History is not the dreadful totality to which art was surrendered as a result of its break with classical harmony. It is a two-faced force itself: for it separates as much as it joins together. It is the potential of community that unites the sculptor’s act with the practice of craftsmen, the lives of households, the military service of the hoplites, and the gods of the city. But it is also the power of separation that provides the enjoyment of ancient art – and the enjoyment of art in general – to those who can only contemplate the blocks of stone where the potential of community was saved and lost simultaneously. It is because it is divided itself, because it excludes at the same time as it gathers, that it lends itself to being the place of Art – that is, the place of productions that figure the division between the artist’s concepts and beauty without concept. The mutilated and perfect statue of the inactive hero thus gives way to the complementarity of two figures. The head without will or worry of the Juno Ludovisi emblematizes the existence of art, in the singular, as a specific mode of experience with its own sensible milieu. The Torso’s inexpressive back reveals new potentials of the body for the art of tomorrow: potentials that are freed when expressive codes and the will to express are revoked, when the opposition between an active and a passive body, or between an expressive body and an automaton, are refuted. The future of the Torso is within museums that make art exist as such, including and above all for their detractors; but it is also in the inventions of artists that will now strive to do the equivalent of what can no longer be done, by exploring the differences within bodies themselves and awakening the hidden sensible potential in inexpressivity, indifference, or immobility. The very dreams of a total work of art, of a language of all the senses, a theatre given over to collective mobilization, art forms identical to the new forms of life – all these dreams of ethical fusion following representative distance are possible only on the basis of a more intimate separation. The history of the aesthetic regime of art could be thought similarly to the history of the metamorphoses of this mutilated and perfect statue, perfect because it is mutilated, forced, by its missing head and limbs, to proliferate into a multiplicity of unknown bodies.
1 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art, vol. II, transl. G. Henry Lodge (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1880), pp. 264–5. [Translator’s note: Wherever possible, I quote the published English translations for passages cited from texts in languages other than English. At times, I have silently modified the quotations from these published translations. Otherwise, all translations are my own.]
2 See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 313.
3 Pierre-Jean Mariette, Abecedario, quoted in Thomas Kirchner, L’Expression des passions: Ausdruck als Darstellungsproblem in der französischen Kunst und Kunsttheorie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1991), p. 137. The artist Mariette is attacking is Coypel. Winckelmann similarly denounces figures with outraged expressions like antique masks meant to be legible for the spectators in the back rows. The History of Ancient Art, vol I. transl. G. Henry Lodge (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1880), p. 365.
4 ‘Article du règlement du prix’, quoted in Kirchner, L’Expression des passions, p. 199.
5 Louis de Cahusac, La Danse ancienne et moderne ou Traité historique de la danse (Paris: Desjonquères, 2004 [1754]). The essentially pantomimic character of ancient dance had already been affirmed by the Abbé Dubos in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture, but for him it was a matter of opposing this rudimentary art to the perfection of modern dance. Cahusac and his heirs reversed the perspective by opposing the expressive perfection of a language of gesture to the formal conventions of courtly art. The first example of such reversals, which continued to feed the discourse on artistic modernism.
6 Jean-Georges Noverre, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (Stuttgart/Lyon, Aimé Delaroche, 1760), p. 122; Letters on Dancing and Ballet, transl. and ed. Cyril W. Beaumont (London: Dance Books, 1966), pp. 52–3.
7 Cahusac, La Danse ancienne et moderne, p. 234.
8 Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, vol. II, p. 122.
9 William Hazlitt, Flaxman’s Lectures on Sculpture (Collected Works, vol. 16, p. 353), quoted by Alex Potts, ‘The Impossible Ideal: Romantic Concepts of the Parthenon Sculptures in Early Nineteenth Century Britain and Germany’, in Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan, eds, Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850 (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 113.
10 Rudolf Laban, Modern Educational Dance (London: Macdonald & Evans, 1948), p. 6.
11 Bernard de Montfaucon, L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (Paris: Firmin Delaulne, 1719), p. iii.
12 See Alain Schnapp, La Conquête du passé: aux origines de l’archéologie (Paris: Carré, 1993).
13 Charles Nisard, ed., Correspondance inédite du Comte de Caylus avec le Père Paciaudi, théatin (1757–1765) (Paris: Firmin–Didot, 1887), p. 9.
14 Comte de Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines (Paris: Desaint et Saillant, 1752), p. 3.
15 Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, vol. II, p. 364.
16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert, in Œuvres complètes, vol. V, Écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1995), p. 114; Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for Theatre, vol. 10, transl. and ed. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth and Christopher Kelly (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College, 2004), p. 343.
2. The Little Gods of the Street
In the like sense, the beggar boys of Murillo (in the Central Gallery at Munich) are excellent too. Abstractly considered, the subject-matter here too is drawn from ‘vulgar nature’: the mother picks lice out of the head of one of the two boys, while he quietly munches his bread; in a similar picture two other boys, ragged and poor, are eating melon and grapes. But in this poverty and semi-nakedness, what precisely shines forth within and without is nothing but complete absence of care and concern, which a dervish could not surpass, in the full feeling of their well-being and delight in life. This freedom from care for the external, this inner freedom in the external is what the concept of the Ideal requires. In Paris there is a portrait of a boy by Raphael: his head lies at rest, leaning on an arm, and he gazes out into the wide and open distance with such bliss of carefree satisfaction that one can scarcely tear oneself away from gazing at this picture of spiritual and joyous well-being. The same satisfaction is afforded by those boys of Murillo. We see that they have no wider interests and aims, yet not at all out of stupidity do they squat on the ground, rather content and serene, almost like the gods of Olympus; they do nothing, they say nothing; but they are people all of one piece without any surliness or discontent; and since they possess this foundation of all capacity, we have the idea that anything may come of these