Winckelmann thus carries the paradox to its extreme point. The accidental lack of the statue manifests its essential virtue. The apex of art is the mutilated statue that represents the greatest active hero miscast in the total inactivity of pure thought. Moreover, this pure thought only stands out as its exact opposite: the radical impersonality of a material movement very similar to immobility: the perpetual oscillation of waves on a calm sea.

The meaning of this radicalization remains to be understood. For there is a way of understanding this praise of calm a little too simply. Winckelmann had a polemical intention in publishing his History. He wanted to remind his contemporaries of the true models of beauty, drawing them away from the excesses of modern sculpture – that is to say, in his time, baroque sculpture: excessively extended or twisted bodies, faces distorted by the will to express extreme pleasure or pain. For him one sculptor embodied this perversion of art that our age, on the contrary, celebrates as the embodiment of baroque genius: Bernini. No more is needed to relegate Winckelmann to a certain role: he is made the retrograde guardian of a classical ideal of divine impassibility and beauty residing in pure lines and harmonious proportions. He would thus be the father of the neoclassical sculpture triumphant during the Napoleonic era, embodied by Canova’s frigid marble figures. Above all, he would be the father of the academic Greece of ‘calm grandeur’ and ‘noble simplicity’, frozen far from its own soil in Roman museums and in the minds of German philosophers. It was against this Greece that Nietzsche’s disciples, like Aby Warburg, raised a savage and tragic Hellas, making art, contrary to all glyptotheque Apollonianism, the manifestation of obscure energies that support and convulse the rituals and monuments of civilization at the same time.

But in order to oppose Dionysian energy to Apollonian calm, a certain Greece must already be constituted, far from all simple adoration of serene perfection. Winckelmann himself constituted its singularity by placing this torso, part of a body whose entire figure we will never be able to appreciate, above the divine form and proportion of the Belvedere Apollo. A mutilated statue is not only a statue lacking parts. It is a representation of a body that cannot be appreciated any longer according to two main criteria used by the representative order: firstly, the harmony of proportions – that is to say, the congruence between parts and the whole; secondly, the expressivity – that is, the relation between a visible form and a character – an identity, a feeling, a thought – that this visible form makes recognizable in unequivocal traits. It will be forever impossible to judge whether the arms and legs of the Belvedere Hercules are in material harmony with the torso of the hero, forever impossible to know whether his face and his limbs are in spiritual harmony with the traits with which the myths represent him. More radically, it will be forever impossible to know whether it is indeed Hercules who is shown by this statue lacking all the attributes that would make him recognizable. Yet Winckelmann nonetheless confirmed the opinion that the statue represents the hero of the Twelve Labours, and does so in optimal form, translating the highest degree of perfection of Greek art. Posterity did not miss the chance to take him to task for this: his successors made this ideal Greek statue into a late Roman reproduction, and one of them even transformed his Hercules seated among the gods into a suffering Philoctetes. But assuming there was an error about the identity of the person, it was not the result of naivety, but a coup. The exceptional fate reserved for this mutilated body does not betray a naive allegiance to an outdated ideal of perfection. Rather, it signifies the revocation of the principle that linked the appearance of beauty to the realization of a science of proportion and expression. Here the whole is lacking just as much as expression. This accidental loss corresponds to the structural breakdown of a paradigm of artistic perfection. Attacking baroque excess does not amount to defending the classical representative ideal. On the contrary, it shatters its coherence by marking the gap between two optima that it claimed to match together: the harmony of forms and their expressive power.

No doubt the declaration of this gap is not absolutely new. It is also the assessment of a long history. For nearly a century, artists, critics and academicians were confronted with the problem of how to match the ideal of the noble harmony of forms, formulated in the seventeenth century by theorists like Bellori or Félibien, with the expression of passion notably illustrated, at the end of the same century, by Le Brun’s physiognomic models. This was primarily a technical problem for students: How was it possible to imitate both the forms of studio models and the passions felt by characters to whom they lent their features, but which they had no reason to feel themselves? One must leave the studio to study the way passions are inscribed on bodies elsewhere. This elsewhere, for some, was the privileged artistic stage for expressing the passions – the theatre. But others objected that, in the best acting, painters would only find ‘grimaces, forced attitudes, and artfully arranged expressive features, from which feelings are excluded’.³ On the contrary, the street or the workshop allowed one to better observe the common man, not yet moulded to expressive conformity by worldly conventions. But how was one to reach bodies expressing the nobility of forms corresponding to beauty? The academicians responsible for establishing ‘the prize for expressive heads’, founded in 1759 by the Comte de Caylus, determined that one could not find models among men whose ‘baseness in outside habits and in their facial character made them incompatible with the study of beautiful forms that must remain inseparable from expression in this contest’.⁴ And the very Diderot who urged students to abandon the academies to observe real movements of the body at work, or praised the expressive attitudes of Greuze’s domestic tragedies, denounced the ‘ignoble’ faces the same Greuze gave his Septimus Severus and Caracalla in his 1765 Salon. Grand painting could not tolerate the living expression of a sly prince and an irascible emperor. Some had already solved the dilemma: the knowledge that neither theatrical convention nor the ‘naturalness’ of the common man could provide should be sought instead in the Ancients. For, like the sculptor of the Laocoön, they knew how to endow the same face with contradictory expressions never present in reality, except by unpredictable accidents, which the hand always arrives too late to copy. Winckelmann established the superiority of ancient models over ‘natural’ models, but he did not find it in the capacity to put the maximum amount of different emotions on the same face. Laocoön’s beauty does not come from the multiplicity of passions it expresses; it comes, instead, from their neutralization in the sole tension of two opposite movements: one that welcomes the pain and the other that rejects it. Laocoön offers the complex form of the formula, which takes its simplest form in the radical insufficiency of the Belvedere Torso: beauty is defined by indeterminacy and the absence of expressivity.

Such a response deserves attention. It effectively seems to go against the current of watchwords developed in the same era by innovators of theatre and dance. They wanted to elevate the truthful expression of thoughts and passions above formal principles of harmony and proportion. Four years earlier, the Letters on Dancing and Ballet by Jean-Georges Noverre had appeared in another German capital, Stuttgart. They targeted the tradition of court ballet, which, according to Noverre, was meant only for the demonstration of aristocratic elegance and the mechanical skill of the artist. This art of steps and entrechats was opposed to an art of physiognomy and gesture fit to tell a story and express emotions. At the time, the model for this art was provided by ancient pantomime, in which another theorist of dance, Cahusac, had recently saluted a language of gestures capable of expressing all tragic and comic situations.⁵ Two years earlier, Diderot’s Conversations on the Natural Son had also pleaded for the resurrection of pantomime, and opposed the emotional potential of the tableau vivant to the artifice of the coup de théâtre. What Noverre and Diderot proposed – and end of the century reformist dramatists, musicians, and actors, from Calzabigi and Gluck to Talma, would take up once again – was a revolution in representative logic, playing upon its internal contradiction. They opposed the organic model of action as body, ideal proportion, and the entire system of conventions linking subjects to genres and modes of expression, with the bare principle of mimesis as the direct expression of emotions and thoughts. To the conventions of the theatre and elegance of the ballet, it opposed an idea of art in which every bodily gesture and every grouping of bodies tells a story and expresses a thought. Noverre’s dancer-turned-actor and Diderot’s actor-turned-mime must display an art of total expression on stage, identical to the manifestation of an entirely motivated language of signs and gestures:

Discourse, according to Plato, must take the image of a living being, given all the elements that make up an organism, and only those; beautiful architecture, Vitruvius taught, took its norms from the proportions of the human body. Dürer’s texts and drawings had renewed this principle of the mathematical proportions of the ideal body. This mathematics of beauty was strongly contested at the time. Artists like Hogarth and philosophers like Burke opposed its rigidity with the charm of the curved and sinuous line that also emblematized the new design of English gardens. Winckelmann was a stranger to their polemic, but he, too, opposed the continuous curved line to sharp angles. And the image that he used to characterize the Torso’s perfection is not accidental: muscles melt into one another like waves in the sea. This is the image of highest beauty, which the mutilated Torso embodies, like the Apollo with its head and all its limbs intact, but also mute, petrified Niobe, represented in ‘a state such as this, in which sensation and reflection cease, and which resembles apathy’ that ‘does not disturb a limb or a feature’.⁸ The beautiful statue is one whose muscles are not stretched by any action, but melt into one another like waves whose perpetual movement evokes the smooth and calm surface of a mirror. When Europe discovered the Parthenon reliefs half a century later, critics opposed their living movement to the poses of statues that Winckelmann admired. But they did so in the name of a criterion of perfection, which he had fixed himself: ‘… a principle of fusion, of motion, so that the marble flows like a wave’.⁹ It was not simply nature’s sinuous lines that were opposed to the right angles imposed by the minds of artists and princes. Rather, one nature was being substituted by another. On this point, the admirer of the immobile Hercules agrees with the philosopher who loved sentimental scenes like those in Greuze: nature, the guarantor of the beautiful, is to be found no longer in the proportion of parts, or the unity of expression of a character, but in the indifferent potential of the whole that endlessly mixes elements together by leaving them perpetually at peace. Forty years later Kleist explored the radical consequence of the rupture implied by the praise for the Torso. He opposed the movement of the marionette, whose ‘soul’ coincides with its centre, to the Bernini-like contortions imposed on the expressive body of the dancer to reach this very centre. A century after him, dance established itself as an autonomous art by exploiting all the possibilities of movement offered by the body freed from the obligation to tell a story, to illustrate a character, or to embellish music with images. These artistic transformations are certainly not inscribed ahead of time on the undulating surface of the Torso’s muscles. But this surface stretched between the memory of the tasks executed by the functional body of the hero and the indifference of the waves that rise and fall is already a surface for converting one body into another. The tension of many surfaces on one surface, of many kinds of corporality within one body, will define beauty from now on. The art announced by the praise for the mutilated Torso is not the art dreamt of by Kleist – an art of well-calculated automatisms meant to maximize an effect. Rather, it is an art of the plural compositions of movements freed by the dissociation of form, function and expression. Winckelmann inaugurates the age during which artists were busy unleashing the sensible potential hidden in inexpressiveness, indifference or immobility, composing the conflicting movements of the dancing body, but also of the sentence, the surface, or the coloured touch that arrest the story while telling it, that suspend meaning by making it pass by or avoid the very figure they designate. This revolution is perhaps more profound than the one Diderot and Noverre ...