The dancer in and out of character

Two paintings, by Giandomenico Tiepolo and Edgar Degas, mark points in a story line about the tension between human figures and the artworks that try to contain them, a story about the heightening and relaxation of that tension over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Any depiction of human figures subordinates, to some degree, the depicted bodies to the “body” of the artwork—its composition. It will be argued here that this tension between body and composition is redoubled— reproduced as subject matter, as it were—when the picture depicts dance and dancers. For a dance, even before it is represented in a picture, very often already involves a rivalry between individual stylized moving bodies and coordinated assemblages of those bodies. In the contest between dancing body and overall staged tableau, the dice are loaded, as it were, because the dancer, even if playing a role, is still a real person with a real center of gravity who may well resist being reduced to an element of a pattern. The transformation of body into artwork is always incomplete. The dancer never quite disappears into his role, as a painter’s model does. Dance thus proposes a counteraesthetic to the art of painting, or at least acts as a drag on some powerful concepts of painting that stress composition or planar patterning above everything: a challenge staved off by the two very sovereign paintings to be discussed, the one knowing, the other doubting. Between the two pictures, as if in a fable, appears a sculptor who set down his chisel, for a time, and took up painting, an art form he little understood, in hopes of courting the muse of dance: this was Antonio Canova. The dancer, he hoped, held the key to a recentering of art on the mobile, self-possessed body—no, more than that: a reduction or leading-back of art to a simple placement, a placing-there, of bodies. The sculptor’s experiments around 1800 expose the plot that embraces the two paintings.