its space in a special way; he feels this not as what is occupied by the object but as the matrix of the object itself, the concave, the negative, the camera obscura, to use photographic terms that would surely not have escaped Brancusi, given his deep interest in photography. Victor Stoichita says this about shadow precisely in connection with a photograph by Brancusi of Beginning of the World: I do not think I am mistaken if I state that in Brancusi’s commentary it is not the egg that engenders the shadow but the shadow—that black bodiless stain—which emerges into the world of existence in the shape of an egg. It is a kind of Platonic reversal where the shadow takes on the role of the paradigm and the marble egg that of the object.19

Here in reference to space, we again encounter Brancusi’s perception that touch and darkness render space itself more evident, that they formalise that unknowable—that ‘within’—that Brancusi claimed he had put into his sculpture. 17 Fauchereau, Sur les pas de Brancusi, p. 76. 18 Here too, it would be easy to contrast Brancusi’s ‘within’ with Duchamp’s ‘through’ and so the dark of the one and the transparency of the other; but this would be to ignore many things in Duchamp: the reference to the fourth dimension that makes the window a place of ‘projection’ rather than of passage, the objects with something hidden inside (With Hidden Noise), the French window with the panes blacked out (Fresh Widow), and so on. 19 Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, p. 194.

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Sculpture in large measure amounts to this: the object and space, how the object occupies space and how space reveals itself through the object: inside and outside, surface and volume. Apart from the egg in the bag, what matters for Brancusi is that space is experienced in the object, and for it to be experienced, each must act on the other and each must show itself through the other. The egg is in space, as the bird is explicitly said to be in the title of Bird in Space: with its striving to fly, it is the bird that makes the space as much as the space determines the shape of the bird, which contains the curve of flight.20 We need to close our eyes, to be blind for a while, so as to feel the sculpture and to let it act in this way. (Translated from the Italian by Richard Davies)

Works cited Edith Balas, ‘Brancusi, Duchamp et Dada’, in Les Carnets de l’Atelier Brancusi: Brancusi – Duchamp, ed. by Marielle Tabart, pp. 63-76 (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2000). Jean-Pierre Criqui, ‘De visu. Le regard du critique’, Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 37 (1991): 79-92. Serge Fauchereau, Sur les pas de Brancusi (Paris: Cercle d’Art, Paris, 1995). Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, in L’Amour Fou. Photography and Surrealism, ed. by Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingston, and Dawn Ades, pp. 54-112 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986). Henri-Pierre Roché, ‘Notice sur le “Commencement du Monde” de Brancusi’ (1955), in Écrits sur l’art, pp. 129-130 (Paris: André Dimanche, 1998). ———, ‘L’Enterrement de Brancusi’ (1957), in Écrits sur l’art, pp. 137-139 (Paris: André Dimanche, 1998). ———, ‘Constantin Brancusi’ (1957), in Écrits sur l’art, pp. 141-143 (Paris: André Dimanche, 1998). Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). Marielle Tabart (ed.), Les Carnets de l’Atelier Brancusi. Brancusi – Duchamp (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2000). 20 One of Brancusi’s most famous photographs is that of a flash of literally blinding light striking Bird in Space. For all that the photograph itself is blind, it can show us this. Also the games of reflection on the mirroring surfaces of the sculptures, which are often at the heart of Brancusi’s photographs, can be read in this key as the constructive action of space on the object, a reversed mimetism like the one discussed by Rosalind Krauss in her Corpus Delicti, but positively.

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About the author Elio Grazioli is a critic of contemporary art and photography. He teaches Contemporary Art History at the University of Bergamo. Since 1978 he has organised solo shows and collective exhibitions, and from 2007 to 2017 he was the artistic director of the annual festival “Fotografia Europea” in Reggio Emilia. He is codirector of the series “Riga” (Quodlibet ed.) and “Imm” (Moretti & Vitali ed.). His most recent publications include La polvere nell’arte (2004); Piero Manzoni (2007); Ugo Mulas (2010); La collezione come forma d’arte (2012); Davide Mosconi (2014); Duchamp oltre la fotografia (2017); and Infrasottile (2019).

3.

Cinema, Phenomenology and Hyperrealism Pietro Conte

Abstract Traditionally, hyperrealistic mannequins have embodied the dream (or rather the nightmare) of animating the inanimate: by imitating the living model to such an extent that any distinction becomes (almost) impossible, they blur the threshold between life and inert matter. It thus comes as no surprise that wax figures have often been taken as a symbol of cinematic creation and its attempt to recreate motion (a quality immediately associated with life) by means of a sequence of static frames. By focusing on three classic movies—Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1923) and Michael Curtiz’s Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)—the essay explores the tension between reality and unreality as the crux of cinema tout court. Keywords: Aesthetics; film studies; mummy complex; animation; hyperrealism; wax figures

In his renowned essay first published in 1937 and then revised in 1947, Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures, Erwin Panofsky reminds readers that the earliest narrative movies were not at all just trivial imitations of the genus proximum of theatre plays; rather, they preferred to add movement to originally stationary works of art, such as the wax figures ‘à la Madame Tussaud’.1 Without providing any further explanation, the art historian touched upon a crucial topic for cinema studies, that of the animation of the inanimate and the paradoxical attempt to recreate motion (a quality immediately associated with life) by means of a sequence of static frames, 1 Panofsky, Style and Medium, p. 17.

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pushing mimetic strategies to the limit by trying at the same time to escape the fate of photographic images, unavoidably condemned to immerse reality in a ‘stop bath (bain de fixation)’ and to ‘cut into the living so as to perpetuate the dead’.2 Providing mummies with the ability to move: this is the logical conclusion of the ‘obsession with realism’3 that André Bazin was mulling in the very same years Panofsky’s essay was published. It should therefore come as no surprise that between cinema and wax statues there was love at first sight, possible only when both sides have something to benefit from the encounter: by animating (even though only in an image) the inanimate, cinema celebrates its own triumph, whereas mannequins, conversely, obtain what they need to finally end the eternal chase after their models, namely, motion. After all, what difference is there between a wax figure and its alter ego in the flesh? What differentiates them? Perceptually, absolutely nothing if not the lack of motion or—in case the statue is equipped with devices enabling it to perform more or less complex gestures—its mechanicalness and jerkiness. When all is said and done, the wax modeler’s dream is the same as Pygmalion’s: to breathe life into something that has none. It is no coincidence that Ovid’s famous tale directly refers to the metamorphic power of wax, just at the moment when the ivory that Galatea was made from starts turning into the flesh of a real woman: ‘Again he kissed her; and he felt her breast; the ivory seemed to soften at the touch, and its firm texture yielded to his hand, as honey-wax of Mount Hymettus turns to many shapes when handled in the sun, and surely softens from each gentle touch. He is amazed; but stands rejoicing in his doubt; while fearful there is some mistake, again and yet again, gives trial to his hopes by touching with his hand. It must be flesh!’4 Wax is poised between the organic and the inorganic: it is the ambiguous material par excellence, characterised by ‘a viscosity, a sort of activity and intrinsic force, which is a force of metamorphism, polymorphism’.5 Edmund Husserl long meditated on the topic of hyperrealistic images, making the most of wax mannequins to unpick the thorny problem of the distinction between perception [Wahrnehmung] and image consciousness [Bildbewusstsein]. The following is an account given by Hans-Georg Gadamer recounting the stages of his own education and recalling the time when he visited Freiburg to meet Martin Heidegger and to attend some lectures by 2 Dubois, L’acte photographique, pp. 161, 163. 3 Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, p. 12. 4 Ovid, Metamorphoses, X, 282-289. 5 Didi-Huberman, ‘Viscosities and Survivals’, p. 155.

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Husserl too: ‘To demonstrate deceptive perception, he [Husserl] described his visit to the Berlin Panopticum on Friedrich Street. Much to his embarrassment, a young lady at the entrance winked at him. Then it dawned on him: “This was a doll”.’6 With its real clothes, hair and so on, indeed, even with movements artificially mimicked by means of mechanical devices, the wax figure so closely resembles the real human being that we always find ourselves in a quandary: ‘We indeed “know” that it is a semblance but we cannot help ourselves—we see a human being.’7 From a purely phenomenological perspective, this tension between knowing and seeing is crucial, as it implies the impossibility of coping with the problem of hyperrealism by means of purely ontological considerations: images and reality are only distinguishable by virtue of a different intentional act of consciousness. Consciousness itself, however, is in trouble before a wax figure, being indefinitely on the tightrope between perception and image consciousness: the excessive similarity to the original obscures the ‘unreal’ nature of the image, thus removing the tension between similarity and difference that is necessarily inherent in the concept of ‘representation’ itself. It was in 1923 that Gadamer heard Husserl speak about his curious encounter with the lady-mannequin. That very same year, Paul Leni filmed Waxworks, a milestone in the history of expressionist cinema that investigates the topic of hyperrealistic figures in the light of a poetics that has as one of its theoretical cornerstones the ambiguous relationship between the real and the unreal. The plot is well known: intrigued by a newspaper ad, a young poet comes to a fairground booth, where the owner and his daughter offer him a lavish recompense for writing three stories, each with three wax statues as main characters, which would make the Panoptikum show even more fascinating, engaging and convincing.8 The task consists in giving a story—and therefore a life—back to those figures: a classic example of the relationship between words and images, were it not that the tales invented by the writer are in this case not actually read but are instead immediately shifted onto the visual plane thanks to film editing. Words conceived to animate static objects are, in turn, animated by the moving images in Leni’s film, so that the viewer may penetrate deep into the heart of both the writer’s and the filmmaker’s creative processes. 6 Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, p. 35. 7 Husserl, ‘Phantasy and Image Consciousness’, pp. 43-44. 8 Originally, there were supposed to be four episodes, but financial issues forced him to give up the one dedicated to Rinaldo Rinaldini, inspired by the adventure novel of the same name written by Christian August Vulpius.

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The transition from the level of reality on which the young poet lives to the unreality of his invented stories is immediately highlighted in the f irst episode by a purely expressionist setting with phantasmagorical streets and buildings. On closer inspection, however, the distinction between the two levels gradually grows more complicated and uncertain: from the fairy-tale-like landscapes of Baghdad, which are well-suited to the style of the stories from the Thousand and One Nights like the one about Sheik Harun al-Rashid, we are first led to the much more realistic dungeons that act as a backdrop to Ivan the Terrible’s wrongdoings. Then we are caught in the dream of the young poet who, overcome with exhaustion before being able to start on the f inal story, f inds himself chased by Jack the Ripper inside that very pavilion that should represent the impregnable bastion of reality, the borderline where the imaginary world created by the writer’s imagination ends and the reality where he himself lives begins.9 However, it is noteworthy that the shift between reality and imagery takes place even before the poet falls asleep, just as he scrutinises the wax f igure to f ind inspiration: suddenly, the statue seems to blur, double and move, forcing the unfortunate fellow to rub his eyes so as to realise it is only an illusion brought on by the fatigue of overwork. However, thanks to one of the very few special effects in the movie, the doubled image calls the spectator into play as well, suggesting that the ambiguous relationship between reality and unreality does not apply just to the storyline of the f ilm but also and more generally to cinema as a medium of animation. Hidden under the false appearance of a casual fairytale lies nothing less than the style of cinema tout court, based precisely on the tension between reality and unreality: before the (image of the) statue of Jack the Ripper, the inner and the outer spectator relate and overlap. By virtue of their hyperrealistic features, waxworks become a symbol of that ‘indecisive nature of the boundaries between the artistic and the living’10 which represents one of the fundamental cruces of Expressionism. Where does ‘reality’ end, and where does the ‘unreality’ of the image begin? Can we establish the exact moment when one stands out from the other? Or is the image (and in particular the cinematic image) perhaps not itself structurally ambiguous, and does it not inevitably raise Ernst Jentsch’s famous doubt—later re-proposed by Freud precisely in reference 9 On the gradual transformation of landscapes that act as backdrops to the three episodes, see Pitassio, ‘Wachsfiguren?’, pp. 76-77. 10 Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on the Frame, p. 189.

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to wax figures11—‘as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate’?12 Some details in the screenplay of Leni’s movie, written by Henrik Galeen, point specifically in this direction, beginning with the words used by the owner of the Panoptikum to describe his beloved statues: ‘Magnificent works of art, equipped with mechanisms which make them move, almost life-like.’13 Moreover, in imagining the character of Harun al-Rashid, Galeen specifies that his face in close-up must seem ‘waxy’,14 just like the corresponding mannequin: once again, the plane of reality where the writer and his patrons live is blurred with the fantastical stories invented for the occasion. The process of animating the inanimate quickly evolves in a crescendo over the following episodes: if the statue representing al-Rashid is completely immobile, that of Ivan the Terrible starts moving thanks to a crank mechanism even before the story of which he is the protagonist has begun, while the final figure—that of Jack the Ripper—pursues the writer and the owner’s daughter among the fairground tents. The overlapping of reality and unreality turns into a dizzying game of mirrors when Leni, following Galeen’s suggestions, introduces in the first episode a statue (in wax, obviously)15 that replaces the Caliph while he wanders nightly through Baghdad streets in search of new flirtations. The reference, which in fact sounds like an actual quotation, is to Robert Wiene and to that symbol of expressionist cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—which had been released in movie theatres just three years before, in 1920.16 In this case, too, the diabolical protagonist resorts to a mannequin that faithfully reproduces the features of the sleepwalking Cesar (played by Conrad Veidt, who in Leni’s film stars in the role of Ivan the Terrible), providing him with an alibi while he, in a state of hypnotic trance, perpetrates horrific crimes. Kracauer expressly states (even if it remains unclear on what basis) that this is ‘a wax figure’,17 thus underlining once more the extraordinary power of a material that proves perfectly suited to bridge the gap between image and reality: the representation becomes 11 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’. 12 Jentsch, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, p. 11. 13 Das Wachsfigurenkabinett. Drehbuch, p. 23. 14 Ibid., p. 25. 15 Ibid., p. 51. 16 In a review in the Berliner Börsen-Courier for 14 November 1924, Herbert Ihering wholeheartedly states that: ‘The cabinet of wax figures is the Caligari of Paul Leni’ (quoted in Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, p. 141). 17 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 64.

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re-presentation, and the copy, platonically meant as a defective and degraded imitation, becomes a double, a surrogate, and ends up identifying with the original, literally taking its place. It may also be that the image does not limit itself to reproducing but actually is the model. This is what happens in a 1933 movie directed by Michael Curtiz, Mystery of the Wax Museum, whose main character is a young wax modeler, Ivan Igor, who at once has a definite artistic talent but very little business sense. His partner, disappointed by the low profit margins of the museum because he had invested a great deal of money in it, decides to set fire to the entire building and cash in on the insurance money. When faced with this criminal plan, the sculptor furiously bursts into cries: ‘You are asking to burn these people?’18 The screenplay leaves no doubt about the fact that Ivan Igor regards his creations (or maybe it would be better to say his ‘creatures’) as real human beings: as he displays them to two expert art critics, he claims that he engaged in heated debate with Voltaire and was reassured by Marie Antoinette, his favourite, concerning the imminent success of the whole exhibition.19 And as soon as these two visitors—enthusiastic about the quality of the works—leave, the artist approaches his beloved creatures: ‘And you, my friends—Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Maximilian, Savonarola, all of you—how will you feel to be famous again?’20 The confusion between images and reality is accentuated by the fact that Fay Wray, who plays the role of Marie Antoinette, does not at all look like an inanimate statue: ‘Why Curtiz didn’t shoot a few feet and then freeze-frame it, is somewhat of a mystery; the shot goes on for so long that Miss Wray can be seen all too clearly to be breathing, moving her eyes, and even twitching!’21 This criticism by William Keith Everson, however, does not hit the mark: Curtiz intentionally avoids the freeze-frame in order to convey the impression that the wax figure is about to come alive, thus insinuating the doubt that the image is not ‘just an image’ and that all the Pygmalionesque efforts on the part of the sculptor—and of the film director, too—are indeed successful. The fire has destroyed everything, and poor, disfigured, mad, cripple Ivan Igor comes up with the idea of recreating the museum exactly as it 18 So runs the screenplay compiled by Mullay and Erikson and published in Mullay and Erikson, Mystery of the Wax Museum. Screenplay, p. 59. 19 See Mullay and Erikson, Mystery of the Wax Museum. Screenplay, p. 54. For an in-depth analysis of the motives behind the choice of Marie Antoinette as the reference historical figure, see Bloom, Waxworks, pp. 124-127. 20 Mullay and Erikson, Mystery of the Wax Museum. Screenplay, p. 57. 21 Everson, Mystery of the Wax Museum, p. 108.

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had been but with a slight difference: the statues are no longer statues but rather real human beings that have been murdered and transformed into wax figures. Mummification as the apotheosis of realism, leading to an incomparable (and for any artist unattainable) degree of similarity. The final result is so perfect that it completely overturns the relationship between images and reality so that, as Ivan Igor comes across the girlfriend of one of his employees who reminds him of the beloved Marie Antoinette, he exclaims: ‘You would be amused if I were to tell you that I knew you before you were born.’22 In the old sculptor’s hazy mind, what was actually only a well-made copy has now become ‘the original’, whereas the real girl that should be the new model to imitate lends herself to becoming a copy of the old wax figure. Visually, Curtiz accentuates the confusion between images and reality by using a fade-out special effect, thanks to which the young woman’s face overlaps with that of Marie Antoinette’s statue. If earlier the dream was to animate the inanimate, now the exact opposite is true, that is, making the animate inanimate. There is a macabre hint of irony when Ivan Igor, caught up in the excitement of having finally found the perfect ‘copy’ of his ‘original’, suggests that she be the model for a new Marie Antoinette: ‘My child, you are that figure come to life. I wonder, some time, would you pose for one of my sculptors who does very excellent work?’23 The intended victim cannot imagine the allusion to the crime and the dramatic change in roles: the wax figure, which is the copy of the historical real-life Marie Antoinette, now becomes the original, whereas the woman in the flesh invited to act as the model—that is, the original—is in danger of becoming a copy of herself. From 1920s Berlin to 1930s Hollywood, hyperrealist mannequins materialised the dream (or nightmare, depending on one’s point of view) of animating the inanimate: by imitating the model to such an extent that any distinction becomes impossible, wax figures questioned all consensual distinctions between reality and imagery, thereby becoming symbols of cinematic creation itself. If at the origins of painting and sculpture we find the ‘mummy complex’, at the root of cinema there is the mannequin complex, which provides further confirmation of André Malraux’s famous statement (not surprisingly quoted by Bazin): ‘Cinema is the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism.’24 22 Mullay and Erikson, Mystery of the Wax Museum. Screenplay, p. 103. 23 Ibid., p. 103. 24 Malraux, Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma, quoted in Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, p. 10.

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Works cited André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), in What is cinema? (1958), selected and transl. by Hugh Gray, vol. 1, pp- 9-16 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1967-1971; repr. 2004). Michelle E. Bloom, Waxworks. A Cultural Obsession (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Das Wachsfigurenkabinett. Drehbuch von Henrik Galeen zu Paul Lenis Film von 1923, with introductory essay by Thomas Koebner and material regarding the film by Hans-Michael Bock (Munich: Text+Kritik, 1994). Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Viscosities and Survivals. Art History Put to the Test by the Material’ (1998), in Ephemeral Bodies. Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. by Roberta Panzanelli, pp. 154-169 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008). Philippe Dubois, L’acte photographique et autres essais (Paris: Nathan, 1993). William K. Everson, ‘Mystery of the Wax Museum’, in Classics of the Horror Film, pp. 105-111 (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1974). Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), trans. by James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. by James Strachey and others, vol. 17 (1955), pp. 217-256 (London: Hogarth 1953-1974). Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. by Robert R. Sullivan (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985). Edmund Husserl, ‘Phantasy and Image Consciousness’ (1904-1905), in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. by John B. Brough, pp. 1-115 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). Ernst Jentsch, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906), trans. by Roy Sellars, Angelaki. A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2 (1996): pp. 7-16. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), ed. and introd. by Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). André Malraux, Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). Don Mullay and Carl Erikson, ‘Mystery of the Wax Museum. Screenplay’, in Mystery of the Wax Museum, ed. by Richard Koszarski, pp. 49-159 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979). José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Meditations on the Frame’ (1921), trans. by Andrea L. Bell, Perspecta 26 (1990): 185-190. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. by Brookes More (Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922).

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Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’ (1947), in Film. An Anthology, ed. by Daniel Talbot, pp. 15-32 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). Francesco Pitassio, ‘Wachsfiguren? Zur Beziehung von Figur, Akteur und bildlicher Darstellung in “Das Wachsfigurenkabinett” von Paul Leni’, Montage AV. Zeitschrift für Theorie und Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation 15, 1 (2006): 63-83.

About the author Pietro Conte is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on illusion, hyperrealism, immersion and the multifarious practices of un-framing, a thematic cluster that he has addressed in the monographs Unframing Aesthetics and In carne e cera. Estetica e fenomenologia dell’iperrealismo (Flesh and Wax: Aesthetics and Phenomenology of Hyperrealism).

4. Ephemeral Bodies: The ‘Candles’ of Urs Fischer Cristina Baldacci

Abstract At the 54th Venice Biennale, Urs Fischer presented the most monumental of his ‘candles’: a 1:1 scale replica of Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Women. Together with two other wax sculptures—a copy of his favourite studio chair (a self-portrait) and the life-size statue of Rudolf Stingel (an alter ego)—it formed quite an eclectic sculptural group. But this ‘untitled’ installation was far from being an exercise in monumentality. At the Biennale opening, the sculptures were lit through candle wicks hidden in their bodies and started to melt. Though copies replaced the ‘originals’, Untitled resulted in a mass of ruins. More than a memento mori, it showed the passage of time focusing on the afterlife of images. Keywords: Contemporary art; Urs Fischer; Venice Biennale; reenactment

At the 2011 Venice Biennale, in one of the spacious rooms of the Arsenale, Urs Fischer presented his most monumental ‘candle’: a 1:1 wax replica of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women (c. 1580), a Mannerist masterpiece which, standing over four metres tall, is still to be found under the righthand arch of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. Fischer’s choice was very fitting. Giambologna had shown proof of great technical virtuosity by carving his complex dynamic sculpture group from a single block of marble. And despite what legends say, not even the ancients had achieved so much. What’s more, the sculpture was conceived in such a way as to be viewed from more than one standpoint, giving the impression of closing in on itself in an upwards spiral motion1 like a twisted column and 1 It may also be recalled that the Latin verb proserpere from which the girl’s name seems to derive (the girl subsequently became Queen of the Underworld after her marriage to

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encouraging the viewer to walk around it. Giambologna’s skill in treating marble to make it look like malleable material is unprecedented: some bodily details of the three figures (a young woman raised by a man and an older man who crouches beneath them) are so life-like that they seem shaped in wax rather than carved from marble. Only Bernini would achieve comparable effects when representing Proserpina and her abductor, Pluto, in the Rape of Proserpina (1621). Two other circumstances might have influenced Fischer’s decision to take the Rape of the Sabine Women as a theme and a model. The first is that, in addition to the mythological episode, Giambologna also intended to portray ‘The Three Ages of Man’ (the work’s other title), meaning the statue as a reflection on life and the passing of time. The second is that, although sculpted from a seemingly solid and durable material such as marble, this Mannerist sculpture group has shown signs of fragility on various occasions. After heavy restoration, there was much debate about whether the work should be placed in a museum to protect it from atmospheric agents and acts of vandalism. As Fischer himself commented, no substance escapes time: ‘Materials are inevitably a means to the end [of the work of art].’2 But there’s more. The Museo dell’Accademia in Florence houses the full-size unfired clay of the Rape, which has also been recently restored because it was slowly falling apart. Therefore, we may hypothesise that this inevitable fate—shared by all works of art but here rendered more evident by the fragility of the material used in preparing the sculpture—may have influenced Fischer’s intentions and work. On each side of his ‘remake’, Fischer placed two other wax sculptures, whose armature was made of styrofoam and iron. One represents the chair Fischer sits on in his studio every day, a sort of self-portrait; the other is the life-size figure of his artist friend Rudolf Stingel, a sort of alter ego. As both refer to the mythological scene and are parts of the work itself, unlike Giambologna’s Rape Fischer’s Untitled is made up of more than one element: in addition to the sculptural group (the central figures), a portrait (Stingel) and a self-portrait (the chair) are present. These are the three traditional main genres of statuary, and Fischer’s work is, as is his way, also involved in the attentive study and reconsideration of artistic practice. Despite the playful and irreverent irony of his works, he never forgets art history, and Untitled, 2011 is a particularly telling case of Pluto, King of Hades) means ‘to emerge’, which in itself is an act that expresses the idea of elevation. 2 Fischer in Gioni, ‘This Is My Grandmother’, p. 62.

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his memory games: as we shall see, in addition to reproducing a masterpiece like Giambologna’s, thus re-evoking both Mannerist sculpture and seventeenth-century vanitas, the candle for the Venice Biennale echoes the Dada movement, the Surrealist objet-trouvé, Fluxus, and Pop objects. We should also remember that the artist’s first ‘candles’ (What if the Phone Rings, 2003) portrayed curvacious naked pin-up beauties, resting on the floor or on classically inspired plinths and pedestals, like something straight out of a Tom Wesselmann painting. In Untitled, 2011, as in other works, the chair is a metonymic portrayal, an artefact replacing a person. It is symptomatic that, rather than the usual work tool of an artist-sculptor, Fischer displays an ordinary office chair. As the artist’s Ersatz, chairs have often appeared in twentieth-century art, from Vincent van Gogh to Joseph Beuys and Franz West (another friend and, in a certain sense, mentor of Fischer). But to Fischer the chair also stands as a connection between himself and the studio, indicating that both the conception and the design involved in his profession are done principally at a desk with a computer. A substitute for the human body, the chair is a metaphor of life’s transience. Jessica Morgan, an English curator who has often been involved with Fisher’s work, describes the image of the chair in his art: An ongoing feature of Fischer’s oeuvre, the chair is a stand-in for the body—its anthropomorphic legs, back, and arms have, after all, been put to use for many years as a form of portraiture of figurative representation in the history of art. Almost without exception Fischer’s chairs have been tampered with, combined, deconstructed, or crudely fabricated in some way that mimics the awkwardness, scale, occasional grace, and sexuality of the human body […]. The chairs/personae are fragmented skeletal forms—the chair as a memento mori—and as such are far uncannier than the limber human skeleton employed by Fischer in works such as Skinny Afternoon (2003).3

At the Biennale, the chair-Fischer and the portrait of Stingel were placed at a certain distance from the ‘Rape’ scene so that they could blend in with the public, thus becoming actors and spectators at the same time. But what sort of performance did Fischer expect these presences or wax statues to take part in? When the show opened, the wicks placed inside all three ‘candles’ were lit (each sculpture normally has a number of wicks located in different parts of the sculpture). Because of its unstable, viscous and metamorphic 3

Morgan, ‘If You Build Your House’, p. 46.

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nature, 4 the wax began to melt, thereby heralding an end to the images it bore. After six months, only the ruins of the sculptural group were left: a shapeless heap of wax drippings and clots where a hand, an arm or a head would peep out here and there, along with a part of the chair’s back or leg. In their own way, the flames had shaped those bodies and those objects by digging into them ‘concave arches and empty shells’ and creating, albeit fleetingly, forms ‘animated by the movement of destruction, and immediately dissolved into a beautiful rain of wax hair’.5 While, on various occasions, Stingel’s portrait and the chair-Fischer were replaced by new casts made in series, the two main figures, which lasted longer because of their monumental size which was also more difficult to reproduce (the sculpture is the result of an assemblage of a number of preshaped slabs), remained the same. The life of the sculpture thus coincided with the duration of the show. The words with which Marc Augé opens his Le temps en ruines (as yet untranslated into English) seem particularly suited to describing the metamorphosis of Fischer’s ‘candles’: The sight of ruins gives us a fleeting presentiment of there being a time that is not the one that history books recount or that restorations seek to bring back to life. It is a pure time, undatable, absent from our world of images, of simulacra and of reconstitutions, from our violent world the rubble of which no longer has time to become ruins. A lost time that it is art’s task to recover.6

Fischer speeds up the natural process of the work-monument’s destruction, but he simultaneously keeps reiterating the image of the ‘Rape’ that is part of our cultural memory: his sculpture—which I would call ‘performative’—may in fact be replicated ad infinitum, since it is in series. Unlike other artists who have worked with wax and attempted to pinpoint the moment in which the material comes undone (Medardo Rosso, Kiki Smith, Berlynde de Bruyckere) or have shown the fractioning of the body in a sort of post-human re-interpretation of classical statuary (Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Robert Gober, Maurizio Cattelan), Fischer goes beyond the portrayal of mere memento mori. With his ‘candles’ he concretely shows 4 All these three adjectives are used by Georges Didi-Huberman in an essay on the peculiarities of wax (Didi-Huberman, ‘Viscosities and Survivals’). 5 Falguières, ‘Urs Hero’, p. 46. 6 Augé, Le temps en ruines, p. 9.

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the passing of time (the time of life, of the work, of the exhibition itself); he reminds us of the extent to which both nature (the body) and art (the statue) are involved in processes of construction and deconstruction, of birth and decay; he confronts the notion of the life of images, of their cyclical appearance and disappearance, a notion that is then reinforced by the serial reproduction of each selected subject. He also engages in some sort of ‘Institutional Critique’, undermining his role as creator and challenging the presupposition that a museum-show is the place where art is displayed and defended. Here, instead, art is allowed to escape from the artist’s control, leaving the material free to follow its own regular cycle of presence and absence, of corporeity and ‘dematerialization’, of life and death. Fisher accelerates the material’s decay through fire, making it immediately perceptible and more effective. As he himself points out, this also involves the loss of authorship: Wax that melts creates in itself a more beautiful perfection than you can create [as an artist]. There is perfection in the movement […]. I’m interested in finding different ways of being an author […]. It is more about letting materials and images take on their own lives. The work has its own reality and you are at its service.7

In a certain sense, his ‘candles’ are supposed to perform a two-fold creative phase: the making of the cast in the studio and the making of its dissolution, which starts the very moment the art piece enters the display space. The work is properly finished not when it leaves the studio but when it has come totally undone at the end of the exhibition. Rather than a mausoleum devoted to memory, the museum becomes a place of cancellation and loss. Consequently, the work cannot evolve into a monument because it immediately turns into ruins, into remains that are destined to disappear quickly and thus deny the process of memory. Sculpture is the language that Fischer has chosen to activate a constant transformation of materials, objects, spaces. What resonates in this notion of transformation is Robert Smithson’s idea of art affected by entropy, the inexorable process that brings everything to destruction sooner or later, passing through those states of perpetual instability and flow that Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss have famously called ‘formless’.8 7 Fischer in Gioni, ‘This Is My Grandmother’, p. 61. 8 Bois and Krauss, Formless. Another example of this attitude of his are the clay sculptures (YES) made in collaboration with other artists and students (see the installation for the courtyard

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As Massimiliano Gioni has observed, Fischer’s sculptures ‘cast in wax and lit as candles […] act as monuments in reverse, celebrating our imminent disappearance’.9 But they also celebrate the end, or rather the evolution of a specific art praxis and tradition. The ‘candles’ are a sort of damnatio memoriae that the artist ironically inflicts upon himself. Bice Curiger, who chose these works for the 54th Venice Biennale—appropriately entitled ILLUMInazioni and inaugurated with three large paintings by Tiepolo—had already pointed out Fisher’s games with dissolution in an earlier exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 2009: When we enter this or any other exhibition by Fischer, the sense of enlightened amusement and whimsical cheerfulness makes us feel that clouds of smoke have just parted to reveal a sky painted by some latter-day Tiepolo—post-apocalyptic, neo-existentialist, or perhaps pre-catastrophic.10

The year after the Biennale (2012), this was partly the effect of Fischer’s intervention in the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, itself a rather evocative location. Built under the patronage of Queen Margaret of Valois in the early 1600s as a prayer and song chapel for the Augustinian convent, this hexagonal architecture has been transformed over time into a small museum of sculpture. But the original décor has mostly been lost and replaced with copies and casts. It also houses important ‘historical’ replicas, such as the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni by Verrocchio for the Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice; Ghiberti’s Gates of Heaven for the Baptistery of Florence; and a series of sculptures by Michelangelo, including the Medici tombs for San Lorenzo in Florence, two Dying Slaves (originals at the Louvre) and the Moses for the first design of the tomb for Julius II in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, the Vatican Pietà. In this treasure trove of Renaissance (and other) sculpture, where the artworks emerge from the shadows in all their magnificence, Fischer placed some of his own works, including two Untitled pieces in wax from 2011. The of the Fine Arts Academy in Venice, also in 2011, as a collateral event of the Biennale)—or even with visitors to his shows (an exemplary case being his solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles in 2013, where Fischer invited 1,500 Californians to take part in a large group work of art)—which, shown outdoors, melt and come undone under the rain or last just for the duration of the event, as in this case. 9 Gioni, ‘Ask the Dust’, p. 72. 10 Curiger, ‘Space Generated by Vision’, p. 12.

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choice was both shrewd and humorous, though also tinged with respect and nostalgia for that mythical artistic-sculptural past. The Biennale versions were, however, exhibited with some variations: Stingel was portrayed seated on an office chair to reinforce his role as an alter ego of his artist friend but also to suggest that this may be a sort of double portrait; Fischer himself appeared now depicted in full figure, also seated on a chair, unlike the earlier one. The comparison with the architectural space and the tradition of sculpture could not have been more explosive: if Fischer’s ‘candles’, as copies or casts, fitted perfectly with the other works in the chapel, the clash was equally considerable. The monumentality of sculpture was annihilated when the wicks were lit and the wax bodies began to melt. In Paris as well, what Fischer denied was monumentality, not sculpture in itself. For him—as for Medardo Rosso—the ‘demise of duration’11 starts with the creative process itself. Likewise, failure represents for the artist a creative opportunity but can also prove an obtuse non-sense leading nowhere. Ultimately, as Jörg Heiser has explained, all of Fischer’s attempts ‘at playing ideas and desires off against one another—as a way of preventing the art object from degenerating into an illustrative accessory—can of course go wrong, turning into pathetic rubbish’.12 One can never be sure that things will go well when one starts working with a material. Quite the opposite: most of the time, things can go off the rails, and the object takes on an appearance that is totally different from what the artist had initially intended. Fischer is aware of this and, with some amusement, he has learnt to accept this intrusion or participation of the material. Anything is possible in his art: relativity, precariousness, evanescence and instability of form are all parts of the game. (Translated from the Italian by Emily Ligniti)

11 Hecker, ‘Fleeting Revelations’. 12 Heiser, ‘Of Cats and Chairs’, p. 61.

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Works cited Marc Augé, Le temps en ruines (Paris: Galilée, 2003). Helle Behrndt and Gitte Ørskou (eds.), Wax. Sensation in Contemporary Sculpture, exh. cat. (Copenhagen: Gl. Strand, 2011). Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless. A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). Fabio Cavallucci (ed.), Post Monument, exh. cat. (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2010). Bice Curiger, ‘Space Generated by Vision or Basements Save Windows’, in Urs Fischer. Shovel in a Hole, ed. by Massimiliano Gioni, exh. cat., pp. 12-16 (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2009). ——— and Giovanni Carmine (eds.), ILLUMInazioni/ILLUMInations, exh. cat. (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia-Marsilio, 2011). Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Viscosities and Survivals. Art History Put to the Test by the Material’, in Ephemeral Bodies. Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. by Roberta Panzanelli, pp. 154-169 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008). Patricia Falguières, ‘Urs Hero. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, in Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher, ed. by Caroline Bourgeois, exh. cat., pp. 38-47 (New York: KiitoSan, 2012). Massimiliano Gioni, ‘Ask the Dust’, in Unmonumental. The Object in the 21st Century, exh. cat., pp. 64-77 (London/New York: Phaidon 2007). ———, ‘This Is My Grandmother She Makes Really Genius Cakes. An Interview with Urs Fischer’, in Urs Fischer. Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., pp. 60-65 (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2009). Hanneke Grootenboer (ed.), ‘Theorizing Wax. On the Meaning of a Disappearing Medium’, Special Issue, Oxford Art Journal 36, 1 (2013). Sharon Hecker, ‘Fleeting Revelations. The Demise of Duration in Medardo Rosso’s Wax Sculpture’, in Ephemeral Bodies. Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. by Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci (eds.), Rosso. La forma instabile, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira, 2007). Jörg Heiser, ‘Of Cats and Chairs’, in Urs Fischer. Kir Royal, ed. by Mirjam Varadinis, exh. cat., pp. 47-62 (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2004). Jessica Morgan, ‘If You Build Your House on a Bed of Rotting Vegetables’, in Urs Fischer. Shovel in a Hole, ed. by Massimiliano Gioni, exh. cat., pp. 44-48 (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2009).

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About the author Art historian Cristina Baldacci is Senior Researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she teaches photography and contemporary art. Her research interests focus on the archive and atlas of images as art forms; appropriation, montage, and ‘re-’ practices; image theory and visual culture; sculpture and installation art. She is aff iliated with the ICI Berlin, where she was a 2016-18 Fellow; a convenor of the “Re-” Interdisciplinary Network at CRASSH (University of Cambridge); and a member of the research group Global Art Archive (Universitat de Barcelona). She has released Archivi impossibili: Un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea (2016/2019) and co-edited several essay collections, including Quando è scultura (2010), Montages: Assembling as a Form and Symptom in Contemporary Arts (2018), Abstraction Matters: Contemporary Sculptors in Their Own Words (2018).

5.

The Celluloid and the Death Mask: Bazin’s and Eisenstein’s Image Anthropology Antonio Somaini

Abstract Funereal images are characterised by a peculiar dialectic tension between presence and absence that plays a crucial role in understanding the anthropological roots of image-making tout court. Building on Bazin and Eisenstein’s remarks about the longue durée of funerary practices aimed at preserving the visual appearances of dead bodies after their disappearance due to physical decay, this essay offers a genealogy of techniques that from casting, moulding and embalming eventually leads to the recording of images onto celluloid film. The death mask, in particular, with its capacity of capturing and fixing through the imprint process the traits of a face that was once alive, seems to respond to that same need to arrest time and ‘secure phenomena’ to which photography and cinema would later respond. Keywords: Cinema; photography; Eisenstein; Bazin; media archaeology

One may believe that these people have lived, breathed, thought, in the very moment in which they were photographed, but in the contact with the instrument they have solidified, they have petrified [sind sie erstarrt, versteinert] —a result, which is similar to the casting of a death mask, which always resembles a corpse, even when an artist intervenes on it.‒ Moritz Thausing, ‘Kupferstich und Photographie’, 1866

In the chapter ‘Image and Death. Embodiment in Early Cultures’ of his An Anthropology of Images. Picture Medium Body—the English translation of a

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chII05

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book published in German in 2001 with the title Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft1—Hans Belting writes that ‘the anthropology of images must probe the origins of the image and of its connection to death in order to advance our understanding of the ways in which we interact symbolically with the image’.2 Firmly rooted in the German tradition of philosophical anthropology that begins with Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1796-1797),3 that continues with figures such as Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, 4 and is further developed today within the context of a branch of German media theory known as Medienanthropologie or Mediale Anthropologie,5 Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie is centred on the triad ‘picture – medium – body’ and considers the body ‘as a living medium for images’: a ‘medium’ that operates ‘by processing, receiving, and transmitting images’.6 Interpreted in this perspective, ‘funereal images’—a vast domain that includes all the images that have been historically produced in connection with funerary rituals and with the treatment of the body of the deceased through techniques such as portraiture, casting, moulding, embalming and mummification—play a crucial role in image anthropology, since they allow us to understand how the human body can be considered as a primary ‘medium’ through which we can shed light on the fundamental question of the relationship between images and media in general. As Belting writes: Body and medium are both involved in the meaning of funereal images, as it is the missing body of the dead in whose place images are installed. But these images in turn are in need of an artificial body in order that they might occupy the vacant place of the deceased. This artificial body may be called the ‘medium’ (and not just ‘material’) in the sense that images needed embodiment in order to acquire visibility. To this end, a lost body is exchanged for the virtual body of the image. Here we grasp the roots of that very contradiction which will forever characterize images: images make a physical (a body’s) absence visible by transforming it into iconic presence. The mediality of images is thus rooted in a body analogy. 1 Belting, An Anthropology of Images. See also Belting, Faces. 2 Belting, An Anthropology of Images, p. 84. 3 Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. 4 Gehlen, Man; Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. 5 On the research field of Medienanthropologie, see Pirner and Rath (eds.), Homo medialis; Engell and Siegert (eds.), Zeitschrift; Glaubitz and others, Medienanthropologie; Voss and Engell (eds.), Mediale Anthropologie. 6 Belting, An Anthropology of Images, ‘A New Introduction for the English Reader’, pp.1 and 5.

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Our bodies function as media themselves, living media as opposed to fabricated media.7

More than fifty years before the publication of Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie, the idea that funereal images are a crucial reference point in order to understand the anthropological status of images and media appears in two texts written very closely one after the other: André Bazin’s famous essay ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ (1945) and Eisenstein’s recently rediscovered notes for the unfinished project of a ‘general history of cinema’ (1946-1948).8 As we will see in the following pages, these texts tackle the question of the ontology and the history of both photography and cinema by locating these two media within the longue durée of a series of funerary practices and techniques aimed at preserving the visual appearances of dead bodies destined to disappear due to physical decay. Among these practices and techniques, the embalming of the body in order to produce a mummy and the moulding of the face in order to produce a death mask were considered by both Bazin and Eisenstein as belonging to a genealogy of techniques that would lead eventually to the recording of images onto celluloid film. The death mask, in particular, with its capacity of capturing and fixing, through the technique of the imprint,9 one last time the traits of a face that was once alive, was identified by both of them as responding to that same deep need to arrest time and ‘secure phenomena’—as Eisenstein writes10—to which photography and cinema will later respond. A renewed reading of such historical texts is important today if we want to better understand the historical roots of contemporary image and media anthropology.

‘Mummy of change’ and ‘dynamic mummification’ In the history of film theories, Eisenstein and Bazin have traditionally been considered to belong to two different, even opposite traditions. In Dudley 7 Ibid., p. 3. 8 Bazin’s ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ was first published in the volume Problèmes de la peinture, edited in 1945 by Gaston Diehl, and later republished, in a slightly different version, in André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, vol. 1, ‘Ontologie et Langage’ (Paris: Cerf, 1958), pp. 11-19 (English translation: ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’). Eisenstein’s notes for a ‘general history of cinema’, first published in French and Portuguese, are now available in an English edition: Eisenstein, Notes. 9 See Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact. 10 Eisenstein, Notes, p. 115.

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Andrew’s classic study The Major Film Theories (1976), for example, Eisenstein is presented as one of the protagonists (together with Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim and Béla Balázs) of the so-called ‘formative tradition’, while Bazin appears (alongside Siegfried Kracauer) as one of the leading figures of the ‘realist film theories’.11 On the one hand we find Eisenstein, who in his writings never stopped redefining the nature, the origins and the possibilities of montage—analysing examples of montage within and outside cinema, in the history of the arts and in the history of religious rituals—and on the other hand we have Bazin, whose ethically grounded notion of realism led him to formulate the idea that in some specific cases montage could even be ‘forbidden’, as we read in his 1956 article ‘Montage interdit’.12 The recent publication of the texts and drawings concerning Eisenstein’s project for a ‘general history of cinema’ allow us to reconsider this traditional opposition between Eisenstein and Bazin. As we will see, between 1945 (the year of the first publication, in the volume Problèmes de la peinture edited by Gaston Diehl, of Bazin’s ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’) and 1946-1948 (the years in which Eisenstein worked on the project of a ‘general history of cinema’, a project that was destined to remain unfinished due to Eisenstein’s sudden death in February 1948), they both engaged in studies concerning the psychological and anthropological roots of both photography and cinema. These investigations led both of them not only to interpret the nature of the celluloid image in connection with ancient forms and rituals such as death masks and mummies but also to use expressions that are almost identical. In ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’, Bazin presents photography as a response to ‘a basic psychological need in man [un besoin fondamental de la psychologie humaine]’, the need to find ‘a defense against the passage of time’ which focuses on preserving the physical appearance of the human body.13 Interpreted from the perspective of a ‘psychanalyse des arts plastiques’, the photographic image is considered to be part of a long genealogy that includes ‘the practices of embalming the dead’,14 ‘the moulding of death masks’15 and ‘the psychology of relics and souvenirs’.16 Cinema, as a natural development of photography, is presented as ‘momie du changement’: a ‘mummy of change’, 11 Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. 12 Bazin, The Virtues and Limitations of Montage. 13 Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, p. 9. 14 Ibid.. 15 Ibid., p. 12. 16 Ibid., p. 14.

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that is, the mummification, through the recording onto celluloid film, of visible phenomena unfolding in time.17 In 1946-1948, in his notes for a ‘general history of cinema’, without having read Bazin’s essay (no evidence has been found so far in the archives), Eisenstein presents photography as a response to an ‘urge to record phenomena’ that runs through history as a ‘resistance against transience’.18 Interpreted from the perspective of a ‘general history’ that locates cinema in the longue durée of a history of media, rituals and art forms that have responded to a number of fundamental ‘urges’ or Triebe—something analogous to Bazin’s besoin fondamental de la psychologie humaine—photography is considered to be part of a genealogy that includes ‘Egyptian mummies’, ‘Roman death masks’, sculpted funerary monuments, ‘repositories of relics’. Cinema, as a natural development of photography, is presented as ‘dinamicheskaia mumifikatsiia’, ‘dynamic mummification’.19 ‘Mummy of change’, ‘dynamic mummification’: the two expressions used by Bazin and Eisenstein are almost identical. In both cases, it is a technique related to funerary practices—mummification—that is taken as a reference in order to understand one of cinema’s defining features: the capacity of capturing and recording visible phenomena unfolding in time and destined to disappear. Even though the general framework of their approach to the origins of photography and cinema is very different—Bazin’s reference to embalming and mummification is inscribed within an ethical understanding of ‘realism’ that is strongly influenced by Christian theology, in particular by the notion of transubstantiation,20 while Eisenstein’s reference to funerary practices is rooted in an interest for those acts of commemoration and reenactment that the Soviet cinema of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s had often staged, recalling the crucial episodes of the October Revolution and of its antecedents (as in the film Battleship Potemkin)21—the use of such similar expression is still surprising. How to explain this unexpected convergence between two authors who have been traditionally considered to be on opposite sides of the history of film theories? A closer look at Eisenstein’s project for a ‘general history of cinema’ and at the role anthropology plays in it, and an overview of other authors who, in the years preceding Bazin’s and 17 Ibid., pp. 14-15 (the translation is slightly modifed by us, since we translate ‘momie du changement’ as ‘mummy of change’ rather than ‘change mummified’). On Bazin and the relationship between cinema and mummification, see Rosen, Change Mummified. 18 Eisenstein, Notes, p. 114. 19 Ibid., p. 122. 20 See Hediger, Das Wunder des Realismus. 21 See Somaini, ‘Cinema as “Dynamic Mummification”’.

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Eisenstein’s writings, had already associated death masks and photography, may help us answer this question. Mummies, death masks, and ‘the urge to record phenomena’ Eisenstein worked on the project for a ‘general history of cinema’ during the last two years of his life—between October 1946 and his death on 11 February 1948—after having been nominated Head of the Cinema Section of the Institute of Art History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The notes gathered in the six texts published under the general title Notes for a General History of Cinema show clearly, even in their scattered, fragmentary state, the wide scope of this ambitious project which was destined once more—as happened to all of Eisenstein’s book projects—to remain unfinished. Initially planned as an introductory volume to a collectively written, multi-volume ‘history of Soviet cinema’ that Eisenstein was supposed to supervise for the Cinema Section of the Institute of Art History, the project quickly developed beyond the boundaries of an introductory volume, and this ‘general’ or ‘universal’ history (two possible translations of the Russian vseobshchaia) turned into an independent work characterised by the same drifts towards endless development, the same oscillations between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies that are typical of most of Eisenstein’s theoretical writings. Rather than a history of cinema conceived as a ‘portrait hall of characters [portretnaia galereia personazhei]’—a history centred on authors and works, directors and films—Eisenstein chose to construct his ‘general history’ as a vast, non-linear genealogy of all the ‘forerunners’ of which cinema could be considered the ‘heir’, organising these ‘forerunners’ according to at least three different, meandering genealogical ‘lines [linii]’: a) first, the genealogy of ‘cinema’s expressive means [vyrazitelnye sredstva kino]’, that is, the history of all the media and all the forms of representation that had explored, before cinema, the same ‘expressive means’ that cinema would later employ: the recording of images onto a light-sensitive surface, the composition of forms within a frame, the projection of images onto a screen, as well as all the possible forms of visual, audiovisual and chromatic montage; b) second, the genealogy of all the popular public spectacles and all the spectacular displays from which cinema had somehow developed: fairground shows and Grand Guignol theatre, cabaret and circus, Kunstkammern and cabinets de curiosités, wax museums and world exhibitions;

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c) finally, the genealogy of all the media and all the forms of representation that had been invented, once more before cinema, in order to respond to the same ‘urges’ (Eisenstein alternates this English term with the German Trieb, currently used by Freud, for instance in Todestrieb) to which cinema had responded: in particular, the ‘urge to record phenomena’, that is, to register, preserve and reproduce a variety of phenomena that would otherwise be destined to disappear with the passing of time. It is within this third genealogical line that we find a fascinating list of forms, practices and rituals that, according to Eisenstein, cinema had somehow inherited and synthesised. To begin with, Eisenstein mentions several different examples of rituals of reenactment: Catholic ceremonies and processions reenacting the Passion of Christ, such as the ones taking place every ten years in the Austrian town of Oberammergau, as well as the ceremonies and mass events reenacting the main events of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, such as Evreinov’s The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920). According to Eisenstein, these ceremonies of reenactment had their deep origins in the Dionysian rites commemorating and reenacting the death and rebirth of Dionysus: that dismemberment and symbolic recomposition of his body which, according to what Eisenstein writes in a chapter of his 1937 book Montage, represented one of the anthropological roots of filmic montage.22 In the myth of the young god Dionysus being dismembered by the Titans and then brought back to life by Zeus—an iconography that will then reappear in the depictions of the sacrificial dismembering [sparagmos] of Pentheus or Orpheus—Eisenstein found the primordial example of an act of ‘dismemberment’ which is then followed by a reunification ‘in some superior new quality’, just as in filmic montage the ‘dismantling’ of a natural order of phenomena is followed by the reunification of these separated phenomena into a new, meaningful and emotionally charged ‘image [obraz]’.23 In the notes for a ‘general history of cinema’, what interests Eisenstein in the Dionysian rites is not so much their being one of the origins of montage but rather the fact that they are rites of reenactment that anticipate cinema’s capacity of recording, preserving, repeating and reenacting. Here as well, 22 The reference to Dionysian rites as the origins of montage can be found in Eisenstein, ‘Towards a Theory of Montage’, p. 171. 23 On Eisenstein’s understanding of montage in the book Montage, see Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, Chapter 4 (‘Le montage en question’), pp. 205-258; Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, pp. 168-177; Montani, ‘Il pensiero denso e il principio dionisiaco del montaggio’; Somaini, Ejzenštejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio.

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we find an interesting convergence with Bazin, who in his 1951 article ‘Mort tous les après-midi [Death Every Afternoon]’ writes: Death is surely one of those rare events that justif ies the term, so beloved of Claude Mauriac, cinematic specificity. Art of time, cinema has the exorbitant privilege of repeating it, a privilege common to all mechanical arts, but one that it can use with inf initely greater potential than records or radio. Let us be even more precise since there are other temporal arts, like music. But musical time is immediately and by definition aesthetic time, whereas the cinema only attains and constructs its aesthetic time based on lived time, Bergsonian durée, which is in essence irreversible and qualitative. The reality that cinema reproduces at will and organizes is the same wordly reality of which we are a part, the sensible continuum out of which the celluloid makes a mold both spatial and temporal.24

This reference to moulding introduces us to the question of the role that death masks play both in Bazin and in Eisenstein. In Bazin’s ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’, the death mask appears in a footnote of the section in which the French film theorist talks about the fact that photography ‘completely satisfies our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part’.25 In the footnote, Bazin adds: There is room, nevertheless, for a study of the psychology of the lesser plastic arts [les genres plastiques mineurs], the moulding of death masks for example, which likewise involves a certain automatic process. One might consider photography in this sense as a moulding, the taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light.26

In Eisenstein’s notes, death masks are mentioned together with several other funerary practices and funerary objects—such as sculpted tombs, funerary monuments, shrines and memorials—and, just like Bazin, he underlines the similarity between photography and death masks. The production of death masks through moulding and detaching is explicitly linked to photography by mentioning Balzac’s idea (quoted by Nadar) of photography as the recording and the removal of one of the spectral layers 24 Bazin, ‘Death Every Afternoon’, p. 30. 25 Bazin, ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, p. 12. 26 Ibid.

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emanated by the body: ‘Removal (from the corpse) of the mask […] A photo is a “take”’ (Balzac).27 Faced with these unexpected points of convergence between Bazin and Eisenstein on the issue of the anthropological roots of photography and cinema, we may wonder if the two of them were the first to connect the moulding of death masks to the recording of images onto celluloid film. The answer, as we will now see, is negative: they were not the first, since beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century and culminating in the 1910s and 1920s we find a whole series of texts in which this connection is made. A brief itinerary through such texts may help us understand how the still image of the death mask could become a major reference point in order to understand some of the fundamental properties of the moving images of cinema.

The death mask, between the still and the moving image Already in 1866, Austrian art historian Moritz Thausing linked death masks and photography in his ‘Kupferstich und Fotografie [Copper engraving and photography]’, underlining how in both cases bodies become solid and rigid like stone. Looking at a series of photographic portraits, he writes, in a passage that we have quoted at the beginning of this essay: ‘One may believe that these people have lived, breathed, thought, in the very moment in which they were photographed, but in the contact with the instrument they have solidified, they have petrified [sind sie erstarrt, versteinert]—a result, which is similar to the casting of a death mask, which always resembles a corpse, even when an artist intervenes on it.’28 27 Eisenstein, Notes, p. 122. We may recall here that in his book Quand j’étais photographe, in the chapter entitled ‘Balzac et le Daguerrotype’, Nadar summarizes Balzac’s understanding of the nature of the photographic image in the following way, recalling one of their conversations: ‘According to Balzac’s theory, all physical bodies are made up entirely of layers of ghost-like images, an infinite number of leaflike skins laid one on top of the other. Since Balzac believed that man was incapable of making something material from an apparition, from something impalpable—that is, creating something from nothing—he concluded that every time someone had his photograph taken, one of the spectral layers was removed from the body and transferred to the photograph. Repeated exposures entailed the unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly layers, that is, the very essence of life. Was each precious layer lost forever or was the damage repaired through some more or less instantaneous process of rebirth? I would expect that a man like Balzac, having once set off down such a promising road, was not the sort to go half way, and that he probably arrived at some conclusion on this point, but it was never brought up between us’ (Nadar, ‘Balzac and the Daguerrotype’, p. 8). 28 Thausing, ‘Kupferstich und Photographie’, p. 167.

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Almost fifty years later, another Austrian art historian, the Viennese Julius Schlosser, reconstructed in his History of Portraiture in Wax (1911) a long genealogy of this often neglected f igurative practice that had its starting point in Roman portraiture and funerary traditions. Further developing the ideas that Aby Warburg had formulated in a text written in 1902—‘The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie’, which underlined the importance of studying the tradition of the wax ex-votos such as the boti which had been hanging for decades in the church of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence29 —Schlosser comes to the conclusion that wax portraiture, a tradition that has important analogies with that of death masks, since wax was one of the materials used in order to produce them, had ‘survived’ through centuries and had found its latest reincarnation in the wax sculptures hosted in wax museums and in the photographic image. This is considered by Schlosser to be a form of modern ‘survival [Nachleben]’ of the peculiar ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’ of wax portraits: In the light of the whole historical development that took place, there can be no doubt that portraiture in wax, with its permanent, inherent tendency to naturalism, served the function that in due course was likewise served by the truly middle-class art of modern times, namely photography, though with the difference that photography worked in a more readily understood way, less sensuously, with greater scientific objectivity—as it were, more abstractly—and above all much more economically: the function of delivering up a maximally ‘faithful’, ‘living’, ‘true’ image of the person portrayed.30

In Warburg and Schlosser, the study of the tradition of wax portraiture and of the variety of beliefs surrounding it had marked a decisive turn from an art history conceived as a history of artworks and artistic styles to an anthropology of images focusing on the phenomena of anachronic ‘survival’ and Nachleben of often anonymous practices that had been previously relegated to outside the margins of art history. This turn is similar to the one that we find in Bazin’s ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ and Eisenstein’s notes for a ‘general history of cinema’, in which the primacy of authors and 29 Warburg, The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie. 30 Schlosser, History of Portraiture in Wax, pp. 286-287. For an interpretation of wax portraiture in relationship to the aesthetics of ‘hyperrealism’ and to the ‘animation of the inanimate’, see Conte, In carne e cera.

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works is abandoned in favour of a sort of Filmgeschichte ohne Namen which has its roots in anonymous funerary practices and techniques.31 In 1926, we find another important possible reference point for both Eisenstein and Bazin in Ernst Benkard’s Das ewige Antlitz [The Eternal Face], a vast collection of 129 death masks presented as ‘works of arts from the laboratory of nature [Kunstwerke aus der Werkstätte der Natur]’ which are considered by Benkard to be gradually freed, at around the end of the eighteenth century, from their roles in funerary practices. The collection includes not only the death mask of Pushkin of which Eisenstein had a copy in his Moscow apartment but also the sculpture-believed-to-be-a-death-mask of the Inconnue de la Seine, one of only three women of Benkard’s collection and an image that will be later mentioned by writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Louis Aragon and photographed by Albert Rudomine and Man Ray. In 1929, in his introduction to August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit [Face of the time]—the first presentation of the much larger project of social, photographic physiognomy entitled Men of the 20th Century—the German writer Alfred Döblin comments on the capacity of photography to capture and record the typical traits of the various components of modern society. Such a capacity, according to Döblin, is grounded in the fact that photography, just like death, produces a kind of ‘levelling’ or ‘flattening [Abflachung]’, a ‘massive retouche’ of human faces, which lets the contingent, ephemeral traits of human faces and human postures disappear in order to preserve only the stable, typical ones.32 As Döblin writes, just as every death mask seems to be lit by a sort of ‘moonlight’ that sheds on it a veil of anonimity, the people we see photographed in Sander’s portraits are not ‘individuals’ but faces that have been ‘levelled’ and ‘flattened’ not by death but by society, laying on them, once more, a veil of anonymity. Sander will later include in his work a death mask of his own son, himself a photographer and a Nazi opponent who died in prison during the years of the war. In the same year 1929, in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger compares photographs and death masks in order to understand the different meanings of the term ‘image’. In a section of the book dedicated to an analysis of Kant’s notion of ‘transcendental schematism’, Heidegger distinguishes among three meanings of ‘look or image’: 31 The research project of a ‘history of cinema without names’ has been recently launched by Leonardo Quaresima and the University of Udine. The proceedings of the first conference on this topic have been published in Diego Cavallotti, Federico Giordano and Leonardo Quaresima (eds.), A History of Cinema Without Names. In this volume, see in particular the essays by Pedullà (‘Four Models’) and Pinotti (‘Why Anonymizing the History of Images?’). 32 Döblin, ‘Von Gesichtern, Bildern und ihrer Wahrheit’, pp. 7 and 9.

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First of all—we read in § 20 entitled Image and Schema—image can mean: the look of a determinate being to the extent that it is manifest as something at hand [Anblick eines Vorhandene]. It offers the look. As a derivation of this meaning, image can also mean: the look which takes a likeness of something at hand (likeness) [Anblick eines Abbilds des Vorhandenen], i.e., a look which is the after-image of something no longer at hand or a look which is the premonition of a being [yet] to be produced for the first time. Then, however, ‘image’ can also have the full range of meaning of look in general [Anblick von etwas überhaupt], in which case whether a being or a non-being will be intuitable in this look is not stated.33

It is in order to explain the second and the third of these three meanings of ‘image’ that the photograph and the death mask are mentioned. The photograph stands here for the second meaning: the image as ‘likeness’ of something that could be intuited directly. A photograph, writes Heidegger, ‘while it shows itself, it wants to show precisely that from which it has taken its likeness. To obtain an image in this second sense now no longer means merely to intuit a being immediately, but instead means, for example, to buy or to produce a photograph.’34 The death mask, finally, is mentioned in order to explain the second meaning of ‘image’, the meaning of ‘look in general’: ‘The death mask can show in general how something like the face of a dead human being appears’, and it is thanks to this capacity of the death mask to go beyond the individual traits of the face of the deceased person that it can be taken as a reference point in order to understand ‘how something appears in general’.35 Heidegger insists therefore—albeit in a very different theoretical context—on the same general, trans-individual dimension of the death masks that is highlighted by Alfred Döblin and that offers Bazin and Eisenstein the possibility of elevating it to the status of a crucial reference point in order to understand the ontological and historical status of photography and cinema. In all these cases, the death mask appears as both an image that is directly related to the singular, individual traits of the face of the deceased person and as an image capable of standing for the face of a dead human being ‘in general’. It is thanks to this ambiguous nature—suspended between the individual and the typical, the singular and the general—that the death mask, with its 33 Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 65. 34 Ibid., p. 66. 35 Ibid. For an analysis of the role of the reference to the death mask in Martin Heidegger’s Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, see Alloa, ‘Anblick und Gegenblick’.

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capacity of petrifying a series of different facial expressions into the unity of a long-lasting form, seemed to both Bazin and Eisenstein as being able to stand not only for the still, fixed image of photography but also for the moving image of cinema.

Works cited Emmanuel Alloa, ‘Anblick und Gegenblick. Totenmasken nach Heidegger und Blanchot’, in Von Ähnlichkeit zu Ähnlichkeit. Maurice Blanchot und die Leidenschaft des Bildlichen, ed. by Marco Gutjahr and Maria Jarmer, pp. 269-294 (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2014). Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein (Paris: Images Modernes, 2005). André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), in What is cinema? (1958), selected and transl. by Hugh Gray, vol. 1, pp. 9-16 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1967-1971; repr. 2004). ———, ‘Death Every Afternoon’ (1951), trans. by Mark A. Cohen, in Rites of Realism. Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. by Ivone Margulies, pp. 27-31 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). ———, ‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’ (1953-1956), in What is cinema? (1958), selected and transl. by Hugh Gray, vol. 1, pp. 41-52 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1967-1971; repr. 2004). Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body (2001), trans. by Thomas Lundap (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014). ———, Faces. Eine Geschichte des Gesichts (Munich: Beck, 2013). David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (New York/London: Routledge, 2005). Diego Cavallotti, Federico Giordano and Leonardo Quaresima (eds.), A History of Cinema Without Names (Milan: Mimesis International, 2016). Pietro Conte, In carne e cera. Estetica e fenomenologia dell’iperrealismo (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2014). Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact. Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008). Alfred Döblin, ‘Von Gesichtern, Bildern und ihrer Wahrheit’, in August Sander, Antlitz der Zeit. Sechzig Aufnahmen deutscher Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, introd. by Alfred Döblin, pp. 7-15 (Munich/Cologne: Schirmer/Mosel, 2003). James Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories. An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Sergei M. Eisenstein, ‘Towards a Theory of Montage’, in Selected Works, trans. by Michael Glenny, ed. by Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, vol. 2 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).

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———, Notes for a General History of Cinema, ed. by Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert (eds.), ‘Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung’, Schwerpunkt Medienanthropologie 1 (2013). Arnold Gehlen, Man. His Nature and Place in the World (1940), trans. by Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Peter Geimer, ‘Das lebende Lichtbild – “Mumie der Veränderung”’, in UnTot. Existenz zwischen Leben und Leblosigkeit, ed. by Peter Geimer, pp. 162-181 (Berlin: Kadmos, 2014). Nicolas Glaubitz and others, ‘Medienanthropologie’, in Handbuch Medienwissenschaft, ed. by Jens Schröter, pp. 383-392 (Stuttgart-Weimar: Metzler, 2014). Vinzenz Hediger, ‘Das Wunder des Realismus. Transsubstantiation als medientheoretische Kategorie bei André Bazin’, Montage AV 1 (2009): 75-107. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), 5th ed. enlarged, trans. by Richard Taft (Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997). Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1796-1797) (Ditzinger: Reclam, 1986). Pietro Montani, ‘Il pensiero denso e il principio dionisiaco del montaggio’, in Fuori campo. Studi sul cinema e l’estetica, pp. 61-80 (Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1993). Nadar, ‘Balzac and the Daguerrotype’ (1891), in Literature and Photography. Interactions 1840-1990, ed. by Jane M. Rabb, pp. 6-9 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). Gabriele Pedullà, ‘Four Models for a Nameless History of the Arts Still to Be’, in A History of Cinema Without Names, ed. by Diego Cavallotti, Federico Giordano and Leonardo Quaresima, pp. 21-30 (Milan: Mimesis International, 2016). Andrea Pinotti, ‘Why Anonymizing the History of Images?’, in A History of Cinema Without Names, ed. by Diego Cavallotti, Federico Giordano and Leonardo Quaresima, pp. 31-40 (Milan: Mimesis International, 2016). Manfred L. Pirner and Matthias Rath (eds.), Homo medialis. Perspektiven und Probleme einer Anthropologie der Medien (Munich: Kopaed, 2003). Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (1928) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975). Philip Rosen, Change Mummified. Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Antonio Somaini, ‘Cinema as “Dynamic Mummification”, History as Montage: Eisenstein’s Media Archaeology’, in Sergei M. Eisenstein, Notes for a General History of Cinema, ed. by Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini, pp. 19-108 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). Christiane Voss and Lorenz Engell (eds.), Mediale Anthropologie (Munich: Fink, 2015).

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Julius von Schlosser, History of Portraiture in Wax (1911), trans. by James M. Loughridge, in Ephemeral Bodies. Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. by Roberta Panzanelli, pp. 171-302 (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2008). Antonio Somaini, Ejzenštejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 2011). Thausing, ‘Kupferstich und Photographie’, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 1 (1866): 287-294. Aby Warburg, ‘The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie’ (1902), in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. by David Britt, pp. 435-450 (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 1999).

About the author Antonio Somaini is Professor in Film, Media, and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. Among his latest publications, the book Cultura visuale. Immagini, sguardi, media, dispositivi [Visual Culture. Images, Gazes, Media, Dispositives] (together with Andrea Pinotti, Turin, 2016), and the edition of writings by Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov: S.M. Eisenstein, Notes for a General History of Cinema, ed. by N. Kleiman and A. Somaini (Amsterdam, 2016); D. Vertov, Le Ciné-Œil de la révolution. Écrits sur le cinéma, ed. by F. Albera, A. Somaini, I. Tcherneva (Dijon, 2019). He is currently working as a curator on an exhibition entitled Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities (Parma, 2020).

The techniques of producing death masks and mummies point back to the petrified cadaver as a primordial image. The corpse is a body that turns into a thing and into an image (made) of itself. The essays in this section cluster around this aspect of the dead body’s materiality and explore its multifarious afterlives focusing on the entanglement among technical images, natural images and the emerging life sciences of the modern period, from biology to chemistry to geology. Starting with the eighteenth century, modern science was fascinated by the states of life-in-death revealed by ostensibly inert matter, be they fossils, crystals or the natural moulds that grow out of volcanoes. As the movement of life in nature was increasingly recognised to permeate ever deeper time and organic structures, the question arose: is the still, mineralised body actually dead? Or are fossils and stones in states of latent life, suspended animation? And how reversible are these processes of transformation? The attempt to emulate natural images and processes by chemical and technical means spurred a modern imaginary of living corpses: far from indicating the extinction of the living, petrif ication seemed to offer a technique for an indefinite extension of life, a living-on that incorporated death in life. Despite the variety of the media involved, this imaginary runs through the photographic plate’s capacity to fix and freeze moving beings, the lithic iconography of modern anatomical atlases, the life of organic fossils that survive through material changes, or bodies embalmed as petrified auto-icons. What we see emerging at this historic juncture are the often-unacknowledged forerunners of our contemporary obsession with the animation of things and the deanimation of human bodies. In this light, all the authors here foreground patterns of continuity among the archaic, the modern and the contemporary, and their essays are ultimately also about cultural living corpses, showing how theories that have seemingly expired can take on a new lease of life. Farinotti’s piece begins the section by approaching the ontology of photography from the theoretical standpoint of Blanchot, Barthes and Dubois, whose thanatological perspectives on the medium are woven into a single narrative of the photographic image as ‘death at work’. Simultaneously, she shows how these theoretical insights are indebted to a nineteenth-century imaginary of photography as a reactivation of ancient mortuary practices and rituals by modern technological means. Blurring the boundaries between death and life, photography was conceived as a novel realm of the ghostly, a site for the return of the living dead that carried specific visual imaginaries, those of reminiscence and reanimation. Farinotti’s most salient examples of this spectrality are chosen among the nineteenth-century genre of (pre)

post-mortem photography, a peculiar blending of the archaic and the modern where the imaginary of still living body was often self-reflexively performed. In showing how these outmoded materials resurface in contemporary archival artworks, such as Linda Fregni Nagler’s Hidden Mothers (2013) or in films such as Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), Farinotti raises the issue of cultural reanimation which the other essays in the section take up under various guises. An uncanny return is also at the centre of Barbara Le Maître’s chapter on ‘Jack Torrance as Fossil Form’, which revisits Stanley Kubrick’s gothic film The Shining (1980) as a geological site imprinted by the fossilised lives of the main character’s body. Taking a cue from Georges Cuvier’s Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813) and the natural plastic formations investigated by modern paleontology and geology, Le Maître singles out the ‘living fossil’ as an instance of bodily matter that not only survives through time in a petrified or congealed state but also undergoes changes of substance by mixing with its milieu. Unlike the fossilised trace, an image-bearing stone that preserves the cadaver’s form unaltered, the fossilised organism is an actual material corpse caught in between fixity and metamorphosis, decay and permanence, past and present, which challenges medial and aesthetic forms with the bizarre performativity of a temporal and substantial mixed species, the ‘anachronistic body’. As an instance of its working logic, Le Maître brings it to bear on the living corpse of Jack Torrance through a close inspection of its geological mutations in The Shining, thus hinting at a possible genealogy of cinematic forms and characters in natural (or indeed evolutionary) formations. Anna Luppi’s essay adopts a closer historical and geographical focus, zooming in on eighteenth-century Tuscany, which was at the time a European leader in the study of anatomy and in techniques for producing three-dimensional wax anatomical models and preparations, the most famous of which were being exhibited in ‘La Specola’, the Natural History Museum of Florence still renowned today. Luppi’s piece takes a minute, historicised side-view of the bubbling scientific terrain in which this project grew, focusing in particular on the anatomist Paolo Mascagni. Barbara Le Maître’s notion of the fossil’s ruination and mixed matter finds a peculiar instantiation in Mascagni’s revolutionary visuality for technical illustrations of anatomy, in which the standard visual trope of the cadaver as a moving statue is broken into pieces and replaced by a ‘lithic iconography’ that draws the corpse as a tesselation of matter in a ceaseless encroachment among the natural kingdoms, suggesting bodily survival through

trans-species permutation. Luppi speculates that Mascagni’s obsession with the suspended animation of stony matter may well have originated from his active researches in chemistry, geology and paleontology, probing the body of the earth around Volterra to find in the ‘cells’ (as he called them) of crystals and minerals a natural pattern of fossilised animation. In its quest for the animation of the inorganic, modern scientific materialism was permeated by the survival and reproposal of ancient myths on the energised body of the Earth or of vitalist ontologies of matter. In her chapter, Alessandra Violi explores this resilience of animistic theories in the sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, setting it in the context of a new concept of physiological death that was being formulated at the time, generating disquiets regarding the border between life and death. Her chapter ‘Glass, Mixed Media, Stone: Bodily Stuffs of Suspended Animation’ recounts the period’s interest in various processes of fossilisation, from vitrification to petrifaction to geoformations, as instances of a ‘biochemical constellation of immortality’ that entrusted chemical materials with the artificial reproduction of the fossils’ life-in-death, holding the dead in suspended animation. In addition to Jeremy Bentham’s famously self-planned autoicon, Violi investigates the activities of Italian petrificators such as Efisio Marini and Paolo Gorini, whose technical solutions for holding molecular death in suspended animation were often found by observing the turbulent geoformations of volcanic lava and mimicking them in phantasmagoric, protocinematic spectacles of stony animation. They thus prolonged, well into modernity, a vitalist imaginary of nature that, while appealing to the animistic cinema of filmmakers such as Jean Epstein or Marcel Broodthaers, has been identified by art historian Horst Bredekamp as among the core sources for the modern notion of a life of images. Undermining the difference between science and superstition, the animated bodies of stone of this modernity which had never been modern were soon pushed aside to the realms of fantasy, whether the gothic or science fiction. Le Maître mentions The Shining, Luppi the series Pirates of the Carribean and Damien Hirst’s Wreck of the Unbelievable, Violi the Marvel comics superhero ‘The Thing’ or the carbon freezing of Han Solo in the Star Wars mythology. Luca Malavasi’s final chapter, however, suggests a more careful approach to the untimely, discussing the reanimation of these inorganic memories in today’s philosophical and medial landscapes. The oscillations set out in the previous essays of this section come back with renewed force in Malavasi’s analysis of two very recent television productions, Les Revenants (2012-15) and The Leftovers (2014-15), which he takes as telling symptoms of contemporary

materialism’s emphasis on the uncanny exchange between reified human bodies and the lives of things. Significantly, both series do away with gothic modes and present the dead ‘revenants’ alongside the grieving living as they both share realistic environments, albeit haunted by a disruption of the boundaries between death and life, nature and artifice, body-objects and object-bodies. Malavasi’s piece suggests that today’s biocybernetic and digital reproduction is not so revolutionary a break with the past. Rather, it is a high-tech fulfilment of age-old imaginaries, where the opposition between life and death has given way to the multimodal and relational forms of existence of the living dead, ‘the life and the death of bodies and of things’. Alessandra Violi

1.

Funeral Eulogy: Post-Mortem Figures and Redeemed Bodies, in Images* Luisella Farinotti

Abstract The essay explores the relationship between dead bodies, statues and photographs, individuating in the images not only a means for petrifying bodies, embalming them in time—as argued by Barthes, Debray and Dubois—but also a form of re-animation of the inanimate. A sort of living relic, the image is the frozen testimony of a fleeting vitality, a paradoxical form of ‘visible hiding’ in which life and death are intertwined. The essay demonstrates this process in some contemporary works, moving from The Hidden Mother (L. Fregni Nagler, 2013), a series of portraits of babies from the late nineteenth century. In these bodies of babies still alive, but in which lives their very same corpse, death is a phantom but also a tangible fear behind the photographic gesture. Keywords: Photograph; statues; body; re-animation; The Hidden Mother

The analogy between the dead body and the inanimate body of the statue is rather abused, based as it is on some qualifying traits they quite obviously share: stiffness; stillness; a single, unchangeable expression. Indeed, the very idea that the statue is ‘a dead body which stands firmly erect, greeting pedestrians from a distance’1 is perfectly consistent with the broader analogy between images and death. This analogy, as Hans Belting has pointed out, is ‘as old as the figurative power itself’.2 The function of the image as a living substitute for the dead body—that is, ‘not as a stony metaphor of the person who passed * An earlier version of this essay was published in Italian in Cinergie. Il cinema e le altre arti, 12, 2017. 1 Debray, Vie et mort de l’image, p. 20. 2 Belting, An Anthropology of Images, p. 89.

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chIII01

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away, but as a real metonymy, an exalted yet physical extension of its own flesh’3—goes back to the idea that ‘figuring and transfiguring are […] one and the same thing’.4 This connection between images and death is still considered both by visual anthropologists and by scholars of visual culture as one of the main presuppositions of art-making.5 Therefore, it is regarded not only as the historical origin of images but also as the gesture behind their invention (in its different forms) which seems to fill a gap, literally re-presenting an absence and filling a void, particularly the void left by death. In the attempt to shape reality and its cracks, images inevitably run into death as an unavoidable horizon of meaning for human life but also as a trauma that cannot be assimilated, while its remainders urgently reappear, asking for redemption. In this sense, even the opposite idea of statues as ‘living bodies’, ‘so lifelike that they look as if they were on the verge of movement or speech’,6 is obviously connected with the desire to defy death by animating the inanimate.7 Among the metaphors through which we have forged our relation with death—sleep, night, dream, travel, etc.8—the statue is the one that seems more connected both with the reification of the body (the dead body that ‘becomes a thing’, a sort of petrified incarnation), and with the crystallisation of memory: monumentum in the original sense of monere (‘to remind, but also to suggest, to exhort, to preannounce’9 the many ghosts who inhabit our memory). Sculpture seems therefore to complete the process of monumentalisation and ‘taxidermy’ of the body that began with the funeral mask reproducing the statue-like impression of the dead body’s face: that is, the cast of the unchangeable expression of the face as fixed in death, a literal memorial cast of the body.10 Surely, according to Didi-Huberman, sculpture 3 Debray, Vie et mort de l’image, p. 22. 4 Ibid. On the equivalence (somewhat too easy) between the primordial and the magical, as well as on the connection of the ‘vital’ qualities of images to similarity rather than to magic, see Freedberg, The Power of Images. 5 See Belting, An Anthropology of Images, and Debray, Vie et mort de l’image. 6 Freedberg, The Power of Images, p. 291. For an analysis of the literary and artistic examples of animating statues, see Franzoni, Tirannia dello sguardo. 7 The need to find the movement of life in sculptures emerges also in the lexicon. As Claudio Franzoni has written, ‘it is noticeable that among the seven Greek words denoting the statue, four are of an inanimate gender (bretas, xoanon, agalma, edos) and three animated (kolossos, andrias, eikon)’; Franzoni, Tirannia dello sguardo, p. 4 (my trans.). 8 On the construction of metaphors as a means to understand death, see Macho, Todesmetaphern. 9 Pinotti, ‘Antitotalitarismo e antimonumentalità’, pp. 19-20 (my trans.). We are not considering here the funerary sculpture with an explicit commemorative aim. 10 On funerary masks, see Schlosser, History of Portraiture in Wax; Freedberg, The Power of Images; and Didi-Huberman, La somiglianza per contatto.

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seems to be defined in opposition to the inanimate character of the cast, against the ‘terrible precision’ of a pure retracing that ‘drags the similarity towards death’:11 In front of the object obtained through a cast—‘live’, as it were—we touch a death, whereas the purpose of another idea of art was that of seeing a life, re-invented through a matter, which, as it were, the sculptor must ‘animate’.12

Thus, if sculpture can be ‘alive’ as a similarity that reproduces and reanimates or a representation that seems real, the cast is a sign that cannot escape death because of its excessive adherence to the referent. The sign is too perfect as a double: it is a cast rather than an image. As Didi-Huberman explains, this process of tracing nevertheless makes room for a redeeming contact which is able to capture an elusive present: There is nothing easier, since metonymy dictates this, than to impose on the inanimate cast the magic power of animation, with which it has shortly come in touch and from which it has gained its nature as a cast.13

The veil of Veronica as well as the Shroud are among the most famous examples of the power of the cast, of the quality possessed by the image to make its ‘originary scene’ appear. This is something similar to what Walter Benjamin identified as the aura of the first photographs: the trace (‘the halo’, ‘the breath’) of a unique hic et nunc14 or, to quote one of his most famous definitions, ‘the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be’.15 This is the ghostly proximity that we find in analogical images and which, to some extent, determines their close connection with death. It is because of a ‘physical relation’ with its own referent that photography is defined as a sign and as a perfect cast of the real, capable of giving back a body that is both present and absent. The spectral nature of the bodies portrayed in 11 Didi-Huberman, La somiglianza per contatto, p. 109 (my trans.). 12 Ibid., pp. 112-113 (my trans.). It is evident that in considering the artistic quality of images a preconception comes into play: that is, extreme similarity and mimetic naturalism have been considered for a long time as a purely mechanical result lacking any artistic dimension. The contrast between precision and beauty is evident. On these aspects, see Freedberg, The Power of Images, pp. 192-245. 13 Freedberg, The Power of Images, p. 81 (my trans.). 14 Benjamin, A Short History, pp. 18-19. 15 Ibid., p. 20.

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photographs, together with the interruption of time—the moment captured by the picture is a suspension that cannot be altered, blocking life in a complete form, with no future in it—contribute to the definition of an experience in which restitution and loss coexist, almost as if photography were the firm proof of an elusive dynamism. The mournful nature of analogical images has been extensively analysed, forming perhaps one of the most central themes in the theoretical debate about photography at least since the well-known notes by Roland Barthes, for whom photography ‘is the living image of a dead thing’, a particular image that ‘produces Death while trying to preserve life’ because of the punctual temporality (the ‘this-has-been’) defining its noeme. It is not only the time fixed in the image but the time between the pose and the gaze on the photograph that evidently defines the catastrophe of an irreparable loss: ‘that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead’,16 hidden behind the ‘frenzy to be lifelike’.17 After all, Barthes himself admits that photography ‘has something to do with resurrection’:18 it represents an attractive force that makes the image as it comes alive under our eyes into ‘an animation’19 which is not proper to the photograph itself but rather to the spectator and which has the power of making it happen, of transfiguring it in a memory. It is impossible to reconstruct here a debate that has involved many theorists.20 However, it is interesting to consider that the recourse to the analogy with the statue and with the ‘becoming stone’ of the body in images is frequently found in the analysis of the relationship between photography and death. According to Philippe Dubois, photography is a ‘thanatography’, a form of survival similar to mummification, where temporality is ‘fixed in the endless duration of statues […], [a]nd penetrates forever in something as the “after time of the death”’.21 For Dubois, the break in the continuity of time and reality, the interruption of the flow of life that manifests itself with the snapshot, defines a radical fracture similar to the ‘Medusa-like effect’ through which the body is paralysed, petrified as a result of having been seen: 16 Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 79, 92, 9. 17 Ibid., p. 31. 18 Ibid., p. 82. 19 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 20. 20 On the relationship between photography and death, see at least Bazin, What is Cinema?; Castel, Images et fantômes; Sontag, On Photography; Barthes, Camera Lucida; Dubois, L’acte photographique et autres essais. 21 Dubois, L’acte photographique et autres essais, p. 160 (my trans.)

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The photographic act, realizing the cut, allows the passage to the other side: from an evolutionary time to a fixed time, from the instant to perpetuation, from movement to stillness, from the world of the living to the world of the dead, from light to darkness, from flesh to stone. […] Every photograph consists of this: to cut through the ‘living’ to perpetuate the ‘dead’. With a scalpel, a photograph beheads time, it extracts the moment embalming it under (over) the bandages of a transparent film […] with the aim of storing and preserving it […]. Photography aims at tearing it off from the continuous escape that would have led it to dissolution, in order to petrify it once and for all in its captured appearances.22

Once again, the dead and the statue are one and the same: each a figure of both the inanimate and of the breaking of time. Let’s start from here, from this body of stone par excellence, which is the dead body and from this place so closely connected with death and its possible redemption which is the photographic image. In what follows, we consider a small number of cases chosen from among photography, cinema and the visual arts, all of which raise some questions about the representation both of death and of the dead body as well as about the power of images to explain their meaning and suggest an interpretation. These works share a clear self-reflexive aim and elicit questions about the status of the vision as well as about the figurative conventions behind the grieving body. They are mostly contemporary works (installations, readymades, films) that reconfigure, rewrite or represent images belonging to the same temporal and geographical horizon: the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States. This is the period of the first widespread diffusion of photography, where a process of transformation in the ways of looking began, carrying with it many important consequences, both epistemological and social. This process can be considered a perceptual turn corresponding to the new forms of experience defined by modern technology, in a sort of aesthetical-cognitive agreement—or a form of ‘mimetic innervation’, as Benjamin wrote23—with the increase in visual and nervous stimulations of 22 Ibid., pp. 160-161 (my trans.). 23 The reference here is to the Benjaminian idea of ‘innervation’ intended as a form of adaptation and incorporation of technology. This is a sort of mimetic faculty, a form of assimilation that produces a new perceptual experience that does not oppose human and machine, subject and technique. Benjamin’s analysis of the new forms of perception, where contemplation is replaced by a more general and complete sensorial stimulation, is fundamental in its attempt to catch a sort of physiological response, anthropologically fixed, to the increase of nervous stimulations in modern technological societies. To better understand this aspect of Benjamin and, more in

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industrial societies. Photography and cinema play a fundamental role in this transformation not only as parts and symptoms of the modern experience of the loss of the sensible and of perceptual and corporeal fragmentation but also in the construction of a new sensorial relation with the world and images.24 Even the body is subjected to this transformation: not only is it made visible in the images—the photographic image is not perceived as a representation but as a cast, a sign or a mirror, making the subject recognisable by its somatic evidence—but it is also thought of as an image: the human being is as it appears, it is defined by its body and by the pose, fixed in gestures of self-representation that photography seems not to build up but to accept and make visible. This triumph of the visible surface, of appearances as places of revelation, finds its confirmation in the dead body: the corpse reveals the original sense of what an image is: it is not a body anymore but just the image of a body. Blanchot wrote famous pages on this subject: ‘The cadaver is its own image’, the image of a body made readable in the achieved resemblance to itself, that ‘similarity par excellence’25 which is the excuse for making present what is already gone. Present and absent at the same time, the dead is not here any longer, it is going to pass elsewhere but is still visible as a body, engraved in figura in its own flesh. Since most of the works I’ll be considering belong to the contemporary age, their work on the past appears intrinsically as an act of memory and of return, or even of explicit redemption, in their repetition of the gesture that is the most evident sign of the complex relationship between the ‘here and now’ of our gaze to the ‘this has been’ of the images. It is in the desire to re-animate, at one and the same time, the body and the image that we can find our way.

To immortalise Linda Fregni Nagler is an artist who reconstructs, studies and reconfigures the iconographic conventions of nineteenth-century popular photography. At the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, she presented The Hidden Mother, an general, of the theoretical debate on the constitution of the modern experience, see Hansen, Cinema and Experience. 24 On the constitution of a new scopic regime in tune with the new experience of the modern, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Sorlin, Les Fils de Nadar; Casetti, L’occhio del Novecento. 25 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 258.

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Fig. 18: The Hidden Mother, 2006-2013, #0376, (16.8 × 12 cm), original tintype.

installation displaying part of her own collection of more than one thousand photographs—tintypes, cabinet cards, ferrotypes, albumen prints ranging from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century—gathered together over about seven years, from 2006 to 2013.26 26 The Hidden Mother was displayed in the room curated by Cindy Sherman in the context of the Palazzo enciclopedico at the 2013 Venice Biennale. The work, as well as the entire collection (which is indivisible), are now part of the permanent collection of the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

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Fig. 19: Linda Fregni Nagler, The Hidden Mother, 2006-2013, original photograph on studio (Courtesy of the artist)

Fig. 20: The Hidden Mother, 2013, installation view. The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale.

Each photograph presents the same subject or, rather, the same mode of representation of the same subject: little children supported by hidden yet visible figures (Figure 18). The photographs were exhibited in a long case with two faces (Figures 19-20), pointing to the collection as a reliquary of some sort.

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Fig. 21: The Hidden Mother, 2006-2013, original tintypes and albumen prints. 997 collected daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, snapshots, dimensions variable.

Much could be said about the way archives and repertoires work as fetishistic collections, little sacraria devoted to the past. However, this gesture, which is very frequent in contemporary art, is not merely an attempt at philological recovery nor an act of compulsive accumulation; rather, it is aimed at searching and reinterpreting existing materials. Here the action of archiving is very close to the Foucauldian idea of an ‘archaeology of the present’; it is more like the order of a promise than that of a return.27 Fregni Nagler is interested in the presence of a ghost, in investigating our relationship with a ‘way of seeing’ that is at the root of our gaze, though it does not belong to us anymore. In this case, this involves a very peculiar iconographical convention that has endured for at least one hundred years in different forms but which seems reversed in relation to its original function. Surely, we cannot look, or rather, we cannot see what the photograph was supposed to reveal to its contemporaries, namely the child. First of all, we see the exhibited cover-up, this very rough and indeed naive trick, which consisted of concealing the mother behind a bundle, a sort of cumbersome mummy that was then made to look like a ‘background’ with the help of a carpet and of a blanket with torn borders (Figure 21). As the times of exposure used to be very long and required the absolute immobility of the subject portrayed, this reduction of the mothers (or of their surrogates) into tapestry, into lifeless yet present bodies, was dictated by the need to hold the child still, who was the only one meant to be immortalised. 27 On the collection as an art form, see Grazioli, La collezione come forma d’arte.

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Thus, the mothers functioned as a replacement for the invisible device used to maintain the subject in an erect position during the long posing sessions. In other terms, they functioned as the ‘headrest’ that, according to Barthes, supporting ‘the body in its passage to immobility […] was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence’.28 In The Hidden Mother, the immobility device is made evident, it is literally on stage, revealing the act upon which the image is built: the body that ‘becomes stone’ involves here not only the child portrayed—fixed in the hieratic pose typical of this period, himself subject to a ‘mummification process’—but the very ‘device’ that grants the image its fixity. Even the ambiguous quality of the photograph, the paradoxical presenceabsence of the bodies captured in the image, f inds here some sort of explanation, as if that rough cover-up were declaring the very condition of the photographic image: revealing an absence while making it present. ‘In the background we can make out the veiled shape of the mother, concealed and motionless, herself transformed into a mummy, as if practicing death, preparing to become a corpse.’29 At the origin of this particular sub-genre of photographic portraits there is a ‘funerary’ function: The Hidden Mother can be considered an instance of pre-post-mortem portraits. They were very frequent at a time when the infant mortality rate was high, and the possibility of preserving a living image of a son was intended to satisfy the desire of presence. In this sense, great faith was accorded to the power of images to fill a void. As a matter of fact, the memorial photography, which developed in the United States during the nineteenth century, considered death as the only motivation for preserving a living person within an image. However, the photographic image does not have a magic value of substitution and of a new incarnation of a body. Rather, as a way of fixing a memory with the trace of photography, it elicits memories, thus promoting a form of ‘internal embodiment’ which, as Belting suggests, moves the collective-figurative practice of the cult of the dead onto an individual, private, affective and mental plane.30 In The Hidden Mother photographs, the ‘making present’ effect is so strong that it ‘conceals’ that obvious error, making it irrelevant. Indeed, as Geoffrey Batchen observes, ‘the presence of a cloth-covered parent behind the child therefore signaled at least one important thing to any viewer: this child is 28 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 13. 29 Gioni, ‘Mothers of Invention’, p. 2. 30 Belting, An Anthropology of Images, p. 89.

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still alive’.31 We are confronted with an exhibited conceal, a sort of comedy of disappearing appearance; or, according to a feminist interpretation, a not so phantasmatical comedy of the maternal superego. The singularity of this form of representation is even more evident since it reveals a canon in the iconography of the mother-with-child: Theotokos, the holy mother who holds up the Baby Jesus on her knees. On the one hand, this formula translates in a visual fashion one of the founding myths of photography and of its ‘unconscious’—the ghost of the mother about whom Barthes wrote his well-known pages without ever showing her photograph. On the other hand, this formula declares the fact that a possibility of redemption was assigned to the image, a possibility rendered even more powerful by that ‘sensible’ trace of life represented by photography. Finally, or perhaps first of all, these photographs, as Fregni Nagler herself points out in the volume that gathers the entire collection,32 reveal the photographic act as a relationship between visibility and concealment, a relationship that is always the result of a vision, that is, of a way of looking, a gaze that is culturally defined. As a form of the social unconscious, the photographic image thus becomes not only the trace of a form of life but the code of a common way of looking. The Hidden Mother pinpoints a serial iconography that is more than a simple visual formula; aligning the images, the collection reveals a ‘common look’, unmasking its appearance: the cultural order that shapes our needs and bends to our desires even the realistic evidence of the image. After all, this is what the post-mortem photography of the Victorian age usually does with its exhibited concealment of the death, presenting the dead body as if it were alive. In these images, life and death are intertwined in an explicit way, especially where the dead body of the child is shown still alive among his relatives: the family, his brothers and sisters (sometimes twins) more often, in an evident symmetry of life and death in the same body (Figures 22-23). About these images, which have been the subject of many studies,33 I want to underline the force of attesting life as well as the will of concealing the cadaver in its own body, an animated body of stone. Death is bypassed by a ‘vital’ mise-en-scène, through a gesture apparently opposed to the obligation to stillness to which the living bodies of The Hidden Mother are subject, even in the common and paradoxical invisibility of what is before our eyes. After all, in both cases it is the same act of concealing—the dead rather than the living—that again invokes the ‘petrification’ of the body. 31 Batchen, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’, p. 4. 32 See Fregni Nagler, ‘“Houdini’s Burqa”’. 33 Burns, 1990; Ruby, 1995; Orlando, 2013.

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Fig. 22: Post-mortem photograph, # 0561, from The Hidden Mother, 2006–2013.

Fig. 23: Post-mortem photograph, #0731, from The Hidden Mother, 2006-2013.

As Rosalind Krauss has remarked, post-mortem photography is an example of the quest for visibility by means of the invisible that is typical of early photography and of its ‘sense of mystery’ or its quality of redemption.34 This possibility of ‘animating the shadows’ is what a long sequence in Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) is based, which reconstructs the photographic session through which the dead body of the bandit Jesse James was immortalised. We are within a legend, the myth of which has grown upon images. The assassination took place in 1881, and the dead body became the object of many representations. In all of these, the presence of a ‘living body’ was central: on the one hand, there was the body of the bandit, immortalised in a photograph that attributed to him a body and a face; on the other hand, there was the body of the assassin, which performed a theatrical show reconstructing the dynamics of the assassination. The sequence of snapshots begins with an extended stop—reminiscent of cadaveric fixity—imposed by the photographic technique of the time. Tied to a table, raised in an upright position, arranged as if he was just resting, the dead body of the bandit imposes its own immobility on the witnesses attending the burial chamber and waiting to verify the reality of the death of Jesse James. The movement of the witnesses, after the shot, 34 Krauss, ‘Tracing Nadar’, p. 38.

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produces a vital yet insulting animation, like an indifferent buzz, thus underlining the statue-like stillness of the dead body. The photographer, dressed in a long black tunic, looks like a priest; the witnesses attend his lay ritual, which guarantees a new life to the dead body, in respectful silence, motionless. As attested by the narrating voice-over, the photograph of Jesse James starts to circulate: it is sold for two dollars, exhibited in the shop windows, published on magazines and animated in the stereoscope together with exotic attractions such as the Catacombs and the Taj Mahal, thus constructing a new vital trajectory that fosters the mythical fermentation of the bandit’s legend. The sequence is not a homage nor a quotation but a careful reconstruction of a form of the gaze and of the desire to which it responds. The old need to perpetuate heroic deaths already gives way to the modern forms of circus-like spectacles, a sort of prelude for the cult of the images that will grow in the following decades. The body of Jesse James, lying on big blocks of ice, preserved from decomposition, finds a fascinating double in the domesticated image of death, recognisable in its appearance. The image supports the mythical construction of the character and activates it, feeding the legend while also maintaining its force, as if it were a relic; at the same time, it prevents the dissolution of identity induced by death, preserving a ‘real’ trace of a body now immortal, as if made of stone. Besides the legendary status of mythical f igures, the dissolution of the identity of the dead seems to be transmitted to their relatives, and in particular to widows. Among the f igurative forms that grief and its mise-en-scène can take on, a peculiar tradition, widespread between 1870 and 1890 especially in the United States, has been lost. This is the tradition of the so-called Grieving Widows, widows in grief portrayed in a gesture f ixing their state, the condition of loss. At that time, it was very common to produce cartes de visite (that is, images intended to be circulated and to make the grief public) where the subject represented was not necessarily the widow in question but often a model bearing all the symbols of grief (the dark dresses, the pearls…). Starting from this iconographic tradition, Linda Fregni Nagler realised Unidentified Mourners (2008), a work of reconstruction that reproduces accurately the poses of the mortuary pictures but reconfigures their meaning with an aesthetic detour from their original form. For instance, the gesture of covering the face to indicate grief but also the loss of identity (Figure 24)—which is clearly borrowed from the iconography of the pious women at the feet of the Cross or, more generally, from certain forms of pantomime—does not have for us the same immediate symbolic value nor the same communicative function.

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Fig. 24: Linda Fregni Nagler, Unidentified Mourners, gelatin silver print, 24 × 30 cm. (Courtesy of the artist)

That culture of pain and grief is no longer accessible to us today. By means of the refined symmetrical composition of the figures, and through a specular doubling of the bodies reminiscent of Rorschach inkblots, Fregni Nagler assigns to the spectator the task of imposing a meaning on the images. As she has said: ‘The onlooker is thus invited to decipher what he sees.’35 Once again, the evidence of photographic images discloses an enigma: their illegibility out of the cultural context that sustains them. We must acknowledge our incapacity to understand phenomena that nonetheless belong to that discipline of the gaze upon which our way of looking has been modelled. Therefore, the act of re-animating their sense is in itself an act of restitution.

Hitting the road We are thus confronted with re-presenting, re-animating the bodies as well as the gaze and the forms of vision, the way we look and we recognise. The image is always the repository of many memories that are sometimes made unreadable by time and cultural transformations, by another form of extinction and death. 35 Fregni Nagler, ‘“Houdini’s Burqa”’, p. 21.

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Fig. 25: Untitled, Ando Gilardi Archive.

Among the recurring images of photography of the second half of the nineteenth century both from Europe and United States, there are the socalled Photos des rêves: that is, photographs of dreams and desires, usually represented by modern means of transportation: cars, airplanes, but also horses, suggesting a desire for movement that only photographic images could, at that time, evoke. Movement and animation will then become one of the typical forms of the filmic representation of death—the last voyage—itself drawing on an old iconography associated with religious rituals. ‘Giving life’ to the dead body can involve putting it on the road, producing a symbolic movement of the living (that is, the survivors) on behalf of the dead. This is what Ando Gilardi says, interpreting an iconographic theme—orphans or widows lifted on small boats—that was very frequent in studio photographs as a funerary motif, as is shown in this anonymous photograph from the second half of the nineteenth century (Figure 25): The boy on the left is a natural orphan: the father, dead after an illness, has just been buried. The image, as was usual for that time, is meant to celebrate the event. It communicates to the parents many things: the boy has now become the man of the house. He will wander for his mother

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Fig. 26: Original tintype and albumen prints (Linda Fregni Nagler Archive, Courtesy of the artist).

through the sea of life. […] If we look closer, he is not holding the oar: indeed, it is the oar that keeps him stable for the photographic pose. (The boat is a symbol for the coffin). His mother, like Death, goes relentless with him towards the shores of melancholy.36

Of course, we may not agree with the interpretation of this photograph, especially with the idea that the boat stands for a coffin, considering that this is only a set and that the genre was very popular and not specifically tied to grief (Figure 26). Yet, in the specific case of this photograph we may think of a sort of symbolic adaptation, a transfer of another meaning, not totally elusive or alien. After all, it is the photographic image that adapts itself to the previous figurative model of illusionistic painting and its symbolic evidence. What remains of photography and of its mimetic power are only the ‘real’ bodies of the boy and the mother, absorbed in a mise-en-scène (that is, in an exhibited construction both of the figure and of sense), whose aim is to make their condition comprehensible to themselves. Reanimation here does not concern the dead body but the idea of the journey, an old metaphor used to give shape to the experience of death, somewhat overcome through the animation of movement. It is to a journey that the dying body of William Blake, the protagonist of Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995), is assigned, a sort of ghost wandering around in a spectral landscape—we are along the border between the United States and Canada, 36 Gilardi, Storia sociale della fotografia, p. 329 (my trans.).

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quite a wild territory in 1870—following a Native American who leads him to discover an endangered world. He is the one who will lay Blake in a dugout covered with flowers for the last voyage that will take him to the house of the fathers. And it is from the river, in a sort of clouded vision, that Blake will see his friend die, after a shooting with a bandit who had been following them. The scene Blake sees is very similar to a western movie, with a longshot of the duel between the Indian and the cowboy at a distance that allows him to see all the elements in action. It is his own death that the protagonist sees ‘on the screen’, in front of him, the figure and the form of something belonging to him. This death scene where everything is vital and animated, except for the body in the dugout, declares the capacity of images to blend memory and waiting: the images not only give us back the ghosts of the past, the stone bodies of an eternal present, they also disclose the open horizon of time, which pushes us forward, like the relentless stream of a river.

Works cited Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (1980), trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’, in Linda Fregni Nagler – The Hidden Mother, ed. by Francesco Zanot, pp. 4-8. (London/Monaco: MACK and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2013) André Bazin, What is cinema? (1958), selected and transl. by Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1967-1971; repr. 2004). Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body (2001), trans. by Thomas Lundap (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011). Walter Benjamin, ‘A short history of photography’ (1931), trans. by Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13, 1 (1972): 5-26. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (1955), trans. and introduced by Ann Smock (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Stanley Burns and Elisabeth A. Burns, Sleeping Beauty. Memorial Photography in America (New York: Burns Archive Press, 1990). Francesco Casetti, L’occhio del Novecento. Cinema, esperienza, modernità (Milan: Bompiani, 2005).

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Robert Castel, ‘Images et fantômes’, in Pierre Bourdeau and others, Un art moyen. Essais sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1970). Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992). Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l’image. Une histoire du regard en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Georges Didi-Huberman, La somiglianza per contatto. Archeologia, anacronismo e modernità dell’impronta (2008), trans. into Italian by Chiara Tartarini (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009). Philippe Dubois, L’acte photographique et autres essais (Paris: Nathan, 1993). Claudio Franzoni, Tirannia dello sguardo. Corpo, gesto, espressione dell’arte greca (Turin: Einaudi, 2006). Linda Fregni Nagler, ‘“Houdini’s Burqa”. Francesco Zanot in Conversation with Linda Fregni Nagler’, in Linda Fregni Nagler – The Hidden Mother, ed. by Francesco Zanot, pp. 9-16 (London/Monaco: MACK and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2013). Ando Gilardi, Storia sociale della fotografia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981). Massimiliano Gioni, ‘Mothers of Invention’, in Linda Fregni Nagler – The Hidden Mother, ed. by Francesco Zanot, pp. 2-3 (London/Monaco: MACK and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2013). Elio Grazioli, La collezione come forma d’arte (Monza: Johan & Levi, 2012). David Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2011). Rosalind Krauss, ‘Tracing Nadar’, October 5 (1978): 29-47. Thomas Macho, Todesmetaphern. Zur Logik der Grenzerfahrung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987). Mirko Orlando, Fotografia Post Mortem (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2013). Andrea Pinotti, ‘Antitotalitarismo e antimonumentalità. Un’elettiva affinità’, in Memorie di pietra. I monumenti delle dittature, ed. by Gian Piero Piretto, pp.17-33 (Milan: Raffaello Cortina. 2009). Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow. Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973). Pierre Sorlin, Les Fils de Nadar. Le ‘siécle’ de l’image analogique (Paris: Nathan, 1997). Julius von Schlosser, History of Portraiture in Wax (1911), trans. by James M. Loughridge, in Ephemeral Bodies. Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. by Roberta Panzanelli, pp. 170-314 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008).

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About the author Luisella Farinotti is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Aesthetics of Cinema at IULM University, in Milan. Her research is focused on theory and history of the image, in particular on the relationship between cinema and memory, on home movies, on the relationship between cinema and photography, and on photographic archives as visual atlas. Her recent publications include Overlapping Images: Between Cinema and Photography (2016, edited with B. Grespi and B. Le Maître) and Harun Farocki. Pensare con gli occhi (2017, edited with B. Grespi and F. Villa). She is co-author, along with E. Gipponi and C. Grizzaffi, of the forthcoming L’uomo con la macchina da presa. Tecnologie dello sguardo e attori della visione (2020).

2.

On Jack Torrance As a Fossil Form Barbara Le Maître Abstract The essay starts with the photograph that reveals the mystery of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) to introduce the notion of a fossil as a mineral compound that continues to evolve into something biologically distinct from the cadaver that provided its origin. The fossil represents a form of survival in stone, a material within which the dead body can continue to decay and so, in a certain sense, to live on. Considered to be a state of suspended animation, the fossil holds a particular attraction for the cinema, as we see in the character of Jack Torrance, a paradoxical figure who takes on a clear identity if we recognise him as a fossil—and more precisely a ‘living fossil’. Keywords: Fossil; fossil form ; anachronism; living fossil

We may begin by specifying the topic of the upcoming pages, namely a peculiar relation between the human body—as has been fashioned and hence conceived by cinema—and the fossil, where this latter is taken as a natural form that lends itself, by way of a conceptual reinterpretation, to throwing light on the creation of certain filmic forms and, in the case in hand, of the elaboration of the character of Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining.

From the fossil to the fossil form A first move towards constructing this hypothesis about fossil forms is a distinction between two types of natural fossils: fossil traces and fossilised organisms. The former present themselves, so to say, as mere imprints that have become permanent through the process of fossilisation, as in the case of the footprints preserved in volcanic ash for just under four million years at Laetoli in Tanzania. By contrast, the fossilised organism is made up of

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the remains, either complete or more often fragmentary, of an ancient organism that was conserved after its death by complex processes that involved a greater or lesser change in its very substance through exchanges with its geological or ecological surroundings.1 Thus, for instance, we have the ammonite in a sedimentary bed, the insect trapped in amber, but also the mammoth frozen in Siberian ice (this last case representing less change of substance than the others). The point to be made is that if the fossil organism can hardly be considered an imprint or a ‘mere imprinted form’, this is because it is not an imprint of a referent but is itself the referent. More precisely, it is it and it is not longer it: it is the dead referent and, hence, has become biologically, materially and formally other. In short, the distinction that counts for our purpose is that, unlike the fossilised imprint, the fossil organism does not constitute a form that is separated or liberated from its referent but is rather a form that adheres to its referent: it is a form that is quite literally constructed on the back of its referent. Albeit rarely, it does happen that a fossilised organism is conserved almost whole, such as the ‘rhinoceros mummified in Carpathian bitumen, the mammoths frozen in Siberian ice’.2 Nevertheless, the process of fossilisation generally begins with the more or less extensive degradation of the organism, and for this reason, the fossil is not just a form that adheres to its referent but is rather a form that is built on the ruin of its referent. After all, at the beginning of his Essay on the Theory of the Earth, Georges Cuvier rightly stressed the partial nature of a fossil that comes into being starting from such a process of ruination or degradation, pointing out that: As an antiquary of a new order, I was obliged at once to learn the art of restoring these monuments of past revolutions to their original forms, and to discover their nature and relations; I had to collect and bring together in their original order, the fragments of which they consisted; to reconstruct, as it were, the ancient beings to which these fragments belonged.3 1 I borrow these introductory notions regarding the process(es) of fossilisation selectively (given that the concept of fossil form is rather distant from the requested definition) from Furon, ‘Fossilisation’, pp. 190-192. 2 Furon, ‘Fossilisation’, p. 190. Further reflections on the different sorts of fossilisation can be found in Gayrard-Valy and Thomas (eds.), Les Fossiles (I observe that, beginning with the title, imprint and fossil are assimilated). The construction of the concept does not call for extensive competence in paleontology; but I have consulted the following books and articles: Tassy, Le Message des fossiles; Jaeger, Les Mondes fossiles (particularly Chapter II: ‘La forme des fossiles’, pp. 75-90); Duday and Garcia, ‘L’ichnologie’; not to mention the text by Cuvier that we discuss below. 3 Cuvier, Essay, p. 1. The ‘restoring’ referred to is without doubt an operation in comparative anatomy.

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It will already be apparent that, in constructing my notion of a fossil form, I took as a starting point ‘genuine’ fossils as well as ‘genuine’ processes of fossilisation and, from the outset, the principle of the ruin that immediately presented itself. Rather than try here to account for the variety of ways in which the fossil form might have been elaborated, let us say in brief that, among the different features of the process of fossilisation, three things deserve to be borne in mind. First, fossilisation generates extremely varied forms—ranging from the coating of insects caught in (and by) amber to the casts made of seashells by way of the incrustation of birds’ skeletons in gypsum or schist—to such an extent that they appear as much a fascinating source of procedures as of formal results. In short, the repertoire of living things is a natural school of plastic forms that raises issues as much for aesthetics as for palaeontology and geology. Second, as has been pointed out, the creation of a fossilised organism derives from the ruin of its referent, whose remains the fossilisation adapts, devours and assimilates to itself; for this reason, it makes sense to say that the fossil form is a cannibal form. Third, no fossil is made up of only the ruin of a referent—none can be reduced to a reference minus something—since this ruin is remodelled by time and by place as a result of the exchange of substances mentioned above; in sum, the referent is also to a great extent enlarged. This ‘supplement’ makes the fossil nothing less than a new form, a genuinely new form and not a mere vestige. By taking the fossil form to be in the f irst instance a cannibal form that adheres to its referent, my definition of the concept allows us to see closer up that the form in question implies a double movement or a double process. First, there is the movement from the referent to the ruin of the referent; then, as it is drawn out, there is the movement from the ruined referent to the re-elaborated ruin. This is the general law or theoretical principle of every fossil form: the slide from the referent towards its ruin, followed by that from the ruined referent towards the re-elaborated ruin. Among other methodological consequences, this general law means that the analysis of any fossil form implies, in the first instance, a question about what is to count as the referent and secondly, a question about what allows us to say that it is ruined. Nevertheless, placing the stress on the principle of a ruined referent is still insuff icient: the question must at the same time be raised about its ultimate destiny, which is to say the re-elaboration of the ruin (of the ruined referent). One or two specif ications are called for at this point to avoid misunderstanding. Over and above the variability of what counts as the referent of the fossil form (and, at a theoretical level, what allows us to distinguish the global

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referent from the image), such a form lends itself to operating either at the level of the whole f ilm or with a narrower focus, such as that of a motif or a character, as we shall see with the protagonist of Stanley Kubrick’s f ilm.

An anachronistic form If, in the first instance, a fossil form can be defined as a form that adheres to its referent, I would like now to add a second specification or definitional element. This is that every fossil form is in the throes of the problem of anachronism. To formulate it in greater detail, the idea is that a fossil is fundamentally constituted as an object out of its own time, in the respect that the living organism from which it derives lived long ago, while its ‘remains’ have been brought to persist into a time that it does not really belong to, a time in which it appears as displaced. Why displaced, exactly? Above all because a majority of fossil organisms are left over from species that have disappeared; they are remains of species that have no living exemplars, at least with the exact same morphology, as the evolution of species requires. One might suppose that there are many things that thus fit ‘a primitive remainder in the contemporary world’ in such a way that this kind of anachronism could be applied to everything that has been handed down to us from the past. Nevertheless, these things from the past have long since held a privileged place in museums and been the objects of a theoretical mode for their recapture, namely historical reason, whose principle it is rightly to avoid anachronism (even in the worst case, there is such a thing as ‘good anachronism’ to which a historian may on occasion make appeal). 4 It nevertheless seems to me that there is a fact that allows us to establish the temporal singularity—if not the properly anachronistic feature—of the fossil in relation to ordinary remains: the question of its relation to living beings. The fossil organism undoubtedly belongs to the order of living beings, but it goes on to pass into the realm of inanimate things, to the point where it belongs among such objects. For the temporality of living beings differs radically from that of inanimate things: it is only for what is alive that time passes. In other words, it is only for living beings 4 On this matter, the key references are to Arasse, ‘Heurs et malheurs de l’anachronisme’, and Loraux, ‘Eloge de l’anachronisme en histoire’. Without being a historian myself, I too have made some suggestions on the question in Le Maître, ‘Contemporanéité, anachronisme’.

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that we can say that they are born, they grow, they age and they perish. As for objects, they are not born but made, and they do not die but merely wear out. Inanimate objects, in short, are not attuned to time as living beings are. To put it in more philosophical terms, from being the mere collocation of objects, time is the necessary condition of being alive. And, because vulnerability and extinction structure the logic of living beings, the persistence of its forms, even in ruins, will always present itself as more scandalous or, what comes to the same, miraculous, and almost against nature. In any case, I would put the anachronistic dimension of the fossil form in the following way: its referent combines the primitive time of its existence with the contemporary time of its persistence, because it is extended in such a way as to produce a rupture between these two times: the time allotted to its persistence exceeds the temporality or the temporal logic of a living being. Someone may well ask to what extent, on this last point, I come into contact with or rediscover the question of survival in the terms that Georges Didi-Huberman has raised it in his writings dedicated to the work of Aby Warburg. The question is indeed legitimate: what relations hold between more-or-less Warburgian survivals and the fossil’s persistence? Is the anachronism the same in the two cases? If pushed, should I not just talk about the fossil in terms of a survival of the past into the present? What holds me back from this assimilation derives from the weight of the referent that we have already alluded to, namely the primacy of the referent in the elaboration of a form that ‘comes into being on its shoulders’. In cases of survival, an old form reappears in a visual object that is more or less contemporary: the old has travelled and changed its support, so to say.5 But the fossil is not a ghost of the past coming (back) to haunt the present: it is in a certain way an element of that very past. Not to mention the emotion I have every time I hold an ammonite in the palm of my hand: about 400 million years separate me from the remains I possess, 400 million years gathered in the palm of my hand. We might say that the point is ghost versus fossil. But, given that we have at least an outline of the concept, it is time to turn to Kubrick’s film and to the fossil form that we can make out in the leading character. 5 It is noteworthy that Georges Didi-Huberman has frequently expressed Warburgian survivals in terms of living fossils (which we will define below but whose conceptual outlines it is worth stressing straightaway) rather than in terms of an ordinary or ‘genuine’ fossil. See, for instance, Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image, p. 68: ‘Indeed, in its own way, Warburgian Nachleben only tells us about “living fossils” and “retrogressive forms”’.

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Jack Torrance, a living fossil It will be recalled that the action of the film takes place, to put it very roughly, during the winter of 1980. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as the caretaker of a hotel during the closed season; one thing that is often stressed, but on which I shall not insist, is that the Overlook Hotel is built on the site of an ancient Indian cemetery. Before he moves into this isolated spot in the midst of the mountains with his wife Wendy and his son Danny, Jack is told by the director that a previous caretaker, who is variously called Charles, Jeeves6 or Delbert Grady had murdered his wife and twin daughters during the winter of 1970 before committing suicide. With the passing of time, the film (and the spectator) is invaded by horror: Jack becomes ever more violent as Danny, who has the gift (the ‘shining’ referred to in the title) of seeing past and future scenes, is subject to bloody visions. My analysis, focused on Jack Torrance, is articulated in two moments. First, I shall show how the very closing moments of the film make the character of Jack Torrance into a form that adheres to a ruined referent. And then, on the basis of another moment in the film, I shall bring out the principle of the anachronistic body. The last sequence of the film suggests the fossil character of Jack Torrance in the first instance in the same way that we find at the very end of Richard Brooks’ 1956 film The Last Hunt,7 which is to say by the slant of the frozen head of the figure seized by the cold at the entrance to the maze, with the rest of his body enveloped in snow (in a sort of re-enactment of the mammoth frozen in the Siberian ice). Later and most significantly, the fossil character is re-affirmed or suggested in other terms by the last host of the film. The spectator is confronted with a photograph taken at the Fourth of July Ball of 1921—we recall that the action is set in 1980—in which there appears a man who is identical in every respect to Jack Torrance. Thus we have a body in 1921 and a body in 1980 that are absolutely similar over a sixty-year lapse of time. There are only two options. On the one hand, we might suppose that Jack Torrance has (or has had) a ‘twin father’, which is to say that he is an exact replica or perfect reproduction of his own parent, both in appearance and in function (the man in the photograph is the hotel’s caretaker at the time). On the other, we might equally well think that there is only one referent for 6 The reference to a butler figure is brought out in the French subtitles, which use the name Nestor in allusion to a character in Tintin. 7 Over and above the motif of the ‘frozen head’ with which both films close, the problem— discreetly touched on by Kubrick—of the massacre and disappearance of the American Indians is an undeniable link between the two.

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the ‘frozen head’ and the ‘photographed head’; in that case, we regard the ‘frozen head’ as the elaborated ruin of the ‘photographed head’, and thus we discover the fossil form of Jack Torrance, who confronts us in the film as an anachronistic body and who is himself articulated into the primitive time of his existence (1921) and the contemporary time of his persistence (1980). Yet the idea of an anachronistic body is even more explicit and even more intense in an earlier sequence, which is undoubtedly one of the most upsetting in the film, namely the second sequence of the ‘Gold Room’. From the moment that Jack enters the ballroom, there is no getting away from a strong sense of anachronism: Jack had just been walking in the hotel corridor, apparently in 1980, when the song we hear just as he goes into the room (Midnight with the Stars and You),8 as well as the clothes of the people shown celebrating, tell us that the action is set in the 1920s. Thus, the 1980 Jack walks into 1921—at least this is the first hypothesis that comes to mind. He heads for the bar. And, to begin with, the words he exchanges with Lloyd the bartender upset this hypothesis. Lloyd recognises Jack and vice versa; but we must recall that they had run into each other in an earlier sequence; nevertheless, the waiter too recognises him, and this time, unless we are mistaken, without our having been shown an earlier encounter. Thus, Jack surely existed in the 1920s and will he be after all the same as a 1980 Jack whom we have already met? Jack orders a drink and is about to pay when Lloyd refuses his money explaining ‘your money’s no good here’—or, as we would say, now. In the end, it seems that the first guess was right: the Jack in question is that of 1980. Jack moves away from the bar and performs a few dance steps; then he collides with one of the waiters, who is variably known as Jeeves or Grady and whose tray is upset tipping the contents of a glass onto Jack.9 Again, the dialogue between the two men puts our grasp of the time situation in doubt. Just before going into the gentlemen’s room to clean the stain off his jacket, Jack tells the waiter ‘Course I intend to change my jacket before the fish and goose soiree’. This is without doubt said by 1921 Jack, the one we find in the ball photo: Jack on the Fourth of July, 1921. It would be hard to find a better marker of the anachronistic dimension of the character’s body than this sequence: sitting at the bar, Jack 1980 banters with Lloyd, while two or three yards away, it is now Jack 1921 who is talking 8 I owe this information to the doctoral thesis in film studies of Anne Lété, Le Récit architecte. Problématique des lieux clos au cinéma, supervised by Francis Vanoye and defended at the university of Paris X Nanterre in 2000. 9 The idea seems to have been taken from an episode in the series Twilight Zone (season 2, episode 13: ‘Back There’) in which, after running into a waiter, a character sets off on a journey through time.

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to Jeeves. The shift in temporality does not depend only on a change of place or room (see the passage from the corridor to the Gold Room) but rather Jack’s body makes us think of a kind of ‘temporal spinning top’. And there is more: what follows is even more uncanny. Jack and Grady (earlier given the forename Jeeves) are now in the gentlemen’s room and the latter is putting Jack right. We recall that Delbert Grady is the name of the previous hotel caretaker who is supposed to have committed suicide around 1970, after killing his wife and daughters. Jack quizzes Grady (whom the viewer is entitled to regard as a sort of living-dead): ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before […]? Weren’t you once the caretaker here?’ We understand that if the Gold Room corresponds to the 1920s, the toilets could correspond to the present of 1980. The timeframe of the place will thus coincide with that of the other character, for all that, it is surely Jack 1980 who is doing the interrogating. There then follows Grady’s reply: ‘You are the caretaker [I note: in 1980, after all] […]. You have always been the caretaker [thus Jack would be the perpetual guardian: 1980, 1970, 1921] […]. I should know, sir, I’ve always been here.’ In short, do we not have here a Grady who is without age or outside age, responding to a multi-timeframed Jack, namely 1921 Jack as well as 1980 Jack (the father of Danny, about whom Grady admonishes: ‘Your son is attempting to bring an outside party into this situation’), to which we may add an intermediate Jack, the contemporary of 1970 Grady—which is to say, one who is in every respect a substitute for Grady? For all that he seems disquieting, Jack Torrance presents himself as the result of an elaboration whose logic can be described in terms of the very peculiar notion of a ‘living fossil’. This apparent contradiction in terms can be used in a general way to describe ‘a being that is still alive in nature today and that represents an earlier state of the evolutionary cycle’.10 More precisely, the concept designates a being whose internal structure and behaviour relative to its niche is associated not with the contemporary species that it may most resemble but rather with species that no longer exist and of which it is more or less the sole survivor.11 What I gather from this is that there are species that no longer exist except as ‘genuine’ fossils. The most commonly cited case of this is the sphenodon or tuatara, which was initially mistaken for a lizard associated with the order of the squamate insectivores which it in any case 10 Delamare-Deboutteville and Botosanéanu, Formes primitives vivantes, p. 24 (italics in original). I note that the whole of the book’s first chapter is given over to the ‘Notion of the living fossil’, which authors approach from the twin points of view of paleontology and biology. 11 This definition and the further information that follows are found in de Ricqlès, ‘Fossiles vivants’.

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resembles but, on anatomical examination, was found to belong to the order of the rhynocephalia, which are vegetarian. Considered as a living point of contact between the primitive and the contemporary, the living fossil offers the perfect model of an anachronistic body. A variety of criteria, including the morphological and the anatomical, have been established to mark out this notion, which might otherwise have got out of control. Thus, the living fossil should exhibit clearly marked primitive forms, and the more evolved features should not mask these ancestral traits, which remain dominant. Likewise with paleontological and stratigraphic criteria (there should be genuine fossils of the living fossil) and ecological, ethological/behavioural and physiological criteria (the living fossil should perpetuate the ecological and physiological features of the primitive organism and be ensconced in a habitat that has not undergone variation), or again evolutionary criteria (the living fossil should represent at least remarkably slow evolutionary change). Overall, then, the living fossil presents itself as an isolated individual that is out of kilter with its surroundings. Who or rather what, then, is Jack Torrance? In my view, this character is an anachronistic form, the construction of which brings into play an interaction of several different bodies in an organisation that we can do justice to with the concept of a living fossil. More specifically, Jack Torrance in the 1980s is an evolving body that attests both the first physiognomy (particularly in the facial features) of 1921 Jack as well as the primitive behaviour (the murderous madness) of 1970 Grady. In addition, Jack Torrance is a creature ecologically ensconced in the single habitat of the Overlook Hotel, which is exclusive to 1980 Jack and to 1921 Jack as well as to Grady; he is a creature whose evolutionary processes seem curiously slow, if we recall that the character seems to have exactly the same looks over a sixty-year interval. This much could be the challenge for another intervention. So, by way of conclusion, not to say ‘working hypothesis’, I limit myself to sketching the following idea: in the light of the foregoing, it would not be unreasonable to propose that Jack Torrance is, in the end, the tool of a sort of epistemological fable. As a living fossil, the character is also and above all the site at which we can reformulate in three dimensions the clash between the radical, even arrogant, doctrine of the fixity of species put forward by Cuvier and the theory of transformation proposed by Lamarck.12 (Translated from the Italian by Richard Davies) 12 On the dispute between Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, see, for instance, Canguilhem, ‘The Living and Its Milieu’.

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Works cited Daniel Arasse, ‘Heurs et malheurs de l’anachronisme’, in Histoires de peintures, pp. 219-231 (Paris: Denoël, 2004; repr. Gallimard: 2006). Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Living and Its Milieu’ (1965), in Knowledge of Life, trans. by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, pp. 98-120 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth, with Geological Illustrations. Preliminary Observations, trans. by Robert Jameson (Edinburgh/London: Blackwood-Cadell, 1827). Armand de Ricqlès, ‘Fossiles vivants’, in Encyclopaedia Universalis. Symposium vol. 17 (1980): 749-753. Claude Delamare-Deboutteville and Lazare Botosanéanu, Formes primitives vivantes. Musée de l’évolution (Paris: Herman, 1970). Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Surviving Image. Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology’, Oxford Art Journal 25, 1 (2002): 59-69. Raymond Furon, ‘Fossilisation’, in Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. 7, 1980, pp. 190-192. Henri Duday and Michel Garcia, ‘L’ichnologie ou la mémoire des roches’, in La Mémoire. Tome II. Le concept de mémoire, ed. by Nicolas Zavialoff, Robert Jaffard, Philippe Brenot, pp. 55-66 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989). Yvette Gayrard-Valy and Herbert Thomas (eds.), Les Fossiles. Empreinte des mondes disparus (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). Jean-Jacques Jaeger, Les Mondes fossiles (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996). Barbara Le Maître, ‘Contemporanéité, anachronisme. Autour de quelques propositions théoriques sur la temporalité des images’, in Extended Cinema. Le cinéma gagne du terrain, ed. by Philippe Dubois, Frédéric Monvoisin, Elena Biserna, pp. 143-149 (Pasian di Prato: Campanotto, 2010). Nicole Loraux, ‘Eloge de l’anachronisme en histoire’, Le Genre humain 27 (1993): 23-39. Pascal Tassy, Le Message des fossiles (Paris: Hachette, 1991).

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About the author Barbara Le Maître is Professor at University Paris Nanterre (HAR). She has published Entre film et photographie. Essai sur l’empreinte (2004), Zombie, une fable anthropologique (2015) and co-edited Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art (2013), Cinéma muséum. Le musée d’après le cinéma (2013), Théorème, n° 24: «Tout ce que le ciel permet en cinéma, photographie, peinture et vidéo» (2015), Cinema & Cie. International Film Studies Journal, Vol. XV, n° 25: «Overlapping Images. Between Cinema and Photography» (2016), La Nuit des morts-vivants. Précis de recomposition (2016) and Muséoscopies. Fictions du musée au cinéma (2018). Her current research deals with cinema and museology; the figure of the living dead; the relations between films and fossils; Mark Lewis’ films; and the film as art historian.

3.

Technical Imagesand the Transformation of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany Anna Luppi

Abstract The essay investigates the production of scientif ic images and threedimensional models in the effervescent dialogue between art and science of eighteenth-century Tuscany. Created to meet new didactic needs, these technical images, such as the anatomical tables conceived by anatomist Paolo Mascagni for the students of the Academy of Fine Arts, abandoned the Vesalian topos of the cadaver as a life-like statue and gave rise to a novel lithic iconography, which emphasised the textured materiality of human remains and their potential transformations across the natural and artificial realms. The miscegenation of manufactures and natural productions was given pride of place in anatomical and botanical atlases, as well as in the scientific collections that sprung up in Tuscany at the time. Keywords: Technical images; anatomy; Paolo Mascagni; lithic iconography; Florentine Academy of Fine Arts Scientific Collections

We must always bear in mind how much the scientist has helped the artist. ‒ A. Targioni Tozzetti, Rapporto delle Adunanze, 1818

The question of how to represent the inanimate as living has been and remains crucial to medical anatomical illustration. It is a conceptual issue that has had to be faced up to by authors of various periods and has called forth, from time to time, various visual solutions in such a way as to bring to light and to anticipate, also unconsciously, the moods and themes of modernity.

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For this reason, the most recent studies of the iconology of the body in its relations to art and to science have concentrated on the analysis of the technical image, regarded not merely as an illustration or example but recognised in its autonomous role as a primary source in the production of knowledge and as a bearer of decisive contributions to theory construction and to showing such theories’ critical points. Moreover, in the case of the plates in anatomical atlases that were jointly conceived by medics and artists, the technical image turns out to be a device that is particularly apt to the reception of an often implicit set of presuppositions and to convey ancient ideas and superstitions about the body as well as nursing embryonic conceptions and styles of life, thus advancing visions and technical solutions able to represent them. From its first appearance, the anatomical illustration is thus called upon to seek out viable aesthetic solutions to the problem of how to present the unrepresentable anatomised body, the cadaver, as a subject still alive and with full dignity. This search concerned and still concerns the conceptualisation and the visualisation of such difficult themes as the passage of human matter from animate to inanimate, from movement to that immobility that underwrites its biological terminus. As is well known, for centuries, this question was brilliantly resolved by recourse to the repertoire of classical statuary. The statue would offer the cadaver the right attitude and would certify the high aspirations of its authors, given that it derived from antiquity and was thus a warranty of the dignity of which the body, for all that it was stripped of skin and muscle, cannot do without lest it become mere matter. But, above all, the appeal to the statue—especially in the anatomical atlases for use by painters and sculptors—satisfied the demand made on every technical illustration, namely that ‘the useful not be sundered from the beautiful’.1 And for centuries, there was no doubting the beauty of the bodies displayed in Greek statuary, given that these artists were aided in their search for perfection by having at their disposal as living models a youth of ‘natural beauty’ formed by fierce physical training. Thus, in his Essay on Painting, Francesco Algarotti could write in connection with the need for artists to study anatomy: To bear well in mind the number, the positions and movements, and to understand the effects, of the muscles, it is part of the art to compare from time to time the cadaver or the chalk anatomy with the natural 1 Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, Statuti e metodo, p. 5. When not specified otherwise, all translations are mine.

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body covered with flesh and skin, and one by one with the statues of the Greeks. It was given to them to characterise and express the parts of the human body rather better than we are able to. And this was due to closer study that, above all other nations, they made of the nude, and to the natural beauty that they had before their eyes every day.2

It may nevertheless be recalled that the statue was used not only to suggest and fix the pose of the skeleton or of the écorché, even in its most strippeddown condition; but, in a further game of references, it could reveal itself as living and mobile. Thus, the mutilated stone torso in Vesalio’s Fabrica could be opened to show the viscera and the internal organs,3 while Jacopo Berengario’s Venus descends unbecomingly from her plinth with her belly open to allow a view of her womb. From the start, the scene of anatomy was decidedly and enduringly the theatre, 4 in which a marvellous spectacle was mounted, and the spectator looked for and wanted to accept every possible transformation and illusion as true. Likewise, the anatomical illustration functioned as a two-dimensional narrative space in which both the cadaver and the statue act as lifelike animated subjects. The figures of myth, the gods and nymphs, were thus enlisted to give their contribution to the creation of new visual metaphors for the novel and ambitious category of the medical surgeons determined to show off their extraordinary prowess as the new healers and miracle workers able to transmute inanimate matter into living flesh. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the appeal to classical statuary as the reference point for anatomical figures aimed at artists came to a turning point with the technical images conceived by the revolutionary anatomist Paolo Mascagni from Siena, who was appointed in 1807 to the chair of Pictorial Anatomy at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Academy of Fine Arts had been entirely renewed, replacing Vasari’s Academy of Arts and Design, which had been abolished by the enlightened reforms of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo implemented twenty years earlier. The academic syllabus was divided into three classes, the first of which embraced all the arts—articulated into fourteen Schools—that had to do with drawing, thus confirming the primacy that Vasari had envisaged. But in addition to the canonical subjects of painting, sculpture, architecture, elements of design, life 2 Algarotti, Saggio sopra la Pittura, p. 17. 3 Andreas Vesalio, De Humani corporis fabrica, p. 372. 4 See Carlino, Books of the Body.

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classes, perspective and anatomy, there were lectures on history, mythology, mathematics and hydraulics, supplemented by laboratory sessions on those artistic techniques that mark out the excellence of Florence, such as copper etching, engraving on gems, ornamentation, inlays (scagliola) and flower painting. The second class, concerned with musical and dramatic arts, would split off in 1860 and become the city’s conservatoire, while the third was given over, in an entirely innovative move, to the mechanical arts and crafts5. To this latter belonged also four consulting professors picked from ‘among the leading scientists of Chemistry and Mechanics engaged in perfecting the manufactures of Tuscany’. The professors and the instructors would meet every last Sunday of the month during the teaching year ‘to discuss the most efficacious Methods for the progress of the Arts and the discoveries made both by the Members of the Academy and by Externals, and to bring together the theories with what has been learnt from practical experience’6. These ‘Meetings of the Third Class’ thus had the double task of taking over the inheritance of the short-lived Accademia del Cimento, the seventeenthcentury group of scientists who sought to apply the experimental method of Galileo in various fields, and to bring the Reports that the professor-scientists published monthly into line with the leading French and English scientific journals of the day. Introducing a collection of these Reports, Antonio Targioni Torzetti, a professor of chemistry, would clarify the relations between the arts and the sciences with the Academy in the following terms: ‘We must always bear in mind how much the scientist has helped the artist, pointing out to him all these improvements with the light that study has afforded him.’7 It is against this very specific background that we may place the appointment of the eminent scientist Paolo Mascagni to the chair of pictorial anatomy, as the first and one of the most famous teachers of anatomy in the reformed Academy. Even though there are still no art-critical studies devoted to him, it was above all his exceptional personality that made him one of the best loved and most influential teachers in forming that generation of Tuscan artists of the first half of the nineteenth century.8 Along with the chair of pictorial anatomy, the Academy readmitted the study of the cadaver and, as Algarotti had prescribed, there were three didactic approaches to the study of the human figure: the life class for nudes; the 5 Cavallucci, Notizie storiche, p. 10. 6 Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, Statuti, p. 6. 7 Antonio Targioni Tozzetti, Rapporto delle Adunanze, p. 3. 8 ‘Friend and father, rather than rigid and austere preceptor of his pupils. Imbued with such feelings, he enjoyed and loved to share with them the treasury of knowledge he had gathered’; Lippi, Elogio di Paolo Mascagni, p. 30.

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cadaver for anatomy; and the evergreen classical statue for poses. We see all three represented in a crowded lecture in the Academy in the frontispiece of the very successful Elements of Physiological Anatomy applied to the Fine Arts (Elementi di Anatomia Fisiologica, applicata alle Belle Arti) published in 1839 by the Turinese polymath Giuseppe Bertinatti. Anatomy is once more presented as a complete and complex subject for artists, with the twin aims of fostering the refined practice of drawing that is able to reinforce vision and resolve problems of the representation of the body, and at the same time of satisfying the theory underlying the philosophical and scientific desire that propels every genuinely artistic vocation. For this reason, and following in the footsteps of the Renaissance medical philosophers, Mascagni was an exemplary teacher, leading the most talented artists of the day through the phases that lead into the penetralia of the human body. To call on the intense metaphor of R.P. Ciardi, this was a ‘descent into Hell … from which one emerges with a fuller grasp of the exterior reality and of one’s own interior conscience’.9 The outstanding importance of Mascagni in relation to the Academy is not limited to his role as a teacher but concerns also the novelty and originality of the images that he conceived and produced to illustrate his Anatomy Lectures to Instruct in Drawing the Students of the Academy (Lezioni di Anatomia per ammaestramento degli Studenti nell’Accademia del Disegno), which were published the year after his death in 1816 by his brother Bernardino and his nephew Aurelio. This is a work that has attracted less critical attention than his Great Anatomy (Grande Anatomia, 1823) and that was dismissed by scholar of medicine Leonetto Comparini in the following terms: [these lessons] were dictated by Professor Mascagni and illustrated by 15 coloured plates drawn and etched by Antonio Serantoni, but for four, I, II, XIV and XV, which were etched by Agostino Costa, are not of the highest quality. We come away with the idea that the iconography aims basically at the formal precision of a superficial anatomy to which can appeal the artistic representation of the human figure. Which, after all, is the aim of the book, which is written in Italian to make it easier to read for its target audience.10

I beg to differ. A fresh re-reading of the Anatomy Lectures holds in store some noteworthy surprises. Generous in size and chromatic richness, the illustrations organise the subjects in daring and liberating compositions: 9 Ciardi, ‘Anatomia: esercizio e mito’, p. 27. 10 In Vannozzi, La scienza illuminata, p. 51.

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Fig. 27: Above: Antonio Serantoni, in Paolo Mascagni, Anatomy Lectures to Instruct in Drawing the Students of the Academy, 1816, Plate VII. Below: Antonio Serantoni, in Paolo Mascagni, Prefaces to the Great Anatomy, 1821, Plate III.

they set on foot a previously unexplored aesthetics of the investigation of the body that distanced itself from the anatomical atlases of the period. Let us take plate VII by way of example (Figure 27).

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This illustrates the superficial musculature of the head and the upper part of the torso viewed from the front. We may notice how, overcoming the traditional schism between myology and osteology, the page is crowded with very varied features. Every nook is exploited to include even clashing anatomical parts, such as the side and front views of the cranium as well as, squashed into the upper right corner, the detail of the muscular formations at the base of the sternal notch. With its vivid colours and dynamic movement, the composition leaves no empty spaces and is visually organised around numerous focal points, drawing the viewer’s gaze into a continuous movement of selection and assimilation of images. In all this, even though the cadaver is cut up and spread out, it continues to be a subject and to show an autonomous expressive capacity. Thus, the skinless face, with its hypnotising open-eyed stare and its half-open mouth, presents within a personal physiognomics the sentiment of astonishment. At the same time, the skull on the right with its single half-closed eye expresses a feeling of pained acceptance of a further and more extreme condition. Whether it is a question of a statue or, as in our case, a cadaver, the physiognomicpathognomic reading was an integral theme in all the atlases produced for use by artists at the time. For all that Mascagni’s Anatomy for Use does not study the passions directly, we find confirmation of this in the contemporary review by Stefano Ticozzi: ‘This posthumous work […] establishes the justest proportions of the well made human body and assigns the various passions that excite the physical features that are proper to them.’11 Thus we come to grasp how the composition of the body in pieces aims not so much to satisfy an astute—albeit bizarre—economy in the use of space as to obey a precise aesthetic of an innovative, provocative and ironic taste. This becomes quite clear in the following plates, in which we may observe the curious overlapping effect of how the left ear of the flayed figure is drawn on top of the occipital part of the skull. With the cancellation of the three-dimensional effect of shading, all the features of the composition present themselves on a single plane. This in turn assimilates the anatomical illustration to a virtuoso performance in ornamentation, of a sort that the taste of the time would employ as designs for multi-coloured marble tables or trompe l’oeil inlay work. Biological matter thus shades into the mineral, and the anatomised body, fragmented and then recomposed, enters into a compositional game in which, so the author seems to suggest, each element has equal weight and importance, at once extraordinary and common. In point of fact, this vision was already clearly expressed in an early work 11 In Corniani, I secoli della letteratura italiana, p. 565.

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of Mascagni’s, his Prefaces to the Great Anatomy (Prodromi della Grande Anatomia), which was little appreciated at the time and subject to criticism. Here, the full-page black-and-white illustrations make up a sophisticated sampling of the textures of living organisms, not only human, magnified with optical instruments. The primary objects are lowly components, such as skin, hair, teeth, glands and tubes, which are all parts that ‘others have neglected or seen only inexactly or set aside because of the poor results’,12 mean minutiæ that nevertheless attract the scientist’s attention. Even though Mascagni did not possess a copy in his personal library, he surely had in mind a famous iconographic forerunner of this operation, namely Robert Hooke’s Micrographia of 1665. Yet, in the Prefaces, the visual organisation is aimed at supporting the wholly novel conceptual premise introduced by the ‘revolutionary’ discoveries in chemistry according to which even the most humble matter is equally precious because combined out of the same elements, which forge free and unlimited connections that can hardly be systematised or set in hierarchies. In this way, we find a scheme of illustrated tiles laid out, sometimes interrupted by rounded and unframed figures, whether of embryos or of glands that seem like sponges or corals, in a ceaseless crossover among the natural kingdoms. Everything is sign and pattern, variety and graphic rhythm, the vital cataloguing confusion of the Wunderkammer, all held together by the perfect compositional taste that, for all that it echoes Piranesi’s etchings of ancient Roman ruins, outstrips their static quality. Whether it starts as a chip of stone or as a strip of flesh, matter is continually coming apart and coming back together, taking on a life as if in a sequence of black-and-white cinema. Though in some plates Mascagni does pay homage to the iconographic tradition inspired by antiquity, he does away with the ‘statuary’ device by breaking it into pieces. Yet, in the very same years, this device found its fullest expression in anatomical atlases for artists who were still in thrall to the neoclassical model. Perhaps the most famous of these, Leopoldo Caldani’s Icones Anatomicæ (1801-1814), declares its devotion to Winckelmann and Piranesi beginning with the frontispiece, where an anatomical dissection is performed in a ruined temple to highlight the metaphor of the body not as living flesh but as a wounded architectural body, over whose petrified innards the surgeon-haruspex presides. The plates of the Icones that follow coherently exhibit the sealed statue-bodies, devoid of veins, hairs or openings, and set rare calcified bones within elegant frames in a black-and-white silence. 12 Paolo Mascagni, Tommaso Farnese, Prodromo della grande Anatomia, ‘Preface’.

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In place of the pallor and the completeness of the statue-body, we find in Mascagni’s plates the ‘noise’ of the material body, which is organic, complex and vital, opened up to show the colours of blood and of the soft tissues, the glands that secrete their humours, the hairs, the nails, the teeth and everything that recalls our embarrassing membership of the order of the primates.13 As Linda Nochlin has brilliantly pointed out in appealing to the fragment as an emblem of modernity, the dramatic shift in vision here is due to a revolution. Indeed, the French Revolution dislodged the blockage in which the nostalgia for the ancient, which reigned over the first phase of Neoclassicism, had trapped the artist. As Füssli illustrates,14 the artist is overcome by the gigantic petrified anatomical fragments of antiquity and is aware of his inability to come anywhere near that level of expressiveness. Only the terrible power of the revolution was able to convert the sense of impotent admiration for the past into an active archaeological and scientific search on the ground. Once the elegiac composure of the Enlightenment lithic iconography was abandoned,15 the body in pieces could come into its own, outside the anatomical theatre, as a genuine and obsessive experience that would be repeated over and over at the foot of the guillotine and in the slaughter of the Napoleonic Wars. Thus the fragment was no longer the metaphor of ruins attacked by time but rather became the embodied story of subjects that were mutilated but were still inhabited, down to the last tissue, by passions and feelings in search of the absolute between a recognition of finitude and an impulse to overcome it. And it is no exaggeration to say that Mascagni’s plates, with their narration of a subject fragmented in its bodily and emotional reality, set on foot a new iconographic period anticipating visions that the artistic production of the time was slow to make its own. These were years in which the scientists–recruited as we have seen to teach in the reformed Academy in the service of a Tuscany that was ‘industrious and industrial’ ‘but that in fact was intent on artisan and agricultural production, which were better suited to preserving the social peace of the Gran Duchy’16 –encountered an artistic production in such a way as to give shape to the themes and 13 At the behest of the Grand Duke, Mascagni also directed the exhibition of the anatomical models in the nearby Waxwork Laboratory (Officina Ceroplastica), of which some are conserved in the Specola and others in the Museum in Vienna. 14 Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825), Artist Moved to Despair before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins, 1778/80, Pastel and watercolour, cm. 42X27, Milan, Civica Raccolta Stampe Bertarelli. 15 Stafford, Body Criticism, pp. 63-64. 16 Vergari, I Targioni Tozzetti, p. 33.

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discoveries in chemistry, geology and botany. This encounter was able to free creative energies capable of pushing forward the representation of reality and of going beyond the art of the time, which was often hobbled by provincialisms and conservative nostalgias. If we want to find the root of the ‘revolution’ in the images that Mascagni conceived, we must recall a great passion that, perhaps even more than anatomy, possessed him: the study of chemistry. This indeed was what led the young Mascagni in his passionate research in the weird and scrambled mineral landscape around Volterra for ways to interrogate matter intimately where ‘nature works with fewer secrets’.17 As in an anatomical dissection, and employing the same gaze, method and language, the scientist works on the body of the earth with test tubes, touching and sniffing and assaying in a sort of synesthetic experiment. Just as with a body laid out on the dissection table, here too, he is faced with a living organism that carries out continuous transmutations of itself in a ceaseless process of generation, decomposition and expulsion. But, unlike an anatomy, the nature of a landscape may disclose its inner workings without thereby interrupting its life cycle. The mineral matter sampled from the bowels of the earth or directly plucked from an already skinless surface reveals ‘to him who has the wisdom to interrogate it […] the history of the natural processes and spontaneous effects of matter in its various combination’.18 The bond that tied together and made the various natural realms objects of investigation, picking out the deep kinships among them, was precisely chemistry: its importance lay in the fact that it ‘held the key to a number of fundamental developments in thinking about matter […]. In crucial respects it provided the vehicle by means of which the natural realm was explored.’19 While anatomical exploration and the study of the body as a ‘whole’ system had by then faced up to and substantially solved the main descriptive tasks, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, scientists like Mascagni and various members of the Targioni Tozzetti family (notably Giovanni, Ottaviano and Antonio), for all their initial training in medicine, would uncover in the search for and application of the principles of chemistry the means for investigating in a novel way also the matter that makes up humans. At the same time, medical science, reinforced by chemical knowledge, would push the enquiry into natural processes to the new frontiers of microscopic anatomy and cytology: in the account given by the ‘geologist’ Mascagni, 17 Mascagni, Dei lagoni, p. 5. 18 Ibid., p. 6. 19 Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human, p. 78.

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the minimal fragments of crystals and minerals were called ‘cells’. From here, interest broadened to comparative anatomy, to palaeontology and the anatomy of invertebrates, and with a renewed attention to the importance of pharmacology, to botany. Chemistry shows how all matter is compounded out of the coming together of simple elements, which can be investigated by the same means that make use of those substances as reagents, solvents and distillates. The thought begins to form that the whole of nature—animal, vegetable and mineral—is the upshot of a long series of transformation in which structural affinities arise as witnesses of the kinship not only among the various forms of a given type but also between one type and another, thus making imaginable more or less wild kinships, passages and encroachments among the kingdoms. The way was open between the living body and the mineral formation, no longer appealing to fable or myth but on the basis of the most advanced science. Especially in Tuscany, the innumerable scientific collections bear witness to this bubbling climate of research. Set up at the end of the eighteenth century, they present in the crowded display cases of museums of science and technology a happy miscegenation of manufactures and natural productions. Like the iconographic apparatuses of the anatomical and botanical atlases, they would much later be an inspiration for the concerns of artists hunting for illuminating connections between living and inert matter. Already in 1775, scientist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti was charged with compiling a ‘Catalogue of the Natural Production conserved in the Imperial Gallery of Florence’. His dream was ‘to place in view all that could contribute to the greatest ease and speed of forming a Museum of Natural Productions annexed to the Imperial Gallery’, in which there would be place for ‘all the fine collection of minerals, crystallisations and fascinating petrifications that the famous Nicolas Steno had made for his own study’.20 The plan was to move all the natural productions from that paradigm of a museum of painting and sculpture that is the Uffizi and to display them in a museum of their own. This was to be housed in an adjacent building that was never constructed but led to the scattering of the collections across the various museums run by the University of Florence. A piece that is still to be seen in the Mineralogy Museum of the University bears eloquent witness to this artificial separation between human artefacts and ‘fascinating’ natural productions and to the taxonomic confusion that followed from it. This is the head of an Etruscan statue, which Targioni Tozzetti describes as follows: 20 G. Targioni Torzetti, unpublished manuscript.

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An ancient Etruscan head of statue of a seated man, used as the cover for an ossuary box, sculpted in a sort of Travertine […] There are present many molecules of iron or of a blackish and dark pyrites […] I chose this head from among the various funerary remains which were found near the underground sepulchres at Volterra. The stone is the same as that of the hill on which Volterra stands.21

By virtue of residing underground for millennia, the ancient fragment has reacquired its primordial mineral status. In the years that Targioni Tozzetti was at work, the zone in question was intensively studied, measured and probed by cohorts of scientists, travellers, geologists and naturalists in love with volcanoes and fossils; and it gave up a rich trove of statues and utensils, mineral deposits and city walls, roads and aqueducts, all testimonies of a petrified world conserved beneath the surface. In this parallel world of grottoes and silent cavities, the stone figures, the gigantic fragments of statues and the couples reclining on urns with their enigmatic smiles live on through time immemorial. With the imperceptible process of transformation, the underworld cancels the traces of human workmanship and gives everything back to the primordial mineral matter. These objects are not unlike the sailors of the Flying Dutchman in the series Pirates of the Caribbean, who are condemned by a curse to be indistinguishable from the planking of their ship. Or, more strongly, the Etruscan head brings us up to date with the coral statues of the unlikely heroes in the ‘Wreck of the Unbelievable’ in which, with an astonishing exercise of ancient and modern resources and technologies, Damien Hirst organises an ongoing game of hide-and-seek with materials, kingdoms and historical epochs. Here, where the insistent human artifice seems to make fun of nature, the overweening pride of the artist-demiurge stuns and wearies us, making us long for that fascinating beauty of the natural productions that were able to charm and bemuse the scientist and the casual visitor alike, in an age that, perhaps, was still that of innocence.22 In the same years that Mascagni was working up his plates, another Florentine scientist was tirelessly busy with the transformation of living matter into inert stuff. This was Girolamo Segato who had earned himself the popular nickname of the petrifier.23 As a young man, Segato had undertaken 21 GIbid. 22 See Hirst, Treasures. 23 Girolamo Segato (San Gottardo di Sospirolo 1792 – Florence 1836), who died at the age of only 44 and was buried in the Florentine church of Santa Croce. His tombstone is inscribed:

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various, often ill-fated archaeological expeditions to Egypt, whence he drew an obsessive interest in the conservation of cadavers that would lead him throughout his life to try to find a recipe for mineralising human tissues. Procedures for mineralisation were well known and practiced in many Italian and foreign universities; but the great secret that Segato took with him to the grave24 was his ability to preserve the same colours and elasticity of the living tissues after they had been treated. His most celebrated trials, the breast of a young woman and the hair of a girl, as well as the table whose surface is made up of human tissue, can still be see at the Museum of Human Anatomy of the University of Florence.25 The character of Segato as a scientist is quite unique at least as much for his activities, which were already criticised at the time,26 as for the methods he adopted to achieve the effect of hardening, for it seems that this feature was often obtained by injecting a sort of plaster under the skin. Indeed, if on the one hand his interest in the transmutation of matter, carried out in isolation and veiled in secrecy, make him seem more like an alchemist, on the other there is a vein of modernity in his seeking to represent the female body with the closest attention to the then fashionable aesthetic models: Segato’s ambition was to petrify one whole. Without having to mimic a clumsy vitality but explicitly calling on the funerary statues of the realist sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini, the display cases containing Segato’s petrification of the young girl’s breasts and nape are in the degree expressive, moving and seductive, for the beautiful girl had died in the bloom of her youth of natural causes. Conversely, he was less canny in offering to the Grand Duke of Tuscany the famous table inlaid with human tissue: looked at closely, the inlays do not resemble precious stones but rather pitilessly reveal their true origins. Moreover, the fact that these samples were not protected by glass but were open to the touch, as the surface of a card table for a noble drawing room, meant that it was a total failure in a period obsessed with contagious diseases. The gift, which accompanied a request for funding, was promptly refused and the monies denied. If the main aim of scientific illustrations and three-dimensional models was to subserve educational purposes, it might seem that this would cramp the creativity of the artist-artisan producers. Yet these very same purposes ‘Here lies Girolamo Segato undone, who would have seen himself petrified whole, if his art had not died with him. He was an unusual glory of human wisdom and an example of not unusual unhappiness’. 24 Giuseppe Pellegrini, Elogio di Girolamo Segato, p. 30. 25 On the visit to the Museum in which Segato’s works are conserved, see Praz. 26 See Giovanni Rossi.

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Fig. 28: On the Left: Egisto Tortori, Paleontology: Fossils from the Cretaceous, 1873-1876, oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm, Florence, Museo della Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica, n. 1164, Cat. IV (Paleontology). On the Right: Egisto Tortori, Comparative Anatomy: hystological models, 1873-1876, oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm, Florence, Museo della Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica, n. 304, Cat. I (Zoology).

allowed someone with an appropriate mastery of technical solutions to outstrip contemporary aesthetic canons and, as in the case of Mascagni’s plates, to propose novel visions of the natural world. Modeller and painter Egisto Tortori27 was commissioned to produce a cycle of didactic canvases for the botany hall of the Florence Technical Institute. Under the direction of Pietro Marchi, between 1870 and 1890, Tortori executed 66 large-format oil paintings with a dense and shiny black background against which are figured subjects of human and comparative anatomy, of palaeontology, of vegetable morphology and anatomy, of geology and of physical geography (Figure 28). The result was the reconstruction of a highly coloured and outsized universe in which cross-sections of giant flowers sensually open themselves up, the layers of the human skin are confused—by way of a single rigorously abstract composition (more Frank Stella than Malevich)—with the strata of 27 Egisto Tortori (1829-1893) was the last in the line of Florentine waxworkers in the Officina Ceroplastica, which had been founded by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo in what was then the Royal Museum of Physic and Natural History (now ‘La Specola’ in Florence).

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lands and moraines of the Appenines … In their original setting in the botany hall, these posters made a visual reference to the collections trapped in the glass cases of the same hall, including very delicate marine life modelled in glass (a hundred glass sea invertebrates carried out by Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolph from Dresden) and magnified models of flowers (from the Brendel workshop in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century) such as: Vegetable gum reinforced with fibre, cloth impregnated with plaster of Paris, animal collagen treated with sulphur compounds, rattan, feathers, metal wires and animal fibres. Standing about 60cm high, the models are painted with tempera and glossed with lacquer and wax. In some cases, the didactic value is enhanced by parts that may be opened or dismantled by means of little hinges or metallic clasps.28

In the overriding drive to present nature as knowable and as destined to be unendingly on display in museums and in atlases, nature is forced to take on a disguise, changing the matter of which she is made and, as in the case of the flowers and the rocks, altering her dimensions. The artifice of human intervention is ever present even in the innocent choice of how to set out a crystal in a display case and in that merry game of transformations in which science itself is complicit and in which nothing is as it seems. Around the same period, one of the eminent chemists who taught in the Academy, Antonio Targioni Tozzetti, brought to Florence a new technique for the reproduction of images—lithography—which was a forerunner of photography. This was a chemical process by which a stone—an inanimate slab—is turned into a mould or matrix. Fixing the imprint or sign traced by a pencil made of fatty, animal-derived matter such as wax or tallow, the stone support allowed the reproduction of higher-resolution images than had hitherto been possible. Moreover, this technique would allow virtually unlimited reproduction of copies and the re-use of the same matrix. At the beginning, portraits, landscapes and religious images were printed with this method but, by the end of the century, lithography would reach out to artists who would give over to it a large part of their production, aware that this technique embodied peculiar capacities for bringing into intimate contact materials that were of wholly different orders. Thus it would be that the weary but unrelenting hand of Félicien Rops would employ lithography to tell his tales of female bodies whose flesh was heavy with the desire to make love with demons, skeletons and gigantic stone 28 See the website of the Museo della scienza e della tecnica, Florence.

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phalluses.29 Admired by Baudelaire, with whom he shared that ‘love for the primary crystallographic form, the love of the skeleton’,30 he was selected by the poet to design the frontispiece of the collection Flotsam (Les Épaves, 1866). Here, the skeleton that becomes a tree (squelette arborescent), which is the modern representation of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, stands out against crystallised and mineralised vegetation, whose pointed flowers are the emblems of vice and death. The decadent and symbolist sensibility would bring to fruition an entire artif icial botany in which flowers act out an anti-nature ‘made of such stuff as dreams are made on’ as well as of the artist’s own erotic obsessions. In the same way, Odilon Redon, with his lithographic albums dominated by black (how can we not put them side by side with Tortori’s?), would gather the face-flowers that in turn herald other unsettling twentieth-century cohabitations, such as Picasso’s woman-flowers, with their rounded and inviting sexuality. (Translated from the Italian by Richard Davies)

Works cited Accademia di Belle Arti, Statuti e metodo d’istruzione per l’Accademia delle Belle Arti di Firenze (Florence: Niccolò Carli, 1813). Francesco Algarotti, Saggio sopra la Pittura (Livorno: Marco Coltellini in via Grande, 1763). Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, Commentaria cum amplissimis additionibus super Anatomia Mundini una cum textu ejusdem in pristinum & verum nitorem redacto, tav. 226r (Bologna: Impressum per Hieronymum de Benedictis, 1521). Francesco Bertinatti, Elementi di Anatomia Fisiologica applicata alle Belle Arti (Turin: Pietro Marietti, 1837-1839), Frontispiece. Luigi Caldani, Icones anatomicae …Tabulas selegerunt et nonnullas ex cadaveribus ad vivum delineatas addere curarunt Leopoldus Marcus Antonius et Florianus Caldani, (Venice: Calcographia Josephi Picotti, 1801-1804), Frontispiece. Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body. Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning (1994), trans. by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 29 Rops, Les Sataniques. 30 Rops’ correspondence with Poulet-Malassis, n.d.: ‘Baudelaire est, je crois, l’homme dont je désire le plus vivement faire la connaissance, nous nous sommes rencontrés dans un amour étrange, l’amour de la forme cristallographique première: la passion du squelette’.

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Camillo Jacopo Cavallucci, Notizie storiche intorno alla R. Accademia delle arti del disegno in Firenze (Florence: Tipografia del vocabolario, 1873). Roberto Paolo Ciardi, ‘Anatomia: esercizio e mito’, in La bella Anatomia, il disegno del corpo fra arte e scienza nel Rinascimento, ed. by Andrea Carlino, Roberto P. Ciardi and Annamaria Petrioli Tofani (Milan: Silvana Editoriale 2009). Giovanni Battista Corniani, I secoli della letteratura italiana (Milan: Vincenzo Ferrario, 1832-1833). Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human. Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Venice: Marsilio, 2017). Kathryn A. Hoffmann, ‘Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground’, Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture 4 (2006): 139-159. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: printed by John Martyn and James Allestry, Printers to the Royal Society, 1664). Regolo Lippi, Elogio di Paolo Mascagni composto dal dott. Regolo Lippi dissettore, (Florence: Stamperia Vincenzo Batelli, 1823). Paolo Mascagni, Tommaso Farnese, Prodromo della grande Anatomia (Milan: Batelli e Fanfani, 1821). ———, Anatomia uso degli studiosi di scultura e pittura (Florence: Tipograf ia Giovanni Marenigh, 1816). ———, Dei lagoni del Senese e del Volterrano commentario di Paolo Mascagni al signor Francesco Caluri… (Siena: stamperia Vinc. Pazzini Carli e figli, 1779). Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces. The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995). Giuseppe Pellegrini, Elogio di Girolamo Segato da Belluno scritto dall’avvocato Giuseppe Pellegrini (Florence: V. Batelli e Figli, 1863). Mario Perniola, Disgusti. Le nuove tendenze estetiche (Milan: Costa & Nolan, 1998). Mario Praz, Bellezza e Bizzarria (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1960). Félicien Rops, ‘Dix-huit lettres de Félicien Rops’, Mercure de France (1933): 48-50. ———, Les Sataniques, L’Idole (Antwerpen: Museum de Reede 1882). Giovanni Rossi, Sulla Artificiale costruzione lapidea… (Parma: Carmignani, 1836). David Scott, Paul Delvaux. Surrealizing the Nude (London: Reaktion Books, 1992). Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism. Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,1993). Antonio Targioni Tozzetti, Rapporto delle Adunanze tenute dalla terza classe dell’I. e R. Accademia delle belle Arti e dei perfezionamenti delle manifatture in Toscana… (Florence: Guglielmo Piatti, 1818). Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, Catalogo delle Produzioni naturali che si osservano nella Galleria Imperiale di Firenze (Unpublished manuscript, 1763, held in the Museo Galileo, Florence).

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William Tronzo, The Fragment. An Incomplete History (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009). Francesca Vannozzi (ed.), La scienza illuminata. Paolo Mascagni nel suo tempo (1755-1815) (Siena: Nuova Immagine, 1996). Daniele Vergari, I Targioni Tozzetti fra ‘700 e ‘900, (Florence: Accademia dei Georgofili e Gruppo di ricerche, 2006). Andreas Vesalio, Andreae Vesalii Bruxellensis, scholae medicorum Patauinae professoris, de Humani corporis fabrica Libri septem (Basel: ex officina Ioannis Oporinii, 1543).

About the author Anna Luppi lives and works in Florence. She graduated in Painting in 1984 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where she has been professor of Anatomy for Artists and Phenomenology of the Body since 1989. A recent exhibition of her personal work—“Exit Strategy”—was held in New York (Project Art Space Gallery, 2017). Her research has focused on the topic of the body between art and science, on which she has published numerous articles and, together with Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Andrea Carlino and Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, edited the three volumes Art&Anatomy (Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2010-2011). She is the curator of the exhibition “Sublimi Anatomie” (“Sublime Anatomies”) at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, October 2019.

4. Glass, Mixed Media, Stone: The Bodily Stuffs of Suspended Animation Alessandra Violi

Abstract The essay takes ‘bodies of stone’ in its actual, literal sense, discussing nineteenth-century embalming techniques which involved a material transformation of human remains into glass, mixed media or stone. These processes of vitrif ication or petrif ication provided, on the one hand, auto-icons of the dead that seemed to rival the chemical immortality offered by the emergent media, such as photography or film. On the other hand, by mimicking natural processes of fossilisation, bodies of glass or stone were infused with vitalist notions of matter, hinting at states of suspended animation and latent life. The essay explores this ‘biochemical constellation of immortality’ through some peculiar nineteenth-century examples and traces the uncanny survival of these living corpses in today’s pop cultural imaginary. Keywords: Vitrification; petrification; Jeremy Bentham; Efisio Marini; Pietro Gorini; Jean Jacques Rousseau

The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. ‒ A.S. Byatt, The Stone Woman Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. ‒ O. Wendell Holmes, The Stereoscope and the Stereograph

In the August 1898 issue of La Revue de Revues, some of the latest and most astonishing discoveries in the field of science were revealed to a wider

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chIII04

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public: in between a ‘marvelous’ technique for ‘[t]he liquefaction of air’ and a surprising apparatus for measuring thought (‘[t]he machine to measure thought’), a long article described a recent breakthrough on ‘[t]he survival of the body’. This was anatomist Efisio Marini’s system for turning human flesh into stone. What the article dubbed a ‘transformation of the human body into marble’ involved the total mineralisation of a dead body so as to preserve its structure and morphological characteristics intact. The dead were transformed into statues, but the wonder of Marini’s secret for petrification was its reversibility: by plunging the marbled ‘pieces’ into a special, regenerating fluid, the body’s tissues surprisingly regained their ‘volume, freshness, elasticity and normal colour’. Stone was turned back into flesh. The whole process could, of course, be repeated indefinitely, giving a sense that those bodies were not dead at all. Rather, they shifted between inanimate and animate states, leaving viewers in ‘enchanted’ suspension as to whether they were looking at embodied humans, marble artefacts or the puzzling objets d’art that readers could see for themselves in the photographs accompanying the article. As such, Dr Marini’s living stones seemed to offer an ‘extraordinary array of useful applications’, from the medical and phrenological to the forensic, though there was no doubt that their best employment would be as a new ‘aesthetic conservation of human bodies’.1 The petrif ied dead could become their own materialised monuments, what we would call today their ‘auto-icons’, a term that philosopher Jeremy Bentham had coined fifty years earlier to describe the transformation of his own dead body into a statue, an image (made) of himself. Unlike liquified air and the mechanical measurement of thought, Marini and Bentham’s dreams of petrified flesh were actually performed in the nineteenth century and are themselves but two among many instances of a widespread modern desire to turn bodies into stone. A project aptly called ‘Androlithe’ (Human Stone), designed to petrify the dead into statues, objects or jewels after their incineration, had been presented to the French Parliament in the 1880s by a certain Urban, while Italian Paolo Gorini’s ‘petrifications’ had achieved international fame already in the 1860s.2 More significantly, as Lynda Nead points out, there was a two-way traffic between flesh and stone, and the fascination of the living with being ‘constantly on the brink of turning to stone and being transformed into a frozen image’ affected also the then-emerging technical media for portraiture, such as 1 Ferrara, ‘La survivance du corps’, pp. 240, 250 respectively. When not specified otherwise, all translations are mine. 2 See Vidor, ‘Andro-lithe et pétrifications’.

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photography. The ‘statuette portrait’ for instance, a trick of photography that involved turning the subject into a marble bust (as in W.E. Woodbury, Photographic Amusement, 1899), became a fashionable photographic amusement in the late 1890s, achieving, by means of a magic trick, the freezing of mortality that medical petrification promised by equally enchanting methods.3 Indeed, Marini’s own techniques for bodily petrification had been developed, already in the 1850s, side by side with photographer Agostino Lay Rodriguez, combining the knowledge of anatomy with the chemical substances involved in the preparation of photographic plates.4 As historian of science Irina Podgorny has suggested, the embalming techniques that were being experimented with during the same years that photography was emerging should thus be reinserted in the ‘chemical constellation of immortality’ that came out of the nineteenth-century experiments in life and matter. Bazin’s well-known ‘mummy complex’, she claims, is more than a metaphor: it refers to ‘the chemical nature—and hence the materiality—of both photography and modern techniques for the preservation of the flesh’.5 Though taking a cue from Podgorny’s literalisation of bodies of stone, I want to suggest that a more messy, knotted entanglement between facts and tropes, the materials of chemistry and the cultural imaginary of matter, was also at work in the period, turning petrified auto-icons into powerful symptoms of modernity’s obsession not with life or death but rather more with uncanny states of betweenness, with suspended animations.

Glass In 1801, the prominent French architect Pierre Giraud published Les tombeaux, ou essai sur le sépultures, a project for a new kind of sepulchre that would revolutionise burial practices by turning human bodies quite literally into indestructible monuments to themselves. Unlike Boullée’s funerary architecture of shadows, Giraud proposed to transform the dead into a crystalline substance by vitrifying their bones, a technique he credited to the (al)chemical discoveries of Johann Joachim Becher’s Physica subterranea (1669), where the ‘art of vitrifying bones’ is deduced from the natural crystallisation of mummies of fat into mummies of glass. Giraud’s idea was that, once the vitrifications of nature had been reproduced by chemical 3 Nead, The Haunted Gallery, pp. 67-70. 4 Zedda, ‘Efisio Marini e Paolo Gorini’, p. 83. 5 Podgorny, ‘Changing the Dead’, p. 308.

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means, the mummies would make up a whole glass monument to and of themselves. ‘Out of the thing itself’, he wrote, ‘an interesting assemblage can be forged […] a unique monument surpassing those of the Egyptians’ because it was composed ‘of the body’s substance’.6 A pyramid placed at the monument’s centre ensured that Egyptian mummification would be both remembered and superseded by modern chemistry. Metamorphosed into the airy matter of glass, the dead (including Giraud himself, who planned his own vitrification) would then make a building of pellucid stone, sand petrified into transparent architecture. Petrification is, of course, a trope to architectural origins; Vitruvius attributed the Erectheion Caryatids to the women of a Peloponnesian town, turned into stone for betraying Athens. Thus Giraud reverted trope to thing and imagined the columns of his circular edifice being made of bone-glass, as if they were a standing, transparent skeleton monumentalising victory over death. Giraud’s materialisation extended, however, also to other forms of bodily substitution, such as sculpture and portraiture: busts of the deceased would be realised by pouring the bone-glass into ‘a cast made when the person was alive’,7 and vitrified portrait medallions made with the substance of the dead were to adorn the monument’s galleries, ensuring their ‘physical’ survival amongst the living. As the body’s ‘inner’ matter was transferred onto the outer form, statues and portraits—those traditional doubles of the dead—would no longer be replacements of the missing body. They would be images of the dead made of the thing itself, the dead coming back to life as autoicons. Anticipating Urban’s ‘Androlithe’ by about eighty years, Giraud’s project was an obvious post-revolutionary return to pre-Christian arts and funerary mores, reviving the ancient Roman practices of bodily cremation as well as the imago of the dead, with the added ‘Egyptian’ touch of having the mummy itself filling the portrait cast. Philippe Ariès is thus right when he claims that Giraud’s project confused the language of two different periods and two distinct paradigms of treating the dead, ‘the period when the cadaver promised to reveal to anyone who dissected it the secrets of life and the period when the cadaver gave to anyone who contemplated it the illusion of presence’.8 Although the languages ‘confused’ by Giraud create a palimpsest of various anachronisms, paradoxically condensing in a single monument also a disquieting blend of the spaces, forms and functions that the dead body would occupy in modern culture: a pyramid, a museum, 6 Giraud, Les Tombeaux, pp. 20-21. 7 Ibid., p. 24. 8 Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, p. 514.

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a huge secular relic, a memorial, a medical laboratory and an industrial factory for recycling human corpses. But Giraud’s chemical transmutations of bodily substance drew, more significantly, on the new kind of body that was being articulated by the then-emerging sciences of life and matter. Becher’s Physica subterranea, Giraud’s source for the conversion of animal into mineral matter, was on the cusp of a transformation of early-modern vitalist alchemy into modern chemistry, one of whose founders, Georg Ernst Stahl (credited with having coined the term ‘animism’), was a follower of Becher’s. As a text bridging two worlds, Physica Subterranea was particularly important in that it carried on, well into the age of modern chemistry, a vitalist notion of matter as thoroughly energised, from stone to human flesh, by the animating power that ancient Lucretian philosophy and alchemy had previously described as ‘semen’ or magis vis and that Becher had now reformulated in a language of elemental operations and concoctions more attuned to biochemical forms of materialism. As Barbara Maria Stafford has eloquently demonstrated, this vitalist model continued to be highly influential in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inquiries into matter, spurring geologists, paleontologists and medics to ‘voyage into [the] substance’ of matter and in particular of plastic earth, seen ‘as a gigantic alembic or distilling furnace’9 moulding life forms in stones as well as in human bodies. As stone was infused with life, also the ancient anthropomorphic patterns of the earth’s body were revitalised. George Hersey notes that the earth’s flow of ‘interior fluids, convulsions, oozings and vomitings’ suggested ‘the growth and modification of biomorphic tissue’, the endogenies of vast anatomies that geologists often couched in a language of flanks, folds, flexures and backbones that recalled human bodies.10 The investigation of modern chemistry into bodies of stone would still be haunted by these ancient forms of animation: Efisio Marini’s marble bodies are the offshoot of his studies on fossil formations; Jeremy Bentham received his idea of auto-iconisation observing human mummies preserved in sand, bogs or the natural casting produced by the volcanic eruptions of Herculaneum and Pompeii; Paolo Gorini’s bodies of stone were informed by his experiments in vulcanology and the belief that stones are generated, grow and die just like all other living beings.11 What inspired Giraud’s auto-iconic monument of stone was thus a biochemical theory that had been widely circulated among eighteenth-century 9 Stafford, Voyage Into Substance, p. 60. 10 Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, p. 43. 11 Gorini, Sull’origine dei vulcani, p. 470.

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natural philosophers,12 prompting, in particular, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s speculations on matters of life and death. In his Institutions Chimiques (1747), Rousseau commented at length on Becher’s idea that ‘man is made of glass and can return to glass’ and the chemistry of natural vitrification described in Physica Subterranea.13 He thus hypothesised that the process of fossil formation by which humans were turned into glass could be reversed and ‘Nature imitated’. Glass humans could be brought into life, he wrote, by ‘making artificial bodies which resemble its fossil productions’,14 and their ‘death’ would be nothing but the transmutation of the animal body back into inorganic crystal. Not alive, not dead, the body of stone could continue living in the suspended animation of mineral life, which Rousseau does not yet imagine in the form of a Pygmalionesque statue (his famous Pygmalion dates to 1763) but rather as a ‘transparent vase tinted with milky white colour’.15 Rousseau’s speculation on the (after)life of fossils is thus both an engineering of life and a dream of immortality, a transformation of natural extinction into life extension. Why not survive in the molecules of a vase, a glass monument, a body of stone? As Denis Diderot famously put it in Entretien with D’Alembert, ‘Alive, I act and react as a mass […] dead, I act and react as separate molecules […]. Don’t I die, then?’.16 In this respect, vitalist chemistry was crucial also in the ‘molecular’ definition of death that was being formulated at the time. As Peter Hanns Reill has observed, ‘vitalist physicians expressed strong doubts about the reliability of the traditional “outward” signs determining death. By the end of the century, it had become an article of medical and educated belief that death was very difficult to differentiate from dying, that great differences existed between the really dead and the apparently dead.’17 The old (Christian) idea of a clear-cut and radical separation between life and death was replaced with the physiological idea of dying, a slow and gradual process inextricable from life and ceasing only with the body’s decomposition. The naturalist George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who was among the first to introduce this novel concept in his Histoire Naturelle de l’Homme (1749), posited a vitalist, Lucretian continuum between life and death and hypothesised that living matter consists of ‘organic molecules’ which, when composed and organised, 12 Simon, ‘L’homme de verre?’, p. 66, which also mentions the mystical and apocalyptic traditions associated with glass. 13 Rousseau, Institutions chimiques, p. 24. 14 Ibid., p. 63. 15 Ibid., pp. 24-25. 16 Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew/D’Alembert’s Dream, p. 182. 17 Reill, Vitalizing Nature, p. 173.

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go to make up the animal organism. Taken to its logical conclusion, this emerging idea of ‘dying’ entailed two crucial consequences for the modern notion of death: that unless a human body was decomposing and losing its form, it could not be properly defined as ‘dead’; and, as the version of vitalist materialism had it, that even once decomposed, the molecules of a body could continue living as the matter of a different body: a vase, a glass monument, a petrified statue. Thus, the imaginary as well as scientific question underlying modern chemical embalming no longer concerned the mere preservation of a body to guarantee the illusion of presence. Rather, it posed the problem of how to guarantee the material survival of the body, in what form and what matter. Against the background of this sensibility, however disquieting it may seem to us, Giraud’s auto-iconic portraits and busts are an attempt to imitate the images created by nature. They express a desire for ghostly human forms congealed in crystal matter, for the undead to survive in some sort of material, pre-photographic glass negative. Giraud suggested, after all, that the auto-icons’ medallions should also be made transportable and ‘carried everywhere’18 as concrete signs of the dead’s enduring presence amongst the living.

Mixed media If Giraud’s auto-icons remained a project on paper, what survives of philosopher Jeremy Bentham can still be viewed today in a glass and mahogany case in the South Cloister of the Main Building of University College London. It is not a petrified body but a complex material artefact partly of Bentham’s own making. As the fascinating history of his auto-iconisation goes, having decided already at the age of twenty-one that his body would be publicly dissected to support the cause of medical anatomy, when death approched in the 1830s (he died in 1832), Bentham left careful instructions on how to convert the ‘incorruptible parts’ of his body into an ‘Auto-Icon’ to be preserved and exhibited.19 The directions contained in his will were also coupled with a manuscript entitled Auto-Icon: or Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living, which Bentham called his ‘auto-thanatography’ to make it, as it were, a natural sequel to an auto-biography. His afterlife, or rather, 18 Giraud, Les Tombeaux, p. 25. 19 On the history of Bentham’s auto-icon, I have consulted Marmoy, ‘The Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham’; R. Richardson, and B. Hurwitz, ‘Jeremy Bentham’s Self Image’; and Crimmins, Bentham’s Auto-Icon and Related Writings.

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his postlife, is thus performed through the transformation of ‘the mass of matter that death has created’ into a fossil of himself, a gesture prompted, as anticipated earlier, by the natural moulds created by nature in ice or sand, rocks or volcanic lava. So his own bones were to be reassembled into a skeleton and his mummified head placed on top of it. Bentham suggested treating it like the desiccated heads of the New Zealand Maoris but also referred to experiments in ‘slow exhaustion of the moisture from the human head’ that had been going on in his country promising ‘complete success’, and mentioned having seen ‘some Specimens in the College of Physicians’.20 The rest was left to the art of taxidermy, a stuffing of cotton wool, straw, hay and paper ribbon, to be dressed, he specified, in ‘one of the suits of black usually worn by me’, seated ‘in a Chair occupied by me when living’ and equipped with ‘the staff in the later years borne by me’. His postlife should see him frozen in the midst of action. What subsequently befell the auto-icon spoiled in part Bentham’s project: the head dehydrated and hardened into stone no longer bore any resemblance to the living Bentham, so a waxen replica was commissioned from the anatomical modeller of the Paris Faculty of Medicine Jacques Talrich and is now still sitting on top of Bentham’s auto-icon, though for a while the ‘real head’ doubled it on display at the feet of the auto-icon. Curiously enough, though this corpse as artwork was not actually exhibited to the public until the early twentieth century, the idea of casting one’s own body hovering between death and life—the idea of ‘auto-thanatography’—caught on some years later in France: in 1866, Talrich’s successor, his son Jules, presented at the École des Beaux Arts a series of plaster casts of his own body half dissected, taking what Jane Munro describes as ‘an extraordinary step’ in inaugurating ‘fictive self-portrait autopsies’.21 Long regarded as the merely bizarre—and to some, frankly ludicrous and embarrassing—whim of the philosopher of utilitarianism, Bentham’s auto-icon condenses, in fact, the desires and the contradictions clustered around bio-chemical immortality in the age of uncertain death. It thus comes as no surprise that it is often invoked today as a prototype for doctor Gunther Von Hagen’s plastinated auto-icons, which equally embody, to some, contemporary anxieties about the bio-engineered immortality of cloning and various forms of digital reanimation.22 To other commentators, Bentham’s 20 Bentham, ‘Auto-Icon’, p. 2. 21 Munro, Silent Partners, p. 157. On Bentham’s auto-icon and contemporary hyperrealism, see also Conte, In carne e cera. 22 See Pierson, ‘The Amethyst Seal’.

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multimedia project—the actual auto-icon along with his writings on the auto-icon—represents instead a first ‘manifesto for the age of monuments’, paralleling postmodern forms of ‘self-musealization’ at a historical moment equally charged with bio-technological advances.23 And some view it finally only as a grim, though extraordinary, summation of the key elements of secularising modernity and medicalised society, a sort of logical prosecution of utilitarian panopticism.24 What these readings mirror, in their differing emphases, is in fact the very instability at the core of the auto-icon itself, the way it feeds on various practices and discourses about the (un)dead body and re-articulates them as a single, jumbled piece, as mixed as the immortalising techniques and materials that make up Bentham’s effigy of stone: medical anatomy, chemical or ‘primitive’ embalming, natural fossilisation, taxidermy and the added, unexpected bit of wax portraiture. In his essay Auto-Icon, whose tongue-in-cheek quality adds yet another layer of instability to the whole project, Bentham specifies that his own auto-icon is a model for a general process of auto-iconisation that he wishes could be extended to all members of society and indicates the various uses to which the unbiodegradable dead might be put. The first is ‘permanent or statuary’. Any dead body, Bentham claims, should have a right to be ‘his own image’ and thus ‘become his or her own statue’, ‘his own monument’. With real bodies of stone replacing symbolic representations, ‘there would no longer be needed monuments of stone or marble’, as means of memorialisation will be based on ‘the perceptible corporeal substance of bodies’. For Bentham, writing in the 1830s, turning oneself literally into a museum piece is one way of ensuring survival in the collective archive and of guaranteeing a democratic right to the memorial image before the advent of massified photographic portraiture. Indeed, as we saw earlier with Efisio Marini’s (de)petrifiable bodies, this idea was contemplated even when photochemistry had provided a cheaper and above all ‘lighter’ means for the survival of bodily form in uncorruptible matter. As Oliver Wendell Holmes famously put it in The Stereoscope and the Stereograph (1859), Lucretian theory of molecular matter and transportable bodily effigies had made it possible that ‘form is henceforth divorced from matter’ and that ‘cheap and transportable […] skins’ could be separated from ‘dear and fixed […] carcasses’. Matter, he added, ‘is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped’, so the dead could now achieve immortality 23 Pickering and Westcott, ‘Monuments and Commemorations’, pp. 3-8. See also Gates, ‘Fixing Memory’. 24 See Collings, ‘Bentham’s Auto-Icon’.

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as pure skins, taxidermied forms embalmed in photochemical matter.25 While Bentham’s project for massive auto-iconisation may be said to predate this desire, it points to what will be perceived as the limitations of photo portraiture in embodying the dead. Indeed, as Geoffrey Batchen has shown, well into the twentieth century, vernacular photographic practices continued to use for instance the deceased’s hair as a corporeal auto-icon to be added to, or woven into, the photograph, thus drawing attention to the material, physical presence of the body in the image.26 Bentham recognises that the museums of auto-icons will also turn into utilitarian exhibitions, replacing memorial iconography with medical display: under the rubric ‘medical uses’, he writes of a ‘museum display of embalmed and representative heads of different races around the world’ or celebrates the benefits of auto-iconisation for the science of phrenology, again foreshadowing the anthropological and anthropometric collections of petrified bodies in late nineteenth-century Lombrosian science. This is where the materiality of death, shorn of all rituals, turns auto-icons from effigies of art into documentary images, and the chemical warding off of bodily decay becomes simply a way of ensuring that the dead should be, in Colling’s words, ‘benign participants in a medicalized society’.27 But the most revealing use of auto-icons is what Bentham calls ‘theatrical, or dramatic’, insinuating that the ‘technologically managed incarnation of the undead’28 will continue to perform life in much the same way as today’s dead actors can be digitally revived on screen. Here’s how he imagines the auto-icons’ spectacle in the theatre of the undead: ‘By means of strings or wires, by persons under the stage, or if the Auto-Icon were clothed in a robe, by a boy stationed within, and hidden by the robe, the eyes being already made in imitation of his, the eyelids might be made to move; and in so far as needful or conductive to keeping up the illusion, the hands and feet, one more of all.’29 Ventriloquised by voices lent by actors, the auto-icons will seem to speak with their own mouths and engage in ‘conversations’ with the dead and the living, thus moving through time and space though with a body designed for fixity and permanence. As uncanny as ghosts, the undead auto-icons performing on stage would compete indeed with the popular London spectacles of ghostly phantasmagorias and automata as shows of 25 Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, pp. 749, 747. 26 Batchen, Forget Me Not, pp. 65-76. 27 Collings, ‘Bentham’s Auto-Icon’, p. 118. 28 Ibid., p. 123. 29 Bentham, ‘Auto-Icon’, p. 13.

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animated corpses, though Bentham’s language of ‘vibrations’30 among the auto-icons indicates that they are to be regarded as active matter, containing energy and radiating energy. Miran Božovič suggests that one of the most faithful proponents of Bentham’s theatre of living mummies is Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho, with his uncanny passion for taxidermy and his auto-iconised dead mother put to a ‘theatrical or dramatic use’.31 But a closer parallel between Bentham’s fantasy and the chemical immortality of cinema was actually proposed, in the 1970s, by Belgian artist and filmmaker Marcel Broodthaers in his film Figures of Wax. Jeremy Bentham (1974). Having seen the exhibited auto-icon and read about its history while he was teaching at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Arts, Broodthaers thought that this would constitute ‘a perfect “scientific” subject for a University/ academic film’.32 In fact, the movie carries out Bentham’s instructions and puts Broodthaers into conversation with his undead mummy, incorporating the oscillations of the auto-icon between the documentary and the aesthetic as well as among various forms of display, from the archival to the forensic and the fetishistic to the purely spectacular. As Shana Lindsay has demonstrated, Broodthaers creates a ‘genealogy for filmmaking’ in Bentham’s project, reflecting on film as an instance of chemical embalming that keeps death in abeyance.33 In the conversation that Broodthaers had imagined between the undead philosopher and himself, the sentient and speaking auto-icon is thus intrigued by the material of cinema: JB: I am cold. Close the window please. What is all this light and apparatus? MB: It is material of cinema. JB: What is that? MB: Movie pictures … representations of reality. JB: Very interesting. I desire to see a film. (pictures of Jeremy Bentham).34

Stone Conceived at the crossroads of geology, paleontology and physiology, the fossilised undead of nineteenth-century vitalism produced imaginaries that 30 Ibid., p. 6. 31 Božovič, ‘The Body and Psycho’, p. 94. 32 Quoted in Borja-Villel and Compton, Marcel Broodthaers, p. 274. 33 Lindsay, Mortui Docent Vivos, p. 105. 34 Quoted in Borja-Villel and Compton, Marcel Broodthaers, p. 271.

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were theoretical, intellectual as well as frankly pop. On the one hand, they found a place in a line of speculation connecting (proto)cinematic projections with the processes of image formation and petrification produced by volcanic eruptions, beginning with phantasmagoria enthusiast Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus (1665), prompted by his visit to Mount Vesuvius in 1637, down to Jean Epstein’s Le cinématographe vu de l’Etna (1926), where the erupting Mount Etna, showing the ‘obstinate, human face’ of the Earth,35 offers a metaphor for the animistic and transmutational power of cinematic images. As Horst Bredekamp has pointed out, the modern notion of a life of images f inds one of its core sources in nineteeenth-century investigations into bodily eff igies made from and into volcanic lava, a to-and-fro between life and death that geologist Paolo Gorini even tried to recreate by setting up public spectacles of artificial erupting volcanoes, aimed at proving a presence of a life in ‘esseri minerali (mineral beings)’ that to him may have confirmed the ancient Ovidian myth of the origin of human bodies from stones.36 This peculiar breed of mythology, medicine and the life sciences was, on the other hand, a key to the appeal of bodies of stone in the popular imagination, especially once the phenomenon hit American culture and was turned into a craze for petrifications by a host of newspapers reporting on the extraordinary findings of ‘effigies in lava’ and petrified bodies as perfect as when they were alive, the modern marvels dug up by archeologists and paleontologists on the lookout for fossil remains. The fake piece of journalism by the young Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), The Petrified Man (1862), written ‘to kill the petrification mania […] with delicate satire’,37 was indeed taken for real, and the 1869 hoax of the ‘Cardiff Giant’, a huge stone statue passed off as the fossilised body of a giant from Biblical times, gave America its first pop icon, with huge crowds rushing to see P.T. Barnum’s spectacular replica of the giant whose petrified flesh had survived in stone. As the petrification mania stuck in the popular imaginary, stone statues were replaced in side shows by real human bodies intentionally injected with chemicals for preservation and petrification, much like Efisio Marini’s androlithes and obviously tapping 35 Epstein, ‘The Cinema Seen from Etna’, p. 289. 36 Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts, pp. 109-121; Lorusso and others, ‘Geology, Conservation and Dissolution of Corpses’, p. 472. As well as for petrifying the body of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, Gorini’s fame now rests on his invention of the first crematoriums in Italy and the United Kingdom. 37 Twain, ‘The Petrified Man’, p. 240. The article was first published in the Territorial Enterprise in October 1862; the July issue of the Scientific American for 1853 had already publicised the discovery of a ‘Petrified Man’ whose limbs had been completely transformed into stone.

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into the same desire, now massified, to believe that life could be caught in an oscillation across states of animation and fossilisation. Unlike their Egyptian counterparts, far from being mere ‘metaphors’, these stone mummies suspended between flesh and rock were the outcome of an imitation of nature that was still attuned to vitalist notions of matter, and as such they hovered between the scientifically possible and the purely imaginary only to follow the discrediting of vitalism as mere science fiction, a leftover from discarded ontologies now deemed incompatible with modern science. By the time H.P. Lovecraft, in the 1935 short story Out of the Eons, offed his version of a wondrous body of stone recalling the Cardiff Giant, the process of petrification was couched in the esoteric lore of ancient magic cults, the lithic creature now clearly assimilated to an Egyptian mummy; though, significantly, its internal organs and brain were found pulsating through the mineralised tissues, and the surface retina of its glassy eyes still preserved moving images from a vanished world, ‘filmed’ scenes from aeons before. Likewise, Edward L. Cahn’s revitalised stone-like man in the B-movie The Curse of the Faceless Man (1958) borrowed Egyptian legends of embalming fluids and uncanny reincarnations from Karl Freund’s horror template The Mummy (1932), only to repropose what was, in fact, a memory of the nineteenth-century craze for natural petrif ications. The story is set in Pompeii, and the petric body—unearthed from the archeological site and suspended between life and death to the amazement of the life scientist called to inspect him—is the (al)chemical make of melting lava, the earth’s radioactivity now responsible for the energy of his petrified flesh. He is undead as the world of stone is undead. So, as if to re-inject the Second World War’s catastrophic history of bodily incineration with a narrative of vitalist metamorphosis, radioactive energy reappears a mere three years later as an agent of a(na)tomic transformation for the fantastic human-rock superhero invented by Marvel comics with ‘Fantastic Four’ in 1961. No longer monsters of horror stories, petrif ied anatomies now resurface in full sci-f i garb through a ‘realistic’ superhuman character whose physiological mutation from flesh to stone, caused by a storm of cosmic rays, marks indeed a single state of being oscillating between human and rock, the living matter of things human and nonhuman (the hero is aptly called ‘The Thing’). This is ‘mummy complex’ as neither embalming nor reanimation but rather as an imaginary postlife that contemplates both, the life of matter’s unstable molecules passing through substances organic or inorganic. Engrossing fans for generations, ‘The Thing’ replays a modern petrification mania whose ultimate revival couldn’t but be within the contemporary archive of Americana pop culture, reinvented as the

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‘man in carbonite’ of a Star Wars mythology centred on a mystical energy field—the Force—pervading all matter. In The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the memorable scene of Han Solo’s carbon-freezing is indeed a bow to the fossil craze that had saturated the nineteenth-century imaginary: immersed down into the bowels of the earth through a steaming crater bathed in a fiery red light reminiscent of an erupting volcano, Han Solo is transformed into a living statue of himself by a material called ‘carbonite’, in a suitable intertwining of hybernation and fossilisation, the natural processes for suspending animation that had captured the modern imaginary. Solo is eructated by the deep hole as an auto-icon, his image petrified into a slab of carbonite which we are only shown lying horizontally on the ground, thus blending in a single frame a fossil, an effigy in lava, and a dead body buried in his marble sarcophagus. But, as we are immediately told, ‘he is alive’, bound to reappear in a subsequent episode of the saga (The Return of the Jedi, 1983) standing upright in suspended animation and turned into the most precious objet d’art in Jabba Hutt’s palace. Just like Efisio Marini’s bodies of stone, Han Solo’s androlithe shall regain his flesh and elasticity, but in the meantime, in 2004, a new species of trilobite fossil has been baptised ‘Han Solo’ by earth scientist Samuel L. Turvey,38 and the story continues.

Works cited Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. by Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not. Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). Jeremy Bentham, ‘Auto-Icon. Or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’ (1831-1832), in Bentham’s Auto-Icon and Related Writings, ed. by James E. Crimmins, pp. 1-21 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002). Manuel Borja-Villel and Michael Compton (eds.), Marcel Broodthaers. Cinéma, (Barcelona: Fondacio Antoni Tàpies, 1997). Miran Božovič, ‘The Body and Psycho. Or, “Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living”’, Umbr(a). Science and Truth 1 (2000): 81-98. Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010). David Collings, ‘Bentham’s Auto-Icon. Utilitarianism and the Evisceration of the Common Body’, Prose Studies. History, Theory, Criticism 23, 3 (2000): 95-127. 38 Turvey, ‘Agnostid trilobites’.

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Pietro Conte, In carne e cera (Macerata: Quodilibet, 2014). James E. Crimmins (ed.), Bentham’s Auto-Icon and Related Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002). Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew/D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. with an introduction by Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin Books, 1966). Jean Epstein, ‘The Cinema Seen from Etna’ (1926), in Jean Epstein. Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, pp. 287-307 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Luigi Ferrara, ‘La survivance du corps. Transformation du corps humain en marbre’, La Revue de Revues 15 (1898): 237-256. Amy L. Gates, ‘Fixing Memory. The Effigial Forms of Felicia Hemans and Jeremy Bentham’, Women’s Writing 21, 1 (2014): 58-73. Pierre Giraud, Les Tombeaux ou Essai sur les sépultures (Paris: Jacquin, 1801). Paolo Gorini, Sull’origine dei vulcani. Studio sperimentale (Lodi: Wilmant, 1871). George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Shana G. Lindsay, ‘Mortui Docent Vivos. Jeremy Bentham and Marcel Broodthaers in Figures of Wax’, Oxford Art Journal 36, 1 (2013): 93-107. Lorenzo Lorusso and others, ‘Geology, Conservation and Dissolution of Corpses by Paolo Gorini (1813-1881)’, A History of Geology and Medicine, ed. by Chris Duffin, Richard T.J. Moody and Christopher Gardner-Thorpe, pp. 469-474 (London: The Geological Society, 2013). Charles F.A. Marmoy, ‘The Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham at University College London, Medical History 2, 2 (1958): 77-86. Jane Munro, Silent Partners. Artists and Mannequins from Function to Fetish (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2014). Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2007). Paul A. Pickering and Robyn Westcott, ‘Monuments and Commemorations. A Consideration’, Humanities Research 10 (2003): 1-8. Patricia Pierson, ‘The Amethyst Seal. Anatomy and Identity in Bentham and Von Hagens’, in The Anatomy of Body Worlds, ed. by T. Christine Jespersen, Alicita Rodriguez and Joseph Starr, pp. 94-104 (London: McFarland, 2009). Irina Podgorny, ‘Changing the Dead to Statues of Stone. The Synthesis of Fossils, Petrifaction, Photography, and the Chemistry of the Gorgonean Arts’, Nuncius 27 (2012): 289-308. Peter H. Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Ruth Richardson and Brian Hurwitz, ‘Jeremy Bentham’s Self Image. An Exemplary Bequest for Dissection’, British Medical Journal 295 (1987): 195-198. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Institutions chimiques (Paris: Fayard, 1999).

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Jonathan Simon, ‘L’homme de verre? Les trois règnes et la promiscuité de la nature’, Corpus 26 (1999): 65-80. Barbara M. Stafford, Voyage Into Substance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984). Samuel T. Turvey, ‘Agnostid trilobites from the Arenig-Llanvirn of South China’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Earth Sciences 95, 3-4 (2004): 527-542. Mark Twain, ‘The Petrif ied Man’ (1862), in Sketches New and Old, pp. 239-242 (Hartford/Chicago: The American Publishing Company, 1875). Gian Marco Vidor, ‘Andro-lithe et pétrifications des cadavres humains au XIXe siècle’, Frontières 23, 1 (2010): 66-73. Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, The Atlantic Monthly 3 (1859): 738-748. Corrado Zedda, ‘Efisio Marini e Paolo Gorini: due personaggi a confronto’, in Storia di uno scienziato. La collezione anatomica di Paolo Gorini, pp. 81-87 (Bergamo: Bolis Edizioni, 2005).

About the author Alessandra Violi is Full Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Bergamo. Her research work has focused on the points of contact among literature, aesthetics and the human sciences, with particular attention to the medical imaginary and, specifically, the sciences of anatomy and neuropathology, on which she has published the volumes Le cicatrici del testo, (Bergamo, 1998) and Il teatro dei nervi (Milan, 2004). In addition, she has written books on the theme of the body as a medium (Impronte dell’aria, Bergamo, 2008), as artistic-anthropological material (Capigliature, Milan, 2008), and in the cultural imaginary (Il corpo nell’immaginario letterario, Milan, 2013).

5.

Bodies’ Strange Stories: Les Revenants and The Leftovers Luca Malavasi

Abstract Focusing on two TV series, the French Les Revenants and the American The Leftovers, the essay aims to analyse the cultural and techno-scientific paradigm of animation of the inanimate and its opposite, which may range from reification and ghostly disembodiment to a redefinition of what the human is. Driven by an apocalyptic imaginary, both television projects revolve around the failure of the natural order to distinguish and separate life from death; therefore, they revolve as well around the crisis of the psychological, social and ritual processes through which life, by working through the thought of death, allows the subject to make sense of time and reality—that is, to perceive and understand the finitude of things and the mortality of bodies. Keywords: Body; presence; object; statue; The Leftovers; Les Revenants

While the philosophy of the new millennium has been marked by a shift towards ‘New Realism’,1 another paradigm has been gradually emerging since the late 1990s, which we may call the ‘paradigm of presence’.2 Despite the obvious differences between their methods and goals, both paradigms respond to the same desire to promote a description of reality and subjectivity which, unlike postmodern constructivist philosophies, tries to account for the ‘materiality’ of existence, the ‘things of the world’ and human action. At the same time, these paradigms fruitfully respond to 1 See Lopéz and Potter, After Postmodernism; Ferraris, Documentalità; Ferraris, Introduction to New Realism; De Caro and Ferraris, Bentornata realtà; Gabriel, Fields of Sense. 2 For an introduction, see Ghosh and Kleinberg, Presence.

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chIII05

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the need to acknowledge and reassign value to the ‘work’ of the senses. As Frank Ankersmit puts it, they form part of a more general movement ‘away from language toward experience’,3 especially as far as the interpretation and the configuration of history are concerned. In Maurizio Ferraris’ view, the movement’s main objective is to overturn constructivist hierarchies in the relationship between things and meanings: ‘The organization is first in the world, then in the eye, and only as a last resort in the brain.’4 The trend is further confirmed by an emerging interest, in philosophy as well as in the cognitive sciences, in the role of perception and the ‘reasons’ of the body, with a view to reconnecting the action of thought to that of the senses. Against this background we may also historically account for the renewed attention to the processes by which ‘vital’ qualities are attributed to images,5 a subject long regarded as a province of the anthropology of art which has now expanded into a study of the nonaesthetic, ongoing relationships between human subjects and images experienced in terms of living presence. Not surprisingly, in his analysis of the contemporary pictorial turn, characterised by a rapidly growing production of images, William J.T. Mitchell has shifted the problem from images onto their viewers.6 In his opinion, the major issues are, in fact, what roles images play in the world, what reactions they arouse in viewers and what power is inherent in/ascribed to their performances. Attitudes such as idolatry, iconophilia, iconoclasm and fetishism do not belong only to the past; on the contrary, the contemporary visual landscape is characterised by quite contradictory feelings about images, ‘adored and reviled, worshiped and banned, created with exquisite artistry with boundless ferocity and destroyed’.7 This is both an ontological and a phenomenological question: at the beginning of postmodernity and at the dawn of a new media age, both the status and the role of images (of all types of images) underwent a significant change in their relation to reality and to viewers. And as a result of that, the viewers’ positionings (concrete, ethical and ideological) and actions have also changed in response to a media production that has made the image its chosen language. Now that the electronic and digital revolutions have reached completion, the crux of the contemporary visual turn seems to lie precisely in the risky, uncertain, experimental reopening of the whole question of 3 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, p. 1. 4 Ferraris, ‘Esistere è resistere’, p. 158. 5 A synthesis in van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence. 6 See Mitchell, What Do Picures Want?. 7 Mitchell, ‘Image’, p. 36.

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the relation between the two worlds, that of the observers and that of the images. The increasing autonomisation of the latter (object, pure sign, idol, living presence, fetish),8 which turns out to be no longer relying on referential anchors9 and ‘demands’ on totality (like a story, a device, a palimpsest, etc.), has been increasingly bringing into play the issue of a sensitive, lived, material ‘corporeality’ and, in parallel, the concept of experience.10 The contemporary paradigm of the image as living presence is thus not only a fundamental research tool in the renewed nexus between the history of art and anthropology but rather an unavoidable hermeneutical filter in the analysis of visual landscapes where constant phenomena of qualitative and functional exchange take place between inanimate bodies (‘It is possible to describe the history of communication as the story of a progressive lighting of stone’)11 and living organisms. While inanimate bodies claim, or require, living presence and action; living organisms undergo various processes of reification. Today the paradigm of presence—here understood as an agency of the image, extending bios and its inherent logic to the inanimate body—is not given without its opposite: the spectral paradigm, i.e. the atrophy of the human, which brings back the issue of the referent, understood as the surrendering of the body to ‘that funereal and loving stillness’12 which is peculiar to the photographic image. The animation of the inanimate and its opposite, which may range from reification and ghostly disembodiment to a redefinition of what the human is, are therefore intimately connected to a social paradigm characterised by forms of existence that are no longer modelled on ‘the human’. Jonathan Crary has actually pointed out that our present 24/7 society is inevitably drifting towards a reif ication of individuals, driven to ‘reimagine and refigure themselves as being of the same consistency and values as the dematerialized commodities and social connections in which they are immersed so extensively. […] Paradoxically, this means impersonating the inert and the inanimate.’13 The impending death of every ‘natural’ principle of existence is a condition that both Crary and Han significantly compare to a lack of distinction between wakefulness and sleep.14 In their turn, 8 See Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. 9 See the dialogue at a distance with Roland Barthes (La Chambre claire) in Han, Im Schwarm (I have used the Italian edition: Nello sciame). 10 See Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies, in particular Chapter 2 (‘Body’) and Chapter 6 (‘Senses’). See also Casetti, ‘Beyond Subjectivity’; Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy. 11 Han, Im Schwarm, p. 72 (Italian ed.; my trans.). 12 See Barthes, Camera Lucida. 13 Crary, 24/7, pp. 99-100 (emphasis mine). 14 See also Nancy, The Fall of Sleep.

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contemporary visual arts (think of Stelarc and Olafur Eliasson) and cinema, whose principle of the animation of images has now become a genuine aesthetics, have been foregrounding a dissolution of the performative and even of the ontological borders between the animate and the inanimate. If the philosophical paradigm of presence resonates through visual culture and sociology as the key word in the analysis of contemporary society, this is because it calls for an investigation into those phenomena of exchange, dialogue and confrontation between the organic and the inorganic that are responsible for a deep resemantisation of the (historical and biological) concepts of life and death: the life and the death of bodies and of things. This issue has been recently addressed by two television productions, the French Les Revenants, created by Fabrice Gobert (two seasons of eight episodes each, aired between 2012 and 2015), and the American The Leftovers, created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta (two seasons of ten episodes each, aired between 2014 and 2015). Driven by an ambiguously apocalyptic imaginary, both projects revolve around the failure of the natural order to distinguish and separate life from death; therefore, they revolve as well around the crisis of the psychological, social and ritual processes through which life, by working through the thought of death, allows the subject to make sense of time and reality—that is, to perceive and understand the finitude of things and the mortality of bodies. Les Revenants does it with presence, the unexplained return of some dead people to their homes and families in a small mountain village threateningly dominated by a dam; The Leftovers does it with absence, the sudden departure of 140 million people around the world on 14 October 2011 (the first season follows the lives of the citizens of Mapleton, New York, while the second is set in the ‘miracle’ town of Jarden, Texas). Both series are deliberately realistic, shorn of all references to the horror or gothic imaginary and careful to avoid the regime of the fantastic, despite their allusion to the supernatural. Because impossible events are immediately domesticated as uncanny verisimilitudes and turned into ‘matters of fact’, the questions of how and why such returns or departures could ever take place seem to matter less than the narrative exploration of psychological and emotional processes. The two dynamics of disruption of the natural order end up questioning less some abstract concepts of life and death than the specific forms and principles of existence of bodies—both animate and inanimate—that inhabit the world. Not surprisingly, in both series even natural elements behave inexplicably: in Les Revenants, while water slowly and mysteriously retreats from the dam, the territory itself undergoes sudden transformations and distortions as if caught in a Moebius strip, so that mental maps do not

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match real places anymore, and entering or leaving the village turns out to be impossible. In The Leftovers, the second season opens with a sort of earthquake (there will be several others in subsequent episodes) and the sudden drying up of a river. Indecipherable behaviours seem to spread even through the animal world. In Les Revenants, while exploring the dam in a vain attempt to find out why the water is subsiding, the divers discover the corpses of about thirty perfectly preserved animals (deer, beavers, wolves, moose); the only unlikely explanation offered for their death is mass suicide, as if the animals, perhaps chased by something terrifying, had preferred to die by drowning rather than to fight. In The Leftovers, after the blackout of 14 October, animals (dogs, wolves, deer…) no longer seek any relationship with the humans and retreat to purely instinctive (and often violent) forms of life at the edge of town: as the ‘hunter’ Dean (a ‘nocturnal’ and evanescent character) points out to Kevin Garvey (Mapleton’s police chief), ‘those are no longer our animals’. This ‘dull’ animism of natural and animal elements, together with the inexplicable movements and trajectories of the bodies of the dead and the living around which both series weave their plots, projects the image of a world where the paradigm of the death (and, by extension, of the life) of the body stops working by natural and unreflective laws. What comes to the fore is an inevitable dissociation of matter from its vital principle, which raises the question of the referential relation of the body to its ‘content’. As a matter of fact, those processes of (re)animation of the inanimate and reification of the human that we have described above are both cause and effect of a contemporary imaginary of the body that puts back into play the ancient dualism between ‘soma’ and ‘psyche’, though the latter is now reformulated in terms of identity rather than the soul. From this perspective, the body can alternatively be understood as the purely carnal envelope of the soul (and, ultimately, its ‘coffin’, following the Platonic etymological connection between séma and sóma); or, following the Christian tradition, as the sacred ‘objective correlative’ of being, from which it cannot be separated.15 The striking similarity between these television series is precisely the circulation of bodies-object (and objects-body) released from their immediate and expected functioning, ambiguously suspended as they are in the uncanny territory of quasi-: as if/almost-subjects and -objects, -alive and -dead, -self and -other. In Les Revenants, the dead who come back—to take their places in their families and homes, with no memory of their death—are bodies petrified in 15 See Detrez, La construction sociale du corps.

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time, because time has not passed for them, as the physical distance between the Séguret twins unmistakably reveals: Camille, the first revenant, and Léna, who has grown and changed over the four years between the death and the return of her sister. Like post-mortem pictures, the revenants are primarily visual and bodily pieces of evidence of the time of their deaths, of which they stand as living remainders. By their mere presence, they thus insinuate a (by no means metaphorical) suspension of time and action in the world of the living, where space, as we saw, is equally ‘suspended’. This regime of death, which is symmetrical and opposed to the breath of life that has returned to them, is marked by a violent repression of a mourning process which, in fact, has already taken place. From the narratological point of view, their amnestic conscience forces a connection between two syntactic ‘sequences’ which, in fact, had been separated by an intermediary stage given over to mourning and to the painful though inevitable projection into the future. Returning from the time of death (from the very moment when life stopped), the revenants will therefore represent a perennial vivification of death; they are like ‘prints’ and analogues of the body framed at the time of its death, living pictures of a finite time that is closer, indeed, to the time of a photograph or a portrait. The powerful paradox that the revenants embody lies in this very incarnation of their cadaverous effigy, for in the eyes of those who re-encounter them, they are both familiar and alien, both themselves and others, body and image, alive at the time of their deaths. They are not simply living dead; their condition has nothing to do with the iconography and the tradition of zombies: they are living presences that embody their own deaths, much like a sign floating between an iconic and an indexical relation to a referent. It is not surprising that, from one episode to the next, the status and the regime of existence of the revenants are met with multiple attempts at definition and ‘moralisation’. Some think that they might be clones, and when not, simply close to nothing; others, following the Christian tradition, understand them as resurrected bodies or, conversely, as the deceptive and ‘psychic’ materialisations of people whose return the living desire most; others classify them as ghosts or angels, zombies or vampires or, more generally speaking, just monsters. This ontological and phenomenological ambiguity, which is both the cause and the effect of the revenants’ disturbing nature, is reflected also in the subtle deformation, by defect or excess, of some of their vital functions (the revenants cannot sleep and keep eating all the time), in the putrefaction of their flesh (whose corruption, beginning a few days after their return, shows a powerful dissociation of the dead body from recaptured life—rotting does not cause them any pain). It is

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also apparent in the ambiguous (because only visual and never thoroughly explored) relation between the revenants and electricity, itself a powerful vestige of the biological and literary imaginary of the electrophysiology of the body: starting with the opening title sequence, the return of the revenants is associated with blackouts, as if the revenants feed on electricity. Starting from the opposite principle of absence, The Leftovers projects an uncanny domestic setting that is marked not so much by the working through of bereavement as by the sheer emotional, psychological and ritual inability of the ‘leftovers’ (the remnants) to give parting from the dead some kind of form, the rite of passage that is also needed for any social construction of time.16 The bodies of family members, relatives and friends have, in fact, not actually died, they simply disappeared: they are (quite literally) departed (14 October will be remembered as the day of the Departure), removed out of sight like ghostly presences, without leaving a clue, a trail, a sign or an image. What is left behind them is just an oppressively empty space, nothing but a shadow or a silhouette, a negative presence (even in ‘photochemical’ terms). This is made clear in the opening title sequence of the second season, where the apocalyptic imagery of the first season is replaced by a series of photographs representing the departed as both present and absent bodies: though emptied of any figurative content, they still retain their plastic ‘encumbrance’ by occupying a place in space and in the syntax of the scene, which is made unstable by their negative presences. That is what the departed actually are: thick shadows, surfaces beyond eidetic recognition, albeit statuary in their ‘mineral’ materialisations (the silhouettes of the opening sequence are filled with light, clouds, water, stars, skies). They look indeed like psychic projections, but they are also quite tangible—challenging once again the relationship between sòma and bíos, bodily envelopes and vital principles. Hence the remarkably subtle work on the animation of simulacra and the statuary reification of the human that runs through the whole series. The empty space—a perfect image of the spatialisation of time—that the inexplicable departure of millions of people has carved into everyday life sparks a phenomenological short circuit in the regime of human presence, which produces either a desire to reanimate and flesh out, through images, a time and a memory left in standby or the acquiescent dissolution into that inanimate state that the Departure seems to have disclosed as an unavoidable fate. So, in the fourth episode of the first season, set during Christmas and opened by a sequence showing the manufacturing of dolls, 16 See Kellehear, A Social History of Dying.

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Kevin Garvey’s main problem is to find one of those dolls which, properly dressed, has been placed among other statues as Baby Jesus in the nativity scene of Mapleton. Someone stole it, a nasty, sadistic joke that aims to reenact and exacerbate the drama of departure. Thus, when the mayor asks Kevin to buy another doll (‘For fuck’s sake, Kevin, it’s not the actual baby Jesus’), the man goes to a shopping mall, but once he is there he remembers the words of his daughter Jill, who thinks that, far from being a solution, buying another doll would be like cheating. Irritated, Kevin leaves the toy and begins his quest for the ‘real’ Jesus Child. Increasingly complex feelings coalesce around this fetish during the episode, while the doll gains vital status (‘this little guy’) and is charged with symbolic values that exceed the boundaries of the sacred rituals: rescuing it (which has now turned into Mapleton’s overall mission) may prove that things never really disappear but can be found and may return to their places. Eventually it is Kevin—who more than anyone else has come increasingly to attach significance to the doll—who will get rid of it, throwing it away in the street and bringing this story of self-deception to some sort of closure: meanwhile, someone else, having heard that Baby Jesus has disappeared, has provided another one to replace the ‘kidnapped’ Jesus. In the fourth episode of the first season, other bodies and other fetishes appear, the so-called Loved Ones. These are ‘fragile’, expensive and perfect reproductions of the departed, commissioned by those who, after three years, have given up their hopes to see their beloved come back and wish to celebrate some funeral and bury ‘something’ at least. The paradox embodied by the Loved Ones is symmetrical and opposite to that of the revenants: it deals with the desire to reassign artificially a body to the departed, so that the remnants can live their death, as if the process of life extinction could be actually, thoroughly and effectively performed only by means of a visible and tangible image. These simulacra of synthetic material, placed in coffins, are given the totemic task of clotting the memories and channeling the feelings of the remnants: their quality of living presence paradoxically lies in their ability to provide shape and substance to death, thus calling time into motion and marking the beginning of a traditional cult of the dead. Aware of the paradox, in the last episode of the first season the Guilty Remnants take possession of these fetishes to set up the extraordinary scenery and sadistic theatre of the dead. In The Leftovers, the Guilty Remnants enact a powerful countermovement to that of the Loved Ones, shifting from living body to statuary presence. Dressed only in white, the followers of this cult are bound to take a vow of silence (although they are allowed to communicate through writing) and to eradicate each and every

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relation with family and friends. Moreover, they are forbidden to feel any love or compassion and to remember the past, as if the blankness of their costumes were but a reflection of their inner condition; as Rev. Matt points out, ‘They’re already dead’. Dried up in their humanity, the Guilty Remnants inhabit Mapleton like real statues: they do not communicate with other people, they just stay still in space, like living reminders which, by appearing outside the houses or on public occasions and ideally replacing the departed, keep memory alive and present in those who are trying to elaborate the absence of their beloved and obliterate the meaning of Departure. In this respect, the Guilty Remnants take on the proper memorial function of monuments while neutralising their power to celebrate and comfort the living. Not surprisingly, in the first episode of the first season, during the public opening of the monument to the departed (a bronze statue of a mother outstretching her arms toward her son while he is flying away into the sky), the Guilty Remnants confront the crowd with placards saying ‘Stop Wasting Your Breath’. In the final episode of the first season, as already mentioned, the Guilty Remnants sadistically overthrow the meaning of the Loved Ones by setting up tableaux vivants inspired by the day of the departure in every house. After having introduced themselves secretly into the houses of Mapleton citizens and having removed all pictures left in the photograph frames (thus anticipating the empty spaces looking for images of the title sequence of the second season), they use these pictures to commission a series of Adored Ones. Later on, under cover of night, they set up a sort of uncanny historical reenactment, again inspired (like their becoming statues) not by ritual celebration and the distancing of time and events by means of the image but rather by the ‘material’ presentification of the departed. Nora—for whom time stopped the morning of October 14—finds her husband and her two children ‘still’ sitting at the kitchen table and having breakfast; another woman, peering out from indoors, sees her husband outside standing on a ladder and cleaning the gutters; in the street other people come across acquaintances and friends who had suddenly disappeared while pushing a shopping cart or meditating in the middle of a lawn. Thus the bodies return to occupy those spaces that were never really freed of their presence, and the community of the living is given a sadistic demonstration of the power of images to take possession of life. In the first episode of Les Revenants, soon after witnessing in disbelief the return of her daughter, Claire (Camille’s mother) runs into the girl’s room to remove the framed photograph, now illuminated by a candle, of Camille smiling next to her sister; in the same episode, Mr. Costa—who

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saw the return of his dead wife after 34 years—gathers all the pictures that portray her and, after having tied up and gagged the woman, sets the house on fire and commits suicide at the dam. Miracle or curse as the case may be, those bodies returning from the dead are in any case perceived as images inexplicably inhabited by life and disturbingly freed from the ‘photographic’ stillness of memory. Claire is afraid that Camille could return into the frame, while Mr. Costa hopes that by burning images of his wife, the woman’s body will return to ashes. As if by way of introduction to the whole series, at the very beginning of Les Revenants’ first episode this movement from the inanimate to living presence is exemplified by the story of a butterfly breaking free from her ‘fossilised’ state in a picture: beginning with a slow flutter, she finally breaks the glass that separates her from the outside world. Alive again, and free. By contrast, at the end of the first season of The Leftovers, a huge fire is set up that, like a painful collective sacrifice, devours and swallows the statues of the Adored Ones arranged by the Guilty Remnants in every house and on every street of Mapleton. The effigies that stole life and memories now are accompanied with tears and despair to an ambiguous death. What the Guilty Remnants really want is to annihilate the power of the image to give death to its referent, against the commemorative function of the monument to the Departed, or against the use of Adored Ones as replacements. After all, as those who saw family and friends enter the sect know too well (like Kevin with his wife, Laurie), the Guilty Remnants impose themselves as paradoxical living funeral monuments, present images of what is no longer there. They function, in a way, like ‘living dead’. As these examples confirm, the impossible events around which these two series revolve—the return of the dead and the departure of the living—do not just call into play the abstract ideas of life and death on a ‘philosophical’ level. On the contrary, they project a phenomenology of the presence of the bodies and articulate it through the ‘mystery’ of images—images that come to life and living bodies which, drawn by the example or the power of images, mimic their logic more or less consciously. Thus, the ‘impossible’ stories of the revenants, the remnants and the departed are also the stories of how bodies (of flesh, of images) move to and fro between the realms of the animate and the inanimate, generating an ontological and performative short circuit that calls into question the relation of psychic images (especially mnemonic) to material images (photographs, monuments, statues, etc.)17 and living bodies. By articulating these relations, the two series end up establishing themselves 17 For the distinction, see Wunenburger, Philosophie des images.

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as emblematic representations of a contemporary social paradigm in which the process of reification has overflowed the territory of the human and, vice versa, where vital qualities are attributed to the world of the inanimate. Far from being just parenthetical phenomena, these are the essential dynamics of a new regime of the image that the digital society seems not only to legitimate but rather to prescribe, calling for a general re-engineering of the forms of life and for a new anthropology of presence.

Works cited Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (1980), trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). Francesco Casetti, ‘Beyond Subjectivity. The Film Experience’, in Subjectivity, ed. by Dominique Chateau, pp. 53-65 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011). ———, The Lumière Galaxy. Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Jonathan Crary, 24/7. Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London/New York: Verso, 2013). Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris (eds.), Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione (Turin: Einaudi, 2012). Christine Detrez, La construction sociale du corps (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002). Maurizio Ferraris, Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciar tracce (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2009). ———, ‘Esistere è resistere’, in Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione, ed. by Mario De Caro and Maurizio Ferraris, pp. 139-165 (Turin: Einaudi, 2012). ———, Introduction to New Realism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense. A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Ranjan Ghosh and Ethan Kleinberg (eds.), Presence. Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2013). Byung-Chul Han, Im Schwarm. Ansichten des Digitalen (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013). Italian trans. by Federica Buongiorno, Nello sciame. Visioni del digitale (Rome: Nottetempo, 2015). Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). José Lopéz and Garry Potter (eds.), After Postmodernism. An Introduction to Critical Realism (London/New York, The Athlone Press, 2001).

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William J.T. Mitchell, What Do Picures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). William J.T. Mitchell, ‘Image’, in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. by William J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, pp. 35-48 (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). Allan Kellehear, A Social History of Dying (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence. From the Animated Image to Excessive Objects (Boston/Berlin/Munich: De Gruyter, 2015). Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Philosophie des images (Paris: PUF, 1997).

About the author Luca Malavasi is Associate Professor at DIRAAS (Dipartimento di Italianistica, Romanistica, Antichistica, Arti e Spettacolo) of the University of Genoa, where he teaches Film History, Film Criticism and Theory of Film Images. He earned a PhD in History and Forms of Representation and Media Consumption at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan). He mainly deals with the theory of the image and contemporary cinema. His books include Mulholland Drive (2008), Italia, cinema di famiglie. Storia, generi, modelli (ed., 2013), Realismo e tecnologia. Caratteri del cinema contemporaneo (2013), Il cinema. Percorsi storici e questioni teoriche (with G. Carluccio and F. Villa, 2015), Postmoderno e cinema. Nuove prospettive d’analisi (2017), Il linguaggio del cinema (2019).

This final section considers the process of monumentalisation that stone produces ‘treating’ the body. The concept of the monument allows a reflection on mnemonic practices that structure our relationship to the heritage of images that is at the base of our collective imagery. The monument is an exemplary and paradigmatic case of mnestic externalisation: it is a visible image in which a community records its memory of an event, a person, a moment crucial to its history in order to avoid loss and forgetfulness. If we look at the ways in which the monumental sensibility of an epoch expresses itself, we will at the same time have a vision of the balance that each epoch negotiates between the dimensions of memory and oblivion. As Plato clearly stated in his dialogue Phaedrus (274e-275a), and as Jacques Derrida more recently repeated in his Plato’s Pharmacy (1968), any device assuring an externalisation of our recollections produces an intrinsically paradoxical effect: trusting the medium to remember on my behalf, I can allow myself to forget. Similar to the paradoxical effect known in pharmacology (for instance, pain caused by a pain relief medication), the aids for remembering end up causing amnesia: they represent a veritable pharmakon, at the same time medicine and poison for memory. In the longue durée that runs from ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary psychological and neurological memory modelisations, what is particularly intriguing is the fact that the externalisation paradigm, far from applying only to actually external devices (from writing tablets to digital clouds), informs the way in which internal procedures of memorisation are understood. The possibility of memory is conceived of as structurally linked to the possibility of the graphic inscription. From Plato’s metaphor of the soul as a wax block, described in his dialogue Theaetetus (191c), through Aristotle’s On the Soul (430a) and On Memory and Reminiscence (450a) to Freud’s A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad” (1925) and down to the contemporary cognitive neuroscience of memory, the influential model of recollection as a kind of script reading has rested on the notion of imprinting as the condition of possibility for the production of the mnemonic trace. The conceptualisation of the internal memory is consequently inspired by the procedures of the externalised memory; internal remembering operates like the reminding and retrieving of an imprinted external trace. In this conceptual frame, a play on words offered by Plato in his Cratylus (400c) is remarkably telling: the body (soma) is called the “tomb” (sema) of the soul but also its “sign” (sema), because through the body the soul signifies (semainei). The cultural background for the connection bodysepulcher (which Plato shared with the Pythagoreans) is to be sought in the ancient Egyptian mystery cults, for which “tomb” is, foremost, the dead

corpse and not the architectural building hosting it. Plato’s pun adds to this thanatological association its semiotic counterpart: the body operates as a system of visible signs for the semantic outputs of the invisible soul. This crucial combination of thanatological and semiotic implications constitutes an early conceptualisation of the idea that the origins of image production, long before being concerned with mimetic representations, are rather intimately intertwined with the death rituals and the dialectics between absence and presence so thoroughly investigated by the school of historical psychology initiated by Jean-Pierre Vernant. The very notion of the cadaver as the first self-portrait finds its roots in this terrain. As the texts collected in this fourth section clearly show, this ancient categorial constellation of monumentality, memory, death and image is far from having exhausted its powerful efficacy in ancient times: quite on the contrary, it has demonstrated its capacity to pervade down the centuries heterogeneous genres of iconic expression and to intersect various medial manifestations, proving to be very much alive also in our contemporary epoch. Filippo Fimiani’s essay analyses in these terms the phenomenon of subjectivisation, as it is set out in 1940s French existentialist thought and taken up by Emmanuel Lévinas. From Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Blanchot, the imagination of the Self is subject to a process of petrification, a metaphor that expresses the production of an image of existence from a retrospective point of view, in sum, the point of view of death. On this view, life transformed into an image corresponds to a solid block, deprived of a future, unchanging and definitive, and traditionally associated with stone. Michel Leiris thinks of his own face as stone, using make-up to ‘chalk himself’, but he also imagines fusing his torso with a column, thus producing a literal monumentalisation of the Self. Maurice Blanchot asserts that the cadaver is an image, a ‘solemnly impersonal’ double of the subject, and this observation helps us to fully understand the concept of ‘face’ that Lévinas contrasts with that of ‘image’: where the former is a living representation, the latter is a death mask. The monumentalisation of the Self in the cadaver is also taken up by Elisabeth Bronfen’s discussion of the figure of Cleopatra. Cleopatra’s corpse plays a fundamental historic role in the Queen’s own choreography that selects the allegorical configuration through which she gives herself over to death and, so, to future memory, thus completing ‘the political divadom she had put on display throughout the play’. Here too, the production of the cadaver is an entry point into aesthetic life, into the symbolic realm, but also into the monumental genre, which in the cinema (and especially in the blockbusters on Cleopatra) features the cadaver’s reawakening from which point of view the protagonist’s story can be told.

Federica Villa’s contribution offers another telling example of a monumental narration that arises out of images of death. This is the case of Amos Humiston, a sergeant at the front in the American Civil War who, as he lay dying, chose to look at the photograph of his three children. Once more, it is the manner in which the cadaver is presented that produces the monumentalisation of the subject; in this case, transforming him into an exemplary individual whose story deserves to be recounted. He is an individual to whom a name needs to be given and, so, an existence that can represent them all; and it will be through a monumental bronze plaque that reproposes also the photograph of the children that he will be monumentalised, thus mineralising not so much the corpse of the soldier as his story. The plaque is one of the most common forms of monument, but, along with the very idea of the monument, it has been profoundly reconsidered in contemporary art. In ‘The Well-Tempered Memorial’, Andrea Pinotti considers the plaque Denkmal an ein Denkmal, by Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz, which was unveiled in 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald. The peculiarity of this large metal plate, on which are etched the nationalities of the camp’s inmates, is that it is kept at a temperature of 36.5°, that of the human body. Reflecting on the non-anthropomorphic equivalence between body and mineral as a broad horizon for the monumental, Pinotti invokes the concept of embodiment as key to overcoming the classical categories for analysing commemorative objects, such as abstract vs. concrete and transitive vs. intransitive. This primary link between body and monument is also at the centre of Sara Damiani’s discussion of ‘Monuments of the Heart’, which takes the limiting case in which the body is not the reference of the work but is the work itself, the living sarcophagus and the monument to another body that is welcomed within itself. This occurs in the contemporary operation of organ transplants, which redefine the boundaries of the Self and expand them to include the Other and other forms of existence, thus introducing the possibility of a biological form of commemoration. The ancient origins of the notion of transplant can be traced to the story of Artemisia, who drinks the ashes of her husband so as to become his sepulchre and to conserve his memory within her flesh. The collection closes with this image of the absolutely up-to-date re-emergence of monuments that move and breathe, that are mausoleums made of flesh or bodies—no longer cadavers—that turn themselves into images, stones, memories. Andrea Pinotti

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The Impassibly Fleshly, the Statue of the Impossible Filippo Fimiani

Abstract According to phenomenology, existence is an incarnate subjectivation which frees, by perceiving and imagining, the ‘Self’ from its petrification. Autobiography is a fiction pretending to repair this vitality, to represent the irrevocable future instant of death by images and words and to record the past as an irremediable destiny. To write the singular own existence is thus to make up a monumentalisation of the living being, fixed as a statue and fascinating as an idol, a death mask or a mummy. In the 1940s, Sartre, Lévinas, Blanchot and Bataille discussed Baudelaire, Proust and Leiris to challenge Heidegger’s existentialism and ontology of art. The essay examines this crucial debate—interdisciplinary, intertextual and intermedial—about literature and philosophy, picture, magic and death. Keywords: Georges Bataille; Maurice Blanchot; Emmanuel Lévinas; JeanPaul Sartre; philosophy of literature; aesthetics of sculpture

It will be with stones that I will vindicate myself. ‒ Leiris

‘At the bottom of sensation there is a corporeity, […] a liberation of the subject from his own petrification as subject, […] a freedom that undoes the structure.’1 ‘The word “I”, summarizes for me the structure of the world.’2 The f irst quotation is from Emmanuel Lévinas, a philosopher of the 1 Lévinas, ‘Intentionnalité et sensation’, p. 162. All the translations are mine. 2 Leiris, Aurora, p. 39.

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chIV01

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phenomenological school, and alludes to Husserl; the second is from Michel Leiris, a surrealist writer and ethnologist, a friend of Sartre’s and Bataille’s. Moving between philosophy and literature and over the course of a few years, I will follow the relation between subjectivisation and petrification and the way it affects imagination, the images of art, and death. To perceive, Lévinas tells us, is not to represent but to transcend, to go out of oneself and beyond the given, to join one’s own body to the flesh of the world. Perception is action in potency and an emancipation of the subject from the mere passion of sensation, in which the ‘aesthetic effect’3 of a material image is merely undergone like an anaesthetic that renders the subject insensitive, feelingless and indifferent. Embodied in a lived experience and in individual imagination, perception is, however, transformed into an image by the subject, which becomes such only through the other-than-himself and through the recounting of his own existence. For Sartre, the imagination produces ‘some petrifiable image’ of a past that has been shaped a posteriori as ‘unalterable and imperishable’, like a statue.4 This monumental image of oneself is a ‘life [seen] from the viewpoint of death [and as] already fixed’; it is an existence stripped of freedom and transformed into being and destiny, withdrawn from the fluid intentional life of the embodied mind. Baudelaire—who will be discussed here from the perspectives of Bataille, Blanchot and Leiris—‘sees and thinks, but no longer feels his own body: he has become insensitive’.5 For Blanchot, existence presents itself as if it had always been as it is in an image, with the solemnity of the ‘monumental presence of a past over which even the author no longer has any grip’, as described in the autobiographical writing of Leiris.6 To model a second body of stone with the rigor and fixity of a classical form in the place of that of mortal flesh is the desire of every writer.7 To make of life ‘a single solid block’8 is the aspiration of every narration of oneself, in which ‘existence […] speaks as if dead, as if always having been, always past, immobilized in a life grandiosely extraneous to every future, and even to that of death’.9 The instant fixed in the image is neutral, withdrawn both from time in its becoming, from life, and from the end of lived time, from death. Furthermore, as elaborated in Towards a Never Laocoon (1940), Malraux’s 3 Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant, pp. 44-46. 4 Sartre, Baudelaire, pp. 204-205. 5 Ibid., p. 105. 6 Blanchot, ‘Regards d’outre-tombe’, p. 248. 7 Blanchot, ‘Combat avec l’Ange’, p. 155. 8 Leiris, ‘De la littérature comme une tauromachie’, pp. 16, 20. 9 Blanchot, ‘Regards d’autre-tombe’, p. 248.

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Le Musée Imaginaire (1947) and Bazin’s ‘mummy complex’ (Ontologie de l’image photographique dates from 1945), sculpture exemplifies the arrest of the living being. Despite their differences, the visual arts share the dream of saving existence from time through the iconic presence, and the ‘single moment that the statue symbolizes and affirms […] is a liberation from duration, a marvelous equivalence of the eternal’.10 In 1948, Lévinas wrote: The image qua idol leads us to the ontological significance of its unreality. […] To say that an image is an idol is to affirm that every image is […] plastic, and that every artwork is […] a statue—an arrest of time, or rather its delay behind itself. […] A statue realizes the paradox of an instant that endures without a future. […] Within the life, or rather the death, of a statue, an instant endures infinitely. […] An eternally suspended future floats around the congealed position of a statue like a future forever to come. […] In this situation, the present can assume nothing, can take on nothing, and thus is an impersonal and anonymous instant.11

This thesis, opposed to that of the unreality of the image as an act of freedom of consciousness, is also supported by Blanchot, who perverts the language of Sartre’s L’Imaginaire: ‘The fact of not being able to feel fully the reality of death makes death unreal [and] condemns us to believe that we will die only unreally, in a state of non-existence and of non-death.’12 La littérature et le droit à la mort13 makes a topic of this relation between the interminable nature of dying and the ambiguity of literature, and thus dismisses Sartre and Heidegger. Impersonal and anonymous, the image as idol can be traced back to the mystic contagion with the sacred, to the ‘primitive mentality’ of Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim and to its fortune in phenomenology and Surrealism. The ‘idolatry of the beautiful’ is also that of the Greek pagan art notoriously favoured by Heidegger, which, ‘in its indiscreet exposition and in its arrest as statue, in its plasticity, replaces God’.14 Lévinas invokes instead a ‘philosophical critique of art’ to bring aesthetics back to ethics and, against the Pygmalion complex,15 to free the experience of works of art from fascination 10 Blanchot, ‘Le Musée, l’Art et le Temps’, p. 42; the article is about Malraux’s Psychologie de l’Art. 11 Lévinas, ‘La Réalité et son Ombre’, pp. 781-782 . 12 Blanchot, ‘Regards d’autre-tombe’, p. 255. See Fimiani, ‘Calque en rien’. 13 Blanchot, ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, pp. 331, 338-339. 14 Lévinas, Autrement qu’être, p. 191. 15 Lévinas, ‘La Réalité et son Ombre’, p. 781.

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and from the confusion between sensation, perception and animation. ‘The work of art’, he writes, ‘can and must be treated as a myth: this immobile statue, it is necessary to put it in movement and make it speak.’16 To bring sculpture back to its mythic state and to trace the plastic artefact back to its function as a magic intermediary of the sacred, ‘which is not an object or a person who speaks’,17 means to replace the substitutive funerary image with the Most High and the Other man, imageless and living: it means putting the Visage, which is irreplaceable, in the place of the Imago. Alluding to Hölderlin and Heidegger, Lévinas writes: ‘The Face in no way resembles its sculptural form, always already deserted, betrayed by the being that it reveals, like the marble, from which the gods that it manifests have already withdrawn.’18 Instead, for the dandy Leiris, the mask of modern cosmetics’ maquillage19 is ‘attractive as the most gracious of statues’ but ‘intangible as an idol’: I liked that sober and correct style, perhaps a bit sustained standoffish and almost funerary, that adapted so well […] to my temperament […]. I had acquired the habit of powdering my face […] as if I had wished to disguise it under a kind of mask and thus imprint upon my person an impassibility like those of gessoes. This corresponded to a symbolic attempt a mineralization, a defence mechanism against my internal weakness and the crumbling away by which I felt menaced; I would have liked to make of myself a kind of suit of armor, realizing in my appearance the same ideal of rigidity that I pursued poetically.20 Night and day, death towered over me like a gloomy threat. Perhaps I strove to believe that I would get around it with this minerality, that would have constituted an armor for me, a hiding place as well (like those that insects make of their bodies, pretending to be dead to overcome some danger), against its mobile but infallible attacks. Fearing death, I detested life (because death is its surest crowning).21

In commenting on these passages, Blanchot writes that ‘marble dreams are associated with the movements of the most lively sensitiveness [and] the 16 Ibid., p. 788. 17 Lévinas, ‘Lévy-Bruhl et la philosophie contemporaine’, p. 562. 18 Lévinas, ‘La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini’, p. 172. 19 Leiris, ‘L’homme et son intérieur’, p. 266. 20 Leiris, L’Age d’Homme, p. 185. 21 Leiris, Aurora, p. 84.

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infinite subterfuges’22 with which the writer invents figures and analogies to anticipate and procrastinate death, to embody in postures, images and words—his own and those of others—what his living organism and his consciousness will never be able to experience. ‘Marble dreams’ is lifted almost word for word from the f irst line of Baudelaire’s La Beauté, already picked up by Breton in Nadja and its famous definition of ‘convulsive beauty’. In poetry, thanks to the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, sculpture is the protagonist of a ‘stone dream’, and Nadja declares that she hates ‘the movement that shifts the lines’, that is, the sinuous and attractive curves of the living being, of the unknown passerby and of Jeanne, writhing like a serpent and cold as a statue.23 Against sculpture, ‘brutal and positive’, ‘boring and primitive’,24 we have the lines of mortal beauty of Femme piquée par un serpent and of Le Masque: the first is realised by August Clésinger on the model of his lover; the second by Ernest Christophe is an ‘allegorical statue in the taste of the Renaissance’ and of the Dying Slave of Michaelangelo. This figure at once headless, semi-covered by an imperturbable mask— ‘universal, yours, mine’, writes Baudelaire25—and ecstatic, with the head reclining backwards, will be photographed by Jacques-André Boiffard for an article by Robert Desnos.26 Leiris seems to allude to these two figures, suspended between carnal abandonment and mortal agony: For a long time, I have attributed to what is ancient a decidedly voluptuous characteristic. The constructions in marble attract me for their icy rigidity. I happen to imagine myself reclining on the pavement (I feel it’s cold on my skin) or standing against a column, with my torso glued to it.27

The beginnings of Proust’s Recherche resound here, where Leiris had found a cruel and precise autobiographical insight and an imaginary of the archaeological and the antique which confused organic details with those of sculpture, rendering the otherness of the characters indeterminate, 22 Blanchot, ‘Regards d’autre-tombe’, pp. 254, 257. 23 Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, pp. 21, 29. 24 Baudelaire, ‘Salon du 1846’, p. 487, and ‘Salon du 1859’, pp. 670-671. See Fimiani, ‘Rêves de pierre’, pp. 203-232. 25 Baudelaire, ‘Salon du 1859’, p. 678. 26 Desnos, ‘Pygmalion et le Sphinx’, pp. 33-38, discussed by Baker, ‘Base-Metal Materialism’, and ‘Surrealism in the Bronze Age. On statuephobia and the efficacy of metaphorical iconoclasm’, pp. 189-213. 27 Leiris, L’Age d’Homme, p. 56.

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ambiguous and indifferent. The uncertainty between vivif ication and petrification becomes a lack of distinction between a becoming-animal and becoming-monument of one’s own body, and these metamorphoses are modelled on the ‘second body’ of funerary sculptures and of threedimensional mimetic representations, the ‘photograph-sculptures’,28 as Caillois calls them, in which the insect is added to and blends with the vegetable or mineral support. The funerary mask and photography appear above all in the tale of Blanchot that is closest to Leiris, L’arrêt de mort. The protagonist, J—‘Je’, first person singular, and the initial of Judith, an obsessive proper name in Leiris—is described as lying down in the ‘immobility of a funerary figure and not of a living person’, ‘already nothing but a statue, living […] for eternity’.29 The source of this image is the photograph of the so-called Inconnue de la Seine, owned by Blanchot and included in Ernst Benkard’s book Undying Faces (1926), where Heidegger finds the paradigm of the material reproductive image.30 The funerary mask and the photograph show what they reproduce as both a singular individual and universal type, as an idea of the image in itself and of the death of man in general. Finally, they replace the singularity of the original and empty the exemplary nature of the prototype, affirming a resemblance without a model.31 The ontology of the image is a hauntology. For Lévinas, the cadaver ‘already bears within himself his phantasm, he announces his return’;32 it shows the unreality and impossibility of death, it affirms the repetition of the general economy of being and denies every symbolic image as an immortal double33 valid for cultural memory. For Blanchot, ‘the cadaver is its own image […]. He is more beautiful, more imposing, already monumental and so absolutely itself that it is as if redoubled by itself, united to the solemn impersonality of itself thanks to its resemblance and to the image […]. The cadaveric resemblance is an obsession.’34 Leiris’ autobiographical writing never ceases to enact an obsessive resemblance, in a proleptic and prophylactic funerary ritual of the images of himself, in which the body transforms, it becomes its own double, an undecidable analogon between the imaginary and the real image, between 28 Caillois, ‘Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire’, p. 100. 29 Blanchot, L’arrêt de mort, pp. 35, 52, 125. 30 Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, pp. 94-97. See Alloa, ‘Bare Exteriority’. 31 Sartre, L’Imaginaire, pp. 31 ff., 39 ff. 32 Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant, p. 100. 33 See Vernant, ‘The Figuration of the Invisible’, p. 252. 34 Blanchot, ‘Les deux version de l’imaginaire’, pp. 346-347.

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mental representation and external presentation, between Vorstellung and Darstellung.35 Blanchot’s article on L’Age d’homme closes as follows: ‘The I, penetrating into its “interior darkness”, discovers that what is looking into him, is no longer the I, “structuring the world”, but already the monumental statue, gazeless, figureless and nameless: the He of sovereign Death.’36 L’Instant de ma mort, written in 1994, ends with a sentence in which it is not clear who is speaking: ‘As if death outside of him couldn’t touch the death inside him. “I am alive. No, you are dead.”’ On the last, unnumbered page: ‘There remains only the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to say it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance.’37 The imminence of death is its immanence and its instance, its singular exemplarity always on the verge, figurable in the living being and universalisable in an image. Fixed and suspended, sanctioned and revoked: each time unique. And repeated.38 The expression Arrêt de mort, the title of the tale from 1948, means at the same time death sentence and the arrest of its happening, decree and prorogation—arête is ridge, crest, turning point, limit—what is prohibited and what the living being transgresses by writing, continually on the point of dying but never dead. The booklet of 1944 is all under the sign of repetition and survival—like Kafka’s The Hunter Gracchus, neither dead nor living.39 L’instant de ma mort came out fifty years after a very brief autobiographical text, ‘Des diverses façons de mourir’, published perhaps the same day that Blanchot—like Dostoevsky and Malraux—eventfully escaped a German firing squad, and in which we read: ‘Death changes us into pure object and destiny.’40 Both for Lévinas41 and for Sartre, 42 destiny is the present of the material image incapable of forcing the future, it is the instant plastically suspended and eternally reiterated and reified. In bad faith, Baudelaire freely chose to transform his life into destiny, into an ‘impossible statue’, and withdrew childishly from the seriousness of commitment and action, he preferred the insufficiency, hypocrisy and imposture of the images of poetry. 35 See Belting, An Anthropology of Images, p. 88. 36 Blanchot, ‘Regards d’autre-tombe’, p. 258. 37 Blanchot, L’instant de ma mort, pp. 17 ff. 38 In Sur Nietzsche, f inished in August of 1944, the eternal return is ‘the dramatic manner and the mask […] of a man for whom by now every instant is senseless’ (Bataille, Sur Nietzsche, p. 23). 39 Blanchot, ‘Kafka et la littérature’, p. 16. 40 Blanchot, ‘Des diverses façons de mourir’, pp. 2-3. For a reconstruction see Bident, Maurice Blanchot, pp. 228-232; for a critical reading, Derrida, Demeure. Fiction et témoignage, pp. 13-73. 41 Lévinas, ‘La Réalité et son Ombre’, pp. 781-782. 42 Sartre, Baudelaire, p. 245.

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Blanchot43 overturns Sartre’s thesis: Baudelaire’s defeat is the abdication of poetry in favour of non-poetry, the verbal ‘imbecility’ of the last days of the poet; the defeat of a deceitful life brings about ‘a poetically true life’ and the success of its literary survival or living on, the unreal eternity of the work of art; militant suicide is echoed by the impossibility of death. Contrary to Sartre, choosing to overcome the likeness of images and of words—to renounce writing in order to live and to act—would mean to Blanchot being ‘petrified by the spirit of seriousness [as another] spirit of imposture’. 44 In the same years, Bataille wrote: ‘From the Fleurs du Mal to folly, it is not the impossible statue that [Baudelaire] was dreaming of, but the statue of the impossible.’45 For him, too, ‘the refusal to act by the accomplished’ and mature man, the absence of seriousness, of usefulness and of realisation that had been condemned by Sartre, take a different sign. They are the symptoms of the sovereignty of man in general and of poetry in particular, which affirms not the possible and its opposite, the impossible as ‘an accepted renunciation’—as the phenomenological suppression or epoché—but the impossible as the inactivity and exasperation of the I.46 In a material, visual or verbal, and mental image.

Works cited Emmanuel Alloa, ‘Bare exteriority. Philosophy of the Image and the Image of Philosophy in Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot’, Colloquy 11 (2005): https://monash.figshare.com/articles/Bare_Exteriority_Philosophy_of_the_Image_and_the_Image_of_Philosophy_in_Martin_Heidegger_and_Maurice_Blanchot/4986437/1 (accessed 9 December 2019). Simon Baker, ‘Surrealism in the Bronze Age. Statuephobia and the eff icacy of metaphorical iconoclasm’, in Iconoclasm. Contested objects, contested terms, ed. by Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay, pp. 189-213 (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2007). ———, ‘Base-Metal Materialism’, Papers of Surrealism 7 (2007): http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal7/acrobat%20files/articles/ bakerpdf.pdf (accessed 9 December 2019). Georges Bataille, Sur Nietzsche (1945), in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 11 (1973), pp. 7-208 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970-1988). 43 44 45 46

Blanchot, ‘L’échec de Baudelaire’, pp. 139-140, 153, 155. Blanchot, ‘Combats avec l’Ange’, p. 161. Bataille, ‘Baudelaire’, p. 202. Bataille, Notes to the Préface à L’Impossible, pp. 512-518.

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———, ‘Notes’ to the ‘Préface à L’Impossible’ (1947-1967), in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 3, pp. 509-522 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970-1988). ———, ‘Baudelaire’ (1947-1957), in La littérature et le mal (1957), in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 9 (1979), pp. 189-209 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970-1988). Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon du 1846’, in Œuvres Complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois, vol. 2 (1976), pp. 415-496 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-1976). ———, ‘Salon du 1859’, in Œuvres Complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois, vol. 2 (1976), pp. 608-682 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-1976). ———, Les Fleurs du Mal (1861), in Œuvres Complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois, vol. 1 (1975), pp. 3-134 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-1976). Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body (2001), trans. by Thomas Lundap (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014). Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot. Partenaire invisible (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1998). Maurice Blanchot, ‘Des diverses façons de mourir’, Journal des Combats 29 June 1944. ———, ‘Kafka et la littérature’ (1945), in La part du feu, pp. 20-34 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). ———, ‘Regards d’outre-tombe’ (1947), in La part du Feu, pp. 238-248 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). ———, ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’ (1947), in La part du feu, pp. 291-331 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). ———, ‘L’échec de Baudelaire’ (1947), in La part de feu, pp. 133-151 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). ———, L’arrêt de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1948; reprint 1980). ———, ‘Le Musée, l’Art et le Temps’ (1950), in L’Amitié, pp. 21-51 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). ———, ‘Les deux versions de l’imaginaire’ (1951), in L’espace littéraire, pp. 266-277 (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). ———, ‘Combat avec l’Ange’ (1956), in L’Amitié, pp. 150-161 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). ———, L’instant de ma mort (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994). Roger Caillois, ‘Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire’ (1935), in Le Mythe et l’Homme, pp. 86-122 (Paris: Gallimard, 1938; reprint 1973). Jacques Derrida, ‘Demeure. Fiction et témoignage’ (1995), in Passions de la littérature. Avec Jacques Derrida, ed. by Michel Lisse, pp. 13-73 (Paris: Galilée, 1996). Robert Desnos, ‘Pygmalion et le Sphinx’, Documents, 2 (1930) (anastatic reprint Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991): 33-38. Filippo Fimiani, ‘Calque en rien’, in Lévinas autrement, ed. by Roger Burggraeve, Joëlle Hansel, Marie-Anne Lescourret, Jean-François Rey and Jean-Michel Salanskis, pp. 59-72 (Leuven: Peeters, 2012). ———, ‘Rêves de pierre’, in Autour de Baudelaire et des Arts. Infinis, échos et limites des Correspondances, ed. by Fayza Benzina, pp. 203-232 (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2012).

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Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929), in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3, ed. by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1975; reprint 2010): 262-266. Michel Leiris, ‘L’homme et son intérieur’, Documents, 5 (1930) (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991, anastatic reprint). ———, Aurora (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). ———, ‘De la littérature comme une tauromachie’, in L’Age d’Homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1946; reprint 1973): 9-22. Emmanuel Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1947). ———, ‘La Réalité et son Ombre’, Les Temps Modernes, 38 (1948): 769-789 . ———, ‘Lévy-Bruhl et la philosophie contemporaine’, Revue de la France et de l’Etranger 4 (October-December 1957): 556-569. ———, ‘La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini’ (1957), in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, pp. 165-178 (Paris: Vrin, 1988, 2nd enlarged edition). ———, ‘Intentionnalité et sensation’ (1961), in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, pp. 145-162 (Paris: Vrin, 1988, 2nd enlarged edition). ———, Autrement qu’être, ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974). Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). ———, L’Imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘The Figuration of the Invisible and the Psychological Category of the Double. The Kolossos’ (1965), in Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. by Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort, pp. 321-332 (New York: Zone Books, 2006).

About the author Filippo Fimiani (born 1964) is a full professor of aesthetics at the University of Salerno. His research focuses on aesthetics, philosophy of arts and literature, and visual culture studies. He has been visiting professor and a fellow of various French Universities and Institutions (such as Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne-CNRS, Paris 7-Diderot, EHEES, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour); he is co-editor of the international journal Aithesis. Currently, he is the coordinator of the Doctoral Program in Sciences of Language, Society, Politics and Education at the University of Salerno.

2.

Frozen into Allegory: Cleopatra’s Cultural Survival Elisabeth Bronfen

Abstract This article explores the ambivalence at work in the cultural afterlife of Cleopatra on stage and on screen. Three aspects of the resuscitation of a political body frozen into a mythic signifier come into play: celebrity as a modern form of political charisma, theatrical spectacle as support of political power and imaginary projection as a tool for feminine selfperformance. Shakespeare’s late tragedy and Mankiewicz’s Hollywood epic are the main texts discussed. Keywords: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra; stages corpse; political charisma; cinematic re-imagination; feminine sovereignty; monumentalism

Our cultural image repertoire has remembered Cleopatra as a transitional figure, suspended between a living embodiment of quasi-divine political power and the reanimation of a mythic signifier. In the historical chronicles of the ancient world, her demise marks the end of a political dynasty that served to consolidate the hegemony of Roman rule. Significantly, the image most readily associated with this last Egyptian pharaoh is that of her beautiful corpse, either exposed as a naked body with a snake at her breast or placed on public display in full funeral regalia. Over her dead body, the Roman ruler, Octavius, came to celebrate the triumph of his political ideology by erecting a monument to precisely the embodiment of the foreign but fascinating culture of the East, which he had finally successfully vanquished.1 Indeed, it 1 For a discussion of the aesthetic and political effect of feminine sacrifice, see Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body.

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chIV02

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is important to remember that we know very little about the actual historical Cleopatra, have little factual evidence of what she looked like. Instead, most research on her cultural afterlife draws attention to the way she functions as an enigmatic ruler, to whom we have access only through a long tradition of posthumous representations that divest Cleopatra of historical specificity so as to have her signify the tragic death of a fated political seductress. For this reason, it is also important to recall that her cultural survival has its beginnings in Octavius’ propaganda, whose purpose was to salvage the name of his countryman, Antony. Having successfully brought about the downfall of his rival, Octavius needed the Egyptian queen to take the full blame for the defection of the warrior with whom he had initially ruled Rome. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Roman authors, on whose texts all subsequent reconfigurations necessarily rely, have tended to paint her as a wicked, morally depraved, oriental lascivious warrior queen who played her own political cards by intervening in a battle between valiant Roman politicians. Her death allowed her to be treated not just as a deposed opponent but more importantly as the embodiment of an entire set of political and cultural values that, in her demise, came to be obliterated as well. Thus, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett documents, while each century since the medieval period has accentuated the story differently, we find an astonishing persistence of the idea of feminine sacrifice.2 However, reducing Cleopatra’s cultural afterlife to the representation of her beautiful corpse is more ambivalent. Even as it commemorates the successful destruction of a powerful political force attributed to the East, this belated mythic narrative also seeks to screen out the manner in which, during her lifetime, Cleopatra posed a real threat to the government of Rome. If, in its foundation myth, Augustan propaganda maligns her, it does so in the sense of a national cover-up that points to the very thing it seeks to erase. By erecting a monument to the vanquishing of this last Egyptian pharaoh, what came to live on in our cultural image repertoire as well is precisely the mythic signifier of an oriental femme fatale whose transhistorical celebrity overrules her sacrifice—indeed feeds on it. In so far as all subsequent representations foreground her seductive allure, they implicitly draw attention to the fact that this political diva of the ancient world had already done so herself during her lifetime. They recall, albeit unwittingly, the fact that one of the enigmas of her rule pertains to the way she had subsumed her natural body into a monumental display of her self-performance as supreme sovereign and descendant of the goddess Isis. 2 Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra. See also Hammer, Signs of Cleopatra, as well as Walker and Higgs, Cleopatra of Egypt.

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It thus also comes as no surprise that in twentieth-century popular culture, and particularly in mainstream cinema, a far more feminist interpretation of this transitional figure—straddling two conflicting visions of power—has emerged. It is precisely the interplay between an embodied political vision, ultimately sacrificed to her opponents’ will to power, and the re-animation of her erotic allure in the narratives subsequently brought into circulation which that explains why Cleopatra has held such fascination for Hollywood’s monumental epic cinema. Three aspects of the resuscitation of a political body frozen into a mythic signifier come into play: the first addresses the issue of celebrity as a modern form of political charisma, the second points to the deployment of theatrical spectacle to support political power, and the third involves imaginary projection as a tool for feminine self-performance. Nowhere do these three issues conflate as pointedly as in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film Cleopatra (1963), and equally poignant is the fact that, his star, Elizabeth Taylor, more than any of her predecessors (to name only Theda Bara and Claudette Colbert), identified herself with this historic/ mythic figure not only to give voice to a feminine politics in the context of a masculinist discourse of Cold War struggles. Rather, taking on the role of the Egyptian political diva allowed her to celebrate her own position in the arena of mass entertainment. This contemporary cinematic refiguration of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh also finds its acme in the powerful ambivalence inscribed in her death, yet Elizabeth Taylor’s performance offers a far more sympathetic take on Cleopatra’s fated dream of defeating Octavius and ruling the world with Antony from her court in Alexandria. After their disastrous defeat at Actium, forced to acknowledge the destruction of her fleet, her sober gaze speaks above all to the destruction of the political vision she has been fighting for. Self-consciously working against the traditional image repertoire of Cleopatra’s beautiful unclad corpse, Mankiewicz furthermore presents her performance of death instead as the final act in her assertion of absolute sovereignty. Having withdrawn into the monumental vault, accompanied only by her two trusted serving women, she commands Iris and Charmian to dress her for her travels in her magnificent dress of gold. She explains that she wants to be ‘as Antony first saw me… He must know at once even from a great distance that it is I’. To the end, Taylor’s Cleopatra insists on her political vision. After she has sat down on the marble slab on which she will have her corpse put on display, she opens the basket where the fatal asp is crawling among the figs. The camera moves into a medium shot as she places her hand into the basket (in contrast to traditional paintings that depict her taking the asp to her naked breast). Then Taylor’s Cleopatra notes how strangely awake

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she feels, ‘as if living had been just a long dream, someone else’s dream, now finished at last’. As we see her briefly wince to signal that the asp has bitten her hand, the camera moves into a close-up. With her dying breath she asserts, ‘but now will begin a dream of my own which will never end’. The destruction of her world is also the sign of radical hope. In Mankiewicz’s version, her last words cement how Cleopatra’s use of seductive charm as a form of politics sets up a contradiction between love (for the powerful men without whom she could not rule) and politics, between a shared vision she could not realise and her own dream. Or, put another way, his Cleopatra dies as a ruler who has acknowledged that she could implement her political vision only as the lover of Roman commanders. Death, in turn, offers her the possibility of radical autonomy. In the final scene of this cinematic re-imagination, an enraged Octavius (Roddy McDowall) breaks into the vault to find Cleopatra’s corpse, dressed in full regalia, stretched out on the marble coffin, her two serving women dying at her feet. He flees in horror while his commanding officer, Agrippa, angrily asks of Charmian, who still has some life in her, ‘Was this well done by your lady?’. Rephrasing Shakespeare’s text, she responds: ‘Extremely well as befitting the last of so many noble rulers.’ Then, as the camera moves back, the voice-over picks up this final dialog, repeating ‘and the Roman asked, “Was this well done of your lady?”. And the servant answered, “Extremely well, as befitting the last of so many noble rulers.”’3 Seamlessly we move from the diegetic scene to an extra-diegetic commentary, accompanying a tableau mort that transforms into a frozen image of the golden-clad corpse of Cleopatra, lying on her stark white marble coffin, at her feet her two serving women as well as the overturned basket with the figs spilled on the floor. The silenced Roman witness has also frozen into immobility while the camera moves further back, passing over the threshold of the vault. The editing offers a visual transition from the re-enacted historical past to its traces in the present. The vault’s door does not fall shut. Instead, the death scene we see through its narrow opening slowly transforms from a cinematic scene to the fragment of a painting in relief on the outside wall of this mausoleum. The unadorned pieces of stone wall in between the painted image shards that have implicitly outlived many centuries visually underline the selfreflexive gesture that is the rhetorical ploy of monumental epic cinema. As a 3 In the original play, Charmian’s final words are: ‘It is well done, and befitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings. Ah, soldier!’ (5.2.325-327); see William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra.

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past brought back to life on screen is frozen into a final tableau, a voice-over commentary, and then into a representation of this scene painted on stone, we have moved through several layers of aesthetic formalisation, which, by virtue of resuscitating the past, transcend time even as they condense it. Both the voice-over commentary as well as the mise-en-scène, pulling us back from the performed scene into our contemporary moment, places the spectator into a fluid relation with the past. As Vivian Sobchack argues for epic films in general, this reanimated past event, ‘by reflexive authorial focus, is foregrounded as retrospectively and now historically significant. It also repeats the dramatic representation in a reflexive and reflective mode—creating an additional textual level that temporally extends the emplotment of the story from the past to the present and confers significance on the story from the present to the past.’4 The monumentality of epic cinema thus speaks not only to the spectacular significance of the past events resurrected by the film narrative, nor simply to the extravaganza of the décor and mise-en-scène by which they are re-imaged on screen. It also produces a double vision that speaks to a past by infusing the present with its visual and dramatic force, even while being caught up in an incessant loop of reification and reanimation. The cinematic resuscitation of Cleopatra’s body on screen, predicated on this final image showing her frozen in stone, deploys the self-reflexivity written into cinematic monumentalism. It explicitly exceeds and transcends any concrete, verifiable past, even while repositioning it within the present. At the same time, the affective power of this historical re-imagination draws on the fact that the political dream that drives the resuscitated Cleopatra in her struggle with Roman tyrants takes on a contemporary guise given its re-embodiment by the Hollywood star, Elizabeth Taylor. Ironically, when Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century Fox, chose the epic story of Cleopatra’s demise in the hope that a monumental film with great spectacles and glamorous stars would resolve the financial difficulties of his studio, it came at the end of Hollywood’s own classical era, making this film the last of the epics of its kind. At the same time, while the Taylor ‘look’—the dark eye make-up, the pink lipstick, the bob hair cut— have indelibly marked the way the twentieth century thinks of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor’s screen performance is the first to foreground the political activities of this historic sovereign within the context of Cold War culture. As Maria Wyke notes, ‘in the climate of the early 1960s, Cleopatra could be 4

Sobchack, ‘Surge and Splendor’, p. 292.

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depicted more comfortably as a woman of considerable political authority, whose great ambition it was to achieve the unity of East and West’.5 While a first draft of the screenplay labels her ‘an early-day Kennedy’, Forster Hirsch, in his biography of Elizabeth Taylor, calls her interpretation of Cleopatra ‘a kind of Eleanor Roosevelt captivated by the ideal of one-world unity’.6 Indeed, the film premiered the same year that Mrs. Roosevelt’s last book, Tomorrow is Now, was published, picking up on the debate for global peace the former First Lady insisted on committing to paper as her final legacy just before her death.7 With historical distance to the media hype around the release of Cleopatra in 1963, it is easier for us to recognise Mankiewicz’s resuscitation of this last Egyptian from the annals of ancient history as a political thinker who was able to combine intellect, authority and ambition with glamour and who invested tremendous care in cultivating the dream of a less militaristic political future. Furthermore, he conceived of his queen as the director in a political theatre, even if she could not rule independently but only in fragile alliances with powerful members of the Roman Senate. It is thus fruitful to recall that the tragic story on which the final frozen tableau of her death is predicated sets in with Cleopatra’s first meeting with Julius Caesar. Mankiewicz self-consciously plays to the expectations the film audience had regarding the infamous carpet scene, in which a loyal slave hides his mistress so as to by-pass the guards her brother has set up at the palace gates to prevent his sister from returning. At the same time, Elizabeth Taylor, fusing Cleopatra’s claim to political power with her own claim to sovereignty within the celebrity culture of her time, also selfconsciously uses her performance to break with voyeuristic expectations. She immediately points to the pain in her back that this cunning trick has inflicted on her. Furthermore, she not only insists from the very outset that Julius Caesar recognise her as the sovereign of Egypt. She also bodily enacts this claim by showing us (if not the Roman warrior-ruler) that just as Cleopatra is in command of the entire palace, Elizabeth Taylor is in command of the screen. In one of the most iconic moments of the film, we see her high up in a hidden chamber adjacent to the chamber in which Julius Caesar is convening with his officers. She is standing inside an enormous sculpture of a sphinx which adorns the back wall. From this clandestine position, she 5 Wyke, Projecting the Past, p. 304. 6 Hirsch, Elizabeth Taylor, p. 101. 7 See Roosevelt, Tomorrow is Now.

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can gaze down on Caesar and his men so as to eavesdrop on their plans. Hers is a panoptic gaze, yet the vision is more than focused on the present. Given the mise-en-scène, we are not only informed of her clear-sightedness, which allows her to astutely assess her political dependence on the Roman politician. The extreme close-up of her eyes behind the painted Sphinx also signifies her vision of a world empire over which she hopes her sons will rule in peace. At the same time, the eyes we see, framed by those of the painted sphinx, are the blue eyes of the global celebrity, Liz Taylor—the body part that stood for her specific star appeal. From a narrative point of view, this scene, fusing a frozen image of the Sphinx with the living eyes of a Hollywood celebrity, also anticipates a later discussion with Julius Caesar in which, again, her political vision is at issue. Having presented herself to him as the mother Nil, she promises to bear him many sons because she hopes to fulfil the dream that Alexander the Great (whom the Roman leader passionately admires) had already fought for. As she holds her passionate speech, Cleopatra is positioned in front of her ancestor’s tomb, visually doubling the deceased encased in the tomb. She once more straddles a monument of past political power with her living feminine body, which she deploys to make her claim for an empire different from Rome. In her eyes, the vision of this dead military ruler has come to be resuscitated. At the same time, to underscore as well the double historical voicing under way as she implores Caesar to help her realise her hope for ‘one world, one nation, one people on earth living in peace’, Elizabeth Taylor also embodies the vision of the deceased Eleanor Roosevelt. Mankiewicz’s reconception of Cleopatra as an astute and charismatic politician finds its acme in another iconic scene: her monumental entrance into Rome. There she sits together with Julius Caesar’s son high up on an enormous black sphinx, a multitude of slaves pulling her magnificent carriage. The golden costume, which she will wear again in her death scene, indicates both Cleopatra’s opulent authority as well as the economic power Elizabeth Taylor commanded as a movie star. Tapping into our cultural memory of the way the Egyptian pharaoh had skilfully deployed her personality cult to counter-act the demagoguery of the Roman senators, the Hollywood star audaciously flaunts her power as a global celebrity. Taylor was the first Hollywood actress to negotiate one million dollars as her fee for playing this part. Part and parcel of the monumentalist gesture that fuses screen presence with off-screen notoriety, the thousands of extras present during the f ilming of this spectacular entrance into Rome themselves rendered the boundary between contemporary film location and historical re-enactment fluid. Although they had been instructed to call out the name

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Cleopatra during the passage of the bombastic sphinx, they instead cried out ‘Leez’ in ecstasy, signalling their support of the woman the Vatican had denounced for her extramarital relation with her co-star, Richard Burton. Mankiewicz had, in turn, himself come up with an unexpected dramaturgic trick predicated on fusing his star and her star role. After descending from her magnificent carriage and approaching Julius Caesar with her son, Cleopatra bows before this Roman ruler. In response to his proud welcoming smile, she boldly winks at him with her right eye. As in the prior scene revolving around their first meeting, Taylor’s blue eyes—one open and one shut—signal that she is in control of the political theatre she is performing in more than one sense. On the diegetic level of the film, the wink functions as a clandestine sign of the intimacy between these two rulers, which the excited crown around them can’t see. As a close-up it is, however, directed explicitly at us. We are to participate both in the pride of the Egyptian sovereign at the public display of her embodied bond to Caesar and in Elizabeth Taylor’s enjoyment of her ambition to be the most powerful global film icon of the 1960s. The self-reflexive twist this monumental epic gives to its celebration of political passion thus repeatedly resides in a conscious dissolution of the boundary between historic queen, screen refiguration and contemporary stardom. We are meant to take note that this is a grand performance. There is, however, yet a further aspect of double vision in play in Mankiewicz’s monumental resuscitation of Cleopatra. If the final sequence of his film transforms the political diva, whom he so lavishly celebrates in this triumphal procession through the streets of Rome, into a frozen image, this passage from a volatile soma to a solidified sema is indebted to the very particular pathos of tragic closure that William Shakespeare’s dramatic re-imagination of the last Egyptian pharaoh had already brought into play. In his Antony and Cleopatra, the final act becomes, as Marjorie Garber argues, ‘the playing space for transformation, metamorphosis, and myth, a space in which the mortal becomes immortal’.8 If, throughout the first three acts of his drama, Cleopatra emphasised the fluidity of the various roles she put on display so as to counter her Roman opponents, the final act is predicated on the powerful signification of a body frozen in death. To her serving woman she justifies her choice of suicide by virtue of the fact that, by having lost Antony to death, she has lost her own world: ‘My resolution’s plac’d, and I have nothing / Of woman in me: now from head to foot / I am marble-constant’ (V.2.234-236). Given that she conceives of the apotheosis 8 Garber, Shakespeare After All, p. 747.

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of her self-performance as queen and lover in terms of a marble fixity, it is useful to recall that, in his study on the origin of the German Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin speaks of the production of the corpse (a requirement of the tragic genre) in terms of an aesthetic afterlife: ‘This much is self-evident: the allegorization of the physis can only be carried through energetically over the dead body, the corpse. And the dramatic persons of the Trauerspiel die because it is only as corpses that they can enter into the homeland of allegory. Their demise is not for the sake of immortality, but for the sake of the corpse.’9 The aesthetic convention that both Shakespeare’s drama and Mankiewicz’s monumental epic film deploy is, then, the following: if death is the prerequisite for the translation into an allegorical sign, this passage from living body into frozen image is also the precondition for Cleopatra’s cultural survival not least because her elaborate staging of suicide marks this act as the perfection of all her previous self-performances. Cleopatra is perfected in death in that, by virtue of this act, she completes the political divadom she had put on display throughout the play. Her carefully choreographed corpse not only subverts Roman control but also leaves her splendidly suspended between the specificity of history and transhistorical myth. To appreciate the force of this ultimate performance, it is fruitful to recall that, in Shakespeare’s text, this monumental suicide is prompted by the scene in which she discovers that Octavius plans to include her in his triumph procession through Rome. The passage in which she anticipates this act of humiliation, describing to her serving woman, Iras, what she believes to know will happen to them if they get captured alive, brings into play one final twist to the political theatricality so seminal to Mankiewicz’s cinematic refiguration as well. ‘The quick comedians / Extemporally will stage us, and present / Our Alexandrian revels,’ she asserts, ‘Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’ the posture of a whore’ (V.2.212-217). It is precisely against this proleptic fantasy that she pits her visceral performance of death, using the materiality of her mortal remains to author a different cultural survival. By perfectly calculating the staging of her corpse, she hopes to define the figuration by which she will enter into the homeland of allegory, from there to be reanimated by subsequent re-stagings of her story. In Shakespeare, her choice of suicide thus entails a radical political gesture in that it deprives Octavius of what he feels he most needs to cement his own power, namely a humiliating spectacle of the Egyptian 9 Benjamin, Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels, p. 194 (my trans.).

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queen he has vanquished. At the same time, it occasions a form of symbolic re-investiture that renders her political power marble constant. As Cleopatra asks her attendants to attire her in her full regal garments—‘Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have / Immortal longings in me’ (V.2.271272)—she fully assumes the dress of absolute sovereignty. The natural body is frozen into the icon of the queen, the scheming woman and the shrewd politician become one, while the seductive whore transforms into the eternal wife. In and through death, she can proclaim her marriage to Mark Antony, taking upon herself a gesture of self-authorisation that was impossible while both were alive: ‘Husband, I come: Now to the name, my courage prove my title!’ (V.2.278-279). By declaring herself to be marbleconstant, she performs a speech act that anticipates the transformation of her dying body into a monument. She proclaims what she hopes will be the result of her action. Given that she invokes Mark Antony, who she imagines to be praising her noble act and mocking the luck of Caesar, it is important to note that this spectral lover is now entirely at the disposal of her self-performance. He serves as the perfect supporting actor in a tableau mort in which, by embracing her mortality, Cleopatra proves her sovereign power both over her adversary Octavius and over her own death. She controls the image of her demise, even while she controls the fact that she will have a mythic afterlife. Frozen into an allegorical sign, her physis will not only become immortal but also resuscitable as evidence of her self-authorship. The dramatic irony that Shakespeare’s text underscores is, of course, that over the dead body of Cleopatra, Octavius’ political hegemony will come into sole power. He has survived and—in contrast to Mankiewicz’s epic film—is left to comment on the tragic event. And yet, faced with Cleopatra’s dead body, he is compelled to acknowledge the sovereignty of his adversary: ‘Bravest at the last. / She levell’d at our purpose, and being royal / Took her own way’ (V.2.325-327). He will be remembered as a powerful political figure in Roman history who was able to successfully defend the unity of Rome against both internal and external enemies. But if, in Shakespeare’s text, he has the last words of the play, Cleopatra occupies this last scene as an immortalised political diva, celebrating her entrance into the transhistoric pantheon of the heroes and heroines of tragedy. The words Octavius utters as he looks upon Cleopatra’s corpse attest to the fluid boundary between a body frozen in death and its interminable imaginary reanimation: ‘But she looks like sleep, / As she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace’ (V.2.344). Through the words that follow, she is furthermore linked to the other allegorical star-crossed lovers in Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

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The inscription on the golden statue to be erected at the end of Romeo and Juliet overshadows Octavius’ command: ‘She shall be buried by her Antony. / No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous’ (V.2.348-350). Octavius concludes the play by offering the final stage directions: ‘Our army shall / In solemn show attend this funeral / And then to Rome. Come Dolabella, see / High order, in this great solemnity’ (V.2.353-356). These words recall Fortinbras’ command at the end of Hamlet: ‘For his passage, / The soldiers’ music and the rites of war / Speak loudly for him / Take up the body’ (V.2.342-345). At the same time, they fuse these with Malcolm’s final command at the end of Macbeth: ‘So thanks to all at once, and to each one, / Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone’ (V.11.40-41). If, then, Octavius’ response to Cleopatra’s last performance recalls the closing words to other tragedies by Shakespeare, in which the entrance into the allegorical heaven of aesthetic forms is predicated on the production of corpses, it also opens up to the principle of resuscitation so seminal to monumental cinema as well. The double vision that Mankiewicz inherits from Shakespeare, fusing as it does the queen’s body frozen into a mythic image, points to the murky interface between a historical sovereign and her re-figuration on stage and on the screen. Cleopatra’s cultural survival is predicated on the production of her corpse, in an endless loop of re-animations.

Works cited Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1978). Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body. Death, femininity and the aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). Mary Hammer, Signs of Cleopatra (London: Routledge, 1993). Forster Hirsch, Elizabeth Taylor (New York: Pyramid Publications, 1978). Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra. Histories, Dreams and Distortions (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). Eleanor Roosevelt, Tomorrow is Now (1963), re-issued with an introduction by Allida Black (New York: Penguin, 2012). William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, edited by M.R. Ridley. The Arden Edition (London/New York: Routledge 1991). Vivian Sobchack, ‘“Surge and Splendor”. A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic’, in Film Genre Reader II, ed. by Barry Keith Grant, pp. 280-307 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

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Susan Walker and Peter Higgs, Cleopatra of Egypt. From History to Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past. Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (New York/ London: Routledge, 1997).

About the author Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of American Studies at the English Department of the University of Zurich and since 2007 Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. Since the publication of Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, she has worked on the intersection of Gender Studies, Visual Culture and Psychoanalysis. Crossmapping is the term she coined to propose a methodology of critical reading that looks for parallels, connections and correspondences in texts over and beyond conventional intertextuality; such as, in her most recent work, the cultural survival of Shakespeare in contemporary serial TV, entitled Serial Shakespeare. Other monographs include: The Knotted Subject. Hysteria and its Discontents and Night Passages. Philosophy, Literature, Film.

3.

The Orphan Image Federica Villa Abstract This contribution offers an example of a monumental narration arising out of images of death. This is the case of Amos Humiston, a sergeant at the front in the American Civil War who, as he lay dying, chose to look at the photograph of his three children. The monumentalising cadaver’s pose transforms him into an exemplary individual whose story deserves to be recounted and to whom a name needs to be given. A bronze plaque including the photograph of the children was built in his memory; the plaque is one of the most common forms of monument undergoing reconsideration in contemporary art. What it mineralises here is not so much the corpse of the soldier but his story as a whole. Keywords: Childhood portrait photography; unknown soldier; survival of images; monumentalisation

Milite ignoto. To the unknown soldier. On 4 November 1920, to honor all the fallen soldiers of the Great War on the anniversary of the armistice, an unusual event of long-lasting significance took place in Rome, to be remembered in the history of the country as the day of the Unknown Soldier. At the Vittoriano—that marble giant, so brazenly white, placed among the buildings of Medieval Rome—the nameless body of one of the many unknown soldiers fallen at war was buried in a small temple next to the equestrian statue of the ‘little king’ of Piedmont and the first of united Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II, and under the statue of the Goddess Roma. The unknown body of a man was entombed in the anonymous marble body of the city. T 
 he idea had come from Giulio Douhet, a colonel on leave and a promoter of the National Union of Officers and Soldiers. In August 1920, in the pages of Il Dovere—a weekly publication he founded and directed—he proposed that the sacrifices and the heroism of the national community during the Great

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War should be remembered through the body of a soldier without a name, who would thus ideally stand for all the husbands, sons and fathers who had gone missing, their remains never found.
But whose remains were to be chosen? Which body, among so many unknown corpses, could be the right one to become everyone’s body?
 Eleven unknown soldiers were selected, and the final choice was given to Maria Bergamas from Gradisca d’Isonzo, the mother of Antonio, who had enrolled in the Austrian army and then deserted to become a volunteer in the Italian army; he too had fallen and had never been found. On 27 October Bergamas, slowly parading in the Cathedral of Aquileia in front of a row of eleven wooden coffins, had a moment of anxious hesitation, perhaps a slight faint, before the tenth coffin, and this was interpreted by the military authorities as a sign of choice. The Unknown Soldier was taken to Rome by a special train; hundreds of thousands of people crowded along the railway line to see the convoy passing through. The coffin took four days travelling, passing through Venice, Bologna, Florence and Rome, a journey of 800 kilometres to remember the husbands and sons who had never returned. The whole country paid heed to what would remain the most heartfelt moment of patriotism and national unity in its history. Resurrectio patris. The resurrection of the father. This is another parable from history, belonging to another place and another time, about an unknown body fallen in battle, the nameless body of a soldier who had died at Gettysburg during the American Civil War in the early days of July 1863. So begins the story, often told and revisited in several studies, of the search for an identity to be attributed to an inanimate body, to an unknown soldier of American history. To return and live in collective memory, again through a long process of recognition, the corpse found near the centre of Gettysburg offers a small photographic portrait of childhood, an ambrotype portraying three serious and composed children, which was probably held tight in the hands of a dying man. The story is that of Sergeant Amos Humiston’s last gaze turned to the photograph of his three children. The photograph belongs to that vast repertoire of nineteenth- and twentieth-century childhood portraiture, which, from the early daguerreotypes to the widely popular carte de visite, provided a royal gallery for the imaginary of the family and the visuality of the child’s body. It is a unique form of portraiture in so far as the subject portrayed is unique: a transitory, passing body that hosts a small adult destined to an unknown fate, a destiny to which that portrait, taken ‘when he was a child’, will always and in any case survive. In this story, the photographic portrait of childhood takes on a whole new meaning; it is no longer the love relic so common, for instance, in the repertoire of post-mortem photography. Here the child’s portrait becomes

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a metaphor for the detection and the resurrection of a man. Three features emerge from the photographic portrait of little Franklin, Alice and Frederick, three dimensions protruding onto three distinct yet coalescing temporalities. The last gaze of the dying man at the photograph of the three children, a simple gesture on the point of his death, allows history to be opened simultaneously onto the present of the event, onto the past of a man’s life and onto the future of his perpetual recollection. Death, life, survival. Let’s start with death, namely the present. A secret is enclosed in the last image seen before dying, the secret of the relationship between the person who is doing the watching and the persons who are watched, between a subject still alive and the subjects portayed by an image. To discover the nature of the relationship, the motivation of a (last) gaze, means to attribute—or not—the paternity of the three children portrayed to the dead man and therefore to begin a series of investigations so as to reunite the corpse with his beloved ones. That is what Doctor J. Francis Burns did, through an endless series of ups and downs: after obtaining the ambrotype from Benjamin Schriver, the owner of the tavern near Gettysburg where it was kept, the doctor published the photograph in the Philadelphia Inquirer together with a long article titled ‘Whose Father Was He?’.1 After careful investigation of the subjects portrayed, of their clothes and their postures, he was sure that they were three siblings. A few months later, after learning the story of the orphan ambrotype, a woman from Portville, New York asked the post office to write to Dr. Burns in her name, to ask him for a copy of the photo in question. When, at the end of November 1863, Philinda Hamiston opened the envelope containing the image, she learnt that her husband, the father of Franklin, Alice and Frederick, had died. This is the story, thus far. The photographic portrait of childhood becomes a trigger of death. According to the canonical photographic formula, the presence of children portrayed sets off that sense of an ending that death inevitably brings with it, though it also revives, thanks to the gaze-link of the man already dead, a possible family history, a cluster of family feelings, a nucleus of private experience. Father, Mother, Children, Brother, Wife, Husband. The presence of that photograph reinstates the relationships in which all the subjects are recognised—the children as siblings, the siblings as children of the woman, the woman as wife of the fallen—thus reviving a present time and making it full of life despite its mournful origin. The photographic portrait of childhood makes possible the family reunion, transforming the lone body into the 1 Morris, ‘Whose Father Was He?’.

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beloved one. But this first consideration immediately triggers a second one. Life, that is the past. Who was Amos Humiston? The dead body, precisely because it is loved, comes back to life. Here the story goes on, jumping backwards: Amos was born on 26 April 1830 in Owego, New York. Having lost his father at the age of seven and then his little sister in a terrible accident, at first he became an apprentice, with his brother, in manufacturing leather harnesses for horses, and then, at the age of twenty, he decided to embark on a whaling ship. That was the golden era of whaling, which supplied oil for lighting and bones for making umbrellas, corsets and various objects. For three and a half years, Amos had a hard life: on Captain Hathaway’s Harrison, bad food and a hard, relentless job were not repaid by just rewards, until in the summer of 1853, while passing near the Kuril Islands, on the side of the cold sea of Okhotsk, the whaling ship came upon a group of beautiful cetaceans. Eighteen specimens were harpooned between May and September. After another six months sailing, the Harrison came back and Amos returned home with a hefty sum of 200 dollars in his pocket for forty days of hard and dangerous work. One voyage across the sea was enough. Shortly afterwards came Philinda Smith, their engagement, marriage and children. But when in June 1862, President Abraham Lincoln called for 300,000 volunteers to serve the nation, Amos left everything, feeling the strong duty to answer the call. He enlisted in Company C of 154th New York, and a few days later he was sent to Virginia, where he was assigned to the First Brigade, Second Division of the XI Corps, Army of the Potomac. The story continues, following all the vicissitudes of the battlefield and the various hospitalisations for war-related injuries, down to his death on the ground near Gettysburg. The childhood portrait photography sets off a retroactive narration. It has an autobiographical power since, much as in subjective writings, it enables a biographical retrospection from Amos’ early childhood down to the moment of his death. The discovery of the photograph with the three children is the point around which the whole path of the lifestory revolves, acting both as its beginning (its motivation) and as its end. But what makes this path, this biotelling, interesting? A man’s life originates from his death, as if in a sort of palingenesis, a strength that brings back to life a corpse otherwise lost in the territory of the unnamed fallen. The three children in the image, their infant bodies, having found a father and a mother who gave birth to them, raise the genealogical question par excellence, namely the question of origins.
Where do they come from? What is the story that generated them? Where does their family tree find its roots?

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Because they are always and inevitably identifiable primarily as ‘someone’s children’, children instigate the gaze of those who see them photographed to move back, driven by some sort of reatroactive care and by the stubborn desire to find similarities, harmonies, continuity. And thus to give a proper name to the body without a name is not enough. A story is also needed, a staged character, set in a narrative that can claim an origin, a life spent in one way or another and a death as its final stage. The third reflection bounces from the past to the future. What sets it going is the reparation immediately activated with the foundation on 20 November 1866 of the National Orphans’ Homestead in Gettysburg, near the tomb where the body of Amos Humiston was buried. The widow and the three children made their home in this building until, in 1871, the family moved to Becker, Massachusetts. At the time of the institution of the orphanage, Amos’ body was removed from that place and taken to the Gettysburg National Cemetery, a resting place that housed more than 3,500 Union soldiers. The history of this cemetery would deserve a long digression, but we may mention that, immediately after the battle, the many dead bodies lying scattered on the surrounding farmlands and needing a prompt burial to prevent the outbreak of epidemics were hastily buried in shallow graves and identified by a small wooden board with the name of the deceased badly affixed. Rain and wind then did their work, eroding the improvised graves and creating some confusion over the identities of the fallen and their bodies. At this point, the citizens of Gettysburg demanded that an off icial cemetery be created as soon as possible. The chosen site was the hill where the crucial events of the battle had taken place. After purchasing the land thanks to a state subsidy, on 27 October 1863, four months after the battle, the burial process was accomplished, and, on 19 November, the cemetery was inaugurated by the politician Edward Everett, who gave a long speech on the causes and the development of the battle, and by President Abraham Lincoln, who gave a shorter speech which is remembered as The Gettysburg Address. The President spoke for about two minutes, and his speech looked to the future: the place to be consecrated was not simply a space for memory but a space of survival, not the celebration of a past but the promise of a future. ‘We cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow—this soil. […] It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.’2 What remains is for survival. It remains as a legacy, not as a simple memory to be 2 Johnson, Writing the Gettysburg Address, p. 42.

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woven again but as an eternal presence, close to the living as a travelling companion. This is why even Amos’ story, here briefly recalled, survived. In the years following the Civil War, in addition to being the subject of the story narrated by guided tours through Gettysburg, Amos’ remains asked again to be present by means of an image. Where the body had fallen dead, where he had been buried and greeted for the last time by the earthly light, where he had been finally exhumed to be brought to the official cemetery, exactly at that point which in today’s Gettysburg is on North Stratton Street, close to the fire station, in 1993 a group of citizens of Portville dedicated a new monument to the story of Amos. The image of the three children is interspersed with the father’s presence, who sneaks between their little heads as if to share that future which death has prematurely denied to him. It is a temporal collapse that is materialised in an image made of bronze, under which a long caption tells, once again, the story of the Unknown Soldier who, thanks to a portrait of childhood, found a name and life. It is on this last surviving manifestation of the story that we would like to close, giving over a few more words to the monument dedicated to Sergeant Humiston, or rather to what it represents. A monument we remember being the only one dedicated to a single common soldier who died on the battlefield of Gettysburg. Imago animi vultus. Amos’ body is not buried at the foot of the bronze plaque but, together with his three children, the image of his face oversees the place of the faraway death. That image turned into matter proposes again the ancient ambrotype, but in the process of survival something comes back changed. As Georges Didi-Huberman claims: ‘The eternal present is not the timeless, the archetype or the unchangeable essence of artistic forms beyond history: it is the intertwining of survivals in the historic reformulation of each present of the forms. We are not in the ideal sphere of universal concepts, but rather in the concrete materiality of time immemorial.’3 In short, what returns does not come back as the same; survival is not repetition ‘as it was’: things that are transmitted in survivals become increasingly impure, they tend to decompose more and more, to corrupt the primordial state. And this is what happens to the image of survival. Let’s take a look at it. First of all, an incorporation occurs. The gaze of the subject onto the image, as well as that of the father towards the children, is nullified by a gaze of joint appeal, which is alive and dead at the same time. A single image repeats the old one in an impure way, indeed, with the children always in the same pose and with the same clothes but abandoning their serious 3 Didi-Huberman, Ninfa Moderna, p. 52.

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and sombre aspect, their sad solemnity, to give a hint of a smile. Their lips arch and their faces, albeit etched in bronze, appear more relaxed. Among them is Amos, the father. Here, time immemorial is materialised in bronze. Sergeant Hamiston in uniform and with a beard (which he actually did not have at the time of death but when he had enlisted) finds the lost union with his children in a time that does not exist in life but is made eternal in the matter of the commemorative plaque. Secondly, survival offers a model of time that is alternative to the genealogical paradigm of the family and very different from a model of time organised around obsolescence, the paradigm of the ‘finite thing’. In this sense, survival does not belong to the survivors, those who remain alive after the tragedy, but belongs rather to what is surviving, to all that was believed to be dead, finished, and instead comes back again to the surface of the world in other places or at other moments of history. Survival does not concern a world of ‘finished’ things but of latent things, of ‘sleeping images’. The ambrotype that becomes a relief on the bronze plate tells us that we have grabbed something surviving, we have awakened something unique and universal at the same time. A vast and unreasonable war has passed through the history of a photographic image, a photographic portrait of childhood which, along with reviving a body by giving him an identity and a history, has itself survived by becoming matter, growing and developing into something else. As such, the photograph reveals its inherent vitality, an élan vital in perpetual search of adoption.

Works cited Gabor Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel. The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa Moderna. Essai sur le drapé trombé (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Mark Dunkelman, Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier. The Life, Death, and Celebrity of Amos Humiston (Westport: Praeger, 1999). Emilio Franzina, La storia (quasi vera) del Milite Ignoto. Raccontata come un’autobiografia (Rome: Donzelli, 2014). Kent Graham, November. Lincoln’s Elegy at Gettysburg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Martin P. Johnson, Writing the Gettysburg Address (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013). Errol Morris, ‘Whose Father Was He?’, New York Times, 29 March – 2 April 2009.

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About the author Federica Villa is Associate Professor of History and Criticism of Cinema at the University of Pavia. Her research interests revolve around Italian post-war cinema, in particular the relationship between cinema and popular culture, the ways in which scripts are written and the contribution of some writers to film work. She currently directs the Research Center Self Media Lab within the Department of Humanities at the University of Pavia. She is interested in studying the shapes and autobiographical and self-portraits phenomena between photography, film and new media. Her publications include Vite impersonali. Autoritrattistica e medialità, (Pellegrini, 2012) and Tracciati autobiografici tra cinema, arte e media, (B&N, Carocci, 2016).

4. The Well-Tempered Memorial: Abstraction, Anthropomorphism, Embodiment Andrea Pinotti

Abstract This paper addresses some crucial categories in contemporary practices of memorialisation and public sculpture, including the polarities of “abstraction / figuration” and “transitivity / intransitivity” and the questions of anthropomorphism and embodiment. Referring to paradigmatic cases belonging to different media—sculpture, architecture, video installations—and comparing different memorialistic subjects (the Holocaust memorials, the Italian fascist sacraria, the monuments dedicated to the Vietnam war), the chapter investigates the dialectics of presence and absence in the relationship between the present material body of the monument and the absent bodies evoked by the process of memorialisation. Keywords: Abstraction; anthropomorphism; embodiment; memorialisation; monumentality

Abstraction In the complex landscape of contemporary monumental practices and strategies of memorialisation, the class of memorials specifically devoted to the Shoah offers an incomparable richness of cases that articulate in apparently inexhaustible ways the relationship between image and memory. At f irst sight, a major difference splits this class into two principal subclasses: figurative and abstract. However, such a distinction is highly problematic from the point of view of the aesthetics of visual arts: although

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the first so-called abstract watercolour by Kandinsky was realised more than one hundred years ago, a unanimously agreed definition of ‘abstraction’ is still a desideratum, and the very term ‘abstract’ has been frequently disputed and challenged by cognate denominations such as ‘non-figurative’, ‘non-objective’, ‘non-representational’ (in the German-speaking literature, the term is often dismissed in favour of the adjective gegenstandslos, literally ‘with no object’). In an essay published in 1938, Kandinsky himself took up the formulation ‘concrete art’, coined eight years earlier by Theo van Doesburg to characterise precisely what in ordinary discourse is usually designated as ‘abstract’ art.1 A series of controversial issues related to the core of visual representation affects this discussion of visual representation performed both by bi-dimensional and by three-dimensional images: resemblance, likeness, recognition and reference. These issues have engaged various disciplinary approaches: from formalism to semiotics, from phenomenology to analytic theories of depiction. I am well aware of the open and unsolved status of this scenario. However, in the absence of a shared notion of non-figurativeness, for the argument I want to propose here I will nevertheless assume the naïve distinction of ‘figurative’ and ‘abstract’ as a distinction between, respectively, images that allow the beholder to recognise in them objects belonging to the real world and existing in this world independently of their visual representation, and images that do not allow such recognition. If we apply this provisional distinction to the Holocaust memorials ( ‘Holocaust’ itself being a no less controversial term than ‘abstraction’),2 one might simply think of two different typologies: referential memorials and monuments (representing, for instance, prisoners behind the electrically charged barbed-wire fences of the concentration camps) and nonrepresentational, non-figurative objects (frequently presented in elementary geometrical volumes, broadly belonging to a ‘minimalist’ style), in which no apparent referent directly pertaining to the Nazi genocidal context is to be recognised. Among the many figurative and referential examples, we could mention George Segal’s The Holocaust at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco (1984) or Kenneth Treister’s Holocaust Memorial in Miami (1990),3 both showing suffering and anguished prisoners. As regards the abstract 1 Kandinsky, ‘Concrete Art’. 2 See the critical remarks expressed by Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz; and Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust, pp. 7-9. 3 On Segal, see Baigell, ‘Segal’s “Holocaust Memorial”’. On Treister: http://holocaustmemorialmiamibeach.org/about/treister_testimonial/

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memorials, perhaps the most famous and debated is Peter Eisenman’s 2005 Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, made up of 2,711 grey concrete stelae. 4 In the initial phase of the Berlin project (around 1997), sculptor Richard Serra was involved as well, but he eventually pulled out because of differences with the commissioning body.5 A reference to his work can help us approach a second fundamental polarity intersecting the first couple ‘abstraction/figuration’: namely ‘transitivity/intransitivity’. Serra repeatedly rejected the designation of ‘monumental’ related to his work: When people see my large-scale works in public places, they call them monumental, without ever thinking about what the term monumental means. Within the history of public sculpture, they are small-to-medium in size. […] When we look at these pieces, are we asked to give any credence to the notion of a monument? They do not relate to the history of monuments. They do not memorialize anything. They do not cry out to be called monuments. A steel curve is not a monument.6

Using a traditional—although inadequate—aesthetic terminology, one could say that Serra’s sculptures exhibit the form of monumentality (vertical development, ideally permanent materials, maximal visibility) but no monumental content: by virtue of their shape, dimensions, verticality, durable materiality, they seem as if they were erected in order to commemorate a person or an event. But there is no such person or event: ‘They do not memorialize anything.’ The apparent commemorative gesture does not apply to any particular object. Their monumental agency is therefore intransitive. A hybrid case is interestingly represented by Berlin Junction, a public sculpture inaugurated in 1987 in Berlin. It consists of two curved corten steel plates that were initially installed in front of the Martin-Gropius-Bau and then repositioned in 1988—following a personal suggestion of Serra—near Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonic and very close to Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the headquarters of the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme, a building destroyed by the Second World War bombings. Although it was not 4 See: Materials on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, edited by the Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. 5 See Young, At Memory’s Edge. 6 ‘Richard Serra’s Urban Sculpture. An Interview by Douglas Crimp’, p. 135.

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originally conceived as a memorial, it became such only post festum, once relocated to a site highly saturated with social mnestic significance. This unusual circumstance helps us to understand why the Jewish community and the general public tended to respond to the rigorously geometric and abstract character of this sculpture with a sense of insufficiency and a demand for supplement: the sculptor Volker Bartsch was entrusted with the task of adding a commemorative plate in order to explicate through an inscription its memorialising function of the victims of the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme. Nevertheless, in some significant occasions Serra did accept from the very beginning the endeavour to design and realise transitive monuments and memorials. Such was the case, for instance, with the above-mentioned initial engagement in the Berlin memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe but also the sculpture The Drowned and the Saved (the title of Primo Levi’s essay on the Nazi camps)—initially installed in 1992 in the Stommeln Synagogue in Germany and now at the Kirche St. Kolumba in Cologne—and Gravity, a slab erected in 1993 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The Drowned and the Saved—two right angles leaning against each other so as to form an inverted ‘U’—seems to evoke the experience of the Holocaust only in its title. Gravity—a 12-foot-square steel slab vertically intersecting the stairs of the Holocaust Memorial Museum7—has neither in its title nor in its form any representative reference to the Shoah.

Anthropomorphism The recourse to abstract geometric forms is not exclusive to Serra. Among other examples we could mention Black Form: Memorial to the Missing Jews, a rectangular wall of concrete blocks painted in black—abstract as to the title, referential as to the subtitle—realised by Sol LeWitt for the 1987 Skulptur Projekte Münster, then subsequently demolished, reconstructed and repositioned at Altona Town Hall in Hamburg.8 But rather than striving for a complete list of the abstract memorials of the Holocaust, a different question should rather be raised, and a theoretical one: is it appropriate to characterise such memorials as both abstract 7 On the commissions for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (including besides Serra also Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt and Joel Shapiro), see Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust, pp. 199-237. 8 Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 35.

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and transitive (identifying respectively their abstract nature in their nonrepresentational status and their transitive quality in their explicit dedication as expressed either in the title or in the commission)? Or are we here perhaps adopting too narrow a concept of ‘representation’ based on a misleading idea of resemblance or likeness and on a simplistic notion of mimesis? In his book Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman repeatedly and severely warns against a naïve assumption of realistic representation based on the ambiguous concept of similarity.9 In his essay ‘Seven Strictures on Similarity’, he expands on this issue, remarking that resemblance is not the necessary and sufficient condition for representation: Similarity cannot be equated with, or measured in terms of, possession of common characteristics. […] When, in general, are two things similar? The first response is likely to be: ‘When they have at least one property in common’. But since every two things have some property in common, this will make similarity a universal and hence useless relation. That a given two things are similar will hardly be notable news if there are no two things that are not similar. Are two things similar, then, only if they have all their properties in common? This will not work either; for of course no two things have all their properties in common. Similarity so interpreted will be an empty and hence useless relation.10

If anything is in some way like anything else, anything (coming to our specific question) is in some way like the Holocaust. LeWitt’s generic Black Form can thus function as a Memorial to the Missing Jews by virtue of some kind of resemblance to the Jewish genocide: as black, perhaps, as the fatal and tragic destiny of the victims? Serra’s inverted ‘U’ of The Drowned and the Saved resembles the leaning against one another as the only elementary human support in the inhuman conditions of camp life. And his slab Gravity interrupts the normal action of ascending and descending the stairs, similar (we might say) to the abrupt interruption that the Holocaust represented for the ascending and descending lives of millions of people. Is the relation of similarity really as indifferent as Goodman puts it? Or is there something that makes the difference? In his confrontation with the poetics of minimalism, Georges Didi-Huberman has suggested that something makes the difference, and that this something is the anthropos: the human being and its irrepressible drive to anthropomorphism, that 9 Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 3-10. 10 Goodman, ‘Seven Strictures on Similarity’, p. 443.

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is, to understand the non-human world according to the rules, principles and dynamics governing the human body. In this perspective, no object can escape the anthropomorphic associations. Certainly not the black cubes so intensely practiced by the minimalists. Let us take Die by Tony Smith: ‘Le cube de Tony Smith est anthropomorphe dans la mesure où il se donne, par sa présentation même, la capacité de nous imposer un enchaînement d’images qui nous feront passer de la boîte à la maison, de la maison à la porte, de la porte au lit et du lit au cercueil.’11 Certainly not a cube by Giacometti, which somehow resembles a face, by virtue of its ‘anthropomorphisme abstrait’.12 Certainly not one of those ex-voto, votive offers made of wax, which base their representative faculty not on the most faithful imitative portraiture of the face or of some parts of the suffering body but rather on the correspondence between the wax mass and other factors, like the weight or the length of the body itself: Aff irmer spontanément que seule est ‘ressemblante’ la face de cire, modelée ou moulée sur le visage du donateur, c’est manifester une bien courte vue quant au champ opératoire de la ressemblance: c’est, justement, ignorer que la ressemblance forme un champ et admet une pluralité d’objets, de critères, de supports et d’opérations. La masse de cire brute, non travaillée, non figurative – type d’ex-voto attesté en Occident depuis le IXe siècle au moins – peut mettre en œuvre des critères de ressemblance extrêmement précis, tout aussi pertinents que les traits du visage: à côté des dons votifs conventionnels que sont les cerei moduli de petites dimensions, les donateurs déposaient des massae cerae à leur propre poids.13

The correspondence between the weight of the suffering body and its wax counterweight guarantees a kind of physical resemblance that has nothing to do with the exterior imitation of physiognomic traits but that is nonetheless founded in re, in the thing itself. An analogous argumentation works for the votive candles ad mensuram corporis or secundum longitudinem, i.e. of the same length as the donor’s body.14 To support his view, Didi-Huberman leans here on Aristotle’s Poetics (1447a), stating that, far from being univocally defined by their copy-like 11 Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, p. 94. On this, see the whole chapter entitled ‘Anthropomorphisme et dissemblance’, pp. 85-102 12 Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage, p. 53. 13 Didi-Huberman, Ex-voto, pp. 70-73. 14 Ibid., pp. 76-79.

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reproductive skill, imitations ‘differ from one another in three ways, either in their means, or in their objects, or in the manner of their imitation’.15 In this respect, we could also evoke Vico’s lesson on the bodily and anthropomorphic root of metaphors: It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; eyes for the looped heads of screws and for windows letting light into houses; mouth for any opening; lip for the rim of a vase or of anything else; the tooth of a plow, a rake, a saw, a comb; beard for rootlets; the mouth of a river; a neck of land; handful for a small number; heart for centre (the Latins used umbilicus, ‘navel’, in this sense); foot for end; the flesh of fruits; a vein of water, rock or mineral; the blood of grapes for wine; the bowels of the earth. Heaven or the sea smiles; the wind whistles; the waves murmur; a body groans under a great weight.16

Anthropomorphism appears therefore as a kind of material and physical a priori of our meaningful relationship to the world: a transcendental condition of possibility that operates as it were ‘before’ the distinction abstract/ figurative, obliging us to radically rethink the very notions of representation and reference. Such a condition of possibility is nevertheless not always recognised in its universal operativeness: as Goethe would put it, ‘a man never understands how anthropomorphic he is’.17 Consequently, the stricture imposed by Goodman (everything is in some way like anything else) could be emended as follows: everything is in some way like the human body.

Embodiment One of the most evident contexts in which the operativeness of the anthropomorphic drive can be clearly recognised is that of what might be named embodied memorials. No less than ‘abstraction’ and ‘Holocaust’, the notion of ‘embodiment’—central to the debates in philosophy, art theory and the cognitive neurosciences in recent years18—is highly problematic and can 15 Aristotle, Poetics, vol. 2, p. 2316. 16 Vico, The New Science, p. 116. 17 Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections, nr. 165, p. 94. 18 See Ziemke, ‘What’s That Thing Called Embodiment?’.

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Fig. 29: Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz, Denkmal an ein Denkmal, 1995; photo © Claus Bach, Gedenkstätte Buchenwald; courtesy of the Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau Dora.

easily lead to misconceptions (the major one being the mentalistic idea that in the process of ‘embodiment’, something that previously existed in a non-bodily form assumes some sort of body). Quite on the contrary, if taken in its proper meaning, ‘embodiment’ should convey the idea of the coming into existence of a particular sense that could not be expressed or achieved in any other way than through that particular bodily experience. Among the embodied memorials, particularly eloquent is A Memorial to a Memorial, designed by Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz and inaugurated in Buchenwald in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp (Figure 29). The apparent reflexive nature of the title of the work—Denkmal an ein Denkmal, a sort of memorial squared—refers to the fact that in the very same place a wooden obelisk had been erected in April 1945 by the liberated inmates with the wood taken from the barracks where they had been imprisoned: an action of re-appropriation and of re-signification of second-hand elements (of bricolage in Lévi-Strauss’ terms),19 which nevertheless could not endure through time because of the perishability of the material. By installing a substitute memorial, Hoheisel and Knitz produced an object that at the same time memorialises both the original memorial and its actual referent, the victims of the camp: this 19 See Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, chap. 1: ‘The Science of the Concrete’.

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Denkmal—literally: a mark (Mal) for thought (Denk)—induces a double movement of reflection oriented both to the initial monument now disappeared and to the genocide perpetrated in Buchenwald. Hoheisel is an artist who shows himself to be particularly sensitive to the intimate fragility of monuments, to their difficulties in withstanding time and oblivion, their need to be themselves supported and remembered—i.e. memorialised. Seven years before the inauguration of the Buchenwald memorial, he had been commissioned to remake the Aschrott Fountain in Kassel, which was a gift of a Jewish citizen to his hometown which had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1939. He conceived the replica following the original model, but instead of installing the fountain in the traditional erected way, he interred it in the spot where it once stood upright, thereby producing a mirror image of the primal monument—a counter- or antimonument in the spatial sense of the prefix.20 Coming to the formal and material nature of Hoheisel’s Buchenwald memorial, it consists of a stainless-steel plate laid horizontally on the ground of what was the roll call square of the concentration camp. The plate bears the inscription K.L.B. (Konzentrationslager Buchenwald) and is engraved with the names of the different nationalities of the prisoners (included the Staatenlose, the stateless people). Thus far, by virtue of its simple square form (2x2 m, corresponding to the base of the original obelisk), this memorial seems to belong to the category of abstract Shoah monuments. What makes it an embodied and anthropomorphic memorial is the fact that the slab is constantly heated to a temperature of 97.7° F (36.5°C), namely the regular temperature of the human body. Even during the icy winters, the warmth melts the snow so that the plate is always perfectly readable—and above all touchable. In fact, visitors tend spontaneously not only to read the inscriptions but also to kneel down respectfully to touch the heated surface, receiving in turn its touch. Such mutual tactile experience (touching and being touched) determines the haptic and motor nature of this memorial: ‘There is just a technical warmth—Hoheisel warns—in this mnestic sign; the task to transform it into a human feeling and acting remains an offer to the visitor to this empty place.’21 20 See Hoheisel, ‘Aschrott Brunnen – Denk-Stein-Sammlung – Brandeburger Tor – Buchenwald’, pp. 253-257; Spitz, ‘Loss as Vanished Form’. 21 ‘Es ist nur eine technische Wärme in diesem Erinnerungszeichen; sie umzusetzen in ein menschliches Fühlen und Handeln, bleibt ein Angebot an den Besucher dieses leeren Ortes’ (Hoheisel, ‘Aschrott Brunnen – Denk-Stein-Sammlung – Brandeburger Tor – Buchenwald’, p. 265).

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A peculiar tension is instituted between the semantic side of the memorial (the inscriptions) and its somatic side (the bodily temperature): while the names of the nationalities engraved on the slab refer to different groups of victims, the heating is indifferent to any national classification, belonging to the human being as such. The bodily temperature is thus anonymous in its evocative power. In this respect, a comparison with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, erected in Washington by Maya Lin in 1982, is worth considering.22 The two slabs of black granite (more properly, gabbro rock) bear the inscription of the first names and surnames of the around 58,000 American soldiers classified either with a diamond as KIA (‘killed in action’) or with a cross as MIA (‘missing in action’) during the conflict. No reference to rank or unit is provided. In this monument, contrasted with the national groups and the universal bodily temperature of Hoheisel’s memorial, the grade of individualisation appears at its utmost. As in the Buchenwald memorial, here too a kind of reflectivity is assured: not by the tactile means of the temperature but by the visual means of the polished treatment of the stone, which optically reflects the bodies of the visitors, who look at themselves as if in a mirror while reading the names of the victims etched on the surface. This visual device appears to collide with the individualised character expressed by the names: whatever name I read, I narcissistically see myself in the reflecting background of the inscription (it could have been me, had I lived in those historical circumstances). Victims and visitors, past and present collapse in the mirror image. The coldness of the granite is ‘heated’ by this empathetic identification on the basis of a potential common destiny. Notwithstanding the different spatial orientation of the two memorials (horizontal in Buchenwald, vertical in Washington), an analogous manual performance is elicited in the two cases: hands and fingers are invited to touch the surface, to palpate it. Maya Lin’s memorial is incessantly caressed and stroked by the visitors in visual-motor search of the names: a gesture that has become part of the iconographic dissemination of this monument. Common rituals of the visitors are the donation of heterogeneous items (military decorations, little sculptures, flowers, flags, even a Harley Davidson, the so-called ‘Hero Bike’)23 and the practice of ‘stone rubbing’ (consisting of placing a sheet of paper on the inscribed name and rubbing a graphite pencil on it in order to reproduce the lettering). 22 See Griswold and Griswold, ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall’; Wagner-Pacific and Schwartz, ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial’. 23 https://vvmf.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/wisconsin-hero-bike-the-motorcycle-left-at-the-wall/ (accessed 9 December 2019).

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In his video installation Transmission (colour, 43 min. sound/loop), realised in 2007 as part of the research project Kunstöffentlichkeit Zürich, Harun Farocki includes the Washington and the Buchenwald memorials among a series of monuments—both religious and secular—that induce in the visitors not only a contemplative and meditative visual attitude but also a tactile or more generally somatic and motor interaction. The shots of his video insist on the hands and fingers of the visitors following the names of the Vietnam Vets or responding to the heating of the Buchenwald slab. In spite of the non-religious nature of these two memorials, their inclusion by Farocki in a class of monuments that embraces religious instances marks a pragmatic continuity of the performative act. Transmission shows the bodily behaviour of the visitors relating to cult items such as: ‘the footprint of the Devil’ in the Frauenkirche in Munich; ‘the handprint of Jesus’ on the ‘Via dolorosa’ in Jerusalem; the bust of Father Rupert Mayer (one of the leading figures of the German Catholic anti-Nazi resistance) in the Bürgersaalkirche in Munich; the gap in a rock, the so-called ‘Bucklwehluckn’ near St. Thomas am Blasenstein in Austria (a very narrow passage in a pre-Christian and subsequently Christianised cult stone that marks the threshold between illness and health, culpability and forgiveness); the so-called ‘Bocca della verità’ (the Mouth of Truth), a man-like face carved in marble representing a river god, located in Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome; the ‘foot of St. Peter’ in the Basilica of St. Peter in Vatican; the Crucifixion Altar on which Jesus was nailed to the cross, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; the Marienfuß or Marientritt (‘the footprint of Mary’) in Würzburg; the cracked column at the entrance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, into whose fissures people place little papers with vows and intercessions; but also the tomb of the French Argentine tango singer and composer Carlos Gardel, buried in La Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires. Farocki focuses on the tactile relationship performed with these monuments in present days: but the roots of such behaviours are very old, going back to the ancient habit (no less magical than religious) of touching and kissing icons and relics24 in order to ensure by contact the ‘transmission’ of a supernatural and miraculous power. Obeying what Frazer called the ‘law of contact’,25 this practice is either performed directly with parts of one’s own body or indirectly through 24 James, ‘“Seeing’s believing, but feeling’s the truth”’. On the importance of Bernard of Clairvaux’s theories for the kissing practices, see Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, chap. 3. 25 Frazer, The Golden Bough, chap. 3: ‘Sympathetic Magic’.

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the intermediation of personal belongings and religious symbols (such as crosses or rosaries) which are physically put in contact with the magic source from which they gain force, in the tradition of the so-called ‘relics of touch, or brandea, which acquired miraculous powers through contact with holy remains’.26 Such an iconophile practice eventually leads to an iconoclastic conclusion, namely the consumption and destruction of the worshipped object: we may imagine that in a distant future, a similar fate will befall the Buchenwald and Washington memorials, too. What is permanent in this kind of monument is less the material they are made of than the motor response they induce. In this sense, they fully belong to the class of performative monuments that radically invest the temporal nature of monumentality itself: ‘What is crucial to the performative monument, then, cannot be impermanence as such, but the temporal interaction with an audience that itself is no eternal public, but a succession of interacting subjects.’27

The name of a present absence Pursuing the comparison between the Buchenwald and the Washington memorial, it is worth making a further remark about the dialectics of abstraction/figuration (from which the present paper started): in this respect, the two monuments appear like a sort of mirror image of each other. In the case of Buchenwald, among the numerous memorials erected on the camp site28 to honour the victims, a particular tension is instituted between Hoheisel’s abstract/embodied plaque and the figurative Denkmal designed in socialist realist style by the sculptor Fritz Cremer (representing eleven heroic inmates of different ages engaged in the self-liberation of the camp), which had been erected during the DDR regime in 1958 (Figure 30).29 In the case of the Washington veterans memorial, the harsh controversy provoked by 26 Belting, Likeness and Presence, p. 59. 27 Widrich, Performative Monuments, p. 6. 28 On the transformation of the Buchenwald memorial site, see Lüttgenau, ‘Eine schwebende Gedenkstätte?’. 29 See Cremer, Buchenwald. Hoheisel himself has recognised the dialectic dialogue of his memorial with Cremer’s group: ‘It is a counter-piece to the monumental installation by Fritz Cremer on the southern side of the Ettersberg: a simple mnestic sign [Es ist ein Gegenstück zur monumentalen Anlage von Fritz Cremer auf der Südseite des Ettersberges; ein einfaches Erinnerungszeichen]’; Hoheisel, ‘Aschrott Brunnen – Denk-Stein-Sammlung – Brandeburger Tor – Buchenwald’, p. 264).

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Fig. 30: Fritz Cremer, Group of figures, 1958; photo © Naomi Tereza Salmon, Gedenkstätte Buchenwald; courtesy of the Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau Dora.

the selection of Maya Lin’s project led to a compromise: in 1984 a figurative bronze group—named The Three Soldiers or The Three Servicemen (European American, African American and Hispanic American physiognomies are recognisable) and realised by the sculptor Frederick Hart (who had come third in the memorial competition)—was placed near the abstract Wall as a referential counterweight. The non-figurative character of the Wall is also counterbalanced by The Vietnam Women’s Memorial, a bronze group representing three nurses assisting a wounded soldier which was commissioned from sculptress Glenna Goodacre in order to commemorate the women (especially those serving as nurses) who died during the conflict; it was dedicated in 1993. Abstraction integrates figuration in Buchenwald; figuration integrates abstraction in Washington. This reminds us of the importance of considering the single monumental option not just in itself but ecologically, namely in the broader context of the memorialising environment, in which different and even opposite tendencies operate in a field of heterogeneous forces. A further comparative element between Buchenwald and Washington is offered by the question of the names of the victims. The list of the names etched on the Washington wall and the names of the prisoners implicitly

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evoked by the very location of the Buchenwald memorial (the Appellplatz, the roll-call square) articulate the dialectics between absence and presence, death and life, which lies at the deepest core of the experience of memorialisation30 and of the funerary origin of the image itself, whose iconic body re-presents by substitution the dead body disappeared in putrefaction or some other dissolving organic process.31 The implication of the roll call integrates and enhances the function of a presentification of the absent that is accomplished by the bodily temperature for the Buchenwald memorial and by the mirroring stone surface for the Washington Wall. As Farocki remarks in a couple of captions related to the Vietnam memorial: ‘Behind the mirror lies an intermediate realm’—‘Behind the mirror, the realm of the dead, who are not yet gone’. The idea to closely connect the ritual of the roll call of the present people to a memorial devoted to the absent and dead can be invested by various and even opposite political and ideological implications. A very eloquent precedent is offered by the rhetoric of the collective answer ‘Presente!’ which characterised the Italian fascist rituals of commemoration of the dead comrades on the occasion of a kind of funerary roll call.32 The utterance ‘Presente!’ eventually became the standard inscription of many military or paramilitary sanctuaries erected in the 1930s by the Italian fascist regime. This practice was inaugurated on the occasion of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution), programmed in order to pompously commemorate the tenth anniversary of the takeover and opened by Benito Mussolini on 28 October 1932 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. In the sacrarium of the martyrs (the fallen ‘Black Shirts’ whose sacrifice had made the revolution possible), designed by the architects Adalberto Libera and Antonio Valente under the supervision of Mussolini himself, six circular rings hosted the etching ‘Presente’ repeated hundreds of times over. This specif ic decoration was extended in the following years to the sanctuaries devoted to the thousands of Italian soldiers fallen during the Great War on the northeastern front as part of the strategy of appropriating their memory and including their sacrifice into the fascist ideological and historical genealogy. This process reached its peak in 1938 with the erection 30 On this, see Conte (ed.), Une absence présente. 31 For the intimate connection between the origins of the image, the dead body and the funerary cult, see Blanchot, ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary’; Debray, Vie et mort de l’image (esp. chap. 1: ‘La naissance par la mort’); Belting, An Anthropology of Images (esp. chap. 4: ‘Image and Death: Embodiment in Early Cultures’). 32 Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy.

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of the military sanctuary of Redipuglia in Friuli Venezia Giulia: a huge war memorial containing the corpses of 39,857 identified and 69,330 unidentified Italian soldiers. Located in the monumental stairs (designed in order to elicit in the visitors/pilgrims a motor ascensional action), bronze plates bear the inscription of the known names of the victims, alternated with the capital lettering ‘Presente’ repeated 880 times. Once again, a significant dialectisation is set up here between the individualisation of the names and the anonymising function of the collective answer, which unifies all differences in a single voice.33 The strategy of listing the victims’ names is a paradigmatic instance of one of the most problematic aspects of monumentality, namely the ideological ambivalence of the memorialising practices, which can serve politically opposite purposes: while it is certainly true that, as has been remarked in the case of the Washington Wall and of many memorials of the Holocaust (such as the one in Paris), ‘it is a discreet, anti-rhetorical and anti-monumental option’,34 the example of the fascist sanctuaries patently shows how this use can be effectively appropriated by the bombastic programmes of totalitarian propaganda.

Works cited Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive (1998), trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Aristotle, The Complete Works, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Matthew Baigell, ‘Segal’s “Holocaust Memorial”. An Interview with George Segal’, Art in America 71 (1983): 134-136. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (1990), trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). ———, An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body (2001); trans. by Thomas Dunlap (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011). Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary’, in The Space of Literature (1955), trans. by Ann Smock, pp. 254-263 (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Pietro Conte (ed.), Une absence présente. Figures de l’image mémorielle (Paris: Mimesis France, 2013). 33 See Taiss, Presente! 34 Zevi, Monumenti per difetto, p. 92 (my trans.).

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Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l’image. Une histoire du regard en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Minuit, 1992). ———, Le Cube et le visage. Autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti (Paris: Macula, 1993). ———, Ex-voto. Image, organe, temps (Paris: Bayard, 2006). ———, La ressemblance par contact. Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008). Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (ed.), Materials on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin: Nicolai, 2005). James George Frazer, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion (1890), ed. by Robert Fraser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (1993), trans. by Keith Botsford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2007). Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections, trans. by Bailey Saunders (London/New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906). Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis/New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1968). ———, ‘Seven Strictures on Similarity’, in Problems and Projects, pp. 437-447 (Indianapolis/New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1972). Charles L. Griswold and Stephen S. Griswold, ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall. Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography’, Critical Inquiry 12, 4 (1986): 688-719. Horst Hoheisel, ‘Aschrott Brunnen – Denk-Stein-Sammlung – Brandeburger Tor –Buchenwald. Vier Erinnerungsversuche’, in Shoah-Formen der Erinnerung. Geschichte, Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst, ed. by Nicolas Berg, Jess Jochimsen and Bernd Stiegler, pp. 253-266 (Munich: Fink, 1996). Liz James, ‘“Seeing’s believing, but feeling’s the truth”. Touch and the Meaning of Byzantine Art’, in Images of the Byzantine World. Visions, Messages and Meanings. Studies presented to Leslie Brubaker, ed. by Angeliki Lymberopoulou, pp. 1-14 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Concrete Art’ (1938), in Complete Writings on Art, ed. by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962), trans. by George Weidenfeld, pp. 555560 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, ‘Eine schwebende Gedenkstätte? Die Gedenkstätte Buchenwald im Wandel’, in Reaktionäre Modernität und Völkermord. Probleme

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des Umgangs mit der NS-Zeit in Museen, Ausstellungen und Gedenkstätten, ed. by Bernd Faulenbach, pp. 113-129 (Essen: Klartext-Verlag 1994). Richard Serra, ‘Richard Serra’s Urban Sculpture. An Interview by Douglas Crimp’ (1980), in Writings, Interviews. 1970-1989, pp. 125-139 (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Ellen Handler Spitz, ‘Loss as Vanished Form. On the Anti-Memorial Sculptures of Horst Hoheisel’, American Imago 62, 4 (2006): 419-433. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. from the third edition (1744) by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948). Robin Wagner-Pacif ic and Barry Schwartz, ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Commemorating a Difficult Past’, The American Journal of Sociology 97, 2 (1991): 376-420. Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments. The Rematerialisation of Public Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). James E. Young, The Texture of Memory. Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994). ———, At Memory’s Edge. After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2000). Adachiara Zevi, Monumenti per difetto. Dalle Fosse Ardeatine alle pietre d’inciampo (Rome: Donzelli, 2014). Tom Ziemke, ‘What’s That Thing Called Embodiment?’, in Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. by Richard Alterman and David Kirsh, pp. 1134-1139 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003).

About the author Andrea Pinotti is Professor in Aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti”, State University of Milan. His research focuses on image theories and visual culture studies, memorialisation and monumentality, phenomenological aesthetics, empathy theories and the morphological tradition from Goethe to the present day. His publications include Il corpo dello stile. Storia dell’arte come storia dell’estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wölfflin (1998), Memorie del neutro. Morfologia dell’immagine in Aby Warburg (2001), Empathie. Histoire d’une idée de Platon au post-humain (2016), Cultura visuale. Immagini sguardi media dispositivi (in collaboration with Antonio Somaini, 2016). In 2018 he was awarded the Wissenschaftspreis der Aby-Warburg-Stiftung in Hamburg. He is currently directing an ERC Advanced project entitled An-iconology. History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images.

5.

Monuments of the Heart: Living Tombs and Organic Memories in Contemporary Culture Sara Damiani

Abstract According to the basic assumption that monuments are the aesthetic mediators of memory—primarily the memory of the dead—the essay aims to discuss the imaginary of the body as a sepulchral monument. Taking as a starting point the legend of Artemisia of Caria, who celebrated the memory of her dead husband/brother Mausolus both by having the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus erected and by drinking Mausolus’ ashes so as to turn herself into his living sarcophagus, the analytic focus is on the replication of similar symbolic practices in contemporary culture, namely in the field of organ transplantation. The transplanted patient receives and preserves within his/her body the organ of the deceased donor, thus becoming, even if unintentionally, the donor’s memorial monument. Keywords: Artemisia of Caria; cannibalism; organ transplantation; living monument

The act of remembering is an affair of the heart from the very beginning: the Latin root of the word recŏrdari, ‘to remember’, means ‘putting back (re) in the heart (cor, cordis)’, i.e. passing a segment of time back to the organ that the ancients believed to be the seat of memory ‘as though the past was thus sutured […] to the heart.’1 This symbolic suture f inds its concretisation today, when organ transplantation surgery sews the heart of a deceased person into the 1 Narváez, Embodied Collective Memory, p. 1.

Violi, A., B. Grespi, A. Pinotti, P. Conte (eds.), Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/978908964852_chIV05

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body of another, attaching it to a different anatomical structure which keeps it alive but which also seems to remember the affective, intuitive and communicative energies of the individual it belonged to. Indeed, despite the scepticism of mainstream medicine, many patients claim, not without anguish, to have changed tastes, habits and lifestyles after the transplantation of the heart or of other internal organs, as if the latter had transformed their bodies into reliquaries of the donor’s memories and personality. The cultural imaginary of organ transplantation is marked by this organic remembering which acts through the body, thus calling into question all the individual barriers that had been theorised with the discovery of cellular immunity in the nineteenth century. According to cellular immunity theory, human anatomy corresponded to a well-circumscribed organism, limited and protected by specific biological frontiers, firmly defending the identity of the individual.2 On the contrary, through the exchange of organs and the related immunosuppressive therapies, the transplantee discovers he is a porous and leaky subject who is even able to preserve, unintentionally, the lived experience of a dead person. In other words, by incorporating the deceased donor’s anatomical fragment, the recipient embodies also the donor’s memory, thus becoming his living monument. In this perspective, the transplantee seems to reactivate in contemporary culture a whole imaginative tradition about the ‘re-cording’ body that is rooted in different cultures, finding one of its most significant expressions in the legend of Artemisia of Caria.

The mausoleum of Artemisia One of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world was the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, a sepulchral monument which, according to tradition, was erected by Queen Artemisia of Caria (Artemisia II) in order to celebrate the memory of Mausolus, her husband/brother who died in 353/352 BC. Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius described the magnificence of this tomb, featuring the work of famous artists, such as the architects Satyrus and Pytheus and the sculptors Scopas of Paros, Leochares, Bryaxis and Timotheus, who rivaled

2 Biological immunity was introduced into medicine in 1881, after Élie Metchnikoff’s discovery of phagocytosis, a cell-mediated immune response to foreign matter. See Cohen, A Body Worth Defending.

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each other to build ‘a memorial of their own fame and of the sculptor’s art’ (Pliny, Natural History, XXXVI.4.30-31).3 Adorned by many sculptural friezes and large statues, the Mausoleum was meant to convey its grandeur as a work of art right from the outset: indeed, the memory of the deceased satrap was supposed to be mirrored in the splendor of the aesthetic object as representation. The legend passed down by Valerius Maximus (Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, IV.6.ext.1) gave the monument a new meaning. In his version, Artemisia, in deep grief, chose to become ‘a living and breathing tomb’4 of her husband and drank his ashes mixed with water. Through cannibalism, the woman decided that she herself would be the monumental representation of Mausolus, his literal sarcophagus—i.e. a ‘flesh-eating’ stone5—although in an intimate and private form. Milad Doueihi points out that Drinking the loved and still-desired body nourishes the wife’s body and turns it, just like the public monument, into a resting and visiting place for the deceased’s body. […] Artemisia’s mourning is a time lived with the dead and in the position of the dead, a time of the living dead in representation [mort vivant en représentation], in the representation of his memory as a public monument or, exactly the opposite, in a complete and radical isolation.6

Incorporating the body of the beloved coincides with becoming a ‘living dead in representation’, that is, a dead person who lives on in the form of a representation but also a living person who represents a dead one: indeed, just like any commemorative work of art, Artemisia assumes the identity of her husband and reproduces it. In De Mulieribus Claris (Famous Women, 1361-1362) for example, Giovanni Boccaccio enlists the Queen as a heroic warrior. After narrating that for Artemisia no receptacle could more suitable for Mausolus than her breast, ‘a resting place where his life would be remembered’, Boccaccio conflates the widow with another Queen Artemisia of Caria (Artemisia I/Artemidora), 3 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, p. 317. See also Vitruvius, De architectura, II.8.11-12 and Preface to Book VII, chapters 12 and 13. 4 Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings‬ , p. 146. 5 The Oxford English Dictionary def ines ‘sarcophagus’ as ‘a kind of stone reputed among the Greeks to have the property of consuming the flesh of dead bodies deposited in it, and consequently used for coffins’. 6 Doueihi, ‘Du bon usage du deuil’, pp. 140-2.

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who lived in the fifth century BC and became famous for her military deeds; having praised the woman’s manly courage, the writer says: As we admire the deeds of Artemisia, what can we think except that the workings of nature erred in bestowing female sex on a body which God had endowed with a virile and lofty spirit?7

After rewriting two different mythical figures, Artemisia I and Artemisia II, to merge them into a single woman embodying both the love of a widow and the value of a warrior, Boccaccio ends the biography of the Queen of Caria with another, far more important fusion of bodies and personalities: a ‘female body endowed with a virile and lofty spirit’ deriving from an act of cannibalism, which will identify Artemisia with her husband Mausolus for ever. Although commonly read as a model of exemplary love, the eating of Mausolus’ body carries with it all the power symbolism traditionally associated with the assimilation of the king’s body politic.8 Indeed, just as in many funerary rites involving cannibalism, so the human meal of the Queen of Caria was a way of incorporating her deceased husband’s soul to put it back amongst the living, allowing Mausolus to resume his command in a new form thanks to her anthropophagous act.9 What distinguishes Artemisia’s cannibalism is, however, the primacy of the aesthetic component, given that her body becomes the sarcophagus (the flesh-eating stone) of her husband in parallel with the erection of the Mausoleum. Mondher Kilani’s work on cannibalism illuminates the equivalence between Artemisia’s cannibalistic body and the fifth wonder of the ancient world, as he defines cannibalism as une fiction modélisante de l’humain, ‘a modelling fiction for what is human’, namely a symbolic agent thanks to which, ‘through the cannibalistic imagination and practice, what is human presents and represents itself’.10 To the anthropologist, this form of ‘presentation and self-representation’ allows human beings to build up models of relationship with each other and is also a means of expression that, passing through a confrontation with power, death and disease, finally engages ‘the relation with aesthetic forms’.11 All these features are evoked by 7 Boccaccio, Famous Women, pp. 233, 241 and 240-242. 8 See Gaehtgens, ‘L’Artémise’. 9 Franklin, Boccaccio’s Heroines, p. 156. 10 Kilani, ‘Violence extrême’, p. 25. 11 Kilani, ‘Cannibalisme’, p. 42.

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the sarcophagus personified by Artemisia, who defines a specific representational model of the body-as-monument that has informed the imaginary of Western culture from early modernity down to our contemporary age. Thus, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the legendary Artemisia is largely present in aesthetic reflection as the symbol of a legitimacy to power that migrates from body to body: a well-known example is the series of tapestries Story of Artemisia (seventeenth century, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale; Musée du Louvre), modelled on Antoine Caron’s drawings (c. 1564-1570), which substantiates the political role of Catherine de’ Medici—and later of Maria de’ Medici and Anne of Austria—as the ‘living memory of the deceased king’.12 Mannerist visual culture is actually pervaded by this mythic woman, always painted with a cup of ashes in her hands and, very often, with the Mausoleum under construction in the background: in the works of Francesco Salviati, Domenico Fetti, Peter Paul Rubens, Francesco Curradi, Rembrandt and Gerrit van Honthorst, the Queen of Caria shows how the pain of mourning could be exorcised by transforming the self into a ‘living dead in representation’, that is, into an image full of an enormous power of remembrance. The literary imaginary as well is charmed by Artemisia’s power. In Les Spectacles d’horreurs (Spectacles of Horror, 1630), the French writer Jean-Pierre Camus evokes Artemisia in ‘Le Cœur mangé’, a tale about the legend of the ‘eaten heart’, a very common motif in the folklore of many countries which is taken up by writers as diverse as Boccaccio, Stendhal and Barbey d’Aurevilly.13 Reworking the basic plot of the jealous husband who, in revenge for his wife’s betrayal, obliges her to eat her lover’s heart, Camus explicitly mentions Artemisia when the elder Rogat, after stealing the embalmed heart of Memnon from the grave to have it served as a meal to his young wife Crisele, reveals to her that she has become the living tomb of his beloved: But Crisele wishing to continue her visits and devotions to the tomb of the heart of Memnon, Rogat one day said to her that she didn’t need to take so much trouble since she was carrying this tomb everywhere in her own stomach, like another Artemisia serving as sepulcher to the heart of her lover.14

Thus Memnon’s heart, which Crisele had previously put in a silver box and buried in a black marble tomb with an epitaph that would ‘give the 12 Mamone, ‘Caterina e Maria’, p. 31. 13 See Di Maio, Il cuore mangiato; Doueihi, ‘A Perverse History’; Rossi, ‘Il cuore’. 14 Camus, Les Spectacles d’horreur, pp. 41-42 (English trans. in Doueihi, A Perverse History, p. 93).

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memory of Memnon the image of life’,15 takes on a new existence through the woman’s body. Indeed, by bringing about Crisele’s cannibalistic act, Rogat offers a tangible ‘image of life’ to Memnon, turning his bride into a memorial for the dead young man, who is thus given the opportunity to be reincarnated in a different form. Crisele on her part, who, like all the portraits of Artemisia at that time, was dressed in mourning clothes and felt desperate for the loss of her beloved, is capable of absorbing her lover’s temperament to such an extent that she changes her own personality and sets on foot a plan of revenge leading to the death of her old husband. By ingesting the heart of Memnon, says Doueihi, Crisele has become an other—it is as if she has also become Memnon himself. […] The literal incorporation of the heart or a part of the body of the lover into the body of the woman transforms the woman and makes her a vehicle of the dead.16

The incorporation of the heart of another (dead) person and the metamorphosis of the self caused by the memory inscribed in this organ are the elements that implicitly structure Camus’ tale. As such, they provide the key to the cultural symbol of the body-as-monument, connecting Artemisia’s mythical cannibalism to another very popular form of anthropophagy in seventeenth-century Europe: the cannibalism, halfway between magic and science, promoted by corpse medicine.

Intrinsic virtues Artemisia chose to feed on Mausolus not only to reincarnate his memory but also to draw the energy she needed in order to survive: some versions of the myth tell that she drank the ashes of her husband daily, consuming them in two years and dying soon after they were finished.17 For this reason, she evokes the ‘cannibal’ treatments originating in classical antiquity and finding their largest circulation in the seventeenth century, 15 Doueihi, A Perverse History, p. 87. Traditionally, the heart of a heroic warrior was wrapped in silk and buried into a precious marble tomb in celebration of his honour: see Denis, ‘Cœur arraché / Cœur mangé’. 16 Doueihi, A Perverse History, pp. 88 and 94. 17 ‘Artemisia’, in Bayle and others, A General Dictionary, vol. 2, pp. 362-365; [L.S.], ‘Artemisia’, in A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. 1, pp. 376-377; Frieda, Catherine de Medici, Chapter 11.

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which consisted of drinking burnt and pulverised human bones in order to be healed from various ailments, including arthritis and epilepsy.18 Human body parts mixed with various ointments and liquids were believed to be miraculous remedies for many diseases because they were imbued with life force. In addition to the bones, the bodily parts used in these drugs included moss upon the skull, the heart, the skin, the blood or fat, although the main ingredient was mummy, a substance coming from Egyptian mummies or other embalmed and mummified human flesh, just like the heart of Memnon in Camus’ tale. As Louise Noble points out in Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature, [t]he most highly prized mummy was that from a fresh corpse, preferably a youth who had died a sudden and violent death, because of the widespread belief that a swift death captured the body’s healing life force, while a slow death depleted it. The belief that the body’s life force is captured and preserved in death gives mummy an uncanny temporal status that registers the past in the present and reinforces the multitemporality of corpse matter; in fact, mummy only functions medicinally in the present because it is embedded with the trace of a past existence.19

The peculiarity of the pharmacological corpse matter used in modern Europe is its power to retain, according to Paracelsian doctrine, the ‘intrinsic virtue’20 of a dead person, the vital spirit that could be transferred from one body to another through ingestion. Leonardo da Vinci already referred to this process when he declared that ‘[w]e preserve our life with the death of others. In a dead thing insensate life remains which, when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life.’21 Noble rightly observes that the therapeutic choice of eating the mummy and absorbing its revitalising properties was based on the belief in the corpse’s ability to keep the memory trace of a previous life. Perhaps this explains why, even in corpse medicine, there was the conviction—or rather the fear—that ingesting human body matter could lead to the transmission of personal traits from one individual to another. In a context where most of the available healing resources came from criminals sentenced to the gallows, the 18 Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, pp. 9-11. 19 Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism, p. 3. With good reason, Noble emphasises the symbolic aspect linking corpse medicine to the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. 20 Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism, p. 20. 21 Leonardo da Vinci, Prophecies, p. 32, quoted in Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism, p. 16.

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seventeenth-century doctor Elias Heinrich Henckel warned that ‘Drinking the blood of a criminal who has been beheaded is likely to result in the acquisition of his criminal character and the pursuit of a career of crime.’22 Drinking the blood of a newly dead person or, as in the case of Artemisia, his burnt remains means incorporating his life force and, at the same time, his personality, prolonging his survival with a procedure whose purposes are not so different from those of funerary cannibalism and whose concerns are very similar to the imaginary of organ transplant in contemporary society. Through these ‘new forms of late modern cannibalism’,23 as Nancy Scheper-Hughes provocatively calls transplant operations, patients are afraid of inheriting the personality of the donor—usually a young individual dying accidentally—and ultimately even his ‘deviant’ subjectivity, thus reproposing the same anxieties formulated by Henckel hundreds of years earlier. Today the myth of Artemisia, precisely because of her ability to represent the multitemporality and multipersonality inscribed in the cannibalistic body, is to be found in the cultural reactions to biotechnology, which paradoxically seems to reactivate the therapeutic cures of corpse medicine on the one hand and the symbolic connotations of the body-sarcophagus on the other.

Cell memories Besides Noble, who in Medicinal Cannibalism clearly explains the link between the cannibalistic cures of the past and those in use today—they fragment, manipulate, recycle and commodify the human body—organ transplantation surgery has been associated with anthropophagy in various areas, including anthropology, psychiatry and literature.24 Essentially, the critical debate insists on the commodification of human anatomy: spare body parts are transferred from one individual to another through surgery, which, just like sixteenth- and seventeenth-century corpse medicine, uses man in order to cure man and exploits the death of one in order to improve the living conditions of the other. The patient receiving a foreign organ is thus forced both to reformulate the boundaries between the self (alive) and the donor (deceased) and to 22 Thorndike, A History, p. 537. 23 Scheper-Hughes, ‘Bodies for Sale’, p. 1; Scheper-Hughes, ‘The Global Traffic in Human Organs’, p. 196. 24 See Lévi-Strauss, Nous sommes tous des cannibales; Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant (eds.), Commodifying Bodies; S.J. Youngner, ‘Organ Retrieval’; S.J. Youngner, ‘Some Must Die’; Silverberg, ‘Caught in the Organ Draft’.

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find a new form of (self-)representation; only thus will he be able to deal with what David Le Breton calls ‘a breach between the real body and its image’,25 i.e. an anatomical and imaginary fissure compelling him to rethink himself as a subject open to alterity and even liable to be invaded by the personality of a stranger. Almost all organ recipients are afraid of inheriting the donor’s character, preferences and habits, and the widespread belief in the existence of cell memory26 —namely the ability of every single bodily cell to remember the lived experience of the individual it belonged to—is one of the main causes for the socio-cultural difficulty in accepting transplant operations. A kidney transplantee reveals: I’m not in my skin, it seems as if I’m in a foreign body and were totally modified […]. I do not believe in reincarnation, but sometimes I ask myself who was the woman who gave me her kidney; perhaps, it is her corpulence I got. It looks like revenge or she still lives in me. By taking her kidney I also took her skin and her brain giving me orders.27

This transplantee becomes the land of conquest of the donor, who, through the surviving organ, seems to take possession of her own body—brain included—by altering its shape, surface and boundaries and literally turning it into her fleshly memory. Today, the body-mausoleum of Artemisia returns in the form of an unpleasing organic memory, which passes from one person to another through biotech cannibalism.28 Far from wanting to embody the dead person’s identity and acquire his political status as in the past, the contemporary cannibalistic subject emerging from transplants paradoxically exacerbates the aesthetic power of the body-sarcophagus and becomes an anatomic monument, portraying the disturbing hybridity between the living and the dead, the container and the contained, the present and the past. The 1968 brain-death criteria, according to which a person can be pronounced dead in the absence of brain activity while the cardiovascular and respiratory systems still work, marked a key step towards the spread of successful organ transplant operations. Mita Giacomini remarks that 25 Le Breton, La Chair à vif, p. 307. 26 Tschui, Les Dons d’organes, p. 240; Sharp, Strange Harvest, pp. 198-200; Le Breton, La Chair à vif, p. 309. See also Lock, Twice Dead, pp. 320-326. 27 Quoted in Recham, ‘Le greffé rénal et l’autre’, pp. 76-77. 28 In the imagination of many people, the danger of rejection affecting the recipient throughout his life ‘consists, literally, in vomiting up the heart and spitting it out’ (Nancy, L’Intrus, p. 8).

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sight and the aesthetic dimension played a decisive role in the revision, still much discussed, of the traditional boundary between life and death: In the years since 1968, diverse interests—utilitarian and humanitarian, clinical and ethical, personal and societal—have continued to struggle over the defining features of ‘death’ in the context of high-technology medicine. […] The diversity of opinions and practices suggests that perhaps death remains largely ‘in the eye of the beholder’. The history of the emergence of brain death in the 1960s illustrates how interested ‘eyes’ have constructed particular visions of death. Redefining death was not simply a technical exercise, but an aesthetic act to f it the hopelessly comatose, the dead, and the organ donor into the same clinical picture.29

The ‘aesthetic act’ referred to by Giacomini is what would associate the dead with patients in irreversible coma, the so-called ‘neomorts’, ‘faux-vivants’ or even ‘living cadavers’ who are, however, in a physical condition far from rigor mortis, being also hydrated, cared for and even anesthetised by the medical staff. The eye of the observer is not able to recognise non-somatic death nor the physical and psychological consequences of the transfer of an organ from a ‘living cadaver’ to a living person: that is why a cultural effort is required in order to accept, especially from the aesthetic perspective, the disturbing liminal states that the deep coma patient (the donor) and the transplant patient (the recipient) are called to embody, against their will.30 In this effort, the idea of turning the recipient into ‘a living and breathing tomb’ of his donor reappears in various forms. For example, most organ procurement professionals try to persuade families to donate the organs of their relatives by encouraging them to imagine their lost loved ones as living on in the body of a stranger. Many advertising campaigns for organ donation collude in this imaginary, emphasising both the continuity of memories and feelings between the bodies of two strangers and the chance to live a second life. In the 2012 campaign of Life Transplant Foundation, the heads of two different persons appeared together on a single, hybrid, anatomical structure, while in 2014 the Sociedad Mexicana de Transplantes promoted organ donation by showing photomontages of people the upper half of whose the body was connected to the bottom half of another body. Like many early twentieth-century Surrealist cadavres exquis—exquisite but also delicious and edible corpses—which were drawn piece by piece by 29 Giacomini, ‘A Change of Heart’, p. 1480. 30 See Agamben, Homo Sacer, on Foucauldian biopower.

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Fig. 31: Václav Bartovsky, František Hudeček, Jindřich Chalupecký, František Gross, Cadavre exquis, Prague 1934, Pencil on paper, 20.7 × 16.6 cm. Published in Virginia Finzi Ghisi et al., Il sogno rivela la natura delle cose (Milan: Mazzotta, 1991), p. 221.

different artists and assembled through the fusion of disparate elements, and like the jigsaw bodies seen in the works of well-known contemporary artists, the images of the transplantee circulating in our society are those of a subject full of a highly disruptive, and therefore highly moving, representational power: a multifaceted individual, composed of diverse body pieces sewn together, who aggregates several existential dimensions (Figure 31).

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However, anthropologist Lesley Sharp notes that many donors’ relatives refuse these sorts of pictures because they exacerbate the undecidability between life and death of their lost loved ones, thus emphasising the collective denial of their demise. Indeed, the reintegration of a body fragment of the donor into the world of the living involves communication strategies that mask his death as well as his identity and past life in order to publicly celebrate the renewed existence of the recipient. Negative remarks from kin also apply to public memorials to donors, since they are considered too impersonal: the National Donor Memorial in Richmond (VA), which was built in 2006 on an area of over 10,000 square feet, shows for example only a long series of first names, without any photos or references to the personal stories of the people who gave their organs.31 Unlike the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, these monuments appear devoid of their primary aim, i.e. the public celebration of the memories of the deceased, paradoxically delegating to the recipient’s body the only possibility of remembrance.

Living monument of the donor In a 2004 survey, a heart transplantee justified his choice not to have any information about the organ he had received as a ‘refusal to turn into a living monument of the donor’,32 giving voice to the terror of both transforming into the Artemisian body-mausoleum and having his identity modified through the cell memory contained in a foreign body fragment. Although transplantation medicine interprets the transplantees’ anxieties as ancestral expressions of ‘magical thinking’ and justifies the changes in their lifestyles as a result of renewed energy or as a side effect of the immunosuppressive drugs, some scientific studies have tried to investigate whether the body is able to store memories—and, if so, to what extent. In the article ‘Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients that Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors’,33 based on several interviews with volunteer heart transplant recipients, recipient families and donor families, Paul Pearsall, Gary E.R. Schwartz and Linda G.S. Russek explain personal changes in transplantees—changes in food, sexual, recreational and career preferences 31 Sharp, ‘Commodified Kin’; Sharp, Strange Harvest, pp. 123-158. 32 Inspector, Kutz, David, ‘Another Person’s Heart’, p. 168. 33 Pearsall, Schwartz, Russek, ‘Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients’; Pearsall, The Heart’s Code.

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as well as specific sensory experiences related to the donors (i.e. to relive their death)—as a result of an electromagnetic communication between the heart and the brain. In their opinion, the donor’s heart might be able to pass information and energy about its original owner to the brain of the recipient: if this hypothesis is confirmed, incorporating the heart of a stranger would mean embodying his memory in all respects, to literally re-cordari him and reactivate, albeit partially, his personality. Claire Sylvia describes this process in the opening pages of her autobiography, A Change of Heart (1997), when she narrates her dream about the man who gave her his heart. At the end of the dream, Sylvia tells us, ‘we kiss—and as we do I inhale him into me. It feels like the deepest breath I have ever taken. And I know at that moment the two of us, Tim and I, will be together forever.’34 Again, cannibalism (‘I inhale him into me’) is a founding trope for a person who is destined to live multiple lives at once (‘the two of us […] will be together forever’); yet Sylvia chooses to read this unusual ‘intercorporeality’35 not as a source of discomfort for her hybrid anatomy/ identity but rather as an opportunity for new representations of the self, open to other bodies and to additional aspects of existence. The fascination for this ambiguous and metamorphic body is well expressed in A Change of Heart (2012), a multimedia project by Andrew Carnie. The work shows multiple reproductions of the photograph of a heart transplantee who welcomes other people inside his own body: they are shadows of individuals, internal organs, anatomies of the self and of others that intersect to form revolutionary human models.36 The (self-)representation of the opening of one’s own heart to alterity is also central in the seminal essay L’Intrus (The Intruder, 2000) by Jean-Luc Nancy. When told that he would have to undergo a heart transplant, the philosopher perceives ‘the physical sensation of a void already open [déjà ouvert] in [his] chest […]; and, as though within a single representation, the sensation of passing over a bridge, while still remaining on it’.37 Inhaling the ghost of the other, introjecting his shadow, feeling suspended in the air as in a ‘representation’: the ‘intruder’, i.e. the acquired organ and all the invasive cures coming with it, compels the recipient to acknowledge that 34 Sylvia, Novak, A Change of Heart, p. 8. 35 On intercorporeality, see Shildrick, ‘Corporeal Cuts’, pp. 31-46; Shildrick, ‘Contesting Normative Embodiment’. 36 Carnie participates in an interdisciplinary project between art and science called ‘Hybrid Bodies: An Artistic Investigation into the Experience of Heart Transplantation’. Cfr. http://www. hybridbodiesproject.com/ [last accessed 9 December 2019]. 37 Nancy, L’Intrus, p. 3.

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he has not only different existential dimensions but also different forms of self-representation as an individual who is in perennial exposition: the truth of the subject is its exteriority and excessivity: its infinite exposition. The intrus exposes me, excessively. It extrudes, it exports, it expropriates […]. I am becoming like a science-fiction android, or the living-dead.38

The Artemisian ‘mort vivant en représentation’ has found its contemporary incarnation in the transplanted body, an organic monument repeatedly celebrating its excess of life and death.

Works cited A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, ed. by William Smith, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1880). Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Pierre Bayle and others, A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical (London: J. Bettenham, 1735). Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. by Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Jean-Pierre Camus, Les Spectacles d’horreur (Paris: André Soubron, 1630). Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending. Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2009). Françoise Denis, ‘Cœur arraché / Cœur mangé. Modulations’, Études littéraires 31, 1 (1998): 95-108. Mariella Di Maio, Il cuore mangiato. Storia di un tema letterario dal Medioevo all’Ottocento (Milan: Guerini e associati, 1996). Milad Doueihi, ‘Du bon usage du deuil. Le cas d’Artémise’, Le Genre humain 29 (1995): 139-148. ———, A Perverse History of the Human Heart (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1997). Margaret A. Franklin, Boccaccio’s Heroines. Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Leonie Frieda, Catherine de Medici (London: Hachette, 2011). Barbara Gaehtgens, ‘L’Artémise de Gérard van Honthorst ou les deux corps de la reine’, Revue de l’Art 109 (1995): 13-25. 38 Ibid., p. 13.

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Barbara Gaehtgens, ‘Artemisia. Un programma iconografico per una reggente’, in Caterina e Maria de’ Medici: donne al potere. Firenze celebra il mito di due regine di Francia, ed. by Clarice Innocenti, pp. 109-115 (Florence: Mandragora, 2008). Mita Giacomini, ‘A Change of Heart and a Change of Mind? Technology and the Redefinition of Death in 1968’, Social Science & Medicine 44, 10 (1997): 1465-1482. Yoram Inspector, Ilan Kutz, Daniel David, ‘Another Person’s Heart. Magical and Rational Thinking in the Psychological Adaptation to Heart Transplantation’, Israeli Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 41, 3 (2004): 161-173. Mondher Kilani, ‘Cannibalisme et métaphore de l’humain’, Gradhiva 30-31 (20012002): 31-55. ———, ‘Violence extrême et dévoration cannibale. Production et destruction du lien social’, in Foi de cannibale! La dévoration, entre religion et psychanalyse, ed. by Myriam Vaucher, pp. 19-29 (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2012). Leonardo da Vinci, Prophecies, trans. by John G. Nichols (London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2002). David Le Breton, La Chair à vif. De la leçon d’anatomie aux greffes d’organes (Paris: Métailié, 2008). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Nous sommes tous des cannibales (Paris: Seuil, 2013). Margaret Lock, Twice Dead. Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2002). Sara Mamone, ‘Caterina e Maria: due Artemisie sul trono di Francia’, in Caterina e Maria de’ Medici: donne al potere. Firenze celebra il mito di due regine di Francia, ed. by Clarice Innocenti, pp. 31-41 (Florence: Mandragora, 2008). Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Intrus (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2000), trans. by Susan Hanson, The New Centennial Review 2, 3 (2002): 1-14. Rafael F. Narváez‬ , Embodied Collective Memory. The Making and Unmaking of Human Nature‬ (Lanham: University Press of America, Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). Louise Chr. Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Paul Pearsall, The Heart’s Code. Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy (New York: Broadway Books, 1998). ———, Gary E.R. Schwartz, Linda G.S. Russek, ‘Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients that Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors’, Integrative Medicine 2, 2-3 (1999): 65-72. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, vol. 6, trans. by John Bostock, Henry T. Riley‬ (London: H.G. Bohn, 1857). Ali Recham, ‘Le greffé rénal et l’autre’, in Le Corps, son ombre et son double, ed. by Colette Méchin, Isabelle Bianquis-Gasser, David Le Breton (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). Luciano Rossi, ‘Il cuore, mistico pasto d’amore. Dal Lai Guirun al Decameron’, Studi provenzali e francesi 82 (1983): 28-128.

358 

Sar a Damiani

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ‘The Global Traffic in Human Organs’, Current Anthropology 41, 2 (April 2000): 191-224. ———, ‘Bodies for Sale − Whole or in Parts’, Body & Society 7, 2-3 (2001): 1-7. ——— and Loic Wacquant (eds.), Commodifying Bodies (London/Thousand Oaks/ New Delhi: Sage, 2001). Lesley A. Sharp, ‘Commodified Kin. Death, Mourning, and Competing Claims on the Bodies of Organ Donors in the United States’, American Anthropologist New Series, 103, 1 (March 2001): 112-133. ———, Strange Harvest. Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2006). Margrit Shildrick, ‘Contesting Normative Embodiment. Some Reflections on the Psycho-social Signif icance of Heart Transplant Surgery’, Perspectives. International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy 1 (2008): 12-22. ———, ‘Corporeal Cuts. Surgery and the Psycho-social’, Body & Society 14, 1 (2008): 31-46. Robert Silverberg, ‘Caught in the Organ Draft’, in Gedanken Fictions. Stories on Themes in Science, Technology, and Society, ed. by Thomas A. Easton, pp. 199-208 (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press LLC, 2000). Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (London/New York: Routledge, 2011). Claire Sylvia and William Novak, A Change of Heart. A Memoir (New York: Warner Books, 1997). Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). Marlyse Tschui, Les Dons d’organes. Donneurs, greffés et soignants témoignent sur la transplantation (Paris: Anne Carrière, 2003). Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings‬ emorable Deeds and Sayings3). greffés e, trans. by Henry J. Walker (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004). Stuart J. Youngner, ‘Organ Retrieval. Can We Ignore the Dark Side?’, Transplantation Proceedings 22, 3 (June 1990): 1014-1015. Stuart J. Youngner, ‘Some Must Die’, in Organ Transplantation. Meanings and Realities, ed. by Stuart J. Youngner, Renée C. Fox and Laurence J. O’Connell, pp. 32-55 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

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About the author Sara Damiani is the Vice-Chancellor’s delegate for Visual Communication at the University of Bergamo. She is a member of Punctum. Centro studi sull’immagine, and of the DFG-Netzwerk: Das nächtliche Selbst. Traumwissen und Traumkunst im Jahrhundert der Psychologie (1850-1950). Her main area of research is the relationship between art, visual culture, literature and medical anthropology. Her publications include Locus Solus 4. I volti di Medusa (2006); L’atelier dei sogni: rappresentazioni dell’onirico nelle arti visive (2012); Fuori quadro: follia e creatività fra arte, cinema e archivio with E. Grazioli and B. Grespi (2013); La cultura delle immagini: la chiesa di Sant’Agostino a Bergamo tra l’iconografia sacra e la città with F. Lo Monaco and S. Maffei (2015); and Arte e cultura digitale (2020).

Index Absolon, Karel 135 Adelman, Janet 37 Agamben, Giorgio 11, 111, 118, 121, 326, 352 Alexander the Great 311 Algarotti, Francesco 244-246 Alloa, Emmanuel 200, 300 Andò, Valeria 59 Andriopoulos, Stefan 16 Ankersmit, Frank 278 Anne of Austria 347 Antoninus Liberalis 46, 48, 53-54, 58 Apollinaire, Guillaume 161 Aragon, Louis 199 Arasse, Daniel 234 Arendt, Hannah 146-147 Ariès, Philippe 26, 264 Ariosto, Ludovico 55 Aristotle 291, 330-331 Armstrong, Rebecca 55-56 Arnheim, Rudolf 113, 192 Artemisia of Caria 293, 343-348, 350-351, 354, 356 Augé, Marc 182 Aumont, Jacques 9, 195 Bachelard, Gaston 135-136, 152 Baigell, Matthew 326 Bailey, Douglass W. 134, 143-145, 147-148, 152 Baker, Simon 299 Balas, Edith 160 Balázs, Béla 9, 23, 106, 116-121, 192 Baldacci, Cristina 130 Baldo, Jonathan 32, 35, 38 Bara, Theda 307 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée 347 Barthes, Roland 106, 144, 207, 211, 214, 220-221, 279 Bartsch, Volker 328 Bataille, Georges 295-296, 301-302 Batchen, Geoffrey 220-221, 270 Baudelaire, Charles 14, 122-123, 258, 295-296, 299, 301-302 Baudrillard, Jean 101 Bava, Lamberto 89, 94-96 Bava, Mario 89, 94-96 Bayle, Pierre 348 Bazin, André 80, 93, 106-107, 111, 118, 170, 175, 189, 191-193, 196-197, 199-201, 214 Behrndt, Helle 186 Bekhterev, Vladimir M. 66 Bell, Hannah Rachel 157 Belting, Hans 190, 211-212, 220, 301, 336, 338 Benjamin, Walter 14, 67, 113-115, 135-136, 140, 154, 213, 215, 313, 319 Benkard, Ernst 199

Bentham, Jeremy 261-262, 265, 267-271 Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo 258 Bergamas, Maria 318 Bergson, Henri-Louis 10, 14, 196 Bernard of Clairvaux 335 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 180 Bertinatti, Francesco 258 Bertinatti, Giuseppe 247 Bertolini, Michele 22-23 Bettini, Maurizio 54 Beuys, Joseph 181-182 Bident, Christophe 301 Blake, William 226-227 Blanchot, Maurice 207, 216, 292, 295-302, 338 Blaschka, Leopold 257 Blaschka, Rudolph 257 Bloom, Michelle E. 174 Blumenberg, Hans 145 Boccaccio, Giovanni 345-347 Boiffard, Jacques-André 299 Bois, Yves-Alain 183 Bolzoni, Lina 26, 33 Bordwell, David 195 Boritt, Gabor 323 Borja-Villel, Manuel 271 Botosanéanu, Lazare 238 Bowers, Charlie 83-86 Božovič, Miran 271 Braidotti, Rosi 45-46, 52 Brancusi, Constantin 130, 159-166 Bredekamp, Horst 209, 272 Breton, André 299 Bronfen, Elisabeth 292, 305 Broodthaers, Marcel 209, 271 Brook, Richard 236 Bruno, Giordano 27 Bryaxis 344 Burkert, Walter 52 Burns, Elisabeth A. 221 Burns, J. Francis 319 Burns, Stanley 221 Burton, Richard 312 Burton, Robert 33 Byatt, Antonia 21-22, 45, 49-51, 55, 261 Caillois, Roger 22, 63-68, 90, 300 Caldani, Leopoldo 250 Caldani, Luigi 258 Camus, Jean-Pierre 347-349 Canguilhem, Georges 239 Cappabianca, Alessandro 92, 99, 101 Carlino, Andrea 245 Carlson, Michael 40 Carmine, Giovanni 186 Carnie, Andrew 355

362 Index Carpenter, Edmund S. 138-140, 146, 150 Carruthers, Mary 32 Casetti, Francesco 216, 279 Castel, Robert 214 Cattelan, Maurizio 182 Catullus 54-55 Cavallotti, Diego 199 Cavallucci, Camillo Jacopo 246 Cavallucci, Fabio 186 Cephisodotus the Elder 77 Chalfa Ruyter, Nancy 88 Chalmers, David 142, 144 Chaplin, Charlie 21-22, 63, 68, 70-71, 74-81, 86 Chareyre-Méjan, Alain 93 Chartier, Roger 31 Cheng, Joyce 66 Chisholm, Hugh 112 Christophe, Ernest 299 Ciardi, Roberto Paolo 247 Clark, Andy 142, 144-145, 149 Cleopatra 36-37, 292, 305-315 Clésinger, August 299 Clifford Williams, Edith 161 Clouet, François 136-137 Cohen, Ed 344 Colbert, Claudette 307 Colleoni, Bartolomeo 184 Collings, David 269-270 Collins, Christopher 144 Collins, Desmond 135 Collins, Henry 139 Cometa, Michele 129, 142, 145, 147, 151, 153 Comparini, Leonetto 247 Compton, Michael 271 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 69 Conkey, Margaret W. 141-142 Conte, Pietro 130-131, 198, 268, 338 Corniani, Giovanni Battista 249 Corsi, Pietro 26 Costa, Agostino 247 Coward, Fiona 143 Crary, Jonathan 216, 279 Cremer, Fritz 336-337 Crimmins, James E. 267 Criqui, Jean-Pierre 159 Crisele 347-348 Cronenberg, David 22, 89, 97, 99-101 Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály 146, 151 Curiger, Bice 184 Curradi, Francesco 347 Curti, Roberto 95 Curtiz, Michael 98, 174-175 Cuvier, Georges 232, 239 Damiani, Sara 293 David, Daniel 354 Davies, Richard 16, 166, 239, 258 Davies, Stephen 144

Davis, Whitney 144 Dawson, Anthony B. 29-30 Day, Matthew 144-145, 149 De Bruyckere, Berlynde 182 De Caro, Mario 277 De Lazzer, Alessandro 58 De Long, Alton J. 148 De Ricqlès, Armand 238 De Rosa, Miriam 115 De Zayas, Marius 161 Debray, Régis 211-212, 338 Delamare-Deboutteville, Claude 238 Deleuze, Gilles 10, 11, 93, 108 Delsarte, François 22, 69-70, 72, 74 Denis, Françoise 348 Dennett, Daniel C. 142 Derrida, Jacques 120, 291, 301 Descola, Philippe 14, 138, 144 Desnos, Robert 299 Detrez, Christine 281 Di Chiara, Francesco 93 Di Maio, Mariella 347 Diderot, Denis 266 Didi-Huberman, Georges 59, 73, 93, 170, 182, 191, 212-213, 235, 322, 329-330, 335 Dieterle, William 119-120 Dietrich, Marlene 23, 107-109 Dissanayake, Ellen 134, 141, 144-147 Döblin, Alfred 199-200 Dobres, Marcia-Anne 135 Dominik, Andrew 208, 222 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich 301 Doueihi, Milad 345, 347-348 Douhet, Giulio 317 Dowden, Kenneth 58 Dubois, Philippe 170, 207, 211, 214 Duchamp, Marcel 160, 163, 165 Duday, Henri 232 Dudley Andrew, James 191 Dunkelman, Mark 323 Dürer, Albrecht 73 Durham Peters, John 118 Durkheim, Émile 297 Eaton, Randall 135 Eidelpes, Rosa 67 Eisenman, Peter 327 Eisenstein, Sergei M. 12-13, 109, 131, 189, 191-201 Eliasson, Olafur 280 Elliott, Maryse 16 Emmanuele, Luigi 94 Engel, William E. 26, 28 Engell, Lorenz 190 Epstein, Jean 9, 209, 272 Erikson, Carl 174-175 Everett, Edward 321 Everson, William K. 174 Evreinov, Nikolaj 195

363

Index

Falguières, Patricia 182 Farnese, Tommaso 250 Farocki, Harun 18, 335, 338 Fauchereau, Serge 161, 163-165 Fauth, Wolfgang 54 Ferrara, Luigi 262 Ferraris, Maurizio 277-278 Fetti, Domenico 347 Fimiani, Filippo 192, 297, 299 Fischer, Urs 130, 179-185 Flemming, Rebecca 59 Fludd, Robert 27 Fogazzaro, Antonio 94 Forbes Irving, Paul M.C. 46-47, 57 Franklin Mowery, John 31 Franklin, Margaret A. 346 Franzina, Emilio 323 Franzoni, Claudio 212 Frazer, James George 335 Freda, Riccardo 21, 23, 93 Freedberg, David 138, 212-213 Fregni Nagler, Linda 208, 211, 216, 218-219, 221, 223-224, 226-227 Freud, Sigmund 90, 172-173, 195, 291 Frieda, Leonie 348 Furon, Raymond 232 Füssli, Johann Heinrich 251 Gabriel, Markus 277 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 170-171 Gaehtgens, Barbara 346 Gaillard, Aurélia 94 Galeen, Henrik 173 Gallese, Vittorio 134, 144-145, 151-152 Gallini, Clara 58 Gallone, Carmine 94 Galton, Francis 138-139 Gamble, Clive 143-144 Garber, Marjorie 312 Garboli, Cesare 95 Garcia, Michel 232 Gardel, Carlos 335 Garland, Judy 106 Gates, Amy L. 269 Gaukroger, Stephen 252 Gayrard-Valy, Yvette 232 Gehlen, Arnold 145, 153, 190 Geimer, Peter 202 Gell, Alfred 135, 137-138 Gentile, Emilio 338 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 184 Ghosh, Ranjan 277 Giacometti, Alberto 330 Giacomini, Mita 351-352 Giambologna 130, 179-181 Gilardi, Ando 225-226 Gill, Roma 29 Gimbutas, Marija 135

Gioni, Massimiliano 180, 183-184, 220 Giordano, Federico 199 Girard, Marie-Christine 59 Giraud, Pierre 263-265, 267 Glaubitz, Nicolas 190 Gober, Robert 182 Gobert, Fabrice 280 Godard, Jean-Luc 109, 111 Godfrey, Mark 326, 328 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 18, 112-113, 331 Gombrich, Ernst 129, 145 Goodacre, Glenna 337 Goodman, Nelson 329, 331 Gordon, Douglas 72 Gorini, Paolo 209, 261-263, 265, 272 Gosden, Chris 141, 144 Graham, Kent 323 Gray Otis, Harrison 82 Grazioli, Elio 130, 219 Gregory, Richard L. 145 Griswold, Charles L. 334 Griswold, Stephen S. 334 Grootenboer, Hanneke 186 Gross, Kenneth 77 Grünberg, Serge 101 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 141 Gunning, Tom 80 Gutenberg, Johannes Gensfleisch, 117 Guthrie, R. Dale 135 Guthrie, Stewart 135 Halverson, John 144 Hammer, Mary 306 Han, Byung-Chul 279 Hansen, Mark B.N. 279 Hansen, Miriam 68, 216 Hanson, Ann E. 59 Hart, Frederick 337 Hecker, Sharon 185 Hediger, Vinzenz 23, 115, 193 Heidegger, Martin 196, 143, 170, 199-200, 295, 297-298, 300 Heiser, Jörg 185 Henckel, Elias Heinrich 350 Henrichs, Albert 52 Herbig, Reinhard 54 Herder, Johann Gottfried 145 Hersey, George L. 12, 265 Higgs, Peter 306 Hirsch, Forster 310 Hirst, Damien 209, 254 Hitchcock, Alfred 72, 97, 271, Hodder, Ian 144 Hodgson, Derek 140, 144-145 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus 14 Hoffmann, Kathryn A. 259 Hoheisel, Horst 193, 332-334, 336 Hölderlin, Friedrich 298

364 Index Homer 47, 109, 160 Hooke, Robert 250 Hsiao Hsien, Hou 106-107 Huarte Navarro, John 33 Hughes-Hallett, Lucy 306 Hugo, Victor 21, 23, 116-119 Humiston, Amos 193, 317-318, 320-322 Hurwitz, Brian 267 Husserl, Edmund 170-171, 296 Ingold, Tim 14, 134, 138-139, 143-145, 150 Inspector, Yoram 354 Iriki, Atsushi 151 Ishiguro, Hiroshi 13 Ivic, Christopher 32-33 Jaeger, Jean-Jacques 232 James, Liz 335 Janet, Pierre 66,69 Jarmusch, Jim 208, 226 Jentsch, Ernst 172-173 James, Jesse 208, 222-223 Johnson, Mark 47, 143 Johnson, Martin P. 321 Jousse, Marcel 67-68 Julius Caesar 310-312, 314 Kafka, Franz 51, 301 Kandinsky, Wassily 326 Kant, Immanuel 190, 199 Karremann, Isabel 32 Keaton, Buster 80, 82-84 Kellehear, Allan 283 Keller, Sarah 9 Kelly, Ellsworth 328 Kilani, Mondher 346 King, Helen 59 Klee, Paul 14 Kleinberg, Ethan 277 Kleist, Heinrich 14 Knappet, Carl 144 Knitz, Andreas 293, 332 Kracauer, Siegfried 112-114, 173, 192 Kraus, Karl 154 Krauss, Rosalind 166, 183, 222 Kubrick, Stanley 208, 231, 234-236 Kutz, Ilan 354 Lakoff, George 143 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 239 Lang, Fritz 110 Lanham, Richard A. 47 Larson, Jennifer 58 Latour, Bruno 14, 279 Laughton, Charles 119-120 Lazzarin, Stefano 90 Le Breton, David 351 Le Corbusier 119 Le Maître, Barbara 208-209, 234

Lee-Jeffries, Hester 28, 32, 36 Leiris, Michel 292, 295-296, 298-300 Leni, Paul 169, 171, 17 Leochares 344 Leonardo da Vinci 349 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 113-114 Leutrat, Jean-Louis 90, 92, 99 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 106, 135-137, 332, 350 Levi, Primo 328 Lévinas, Emmanuel 292, 295-298, 300-301 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 297-298 LeWitt, Sol 328-329 Libera, Adalberto 338 Lin, Maya 334, 337 Lincoln, Abraham 320-321 Lindelof, Damon 280 Lindsay, Shana G. 271 Lindsay, Vachel 82-83, 113 Lippi, Regolo 246 Lock, Margaret 351 Lopéz, José 277 Loraux, Nicole 234 Lorusso, Lorenzo 272 Löwy, Michaël 112 Lucan 48 Lucretius 48 Lukàcs, György 113 Luppi, Anna 208-209 Lüttgenau, Rikola-Gunnar 336 Lyne, Raphael 36 Macho, Thomas 212 Mack, John 134 Macrì, Sonia 47, 57 Malafouris, Lambros 142, 144 Malavasi, Luca 209-210 Malevich, Kazimir 164, 256 Malraux, André 114, 175, 296-297, 301 Mamone, Sara 347 Mamoulian, Rouben 23, 107, 110 Man Ray 199 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 307, 310, 312, 315 Manuli, Paola 59 Maravita, Angelo 151 Marchi, Pietro 256 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 161 Marini, Efisio 209, 261-263, 265, 269, 272, 274 Mark Antony 306-307, 312, 314 Marlowe, Christopher 29-32 Marmoy, Charles F.A. 267 Marshack, Alexander 135 Marshall, Yvonne 156 Mascagni, Bernardino 247 Mascagni, Aurelio 247 Mascagni, Paolo 208-209, 243, 245-246, 248, 249-254 Mastrocinque, Camillo 89, 94 Mausolus 343-346, 348 Mayer, Rupert 335

365

Index

Mazzini, Giuseppe 272 McDermott, LeRoy 135 McDowall, Roddy 308 Medici, Catherine de’ 347 Medici, Medici, Maria de’ 347 Méliès, Marie-Georges-Jean 90, 97 Memnon 347-349 Mérimée, Prosper 94-96, 109 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 66, 68 Michelangelo 184 Millhauser, Steven 133 Mitchell, William J.T. 97, 138, 142, 278-279 Mithen, Steven 140 Montaigne, Michel de 33 Montani, Pietro 195 Morgan, Jessica 181 Mori, Masahiro 13 Morris, Errol 319 Mullay, Don 174-175 Munch, Edvard 98 Munro, Jane 268 Münsterberg, Hugo 113, 192 Murray, Penelope 47 Mussolini, Benito 338

Perrault, Charles 136 Perrotta, Tom 280 Peterson, Kaara 37 Picabia, Francis 161, 163 Pickering, Paul A. 269 Pierson, Patricia 268 Pietro Leopoldo 245, 256 Pietrobruno, Sheenagh 151 Pinotti, Andrea 73, 199, 212, 293 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 250 Pirner, Manfred L. 190 Pitassio, Francesco 172 Plato 291-292 Plessner, Helmuth 190 Pliny the Elder 344-345 Podgorny, Irina 263 Poe, Egar Allan 14 Porr, Martin 144 Potter, Garry 277 Poulet-Malassis, Auguste 258 Prawer, Siegfried S. 93 Praz, Mario 255 Preston, Carrie J. 73 Proust, Marcel 295, 299

Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) 196-197 Nancy, Jean-Luc 279, 351, 355 Narváez‬ , Rafael F. 343 Nauman, Bruce 182 Nead, Lynda 262-263 Neumann, Erich 135 Nicholson, Jack 236 Noble, Louise Chr. 349-350 Nochlin, Linda 251 Nöe, Alva 134, 148 Norman, Donald A. 149 Novak, William 355

Quaresima, Leonardo 199 Quinn, John 160, 163-164

O’Neill, Michael 37-38 Octavius (Caesar) 305-308, 313-315 Onians, John 135 Orlando, Mirko 221 Ørskou, Gitte 186 Ortega y Gasset, José 172 Ovid 25, 32, 46-48, 52-54, 56-57, 89, 94, 114, 170 Païni, Dominique 93, 97 Panofsky, Erwin 169-170 Papapetros, Spyros 9 Paris, Gaston 136 Paul, Jason N. 9 Pavlov, Ivan 66 Peacham, Henry 34 Pearsall, Paul 354 Pedullà, Gabriele 199 Pellegrini, Giuseppe 255 Perkins Wilder, Lina 32, 34 Perletti, Greta 21, 34 Perniola, Mario 259

Rath, Matthias 190 Recham, Ali 351 Redon, Odilon 258 Reill, Peter H. 266 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn 347 Renfrew, Colin 142, 144 Resnais, Alain 107, 109 Richardson, Ruth 267 Rilke, Rainer Maria 14, 199 Robinson, David 74, 79 Robinson, Edward 77, 106 Roché, Henri-Pierre 160, 163 Rogat 347-348 Romani, Silvia 21, 52, 57-59 Roosevelt, Eleanor 310-311 Rops, Félicien 257-258 Rosen, Philip 193 Rossellini, Roberto 11 Rosset, Clément 93 Rossi, Giovanni 255 Rossi, Luciano 347 Rosso, Medardo 182, 185 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 120, 261, 266 Rubens, Pieter Paul 108, 347 Ruby, Jay 221 Rudomine, Albert 199 Russek, Linda G.S. 354 Sahlins, Marshall 138 Salviati, Francesco 347 Sander, August 199

366 Index Sarkar, Malabika 28 Sartre, Jean-Paul 292, 295-297, 300-302 Scharoun, Hans 327 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 350 Schlosser, Julius von 198, 212 Schriver, Benjamin 319 Schuster, Carl 138-139 Schwartz, Barry 334 Schwartz, Gary E.R. 354 Scopas of Paros 344 Scorsese, Martin 23, 89, 97-98 Scott, David 259 Scott, George C. 107 Seel, Martin 114 Segal, Charles 47-49, 52-53 Segal, George 23, 47-49, 52-53, 98, 326 Segato, Girolamo 254-255 Seppilli, Anita 58 Serra, Richard 327-329 Serres, Michel 99 Severi, Carlo 140 Seyrig, Delphine 107-108 Shakespeare, Hamnet 35 Shakespeare, William 21, 25, 27-28, 30-32, 34-38, 40, 49, 305, 308, 312-315 Shapiro, Joel 328 Sharp, Lesley A. 351, 354 Sherman, Cindy 217 Shildrick, Margrit 355 Siegert, Bernhard 190 Silverberg, Robert 350 Simon, Jonathan 266 Sissa, Giulia 59 Skouras, Spyros 309 Smith, Bruce R. 32-33 Smith, Kiki 182 Smith, Philinda 320 Smith, Tony 330 Sobchack, Vivian 309 Soffer, Olga 155 Soldati, Mario 94 Somaini, Antonio 131, 193, 195 Sontag, Susan 214 Sorlin, Pierre 216 Spenser, Edmund 32 Spitz, Ellen Handler 333 St. Augustine 32 Stafford, Barbara M. 251, 265 Stallybrass, Peter 31 Stebbins, Genevieve 69-70, 72-73 Steele, Barbara 95 Stelarc 280 Stella, Frank 256 Stendhal 347 Stewart, Susan 134, 146 Stingel, Rudolf 179-182, 185 Stoichita, Victor 13, 97, 165, Sugg, Richard 349

Sullivan, Garrett A. 31-34 Sutton, John 34 Sylvia, Claire 355 Targioni Tozzetti, Antonio 243, 246, 252, 254, 257 Targioni Tozzetti, Giovanni 252-253 Targioni Tozzetti, Ottaviano 252 Targoff, Ramie 28 Taylor, Elizabeth 307, 309-312 Thausing, Moritz 189, 197 Thomas, Herbert 232 Thorndike, Lynn 350 Ticozzi, Stefano 249 Tiepolo, Giambattista 184 Timotheus 344 Todorov, Tzvetan 90 Tortori, Egisto 256, 258 Treister, Kenneth 326 Tribble, Evelyn 33, 38 Tronzo, William 260 Tschui, Marlyse 351 Turvey, Samuel T. 274 Twain, Mark 272 Valente, Antonio 338 Valerius Maximus 345 Van Doesburg, Theo 326 Van Eck, Caroline 278 Van Gogh, Vincent 106, 181 Van Honthors, Gerrit 347 Vannozzi, Francesca 247 Varda, Agnès 23, 121-123 Veidt, Conrad 173 Vergari, Daniele 251 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 46, 292 Verrocchio, Andrea 184 Vesalio, Andreas 245 Vico, Giambattista 331 Vidor, Gian Marco 262 Villa, Federica 293 Viola, Bill 72 Violi, Alessandra 69, 209-210 Virgil 29-30 Vittorio Emanuele II 317 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 14, 115, 138 Voss, Christiane 190 Wacquant, Loic 350 Wagner-Pacific, Robin 334 Walch, Guenter 40 Walker, Susan 306 Wall-Romana, Christophe 9 Warburg, Aby 73, 140, 198, 235 Weber, Max 112-113, 115 Wegener, Paul 110 Weinrich, Harald 33 Wendell Holmes, Oliver 261, 269

367

Index

West, Franz 181 Westcott, Robyn 269 White, Randall 134-135, 141-143 Widrich, Mechtild 336 Wiene, Robert 169, 173 Willetts, Ronald F. 58 Williams, Grant 32-33 Wimmel, Walter 52 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 250 Wise, Robert 22, 89, 91 Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle 134, 144-145, 151-152 Wolfe, Heather 31 Worringer, Wilhelm 14

Wright, Thomas 33 Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques 286 Wyke, Maria 309-310 Yates, Frances A. 26 Young, James E. 327-328 Youngner, Stuart J. 350 Yourcenar, Marguerite 55-56, 105, 111, 119 Zedda, Corrado 263 Zevi, Adachiara 339 Ziemke, Tom 331 Žižek, Slavoj 71-72