To the conventions of the theatre and elegance of the ballet, it opposed an idea of art in which every bodily gesture and every grouping of bodies tells a story and expresses a thought. Noverre’s dancer-turned-actor and Diderot’s actor-turned-mime must display an art of total expression on stage, identical to the manifestation of an entirely motivated language of signs and gestures:
When dancers are animated by their feelings, they will assume a thousand different attitudes, according to the varied symptoms of their passions; when, Proteus-like, their features and glances betray the conflicts in their breast … stories will become useless, everything will speak, each movement will be expressive, each attitude will depict a particular situation, each gesture will reveal a thought, each glance will convey a new sentiment; everything will be captivating, because it will all be a true and faithful imitation of nature.6
The analysis of the Torso seems to go precisely against the current by setting a counter-revolution of suspended expression against a total revolution in expression. However, these two opposite revolutions share a common principle: the destruction of what lies at the heart of representative logic – namely the organic model of the whole, with its proportions and its symmetries. It is already significant that the art Cahusac, Noverre and Diderot considered to be a model of finally living theatrical action was painting. ‘Any truly theatrical situation is nothing other than a tableau vivant’, Cahusac declared.7 Diderot opposed such composition of theatrical tableaus to the coup de théâtre. For Noverre, ballet masters must learn from painters to give each figure its own expression and to break the conventional symmetry that makes them place six fauns on one side and six nymphs on the other. This individualization of expressive figures and the natural way bodies are grouped together, according to the demands of each situation, provides the model for vivacity, which counts more than the effective mobility of bodies. The multiplicity of gestural and physiognomic events, which they demand, shares at least one common point with the radical inexpressivity of the Torso, which is meant to gather an entire series of actions and a whole world of thought within itself. Both models undo the supposed conjunction of formal beauty and living expression. Both offer a form of inscription of life on bodies in rupture with the old organic paradigm that dominated the way discourse and the work were thought.
Discourse, according to Plato, must take the image of a living being, given all the elements that make up an organism, and only those; beautiful architecture, Vitruvius taught, took its norms from the proportions of the human body. Dürer’s texts and drawings had renewed this principle of the mathematical proportions of the ideal body. This mathematics of beauty was strongly contested at the time. Artists like Hogarth and philosophers like Burke opposed its rigidity with the charm of the curved and sinuous line that also emblematized the new design of English gardens. Winckelmann was a stranger to their polemic, but he, too, opposed the continuous curved line to sharp angles. And the image that he used to characterize the Torso’s perfection is not accidental: muscles melt into one another like waves in the sea. This is the image of highest beauty, which the mutilated Torso embodies, like the Apollo with its head and all its limbs intact, but also mute, petrified Niobe, represented in ‘a state such as this, in which sensation and reflection cease, and which resembles apathy’ that ‘does not disturb a limb or a feature’.8 The beautiful statue is one whose muscles are not stretched by any action, but melt into one another like waves whose perpetual movement evokes the smooth and calm surface of a mirror. When Europe discovered the Parthenon reliefs half a century later, critics opposed their living movement to the poses of statues that Winckelmann admired. But they did so in the name of a criterion of perfection, which he had fixed himself: ‘… a principle of fusion, of motion, so that the marble flows like a wave’.9 It was not simply nature’s sinuous lines that were opposed to the right angles imposed by the minds of artists and princes. Rather, one nature was being substituted by another. On this point, the admirer of the immobile Hercules agrees with the philosopher who loved sentimental scenes like those in Greuze: nature, the guarantor of the beautiful, is to be found no longer in the proportion of parts, or the unity of expression of a character, but in the indifferent potential of the whole that endlessly mixes elements together by leaving them perpetually at peace. Forty years later Kleist explored the radical consequence of the rupture implied by the praise for the Torso. He opposed the movement of the marionette, whose ‘soul’ coincides with its centre, to the Bernini-like contortions imposed on the expressive body of the dancer to reach this very centre. A century after him, dance established itself as an autonomous art by exploiting all the possibilities of movement offered by the body freed from the obligation to tell a story, to illustrate a character, or to embellish music with images. These artistic transformations are certainly not inscribed ahead of time on the undulating surface of the Torso’s muscles. But this surface stretched between the memory of the tasks executed by the functional body of the hero and the indifference of the waves that rise and fall is already a surface for converting one body into another. The tension of many surfaces on one surface, of many kinds of corporality within one body, will define beauty from now on. The art announced by the praise for the mutilated Torso is not the art dreamt of by Kleist – an art of well-calculated automatisms meant to maximize an effect. Rather, it is an art of the plural compositions of movements freed by the dissociation of form, function and expression. Winckelmann inaugurates the age during which artists were busy unleashing the sensible potential hidden in inexpressiveness, indifference or immobility, composing the conflicting movements of the dancing body, but also of the sentence, the surface, or the coloured touch that arrest the story while telling it, that suspend meaning by making it pass by or avoid the very figure they designate. This revolution is perhaps more profound than the one Diderot and Noverre announced in their manifestos. No doubt Rudolf Laban saluted Noverre and his ‘ballet d’action’ as a precursor of modern dance. But he saluted even more the revolution brought about by Isadora Duncan’s dance, which aimed to show the identity between movement and rest that came to question the primacy of ‘achievements through willpower’.10 Now she sought her means of expression by observing the immobile figures on Greek friezes and urns. Free movement, movement equal to rest, only frees its expressive power once the links that oblige bodily positions to signify fixed emotions are undone. ‘Expressive dance’ celebrated in the twentieth century assumes the dissociation between sign and movement carried out by the analysis of the mutilated Torso. It assumes the breakdown of models of voluntary action and the legible tableau that still guide the ‘ballet d’action’.
By separating beauty and expression, Winckelmann also separated art into two. He dissociated the beauty of forms from their science. To appreciate this beauty liberated from expressive convention, one must stop examining it for a precise and functional muscular outline, which allows one to recognize the artist’s anatomical knowledge and his capacity to translate it into the production of forms. The Torso reduced to a mere muscular outline, similar to waves, is still closer to the great era of art than the Apollo, in which divine majesty must be displayed on a face. Yet the Apollo, with its lines melting into one another, prevails in beauty over the Laocoön, forced to show both the pain of the bite and the greatness of the soul that resists it, even though the latter prevails in scientific terms, through the precise outline of its tense muscles and its facial expression, over the inactive and inexpressive Apollo. Kant summarized the separation between the beautiful form and the work of science in the thesis that our students know by heart, but whose unthinkable violence towards representative canons they have forgotten: the beautiful is that which pleases without a concept. It is necessary to realize what this break consists of. Surely, representative logic was familiar with the je ne sais quoi and the touch of genius that had to be added to the most learned application of the rules of art. Partisans of the Ancients even used it as a weapon to repel the criticism of the Moderns. And this is the reason Boileau excavated the treatise On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus. Some of our contemporaries have sought to locate the ruin of the representative model and the watchword of modernity in sublime disproportion. But this is a misunderstanding to say the very least, for the sublime was not discovered by champions of modernity. The defenders of the ‘Ancients’ made the sublime the secret of the superiority of the old masters and the keystone of the representative system. Genius, the power of
