ARS AETERNA Unfolding the Baroque: Cultures and Concepts

ARS AETERNA 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Unfolding the Baroque: 

Cultures and Concepts 

Constantine the Philosopher University 

Faculty of Arts 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

ARS3.indd 1 27. 8. 2010 8:47:15 

1


Názov/Title 

ARS AETERNA - Unfolding the Baroque: Cultures and Concepts 

Vydavateľ/Publisher 

Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre 

Filozofická fakulta 

Štefánikova 67, 949 74 Nitra 

tel. + 421 37 77 54 209 

fax. + 421 37 77 54 261 

email kangl@ukf.sk 

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Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre 

Dekanát FF UKF 

Štefánikova 67, 949 74 Nitra 

Tel.: +421 37 7754 201 

Fax: +421 37 6512 570 

E-mail: dekanatff@ukf.sk 

Šéfredaktor/Editor in Chief 

Mgr. Alena Smiešková, PhD. 

Redakčná rada/Board of Reviewers 

Prof. Bernd Herzogenrath (Germany) 

Doc. PhDr. Michal Peprník, PhD. (Czech Republic) 

Doc. PhDr. Anton Pokrivčák, PhD. (Slovak Republic) 

Mgr. Petr Kopal, PhD. (Czech Republic) 

Redakčná úprava/sub-editor 

Ing. Matúš Šiška, 

Mgr. Simona Hevešiová, PhD. 

Jazyková korektúra/Copy Editor 

Jeanne Lance 

Editorial assistant 

Trevor Joy Sangrey 

Názov a sídlo tlačiarne/Printing House 

ŠEVT, a.s. Bratislava 

Náklad/Copies 

100 

Počet strán/Pages 

169 

ISSN: 1337-9291 

Evidenčné číslo: EV 2821/08 

(c) 2010 

Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre 

This publication is the result of the project KEGA 3/6468/08 Teaching intercultural awareness 

through literature and cultural studies. 

2 

ARS3.indd 2 27. 8. 2010 8:47:15

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Introduction for the Extension of the Baroque 

Catherine M. Soussloff 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

In Lieu of an Introduction: The Baroque Space in Paul Auster’s City of Glass 

Alena Smiešková 

DEFIGURATIONS 

The Culture of Defiguration: Anamorphosis, Then and Now 

Jon R. Snyder 

Bastarda Musicians and the Practice of Musical Anamorphosis 

Nina Treadwell 

The-Approach-of-the-End-of-the-World-Feeling: Allegory and 

Eschatology in the Operas of Robert Ashley 

Tyrus Miller 

EXCESSES 

If the Term Baroque Did Not Exist Would It Be Necessary to Invent It? 

(with Apologies to Voltaire…) 

Dana Arnold 

An Aura of Excess: Zaha Hadid and the Baroque Genetics of 

Contemporary Architecture 

Meredith Hoy 

Echoes from the Future: Édouard Glissant and the Infinite Work of the 

Baroque 

Gerwin Gallob 

EMBODIMENTS 

Body-Language and Language-Body in William Forsythe’s 

Choreography: Michel Foucault and Louis Marin on the Baroque Body 

Mark Franko 

The Embodiment of History at the Great Altar of Pergamon: The Power 

of Helenistic Baroque 

Maria Evangelatou 

Spatial Effects and Meaning in the Galerie des glaces at Versailles 

Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf 

Bios and Baroque: Life in the Folds of 17th-Century Artifice and 

Contemporary Bioart 

Anna Munster 

CODA 

A Rent in the Clouds 

Robert Harbison 

REVIEW 


4 

9 

16 

28 

40 

52 

62 

74 

89 

108 

137 

150 

163 

168 

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Introduction for the Extension of the Baroque 

This special issue of the journal 

Ars Aeterna provides an extensive 

meditation in the form of eleven 

scholarly essays on the significance 

for the arts and the humanities of the 

conceptual and historical aspects of the 

baroque. Sponsored by the Visual and 

Performance Studies research group 

at University of California, Santa Cruz, 

the conference “Unfolding the Baroque: 

Extensions of a Concept” took place in 

April 2009. 1 The conference explored 

the Baroque, baroqueness, neo-baroque, 

baroquisms, and other extensions of the 

baroque from a variety of disciplinary, 

temporal, and methodological 

directions. Like all of the research 

endeavors of Visual and Performance 

Studies, “Unfolding the Baroque: 

Extensions of a Concept” insisted on 

a geographically de-centralized and 

culturally diverse series of explorations 

of the idea of the baroque, which 

has had a significant place in transmedia 

and meta-historical studies of 

visualities and performativities for at 

least the last four centuries. 2 Working 

within the framework of a collaborative 

research model for over twelve years, 

Visual and Performance Studies 

allowed a particularly rich context for 

4 

Catherine M. Soussloff 

Catherine Soussloff served as Director of Visual and Performance Studies at UC Santa Cruz 

for ten years. She is the author of books and articles on the history and theory of European 

art and visual culture from the early modern period to the present. She is currently 

Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University 

of British Columbia. 

this exploration of the inflections of 

the baroque on human creations and 

actions, performances and artifacts, 

texts and images. 

Once thought of only as a seventeenthcentury 

art historical and musicological 

phenomenon of style, the baroque 

is back. 3 Given the intense attraction 

to the Baroque in a number of arts 

practices and scholarly disciplines over 

the course of the last three decades, the 

essays found here seek to understand its 

location in the context of contemporary 

culture and historical critique. 4 In 

1977 the American artist and selfstyled 

“anarchitect” Gordon Matta- 

Clark (1943-1978) made the work he 

called Office Baroque in Antwerp. 5 The 

Whitney Museum of American Art in 

New York City displayed a fragment 

of this example of Matta-Clark’s 

deconstructive architecture in the 2007 

retrospective exhibition. Consisting of 

nothing more than a slab of parquet 

wood flooring, drywall and wood floor 

joists Office Baroque, the now-destroyed 

monument of Postmodernity, stands 

for the fascination that the Baroque 

holds for our times. The connections 

and disconnections, the contrasts 

and similarities, the fragmentary and 


deconstructed aspects found in the 

visual artifacts and performance events 

discussed in this issue of Ars Aeterna 

attest to the power of what can only 

be described today as the “baroque 

aesthetic.” 

This contemporary baroque aesthetic 

goes well beyond the dictionary 

definition of the root of the term 

“baroque” as meaning a misshapen 

pearl, although the anarchitecture of 

Matta-Clark, to take again my primary 

example, offers misshapen artifacts 

as a result of the performativity of 

this aesthetic. Office Baroque related 

canonical art media, e.g., architecture 

and sculpture, to the then more 

radical art practices of installation, 

performance, and deconstruction. The 

result, as in the case of Matta-Clark’s 

fragment in the Whitney exhibition, 

puts the contemporary baroque 

aesthetic in relief both to its own 

genealogy in the history of Post-1968 

art and performance, and to today’s art 

world. The crossing of media and the 

engagement between materialistic and 

conceptual practices perpetuated in the 

late 1970s the anarchistic heritage of the 

Situationist derive and the theatre of the 

absurd, both of which may be considered 

foundational to Matta-Clark’s work to 

the baroque aesthetic as I am defining it 

here. As a fragment or a mere remnant 

of its earlier form and exhibited today 

at the Whitney or elsewhere, Office 

Baroque extends the concept of the 

baroque into the institutions of art with 

which it will always already have an 

anarchistic, if not absurd, relationship. 

The extension of the baroque aesthetic 

causes interpreters to note common 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

characteristics not so much embodied 

in as elicited from the artifacts and 

performances addressed in this journal 

issue. Works of art and performance 

are understood according to their 

affective qualities: elaboration, excess, 

juxtaposition, surplus, dissimulation, 

ecstasy, virtuosity, efflorescence, 

and absurdity. Antinomies not 

encountered in other performative and 

representational regimes press forward 

in the baroque aesthetic also and the 

artifacts and practices that extend it: 

prosthesis/antithesis; assemblage/ 

diffraction; impoverishment/excess; 

plentitude/vacancy. As that which 

always and explicitly exceeds itself 

the baroque aesthetic articulates an 

extension of that which was prior to it in 

both historical and conceptual terms. For 

these historical reasons, in the baroque 

aesthetic interventionist strategies into 

canonical art practices and predominant 

political regimes prevail and cause the 

remainder to become centralized, as in 

Matta-Clark’s work, and expressed, as in 

the performances of William Forsythe 

(addressed in this volume in the essay by 

Mark Franko). It therefore seems useful 

to consider here the meaning of the 

term “extension” as it relates specifically 

to what I have been calling the “baroque 

aesthetic.” 

The most familiar use of “extension” 

refers to prolongation—as in the 

prolongation over time or through 

historical representations of the 

baroque style and its subject matter. In 

art history the Baroque may be called 

a period style, occurring between 1600 

and 1750, although that chronology 

is imprecise and determined by 


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disciplinary convention as much as by 

anything else. In art history the baroque 

period style is understood to have 

occurred between the Renaissance and 

the Neo-Classical period styles. We might 

call this temporally defined meaning 

of extension: the historiographical 

baroque. However, certain caveats or 

conditionals to the historiographical 

extension of the Baroque arise. While 

both the Renaissance and the Neo- 

Classical period styles have contained 

within them the concept of the revival of 

antiquity (the Renaissance being the rebirth 

of Roman culture; the Neo-Classical 

being the new Classical or Greek style), 

the Baroque does not contain within it 

either a concept of an idealized past or 

the idealized memory of artifacts and 

conventions of representation from an 

earlier era. Even as a period style, the 

Baroque produces something other 

than the ideal or the idealized. It has 

been said that the Baroque period style 

“relies overtly on illusionism and the 

supernatural, and on strong subjective 

appeal and opulent décor—all tastes 

that have not yet returned to fashion.” 

While this view of the Baroque period 

in art history may explain its lack of 

relationship to a revival of an earlier 

historical moment, the statement itself, 

particularly when put in relationship 

to the art of the late 20 th century, 

seems incredibly anachronistic. Yet, the 

negativity of the concept of the period 

style of the Baroque cannot be ignored 

in its disciplinary context of art history. 

Turning from the historiographical idea 

of a period style, a second, philosophical 

meaning of the term “extension” pertains 

here. Extension may be understood in 

6 

this context as a term generated by the 

Baroque philosopher, René Descartes 

(1596-1650). In Descartes, extension 

is the essential characteristic of all 

matter—let us say for the purposes 

of our interests here, of all material 

objects, monuments, performances, etc. 

Importantly, the number and nature 

of the matter discussed dictated the 

meaning of extension in the Cartesian 

sense. In the nominative, or singular, or 

individualistic sense, extension referred 

to the object named, e.g., the extension 

of Descartes is Descartes. Conversely, 

the extension of a predicative noun or 

adjective or a plural non-nominative 

are those things to which the predicate 

applies. The extension of artist is all 

artists. The extension of the Baroque is 

all baroques. 

To speak of the extension of the 

baroque using the allegorical register 

theorized for it by the Postmodern 

philosopher Gilles Deleuze is to use 

it in this Cartesian way; e.g., the way 

in which the relationality among the 

particulars are common to all baroques. 

Although Deleuze names Leibniz as the 

thinker through which the Baroque will 

be theorized as fold, Descartes must be 

understood as the locus of the possibility 

of the concept of extension itself. For 

Deleuze this meant to see the thing as 

or the characteristic particularity of the 

Baroque, i.e., “the fold,” as “the traits [, 

which] taken in their rigor that have to 

account for the extreme specificity of 

the Baroque.” 6 At this point a summary 

of Deleuze’s extension of the Baroque 

will prove illustrative for the essays in 

this issue of the journal. 


1. 

2. 

3. 

4. 

5. 

Questions which arise for the reader 

of this volume in taking Deleuze’s 

fold as the paradigmatic extension 

of the Baroque pertain both to 

materiality and medium-- what is the 

best material for the fold or for the 

texture of the fold?—and to political 

action and power—what gives the 

fold its particular political force in the 

object or the performance that has 

been achieved? The essays here will 

provide not one but many answers 

to or suggestions of where these 

questions might take us in the quest 

for a philosophical meaning of the 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

The fold: as in the infinite work or process, not how to finish a fold but how to 

continue it, to have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity. 

The inside and the outside: that which moves between matter and soul, the 

façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside. 

The high and the low: resolution of tension achieved in the division into two 

levels, as I n “the coupling of material-force replacing matter and form.”” 

The unfold: not contrary to the fold or its effacement, but the continuation or 

the extension of its act, the condition of its manifestation as a method or process. 

Texture: how it becomes visible at the limits of the fold, where there might be 

scarring or tearing or rupture, including different textures that appear in the 

fold. 

extensions of the baroque. For, the 

extensions of the baroque take us far 

from the nomination of a particular 

style, artist, movement or historical 

period and beyond the proliferation 

and iteration of the terms of the 

baroque, such as, neo-Baroque, 

baroqueness, the theatrical baroque, 

Baroque music, and Office Baroque. 

The baroque aesthetic that we have 

identified plays out in a myriad of ways 

between the Baroque, as a period style 

or content, and baroque as a predicate 

noun with infinite extensions into 

space and time. 

This author and the editors of this volume would like to thank Trevor Sangrey 

for her programmatic and editorial work on behalf of this issue of the journal and 

the conference at UC Santa Cruz that preceded it. 

Notes 

i A number of groups and individuals supported this conference: The University of California 

Humanities Research Institute, Major Conference Grant Program; the UC Santa Cruz Vice 

Chancellor for Research; the UC Santa Cruz Division of the Arts; the Department of History 


7


of Art and Visual Culture; the UC Presidential Chair in the History of Art and Visual Culture; 

Cowell College and the Provosts of Cowell College, Professors Tyrus Miller and Deanna 

Shemek. Without the brilliant organizational mind of Trevor Sangrey, graduate student in 

History of Consciousness, this event would not have been possible. 

ii At least two books and numerous articles have directly resulted from the research activities 

of the members of Visual and Performance Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, 

see all of the essays in Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Edited by Mark 

Franko (London: Routledge Press, 2006) and Acting on the Past: Historical Performance 

Across the Disciplines, Edited by Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Middletown, Ct., 

Wesleyan University Press, 2000). See also, Catherine M. Soussloff, “Jackson Pollock and 

Post-Ritual Performance: Memories Arrested in Space,” TDR 48 (Spring 2004): 60-78 and 

Catherine M. Soussloff and Mark Franko, “Visual and Performance Studies: A New History 

of Interdisciplinarity,” Social Text 73 (Winter 2002): 29-46. 

iii In this sense of the terminology of style in regard to the Baroque, it seems the ideal 

concept for the critique of style made by Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style 

(New York: Routledge, 1979). 

iv In addition to the sources cited here some recent literature dealing with aspects of the 

baroque may be useful for thinking through the issue of the extensions of the baroque, see 

Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media and Cinematic Folds (Minneapolis: University 

of Minnesota Press, 2008); Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham 

University Press, 2004); Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous 

History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Lisa G. Corrin and Joaneath Spicer, 

Eds., Going for Baroque : 18 Contemporary Artists Fascinated with the Baroque and Rococo 

(Baltimore : The Walters Art Gallery, 1995). 

v On Office Baroque specifically and Gordon-Matta Clark’s work overall, see Pamela Lee, 

Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 

2000) and Gordon Matta-Clark, Edited by Corinne Diserens (London and New York: 

Phaidon, 2003). 

vi Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, 

University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 

8 

Catherine M. Soussloff, Ph.D. 

Professor and Head, Department of Art History, Visual Art & 

Theory 

University of British Columbia 

403 - 6333 Memorial Road 

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 

V6T 1Z2 

csoussloff@aol.com 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

In Lieu of an Introduction 

The Baroque Space in Paul Auster’s City of Glass 

“An infinite space has an infinite potentiality and this infinite potentiality may be 

praised an infinite act of existence.“ 

Giordano Bruno 

What allows us to speak of the 

two concepts that might appear 

seemingly very distant from 

contemporary American fiction, 

such as the Baroque and the space, 

is the confusing chronology, which 

the contemporary rereading of the 

Baroque initiated. The Baroque 

has been most widely perceived 

through its manifestations in 

the visual arts. The collection of 

essays presented in this issue of 

Ars Aeterna, however, confirms 

that looking for the affinities does 

not imply to search for the identity 

between the artwork in inspection 

and the concept of the Baroque 

because in the words of one of the 

contributors, Robert Harbison “even 

writers like Milton are not exactly 

Baroque but like Baroque in a kind 

of metaphorical extension“. (2000, 

p. 227). Therefore, my introduction 

as well as all the collected essays, 

proposes the possibilities for a 

metaphorical extension of the 

change in consciousness, which 

we read in the Baroque and in its 

meaning for the present. 

The presented essays discuss not 

the Baroque as a specific set of 

rules and aesthetically appropriate 

Alena Smiešková 

stylistic or thematic devices but 

a kind of meta-baroque, the term 

I borrowed from Tyrus Miller; 

they are a “reflection on historical, 

ideological, theological and semiotic 

nature of the baroque” (2010, p.43). 

As it follows, we praise the Baroque 

for the construction of a new space. 

Not only that the new places were 

discovered - it was the time of 

exploratory travels - but visual arts, 

such as architecture and painting, 

focused on the creation of the space, 

which in various forms generated 

the illusion of a cross over, the 

movement from the real physical 

plane of perception to the simulation 

of yet another space. Harbison in his 

coda “A Rent in the Clouds” writes an 

ode on the vertiginous ecstasy, in 

which many examples of Baroque 

architecture conjure up the way to 

heaven ad infinitum. 

The two examples of the newly 

conceived space mentioned above 

propelled Baroque men to expansion 

– whether physical or spiritual. 

The radical reconfiguration of 

the consciousness came however, 

with the idea “that space does not 

surround architecture but is created 

by it …” (Norberg-Schultz, 2003, 


9


p. 14). A single building loses its 

focal centrality, it is integrated into 

the larger system, which means 

“the space between the buildings 

acquires a new importance as the 

real constitutive element of the 

urban totality.“ (ibid., p. 12) The 

buildings and squares in a Baroque 

city are linked by straight and 

regular streets. In the Baroque 

city par excellence such as Rome, 

the space in between them creates 

a hierarchical structure reflecting 

the structures of power, dominance 

and control and organizes the 

social life. 

With the new considerations on 

space not only the grandiose scales, 

churches and palaces to support 

the hierarchy of power came to 

existence, but the fascination with 

the possible reconfiguration of the 

space in a smaller, more intimate 

size found its form in the decorative 

element of mirror. Mirrors visual 

worlds expose the ontology of 

the viewer in the act of looking. 

Similarly to the subject enmeshed 

in the public space positing herself 

in contrast to the allegorical 

representations of social structures 

and proportions, the viewer, when 

confronted with the mirror, has 

to reconsider her position and 

perceptive limitations. Being “both 

meta-reflective and reductive“ they 

open the questions of similarity, 

identity, and deformation. 

(Rossholm Lagerlöf, 2010, p. 138) 

Since they are predominantly 

“visual worlds” which “represent 

and reflect“, their decorative 

10 

employment in the baroque interior 

provides the allegory of multiplicity 

corresponding with the new 

consciousness (ibid.). 

The social world of the Baroque 

is paradoxical. On one hand, the 

physical expansion, colonization 

and new scientific discoveries 

characterize that system as open and 

dynamic, endowed with multiplicity 

of opportunities; yet everybody 

has a certain specific assigned 

place in terms of social relations. 

Moreover, as Anna Munster in her 

essay on bioart points out, the crisis 

also takes place invisibly, in the 

domain of life conception. (2010, 

p. 153) She refers to Leibniz in 

Deleuze’s reading: “…our body is a 

type of world full of an infinity of 

creatures that are also worthy of 

life”, which corresponds with the 

state of sciences at the time namely 

Giordano Bruno’s vision of the 

space: “there are innumerable suns, 

with countless planets likewise 

circling about these suns“ (Leibniz, 

quoted in Deleuze, 1993, p. 109). 

As number of the essays in this 

volume refer to Gilles Deleuze‘s 

The Fold (1993), the authors 

support the idea that the book 

provides an eccentric and inspiring 

understanding of the baroque mind. 

The figure and the form of the fold 

that is central to the book was not 

an arbitrary force for Deleuze, as 

Tom Conley, the translator of the 

book explains. It originated in his 

earlier writings on subjectivity, 

for example, in the last chapter of 

his book on Foucault. As Deleuze 


examines Foucault’s principal works 

he describes the idea of doubling, 

a productive force reflected in the 

metaphor of the fold. In this way, 

the I is always defined as the double 

in the formative process of creating 

the Self and relating the Self to 

the past. Delueze claims that the 

“knowledge is known only where it 

is folded“ (1993, p. 56). Because in 

folds, the two sides, the inside or the 

past as memory and the outside as 

the present and the subjectivity are 

inseparable and constitute one. 

Even though Deleuzian fold is 

a palpable concept, and uses a lot 

of examples that are primarily 

visual he claims that “the dialectics 

of seeing and gazing” might be 

restrictive and can turn it into 

a definition of an optical fold only. 

(ibid. p.37) He rather suggests 

that “the form as folded” exists as 

a “mental landscape”. (ibid., p. 40) 

Then what is the form, what is the 

style and manner in which a work 

of art inhabits a folded space? The 

examples in this volume range from 

visuals arts, such as architecture and 

photography through various forms 

of music and literature to bioart. 

Our example points to a possibility 

of reading contemporary American 

fiction through Deleuzian folds and 

self-similarity. 

As the visual images dominate 

the contemporary world one 

of the popular forms of the 

interaction between different 

media is the examination of their 

representational qualities. The 

individual established forms such 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

as fiction or film, for example, to 

take over stories or characters and 

search for the ways to present them 

within their own territories. 

Speaking about the interaction, 

we suggest that these processes are 

qualified at present as legitimate 

ways of art production. Traditional 

classification of genres and forms 

as high or low, central or peripheral 

loses justification since it is exactly 

the constant flux between the 

peripheral and the centre that 

describes the contemporary art. Our 

example shows how the interaction 

allows for the productive exchange 

between a piece of fiction and a 

graphic novel. 

There are many examples when 

graphic novels inspired artists to 

other graphic representations, 

usually films. The most famous, 

probably, are Batman series, or 

Spiderman films. The films deploy 

the popular iconography of graphic 

novels and enhance their potential 

through a specific film technology. 

The graphic novel by Paul Karasik 

and David Mazzucchelli City of Glass 

(2005) is a rare example when 

the inspiration comes from other 

media. Paul Auster’s novel City 

of Glass (1987) inspired Karasik 

and Mazzucchelli to turn the 

dematerialized space of the novel 

into a palpable visual scene. In 

fact, their graphic representation 

materializes the “mental landscape” 

the novel generates. 

In one of the first images of Karasik 

and Mazzucchelli’s novel we look 

at the folding of two essential 


11


elements which can be discerned 

in Auster’s novel. One is material, 

in the picture embodied in the 

physical diagram of a city, the other 

is sublime presented in the graphic 

form realistically as a figure of 

a man, walking over a cartographic 

maze. The city is New York where 

the sublime in the Auster’s novel 

is presented as a set of characters, 

with specifically assigned roles such 

as writer, private eye, or narrator, 

which in different points of the story 

overlap, cumulate or exchange their 

hierarchical positions. 

In the Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s 

image, it is precisely the impossible 

juxtaposition of a scale, one of 

a map and one of a figure that 

reveals the “pleads of matter and 

the folds of soul“. (Deleuze, 1993, 

p. 40) The iconography of the 

picture subverts the simple one 

to one correspondence between 

metaphysical and the physical. The 

realistic oversized figure of a man 

walks on the diagram of the city. 

In the image the body is immersed 

in the cartographic representation 

of the city the same way as the 

protagonist of Auster’s novel 

dissolves in the novel’s story. In the 

graphic novel’s presentation the city 

and the man become the one, the 

two sides of the same thing like in 

Moebius strip, similarly to Auster’s 

novel: 

“New York was an inexhaustible 

space, a labyrinth of endless steps, 

a no matter where he walked, no 

matter how well he came to know 

his neighborhood and the streets, 

12 

it always left him with the feeling 

of being lost. Lost, not only in the 

city, but within himself as well. 

Each time he took a walk, he felt 

as though he were leaving himself 

behind , and by giving himself up 

to the movement of the streets, by 

reducing himself to a seeing eye, he 

was able to escape the obligation to 

think, and this, more than anything 

else, brought him a measure of 

peace, a salutary emptiness within.“ 

(Auster, 1987, p. 4) 

In Auster’s novel, New York 

becomes a baroque city. Glass 

buildings create the living space and 

constitute the urban totality where 

the invisible force, the sensation 

of being lost within oneself or the 

possibility that the body contains 

another body, emerges. In the 

character of Daniel Quinn, who is 

a writer of detective novels under 

the pseudonym of William Wilson, 

Auster created a contemporary 

urban man, confused with his own 

ontology. For Auster it is no longer 

important to follow the traditional 

fictional lines and generate the 

character’s story. On the contrary, 

the trajectory of characters is 

reduced to reveal the materiality of 

the novel, “fold after fold” in a series 

of mirror like embeddings. 

“It was a wrong number that 

started it, the telephone ringing 

three times in the dead of the night, 

and the voice on the other end 

asking for someone he was not“, the 

novel starts (Auster, 1987, p. 3). The 

mistaken identity, a traditional, if 

not a cliché literary compositional 


technique within the novel, reveals 

“alternative structural order” 

because the identity of who he was 

not, is the identity of the writer 

Paul Auster (Hoy, 2010, p. 69). As 

Delueze says: “As a general rule the 

way a material is folded is what 

constitutes its texture” (Deleuze, 

1993, p. 41). The more you fold, the 

better you insight its texture. So if a 

texture is revealed in folds, it is the 

materiality of fiction that surfaces 

in the above mentioned ontological 

fold. While in a mannerist Baroque 

painting chiaroscuro reveals the way 

the fold catches the illumination, 

the moment of revelation for the 

reader of fiction comes from seeing, 

reading and the ability to present 

legible allegories of fiction in her 

mind. In fiction, the fold catches the 

light of creation and acknowledges 

the process of world making. 

While in Baroque architecture the 

play of light and shadow depends 

on such categories as the hour of 

a day, the intensity of light, and 

the perspective from which the 

particular allegorical object is 

perceived, in fiction the process 

of folding and unfolding may be 

connected to a reading experience, 

to the intensity with which the event, 

that is the process of creating the 

fold, comes to existence. The event 

happens when different spaces are 

linked together as Meredith Hoy 

suggests in relation to Zaha Hahid’s 

architecture elsewhere in this 

volume. (Hoy, 2010, p. 68) 

Where is the lineage between the 

Baroque as a period style and the 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

baroqueness as a quality attributed 

to the contemporary art? Deleuze 

characterizes the Baroque as “an 

abstract art par excellence” (1993, 

p. 40). The novel City of Glass is 

abstract in so far as Klee or Dubuffet 

is abstract in contrast to Winslow 

Homer. It employs metafictional 

elements and discloses its own 

texture. It exists as a “mental 

landscape in the soul and in the 

mind” of the reader (ibid.). Moreover, 

it includes immaterial folds that 

integrate also the characters in the 

novel, in the following example, the 

protagonist: 

“It was all a question of method. 

If the object was to understand 

Stillman, to get to know him well 

enough to be able to anticipate what 

he would do next, Quinn had failed.... 

But ... Quinn felt no closer to Stillman 

than when he first started following 

him. He had lived Stillman’s life, 

walked at his pace, seen what he 

had seen, and the only thing he felt 

now was the man’s impenetrability. 

Instead of narrowing the distance 

that lay between him and Stillmanm 

he had seen the old man slip away 

from him, even as he remained 

before his eyes“ (Auster, 1987, p. 

80). 

The above quotation constitutes 

one of the immaterial folds of selfsimilarity, 

when ontological levels 

of two characters, in this case the 

protagonist Quinn, now in the 

role of the private eye, supposedly 

following the man named Stillman, 

reverse. Even though Quinn follows 

Stillman, the clues he receives do 


13


not move his investigation further 

on. He meticulously records 

Stillman’s movement every day 

in his red notebook, however, he 

is not able to homogenize the 

knowledge he receives. “To see 

and to speak is to know but we 

don’t see what we are speaking of 

and we don’t speak of what we are 

seeing” (1987, p. 83). Quinn is the 

seer but he cannot speak of what 

he sees, he only records in his red 

notebook the visible traces of the 

object he follows. Inevitably he, as 

a subject, the seeing and speaking 

self, starts to evaporate. Stillman, as 

the object of following disappears, 

but Quinn in order to perpetuate 

his role of a detective, continues 

in the process for the sake of the 

process and becomes immersed 

in the territory of maps he drew 

into the red notebook. He becomes 

the space and disappears. The last 

sentence in the red notebook reads: 

“What will happen when there are 

no more pages in the red notebook? 

“ (Auster, 1987, p. 157) 

The abstraction is, however, not 

the negation of the form states 

Deleuze (Deleuze, 1993, p. 40). We 

claim it is rather the accentuation 

of the form. For the Baroque and 

contemporary art it is, however, not 

the good form of mimesis. Instead, 

the lineage between the past of the 

Baroque and the now in the arts 

can be traced in forms that reveal 

what remains in excess. 

14 

Self-similarity as a paradigm for 

structures in the natural world has 

been popular as an artistic form of 

presenting the infinite. Whether 

employed as a structural element 

in architecture or as metafiction 

and intertextuality in literature, 

it serves to emanate what lies 

outside of the representation: “the 

intensities, affects and sensations”, 

and the materiality of the fold, 

the form itself (Slaughter, 2004, 

p. 237). Catherine Soussloff, in 

the introduction, summed up the 

affective qualities of interpreted 

works of art, which the essays 

in this volume discuss such as 

“elaboration, excess, juxtaposition, 

surplus, dissimulation, ecstasy, 

virtuosity, efflorescence, and 

absurdity.“ (2010, p. 5) Most of 

them are elicited from works of 

art, which in various forms employ 

self-similarity. 

Although its aims and social 

background were different, we 

may learn much from the Baroque. 

The simulation of infinity through 

self-similarity has a liberating and 

assertive effect no wonder that 

a keen interest in the Baroque is 

again being felt. Its openness and 

dynamics bears a basic affinity to 

contemporary art and its emphasis 

on expression and happening rather 

than ideal order, is certainly related 

to many aspects of contemporary 

life. 


Works cited: 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Auster, P. 1985. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin Books. 

Auster, P., Karasik, P. and Mazzucchelli, D. 2004. City of Glass, the Graphic Novel. New York: 

Picador. 

Delleuze, G. 1993. The Fold. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Harbison, R. 2010. A Rent in the Clouds. In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. 

Harbison, R. 2000. Reflections on Baroque. London: Reaktion Books. 

Hoy, M. 2010. “An Aura of Excess: Zaha Hadid and the Baroque Genetics of Contemporary 

Architecture“. In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. 

Miller, T. 2010. “The Approach of the End of the World Feeling: Allegory and Eschatology in 

the Operas of Robert Ashley“. In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. 

Munster, A. 2010. “Bios and Baroque: Life in the Folds of 17th-Century Artifice and Contemporary 

Bioart“.In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. 

Norberg-Schultz, C. 2003. Baroque architecture. History of World Architecture. Milano: 

Electa Architecture. 

Rossholm Lagerlöf, M. 2010. “Spatial Effects and Meaning in the Galerie des glaces at Versailles“.In 

Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. 

Soussloff, C. M. 2010. “Introduction for the Extension of the Baroque” In Ars Aeterna. Vol 

2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. 

Slaughter, M. 2004. “The Arc and the Zip: Deleuze and Lyotard on Art.” In Law and the Critique 

15: pp. 231–257 copyright Springer 2005 

Endnotes 

i Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivisation) (1986) 

ii History of Sexuality (1976 – 1984), Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) 

iii with the introduction by Art Spiegelman. Art Spiegelman is a recognized cartoonist, 

the author of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986, 1991), a cartoon narrative on the biography 

of the author’s father, a Holocaust survivor. 

iv “knowledge is known only where it is folded“(Deleuze, 1993, p. 56) 


15

DARS AETERNA 

EFIGURATIONS 

The Culture of Defiguration: Anamorphosis, Then 

and Now 

Jon Snyder, professor of Italian and comparative literature at the University of California, 

Santa Barbara, has published widely on European literature, art, and culture, with 

particular emphasis on early modern Italy. His most recent book is Dissimulation and the 

Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (2009). The subjects of his essays, reviews, and 

translations specifically concerning modern Europe range from Wilde to Nietzsche, from 

fin-de-siècle architecture and painting to postmodern philosophy. 

This article examines, in the wake of many recent studies, a key practice of 

visual representation that was first perfected and widely deployed in 17th-century 

Europe, namely anamorphosis. The Baroque, as the first tentative “media world” in 

the West, stands in a peculiar relation of proximity to modernity and its aftermath, 

whose revival of anamorphosis privileges its power to distort and re-form the 

visual field, in a process of defiguration and refiguration that calls the very act of 

seeing into question. The article concludes with an analysis of the “neo-baroque” 

photographs of Loretta Lux, which, it is argued, work to this same end. 

In his classic critique of 

“ocularcentricity” in modern 

Western—especially French—culture, 

the intellectual historian Martin Jay 

contends that in our time the Baroque 

has perhaps finally come into its own (Jay 

1994 [1993]). Jay’s acknowledgement 

of the particular affinities between the 

privileged visual field of the Baroque, 

on the one hand, and media-saturated 

modernity/postmodernity, on the 

other, resonates with the work of 20thcentury 

thinkers as diverse as Walter 

Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, to name 

only two of the many who have explored 

this same connection (Benjamin 

1928; Deleuze 1988). The long era, 

driven by the respective agendas of 

the Enlightenment and Romanticism, 

of disinterest in—if not disdain for— 

16 

Jon R. Snyder 

the artistic and cultural achievements 

of the late 16th and 17th centuries 

came to a close by the turn of the 20th 

century (see, for instance, Wölfflin 

1888). In underscoring the intrinsic 

relationship between the Baroque 

and the emergence of the modern 

“ocularcentric” regime, however, 

Jay adds an important dimension 

to the philosophical discourse that 

seeks not only to articulate a critical 

geneaology of contemporary thinking, 

but to define the contemporary artistic 

movements often loosely labeled “neobaroque.” 

In the following pages, I will 

examine an advanced technology for 

visual representation that was first 

perfected and deployed in 17th-century 

Europe, namely anamorphosis, before 

concluding with a brief look at the work 


S 

of one of the many contemporary artists 

around the world who have adopted 

or thematized anamorphosis, thus 

reintroducing the Baroque into the art 

of the present day. 

Although its definition is elusive, 

the neo-baroque is widely supposed 

to extend, develop, reflect, recycle, or 

revise the most salient traits and themes 

of Baroque art. Libraries and bookstores 

contain recent titles such as The Return 

of the Baroque in Modern Culture, 

Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary 

Art, Digital Baroque, La modernidad de 

lo barroco, The Universal Baroque and 

many others promising to elucidate 

the neo-baroque and its links to the art 

and culture of the past and the present 

(Lambert 2004, Wacker 2007, Murray 

2008, Echeverría 1998, Davidson 2007). 

By the same token, there is no question 

today of a revival of “neo-Renaissance” 

art: that was something for the 19th 

century, with its seemingly unshakable 

belief in progress and in overcoming, 

inspired by the path-breaking political 

and intellectual freedoms of the Italian 

city-states. The Baroque seems instead, 

from the vantage point of today, to stand 

in a peculiar relation of proximity to 

many projects of modernity and its 

aftermath. In his extraordinary study 

of the origins of German tragic drama, 

for instance, Walter Benjamin detects 

a striking parallel between the 17thcentury 

Trauerspiel (tragedy) and 

20th-century German Expressionism, 

one of the most avant-garde modes of 

modernism around the time of the First 

World War (Benjamin, 2003 [1977], 

pp. 54-55). Benjamin does not imply 

that all of 20th-century art can be said 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

to reflect the Baroque, but rather that 

certain modern and contemporary 

artistic movements or practices—such 

as German Expressionism but not, say, 

Abstract Expressionism—reveal a deep 

affinity with the styles and themes of 

that prior period. For Benjamin, this 

constitutes the “return of the repressed” 

in modernist Western art and culture, 

i.e., Baroque allegory, which works to 

undermine dominant representational 

practices such as realism and symbolism, 

as well as the twin pillars of historicism 

and progress. It would be impossible for 

me, in the space provided here, to offer 

a pocket guide to the various itineraries 

of the Baroque across the art of the 

20th century: Francis Bacon’s powerful 

reworkings of 17th-century Old Master 

paintings, to give only one example, 

indicate the importance of this tradition 

for the new Western art. With the 

decline of High Modernism in the post- 

1968 period, more than a few critics 

have even gone so far as to conflate the 

neo-baroque with Postmodernism tout 

court, subsuming the former entirely 

within the labile confines of the latter. 

Although it is not difficult to point to 

Baroque influences in a wide range of 

postmodern artists (think of Damien 

Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, Frank 

Gehry’s convoluted metallic façades or 

Orlan’s free-standing bodiless figures 

made of swirling drapery), there are 

far more who cannot be made to fit into 

such a rigid scheme. I will in this essay 

instead consider the neo-baroque solely 

in terms of its contemporary response to 

the radical technological interrogation 

of the visual field put forward with such 

emphasis centuries ago in the Baroque. 


17


I have argued elsewhere that, despite 

its obvious technical limitations in 

comparison to subsequent eras, the 

Baroque may be termed the first 

tentative version of a “media world” in 

the West (Snyder, 2005, pp. 99-139). 

We can see this clearly in opera, which 

constitutes a multimedia genre unlike 

anything known before it, and whose 

very high degree of artifice appealed 

powerfully to early modern spectators 

at court or in public theaters. That 

opera has survived the many successive 

transformations of Western theatrical 

and musical culture, and has in essence 

descended to us relatively intact from 

the Baroque, while so many other 

artforms have either gone extinct or 

have fallen moribund in the meantime, 

cannot be merely a matter of chance 

(and the same could be said for the 

revival of baroque opera from the late 

20th century onward). We can detect 

traces of this same nascent media world 

in experimental baroque works for the 

stage, such as those of the playwright 

and capocomico G. B. Andreini, which 

seem to have incorporated and 

thematized the latest technological 

innovations in optics—mirrors, lights, 

projections, and other visual effects— 

in public performances (Snyder, 2009, 

pp. 1-32). Moreover, we can discover 

a theoretical basis for this same media 

world in the writings of those late 16th- 

and 17th-century critics and thinkers 

concerned with concettismo or “wit.” In 

these years, Francesco Patrizi, Matteo 

Peregrini, Maciej Sarbiewski, Baltasar 

Gracián, Emanuele Tesauro and a 

number of others set out to redefine 

the autonomy of art, the faculty of 

18 

imagination, and the aesthetic purpose 

of novelty and surprise, while openly 

rejecting the long-acknowledged 

classical rules of decorum, proportion, 

harmony, unity and so on (Snyder, 2005, 

p. 21). 

As the last in the long chain of 

concettisti, Tesauro—by the time that he 

completed his work on the massive final 

version of Il cannocchiale aristotelico 

(The Aristotelian Spyglass) in 1670— 

does not hesitate to contend, without 

the faintest trace of anxiety, not only 

that “tutto è lecito” (there are no rules) 

in the new arts of the Baroque, but 

that everything encountered in human 

experience is indeed always already a 

representation or a figure, devoid of 

any authentic foundation in the real, 

and generated solely by human wit or, 

as he terms it, ingegno (Tesauro, 2000 

[1670], p. 735). What frees his version 

of the Baroque aesthetic, allowing it 

to float clear of the ground of reality, 

is its willful and highly self-conscious 

break with the Aristotelian definition 

of mimesis, or the so-called “mirror of 

nature.” The dynamics of Baroque art 

are based on the principle of difference 

rather than repetition, Tesauro argues: 

so that it may propagate itself ad 

infinitum, figure upon figure upon 

figure, the Baroque does not attempt to 

repeat the real but to remake it entirely. 

It is, simply put, the triumph of the new, 

invoking a wholesale transformation— 

through the endlessly creative work 

of wit (the most highly evolved mode 

of human consciousness)—of what 

already exists, in which the original 

model loses whatever weight it once had 

and is reduced to a mere trace of what it 


once was. For Tesauro, the experience 

of the Baroque figural universe is not 

only one of extreme freedom from the 

limits of the real or the necessary, but 

must be understood as an essentially 

aesthetic experience: it is constantly 

metamorphosing into something 

unexpected—and at once beautiful and 

pleasurable—that has never before seen, 

whether figure, metaphor or image. The 

aestheticization of the universe, after 

the breaking of the mirror of nature, 

is the universalization of the aesthetic. 

There was one contemporary thinker 

in Italy who was every inch Tesauro’s 

equal: Marco Boschini, art critic and 

author of the bizarre and extravagant 

treatise entitled La Carta Del Navegar 

Pittoresco (Boschini 1966 [1660]). 

In this seemingly interminable verse 

work, composed of over five thousand 

stanzas in Venetian dialect, Boschini 

memorably, if crudely, defines the new 

Baroque artworks as being “dove fa 

l’arte alla natura i fighi,” or “where art 

gives nature the finger” (see Snyder, 

2005, p. 146). 

It goes almost without saying that the 

representation of space, especially of 

figures in space, was a key experimental 

area for the visual arts in early modern 

Europe. From the early Renaissance 

onward, at least two basic perspectival 

techniques are employed in twodimensional 

pictorial representation 

to re-create the illusion of viewing 

objects that exist in three dimensions. 

The first of these, accelerated or relief 

perspective, consists in showing objects 

in a compressed or foreshortened form, 

as if they were farther away than they 

really are, as was commonly done in 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

the Renaissance with, say, theatrical 

backdrops and stage sets (Elkins, 1994, 

p. 72, n. 67). The second perspectival 

practice instead makes represented 

objects seem nearer to the viewer by 

enlarging their component parts rather 

than shrinking them, as, for example, 

in Antonio Pollaiuolo’s late 15thcentury 

Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian 

(1473-75). Both of these respective 

perspectival techniques are, however, 

widely understood. In the Renaissance 

to produce not an optical illusion per 

se, but rather “a window on what (and 

through which) the eye actually sees, 

constructed according to the way that 

it sees” (Clark, 2007, p. 84). In other 

words, Renaissance perspective is an art 

of illusion at the service of the painter 

who is, as Leon Battista Alberti argued, 

“solely concerned with representing 

what can be seen,” like a mirror or 

other reflecting surface guaranteeing 

privileged access to the real and the 

true (as cited in Clark, 2007, pp. 84- 

85). The concettista culture of the 

Baroque, as we have seen above, tends 

programmatically to call into question 

any such inherited assumptions about 

the mimetic stability of representation 

or its performance as a mirror of nature. 

Indeed, one Baroque artistic practice 

in particular critiques the artifices of 

traditional perspective by pushing 

them to such extremes that their rules 

are not merely bent but in fact reversed, 

in what amounts to a spectacular 

“laying-bare of the device” (to borrow 

a central notion of Russian Formalism). 

As a result, a glaring—if intentionally 

transient—disconnect between artistic 

representation, on the one hand, and the 


19


reality that it purports to represent, on 

the other hand, arises in the eye of the 

beholder: this is called anamorphosis. 

Anamorphosis was known to artists 

in Europe since at least the 15th 

century, and was widely explored 

in the first part of the 16th century, 

as we can see from such now-iconic 

works as Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait 

and Holbein’s The Ambassadors, to 

mention only two examples. However, 

anamorphosis became a subject of 

intensifying interest—an “outburst” in 

both theoretical and practical terms— 

over the course of the 17th century: 

Stuart Clark notes that the term first 

appears in 1646 (Clark, 2007, pp. 

90, 95). Anamorphosis combines 

“two visual orders in one image, one 

depicted naturalistically and the other 

distorted according to the rules of the 

technique. By definition, this ma[kes] it 

impossible to see one of them correctly 

without simultaneously failing with 

the other” when the viewer seeks to 

make visual sense of the image (Clark, 

2007, p. 92). In this system of deliberate 

double-imaging, whenever the onceskewed 

realistic order is restored 

through the discovery of the hidden 

“correct” viewpoint, the unnatural or 

distorted original order is lost to sight, 

and vice versa (Clark, 2007, p, 93). 

This discovery can occur when the 

viewer finds the proper oblique angle in 

relation to the surface of the picture to 

be able to recover a legible, naturalistic 

image otherwise deliberately disguised 

by anamorphosis (a process taken to an 

extreme in viewing a painting such as 

The Ambassadors, which now requires 

the viewer to step almost into the plane 

20 

of the painting itself in order to grasp the 

image of a skull). Alternately, in another 

version of the same practice that— 

thanks to dramatic advances in optical 

technology—became widespread in 

the Baroque, the anamorphic logic of 

double-imaging is affirmed when a 

catoptric mirror of the correct shape 

is placed in the proper relation of 

proximity to intentionally distorted 

images (see Fig. 1, lower right). A 

cluster of sometimes random-looking 

blotches or stains on a two-dimensional 

surface is transformed, when reflected 

in the appropriate kind of cylindrical 

or conical mirror, into a naturalistic 

representation (and the obverse holds 

equally true upon removal of the mirror). 

One of the most famous 17th-century 

examples of an enigmatic anamorphic 

image being resolved by a catoptric 

mirror is to be found in the engraved 

frontispiece of Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale 

aristotelico (Tesauro, 2000 [1670], p. 3). 

What is thematized in such anamorphic 

artworks is not only the arbitrariness 

of the conventions of perspective, but 

an accelerating sense of the elusiveness 

of the objects to be represented, which 

seem almost centripetally thrust out of 

their former familiar states. If “media 

are spaces of action for constructed 

attempts to connect what is separated,” 

as Siegfried Zielinski contends, then in 

the Baroque anamorphic media world, 

especially when catoptric devices are 

employed, we witness an intentional 

and technically complex attempt “to 

connect what is separated,” that is to 

say, the viewer and the increasingly 

remote objects of the representation, 

while at the same time problematizing 


that attempt and acknowledging the 

difficulty of overcoming the dispersion 

of the latter in infinite space (Zielinski, 

2006, p. 7). 

There is no doubt that many 

Baroque artists and theorists valued 

the catoptric mirror for its power to 

distort and re-form the visual field, in 

an act of defiguration and refiguration 

that ultimately threatens to disturb, 

or even to undermine, the presumed 

certainty of the act of seeing itself, 

which stands at the very center of 

the “ocularcentrism” of the West (Jay, 

1994, p. 49). Anamorphosis charges the 

relation between vision and the visible 

field with a sense of fundamental, even 

radical uncertainty: not only is that 

which appears in the catoptric mirror 

an unnatural product of skillful human 

artifice, but the viewer’s eye is wholly 

reliant on a sophisticated technological 

intermediary—the medium of 

the mirror—in order to be able to 

detect any figure at all. The seeming 

immanence of vision is undone, making 

the ordinary gaze “into little more 

than a kind of blindness” that, in the 

case of mirror-anamorphosis, may be 

helpless to decipher the image without 

the assistance of an optical instrument 

or visual aid (Massey, 2007, p. 68). In 

this version of the Baroque there is 

in fact nothing natural about vision, 

and the new optics, as Tesauro notes, 

“makes you see what you do not see” 

(le Optiche . . . ti fan vedere ciò che non 

vedi [as cited by Clark, 2007, p. 87]). 

Anamorphosis effectively de-faces 

or de-figures the signs in the visual 

field, alienating them from themselves 

and from the viewer, although this is 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

not meant to be a permanent state of 

affairs. There is of course a way and 

a moment for restoring the logic of 

vision to its rightful place by suitable 

manipulation of the visual field that 

has been destabilized by anamorphosis 

(through the placement of a suitable 

mirror or the proper positioning of the 

viewer’s eye). Resemblance that seems 

lost may therefore be recovered; in a 

curious procedure, as Jurgis Baltrušaitis 

notes, “the destruction of the figure 

precedes its representation” (as cited 

in Paz, 1990, p. 141). Yet there can be 

no denying that in this process the 

picture, in a sense, looks back at the 

viewer. In other words, the anamorphic 

image is not solely a passive recipient 

of the gaze, but ambiguously makes the 

viewer at once subject and object of 

a reconfigured viewing space, as Lyle 

Massey has brilliantly argued (Massey, 

2007, pp. 68-69). As she points out, 

one is forced to move, or to move 

something, in order to see properly the 

anamorphic picture: in some cases the 

viewer may feel compelled to push the 

subject-object distinction to the very 

limit, by bringing herself or himself 

hard up against the plane of the picture 

in an effort to resolve the visual enigma 

(Massey, 2007, pp. 68-69). Thus, Massey 

concludes, in anamorphosis “the subject 

is but another object in and of the view 

itself” (Massey, 2007, p. 109). Or, to put 

it another way, the anamorphic image 

is first of all “there” in the mirror, as it 

were, and not in the eye of the subject. 

No wonder that the eye itself appeared 

to be of special interest in early modern 

studies of anamorphosis (Leonardo 

da Vinci’s anamorphic drawing of an 


21


eye is emblematic of this interest, but 

other examples can readily be found). 

In the most notable Baroque treatise on 

anamorphosis and other optical tricks, 

the French Minorite monk Jean-François 

Niceron’s La Perspective curieuse ou 

magie artificielle des effets merveilleux 

(1638), the emphasis in both image 

and text is on the eye as the organ and 

organizer of vision (Niceron 1638, Fig. 

2). Anamorphosis invariably realigns 

the very act of seeing for the subject, 

as I have argued above, and thus posits 

the crisis of the eye in early modernity: 

the latter is no longer an organ that 

rationally and objectively apprehends 

and organizes the visual field, but 

rather is forced to accept the relativity 

of that field (which “is not constituted 

in its entireness and fixity in advance of 

our gaze and our gestural and mental 

performance” [Margolin, as cited in 

Clark, 2007, p. 95]). In turning back 

vision onto itself and in insisting on the 

eye’s essentially self-reflexive nature, 

the anamorphic image problematizes 

any attempt to interpret fully, in an 

artificial and nonmimetic universe, 

the field of the visual (Clark, 2007, 

pp. 91, 95). For Baroque culture every 

act of perception, as Deleuze argues, 

tends to be “hallucinatory, because 

perception [no longer has] an object” or, 

I would add, any object other than itself 

(Deleuze, 1988, p. 125). One of the plates 

in Niceron’s 1638 treatise displays the 

portraits of a dozen Turkish sultans 

which, if viewed through a specially 

faceted prism of Niceron’s own design, 

recombine to create a portrait of King 

Louis XIII, the defender of Christianity 

against the Ottoman Empire. What the 

22 

eye is to “see” is not what is there on the 

page, but only what is in the glass [Fig. 

3]. 

Roughly four centuries later, we 

now generally take anamorphosis 

for granted, although not in the early 

modern sense of the term. Anamorphic 

lenses, including the fish-eye lens, 

have long been a part of photography 

and cinema, and in the computer age 

the production of anamorphic images 

has become child’s-play for anyone, 

not just gifted artists or specialeffects 

technicians. There are software 

programs that will instantly transform 

any .JPEG file into anamorphic images 

of every conceivable kind: and who 

among us is not weary of seeing these 

on blogs, Facebooks, and the like? 

At the very moment, then, in which 

anamorphosis is no longer a technically 

challenging practice, either in terms 

of draftsmanship, lenses, mirrors, or 

media, it seems to have lost whatever 

allure it may have once had for artists. 

We might say that it is a Baroque visual 

practice that seems by now to have 

become routinized, commonplace, 

and conventional to such a degree as 

to be almost wholly naturalized and, 

in short, forgotten. To put it another 

way, anamorphosis today appears to 

be no longer possessed of a distinctive 

aesthetic or critical function. 

I must insist on “almost,” however, 

because I believe that in fact in our 

time the neo-baroque has—true to its 

name—made room for anamorphosis, 

or at least anamorphic effects, in new 

and unexpected ways. This is not the 

place for a survey of anamorphosis in 

modern and contemporary art (see 


Mannoni et al. 2004). Suffice it to say 

that there is no single representative 

figure or oeuvre that can capture the 

full complexity of the modes of its 

deployment, from the avant-garde 

photographs of Hungarian-born André 

Kertész to the experimental political 

films and drawings of South African– 

born William Kentridge in What 

will come (has already come) [2007] 

(Kentridge, 2009, pp. 58-59, 114-115). 

I will instead limit myself here to a 

brief examination of the corpus of one 

contemporary painter-photographer, 

German-born Loretta Lux (1969- ), 

whose subtle recourse to the techniques 

and themes of anamorphic art touches 

on some of the same questions that 

the Baroque first raised systematically 

some four centuries ago. 

Lux originally trained as a painter in 

Münich and started to use the medium 

of photography only when she was 

already 30 years of age. Unlike most 

contemporary portrait photography, 

her carefully composed and heavily 

manipulated photographic portraits 

of children appear to be subtly but 

deliberately “painterly,” referring 

especially to the tradition of the Old 

Masters (who instead lived, it goes 

without saying, in an era before 

photography). Lux’s portraits of children 

may bear a marked resemblance to those 

of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries 

in particular, but they are principally 

dependent on digital technology rather 

than the medium of oil paint. Her young 

subjects are first photographed in 

meticulously chosen modern vintage 

clothing and hairstyles in front of a white 

background in the studio, often in poses 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

suggestive of the work of Bronzino or 

Velázquez, among others. Subsequently 

the artist inserts the portrait—after 

extensive digital enhancement—into a 

digital photograph of either one of her 

own paintings of imaginary scenery, 

or of a landscape or scene that she 

encountered somewhere on her travels 

(which are anonymous, or cannot in 

any case be readily identified by the 

viewer). Each portrait is an artful 

montage, in other words, of modern 

and contemporary elements that are 

intentionally reassembled to recall or 

refer to the European artistic heritage, 

especially that of the Baroque. 

In Lux’s portraits the colors of a child’s 

clothes characteristically match (or 

nearly so) those of the photographed 

backgrounds, in which pale, washed-out 

pastel tones tend to predominate. This 

produces a marked Verfremdungseffekt, 

inasmuch as the subject of the portrait 

and the rest of the image often seem 

to be isolated from one another: faces, 

heads, and unclothed body parts 

seem to float like fragments against 

the same background into which the 

children’s clothing blends seamlessly, 

like some Lacanian fantasy of le corps 

morcelé. The children who pose for the 

photographer are usually alone; not 

only do they never smile at the camera 

or at one another (if accompanied by 

other children), but they generally 

refrain from any expression of passion 

or emotion. Although the children may 

look back directly (albeit impassively) 

at the camera, they seem incapable 

of, or indifferent to, communication; 

Lux’s images appear intent on 

conveying a “zero degree” of interiority 


23


that establishes an insuperable 

distance between the viewer and the 

photographic subject. Anyone familiar 

with early modern portraiture of noble 

or royal children will recognize that 

Lux’s work shares some or many of these 

same traits with the works of the Old 

Masters. These same unsettling pictures 

may also bring to mind Victorian 

photographic portraits of children, the 

paintings of Balthus, or even the style 

of some contemporary Japanese manga 

(and on the Internet one can find for 

sale numerous disturbing-looking dolls 

that are look-alikes modeled on Lux’s 

portraits). 

Lux’s art consists in the subtle 

transformation and recombination 

of the elements of the image to create 

an effect of estrangement both from 

the spectator and from the inner lives 

of the children that she portrays: the 

latter keep their distance from the 

photographer, from the viewer, from 

each other, and from themselves. One 

of the principal means through which 

the artist achieves her purpose in these 

highly self-referential pictures, which 

depend far more on artifice rather 

than on any indexical relationship 

to the real, is digitally generated 

anamorphosis. Often one or more parts 

of the child’s body are very slightly— 

yet perceptibly—distorted, enlarged 

or stretched out of normal proportion 

in Lux’s photographs. The viewer’s eye 

encounters heads that seem to be too 

big, relative to the rest of the body of 

the child, or arms that appear to be too 

long, creating an uncanny sense that the 

familiar is in fact alien to us. The bodies 

shown in these portraits are a subtle 

24 

assemblage of component parts that 

do and do not fit together, almost like 

Niceron’s bizarre composite portrait 

of Louis XIII. Lux’s greatly understated 

use of anamorphosis is the only one 

possible for this somber approach 

to neo-baroque image-making. The 

medium itself, in the 21st century, no 

longer needs to call the act of seeing 

into question in order to interrogate the 

relationship between subject and object 

that arises in it. 

At the same time—and here we 

may detect the difference between 

neo-baroque anamorphosis and its 

predecessor—there is no way to 

recompose these unsettling figures or 

to restore them to normal dimensions 

through the exercise of reason and the 

discovery of the correct vantage point for 

the viewer, as the artists of the Baroque 

fully intended to do. Such images thus 

work to destabilize the power of the 

ocularcentric regime which Martin Jay 

so eloquently describes and critiques, 

and for which Baroque art helped 

to lay the original groundwork (Jay, 

1994 [1993], pp. 49-52). In Deleuze’s 

philosophical terminology, Lux’s 

anamorphic images instead cannot be 

“unfolded” once the process of (neo) 

baroque folding has begun. There is no 

privileged viewpoint, and no magical 

mirror, that could be employed to turn 

these children back into what they once 

may have been. The children in Lux’s 

portraits bear a striking resemblance to 

Deleuze’s description of the philosophy 

of Leibniz in Le pli (The Fold). They are 

like monads, windowless, sealed off in 

themselves, and absent from us—or 

rather, we may say that they are sealed 


off from the viewer by an invisible 

barrier that absolutely cannot be 

broached or penetrated (Deleuze, 

1988, pp. 20-37). These are images 

of so-called “Photoshop Children” 

in which past and present, painting 

and photography, high art and mass 

culture, Baroque aesthetic technique 

and contemporary digital imagery 

are combined to create portraits of 

the surfaces of childhood, or, as I have 

already suggested, of the distance 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

between the viewer and what is 

viewed. Perhaps in the last analysis 

what these pictures are about, as 

emphasized by Lux’s recourse to the 

subtlest touches of anamorphosis, is 

not so much the distortions inherent 

in vision and representation as the 

fact that in our era what can be seen 

and what can be represented—as 

the Baroque knew, but still thought 

to overcome—is none other than 

distance itself. 

Works cited: 

Andreini, G. B. 2009 [1622]. Love in the Mirror. Snyder, J. R. (ed. and trans.). The Other 

Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 2. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and 

Reformation Studies. 

Benjamin, W. 1928. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Berlin: E. Rowohlt. Rev. ed. 1963. 

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 

The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Osborne, J. (trans.). London: Verso, 2003 [1977]. 

Boschini, M. 1966 [1660]. La carta del navegar pitoresco. Pallucchini, A. (ed.). Venice and 

Rome: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale. 

Clark, S. 2007. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford and New 

York: Oxford University Press. 

Davidson, P. 2007. The Universal Baroque. Manchester and New York: Manchester University 

Press. 

Deleuze, G. 1988. Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. 

Echeverría, B. 1998. La modernidad de lo barroco. Mexico City: Ed. Era. 

Elkins, J. 1994. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 

Jay, M. 1994 [1993]. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French 

Thought. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. 

Kentridge, W. 2009. William Kentridge: Five Themes. Rosenthal, M. (ed.). San Francisco: San 

Francisco Museum of Modern Art; West Palm Beach: Norton Museum; New Haven: Yale 

University Press. 

Lambert, G. 2004. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. New York: Continuum. 

Mannoni, L., W. Nekes, and M. Warner. 2004. Eyes, Lies and Illusions: the Art of Deception. 

London: Hayward Gallery. 

Massey, L. 2007. Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories 

of Perspective. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 

Murray, T. 2008. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: 

University of Minnesota Press. 

Niceron, J.-F. 1638. La Perspective curieuse ou magie artificielle des effets merveilleux, par 

la vision directe, la catoptrique, par la réflexion des miroirs plats, cylindriques et coniques, la 


25


dioptrique, par la réfraction des crystaux.... Paris: P. Billaine. 

Paz, O. 1990 [1978]. Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare. New York: Arcade 

Publishing. 

Rosenthal, M. (ed.). 2009. William Kentridge: Five Themes. New Haven and London; Yale 


Snyder, J. R. 2005. L’estetica del Barocco. Bologna: Il Mulino. 

Tesauro, E. 2000 [1670]. Il cannocchiale aristotelico. Savigliano: Editrice Artistica 

Piemontese. 

Wacker, K. A. 2007. Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art. Newcastle: Cambridge 

Scholars. 

Wölfflin, H. 1888. Renaissance und Barock: eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung 

des Barockstils in Italien. Munich: Ackermann. 

Zielinski, S. 2006. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by 

Technical Means. Custance, G. (trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. 

26 

Jon R. Snyder 

Department of French and Italian 

University of California, Santa Barbara 

Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4140 

snyder@frit.ucsb.edu 


Fig. 2: J.-F. Niceron, Anamorphic projection, La Perspective curieuse (1638) 

Fig. 1: J.-F. Niceron, Title page with catoptric 

mirror, La Perspective curieuse (1638) 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Fig. 3: J.-F. Niceron, Composite portrait of 

King Louis XIII, La Perspective curieuse 

(1638) 


27


EFIGURATIONS 

Bastarda Musicians and the Practice of Musical 

Anamorphosis 

28 


Nina Treadwell is associate professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 

specializing in 16th- and 17th-century Italian music. Her publications appear in journals 

such as Cambridge Opera Journal, Women and Music, Lute Society Journal, and Musicology 

Australia, and the edited collection Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music. Her monograph Music 

and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for “La pellegrina” was published by 

Indiana University Press in 2008. 

This article describes the little-known practice of bastarda musicians, particularly 

that of bass singers and viola da gamba players. Though criticized by connoisseurs 

for subverting the musical architecture of a preexisting composition, bastarda 

musicians were renowned for their meraviglia-inspiring performances. This study 

explores the anti-mimetic, anamorphic dimensions of bastarda performance, as 

an important strand of early baroque musical culture. The bodily dimension of 

bastarda practice brought to the fore broader tensions between the natural and 

the artificial, challenged the boundaries between an original (musical) “text” and 

its performative realization, and ultimately questioned the constitution of musical 

(and social) order. 

And I remember, when I was in Rome in the year 1567, hearing of 

the reputation of a famous bass [singer] who was praised beyond 

measure. I went to hear him one day in the company of certain 

accomplished foreigners. He filled us with wonder [meraviglia]— 

with meraviglia, I say—because there was never a man who had 

greater natural gifts than this one, for he could reach a large 

number of notes—all resonant and sweet—up high as much as 

in the deepest and middle ranges. But to return to our subject, he 

so spoiled nature with art that he broke the [poetic] lines, indeed 

shattered them to pieces, making long syllables short and short 

ones long, putting runs on the short and stopping on the long, 

that listening to him was to witness a massacre of the unfortunate 

poetry. The wretched fellow, entreated by adulation, the more he 

saw eyebrows arching, the greater was his foolishness to satisfy 

the ignorant public. 1 

- Giovanni de’ Bardi, “Discorso . . . sopra la musica antica, e’l cantar bene” (c. 

1578) 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

[Those singers] who perform the low part and the bass, do not 

remember—not to say are ignorant of the fact—that it is the base 

and foundation upon which the song was built. And not standing 

firm beneath it, as the fabric requires, they go on up, they add 

nonsensical passages and allow themselves, because they enjoy it, 

to go so far as not only to pass into the tenor part but even into that 

of the contralto. Even this is not enough, they go almost to that of 

sopranos, climbing in such a way to the top of the tree that they 

can’t come down, without breaking their necks. 2 

- Ercole Bottrigari, Il desiderio overo de’ concerti di varij strumenti musicali (1594) 

These two accounts document 

a specialized, highly virtuosic 

performance style especially practiced 

by bass singers and players of the viola 

da gamba. 3 In the case of bass singers, 

particularly those working in Rome 

and Florence, an extended vocal range 

was cultivated. The term bastarda was 

first used in 1584 to describe the style, 

though the practice likely dates from 

the mid-16th century and flourished 

through the early-17th century. 4 While 

some musical commentators derided 

singers who cultivated vocal basso 

alla bastarda, the capacity to inspire 

meraviglia (often at the expense of text 

clarity) was guaranteed by the singer’s 

ability to transcend his “natural” voice 

range, thus traversing the vertical 

“terrain” of a musical composition from 

the very lowest to the very highest parts. 

In the context of essays largely devoted 

to visual culture, the architectural 

and spatial metaphors in Bottrigari’s 

description above are useful for 

explaining the bastarda style as an 

important strand of baroque musical 

practice that relied on aural perception, 

but resonated with broader artistic 

cultures privileging anti-mimetic, 

anamorphic structures of meaning. In 

the narrower construct of the discipline 

of musicology, the bastarda style is 

representative of tensions regarding 

conceptions of baroqueness: lack of 

attention to text setting—or failing to 

observe the integrity of the poetic line, to 

paraphrase Bardi above—is frequently 

posited as antithetical to mimetic 

modes of musical composition and 

practice that led to the “birth of opera,” 

signaling the “arrival” of the musical 

baroque in 1600. 5 Yet as Tom Conley 

asks, “Can styles be periodized and, if 

so, what are the ideological motivations 

betraying the historical schemes that 

also tend to produce them?” (Deleuze, 

1993, p. ix). The bastarda style, like 

other styles and musical practices I 

have examined elsewhere, do not “fit” 

the traditional definition of the musical 

baroque as heralded by the birth-ofopera 

narrative (Treadwell, 2008); they 

have thus been largely ignored, or in 

some cases examined and dismissed. 6 

In part, this dismissal implicitly 

relies on descriptions such as those of 

Bardi and Bottrigari—documentary 


29


sources—that appear to provide 

“evidence” for disregarding particular 

strands of baroque musical culture. 

Bardi, of course, is a key figure in this 

regard, because of the prominence 

granted his writings, and those of 

his circle, including members of his 

camerata that met at his Florentine 

palazzo during the 1570s and 1580s. 

As the standard narrative goes, Bardi’s 

camerata was instrumental in the 

development of monody (solo song, 

in the word’s strictest sense), which 

provided the practical means for the 

development of opera. 7 The emphasis 

was not only on solo song (as opposed 

to multi-voice compositions), but a 

style of composition in which clarity of 

text expression was the primary goal. 

Notwithstanding Bardi’s contributions 

in this regard, one must also look 

carefully at both his writings and other 

practical activities and intellectual 

affiliations; 8 moreover, in terms of the 

influence of Bardi’s camerata, Richard 

Wistreich (2007, p. 161) aptly describes 

their activities in terms of “a research 

group”—and a highly specialized 

one at that—whose ideas were far 

from representative of performance 

practice in general during the late 16th 

century. Indeed, the various tirades 

against bassi alla bastarda (and other 

types of singers who performed highly 

florid embellishments) represented a 

somewhat limited attempt to reign in 

performers with respect to the license 

they took with music as presented 

on the printed page. Moreover, these 

tirades indicate that the practice of 

adding lavish embellishment was 

indeed widespread. 

30 

Returning specifically to Bardi’s 

account of the bastarda bass 

he witnessed in Rome, a certain 

ambivalence is also in evidence. The 

passage occurs as a digression in the 

context of instructions on the art of 

“good singing,” where the primary 

goal is to communicate how best to 

sing poetry so that the words can be 

most clearly understood. Though his 

assessment of the bass singer seems 

ultimately damning, he cannot help but 

admire the singer’s “natural gifts” and 

the astonishing, meraviglia-inspiring 

nature of the performance. He later 

reintroduces the topic of embellishment 

and bass singers in general: “To make 

divisions [embellishments] on a bass 

is contrary to nature, because this 

part contains (as we said) the slow 

and severe and drowsy too. But since 

it is customary to do it, I do not know 

what to say of it—I dare not praise 

or blame it” (Bardi, c. 1578, pp. 124- 

125). Acknowledging the practice’s 

widespread cultivation, Bardi goes on 

to explain how to temper the practice, 

suggesting to the singer to “do this as 

little as you can, and when you must, 

show that you do it to indulge someone 

else” (c. 1578, pp. 124-125). 10 Bardi 

suggests a complex performative feat: 

while foregrounding musical prowess, 

the singer must simultaneously 

distance himself from his own 

virtuosity, thereby demonstrating a 

self-conscious awareness of his practice 

to the audience (communicating that 

the singer does not personally endorse 

his own performance). 

Yet Bardi’s account of the bastarda 

performance he witnessed in Rome 


describes a very different kind of 

engagement between the performer and 

his audience. 11 Audience and performer 

engage in an ongoing “dialogue” 

whereby the performer, encouraged by 

audience response to his singing, strives 

for yet greater heights (both literally 

and figuratively). Likewise, rather 

than exhibiting discretion, Bottrigari’s 

singer foregrounds his virtuosity by 

moving as far away as possible from 

the compositional model on which 

his embellishments are based. In this 

regard, the bastarda practice threatens 

the assumed authoritative “voice” of the 

composer. Though Bardi and some other 

contemporaneous writers suggest that 

performers follow a composer’s musical 

work note-for-note in performance, 

such opinions were commonly voiced 

in the context of discussions of unruly 

singers. 12 In general, it was assumed that 

the musician would embellish a given 

composition during this period; the 

extent and manner of embellishment 

was dependent on aspects such as 

style, genre, and performance context. 

The bastarda musician incorporates 

embellishments that go well beyond 

those a singer might choose to articulate 

within his or her “natural” voice range. 

Music on the printed page—as a tangible 

element of material culture—provided 

a mere basis for the bastarda musician 

to create a composition anew, through 

anamorphic performative process. The 

original (notated) musical model was 

already completely internalized by the 

best of singers, allowing maximum 

flexibility, moment-by-moment, during 

the course of a performance. While there 

are surviving examples of bastarda 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

music in notated form, providing 

insight into the practice, 13 the practice 

was primarily one in which the most 

renowned musicians improvised on the 

spot, with the interactive component 

between musician and audience 

contributing to the aural outcome. 

Contemporaneous criticism of 

bastarda performances, especially by 

music theorists and connoisseurs, was 

also based on the fact that the bass singer 

virtually abandoned his traditional role, 

which was to provide the foundation for 

a musical composition. Writing of 16thcentury 

four-part counterpoint, theorist 

Gioseffo Zarlino states: “As the earth is 

the foundation of the other elements, 

the bass has the function of sustaining 

and stabilizing, fortifying and giving 

growth to the other [musical] parts. 

. . . If we could imagine the element of 

earth to be lacking, what ruin and waste 

would result in universal and human 

harmony!” (1558, p. 179). Zarlino 

then proceeds to describe the distinct 

function of each of the parts above the 

bass, proceeding in order of vocal range: 

from the next part above the bass—the 

tenor—through the alto and soprano 

ranges. 

A tacit understanding of the “correct” 

performance and spatial distribution 

of musical parts—from lowest to 

highest—lies at the heart of Bottrigari’s 

account of bastarda singing. What he 

describes is not the performance of a 

four-part composition by four singers 

of appropriate range, but a single 

singer traversing the entire musical 

texture (in a seemingly indiscriminate 

and reckless fashion). When a bass 

singer or instrumentalist cultivated 


31


the bastarda style, the (usually four) 

discrete musical lines of a preexisting 

composition become a mere framework 

for the musician to transform the said 

music anew, by leaping between the 

various musical parts at will, as well 

as embellishing each part with florid 

passagework. (Accomplished bass 

singers were known to sing bastarda 

style with a range of approximately 

three octaves, using the falsetto voice 

for the soprano range.) Often, too, an 

additional “fifth part” was generated 

that was freewheeling, so to speak, 

independent of the traditional four-part 

texture. 

During the late 16th century 

and beyond, bastarda musicians 

(particularly viola bastarda players) 

frequently relied on well-known, fourpart 

compositions from mid-century— 

madrigals and chansons—as the basis 

for their practice. There was good 

reason for choosing this repertory. 

Madrigals and chansons from earlier 

in the century continued to be reissued 

in print throughout the 16th century; 

they were popular with amateur 

musicians who could perform them 

with relative ease in the traditional 

fashion (with four singers, one per part) 

during an evening’s entertainment. 

These madrigals were also relatively 

straightforward from a structural 

point of view, and were mainly diatonic 

with little chromaticism. From the 

standpoint of the bastarda musician, 

the four vocal parts were easy to 

memorize. In performance, then, 

the bastarda musician engaged with 

audience members who were familiar 

with the model that provided the 

32 

framework for his improvisations. The 

meraviglia that the musician induced in 

his audience was thus partly dependent 

on the auditor knowing the original 

musical model. In this context, the 

extent of a singer’s virtuosity could be 

measured in relation to the model, as 

well as elements of novelty and risk. As 

Bottrigari’s account attests, risks could 

involve leaping to the very highest of 

ranges, with the singer “dancing” on the 

edge of the architectural precipice, as it 

were. 

With the connection to visuality 

implicit in accounts of performances 

by bass singers, one wonders if the 

generation of meraviglia also involved 

the combined visual-aural impression 

of, at times, comparatively high pitches 

emanating from the body of a bass 

singer, whose traditional function was 

tied to that which was understood as 

earth-bound or grounded, to paraphrase 

Zarlino. In addition, the musical lines 

produced by bassi alla bastarda were 

quite different from those produced 

by “regular” basses or those who 

sang in the typical range of a soprano 

or tenor, for example. As Wistreich 

has stressed, singing alla bastarda 

was not simply “a ‘natural’ technical 

development” but, rather, “something 

[that was] remarkable even well into 

the seventeenth century” (2007, p. 181). 

First, during the 16th century, singing in 

“more than one vocal register or modal 

ambitus” was “out of the ordinary” 

(Wistreich, 2007, p. 176). When singing 

four-part counterpoint, it was unusual 

for any one singer to go much beyond 

the designated voice range. Second, 

singing alla bastarda produced a very 


different effect than ornamenting the 

discrete, more melodically oriented, 

tenor or soprano lines. Deriving from 

the bass part’s traditional function, bass 

lines were usually slower moving and 

typified by leaps of fourths, fifths, and 

octaves, providing a harmonic support 

to the more conjunct movement of the 

soprano and tenor lines (Zarlino, 1558, 

p. 179). Therefore, the embellishment 

or passaggi (passagework) employed 

by bass singers produced different 

styles of passaggi designed to “fill in” 

leaps in the musical line. In addition, 

it seems fair to say that the disjunct 

motion that characterized bass parts 

must have contributed to the singer’s 

facility and propensity for leaping 

between various voice parts, while 

internally maintaining a secure sense 

of placement within the composition’s 

harmonic structure (pace Bottrigari). 

For audience members, however, the 

feat clearly appeared miraculous. 

Interestingly, viola bastarda players 

do not appear to have received the 

same kind of criticism as their vocal 

counterparts. Though the basic 

characteristics of the style were more 

or less the same, and it is even possible 

that viola bastarda style was initially 

derived from vocal practice (Wistreich, 

2007, p. 186)—considering the longstanding 

tradition that instrumentalists 

should imitate vocal style—there is one 

fundamental distinction: the use of the 

body. The basso alla bastarda actually 

produced sound through his own body: 

given the preeminent position of vocal 

music during the 16th century, and the 

common analogy between the physical 

body and musical composition, 14 a 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

singer who disrupted the functioning 

parts of a musical composition, invading 

other parts at will, was in a sense also 

threatening the bodily fabric that 

constituted social and musical order. 

This brings us to the bodily implications 

of the term bastarda itself. 

The term bastarda was obviously in 

common usage to denote musical style 

long before Girolamo Dalla Casa first 

used the term in 1584. In a few method 

books—“how to” books that describe 

and give examples of making passaggi 

and also include music in bastarda 

style—the term is briefly defined. Viola 

da gamba player Francesco Rognoni 

explains that “it is named bastarda 

because one moment it moves to the 

alto range, the next moment to the bass, 

the next to the soprano; sometimes 

it plays one part, then another; 

sometimes with new counterpoint, the 

next with passaggi in imitation” (1620, 

part 2, p. 2). 15 Michael Praetorius’s 

definition of 1619 is perhaps a little 

more suggestive: “It is possible that the 

viola bastarda received its name from 

the fact that it affords a mixture of all 

the parts, for it is not restricted to any 

one part” (italics mine) (cited in Paras, 

1985, pp. 11-12). 16 Praetorius hints at 

the connotation of bastarda as mongrel; 

indeed, in many cases not only does the 

bastarda musician appropriate various 

parts of the musical texture—grafting 

itself onto and embellishing those parts 

temporarily before moving on—but in 

many cases boundaries begin to blur 

between an embellished original part 

and new material (the so-called fifth 

part that the performer creates from 

scratch). For example, Dalla Casa’s 


33


bastarda version of Cipriano de Rore’s 

famous madrigal “Ancor che col partire” 

relies heavily on a “fifth part” that is 

characterized by rapid passagework. 

The musical invention is not only 

confined to these rapid passages, 

however; Dalla Casa plays a continual 

“game” with the original by adding new 

counterpoints and highlighting small 

groups of notes (from the original) 

which spur new invention, such as 

sequential treatment (i.e., imitation 

of a motive at different pitch levels). 

By nature of the practice, then, the 

distinction between the original and 

a parasitic other becomes increasing 

oblique. 

In terms of extant viola bastarda 

repertory, the works of Oratio Bassani 

(died 1615) depart most radically 

from their models. In his setting of 

Orlando di Lasso’s chanson “Susanne 

ung jour,” only a very small portion of 

the work draws on the original model. 

The work is almost entirely based on 

freewheeling ornamentation over the 

original bass line (which incorporates 

minor modifications), creating 

dissonances and adjustments to the 

original harmonic structure (Paras, 

1985, p. 42). In other words, aside from 

the original bass line, the remaining 

three voices (that also constitute the 

chanson’s harmonic dimension) are all 

but eviscerated in the viola bastarda 

version. In instances such as these, the 

performer moves so far away from the 

music in its notated form that, according 

to Bardi, “even the composer does not 

recognize it as his offspring” (c. 1578, 

pp. 126-127). 17 The bodily connotations 

of the term creatura (best translated 

34 

in this context as “offspring”) help to 

call into question the authoritative 

position of the composer as progenitor; 

in such cases the bastarda musician 

becomes the generator, in the sense of 

the one who creates or reproduces. The 

question of illegitimacy is key here: the 

bastarda is literally one who is born 

outside of the legitimate social contract 

of marriage. Socially and musically the 

bastarda is one who moves both inside 

and outside of traditional structures. 

The creative insights gleaned from such 

a position, and the practical results of 

such insights—most significantly the 

potential to reproduce—were clearly 

threatening to musical (and social) 

order as traditionally understood, hence 

the derogatory implications of the term 

bastarda, adopted to describe a musical 

practice that nevertheless produced 

awe and astonishment in those who 

witnessed performances. 

During the course of a performance 

a bastarda musician could potentially 

transform a given musical composition 

to the extent that it became 

unrecognizable, even when the original 

counterpoint apparently served as 

a kind of veiled sonic backdrop (i.e. 

an “accompaniment” of sorts). The 

inherently diffuse nature of sound and 

its ephemeral constitution guaranteed 

that, in the performative mode, neither 

the “original” nor its “offspring” could 

be recaptured. In this sense, what the 

bastarda musician chose to create 

was, like all performances, ultimately 

irretrievable. Alternatively, in the realm 

of visual culture, Jon Snyder describes 

anamorphosis as a kind of “doubleimaging”: 

both the naturalistic and 


the distorted could be seen at once. In 

this way, the naturalistic image was 

always recoverable, albeit through an 

unconventional viewing angle or the 

use of a mirror (see Snyder, 2010, in 

this issue). In this regard, one must 

distinguish anamorphosis in the visual 

sphere from its musical counterpart. 

Perhaps the immutable nature of 

notated music, as material culture, 

made possible the anamorphically 

irretrievable feats enacted through 

performance by bastardi. One thing 

is clear: the practice of the bastarda 

musician was not merely to bastardize 

from one (preexisting) musical part, 

then another, and so on. Though highly 

virtuosic, and perceived as such by 

audience members, the cultivation 

of bastarda style not only required 

extraordinary vocal technique and 

thorough understanding of the art of 

counterpoint, but the ingegno necessary 

to invent or fashion the new. 

The bastarda repertory flourished in 

Italy through the early 17th century. 

Though the practice began during the 

period that musicologists define as the 

“late Renaissance,” the lion’s share of 

notated examples fall squarely into the 

“early Baroque” (although the bastarda 

tradition began and remained an 

essentially improvised art). 

Thus, during the “early Baroque” 

period—as demarcated by the 

musicological tradition—competing, 

and at times complementary strands, 

of musical culture co-existed and 

continued to “rub shoulders.” Even 

Giulio Caccini, Bardi’s protégé (also 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

In its baroque manifestation, the viola 

bastarda style moved even further 

away from adherence to a four-part 

contrapuntal model that provided the 

basis for improvisation. Instead, a socalled 

basso continuo line was included, 

along with bastarda embellishments, 

reflecting the new notational practice 

of emphasizing the bass line as support 

for a soloist (the works of Oratio 

Bassani reflect this practice). These 

stylistic changes paralleled the socalled 

“monodic revolution”; while the 

practice of solo singing was common 

throughout the 16th century, it was 

not until 1602 that print technology 

was utilized to provide an independent 

basso continuo part (with implied 

harmonies) that underpinned the solo 

voice part (usually tenor or soprano). 

Yet as Wistreich (2007, p. 207) points 

out, a small but distinctive group of 

songs influenced by the basso alla 

bastarda tradition are dispersed 

among these early printed monody 

collections. Thus, Bardi’s interest in 

foregrounding the solo voice was finally 

reflected in the medium of print, yet the 

concomitant demand for text clarity 

above all else was not entirely satisfied, 

most especially in bass solos where the 

characteristics of the bastarda style 

continued to prevail. 

well-known for his rants regarding 

unruly singers) chose to include two 

songs in this 1614 publication replete 

with passaggi covering both tenor and 

bass voice ranges in rapid succession. 

Clearly, composers and performers, 

like their counterparts in the other arts, 


35


continued to negotiate the boundaries 

between the natural and the artificial. 

If the “birth of opera” was characterized 

by the naturalistic (i.e. speech-like) 

qualities of recitative, then apparently 

the “birth” was not a particularly 

spectacular one. Indeed, as Tim Carter 

pointed out in passing more than 25 

years ago, the new style of recitative 

was not particularly well received: 

“Euridice was, according to one source, 

‘like the chanting of the passion’, while 

. . . [in Il rapimento di Cefalo] ‘the style 

of singing easily led to boredom’” 

(1983, pp. 93-94). In fact, non-operatic 

musico-theatrical entertainments, such 

Endnotes: 

36 

as intermedi (interludes), continued 

to be favored genres in the early 

decades of the seventeenth century. 

Indeed, Carter’s “aside” deserves a 

full study in and of itself. Such a study 

would surely complicate the history 

of musico-theatrical entertainment 

during the “early baroque” period. 

Yet it seems that incentive is lacking. 

Could it be that charges of artificiality 

and lack of expressivity in repertories 

and genres such as that of the bastarda 

and intermedi continue to pervade our 

historical imagination, thus precluding 

their serious consideration today? 

* I wish to thank Christen Herman (voice) and David Morris (viola da gamba) for working 

with me to explore the bastarda repertory and for their participation in the concert 

“Vocalizing the Baroque: Qualities of Motion and Instrumental Extensions.” 

1 “. . . et mi ricordo essendo in Roma l’anno 1567 udendo la fama d’un Basso che oltra 

misura era lodato un giorno andai à udirlo essendo in compagnia con certi uirtuosi 

forestieri, il quale ci empì di marauiglia, di marauiglia dico, perche non fù mai huomo che 

hauesse in questo fatto più dote di costui dalla natura: auuenga che ricercaua assai voci 

tutte sonore, e dolci così nell’alto, come nel basso, e per lo mezo, ma hau poi, tornando al 

nostro proposito, tanto guasta la natura con l’arte, che rompeua i uersi, anzi gli fracassaua, 

facendo della lunga breue, e della breue lunga, correndo in su quella, e fermandosi in su 

questa, che altro non era l’udir costui, che uno scempio della misera poesia, e l’infelice 

sollecitato dall’adulatione quanto più uedeua inarcar le ciglia, tanto più andaua crescendo 

le sue scempiezze per sodisfare al poco intendente uolgo” (Bardi, c. 1578, pp. 122-123). 

The identity of the bass singer that Bardi heard in Rome is unknown. It was not the 

famous basso alla bastarda Giulio Cesare Brancaccio because he was in France at the 

time, although it may have been Alessandro Merlo or “Gio. Andrea napoletano.” Both 

were mentioned by Vincenzo Giustiniani as active in Rome during this period. For this 

information I am indebted to Richard Wistreich. 

2 “[Those singers] che essercitano la parte grave, e bassa, non si ricordando, per lasciar 

di dir non sappendo, che ella è la base, & il fondamento, sopra il quale è stata fabricata, 

conviene, che vada sossopra, che si pongono sù grilli de’ passaggi, & si lasciano da questo 

particolare diletto loro tirar tanto oltre, che non solamente passano nella parte de’ 

Tenori: ma giungono a quella de’ Contr’alti: & non li bastando, quasi a quella, de’ soprani: 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

inarborandosi di maniera alla cima, che non ne possono scendere, se non a rompi collo” 

(Bottrigari, 1594, MacClintock, trans., p. 6). 

3 The viola da gamba is a bowed, stringed instrument that was particularly popular in 

Italy during the 16th and early 17th centuries. Although lutes, organs, and harps were 

sometimes played in bastarda style, the practice was far less common among players of 

these instruments. 

4 Because of the improvised nature of the practice, it is difficult to pin down exactly when 

bass singers began to sing solos using extended ranges. Though the practice of adding 

extensive embellishment using the “natural” voice range dates from the late 15th century, 

Wistreich (2007, p. 162) surmises that using the actual bass line as source material 

for improvisation by bass singers dates from 1540s Naples. With bass singers creating 

improvisations from an actual bass line (rather than a “tune” that a singer transposed 

as a bass solo), it was but a small step for bass singers of exceptional merit to cultivate 

an extended virtuoso range. In terms of viola bastarda repertory, the earliest notated 

music dates from 1553 with the arrangements of Diego Ortiz. His ornamented versions of 

Arcadelt’s madrigal “O felici occhi miei” and Pierre Sandrin’s well-known chanson “Doulce 

memoire” involve the voice-crossings that are characteristic of bastarda style (Ortiz, 

1553). 

5 The musical baroque is typically periodized from 1600 to 1750, the latter date 

corresponding with the death of J. S. Bach. 

6 The basso all bastarda style has only recently been given serious attention by Richard 

Wistreich (2007). A classic dismissal of late 16th-century florid singing style in general— 

using charges of artificiality and inexpressivity—is articulated by Warren Kirkendale 

(2001, p. 166). Bernard Thomas recognized this bias in 1980, when he produced the 

first series of modern musical editions of bastarda repertory: “Modern performers 

and scholars have tended to dismiss the viola bastarda repertoire as something rather 

contrived and artificial” (Thomas, 1980, p. 2). 

7 This characterization is of course oversimplified, as a number of factors influenced the 

“development” of opera. Nevertheless, the Bardi-opera connection is one that remains 

central to the birth-of-opera narrative, as any textbook on the history of opera or baroque 

music attests. 

8 Bardi’s practical involvement in the Florentine interludes for La pellegrina in 1589 

indicates his awareness of a variety of musico-aesthetic trends. His friendship and 

familiarity with the work of Francesco Patrizi, who advocated poetic forms incorporating 

fragmentary, meraviglia-inspiring scattered bursts, may have influenced his conception 

for the Pellegrina interludes. Patrizi’s aesthetic also resonates closely with the “scattered 

bursts” (with the musician leaping between various parts at will) that characterized 

the bastarda style. Regarding Bardi’s involvement in the Pellegrina interludes and his 

relationship with Patrizi, see Treadwell (2008). 

9 “Il diminuire i bassi è cosa contra natura, perche in essi, come habbiam detto, è il tardo, 

il graue, e’l sonnolente pure poiche cosi è l’uso non sò che dirmene, ne ardisco lodarlo, ne 

biasimarlo.” 

10 “. . . ben darei per consiglio à far ciò il men che si possa, et quando ciò si debba pur fare, 

almeno mostrar di farli per altrui compiaciemento.” 

11 See the final sentence of Bardi’s account, as cited at the opening of this article. 

12 “I would add that the best thing a singer can do is to perform a song well and precisely, 


37


as it was composed by its creator.” (Soggiungendoui oltre di ciò che la miglior, parte che 

possa hauer un cantante è di bene, e puntualmente sprimer la canzone secondo che dal 

maestro è stata composta.) (Bardi, c. 1578, pp. 126-127.) 

13 For basso alla bastarda sources, see Wistreich (2007); for the viola bastarda repertory, 

see Paras (1985). 

14 Examples are ubiquitous. Regarding Zarlino, near the opening of book 3 of Le istitutioni 

harmoniche he states: “Since counterpoint is the principal subject of this part, we shall 

first see what it is and why it is so named. I consider counterpoint to be that concordance 

or agreement which is born of a body with diverse parts, its various melodic lines 

accommodated to the total composition, arranged so that voices are separated by 

commensurable, harmonious intervals” (1558, p. 1). See also p. 178: “As every physical 

body is composed of the elements [i.e., the four elements], so every perfect composition is 

composed of the elemental parts.” 

15 “. . . si chiama Bastarda, perche hora và nell’acuto, hora nel grave, hora nel sopra 

acuto, hora fa vna parte, hora vn’altra, hora con nuoui contraponti, hora con passaggi 

d’imitationi.” 

16 The citation is drawn from Praetorius’s Syntagma Musicum 2: De Organographia 

(Wolfenbüttel, 1619). 

17 “. . . che quegli stesso che l’ha composto, per sua creatura nol rinonosce.” 

18 As Carter states, “Indeed, one could argue that opera did not establish itself as a selfsufficient 

dramatic genre until it escaped the artistic confines of the courts, as occurred in 

Rome and, especially, Venice in the second quarter of the [17th] century” (1983, p. 93). 

Works Cited: 

Bardi, G. de. c. 1578. “Discorso mandata a Giulio Caccini detto romano sopra la musica 

antica, e’l cantar bene.” In: Palisca, C. (ed.). 1989. The Florentine Camerata: Documentary 

Studies and Translations. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 90-131. 

Bottrigari, E. 1594. Il desiderio overo de’ concerti di varij strumenti musicali: Dialogo di 

Allemano Benelli. 1962. MacClintock, C. (trans.). Musicological Studies and Documents, vol. 

9. Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1962. 

Caccini. G. 1614. Le nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverle. Florence: Z. Pignoni. 

Carter, T. 1983. “A Florentine Wedding of 1608.” In Acta Musicologica, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 

89-107. 

Dalla Casa, G. 1584. Il vero modo di diminuir con tutte le sorti di stromenti. Venice: A. 

Gardano. 1980. Repr. Bologna: Forni. 

Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: 


Kirkendale, W. 2001. Emilio de’ Cavalieri “Gentiluomo romano”: His Life and Letters, His 

Role as Superintendent of all the Arts at the Medici Court, and His Musical Compositions. 

Florence: Olschki. 

Ortiz, D. 1553. Trattado de glosas sobre clausulas y otros generos de puntos en la musica de 

violones. Rome. 

Paras, J. 1985. The Music for Viola Bastarda. Houle, G. and G. Houle (eds). Bloomington: 

38 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Indiana University Press. 

Rognoni, F. 1620. Selva de varii passaggi: secondo l’uso moderno per cantare, & suonare con 

ogni sorte de stromenti: divisa in due parti. Milan: F. Lomazzo. 

Snyder, J. R. 2010. “The Culture of Defiguration: Anamorphosis, Then and Now.” In: Ars 

Aeterna, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 9-20 

Thomas, B. (ed.). 1980. Girolamo Dalla Casa: Madrigali da sonar con la viola bastarda I. 

London: London Pro Musica Edition. 

Treadwell, N. 2008. Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for “La 

pellegrina.” Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 

Wistreich, R. 2007. Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance 

of Identity in the Late Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate. 

Zarlino, G. 1558. Le istitutioni harmoniche. 1968. Marco, G. A. and C. V. Palisca (trans.). In: 

The Art of Counterpoint: Part Three of “Le istitutioni harmoniche, 1558.” New Haven and 

London: Yale University Press. 


Music Center 

University of California, Santa Cruz 

Santa Cruz, CA 95064 

treadwel@ucsc.edu 


39


EFIGURATIONS 

The-Approach-of-the-End-of-the-World-Feeling: 

Allegory and Eschatology in the Operas of Robert 

Ashley 

40 

Tyrus Miller 

Tyrus Miller is professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He 

is author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars, 

Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde, and Time-Images: Alternative 

Temporalities in Twentieth-Century Theory, Literature, and Art and editor of Given World 

and Time: Temporalities in Context. 

In his series of television operas following his 1978 work Perfect Lives, Robert 

Ashley explored the cultural and geographical landscapes of North America 

through an individualized appropriation and reinscription of the world-view and 

accompanying aesthetic of the baroque. This essay consider Ashley’s work in light 

of recent media theory utilizing the notion of the Neo-baroque and goes on to 

discuss Ashley’s particular use of allegory and eschatology in his operas, concerns 

that reveal his creative connections with the conceptual cosmos of the Baroque. 

I. Neo-Baroque and Meta-Baroque 

In her recent book Neo-Baroque 

Aesthetics and Contemporary 

Entertainment, Angela Ndalianis 

considers the current corporate 

entertainment media landscape in 

relation to the aesthetics of the classical 

Baroque. In the serial spin-offs of 

characters and narratives in multiple 

media, the polycentric proliferation 

of branches of single “works,” the use 

of advanced special effect techniques 

and technologies to dazzle viewers, 

and the movement of narratives along 

overlapping planes of reference and 

allusion, Ndalianis discovers a distinct 

new phase of the baroque characteristic 

of the contemporary age. The “neobaroque” 

aesthetics she describes are 

closely related to the economic and 

institutional organization of presentday 

media production, in particular, 

the dense horizontal connectedness of 

media industries and other commodified 

domains of popular leisure experience 

(Ndalianis 2004). 

Ndalianis’s notion of the neo-baroque 

implies that industrially produced 

works of popular culture may exhibit 

some of the same structural and 

semiotic logic typical of avant-garde 

works of art. Popular culture, she 

suggests, has already incorporated 

and outstripped the innovations of 

the avant-garde, manifesting in even 

more developed and effective forms 

supposedly “avant-garde” dynamics of 

formal inventiveness and productivity. 

The so-called “television operas” of 


Robert Ashley—“so-called,” because he 

managed to produce only a small fraction 

of the material in television versions— 

would seem to constitute a ripe example 

for such a dialectical undercutting of the 

avant-garde’s cultural capital. Between 

1978 and 1994, composer, performer, 

and video artist Robert Ashley 

composed a series of operas—including 

Perfect Lives (1978-80), Atalanta (Acts 

of God) (1982-87), Improvement (Don 

Leaves Linda) (1985), el/Aficionado 

(1987), Now Eleanor’s Idea (1993), and 

Foreign Experiences (1994), which are 

linked in a proliferating, labyrinthine 

set of narrative interconnections that, 

together, unfold an ever–more complex 

set of allegorical references. These fit 

the formal criteria of Ndalianis’s neobaroque, 

not only because they make 

explicit use of baroque musical, literary, 

and imagistic elements—from allusions 

to Giordano Bruno and Handel’s pastoral 

opera Atalanta, to Calderón’s “la vida 

es sueño” theme—“remediating” them 

in a contemporary electronic music 

and video idiom; but also because they 

exhibit within a postmodernist avantgarde 

performance work many of the 

“neo-baroque” polycentric, serial, and 

allegorical elements that Ndalianis 

and other commentators like Mario 

Perniola, who speaks of the neobaroque 

as “the Egyptian moment” in 

postmodern society and art (1995), also 

discern within popular media culture. 

Moreover, Ashley exhibits his interest 

in establishing correspondences 

between the classical baroque and the 

contemporary neo-baroque popular 

cultural landscape particularly in his 

choice of visual imagery. Thus, for 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

example, just as Stephen Calloway 

documented in his Baroque Baroque: 

The Culture of Excess a propensity 

towards baroque stylization in a 

wide range of 20th-century fashion 

and design (1994), so too Ashley has 

underscored this connection. Thus, on 

the cover of the recording of his opera 

Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), his 

protagonist Linda appears in a Spanishstyle 

Roberto Cavalli outfit, set against 

a fake Southwestern landscape, which 

recalls the baroque ornamentation 

and foregrounded artifice used by 

other haute couture designers such as 

Karl Lagerfeld, Vivienne Westwood, 

and Christian Lacroix. So too, in Now 

Eleanor’s Idea, Ashley utilizes the 

popular baroque aesthetic of low rider 

car panel and glass paintings as a source 

of both thematic and narrative material 

for the opera. And in his video version 

of an excerpt of Atalanta (Acts of God), 

which is allegorically a meditation on 

architecture, one sequence especially 

emphasizes, through a graphic 

language of baroque geometry, the 

visual analogies between historical 

architecture and industrial designs. 

Yet in some crucial respects, Ashley’s 

reinscription of the Baroque is richer 

and more complex than that which 

Ndalianis develops on the basis of 

current culture industry products. For 

like Latin American and Caribbean 

writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Severo 

Sarduy, and José Lezama Lima who 

developed the neo-baroque concept in 

the 1950s and ’60s (see e.g. Carpentier 

2001, Sarduy 1995, Lezama Lima 2000), 

Ashley’s remediation of the Baroque 

is explicitly intended to characterize a 


41


“New World” experience and aesthetic. 

Ashley’s operas conjure up allegorical 

underpinnings of otherwise banal, 

contemporary American incidents, 

characters, and settings, such as the 

Midwest (Perfect Lives), the South 

(Atalanta, in which there is a whole 

reflection on the Tennessee Valley 

Authority dam projects of the New Deal 

era), the Southwest (Now Eleanor’s Idea, 

which involves a television report on 

the low rider community in Chimayó, 

New Mexico), and California (Foreign 

Experiences, in which the character Don 

moves to California to teach at a small 

college and sinks into isolation, madness, 

and dental disease). Each of these 

stories explores, at a variety of levels of 

meaning, typical destinies associated 

42 

with the larger New World history of 

conquest, territorial expansion, and 

ethnic encounters, the same history 

that established the American regime 

of hybrid, deterritorialized signs from 

which Ashley’s invention draws its 

materials. Moreover, unlike Ndalianis’s 

neo-baroque, which describes an 

existing mode of the American-centered 

global culture industry, Ashley’s use of 

baroque aesthetics is a more localizing, 

critical counterpoint to the culture 

industry. This can be seen especially 

in his bitter remarks about his failure 

to produce the opera Now Eleanor’s 

Idea for television as he had intended 

and as he had promised members of 

the Chimayó low rider community who 

assisted him in developing his material: 

I want to apologize to my many friends in the Low Rider 

community. I came to you with the idea that this opera was 

to be made for television. I told you that because I believed I 

could make it happen. In this I failed. There is only the sound 

of the opera. And the damage of my failure (and the failure of 

American television) is more than just the loss of your trust. 

The opera is designed for television. It is intended to be seen as 

well as heard. The libretto describes specific images made to be 

seen. . . . Maybe this will happen someday; the score is not to be 

changed. Or maybe it will never happen, and the Low Rider will 

disappear into the mythology of the Hispanic heritage (Ashley 

n.d., last accessed April 13, 2009). 

Hence, in both respects, Ashley 

retains a connection to the critical edge 

of the Latin American and Caribbean 

articulations of the neo-baroque, which 

were strongly indebted to the modernist 

and avant-garde legacy, hybridized with 

and refreshed by indigenous cultural 

modes, which thus also continue to 

stand in a critical “New World” relation 

to the Western culture industry. 


II. Allegory 

From the work of Walter Benjamin in 

the 1920s on German baroque drama 

through later theories of such diverse 

thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Jacques 

Lacan, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Frank 

Kermode, Angus Fletcher, and Paul 

de Man, the mid-20th century saw a 

devaluation of the critical fiction of 

the romantic symbol and a corollary 

elevation of allegory to a sort of master 

trope for meaning-eliciting or meaningpositing 

processes in general, both in 

language and in nonlinguistic media as 

well (see e.g. Benjamin 1998, Adorno 

1997, Lacan 2006, Gadamer 2004, 

Kermode 1957, Fletcher 1964, De Man 

1983). In his notes and statements 

about the operas and in structural 

features of the works, such as titling, 

Ashley has signaled a parallel, metabaroque 

artistic concern with the 

conditions of possibility and validity of 

allegory, which brings his protagonists 

to the edge of visionary insight or 

paranoic delirium. (By the term “metabaroque,” 

as applied to Ashley’s work, 

I mean an artistic orientation that 

THE ALLEGORY 

Linda 

Don 

Now Eleanor 

Junior, Jr. 

Mr. George Payne 

Mr. Payne’s mother 

Tap dancing 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

does not merely appropriate stylistic 

or thematic devices from baroque art, 

literature, or music, but a reflects on 

the historical, ideological, theological, 

and semiotic nature of the baroque, 

and on its relation to our contemporary 

cultural horizon.) A quick perusal 

of Ashley’s titling of his works and 

his accompanying texts reveals the 

degree to which the television operas 

are explicitly allegorical, with their 

manifest contents correlated to hidden 

levels of meaning. To take one of the 

most striking examples, in Ashley’s 

opera Improvement (Don Leaves 

Linda), a husband (Don) abandons his 

wife (Linda) in a Southwestern vista 

point bathroom and flies off without 

her; both Don and Linda begin a 

wandering itinerary with various new 

partners that leaves them spiritually 

transformed. We discover in the 

notes to the recording that Ashley 

has provided an elaborate key that 

establishes its thematic parameters 

and the allegorical references of its 

various elements: 

The Jews 

Spanishness 

America 

The descendants of Jews and non-Jews (i.e. us) 

Giordano Bruno 

The Roman Catholic Church 

The Art of Memory 

(Ashley 1992) 

— and so on through a list of 28 characters, objects, or other details of the opera. 


43


A further dimension of allegory 

that Ashley mobilizes is in the music, 

with his use of what he calls vocal 

“characterization,” the keying of 

certain ranges of pitch and timbre to 

44 

the characters of the opera, within 

which, in another redux of baroque 

musical practice, the performers have 

substantial leeway to improvisationally 

realize their parts. Ashley explains: 

Most important to explain, for me, is the technique of the vocal 

characterization. In almost every solo or ensemble part, the 

singer is given a “character defining” pitch (that is, a pitch 

somewhere in the singer’s range that, understandably, forces 

a certain “character” to emerge.) Around this pitch the singer 

can (is asked to) invent vocal inflections (pitch changes, vocal 

techniques, etc.) that express the intent or meaning of the text. 

. . . . [T]he singer is entirely free to invent the vocal character. 

This invention can be spontaneous or prepared in advance and 

in any degree of detail. So, with rare exceptions, there are no 

written melodies in the operas, and there is a preponderance 

of empirical decisions found in practice and in rehearsal, 

collaboration (with and without tears) and spontaneous 

invention. In short, everybody has invented his or her part 

(Ashley n.d., last accessed April 13, 2009). 

Ashley says that he thinks about 

his music in a “dramatic” sense. He 

does not, however, mean this just 

in the limited sense that he writes 

works for performance, and there 

are many ways that his performances 

are spare and “undramatic” in a 

traditional sense. Rather, just as 

allegorized mythologies could 

allow theological and philosophical 

concepts to be played out in terms of 

actions and relations of beings—in 

Gnostic or kabbalistic cosmologies, 

for example—so too Ashley treats 

philosophical and spiritual contents 

through a dramatization of music, 

word, and image complexes as mythomusicological 

characters and stories. 

Besides these allegorical structural 

features, Ashley’s operas also 

foreground the mechanism of 

allegoresis working within the operas, 

with plots that reflect upon the 

allegorizing mental operations of his 

characters as well as general features 

of image and language that lead to 

the implication of hidden dimensions 

of meaning. Thus, a typical remark of 

Ashley on his compositional thinking 

is the following remark on his opera 

Perfect Lives, from a lecture at Mills 

College in 1989: “I started out writing 

without naming anybody. I was just 

describing imagery. I realized very 

soon that if you describe a whole bunch 

of different images like snapshots, it 


ecomes sort of arbitrary. If you attach 

those things to a name, even though 

the name is doing many different 

things, people connect it in some way” 

(Ashley, 1991, p. 186). As a corollary 

to his reflections on how allegories 

get generated, Ashley also considers 

how such allegoresis comes to an end, 

what decisions or mere contingencies 

halt the potentially infinite generation 

of new allegorical connections, and 

what are the existential implications 

when allegoresis is terminated or 

fails to find any end. Both the ultimate 

disappointment of failing to go all 

the way through a crisis of meaning 

towards a mystical breakthrough, 

and the ultimate breakdown of the 

self into mad fragments and schizoid 

shards of self-interpreting language 

to infinity, hover indefinitely around 

this borderline of terminable and 

interminable allegoresis. Throughout 

these operas, Ashley’s characters 

cross this line or stop short of it or lose 

track of it altogether, thus drawing our 

attention to the existence of a border 

that is invisible but complementary 

with whatever identity “we,” as 

Americans, might be said to construct 

both individually and collectively. 

Ashley’s quadrilogy of operas, 

“Now Eleanor’s Idea,” exemplifies 

the allegorical logic and structural 

principles of much of his work 

following Perfect Lives at the end of the 

1970s. The interpretative frameworks 

of the “Now Eleanor” cycle are, 

according to Ashley, provided by the 

four “major religions” of America: 

Judaism, “corporate mysticism,” 

Spanish Catholicism, and Pentacostal 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Evangelism, respectively (Ashley 

n.d., last accessed April 13, 2009). 

The “Now Eleanor’s Idea” sequence 

thus explores the meaning- and 

life-organizing systems of religious 

practice and how they interacted 

with the American geographical 

and cultural space. If, however, the 

operas’ individual narratives each 

allegorically refer to one of the 

major monotheistic religions, the 

names themselves of the allegorically 

referenced religions taken together 

become textual signifiers for their 

own hidden, composite allegorical 

meaning, which according to Ashley is 

the abstract concept of “genealogy” or 

“How to find out who you are.” Ashley 

has also noted that he drew the operas’ 

conceptual and verbal materials from 

four basic sources: Francis Yates’s 

writings on Kabbalah and 16thcentury 

hermeticism, writings by 

and about Carlos Castaneda, Low 

Rider magazine, and business papers 

such as The Wall Street Journal and 

Fortune magazine (Ashley n.d., last 

accessed April 13, 2009). Within each 

of the interpretative frameworks 

established by the four religions of 

America and in the idioms provided by 

these vocabulary sources, each of the 

four operas presents a character who 

sets out on a quest, passing through 

a spiritual crisis, to achieve deeper 

insight into and transformation of 

his or her identity. Yet just the use 

of the same title “Now Eleanor’s 

Idea” for the whole cycle and for one 

opera within the cycle, so too the four 

individual allegories are subordinated 

to a synthetic “idea.” As Ashley goes 


45


on to explain in the notes for the individual opera entitled Now Eleanor’s Idea— 

46 

Now Eleanor’s idea is that in the modern form of Judaism, 

Protestantism, Business and Catholicism—the religions of 

America—all the important things have become as one and 

the differences have disappeared. This seems wrong. So, when 

the opportunity presents itself she will be responsible to see if 

there is a purer form (Ashley 2007). 

Moreover, “Now Eleanor”’s own name 

is, in fact, no more a metonymic sign of 

her capacity to allegorically represent 

her own identity as a self-reflexive 

thought process, as an ongoing process 

of dissolving personality into ideation 

and judgment. As Ashley explains: 

“She noticed, finally, that whenever 

she thought of herself it was with a 

tone of caution, if not scolding, as in 

‘Now, Eleanor. . .’ So, as a matter of self- 

III. Eschatology 

Along with its engagement with 

allegorical narratives and interpretation, 

Ashley’s meta-baroque aesthetic also 

remediates baroque concerns with 

secular and sacred history and with 

what Walter Benjamin, in relation to 

the German baroque drama of the 17th 

century, called the “total disappearance 

of eschatology” (Benjamin 1998; 81) All 

four of the operas in the “Now Eleanor’s 

Idea” sequence are pervaded by what is 

characterized in the opera entitled Now 

Eleanor’s Idea with “the-approach-ofthe-end-of-the-world-feeling.” 

However, 

three of the four would appear to 

emphasize the retreat or dissolution 

of a religiously motivated eschatology 

into features of the modern American 

respect she dropped the comma and 

the three dots” (Ashley 2007). “Now 

Eleanor’s Idea” is, in a sense, the idea 

of Idea: a sign of the always available, 

but always problematic capacity of 

the human mind to proffer names for 

hidden meanings and experiences and, 

in turn, to interpretatively correlate 

meanings and feelings with names 

whose significance are uncertain or 

underdetermined. 

lifestyle and psychology, which is, as 

it were, the spiritual correlative of the 

transplantation of Judaism, Catholicism, 

and Protestantism, the “Three Great 

Families” as the (individual) opera Now 

Eleanor’s Idea puts it, to the American 

soil. Thus, in Improvement (Don 

Leaves Linda), in which the allegory is 

concerned with the expulsion of the 

Jews from Spain and—following Francis 

Yates—the influence of kabbalah on the 

rise of secular and scientific thought 

in 17th-century Europe, there is only a 

precipitate of eschatological foreboding 

expressed in one of the four songs, 

“North,” “East,” “South,” “West,” that end 

the opera. In the song entitled “South 

(Campo dei Fiori),” which the key tells 


us allegorically signifies “History,” 

Ashley draws the line of modern history 

as a register of persecution, intolerance, 

and mass violence, spanning from 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

the burning of Giordano Bruno by the 

Inquisition in the Campo dei Fiori to 

National Socialism and the atom bombs 

of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: 

Almost unimaginable. Twenty-eight 

million, two hundred seventy-eight thousand, 

four hundred sixty-six (calculated 

simply!) all facing the same way, 

arms raised, allow their image to be snapped. 

To represent an idea? You can’t 

believe they could hold still. 

BUT THEY DO. 

I try to tell them. I hear others 

try to tell the that it’s a big mistake. 

It’s unspeakable. A flash of light. Twenty-eight 

million, two hundred seventy-eight thousand, 

four hundred sixty-six (because it 

happened once?) could perish in a flash of light. 

They deny that they admit the possibility. 

BUT THEY DO. 

WHAT COMES NEXT IS WHAT WAS FIRST, OR SO THEY SAY. 

AS FAR BACK AS WE CAN GO. 

(AT LEAST ON THIS SYSTEM.) 

NOTICE THAT WE SPEAK OF IT WITH AWE. 

AS IF THERE WERE PERFECTION ONCE. THAT’S NICE. 

AND AS IF THERE IS RENEWAL. THAT’S NICE, TOO (Ashley 1992). 


47


The speaker is the classic baroque 

melancholic, who examines the shards 

of the past while helpless to change 

them; under his hapless gaze, they 

turn to allegories. Here, the scenes 

of mass politics and mass death 

prompt the speaker’s anguished 

question to human beings, alienated 

from themselves and functioning 

as signifying elements supposedly 

embodying in their collectivity a global 

meaning of history: “To represent an 

idea?” The eschatological horizon to 

which the realized allegories of 20thcentury 

mass ideological politics point 

are, however, as the last lines of the 

48 

song suggest, perhaps only a regression 

and termination, expressing a Freudian 

death-drive to return to a lower state 

of organization, rather than redeeming 

the sacrifices and sufferings of history. 

This tendency of eschatology to turn 

to entropy when the European religious 

world-views flow into the American 

geography also characterizes the 

conclusions of el/Aficionado and Foreign 

Experiences. el/Aficionado concludes 

with a cessation of happening, but in an 

end time that is more the interminable 

waiting of Samuel Beckett than the time 

of expectation of Saint Paul or his most 

fanatical 17th-century successors: 

The outcome was not clear. 

The line went dead, as I have told you. 

The waiter appeared almost immediately. 

He brought the bill for the food that I had ordered, 

which was untouched, except for what appearances required. 

I don’t know how long the scene had lasted. 

It was dark outside now. 

The lights in the café had come on. 

And the light was on in the apartment, 

as it must have been on from the beginning, 

in readiness, but unnoticeable in the twilight. 

Finally, my attention softened. 

I paid the waiter and forgot why I had come. 

His indifference canceled the urgency of the past. 

I have nothing more to report to you. 

I learned long ago that there is never any news (Ashley 1994). 

Foreign Experiences, too, is a narrative dead-end, the nihilistic end-time of a place 

called California. As Ashley explains in the program for the opera: 

There is a peculiar, eerie, indescribable loneliness in all of California. 

It permeates everything. Maybe it’s just the water. Maybe there are 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

other places of the same sort in other places on Earth. But California 

could be special, the place where the early European-American settlers, 

upon arriving—if they got there, realized they would never get back. 

California is the end of the earth. That feeling is passed on from generation 

to generation without anyone recognizing that it is part of them. And it 

is passed on to the most recent arrivals. Even today in the precious palaces 

of Malibu, in the vast developments between Los Angeles and San Diego, 

in the spreading domestic comfort of the San Francisco Bay area it’s there. 

It poisons our movies and TV shows. It generates the most violent and 

interesting mystery novels. Even now jet travel doesn’t cure it. It comes 

down on you hard when you get off the plane and step outside the terminal. 

It drives some people mad. 

Don Jr. has come to California with his family—Linda and Jr. Jr.—and 

his friend “N,” to take a job at a small college. They have movedfrom the 

Midwest of fractured identities to the world of no identities (Ashley 2006). 

It is in the opera Now Eleanor’s 

Idea, however, that Ashley gives 

the most positive treatment of the 

eschatological theme. The whole 

introductory section of the opera, 

which adumbrates the overall arch of 

the work from the premonition of the 

end to a redemptive vision-song of the 

“Seventh Age” that reunites the various 

religious answers to the eschatological 

question, also sets up the character 

Now Eleanor who will embody this 

redemptive trajectory from sense 

to song and vision. I will conclude 

by quoting the opening “paragraph” 

of the opera that sets her up for this 

allegorical task, which she will realize 

Now Eleanor rarely allows herself to talk. 

She is at the nadir of the cycle 

That all humans share. The nadir, 

Unlike its opposite, has been described. 

We can name it, speaking clumsily, 

The “Approach of the End of the World Feeling.” 

by becoming a television reporter, 

going to New Mexico to realize an 

assignment about the Low Rider 

community, learning Spanish with 

miraculous speed and ease, becoming 

a source of popular wisdom as a callin 

host of the show “Now Eleanor’s 

Idea,” and in the end realizing that 

“she has been chosen to sing a special 

song” to the Low Rider community— 

“the song of the Three Great Tribes” 

describing their wanderings through 

“the Seven Ages” (Ashley 2007). This 

spiritual calling, however, begins in 

the presentiment of the eschatological 

horizon, “the Approach of the End of 

the World Feeling”: 


49


50 

It happens in men every fourteen years. 

It happens in women every ten years. 

Who knows why this difference should be so great? 

On a larger scale it happens to whole 

Peoples. We don’t know the time of that scale. 

When as individuals or as a culture 

We see it and know it’s happening in others, 

Most often we ascribe the cause to 

A religion different from our own. 

So, we can dismiss the anguish that comes 

With the feeling. We can laugh it off. 

When the feeling comes in our own language, 

Our religion, that’s a different fish. 

For instance, now, here, where we are, 

We are obsessed with the question of 

The Approach of the End of the World Feeling. 

The question is expressed in language, 

And the language is appropriated 

Into other modes of thinking, e.g. 

Politics, philosophy, et cetera. 

All other manifestations of the feeling 

Are thought of as pure superstition. 

This introduction, brief, will help explain 

Now Eleanor to us. She is not. . . 

Nuts, or a scientist, but she has 

The Approach of the End of the World Feeling (Ashley 2007). 

Works Cited: 

Adorno, Theodor. 1997 [1970]. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Eds. Gretel 

Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Ashley, Robert.. n.d. Note for Now Eleanor’s Idea. http:// 

www.lovely.com/albumnotes/notes1009.html 

1991. Perfect Lives. New York: Burning Books. 

1992. Libretto for Improvement (Don Leaves Linda). Electra Nonesuch 79289-2. 

1994. Libretto for el/Aficionado. Lovely Music LCD 1004. 

2006. CD note for Foreign Experiences. Lovely Music LCD 1008. 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

2007. CD note for Now Eleanor’s Idea. Lovely Music LCD 1009. 

Benjamin, Walter. 1998 [1963]. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. 

London: Verso Press. 

Calloway, S. 1994. Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess. London: Phaidon. 

Carpentier, Alejo. 2001 [1953]. The Lost Steps. Trans. Harriet de Onis. Minneapolis: 


De Man, Paul. 1983. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the 

Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 187-228. 

Fletcher, Angus. 1964. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, New York: Cornell 


Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004 [1960]. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinshemer and Donald 

G. Marshall. London: Continuum. 

Kermode, Frank. 1957. Romantic Image. London: Routledge. 

Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 

Lezama Lima, José. 2000 [1968]. Paradise. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey 

Archive Press. 

Ndalianis, A. 2004. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: 

MIT Press. 

Perniola, M. 1995. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art. Woodall, C. (trans.). 

London and New York: Verso. 

Sarduy, Severo. 1995 [1972, 1978]. Cobra and Maitreya: Two Novels. Trans. Suzanne Jill 

Levine. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press. 

Tyrus Miller 

Cowell Faculty Services 


Santa Cruz CA 95064, USA. 

tyrus@ucsc.edu 


51

EXCESSES 


If the Term Baroque Did Not Exist Would It Be 

Necessary to Invent It? (with Apologies to Voltaire…) 

52 

Dana Arnold 

Dana Arnold, F.S.A., F.R.Hist.S., is professor of architectural history. She is author of Art 

History: A Very Short Introduction; Rural Urbanism: London Landscapes in the Early 

Nineteenth Century; Reading Architectural History; and Re-presenting the Metropolis. 

Recent edited volumes include Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method; 

Biographies and Space; Rethinking Architectural Historiography; Architecture as 

Experience; Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness; Tracing Architecture; 

and Art and Thought. She edits the book series New Interventions in Art History. Her 

monograph The Spaces of the Hospital will be published by Routledge. 

Baroque has been the focus of writers spanning the chronological and 

conceptual breadth of architectural history. Heinrich Wölfflin (1888) saw it as a 

reaction against the style of the Renaissance, John Summerson (1953) argued for 

a specifically English version of baroque, while Gilles Deleuze (1988) wanted us to 

see it as a multiplicity of possibilities and repetitions. This article explores the uses 

and usefulness of the term baroque to see what it tells us about the historiography 

of architectural history. This can help us open up the conceptual framings of 

architectural history in order to contribute to the ongoing transformation of it 

and our understanding of notions baroque. 

In architectural history, the term 

baroque has been used to define the 

formal qualities of a building—its 

space as well as its cultural context 

and meaning. The notion of baroque 

has been the focus of a range of 

writers spanning the chronological 

and conceptual breadth (and depth) 

of architectural history. For instance, 

Heinrich Wölfflin (1888) encouraged 

us to see the Baroque as something 

that is not classical—a reaction 

against the style of the Renaissance; 

John Summerson (1953) argued for a 

specifically English version of baroque; 

while Gilles Deleuze (1988) wanted us 

to see it as a multiplicity of possibilities 

and repetitions. 

In this article, I aim to explore the uses 

and usefulness of the term baroque in 

its various complexities to see what 

it tells us about the historiography of 

architectural history. This can help us 

further open up the spatial boundaries 

and conceptual framings of architecture, 

in order to contribute to the ongoing 

transformation of architectural 

history and to our understanding of 

notions baroque. I want to focus on 

the mid 20th-century writings about 

architectural history that attempted to 

tell macro histories. These are mostly, 


ut not exclusively, histories of British 

architecture, and the moment when they 

appeared is a very particular one in the 

historiography of the discipline. What 

follows is a series of provocations that 

fold together or unfold to reveal at once 

the complexities and the elusiveness of 

the term baroque. 

First I want to think about baroque 

as a stylistic category. We often see 

architecture and style as being so 

interlinked that style can be believed to 

contain the essence of architecture. But if 

this were the case, style would constitute 

the subject of architectural history. Style 

is one of the many orders of narrative 

open to the architectural historian. 

What then is style? We might say 

that style is the specific organization of 

form. But the characteristics of a style 

consist of a repertory of ornamental 

components that cannot be confined to 

a single period—many appear again and 

again in different configurations. This is 

especially the case with the baroque in 

architecture, as it is normally understood 

as being the use of classical architectural 

motifs (in the broadest sense), which 

may be combined with a range of spatial 

possibilities. I suggest then that baroque 

is characterized by the manner in which 

form is interpreted, as the reading 

of these ornamental components 

changes according to their context. The 

privileging of the aesthetic gives a work 

British Architecture and the Baroque 

In the mid 20th century, the cultural 

value of Britain’s historic architecture 

was acutely felt. Both during and 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

of art an autonomous status and this can 

be employed in the historical analysis 

of buildings. But architecture is more 

than façades; it is a lived experience—a 

set of spaces that stage social and 

cultural relationships. Style is a means of 

identifying, codifying, and interrogating 

the aesthetic, and I want to use it as 

a way of exploring the taxonomies of 

architecture and the impact this has on 

our understanding of the Baroque. It is 

the space-time location of the notion of 

baroque that is of interest here. 1 

My argument focuses on two discrete 

areas of architectural history which 

demonstrate how the baroque has 

been adopted for use by architectural 

historians in the telling of different kinds 

of narratives. The first case study focuses 

on how histories of British architecture 

have been formulated, and here we 

see how “baroque” is used as a stylistic 

category. It is presented as a variant or 

subcategory of classical architecture, its 

qualities being principally decorative. 

The second example is a specific history 

of modern architecture where the 

spatial possibilities of “baroque” are 

explored and exploited in a mutually 

enlightening dialogue with modernity. 

In both cases, the Baroque can be used 

as a tool to understand more fully the 

methodologies and approaches of the 

historians under review in terms of their 

stylistic and spatial analysis. 2 

immediately after the Second World 

War, photographic and documentary 

records were carefully archived and 


53


historicized. As part of this process, the 

map of the history of British architecture 

was drawn up by Sir John Summerson in 

his seminal work Architecture in Britain 

1530-1830, and this remains in use 

today. The choice of examples made by 

Summerson as a set of stepping stones 

through the architectural history of 

the period has become the bench mark 

of greatness. But the development of 

architecture in the period is presented 

as some kind of autogenesis where a 

repertory of ornamental components 

reappears. This is seen, for instance, in 

the diagrammatic grouping of buildings, 

such as 18th-century villas that share 

common stylistic elements, to present 

some kind of formal coherence or 

development. 

Summerson devotes two chapters to 

the discussion of baroque in England: 

one is a consideration of Sir Christopher 

Wren’s designs for the City churches; 

the other is a discussion of the work 

of Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir John 

Vanbrugh. 3 Although reference is made 

to the influence of both contemporary 

southern and northern European 

Baroque as Kulturgeschichte 

Summerson established an insular, 

inward-looking view of classical 

British architecture that encompassed 

the category of baroque. But if the 

architectural history of the British Isles 

was to have the same academic weight 

as its continental counterparts, it 

required recognizable formal qualities 

which gave it distinction and allowed 

it to be read as signifying sets of social 

54 

architecture, Summerson is more 

interested in establishing a genealogy 

of English Baroque flowing from Wren. 

That said, his survey is concerned 

principally with classicism, and it is the 

classical country house, and its villa 

variant, which dominates—the “purer” 

the style, the better. This constructs 

categories of quality determined only 

by 20th-century criteria based on 

what we know to have happened and 

our fuller understanding of classical 

systems of design. This system must 

embody political, economic, cultural, 

and philosophical beliefs of the 

dominant ruling class. The variations 

in this style, whether Palladian, 

neoclassical, or baroque, matter less 

than the persistent use of the repertory 

of classical elements. 4 And on closer 

inspection, the distinctiveness of 

these seemingly discrete categories of 

classical architecture is further eroded. 

For Summerson, baroque becomes just 

one manifestation of the adoption and 

adaptation of classical architecture in 

Britain. 

and cultural ideals of its builders, users, 

historians, and its many publics past 

and present. There is no doubt that 

Summerson achieved this. But it would 

also be preferable for these formal 

qualities to relate to the European 

canon of architecture—namely the 

classical style. (Here again I use classical 

to mean any style that draws on the 

architecture of Greco-roman antiquity.) 


The influx of European scholars 

into Britain in the mid 20th century 

opened up the possibilities for placing 

British architecture in its cultural and 

aesthetic context and seeing it as part 

of a broader intellectual history of 

culture. Not least here are Fritz Saxl and 

Rudolph Wittkower, who jointly wrote 

British Art and the Mediterranean, 

first published in 1948, which in the 

Warburgian tradition presented a 

cultural and iconographic survey of the 

use of classical motifs across a broad 

chronological span. The typological 

approach adopted by Wittkower here 

and elsewhere in his discussion of the 

use of classical architecture in Britain 

comprised the study of specific stylistic 

details or elements and provided an 

illuminating set of connections. 

An example of this can be found in 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Wittkower’s article “Pseudo-Palladian 

Elements in English Neoclassicism.” 

His discussion of a type of window 

and door frame, with blocked quoins 

at regular intervals and a compact 

mass of three or five voussoirs in its 

lintel, demonstrates his innovative 

method of analysis of a motif that was 

extensively used in 17th- and 18thcentury 

British architecture. This 

architectural form can be found across 

the whole range of classical design in 

Britain from the Palladianism of Lord 

Burlington’s House for Lord Montrath 

to the baroque of Sir John Vanbrugh’s 

Grimsthorpe. The intrinsic nature of 

the Englishness of English classicism, 

and within this its baroque variant, was 

not however lost as Wittkower offers 

this examination of a specific classical 

ornamental form: 

How does this motif fit into the pattern of Palladian and 

Neoclassical architecture? Does it correspond to our conception 

of classical poise and is it—an a priori demand of classical 

architecture—easily “readable”? … but also that in its English 

interpretation the conflict, which it originally held is blotted 

out.... 

Was the important motif really taken from Palladio? The 

answer is no. A shrewd observer like Sir William Chambers 

in his Treatise on Civil Architecture, published such a window 

with the comment: “It is, I believe, an original invention of Inigo 

Jones, which has been executed in many buildings in England.” 

The question arises whether, as Sir William Chambers believed, 

this treatment of doors and windows originated in the circle 

of Inigo Jones or whether it has an older pedigree. Although 

very rare, a few buildings with the same peculiarity exist in 

Italy. Jones, who was in Rome in 1614, may have seen Ottavio 

Mascheroni’s entrance door to the Palazzo Ginnasi in Piazza 

Mattei. The door is dated 1585, i.e. it was modern in Jones’s 

days and may have attracted his attention as the last word in 

architecture.... 


55


56 

The form of the motif used in England was, of course, far 

removed from the highly personal interpretations of Guilio 

Romano, Serlio and Giacomo del Duca [the architects of other 

examples cited by Wittkower]. It was legalized and academically 

petrified. France was the junction whence the standardized 

type went on to its further travels.... 

...[it] reached England in the beginning of the seventeenth 

century, [the motif was also found in the Low Countries, 

Belgium, and Austria].... 

What is the conclusion to be drawn from these observations? 

Although originating in Italian mannerism and cherished in 

France for a short period, the motif was never absorbed into 

the countries of “functional” architecture. The pedigree of the 

motif has revealed its unorthodox [my emphasis] origin, and 

now it should be mentioned that there were men in England 

[Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor] who understood its original 

meaning.... 

...it remains to inquire what it was about it that fascinated 

English academic architects. The answer is that they had no eye 

for the intricacy of the motif and saw in it a decorative pattern 

which could be advantageously employed to enliven a bare 

wall... 

In English academic architecture flat surface patterns replace 

Italian functional elements (Wittkower, 1974, pp. 171-174). 

My aim in citing such a lengthy 

passage is to illustrate the way in which 

British classicism is discussed. It is at 

once related to Europe (through the 

perceived influence of Inigo Jones), 

albeit with idiosyncrasies, and a selfreferential 

entity. Interestingly, the 

English baroque architects Vanbrugh 

and Hawksmoor are the only ones 

credited with fully understanding this 

form of architectural motif. How then do 

we or can we move away from the kind 

of insular British architecture identified 

by Wittkower and Saxl? 

Wittkower goes some way to 

providing the answer to this in his 

seminal work Architectural Principles 

in the Age of Humanism, first published 

in 1949. For the first time British 

architecture was linked with the 

architecture of Europe in formal 

and intellectual terms. This made a 

significant break with the inwardlooking, 

insular empirical surveys of 

previous decades. But, importantly, 

while placing British architecture in 

its European context in formal terms, 

Wittkower did recognize that it is a 


epertoire of classical ornament that he 

identifies rather than a coherent selfconsciously 

constructed style. Moreover, 

although he picks Palladianism as the 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

progressive thread, as we have already 

seen the architectural elements used 

are common to all forms of English 

classicism, including baroque. 

Classicism, Taste, and the Formation of Class Ideologies 

Although, from the 18th century 

onwards, there have been studies 

written of the history of British 

architecture, as we have seen the 

convergence of continental academics 

and new archives and interest led to 

a much wider field of investigation. 

This offered greater possibilities 

with thorough attention paid both to 

the form of the buildings and their 

social and cultural contexts. Now the 

form or style of British architecture 

was being scrutinized in the same 

way as its European counterparts 

and the taxonomic system of stylistic 

classification was grafted onto its 

discourses. In this way, sensitivity to 

and articulation of the aesthetics of 

architecture became more refined. 

Previously, British architecture from 

Inigo Jones to Sir John Soane was simply 

referred to as “renaissance” by writers 

such as Reginald Blomfield (1897), 

who wished to keep a substantial 

distance between Britain and Europe 

by celebrating the divergent traits in 

design on either side of the Channel. 

Now style became subject to closer 

scrutiny, allowing micro histories based 

on classifications such as mannerism, 

baroque and neoclassical. The balance 

of analysis also shifted from the 

originality of a vernacular tradition 

based loosely on classical design as 

stressed by Blomfield and others to 

the manifestation of different styles 

all within the classical canon and all 

borrowing heavily from European 

traditions. 

This raises the question of a national 

style or school of architecture, or at 

least the formulation of such an idea 

by historians. British architecture 

could be seen as derivative and lacking 

in originality and certainly without 

influence in the European arena, the 

emphasis being on the import rather 

than the export of ideas. And it is 

difficult to find examples of the export 

of either British architectural styles or 

the employment of British architects 

on the continent. 5 The identification of 

classicism as a primary expression of 

English culture helped to underpin the 

imperialist nature of British society 

while allowing historians to credit its 

architecture with appropriate gravitas 

to hold its own in the arena of European 

architectural design. 6 The diversity of 

classical formulae was rationalized 

by the selection of one strand as the 

progressive element. Indeed stylistic 

histories that offer an evolutionary 

view of architecture impose a notion of 

continuity and progress which might not 

necessarily be there. The architectural 

stepping stones chosen may well pick 

a route through moving from baroque 

to Palladian and then to neoclassical by 

fiat of the historian’s backward glance. 


57


But discontinuity is not a problem if 

the historian recognizes the limitations 

of teleological methodologies. 

Palladianism might appear to be the 

inevitable style for the Augustan era but 

is this really the case? Does something 

become Palladian in this era because 

it is no longer baroque? And can the 

baroque of architects like Vanbrugh be 

seen as part of the repertory of classical 

elements rather than a break with 

the Palladian tradition? Indeed, the 

testimony of Wittkower would appear 

to endorse this view. Ultimately the 

repertoire of motifs, as Wittkower has 

suggested, is the same but he attributes 

Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor with an 

understanding of these in contrast 

Sigfried Giedion and the Baroque 

This brings me to my second example, 

where I consider the use of baroque 

as a category in broader histories 

of architecture. Sigfried Giedion, a 

Bohemia-born Swiss historian and critic 

of architecture, might at first glance 

appear to be an unlikely candidate for 

my survey of the uses of baroque by 

architectural historians. 8 But following 

E. H. Carr’s maxim “. . .our first concern 

should be. . . with the historian” (1964, p. 

22), a brief biographical sketch quickly 

reveals why Giedion is of interest here. 

His training as a historian was very 

much in the field of architecture as 

kulturegeschichte, as he was a student 

of Heinrich Wölfflin and wrote a Ph.D. 

dissertation under Wölfflin’s direction 

on Spätbarocker und romantischer 

Klassizismus (Late Baroque and 

Romantic Classicism). Despite his 

58 

to those architects who used them 

subsequently, albeit in a more academic 

style. 7 

If baroque is then anything more 

than formal analysis or a description 

of the ornamentation of a building, 

it must surely offer or represent a 

specific set of ideals from the moment 

of its production. We, the viewers, will 

see this within the context of our own 

culture. In this way, the understanding 

of the formal qualities of a building are 

the product of the convergence of past 

and present. In this way, a building 

plays an important ontological role in 

representing, and it is up to us as the 

viewers to be sensitive to the particular 

statement it is making. 

firm grounding in architecture of the 

past, Geidion’s ideas and writing had a 

significant conceptual influence on the 

members of the Independent Group at 

the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 

the 1950s. His first book: Space Time 

and Architecture (1941) is an important 

standard history of modern architecture 

while in Mechanization Takes Command 

(1948) Geidion worked to establish 

a new kind of historiography.. Space, 

Time and Architecture is a metahistory 

of European architecture which begins 

with the innovations in design and 

planning of the Italian Renaissance and 

Baroque. Although Giedion organises 

his material in a chronological 

narrative, he side steps the teleological 

and determinist pitfalls of the implicit 

notion of progression. Instead, he 

moves across time periods using art 


historical methodology, especially the 

comparative method of formal analysis 

developed by Giovanni Morelli and 

used by Wölfflin in his seminal work 

Renaissance and Baroque, to explain 

how things are baroque and the kinds 

of specific qualities they share. 

Alongside a lucid and insightful 

narrative, Giedion, taking his lead from 

Wölfflin, presents some provocative 

visual comparisons where formal 

and spatial analysis combine. And the 

abstract notions of baroque space are 

explored through juxtapositions of 

architecture and sculpture that are as 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

challenging as they are atemporal. As 

a consequence, Giedion’s innovative 

methodology brings one of the 

recognized major players in Italian 

baroque architecture—Francesco 

Borromini—into juxtaposition with 

those of the modern movement. In 

his discussion of the dome of the 

hexagonal, star-shaped structure of 

Borromini’s Sant’Ivo della Sapienza in 

Roma (1634-41 and 1642-62), Giedion 

(1941 p.115) compares the treatment 

of space and the plasticity of form to 

the sculpture of a human head made 

by Picasso: 

To cut out sections along the perfect circle of the dome, to 

continue the movement of a design by treating it as though it 

were flexible, must have had the same stunning effect upon 

Borromini’s contemporaries that Picasso’s disintegration of 

the human face produced around 1910 (p. 115). 

The relationship between the sculpted 

spaces of the baroque and modernity 

is explored further as Giedion (1941, 

p. 117) argues that like the Russian 

constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, Borromini 

explored the transition between inner 

and outer space by exploiting the 

potential of the spiral form. Giedion 

evokes the movement inherent in 

this sculptural and architectural form 

through the powerful visual comparison 

of Tatlin’s design for a monument in 

Moscow c. 1920 (sometimes referred 

to as the Pravda Tower) and the lantern 

of Sant’Ivo with its coupled columns 

supporting a spiral top. 

In some ways Giedion’s approach 

stands in contradistinction to the 

typological, almost archaeological (in 

both senses) approach of Summerson, 

Wittkower, and Saxl. There is no doubt 

he is using and extending the concept of 

baroque in an intuitive rather than an 

archivally based scholarly way. But how 

else can space be discussed, especially 

in such pan-historical, cross-cultural 

contexts? 

Giedion’s innovative juxtapositions 

bring us back to English architecture, 

where once again we find comparisons 

made between baroque and modern. 

Attention is focused on the design and 

planning of Bath in the 18th century as 

it was transformed from a provincial 

town to an elegant city. The Royal 

Crescent (1769), designed by John 

Wood the Elder, is a key feature of the 

urban topography of Bath resting on 


59


top of one of the city’s gentle hills. It 

comprises a terrace of 30 identical 

houses in the form of an ellipse, each 

enjoying open views to the landscape 

beyond. Its baroque form is compared 

to the near contemporary example of 

Jacques-Ange Gabriel’s Place Louis XV, 

1763 (now Place de la Concorde) in 

Paris. But perhaps more importantly for 

Giedion (1941, p. 149), the production 

of a single unit that is impressive 

without any separations is not seen 

again until Walter Gropius’s scheme 

of an eight-storey apartment house 

at St. Leonard’s Hill near Windsor 

(1935). The mixture of residence and 

natural surroundings found in Bath 

through its series of garden squares 

and hilltop crescents is also likened 

to the Place Vendôme in Paris, as well 

as the baroque urban forms found in 

Nantes and Rome (Giedion, 1941, pp. 

147-149). Moreover, the serpentine 

form of Landsdowne Crescent (1794), 

emphasized through the use of an 

aerial view of it in the text (p. 157), is 

compared to the movement implicit in 

Borromini’s design of an undulating 

wall for the façade of San Carlino (1662- 

67). Here Giedion’s understanding 

of the dialogue between English and 

continental baroque recalls the formal 

comparisons made by Summerson, 

60 

Wittkower and Saxl, although for these 

writers the architecture and planning 

of Bath has no place in their lexicon of 

baroqueness. 

My aim in this essay has been to 

explore the use and usefulness of 

the term baroque, albeit within the 

confines of a specific set of texts, and 

to explore the question “if the term 

did not exist would we have to invent 

it?” The resonance between baroque 

and modern, English and continental 

examples, reveals something of the 

historiography of the term. It is clear 

that baroque as an architectural concept 

has a fluidity that allows it to fold and 

unfold across a range of complex spacetime 

coordinates. Could, then, these 

concepts be articulated and discussed 

without the term baroque? Certainly 

in architectural history baroque 

helps us pinpoint specific stylistic 

characteristics within the canon of 

classical architecture. More generally 

we can also extend the concept to help 

us understand the spatial complexities 

of individual buildings. Perhaps, most 

importantly, it can enable us to think 

about architecture—here I am thinking 

of that of Britain—across traditional 

space-time barriers in order that we can 

rethink its history and historiography. 

Endnotes 

1 For a fuller discussion of the relationship between style and architectural history, see 

Arnold (2002), ch. 3, “On Classical Ground: Histories of Style,” pp. 83-108 esp. 

2 Arnold (2002) discusses this at length; see pp. 8-11 esp. 

3 Summerson (1953), ch. 13, “Wren and the Baroque, pp. 203-220, and ch. 17, “English 

Baroque: Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, Archer,’’ pp. 269-291. 

4Summerson (1953) admits that the name Palladianism is inaccurate but nevertheless a 

useful taxonomic tool “....the whole output of English building [from the period 1710-50], 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

has long ago become labelled ‘Palladian’, a description not wholly accurate (as no such 

labels can be), but accurate enough and secure in acceptance,’’ p. 317. 

5In the latter half of the 18th century, there are isolated examples of the influence of English 

academic architecture (i.e., that which followed the strict rules of classicism) on European 

architects. For instance, Jacques-Ange Gabriel drew on this tradition in his designs for the 

Ministère de la Marine and the Petit Trianon. See Kimball (1943), p. 216. 

6The historical background of British Imperialism and mercantilism, which underpinned 

the choice of Augustan Rome as an imperialistic and cultural model, is discussed in Hill 

(1966) and in Speck (1977). 

7Wittkower (1953, 1974) makes an important distinction between the use of classical 

elements that shows an understanding of their function and purpose in Italian architecture 

and their reiteration as part of a tradition of design taught by rules in academies, where 

these elements were divorced from their original context and subsumed into a classical 

repertoire. See “Pseudo-Palladian Elements in English Neo-Classicism.’’ 

8 Giedion was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d’Architecture 

Moderne. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, 

where he became chairman of the Graduate School of Design. He was also a friend of Walter 

Gropius. 

Works Cited 

Arnold, D. 2002. Reading Architectural History. London: Routledge. 

Blomfield, R. 1897. History of Renaissance Architecture in England, 1500-1800. London: G. 

Bell 

Carr, E. H. 1964. What Is History? Harmondsworth: Penguin. 

Deleuze, G. 1988. Le pli—Leibniz et le baroque. Paris: Minuit. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the 

Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Giedion, S. 1948. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. 

Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1941. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of 

a New Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 

Hill, C. 1966. The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714. London: Oxford University Press. 

Kimball, F. 1943. The Creation of the Rococo. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art.Saxl, 

F. and R. Wittkower. 1948. British Art and the Mediterranean. London and New York: Oxford 


Speck, W. A. 1977. Stability and Strife in England, 1714-1760. Cambridge: Harvard University 

Press. Summerson, J. 1953. Architecture in Britain, 1530-ß1830. Harmondsworth: Pelican. 

Wittkower, R. 1949. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. London: Warburg 

Institute, University of London.———. 1953. “Pseudo-Palladian Elements in English 

Neoclassicism.” In Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, VI, pp. 154-164. Republished 

in the edition cited in this article: 1974. Palladio and English Palladianism. London: Thames 

and Hudson. Wittkower, R. (ed.). 1945. England and the Mediterranean Tradition. London: 

Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 

Wölfflin, H. 1888. Renaissance und Barock. Munich: T. Ackermann. 

Dana Arnold 

School of Humanities, University of Southampton, U.K. 

d.r.arnold@soton.ac.uk 


61

EXCESSES 


An Aura of Excess: 

Zaha Hadid and the Baroque Genetics of 

Contemporary Architecture 

Meredith Hoy 

Meredith Hoy is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Art and 

Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She received her Ph.D. from the 

University of California at Berkeley in 2010. Her dissertation, entitled From Point to Pixel: 

A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics, traces links between contemporary digital art and 

modern painting. Drawing on theories of visuality, space and spatial practice, cybernetics 

and systems theory, phenomenology, and post-structuralism and semiotics, her research 

focuses on the impact of technology on art and visual culture. She has written on modern 

and contemporary art and architecture, generative art, information visualization, and the 

phenomenology of networked space. 

This article examines the genetic tracelines extending back from Aura, Zaha Hadid’s 

2008 installation for the Venice Architecture Biennale. Against the backdrop of its site, 

the Palladian villa LaMalcontenta, Aura appears at first to forcefully assert its status 

as a contemporary art object. However, further inspection reveals the deep structural 

connection between Hadid’s swooping forms and renaissance and baroque theories of 

harmonic proportion. At a phenotypic level, Aura resists categorization as an architectural 

object, but its genotypic composition performs a nuanced meditation on the persistence of 

historicity in even the most radically contemporary architecture. 

In Zaha Hadid’s Aura, installed at the 

Villa Foscari La Malcontenta (1558- 

60, Mira, Italy) for the 2008 Venice 

Architecture Biennale, two striated 

curvilinear forms confront the simple 

harmonic proportions of Andrea 

Palladio’s renaissance architecture. 

Built to celebrate the 500th anniversary 

of Palladio’s birth, Hadid’s two 

structures, located in facing rooms of 

the villa, are a concrete translation 

of Palladio’s linear proportions into 

dynamic, undulating sculptural forms. 

By generating frequency curves distilled 

from Palladio’s proportional rules and 

manipulating them using mathematical 

algorithms, Hadid produces a series of 

structures that, according to the press 

62 

release for this installation “define a 

genotypic elementary space whose form 

contains in its DNA the whole Palladian 

set of rules.” For Aura, the linear 

proportions undergirding the plan of the 

Villa correspond to a musical harmonic. 

These harmonics are computationally 

transformed into frequency curves, 

which in turn are gradually twisted, 

manipulated, and then physically 

actualized in polyurethane foam and 

fiberglass. In other words, Palladio’s 

harmonic proportions provide the 

genetic blueprint for the seemingly alien 

curvatures that set Aura apart from its 

architectural container. As they pierce 

the space of the villa these two glossy 

structures appear, at first glance, to be 


emphatically contemporary. However, 

the complex historicity enfolded into the 

sculptures puts them into conversation 

with the conceptual and aesthetic 

parameters of the Neo-Baroque; when 

considering Aura’s reflexive historicity, 

apparent in its recursive iteration of 

Palladio’s proportionally calculated 

architectonics, it is almost impossible 

not to see the installation as a gesture not 

just to renaissance proportionality but 

to the folie du voir, the ecstatic madness 

of vision, that signifies the Baroque. 1 

Zaha Hadid, born in Baghdad in 

1950, studied at the Architecture 

Association School in London and 

worked under Rem Koolhaas at the 

Office for Metropolitan Architecture. 

She became the first woman to win 

the prestigious Pritzker Architecture 

Prize in 2004. Due to her highly 

experimental approach to architectural 

design, she has rather notoriously 

encountered obstacles in the translation 

from planning to building, a difficulty 

which has solidified her position as 

a radical, if sometimes impractical, 

figure in contemporary architectural 

practice. Hadid’s projects are complex, 

stylistically and conceptually dense, 

but frequently unfeasible to engineer. 2 

However, the buildings that have 

been completed, including the Taiwan 

Guggenheim (2003), the Vitra Fire 

Station (1990-94), the Landscape 

Formation ONE/Landesgartenschau 

(1999), the Cincinnati Contemporary 

Arts Center (1997-2003), and the BMW 

Plant Central Building in Leipzig (2001- 

2005), all bear the mark of their initial 

conceptualization as densely layered 

networks of lines, axial geometries, and 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

multi-nodal perspective projections. 

Both Hadid’s plans and built structures 

reveal the highly contemporary and 

technologiclal nature of her architectural 

style. Much of her work looks not 

only like it was made by a computer 

but perhaps expressly to showcase 

the complexity of form enabled by 

computational technology. At the same 

time, however, she not only situates 

herself explicitly within the grand 

tradition of modernist abstraction, but 

also frequently references Palladian 

and Georgian, Mannerist and Baroque, 

Cubist and Constructivist spatial 

geometries. Although her work has 

been most prominently linked to the 

Soviet tradition (Suprematism and 

Constructivism), the morphological and 

theoretical connections in her design to 

the Baroque have also been remarked 

but not pursued systematically 

(Mertins 2006). Hadid’s particular 

brand of modernism, in its radical 

reshaping, dissolution and morphing 

of three dimensional surfaces, finds its 

origins in the porous folds of baroque 

space, described by Leibniz as “a 

pond of matter in which there exists 

different flows and waves” (Deleuze, 

1993, p. 5, n. 8). And while it might 

seem contradictory to emphasize 

the copresence of Soviet modernist, 

Palladian, and baroque resonances 

in Hadid’s oeuvre, scholarship on the 

history of proportional systems in 

architecture has invested itself with 

some persistence in the question of 

the historical function and legacy 

of proportion. After Le Corbusier’s 

publication of Le Modulor in 1950, 

for example, Wittkower renewed his 


63


argument for the enduring significance 

of proportional experimentations in 

architecture by drawing connections 

between renaissance proportional 

theory--specifically the latticed 

floorplans of Palladian villas--and the 

asymmetrical modulor lattices found 

in Le Corbusier’s architecture (Millon 

1972). Given that Wittkower was a 

renaissance scholar, it is not surprising 

that he draws a line between renaissance 

and modernist architecture, 3 skipping 

over the use of proportional systems in 

the Baroque. But it is also important to 

note that the numerical/proportional 

underpinnings of baroque architecture 

have been largely ignored or simply 

viewed in terms of distortion or 

degradation of the regularity of 

renaissance proportionality (Hershey, 

2000, pp. 4-5). 

In their incorporation of modernist 

tropes of geometric abstraction 

developed by the Soviets in the first 

half of the 20th century, Zaha Hadid’s 

sketches and drawings look like a cross 

between pared down Suprematist motifs 

and 21st-century blob architecture. 4 

Internally, they use classical proportions 

and harmonic form as their generative 

principle. But their final form recalls 

with a subtle insistence the anamorphic 

stretching and folding of matter 

and surface performed in baroque 

imaginations of infinite heavenly space. 

Aura presses us to consider how and 

why contemporary architectures are 

comparatively categorized, in this 

instance vis-à-vis the Renaissance and 

the Baroque. Where does Hadid’s work 

stand in relation to the theoretical 

vocabulary given by these categories, 

64 

and what do such comparisons offer 

us? To what extent is Hadid performing 

a contemporary rendering, and thus an 

“extension,” of a baroque aesthetic or a 

baroque ethos? 

Hadid’s use of projective geometry 

to build multiply-layered perspective 

constructions both activates her spaces 

and underscores the link between her 

contemporary approach to architectural 

design and the geometries employed in 

classical and baroque architecture. Her 

superimposition of spatial slices, each 

with their own notional vanishing point 

and system of projection lines creates 

a vertiginous, articulated, “poly-central 

and multi-directional” experience of 

partial, interpenetrating spaces whose 

multiplicity confounds any attempt to 

stabilize the space into a coherently 

unified format (Schumacher, 2004, p. 

9). Viewed from the perspective of the 

21st-century eye, the incorporation of 

projective geometry, in its capacity to 

squeeze, stretch, and morph regular 

and irregular figures, most immediately 

emphasizes the computational genesis 

of Hadid’s designs, in which we suppose 

morphing and layering to be an easily 

recognizable property of computation. 

However, while some of Hadid’s plans 

do not insistently analogize baroque 

aesthetics, Aura adamantly performs 

its link to the baroque fascination 

with projection and distortion. 5 Aura’s 

physical structure bears palpable 

marks of manipulation; the skeins of 

composite material seem to stretch past 

their capacity for elongation, and begin 

to separate into striated threads. The 

distended materiality of the sculptures 

effectively ups the ante of baroque 


architectural distortion, straining ovoid 

and ellipsoid forms past the breaking 

point of structural integrity. 

Materialists might connect this 

fascination in contemporary art and 

architecture with the exaggeration 

of baroque principles and properties 

to the availability to contemporary 

architects of manipulable, stretchablecompressible 

media, like polyurethane, 

whose capacity to convey a sense of 

viscosity would be immensely difficult 

to match with stone (though baroque 

sculptors managed to approximate 

this to the greatest extent possible 

with “spongy” travertine). But Hadid’s 

baroqueness is as conceptual as it is 

material; her radical swoops and folds 

actualize Deleuze’s intensification 

of Wölfflin’s more sober reading of 

baroque spatiality, 6 and thus insert her 

in a performative way into a theoretical 

conversation about the nature of the 

Baroque. 7 By adapting and permuting 

Palladio’s plan--converting the lines of 

his proportioned grid into a waveform 

spiral--Hadid activates a metaphorical 

bridge between renaissance, baroque, 

and contemporary architectural 

styles. Aura performs an answer to the 

question of how the elegant simplicity 

of the Renaissance can transmute into 

elaborate curvatures but still maintain 

traces of its genetic predecessor. 

Her solution is to reference baroque 

concepts of anamorphosis and multiple, 

shifting movements between real and 

virtual space, so that Aura’s structural 

integrity could be said to depend upon 

the hidden support of the Baroque. 8 

If renaissance geometry is a closed 

system, baroque visuality is defined 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

by its openness, its manifestation of 

transformative potentialities: of bodies, 

of spaces, of the very notion of structure 

itself. 

Let us move away now from 

architecture into a consideration of 

renaissance and baroque pictorial 

strategies. These are in some senses 

distinct from architectural concerns 

given that pictures represent rather 

than design inhabitable spaces; 

however, the two modes, pictorial and 

architectural, are also strongly related 

in their mutual engagement with 

viewer’s phenomenological responses 

to spatial effects. 9 From the moment of 

its invention by Filippo Brunelleschi, 

the particular model of visuality 

constructed using perspective created 

an interplay between the coordinate grid 

and the eyepoint of an ideal viewer, the 

point of origin that structures and limits 

the scope of a given pictorialization. 

This dependence on point of view 

actually makes it difficult to argue that 

renaissance perspective presents a 

fully universalized, disembodied model 

of visuality (Summers, 2003, p. 558). 

Nevertheless, it has been thoroughly 

critiqued for divorcing spatiality from 

the empirical/experiential plane and 

positing instead an abstract geometrical 

spatial model that submits to the rigors 

of Cartesian rationalism (Damisch 

1994, Jay 1993, Davis 2005). 

Baroque space builds itself on the 

foundation of geometrical perspective 

but turns the rectilinear schema of 

Cartesianism against itself, performing 

instead a series of involutions 

and juxtapositions--of opacity 

and transparency, of visibility and 


65


invisibility, of regular structure and 

radical metamorphosis. The Baroque 

is characterized by excess, fluidity, 

and ecstatic transformation. The 

idea of “madness of vision”--folding, 

irregularity--is morphologically and 

sensorily apparent in Aura’s curvatures. 

The “massiveness” attributed by Wöfflin 

to baroque architectural sensibility is 

nowhere present in this installation; 10 

Aura’s shapes are open, airy, shimmering 

in and out of substantiality. Indeed, we 

must see its baroqueness precisely in its 

anamorphic adaptation of renaissance 

metrics, in its pointed reference to a 

parabolic bending of a straight line and 

the eventual meeting of the line’s two 

endpoints in an ovoid loop. Redacted in 

2008 by Hadid, baroque geometry based 

on conic sections and changing curves 

does away with the “square-based 

visual ‘culture’” of the Renaissance 

(Hershey, 2000, p. 159). 

Imported to baroque pictorial schemas 

from the renaissance skenographic 

coordinate plane, the concurrence 

of mathematical/metric space with 

the phenomenological/cardinal 

particularity of subjective vision persists 

as an operative mechanism in Hadid’s 

conceptualization of Aura. A universally 

metric space would be notionally prior 

to the phenomenological space of the 

viewer. Its capacity to map space and 

predict positions within that space 

would be independent of the particular 

standpoint of any given viewer. But, 

although both renaissance and baroque 

pictorial systems contain metric 

characteristics, they both depend for 

their effectiveness on cardinal viewer 

space, which seems structured on 

66 

entirely different and even contradictory 

principles, namely a subject-centered 

model of vision which presupposes 

seeing from a particular standpoint, 

being directionally oriented, etc. 11 

Although, in the end, the particularity 

of viewing position becomes subsumed 

into the coordinate matrix, a tension 

persists between subjective vision and 

the objective “world of measure and 

ratio” (Summers, 2003, p. 559). 

For example, the famous baroque 

ceiling frescoes rely for their spectacular 

spatial effects simultaneously and 

paradoxically on the independence of 

universal coordinate space and on the 

situatedness of a viewer in a physical 

location. The complex relationships 

between real space and pictorial space 

established by this system are evident 

in Giovanni Battista Gaulli’s Triumph of 

the Name of Jesus (1676-79, Church of 

Jesus, Rome); looking at the painting as 

a series of layers of spatialization, we 

can observe a clear attempt to establish 

continuity between real and pictorial 

space. A series of plaster figures--putti 

and apostles--mediate between twodimensional 

pictorial illusionism and 

the three-dimensional viewer-space 

(Summers, 2003, p. 543). We see the 

precedent for this in Andrea Mantegna’s 

earlier dome in the Camera degli Sposi 

at Mantua (1465-74), in which we are 

not supplied with transitional plaster 

figures. However, the putti standing 

around the edge of the parapet and 

the precariously supported basket 

help our eyes make the transition 

between real and virtual space--from 

three-dimensional extension to twodimensional 

illusionism. The objects 


occupy a layer below the indeterminate 

space of the heavens and are distinctly 

oriented in relation to the viewer, 

leaning towards them or threatening 

to fall. But, again, the conditions under 

which this continuity becomes possible 

result from the notional construction 

of an infinitely extensible, modular 

system that effectively metricizes 

space, making any point in space 

hypothetically calculable in relation to 

any other point. 12 

What I want to show with these 

examples of the Italian tradition 

of illusionistic painting known as 

quadratura is that the complex 

relationship between metric and 

cardinal space is the generative principle 

that gives rise to Aura. The illusionistic 

operation of quadratura, its potential to 

produce simultaneously the sensation 

of virtualized extension to infinity and 

vertiginous disorientation is a product 

of dissonance between metrically 

regulated and phenomenologically 

experienced pictorialization. Aura 

playfully enacts this tension by enfolding 

both the metric regularity of harmonic 

proportion and heavily distorted 

frequency curves into its structures. 

In architecture, a conflict often exists 

between ideational plan and material 

structure: between the space of drawing 

and the space of construction, and 

between what might be called “virtual” 

space, and “real” space. 13 This shifting 

between material and notional registers 

finds an analogy in the representation 

of the heavens in quadratura, in 

which a series of gradations between 

pictorialization and sculptural form 

concretely instantiate the transition 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

between real and virtual space. The 

pictorial field, in this instance, is the 

blurred, light-saturated suggestion 

of heavenly space at the oculus of the 

fresco. The sculptural forms mediating 

between the viewer’s space and the 

pictorial space are identifiable in the 

plaster figures mimicking their painted 

counterparts, and issuing the viewer 

into the virtually represented heavens. 

Aura obliquely references this 

transitional layering of two- and 

three-dimensional representation 

by translating Palladio’s harmonic 

proportions into swirling lines of glossy 

polyurethane. These shapes operate 

like the putti and the plaster figures in 

Mantegna’s and Gaulli’s frescoes insofar 

as they function as a connective tissue 

between the metric coordinate relations 

comprising illusionistic, pictorial space, 

and the thickness of the real space 

occupied by the viewer. However, in 

our baroque example, the placement of 

three-dimensionally-sculpted figures 

intermediately between virtual pictorial 

space and “real” viewer space activates 

an immediately perceptible relationality 

between these two domains. The “trick” 

and the fascination of the laughing 

putti, which operate as extensions of 

the pictorial schema in baroque ceiling 

frescoes, lies precisely in their legibility 

as mediating figures. Even while 

quadratura depends for its illusionistic 

success on the notionally prior existence 

of metric, coordinate space, it is also 

reliant on the bodily correspondence, or 

lack or correspondence, experienced as 

distortion, between the viewer’s space 

and the space of pictorialization. 

Aura, on the other hand, obstructs and 


67


confounds the viewer’s apprehension of 

its internal relations by designing objects 

whose status as mediating objects 

between real and metric space remain 

illegible on their surface. We cannot 

readily see that Hadid is using Palladian 

harmonic equations to generate the 

shapes we come to recognize as Aura-S 

and Aura-L. These shapes ultimately 

result from a complex oscillation 

between metric space and cardinal 

viewer space. This oscillation would, 

in a baroque fresco, supply a sense of 

continuity between these spaces that 

would be intellectually and sensorially 

accessible to any viewer. Hadid, however, 

takes the baroque ideal of representing 

the unrepresentable a step further, 

by creating a series of relationships 

between architectural, sculptural, and 

cardinal space that may be based on 

mathematical rules but that can only be 

intuitively or sensorially apprehended. 

In the design of La Malcontenta 

and other villas, all of which relied 

on the same underlying geometrical 

skeleton, Palladio’s use of proportion 

functioned explicitly, according to 

Richard Wittkower, as a “systematic 

linking of one room to another” and 

was “the fundamental novelty” of his 

architecture (1998, p. 122). Through 

repetition and proportional expansion 

and diminution, Palladio sought to 

unify the diverse features of a building 

into a coherent structure in which 

each part could be both experientially 

and mathematically ascertained to 

be a subset of an overarching system. 

The linking of rooms, hallways, and 

structural details through repetition of 

self-similar or progressively multiplied 

68 

ratios establishes the organic unity of 

the building--a unity that unfurls from 

the seed of the module, or the “regola 

homogenea” (Wittkower, 1998, p. 122). 

The incursion of a different kind 

of module--that belonging to the 

coordinate plane--into the pictorial 

schemas of the Renaissance and into the 

baroque invention of quadratura both 

function as ways of “linking” different 

spaces. Likewise, Aura acts as a linking 

device--between architectural styles, 

historical modes of spatiality and 

spatial representation, and between 

the mathematical modeling and the 

phenomenological experience of space. 

The visual field of baroque ceiling 

frescos is largely determined by the 

vertical axis--the stretching of strings 

from the standpoint of the observer 

on the floor, through a gridded picture 

plane, to the ceiling (creating an inverted 

visual pyramid opening out onto infinity 

instead of closing off at a vanishing 

point opposite the viewer’s monocular 

eyepoint). Aura, by contrast, stretched 

horizontally across the rooms of La 

Malcontenta, creates an irregular web 

that obliquely analogizes the visual 

rays linking viewer and world in the 

theorization of renaissance perspective. 

A great deal of the attraction of 

Aura lies in the juxtaposition of 

computationally designed structures 

whose morphogenesis seems most 

closely related to pods, blobs, or 

primordial ooze with the simple 

harmonic proportions and geometric 

elegance of renaissance architectural 

styling. Aura’s dynamic curvatures 

not only reference but are genetically 

structured by Palladio’s proportional 


and harmonic equations. Thus, the 

mirroring of renaissance proportions 

and contemporary digital computation 

actively produces a visible structure 

from a set of abstract relations. We can 

view the juxtaposed visual models in 

Aura as architectural mirrors--but the 

relations mirroring each other here 

are multiple, and some exist outside 

the visual register. In other words, the 

mirroring results in a visible structure 

(the building, the sculpture), but what is 

being mirrored is a set of mathematical/ 

numerical relations rather than 

morphological features. 

The figure of the mirror here is not 

accidental; unlike the astonishingly 

accurate reflection given by a leadbacked 

flat mirror as exemplified by 

Brunelleschi’s infamous demonstration, 

the mirror employed in baroque visual 

practices was anamorphic (Edgerton 

1975). Not only does the anamorphic 

mirror bend what is visible, and not 

only does it call into question the notion 

that vision supplies a perfect carbon 

copy of the physical structure of the 

world, but this anamorphic mirror also 

refers, if somewhat obliquely, to the 

invisible, or in the words of Martin Jay 

(1993, p. 48), signifies an “alternative 

visual order” that the “solidity of… 

presence cannot efface.” Just as the 

anamorphic skull hovering at the base 

of Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533, 

National Gallery, London) serves as a 

memento mori, reminding its viewers 

of the eventual insignificance of the 

earthly treasures surrounding its 

titular figures, gazing at, or moving 

alongside, the cadenced lines of Hadid’s 

sculptures must also remind us of an 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

alternative structural order, of musical 

or numerical principles of structuration 

whose visual instantiation appears to 

curve and distort its referent. Despite 

Donald Preziosi’s reminder that the 

bizarre distentions and compressions 

occurring in anamorphic art reinscribe 

the conventions of linear perspective 

in the very act of challenging them, the 

sense of disorientation and instability 

activated by anamorphic figuration 

presents the possibility of a decentered 

mode of apprehension that crossreferences 

between different sensual, 

conceptual, or even temporal registers. 14 

The instance of mirroring found in the 

streaming curves of Aura crosses not 

only between historical periods but also 

between the human sensory register 

and an inhuman computational domain 

which cannot be sensed directly, but 

whose epiphenomenal effects can be 

intuited. 

Approaching Aura as an example 

of refiguration of a harmonically 

proportioned architectural plan 

expands the field of anamorphosis, so 

that it becomes something more than 

a mere outlier within the relatively 

narrow boundaries of perspectival 

systems. Although Palladio’s plan 

has a visual component--it exists as a 

drawing separate from the built form 

of La Malcontenta--it would not be the 

kind of object traditionally available 

for anamorphic manipulation. It is a 

plan, not a skull, nor a depiction of a 

skull, and as such it is an object whose 

chain of reference, its raison d’être 

exists outside of itself; the capacity 

of the plan to signify, or the particular 

way in which it will signify, depends on 


69


whether the Villa is actually constructed. 

Additionally, the plan is perpetually 

incomplete--it reaches toward a 

projected spatiotemporal existence, 

and towards the kind of specificity that 

can only be achieved and experienced 

in lived space-time. Thus, Hadid’s 

anamorphic visualization of the plan, 

and more specifically the equations that 

give rise to the plan, carries out a further 

decentralization of the subject and a 

destabilization of the “objects” at hand. 

If the Baroque plays with the desire 

to represent the unrepresentable, 

Hadid does this by representing the 

invisible--the numerical universe that 

invisibly structures and provides the 

possibility conditions for proportional 

architectures to be physically 

constructed. What is being represented 

in Aura is not a distortion of an originary 

visual or physical referent; there exists 

no “correct” view of the structure that 

would conform to unaltered perspectival 

conventions. The referent, in this case, 

is something mathematical, physical 

only in the sense that mathematics 

can be said to (in some cases) supply a 

“representation” of forces. The interest 

in forces and dynamic change, embodied 

graphically in anamorphosis, cannot 

but place Hadid’s design alongside the 

baroque preoccupation with temporal 

processes, particularly transformation 

and distortion. Of course, we must 

continually remind ourselves that the 

Baroque depends for its particular brand 

of ecstatic excess on the same view of 

universally metricized space for which its 

more staid older cousin, the renaissance, 

is so frequently criticized. Ultimately, 

baroque topology expands Renaissance 

70 

metrics by adding a ludic, reflexive 

dimension to spatial illusionism, calling 

attention to the possible deviations from 

and perceptual/sensory instabilities 

within the metric space that in the 

Renaissance was held forth as a paragon 

of geometrical perfection. 

I will conclude now with a brief comment 

on possible nodes of connection between 

the Neo-baroque, exemplified here by 

Aura, and the specter of postmodernism. 

As Angela Ndalianis has pointed out, 

the term “transformation,” applied 

with such great gusto to the stylistic 

excesses of the Baroque, demands the 

“coexistence of the-thing-that-has-beentransformed 

and that-which-it-has-beentransformed-into” 

(2004, p. 22). Just as 

the Postmodern has been characterized 

as an explosive intensification or 

tectonic rupture of modernity that 

creates a new periodization through 

amplification rather than radical 

novelty, the Baroque, itself, is suffused 

with self-reflexive historicity. Its focus 

is on the exploitation of irregularities 

embedded in the rationalized system 

of Cartesian perspectivalism. But the 

Neo-Baroque performs an amplified 

doubling of baroque historicity; 

in adopting the stylistic markers 

most closely associated with the 

Baroque--irregularity, transformation, 

excess, madness, ecstasis--the Neo- 

Baroque performs and intensifies 

its own historicized relationship to 

its progenitor. But it also retools the 

critique of renaissance systems enacted 

by the Baroque for a response/critique/ 

rejection of contemporary systems, in 

this case most pointedly the particular 

limitations imposed and possibilities 


afforded by computational technology. If 

the baroqueness of Hadid’s architecture 

is hidden in Aura’s folds of polyurethane, 

we also cannot forget that this structure 

Endnotes: 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

suspends and extends the Baroque 

like a bridge between Renaissance and 

contemporary architecture. 

1 This aspect of the Baroque has been explored extensively by several contemporary scholars 

of visual culture, including Buci-Glucksmann (1986). Martin Jay provides a brief but cogent 

analysis of the Baroque ethos in his essay “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” (1988). 

2 As collaborator Patrik Schumacher has written, “The idiosyncracies of [Hadid’s] drawings 

made it difficult to read them as straightforward architectural descriptions. This initial 

openness of interpretation might have led some commentators to suspect ‘mere graphics’ 

here” (2004, p. 9). 

3 It should be noted that Wittkower posited the use of proportional systems in architecture 

as evidence of biological determinism, arguing that architectural exercises in symmetry, 

balance, and proportion are not only integral to human nature, but that the achievement of 

proportion in architecture indexes cultural advancement and aesthetic universalism (Millon 

1972). Nevertheless, it is instructive to examine the persistence of proportional systems 

in architectural practice in order to highlight the deviations in these systems that appear 

within periodic or stylistic categories. 

4 Hadid’s thesis project at the Architectural Association in London, entitled “Malevich’s 

Tektonik” (1976- 77), was a conceptual painting of a series of structures on Hungerford 

Bridge that transformed Suprematist compositions into a series of plans for functional 

geometric structures, including a hotel and a nightclub. It remained, like many of Hadid’s 

designs, unbuilt (Giovanni, 2006, p. 24). 

5 George Hershey uses a comparison between the hemispherical dome of the paragon of 

Roman architecture, the Pantheon, and Blondel’s proposal for a redesign of the structure 

with a hyperboloid dome. While Wölfflin would probably have attributed this to the baroque 

obsession with massiveness, manifested in constructions that seem to crush under their 

own weight, Hershey views this as a moment of play with the properties of squeeze and 

stretch that made mapmakers aware of the cartographic possibilities for completeness and 

legibility opened up by using projective geometry to transform the globe from an ellipsoid 

sphere to a two-dimensional ellipsoid or ovoid shape (Hershey, 2000, pp. 150-151). 

Hershey points out the baroque aptitude for figuring continuous change, a shift from the 

renaissance tradition of working with regular figures and proportions. He attributes this 

shift in the baroque imagination to experiments with conic sections, which are themselves 

continuously changing curves (2000, p. 154). 

6 According to Deleuze’s more radical reading of the Baroque, “the new status of the object 

no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold--in other words, to a relation of form-matter- 

-but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation 

of matter as a continuous development of form (1993, p. 19). 

7 For Wölfflin, baroque aesthetics are characterized by massiveness, amplification, and 

distortion, but do not result in a full-scale implosion of the descriptors of spatial experience. 

In other words, while Wölfflin argues for a quality of strangeness and tension in baroque 

architecture, this tension relies on deviations from, and therefore reliance on, recognizable 


71


forms as opposed to the invention of an entirely new model of space and spatial experience. 

This is similar to anamorphosis, which depends on the underlying support of the laws of 

linear perspective for its parodic destabilization of perspectival geometry. 

8 Hadid’s encounters with virtuality are more than just metaphorical; the fact that in her 

early career her designs were not built, remaining instead in the form of drawings and 

paintings, seems to have oriented her to a mode of architecture sensitive to the possibilities 

inherent in virtual planning. Between the years of 1750 and 1761, Giovanni Battista Piranesi 

printed 16 drawings of the Carceri d’invenzione or “Imaginary Prisons,” a series of drawings 

of imaginary architectural constructions whose labyrinthine complexity are later evoked 

by M.C. Escher and the Surrealists. Like Piranesi’s impossible designs, Hadid’s own drawing 

practices enabled a greater degree of experimentation with the limits of form, plasticity, and 

structural coherence. For more on Hadid’s unbuildable drawings, see Giovanni (2006). 

9 Irrespective of the use of frescoes to augment viewers’ experience of architectural space, 

Wölfflin differentiates baroque from renaissance architecture on the basis of its “painterly” 

quality. Thus, “if the beauty of a building is judged by the enticing effects of moving masses, 

the restless, jumping forms or violently swaying ones which seem constantly on the point 

of change, and not by balance and solidity of structure, then the strictly architectonic 

conception of architecture is depreciated. In short, the severe style of architecture makes 

its effect by what it is, that is, by its corporeal substance, while painterly architecture acts 

through what it appears to be, that is, an illusion of movement” (1966, p. 30). 

10 “As matter becomes soft and masses fluid, structural cohesion is dissolved; the massiveness 

of the style, already expressed in the broad and heavy forms, is now also manifested in 

inadequate articulation and lack of precise forms. To begin with, a wall was now regarded 

as a single uniform mass, not as something made up of individual stones” (Wölfflin, 1966, 

p. 46). 

11 I owe this particular reading of “metric” vs. “cardinal” space to David Summers’s 

encyclopedic study of the developments in Western art, such as the coordinate plane and 

ultimately the metaoptical cube, which, according to Summers, create the “conditions of 

Western modernism,” in which “modernism in European painting emerged as a more or less 

continual transformation of virtuality from the late Middle Ages onward” (2003, p. 550). 

12 For example, it would be possible in a consistently metricized universe to compute the 

position of a floor tile in a palace 10 miles from where I stand. 

13 Patrik Schumacher introduces the problem of graphic space--the question of the ontological, 

material, and formal importance of architectural drawing in relation to building--with the 

contention that “Architecture as a design discipline that is distinguished from the physical 

act of building constitutes itself on the basis of drawing. The discipline of architecture 

emerges and separates from the craft of construction through the differentiation of the 

drawing as a tool and domain of expertise outside (and in advance) of the material process 

of construction” (2004, p. 15). In other words, architecture always exists in reference to 

space and the built environment, but in the extreme cases of architectural experimentation, 

drawing is seen not just as a tool whose success will be measured in the actualization of a 

habitable structure, but becomes an object of consideration in and of itself. The drawing is 

thus not merely a means to an end, but an entity that exists and signifies independently of 

material construction. 

14 “The wit of anamorphism is a constant reference to a rational and stable system that it 

assumes in the very moment that it is parodied or questioned” (Preziosi, 1989, p. 57). 

72 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Works Cited: 

Buci-Glucksmann, C. 1986. La folie du Voir: de l’esthetique baroque. Paris: Galilée. 

Damisch, Hubert. 1994. The Origin of Perspective. Goodman, J. (trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. 

Davis, Whitney. 2005. “Real Spaces.” Graduate Seminar University of California at Berkeley. 

Department of the History of Art. Berkeley, CA. Spring. 

Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University 

of Minnesota Press. 

Edgerton, S. Y. 1975. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: Harper & 

Row. 

Giovanni, J. 2006. “In the Nature of Design Materials: The Instruments of Zaha Hadid’s Vision.” 

In: Zaha Hadid. New York: Guggenheim Museum, pp. 23-32. 

Hershey, G. 2000. Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque. Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press. 

Jay, M. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. 

Berkeley: University of California Press. 

---. 1988. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In: Foster, H, (ed.). Vision and Visuality. New York: 

New Press, pp. 3-23. 

Le Corbusier. 1950. Le modulor: essai sur une mesure harmonique a l’echelle humaine applicable 

universellement a l’architecture et a la mécanique. Boulogne: Editions de l’architecture 

D’aujourd’hui. 

Leibniz, G. 1696. “Letter to Des Billettes, December 1696.” Cited in Deleuze, G.1993. The Fold: 

Leibniz and the Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Mertins, D. 2006. “The Modernity of Zaha Hadid.” In: Zaha Hadid. New York: Guggenheim 

Museum, pp. 33-38. 

Millon, H. A 1972. “Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism’: Its 

Influence on the Development and Interpretation of Modern Architecture.” In Journal of the 

Society of Architectural Historians, May, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 83-91 

Ndalianis, A. 2004. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: 

MIT Press. 

Preziosi, D. 1989. Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven: Yale 


Schumacher, P. 2004. Digital Hadid: Landscapes in Motion. Basel: Birkhäuser. 

Summers, D. 2003. Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. New 

York: Phaidon. 

Wittkower, R. 1998. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. West Sussex: Academy 

Editions. 

Wölfflin, H. 1966. Renaissance and Baroque. Simon, K. (trans.). Ithaca: Cornell University 

Press. 

Meredith Hoy 

Department of Art and Art History 

University of Massachusetts, Boston 

McCormack Building, Rm 458 

100 Morrissey Blvd 

Boston, Massachusetts 02125 

meredith.hoy@umb.edu 

meredith.hoy@gmail.com 


73

EXCESSES 


Echoes from the Future: Édouard Glissant and the 

Infinite Work of the Baroque 

74 

Gerwin Gallob 

Gerwin Gallob is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the 

University of California, Santa Cruz. His dissertation-in-progress, entitled “Sonic Lines 

of Flight: Black Techno-Aesthetics, Black Politics of Sound,” addresses questions of black 

particularity and aesthetic militancy in the kinds of 20th-century Afrodiasporic music and 

sonic cultures that depend on, and celebrate, not “liveness” and presence but the mediations 

and materialities associated with the phonographic apparatus. 

This article discusses some aspects of Martinican writer Édouard Glissant’s 

theoretical work on the significance of baroque forms and concepts for a New 

World “Poetics of Relation.” Glissant contends that the diversions of orality and 

musicality may bring about a future language that enables a collective articulation 

adequate to the realities not only of the Caribbean archipelago, but a creolized 

and creolizing world. The idea of echo emerges as both central rhetorical trope 

and sonic manifestation of the baroque fold taken to infinity. Cross-cultural links 

to black American culture are explored, and an expanded notion of a baroque 

without territory is proposed. 

Words are but the surface appearance of the 

deeper echoes of song, dance, and eternal 

rhythms. Words are necessary. You must hear 

them. But there are times when it is not 

important to listen closely. Only their resonance 

is needed, their concrete existence and deeper 

urges are awakened. Then they can reach a 

conclusion…. 

-Édouard Glissant, The Ripening 1 

Make him speak the unknown tongue, the language of the future. -Ralph Ellison, 

Invisible Man 2 

Ever since the mid 17th century, 

the baroque as concept, as trait, as 

set of techniques, has been planting 

its extensions all across the multiple 

geopolitical locations that constitute 

the world we have come to understand 

as modern. Imported by the Spanish 

colonizers, the Euro-baroque impulse— 

premodern by most accounts—has 

profoundly affected the eccentric New 

World modernities that have emerged 

in the wake of European conquest 


and colonialism. The processes of 

cultural and racial mixing, mestizaje, 

that blended Old World baroque 

and indigenous forms that were also 

baroque, soon led to complex aesthetic 

rearticulations, adequate to Latin 

American and Caribbean realities. 

Recognizing the political potential of 

such a “baroque to the second power,” 

20th-century artists and intellectuals 

inhabiting these realities have deployed 

it as an instrument of contraconquista, 

of counterconquest. In their artistic and 

political efforts that often accompanied 

local struggles for cultural autonomy and 

decolonization, trans-American writers 

like Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, 

Severo Sarduy, Carlos Fuentes, Haroldo 

de Campos, and others have recurred 

heavily on the guiding principle of the 

Baroque. In recent years, formations 

of this Neo-Baroque in the New World 

have received increased attention in the 

interdisciplinary humanities and the 

arts. 3 

The subject of this essay is Édouard 

Glissant, Martinican novelist, poet, 

essayist, and activist. Born in 1928, 

educated in Martinique and Paris, 

influenced early on by his friend and 

compatriot Frantz Fanon as well as 

by négritude poet and teacher Aimé 

Césaire, Glissant is today regarded as 

the preeminent thinker of creolization 

and antillanité, or Caribbeanness. 

Antillanité refers to a utopian, crosscultural, 

post-nationalist and postidentitarian 

conception of being-inthe-world 

as becoming-Caribbean. 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Animated by the political urgency of 

decolonization, and informed by the 

rhizomatic thought of Gilles Deleuze and 

Félix Guattari, his “Poetics of Relation” 

points to a new set of possibilities that 

favors processes of becoming over 

states of being, interdependence over 

autonomy, expansion over depth, and 

ceaseless cultural mixing over the old 

violence of filiation and purity. In his 

most recent work, Glissant has tweaked 

and expanded his conceptual apparatus 

to fall even more in line with Deleuzian 

philosophy, in terms of articulating 

a “coherent theory of becoming that 

is both immanent and specific” (see 

Burns, 2009, pp. 104-115). 

Glissant’s theory of the baroque 

rarely finds its way into contemporary 

debates. In part, this may be due 

to his marginal status, as a French 

Caribbean writer, within a field that 

has been dominated by artists and 

writers from the hispanophone and 

lusophone parts of the New World. At 

the same time, Glissant’s theoretical 

explorations of the baroque seem 

somewhat marginal to his own body 

of work as well. Dispersed across his 

essays, novels, and poems, they are not 

easy to locate or summarize: apart from 

a brief 1985 text entitled “Concerning a 

Baroque Abroad in the World,” no other 

distinct elaborations of the topic exist. 

Instead, Glissant offers something like a 

distributed, discontinuous theory of the 

baroque that both infuses and emerges 

from his work across the genres of 

fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism. 4 


75


Echoes, Folds, Diversions 

Glissant’s domain is language. In 

what follows, I will read a series of 

moments in his work that revolve 

around questions of speech, sound, 

and writing in the French Caribbean 

context. As I do this, I will pay special 

attention to the ways in which the 

baroque is being deployed, following 

Deleuze’s formula, as an “operative 

function” that “endlessly creates 

folds” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 3). However, 

I will not be able to adequately discuss 

in Glissant’s work several issues 

crucial to neo-baroque discourse, 

including temporality, narrative, 

and the function and figuration of 

76 

physical space. 

Shaped by a centuries-long 

history of slavery and colonialism, 

and lacking what Glissant calls the 

“collective density” of an “ancestral 

cultural hinterland” (Glissant, 1989, 

p. 64), Martinique has never had at its 

disposal a language that, by its nature, 

enables collective articulation. 

Caught up between two problematic, 

alienating alternatives—the official 

French and the people’s “stagnant” 

Creole—it remains a “country 

without a language.” Here is Glissant 

outlining this basic predicament, as 

well as hinting at a possible way out: 

Our aim is to forge for ourselves… based on the defective 

grasp of two languages whose control was never collectively 

mastered, a form of expression through which we could 

consciously face our ambiguities and fix ourselves firmly in the 

uncertain possibilities of the word made ours (1989, p. 168). 

We have so many words tucked away in our throats, and so 

little ‘raw material’ with which to execute our potential (1989, 

p. 140). [F]or us it will be a question of transforming a scream 

(which we once uttered) into a speech that grows from it, 

thus discovering the expression… of a finally liberated poetics 

(1989, p. 133). 

Glissant here emphasizes the 

materiality of language, which manifests 

itself most forcefully in the primordial 

scream that marks the arrival of his 

African ancestors on the archipelago, 

what he calls their “irruption into 

modernity” (1989, pp. 100 and 146). 

The texture of that scream (its passive 

force) is the resistance of(fered by) the 

material, i.e., the body, i.e., the object. As 

Glissant indicates, this initial moment 

of excess, of speech at its limit, will not 

and cannot be forgotten in the quest 

for true collective articulation. But 

alongside the various types of verbal 

expression that formed among slaves 

and eventually found their way into 

the Creole language, another kind of 

outburst took place in the enclosure 

of the Plantation, namely, “a music of 


eserved spirituality through which the 

body suddenly expresses itself” (1997, 

p. 73). The embodied presentness, 

the dynamism, and the rhythmic 

exuberance he hears in New World 

forms of orality and musicality have 

strongly shaped Glissant’s conception 

of his own experimental language, 

which he sees to take shape “at the edge 

of writing and speech” (1989, p. 147). 

Now, where is the baroque in all this? 

It first appears, argues Glissant, in the 

evolution of Martinican rhetoric “as the 

symptom of a deeper inadequacy, being 

the elaborate ornamentation imposed 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

on the French language by our desperate 

men of letters” (1989, p. 250). In other 

words, the excessive, convoluted yet 

grammatically impeccable French of 

the cultural elite suggests to him a 

compensatory strategy, covering up 

a profound insecurity, a vulnerability. 

Excess signifies lack. But baroque 

derangements, foldings, unfoldings, and 

refoldings have also affected Creole, 

the language of the people. Glissant 

reminds us of the centrality of sound in 

the formation of a language originally 

designed to enable communication 

between slave and master: 

For Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. 

Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse… It was the 

intensity of the sound that dictated meaning… 

[T]he dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving 

it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise… 

Creole organizes speech as a blast of sound (1989, pp. 123- 

124). 

In addition to the manipulation of 

sound intensity and raw sonic matter, i.e. 

noise, the excess of spoken Creole also 

involves verbal acceleration, which adds 

to the texture of speech while inflicting 

further damage on the transparency of 

enunciation. Sped-up, rushed, frenzied, 

Creole orality produces a “continuous 

stream of language that makes speech 

into one impenetrable block of sound” 

(1989, p. 124). Creole has at its origin 

a conspiracy to conceal meaning, which 

makes it proliferate sonic foldings in 

order to mislead, to disguise its message 

in the textural density of speech. Its 

rhetorical strategies favor concrete 

imagery over abstractions, and they 

operate through the chain reactions of 

echo, repetition, tautology, and word 

association. Decentered, deformed 

language, Creole is the art of diversion. 

To this end, it can also employ the 

ultimate technique of verbal expansion, 

namely delirious speech. However, such 

a counterpoetics can present a danger 

for a language that has been stagnant for 

too long, lacking a historical dimension 

due to never having passed “naturally” 

from “secret code to conventional 

syntax,… from the diversion of imagery 

to conceptual fluency” (1989, p. 128). Of 

contemporary Creole, Glissant writes: 


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78 

Verbal delirium as the outer edge of speech is one of the most 

frequent products of [its] counterpoetics. Improvisations, 

drumbeats, acceleration, dense repetition, slurred syllables, 

meaning the opposite of what is said, allegory and hidden 

meanings—there are in the forms of this customary verbal 

delirium an intense concentration of all the phases of the 

history of this dramatic language (1989, p. 128). 

Such foldings and contractions 

of speech-matter mark a series of 

diversions, a fugitive impulse. In true 

baroque fashion, they counterpose an 

irreducible density—what Glissant 

calls an opacity—to the oppressively 

transparent, rational discourse of the 

colonizers. Delirious speech is eccentric 

and impenetrable; it compromises 

language in unpredictable ways. 

Importantly, like all tactics of diversion, 

it must not be seen as an end in itself, 

but rather as a tool to enable a future 

articulation. 5 

At one point in Glissant’s 1975 novel 

Malemort, the narrator—a collective 

“we” that belongs to a group of 

Martinican students—is confronted 

with the baroque ostentation of their 

three schoolmasters’ French. It is 

alienating, convoluted speech, filled with 

redundancies and artful diversions. As 

mentioned above, Glissant claims that 

the diversions and decenterings that 

the official language is made to undergo 

by the French Caribbean elite merely 

mask an underlying deficiency, a lack. 

This fact would seem to rule out any 

liberatory possibilities. But, attentive to 

the gaps and silences in the discourse 

of those learned men, Malemort’s 

narrator comes to the realization that, 

precisely in and through its breaks, this 

alienating discourse may actually reveal 

to them the contours of a truly collective 

language that is to come: 

[When the masters stop talking] we can hear around them… 

the future echo of the way of speaking that they would perhaps 

have wanted so much to know and against which they defended 

themselves so fiercely: our way of speaking, impossible and 

sought after! (Glissant, 1975, pp. 153-154; translation quoted 

in Britton 1999, p. 102). 

An impossible dream like Glissant’s 

notion of antillanité, this utopic, 

collective speech is nevertheless present 

to Malemort’s narrator as a faint sound, a 

“future echo” of itself. And what is echo, 

other than an infinite series of foldings 

in the material that is sound? While 

it lacks the power to initiate speech, 

echo makes the word shudder, sets it 

in motion, reveals its texture. Traveling 

at the speed of sound, echo unfolds in 

time (it takes sound to infinity) but 

also always evokes a particular space 

whose acoustic signature it carries. 


It adds reverberation, rhythm, and 

thickness to the sound that serves as its 

occasion, gives it a material presence 

and spatiality in the listener’s here and 

now. 6 

Across his novels, poems, and essays, 

Glissant makes frequent use of echo 

as both concept and rhetorical device, 

just as he regularly employs other 

sonic and musical tropes as well. For 

instance, along with fellow Martinican 

author Patrick Chamoiseau, he 

understands the task of the Caribbean 

writer to be hypersensitive to creolized 

and creolizing sound, and in particular 

to listen closely to that “distant voice 

Cross-Cultural Poetics 

The line between vocality and music 

disappears when speech is enriched 

and texturized by repetition and 

echoic resonance. Glissant, who often 

finds inspiration in African-American 

culture, here cites “the homiletic 

style of Black American preachers, 

men who imperceptibly enter into 

the chanted word as well as choral 

music” (1999b, p. 200). This type of 

excessive speech oscillates between 

two registers, puts them into relation. 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

whose echo hovers over the scenes 

of our collective memory and guides 

our future” (1999a, p. ix). Again, the 

possibility of a collective future is 

here linked to a barely audible sound, 

a persistent vocal echo that ought 

to befall the written word so that 

something new can emerge in the 

process. Through echo, repetition, 

and assonance, a characteristic 

rhythm enters into speech, producing 

“infinitely multiplying expressions 

of the real” (1999b, p. 201), as well 

as variances, or versions thereof. In 

other words: endless reverberations, 

foldings upon foldings of sound. 

It thus opens itself up to the new and 

the unpredictable, making audible 

future possibilities. The poet takes 

note: “When the written text adopts 

the economies of orality, it frequently 

tries to suggest or imitate this music” 

(1999b, p. 200). In the following 

passage, Glissant again exalts the 

rhetorical power of African-American 

speech. Two personal experiences 

in the United States, he writes, have 

particularly moved him: 

I remember having heard, at Tufts University, an exposé 

on Afro-American literature and having discovered with 

great surprise and feeling the spectacle of this audience that, 

rhythmically swaying, turned the lecturer’s text into melody. 

I also saw the television film on Martin Luther King and 

discovered the doubling of the voice, the echo placed behind 

the speaker to repeat and amplify his speech. As in the tragic 

text, here repetition is not gratuitous. Therein lies a new 

management of language (1989, p. 149). 


79


Echo, stretching of the voice, 

musicality, call-and-response: these 

are only some of the diversions and 

decenterings that characterize black 

English. Here, multiplication and 

resonance serve to fortify the voice 

of the speaker, to expand its range, 

and to increase its impact. Affected 

by musicality and generating echoic 

responses, it enters into relation with 

other voices, other bodies. Speech 

thus becomes creolized, sonic matter 

folded to infinity. What Glissant calls 

a “new management of language” 

concerns the essentially collective or 

communal articulation (or at least 

its “future echo”) that these material 

practices enable. By its nature, 

such an articulation will involve a 

baroque decentering, recognizing, 

80 

and conforming to no preestablished 

norm. According to Deleuze and 

Guattari, black English would lend 

itself particularly well to this project: 

commenting on the versatility and 

inventiveness of its speakers, they have 

rightly called it a “deterritorialized 

language, appropriate for strange and 

minor uses” (1986, p. 17). 

As mentioned above, Glissant 

considers African-American culture 

to be exemplary with regard to 

creolization. To him, jazz in particular 

serves as both model and inspiration. 

Bemoaning the absence of a truly 

collective and popular form of musical 

expression in Martinique, he cites jazz 

as a counterexample, emphasizing its 

ethics, its discipline, and its ability to 

creolize. Jazz, Glissant argues, 

progressively records the history of the community, its 

confrontation with reality, the gaps into which it inserts 

itself, the walls which it too often comes up against. The 

universalization of jazz arises from the fact that at no point is 

it an abstract music, but the expression of a specific situation 

(1989, p. 110). 

In this formulation, Glissant calls jazz 

“universal” while also insisting on its 

concreteness and specificity, its link 

to the community that is its condition 

of possibility. 7 Ever since its inception, 

jazz has been subject to the process 

of creolization, here understood as 

“the unstoppable conjunction despite 

misery, oppression, and lynching… that 

opens up torrents of unpredictable 

results” (1999b, p. 30). Along these 

lines, jazz can be seen as a set of 

concepts, attitudes, aesthetic strategies, 

and musical techniques that have 

entered into relation with musical 

and nonmusical cultures worldwide: 

Glissant calls it “a recomposed trace 

which has roamed all over the world” 

(quoted in Martin, 2008, p. 107). At 

the same time, jazz as/in performance 

asserts black subjectivity as/in the 

resistance of the object, thus giving 

aural and gestural testimony from the 

margins of a world without center. 8 

The singular eloquence of this kind of 

testimony, multi-voiced and ongoing, 

is rooted not in words but in rhythms, 

tones, textures, and cadences. What’s 


more, in its emphasis on improvisation 

and collective poesis, and often without 

recourse to preexisting written 

scores, jazz ceaselessly produces 

unforeseeable, provisional, and everchanging 

outcomes (echoes, folds, 

diversions) that are all its own. 

On the subject of these baroque 

hallmarks—sonic decenterings, 

proliferations, multiplied voices—one 

is reminded of that famous jazz moment 

in 20th-century black literature, in 

which Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, 

sitting in his windowless basement, 

dreams of the baroque opulence of 

having five radio-phonographs playing 

the same Louis Armstrong record, all at 

one time (1965, pp. 10-11). A glorious 

noise must be the result from such 

a hypothetical, yet-to-be actualized 

setup: I imagine that echo, resonance, 

and static would accrue around, enfold, 

and distort Louis’s multiple/multiplied 

voices (both vocal and instrumental), 

thus constituting a soundscape of 

fantastic density. By turns falling into 

and out of phase, reverberating and 

bouncing off the walls of the narrator’s 

hyper-illuminated “hole in the ground,” 

the sound simultaneously produced by 

the five phonographs would carry the 

acoustic signature of this subterranean 

space, making it vibrate along with the 

body of the listener whose resistance 

(existence) it would serve to confirm 

and validate: “No, I am not a spook… 

I am a man of substance, of flesh and 

bone, fiber and liquids—and I might 

even be said to possess a mind” (1965, 

p. 7). At the very least, the quintupled 

Armstrong sound, played back in sync 

from inanimate black vinyl objects over 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

a jury-rigged home audio system, would 

combat the hole’s “acoustical deadness” 

that the narrator so abhors. 

Of course, the name of the record, 

whose “future echo” Ellison’s narrator 

conjures up so vividly, is “(What Did 

I Do to Be so) Black and Blue.” On it, 

Louis sings the blues, his voice doubled 

and assisted by his trumpet, whose 

hidden possibilities he unlocks as he 

“bends that military instrument into 

a beam of lyrical sound” (1965, p. 11). 

This is a diversion, and testament to 

the workings of a limitless creativity, as 

well as evidence of a fugitive spirit in 

search of ever-new lines of flight. There 

is also a second diversion, 9 concerning 

time as embodied experience. As the 

narrator informs us, Louis (his sound) 

calls attention to the nodes and breaks 

that mark the passing of nonlinear time, 

thus making audible the peculiar sense 

of temporality that is a known side 

effect of invisibility, of being excluded 

from the project of modernity and the 

flow of History (1965, p. 11). 

This idea, then, brings us back to 

Glissant, who has also grappled at 

length with contrasting, disjunctive 

conceptions of temporality. Antillean 

history, he claims, does not unfold in a 

linear, continuous fashion but “comes 

to life with a stunning unexpectedness” 

(1989, p. 63); the task of the writer 

is thus to “give a prophetic vision of 

the past” (1989, p. 64). This can only 

be accomplished through constant 

experimentation, through listening 

for echoes from the future. It requires 

attentiveness to opacities, a taste 

for unpredictable outcomes, and a 

heightened sensitivity with regard to the 


81


diversions introduced into languages 

and practices of any kind. Revisiting his 

earlier discussion of the French language 

in the Caribbean—the language in which 

he himself writes and of which he makes 

“minor” 10 uses—Glissant insists that in 

and through such diversions, we have a 

Un Baroque Mondialisé 

A slight shift in parameters and a 

new set of key formulations appear 

in Glissant’s more recent work, 

particularly with regard to the 

baroque. With the introduction of new 

concepts like tout-monde, errance, and 

pensée archipélique, his theoretical 

apparatus “thickens” and becomes 

more powerful, but his thought does 

not change in nature. 11 Throughout 

the 1990s, Glissant develops a poetics 

and philosophy of Relation that 

relies heavily on Spinozist/Deleuzian 

conceptions of totality and immanence, 

while also drawing on insights gained 

from chaos theory (see Burns 2009). 

Glissant’s notion of a “naturalized” 

baroque “abroad in the world” (un 

baroque mondialisé) exemplifies this 

shift in theoretical emphasis, toward 

the post-territorial thought of worldtotality. 

In the course of modernity’s 

historical development, Glissant 

argues, the baroque impulse became 

generalized, eventually extending 

into the mode of Relation and thus 

engendering a whole new way of 

being-in-the-world. 12 This baroque is 

self-constituent and self-regulating; it 

“no longer constitutes a derangement 

[of classicisms], since it has turned 

82 

chance to “compromise this language in 

relationships we might not suspect. It is 

the unknown area of these relationships 

that weaves, while dismantling the 

conception of the standard language, 

the ‘natural texture’ of our new baroque, 

our own” (1989, p. 250). 

into a ‘natural’ expression of whatever 

scatters and comes together” (1997, p. 

91). 

By proposing this notion, Glissant 

suggests that the kind of thought that 

requires the division of the world into 

center and margin, metropole and 

periphery, has long been rendered 

obsolete by the global processes of 

creolization. Renouncing the search 

for origins, universal truths, and 

fixed identities, Glissant’s baroque 

prizes becoming, horizontal relations, 

the proliferation of centers, and 

destabilized/deferred meanings. 13 

Via the concept of errance (errantry, 

drifting, wandering), Glissant 

introduces a practice of nonlinear 

movement and mobility that invites 

the unpredictable outcomes of 

unforeseen detours and encounters, 

while no longer recognizing the 

primacy of “home” tw ideal of voyage, 

a “journeying beyond foundational 

certitudes, over exploded ground” 

(Dash, 2004, pp. 99-100). 

Glissant’s New World baroque poetics 

require a conception of space that can 

account for the nature of island ground, 

the connecting function of the ocean, 

and the role of the littoral. 14 As Michael 


Dash writes, Glissant thus “attempts 

to conceptualize space in terms of 

frontier zones that become patterns of 

archipelagos” (2004, p. 108). Pensée 

archipélique (archipelagic thought) is 

what Glissant calls this particular mode of 

engaging the world by way of rethinking 

Caribbean island space within a New 

World archipelago. The next logical step 

in Glissant’s line of thought, suggests 

Dash, is to propose that “all places must 

be opened out to their archipelagic 

dimensions” (2004, p. 95). 

As it happens, one of these places 

may turn out to be the “island” of 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Paris, France. To wit, in some of his 

earliest writings Glissant has used the 

island metaphor to defamiliarize and 

deterritorialize the City of Light, thus 

“provocatively reducing the métropole 

to a kind of open insularity” (Dash, 2003, 

p. 102). This notion first appears in the 

surrealist fragments and meditations 

that comprise Glissant’s 1955 essay 

collection, Soleil de la Conscience, in 

which he chronicles his first journey to 

Europe. Of Paris, he writes: 

So Paris, in the heart of our time, receives, uproots, blurs, 

then clarifies and reassures. I suddenly learn its secret: and 

it is that Paris is an island which draws light from all around 

and diffracts it immediately (Glissant, 1957, p. 68; translation 

quoted in Dash, 2003, p. 102). 

Following Glissant across the Atlantic 

Ocean, I would like to conclude this essay 

by revisiting, in brief, one of its core 

themes. In section 2 of his 1993 lyrical 

work The Great Chaoses (2005), Glissant 

focuses on (the discourse of) a group of 

homeless wanderers and tramps—“magi 

of distress”—who congregate in certain 

Parisian public places, turning them into 

theatrical, noisy, baroque zones. Insisting 

on their right to opacity, and speaking 

their creolized, unheard-of tongues, 

these figures are exiles, alien invaders. 

They introduce a set of disturbances 

into the smoothly operating modern 

city; they personify noise, friction, 

criminality, excess. By organizing section 

2 of The Great Chaoses around the speech 

of subjects who seem so radically out of 

place, so unassimilable, Glissant offers 

another variation on the New World 

baroque theme of counterconquest (an 

earlier example would be his account— 

in Soleil de la Conscience—of traveling 

to Paris, and experiencing its essential 

insularity). In this case, the idea of 

counterconquest must be understood 

not only in the general sense of “a 

reconquest of European civilization by 

American colonial subjects in the realm 

of the arts,” but more literally, as “a 

reverse invasion of the metropolis by 

the periphery” (Kaup, 2007, p. 235). 15 

Bernadette Cailler, whose work on 

Glissant’s poetry is invaluable, writes 

that in section 2, Glissant 


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84 

is describing the old European city that has been invaded, 

willy-nilly, by the descendants of all these Conquis or 

conquered peoples and by their myths, dreams and 

truths. These erstwhile victims are the new conquerors 

of this new “Old” World (2003, p. 110). 

Marked by a condition of rootlessness 

and existential alienation whose 

side effects include an increased 

inventiveness, a talent for improvisation, 

and an uncontainable, polyglot 

verbosity, these errant subjects emerge 

as visionaries that can teach the poet— 

and the world—what a truly collective 

articulation may look, feel, and sound 

like. 16 In the brief “prosaic” passage that 

acts as a preface to section 2, Glissant 

writes of them the following: 

History has debated them and dumped them here. But along 

with the unfurled language of their vagrancy. They deflect the 

sufficient reason of the languages they use (…). They understand 

the chaos-world instinctively. Even when they affect, to the 

point of parody, the words of the Other. Their dialogues are all 

allegorical. Mad preciosities, unknown science, baroque idioms 

of these Great Chaoses. Come from everywhere, they decenter 

the known. Vagrant and offended, they teach. What voices are 

debating there, announcing every possible language? (2005, p. 

231, emphasis in original). 

Endnotes: 

1 Glissant (1985, p. 169). The Ripening is Glissant’s first novel, originally published in French 

as La Lézarde in 1958. As of today, many works by Glissant remain untranslated. With the 

exception of two instances, in this essay I restrict myself to using only those of his texts that 

are available in English translations. 

2 Ellison (1965, p. 382). 

3 For instance, the 2000 exhibition Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art, 

organized by Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and on display in North America 

until 2003, convincingly reasserted the relevance of New World baroque forms for the 

contemporary moment, while also extending their aesthetic range, their theoretical 

contours, and their political claims. The following texts provide a good overview of recent 

scholarship on the aesthetics and politics of the New World neo-baroque: Kaup 2005; Kaup 

2007; Kaup 2006; Egginton 2007; Moraña 2005. Most recently, the January 2009 issue of 

PMLA included a special section on “The Neobaroque and the Americas” (Monsiváis 2009; 

Oropesa 2009; Zamora 2009; Egginton 2009; Greene 2009; Kaup 2009). A comprehensive 

anthology of key theoretical and critical texts, entitled Baroque New Worlds: Representation, 

Transculturation, Counterconquest, is scheduled for publication in 2010 (Zamora and Kaup). 

4 Aside from its rather opaque, discontinuous nature, Glissant’s theoretical work on/with 

the baroque poses another problem, namely its seeming lack of direct applicability in the 

fields of art history and visual culture studies. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it has 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

rarely been commented on, at least in anglophone academic writings. Indeed, Glissant’s 

name is entirely absent from the essays that comprise the PMLA special section mentioned 

in the previous note. However, his text “Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World” (“D’un 

Baroque Mondialisé”), a version of which appears in his 1990 essay collection Poetics of 

Relation (Glissant 1997), will be included in the forthcoming Baroque New Worlds anthology 

(2010, Zamora and Kaup). 

5Setting into relation the work of the trans-American poets Pablo Neruda (Chile) and Kamau 

Brathwaite (Barbados), Nathaniel Mackey encounters similar types of broken, impeded 

speech, and suggests that instances of “linguistic perturbation” such as Neruda’s “semantic 

phanopoetic and phonological folds and flutter” or Brathwaite’s use of “calibanisms” may 

actually function as catalysts for the radically new (Mackey, 2005, p. 6). What these writers 

seem to propose, writes Mackey, is that “postcolonial speech begins in a stammer” (2005, 

p. 44). 

6In an essay that connects the black diaspora process and Jamaican dub reggae (another 

specifically Caribbean cultural practice that is built around a poetics of echo and echoicity), 

Louis Chude-Sokei offers a cosmological reading of sound, silence, and the infinite foldings 

of echo: 

[The Big Bang] is a sound which makes possible the universe and then the world. 

The creation of the universe and the world are merely echoes of this primal sound, 

products of its sonic waves. This myth establishes one of the most crucial dialectics 

in human knowledge: sound and silence. What bridges the two elements is echo, 

the races of creation. If sound is birth and silence death, the echo trailing into 

infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for 

history (1999, p. 47). 

For displaced and dispersed subjects who find themselves outside of History, echoicity 

manifests the metaphorical and material dimensions—the disorientations—of an ongoing 

experience of temporality as nonlinear and disjunctive. At the same time, as Chude-Sokei 

suggests, by its very nature echo also evokes histories of (uprooted, stolen) bodies moving 

through spaces that lack both center and bounds: “[D]iaspora means distance and the echo 

is also the product and signifier of space” (1999, p. 47). 

7Elsewhere, tracing the evolution of speech and music in the enclosure of the Plantation, 

Glissant further elaborates on this notion of universality. “The cry of the Plantation,” he 

argues, was “transfigured into the speech of the world. For three centuries of constraint 

had borne down so hard that, when this speech took root, it sprouted in the very midst 

of the field of modernity; that is, it grew for everyone. This is the only sort of universality 

there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out” (1997, pp. 73-74). 

8The work of Fred Moten is indispensible with regard to this notion (e.g., Moten 2003a; 

2003b). 

9On the subject of the multiple strategies of diversion deployed in black music and black 

sonic cultures, Albert Murray’s comment on the blues aesthetic seems pertinent: “With 

all its so-called blue notes and overtones of sadness, blues music of its very nature and 

function is nothing if not a form of diversion” (1989, p. 45, my emphasis). 

10This is a reference to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “minor literatures,” 

which they develop in their 1975 book on Franz Kafka, and of which Glissant has surely 

been aware. “A minor literature,” they write, “doesn’t come from a minor language; it is 

rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (1986, p. 16). When 


85


they go on to identify its three characteristics as “the deterritorialization of language, 

the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage 

of enunciation” (1986, p. 18), they may as well be talking about Glissant’s poetics and its 

orientation toward diversion, politics, and collectivity. 

11 Some critics would disagree with this statement. See, for example, chapter 2 of Peter 

Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (2001). 

Glissant himself has emphasized the continuity in his thought across the decades, e.g., by 

describing a more recent book as “a reconstituted echo or a spiral retelling” (1997, p. 16) 

of previous works. 

12 The relevant passage reads as follows: 

As conceptions of nature evolved and, at the same time, the world opened up for 

Western man… [t]he baroque, the art of expansion, expanded in concrete terms. 

The first account of this was Latin American religious art… Baroque art ceased its 

adversarial role; it established an innovative vision (soon a different conception) 

of Nature and acted in keeping with it. This evolution reached its high point in 

métissage. (…) The generalization of métissage was all that the baroque needed 

to become naturalized. (…) No longer a reaction, it was the outcome of every 

aesthetic, or every philosophy. Consequently, it asserted not just an art or a style 

but went beyond this to produce a being-in-the-world (1997, pp. 78-79). 

Note that in Glissant’s poetics, the term métissage—intermixing, braiding, mongrelization— 

is used to complicate unproblematic notions of unified new (racial, cultural) identities 

emerging out of the encounter between two previously distinct subjects. In fact, Glissant 

understands métissage as a relational practice, “the meeting and synthesis of two 

differences.” Once it becomes generalized, i.e., “limitless…, its elements diffracted and its 

consequences unforeseeable” (1997, p. 34), it mutates into creolization, a concept closely 

related to Glissant’s expanded notion of the baroque. 

13 “Baroque naturality, if it exists, has a structure or at least an order, and we have to invent 

a knowledge that would not serve to guarantee its norm in advance but would follow 

excessively along to keep up with the measurable quantity of its vertiginous variances” 

(1997, pp. 101-102). In its rejection of a priori knowledge and first principles, Glissant’s 

formulation resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s account of the way in which 17th-century 

European baroque theologians deflected attacks against their ideal: 

The Baroque solution is the following: we shall multiply principles—we can always 

slip a new one out from under our cuffs—and in this way we will change their use. 

We will not have to ask what available object corresponds to a given luminous 

principle, but what hidden principle responds to whatever object is given, that is to 

say, to this or that ‘perplexing case.’ […] A case being given, we shall invent its 

principle (1993, p. 67). 

14 The zone where “water withdraws in successive waves, each following its own current, 

leaving behind muddy streaks and silt and spores of life from the deep” (Glissant, 1999b, 

p. 228). In his monograph on Glissant, Michael Dash writes that “[i]t is the threshold of the 

sand facing the open sea that is the poet’s exemplary space” (1995, p. 163). 

15 For another literary example of this type of reverse invasion, see Alejo Carpentier’s novel 

Baroque Concerto (1991). Carpentier’s magical realist narrative chronicles the fantastic 

journey to Europe of a wealthy Mexican merchant and his Afro-Cuban servant, Filomeno. 

The nameless merchant is a criollo, a locally born direct descendant of European colonists. 

86 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Arriving in Madrid and visiting Venice in 1709, the two journeymen part ways over 200 

years later, in what must be the 1930s: the criollo, grandson of Spaniards, feels alienated 

in the world of his ancestral allegiances, and returns to Mexico City. Filomeno, however, 

trumpet in hand, decides to stay, and, in the absence of any redemptive notion of “home,” to 

keep moving. The novel, in which music and aurality play a key role, ends at the scene of the 

last in a series of marvelous “baroque concertos”—a Louis Armstrong (!) show in Venice 

that Filomeno attends. In appropriately ecstatic terms, Louis is described as he “who made 

the trumpet ring like the voice of the God of Zachariah, the Lord of Isaiah, or as called for 

in the chorus of the most joyous psalms of the Scriptures” (1991, p. 116). On the morning 

after the concert, we learn, Filomeno plans to board a train to Paris, that archipelago of 

black diasporic modernism, where he expects to be known as “Monsieur Philomène. Like 

that, with a Ph and a beautiful grave accent over the e” (1991, p. 114, emphasis in original). 

15 Elsewhere, Glissant presents us with this concise formula: Baroque speech, inspired by all 

possible speech (1997, p. 75, emphasis in original). 

Works Cited 

Britton, C. 1999. Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. 

Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 

Burns, L. 2009. “Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: Édouard Glissant and the Poetics 

of Creolization.” In Textual Practice, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 99-117. 

Cailler, B. 2003. “From ‘Gabelles’ to ‘Grands Chaos’: A Study of the Disode to the Homeless.” In: 

Gallagher, M. (ed.). Ici-Là: Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French. Amsterdam: 

Rodopi, pp. 101-124. 

Carpentier, A. 1991. Baroque Concerto. Zatz, A. (trans.). London: Deutsch. 

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Process.” In Emergences, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 47-59. 

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N. Cohn (eds.). Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 

pp. 94-109. 

Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University 

of Minnesota Press. 

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Polan, D. (trans.). Minneapolis: 


Egginton, W. 2007. “The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque.” In South Atlantic 

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2009. “The Baroque as a Problem of Thought.” In PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 143-149. 

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L. (trans). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. vii-ix. 

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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 223-257. 

Greene, R. 2009. “Baroque and Neobaroque: Making Thistory.” In PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 150- 

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Hallward, P. 2001. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. 

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no. 2, pp. 128-152. 

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88 

Gerwin Gallob 

History of Consciousness 


Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA 

ggallob@ucsc.edu 


E

EMBODIMENTS 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Body-Language and Language-Body in William 

Forsythe’s Choreography: Michel Foucault and 

Louis Marin on the Baroque Body 1 

Mark Franko 

Mark Franko is professor of dance. His publications include Ritual and Event: 

Interdisciplinary Perspectives (editor, Routledge); Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque 

Body (Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions Kargo; Palermo: L’Epos), and Dancing 

Modernism/Performing Politics (Indiana University Press); Modernizem v plesu/Politike 

uprizarjanja (Lublujana: Zavod EN-KNAP). Franko is editor of Dance Research Journal and 

a choreographer and director, whose most recent work (in collaboration with Alessandro 

Rumie) on Pasolini as poet and theorist was produced at the Akademie der Künste (Berlin). 

This essay explores the relations between the return to 17th-century language 

theory in the early work of Michel Foucault and Louis Marin (1966-1975) and 

the ‘poststructuralist choreography of William Forsythe in Artifact (Ballet 

Frankfurt, 1984), the first work in which Forsythe addresses the ballet’s past in 

the 17th century. Foucault and Marin both analyzed La logique de Port-Royal and 

arrived at concepts of a body-language and a language-body that have resonance 

for Forsythe’s choreography. The author reviews their critique of classical 

representation theory and then uses it as a grid through which to interpret Artifact, 

a ballet that gives a significant space of play to language. 

I 

From the 1920s to the 1990s 

philosophical, literary, and 

choreographic modernity in Western 

Europe, the United States, and 

Latin America drew critically and 

artistically on 17th-century ideas 

and forms. Frequently, the aim was to 

seek an alternative to classical (often 

understood as official) representation 

in literary, visual, and performance 

culture, but also to grasp the modernity 

of the critique as always already internal 

to classical theories of language, 

representation, and movement. 2 At the 

same time, this intellectual and artistic 

tendency rediscovered neglected 

aspects of 17th-century performance 

that shed light on 20th-century avantgarde 

aesthetics. 3 In both cases, the 

17th century was conceived of as a if 

not the origin of modern power and 

representation, but also as a historically 

grounded alternative critique of 

contemporary manifestations of this 

power. Anti-bourgeois resistance to 

normative classicism and to doctrinaire 

modernism alike could be called 

“baroque modernity.” 

In “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward 

a Theory of Postmodernism” (1980), 

Craig Owens argued that postmodern 

art was allegorical. His references 


89


to Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des 

deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), which 

had appeared in English translation 

three years earlier in 1977 as The 

Origin of German Tragic Drama, made 

allegory a code word for the baroque 

as a contemporary issue of art practice. 

Owens found allegory in a variety of 

contemporary art strategies, including 

“appropriation, site specificity, 

impermanence, accumulation, 

discursivity, [and] hybridization” (p. 

75). One dance example he gave was 

Trisha Brown‘s Primary Accumulation 

(1972). From a prone position, Brown 

moved isolated parts of her body in 

repetitive sequence, always mindful 

to recap the sequence before each 

added variation. If accumulation was 

allegorical for Owens it was figural too, 

because he understood allegory as the 

“rewriting [of] a primary text in terms 

of its figural meaning” (p. 69). Each 

added movement variation, coming as it 

did at the end of the already established 

sequence, rewrote the primary 

movement. Brown’s sequence was an 

evolving primary text. Furthermore, 

adding “another meaning to the image,” 

was “the model of all commentary, all 

critique” in Owens’s terms (p. 69). In 

addition to accumulation as both figural 

and critical allegory, “a conviction of the 

remoteness of the past, and a desire to 

redeem it for the present . . .” (p. 68) was 

an accompaniment. The accumulation of 

signs of the baroque that Owens amassed 

in this essay at the dawn of the 1980s 

did not coalesce critically. But, the essay 

announced the role artistic production 

of the 1980s would take in the ongoing 

project of baroque modernity. 

90 

Rather than cite baroque theory 

with Benjamin’s theory of allegory in 

the 1920s and in postmodern dance 

of the 1960s, I shall turn to early 

poststructuralist theory in France 

between the mid 1960s and mid 

1970s and choreographic practice of 

the 1980s. 4 I understand the 1980s as 

the baroque decade of contemporary 

choreography par excellence in Western 

Europe and the United States. Some 

examples (in chronological order) of 

baroque-influenced choreography 

include David Gordon’s Trying Times 

(1982), William Forsythe’s Artifact 

(1984), Dominque Bagouet’s Déserts 

d’amour (1984), Mark Franko’s Le 

Marbre Tremble (1986), John Kelly’s Find 

My Way Home (1988), Jarva Yuotonin’s 

Pathétique (1989), Mark Morris’s Dido 

and Aeneas (1989), to which list I could 

add the much later Trisha Brown’s 

Orfeo (1998). Although choreographic 

baroquism as well as baroque dance 

reconstruction flourished in North 

American and continental dance in the 

1980s, it has existed in different guises 

throughout the 20th century (Franko 

2007a). 5 

I shall limit myself here to the 

postmodern baroque. Rather than 

the lateral slide between signs that 

characterizes Benjamin’s treatment of 

allegory, and which was influential for 

Jacques Derrida’s notion of the trace, I 

address the movement within the sign 

itself or the movement produced by the 

sign, as analyzed by Michel Foucault 

and Louis Marin on the basis of 17thcentury 

language theory. I then turn to 

the connections between the theory of 

movement within the sign--the sign’s 


expressivity and corporeality--and 

William Forsythe’s evening-length ballet 

Artifact created for Ballet Frankfurt in 

1984. Taking its inspiration from 17thcentury 

ballet spectacle, Artifact stages 

language and the body on a continuum 

that also raises questions of movement, 

the sign, and representation. 6 Further, 

Artifact engages in a critique of ballet 

as a classical system of representation 

while also envisioning it as generative 

of resistant spaces of representation. 7 

I realize that I am linking the 

choreography of an American artist 

working in Germany with French 

theory. William Forsythe, however, was 

and is a reader of Michel Foucault and 

was hence influenced by these ideas 

(Franko 2010). 

II 

The visual and performative concept 

of the baroque had to be wrested in 

France during the 1950s and 1960s 

from the dominant and monolithic view 

of the French 17th-century culture as 

exclusively neoclassical. The baroque, 

initially identified with the reign of Louis 

XIII in the first half of the 17th century 

(Rousset 1954; Tapié 1967, 1980) as a 

forgotten alternative to neoclassicism 

that had chronologically preceded 

neoclassicism but was then entirely 

eclipsed by it, became transformed 

under poststructuralism into a parasitic 

force below the surface of neoclassicism 

that furnished a model for modernity. 8 

By 1967 Guy Debord could claim: “The 

sometimes excessive importance taken 

on in modern discussions of aesthetics 

by the concept of the baroque reflects a 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

growing awareness of the impossibility 

of classicism in art . . .” (1995, p. 134). 

Between 1966 and 1975, Michel 

Foucault (1966) and Louis Marin (1975) 

addressed the body and language-movement 

as sign--in their respective 

analyses of general grammar in La 

logique de Port-Royal. 9 Foucault’s Les 

mots et les choses (1966) and Marin’s 

La Critique du Discours (1975) present a 

striking intersection between their early 

work. 10 Taken together, these works 

delineate a position on representation 

that could be characterized as 

poststructuralist, and in so doing they 

also delineate a generative connection 

between critical examination of 17thcentury 

theories of representation and 

poststructuralist aesthetics. They are 

poststructuralist at the very least in that 

they are implicitly critical of structural 

linguistics that had grown from the 

work of Ferdinand de Saussure. In 

examining the differences between the 

analyses of Foucault and Marin, I intend 

to discern where the problematic of 

movement/gesture invests the critical 

philosophy of language such that the 

subject of art displaces the focus on 

linguistic communication per se. 

Although neither author isolated the 

baroque as an issue in the context of 

17th-century general grammar, Marin 

was to do so elsewhere; Foucault’s 

friend and colleague Gilles Deleuze 

did so in Le pli, originally published in 

French in 1988 (1993). Nevertheless, 

their seminal critiques of classical 

representation underline that the 

baroque phenomenon in the French 

context operates as an internal critique 

of neoclassicism, and hence of classical 


91


representation or mimesis as such. 

I shall be particularly vigilant to the 

way a language-body and a bodylanguage 

emerge to overcome the 

impasse of general grammar (Marin) 

and to theorize a postclassical theory 

of representation. 

92 

III 

As a critical concept in the French 

intellectual context, the baroque implies 

that normative classicism was and is a 

fiction. In terms of the philosophy of 

language, that fiction is what Foucault 

calls the “reciprocal kinship between 

knowledge and language” (1970, p. 

89). 11 “In the Classical age,” wrote 

Foucault, “knowing and speaking are 

interwoven in the same fabric” (p. 

88). 12 It is this fiction about language- 

-that the representation it affords 

guarantees the truth of the content 

it conveys--that undergirds the 

reflexivity of the classical episteme. 

For Marin, “Language and thought 

will be linked like the two faces of 

one reality,” which is “man in his 

expressivity.” 13 This simultaneity or 

duplication (dédoublement) of truth 

and representation is, for Marin, 

expressive. Poststructural aesthetic 

thought is resolutely anti-expressive 

for this reason (Murray 1997). 

Representation originates in the 

subject for Marin, and more precisely in 

the mental image the subject’s thought 

produces. Here, Marin introduces the 

image into the relationship between 

knowing and speaking. Another 

way of saying this is, “the sign is 

(a) representation” (“le signe est la 

representation…”) (1975, p. 9).Marin’s 

model of the classical sign is as follows: 

Esprit ______ idée ________ signe ________ chose14 

Between the mind and the sign is an 

idea. This idea is a representation of the 

thing: a mental image. Hence, every sign 

being a representation of an idea, which 

is itself the representation of a thing, is 

the representation of a representation. 

In this sense, the sign always introduces 

duplication. It is also true, continues 

Marin, that “the representation [is a] 

sign” (“…et la représentation, signe”) (p. 

9). “The sign is representation, and the 

representation, sign.” 15 “If the sign, and 

in particular the word,” he specifies, “is 

customarily linked to the idea, a second 

connection slips in: that of the thing and 

the idea” (p. 47). 16 Marin cites Arnauld 

and Nicole: “It is necessary to consider 

in the Logic ideas joined to words, and 

words joined to ideas” (p. 47). 17 Hence, 

concludes Marin, the sign is in actuality 

an idea-thing. It is in this way that the 

classical episteme can be founded on a 

belief in the equivalence of knowledge 

expressed and truth in the mind: the 

sign is the glue that aligns the mental 

image with objective reality. 

The sign is an idea-thing because it 

encompasses both the subject’s way of 

being (“esprit” in the diagram) and the 

formal reality of the idea, which is the 

representation of an objective reality. 

Precisely for this reason, the sign 

appears to act twice: it stands both for 

the thing it represents and the idea of 

the thing in the mind of the subject who 

mobilizes the sign (the sign “opère un 


dédoublement”): “The sign is a thing that 

represents an idea, which idea is itself 

the representation of a thing” (1979). 18 

Between the subject, language, and 

reality emerges the (mental) image as 

an integral part of representation, and 

the role of the subject in representation. 

The sign is a thing--a piece of linguistic 

materiality--that can represent another 

thing (a piece of objective reality) 

through its association with a mental 

image. Marin implicitly critiques 

Saussurian linguistics, which deals 

exclusively in acoustic images, not in 

mental images. The sign shares the 

stage with the mental image. Marin, in 

other terms, offers us the linguistic sign 

as an effect of anamorphosis between 

thing and image. 

Foucault also speaks of duplication 

(dédoublement), but places duplication 

structurally within the representation 

itself: “Since it [general grammar] makes 

language visible as a representation 

that is the articulation of another 

representation . . . its subject is the 

interior duplication existing within 

representation” (p. 91). 19 The sign exists 

in its own right as a thing because, as 

Marin points out, it is “without visible 

relationship to what it represents” 

(“sans rapport visible avec ce qu’il 

représente”) (1975, p. 60). The sign 

itself is visible, but not transparently so: 

we do not see through it to the object 

it represents. On the other hand, the 

idea in the mind has “a visible relation 

to what it represents (“a un rapport 

visible avec ce qu’elle représente”). 

Yet, the image in the mind is invisible. 

Representation presupposes the 

absence of the thing represented (be 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

it the referent of objective reality or 

the mental image) and the visibility of 

that which takes its place: the linguistic 

sign. Hence, for Foucault, substitution is 

the second principle of representation. 

The sign is a thing that takes the place 

of another thing, but that works like an 

idea (p. 60). 20 

To say that the sign is a representation is 

to say that despite being twice removed 

from the object, it still maintains the 

illusion or the effect of transparency. 

This apparent transparency links the 

subject both to the sign and to the thing 

represented, and creates the properly 

ideological sense of the seamless closure 

of knowledge and representation. To 

reverse the formula, as Marin does, and 

say that the representation is a sign, is to 

say that all representations work against 

their own supposed transparency-against 

their own merging of image and 

truth--because they substitute image 

and truth with a certain ordering in a 

space proper to itself, a space foreign to 

the subject and, hence, an unexpressive 

space. 

Marin points to Arnauld and Nicole’s 

discussion of the Eucharist as a solution 

to the problem of representation. The 

bread and the wine--these “things”--are 

proposed by the Eucharist as symbols 

of the body and blood of Christ, but 

also as his corporeal presence through 

the words: “This is my body.” “The 

thing as sign here is at once effect 

and symptom, symbol and image” 

(1975, p. 54). Transubstantiation, 

a phenomenon in which language 

produces a “real” body as an effect of 

representation, produces the image 

of a body-language as the guarantee 


93


of the seamless joining of truth and 

representation. The sign’s transparency 

is redeemed as a body that emerges 

from the verb. While this solution is 

magical, it is also performative. Bodylanguage 

facilitates the incarnation of 

the image. In incarnation language as 

materiality gives way to that which it 

represents. Incarnation is ultimately 

the redemption of language as image 

that weds truth to representation. 

To recognize its religious and/or 

ideological character does not obscure 

its mechanism. Although Marin refers 

to it as “a body and a ‘real’ body,” I shall 

refer to it as imaginary. 

The specificity of language for 

Foucault, on the other hand, is the result 

of its successive (and hence temporally 

linear character), which works against 

the image: “It is here that the peculiar 

property of language resides . . . . It 

replaces the simultaneous comparison 

of parts (or magnitudes) with an order 

whose degrees must be traversed one 

after the other. It is in this strict sense 

that language is an analysis of thought: 

not a simple patterning, but a profound 

establishment of order in space” (pp. 

82-83). 21 It is precisely the reality of this 

ordering in/of space that undercuts the 

classical episteme’s view of language 

that weds truth to representation. 

Foucault removes representation from 

the mental imaging framework of the 

subject that had constituted one pole 

of Marin’s model, and places it in space 

as a grammatical and tropological 

phenomenon. There is, in other terms, 

a profound discrepancy in language 

embodied in substitution, which 

attempts to replace the simultaneity 

94 

of the mental image with a succession 

of signs: “General grammar is the 

study of verbal order in its relation to 

the simultaneity that it is its task to 

represent” (p. 83). 22 

The unspoken truth of general 

grammar is that language is corporeal 

because it exists in both space and 

time. Time is the order of the subject 

but space is the order of the body. 

The sense here of corporeal is neither 

energetic nor organic. Language, like 

the body, can be moved from place to 

place and made to assume a variety 

of shapes and figures. 23 The body, like 

words, is an instrument of meaning, 

and the linguistic chain is “corporeal” 

once we acknowledge its alphabetical 

nature. Once language is acknowledged 

to exist in space rather than in the ideal 

representational space of the mind, the 

word diminishes in expressive value in 

favor of its tropological value: the word 

becomes tantamount to a letter. 

Language (more particularly 

discourse) as a spatializing analytics, 

for Foucault, calls of necessity for 

“alphabetic writing”: “[A]lphabetic 

writing, by abandoning the attempt to 

draw the representation, transposes 

into its analysis of sounds the rules 

that are valid for reason itself. So that 

it does not matter that letters do not 

represent ideas, since they can be 

combined together in the same way as 

ideas, and ideas can be linked together 

and disjoined just like the letters of the 

alphabet” (p. 112). 24 Foucault continues, 

that “ . . .exactly in that fold of words 

where analysis and space meet” we 

come upon “the fundamental relation 

between space and language” (pp. 112- 


113). 25 This is not an “expressive” but a 

discursive relation. Discourse, in other 

terms, is not embodied in the sonorous 

voice but in writing, which for this very 

reason is likened to a body. Discursivity 

renders language’s “body” visible as a 

materiality rather than as transparent 

intent. The effect of this emphasis on 

succession in the alphabetical view of 

representation is to remove the body 

from vocal conceptions of movement 

and hence from expressive principles 

based on the idea-thing deriving from 

the subject. The body’s space becomes 

more properly the space of the written 

character, the gramma, which places 

it in the symbolic order: the body 

becomes the subject of space rather 

than of breath. 26 The body is drawn 

into this scheme metaphorically as a 

language-body. Foucault erases the 

expressive dimension of the classical 

sign. “For classical thought, language 

begins not with expression but with 

discourse” (p. 92). 27 

It is this view of the body that stands at 

the opposite pole of transubstantiation 

as a body-of-meaning dressed as 

the real. With substitution is thus 

introduced the importance of spacing 

and spatialization. The function of 

analysis (commentary and critique) 

enters into tension with representation 

understood as the simultaneity of the 

idea as mental image with the thing 

existing in the world. Returning to 

Owens’s baroque model, we might 

say that expressive simultaneity is 

part of the past to be restored--the 

premise without which there can be 

no coherent critique--whereas analysis 

and/or commentary furnishes the 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

figural dimension, which brings new 

meaning to the primary text. The point, 

however, is not that one conception 

of language precedes or follows the 

other historically, but that both exist 

simultaneously as ideological and 

operational factors. This simultaneity 

is itself a doubling, which contains 

contradictory pulls within it. 

Marin speaks of “a compensatory 

movement between presence and 

invisibility on the one hand, absence 

and visibility on the other” (p. 60). 28 In 

other terms, every representation entails 

a compensatory movement between 

doubling and substitution, simultaneity 

and succession, a movement internal to 

the sign itself. Movement compensates 

for the discrepancy between bodylanguage 

and language-body. The 

cohabitation of simultaneity and 

substitution, expressivity and analysis, 

constitutes the sign as a contrapuntal 

structure: it is traversed with contrary 

vectors of energy. Every sign is an ideathing 

in which we find duplication and 

substitution, expression and analysis, 

simultaneity and succession. The 

endpoint of doubling is incarnation 

whereas the endpoint of substitution 

is alphabetization. 

The respective emphases placed by 

Foucault and Marin on body-language 

and language-body--the alphabetical 

body as “fragment of ambiguous space” 

(“fragment d’espace ambigu”) (p. 

314; p. 325) and the expressive body 

in which the verbal and the figural 

encounter the sacred as the “time” of 

their performance (p. 77)--stage the 

theatrical body in an epistemic shift in 

the 17th century. 


95


The poststructuralist analysis of 17thcentury 

language theory has applications 

to ballet, which itself replicates the 

coordinates of the classical sign and its 

critique: ballet is both expressive and 

alphabetical. The balletic sign is forged 

from this very tension. In ballet, we 

observe the body image as a mode of 

being of the subject and, at one and the 

same time, as an analysis of corporeality 

in the axiomatized order of space. 

These two tendencies are in historical 

and conceptual counterpoint to one 

another. No other contemporary ballet 

choreographer makes us more aware 

of this counterpoint as a productive 

performative principle and a product 

of choreographic analysis than William 

Forsythe. No other work of Forsythe’s 

more directly addresses this historicaltheoretical 

complex of ideas with direct 

reference to language than Artifact 

(1984). 29 

Artifact is the first of Forsythe’s ballets 

to constitute, in Gerald Siegmund’s 

96 

IV 

ARTIFACT 

Language Model 

SEE SAW 

HEAR HEARD 

THINK THOUGHT 

SAY SAID 

DO DID 

ALWAYS NEVER 

phase, an “Auseindersetzung mit der 

Tanzgeschichte” (a productive argument 

with dance history) (2004, p. 33). Indeed, 

Artifact provides a critically conscious 

and historically informed vision of ballet 

spectacle, e.g., as a form of theatricality 

that, until the late 18th century, actually 

included the spoken word (Franko 

2009). Artifact is itself the closest thing 

imaginable to a poststructuralist ballet 

in that it returns to the 17th-century to 

both articulate and critique the theory of 

meaning in the linguistic and corporeal 

representation, which is classical ballet. 

Artifact is distinguished not only for its 

extensive use of language, but because 

the work itself was generated from a 

“Language Model.” 30 My approach to this 

highly complex evening-length work will 

be to describe its concurrent deployment 

of movement and language along the axis 

of the historical theory of language and 

its critique. 31 The language model takes 

the form of a diagram with two columns 

listing the key words of the ballet’s text. 

FORGET REMEMBER 

OUTSIDE INSIDE 

ROCKS 

DIRT 

DUST 

SAND 

SOOT 


On the left side we read: SEE, HEAR, 

THINK, SAY, DO; on the right side: 

SAW, HEARD, THOUGHT, SAID, DID. 

These are the modalities of present 

and past that structure the verbs used 

in the ballet. Despite the lack of any 

coherent narrative, there is an anxiety 

conveyed throughout Artifact about 

the relation of thought and image to 

representation in a sender-receiver 

model (to use linguistic terms) that is 

adapted to spectacle and acted out in 

a spectacular framework. Below this 

first box in the language model, we 

find three other governing polarities: 

ALWAYS-NEVER and OUTSIDE-INSIDE 

are recurrent adverbial modifiers; 

FORGET-REMEMBER are commands 

that make the use of present and past 

with respect to the five verbs obsessive. 

ALWAYS and NEVER tend to introduce 

doubts as to the nature of the action 

we perceive and the “story” sought by 

the protagonists, while OUTSIDE and 

INSIDE refer to the audience and/or 

the space off-stage with respect to the 

perspective-oriented proscenium stage. 

The architectural space of the theater 

and the orthogonal choreographic use 

of space it imposes become the uneasy 

scene for the transmission of ideas in 

time. At the bottom of the diagram are the 

five nouns: ROCKS, DIRT, DUST, SAND, 

and SOOT. These words formulaically 

intoned appear to contradict the energy 

of combinatory inventiveness to which 

the other alternatives are DEVOTED. 

Indeed, the language model indicates 

structured improvisation rather than 

set text. These improvisations--for 

example: “you think you thought you 

saw”--tend to undermine or at least 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

cast doubt on the dictum: “Language 

and thought will be linked like the two 

faces of one reality”, which is “man in his 

expressivity.” 32 The permutations of the 

language model are almost impossible 

to follow for the spectator. The word 

games wash over the audience with 

the vertiginous rapidity of movement 

leading the eye constantly in new 

directions. Words, like movement, are 

material in a textual and choreographic 

labyrinth for endlessly renewed 

combinations. 33 

Despite the fact that Artifact appears 

bathed in words there are only two 

speaking characters: Person with 

Historical Costume and Person with 

Megaphone. Person with Historical 

Costume is a woman dressed in a 

pseudo-baroque gown and suggesting 

a 19th-century Fairy God Mother from 

Charles Perrault’s Tales (Fig. 1). With 

this allusion, Forsythe connects the 

historical meditations of Artifact to the 

19th-century story ballet. Person with 

Megaphone has no rhetorical presence; 

he seems an untrained and aging body 

on the ballet stage without a voice or 

a body to “project” to the audience. 

His gravelly voice is captured in and 

conveyed through a megaphone, which 

creates a kind of muttering echo in 

the background of the historical figure 

(Fig. 2). The vocal delivery of Person 

in Historical Costume as mistress of 

ceremonies--she initially addresses the 

audience: “Good evening! Remember 

me?”--is presentational and cloyingly 

patronizing. Her gestures scan the 

rhythm of her words and her vocal 

inflections in a way that suggest baroque 

declamation as rhetorical scansion of 


97


thought. That is, her gestures are not 

mimetic but serve to aid in the delivery 

of the idea. Person with Megaphone is 

the polar opposite: an older man, a nondancer, 

in contemporary street clothes 

with a megaphone in hand. She is not 

only meant to be seen, but is the center 

of attention; he is a back-stage figure 

whose lack of aesthetic appeal and 

period style clashes with her. The nonspeaking 

roles include OTHER PERSON, 

a Kunstfigur (fictional character) of 

uncertain gender with metallized skin 

and short-cropped hair friséed like Lee 

Miller’s as the classical statue in Jean 

Cocteau’s film Blood of a Poet (Fig. 3). 

Other Person appears to be the ballet 

dancer as abstraction. 34 

Christel Römer (1993) calls Other 

Person a Kunstfigur, but does not 

elaborate on her use of this term. I 

understand Kunstfigur in reference 

to Oskar Schlemmer’s designs for 

modernist allegorical dance figures 

inspired by the 17th-century court 

ballet: these figures embody certain 

qualities of, or tensions within, theatrical 

movement (Franko 1993). S/he is a 

reminder that ballet historically belongs 

to an allegorical rather than a symbolic 

order. The allegorical order is a visual 

order in which language itself can easily 

become a form of visual communication 

through the motif of writing. Person 

with Historical Costume functions 

on the opposite premise: language 

structures dance, and language is, in 

Lacanian terms, part of the symbolic 

order. Her language, however, is always 

in jeopardy of opacity as vocal gesture. 

Following the conceit of the allegorical 

structure of court ballet, we could add 

98 

that these three characters themselves 

form a Lacanian allegory: the Symbolic 

(Person with Historical Costume), the 

Imaginary (Other Person), and the Real 

(Person with Megaphone). The Person 

with Historical Costume fights for the 

symbolic consistency of theatrical 

experience through her expressive 

intent; the Other Person is mute and 

exists on the margins of this meaning 

to lead the Corps de Ballet; the Person 

with Megaphone does not at first belong 

to the visual universe of the ballet and 

embodies the unattainable real. He is 

linked to the Corps de Ballet in that they 

too are in contemporary dance garb. 

“In their green costumes they barely 

stand out from the dark background. 

From the rows of the orchestra, radial 

spotlights shine and put a veil of light on 

the dancers. They are not recognizable 

as persons, but are dancing figures, 

depersonalized.” 35 

In order to flesh out the symbolic 

import of Person with Historical 

Costume, consider that the relation 

of linguistic representation to truth 

in 17th-century general grammar is 

replicated in the proscenium box of the 

classical stage, which is a mimetic space 

cut off from the external world where 

reality is mirrored as a compelling 

experience of the present. In order 

to maintain the illusion of reality, the 

theater must operate according to the 

architectural boundaries of the outside 

and the inside. The spatial coordinates of 

classical theatrical mimesis--what Luce 

Irigaray calls the “symmetrical closure 

of this theater” or the stage setup-is 

Artifact’s starting point (Murray, p. 

70). As André Green notes: “ . . . [T]here 


occurs a projection of the relationship 

between theatrical space and the space 

of the world on to the theatrical space, 

itself split into a visible theatrical 

space (the space of the stage) and an 

invisible theatrical space (the space 

offstage)” (Murray, p. 139). The present 

of the performance that takes place 

on the inside is nonetheless elusive. 

Person in Historical Costume taunts the 

audience with phrases like “You think 

you thought you saw,” which suggest 

not only the difficulty of perception, but 

also the uncertain role of memory in 

the retention of the present: her words 

make the space of representation an 

unstable one. 

The invitation of Person with 

Historical Costume to the audience to 

“step inside” nevertheless establishes 

the stage space within the three walls 

of the theater as theoretically “inside.” 

Only the performers step in this space: 

the stepping of the audience is purely 

visual and imaginary. This is the space 

of representation (in French, both 

representation and performance) 

in which, as with language theory in 

general grammar, what is represented 

will by definition be what is true. Hence, 

the role of Person with Historical 

Costume as subject--originator of the 

sign as idea-thing, with her anxiety 

about past and present--is foregrounded 

against the depersonalized dancers. 

Three items of the Language Model 

for Artifact--SEE, THINK, and SAY-correspond 

to Marin’s diagram of the 

sign in which the thing SEEn becomes 

an idea in the mind (THINK), which 

itself is a representation: a sign to be 

used in speech (SAY). 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Transposed to the theatrical setup, 

the role of Person with Historical 

Costume is to speak and to be heard 

by the audience, which occupies the 

outside of the theatrical “box.” The stage 

in darkness, with the exception of a light 

box in the floor, underscores this sense 

of the inside and the outside as unstable 

boundaries bequeathed us by history. 

Constantly in a process of reversal, they 

have the structure of the fold, described 

by Deleuze (1993), as axiomatic for the 

baroque. The dialectic between inside 

and outside is the very condition of the 

baroque, which itself is a variant of the 

critique of classical representation. Yet, 

at least in principle, these two realms 

must remain differentiated; their 

continued differentiation constitutes 

their artifactual nature. As Person 

with Megaphone says at the start: 

“She stepped outside and she always 

saw it. She stepped inside and she 

always said it.” The inside is the space 

of representation that can only be seen 

from without; the outside is the space 

of reception that must be projected 

from within on the model of the voice. 

The regime of seeing and hearing is 

“outside” as opposed to saying and 

doing, which are “inside.” Inside is the 

space of the stage as a representational 

container; “outside” is the space of 

representation for the audience. But, 

“outside” is also the space of the world 

outside of representation, the space 

of history strewn with rocks, dirt, 

dust, sand, and soot. The lines “I never 

think rocks . . . I never hear sand . . . I 

never say dust” indicate that history 

and spectacle are incommensurable. 

Spectacle is sundered from history as 


99


decay (Vergänglichkeit in Benjamin’s 

terms), ruins, and fragments. Yet, 

the role of light as a blinding force 

in competition with darkness, of 

choreography breaching the orthogonal 

use of space with diagonals reaching 

beyond the confines of the proscenium, 

the reminder of the existence of dust, 

and the periodic dropping of the firewall 

during the double duet of Part II all 

conspire to transgress this distinction 

between inside and outside. 

The geometrical formations of the 

Corps de Ballet during the double duet to 

Bach’s Chaconne in D minor will always 

remind us that the disciplinary order 

of ballet aligned itself historically with 

the symbolic order. “Male and female 

dancers in skin-colored suits form a 

square, cued by a woman in white. Rigid 

rows, virtuosity in ballet dance, pas de 

deux, artistically arranged: ballet as a 

piece of art in a warm, yellow light.” 36 The 

two duets, which deserve an analysis 

of their own, are indeed virtuosic, and 

also patently expressive. Without any 

romantic tinge, the heterosexually 

paired couples appear to be in a contest, 

and their treatment of each other 

borders on violence while remaining 

perfectly cooperative in the execution 

of off-center balances, promenades, and 

lifts. Here, Forsythe displays his ability 

to innovate with traditional ballet 

vocabulary (the women on pointe) 

in partnering while injecting a very 

contemporary sense of relationships 

as disphoric rather than euphoric. 

This quality of relationship prefigures 

the end of the work when Person in 


Megaphone fight, destroy the set, and 

100 

breach the distinction between inside 

and outside with their language. Here, 

there is the hint of a relation between 

classical theories of representation and 

heterosexual normativity. 

In the Language Model, the remaining 

two terms--HEAR and DO-- correspond 

to the disciplinary order of movement: 

Other Person claps and the Corps de 

Ballet responds by replicating his/her 

gestures. Once the Corps de Ballet enters 

the stage to form a series of extended 

geometrical lines, a mirroring occurs 

between it and the Other Person. The 

dancers of the Corps see Other Person, 

and then do what they see Other Person 

doing. The port de bras of the Corps led 

by Other Person’s clapping introduces 

a grammatical and disciplinary quality 

to movement. This is the choreographic 

apparatus that corresponds to the stage 

setup. (Later in Artifact the clapping 

will have an interruptive force.) 

This disciplined adherence to 

geometry and the alphabetical figure 

cannot, however, be absolute, since 

the lines of bodies are too long to be 

contained with the “inside of the space” 

and yet extend off into the wings. The 

initial crossing of the stage by Other 

Person at the start also orients us to 

a transgressive diagonal trajectory 

intersecting the space off-stage, and 

leaving us “alone” for what seems like 

an undetermined length of time. 37 

The space of the stage is a space of 

representation in that it is a space both 

of visibility and invisibility. That Other 

Person also descends into a trap door 

in the stage floor from which s/he 

gestures, indicating that the Kunstfigur 

does not occupy space unequivocally 


as a symbolic order. Moreover, some of 

Other Person’s choreography in the trap 

(especially the movement of the hands 

and arms that emerge from below) is 

far more expressivist than classically 

formal and thus contrasts with Other 

Person as the symbolic representative 

of the Corps de Ballet, the singular 

embodiment of that collective entity 

that founds choreography as spectacle in 

the symbolic order. The Corps’ gestures 

are frequently designed to suggest 

the simulation of a sign language, the 

alphabet and grammar as an alternative 

to expressive movement. In this way, as 

well, the distinction between inside and 

outside is breached. More importantly, 

I should emphasize the distinction 

is not breached as an impossibility, 

but is breached to reveal the space of 

representation itself and the conditions 

through which it constructs meaning 

and posits truth. 

The initial invitation of Person with 

Historical Costume to “step inside”- 

-the Person with Megaphone says: 

“Forget the sand, forget the dirt, 

forget the rocks, forget….”--is an 

invitation to enter the symbolic order- 

-the space of representation as the 

stage setup--within which history as 

an accumulation of deathly ruins is 

suspended in favor of power (Franko, 

2007b). Rocks, etc., are the dust of 

history that we are constantly entreated 

to forget. (In this sense, the right side of 

the language model allies REMEMBER 

and INSIDE with NEVER (at least 

spatially), indicating that the symbolic 

order of the stage is a fiction and an 

impossibility. Hence, stepping inside 

always corresponds to remembering 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

rather than forgetting, to the present 

rather than the past. At the same time, 

Person with Historical Costume also 

enjoins us to “try not to forget.” The 

periodic injunctions about forgetting 

and remembering refer also to the 

unfolding of the performance itself in 

its receding present. Performance, like 

language, proceeds linearly and hence 

poses challenges to the expressive 

certainty it presumably embodies. But, 

to remember is also to forget: the first 

line of Person with Historical Costume is 

a question to the audience: “Remember 

me?” When we remember her, we forget 

the dustbin of history and bask in the 

compelling power of the stage setup. 

“Always” and “never” underline the 

incompatibility between the expressive 

and the alphabetical (visually figural) 

signifying theatrical and choreographic 

orders that nonetheless coexist, and 

whose tension generates the spectacle 

of movement. Despite the architectural 

stability of the theater itself, we are 

constantly being invited to step inside 

and outside, to enter and leave the fold 

of representation rendered not only 

by architectural space as such, but by 

the use of light and darkness as well 

as the choreographic patterns of the 

work, which are often obscured or only 

partially visible. 38 

I shall conclude with a few remarks 

on the third part of Artifact. The stage 

is filled with flats, free standing screens 

inscribed with calligraphic scribbles 

in black ink. The scene is chaotic with 

dancers improvising both before 

and behind the screens. Person with 

Historical Costume is screaming “Step 

inside!” after which she goes behind one 


101


of the flats and pushes it over. Behind it 

we find a dancer. The flats are arranged 

in a diagonal line across the stage, 

and Person with Historical Costume 

moves along this diagonal pushing the 

screens down until the unity of the 

stage appears definitively breached. We 

have a sense of the orthogonal theater 

in chaos with glimpses of backstage, 

and of un-choreographed action. The 

overturning of these flats reminds us 

of the fragility of the “inside,” as they so 

thinly mask what stands behind them. 

More importantly, this is the scene of 

a violent quarrel between Person with 


Megaphone. Siegmund (2004, p. 33) 

views it as the inverse of a marriage of 

state, which many court ballets were 

designed to celebrate. We could also 

view the scene allegorically as the 

destruction of the alliance between the 

symbolic order of language and the real, 

an alliance assumed to be inevitable in 

classical language theory. The break 

up occurs when the two proponents of 

the spoken word in the ballet confront 

and oppose one another. Caspersen’s 

notes refer to this as the betrayal, and 

the only point at which “you” no longer 

interpellates the audience, but another 

actor on stage. 39 The fight reaches fever 

pitch with Person in Historical Costume 

struggling to get out of her dress 

102 

and the two screaming at each other 

hysterically. 

The language-body is an artifact, 

expressively fragmented and 

syntactically deprived of the impulse 

to move through the contrivances of its 

own grammar. (fig. 4). Body-language 

subsists as the transubstantiation of 

word into body, but at the level not 

of the sacrament but of rage. Just 

as Foucault and Marin unveiled the 

way linguistic representation undoes 

the classical ideal of language as the 

marriage of representation and truth, 

so Forsythe demonstrates how this 

classical episteme is undermined in 

and by theatrical representation. This 

is both because a concept of the body 

is necessary to an understanding of 

language theory and because dance 

is invested with the syntactical and 

alphabetical qualities of language. 

Furthermore, the very visual processes 

of classical representation were worked 

out in terms of the linear perspective 

of the procenium stage. The languagebody 

and body-language intersect 

precisely where choreographic 

classicism becomes impossible, and 

this could only be thought through and 

realized in choreographic practice in the 

1980s when a deconstructive approach 

to classical ballet within the grid of the 

classical stage became possible. 

Endnotes: 

1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the Collège International de la Philosophie 

(Paris) in the framework of the seminar “La Métaphysique du mouvement,” organized by 

Franz-Anton Cramer (and held in Berlin and Paris between 2008 and 2009). 

2 Noam Chomsky found the basis for generative grammar in the 17th century when he 

acknowledged that “the distinction between deep and surface structure, in the sense in which 

these terms are used here, is drawn quite clearly in the Port-Royal Grammar” (1965, p. 199). 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

3 Peter Bürger has argued (1984, p. 68) that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of 17th-century 

allegory in his study of German tragic drama was only possible from the 20th-century avantgarde 

perspective. 

4 My intent is not to diminish the importance of Benjamin to 20th-century baroquism, but 

to locate distinct moments of baroque theory across the 20th century. Benjamin cannot be 

evacuated from these contexts. In the discussion of Forsythe’s Artifact with which I conclude 

this analysis, the Benjaminian motifs of the ruin, the fragment, and allegory in tension with 

the symbolic (rather than as accumulation) cannot be avoided. Issues of the relation of the 

Frankfurt School to French poststructuralism are beyond the scope of this paper. 

5 This essay is part of a larger study in progress to examine the baroque as a literary and 

philosophical concept in relation to choreography of the 17th and 20h century. 

6 Forsythe consulted with the Frankfurt School–influenced German theorist of historical 

dance Rudolf zur Lippe before he created Artifact. Personal communication with William 

Forsythe, 2000. 

7 My analysis of Artifact is indebted throughout to the work of Gerald Siegmund (2004, 2006), 

although I give greater importance to the interpretation of the text in the ballet. 

8 Victor L. Tapié’s Baroque et classicisme was first published in 1957. The history of the 

emergence of the baroque in 20th-century consciousness deserves a much more detailed 

analysis for which there is not space here. 

9 Particularly relevant in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses is the section “Parler,” pp. 92-136. 

Foucault also edited a critical edition of La logique de Port-Royal in 1967. Marin’s book, 

originally his doctoral thesis, has not been translated into English. All translations of it here 

are mine, and for the purposes of clarity I shall provide the French and English of both authors 

throughout this article. 

10 Marin and Foucault subsequently also had a common interest in utopias. Xavier Vert (2008) 

reveals connections between Marin’s Utopics: Spatial Games and Foucault’s discussion of 

heterotopia in the essay “Different Spaces” (1998). 

11 “L’appartenance réciproque du savoir et du langage” (1966, p. 103). 

12 “A l’âge classique, connaître et parler s’enchevêtrent dans la même trame” (p. 103). 

13 “Le langage et la pensée seront . . . liés comme les deux faces de la même réalité.” This reality 

for Marin is “l’homme dans son expressivité” (Marin, 1975, p. 40). 

14 This diagram is reproduced from class notes I took in Louis Marin’s seminar on historical 

discourse at Columbia University in 1975. 

15 “Le signe est la représentation, et la représentation, signe.” 

16 “En effet, si le signe, et en particulier le mot se lie par accoutumance à l’idée, une deuxième 

équivalence s’introduit subrepticement, celle de la chose et de l’idée.” 

17 “Il est nécessaire dans la Logique de considérer les idées jointes aux mots et les mots joints 

aux idées.” 

18 “Le signe est une chose qui représente une idée qui est elle-même la representation d’une 

chose.” 

19 “Puisqu’elle fait apparaître le langage comme une représentation qui en articule une autre . 

. . ce dont elle traite, c’est du dédoublement intérieur de la représentation” (p. 106). 

20 “Le signe est une chose qui prend la place d’une autre mais qui fonctionne comme une idée.” 

21 “Là reside le propre du langage, ce qui le distingue à la fois de la représentation (dont il n’est 

à son tour que la représentation) et des signes (auxquels il appartient sans autre privilège 

singulier)” (1966, p. 97). 


103


22 “La Grammaire generale, c’est l’étude de l’ordre verbal dans son rapport à la simultanéité 

qu’elle a pour charge de représenter” (1966, p. 97). 

23 It is not far from the definition we find of “body” in the Encyclopédie: “Corps, C’est une 

substance étendue et impenetrable, qui est purement passive d’elle-même, et indifferente au 

mouvement ou au repos, mais capable de toute sorte de mouvement, de figure, et de forme” 

(1988, vol. 4, p. 260). (“Body is an extended and impenetrable substance, which is purely 

passive in itself and indifferent both in movement and in repose, but capable of all sorts of 

movements, figures and forms.”) 

24 “L’alphabet représente mieux que tout autre exemple la spatialisation qui caractérise 

l’écriture. . . . Les lettres ont beau ne pas représenter les idées, elles se combinent entre elles 

comme les idées, et les idées se nouent et se dénouent comme les lettres de l’alphabet” (1966, 

p. 128). 

25 “[T]rès exactement en cette pliure des mots où l’analyse et l’espace se rejoignent . . . un 

rapport fondamental de l’espace et du langage” (p. 129). 

26 There are, of course, many resonances that cannot be explored here with Jacques Derrida’s 

Of Grammatology: “Visibility--a moment ago the theorem, here the theatre--is always that 

which, separating it from itself, breaches [entame] the living voice” (p. 306). 

27 Foucault defines discourse in these terms: “language in so far as it represents--language 

that names, patterns, combines and connects and disconnects things as it makes them visible 

in the transparency of words. In this role, language transforms the sequence of perceptions 

into a table, and cuts up the continuum of beings into a pattern of characters” (p. 311). “Le 

langage qui nomme, qui découpe, qui combine, qui noue et dénoue les choses, en les faisant 

voir dans la transparence des mots. En ce rôle, le langage transforme la suite des perceptions 

en tableau, et en retour décope le continu des êtres, en caractères” (pp. 321-322). 

28 “[U]n mouvement de compensation entre présence et invisibilité d’une part, absence et 

visibilité d’autre part”. 

29 Artifact received its premiere by the Ballet Frankurt, December 5, 1984, in Frankfurt. 

30 I thank William Forsythe and Ballet Frankfurt for allowing me to see Dana Casperson’s 

original notes for Artifact. Christel Römer (1993, p. 28) asserts: “ . . .[T]he structural principle 

of this work is clearly derived from the zone of speech.” 

31 My description and analysis is based on a live performance of Artifact I saw at Sadler’s Wells 

in London (2000) and on subsequent viewings of the work on video. The performance on 

the video housed at the Dance Collection is not identified, but may likely be the February 28, 

1992, performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris). 

32 “Le langage et la pensée seront . . . liés comme les deux faces de la même réalité.” Cette 

réalité pour Marin est “l’homme dans son expressivité” (Marin, 1975, p. 40). 

33 This explains the position of Gerald Siegmund (2004, p. 32) on the illogicality of language 

in Artifact: “ . . . schaffen die Sprecher durch die Komination der Wörte immer aberwitzigere 

Sätze, die zwar grammatikalisch korrekt, semantisch aber vollkommen unlogisch sind.” (“The 

speakers use word combinations to create absurd sentences that, although grammatically 

correct, are completely unlogical.”) 

34 Gerald Siegmund (2006, p. 244) has suggested that the Corps de Ballet constitutes in and of 

itself a fourth character in Artifact. 

35 Program notes for Artifact, Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing 

Arts at Lincoln Center (*MGZB. Forsythe, William. Programs). 

36 Ibidem. 

104 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

37 Valerie Briginshaw (2001, p. 190) cites architect Daniel Liebeskind on Forsythe’s use of 

space: “There are . . . particular diagonals which differentiate his view of space from the 

orthogonal spaces . . . so often the scenography of contemporary dance.” Briginshaw adds: 

“Orthogonal spaces, made up of straight lines and right angles, are examples of the ‘cues’ for 

reading and ordering space in a perspectival sense.” 

38 It is important to note here that Forsythe creates his own lighting design. 

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kann.” In: G. Siegmund (ed.). William Forsythe: Denken in Bewegung. Berlin: Henschel. 

---. 2006. Abwesenheit. Eine performative Äesthetik des Tanzes. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. 

Tapié, V. L. 1967. La France de Louis XIII et de Richelieu. Paris: Flammarion. 

---. 1980. Baroque et classicisme. Paris: Collection Pluriel. 

Vert, X. 2008. “Louis Marin en Utopie: fiction, idéologie et représentation.” In: Careri, G. 

(ed.). Louis Marin. Le pouvoir et ses représentations. Paris: INHA, pp. 53-75. 

Mark Franko 

35 West 92nd Street 7D 

New York, NY 10025 

USA 

markfranko@earthlink.net 

Fig. 1. Person with Historical Costume in Artifact (photo: Dominik Mentzos) 

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Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Fig. 2 Person with Megaphone in 

Artifact (photo: Dominik Mentzos) 

Fig. 3 Other Person in Artifact (photo: 

Dominik Mentzos) 

Fig. 4: The final variations of Artifact 

(photo: Dominik Mentzos) 


107

EMBODIMENTS 


The Embodiment of History at the Great Altar of 

Pergamon: The Power of Hellenistic Baroque 

108 


Evangelatou was awarded her B.A. in archaeology at the University of Ioannina, Greece, 

and studied museology and art conservation at the Universitá Internazionale dell’Arte, 

Florence. She received her diploma in art history from the University of East Anglia and 

her M.A. and Ph.D. in Byzantine art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Institutes 

that have supported her research include Dumbarton Oaks, the Princeton Program in 

Hellenic Studies and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She teaches Ancient Greek, 

Byzantine, and Islamic visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

The paper examines the most famous case of Hellenistic Baroque, the Great Altar 

of Pergamon, in order to suggest a new approach to its multivalent significance. 

Emphasis is placed on the synergy of sculpture and architecture for the creation 

of a sacred space that acquired its full potential through its interaction with the 

Hellenistic visitors. Their spatiotemporal experience of the monument defined 

their understanding of its political and cultural statements. It is suggested that 

this embodiment of meaning led the visitors to perceive the altar as a solidification 

of time and history and a visualization of past, present, and future. 

“It is not the body that realizes, but it is in the body that something is realized, 

through which the body itself becomes real or substantial” 

- Deleuze, 2006, p. 120. 

The Great Altar of Pergamon, created 

in the first half of the second century 

B.C. in the homonymous city of Asia 

Minor, can by justifiably considered the 

most representative and elaborate case 

of what scholars call the Hellenistic 

Baroque. 1 However, my main purpose 

in this paper is not to present those 

elements that justify the identification 

of baroque before the Baroque in the 

Pergamene monument. Rather, my 

intention is to emphasize previously 

unnoticed features of the altar that 

highlight its admirable complexity, its 

interaction with the Hellenistic visitor, 

and its function as a powerful political, 

religious, and cultural statement. In 

other words, I will discuss features 

of visual conception and perception 

that are also central in the creation 

and function of European Baroque 

monuments, but I will not attempt 

to draw extensive parallels that 

only specialists of the latter period 

could identify in a well-informed and 

systematic way. 2 After a brief historical 

introduction on Hellenistic Pergamon, 

I will make selective reference 


to iconographic, compositional, 

and stylistic aspects of the altar’s 

sculptures that contribute decisively 

to the construction of the monument’s 

meaning. Finally, I will examine the 

collaboration of architecture, sculpture, 

spatial design, and ritual for the creation 

of a sensorial experience that led to 

the embodiment of meaning by the 

Hellenistic participants while they were 

themselves absorbed in the body of the 

monument. I hope that this approach 

will be interesting to those specialists 

of European Baroque art who have been 

influenced or intrigued by Deleuze’s 

Fold. 3 

The Great Altar of Pergamon is one of 

the most famous and studied, yet still 

puzzling monuments of the Hellenistic 

period. 4 It was constructed in the first 

half of the second century B.C. on the 

acropolis of Pergamon, the Greek city 

of Asia Minor, in present-day Turkey, 

which was the capital of the Hellenistic 

kingdom of the Attalids. 5 The dynasty 

was founded by Philetairos (c. 343- 

263), son of Attalos and commander 

of the city of Pergamon during the 

power struggle between the successors 

of Alexander the Great, who divided 

among them the empire created by 

the Greek king of ancient Macedonia 

in the fourth century. During the early 

third century, as the royal families of 

the successors were embroiled in bitter 

wars, Philetairos took the opportunity 

to promote himself as independent 

ruler of Pergamon and used the 

immense funds of the city’s treasury 

entrusted to him by Alexander’s 

generals in order to advance his own 

goals. 6 Since Philetairos and his family 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

were newcomers in the political arena 

of the Hellenistic world, of obscure 

descent and with no connections to the 

royal houses of Alexander’s successors, 

and since the city of Pergamon was 

a relatively new foundation with no 

historical ties to the major cities of the 

Greek world, the Attalids had to promote 

their status and legitimize their claims 

as rulers through an intensive political 

campaign of cultural sponsorship and 

military victories. 7 Both Philetairos and 

the family members who succeeded 

him spent great sums of money to 

ensure alliances with other Greek cities 

and to fund defensive and offensive 

wars that expanded their territory, 

but above all to elevate Pergamon as 

a preeminent cultural center of the 

Greek world. 8 Myths were employed 

to further promote the Attalid political 

and cultural agenda. The claim that the 

progenitor of the dynasty and founder 

of Pergamon was Telephos, son of 

Herakles and the Arcadian princess 

Auge, provided a prestigious Greek 

lineage for the Attalids and their capital 

city. 9 In addition, the Pergamene rulers 

won a number of decisive victories 

against the Gauls, warrior tribes of Celtic 

origin that had invaded Asia Minor in 

the third century and posed a great 

threat to the Greek cities of the region. 

In Greek eyes, the Gauls were the new 

insolent barbarians who defied Greek 

supremacy and cultural superiority and 

should be defeated like the Persians 

before them. 10 It is already established 

in the literature that the Great Altar of 

Pergamon is a monumental expression 

of and tool for the promotion of the 

above Attalid concerns of political, 


109


cultural and military supremacy in the 

Greek world. 11 The following analysis 

will be set against this background. 

What is known today as the Great Altar 

of Pergamon is in fact the monumental 

precinct of an altar whose exact 

dedication remains unknown. 12 Most 

surviving fragments of the monument 

are kept today in the Pergamonmuseum 

in Berlin, where the complex is partially 

reconstructed (Fig. 1). Its original 

location was on a terrace inside the 

royal citadel of Pergamon, at the upper 

part of the acropolis (Fig. 2). 13 The 

Π-shaped monumental altar precinct 

consisted of a high podium with the 

Gigantomachy frieze, which supported 

an Ionic colonnaded courtyard with the 

Telephos frieze around the actual altar, 

accessible through a large stairway 

from the west. Free-standing statues 

of numerous figures stood between 

the columns at the exterior side of the 

colonnade and on the roof above. 14 

Although the most famous part of the 

monument today is the Gigantomachy 

frieze (Figs 1, 3), it is clear that the 

religious, political, and cultural function 

of this structure depended on the 

masterfully orchestrated interaction 

of all its parts. The monument should 

not be seen simply as a combination of 

architectural, sculptural, and painted 

parts, 15 but rather as a sacred space of 

multifaceted significance, its elements 

organically integrated to create a 

complete body which reaches its full 

potential in interaction with the bodies 

of the visitors. Before I can turn to 

this interaction, I will discuss some 

significant aspects of the monument’s 

parts, starting with the Gigantomachy. 

110 

This major event of ancient Greek 

mythology was considered the final 

battle of the Olympians against the 

forces of chaos and disorder, the unruly 

children of the primordial goddess 

Gaia. The extermination of the giants 

sealed the beginning of a new age of 

justice and order in the world, under 

the guidance of the Olympians led by 

Zeus. In ancient Greek literature and 

visual culture, it was customary to use 

the Gigantomachy as a metaphor for 

important contemporary conflicts that 

were cast into the antithesis of order 

versus disorder, justice versus injustice, 

entitlement versus usurpation, or 

simply superiority versus inferiority 

(Castriota, 1992, pp. 139-141). 16 A case 

well known in antiquity appeared in the 

sculptures of the Parthenon, constructed 

in 447-432 B.C. on the acropolis of 

Athens with money of the city’s allies 

in order to celebrate primarily the 

victory of the Athenians over Persia and 

therefore their supremacy in the Greek 

world. 17 On the Periclean monument, 

the insolent giants who were depicted 

like savages, dressed in animal skins 

and fighting with rocks and tree trunks, 

were probably an allusion to the 

Persians, constructed as the barbarian, 

uncivilized, arrogant invaders whom 

the Greeks defeated with divine help. 18 

Giants represented with the round 

shield of Greek hoplites could be a 

cautious reference to other Greeks 

whom Athenians increasingly treated as 

inferior subordinates, punishing them 

severely whenever they dared defy 

Athenian supremacy. 19 

The same double reference can be 

seen in the altar of Pergamon, where 


it has been observed that some giants 

are dressed in animal skins and fight 

with rocks and tree trunks or carry 

non-Greek armor, while others have 

helmets or shields that are recognizable 

as Greek, or even specifically carried by 

the armies of Alexander’s successors 

that were enemies of the Attalids (Fig. 

3, left). In addition, several giants are 

now clearly characterized as alien 

and inferior through their hybrid, 

half-human–half-animal forms (Fig. 

3, center). It is well know that ancient 

Greeks placed barbarians in the same 

category with animals, so it can be 

assumed that here the giants, many of 

whom crawl on snaky lower parts, are 

a reference to the non-Greek enemies 

of the Attalids, especially the Gauls. 20 

There is at least one such giant who 

bears a mustache, an ethnic feature of 

the Gauls known from contemporary 

Greek written sources and visual 

representations. 21 

It is worthy of notice that many giants 

bite their opponents in the same way 

that the sacred animals of the gods, 

but never the gods themselves, bite the 

giants (Fig. 3). 22 Scholars have drawn 

comparisons with Greek monuments 

of the fifth century where centaurs, 

another category of uncivilized 

creatures that Greeks used as 

metonyms for their barbarian enemies, 

also bite their Greek opponents who 

fight honorably according to the rules. 23 

The exact nature of these rules deserves 

attention: I believe a reference is made 

to athletic competitions, which were a 

quintessential component of ancient 

Greek culture and civic identity. 24 

In the fighting competition known 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

as pankration, or all-powerful, the 

only two moves that the opponents 

were forbidden to use under penalty 

of disqualification were biting and 

eye-gouging (Miller, 2004, p. 57). 

And indeed, next to biting the giants 

attempt eye-gouging on the Pergamon 

altar, which as far as I know is not 

attested in older surviving monuments 

(Fig. 3). 25 Pergamon had prominent 

training facilities and its own athletic 

competitions, established by the rulers 

in order to promote their cultural and 

political goals and reinforce communal 

identity and pride among the citizens. 26 

The improper ways in which the giants 

fight would not have been missed by 

ancient Greek viewers, reinforcing the 

identification of these figures with the 

uncivilized other. 

Another significant feature that 

scholars have observed in the 

Gigantomachy frieze is the fact that the 

passionate emotional expressions of 

baroque character are mostly confined 

to the giants and the animals, while 

the facial features of the gods are calm 

and composed, and only their clothes 

and their gestures reveal agitation. 

This obviously highlights emotional 

control as a supreme value of ancient 

Greek culture, but it also reinforces the 

victory of the confident powerful gods 

over their desperate opponents (Pollitt, 

1986, p. 105). 27 At the same time, the 

treatment of the composition, with 

dense overpopulated scenes, intense 

movements and deep relief, confers an 

air of urgency and utmost importance to 

this conflict, which becomes emblematic 

of all other conflicts but is also vividly 

present in front of the viewers. This 


111


brings me to the second part of my 

paper, relating the Gigantomachy to 

the Telephos frieze and the experience 

of embodiment that the ancient viewer 

would have undergone when visiting 

the monument. 

There are several aspects that 

differentiate the Telephos frieze from the 

Gigantomachy, for example its smaller 

size and chronological narrative. While 

the Gigantomachy is a continuous frieze 

of an active conflict with no beginning 

and end, the Telepheia narrates a 

story of separate episodes, unfolding 

in different times and places and with 

very different subjects. 28 A constant 

element in scholarly discussions of the 

Telephos frieze is the novel depiction of 

landscape and architectural elements 

and the illusion of spatial recession (Fig. 

4). 29 Stewart has perceptively observed 

that the special features of the Telephos 

frieze “serve a number of specifically 

narrative functions: to anchor the story 

in a definite spatiotemporal context (in 

our case, one the Pergamene spectator 

would often know intimately); to 

increase its power and credibility; 

and to promote the illusion that the 

spectator is an eyewitness to it…. Yet 

in the final analysis both landscape and 

personifications are two-edged swords. 

While they certainly contextualize 

the story and make it and its hero 

more relevant to the viewer, they also 

compromise the universality of heroic 

myth and to some extent relativize it. 

As always no ‘advance’ is ever cost-free” 

(1996, p. 42). 

In my opinion, it was exactly this 

specificity that was intended in the 

Telephos frieze, and was created 

112 

through the above visual components: 

the goal was to relate the newly 

founded city of Pergamon and its 

alleged ancient founder with specific 

locations of mainland Greece and Asia 

Minor that would support the claim 

of prestigious ancestry and historical 

significance. 30 Here the myth was not 

used primarily as a universal paradigm 

but on the contrary as historical and 

biographical account. I believe that the 

intention was not to create the illusion 

of events that were eyewitnessed by 

the ancient viewers in their own space, 

but of events that belonged to a specific 

spatiotemporal historical context and 

were therefore recorded as such through 

the medium of sculpture. Indeed, the 

frieze was viewed behind the colonnade 

that supported the protective roof 

above and created a certain distance 

from the viewers and interruptions 

in their continuous reading of the 

narrative. 31 The comparison with the 

Gigantomachy is most revealing in 

this respect. Although this primordial 

conflict was further removed from the 

viewers in terms of chronology and the 

nature of the protagonists (gods and 

giants rather than humans, fighting at 

the beginning of time rather than the 

time of the Trojan War), its treatment 

on the altar turned it into a real event 

unfolding before viewers who became 

eyewitnesses: in the Gigantomachy the 

total absence of landscape elements 

and the occupation of the entire frieze 

by a multitude of figures in high relief 

turns the monument itself into the 

background of the conflict and makes 

the sculpted figures present in the 

space of the viewer (Figs. 1, 3). 32 This 


impression is further supported by the 

unobstructed way the Gigantomachy 

can be read by the viewers walking 

in front of it and makes perfect sense 

considering the contemporary allusions 

of the composition. The Gigantomachy 

takes place everywhere but also 

here and now, because it is not just 

a cosmic event but a paradigm for 

contemporary conflicts, in this case the 

ongoing confrontation of the Attalids 

with the Gauls and other opponents. 

The atemporality of the Gigantomachy 

stemming from its cosmic significance 

makes it appropriate as a metaphor 

for any temporal conflict, while the 

historicity of the Telepheia keeps it 

anchored in the heroic past of Pergamon 

and links it to the present exactly as a 

historical model. 33 It is not a coincidence 

that the Gigantomachy is depicted as 

still evolving while the life of Telephos 

has a beginning and an end. 

If we now turn to the way ancient 

visitors would have experienced the 

monument while moving around 

and inside it, we can begin to 

unravel additional layers of meaning 

that depend on interaction and 

further reveal the multivalence and 

sophistication of the Great Altar and its 

parts. In fact, the process of embodied 

experience that was created when 

ancient viewers visited the monument 

or even more importantly participated 

in the rituals of sacrifice inside it makes 

the terms “visitor” and “viewer” or even 

“worshiper” totally inadequate. 34 The 

levels of interaction anticipated in the 

design and fulfilled in the life of the 

monument were intended to create a 

sacred space in which both the people 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

present and the monument itself 

were transformed by complementing 

each other’s significance. This will 

become more apparent in the following 

analysis, but in order to emphasize the 

point, instead of words like “viewer” 

or “visitor” I will use the Greek term 

“symmetexon” which can be loosely 

translated as “participant.” 35 In the 

following analysis, the symmetexontes 

who were equipped with the cultural 

and political awareness necessary for 

the fullest experience possible were the 

people of Pergamon themselves, but 

the message would not be lost on other 

visitors. 36 

The ancient symmetexontes would 

approach the monument from the 

east (Fig. 2, from right), first viewing 

its back side, which very much 

looked like an inverted Greek temple, 

with the colonnade on top and the 

Gigantomachy frieze below, and a 

multitude of statues looking out 

from the intercolumniations. 37 These 

elements alone would already demand 

the attention of the symmetexontes, 

emphasizing the importance of 

viewing. By its size and stylistic 

features as well as its location, closer 

to the symmetexontes than distant 

temple friezes, the Gigantomachy 

would immediately become a feature 

of importance to be carefully examined 

as the symmetexontes walked around 

the monument. At this point the frieze 

was at a higher level in relation to the 

symmetexontes, which emphasized that 

they operated on different dimensions, 

the historical human present and the 

mythistorical divine past. 38 However, 

as soon as the symmetexontes turned 


113


around the southwest or northwest 

corner of the monument and started 

ascending the stairway, their level 

would be gradually equated with 

that of the Gigantomachy, and they 

could see the sculpted figures actually 

climbing the stairs with them (Fig. 

1). This would create a common 

level of existence emphasizing the 

contemporary allusions of the mythical 

conflict. 39 When reaching the top of the 

staircase, the symmetexontes would be 

once more on a different level, this time 

above the Gigantomachy, which could 

be now perceived as the base of the 

altar with the story of Telephos around 

it. This phase of the experience could 

be read in various complementary 

ways. The mythistorical conflict of 

the Gigantomachy was the first step 

in the establishment of universal 

order, instituted by the Olympians 

and safeguarded by the Greek kings, 

first Telephos and the generation of 

the Trojan War and later their Attalid 

successors. A similar idea was in fact 

reflected by the rhythmical alternation 

of statues and columns above the 

Gigantomachy frieze on the outside of 

the monument. The identification of 

these female statues is disputed, but 

according to one reading they might 

have been an extended group of muses 

and ancestors of the royal family of 

Pergamon, both of which could be seen 

as forces of culture and order standing 

above the defeat of disorder. 40 Turning 

again to the inside of the monument as 

perceived by the symmetexontes at the 

top of the stairway, the contemporary 

references of the Gigantomachy just 

seen would also emphasize the idea 

114 

that constant vigilance and struggle 

were needed in order to safeguard 

the ancestral values represented by 

Telephos and to perpetuate the current 

prosperity of Pergamon for which the 

gods were thanked by sacrifices on 

the altar. 41 In a sense the sacrifices 

would reinforce the domination of 

humans over animals and nature, in 

the same way the Gigantomachy had 

reinforced the similar status of the 

gods over the half-animal children of 

nature. 42 This analogy would highlight 

the significance of the rituals taking 

place in the altar, binding together the 

various elements of the monument in 

interaction with the symmetexontes. 43 

In addition, modern viewers tend to 

ignore that the ancient symmetexontes 

were dressed in the same clothes as the 

figures in the sculptures. 44 This feature, 

which further bonded the monument 

with the symmetexontes, was especially 

reinforced when each symmetexon 

experienced the space with others 

in it: the monument was complete 

and significant to its fullest potential 

especially when it was populated by 

symmetexontes, even though as a 

dedication to the gods and a testament 

to Pergamene wealth and power, it was 

also significant on its own. 

In a sense there is an analogy here 

with the function of a theater, which is 

fulfilled through the interaction of actors 

and audience. In fact the Pergamene 

monument has some elements that 

are reminiscent of ancient theaters in 

reverse, with the great stairway leading 

up to an altar and a proscenium-like 

arrangement, while in actual theaters 

the seats looked down to an altar, 


eyond which stood the proscenium. 

This reversal could be perceived as 

a sign of the heightened role of the 

symmetexontes in the Pergamon 

altar and their interaction with the 

sculptures. A modern viewer might 

tend to identify the sculptures with 

the actors, reenacting a story, and the 

symmetexontes with the viewers or the 

audience, passively watching the action. 

This reading ignores the role of the 

symmetexontes as actors in the rituals 

performed at the altar and the role of 

gods and heroes as viewers, receiving the 

honors offered by the symmetexontes. 

In other words, we need a more flexible 

reading, in which the sculptures and 

the symmetexontes interacted in ways 

that collapsed the distinction between 

actor and viewer. They both acted 

stories that ran parallel to each other 

and at the same time intersected; their 

interdependence was what brought 

the experience of the monument to its 

fullest and completed its meaning. 45 It 

is appropriate to remember here that 

during ritual sacrifices the experience 

of the symmetexontes was further 

enhanced by the participation of other 

senses besides vision, through music, 

smell, and taste, components that 

were also addressed to the gods and 

rather than separating the two levels 

of existence they further intensified 

their interrelation. In this sense, 

the sacred space and experience 

constructed through the monument 

and the symmetexontes prefigures the 

function of another sacrificial space, the 

Byzantine church in which the faithful 

are in communion with the figures 

surrounding them on the walls and 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

participate together in the celebration 

of the Eucharist that reinforces the links 

between past, present, and future. 46 

If space is the solidification of 

time (Queyrel, 2005, p. 174 quoting 

Novalis), then certainly the sacred 

space that was created at the Great 

Altar was a solidification of Attalid 

Pergamene identity in time and history. 

According to the above analysis, the 

ancient symmetexontes would better 

understand the ideological references of 

the monument to time and space through 

their own spatiotemporal interaction 

with this complex construction. Alert 

from such an experience of embodiment, 

they could look at the monument’s 

body with renewed insight and identify 

structural elements that further 

enriched its temporal significance: 

in the context of a spatiotemporal 

reading, the monumental west stairway 

could be perceived as a visualization 

of the progression of time (Figs. 1, 5). 

Interestingly, the base of the entire 

monument, below the Gigantomachy 

frieze, was formed by a few steps 

(krepis), 47 which could be a reference 

to undifferentiated time at the 

beginning of the cosmos. Above them 

the monument consisted of three parts 

of progressively diminished solidity 

that could refer to the succession of 

past, present, and future and their 

interdependence (Figs. 1, 5 48 ): 1. The 

level of the Gigantomachy, the solid past 

that was also a metaphor of the present. 

The conflict that brought order to the 

universe and therefore structure to 

time. It initiated the past of a specifically 

Greek world under the protection of 

the Olympians and their values, still 


115


operating in the kingdom of Pergamon 

and its victorious campaigns. 49 2. The 

colonnade and altar courtyard, a more 

structured and yet more permeable 

present (the space of Pergamene 

rituals) that looked back to the roots 

of history (Telepheia). It presented 

the origins of the city and its rulers 

and linked past and present in a more 

historical and less metaphorical way. 

3. The level of free-standing statues 

on the roof (akroteria), the less solid 

and more fluid part of the monument, 

the future. It included figures of the 

Olympians and mythical creatures 

that supervised the offerings on the 

altar and ensured a prosperous future 

for the pious city. 50 In smaller size and 

higher level than the other sculptures, 

these figures looked more distant, 

like future itself. 51 At the same time, 

only the second and third levels of 

the monument (present and future) 

included free-standing sculptures, 

while the past of the Gigantomachy 

and the historical references of 

the Telepheia were represented in 

relief, embedded in the marble of the 

monument, literally set in stone and in 

the structure of time. 52 

It is certainly a pity that time 

didn’t pass gently over a monument 

dedicated to its solidification. When 

the rituals performed on the altar 

were no longer relevant after the 

advent of Christianity, when no 

Endnotes: 

116 

symmetexontes were left to embody 

the monument and its significance, it 

was deliberately ruined, abandoned, 

or reused and finally amputated from 

the body of the Pergamene acropolis to 

be partly reassembled in the inhibitive 

environment of a museum. 53 Yet 

thanks to the dedication of those who 

studied it and preserved it in modern 

times and despite its uprooting, this 

extraordinary monument continues 

to stir its viewers and therefore still 

offers to its ancient patrons perhaps 

the only kind of temporal solidification 

available to mortals: posterity. 54 

Through its design and 

sophisticated features, the Great 

Altar of Pergamon was intended to be 

the site of a multilayered experience 

by symmetexontes who interacted 

with the monument and with each 

other in a holistic way that reached 

the full potential of embodiment: an 

experience that was not only sensorial 

and kinetic, but also intellectual, 

emotional, and ultimately cultural. 

It was formulated not only through 

individual bodies but through the 

collective body of participants in 

relation to the body of the monument, 

conceived and perceived through the 

cultural and political conditions of 

the time. The ambitious goals of the 

Attalids could not find a more powerful 

tool and a more successful expression 

than this Hellenistic Baroque. 

1 Although the application of this term is anachronistic strictly speaking, it is still meaningful 

for reasons that go beyond stylistic analogies between the Hellenistic monument and 

visual expressions of 17th-century Europe. In my mind, one of the most significant such 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

analogies is the recent historiographic reappraisal of both Hellenistic and Early Modern 

Baroque, after their earlier condemnation by those who had idealized classical Greece or 

Renaissance Italy and considered decadent whatever did not conform to their standards. 

This could be the theme of a separate article, and it will not be discussed in the present 

paper (see Ridgway, 2000, p. 4, for a reference to the reappraisal of Hellenistic sculpture). 

Usually scholars employ the term “baroque” in Hellenistic art when they discuss the style of 

its sculptural production. The Gigantomachy frieze of the Pergamon Great Altar is perhaps 

the most representative case of Hellenistic Baroque as defined for example by Pollitt, 

who mentions “first, a theatrical manner of representation which emphasizes emotional 

intensity and a dramatic crisis, and, second, the formal devices by which this theatrical 

excitement is achieved--restless, undulating surfaces; agonizing facial expressions, extreme 

contrasts of texture created by deep carving of the sculptural surface with resultant areas 

of highlight and dark shadow; and the use of ‘open’ forms which deny boundaries and 

tectonic balance” (1986, p. 111). In addition, Pollitt introduces his chapter on “Hellenistic 

baroque” (1986, pp. 111-126) with a number of significant clarifications: First: The term 

“Hellenistic Baroque” is convenient not only because there are certain analogies between 

Hellenistic sculptures and later baroque sculptures but also because it can substitute for 

prejudicial phrases like “high Pergamene” or “middle Hellenistic.” Second: The use of the 

term should not mislead us to believe that Hellenistic sculpture betrays all the stylistic 

features of 17th-century European sculptures. Third: The use of the term does not imply 

“an inevitable cycle in which a baroque style will always follow a ‘classic’ style.” See also 

Ridgway (2000, pp. 39-42) for a stylistic analysis of the Gigantomachy frieze that touches 

upon its baroque character. 

2 Occasional brief references to analogies between European Baroque art and the Great 

Altar of Pergamon will be included in these endnotes and will not be confined to issues of 

sculptural style. 

3 My limited familiarity with this demanding work is based on the English edition translated 

by T. Conley (Deleuze G. 2006. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. New York: Continuum). 

I have found Deleuze’s emphasis on the primacy of the body in human perception 

and expression to be stimulating and refreshing, and although his writing (at least in 

the available translation) was often obscure to me, I especially enjoyed philosophical 

passages that verged on poetry or revealed an affinity with Eastern religious (or for others 

philosophical) systems like Buddhism, which Deleuze sees through the looking glass of the 

body. The following is a statement that I consider particularly relevant to my approach: “It 

is not the body that realizes, but it is in the body that something is realized, through which 

the body itself becomes real or substantial” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 120). 

4 Two of the most extensive recent publications with systematic discussion of previous 

literature are Massa-Pairault (2007, focusing on the Gigantomachy frieze) and Queyrel 

(2005, on the whole monument). See also the Pergamon-related articles in Grummond and 

Ridgway (2001). Important articles on the Great Altar with special attention to the Telephos 

frieze are also included in Dreyfus and Schraudolph (1996, vols. I-II). Useful introduction 

and overview of basic scholarly interpretations is found in Pollitt (1986, pp. 95-110, 198- 

205). See also Ridgway (2000, pp. 19-102). The fragmentary survival of the Great Altar, 

including its architecture, sculptures, dedicatory inscription, and identification inscriptions 

for the gods and giants of the Gigantomachy, cloud with uncertainty the identification of 

many figures and architectural components, as well as the purpose, date, and dedication of 


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the monument (for which see below), and render hypothetical any modern interpretation 

of the monument, including my own. 

5 Scholars still debate the date of the monument, which is generally placed in the years 

180-160 B.C., during the reign of Eumenes II (r. 197-159), the greatest builder of the Attalid 

dynasty. Within this time span, some researchers prefer an earlier date for the completion 

of construction, closer to 180 B.C. (after the Attalid victories against the Gauls in 189 and 

183), while others promote a later date in the second half of the 160s (after the new triumph 

against the Gauls in 166). Either way, arguments are still inconclusive, especially when 

they are based on the interpretation of the monument in relation to political circumstances 

(resulting in a kind of circular reasoning). For example, Massa-Pairault (2007, pp. 24-28, 

123-157) prefers the early dating, and Andreae (1996, pp. 121-126) the late one. Queyrel 

(2005, pp. 123-126) even suggests that the altar was consecrated after the death of 

Eumenes II, around 150, by his brother Attalos II (r. 159-138) who supposedly dedicated 

it to his deified predecessor. Stewart (2001, pp. 39-41) seems to favor a late date in the 

reign of Eumenes II, but his references indicate how on political grounds an earlier date 

is equally appropriate. See also Ridgway (2000, pp. 21-25) for another review of dating 

hypotheses. Based on general values of Attalid culture and politics that remained stable 

throughout this period, the interpretation of the monument proposed in the present paper 

is practically unaffected by an early or late date (although I also agree with a dating during 

the rule of Eumenes II rather than Attalos II). 

6 For a brief and useful historical introduction on the Attalids, see Pollitt (1986, pp. 79-83), 

Shipley (2000, pp. 312-319), and Kosmetatou (2005). For an extensive monograph on the 

Attalid Kingdom, see Hansen (1971, out of date on certain issues, especially since it does 

not examine all the available epigraphic evidence) and Allen (1983). 

7 Although Attalos, the father of Philetairos, was probably Greek (Macedonian general), his 

mother Boa was non-Greek (Paphlagonian, and perhaps a courtesan). A Greek settlement 

is first attested in Pergamon in the fifth century B.C., but the city became important only 

under the Attalids. The first of them to assume the title of king was Attalos I Soter (r. 241- 

197), probably in the 220s, after important victories against the Gauls. Most of Alexander’s 

successors had proclaimed themselves kings decades earlier, by the end of the fourth 

century. For an insightful discussion of Attalid cultural policy see Gruen (2001). For a more 

extensive treatment of their military, diplomatic, and cultural achievements and their selfpromotion 

as patrons of Greek culture and protectors of Greek freedom, see McShane 

(1964). For the importance of military victories in the ideology of Hellenistic monarchy 

and specific references to the Attalids, see Chaniotis (2005, pp. 57-77). 

8 The city with its famous library and scholars and its impressive monuments was 

modeled as the successor of Athens and the rival of Alexandria. Sculptural commissions 

of the Attalids dedicated to the sanctuaries of Delphi, Delos, and Athens further advertised 

their cultural and political claims in the Greek world. See Gruen (2001), and for a more 

detailed discussion of their sculptural dedications and artistic patronage, see Pollitt (1986, 

pp. 79-110). See also Dreyfus (1996) for a well-written overview of Pergamene history 

and culture, Nagy (1998) for the Library of Pergamon and its rivalry with Alexandria, and 

Hansen (1971, pp. 390-433) for an overview of the Attalid patronage of learning. 

9 Through Telephos, the Attalids traced the roots of their city to the time of the Trojan 

War and placed their founder on the same level with major Greek heroes like Achilles and 

Agamemnon. In addition, through him they claimed descent from mainland Greece and 

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especially from the bloodline of the most venerable Greek hero, Herakles, son of Zeus. 

This lineage indirectly related them to the royal house of Macedonia and Alexander the 

Great, whose origins were also traced back to Herakles and Zeus. In addition, the Attalids 

promoted the otherwise obscure hero Pergamos as another founding figure of their capital 

city, for he was grandson of Achilles and therefore another link to the heroic past of Greece 

and to Alexander, whose mother Olympias traced her descent from the same Achillean 

bloodline. These issues are discussed by Gruen (2001) and more extensively by Scheer 

(2005, esp. pp. 220-226). 

10See Allen (1983, pp. 136-144), Mitchell (2005), and Shipley (2000, pp. 52-54), for a 

historical discussion of these Gauls, and Marszal (2001) for an art-historical approach. 

Ancient Greek writers used the name Galatai in the same way modern English writers 

use the term Gauls, to refer to both the Celts of Gaul and to those who invaded Greece 

and Asia Minor. On the contrary, the term Galatians is used today to denote exclusively 

the Celtic peoples of the eastern Balkans and especially of Asia Minor (Mitchell, 2005, p. 

281). Hellenistic rulers, including the Attalids, at times fought against Galatian tribes and 

at times employed them as mercenaries in their own armies. Consequently, the Attalids 

fought against Gauls both when the latter attacked them individually and when they 

served under the commands of other Hellenistic rulers who waged war against Pergamon 

(Mitchell, 2005; Hansen, 1971, pp. 224, 227). 

11For example, both Massa-Pairault (2007) and Queyrel (2005) examine the Great Altar in 

this context. 

12Scholars’ suggestions for the patron deities offer a wide range of possibilities. For 

example, Queyrel has suggested Eumenes II was honored together with the 12 Olympians 

(2005, pp. 112-122, esp. pp. 114-115). Massa-Pairault (2007, pp. 7-23) suggests that next 

to Zeus, Herakles was also honored. Stewart (2001, pp. 34-41) agrees with the hypotheses 

that the altar was dedicated to Zeus, Athena, and possibly also Queen Apollonis (mother of 

Eumenes II and Attalos II). They all offer reviews of previous literature on the subject (also 

in Ridgway, 2000, pp. 21-25). 

13For a discussion of the original location, modern discovery, excavation, transportation, 

and exhibition of the Great Altar, see, for example, Queyrel (2005, pp. 21-48), Kästner 

(1996a), and Heilmeyer (1996). 

14The visitor entered the terrace of the Great Altar from the east, facing its back side, 

decorated with that part of the Gigantomachy frieze on which most Olympians were 

represented, including Zeus and Athena (the most important Olympians in Pergamon) and 

their indispensable helper and Pergamene progenitor Herakles. The Gigantomachy frieze 

covered the entire length of the east north and south sides of the podium and the projecting 

west wings that flanked the stairway. The smaller frieze with the life of Telephos was on the 

north east and south wall of the Ionic colonnade above, facing towards the altar courtyard. 

See Pollitt (1986, pp. 96-97) and Ridgway (2000, p. 25). For more information on the freestanding 

sculptures, see below. 

15Originally, the sculptures of at least the Gigantomachy frieze were painted, as was 

common practice for sculptures at the time (Queyrel, 2005, pp. 48, 79). This interaction of 

architecture, sculpture, and painting can be considered analogous to similar tendencies in 

European Baroque (although in ancient Greece it also characterized archaic and classical 

monuments such as temples). 

16For example, scholars have debated the political message of the Gigantomachy on the 


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north frieze of the Siphnian Treasury in Delphi (525 B.C.) where the victorious gods are 

represented as individual unarmored warriors, fighting heroically against giants in the 

armor and the phalanx formation of contemporary Greek armies. The interpretations by 

Watrous (1982) and Neer (2001) vary greatly, but they both refer to political tensions 

within the Greek world (or specifically the Siphnian society). Only after the Persian Wars 

was the Gigantomachy systematically used as a metaphor for the conflict between Greeks 

and non-Greeks. 

17 The Gigantomachy was represented on the east metopes (barely legible today) above the 

entrance to the temple, and on the interior of the shield of the chryselephantine statue of 

Athena Parthenos inside the temple (now lost). For an extensive discussion of the political 

message of the Parthenon and especially its sculptures in relation to the victory of Athens 

in the Persian Wars and her imperialist policy, see Castriota (1992, pp. 184-232; pp. 138- 

143 for the Gigantomachy). 

18 Vian (1952) has argued that the Parthenonian sculptures had a particularly emphatic 

representation of giants as savages that was previously uncommon in Greek art. This 

innovation (reflected in Gigantomachy depictions on Attic pottery of that time) could 

highlight the allusion to the just defeat of the uncivilized barbarian Persians according to 

the Athenian point of view. 

19 Despite the bad preservation of the metopes, it is evident that at least in one if not more 

of them the round shield was held by the giant rather than his divine opponent (Castriota, 

1992, p. 140, fig. 13.4; Praschniker, 1928, fig. 121; basic bibliography on the north metopes 

of the Parthenon in Schwab, 1996). Although in his analysis of the Parthenon metopes 

Castriota focuses primarily on anti-Persian allusions (1992, pp. 134-175), I believe 

references to Athenian supremacy in relation to other Greeks was also a prominent part 

of the agenda, especially since the Athenians had grown increasingly despotic towards 

their allies (even more so after the inauguration of the Peloponnesian War in 431). The fact 

that in 454 the Athenians moved the treasury of the Delian League from Delos to Athens 

and used it to construct the Parthenon in which they stored the new revenues is rather 

telling of the way they treated their allies as subordinates and is also indicative of the 

political significance of the Parthenon. Whether or not the atrocious behavior of the Greeks 

during the sack of Troy was depicted on the north metopes, the representation of Akamas 

and Demophon (sons of the Athenian hero and king Theseus) saving their grandmother 

Aithra rather than participating in the looting of the city and the massacre of its royal 

family was probably included as an emphatic reference to Athenian piety and moral 

superiority. The Amazonomachy chosen for the west metopes was the battle fought on the 

Athenian acropolis, where Athenian men (and not just Greek heroes in general, as in the 

Amazonomachy led by Herakles) defeated the insolent oriental invaders. I believe a most 

significant allusion to Athenian moral superiority in relation to other Greeks was included 

in the depiction of the Centauromachy on the south metopes: the probable representation 

of the myth of Ixion reminded the viewer how the hybristic and unethical behavior of that 

Thessalian Greek (who killed his father-in-law, disrespected the gods, and attempted to 

rape Hera) led to the creation of the half-animal violent race of the centaurs, against whom 

the Athenian Theseus fought valiantly. 

20 Stewart (2001, p. 40) discusses the possible references of some fully anthropomorphic 

giants to Greek opponents of the Attalids. Although Ridgway (2000, pp. 36-37) doubts their 

armor can securely identify them with specific Greek armies, at least a general Greek rather 

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than barbarian identity can be assumed. Massa-Pairault (2007, pp. 126-128), describes all 

the categories of giants and their possible allusions. I disagree only with her assumption 

that snake-legged giants refer to rivers with a geopolitical significance: giants were 

considered sons of Gaia and snakes clearly reflected their chthonic character, while rivers 

were thought to be sons of Pontos and snakes did not share their fluvial character. Besides, 

as providers of valuable water, rivers were usually considered benevolent entities. The 

case of the mustached snake-legged giant discussed below demonstrates the anti-Galatian 

reference of anguiped giants on the Great Altar. 

21 For the mustache as a characteristic trait of Gaulic chiefs, see Marszal (2001, p. 192, 

and figs. 70, 73). It is significant that this giant is in a very prominent position: among 

the few figures represented at the left side of the stairway (northwest projecting flank 

of the podium, the giant defeated by Nereus [Queyrel, 2005, p. 67, figs. 58-59 ]). As the 

Gigantomachy frieze is only partly preserved today, it is possible that originally more 

giants were represented with this trait. It has been also noted that three giants appear in a 

reversed hybrid form, with human body and animal head (lion, bird, and animalistic head 

with bull horns, Ridgway, 2000, p. 36). A tentative interpretation could be to see them as 

allusions to the Greek opponents of the Attalids, through a reference to the culture of the 

non-Greek people they ruled. For example, the Egyptians under the Ptolemies worshiped 

animal-headed gods, which for at least political reasons were also respected by the 

Greek rulers (for the acceptance of local religion by the Ptolemies, see Thompson, 2005, 

pp. 105, 107, 111-112. On p. 107, he mentions the preference of Greek settlers in Egypt 

for anthropomorphic versions of local gods. Also, when Hellenistic Greek cities adopted 

Egyptian deities, they preferred the anthropomorphic Isis and Sarapis, but they rarely 

accepted the dog-headed Anubis, who was the customary companion of these gods in Egypt 

[Koester, 1998].) Through the defeated animal-headed giants of the Great Altar, the Attalids 

might have intended to make a statement of cultural superiority and purity, presenting 

themselves as patrons of exclusively ancestral anthropomorphic Greek gods who fight 

against inferior beings, reminiscent of the deities of the syncretic culture of Ptolemaic 

Egypt. The cultural rivalry between Pergamon and Alexandria could be significant here. 

Massa-Pairault (2007, pp. 83-90, 94-98, 144-145) mentions the possible Egyptian sources 

for both the lion-headed and bull-horned giants (she does not discuss the bird-headed one), 

but she also refers to possible oriental connections (Syrobabylonian, Phoenician, Persian, 

Chaldean) and suggests a complex astrological and religious interpretation. In addition, 

she hypothesizes that these two giants are a reference to the political confrontation of the 

Attalids with the Ptolemies (lion-headed) and Macedonians (bull-horned). I do not consider 

probable the interpretation of the latter giant as a reference to a river (Massa-Pairault, 

2007, p. 85), for the river-god Achelloos used as comparative material is represented with 

a bull’s body and horns while this giant has a human body. 

22 Indeed, it is significant that the gods not only defeat the animal-like giants but they also 

control their own animals, whose bestial nature contrasts with the serenity of their masters. 

The only element that might relate the gods with their sacred animal besides their spatial 

proximity are rare external features such as the mane-like long hair of a goddess who fights 

next to her lion (Massa-Pairault, 2007, pp. 50-54), variously identified, for example, as Keto 

or Adrasteia. 

23 Ridgway (2000, p. 59, n. 58) mentions the centaur who bites a young Lapith on the west 

pediment of the temple of Zeus in Olympia and a similar representation from the frieze 


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of the temple of Apollo at Bassae. The giants of the Pergamon Gigantomachy bite their 

opponents or their armor with their snake legs (e.g., Pollitt, 1986, fig. 103, upper image), 

but in one famous case of the north frieze, a giant sinks the teeth of his human yet animalwild 

head on the arm of his opponent (Pollitt, 1986, fig. 109). 

24 Local athletic competitions were indispensable components of religious festivals that 

were prominent expressions of civic identity in ancient Greek cities. In the Hellenstic 

period a number of cities established or upgraded athletic competitions that they 

advertised throughout the Greek world in order to attract participants and visitors and earn 

panhellenic recognition for their festivals, consequently elevating the status and economic 

prosperity of their city. Athletic facilities were indispensable in Greek or Hellenized cities 

that were founded or redeveloped in the Hellenistic world, and participation in athletic 

training and competitions indicated the Hellenization of non-Greek inhabitants of the 

Hellenistic kingdoms. See Miller (2004, pp. 196-197, 199-201). 

25 In a very dramatic and prominent gesture, the fallen giant in front of Artemis attempts to 

gouge the eye of her dog which is biting his neck (Fig. 3). Massa-Pairault makes reference to 

pankration when discussing fighting groups of the Pergamon Gigantomachy, including the 

case of the giant who bites his opponent on the north frieze (note 23, above), but does not 

mention the violation of regulations (2007, pp. 46, 69, 95). 

26 For example, the Nikephoria in honor of Athena Nikephoros (“bringer of victory”) 

was a triennial athletic festival (probably a reorganization of an earlier celebration), 

instituted after an important military victory by Eumenes II against the Gauls in 183 B.C. 

Obviously, it commemorated the military triumphs of the ruler and his divine protector 

and celebrated the prosperity and collective efforts of the city. The festival acquired even 

greater importance when Eumenes invited various other Greek cities to recognize it as 

equal to the panhellenic Pythian and Olympic games (Hansen, 1971, pp. 448-450). The 

elevated status of the Nikephoria reflected the prominence of Pergamon. The gymnasium 

of this city (both an athletic and educational institution as were all gymnasia at the time, 

Miller, 2004, 186-189) “is the largest and most complete to survive from antiquity” (Green, 

1990, pp. 168-169). 

27 To refine this point further, notice how the fully anthropomorphic opponent of Artemis 

(Fig. 3), a very beautiful giant with helmet and shield possibly alluding to the Greek rather 

than non-Greek enemies of the Attalids (Massa-Pairault, 2007, p. 139), has the same calm 

expression shared by the gods, as the worthiest of their opponents. This polarized use of 

emotional expression differentiates the Hellenistic Baroque of the Pergamon altar from 

European Baroque, where passion, pathos, and empathy are spread across the spectrum of 

both positive and negative figures. This is not to say that baroque features have a negative 

value in the Hellenistic monument, but that they are used according to ancient Greek values, 

in order to highlight antitheses and conflicts. Scholars debate whether the Pergamon giants 

and the defeated Gauls of other Attalid monuments are absolutely negative figures or were 

also intended to invoke the pity of the viewers towards the defeated opponent (Marszal, 

2001, p. 195, with further literature). I tend to agree with those who condemn the emphasis 

on pity as a reading that stems from our own modern perception--although I would not 

exclude it from the spectrum of psychological reactions possible among ancient viewers. 

28 The most important episodes of the story, ranging from peaceful and romantic to agitated 

or violent events, narrate the reception of Herakles to the court of the Arcadian king Aleos; 

the hero’s encounter with the king’s daughter Auge; the exposure and childhood of baby 

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Telephos in the wild and the punishment of the mother cast in the sea in a chest; her salvation 

in Mysia by King Teuthras; her son’s later efforts to find her; his favor with the Mysian king 

when Telephos helps him against his local enemies; the recognition between mother and 

son; the invasion of the Greeks who mistake Mysia for Troy; the fight and wounding of 

Telephos by Achilles; Telephos’ trip to Argos in order to force the Greeks to assist in the 

healing of his incurable wound; his return and founding of Pergamon and his honorable 

treatment of the gods. The last episode might be a scene of Telephos’ heroization. For a 

discussion of the surviving episodes and the significance of the frieze, see Heres (1996, pp. 

83-94) and Queyrel (2005, pp. 95-100). 

29 The protagonists usually occupy only two-thirds of the frieze’s height, while smaller 

figures on lower relief are depicted on higher ground receding in the background, giving 

the impression of actions within a real space (Fig. 4). Further emphasis on specific 

locations is created through the representation of personifications of rivers, mountains, 

and other places. For a discussion of these features, see Pollitt (1986, p. 205) and Stewart 

(1996). Usually scholars focus their attention on the hypothetical sources of inspiration for 

the treatment of space and narrative in the Telephos frieze, by reference to monumental 

paintings (for the spatial recession) or book illustrations (for the continuous narrative). 

The latter especially seems improbable. See Pollitt (1986, pp. 200-208) and the critique of 

the model theories (especially the use of book illustrations) by Stewart (1996, pp. 45-48). 

30 This function is also recognized by Stewart (1996, pp. 43, 45) and other scholars like 

Heres (1996, p. 82), Sturgeon (2001, p. 73), and Green (2001, p. 175). 

31 Visitors could also step behind the colonnade and view the frieze up close, but this 

proximity wouldn’t favor an all-encompassing and continuous reading of the story either; 

rather, it would allow for only a piecemeal reception, episode by episode, which would 

reinforce the impression of viewing a historical record rather than witnessing an event 

in real time. The historical presentation of Telephos’ biography in an important public 

building of Pergamon and its function as a political tool in the shaping of civic identity make 

it analogous to other historical representations of famous public monuments of Greek 

cities (despite their differences in medium, narrative technique, style, and architectural 

setting). For example, in the fifth century, the Stoa Poikile of Athens (the city which in many 

ways was the model for Attalid Pergamon) was adorned with painted representations of 

the Attic Amazonomachy, the Trojan War, and the Battle of Marathon--the historic victory 

of the Athenians against the Persian invaders in 490. The two mythical stories were 

considered historical precedents from the heroic past of Greece and models of the recent 

victory against Persia. For an examination of this and other similar cases, see Castriota 

(1992, pp. 33-133). For a detailed examination of the architecture of the Great Altar’s court 

with the Telepheia, see Kästner (1996, pp. 73-77). 

32 Many of the Gigantomachy figures seem about to detach themselves from the monument 

and are sculpted with great attention to detail, seen for example in the meticulous rendering 

of different textures. On the contrary, the Telepheia figures are firmly anchored in their 

sculpted environment, and this impression is reinforced especially by those who retreat 

in the background, sculpted on lower relief, as if they recede not only in space but also 

in time (compare Figs. 3-4). Scholars have also noted that the Telephos frieze does not 

have the detailed finish nor the traces of color found in the Gigantomachy, so they have 

suggested that the Telepheia remained unfinished (Queyrel, 2005, pp. 48, 79). Although 

this could have been the result of accidental circumstances, its visual effect would have 


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been very appropriate for the ideological function of the monument: it reinforced the 

contrast between the highly finished and colorful Gigantomachy, vividly present before the 

viewers’ eyes, and the hazy and pale Telepheia recording events of the past. 

33 Compare Massa-Pairault (2007, p. 33), who states that the Gigantomachy appears inscribed 

in the time of the universe while the Telepheia in the time of history. My reading does not 

imply that the ancient viewers would have considered the Gigantomachy nonhistorical in 

the same sense that we treat today myths as fiction. Even though some ancient scholars 

perceived it only as an allegory of ethical or physical significance (Queyrel, 2005, p. 168), the 

majority of people would have considered the Gigantomachy an important event of divine 

rather than human history (the only human protagonist being Herakles), which was also a 

model for later human conflicts of the heroic age thought to belong to the distant historical 

past of Greece (like the Trojan War or the Amazonomachy), in their turn models of more 

contemporary battles between Greeks and barbarians (like the Persian and Galatian Wars). 

The historical significance and political relevance that mythical battles had for ancient 

Greeks is for example evident in the Attalid dedication of a sculptural group on the Athenian 

acropolis, which represented the Gigantomachy, the Amazonomachy, the Marathonomachy 

(Athenians against Persians), and a Galatomachy (Pergamenes against Galatians) (Pollitt, 

1986, pp. 90-97). As a historical record referring to the life of the Attalid progenitor, the 

Telepheia of the Great Altar provided very appropriate historical and moral parallels 

that could enhance the status and reflect the values, achievements, and self-presentation 

of Pergamene royalty. Like them (or for them), Telephos was of humble beginnings yet 

glorious lineage and destiny, he successfully fought both Greek and non-Greek enemies, 

he represented Greek supremacy in a land of non-Greek indigenous people, he was a great 

builder and a pious and favored devotee of the gods. Indeed, scholars have noted that the 

myth of Telephos was manipulated in the Pergamon frieze in order to better serve the 

political and cultural goals of the Attalids (Queyrel, 2005, p. 108). Certainly, the function of 

the Telephos frieze as a reference to second-century Pergamon was based primarily on its 

historicity. In other words, on the Pergamon altar both the Gigantomachy and the Telepheia 

made references to past and present, but while the Telepheia was constructed firstly as a 

historical event and therefore secondly as a contemporary metaphor, the Gigantomachy’s 

emphasis was visually reversed, showcasing an ever-present conflict and moral model 

which echoed from the past or rather transcended time. 

34 The kind of rituals performed at the Great Altar remains practically unknown to us, and 

some scholars even dispute whether sacrifices were performed there at all (e.g., Ridgway, 

2000, pp. 27-31, questions the function of the monument as an altar). Because of the lack 

of fire traces, Hoepfner (1996, pp. 55-57) assumes only unburned sacrifices were possible 

on the altar and even suggests that no religious ceremonies were performed there because 

the construction was a victory monument. However, the one function does not exclude the 

other. Various scholars have emphasized the multivalent and multifunctional character of 

the Great Altar (e.g., Stewart, 2001, esp. p. 49; Sturgeon, 2001, pp. 71-75; Green, 2001, 

pp. 174-180). Stewart (2001, pp. 46-47) suggests that sacrificial meat was indeed roasted 

on the altar and explains the lack of fire traces by the revetment of the marble altar with 

clay or other protective material, as was customary. However, he hypothesizes that animals 

were not actually killed on the altar but in front of the monumental precinct, because 

it would have been difficult to force them to ascend the stairway and pass through the 

narrow intercolumniations (1.2 m.) of the west colonnade without incurring damage to the 

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structure. Grummond and Ridgway (2001a, p. 8) express doubts about such a process of 

sacrifice away from the altar, which would have been contrary to normal practice. It would 

be interesting to know how big ancient Greek bovines actually were (through a study of bone 

remains), since the large size of various modern domestic animals in many cases is the result 

of centuries of breeding. Queyrel (2005, p. 25) has suggested the use of a wooden ramp for 

the ascent of sacrificial animals on the altar courtyard and has mentioned the possible use 

of the west stairway as a seating area for viewers of ceremonies taking place on the terrace 

below. In past reconstructions (including the one in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin), the 

west colonnade was assumed to have intercolumniations that gradually increased in the 

center of the structure to avoid a monotonous visual effect, and such planning would also 

allow more space for large animals to pass through. The recent arguments in favor of equal 

intercolumniations through the whole length of the west colonnade do not seem conclusive 

to me, since ceiling slabs of different dimensions have been found on the site (compare 

Hoepfner 1996a, p. 59-60, with Kästner, 1996, p. 72). Indeed Kästner, who agrees with the 

use of the monument as a sacrificial altar, also opts for intercolumniations of varied length, 

adding that this “baroque variability” was quite common in Asia Minor and was found on 

temples from the Archaic to the Roman period (1998, pp. 152-153). 

35 Symmetexon, plur. symmetexontes: transliteration of the Greek συμμετέχων, plur. 

συμμετέχοντες, participle of the verb συμμετέχω which is composed from the preposition 

σύν and the verb μετέχω. The latter is a composite of the verb έχω (to have) and the 

versatile preposition μετά (“together, with, between, among, inside, beyond, after”; can be 

also used in the sense of “in union with,” “in agreement with,” “in the manner of”). The verb 

μετέχω denotes ownership, sharing, inclusion, participation, or communion and can refer 

to an intimate experience with notions of embodiment, sensorial perception, the sharing of 

values or thoughts (e.g., participation in a religious mystery/ritual). In the composite verb 

συμμετέχω the addition of the preposition σύν (“together, with, plus”) further emphasizes 

the notion of communal/collective experience, which to a certain extent is already included 

in the verb μετέχω because of the preposition μετά (Liddell-Scott, 1996, pp. 1108-9, 1120, 

1679.). 

36 I do not intend to propose a unified vision, as if all symmetexontes would have 

experienced the monument in the same way. This is obviously impossible, given differences 

in gender, social status, personal interests, and specific role in the rituals performed there, 

to mention just a few variables. (For example, if any symmetexontes were prohibited 

access to the sacrificial courtyard, their exclusion would make them see in a different light 

both the monument and the symmetexontes who enjoyed full access.) Nor do I suggest 

that the following reading is the only way the producers of the monument intended it to 

be experienced. After all, multiplicity is a major characteristic of this complex creation. 

Besides, our cultural and spatiotemporal distance from a monument that survives in 

such a fragmentary state makes all our modern readings hypothetical. As Queyrel notes 

(2005, p. 18) “notre vision est fugitive et partielle et, en cela, nous rertouvons la vision 

d’un spectateur antique qui n’a jamais existé sous une forme unique; il y avait pluralité 

de visions, dans l’Antiquité aussi bien que de nos jours.” However, I do believe that the 

following considerations were central in the conception and perception of the monument 

in its ancient context and can help us realize its communicative power, because they 

suggest a basic framework within which other paths of perception and understanding 

can be developed. In my opinion, modern attempts to relate all the parts of the Pergamon 


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Gigantomachy and Telepheia with specific historical events and personages and timespecific 

political statements of the first half of the second century (as in the analysis of 

Massa-Pairault, 2007, pp. 123-157), besides being conjectural and impossible to prove 

(or disprove), also reduce the potential of the Great Altar to be continuously relevant in 

its Hellenistic context as a powerful statement of Attalid cultural, political, and military 

superiority regardless of specific historical developments that occurred shortly before its 

construction. Indeed, very precise references to recent historical events could have been 

included in the planning of the monument and especially in the design of the Gigantomachy 

by its erudite planners, and be addressed to an equally sophisticated audience. However, 

this was also an extremely expensive public monument that took years to complete and 

was addressed to all the citizens and other visitors to the city. Therefore, the planners 

would have wanted it to be meaningful in a basic yet significant and “time-proof” manner, 

referring to fundamental values, achievements and aspirations of the Attalid kingdom. 

Queyrel (2005, pp. 136, 148) emphasized that even if very erudite, this monument was 

also very simple and destined for a collective experience. Grummond and Ridgway (2001a, 

p. 6) also admitted layers of meaning in the perception of the monument by sophisticated 

ancient viewers but they wondered whether modern scholars have exaggerated the impact 

of history and “propaganda” on the planning of the monument. Therefore Green’s statement 

that we cannot define the type of propaganda constructed by the Great Altar without 

a precise dating (2001, p. 170) would be true only if we were after a very narrow and 

temporally specific propaganda--which is not my goal. Green himself eventually identifies 

a more general scope for the intended message of the monument that would not be affected 

by a year-specific dating (2001, pp. 176-180). 

37 It should be noted that the placement of statues in the intercolumniations is in fact 

uncertain (Queyrel, 2005, p. 43). For a discussion of possible architectural models that 

might have informed the design of the Great Altar (which remains an exceptional creation), 

see Sturgeon (2001). 

38 I use the adjective “mythistorical” and the noun “mythistory” (composites from the words 

myth and history) to refer to events or stories like the Gigantomachy, the Trojan War, and 

the Telepheia as the ancient Greeks perceived them or at lest presented them and used 

them: something that had happened in the remote past and was believed to be true (and 

therefore historical in the modern sense of the word history) even though it was beyond 

scientific verification and its transmission through oral tradition might have embellished 

it with imaginary details. Today, we know that this is indeed the nature of the Trojan cycle, 

a legend woven in the first millennium B.C. around a core of historical memories from 

the Mycenaean past of Greece in the second millennium. Ancient Greeks would describe 

such stories as myths (mythos, μυθος), oral narrations about the remote past, unverifiable 

but believable and to a large extent true), in contrast to history (historia, ιστορία), which 

was knowledge/information or narrative resulting from research and/or eyewitnessed 

experience/accounts. These differences between mythos and historia can be also seen in 

the use of the word mythos to denote an imaginary (fabricated) story already from the fifth 

century B.C. onwards. In ancient Greek, the word mythistory (mythistoria, μυθιστορία) 

also denoted an imaginary story, mythical in today’s sense of myth as fable (Liddell-Scott, 

1996, pp. 842, 1151.). 

39 Green (1990, p. 352) cites Robertson (1975, p. 538) in the following way: “The frieze’s 

figures, carved in high relief, actually intruded, with foot or knee or hand, onto the steps by 

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which the worshipper ascended to the altar. The two worlds intersect and at this point are 

one.” It should be noted, however, that at the same time the symmetexontes would continue 

to perceive the larger-than-life size of the Gigantomachy figures, thus being reminded that 

they operated in parallel but different dimensions. 

40 See Stewart (2001, pp. 41-43), for this identification of the figures and an interpretation 

that emphasizes culture and virtue in juxtaposition to the Gigantomachy. He offers 

arguments against the identification of these female statues with personifications of cities 

under Attalid control. On the contrary, Sturgeon thinks personifications of these and other 

Mediterranean cities (perhaps bringing gifts to the Pergamene kings) could have been 

included in the group, together with representations of priestesses (2001, p. 72), in addition 

to muses and Attalid ancestors. Hoepfner also makes some suggestions about the visual 

and conceptual relation between the colonnade with female statues and the Gigantomachy 

below: tranquility above agitation; equal height of figures; and rhythmical placement of 

columns and Gigantomachy combatants at roughly four-foot intervals (1996, p. 55; 1996a, 

p. 62). 

41 Herakles was another link between the Gigantomachy and the Telepheia (Massa-Pairault, 

2007, pp. 3, 19). The preeminent Greek hero was not only the only human to take place in 

the Gigantomachy but was also necessary for the victory of the gods. At the same time he 

appeared as a protagonist and father of Telephos in the Telepheia. 

42 For the debate about the performance of sacrifices on the altar, see note 34, above. It 

is worthy of notice that on a fragmentary dinos by Lydos of the mid sixth century, one 

of the most detailed archaic representations of the Gigantomachy appears above a frieze 

depicting animals sacrificed and hunted (Moore, 1979, p. 79). Obviously there is no direct 

connection between this object and the Pergamene altar, separated by almost three 

centuries and hundreds of miles, but both of them might be considered reflections of the 

same idea of a certain correspondence between the defeat of the giants and the sacrifice 

of animals. Queyrel (2005, p. 128) compares the giant about to be killed by Athena on the 

Gigantomachy frieze with a victim about to be sacrificed. 

43 As a basic ritual that established the relationship between gods and humans on the basis 

of exchange, ancient Greek sacrifices were thanksgiving offerings for divine blessings and 

favors bestowed in the past and invoked for the future. In this sense, what event could be 

more appropriate for a thanks offering than the defeat of chaos and disorder through the 

Gigantomachy, or the analogous victorious battles of the Attalids in which they claimed to 

have exterminated animal-like barbarians? Indeed thanksgivings for blessings provided by 

the gods are mentioned in the fragmentary dedicatory inscription of the Pergamon altar 

itself, probably alluding among other things to military triumphs. See Stewart’s discussion 

of the altar as a victory monument (2001, pp. 34, 35, 42, 44-46, 48-49). 

44 That is, the gods in the Gigantomachy frieze, the statues in the intercolumniations, and the 

participants in the Telephos frieze. In addition, some furniture and other objects represented 

in the Telepheia have a more archaic look while others conform to contemporary secondcentury 

fashion (Heres, 1996, pp. 96, 99-100), further emphasizing the reference both to 

the historical past and the Pergamene present. In addition, we should not forget that a 

number of activities central in the Gigantomachy (war) and in the Telepheia (war, rituals 

of worship and hospitality, construction works) were intimately familiar to the ancient 

symmetexontes and central to their lives in ways that we as modern viewers do not share. 

For example, the continuous presence of war in Hellenistic societies is vividly brought to 


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life by Chaniotis (2005). Rituals, altars, and an emphasis on construction works seen in the 

Telephos frieze would have created a network of cross-references between the historical 

past of the Telepheia and the actual altar with its precinct, which was a major construction 

of the time and a venerable ritual space. The ritual of hospitality is presented three times 

in the frieze, when Aleos receives Herakles, when Teuthras welcomes Telephos, and when 

the Greeks receive the hero in Argos. Cult rituals appear when Herakles sees Auge serving 

as a priestess of Athena (her figure is now lost), when the heroine establishes the same 

cult in Mysia, when Telephos founds a cult in Pergamon, and when the male figure of panel 

1 consults an oracle (previously identified as Aleos, now relocated in the frieze sequence 

and identified as Telephos; compare Pollitt, 1986, fig. 213, with Dreyfus and Schraudolph, 

1996, v. I, pp. 16-17, fig. 8). If the last scene of the frieze is Telephos’ heroization, then it 

is another cultic reference. Rituals are also depicted in the marriage of Telephos and Auge 

(not consummated) and in the hero’s seeking of sanctuary at an altar in Argos. Construction 

works on a cult building are prominent when Telephos founds a new cult in Pergamon, but 

interestingly enough construction is also emphasized in an almost self-referential manner 

(for the artists who worked on the frieze) when carpenters are depicted at work on the 

chest in which Auge will be cast at sea, and they appear larger and closer to the viewer on 

the first plane of the scene, while she is removed in the background (Fig.4). See diagram and 

photos in Pollitt (1986, figs. 213, 216, 217, 220); description and photos in Heres (1996, pp. 

83-108). Massa-Pairault, (2007, pp. 147-157) hypothesizes very precise and unverifiable 

political references in the Telephos frieze, as she also does for the Gigantomachy (pp. 123- 

146). 

45 Considering the possible theatrical references of the Great Altar, we should not forget 

that it was built on an acropolis famous for its theatricality (raised on terraces that offered 

a magnificent spectacle of the acropolis and of the valley below,Fig. 2). In addition, the altar 

was built above and close to the theater of the city and had the same orientation (looking 

west, towards the left in Fig. 2). Both spaces were used for the interaction of the citizens 

with each other, their rulers and their gods, through cultural, civic, and religious rituals and 

visual expressions that related the past with the present. See Pollitt (1986, figs. 83, 247, 

and pp. 230-235) for the the atricality of Hellenistic architecture, of which the acropolis of 

Pergamon was the supreme example. Massa-Pairault (2007, p. 4, n. 23; pp. 11, 19) mentions 

the use of the Pergamon theater in political and civic gatherings and celebrations. 

46 For the creation and experience of sacred space and ritual in Byzantine churches, see, for 

example, the collected articles in Safran (1998, especially Ousterhout on architecture and 

liturgy and Maguire on the cycle of images in the church, pp. 81-151). 

47 Kästner (1996, p. 70) mentions four or five steps, and Hoepfner (1996a, p. 560) four. 

48 The model of the monument shown here in fig. 5 is better reproduced in Hoepfner (1996, 

fig. 1, repeated in Stewart, 2001, fig. 1), and is a useful visual aid for a better understanding 

of the following analysis. 

49 Furthermore, the frieze was absorbed in the body of the monument, incorporated in it, as 

it gradually diminished in height and finally disappeared at the point the stairway reached 

the courtyard of the altar, or else when the flow of time reached the present (Figs. 1, 5). This 

merging in a sense visualized the continuity between past and present, the fact that even 

if the past is lost in time, it is also very much present: it actually climbs the steps of time 

up until the present and dissolves in it, in the same way the figures of the Gigantomachy 

ascended the stairway with the symmetexontes, but also disappear below the level of the 

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courtyard. 

50 It is worthy of notice that, according to Stewart, spoils of war were displayed around 

the altar table in the courtyard (secured with dowels where holes survive on the stone 

structure, where Hoepfner has suggested the placement of statues representing defeated 

Galatians, a theory that has not found wide acceptance). The spoils would have consisted of 

defeated-enemy weapons and would have offered an additional link between the various 

spatiotemporal components of the monument. Stewart sees a connection with the battles of 

the Telepheia and the deities of the roof who would appear to sanction the spoils of Attalid 

victory (2001, pp. 48-49). A connection with the victorious conflict of the Gigantomachy 

which also alluded to Attalid triumphs should be seen as another possibility. Therefore, 

from a temporal point of view the spoils referred to victories of the past (Gigantomachy, 

Telepheia, Attalid wars), which were the basis for the prosperity of the Pergamene present, 

expressed in thanksgiving sacrifices that also invoked the presiding gods for continuous 

blessings in the future. 

51 The exact location, identity, and meaning of these figures are still debated. Chariots were 

part of the group, and it is uncertain who was driving them. Stewart’s interpretation of 

these figures as references to virtue, victory, and prosperity is closer to my reading (2001, 

pp. 43-46). Queyrel (2005, pp. 44-45) states that centaurs did not belong to this sculptural 

group as was formerly believed. Since these creatures usually had negative connotations 

in Greek culture, it would be difficult to justify their presence among protective figures- 

-although Hoepfner (1996a, p. 67) mentions the positive identity of the centaurs Chiron 

and Pholos, and Ridgway (2000, p. 46) and Stewart (2001, p. 44) relate them to Dionysos. 

Ridgway (2000, pp. 43-47) expresses doubts about the placement and role of this group 

of statues, but she does not offer any alternatives and she admits her doubts to be related 

with her own personal aesthetic prejudices. She mentions the smaller size of the roof 

sculptures in comparison to the larger than life-size sculptures of the Gigantomachy and 

the free-standing figures of the intercolumniations, a difference that has induced Sturgeon 

(2001, p. 72) to reject a divine identification for figures of the roof. However, Ridgway 

herself mentions the possibility (which she does not find very plausible) that smaller size 

could have been a conscious choice in order to create the optical illusion of great distance 

between the roof sculptures and the viewers and therefore make the monument look higher. 

The temporal reading I propose is perhaps a useful key for the interpretation of this group, 

whose smaller size could allude to temporal as well as spatial distance. Their placement 

and orientation remains conjectural; we don’t know if all of them were turned inwards 

to look at the altar, or they were mostly facing west (as they are usually represented in 

modern reconstructions), so that the ones above the east colonnade presided over the altar 

and the ones above the west colonnade gazed at the arriving symmetexontes and also the 

acropolis and the city below them. 

52 It should be noted here that the perception of space in interrelated hierarchical levels (a 

case of which is the above temporal interpretation of past, present, and future) would have 

been a familiar process to the Pergamenes through the structure of their own acropolis: 

Pollitt (1986, pp. 233-235) mentions that the planners of the acropolis seem to have thought 

of the monuments on its slope “as ascending in a symbolic as well as a physical way, with 

the buildings connected with mundane affairs of life at the bottom, those connected with 

education and the development of the mind in the middle, and those expressing divine 

powers and supreme cultural achievements at the top (p. 233).” The latter included the 


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Great Altar, the Library of Pergamon, and the temple of Athena as well as the palace of 

the Attalids. Pollitt concludes that like the sculptures of the Great Altar (in my opinion, 

like the entire monument as sacred space) “the plan of Pergamon was designed to engage 

the emotions as well as the mind, and in doing so it created an environment unparalleled 

by any other ancient city.” Finally, Queyrel (2005, pp. 140-145) has noted that most 

Olympians were positioned in the Gigantomachy frieze so that they appeared moving or 

facing towards their respective sanctuaries in the city of Pergamon and its surroundings- 

-some of which had been sites of critical battles between the Attalids and their enemies. 

Even though this cannot be proven for all the Olympians (Massa-Pairault, 2007, p. 30), this 

sophisticated interrelation can be taken as another aspect of the spatiotemporal character 

of the Great Altar and reminds us that the entire urban, geographic, and historical context of 

the monument further enhanced the embodied experience of the symmetexontes. Statues 

and other dedications that might have stood on the monument’s terrace and the altar’s 

courtyard would have also influenced its perception, but unfortunately those components 

are now beyond our reach. 

53 For the adventures and vicissitudes of the monuments from the advent of Christianity to 

the present, see Queyrel (2005, pp. 27-48), Kästner (1996a), and Heilmeyer (1996). 

54 Various scholars who have perceived a multivalent function in the Great Altar have 

particularly emphasized its character as a victory monument (see note 43, above). Indeed, 

I believe the reference was to a multivalent victory (military, political, and above all cultural 

victory of Hellenism led by the Attalids), that was won and celebrated through and over time. 

Green described the altar as “the dynast’s make-your-own-immortality kit” and emphasized 

the function of the monument as the commemoration of Attalid “accomplishments in the 

name of Hellenism that would endure and be remembered by posterity.” He also suggested 

that its founder Eumenes II was “always planning for the future rather than enshrining the 

distant past” (2001, pp. 176, 180). Here my reading varies, as in the Great Altar I clearly 

see Eumenes planning and addressing the future on the basis of the past. In addition, the 

emphatic reference to time that I detect in the monument can be also perceived as an interest 

in tradition. Hellenistic Baroque (and perhaps later European Baroque) was developed in 

dialogue with the teachings and values of what preceded it, in an intention to compete with, 

improve, and perhaps outdo, but not to destroy or criticize what came before it. See, for 

example, the various “quotations” of famous sculptural creations of the fifth century B.C. 

in a number of figures in the Gigantomachy frieze, and even stylistic connections between 

them, discussed by Ridgway (2000, pp. 34-35, 39-42); also Queyrel (2005, pp. 157-160, 

169). Compare the interest of Hellenistic scholars in editing texts of the previous literary 

production of the Greek world (Nagy, 1998). It is worthy of notice that another famous altar 

and political monument of the ancient world, the Ara Pacis Augustae in Rome (13-9 B.C.) 

was also designed and experienced from a spatiotemporal perspective that emphasized 

the connections between past, present and future as well as between myth and history, but 

contrary to the Pergamon altar which visualized time as an ascent, the Ara Pacis presented 

it as a cyclical renewal. See for example the discussion by Holliday (1990) and Laurence 

(2000). 

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Department of History of Art and Visual Culture 

D-201 Porter College 

1156 High Street 

Santa Cruz, CA 95064 

mevangelatou@hotmail.com 


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Fig. 1. The Great Altar of Pergamon, partially reconstructed in the Pergamonmuseum in 

Berlin, Germany. View towards the western stairway. Image in the public domain (photo by 

Lestat Jan Mehlich, GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5, Wikimedia). 

Fig. 2. Model of the acropolis of Pergamon, with the Great Altar at bottom center, seen from the 

south. Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, Germany. By permission of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. 

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Fig. 3. Great Altar of Pergamon, Gigantomachy frieze, east side. Artemis confronts an 

anthropomorphic giant while her dog bites a snake-legged opponent who attempts to gouge its 

eye. Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, Germany. By permission of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / 

Art Resource, NY. 


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Fig. 5. Model of the Great Altar of Pergamon after Hoepfner. 

Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, Germany. Image in the public domain 

(www.webshots.com). 

136 

Fig. 4. Great Altar of Pergamon, Telephos frieze, north wall. 

Carpenters build a raft or chest for Auge who mourns her fate 

in the background. Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, Germany. By 

permission of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. 


E

EMBODIMENTS 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Spatial Effects and Meaning in the Galerie des 

glaces at Versailles 


Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf has been professor of art history at Stockholm University 

since 1998. She is leader of an international curatorial program with a wide network in 

the art world in Sweden with international extensions. Lagerlöf is founder and leader of 

an interdisciplinary research group, Barockakademien, with meetings once a year. She 

has published works on 17th-century “ideal landscapes,” the Parthenon sculptures, and 

theoretical issues. She edited Konsthistorisk tidskrift (Journal of Art History), 2002–09. 

The article is an analysis of meaningful spatial effects of the decoration in the 

Galerie des glaces at Versailles. Visual spaces (representational space of paintings, 

reflected space of the mirrors, and the physical space of the room) are examined 

in terms of their interrelations and in terms of the address to the viewer. Visual 

space is considered the most important tool to arouse curiosity and admiration in 

the spectator, the rhetorically most efficient aspect of the decoration. Three types 

of effects are discerned and discussed: ambiguity; control and domination; tension 

(as intensification, as challenge, and as risk). 

Baroqueness in art has to do with 

arousing reactions in an audience or in 

individual subjects. The artwork seems to 

perform like a living agent, as it protrudes 

balancing on its representational 

essence, transforming not only subject 

matter, but also the means of art (stone, 

chalk, paint, ink…), enlivening the 

audience to question and simultaneously 

demonstrate dimensional differences. 

And the viewer becomes attracted, 

Visual Space of the Galerie des glaces 

The decoration of the Galerie des 

glaces at Versailles (managed 1678–84 

by the premier peintre Charles Le Brun) 2 

is about the king’s deeds in the years 

immediately preceding the date of the 

maybe confused, and caught in an optical 

construction (a self-reflection and a 

world-reflection) with no clear issues. 1 

Image in a baroque artwork is body, a 

physical thing with changing illumination 

and light conditions, a spectacular and 

triumphal presence, and a passing having 

the aura of aging and imminent loss. The 

generality of its character as a sign (its 

inherent abstractness) stands in contrast 

to this corporeality. 

decoration itself; it shows the impact of 

controlled action and it invokes present 

time (or at least recent time) amplified 

in an aura of mythology and concepts. 

With its focus on precision, speed, and 


137


vehemence of action, it combines the 

modes of courtly dance and the display 

of war. 3 

Mirrors and visual representations 

(predominantly painting) compete as 

devices of visual space in the gallery, 

but they also suggest each other and 

depend on each other in the production 

of effects. The differences between the 

devices (the sign-function, the causes 

and conditions) are at stake, but also 

the resemblance between them in their 

shared power to induce impressions of 

visual space with the look of reality. 

Both mirror and painting suggest 

Spatial effects in the Galerie des glaces 

In the Versailles decoration, there are 

three kinds of visual space, interacting: 

the representational areas as pictorial 

space; the mirrors as reflected space; 

and the room as physical space. The 

meaning of pictorial space is not a 

question of formal aspects against 

literary, conceptual, or ideological 

concerns. Visual space in the decoration 

is determined by identifications of 

various sorts and by comparisons with 

the imagery of the classicist tradition. 

An impression of a spatial effect occurs 

not only in relation to manifest shapes; 

it can be issued from expectations 

that are sustained or frustrated. 

Basically, however, spatial analysis 

concerns framing, correlations, scale, 

perspective, lighting (including color 

pitch), and bodily stance, gestures, 

and relations of figures. But, a figure 

seen as flying, wearing a red dress, 

and identified as Mercury, produces 

a spatial effect that is a compound of 

138 

“visual worlds.” The paintings bring 

forth the rhetorical inventions of the 

mind. The mirror evokes recognition of 

identities, sources of impressions, and 

facts, in a mode of dream, wish, desire, 

or fear; it is both meta-reflective and 

reductive, recalling dimensions of 

early memories. 

The illusions of both kinds 

of image—representation and 

reflection—stress the paradox of a 

visual reality-impression: the viewer 

is invited to “enter,” through vision 

and imagination, an unattainable 

dimension. 

the figure’s mythological identity and 

its flying position in a certain light, 

perspective, and scale. The decorations 

of the enormous gallery—in attached 

oil painting, in painting on the wall (on 

a foundation of plaster), and in gilded 

stucco—amount to an ensemble of 

various visual represented spaces. A 

viewer confronted with this compound 

of pictorial spaces can observe them as 

co-existing, in a miraculous continuity. 

What does it take to identify a specific 

pictorial space (the boundaries of 

it)? The various virtual openings are 

shown in a construction that has no 

clear-cut or essential distinctions, 

since the sign-system is not verbal but 

iconic. 4 There could be an incitement 

to imagine a simultaneous realization 

of many different spaces, merging in an 

open-ended totality embracing the site 

and the mirrors (extending the scene 

into the garden, the castle, the realm…). 

“Visual space” could then be this larger, 


ever-extending compound, consisting 

in a variety of modes and scales, more 

or less conceptual. Each part could, 

however, also be identified through its 

medium; its character as an “object”; 

its frames; scale of figures; and subject 

matter. But the impulse to experience 

the various spaces as co-existing (even 

sharing ontological essence) in an 

expanding visual world (different from 

the usual order of things) remains and 

creates an impression of similarity 

between the parts and the actually and 

potentially growing ensemble. 

This effect of co-existence is similar 

to mirror reflections and to the way 

inventive decorations of this kind 

appear in prints. The mirrors and the 

representation compete on the issue 

of “sameness” in the visual world 

presented; in the Versailles case, the 

intermediary expression of prints is 

missing at the earliest period of the 

decoration’s existence. 5 Painting and 

sculpture materialize heavily in the 

grand vault, addressing the bodily 

presence of viewers. As painted or 

sculpted, the image penetrates the 

physical space; as reflections of the 

mirrors, the image captures and 

vanishes towards the distance. The 

mechanisms of the media themselves 

are stressed in the pictorial effects. But 

in the juxtaposition of painting and 

mirror, the theme of pure visuality is 

actualized with different kinds of visual 

mode. 6 In the Versailles decoration, 

three kinds of spatial effects are 

especially elaborate: ambiguity, 

control and domination, and tension. 

Ambiguity serves the rhetoric of the 

message; it stimulates the curiosity 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

and astonishment of the viewer. Control 

and domination is the main message. 

Tension concerns the conditions of the 

triumph or success displayed in the 

decoration—the challenges and the 

risks. 

Ambiguity comes forth particularly 

through impressions of scale and 

identification of material or substance. 

The double view (varying understanding 

of material and size) activates the 

viewer’s energy of attention. The series 

of large historical and narrative scenes 

can be seen, in a glimpse, as joined in 

a continuous “world” with a shared 

sky-dimension that seems to spread 

out “behind” the girders and frames; 

yet, each scene is also self-contained; 

each one renders a detached visual 

world within the frames. Furthermore, 

ambiguity is not only an effect of the 

continuous as opposed to the solitary, 

but also an option between expanding 

space and closed surface, between the 

impressions of an imagined reality and 

those of an inserted framed canvas. 

The historical scenes appear as 

paintings inserted in framework (as 

quadri riportati), 7 and at the same time 

as openings into an imagined ideal 

universe. This dual visual function of 

the narrative scenes adheres to the 

tradition and the ultimate paradigm 

of the invention: the vault of the 

Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. In 

this tradition, the framework usually 

recalls architecture; this is the case in 

the Vatican and in the Galleria Farnese 

that was widely known through prints 

and that was also the obvious source for 

some of the figures in the Galerie des 

glaces. 8 


139


In the Versailles decoration, the 

frameworks play on two different 

scales of reference: they suggest 

architectural devices, such as atlantes, 

pediments, and niches; but they also 

appear as metalwork, as if forming a 

large decorated belt, with jewels and 

ornaments. In an effect of ambiguity, the 

viewer can experience how precious 

collectibles, such as goldsmiths’ craft, 

cameos of lapis lazuli, and medallions, 

turn into colossal format, becoming 

girders and symbols articulating the 

broad tunnel vault. 9 Things seem to be 

growing and then become reduced in 

size, expanding and shrinking, as from 

a pulse, as if animated in a rhythm of 

a colossal creature, both distanced and 

intimately near (Fig. 1). 

There is an impression of ongoing 

change in this ambiguity; not only 

a transformation of size, but also 

of material and work: from built 

to carved; from products of mason 

work and smith work to figures 

delineated with chisel; from elements 

of buildings to things to wear and 

hold. The idea of a “metamorphosis” 

is thus performed as a topos of art’s 

magic (hailed in various forms and 

formats in the steadily recurring 

references to Ovid’s cycle of poems, 

the Metamorphoses, 10 during the whole 

Baroque period). The ultimate effect of 

this power of transformation is shown 

in the emotive masks of the decorative 

frames, where we can witness how the 

lowest-ranking figures of the pictorial 

universe suffer or rejoice, looking 

animated and really alive (not only as 

vivid representations), although tied 

to their bodily confinement as masks. 

140 

All these effects are entertaining and 

surprising, they quicken the reception 

of the viewer, and they arouse an 

interest to capture the messages on 

triumph and power. 

Control and domination are effects 

that occur in relation to the king’s 

figure. The king is displayed in the 

historical scenes and the medallions 

as a resource of strength and action, 

but also as the keeper of this energy, 

deploying force to control and manage 

the outcome. 

The spatial effect of the king’s 

persona is a result of perspective, angle 

of vision, and bodily stance. The king’s 

figure is seen as composed and stable 

in contrast to chaotic bundles of figures 

surrounding him in the battle scenes. 

In the war scenes, the turmoil of the 

falling enemies denotes disorder and 

surrender; in the institutional scenes, 

the surrounding figures convey the 

idea of dependence. We witness how 

figures bend in submission or turn 

towards the king as if consulting him 

or waiting for his orders or answers. 

The king is regularly depicted 

in three-quarter profile, never 

completely parallel to the canvas’s 

surface, never completely frontal. In 

this pose, the figure seems to control 

the space widely—sideways and 

towards the pictorial depth. And in this 

stance, he seems to hold and withhold 

a compressed compound of energies 

that could be spread from his body, 

issued outwards in the shape of a fan 

(the range of his potential movements, 

towards the sides and forwards) (Fig. 

2). 

The large war scenes and the far 


ends of the gallery are adorned with 

clusters of decorative figures shown 

arranging trophies and drapery to 

amplify the scenes and the messages. 

Also in relation to these elaborate 

groups of figures, the king himself, 

in the enframed area above them, 

radiates an impression of stability 

in conjunction with activity. The 

impression is of control and readiness 

for more action. The stability facet is 

due to lighting conditions; among the 

decorative figures, the direction and 

sources of light are changeable; but 

the king is always illuminated from 

the same angle, from the left side (not 

far left, but slightly in front of the 

painting, on the left side), allowing his 

active profile (from right to left) to be 

emphasized in the scenes where he is 

turned with his face towards the left. 

On the northern side of the center, the 

king is turning towards the left in the 

narrative scenes (more hard energy 

is needed); on the southern side, he 

is usually turned towards the right, 

with a softer shadow on his profile, 

advancing on the swiftness and force 

of his own active speed (Figs. 3 and 4). 

This is more of a tendency, admitting 

intermediary settings, (like the 

narrative scene about the resolution to 

start war with Holland, on the window 

side south of the central scene), 

with more variety on the side of the 

windows, stressing the eastern part 

of the decoration above the mirrors as 

the main and representative one. In the 

medallions, the system of directions is 

more heraldic: four medallions with 

the king seen organizing his rule are 

flanking the central large scene, where 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

the young king starts to rule on his 

own; in the medallions, the figure of 

the king is turned more towards the 

center (although in the scenes about 

institution of justice and protection of 

the arts, he is seen in an intermediary 

way again, on the throne with his legs 

pointing away from the center and 

his face turned towards it). However 

the directions change subtly with the 

message and its rhetoric, the lighting 

of the king’s body is always slightly 

from the left. 

Tension occurs in various ways 

in the decoration: as enhancement 

or intensification; as opposition or 

contrast; as challenge and, ultimately, 

risk. The whole tendency of action and 

transformation in the decoration has 

natural passages of tension, but the 

effect also emerges as emphasized, 

carrying its own meaning. 

Tension as intensification is an effect 

of the relation between the two large 

parts of the vault—the northern versus 

the southern. In the north the character 

of the figures and events is coarser, and 

the labor of governing and battle is 

heavier; deceit and conflict are themes; 

primitive figures like satyrs appear, 

in one case, as flanking devices; the 

colors are somewhat darker or duller. 11 

In the south, by contrast, the themes 

concern victory, concord, and future 

prosperity; here, the figures are more 

ideal, and the colors are more vivid 

and luminous; even the degree of lapis 

lazuli in the feigned cameos is higher, 

turning these pictures more bluish and 

brighter. 12 

The most obvious case of 

enhancement is the “passage” from 


141


the northern large victory scene to 

the southern counterpart. In the battle 

scene on the northern side (the passing 

of the Rhine, leading to the seizure of 

Maastricht) the works of war are heavy; 

the victorious king makes his way with 

his carriage among corpses and dying 

enemies; there is a pull downwards, 

as if from the depths of trenches; the 

king is turned towards the left, with 

the energies of his own muscular force 

accentuated; the label states a duration 

of 13 days. In the southern victory 

scene (the seizure of Ghent), on the 

other hand, we witness the king flying 

through the sky, without resistance or 

effort, and the situation has an aura 

of triumph, but also of a joyous mode; 

even time has become quicker and 

lighter (the event happened in six days, 

cutting the edge of the other victory 

with speed). 13 The change from one 

side to the other has a tonal character, 

as a musical theme rendered in two 

different rhythms or pitches 14 (Figs. 

3 and 4). Seen by themselves, one by 

one, the scenes could not convey this 

message of evolution and enhanced 

success, but together they bring out a 

sense of changing qualities and a new 

atmosphere, the dawning and light of 

the day, after the grayish dusk. 

As contrast and opposition, the 

effects of tension amount to stages in 

the orchestration of the enhancement 

from one side to the other, from the 

threats and burdens of war to the 

prospects of a glorious peace. 

As challenge or risk, tension 

pertains to the decoration seen in a 

vaster ideological field concerning 

tradition. Furthermore, tension (and 

142 

particularly risk) occur in the meeting 

between mirrors and paintings, in an 

interrelation with aesthetical (and 

thus rhetorical) dangers, much more 

hard to control than any of the other 

spatial effects of the gallery. 

The decoration is inscribed in 

patterns of conflict and adherence 

to ideas and values, in the classicist 

tradition of painting and sculpture, the 

grand goût. 15 Charles Le Brun had to 

leave two project ideas behind before 

delivering the scheme chosen by the 

king—the recent military victories and 

the establishment of rule, a modern 

theme embedded in mythological 

references instead of mythology 

symbolizing the king’s rule. 16 With 

present time, French language in the 

labels, and blossoming natural colors 

in oil painting, the decoration sides 

with the “modern” ideals launched 

in the “quarrel” between “ancient” 

and “modern.” 17 Impressions of a 

timeless classical past are different 

from impressions alluding to recent 

French life—even if mythological 

figures can join the two dimensions. 

In the Versailles decoration, the case 

is not either-or, but both-and; the 

impressions are of recent military 

victories in an amplified setting. Jupiter 

does not symbolize the king; Jupiter 

and the king share the same identity 

(Fig. 5). The events appear as allembracing 

and expanding, as present 

time and ageless ideals simultaneously. 

According to the moderns, the French 

achievements had all the values of 

classical models and more, because 

they were advanced and included more 

and better elements. 18 


The French ambitions were aiming 

towards three sources of cultural 

value: Antiquity; Christianity; and the 

national heritage. Like Francois 1er, 

Louis XIV was the très chrétien, the 

protector of Catholicism. And, again in 

continuity with the 16th century, the 

rivalry with the Italians on the role as 

true interpreters of classical sources 

went on, allowing the grand goût and 

the grande manière to be without nation 

but preferably rooted in French soil. 19 

The decoration held the utmost claim; 

it was the most ambitious endeavor of 

the most powerful ruler. The aesthetic 

risk was obvious and the challenge of 

a possible failure as enormous as the 

dimension of the task. Le Brun was in 

the lead, without competition; but the 

cultural environment was critically 

very potent; already in his lifetime, 

Le Brun was questioned on artistic 

grounds. 20 

It is, however, with the spatial effects, 

in general, that Le Brun seeks the glory 

of his achievement. Le Brun works like 

a scenographer, installing the scenes 

with bodily stances, lighting, color 

intensity, perspective, and scale. These 

aspects are further out on the register 

of verbally coded values, determining 

the theories of the day and also art 

history in many ways; the decoration 

has been analyzed in terms of thematic 

of subject matter, but not in terms 

of the visual scenography Le Brun 

worked out, as an ardent member of the 

“modern” camp, to whom literary ideas 

were less important than a “method” 

for constructing the images. 21 

An even more challenging risk, than 

that between the ancient and the 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

modern, is the one between paintings 

and mirrors. This aesthetic tension is 

strikingly obvious and simultaneously 

subtle and dangerous. The mirrors 

bring brilliance and extreme luxury into 

the room. But they also bring another 

visual code. Mirrors are paradigms 

and sources for painted images, but 

also the threatening “other”: painting 

idealizes and enhances, splitting reality 

in dimensions of purification; mirrors 

stand for equality, sincerity, exposure, 

desire, and presence. 

In the gallery, the king’s figure in the 

more triumphant scenes is protected 

from the mirrors; these paintings are 

to be seen by the visitor standing by 

the windows and looking towards the 

other side, where the main scenes with 

the king would appear, crowning the 

mirror row but not reflected in them. 

In baroque art there is triumph and 

excess. But there is also always a sense 

of risk of failure, and an exposure to 

that risk. Painting pretended to take the 

viewer to heaven, showing what God’s 

heaven could be like—but at the risk 

of ending up with a rough surface that 

would instantly break. That is where 

the idea of a performative quality in 

baroque art is especially relevant—not 

so much in the processual, exuberant, 

and spectacular—but in the exposure 

to risk and a vulnerability bordering 

on failure. It was an age of endless 

wars. The sufferings could be turned 

into glorifications; this idea was a 

pretense that was expected, it could be 

needed and asked for, as the only hope 

to be had. The risk was different. It was 

shared—like the space. 

The king was very seldom in 


143


the gallery, and when he attended 

ceremonies with audiences he appeared 

against a covered background, a built 

stage and a throne. In the gallery, the 

great power of the French monarchy 

lets the audience in—to impose 

magnificence on people, to silence any 

opposition and questioning—but also 

144 

to come out in the open of a shared 

fragility of being in an act of exposure, 

to a brilliance that impressed the minds 

but that could also catch the view of 

the king from his back. The edge of 

power is on display, the triumphs and 

the pretense, and the high stakes of the 

play that is performed. 

Endnotes: 

1There is a constant play with reflections in baroque art. The increasing use of optics is 

significant as well as the idea that the reflection does not explain, but expands and confuses. 

At Versailles, the row of mirrors and the king’s realm are in a relation of a mise-en-abyme, as 

one infinity consumed in the other. The term mise-en-abyme refers to a reflection within a 

reflection (often with the idea of an entailing self-reflection); or a reflection or impression 

ending up in a sense of infinite abyss creating vertigo or nausea. For further reading, see 

Dällenbach (1977). 

2For Le Brun’s work on the gallery, see La Galerie des Glaces (2007), especially chapter 2, 

“Une oeuvre d’art totale,” pp 120-211, and chapter 3, “Les trente tableaux expliqués,” pp 

214-288. An early biography on Le Brun is Nivelon (published 2004; Claude Nivelon was a 

follower and pupil of Le Brun). 

3Van Orden (2005, pp. 3-36, 187-234, and passim). Chivalry in modes and habits such as 

court dance and elegant and measured gestures stands in contrast to the violence of battle, 

but in the French monarchy, music and dance were aspects of the military ideal, as means 

of control and hierarchy of style, ultimately related to the figure of the ruler. 

4In an image, the distinctions are not inherent in the language system, but adhere to the 

things or dimensions referred to or signified. The figure of a model depicted in an image is 

singled out as an element, since viewers are used to identify a body as a unit. The distinction 

between arbitrary and motivated signs (or natural and artificial) is used by Gotthold 

Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, see Townsend (1998); although contested by 

modern semiotics, the distinction is still widely in use; it also has an ancient tradition, from 

Stoicism and Scholastic philosophy. 

5As late as in 1753 appeared a magnificent collection of prints, by Jean-Baptiste Massé 

(1687–1767); see Castex (2007). The reason why there were no print albums to accompany 

the early descriptions was probably economic. The costs of the long wars exhausted the 

resources of the monarchy. 

6Mirror and painting have been companions in the development of theory and practice 

for illusionism in visual art. An important tradition was the legacy of Leonardo’s treatises 

where the use of mirrors is explicit. But the idea that artificial images could imitate the 

images “made” by nature, such as reflections in water or shadows, was part of the narrative 

tradition on the origin of painting, mainly with references in Pliny and in Ovid. Interests in 

optics during the Baroque era strengthened the interests in mirrors and other reflective 

devices. For a survey of this tradition, see Kemp (1989). 

7Quadri riportati is a Bolgonese invention used by Michelangelo in the ceiling decoration 

of the Sistine Chapel; from there the idea spread and became inherent in illusionist ceiling 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

decoration. The Galleria Farnese provided the next major impetus for the idea. See Sjöström 

(1978). 

8For instance the grimacing faces of the mascarones and the figure of the flying Mercury are 

obvious quotations. 

9The influence of interests for collections of cabinet size probably came from the Petite 

Académie, an assembly of learned men, and men of letters, not painters or philosophers. See 

Milovanovic (2005, pp. 60-68), on the Petite Académie, founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 

1663, to institutionalize the erudite advisory group concerned with ideological programs 

for the monarchy; in 1701 it was renamed as Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. 

Although the “modern” side in the conflict on the arts, with leaders such as Charles Perrault 

and Charles Le Brun, represented a panegyric attitude to the present French rule, Louis 

himself carefully selected men from the side of the “ancients” (Nicolas Boileau and Jean 

Racine predominently) for important and honorable tasks. See Fumaroli (2001, pp. 178- 

179). 

10 Ovid’s poems in the Metamorphoses are tales on the transformations of human bodies 

into plants, animals, and other nonhuman forms, thematizing subjects such as the poet, the 

creative invention, and relations of love. The poems were immensely influential during the 

16th and 17th centuries, especially for visual arts. See, for instance, Barolsky (1998). 

11For this observation, see Mérot (2007). See also note 12. 

12 Martin (2007). Élisabeth Martin notices how the painting techniques stress the brilliance 

of the south side in relation to darker and cooler colors on the north side. 

13The two double scenes are obviously pendants. But in a baroque taste for complexity, the 

references are tied crosswise: the main northern scene, which shows the king leading the 

war as a Roman warrior and as Jupiter is the “passing of the Rhine,” while the victory itself, 

on Maastricht, is shown in personifications and mythological figures; the main southern 

scene, corresponding to the “passing of the Rhine” is the “seizure of Ghent,” showing the 

king again as Jupiter, flying through the sky; and the effects of the victory, on the enemies, 

are shown through groups of personifications. Thus we have the scheme: North 1 (opposite 

the windows) = the troops cross the Rhine, the king as Jupiter + South 1 (on the same side, 

opposite the windows) = the victory at Ghent, the king as Jupiter; North 2 = the victory 

at Maastricht with personifications + South 2 = the plans of the Spaniards are disturbed. 

Thematically and historically, North 2 + South 1 belong together. Through visual analogy, 

however, between North 1 + South 1—in the fact that the king as Jupiter is the protagonist 

in both and that the images are focused on the prominent place above the mirrors, lightened 

from the windows opposite—there is an impression of the initial war action (the passing of 

the Rhine) as already entailing the victory at Maastricht. In reality, the victory at Maastricht 

was extremely difficult with large numbers of dead; these events were actual and terrible in 

fresh memories of people. See Lynn (1999, pp. 119-120) and Treasure (2001, pp. 143). Le 

Brun makes a visual apology for the whole war in the juxtaposition of the scenes, showing 

the initial passing of the Rhine as already a measure with the promise of imminent victory, 

although the hard times are also shown as prerequisite. 

14See note 3. 

15The expression grand goût was current on the elevated style in painting, used both by 

the “ancients” and the “moderns.” Both sides advocated models from Antiquity, but the 

moderns extended the realm of classical values into modern times, and they stressed 

rationality and “method.” In the modern camp, Roger de Piles developed theories around 


145


the concept goût, using the term goût artificial for the elevated and cultivated taste in art. 

The term le vrai goût was also used, and it was stressed that it had no nationality. De Piles 

developed his thoughts about goût especially in L’idée du peintre parfait, the introduction of 

Abregé (sic) de la vie des peintres, and in the chapter Du goût et de sa diversité, par rapport 

aux differentes Nations, in the same work (1715, pp. 538-545). I thank Linda Hinners for 

discussion on the notions of “taste” and “style” in de Piles’s works (see also note 19). 

16 On the decision about a change of subject matter and idea of the decoration, see Thuillier 

(2007). Thuillier states (p. 24), that there is no document proving how, on whose initiative, 

the decision was taken, but it was certainly within the nearest council of the king, Le Conseil 

des Dix. Nivelon (2004), who wrote about Le Brun’s life, says it was on the highest level, 

which means the king himself. 

17 In a conference at the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture, Le Brun made a 

logically based apology for drawing, probably in order to claim excellence in drawing as 

the cause or condition for perfect painting. See Conférences inédites de l’Académie Royale… 

(1903, pp. 35-44). 

18 Fumaroli (2001, pp. 18-24). 

19 The Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin the younger who was in charge of the 

“scenography” of the Swedish monarchy (its buildings and decorations as well as its 

entries, festivities, etc.) arranged for a group of French artists to come to the Swedish court 

to work on the castle decoration, and after the fire destroying the whole castle in 1697, to 

work on the rebuilding. In the correspondence with his agent in Paris, Daniel Cronström, 

Tessin talks about the craftsmen he needs and the requisite that they should be trained in 

the “real taste from Italy” in which “one succeeds nowadays very well (fort heureusement) 

in France.” See Tessin/Cronström (1964, pp. 13-14). Riksarkivet=National Archives, RA E 

5716. My thanks to Linda Hinners whose forthcoming doctoral thesis treats the lives and 

works of the French artists working at the Swedish royal castle in Stockholm in the late 

1690s and a few decades of the early 18th century. 

20 Tilghman (2006, pp. 83-93). 

21 Le Brun was a keen follower of Descartes, as can be seen in his studies of emotive faces, 

where he departs from Descartes’ Passions de l’âme; see Montagu (1994). The moderns 

were rational and stressed the importance of critical thinking and scientific method, instead 

of the realm of poetic “ideas” from Antiquity, stressed by the ancients. See Fumaroli, who 

describes the contrast in terms of “évidence géometrique, opposée à l’évidence de l’ordre 

esthétique” (2001, p. 192). 

Works cited: 

Barolsky, P. 1998. “As in Ovid, So in Renaissance Art.” In Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 

2, pp, 451-474.Castex, J.-G. 2007. “Du tableau à la gravure ou le dessin d’interprétation au 

XVIIIe siècle: cinquante-deux dessins pour une oeuvre?” In Revue du Louvre et des Musées 

de France, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 96-104.Conférences inédites de l’Académie Royale de peinture et 

de sculpture d’après les manuscripts des Archives de l’École des beaux-art. 1903. Assembled 

and annotated by Fontaine, A. Paris: Albert Fontemoing, Collection Minerva.Dällenbach, 

L. 1977. Le récit spéculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil.Descartes, R. 1650. 

Les Passions de l’âme. Amsterdam: Louis Elzevier.Fumaroli, M. 2001. “Les abeilles et les 

araignées.” In: Lecoq, A.-M. (ed.). La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Paris: Gallimard. 

146 


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La Galerie des Glaces: de sa crėation à sa Restauration. 2007. Prefaces byAlbanel, C., P. 

Arizzoli-Clémentel, and P. Coppey. Dijon: Éditions Faton.Hinners, L. (planned for 2010, 

forthcoming doctoral thesis), De fransöske hantwerkarnaIdeologiska, sociala och tekniska 

aspekter på de franska utsmyckningsarbetena på Stockholms Slott under Nicodemus Tessin 

d.y.:s ledning (Ideological, social and technical aspects of the decorations made by “French 

artists/artisans” in the Royal Castle of Stockholm under the direction of Nicodemus Tessin the 

Younger). 

Kemp, M. 1989. The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. 

New Haven: Yale University Press.Lynn, J. A. 1999. The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714. London 

and New York: Longman. Martin, E. 2007. “Les techniques originales des peintres.” In: 

Galerie des Glaces, pp. 323-325. Mérot, A. 2007. “Le rôle de l’ornement: Le Brun ensemblier 

de genie.” In: Galerie des Glaces, pp. 154-171Milovanovic, N. 2005. Du Louvre à Versailles. 

Lecture des Grands décors monarchiques.Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Montagu, J. 1994. The 

Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s “Conférence sur 

l’expression générale et particuliere.” New Haven: Yale University Press.Nivelon, C. 2004. 

Vie de Charles Le Brun et déscription détaillée de ses ouvrages. Génève:Librairie Droz 

S.A.Piles, R. de. 1715. Abregé de la vie des peintres, avec des reflexions sur leurs ouvrages, 

et un traité du peintre parfait; de la connoissance des desseins; de l’utilité des estampes, 2:e 

éd., rev. et corr. par l’auteur; avec un abregé de sa vie, et plusieurs autres additions. Paris: 

C. de Sercy.Sjöström, I. 1978. Quadratura: Studies in Italian Ceiling Painting. Stockholm: 

Almqvist & Wiksell International.Tessin, N./Cronström, D. 1964. Les relations artistiques 

entre la France et la Suède 1693–1718: correspondance (extraits) / Nicodème Tessin le jeune 

et Daniel Cronström. Weigert, R.-A. and C. Hernmarck (eds.). Stockholm: Nationalmuseums 

skriftserie, 10. Thuillier, J. 2007. “Charles Le Brun et la Galerie des glaces: un moment de 

l´histoire de l’art francais.” In: Galerie des Glaces, pp. 24-25.Tilghman, B. 2006. Reflections 

on Aesthetic Judgment and Other Essays.Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Townsend, D. 

1998. “Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim.” In: Craig, E. (ed.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

London: Routledge. Retrieved August 01, 2009 from http://www04.sub.su.se:2061/ 

article/M029SECT3Treasure, G. 2001. Louis XIV. Harlow: Longman.Van Orden, K. 2005. 

Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. Chicago and London: University of 

Chicago Press. 


Art History, Stockholm University 

SE-10691, Stockholm, Sweden 

Margaretha.Rossholm-Lagerlof@arthistory.su.se 


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148 

Fig. 3. Passage of the Rhine 

in the Presence of Enemies 

1672 and The King Takes 

Maastricht in Thirteen Days 

1673 

© RMN (Château de 

Versailles) / Gérard Blot / 

Hervé Lewandowski 

Fig. 1. Section of the decorative 

system. Photo: Margaretha 

Rossholm Lagerlöf. ©RMN 

(Château de Versailles) 

Fig. 2. Decision to Start War with 

the Dutch 1671. 

© RMN (Château de Versailles) 

/ René-Gabriel Ojéda / Franck 

Raux / montage Dominique 

Couto 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Fig. 4. Seizure of the Town 

and Fortress Ghent in Six 

Days 1678 and Measures 

of the Spaniards Broken by 

the Seizure of Ghent 1678 

© RMN (Château de 

Versailles) / René-Gabriel 

Ojéda / Franck Raux / 

montage Dominique Couto 

Fig. 5. Seizure of the Town and 

Fortress Ghent in Six Days 1678, 

detail. 

© RMN (Château de Versailles) 

/ René-Gabriel Ojéda / Franck 

Raux / montage Dominique 

Couto 


149

EMBODIMENTS 


Bios and Baroque: Life in the Folds of 17th-Century 

Artifice and Contemporary Bioart 

150 

Anna Munster 

Anna Munster is the deputy director of the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics and 

an associate professor in the School of Art History and Art Education, College of Fine 

Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Materializing 

New Media (Dartmouth College Press, 2006). Her research interests are in contemporary 

art, new media, networks, and embodiment, and she is currently researching a book on 

networks, aesthetics, and experience. 

The Baroque is a topography in which connection and difference between lived 

bodies, material objects, science, and the passions formed a mesh of enfolded 

territories. These relations also suggest a mode for articulating the materialityinformation 

relationships of contemporary life. Information now materially 

inhabits life—in the networking of genes, in the scaffolding of tissue onto digitally 

designed polymer structures to cultivate semi-living entities, and so on. In a deeper 

way, the differential unfolding of “bios” is scaffolded to technologies of life. Can 

recourse to baroque folding assist us to think the aesthetics of contemporary life 

including the emergence of bioart? 

If the Baroque has often been associated with capitalism it is because the Baroque 

is linked to a crisis of property, a crisis that appears at once with the growth of new 

machines in the social field and the discovery of new living beings in the organism 

- Deleuze, 1993, p. 110. 

The work of rereading the baroque 

philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm 

Leibniz performed by Gilles Deleuze 

in his book The Fold (1993) has been 

something of an inspiration in the field 

of new media practices and art theory. 

Deleuze’s folding has inspired fields 

of architectural practice such as Greg 

Lynn’s (2004), Tim Murray’s writing on 

the digital baroque (2008), and my own 

theorizing of digital-baroque relations 

(2006). But in the quote above, Deleuze 

draws our attention to a particular 

triangulation of ownership, emergent 

social formations, and biology to which 

baroque aesthetics are linked. It strikes 

me that although digital aesthetics may 

well resonate with baroque folding, it is 

to the life sciences and their emergent 

aesthetics that Deleuze’s Leibniz might 

now take us. In this article I want 

to extend Deleuze’s understanding 

of baroque aesthesia to the crisis of 

living and life under contemporary 

biocapitalism. In particular, I am 

interested in the emergence of a form 


of aesthetic practice that coincides with 

crises in biocapitalism—bioart. Bioart 

is a reasonably young and emerging 

art form and movement, with many of 

its artists still engaged in debates over 

what constitutes its key techniques, 

media, and artifacts. However, after 

a number of large-scale exhibitions 

such as L’Art Biotech, staged in Aix-en- 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Provence in 2003, and Bio-Difference, 

which was part of the 2004 Biennale 

of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) in 

Australia, most artists and curators 

now vehemently defend the biotech 

fleshiness of their medium and form. 

Quoting Eduardo Kac, a prominent 

bioartist, Jens Hauser (curator of L’Art 

Biotech) states that: 

Bio Art is first and foremost an art of transformation in vivo 

that manipulates “biological materials at discrete levels (e.g. 

individual cells, proteins, genes, nucleotides)” (2005; the last 

part of the sentence comes from Kac). 

Bioart is not, then, comprised of images, 

sculptures, or even computational 

simulations of biological life. Artists 

such as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr who 

belong to the Tissue Culture and Art 

project (TCA) have adamantly asserted 

an anti-representationalist stance in the 

bioart arena, differentiating themselves 

particularly from artists who work 

with biological metaphors, such as 

the genetic algorithm or simulated 

artificial-life environments (Catts and 

Zurr, 2008, p. 140). As I hope to show, 

this anti-representationalism connects 

contemporary bioart to what I will call, 

borrowing from Tim Murray’s recent 

book, the “digital baroque” (2008). 

This anti-representationalist position 

is also linked in some bioart to a deep 

understanding of the baroque as an 

aesthetic of folding. However, this 

involves a move on my part, which 

is anathema to many bioartists—the 

reconnection of bioart to a tradition 

of digital or new media art. Many 

bioartists have raged against the 

implicit representationalism of the 

computational machine, insisting on the 

brute fleshiness of their medium and 

artifacts. For example, in a workshop 

on “The Aesthetics of Life” conducted 

by Adam Zaretsky and Jennifer Willet in 

2008 (at the University of Exeter, U.K.), 

both artists distanced themselves from 

computational biotechnologies and the 

“genetic hype” of the biotech industry 

(Willet and Zaretsky 2008). They insisted 

instead on their immersion in the 

“wetware” of the laboratory as space for 

artistic practice and on the importance 

of “re-embodying” biotechnologies. Yet 

we need to situate the debate about 

the relation of contemporary bioart to 

biotechnologies within the debate about 

a “digital baroque” and the baroqueness 

of digital embodiment. By doing this 

I think we can begin to ascertain an 

aesthetics for bioart that is not simply 

steeped in negation; that is, bioart 

is not genetic art, not digital art, not 

new media. Rather we can understand 

bioart as a practice propelled by a set of 

energies that gain their force through 

differentiation. We are then led to 


151


another set of considerations: if bioart 

is produced through the differential 

folding of flesh, and its artifacts embody 

differentially inflected and produced 

flesh as contemporary embodiment, 

then to what extent does this respond to 

the “crisis in property” Deleuze raises? 

We need to examine the status of bioart 

(and especially its parasitic relation with 

biotechnologies) as either an aesthetic 

that is generated in response to a 

contemporary property crisis or as part 

of the crisis. In working to transform 

and often to produce living things at 

the level of biotechnical manipulation, 

bioartists engage (to pick up on the 

positive aspects of crisis invoked by 

Deleuze) “new machines in the field of 

the social” and in fact discover, or at least 

call forth, new modes of living for the 

organism (to now paraphrase Deleuze’s 

“discovery of new living beings in the 

organism”) (Fig.1). Of course, the very 

machines bioartists engage in the field 

of the social are precisely assemblages 

of technique, matter, and life science 

deployed by biotech corporations, 

which are posing enormous social, 

environmental, and ethical concerns 

for contemporary life. For Deleuze, the 

key problem posed by the Baroque, 

and what in fact links the Baroque to 

capitalism, is the problem of property 

or, as he suggests, the determination 

of appurtenance (1993, p. 107). For 

him, the Baroque’s association with 

capitalism is not its historical link to 

the rise and spread of mercantilism (as 

a straightforward, traditional Marxist 

theory of aesthetics—for example, 

Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art, 

1962—might argue). Rather, capitalism 

152 

arises as result of a “crisis in property,” 

and it is the baroque machine that 

drives this crisis. Hence capitalism 

might be understood as a socialfinancial 

machine that tries to manage 

property crises, that is forever trying 

to stabilize a crisis in property, with 

disastrous consequences. To what crisis 

in property is Deleuze referring that the 

Baroque provokes? It is not, for him, 

foremost a crisis of property considered 

in its commodity form. Rather it is the 

epistemic and ontological preconditions 

for property as such: knowledge of 

what belongs to what in the world and 

how to live according to the knowledge 

that pertains to these relations. These 

relations are not initially played out 

in the realm of the market but rather 

in the domain of life, of organism and 

body. For what the Baroque discovers 

in the realms of 17th-century natural 

history and philosophy is that the 

body that belongs to me is not unified 

and possessed but rather aggregated, 

enfolded, and distributed: “…our body 

is a type of world full of an infinity of 

creatures that are also worthy of life” 

(Leibniz, quoted in Deleuze, 1993, 

p. 109). For Deleuze, this raises the 

question of what belongs to what— 

species, relations, degrees, and the 

extent to which what I belong to and 

what belongs to me determines what I 

am. These relations and degrees reorder 

the relationship between belonging 

and being such that what I belong to 

is precondition for what I am (1993, 

pp. 109–110). In the light of this, we 

might reconsider the debate between 

preformationists and epigeneticists, 

which haunts the history of the life 


sciences from their nascent form in the 

early modern period to the present day. 

The early microscopists such as van 

Leeuwenhoek and Swammerdam have 

often been attributed a preformationist 

position, (fig. 2) perhaps due to the 

ambiguities within their drawings and 

correspondence to places such as the 

Royal Society in Britain. Homunculi are 

found in the drawings of microscopists 

of this period—for example, Nicolas 

Hartsoeker’s 1694 woodcut of a 

homunculus inside sperm (fig. 3). 

Epigeneticist illustrators and scientists 

of later ilk, such as Ernst Haeckel, were 

preoccupied with the force of form 

and deformation in embryogenesis. 

It is here that we begin to see a much 

more definitive split between notions 

of epigenesis and preformation. 

Interestingly, Haeckel’s drawings have 

often been attributed a “baroque” 

aesthetic (fig. 4). 

There was a lot of fluidity between 

the preformationist and epigenetic 

positions during the early modern 

period. Their sharp distinction was 

more an effect of a couple of centuries 

of ensuing argument in biological 

theory and experiment. In fact, the 

idea of beings inside other beings 

could just as easily be understood as 

an effect of the modulation of serial 

enfolding—worlds within worlds 

within worlds—upon conceptions of 

“life” in early natural history. In other 

words, a hardened preformationist 

position can sometimes seem almost 

epigeneticist. Contemporary historians 

of the life sciences suggest that 

Swammerdam and Malpighi were used 

later by thinkers to forge a coherent 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

preformationist framework (Magner, 

2002, p. 159; Roe, 2003, pp. 5–7). It was 

Nicolas Malebranche who developed 

a fully fledged theory of preformation, 

referencing Swammerdam’s and 

Malpighi’s drawings and observations. 

In The Search After Truth (1674), 

Malebranche schematized 

Swammerdam’s ideas into the concept 

of emboîtement (encasement)—all 

living things encased other living things 

inside them. And making the protocreationist 

leap, Malebranche drew the 

conclusion that, “the body of every man 

and beast born till the end of time was 

perhaps produced at the creation of the 

world” (1997, p. 27). Malebranche tried 

to use microscopy to settle the infinite 

regress of relations of belonging. On 

the other hand, Kaspar Friedrich Wolff 

(1734–94), who is often thought of 

as one of the founders of modern 

embryology, drew upon microscopic 

investigation of the development of 

the intestines of chicken embryos to 

support an epigenetic position (see Roe, 

1979, pp. 5–12).On Deleuze’s reading of 

Leibniz, relations of belonging cannot 

be settled. Instead they are induced 

as a problem to be worked at by the 

baroque machine. To have relations to 

other beings inside one or to diverse 

thoughts in the field of perception is to 

acknowledge that belonging involves 

“moving and perpetually reshuffled 

relations” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 110). 

What a Leibnizian monad “has” is not 

a property such as plasticity but rather 

other monads. What a “little animal” 

has—as revealed by microscopy—is 

not motility as a property of life but 

rather many other little animals moving 


153


in relation to it (van Leeuwenhoeck in 

1688, republished 1932, pp. 109–166). 

The question of having is not settled by 

emboîtement, ownership, or attribute. 

Rather, “to have” means to live in 

relation to a “crisis” of the unfixability 

of property. 

Transversally cutting into 

contemporary questions, we can ask: 

if we do reverberate with a baroque 

aesthetics, is this because, likewise, 

there is today a kind of crisis in 

property in the fields of life and living? 

We are now similarly beset by the 

question: what does it mean to have 

a body or for a body to belong to us? 

For, courtesy of the pervasiveness of 

biotechnologies, my body is filled with 

the organ transplants of other species, 

has the hands of another grafted onto it, 

parts of it may become an immortal cell 

line perpetually grown in a laboratory, 

and/or is subject to genetic marking 

by transgenic organisms. Here we see 

“the body” distributed in an endless 

deferral of its totality to the non-sum 

of the whole of its parts. This inability 

to find a bodily center or to find a 

center that is “the body” resonates with 

conceptions of the Baroque explored by 

authors such as Tim Murray and myself. 

Murray (2008) argues that digitality’s 

“baroqueness” is to be located in 

the ways in which digital aesthetics 

enfold and unfold temporality. The 

digital image (especially displayed by 

multimedia, installation, or hyperlinked 

work but also in cinema that deploys a 

digital baroque aesthetic such as Peter 

Greenaway’s 1991 film Prospero’s 

Books) presents simultaneous, 

interconnected information—layering, 

154 

hotspots, embedded imagery, and so on. 

Yet this simultaneity is never reduced 

to presence. Instead, what is baroque 

about this digital visuality is the extent 

to which the co-present elements of 

the image are engaged in deferringreferring 

interplays; the hotspot reveals 

an embedded textual fragment—a kind 

of past or archaeology to that image— 

and the entire image is potentially 

subject to future rearrangement. 

Processes of differentiation energize 

both the conceptions of digital baroque 

and digital embodiment. For Murray, the 

digital image is not a specular projection 

that greets or emanates from a stabilized 

subject position. Instead, the arc of visual 

traces and serial productions unfolds 

the engagements of and between a 

viewer-participant, artist-participant, 

and digital information. For me, digital 

embodiment is a local actualization of 

the potentially (virtually) distributed 

vectors of corporeality—distributed as 

traces in databases and as emergent 

arrangements to be brought forth by 

interaction between user-participants 

and computational machines (Munster, 

2006, pp. 62–66). In other words, there 

is no “the body” and “the computer” 

but rather corporeal-informatic 

assemblages (the artistic machine 

deploying an aesthetic of humancomputer 

interaction, for example), 

which engender embodiments. 

In what way, then, might bioart be 

situated as a mode of digital embodiment 

playing out across this digitalbaroque 

aesthetic? We would need 

to understand bioartistic production 

as preoccupied with “unmaking” the 

solidity of the flesh, of unmaking flesh 


as property, preformed or as the tabula 

rasa that supports form. We need to 

ask to what extent bioart participates 

in a kind of folding such that its flesh is 

processually or differentially produced 

and inducing. Perhaps not all bioart 

does engage in this kind of enfolded 

aesthetic but I hope to suggest that 

such a direction is emerging within 

some of its practices. However, and this 

is to situate Deleuze’s question about 

capitalism and crisis within a more 

contemporary context, to what extent 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

is the production of flesh as ongoing 

folding—permanent differentiation, 

permanent embryogenesis—an 

activity of contemporary capitalism, 

otherwise known as biocapitalism? 

Biotechnical organisms embody a crisis 

of property because their processes 

and technical arrangements mitigate 

against the location of property and 

bodies within “the body.” As Eugene 

Thacker puts it, we are in the midst of 

the production of a new kind of biology, 

which he calls “biomedia”: 

The “body” in biomedia is thus always understood in two ways—as a 

biological body, a biomolecular body, a species body, a patient body, 

and as a body that is “compiled” through modes of visualisation, 

modelling, data extraction, and in silico simulation (2004, p.13). 

Biotechnical flesh belongs to a more 

generalized liquidation of property and 

capital as fixed assets, as it both propels 

us and is propelled into the bioeconomy 

of permanent speculative liquidity 

(Rajan 2006). Does this abundance of 

ongoing flesh production by the biotech 

industry signal a new formation of 

capitalism as infinite differentiation or 

does it signal a crisis in property? Might 

any bioart—even that which highlights 

processes of differentiation—be fully 

engaged by a regime of bio-capitalpolitics?As 

Melinda Cooper has recently 

argued, at stake in biotechnology are 

the kinds of techniques/biologies being 

deployed, including their historical 

antecedents, discursive formations, 

and actual engagement with materials 

(2008). Cooper explores the genealogy 

of tissue engineering (TE), arguing that 

it is historically connected with concepts 

of epigenesis. TE’s techniques, she 

argues, share less epistemological space 

with mechanical engineering and more 

with the mathematics and geometry 

of topological space, especially when 

deployed in the sphere of regenerative 

medicine (2008, pp. 103–105). This 

area of mathematics is concerned 

with the generation of form due to 

continuous modulations by forces, 

something we see manifest in Haeckel’s 

19th-century embryo series. In the 

quest for what Cooper calls “permanent 

embryogenesis” in regenerative 

medicine, tissue is engineered from 

immortal cell lines—cells that are 

sustained precisely on the basis that 

they continually differentiate. But what 

this confronts us with, Cooper suggests, 

is the possibility of a body unbound by 

measurable (metric and chronological) 

time. Instead we must confront a new 


155


constitution of embodiment via TE— 

biology produced (and increasingly 

lived because of its deployment in 

areas such as regenerative medicine), 

in “nonmetric time” (Cooper, 2008, p. 

105). The bioartists I have mentioned 

so far in this article—Willet, Zaretsky, 

and TCA—could be said to be pursuing 

a trajectory within bioaesthetics that 

explores nonmetric embodiment in 

the age of biotechnologies. Willet and 

TCA have used tissue engineering as a 

technique for exploring the dispositif of 

biocapital (fig. 5). 1 Under the auspices 

of a “fake” biotech company Bioteknica, 

Willet with collaborator Shawn Bailey 

grew tissue culture “teratomas” at the 

SymbioticA Art and Science Laboratory 

in Perth, Western Australia (codirected 

and founded by members of the TCA 

project). Willet and Bailey hybridized in 

vivo and representationalist techniques 

in the ongoing performance that was 

Bioteknica during 2003–07. They 

produced marketing brochures for their 

“corporation” as well as successfully 

growing semi-living teratomas. 

Teratomas of course represent the 

paradox at the heart of areas such 

as TE and indeed the very idea of 

156 

regeneration. Literally “monstrous 

growths,” cancers and tumors are 

often also teratomas. The teratoma 

is cell growth “out of control” or in 

permanent differentiation. And here 

lies the very paradox explored by the 

Bioteknica project—so too are cell lines 

used to regenerate tissue in permanent 

embryogenesis. Bioteknica ironically 

market the very idea of growth, 

monstrous growth, as the force that 

subtends the contemporary biotech 

corporation.The focus of the TCA project 

lies with exploring the aesthetics and 

ethics of what they call “semi-living” 

organisms; organisms that have been 

grown in vivo using tissue engineering 

techniques. The TCA artists have 

developed a complex ethico-aesthetic 

framework that is embedded in their 

work. The “semi-living” entities they 

make, display, and perform with are 

not simply to be located between the 

living and the dead. Rather they are 

fundamentally fragmented, dependent, 

and distributed organisms, which 

also call upon humans to consider the 

ways in which we, too, have become 

imbricated in this networked ecology 

of life (fig. 6): 

In the context of our work once a fragment is taken from A BODY it becomes 

a part of THE BODY. The living fragment becomes part of a higher order that 

embraces all living tissues regardless of their current site. We see it as a 

symbolic device that enhances the bond humans share with all living beings. 

The semi-living are fragments of The BODY, nurtured in surrogate body—a 

techno-scientific one. The laboratory is part of the extended body, but the 

care can only be performed by a fellow living being—us, the artists 

(Catts and Zurr, 2008, p. 141). 


The questions raised by these artists 

in their work follows a line of baroque 

folding that leads us all the way from 

the worlds-within-worlds fold of the 

early modern flesh of natural history 

to the ecologies of contemporary 

biotechnical life. But is this enough 

to continue to incite or at least draw 

upon the radical conclusion to which 

Deleuze leads us—that the baroque 

art-machine incites a crisis in property? 

As stand-alone art pieces, I doubt 

that bioart and its aesthetics set off a 

process of unraveling on such a scale. 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Indeed, as I have hinted, they might 

even constitute part of a movement that 

throws us into a permanent unraveling 

as a new mode of life lived under crisis 

capitalism. But the redeeming grace of 

the kind of bioart I have been gesturing 

toward, is that for all its defense of the 

presentational nature of its medium 

and techniques, the bioartists to 

whom I have referred are also active 

participants in a broader movement 

that has recently been referred to as 

“tactical biopolitics” in which bioart 

plays a more interventionist role: 

…a thriving community of bioartists, researchers, and hobbyists have 

provided new analytical and activist models by which to intervene 

and participate in the life sciences. Through a broad set of hands-on 

interventions that provide a critique-in-action of both the political economy 

and the naturalization of the biotech industry, bioartists and researchers 

have fostered interspecies contacts, engineered hybrid life forms, and set 

up independent Biolabs (da Costa, 2009). 

Perhaps, then, bioart gains its gravitas 

from the extent to which it rejoins a 

more general relation to information 

and knowledge—the extent to which its 

ethico-aesthetic claims can or do become 

part of a more generalized epistemological 

distributive and differential impulse in 

culture at large. And this impulse has as 

much to do with sets of problems opened 

up within digital culture as it does with a 

restricted notion of “the biotechnical”— 

issues such as the multiplicitous 

tendencies of digital code, which are then 

“managed” by patenting and proprietorial 

regimes such as intellectual property 

and digital management rights. So, too, 

are biotechnical artifacts and techniques 

subject to such forms of management 

techniques. Where bioart does 

differentiate itself from becoming simply 

another aspect of the unfolding crisis 

of life and capital in the contemporary 

world is inasmuch as it participates in 

an onto-epistemological redistribution 

of this crisis beyond techniques of 

“managing” life and property. This is 

demonstrated explicitly in the sharing 

of knowledge about biotechnology in 

art-laboratory environments where 

scientists and artists are together 

engaged in the politics of information and 

the will to unfold different relations to 

“life.” Here bioart contributes to a broader 

process of creating ecologies of bio-lifeinformation, 

invoking the ceaseless work 

of folding these into and out of each other; 

ecological work in which “digital” artists 

and thinkers are likewise engaged. 


157


Endnotes: 

1 The term dispositif is drawn from the work of Michel Foucault and is badly translated by the 

English term “apparatus” (see Foucault, 1980, pp. 194-228). Foucault uses it to refer to an 

assemblage comprising variable elements—discourses, institutions, protocols, statements 

and propositions, architecture and so on—which when working together generate and 

sustain a social order of power relations. I am suggesting that the Bioteknica work is not 

simply aesthetic but is designed to investigate the interrelations among biotechnologies, 

corporations, aesthetics, economics, marketing, and the various discourses and statements 

through which these circulate and are affirmed. This “assemblage” makes up contemporary 

biocapital, and the artists are interested in critically investigating this assemblage via their 

art practice. 

Works cited: 

Catts, O and I. Zurr. 2008. “The Art of the Semi-Living and Partial Life: Extra Ear–1⁄4 Scale.” 

In: Pandilovski, M. (ed.). Art in the Biotech Era. Adelaide: Experimental Art Foundation/IMA 

Books, 140–147 

Cooper, M. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: 

University of Washington Press. 

da Costa, B. 2009. “Rationale.” Radars and Fences II: Tactical Bioart in the Age of Biotechnology. 

Symposium, New York University, March 5. http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/md1445/rf/ 

Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Foucault, M. 1980. “The Confession of the Flesh.” In: Gordon, C. (ed.). Power/Knowledge 

Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon, pp. 194-228. 

Haeckel, E. H. 1874. Anthropogenie. Entwickelungsgeschichte des menschen von Ernst 

Haeckel. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. 

Hartsoeker, N. 1694. Essay de dioptrique, Paris: J. Anisson. 

Hauser, A. 1962. The Social History of Art. vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 

Hauser, J. 2005. “Bios, Techne, Logos: A Timely Art Career.” In: SantaMoniCA Arts Bulletin 

(Barcelona). December. http://cultura.gencat.cat/casm/butlleti/hemeroteca/n19/en/ 

article_03.htm#1 

Leeuwenhoek, A. van. 1688. “The First Observations on ‘Little Animals’ (Protozoa and 

Bacteria) in Waters,” Antony Van Leeuwenhoek and His “Little Animals.” 1932. Dobell, C. (ed. 

and trans.). New York: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson. 

1722. Opera Omnia, seu Arcana Naturae. vol. 1, Leyden: J. A. Langerak. 

Lynn, G. 2004. Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays. Brussels: La Lettre Volée. 

Magner, L. N. 2002. A History of the Life Sciences. 3rd ed. New York: Dekker. 

Malebranche, N. 1997. The Search After Truth: With Elucidations. Lennon, T. M. and P. J. 

Olscamp (trans. and eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Munster A. 2006 Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. Hanover: 

Dartmouth College Press. 

Murray, T. 2008. The Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: 

158 


Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 


Rajan, K. S. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Post Genomic Life. Durham: Duke University 

Press. 

Roe, S. 2003. Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the Haller- 

Wolff Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

1979. “Rationalism and Embryology: Caspar Friedrich Wolff’s Theory of Epigenesis.” In 

Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1-43 

Thacker, E. 2004. Biomedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Willet, J. and A. Zaretsky. 2008. “The Aesthetics of Life,” Seminar on BioArt presented 

by the Information Society Network, University of Exeter, U.K., May 14. For information 

regarding this seminar see: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/networks/information/ 

Bioartdescription.shtml 

Anna Munster 

School of Art History and Art Education, 

College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, 

P.O. Box 259, Paddington NSW 2021, Australia 

A.Munster@unsw.edu.au 


159


Photographic images of A Semi-Living Worry Doll H and Semi-Living Worry Doll A, (McCoy 

Cell line, Biodegradable/bioabsorbable Polymers and Surgical Sutures), The Tissue Culture 

and Art Project, 2000 

Growing the semi-living steak in a bioreactor’ Research image from 

‘Disembodied Cuisine’ The Tissue Culture and Art Project, 2003 

160 


Shawn Bailey & Jennifer Willet, BIOTEKNICA Generational Prototypes 

Installation 

Installation View at Biennial Electronic Arts Perth, 2004 

Spermatozoon. Homunculus.’, woodcut, Essay de dioptrique, 

Nicolas Hartsoeker (J. Anisson: Paris 1694) 

p.230. Image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London. 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Figures 5 and 6’, Opera omnia, seu arcana naturae..., Anthony 

van Leeuwenhoek, (J.A. Langerak: Leyden 1722 – 1730), vol. 1, 

p. 168, image courtesy the Wellcome Library, London 


161


Plate V, ‘Comparative embryos of hog, calf, rabbit and man’. 

Anthropogenie. Entwickelungsgeschichte des menchen von 

Ernst Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, (Wilhelm Englemann, 

Leipzig 1874) image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. 

162 


C

CODA 

A Rent in the Clouds 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 


Robert Harbison teaches architectural history at London Metropolitan University 

and is the author of Travels in the History of Architecture published in 2009 

and a series of books that cross the boundaries of disciplines: Eccentric Spaces 

(on imagination), Deliberate Regression (on primitivism), Pharaoh’s Dream 

(on subjectivity), The Built the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable, Thirteen Ways, and 

Reflections on Baroque. 

The archetypal baroque cloudscape 

occurs on a certain kind of painted ceiling 

that pretends to redraw the boundaries 

of the building, sometimes increasing 

the apparent size of the space to twice 

the original. One of the most flamboyant 

instances was constructed by a painter, 

who was also a Jesuit, for the church of 

Sant’Ignazio in Rome. When you stand 

under this ceiling, it looks as if Fra 

Andrea Pozzo has taken off the roof and 

piled another building just as big, on top 

of the one we’re standing in, using the 

huge existing church as its foundation. 

This second, illusory building also lacks 

a roof and opens straight onto the sky 

(likewise painted) which drifts down 

into the building beneath, in the form 

of stray clouds and groups of levitating 

bodies. Beyond them is a further 

depth of cloudy sky, tubelike in form. 

Our giddiness looking up at all this 

movement is mirrored, at a different 

metaphysical temperature to be sure, by 

our sensation when gazing down at the 

sand underfoot in the Ryoanji garden 

in Kyoto, sometimes said to represent a 

sea of cloud, interrupted only a by few 

mountain peaks (15 carefully strewn 

rocks) poking through. 

At Sant’Ignazio many unquiet painted 

figures cling to imaginary ledges and 

protrusions, obscuring the fictitious 

structure. Most of them are being sucked 

upward by invisible forces in the air. In 

our most fervent imaginings we might 

expect the space to end as an alarming 

vision of emptiness, approaching that of 

the final surrealist stage, up a little set 

of stairs all its own, of Le Corbusier’s 

roof garden for Charles de Beistegui, 

the heir of Mexican silver mines, where 

a rococo sitting room is mocked up 

without windows, furnishings (except 

for a fireplace and one garden chair), 

or roof. When you stand beneath the 

cyclonic events depicted overhead 

at Sant’Ignazio, the idea of such a 

disconcerting void does not seem far 

away. 

There is a further troubling ambiguity 

about the world of these interiors. 

Are they so vast, staked out by four 

writhing, personified Continents on 

the lowest tier and incorporating 

the entire sky, in order to express an 

intelligently enlarged idea of God’s 

scope? Or is it self-praise, the grandiose 


163


view propounded by a powerful human 

institution, the Jesuit order, with a 

wider grasp, effectively, than the Church 

to which it pays lip service? So this 

extraordinary incorporation of clouds 

into architecture may represent both 

a serious disruption of architectural 

coherence and a drastic realignment of 

spiritual power. 

Taking the roof off in a controlled 

explosion directed by the science of 

perspective is only one of the ways in 

which spaces beyond the building and 

the city itself are intimated: substances 

like silver, jade, and lapis lazuli are 

visible here in great abundance, 

instantly recognizable as trophies from 

specific Jesuit triumphs overseas in the 

recently explored territories alluded to 

in the frescoes. 

Perhaps this is only a variation on 

the classical idea that the building 

represents the cosmos because it 

incorporates rare marbles from the four 

corners of the earth, that remind us in 

their veins and blotches of the rivers, 

clouds, and storms of the far-off places 

from which they have traveled to get 

here. Early commentators on Hagia 

Sophia, the great imperial church in 

Constantinople, make this argument 

almost explicit, while describing its 

sequence of dome and semi-domes all 

coated in gold mosaic as an imitation 

heaven, suspended from the actual one 

by a golden chain. 

The dome of the Pantheon, Bernini’s 

favorite ancient Roman building, has 

also been seen as a sky, in a more 

abstract and purely geometrical sense 

than Pozzo’s, though apparently the 

coffers in its ceiling were once peppered 

164 

with metal rosettes or stars, and though 

to this day you can still watch—at 

least on sunny days—the sun passing 

slowly across it as a patch of light given 

roundish shape by the single hole in its 

roof. 

Taking their cue from the Pantheon, 

most renaissance architects would 

have been non-plussed by the idea of 

cluttering their domes with deceptive 

representations of clouds. Clouds 

are quintessentially impermanent 

and domes have always been favored 

architectural forms because they echo 

the permanence of the heavenly spheres. 

So the interior of Bramante’s little dome 

on his Tempietto is painted a uniform 

blue and sprinkled with a regular grid of 

gold stars just like the roofs of Egyptian 

temples from thousands of years earlier. 

Thus the lighter patches on this ceiling 

that you might mistake for clouds are 

probably only water stains. 

It is true that the little saucer domelet 

over the chancel of Brunelleschi’s Old 

Sacristy at San Lorenzo in Florence, 

the first fully fledged architectural 

ensemble of the Renaissance, is painted 

with a night sky, but this is cloudless 

and diagrammatic, more like a star map 

than the accompaniment of a particular 

evening walk. It shows a world far above 

the clouds, peopled by the mythological 

beasts and beings that keep the stars in 

order, and is said to record the positions 

of the heavenly bodies at the moment 

of the patron’s birth, making it an 

extremely displaced form of portrait. 

The Baroque interest in clouds, unlike 

Constable’s or even Turner’s, cannot be 

classed as naturalism, but a series of 

invitations to new forms of license that 


lead one on to more preposterous levels 

of artifice. So unsympathetic observers 

nowadays find the preponderance 

of plaster clouds one of the most 

damning signs of baroque corruption 

and excess. When Bernini, most brazen 

of baroque sculptors, wants to show a 

saint in ecstasy, he suspends her a few 

feet above the floor on stone clouds. 

Saint Teresa forms part of a careful 

three-dimensional reconstruction 

of an incident described in her 

autobiography, which took place not 

in the sky but in her cell, an ordinary 

interior. Bernini has taken a liberty in 

the siting, placing the event on a little 

theatrical stage where it can be savored 

by eight marble spectators who twist 

round dramatically to see it better 

We have to assume that these 

contradictions, one could almost say 

these absurdities, stirred Bernini’s 

imagination rather than defeating 

it. Spiritual ecstasy looks like fleshly 

orgasm; depicting it, the sculptor excites 

the senses with marble sometimes 

soft like butter, sometimes jagged like 

ice, material so strange and intense 

it pushes us to levitate too, imagining 

ourselves floating above the ground, 

buoyed up on the cloud of our thought. 

Without pretending to penetrate fully 

the mixture of literalism and symbolism 

in 17th-century devotion, we can be 

reasonably sure that reason should 

here be kept at bay. However far he 

was from the style of the anonymous 

14th-century author of The Cloud of 

Unknowing, Bernini would have agreed 

with him that some forms of knowing 

are enemies of spiritual truth. 

As in the fundamentally weighty 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

Roman Baroque, there is something 

paradoxical in the hankerings of 

Bavarian Rococo after the immaterial. 

Structurally, most of the pilgrimage 

churches are lumbering beasts of 

daunting mass, until you enter them, 

that is, at which point you feel raised to 

another plane. The whiteness of most 

surfaces, especially lower down, seems 

to wish away our relation to earth and 

ordinary substance. You could imagine 

yourself in a cloud world, an ideal place 

of unearthly radiance and sparkling 

unreal substance. Ceilings are painted 

as skies where important meetings 

and raisings take place, but this seems 

almost a sky on top of the sky, because 

we already inhabit a purified empty 

realm, a kind of heaven on earth, like 

such worlds of myth as the vast sea of 

milk waiting for the troop of Hindu 

demons who will churn it and bring forth 

life, or Jack London’s Yukon, an ideal 

endless whiteness. The works of 

the late baroque architect Dominikus 

Zimmermann, large and small, are 

continually assuring us that we can 

break away from the restrictions of the 

material world and enter a freer sphere. 

His most interesting ways of enforcing 

this idea are various forms of piercing, 

breaking through to a space beyond or 

above the one we are temporarily in, 

with the effect of a rent in the clouds 

showing us suddenly another realm 

stretching ahead. Bernardo Vittone, 

the 18th-century Torinese architect 

who marries Guarini’s intellectual 

complexity to Juvarra’s decorative 

exuberance, is another expert at slicing 

holes in the fabric to give views of little 

worlds stretching off in all directions. In 


165


Vittone’s buildings the effect is puzzlelike, 

as if we inhabit an oversized 

children’s toy, and the experience that 

results is exhilarating but a joke at the 

same time. 

Zimmermann seems far less 

detached; the fervency in his simulation 

of outdoor sensations indoors suggests 

that he wants to move a garden into the 

building bodily to preserve his dream 

of an ideal place. And the piercing— 

first of all, odd shaped windows like 

organic apertures, reminiscent in 

turn of eyes or ears or mouths. And 

then, even more gratuitous ones, a 

series of irregular fringed openings 

running along the top of an arcade, at 

just the place where you expect the 

fullest structural sobriety. Sometimes, 

quite unnecessarily, he erects little 

membranes between the walls of a 

narrow ambulatory just so he can poke 

a cartouche-like hole in each one. 

Appliances like altarpieces and 

pulpits are ideal playgrounds for this 

impulse to dissolve the substance by 

removing selected excerpts. Sometimes 

the altar will jut up into a small dome 

straight above, so it looks as if it has 

broken through the ceiling and into 

the space beyond, suggesting that the 

ceiling is a kind of cloud-substance, 

easily penetrated. Sometimes the 

breaking through is contained within 

the altarpiece, as if a cavity had been 

discovered high up, which turns out to 

have the Christ Child within it waiting 

to shine out like the sun from clouds. 

No one is surprised to find that He is 

comfortably seated there on a sofa of 

cloud. 

I have sometimes felt that all these 

166 

disintegrating surfaces must point 

to an unspoken malaise, a lot of little 

hints that death lies just around the 

corner. A radical change in taste did 

in fact lie not too far ahead. Within 

the career of Balthasar Neumann, who 

created one of the most compelling 

cloudscapes, in the form of a whole 

interior at Vierzehnheiligen near 

Bamberg, his clients turned against 

the exuberant Rococo in favour of a 

colorless classicism. Vierzehnheiligen 

is a billowing space seemingly open 

on all sides, lightly stitched together 

like a tent or balloon that lets the 

surrounding air dictate its form. Of 

course this is a cleverly calculated 

illusion, not a reflection of the building’s 

actual relation to the weather outside. 

Neumann practices here a less literal 

naturalism than Zimmermann’s, 

summoning up certain features of the 

world beyond without imitating them. 

It would be a wonderful irony if one 

could believe that the great English 

landscape gardens of the 18th century 

were inspired in part by the grandiose 

irregularity of baroque interiors. Do 

we need such a spur to explain the 

scale of these huge works of art, that 

incorporate the whole visible world as 

far as one can see and even rope the sky 

itself into playing its part by providing 

a changing display of baroque forms, 

a literal realization of our subject at 

last, baroque clouds indeed. Gardens 

like Stourhead and Stowe must rank as 

both apotheosis and final dissolution 

of the expansive aesthetic of the 

Baroque, straining at the limits placed 

by gravity and building technique on 

its constructive ambitions. 


Now, right on the heels of the wildest 

excesses, and almost contemporaneous 

with them, comes a backlash or scaling 

down of baroque overconfidence. 

We could follow this in the park at 

Versailles, of all places, where some of 

the purest expressions of the new taste 

are built. But I would prefer to look 

at a few paintings by Fragonard that 

do brilliant translations of baroque 

cloudscapes, bringing them down to 

earth. In Fragonard’s pictures instead 

of the mysteries of the heavens we 

are given clouds of steam in a laundry, 

clouds of incense in a pagan temple or 

an enveloping mist conjured out of an 

ordinary pot of milk. These depictions 

of “weather” are in some uncanny 

way more beautiful than anything in 

earlier baroque painting, as the detail 

in Pope’s Rape of the Lock is more 

beautiful than anything in Milton, in 

part just because it is smaller, allowing 

a more intimate, intenser inspection. 

Maybe, as in Pope, mockery is not 

absent from Fragonard’s subjects, 


Professor of Architectural History and Theory 

London Metropolitan University 

31 Jewry Street 

London EC3N 2EY 

r.harbison@londonmet.ac.uk 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

of the vast Miltonic or Versaillessized 

distances, but also of us, for 

strutting so preposterously on such 

tiny stages. The beauty but also the 

sadness of Watteau’s or Fragonard’s 

ladies, their dresses spread out like 

entire cloudscapes, their surroundings 

dissolved in clouds of trees overlooked 

by trees of cloud, is that there is no 

need for them to do anything at all. 

In the century that follows, a more 

scientific approach intrudes even on 

artists’ views of clouds, until even 

mystics like Caspar Friedrich and 

romantics like Ruskin find themselves 

studying clouds with clinical precision, 

which doesn’t stop either of them 

from viewing clouds apocalyptically, 

signs of cosmic emptiness or evil. We 

might conclude that, even in an age 

hamstrung by a scientific view of the 

world, clouds continue to function 

as Rorschach blots in which people 

discover their own already-formed, 

deepest ideas about reality all over 

again. 


167

Review 


On literary roads: 

a guide to the (fictional) cities in literature 

There is an eternal circle in which 

a writer – a wanderer/pilgrim/ 

inhabitant - fascinated by the particular 

city makes it alive and as the fictional 

city approaches its reader s/he may or 

may not be equally enchanted by its 

representation though it might shape 

the perception of the mentioned place. 

As a result, the reader also quite easily 

turns into a wanderer, a traveler who - 

while visiting the place - actively shapes 

its nature; being there as a living part of 

it makes fertile ground for other fiction, 

and – if lucky enough and spotted by 

a writer - may be even turned into a 

fictional character himself and the 

process continues. 

Places we love tell much about 

ourselves and without any doubt cities 

have been acquiring the status of 

cultural icons and representations since 

time immemorial. Their identities have 

been based not only on those living 

there, on the events taking place but - 

as it already happened a few times in 

literary history – the identity of the city 

has been created via writers´ fictional 

characteristics of cities that get alive so 

much as to trespass the border between 

fiction and reality. Consequently, 

we presume – especially in terms of 

168 

Reviewed by Mária Kiššová 

Petr Chalupský: The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night (The image of the city in 

the Works of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan). VDM Verlag Dr. Muller: Saarbrucken. 

2009. 133 pages. 

cultural aspects – that one cannot fully 

understand Petersburg without Gogol, 

Dublin without Joyce or London without 

Blake or Ackroyd. 

Literature loves cities and cities love 

being fictionalized; and – to make it 

complete – we also need to reflect 

upon their representation in fiction, to 

uncover and discover their textual layers 

in order to understand how urban life 

establishes links between the individual 

and the collective, everyday and unique, 

natural and artificial. Thus it is pleasure 

to read through The Postmodern City of 

Dreadful Night, a thought-provoking and 

definitely further-reading-provoking 

book, in which Petr Chalupský shows 

and comments upon the significance 

of the city in the British fiction. Though 

his detailed analysis concentrates on 

Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, the 

book offers much more and anyone 

interested in modern literature would 

find author´s comments on literary 

works in the first part of his publication 

very useful. Petr Chalupský explores 

how the city appears and reappears 

in various literary contexts and 

talking specifically about London, he 

emphasizes how Ackroyd´s London: The 

Biography has shaped the iconography 


of the capital (and of the city narratives 

as such) since 2000 when the book 

was first published. Chalupský´s book 

is clearly and well-structured and 

after already mentioned overview of 

the fiction in which cities and urban 

places gain specific significance, he 

moves on analytical part and in the 

two chapters he gives a detailed 

portrayal of Amis´s (Other People: A 

Mystery Story; Money: A Suicide Note, 

London Fields and The Information) 

and McEwan´s (The Cement Garden, 

The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in 

Time and Amsterdam) works. Besides 

a close analysis of the image of the city, 

he identifies essential characteristics 

of the narratives which also offer a 

more general perspective upon both 

authors. As far as the city is concerned, 

Petr Chalupský shows how it becomes 

a character, what different forms and 

aspects it acquires, what language it 

uses, how its “fictional soul” is created. 

For instance, in McEwan´s The Cement 

Garden, London is nightmarish and 

becomes an “urban wasteland” where 

consolation and comfort would hardly 

be found. In another McEwan´s work 

The Comfort of Strangers the city – this 

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010 

time anonymous - appears as the actual 

city and the narrative directly hints on 

the phenomena of mass tourism which 

again turns into a sort of delusion: “The 

result is then that the tourist, in search 

of an unknown, exotic place, enters a 

world that has lost its originality and 

does not differ much from his or her 

home environment.” (88) On the other 

hand, another representation of the city 

is mystical, metaphorical, impossible 

to grasp and map. Similarly in other 

analysed works, the city emerges in 

various contexts and perspectives. It 

is not just a setting; the place forms, 

suggests, contributes and helps but also 

destabilizes, provokes fear and hatred. 

It often oversteps characters; and 

pulsates emotionally with love or hate. 

There are more things for which 

Chalupský´s work may be praised and 

in conclusion The Postmodern City of 

Dreadful Night definitely represents an 

interesting contribution to the literary 

criticism on Martin Amis and Ian 

McEwan as well as on the representation 

of the city in the contemporary British 

literature. When lost in the labyrinth of 

the postmodern fictional landscapes, a 

handy guide is always worth having. 


169

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