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Abstract

What does the image of gesturing involve? How can the tension between mere physical movement and the system of meaningful sign, which has always defined the sphere of human gesture, be understood? What index of temporality does every gesture contain? Why can today’s gestures appear identical to those represented by ancient images? The publication of Andrea de Jorio’s La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (1832) marks the moment when questions about gesture emerge in all their problematics. The treatise’s premise is as innovative as it is ambiguous: the gestures of Greco-Roman vascular painting are compared with those of contemporary Neapolitan painting. From this perspective, figures belonging to different contexts, separated in time by two millennia, are mysteriously freed from all diachronic presuppositions in the name of gesture. A century later, Aby Warburg would rethink the birth of Renaissance painting through the category of gesture as a condition for the survival of antiquity (Nachleben). Pollaiolo and Donatello intensified the gestures of ancient reliefs, thus attempting to shorten the distance from the paradigm.