Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Moved by Stone

Helen Slaney

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350144040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art

This book argues that touch and movement played a significant role, long overlooked, in generating perceptions of ancient material culture in the late 18th century. At this time the reception of classical antiquity had been transformed. Interactions with material culture – ruins, sculpture, and artefacts – formed the core of this transformation. Some such interactions were proto-archaeological, such as the Dilettanti expeditions to Athens and Asa Minor; others were touristic, seen in the guidebooks consulted by travellers to Rome and the diaries they composed; and others creative, resulting in novels, poetry, and dance performances. Some involved the reproduction of experience in a gallery or museum setting. What all encounters with ancient material culture had in common, however, is their haptic sensory basis. The sense typically associated with the Enlightenment is vision, but this has obscured the equally important contribution made by touch and movement to the way in which a newly materialised Graeco-Roman world was perceived. Kinaesthesia, or the sense of self-movement, is rarely recognised in its own right, but because all encounters with sites and objects are embodied, and all embodiment takes place in motion, this sense is vital to forming more abstract or imaginative impressions. Theories of embodied cognition propose that all intellectual processes are also physical. This book shows how ideas about classical antiquity in the volatile milieu of the late 18th century developed as a result of diverse kinaesthetic relationships.

PART ONE

APPROACHES

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Part 1 sets up a series of programmatic touchstones to which we will return throughout. Each chapter functions as a reference point for identifying the role of kinaesthesia in classical reception. Chapter 1 examines the performance art of Emma Hamilton, whose tableaux vivants, created in the 1790s in response to South Italian red-figure vases, represent an alternative way of ‘owning’ and ‘knowing’ material culture. In place of the static collection or the flattened catalogue, her embodiment of the figures depicted on ancient pottery internalizes their physical characteristics, reinventing them in the process. I argue that far from being viewed as the passive plaything of her husband, Emma should be reassessed as a skilled cross-modal translator of ancient culture in her own right, and her choreographic fluency can be recuperated as the period’s instance par excellence of sensuous cognition.

In Chapter 2, the focus shifts from practice to theory and two key essays on sculpture by Johann Gottfried Herder (1769 and 1778, respectively).¹ Herder builds up a fine-grained argument for treating sculpture – specifically classical sculpture – as an art-form most fully experienced not via the sense of vision but via the sense of touch (Gefühl). For Herder, however, ‘touch’ is not tactile, and does not involve literally running one’s hands over an artwork, but rather is realized in a whole-body sense that allows the visitor to perceive the work as a three-dimensional entity. I show how Herder’s ‘sense of touch’ anticipates recent formulations of embodied cognition, and suggest it provides a paradigm for haptic reception not only of sculpture but of all material artefacts.

Moving from vases, to sculpture, to architecture, Chapter 3 presents a reading of Charlotte Eaton’s travelogue-guidebook Rome in the Nineteenth Century (1820). This introduces another important strand, namely the theatrical aspect of haptic reception. We have already touched on performance per se in relation to Emma Hamilton, but Eaton’s treatment of the sites she visits enables tourist activity also to be encompassed within the performative domain. For Eaton, movement through and around ancient sites, including tactile interactions, connects directly with her capacity for imagining – that is, simulating – their corresponding occupation in antiquity, which in turn informs her interpretation of the ruins in their capacity as vessels or vehicles for moving bodies. Eaton is fully aware of the inauthenticity of her conjectures, but like an actor fully aware that her set is a fabrication, she nevertheless enters wholeheartedly into the illusion of perceiving in place of the ruin the historical setting it represents.

No account of haptic reception would be complete without Goethe’s exploration of Rome as an erotic topography which the narrator of the Roman Elegies, published in 1795,² learns to ‘see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand’. As Goethe casts a contemporary love affair in the tropes of Latin love elegy, he fuses the pursuit of sexual desire with a deepening passion for the city itself, poetic tribute figured as a re-enactment of ancient practice. Chapter 4 focuses on movement in the Roman Elegies, both as an aspect of the narrator’s (re)performance, and metapoetically as inextricable from sound. No sound can occur without movement, and vice versa. For Goethe, the sonic fabric of the Roman Elegies, its rhythm and its onomatopoeia, is crafted in and out of bodily motion.

Taken together, these paradigmatic approaches make manifest the inescapable contribution of kinaesthetic experience to perceptions of antiquity. Although the classical past had a particular value and valence for its recipients in the late eighteenth century, any historical period may of course be similarly accessed via kinetic interaction with its material remains, that is, not by simply presenting objects to the gaze but by making them explicitly available as stimuli for movement. Movement internalizes and personalizes. It translates object into subject while avoiding crude assimilation. Goethe is entirely aware that he is not Propertius; Emma is entirely aware that she is not Agrippina, Charlotte Eaton that she is not Cicero, and yet by adapting their own physical (kinaesthetic) selves to the stimuli of ruins and vases in a manner contrary to the everyday, each visitor temporarily occupies a different (version of their own) body. The kinaesthetic relationship is always performative – for the duration of the encounter, you are not yourself, but at the same time, you are not not yourself³ – but need not involve pretence. Herder, for example, trains the gallery visitor to feel a form of sensory heightening and aesthetic absorption without necessarily assuming a specific role. Nevertheless, in all four instances, it is the recipient who undergoes a transformation, as opposed to the artefact, and this transformation has its roots in kinaesthesia.

CHAPTER 1

EMMA HAMILTON’S ATTITUDES

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In the stillness between two waves of movement, the arrest of arrival is inseparable from the gathering of preparation. Her stillness is a skilful illusion. There is a paradoxical interplay involved in the representation of marble draperies by billowing scarves and lifelike stone by immobilized flesh. It might look easy, this (re)pose, but holding oneself in graceful stasis takes sustained and considerable effort. Stretched out on the ground on her side, one knee slightly bent, both arms cradling a vase – antique? – too fragile to support her weight, neck twisted back so her swimming gaze is averted away down the length of her body, Agrippina mourns the death of Germanicus (cover illustration).¹ Her tragic collapse is reminiscent, perhaps, of tragedienne Mlle Clairon’s innovative swoon as Electra, managing to fall full-length while retaining a firm grip on Orestes’ funeral urn.²

It is 1791, and the performer in this case is Emma Hamilton, talented and scandalous wife of Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador to Naples.³ While Sir William collected tangible objects – most notably Greek vases, but also coins, intaglios, paintings, miniature bronzes and geological specimens⁴ – Emma absorbed her antiquity via a different modality. In response to the ancient artefacts around her, primarily the figured vases, Emma practised a conscious adoption of physical attitudes, mirroring the female figures depicted in such a way as to render them recognizable characters from myth. Contemporaries regularly chose to characterize her as a prize acquisition, Sir William himself describing her as a ‘delightful object’ and other men seeing in her the embodiment of all his antiquities or his ‘gallery of statues’.⁵ The tendency has unfortunately trickled down into modern scholarship. Many studies of Emma’s Attitudes approach them from a spectatorial point of view, explicitly or implicitly endorsing what Gail Marshall calls the ‘impulse to Pygmalionism’ which casts Emma as passive material and Sir William as its animateur.⁶ This essentially Cartesian interpretation cleaves the bodily realization of the Attitudes away from their intellectual conception, endowing Sir William with creative responsibility while Emma remains his (our) exhibit. Instead, I suggest that Emma’s performances constituted a point of reception in their own right, and that recovering them in terms of kinaesthesia as opposed to spectacle sets up an alternative, haptic paradigm for interaction with ancient material culture.

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The Attitudes were first developed between 1786 and 1787, and Emma continued to perform them throughout the 1790s. Swathed in one or more floor-length shawls, she would adopt a sequence of iconic poses recognizable as belonging to figures from art or mythology. Each individual pose remained static, but the fluent transitions from one Attitude to another rendered each performance overall, each montage, a form of dance. As well as involving more or less energetic gyrations, dance can also take place in stillness.⁷ The diversity of the passions assumed by Emma’s face and body was equally skilful. Her distilled realization of character (ēthos) and emotion (pathos) combined to evoke a medley of contrasting scenarios.

As well as the historical personae such as Agrippina, the figures embodied by Emma included tragic heroines such as Medea or Cassandra, and generic types such as ‘a bacchante’ or ‘a water nymph’.⁸ Not all were classical; her repertoire, referencing Renaissance art, also included Mary Magdalene and other canonical saints. It may even have included male characters, although the evidence for this is flimsy.⁹ Among the specific roles mentioned by those who attended her recitals, she is recorded as playing Niobe and Galatea, both peculiarly apposite to her art-form. By the mid-eighteenth century, the sea nymph Galatea had lent her name to Pygmalion’s ivory beloved, an association unlikely to have escaped Emma’s contemporaries, especially in a context reliant on the effective identification of woman and statue. Niobe’s imminent petrification likewise resonates as she becomes Galatea’s tragic double, a figure in whom the process of metamorphic animation is reversed.

The earliest account of Emma’s Attitudes is also one of the most detailed. Poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visited Naples in the spring of 1787, later related his impressions of Emma’s performance in his Italienische Reise (Italian Journey):

Dressed in this [Greek costume], she lets down her hair, and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety (Abwechslung) to her poses, gesture, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes (man zuletzt wirklich meint, man träume). He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations (Bewegung und überraschender Abwechslung) – standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows another without a break (eins folgt aufs andere und aus dem andern). She knows how to arrange her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress.¹⁰

Although Goethe’s is necessarily the perspective of a spectator, a number of the features he identifies can also be examined for their contribution to the performer’s own experience. The use of costume was evidently integral. As a precursor to the fashion for white muslin in Napoleonic Europe,¹¹ Emma garbed herself in clothing specially made for the purpose, intended as a direct replication of the images on Sir William’s Greek vases. It seems also to have been mediated by figures in artwork from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and of course by sculpture. In any case, Emma’s shawls, her drapery, required manipulation as skilful as that of her deportment and expression if the fabric was to contribute, as Goethe suggests, to conveying a desired emotional condition.

Goethe also stresses the variety (Abwechslung) of the portrayals, repeating the word as if to underscore this defining property. Metamorphic plasticity is indicated by the observation that eins folgt aufs andere und aus dem andern (‘each one follows on into another and out of another’), perhaps producing the disorienting, dreamlike effect (man träume) of a body destabilized, able to pour itself into any shape. Each pose seems to emerge with apparent inevi...